John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  As Clarissa in mad careen rose and plummeted, so Waldo, too, riding high, bounced and reared and soared and plunged, but was not thrown, belted in by thighs of steel, and having passed, as love’s brave adventurer, from curiosity and carnal desire through wonderment and awe and deep alarm to mortal funk and finally sheer exhaustion, he slept now even as he pitched and rolled, his stentorian snores chorusing those of his wildly bucking mount, this the raucous concert that greeted Lorraine and Trevor upon their arrival at the seventeenth hole, drowning out the remote rumble of threatening thunder, and that left them, for the moment, standing there at the edge of the torn-up green in stupefied amaze. Just before the lights went out in the motel bathroom, Lorraine had picked up on Trevor’s anguish and, dressed by darkness, asked: “Who did you think was in here, Trevor?” He hadn’t answered, but the impression she’d got looked a lot like Sweet Abandon, and the mystery of the switched pants no longer was one. She’d knotted the bath towel around her waist and led her erstwhile best friend’s half-blind husband out to his car (“You see, it’s all right, Trevor, just a local power failure …”), asking that he drive her to the place where he’d picked up the girl, he muttering, “What girl?,” but meekly taking her there just the same, the choral snore then bringing them the rest of the way to the edge of the shaved green whereon these sleeping beauties tirelessly jounced and tumbled. “They’re like some kind of perpetual-motion machine,” Lorraine said at last, breaking the spellbound silence between her and Trevor, and loosening the towel, sat down on the bench next to the ball-washing pump and the tee to the final hole, her mind less on revenge (certain justifiable cruelties did occur to her) than on trying to find a language adequate to describe the performance being played out before her. But dimly lit: that helped, no squalid detail, please, the broader strokes will do. One such stroke now lifted the entwined duet beyond the cusp of green and down they rolled, losing not a beat as, snoring on, they rose and fell beneath each other, landing in that undulant turf below where Lorraine commonly fluffed her shots, her rakehell hubby back on top once more, flapping loosely in Marge’s tenacious clasp, the milky pallor of his broad rump phosphorescing rhythmically in the steady pulsing from the sky. A storm was brewing, and just over the horizon, it seemed to her: something was on fire. She flexed her shoulder, still sore from the shotgun recoil. “You wish to know delight and here you’ve been sleeping beside it all these years,” she said, and Trevor started: “What—?! How—how did you know?” he gasped. “I guessed,” she lied. “Should we wake them up?” he asked. “If,” she said, knowing full well he didn’t think so, “you think you can.” The accountant, weighing up the options, sighed ruefully, came over to sit on the bench beside her, his black-patched eye the one she saw. “Why do we even get married?” he asked, a rhetorical question, she knew, but she answered it just the same: “It’s an art form, making something out of nothing.” The bouncing lovers had fallen into a sand-trap and were now kicking up a sandstorm that partially concealed them from view, carrying the turbulence around with them as they shifted, motors roaring, about the pit. “There is something fast and furious and beautiful about the sudden casual encounter, you know, like yours with Sweet Abandon. There’s the feeling of—” “Who?” “That girl from the barbecue.” “Oh. But I didn’t—” “I know.” But it was beautiful, he was thinking, or nearly was, or might have been. “Yes, there’s a feeling of being free from story, or at least of your own sad hopeless tale—if there’s a story at all in the one-off quickie, it is cosmic and essentially electrochemical and you are not a ‘character,’ only an action.” “Yes, I see that,” he said, and she saw that he did. It’s like a waking wet dream. Did she think that or did he? It was hard to tell, for his thoughts, she saw, were interlaced with hers now with the same sort of rhythmic intimacy that conjoined their more athletic mates, now out of the sandpit and noisily churning up the water-trap nearby; she didn’t even need to tell him that prolonged affairs and marriages were forms of storytelling and thus of human artifice, tender but droll attempts to impose meaning on the lonely, empty, and all but intolerable cosmos. She laid her hand on his lap. “Your pants are wet.” “I—it was—!” “I understand.” She did and knew he knew she did, her hand still where she’d laid it. In the watertrap the froth was rising like ferment around the pounding bodies, all tinted now with the ocherous tones of a wet sky burnished by the distant fire. Something big was burning over there. The broken rhythms of the snoring couple convulsing at the water’s edge told Lorraine that the break of dawn, however stormy, was not far off, the night, not yet, but soon, would end, the shades disperse, a thought her one-eyed companion on the bench was having, too. She squeezed. “Why don’t you take them off and hang them over a limb to dry?” Because, she started to say but heard his own like thought penetrate hers: “Accountants can be artists, too,” he added. “I’m sure. Here. You can put my towel under them if you like.”

