Driftless

by David Rhodes

  BROKEN THINGS

  WHEN JULY MONTGOMERY PICKED UP HIS MANURE SPREADER at the Words Repair Shop, he reminded Jacob Helm to work on the stalled rider on the edge of town. “Send me the bill,” he said.

  In the craft room, Clarice Quick called Gail Shotwell about her lawn mower, but there was no answer. “I’ve tried three times,” she told Jacob.

  “I’ll stop on the way home,” he said. Several hours later he walked out of the shop, padlocking the double garage doors behind him.

  The sun had faded from its yellow brilliancy to resemble a golden bowl filled with late afternoon. The air felt warm, humid, and sleepy-still.

  The painted black mailbox read GAIL, in white stick-on block letters. He parked his jeep near an orange- red mower surrounded by tall grass, mired like a rowboat abandoned in seaweed.

  Providing mechanical remedies appealed to Jacob in much the same way that healing appealed to physicians. Broken things wanted to function properly and were tragically prevented from doing so. When they were fixed, they returned to their normal state and resumed their activities, happily cutting off the tops of grasses or whatever else they had been created for. Ending their uselessness constituted a noble calling: liberation mechanics.

  A short time later he located the problem: a faulty switch designed to allow the engine to start only when the mower blades were disengaged. The best solution required a new switch, but in the meantime he could bypass the safety precaution with a small length of spliced electrical wire. The appearance of the lawn suggested that the owner would probably want to mow as soon as possible.

  After returning his toolbox to the jeep, he walked along the assorted collection of wooden planks thrown down for a sidewalk to the house and knocked.

  No answer, yet inside the house he could hear a low, unsteady noise.

  Jacob knocked again, louder. Again no answer. The staggered, muffled noises inside the house grew louder and more rhythmic. Someone, it seemed, must be inside.

  He decided to try the back door and walked around the yard, climbing with some effort through blackberry brambles and hickory saplings.

  The sounds could be heard more clearly here, rambling yet melodic, each tone flowing away from the previous one in a mocking, playful humor, as though the ground itself were making up earthy songs about the foibles of nature. Then he recognized something familiar in the melody, and while he was pondering this familiarity he walked around the corner of the house and discovered inside the screened-in porch a young, completely naked blond woman, seated on a broken glider, her head tilted to one side, playing a bright red guitar. Her eyes were closed, her mouth partly opened, an expression of concentrated effort on her face.

  A wide, sequined guitar strap fell over her right shoulder, and the additional weight of the instrument rested in the cleavage between twin pale thighs. The slender fingers of her right hand plucked vigorously at the four coiled strings as her left hand darted up and down the neck as quick as a weaver’s, searching for some combination of movements to free the notes she hoped to coax from the instrument. The motion of her hands was relayed by a thick black cord issuing from the front of the guitar onto the porch floor, around her naked right foot, and through the back door, leaving the impression that the house itself amplified the muted stirrings into heavy, spacious, romping tones. Because of the angle of the guitar, her left breast remained partially obscured, hidden. The other stared amply ahead, apparently aimed through its ripe focused nipple at the bridge of his nose.

  She opened her eyes, raised her head, and looked directly at him. The music stopped at the same moment that her uncommon beauty announced itself inside Jacob’s mind, like the bright pain following with brief delay after an openhanded slap.

  Jacob felt accosted. A barrier had been breached and he was immediately surrounded by a number of aggressive and uncomfortable revelations. He was thirty-eight years old, and his feet were stuck in a pivotal spot in history in which six million years of instinctual male responses to naked females of childbearing age meeting the highest standards of pulchritude needed to change. Indeed, it had fallen solely on Jacob, the responsibility of crafting a Better Way of reacting to young, unclothed women, based on unassuming contractual and egalitarian considerations, shared ideals, and mutual respect. His obligation, it seemed, required him to ignore the synaptic and endocrinic associations that men were assumed to hold in regard to such women: leafless bouquets, genetic rewards, orgasmic flutes and funnels, slippery wine skins, squeeze toys programmed by Nature’s Cunning Twin to reduce even the most sober, mechanically oriented minds to mush. He reminded himself that beauty was subjective, interpretive. The viewed object-in-itself did not possess a wild nympholeptic spirit able to reach inside him and command his allegiance. The only reaching going on within his present circumstances lay within his own jurisdiction. Everything happened inside him. His memories and loneliness were directly contributing in some unknown but potentially understandable way to the perception that Diana herself had come to be seated inside the porch—Diana or some other mythopoeic creature of such alarming loveliness that ordinary human relations became temporarily suspended. He was projecting these alluring symmetries onto her and he needed to take responsibility for doing so, now. A woman on a porch, nothing more. Everything else about the situation he was simply making up. Someone dying of thirst and stumbling upon a cavern filled with dark, wooden casks of chilled wine will not be the most reliable judge of viniculture.

