In the Country of the Blind

by Edward Hoagland

  “I wouldn’t fret, but I’d call the cops,” she advised. “That way, if they’re in on it themselves, they’ll know you’re wise.” The state police rotated in and out, so they were likely to be clean. “And they don’t mess with little stuff either. But the sheriff before this one—he had an arrangement where he didn’t notice a certain field where a Piper Cub from Canada could land once in a while, under a mountain, below the radar. He didn’t run again, but he didn’t suffer for that either; moved to Florida. Maybe you just had a hungry hiker.”

  “So I shouldn’t call the new one?”

  “I’ll get Rupert to. We’ll widen the net. You’ll never know who knew. But a blind man!” she added to comfort him. “Who’d beat up on him? Just keep your money in the bank.” Men were like hound dogs at a strip show, she said, eyes begging, tongues hanging out, yet when money moved into the picture they turned mean. “So mean.”

  She laughed, recounting the meanness she had seen while cleaning a thousand people’s motel rooms across the West. Blood from bloody noses, abandoned girlfriends, even children. Comatose patrons in their skivvies awaiting eviction, with coins and condoms on the floor. Veterans hallucinating, women hemorrhaging from abortions gone wrong, rich bastards dangling a hundred-dollar bill in front of her nose that they might leave as a tip if she put her tongue on their crotch. “No, flat out, I don’t move in with guys anymore.”

  Not that Press had asked her, of course, but he was toying with the notion of inviting Carol’s family to share his roomy home her kids had already enjoyed exploring so much. A sexy, farfetched idea, to be sure, but also a selfish one if it would endanger them. And should his house thereby become a sort of branch of the commune? Was he up for that? Forbidding visitations would be out of bounds.

  “Not that I like to talk to Rupert, especially, but I’ll tell him. Macaroni money,” she called the bill he gave her. “Most of us live on the edge.”

  That night, he heard both great horned owls hooting from the swamp and barred owls from the mountainside, grateful for Karl’s instruction and the bird-call tape a friend had sent him. A porcupine was methodically chewing on the salty, oily floorboards of his garage, then quarreling in high-pitched, abbreviated whines with another. Salts were needed for digesting bark, their main diet, Karl had said, and Press heard them rattling their quills aggressively at each other. This somehow prompted the idea of a ruse—buying an old heap from Benny Messer to park in his drive so it looked occupied, as if people were at home.

  “Hey,” Benny responded when Press called from the Swinnertons’. “It’s on me. I’ll loan you a loaner! In fact, I’ll rig up a shotgun on that trail that’ll blow anybody’s head off that trips the wire. I’ve got a goose gun perfect for that!”

  “No, please, the car, not the gun,” Press insisted, as the Swinnertons listened, chuckling, over lunch. Karl took out a goose gun, long-barreled, to show him, three shells in the magazine, so you could subtract three from a low-flying chevron.

  Chapter 3

  Lounging at home the next morning, he was surprised to hear Carol’s car, and then her footsteps, so female. His juices, his longing, flowed, and when she hugged him, his hands tried to slide down her backside, but she shook him off. “I’m depressed.” She led him to the couch, sat beside him, and leaned her head on his shoulder, but then laid it in his lap. “My father would do this,” she mentioned.

  “And … what?” Press gently suggested.

  “My mistakes! Wasting time. Who’s going to buy glass in the sticks like this?”

  He couldn’t argue to the contrary, imagining how paltry the few crafts fairs must be hereabouts. He scratched her scalp, stroked her neck.

  “Also the kids! No father.” Unlike some of the other ladies, Carol wanted to know who their father was, and for them to eventually—she had picked the gentleman, a poet in New York, also an alumnus of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement, who hadn’t wanted to try the country, though, like her. And she’d returned to him again for Christie to be fertilized, even knowing he was going to stay on the Lower East Side, doing both work for Dorothy and dealing in pot on the side. Now her children had no man at Ten Mile Farm who, when he looked at them, registered them as his. “That may be convenient for me sometimes, but it’s bad for them.”

