In the Country of the Blind

by Edward Hoagland

  A lost hiker showed up to use his phone; then Rupert to relieve him of accumulated garbage Melba must have told him of, and gossip about Karl’s health. Since the families weren’t friendly, Press gave nothing away, especially because auctioneers trolled for properties to empty after a death. No, Karl was all right. Rupert, amused by the drug haul seized at Press’s place, observed, “Somebody’s in a hole for it. Keep your chin up,” he advised, patting Press on the shoulder. “Melba’s a good old bird.” Rupert laughed. “I was glad to take her in. What a mess. You probably haven’t made a hash of your life, so you think you can sympathize with somebody like her that has. But I’m not so sure.”

  Press, remembering Cos Cob’s chapter of AA, invaluable to acquaintances whom he and other straight-laced fellows could not have helped, saw what he meant—if Rupert was indeed a benevolent force. Motives were a crisscross, his and Carol’s too. At the Clarks’ church people were forgiven for their adultery or shoplifting if they repented. Rupert seemed as considerate as Karl regarding Press’s handicap yet less at ease, probably because Karl had officiated at so many catastrophes. Rupert wanted to be of service and then gone, but his son Al, “The Hippies’ Horse,” was less inhibited and formal. Rog, on the other hand, had a more brutal cast, on the watch for wounds that could be exploited.

  “I don’t know whether I should forgive people or kick myself for suspecting them,” Press confided unexpectedly.

  “Well, why not both?” Rupert laughed. “Somebody did wrong, but you’ll never know who, so fuck it.”

  Press called Dorothy and then his children after Rupert left. He wanted Carol back, however, teasing him. Instead, a farmer turned up who’d been foreclosed on. The church had sent him so Press could read the papers. Of course Press couldn’t, so listened to the farmer read them. Then they got in his car to ride to the bank. The manager—the woman who Karl distrusted because she was a woman—patiently explained what they meant, and Press couldn’t dispute what she said. “Sorry to be useless,” he told the poor man. Asked to be dropped at the Clarks’ farm, it being almost milking time.

  The milking machines sounded tranquilizing, and there was the collegiality of seventy animal spirits thriving, warming the barn with cud-chewing, nose-snuffling and sisterly mammalhood. Here every advantage accrued to the farmer whose beasts were content, welcoming the very procedures which earned his income. Two cats rubbed against Press’s legs and Avis in passing mentioned the blessings of the Lord.

  * * *

  Carol did come by a day later bestowing a brush-by kiss and inspected the house for other visitations; then led him for a walk-around, his arm pinned round her waist, and after asking, “Are you up for it?” down the stubby trail into the swamp. They scarcely talked, yet he had never been so far or zigzagged so very much before, until she stopped and spun him around, shifting her own position too, so he had no idea where he was.

  “Scary,” he blurted, both pleased and apprehensive.

  “So who’s your friend?”

  “You are, if you take me back, not play Hansel and Gretel.”

  “Did Gretel make love with Hansel? Let’s see.”

  She moved close to hug and lead him. He didn’t know where, until at last he recognized the arching crowns of his shade trees. “Safe and sound,” she gloated. “So now you can discard me.”

  She led him inside for their old ritual of a hot bath, whereby he was permitted to sit alongside and soap her back. “What footing are we on? I missed running into you when you came by the other day,” she joked as he dried her. “But you’re going to make the fish run to Maine, I hear. That’ll be fun.”

  * * *

  There were banalities he missed though, like his dentist in Greenwich, who chatted for half of your hour in the chair but was precise enough during the other half. An “angry tooth,” he would have called the loose one Press was probing. “It’s lost its moorings.”

