by Nancy Mauro
Yes, he thinks. Rivals become the enemies who’ll massacre you while you sleep. Hasn’t history demonstrated—hasn’t literature chimed in—that to be truly valiant, one must earn his chops for action? Seek out and destroy the enemy? Or better, destroy and then seek? Hawke would have agreed to this in his salad years, no doubt. So would have Luis Oster, Senior, in the year 1902. There was a man willing to cut the governess to bits for wronging him. It’s no wonder that today, his great-granddaughter considers her own husband so irresolute—she has the same strain of bloodlust coursing through her.
Now Duncan finishes putting the boot to one row of cubicles, and starts down along the east wall of the department. He knows better than anyone that all great ideas seem absurd at first—but only until pop culture absorbs them. After which they tend to outgrow their masters, become pervasive and household, sometimes financially lucrative enough to allow the discarded masters to move forward. He’s been working on a voice-over for a television spot that has his Grunt Girl crawling through the understory of Vietnamese jungle. With ten confirmed kills under her belt, she’s just returned from a special ops mission with the Long Range Recon Patrollers. Was actually shanghaied by the crazy motherfucker Lurps to help chase Charlie up the Mekong Delta and into the no-go zone of Cambodia. It was against protocol but put an M-16 in her hands and, hell, everyone’s fighting the same war anyway. Duncan has been considering the imposition of a voice-over, but wonders if this information will simply telegraph through the visual of his Grunt Girl, bulletproof, pulling the gooks back by the cinched pant leg, tearing them to shreds like a starved dog on a joint of meat—
He stops in front of Hawke’s glass office, its vacancy easily confused for minimalist design. The great engine Upstairs has yet to descend and announce which new wrist they’ll be fitting into their fist of steel. Sunrise does make the position tempting, however. An arc of eastern light illuminates a film of dust over the man’s desk. Duncan steps closer to the glass. Across the surface of the scored metal someone has written in finger script:
RUN, SAVE YOURSELF
He tries the door but finds it locked. Brass’s little trick to keep the minions from poaching office furniture. Was this Hawke’s final message to those still in the pen? An alert from the old ranger who had read the signs, seen the scalpers riding over the bluff?
Tuesday, Lily decides to skip the library and, instead, bows her legs up at the knees and slots herself into the narrow sarcophagus of the bathtub. She rests an old thermos lid of sherry on the ledge. In the window, two trapped yellow jackets serenade her with the most extraordinary, the most enormous unmusic. The buzz and thud of insect against glass creates the Foley effects of snapped power lines or the blue light death of obstinate golfers, three-irons raised to the electric sky. …
She should write that down. Lily picks up the cordless phone from the ledge beside the thermos lid. She clicks on the handset, listens to the drone of ring tone and then, changing her mind, turns it off. Drains the cup of sherry instead. Thinks how nice it is to be drunk in her own private body of water. She sticks her toe into the corroded spout, inviting death by tetanus. No clawfoot romance and milky water here, no sir. No grievous Ophelia floating an inch below Millais’s oiled surface. One would have to scale brick to spy on her, only to be disappointed by a view of her knees cropping up through the water. She forgets the thermos lid is empty, and raises it in a toast to the Invisible Man. To Tinker. Why hadn’t the nanny simply turned to drink instead of kidnapping? Crime required such effort. Lily herself used to steal lipsticks from the Rite Aid. But it was an act of impulse, only forming into a habit and sustained during junior high because of her relative success. To snatch a child, though. That required hours of premeditation. The nappies and milk and jointed teddy bears alone. Lily holds the thermos lid between her knees. It’s because she doesn’t want children, isn’t it? That’s why she can’t understand the risking of life. Become a fugitive to wipe the snotty nose of someone else’s child? Although, there was a case to be made for avoiding the messiness of childbirth. For retaining all forms of ownership over your body.
But what kind of deal is that? A kid without the fun of making it?
