by Jeffrey Lent
“If you fuck with me,” she said, “I’ll cut your throat.”
He pulled away from her hands and lay back on the bed again, his feet still on the floor. Looking up at the ceiling. He said, “I know it.”
Five (interlude)
They’d rise midafternoon long after the morning fog burned away and the sun was beating through the hemlock and tamarack stand surrounding the house, the air still and resinous of soft-needled duff, waking slow with the dawn blankets thrown off and the sheet twisted to a rope between their legs, slick and slow with sleep. Green-backed flies beat against the screens and thrummed against the ceiling, the song of afternoon. One or the other of them would make coffee and they’d carry this, wearing only robes with towels slung over their shoulders, out through the redolent canopied evergreens where chipmunks trilled at them, into the sheep-shorn pasture with ledges of clamshell-colored boulders thrust up in the full bake of the afternoon, down the worn path to the Ammonoosuc. They sat on flat-topped boulders the size of boats and drank the coffee and then swam in the hole made by the riverbend, the water in July or August a cold shriek that shrank his scrotum and lifted her nipples and gooseflesh laid over them. Awake, hangovers gone with the current, they’d stretch on the boulders’ backs with eyes closed and hands under their heads to doze and brown in the sun, the quavering myriad river-tongues cleanly filling their minds with nothing beyond precisely and minutely where they were. Sometime later while the northern summer sun was still distinct but the folds of the riverbank had gained slight shadow they would go back up to the house and there bathe and shave and dress for the night, eat a breakfast of eggs and toasted bread and she would drink a cup of tea with honey and lemon laced with whiskey and he’d take a small fruit-juice glass of the whiskey neat. Then in the long lovely twilight they’d drive the three miles west into Bethlehem and he’d drop her off at the Casino on the grounds of the Maplewood and then continue a mile farther west to the Sinclair where he began his night, a shift of five hours managing the lounge there, hiring and firing and taking inventory and stopping left and right all throughout that time to make fine kind relaxed talk with anyone not in his employ who happened upon him. Around midnight he’d leave there to run up and down the long main street and the few short sidestreets where there was reason to go, pulling up to backdoors in the thick shadows of summer night and making deliveries from the backseat and trunk of his automobile. Sometime between two and three in the morning he’d go from where he finished to the illicit after-hours club on Swazey Lane where most nights Joey would already be before him, sitting on a stool on the small raised platform beside the piano player, no longer having to work the room or pose and stretch but able now to just sit with her knees together and sing, the room swathed in layers of smoke and blue from the low lights and the people allowed in would be content with their stupor and fatigue merely to sit and listen to her. Here Jamie did not work so much as make contact: a man easing up to him and while maybe looking away mention the name of the place or the name of a man met in the place and the threads of a deal would be laid. Jamie never agreed to anything. All things were tentative, not even so much as implied. He’d listen and at most nod his head, not in complicity but simply as if indicating he’d heard what was being said or asked. Then he’d go away and think about it, or not think about it but let it settle within him and a few days later he’d know if it was right or not. He made no promises, except to himself. And those had nothing to do with greed. Mostly he sat back in a far corner and watched her sing and sipped whiskey and waited. When she took breaks he’d join her outside to smoke and breathe in the night, not even really speaking but in short bursts of coded language, fragments of speech. Other times he’d stay seated, seeing she was at work, crooning to someone, leaning forward off her stool, her eyes without distraction, milking the one ripe fruit in the room about to fall. Then he’d leave her be. He trusted her. He’d learned he had to. She drew money from men the same way he filled the hole in them; it was what they wanted. It was not that he thought people were stupid about love or whiskey or sex. It was that he knew all men were tigered. Each had the chink, the soft spot. The only ones he liked were the ones it was hard to find. He’d not yet met a man where it wasn’t there. The thought of that was the one thing he feared. Finally there would come a time when the piano player didn’t return to the keys and the room was empty but for the two or three unwilling to go and Joey would be slumped with her arms spread around her drink on the table and the sound of birdsong from the lilacs and elms and rosebushes outside would break through into the basement and he’d reach and touch her arm and he’d say “Home” and she’d nod. This was summer.
