The Mt. Monadnock Blues

by Larry Duberstein

  Al and Alice! He would have to remember their names. And the twins were…Ted and Fred? It emerged that Al McManus edited a software magazine with half a million circulation. You could do a job like that anywhere, he testified; could do it from your own bathroom. Al had not surrendered anything, he had jumped at the chance to move here. Al’s word: jumped.

  Tim cut pale swaths in the emerald green, going back and forth with lazy pleasure. The twins—Heathcliffe and Horridge?—had gone in the house to roust out the Hergies. Clearly they were great pals, and Tim wondered how many good times the Hergies had missed out on just because he showed up, with his Camp White Sneaker plans. “Good intentions, bad planning,” Monty had to tell him once; they were driving away as he arrived.

  A red Chevy pick-up came fishtailing into the driveway, like a stray Duke of Hazzard: racing stripes, mag wheels, thrumming dual exhaust. The Earlmobile, no less.

  “Came by to say hi,” Earl rhymed, singsong.

  “Where’s Ric?”

  “I didn’t eat her, if that’s what you are suggesting. We are not joined at the hip, she and I.”

  “I’m just surprised you would come here without her. Or at all, after what you pulled.”

  “Big Bad Bill!” exclaimed Earl, stepping past Tim to snare the approaching boy and swing him high. Cindy was there in a tick to gain her share of the attention and Earl aired her out, spinning her like a baton before he set her down shouting. After a decade of behaving as though these children resided in Missoula, Montana, he was suddenly their loving Uncle Earl.

  Yet so convincing was this act, they seemed won over. In thirty seconds, Earl had rewritten family history. “I thought Bill might wish to fish,” he grinned.

  “Wish to fish,” said Cindy, liking the music.

  “Nothing fancy, mind you. Just a line and a pole—and the Schooner, of course. Check out the bass in Powder Mill Pond?”

  Hugh and Henry, that was it. He should scribble it on his wrist before he forgot. Hugh and Henry were the twins, and they were the reason Billy, though sorely tempted by Earl’s line-and-a-pole, had to pass on his fishing expedition.

  “Raincheck on it, little amigo,” said Earl. “Another day, we’ll go and play.”

  Tim marvelled at the chutzpah; at the lack of any vestige of a conscience; at the pathetic rhymed couplets.

  “You are quite the poet,” he snapped, when they were alone again in the yard.

  “I was addressing a child,” Earl confided. “You may not have mastered the knack.”

  “Poetry, did I say? More like doggerel.”

  “Maybe. But youngsters do tend to enjoy old Earl. And that boy will want to learn his fishing gear and lore.”

  “Guns and knives too, don’t forget.”

  “And ropes!” Earl exploded with glee. “Hey, I know some knots you couldn’t untie on your most memorable bondage date.”

  Tim wheeled away, with Earl in close pursuit.

  “I’m sorry, Timmy, I apologize. Couldn’t resist the opening. But this is a business deal, that’s all it is, where everyone has a point of view. Like the ballplayer who says he’s worth four million and the owner wants to pay him two. They don’t have to hate each other.”

  “I’m guessing they do, though.”

  “Well I sure don’t. Hell, I respect you trying to do your best by Bill. Why not respect the same in us?”

  Softened by this gambit, and by the sugared tone, Tim wavered. Dear God, he gasped, don’t let me buy a house from this man when I know for a fact there is water in the basement. This man who has always ridiculed and despised me. But he did waver.

  Arms spread wide to welcome Tim’s reply, Earl’s gaze and posture were almost Christlike. Over the top? Maybe. But you needed to believe in yourself to make the sale, and Earl did. Moreover, he had registered Tim’s confusion the way a boxer senses that a tough body punch has discouraged his opponent.

  “Friends?” he said, extending a hand. “We do want to stay friends.”

  “Stay? Friends?”

  “For the sake of the family. For young Bill, and for your Mom. Don’t forget your mother now, Timmy.”

  “I won’t forget my mother. I also haven’t forgotten the adjectives in your friendly note to the Probate Court.”

  That saved him. Thank goodness he remembered The Complaint, in all its saturnine verbosity.

  “Come on now, Timmy, you have to ignore all that bullpiss. That’s not us talking, that’s the damned liars. That’s how they do. You can’t say I didn’t warn you against letting them in.”

