by Tom Drury
“Well, how small?”
She held her hands perhaps a foot and a half apart.
“I have no problem with that.”
“There’s moss growing on the walls. And I just feel like if we don’t do something with it soon, it’ll fall down.”
“I’m definitely interested.”
He brushed the leaves from his collar, picked up Alice with one arm under her back and the other slung into the crook of her knees, carried her to the leaves, and dropped her in.
“Hey!” she said.
“You started it.”
“You sound like Faith and Chester.” She stood, knee-deep in leaves, laced her fingers in his, and tried to bend his hands back. They wrestled and fell, and Alice climbed on top of Paul. Leaves clung to her hair and shoulders, and the seam of her jeans pressed taut across his bones.
“Does Chester really steal?” said Paul.
“He doesn’t think of it in those terms,” said Alice. “In his mind, it’s all his to begin with. He’s got a pack-rat sensibility.” Paul raised his hands and she grabbed his wrists. “Do you give up?”
“I’m just getting started,” said Paul.
Alice’s eyes gleamed in the darkness, and her shoulders rose and fell. “You have no business here,” she said.
“I’m the swing reporter,” said Paul.
Alice picked him up at the motel the next morning. She drove the station wagon with her fists touching at the top of the wheel, and an emerald ring on one of her fingers arced back and forth like a jewel on the wheel of trouble. It was a gray and windy day. Alice pulled off the road and onto a dirt lane that curved between birch trees with leaves spilling to the ground. The car bounced up the lane to where a tree lay across the path. Alice stopped and got out carrying a small suitcase. They walked up over a rise between the trees and through a gate made of vine-covered branches that had a peaked hood like an arrow pointing at the sky. The house lay hidden by dead morning glories that had climbed the porch columns and stitched themselves together along the roof’s edge. It was a small clapboard house with patches of the foretold moss. A square stone chimney climbed the side of the house by an attic window. Scraps of paint moved restlessly in the wind.
“This is like a place where trolls live,” said Paul.
Alice stood on the front porch. “It’s in worse shape than I thought.” She worked a skeleton key in the lock of a wide and windowless front door and pushed it open. “See what I mean about how dark it is?”
Furniture lurked in the gloom of the big front room: leather trunks, claw-foot tables, heavy wooden chairs that didn’t match. An odd wall jutted three feet into the room, the beginning of a partition that was never finished. When Alice’s keys hit the surface of a table, the sound sent squirrels running across the roof. She lifted the receiver of a black telephone. “That’s strange,” she said, and held the phone in the air. Paul went over and listened to faint voices:
“So what did you say?”
“Well, I told him he had to make a choice, frankly, and if that means we don’t go to the barbecue, then, by God, we don’t go.”
“Wow, you really laid it down.”
“Hello? Hello?” said Paul. “They can’t hear me.”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t even know whose name this phone would be under,” said Alice.
“Are these things yours?” said Paul.
“I guess they are,” said Alice. “Just reclaim it. Get the vines off and do some painting. And that can be your rent, to make it good again.”
Paul and Alice walked methodically through the house as if expecting to find someone. The setup was unusual in that the moms you would normally find on the first floor — the kitchen, dining room, and bathroom — were in the basement, which, because of the slope of the land, opened onto the back yard through a door in the kitchen. They ended up in a long, narrow workshop. Paint-spatter hieroglyphs studded the benches. Carving tools hung on pegboards with their outlines drawn behind them.
“I feel like I’ve been here before,” said Paul.
“Maybe you have. Did you ever come to Ashland when we were in college?”
“I always meant to.”
“It takes some getting used to.”
Paul reached up and took a wicker-handled chisel from one of the tool racks. It had a blue blade with a V-shaped tip and Japanese characters inscribed on the metal.
“The man was a carpenter,” said Alice. “I don’t know very much. Loom has always shrugged it off. The woman was one of his teachers.”
Paul put the chisel back. “I could live here.”
