“Tweren’t funny. Bear got ’im.”
“Serves him right. Sonofabitch was a lousy shot. Couldn’t kill a bear unless it was in a backhouse.”
She was neither frightened nor upset by his nose-out-of-joint attitude. “We don’t have much experience with strangers up here. People don’t usually come here—they just leave. So maybe we find you a little strange, too.”
“Well, I may seem strange, but I don’t go around tellin’ people that other people are dead when they’re alive.”
“Ya told me Maynard was dead.”
“He is dead.”
“Don’t see no tombstone.”
“There was no next of kin to ship his body to, so he was buried in Vietnam.”
“Were ya there when they buried him?”
“No, I was somewhere up the line, getting my ass shot at!”
“Then how do ya know he’s buried?”
“Because I was there when he got killed!”
“Not what I asked ya.”
“Listen—Maynard is dead and Jack Meeker is not. And as for Benson, I don’t much give a damn!”
“Then why ya so angry?”
“Ara—”
“And usin’ bad language? I was just givin’ ya the news. Ya don’t want to believe it, that’s okay.”
“Ara, I’m not angry. I’m just tired of listening to stories and making stupid cocoa. As to my language, I’m sorry. Besides, if that’s your idea of bad language—”
Something hit the side of the house. And Austin, off balance and preconditioned by combat, grabbed her, pushed her into a corner and reached for his rifle.
She was calm. “It’s Froom. He’s snowballin’ ya house. He wants to go home. So do I.”
Austin ventured a look through the window. It was Froom, all right, lobbing snowballs at the house as if they were grenades, pulling imaginary pins and counting before releasing them, a barrage of them.
Ara was in her jacket and by the door. “Sometimes I tell stories, but most of the time I don’t. Thanks for the stupid cocoa.”
She left, linking up with Froom at the sled. The sun was setting prematurely, loosing lavender shafts every which way from behind the only cloud to appear in the sky that day. Austin watched them haul their sled up a hill, where they disappeared within the folds of a peach-purple light.
His gaze then went to the snow just beyond his porch. There was a shadow even though there couldn’t have been, all light that could cause a shadow having gone over the hill with the sled. Yet there it was—and it was of the witch’s tree, lead-gray upon the lavender snow, even though the tree itself was three hills and a quarter of a mile away.
Austin didn’t care for it, not for any of it. He shuttered his windows, and went back into his house to where his fire had died despite the fact that it had been burning brightly five minutes prior. Reaching into the stove, he found the charred wood to be days cold to the touch, and the house a hundred years that way.
14
Inside the house the fire was roaring and the coffee was on, Austin having rekindled the one and reboiled the other, while outside, the in-and-out yelping of dogs pockmarked the otherwise noiseless and curiously windless night.
Austin was not yet willing to accept Ara’s opinion that the barking was being done by wolves or foxes. He knew a dog when he heard one—and those were dogs out there. How many, he couldn’t be certain of. Two for sure. Still, if he was right, and if they were truly Maynard’s dogs, why weren’t they sniffing right up to the house in search of their master? The answer: they were wolves or foxes.
On the other hand, since it was far more comforting to believe that they were dogs and not wolves or foxes, that was what he did. They were dogs. And that was all the thinking that he cared to devote to the issue.
He sat at his table, Maynard’s book before him, propped up between two kerosene lamps that tossed haphazard light every which way but up the chimney. And, as had been the case for the last few nights, as he read Maynard’s words he heard Maynard’s voice. It was a phenomenon of Austin’s own creation, and he indulged in it for all the right reasons. It was as though he were recreating Maynard, bringing him back to life, at least for those moments when he sat down to learn from his friend’s writings.
And even though the words were set on the page quite grammatically, with proper punctuation and without slangy contradictions, they didn’t pass into Austin’s brain that way. For they weren’t so much going through his eyes as through his ears, in Maynard’s own curious manner of speech, inflections, mispronunciations, folksiness et al. And despite the fact that the night was pressing darkly in on him from all sides, even the house seeming to lose its interior dimensions, Austin was neither alone nor apprehensive—for, as Maynard used to say whenever they were confronted with a sticky military situation. “Have no fear, Maynard’s here.”