  “Quite an imagination those liars have. To dream up all that nasty stuff on their own.”

  “It’s a sales job,” said Earl, in a moment of jarring sincerity, where his interests and the truth coincided precisely. “The liars are just selling something to His Honor.”

  Earl winked. This was all a game. Indeed, it was a fine collaboration, with Tim and Earl on the side of the angels and the corrupt lawyers and judges in Satan’s pay. Earl could be seduced by the sound of his own voice; the meaning did not necessarily matter. It might be Holy Ghost Power or a raised-ranch starter home out on Route 31, all the same once he got rolling. And he had sold himself on Tim as well, on this idea of staying friends. Earl was genuine (that is, he meant it while he was saying it), inviting Tim to ride with him to Keene. “We can hash this thing out,” said Earl.

  “That’s all right,” said Tim. “I’ve got a lot to do.”

  He didn’t have a bloody thing to do, in fact. The grass was cut and Alice McManus had whisked the kids off to the skateboard park. Then, with Earl’s dust still swirling in the air, he was seized by inspiration. Something to do.

  It had been years—decades?—since the last time he had spoken with Erica. Alone, that is. She was like a Russian ice-dancer, with no identity outside the arc of her partner. Her partner, however, would be gone for the next two hours.

  Pit stop at Mrs. Murphy’s, where the coffee was just good enough to let Tim forego one of Mrs. Murphy’s doughnuts, then north on 202 almost to the Peterborough line. He was pretty sure he could find the house; pretty sure she would be home. He sipped past steep farmlands and sand hills on the left, the Contoocook snaking its way north on the right. He would seek Ric out, yes, but what would he say to her? The question was still unanswered when he arrived at her house.

  He could see her shock from twenty yards away. As he approached on foot, such panic was in her eyes that he wondered if he had forgotten his pants—at the very least spilled a bad splotch of coffee in a bad spot. Hers was an expression to greet a madman or a rapist, not a brother, however estranged.

  “I was so close by it would have been rude not to stop.”

  “Earl never found you?”

  “He did. He came by Jill’s house.”

  “So then—?”

  “So I don’t know, there’s just the two of us now, Ric, and it seems too sad and stupid for us to be enemies.”

  “I’m not set against you—not the way you suppose. But Earl and I are together on this. Don’t go thinking we aren’t.”

  “Meaning you assume I came here to trick you somehow?”

  “Beats me why you came here.”

  “I told you, I came because you’re my sister. And you ought to know how honest I am. Don’t you remember when we backed into Mr. Lindsay’s carry-all?”

  “Tim, that was like twenty-five years ago.”

  “Almost. But do you remember what you said we should do?”

  Tim had owned a driver’s license for two days and the whole time Erica, who was fourteen, had pestered him for a joyride. Then they smacked into Jack Lindsay’s immaculately restored lemon-yellow ‘48 Apache in the Monty Ward parking lot.

  “Well,” said Erica, coyly, “it didn’t show. No damage showed.”

  “Maybe not, but it cost a hundred bucks to fix. Jack got every penny of my summer profits that year.”

  “You should have listened to me.”

  Erica had softened. S
he had braced in the doorway like George Wallace on the schoolhouse steps and now she was offering coffee. Tim said yes, to be agreeable, though he saw that the coffee was instant—undrinkable even had he not just polished off a cup of Mrs. Murphy’s. He drank some anyway, to mark acceptance of this newly humane treatment.

  Naked of Earl, naked of attitude, his little sister was still a stranger to Tim. An attractive stranger, he acknowledged, with her long brown hair in a silver clip and her signature close-fitting jeans. It was tight jeans, Anne Bannon said long ago, that kept Ric from caring about her high school grades. She still wore them well, even if Earl Sanderson was all they had fetched her in lieu of education.

  “Remember Sibby Hopkins?” said Tim.

  “Sure I do. What makes you think I can’t remember my own life? But why Sibby?”

  “He just came back to me. A blast from the past.”

  Sibby was the first fetch of Erica’s snug-in-the-seat jeans, that was why. Sibby had occupied her every waking moment junior year; his senior year. He was a clever suitor, too, always cutting deals on the side with Anne. “We’re going to study. I want her to study as much as you do, Mrs. Bannon—so she can come up to the college with me next year.”

