In the Country of the Blind

by Edward Hoagland

  People’s main concern had become who might have tipped off the dealers ahead of the raid, which in a sense was Press’s also. Who was a dealer? Who was a snitch? Hadn’t Carol turned up unexpectedly this morning to scoop him out of there? Had all her visits to him been motivated by measly thoughts? No, of course not—and yet? Ouch.

  He squeezed the hand of this strange Vietnam-vet lady, who muttered with amusement, “Uniforms.” Odds on, at least he wouldn’t hear intruders around tonight. He kissed her slender hand without a peep from Carol, wondering if maybe he could stay a while.

  “I’m a very well-behaved blind man,” he promised.

  “If I ever need one I’ll remember that,” she teased back. “You forget I’ve been in a war zone. I’ve seen men with their legs blown off waiting to be evacuated. I saw our Vietnamese torture Vietcong they caught by tying a phone wire to their penises and cranking the battery handle it ran to. Or they’d put them in a cage, all woven of barbed wire, so small they couldn’t lie or stand, for days in the sun. But I didn’t try to save them for fear my orphans would suffer if I was thrown into a helicopter and shipped out.”

  Press, without calculating how to respond, laid his head comfortingly against her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said, and she put her fingers he wasn’t squeezing into his hair.

  “So if this zoo doesn’t hit the sweet spot, where should I try? Maybe Bangkok again, or Beirut, or Bangalore? Anywhere there’s no spooks and no paratroopers. I’m not amused anymore by spooks or paratroopers.”

  “But won’t you miss the rush?”

  “No. And I’m going to lose my security clearance anyhow for staying here.” A college classmate had inveigled her into noodling here awhile and chilling out. Hash she didn’t use, having had her fill in Vietnam; nor bullying, weepy men strafing “gooks” from the air. “But if you are a pet rock, can I pick you up and put you down?” She shrugged the shoulder he was leaning on to free herself.

  “Sure. I’d like a break. I’m forty-six, so the undertow is beginning to get to me.”

  “Then what are you good for?” she asked, in a kind tone.

  “Oh, a man around the house has his uses. A dildo; an ear to talk to; two arms around you; a voice from the next room when you’re lonesome.”

  “I have a dog to talk to.”

  “That might be a deal killer.” For the umpteenth time he squeezed her hand, signaling that if a pet rock was needed, “Barcus was willing.” Carol was lanky, this one seemed short, but where was Carol? It would be a mistake to poison their friendship with jealous suspicions when Carol was way past the toying-with-him stage. He could end up stranded.

  He inquired about flings and she told him a West Point graduate had flown her to Tokyo for R&R. When he asked if danger had added a frisson to sex in Vietnam, she said, “Do you mean like doing it with a man who’s going blind? There are lots of people around here or anywhere to feel sorry for, so you don’t sleep with a twenty-year-old kid who is shitting his pants he’s so scared, or the stockbroker who wonders what life has in store next. We have that in common. But do you feel sorry for me?”

  “I’m ready to,” he promised jokingly. “Easy does it. If you were prettier you’d be eye candy.”

  He felt a tap on the shoulder and realized Carol was ready to drive him home. Who else, indeed, would have?

  “Your harem,” she said, but her kids were with her, so no more. “Jim wanted to talk to me, and this other chap from Arkansas. I’d like you to meet him.”

  Chapter 6

  Press sank into his squeaky porch swing, alone, and listened to the evening birds. The trees, though not protection, were comrades, he thought, rooted where they were and couldn’t leave, had to face the music along with him: fire or windstorm. Eating cottage cheese and peanut butter from their containers with a spoon, he contemplated his situation. Probably safer than before the police raid and maybe no more lonely, unless the Clarks and their Solid Rock Gospel congregation stopped making allowances for the rumors of his consorting with free-loving, drug-snorting souls. But the Clarks always spoke of Carol, like Melba, as a cleaner, charwoman, and eyesight aid and his hosting her children at his house as perhaps a kindness. At church, more than once, families ambitious for their children’s future had introduced Press to them so he could talk about what college was like, how to prepare for it, and what it could do for you. A few Sunday dinners he’d been brought home for had been devoted to what the parents hoped were pep talks or verbal quizzes that might boost a high school kid toward glimpsing what college conversations were about. Maybe Carol was similarly forward-thinking.

