Maynard’s House

by Herman Raucher

  “What’s goin’ to kill me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A bullet? A grenade? How about the food?”

  “Don’t know. Could be anythin’. Now, calm down, Austin. I know ya upset, but don’t go loony on me.”

  “How ’bout the weather?”

  “Weather could do it.”

  “How about a hat?”

  “A hat?”

  “Yeah. A hat.”

  “Austin, I want ya to hold yourself together till we can get a doctor to look ya over.”

  “How about a hat comin’ at me and killin’ me?”

  “Like in James Bond? That Chinese fella who used to flip his hat? That kind of hat?”

  “I don’t know. A hat.”

  “What kind of hat?”

  “I don’t know. Pointed.”

  “Pointed? Like those old German hats?”

  “I don’t know. No. Older.”

  “Like a Roman hat? One of those helmets?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, if ya don’t know…”

  “A dunce hat. How’s that?”

  “A dunce hat?”

  “Right.”

  “Ya think a dunce hat can kill ya?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’m askin’ you.”

  “Well, I suppose if it came right at ya, it could. I mean, it’s got a point, don’t it?”

  “Yes. It’s definitely got a point. A very sharp point. As I recall, a very sharp point, indeed.”

  “Then it could kill ya.”

  “It got away.”

  “Good. Ya better off without it. Come on, Austin, keep movin’.”

  “It blew away.”

  “Austin, when we get back to whatever town we’re nearest, I’m goin’ to buy ya a beer and we’re goin’ to get ya head on straight again.”

  “It blew all over the place. Across hills. Over roofs. Over snow. You should’ve seen it.”

  “Let’s keep movin’, Austin. One foot, t’other foot—”

  “It was very angry with me. Madder’n hell. Real pissed off. Chased me half a mile, snappin’ at me all the way.”

  “I know ya liked those two boys, Austin. I did, too. But ya can’t let it get to ya.”

  “It tried to break my windows. It tried to come under my door, down my chimney.”

  “Why would it want to do that?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’d like to find out.”

  “Yeah, well, I should think so.”

  “Why’d they die?”

  “Obermeyer and Schaefer?”

  “No.”

  “Obermeyer and Schaefer died because a Charlie shell came over that ridge and—”

  “No. Wrong. You got it wrong, Maynard.”

  “Hang on to me, okay? I got ya rifle. You just hang on to me.”

  “One by fire and one by bear. Helluva way to go, don’t you think?”

  “Gotta be a medic up here somewhere.”

  “I got hit a hundred times, Maynard.”

  “Come on. One foot, t’other foot. Ya doin’ fine.”

  “A hundred times. Snowballs. Snowballs and hats. Fire and bears. I tell you, Maynard, you don’t give me some answers real soon, I’m leavin’. AWOL. Over the fuckin’ hill and outa sight.”

  “Sure, Austin. I understand.”

  “I mean, old buddy, I’m leavin’ tomorrow. Crack of dawn. I’m goin’ to pack up my duffle and make tracks. I mean, fuck this, Maynard—who needs it? Hangin’ around, waitin’ to get killed, that’s not smart.”

  “Don’t seem much we can do about it.”

  “Not much you can do, because you’re dead.”

  “Me?”

  “Me, I’m still alive. And I plan on stayin’ that way.”

  “When’d ya find out I was dead, Austin?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “A-yuh. I would.”

  “Hah!”

  “Who told ya?”

  “A little bird told me.”

  “Nice of ’im.”

  “Actually was a big bird. An owl.”

  “Said I was dead?”

  “Says it every night. Tells everyone. Has a big mouth. First he asks, ‘Who?’ And then he says, ‘Maynard.’”

  “Well, I’ll have to have a little talk with ’im. Keep walkin’, Austin. Ya doin’ fine.”

  “It was a pointed hat, Maynard—but it wasn’t a dunce’s hat.”

  “No?”

  “It was a witch’s hat.”

  “A witch’s hat, ya say?”

  “Yeah. Wicked witch of the fuckin’ north. Has a big bear for a familiar.”

