Harrow

by Joy Williams

  “He wanted to put it back but I’m not sure if he did, they didn’t want to be observed, I think.”

  “That woman has quite the dilemma. Actually if you attended little Jeffrey’s birthday party it would be much appreciated. I know Barbara is less than pleasant but she’s got a lot on her mind. The boy’s father murdered his grandfather recently and since the child is not aware of this, she feels she’s raising him under a cloud. She wants him to be a lawyer. Both his father and grandfather were lawyers and you may well ask what good it availed them but she’s insistent. She’s trying to keep him focused on the future. Torts, she told me, is his destiny.”

  “Torts,” Khristen repeated. She thought it meant twists. To some degree turns. Twists and turns foreseen as design. It was nice that the child’s mother was admitting for him such freedom; she hadn’t seemed to be the type.

  “You just hang on until tomorrow. You’re welcome to stay for a night or two though you’re not at all qualified. Frankly those of your age are anathema to our whole concept. We don’t want to be responsible for you. We do pity you, however. Anyway, I’ll find something for you here. We all stay in that building. The motel’s just for show.”

  “That building doesn’t look safe,” Khristen ventured.

  “Safe! Well, we don’t go out on the balconies much.”

  Indeed the balconies did not look as if they would suffer to be enjoyed.

  “I’ll make you head of housekeeping, perhaps,” Lola said. “This would not involve any mundane cleaning of rooms of course. You seem a lovely girl. Most people carry their ultimate end around with them like a stepchild they’re reluctant to acknowledge, but you don’t.”

  “My mother said…”

  Lola raised one pale hand dismissively. “I harbor no prejudice against the woman but she obviously wasn’t the one for you.”

  “We only get one mother.”

  “All the more reason, even if it were true. Do you think there’s a certain time for everything and a certain season and all will be well and all will be well and all will be well?”

  “Not really.”

  “Let me tell you a little story. When this place was going good, wildlife biologists would rent blocks of rooms for weeks at a time and do research on the herons and egrets which were plentiful then. They’d go out to the bird colonies on the little islands in airboats, knock as many birds as they could off their nests with tranquilizing darts, fit them with solar-powered radio transmitters attached to little backpack harnesses and release them. Then they’d track them by airplane and learn what they could learn. One evening they came back with this little tricolored heron that they thought they had fatally overdosed, not their intention of course. They kept it in a box and poked and prodded it through the night hoping for a sign of life and there was none. But some time just before daybreak, one of the researchers heard a weak scratching emanating from the box and when she turned on the light, much to her amazement, there was the heron looking at her. They called the heron 144 which was the frequency of the radio signal they fitted her with and released her in the vicinity of her nest which, unattended, had unsurprisingly collapsed. They lost contact with 144 almost immediately. She vanished from the search area. They never found her.”

  After a moment, Khristen said, “It doesn’t sound as if it were ever nice around here.”

  “Those biologists paid in cash and always messed up the plumbing,” Lola mused. “And they were so smug about those damn harnesses. They claimed they were designed to allow complete freedom of flight as well as all other activities.”

  “I don’t believe that, do you?” Khristen said.

  Dirty-looking clouds passed over them in a lofty rack. “They do that every afternoon around this time,” Lola said. “Go to squat above the lake.”

  “That is such a sad story,” Khristen said.

  Lola looked surprised. “That little tricolored heron thwarted those people. I always found it quite inspiring.”

  A truck hauling a bass boat roared noisily up to them, filming Khristen’s bare legs with dust. The driver, with little ceremony, inquired as to how the hell he could access the frigging lake, he’d been driving for hours and seen no break in the fucking dike.

  “You can access it from here,” Lola said, “but you’ve got to pay for a room. I don’t care if you use it or not, spend the night or not, but you’ve got to pay for it.”

  “I’m not paying for shit!” the man hollered. He cursed the establishment and sped away.

  “I’m going to rest,” Lola said wearily. “I’m tuckered. I’ve got the cancer down to my fingertips, down to my very bunions—no need to commiserate. Whyn’t you take Room Five, that’s on the other side of the breezeway from Honey, Heart of Gold. You’ll meet her. Nothing to be afraid of there.”

  “It’s too late to be afraid, I think,” Khristen said.

  “Why that’s so true,” Lola exclaimed. “You’re cheering me up and here I thought I was cheering you up!”

  “You did?”

  “It’s why I told you the story of 144.”

  Khristen was silent. The story of the little tricolored heron did not seem to her a happy one.

  * * *

  —

  Lola had found much to admire in the girl. The time and place was not of her making but whose time and place ever is? She’d be dealing with the rigors of the beyond soon enough.