Five
It had been the skeletal accordion-limbed piano player who saved them. Scully. They’d flown through that first season of summer and fall five years before heedless as children, living in a cramped basement room and sharing a cold-water bathroom with a dozen other hotel workers, Joey from the start working at the Maplewood as a dining room waitress and singing from time to time in the small clubs that sprang up and disappeared, while Jamie went through a string of jobs not from an unwillingness to work but a restlessness that drove him distracted from place to place as if intent on unraveling the workings of the entire town as quickly as he could. Both of them not oblivious so much as in some dream-trance of summer and so disregarded any signs or indications that they should make preparations of any kind until the wet cold third weekend of October when the leaves stripped from the trees and Monday morning the trains were filled leaving and shutters began to go up over the tiers of windows as if the hotels were closing their eyes against the sudden damp chill. Not even the few rare clipped mornings earlier in the month when all had gazed off at the snow topping the Presidentials, the glaze of white brilliant against the sky—this had seemed to them nothing more than a moment, a flare to the festive quickened life around them. Their summer wages: new clothing hung from a strung wire across one corner of the room and the memory remnants of whiskey-laced summer dawns, the etching of color as an electric current promising the day only hours of sleep away from them. And all either of them needed then on those foot-soaked dawnings was not to sleep or eat or even think of the work that waited once more but only now to be alone one with the other and let loose the creature they made together, the loveliness of tongues and skin. Walking from wherever they were to the small basement room, holding tight one to the other, their heads together, the smell of each sharp as must to the other’s nostrils, staggering up that long swooping main street of Bethlehem, not even noticing or when they did laughing back at the tight pursed glares or purposefully turned-away eyes of the other early morning walkers, the guests—middle-aged women in pairs dressed in long white frocks and white gloves and with their hair up under wide-brimmed hats or older men in full suits alone out walking for the mountain air and striding along away from the sluggish downward spread of their own bodies and the pull of the earth made all the keener for the sotted sex-wraithed stain of youth passing them by—and Joey and Jamie knowing this hatred and knowing it did not apply to them, that it was a bitterness not of their making. “You gotta wonder about it,” she told him once. “All anybody needs is a good drink and a good fuck. What’s so hard about that? What’s the big fucking deal?” He couldn’t tell her otherwise. And he knew the sorrows layered behind her words. The only thing to do, the only thing that mattered at all was to steady her with his one arm and hold her cheek tight against him with his free hand and take her near earlobe between his teeth. Hear her breath freeze up in her throat.
And so to the late October Monday when as if from a sleep they stood with a cold drizzle against them and the town shriven around them. Workmen on ladders up and down the street unlatching the black or dark-green painted shutters and folding them over the windows and screwing them in place. The train platform a stew, classless now with end-of-season vacationers and fleeing workers all clumped under the sparse awning. Steamer trunks piled in lumps against the
duffels and straw or rattan suitcases. The freights going through thoughtless now to the suddenly small town. No one arriving.
They went to the Casino. It was not yet noon. They were the only custom. No one paid attention to them. A pair of men were taking inventory. The floor was mopped under their feet. The room was dark and it grew darker as broad shutters the size of barn doors were laid one by one at long intervals over the windows. They sat huddled at the table, not talking, not bold enough to demand anything from anyone. After a time the barman brought over a pair of glasses and a stoppered half-bottle of something which he left on the table before them without a word. They knew it was without charge. They drank from it slowly. There was nowhere to go and they did not speak of it.
Scully found them there, crossed the room as if he’d known this was where they might be. In a rusted black suit with cuffs and pantlegs too short for him, hollow-chested with stretched thin skin over the bulb of his skull, the lank paste of hair the color of a worn coin, fingers stained with nicotine dangling off the knobs of his wrists, his fingers even in movement composed, as if they alone of his parts knew their competence. He seated himself, a limberjack of angles and lines. A slender ankle hooked up over the other knee.
