The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski

  “Can Tinder make it on that foot?”

  And that was the question, wasn’t it? Tinder’s foot wasn’t bandaged anymore, but mornings, the dog gimped badly. Edgar didn’t know when Tinder would be ready, if ever.

  He shrugged his shoulders. There was no answer except to try.

  ON FRIDAY, HENRY ARRIVED home with a trailer hitched to the sedan. He got out and he knelt and, grinning at Edgar, let the dogs accost him. He gestured at the trailer, where four inflated tires lay.

  “I had retreads put on the wheels for the Skyliner. Tomorrow, she’s gonna roll for the first time in, oh, fifteen years.” He pulled a bag of groceries from the passenger seat of his car. “Chicken on the spit and potato salad,” he said. “Ordinary or not ordinary?”

  Ordinary, Edgar signed. But good.

  They started the grill and put the chicken on and sat in the lawn chairs and looked out at the piles of junk.

  “I’ve almost got used to seeing it there,” Henry said. “Putting the Skyliner in the shed: ordinary or not ordinary?”

  Not ordinary, Edgar signed.

  “Just checking,” Henry said. He was working a crossword puzzle.

  “Six-letter word meaning ‘to stamp a coin.’ Starts with Q.”

  Edgar looked at him.

  I don’t know.

  “Gotcha!” he said. “Only joking. It starts with an I.” He handed the newspaper over to Edgar.

  Incuse, Edgar wrote on the paper and handed it back.

  “Jesus,” Henry said. “That’s just plain scary.”

  THE NEXT DAY THEY jacked up the Skyliner, mounted the tires, and dragged the cinder blocks away.

  “Oh man,” Henry said. “Oh boy! Hold on, wait a second.” He ran to the barn, returned with a hammer, and folded the car’s top into the trunk again. When he finished, they coaxed all three dogs onto the front seat. It took the better part of an hour, laboriously pushing the car back and forth, to align it in front of the shed. The dogs had long since abandoned ship.

  “Come back,” Henry cried as they fled. “That’s an honor!”

  Then they pushed the car into the shed. Henry ran around front to keep it from rolling into the wall, since the brakes didn’t work. “Careful,” he said. “Just…a little…more…” And then the Skyliner was inside. They closed the now bright red doors and Henry dropped the bolt through the flap latch.

  Henry fetched a beer and began to walk through the piles of junk sitting in the yard, scratching his head. He looked at the mirror and the stanchions. “Jeez, that’s a shame,” he said. Over a broken porcelain sink he moaned, “Whoa. Just imagine what happened to that.”

  He walked to the stoop and sat down.

  “I can’t do it,” he said.

  Can’t do what?

  “Haul that stuff away. It was here before I was.” He took a long swallow from the beer and held it up to the light. “Putting that stuff back in the shed: ordinary or not ordinary?”

  Edgar looked at him.

  I don’t know.

  Henry made the decision.

  They worked like maniacs. Not everything could go back in, but they rehung the hubcaps and the old tools on the walls. They found space in the rafters to lay the salvageable sheets of plywood. Edgar handed up the old broken sink and the pruning shears and they leaned two of the stanchions in a corner. When they had finished, the mirror graced the front wall of the shed, reflecting the Skyliner’s broad front bumper, and two of the wagon wheels leaned against the outside like wreaths of gray wood. The shed was jammed full. The Skyliner could roll out, but with inches to spare.

  “That’s it,” Henry said, stepping back to look at what they’d done. “That feels right.”

  It did feel right, Edgar thought. He watched the dogs sniff the wagon wheels as Henry backed the trailer up to the gravel apron. They hefted the old furnace and the transmission and the wringer washer onto its bed.

  “What say we celebrate with a little ride?” Henry said.

  Edgar shook his head. Not in the daylight.

  “Oh, come on. Lighten up. Nothing bad’s going to happen.”

  Maybe it was the idea of Henry Lamb telling him to lighten up that made the request seem reasonable.

  All right, he signed. Okay.

