The Well

by Jack Cady

  She could certainly admire that.

  Bananas, paint, potato chips, drums of pickled frogs, china, clothing, furniture, medical instruments, construction supplies, guitars, bulldozers, plumbing, hymn books, office machines, automobile parts — finally all of it came his way; his warehouses were like museums of modern industrial foul-ups.

  Then, three years ago, about the time she came to work for him, Tracker went into the landscaping business. That was the part of John Tracker she did not understand. He lied to himself about that business. He never did that about the consignment business. His overhead was high, which was okay if you figured it into your bids. Somehow, though, the landscaping never much more than paid for itself. The lie Tracker told, and believed, was that it made money. The books showed the opposite, showed also that he was putting more material, or higher-priced material, into the jobs than was required by the specs. It was amazing to see someone as sharp as John Tracker fool himself over a business that was only a sideline.

  She would have to speak to him. If she dared. When you went to bed with a person, life mostly got better, but in a way it got worse. When you went to bed with a person you could talk about things you would not have talked about before. On the other hand, things like this landscape business might well sound like nagging.

  Amy paused, ran her hands across her naked belly, looked at her slender arms and smiled. She was much prettier naked than dressed, if only anybody knew it; well, she guessed John Tracker knew it now. No, she thought again, it really wasn’t like him to fool himself. He had a job in Council Bluffs next spring, the biggest landscape job his company had ever done. He was so excited about that job, and planning for it, that he was already wasting time that could be put to other business. Then there was this matter of the house. He shouldn’t be so reluctant to talk to her about it. All she knew was that there was a big old house downstate that belonged to his family. Period.

  She paused. Her mouth, which had been lax, became a firm, disapproving line. She went to the bathroom and began running water in the tub. Somehow it seemed like a bad sign to make love to somebody, and then start tearing down a house.

  The tub filled rapidly, and Amy stood for a moment before entering it. Her worst worry, the one she had not allowed herself to think of yet, splashed over her the way the water splashed in the tub. Was she only a trip mistress? Was that what he wanted? Just somebody to type letters and sleep with but not someone to be a part of his life? That would be bad, that would be really really wrong. She couldn’t handle that.

  She turned to look in the mirror. When you stood erect and pushed your kind of skinny chest forward it helped draw attention from your big nose. It seemed like she could remember every single one of the naked times. When you had a past that could be told in two minutes, you needed to hang on to all of it.

  She was raised in religious schools — her family almost always had enough money for that. She came from the discipline of school to a home where her father was an amiable drunk, though he liked an occasional fist-fight in bars. He went to Mass because, as he said, “They need the money.” If her father was an amiable cynic, and alcoholic, it was largely because nothing was ever asked of Jefferson Griffith except that he defend the Pope and the Cincinnati Reds against all comers. Her mother was worse. Her mother was so selfish that when the family broke up, her mother did not even want Amy to live with her. So Amy sought her consolation in the known. What was known in her childhood was the firm regimen of the Church. That pretty well preserved her for the first eighteen years. She spent her time all the way through high school with her father, checking for him in bars as if she were acting in a play written for the temperance league. Sometimes Jefferson Griffith brought a woman home with him. There would be laughter and thumps heard through thin walls. Against this, Amy had church or the streets. Church was more certain.

  The first of the naked times was best. Until she was eighteen she’d considered a convent, but then shejoined a theater, where the best man in the company was also a fair actor. Jim Randall deceived no one but himself, and seeing this, Amy trusted him and perhaps loved him. The convent was forgotten. They lived together for two years, then parted. Randall wanted to go to Europe to study acting, and Amy refused to go because they didn’t have enough money. Randall was not practical, going off in spite of her good arguments.

  Then there was the time with the bum. That was at twenty-four when she was so lonesome. His name was not important and she made herself forget it. He was not important, except she got pregnant, quit the theater, and was so nervous that she lost the baby. She had no interest in where the man went when he left.

  Jim Randall wondered, though. To him it was important. He felt that he had loved and lost and had to leave. Randall was entranced by memory, and as the years passed, Amy received occasional letters that dropped like faint astonishments into her mail. The envelopes bore stamps from all across Europe. When a hotel was especially bad and the loneliness surfaced, a letter would arrive for Amy. And, impractical or not, Randall’s letters were welcome. Her answers were vague, but somehow encouraging. She didn’t exactly want Randall, but she didn’t want to lose him either. His letters brought fantasies of youth and love. She liked the fantasies, but avoided encouraging reality.

  Sometimes Amy felt that she was too practical, not quite realizing that practicality was her defense to protect her innocence. When wrong-doing brushed past her she took a direct approach in her advice: “Sober up. Buy a new suit.” Her picture of herself was of a responsible career woman. She held to it as well as she could.

