The Road to Wellville

by T. C. Boyle

  Badger was on the ground, writhing, a flower of blood blooming between the knuckles pressed to his groin. The womb manipulator was on his haunches, holding his face. Virginia Cranehill, heavy in her suit of flesh, couldn’t stop screaming. Will hadn’t uttered a word. He stood there, chest heaving, the club dangling from his fingertips, and looked at Eleanor. She didn’t scream, didn’t whimper, didn’t move. But he saw something in her eyes he’d never seen there before: fear. She was afraid of him. Afraid of the look on his face and the stick in his hand, afraid of the way the world had suddenly shifted beneath her. Her eyes darted to Badger, to the quack and to Virginia, and then back to him again. There was shame and guilt in the look she gave him, a plea, a promise, but most of all there was that new emotion, fear. Will dropped the stick in the dirt. “Get your clothes,” he said, but he didn’t wait for a response, his mind moving too quickly for that, and he had her by the wrist, her clothing—bloomers, dress, stockings, shoes, hat—bunched against his chest, and he was leading her, barefoot and naked, back up the path through the stand of birch, and away.

  When they’d gone a hundred yards—and he didn’t give a damn for her feet, let them bleed—he released her wrist, threw down her clothes and ordered her to get dressed. “I’m sorry, Will,” she whispered, bending to her dress, the hair fallen round her face, her body lean and golden, tanned in every crevice, ripe as fruit. “I’m so ashamed.”

  He didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to know. The rage and the hurt—he’d never known anything like it. He trembled with it, gritted his teeth, let it surge through him like some new kind of blood, like fuel—and he wouldn’t let it settle in his stomach, not there, not anymore. Virginia Cranehill screamed in the distance. The sun tore through the trees. He held that rage in the back of his throat, that hurt, and he brought it up again and chewed it like a cud.

  Eleanor hurried with her garments. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, busy suddenly, so busy. Despite himself, despite his shock and disgust and the fierce seething wave of jealousy that ate at him like acid—he would never touch her again, never—he found himself growing hard as he watched her, harder than any mail-order belt or buxom nurse could ever make him. Her legs, he focused on her legs as she stood first on one foot to slip into her bloomers and then the other, and her breasts, swaying with the pull of the earth until the fabric of the dress enclosed them, and that excited him, too—she wore nothing beneath it, nothing but bloomers. “I-I don’t know what came over me, Will,” she began, and still she wouldn’t look him in the eye, smoothing a wrinkle at her waist, tugging at her collar, her voice muted, buried. “It was Freikorper Kultur, it was therapy, it was—it was wrong, deeply wrong—” Her voice choked on itself. Her eyes were wet.

  He hushed her. Took her hand, but gently this time, gently. “We won’t talk of it,” he said, and he couldn’t breathe. The trees leaned over them, complicated, shadowy, limbs, digits, leaves. “We’ll never talk of it, never again, never,” he said, and he led her up the path and out of the woods.

  At the same time, on the far side of Battle Creek, Charlie Ossining sat hunched in his misery on the doorstep of Chief William Farrington’s gray-and-white clapboard house. The sun beat down on him, too, but he hardly noticed. His hands were manacled in front of him, his neck bowed like a postulant’s, and he stared fixedly at the ground. The great black thick-soled shoes of the deputies who stood over him, one to each side, were the only objects in his line of vision, aside from the ants that crept obliviously across the step, and he sank deeper into himself as the minutes ticked by. All he could think of, all his body and brain could focus on despite the circumstances and against all odds, was escape. If only the deputies—open-faced men, reluctant, almost as embarrassed by the situation as he—would leave him for a second, just to get a cup of coffee or a slice of Mrs. Farrington’s rhubarb pie … He stared at the shoes, stared at the ants, and saw himself running, leaping hedges and ducking down alleys, the wind in his hair, Battle Creek, Per-Fo, Kellogg, Mrs. Hookstratten and all the rest of it falling away to nothing behind him. It was all he could do to keep from springing up right then and there, but he restrained himself—he’d get only one chance, if that, and he couldn’t afford to squander it.

