* * *
—
So okay, she walks home. She is very nearly on time. She walks so fast her pumps clatter on our broken Thorne sidewalk. She swings her shoulder bag like a cheerful weapon and arcs into the street automatically to avoid carelessly placed sprinklers. She touches a safety match to a long filter brand, as she surveys her little yard, and goes in. She works, I understand, at the county assessor’s office, and I certainly imagine she does a fine job for those folks. With her bounce, her cigarettes, and her iffy hours, she makes just the kind of woman my wife had no use for. Hey! It takes all kinds. Human life is thus filled with variety, and if I have a regret in my own so far, it is that I have not been close to that variety: that is, right up against where it throbs but at this exasperating remove.
I need a break and go for a daylight drive. I take the river road through the foothills north of Thorne—a peerless jaunt—to our prison. It is an elegant old dungeon that has housed many famous western outlaws in its day. The ground it rests on was never farmed, having gone from buffalo pasture to lockup many years ago. Now it has razor wire surrounding it and a real up-to-date tower like out east.
One man stands in blue light behind its high windows. When you see him from the county road, you think, That certainly must be the loneliest man in the world. But actually, it’s not true. His name is Al Costello, and he’s a good friend of mine. He’s the head of a large Catholic household, and the tower is all the peace he gets. The lonely guy is the warden, an out-of-stater, a professional imprisoned by card files: a man no one likes. He looks like Rock Hudson, and he can’t get a date.
Sometimes I stop in to see Al. I go up into the tower and we look down into the yard at the goons and make specific comments about the human situation. Sometimes we knock back a beer or two. Sometimes I take a shot at one of his favorite ball clubs, and sometimes he lights into mine. It’s just human fellowship in kind of a funny spot.
But today I keep on cruising, out among the jackrabbits and sagebrush, high above the running irrigation, all the way around the little burg, then back into town. I stop in front of the doughnut shop, waiting for the sun to travel the street and open the shop and herald its blazing magic up commercially zoned Thorne. Waiting in front is a sick-looking young man muttering to himself at a high relentless pitch of the kind we associate with Muslim fundamentalism. At eight sharp the door opens, and the Muslim and I shoot in for the counter. He seems to have lost something by coming inside, and I am riveted upon his loss. By absolute happenstance, we both order glazed. Then I add an order of jelly-filled, which I deliver, still hot, to the lady’s doorstep.
* * *
—
I’m going to stop reading this newspaper. In one week, the following has been reported: A Thorne man shot himself fatally in a bar, demonstrating the safety of his pistol. Another man, listening to the rail, had his head run over by every car of a train that took half an hour to go by. Incidents like these make it hard for me to clearly see the spirit winging its way to heaven. And though I would like to stop reading the paper, I really know I won’t. It would set a bad example for the people on the porches who have trained Spot to fetch.
“Did you get the doughnuts?” I called out that evening.
I know they’ve been talking when I see Deke Crowley give me the fishy look. I cannot imagine which exact locution she used—probably that I was “bothering” her—but she has very evidently made of me a fly in Deke’s soup. There is not a lot he could do, standing next to his warming-up sensible compact, but give me this look and hope that I will invest it with meaning.
I decide to blow things out of proportion. “You two should do something nice together!” I call out. Deke slings his head down and bitterly studies a nail on one hand, then gets in and drives away. “Maui! Ever hear of it? Mountain Travel: they’re having a special!”
* * *
—
You think you got it bad? Says here a man over to Arlee was jump-starting his car in the garage; he had left it in gear, and when he touched the terminals of the battery, the car shot forward and pinned him to a compressor that was running. This man was inflated to four times his normal size and was still alive after God knows how long when they found him. A hopeful Samaritan backed the car away, and the man just blew up on the garage floor and died. As awful as that is, it adds nothing whatsoever to the basic idea. Passing in your sleep or passing as a pain-crazed human balloon on a greasy garage floor produces the same simple result year after year. The major differences lie among those who are left behind. If you’re listening, please understand I’m still trying to see why we don’t all cross on our own, or why nice people don’t just help us on over. Who knows if you’re even listening?