  There were other pictures in her history, if not in her memory. They were in her mother’s attic in Cincinnati. She told herself that she would not think of the past, and then went right on thinking about it. The picture taken at the time of her first communion was best, her long dress revealing the slight slump of her shoulders and the contrast of thin arms and hands with the overpuffed dress material. She was obviously taller and thinner than most other girls her age, with not a trace of baby fat. Her lips were neither thin nor full. Her cheeks and forehead dominated her face; this and a look of both self-consciousness and quick intelligence. Her hair was abundant, and worn to her shoulders, rich and thick and dark brown.

  Two other pictures were important, not only because they showed her, but because they told something of her past. Her family’s fortune was not money but tradition. It was the tradition of black Irish poverty. Amy could never, would never, admit that her father was a failed and badly spoiled child who was good at nothing but drinking. Since he had little money the only picture of Amy’s graduation was of a group of students, she standing in the back row of uniformed girls, still slumping a bit, and half-obscured by a heavy, grinning girl who displayed the sureness of ignorance. One of her thin shoulders, she recalled, was visible. Her face was still intelligent, but now it held both withdrawal from her surroundings, and confusion. It was a relief to turn to the last important picture. Amy on stage. She was twenty in this photo, working ten hours a day on a job that was advertised as thirty hours a week. Her youth and hope gave her the energy to work and still attend long evening rehearsals and performances of little theater. In the glossy photo she was shown as Miranda, a part she played to considerable acclaim. The performance ran for thirty weeks, a record for both Shakespeare and little theater in Cincinnati. Amy was a great beauty. The dress was long and cut to display the swell of adequate if not large breasts. The curve of the neck accented its length. There was a gentle line of shoulders and arms. Her hair was piled high, which pushed her dramatic cheeks, forehead and nose forward. She mourned that big nose for years, but it was thin and aristocratic, well-suited to the particular play.

  Amy at thirty. She toweled down and again passed the mirror. She hesitated, looked for the imperfections that had to be there if you were a woman who was thirty. She looked carefully, searching, testing first for detail and then for o
verall effect. The age seemed to crawl beneath the smooth skin. Surely she could see it if she looked hard enough. Her high forehead wrinkled with traces of some old confusion, then smoothed above high cheeks. Her hands rose to touch her long hair, worn long because John Tracker at one time indicated that he liked it that way.

  She smiled and for the moment imagined that she really was beautiful, although for years it had been her private pain to believe she was not. She dressed and turned to the work. Get it done, and then to the movies to cast herself in parts owned by other actresses.

  Chapter Four

  John Tracker’s great grandfather on his father’s mother’s side was named Able Rothstein, an immigrant. Able met Maggie, the illegitimate daughter of the witch Judith, when Maggie was fifteen. Maggie bore Vera who would eventually become John’s grandmother. Rothstein moved his family west.

  Rothstein was not a yielder. He had learned nothing about survival from hisJewish heritage. Within a year he was beaten and drowned. His body floated on a pond in Minnesota for several days before it sank and passing neighbors were able to stop averting their eyes. Rothstein’s crime was not recorded, but it was doubtless his religion or his accent. Tracker history does not know, or has conveniently concealed, what eventually happened to Maggie; but Vera stayed with her mother Maggie until age thirteen when she felt old enough to run away. She ran to Chicago, where she lived until the time when she entered the house of the Trackers.

  John was sure she was dead. Vera Tracker, a woman who could not possibly be less than eighty, sat with her profile turned to her grandson. She was probably a lot older than eighty. Dead or alive, she still seemed to preside over this ancient house as she sat motionless in the old rocker. She had to be dead, John told himself.

  She stared straight ahead. The eyes held the flat, profound and yet expressionless look of a corpse. Her hands and arms extended to the arms of the chair like rigid, brittle sticks. A lap robe of purple and brown velvet fell about ankles that were bone-thin in cracked and faded shoes. There was dust on the shoes.

  John nearly stepped backward, and then made himself stand still. Involuntary movement in this house could put you in the mouth of a trap. When he had accepted the fact that he had to come here, he also accepted the possibility of finding the remains of Theophilus or Vera or Justice. He felt he could bear to confront a corpse. He did not expect one that sat and stared at him.

  His grandmother’s eyes blinked once, snapping; the snap gaining momentum like an unused camera shutter that almost, but not quite, sticks. Her face was tight and loose at the same time. The flesh hung over cheeks and was pulled smooth like thin wattles about her mouth. Her face was like half a death’s head with the wings of a dying moth in the eye sockets.

  He stepped toward her, relieved. He was also strangely angry. Her eyes did not blink again. The room was not as cold as outside, but it was coat-cold, breath-frosting cold. She was dressed in light clothing.

  “Vera,” he said. “Old Sis.” That had been the name Theophilus called her, when he was not calling her something worse.

  She stared at him.

