by CJ Hauser
“That’s normal. When you see it in print you’ll feel better.”
“And then?” Quinn says.
Then. I take a long pulling curve in the car and drive into the Stationhouse parking lot. Then, I hope that Henry doesn’t find out I’ve been contributing to the piece. Then, I resolve to never do anything like this again. If only he doesn’t find out this time, I swear, I will never do it again. I’ll be just as good as he thinks I am. And maybe the Dorian job will fall through, and he’ll go back to selling plants and climbing sick trees. And I will keep on at the Star. And we will keep living here and nothing will have to change. Menamon will be the way it is in Henry’s stories. Someday we will have children, and they will ride the oldest carousel in America and swim in the Atlantic and buy lobsters from Deep’s and be braver than he or I ever was and we will love them for that, our small brave children. He will never have to know the part I played in making all this possible.
“Then we write about something else,” I say to Quinn. “There’s always something else to write about.” Quinn is staring up at her apartment above the restaurant porch, the smell of car exhaust creeping in our windows. “Are you going to go get your girl, or what?” I say.
“I am,” she says. She clicks open her seat belt and jogs around the house and up the stairs. The porch is empty but the way the plastic chairs are left behind I can imagine a family getting up after a meal, full and sleepy as they lay their soft bills down for Rosie. I imagine wives saying to the men, “What a nice girl that waitress is, I hope you gave her a good tip.”
Quinn is back. She slams the door after her. Does not buckle up. “She’s not there,” she says.
“Maybe she’s at the bar already,” I say.
“Maybe,” Quinn says. “She might be out with Billy, picking up their flyers for tomorrow.”
I can imagine Rosie and Billy on the balcony of the Stationhouse, tossing down pink leaflets. Spreading the news. Shouting from the Stationhouse porch.
“Maybe we should swing by Deep’s, give her a lift,” Quinn says.
“Let her do her thing,” I say. “I bet she’ll show up later.”
THE UNCLE’S PARKING lot is full of trucks. You can hear the bar from outside. We push in the doors and the heat and the noise of the crowd is something to be waded into. Every fisherman in town is here and has a half-dozen empty glasses in front of him. The jukebox is pumped full of quarters.
We push our way to the bar and try to order but Sara Riley is nowhere to be seen.
“Can I get a whiskey?” Quinn shouts down the bar. No one answers.
A man holding a glass in each fist notices us and says, “There are women! Whose women are these? We said no wives!”
“I’m no one’s wife!” Quinn shouts.
I see Joseph Deep at a corner table, smiling and nodding at some bearded man. “Joseph!” I shout.
Joseph sees us and excuses himself. The guy he was talking to lifts his glass and shouts, “To the DMR pulling their heads from their asses!”
Joseph lifts his glass in return, and comes over.
“What the hell is going on?” Quinn says.
Joseph smiles. “The Department of Marine Resources just released a study that says the lobster population is on the rise. They’re lowering the minimum-size catch.” I look to Quinn for translation but she is looking at me. “It’s good news,” Joseph says. “We’re allowed to bring in more lobsters. You here to celebrate as well?”
“It’s gone to press,” I say. “But I wasn’t really working on it. Just Charley and Quinn.”
Joseph gives me a look that shows just how little he believes that, looking down his nose at me. “Really?” he says.
“Really,” I say. This is when I realize I have made a terrible mistake: no matter what the byline says, no one is going to believe I kept my hands off this piece.
“Come join the party,” Joseph says, and motions us over to a table.
We pull up seats. “Leah, did you—” Quinn starts to say, but is interrupted.
“Marks!” someone shouts. “Hey, Marks!” I look around for Carter but don’t see him. Quinn is doing the same. Then I realize the man is pointing at Quinn.
“I think he means you,” I say.
Quinn wheels around to face the guy. “Me?” she says.
“You’re Marks’s girl, ain’t you? What number is that song of his?”
“J42,” Quinn says, and she turns around. The jukebox starts singing about the whiskey-eyed dame.
