And now here he was on the sofa, his head pounding, his mouth dry. But it wasn’t his fault. There had been something about the snow the night before, about the way his wipers whisked it off the warm windshield that hypnotized Pike. Michelob, Michelob, Michelob, the wipers whispered. As he approached The Crossroads, it was all he could do to remember his promise to Lynn. By the time he saw Billy’s Dodge Ram and Ronny’s Volvo lounging in the front yard, Pike was no longer driving. The old Chevrolet was steering itself.
“Just like one of them cars on The Twilight Zone,” Pike thought, but he knew he couldn’t say that to Lynn. He’d already used a similar excuse the time he disappeared for three days without a trace, unless one counted the lingering smell of cheap perfume. “I musta stepped right into one of them other dimensions,” he’d said to Lynn. “Remember that little girl and her dog who disappeared right through the wall on The Twilight Zone?” That was Pike’s favorite rerun. “Well, you can step right back,” was all Lynn had said. “You’re probably more welcome in that other dimension anyway.”
Pike sighed and kicked at Lynn’s coat. It rolled off the sofa and onto the floor, stiff as a body. He looked at his watch. Four thirty. It had been sometime before two when Billy dropped him off. He should have made a move then to get on up the stairs. He’d have been two and a half hours less in trouble. But the truth was that he was a little too woozy to have attempted a reconciliation at that point. Pike wondered what his chances were now of sneaking up the stairs and perhaps slipping unnoticed into the warm bed beside Lynn. He would love to know the exact time she had last lifted her head and looked at the clock; he would add twenty minutes to that time, and then declare that that was when he’d gotten home. Goddamn, but there were booby traps everywhere when a man took it in his head to keep his marriage together. He could slip in with one of the twins, in one of those narrow little twin beds, and pretend he’d been there all night. In Julie’s bed, maybe. She didn’t spread out and kick as much as Stevie. She had a mouth as big as Lynn’s, though—but maybe if he fitted a tightly rolled dollar bill into Julie’s little palm, she would keep her tiny trap closed. Pike pulled himself up, decided the trip might be worth it. It was at the top of the dark, creaking, tell-all stairs that he ran into a body standing there, waiting for him.
“Jesus!” he said to Lynn, and flung himself back against the wall. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“I’d rather beat it out,” Lynn whispered, ice in every word. Then she went back into her bedroom without slamming the door. The children were still sleeping. Pike heard her click the lock on and took the hint. He went back down to the sofa where the lengthy shape of his body was well-known among the cushions, and stretched out there. Sometimes he didn’t know what Lynn expected of him. He’d been toeing the goddamn mark for almost a week now, so much so that his toes hurt. His toes were stubbed, you might say. He hadn’t even stopped by The Crossroads when he knew it was his cousin Ronny’s birthday, and Sally would be baking a cake, and Maurice would send a free drink all around the horseshoe bar.
Pike heard one of the kids get up to go to the bathroom, heels hitting the floor roughly over his head. Conrad. Conrad walked on his heels, just as Pike did. A flash of anger swelled up inside Pike. He’d almost had to have stitches put in his head at the emergency clinic in Watertown because of Conrad, and he could still feel the disappearing lump, even though it had been almost two weeks. What was it about Conrad that rankled him so? Lynn had asked him this very question. Why did he seem to hate Conrad? It was like looking at a picture of his childhood self, wasn’t it, to look at Conrad? Lynn had even gotten out an old school snapshot of Pike and put it next to one of Conrad. If it hadn’t been for the dates below, not even Pike could’ve told them apart.
Pike heard Conrad flush the commode and then water rush up through the pipes of the house. How many times had Pike told him not to flush in the middle of the night, unless he had diarrhea, because the noise of it usually woke up one or more of the household? The little three-legged faggot. He had to do the opposite of every single thing Pike told him. Pike hadn’t been so liberal with his own father, had he? If he so much as opened his mouth to protest, he’d have felt Big Pike’s hand bash across it. But Goldie, his mother, had never hit him. So why hadn’t he gone off to Connecticut with her when she’d taken the other children and left Mattagash? Connecticut was a place where you could put on a new life, as though it were a skin you’d just picked out. In Mattagash, your life was like an old winter coat you were forced to wear until it wore out. So why hadn’t he gone with Goldie? This was what Pike had asked himself a million times now that his childhood was over, the way a Christmas comes and goes, so fast you don’t even know it’s happening.
