Heart Songs and Other Stories

by Annie Proulx

  “Don’t know how somebody can live like that.” mumbled Albro.

  One of the Nourys was a pastry chef, another the principal of an elementary school in Massachusetts, but the others were brawlers, knifers, crazy log-truck drivers known for taking corners too fast, rolling the load and leaping clear, unhurt.

  “That’s a rat’s nest of Nourys up in the eastern townships,” a farmer said. “You look in your graveyards both sides of the border you’ll find plenty of Nourys. Most of them got there the hard way.”

  Archie Noury had ginger hair, bloodshot eyes and a scar down the middle of his nose that made him say. “what are you starin’ at?” He was greasily handsome, despite the scar, and badtempered. He glanced in windows and mirrors not out of vanity but to see whom he resembled, for his parentage was uncertain. A locket on a tarnished chain hung around his neck, tangled in his chest hair. No one knew what pictures were inside. Maybe Rose, maybe she knew.

  In the thick summer darkness, window cranked down for the cool, Albro pulled into Warren’s yard to turn around, to begin his homeward run. A parked truck blocked the way. He looked it over in the moth-shot headlight glare; an old bucket with a varnished board sign in the back window, CHEVY, the letters fashioned from popsicle sticks; a rack of maple poles with the bark still on; and two bumper stickers—one on the driver’s side HIS, on the passenger side HERS. Then somebody came up beside him, pressed the mouth of a side-by-side 12-gauge into the soft flesh of his neck. He smelled vanilla, swiveled his eyes to see a huge woman with hair billowing around her head like crimped silk.

  “You’re the booger turns around in the driveway. Warren don’t want you to do it. So you better get out of here. This is private prop’ty.” A creeping flashlight beam came out of the trailer door, slid over them, lighting up her yellow flaring hair and Albro’s surprised hands gripping the steering wheel. He couldn’t say a word at first, got his voice back when she lowered the gun.

  “Hell, I didn’t know nobody lived up here, thought the trailer was empty. He should of said something. End of the town road, no place to turn around.”

  “Is now. He cleared out over there.” She pointed across the road with her chin.

  Albro backed across into a slot of stumps and rocks that chewed his tires, turned, passed the trailer. She was up on the steps, Warren holding the aluminum door open for her with his foot, his flashlight twitching. The bumper stickers on the Chevy truck blazed and he saw where she’d tried to scrape HIS off.

  A mile or two down the hill he pulled onto a logging road, drove into the ash whips, stopped, turned off the motor and lit a cigarette. His hands trembled. He couldn’t stop seeing the purple mouth like melted crayon, the yellow hair; he still felt the shotgun’s hard snout.

  At first light he was drinking coffee in the kitchen, and Simone was mixing brownies for the store. The window fitted around a sky like milk. She tilted a bottle; a fragrance rose from the bowl.

  “What’s that!”

  “Vanilla, same as I always put in.” She looked at him. “When you gonna do something about Robichaud’s garden tiller? Been settin’ there for weeks and they come by twice, see if it was ready.”

  Friday morning Albro rode his mower around the lawn in wet heat, starting from a central point known only to him and working outward in a spiral. The river lay between its banks like molten lead; the cornfields were as flat as wallpaper. A farm truck dragged past in a hot clatter. Around eleven the Chevy truck with the pole rack pulled in.

  Warren Trussel jumped down from the passenger side and went into the store. The fat woman followed him, hair like cascading heat over her magenta dress, a huge bell of fabric. Two laps of the lawn, the mower vibrating under his buttocks, and Albro saw them come out. Warren with his box of mystery cans. The woman said something and he went back in. She stepped onto Albro’s lawn, waited at the edge for him to come around.

  He stopped the mower but kept it running. The engine’s tremors shook his flesh. She came up to the machine. The smell of vanilla mingled with exhaust. He stared at the lawn as if his interest was grass. Warren came out of the store again, got in the truck, and bent forward, drank from a can.

  “Didn’t know you was the storekeeper’s husband; thought you was some troublemaker. Warren says it’s okay if you turn around in the yard. Says it’s okay, do whatever you want.”

