Fellow Mortals: A Novel

by Mahoney, Dennis

  “I’m sorry. You’re a good dog. Good dog. Come here, you’re a very good dog.”

  Wing licks him on the mouth. Henry pets him up and down, trying not to cry, and then he reaches into the bag and offers him a sandwich. He can barely see the road through the fogged-up glass and his head’s still roaring like he’s revving up the engine.

  * * *

  Sam trembles on the flip-down bedding of the trailer and the rain ticks metallically above him. He can’t sleep, can’t sit, can’t go out or walk around, and when he punches the wall, harder than he means, it leaves a two-foot fracture in the cheap wood veneer. He opens a can of chicken noodle soup and eats it cold. The oil in the broth reminds him of Laura but he can’t remember why—some memory of winter and the clink of metal spoons. It’s a terrible meal even by nonperishable standards, and he reminds himself he has to call the power company and see about electric. Peg was right: he needs a better plan than living like this, especially with everybody knocking on the door. He makes a shopping list: batteries, a radio, sanding cloth, rope. Another round of groceries and a few more books. He could really use beer, now instead of later, but he can’t imagine driving into town right now.

  To hell with the weather. He grabs his backpack and a cooler full of hot dogs, soda, and potato chips and hikes into the trees. They swallow him at once, branches sagging down, leaves reaching out and clinging to his clothes. It’s damper in the shade where the ground stays cool. Little molecules of fog hover in the air. He has a memory of driving up a mountainside with Laura—Mount Paradox, a tourist peak with a paved road and a restaurant waiting at the top, spectacular in leaf season, scarier going up than coming down, the backward pull more insistently alarming. He white-knuckled the ascent but Laura didn’t mind, not until the summit, where they had to turn around. That was when it got her, on the long drive down. She kept her hand against the dash and wouldn’t speak until the bottom, whereas Sam preferred to know that gravity was driving. He can feel it right now—the sense of nature taking over, the inevitable tug of moving in the wild. This is where he doesn’t have to fight to stay in motion. This is where he feels more solid on the ground.

  The weather settles down by the time he’s in the clearing. He looks directly up and can’t see the rain, just a bright gray sky and mist around the leaves. The place has grown familiar, and despite being soaked he’s happy that he’s come, safe from any visitors and bigger, more at ease, in the broadness of the woods. If only he could pull the trailer out here, but he’s something like a quarter mile in without a road. He notices the logs that Henry piled yesterday. The notion isn’t new: build a cabin, settle in. He could clear the way enough to get an ATV and then deliver what he needed. Keep it simple, off the grid.

  He finds the ax where he left it and continues past the clearing to an elm tree looming in the shade. He rejected it the first few times he came across it. The trunk has a hole too pronounced for him to work around, an oblong pit, deep black, full of rot. It’s the hole that draws him in today, focusing his thoughts. It reminds him of the burned-out window of the dormer, and he swings the ax with terrible precision at a limb. Everything dissolves in the action of the cuts—Henry and his dog, Peg and her concern—and he picks another limb and hacks that, too. His blood warms up and pretty soon he’s settling into shorter cuts, aiming them at angles. After that he takes his chisels and a mallet from his bag, concentrating closely, roughing out the form. His nerves begin to settle like he’s had a couple drinks and he continues for an hour, maybe two, maybe more.

  He started working with wood in eleventh grade, whittling sticks with a pocketknife he’d gotten for his birthday, just trying out the blade by shaving bark and chipping knots off the side. Later he began to carve symbols and designs, and after the knife snapped shut and almost severed a fingertip, he bought a proper carving set with chisels, gouges, and a fixed-blade knife.

  He moved to songbirds and people but he’d always liked mythology, and before long he was carving nothing but monsters and female nudes. He made a three-headed dog that was crude but recognizable, a minotaur, a winged man, and every nymph or goddess he could find a good picture of. After high school he earned his MFA, tried a few small gallery shows, and had a sculpture, Death of Hercules, featured in an issue of Woodcarving Illustrated.