“I haven’t really told Loom,” said Alice. “I want to present it as a fait accompli.”
They went out of the house and into the back yard. Alice opened her suitcase, which turned out to be a portable tape player. She put in a cassette. A violin played a lonely string of notes that slowly took the form of “Greensleeves.”
“This is Vaughan Williams,” said Alice.
The music played over the bent grass. It reminded Paul of the time in Verona Elementary School when two girls — one with dark hair and a clarinet, the other with light hair and a flute — had played “Greensleeves” at an assembly. They both wore black skirts and white blouses, and after the song was finished the dark-haired girl tightened the screws on her reed with gentleness and respect.
Alice smiled and rubbed her black eyebrows. “I’ve been so unhappy,” she said.
“Yeah, recently?”
“For years. It just seems like years.”
He touched her arm. “Let’s go into town for a matinee.”
13
Paul took the cottage by the lake. He and Loom carried the furniture from the front room into the basement, leaving only a trestle table, chairs, and trunks upstairs. Green wallpaper with purple flowers covered the walls.
Paul’s bedroom was a small room on the first floor whose door opened next to the fireplace in the living room. The electricity worked, and once the propane company had come and filled a rusted tank beside the house, so did the stove.
On his first night, having returned home from the newspaper, he sat at the trestle table listening to a radio and writing a letter to Mary. “All is well here and hope you are the same. I have a house by a lake in a town called Ashland, Connecticut. The country is wooded and steep. Some old friends from college live here. I picked up Scratch at my parents’ house and she is as mean as ever she was. My address is West Shore Road and I hope you write . . .”
“Ever she was” — Jesus Christ, he thought, what is wrong with me?
He put his pen down and began stripping wallpaper, using a serrated blade he had found in the shop. This worked perfectly for the outer walls, which had shifted and flexed with the seasons, weakening the glue and making the paper brittle. All he had to do was slash the paper, put aside the blade, take hold of the torn part, and back away from the wall. The paper made a satisfying rasping sound as it gave up the surface, and glue dust coated his arms and clothes.
A little bit each night was the way the work went, an hour or two after his shift at the Sun, but the work got harder as the nights went on. The wallpaper clung stubbornly to the inside walls, and Paul ended up renting an iron steamer from a rental warehouse in Ashland that had a wedding tent pitched inside.
Electrical coils in the base of the steamer heated water in a tank, forcing steam through a rubber hose and into a plate the size of a clipboard. This plate Paul would clap to the wall and hold there while applying the steam with a metal trigger on the back of the plate. It was hot work in a cool season. Even with steaming he had to slash and scrape the inside walls, and often he gouged the plaster, revealing tufts of dark and wiry horsehair.
One Saturday night all the lights went out and the steamer died, and he went outside to si
t on the back steps of the dark house, His wet shirt cooled in the night air and an outboard motor droned somewhere on the lake. Then he climbed into his car and drove into town for a bottle of club soda. His hands were dry and dusty and he stood scratching his palm in front of the woman who ran the convenience store.
“That means you’ll be coming into money,” said the woman.
“I’ll be waiting.” Like many of his unfinished generation, Paul gave reflexive credence to most superstitions.
“Take it easy,” she said. “Or go crazy. Those are your options.”
Driving back to the house by the lake, Paul got stuck behind a charter bus that lurched and huffed along the twisting road. He decided not to pass. He did not trust his depth perception, and the penalty for miscalculation seemed excessive. Instead, he turned on the radio and listened to a song called “I Can’t Tell You Why” by the Eagles.
This reminded him of a winter years ago when he and Mary had spent a weekend in Williamstown, and they had gone down to Pittsfield to see a movie with “I Can’t Tell You Why” on the soundtrack. In the movie, Diane Keaton and Albert Finney split up, Finney falls in with the crazy-eyed Karen Allen, and eventually he crashes his car into a tennis court, whereupon Diane Keaton’s studly new boyfriend stomps him viciously into the court. Afterward, somber from the violent ending, Paul and Mary headed back to Williamstown.
