After Gregory

by Austin Wright

  Just a moment honey.

  Excuse me. He opened his mouth. It came out. I’m looking for work.

  He’s down at the garage. I saw him a half hour ago.

  The expressionless cashier came over. You’ll have to see the boss, she said. Tomorrow. I doubt if he can give you anything. The fat waitress caught on. You want a job? You’ll have to see the boss. Tomorrow.

  I already told him that.

  James Green went into the hardware store next door, full of shelves up to the ceiling, the shelves full of goods. He went to the back and found a man trying to decide what to do about a large uncut sheet of glass.

  This is a family operation, the man said. Myself, my sons, daughter, old man. Ever work in a hardware store? What do you know about hardware? Well, what do you know? What I mean is, what’s your brand of expertise?

  In the garage, James Green in his coat and tie faced a man in blue coveralls, who had white hair and a heavily lined tan face. The name Work was stitched in red on his pocket. I need a mechanic.

  I’m not a mechanic. What can you do? I can work a gas pump. I can check the oil and the batteries. The man was chawing. I need a mechanic. Guess I’d better try someplace else. Guess so.

  James Green crossed the street and went around to the back stoop of a large white house. Round-faced elderly woman with white hair and pleasant face. You’re selling something I don’t want it.

  I was wondering if you had any odd jobs I might do.

  Well I’ll be. You remind me of the Great Depression. People don’t come round looking for work nowadays. Why it takes me right back.

  I could mow your lawn. She laughed. Her face changed. She was looking into the ugly mug of Peter Gregory, which he had forgotten in the excitement of his adventures, the bullfrog eyes, the bald front, he couldn’t blame her. No telling what strangers might be in these changed times when it ain’t people looking for work you got to worry about. Sorry, we don’t have a thing.

  A woman asked if he was an electrician. A man wondered if he had registered with the employment agency in Harristown. A dog barked at him. He turned down a side street where he saw a small stone bridge crossing a stream. He sat on the grass at the edge of the stream and watched the clear slow water. With a house on the other side of the stream and another house behind the bushes at his back.

  Rustling grass, twigs—life around you, a cat coming out of the bushes—large, gray, striped. Well-fed. It came up to you, curling its tail in the air like a string attached to a balloon with gravity reversed. You asked its name and it told you.

  You sat on the grass next to Murry Bree, and took the liberty of stroking behind its ears. Looked into its alien eyes, its face alert but not much surprised, the confident, cautious, slightly baffled expression you were accustomed to seeing on the faces of rabbits, antelope, cows, and mountain lions in the zoo. All the more expressive animals look like that, Murry Bree said. A robin lit on the grass a few feet away. Hopping along, listening for worms. Its round black eye had the same expression. The robin was calmly at work, while Murry Bree’s tail twitched and his kinship eyes brightened with hope. Yet he wasn’t sure, torn between his innate catness and the induced luxury of being stroked by his namesake. The robin clucked and flew away. Murry Bree relaxed and was glad, saved from decision. The second Murry was glad too, thinking how that robin’s simple honest expression would have looked if Murry had caught him: how without visible change in the plain round eye the simple confidence would indescribably convert into terror. The same simple universal terror you would see on any other animal, including Murry Bree, in the presence of a larger animal or pain or catastrophe.

  He asked the other Murry Bree, who was washing himself, What’s it like in there? Much the same as you, the cat said. A little simpler. Harder to draw conclusions beyond the obvious inductions. Memory not too good, which you might consider a handicap.

  Never mind the memory. Sitting there, warm and not too hungry, with still a little money in his pocket and unburdened by a serious name, Murry Bree thought he could live forever, for as long as that lasted, with no noticeable difference between forever and now.

  SEVEN

  A man gave the Hitchhiker a day’s work putting shingles on his roof. Took him out to his house in his dusty pickup truck. The man wore overalls over a red plaid shirt, his face was thin, and his eyes overlooked his nose like a bird of prey.

  What’s your name? he said.

