by Matt Cohen
This was as far as he had planned: to get the car, drive it to the old farm, park where he couldn’t be seen.
But now he was at the house itself, at the doorway he had passed through so many tens of thousands of times. Despite everything they’d done to the outside of this tastefully renovated waterfront jewel, he could feel his mouth forming into a stupid grin, his eyes closing as though inside this bizarrely deformed memory-house his youth was waiting to be stepped into again like an old coat miraculously converted into a handsome new garment. He was sweating and clinging to the brass handle of the new door with its matched metal-vinyl self-hung casing. He was wishing he was back in bed at the R&R listening to the news and the birds squabbling in the feeders. If only Elizabeth would suddenly appear.
The thought of Elizabeth steadied him. He straightened up, looked at the white panelled door with its half-ring of half-moon peek-a-boo windows. Like the swings, the siding, the newly shingled roof, the door made him wonder about the people who’d lived there. Of course they had ripped out the old hand pump in front of the house—a man couldn’t even get a drink of water without going inside. He turned away from the house and went to the chicken coop. The electric meter was still there. He threw the master switch. The previous owners had used the coop for storing wood and at one end of the small woodpile they’d left a splitting axe. It had a long hickory handle, the varnish still unworn, and a good solid weight that swung like a comforting pendulum as he limped back across the grass towards the new door.
His shoes were soaked through with dew and he had a sudden memory of himself as a boy, a day like this, barefoot in this very grass, grass so wet he could feel the juice squirting between his toes as he ran.
The rotting wooden steps had been replaced by poured concrete. McKelvey positioned himself carefully, stiffened his bad knee, swung back and then torqued his two hundred and forty plus pounds into low gear as he powered the butt end of the axe into the gleaming brass handle. The lock gave way but when the door swung open McKelvey saw not his nostalgic old kitchen but a great sweep of whiteness that looked like an oversized bathroom in search of a piss-pot. White tiles, white counters and stove, white-enamelled sink, white walls and ceiling, even a white ice-making refrigerator.
McKelvey went to the sink and pulled hard on the new tap. It shot out a thick stream of water that ricocheted off the bottom of the sink and into his face. The telephone rang. A loud old-fashioned bell that started his heart racing and for a moment he was sure that if he picked it up he would hear Elizabeth. For the first time in a decade, he could remember her voice: dry, affectionate, yet with a built-in twist that announced—or was it insisted?—that between her and every other living being was a space that could never be crossed. Then he wondered if the telephone meant someone was calling who had reason to expect an answer. Frightened, he grabbed the axe and bolted outside.
By the time he was back in the comforting whipped-cream leather of the driver’s seat, had the big motor purring and awaiting his orders, his stomach was going again. But instead of returning to the road, he drove into the heart of his old farm, going between the barns to pick up an old tractor trail that wound between the fences of two hayfields, through the vintage maple bush, down into the swamp between the maples and the lake. The trail was long unused, the hay uncut, and as he eased the car along the overgrown track between the fields, there were moments when the clover and alfalfa obscured his view before swishing beneath the bumper. In the deep shade of the maple bush the grass was shorter but two or three times he had to stop to remove a fallen limb. Each time he stepped out of the car he left the motor running, afraid that any unguarded moment of silence might drown him. Safe swimming. At the edge of the swamp he stopped and threw in the axe. Here the old trail turned soft and boggy. When the wheels started to spin he slowed to a crawl and then, just to see what would happen, he tried accelerating through it. The big tires whined briefly before the car began to settle. He opened the door. The wheels were half sunk into the mud.
McKelvey grabbed the roof and hauled himself to his feet. His knee locked and he had to massage it again before he could limp around the car and assess the situation. Thirty years ago he’d dumped a few loads of sand to keep this stretch of swampy track out of the water. At the time he’d thought about solving the problem for eternity by mixing in some gravel and ditching the sides so the water could escape. But that would have been an extra week’s work. Better just to use the road in late November, after the fall rains, when the frost was in the ground and a thin crust of snow lay on top. He would load up his chainsaw and drive back in the old truck with a couple of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. A few hours later he’d have enough wood to spend the rest of the day splitting and stacking.
