Accordion Crimes

by Annie Proulx

  Dr. Squam’s goat gland treatment

  In the spring of 1929 Loats was the first to die, a complication of his rupture, and was buried in his bald-cypress box. The farm was subdivided among his five surviving children and his grandchildren who sold it off in lots and parcels. Small houses and garages dotted the great fields. A month later word came from Texas that Messermacher had dropped dead at his mailbox, the new Sears catalog open on his breast at the pages showing a selection of women’s hair nets. To Beutle, his old friend and neighbor, he left Radio stock valued at two thousand dollars and going up like a rocket.

  Charlie Sharp had gotten the old man into the market. Beutle, excited by his windfall and the idea of a quick fortune through the big bull market, got through to Charlie on the feed store telephone and asked his advice. Should he put money into more stocks? Which ones?

  “Radio Corporation of America. What Vati had. Radio’s going to the top. General Motors, Montgomery Ward, the market’s the thing, a sure thing. Uncle Hans, everybody in America can be rich. It was a little stormy last winter, the market, but she’s steady and climbing again. The country is rock solid.” His voice lowered deeply. “I’m telling you something. I’m worth a quarter of a million now, Uncle Hans. I started out buying a little Studebaker stock, but now I’m really doing good. Not bad, anyway, for an Ioway farm boy, hey?” He gave Beutle a quick spiel about buying on margin and offered to act as Hans’s broker.

  Beutle, dazzled by the proof, after thirty-odd years of experience to the contrary, that in America prosperity was for the taking after all, put a mortgage on the farm and, through Charlie, bought a hundred shares of Radio at 120½. “If you’d bought last week, Uncle Hans, you’d of got it at ninety-four! It’s going up fast. There’s no limit. The sky is the limit.”

  Under the thrall of Radio stock and his swelling fortune, Beutle gave in and bought an expensive Freed-Eiseman Neutrodyne five-tube receiver with a Prest-O-Lite ninety-amp battery, two forty-five-volt batteries, an earphone plug, an antenna set, vacuum tubes and a round loudspeaker that leaned against the wall like an abandoned discus and blasted out The A & P Gypsy Hour. Percy Claude said, “If you got electric out here, you could skip all them batteries and get a plug-in. You could of got a Crossley Pup for ten dollars, what you spend for all this, fifty? Sixty?”

  With his fortune sure, Beutle began to worry about fate. “All three the same age, all three the same life, now Loats and Messermacher die, they are gone, like that, one, two, and I am three, I am next. I will go soon. The same age, all sixty-four, and they’re in dem Grab.” For the first time since boyhood he felt a slackening of desire. Gerti leaned into the potato barrel presenting her rump and singing “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” and he thought of his tombstone.

  But he was still sitting down to dinner, still lighting his pipe, still waking up in the morning, so he knew he had truly outlived them, the other two Germans, and the only thing he had done differently in life, the activity that had clearly preserved his vigor and strength, was good honest lust. It would keep him alive and interested until the age of one hundred.

  “Jesus Christ, I told them!”

  Yet his fires were cooling, and this was real and dangerous. He forced himself to grapple with Gerti once a day, but the effort left him wringing wet and depressed. He spoke sharply, commanded his sons as though they were still children—he knew they were waiting for him to join Loats and Messermacher, especially was Percy Claude watching his father with wolf’s eyes. An answer came to Beutle out of the radio.

  He was devoted to KFKB, Kansas First, Kansas Best, out of Topeka, when he could get it, listened to Concertina Roundup, The Happy Hillbillies, Cowboy Carl and His Little Guitar, a few times picked up the WLS Barn Dance out in Chicago, but usually got only the Cedar Rapids station with Coon Sanders’ Nighthawks. He didn’t much care for the hot jazz fox trots, said “Muskrat Ramble” was more like Mess Pants Scramble. Sometimes he’d get out the Hohner—the little green accordion would have been better, maybe—and play along with the musicians on Concertina Roundup though they were usually a bunch of wacky Swedes making sounds like corks pulled out of bottles, like pissing cows. (Only once did he hear a virtuoso playing Bach’s Prelude no. I in C on a superb Wheatstone concertina, but so many listeners complained that the experiment was never repeated.) He listened to Dr. Squam’s crackling, nasal voice.

