by Larry Watson
Although he was uncomfortable walking into the house without knocking or ringing the bell, the lawyer did as Lee Mauer requested. Just inside the door, however, the lawyer called out, “Hello?”
From the darkened stairway came a feeble “Down here.”
The Stoddard basement was only partially finished. The laundry and storage rooms, separated by only a wall of widely spaced two-by-fours, had concrete walls and floors and exposed ceiling joists. Before his death, however, Raymond Stoddard had made progress on a recreation room. He had installed ceiling acoustical tiles and recessed lights, and he had laid flooring with the markings for a shuffleboard court. On one paneled wall was a gun rack, though Raymond Stoddard owned no guns himself. Protruding from another wall were the pipes that were supposed to connect to the fixtures of a future wet bar.
In spite of Raymond’s plans for the room, it had, as basements inevitably do, gone over to storage. The lawyer was sure that the cardboard boxes, the mildew-spotted suitcases, the dresser missing a few drawer pulls, and the cedar chest were all full. Similar items in his own basement certainly were. Positioned almost in the center of the room was a space heater, its bars glowing orange and giving off the odor of hot dust. The appliance must have been running for hours. The basement was so warm that the lawyer felt immediately the onset of sweat prickling at his hairline.
And in a darkened corner, lying flat on his back on a rollaway bed’s bare mattress, was Lee Mauer. Mauer was wearing nothing but briefs, yellowed with age, and above the waistband rose the great mound of his belly, a shape like an overturned bowl. His stomach, chest, and shoulders were thickly covered with dark hair, and the pink nipples peeking through the thatch were an incongruous sight, looking as though they belonged on the body of a woman in an oil painting from another century. His round face was moist and flushed, and though he smiled at the lawyer, pain lined his forehead.
“Thanks for coming.”
“What can I do for you, Lee?”
“My back’s gone out.” He twisted his lips as though the words themselves hurt.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Mauer weakly waved away the lawyer’s sympathy. “It’s happened to me for years. There’s a doctor who thinks he can fix it, but that’d mean surgery. You know me—no knives.”
In fact, the lawyer didn’t know Mauer well at all, and the revelations about both the man’s back problems and his dread of surgery came as news to the lawyer.
“Usually,” Mauer continued, “if I just take it easy for a couple days, the pain eases and then I’m okay until the next time it happens. Not that I have any choice in the matter. I can’t do much more than lie flat.”
“Okay.” The lawyer was not a fastidious man—he had, after all, recently had his hands covered with pumpkin slime—but he guessed that Lee Mauer was going to ask for his help in getting dressed and moving, perhaps up the stairs, and the lawyer wasn’t eager to put his arms around the fat man’s sweaty body.
“So there’s some things I just can’t do for myself when I’m in this condition. Goddamnit.”
All right, here it comes, thought the lawyer.
“If you’d drive my car, I’d sure appreciate it.”
The lawyer wasn’t prepared for that request, but then he was thrown further off balance by something that hadn’t occurred to him earlier. If Lee Mauer couldn’t get up, how had he made the telephone call that brought the lawyer to where he now stood?
“Your car, Lee?”
“It’s in the driveway.”
“I saw it. . . .” But the lawyer would have to use his own car to take Mauer home, wouldn’t he? Unless Lee wanted the lawyer to keep Mauer’s car until he was up and around. And while the lawyer was trying to puzzle through this matter, the answer to an earlier question was provided. Just under the rollaway was the black shape of a telephone, and from under the foot of the bed snaked the telephone cord. The long cord ran to a wall where it was plugged into a phone jack, not secured but hanging from the outlet by its wires. Raymond, Raymond, to leave with so much undone . . .
Mauer said, “I wouldn’t want the neighbors to see the car here all night.”
Would the neighbors be likely to conclude something if they saw the car parked there at seven A.M. that they didn’t conclude now when they saw it late at night? The lawyer supposed they would. After all, he had withheld his own judgment until, as he put it, all the evidence was in.
