John's Wife: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  There were plenty who disagreed. Committees were formed up to try to save the park, there were door-to-door campaigns, petitions for a referendum. Marge, needless to say, though Lorraine did, was mad as a wet hen. Lollie’s helpmeet Waldo thereupon started calling her a “wet Hun” and dropped out of the club golf tournament that summer in protest against her constant bellyaching, which he said was polluting the course with acid pain, and also his heinie. Marge had her small successes, but Barnaby, at the time clear-sighted still, saw clearly the futility of this homely town-meetinghall approach: John had the mayor and the city council in his back pocket, plus the full weight of state and national government behind him, probably even majority support in town, and the park had been allowed to fall into a state of serious disrepair—part of John’s strategy, Barnaby supposed. Had to credit the boy’s wile. First, he destroys the town center with his junky outlying malls, then he puts the squeeze on that center’s ruined faithful to buy themselves something back, cutting himself a handsome profit each direction. So ruthless was he, Barnaby actually began to fear for his daughter for whom, until then, he had only, John being the sort of husband that he was, felt sorry. Of course, there was nothing wrong with a civic center—hell, Barnaby would happily have built one twice as beautiful for half the money John was asking—but why, he wanted to know, did the town’s only park have to be sacrificed for it? Too few objected, and they objectors more by reflex than by rage. Even Ellsworth, who should have known better, homespun tree-loving eulogies aside, seemed unable to resist the appeal of John’s grand but fraudulent architectural drawings, which he published regularly in The Town Crier, fanciful as illustrations in children’s books. There was only one way to stop him, Barnaby came to feel, and that was somehow to wrest his old company back from John, something only he and, with Audrey gone, he alone could do. Wouldn’t be easy. It would mean risking everything he had. Might even alienate his daughter, an almost unbearable thought, she being all he had left in this world save his builder’s pride. But he glimpsed a way, lonely and heroic though it was. One last grand adventure, come what may: he saw a path and took it. Well. A catastrophe, of course, worse than ever he could have guessed. Ruined. Made the villain of a plot no longer his. Humiliated in front of his own daughter. Stripped of everything he had. Though he never figured out how or why. Betrayal probably. Didn’t matter. When it was over, half of him was crushed and embittered, the other half was dead.

  Dutch, would-be emulator of John’s killer instincts, though only half so sure a shot, looked on admiringly as his ex-battery mate and fellow hunter gunned down his own in-law, toying with the hapless dodderer before finishing him off as one might shoot away the knees of a dumbstruck moose so as to create a moving target. Shot him down, then gutted him, cleaned him out. Many in town suspected betrayal, meaning Maynard, but Dutch knew better, having sat with John in his motel Back Room sucking a beer while on the other side of the mirrors poor old Barnaby with Maynard’s slick collusion spread the hand they’d hoped to play. Dutch, as always slow to pick up on the story stuff of numbers, was a bit baffled at the time, understanding the conspiracy’s dynamics but not the details, until the whipped and humbled Nerd, deftly pressed one afternoon at the motel bar, filled him in, at least enough to outline the plot by which the old man had hoped to retake the firm he had lost by an ill-writ will. Audrey’s doing. After the wedding, the construction business, enlarged by the assets John brought in, was still, as Barnaby thought, three-fourths in the family, jointly owned by himself, his wife, his daughter, plus her husband John, a quarter each. In effect, though, it was a troublesomely fifty-fifty partnership between the two men, Barnaby the senior partner and a bully of a sort, full of antique certainties, John forced to bide his time. Audrey, meanwhile, anticipating as most wives do a prolonged widowhood, with John’s advice so revised the family will as to change the shares to thirds on the death of any member, business a nuisance to her once Barnaby was gone and trusting her much-loved son-in-law to further gild her golden years, sparing her the details. And thus, when unexpectedly she popped off first instead, Barnaby was left with the short straw, a minor shareholder in the enterprise he had with his own hands created and by which he felt his life defined, now suddenly overruled by John at every turn, turns taken often and without remorse or pity, though always with a smile. Embittered, exasperated, but unbeaten (“It was the civic center that broke his water,” Nerd told Dutch over an unhappy happy hour martini, “worse than rape, he said, the town like some kind of woman to him, to do that to the city park …”), Barnaby, abetted by Maynard, devised a scheme to recapture what he’d lost.