  “Ya don’t say.”

  “I do say. I also say it’s time for me to get outa here.”

  “Hey—let me help ya.”

  “You helped me enough, Maynard.”

  “Austin?”

  Watching the snow fall and pile in the encompassing dimness, his sanity pressured by things monstrously beyond his ken, his equilibrium provoked by a conversation with Maynard that could not possibly have taken place except as a distortion, he knew that staying just one more night in that house would cause him to cross over completely—to a never-never land where nothing had a shadow, where memories were marbles and thoughts chewing gum, and people but tenpins in the gutter of the gods. He had to get out, make tracks, leave dust. Snow or no snow, wolves, bears or ducks, midnight or Mardi Gras, he had to go. He had come by lantern, he would leave by lantern, for, as the man had written on the fine pine plank, “This house is not fit.”

  He found his duffle bag and began to stuff things into it. All things, anything. Socks, beer, towels, ammo, crackers, underwear, salt. Whatever his fingers found, whichever they closed about, he took. He was like an amateur shoplifter, sweeping over every shelf he passed, shoveling into his duffle guns, knives, candles, coffee, soap, cigarettes and an ashtray.

  He filled his biggest kerosene lamp and slung it over his shoulder. Over his other shoulder the .30-.06. In his jacket pocket the .44. The duffle bag, full to bursting, was so poorly packed that sharp things protruded from within, like poles under a collapsed tent, like porcupine quills inside a cocoon.

  He dragged it all to the door, and, opening the door, he saw that it was darkest night and most foreboding; not a time for casual trekking, more a time for staying home and hiding beneath the bed. But he was committed to leaving, driven to it well past the point of reconsidering. He would go down the trench to his woodshed, to where his sled sat waiting. He would load his duffle upon the sled and move out—Jack London on the half shell, Admiral Peary on the floe. And he would not stop at Belden, or at Millinocket. He would go on to where there were no more tracks. And from there to where there were no more roads. And he would find himself a river. And he would make himself a raft. And he and Huck Finn would take themselves a trip, down the Mississippi to Mexico, Peru and Timbuktu, and—

  Two yards off the porch he stopped, the night coming up to bless him, splendid and tranquil and inky, more stars in its tapestry than ever it had hung before, all of it occurring so suddenly that it was as though a page had been turned and the earth flipped onto its other side.

  And he thought that it had to be on such a night that Christ was born, all life holding its breath, a beauty so rare and infinite upon them as to stop all men and all thinking, and make of time a fool, of death a caprice, and of life a new beginning.

  She was bewilderingly lovely, immeasurably so, the light around her playing almost as music. Hatless, her hair flew loosely. Smiling, she did seem to glide across the snow, the cool gray eyes of her triumphing over the night’s black velvet. Still the young girl, in the same thick jacket and the same sweet mittens, she was all the same something else, something astonishing and unexpected, paling the delicate snowfall, stifling the Jack Frost wind.

  Her black hair, lost as it was against the night’s dark canvas, framed her face like an ivory cameo, and she was with him. Ara. Slung ahead in time eno
ugh years to match his, arriving as intensely beautiful as ever God dared make a woman, taking his hand at a time when he was certain that he had used up all his luck.

  She kissed him, finely, a child’s kiss, lighting on his cheek, then sliding into the kiss of a woman—on the lips, the ear, the neck. A woman’s eyes on his eyes and the marrow of him caldroned. A woman’s arms around him and the soul of him shook free. A woman’s touch, a woman’s breath, a woman’s voice saying his name—and the kiss that should not happen happened, and the bargain thus was sealed.

  An effusion of stars accompanied them, writing their names on the frosted windows and in the stove fire’s slow dancing. And nowhere did so much as a night bird comment, not an owl and not one loon. Though somewhere, in the very fabric of the house—in the beams perhaps, or possibly the cellar—a laugh occurred, tremolant and fleeting, passing over them as if on the motion of a wand, before disappearing as a vapor on the wind. And, as it always is with all doomed lovers, Austin never heard.

