Mohawk

by Richard Russo

  “Anyways, I went along. I always tried to be Mather Grouses’s friend, even though he never wanted none. They were tough times, but we all made out somehow.”

  Randall continued to hear the fundamental insincerity of the man, but also knew that the most effective lies were those liberally laced with truth. The lie could be ninety-nine parts truth to one part falsehood, the one tarnished part mingling with the pure until it was all tainted, more false than pure fabrication.

  “You’re the same,” the man concluded. “A young Mather Grouse.” With effort Rory Gaffney lifted himself from the truck tire he had been sitting on. He was half a head taller than Randall and seemed aware of the fact, though the boy had to admit that maybe it was he himself who was.

  “No,” Randall said, unsure of exactly what he was denying.

  Gaffney raised the bottle. “To your granddad,” he said, “and youth.”

  When the man offered him the bottle, Randall took it and drank without wiping the lip. The whiskey tasted only slightly better than what it washed down. Then, as the rancid liquid tracked downward toward his bowels, a strange notion occurred to Randall. I could go to war, he thought to himself. I could kill a man.

  45

  On Saturday night after the bars close, the only spot hotter than The Velvet Pussycat is the new Mohawk Medical Services Center, though most generally concede that the new hospital lacks the ambience of the old, whose crowded vestibule encouraged a desperate camaraderie of the bleeding. If you’d tiptoed home six hours late and your wife hit you in the face with a chair, chances were pretty good you’d be standing in line next to someone with a remarkably similar set of circumstances or, at least, an equally interesting story. That was the cozy kind of place the old hospital had been. You could compare wounds and feel either fortunate or proud.

  The new hospital has a reception area like a large modern hotel, and the carpet sucked sound. You overheard no intimate revelations as the staff scurried about stuffing patients into the sterile, private cubicles that ringed the lobby, as if the institution was ashamed of its patients. In the hospital’s planning stages, someone had come to the entirely erroneous conclusion that people preferred to hurt in private. From the beginning no one liked the new facility. They didn’t mind particularly that the building came in over budget, nor that the lights dimmed and flickered during thunderstorms. In fact, the place was altogether too bright. The walls were bright, the furniture bright, the paintings vivid. People were yanked out of sight before you could figure out what was wrong with them, what folly they had succumbed to. Several of the denizens of the beloved old ivy-encircled Nathan Littler Hospital let it be known that they preferred to bleed to death than be stitched up in a place like the new hospital. One citizen was good to his word, dying in the arms of his wife of thirty years, off and on, and whose agency in the matter was later examined in public proceedings.

  Nor is there any challenge in the new hospital. The old, perched at the top of Hospital Hill, had required mettle. In bad weather, negotiating the incline was a test of commitment and, sometimes, manhood. People still talked about the year Homer Wells tried several runs at the incline and nearly made it, too. People watched him, fascinated, from their living room windows. He bent forward as if into a headwind and churned upward methodically, undeterred by treacherous patches of ice. The hill that day was impossible to ascend by automobile. It may have been Homer’s sense of accomplishment at reaching the summit that caused him momentarily to lose his concentration and his balance on an icy patch. By the time he reached the bottom of the hill, he had built up such a head of steam that he flew cleanly over the snowbank into the street. Here he encountered the Bronson Dairy truck, whose driver later remarked that seeing old Homer on his hood was the surprise of his life, for he owed Homer money and the first thought that crossed his mind when he saw his friend’s nose pressed urgently against the windshield was that Homer had come to collect. Ironically, it was this very event that had provided the impetus for the new hospital drive. It was the last thing Homer would’ve wanted.

  Tonight, business at the Mohawk Medical Services Center is brisk, though it lacks the appearance of being so. An enormous man looms over the registration desk, flanked by two equally formidable women. He admits to having contracted a dose of the clap, and he wants to know where it came from, his wife or his girl friend. “It better be one of us, dumb fuck,” the larger of the two women warns.