* * *
—
“So,” I cry out to the person with exaggerated innocence, illustrating how I am crazy like a fox. “So, how did you enjoy the doughnuts?”
She stops, looks, thinks. “That was you?”
“That was me.”
“Why?” She is walking toward me.
“It was a little something from someone who thinks somebody should take you somewhere nice.” My foot is in the door.
“Tomorrow,” she says from her beautiful face, “make it cinnamon Danish.” Her eyes dance with cruel merriment. I feel she is of German extraction. She has no trace of an accent, and her attire is domestic in origin. I think, What am I saying? I’m scaring myself. This is a Thorne local with zip for morals hoping to fornicate her way to Hawaii.
I decide to leap forward in the development of things to ascertain the point at which it doesn’t make sense. We are very much in love, I say to myself. I recoil privately at this thought, knowing I am still okay if not precisely tops. I am neither a detective nor a complete stupe. Like most of the human race, I fall somewhere in between.
“Tell you what,” she says with a twinkle. “I come home from work and I freshen up. Then you and me go for a stroll. How far’d you get?”
“Stroll…”
“You’re a good boy tonight and I let you off lightly.” Mercy. My neck prickles. “Deke tells me you still own that ranch. Maybe we can go out there one of these days and work on the fence!” She laughs in my face and heads out. I see her cross the trees at the end of the street. I see the changing flicker of different-colored cars. I see mountains beyond the city. I see her bouncing black hair even after she has gone. I say quietly, I’m lonely; I had no idea you were not to have a long life. But I’m still in love.
I call Doc. I tell him I’m going it alone. I call him a quack. I must have laid one on him because he never said a word.
* * *
—
She stood me up and it’s midnight. I have never felt like this. This house doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the person, and I’m lying on her bed viewing the furnishings. It’s dark here. I can see her coming up the sidewalk. She will come alongside the house and come in through the kitchen. I am in the back room. I’ll say hello.
“Hello.”
“Hello.” She’s quite the opposite of my wife, but it’s fatal if she thinks this is healthy. She’s in the same tight dress and appears to view this as a clever seduction. “It’s you. Who’d have guessed? I’m going to bathe, and if you ask nice you can help.”
“I want to see.”
“I know that.” She laughs and goes through the door undressing. “Just come in. You’ll never get your speech right. Do I look drunk? I am a little. I suppose your plan was a neighborhood rape.” Loud laugh. She hangs the last of her clothes and studies me. Then she leans against the cupboards.
“Please turn the water on, kind of hot.” She is sitting on the side of the tub. I think I am going to fall, but I go to her and rock her in my arms so that she kind of spreads out against the white porcelain.
She looks at me and says, “The nicest thing about you is you’re frightened. You’re like a boy. I’m going to frighten you as much as you can stand.” I undress and we get into the cl
ear water. I look at the half of myself that is underwater; it looks like something at Sea World. Suddenly, I stand up. “I guess I’m not doing so good. I’m not much of a rapist after all.” I get out of the tub, a tremendous boob.
“You men oh my God are like peas in a pod. You can hardly tell them apart.”
“That Deke has caused you to suffer.”
“Oh, crap.”
“It’s time he took you someplace nice.” So I’m on the muscle now and it gets worse when she bugs me about the ranch, acreage et cetera, and seriously impolite questions.
I am drying off about a hundred miles an hour. I go into the next room and pull on my trousers. I don’t even see her coming. She pushes me over on the daybed and drags my pants back off. I am so paralyzed all I can do is say, Please no, please no, as she clambers roughly atop me and takes me, almost hurting me with her fury, ending with a sudden dead flop. Every moment or so, she looks at me with her raging victorious eyes.
