“No.”
“Will we ever see snow again?”
“Yes.”
Yes. William T. listened to the sound of her quiet voice in the air. He thought of Burl, happy to be driving on iceless, snowless roads. Happy to be without the worry of winter weather. Did he not find it strange beyond words that here in the Adirondack mountains there was as yet no snow?
William T. leaned back against the seat. They were already on Route 12 heading north. The highway lights arched over the road, marching like lit insects in a row as far ahead as he could see, until the road curved. He was returning to his home in darkness, to his white house on the hill, the hill that had been named for his father and now was named for him.
William T. studied Crystal in the faint glow of the dashboard lights, the rhythmic sweep of the highway lights. Her nose was tipped up at the bottom, and her hair hung over her forehead. She reached up now and then to swipe it away.
She turned to him for a second, her eyes half-hidden under that dark hair. William T. resisted the urge to push it off her forehead.
Crystal’s hands gripped the steering wheel at ten and two. That was the correct driving position, the position that William T. had taught to William J. Arcs of highway light swept through the darkness of the truck cab, one after another after another.
Riverside Mall was dark on their right as they rolled up Route 12 out of Utica, toward the low rise of the mountains that William T. could not see but knew were there.
“My son used to work at the ice cream store there,” he said to Crystal. “When he was in high school.”
“I know he did.”
“You know?”
“I used to go to Friendly’s now and then with Johnny for a cone. William J. would give him an extra scoop for free. Rainbow sherbet, his favorite.”
William T. pressed his cheek into the coldness of the window and turned his head to watch the mall recede into the blackness. He had not known that William J. used to give Johnny an extra scoop for free. He had not known that William J. knew Johnny’s favorite ice cream flavor. He tried to imagine the conversation between Crystal and William J., William J. behind the counter, Crystal holding Johnny’s hand in front, but he could not conjure the expressions on their faces or the words that might have passed between them.
There were few highway lights on Route 12. There would be fewer and fewer, until, when Crystal took the sharp left up the steep hill into Barneveld ten miles north, there would be none. They would roll through the darkened streets of Barneveld and then on out into North Sterns, where the only lights came from the stars and the moon and the occasional farmer, working late in his barn.
If it were winter, real winter, the plows would be out. They would grind their way up and down this road, first one lane, then the other. Cars would follow at a safe distance in their wake, taking comfort in the vast rumble of the snowplow engine, the steady sweep of the giant blade.
Crystal never took her hands off the steering wheel, never moved them from ten and two. Who had taught her to drive?
William T. couldn’t remember her parents. It seemed that she had lived alone with Johnny as far back as he could remember.
“Burl asked me to come get you,” Crystal said. “It tears him up, seeing you like this.”
On they drove through the darkness, the air motionless all around them, not even stirring enough to bend the arms of the pines that hung heavy on either side of the road. Crystal neither hummed nor turned on the radio when she drove. She was a person of silence.
“Look at the size of those pines,” William T. said. “Evergreens don’t usually live too long.”
“They can, though.”
She didn’t turn her head. William T. couldn’t see her big black men’s boots down on the pedals, but he imagined they didn’t move much either.
“They’re softwoods. They live only about fifty, sixty years.”
“They live longer than that if they’re not chopped down,” Crystal said.
“But they’ve reached the end of their usefulness at fifty or sixty. They’re ready to be pulped. They’ve lived out their lives.”
“According to who? Who’s defining what’s useful?”
He looked at her, at her profile, her parted mouth, which revealed the crookedness of her front teeth. He imagined her as a nine-year-old, with front teeth just grown in and way too big for the size of her. She turned for a second to glance at him, her eyes unreadable in the darkness.
“Do you believe your trees had reached the end of their useful lives?” Crystal said. “In your opinion, was it time for them to go?”
William T. closed his eyes again. His red spruce appeared to him again the way they did, spires reaching to the sky, roots spreading like fingers into the earth, holding on for all eternity. On fall days made splendid with rushing air and the flaming garments of other trees and bushes, William T. had sometimes stood beneath his red spruce, listening to their crowns communicating in a language of their own. Old women rocking back and forth, talking among themselves.
Eyes gleamed briefly in the ditch as they passed. Deer? Skunk? A fox, maybe.
“Crystal, did you know that the finest musical soundboards come from Adirondack red spruce?” he said.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Burl told me that. He’s a man of music, you know. Unlike me.”
