Before he drove off, Orville looked at the moose mailbox.
“Tomorrow, buddy,” he said. “Get ready to rumble.”
***
Edna had kept the items hidden in the trunk of her car since her shopping spree. Now the easel was set up in the dining room and the canvas in place when she heard Roderick drive into the yard. She had made a pot of beef stew earlier, before she drove over to wash Mama Sal’s hair, and it was still warm on the stove. She hadn’t expected Roderick home for lunch, but then, she hadn’t packed it for him again that morning. Why couldn’t he go to Blanche’s like the single men who had no women to feed them?
Mama Sal knew why. She had called ten minutes before Roderick’s pickup pulled into the yard and didn’t even bother with hello. “I hope you’ve got a hot biscuit and a slice of ham to put on the table for your hungry husband,” Mama Sal said. Edna felt the same courage she often did when a telephone line stretched four miles between her and her mother, not to mention the bridge.
“Why can’t he pack his own lunch? He’s a grown man.” There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, one that said Mama Sal didn’t approve of even the meekest confrontation.
“Your husband is out working to pay the bills,” Mama Sal finally said. “That’s his job. Your job is to feed him.” And then she’d hung up. Edna had turned on the oven, and when it was hot enough, she slid a pan of Pillsbury biscuits inside. Now here was Roderick, ten minutes after the phone call and, like a well-wound clock, driving into the yard. This was proof that he’d stopped at his mother-in-law’s to tattle on his wife and then listen as Edna got a scolding over the phone.
Roderick wiped his feet at the door. Edna could hear the loud scraping of his boots and knew he wanted her to hear.
“I’m home,” he announced.
“There’s a pan of biscuits in the oven,” Edna said. “When you hear a bell ring, they’re ready.”
She was opening her green paint when Roderick came into the dining room. She could feel him standing behind her shoulder, breathing heavy from that extra fifty pounds, not to mention the smoking. He was watching her work, maybe wondering if he should tattle this to Mama Sal too. It was as if Roderick thought Mama Sal had some kind of mystical power. Like a fortune-teller in a turban, she could reveal the future to him if he gave her enough facts and information.
“What’s this?” he asked. Edna didn’t bother to turn and look at him. She began patting the canvas with pats of bright green paint.
“What’s it look like?”
“When did you decide to take up painting?”
She could sense him leaning in for a better look—Mama Sal’s spy.
“Hear that little bell going off in the kitchen?” Edna asked. “That means your biscuits are ready. If I were you, and if I wanted a biscuit, I’d take them out of the oven before they burn. Turn the burner on beneath the beef stew and it’ll be warm in no time. There’s a box of donuts on the counter.”
She went back to her work, patting more green across the canvas where she wanted some trees to grow. Roderick had hovered a few more seconds, watching her paint, before he gave up. She could hear him now in the kitchen, swearing softly as he burned his finger on the hot pan of biscuits and rattling the silverware as he found a spoon and a knife in the drawer. Edna knew this was his way of whining about having to get his own lunch. Fifteen minutes later, he was back in the dining room, a toothpick hanging from his mouth and staring at Edna’s work.
“Whose pickup is that?” Roderick asked and pointed at the white outline of a truck that had appeared on Edna’s canvas while he ate. “White’s not a smart color for snow country.”
“It’s nobody’s pickup,” said Edna. “If you invent something in your head, it doesn’t have to belong to anyone.” Before she knew it, he’d be wanting to drive the white pickup on her canvas over to the town office so he could register it.
“You get good enough at them things,” Roderick said, “maybe you can sell them over the computer.”
“Maybe,” said Edna. Them things. How could she ever talk to him? She had seen television shows about how artists lead lonely lives. And here she was, less than an hour into her first creation. Roderick moved forward to plant a kiss on her face, but Edna leaned down to derail it. She picked up her new book, Easy Steps to Basic Painting, and opened it to any page, pretending to read. That’s when Roderick turned and left the room. She heard again the sound of footsteps on the porch and the truck door opening and closing, a man reversing himself, rewinding his life. Edna listened to the sound of his pickup pulling out of the yard, a dark blue truck nothing like the white one that had driven out of her subconscious mind and parked on her canvas. She hadn’t expected to draw it, but there it was, as if maybe she could bring him back to Mattagash if she painted his truck, a kind of artistic voodoo.
