by Ian Woollen
“And now you’re driving a bread truck?” Rob blurted.
“Live on a commune near Skowhegan and we each take turns working a day-job for a few months.”
“I’m trying to get over to Stonington,” Rob said, “down at the tip of Deer Isle.”
“I know where that is,” the driver grinned, “and, man, I sure hope there’s a place in Stonington where you can get a bath. I usually admire a natural fragrance, but you seriously need to groove with some soap and water.”
In response to a few knowledgeable questions about Appalachian Trail terrain, Rob slowly spilled his story, including the expulsion from Rokeby. He surprised himself by providing a vivid account of the showdown with Gus and the girl in his closet and the fight with Duncan and details of animal encounters along the trail.
The driver cheered appreciatively at each episode, such that Rob began to feel that maybe it had all been a kind of adventure, and not just a desperate nightmare. He hoped that someday he would be able to tell the story with a flourish. He recognized it would not be smart to try that on the phone with his father.
The bread truck driver, whose name was Wolf—Rob was never sure if that was his first name or his last or a nickname—took him the extra twenty miles down to Stonington after his last delivery in Blue Hill. Arriving ten minutes before the ferry, Rob decided to postpone the mainland payphone call to his parents until he’d had a couple days to get settled on the island.
Wolf gave him a thumb-lock handshake and slid a freshly rolled joint into Rob’s pocket as a goodbye present.
He said, “Lemme know if you stick it out on Great Tusk and I’ll bring the gang down for a visit.”
“That would be a gas,” Rob said.
If Rob was expecting an island welcome like his last fog-lifting one, he was disappointed. The tree squirrels jeered at him. The mice sauntered openly across the kitchen floor. If he was expecting that his announcement of year-round residency at the general store would bring invitations to dinner, he was doubly-disappointed. Marsden recommended the beef jerky.
After three days alone in a cold summer-house, Rob began to have doubts. The house seemed indifferent to him out of season. Everything seemed indifferent out of season—the walk to the pond, the low tide beach—as if the stones themselves were saying, “What are you doing here?” He slept a lot. He bathed in a washtub of lukewarm water, heated on the woodstove.
Sitting out wrapped in a blanket on the porch, Rob wondered if he had made a huge mistake. He knew the islanders routinely saw year-round wannabes come and go, lasting a few weeks or a few months, and nobody was going to accord him citizen status until he had endured at least one full winter.
He tried to focus on ideas for earning some dough. To justify his decision to his parents, he would need a business plan. He found a pencil and paper. He wrote “Business Plan” at the top of the sheet. The only real job on the island was sterning for a lobsterman. That was dangerous work and Rob knew his mother would never allow it.
The wind changed and blew away the paper on Rob’s lap. He saw the gulls tilting against the stiff updrafts over the cove. He wrapped the blanket tighter around his legs and remembered a day of kite-flying with Geneva down on the shore, one of those daylong ‘activities’ that Mary engineered for them as kids. Home-made kites. What about that for a business idea? The Great Tusk Kite Company. He and Geneva would be partners. Rob flinched at this bittersweet fantasy. More than bittersweet, it hurt to be thinking about her again.
He reached for the joint lurking in his pocket. Other than a few faked tokes at parties, Rob had never really smoked pot. He stared at the fat, crinkly joint and saw a shred of connection to Wolf and his commune and whatever kind of ex-preppie hippiedom he was about to enter and maybe the joint would tell him a better way to make a buck on the island.
He stepped inside again to find some matches. He lit one against his pant leg. It flared out. He suddenly got nervous about smoking in his parents’ house.
Outside, a vehicle without a muffler skidded to a stop in the dirt turnaround. Still slightly nervous from the Rokeby bust, Rob feared another one. He hid in the windowless pantry. A knock at the door followed by her voice calling his name, only it wasn’t a kid’s voice anymore, or a teenager’s. It was a womanly voice. Geneva’s womanly voice.