  Out of loneliness he phoned Dorothy and Karl to apologize for missing lunch that day without calling. “So who—whose pot was stored in my shed, and who ratted them out to the cops, and who tipped off the drugsters?”

  Karl laughed because town-wide gossip had it that “all three or none” could be from the Sheriff’s Department itself. “Like with soldiers, your best fighting men can be hell-raisers on leave. Your bravest fireman or deputy might not be Emily Post when the fire’s over. I’ve seen them steal stuff right from the embers.”

  “And how about hippies?”

  “Well, you know the hippies better than me, but aren’t they just users and retailers? This seems above their pay grade, and they don’t speak Italian. When you are counting the money, in Canada you want to speak French and in New York it’s better to know Sicilian.”

  Press appreciated the humor to demystify the incident, though he thought more of the potential for good or evil of the hippies than Karl. You didn’t need to be Italian to shuttle drugs back to your old neighborhood in Brooklyn, particularly if you were already selling Vermont pistols to a street gang as well, like the guy who had given Carol her case of herpes. Nor did you have to be a Frenchman to make mischief in Montreal.

  Next morning Press, after the BBC and Canadian news programs, biked to the Clarks’ in time for milking, to touch base with other friends again, as Avis immediately recognized. “Hard for you! Here in the boonies. We’re not used to it either. You used to know your neighbors, so if they were running rum it wasn’t scary and you didn’t tattle and they made their separate peace with the law and the Lord.”

  She brought him a three-legged stool to perch on while listening to the cows munch their corn or cuds and the machines rhythmically pump. He could even hear the barn cats lap from their bowl and skirmish sveltely with each other. “You’re in the clear. They won’t be back,” she assured Press.

  Nevertheless, at midday a detective did drop by for a further chat. “Hope we didn’t disturb anything when we searched. I should think, though, you might have an idea who was doing that, in retrospect. We’ve checked you out in Connecticut and all that. You were not responsible, but thinking back, you must suspect somebody.”

  Press didn’t give up Carol’s name, of course, or implicate Ten Mile Farm, but when he answered that, being a newbie here, he didn’t know, the other man mentioned both her and Melba. Press then pointed out that a hiker’s and hunter’s trail led people into his yard if they were in the swamp, so he often heard voices he had no explanation for.

  “Well now it’s different. Call us,” said the cop.

  Melba arrived to houseclean before Press’s depression about the visit had cleared, and sped that process along.

  “They got nothing on you. No judge would blame a blind man.” Al, Rog, Rupert, and she also appeared cleared of suspicion after short interviews. “So get on with your life. Figure it’s like living next to a big auto dealer who’s making tons of money and you’re not. So what? Forget it.”

  He realized she meant the swamp was like a dealership. People sometimes made piles of money off it, but don’t eat your heart out envying them. To his silence, she went on with the subject. Long-distance truckers had the choice—or even snowbirds returning north in their cars after wintering in Florida—of running a delivery as a mule for the mob if they had the connections. “If you bet the rest of
your life you can wind up with a lotta money.”

  “Yeah but how do you meet these folks?”

  “Well, mainly through me because I was in Vegas so much. But you’re dead if you don’t deliver.”

  Press looked startled, even guffawed.

  “No, no not me. I was a bed-maker, and my guys didn’t do Horse. They rode broncs and bulls.”

  He laughed because her scope as a motel bed-maker had been so inclusive.

  “Are you stumped? You think a wise guy hides his piece when the maid walks in the room? A girl’s gotta work. I had my babies to feed. And you’re sitting pretty. Why is anybody going to bother you? The cops know you’re blind and so do the bad guys. You’ve got money coming in but not too much.”

