A Burned-Over District

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 15

  The next day Parnell called me up in the middle of one of my classes, which he liked to do at random just to remind me not to take my job too seriously. This time instead of just harassing me in front of the kids he had an actual request to make.

  “Hey Simon, could you come over here this afternoon?” he said. “I’ve got some stuff that needs to be transported from one area to another, and the goddamn plumber tells me I’m not supposed to be moving around right now.”

  By the plumber of course, he meant Tadich Grant, the town doctor, who’d been advising him about his bad back and aching joints for years, and had kept a sensitive middle finger on his prostate until advising him to have it yanked out the year after he retired from teaching.

  “Why, what happened?” I asked him, while the kids listened curiously.

  “I don’t want to talk about that right now,” he grumbled. “Just come over if you will and give me a hand for as long as you can stand it. Or if you can’t do it, I’ll find someone else. I just have a need for a body that’s a little less of a fucking disaster area than my own.”

  “Did I hear what I thought I heard?” said Brad Pentane, when I hung up. Referring to the f-word.

  “That was Mr. Parnell,” I said, by way of explanation. “Listen, why don’t you and Arnold make yourselves useful for a change and go over there with me after school today. You’re skipping basketball practice anyway these days. He needs some muscle to move things out of his basement.”

  Arnold shook his head in bogus regret. “My ankle’s still bothering me, Mr. Houba. I don’t think it’d be a good idea. Mrs. Houba’s counting on me for the county tourney.”

  “I’ve got to study some algebra this afternoon,” said Brad. “The state exit exam’s coming up, you know. I don’t want to end up pushing a shopping cart around Mildred for the rest of my life.”

  “You’re in calculus, aren’t you?” I asked him. “And you’re worrying about the algebra test?” But both of them just stonewalled. They knew I was very suspicious of their after-school activities these days, and they enjoyed feeding my paranoia.

  At 4 o’clock I found Parnell stretched out on the couch with Millie’s white afghan pulled up to his waist. The two black dogs were posed like library lions at his head and feet with their chins on their crossed paws. They barked and growled a couple of times when I knocked on the door, but didn’t bother to get up.

  “What the hell happened to you?” I asked him, removing a stack of 1980s New Scientists from a dusty chair and replacing them with my butt. Albert, in his sling on my chest, seemed annoyed at having only my face to look at, so I extracted him and set him on my lap, facing Parnell.

  “Hey Simon, you ever had the feeling you’ve been occupying space on the planet for too long? When you get to the point where any wrinkle in the goddamn rug can send you to the Emergency Room, isn’t it time for some public-spirited citizen to put a bullet in your head?”

  “Tadich didn’t give you anything?” I asked. I knew Tadich Grant had been showering painkillers on Parnell for years, but most of them were gathering dust on top of his dresser. He was saving them for an emergency, as he put it, without elaborating. Anyway, he didn’t like to take drugs, preferring to complain.

  “Yeah, I took a few of the new ones, just to see what kind of buzz it is this time. But what’s the point? The goddamn machinery is wearing down.” Something about Parnell’s raspy voice appealed to Albert, who flapped his arms and laughed every time he heard it.

  “Well. . . growing old gracefully,” I said. “They tell me it’s hard work.”

  “You bet your sweet ass it is. But let’s talk about something more interesting. I promised to give Matawan that old tool set of mine, and since I’ve incapacitated myself I need you to bring it up from the basement. If I go down there they might have to haul me up with a winch.”

  “You’re giving him the tool set, but I have to carry it around for him? What am I, UPS?” I was joking, of course, but also a little annoyed.

  “You’ve got about as much use for that tool set as I have for a pink tutu,” said Parnell. “Actually, I don’t even know if Matt’ll use it, but he’s getting it anyway. If he doesn’t want it, he can throw it away or bury it in his back yard for all I care. I never really thought about it before, but that basement is starting to feel like an anvil around my neck. I’ve been dreaming about it, did I tell you that? I dreamed I went down there to get a broad sword or something and everybody I know who’s died was sitting around eating sandwiches, like the lunch room at the high school. If you see anything else you want down there, just bring it up. It’s all got to go, but for some reason I seem to have this need to give it all to the right people. Whatever that means.”

