Maynard’s House

by Herman Raucher

  He was feeling good, the bite on his nose coming almost as an injection of toe-tapping vitamin B. He knew that he was susceptible to Ara’s charms, fair game for the gray-eyed huntress, if for no other reason than that she was the only game in town. Still, he had never been an itinerant tail-chaser. Any girl able to raise his hackles had to have something more going for her than merely being the only target in his sight. It had always been that way with him. He had always been discerning and particular, choosing the company of just himself over the debatable attractiveness of some handy lady. Even in Nam, where the females toppled like fir trees in lumber country, he had never been interested. No—Ara was different. Ara was worth his attention and his yearning. Even in crowded Cincinnati or steaming Saigon she’d have been a standout. The only thing she wasn’t that he wished she was—was older.

  He thought he was shot. He never heard it. It simply came out of nowhere to strike him squarely in the heart. It splatted, broke into powder, dusted his boots and lay there—the residue of another insidious Froom-ball.

  Austin kicked it off and looked ahead, in the direction the missile had come from. And there he was, the Minnawickie kid himself, standing astride the crest of a small hill, hands on hips and a curse on his lips. Austin resumed his walk, heading toward the boy because that was the direction in which he originally had been going.

  Froom loosed another snowball at Austin, and while it was still in the air, and before it had even reached the height of its parabola, the boy loosed still another snowball, the second one more of a line drive, calculated to strike its target quickly while its intended victim was looking skyward at the first one.

  It was a fine strategy and it might have worked had Austin not been so combat-wise. He sidestepped the line drive and ducked the Texas Leaguer, and continued to advance on the Philistine.

  Froom jumped and swore and dropped back to where he had a cache of snowballs piled like small cannonballs in the town square. He fired them all at Austin, but Austin kept coming, dodging most, undismayed by the few that did strike, because they were not life-threatening.

  Froom dropped back farther to where he had stockpiled yet another pyramid of snowballs. These too he fired at Austin, who continued to advance, fascinated at the boy’s tactics, wondering why he was doing it and where it would stop, sensing that he was being sucked into an ambush but walking into it anyway.

  The contest continued for three more stockpiles, and when it finally did stop it was only because there were no more stockpiles. That was it. Froom had used up all of his snowballs, perhaps a hundred of them, and that was all he had. He was plumb out of ammunition.

  Austin had been hit perhaps fifteen times, none of the hits of a disabling nature, and still he had no idea as to why Froom was so determined to egg him on—over that small hill, into those few birches.

  The boy was reduced to running large circles around Austin, like Indians circling a dug-in wagon train. Only this wagon train wasn’t dug in, it was moving on, and not even the last desperate tosses of the tiring attacker were going to deter it.

  On more than one occasion Froom darted in close enough for Austin to have grabbed him. But where, in the beginning, Austin would have been delighted to get his hands on the mad Minnawickie, he was by then far more interested in discovering just what it was that Froom was so intent on drawing him into.

  And so, with Froom sprawled on the snow, his energy and his ammunition spent, nothing coming from him but a few rasping epithets that the wind stole long before Austin could be offended, the way was clear for Austin to see what he could see.

  He walked up and over the small rise, down the other side, and on to the sparse birches that stood motionless until he reached them; after which they whipped and bent in a fresh-boiled wind, as if trying to hit at him as he passed. They creaked and groaned, and whistled and stabbed, sending dead twigs flying and deader leaves dancing—and whatever birds there were roosting in them at the time, they all took to flight as if flushed by hounds and harried by hunters.

  Austin picked his way carefully between the snapping trees, ducking the grasping limbs whenever they swept down at him. He bobbed and weaved like a boxer and sidestepped like a halfback, but was unable to avoid all of the cutting edges—for they came at him without design, and no amount of anticipation on his part could enable him to predict just when they would strike.