When Edna heard the bus brake, she looked up at the clock. Almost three. The twins were home from school. Roddy broke through the door first, letting it slam back and hit Ricky.
“Hey, watch it!” said Ricky. “Or I’ll kick your goddamn butt.”
“You catch it, you can kick it,” said Roddy. “And you can even kiss it.”
Edna decided to ignore the rule she had set, a dollar a curse from the allowance. Otherwise, the twins would be in the dining room asking all sorts of questions. She heard the fridge door opening and bottles clinking about inside. Now the cupboard door opened, the one where she kept bags of cookies and potato chips. She heard it slam. The silverware drawer opened next. When it also slammed, forks and knives and spoons clinked painfully. She waited for the pantry doors, where she kept the peanut butter and jelly, knowing the twins would want their sandwiches. And there went the pantry doors. It was as if her life had become that of spectator in a house filled with noises, the sounds of human lives being lived with or without her. In a few hours would come the sound of Roderick’s blue pickup turning back into the yard, his door shutting, his boots on the front porch, and then the door opening. I’m home.
Edna wiped her brush on the cotton rag she’d found under the sink, then doused it in a glass jar filled with turpentine. She looked at her work and smiled. It was not a bad job for her first try. There it was, a white pickup truck driving away from the viewer, headed down the road. Behind the steering wheel was the back of the driver’s head, his neck and shoulders. It was a man wearing a light blue shirt, with most of his brown hair hidden beneath a baseball cap. A man leaving town in the heart of autumn, without looking back. On each side of the truck, the land was on fire, and that’s where Edna had had the most fun, painting orange and yellow and red blobs on all her trees, leaving bits of the bright green to peek through in places. She felt a power in what she had created. She could even destroy it, could paint over it. Or she could turn the truck around, put a smile on the man’s face, maybe even figure out how to paint the blinker as if it were blinking, and the truck driving into her yard. But what good would it do? For one thing, it wouldn’t be true. This first painting she had done was the last glimpse she’d had of Ward Hooper that day he drove away from Mattagash, his job in soil conservation over. So why kid herself?
***
Orville had done his deliveries for the day and had stopped off at Blanche’s for his piece of blueberry pie, a tradition since he began his job as mailman. Florence Walker was there, having the daily special with some old woman Orville didn’t know. He had always wondered if Florence, a spinster, might have some kind of dark secret that even Mattagash couldn’t get out of her. Meg thought he was imagining things. “Just because a woman don’t stand out at her mailbox in a housecoat and flirt with you over a book of stamps don’t mean she’s that way,” Meg had said. Maybe, but one other thing was certain. Orville would miss the town flirts, even if they did hold him up some days and keep him running behind schedule. There were two widows under sixty and three divorcees along his route, the latter
sometimes leaning into his delivery window so that he could catch a glimpse of white cleavage before he put a book of stamps in an outstretched hand, a hand that now had a birthstone ring where a wedding band had once been.
“Harry hasn’t come in for lunch,” Blanche said as she gave Orville his cup of tea. “Have you seen him?”
The whole town knew about Harry’s moose mailbox, and Orville had no doubt they were making sport of him behind his back. Maybe Harry Plunkett got their attention and respect, but it was Orville who got them their mail on time.
“Nope,” he said.
“Strange,” said Blanche. “That’s not like him.”
Orville finished off his piece of pie.
“One more day,” he said to Blanche as he paid his check. “Then I’m a free man.”
Orville was almost to the one-way bridge when he saw what looked like a man standing in the middle of the road, waving his arms.
“Damn,” Orville said, although he hated to swear within the mail car itself when he was still on the job. He knew who it was. Box #46. Billy Thunder. Orville slowed the car and pulled to the side of the road. It was either that or flatten the boy squirrel-flat by driving over him.