  Press didn’t demur. The father was a good poet, apparently, and better, she thought, than any artist here, but your genetics were incomplete; a child should have someone to run to for hugs.

  He forbore murmuring “How about me?” Just rubbed her scalp, fingered her hair, and told her to listen to the indigo bunting. Besides pleased that she had turned to him when blue, he was relieved because her trust erased the gnawing suspicion he had harbored that she could be in league with a commune plot to sneak drugs through his property. Indeed, the sheriff and Rupert arrived while they were innocently communing, the sheriff younger and raspier-voiced than old rascally Rupert. By their questions, both seemed primarily interested in sizing up Press, rather than the home invasion, and now in his relationship to this younger woman. Was she a live-in, a hippie, or a relative? Press recited for the sheriff a resume of his life preceding Vermont, and Rupert offered to take him to the dump to shoot rats if he wanted, then was embarrassed because Melba had already told him Press was blind.

  “She said you have a seeing-eye dog,” he said rudely, meaning Carol, to cover his blunder; however, then made up for it by asking if Press would like to go anyway, since “In my dotage I’m Waste Commissioner.”

  “Nearly finished him.” The sheriff laughed. “The Cat plumb threw him off. And he lay under the fucking blade with the engine roaring for a couple of hours before anybody discovered him, with the tracks trying to get a purchase the whole time.”

  Rupert humphed as though glad and sheepish in equal measure to hear his ordeal recounted. “Well, it’s a big change for you,” he said to shift the topic to Press. “Melba says you do know your ass from a hole in the ground.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Swamps are kind of a law unto themselves,” the sheriff observed. “Good for mosquitoes, good for a man like Karl, but you need to accept the conditions when you buy a house next to one. But he can break you in. Best firefighter in the county. Best game warden, if he ever would be.”

  Rupert shook hands vigorously, too, making amends for any discourtesy. “Yeah, I’ll stop by. We go to the dump if you have crap to get rid of. Lots of gulls there, fighting with the crows over the banana peels. They fly a long way to eat our garbage. Up the St. Lawrence or up the Connecticut, whichever. And they eat the mice, but can’t the rats, unless you shoot ’em.”

  Press thanked him and said yes.

  “That was pretty painless,” he remarked to Carol as the squad car left. She agreed, though sorry to have been present, or spotted; commune folk wanted a low profile. On the other hand, she’d had her head in his lap beforehand, wondering whether she belonged here at all. And no, she stated, Ten Mile Farm people wouldn’t have to smuggle in dope through the swamp. They had their own “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” over the mountain into Canada: which was not to say she approved of it.

  Press teased her by asking how else she would procure the weed she smoked, but she laughed. “Stupid question. You think we can’t grow it as good as they do in the Himalayas?”

  “No, I don’t think that, except it’s a slippery slope. Dorothy Day, your friend, is trying to help addicts, not ‘enable’ them.”

  Talking Christianity cheered her a bit and she let him kiss her, friendly-like. He helped draw out her memories of the Catholic Worker movement, not all charitable. Bedbugs inhabited the shelter, and when it was full, staff like her might have to put homeless people onto the subway for a cold night. The lectures by visiting priests and monks and the newspaper were most fun, but you rolled up your sleeves and manned, then mopped, the soup kitchen for two meals a day. Christianity was a riddle because it could be practiced so many ways: engagement, like Dorothy Day’s or the Franciscans’, or abs
tinence, like Thomas Merton and his friend Robert Lax, whom she had actually established a philosophical correspondence with, from her cabin to his Greek isle. The rich went to church in silks, the poor in cotton, but few really thought of “the manger.” Dorothy Day herself, before finding her calling, had had a daughter, who with Dorothy’s blessing was also moving “back to the land,” to the country, like Carol.

  Press’s Congregational upbringing had been pallid compared to Carol’s church-window Catholicism, but he had seen it evoked in European museums. The head-in-lap episode, if he’d misinterpreted it as flirtatious instead of poignant, might have blown up in his face. She believed in sleeping with people whom you loved, and that might happen in staccato fashion after droughts, but not with Press yet. The oral incident, when he asked, had been “foreplay” to her. He trusted her, however; even trusted Rupert, and Melba, and the sheriff, and certainly his neighbors, which was progress.

