by Amy Hempel
I dialed, and he answered without saying hello.
“In a session,” he said, the last syllable trilling up in a bitchy way, and hung up the phone. Stephen makes his living as a music therapist, but session or not, you’d think he could spare a second to at least say hello to me. We hadn’t spoken in eight months. I dialed again.
“What the fuck, fool, it’s Matthew.”
“Matthew,” he repeated, in the way you might say “cancer” after the doctor’s diagnosis. “I’m with a client. This is not an optimum time.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Question for you: mountains.”
There was a wary pause. From Stephen’s end came the sound of someone doing violence to a tambourine.
“What about them?”
“Do you like them? Do you like mountains, Stephen?”
“I have no objection to them. Why?”
“Well, I bought one,” I said. “I’m on it now.”
“Congratulations,” Stephen said. “Is it Popocatéptl? Are you putting 7-Elevens on the Matterhorn?”
Over the years, I’ve made a hell of a lot of money in real estate, and this seems to hurt Stephen’s feelings. He’s not a church man, but he’s big on piety and sacrifice and letting you know what choice values he’s got. So far as I can tell, his values include eating ramen noodles by the case, getting laid once every fifteen years or so, and arching his back at the sight of people like me—that is, people who have amounted to something and don’t reek of thrift stores.
But I love Stephen. Or I think I do. We’ve had some intervals of mutual regard. Our father came down with lymphoma when Stephen was four, so we pretty much parented ourselves while our mother nursed our father through two exhausting cycles of remission and relapse.
At any rate, the cancer got our father when I was ten. Liquor killed our mother before I was out of college, and it was right around then that we went on different courses. Stephen, a pianist, retreated into a bitter fantasy of musical celebrity that was perpetually being thwarted—by his professors at the Eastman School, by the philistines in his ensembles, and by girlfriends who wanted too much of his time. He had a series of tedious artistic crackups, and whenever we’d get together, he’d hand me lots of shit about how drab and hollow my life was.
Actually, my life was extremely full. I married young, and married often. I bought my first piece of property at eighteen. Now, at forty-two, I’ve been through two amicable divorces. I’ve lived and made money in nine American cities. Late at night, when rest won’t come and my breathing shortens with the worry that I’ve cheated myself of life’s traditional rewards (long closenesses, off-spring, mature plantings), I take an astral cruise of the hundreds of properties that have passed through my hands over the years, and before I come close to visiting them all, I droop, contented, into sleep.
When no orchestras called Stephen with commissions, he exiled himself to Eugene, Oregon, to buff his oeuvre while eking out a living teaching the mentally substandard to achieve sanity by blowing on harmonicas. When I drove down to see him two years ago after a conference in Seattle, I found him living above a candle store in a dingy apartment which he shared with a dying collie. The animal was so old it couldn’t take a leak on its own, so Stephen was always having to lug her downstairs to the grassy verge beside the sidewalk. Then he’d straddle the dog and manually void its bladder via a Heimlich technique horrible to witness. You hated to see your last blood relation engaged in something like that. I told Stephen that from a business standpoint, the smart thing would be to have the dog put down. This caused an ugly argument, but really, it seemed to me that someone regularly seen by the roadside hand-juicing a half-dead dog was not the man you’d flock to for lessons on how to be less out of your mind.
“The mountain doesn’t have a name yet,” I told him. “Hell, I’ll name it after you. I’ll call it Brown Cloud Hill”—my old nickname for the gloomy man.
“Do that,” said Stephen. “Hanging up now.”
“I send you any pictures of my cabin? Gets its power off a windmill. I’m telling you, it’s the absolute goddamned shit. You need to come out here and see me.”
“What about Charleston? Where’s Amanda?”
I spat a lime rind into my hand and tossed it up at the bats to see if they’d take a nibble at it. They didn’t.
“No idea.”
“You split?”
“Right.”
“Oh, jeez, big brother. Really? Wedding’s off?”
“Yep.”
“What happened?”
“Got sick of her, I guess.”
“Why?”
