Into Woods

by Bill Roorbach

  My first trip with the Downeast boys proved a good one for them, Walter and Dicky both counting 1500 sands—$90.00 each, plus enough bloods to carry the take over a hundred dollars for the tide. Truey, always a little more aggressive, got 1650 sands that day. Dicky was kind enough to count my worms for me, and after culling me about fifty (too small, or diseased, or broken by the bloods I’d thrown in with them), my count for the tide was an unspectacular 155 worms. $9.30. The five killer bloods in there brought my payday up to $9.80. I refused the cash, but Delores refused my refusal, and so—after a spot of negotiating, and a suggestion by Dicky—I became a minor sponsor of Truey’s big number five, glory of the Bangor Speedway.

  Still trying, I make yet another worming trip, drive down from Farmington the night before a tide Truey thinks’ll be a good one, eat a diner dinner, stay at the Blueberry Motel. It’s a nice late low tide, and I sleep in, eat a big breakfast. Truey’s broken a camshaft in the race Saturday night and wrecked his engine, so there’s extra incentive for a big day for all of us. My boots are tight; I’ve been out on my own in the mud below Milbridge, practicing. I’ve bought myself a sandworm hoe. I have my own gloves, a proper shirt. I know the Harrington River mud, now, and the Harrington River mud knows me. I’m ready to leave the ranks of professors, even scientists, ready to move up to shitdigger. The day is auspicious, the parking lot at Ripley Neck entirely full. Walter points out a Garney across the way, hovering in a workboat. “Spyglass,” he says. “He’ll sit there and wait to see where the real wormers go.”

  We cross the bay in good weather. The talk is briefly of cranberries: Walter has had a brainstorm: he’ll dig a homemade bog in the woods up behind his house, grow cranberries. Dicky and Truey don’t have much to say about that; then Truey invokes sea urchins, and they’re off on that good subject again. $2800 a day, and you can go all winter. $2800 a day, and you don’t have to worry about the worm market drying up, and you don’t have to cut wood, or make wreaths, or shovel snow or work blueberries. You just get in your diving gear, bring up the urchins, get your body heat back in the hot tank on the deck of your boat, dive and dive and dive again, get rich on the Japanese.

  “It’s a hard winter in this county,” as Walter says. Here in June, the Downeast boys are already thinking about ice.

  That fucking spyglass Garney is going ashore in the neighborhood of some Milbridge boys. The sun is hot. Thunderheads are building up. You think of lightning, then you think of yourself plugged into the mud, the highest thing for hundreds of yards around, a lightning rod. Workboats are tooling every which way, and Truey and Dicky and Walter know everyone. “That fellow there is Minton Frawley. He went out to Arizona one winter and got himself in the movies. Did you see Stir Crazy? He’s the guy looking up the girl’s crotch in that bar scene.”

  “He’s back worming,” Dicky says.

  “Scared of lightning,” Truey says, meaning Frawley. “He’ll run at the first boom-boom. Watch him.”

  “Winter does take a toll,” Walter says, drifting on his own raft of thought. When we hit the mud, Walter gets in it, immediately marches to a big mussel flat and begins to dig its borders. Dicky and Truey and I wait. Like most wormers, they like to watch the tide, size it up, have a chat. “Ask your daddy how many orders he’s got,” Dicky says. “I need some ambition.”

  He does look tired.

  Truey just watches his father at work.

  Dicky sizes up the tide, pretends a discouragement that looks real: “I don’t think this is going to be a profitable day, Truey.”

  My deadline is long gone, my story’s a kill, but here I am. The guys don’t pay much attention to me anymore, negative or positive. I’m up to about forty bucks in Truey’s race car. Maybe one Saturday soon I’ll go to the races, hang in the pit, a scientist, see, interested in speed. Maybe Harper’s will like that story!

  There’s a rumble of thunder, not far distant. Truey smiles briefly at Dicky’s joking, goes over the gunwales, gets himself ready to worm. Dicky reluctantly follows. I’m so reluctant I just sit in the boat and watch them start. More thunder.

  “There he goes,” Truey says. Sure enough, movie-star Frawley has turned his boat around and is heading back in.