On the way, they stopped at a ski lodge, where they drank Irish coffee while sitting by a fire and watching the skiers gliding down the mountain under the lights.
Now, stuck behind the bus with nothing to do, Paul had a certain hunger for this version of themselves. Why could they not have spent their lives in the spirit of that moment between Pittsfield and Williamstown, with hot whiskey in their cups and brightly dressed skiers shooting down the mountain?
The next day they had gone to a museum called the Clark Institute, where Mary stood close to the paintings to study brush strokes and where Paul walked through the galleries considering the essential horniness of artists. So many seemed to dress up their hubba-hubba natures with an elaborate layer of allegorical interest. In The Women of Amphissa nine or ten women lay in flimsy gowns on animal skins spread on the stones of a marketplace among tables laden with honeycombs and avocados. And Renoir’s girl with a cat slept in a red chair with her peasant blouse fallen from one shoulder, as if Renoir himself had tiptoed forward to slide the strap off, which maybe he had . . .
Now a lone headlight danced in the rear-view mirror of Paul’s car. The light darted and charged, up and back, left and right, conveying the impatience of a motorcycle driver.
“What would you have me do?” said Paul aloud. “Drive over the top of it?”
Exhaust fumes flowed steadily from the bus, and when the thin smoke paused for the shifting of gears the bus seemed in danger of losing momentum and rolling backward. Paul checked the mirror again, which reflected only darkness, and he wondered where the motorcycle had gone. Sometimes it seemed to him that vehicles simply disappeared with no explanation, or perhaps a sports car that had been behind him would be suddenly ahead of him, just like that. This was especially true in Belgium, where the motorists drove with that sense of high-velocity order that he associated with the highways of every country he had ever been in, save the United States and Canada and even in Canada, around Montreal. Then the motorcycle headlight blinked on the edge of his vision; it flickered and climbed through the trees along the road. The rider had evidently found a parallel trail on which he would overtake them all. The light stayed even with Paul’s car for a moment and then rose and disappeared in the trees. Soon the red bus lights flared and the bus stopped cold in the road and Paul stopped too, which was no trick, slow as he had been going. He pulled off onto the soft shoulder of the road, got out, and walked up beside the bus. The motorcycle had come to rest on its side in the other lane, and the rider sat somewhere else entirely, with his back to a pine tree and his head tilted away from the road. The bus’s headlights flooded the corpse. The eyes were open, and Paul knelt down and shut them as he had seen done in movies.
The bus driver stood near the door of the bus with his arms spread wide as if to contain his passengers, for they seemed to be mindlessly moving into the darkness. One man clutched a duffel bag to his chest and shouted at the motorcyclist as if he were still alive.
“You cut it too close,” he said.
“He can’t hear you,” said the bus driver.
A short woman put her arm around the driver. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “Don’t take it on yourself.”
“Please get back on the bus,” said the driver.
Paul fetched his notepad and pen from the car and began taking notes. The police arrived, followed by an ambulance and a fire truck, and soon the trees shivered in waves of red light. Then another motorcycle came idling up, and a tall couple dismounted and walked toward the tree where the dead rider reclined as if resting in the cool of the evening. The man and woman knew the rider, and comprehension seemed to hit them very specifically in the shins, so they made halting progress. The man wore all denim, but instead of making him look rugged or hearty, his outfit gave him the appearance of a denim stick figure.
The EMTs covered the fallen rider with a sheet or shroud. The couple took off their helmets and nestled them against their hips. The woman’s long, thin face seemed familiar, but Paul could not place her. The police would not let the man and woman near the covered figure, so they walked over to the motorcycle, where it lay in the road, and hunkered down, set their helmets on the pavement, and looked through a saddlebag. Paul told them that he worked for the Sun, and if they didn’t want to talk he would understand, but if they did want to talk, he would be there to listen, because he wanted to give some sense of the man for the people who would read the story but did not know him.