“She was hard of hearing and her pussy stank.”
“That’s grand. Now look—”
Actually, like about fifty million other Americans, I’d been blindsided by sudden reverses in the real-estate market. I’d had to borrow some cash from my ex-fiancée, Amanda, an Oldsmobile dealership heiress who didn’t care about money just so long as she didn’t have to loan out any of hers. Strains developed and the engagement withered. I used the last of my liquidity to buy my hill. Four hundred acres, plus a cabin, nearly complete, thanks to my good neighbor George Tabbard, who’d also cut me a bargain on the land. The shit of it was I’d have to spend a year up in residence here, but I could deal with that. Next fall I could subdivide, sell the plots, dodge the extortionary tax assessment the state charges nonresident speculators, and float into life’s next phase with the winds of increase plumping my sails and a vacation home in the deal.
“Anyway,” I went on. “Here’s a concept. Pry the flute out of your ass and come see me. We’ll have real fun. Come now. I’ll be under a glacier in six weeks.”
“And get the airfare how? Knit it? Listen, I’ve got to go.”
“Fuck the airfare,” I told him. “I’ll get it. Come see me.” It wasn’t an offer I really wanted to make. Stephen probably had more money in the bank than I did, but his poor-mouthing worked an irksome magic on me. I couldn’t take a second of it without wanting to smack him in the face with a roll of doubloons. Then he said he couldn’t leave Beatrice (the collie was still alive!). Fine, I told him, if he could find the right sort of iron lung to stable her in, I’d foot the bill for that too. He said he’d think it over. A marimba flourish swelled on the line, and I let Stephen go.
The conversation left me feeling irritable, and I walked back to my cabin in a low mood. But I bucked up right away when I found George Tabbard on my porch, half of which was still bare joists. He was standing on a ladder, nailing a new piece of trim across the front gable. “Evening, sweetheart,” George called out to me. “Whipped up another objet for you here.”
George was seventy-six, with a head of scraggly white hair. His front teeth were attached to a partial plate that made his gums itch so he didn’t wear it, and his breath was like a ripe morgue. At this point, George was basically my best friend, a turn I couldn’t have imagined ten months ago when life was still high. His family went back in the area two centuries or so, but he’d moved around a good deal, gone through some wives and degrees and left some children here and there before moving back a decade ago. He’d pretty much built my cabin himself for ten dollars an hour. He was good company. He liked to laugh and drink and talk about road grading, women, and maintaining equipment. We’d murdered many evenings that way.
A couple of groans with his screw gun and he’d secured the item, a four-foot battery of little wooden pom-poms, like you’d see dangling from the ceiling of a Mexican drug dealer’s sedan. I’d praised the first one he’d made, but now George had tacked his lacework fancies to every eave and soffit in sight, so that the house pretty well foamed with them. An otherwise sensible person, he seemed to fear a demon would take him if production slowed, and he slapped up a new piece of frippery about every third day. My house was starting to resemble something you’d buy your mistress to wear for a weekend in a cheap motel.
“There we are,” he said, backing away to get the effect. “Pretty handsome
booger, don’t you think?”
“Phenomenal,” I said.
“Now how about some backgammon?”
I went inside and fetched the set, the rum, and a jar of olives. George was a brutal prodigy, and the games were dull routs, yet we sat for many hours in the cool of the evening, drinking rum, moving the lacquered discs around the board, and spitting olive pits over the rail, where they landed quietly in the dark.
To my surprise, Stephen called me back. He said he’d like to come, so we fixed a date, two weeks later. It was an hour and twenty minutes to the village of Aiden, where the airfield was. When George and I arrived, Stephen’s plane hadn’t come in. I went into the Quonset hut they use for a terminal. A little woman with a brown bomber jacket and a bulb of gray hair sat by the radio, reading the local newspaper.
“My brother’s flight was due in from Bangor at eleven,” I told the woman.
“Plane’s not here,” she said.
“I see. Do you know where it is?”
“Bangor.”
“And when’s it going to arrive?”
