Leah, New Hampshire

by Thomas Williams

  And while I wait rather tensely here in my study for the hour when I’ll have to go to my office and meet G., I remember other confrontations with delusion. Perhaps there is an order to them, not in time but in another way. In fiction one plays a strange game with ugliness and fear.

  F., an occasional handyman and jack-of-all-trades in our town, came up to me in the general store and told me that he had been seeing several deer, including a large buck that would go at least eight points and two hundred pounds, in the orchard behind his house. The deer nearly always came into the orchard at dusk, he said, and why didn’t I come out and see if I could “connect “?

  F. was a rugged, dark little man, about thirty-five years old. He always wore the laborer’s uniform of our region, which in all seasons is, basically, green chino work pants and shirt, and leather boots. At this time, since it was November and getting cold, he had added to this basic outfit a greasy red wool hunting cap with his hunting license pinned to the crown, and a faded red sweatshirt. He had been sitting with the others on the benches in front of the store in the mild morning sun when I came to get the Sunday papers, and I was surprised when he followed me into the store, touched my arm, and offered me a chance at his deer. I hadn’t shot a deer for two years in a row, and the offer excited me perhaps beyond my better judgment, because I knew that F. was a tense and unusual character, a man involved in many complicated, interlocking local feuds. Some of these involved work that he had contracted to do and never finished, some were over damages he had claimed for one reason or another, some were with the selectmen and road agent concerning the plowing or grading of the gravel road that led to his place. He was quite a verbally clever man, and his voice was heard often in town meeting. He was generally considered to be a good workman, too—if you could get him to do the work. He could blast ledge, fix nearly anything mechanical, paint, paper, shingle, glaze, wire, do stonemasonry that was widely admired by other professionals, and so on. At times, however, he wouldn’t do anything for months on end except sit on the benches of the general store, or drive around in his old pickup truck drinking beer and tossing the empty cans with an expert backhand flip out of the window of the cab into the truck bed. Or he wouldn’t be seen at all for weeks.

  His hand, still on my arm, was a cracked red instrument of scars and calluses, the ridged brown fingernails packed smoothly with hardened black.

  “You git your gun and come on out ’bout three-thirty—’bout an hour ’fore dark. You know the way.”

  I thanked him for the chance at the deer, and said that I knew approximately where he lived, but I’d never been there and wasn’t sure I could find the place after I left the blacktop.

  He feigned surprise—or I thought he did; all of F.’s publicly displayed emotions seemed exaggerated, meant for effect. Then he laughed loudly, his hard little eyes, as always, watching through the mask, and gave me closer directions.

  “You familiar with the back road to Cascom?” he said, and continued with the directions, smiling as if the whole thing were a needless hypocrisy and of course I knew the way exactly. At the time, partly, I suppose, because of my greed for venison, I took this to be only another of F.’s peculiarities. The reason for the gift, I thought, was that I had recently published a book. This event had been mentioned in our local newspaper, and I thought F.’s gesture was a manifestation of the intense interest that even the smallest amount of celebrity seems to evoke.

  That afternoon at three-thirty I found F.’s place, a rundown farm typical of our region. The small unpainted house was fairly level upon its foundations, but the barn sagged, a wooden silo had spun down upon itself like pickup sticks, and the connecting outbuildings and sheds had all begun to lean heavily upon one another, doors sprung, roofs mostly stripped by wind and ice of their ancient tar paper.

  Nailed to a tree in the ragged front yard was a sign, uneven black letters on a white-painted board:

  THELMA’S BEAUTY SHOP

  The house had been well banked with sawdust, but the sawdust was old, reddened by age, probably put there winters ago and left by someone who didn’t care enough that the house would rot at its footings.