  On the fourth floor, Diana Wood is preparing to go home. Her mother is sleeping peacefully and there’s no reason to stay the rest of the night, though she often does, sleeping upright in one of the straight-backed chairs. Only one other person sits in the hospital corridor, a woman in her mid-thirties, facing the wall, resting her forehead against its cool surface, her arms hanging limply at her sides. Diana cannot see the woman’s face, but the grief in her posture is so profound that Di is embarrassed to come upon her unexpected. Since on the carpeted floor there’s no way to announce her presence, Diana concludes it would be best to just pass quietly by. Still, the implications of doing so are too grave to ignore, and Diana glances up when she comes parallel with the other woman, who hasn’t moved. The three-by-five card on the nearest door reads YOUNGER.

  Diana stops. Eventually the woman straightens, staring at the blank white wall before turning. She doesn’t seem terribly surprised to see someone standing there. Rather, her eyes suggest that for her there are no more surprises. “I don’t mean to intrude—” Diana says. “That’s silly, though. Of course I’m intruding—”

  “No,” the woman says vaguely.

  “It’s just that my husband and I were once friends with a Dallas Younger, and I couldn’t help noticing the name.…”

  “Dallas is my brother-in-law.”

  “I thought perhaps he’d married,” Diana explains, “and we hadn’t heard.”

  “No. Not that I know of. I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

  “I’m very sorry—”

  “He’s nothing to me,” the woman says.

  “I meant.…” Diana nods toward the door.

  “Oh,” she looks flustered, embarrassed. “My daughter. Who means everything. That’s the way things work out, isn’t it.”

  “She will get better,” Diana says.

  Something like hope registers in the woman’s eyes, as if in her fatigue she believed momentarily that this stranger had second sight. But the hope vanishes quickly. “You’re very kind,” she says dully.

  I know what it means to lose, Diana feels like telling her. But it wouldn’t do either one of them any good. Downstairs in the lobby she has to wait for three enormous people to get through the double doors. “You happy now, dumb fuck?” one of the women says. Diana suddenly feels a blind, irrational rage. In all her life she has never once spoken out of turn, but she can’t restrain herself. “Watch your language,” she says. “You don’t own the world. You—you’re a blight on it!”

  The three stand transfixed as she brushes by, stymied by her smallness and insignificance.

  “Little troll,” the larger woman says when Diana is out of earshot, and all three laugh.

  46

  With less than two weeks until retirement, Officer Gaffney wondered for the first time if he’d be able to make it. Lately he’d been troubled by dreams. In the most recent, he was caught up in a shoot-out at the Mohawk Bank and Trust. He was standing in the middle of the Four Corners intersection directing traffic when the robbers rushed out of the bank. The traffic light was showing green in all directions and, when he drew his revolver, cars began speeding by, narrowly missing him and each other. The robbers took cover behind the bank’s marble lions and opened up. They had no trouble hitting Officer Gaffney, but each time he discharged his revolver, one of the passing cars intercepted the bullet, which would then ping around inside the vehicle like a penny in a tin can. The best he could do was blast the snout off one of the marble lions, which sported a shaggy mane a little like his brother’s. Being shot di
dn’t hurt much, but he was afraid to die and ashamed when the robbers got away. He woke up crying and was afraid to go to work, but did. The fear remained with him all day, even during his coffee break at Harry’s. He bought the bottle of whiskey on his way home.

  The policeman lived in a small upstairs flat with a view across the street of the Presbyterian church, whose belfry was always illuminated at night, the light streaming through Officer Gaffney’s window like a searching beam, keeping him awake. He could’ve drawn the shade, but he never did.