“You think you’re any different? Don’t make me laugh.” She bounces up and returns to the bathroom while I dress again. There is a razor running and periodic splashes of water. Whether it is because my wife has to sit through this or that I can’t bring her back, I don’t know, but the whole thing makes me a different guy. In short, I’ve been debased.
She tows me outside, clattering on the steps in wooden clogs, sending forth a bright perfume to savage my nerves. I see there is only one way my confused hands can regain their grasp: I burst into tears. She pops open a small flowered umbrella and uses it to conceal me from the outside world. It seems very cozy in there. She coos appropriately.
“Are you going to be okay now?” she asks. “Are you?” I see Deke’s car coming up the street. The Impact Man, the one who never does anything nice for her. I dry my tears posthaste. We head down the street. We are walking together in the bright evening sky under our umbrella. This foolishness implies an intimacy that must not have gone well with Impact Man, because he arcs into his driveway and has to brake hard to keep from going through his own garage with its barbecue, hammocks, and gap-seamed neglected canoe, things whose hopes of a future seem presently to ride on the tall shapely legs of my companion.
I can’t think of something really right for us. The only decent restaurant would seem as though we were on a date, put us face-to-face. We need to keep moving. I feel pretty certain we could pop up and see Al Costello, my Catholic friend in the tower. He always has the coffeepot going. So we get into my flivver and head for the prison. It makes a nice drive in a Tahiti-type sunset, and by the time I graze Staff Parking to the vast space of Visitors, the wonderful blue-white of the glass tower has ignited like the pilot light on a gas stove.
“I want you to meet a friend of mine,” I tell the lady. “Works here. Big Catholic family. He’s a grandfather in his late thirties. It looks like a lonely job and it’s not.”
The tower has an elevator. The gate guards know me and we sail in. The door opens in the tower.
“Hey,” I say.
“What’s cooking?” Al grins vacantly.
“Thought we’d pop up. Say, this is a friend of mine.”
“Mighty pleased,” Al says. He has the lovely manners of someone battered beyond recognition. She now glues herself to the window and stares at the cons. I think she has made some friendly movements to the guys down in the yard. I glance at Al, and evidently he thinks so, too. We avert our glances, and Al says, “Can I make a spot of coffee?” I feel like a fool.
“I’m fine,” she says. “Fine.” She is darn well glued to the glass. “Can a person get down there?”
“Oh, a person could,” says Al. I notice he is always in slow movement around the tower, always looking, in case some geek goes haywire. “Important thing, I guess, is that no one can come here unless I let them in. They screen this job. The bad apples are soon gone. It takes a family man.”
“Are those desperate characters?” she asks, gazing around. I move to the window and look down at the minnowlike movement of the prisoners. This would have held zero interest for my wife.
“A few, I guess. This is your regular backyard prison. No celebrities. We’ve got the screwballs is about all we’ve got.”
“How’s the family, Al.” I dart in.
“Andrea Elizabeth had strep, but it didn’t pass to nobody in the house. Antibiotics knocked it for a loop.”
“For Christ’s sake!” says my companion. We turn. He and I think it’s us. But it’s something in the yard. “Two fairies,” she says through her teeth. “Can you beat that?” After which she just stares out the windows while Al and I drink some pretty bouncy coffee with a nondairy creamer that makes shapes in it without ever really mixing. It is more or less to be polite that I drink it at all. I look over, and she has her widespread hands up against the glass like a tree frog. She is grinning very hard, and I know she has made eye contact with someone down in the exercise yard she seems to know. Suddenly, she turns.
“I want to get out of here.”
“Okay,” I say brightly.
“You go downstairs,” she says. “I need to talk to Al.”
My heart is coated with ice. I’m mortified. But down the stairs I go and wait in a green-carpeted room at the bottom. There is a door out and a door to the yard. I don’t want to sit in the car trying to look like I’m not abetting a jailbreak. I’m going downhill fast.