Billy came around to the driver’s window and stood there waiting. Orville could tell by his face that Billy wasn’t there to compliment the United States Postal Service. He hesitated before he put his window down.
“What is it, Thunder?”
“You think you’re funny, don’t you?” asked Billy. Orville tried to answer this honestly.
“I’ve been known to tell a joke now and then,” he said. “But I’m no Will Rogers.”
“What kind of joke is this?” asked Billy. He pulled a small sample box of dishwasher detergent from his pocket.
“That looks like the detergent sample I put in your mailbox today,” said Orville. “I put one in every mailbox. If you don’t want it, Thunder, throw it away.”
“This is war, Orville,” said Billy. “You don’t fuck with a man who’s down on his luck.” He slammed the sample box back into the car. It hit the steering and bounced into the passenger seat. Orville wasn’t happy about the box either. He resented it when companies sent out sleazy samples to the multitude, all those Residents and Occupants, hoping to addict them to a new product. Postal carriers shouldn’t be turned into pimps by rich cartels sitting behind corporate desks.
“A customer’s luck is between them and their god,” said Orville. “I deliver the mail, and sometimes packages are among it.”
***
Billy stood watching as Orville’s mail car crossed the bridge. He was thinking about revenge the way he often thought of sex, a thing you can sink down into and lose yourself in for hours. How do you break a man who doesn’t have a heart beating beneath his shirt? Where’s the Achilles’ heel on a mailman? That’s when Billy remembered the gossip at Blanche’s, on one of those days Orville had stopped for his blueberry pie, eaten it, and then left so people could talk about him. It had started out as a secret that Meg told her niece Lillian, who shared it with the four members of her rug-braiding class, who all swore before God they’d never tell. Now it was all over town.
Five minutes later, Billy was inside his rental camper, sorting through his stash of Valiums and sleeping pills, all beautiful supply that had fit so nicely with demand at the Portland Nursing Home. This was the place where his mother had once nodded off in the afternoon sun, oblivious to the woman she had been for the past fifty-two years of her life, one of the youngest cases of Alzheimer’s her doctor had ever treated. She was oblivious to her children as well, including her youngest child, William Thunder Jr. Billy. He had been her favorite, her pet. At least that’s what his siblings claimed. Now, what did it matter? That’s what Billy asked himself all those nights he couldn’t sleep, nights when wind coming off the river had rocked the camper until he thought it might be airborne, might hit the water and float like a silver boat all the way to the Bay of Fundy. What did it all matter to anyone now who had been the pet and who hadn’t? The last time he’d seen his mother alive, a few months earlier, she was standing in the long green hallway at the nursing home, bewildered as a child. When Billy put his hand on her arm, she glanced up at his face, that blank look he was noticing more and more in her eyes. “Can you tell me who I am?” she had asked her son.
But before this, when Billy was still visiting her and still believing that she would recover, that whatever was wrong in her brain would untangle itself, all those snarled and malfunctioning areas, he had seen in the social atmosphere around him a good place to peddle a few wares. Someone’s grandmother might need sleeping pills that her doctor wouldn’t prescribe. Someone’s great-aunt, a Valium. And there were the wrinkled old guys who were courting the wrinkled old women. He never sold them more than 50 milligrams for fear they’d be poking holes through wooden doors and puncturing the tires on their wheelchairs. But thanks to Billy, the Portland Nursing Home, at least for a time, had its share of eighty-year-old men waving from doorways as sexy young nurses passed by, both female and male.
Then, Billy lost his mother for good. After that last visit, when he took her by the arm and led her back to her room, he had told her everything his heart could handle. “Your name is Abigail Fennelson Thunder,” he said, his voice low so as not to frighten her. “You’re fifty-two years old, and you have three children. I’m the youngest, your son, Billy.” Before he could say anything else, one of the attendants arrived with a supper tray. As Billy turned at the bedroom door and looked back, she was looking at him too, as if maybe somewhere in her tormented brain she remembered the baseball games, the birthday cakes, the scraped knees, the schoolbooks, the Christmas presents. Then she looked down at her plate, excited to see creamed potatoes.