  Anne was flattered, and charmed, for Sibby was a well-spoken fine-looking boy. But neither he nor Ric studied very much, and neither ever went up to the college. Sibby became a Seabee.

  “He’s divorced,” said Erica. “I heard it when we were home.”

  “I thought they had four kids.”

  “Five, actually.”

  “Children having children, as they say.”

  “Hardly, Tim. Sibby’s thirty-nine. And what’s-her-face is a year older.”

  “I know, but they had numero uno real early on. He definitely has a twenty-year-old living in Charleston.”

  “I am well aware of that, thank you.”

  “Whoops, sorry. I kind of forgot that what’s-her-face stepped into your picture frame there. Hey, you can be thankful you aren’t down South raising those five kids—on factory wages.”

  “Not everybody breeds like cattle.”

  “A good thing, too. Imagine five kids, day in and day out. Man, it’s hard enough with two.”

  Erica changed, like litmus paper. Uneducated, maybe, but not slow. “So: we finally get the propaganda.”

  “Sorry if it seemed that way. But I wonder if you know how much work is involved.”

  “Does anyone know? Before they have a kid?”

  “Good point. But at least they get to ease into it. They get the one kid, and he’s really small. Can’t talk, just eats milk. So there’s a period of adjustment.”

  “We’ll manage. People do.”

  “Hey, tell me about it.”

  They stepped through a sliding door onto the deck, which looked over a flat, barren yard, with nothing growing. Firewood, stacked tight and square, sat on the sparse grass. It looked as if a boxcar had been packed full of logs and then the boxcar walls had dissolved away.

  “At least there’s two of us,” said Erica. “Plus, kids are in school all day.”

  To Tim, this smacked of Earl offering her comfort. His retort was gentle, merely factual. “They do come home at three o’clock.”

  “There’s always boarding school, in a pinch.”

  Parent to parent, across the picket fence, this would be a harmless, cynical jest. But Tim heard Earl again, buttressing Ric with a fallback plan.

  “Sure. Boarding school would cut way down on your obligations.”

  “I imagine it would.”

  “Expensive, though. From what I hear, private school is as much as college.”

  “I know that.”

  Had Tim read her mind a minute earlier, it would have been Sibby Hopkins and summer nights at the tank in Mullins. When he read her now, it was Come home Earl and be quick about it.

  “Imagine the cost of two kids over ten years—before they even get to college. Sixty bucks for sneakers? Three bucks for an ice cream cone? It’s gotta be a million dollars.”

  “You’re the math whiz.”

  “I’m the parentis, too, Ric. And I don’t want to send them away to school.”

  “Who said we do?”

  You did, said Tim, though only to himself. He saw her steeliness and regretted the way the visit had drifted; knew that he had blown it.

  “No one,” he said. “And this is my fault. We shouldn’t have gotten into any of this stuff.”

  “It’s bound to be on our minds,” she said, regaining equanimity, choosing civility, though she had a powerful impulse to kick her brother in the shins.

  The children seemed way too calm. They had gone back into society, so to speak, and they moved back into their lives so comfortably. Billy organized his baseball cards, Cindy endlessly rearranged a collection of rubber dolls with comically hideous faces. Now and then, they came to him with harmless questions.

  Where was the trauma?

  Hoping to find out, Tim placed a call to Olivia Goldsmith—several calls, as the day progressed. He tried her office, home, pager, cell: no Goldsmith today.

  Before dinner he assigned some yard work, raking, on general trail-through-the-jungle principles, and they pitched in enthusiastically. When he fired up the gas grill, they practically salivated, and eagerly wolfed down the hot dogs and hamburgers.

  There was a basketball hoop mounted on the neighbors’ garage, and Billy bounced his ball that way after dinner. Tim went along, to hang out. He retrieved Billy’s hits and misses, took very few shots of his own, and avoided altogether the nefarious practice of “dribbling.” Billy seemed untroubled. Businesslike, really; basketball was his business.

  When Hugh and Henry came out, Tim stood with Al McManus, side by side, arms folded. “It’s really Bill’s court,” said Al. “He uses it more than we do.”

