She asked for a summary of his trip. Could Claire still rattle his cage, pull on his chain? And didn’t he really prefer bankerdom? “Isn’t it nicer?” Bankerdom had become her word for Press’s former life.
“No, it isn’t.” He laughed. She laughed. “The whiskey is better and immigrants mow your lawn and corpulence is not a sign of poverty.” He added that a weight was off his heart, regarding Jeremy and Molly for the time being. Carol chimed in though, with her own shifting worries about her children’s upbringing in the north woods, not Connecticut. “Gramma wants them—‘Give them a proper home.’”
“So what do we do now?” Press asked, squelching a desire to propose to her.
“We do nothing. Cheer me up for heaven’s sake. My life is such a mix-up.”
The Clarks were pleased he had returned, having felt less certain than the Swinnertons that he would. Satan had more sway near the cities. Neither had ever visited one or left Vermont, except an apple-grafting adventure in Quebec and treatments by the healer there. “Mammon and Delilah!” he informed them, about his trip, since they could take a joke. “Those canyons of sin. No, I never went into New York, just saw my kids.” He sat in their milking parlor, listening to the cows munch a ration of corn while the machines rhythmically, soothingly suckled their udders. “We each sculpt our lives,” he said. “And you’ve done pretty well.”
“Hoe your own row,” echoed Darryl.
“We sure do that,” Avis murmured ambivalently. She wanted to see Paris. Had a picture of Paris in her kitchen. Not New York or Montreal, but Paris.
“I’ll bet you will, but not Germany. Will God forgive Hitler?” Press asked, seeking to stump them. But they were used to his joshing riddles. If a child-murderer repented? If you coveted your neighbor’s wife but didn’t act on it?
“You’ll find out when you get there.”
“Yet if I don’t have a body, how will I feel the flames?”
“How do you feel hot or cold now? Or love and hate, dummy? Because He wants you to.” Darryl laughed, having topped Press, but Avis approached and kissed him.
At the Swinnertons’, he told Dorothy her biscuits seemed flakier, lighter, better. “Because you missed them,” she said. She read him a column she was drafting about Hesperus, the evening star, or the morning star, bringer of light, and according to the encyclopedia, son of the dawn goddess Eos; and Prometheus, who brought fire to mankind. “‘Dusk and Dawn’ is the title.”
“Whopping topic. Won’t you get tangled?”
“She is tangled,” said Karl affectionately but reprovingly, having breathed too much smoke. “Creator of fire, huh?”
“And a great influence on Greek and modern civilization,” she retorted.
“Well that figures.”
Press rubbed Sheila the setter’s ears. The rooster crowed to announce that one of his hens had just laid an egg. Some crows were mobbing an owl in the swamp from the sounds, as Karl had taught Press. It moved but they followed, which now reminded Karl of the trotlines he’d set in the river that must have hornpout rotting on the hooks, and crawfish in traps he couldn’t empty. Like a man who shouldn’t drive any more, he wouldn’t admit his lungs’ impairment, give up the hope of mucking about in the dozen square miles that had been his haunt.
“You’ve ate muskrat,” he told Press, needling him. “You didn’t know it but you did. She fried it. Delicious. You said so.”
Dorothy’s silence was an admission of guilt. Finally she conceded, “Once in a great while he makes me. Bobcat too.”
Press smiled because he wasn’t mad. “You should write a story about feeding flatlanders rats without their knowledge so they’ll be prepared for the next terrible famine, when New York is under siege. Maybe the Dutch will take it back.”
“This country was settled by people eating beaver,” Karl asserted.
“Anyway, the mountain men in the Rockies,” Press agreed. “And I’m glad to have. You’ve led an enviable life. Both of you.”
“The war wasn’t, but we made shift,” Dorothy corrected him. Karl, however, being the type of man who would call in artillery on his own position if it would kill enough of the enemy, had sure needed her. Press wondered what the hippies would decide to live for. Not that he’d just returned from a place that had. As a customer’s man, his best brokerage work was securing the old age of this clients: time for them to do what they wished.