  Settler’s Woods was burning. The fire, roaring its hollow inanimate roar as it licked at the black sky, seemed to stroke the lightning out of the night as it stormed inward from all sides toward the center, where a deep darkness also reigned. A great conflagration, unlike any this place had known since Barnaby’s lumberyard went up just after the war. The glow of it could be seen all the way across town, as far as the golf club and no doubt beyond. Indeed, on a night so dark and overcast, with the power out, the whole town seemed gilded by it, and many of those not asleep were soon drawn to the source of so eerie a spectacle, some dressed only in raincoats pulled on over pajamas, these gathering sightseers adding to the worries of the beleaguered police chief and mayor and the forces of law and order they’d assembled there, all of whom were now encircling the blazing woods, weapons poised to shoot whatever might come raging out through the billowing smoke and flames. That big thing was in there somewhere, ringed about now by a circle of fire, that was what might come out, that was what people were waiting to see: Big Pauline. The word was, she was wounded and dangerous. People should clear the area. Of course, they pressed closer. How big was she? There were rumbles of thunder in the air, and some of the armed men said that might be her, walking around in there. She could kick a car like a football, they said. There were rumors she had eaten people alive. “She picked her own father up and threw him so far outa here he ain’t been seen since!” She was once a woman, known to many in the crowd, intimately to more than a few, and as a woman, was wed to the town photographer, surely soon to be a widower and so to be pitied, and indeed he was pitiable, standing there at the fire’s edge in a fat gap-mouthed stupor, his bulging lashless eyes blankly reflecting the flames, looking, without his familiar camera and bagful of lenses, as though he’d left his wits somewhere as well. He seemed to be the only person present who did not know why he was here. The police chief wished, frankly, he’d not had the man brought out, dazed and clumsy and unreliable as he was, useless to him and a likely casualty if things got worse, and they showed no signs of getting better. The tossing of his prisoner, for whose well-being he was responsible (how was he going to explain all this to Bert and the boys upstate?), was the act of terror that had convinced him finally that this creature who was once his friend had to be destroyed. Before that, he’d been clinging, while clinging to the soft ridge of flesh just below her navel, to the hope that they might somehow find a peaceful resolution to a public crisis that had, increasingly, become a personal crisis of his own: not just that as a prisoner of sorts, he was in the line of fire and could get killed (he was not afraid, he had been through all that in his days as an expendable grunt in a deeper, darker woods, and what was a football lineman but a body in the line of fire?), but more that he was being forced to choose, loving both, between order and the embodiment, not to put too fine a word on it, of its contrary. Forcibly snuggled up against her warm rumbling belly during her interrogation of her father, he’d gazed up at the tender monument of her overhanging breast, rimmed with a pale radiance whenever lightning rippled, and felt himself a
t the edge of some fundamental revelation and some fundamental change, as though … as though he might… But then she’d cocked her arm and spread her legs to pitch the old goat, and his brief visionary moment over almost before it had begun, he’d fallen out of her relaxed grip and slithered down through her dense jungly bush, barely escaping being flattened as, hurling herself forward to complete her throw, she’d slapped her thighs together just as he’d dropped between them. The mayor and the deputized posse had opened fire to cover his escape as he scrambled out from beneath the beetling mass of her squatting haunches, limping from his fall, and she’d groaned and lashed out at her tormentors, tearing up the space around her and sending them all scattering in frantic retreat. All but the young golf club manager who, slow to react, had got snatched up by her, whether as hostage or provender, it was hard to tell from down in the trees. His capture had restricted them to shooting at her bottom half only, which only added to her rage without bringing her down, her savage counterblows forcing them into ever deeper withdrawal, dragging their wounded with them. It was the mayor who had finally suggested they burn her out. “No choice,” he’d said, and most had agreed. The police chief had objected, but he’d lost his bullhorn, and could be heard by only a few and those few had little sympathy with his dithering. They were all frightened and exhausted and nothing else had worked. “But what about the guy in the banana pants?” “He’s dead, man. She ate him.” And so they’d spread out and encircled Settler’s Woods with gas cans and torches and, on a signal passed by honking horns, had set the fire that now raged, sending flames soaring into the sky and drawing townsfolk to its edges by the hundreds, more arriving every minute with blankets and coffee thermoses and instant cameras in spite of ominous signs of an approaching thunderstorm and repeated police warnings that everyone should return home immediately or face possible arrest. Some scoffed at the extravagant accounts and said they doubted any such creature was in there, but others said she was in there all right, they’d seen her, plucking trees like Brussels sprouts and eating people whole, chucking them into her jaws like breakfast sausages. There was a sudden clap of thunder, and the skeptics in the crowd wisecracked about that (“I suppose she just let one!”), but an old boy from the Country Tavern, showing them his fresh scratches and bruises and torn shirt, said it was no joke, that was one mean fucking mother in there, and he gave them all a chilling account of what had happened to poor old Shag and Chester earlier in the evening. “Damned