  Murry Bree.

  That’s a funny name.

  It’s French, you explained. It used to be pronounced Bray, but my father anglicized it to Bree.

  The man believed Murry Bree had just been released from prison. That’s why you’re bumming around for work, he said. I don’t care. You served your time and now you’re out.

  Murry Bree (Ex-Convict) spent most of the afternoon on the roof of Roy Clements’ house. He climbed up a tall ladder that swayed under his feet. You could see across rolling fields and patches of woods. He smashed his thumb with the hammer and bumped the box with the shingles off the roof twice. In the middle of the afternoon Roy Clements invited him down for a break.

  He had coffee in a thermos jug. They sat on the ground by the saw horse. How come you never learned to hammer a nail? A man who can’t hammer a nail, what kind of a man is that?

  I can hammer a nail.

  Sort of. The eye of Roy Clements, looking at him under thick red eyebrows, evil. Every man learns how to hammer a nail. How come you got left out?

  That was a question only Peter Gregory could answer, but you faked it. I guess other things interested me more, you said.

  The man’s eyes narrowed, deep in their shade. That’s a shitty answer. You hammer like a girl.

  The man talked quiet and the look in his eye could be mistaken for friendly, but the words were not. So what did you do before you wound up in jail? Salesman, bank teller?

  The question referred to Peter Gregory and was irrelevant, but you were the one who had to answer. I didn’t go to jail. I worked just like everybody else.

  That so? So tell me what you did. Schoolteacher? That’s you, I bet.

  You got it. You felt yourself blushing.

  No shit? Schoolmarm, hey? It figures. You talk funny. So how come you’re looking for work you can’t do? How come you ain’t giving the Pledge Allegiance?

  I resigned.

  Went to jail, you mean. Don’t shit me, I know your type. You think you’re better than folks. You think you’re so much god damn fucking smarter than folks.

  No I don’t, you said, with loathing for Peter Gregory. You don’t know a damn thing about me.

  I don’t hey? Okay professor, you tell me. You like the niggers and the Jews?

  What?

  You heard me.

  What’s that question supposed to mean? You knew what it was supposed to mean. This was a challenge to Peter Gregory politics, Peter Gregory conscience. You wanted to be innocent, new in the world, untouched by the world’s guilt. I don’t make distinctions, you said.

  You wondered who was talking for you now, while you watched this guy nudge you into the slot he had set aside for you. You know something? We don’t allow niggers in this town.

  Watching for your predictable reaction, waiting to pounce. Any objections?

  You didn’t say anything.

  No objections? Come on, guy, no objections?

  I don’t want to argue.

  What? Look at you. I gave you a job. You would of starved without me. You want your pay? You’re fuckin right you do. You’re gonna finish this job, and do it for me, and I’m gonna pay you, and then you get your ass out of here and never let me see you again, got it? His eyes were gray under the red brows, looking at you straight, smiling like human eyes, with no visible connection to his words.

  That night Murry Bree blew your day’s earnings for a room in the Crawley House in Badgerton. The room was not worth it, he slept so badly. Roy Clements was in his sleep, overlooking him, with tremors of rage and fe
ar. To hell with Murry Bree, you said. If you don’t like the adams apple man standing over you sneering, in ignorance of who you are, you know how to stop it. You did it once and you can do it again.

  After breakfast, you sat on a bench in the middle of the town square. You noticed the action at the garage across the street, cars stopping for gas, one car on the lift, another with the front wheels off. The attendant parked one of the cars on the street, leaving the keys in the car. Full of rage, Murry Bree was a Criminal like Roy Clements, thinking, gun, holdup, steal that car and drive away, serve him right, Bree, Gregory, serve them all right. Then you heard a voice behind you. You heard it a second time, louder. Hey Bum!

  Man with blue T-shirt and heavy belly, big, coming this way across the square. He looked like a bum and he said, Hey Bum!

