by Drury, Tom
It belonged to the friend and one day Jack took it to a used sporting goods place and sold it.
“I figured you’d want it off your hands,” he explained when his friend came home. “It’s not like you use it.”
“What I do with my canoe is my business.”
“It hangs behind the garage. That’s what you do with it.”
“If I never so much as touch the motherfucker that doesn’t give you the right to sell it.”
“Okay, okay,” said Jack. “I was going to take a commission, but you can have it all, if that’s how you’re going to be.”
Jack’s friend counted the bills. “That was a nine-hundred-dollar canoe.”
“Not all bleached out it wasn’t. Did you even look at it lately?”
“Get out.”
Jack took a room by the week in the Continental Hotel on the north end of Stone City. This was an ornate stone property built when the railroad came through and falling to ruin ever since. The people who stayed there seemed like ghosts, with unkempt hair and mismatched clothes.
Jack Snow met Wendy, daughter of the couple who would hire Dan, at a fair in the park, where she had set up a folding table to sell moccasins and billfolds.
“Beautiful hobbycraft,” said Jack.
Wendy had thick blond hair, small and nimble hands, and a skeptical expression that invited you to talk her out of it.
“When are you supposed to wear moccasins?” said Jack. “Are they bedroom slippers? Can you wear them on the street? Wouldn’t the asphalt wear them down?”
“All shoes are damaged by asphalt,” said Wendy. “It may surprise you that moccasins hold up better than most. I myself wear them all the time.”
She turned sideways on her folding chair and crossed her legs. Jack knelt in the grass and slipped a moccasin from her foot, revealing toenails painted cobalt blue.
Wendy pressed her bare foot to his chest and gave a little shove, setting him back on his heels.
“You should get some for your girlfriend,” she said.
“Don’t have one. I’m new in town.”
“Oh. I see.”
They slept together that night in the Continental Hotel. The atmosphere was eeriest at night but Jack found it entertaining in the company of Wendy. They lay in bed listening to the groan of the elevator moving floor to floor. Coughing and faint voices came from other rooms.
“You got a tiger’s eyes,” said Jack.
“Tiger sounds,” she said.
Wendy lived in a duplex by the water tower, and Jack soon moved in with her. He called her Wendell and said no one understood her the way he did, which may have been true.
He liked to watch her remove makeup with gauze pads, mouth open, eyes serious and dark in the mirror. Their sex was bereft and elemental and reminded Jack for some reason of the ranch house on the empty hill.
Wendy cut and sewed her leather pieces at home under a halogen lamp until one or two in the morning. She wore big glasses that made her especially sexy. Sometimes a sadness came over her, and she did not want to do anything, and Jack would feed her cherry ice cream from a spoon.
One summer evening as Jack Snow sat smoking in a nature preserve north of Stone City a man and his long-legged pointer came strolling along.
The dog bounded into the reeds as the man walked the trail, hands in pockets, eyes on the ground. Every once in a while he would whistle and the dog would leap above the weeds, now close, now far.
The man walked over and sat on the bench beside Jack. He called the dog and she came running and sat panting and looking at the man from the corners of her eyes.
“Are you from Omaha?” said Jack.
“Mmm, could be.”
“I hope you’re happy with what you’re getting.”
“Wouldn’t be here otherwise. We need more of it.”
“What do you do with it?”
“Not your concern.”
“Who buys it?”
“Nobody.”
“I was told I would learn the trade,” said Jack.
“This is the trade.”
The man stood and the dog looked up. “How’d you get into the Celtic stuff?”
“I had a girlfriend one time who was big on it,” said Jack. “Her name was Sandy.”
“Was she a Druid?”
“Something like that.”
Jack exaggerated—he lied—calling Sandy Zulma his girlfriend. They had been friends as children in the town of Mayall, Minnesota, where they’d played scenes from books of Irish and Welsh legends that she knew and taught to him.
Sometimes she would be Emer to his Cúchulainn, Hound of Ulster, flirting with the young warrior or dying of grief over his body finally brought to ground.
She liked to portray the tragic Deirdre who killed herself rather than live without the betrayed Sons of Usna. They fought the endless battle of the Hound and his old friend Ferdiad, who lost with grief on both sides. And they played chess, because the kings and warriors often did so in the downtime between battles and other adventures.
As teenagers Jack and Sandy went their separate ways. Sandy wanted to keep playing, or perhaps it was no longer play, and Jack fell in with a drinking crowd and gave up their games. When he saw Sandy on the street or in school he would act as if he hardly knew her. He regretted the unkindness.
Louise took the long route home and stopped to see her mother in Grafton. It was after ten but Mary Montrose stayed up late listening to radio shows about paranormal phenomena and the breakdown of society.
Mary’s recliner stood in the center of the house on a thronelike platform with its back to the wall. The platform had been built by her friend Hans Cook. Mary had become nervous about storms in her old age—lightning, tornadoes, tree branches breaking through windows—and thought the elevated chair would help her see what was coming.
“Look what the wind carried in,” said Mary. “You coming from the junk store?”
