Spin Dry

by Greg Hollingshead

  ——

  “Rachel?” It was Alex Silver, right next to her ear in the Dream Centre. Must have pulled up a chair, or be squatting. “Before you open your eyes. Let me ask you: Why when you first met Wilkes? Why not when you and Leon moved to the Millpond? Or when you married Leon? Or long before that, when your father—”

  “It was that piece Cam played,” replied Rachel, without hesitation. “Nothing’s been the same since.”

  “Nothing?”

  A tear gathered at the corner of Rachel’s eye and ran swiftly into her ear. “I’m overstating.”

  “How not the same?”

  Rachel thought for awhile. She thought about 201 Dell Drive in that picture on the Mortprop Sales Office wall, a rose-colouredtownhouse-type two-and-a-half in Contractor Modern, with optional gun-grey demi-gable roof, lines softened by vague vegetation spilling out of planters and by a tiny childlike person standing out front for no reason at all, holding balloons. She remembered it up there with pictures of clean-jawed smiling men in bulldozers, of intelligent-looking people sitting around a boardroom table gazing serenely at an even more intelligent-looking developer who was pointing at a map, of well-dressed happy people sitting at outdoor cafés, of a mother with a baby carriage staring at a tubular peaked kiosk with schedules of cultural events pinned to it, of two little kids, a boy and a girl, walking hand in hand through dappled woods—

  And she thought about the first time she had seen 201 Dell in actual brick and aluminum, how it had looked so good, good enough, as Leon put it at the time, to resell immediately, too good to believe that quirky Rachel and scruffy Leon would be allowed to buy it, let alone be able to afford it.

  In fact, they could not. Even when Leon was still working they could not.

  ——

  “Quite an achievement, eh?” he had cried when they first drove through the new development, on boulevards with scored pavement and protruding drainage grates. Landscaping contractors were planting small trees; many windows still had masking tape X-ing them; men were spreading cork chips with rakes. “I mean, your first impulse is to despise it, right? But really, when you getright down to it: Wow. Two years ago this was probably just a bunch of broken-down farms.”

  “Broken-down because the farmers sold out to land speculators.”

  “Something eating you today, Sweetheart?”

  “Bet you any money there’s never been a mill or millpond anywhere within ten miles of here.”

  “Kind of hard to have a mill without a stream,” Leon admitted. “I guess it’s just a concept …. Gently turning wheel, pastoral setting, swans on the pond. Powerful stuff, really, when you think about it.”

  Rachel had nodded, knew of course what he meant. Swans, sure. She could go for swans. What was eating her was trying to believe there was not something else about this place that was pulling her. Swans couldn’t pack half the promise of all these decisive exclusions made by so much space and simple geometry: Here the man at the wheel would love her forever.

  “By the way,” he was saying. “Aren’t they building this project on a township dump? Didn’t I read that someplace?”

  “Not in the Mortprop Investments literature you didn’t.” They had just stopped by the Sales Office, inside the front gates. This was a mobile unit in a frame of giant overlapping cut-outs depicting an old gristmill with a cascading water wheel in a lush Arcadian setting. Rachel now clutched about a kilo of incredibly slippery brochures on her lap.

  “It should be there,” Leon said. “None of your soft focus. Dumps are primal stuff. The place has a buried history. Chthonic depth. Beautiful. Rachel, we really should think seriously aboutmoving out here. There’s a lot more to this place than meets the eye.”

  “What’s chthonic again?”

  ——

  “Rachel? Rachel?” It was Alex Silver, in the Dream Centre, still at her ear. “Did you hear me?”

  But Rachel had forgotten the question. “That time, Alex, I was lost and first met Cam Wilkes? After I finally found No. 201, I sat in the driveway for a long time with the engine off before I noticed that Leon’s Subaru was gone. And then I noticed that he’d pounded out the dent he made in the garage with the U-haul the day we moved in and repainted the whole door. What was going on? He’d come out of his depression, as Mr. Fix-It? I got out of the car, and the next thing I saw, he’d replaced the heaved brick approach to the front steps with these zigzag grey cement things, and repainted the front door, and attached a new—

  “Wrong house, Alex. I had the wrong house. Right number, wrong Drive. Dill Drive. 201 Dill Drive. Never heard of it. I put the groceries back in the car and drove away.”