I must be there twenty minutes when I hear the electronics of the elevator coming at me. The stainless doors open, and a very disheveled Al appears with my friend. There is nothing funny or bawdy in her demeanor. Al swings by me without catching a glance and begins to open the door to the yard with a key. He has a service revolver in one hand as he does so. “Be cool now, Al,” says my friend intimately. “Or I talk.”
The steel door winks, and she is gone into the prison yard. “We better go back,” says Al in a doomed voice. “I’m on duty. God almighty.”
“Did I do this?” I say in the elevator.
“You better stay with me. I can’t have you leaving alone.” He unplugs the coffee mechanically. When I get to the bulletproof glass, I can see the prisoners migrating. There is a little of everything: old guys, stumblebums, Indians, Italians, Irishmen, all heading into the shadow of the tower. “We’re just going to have to go with this one. There’s no other way.” He looks crummy and depleted, but he is going to draw the line. We have to go with it. She will signal the tower, he tells me. So we wait by the glass like a pair of sea captains’ wives in their widow’s walks. It goes on so long, we forget why we’re waiting. We are just doing our job, just two little old Americans.
Then there is a small reverse migration of prisoners, and she, bobby pins in her teeth, checking her hair for bounce, waves up to us in the tower. We wave back in this syncopated motion, which is almost the main thing I remember, me and Al flapping away like a couple of widows.
As we ride down in the elevator again, Al says, “You take over from here.” And we commence to laugh. We laugh so hard I think one of us will upchuck. Then we have to stop to get out of the elevator. We cover our mouths and laugh through our noses, tears streaming down our cheeks, while Al tries to get the door open. Our lady friend comes in real stern and we stop. It is as if we’d been caught at something and she is awful sore. She heads out the door and Al gives me the Smith.
In the car, she says with real contempt, “I guess it’s your turn.” Buddy, was that the wrong thing to say. “I guess it is.” I am the quiet one now. She gives me a wary glance.
There is a great pool on the river about a mile below the railroad bridge. It’s moving but not enough to erase the stars from its surface, or the trout sailing like birds over its deep pebbly bottom. She’s a ghost of the river. It’s such a relief.
DOGS
No one imagined how it would turn out for Howie Reed. But it all began when he was beaned at the rodeo picnic when the Jacquas, the Hatfields, and the Larrimores uniformly felt that everyone was so sick and tired of having
to clean up the fairgrounds that a game would be fun.
Howie Reed got beaned in the first inning. It was softball and he didn’t even fall down. At fifty-one, he was close to the average age of all the players. It was a stately game with no scores.
Right after that he went on a trip. He was gone for about two weeks, and just before returning, he called his friends to tell them he had walked into a door at the bank and blackened his eyes. When he got home, the black eyes were almost gone. But it was clear that he hadn’t walked into a glass door. Howie had had his face lifted. It is not possible to really explain the effect on us, his old friends and acquaintances, of his new glossiness: the incisions behind the ears, the Polynesian serenity of his new gaze, left many of our circle in Thorne speechless.
The next time we all got together it was for a trout fry welcoming the new internist to town. In an area of long winters like ours, the entire community grows to hate all its professional people in about five years. A new doctor is taken in with urgent affection. The arrival of Dr. Kaufman, fresh from the Indian Health Service at Wolf Point, was no exception. A horseshoe pitch was improvised; an extension cord was found so that a television set could be left running in the yard for guests following serials. Most of us drank and pitched horseshoes or skipped stones on the beautiful river. Howie fainted.
Dr. Kaufman examined him and then came over to the carport where some of us had gone to avoid the sun. There, Dr. Kaufman assured us that Howie was faking and that we should realize our friend was a mild hysteric; bring him a glass of water, possibly. Even given Dr. Kaufman’s diagnosis, it was awfully touching to see our old friend stretched out with his sleek new face aimed at heaven, the river flowing past him like time itself. In my view, it was either that very time, or the beaning, that explained Howie’s face-lift and faints. But that didn’t lessen my concern for him.
Cloudbursts Page 5