  I transferred Albert to Parnell’s lap and left them staring at each other while I worked my way down the steep and narrow stairs into the gloom. I found the big red toolbox sitting in one of the few cleared spaces on the floor, next to the last step. It was very heavy. No Parnellian toolbox would contain anything like just a basic set, I knew. There would have to be a tool for every possible eventuality in home or vehicle, along with a couple of odd-shaped devices whose function was lost to antiquity, like the curious wheeled, toothed, perforated, and bladed items you see in those displays of farming equipment of the 17th-century American colonies.

  I stood looking around, trying to penetrate the darkness that was barely kept at bay by the single hanging lightbulb, wondering if there could be anything there that I would want. On more than a few occasions interesting surprises had emerged from that dim jumble. One of our bookshelves at home held a beautiful, though nonfunctional, brass marine chronometer, suspended on gimbals in its polished wooden case behind a pane of glass. On the dial was painted “Overhaul due Nov 71.” Parnell had simply handed it to me one morning, when Lu and I had been over there for some of Millie’s pancakes. Most of the time, however, he’d try to get me to take away something like an ancient pair of hip boots or a moth-eaten tent or a 1950s Thermofax machine. There was so much stuff in that basement that I found it impossible to focus on any one object. All I could see were parts of things: rods, tubes, metal plates, springs, wheels, knobs, dials, lop-eared swatches of fabric, the sawn-off ends of two-by-fours, and the flaking butts of reams of yellowed paper. It was like one of those limestone facings you find in the old big-city post offices, where if you put your nose right down on them you discover the tiny shells and bones of countless fossilized animals, all entangled and interwoven with each other in a graveyard hundreds of millions of years old. I was sure even Parnell didn’t know everything that was in there, which may have had something to do with his trying to go through it all now, in his old age. I was tempted to poke around a little, but the sheer volume of stuff was daunting. Anyway, there was something about Parnell and his works that resisted any kind of deliberate or systematic approach. There was little point in digging; you had to wait for the sudden gleams, when the light caught some half-buried crystal facet at the right angle. Thinking of the old man brooding on his couch, I wondered how many more of those flashes there would be.

  I carried the red toolbox upstairs and deliberately let it crash on the hardwood floor.

  “Jesus Christ, Simon, take it easy,” said Parnell. “This house is about as wobbly as I am. You could bring the whole thing down that way.”

  “I hope you haven’t been using such profanity in my son’s presence while I was downstairs,” I said. “This thing weighs a ton. Why the hell can’t Matt come out here and get it himself? He’s the one with the goddamn 4-wheel drive truck.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of disrupting that program of his that he’s all wound up about. You, on the other hand, I know you don’t have anything better to do. If you weren’t here, you’d be grading papers or something even less useful.”

  “So why are you indulging his feverish imaginings? What the hell is happening to him, anyway? And everybody else in this town.”

  Parnel
l jounced Albert absent-mindedly and shook his head, annoyed to have to make such an elementary point. “Simon, you can’t separate the human animal from its entertainment. If you do that, it might have to start occupying itself with real problems.”

  “Such as?” I said.

  “Hell, I don’t know.” Parnell gestured vaguely at the house, or maybe it was at the whole world. “Has he found anything out there yet? Any organisms with inflated frontal lobes or extra gluteals?”

  “Of course not. But you know how he is. He’s got everybody so pumped up that he’s getting reports about fiery chariots from as far away as Reno. Nobody’s actually seen any aliens, leaving aside the obvious nutballs, but they’ve seen all kinds of other suspicious things, and everybody knows, if you know what I mean. They’re all feeding on each other’s craziness. The latest is that some fool has been up on Devil’s Table clipping the rabbit brush to make it look like something landed on it. Just when the whole damn thing was starting to wind down.”

  Parnell sat motionless on the couch, staring at Albert, a slight pout and furrowed brows the only signs that he was listening. I said, "It’s partly my fault. I got so annoyed at him that I put a phony thing up on his website, about a spaceship landing. I thought he’d just laugh it off, but he’s been running with it ever since.”

