He wiped his forehead with his rag, leaving a long black streak. “Is that what you’re…saying?”
“Let’s say it is.”
Bud shrugged, nodded. “Yup, okay,” he said, and slinked sideways out the door.
* * *
Dave Dryer, meanwhile, was driving down to the hospital, north of Nestor. You could see it from Equinox—it was right there, on the other side of the lake—but it took an hour to drive to. The truck’s suspension was shot—it had the approximate jolt-absorbing power of a tricycle—and every bump in the road, every stray bit of gravel, was transferred directly to his mouth and magnified there a thousand times.
He seemed to be, for the first time in several years, experiencing some kind of medical crisis. His face had swollen during the night, and he had begun to spit blood. His eyes, when he gazed at them in the mirror, looked like they belonged to a squirrel or raccoon, and his tongue had the weight and gray smoothness of a rock dredged from a river.
To make matters worse, Janet Ping had visited the night before, to try to reconcile their differences. It seemed that her friends had dissed her when they found out she was working for Happy Masters. She figured that Dave would be more forgiving.
Well, duh. He let her in and gave her a drink, and she spilled her guts—confessed that she loved Happy, her friends were trying to make her choose between Happy and them, yada yada yada. Dave nodded, made comforting noises, and lusted after her: her face was almost perfectly round, a freckled moon; her shoulders were narrow and seemed to shiver at random intervals as she talked, despite his having the heat turned up to like 70. He drank along with her, firmly off the wagon now, and as he watched and listened and drank, the pain in his jaw dulled, and his anger (at Happy, at his father, at his customers, at Janet) seemed to melt and mingle with his woozy affection.
She told him about Sally Streit, the lesbian sex celebrity who was coming to campus. She said she found the whole thing disgusting.
“What,” he said, kind of sliding down a little on the sofa, so that his knee pressed against hers, “is so disgusting about it?”
“It’s a—there’s a lucture,” she slurred. “Ha! That’s good, a lucture.”
“A lickture,” Dave offered.
“A fuckture.” She snorted with laughter and poured more wine—the last of it—into her coffee mug. “It’s a lecture, and a demonstration. She supposely—supposededly—supposedly does stuff with the audience.”
“Like what?”
“Like makes them put on a dildo or something.”
They looked at each other and laughed. Dave slapped his knee. She slapped his knee, and then he slapped her knee.
So they started talking about dildos, had he ever seen one, had she ever used one, it was all completely hilarious, and they kept laughing, and kept slapping each other’s knees. And then she ruined everything. She said, “Oh, I’m just sick of it all.”
“Sick of what all?” he said.
And she said, “The whole lesbian shhthing. The whole girls unite, woman power thing.” She wiped her tired face with a rubbery hand. “I just want to have…normal friends. I want regular love.”
Which he took to mean she was going hetero. Which was apparently not what she meant, because when he tried to kiss her, he soon found himself pushed away to arms’ length, her arms. Upon her face there seemed to be an expression of alarm. Fear. “What!” he shouted, “What!”
“No, I didn’t—” she started to say.
“What!” She kind of pushed him, just gave him a little shove, and he…sort of pushed her back—sort of pushed her by the shoulders. She pitched back against the pillows and spilled what little was left of her wine. She let the mug fall—it rolled to the carpet and emptied itself there. And she put her hand over her eyes. And he found himself shouting at her.
“You didn’t what!” he said. “Didn’t you say—didn’t you mean—”
“No,” came the voice, from under the hand.
“—that you didn’t want to be a lesbian? I mean, Janet! Come on!”
“No,” she said, pretty much definitely crying now, speaking in an exaggeratedly even tone, like a shrink, “I’m sorry, I just meant—ssshhomething else. I meant another thing. I mean not being a lesbian, or rather being—I just, I meant the whole thing.”
He ought to have apologized, but instead he stood up. She gasped, as if she thought he would hit her, and that made him want to hit her. Instead he swept a lamp off the end table, and said, “Well what the fuck!”
