Heart Songs and Other Stories

by Annie Proulx

  5

  A thin dust of snow falls. Visitors’ cars rush along the road again, stirring up pale clouds.

  “Must be havin’ a party,” says Aunt.

  “Goodbye party. I hope,” says Reba.

  Mrs. Beaubien’s little hungry face bobs into her window every time a car goes past.

  Reba and Aunt and I get in the truck and go for a ride, careful to look straight ahead. There are eight coffee cans with dead marigolds on Yogetsky’s porch. We can see the Moon-Azures up in the high field where the smooth, sloping granite lies exposed. We can see them among the poplars that have multiplied into a grove since I was a kid. Those trees all drop their leaves on the same day in autumn.

  “That’s the spring up there. Dad used to go up there at noon with old Diamond.” I say. “Under the maple that went down.”

  “They can’t be all that excited about a spring.” says Aunt.

  We see them bending over, one woman down on her knees with a pad of paper, drawing or writing. Dr. Moon-Azure leans forward from his hips with a camera screwed into his eye.

  “They’ve got a body there.” says Aunt. I can smell the faint lemony scent of lotion, the thick warmth of hair. The truck heater is on.

  “More like a dead porcupine—probably the first one they ever see,” says Reba. We turn around and go home and watch The Secret World of Insects. Our spoons clink and scrape at the cream and Jell-O in the bottom of the pressed glass bowls, the double-diamond pattern. It’s just the field and the spring and the rock. Hey, I’ve been up there a hundred times.

  The phone rings.

  “What do you think,” Marie Beaubien says.

  “I think they’ve found a corpse in the bushes, one of those poor girls who’ll take a ride from anybody in a red car,” says Aunt.

  “No, we would of seen that little skinny man, what’s his name, over there in Rose of Sharon, the medical examiner.”

  “Winwell. Avery Winwell. His mother was a Richardson.”

  “That’s right, Winwell. Yes, and the state police and all them. Whatever they’ve got there isn’t no body.”

  “Well, I don’t know what they could have found.”

  “Something.”

  The next day I walk down to Yogetsky’s to get away from the sound of the vacuum cleaner. Reba knows it gets on my nerves.

  Yogetsky is knocking the dead marigolds out of the coffee cans. Brown humps of dirt lie on the ground. He says, “See your neighbors found a Indian carving.” I think at first he means the Beaubiens.

  “What carving is that,” I say.

  “I got it inside in the paper,” he says. I follow him into the kitchen. He washes his hands in the clean sink. The paper is folded over the arm of a chair. I look out the window and see our house, the grey clapboards stained with brown streaks from the iron nails, see the sign, CLEW’S APPLIANCES.

  Yogetsky shakes out his paper until he finds the right place. He peers through his slipping glasses, his blunt finger traces across the text, and he reads aloud. “It says, ‘Complex petroglyphs such as the recently discovered Thunder God pictured here are rare among the eastern woodland tribes.’ It says. ‘Discovered by the owners of a farm in Ironworks County.’” Yogetsky peers at me. “I didn’t know there was no Indians around here.”

  He shows me the picture in the newspaper. I see my father’s self-portrait cut deep into rock. In one stone hand he clenches three bolts of I electricity. Around his waist is his lineman’s belt. His hair flows back, his eyes fix you from the stone.

  “Dad. I’m standin’ on the eyes,” said Bootie.

  In our game the stick touched the kite, inexplicably fell away. Diamond swayed, his balance gone. Falling, his hand grasped the wire. His spine arched, his hand clenched living bolts of lightning. His eyes fixed mine, his mouth opened, and from the corner of his lips spilled the dark molasses, like blood, like uncontrollable tobacco juice.

  I laugh, because isn’t there something funny about this figure slowly cut into the fieldrock during the long summer noons half a century ago? And how can Yogetsky understand?

  A Country Killing

  TWO Jehovah’s Witnesses, suffering in hot clothes, found the bodies a little before the cloudburst. They got out of their car, the man thin and sallow from some long trouble, stood a minute under the saw-edged trees looking at the clouds coming up dark as plums, then at the trailer in the clearing. The man, arrowhead of sweat on the back of his suit jacket, hitched at his necktie, followed the woman up the path. The woman had experience. They had told him to stay in the background, watch how it was done.

