In the Country of the Blind

by Edward Hoagland

  But Carol disagreed agitatedly. “No. That’s letting us off the hook.”

  A comment that “the land has been damaged” made Press wince. Clumsily, sincerely, other voices testified to their own “crash landings” on this mountain and how it had saved them. “This is sanity. It’s not sane out there. Look what we’ve accomplished.”

  Carol chipped in again, “We ought to set up a kind of council, about membership and policies. A sort of legislature.” A man across the circle asked how that might have saved the hapless kid. “Freedom is dangerous.”

  But Carol did have an undertone of less vocal support.

  “A gatekeeper,” Press offered, adding his two cents’ worth. But he was answered with arguments about the illogic of living off the grid with gatekeepers.

  “We shouldn’t have kept him,” The Dad agreed. “It drew attention.”

  “But policies. A council for ground rules,” Carol persisted.

  Certain male voices seemed to suspect where she was going and wanted to head her off. Several women supported her euphemistically, however, by referring to cops being around. The Dad refereed with amusement. “The City Council,” he called the idea. “But smoke it, don’t sell it? Should we elect our own cops?”

  Laughingly he didn’t take sides, but the druggies did. They wanted their money. Those lucrative trips to Brooklyn. And no male voices augmented Carol’s doubts. A woman blurred the discussion by suggesting that social workers might be brought in. She was known for nursing her little boy in public though he was turning five. The stoners hooted in support of her.

  “We accept people, acid and all, no questions asked.” Sentiment was swinging against using this off-kilter visitor’s death to formalize the valuably disorganized lifestyle at Ten Mile. Creeps could be shouldered out pronto after they arrived. The squalid square world wasn’t perfect either. A Council smacked of regimentation, “and we have something precious.”

  The Dad, like a tillerman, let the winds blow idiosyncratically, till afterward he’d speak to the losers. Just so, he had fathomed Carol’s viewpoint. “We were asleep at the switch. Our eyes and ears should have prevented that. And the pot-growing’s got to get under cover,” he said in passing. “You put yours in the cornfield, where the pig plane can’t spot it.”

  Of course her concern had been that money hustles like drug peddling undermined The Farm, not how to conceal them. “We failed, but you were my moral support,” she told Press, serving him cornbread and carrots to complete his picnic supper. The sky seemed anciently velvet, the breeze sweet with leafy perfume, and people remained roundabout in what was indeed a healing process.

  Chuck, in Carol’s hearing, asked Press if he would go over some paper with him. “I don’t read good.”

  “Neither do I.” They laughed. “Have you got kids in Arkansas or San Diego?”

  “I won’t tell you where I have kids. But it’s not child support. It’s loan papers. I’m buying a car,” he chuckled, and drove Press home.

  Payment schedules was the topic of the day, plus trade-in details. Fine print was read to him by the dealer and Chuck, who appeared to be dyslexic, queried the terms with Press’s help. Apparently he had no credit history except for an Exxon card and had brought two thousand cash for a down payment because he didn’t believe in banks. The dealer wouldn’t have gone through with it for a new car, but this one just had eighty thousand fewer miles on it than the truck he was turning in, and when he was asked for another thousand dollars in earnest money up front, Chuck came up with it.

  “I can see why you brought a blind man. He can’t rob you.”

  Chuck, triumphant behind new wheels after “signing on the dotted line,” said driving was as good as sex for him; he loved it. He suggested driving into Canada “for Frog food,” for the restaurants on his list, with the temporary plates, but settled for just two pepper steaks in town because the paper trail wouldn’t have cleared.

  “Sure I’ve got kids. They’ll look me up when they want a trade. Their stepdad’s a loser, the salesman type. Nothing solid in that. I can go to Alaska or anywhere. Sign for a year, and free airfare. So you pick a hotel you want to winter in in Florida or on the Gulf when the snow flies, and in fact, I’ll drive you down, cheap as a plane.”

  When Press asked why these communes, “No lease. Free love,” Chuck explained, and they laughed. But he loved the Kaw River—Kansas River—“Special. I’ll go back.” His old lady in California had wanted him to put his money in a car wash or pair with her brother as a house painter, so he wouldn’t travel. “Look for me among the hippies,” he advised any private dick that might be trailing him. His boys would find him when they wanted to.

