The Mt. Monadnock Blues

by Larry Duberstein

  He was so agitated afterward, however, that sleep was an impossibility. Tim was a gifted sleeper. Everyone else complained of bad nights, but when Tim went to bed he went to sleep. Except tonight. Tonight he found himself caught in that exhausting conundrum whereby the more desperately you crave sleep, the less likely sleep becomes. His thoughts ricocheted around a universe of distress, beginning with the kids. The two mutes.

  Their sleeping, at least, Tim had taken for granted. But why had he? What if they tossed and muttered in the dark? What if they argued with God every night, unleashing their sadness at the stars? He had been so careful not to invade their space, or compromise their privacy. If he went to their rooms at two a.m. would he find Billy wide awake with jaws clenched or Cindy weeping softly, pawing at her ancient scrap of blanket?

  Al. He went back over the conversation with Al, rewriting it. He had labored to remain civil despite feeling undermined, betrayed. Now he let Al have it, forming whole paragraphs in the dark, acidly refuting all Al’s points. Letting anger be okay.

  Then it was Earl’s turn, for really Al McManus was just a well-meaning guy whose wife wished she had more children. Why be pissed at him when Earl Sanderson was the true villain? Earl had ignored Jill’s wishes, manipulated Anne, confused Billy—and all for the love of money. To make money off Jill’s death! Tim ought to have gone straight there and pounded Earl into dust. Yes, physically. Should have held him to account, just as Tim’s father had done with Joss Lyman. Was there any doubt what Rex would have done when he learned that Earl was in this for the money?

  No one liked Joss Lyman, but no one ever intervened in his drunken sprees. In Carolina, in 1958, you minded your own business, especially when it came to family. Until Rex had to make an exception. There were people who believed it concerned a loan, since Lyman never paid back the fifty dollars Rex gave him when Clara was sick and they couldn’t afford the hospital. Anyone who knew Rex understood he never expected to see that money again, that it wasn’t a loan, just charity—same as when he intervened.

  Lyman’s sins usually stayed within his walls. You never saw it, but Clara Lyman somehow walked into a lot of doors. This one time, though, she was running through the yard as they chanced by in the pickup: Tim, Jill, and Rex. They saw her trip in the debris (tires and frames and rolled fence) then claw her way toward the road. Saw Lyman twist her arm until her face came around and smash her with his fist closed. It made a sound Tim had never forgotten, like an axe splitting bone.

  He had never seen Rex move so fast. Rex shouted, but Lyman ignored him. He tried to pin the man’s arms, but Lyman shoved free and stood snarling at Rex about private property and goddamned Communists. Tim guessed it was the Communists that did it, for Rex promptly coldcocked him. Laid him out like a sack of meal, right there in the man’s front yard.

  When Lyman came awake, Rex apologized. Said he was sorry to hit him, he was only trying to keep him out of jail. It was a crime to lay hands on your wife, didn’t Joss know that? Didn’t he understand if he ever did it again, Rex would have to call in the sheriff?

  “You said that part so he wouldn’t. Right, Daddy?”

  “That’s right, Jilly. But he will anyway.”

  “Maybe not, Pa. You really whomped him one.”

  “I lost my temper, Timmy, I truly did. When he said about private property, I thought he meant poor Clara Whipple—like she was in white slavery to him. I reckon he meant I was in his yard, is all.”

  So it wasn’t the Communists. But this was by far the fullest explanation Tim (eight at the time) ever heard from his father, the strictest accounting. Rex did what he did with such clarity of motive that words rarely attached to his actions.

  “She should have stayed Clara Whipple,” he said to them with a sheepish grin. “That’s where the problem began. Never marry a Lyman.”

  Rex was on rare uncertain ground, his voice still troubled, when he told Anne what had happened. It stayed with him for weeks, surfacing in hints that Tim could hear clearly. Tim himself had no doubt his father had behaved nobly. It was shocking to see Mr. Lyman get exactly what he deserved, yet it was grand. It was like the frontier justice doled out every Saturday at the matinée western.