* * *
“Yes,” he said when Carol swung by to invite him on another venture to the commune, squeezing his hand as she drove. “Bring skivvies and a toothbrush,” she’d instructed him, meaning an overnighter, and he’d given her what she described as a fifty-dollar bill to buy beer for the party. They stopped in the woods for a ritual pee, since she enjoyed helping him do that and had started lifting her own skirt to join in. “Our thing.”
She mentioned that a new fellow had shown up from Arkansas—originally from California, but from a commune in Arkansas—who was hitting on her. “Are you trying to make me jealous?” he asked.
The farmhouse porch where he customarily creaked in a peeling rocking chair while miscellaneous children brought him objects to smell and grown-ups disputed which chores were whose felt about the same. He chewed a piece of day-old pie. Roddy and Karl, as poles, came to mind. But what should he do to be of use, talk about the five continents? He asked a boy and a girl if they could name the five, and the oceans.
“It’s not school.”
“No it’s not. That’s what makes it more fun. You don’t have to be right. All the A’s. America—two Americas—Asia, Australia, Antarctica, Africa. Only Europe is left out.”
What to say simply came to him and they considered it. “Why the five?” came the question. “How about the Arctic?”
He explained that you subtract Australia and Antarctica if you want to be official and the Arctic had no separate land mass, only ice, but might qualify sentimentally—then needed to define officially and sentimentally. A gathering clutch of new kids had the questions and solutions posed to them triumphantly by the first two, but when he started drilling them on the multiplication tables he lost scholars.
The stippled white dots characteristic of his eye syndrome began bothering him, and he rubbed his lids.
“What’s white and black?” he asked the remainders. But they couldn’t guess pandas. “Moonlight” was the best answer, actually better than pandas would have been.
“What goes around the sun?” he asked. Not the moon, no. “What planets do you know?” But one had an astrological mother and aced Press himself.
“The Shaman instructs.” He heard a friendly voice, calling up the memory of that woman he had twice been employed by Carol to inseminate. She sat nearby approvingly, and after a minute suggested she might be willing to give him a haircut if he wished. The kids of course wanted to watch that, and on the strength of the gentleness in her voice he consented. When she went to fetch her scissors, he regretted it, but didn’t have the heart to rebuff her delight when she crouched behind him and carefully commenced to clip.
“You darling,” she gushed. “I used to do this for my father, but your hair is different, and Carol will kill me if I botch it up.”
The kids wanted to hear about the Big Dipper and the North Star. Which pointed to which? And how about Jesus’s Star? One girl, perhaps an atheist’s daughter, said there wasn’t one, but Press recognized Carol’s daughter Christie arguing that there was. They asked him to referee, but he begged off by claiming it happened before his time. The lady barbering him patted his head and he realized this all might be quite important to her, if she was the anonymous woman who had chosen him to father what could be her child.
Carol arrived before they reached any weepier stage, and without betraying her friend’s identity, just was amused, patting his locks. “Good job. We do coddle him, don’t we?” Handing him a salad sandwich she hadn’t quite finished, she asked obliquely if he needed to pee. Somebody had shot a loose moose, so there was go
ing to be a barbeque for non-vegetarians he could look forward to. After leaving for a few minutes, she came back, saying some friends wanted to meet him. They walked a long way but he enjoyed it because their arms around each other’s waists was affectionate, not just so he wouldn’t stumble. The homestead sort of cabin of peeled logs chinked with forest moss that he fingered was comfortably crowded for a birthday beer party, and guys asked him how you got a job like the one he had had.
“Well, you go to college, and then you take the train down and apply. No, they don’t particularly care what you majored in,” he added when that was asked. “My job was to talk to people all day long on the telephone and get them to buy or sell what the research department told me was in their best interest, and I hoped it was.”
“But how do you start?” a woman asked.
“You start by being interested in everything in college, not just a grind.
