“Where you going?” Roxanne asked.
“To freshen up. To perform ablutions.” He grabbed a towel and a skinny bar of soap and started to move toward the stream.
“Hey, wait for me,” and the girl came out of the van and followed him down the incline in the land to the water. She stared at it with an expression of horror. “It’s stagnant,” she said. “You can’t bathe in stagnant water.”
“Your eye deceives you. There are undercurrents.” Frog stepped into the greenish water and felt its coldness against his hips. After a moment—as if after having cuckolded her husband she saw stagnant water as only one other step in her moral deterioration—the girl joined him. Frog watched her splash herself tentatively.
She sank downward until her face was submerged and her long hair floated out like black seaweed. He waded toward her. Now this is quite perverse, he thought. This sudden arousal he felt through the folds of his hangover. The last thing I need.
The girl surfaced. “Gimme the soap,” she said.
“At your service,” and he passed the slippery bar toward her.
He watched as she slid it between her breasts and then her hand went down into the water and she was soaping herself between her legs. Frog sighed like a man made weary by his own rebellious libido. To what do I owe this reaction? he wondered. He looked past the girl a moment in the direction of the trees, as if he might put this new temptation out of his mind. He didn’t need the moral complications of all this.
The girl was looking at him with an unmistakable light in her eyes. “Come on,” she said. “What are you waiting for?”
A stand-up performance, he thought. Hampered from the hips down by water. She pressed herself against him and he could feel her legs swing around him, an interlocking of limbs.
When she kissed him her mouth was wet and open and her tongue moved inside his lips. It was a forceful, hungry kiss.
He pulled his face away from her shoulder, feeling her hand go under the water toward him. This aquatic fucking was a young man’s sport, he thought. Now she was clinging to him and the quick way her breathing came suggested a kind of desperation.
Hold on, he wanted to say. Let me get my bearings, baby. Pressed against her shoulder again, he found himself gazing absently up the bank toward the trees. A visual exercise in detachment, in control.
And he saw—thought he saw—something or somebody moving just beyond the screen of the trees. His impression was of little more than shadows, gray as the light of the sky.
He shut his eyes because this kind of submarine pounding took all the concentration he could muster—and when he felt the girl shudder against him and the long painful raking of her fingernails on his spine he realized it was all over and he could go limp in the chill water. Limp, relieved. And not very happy with himself.
When he opened his eyes again his visual field was still, devoid of movement. But he knew. Who else could it have been but the old couple? Who else? Out on one of their strolls, casually taking the morning air, they had stumbled over his watery indiscretion and perhaps had inadvertently watched for a moment, with something akin to astonishment on their faces. An unexpected sideshow here in the forest! Naked people sporting in a stream! Come See Frog Fuck! He felt a burning sensation on his cheeks. What was it? A sense of shame? Some old bourgeois coyness resurrected?
What the hell—he didn’t like people to see him in the throes of coitus, that was it. Not even the old folks, whose own recollections of similar couplings in their own lives must be little more than dim memories by now.
He staggered up onto the bank and the girl came after him, laughing as she moved. From behind, she reached up under his buttocks and caught him gently by the testicles. These young girls, he thought, these kids—they just don’t know when enough is enough. He was too old for this shit. Depleted, he sank into the grass and lay there wondering what the old folks were thinking about now. He imagined them perched out on that little porch of theirs, looking like two ancient squirrels who disapprove of the world around them. Can you believe what we saw in the stream? Maybe it was an hallucination, dear.
Frog smiled. On the other hand, he thought, the spectacle in the stream might have inspired them to antique fumblings of their own. It was quite a thought.
Metger parked his patrol car in the lot of the Ace of Spades and went inside the tavern, where he hauled himself up on a stool at the bar. He ordered a beer and sipped the froth from the head of the ice-cold Coors.