  That image, alas, brought Melba’s lost sons to mind. Maybe desperados like her and this chump weren’t bored by him because they felt a link to that flip of a coin which determined that one man had it all and the next was blind.

  “Yep. A fork in the road,” Press teased—Saudi Arabia or fish—remembering the pistol in the glove compartment of the truck being transferred to the Chevy.

  On the drive home, Press regretted allowing himself so little freedom of the road when he’d been young. The straight and narrow had claimed him. And even now, car jaunts with Jeremy and Molly were beyond him.

  They gossiped about The Dad, a mystery man who had had a garage band in New Jersey and half-graduated from music school before becoming a “group therapist” here. The Ozark commune was started by a classmate of his from Little Rock.

  “How about Carol?” Press asked.

  “Another good soul. But I’m to tell you about Carol?”

  “Well, what I don’t know.”

  “Pussy is pussy. The long-assed type, though I like compact. But if you’re getting some don’t ask questions.”

  “I envy you being able to jump in your car.”

  * * *

  In his kitchen, Press thumped his head against the wall in frustration.

  One hippie he knew, by contrast, had ridden a stallion to San Francisco and back. Another had bicycled across, also a stunt befitting a different stage of life but unmatched in his memories. He was getting his ticket punched, fortifying his resume. Others traveled the famous counterconventional trail from Istanbul to New Delhi by bus or thumb through Iran and Afghanistan. And afterward, enlarged by the experience, they went into the export-import business or a multinational corporation.

  To stabilize himself, and after calling Connecticut and finding his children not at home, he walked to Dorothy’s for a bit of solace. She was nostalgically regretful. “I saw an hourglass in the clouds.” Karl had never gone with her to New York so she could see a play or go to the great museums. Like other veterans of the war, combat had shown him all the Europe he wanted exposure to. Press remembered Rog’s wife Juliette also complaining about never having gotten to the Big Apple, and invited Dorothy to go with him.

  Speculating with a smile in her voice, Dorothy answered that she’d hate to look like a hick. “Except if I was guiding you around these places you already know it would lend me a veneer.”

  “I could be the redneck from Peoria, yet whisper to you so you’d ask for the Rembrandts and Monets.” Press found himself imagining climbing the classic steps of the Met with his arm linked in hers, and the joy of resonance in those sculpture galleries and exhibit halls. He still had maintained his membership in the Harvard Club, as if for a last hurrah, so could reserve separate rooms and do it right.

  Ruefully she suggested, “I’ll never leave here.” In her teens she’d ridden her brothers’ Christmas tree truck to sell bales of firs on Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan—a doorman letting them use the service lavatory—“but never went back. Not meant to be. We each have a row to hoe.”

  “You sound like Avis. ‘Jesus was my travel agent.’”

  “Yes,” she agreed, unswayed but amused. Yet he sensed there might be an opening for a trip south. The Holmewood Inn would delight her, and then the short drive to Central Park, not
to mention the Club off Fifth Avenue.

  “I owe you lots of hospitality.”

  “My family’s been selling summer people hospitality as long as Karl’s was selling rotgut to the Woodchucks,” Woodchucks being Vermonters of the type who hibernated in the winter or moseyed about drinking moonshine otherwise. Widowhood, “At Sixes and Sevens,” was her current column topic and its “danger of running off the rails,” so he told her she was doing a pretty good job.

  * * *

  “The school’s dismal, the neighbors freaky. No role models,” Carol railed on his porch the next day. She was sick of counting food stamps and disheartened at selling zero artwork for the past three months. Chuck had started hitting on her too, after the roof leak.

  “On the other hand, growing up beside a brook that you can drink out of seems like a pretty promising beginning to me. Abraham Lincoln had it just about the same. We ought to try going on a sales trip with your collages, don’t you think? They’re so beautiful.” She had hung glasswork in his windows where the sun hit.

  He stroked her, rediscovering her lanky height and straight long hair. She remained too antsy to come inside the house, yet wanted comforting and squeezed his hand. Really, he emphasized, children create their own advantages, and the high school had good teachers whom he’d met at the football game, while his own fancy prep school—when you went to reunions—had turned out some incredibly dull specimens. “We could rent a car to show your work,” Press proposed.