  Silver mused. At last he said, “The Millpond stuff is purely symptomatic.”

  “I know.”

  “Wilkes knew it too.”

  “He was trying to get through.” Rachel’s head came around. “Alex, I’m scared. I don’t think I should be here. Why don’t I just find Leon and—What exactly are you up to?”

  “You’re anxious. But first let’s focus on Leon a minute. I mean, absent or present he’s close to the heart of the actual problem, you’d agree?”

  Rachel closed her eyes and settled back. She nodded.

  “So tell me about Leon. What happened when you got home after that first time you met Wilkes and heard the melody?”

  ——

  Twenty minutes after entering the wrong driveway, Rachel was pulling up alongside Leon’s Subaru, nosing the Civic against the dent in the garage door. Shopping bags in her arms, she was on the steps leading from the driveway to the front door when she heard a distant, muffled explosion: Crump. Dynamiting, she thought vaguely; she was still on that melody. She entered the kitchen calling to Leon that she had got lost on the way home. When there was no answer she put down the groceries and went on into the living room where she found him stretched out on the shag with the headphones on. She flopped over the back of the chesterfield and studied him for a while foreshortened, this person she had married, the soles of his sneakers the biggest thing about him.

  The past year had not been kind to Leon. He came back from the unemployment office pale and smelling of smoke and defeat. The cheque he left lying around for Rachel to find, never put it directly into her hand. Except for job interviews and the unemployment office he did not go out much any more, had taken to spending his days on rock and roll odysseys into the past. Now, Rachel had nothing against old, bad rock and roll onold vinyl, but she found something sad about a guy in his late thirties trying to piece himself back together out of it. Sad and a little scary. Same with his practice of sleeping with a pen and pad between himself and his wife, a telling arrangement. Rolling over after each dream to write it down without actually waking up. Freud would have killed to get Leon for a patient. Whereas Rachel was beginning to wonder how not so long ago she might have been ready to do the same to get him for a husband.

  ——

  In the Dream Centre, Alex Silver cleared his throat. “Did you know or suspect at that time who or what Leon was dreaming about?”

  “No.”

  “Continue.”

  ——

  A few minutes later, the needle eddying in the small grooves, Rachel tried again. “Leon—”

  “Whohhaaahh!!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Geez, Rachel,” pulling the earphones off and coming up on an elbow. “Don’t do that! Where have you been?”

  But for some reason Rachel was not ready to talk about that melody with anyone, even—especially—Leon. “I got lost on the way back,” was all she said.

  “A distracted driver is a loaded weapon, Rachel.”

  “Leon,” she ventured later, in the dining room, over a pizzathey got in. “I don’t think the Millpond has turned out exactly as we hoped it would.”

  But this was heard by Leon as her latest bivouac in an old argument. “Archeologists, Rachel, have traced the suburb back to greater Ur in Mesopotamia. That is thirty centuries B.C.”
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  “Doesn’t mean it’s what we hoped it would be,” Rachel gazing at the joint Leon offered her. “No thanks.”

  “It’s just,” he continued, toking, not listening, “most of the people who live out here don’t appreciate the city. But they don’t appreciate the country either. If they did, they would never live out here.”

  “If the country was all you knew,” Rachel replied, “it would be easy not to appreciate the country. Here you might prefer the convenience.”

  “Your argument is academic. Most suburbanites have moved to where they are from other suburbs. Generation after generation. A breed apart. Like cops. But answer me this. Why don’t we ever hear about people in downtown apartments being alienated out of their minds?”

  “We do.”

  Just before they turned out the light, Rachel said, “Leon, what happens if you hit your gas line with a backhoe?”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “No, really.”

  “Kaboom?”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Ten minutes later Rachel shot bolt upright thinking Crump. Oh my God! She turned to tell Leon about Cam Wilkes.