  Chief Farrington was inside, on the telephone, trying to arrange transportation to the county jail at Marshall, a place with which Charlie had become all too familiar through his dealings with George—two cells, no windows, heavy iron doors that swung to with a sound of finality and doom. He could hear the man’s voice, patient, country-inflected, as he spoke into the mechanism, asking for Walter or Isaiah or Clinton, trying to scare up a vehicle on a day when the whole town was at the parade. Neither of the deputies said a word. The sun beat down. Off in the distance, snatches of music glorified the air.

  When he finally looked up, out of boredom and misery and because he was still alive to the possibilities despite the face of utter defeat he put on for his captors, he found himself staring into the eyes of a boy in the yard next door. He couldn’t have been more than six or seven, this boy, and he was wearing a clean starched white shirt, corduroy knee pants and a jacket of the same material. The way he was staring at Charlie, the way the whole focus of his world seemed to narrow until it enclosed only the front stoop of the police chief’s house, you would have thought Charlie was Jesse James or William Bonney himself. The boy didn’t look away when Charlie lifted his eyes, and that saddened him, hurt him in a way even Kellogg hadn’t been able to. What was he then but a freak, a thrill, one more curiosity for a boy on his way to the parade? Charlie had to turn away, remembering himself at that age and how he and his friends would gather on Sunday after church to watch them let the Saturday-night drunks out of the lockup, and the thrill it would give him to be so close to these desperate men, these blinking criminals with their two days’ growth of beard and slouchy clothes, men bewildered by the clarity of the day. Sure. And now he was one of them.

  An hour passed. Two. The chief wasn’t talking on the phone anymore—the house was quiet, in fact, and Charlie suspected he’d gone up to take a nap—and Mrs. Farrington, fat in the ankles and with a pouchy flushed suspicious face, had appeared twice to offer the deputies “a nice cool glass of water” or “a nice cool glass of lemonade,” which both accepted, both times. She offered Charlie nothing. He sat there on the doorstep as if he’d sprouted from a seed while the sun moved overhead and the deputies sporadically conversed above him in soft whispering non sequiturs. Finally, at about four—Charlie was only guessing; he’d been relieved of his watch, billfold and rings by the constable—an open wagon, drawn by a pair of rawboned, skittish-looking horses, pulled up to the curb in front of the house.

  Almost to the instant, the screen door swung open and Chief Farrington emerged from the house, dipped for Charlie’s arm as casually as if he were scooping up a bucket on his way to the well and lifted him off the doorstep. They moved across the lawn in a little group, Charlie and the chief in front, the two deputies lumbering behind.

  The man at the reins wore a stovepipe hat and an antiquated jacket polished with age at the seams. He was a farmer, obviously, dressed up for a day on the town, and he gazed out grimly on them from beneath the brim of his hat. “Isaac,” the chief said, nodding a greeting, and the man returned it in a single clipped syllable, part of a ritual, nodding, too, “Bill.”

  The chief led Charlie to the back of the wagon, which was strewn with hay and clumps of dirt and torn sacking, and the larger of the deputies, the one with a face like the hind end of something you’d see in a pasture, helped him up. Farrington got up on the platform beside the driver, the two deputies scrambled into the back with Charlie and settled themselves in the straw with barely suppressed groans of pleasure, and they were off. As they pulled away from the house, Charlie caught a glimpse of the boy in the yard next door, motionless and patient, still staring.

  The trees moved overhead. Shadows pursued them, a breeze came up, the sun dodged in and out of the b
ranches- A few yards down, a dog lay prostrate on the lawn of a great looming meticulously kept house and lifted its head to give them a sleepy look before letting it drop back down again. The streets were quiet. Dead quiet. And that was a mercy, because Charlie knew these streets, knew the stolid sedate ranks of freshly painted houses and the ordered lives that went on within them. He’d wanted a piece of that prosperity, wanted the Daimler and the billiard table and the woman like Eleanor Lightbody that went with it—and was that so bad? Was that such a crime?

  The wagon plunged precipitately and rocked back up again, lax on its springs, and Charlie took the sharp stab of it at the base of his spine and he shifted position, awkward with his shackled hands. The deputies were oblivious. They lay sprawled in the straw, their eyes slits, jaws working round twin stalks of grass, as snug as if they were home in their own beds. And what did they care? They weren’t the ones going to prison, they weren’t the ones abandoned by the world. He felt his stomach contract at the thought of it. For one terrible moment he held the whole thing in his mind, the lawyers in their fancy suits, the outraged witnesses against him, the term paid out in years and months of a young man’s life, the prison grays, the stale incinerated world of the ex-convict. And who would help? Who would care? Not Mrs. Hookstratten, not his Auntie, that much was clear. He thought of the look on her face as she betrayed him, washed her hands of him, led him off to the chopping block as if there were nothing between them, as if all those years and all they’d shared amounted to nothing more than a bad memory. He should never have lied to her, he saw that now. Right from the beginning, right from the moment she got off the train, he should have told her the truth and pinned the blame on Bender, where it belonged.