He lit a cigarette and watched as Martine, the barmaid, folded her arms on the counter and leaned toward him. Years ago, when he had been a young officer, not sheriff of Carnarvon, when he hadn’t been a married man weighed down by a life of domestic responsibilities—a swimming pool and a home and a 1984 Chevy, all owned by one bank or another—he had had a sweet thing going with Martine.
She had aged pretty well, he thought. Maybe a thickness at the hips and pronounced circles under the eyes, but these were surface things, and as you got older you learned to look a little deeper than that.
“Well, stranger,” Martine said. She had wonderful, thick black hair, almost the intense black-blue of a raven. “We don’t get to see you in here very much these days. Crime wave in Carnarvon keeping you busy?”
Metger set his glass down. “Somebody ripped off a stereo from Radio Shack. And a stray dog was run over by vacationing Texans in a Winnebago.”
“No shit,” Martine said. “A real crime wave.”
Metger nodded. “I tell you, no place is immune these days.” He drained his glass and watched the woman draw him another beer. “How’s business?”
She patted the back of his hand. “Fair to middling. How are you? How’s married bliss?”
Metger said, “I can’t complain, Martine.” He had been married for two years. “Nora’s pregnant. Seven months.”
“That’s nice,” Martine said. “You must be looking forward to the big event, Jerry.”
“I am. I guess I really am.”
He was conscious of a memory in Martine’s eyes, the way it had been back then when both of them were younger and more carefree and caution was something other people brought to their behavior. Not them, though, not when they had been as free as goddamn birds and there had been long wild nights of wine and lovemaking. The memory stirred inside him like a soft wind. He had married Nora and he was glad things had worked out, but there wasn’t any harm in a little nostalgic indulgence now and again. If it didn’t get out of hand. Martine, he knew, had never married.
“How’s your dad, Jerry? I heard he wasn’t too well.”
The thought of his father depressed him. The old man was stuck in the nursing home at the edge of town; he spent long hours secretively counting candy he hoarded. When you spoke to the old guy you were never sure what kind of answer you were going to get. At times Metger Senior was lucid, but more often he was tuned to different frequencies from those of anyone else.
Metger said, “He’s not good. It’s weird. I still can’t figure it out. One day he was fine. The next day his mind was gone. Just like that. As easy as blowing out a match. I always thought he was indestructible.”
Martine looked at him sadly. “That’s too bad. You get a chance, Jerry, you give him my best.”
“If I catch him on a good day,” Metger said.
They were both silent for a time.
“You didn’t say what brought you out here, Jerry.”
Metger was quiet for a time. “Well, I heard in town they’d rented out that redwood house for the summer.”
Martine leaned nearer to him. “Is that right?”
“That’s what I heard.”
Metger shifted his weight against the bar, then pushed his empty glass away and frowned at Martine’s suggestion that he have another.
“A family,” he said. “Married couple with a young kid.”
Martine didn’t speak.
“They haven’t rented that place to anybody with a kid for some time,” Metger said
.
“I didn’t know Joe Lyons had gone,” Martine said.
“Last spring. I heard he moved down to San Diego.”
“He’d been there a long time.”
“Eleven years,” Metger said. With certainty. Joe Lyons had been the tenant for eleven years and now he was gone and a new couple had moved in with their kid and this distressed Metger—even if he knew his unease wasn’t exactly rational. He looked past Martine’s face at the rows of liquors along the shelves, then he said, “I was thinking of going down there. A courtesy call.”
“So that’s why you’re out this way,” Martine said. “And I was flattering myself that you wanted to see me.”
Metger smiled. “Introduce myself. No big deal. Just a quiet visit. Make them feel at home.”
“Like the Welcome Wagon,” Martine said.
She took his empty glass and filled it with Coors and this time she added a shot of rye to the beer. “It’s good for you. Drink it.”
Metger tasted the mixture, then set the glass down.
