John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Which was not soon enough for Otis, now gathering his troops together in the lot outside what Bruce called “that wayside chapel.” The chief was into crunch time and could use his old team captain to help call the plays, but he could wait no longer. The town had been stripped out, power and phone lines were down, there’d been killings, and from the attacks along the periphery of Settler’s Woods—the motelkeeper had been shot, for example—he figured Pauline was getting dangerously hungry. The parking lot of the closed-down Country Tavern looked like a goddamned wrecking yard where she’d stumbled through on her last foray. Of course it often looked that way, junkers being the vehicle of no choice among the Tavern regulars, a lost lot mostly, from the wrong side of town. Otis’s side of town. He’d hung out here himself in the old days. The Tavern was popular with the school football team in the off-season, being a place they didn’t ask your age, a good hole for poker nights and stag parties and beery rough-and-tumble. A lot of famous events had happened out here, but they were not the sort of stories that ever made it into The Town Crier. Then came the army, and what furlough time Otis got he spent here, especially after his old man blew his head off. He was wounded in the war, discharged, came home depressed, took a job helping to build the new highway, and the Tavern became more like home than home. Drank too much. Got into too many fights. Might have got into worse, but John changed all that. Talked him into joining the police force. Built him up as a town hero and the promotions came along fast and steady with John behind him. He’d declared his true love out here on a tabletop and now John had helped him find its true expression. So Otis reduced his Tavern time to football afternoons and when he got married that stopped, too, coming out only when called out. Not often. Mostly having to do with what the regulars called tourists. Their own problems, they sorted out themselves. Some of these guys had, unbidden, joined his posse, drunkenly vowing revenge for the loss of Shag and Chester; Otis told them to go on home (they just smiled) and ordered up an ambulance for the victims. “You sure you want an ambulance, Otis?” one of his officers asked. “There’ll have to be an autopsy.” “But they’re—” “Don’t argue with me, goddamn it! Just do as you’re told!” He was very edgy, he knew that, couldn’t help it. He felt betrayed somehow. Otis hadn’t really thought about it until tonight, but the fact was, Pauline had been his best friend, the only real friend he had, and now, though it wasn’t exactly her fault, she was ruining it, threatening to turn his whole life since his Country Tavern days upside down, just by being who she was, forcing him to destroy what he loved to save what he loved. She made him feel like the wickedness he was up against was himself. What was worse, a lot of these other guys out here, he’d discovered, felt much the same way he did, only less guilty about it, and that burned him all the more. He’d heard someone waxing sentimental about knowing Pauline from the old Pioneers Day fairs, and before he could stop himself he’d drawn his revolver. Jesus. If he’d been able to see the prick, he might have greased him. Calm down. Remember the Blessed Virgin. He raised his bullhorn. “Okay, we got no time to lose. This is what we’re gonna do.” Pauline was dangerous, but Otis wanted to resolve the crisis without calling out the National Guard, though he knew he’d have to move fast or the problem would, literally, get too big for them. His tactics were simple: encircle and patrol the periphery with his own boys to try to cut off the escape routes, lead the deputized posse into the center himself, along with the mayor. “What do we do when we find them, Otis?” “Arrest them.” That was the official line. In truth, although he didn’t want to harm her, he didn’t know what he’d do with Pauline if she did surrender. “We gonna rassle them freaks to the ground, are we?” “From what you been sayin’, ain’t that sorta like tryin’ to bring a tree to its knees?” “Nobody said this’d be easy,” Mayor Snuffy yelled out. “Remember, to shoot a takedown, you can always win with a tough ride, but you gotta be aggressive!” “Sure, coach, you take the lady, I’ll take the other one.” “Maybe if we all stood there with our dicks out, she’d just go down—” “Shut up!” Otis barked. Someone asked who the prisoner was, so Otis, in a biting rage, flashed a light on his ugly mug and introduced them all to Pauline’s old man, explaining tersely that he was here because he knew how to track and handle her. Duwayne, his ball-cap on backwards, spat disdainfully through the gaps in his teeth, rattled his chains, and hollered out that the terrible Day of Rupture was upon them and there wouldn’t be no handling to it, just a lot of blood and tears and gnashing of teeth, Otis cutting off his wind with a rifle butt to the solar plexus and warning him he wouldn’t have any teeth to gnash with if he didn’t shut his goddamned trap. “Easy, Otis,” someone said, and he nearly hit him, too. He passed out flashlights and ammunition, asked the young car mechanic who was soberer than most to stay to the rear to cover their ass, ran radio and weapons checks, tossed his jacket in the patrol car: it was a close, sticky night. Must be a storm brewing. “Listen, have you talked this out with old Gordon?” someone asked. “What’s he got to do with it?” he snapped. But then he thought better of it. “Send a car to pick him up,” he muttered glumly. He stared into the ominous darkness of Settler’s Woods. Maybe he should have called out the Guard. Could have used a few choppers with heat-seeking missiles in his arsenal instead of this bunch of bleary-eyed clowns: already a couple of the rifles had gone off accidentally out there in the darkness. For Otis, at times like these, horseplay was a felony. “Okay, men, this is it,” he said through his bullhorn. “Let’s go.” But before they could cross over, the last of his squad cars rolled up with the news that the owner of the Ford-Mercury garage had been shot dead in his own office. “Goddamn it, I don’t have time to deal with that shit now!” Otis cried, feeling like someone had just thrown him an infuriating block out of nowhere. “What did they kill him with?” the mayor wanted to know. “One of those,” said the officer, pointing at the mechanic’s rifle. “Musta happened about the time we was at John’s place.” “That’s the bad news, Otis. The good news is the simpleton’s back home again. Big Pauline’s in there all on her lonesome.”