“Life is frittered away in just doin’ details. What ya have to do is drive it into a corner, like ya do with a fox. And ya got to keep it there, and break it, and make it do what ya want it to. Some men go out to take on life directly, like on a battlefield. I think that’s wrong. Least it’s not the way I see it. The way I see it, life should be dealt with from a base. Like a house.”
Austin spoke to the book. “Yeah, I figured you’d say somethin’ like that.”
“A house is a place to go back to, to regroup in. A house is a kind of a special corner of the universe. It’s a place where everyone whoever lived in it still does.”
“What you’re sayin’, Maynard, is what I know. I got a lot of company here.”
“That’s the nature of a house. It absorbs its occupants, kind of keepin’ them forever alive.”
“Well, that’s just swell, Maynard. That’s just—”
“In particular, that applies to those who loved that house without reservation and stuck with it through whatever tests and obstacles arose.”
Austin’s heart came close to stopping, for those last words, coming in Maynard’s voice, were nowhere on the page, the written diary ending with the words “keeping them forever alive.”
Austin closed the book and pushed it away, almost off the table. “Maynard, I got to tell you—I think you left your house to the wrong boy. And I’ll tell you something else, I’m beginning to lose that rich sense of humor of mine that I was never noted for in the first place.”
He was tired. More tired than he had at first realized. He was drag-assed tired, fall-down tired, dead tired. That, added to the unsettling things Ara had told him earlier—about Jack Meeker and Benson—was causing his mind to function like a badly run motel. Room numbers were either missing or upside down. Telephone receivers were off their hooks, and no one was at the switchboard. Specters, arriving with no advance notice, signed in with invisible ink and checked out with no forwarding addresses. Sudden clouds, unsponsored shadows, suggestive noises and intimidating silences were the only permanent guests, and they skulked about the corridors with all the attendant freedom such privileged phantoms were invariably afforded.
A good night’s sleep, followed by a good day’s sunshine, would scatter those oppressors, but Austin wasn’t sure he was in line for either. On balance, in this house, there were more positives than negatives, more reasons for running than for digging in. The dogs, the tree, the book, the fucking hoot owl—all the incipient terrors he was sparring with were laying siege to his sanity.
If it were Nam it would be time for rest and rehabilitation. But it wasn’t Nam. And there wasn’t any respite—or any chaplain to take his troubles to, or buddies to hoist a beer with. It was wilderness Maine and he was more alone and unruddered in it than if he were wandering wounded behind Charlie’s lines.
He had a beer anyway. Dutch Courage. It was warm, because he couldn’t keep it on ice without having it freeze. Even stored in his root cellar it never approached the cool temperature it was supposed to have on being consumed. But it did its job, loosening the bolts in his head, calming the furor in his chest.
<
br /> He went to bed, allowing two kerosene lamps in his other room to burn. They would be as twin beacons against anything that hid from light. And if the light failed he had his artillery and his cutlery, guns and knives to take up against things that flourished in shadow.
Sleep fluttered in, vague and spastic in its getting there, but it did arrive. And if it did not blanket him thoroughly, it did provide him with enough cover to drift off under. In the beginning of it, and at irregular moments, his eyes would open, involuntarily, as if programmed to check the lamps in the other room, to see if they were still there, on the alert. They were. Not as small lighthouses but, rather, as ship’s searchlights, semaphoring some message at him across the floor.
Actually, the lamps were bright and unerringly steady, the semaphoring flicker taking place only in his head, caused by Austin himself, by the erratic blinking of his eyes. But in his haze he could not know that, and, tired as he was, he worked at deciphering that message, for he knew his Morse Code. And it came across the room at him—Thoreau, though he had never read it—“To be awake is to be alive.”