  The woman knocked at the door, the man behind her, holding his sunheated bible against his leg, breathing air as heavy as wet felt. The woman shaded her eyes with a plain hand, nails cut blunt; looked through the glass of the door and saw Rose lying faceup in front of the stove, saw a grimy brassiere in some huge triple-X size, and Rose’s face with its raccoon’s mask of bloody pulp. Warren was farther back, red foot and shin showing, the rest of him hidden by the stove. He had fallen against shelves crammed with empty jars, folded paper bags, spindles of binder twine. The smell of roasting chicken greased the humid air. The woman had to look at the stove, saw the oven knob set at 350. The man stared at Rose’s pale pubic hair.

  “Hello?” said the woman. “Are you all right?”

  “They’re dead. They look dead as mackerels.”

  The woman whirled, jumped past him down the steps, almost falling to her knees with the force of the leap, but rose again with the man limping after her, slapping his thigh for the car keys but still clenching the bible and some badly printed pages describing the future of the world and those in it. Lightning hair jolted from the thunderheads.

  The car swayed over the road, and before they entered the hairpin, raindrops the size of wild birds’ eggs hit the windshield and the trees roared over them, casting off twigs and whole branches. The man drove through bursting rain and luminous blue hail that sounded like an avalanche of gravel, and the woman’s praying voice burrowed under the drumming and thundercrack.

  At the main road a washout cut them off from the blacktop. On the other side they could see Sweet’s Country Store. The fogged windshield glowed like a television screen, rods of hail and rain struck the macadam and rebounded in perpendicular strokes: across the way the trembling letters that spelled out BEER faded as the electricity died in the store. Suddenly the man trod on the gas pedal and the car launched into the washout, made it onto the blacktop before it stalled.

  “We ought to get it off the highway.”

  He got out and pushed the car, and the woman pushed too, the roadway water over the tops of their shoes, the woman’s hair twisting into snakelets, and the smell of dye coming out of their drenched clothes. The red-coaled images of what they had seen were already taking on ashy crusts, cooling into memory. They ran for the store, splashing halos of water.

  Inside, the woman shouted excitedly at Simone Sweet who stood at the counter pumping up a gas lantern.

  “Phone the police. People dead up there. In a trailer. Up that road.”

  She spoke from the distance of the door, water draining from her saturated hem. The overhead light flickered; the beer sign glowed again. Simone pointed. The woman thought she meant for them to go outside with their wet clothes, but, turning, she saw the payphone and the man fumbling for a coin.

  The store was in a river valley among scrolled cornfields that broke green against sudden cliffs. The road ran along the river, into the northern spruce, to Quebec. Because it went to Canada the road had a blue mood of lonely distances and night travel.

  A spring ice jam had forced the river onto the road. The water, charged with branches and dead leaves, got into the store, gleaming like some brilliant wax, and ruined bags of potatoes, melted the labels off cans on the bottom shelves. For a few days farmers parked at the edge of the flood and sat in the cabs of their trucks, smoking and drinking beer, watching the slurring current. Someone said a drowned hog
might have plugged a culvert. Finally a high school kid drove through the water, arm braced in the window, rooster tails spurting from the tires. One by one the watchers left, marking the macadam with muddy arcs as they turned around. The fogged cliffs buried their heads in rain; the dripping woods were as ill-defined as a grainy newspaper photograph.

  The Sweets lived in a double-wide with awnings and picture window, set off by a scribble of fence and two plywood ducks. Their kitchen opened into the store. The side lawn was brown from close mowing. Albro rode the machine up and down every day, as though it were a horse that needed frequent exercise. At the center of the lawn were five boulders and an upended bathtub painted the bitter blue of a Noxzema jar. A madonna stood under the curve of the tub rim. In winter her crusted chin rested on snow and the boulders became humped penitents.

  Simone, arms like dowels, a frizz of tea-colored hair, worked all hours in the store under the droning neons, surrounded by potato chips, candy, toilet paper, dry gas, adventure videos, the lottery machine. She made the brownies herself. Smell of the devil’s hooves from the coffeepot beside the cash register. Under the counter she had a metal box of rolled quarters and a nail puller with a broken claw.