A red-haired guy sits at our table. He puts down a bottle of Old Crow bourbon. “It’s a good enough day, hey, Joseph?” he says.
Joseph reaches out and they clasp each other’s arms. “It is,” he says. “You know Quinn and Leah?”
I stare at the new man, trying to place his face. He looks familiar. He sees me looking and says, “Frank. I bought the bottle, if that’s what you’re thinking. Thought it would be easier than going back and forth.”
“Smartest thing I’ve heard all night,” Quinn says, and shakes his hand before filling a glass with Old Crow.
“Were you out on the water when they radioed it over?” Joseph asks Frank, his face almost splitting open in a pumpkin grin.
“I couldn’t get a clear channel for ten minutes,” Frank says. “Every channel I tried had someone whooping on it.” He settles into the chair and kicks his legs out. A dark Celtic tattoo winds around his calf. But give me a kiss and I might let you, he said.
“You run the carousel,” I say.
Joseph and Frank start laughing. “When I’m not on the boat, sure I do. Joe Sanford told me to take care of the thing when he moved down to Carolina,” Frank says. “And you, Mrs. Lynch, are still too tall to ride.”
“Who’s taking care of it now?” I say, thinking about the Dorians.
Frank looks at me sideways. “Well,” he says. “If someone wanted a ride about now . . .” He pulls a ring of keys from his pocket, holds them up, and fingers a little brass one. “I suppose they’d need this.”
“Can I see that?” I say.
He hands me the whole heavy snarl of keys. I examine them, and remember when Henry and I had just moved here, months ago, when I thought the carousel had the gears that kept the town running. Maybe it’s the whiskey, but with Frank sitting here with the keys, the carousel still, and every able-bodied man in the bar tonight, I can’t help but wonder: What is running Menamon tonight? It feels like some natural rule has been suspended. Like our parents are away or the whole night is happening off the record. The carousel is not yet gone, but it’s not running either.
Quinn pours me a generous glass. “Have a drink,” she says. She grabs my face and squashes my mouth into a couple of grimaces. “What’s wrong? We’re supposed to be celebrating.”
I sit there, my face squished in her hand, and say nothing.
“You didn’t tell him?” she says. “Tell me I’m wrong. Please. Tell me you told him.”
“I didn’t tell Henry,” I say.
“Oh, lady,” Quinn says, and exhales about three people’s worth of air from her lungs. “You’re in deep trouble.”
She sits back and grabs her glass, clinking it against mine where it sits on the table. “Well, there’s nothing to do about it now. You’d better make merry while you may.”
How bad will it be? I’m thinking now. Will there be yelling or just quiet disappointment? Will he leave for the night? For longer? How bad was it, how bad am I, and was it worth it? That I don’t know yet. Won’t know till I see how everyone reacts when the article comes out. How Henry reacts.
I drink my whole glass down to the film at the bottom.
“There you go,” Frank says, and fills it up again.
Sometimes I lean too heavy on the rational facts. I put too much stock in being right. And why can’t it just be that if you’re the one who’s right, you won’t need to plead your case so hard? I finish another whiskey.
I see Joseph watching me. He has been listening. I see
that he understands everything.
“What do you think the over-under is on how long it will take him to forgive me?” I ask him. “A week? A month? What?”
Joseph shakes his head and leans back, away from my question. “It’s hard to say, Leah, with things like this.”
“Hey, buck up, Bernstein,” Quinn says. She puts her glass down for a refill, too hard, and I know she’s feeling the booze too. Sometimes a drink will hit a girl at just the right angle to upend her. Quinn shouts loud: “Someone put on a song that will cheer this lady up!”
An up-tempo country song starts playing on the jukebox. A couple of the guys get up and start stomping, dancing. A few men do drunken little jigs.
“Time for dancing,” Joseph Deep says, and pulls me up by the hand.
Frank looks Quinn up and down. “You dance?” he asks.
“Hell yes, I dance,” Quinn says. “But if you think I’m dancing with you, you’re zonked.”