Now the leaves were thick and green. And even though the sky was clear and the sun high, there was a ripe marshy smell.
Mud had spattered the car’s fenders and doors. McKelvey got onto a dry spot behind the trunk and opened it to search for a shovel. Not that he would have used it. “Nyet! Absolutely forbidden,” Dr. Knight had decreed. “No physical exertion. No exercise. Nothing a pregnant woman wouldn’t do.” This last had mystified McKelvey since Elizabeth, when pregnant, had done all sorts of things, many impossible for him even when his knee worked, his heart hadn’t needed a valve job, and that tractor tire around his gut had been just a few extra layers of muscle, beer and bumbleberry cake.
There was a loud crack. A porcupine that had hoped to scramble unseen up a young maple came crashing through the branches and landed in a juniper bush a few feet away. As it began to waddle off, McKelvey felt something release in his lungs, as if for the last eight years at the R&R, without his even knowing, his breath had been blocked. Now the swamp smell broke down into the odour of rank ferns, beaver shit, fast-growing marsh grass, spruce pitch, maple bark, decomposing bullrushes, frog breath, honeysuckle, a dozen, a hundred, a thousand different messages that crowded and fluttered through his brain like swarms of moths released from a long-closed trunk. He began to hear the peepers, the frogs, the crackling footsteps of the porcupine, the movement of bird wings through the air, the mud bubbling around the Pontiac he’d taken from Luke Richardson’s lot.
He reached into his fishing vest, broke off a hunk of cheese with his fingers, wrapped it in salami. He repeated this until the supplies he’d taken from the R&R were used up and the anxious edge in his stomach had settled into a dull digestive warmth. He realized the phone had spooked him out of inspecting the rest of the house. Maybe the bedroom he’d once shared with Elizabeth now had a four-poster with a canopy. The old parlour with wallpaper that had been peeling for sixty years might be a haven warmed by a fireplace with a marble hearth. Or have, built right into the wall, one of those wood-stoves with glass doors through which you could contemplate the fire and remind yourself of the days when you were a Neanderthal roasting up a nice chunk of hairy elephant.
McKelvey found a few dead branches and pushed them into the mud under the tires for traction. He climbed back into the car. His shoes—heavy and caked with the slick clay-rich mud—attached themselves to the floormats, which he considered might be useful under the wheels if the wood didn’t work. Brute force was for the young and the brainless, those whose bones were still green and pliable. Now was the age of wisdom and cunning. He switched on the motor. It gurgled enthusiastically. McKelvey pushed the accelerator to the floor.
The motor growled and roared. The wheels spun and whined. Shooting up from under the car came a powerful curtain of mud. The car sank even lower. Underneath all that mud were some rocks McKelvey remembered dumping into place on a rainy October afternoon the year his father died. McKelvey opened his door, now level with the mud, keeping the pedal to the floor.
From beneath the hood a thick black cloud of rubber-scented smoke began rising into the swamp’s green canopy of leaves. The oversized muscle-bound super-tread tires clawed down to those rocks from long ago. The car jerked upward, then fell back briefly befo
re blasting out of the mud as if kicked in the ass by a 450-horsepower hoof. Spinning and careening, it shot down the trail, mud spraying everywhere. McKelvey’s door slammed against a birch tree. When the car came to a forgotten hump, its exhaust system sheared off with a loud explosion.
McKelvey had been trying to lift his foot from the accelerator but the new-born howl of the unmuffled engine frightened him so much that his knee locked again, jamming the pedal to the floor. McKelvey could only hang on to the steering wheel while the car cleared itself a trail through the woods, picking up speed as it fought through the saplings and underbrush. When it reached the beach it shot forward with a roar, the speedometer needle swinging wildly until the car reached an unfamiliar cedar dock which moaned and splintered under the car’s weight as it became the runway for McKelvey’s bid for outer space.