Just at that moment, as if she had read his thoughts on matters of proof, Alma Stoddard walked into the room. She was wearing an old flannel bathrobe, and from the way her breasts moved beneath the worn fabric, the lawyer guessed that she was naked under the robe. He also surmised that she had been in the room recently, and that its warmth was what had caused tendrils of her hair to stick to her perspiring forehead.
“His back . . . ,” Alma said. She crossed her arms and held her elbows. “If you could just . . .”
The lawyer held up his hands. “It’s not a problem.”
She smiled gratefully and then, to save them both further embarrassment, hurried from the room. Perhaps she had made an appearance as a way of confessing to the nature of her relationship with Lee Mauer. Your life is your own, the lawyer would have said to her; you live it as you see fit. You don’t owe me any explanations.
As soon as she was gone, Lee Mauer said, “I was thinking you could just park the car a couple blocks away. In the lot over at First Presbyterian, maybe. Then if I’m up and around tomorrow, I’ll go get it. You wouldn’t even have to come back here.You could just leave the keys on top of the right rear passenger tire. An old cop trick . . .”
The lawyer wondered what kind of trick that was supposed to be, but he didn’t ask. Just as he didn’t ask why Alma couldn’t drive the car.
“Where are your keys, Lee?” The lawyer preferred to get on with the mission and return to his home. He planned to describe this scene to his wife and allow her the satisfaction of having her suspicions confirmed.
“Pants pocket.” He pointed to the clothing draped over a rocking chair with a torn cane seat.
The lawyer picked up the trousers and carried them to Lee Mauer.
Before he turned the car keys over to the lawyer, Lee Mauer separated them from the rest of the keys on the chain. Holding out the keys, he said, “Park it under the light, if you can.”
The lawyer was able to leave the car just where he had been instructed to park it, but before he reached inside the wheel well to put the keys on top of the tire, he surveyed the area. Most of the nearby houses were dark, and where there was a lighted window, he saw no human form looking out. When he was as certain as he could possibly be that he was not observed, he left the keys and walked away. Snow was falling continuously now, and though the flakes were still widely spaced and airy, by morning the car would be veiled in white.
There were two routes he could take back to his home and his waiting pumpkins. He could walk north and then east, staying on sidewalks all the way, until he came to his own block, or he could plot a diagonal course, which would allow him to come up through the Stoddards’ backyard. That was the most tempting because it would allow him to peer into the basement where Lee Mauer lay and where, perhaps, he and Alma had resumed their sexual frolic. After all, for what other reason would Lee insist that the lawyer not bring the car keys back to the house?
But the lawyer had not traveled far in that direction when a number of thoughts stopped him. And it was not just his twined senses of pride and propriety that held him back. Enough snow had fallen that his footsteps across the lawn would be revealed, and he couldn’t do anything to cover or conceal his tracks. Besides, Lee Mauer’s injury, Alma Stoddard’s sweaty forehead—whatever the act they had been engaged in, they were doubtless finished by now. And if not, Lee’s back would prevent them from resuming.
So the lawyer took the longer route, staying on the sidewalks that still held enough of the day’s heat that the snow couldn’t accumulate on the concrete. He
wished now that he had worn a coat. The web of dark hair covering Lee Mauer’s torso probably would have done as much to keep out the cold as the lawyer’s white shirt did.
Besides, even if the lawyer had indulged in that brief voyeuristic impulse, even if he had looked in that window and seen Lee and Alma naked again on that narrow bed, the sight wouldn’t have satisfied his real curiosity about those two. He may not have been particularly knowledgeable or sophisticated when it came to sexual practices, but neither was he naïve; he was aware of a range of carnal activities that men and women could engage in, some more likely than others to cause a man’s back to go out. But the question that most tormented the lawyer couldn’t be answered by peeking through a window. What truly perplexed him had to do with the fully clothed Lee Mauer and Alma Stoddard. How could a fat, bald cop, a loud, vulgar man with two chins and no charm persuade an attractive woman—a woman less than a year into her grief—to disrobe and . . . and . . . what? To love him?