  “A dribble. Lucky,” Press agreed. Since Melba then seemed more interested in who’d ratted out the dealers to the cops than the crooks themselves, he slipped into his separate musings. Was he Carol’s “pet rock”? And didn’t those innumerable hours she devoted to cutting and fitting together stained-glass mosaics, plus her love for her kids, argue against his unease that she might have suddenly appeared and whisked him away from his place yesterday for a purpose? Wasn’t it really a coincidence? Though she was a pothead, to use the vulgar term, surely only a consumer, not a dealer? Why chance going to jail, where you couldn’t jigsaw lovely colors and designs, or hug your children till your time was up? Yet what about her wasn’t illogical?

  “Play it as it lays,” he murmured to himself.

  “Amen,” said Melba, kissing the top of his head in passing, with her pail and mop. A woodpecker rapped, and he hoped that might be enough company after she left. She wanted to go home and nuzzle her horses.

  He’d called Jeremy and Molly last evening and did so to touch base again when school let out, though not saying why. Also he went through his drawers and closets to settle his belongings in order again after the police search. His little cache of household money for paying Melba, buying groceries, etc. had been discovered but not disturbed. He walked around the shed where the pot had been stored, while listening to a pileated woodpecker holler in the swamp; then tuned in to a French-language classical music station to reclaim his downstairs for himself. No cops or crooks. But by nightfall, getting lonely again, he called the Clarks to see if any church socials were planned, and Roddy back in Cos Cob, to thank him for his help, but really to talk. Roddy was out, and though his wife was polite to Press, one needn’t envy their round of activities to wish more for oneself. He missed the whisk of Melba’s broom, and anticipating Carol’s next visit, wondered why these were becoming few and far between. Would he grow bats in his belfry—flap, flap? He wished he were blind like a bat. Echolocation would be marvelous.

  He slept past dawn with milling personalities in high-key, bossy dreams. Then a Sousa march woke him from his gnomish radio, and outside an animal nibbled birdseed under his window. It was hard to believe, when roused from such a rich harvest of dreams, that he was blind. So impoverishing. He saw daylight and bipedal forms, tree crowns and running water. But was this the place for him to live?

  * * *

  “I wanted to see my friends,” Carol said, driving up when the sun was high and hottish. He’d just returned from a wordless lunch at the Swinnertons’, gloomy because of Karl’s wheezy emphysema. The labored breathing, plus his nose hook-up to a cylinder of oxygen, depressed everybody. Press wondered whether Karl’s lung problems weren’t more dire than the cursory clinic diagnosis.

  Carol led him to adjoining chairs, fetched a brush, loosened her hair, and told him to attend to it. When eventually he finished that task they stood and hugged. She felt him harden against her thigh. “Oh, that’s another friend. And he probably wants some attention.”

  Letting well enough alone, Press didn’t answer while luxuriating in playing with her breasts and bottom and received a considerate hand job.

  Since they both were still panting just a bit, she waited a couple of minutes to explain her actions vis-à-vis the drug raid. “Luckily I was home. A guy showed up out of nowhere and told me, ‘Get him out of there!’ I’m not going to say who it was or if I knew him.”

  Press also wanted to know if she’d been less directly aware of what was going on on his property, but let that ride while he returned to attending to her waist-length hair. Carol herself used only her fingers to untangle and pile it up, then scissors before it reached down to her coccyx.

  “I promise you, I’m sorry. It’s what I don’t like,” she said.

  “You mean smoking dope?” he asked sarcastically. “How’s it get to you otherwise though? You can grow it here, but in the city?”

  “I know my inconsistencies.” Jerking her head away, she moved out of reach.

  “Prisoner’s Base,” he said, reminded of the children’s game in one version of which you had to touch the blind-folded prisoner at “prisoner’s base,” a certain tree, or whatever it might be, and he was a prisoner. This softened her. Fathoming his meaning she moved a little back.

  “When you were handling millions in other people’s money, you must have seen things done you wouldn’t have done yourself?”

  They laughed but found nothing to talk about. She wouldn’t let him pet her hair, pinned it up instead. “I overlook your wicked ways. My dad doesn’t like pot at all either, that’s for sure, but I suspect he likes Wall Street even less. It’s called the Catholic Worker movement, that he and I were in, or elsewhere, Liberation Theology.”