  Bender. The son of a bitch. So they’d caught up with him finally. At least there was that. But how could Charlie have listened to him? How could he have been so stupid? And why hadn’t he run when he’d had the chance and Will Lightbody’s money to stake him? Because he was thinking of Mrs. Hookstratten, that was why, and look where it had gotten him.

  Charlie stole a glance at the slumped spines and nodding heads of Farrington and the funereal driver, both of them already gone in a daze, and he thought of leaping, right then, right at that moment, leaping over the side and running cuffed through the streets like a runaway slave till they caught him or he dropped dead or got away clean, but the impossibility of it strangled the impulse in the instant it came to him, and he sat, merely sat, and rocked with the wagon. Lurching, heaving, it ground on with a faint percussive thump of spring and axle, endlessly repetitive, wearing him down as surely as if he were strapped to the wheel beneath him.

  They turned onto Lake Avenue, and there was traffic now, farmers in traps and buggies coming in from the countryside for the parade and fireworks and all the other simple pleasures Charlie would be denied for who knew how many years to come. He was going to prison. He was a criminal. An outcast. The farmers and their wives drew even with the wagon and carefully looked away, as if a glance might contaminate them. Eleanor Lightbody had looked at him as if he were an insect, and she’d known, she’d known what was coming, and Kellogg, that blow-hard, he’d really rubbed Charlie’s nose in it. There was no call for that. The old goatbeard couldn’t bear to see him quietly arrested—no, he had to make a spectacle of it, a lesson. God, how he’d like to even the score, just once, how he’d like to batter that self-satisfied goateed moon-face until every last glimmer of superiority was bruised out of it, until the big shot went down on his knees and squirmed and pleaded and begged….

  Charlie never got to complete the fantasy. Because at that moment, the motorcar that was attempting to pass on their left—a midnight-blue Cadillac, so blue it was black, with its high open seat and gleaming headlamps—backfired. It was no fault of the driver, a Mr. Rudolph Jenkins, of Albion, who, with the veiled, hatted and satin-enveloped form of Mrs. Jenkins, was heading into town for the Sanitarium concert and fireworks display—it was just one of those things, too rich a fuel mixture, a spark too far advanced or retarded. Sudden, blood-quickening, loud as a gunshot in a closet, the flare of that erupting blast caused the deputies to snap their eyes open, the chief to duck his head in a reflexive huddle and the farmer, Isaac of the worn jacket and tall hat, to drop the reins between his legs. Which in turn caused the already spooked horses to attempt a sudden U-turn, lifting the back end of the wagon two feet clear of the ground in a crazy spinning tilt and ultimately slamming it into the right rear fender of Mr. Rudolph Jenkins’s pristine Cadillac motorcar.

  Ten seconds later, it was over. The Cadillac was impaled on a decorative stone wall twenty yards from the street, the Jenkinses and their baggage were strewn across the lawn behind it, and the farm wagon lay overturned in the roadway, its wheels spinning gratuitously in the warm filtered light of the late afternoon, its occupants trapped beneath its splintered planks. All its occupants except Charlie, that is. With his hands encumbered, he’d been unable to find a grip when the wagon pitched violently into the car, and he’d been thrown up off the floorboards and into the dazzle of sunlight like a volleyball on the rebound.

  There’d been an accident—he could see that from where he sat, unharmed, on the fine rich deep carpet of a well-tended lawn, assessing the scene. It took him a minute. He watched the wheels spin; heard the groans of the Jenkinses, saw the white. pulp of an arm, the shirt torn from it, moving fitfully beneath the wagon. A minute, that was all. And then he was up and strolling off casually down the street, his hands folded up high under his jacket so that the chain of the handcuffs, draped across his chest, might have been nothing more than a glittering watch fob.

  But what now?