  She would discuss the Institute with her shortly. The Institute was not a suicide academy or a terrorist hospice. Or not exactly. Possibly the authorities would consider it so if they knew of its existence but they did not know of its existence. Its purpose was on another plane of comprehension entirely. To the extent that they were even aware of Lola, they considered her a harmless struggling businesswoman trying to make the best of a squat she’d taken over with an old friend of equal decrepitude, keeping up the appearances of a simple-witted motel of yesteryear with plastic flowers in the window boxes, fishing poles for rent, and an absence of social networking or newsgathering devices for the few deluded travelers who thought they could get away for a few days from the reality of a permanently ongoing situation. Guests of the motel never advanced to the hotel. They weren’t even aware of it, so determined were they to hold on to the old illusions. They were oblivious to the designs of the unseen oldsters and their extreme end-of-life plans. Had they been informed of such intentions they would have found them apocalyptical, though for all intents and purposes the apocalypse had pretty much occurred. The incomprehensible beauty of nature was no more, but most had accepted the destitution done in their name. It was over and now it could begin, was the way those on the outside justified their refreshed complacency. Lola’s true tenantry were dedicated to disrupting that complacency.

  Certainly no one expected the old to be difficult. The old were tolerable if they were reasonable and responsible enough to make way for the next ones, the new ones, the fresh ones, at their earliest opportunity. “Retirement communities” and “assisted living facilities” had long been in the process of being phased out as they no longer produced adequate profit to shareholders. The elderly were encouraged to depart life and they obliged with little protest and surprisingly few regrets. It had not been foreseen that some would turn on the very institutions that had made them the last beneficiaries of what was enshrined as progress. These oldsters, if not exactly a force majeure, were a baffling and bitter anomaly, characterized and dismissed as senile mavericks, lone termites or perfect examples of why the aged mind was not in the interests of society.

  They did not consider themselves “terrorists,” reserving that word for the bankers and builders, the industrial engineers, purveyors of war and the market, it goes without saying, the exterminators and excavators, the breeders and consumers of every stripe, those locusts of clattering, clacking hunger.

  When Lola’s graduates reengaged with
the world it was to make amends and instigate corrections, and not with fatuous good works either. They were given a directive, selected at random from a basket of folded papers. Some of the papers were worn and torn with handling and seemed destined never to be chosen.

  There had been some successes, if tentative, when abruptly Lola found herself without her friend and soul traveler, Gordon. They had been reading Conrad together, Joseph Conrad, a favorite of theirs…the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable…and they were just about to discuss this rather stygian statement when a largish lapse occurred. Gordon was no longer beside her though the book remained in her lap, the pages still turned to the old sailor’s words. Since then, moments, months, however you cared to call them, had passed and Gordon had yet to appear. Even the collected works of Conrad went missing, not that she particularly wanted to consult them again. And she wouldn’t be lying either if she said she harbored increasing reservations and misgivings about the current crop in residence. Khristen had arrived at a low point in the caliber of the place, certainly. Ideally, elderly people of purpose arrived, trained, meditated and were inspired, then went off to do their holy havoc but a logjam had gradually been building. The integrity of the Institute was at risk. Fewer people were getting through. Even the motel was seeing fewer visitors. In the past, guests would arrive determined to seize the simple pleasures of their yesterdays, pleasures so barely recalled that their reenactment could only be unsatisfactory. Burdened with an unhappiness greater even than they’d arrived with, they returned to a world they could only address with a refashioned and ruthless optimism. The birthday child and his mother were shaping up to be an exception to this, but to Lola’s relief the two seemed no more awake to the residents and purposes of the Institute than any of the other occasional guests.

  The clouds had retreated with the sinking sun, and Big Girl resumed her avernal black. The long twilight commenced. Lola ate a few jelly beans and swallowed a Vicodin. She felt guilty about the Vicodin. She was just like anybody else, clinging on, thinking she’d have a thought she hadn’t thought yet that would make all the difference. Twice she had taken mescaline. The first time she’d had an impression of absolute white, white beyond all whiteness. The second time there was blackness, a vivid all-encompassing black. She doubted a third time would have anything more to tell her.

  She was losing nerve-cell population daily. Everyone was. The last physician she had gone to said it wasn’t an acute problem. We have more nerve cells than we ever employ. Massive loss is not unacceptable, he assured her. He compared it to the amount of ink that can fade from a written message without changing what it says. She had found this charming. But there comes a moment when the message changes or becomes unintelligible or both, doesn’t it, doctor? she had said. And he had smiled and said, Of course.

  She considered once more the gaping dark that was Big Girl. Someone was down in her depths, this she’d once believed. A woman, of course, with long tangled hair. And all the wickedness of humankind against nature fell down through the waters and collected in her dark locks. Someone—shaman, vizier, gangrel—had to go down there and comb out her hair and confess and atone and promise, promise and atone and confess. This person would have to possess considerable authority and strength, certainly, to represent a desperate and repenting and lamenting people.

  The old dear stories of possibility. No one wanted them anymore, but nothing had replaced them.

  * * *

  —

  Jeffrey’s birthday party was to take place at a bowling alley. When Khristen expressed surprise that amusements such as bowling alleys still existed, Lola said it was akin to the survival of lightbulbs lying intact on a rocky shore. Plus there was a little buffer zone around them here at the Institute where matters appeared to transpire in their customary nasty way, via establishments of entertainment mostly.

  Thus Paradise Lanes flourished with its proud leagues, its rules and captains and hierarchical clubs. It was even expanding under new ownership to host children’s birthday parties, which was highly controversial.