  The deal was this: Through a dummy put in place by Maynard, Barnaby bought up controlling interest in another smaller building firm, an upstate industrial and commercial paving business with other attractive holdings, at least on paper, staking on this bold maneuver almost all he had, much more to be sure than that down-at-the-heels outfit, soon to be John’s by default, was worth. Then, Barnaby still screened from view, Maynard approached John with a merger proposal, asking for forty-five percent of the new corporation, but “negotiating” easily down to thirty, giving John the illusion of continued control but Barnaby actually majority stock, once the masks came off. John still seemed reluctant, or else distracted, short on cash, he hinted, problems to be solved, so Maynard coaxed Barnaby into sweetening the pot with an investment offer: three hundred thousand dollars was the figure they came up with. Too much maybe, looked too eager. Probably what made John suspicious, though just how that wily fuckhead read their elaborately veiled stratagems as easily as the goddamn funny pages, Maynard would never figure out. John’s wife might have helped him somehow, Barnaby being a sentimental old coot who talked too much, but she didn’t seem quite in the picture, not these days anyway. Probably, as Maynard put it to Dutch out at the Getaway Bar and Grill that wet and gloomy end of day, remembering all the Monopoly games he had lost as a kid, it was just genius, intuition, John’s fucking gambler’s luck, and Dutch with a grunt agreed. “Or else there was a leak somewhere.” “Mm. Speaking of which,” Dutch rumbled, tweaking his crotch and sliding down off his stool. “Have another one on the house while I’m gone.” He nodded at his barkeep as he sidled away, and the woman down at the other end of the bar stubbed out her smoke and said: “Thanks, honey, don’t mind if I do.” Maynard’s bibulous and bilious ex. She often came in this time of day to wait for her husband Stu to drop in from the car lot and join her for a friendly drink or two before their serious swilling began, main reason Maynard didn’t stop in here more often. “Hey, Daph,” he greeted her, hunched over his glass, tearing the wet napkin under it with the pointed end of his plastic swizzle stick, “what’s your ass go for these days down at the used-cunt lot?” “More than you’re worth, scumbag.” “Hunh. You mean it’s overpriced like all the other junk your old man peddles.” “Hey, you want me to punch that fatmouth sonuvabitch?” asked some swarthy young guy in greasy workclothes, sitting over in the shadows with a bottle of beer in his mitts. Maynard hadn’t noticed him there before, didn’t know who he was, though he’d seen him around town from time to time of late. One of his cousin’s underpaid throwaway workers probably. “Nah, you better not, sweetie,” Daphne said, lighting up again, blowing smoke out through her flared nostrils like rocket launchers. “That’s the Nerd. Swing at him, you just get yourself all splattered in shit.” “Jesus, what a nice fuckin’ town this is,” the guy muttered, and slumped back into the shadows, sucking at his beer.

  This was Rex. He’d blown into town a year or so earlier with Nevada, and it was true, as Maynard supposed, he’d worked for John for a time, sitting in as an apprentice joiner with John’s construction company, then driving a truck for the lumberyard for a while. John had taken a liking to him, or so it seemed, soon moving him out to his private airport as a kind of janitor and handyman, not the worst gig Rex had ever had. John met a lot of women out at that airport, Nevada among them, and Rex had the idea he staffed the p
lace with trusties who kept their traps shut about his fucking around. Okay by him. Though he was no pimp, Rex was cool about Nevada’s operations, she had what she had, her own bod her ax, and she did what she could with it, professional as a dentist or a computer programmer, he respected that and helped her unwind when she came back from one of her hustles, all stained and rumpled and wired from the tension of it. She needed him then, or said she did, and so she took him along with her wherever she went, and he needed that, needed the needing, it got him up like nothing else did, except maybe a wailing horn, and made more bearable what he’d come to call the daily grunt, stealing the line from somewhere, a tabloid or a music mag probably, the least of his thefts. So being in the neighborhood when an old guy nearly twice his age was punching out his woman didn’t bother him, far from it—go to it, kid, pump the sucker dry, then come on home and lay your weary little chassis next to mine—no, what burned Rex’s ass was the way John yelled at him one day when he caught him tinkering around inside one of his private planes. Wasn’t even trying to steal anything, just trying to see how the fucking thing worked, trying to improve himself, as you might say, no call for John to get on his high horse like that, bawling him out and swatting at him with a rolled-up operator’s manual when he crawled down out of there, like you’d do to a dog that had just shat on your rug. Right in front of old Snuffy the schnozz, Rex’s windbag boss, and a bunch of the other dudes, grinning like fucking monkeys with grease guns up their butts. So then Rex did steal something after all: he copped some keys. And gave John the finger, went off to work as a mechanic in Stu’s Ford garage, where he soon found himself servicing more than the old juicehead’s cars.