  He turned down a side street, quickening his pace, his eyes sucking at the fronts of the houses along the way, willing the doors to stay shut and the windows untenanted. He ducked into a driveway, cut through a yard, climbed a fence and dropped down into a vacant lot prickling with weed and wildflower. Crouched low in the vegetation, his back pressed to the naked slats of the fence, he took a minute to catch his breath and consider the situation.

  The fire bell was ringing in the distance and he knew it would be a matter of minutes before Farrington and his deputies climbed out of the wreckage, brushed off their clothes, counted their teeth, toes, fingers, limbs and ears, and recollected that something was missing. The fire company would turn the wagon over, and Charlie wouldn’t be there. Then all hell would break loose. They’d start knocking on doors, deputizing hayseeds and amateur marksmen, calling out the bloodhounds. He had an hour, maybe less. He needed money, a change of clothes, a place to hide. He couldn’t go back to his room—Mrs. Hookstratten would have alerted them to that—and he didn’t dare go anywhere near the rail yard. The smart thing to do—and from now on he was going to do nothing that wasn’t smart, he vowed it—would be to lie low someplace in town for a day or two, in a cellar, a barn, a carriage house, and find some way to spring the cuffs and free his hands. It was the handcuffs that made the criminal, the handcuffs those farmers and their dried-up wives wouldn’t look at, and if he couldn’t get rid of them, he might just as well give it up and turn himself in.

  The fire bell was closer now, shrill and urgent, and he could hear voices raised over the tumult—he had to move. They’d start with these streets, this neighborhood, this lot. Distance, that’s what he needed, and quick. He stood, hurried off across the lot and turned up the sidewalk, fighting to keep himself from breaking into a trot. Just then, a blur of movement froze him in place, and two boys emerged from nowhere to dash past him in the direction of the fire alarm. It was a bad moment—he thought he’d been taken—and he had to hold himself there, hugging his shoulders, until he fought the panic down. When he felt his legs moving beneath him again, he risked a quick reconnoiter of the wide brilliant tree-hung street and found himself locking eyes with an old woman on the porch opposite him. She was leaning on a broom, her pinned-up hair like a helmet, and she gave him a long steady look that ate through to his b
ones. He kept walking, studying his feet now, his fists wedged up into his armpits to conceal the cuffs, but he could feel her eyes on him all the way to the end of the block.

  It was no good. The frenzy began to creep up on him—he wanted to run, had to run, there was no reason or purpose to existence that didn’t involve legs and feet, the sure swift arrow of flight, escape, freedom, safety. He couldn’t just stroll the public streets as if he were invisible—they’d have him in ten minutes. What was he thinking? Had he gone mad? For all he knew, the old lady was on the telephone now. He looked suspicious, he knew it, sweat coursing down his face, bits of grass and lint clinging to his suit, coat sleeves dangling, his hat gone—and that was a giveaway right there, a dead giveaway. Who but an escaped criminal would walk the streets without a hat? He was practically cantering now, craning his neck left and right to look over his shoulder like a mad heifer in the midst of a stampede, doomed, all but doomed.

  It was then, at the very brink of disintegration, that the architecture of his salvation appeared to him. Just as he was about to lose all control and fling himself howling down the street, he spotted something familiar—looming, tall, laminated in sunlight, a great stepped stairway cut out of the sky like a pyramid in profile. And what was it? He knew this place, didn’t he? Stumbling, hurrying, no one in sight, he turned a corner and there it was: the ruin of the Malta-Vita plant.

  A tumble of brick, walls without roofs, careening timbers, the great rusted three-story relics of the traveling ovens that had beckoned to him over the treetops: nothing had changed since that bitter November afternoon when he’d stood here and hammered the first nail into the coffin of his hopes. Or had it? As he crossed the deserted street, heart racing, holding himself back, inconspicuous, a decent citizen out for a holiday stroll, he saw that the place looked different somehow, softer, almost inviting. And then he understood: spring had come. Where the fire-blackened walls had stood stark against the barren ground, a testament to futility, now they were buffered by leaf, bud, stalk and creeper. A splash of wildflowers decorated the stripped doorway, saplings six feet high sprang up through the cracks in what had once been the packing-room floor. Six months ago the place had depressed him, shaken him to the core; now it was his sanctuary. There was no reason to get philosophical about it: he ducked behind the wall, and he was safe.