“He is that. Sometimes when Johnny and I sit outside on summer nights we can hear him, all the way over at our place. We used to, anyway. It’s been a long time now.”
Come summer the cars and trucks would once again head up Route 12, Route 8, towing boats behind them. Camps would be unlocked, rugs shaken out, electrical mains flipped. All day the sound of voices and laughter would spiral up amid the music of splashing water. Far out on the lakes the engines of boats would drone. When William T. thought of summer in the Adirondacks he thought of lemonade and the smell of coconut sun lotion. He had been a child, with his parents on either side of him, sitting on the porch of the cabin on Deeper Lake they used to rent for a week. There had been a strip of sand beach in front of the cabin there, a few feet wide.
They were up in the foothills now, near the beginning of the Adirondack Park. Parts of the park were inaccessible except by foot. It was possible that there were places there that had never been seen by human eyes. Uncharted, unmapped, untrodden. Places where snow had fallen for thousands of years. No one to hear the hush of its landing, and only the lacy lines of bird footprints written upon it.
If there had been a moon, stars, William T. could have stuck his head out the window and gazed up at their light. He thought of the plane he had ridden on that one time. If he had flown at night, angling up through omnipresent clouds, would the light of the stars and moon have appeared to him?
“Have you ever been to California, Crystal?”
“No.”
“Burl and I were going to go there when we were kids. That was the plan.”
William T. gazed out the window at the darkness and wondered if it was still light in California, out there on the other side of the country. Perhaps the false William T. Jones, the man who had stolen his wallet and his name, was even now wandering barefoot on the sand, waves rolling in to cover his toes briefly, then receding, foam left on the rim of the water line like dirty whipped cream.
“My son and I had plans to meet there someday,” William T. said. “When we bought our around-the-world plane tickets.”
They passed the Buchholzes’ barn. The lights were on.
“The Buchholzes are up late,” Crystal said.
William T. looked over at the barn. A shadowy figure moved behind one of the windows.
“They’re always up late,” he said.
Crystal glanced out the window again.
“Actually, they’re dancing,” William T. said.
“Dancing?”
William T. nodded. “Naked.”
Crystal turned to stare at him. “They dance naked in there?”
&n
bsp; “They do.”
Crystal laughed. She had a soft laugh, a laugh that didn’t sound itself very often.
“But the Buchholzes are so shy! I grew up with the oldest one, and he could barely bring himself to say a word in class for twelve straight years.”
“They’re shy people, the Buchholzes. They’re not much for talking. Naked dancing is their only outlet.”
“In their barn?”
“In their barn.”
She glanced at him again, her hands never moving from the preferred driving position, and shook her head in wonderment.
“They’re in there dancing now, Crystal. Through the cow shit and the hay and the spilled milk. Come what may, the Buchholzes dance on.”
“William T., are you telling me the truth?”
“I wouldn’t he to you, Crystal.”
She started to laugh. He looked at her and smiled.
William T.’s house was dark, as were the sturdy barn and the broken-down barn. The truck headlights reflected off the tractor, left to rust halfway down the lower driveway. The tractor had not been driven this past season, and William T. had no idea if it would even start were he to turn the key that he had left in the ignition. Crystal inched by it on the right.
“The key’s in your tractor,” Crystal said.
“Leave it.”
The ruts in the upper driveway jounced the truck the way they always did. Crystal was thrown up and down in her seat a bit, but still she said nothing. She turned off the engine and they sat in the darkness, the ticking of the engine a slight familiar sound. William T. could feel the outdoor air creeping in, still and cold. Crystal would leave soon. He could sense her hand on the door, her thoughts on Johnny, waiting for her in her trailer. He could already feel the moment when she would be gone, disappeared into the darkness.
“Crystal.”
She turned toward him and nodded.
“Say you were an old diabetic cat who couldn’t meow.”
Crystal smiled.
“Am I an old diabetic cat who can’t meow and who also likes tomatoes?”
“You are.”
“Pickles, too?”
“You’re a cat fond of all table food. And one day you’re out for a stroll, and a tree falls on you. Bam.”
No frown. No look of surprise or worry. Instead she crossed her arms around herself, considering, and William T. had a glimpse of the child she must have been, skinny and shy and observant.
“Well, if I’m a cat, and a tree falls on me, then I guess I’m dead.”