  “We’re blessed, I guess,” she said, as if to convince herself, but without confidingly snuggling up to him again. When she’d left, the Clarks called, after seeing the sheriff’s cruiser go by, to invite him to a church social where Avis told him a healer was going to speak. Press was a bit amused, because he suddenly remembered Melba, on her last cleaning stint, recounting how Darryl in high school forty years ago “was always trying to get my shirt off.” In a culvert that ran under Athol’s main street by the garage, where she’d let him lead her if they weren’t observed, alongside a trickle of brook water, he’d necked with her and handled her as he wished as long as he didn’t try pulling her shirt off.

  “Oh how he’d pant so! Why do men pant so? And then, with Avis, he went to a diamond store.”

  Avis, though not amused that Melba was now “charwoman,” as she put it, three times a week for Press—“The prodigal comes home broke”—in Christian charity, forbore to nag. Avis was also genuinely kind. She sat next to Press at gospel discussions to make sure his input was included. The Clarks were like his backstop, upbeat, welcoming if he should phone or show up. Theirs was one of the half a dozen numbers he had memorized, using Information to connect him with all the others.

  At this meeting the healer was a French Canadian from across the border, but charismatic nonetheless. After a heartfelt group prayer and some general Bible commentary, he progressed to the soul’s influence on the trials of the body, and next separated the men from the women so each group might speak more freely. He asked each man whether he’d stayed true to his wife, and anything from the nature of his night dreams to the state of his mortgage or how often the kids called.

  “Jesus had to spit in the blind man’s eyes to cure him. Remember that?” he asked Press, grasping his knee to center his attention. “But Tums; too many Tums?” he intuited, and, when Press nodded, put a hand on his stomach. He wasn’t healing at this session, however, but discussing Personal Balance under the title “Toss and Turn.” His clinic was a big house trailer in the woods in Quebec, where you paid ten bucks to his wife for a laying-on of hands, Darryl said, who had gone there to get his hemorrhoids shrunk. They lived in an equally large house trailer nearby, and the only reason for entering Canada you needed to give at the border crossing was “The Rock,” or “Laroque.”

  Tossing and turning was apt. That night Press did, but chewed fewer antacid pills. His hands had been squeezed by at least a dozen people unknown to him that evening; or at least, that is, whose identities he didn’t know. Evanescent affection was delicious for those moments, but what was going to happen to him? A further episode of blindness, and then a nursing home for decades maybe, with world news from the BBC on the radio to keep life interesting?

  Karl was now “Honorary” Fire Chief because his emphysema hampered real emergency exertion; his former duck-dog or bird-dog training clients could out-walk him, like the hunters he’d guided. So pleasures were dwindling for him too.

  Blindness was like meditating at a Quaker meeting, Press decided. Other people might be present but your awareness of them was limited. In your fancy you could fill out details as you wished, or ignore them, if that felt best. When he phoned Connecticut at homework time, he’d begun to call himself Mister Magoo, until Molly or Jeremy, who laughed at first, told him to stop. Yet Carol, happening to overhear such a conversation, told her own kids, when they visited the next day, “Here we are to visit Mister Magoo.” When their voices rang out from the back lawn, where the tire hung and swung, “Is that okay?” she asked Press. In case it wasn’t, she gripped his hands and cupped them to her breasts. “Mama’s here.”

  He groaned, knees buckling against her sturdiness, and she touched his hardening penis sympathetically through his pants. “We’ll take care of that.” But she didn’t then; just cooked steaks from the fridge and frozen mixed vegetables for them.

  “How’s my buckaroo?” asked Melba, a day or two afterward. “Got my mop and buckets?” And, hearing her begin to scrub, he wondered, if he could have seen her, his heart would have contracted at the labor required for an old woman to earn her “macaroni money.” So he didn’t trouble her with his vague memory of hearing untoward sounds last night. Instead, Melba reminisced about cleaning vomit off the floors at bars after closing hours. Men were so violent, she complained. Why were men so violent? You had to be careful as a woman. You could get somebody’s nose broken if you griped that they had pinched you or even looked at you funny. And of course that wasn’t what you wanted; you just wanted to be left alone. Also, you knew that the mean son of a bitch that broke the poor jerk’s nose was just getting his rocks off—didn’t care about you personally. “Bothering” a woman was just his excuse to hurt somebody.