Lily slowly lowers herself further down in the hot broth, watching as her nipples pucker and respond to the heat. In the window, the yellow jackets rattle away in appreciation of her naked self. She runs a sea sponge down the inside of her thigh, raking it timidly against the flesh until it sets off an electric response. She has either forgotten or ignored the simple pleasure of being alone with her body. Fortified wine and the smell of soap have softened her reflexes. When she no longer feels like someone is watching her, she slips her hand between her legs.
By day the Viet Cong Guerrilla leads a draft plow through the rice paddy muck of her family farm. The docile water buffalo she rides requires only the occasional switch across the rump to keep it from straying into the bamboo hedgerow. Years of southwestern monsoons have cured the animal’s hide into the tough-wearing leather of an old armchair.
Or maybe, Duncan thinks, it’s not the monsoon rains that have worn down the buffalo’s hide. It’s the rolling friction of the VC girl’s thighs in her skinny-fit jeans.
He turns to the marker pad on his desk. Come to think of it, why show the girl at all? He sketches the rectangular lump of a Southeast Asian ungulate on four stick legs, grazing in a swamp. Why not remove the product from the shot entirely? Might work. Might be brilliant to show the water buffalo, alone on some yellow silt bank, with just the straddle pattern of denim clad legs worn down either side of its withers.
He likes the print potential and begins shading in the creature himself instead of waiting for Leetower. And when the phone rings, he’s so caught up in detailing the greasy patina marks on the animal’s side that he doesn’t recognize the caller. “Valerie from the Historical Society,” the woman repeats. “Of Osterhagen?”
Duncan stops middraft. “Right. Osterhagen.” He flexes his left hand, the humiliating sequence in the driveway pecking its way back in.
“Duncan, a couple things.” The woman clears her throat, a prefatory effect which assures him that she, in fact, has an entire laundry list to run through. His mind suddenly sweeps back to Tinker. To the bones in the cellar and the lazy open grave. He sits up very straight.
“We’ve had reports of cannon discharge over the weekend. Just following up to see if you heard any of that?”
This is not at all what he was expecting. “No,” he tells her slowly. “I don’t think I did.”
“You were in Osterhagen this past weekend?” the woman says. “Isn’t this your work number?”
Duncan takes up his marker again. Draws a shark fin rising up out of the same swamp that the water buffalo is lolling about in. “I go up Thursday nights. I don’t have the entire summer off, I’m afraid.”
“I tried your wife at the house but there was no answer.”
Brilliant strategy, he thinks. Tell a man his wife’s never home.
“Is there an active cannon in Osterhagen?” he asks.
“Some of the old homesteads below Market Road got a hold of one. The farmers there pitched in, brought it back from the foundry in Cold Spring.”
“I wasn’t aware.”
“You must have met Skinner? He’s quite the character.”
Duncan taps his notepad, chews at a stray bit of cuticle. “I have met him,” he says casually. “At the library.”
Valerie sighs down the wire. “We had to pass an ordinance against him. A few years ago. Well, more of a cease-and-desist letter. He was just firing that thing off willy-nilly. Made the summer people nervous as anything.”
“Did you hear the cannon?”
“God, no!” Valerie laughs. “I live in Scarsdale, I’m just on the committee. My late husband owned a house in town.”
That’s a good thing, Duncan thinks, crossing her off his list of guests most likely to drop by unannounced. “Well, I’ll let you know if we hear anything.�
��
“Look, Duncan. Can I ask you something?” She ignores his conclusive tone. “Is Laura up there alone all week?”
“Lily.”
“That’s right. Lily. By herself?”
“Yes, Lily is by herself. She’s writing her dissertation.”
“Isn’t that marvelous!” But Valerie’s trill is distracted. “Duncan, not that it’s any of my business, but you might want to rethink that arrangement. I know you’re not strictly summer people—there’s family history with that house—but the town is, you know, somewhat eccentric.”
Instead of responding, he leans on his desk and weighs the risks of this conversation. He can’t grasp what the woman is angling for. How much does she already know? And Skinner, Duncan’s still not sure what to make of him. Despite his threatening prologue that night at the farm, the cannon hadn’t been loaded. He’d fired a blank charge at the river. While the sound was shit-inducing enough, there was no ten-pound lead projectile launched into the woods as they were led to believe. Not yet, Skinner had muttered on the drive home that night.
