The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski

  Bottles kept catching his eye, especially smaller bottles. He picked up a bottle of fingernail polish remover and carried it for a while. He knew of only two uses for it—the second was to kill butterflies, an act he’d seen performed but had never done himself. The idea reminded him of Claude and Epi and the Prestone. He picked up bottles of saccharine, bottles of syrup, bottles of corn oil, and hefted them and set them down again.

  At last, he returned to the front counter. Ida stood with her back turned, twisting the radio’s antenna as the speaker hissed and crackled. Then she turned and centered him in her black pupils. He pointed at the soda case outside and she nodded. Her left hand groped toward the adding machine, paused over the keys, and withdrew. He expected her to ask her question, but all she said was, “Nickel for the bottle.”

  He dropped a quarter and a nickel into her palm. She stopped cold for a moment, blinked, then turned and dropped the coins into the cash drawer. Outside, he lifted a bottle of Coca-Cola from the red cooler and pried off the top using the zinc bucktooth of the opener and watched the soda fizz. Clouds had appeared in the blue sky during his ride and now they’d begun to clot, turn dark. The breeze carried with it a vestige of spring chill.

  The window sash by the cash register slid up. Ida Paine’s face appeared gray behind the screen.

  “You miss your daddy,” she said. “He was a good man. He came in about a week before and I got a feeling then. Nothing certain. Happens all the time. Someone hands across corn flakes, soup—nothing. Then they’ll hand over some little thing and I’ll get a jolt off it, it’s so loaded up. It’s not a message. People will tell you it’s a message, but they’re wrong. What it is, you pay attention to it long enough, you can start to read it. Read the juice.”

  Through the screen he could make out the shape of her face, the glint of her glasses, the stream of smoke fluttering up from her nostrils.

  “Some juice feels good,” she said. “Some juice feels bad.”

  He nodded. There was hot and cold lightning.

  “What can you do?” she said. “No one knows when something like that’s going to happen. Weight of a coin can make all the difference. Man came in once, told me how he’d nearly died except for the change in his pocket, change I’d made for him the day before. Something about that dime being just the right size to turn a screw, and without it, he’d’ve been lost.”

  She didn’t expect a response, he knew that. He stood waiting for her to go on and thought about all the times he’d watched Ida Paine’s left hand hop over the keys of her adding machine.

  “When your daddy came in that last time he bought milk and eggs. That’s all. I rung up the milk same as any day, but with the eggs there was so much juice it was like a hand grabbed me when I touched them. I dropped the whole carton on the floor. He went back and got himself another one. I was half afraid to ring it up. And I had this powerful feeling—almost never happens—that I should charge your daddy more for those eggs, not less. More, you see? But I can’t do that. People get mad. But your daddy, he looked at me and said, ‘Here’s for both.’ I should have taken the money. That would have been the right thing to do. But I said, no, that it was me that dropped them, and I wouldn’t charge for both. And that time, the total rang up two dollars, even-steven.”

  She was silent for a long time.

  “Even-steven,” she repeated. “That was the last time I saw him. I should’ve come, but I couldn’t. To the funeral, I mean.”

  Then she tipped her head and looked at Edgar one-eyed, a primeval bird in its cage. “Child,” she said from the gloom, “come in here and show me what it is you brought with you.”

  He almost didn’t go back in. He stood and looked at his bicycle and then at the clapboard siding with its crazing paint and thought how, though every individual board looked straight and square, when you took them all together something was cockeyed. But in the end he pulled open the screen door and walked to the counter. From his back pocket he drew out the photograph of Claude and Forte and set it on the scored wood between them.

  Ida’s right hand scrambled across the counter and lifted it up for her to see.

  “That one hasn’t been here for a long time,” she said. She looked from the photograph to Edgar and back again. “I remember him, though. Those dogfights.” Her left hand placed a nickel on the counter. “Take your deposit,” she said.

  He reached out and set the empty Coke bottle on the counter. Before he could let go of it, Ida’s adding machine hand sprung forward. Its fingers encircled his wrist with a surprising might and pinned his hand hard against the counter. At once his fingers cramped closed around the fluted bottle. Then, before he quite understood what was happening, Ida’s other hand had pressed the photograph of Claude and Forte against his free palm and she’d somehow curled his fingers closed and locked that hand shut as well. Then she leaned over the counter toward him.