  “He’s good,” said Tim.

  Al gave him a look, as though Tim had just told him it can get cold in December. “Very good,” he smiled.

  “I didn’t want to brag.”

  Later, Tim suggested an evening cruise on Gilmore Pond—load the canoe and be there for the sunset over Mt. Monadnock.

  “Sunset, Unk? No thanks,” said Cindy, and Billy shot him the high sign. BATS, he mouthed silently.

  This would have to pass for the trauma. The one time they had canoed through the Gilmore twilight, they noticed a bat skimming across the water toward them and soon a second bat. (Mr. and Mrs Bat, they joked.) Before long it became a bit alarming—dozens, possibly hundreds of bats, black against the blackening sky, and the creatures were strafing them absolutely, as though the mosquitos were only for dessert.

  “You’ve got bats in your belfry,” Tim said to Cindy. “And don’t you ask me what a belfry is.”

  “What’s a belfry?” she fired back on cue, with childlike joy he would have to say, still baffled by it.

  “Can we stay this week?” said Billy.

  “I wish. Next week, though. Promise.”

  “For real?”

  “For real, Cynthia.”

  That would be the week of the hearing in Keene. Dissolution and Promiscuity, starring Timothy Bannon.

  He took Cindy along to pick up milk and bread. (Quality time, he could not help thinking, parentally, though they had run out of milk.) She slid close to him coming home, almost like a teenage girlfriend. Reluctant to dislodge her from any source of comfort, Tim only belatedly registered the departure from form. Cindy had disdained the back seat, disdained her seatbelt, disdained rules altogether.

  Jill’s rules. As if, on a subterranean level, she too was moving them into an experimental new regime. “I’ll be your seatbelt for this trip,” he laughed once he had caught on, and comically extended his right arm like a guard rail the rest of the way.

  “What’s up?” said Olivia Goldsmith.

  “Nothing in a way. That’s the problem: life just goes on.”

  “Life does go on.”

  “It’s crazy, it’s like n
othing happened. They never talk about it.”

  “Do you? Have you brought it up?”

  “I have kind of left it to them—so no, I guess. I didn’t want to force it on them.”

  “That’s fine. But what exactly do you see as the problem?”

  “Reality? I’ll give you an example. Since we were last here, some of my sister’s flowers came up. Nasturtiums. Cindy helped Jill plant them, which I know because I know, not because Cindy said so. She noticed the flowers, I noticed her noticing them, and then she sort of skipped away.”

  “Nervously.”

  “Maybe. She looked calm to me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “A test! I did do something, I asked her what they were, the flowers that she and her mom had planted. She said ‘Nasturtiums—Mom’s favorite.’ Just like that.”

  “That’s some kid you’ve got there.”

  “She was closer to Monty, you know. And not once has she mentioned him. Not one word.”

  “She will. It sounds as though you are all doing fine.”

  “You don’t know the rest of it,” said Tim, and made her listen to a brief synopsis of the legal tangle. “So now I’m supposed to fight off the competition with one hand while I boil oatmeal with the other.”

  “Try some of that one-minute stuff. My kids actually preferred it.”

  “Apart from the homemaking tips, I don’t suppose you would know who the guardian ad litem is up here.”

  “There’s no such office. Different people get appointed to do it. I’ve done it.”

  “I’d love for it to be you.”

  “It can’t be me. I’ve been involved.”

  Tim was hoping she would ask him to bring the kids in for a tuneup. Instead Goldsmith closed with another tip from her country kitchen: “Honey wheat germ and thin slices of banana. Add them to the instant oatmeal and kids will eat it like a hot fudge sundae.”

  That night Tim sat in the kitchen with a glass of wine, reading magazines. Monty subscribed to half a dozen and sometimes, on a rainy day, Tim would leaf through them the way one does at a dentist’s office. Absently. Because they were there.

  But tonight he read them intensively, as though cramming for a final exam on makeovers or celebrity dating. He was digesting every sentence, storing every shard of gossip, though none of it held the slightest interest for him. On the contrary, he hated Michael Jackson’s music, hated Woody Allen’s movies, didn’t care a fig for Alan Greenspan’s fiscal pieties. Yet he absorbed it all, Time and Life and Newsweek after Newsweek.