“If I knew that, I’d be somewhere picking horses, wouldn’t I?”
Then she turned back to her newspaper and brought our chat to an end. The front-page story of the Aroostook Gazette showed a photograph of a dead chow dog, under the headline, MYSTERY ANIMAL FOUND DEAD IN PINEMONT.
“Quite a mystery,” I said. “The Case of What Is Obviously a Dog.”
“‘Undetermined origin,’ says here.”
“It’s a dog, a chow,” I said.
“Undetermined,” the woman said.
With time to kill, we went over the lumberyard in Aiden and I filled the bed of my truck with a load of decking to finish the porch. Then we went back to the airfield. Still no plane. George tried to hide his irritation, but I knew he wasn’t happy to be stuck on this errand. He wanted to be out in the woods, gunning for deer. George was keen to get one before the weather made hunting a misery. Loading your freezer with meat slain by your hand was evidently an unshirkable autumn rite around here, and George and I had been going out about every fourth day since the opener three weeks ago. I’d shot the head off a bony goose at point-blank range, but other than that, we hadn’t hit a thing. When I’d suggested that we go in on a side of beef from the butcher shop, George had acted as though I’d proposed a terrible breach of code. Fresh venison tasted better than store-bought beef, he argued. Also you were not out big money in the common event that your freezer was sacked by the meat burglars who worked the outer county.
To buck George up, I bought him lunch at a tavern in Aiden, where we ate hamburgers and drank three whiskey sours each. George sighed a lot and didn’t talk. Already, I felt a coursing anger at Stephen for not calling to let me know that his plane was delayed. I was brooding heavily when the bartender asked if I wanted anything else. I told him, “Yeah, tequila and cream.”
“You mean a Kahlúa and cream,” he said, which was what I’d meant, but I wasn’t in a mood to be corrected.
“How about you bring what I ordered?” I told him, and he got to work. The drink was bilious, vile, but I forced it down. The bartender told me, sneering, that I was welcome to another, on the house.
When we rolled back by the airport, the plane had come and gone. A light rain was sifting down. Stephen was out by the gate, on the lip of a drainage gully, perched atop his luggage with his chin on his fist. He was thinner than when I’d last seen him, and the orbits of his eyes were dark, kind of buttholish with exhaustion. The rain had wet him through, and what was left of his hair lay sad against his skull. His coat and pants were huge on him. The wind gusted and Stephen billowed like a poorly tarped load.
“Hi, friend!” I called out to him.
“What the shit, Matthew?” he said. “I just stayed up all night on a plane to spend two hours sitting in a ditch? That really happened?”
Of course, Stephen could have waited with the radio woman in the Quonset hut, but he’d probably arranged himself in the ditch to present a picture of maximum misery when I pulled up.
“You could have let me know you got hung up in Bangor. I shit-canned three hours waiting for you. We had stuff on our plate, but now George is drunk and I’m half in the bag and the whole day’s shot. Frankly, I’m a little heated at you here.”
Stephen bulged his eyes at me. His fists clenched and unclenched very quickly. He looked about to thrombose. “Extraordinary! This is my fault now? Oh, you are a remarkable prick. This is your fucking . . . region, Matthew. It didn’t occur to me that you’d need to be coached on how not to leave somebody in the rain. Plus call you how, shitball? You know I don’t do cell phones.”
“Come get in the truck.”
I reached for him and he tore his arm away.
“No. Apologize to me.” He was red-eyed and shivering. His cheeks and forehead were welted over from repeated gorings by the vicious cold-weather mosquitoes they had up here. Right now, one was gorging itself on the rim of his ear, its belly glowing like a pomegranate seed in the cool white sun. I didn’t swat it away for him.
“Motherfucker, man. Just get in the truck.”
“Forget it. I’m going home.” He shouldered his bag and stormed off for the airfield. His tiny damp head, and squelching shoes—it was like watching the tantrum of a stray duckling.
Laughing, I jogged up behind Stephen and stripped the bag from his shoulder. When he turned I put him in a bear hug and kissed his brow.