  Truey takes his shirt off, and you have to wonder if his naked-lady tattoo is by the same artist as Dicky’s. It’s the same woman, same colors, same thick lines. I climb into the mud. Today I plan to up my sponsorship of the glorious number five to serious partnership proportions. Today I want to dig like a Downeast boy.

  Truey is already at it, working hard.

  Dicky can’t seem to get started. “Help,” he says. A plaintive joke. He doesn’t feel like it today. In the end, though, he’ll get 1900 sandworms, 120 bloods: $126.00, a super tide. Truey will get 2100 sands, fifty bloods. A money tide, a monster. Walter will do as well as Dicky. I will get 210 sandworms, zero bloods, working hard as I’ve ever worked, chopping and stomping and picking, legs sore as hell from previous outings, shoulders aching, mind blank, struggling in the mud, turning it, panting, mucking along, pulling worms: $12.60.

  Truey hikes off far away across the mud. Later, when the tide comes up, well have to go pick him up. Walter is chopping away at some distant mussel mound. Dicky doesn’t range too far, gradually gets his rhythm, digs faster and faster, coming into the worms. I never get a rhythm at all, stay close to the boat, trying to get a whole tide in, no breaks, no getting stuck. I know how to walk now, don’t pause long enough to sink, but march forward, ever forward, chop left, chop middle, chop right, pulling worms from the mud. To me, they seem scarce today. To me, they seem terribly fragile. I break every third worm, miss a million that zip into their holes before I can get hold. The thunder booms a little closer.

  Late in the tide, Dicky starts saying “Help,” again, just kind of saying it out loud every twenty steps or so, groaning comically. He’s found some good mud, is plunking worms into his box three and four at a dig. “Help,” he moans, kidding around. Then he shouts: “Truey, let’s quit.” It’s an old joke, and from across the flat Truman Lock gives Dicky the finger. Dicky excavates his way through the mud, pulling worms, pulling worms, dunking them in his box, saying “Help, Truey. Truey, help,” a mantra for the dig. Then he bellows, loud as hell across the mud: “Truey, get me outta here” and then he shouts it again.

  You Have Given

  This Boy Life

  When I have kids, friends told me, it would get worse, this intermittent death thing of mine (priest to his parents at Jimmy Passaro’s baptism: “You have given this boy life, but you have also given him death”). For now, it comes and goes predictably with the other rites of passage. My wedding, Jesus: ghosts everywhere, but that was years back. Then the big job change, from the University of Maine at Farmington to Ohio State, and with that the big move, and the toggling back and forth: summers in Maine, school year in Ohio, the movement of seasons and years delineated by the long car trip, packed boxes, hellos, goodbyes. And then, surprise, middle age. I came to Ohio on the old side of young. But suddenly, no. I can very nearly point to the day the change came. Eyeglasses, for one thing. A student calling me Dad by mistake. And then, tenure and promotion at that great and eternal Midwestern land-grant university. I celebrated with the others who didn’t get fired, but I was unaccountably depressed. Options seemed to narrow. Where once there had been the whole world to live in on the whim of choice, there was now ... Ohio. Glum, glum, congratulations, Bill! Grim, grim, the march is on. Unanimous vote! You are in!

  You’re going to die.

  Behind our rented house in Columbus (“Poor, gray Columbus,” young Robert Lowell mourned in a letter home), the leaves fell and revealed neighbors’ yards and also a large parking lot that happily I mistook when it was wet for a black pond. Often it was wet that winter, often the lot was water, only a rare police car, idling, to kill the illusion. Empty, empty.

  But suddenly, the lot would be full for a few odd days, then empty again for several more, then—around Chr
istmas—full for weeks, then empty and full sporadically all the way into spring. One influx would be rich: Mercedes, Jaguars, Cadillacs. The next a different class altogether: pickups, muffler draggers, rusty old American sedans, low to the ground, shocks dead. The next, family values: minivans, “sport utility” vehicles (to me, these look like running shoes), Volvo wagons. Always there was a thread of some kind in the grouping of autos. A puzzle, that lot, the kind of thing I notice while shouting blues songs and crashing live riffs on the piano, looking out the window as if into a huge crowd at Woodstock, rainy morning: fantasy.

  I didn’t figure it out till I saw the hearse one day: the O.O. Olson funeral home out on High Street. Of course. What must Olson’s full name be? Oscar Oliver? Anyway, his initials are O.O.O. His monogrammed towels, his ring, imagine: oOo.

