He watched the train pull away backward, retreating in the direction from which it had come. Cowardly, but wise. Then he moved out into his own direction, carrying his lantern and balancing his duffle bag. And even as he trudged the first few yards into the encroaching cold and snow, the thought began to invade his mind that, in all his short and fretful life, this would surely rank as the most imbecilic move he had ever made.
That he had chosen to walk into it so quickly, and with so little thought, troubled him. For he was behaving exactly as Maynard had described him—acting first, thinking later. When would he learn? Why, in the name of all logic, had he gone so offhandedly on this suicidal stroll? What compulsive death wish had taken over the tiller of his ship, steering him on like a character out of Kipling—“To Belden and glory!” Christ, how could he be such an ass?
The questions gathered and bumped in his mind, but failed to deter him. They no longer mattered. He had made his decision and he was stuck with it. Turning back would be more idiotic than plowing on. And standing still would be more self-destructive than either. Standing still would be to die.
The parallel rails knifing ahead were so snow-laden that had he not been walking between them from the outset, he’d never have been able to find them. They were like low-rising, straight-ahead mole tunnels, barely a few inches higher than the snow that housed them, in no way discernible to the naked eye, only to the stubbing toe. And—it was getting colder. A raw kind of cold, and wet. All of it cloaking around him as if an arctic spider were spinning him into an icy pupa.
The light was turning eerie, the sky darkening, causing the snow to look even whiter and the flakes larger, the mix of it milling familiarly, like that Christmas poster he had fashioned in an inspired moment of Yuletide creativity—random cotton puffs pasted on that helpless blue desk blotter, red and green letters slapped over it all with the practiced hand of a palsied Picasso: FRANK’S AUTO SERVICE—CINCINNATI’S FINEST—WISHES TO EXTEND TO YOU AND YOURS A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY 1970.
The radio was playing something scratchily and indefensibly Christmas, while outside it was snowing so heavily that no cars dared risk the road. Frank Brauntuch, a gruff man who always managed to feature a two-day beard stubble no matter how often he shaved, appraised the poster that Austin had Scotch-Taped to the office wall. “I got a three-year-old nephew could do better.”
“Can he patch a tire?” asked Austin while doing that very thing.
“The green is wrong. It’s got no balance. And my name should be bigger. It should be FRANK’S—big. And maybe with a shiny gold. No, make it silver—for the snow.”
“Tell your nephew that’s the best I can do.” Austin finished the patch and stood the tire on its side in the water trough, to test for air bubbles which were not forthcoming. He had saved another tire. Big deal.
“And how about my last name?” asked Frank, “Shouldn’t that be on, too? Big? In silver?”
“It’s a poster, not a billboard.”
“I suppose you’d like to frame this thing and put it in a museum.” Frank was an unattractive man in both body and attitude, pushing forty very hard, at the waistline as well as chronologically.
“I’d like to frame it and shove it up your ass.” Austin had had it. He was tired. He’d been working all day. And he no longer could abide the side symptoms of Frank’s five-day head cold—i.e., the way the man’s nose ran continuously, like a faucet left on, and the fact that he wouldn’t blow it, like a gentleman, but rather sucked it back in, like spaghetti.
Frank looked at him with watery red eyes. “Careful there, fella. You ain’t indispensable.”
“Then stop knocking my poster. Let’s see you do one, you’re such an expert. And for Christ’s sake, why can’t you blow your nose like a human being instead of suckin’ it all back in? It’s goin’ to come out your ears.”
Frank smiled, grimy teeth to match his hands. “I like the way it tastes. I’m goin’ to get Campbell’s to put it in cans.”
“Jesus, how’d I ever last this long in this place?”
“I don’t know. You don’t know your asshole from a drive shaft. Where you goin’?”
Austin found himself slipping into his jacket. He was walking out. He was going to quit. Just like that. The idea occurred, took hold, and spurred him on. “Where am I goin’? Well, I tell you, old buddy, I am resigning my post.”
“You quittin’?”
“I am quitting.”
“Best news I had all day.”
“Merry Christmas, you stupid sonofabitch.”
“Happy New Year, you ignorant bastard.”
Austin pulled up his collar so high that his earlobes folded up to close his ears. And, going out, he slammed the door, hard, hoping to break the glass, but all it did was ring the bells and cause Frank to laugh and grunt and reach for a beer.