Once the lawyer’s house came into view, he picked up his pace to hurry toward its warmth. On his block, from front porches and kitchen windows, his neighbors’ jack-o’-lanterns grinned, leered, or stared in cross-eyed disbelief at him as he passed. His own pumpkins were of course still without expression. He had gotten no further than cutting open their skulls and scooping out the tangled mess inside.
That story eventually appeared in The North Coast Fiction Review. My father is, of course, the model for the lawyer protagonist, and Lee Mauer (Ken Crowder in the fiction) did injure his back and call on my father for assistance. That incident occurred not on Halloween but in the week before Christmas, and beyond the fact that my father returned home shaken, I never knew what happened when he went to Lee Mauer’s aid. If he told my mother, she never told me.
A little more than a year after I sat in an almost empty First Lutheran Church for Raymond Stoddard’s funeral, I attended another ceremony in the same building. Once again, few were present, and again, a Stoddard was the reason we were gathered. This time, however, the sparse turnout was predictable. Alma Stoddard had not invited many people to witness her marriage to Lee Mauer. Furthermore she must have decided that since it wouldn’t be possible to keep her dead husband out of people’s thoughts, she might as well go ahead and recite her vows in front of the same altar where his coffin had been so recently stationed.
And those of us there . . . I have no doubt we all spent our time in the pews in the same manner—by trying to determine what had been in Alma Stoddard’s heart and mind in the days, weeks, and months leading up to the wedding. What, we wondered, moved her to say yes to Lee Mauer’s proposal? Among the countless varieties of human love was there one that explained what the widow of a murderer and a suicide might have felt for a fat policeman?
For her part, my mother didn’t believe affection of any kind was involved. When she learned of the impending marriage, she had a simple explanation.
“She needs protection,” my mother had said.
My father scoffed. “In Bismarck? On Keogh Street? Protection from what? From whom?”
“You’re a man,” my mother answered. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“Enlighten me.”
“If you’re lying in bed alone at night, and you hear something, it’s no help to tell yourself there’s nothing to be afraid of. You feel what you feel. And perhaps for Alma, having Lee Mauer beside her is preferable to having that feeling.”
As he had in his conversation with Ross Wilk, my father rejected someone’s theory of human motivation. And again, he had no formulation of his own to put in its place, for when my mother pressed him—“All right, then. You tell me. What’s behind this? Has your friend taken you into his confidence? You seem awfully incurious about the upcoming nuptials.”
My father answered with a question of his own. “Is that what you’ve felt, when I’ve been out of town? Afraid?”
“I’m not Alma Stoddard,” my mother said, thereby ending both lines of inquiry.
I wasn’t sure why my parents insisted that I attend the wedding. Perhaps it was a desperate attempt to swell the congregation. Perhaps they wanted to bring home to me, through the unmistakable parallelism of the two Stoddard rites, a lesson about the cycles of human life. If that was the case, it was wasted on me. I did observe that after the funeral and the wedding, similar fare—ham sandwiches and date bars—was served in the church basement, but I had no insight into the nature of the rituals that attended grief and joy.
After only a few minutes of milling around at the reception, Gene nudged me and asked, “Want to grab a smoke?”
I seldom smoked, and Gene and I had reached the point where we rarely said more to each other than a passing hello in the halls at school, but I followed him out of the fellowship room. How could I refuse him on the day when his mother had married a substitute for his father?
It was too cold to go outside, so we made our way over to another section of the church basement, the darkened wing where we had both once attended Sunday school classes.
Inside the boys’ lavatory, with its undersize porcelain fixtures for its undersize patrons, Gene offered me a Camel. We lit up and before I had taken my first timid drag, he asked his question.
“Would you be my best man?”
Since my father had just served as Lee Mauer’s best man, I assumed that Gene was asking me a hypothetical question, that the occasion had revived in him some of the affections of our once-close friendship, but I hadn’t even formed a response on that basis when Gene added, “Marie’s late.”