  Thirty-two years later, the lesson was intact: when someone truly earned a punch in the nose, a real man went and punched him. But Tim was not a real man, not his father’s son. He was a coward, who had never hit anyone in his life.

  Or not yet. Sliced through by this sharp memory, his eyes raw with exhaustion, Tim began to plan (or fantasize) an assault. He would coldcock Earl Sanderson and he would scatter a few dollar bills on Earl as he lay on the ground rubbing his busted jaw. “You want money? Here’s some money for you.” It sounded so right, this new resolve, and it soothed him. It let him drift into a brief light sleep, too quickly jostled by a dream. A dream so quick and vivid he might have slept simply in order to dream it…

  At the COURT HOUSE in Keene, Tim was imploring the judge. He shoved papers forward, spoke forcefully, made his case. The judge, leafing through a newspaper, showed no interest. Then Earl was lodging an objection (“Enough of this gobbledy-gook”) and the judge was amused. He and Earl laughed together, a ratcheting metallic laughter that drove Tim from the room.

  As he left, Earl heckled him (“Homo homo homo”) and Tim whirled, screeching like a toucan, trying to lash out. His arms were pinned. “Timmy Timmy Timmy,” mocked Earl, and finally Tim broke free and began whacking at Earl’s knees with a canoe paddle. He woke hot and frantic, flailing in the bedsheets.

  And he lay there, the Timmy Timmy Timmy echoing inside his head. A crow was cawing on the road. The children were downstairs crashing plates in the kitchen. He reached for the phone.

  “A question. When you ran down Earl’s scheme for me—hoarding land, Wal-Mart—what did you expect me to do about it?”

  “Do? I didn’t expect you to do anything.” (Except maybe be grateful. But no, Karl certainly did not expect that.)

  “You didn’t think I’d be angry?” demanded Tim, clearly angry now.

  “Sure, Tiger, absolutely. Royally pissed.”

  “Pissed enough to go after him?”

  “Not this again. Not the Rex.”

  Tim begged for the chance to explain himself—which Karl, stunned, could hardly resist. Tim never explained himself. But then the explanation was so silly. Confirmed: a full-blown Rex Attack.

  “Bust his chops, Timothy? You are in fear for your mortal soul because you failed to ‘bust Earl’s chops’?”

  “I’m a wimp, Karl. A coward.”

  “You just have this huge Rex hangup. It’s way too obvious.”

  “This has nothing to do with my father.”

  “It has everything to do with him.”

  “You think that.”

  “Yes I do. Listen, my poor dear boy. We are gay, in America. Which does not grant us easy perspective from which to assess our manhood, of all things.”

  “How does anyone prove his manhood?”

  “Why does anyone prove it, is what I always say. Timmy, you’ve been under a terrific strain.”

  “I am so incredibly tired, Karl. I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “You?”

  The children were still at the kitchen table. Billy (head down, the oval of brown hair presented) was reading the box scores. He glanced up for a nanosecond—“Hey, Unk”—when Tim said good morning. Cindy was reading Jessica Ballou, Balloonist which, as far as Tim could tell, she had read six or seven times by now.

  She greeted him so blandly she might have been one of those windup dolls: you pull a string and it squeaks out set phrases in a waning soprano, Have a nice day.

  They were doing just enough to place themselves beyond criticism. Then, abruptly, they were stuffing knapsacks with apples and granola bars, and mumbling a plan for the day that sounded safe and approvable. Tim, who had not had his coffee yet, could only give approval and watch them go. They weren’t even talking to each other, just pedali
ng their bicycles like automatons.

  Who were these two short people? It rattled Tim to lose track of them, to lose the threads of union that made running a household (even this one, with himself at the helm) possible. He was the cook and the maid, reduced to feeding them and cleaning the house, though he had not cleaned their rooms in a month. Had not laundered their sheets. He went upstairs now to gather the bedding, but really he went to snoop for clues.

  Billy’s room, like its occupant of late, had little to say about his identity. Or no: it said what it always said, in cards and magazines and posters. It said Larry Bird and Diego Maradona. The boy was terrific, yet all he could offer future archaeologists was sports paraphernalia, plus a few candy wrappers under his desk.