  “Friends, this here’s Dr. Squam, talking plain talk to you again. Now I want to say a few words to the men out there, so if there’s ladies listening, you might just as well go upstairs and get at that mending you put off, for this is men’s business. But before you go, take a double spoonful of my number fifty-five tonic treatment and number fifty-nine, for there may be a big change in your life coming soon.

  “Now, men, when a man reaches a certain age, and you know what I mean, you men who are suffering, he begins to lose interest, his spirit droops, certain glands begin to wither and all the spring goes out of his step. If this sounds like someone you know, pay close attention. Until now there was no hope for such a man, even if he was in good health and otherwise strong and able. But now there is a chance. Dr. Squam has developed a four-phase compound operation that rejuvenates depleted sex organs by directing a new blood supply to the affected area—giving a real kick to the old starter. Listen to what this Texas oilman has to say.”

  A slow drawl came out of the rayon speaker fabric, then the announcer’s voice, in subdued excitement:

  “If you want to know more about how this miraculous procedure can once more give YOU the energy and drive of a boy of eighteen, write to Dr. Squam at this address …”

  Beutle knew he’d sell some of the stock Messermacher had left him, he’d have the operation on Messermacher’s nickel. “Turn over in his grave laughing if he knew. And the hell with writing Squam. Claude! Percy Claude, come on in here, I want you to take me to the station.”

  He caught the afternoon train to Topeka. Two days later, in mid-August, he lay on a table in an operating room while Dr. Squam made an incision in his scrotum and skillfully implanted sections of goat gland in his testicles. During the procedure a radio played a selection of waltzes and polkas broadcast from the doctor’s radio station behind the hospital. When he heard that Beutle played the accordion, Dr. Squam reduced the charge for the operation to a flat seven hundred dollars.

  The devil’s hot day

  The train back to Prank was intensely hot, plowing through a prairie scorcher, a stifling blanket of heat, the hazed air as thick as glue, the corn shriveling before his eyes and a pall of dust coating the margins of every road. The scratchy plush seat in the coach heated up. His swollen testicles began to throb and inside an hour the pressure of the straining cloth of his trousers on his privates was unbearable. He tried to walk up and down the aisle, but spraddled so obscenely the eyes of every passenger fastened on him. By the time the train reached Prank he had collapsed, nearly insensible, his ears ringing. When he looked through his fevered eyes the sky was upside down, birds skittering across it like insects on a glass floor. The conductor dragged him off at Prank and turned him over to Percy Claude who waited, dumb and stolid, in the shade of the station overhang, red arms dangling.

  “There’s something wrong with the old boy, Percy Claude. Walks like he’s got a corncob up his ass. I was you, I’d get the doctor to him.”

  Dr. Diltard Cude, a spindle-shanked man who held a nice packet of American Telephone and Telegraph stock, came out to the house, took a look at the testicular stitchery, the arrgry streaks shooting up from the old man’s groin and down into his black thigh, said infection, gangrene, nothing to do but take him home, make him as comfortable as possible in this goldarned heat, set a block of ice in a tray and set a fan so’s it blows over the ice onto him, then nothing to do but wait for the end. Percy Claude didn’t bother to say they couldn’t run a fan without the electric.

  For thirty hours Beutle lay on the sofa, unable to open his eyes. He felt someone come into
the room. There was a great tingling all over his body, a burning and buzzing. He tried to move but could not. He wanted to cry out “der Teufel!” but his throat stifled his voice. Yet he was not afraid, but intensely interested, for he heard the wheezing notes of “Deutschland, Deutschland” and thought that at least there was German accordion music where he was going.

  His name was misspelled on his tombstone as Hans Buttel. That’s how everyone spelled it and Percy Claude let it stay that way.

  Charlie Sharp’s misfire

  On the third of September, Radio, split and split again, went for an adjusted price of 505; Beutle’s remaining hundred shares were worth more than fifty thousand dollars. Percy Claude straightened up, walked around outside for an hour, then came in and sat down next to Greenie and told her how it was.