  “I have a good dad, but I do need a fairy goddad. The trick is, when you’ve been trained to do church art—then, if you no longer believe in what the windows are about, how do you operate?”

  She liked to mix and blend, brindle with verdigris, a starfish near an angel’s wings, Quaker silence, Buddhist silence, a touch of the Jain. Still, why not try glassblowing, or paint on slate?

  “Sounds goopy,” she said, “no traction,” though she granted that she should have gone to art school, not just apprenticed with her father. But since his work was celebrative at heart and hers rooted in that same vein too, Christian communitarianism could segue into anarchist communes such as Ten Mile Farm.

  “We could take your kids to Quebec City, almost like a trip to Europe, wouldn’t that be fun?” he suggested. She’d never been to Europe herself, he realized, with nine children in her family—round-numbered Catholicism.

  “You’re sweet,” she answered unenthusiastically, yet still awaited input from Press. Maturity. Wisdom.

  Melba appeared at this juncture, lightening the quandary. “It’s only the scrubwoman! You’ll have your harem with you, after I mow the lawn.”

  “Oh yeah, my odalisques. We were talking about a trip to the big city—look at Renoirs—if you want to join us.”

  “I’ve seen my share of nudes, but thank you anyway,” she replied, and, assuming Press meant New York, “You’ll stay at the Waldorf. I don’t pay nothing. I sleep in the straw at the Garden, with the horses. Madison Square Garden,” she added, since they didn’t know what she was talking about. “I won the Barrel Race, in my time.”

  Press, laughing, explained to Carol that the rodeo world was being invoked, and to Melba that such a jaunt was “above our pay grade.”

  Melba, though, kept talking about the New York waterfront, a few blocks west of the Garden, where she’d walked between performances and wanted to stow away on one of those great passenger ships named after a queen.

  “Oh boy, I envy you.” He offered Melba a ginger ale, and she offered to cook lunch for both of them.

  Carol groaned, yet Press sensed it was internal, not a rejection. “Settle down. Men dumped me right and left,” Melba told her. “Left me on the curb. We were changing cities and I was standing with my suitcase. But off he goes, by his self. Oh, was I lonesome.”

  “Couldn’t have said it better. Join the club,” Press chimed in, although he knew Carol’s blues did not relate to a single episode like him and Claire.

  She sighed, wanting to leave, wanting to stay. “No, I’m always on a tangent.”

  Melba was disarmed. “I’ve got chops for you.”

  “Nice of you, but I’m going to lie down,” Carol murmured.

  “Been there. And they hump us like a dog on your leg.” Both of them laughed, the gentler sex, and Press felt oddly as though Melba and Carol were two ends of a balancing pole, particularly when Melba added that women were “lifesavers” and Carol’s lips clicked in a smile.

  His own face might have called for elaboration because Melba conceded, “We’re rattlebrained, agreed. And if you give us your boys to raise, we’ll make them the same as we complain about. Rifles at twelve, and so on. So what do we do about this buckaroo? Don’t want to play nursemaid, but he’s marooned himself on this desert island where the bears hoot and the herons eat baby alligators down south all winter to get fat for flying up here in the spring.”

  “Scary. A crash landing.” Carol laughed. “Except he can always buy his way out, whereas I can’t even pay for a therapist.”

  They left him to his thoughts, which bobbed like a raft in a calmer sea. Winds from Labrador and Alabama alternated overhead, with miles of tree scent lending pungency. Day by day, was Melba’s mantra, like Carol’s memory of Dorothy Day.

  In New York, while living in a Catholic Worker dormitory, besides kitchen work and mopping, Carol had been assigned to hospice stints at nearby hospitals, holding hands with dying patients who lacked relatives around. Carol did carom back after a couple of days. “I’m flailing.” He wished he could see her face. “At Dorothy Day’s you could recharge maybe and we’d go to Bleecker Street and hear a sax.”

  “Let me take you shopping for something nice.”

  She drew a breath and paced the porch. “That’s so sweet a thought, thank you. So generous,” she repeated, as if distancing herself without saying no. “It’s more than nice, in fact. I should shop, it’s been so long.”

