Jane Was Here

by Sarah Kernochan

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Even at a distance Hoyt can see the skunk, the black and white punctuation at the end of the green lawn, as he pulls up his truck in the Meltzers’ driveway. He can tell by the animal’s flattened shape that it spent the night in the cage trying to dig out or arching up to test the metal bars overhead with its webbed toes. Now it is lying down, weary and dull-eyed, head squeezed against the corner, with no appetite for the barbecue-sauce-smeared slice of bread that enticed it into the cage. The knowledge of its doom has spread like noxious gas through its body, leaving the animal with only enough energy for its last stand.

  He shuts Pete inside the cab, where the mutt writhes with excitement. He takes the lid off the rubber trashcan in the truck bed, releasing the miasma of skunks gone by. Next he grabs a plastic tarpaulin, holding it in front of his face and body as he walks across the lawn to the cage. The skunk scrambles to its feet.

  Mephitis mephitis, Hoyt thinks.

  He has a head full of Latin, from prep school, law school, and earlier, when he was a kid and wanted to be a vet, studying the phyla of fauna obsessively, species and subspecies, markings and habitats. All that academic knowledge has devolved over time into a low-lying mental sludge that randomly belches up a stray fact once in a while, like the Latin name for skunk: mephitis mephitis.

  Hoyt still knows everything he knows. But there are ineffable pleasures in playing stupid. If he had his way he would pass without pause into genuine and sincere stupidity, commensurate with his position in life. Unfortunately his intelligence, the fruit of his early industry, refuses to die, like the stink that is about to explode from mephitis mephitis.

  Hoisting its tail, the skunk unleashes its spray on the tarpaulin. Hoyt uses the plastic to cover the cage, picking it up and returning to the truck. Fumbling through the tarp to open the cage door, he upends the cage, and the skunk plummets into the garbage pail. Hoyt fastens the lid over it.

  Later, at home, he’ll dispatch the critter with a .22 CB, single shot to the head, then hand over the pelt to Googie Bains, an aide at the nursing home and amateur taxidermist.

  The Mistress of the Manor (Hoyt calls her MOM) has no idea he shoots the skunks and raccoons he traps on her property. She has asked him please to release the creatures in some other vicinity, a “humane” act that only makes them somebody’s else’s problem. Typical: MOM sees nothing contradictory in driving twenty miles in a gas-guzzling atmosphere-choking SUV to buy organic vegetables.

  Hoyt just ignores her. Her husband, not Audrey, hired him to be caretaker, and Jack Meltzer understands that pests must die. And there is no more humane method than a bullet to the medulla oblongata. It’s what Hoyt would choose for himself, if he had half a mind. (In fact, if he did have half a mind, it would be a mercy and a pleasure to blast out the remainder.)

  Opening the cab door, Hoyt releases Pete. He’d bought the mutt from a shelter and now he charges the Meltzers fifty dollars a month for Pete to chase away Canada geese. Tearing across the lawn, Pete scatters the birds from the putting green, pursuing them to the artificial lake, where it bounds ecstatically into the water, content to churn and bark all day long until they get the picture.

  Hoyt’s neck still hurts from last night’s collision with Marly Walczak. Maybe he should buy one of those foam cervical collars. Meanwhile, he has to make his rounds.

  Of the estate’s thirty acres, twenty are wooded and ten cleared for the 10,000 square-foot country-French-style manor, the tennis court, lap pool, fishing lake, horse barn (never occupied), formal garden, remote-controlled waterfall, great lawn, and topiary maze.

  The latter, MOM’s creation, never fails to crack Hoyt up: that anyone would want to construct a claustrophobic labyrinth in the middle of such open splendor. Bathed in sun and sky, the property is perched on a high hill above Graynier, opposite its smaller sister Rowell Hill, boasting views of two counties beyond. So what does the Mistress of the Manor do but put up a maze of eight-foot hedges to hide in? “It’s a beautiful place to meditate,” she claims, though the only evidence of transcendental activity Hoyt has ever seen is a bong and a book of soggy matches hidden behind a stone bench—probably belonging to the Meltzers’ 13year-old daughter (currently at theater camp), who won’t be coming up this summer.

  For three weeks the region has seen no rain; patches of the lawn have turned brown. He turns on the underground sprinklers, which he really should have done every day of the drought. He will have to leave the sprinklers on all night to coax the grass back.