  For five years or more after in dreams I saw the young man’s Nike Air sneakers, and the puddle he lay in, and the dark square of sky at the top of the air shaft. The dreams focus on his chest somehow, his perfect chest exposed so fast by the ALS guys, his bright brown skin, his beauty, his youthful belly, the band of his boxers, his one moan as the medics sought his wounds, which were many, and not only from the fall. The dream is static, no movement, a vision really—dying boy, odiferous air shaft, cops, a certain hovering viewpoint—fixed, everlasting.

  At a dinner party in SoHo, lower Manhattan, I got seated at the very end of a long table next to Larry Vignoble, the mysterious new boyfriend of an actress I knew back then. Across the table perched an intent woman I didn’t know at all. The guy to my left was enormous and sat with his back turned, effectively isolating me from the rest of the party. Beside the intent woman was a nervous young actor with a long chin and judgmental eyes. He stared down at the head of the table, seeming to hope he was finally in the presence of his big break (and maybe he was). I guess I hoped the same most days in New York.

  As we ate the salad thrust over our shoulders by catering staff, the woman and Larry Vignoble and I began to chat, even grew voluble, and it seemed less to matter that the famous people I’d come hoping to meet were far up the line of faces by the host, talking, clinking, laughing hard. My interlocutors and I got past the weird weather of that season and dismissed the Mets and Yankees easily, then the lady told us what she did: public relations. What do you do? she asked me. I saw that she hoped I was famous, or at least important. I didn’t want to talk about what I did because what I did in those days amounted to nothing, in most people’s eyes. I tried to put a good face on it, said I was a contractor, said I was a writer. Trying to be a writer, was the exact phrase. I could have said trying to be a contractor, too.

  The big man next to me turned at that, smiled indulgently. “You’ll get there,” he said. Then quite subtly and charmingly he turned the talk at our end of the table to his scriptwriting successes. People several seats down began to listen. He was hilarious and quick and likeable and had big names rolling from his lips: Dusty, Meryl, Madonna. He included me with winks and pats on the hand. He graciously declined to talk about money when someone asked, and—just when the time was right, just when you felt he was dominating the talk—he handed the baton to Larry Vignoble: And what about you?

  You could see Larry wasn’t in the mood to talk about what he did any more than I had been. But everyone at our end of the table had fallen silent, regarded him benignly. He shrugged and said, “I work in Jersey.” Still the expectant silence. “For a small company,” he said.

  “What company?” said the PR lady, with the air of a person who knows all companies large and small.

  “What sort of work?” said the scriptwriter.

  Larry gave a sad smile, said, “I am a funeral director.”

  The answers to two or three questions from the scriptwriter made it clear: a funeral director is an undertaker, a mortician, an embalmer, haberdasher to the deceased, makeup on dead skin, barrels of loose body parts, ghosts, death, doom, horror, despair.

  Deep pause.

  The scriptwriter said, “Well.”

  We turned to the nervous, good-looking fellow, who smiled painfully and started to talk about the class he was taking with Uta Hagen at the Actor’s Studio.

  But quickly some uproar at the host’s end got the scriptwriter shouting wittily, the PR lady laughing. Both of them turned to the length of the table, silencing the young actor, cutting the mortician and me off entirely from everyone but one another.

  I turned to Larry, said, “All right,” meaning that his work interested me. We drank sips of wine.

  He said, “It’s a job,” understanding what I’d meant.

  I asked how he’d learned his trade. I mean, how did someone learn that stuff?

  He said that, okay, a lot of morticians grew up in a family trade. But some didn’t. He hadn’t. “Christ, my dad’s an engineer at WABC radio.” He eyed me suspiciously, trying to know whether my interest was real. He seemed to see it was, seemed to trust me not to make any jokes. He let it out: he’d gone to the Cincinnati College of Mortuary.

  I said I knew at dental schools they practiced on plaster heads and porcelain teeth, hoping to lead him along.

  He said at mortuary school they practiced on dummies, first. Then cadavers. Then actual newlydeads (he said) whose families got the benefit of a budget funeral. But the general public doesn’t think past the dead-body stuff. Part of the curriculum at school, for example, was a psychology course about grief. And you took business courses: bookkeeping, marketing, advertising. You took medical courses: anatomy, communicable diseases, embalming.

