John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Floyd could top that one, but when asked, said no. Floyd now managed John’s downtown hardware store, but he was not from this town and no one in town knew much about his life before he came here, or thought much about it either. A traveling salesman who blew in out of nowhere, they knew that, an ignorant redneck with some familiarity with the Bible (the kids called him Old Hoot) and a marked reluctance to talk about his past, but once John had hired him, they all accepted him as he was (not much) and mostly forgot about him except when they needed a new door lock or toilet plunger or a lug wrench. But traveling, before he got here, was mostly what Floyd had done all his life, some of it selling, some trucking, a lot of it running from the law, the only settled times being those when they’d caught up with him and clapped his iniquitous ass into one prison or another, which was where he’d picked up his Bible knowledge and honed his cardplaying, the bowling came natural. Edna had been his girl in high school before they both dropped out, and she’d stuck with him through all the bad times, though not even she knew all he’d done. The things he’d been caught at, sure, the thieving and hell-raising they’d charged him with in one town or another when he didn’t get out fast enough, but not everything. Some things nobody knew. There was the woman trucker who lured him on her CB radio to that lonely highway pullover, for example, the filthy drunken whore. Had a wart on her eyelid and a tuft of black hair on her chin. The old fleabag wanted fifty bucks for a quick ride. Got a quicker one than she counted on. She still turned up in Floyd’s nightmares, wart and all, and sent him to his knees beside the bed in fervent prayer. It wasn’t so much the sticking, he’d killed others, God save his shit-soaked soul, but the way he cut her up so badly and the places he dicked her after. I Remember. There were others, too, and none of them pretty—that fat cowboy with the false dentures who waved him over to help with a flat tire on his camper, then offered him a blowjob, for example, or the rich bitch in Santa Fe with the hairless tattooed pussy who wanted to hire him to knock off her husband, or that snot-nosed longhaired kid with rings in his ears he picked up outside Cheyenne, who made the mistake of saying he didn’t think God existed, but if He did He was an asshole, that swoll-up shit-for-brains got it good. And that was the worst of it. Floyd repented of his sins but kept reliving them, knowing that for all his praying and promising, there was no meanness that had happened that couldn’t happen again, and same way all over. It scared the bejabbers out of him but also somehow gave him the juice to get from day to day, and that was worrisome, too. What no one knew, except Edna maybe, was how damned vulnerable he felt, how closely the dark powers dogged his heels. John had saved his life with this hardware job, but if he ever got let go or the store got shut down, Floyd strictly hoped somebody would kill him before he walked out that fricking door.

  That store Floyd managed probably should have been closed long ago or at least moved out to one of the malls, but it had been in the family a long time, always on that same corner of Sixth and Main, literally the cornerstone—or cornerstore—of the family legend, so John was reluctant, history sparing what history had abandoned, to shut it down, at least so long as his father was alive, and Mitch, though he had turned over most of the local day-to-day operations to his son and had announced his retirement more than once, showed no intention of cashing his chips in soon, on the contrary. Mitch’s wartime profits had made him the largest landowner in the county and an influential business leader throughout the state, he was a major player in the area and felt that staying in the game was what kept him in the pink and his golf score down. He did not want to get in John’s way, though, so, complying with the old wild oats dictum, once his to lay on John, he moved his financial dealings away from home and out into the national and international markets, crossing paths with his boy only when it came to a profitable exploitation of his local landholdings. John was just a kid, still in his mid-twenties when they worked up their first big project together, a neighborhood mall on the road out to the golf course, the town’s first. Barnaby was still very much in the picture then, so it was a shopping center solid as Main Street and appealingly brick-cottagey, built in a semicircle around a parking lot with a fountain in the center and potted bushes lining the border, but it was soon found to be, as John had chafingly predicted, woefully inadequate. John called it a misuse of light and space, meaning he wanted more blacktop and more glass and less superfluous detail. The bushes blocked the display windows, the fountain (long since paved over) collected excrement and graffiti as wishing wells caught coins and used up valuable parking space, the heavy brickwork inhibited turnover renovations and the personal expression of the shopkeepers, and Barnaby’s ban on marquees and neon and rooftop signs, Mitch’s son felt, was like banning popcorn in the movie theaters. Worst of all was the lack of expansive unobstructed brightly lit shop floorspace, America’s no-tricks answer to all the mirrored Versailles of the world, a mistake that John, riding over his father-in-law’s muttered objections, put right on all his future shopping centers, but one never resolved in that first mall, now limited to arts and crafts boutiques, beauty parlors, and home video outlets. Barnaby’s latest fiasco, his attempted raid on the family company, Mitch found repugnant and in fact completely loony, as though Audrey’s death might have knocked Barn off his rocker, but, father to one, longtime business crony of the other, he did understand what divided John and his father-in-law, at least while the old curmudgeon was not yet himself so cruelly divided. John’s first constructions had been high school and college theater sets: fantasy structures thrown up and knocked down in a day, and sufficient unto it, as the saying went, constructions Barnaby would never even acknowledge as such. Barnaby’s first was his own home, a classic pictured to this day in books on twentieth-century American architecture, books John scoffed at as the purblind trivia of academic twinkies who wouldn’t know which end of the hammer to pick up.