Stepping indignantly into the snow-blasted night, Austin found it to be unnecessarily cold, colder than should have been allowed, and certainly colder than he had expected. His house was over a mile away, his car in the garage, a taxi a bad joke. He had a better chance of flagging down an Eskimo.
He had not foreseen. Not the severity of the storm or how heavy his duffle bag would become, the snow piling all over it, adding its own weight to the burden. It all seemed never-ending, and the bleakness was visually impenetrable. His feet were dragging and his breath was freezing on his lips. The wind was laying in, the cold was building up, and the name of the game was “Stay Alive.” And toward that end his thoughts exploded, the heat of them serving to fuel his furnace, or so he hoped.
“My name is Austin Fletcher. I have two parents. I have logged four years of high school and am saving up for college, though I’m a good bet to flunk out because I’m basically not too smart. I worked eighteen months in Di Paolo’s Supermarket, starting at forty-five dollars a week and advancing to eighty, not counting F.C.I. and S.S. and withholding tax and small change. I worked twenty more months in Dugan’s Doughnuts, where nothing happened except a hold up where sixty-three dollars was taken and Dugan crapped in his pants. I worked three weeks in the iron foundry, four months at Binder’s Dry Cleaning, and one month at Frank’s Fucking Auto Shop. It is the year of our Lord 1972 and I am twenty-three years old, six feet tall, one hundred sixty-five pounds, and only two cavities. I have been honorably discharged from the U.S. Fucking Army, my serial number being US 51070406 and my home phone 253-277 fucking 3. My Social Security number is 220-70-069 fucking 4 and I used to know a girl named Alice O’Neale, 35-23-39. I have ten fingers in two gloves and five toes in each of two arctic boots. I have two nostrils sucking wind and one mouth doing likewise. I have two ears turned to dried apricots and two eyes turned to golf balls. I have zero control over my feet and they are going slower than the top of me. I am pitching forward, my head at a ten-degree angle with whatever I’m heading into. It is now twenty degrees. Now thirty degrees. Forty-five will be crucial—and forty-five it is. And all the numbers are leaving my brain like a cash register being cleared. And down I go for the count, like the proverbial bag of shit. And whatever it is I’m carrying I carry it no more…”
The medics at the forward aid station were there almost as soon as he fell, Maynard tombstone-heavy across his back. And he lay there for a moment, gasping for breath and crying, because he knew what the man was going to say.
“He’s had it. Do you know that?”
“Yes.”
“How far’d you carry him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, we’ll take care of him.” The medic checked Maynard’s dogtags, rather respectfully, considering the circumstances. “Okay, Maynard—it’s all over. No more war for you. Rest easy, kid.” He looked over at Austin, who hadn’t moved. “It’s up to Graves Registration now, okay?”
“What?”
“I said it’s over, you can go back to your outfit now. Do you understand?” Seeing that Austin wasn’t moving, the medic called off to someone else, “Hey, Willie? W
e got a guy here in shock. Willie?”
But Austin was on his feet and moving off, mourning his only friend but sustained against wracking grief by his soldier’s knowledge that death, quick and impersonal, was preferred to death that singled you out, came at you slowly, and hung around obscenely. From that standpoint, and that standpoint only, Maynard had lucked out.
His duffle bag lay in the snow, between the rails, where he had struggled out from under its oppressive weight. And his lantern, which had flown from his grasp when he made his big flop, rested off to the side and down a decline, where it would never be found again.
As to Austin himself, he was mushing on, still keeping between the rails, the snowflakes coming down without end, the wind crowding him, the cold hugging him. He tried to work his fingers into a fist, but his gloves had frozen into boards. With the aid of his armpits, he pulled the gloves off and blew on his fingers. He could see the hot breath but could feel nothing. Time and heat and life were running out, and he knew it. He goddamn knew it.
His legs were pumping forward again, but nightmarishly, slowly and without sensation, seeming to lose ground rather than gain it. He rammed his finger stubs into his parka, groping them about in his inside pocket, where he had earlier cached the chocolate. He found the chocolate and drew it out, losing it twice to the pocket and once more to the snow. He picked it up and held it between hands that had become paws, his fingers no longer able to flex. He couldn’t peel the wrapper away, not even with his teeth. And so he shoveled the whole bar into his mouth, wrapper and all, as far as it would go, and he chewed for dear life, his frozen jaw oafishly resisting the entire effort.