Now he heard Conrad, the picture of his childhood—his childhood self kept alive in the blood and bone and muscle of this oldest son. Conrad’s steps came quietly now, tiptoeing to the top of the stairs. Pike could hear the measured, labored breathing coming out of the boy’s chest. He opened his eyes and looked up the stairs, saw his son silhouetted there at the top, the dark outline of a boy. Conrad was checking to see if Pike was home. The little snoop. Pike had left the old Chevrolet back at The Crossroads. It simply wouldn’t start, not even after Billy dragged out his booster cables and tried to jump it. And in the midst of his happiest, booziest moments, Pike didn’t give a damn what Lynn might say about his abandoning the car. She could keep her opinion to herself or tell it to the priest the next time she went to Mass. Now he wished he’d figured out a way to bring the old clunker home. Conrad leaned farther down the stairs, his eyes trying to adjust to the shapes of the room. Pike lay motionless, quiet, watching his son. Conrad tiptoed down three steps and peered about the dark room, his eyes searching out the contours of the recliner, looking to find a body of some sort, his father’s body. Pike moved his arm, ever so slowly, down to the side of the couch. His hand felt about the floor until he touched one boot. He locked his fingers around the neck of it and waited. Conrad crept down another two steps, his hand against the wall, balancing himself in the gray light of the morning. Pike saw the outline of Conrad’s head turn away, toward the door of the kitchen. This was his chance. In a flash he flung the boot against the stairway wall. He saw Conrad jump, a finicky rabbit’s jump, heard the scared gasp for breath rattle in the boy’s throat.
“Boo,” Pike said softly, from his frozen position on the couch. He laughed as Conrad beat a crooked retreat back up the stairs and into his bedroom. Pike didn’t even care if Lynn heard the racket. She was already pissed at him. And besides, what business was it of Conrad’s if Pike was home or not? That little fairy faggot had opened up a gash on Pike’s skull with a baseball bat, and it would be a damn long while before Pike forgot about it.
***
Lynn zipped up Julie’s ski suit, found Stevie’s mitts, and told Reed not to let the twins go too far out on the pond. Reed was taking them sliding down by the old sawmill hill, where the sleds would not come to a halt until they’d glided a bit out onto the frozen swamp.
“That ice is thin out there in the middle,” Lynn said. “And there’s just enough water in the pond to freeze your feet off, so be careful.” She held the door open and let the three of them tromp past. They found their sleds beneath the porch, where Conrad had pushed them when it started snowing the day before. Now it was a bright, gloriously sunny afternoon. The snow shimmered with a blue-white sheen, hard on the eyes, sharp as glass. The temperature was a superb twenty-five above, but as Lynn watched her children tugging on the ropes of their sleds, she could see their cheeks already turning red with cold. She answered their good-bye waves with a feeble wave of her own. From the kitchen window, she watched until she could make out only the color of their jackets moving against the white expanse of forest. Then they disappeared into the pines bordering the swamp. She went back to folding towels out of her laundry basket.
It was half an hour later, after the towels had been
neatly stacked away in the bathroom, when she heard Pike’s footfalls upstairs moving from the bedroom to the bathroom. He’d gone on up to bed at nine o’clock, after Lynn started a noisy breakfast in the kitchen. Forks and knives and pans banged together in such a metallic cacophony that Pike had taken the hint and dragged himself upstairs. He had flopped, fully clothed, across the mattress of the matrimonial bed. There would be no peace down on the sofa, not with the twins wanting to watch some damn rented movie about aliens, and Lynn slinging her wifely anger about the kitchen. Pike wished, on these lazy, painful, hangover mornings, that Lynn would just go on ahead and slap his face, air her grievance, get the show on the road. It was the silent treatment he hated most, accompanied by things being thrown instead of placed. Pike hadn’t gotten off the bus to Mattagash yesterday. He knew the sights and sounds of a woman with her dander up.