  Clarissa, diminutive queen of the mall rats and the pool punks, would have loved her grandfather’s description of her daddy’s constructions as “fantasy structures.” Especially the malls. Pure magic. They were, always had been ever since she was little. Like fairy kingdoms, sun palaces. They let her run wild in them back then and she could do no wrong and everybody smiled at her and gave her treats and presents, it was very exhilarating. Her daddy used to bring circus acts and musicians and famous comedians to the malls to draw the crowds, and there were always coin-operated machines to ride or play and free badges and balloons from the stores and special decorations for every season with Valentine redhots and chocolate Easter bunnies and Fourth of July fireworks and Halloween masks and corn candies and Christmas Santas. When she was only five years old she was a model in a spring swimsuit show out there, and she never forgot how they laughed and cheered, especially her daddy with his dazzling eyes lit up, when, in the middle of her routine, she tucked one arm in and, with a smile like the ones she’d seen on television, let the shoulder strap fall to her elbow. It was electric. Then her daddy built the new mall with the big food court in it and that became her favorite. Still was, even though there was an even fancier one now out by the highway. All the big kids started hanging out there in the food court, and lots of intense things were going on, grown-up things, though in the beginning she didn’t know exactly what. Just that they seemed too important to miss. And now, for the first time, she was no longer allowed to run free, she always had to be with her mother or Granny Opal, the only grandmother she had left, so that just proved it. Something was happening. Luckily, there was a video games arcade right next to the taco bar and she could always get them to take her and Jennifer there (they were best friends now and both curious as cats), and then go for a coffee and leave them alone. It helped when her granddad had his stroke, because the retirement home was out near the mall and Granny Opal or her mother, whichever one was with them, often slipped away then to pay him a visit. Anyway, Clarissa was in high school now and too old to be chaperoned, and she said so in no uncertain terms. This was her real life and it wasn’t
fair to let her miss it. Jen, who was a preacher’s kid, loved it at the malls just as much as Clarissa did; her word for it was “spiritual.” She said she thought there was something phony about church and Sunday school with their blowhard Moseses and dead Jesuses, the malls were where God was going to show Himself (or Herself) if anywhere at all. You could just feel it. She and Jen figured out most things out there—the dare-me shoplifting, the ripped-off stuff for sale, the alcohol snuck into the rootbeers and milkshakes, the secret pot smoking and the funny pills and the furtive dealing, what was going down at the far end of the parking lot when people paired up and went out there for a while, all that—and they started dressing in printed album-cover tee shirts and leather jackets and chains and torn designer jeans so as to fit in better. Jen even got herself a nose ring, though she never wore it back home at the manse, she said it really freaked her mother. Clarissa was not so sure about this. Jennifer’s mom used to be a hippie, and she was still spaced out a lot of the time. Which could be fun, she now knew. There was a lot of cigarette smoking going on out at the mall, too, of course, it seemed like everyone had the deathweed habit, but Clarissa didn’t go that far. It was the one completely serious thing her father had ever said to her: “Clarissa, please. Promise me. Don’t.” And she had promised, and she’d never break her promise either, though she took it for granted if it wasn’t tobacco, it was okay. Her dad loved her, but he was no square.