  I didn’t see F.’s truck anywhere, but thought it might be around in back or in one of the leaning sheds. The front door to the house was obviously never used; it seemed as permanently fused into its frame as the gray subsurface of an old wound in a tree. I left my rifle in the car and followed the worn track to the kitchen door, feeling that I was being observed. I knocked, and after a suitable amount of time the door was opened by a young woman in her late twenties. She seemed frightened, but asked me without the usual belligerence that emotion causes what I wanted. I said F. had asked me to come out this afternoon to see if the deer would come into the orchard.

  “You mean he asked you to come here?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She seemed puzzled and cautious. After some worried thought she asked me to come in and sit down. I sat at the table in the large, crowded kitchen. The implements of the beauty shop stood among the domestic paraphernalia like a double exposure, dominated by what I took to be a hair dryer, a huge, battered chromed bell on a stand.

  “You’re Thelma?” I asked, and she nodded, smiling quickly. She knew who I was; she told me that her cousin had been a student of mine several years before, and that the cousin had pointed me out to her once.

  “I don’t get to town much, though,” she added. She wanted to be friendly, but it was so obvious her friendliness was undercut by fear. I watched her as she prepared coffee, thinking even then how one might document this unfortunate woman, who seemed in her unhappiness typical, common, yet sharply her own living self. Her hair was a dull, lusterless brown that no surface beautification would ever bring to life, her face was smooth and well-boned, yet dark, wasted by the forces of poverty and unhappiness. That look, which is common among oppressed children and women, had deeper causes than poor diet and a lack of sunlight. She seemed a woman of another kind of shadow, a prisoner of this prideless house. It took a startled second look to see that she was pretty, that beneath her faded print dress she still carried her light burden of woman’s flesh with grace. When we smiled at each other,1 we both grew tense and shy, as if appalled by a vague and secret understanding.

  F. came in then, banging the door open. He stood in the doorway, arms akimbo, a look of mock anger on his face. “Well!” he said fiercely, looking from Thelma to me, then back to Thelma. “So you come after all!” He laughed, to indicate that his fierceness was only put on, but we were not all that reassured. “Come on,” he said, and took his Winchester from a wall rack made of cocked deer hooves.

  Until dark, F. and I sat beside a granite boulder where we could overlook the small orchard, but the deer didn’t come that evening. Their one great talent is, of course, survival. When it became so dark we couldn’t see our front sights, F. got up, saying, “Tomorrow. Sure as hell they’ll be coming back one of these nights. Let’s give her a try tomorrow.”

  We walked back to the house in the dark, coming upon its warm window lights. In the kitchen we sat at the table and had a cup of the coffee Thelma had made earlier.

  F. sat across from me, grinning like a wise cat. “I don’t know what’s going on these days up to the college,” he said, his expression belaying his words. “Some of them coeds, they wear their skirts any higher they going to have two new cheeks to powder!”

  Thelma was over at the oil stove, her back to us, and F. pretended that she couldn’t hear. His hand rose to the side of his mouth—one of the strange devices he used to superpose his own artifices upon reality. “It must git you all hot and bothered, having to look at it all day long.” He laughed and pounded the table. When this timed paroxysm was over, he wiped his eyes. “And you a writer, too,” he added, shaking his head.

  I grew weary at the thought of trying to plead anything before the court of F.’s prejudices. “Sometimes it’s not easy,” I said.

  ” ’Course I sup
pose you get caught with your eyeballs hanging out they’d throw your ass out of there.”

  “No,” I said recklessly. “We can look all we want.”

  He seemed taken aback. “That so?” He expressed exaggerated surprise. Even his thick black hair seemed to stiffen as his eyes stared at me. “Well, you never know!”

  I began to wonder just what I’d said to cause such a reaction, but of course it mattered little what I’d said; F.’s drama coexisted with real life. Finally he did drop this subject and we talked for a while of the deer—a subject as rigidly classical in its turns and counterturns as Oriental theater. When I left, I promised to come back the next afternoon.