  That airport was John’s own special baby, literally his pride and joy, loved more than his offspring, no surprise he was touchy about it. It was the first thing he ever built on his own without Barnaby interfering, just a cleared sod strip on a piece of his dad’s land at first, not far from the new highway then being built, an arc of corrugated roofing tin added to an old collapsing barn for a hangar and a couple of construction trailers parked about, but as beautiful as anything he’d ever made before or since. Bruce had taken him up for the first time in his own Piper Cherokee a year or so before and, in midair, had handed him the controls, and John had experienced a rush unlike anything he’d ever felt before. This was on a visit to his old friend and fraternity brother up in the city, ostensibly a business trip, their first weekend together since John’s recent wedding, and though Bruce had laid on a lot of entertainments, including a crazy party at the mansion of a young porno entrepreneur, featuring a glass-walled bar below pool level with naked nymphets swimming by, a hot new British band out on the terrace, and a contortionist in the upstairs lounge who could lie on her back, put her knees by her ears, and finger a tune on a flute blown by her ass while smoking a cigarette with her cunt, nothing could top that morning in the air. By the time of Bruce’s first marriage a few months later, John had his first plane, a Sky-hawk bought secondhand with Bruce’s advice, Bruce joking that since he’d bought a secondhand bride with John’s advice, their consultancy fees canceled each other out, and so John and his wife were able to fly up to the wedding, Audrey and Barnaby fit to be tied of course, their only daughter put at such risk, John telling them not to worry, he’d stay out of the war zone. He wanted to fly all the way to Paris for their second honeymoon not long after that, but Audrey nixed it, buying him off with money for an electricity generator for the airstrip and a proper hangar with a paved apron. Over the years, she herself began to fly with him, and liked it, even took some lessons before she died, though she continued to beg John to leave her daughter on the ground.

  Gordon had one photo of John’s wife taken at the airport, long ago, a chance opportunity. He’d thought, on the day, he’d got more, but when the developing was done, one was all he had. He had gone out there on a routine Crier assignment from Ellsworth to get shots of the new generator and the laying of the concrete foundations for the hangar being built, John agreeing to meet him there at noon to show him about. Ellsworth was giving him a lot of work for little pay in those days, but he was an old friend and Gordon did not complain. Must have been mid-February or so, the fields barren, but the day bright enough and not too cold. Not much to shoot at, even for a man who favored bleak abstractions, the new airport just another ugly scratch in a much-scarred landscape, but the occasion turned out to be a family event of sorts, Barnaby the only in-law missing, Mitch with a chewed-up unlit black cigar in his jowls, strolling about with his thumbs in his belt, admiring the premises, Opal and Audrey hovering maternally around John’s wife, heavy then with her first child, and Gordon was able to convince them that a kind of family portrait out there in front of John’s plane was in order. John’s wife protested shyly, placing her hands lightly on her belly as though restraining a balloon about to fly away (Gordon, to his deep regret, did not get this photo, his unloaded camera hanging heavily at his side), but all the grandparents-to-be laughed her protests away, insisting they’d never seen her more beautiful. Indeed, she was almost childlike in her beauty, Gordon thought, though perhaps he was only seeing in her the beautiful child he once knew and, back in those days as a tagalong at the games his schoolpal Ellsworth played with her, drew. Once, somewhat frivolously, with a pregnant tummy, a secret sketch. There was a young man helping John with the hangar construction, a greasy-haired beer-bellied fellow famous for his Saturday night binges called Norbert or Norman, who got drafted not long after, went into the army engineers and stayed in, never looked back, gone like so many from this town for good, and together he and John rolled the plane out of the old hangar, which was little more than a tin canopy attached to an ancient gray barn whose roof was caving in (piece of history, that barn, gone three weeks later), and moved it over beside the new hangar-to-be’s freshly spread concrete floor, still too wet to walk on. (Audrey had got them all to leave their handprints in the fresh cement, another photo Gordon had missed, having arrived too late, though he did photograph the handprint, the one he believed to be hers, many times over.) Gordon set about lining them up beneath one sleek white wing, worried a bit about the possible glare from the slanting sun off the shiny fuselage and trying to coax John’s wife out from behind the others. He’d just got something like the pose he wanted when the whole session was interrupted by another airplane swooping by, a racier model, wagging its strutless wings, then circling around for a landing, everyone in John’s party laughing and running out onto the packed-dirt airstrip to meet it, Gordon left with no one to photograph except the greasy-haired assistant, who stood alone beside the tail smirking stupidly. The new arrival, stepping dashingly out of his plane with a fistful of champagne bottles and a picnic basket, was one of John’s rowdy university friends, Gordon recognized him from the wedding. He also had a woman with him who, unlike John’s wife, wanted to be, front and center, in every photo Gordon tried to take, such that in the one photo he managed to get of John and his wife, there she was, throwing her arms around John and kicking one leg back, flapper-style, John’s wife a shadowy blur, vaguely smiling, behind her. Later, John and his friend went up for a spin with the young woman, John’s expectant wife declining, at the rather sharp bidding of her mother, the invitation to join them, giving Gordon hope that he might have her alone to his lens at last. But while, at their whooping insistence, he was photographing the three young people clambering up into the plane, the friend’s hand playfully cupping the woman’s behind, her mouth in a theatrical O, eyebrows bobbing and eyes crossed, the other two laughing back over their shoulders and waving champagne bottles at Gordon, the rest of the party made their exit: all he saw when he turned around was Mitch’s car pulling up off the dirt shoulder onto the road into town. Well. His camera was loaded. He photographed the barn. The handprints in the wet cement.