  The party carried on up table, but Larry and I talked. He was glad of my interest, said people seldom wanted to talk about what he did except to accuse the trade of deception, chicanery, dishonesty. This brought the blood to his cheeks. He sipped wine, looked up-table at his girlfriend by the host. At length he said that somehow he’d been drawn to funeral practices from high school. Did all his papers on subjects of death: Amish burial practices, say, or treatment of the dead in Homer’s Iliad. Couldn’t say why. Something about the quiet dignity of the enterprise, its plain necessity. Also, he’d been curious, drawn to the dead.

  After mortician school he’d lucked out and gotten this job in Jersey right away. Super benefits. Fair pay. And there were quite a few weeks in the year with no work, since people tend to die in bunches. Stedler Funeral Home averaged seventy funerals a year, most in the winter, a lot toward the end of summer, not many in the spring or fall.

  I found a roundabout way to ask if he thought he’d gotten inured to death. He said, “No way. Nope. In fact, doing that work is really, really scary. You just can’t believe all the ways there are to die.”

  My dad took us five Roorbach kids to Jones Beach on Long Island, New York, once or twice a summer to get our early sixties sunburns and to get smashed up in the real surf and to have a day of it, a long ride from Connecticut. In the car we all called first shower (you sang it loud: I call first shower) and felt itchy with the salt and roasted by the sun, burned to a crisp. I see even now the traffic jams there, and then a particular jam, the cars just stopped in thick air. Ahead you could see police lights, hear the sirens coming.

  “Accident,” Dad said sighing.

  Then our lane began to move, bumps and starts, bringing us closer to the flashing lights, the trouble. On a bridge over an inlet the road was mostly blocked with police cars and fire engines, men milling about, an ambulance, a guy out of uniform directing traffic through the breakdown lane one car at a time. Down in the marsh reeds four cops leaned dolefully, their heads almost touching, looking at something. Dad moved a slow car-length ahead, and I saw the heart of things: a motorcycle seriously mangled, partly hanging off the bridge. On the sidewalk a teenage girl in a bikini lay on her back with her head crushed badly and the cops and two doctors (yes, doctors then, straight to the tragedy, no EMTs or ALS in between) busy around her.

  Pop said, “Don’t look,” but we did. We looked, knowing we should not, that we were rude to look,
or worse. Our station wagon idled. We’d been halted by the plainclothesman’s hand; the ambulance was maneuvering. What else could we do? The girl’s lips moved like talking, but she was not talking. She put a hand to her face, let the hand drop, felt the pavement beside her. Then she died. You saw the life leave her, somehow. You saw how it couldn’t stay. I knew what I had seen. The doctors saw it too, looked at each other, looked sick, really, looked at one another helplessly, stopped their ministrations in the hot white sunlight. One of the cops brought a blanket.

  I looked till suddenly the plainclothesman waved and Pop hit the gas and we were free. He said, “That was awful to see.” And he said something grim about motorcycles. He also used the word rubberneckers with some disgust, and defined it for us: people who slow down to look at these things, people who clearly weren’t us.

  Pretty soon being kids we were nuts again and calling first showers and saying how we would kill each other. Pop was quiet, quiet the whole ride home. But later, when I couldn’t sleep from the sunburn, later I just lay there in my bed thinking about that girl. That older kid in her bikini. Dying and then dead. When a minute before she’d just been riding along behind her boyfriend, maybe laughing, holding his flat stomach. The whole thing had a kind of plainness to it: if your head got crushed, you died, just like anything that got its head crushed, just like anything, a squirrel or an ant or a dog.

  And even in my wildest high school and college years I never took the slightest interest in motorcycles—stayed away from them, in fact.

  I kept calling Larry Vignoble because I wanted to do a story on his work. I wanted to do a story on his work because I was morbidly interested in his work. I mean, it was morbid work, and that was exactly why I’d got so interested. I called him a couple of times, trying to interest him in my interest, in the supposed interest my readers would have, that some important magazine would have. But I’d had something of a breakthrough: for the first time I was more interested in my subject than in venal and unwriterly ambition. I wanted to see the whole death operation, from pickup to burial. I wanted to see an embalming. I wanted a tour of the morgue.