  Opal felt uncomfortable leaving her granddaughter and her little friend by themselves, dressed so provocatively, in that loud unseemly place, but she felt even more uncomfortable sitting there alone among all those ill-behaved children, so she often, whenever obliged to take Clarissa to the mall, fulfilled a second obligation, this one to her daughter-in-law, by visiting the child’s father, poor devastated Barnaby, at the retirement home, though it was hard to say in the end which experience was more repellent. The mall certainly was unbearably noisy and the air in the open restaurant area where the only chairs were was saturated with the fumes of fried fat and sticky sugars and cigarette smoke and a sour-milk smell that reminded her of sick babies. Outside there were no park areas or sidewalks or benches, or inside either, no place just to sit, but even if there were she would have felt conspicuous plopping herself down in the middle of all that mindless bustle. So, really, she had no choice, and anyway she did not really fear for her granddaughter, it was a public area, after all, dozens of people passing through every minute, and they all knew John’s daughter when they saw her, what could possibly happen? The town had changed dramatically, almost unrecognizably, since Opal was a girl here, but in some ways her son’s shopping malls, as Kate had pointed out to her when she was still alive, were a throwback to the village past of their youth, or perhaps even earlier. More anonymous maybe and off-center, but they were simple communal gathering places for scattered populations the way the old farm towns were (said Kate), this one among them, a place for barter and exchange, for the transmission of news and ideas, for ceremony and for courting and for friendly competition. When Opal, whose love for her son clashed with her distaste for his malls (if a throwback, certainly a parodic one), had objected that what was missing was that there were no churches out there, Kate had replied: No imported old world churches maybe, but holy places just the same, Opal, good old national temples with the sacred stuff of glorious enterprise heaped up at the altars and shopping baskets as communion trays and beeping cash registers like the ringing of church bells, moral lessons provided by merchant-priests and their security guard-sextons. And there are all the fastfood chapels for ritual feasting, inviolable in content as kosher or Eucharist, and the cinemas for divine specracle and iconic representation, with multiple screens for the different denominations, and mannequin angels and God’s omnipresent Muzak voice and the final benediction straight down from heaven of the accepted credit card and even, or maybe above all, the vast apocalyptic barrenness of the parking lots: go visit those prophetic fields on a Sunday morning sometime, “Opal, if you want a true”—and here she employed the very word that the preacher’s daughter (virtually unknown to Kate at the time, little Jennifer being a less than devoted user of the municipal library), was to use many years later, riding home from the mall, all ecstatic in her adolescent way, in Opal’s car—“‘spiritual’ experience.” Ah, dear impossible wicked Kate, who never ever went to the malls herself, how she missed her! And Harriet, too, the doctor’s wife, so many good friends gone! Even poor Audrey, difficult as she could be, Opal missed her, too, all her friends were slipping away, soon she’d be all alone. And now Audrey’s Barnaby as well, not much better off than dead; she visited him as often as she could, but he didn’t even seem to know who she was most of the time, it was very sad. It was while returning from just such a visit one day, Barnaby having mistaken her on this occasion for his dead wife, breaking into a violent tantrum and accusing her of betrayal and stupidity, some sort of division problem Audrey had got wrong or something, you could only make out about half of it, that Opal found the shopping mall surrounded by police cars with their blue lights flashing. She was in one of John’s cars that day, so they waved her through. She felt dreadfully guilty, though whether on account of Barnaby’s accusation or because of her abandonment of Clarissa or on behalf of her son whose mall was being so dramatically besieged, she couldn’t say. But when Clarissa saw her, she came dancing over as though nothing were happening, carrying a big plastic bag from Jeans City with what looked like a box of shoes and Jennifer’s folded-up jacket inside, Jennifer now wearing a man’s white shirt, knotted at the waist, over her printed tee shirt which on this day, as Opal remembered all too clearly, showed four naked men holding musical instruments in shockingly obscene positions. And she the minister’s daughter! These children today, Opal would never understand them. It was like there were no rules, no boundaries at all. And yet they seemed as innocent as ever. Clarissa, squealing something about finding “these really crazy walkers,” leaned in and gave her a big hug and kiss, just like she used to do when she was little, but hadn’t done in so many years Opal had forgotten what it felt like, and then insisted on skipping over to the police chief to show him her purchases. He waved her away with a weary smile, while continuing the conversation he was having on the walkie-talkie held at his mouth. Jennifer meanwhile, in the backseat, had a frozen smile on her face that made her look more dead than alive. Maybe she’d eaten something she shouldn’t have. All the way home, Clarissa kept wanting to know about Opal’s own adolescence, which Opal found flattering until Clarissa asked her: “When was the first time, Granny Opal, when you did it, you know, with a man, and what was it like back then?” “The first time was with your grandfather, of course,” she lied, feeling suddenly less flattered. “And it was just as it should have been.” The little rascal. When, a day or so later, Opal asked about the shoes, Clarissa shrugged and said they were the wrong size, she’d taken them back.