“They tend to do things their own way,” Valerie continues. “Some people there don’t really welcome change. When word got to me that Laura was living there alone for the summer, well, I thought, that’s such a big house for one woman by herself! And you can imagine I feel somewhat responsible. I did help arrange the opening.”
Duncan stands up, walks around his desk, stretching the phone cord until he can reach the office door and close it. He has a sense that her uncomfortable thesis statement is on the horizon. “Valerie, I drive up to Osterhagen every weekend.”
“Oh, I understand, I don’t mean to pry. I just want you to be aware. Some people in Osterhagen, once they get it in their head that they don’t like you—”
“Who doesn’t like us?”
“I wouldn’t know that, Duncan. Like I told you, I never go up there. I just hear things.”
“Have you heard someone doesn’t like us?”
“Not yet.”
Christ. The last thing he wants to do is try monitoring Lily’s whereabouts. These days, she seems to suspect anything he does of an ulterior motive. “Lily’s at the library most of the time and they seem to like her.”
“Oh, yes! Those women are old darlings. But I’m talking about, you know, this undercurrent. They’ve recently lost the town mascot. I don’t know if you’ve heard?” Valerie’s voice drops an artful octave. Duncan pictures her on the other end, telephone cradled between neck and shoulder, brushing cat fur from her pantsuit. “It’s a wild boar—the mascot. The high school parades him around at homecoming. Something silly like that.”
“Lily mentioned it.”
“Well, that was Skinner’s pig. He thinks someone stole it. Maybe it’s unrelated, but some dormitory windows at Bard were shot at. I mean with a BB gun—they didn’t break, but the kids got a jolt.”
“He thinks some of the kids from Bard are responsible?”
“Well, like I mentioned, the windows didn’t break. Anyway, Duncan, what I’m saying is, if Laura’s going to be up there, she should just be aware.”
Duncan scratches at his scalp. “Lily has spent her entire adult life in Manhattan.”
“Oh, for sure. She’s got her street smarts. I just wanted to say my piece.”
“Whatever problems they might have, we can’t really change our summer plans. It’s kind of petty, this issue.”
“Yes, that’s it exactly. Petty! It’ll pass. The pig will come back and it’ll all pass. Everything does, isn’t that the way?”
But now Duncan isn’t so sure. When he hangs up with Valerie he’s lost his thrill for the Viet Cong guerrilla girl and her tapered pant legs. What the Historical Society Matriarch has reinforced here is a real sense of reckoning. The possibility of comeuppance for a single, stupid, and innocent mistake that simply lacked a decent follow-through. And he has left his wife to face it alone. He looks at his left hand. Fresh skin is already growing to cover the injury. Lily’s tough, he must bear this in mind. She released him from a fender skirt with her bare hands. Sill, tough means squat when a ten-pound Parrott rifle is rolled onto your front lawn. No, what he needs to do is get those bones out of the garden. Lily’s stuck on the find and he knows full well that she won’t budge until it’s done. If this turns out to be nothing less than his own special ops mission into the Mekong, then at least his orders are clear: get your bones, get your woman, and get the hell out.
When the concert’s over Lily raises the rotting window sash hoping the musicians will fly off without having to trap them under a jam jar. She’s waving a toilet paper streamer out the bathroom window, flagging the wasps away from the tacky resin of the outer casement, when her eye catches on a white bundle in the garden. Lily sticks her head out the window. She’s mistaken. It’s not a white bundle lolling around down there. It’s a sheep.
No way. She takes another look, thinking it might have something to do with the cooking sherry she just polished off. No. It’s still a sheep. And now with its head lowered in Tinker’s grave. My God, she thinks. This has got to be the worst bit of Orwellian recompense conceivable. Even the animals are revolting.
“Hey!” Lily knocks at the top of the windowpane. “What are you doing down there?” The animal keeps its hindquarters angled in her direction, its head down and grazing around the site. It must have detected from the tremble in her cry that she’s pure greenhorn when it comes to negotiating with livestock. Perhaps her precision with the tire iron was nothing more than a lucky strike after all.