  Hoyt is helplessly devoted to the art of negligence. Audrey Meltzer has pointed this out a hundred times to her husband, but Jack Meltzer always gives his caretaker the benefit of the doubt. Jack just flat out likes the guy. He’s impressed and amused that his property manager can quote Chaucer and draft a will. Sometimes he invites Hoyt in for a drink, opens up a prize bottle of Meursault or Medoc from his wine cellar, and they shoot the shit, which leaves Jack with the agreeable feeling of fraternizing with a salt-of-theearth local without having to lower himself. Hoyt is his intellectual superior, he doesn’t mind admitting. Also a hell of a raconteur, a decent fellow, and honest.

  Leaving “decent” and “honest” aside, Meltzer is mistaken that Hoyt Eddy is a local. He is the son of Hamilton Eddy of the Boston Eddys, a well-heeled, Catholic, hard-working, entrepreneurial family. Hoyt’s father ran a mutual fund, and begat six boys, of whom Hoyt was the youngest and—conceived during his parents’ divorce—the least welcome.

  Absorbed into the father’s new household, Hoyt’s older brothers were overseen by his second wife, a brisk, rosy woman with four sons of her own. (These later turned out also to have been sired by Hamilton Eddy.) Hoyt was left with his mother Maeve.

  Hoyt’s earliest memory is of lying in his crib and seeing the shape of his mother’s head beating rhythmically against the bars as she kneeled on the floor, sobbed and prayed. In place of any lullaby was the unchained melody of Maeve’s prayers; her hiccupping cigarette-roughened voice pleading with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, to take away her sins, cleanse her of hatred, and murder Hamilton Eddy and his bitch in their bed.

  As Hoyt grew up, his mother’s church-fueled hysteria landed them both on the streets. She’d given away the divorce settlement money to the parish and then entered a cloister, briefly putting Hoyt in a foster home. But when the nuns found out how crazy she was, they showed her the door. Collecting Hoyt, she moved them into a homeless shelter for a few weeks, and from there to Seattle, where she got a job at a florist’s. She seemed to be waking up from her nightmare.

  Then, when Hoyt was thirteen, she disappeared.

  He continued going to school, living on what food she had left behind in the apartment, not telling anyone what had happened. Evenings, after football practice, he used his bus pass to travel all over the city, searching for her in every Catholic church and shelter he could find.

  He loved Maeve. He was her little husband, her soul mate, her soldier; “my sword,” she said. Forgiving her, picking up after her, soothing her rages, forcing her to eat, letting her sleep in his bed when she couldn’t settle—he had no idea who he was without her.

  A year after her disappearance, a post card arrived from Asia, forwarded by the Seattle post office to Boston, where Hoyt was by now living with his dad. Maeve wrote that she was working in a Catholic mission in Cambodia; she was at peace with herself, and asked Hoyt’s forgiveness.

  Hoyt was in no mood to forgive. Uprooted from a life of drama and chaos, he was in shock: marooned in a highly regulated, even-keeled household of over-achievers. Everyone was his own man here. Everyone slept in separate beds. No one had ever held his mother’s head under the shower, washing clumps of shit out of her hair where she’d smeared it in penance for her sins. His brothers and half-brothers had Hamilton Eddy, his firm hand, sober love, and high expectations.

  Ham Eddy’s other sons kept their eyes trained forward, rarely talking to Hoyt, marching to collect their prizes and degrees
with regimental precision. Ham had his own reasons for averting his eyes from his youngest son. Hoyt knew too much. He too had been sucked into Maeve’s crazy, throbbing allure, had waded into the same muddy bog. And young Hoyt knew that Ham had the same weakness, that bent toward her madness. Not only had his father coupled with it, he still secretly pined for its tyrannical rhythms.

  Submitting to the Hamilton Eddy program of hard, character-building work, Hoyt tried his best to make his dad proud. He was a quick study, nimble with words, brighter even than his brothers. But his heart was flayed, a salt tide of hormones surging into the wound. His grades rose and fell spasmodically; he became hostile to authority.

  At sixteen, he was diagnosed as hyperactive and prescribed medication, which he sold to other students, since he was already embroiled in a passionate romance with paint thinner.

