River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  At this point, Tony and Parker rarely invited or even allowed guests into the house. The only people who were allowed entrance were the exterminators who the Boyetts hired to help them deal with the catastrophic vermin problem plaguing the old house—squirrels both red and gray, chipmunks, mice, and even a couple of raccoons raced through the attic, the pantry. The creatures had their own secret passageways inside the walls, up and down, side to side, a world of their very own where they moved unmolested. Sometimes the sound of their scratchy scampering made one feel that madness was closing in. But the Boyetts were far from prompt in paying the exterminators and most of them had not been at Orkney since May.

  “The boy and I wanted to get back to the west pasture and do a quick cutting,” Hat said. “The power takeoff shaft on the International Harvester is part of the original equipment. Now you will recall that we have done extensive repairs on that temperamental tractor of yours, but we were hoping to stay lucky on the PTO. You know it will run almost . . .”

  There were occasions when Boyett would let Hat go on forever. There was something relaxing about the old man’s garrulousness, but right now time was tight.

  “Hat, the favor I need. It’s this. Parker has reinjured her hand and won’t be able to cook. I don’t know a spatula from a chamber pot so I’m going to be useless here. But you! You, you sly dog, you turn out to be a culinary genius.”

  “Chemistry was and remains one of my primary interests, Tony,” Hat said. He was tall, with a weathered, somewhat caved-in face, deeply lined from the sun. He held himself at odd angles. When his wife was alive—and she was a heavy woman, with a large bosom and sturdy legs—Hat had a bit of a belly, but now his body was lean, with a lonely, sinewy quality. He had a long nose, blue eyes, and a full head of thick gray hair. He was sixty-two but looked older. “If you can remove the fashion from cuisine and see it primarily as a form of chemistry, the combination of elements . . .”

  “Yes, exactly. How about that beef stew you brought to us last week?”

  “Ah, the bourguignon,” said Hat. “A perfect disguise for an overlooked cut.”

  “Well, it was excellent. And we realize you can’t come up with something like that with no warning. Truthfully, we’d like you to just grill up some hamburgers. Done right, there is simply nothing like a good hamburger. Don’t you agree? And you can bring your son. The two of you can cook and serve and I think you’ll be out of there no later than eight o’clock. Tell your boy we’ll pay in cash. Knowing him, he’ll head into the village with a pocket full of whoopee.” Boyett smiled broadly, though Parker had just an hour ago warned him not to—he was missing an incisor.

  “I’ll see what can be done,” said Hat. “He’s his own man, now.”

  Hat’s son, Jennings, was back in Leyden after a stint in Saratoga Springs, where he had been living with a woman fifteen years his senior. Her name was Karen Colton and she worked as a secretary at Skidmore College. She’d gotten Jennings a temporary job with buildings and grounds, where he worked insulating a few of the older buildings. His job was mainly getting rid of the old asbestos, though the mission was confused because he was also wrapping some of the heat and hot water pipes in new asbestos. The school had a limited budget for winterizing, and despite the speculation surrounding asbestos, it was still one of the best things out there for insulation. The job paid decently and Karen herself was pulling in three hundred a week, so together they managed to live well. There were a few months in a row when it seemed to Jennings that every single day had something good in it. He liked where Karen lived, a mile from the racetrack in a ranch-style house built in 1950. He liked the bedroom, liked the bed, liked sleeping with her. She was self-conscious about being overweight, but she was sexually charged and adventurous. (He was a little on the heavy side, too—he had his mother’s build—and though he preferred thin, girlish women, he didn’t mind Karen’s weight.) At first, Jennings had felt reluctant to accommodate her unfamiliar erotic suggestions—he had always slept with many women but his sexual adventurousness was confined to seduction. Soon, however, he found he enjoyed these things, too—both giving and receiving rough treatment, cuffing and blindfolding her, slapping her ass. Other than occasional bouts of what Karen called their Divine Madness in bed, their life was calm, cozy, and affectionate, built around lovely dinners and long walks. However, Karen was in a custody dispute with her ex-husband, with whom she’d had a son, and her lawyer told her that living with a twenty-two-year-old would not look good to the court, and whether this would have been a determining factor or not it frightened Karen into ending the relationship. Jennings moved into an apartment a bit out of town and continued to work at the college, but he missed Karen. Saratoga Springs without her seemed dreary and unlucky and he returned to Orkney, to the yellow frame caretaker’s house, where he had been raised. In his childhood, it had been a happier place, while his mother was still alive and before his sister and Hat had had a falling-out and she left the house for good. Now it was just Jennings and his father and all Jennings wanted was to save enough money to move on.