  He had walked through those birches before, for they were only slightly off the path to his postbox, and never once had they behaved in so unruly a manner. Rather, they had been a picturesque bunch, black, white and gray in their markings, more evocative of Currier and Ives than of such dark doings as they were then involved in. He emerged on the other side of them pretty much unscathed, except for the one long scratch that had drawn blood from his left cheek.

  At first glance he saw nothing there, save a few trees and bushes, a few rises and falls. It was the same open expanse that led circuitously to the road, featuring the same small path that Austin had stamped out in it, for there had been no appreciable snowfall since the last time he walked it.

  He looked again, shielding his eyes from the late-day glare with both hands, searching the horizon from left to right, like a maximum-security prison guard. And there was something out there, something pressed against the lowering sun and therefore silhouetted to his eyes. It had a shape that was of human dimension, and something about it was fluttering on the wind, flapping and billowing like the wings of some prehistoric bird.

  A scarecrow, he thought. But why in winter? And how without his knowledge, since it hadn’t been there before? And who? And when? The only question that brought an immediate answer was “Where?” There. Out there perhaps a hundred yards across the level snow. And he continued toward it, wondering how it was that he never had a gun when he needed it.

  And with each step he took the wind built further, the birches behind him giving up all their old leaves, every dead one, shooting them at him, climbing them up his back, against his neck, the loud rustle of their last fury filling his ears like a necklacing explosion.

  But he was not frightened and he was not deterred, for it was his land, his snow. The wind too, that was his. And the dead leaves shouting, those too. And the red sun setting. And the hard snow packing beneath his boots as he kept walking toward whatever it was out there. And the cold spearing up through his boot soles, and the strangled sound of his own breathing. And then the witch, its cape flapping, its laughter demonic. And its coal-black eyes and toothless maw, and hooked nose, and tall peaked hat, and frazzled broom—that too was his, and it froze his heart close to stopping.

  And as he raised his hand to ward it off, making a noise that he had no sense of and could never identify as his own, she jumped out from behind it. Ara. And, as if to announce her appearance as the culmination of her trick, she thrust out her upturned palm at him while singing, “Ta-da!”

  He sagged and almost fell, so close to dying on the spot that all his muscles went soft, all his bones going to wet spaghetti.

  “What’s the matter with ya, Austin?”

  He could only look at her.

  “Can’t take a joke?”

  The power of speech had not yet returned to him.

  “Shame ya can’t take a joke. Me and Froom worked all afternoon on it.”

  Froom appeared from between the birches, dancing and laughing and generally having himself a bang-up good time, falling all over himself in thigh-slapping hysteria.

  “It’s a snow witch, Austin,” said Ara. “Guess it really scared ya. Found this old blanket, and I made this old hat. Eyes are coal. Teeth too, what there are of ’em. Broom I found. Sure ya not havin’ a heart attack or somethin’? Ya get somethin’ like appendicitis out here, ya can forget it. Ya just blow up and burst. Austin?”

  “Yes?”

  “Ya okay?”

  “Sure. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “Ya face is cut.”

  “It is?”

  She studied him more
closely, her voice more sympathetic. “I guess we really scared ya. I’m really sorry, Austin.”

  “It’s okay. You didn’t scare me.”

  “Did.”

  “Didn’t.”

  “Well, did or didn’t, I guess maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea.” She came even closer, touching his cheek. And he had an image of the cut healing and disappearing on contact. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “Just a branch bite. Birches’ll do that if a wind kicks at ’em.” She looked deep into his eyes and said the next words innocently, as one might say “Nice day” or “Let’s have lunch.” “Ya can kiss me if ya like.”

  “You goin’ to bite my nose?”

  “Nope.”

  He kissed her and it was fine. No arms, no bodies pressing. Just mouths, just lips. His still cold with shock and fear, rigid and leathery, his physiology yet to catch up with the moment. Hers more malleable, moist and receptive, parting softly but not enough to give him entrance. And they hung there like that, the pair of them, like two kids playing Pass the Orange, no hands allowed.