  “You think you can find that bottle?” she said. “You need to look for that bottle. Because unless you can lay hands on it, you need to go. You understand me? You need to go. That’s what’s in the juice.”

  He didn’t understand her. Not in the least. Her face was dreadfully close to his and her fingers were squeezing his fist until the crushed photograph bit into his palm. The smoke above her head crawled in knots and ropes. Images he didn’t understand occupied his mind’s eye: a dark, cobbled alleyway, a dog limping through the rain, an elderly Oriental man holding a slender length of cane with great delicacy. Edgar looked at the Coke bottle in his rigor-locked hand and Ida’s monkey fingers encasing his wrist like a hot iron manacle and then he saw that the bottle had changed. It had taken the shape of an antique cruet or inkwell, maybe a prescription bottle from olden days. Some oily liquid glazed the inside, prismatic, clear, viscous. The thing was banded with a ribbon, and the ribbon was covered with markings in some foreign alphabet.

  “And if you go,” she whispered, “don’t you come back, not for nothing. Don’t you let the wind change your mind. It’s just wind, that’s all.”

  Then she cocked her head and looked at him. She blinked. He recognized in her then a wizened version of the little girl with Shirley Temple curls, the one who had confronted him in the Mellen diner and asked for the secret he didn’t know.

  My gramma’s like me. Wanna know what my gramma says?

  A slab of a hand appeared on Ida Paine’s shoulder, carrying with it the odor of blood and flesh. Then the butcher stood behind the old woman, his white apron smeared with sausage-size lines of red.

  “Ida,” the man said. “Ida.”

  “It’s just wind,” she repeated. “It means nothing.”

  Her fingers uncurled from his wrist. Instantly, Edgar felt his grip relax and the bottle was simply a Coke bottle again and not the odd-looking vessel they’d grappled over. Ida snatched it and slumped onto her stool, chin on her chest, drawing great, deep breaths. Smoke issued lazily from her nostrils. When her eyes, magnified through the lenses of her glasses, went momentarily pink, he saw the doll-like face of the little girl again.

  She says that before you were born, God told you a secret he didn’t want anyone else to know.

  The butcher lifted the Coke bottle from Ida’s grip and clomped to the rear of the store. There was a clank as he racked the empty. For some time Edgar stood rooted to the unvarnished floor of the Popcorn Corners grocery while the radio hissed out pork futures.

  The next thing he knew he was pedaling like a maniac over the gravel of Town Line Road, halfway home.

  FOREWARNED WAS NOT FOREARMED. The catastrophe, when it came, turned on a vanity of Edgar’s so broad and innocent that he would look back on the events of that afternoon and find blame only in himself.

  He had nearly arrived home, pedaling the upslope on the last small hill before their field opened greenly to the west, when the shakes came over him, first in his hands, then his shoulders and chest, until he thought he would either be sick or jerk the handlebars sideways and pitch onto the grave
l. He ground the coaster brake under his heel and stumbled away to sit in the weeds beside the road.

  Whatever had happened under Ida Paine’s grip had been frightening enough, but worse, it had brought on a sudden, suffocating desire to recall his father’s memories, those memories he’d held so briefly. He closed his eyes, pressed his palms to his head. He heard the hiss of rain striking the new grass and he felt the thousand soft impressions of it falling coldly on his skin. He remembered his father’s hands passing into his chest. The sensation of his beating heart cradled. The images sieving through him. The dogfights. The desire to stand between Claude and the world. A whole history he couldn’t know. But their substance was again lost to him, as fugitive as the shape of a candle’s flame.

  I have to go back, he thought. She can help me remember. She knows something about Claude—what had she said about dogfights? And who was the old man he’d seen in the alleyway? What was he holding? But he thought of how Ida looked afterward, slumped on her chair like the empty shell of an old woman, and he wondered if she would even remember talking to him. If he asked her about the old man in the alley, he felt sure she wouldn’t know what he was talking about. And anyway, he didn’t have the courage to face her again. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever.