  There were few places for employment in Leyden. Jennings tried to stay in the insulation and asbestos business, but the only crew doing that kind of work in Leyden was run by Tim O’Mara, whose daughter Jennings had known in high school and there were hard feelings that made it impossible for O’Mara to hire Jennings, though he wanted to since his best worker had recently walked off the job after seeing a show on TV drumming up a bunch of hysteria about asbestos. There was nearby Avon College, but Jennings was reluctant to apply for B and G work there because they would check at Skidmore and see he had left that job without giving notice. There was Leydencraft, a furniture factory that had been in operation since the beginning of the century, turning out tables, chairs, dressers, armoires, blanket chests, and even little rustic-looking wooden plaques, which they could customize with your name and address burnt into the wood. A combination of inexpensive furniture, manufactured abroad in places like India and Guatemala, and new ways of making furniture parts had gutted Leydencraft. They went from employing over seventy workers to having twenty-two on the payroll, and those twenty-two had had their wages frozen for the past several years, and were working without contracts. The paper mill had been closed since 1970, as part of a government initiative to clean up the river, and the men who used to work there either had moved away or were mowing lawns and plowing driveways. The one expanding business in Leyden was Research Tech, which despite its forward-sounding name was a converted dairy barn used to breed rats and mice, which were used in experiments by laboratories all over the U.S. Research Tech’s only foreign competition was from Mexico and Canada, both of which were close enough to ship crates full of rodents to U.S. labs without losing too many to the cold or starvation. But the Canadian mice were expensive and the Mexican specimens sometimes had a hard time getting into the country—once, fifty thousand Wistar rats, with their large heads and long ears, were cooked into a bony-white soup while languishing on the tarmac at Dallas–Fort Worth. RT was getting a computer and already had automatic feeders; they weren’t cutting back but they weren’t hiring, either. And now a few people from the college and a couple of New York City transplants were picketing Saturday afternoons in front of the barn, saying that it was cruelty to animals to use the rats and mice in experiments, even if it meant curing cancer. The rat lovers marched with picket signs pumping up and down like pistons in an engine, bearing gruesome photos of white rats with electrodes on their heads or their torsos split open and their organs exposed or an unmolested rat staring beseechingly, its little pink humanish hands held up as if the creature were begging for mercy.

  When Hat asked Jennings to help prepare and serve the meal to the Boyetts and their guests, Jennings was glad for the work. Hat’s arrangement with Tony and Parker was that he would be available to them forty hours a week in exchange for rent-free housing and whatever he could cultivate and harvest off the land. If he worked beyond the normal 7 A.M.�
��3 P.M. workday he was paid five dollars an hour. Hat assured Jennings that he, too, would be earning at least twenty-five dollars.

  “If you ask me, I don’t see where it takes two able-bodied men to serve a simple supper to four people. With the heat and all, Tony wants us to use the Weber and make hamburgers. I told him straight out we would not be using charcoal. We’ll do the whole thing with wood and that way they will get the real taste of the meat. Anyhow, it was Tony’s idea. He figured you needed some money.”

  “Don’t call him Tony like him and you are friends,” Jennings said.

  “You and he,” Hat said.

  “Yeah. Just don’t. Because you’re not. Not yesterday, not today, or ever. You’re a back and a couple a hands and that’s it.”

  “With that kind of attitude, you’ll get us both fired,” Hat said. “Don’t you need twenty-five dollars?”