  20

  At a place in the onyx night where the hour of the wolf takes hold and all time stops though man never knows it, Austin awoke. She was gone, as he knew she would be. Even as he felt himself dropping into sleep, he knew she’d be gone when he awoke, for that would be in keeping with the way she had arrived, unexpected entrances begetting unanticipated exits.

  He lay in the dark and spun it all back, how avidly the girl had made love. How knowledgeable and sweetly aggressive she had been. How demonic even, lost in her own pleasure while sponsoring such exaltation in him as few men would ever dream of.

  It had occurred to him, even in the soft frenzy of their lovemaking, that the girl could not have been the sixteen years of age she had earlier claimed to be—not if she were to be judged by the way in which she was directing the trysting. She would have to have been older. How much older, to have behaved in so experienced and expert a manner? Five years at the least. Ten to be sure. A hundred would have been believable, though the young body, feline and willing, belied such an estimate.

  The compelling thing, though, now that she was gone, was his certainty that she was not a child—not that he would have been all that troubled at having offended the law, for better men than he had locked horns with younger girls than she and lived to boast of it outside prison walls and inside confessional booths.

  So it was not chronology and it was not the law that was troubling him. It wasn’t even his own pristine upbringing, which, when examined alongside that of other men he had known, was considerable indeed. It was Ara herself and that fluctuating child-woman aspect of her, enabling her to appear as a temptress, yet preventing her from harboring or verbalizing a single licentious thought. And though she might well have gone to his bed willingly had he asked her directly, the having of her would have to have come under the broad heading of rape.

  The way it turned out, however, rape was never an issue—unless it was his by her, for that was how magnificently in charge she had been and how happily helpless he had been, worshiping at her loins.

  It crossed his mind that she might not have been there at all, that he had imagined her there or dreamed her there, for, Lord knows, the precision of his thinking those past few days had hardly been as a compass pointing unwaveringly north. It had been more like a weathervane in a tricking wind, signaling a dozen directions at once, as unerring in its pursuit of truth as a mindless mouse in an exitless maze.

  The house had been deceiving him of late, lying low in the daytime and pouncing on him at night. Why could not the presence of Ara, at his side and in his bed—why could that not have been another errant fantasy cooked up by the house to further sport with him for whatever purpose it had in doing so all along?

  He would have to check that kind of paranoia, of course, because it was precisely that kind of thinking that had set him to running from the house in the first place. And he would still be running had Ara not appeared in the night to lie with him and prevent his leaving.

  Perhaps the quickest, easiest way for him to determine whether or not she had been with him was to look outside the house for her bootprints. If she had been with him, her bootprints would be there, in the snow, clear evidence of a human presence. On the other hand, if she had been conjured by him, or by the house, there would be no prints at all—for the girl, as light and lovely as she had been in her arriving, could hardly have flown there, or ridden the wind, or reindeered the roof there like Santa.

  He got up from his bed and went to his door, and, opening it, he could see that it was still snowing, so heavily and incessantly that any tracks that she might have made had to lie buried well beneath the new fall.

  So there was no answer to the riddle of her—not that he had expected one, for such an easy and irrefutable solution would have been inconsistent with the way things had unfolded thus far. Nor was there anything within the house that could speak of her having been there—not an item of clothing casually forgotten, or a word of hers clearly remembered, or a fragrance of her adrift in the room, conquering and occupying him with its dizzying dogma.

  As to their names which he had clearly seen in the windowpane’s frost, the spreading heat of the house had simply erased them, setting them to running down the glass as droplets before causing them to gather on the sill as a pool.

  He dressed and ate, early as it was, for sleep was not of a mind to return, nor would he have trusted it if it had, for it had already fooled him enough times to no longer qualify as friendly—the best status it could aspire to under the circumstances being “nonbelligerent.”

  But if sleep was risky, catnaps were more so, for they were more vivid, with sharper images and colors less pastel, and when he awoke from them it was always with a start, his eyes cracking wide and his hands shooting out—sight and balance being continually compromised. At to the cast and conclusions of his catnaps, they were consistently terrifying: pain, fear and death the principal players; cold sweat and stifled screams the curtain-call survivors.