  To you Murry Bree said, I’m not a bum. Who, me? You! Hey Bum! You went for a walk, the other way, around the square. Keep out of our streets, hear, nobody wants you around here, Bum.

  Past the white column door of the Crawley House, you turned a corner. The bum was following. No running, just walking fast. His face was thick, wet, shiny. Lots of s and k and ch. I’m not a bum. A curious old man looked up from the hood of his car, you did not stop to talk. Down a gravel alley between two close houses, if you could get to the next street before he could see you, past the garbage cans and back garages and backyard play sets: it would not be nice to be caught back here.

  So much for Roy Clements. Gravel road down a slope below the backs of houses, descending into a woody ravine. Across a bridge, a shallow vegetable field, a shed across the way, men loading branches into a pickup truck, unaware you were a bum. Beyond them, beside the road, you came to a row of cages, hooked up to each other on wheels, with wolves, foxes, a deer, a lynx, each animal in a separate one. No people around. The animals paced and looked at you, snuffling, thin, an empty food dish in each cage, floors dirty.

  The road came to an end. A deeper ravine on the left, used as a dump, with plastic bags and faint white smoke and a putrid smell and below that the remains of old disintegrated stoves and pieces of chairs and junk. You turned and went into the woods. The slope climbed to your right, but to your left the forest floor was flat and clear of brush. You came to a place like a blight, where the raw bare earth bled into a crater beneath a bluff with streams of gravel, which your human mind recognized as a quarry. A wall of red soil and streams of pebbles rising beyond, an embankment for the quarry road. An animal at the foot of the embankment rooting and scratching around in the leaves, its furry tail up, white and black, a skunk. It was poking around a dull rubbery thing, a broken inner tube.

  You stopped, realized your mistake, it was not an inner tube but the skin of some dead creature, quite large. It must be a big event when large animals die in the wild, yet how quiet this was with only the skunk paying attention. You came closer, carefully, not to disturb the skunk. He was gone now, and you saw your mistake again. It was the upturned hands alongside the body where it lay on its back, or the gray coon-like fingers curled up, or the little dust-coated dead eyes in the flat noseless face, or the flatness of the face itself with its matted black hair. Or the shoulders, the way the arms were attached to the body.

  You approached to look at it, this dead thing like yourself. What to call it, he or she? Frailty of its shoulders and arms, for now you knew what kind of animal it was it did not seem so large. But the signs of its sex were buried under the leaves and mud, if they still existed. You wondered if the creature was still intact. You could not tell because of the mud and leaves in which it lay.

  You felt no horror. You did not wonder who it was, nor how it died nor why it was there. A long time passed before you remembered what a civilized person does when discovering death. He calls the authorities, police, doctor, coroner, neighbors. You wondered if someone who has committed suicide only a couple of days before was similarly obligated. You sat on a stone, leaning against a tree, rested, looking through the open tree tops to the field across the valley, then went back to the thing in the leaves and then again to your seat against the tree.

  You felt a distinct thrill, while you waited in the presence of the corpse. How the word corpse returned to your vocabulary, reminding you: if you reported this to the police, you would be Peter Gregory again.

  No need for that. Police were for the people who had names, who put up and obeyed NO TRESPASSING signs. For you, it was only a certain curiosity, like picking up a newspaper in a strange city and getting a mild interest in the local obituaries. Only you’d better get out of here. Let’s go, whatever your name is, Murry, let’s go, Murry. Just quietly, as casual as you had come. You looked up the embankment, too steep to climb. You came to a place where the forest floor rose almost to the top of the embankment, and you scrambled up to the quarry road. It was full of shoe prints and tire tracks and big caterpillar tractor tracks. A long walk, the hot sun. You came in sight of farm houses across a field. A car approached from behind. It passed slowly, the men inside looking at you. You tried to ignore them. After a while the dirt road came out to a paved road, with farm houses, to the edge of another town, and you walked by the signs, the lowered speed limit, a motel, gas station, houses and another square, and you realized, from the cannon on the grass and the brick courthouse and the Crawley House, that this was the same town and same square from which you had been chased this morning by the bum in the blue T-shirt. You had come into it from the other end, and everything was merely upside down. You fought down despair because there was nothing you could do about it, and since Murry Bree had to eat you went into a lunch room and had lunch.