We take to the floor and I feel light and dizzy as Joseph and I do a little country four-step turn around the dance floor. The men form small circles and move surprisingly lightly for the number of heavy boots in the room. Quinn and Frank are dancing, not together but at each other. Quinn might be winning. The song ends and Frank says, “Trade partners?,” to Joseph, and I say, “Sure.” I cut in and grab Quinn’s hand.
I put a hand on Quinn’s waist, which doesn’t really exist. She snorts, but dutifully makes her arms into a triangle with mine. I start us off with a hop and then I’m leading us around in a waltzing gait.
Quinn cracks up. “Look at Frank’s face.” She laughs. Sure enough, Frank is watching us, then looking at Joseph, who extends a hand, which Frank slaps away.
Quinn and I spin around the dance floor, me drawing her under the tall bridge of my arm, her dragging me under hers. The men start whooping. We go faster, one spin feeding another. The reel moves a million beats a millisecond and the men start stepping and hopping in time to the fiddle. I let myself forget about Henry for a minute, here in the heart of the Menamon I was trying to save. We have done it! I think. This is it. Tonight in the bar is the way Menamon is supposed to be. Quinn and I have written our article and soon we will be heroes and everyone will know that we, we two From-Aways, are the ones who have set things right so this place doesn’t have to change, or grow up, ever.
The song winds down and then it’s gone. The men are clapping and cheering and the two of us are heaving in unison, like we’re both pulling from the same reserve of air.
“I’m sweating, Bernstein. Are you sweating?” Quinn says. “Holy shit, everything’s still spinning.”
I say, “Thanks for the dance, Miss Winters.” The whole room is tilting on its floor planks back and forth.
“That’s the Old Crow, not the dancing,” Frank says as he saunters over and pours us new drinks.
Joseph Deep says, “My play,” and feeds the jukebox. The first chords of Joseph’s song play out and someone says, “Aw, Deep, how old are you anyhow?” The men instinctively tighten their circle around the yellow burbling jukebox. A trilling drumbeat pipes through the speakers and then the floor feels like it’s about to give way as every man in the bar starts stomping along. When the first keening “Ohhh!” sings out of the speakers, all the men join in: “Ohh!”
The singer in the jukebox starts rattling off a list of things he’d like.
“And a little drop of wine wouldn’t do us any harm and a drop of Nelson’s blood wouldn’t do us any harm. And a little slug of gin wouldn’t do us any harm, and a night up on the shore wouldn’t do us any harm.”
And then they start singing,
“Roll the old chariot! Roll the old chariot!”
Quinn and I are jumping up and down. We start singing along to the chorus as well, then suddenly the room goes dark and the singing a cappella. There’s grumbling in the silence.
Frank jumps up on a wooden chair and starts improv-ing: “And a couple million bucks wouldn’t do us any harm! And a week of summer weather wouldn’t do us any harm! And a night without the wives wouldn’t do us any harm! And a pot all full of bugs wouldn’t do us any harm!”
Everything dissolves into shouting and clapping and Frank hops off the chair and into the dark.
“Power’s out,” Joseph says.
“Power’s out!” The men cheer and clink their glasses, then sit back down and start talking like nothing’s wrong.
Quinn and I are left standing there alone by the dead jukebox in the semidark.
“Seriously?” I say.
“What about the music?” Quinn says.
“Isn’t there a generator?” I say.
“Let’s go look,” Quinn says.
We go out the back. It’s dark outside. I know there are houses across the street but I don’t see a single window lit up. “They lost power too,” I say.
“It must be the substation,” Quinn says. “It could shut everything off.”
“Look up,” I say. With all the other lights off, the sky is bright; there seem to be more stars than usual.
We crane our necks, lose our footing on the gravel, lean against each other for balance, like elderly people. Quinn sighs. “Yeah, there’s a whole lot of flickering cosmos up there.” She spins around.
