by Tom Drury
A jetliner had crashed while trying to land. Then a gas truck, hit by flying metal, burst into flames. Then a fire truck speeding to the airport smashed into a city bus, killing two and injuring seven. Then it was discovered that a second plane had been involved in the initial collision, a small private plane bearing a woman who had once claimed to be the mistress of the mayor. Then three people from the bus crash arrived dead at the hospital, for a total of five dead. Then there was a rumor that the mayor had been on the small airplane with his mistress, along with a competing rumor that the mayor was safe at city hall, listening in horror and fascination to the police radio. On and on went the writing test, and by the time it was over Paul had produced two pages beginning, “ASHLAND — In what surely must rank as one of the worst days in aviation history . . .”
Paul walked back across the river and out to the Coltsfoot Motel eating a candy bar and carrying his bag of clothes. At the Salvation Army he had also bought a pair of black-soled canvas shoes reminiscent of the ones worn by Eiji Okada in The Woman in the Dunes, and these were on his feet. It had stopped raining and the water beaded in the grass. Everything had gone so smoothly that he felt he must be on the right track. The land behind the motel rose to a small swimming pool he had not seen before, surrounded by a wooden fence bearing red-lettered warnings about the dangers of swimming, including a diagram of a stick figure hitting its head on the bottom with jagged pain bolts shooting from its neck. Barbara, wearing a modest blue-and-white-striped bathing suit, played with her son Keith in the shallow end of the shimmering pool. Paul took off his shoes and socks, rolled up the cuffs of his wool pants, and dangled his feet in the cool water while Barbara pulled Keith firmly around by his arms. Paul told Barbara that he had taken a test at the newspaper, and Barbara told Paul that Billy Trautbeck had that very afternoon smacked a baseball over the wall of the stadium and into String Lake. Then the night manager came walking slowly over the grass and warned them not to dive.
After supper Paul tried the Hanover place again. Gravel snapped under his tires as he drove up the driveway, and two labradors, a black and a yellow, loped like horses around the corner of the house and struck a noble pose. He walked the dogs down to the dock, where Loom stood gazing across the water with binoculars.
“Are we ready to begin?” he said, then lowered the binoculars. “You’re not the pest-control man.”
“Try to remember,” said Paul.
“Nash,” said Loom. “I will be hit with a stick. Where did you come from?”
“The Coltsfoot Motel. And they don’t call me Nash anymore.”
Loom picked Paul up and swung him around. The dogs barked and jumped. “Who doesn’t?”
“The Witness Security division of the U.S. Marshals,” said Paul. “I’m Paul Emmons.”
“You sad case!” Loom shouted. “Where did you get that name?”
“From Ragnar Emmons. He and Vilmö Frisch won the Caracas Prize for econometrics in 1987.”
“Well, that means nothing to me,” said Loom, “but they had a story about you years ago in the alumni magazine, and that’s the last we heard. I just don’t believe it. I am just standing here in total amazement.”
“How’s Alice? Where’s Alice? Are you still together?”
Loom frowned pragmatically. “Oh yeah. She’s wonderful. Works for the mayor’s office. We have two kids, Faith and Chester. She is going to freak when she sees you.”
“What did they say in the magazine?” said Paul.
“It was positive, for the most part,” said Loom. “They said you brought down some crime figure.”
“Not really,” said Paul. “My testimony was so peripheral you wouldn’t believe it.”
“I’m trying to remember the guy’s name.”
“Carlo Record.”
“Maybe,” said Loom. “They gave his nickname.”
“The Shepherd?”
“No . . .”
“The Pliers?”
Loom shook his head, then punched Paul hard in the shoulder. “You’ll always be Nash to us.”
They walked up to the house. The dogs danced on the slate floor of a courtyard and picked up tennis balls in their mouths. Paul threw a ball down the rolling yard and the dogs froze, then settled their haunches on the stone with great concentration.
“Clap your hands,” said Loom, and Paul did so, sending the dogs galloping down the grass. Paul kept throwing the ball for the dogs, letting his arm unwind with harsh jolts.
“Their names are Mitzi and Bump,” said Loom. “They’re the reason we’re having the house dusted for fleas. But come on in, I’ll show you the place.”
They walked into the house and down a cool wallpapered hallway to the library. The evening light fell on fumed wood, cracked leather, and blue glass. The books had the moss-green and maroon bindings and innocent titles of works written and last read by no one still living: Here Comes Leona, The Mysterious Chamber, Jazz-Man from Kirghizstan.
Stuffed animals and birds crouched on the bookcases and tables. A raccoon with frazzled wire whiskers rested its withered black paws on a stick. The animals looked cross-eyed and dizzy, as if they had been conked on the head and stars were orbiting their skulls.
“I’ll be right back,” said Loom.
Paul took an encyclopedia from a shelf and sat down in an armchair. The article on taxidermy seemed to warn people away from a career in it but admitted that the University of Iowa taught the “complicated art.” Paul thought that if all taxidermists had gone through the training offered by the University of Iowa, stuffed animals might look more alive and less insane. He returned the encyclopedia to the shelf, under a section that had evidently been reserved for books about children’s behavior, induding What to Expect During the Winter Solstice and Raising the Mean-Spirited Child.