  IT WAS EASY WORK AND to make it even easier Parker had ventured into town to buy the groceries. She drove the old maroon Buick station wagon, creeping along curvy Riverside Road, fully aware that she was impaired and not wanting to make matters worse for herself by slamming into a tree or clipping a bicyclist. Hat had wired up the tailpipe so it would stay in place, but before Parker was halfway into town, the wires had devilishly untied themselves and the tailpipe was scraping against asphalt, and suddenly she was being stalked by huge hydrangeas of yellow and silver sparks. She switched on the radio and sang along with an old Bee Gees number, to block out the scraping sound, and the anxiety. You don’t know what it’s like . . . to love somebody. At the A&P she left the engine of her car running to keep it cool, and as insurance against her going into a kind of supermarket trance, in which she pushed her little cart up and down the aisles, amazed and appalled by all the crap for sale. She was famously frugal and bought the cheapest chopped meat and day-old hamburger buns from the half-price bin. When she brought her bag of groceries back to the car, it was nice and cool inside. “Parker, you are a very wise woman,” she said to herself.

  “The buns are stale, Dad,” Jennings said as he shook them out of their plastic bag and onto a platter.

  “We’ll warm them up and no one will be any the wiser,” Hat said.

  They were on the bluestone patio off the kitchen. Gnarled wisteria vines, swollen and gray, hung from the overhead trellis like pythons. Hat and Jennings had the hamburgers on the grill. Licks of flame rose, and the heat corrugated the evening air. The light was fading. Jennings watched as a long furled contrail slowly dissipated and became part of the sky again. The river reflected the sunset, the pulsating orange of it, the dark blue. He wondered what it meant, any of it. Just another spin in the nothingness of space? How could it be so beautiful? On Hat’s insistence, Jennings was in black slacks, a white shirt—he drew the line at the toque blanche, though Hat wore his and had brought an extra, in case the boy changed his mind. “If you’re going to do something, I always say, do it right,” Hat declared. To which Jennings replied, “I’m going to do it right, Pop, just not with a dunce cap.”

  Tony and Parker and their guests were back from their walk. The guests were in their forties, too—the Longacres, Kenneth and Donna. He was loud and forceful and had a reddish helmet of wavy hair. He had a hanging gut and his shirt was misbuttoned; Jennings had a grudging admiration for the type—this guy was secure, his card had been punched, and he was past caring what he looked like. The wife, Donna, was another matter. She was dark and moody, and the shape of her body was hidden by a gold-and-white caftan. Despite the July heat, she hugged herself and seemed to shiver. She had slipped somewhere along the way on their trek to and from the river’s edge and there were grass stains on her caftan, as well as dirt on the heels of her hands, and a little brushstroke of it on her cheek.

  The four sat in Adirondack chairs, with their legs extended and their heads tilted back. The night sky was darkening. One by one the stars appeared, like early arrivals taking their seats in an otherwise empty auditorium.

  “You sure know how to throw a fucking party, Tony,” Kenneth said. “I hope you’re prepared to put us up.”

  “This is very nice,” Donna said, in a sad whisper.

  “Are you okay?” Parker asked her.

  “It’s stronger than I’m used to,” Donna said.

  Jennings tried to catch his father’s attention with a quick, pointed glance. More than once, Jennings had told Hat that the Boyetts might be junkies; Hat would just shrug, as if the word was incomprehensible, some new kind of lingo, and then the third time Hat seemed to understand that Jennings was calling the Boyetts dope addicts and he said it was all so sad, and such a waste. But Hat’s hands had trembled as he said it and Jennings had regretted pressing the point. In the first place, he wasn’t 100 percent certain the Boyetts were actual down-for-the-count junkies, and second, it was unbearable for him to see his father with that look of dread and uncertainty on his face. He didn’t want to be the one who forced Hat to face unpleasant truths. With a dead wife and a daughter with whom he was not on speaking terms, Hat had enough to deal with. His sense of well-being was fragile and built on the assumption that he was a valuable man, and in order to fully believe in his own value he had to hold in high esteem the people for whom he worked. If he was hop-to-ing it for a couple of degenerates—what did that make him?