  White-collar guy in a blue-collar pickle. No dentist or doctor, but he did have a Rotary Club to go to if someone would pick him up. He’d been once and paid his dues, talked to the bank manager and pharmacist, and met a high school teacher who’d offered to bring him to a football game if he called. What he wanted was footing. He might mentor a college-bound kid, who he could also dictate letters to. At the Solid Rock Church none had approached him, but how about a football game? So he did call, and the next thing he knew he was in the stands. Although they didn’t become close friends, it was exhilarating cheering for North Country Regional High School when they scored and the faculty around him yelled. The quarterback apparently lacked receivers as good as him so they didn’t win, but he also boasted a mean curveball, when he pitched in the spring, Press heard. “No problem about a college there,” Pete, his host, said. He brought two other students over to shake hands and a couple of teachers too. Press hoped to be invited for a beer afterward, if teachers permitted themselves that, but they seemed committed to showing up at parents’ post-game parties. The hubbub reminded him of a different stratum of society he missed. The country-clubbers of Cos Cob at their best. Lawyers, doctors, bankers, who read books and went to concerts, or might be a Sunday painter, arguing nonconformist politics if no one else was listening.

  When Pete drove him home, “Tell ’em they don’t need to major in Economics to make money. Tell them what makes them happy should be it,” he said, but received no response beyond kindly wishes and good-byes.

  Press called Dorothy for news of Karl, still tethered to an oxygen tank and making his children’s phone calls no picnic for them. When Press himself tried, he muttered quietly that he should have shot himself while he had had the chance. “I could’ve tripped on a footlog or something. No proof of suicide.” He cursed the bank in advance, if they took the house away from Dorothy, already having cashed in his life insurance to pay their bills.

  When he went over, Dorothy gave him a chicken sandwich in lieu of lunch, which he apologetically wolfed down before clearing out so she could receive a train of visitors—her many friends.

  The swamp was a bedlam of crow caws and owl hoots because of a major dispute, and simmering scents. Sheila, the setter, had accompanied him, wagging, swaying against his legs, but soon returned to her mistress’s house.

  At his own, the swamp indeed wasn’t slumbering. Crows versus hawks or owls continued clamoring, as if at war. An out-of-sync tree frog piped once or twice, and a larger one, presumably green, snored an untimely croak, while the wind flapped like a heron’s wings. A loud bird—perhaps an osprey swirling—protested an intrusion. Karl had honed Press’s ability to listen. He smelled the usual skunk, heard his chipmunks, and talked to his son, hockey the topic, likely to become Jeremy’s favorite sport, though months away. The rink was opening, so kids could practice, and on defense he could skate backward faster than forward.

  “God’s will,” Dorothy invoked, as Karl hung on in a manner he would have preferred to shortcut. She sat by his bed scribbling notes for a column she’d call “A Veteran’s Memories,” to cut the tension. None of these he would have talked about under ordinary circumstances, lest they sound like “chest-thumping.” But now he’d never see anybody who’d read the newspaper so he let her recount the dud German artillery shell rolling into his foxhole at Anzio, then fighting through the mountains nearly clear to Rome. After that, his unit had landed in the south of France, battling north to the hellish burning tanks at the Colmar Pocket. Outside the room she read a draft aloud to Press for suggestions until some of their grown children materialized, each a pincushion of idiosyncrasies, Karl not having been the easiest of pops.

  Melba in her still-unregistered car clanked to his door in search of grocery money till her social security check arrived. And did he know about antiques? Rog had stumbled on a clutch of such at a dead widow’s house, probably originally from Connecticut, he thought: “Like you, and like the dealer he’ll likely sell them to. But he don’t want to be taken for a fool.”

  “He’s forgotten I’m blind
!” Press laughed. “And we didn’t do antiques.”

  “Rog doesn’t forget anything, but he’d like you to feel them or stroke them. He thinks you’re classier than him.”

  They agreed that was funny, though not the deal that Rog would try to foist upon the relatives who wanted to empty the house for sale. Probably would tell them he’d truck the old stuff away for free—not charge them, unless they had plans for it, which, addled as they were, they wouldn’t. “Also he wants to know if Karl is dead.”

  Press sputtered angrily, “No!”