And she got up, her hand still over her eyes, and maneuvered backwards to the door and tried to open it. But she couldn’t seem to find the knob, and she turned and pounded on the door, and then screamed. “Let me the fuck out of here! Let me the fuck out of here!”
“It’s open,” he groaned.
“Let me out!”
“Janet, the door is fucking open!”
She found the knob at last and ran out. He heard her crying all the way down the stairs, her large-soled shoes clomping on the wooden steps, the roaring in his head: yes, the throb had started up again, and the pain, and the tang of blood in his mouth. He went to the toilet, threw up, and lay down on the floor, where he spent the night. And now, still drunk, he was driving his truck to the hospital. Because he was in, he believed, serious medical trouble.
Or so he thought.
“No…” the emergency room nurse said, probing with a gloved finger, “it looks like you bit your cheek and tongue.”
“Hah?” he asked, and she recoiled, slightly.
“Have you been drinking?” she asked, removing her finger. It was about ten in the morning. She was thin, long-faced, large-eyed, and regarded him with obvious moral superiority, for which he could hardly blame her.
“Yeah.”
“Did you bump into something? Did anyone hit you?”
“No.”
“Well, the blood and the swelling are from something hitting your face. I see what you mean about the old dental work, but I don’t think that’s your problem this morning.” The gloves came off, snap, snap. “Or maybe that’s just making it worse.”
“Nobody hit me.”
“I’m going to give you a prescription for pain relief and to keep the swelling down, and a topical anesthetic. But if you want to talk about the other stuff, you have to see an oral surgeon.”
Her back was to him. He wanted to kick her ass. “I’m not making it up,” he said. “It hurts every goddam day.”
“Here,” she said placidly. She handed him a prescription and a business card. “Get the medicine. See the surgeon. And you don’t have to curse at me.”
“I don’t have any money.”
She leveled a stern look. “Well, get a job,” she said. “And I want you to stay here for the rest of the morning. Go to the cafeteria and get a coffee. Here,” she said, and took some change out of her pocket, “it’s on me. If I see you leave here before noon, I’ll call the cops.”
“The cops?”
“Driving drunk. Which you did on the way here, right?”
He said nothing.
“Right. So sit down and relax and have a cup of coffee.” And that was that.
In fact he fell asleep in the cafeteria, and it was more like two before he left—he supposed the bar would be opening late today. He stopped off at the Megashop and picked up his prescription and some groceries. He used a credit card, and endured the clerk’s frown of distaste—a quarter-inch of makeup, hair dyed and teased, and she was looking down on him. And why not? He probably smelled like a homeless shelter. When he got home he went straight upstairs, ignoring the bar (nobody, as it happened, was waiting to get in) and took his medicine and another nap. He got up and ate and opened the bar, and nobody came. For an entire hour, nobody at all came. People went to the Bistro across the street, but not a single customer came to the Goodbye Goose.
Around seven-thirty a few of them trickled in, just the drunks. No students. He served them, all on their tabs, and opene
d up the cash register. Underneath the drawer was a piece of paper that he had looked at many times. It had two numbers on it, a dollar amount and a phone number. Dave mentally multiplied the days since he received it by a thousand, and then he subtracted that from the dollar amount. He considered, decided, picked up the phone, and dialed. The painkillers had made him dizzy, made the world bend slightly at the edges, and they weren’t even working.
“Yes?” said Happy Masters.
“You win,” Dave said. “I’ll sell.”
Happy cleared her throat. “Who’s this?”
“Dave Dryer. A thousand times sixty-one, that leaves us with—”
“Ohhh, that,” Happy said. “Actually, Dave, you can keep your bar. I don’t need it.”
“What?” he said, though he’d heard perfectly.
“I have a bar, as I’m sure you noticed. No offense, but that offer is moot. Have a nice evening.” And she clicked off.