  And so, with sleep and all its variations offering him small sanctuary, he turned to working by day and reading by night—light work and lighter reading, for he was conserving his strength, though he didn’t know why, and keeping his mind clear for he didn’t know what. He chopped wood and shoveled trenches and fished and hunted, the latter two with nonresults. And he read S. J. Perelman and H. Allen Smith, and perused the cartoons of Mauldin and the collected humors of Thurber. And all the while he did that, there was no sign of Ara, though he knew that she would return, because she simply had to—the only question being when. And for as long as it would take for that question to be answered, that’s how long he was prepared to remain with the house.

  He searched every horizon for her, and at night he would go repeatedly to his door, to look out over the blue snow for her, so hopeful of her returning that he truly believed that he could coax her into doing so. And more than once did he see her there, teetering on the mists—but as often as he saw her, that was as often as she failed to sustain.

  As to his leaving—that became increasingly more impossible with each wending day. He could not leave, not without seeing her, talking with her, if only to establish whether or not she had lain with him in reality or only in his mind’s creation. There was no avenue through which he could reach her. He didn’t know her name or where she lived—though it did occur to him that, with Jack Meeker dead, a postman’s job was open. He could apply for that job and take on its duties, traveling the countryside in a town-provided jeep, learning the names and houses of the area’s citizens. Surely Ara’s father received mail. Perhaps Ara herself received mail—The Minnawickie Gazette or The Witch’s Weekly or Seventeen. By a process of elimination, sooner or later, he would uncover her, in some house, some school, though it would very likely take a year, and more likely two.

  He had no idea as to what the day was, for he had lost all count. Perhaps it was a weekend and Ara was made to stay at home, or go to church, or sew some crewel, or make apple butt
er. Or perhaps it was a school day and she had exams and quizzes and homework and gym, things enough to keep her busy, preventing her from coming by. Or perhaps, just perhaps, he was plainly going nuts, no longer able to distinguish logic from lolligog and fantasy from flapdoodle. Better men than he had courted madness—artists, scholars, scientists, lechers—why not a rudderless veteran?

  Each day shuffled by like its predecessor, gnawingly lonely, a circumstance that would have delighted Thoreau, though it merely caused Austin to feel sick at heart. The sun would rise, shine, wane and set—and another day would be gone, another night passing without her, another piece of his life lost to pointless pathos.

  Four days passed in this manner, dragging off into history with nothing remarkable to take note of. Four days and four nights filled with the absence of her. Four suns going peach, to orange, to flame, to violet—and no Ara.

  But on the fourth day, with evening telescoping into night, the sun dropping away like a red disk, Austin returned to his house, his sled loaded with pinecones to sweeten his fire, and he found there, sitting and creaking on the Boston rocker, the fire playing on his pixyish smile to such a degree that it almost endowed it with sound—Maynard, good-naturedly cross.

  “Ya missed Christmas, Austin. And ya missed New Year’s and almost half of January. What the hell ya been doin’?”

  Maynard was not wearing army issue, which was the only clothing Austin had ever seen him in. Rather, he was wearing something from his own wardrobe, winter clothes and warm, a shirt and sweater that Austin himself had worn on occasion. And he was sitting there and rocking, while cleaning the .30-.06, pushing the brushrod up and back in the rifle’s barrel.

  “Ya got to do a better job on ya rifles, Austin. Wintah congeals the oil if ya don’t get it all out. Good thing there’s no inspection up here. Better thing ya don’t fire this till ya sure it’s clean. Bullet’d be so grimy, might just come back at ya and complain. Well, come in, Austin. Don’t just stand there. And shut the door ’fore ya demoralize the fire.”

  Austin came in, shut the door, and found a place to sit. He also found a way to speak, for nothing that the house had tossed up at him of late could truly startle him. He would go along with it and contain his surprise. He would act as though it were a plain everyday thing that a dead man could show up in his house and make like nothing was unusual. “How long’ve you been here, Maynard?”