Lynn was at the sink, rinsing the plates from lunch, when she heard Pike coming down the stairs.
“Nice mornin’,” he said sheepishly. He was standing at the door to the kitchen, waiting for a response. Lynn said nothing. It wasn’t morning anyway, it was twelve fifteen. And even if it were, there was certainly nothing nice about it. It was the typical Sunday after the hangover, no more, no less. It meant Pike sleeping until the late hours, missing another morning of his children getting ready for church. It meant she and the kids were expected to tiptoe like mice while the tomcat slept.
“I’m gonna sign that damn petition that Prissy Monihan has got,” Lynn thought. True, Pike and Billy were famous for cruising in the Dodge Ram, a beer between their legs and a bottle of vodka on the front seat, a kind of liquid Meals on Wheels. Closing The Crossroads wouldn’t stop them, but it would inconvenience them. She heard Pike shuffle into the kitchen behind her, but she went ahead and wiped the counter, pretended not to notice. Pike put his hands on her waist, pinched her rear playfully.
“Come on, Lynnie,” he coaxed. “You know how Billy can be. I’d no sooner finished a beer but what he had another one waiting for me.”
“Did he cut your hands off and pour it down your throat?” Lynn asked angrily.
“As a matter of fact,” Pike said in good humor, “he did.”
“If Billy told you to jump off the Empire State Building, would you do it?” Lynn asked. Pike had to think about this. He had never been to New York City. Who knew what caper he might pull once he was cavorting beneath all those lights? Billy had once dared him to jump off Albert Pinkham’s barn when Pike was only ten years old, and he had done it. That was the interesting thing about being Pike Gifford. You just never knew what you might do.
Lynn pushed him away and moved to the stove, where she began furiously washing it with her dishcloth. Pike waited, wondered what his best next move might be. At least she was talking, no matter that her words were as cold as the temperature outside. Spring was happening somewhere in Lynn, he could sense it. Pike let a minute or so pass before he made his way over to the stove and tried his luck again with placing his hands on Lynn’s waist. She brushed them away quickly and turned to face him, the dishcloth clenched in the fist she shook in his face.
“Enough is enough,” Lynn said. “I’m tired of watching you drink yourself into an early grave.” She pushed her way past him and went back to her sinkful of soapy suds.
“So I spent a Saturday night with Billy,” Pike said. “Who’s the worse for it but me? I’m the one with the hangover. Didn’t you get the kids that outer space movie? They probably didn’t even notice I wasn’t here.” He waited to see how this would settle in. Lynn stopped washing the frying pan to look at him.
“Is spending an evening with your wife and children such an awful thing?” she asked. He could hear panicky emotion behind the words, a threat of tears. A good sign. This meant that the dam of anger had burst.
“You’re gonna end up like Big Pike and you know it,” Lynn said. “Drinking’s gonna kill you.”
“Don’t you bring him up,” Pike said, and now he was angry. He had been trying to apologize, to heal the wounds, and here she went and doused them with alcohol, if you could pardon the expression. She knew damn well how he hated for her to mention the elder Pike’s death. It was none of her business. “Shut up now,” he said, pointing a warning finger at Lynn.
“Oh, I don’t give a shit anymore,” she said. She threw the dishcloth into the water. Soap bubbles flitted like snowflakes into the air. “You can stay out every damn night. I’ve had it.” She stomped out of the kitchen. Pike listened as her feet hit each step on her way upstairs. Then her bedroom door banged shut. This was step A in the pattern of her forgiveness, and he recognized it easily. Step B was for him to leave her alone for a few more hours. Step C was sliding in to home plate with a big sorrowful smile on his face.
Pike went on up to the twins’ room to sleep away a bit more of his Crossroads hangover. He ignored the door to his own bedroom, knowing Lynn had locked it anyway. Let her sulk. He had seen the quick flash of remorse in her eyes. She would come around by evening. He pulled off his boots and settled down onto the pile of blankets on Julie’s unmade bed.