“Get off me, you ape,” he said.
“Who’s a furious fellow?” I said. “Who’s my little Brown Cloud?”
“Fucking asshole, I’ll bite you, I swear,” he said into my chest. “Let me go. Give me my bag.”
“Ridiculous,” I said.
I walked to the truck and levered the seat forward to usher Stephen into the club cab’s rear compartment. When Stephen saw that we weren’t alone, he stopped grasping for his bag and making departure threats. I introduced Stephen to George. Then my brother clambered in and we pulled onto the road.
“This is Granddad’s gun, isn’t it?” said Stephen. Hanging in the rack was the .300 Weatherby magnum I’d collected from my grandfather’s house years ago. It was a beautiful instrument, with a blued barrel and a tiger-maple stock.
“Yes,” I said, marshalling a defense for why I hadn’t offered the gun to Stephen, who probably hadn’t fired a rifle in fifteen years. Actually, Stephen probably had a stronger claim to it than I did. As kids, we’d gone out for ducks and rabbits with our grandfather, and Stephen, without making much of it, had always been the more patient stalker and a better shot. But he did not mention it.
“Hey, by the way,” he said. “The tab comes to eight-eighty.”
“What tab?” I said.
“Eight hundred and eighty dollars,” Stephen said. “That’s what the flight came to, plus a sitter for Beatrice.”
“Your daughter?” George asked.
“Dog,” said Stephen.
“George, this is a dog that knows where it was when JFK was shot,” I said. “Stephen, are you still doing those bowel lavages on her? Actually, don’t tell me. I don’t need the picture in my head.”
“I’d like my money,” Stephen said. “You said you’d reimburse me.”
“Don’t get a rod-on about it, Steve-O. You’ll get paid.”
“Lovely. When?”
“At some future fucking juncture when I don’t happen to be operating a moving motor vehicle. Is that okay with you?”
“Sure,” said Stephen. “But just for the record, me being colossally shafted is how this is going to conclude.”
“You little grasping fuck, what do you want, collateral? Want to hold my watch?” I joggled the wheel a little. “Or maybe I’ll just drive this truck into a fucking tree. Maybe you’d like that.”
George began to laugh in a musical wheeze. “How about you stop the car and you two have yourselves an old-fashioned rock fight.”
“We’re fine,” I said, my face hot.
“Sorry, George.”
“Forget it,” Stephen said.
“Oh, no, Steve, money man, let’s get you squared away,” I said. “George, my checkbook’s in the glove box.”
George made out the check, and I signed it, which hurt me deeply. I passed it to my brother, who folded it into his pocket. George patted my shoulder. “His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace,” he said.
“Oh, suck a dong,” I said.
“If there’s no way around it,” sighed George. “How’s clearance under that steering wheel?”
“Fairly snug.”
“A little later, how about, when I can really put my back into it?”
“That’s a big ten-four,” I said.
At all this, Stephen tittered. Then, after being such a childish shit about the check, he began a campaign of being very enthusiastic about everything going past the windows of the truck. The junky houses with appliances piled on their porches? “Refreshing” compared with the “twee fraudulence of most New England towns.” Two hicks on a four-wheeler, blasting again and again through their own gales of dust, knew “how to do a weekend right.” “Wagnerian” is how he described the storm clouds overhead. Then Stephen began plying George with a barrage of light and pleasant chatter. Had he lived here long? Ten years? Amazing! He’d grown up here, too? How fantastic to have escaped a childhood in the ex-urban soul vacuum we’d been reared in. And George had gone to Syracuse? Had he heard of Nils Aughterard, the music biographer on the faculty there? Well, his book on Gershwin—
“Hey, Stephen,” I broke in. “You haven’t said anything about my new truck.”
“What’d you pay for it?”
“Best vehicle I’ve ever owned,” I said. “V-8, five liter. Three-and-a-half-ton towing capacity. Carriage-welded, class-four trailer hitch. Four-wheel drive, max payload package. It’ll pay for itself when the snow hits.”