  Parnell looked at me. “You should tell him, Simon. Before he makes a total asshole of himself.”

  “I did tell him! It didn’t make any difference! That’s the trouble – it’s too late. He’s made a whole industry out of this thing. If I confess to everybody else now, his credibility is chopped liver, not to mention that I’ll probably get stoned to death by the Research Committee. But if I don’t, he’ll just keep inflating it. By now it’s got a life of its own. I’m not sure it would even matter if I confessed publicly. Nobody would want to hear it. You don’t know, because you’re not spending any time in town these days. The place has gone crazy. There are factions at each other’s throats, the extraterrestrials versus the Federal bureaucrats versus the message-from-heaven crowd. Matt’s choreographing the nuthouse. He’s got everybody in town dancing around out on the desert every afternoon and blogging each other to death in the evenings. Father MacGill’s writing sermons and the Cowboys are forming armed posses. Somebody’s going to get hurt if it keeps up.”

  Parnell shook his head again. “Well, you did the right thing to tell him. The ball’s in his court now. All you can do is inject as much reality into the other guy’s situation as you can, no matter what mental gymnastics he’s performing. If you’re lucky, maybe he’ll do the same thing for you sometime.” He stared moodily at Albert, jouncing him occasionally. “Is this the next generation?” he said. Albert regarded him with wide-eyed delight, his arms stretched out and his head cocked slightly.

  “I believe it is.”

  “They have to do better than we did, don’t they Simon?”

  “No,” I said, “but they’ll make different mistakes at least. I’m not ready to turn it all over to Albert yet, though.”

  Parnell didn’t answer. Sunk into the battered cushions and with the white afghan pulled up to his waist, he looked as though he’d lost his legs. His blue turtleneck shirt hung loosely on him, its collar sagging a couple of inches away from his wrinkled and shrinking neck, and there was a distracted and sulky expression on his unshaven face. He’d been something of a mentor to me ever since I’d met him, and now I wanted him to answer the questions that were bothering me: why everyone in town, even my normally level-headed and unimaginative wife, was so willing, even determined, to invent some fairy tale or other to explain what was almost certainly a simple astronomical phenomenon; how a nominally rational person like Matt Matawan could walk right over a logical cliff with his eyes wide open; and most of all, what it felt like to be him, Parnell, perched out on the tip of the long wobbly plank that was his life, looking down at the murky waters that awaited him. But I didn’t quite have the courage to ask him question #3, which was the most interesting one, and probably the only one he could answer.

  “I’m the only sane person left in town, Parnell. I’m the only one who doesn’t have all the answers. Tell me what to do,” I said, flapping my hands helplessly and trying to make a joke of it.

  He puffed out some air. “There’s not a hell of a lot you can do, Simon. You’ve got this idea that the world ought to make sense, but the fact is we’re just making up the whole damn circus as we go along.” He supported Albert with one hand and pulled the white afghan higher around his torso, as if he were deliberately blanketing himself with Millie. “That doesn’t relieve you of the obligation to try to move things in a certain direction. All you can do is get up every day and ask yourself, How do I want this day to go? Then that’s the way you push. Everybody else is pushing in their own direction, and some of those directions aren’t conducive to a positive result, at least by your standards. But then, if you don’t push, everything goes their way.”

  He didn’t have much more to say, and seemed to want to just sit quietly on the couch. I fed the dogs for him, asked him about his food supply and so on, then reloaded Albert into his sling and headed for the door, lugging the toolbox. He roused himself at that point and said, “Let me have a look in there for a minute, will you?” I carried it over and put it on a chair next to the couch. He opened it up and began to paw through it, but stopped abruptly and put the lid down again, latching it carefully and caressing it briefly with a callused hand. “Never mind,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell I think I’m going to find in there.”

  It was already almost dark. “Well, don’t do anything rash,” I said lightly. “I happen to know that Margaret Quitclaim is expecting you at the book club meeting this week.

  “Don’t I know it. That’s about all that’s keeping me alive.” He raised a hand as I went out the door. The dogs were busy eating and didn’t notice my departure.