by Tom Drury
“Does it work?” said Paul.
The owner of the store plugged in the radio and found a music station on which Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton sang that song the chorus of which had always sounded to Paul like “island dentistry.”
“I hate to let it go,” said the owner, a middle-aged man in a chamois-cloth shirt. “I’ve got one just like it at home.”
“Can you do anything with the price?” said Paul.
“Why’d you have to ask that? Now I don’t feel like selling it to you.”
“You’re the owner.”
“I’ll pretend you never said it.”
Paul paid with one of his credit cards, and the owner helped carry the radio out to the car. An old couple in scarves and overcoats were looking at a butter churn on the sidewalk.
“It’s a nice churn,” said the man.
It was late afternoon. Alice and Paul stopped at a lighted rink outside the town of Wetsell and rented ice skates. “We’re closing pretty soon,” said a boy in a purple stocking cap pulled down to his eyes. Alice and Paul raced over the ice holding gloved hands as wind burned their faces. Eventually the boy wobbled out onto the ice and said they were closing. When Paul and Alice got back in the car it would not start. Paul lifted the hood and tugged on a web of rubbery black wires until his knuckles scraped the engine block. He closed the hood. The boy in the stocking cap was drawing a wooden shutter over the counter where they had rented the skates.
“I can’t help you,” he said. He looked not at Paul but above him. “We don’t have a telephone. My brother doesn’t want one. He’s got a phobia about people making calls.”
“We’re stranded,” said Paul.
“I’m closing now,” said the boy. “Probably I’ll see my brother back in town. Maybe he can help you.”
“Why don’t you give us a ride?”
“My brother wouldn’t go for that.”
The boy locked up and drove off. The sun was almost down and the hills were dark and deeply wooded. Paul swore and hit the hood of the station wagon with his fist.
“Don’t hit the car,” said Alice. “There’s nothing to be gained by that.”
They sat in the front seat eating pretzels from a bag. The radio lay heavily in the gloom of the back. Just as they were setting off to walk into town a tow truck arrived. A man with a crew cut and wire-rim glasses rolled the window down.
“I’m Leif,” he said. “I believe you and my brother Toby are acquainted.”
The brothers got out of the truck. Leif started a generator on the back and pulled red and black cables from a reel. Toby opened the hood of the car and shined a flashlight inside. Leif handed Toby the toothed clamps on the ends of the cables and Toby squeezed them open and attached one to a battery terminal and one to the frame of the car.
“We’ll let them get to know each other,” said Leif. “What do you think, Toby?”
“Alternator looks like to me.”
“Yes,” said Leif. He walked around the station wagon with his hands clasped behind his back. “Could be the alternator, could be the generator, could be a host of things.” He looked in the back window. “What’s this, an old casket of some sort?”
“A radio,” said Paul.
“What do you do with a radio like that?”
“Play it,” said Paul.
“Where you folks from?” said Leif.
“Connecticut.”
“We’re lucky you came along” said Alice.
“Everybody breaks down on Sunday night,” said Leif.
“Leif owns the gas station and the skating,” said Toby.
Paul got into the station wagon and turned the key. The engine started, but a needle on a gauge showed that the battery was not charging.
“What did I tell you,” said Toby.
“Can we get home?” said Alice. “Can we make it back to Connecticut?”
“Unlikely, yet not impossible,” said Leif. “But listen to me. Now that it’s going, you cannot let it idle down and stop. And it’s not like it’s idling well.”
“It’s idling rough,” said Toby.
“What happens if we do stop?” said Paul.
“Will get real quiet,” said Leif.
The trip home proved arduous and brittle, with Alice taking obsessive care to keep the car running. Before touching the brake, she would push the transmission into neutral and step on the gas. They talked very little, the better to monitor the idle.
“I have land over in New Hampshire,” said Paul after they had been driving half an hour.
“Is there a cabin?”
“We talked about one.”
The car rolled through empty towns in the dark. Outside Brattleboro, a deer broke from the black trees into the cones of headlight where they could see the whites of its eyes and the muscles of its flanks. Alice kicked the brake pedal. The station wagon racked and skidded. Time slowed way down. They could have counted the burrs in the golden coat. The deer’s waxy black hooves cleared the fender of the car and Alice turned into the skid, as one is supposed to. The deer stood staring from an avenue of tree trunks.
In Ashland again, Alice parked the car at the porch of Paul’s house and they walked with vibrating legs across the snow and away from the radio. It was one-thirty in the morning. In the house, Paul had left lights on in odd places, which seemed to damage his credibility.
“Who’s this?” said Alice. She stood undoing her coat before the statue in the corner of the living room.
“Linda Tallis,” said Paul. “She lived in this house before Loom’s family bought it.”
Alice stroked the face of the statue. “I’ve heard bits and pieces,” she said. “She overdosed on pills.”
“She drowned in the lake.”
“Why was I thinking pills? I guess I associate the sixties with pills.”
