In the Country of the Blind

by Edward Hoagland

  Chuck said it was lonely at sea but “umbilical if you know what I mean.” He drove nonstop, except for gas, to a modest motel, the Sleepy Eye, on a lake near the coast where they already knew him. In his room Press napped like a log at first, exhausted. Alone when he woke, he tried to summarize what he’d learned about Chuck, a little disturbed after overhearing him on the phone refer to himself as “Garth.” Yet he enjoyed his company nevertheless, as in boyhood memories of when he had hitchhiked all over a bit with strangers. The other kids were playing tennis at their country clubs, but he’d wanted his summers not preppy, just as at school he played hockey not squash during the winter. Being fluid not buttoned-down had been useful at Merrill Lynch because a window-washer might walk in with a million-dollar settlement he wanted to invest that he’d gotten when his rigging broke, or a widow suddenly rich but unsophisticated. If he’d climbed the ladder higher his prep school connections might have helped, but he’d stayed in the infantry.

  Vegetating in his room, Press wished he could call Carol or Melba. Paying for a line to Carol’s would be prohibitive, not to mention her disinclination for interruptions. But Melba might allow him to connect her trailer to the world. “At your beck and call”—he could hear her sarcastic response. He sat eye to eye with a news commentator’s face on the television. Then in the lobby, where he snagged snatches of dialogue, partly because he was paying more attention or simply because he may have seemed inert and therefore harmless. When did people develop laughter paleolithically, he wondered? Did chimpanzees do it? He also calculated as best he could an estimate of his assets: bonds, bank, stocks, et cetera. He used to like to take a flyer on a startup, feel courted with the conference calls, golf dates, a chocolate martini, or go in with a hedge fund.

  The desk clerk was a chatty, sympathetic single mom whose ex-husband, she said, was living in a homeless shelter in Boston and trying to persuade their daughter to lend him money, since she wouldn’t.

  “Good for you. Men are beasts,” Press suggested so they could laugh together. She offered him a licorice stick and invited his help on a crossword puzzle. Who stayed here he wondered? Honeymooners and pipeline hunks. The lake was said to be beautiful, she told him, by people who hadn’t been looking at it all their lives.

  When Chuck called to ask her to give Press a supper sandwich because he’d found some newbie buddies to drink with at a roadhouse, she did, although the Sleepy Eye served no meals beyond the complimentary muffin and coffee at breakfast. A call or two came in for Chuck himself but not from individuals who volunteered their identity. Press, however, was treated considerately by the lady at the desk and her successor. He turned off the TV because the second one preferred a raffish radio host, who, with the gab of customers checking in or seeking solace, provided diversion enough until Press went back to bed.

  Chuck reappeared, his arrangements complete for an early departure. At dawn, he put Press in the car, returned to the port, packed crates of fish, presumably, in the trunk, and they hit the road with the sunrise behind them.

  Weaving out of Portland and into rural terrain, Chuck chortled happily. “I was telling this guy to get his ass oiled. He’s going to jail. Been sentenced. Has a week or two to turn himself in. Scared shitless of getting raped.”

  Press was at a loss for words. Finally he said, “So it happens? Have you been in jail?”

  “You do the crime, you pay your time.”

  “So you were?”

  “No. I put my dukes up. It might happen to a greenhorn, or if you were a real pain in the ass to the guards, they could put you overnight in a cell with a certain muscleman who was a fag and when they let you out in the morning you could hardly walk, your asshole hurt so much.”

  “So you never went back?” Press asked hesitantly.

  “You mean boomeranged, to the lockup? I’ve had my issues. AA and whatnot. Going out in the snow and lying down to let it snuff me.” When Press’s hand groped toward the glove compartment, Chuck brushed his hand aside. “You don’t mind armaments there. Take the chance to snooze.”

  The way waltzed slowly around furry hills. Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, the Carter family, or Loretta Lynn on the radio. The scent of Christmas trees was salted with clean deep-sea whiffs of brine and the “Coal Miner’s Daughter” for company. Press napped, rocking to the dips and curves of the road. Chuck was even reminded of one he knew, a coal miner’s daughter he’d like to revisit down in Alabama. “And don’t tell anybody I may not stick here all winter.”