  Hat placed the hamburgers on a pewter tray that Tony had scratched up a couple of weeks ago while chopping an onion. Tony, Parker, Donna, and Kenneth waited to be served, with their plates and flatware and glasses of beer on the broad cedar arms of their chairs. Jennings bent his knees a bit to make the tray more easily reached by the recumbent diners. “Oh my God in heaven, my God, my God,” said Donna as she lifted the top bun on each of the hamburgers. “Are they all the same?” she asked Jennings.

  “Pretty much,” he said.

  “He’s a handsome one,” Donna said to Parker. She was open about it, as if they were speaking a language only they understood.

  “You think so?” said Tony. “You like the peasant body, with those short arms and round belly?”

  “I didn’t come here to argue,” said Donna. “But there’s a manliness to him, and I like a guy to be heavier than me.”

  “If you’re not careful, you won’t be able to find such a man,” her husband said.

  “Hat and his family have been here forever,” Parker said. “His father was called Whitey and he worked for my uncle Payson. And when the place came to me.” She paused, mired for a moment in the delicious confusion of narcotics, which was like being caught in a spiderweb made of honey. “How long have we lived here, Tony?”

  Tony was pointing at the sky, moving his thumb as if it were the hammer of a gun, shooting at the stars as they made their appearance.

  “Tony?”

  “I don’t know. Five years? Seven?”

  “Oh, I don’t think it can be seven years. Seven years ago we . . .”

  “Then five,” Tony said.

  “Why are those the only choices?” Parker asked.

  “All right. We have been here six years. Are we all right with that?”

  “Hat?” Parker made the effort to call out to him. “How long have Tony and I owned Orkney?”

  Hat’s face had turned red from the heat of the grill. A bead of perspiration trembled at the end of his long nose. He stepped back and took off his chef’s hat, as if to say the person who would be answering Parker’s question was not the person who was broiling up hamburgers.

  “It was five years last March fifteenth,” Hat said. “The ides of March.” He frowned, looked away, as it occurred to him that in Shakespeare this was not a fortuitous day.

  Perhaps the mention of the ides of March knocked something loose in Donna’s memory. She raised her hand and shook it back and forth like an eager child insisting she knew the answer to the teacher’s question. She wore an imposing ring, a cushion-cut sapphire, nearly twenty carats, surrounded by pear-shaped diamonds. “The dogs!” she cried out. “The dogs.”

&nb
sp; “I said you were welcome to bring them,” Parker said.

  “We did,” drawled Kenneth, “but Donna insisted on leaving them in the car. She was afraid they would get lost.”

  “They’ve been in the car too long,” Donna said. “It’s hot.” She struggled to her feet and twisted her ring nervously. It was slightly too large for her—it had been her great-aunt’s—and it rattled onto the bluestone patio.

  “There goes two hundred K,” Kenneth said.

  “Your dogs can scamper around here,” Parker said.

  “Martin, Bobby, and John,” said Tony. “Is that right? Am I remembering correctly?” The ring had rolled toward him. He delivered it to Donna, who slipped it back onto her finger. The panic in her eyes burned through the narcotic haze.

  “No, everyone thinks that,” said Kenneth, with evident pleasure. “It’s Abraham, Martin, and John. Bobby’s not in the song. No, wait. Correction. Dion mentions him in the last part.”

  “Someone help me find the keys,” Donna said. “Please. They’ve been in there too long.”

  “You don’t have them?” Kenneth asked. He seemed to enjoy catching his wife’s mistakes. It was not out of the question that he kept a private tally of them.

  “When I fell.”

  “Why would you lock the car?” Parker asked.

  “Force of habit,” said Tony. “One of the strongest forces in nature. We just walk up and down the same neural paths, over and over and over, until by the mercy of God we are allowed to die.”

  Donna continued to search her pockets, but it was clearly hopeless. She gazed out at the long sloping lawn that wound its way down through the high grass, the scrub, until it came to the train tracks and the river.