  “Yeah,” Press agreed. Country clubs had bullies too, although more subtle. And in the city bar you went to after trading hours, you might find out that another broker was “on a different page” in the advice he was passing to customers. Even fleecing them. On the phone to the Merrill Lynch office where he’d previously worked, he could tell he had already been reduced in status from a colleague to just another client, out of all the loops and only marginally informed.

  “Men,” she said. “They’re okay when they’re like you.” And Press wondered if she meant helpless, not simply cultivated or a gentleman. “But so many times they’re knuckleheads, or worse.” He heard her actually start to weep, and standing up to comfort her, he couldn’t find her. Was she dodging him? “I’m sorry. I had two die, you know.”

  Press sat down again in order not to pressure her, but mumbled empathetically so as to accept whatever she might do; suddenly leave, or tell more of her story, or silently return to work.

  “The sons want to be men like their fathers. And anyhow I couldn’t afford to give them other choices. Their father was a bull rider. So I could not have told them ‘Here’s some money, go be a businessman.’ Therefore they became a carpenter, not a lawyer or a professor. They’re building ski chalets for lawyers and doctors. Not starving—so why don’t they go to night school, people say? Well, they want to be a man. The father rode broncos and bulls for money in the rodeo, but at heart he was a mountain man. If he coulda made a living in the mountains he would have. Bulls weren’t wild enough for him. I slept with lawyers and doctors in Vegas and Jackson Hole—lonely ones—although not lonely enough to father a child they would have acknowledged by me. So my man was really just as good as any shyster, but then he’d go up in the snows in the mountains with the bighorns in the off-season, when there wasn’t any rodeos. And he’d performed back east in Madison Square Garden in New York City, too—he was a good one! But if your boy wants to be like his father, and doesn’t ride the bulls, he may climb way up into those mountains in the winter lookin’ for his dad, or to be like him. And when he’s lost, he dies in the snow.” She choked, finishing.

  After a minute, Press suggested she brew tea, if she’d like. Plus there were cookies.

  “He hadn’t seen his pop for a year. I didn’t pick the most conscientious of men, and then I’d leave them. A
nd I wasn’t there, so I don’t know if he thought his father was camping in a certain cabin up in the Absarokas somewhere or if he was just trying to get to be like him, imitate him, when he froze. They didn’t find him till a month later, because he wasn’t reported missing for a while. He’d been washing dishes in some joint, taking after me. And that broke my spirit. He was twenty-two. The saddest funeral you can imagine. I never got him back. So I lost two.

  “No, I know men. And why do boys want to be like them?”

  Press abstained from asking why she’d chosen macho ones, if that were the case, though you could argue that, like Rupert, cowboys had the saving grace of liking horses as she did. He also guessed that Melba enjoyed raucous, muscly, never-a-dull-moment guys. Hard-bitten had a double meaning: bitten hard by life, like her, or clamping meanly down on other people. But, as though belying his thoughts, she said, “I hope your days are good.”

  “If only. My eyes, you know, are like Swiss cheese, the doctor says. I see through the holes.”

  “I notice your hippie ladyfriend is mooching from your stuff. She eats some, throws some in the garbage.”

  He admitted it, grinning.

  “I hear from Benny that they take their shirts off, gardening.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Press pointed out, laughing.

  “I hope they do. These busybodies harp on anything,” she complained, as if on his and Carol’s side.

  * * *

  Karl was less than satisfied with the new fire chief, his replacement, and the radio scanner brought in new titbits to crab about, as Dorothy put it. “Think about how much earlier athletes have to retire. He’ll save lives. He’s a good EMT—you say so yourself. That’s what matters.”

  Karl told her that when she won the annual frying pan throw at the county fair she’d win the right to start to tell him what to do.