9
For the next two days Louise was involved in household tasks—rearranging furniture to please herself, driving with Denny and Max into Carnarvon for supplies, checking out the stores, getting the phone company to install service—something Max was curiously reluctant to do. Did he want to cut himself off entirely from his patients? What if there was some kind of crisis Ed Stallings couldn’t handle?
She had no time to sit down to her own work, even though she had an upcoming deadline for a series of illustrations that were going to be used in a book for first-grade kids. She set up her drawing board, arranged her paints and brushes, but even in idle moments when she thought about the illustrations or when she leafed absently through the spare text of the book, she invariably found herself drifting through the glass doors to the sun deck and just staring at the forest.
The trees pulled her away from her thoughts, as if she were the willing victim of a magical spell. She would simply lean against the deck rail and let the quiet undertones of the pines fill her mind. A seductive lethargy had overcome her.
Peace, she thought. The tiny miracle of peace here in the middle of the pines. She enjoyed the silent telephone and the absence of traffic and the sense she had of somehow stepping outside the boundaries of time.
At night she would sit out here with Max and drink a couple of glasses of wine. Sometimes Denny joined them and she’d experience the true sense of family for the first time in years.
If there was anything that troubled her, even in a minor way, it was the fact she hadn’t become attuned to the night sounds of the forest. It wasn’t so much the occasional unexpected cry of a bird or the way the night breezes would rattle the trees, it was the noise of the animal that came every night to prowl around the house.
She assumed it was the same beast both nights. Now and again she’d been tempted to take a flashlight and go out and identify the thing once and for all, but somehow the unbroken blackness of this place prevented her. There were secret pools of dark that moonlight didn’t penetrate, hollows beyond the reach of stars.
She lay awake and listened to it roam, shuffling, circling. Was it stalking something? Or was it simply a scavenger drawn to the house by the prospect of food or the attractions of trash cans? In the mornings the cans were never disturbed. And she could never find any tracks, paw marks, any sign of the creature’s passage.
She had vague dreams, indistinct images that sneaked into her brain like light passing through the lens of a camera. Once or twice on waking she remembered the snout of an unidentifiable animal, wet and black and quivering, and she recalled small amber eyes that held her in some hypnotic manner.
On the morning of the third day when she was in the kitchen and wondering about the two antique pie dishes that nobody had bothered to come and collect, she heard the unexpected sound of a vehicle pulling up outside the house. She walked out onto the front porch and saw an old VW van turn into the driveway, its side panels streaked with mud and its windows dirty. At one time it had obviously been painted in Day-Glo colors, a kind of psychedelic camouflage, but they had faded over the years into pale yellows and bleached reds.
Louise went down the steps and saw a man emerge from the van. He had his hair in a ponytail and he wore a T-shirt with the legend LET FREEDOM RING. He wore cutoff blue jeans and had sandals on his bare feet and he looked like somebody suffering from malnutrition. A freak, she thought. A superannuated hippy coming out of the forest.
The man came up the driveway, his arm extended and his hand open in a gesture of greeting. She took his hand and felt the vigor of his grip.
“James Arnott Bartleby,” he said, grinning. His teeth were good and his hair clean and strong, but it was the glow from his eyes that captivated her.
“Is that really your name?” she asked.
“Call me Frog.”
“Frog?”
He looked beyond her at the house for a moment. “We’re all a little ashamed of something,” he said. The eyes were pale blue and they burned in his head. But the quality wasn’t anything manic or drugged-out; rather, there was a kindness, a warmth, an openness she found herself liking at once. “Why Frog?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I do. Really.”
“Ancient history.” He shuffled his feet around. “You remember communes? Those dens of hippy evil?”
“Communes, sure.”
“I was once in a commune in Colorado,” he said. “In those days a lot of people were not exactly in their right minds. Those were the days of chemicals. Well, yours truly apparently lost whatever trifling control he might have had and spent one entire night thinking of himself as a frog. Making frog noises all night long. Rebbit. Rebbit. Amazing what you can do with your time when you’re really applying yourself, isn’t it? The name stuck.”