I look past her. There’s a low shed at the back of the lot. “Generator!” I say. I pull Quinn across the parking lot, laughing. It feels like we are up to no good, doing something important. We have to do something important because we did something important with the article and no one knows about it, so it feels like it was nothing, which is terrible. It is terrible because it leaves us wondering what’s next, which is bad.
We unbolt the door. Inside, it is dark and smells like pine and diesel. I stoop, because the ceiling is low. The floor is covered with wood chips. The tank of the generator is like a sleeping animal, curled at the back.
We both stare at it.
“I know I said I wanted to turn it on but I don’t know how,” I say.
“I got it,” Quinn says. We are whispering, though I don’t know why. Quinn slinks back and starts feeling around for something that might start it.
Because Quinn can do anything. She can be a girl and sing and fix a generator and cheer me up, and fine, she’s only okay at writing newspaper articles but there will be music again soon, because Quinn and I are always making something happen. We are a team. We are in cahoots. We are Woodward and Bernstein. I start to tell her this, but then the generator switches on and it is so loud I can’t hear anything except the roaring.
38
Quinn
At the end of All the President’s Men they never show what happens after Woodward and Bernstein get the story. They crack it, they write it, then they make you hold your breath as you wait to see if they’ll be able to run it. Spoiler: They do. And then the movie’s over.
Of course you know what happens because you already knew what happened when you started watching it. It’s a historical fucking movie. Still, after the story is done, it feels like a copout, that spinning newspaper montage.
What happened to those men, together, after?
How do you celebrate a thing like this?
In the shed, it smells like cheap pine two-by-fours. It smells like the saw that buzzed through the pieces to cut them and make planks. It smells like the one one-hundredth of an inch of wood that you have to account for in your measurements, because it disappears when the saw runs through. That much of it, just gone. This is where we are, Leah and me, right now, in this shed. We are on that line you draw between the one part of the plank and the other, and once the saw goes through it, it will be gone. Sawdust.
I’m leaning back into the corner, over the generator, trying to figure out how to turn it on. I find the switch for the power and I flick it. The noise the generator makes is so loud it feels like someone’s slammed me on the ears. The shed’s board walls glow, beams filtering in all crisscrossed between the uncaulked boards. The lights are back on at the
Uncle. Leah has this look on her face and she’s saying something but I can’t hear her, so I say, “Hold on!,” and I reach down to turn the generator off again, but I’m having trouble finding it because it feels like the world’s about to shake itself to pieces. And then Leah grabs me and spins me around and makes her mouth say the words big and clear so I can see them.
Sirens. Sirens, she mouths to me. And I figure this is it. They’re coming to get us. The Dorians.
Leah pulls me by the hand out of the shed. My ears are ringing but I hear them. The sirens get louder as we run across the parking lot. And there they are, not police cars at all, but fire trucks, two of them, headed east. I didn’t think Menamon had two fire trucks. Guys start coming out of the bar, looking around, sniffing. And then I smell it. The smoke. It doesn’t smell like campfire. It’s more chemical. Other men come out of the Uncle and soon we’re a crowd standing in the parking lot. We all stare off toward where the fire trucks disappeared. “Look,” someone says. He points off to the east. I squint hard and see something awful glowing through the trees.
39
Leah
The woods are on fire.
People push out the front door of the Uncle, and I can hear the jukebox playing from inside.
We see a man coming out of the tree line. He is carrying something.
It’s Patsy Cline, I think. On the jukebox.
And it’s Jethro, coming through the trees, but what is in his arms I cannot tell.
40
Quinn
I thought she would wake up,” Jethro says. “But she’s still sleeping.” His face is covered with soot. Rosie lolls in his arms like a heap of blankets too big to carry right. She keeps sliding out of his grip. Her face is sweaty. There’s blood in her hair. Why would there be blood in her hair? She looks very small and I worry about her eating again.
I say, “Jethro, get your hands off my girl.”
And he says, “Quinn.”
I say, “I mean it.” She’s drunk, Rosie, and Jethro is carrying her around like a prize. I think that she must be drunk. Too drunk.