Billy had gone home and made big plans, dreams where he would come into the kitchen and find her cooking dinner. He would put his arms around her, surprising her, and she’d turn and smile at him, remembering he was her son. He would save enough money to find a place for them to live, maybe even enough money to hire a nurse. He was still planning when he got the phone call no person who loves another person wants to get. His mother had suffered a stroke. Billy remembered the doctor’s words in bits and pieces. Severe and long-standing high blood pressure. Hypertensive bleeding within the brain. It was as if her body knew the truth, even if her mind no longer did. Her body knew what was coming, all those blank and frightening years that lay ahead, bewildered days and fog-filled nights. And so her body had taken her back, had taken her home before the other illness could.
And it was somewhat true that Billy had driven up to Mattagash because it was where she was born and raised. With his father also gone, he had no one left but a brother who didn’t return his phone calls. And a sister who didn’t return his phone calls. And maybe it was true that he’d made most of those phone calls asking for money. His mother had always believed in him, and his heart had never left her side. So he did feel closer to her in Mattagash. But if it ever came up in a court of law, he had really gone to Mattagash for more reasons than searching for the Fennelson family ancestry. He had some pressing issues in Portland, one being all those bad checks that had bounced higher than basketballs, especially the one he had given his girlfriend. The stack of unpaid parking tickets didn’t worry him as much as the bouncing checks. If he could sell enough pot, if he could get back his good business sense that he lost for a time, he could cover the checks, pay off the boys who sent those brown boxes, and maybe even marry the girlfriend.
But for now, right now, it was payback time. Billy opened the cap on the bottle of pills, each one a brilliant blue, and knocked a couple into his hand.
***
The Delgatos were in the sports aisle at Walmart. Raul had visited his mother in Boston the previous weekend and forgot the baseball bat at a bar in Little Italy. Now he and Jorge were shopping for a new one. They had a business meeting
set with an acquaintance later that night, in an empty parking lot out by the airport.
“The ball bounces harder off aluminum than wood,” said Jorge, which is what he said every time Raul suggested, nostalgically, that they buy a wooden bat. “Plus, they don’t break at the handle like a wooden bat can.”
The model of bat had not come quickly to the cousins, although they had decided upon Easton as the manufacturer. The bat used by the Little League team the cousins had played on as kids had been an Easton. Jorge felt that keeping this tradition alive would bring them good luck. That the Portland Peanuts had never won a game was an irrelevant statistic.
The cousins had shopped long and hard on their first visit to the sports aisle. Easton offered a smorgasbord of bats. The Hammer, the Stealth, the Rampage, and the Cyclone models were contenders at first. But there was something formidable about the Typhoon, something sailors probably knew well. Jorge loved its ultra-thin black handle, its white middle section, and then the word itself written across the extended barrel in angry black letters. Dark blue and black, colors that were difficult to see at night in an alley, were also the colors of a storm that could wipe out everything in its path. They had selected the 32-inch, instead of the 31-inch, after Raul made an aerodynamic observation that rated alongside Why do curve balls curve? and How does drag affect the speed of a pitch?
“If you swing at someone and they run,” said Raul, “that extra inch might make the difference.”
The Typhoon had been the Delgatos’ weapon of choice ever since they’d spent almost a year in the slammer for an armed robbery charge. Actually, it was Raul who had done the time, since the gun was registered to him. A burglary gone bad had persuaded the Delgatos to change their MO. Actually, it was Raul who decided they should do this, after a lawyer finally got him out of jail once the star witness recanted. That Jorge had discussed the case with this witness could never be proven, but the witness—he was also the victim, a seventy-year-old convenience store clerk—woke up one morning with amnesia. When Raul stepped back into the Portland sunshine and saw Jorge waiting for him in a 1995 Cadillac Deville, an ancestor to the 2000 model, he had lit a cigarette and said, “No more guns. If you want me to be your partner, we find a new way.”
The One-Way Bridge Page 9