  “Rupert was never crooked, you can say that for him. Not as smart a businessman but not a crook. If he’d chiseled you a little, he’d make it up later—like now,” she said, meaning lending her the trailer to live out her last days in. She reminisced about when his boys were close, before they went their separate ways. They’d bent some people so out of shape that when a ski-mask bank robbery occurred, the cops suspected them, but couldn’t find where the money was to prove it. The miscreants had calmly directed traffic with their deer rifles before the getaway car whisked them away. No big spending or bragging in the saloon, yet the rumor was so persistent that Rupert floated the whisper that his boys had hidden their loot in a cowshit pile. Sure enough, the FBI or troopers had hired a backhoe to dig all through the manure, looking in vain.

  Press, spellbound, waited. “So?”

  “Oh, nobody got arrested.”

  “So?” he persisted.

  “You mean did Al and Rog do it? Well, since there’s no proof and it was twenty years ago and since they came to their senses and we’re friends, you bet, I think, though no one’s told me so.”

  Press kicked her in the ankle when she didn’t go on, and she laughed.

  “You want a kicking contest? You don’t think I could take advantage and win?”

  “You win,” he conceded.

  “You want to know what they did with the money? Where is it? If it’s buried, why wouldn’t they dig it up after the heat was off? The word I heard was—and don’t say so—they put their bag of money in a freight car and then lost the freight car.”

  Afraid to kick her again, Press just waited.

  “They were smart enough to figure that if they got the wad across the border, nobody would be looking as hard for it in Canada. Our cops don’t go there. And the rail line from Montreal to Portland runs through here. So it’s like with the drugs. You put a bundle into a boxcar—used to be passenger trains, too—and open it on a siding on the other side. Then it’s yours, whichever direction you smuggled it from. So,” she continued, after he waited a minute, “Rog and Juliette—she’s French anyway, you know—went through the border controls on the highway like normal, to visit her relatives. But when they looked for the car that he and Al had stuck the money in they couldn’t find it. Maybe the engineer went right on through to Montreal without stopping anywhere, or they forgot the numbers on the car, or the railroad cops started asking what they were snooping around every railway spur in southern Quebec for. So God knows where the bundle ended up and who spent it.”

  “They flubbed it,” Press agreed.

  “They learned their lesson,” she concluded, as Rog’s car pulled in.

  Rog was dismissive of Melba and patronizing toward Press, as he realized the extent of his handicap. He led him out with a bit of a swagger and into his auction house downtown. But Juliette, the Canadian wife, Frenchily perfumed, who handled their larger-scale finances, promptly put an end to that, seating him on a couch with tea. She wanted to read him the list of stocks, like GE and IBM, the “hicktown adviser” had picked for them.

  “Good blue chips. Don’t try to beat the market and trade.” Yet, beyond that, she wanted to ask if he had been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Modern Art. Rog had never taken her to New York, not to mention Paris—had he been to the Louvre?—where she also deserved to go, considering the money their business had amassed. Renoirs, Picassos she’d seen in Montreal.

  Rog interrupted her cultural pining by bringing over a side table for Press to feel—the lines, inlays, and finish. “Should we clean it, oil it? Or would that ruin the patina?”

  He showed Press other items he couldn’t see and was advised to let the dealer he sold them to make that decision, which of course begged the question of whether the pieces had intrinsic worth. “You know cows, they know breakfronts and bureaus. Take her to Paris,” Press laughed, and got a hand-squeeze.

  Rog, displeased, asked snidely whether Darryl and Avis might not be glad that Karl was sick, remembering the families’ feud after Karl’s son had mistreated the Clarks’ daughter.

  “That’s absurd,” Press said, but wishing to mollify him, praised the good-guy kindness of his brother Al, not to mention how he enjoyed sitting in the bleachers at his auctions. He dredged up, too, the name of a fancy antique shop in Greenwich whose owner wouldn’t stoop to sleaze-ball appraisals even of a hodgepodge of rickety items in a truck with Vermont license plates.

  “Sir, I’m glad we’ve done this,” Rog conceded, over the bleating of two lambs in a pen in the background, after Press had fingered a kitchen hutch, a Queen Anne-style chair, a Shaker sort of rocker, and other booty.

  Back on Ten Mile Road again, he creaked in his swing on the porch as Melba found excuses to earn some “steak money.” Her social security check just paid for macaroni. “Bats! Bats in the belfry?—you don’t care, right?”