Chewing didn’t work, and so he concentrated on sucking, reverting to that one primordial instinct that got infants through the night and the species out of the cave. He couldn’t taste, not yet, certainly not immediately, but he could feel the saliva slipping from his mouth and dribbling down his chin.
He sucked harder, then able to bring his teeth into play, and he tasted paper—a good sign. He stuffed his fingers into his mouth to rip again at the wrapper. Soggy and thawing, it came free in shreddy bits which he then spat away, and the chocolate was naked and in the clear.
He could taste it, his tongue dancing over it, around it, pushing it, melting it, nudging it back into molar country where those big teeth churned and ground and joined with the tongue and the saliva in the big push toward survival. The chocolate broke and the flavor gushed out, sliding deliciously about in his mouth before diving delightfully down his throat, followed closely by that warm, unmistakable, undeniable feeling of life.
His toes got the news, and tendrils of heat fired the boilers in his boots. His fingers, flexing, grabbed the petrified gloves and forced their way inside, cracking and bending the tough leather into obedient fists.
The banquet lasted but a few moments, Austin knowing he couldn’t stay for tea. He foraged about in his pockets for a match with which to light his lantern. But there was no match, and he remembered, all too clearly, that he had used his last match to light his last cigarette, in the last car of what was beginning to look like his last train ride. There was no lantern either, so why all the fuss?
And there weren’t any sticks around that he could rub together and thus invoke a flame. Or any flint or steel, or smudge pots, or Zippo lighters, or careless forest fires, or fairy godmothers, or U.S. Cavalries. Nothing but snow and two railroad tracks pointing endlessly north. And he wondered why the bored tracks, if out of nothing but caprice, didn’t turn occasionally left, or indifferently right, or go straight up, or straight down, or separate into different directions, or whistle Dixie, or buy six doughnuts and get one free because it was Dugan’s birthday and he did that to drum up business ten or twenty times a year.
His lungs were as full as a blowfish’s, one more squeeze still left in the old accordion; one more song to let out slowly before the band went into “Auld Lang Syne.” And though he couldn’t see the finish line or hear the crowds, instinct told him that if he could just keep pumping, just keep running within the legal confines of his specific lane, clearly indicated by the fucking railroad tracks, he had a chance, albeit a farfetched one, of beating the grim reaper to the tape.
His arms flailed, his spine barely able to maintain its perpendicular, and he saw it, out in front of him like a dangling carrot, flickering and nonspecific but urging him on all the same—some kind of light.
And when he finally got to it and teetered before it in that last shimmer of glacial evening, he wiped the caked snow from his eyes and read aloud the one word in the misty halo beneath the visor-topped bulb; BELDEN. Sweet Jesus. Whomp.
He was dead asleep in the crummy hotel room that had the dimensions of a shoebox and the smell of a green toilet. His duffle bag lay at the foot of his bed where he hadn’t bothered to unpack it, let alone open it. And he would have slept another five hours, at the least, had the telephone not rung itself silly. It was the hotel operator, telling him that she was ready with his call to Cincinnati.
“Hello, Mom?…It’s Austin, yeah…I’ve been tryin’ to reach you…Oh, bowling. Ahhh.
“I’m in San Francisco…San Francisco…No, I’m not coming home…I mean, not right away…Maine.…Maine…I have a house there…A house!…Mom? Mom?…
“Hello, Dad…I’m sorry I upset her…No, I didn’t know you bowled eleven games…No, I didn’t know the championship was at stake…I told her I wasn’t coming home…Because I have a house…A house! …In Maine…In Maine!…I don’t know; I never saw it. That’s why I’m going…I don’t know how much it’s worth…It’s not important…
“Shit, Dad—you’re drunk.…I said, ‘Shit, Dad—you’re drunk!’…
“Listen—Dad? It’s kind of a trust…I owe it to a friend to at least have a look at it…Because he left it to me…Because he liked me…Because he’s dead!…He got killed! Goddamnit!…”
Disgusted, he slammed down the receiver and plopped back onto his bed, hating himself for having been so abrupt with his parents, hating them because they bowled, drank beer and watched Lawrence Welk.