In the morning he would forget all of it—but the night was not yet over. And somewhere in the darkest, iciest low part of it, when even owls and loons were prompted to noiselessness out of either fear or respect, he slipped deeper into sleep, as deep into it as a man could go without losing all chance of coming back. Still, even in the pit of it, he could hear and identify the sound. The rocker, creaking.
It was possible to sleep. Even though the jungle grab-bagged a thousand ways in which a man could die, if that man was tired, so tired that “Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn,” sleep would come. Fear could delay it somewhat. Awareness could deflect it. Youth and strength could ward it off to a degree—but it would come. As sure as God made little eyelids.
Austin was asleep, the ground, damp and acrid, making a fine enough mattress, the trees, thick as flared umbrellas, switching off the light of the moon.
It had been a piss-poor patrol—they usually were—Charlie in his black pajamas using the night to slither about in as naturally as if he were one of the nightscape’s true nocturnals. Still, Austin slept well because Maynard was on guard.
They worked as a team, everyone did—one man awake, the other asleep. That far away from base it made more sense to wait until daylight than to keep pushing on. Yes, they’d be written off as missing, because they had no radio, but it wouldn’t be the first time. Nor would they be the first patrol to have operated in such a manner. It was accepted procedure, though no manual ever prescribed it. They would straggle in in the morning, make their report, the C.O. would put a line through “Missing,” and they’d all get something to eat.
Austin heard the creaking rocker in his sleep and sat straight up. He picked Maynard out in the night and smiled at him. “I think you spent too much time alone in this house, Maynard. And now you’ve got me doing it.”
“Shhhh. Keep ya voice down, Austin. Ya don’t have to advertise our presence.” Maynard was sitting against a tree, as were four of the others in his ten-man patrol, all of them fanned out like the points of a star, each of them covering the jungle from a different direction. “Ya supposed to be asleep, anyway. Ya want to stay up, Austin, ya can stand my watch.”
“If I’d of thought ten minutes before comin’ here—but no, there I was, runnin’ through the snow like a drunken rabbit.”
“I’m not sure ya cut out for this world, Austin. A man has got to know what he’s doin’ before he sets out doin’ it. I mean, ya got to be careful ya don’t commit to somethin’ too soon and then find yaself outflanked.” Maynard’s voice dropped and hushed. “There’s somethin’ out there, ya know.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know quite what it is…”
“Maynard, did you ever check out the people who lived in your house before you did?”
“I said, ‘There’s somethin’ out there.’”
“I heard, and I agreed.”
Maynard coiled and waited another moment, his head cocked, his ear focused. Then he eased. “It’s gone.”
“Good.”
“But it’ll be back, so stay ready. Now what’d ya ask me, Austin?”
“I asked if you ever checked out the people who lived in your house before you did.”
“Well, I tried to, but the records were gone. All I had was this pine plank on the wall where some of ’em wrote what was on their minds.”
“Didn’t it seem to you they were just a little leery of this house?”
“Some of ’em.”
“Most of ’em.”
“I love that house, Austin. That’s why, if I don’t come out of this ruckus alive—that’s why I want to leave it to someone I can count on. That’s why I’m leavin’ it to you in my will.”
“Why me? I’m unreliable—not likely to stay in one place too long. I’m the last guy in the world for the job.”
“I think ya perfect for the job.”
“Yeah?”
“Wouldn’t leave my house to anyone else.”
“What about Ara and Froom?”
“There it is again. Wonder what that is. Keep ya voice down, Austin.”
“That Ara—she’d have me believe Jack Meeker’s dead.”
“Shhhhh.”
“Claims to be a Minnawickie. Did you put that idea in her mind, Maynard?”
“It’s some kind of light. Two of ’em. Close together. Somethin’s out there, all right. Makin’ some kind of signal. Wait a minute…It’s gone.”
“Do you think Jack Meeker’s dead?”
“What?”
“Do you think Jack Meeker’s dead?”