  He walked toward her. Her eyes did not track. The thin clothing and lap robe seemed like wrappings for a mummy. He walked through two conventional rooms, found an afghan lying on an antique loveseat and returned. He placed it around her, and as he tucked in the light shawl he found that she was as bald as he knew she would be. A few strands of hair were yellow with age. There was a mole as big as a thumbprint on her head. He had not known of that mole.

  He did not know whether there was more fear than anger hanging just beneath the surface of his mind. The part of him that was Tracker was both unfrightened and angry. She was a double-damned inconvenience. How did you get her out of this place and over that snowy grade? She might die any minute. Part of him wanted to snatch the afghan away and let her freeze, and he had to will himself to be careful when he touched her.

  The arms and hands seemed so brittle he feared to move them because they might break. She did not move. The eyes did not blink again. Once more he began to believe she was dead. The veins of her hands were submerged, faint gray lines where there was no flesh to bury them. The hands were skeletal, except for competent nails. She had always been proud of her nails. They were tools that could cut.

  He turned to the fireplace. Wood was stacked, but a fire was not laid.

  Impossible, he thought, to be unable to tell whether a human being was dead or not. He touched her arm. It was cold, but cold enough?

  He felt time shift, and told himself that either time was shifting, or he was separated from his normal senses. If you were in the house of the Trackers, you were, after all, prima facie mad. He made his mind switch to indifference. From the distance came the tinkling notes of a piano, but at the moment his mind sought indifference the sounds started to fade.

  “I’ll get you warm.” His voice sounded worse in the silence than the silence itself. The thought crossed his mind that if he thawed her out he was only saving Hell some trouble. Let the Devil thaw her out.

  The black, Tracker side of his mind was fighting to gain control. He pressed it downward, back into the depths of his unconscious. He was not going to let this place get him, Vera Tracker, or no.

  He laid the fire and lighted it. As he worked with his back toward her he felt movement. The silence intensified. It was like the silence was turning into a void.

  “Tracker walks.” The voice was dry. Her tongue seemed to grate in a mouth that held no spit. “Walks.” The voice was a whisper.

  He wheeled and stumbled from his crouch in front of the fire. In spite of his logic, some part of him was still convinced she was dead. He was adding shock on shock. Or she was.

  He watched her movement. There was none. Then the fingers of her left hand began to tremble, made feeble, grasping motions. He watched but did not move toward her, and then her words seemed to echo in the vacuum of silence.

  “Walks. Who walks?”

  He watched her slowly raise her hand, pluck at the robe, apparently trying to pull it closer.

  “How long were you without fire?” He knelt to place more kindling under the logs. The wood was dry like old bones. The fire was catching quickly and illuminated the shadowed room. As he worked his hands were red with the glow.

  “Good spell.”

  He turned back. Color was on her cheeks. It was only a trace, and it might be a reflection from the fire. Reflection or not, she no longer looked dead.

  “Been ill?” He felt that he was bustling.

  “Fits, I reckon.”

  He assumed that meant epileptic, and was glad to discover any weakness.

  “A good thing I arrived. The worst winter, ever. It would have gotten colder.”

  “Lord save us from a fool.”

  Her color was coming back. She looked no more than a worn eighty. She no longer looked like something dragged from a burial cave.

  “You haven’t changed.” He almost admired her. Old. Weak. Helpless. Still calling names. Soon she would start cursing. He decided to try for information before she regained full control.

  “What do you mean, walks? Who walks? The old man?”

  “Which old man?” Her voice was filled with contempt. “Which dangledy old man do you mean?”

  “You said Tracker walks. Which Tracker?”

  “Theophilus walks. Cellar, subcellar, woodlot, rooms. Hollers silent-like, mouth wide as a cistern, head fulla scream. Comes of tampering things.” She stopped speaking. Her mouth became a rigid line. Her body stiffened. A slight tremble.

  “Tampering?”

  Her eyes were getting quicker. There was flash in them, movement behind her eyes like sudden awareness. The tremble stopped. Her face went calm. It seemed more fleshy and substantial.

  “You knew the old rut. You figger it out.�
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  “Justice?” He watched to see if there was any reaction. “How did he die?”

  There was a reaction. A tight smile.

  “He aint walkin’, sonny, and he aint crawling, neither. Your pa aint goin’ nowhere.”

  “What?”

  “Comes of tampering things.”

  She was crazy. Living alone. Imagination. She was always a woman who drove goads into boys, into men. Now her goads must have reached into herself, her mind twisting and building the images of hate that she threw outward. Destruction, he figured, was bent on its final victory. Self-destruction.

  “You’re not well. I’m going to get a doctor.”

  “You’re gonna build houses outta cow pies. You aint leaving. I aint leavin’. Twenty years gone and you aint leavin’ until this trouble’s laid.”