Paul led Alice into the bedroom, where he opened the trunk that the woman in his dream had used as a bench.
“I think these are her clothes,” he said.
There seems to be something identifiable about clothes that have been put away because someone died. Light touches them a certain way, imparting a dull blue sheen, and the folded edges are frail with the years.
Alice took a lavender dress from the trunk. “Turn your back,” she said.
“I’ll get us something to drink.” Paul went downstairs to the kitchen, where, after a moment, he heard Alice’s belt buckle crack against the floorboards.
When he returned she had put on the dress and was looking into the mirror on the wall above the trunk. He buttoned her up and she turned toward him. The neckline of the gown was low, in a modest way, and trimmed with a ruff of gauzy linen. The dress of the science teacher appeared to free Alice from the tension of the long drive and from the rules and history she had known. Her eyes held longing and sadness and seemed to offer passage through time. A wide ribbon circled her waist and Paul pulled it tight and tied it. He kissed her face while holding her shoulders. Her hair, redolent of the ice rink’s cold wind, fell long and black and thick over his hands. She reached behind, feeling for the trunk’s leather lid, faltering, finding it, lowering the lid slowly so that it closed with no sound, or none that he could hear. She sat down on the rounded surface, drew up her left leg so that her heel rested on the edge of the trunk, and wrapped her hands around her knee. Her right leg extended, relaxed and open, foot to the floor, and the fullness of the lavender dress covered everything above her shins. She smiled, said it was cold in the house, and he knelt before her, and she let go her knee and pulled him close. She whispered something in his ear that he could not understand. He asked her to repeat what she had said, but he still could not make it out. She said it over and over until he began to love the sound itself, the roll and hiss of her breath.
In t
he morning he made coffee and toasted thick slices of bread on the gas stove. He brought the food to the bed. They ate and talked above the radio and then they got up and put away the lavender dress. They put on their clothes and went outside, where it was cold and where the broken-down car sat like a lump in the driveway.
“It’s the Mir station wagon,” said Paul.
Alice let down the tailgate. “You know what I felt like?” she said. “Like one of those storm fronts.”
Paul slid the radio over the gap between the bed of the station wagon and the tailgate. “Like on a map.”
“Yeah,” said Alice. “Over Canada.”
They set the radio against the living room wall near the fireplace. Paul turned it on and dialed in a station from Manhattan on which an orchestra played “The Celery Stalks at Midnight.” They danced to that and left each other in a state of ardent confusion. In late morning a wrecker came to take away the station wagon.
18
Because the egotist habitually perceives himself at the hub of the functioning world, it is hard for him to know when he has truly fallen into something. He may even ignore the evidence out of some false or compensatory attempt at modesty. So Paul expected nothing but a good time when, in January, Ashland Fastener and Binder threw a party in a stone church for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the factory’s conversion to the manufacture of fasteners.
Loom wore a tuxedo and seemed to forget or disregard whatever tendency toward abstinence he had learned at the Looking Glass clinic, but then, it was an easy night on which to drink. Caterers offered whiskey and champagne and deviled eggs, and nostalgia hung like an oily film in the vault of the church. To avoid drinking in this setting, you would have needed the determination of Theognis, a Greek poet whom Paul had read long ago and whose insistent verses about when to drink from the wine bowl and when to stop drinking from the wine bowl suggested a writer with a big bad habit.
At a table beneath stained-glass windows, Paul sat with Loom and two veterans of the fastener trade — Ernie Warwick and Lester Cranston — and a manager in the Switch-Barter division named Mimi Austin, who wore a red sequined dress and drank her champagne through a straw.
Loom introduced Paul to his colleagues. “He wrote about that stream that went away in Tableville.”
“Whatever happened with that?” said Mimi Austin.
“They don’t know,” said Paul. “Where’s Alice?”
“Home,” said Loom.
“Let me tell you about this kid Loom,” said Ernie Warwick. “From the time he came into this company, he made the most of a difficult situation. He could have done whatever he wanted, but he never let that stop him.”
“I don’t follow you,” said Mimi. Her blunt finger stoppered the straw as beads of champagne fell slowly into her glass.
“Money was never the issue,” Ernie said. “He came into this company green as a blade of grass, and his old father told him, ‘Take any job you want. Hell, take my job.’ And what do you think he chose?”
“You have it all wrong,” said Loom.
“Night watchman,” said Ernie. “And don’t be shy about it. You said, ‘Father, make me a night watchman.’”
“Wrong,” said Loom.
“I believe I heard it with my very ears,” said Ernie.
“He told me,” said Loom.
“It amounts to the same thing,” said Lester Cranston. “You did become the night watchman.”
“Which put us in a dilemma,” said Ernie, “because at the Hanover plant, night watchmen get initiated.”
“I admit we try to rattle them a little bit,” said Lester. “It’s just the way it’s always been done, and I expect always will.”
“Hazing,” said Paul.
“Hazing, sure, though we call it initiation,” said Ernie.