“And you start every day by reading the papers on the train into town so you’ll know what your clients who call will be worried about. Corn futures, the Middle East.”
“But why do you have to go to college,” a male voice asked, “if other people do the statistics of what you ought to say and all you have to do is say it on the phone to people who don’t know anything?”
Press laughed. “Just because they’re rich doesn’t mean they don’t know anything. They can ask hard questions like you, and you’d better know which of the researchers you depend on are worth their salt—which, in a big company, you ought to believe. Besides, your customers have gone to college, or they wouldn’t have the money to invest, and they may want to chat about their trip to visit the Acropolis and the Uffizi, and you’d better know where those are or they’re going to ask for a different customer’s man. They’re lonely sometimes and want to engage with you. It doesn’t necessarily matter what you majored in.”
A silence indicated that he had made his point.
“And did they lose money, your clients?” Carol inquired teasingly.
“Well, not all of them.”
“And you majored in?”
“History, from Garibaldi to Mike Fink.”
Somebody muttered, “A bean counter,” but overall he sensed he’d made a hit, and relaxed into the cowhide sling chair that had been provided for him. Dropouts were recounting tales of bad professors they’d locked horns with, or outlandish interest rates proffered by a bank on college loans. “Once you’re in, it’s easy though,” Press remarked about Harvard. “Just show up. Why drop out?” But he knew there might be torturous reasons. A roommate had attempted suicide with a razor in their sophomore year and Press unluckily had been the one who discovered him in the process, walking in when faucets in the shared bathroom were loudly gushing and Ned already had cuts on his wrists and forehead. A gesture, yes, but Press required a week to recover his equilibrium—shook like a leaf—after his friend was hospitalized. When they left the cabin for the barbeque, hugging each other again so he wouldn’t trip, he confided this memory to Carol, although choosing innocuous words because her kids had joined them.
The moose, dragged for a sizeable distance through the woods by the commune’s workhorse, lay with its legs sticking into the air wildly akimbo.
“Big haul,” said the guy patting the horse to the guy flourishing the rifle that had laid it low. Adding a Paleolithic note to the scene were the women who had come directly from gardening and thus were still bare-breasted, a facet Press was able to perceive. When Carol noticed him ogling them, she moved his hand from around her waist to cup her braless breasts under her T-shirt. A lot of folks who wouldn’t know how to butcher a cow were suggesting procedures for dismembering the moose, and a campfire with a tripod planted over it for boiling water awaited further instruction. A pot full of moose and potato stew could be hung there, or a grill substituted if they wanted steaks—but not both at the same time—so the discussion was lively and lengthy. The hunter himself sounded exasperated about how sloppily the moose had been skinned, because they were searching for cuts of meat. No good rug would be obtainable. He’d wanted to dry and display it as a trophy, but the more dogmatic communards argued that like everything else the moose belonged to everybody.
Cross-legged as the sun set and daylight darkened, Press awaited developments. The slabs of moose meat sizzled aromatically on the fire, charring a tasty crust on the portion Carol sliced and diced for him. Someone was playing a mouth organ, and tussling accompanied the wild fare, though he couldn’t recognize which kids were involved. Imperturbably the horse munched the grass. The hunter handed Press his rifle to examine, boasting that next time might be a bear. “Not this much like beef,” he said, “and more for us,” when the vegetarian contingent grew sarcastic about the heaps of meat.
The dancing fire, crenellated like a castle—and eavesdropping—contented him for quite a while, until when Press reached for Carol, she wasn’t around. The horse was led away to pasture, kids to their homes. “What shall we do with him?” he heard someone mutter. “Bring him to the house?” A lady who told him she had trained to be a dental hygienist “in the First World” gripped his arm and led him back to his appointed chair there, after a visit to the indoor bathroom. He asked her if she wanted to look at his teeth.
She laughed. “Heavens no. Except, yes, so I can tell if you’ve been telling the truth. Teeth don’t lie.” But Press’s dental work, when she peered into his mouth, looked consistent with his income level. “Lots of crowns.” She squeezed his hand.