I thought Gene meant that Marie was supposed to attend the wedding—I had wondered about her absence—but that her tardiness had caused her to miss the ceremony.
“And she’s never late.”
Struck suddenly by the full force of what Gene was telling me, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying what a naïve, self-deceiving, heartbroken parent might say—how could this happen?—as if the only consolation left was in learning that it was the result of a single, mindless, aberrant moment.
But Gene addressed the matter without my question, not that his response offered any satisfaction. “I don’t even know how the hell it happened. . . .”
“Oh, come on.”
“Really. We hardly even—Oh, what the hell.” As long as I had known him, Gene had had a nervous little habit of tugging at a lock of his hair right at the hairline. When he did that now with the same hand that held the cigarette, I expected to hear the sizzle of burning hair. But, deftly, he managed the maneuver by pinching his hair with his thumb and little finger. “If that’s the way it is,” he said, in a phrase I had never heard him use before, “that’s the way it is.”
I knew I was supposed to commiserate with him and his predicament, but at that moment it was my own anguish I was concerned with. As coolly as I could, I said, “So, when’s the wedding?”
Smoke tumbled out of his mouth with his sardonic laugh. “How about as soon as I get out of the hospital? Because that’s probably where I’ll end up if her old man finds out I knocked up his daughter. Unless he has a heart attack before he can kick my ass.”
“Jesus, I don’t envy you.” In truth, I would have traded places with him in an instant. Even if a beating were a part of the exchange.
“Yeah, and then good old Lieutenant Mauer would probably want to get his licks in because I’d have upset his precious new bride.”
Gene backed up and wedged himself into the space between the sink and the towel dispenser, a position that was doubtless a physical analogue for how cornered he felt in his life.
“How far along is she?” It may have seemed the most natural thing to ask, but I was still desperate to hear something that would make this news easier to bear—I know exactly how pregnant she is because I got her drunk and raped her on—
“Fuck if I know. She’s supposed to keep shit like that figured out.”
“You don’t sound like you’re ready to be a daddy.”
“Ready? I haven’t even . . . Yeah. Raymond Stoddard’s kid has a kid. . . . What a fucking joke.”
“And this is for sure? You’re getting married for sure?”
He scraped the ashes from his cigarette on the edge of the sink. “If she told me she wanted to go to the Florence Crittendon Home, I sure as hell wouldn’t argue. Or if she’d go live with her sister in Minneapolis and have the kid there. Or if she’d just . . . Hell, I don’t know.”
That did it. When Gene spoke of his wish to escape from a predicament I would have given anything to be in—I became enraged.
Anger, however, almost always renders me inarticulate, and I couldn’t come up with anything more to say than, “Find another goddamn best man.” A part of me must have sensed how inadequate that line was, because I accompanied it with a gesture, and for once action and intention matched. I flicked my cigarette at Gene, and the butt struck his lapel, spraying sparks down the front of his suit.
Maybe, I thought, as I walked out of the lavatory, the next time he puts on his suit—on his and Marie’s wedding day, perhaps—he’ll see a burn mark or two and remember this occasion.
But as I was walking home from the church in the glittering January sunlight, after having told my parents that I was leaving, I realized that Gene probably didn’t have any idea why I was angry. Why would he? I’d certainly never told him how I felt about Marie, and nothing in our shared history would lead him to believe that I was the sort to become furious over his unchivalrous attitude. Then again, he was Raymond Stoddard’s son, and no training in the world could have better prepared him for the irrational behavior of others.
Lee Mauer not only married Raymond Stoddard’s wife and moved into Raymond’s house, like Raymond he brought the sound of sirens to Keogh Street.
This happened a few years after I moved from my parents’ home, but my sister remembered the incident vividly. Late on a Saturday night she was in the bathroom, scrubbing off her makeup and trying to stop singing to herself the songs from Brigadoon, the fall musical put on by Bismarck High School and in which she had performed.