Loom strode purposefully into the room with his old, pale red leg weights strapped to his ankles.
“Take them away,” said Paul.
Loom laughed. “I never use them anymore,” he said. “Instead, I’m into the martial arts.”
“I read that your father died,” said Paul. “It was in a pamphlet at the motel.”
“The writer was biased against Dad, but she got his dates right,” said Loom. “Basically, he dumped the company in my lap.”
“I’ve never understood what you make.”
“We do a lot of defense work,” said Loom. “In missile guidance systems there is something called an Emery clip. It’s kind of misleading, because it’s not really a clip in the sense that you or I would think of a clip.”
“How big is it?” said Paul.
“Just minuscule. Stick-of-gum size.”
“And this is what you make.”
“I wish we did. No, Emery clips come primarily from Texas, and some from England. What we make is the bracket that holds the Emery clip.”
“Was your product used in —”
“The Gulf War?” said Loom. “Not much. Some. Hanover fasteners are mostly employed in submarine-launched missiles, meant to withstand the tremendous pressures of water.”
“But at one time you made matches. The company, I mean.”
“Yes, long ago.”
“Some kid at the park told me to ask you about match mouth.”
“They always bring that up,” said Loom. “A town needs its bad characters.”
They went for a drive then, down the western side of the lake. Loom had a fast blue car that was not much larger than a kitchen table. The lake raced blurred and broken through the boughs, and when the road opened they could see Red Mountain across the water. The car’s engine trumpeted like an elephant during the downshifts. It dove eagerly into depressions in the road, drawing the riders’ center of gravity below the pavement. Houses appeared every so often, log cabins with wind chimes and sagging ranches wi
th power boats on trailers, or strings of laundry waving in the yard, and Paul had a vision of Mary trying to shove open the door of the laundry room back in Vertige. The door dragged, carving an ever-deeper arc into the red-painted floor. “You know,” Mary had said one time, “I’m beginning to think that painted floors are bogus.”
Why this should now seem such a disarming remark Paul could not say, but he suspected that it was a mistaken tactic to covet Mary now that they were apart. When he was a boy, his father had taken him and Fred on Saturdays to a park in Verona where there was a marble public bathroom next to the bocce court. The restroom was entirely underground save for its roof, which served as a modest grandstand. The Nashes did not waste time above ground, even on sunny days, but went directly down the stairway to the outer hall of the men’s room. There the men of Verona rested in wooden chairs, tipped ashes into brass trays, played cards, and watched slow gray boxing matches on a television with iron legs. Paul remembered listening to the gripes and bidding, and watching the men draw coins from rubber squeeze pouches that seemed strangely out of place in their rough hands. Slit windows just above the grade of the park gave a low view of the world, and one afternoon a young lawyer stood by the windows commenting on the women passing by. If he saw a woman dressed in red, he would say, “I wish I was the color red”; if he saw a woman riding a bicycle, he would say, “I wish I was a bicycle,” and once, by mistake, he wished to be “the color bicycle.” After a while Paul’s father said, “You’re breathing a scab on your nose,” which was his way of warning you that harm was headed your way.
Loom and Paul stopped at a bar called Hanrahan’s, which stood at a lonely bend of String Lake next to a tangle of power lines and a pumping station that throbbed and clicked as they walked to the front door. Inside the bar, three men threw darts, and two men and a woman played pool, and the dart board and pool table were so close together that it seemed the darts might hit the pool players. Paul and Loom ordered drinks and sat at a wooden table near a window.
Paul explained the places he’d lived and the work he’d done. “The witness program is nothing like what people expect. It’s all words on paper.”
“That’s all it ever is,” said Loom.
“It has nothing to do with reality.”
“That’s all it ever has to do with.” Loom pushed buttons on a watch with a leather band. “Guess what time it is in Burma.”
“Time to get a new government.”
“Breakfast time,” said Loom.
Just then a man struggled into the bar carrying a large wooden dollhouse. He lugged the house around selling tickets to win it in a drawing.
“I will buy two chances,” said Loom, “but if I win, I want you to give it to the March of Dimes.”
The man set the house on a table and reached into one of its rooms for a roll of blue tickets. “Would the March of Dimes want a dollhouse?”
“You work out the details,” said Loom. The man tore off the tickets and moved on.
“What is having kids like?” said Paul.
“Faith is wonderful,” said Loom. “She rides horses and once had a poem printed in some magazine. Chester is a little bit of a trial. Do you have a family?”
“Well,” said Paul. “Remember that professor who died? That professor who was supervising my internship in Boston, but he died.”
“No.”
“Well, anyway, he died,” said Paul, “and I ended up marrying the woman he had been married to.”
“Oh, come on. What was she, old?”
“Not at all,” said Paul. “That’s the thing. She was young. We met at his funeral. They had gotten married right after she graduated.”
“Jesus, man,” said Loom. “You have just made every mistake there is.”