  Laura liked his work but struggled with his working, especially once she took an overnight shift at the hospital pharmacy. She went to her job at eight p.m. and left Sam sculpting in the basement, hour after hour, until he finally went to bed at one or two in the morning. He’d wake the next day underslept and noncommunicative, just as Laura was getting home, ready to talk and share a meal, and after that she’d go to sleep and Sam would teach lithography and watercolor at the high school. Their schedules aligned on afternoons and weekends. Laura would be up and fully slept when Sam returned from teaching. They would talk and watch the news and go for walks after dinner. They liked making love in the five-o’clock light, right when half the town was buried in commute. But after a while, Sam’s eagerness to sculpt preoccupied his thoughts and he found himself waiting for the hour she would leave.

  Laura sensed it. Now and then, when the work seemed important, she encouraged him to head downstairs right away. He could tell it disappointed her and tried to stick around, but Laura noticed that, too, and it was easier to go. Walks became requirements. Meals were more efficient. Laura just assumed that he would sculpt after dinner. She would garden, she would read, she would fill her time alone, and Sam would do his thing, not wanting to disturb her. In the last few months, he’d been going downstairs earlier and earlier. Weekends were daylong versions of the same.

  It had gone that way the night before the fire. Sam sculpted after dinner. Laura weeded in the garden, showered and dressed, packed her midnight lunch, and called his name from the top of the basement stairs. He put the chisel down long enough to see her. She mentioned some trifle, a door hinge he needed to fix or one of the other chores he’d been neglecting all season. They smiled goodbye without a kiss and went about their nights.

  He finished after one and slouched upstairs, massaging his neck and passing a sculpture in the living room, the only life-size piece he’d done all year. He’d cut her out of pine, a beauty in her youth. Her body curved upward like a vine or a shoot, one arm raised high above her head. Her upturned eyes gave balance to her frown. Flowers twined around her waist, clinging to her hips, and a long gnarled hand held tightly to her calf—a monstrous hand, something that would never let her go. She might have been sinking into the ground or rising into the sun, and though he’d striven for exactly that effect when he conceived her, the sculpture didn’t work as fully as he’d hoped, as if he hadn’t really caught the tension of the struggle.

  Laura wanted it out of the living room—he wasn’t sure she liked the piece at all—but he needed someone’s help to move it into the yard. It was one more thing he hadn’t yet done, like staining the deck and finding time to build the table she’d been asking for. When he woke the next day, she was sleeping at his side. He wasn’t used to that. Most mornings, she’d be waiting in the kitchen, where they’d eat and say goodbye before she finally went to bed. He’d forgotten how adorable she was when she was sleeping, hair covering her cheek, hand tucked below her chin. She sighed and cuddled over, sweaty in her gown, and he spooned her with a palm cupped gently to her breast. When her breathing felt deep, he raised the sheet above her waist, admiring her knees and the bottoms of her feet, more familiar with her shape than anything he’d ever tried to sculpt. He thought to wake her up but she was sleeping too smoothly; she was perfect there without him, better untouched. Instead he took a shower, missing her more than usual, and when he passed the nude sculpture in the living room he noticed every flaw, every accident of form.

  He puts the chisel down now and shivers in the mist. It isn’t raining but the clouds are here to stay. He hasn’t eaten and his skin feels cold beneath his clothes. Yesterday he gathered dry wood beneath a tarp.
He gets it now and takes it to the clearing, along with a bagful of shavings from the elm to use for tinder. He sets the first log and splits it with the ax. The inner wood’s clean, like a new bar of soap. He chops until he has a good pile for a fire, makes a teepee of kindling on a loose mound of shavings, takes the hot dogs out of the cooler, and fishes a box of matches out of his bag.

  He pauses with a match pressed against the box. He scrapes the tip. The fire flares, glowing open in the gloom. Then the flame looks delicate and neat, like a seed. He watches how it moves, how it bends when he breathes. Pinpricks of Laura sparkle up around him. Dried paste on her toothbrush, crusty in the bristles. Half snores. How she drooled on her pillow like a child. He holds the fire in his fingertips, squeezing at the sting. The blisters are immediate, the pain so intense he can think of little else. From his fingers. From a tiny pair of millimeter burns.