He hoped, hanging up the phone, to smash it into a thousand pieces, and he tried his best. But it was the old style phone, the heavy kind made of thick bakelite, and quite sturdy, so that all it did was make a very, very loud noise and move several inches to the left.
19. Control the agenda
Archie woke up the next morning and tried to think of nothing but the weather as he walked out to the shed for his work gloves. It was a nice day, by his standards: cold and overcast, the maple leaves fully oranged and falling off the trees, and the dull new light giving everything a gunmetal sheen, making the world seem to have slowed by half. Late October was Archie’s favorite time of year, and the hours before seven his favorite hours, and absorption in a simple physical task his favorite state of being. He liked Equinox best when it slept. The irony of this was not lost on him.
The garden shed was all that was left of the house the town founder, Thomas Crim, had built. It appeared to Archie that it had originally been the kitchen—the remains of an ancient lake-stone hearth stood against one wall, and the dirt in front of it was still packed to the consistency of cement. To Crim’s credit, the building was solid. It was about fifteen feet by ten, composed of tough old-growth logs, blackened with pitch and insulated in between by horsehair and clay. Archie used it to store tools and wood, and his potter’s bench was here, teeming with jars of carefully labeled seeds, and it was from here that Kevin Russell, dressed up as a ghostly Crim every Halloween, emerged to frighten trick-or-treating children. Every once in a while some local historian would come and ask to see the shed, which was thought to be among the oldest structures in the county. Everybody who visited touched the hearth. Just a pile of rocks, piled by famous hands. Or infamous, he supposed. It was Ruth Spinks, long before they became lovers, who told him the truth about his land—at the time, Mary had barely been in the ground a year, and Ruth seemed to him gaunt, guarded, nasty. But they had gotten to be friends, and one night, six or seven years back, she had showed up at his door with a bottle of wine in her hand and half another bottle in her belly.
It was harvest time for Mary’s Pearl. Archie pulled on his gloves, carried his ladder into the orchard. He felt a connection to the trees, and to the land they grew upon, that was harder to come by in other seasons, at other times of day. He hummed as he worked, twisting the apples off the branches. It was good work: he was happy. He stripped off his overshirt and the steam rose off his shoulders. The clouds cleared a little in the east and the sun shone through. When people pulled over at the stand, he went to meet them. Simple life. Simple town.
Or not. He knew he was kidding himself, that this idyllic life was an illusion. But it was one he thought he deserved. He’d managed to hold on to his trust in other people all the way through the war, and wasn’t that good for something? He chose to believe that his government’s cause was just. He fought in a spirit of respect and obligation. And his reward had been Mary, and this town, and this orchard, and the law.
But when she died, his trust in other people died, and now he was like Ruth: he believed in duplicity and manipulation. He understood that money was made by exploiting the weak, and that wars were acts of political convenience. He knew that the law was fallible, because it had been designed that way, by people who had wished to exploit it. Laws, he could see, were made to be gotten around. But he was different from Ruth, as well, because he no longer believed there was a point in resisting. He believed in hiding, and taking his pleasures where and when he could get them, and minding his own business.
Maybe he was weak, for giving up so easily. There were plenty of other people who had shared his experiences and still held on to their convictions. But knowing that was no cure. For Archie, the orchard was the only cure; it was the thing he could trust. The trees wouldn’t notice when he was dead; the apples would keep coming. If he drowned himself in the lake tomorrow, apple trees would continue to grow, for hundreds of years, for thousands. There was nothing complicated about it. The trees had it figured out; he just kept them on a course that let him make an honest living.
And then here came Happy Masters to foul everything up. Everything reminded him of her these days. That was her modus operandi: control the agenda. Always a new plan, a new ground-breaking, or leave-taking, or sudden return. A rumor, a theory, a plan. She was sighted almost daily now striding up and down the salted sidewalks, waving hugely to every citizen, shaking hands, popping into the building sites like, of all things, a mayor.