“No, that was good,” said Paul.
“When do we meet her?”
“You don’t. She’s in Belgium. It’s hard to explain. I remember one time I was on a ladder painting the barn at the inn, and hornets flew out of the eaves, so there was nothing to do but go down the ladder and wait. And I was sitting on the grass, you know, just doing nothing, just watching these mindless hornets, and there was this quiet sunshine, this dead-quiet sunshine, and I thought, There’s got to be something else I can do.”
“Chased across the Atlantic by hornets,” said Loom. “There are sprays that would be much cheaper. Which reminds me —the exterminators.”
They zoomed back to the house in the little blue car. Loom gestured toward the lake. “Right out there are a lot of people fishing in the dark that you can’t even see.”
Three silver vans sat in the driveway, and men milled about in gray overalls and orange rubber gloves with large rounded fingers.
“You can’t go in,” said one of the men. “Oh hi, Mr. Hanover. Sorry, but even you can’t go in. We already started.”
“Why do you work at night?” said Paul.
“Got to be at night, evidently,” said Loom.
“The rays of the sun destabilize our fog,” said the fumigator. “It’s much less toxic than other fogs, but it has to be applied at night. Some of our guys are in there already with tanks and such. Those fleas are well on their way to the magic kingdom.”
“Has my wife been here?”
“They’re all around back of the house.”
Dense fog swirled behind bands of windows, and every now and then a beam of light would break free, sweep a pane, and disappear. Paul and Loom shifted their feet and kept a respectful silence in the presence of the unusual work.
Alice Miller Hanover had lit a kerosene lantern on a table, around which she and the children sat in wicker chairs.
“We have a visitor,” said Loom. “Alice, you are going to fall over.”
“Move to the lantern so I can see,” said Alice.
“It’s Nash,” said Loom.
Alice stood with her black hair pulled back from her face. Paul hugged her and breathed in the smell of her hair, something of smoke and something of mint too. “Have you come to rescue us?” she said.
“From what?” said Paul. “From what, Alice?”
She stepped back and swept an arm toward the house. “From these people,” she said. “These people in our house.”
“Faith and Chester, say hello to Paul,” said Loom. “He’s an old friend from college days.”
Faith shook Paul’s hand. She had long arms and her mother’s large and doubtful eyes. Chester crouched in a chair with his legs drawn up.
“Stand up, Chester,” said Loom. “Stand up and be accounted for. Look Paul in the eye and shake his hand.” Chester did so, then rolled himself up in the chair once more.
“Watch out for Chester,” said Loom. “He steals.”
“Like what?” said Paul.
“No, I don’t,” said Chester.
“What about that diamond ring?” said Loom. “Doesn’t that mean anything?”
“We don’t know how that got here,” said Alice.
“I think it came from the jewelry store in town, but I’m not sure how to approach them,” said Loom.
“I found that at school,” said Chester. “I told you, Dad. I told you that I found that ring.”
“Let’s not argue,” said Alice. “Can we just watch the red smoke in peace?”
“I thought we were going to Grandma’s apartment,” said Chester.
“When I say,” said Loom.
“You’re not the boss of me.”
“Yes, though, I am.”
“Faith,” said Alice. “Take Chester around front to see how the workmen are doing.”
“I will, Mother,” said Faith. She pulled Chester away by the hand, and Loom sat in one of the chairs.
“But don’t bother them,” said Loom. “Just stand on the periphery. Who’s got the dogs
?”
“I kenneled them,” said Alice. “I took the kids and the dogs and I drove all of us to the kennel.”
“Bless you,” said Loom. The children walked off into the darkness.
“Be careful,” called Alice. To Paul she said, “I guess Loom told you we have fleas.”
“It happens to the best of families.”
“The other day I walked through the house in white ankle socks and I counted seven on one foot.”
“Didn’t there used to be a cartoon about a flea?” said Paul. “He was traveling over a dog and the hairs were as big as trees. And he carried a suitcase and kept singing about a home around the corner.”
“I missed that one,” said Alice.
“You could be him, if you had a suitcase,” Loom said to Paul. He adjusted the wick on the lantern while giving, for Alice’s benefit, a brief and confusing account of Paul’s travels.
“Just don’t go to Paris in August,” said Alice.
“A home around the corner is sort of profound when you think about it,” said Paul. “The Odyssey is all about a home around the corner.”
“The Searchers,” said Alice.
“The Mill on the Floss,” said Loom.
“What happens in The Mill on the Floss?” said Alice.
“Hell, I don’t know.”
“Adam and Eve, after getting kicked out of Eden,” said Paul. “Cain getting sent away.”
Loom said, “Where did Cain go?”
“San Diego,” said Paul.
“Cain slew Abel,” said Alice. “And beyond that I’m a little hazy.”
“Or did Abel slay Cain?” said Loom.
“No, Cain did the slaying,” said Alice.
“There was always something weird about that,” said Paul. “Here the mother and father have been thrown out of Eden and they’re forced to scratch in dirt for their living. And so, when Cain murders Abel, what does God do? He makes Cain an outcast.”