  He wondered whose mental state she was referring to, till she explained that she had discovered actual bats in a corner of the attic where a broken window offered them access.

  “Let them live.”

  “I like horses. You like bats.”

  “Yes, but I want to hear about those racetracks, when you were sleeping in the straw in the stalls.”

  “We didn’t want some rat slipping our horse a mickey.”

  “And the rats talk too?”

  “Oh sure. The real rats, they talk more than the people do. But they’ll defend their turf, so the ones eating your horse’s oats won’t let a bunch of others in to meddle with you once they know you and you know them.”

  “And at a rodeo?”

  “At the rodeos, you don’t sleep under the hooves of a bull or bronco! No, your horse that you ride for roping, she wants to spend all night outdoors in a pasture eating grass. It’d be mean to stick her in a stall.”

  “I want a parrot,” Press suggested frivolously. But Melba had inherited a cockatoo in a house she and one of her husbands had rented.

  “He didn’t like cages; he’d been in jail, so we let it roam the place, fed it good, and didn’t clip its wings. And one day the door was open for a moment too long and it flies up into a tree, talking to the jays that hung around, the way it had been doing anyway when it was in the house. Their colors were different but their voices weren’t. Anyhow, in a tree, up high. Hadn’t been that high maybe ever. The whiskey jacks surrounded it, amazed that it was free. They’d used to yell through the window—‘Let my people go!’ Yet it didn’t really speak their language or know how to fly right. It was bigger, with plumage not built for warmth. So they left—those jays that had hollered through the window like comrades when it was perched inside. There she was, at the top of the tallest tree. Wouldn’t come down at sunset when the wind blew cold. At dawn, still freezing there, wouldn’t come down for something to eat, or know where to drink. Broke your heart. Died there at the top the next day, rather than surrender and fly down. Just dropped. Braver than you can imagine.”

  Press waved to Melba’s car as she rattled off, having scotched his idea of a bird to talk to.

  Then Dorothy turned in, inviting him to the hospital. Karl was free-associating and held his hand. He ruminated about how he’d shot a German soldier from a ridgeline who was indulging in a crap. Also on the subject of war brides. He could have brought one back, taught her English, and installed her on the farm. “Black, black hair.” Karl laughed. At the Legion he’d observed a ton of war brides. The
Koreans fitted in, so tickled to get clear of Korea, but the English ones sometimes cried at the bleakness of this north country.

  Karl dropped asleep just as Benny Messer showed up, so Benny drove Press back to his place, cleared the “skin magazines” off the Mercedes’ backseat that served as a divan, and showed him the telescope that he used to spy on the hippies in the meadow up the hill. “I’ve seen you there!” He wouldn’t divulge whether he’d ever had kids or wives or seen the inside of a jail, but good-humoredly suggested half the people Press was hanging out with could have. Benny thought that all the world’s a junkyard, so why not live in the midst of it—boilers from starter houses, fridges from failed marriages that garter snakes lived under, he said. A honeymoon dining set discarded the year a doctor found the lump. Stoves on legs, toilets intact. Press smelled motor oil from the totaled cars the cops or wreckers had hauled in. “People forget stuff. Just in the glove compartment, for example, or taped under the spare tire. You find cash. I go through my wrecks; a gold chain, earring, or just a book that’s fun to read on the floor in the back.”

  “You’re like an undertaker.”

  “No, more interesting than that. I see their mistakes, not just the corpse. Like a head-shrinker. If you could see all the junkers in my yard.”

  “It’s a rough world,” Press agreed, arm wrestling for a futile second with him. Benny said he’d lay for anybody bothering Press and “twist their ears on backwards.” He put a pistol in its holster in his hands.

  Delivering Press to his home, Benny spotted Carol and her kids waiting for him, and snickered, “You got a good thing going.”

  “Hot baths. You should gimme a key,” Carol said when he climbed to the porch. The children’s voices he was so fond of whooped through the house, using both bathrooms, upstairs and down. Her roof leaked, but because she wasn’t sleeping with the guy who had built it for her anymore, he wouldn’t fix it. So what should she do?