  “What good’ll that do you?” said Albro.

  “You wouldn’t care to get clipped behind the ear with it.”

  Albro’s good looks had slipped over thirty-odd years to a hump of steel-colored hair, a congealed expression, oily hands picking over a strew of metal parts. A silvery scar the size of a beer cap marked one thigh, from the time when he was married to his first wife and had fallen raving drunk into a barbwire fence after a jealous fight because she knew he was cheating with other women. That supple, hot-blooded self was still stored in his stiffening body, though long unused.

  He was a night driver. A hundred times a year he eased open the door of the back room where he slept—the office they called it: a desk buried in bills and receipts, a cot, a tumble of blankets—while Simone slept in the double bed in the front bedroom in the bleed of the yard light, her shoes crooked on the rug in front of the bureau like dead fish on a sandbar.

  Sometimes he was out until morning light. Simone would hear the loose rumble of the wrecker pulling in and get up to start the coffee. Albro, stinking of cigarettes, would lean his elbow on the table and tell her what he’d seen as he’d crawled on the sweet note of second gear over the moon-shot roads, pitted and obscure under the wheels.

  “I see two bobcats fighting or fucking in a ditch, one, don’t know which, anyway, blood on the fur.”

  Wailing songs on the radio. In the rainy headlights the side roads glistered like roof flashing. He came upon disabled cars wallowed in snow or drunks passed out on their steering wheels. If they wanted a tow, he charged thirty-five dollars. Once, he caught a glint in the roadside alders that turned out to be a ring hanging on a twig, a ring set with chip diamonds. And, years back, that car with Arizona plates in a snowplow turnaround, nose pointed into the woods and the windows frosted on the inside with condensed breath, the dead man dimly visible through the pearly scrim of his past exhalations. Fragments of teeth across his jacket like red crumbs.

  “Come all that way to do it,” said Albro.

  Simone listened, spreading newspaper on the concrete floor, down on her knees to jab into the vending machine with a straightened coathanger.

  “Supposed to be rodentproof, but there’s a mouse in there. Must weigh three pound now off the candy. You ought to stay away from a car pulled off the road. Get mixed up in it. You don’t know who’s in it. You ought to be taking care of the mice and rats eating us up.”

  “Could be somebody needed a tow.”

  “Ask me, you need a tow.”

  How many times had he driven up Trussel Hill, the road bent like a folded straw before it went nowhere, seven or eight miles of uphill woods ending in Warren Trussel’s yard with its chalky, rake-ended trailer up on blocks, the thirdhand kind from the back of the lot, the kind with a spaceheater between the bedroom and the door? The mobile-home salesmen, laughing in their plywood office, called them roaster ovens. Through the trees Warren’s roaster oven resembled a sinking boat. Sometimes, when Albro pulled in, a mealy face loomed at the door, a flashlight ray stuttered over the lumber piles. Albro took his time turning around.

  The trailer swam in a sea of junk auto parts, mildewed hay bales, cable spools, broken shovels and tractor seats, logging chains, the front half of a bus without windows or engine, a late-model wreck folded like a wallet. Plywood steps atilt, aluminum door decorated with a curlicued letter in stamped metal .22-shot into a twist.

  “Prob’ly Warren done that,” he told Simone. “Fed up to see that B every time he opens the door. B for bum. B for deadbeat. He made them halfassed steps. Only trailer in the world without a dog. B for sonofabitch.”

  “Don’t know how anybody can live that way.” Simone wiped the table, looked in Albro’s coffee cup to see if he was done yet.

  She knew Warren. When she opened the store Friday mornings he was there, tall as a henyard post, wearing brown canvas overalls that stood away from his legs like tarpaper rolls, nodding his big panhead with its greasy cap. Down for the mystery bins and his lottery ticket. Sore-looking eyes. He pawed through the boxes of cans without labels, the halfprice microwave dinners.

  “How can you tell how long to heat up them microwaves. Warren,” said Simone in her pitched storekeeper’s voice. “No way to tell how long to cook them if the labels is off.”