He turned onto his stomach and fell immediately back to sleep. It was a warm sleep. All-encompassing. Snug and cozy. A familiar smell slowly filling his nostrils…
3
It was coffee. Whenever he smelled coffee it meant that he had slept later than someone else. He also smelled mothballs. Smelling mothballs had no significance, other than that it offended his nose. Still asleep, he turned away from the smell, only to find the odor stronger.
He moved on the narrow cot, vaguely remembering that he had pulled himself up out of the snow one more time, one last time after seeing the light suspended on the sky, and had stumbled on into the rickety building where the door had been left unlocked.
He was covered with a blanket, old and rough. It was the blanket that smelled of mothballs. He didn’t remember any blanket. He remembered wishing there was a blanket, but he didn’t remember finding one. Then he remembered finding the cot. The cot was refuge enough and he had plunked onto it. That’s all that he remembered.
“Left the door open for ya when I closed up. Just in case ya made it. Left the outside light on, too, though I wasn’t too sure how much life was left in that old bulb. Been out there over three years. Long time for a bulb. Longest we ever had a bulb out there was five years, but that was because we never hardly used it. Ya don’t use a bulb, it’ll last a long time, unless some woodpecker takes a liking to it. Most of our woodpeckers, though, are smarter’n that. Smart woodpeckers up here, even though they don’t have to be, since we got trees enough for all of ’em.”
It was a Maine voice, nasal and friendly, long-hanging vowels rolling out as small songs, all of it spiced with bursts of vigor that snapped like pine cones underfoot. And whenever a sentence ended with a word like “here” it would curve up into the air and come out “hee-ya.”
The voice continued, a man’s voice—a big man’s voice, deep and resonant. “Nawm called a
head. Said ya might make it but not to count on it. Nawm bet on ya makin’ it, so he wins, if I recall him correctly, eleven dollahs and thutty-five cents. Thutty-five cents is from Guerney. Not much of a bettor, Guerney.”
Austin shook the fur from his head. “This Belden?”
“Depot, not the town. Town’s a quarter-mile up the line. To answer ya next question, it’s eight-forty A.M., Tuesday. I should’ve thought to leave the blanket on the cot before I closed up. Come in at six A.M. and found ya there, half-froze. So I give ya the blanket. Used to belong to a horse, which is why I keep it in mothballs, so’s it might forget. Mothballs all over, so careful where ya step. They’re white, that’s how ya’ll know ’em. Also have a distinct smell of camphor, in case ya never come up against ’em before. ’Course, if ya got here and then died, all bets’d be off, as that would’ve been judged a tie. Dead heat, so to speak.”
The man was about forty-five and round. Round like a rhino, not a hog, with an obvious strength to him, all of it casually covered by an oversized nappy black sweater that the man’s shoulders still pushed to its limits. The navy-blue woolen watch cap he wore looked to be Paul Bunyan’s. Even the boots looked to be seven league if they were a league at all.
“My name is Austin Fletcher.”
“You in service?”
“Just out.”
“Jack Meeker.” And he smiled, two dozen facial creases set to work to do the job. It was a good face and honest, like a favorite leather wallet, the eyes so deeply set that they appeared to have no color; the nose and chin slotting perfectly into the framework as if painted on an old barn door by Andrew Wyeth.
Austin raised himself to one elbow and looked over the room that unwound small, square and Spartan, and varnished—everything that mahogany color and all of it ashine. Table and chairs on a swayback floor. Windowsills swollen from rain that got in. A sink, blue-stained. Small refrigerator, circa 1935. Wall clock, loud, energetic pendulum. Telephone on a rolltop desk that didn’t rolltop anymore. Two kerosene lamps supplying the light, aided by three bare bulbs dangling on frayed electrical cords. A Franklin stove with a flue driving itself through the roof. A toilet egomaniacally squatting in a corner as if it were a Bernini statue. A square opening in a wall, just above a counter—a place to sell tickets through. A cash register worth thousands if a collector ever saw it. And a dogeared railroad timetable tacked to a wall by three of its four corners, looking for all the world as though it hadn’t been changed since Casey Jones blew through.
Maynard’s House Page 2