  “You know Vater Hans left some stock. He’d got in on some stock through Charlie, Charlie Sharp. It’s quite a bit.”

  “How much is it?” She lit one of the cigarettes she’d started smoking and blew a plume of smoke from her powdered nostrils.

  “Oh, quite a bit.” He didn’t like to see a woman smoke but said nothing. She’d had her hair bobbed—butchered, he thought—big wads of straight hair chopped off at the earlobes. And she must be doing something to her chest; she was flatter somehow.

  “Enough so’s we could leave this damn farm and move to Des Moines? There’s no reason to stay out here. I thought about living in Des Moines so bad.”

  “Now, don’t sound like some crazy Flaming Mame. You’re not thinking about Mutti.”

  “Oh, she’ll be happy in town—there’s other old ladies around, there’s stuff to do, go to the movies, learn to play mah-jongg. She can get a nice Colorinse, primp up a little. Oh god, tell me, Percy Claude, tell me we can move to Des Moines. I’m sick of washing clothes in that damn old boiler and cleaning out them stinking kerosene lamps. We’re the only ones in Prank don’t have electricity.”

  “I don’t say yes and I don’t say no. There’s plenty got to be done.” But he called up Charlie on the feed store phone and told him he wanted to sell the stock.

  “Jesus, Percy Claude! Not now! Not now! She’s climbing! That stock splits again, you’ll double your money. If I was you I wouldn’t sell at all, I’d buy more stock, diversify a little. I had my eye on this here Rotary Oil.”

  “No, I guess I want to sell it. Thinking of putting the farm on the market, too, and moving to Des Moines.”

  “Listen, if you’re going to move, move to Chicago. You can’t believe this here city. It’s a pretty important city; pretty big men here who pretty damn near run the country right from this here heartland. It’s not the millionaires back east who make the world go around. Hey, can you get Roxy’s Gang down there on the radio? Al Jolson was on the other night. I’m telling you, he’s a hot number.”

  “No. We don’t get it. I guess I’ll sell.”

  “Percy Claude, it’s your funeral. Just remember what I told you when it goes through the roof.”

  “I made up my mind.”

  “Check and double check, Percy Claude.”

  By the end of the month the market was crashing and sliding, but Percy Claude smiled to himself. He went out to the mailbox every day to see if the check from Charlie was there. Finally he called Charlie up on the feed store phone to ask if he’d sent the check registered mail, but there wasn’t any answer on the other end, just the burring ring again and again until the operator came on the line and told him to hang up. They heard the news the hard way, the second week in October, from Loats’s daughter who had had a letter from the Sharps down in Texas. Charlie Sharp up in Chicago had lost everything in the crash, including Percy Claude’s inherited and unsold Radio stock, and had shot himself in the face. He wasn’t dead but his nose and mouth and teeth and lower jaw were blown away, just two crazy little blue eyes staring out of the raw, scabbing flesh. He was a horror to see and they had him down in Texas in a dim back room. Couldn’t speak and had to be fed with a funnel.

  “You know what, Percy Claude,” said Rona Sharp on the phone after she told him that was correct, it was a sad thing, tragic, but there was maybe a bright side because Charlie had found Jesus, and wasn’t this a clear connection? “They give you a big box of free tomatoes down here when you fill up your car with gasoline. You ought to move down here.”

  In a private deal Percy Claude sold the farm to a couple from Ohio, but their bank failed before he could cash the check. They had the deed and he had a no-good check. He had less than Beutle had started with forty years earlier.

  “I’m going down to Texas and kill Charlie Sharp,” he said to Greenie. But instead they went to Des Moines, where, after three weeks of looking, Greenie got a job working in the five-and-ten and he was assigned to a CCC work gang building roads.

  (But wasn’t it their son Rawley, born a few years later in the back of a car at a drive-in, who pieced together his grandfather’s farm and more, ended up with three thousand acres in production, owned a golf course, a farm machinery dealership, a tile and culvert business and an interest in a cheese factory while receiving twenty thousand dollars a year in government farm subsidies? Wasn’t it Rawley who gave money to start the Prank Farm Pioneer Museum and who moved heaven and earth, hired private investigators, to find the old green accordion his grandfather played? Weren’t they still searching in 1985 when Rawley and his wife, Evelyn, celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with an autumn trip to Yellowstone Park where Rawley, in the West Thumb Geyser Basin, dropped a roll of film, trod on it, lost his balance and fell headlong into a seething hot spring, and despite eyes parboiled blind and the knowledge of impending death, clambered out—leaving the skin of his hands like red gloves on the stony edge—only to fall into another, hotter pool? You bet.)