  They unhitched the trailer, piled into the car, and barreled through the waves of heat rising over the blacktop. Henry took them daringly through the middle of Ashland, and Edgar felt, if not entirely carefree, more lighthearted than he had in a long time. They were heading back toward the open highway when the light on the railroad crossing started to flash and the thin striped crossing arms levered down. Henry brought the sedan to a stop and a flush of adrenaline went through Edgar. He slid down until he was hidden from the cars around them. That was safe enough, he thought. A man with three dogs in his car wasn’t that unusual. The train lumbered past. The crossing lights flashed and the bells pounded. Edgar lifted his head to see if the caboose was visible yet, then ventured a look around.

  A young woman sat alone in the car next to them.

  Edgar tapped Henry’s arm and pointed.

  “Holy cow,” Henry said. “That’s Belva. Act natural.”

  Edgar wasn’t sure what Henry meant by that. Edgar was acting natural. The dogs were acting natural. Henry, however, had immediately stopped acting natural. He sat ramrod straight and began whistling a little nervous tooty-toot-toot and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as if some pounding rock-and-roll ballad were playing on the radio, though in fact it was the weather forecast—partly cloudy today, the announcer droned, chance of severe thunderstorms tomorrow. Harvest weather, Edgar thought.

  The woman must have glanced over and noticed Henry, for when Edgar lifted his head to look again, she too was turned forward, looking intently ahead. The train kept rolling along, car after car. There was plenty of time to read the letters and numbers on the sides. Finally, the woman leaned over and rolled down her passenger-side window and shouted, “Henry!”

  Henry turned and looked at her, still whistling. Toot-toot-toot.

  “Belva,” he shouted back.

  “I’ve been meaning to call you!”

  “Is that right?” Henry said. He glanced at Edgar and gave a little wink. “I guess you saw the sunflowers!”

  “What?”

  “The sunflowers! I guess you saw the sunflowers!”

  “What sunflowers?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Never mind!”

  “I’m moving,” she shouted.

  “What?”

  “Moving. I’m moving to Madison.”

  “How come?”

  “Why are all those dogs with you?” she shouted, instead of answering his question.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Henry said, lamely. He pounded a fist on the steering wheel and looked down at Edgar, scootched below the windows.

  Ordinary, Edgar signed up at him.

  “Right,” Henry muttered. He turned back to Belva. “I just decided to get a dog. Uh. Three dogs.”

  “Wow,” she said. “They’re really nice.”

  Very ordinary, Edgar signed, rolling his eyes.

  “Actually, they belong to my nephew,” he corrected. “I’m just looking after them.”

  She laughed again. “You don’t have any nephews, Henry. You’re an only child.”

  He looked stricken for a moment. “What’s that? No, no, not ‘nephew.’ Nathoo. They belong to my friend Nathoo. Say hello, Nathoo.” He waved Edgar up from the floorboards.

  Edgar shook his head.

  “Come on,” he hissed. “Help me out here.”

  No.

  “Who are you talking to?” Belva shouted.

  “Nobody—just the dogs,” he said. “Why are you moving to Madison?”

  There was a long pause, and Edgar could hear the clank of the joints between the train cars, and the clang-clang of the crossing gates, and even, faintly, radios playing in the cars around them. The dogs were looking out the windows and panting happily. Bab
oo, in particular, seemed interested in Belva. He pushed his head out the driver’s-side window to get a better look.

  “Well,” she shouted at last, “because Joe is.”

  “Joe?”

  “My fiancé.”

  “Ah,” Henry said. “Aha. Oh.”

  “You did know I was engaged, right?”

  “Yes, of course!”

  “It was in the paper!”

  “Yep, that’s where I saw it!” he said. “I bet he’s a moron.”

  “What?”

  “I said, I bet you’ll love Madison.”

  “Really, Henry. Who’s in the car with you?”

  Henry looked over at Edgar. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

  “Come on,” he hissed. “Just this once.”

  Then the caboose rattled past and Edgar thought he could probably risk it that one time—the guard arms were already lifting and they were about to drive away. He was being silly, hiding under the dash like that.

  He sat up.