  He kicks the kindling in a scatter, eats a hot dog raw and drowns it with a full can of cold 7-Up. The carbonation hurts, building in his chest. He screams around the clearing, just to let it out, and then he thinks of Henry Cooper lying on his back. How he sobbed out loud, guileless and small. He didn’t mean it, Sam thinks. Doesn’t matter. Yes it does. He imagines taking off—shutting his eyes and running full tilt until his forehead bangs off a trunk. Instead he wanders back toward his first finished sculpture.

  He gazes at his work, feeling it anew—an emaciated man reaching overhead. Sam worked it from the bottom of a great cracked fork, but he only carved the torso, leaving out the legs, as if the body had been left partly buried in the maple. There’s bark along his hips and nearly to his navel, where his skin begins to lighten with the soft inner wood. The rib cage is skeletal and hacked, almost crude, and his abdomen is twisted with impossible severity. His neck is long and striated, showing every tendon, and his head is like a skull wrapped tight in old skin. The figure gazes upward and his mouth hangs horrifically ajar—unhinged, bare-toothed, with a low, crooked jaw. He stretches for a bough with an overlong arm. His finger bones are delicate. His nails are bitten raw. The bough is just above him, dipping to his hand, with a tiny bunch of key-leaves floating out of reach.

  Sam stares for many minutes with his hands in his jeans, shivering and wishing there were someone he could call. He feels something damp in the bottom of his pocket, takes it out, and sees a little piece of paper in a ball. It’s a credit-card receipt from the owner of the Bat Chalet, the last person he intentionally spoke to. Fourteen days ago, according to the date. For a second he’d been certain it was Henry Cooper’s number.

  PART TWO

  9

  Nan and Joan seriously consider rebuilding their house, but after daily conversations, prayer, and sleeping in the Coopers’ cozy, lived-in home for so many nights, their hearts turn reluctantly to facts. They would have to build cheaper, maybe smaller, maybe uglier, and even for a house with no personality, most time frames were over half a year. They’re also forced to admit that Arcadia Street changed long before the fire, as most of their older friends died or moved to retirement communities, their vacant homes filled by strangers or the likes of Billy and Sheri Kane, whose fights were often loud enough to overcome the Finns’ storm windows and air conditioners.

  Sam and Laura were the notable exception. In the short year the Baileys lived on Arcadia, they had fixed the picket fence, spruced up the yard, and painted most of the house from the inside out. Sam shoveled the Finns’ walk after every winter storm and Laura liked to bake and bring them slices of her pies. They were good for the neighborhood, openly affectionate and balancing the Kanes, although the Finns had often wondered if the marriage might be strained. Laura was frequently out in the yard, growing vegetables and trading almanac strategies with Nan—giving milk to pumpkins, feeding cornmeal to cutworms to make them explode—whereas Sam was always hidden in the house, friendly but aloof, the two of them increasingly apart when they were home.

  Now, with little chance of Sam reclaiming the lot next door, they’re all but guaranteed a new-construction family, the kind who puts tiki torches in the yard and has parties after eight. It simply won’t do.

  They choose Peg Carmichael as their agent. She mailed the Finns a packet of listings shortly after the fire, and while she isn’t quite a star of the Waterbury real estate firmament, she’s familiar to them and has, strictly speaking, been a neighbor.

  “I’ve known a lot of good agents,” Nan says one night over lasagna. “Some of them have a true passion for finding people the right home. Peg isn’t one of them. She wants to find a house that’s five to ten percent above its true worth and keep it there.”

  “She works for you,” Henry says. “It’s in the agent’s best interest to lower the asking price.”

  “She works for half of the final commission. It’s in Peg’s best interest to close the deal at the highest price her client will accept.”

  “That’s got to be unethical.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “Pick another agent,” Ava tells her.

  “I can handle Peg Carmichael,” Nan says, and no one at the table disagrees.

  “I still want to offer those boys a swing set,” Henry says.

  He’s crushed when Joan informs him that they had one several years ago. Peg donated it to a local school after Ethan sprained a wrist.