  But Leon was sunk in buzz-saw respiration.

  Next morning Rachel woke exhausted. In the Saturday light her fears of the night seemed lurid and foolish but not to her unconscious. When she got into the Civic for a run to the 7-Eleven to pick up some half-and-half and a paper for Leon she gave a little scream: a hand was coming for her. But it was one of Cam Wilkes’ flesh-coloured workgloves, caught in the window. Must have been why he’d been waving the other one in the air so frantically. On the way back from the 7-Eleven, that melody nagging at the back of her mind, she thought to check Wilkes’ card, but there was no address. A phone number but no address. She didn’t want to talk to him, so she decided to drive around a little until she found his house. If it was still standing. She pictured herself tossing the glove at it like the paperboy. Then again, she should probably knock and ask if he understood how dangerous it is to go looking for your gas line with a backhoe.

  But she got lost again. This being Saturday morning there were lots of people out on their lawns, but her question about a backhoe caused some pretty strange eyebrow conformations. So Rachel just drove around, searching. She would never forgive herself if she was too late. Or was that just stupid?

  Finally she spotted an old guy gripping a cane. The cane reminded her that Wilkes had mentioned the Village Cane Fighters. A sign? She pulled over and asked the old man if on his walk he had noticed anybody digging their lawn with a backhoe.

  “You call this a walk?” the old man shouted. “My doctors are considering if I can survive an operation for plastic goddamn hip joints, and you call this a walk? How old are you?”

  “Twenty-nine,” Rachel lied.

  He snorted.

  “How about fresh-dug earth?” she tried.

  “Earth!” he bellowed. “How far do you think I ‘walk’? Twenty, thirty blocks? Or is it more like 24.6 miles, the Boston marathon? Well, girlie, I got news for you. Standing where you are you can see every place I was today. Big accomplishment, eh? So you tell me. How much ‘earth’?”

  Rachel’s next question, rattled-aggressive, was, Did he belong to the Village Cane Fighters?

  But the old man surprised her by shaking his head in a startled way and saying quietly, “I thought they folded.”

  “Not what I heard.”

  He stepped closer, confidential. “You got the number on you?”

  “They’ve been absorbed. How do you feel about going out?”

  “Folded, you mean.”

  “Maybe you’re right, but try this.” She gave him Wilkes’ card.

  When Rachel got home, Leon was sitting on the front step waiting for his half-and-half and the paper. She nosed up to the garage, and he came around the Subaru to lean on her passenger door, something the way Cam Wilkes had done. She rolled down the window.

  “Nice to see you back. Whose glove?” Cam Wilkes’ workglove was lying on the seat beside her.

  At that moment a sense of omission, possibly betrayal, about not filling Leon in—even obliquely—on last night, had Rachel reacting with more rattled aggression. “Leon, why am I the one whoruns to the 7-Eleven for your half-and-half and your paper? And why should you make me feel guilty that I didn’t get back faster?”

  “Because you’re the one who took so long to get home last night the superstore half-and-half curdled in the heat. Because you’ve been gone exactly one hour and ten minutes on a fifteen-minute errand. I pictured you bleeding in a ditch somewhere. Think of me, Rachel. Think of me.”

  “I do, all the time. Maybe that’s my problem.”

  “You stopped off at a garage sale and bought me a workglove. Half price?”

  Rachel looked at the workglove. Vaguely she decided to punish Leon by lying. She explained that she had found it and been trying to find the owner.

  “Just driving around looking for somebody pushing the mower with one hand bare?”

  “That’s right.”

  ——

  “I’m going to have to be a little more confrontational than the first time through, Rachel,” Alex Silver told her. He was still in that crouch. “That is, talk more. Less like a therapist. More like a friend—”

  “A confrontational friend.”

  “Aren’t the best?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why the hell not at least tell Leon about Wilkes? You didn’t have to go into the melody stuff!” “Because I knew I couldn’t tell the story well enough for Leon not to think I was telling it because I’d been smitten by Cam Wilkes.”