right, flat as a doormat, I shit you not!” A woman in a checkered nightshirt and anorak, sipping coffee, wondered aloud where John was, wasn’t this the night of his Pioneers Day barbecue, and someone said hadn’t he been killed in that terrible accident at the humpback bridge they’d passed coming out here, and, no, argued another, that must have been someone else, John had flown upstate to call out the National Guard. Others said they’d heard his daughter had been abducted and possibly his wife as well, and there were reports that the motel at the edge of the Woods was on fire and its owner shot, that babies had been stolen from their cribs to feed the monster lady and that churches had been desecrated, and that the owner of the Ford-Mercury garage and his wife had been brutally murdered in their own home or else in an ambush out at the car lot. “They say the manager of the hardware store might have done it.” “I’d heard it was the simpleton who was helping Big Pauline.” Thus, at the edge of the burning forest, the wild rumors spread like the fire itself, now closing in on the dark center of the woods and setting the air in there madly awhirl. Suddenly, there was a blinding light and a terrific explosion as a thunderbolt came smashing down as though sucked into the woods’ core and people were knocked to the ground or fell over one another and everyone pulled back, even the police and their deputies. They’d all heard it: something like a haunting baleful wail, or maybe it was just the whine of the whirlwind at the center of the great ring of fire, but now the storm began in earnest and the lightning crashed about them and the sudden hurricane-force gales whipped up the forest flames, and sparks flew in all directions. “It’s gonna get outa hand!” someone shouted, and indeed little wildfires were starting up everywhere and people’s clothes and hair were getting singed as they tried to escape the burning shower and there were fears the sudden violent winds might drive the fire into town. “Oh my God! I left my kids home sleeping!” “Damn it, Otis! I told you this was a bad idea!” But then the rain began to fall, great lashing torrents of it, upending people as they ran toward their cars, turning the ground underfoot almost instantly into a river of mud through which they slipped and splashed and crawled on all fours, the incessant flashes of lightning cracking around them like celestial whips, herding them, soaked and terrorized, homeward to their dark empty beds.

  Outside the saloon a storm was raging, echoing the turbulence within as Veronica, changing Second John’s dirty diapers on a wooden cardtable, got set upon by all the barroom rowdies offended by her little boy’s childish antics with his pistol. They were both sprayed with beer and pelted with cigar butts and peanut shells and candy wrappers and lashed with a thunderous barrage of uncouth insults, mostly having to do with the contents of his diaper but some calling his origins into question and others deriding her exposed backside, which she couldn’t help. It wasn’t fair. “If I had an ass like that, I’d sell advertising space!” “The last time I saw an ass like that, it was pulling a plow!” That didn’t stop them from attacking it, she could feel them crowding up behind to make painful use of it as Maynard so often did, and she certainly didn’t like it, but what could she do, she had both hands full and open safety pins in her mouth and her baby was crying: “I been caught with my diapers down, Ma! You gotta hold them off any way you can!” The few gas lamps he hadn’t shot down were swinging on their chains as though buffeted within by the storm without, sending shadows flying about like wheeling bats, and tables and chairs were crashing as the men clambered forward, their vile threats and humorless laughter like a hot beery breath on the back of her neck. Though she shielded her son from the worst of it, they were both being drenched in buckets of beer, her backside their last line of defense, all too easily breached. There was nothing to do finally but pick the baby up, dirty bottom or no, and make a run for it. But she could find no way out. All the exits were blocked. The men surrounded them, brandishing hard penises and baring their tobacco-stained teeth as they closed in. The saloon seemed on fire from the dancing light of the swinging lamps. “We’re done for, Ma!” Second John cried, clinging painfully to her breasts. “Do something!” He was slippery and getting heavy, she almost couldn’t hold him, and the smoke from his cigar was making her nose sting and her eyes water. Then, just as she was about to collapse from exhaustion and despair, First John’s wife came in with a fresh diaper, made the men put their penises back and return to their tables, settled the lamps down, took the baby’s cigar away and threw it into a cuspidor, cleaned his bottom, gave him a change, and wrapped him up in a towel the barman gave her. “Come on, now, let’s send him back where he came from,” she smiled, and led Veronica out the door to a windy railway platform, where a train was just pulling in through the thunderstorm. “I didn’t know the train still came through here,” Ronnie said, putting her breasts back inside. “You have to know where to find it.” Her friend handed the baby to the conductor, who tossed it behind him, and the train pulled out, seeming to pull the storm away with it as it went, and Ronnie started to cry. “It’s all right now,” her old classmate said gently, helping her up out of the lawnchair. “It’s letting up. You can go home now.” “I’m sorry,” she sniffled. “I’m afraid I split the seat …” “It’s not your fault. It’s been left out too many times in the rain.” “No, I meant—” “Here, you’re completely soaked, poor thing. I’ve brought you your nightgown, which is dry at least.” She took off the ruined linen dress and dried herself with the towel offered her and pulled on the nightgown and thanked her hostess for the lovely party, begging her pardon for having stayed so late, then stumbled out by way o
f the darkened driveway and headed wearily home through the wet streets in the lightless early dawn.