  Cindy’s room was more eloquent. It was shockingly direct and Tim had no excuse for missing the message it delivered—nor had he the slightest doubt that the tightlipped ad litem had heard it loud and clear. The room was a small airless shrine. Cindy had locked the windows, drawn the curtains, and dotted the perimeter with candles. None of them had been lit, thank God, though even from within his caisson of obliviousness Tim might have noticed that.

  There were photographs of Jill and Monty everywhere. As teenagers, in college, ice skating, marrying. On the nightstand was a framed enlargement of Jill hugging Cindy that looked recent, possibly taken the last day of school, in June. The school entrance and the sign were visible behind their sundrenched heads.

  Alongside the photo lay Cindy’s copy of a book Monty had made for her with the title Cautionary Poems. He made one for each of them; Tim recalled that Billy’s copy sported the famous “cowlick picture” with the ever-tilting tuft of hair. Where had that tuft gone, and when? Everyone assumed it was permanent, that it would be there when Dr. William Hergesheimer, aged sixty, performed complex brain surgery with the cowlick poking up through his green hospital cap.

  On each page of Cautionary Poems Monty had drawn an animal and written two short lines of verse about it. Don’t get in line/ behind that porcupine. Don’t lock the skunk/ in your steamer trunk. The sketches, the poems, even the binding had all been done by Monty. Better not wake/ that poison snake.

  Cindy had been clinging to history, to these happy fragments of her past. Tim read the inscription (“To my baby girl with LOVE from Daddy”) and looked at the picture of Cindy at three and a half, with a two-tooth hole in her smile, the fair hair much curlier. It was a devastating sight. His tears came hot and steady, his body rocked on the child’s bed. The tears were general, for everyone (not least for himself), though first of all for Cindy. Her room, her shrine. Her grief concentrated here like an intense local storm.

  He fled the house. Vaulted the low stonewall to go through woods to the main road. There he began to run, with no destination in mind, nothing in his head beyond the echo of Monty’s rhymes. Don’t swim in the dark/ so close to the shark. Running in the bright air slowed his tears, though the sadness had bored into his muscles like a cramp. He shut his eyes and inhaled aromas: freshmown fieldgrass, cold kettle water from the nearby pond, tarry heat building on the road.

  Life gave you those green fields, and lakes, and laughter. It gave you love. Then, sooner or later, it took everything away. It gave you youth (and hair!) only to blow it away like stray paper. And yet loss—whatever you lost—was your best evidence of blessings for you could only lose what you had and having was irrefutably a temporary condition. Was this consoling, though, or just a way of framing the bad news?

  It did seem tears could be cathartic, because Tim was cleansed of anger, released from any urge to demonstrate his manhood. All that was gone the way a trailer is gone after a cyclone—gone gone—and his concern had come back around, quite purified, to the children. He was himself again—just Unk—and he was there to do what he could for them. Though first he would have to find them.

  He went straight to Alice. Earlier, feeling awkward and resentful, Tim had avoided her. With his anger as mysterious now as it had been vivid then, he wanted to bring Alice in on the case. She would know where Billy and Cindy had gone, plus he could thank her (belatedly yet sincerely) for her largehearted gesture. Thank both McManuses, and let them know he had given their proposal careful consideration. He had not given it one moment’s consideration, of course, but surely that was beside the point. The point was to find the kids.

  Alice was not at her house, however. Too restless to wait around, Tim made a circuit of likely spots: the schoolyard, the riverwalk, soccer field, convenience store. Apart from Hugh and Henry, he had no idea where their pals lived. The kids were safe, Tim told himself, no reason to suppose they weren’t safe. Possibly they were with Alice. But there was nothing he could do at the moment and because he could not do nothing, he started making calls.

  “I wanted your opinion,” he said to Attorney Dee Barnes. “There’s a new offer on the table.”

  “No one’s called me.”

  “This didn’t come from Earl and Erica, it’s the neighbors up here, the McManuses. Should I give you the quick and simple version?”

  The quick and simple version was the only version there was:

  Al and Alice would take the kids. And there was the garage apartment, with Unk in a bunk.