  “Ah but,” Silver sagely, “wasn’t it the fact that you had already fallen out of love with Leon that caused this irrational fear that he’d be jealous?”

  “Irrational? What do you mean? He was jealous!”

  “No wonder! You never told him about Wilkes! You set him up!”

  “I did not! I was only trying to spare him the embarrassment of looking like a paranoid!”

  Alex Silver placed his face in his hands, nearly lost his balance. “Consideration among the married. Go on. What happens next.”

  “Leon, Cam, and the explosions.”

  “Tell it.”

  ——

  After two weeks of that hot spell and two issues of The Villager containing no news about anybody blowing up their house with a backhoe, Cam Wilkes’ workglove had wormed its way into the front seat crevice of Rachel’s Civic, and Cam Wilkes himself had just about faded from memory. Not so the effects of that melody, which had been taking so much energy to repress that Rachel herself had gone into a virtual depression of her own. Everything seemed so second-rate. Always had been, ever would be.

  And then it was Friday again, and Rachel was on her way home again from shopping, this time at the local MortpropMall, a disappointing, single-level throwback that couldn’t touch some of the supermalls opening in other developments. The thermometer was still up there close to forty. Listening to a CFRT MiniReport on the car radio about a rash of ugly explosions that recently had been tearing up the Millpond, Rachel took a wrong turn somewhere past the 7-Eleven and got completely lost. Meanwhile that CFRT MiniReport explained how, as a result of the fact that the Millpond had been built on a former township dump site, the pond had chemicals leaching into it that could kill a swan in less than a week. Also, in the extended summer heat, expanding gases inside buried green garbage bags were causing them to explode like land mines. Talk about hazardous waste.

  The report had just ended when Rachel spotted five or six people standing around the perimeter of a lawn pointing into a crater a good fifteen feet across. She slowed down to take a look and noticed Leon’s Subaru parked in the immaculate driveway. Disoriented now, she got out and checked the back seat for empty beer and Pepsi bottles. It was Leon’s car all right. The house was a two-bedroom bungalow with aluminum foil in the windows. Just another Millpond home, and yet who else’s could it be?
Then again, she’d been wrong before. On her way to the door she paused on the lip of the crater and gazed in. Invariably after these explosions you saw strata of mid-century garbage that made you think of archeology of the future. Not here. Here was just earth and rocks. No twisted ends of gas pipe jutting from the sheer sides, either.

  A few seconds later, after recoiling from a pair of bare wires where the doorbell should have been, Rachel knocked, and the door swung open the way doors do in haunted houses. This one, dark because of that aluminum foil, seemed to be filled with large vehicle parts: sections of engine, fenders, hubcaps. He must take in bodywork, Rachel postulated. She remembered how he had placed the toe of his slipper against rust on the Civic.

  “Leon,” she whispered, stepping forward, staring into pure darkness.

  And then she saw him, Leon, right there in the hall, slumped on what appeared to be an old bus seat, his head slowly, like a doll’s, rotating in her direction. She did a lot of falling over pieces of vehicle before she was able to drop down next to him, hugging his arm.

  Leon tried to speak, could not. He cleared his throat. “Listen,” he said, huskily.

  She heard it then, the melody that Wilkes had played for her in his pajamas by the backhoe. A melody that seemed to rise from the depths of the earth, its familiarity like a bubble of memory floating up through the still, dark levels of her mind, the melody itself a white ribbon being pulled out of her ear to soar into a shifting blue sky and make restless, changing shapes of unutterable sadness and grace.

  “So beautiful,” Rachel whispered when it ended, looking to Leon, who was sprawled white and transfixed, like a man who had just given a gallon of blood.

  “That was it,” Leon said.

  “I know—Was what?”

  They made their way stumbling in the dim light amidst leaning tires into a kitchen strewn with more large vehicle parts to a door that seemed likely to lead to the basement. “Anybody home?” Leon called down into the darkness.

  “Eee-aw-kee,” Cam Wilkes replied conversationally. He added that if they found the kitchen too cluttered they should step out the screen door onto the patio where they would find room to swing a collie.