  When he remembered the photograph, he clapped his shirt pocket. Empty. Sweat broke out across his forehead. At first he thought he’d left it at the grocery. If so, he’d have to go back. He lay in the grass and frantically searched his pants pockets until he found it, bent in half and roughly jammed in the back right. The photograph was in bad shape after being crushed in his convulsed fist under Ida’s fingers. The emulsion was shot through by white cracks half a dozen ways. He pressed it flat. It puckered into meaningless, geometric bas-relief, dividing the image into triangles and trapezoids. But Claude and Forte were still unmistakably the subjects. Edgar propped his arm on his knee and held the photograph out and looked at it. When his hand stopped quaking he remounted the bicycle.

  He topped the hill and coasted up their driveway. It was mid-afternoon. The Impala was parked behind the tractor and Edgar’s mother was crossing from the barn to the house with a set of training notes in hand. As he rolled past, she called to him.

  “Edgar! Could you unload the truck? I was at the feed mill yesterday.”

  He walked his bike into the milk house, wishing he could have gotten home unseen, to go somewhere with Almondine and think before he had to face his mother or Claude. At least his mother had been preoccupied; by the time he shut the milk house door, she had disappeared into the house. He turned the corner into the barn to get the wheelbarrow. As he passed the workshop, he glanced through the doorway out of habit. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular. He didn’t even know anyone was there.

  Claude stood before the workbench, bent over something small, perhaps a jammed spring latch for a lead, tinkering with it like a watchmaker. Almondine lay on the floor, hips tilted, peering up at Claude, relaxed and complacent, her mouth hanging open in a quiet pant. A wedge of light streamed from the high workshop window. Motes of straw dust hung suspended in the air. Everything there was lit in degrees of light and shadow—Claude’s shoulders and head, the chaff on his shoes, the saws and hammers hanging from the pegboard, the outscooped curve of Almondine’s chest, the contour of her head and ears, the scythe of her tail trailing along the dusty floor. Almondine turned to look at Edgar, sleepy-eyed and relaxed, and then back at Claude. All of this was framed in the doorway, like some sort of painting, but it was the accident of a moment, something unpracticed and undesigned.

  And, to Edgar’s eye, beautiful.

  His breath stopped as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Suddenly nothing at all about the situation seemed tolerable. He saw with absolute clarity that he’d lulled himself into acquiescence and complicity. But now some last thing gave way inside him, something with no name. Perhaps it could be called the hope of redemption. For him. For Claude. For all of them. When it was gone, he felt that he had become someone else, that the Edgar who had split away that first morning after the rain had at last returned, and in that new state, as that new person, he believed Almondine had acted unforgivably, her pose so lovely and serene, completing that homely tableau as if Claude belonged right where he stood, when in fact he belonged anywhere else. In jail. Or worse.

  He managed to keep walking. He grabbed the wheelbarrow from the far side of the barn and hurled it before him along the aisle and onto the driveway. Then Almondine trotted up beside him. He flung the handles forward and turned and raised his hand above his head to down her.

  She looked at him for a moment, then dropped to the ground.

  He turned and kicked the wheelbarrow ahead, runners raking clouds of dust from the driveway. Almondine broke and came forward and this time he whirled and lifted her by the ruff until her front feet came off the ground and he shook her and shook her and shook her. Then he let go and downed her again and turned away. He loaded the heavy sacks of quicklime into the wheelbarrow and piled the bags of food on top crosswise and walked around to the handles and backed the wheelbarrow away from the truck. He meant simply to walk away without another word to her but at the last minute he turned and knelt, his arms and shoulders trembling so violently he almost lost his balance.

  I’m sorry, he signed. I’m sorry. But you have to stay. Stay.

  He rolled the overloaded wheelbarrow up the driveway, staggering. When he tried to turn it toward the barn the thing tipped and the feed bags spilled onto the ground. One of them split and its contents poured out and he kicked it over and over until kibble was spread out in a brown swath across the ground. He reached down and threw fistfuls toward the woods until he couldn’t breathe. After a while he righted the wheelbarrow and loaded all the bags of food that had not split into the wheelbarrow’s bed and bore it heavily forward. He emerged from the barn with a rake clattering inside. He made a pile of the loose food and shoveled it into the wheelbarrow with his hands. It took a long time. Spots danced before his eyes as if he had stared into the sun.