  His exasperated father sent him to work on a country road crew in southeastern Massachusetts for the summer.

  Hoyt seemed to thrive on outdoor labor and the community of laughing, cursing, shirtless brutes. He loved the hot hazy air, the exorbitant July foliage, the smell of wet tar, the filth that covered him until the evening shower and headlong collapse into bed.

  The advent of August found the crew repaving a minor route near Graynier. One night at a bar, scarfing buffalo wings and brew with his fellows, Hoyt caught the eye of a waitress ten years his senior. She brought over the check, and the other guys grinned in Hoyt’s direction. “The trust fund baby’s buying tonight,” someone said.

  The waitress was late on her rent and must have thought the rich boy might leave some gratitude on her dresser if she did him up good, a hope fanned by the fifty dollar bill he threw down on the check.

  “Do you have anything smaller?” she asked.

  “No.” He didn’t even look her way.

  “Well, do you have anything bigger?”

  The men guffawed. “Reach in his pocket and find out!”

  Hoyt’s face burned redder than his sunburn. Up until then, he had successfully avoided women, still poking the embers of resentment toward his mother. But something, maybe the waitress’ boggy odor, drew him back into the treacherous delta of womanity. Egged on by his cohorts, Hoyt spent the night in her little room above the bar.

  Three nights later, when the road crew moved on to the next county, he left the waitress nothing except the memory of his ropy, sunburnt muscles, his blue, prematurely haunted eyes, and how odd he was, both insolent and shy. For his part, he would remember how she made him a man. He still held onto his misogyny, but he had discovered that a woman could be hammered down to size with the skilled use of his blunt instrument. It was almost a duty to do so: to neutralize the foe.

  Inspired, he knocked up three girls back at school in quick succession. After the third request for abortion money, Ham Eddy gave up on Hoyt. Tired of raising sons, he decided to cut his losses. Though he agreed to pay for the rest of Hoyt’s education, there would be no more beyond that: the boy was hereby disinherited.

  As if chastened, Hoyt immediately applied himself to his studies, and never faltered. As his years of education extended from high school to university to graduate school, his master’s degree in European literature was followed by a law degree, and Ham Eddy began to feel the prickings of fatherly pride despite himself.

  Then Hoyt moved on to business school for two years, studying human resources management. Next came agricultural college, two years in animal husbandry. By now his father suspected he was being hustled. When Hoyt tried to enroll in divinity school at the age of thirty, Ham retracted his promise, cutting his son off for good.

  Once again, Hoyt found himself undefined. Who was he? For all of his childhood he’d been an adjutant to his mother’s fury: a page to her rage. Then from sixteen to thirty he’d become the vengeful scholar, determined to have his old man pay through the nose for a never-ending education.

  Now it was time to put his abundant knowledge to some use. He had no particular ambition. Where should he live? He was a campus rat. What attachments did he have? His male friendships were fleeting, and he had never fucked any woman long enough to fall in love. Who was he? Where did he belong?

  He pictured himself hanging his attorney’s shingle in a quiet, affordable town, not too much work, plenty of time to himself to reread the classics and walk back country roads in the snow; under a canopy of green trees in the summer.

  His thoughts wandered back to Graynier. For three days there, he dimly remembered, he had felt himself emerging as something—a man, a free working man. He remembered the smell of the leaves, the tar, the beer nuts, and his own sweat, pungent and eager; remembered a woman who lived above the bar; the excitement and anticipation as his manhood came forward to greet him.

  Could he force time to yield up that moment again?

  Another force was pulling him back to Graynier, one he wouldn’t have understood even if he had been aware of it. Something darker, baser, unnamable, like the suck of a bog, like a mother’s mud embrace.

  Buying a small bungalow at the foot of Rowell Hill, he had started out full of enterprise. He rented an office in town for his law practice, posting his ad in the community bluebook and The Graynier Gazette. He introduced himself at churches, town meetings, high school sports rallies. He was handsome and magnetic—too good for the sorry little town, really. Jobs began to trickle in: a property closing here, an estate filing there.

  He made the rounds of the bars, handing out his card at the Graynier Saloon, Shicker Shack, The Hut, and O’Malley’s Mare.