  In her car, joshing with each other, spurred by the moment, they made a circuit of several thrift shops and rummage-sale locations where she ordinarily acquired her clothes. Though he pointed out he had meant going to New York, she gushed, “It’s a godsend now when the summer people leave and don’t want to pack their stuff.” The pickings were ripe, often scarcely worn. “I can’t believe it. So much. I could wear different things for a week! But I don’t feel like a road trip. If you want one, that loose cannon Chuck can run you to Portland and back.”

  Chapter 9

  Dorothy’s friends rallied around, perhaps more comfortable in the house now that Karl wasn’t present to remind them that their husbands were shirking fire department service or hadn’t been in the military. Press wasn’t odd man out at the kaffeeklatsches, but felt more like an object of charity than before, with conversations around him he couldn’t join but extra sandwiches pushed on him to carry home. His hope of remaining a part-time boarder, or shifting to full-time soon, was eluding him. He was a sort of Good Samaritan project, as Dorothy bloomed in her womanly circles, sympathetic, perceptive, over tea and cards, and Karl not there to bring up the Legion’s Auxiliary duties for them to cook or plan for. Spiky and demanding, he was missed, but Dorothy, independent now, simply suggested, “Bring ’em up!” when Press raised the subject of a visit south for her to meet his kids and possibly continue on to Broadway and even the two Mets, for opera or art. She was flourishing as is.

  He missed lying in bed spoon-style with his wife, one hand on the cello shape of her sweet body; Carol didn’t sleep with him. In fact, she seemed more distant, worrying about her children’s future here “in the bush” once again. She’d begun phoning that guy on the Hudson—that so-called “poet”—who by her choice had inseminated her for both of her kids.

  The trouble was, some woman always answered. Did he have a new partner? She couldn’t ask.

  Melba was no problem, though. He bought her a hundred-pound sack of oats to feed through the window to her horses, and this pleased her immensely. He felt a bit dum
b for not having thought of it before.

  Chuck—who’d traded in his Arkansas pickup for the car with temporary plates—swung by “on Carol’s say-so” for the fish run to Portland, if Press wanted to go. “You only live once.”

  True. Press tucked necessities into an overnight bag and climbed in, cane and all, not omitting his passport. “Gone fishing” was what they said here. The smell was of sandwiches and coffee, but he sniffed for clues of who the car had belonged to before. A lady, a plasterer? Chuck drove east toward New Hampshire with careless aplomb, like a man who might put fifty thousand miles on a car’s odometer every year or two. Blindness curtained much of the beauty they were passing but not his sense that it was there. White spots checkered his vision. How did people manage blind from youth?

  Chuck complained that his parents had sent his less talented brother to college, but not him. But after all what did it matter and he dropped out.

  “Nine to five,” Chuck laughed, dismissing him, whereas he’d shipped out of Long Beach for the Philippines, Bombay, Mombasa. “And yet the girls are ashore,” he explained. “But wow, I was weirded out at The Farm. This girl there likes to drink your cum right out of the condom when it’s over. A vitamin freak.”

  “Internal combustion,” Press responded with amusement, listening to the GM engine.

  The miles spun. They arched high until the White Mountains gave way to Maine’s softwood forestlands cut by creeks. “It’s nice when it’s nice,” Chuck said of the weather. Spoke of eating javelina steaks in Arizona. And then of being in a house that was practically full of money, but you’d better pretend you hadn’t seen it. “Variety is the spice of life,” he recited. This gig he’d picked up from another Ten Mile hippie. The big supermarket chains like Shurfine used their own trucks of course, but he delivered to the smaller stores. Flounder, cod, sole, lobsters, bluefish, bass. The wind smelled yeasty, hopping through the wavy trees.

  Chuck hummed and talked about the inshore lobstermen versus the cod boats that went way to the Outer Banks for deeper prize money. Dangers there. He confided that he wore a money belt because he dealt with so many individuals, both on the waterfront, then selling their catch to the storekeepers back in Vermont. Press happened to remember a story on the radio about how Vermont’s murky border with Canada was not the only conduit for drugs. Fisher folk might run clear out to international waters and intersect with a mothership to ferry the junk in, hidden among a hold full of fish.