Chewing gum, sniffling slightly, wearing a knife on her hip, she looked as if their childhood had been erased, as if she were just delivering a message. Geneva said, “I came to tell you that your dad called the ship-to-shore at the harbormaster’s and you’re supposed to go there and call him back at his office.”
Rob said, “Now?”
“Or never,” she shrugged and squinted at him. “Are you okay?”
Rob forced back a surge of something in his chest. “That depends on who you ask,” he said.
“I’m asking you,” Geneva said.
“What’s the knife for?” Rob said.
“I’m sterning on my brother’s boat.”
“Tough work,” he said.
“It’s work.”
“I want to be your friend,” Rob blurted.
“Is that why you came here?” Geneva asked.
Rob replied, “There were a number of reasons. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it on the trip.”
Geneva peered around behind him. “The house looks good,” she said. “I haven’t been inside since the remodeling.”
Rob bowed and ushered her into the parlor. He dropped a log into the woodstove and poked at the embers until they sparked.
“I suppose you want to know about my brother,” he said.
“Who?” Geneva smiled by crinkling her upper lip.
“Right. The less said, the better,” Rob agreed.
Geneva reached for the poker and stirred the fire. She said, “I heard you took a long hike to get here.”
Rob nodded, “Thanks to you, I made it. A lot of times I remembered things you taught me. Simple stuff, like how to start fires with birch bark.”
The fresh log flared and crackled. Geneva pointed at the joint tucked behind Rob’s ear. “Well, are you going to share some of that?”
Rob gulped and grinned and stammered, “Uh, sure! But just so I won’t be feeling all strange about smoking pot in my folks’ house, how about we sit out in your truck?”
Geneva said, “Let’s walk down to the shore.”
They hunkered out of the wind behind the boulder at the mouth of Zippy Cove. Leaning against an immense slab of granite that felt like it had been custom contoured to their backs, Rob and Geneva smoked some homegrown commune weed and ate gorp and sniffled and sighed away any unspoken resentment lingering from a period of their lives that was understood to be—as soon as Geneva pulled out a couple of toothpicks and silently handed one to Rob—a closed case.
Rob palmed a small stone and threw it up backward over his head and over the boulder. They heard a brief clatter and a splash. “Tide coming in,” Geneva said.
“That means we’ll have to move,” Rob said.
“Another ten minutes,” Geneva said.
“We could go play guitars,” Rob said.
“Or hike out to the cliffs.”
“Or cook up some mussels.”
“The possibilities are endless.”
“Except that at some point I have to call my father,” Rob said.
Geneva contemplated her toothpick. “Probably don’t want to do that when you’re stoned,” she cautioned.
“Why not?” Rob said. “Hell, maybe I should.”
Geneva gestured, using her toothpick as a tiny wand, to the grove of budding shiver trees and the deer path leading down to the shore. “A thousand times I’ve seen it,” she said, “and every time is like the first.”
“It’s the best. But what does that have to do with calling my dad right now?”
“Because you might just tell him that we’re planning to live here forever,” Geneva said.
Rob wanted to hear this as an invitation. He as
ked, “Aren’t you supposed to be going off to Bangor for dental hygienist school?”
Geneva nodded and answered slowly, “That was the idea. I hated the mainland. It’s not for me.”
Rob agreed, “Fortunately, we’ve got our island fortress.” They slapped five, and played percussion on the boulders. He leaned into her and she leaned into him and some long-overdue nuzzling ensued.
By the time he finally called his father five hours later, Rob and Geneva had hatched a plan to build matching guitars and amps with scallop shell inlay and charge lots of money. They’d only have to sell a couple per year to get by.
“We’ll call it ‘Island Instruments,’ ” Rob announced to his father.
“That sounds kind of like the scheme you and Geneva used to concoct to sell broken lobster traps to day-trippers,” Ward chided.
Rob made his pitch, and Ward was having none of it.