  A siren did sound when Chuck grew too nonchalant in mid-Maine. The trooper, however, needed no convincing that fish was their cargo and a reason for haste, and a blind guy’s presence—he walked around to the passenger window to check—helped. Chuck averted a ticket. “Got a warning,” he crowed. “Luck of the Irish!” He whistled likably, as the White Mountain Range rose in profile on the left.

  Press ruminated on the risks of an ambitious marriage like his had been. Tainted motivations bring a reckoning. You marry someone snappier for climbing the network, but fall off yourself. Serves you right?

  Chuck was talking about the traveling life. A legal-age girl for instance, working in her parents’ laundromat who felt trapped and wanted to clear out, when you stopped for the night, did your laundry, and talked to her, then went to bed in the motel next door. Yet, emerging next morning, going out to your car and unlocking it, then returning to fetch your luggage, you climb in, speed off, whereupon a voice from the floor of the backseat pleads, “It’s just me. So don’t freak out. Just take me somewhere. I can call them from there, and they won’t know who helped me out.”

  “Must be okay,” Press agreed. Transport was the coin of the realm and your slate got clean. But the gossip at the Solid Rock Church lately concerned a boy who was missing in the next town. Had he lit out for the West as his parents hoped, or had something happened to him?

  He mentioned this to Chuck. “What do you think?”

  Chuck grunted, groaned, “I dunno. I did hear about that. I guess I would bet he was humping some junk and probably messed up.”

  “I heard there was a guy over there, an Italian, who comes to his door with a pistol in his hand.” Press paused.

  “You mean if you knock?” Chuck laughed. “I wonder. Exiled from Jersey? A mob guy? Sure, no, it would be a helluva mistake for a local kid to work for him.”

  “And our hippies don’t?”

  “No, no. They might hump stuff over the mountain for themselves, but if you come from Brooklyn you sure don’t mess around with a Sicilian guy.”

  Skipping the deliveries, Press was dropped at his lonely house, glad that his thermostat had kept it warm. No Carol to quiz him, but wanting her to quiz him. That didn’t happen for nearly a week, as she “got on with her life.” Melba showed up for her regular “shift,” as she put it, however, slurping a mop around the floor by the sound of it. Not that he cared how clean his place was, but he wanted the chat and the reassurance of a warm meal in the oven for nightfall. Wranglers she’d been good to was her usual topic, or dirty tricks Rog the auctioneer would play. “The Widow’s Nemesis,” Press suggested, although not believing all the bad stories, any more than all her yarns of buckaroos. She agreed to his idea for a phone.

  He even persuaded Melba to take him home with her to Rupert’s place; she had a little terrier that ate the rats she trapped, so they stopped for dog kibble. Her trailer seemed cramped for a permanent abode, but boasted a woodstove, a kitchen table, padded lounge chair, and piles of blankets she said Rupert salvaged from the dump. Her bedsprings were supported by stacked cans of food two feet or a yard high. They were a source of pride. If either social security or Rupert cut her off, she could survive. Press fingered a can, and her reading lamp, and the pup she slept with, and the nuzzling noses of the three horses who trotted close when Melba whistled them in.

  He stepped outside and felt the musculature and mane of the tamest mare, till her tail switched his face.

  “She gotcha! Yo
u got too fresh. I wish I would have done that to the horny dudes.”

  Trying out her La-Z-Boy, he imagined the dimensions of her life. Rainy days. Bright days. When he asked about Rupert, she said the less she laid eyes on him the better, though Press suspected a false bravado there. She was living on Rupert’s largesse, after all, and conceded good qualities in him, like impulsiveness yet decisiveness, and those knowledgeable hands when manipulating cattle in an auction ring. And he knew everybody he needed to know; “But not so smart with a bank statement.”

  As for the phone, “I may need you as much as you need me.”

  “And vice versa.”

  “Yep, lay me out in my finery.”

  “I will, and you’ll notify my next of kin.”