  In addition, a hateful thought soon informed Jacob that the young woman before him so far surpassed his late wife in physical beauty that they could not be compared. In other words, there was a comparison but no one who loved his wife or at the very least the memory of her would propose it. This woman communicated an exuberant compact burgeoning that had years ago departed from Angela, whose bodily form had been consumed in a losing battle against disease. But even in her best days, Jacob feared, before illness had begun to exact its limping toll, Angela had never possessed this creature’s combination of raw visual appeal and unrehearsed grace. She glowed with health. Her neck, stretching out of the extraordinary suppleness of her shoulders, mimicked in every detail the curving stem of a lily rising to its flower. And the problems posed for him by the rondure of her hips were addressed in his imagination, one after another, before they blossomed into conscious questions, only to be posed anew.

  Jacob felt ashamed of these thoughts. Protective of Angela’s memory, he attempted to lay them aside. It could only mean that fate had endowed one at the expense of the other. Angela had not escaped the harsh levies that fall on all who would be honorable and true, while the beauty of the young woman before him obviously issued from outrageous good fortune, undeserved luck, and perhaps even outright theft.

  As though to confirm this thought and wound him further, Gail shifted slightly, and in this nearly imperceptible twitch of positioning her beauty became even more pronounced—a trick of proportioning magic. She had instantly crafted an enhanced visage through which to be seen, arriving in it with an effortless flinch. A wicked shiver moved through Jacob.

  Gail looked up and discovered someone behind her screened- in porch, someone in stained clothes with greasy hands.

  Her first conscious thought was terror. Her imagination dutifully informed her of impending doom, illustrated in lavish detail from its arsenal of anticipated horrors, but this soon subsided. Even strangers can know things about each other, and the stance of her unannounced visitor seemed too upright, his gaze too worried, his hands, though thick, unwilling to play the roles her imagination scripted for them. Indeed, all those brutish qualities he shared with other men were supervened by a determined refusal to face up to the fact that he had them. This guy thought too much, lived too much in his head, and, whoever he might be, he was no threat. Something about him was broken.

  Her next worry concerned her privacy. A sense of violated propriety—her house, her yard, her porch, her her—found expression in contemptuous anger mi
ngled with mild curiosity and surprising embarrassment at being discovered naked. Without looking away from him, she rose to her full height, slowly untangled herself from the sequined strap, set the guitar on the glider, turned around, walked in hieratic, ceremonial steps inside the house, and closed the door.

  A minute later, she emerged in denim cutoffs, yellow top, and yellow running shoes.

  Both pretended the earlier moment had not occurred. Something completely unrelated to it caused them to be unable to make eye contact.

  “July Montgomery said I should come over and check your lawn mower. I’m Jacob Helm.”

  “Hello,” she said, without offering her name.

  “I called earlier, there was no answer . . . I knocked on the front door, but, I’m sorry . . .”

  “July should have said something to me. I hate him. Nobody minds their own business anymore.”

  “No, I don’t suppose.”

  She stepped off the porch and into the back yard. Jacob looked away from her mouth to the ground, but soon had his attention drawn to a yellow shoelace, untied, falling loosely over her instep and quickly gathering significance—a drama threatening to invoke the scene of her ankle—and he looked up again.

  “Did you look at it?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “It has gasoline but it won’t start.”

  “What?”

  “The lawn mower.”

  “I mean yes, I did look at it. A switch needs replacing. You can use it, though, while I order a new one, but you have to remember not to start it with the blades engaged. It’s hard on the motor and solenoid.”

  “You’re the owner of the repair shop,” said Gail, as though making a general announcement.

  “Yes, and I’ll be leaving now. Remember not to start the engine with the blades engaged.”

  “What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing. I was on my way home anyway . . . and that was a Barbara Jean song you were playing. I recognized it: ‘Cradle of Your Smile.’ ”

  Gail tried to keep her face still, but a pleased-with-herself smile that she couldn’t swallow crept into her mouth.

  “Really?”

  “Really. It’s unmistakable.”

  HOT MILK

  THE MORNING FOLLOWING CORA’S CALL TO THE DEPARTMENT of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, early, her husband, Grahm, walked to the barn. The air seemed unusually fresh, and the sky drew the dew away from the ground in long curls of smoking water—hundreds of tiny, silent geysers erupting.

  Unlike on other mornings, the dog did not greet him. Once Grahm was inside the barn, he discovered the north door, which he routinely closed each night after milking—a door that could only be fastened from inside because of a broken latch spring—wide open. But this seemed of no consequence.