“You don’t understand, Dad. You’re just mad because I got kicked out of your fancy establishment boarding school and they won’t refund this year’s tuition.”
Ward made the mistake of mentioning the lost tuition, and also the cost of the plane ticket waiting for Rob at the Bangor airport and the taxi fare to get him there tomorrow.
“Your mother and I are very disappointed. And we can’t let you continue to compound your errors. You will be on that plane. And I won’t let you continue badmouthing the Rokeby School. You broke their rules. If you’ll remember, it wasn’t so long ago that you were pleading with us to send you there.”
“That was just so I could get out of Indianapolis.”
“Son, please don’t denigrate your birthplace either. Indianapolis has its faults. But it’s been hometown to the Wangert family for a long time, and by God, you’re going to have to get used to it, because you’ve screwed up any chance to live elsewhere.”
Ward’s gravelly voice crackled through the static from the ship-to-shore connection. Rob’s voice crackled back through his escalating bravado. Emboldened by Geneva’s presence, Rob said, “I’m not leaving, Dad. I’m the one who crosses over. I’m staying on the island. You can’t stop me.”
Ward was unaware that, in the next room, Geneva, Marsden, and the harbormaster were overhearing his amplified end of the conversation. He proceeded to make some unflattering comments about the Great Tusk gut and the year-rounders’ small-mindedness. When Rob refused to back down, Ward swore an oath that set them more at loggerheads, “Dammit then, you won’t be living in my house out there!”
Chapter 56
The Dark Star
He Who Remains Classified uncorked a fresh bottle to gloat over the Wangert’s haplessness. The family was disintegrating, their worst traits creeping forth from their liberal short-sightedness. Listening in on their phone conversations while sipping a few drinks, he spontaneously talked back to the fading daylight in his office: “I’d go out and buy some clippers and give that kid a haircut myself!”
He Who Remains Classified reached for a fountain pen and noted down his comment. On the advice of his political consultant, he collected tough-sounding lines to use on the stump. As his ambitions grew, he considered using instructional examples of the Wangerts’ failings in his campaign speeches. The noxious combination of Anthony’s homosexuality and extremist views revealed the fallacy of progressive parenting. You could have seen Rob’s rude degeneracy coming a mile away, ever since his descent into that astrology fluff. Duncan was turning out to be as pussy-whipped as his dad. And as for Mary becoming a therapist, oh, those loopy women libbers!
All of which—his incipient Senate candidacy plans included—came to a painful, screeching halt a week later with a sudden heart attack. A nearly fatal thunderbolt.
He was standing at his office window, adjusting his binoculars, focusing on a crow perched on the top of a flagpole. His left arm tingled hot and cold and everything went numb and he fell. The binoculars clattered to the floor. He Who Remains Classified crawled toward the door, his chest and lungs aflame.
He groaned and sputtered and slowly lost consciousness, but not before being visited by a vision of Mary. His convulsing brain registered the ironic surprise that something inside still rated her as the person closest to him. She arrived naked—a flashback to the LSD experiment?—and knelt and hugged him and breathed life into his struggling body and whispered that it was not yet time for him to leave this earth.
This vision haunted him during his three months of recovery and rehabilitation at Walter Reed Hospital. The exact nature of the medical event was hushed up. The Soviets could not be allowed to get wind of it. They pounced on anyone perceived to be in poor health. Neither did He Who Remains Classified ever mention his private angel to the doctors, who marveled at his ability to survive such a serious cardiac arrest. He Who Remains Classified promised himself never to think ill of Mary Wangert again.