“Let’s have a drink,” said Mimi. “Here’s to twenty-five years of hard labor.”
“So we asked ourselves, Should we initiate the boss’s son?” said Ernie. “Maybe we’d get fired. Or should we forget what we had always done?”
“Our theory was, skip what we had done,” said Lester Cranston.
“Sure, to save our jobs,” said Ernie. “But then Loom came to us, and this you can’t deny, and he said, ‘Boys, we all put our pants on the same way.’”
“Meaning . . . ,” said Mimi.
“The feet go out the holes,” said Paul.
“So then,” said Ernie, “we thought, ‘Hell, that being the case, we have no choice but to initiate him.’ So first we told him the story of Bitter Charles.”
“How does that go?” said Paul.
“Lay off,” said Loom.
“The story will fall flat without it,” said Ernie Warwick.
“Don’t tell it.”
“Very quickly, then,” said Ernie. “A summary. A long time ago in the bobbin works there was a young man named Charles, who one day came down with a fever and asked to be excused from the lathe shop. But Ambrose Hanover — this would be Loom’s great-uncle or something, right, Loomis?”
“Stop, Ernie.”
“Just one little bit, then I’m done,” said Ernie. “Ambrose Hanover said that if Charles left, he could just keep going. So he didn’t leave, and the fever got worse, and, long story short, Charles fell into his lathe and lost a hand. After that, they didn’t know what to do with him, so they made him night watchman, and the legend goes that he still haunts the plant, looking for the bloody remains of his hand.”
“I never heard that,” said Mimi.
“It’s a myth,” said Loom.
“Not entirely,” said Lester Cranston. “There’s a shred of truth in it.”
“And then what we do,” said Ernie, “we put a rubber hand in the guy’s lunch pail for him to find later, when everybody’s gone.”
“Where do you get the hand?” said Paul.
“Mail-order house.”
“What did you do, Loom?” said Mimi.
“I didn’t want you to tell that,” said Loom.
“Why not?” said Ernie Warwick.
“It’s a free party,” said Lester Cranston.
“He took French leave,” said Ernie.
“I left the plant,” said Loom. “I went over to a fortuneteller who had a storefront on Harp Street where she sold beer and told fortunes.”
“Madame Fleming,” said Lester.
“I ducked into her place and sat on a bench in the front of the house until eventually she came out and read my fortune for five bucks.”
“I’ll bet it was just really general,” said Mimi Austin.
“She looked at my palm and said I had a great sorrow in my life. And then she said for five more dollars she would pray for the sorrowful thing to pack up and move along.”
“Did you pay the extra five?” said Paul.
“I didn’t,” said Loom. “I mean, it could have applied to anybody. So I went back to the plant, but unfortunately I had let the door lock behind me. So I had to jump up on a barrel and break a window to get in. But it worked out all right, since I was able to report the broken window as if I had happened on it instead of causing it.”
Ernie Warwick stood and hugged Loom’s head to his chest. “We forgive you,” he said.
“Let go of me,” said Loom. “Mimi, would you take Paul and show him the carvings on the chancel? I want a word with Ernie and Lester.”
Mimi stood unsteadily with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. She led Paul up a side corridor of the church and into a little room with a picture of Jesus raising his left index finger as if something had just occurred to him.
“I thought we were going to the chancel,” said Paul.
“What is a chancel?” said Mimi.
“I don’t know”
“Well
, I don’t either. And one thing you find out about Loom over the years is that when you don’t know what he means, you shouldn’t ask.”
They sat on carpeting in the corner of the room. Mimi poured champagne and then shook a vial of powder over the glasses.
“It’s a buffered pain reliever,” she said. “Keeps the hang-over away.”
They drained the glasses.
“What do you do in the Switch-Barter division?”
“I’m a troubleshooter,” said Mimi.
She opened a handbag, took out a tube of lipstick, and twisted it.
“Here goes,” she said.
She began drawing on his forehead with the lipstick. He tried to raise his hands, but his arms seemed to be under water.
“Happy new year,” she said.
Mimi left. A swarm of images moved through Paul’s mind. The gouge with the wicker handle, the lavender dress that Alice had worn, the bathtub full of groundcover in Providence. “Get me out of this,” he said to the picture of Jesus, and it seemed to speak.
“You’ll be all right,” it said. “You’re the actor James Mason.”
“This has been a magical day,” said Paul.
He got up slowly and made his way down the hallway and back to the party lights. “Club soda, please,” he said to an impassive bartender.
“You’re shut off. You have writing on your head.”
“I’m James Mason.”
The bartender wiped his hands on the edge of a tablecloth and proceeded to hustle James Mason down the center aisle of the old church. Everyone cheered. When they got to the front doors the bartender kicked one open and pitched him off the steps and onto the sharp cold stones of the parking lot.
Paul got up and went for a walk. He was confused about the direction in which he was going. The skin of his hands stung. He ended up near a dumpster at the back of the church. It was a large dumpster with an 8oo number to call to have it taken away. He did not know what to do next.