  He waved hello to Belva.

  And that was when he looked through the rear window of Henry’s sedan and noticed the State Patrol cruiser.

  Glen Papineau

  GLEN PAPINEAU SUPPOSED HE WAS IN MOURNING. HE HAD USED that word before, even thought he understood what it meant, but he really hadn’t. For one thing, mourning sounded like a formality, a stage a person was required to go through—wearing a black suit and attending a funeral—but real mourning didn’t end the day after the funeral, or the week after, or even the month after. His pop had died nearly two months earlier, and sometimes Glen felt like he’d just then gotten the call.

  In his mind, he called them the day feeling and the night feeling. The day feeling caught up with him before lunch most days, a hot blanket of lethargy so suffocating it made his temples pound. He dragged himself around work as if facing a high wind. Everything took an eternity, became a laborious detail. And Glen hated details. He was built for broad gestures—all a person had to do was look at his hands to know that. A man with hands like Glen’s would do certain things, and certain other things would never be in the cards. He’d never be a pianist, for example, or a veterinary surgeon. Not that he wanted those things, it was just that he’d found himself looking at his hands a lot lately, and his hands said they weren’t there for detail work.

  The day feeling was bad, no question, but the night feeling was the real killer—a bleak sledgehammer to the soul, as if some stranger had whispered a terrible secret in his ear, and that secret was how death was senseless and inevitable. The knowledge made sleep impossible. He sat up watching television, and if he didn’t want to be alone, he went to the taverns—not the smartest move for local law enforcement to drink in public, but people understood. Some even bought him beers and told him stories about his pop.

  There were moments of acceptance. After all, his pop had been getting up in years, and Glen had contemplated his death more than once, though he’d imagined something long and slow—a tangle with cancer, an unnameable decline. What he hadn’t expected was that death’s visit would be so sudden. One day he’d been a vigorous sixty-seven-year-old man, running his clinic, flirting with the bakery ladies, blabbering to anyone who would listen about his winter vacation in Florida, and the next he was lying at the bottom of the stairs in the Sawtelles’ barn.

  Glen, as an only child, had been responsible for the funeral arragements. There had been a detailed will, specifying that his father be buried alongside Glen’s mother in Park City. At the shop, as his father called the veterinary clinic, Glen had boxed his father’s desk, his books, the jackets hanging on the hooks. Jeannie had called all his father’s clients and referred them to Doctor Howe in Ashland. The will specified that the vet school in Madison be contacted and his practice be sold in toto rather than auctioned off, but no one seemed terribly interested in a practice in the hinterlands and Glen had gotten no serious calls. The shop stood dark and silent now, pharmacy locked down, plastic sheets thrown over everything as if it were a morgue. The place was a break-in waiting to happen, Glen thought; in fact, someone had already put a rock through one of the back windows, though nothing was missing.

  So there was the day feeling and the night feeling, and those were bad, and he was drinking a little more than he used to, but Glen thought he was handling things, if not thriving, until Claude called and said he wanted to talk. Glen offered to come out to the Sawtelle place, but Claude suggested the Kettle, a tavern south of town. The Brewers were playing on the television when Glen walked in. Claude hailed him from the end of the bar. The bartender, Adam, drew him a Leinenkugel and Glen sat down next to Claude.

  They watched the game and talked about Pop, how Claude remembered him coming out to the kennel back when he was a kid. Claude said some nice things about his pop. He said that, besides Glen, he thought he was probably the closest thing to family Pop had. Said he thought of Glen’s father as an uncle, which meant a lot because the Sawtelles were a small family.

  It was much later when they got to Claude’s reason for calling. Doctor Howe was incompetent, Claude said. Until they found another vet, Claude intended to do the workaday medicine himself—worming the pups, treating mastitis, and so on. He’d been a medic in the navy and he knew his way around a medicine chest. Glen knew his father had some sort of arrangement with the Sawtelles, since it wasn’t practical to be running out there five days a week just to prescribe penicillin. So they had set aside a medicine chest in their barn for the supplies Pop usually locked up in his office. And now Claude wondered if Glen would be willing to sell off some of the meds in the shop pharmacy, seeing as no one was beating down the door to take over.