* * *
PART VIII
* * *
Chapter 57
Mary and Ward’s Nighttime Tale
Sometimes Mary and Ward pulled the covers up over their heads and huddled under a blanket tent. Staring into each other’s weary eyes as into a teleprompter, they demonstrated an uncanny ability to read each other’s thoughts aloud :
At the Ministry of Defense, the diplomat attended a Top Security meeting to discuss the latest report from the International Brotherhood of Pure and Applied Physics. He learned of the discovery of sakhalinium, a new element in the Periodic Table, so named because of its existence in the crater of a volcano on Sakhalin Island. The volcanic origin of sakhalinium created isotopes that, if subjected to extreme heat and pressure, could be rendered unstable, generating a volcanic eruption, as it were, at the atomic level. The diplomat listened more closely when the presenter mentioned a pound of sakhalinium recently stolen in Yalta.
So … that was the bottle hidden in the secret compartment of the steamer trunk! The diplomat had almost thrown it out, foolishly mistaking it for foot powder! Wide awake now, and for days to come, the diplomat pondered his leverage. He was in possession of a pound of sakhalinium and the technical plans for an instrument to explode it!
Chapter 58
The Great Rifts
The dawn of the 1980s brought upheavals in the Wangert family that shaped their interactions for the entire decade. Mary often hiked along the exposed eastern side of Great Tusk, hoping to run into Rob. She encountered weather-beaten trees gnarled by stones thrust into the trunks and limbs by high winds. The invading stones had not killed the trees, but forced them to grow in strange shapes around them. To Mary they were painful symbols of her own family. She photographed the stones in the trees and used them on the cover of her master’s thesis, Odd Connections: the Intimacies of Family Conflict. Ward and Mary’s stand-off with Rob turned out to be only the beginning.
At the Yale reunion they attended with Anthony, the long suppressed question of his biological parentage burst unexpectedly into their midst. Mary and Ward agreed beforehand on a no-contact policy with He Who Remains Classified, in the event that he had time to waste among Old Blue alums getting sloshed during reunion weekend in New Haven.
The weather was blatantly marvelous. After not seeing New Haven for almost thirty years, Ward and Mary were enthralled. They had heard reports of Dutch Elm blight and urban blight and modern architecture monstrosities. “Yes, the town has changed a bit, but who hasn’t?” Ward counseled two grumpier alumni on the campus tour complaining about panhandlers on Chapel Street.
Anthony and Trip arranged for an afternoon sail on a professor’s boat moored out at Branford. From the water, a new vantage point for Ward and Mary, the working port and the city looked as green and lively as ever.
To save on hotel expenses, Ward and Mary signed up for the Old Campus housing option. This meant staying among a much younger crowd. A spontaneous, pre-dinner party had already taken over the stairwell of the southeast tower. As they climbed the stairs, Ward and Mary received a respectful welcome as adventurous old-timers. The thro
ng parted to make way for their suitcases. Ward commented on the number of outfits his wife brought and a younger woman remarked that every dress and pair of shoes was essential! Another chimed in, “I’m sure your wife rocks, whatever she’s wearing!” A call went up for Mary to model her finery, which she took as a challenge.
Mary closed the door to their room and immediately began to change into a black cocktail dress and pearls. “I thought you were the one warning me that reunions can bring out regressive tendencies,” Ward said. “This isn’t like you.”
“What isn’t like me?” Mary asked.
“To care what those kids think about how you look.”
“I don’t care what they think,” Mary explained. “We’re here to have fun, right? We’re here to forget about our drop-out son, and take our minds off the fact that our oldest son is obviously gay and doesn’t know how to tell us.”
“What about my nap?” Ward asked.
Mary stared daggers at him. “Should I order a wheelchair for you?”
Ward shrugged, “Sorry.”
Within minutes, they were waving to each other across a bouncing dance floor in the adjacent suite. Queries from the younger alums brought forth laudatory “far out” responses—Mary from a young mom admiring her return to graduate school, Ward from a recently minted Economics PhD who praised Ward for “maintaining the family-business cornerstone of the economy.”
Ward, carrying two beers from the keg in the hall, made his way through the revelers to his wife. Feeling professionally bucked up, he pretended to be a stranger approaching Mary at a college mixer. He said, “Hello, there. Oh, my, you’re cute. I especially love those big brown cow eyes.”