  The stranger who accosted you in the lunch room had a big football face and a colorful shirt like a tourist, and when he sat down next to you he smiled like an insurance salesman. He was friendly until you refused to tell him your name, and then he asked what you were doing in the woods.

  He must have been one of the men in the car that passed you on the quarry road. See anything unusual out there? he said. Like what? Unusual like what? Just wondering if you saw anything. All this, while you were standing by the stool with the lunch check, like a hold-up. Didn’t see anything, eh?

  What are you, police? The man was surprised by the question, he laughed, stopped abruptly, and said, What would you say if I was?

  You thought your words out and said, What would you expect me to say?

  How should I know? You tell me.

  So it was excuse me, I’ve got to go. You paid the cashier and went out into the street across the square, thinking grab a ride out of here, can you grab a ride? For the first time since it began you seemed to have a stake, something to lose, and nothing was fun anymore, which was a surprise since you had not thought it was fun before. The man came out of the lunch room across the square, intending you harm.

  You were to think often later about that stranger, wondering who he was. You assumed he was a detective, but he could have been one of a gang of killers. Or he and his companions could have discovered the body themselves and were just going back to town to report. In that case you yourself would have been a suspect.

  You were destined never to know who was killed, what local passion had been acted out, who had suffered, who was bereaved. Your concern was to escape, and when you escaped, you left it behind and never heard from it again. And mostly you could forget, but there were always moments when, from the deep inner discomfort of unremembered things it would rise again into mind: the little raccoon. It reminded you of distractions in Gregory’s life before his suicide: of the Hammer Man, who bludgeoned old men to death including the one who lived across the street from you, a night or two before your swim. And the detective named Sam Indigo, who interviewed you about that, asking if you had heard anything, while your mind was occupied by other matters. With that opening up, you remembered more, you remembered for a moment Gregory things no one should have to remember, like a dream you had waked from, to make you glad to be here, after all.

  The man with
the football face was across the square, looking at you. If you stuck out your thumb to hitchhike, he would drive up and offer you a ride. You moved on quick to where the garage attendant had parked his cars with the keys in them. You got in the Ford, which started right up, fresh and new, waxed and polished. Drove to the corner, turned right, and headed out of town on the next road. Good to be driving again. It was only Murry Bree who was shaking so hard he could hardly steer. Back roads, the Criminal said. Just keep it long enough for the escape. At the edge of town he saw two hitchhikers, standing by the sign that said RESUME NORMAL SPEED. They were a young man with a blond beard and a woman with long light brown hair in a ponytail. They carried a cardboard sign with the black letters: N Y. They were smiling at him, and he stopped to pick them up.

  EIGHT

  The young man and woman, whose names were Amy and Joe, went with you the rest of the way to New York. They became good friends, sharing your adventure and taking an interest in your case, though there was an awkwardness at the beginning because of the car. You said, Do you mind if I take back roads? You turned off to a well-paved road starting up a hill, which had no route sign. You may not want to drive with me. This car.

  You mean it’s hot?

  I only picked it up to get out of Badgerton.

  Let us out, mister. No wait, the girl said. Why do you want out of Badgerton? Natural child, no makeup, oval face, inquisitive eyes—nice looking, according to Murry Bree.

  Well. Menaced by a guy who called him a bum. No money. Not a bum, too long a story, tell you sometime. He didn’t intend to keep the car, only get out of Badgerton with it.

  She sympathized. Murry Bree said, I’ll tell them you’re hitchhikers. The road curved up a hill, down, then up again, by woods and fields and occasional houses and rural mailboxes. The guy was mumbling, stupid dumb-ass, fuckin brainless. Listen mister. How come this car was sitting there with the key in it? When do they start looking? Are they chasing you now?