“Frog,” she said. “It might have been worse. You might have imagined yourself a hyena. A worm.” She smiled and shrugged. She could catch the whiff of instant nostalgia here. During the mid-sixties, when she’d been a student at UCLA, she had lived for one entire semester in the purple haze of marijuana. Those lazy days when you let everything hang out. Brain cells were popping all around her as her friends swallowed acid or sat up night after night in amphetamine bewilderment or took reds to come down. Even Max back then had been known to eat speed, which, as a med student, he had easy access to, but he’d given up foreign substances when his weight started to plummet. When he’d dwindled from a healthy one forty-three to a spindly one twenty and couldn’t stop his hands from trembling, he’d decided it was time to call it quits.
“Settled in?” Frog asked.
“Pretty much.” She paused. “What can I do for you?”
“Don’t ask what you can do for me. Instead, ask what I can do for you.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “I weed. I trim. I tidy around. At a pinch I can cook gourmet meals. Your fancy. It’s been a long trip and I’ve picked up a few skills along the way.”
She smiled at him. “My name’s Louise. Louise Untermeyer. We’re from San Francisco. We’re going to be here for the summer.”
“Is that the royal ‘we’?” Frog asked slyly.
“My family. My son somewhere. And a husband upstairs reading.”
Frog surveyed the grassy area alongside the driveway. He pointed. “Look, Louise. Weeds. Stinging nettles. Curled dock. Ragwort. I’d say you need my services around here.”
Louise stared at the weeds. “Where do you live, Frog?”
He pointed to the VW.
“Where do you park it?” she asked.
“My address is General Delivery, care of the forest. No zip. If you really want to know, you follow the wash back there until you come to a stream of sorts. Hang a left and keep going. That’s where you’ll find me. We’re neighbors.”
Louise thought about the smoke she’d seen rising out of the trees a couple of days ago and she asked, “Is there anybody else in the vicinity? Other neig
hbors?”
Frog, bending to scrutinize the weeds, glanced up at her. “Beat the woods with a big stick and you’d probably scare out fifty people. Dope dealers. Lovers. Bums. Fugitives from the FBI. Illegal aliens. Moonshiners—”
“Seriously,” she said.
“Seriously, there’s only an elderly couple over that way,” and he pointed a finger absently. “I say elderly. Old would be better. Very old. I’m talking Wrinkle City, if you pardon the phrase.” He paused, licked his lips, tugged at the end of his tiny beard. “What the hell. We’re all headed for Wrinkle City.” He smiled at Louise. “You want these weeds pulled?”
“I’m not sure—”
“A weed is an affront. Nature’s pests. A bane to mankind.”
Louise laughed. “If they’re that bad,” she said, “why don’t you do what you have to do, Frog?” Then she turned and went up the steps of the porch and Frog watched her go. In the doorway she looked around and raised one hand in a small, delicate gesture, then the door swung shut and she was gone.
He studied the weeds, then he went to his van to get his gardening tools. Shears. A weeder. A black plastic trash bag. On his way back to the weeds he looked at the sleek house and thought, Good-looking woman. A class act.
He bent down to start his assault on the ragwort.
As he did so, a kid appeared around the side of the house, smiling at him shyly. Dennis, who had been behind the house trying to fix a snag in his fishing line, was surprised to see the skinny bearded man hacking away at the weeds. For a moment he wasn’t sure what to say, how to introduce himself; sometimes he had trouble with adults when it came to basic social skills. They seemed to observe you as if they expected you to perform. Tell us about your girlfriends. How are your grades? But the bearded man wasn’t like that at all. Dennis understood that right from the start. The guy skipped through the weeds and flipped the palm of his hand over so that Dennis could give him five.
“Frog,” he said. “You must be the boy about the house.”
“That’s me,” Dennis said. Frog? he wondered.
“Got a name or do you go by a number?”
The Wanting Page 6