  They were four or five beers in at that point, which wasn’t much for someone Glen’s size, but he’d also had a couple before he drove down. They watched the Brewers give up another run. Adam swore at the television as a service to the bar patrons.

  “You know what I think about when I think about your dad?” Claude said. “The Hot Mix Duck Massacre.”

  Glen chuckled. “Yup. That first rain—remember all those ducks quacking around the shop?”

  When Glen was eight years old, the state had come through and repaved Main Street and put up street lights, the first significant improvement that Mellen had seen, on its long glide toward oblivion after its lumbering heyday, since Truman was in office. The streets had been so bad the town kids made a game out of riding bicycles down the street without crossing any pothole patches. It wasn’t easy. In some places, it hadn’t even been possible.

  But instead of the pebbly tar-and-gravel asphalt that had once covered the street, the state crew had applied a new formula that went down like black, smoking glue and hardened pudding-smooth. This was called “hot mix,” presumably because they poured it from a huge wheeled furnace. The hot-mix furnace stank to high heaven for the three weeks it took to resurface the street, but it was a small price to pay; afterward, Mellen’s previously pocked Main Street was a pristine strip of smooth, black pavement.

  Things were hunky-dory until the first rainy spell. One night, a couple of ducks flew by, looking for a spot to land on the Bad River. With the new street lights shining off the rain-slick hot mix, Main Street must have looked like a placid, fish-filled stream, more inviting than the Bad River had ever been. The first two ducks came in for a water landing, quacking like mad, and broke their necks on impact. Then the main flock came up over the trees, their tiny bird brains unable to figure out why their compatriots looked so odd there in the water. The result had been known ever after as The Hot Mix Duck Massacre.

  The luckiest birds tumbled head over heels, shook their bills in confusion, and flapped off, but a half-dozen others became dinner for quick-thinking observers. The rest suffered all manner of injuries. The diner emptied. A strange roundup of the wounded ensued. People herded limping, stunned ducks into boxes, captured them under blankets, even shooed them into cars. A caravan had arrived at Glen’s father’s shop.

>   “They got so they limped around behind Pop wherever he went,” Glen said.

  Claude had forgotten some of the details, but as they’d drank and talked, he’d gone from grinning to laughing out loud at Glen’s recollection.

  “Yup. What I remember best is him setting them on the receptionist’s counter,” Claude said, “and talking to people as if he couldn’t see them. ‘What duck?’ he’d say. I used to fall down laughing when he did that.”

  Glen remembered that, too. That was back when Claude had worked around the shop doing odd jobs. He remembered thinking back then what a striking figure Claude was—a bit of a hero to Glen, in fact. He’d been athletic. (He still looked good for—what, forty?) And another thing: Claude always seemed to have a girlfriend, which, even back when he was eight, Glen suspected might turn out to be a problem for him.

  “Did I ever tell you what he did at the diner?” Glen said.

  “What’s that?”

  “One time, when the splints were off and he knew those ducks would do just about anything for him, he put one in an old medicine bag and closed it up and we went to the diner for lunch. He set the bag on the seat in the booth and waited. The duck never made a sound. Pop ordered first, and while the waitress was taking my order, he reached over and opened the bag and out popped the duck’s head.”

  “No,” Claude said, laughing.

  “When I finished, he said, ‘Aren’t you going to take his order?’ and she saw the duck and screamed.”

  “No.”

  “Yes! Dropped her order pad and everything. And do you know what the duck did?”

  “What?”

  “It jumped out of the case and chased her back to the kitchen, gabbling at her heels. She hollered the whole way.”

  Claude was shaking and holding onto the rim of the bar as if he were about to fall off his stool.

  “Pop shouted back that his friend wanted the smelt.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “He said he wouldn’t put the duck back into the bag until it was done eating, that even ducks had a right to a decent lunch. Especially in Mellen.”

  “Stop,” Claude begged. “Please. Stop.” Tears were streaming down his face.