“I thought you two might yet be around.”
Joey said, “Where’s everybody going off to?”
He shrugged. “Boston. New York. Some go south: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina. Where there’s work.”
“It might be nice,” she said, “to be somewhere warm for the winter.”
Scully nodded. “I’ve done that. You have the train fare?”
Jamie said, “I’m going nowhere. Make my way whatever way there is to make.”
She looked at him, said nothing.
Scully said, looking more at her than Jamie, “There’s ways to winter. It takes two-three things all run together at the same time but it can be done. Sometimes lean, sometimes fat.”
Joey turned her glass in the wet track on the table and looked at Scully. “You’ve heard me sing.”
“Why yes I have,” he said. “That’s the easy part.”
That first winter they lived together in Scully’s four-room house in Littleton down the hill close by the railroad tracks where the freights rocked their sleep and the whistles pierced their dreams, the house with the close-layered reek of a man alone a long time, the front room filled with an upright black piano scuffed and chipped but precisely tuned and stacks of sheet music on the floor and scattered over the burst-spring sofa and the spindle-legged chairs. The small room off the kitchen where Joey and Jamie stayed was layered with alligator-hide instrument cases mired with dust and frozen broken latches, the cases in all shapes and sizes as if a mad leatherworker had been building anatomies. “I don’t play a one of them anymore,” he’d told them. But I can’t help but hold on to them.”
“Maybe,” Joey said, “I should take up the ukulele. Give me something to do but sit there between verses.”
“Don’t do it,” he warned. “Your audience don’t want a thing between you and them.”
That first winter Joey and Scully traveled the north country, mostly on weekends to North Conway and Fryeburg, Colebrook and Saint Johnsbury, even Dixville and Berlin to opera houses and house parties and a handful of winter-pressed swelled-bride weddings and wherever the money took them. From ten days before Christmas until the day after the New Year they slept on trains and worked every night and arrived back in Littleton with pouched black eyes and a thousand dollars between them and had their own small celebration then. Other nights they worked barn parties and skating parties around the western ridge of the Presidentials and made little more than their fare. As if the musicians existed for no purpose beyond that moment back off in the corner spinning out what was needed. “We’re preachers to the blood,” Scully told her. “They need us there but nobody wants to figure out why. It’s a good time is all. If they’re having one, we should be too. It ain’t talent so much that makes it a business as understanding what exactly’s provided. Don’t confuse it with anything else.”
“I was raised by a whore. I don’t spin pipedreams.”
He’d looked at her then. Somewhere on a daylight train. Through the window sunlight on their laps like summer. Beyond the glass, snow plowed back off the road so high the banks went out of sight overhead, the direct look out the window into the bluewhite snow. So fine and cold that the lips and furrows of the banks tilted and held in place, not moved even by the passing train. Scully said, “A bit of dream won’t kill you.”
He was a man without women. Had clearly at some point indeterminate abandoned the idea of them in his life. His hands worked up and down the ivory and ebony keys like a lover finally at home. Always, even after a ten-minute break, with the attention of a long absence.