“We were going to play cards,” said the woman. She sat back with her hands on the asphalt surface. “We were going to play poker at our house. Is that what you want to know? A game of cards? Happy now? His name is Mike Snowe. I’m Carrie, this is Lonnie, and that’s Mike.”
“You work at the courthouse,” said Paul. “You gave me my driver’s license. Remember? I thought there was going to be a hassle, but you just gave it to me.”
“She has tremendous power no one knows about,” said Lonnie.
“Poor Mike,” she said. “What happened?”
“He tried to pass the bus on the side trail,” said Paul.
“I mean, to our lives,” said the woman. “I mean, what happened to our lives that we would wind up this way? On the side of the road talking to a reporter like some angel of death. ‘We had no idea.’ ‘We didn’t expect it.’ How did it come to happen this way?”
“Is the poker game a regular thing?” said Paul.
“No, not really,” said Lonnie.
“It was a regular thing for a while,” said Carrie. “We were trying to start it back up.”
“Where did Mike work?”
“At the hospital,” said Carrie. “He and Lonnie both work at the hospital.”
Lonnie took out a light blue pack of French cigarettes and lit one up. The match glowed between the fingers of his hands. They were all huddled by the motorcycle. “Mike was kind and gentle,” said Lonnie. “That’s the thing to remember about Mike. You would never hear a word out of him. If somebody couldn’t make their shift, it was always, ‘Call Mike.’ If somebody needed help moving, it was always, ‘Call Mike.’ ‘Mike’ll be right over to carry things.’”
Paul wrote breathlessly, in a large and careless script. He filled pages and flipped them. He wrote like a fiend.
“He was good and understanding, and a lot of people treated him like their personal slave,” said Carrie. “That’s how I feel, anyway. He read everything he could find. He was a constant reader. I remember one time he picked up a bottle of shampoo
and just read out all the ingredients. He had this wonderful curiosity, and he also cared for tropical fish.”
Lonnie laughed quietly. “That’s for sure.”
“He had two tanks,” said Carrie.
“That’s a lot, I guess,” said Paul.
“It was a lot for Mike, but he never complained,” said Carrie. “I don’t know what will become of the fish now. He wasn’t from here. I don’t know where he was from. We should call someone. His parents were in the service, so he traveled around a lot. He was an army brat.”
“How old was he?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how old he was. Lonnie, how old would Mike have been? Twenty-eight?”
“I don’t know,” said Lonnie. “He loved racquetball, and I’d tell you what, he was good at it.” He reached down and flipped the saddlebag open. “Look, here’s his racquet.”
“Move away from the motorcycle, please,” said a policeman with slick black hair. Lonnie, Carrie, and Paul stood up. “And put that cigarette out.”
Someone began singing from a window of the bus. “Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom; lead thou me on, the night is dark, and I am far from home . . .”
“We knew him,” said Lonnie.
“Will you bring charges?” said Carrie.
“Unlikely,” said the policeman. “I’m not sure what the bus driver could have done differently. And the other one gets out of charges the hard way. We’ve all made our mistakes. There’s no joy in this job.”
“What’s your name, officer?” said Paul. “I’m Paul Emmons from the Sun.”
“I hate that rag,” said the policeman.
The emergency workers lifted the rider onto a stretcher as Paul slid the notebook into his back pocket. Leaving the accident, he picked up a clublike police flashlight that someone had left on the trunk of a cruiser. Then he got into his car, drove to the newspaper, and wrote up his notes for the police reporter Carolyn Wheat to find in the morning.
It was after three o’clock when he got home. He turned on the flashlight and went down to the basement. The fuse box was in the kitchen, and he unscrewed the blown fuse and replaced it with a penny. The electricity surged, sending thin rays of light down through the cracks in the flooring. He turned the kitchen light on, and Scratch came bleating down the stairs. Paul opened a can of cat food and ran her a fresh bowl of water.