Emboldened, Press tugged her to sit down beside him and tell him her story. She acquiesced, saying she’d been an aid worker in Vietnam, doing teeth—pulling teeth because the actual dentist had too many patients—and when she came back stateside found herself living on pizzas, even cold for breakfast the next day, and so she “decided to try this.”
“Is it working out for you?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.” She laughed. Her soldier boyfriend in Vietnam hadn’t been matched, “that’s for sure.”
“I can be your pet rock I suppose, until you find Joe Soldier,” Press suggested, since pet rocks were becoming all the rage in children’s stores, Molly and Jeremy said.
“You could,” she agreed, then stood up and vanished for a time. He waited for Carol also, wondering about that Arkansas guy whom she had mentioned, and realized he didn’t even know this other one’s name in case he needed to ask for help in getting home. But the hygienist materialized chummily again, and he asked about Vietnam.
“Oh, I loved the countryside as much as here, although it sometimes couldn’t be more different. And you wanted to hug some of your patients, they were so keeled over. But it was incredibly unreal. You heard torture as you worked. And I don’t mean pulling teeth. I mean they were torturing prisoners. Vietcong. ‘Gooks.’ We were doing that.”
“You mean our side?”
“Yes, at the base nearby. We’d hear the screams. It was crazy.”
“What did your boyfriend think?”
“He wanted the war to end too.”
“So you wanted to try hippiedom?”
She had spent half a year of solitude at her family’s in Baltimore, not even going to the movies, she said, so he reached for her hand.
“Cheating on me!” Carol exclaimed, when at last she turned up. But there wasn’t much chance to thrash it out, joke or not, because he soon found himself being interviewed by a policeman, or “the police,” as Carol said. Was he the owner of such and such a house on Ten Mile Road?
“Yes, I am!”
“Am I correct in hearing that you are legally blind?”
“Times two,” Press said to the officer or detective or whatever he was.
“Pardon?”
“I’m legally blind times two. 20/400. Legally blind’s 20/200. You can call my eye doctor it you want to.”
“I’d like to do that,” the officer replied. “Did you know that a building of yours was being used as a stash for weed? They got it out before we got the
re, but there’s plenty of traces on the floor. The dog went wild. Must have been hundreds of pounds.”
“No. No, I didn’t. No, not at all.”
“Did you hear a truck? Where have you been? There are fresh truck tires.”
No. Press explained that he’d been at the commune all day. He gave them his eye doctor’s name and the Holmewood Inn in Cos Cob as a place he’d spent a couple of nights recently away, when shenanigans might have occurred.
Both the Swinnertons and Clarks had already vouched for him, so the police—like, gradually, Press himself now—were casting a net of suspicion for who might have exploited his vulnerability. His shed had been used, then emptied so conveniently before this raid. Carol, Melba, Al, Benny Messer, the junkyard guy, came to Press’s mind, though he didn’t mention any of them. He played clam except to complain about the ne’er-do-well noises from the swamp some nights.
“So why didn’t you report it?” the cop asked.
“I did once. I should have again,” Press agreed, but remembered how locals like Karl had told him smuggling was part of life along the border. He knew property seizure was possible in drug busts, but not if you were blind.
Yet his “pins,” as he put it to himself, were knocked out from under him because were intimates of his like Carol involved, even tangentially? No, he stressed, he was not a resident at Ten Mile Farm, or a member, just a visitor; they questioned the Vietnam War aid worker sitting next to him more than Carol because of her proximity. At least it wasn’t hard drugs, and they hadn’t gone to Carol’s cabin or their dog would have found marijuana. But what a coincidence, for her to have brought him here just when the shed needed emptying!
They had no warrant to search the commune, just his own place and of course had found nothing to incriminate him, not even butts left by Carol. Ten Mile Farm had sounded unusually thinly populated as the cops circulated; probably a good deal of pot was being destroyed off-site.
In the Country of the Blind Page 9