  “We could sell it,” said Barnes.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Enneguess will like it. You do understand this is still in his hands. You and Erica can’t make it happen simply by agreeing. But I’m sure he’ll like this.”

  “Why will he?” said Tim, with reflexive prickliness.

  “It gives him a way to compromise. Judges like to do that. And it’s good. With you so strongly in the picture, and Erica right close by? The kids could do worse. Presuming they go for it.”

  “The kids don’t know about it.”

  “But the Sandersons are agreeable?”

  “They don’t know about it, either. And I haven’t made a decision, I was just letting you know.”

  “You do remember we’re due in court on Monday?”

  Barnes could be curt. She was his lawyer, not his friend, and she worked without a secretary. Fair enough for her to end a conversation abruptly. But Karl Trickett was every bit as impatient with him. “I’m in court, Tim. Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday, when you were maundering on about your manhood?”

  “Are you really in court, or is that what lawyers say to get themselves off the telephone?”

  “I am standing inside an actual bricks-and-mortar courthouse. Though I admit I’m downstairs buying Lifesavers at the precise moment.”

  “Then you can spare a minute to go over the pros and cons.”

  “What cons? Do the deal, Timmy. You could not hope for better than those two people.”

  “They’re nice people, Karl, but they’re not family.”

  “There you have it. They are nice people and Earl is family. Quod erat demonstrandum. Reductio ad absurdum.”

  “Agricola agricolae,” said Tim in response.

  Maybe Ellie would be nicer to him. She had called last night to chat with Cindy—and Cindy had chatted! A couple of times, Tim heard Cindy’s best laugh, sort of a hum inside a gurgle. (Heard it for the first time in over a week.) Then she had breezed past him en route to her secret cave of sadness.

  Ellie was perfectly nice to him, she listened patiently, but her response seemed oversimplified. “Great,” she said.

  “What’s so great about it?”

  “Wasn’t your big thing that you had no alternative? Well so here’s an alternative and a pretty good one, I’d say.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. Good for the kids and good for you, don’t forget. You could come home. We need you here.”

  “You noticed I was gone.”

  “Just a little. You know how insufferable Charles can get when he has two women. He thinks it proves something—which it does, of course. Plus he has this new scent—”

  “Two women? What about Cassandra? Two weeks ago he was head over hee
ls in love.”

  “Cassandra is the fair, but Donna is the dark.”

  “I don’t believe you. Does he have photos of Donna too?”

  “Photos?”

  “Never mind,” said Tim. He could see Ellie draw back, as if the pictures might prove even more obscene than the new scent.

  “Listen,” said Ellie, pushing her way past a fresh and startling insight that Tim and Charles were not so different, that stability scared them both silly. “Tell Billy and Cindy. Ask them what they think about it.”

  “I knew you would say that.”

  “Because it’s so sensible?”

  “No, because it’s what you always say.”

  “It’s what you always seem to forget.”

  “Ell, I’ve got to get off,” he said, as he spotted Alice’s van at the mailboxes. He rushed out.

  The twins were with her, Billy and Cindy were not. Alice said she hadn’t seen them in two days. The Hugh (or the twin Tim suspected of being Hugh) hazarded a guess: “They might be at the graveyard.”

  “The graveyard?”

  “At the tennis courts, Mom. On the hill.”

  “Why would they be there, honey?”

  Hugh shrugged. “Maybe they aren’t. They go there sometimes is all.”

  “Okay, that’s good to know. It might help.”

  Minutes later, Tim was driving back down the bumpy dirt lane that led to the soccer field and the town tennis courts. He had never noticed the cemetery, which spread over a plateau above the courts, obscured by a fence that ran along the ledge. It seemed unlikely the kids could have dragged their bicycles up the steep embankment, but Tim scrambled up the dirt cut in the hillside, stepped through a portal in the fence, and saw them. Score one for Hugh.

  “Why are you here, Unk?” said Billy, more puzzled than rude.

  “Why are you here, is the question. I’ve been looking for you all over town.”

  “We were coming home by six.”

  “And we ate lots of carrots,” said Cindy. She was relieved to see her uncle, having feared the person they heard coming might be a gravedigger, or a policeman.