  Spider, Bite Me

  Don’t like your look

  That great accordion player who was also a busboy, Abelardo Relámpago Salazar, rolled over in bed one May morning in 1946 shortly after sunrise in Hornet, Texas, and sensed that he was dying, perhaps even dead. (A few years later when he was truly dying and in this same bed, he felt violently alive.) The sensation was not unpleasant, though mixed with regret. Through his eyelashes he saw bedposts of solid gold, a diaphanous wing quivering at the window. Celestial music washed over him, a voice of a melting quality he had never heard while he was alive.

  Listening, he returned to life and recognized the sun as the source of the gilded bedposts, knew the seraphic wing was a wavering curtain. The music was coming from his accordion, not the four-stop, three-row button Majestic in white pearl with his initials, AR, set out in tiny cut-glass gems, but the special one, the little nineteen-button green accordion with its rare voice. Not to be touched by anyone but him! Still, he listened, despite the disagreeable sensation of a swollen bladder, the stoking oven of the coming day. It was the voice of his overgrown, lanky daughter, a voice that he never heard, except thick humming as she drizzled and drabbed around the house. He had not even known she could play the accordion beyond a few strung-together chords, although she had been his child for fourteen years, although he had seen her a hundred times fooling with her brothers’ small Lido model. When was he ever home long enough to know his children? It was the sons who were the musicians. His anger burned because perhaps it was the daughter who was exceptional. That wonderful voice coming from the high part of the nose, plaintive and quavering, all the ache of life in it. And he thought of his oldest son, Crescencio, poor dead Chencho, without wit or musical sense, like a timid dog that was afraid to come forward. What a total waste! It must have been the devil, not God, who sent that music into his dream. The same devil who deceived men over the age of the earth by concealing fossils in perverse places. He was furious as well because she was mauling the treasure of his life.

  He shouted from the bed, “Félida. Come in here!” Put the pillow over the top of his head so she might not see his hair undone. Heard the scrabbling and the huff of the accordion. She came int
o the room with her head turned away. Her hands empty.

  “Where is the green accordion now?”

  “In the case. In the front room.”

  “Never touch it again. Never open that case. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes.” She turned her sullen face away, slouched to the kitchen.

  “I don’t like your look!” he shouted.

  He considered his daughter’s music. How well she sang! He had heard her but he had not heard her. Well, and how had she learned the accordion? No doubt from watching, from listening to him, from admiration of her father. It might be a novelty to let her come with him to one of his engagements, introduce his daughter, let them see how the whole Relámpago family—except Chencho, of course—had been richly gifted by God. But even as he imagined the handsome picture it would make, himself in his dark pants and jacket, the white shirt and white shoes, and Félida in the beautiful lace-edged pink dress Adina was sewing for the girl’s quinceañera—ay, how much that would cost!—and how he would let Félida step forward and release her astonishingly beautiful voice, move over Lydia Mendoza, here comes another gloria de Tejas, the future was crouching at a dark side road on the path of events.

  A bus went by and filled the room with a roar like a bomb blast echoing in a sewer. He got up, lit a cigarette, felt a pain in his right thigh, held his hair up with his right hand, squinting. How could he run back and forth all day at work and then stand half the night playing music? And the usual business with his agringada wife. It seemed to him that few people had to bear what he did. Or could bear it as bravely.

  But he was up now, and, as always, the music started in his mind, a kind of bitter, lopsided polka that resembled “La Bella Italiana” the way Bruno Villareal played it. All his life he had enjoyed this private music, sometimes sad little phrases that belonged to no known ranchera or waltz, sometimes note-for-note repetitions of huapangos or polkas he himself played or had heard another play. Sometimes fresh inventions, new music never heard before, an inner musician working all night as he slept.