  Once the rye was half gone, sometime after midnight, Officer Gaffney went to the closet where he hung his holster on a hook and returned to the living room with his revolver. Though it was the evening of the third of July, firecrackers had been going off in the neighborhood for the last couple of evenings. A cherry bomb exploded somewhere down the street, and he heard some kids laughing. At him, probably. They all seemed to know where he lived. He went to the window and stared out into the dark night and the lighted belfry across the street, remembering his dream of the night before. The revolver was heavy and warm in his hand. He hadn’t cleaned the weapon in a while, so he let the bullets clatter onto the coffee table. Then he cleaned, oiled and reloaded, pleased with the sound each bullet made when it slid home in the chamber. Bullet fit gun. Gun fit hand. Hand? What did hand fit? Man? And what did man fit? Man had to fit something. Family? It wasn’t like he had to live all by himself across from the yellow light. His brother’s house was too big for one man, and when the policeman retired he might suggest to his brother.…

  Out in the street there was another loud bang. The rye slid down Officer Gaffney’s throat painlessly. He switched off the light before going to the window and raising the screen. He fired four rounds in all, four sharp explosions, the fourth followed by shattering glass and darkness. “Good,” he said. It was late, and the houses up and down the street remained dark. His own landlady below was old and deaf. He drained all but a swallow from the bottle of rye. I have just committed a crime, he thought to himself. Assaulted a belfry. He wasn’t ashamed, and what’s more he felt safe from the law. His brother had the right idea, doing as he pleased. Simple. Never got confused. Never found himself in the middle of the intersection beneath a jammed traffic light with cars whizzing by.

  Right now his brother was probably in the girl’s trailer, unless the Younger boy had beat him to it. Officer Gaffney realized that he loved his brother and was proud of his exploits. Except for the once, he couldn’t remember Rory ever doing anything he himself didn’t approve of. He didn’t exactly like the idea of Rory and the girl, but she hardly looked at the policeman anyway. He wasn’t the type girls went for, though he’d never known exactly why. Other men like himself had succeeded, at least enough in marrying homely girls. When he was younger, he figured that being a cop would itself guarantee him some sort of girl, but the uniform hadn’t done the trick, and now he was too old to worry about it. He was content to watch the girl at Harry’s and, now and then, in the trailer.

  He liked it when she was alone, but now Younger had moved in. He’d cause trouble yet, always had been trouble. Just the other night Officer Gaffney had warned his brother again, but as usual Rory paid no attention. “Younger!” he almost spit the name. “Do you think I’d trouble myself over a Younger? The boy’s a Grouse. The last of ’em. I can feel his grandfather in the ground.”

  “If he’s a Grouse, the more reason to leave him alone,” Officer Gaffney said. “Besides, I can take care of him for you. Let me run him in.”

  His brother reacted to the suggestion as he might to foul air. “You,” he sneered.

  The fact that his own brother despised him seemed to Officer Gaffney the most insupportable thing of all. He lay in bed and thought about this for a long time, and then about the girl, and before long he began to sob. He didn’t know what time it was when he fell asleep.

  When he awoke, it was light. He didn’t have to open his eyes to know that someone had been in the room just a moment before. Everything looked as it had the previous night, which was one of the things that made him certain. Everything was too exactly the same, as if someone had moved and then replaced each item carefully. Even the whiskey bottle had been positioned precisely on its own moist brown ring. Two flies perched on the bottle rim until he waved them away and drained the last swallow. In the living room he saw the open window, and then he was sure.

  On the way to Harry’s, he stopped at the liquor store and bought another bottle. He cracked the seal before going into the diner. The regulars were all there, and everybody looked at him when he walked in. That was all right with him. He said nothing to them, nothing to Harry or The Bulldog, or even to the girl. When Harry set the eggs in front of him, Officer Gaffney stared at them for a long time before pushing the plate away. When the door swung open, he could see Wild Bill intently stacking dishes in the Hobart and Randall Younger, wearing one of The Bulldog’s bright hair nets, cutting parsley snips and lemon wedges. When he approached the register to pay for his uneaten breakfast, everyone was still staring. “Gaff?” somebody said.

  Outside, the sun was already blazing. Officer Gaffney drove up toward Myrtle Park, but failed to negotiate the sharp turn at the entrance. A young policeman found the abandoned car in the ditch later that afternoon. Off and on all day, there were reports of loud explosions in the park. But it was Independence Day, and there were loud explosions everywhere.