The sheep’s fleece, all spit curls and marcel waves, betrays the renegade lifestyle of the untended: the crimped underbelly wool dragging like trampled hems, the flanks snaggled with twigs and grass and seasoned brown from a long, rasping massage against the base of a creosote-soaked telephone pole. Dirty sheep. She sees it raise its shock-headed skull from the hummocky pile of Tinker’s plot to scout left and right.
“Up here, lamb chop.”
The animal lifts its head to observe treetops for voices, turning to her finally, the source of recrimination, and it’s only then that she realizes she was wrong yet again. It’s not a sheep. It’s a poodle.
Lily leans on the windowsill, naked, swearing off cooking sherry and overcome with either hysteria or a sense of adversarial one-upmanship. If only Duncan could see they’re up against much more than Skinner’s crew. A dog’s urgency! The innate compulsion to dig! The poodle raises its left paw at her, either an atavistic impulse or the forgotten gesture of puppyhood, the shake-a-paw gag that delighted someone once. But Lily is not kindhearted.
“Go on,” she shouts. “Get out of there!”
The dog lowers its trick paw. Its good humor has vanished; Lily isn’t going to play. They face each other: the poodle, a filthy meringue, and she, naked at the breast. Nothing regal in that face, she thinks. There’s a twitch of snout muscle as the poodle’s lip ruches over its fang, forming a sneer that is not of Lily’s anthropomorphic creation.
Lily, furious, barks twice out the window. She’s surprised by the harsh and authentic sound that she produces. The dog, however, ignores her, turns back to the hole, and noses around for the spot where it left off. She reaches down, picks one of her sneakers off the floor, and launches it through the window.
CHAPTER 17
Topography of the Cerebral Cortex
“After witnessing the dismemberment of a field medic from Alabama and shaking the trees for dog tags, Grunt Girl realizes she isn’t going to win this war. We see her, jeans and cammies, under a tree that’s literally strung with dog tags.”
“Dog tags in trees?”
“Yeah,” Leetower turns to Kooch, “I should have mentioned that. Idea there is someone’s been blown sky high from a land mine, okay? So, the various bits, they end up in the trees.” The tail of his sentence bends upward, seeking affirmation.
“Then Grunt Girl says—and we put this in quotes in the print ad—she says, ‘What’s left of th
e field medic from Alabama could fit in a shoe box.’” Leetower spreads his drawings on Duncan’s desk. “See how the, uh, the quote functions the same as the voice-over on the TV?”
For a minute no one speaks.
“Well.” Duncan, relying on monosyllabic ambiguity to communicate his disinterest, shuffles the concepts around. Maybe if he changes their order.
“Stick to pictures, Leetits.” Kooch puts his feet up on the desk. “Doesn’t it say Art Director on your business card?”
The boy sits and crosses his legs at the thighs. His lips are the color of bone. “Right, in the same place where yours says Asshole.”
“I’m rounding out a script here where Grunt Girl realizes the frayed edges of her jeans have grown into a scabbing wound on her calf. Right into the scab so that skin and war and denim are inextricably laced.” Kooch slaps his broad mitt down over his notes. His cuticles are immaculate, Duncan observes. Bred for the barn but raised in the manor house.
“The field medic is alive. He’s bent over Grunt Girl’s leg with a rusty straight-edge razor, slicing the jeans away from the scabbing wound. Transferring his cigarette to her mouth the way two scuba divers may be forced to share a single oxygen mask.” Kooch doesn’t look to either of them for a reaction. He flips the page.
“Next spot. We open on a wide shot of an opium den.”
Duncan stands, acknowledging a certain didactic thrill. While he needs to take these two in hand before the entire concept bleeds away into the furniture, he’s got to admit he’s pleased they’ve followed his lead instead of putting up roadblocks.
“You guys ever hear that saying, ‘Kill your darlings’?”
“Yeah. Bob Barrie.”
“No, it was Helmut Krone.”
“Actually it was Faulkner.” Duncan walks around his desk. “You two are close, but I think we’re getting stuck on genre films. Let’s go more stylized. Forget reality altogether.”