“Yep,” said Louise, who had long since given up telling Mary it wasn’t a junk store. “Have you eaten?”
“I was just about to put something on.”
“You lie. You need to eat, Ma.”
Mary went to the dining room table and took a seat, blinking in the light. Louise lit a burner on the stove and poured oil into a skillet, tipping it back and forth. She held a bag of frozen shrimp and vegetables and sawed it open with a butcher knife.
“Here, Louise, there’s scissors for that,” said Mary. “You look like somebody cleaning a fish.”
“I wouldn’t clean a fish if my life depended on it.”
“I bet you would.”
“This is true.”
Louise slid the frozen block of food into the pan of hot oil, where it made the reassuring racket of frying.
“What’s Dan think?” said Mary.
“About what?”
“You running around so late.”
“He’s all right with it. Why? Did he say something?”
“They go crazy.”
“Who does?”
“Men. Get to a certain age. There was a lady on the radio the other night, her husband left her and moved to Phoenix. Baby of the family no more than seven years old.”
“What’d he do in Phoenix?
“What didn’t he do is more like it. Bought a boat. Wrecked the boat. Got a nurse pregnant.”
“Jesus.”
“Married the nurse, divorced the nurse. Opened a restaurant, that went bust. Got hepatitis.”
Louise put oven mitts on and carried the skillet to the table. “What do you think?”
“I would give that one more minute.”
Louise went back to the stove and pushed the seared food around with a wooden spatula. “You shouldn
’t listen to that morbid junk.”
“It is morbid.”
“Supper is served,” said Louise, setting plates on the table.
After they ate, Louise did the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen, and they moved their little party to the living room. Louise made a Twister for herself and tea with brandy for Mary, and they sat looking out the picture window.
Every now and then a car would go around the corner, headlights glancing off the leaves of Mary’s trees before pivoting toward the deserted downtown.
They didn’t say much. Mary seemed to have talked herself out with the tale of the man who went to pieces in Phoenix. Louise sat on the davenport, one level below her stately mother, her mind floating with the ice in her drink. Around eleven-thirty, she closed the curtains and kissed her mother goodnight.
Mary took her hand. “I won’t be here forever, Louise.”
“Yes, you will,” said Louise. “Your signs are all good. The doctor said. Why? Is something wrong?”
“Not at all. I just want you to know that when I do go? I’ll be ready. And that will be why.”
“I won’t be ready.”
“I know. But I wanted to tell you. So you won’t have to feel bad.”
One afternoon in August Lyris Darling and her boss Don Gary rode out to Rose Hill south of Boris to look at a gravestone with a typographical error. Chrysanthemum bushes were taking over the burial ground, flinging stems and flowers over the long grass. Lyris liked cemeteries wild and abandoned.
They found the monument, on which the inscription was every bit as defective as had been reported by the family. The deceased was named Cynthia and the engravers had transposed the second and third letters of her name.
“This is sad,” said Don Gary.
“You want me to call Taber Brothers?” said Lyris.
Don Gary took his glasses off and cleaned them with a handkerchief. “Did we have it right?”
Lyris took their copy of the order from her purse and handed it to him.
“You get Tabers on the phone and you tell them Don Gary is pissed off,” he said.
“Okay.”
He ran his fingers along the top of the stone. “Actually, don’t,” he said. “All I need is those fuckers mad at me.”
“I’ll just say they owe us a new stone.”
“Good idea.”
They went back to Don Gary’s Suburban and drove the perimeter of the cemetery. Don pointed out a memorial with a row of beer cans set carefully before it and observed that tributes evolve with the times and the industry must stay relevant.
As he spoke Lyris saw a black pickup rolling in, tiger-striped with dust. She slouched in her seat.
“It’s my grandmother. Keep going.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” said Don Gary, always eager to meet someone who might someday die.
He stopped and called out the window, and Lyris’s grandmother parked her truck beside his and leaned her heavy arm on the door.
“What do you want?” she said.
“I’m Don Gary of Gary Memorials in Stone City. Got somebody here I think you know. Look over here. It’s Lyris.”
He leaned back, glancing from grandmother to granddaughter, beaming.
“You let her go now,” said Colette. She pushed the door of the truck open and it banged the side of the Suburban.
“No, no, no,” said Don Gary, his friendly, professional voice gone thin with alarm. “You misunderstand me.”
Colette stepped down from the truck with a crowbar in her hand. Lyris skirted the front of the Suburban and took the bar from her grandmother and led her down the space between the vehicles.
“Sorry, Grandma,” she said. “That’s my boss. He’s not kidnapping me. He just can’t shut up sometimes.”
Colette looked at Don Gary, who was rubbing the side panel of the Suburban with a handkerchief.
“What are you doing in the graveyard?” said Colette.
“One of the headstones is messed up,” said Lyris.
“You tell that man not to yell at people he don’t know.”
“Well, I did tell him that.”
“Maybe that’s how they do it in Stone City but down here it’s bad business.”