  “Righto. Who are they? I’m writing it down. And who’s Tonto if we’re gonna be pardners?”

  “Well, Tonto probably had longer hair. Did yours hang down to your belly button?”

  “It covered my boobs, if you want to know.” Her voice sounded young.

  “Yum, yum. I always liked that.”

  “Oh, I’d look like a chimpanzee if you could see me.”

  “I don’t believe you, and I can’t.”

  “In sickness and in health!” Melba intoned, as if mimicking Claire’s wedding vow. “Oh, I could wake the dead, pant, pant, pant, like a metronome—those boys’ breathing, if you let them touch you. Darryl Clark, Karl Swinnerton, Rupert, and Rog. Or then go home to Mary Five Fingers.”

  “Were you a ball-breaker?”

  “No, I like men. Without men what do we have? The old ones too.”

  They split a beer, and when the horses had snuffled enough of a snack out of her hands, she drove him home and fluffed an apple walnut salad for him in the cherrywood bowl. “It’s the life of Riley,” she said, “until your money runs out.”

  * * *

  Ninepin thunder, pelting rain, a coon in the garbage can, loose slats rattling somewhere in the wind, and the vulnerability of owning outbuildings he couldn’t see: Wasn’t this a fool’s errand? Maple Lane was the closest assisted-living facility he’d heard about. Shouldn’t he just move there, and keep this place for sentimental visits, perhaps, or a legacy his kids might enjoy, and let Carol live here in the meantime? Or he could scurry to Florida and install himself on a beach somewhere. Northern ice was not his métier. Had he hit a wall, though with a handicap, you always wondered whether everything could really be blamed on that, not your lame foolishness? How quickly, for example, without organized exercise your muscles began to wither—yet what a bore abstract exercise became. He walked on the road, enjoyed a ricey meal at the commune, and helped Carol finance three trips to craft fairs, where she sold some window hangings and medallions. She was still calling that guy on the Hudson, but he wouldn’t give his new woman the boot. Nor did she, apart from the personal humiliation, want Christie and Tim living in a fucked-up situation. Here such irregularities were tucked away in shacks and tepees a quarter-mile apart.

  What happened, however, was that a resident pothead lent his cabin to two druggies from the city who had never used a woodstove before, and their bedspread caught on fire. They were so high at the time they were lucky to escape as the place burned down. For Press, and Carol too, it seemed to embody how haphazard and half-assed the whole operation had become. Not a going concern.

  Press began calling call-in shows to register his two cents’ worth on current issues or complain about the “ego trips” of certain presenters. His pledge to see Carol’s kids through college hadn’t registered unduly. “You’ve got your own,” she said. A bird-call project—learning from the tapes a friend had sent—was vanishing as migration proceeded apace. He’d hear sundry flocks swirl over the swamp, collecting adherents. Dorothy still welcomed his drop-ins on his “constitutionals,” remarking how the dog Sheila missed a male presence now that Karl was gone. At the Solid Rock he was perpetually accepted, but sensed that after hearing so many of the other parishioners’ confessions, there must be an expectation that he ought to get up on his two hind legs and make some show or presentation of his own, being divorced, after all, which was a no-no. And mustn’t they tacitly wonder whether he was playing both ends against the middle by hanging out for so long with both their church and Ten Mile Farm?

  And, indeed, he did propose to Carol that they go down to the city so she could revisit Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker on Houston Street, and maybe the Museum of Modern Art, et cetera, again. Also, his furnace with a thermostat; rooms to play upstairs, downstairs; a real gas stove and fridge for regular meals. Electric lights instead of kerosene for homework. Wouldn’t that be right for her and the kids?

  “You know,” Carol admitted to Press, “a sensible woman might consent to that, even prefer that. But sensible people don’t run off to the woods and become Freaks. If the roof falls in, we’ll be on your doorstep before you can say Jack Robinson.” Rain was whispering in the trees, and a barred owl hooted coincidentally “Who Cooks For You, Who Cooks For You All.”

  “It’d be awfully cozy.”