  But if she did not take his tongue, that was not true of his breath, for she inhaled of him, at first most delicately, almost imperceptibly, without his knowing it, until he felt himself snaking down her throat, sucked in as if by a vacuum, his entire soul losing its hold on the outside world, all of him seemingly stuck on something wet and reptilian and inexorably retracting.

  He was as an insect, death-dancing on the point of a lizard’s tongue, and if he could not break free of it he was doomed to whatever undefined inner recesses lay beyond the sweet red lips and the fine white teeth.

  There was a roaring in his head, a wind of no return, as he felt himself being drawn right out of his boots, off the earth, his brain stammering, struggling to clarify the moment, to frame the question: Is this a young girl yearning that I am kissing—or a witch upon whose lips I am dying, my will shattering, my grave opening?

  And he broke from her, pushing her aside in a gesture of consummate revulsion—and she fell to the snow, her face whiter than the white of it.

  He left her there, making straightaway for his house, too unstrung to look back, afraid that she might have metamorphosed into something as horrifying as her kiss. He fled the snow witch, its cape still tripping on the wind, endowing it with another moment of corporeal life. He didn’t look at that either, sensing that it would be wearing Ara’s face, pushing out Ara’s smile.

  He passed between the lean torsos of the birches, where he saw Froom, hiding from him. And it crossed his mind that Froom might well be Ara’s familiar, for witches traveled with familiars, a cat or a dog, why not a boy? In any case, there’d be no more snowballs from that Minnawickie this day, Austin thought, as he made his way up the hill and down the other side, the sun behind him throwing his shadow before him, gargantuan and black and malevolently awesome, though proper for such a low-angled sun. He wouldn’t catch it until he reached his house—if indeed it was his own.

  17

  That night, fortified by two beers, and having dined on tunafish and mandarin slices, with a box of Lorna Doones as a chaser, it occurred to him that he never did get to see what might have been in his postbox, if anything. He laughed, chiding himself for having overreacted to everything, Ara included. The poor girl, aroused and inexperienced, had no doubt been going for a soul kiss, and he had responded like Captain Virgin. He’d straighten it out the next day. Hopefully, the girl would still talk to him. And, actually, it was funny. They had scared him. As to Froom’s being a familiar, the boy had more chance of being a full-blooded Minnawickie, with a touch of Apache, than a familiar.

  He spent some time with Thoreau, whom, if the truth were known, he was becoming quite taken with. “When the playful breeze drops in the pool, it springs to right and left, quick as a kitten playing with dead leaves.” That was nice, and it almost seemed to describe nutsy Froom.

  As to Ara, Thoreau had captured her too: “I saw a delicate flower had grown up two feet high between the horse’s feet and the wheel track. An inch more to right or left had sealed its fate, or an inch higher. Yet it lived to flourish, and never knew the danger it incurred. It did not borrow trouble, nor invite an evil fate by apprehending it.” That surely described Ara—a delicate flower, flourishing and never knowing danger or borrowing trouble. Just a beautiful innocent. Surely, Thoreau must have had her in mind when he wrote those words—or someone like her, since he wrote them in 1850, more than a hundred years before Ara came to be.

  He heard the dogs again, faint but audible—and spooky. And he smiled because it struck him that it might just be Ara and Froom, the two of them, doing the dog bit, still trying to frighten him. If he was correct in that suspicion, it meant that they were out there in blackest night, in subzero temperature, a helluva way from home. So he didn’t think about it anymore.

  His fire was good, oak and pine and a variety of twigs for kindling. And the house was talking, its usual soft babble whenever the heat came out to expand its beams and floorboards and lay a coat of mist on all its windowpanes. And he felt the urge to set down some thoughts of his own, for he was feeling better about things and reasoned that it was time to add his own observations to those of his predecessors—about the house and the “fun” he was having in it. Ha-ha.

  He searched for a pencil and, after some ten minutes of scrounging, realized that the house did not harbor any. It was perhaps the only item that it did not stock. No matter, for he found the nub of one in the bottom of his duffle bag, though he could find no paper there. Nor could he find paper anywhere in the house, unless he cared to write his observations on the back of a cracker box or on the label of a can of beets.