He screamed. Unconsoled by the whipped-cream comfort of his bucket seat, he clutched the white leather steering wheel and listened to the sound of his own terrified bellow. Ahead of him were the blue sky and jagged pine horizon, beneath him a terrible series of thuds and clunks. With a splash and an ear-splitting sizzle, the white bomb hit the water. Even as it sank, it struggled to take off again, the tires churning up great sprays of water and sand. Then with a fizzle and a hiccup the engine conked out and the car came to rest—a thin film of water lapping over the hood. At some point the windshield wipers had activated themselves. They cleared away the mud and debris to offer McKelvey a view of the centre of Dead Swede Lake. A few hundred feet away a rowboat turned towards him. McKelvey waved at the familiar blocky figure, and went to work on his knee. When he got it loose he rolled down the window, then used his good leg to try to push open the door. He’d always imagined it would be impossible to open a door underwater. In movies people were always having to escape out their windows. But now, maybe because the water wasn’t very deep, the door began to move. Just as well because he didn’t need a ruler to figure there’d be no wriggling out through the narrow window.
By the time he’d got to shore, emptied his shoes and squeezed out his pantcuffs, the rowboat had drawn up beside the car.
“How’s the fishing?” McKelvey asked.
“Slow.” The occupant of the rowboat, Gerald Boyce, was short but very wide and though his hair was spun a thick and snowy white, his round baby face was smooth.
“Fucking car,” McKelvey said. He stepped closer to the rowboat and peered at Gerald as though he hadn’t recognized him before.
“You like a ride?”
“Wouldn’t mind.”
He picked up his shoes and socks and put them in his vest pockets. Then he walked his bare feet along the remains of the hot sun-warmed dock until he was positioned to step into the boat.
While Gerald was rowing towards the middle of the lake, McKelvey took a package of makings from the pocket of Gerald’s workshirt and rolled himself a cigarette. He still had his own lighter at least. Dr. Knight hadn’t said anything about pregnant women not being allowed to start fires.
By the time McKelvey got his smoke set and going, Gerald was near the centre of Dead Swede Lake. A stringer hung from one oarlock. McKelvey pulled it up. A few small bass wiggled enthusiastically, then started trying to swim as he lowered them into the water.
“We could go home and eat them,” Gerald said. “You think you can work a fillet knife without slitting yourself?”
McKelvey undid the top buttons of his shirt to let in the sun and air. He would go back to Gerald Boyce’s. They would fry the fish and sit on Gerald’s broken-down front porch and look out at the orchard of hybrid trees and freak apples that surrounded Gerald’s house. He would pick the bones from the charred fish flesh, smoke Gerald’s cigarettes, drink his boiled coffee and listen to stories about how Gerald’s dead brother Vernon, had tried to save the township from developers and cable television. Every now and then he or Gerald would go into that black hole of a kitchen, the way they used to, and kick the refrigerator to make sure the beer didn’t freeze.
The sky was a deep endless blue, the kind of blue McKelvey had always loved as a boy, the kind of blue that promised to turn into a heart-grabbing purple when evening came.
“Sure,” McKelvey said. “Fry those fish. Ruin that coffee.”
Gerald raised his eyebrows. They were two white furry patches on his smooth and deeply tanned forehead. Beneath them, his eyes: bovine spheres of a rich chocolate brown so full of mute compassion that McKelvey felt his own eyes fill with tears at the thought of how fate had taken his life, shrunk it, dried it out, thrown it so far from its sources that until this moment—suddenly and inexplicably back in the midst of everything that nourished him—he hadn’t even noticed.
At this distance the white bomb was just a curving sheet of wet white metal. It could have been anything. Moby Dick. A creamy mermaid haunch. The bulging remnant of a white kitchen fallen from the sky.
“Nice car,” Gerald finally said. “Hope you didn’t pay cash.”
Gerald Boyce was one of three: there had been Vernon, the deceased and sainted reeve; there continued to be Vernon’s twin brother, Roydon, an upright stick of a man who’d been West Gull’s doctor until he migrated south to be a rich old geezer doing plastic surgery on movie stars and socialites in an Arizona clinic; finally there was Gerald, the forgettable recluse who, aside from digging the occasional winter grave with his fancy front-end loader, had squandered his share of the family money by playing mad-scientist with old television sets, breeding so-called organic fruits and vegetables and using his big cow eyes to draw various local widows and other helpless women into his dubious lair like trusting minnows to a shark’s gullet.