  From the corner of his eye he saw Warren drain the can and turn toward them, his head framed in the passenger window. Albro cleared his throat. Quickly the woman’s hot, ringless hand went to his groin, squeezed. She walked back to the truck, her sheet of hair flashing in the sun like signals. He threw the mower in gear and finished the lawn before he went in the store. Simone was wiping out the refrigerator case.

  “How do you like that?”

  “What,” said Albro.

  “Who Warren had with him. I see her over there talking to you. You know who she is, do you?”

  “No. She wanted to know what time it was.” He held up his left arm with its stainless-steel watch.

  “She’s Archie Noury’s wife. Rose Noury. Left Archie, come to live with Warren. For how long, who knows? What I call leaving the frying pan for the fire. There’ll be trouble over it. Archie Noury will make trouble. I remember Rose at school, big fat thing even then, a big fat slob. Wish it would rain and cool things off.”

  “Sooner or later,” he said. He fished in his pocket, came up with a dollar and a quarter and laid it on the counter. He took a brownie. For the smell of the vanilla. It was not enough. Later he sneaked a small bottle off the shelf and slipped it in his pocket.

  Miles away Archie Noury was sharpening an umbrella spoke, whetting the points of his hunting arrows, throwing his deer rifle up to his shoulder and dry-firing, flinging a knife at a post, punching at his mirror image, whirling to hit the surprised air.

  “Nobody pulls nothin’ on Archie Noury!” he shouted. “You like that?” he yelled at the gouged post.

  Hot, listless days went by. There was thunder in the night but no rain. Albro fooled with the garden, got the lawn down to stubble. He stayed home, watched the late programs with Simone, slept or didn’t sleep in the back room.

  Wednesday the white air shuddered with heat and the hazy cornfields undulated. Simone had a fan going, the wash of hot air riffling the real estate guides on the counter. Albro was in and out between the store and the garage. He was messed up, a snake eating its tail. He couldn’t think of anything but the hot, ringless hand, the big haunches under the dress. He couldn’t stand the waiting until night when it might cool down.

  After the late news Simone went to bed where she lay listening to the wawl of trucks on the road, the sound of water running into the bathtub. She was awake when he drove out of the yard.

  He turned in the stump-pocked cut, drifted past the trailer and there was Rose, leaning against a pile of boards. His wet hands slid on the steering wheel. His chin was smooth, hair still damp; he wore clean underwear, the pastel yellow boxer shorts that Simone bought at Ames, three to a package. Rose was walking to him through the darkness.

  “Hey, ain’t it hot? What took you so long.? Thought I was gonna see you before this.” She was in the seat beside him, the interior light briefly on her face, the huge arm shawled in bright hair.

  “Where you want to go?” He listened to the engine beating and turning.

  “Nowhere. Just pull in behind my Chevy.”

  “Here?” He was appalled. “What about Warren?”

  “Warren! He don’t have nothing to do with it. Just park there, it’s okay.”

  But he wanted to go to the old logging road, get in behind the ash saplings. No sir, he said, he wasn’t going to park in Warren’s yard. In the trash and the dirt.

  “C’mon,” she coaxed. “It’ll only take a minute.”

  A minute wasn’t what he had in mind, either. He said nothing.

  “Well, then, I’m goin’ back inside.” she said. The event, which for days he had imagined as a luscious,
secret hour behind the leaves, rotted in her purple mouth. Everything was screwed up.

  “All right.” He jerked the truck up behind the Chevy. HIS. HERS. He turned off the engine and the lights, trod the emergency brake pedal. She was at him, agile for such a fat woman. And it did take only a minute, ending with a burst of light, his wide-open eyes seeing a flash that illuminated a pile of logs and some chicken bones and eggshells raying from a burst garbage bag.

  “What was that?” His numb mouth mangled the words.

  She laughed. “Oh, prob’ly only Warren shinin’ his flashlight around. Heat lightnin’.” She was already out of the truck. “Maybe a car comin’ up the hill. Maybe somebody comin’ to turn around in the yard.”

  “Maybe Archie Noury,” he said meanly. Seven minutes after he’d pulled up, he drove away. He was sorry he’d wasted the hot water on a bath.