“I think people die only because they accept it. I think Thoreau said it best when he said—”
“Listen, fuck Thoreau, okay?”
“—‘Time is but a stream I go fishin’ in. I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.’”
“I said, ‘fuck Thoreau,’ Maynard. He’s beginning to bore the crap outa me.”
“There it is again. Those lights. Flickerin’. Can ya make it out?”
“And your witch’s tree. What about your witch’s tree?”
“‘There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root…’”
“And your goddamn rocking chair! Tell me about that chair, Maynard! I mean—I can hear it! I can hear it right now!”
“‘…I have three chairs in my house. One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society…’”
“Don’t you hear it?”
“‘…I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the range of sight, new earths and skies and seas abound, and in my day the sun doth pale his light…’”
“Jesus, Maynard! You keep it up and I’m goin’ to stuff that book right up your escape hatch!”
“Austin, ya gotta pull yaself together or ya ain’t gonna make it.”
Austin was sitting upright in his bed. The kerosene lamps had gone out and the rocker had stopped creaking. Absolute silence ruled. It was his only companion in the aberrated night. His bed was drenched with jungle sweat, his hands so morbidly clammy that when he touched them to his eyes and forehead, to chase the demons, he was revulsed by them. Maynard, wherever he was, was right—he would have to pull himself together if he was going to make it.
What nagged at him most was that he had no true reason for trying to make it. No one would miss him if he stayed, and no one would miss him if he left. It was his usual condition—he could do whatever he damned please, and the world would go right on turning. And yet he felt very important. Very important indeed. He didn’t know why. He only knew that if he were to leave he’d never know.
And so he sat there, in his bed, ridiculously singing the lyric from an old Jimmy Durante song—“Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go; did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to stay…”
He had no idea what he was going to do. Even the next day was up for gr
abs. He was playing Hamlet in snowshoes. He was unfamiliar with the script. And he had never been a critic’s darling. So what else was new?
15
The next morning Ara returned, looking too pretty to classify as mortal. Austin was fishing, or trying to fish, when she stepped between him and the sun, her shadow preceding her voice, causing him to almost drop his line in the quick blackness.
“Didn’t mean to startle ya.” She was smiling mischievously, for she did indeed mean to startle him.
And Austin knew it. “Oh, didn’t you?”
“Didn’t.”
“Okay.”
“Catch anythin’?”
“Yeah. Pneumonia.”
“I had pneumonia once. Came close to dyin’.”
“How do you know you didn’t?”
“Nobody buried me.”
“Where’s your stupid brother?”
“Other side of the hill.”
“I miss his snowballs.”
“Ya won’t for long. That’s what he’s doin’. Makin’ ’em. Think ya got a bite there.”
Austin looked and his line was jiggling. “Sonofagun!”
“Careful. Don’t want to lose ’im.”
Austin played the fish deftly. It fought hard, and for a moment he worried that the hole he’d chopped in the ice was not wide enough to haul his huge catch through. That fear vanished when he reeled in a small trout that couldn’t have weighed a pound and wouldn’t have fed a cat.
“What a whopper, Austin.”
“Think so?”
“A-yuh. Biggest sardine I ever saw.”
“Actually, it’s a small whale.”
“Goin’ to mount it?”
“I don’t think I’ve got a wall big enough.”
“In that case, best ya throw it back.”
“Give it its freedom.”
“A-yuh.”
“Only if you come back to the house with me.”
“Only if ya don’t make me drink cocoa.”
“Deal.”
He dropped the trout back into the lake, and he and Ara started back for his house, the day deliciously new around them. She had that ability—to turn the day on. It had been goofing off until she got there, moving this way and that, indolently, no pattern to its flow, no special requests of cloud or wind. But with her arrival it snapped to. Sounds were sharper, the crack of old twigs beneath their feet, their own breath laying into the air like dragon steam. Sights were more vivid, rabbits quicker, treetops greener, mountains higher. Even the sun switched over to a higher-intensity bulb, illuminating the horizon, setting fire to the snowline.
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