  “Guess at it. Can’t tell what you get until you get it. Beans. Soup. Chinese shit. Cans is better. Know what the best ones is? Some a that dogfood. That is kangaroo. That is good meat. Too good for goddamn dogs.” Heavy mouth with its frieze of cold sores, stubble over the jaw and down the neck into a fester of ingrown hairs

  He logged in winter if somebody came up with a short crew, in summer stacked boards at the lumber mill, picked up roadside bottles in company with Archie Noury. Sometimes he had a horse up by the woods for a few weeks, keeping it for somebody.

  “Horses?” A farmer looked at Simone, his thick yellow hand on the counter a little in front of the quart of ice cream, three blackening bananas, a canister of ersatz cream. “Let me tell you something about Warren and horses. You know that old Dodge he drives, thing hangs down so low its tits drag on the ground. You could put your fist through the side of the door. Somebody didn’t know no better give him two kids’ ponies to keep while they went off. He went to pick them up. He’s got this business rigged up there, a pole in the back to separate the ponies. Gets them in and takes off. On the interstate, doing fifty at most. Paper trucks on the way up to Quebec, semis going past him, sixtyfive, seventy miles an hour. The ponies see them big tandems eighteen inches away. Warren gets to the bridge, they are over the water there, the ponies see the railing. A couple trailer trucks pass Warren. He claims one of them hit the airhorn. The ponies lose it, rear up and one kicks the tailgate. Tailgate falls off and the ponies go out on the road. At fifty miles an hour, hitting the concrete and the trucks coming up fast behind them. That happened three years ago. And that’s Warren and horses.”

  “Oh my god,” said Simone who had heard the story many times. “Was they hurt?”

  “Hurt! I guess they was hurt. Killed. They was killed. Guts and blood all over the road. Traffic piled up. State trooper had to shoot ’em to put ’em out of their misery.”

  “Guess I know somebody’s going to have banana splits after supper,” she said. Knew something about him, too—that he’d been seen coming out of a restaurant men’s room in another town, naked to the waist and blushing scarlet from belt-line to scalp. Shirt rolled up under his arm. Who could say what that was about?

  On Father’s Day Albro went to see his sons by his first wife, Arsenio and Oland, twenty-eight and twenty-six years old and still living in the Homer B. Bake Training Home. They would never be trained for anything but raking leaves or sweeping the long, shining corridors, their hairy arms scything away t
he years.

  Arsenio never knew him, but Oland said, “Dad, Dad, Dad,” like a mourning dove, whacking his pliant hands together in counterpoint. Unless it was raining, they stood on the lawn. Wooden benches faced each other like wrestlers. Arsenio’s waxy fingers clenched his broom. Albro stood alone and to the side.

  “Well, here’s your dad again come to say hello and see how you’re gettin’ along,” he said. Arsenio’s face clenched like someone listening to a loudspeaker test. He began to sweep the sidewalk and Oland, without a broom, swept with him. Albro walked beside them in the grass, doggedly giving the year’s news.

  “There was a break-in at the store and at first we thought nothing was took. But a day or so later Simone see the shoelaces was all out. Somebody robbed the shoelaces. Imagine that. And there was a flood. Foot deep in the store. Elgood Peckox, you remember him, Oland, he give you apples when you was little, well he died. Seventy-two years old. Cancer of the bowels.”

  “Papple,” muttered Oland.

  At the end of half an hour Albro handed each of the men who were his sons a two-pound box of chocolates shrink-wrapped in red plastic. Arsenio, gripped by the passion of sweeping, let his box fall, but Oland tore the crimson covering and crammed the dark candies into his mouth. His eyes closed and a kind of ruined beauty shuddered over his face like the hide of a horse disturbed by flies. Although he tried to cramp it back, hopeless affection fluttered in Albro like a tic.

  Before Rose came to live with Warren Trussel he went around with Archie Noury. Simone often saw them driving past in Warren’s old truck, heading out to pick up bottles along the roadside for the deposit money.

  “Can’t be much of a business,” said Simone. “They get, what, twelve, fourteen dollars’ worth of cans, if they’re lucky, for a full day of fooling around. Have to buy more gas for what they use up: that takes most of the money. They get two six-packs, get a pack of them generic cigarettes, and that’s it. Six beers and ten cigarettes for a day’s work. Reminds me you ought to get at them potholes in the parking lot. ’stead of fooling around with the mower.”