  By the time he got to the bottom of the hill, he was sure it had been Warren Trussel crouched on one of the lumber piles with a flashbulb camera he’d stolen somewhere. The thought of Warren made him sick. Dirty trash like that. Warren and Rose. He gagged.

  Archie Noury started to drink the next morning. He began with a dreggy swallow of Old Duke from an almost empty bottle in the stifling shithouse, switched to warm beer at 7:30, found a quarter of a pint of cheap tequila in the glove compartment, then, at noon, drove down to the shopping mall, cashed in his deposit bottles and bought a fifth of Popov. The bank thermometer read 92. He drove with the bottle between his legs, the neck sticking up like a glass hard-on. He looked at himself in the rearview. “Bam,” he said. “Bam, bam. Thank you, ma’am.”

  Albro couldn’t get the mower started. He could hardly breathe the thick air. Around one o’clock he went into the store. “I got to go get a part for the mower,” he said.

  “If this heat don’t break soon,” said Simone. She regarded the shimmering road, the distorted shapes of passing cars and trucks. She started to say something else, but Albro was already outside, his hand reaching for the door handle on the truck.

  He came back late in the afternoon under knobby blue thunderheads pulsing with lightning. His face was grey and sweaty; he wiped at his mouth as if he’d eaten fried meat.

  “What’s the matter.” said Simone, “heat got you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Looks like we’re going to get it.”

  He went out to the garage to work on the mower.

  The Jehovah’s Witness man could not dial the state police number, his hands were shaking so hard. He had thought he had things under control but this shaking had started. The woman took the quarter out of his hand, dialed, did the talking. After she hung up she bought a bottle of pop from Simone.

  “The police cruiser is coming.” the woman said and retold what she had seen, the fat naked body, the bloody foot; the roasting chicken, burned up by now; the heat, the washed-out road.

  “We ought to pray.” she said, looking at the man who stood off by himself, gazing into the rain. She put her chin down and folded her hands. “I believe in the love of Jehovah and its power to—come on, pray with me.”

  “I believe in love …” said the man.

  Simone said she had to run over to the garage for a minute. She held a folded paper bag above her hair, dodged through the downpour.

  Albro leaned against the edge of the workbench at the back of the garage, the oily fingers of his right hand pulling the fingers of the left. The bench was littered with tools and empty brown vanilla bottles.

  “Well,” Simone said, “there’s two bible nuts, just come down from Warren Trussel’s place. Say they are both dead on the floor. Called up the police.”

  She squinted, and made out the blue bathtub and the madonna in the streaming rain through the window behind him. “It’s really coming down.” The cotton dress hung damp on her stick bones.

  “Um,” he said.

  She sighed, walked over to the door and opened it.

  “That’s the cruiser. They got here fast enough.” She held the damp newspaper over her head, ready to make a run for it. “Now I’m goin’ to tell you something. You shut up. You hear me, you just shut up,” she said.

  He knew that much, anyway.

  Negatives

  YEAR after year rich people moved into the mountains and built glass houses at high elevations; at sunset when the valleys were smothered in leathery shadow, the heliodor mansions flashed like an armada signaling for the attack. The newest of these aeries belonged to Buck B., a forcibly retired television personality attracted to scenery. A crew of outside carpenters arrived in the fall and labored until spring. Trucks bearing great sheets of tempered glass crept over the dirt roads. The owner stayed scarce until June when his dusty Mercedes, with an inverted bicycle on the roof, pulled up at the village store and in came Buck B. clenching a map and asking for directions to his own house.

  A few weeks later the first yellow cab ever seen in the town disgorged Walter Welter in the same place. Walter, who had come a long way in ten years from Coma, Texas, called Buck B. on the pay phone, said he was at the store and Buck B. could just get down there and pick him up. The cab driver bought a can of pineapple juice and a generic cheese sandwich, waited in his taxi.

  “I give ’em a year,” said the storekeeper peering out between advertising placards, watching Walter transfer tripods, portfolios, cameras and six suitcases from the taxi to the Mercedes.

  “Tell you what I’d give ’em,’” said the tough customer. “What I’d do.”

  But it all was all over before the first snow and no one had to do a thing.