  “You can help,” Ava says, “by finding Nan and Joan a house. Am I right?” she asks, deferring to the Finns with a bright, unchallengeable edge.

  “You’ve been so good to us,” Joan says, touching Henry’s hand.

  “That’s right,” Nan declares. “We need you now. And if you want to help the Carmichaels, you’re better off speaking to Bob.”

  * * *

  The Finns don’t drive anymore, and in spite of Peg’s offer to pick them up herself, they insist on Henry being their chauffeur—Joan because it seems like a wonderful idea, Nan for reasons of her own.

  “Frankly,” Peg told her on the phone, “I’m uncomfortable letting him into other people’s homes.”

  “He isn’t a wood bee,” Nan assured her.

  “He’s an arsonist.”

  “Not according to the Waterbury County grand jury.”

  “You have to understand my point of view…”

  “I do,” Nan said. “We’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

  Nine o’clock the next day, Henry drives them to the first of four prospective houses. Nan watches Henry out of the corner of her eye, how he never once glances at the dash but holds a perfect legal speed, talking like a tour guide driving in his own hometown. He has a comment for everything they pass, facts about this billiard hall and that gas station, how the owner of Tom’s Diner is a man named Bob, how green the park grass has finally gotten, and look: there’s Mary Robeson—she used to give him bourbon on his route every Christmas. For all his nonstop talk, the most he’s said about his second trip to Sam’s is that “it didn’t go so hot.” Even Ava couldn’t wheedle any details, but Joan had caught him off guard by noticing he’d changed his pants as soon as he made it home. How had he gotten dirty on a five-minute visit?

  “Ahh, the woods … you know,” Henry told them, like he’d just spent a week in the primeval forest.

  “Watch your speed,” Nan says.

  Henry nods, easing off the gas and slowing the car to twenty-nine, still without checking the speedometer and pointing out a dentist’s office where he once found a molar under the mailbox.

  “This is a great neighborhood,” he says, turning onto Winterbourne.

  Nan hones her eye. The trees are short, the houses all a decade old, the hedgerows … was that a football flag hanging off a porch?

  “Lot of young people,” Henry says. “College grads, couples just starting out. People like the Baileys,” he adds with a sigh.

  “It’s pretty,” Joan says. “It doesn’t look like Arcadia, though.”

  “Of course it doesn’t,” Nan says.

  They all spot Peg in her buttercream suit. She’s
standing at the curb as only a real estate agent is able to do, all business on a residential street, both belonging there and not quite part of the environment. She gestures with her hand, meaning here instead of hi.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” Henry says.

  They park and meet Peg along the sidewalk. She greets the Finns but doesn’t acknowledge Henry, not so much snubbing him as acting like he truly isn’t there.

  “Here we are,” Peg says, unclasping her portfolio and not bothering to look at the actual house.

  It’s a plain little Cape with beige siding, vinyl windows, and PVC fencing, the whole place reminding Nan of Home Depot circulars, right down to the bushes out front, the kind of squat generic landscaping typically seen on parking-lot islands at the mall.

  “It has a lot of charm,” Peg reads.

  Nan looks at Joan, whose smile glazes over with her eyes, noticing the charm now that Peg’s pointed it out. Joan would rather be charmed than saddened by an undistinguished home, and her effort to stay positive fills Nan with a deep rush of love. She remembers the year Joan struggled with anxiety, the night she called from her apartment in a panic, convinced she had a prowler in the kitchen. She’d heard footsteps, silverware shifting in the drawers—all of it imagined, possibly a dream—and when Nan later asked her why she hadn’t called 911, Joan admitted she had only hoped to hear Nan’s voice. Her escalating fears, born of loneliness and winter, culminated in a near-fatal month of pneumonia. Nan remained at her side throughout the hospital stay, determined to be there, voice and all, even when Joan’s health began to stabilize again, and when she was finally strong enough to go home, there was never any question of where that home needed to be. Nan ended Joan’s apartment lease, hired movers to bring her belongings to Arcadia Street, and spent a whole Saturday arranging her sister’s collectible figurines around the living room. Joan’s expression when she saw the figurines was unforgettable, a vision Nan has frequently recalled ever since.