  He found that odd and somewhat premeditated, as if someone or something was against his setting down any of his own impressions of the house. The more he thought about it, the less he cared for it. It was arbitrary. Too many things in and about the house were arbitrary—and seldom in his favor.

  In any case, there was nothing for him to write on, unless there were some pages left empty in Maynard’s notebook. He went to the table and to the book, which lay passively between the two kerosene lamps, both burning brightly, dutifully pumping much light into the house. He found no empty pages, not a one.

  Jack Meeker had left pencil and paper in the postbox for him to use in their little correspondence. Well, he’d pick them up in the morning and that would be that. He’d begin his own notes, his own composition, first thing in the morning.

  Still, he had his pencil nub in his hand and he wanted to write that night, and he was growing as stubborn in that desire as the house seemed determined that he not write. Again he thumbed through Maynard’s book, and again he could find no page upon which he could scrawl as much as his name, unless he cared to write on the inside back cover, which, under the circumstances, he did.

  As with many such looseleaf notebooks, the inside covers were of a kind of fabric, in this case light blue in color, a surface that could take a pencil imprint and still be reasonably legible though somewhat mottled. The inside front cover Maynard had already written on, utilizing that surface for his index. But the inside back cover was clean, and though it offered an area that was only eight and a half by eleven inches, to Austin it suddenly loomed as spacious as an empty billboard.

  And so he started to write, perhaps a bit too forcefully, for his pencil point snapped immediately. Using a knife, he inflicted a new point upon the pencil, but it wasn’t easy, either the knife being too dull or the pencil too hard. Still, he had his new point and once again he addressed the inside back cover. And once again the point broke.

  The pencil did not have all that much length to it that he could continue to so abuse it. He would have to be more careful in fashioning the next point, and he was. It was more blunt than its ancestors and did not break upon making contact with the book. It merely grew hot to the touch, so hot that he could not hold it.

  Annoyed more than alarmed, he picked up the thickest, most heavil
y insulated glove he could find, slipped his hand into it and went again for the pencil. Because the pencil was small and the glove bulky, he could not readily pick it up. And all the while he fussed with it, he could hear it hissing, burning easily into the leather of his glove so that, when he finally had it ready to write, the damned thing had burned right through, searing his thumb and forefinger, and he had to drop it.

  “Fuck you, house!” He roared, smacking the pencil nub and sending it cartwheeling across the room. “What the hell is this! What the hell is going on here!”

  It took awhile, but finally he rediscovered the pencil. It was cold. But when he put it to the book to write again, it had no point.

  In frustration, he flung it across the room again, he didn’t care where, and he stormed about the house, his words vibrating pots and pans and causing all underfloor life to scurry for cover. “Whoever the hell you are in here, I don’t scare, okay! You don’t want me to write—fine! You don’t want my fires to burn—fine! You want to send bears after me, and snow witches and bullshit—fine! But you better get used to me, because I ain’t leavin’! You don’t like it, you leave! Pack up your spooks and piss off!”

  He stood in the middle of the floor, allowing silence and sanity reentrance into the room. He was half surprised that he hadn’t been struck dead as a result of his challenging words. But still he seethed. He had rights, damn it. He was a person, an entity. He was legal on the premises. First thing in the morning he would go out to his postbox, pick up the pencil and paper there, and write anything he goddamned pleased, and to his heart’s content. And he would mail it to the D.A. in Millinocket, with instructions that it be opened and read upon his death. That would be first thing in the morning. He still had to contend with the night.

  He read awhile, something other than Maynard Whittier because that writer was fast becoming a pain in the ass—and something other than Henry David Thoreau because, entertainingly informative as it was, it was also rooting him too firmly in the very ambience he was trying to escape. What he wanted of a book was an opportunity to check his brains, to fly, to cut out, at least for a few hours. Somerset Maugham’s short stories filled the bill. They were lousy with jolly old England, but he preferred that to jolly New England any old day, old top, what ho.