  Again when I arrived at the small farmhouse, F. wasn’t there, but a rusted-out Chevrolet was parked next to the kitchen. Thelma opened the door for me without my having to knock. I saw immediately that she had prettied herself up. She wore red lipstick, and her hair was fluffed out. She had just finished with a customer, a pale woman in her forties who, below the convolutions of her freshly baked hair, wore a man’s old mackinaw over a polka-dot dress, her milk-white legs descended into unbuckled galoshes.

  As Thelma explained carefully that I had come to hunt with F., the woman’s steady eyes judged this information upon its own merits.

  After the woman left, Thelma was busy putting away the various objects of her profession. In the air, competing with the domestic odors of the kitchen, was the odor that always reminds me of burnt feathers, or burnt glue—the chemical that sets the hair. As I watched her putting away the jars of goo, the racks of curlers and other torture devices that women think powerful enough to do magic, I knew by the delicacy of Thelma’s movements that she knew I watched her. For me she kept her back straight, calculated the cant of her pelvis as she knelt to a cupboard, the profile of her breasts as she rose on tiptoe to reach another. It was all innocent and pretty, and I felt considerably more than pity for her.

  Now, I am a man whose mere daydreams do not excite guilt. In my fiction I am constantly haunted by adultery, murder, cruelty, and betrayal, but that is another world, and in it I will enter any darkness, leaving whatever loyalties I have back in the real world. So if I begin to consider then, even in the most vivid detail, how I would take F.’s young wife to a motel on the highway to the city, ease her of all the sickness of her ugly marriage (in bed, she trembles as I gently touch her pink, childless nipple, etc., etc.)—I felt no guilt. Thoughts are merely thoughts.

  And I was here to kill a deer. A knife at my belt, my accurate Marlin in the car, I was prepared only for that kind of reality.

  F. came in then. He stood in the open doorway looking at us, not speaking. Toward him Thelma turned the wasted look of apprehension.

  “My!” he began in a high falsetto. “Ain’t we all gussied up! What’s the occasion, as if I didn’t know.” He turned to me. “Ain’t she something, though? You kind of like her sweet little ass, don’t you, Professor.”

  He strode forward and hit her in the mouth. She nearly fell down, but held on to the counter, one hand over the lower part of her face.

  “Hey!” I said.

  He turned to me, his hands held low in front of him, as though he expected, or welcomed, an attack.

  “You think I’m so bone-dumb I don’t know what’s going on? I knowed for a long time.” Without looking at her he hit her with the back of his hand, and her head hit the cabinet like a piece of wood. A canister set rattled on the counter. Quickly he took his rifle from the deer-hoof rack and levered a shell into the chamber. The rifle pointed at my belly, where I felt its ghostly power in the form of ice. “You want to stay and watch,” he said, “or you want to get the hell out of here?”

  I heard Thelma bawling as I left. At first I was going to call the police, and I drove fast down the gravel road in the cool light of dusk. But by the time I got back to town I had gone through in my imagination what that summons would entail in this world, where actions beget actions. I considered my wife, my family, but mostly my work, the symmetries and balances I pursue, and my dwindling reservoir of imagination and time.

  I don’t have to look for trouble in this world; it comes to me. For instance, there is a little man I’ve seen three times over the last few years. I find him waiting for me in the hall in front of my office door. I don’t remember his name, but I remember him so well that after not seeing him for a year or more I am aware of the increasing gray in his brush-cut black hair. He is wiry, big-handed, a factory worker, as quick in his movements as a squirrel that finds itself a little too far from the nearest tree. As I come up to my office door I see him, and keep my eyes away from his as I unlock the door. After I’ve entered the office he stands in the doorway peering at my name in the little card slot on the door, then at me with alert, avaricious eyes. He asks if I am Professor Benham, and during our subsequent interview makes absolutely no reference to ever having seen me before.

  Something is wrong, he says, with what’s going on in the White House, and he needs my advice.