  47

  In mid-July, two days after Anne Grouse was replaced by a new personnel director at the store, there was a terrible electrical storm. She had reason to anticipate both events.

  No Mohawk summer she could remember had ever passed without at least one duly of the sort that had terrorized her childhood—beginning in the west, the thunder low and rolling on the perimeter of her sleep, altering her dreams to accommodate what her mind was marginally conscious of. Such storms were always windy and dry at first, rattling the screens fiercely, blowing tree branches up against them like scratching fingers. She always woke up and waited for her father to come close the windows, for when the storm broke, driving rain would soak the curtains and sills. She wanted him to stay with her until the thunder and lightning subsided, but he was always busy making his rounds of the house. After a light kiss on the forehead he was gone, leaving the room black and then, when the lightning flashed, bright. There was always one thunderclap that rocked the house to its foundations. In the dark, her hands covering her eyes, she awaited the storm’s direct hit, always preceded by the lightning’s hiss overhead, then the terrible crack that she imagined must have originated at the center of her brain. No one had ever known, because she had never told, just how terrified she was of electrical storms.

  Dallas, who never understood anything, hadn’t understood that either, and had clownishly imitated what was going on outside their bedroom window, hissing and poking her in the ribs with his index finger. At least he did until the night she hit him in the face with her open hand, hard enough to knock him out of bed, erection and all. These same storms made Dallas horny.

  Anne wasn’t particularly surprised that she had been let go at the store. Like the storm, it had been approaching in its own leisurely fashion all summer. Again, she’d been given the opportunity to transfer, and had turned it down almost without thinking. The store was doing well enough by regional standards, but the district office wasn’t interested in regional standards. Eventually, she knew, the store would close, as so many others had. The ones on the highway died slower deaths than the downtown retailers, but they died just the same. She told no one but Randall, who frowned and asked what she’d do.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “The only reason I mention it is that if you decide to go back to school, I won’t be able to help much.”

  “I doubt I’ll be going back right away,” Randall said.

  “I can understand that,” Anne said. “With a blossoming career as a dishwasher at the Mohawk Grill, what would be the point?”

&nbs
p; Since his return to Mohawk in the spring, Anne discovered that they had even less to say to one another than before. She began to understand her father’s attitude when she had returned years ago. She didn’t doubt Randall had his reasons, but doubted they were sufficient or would ever turn out to be. But then, she was an expert on good reasons that turned out not to be. Maybe her father was as well. He certainly understood how perversely loyal human beings could be to mistakes. Anyway, if there was any detectable pattern of motion in the universe, it was clearly cyclical, and for that reason she refused to be upset. Attempts to make life do what it had resisted doing in the past were mostly futile. She had run into Dallas on the street a week earlier and he had told her about Randall—that he was living with some girl. “What am I supposed to do about it?” she said.

  “You could talk to him.”

  “So could his father, assuming he wanted to.”

  “She’s married.”

  “I can’t help that either.”

  But it had sickened her a little, just the same. She couldn’t look at him without seeing the boy instead of the man. Talking might not be a bad idea, but the fact was she didn’t really want to know about the girl, the husband or the sordid details that had a way of rendering everything understandable. She wasn’t sure she wanted to understand. Probably her father had felt the same way, and it occurred to Anne that, viewed objectively, there had been an insidious moral slippage through the generations, each succeeding one surrendering a small patch of ethical territory.

  It was after midnight when the branches outside her bedroom window began to scratch their urgent message on the screen. “So,” she thought, “it’s to be tonight.” Below, a yellow patch of light reflected off the house next door, which meant that her mother was awake too, prepared to ride out the storm with a grim determination that came from having ridden out a lifetime of them, firmly believing in the efficacy of passive resistance. Storms went away, like pain and disappointment, like tough times. Not such a bad philosophy. It would’ve been nice to subscribe to it.