  Almondine was holding her down-stay behind the truck when he walked out of the barn. He passed her on his way to the house, stride halting and overbalanced as though his spine had fused into a column of stone, and then he threw his hands into the sign for a release.

  At the porch steps, he turned back. Almondine stood in the sun panting and looking at him, tail uncurled behind her.

  Go away, he signed. Release. Go away. Get away!

  And before she could move, he walked up the porch steps and into the house.

  The Texan

  THE INSOMNIA THAT NIGHT WAS BEYOND ANYTHING EDGAR HAD experienced, a goblin presence in his room, goading him between self-recrimination one minute and white anger the next. The sight of Almondine lying at Claude’s feet like an idiot puppy had wounded something in Edgar so close to his center, so bright, so painful, he couldn’t bear to look at it. He sat flinging out arguments, rebuttals, accusations, his heart firing like a piston in his chest, his thoughts whirling like flies around some phosphorescent blaze. He should have acted that morning, so long ago, the moment he’d understood what Claude had done. The hammer had been in his hand. Instead he’d faltered and doubted, and the flame in him had choked to embers. But one breath of pure air had drawn it up again. That had been Almondine. None of it was her fault, he knew. And yet he couldn’t forgive her.

  When his mother saw how he’d been treating Almondine, late in the evening, she’d dropped any pretense of patience. He would stop immediately, and while he was at it, she said, he was going to rejoin the household and quit the nonsense about sleeping in the kennel. He’d stormed upstairs and slammed the door and stood swaying with rage and confusion. The red rays of sunrise were coating the woods before he at last fell into an exhausted slumber. But it was no rest and no balm. When the sound of his mother working a pair of dogs in the yard woke him it was almost a relief.

  He sat on the bed and looked at the closed
bedroom door. He couldn’t recall a morning in his life when he hadn’t opened his eyes to the sight of Almondine. When she was younger (when they were younger) she’d stood beside his bed and nosed the tender part of his foot to wake him; later, she’d slept beside him, rising while he stretched and yawned. Even if she’d gone downstairs to greet the early risers, no matter how quietly he walked to the stairwell, she was there waiting, front feet on the bottom tread, peering up at him.

  He pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. He could hear the scrabble of her nails on the hallway floor. When he turned the knob and swung the door back, she pretended it was a surprise, and she bucked in place and landed with her front feet spread wide, head lowered, ears twisted back. And he meant to forgive her, but at the sight of her, playful and coy, all his arguments from the past night possessed him again: How she pandered. How she was so much like another person he could name that she ought to go find her instead. Or even him, since she didn’t care who gave her the attention she craved. She danced along behind him, catching the cuffs of his jeans. It took her a minute to follow him down the varnished stairs—the headlong plunge of her youth replaced by cautious navigation—but she darted past as he crossed the living room and whirled to face him, making a little yowl and play-bowing again.

  He signed a down and stepped over her.

  Two empty coffee cups sat on the kitchen table, the chairs pulled out to hold invisible occupants. He swabbed out a cup from the sink and poured himself the dregs from the coffee pot. It tasted like acid on his tongue. He swallowed once and flung the rest down the drain.

  HIS MOTHER WAS WORKING the two dogs to be placed that day, Singer and Indigo. She would, he knew, be in a terrible mood. On the mornings of placements all she talked about were the qualities that made the dogs unprepared to leave. Edgar knew the litany by heart. All that time spent building their confidence. All that work teaching them a language in which questions could be asked and answered—all of it about to be abandoned and lost. His father had always been more circumspect about placement, but then he had surrendered the pups once already, to training. He was also the one who managed the carefully scheduled mail and telephone correspondence with new owners to keep track of the dogs, so in a sense he never lost them. Edgar’s mother, on the other hand, would storm around the house, indignant at the idiocy of owners, their laziness, their lack of compassion, flinging papers, slamming doors.