It took Jamie longer than he liked to learn this. It was a hard winter. Through the first part he found no work and spent his days in the house, most often alone, or idling in the newsstand or barbershop upstreet. Sure someway he’d lost her. Taking each phrase she passed to him, even those in lovemaking, and turning them over and over in his mind, finding the rot there that he wanted. And still she came back. Then in January Scully and Joey responded to an offer of three weeks’ work in North Conway and he saw them off at the station with flitting eyes, unable to focus clearly on either of them or on what she was saying to him, and he did not wait for the train to depart but walked out along the frozen river to the tanning sheds and shoe works and took a job in the gluing room of one of the factories, knowing he’d squandered his summer and seeing clearly he was less well off than being back on the farm but was determined to grit it out, to wait the spring and pay attention this time. The only alternative was to steal the gold and go but he had to believe she’d come back and knew he wanted to be there when she did. In an odd way he did not care what he had to do, did not care about the work if she was not there to see him doing it. So he worked three days in the gluing room and left the first two nights sick to his stomach with his head aching and his eyes red-rimmed and weeping tears that froze on his cheeks as he walked back through the early January night to the cold house and a cold supper. And at midday of the third day he found his supervisor and quit, only shaking his head when asked why. The other glue workers were imbecilic, misshapen, enormities of oddity and he was without interest in learning if they were born that way or came to the condition through the work; he would not remain there and felt this answer to be obvious. And so ended up on the large open floor of the factory, seated at a stitching machine sewing precut tongues to uppers over and over, but the room was warm and the windows looked out over the river and a rank of spruce beyond that and he found he could do the work and still cut trails through the spruce in his mind. And so he made a living and was without pride about it; even when the musicians came home he would still be at his machine each morning at seven, hungover but awake from the thirty-below mile walk to work. He made no friends there and wanted none. This was a time in his life he’d never repeat and would never revisit. As a child kept in after school writing I will nots on the blackboard he sat at his machine, stitching leather to leather, his right foot working up and down in a smooth steady pump, the sound each beat the passage of time, each shoe a shoe closer to summer.
When she was away he did not try to avoid thinking of her, of where she might be and what doing, of where, halfway through his workday with the sun on the icicles outside the factory windows like blades; she might be waking and the countless faceless men all beside her or at least all those each night wanting to be. And he never questioned her of any of this. There was nothing he wanted to know. Twice, as winter ground on through March with slate skies pressed low for days on end and the cold damp now but with nothing yet of spring in it, he walked girls home from the shoe works and both times sat talking with them until he saw they were bored with him and then excused himself and walked to the dark house, where he helped himself under the stiff cold blankets, thinking of what he coul
d have, should have, done. Imagining those girls and others as well but never once Joey for his pleasure. As if excluding her kept him removed from all guilt. When she was away he never assumed she’d return but let the fever of his soul, the turmoil of his blood, call her back. It was a winter of holding breath.
So in May when the snow was rotting under the spruce outside the shoe works windows and while the river ran high and free of ice, and Scully and Joey were far down south in Portsmouth at Wentworth where some semblance of a season was already under way, he collected himself and quit his stitching post. Daily he rode the train to Bethlehem where the great hotels still wore their shutters and the grass was matted brown in packed swirls left as shadows of the snow on the lawns and the golf courses but where also some few of the hotel men were back in town, camped in basement offices next to wood- or coal-burning heaters and going over their books from the season before, walking out each noon to stand on the empty porches to gaze east and gauge the snowmelt on Mount Washington, which stood at a far distance away down the main street. And some few of these men, he learned, would also come out of an evening with a glass of whiskey in their hand to stand in the same place and watch the snow-crest of the mountain turn pink against the crystalline sky as the sun sank behind their shoulders and on some of those evenings they came out in their shirtsleeves. And he came to know them all by first names and learned something of their histories and families, and so in mid-June on a Friday afternoon when the first guests of summer disembarked the trains out of Boston, Jamie was assistant to the bar manager at the Sinclair, a position he was qualified for simply by proximity and persistence.
And his winter of eating day-old bread and hard cheese and green bacon fruited as he spent his savings renting a small green-shingled house with three rooms just off the Whitefield road north of the center of Bethlehem and it was here he led Joey when she came back north from Portsmouth with a summer tan from the ocean beach, her hair stiff from the salt breeze. That first night he ate the salt from her body as if he’d had no seasoning for months, she curling up under his tongue. Later he propped on an elbow to watch her sleep. He felt back in the race. The temptation to take her by the throat and beat her head against the wall was momentary. He let himself out of the house into the June night, standing naked on the thin grass sprouting around the heaved-up elms. A frail moon was caught in the new tender leaves.