  One night on his way home he stopped off at the Mare to chat with the owner, Russ. It was Saint Patrick’s Day; the place was crammed with singles. At one end of the bar, a trio of women wearing plastic leprechaun hats took turns shooting glances at him. At the opposite end, a small middle-aged man of Indian descent was giving a hicky to a scrawny flaccid-breasted fortyish blonde in a green sweater.

  Spotting his mortgage officer across the room with a couple of cute bank tellers, Hoyt took his glass over to their table. A woman stepped in his path.

  “Aren’t you gonna say hi?”

  It was the hickeyed blonde in the green sweater. She was smiling broadly; he noticed a back molar was missing. She struck a challenging pose, one hand coyly covering the burst vessels on her neck. Apparently she thought this was provocative.

  “I’m meeting friends,” he said.

  “Aren’t we friends?” she teased. “Whoops, more than friends, I’d say.”

  He remembered there was a ten in his pocket, change from the gas station. He proffered the bill. “Go have another on me,” he said, hoping to get rid of her.

  Instead she roped her arms around his neck, pulling him in tight. “I can’t believe it’s you. Hoyt! You came back!”

  Despite himself, the pressure of her deflated tits against his ribs woke up his dick.

  The next thing he knew, she was weeping with happiness. “Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod.” She snuffled tears back up her nose, taking her hand away from the hicky to fan herself.

  He looked at her wet, hope-filled eyes, the wrinkled lids powdered blue, her lips coated in some sticky petroleum product. Even through the odor of whiskey and sawdust he knew her scent. She was the waitress of his sixteenth summer.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind he had known, when he moved to Graynier, that this encounter might happen. He had been content to leave it to chance, but now he wondered if he had sought it all along, wanting a reprise of the past—so that she might answer the question a second time, and show him what kind of man he was.

  But he hadn’t reckoned on her aging badly.

  She fumbled in the purse hanging from her shoulder, handing him a photo. “Look. Guess who!”

  He glanced at the picture of a grim overweight adolescent girl. “That’s Pearl,” she said. “She’s your daughter, honey.”

  He smelled bait, saw the trap. He lifted cold eyes to hers. “The hell she is.”

  Her smile vanished
as he thrust the photo back at her. “Hoyt, it’s Marly. Don’t you remember me?”

  “No,” he lied. “Somehow you know my name, but that hardly makes us acquainted.” As she rocked back, he observed her clinically, verifying the wound. Then he flashed his handsome grin. “However, we can fix that. What’s your name again?” And smacked her lightly on the rump.

  Later, leaving Marly’s bed while she slept, he stumbled over the dog in the corridor, falling against Pearl’s door. The girl, fourteen then, stuck her head out: “What the fuck?”

  Hoyt apologized, barely glancing at her as he moved off.

  Outside, he stood in the gray dawn light. Marly had indeed answered his question a second time. Now he knew what kind of man he was: a man who didn’t give a shit.

  What was he doing here, in this town of all places? He felt suddenly that he would never leave, as if he were condemned to the spot. The hills leaned in, the sky pressed down; here he would stay.

  Graynier was his home because it held his truth. He belonged here in this shithole because he was shit. He neither gave a shit about the whore he’d knocked up nor the fat kid who might or might not be his. He would go on banging Marly, now and then: it didn’t mean anything. His feelings were dead.

  And, being dead, required burial. He went back in Marly’s trailer and swiped a bottle of tequila.

  TURNING ON THE JETS in the Meltzers’ steam room, Hoyt strips off his clothes. He sits on the tile banquette to sweat out the skunk odor, swigging from a bottle of Jack Meltzer’s Meursault.

  The wine fails to anesthetize the pain in his neck.

  Images of the accident return. The girl suddenly appears in his truck lights; he rakes the wheel to the left… the car out of nowhere…the smash. His neck in a hot noose of pain.

  He curses Marly. He drinks. He curses the girl in the road. He should have pasted her to the grill. Later, he lies naked on the Meltzers’ bed, letting his body dry in the breeze from the balcony.

  He imagines MOM walking in and catching him. Opening her mouth to scream. He clamps one hand over her mouth, inserting the other between her legs. His fingers find her cleft, squeezing forth the juice until she groans for release. He throws her onto the bed, straddles her, grips a fistful of her hair to hold her head steady, guiding his member to her mouth. She opens to receive it…and laughing, he empties his bladder on her face.