  “Why do you let that slut come here?” said Buck, casting his lightless eyes on Walter, who knelt beside the tub in the downstairs bathroom. Buck’s hands were crusted with clay, held stiff in front of his black apron. Walter’s hands were in yellow rubber gloves, scrubbing away Albina Muth’s greasy ring. Buck’s face was all chops and long teeth like the face of Fernandel in old French comedies: his hair rippled like silver water.

  “You think you’re going to get some photographs, don’t you? That she’s some kind of a subject. The Rural Downtrodden. And then what, the pictures lie around in stacks. Nobody but you knows what they are. The edge of an car. A dirty foot. You better keep her out of the upstairs.” He waited but Walter said nothing. After ten or eleven seconds Buck kicked the bathroom door shut, stalked back to his clay, hands held in front of him like ceremonial knives shaped for cutting out viscera.

  The fingers on both hands wouldn’t count the dinners Walter Welter ruined with his stories of Albina Muth. Friends came up from the city for a mountain weekend, had to listen to grisly accounts: she had left her awful husband for a deranged survivalist who hid knives under tin cans in the woods: she lived with an elderly curtain rod salesman made such a satyr by rural retirement that Albina had been rushed twice to the emergency room: she was being prosecuted for welfare fraud: her children had head lice: she sported a vestigial tail.

  They saw her at the mall supermarket standing in line with children clustered on the cart like flies, or carrying bags of beer and potato chips out to a pickup truck in the parking lot. Her children, with thick-lidded eves and reptilian mouths, sat in the bark-strewn truck bed rolling empty soda cans. Albina, her hair squashed against her head, climbed into the passenger seat of the cab. smoked cigarettes, waiting for someone who would come later.

  One day Walter passed her walking on the muddy shoulder of the road, the children stumbling and squalling behind her. He pulled up, asked if she wanted a ride.

  “Sure as hell do.” Smoky, rough voice. She stuffed the kids with their chapped, smeared faces, into the back seat and got in beside him. She was thin, about the size of a twelve-year-old. Her coarse hair looked like she cut it herself with a jack-knife, her white face like a folded slice of store bread. He noticed, not the color of her eyes, but the bruised-looking flesh around them.

  “Know where the Bullgut Road is? Next one after that’s my road. You’n drop us there
.” The tone was bold. She bit at her nails, spitting fragments off the tip of her tongue.

  The road was a skidder-gouged track. She pulled the half-asleep children out like sacks, saying, “come on, come on,” and started up through the mud, one brat jammed onto her hip, the other two coming at their own pace and crying. He waved, but she didn’t look around.

  At dinner he did an imitation of the way she wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Buck B. listened, tarnished hair clouded with clay dust, eating his dish of yogurt and nuts, gazing through the glass wall at the mountain. He said, “God, that’s beautiful. Why don’t you do mountain studies? Why don’t you take pictures of something attractive?” Then he said he was afraid that Albina Muth’s children had sowed the back seat of the Mercedes with louse nits. They were starting to fight when the phone rang and Walter got the last word, saying, “I’m not here if it’s one of your stupid friends wanting a tree picture.” He meant Barb Cigar, who once had called to say that her trees were covered with lovely perfect leaves and didn’t Walter want to come with his camera? No, he did not. It was Barb Cigar with the dewlapped mouth like the flews of a hound who had given Buck B. an antique sabre reputed to have fallen from Casimir Pulaski’s hand in the battle for Savannah (a parting token from her ex-father-in-law from his cutlery collection), she who had sent a youth in a panda bear suit to sing Happy Birthday under Buck’s window, she who named her Rottweiler puppy “Mr. B.”

  Walter Welter’s photographs were choked down and spare, out-of-focus, the horizons tilted, unrecognizable objects looming in the foreground, the heads of people quartered and halved. What he called the best one showed a small, boxy house with a grape arbor and a porch glider. The grass needed cutting. Guests sorting through the photographs kept coming back to this dull scene until gradually the image of the house showed its secret hostility, the arbor turned harsh and offensive, the heavy grass bent with rage. The strength of the photograph emerged as though the viewer’s eye was itself a developing medium. It would happen a lot faster, said Buck, if Walter wrote out the caption: The House where Ernest and Lora Cool were Bludgeoned by their Son, Buxton Cool.