  Of the many famous but unreported events that had taken place in Otis’s old stamping ground over the years, not least was the legendary stag party on the eve of John’s wedding, the night Bruce was first introduced to this “wayside chapel”—as were all of John’s other fraternity brothers, down from the uninursery (as Brains would say) for the grand occasion, among them doleful Brother Beans, he of the inimical wit, contest-winning wind instrument, and Swiss Army knife. Which he was still gripping in his fist when he awoke from a thumping nightmare, a gift no doubt of his thumping hangover, his face in sticky spilled beer and bladder ready to erupt. He’d been out hunting somewhere. In the nightmare, that is. Something gross. He’d had the uncomfortable feeling, he remembered, that he was around spooks of some kind. The Freudian content was inescapable, but Beans escaped it, a knack he had: nothing that entered his head stayed there for long, it was hello and goodbye. Time now, having helloed himself shitfaced, to say goodbye to the moribund Country Tavern. There were a few bodies around, but none Beans knew. Lights, music, movies, bar, all shut down. Beans considered giving the cymbals a crack, just to see if these dead might rise again, but decided his raw brain, which seemed to have got outside his skull somehow, couldn’t take it, nor did he relish commerce with any he might thus return, no doubt embittered, to the living. He staggered through the butts and bottles and other detritus of the prenuptial joys to the door and on out into the moonlight, worrying about the long sick walk to town and the critical decision he would have to make ere he set off: to wit, which fucking direction was it? First, though, weewee time. Beans was often deemed an impractical man, but not true. Now, for instance, he used his pee to hose down the dust-caked windows of the Country Tavern, yet another of his good deeds that history would fail to record, wondering as he did so about the peculiar feeling of déjà vu that came over him. Something to do with the absent Brains, his old pal, now greener pastured: faint re
call no doubt of one of many such early-morning makings of water (not made really, just, like all of life, borrowed and passed on) they had, after immemorial nocturnal adventures, shared. Out on the lonely road, cranking the throbbing blob on his neck to one side, then the other, he discovered through his pain, just down the way a piece, an old battered pickup parked aslant on the shoulder, and he thought he could make out voices in the woods. He was not alone in the world after all! He picked his way over into the trees where, yes, he could hear heavy thrashing about and grunts and curses, the tenor of which led the ever-rash Beans to a rare exercise of caution before declaring himself: he watched from behind a tree as two men struggled toward a ravine with, what? a body? Yes, a body. Well. The walk to town—run, rather—would probably do him good. But now he worried that they might hear him as he made his characteristically graceless exit and marry the witness’s fate to that of their victim, now tossed rudely in the ditch, so he crouched down and, seriously ill but sobering up fast, waited for them to finish their business and take their leave. Their business included pummeling and kicking the body and then pissing on it. “Clean the whore up,” one of them tittered: Beans recognized him as Brother John’s scowly cousin, the other one being the sullen fat boy who’d organized the stag party. They both looked blitzed out of their skulls. The fat boy asked the other one how much he’d put in, and he said about thirty, forty dollars. “Here, you’ve just doubled your money,” said the fat boy. He tossed something down on the body, a single bill perhaps, pocketed the rest, and the two of them staggered out of there, hooting and snorting and singing “Roll Your Leg Over.” Beans waited until he’d heard the doors slam and the old truck grind and rattle away, then crept over into the ravine to examine the body. Naked but for a few wet tangled rags, ghostly white and motionless, but still warm. He put an ear to her breast and heard a beat: so, still alive. In a manner of speaking, for, though her eyes were open, she clearly couldn’t see him and she was limp as a rag doll. Just a little kid in dirty school socks with a five-dollar bill resting on her damp tum like a fallen leaf or a sale price tag. Familiar in some odd way, though he was sure he’d never seen her before. Somebody in the movies maybe. He was equally sure he’d never seen the old gent in the leather jacket and ballcap standing beside him with a shotgun either, though he was also weirdly familiar. Like somebody you might meet in a nightmare. “What you been doin’ to my little girl, you iniquitous transgressin’ sonuvabitch?” From his knees, Beans whispered: “I, uh, I heard noises and came over. Sir.” “Great Gawdamighty, Behold my accusséd affliction!” roared his interlocutor and poked the gun up Beans’s tender nose. He could feel the puke rising. “Her defilement’s in her putrid skirts, her temple’s been desecrated all to frickin’ hell!” Beans held up his hand asking to be excused, wishing badly he could have the old dream back. He’d been too hasty about waking up. “This unholy shit-soaked abombination has gotta be smited, Lord! Amen! It’s time to bring down the final reckonin’!”