Which he didn’t doubt she would someday be. And which, though it would appall Ruth to know it, he wouldn’t really mind. He would still have his house, his orchard, his little stretch of lake. He would still have his books and his memories.
But would he still have Ruth? Or would Happy Masters drive them apart? The fact was, he and Ruth Spinks were the same inside—cold and calculating and strong enough to ruin one another. And this idyll that Archie valued above all—the false innocence of Equinox—this was the thing that insulated them, that kept them from freezing one another to death. If it disappeared, so then would whatever they had together: not love, he supposed, but something.
Or not. Maybe he had overthought everything. Maybe he loved Ruth. Maybe people could be trusted. Maybe Happy Masters didn’t have that kind of power.
“Oh, Mayor!” came a voice, in his head—her voice, materializing as if to answer, at great length, his rhetorical question. And then came crunching footsteps, and, carried on the breeze, a whiff of some subtle scent—some spritz or mist or after-bath splash of undoubtedly extra-Equinoxian origin—and he realized that it wasn’t his head she was in, but his orchard. “Archie!” she said, hearty as a pirate.
“Hello, Happy,” he muttered, turning. There she was, wrapped in a pair of gray wool pants and a fluorescent yellow fleece. She looked up at him and, apropos of nothing, winked.
“I knocked on your door, then saw you wandering out here.” She glanced around, nodding in apparent approval. “Lovely, isn’t it. Hard to believe, these apples just come out of nowhere every year. Out of the dirt and the water and the sun.”
Archie climbed down from the ladder, his joints cracking audibly. “Hard to believe.”
They faced each other, hands in their pockets. She grinned.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing, it’s just—” She gestured around the orchard with her open palms. “All this. It’s wonderful. It’s everything a small town means. It’s everything I love about Equinox. And America,” she added, as if reporters might be lurking nearby. “You’re a lucky man.”
“I agree,” he admitted. “What can I do for you then, Miz Masters?”
Her eyebrows went up. “I know, you’re busy. Well, I’ll get to the point. There’s something I want to do, something for the town, and I thought I should come to you and ask about it.”
“Something for the town,” he repeated.
“Well, Equinox has been very generous to me. The people have given me room to explore my vision, and I want to give them a little gift.”
He scowled, crossed h
is arms, waited.
“Ah, you’re skeptical. As well you should be. Let me explain. You have noticed, I’m sure, the signs posted on the way in to town? The green ones with the white letters that say ‘Equinox’? And the one down by my place is actually a bit bent in half?”
“Truck hit it,” Archie said.
“Of course. Well! I propose to replace those signs with ones that are a bit more…appropriate to the feel of our village. At my own expense, of course. This is a lovely place and I think lovely signs should announce it.”
“What,” he asked, “do you mean by lovely.”
“I mean,” she said, feigning exasperation, “wood, for one thing, and painted, for another, and no, nothing fru-fru, no gold trim or any such thing, just a nice big wooden sign on wooden posts, with the name of the town painted on it—I have one of my people working right now—and perhaps underneath, the population, which of course has gone up by a citizen or two recently, wink wink.”
“What makes you think the population will stay where it is now?”
She laughed, reached out, squeezed his bare arm. Her fingers were warm on his skin, and soft. She left the hand there.
“Very good, Archie, you can read me like a book. Let me put it to you this way.” She released her grip now, gave his arm a pat. Inaction had allowed the cold to find him, and he shivered. “The sign on the south end of town is actually on my property? Remember, I own everything from the north property line all the way on down to the game preserve? So, essentially, I don’t need anyone’s permission to put up a sign.”
“Ah.”
“And after having checked the appropriate papers in the county office, I discovered that the other sign is on a little patch of land—”
“That belongs to me.”
“That belongs to you, yes!” She leveled a finger at him. She went on, her voice maple-syrup sweet and just as smooth. “So all I want is permission to replace the lousy old sign on your little plot over there—”
Happyland Page 18