  Press considered this notion of equivalence seriously, maybe for the first time, although Carol had joked with him before about being regarded as “a pig” in the canon of younger people of her stripe. “If you weren’t blind I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole,” she’d joked previously, but now claimed flatly, “In a better world, what people like you are doing may be illegal and what I do may actually not be.”

  Though silent for a while, she radiated first impatience, then patience again. “You know,” she stressed at last, “If you think about it, your safety has always been my concern. Not infecting you with herpes. Not letting you stumble and fall; or starve from loneliness; or get caught in any cross fire from this. I had very little knowledge but was looking out for you.”

  “I believe you,” he replied untruthfully, yet stretched out to touch her even so, as she stayed out of reach. “Don’t leave.” He could see her shape straying toward the porch.

  “No. I can understand your viewpoint. Shall we run away together?” She laughed. “Wouldn’t that be scarier than my suing you for palimony?” She moved to his side, however, and placed his hand inside her thigh. “Don’t be scared. We’re not ogres, us potheads, and I hate the hard stuff. Are you a leg man or a breast man? Shall we test?” she teased.

  Press was at a loss for words. “I do think we could test you, some time when you’re up to it. Touching different parts of my body. Seeing how hard you get.”

  “You win,” he told her huskily, as she ran a sort of preliminary examination along those lines, meaning his suspicions were trumped.

  “Then sculpt me,” she reiterated, harking back to her script for tantalizing him after they met when he climbed Jack Brook. “Better yet, I’ve brought you a Barbie doll one of my friend’s kids outgrew.” She took it from a bag and put it in his hands. “You can finger her.” And she kissed him to lighten the import of leaving him with Barbie’s boobs.

  What do you do about claustrophobia? In jail, he figured, there might be no evading the panic except to live each day for itself with a few makeshift, shaky alliances stitched to other jailbirds. He had his ears, feet, freedom, and judgment, a telephone to connect to his memories, a melodious voiced, high-collared bank teller to read his mail to him, and had solved the problem of reading numbers on his greenbacks by carrying a wad of fivers in his left pocket and ones in the other. And he’d sit on the steps of the Memorial Building listening to the town’s bustle around him, if he wasn’t accompanying Karl to the pharmacy, or slowly pushing Dorothy’
s cart at the supermarket. So life seldom seemed not worth living when he flexed his blood into circulation in bed in the morning.

  Carol dropped by two days later, asking if he wanted a ride to town for shopping. Wordlessly he got in the car, and from the post office crossed to the bank to have that favorite teller help with his mail as usual, cutting Carol out of the process. In the food market, though, she retrieved hummus, V8 juice, raisin bread and raisin bran, pitless olives and olive oil, yogurt and cottage cheese, bananas, Thousand Island salad dressing and greens, and a roasted chicken for him.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Stay on Ten Mile Road, or scram, clear out. What do you suggest?”

  “Well, that damned drug bust. Can’t you forget it? As you know, I’ve often said we don’t like—my friends and I—the drug stuff for money.”

  Press sighed. “Okay.”

  “No. You must be enthusiastic,” she decided. “I won’t let you starve, but I won’t be your friend unless you adore me.” Letting him off then, she laughed while he protested that he did adore her. She lingered like an angler with a fishing pole before driving away.

  Whatever the truth, he figured that being downtown with Carol after the police raid might implicate him a little more in the suspicions of locals like his Solid Rock Gospel friends.

  He did receive another police visit, a detective asking about recriminations, echoes, second thoughts, night movements. He heard the fellow search around the cellar, attic, and outside. “I think I’d be an unconvincing witness in court, nearly blind,” Press suggested. “This trail in the swamp goes back to rum-running in Calvin Coolidge’s era, probably to the Underground Railroad, if you know what that is.”

  “I know more than you think,” the lawman replied, so Press apologized for sounding sarcastic.

  “No, it’s scary. Hey, please, I want you to catch them, hippies, Mafia, or rednecks, whatever they are.”