  Should I agree that things are going wrong? Things are going wrong indeed, and I could go on intemperately for an hour, for two hours, for a marathon, a filibuster, a teach-in. The difference between his delusional system and mine is that mine is not encapsulated, and my despair at the vain and vicious actions of men can be documented at all levels. Something is going wrong in the White House, in the Kremlin, in Peking, in Cairo, in Athens, in Tel Aviv, in the Vatican, in your living room and mine. Something is going wrong and it always has the symptoms of the incurable psychosis he has brought to me with such excitement that I know he believes it to be a precious gift.

  He has a letter from the Office of the President, an answer to a letter he has previously sent. He has studied this answer very carefully, as you can imagine, and in its bland, perfectly trite, noncommittal platitudes he has found a code in the form of an anagram. If you take the first letter of the first word, the second letter of the second word, the third letter of the third word (at this point his smile is sure and hard, for even the most skeptical dolt would have to be convinced by now), you will see that these letters, slightly rearranged (according to an arithmetical formula he won’t go into now), spell DEATH U.S. The President is surrounded by Communists, but how to let the President know? And there is one other little problem—he wants to be rewarded for submitting this vital information to the President. He wants to be paid, and paid well.

  I am not a snake-poker. I am afraid of this man and of the multitudes he represents. The things I might tell him, however, rush through my mind like the horrible thoughts one can’t thrust away at four in the morning.

  I might close the door and turn toward him slowly, a grim smile on my face, and say, “So you know. It is very unfortunate for you, sir, that you have such an inquiring mind. But you haven’t gone quite far enough, and I can tell you this because you will never get out of this building alive: the President is in no danger, for he is one of us!”

  I think with awe of the perfect ecstasy these words would evoke in him. What glorious, heroic justification! How terrible it is of me to deprive him of this gift.

  But of course I don’t want to enter his system in such an active role; he has already enlisted me in the secret armies of his fantasy, and I want to resign my commission, please, thank you. I do not want to be caught again. So in order to get away I must lie with great subtlety, treat his madness with respect and even sympathy, yet beg to disagree with certain of his conclusions—when all the time my violent apprehension screams from below: Kill him, don’t let him get out of this building alive.

  I look around me and observe how reality and our common paranoid tendencies reinforce each other. For instance, I believe that H., a radical student, was framed on a marijuana charge by the police in a nearby town. He is a militant who has a pure, messianic contempt for drugs, alcohol, or any other distraction that might lessen his usefulness to the cause he so fanatically serves. I have known him for three years, and at first we were quite c
lose. Now, I no longer question to his face the elaborate system he has devised in order to find, over and over again, evidence that there is a deep, revolutionary alliance between his faction and the great masses of the exploited workers of America. I wonder how much longer he will even speak to me.

  He may be mad, dangerously infected by one idea, but he did not keep marijuana in the bottle marked “oregano” on the shelf above his stove. In their raid upon his apartment the police triumphantly confiscated his posters of Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung, and also informed the newspapers that “human excrement” was found on his floors. He and his wife had recently adopted an un-house-trained puppy.

  Where does delusion end and reality begin as our various delusions start to mesh? The connection is made, and madness, as always, seems dominant.

  And now another incident comes to mind, one that happened many years ago, when I was a young soldier. In Phenix City, Alabama, was a second-story beer joint frequented by paratroopers from nearby Fort Benning, Georgia. Perhaps Phenix City has changed, and the second-story place, along with all the other squalid clip joints, has disappeared, but in those days the town, with its air of small-time graft, was a study in degradation, in which the varied possibilities of humanity seemed to have been reduced to nothing but a vicious strut.

  The second-story bar was called Club Geronimo, after the fierce Apache chief whose name had been adopted by the Airborne as its battle cry. One entered the place by way of a wooden outside staircase. Inside the club were mismatched wooden and metal tables, chairs, a linoleum floor always damp with spilled beer and booze, and several young but used-looking waitresses who changed off during any evening because of accepted propositions or the results of slugging the dregs of too many drinks. On the musty, wallpapered walls were calendar pictures of streamlined blondes in shorts and halters. Hamburgers and other simple foods were served, but these were not highly recommended.