  The dog appeared in the afternoon, with dried blood in her fur and a lump above her left ear, but Grahm thought no more about it until the following day when the driver of the milk truck handed him a bill for $5,314—the cost of a tanker-load of milk.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Sorry, Grahm,” said Hubert Shorn. “Your antibiotics contaminated the whole load.”

  “Can’t be,” said Grahm.

  “Sorry. There it is—black and white. I don’t do the testing, just haul milk and bring in samples.”

  “There’s some mistake.”

  “Talk to the lab about that, or management. The whole lot was hot. Had to be dumped. Your sample, when tested, turned as green as food coloring.”

  “It says penicillin.”

  “That’s what they mostly test for.”

  “We haven’t used penicillin since summer before last. We applied for organic certification and they won’t allow it. Don’t use antibiotics.”

  “Like I said, I just haul milk.”

  “Five thousand dollars!”

  “Talk to management. Hell, I’m on your side.”

  Grahm drove to the branch office in Grange, met with the plant manager, and talked to the head of the testing lab. He insisted they run a second test on a sample he had brought with him. The test showed no antibiotic residue and Grahm asked how his milk could be contaminated one day and clean the next.

  The technician rearranged utensils on the counter. “Milk from treated cows was not put in the bulk tank today,” he said.

  “But the amount of milk was the same. If I’d withheld milk it would show up in volume. If I’d added water, the butterfat would be off.”

  “Perhaps treatments were discontinued, or milk was brought in from another farm. Ninety-five percent of hot milk clears up the second day.”

  “Are you calling me a liar?”

  “Of course not,” said the branch manager, stepping between the technician and Grahm. “Mistakes are always possible. If you want to contest the assessment you can file a complaint with DATCP. They set the standards and make the rules.”

  By the time Grahm returned home, his thoughts were swimming in mud. He needed help. He needed Cora.

  But when Cora came home, Grahm could tell from clear across the barnyard that something was wrong.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked when he reached her.

  “The second set of files in the Madison office—the filing cabinets—are gone. They just disappeared. I asked about them and everyone ignored me. That woman, Harriet, who has worked there for twenty years said she couldn’t remember any file cabinets.”

  An hour later a solid blue Chevrolet pulled into the drive. A deputy sheriff walked disdainfully around the tractor ruts and through the yard. Cora met him on the porch and he placed a legal summons in her hand. It ordered her to appear before an administrative judge at the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.

  Monday morning, Grahm and Cora dressed in their best clothes and drove into Madison, the cardboard box of photocopied documents in the back of the station wagon.

  Inside the slate gray building they were directed to the fourth floor. They waited in an empty waiting room for almost an hour, sitting in sculptured plastic chairs.

  “Cora Shotwell,” said a woman with short reddish-orange hair, carrying a yellow notepad. “Come with me, please.”

  Grahm rose to follow but was told to remain. Cora walked behind the woman down a long hallway and into a room with men seated at tables. She was told to sit down, and she did.

  The five men seated at the tables appeared to be reading from papers in ringed binders. Because of the position of her chair she could not face them all at once. They continued reading and paging through the thick volumes without speaking.

  “We understand you have a grievance with your milk plant,” said one of the two men seated at the furthest table from her.

  “It’s not a grievance,” said Cora, turning her chair to address her comments in his direction. She thought he might be a judge, but wasn’t sure. “I have proof American Milk has been robbing farmers, keeping a second set of records, and selling illegal milk.”

  “How long have you been working for the cooperative?”

  “Five years.”

  “What position do you currently have there?”

  “Assistant bookkeeper.”

  “How long ago did you begin to think irregularities were taking place?”

  “Seven months ago, and they’re not irregularities.”

  “Why didn’t you report this immediately?”

  “I had no proof.”

  “Did you report your suspicions to your supervisor?”

  “Yes, and it become clear that if I continued to ask questions I would lose my job. He said the main office had a different accounting system.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I made copies of the reports and billing sheets. I have them outside in the car.”

  “Did you have authorization to make these copies?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Cora.

  “Were you given permission by the American Milk Cooperative
to make copies of their internal records and reports?”

  “No.”

  “Are you aware that making unauthorized copies of proprietary information and other data can constitute a felony?”

  “No, but I have the documents outside in our car.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” said a man seated at the table directly behind her. “This agency is not in a position to accept any documents before a review panel can be convened.”

  “Nothing was said about this when I called last week.”

  “We are bound by law,” said the man seated closest to her, without looking up.

  “I talked with Mr. Wolfinger. I told him—”

  “I am Mr. Wolfinger and I never told you we could accept your papers before a department review had been convened.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  “We have begun a preliminary investigation and American Milk has offered to cooperate in providing us with all the information we require.”

  “I can’t believe this. I have the documents in my car. They prove everything.”

  “During this phase of the investigation it would be improper for us to accept them.”