  “I advised Barbara against going there but she said she was told that they provide balloons, pizza slices and cold drinks for the children as well as a mystery gift for the birthday child,” Lola said. “All she has to pay for is the cake, the lanes and the adults’ incidentals. It’s the bowling leagues that’s my concern, I know those people. That’s a sacred place to them and Tuesday night their sacred hour. The new owner has no idea how seriously they take their traditions. They could make us feel most unwelcome. I foresee possible unpleasantness on a considerable scale, particularly if in the middle of it Barbara tells the boy that his father murdered his grandfather, which I think is her intention. They were a close-knit family until they unraveled. It happened at luncheon when little Jeffrey was at the dentist having his teeth cleaned. The men were arguing some legal technicality and it got out of hand. Mother and child have been fugitives from that fraught occurrence ever since.”

  “Does anybody know how to bowl?” Khristen asked.

  Khristen sat in back with Jeffrey. He would be ten years old at seven o’clock that night. He held a boxed cake on his lap and stared through the cracked windshield of Lola’s old car while maintaining a soft and running commentary with himself. “…now…similarly…unlike…objection…the point…the point is well taken up to a point…may we justifiably harm one innocent in order to save the many?…objection…by the mutual agreement of parties concerned, all parties concerned…objection…”

  “What does it feel like to be almost ten, Jeffrey?” Lola asked.

  “What?” Jeffrey said.

  “You’re such a skinny little fellow. You must eat like a gerbil.”

  “I don’t know what a gerbil eats.”

  “Oh, let’s see, a gerbil eats ground nuts, beans, flaxseed oil maybe. Tea.”

  “If that’s what my mother fed me she could be charged with assault, reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child,” Jeffrey said.

  “You want to come up front and shift when I make my turn up here?” Lola inquired. “You push down, then over and down as I depress the clutch. You want to shift?”

  “No, I don’t,” Jeffrey said. “Excuse me.” He resumed his discouraging singsong. “…if the statute is content based, strict scrutiny applies…arbitrary and capricious…it is a well-established principle of statutory interpretation that the law favors rational and sensible construction…”

  They pulled into the parking lot of Paradise Lanes and parked between a panel truck that had Good News Exterminating painted on the door and a sedan displaying a Former Fetus Driving sticker on the bumper.

  “Frank Lloyd Wright designed this bowling alley,” Lola informed them.

  “Surely not!” Barbara protested. It was the first time she had spoken all evening.

  “The blueprints suffered considerable compromises, though,” Lola said. “The bowlers were locked in long and bitter conflict among themselves. Some of them had strokes.”

  “I’m sure that Frank Lloyd Wright would not for one moment have expended his talents on designing a bowling alley.”

  “In the beginning it was supposed to be on stilts,” Lola said.

  “Get out of the car, Jeffrey,” Barbara said, breaking off this hopeless discussion. “Let’s get this birthday over with. Don’t look at that cake yet!”

  He was dressed in a meticulous fashion: tasseled loafers, khaki pants, a white shirt and a seersucker jacket.

  “I hope she doesn’t let that cake do the talking for her,” Lola said quietly to Khristen. “Like she’d re-create the murder scene in frosting and let him deduce the worst.”

  They followed mother and child into the building. The light inside was golden and the sound of falling pins relentless. The bowlers, men and women both, were of that pastime’s typical
bent—hefty, of a tribal disposition and with themselves well pleased. After they released the ball they held the afterward of their poses for a vanity of time.

  “I want tickets for four,” demanded Barbara of the concessionaire, “a gutter block, a pitcher of martinis, and a couple of chocolate milks. Forget the pizza and balloons.”

  “Is this the extent of the party?”

  “That’s right,” Barbara said.

  They were directed to the last lane, near the toilets, and seated at a small table there.

  “Bowling’s sort of like archery,” Lola said to Jeffrey. “You want to hit the mark.”

  “Archery!” Barbara cried. “It couldn’t be less like archery!”

  “Shelley’s Case,” Jeffrey said worriedly. “I don’t understand the definition of the rule in Shelley’s Case. One of the first and most relevant cases in common law.”

  His mother looked at him disapprovingly. “Nobody has the capacity to understand the rule in Shelley’s Case.”

  “That’s right,” the child said after a moment, clearly relieved. “Precedent, principle and policy. Everything depends upon the choice made from a large number of possible broader propositions.”

  “Before he discovered the verbal wiles of the law he had to use an inhaler,” Barbara said to Lola.

  “Do you know what civil death is, Jeffrey?” Lola asked.

  “The deprivation of civil rights as a result of being declared an outlaw,” little Jeffrey said happily.

  “The kid cannot be stumped. Nothing stumps him,” Barbara said.

  The beverages arrived as well as the mystery gift, which proved to be a paper bag containing a buzzer ring, a plastic fly in a plastic ice cube and a splash of authentic-looking vomit, also plastic.

  “Well would you look at that, Jeffrey,” Lola said. “Some care went into this selection for a little boy.”

  “I don’t want to bowl, Mother,” Jeffrey said.