She unlatched the tailgate of the pickup and let it fall. A red wagon lay wheels up among flats of flowers on the truck bed. Lyris picked up the wagon, set it on the ground, and put the flowers in it.
“Thank you, sweetness. I bet you’re missing Micah with him gone.”
“Yeah. We didn’t see that much of each other after Albert and I started going out. He was jealous, I think.”
Colette took the handle of the wagon from the grass. “Did you see any birds this morning?”
“Not that I remember.”
“I didn’t either.” She looked at the trees and the sky. “I’m trying to figure out why.”
The old lady trundled among the headstones, pulling the wagon. She had three husbands buried here. She had never spoken well of them and said flowers were a small price to keep them where they belonged.
Don Gary and Lyris drove north to the city. They went several miles before saying anything. Then Don checked his mirrors, cleared his throat, and said, “I imagine nobody pushes her around too much.”
“Not too much, Don,” said Lyris, watching the roadside for birds.
A faded sign by the desk of the Continental Hotel said that shoes left by eight o’clock in the evening would be shined by eight o’clock the following morning.
Dan Norman showed the manager a photograph of Jack Snow and asked if he recognized him.
“Vaguely,” said the manager. He was an old man wearing a starched white shirt, vest, and bow tie. “What’d he do?”
“Maybe nothing,” said Dan. “Did he talk to you about his business? Meet with anyone? Did he carry cash beyond the usual?”
“I wouldn’t say so.”
“Do you remember him at all?”
“You know, I don’t.”
Dan looked around the lobby. The shades were open but the light did not come in. Four people lay about on frayed furniture. Two watched a game show on television, one sat with folded hands by the window, and the fourth lay with her feet on the back of a couch looking at a big book of railroad pictures.
“Good morning,” said the manager over a public-address system the existence of which seemed to surprise everyone. “This is Leon speaking to you once again. If anyone should happen to recall a guest named Jack Snow, please advise the desk.”
The woman lying on the davenport closed the book of locomotives and got up. In slate-blue coveralls and black clogs, a red scarf over her hair, she crossed the lobby in long strides.
“I know Jack Snow,” she said. “Is he here?”
“In Stone City, I believe he is.”
“I think he might have something I want.”
“Like what?”
She told Dan about the rock she was after and its possible origins, this time adding that it might be a piece of the stone split by Cúchulainn at Baile’s Strand after he killed his son by accident.
“Are you part of his business?” said Dan.
“What business?”
“Celtic artifacts.”
“He stole the idea from me.”
“What is the idea?”
“Putting the world back together.”
Dan understood that the young woman was not in her right mind and gave her his business card, which he found to be a good way to end a conversation.
“You run across Jack Snow, you give me a call,” he said.
She read the card and then tucked it into the red scarf above her ear.
“I will, Daniel,” she said.
She went back to the davenpo
rt and began looking at the picture book again.
“I wouldn’t take her too serious,” said the manager quietly. “She’s not current on her accounts. But I let them go sometimes. They’ve got to be somewhere. Aren’t you the sheriff?”
“One time I was. Do you really shine shoes?”
“Ah, there’s no real call for it anymore. Can’t shine a tennis shoe.”
Sandra laid the railroad book on the rug and climbed the stairs of the Continental Hotel to her room on the fourth floor. She reclined on the bed, head on the pillow, feet against the end rails.
“I am an immortal,” she said to the ceiling, as if reassuring herself. “We came to the island of Eire in clouds that blocked the sun three days. From Falias we brought the stone that sings for the true king. The Milesians drove us underground. I washed red clothes in the ford, trying to warn Cúchulainn. But he was too proud to go back.”
Then she turned on her side and folded her legs to fit the bed. Sleep was her only happiness. She was sleeping too much. It could not be helped. She would need her strength for what was coming.
Tiny Darling rattled an aluminum pan of scraps and set it in the sun for the goat.
“Who’s hungry?” he said.
The goat rocked on silver haunches, building momentum to climb onto the porch.
The phone rang and Tiny went inside. It might have been a job and might have been Micah, but it was only a recording.
“The FBI has learned that houses in your zip code are burglarized once every five seconds,” said a woman. “We are in your area now.”
“Hell, come on by,” said Tiny. “We’ll throw some steaks on.”
He hung up the phone and went back out to the porch and watched the goat eat.
“I’m told we might be in for some burglaries,” Tiny said.
CHAPTER FIVE
JOAN HAD to find a school for Micah in the fall. She made packets with an eight-by-ten glossy, transcripts, and an essay he’d written. This is how the essay started:
When I was small I survived a tornado that blew the van in which I was a passenger through a silo. The wind was so loud that all the world and its things seemed to be made of sound waves. Tools floated about like you might pick one from the air as an astronaut would in zero gravity. The tornado taught me that you can get in and out of trouble in unexpected ways. I used to have a goat who would knock things over and pin them with her forelegs as if to say, “Now it is mine.” My favorite subject is world history. I think it was a bad deal when the citizen farmers were forced to move to Rome where they had nothing to do in the second century.