  “I’ll grant you it would,” Carol assured him with unmistakable sympathy. “Could be best for us too, but I am what I am. Hippies are a kind of circle-jerk, you know,” she confessed; he could hear her lips part in a smile.

  “You’re a beacon of honesty. I love you for it. It’s why I want your company.”

  “But we’re not caretakers,” she pleaded, more seriously, as Press was starting another persuasive pitch, then stopped in mid-sentence. Capitalizing on his pause, she went on. “You know, I could have given you herpes but I didn’t. I could have pleased you but made you sick,” she stressed, though rubbed his arm soothingly. Press asked her what she thought of Chuck. Through her hand he felt her shrug.

  “He’s not an axe murderer, no.”

  “But beyond that?”

  “I was with him.”

  Silence followed.

  Chuck swung by en route to Maine again, but Press said no and then regretted it. He asked Melba if she thought Chuck was a loser. “Who isn’t?” she laughed. Once, Al had done that run, before he switched to hauling cattle to the slaughterhouse. “Whatever floats your boat. I’m pretty hard up, bless the Good Lord.”

  “And you’ve got your marbles.”

  “You’re damn right. Even us sluts who never knew where to get off.”

  Chuck left Press alone for a while as the weather chilled, until turning up he pitched a different proposal. “How about clearing out of cold storage before it’s too late?” Down in Alabama where that old girlfriend lived, he knew a hotel to winter in. Not expensive like New Orleans and yet near a beach, and carny strippers liked to winter there. They wouldn’t stand for any creep hitting on them—they got that all summer—a blind man like Press could be the perfect ticket.

  He might leave Press there awhile, then pick him up.

  “Why?”

  “Why?—if you have to ask why, forget it! Or, remember you can always fly back.”

  Press threw caution to the winds. It seemed time to. “Tomorrow I’ll know.”

  “Tomorrow you’ll know? You need to print your last will and testament?”

  Press laughed with him. “I just need to sleep on it. I always sleep on things.”

  “I’ll write the girls. They’ll like that. A blind guy, after a whole season of stripping for goggly chumps down the midway.”

  “Almost a mascot. My mouth is watering,” Press said, though not believing a word of it.

  Yes, he decided to pack. No pets to worry about. He wrote Melba a note to notify Dorothy and Darryl, not wanting to discuss what he was doing with either of them. As for Carol, the more fretting she might do the better.

  “Ready to roll, baby, tomorrow,” Chuck said. “All aboard for the nookie express!”

  “Why me?” said Press.

  “Company. And you got me out of a ticket. And I don’t know where I’m going anyhow, and neither do you.”

  A fool’s errand, Press
’s mind warned him mildly. Yet although he knew that Chuck might be an unreliable goofball in some ways, he wouldn’t strip and dump him somewhere either. He’d drop him at an airport where his credit cards plus a kindly flight attendant or two could fly him back to Merrill Lynch-land or perhaps Melba-Carol-Dorothy territory. If blindness was a dead end ordinarily, why not live it up when a high flyer swung by?

  The familiar rhythm of rubber on the road and shoulder against shoulder when the car swayed with the curves was tranquilizing. Did you have to understand life to plunge in? Even kindness, when he encountered it, was a riddle half the time. If you walked into a door and bloodied your nose, it was one thing, but empathy for handicaps had never been his thing when he himself had none. Empathy had been for people of good cheer. Yet Chuck in contrast of course was an operator, an improviser, not a betterment person. And improvising was the very essence of going blind, as the mind surfed continually through its library of memories for clues as to what was going on. When you were so easy to take advantage of, people generally didn’t. A friend in need was a friend indeed, Press recited humorously. Not for most folks—when did you last help somebody in need?

  Press unexpectedly remembered the boy who’d hung himself, and how little he had done to remedy the situation when Carol was telling him about the kid’s antic behavior.

  He had called his children before he left, and reminded himself to buy a butterfly book and a dinosaur book for Jeremy when he found a bookstore.

  Molly had been excited because her rabbit had escaped and seemed to be having a ball outside, nibbling all the foliage.