  She could hear his nasal squawk in the darkness, calling down eternal hellfire and dangnation on all around him, a voice that belonged to her old life though she could not name it, knew only that she feared and hated it, yet loved it, too, in some sad painful way. There were other voices and a distant flickering of lights in the trees like insects in grass. They had passed close by, gone on, were coming back again. Her little friend who’d been helping her all day had vanished into the night and she was alone and hungry and afraid. There was more food somewhere but she couldn’t find it, she’d torn up the forest looking for it, until the men arrived and sent her scurrying for shelter. Now she squatted there in the scratchy darkness, trembling, waiting for she knew not what, nor knowing just what she’d do when the waiting ended. As his voice drew near, she remembered that he used to tie her up and yell at her and do bad things to her, though what he did exactly was less clear than how much it hurt and where, and how she couldn’t get away no matter how she tried. And he was kind to her sometimes, too, if she did the things he liked, and sometimes he cried and hugged her and called her his little baby, though this was bad because he always got angry afterwards and hurt her all the more. She closed her eyes and sniffed the air and picked up the odor of his old leather jacket, worn and often wet, which smelled like just-turned cider, and there were other smells as well, those of tobacco and body lotions and breaths soured by drinking, and the acrid smells of the sweat of men she might have known (she could almost taste them on her tongue), others strange to her, and the smells, too, of fear and excitement and confused desire, and when she opened her eyes they were standing all together down in the trees, shining their little lights on her, hushed it seemed by what they saw. Most of them had weapons, pointed at her, and bunched together like that, they looked like a single glittering animal with quills erect. A burly little fellow who was familiar to her stepped forward and shouted up at her through a thing in front of his face: “Pauline! We don’t aim to harm you none! It ain’t your fault, but you been seriously outa line here and you got the whole town shook up!” When he said her name, it brought back something about who she was, and she looked down between her legs and scratched herself there. This got the other voices going again and focused all the lights. “Now stop that, Pauline! Listen to me! You come along peaceful-like and we’ll figure out some way to take care of you and get you covered up proper and find you something to eat!” She was still afraid but his voice through that thing soothed her like something on the radio and she thought he might help her like her other friend did and she reached down toward him. He yelped and fell backwards, trying to get away, and there was a bang and then another one and something pinched her in the arm and suddenly there were more bangs and pinches and light beams flying in all directions and all those little men falling and scurrying away like they had wasps in their pants. The burly one jumped up and cried out: “No! Don’t shoot, goddamn it! Hold your fire!” Several of them had run off, but those who’d stayed picked themselves up and chittered and laughed nervously and hid behind trees to watch. There was a very funky smell all around her now and she knew they were afraid and there was nothing she could do to make them less afraid. It was then that the one whose squawky voice she had first recognized hopped forward with his hands and feet stuck together and came right up and stood by her knee with a rifle he’d picked up off the ground and shouted out that was enough, he’d send any sinner here to hell and beyond who tried to hurt his little girl. “We ain’t fixing to hurt anyone, Duwayne,” said the burly one, coming forward. “You done your bit. Now get your ass back here before it gets shot off!” She picked the chubby little fellow up and put him in her lap so the one with the rifle wouldn’t shoot him. All the others went scrambling away again and there were more bangs and shouts: “You okay, Otis—?!” “Christ-amighty, what do we do now—?!” “Nothing!” he yelled back, hanging onto her tummy wrinkles. “Don’t shoot! It’s all right! Just gimme a minute to think!” “It ain’t all right, you miserable hind tit of the goddang Prince of Darkness! The time of the tribulation is at hand!” Ah. She remembered that. And the wide gate and the narrow gate, and the rod of wrath that always got stuck into both of them. And something else: that this was the one who’d done something bad to her mother and sister. She’d nearly forgotten that, but it came back to her now clear as a picture in a storybook when everything else in her head was slipping away. She lifted him up to have a better look. “No, I never,” he protested. “I done a lotta sinful shit in my time, Pauline, mostly on accounta demon drink, but I never done that.” He was wriggling around in her fist, so she squeezed a little harder, while cuddling the other one close against her tummy. “Now hold on, Pauline! Your momma killt your sister with her kitchen shears, and she was gonna git you, too, that whorish old gash had the devil in her, so I, you know, brought an end to her persecutions before she could do her wickedest.” An end? “Well, we got company here, Pauline. Let’s say I chased her diabolical hellhole off the premises and she ain’t been beholden
since. Hey! Wait a minute! The wicked hosts is them down there! Smite them, not me! Not your own daddy! Pauline—?! Stop!”