A few minutes into his sleep, Pike heard footsteps on the stairs and opened his eyes. From Julie’s bed he saw Conrad’s head appear, then the narrow shoulders, and soon the full body of his oldest son. Pike knew Conrad had been babysitting for his aunt Maisy. He’d heard Lynn on the phone yesterday, before he ambled off to The Crossroads and into a heap of trouble, discussing Conrad’s availability for the next day. A boy babysitting. Lynn was turning that kid into a little faggot. But it seemed Maisy had an Avon brunch she had to attend or she would simply die. A brunch, for Chrissakes, one of those things folks were forever having on Dallas or Dynasty, but had no business bothering with in Mattagash, Maine. What a lot of foolishness some women could think up, and so early in the morning! Pike used his brunchtime to get over a serious hangover.
Pike saw Conrad linger at the top of the stairs. He was looking at Lynn’s closed bedroom door, his head canted like a bird’s, listening for sounds. Pike considered reaching down casually for a boot and heaving it out into the hallway. Conrad was turning into a regular little eavesdropper and spy, always trying to size up the relationship between Pike and Lynn. But Pike decided not to. He’d gotten him real good that morning on the stairs, and he didn’t want Conrad to become immune to these surprise attacks. Two, three times a month had always been enough. So he lay peering out of half-closed eyes as Conrad gave up his vigil and went on into his own bedroom. Reed was still off sliding with the twins, so he had the room to himself. Pike watched as Conrad fumbled around with the articles on his dresser. He hadn’t closed his door because, Pike imagined, he’d assumed his mother and father were in their bedroom asleep. Pike smiled. This was better than a shoe hitting a shin or a boot tossed against the wall. He liked being the spy for a change. He saw Conrad reach into his pocket and pull something out, money it looked like, a few wadded bills, no doubt his babysitting money from Maisy. He squatted in front of the dresser, and while Pike watched, he pulled the bottom drawer out of its grooves and put it quietly on the floor. Then he reached a hand into the darkness and brought out a brown envelope. Pike wondered what the little pack rat was up to this time. He was always hoarding something, this kid, always looking over his peaked shoulder. Conrad opened the envelope, stuffed the bills inside, stashed the envelope again, and hurriedly fitted the drawer back in place. Pike smiled lazily, his headache gone suddenly in the midst of this new discovery. He’d just seen where the little faggot squirrel was hiding his winter nuts.
MAINE AS A WAR ZONE: THE FLASH OF WHITE GLOVES
“Hunting is just God’s way of telling us that he created too many animals.”
—Paulie Hart, Lottery practitioner and avid hunter
Dorrie and Lola had caught Charlene Craft off guard, appearing out of nowhere, silhouetted in the bright sun on her front porch. Charlene had hoped to dig her snowshoes out,
now that it had stopped snowing and the sun was brilliant on the white fields. She needed the outing badly. Her legs could use the exercise and her mind a peaceful, woodsy rest. But they had caught her, face-to-face, when she’d opened the door to let Otis the cat out to pee.
“We’ll only be a second,” Dorrie said as she unbuttoned her bulbous winter coat—her stadium coat, although she’d never set foot inside such an edifice—and hoisted it off. It kept its shape stiffly, too padded to bend or lie low. Instead, it stood upright on the sofa, waiting for its owner to come back again. Charlene was reminded of those statues on Easter Island. She wondered what Dorrie’s winter coat weighed and if one lone truck had transported it to the J. C. Penney store in Watertown.
“They claim we’re gonna have some male strippers in Watertown next spring,” Lola said. “Prissy Monihan says that if they bring them to the Acadia Tavern, she’s gonna picket, just like she did The Last Temptation of Christ.”
“She might picket, all right,” Dorrie said, and began the job of arranging her bulges onto Charlene’s narrow kitchen chair. “But you can be sure she’ll get a real good look before she sticks a sign up in her face.”
“I wish she’d leave this Crossroads thing alone,” said Lola. “She gets that place closed down and we’re stuck with our husbands home every night, although Raymond has yet to admit he goes there.”
“And it’s real helpful to have a close-by place to get a take-out pizza or have a microwave sandwich,” Dorrie added, her mind strolling upon the familiar field of food. Charlene decided she might as well thaw some cobs of corn for supper, might as well accomplish something during her entrapment. She found the plastic bag in the freezer and took it to the sink.
The Weight of Winter Page 21