Early on the Sunday morning he witnessed the amazing re-appearance of William McKelvey, he had been woken up by the piercing squeak of his rusted mailbox hinges. He lay still, letting his dizziness settle, then went into the kitchen and looked down to the end of his driveway. The mailbox was turned. He slid his feet into the shapeless deer moccasins Vernon’s wife, MaryLou, had given him a few Christmases ago and started towards the road. At the mailbox he found a square white envelope that looked like it should be holding a Christmas card or a wedding invitation. His name was hand-printed on the outside. Inside was a single piece of paper that read:
LOOK UP AND YE SHALL SEE HIM
Gerald Boyce looked up. He saw only that the dark blue stain of dawn had yielded to a yellow shimmer announcing the sun.
“Idiot,” he said.
At intervals that ranged from weeks to years and at unpredictable hours of the day and night but always when he wasn’t looking, someone deposited these bizarre messages in his box, each time in a different kind of envelope, perhaps to trick him into opening it, which he always did. MY WAY IS YOURS had been the previous message. What was that supposed to mean? Was it sponsored by some kind of hitch-hikers’ association? He’d put it in his truck and later, while in town, slid it under a windshield wiper at the supermarket parking lot.
He stuffed LOOK UP AND YE SHALL SEE HIM into his pocket and went back to the house for breakfast. He boiled his coffee camp-style just for the strong bitter taste of it. Walking with a slight forward bend to keep his mug from spilling, he set off on his morning rounds: first the chicken coop, the sour-smelling domicile of four sinewy hens long past stewing and a rooster whose feathers had fallen out when Gerald called it a useless tit—he later apologized but the damage was done; next the glass-and-plastic greenhouse now empty except for its raised trays of manicured earth; lastly the garden—long hummocked hay mounds divided by rows of vegetables he brought twice a week to the West Gull supermarket for their local produce section which the locals carefully avoided while tourists clustered round it like vampires at a blood bank. There had been a time when he spent whole days weeding. Now mulch, a Rototiller and laziness had made his life easier, which meant that after he had returned to the house for a second cup of coffee, he got his tackle box and headed towards the lake.
By the time he reached the shore the
sun was already above the trees. Hawks squawked and thrummed. Bugs buzzed and bugged. Gerald pushed off and started rowing, the sun clanging against the metallic surface of the water, hammering at him the way it had done all summer.
He was starting to doze in the boat when he heard the sound of a car at the old McKelvey place. After it died away, he rolled himself a cigarette, stroked towards shore and began to fish. He was bringing in his fourth bass when the car started again. For the first time in more years than he could recall, he heard a motor coming from the barns towards the lake. The barely audible hum grew louder, deepened. Then there was the high whine of a stuck car trying to free itself and another silence that was broken by a new roaring—this one wild and ever louder as whatever machine it was bore through the bush towards him. Gerald remembered LOOK UP AND YE SHALL SEE HIM.
He looked up and he saw it—wreathed in a black shroud of smoke, accelerating along the dock until for a brief crazy moment it was airborne, a shining white wingless Armageddon beast launched to avenge the world’s sins. It hung suspended while its windshield wipers suddenly went into action, the furiously blinking eyes of a demented monster, after which, with a huge slapping splash followed by a great hissing of steam and rising of vapours, it fell into the water. Gerald Boyce applauded long and loud. He was just about to call for an encore when the car door opened and a thick body pitched into the lake.
He took McKelvey into the boat and rowed him across the lake. He could hardly believe how McKelvey’s face had changed: it looked like puffed pale pudding and hung off the bones as though he’d just stepped out of his own coffin—except the coffin had been one of Luke Richardson’s fancy cars and was now parked up to its gills in what some incredible wit had christened Dead Swede Lake because more than a century ago, local legend had it, a landless and love-tormented Swedish labourer had swum out into the middle of the lake, yodelled out his heart-struck swan song, then drowned.