“Don’t you think that’s unfair, though? Here you’ve already got two strikes against you, age and diabetes. The tree should have stayed upright.”
“The tree didn’t, though. It fell.”
“It shouldn’t have.”
“But it did.” She regarded him with her gray eyes.
“You’re not a what-iffer?” William T. said.
“I used to be,” Crystal said. “There was a time when I was a what-iffer. When Johnny was a baby I’d lie in the trailer at night and imagine him waking up in the morning, talking, running, singing. I had a tricycle I kept out for him for a long time, thinking someday, maybe.”
He had never heard her say so much at one time. She took her hands off the steering wheel and jammed them into the pockets of her parka. She hugged her arms tight to her sides. Even hidden in the giant red parka as she was, William T. could see her draw herself into herself.
“What happened?” he said.
Crystal shook her head.
“What happened was that a day came when I put away the tricycle.”
Her gray eyes were darkened and unreachable. There was a look on her face. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Then the driver’s side door was open and she had slipped out, vanished into the night like a shadow. William T. rolled down his window.
“You want a ride?”
Her voice came floating back on the still cold air, already a hundred yards gone.
“You shouldn’t drive. It’s only a couple of miles, no snow. I’ll walk.”
William T. sat in the truck. He turned off the headlights. How much gas was in the tank? Enough to last all night? He lay down on the bench seat and pulled his flannel shirts down as far as they would go. The engine hummed and rumbled, and his body vibrated along with it.
Crystal would be at her trailer door soon, her painted-red door. All the lights would be out. Rarely were the lights on at Crystal’s trailer. She and Johnny went to bed early. William T. had driven by often enough late at night and never seen a light on past ten o’clock.
Crystal would lift the latch and push it open, step into the warmth of the interior. She would take off her huge red parka and step out of her big black men’s boots. She would unwind the scarf from about her neck and hold her hands above the woodstove to warm them. In the little bedroom off the living room Johnny would be sleeping. Burl would rise from the couch where he had been sitting and waiting. He would leave. Crystal would walk into Johnny’s bedroom and listen for the sound of his breathing. Maybe Johnny would have a radio playing. A tape recorder, maybe. Maybe he would have gone to sleep listening to music playing softly, lulling him into that other world.
SMALL GRAY FUZZIES UNDER THE REFRIGERATOR. Mouse turds on the counter. William T. went to open up the refrigerator but thought better of it.
In California there were no mice, no ghosts, no need to dust. All that sunshine, all that lack of rain, all that blue sky. In California the windows of houses were left wide open. Californians looked out at the white sand and breathed in the ocean breeze and watched porpoises frolicking in the waves.
Californians set wooden bowls of oranges and avocados all about their houses. The false William T. Jones might have several bowls himself, one in each room. When the false William T. got hungry, he picked up an avocado and cut it in half, slamming a knife into the big pit to lift it out whole, the way William T. had once seen someone do in a Mexican restaurant in Syracuse, and scooped out the soft green flesh with a spoon. Then he strolled down the beach in his bare feet because hardly anyone wore shoes in California, there being so few barns, so little manure, so few brittle cornstalks to cut and scratch, and sat himself down in a dune to be among the last people in the continental United States to watch the sun set on another perfect, peaceful day.
William T. looked at his kitchen clock. Ten o’clock, seven in California.
He was tired, so tired. The phone rang on the table next to him. He tried to count the seconds between rings. Five, or six, or seven. He was never good at counting seconds, never knew how long to draw out the thousand between each number. The machine clicked on. William T. reached for the jack and unplugged it from its socket.
He put on his work boots and his work jacket. He pulled on his leather gloves.
Late January now.
But out the window it looked less like a January morning than a November morning, the kind of morning that as a child William T. had loved. He used to wake before it was possible to say with any evidence at all that dawn was nigh, yet he had known and in darkness risen. Heading north out of Remsen on the old train tracks, he would admire how the puddles of water had frozen overnight, a paper-thin layer of ice sheeting them, dissolving the minute William T.’s boot touched down. Air so still that it felt like a sacrilege to breathe it in and displace it from where it hung invisible in a sky turning imperceptibly lighter. William T. had watched the world around him grow gradually visible. Trees had emerged from dark huddles: sugar maples shorn of their blazing leaves, white pines towering over the spruce and birch and oak and aspen. He had walked for miles along the railroad track, until the sun was a fist or two above the horizon.
When they got married William T. had tried to persuade Eliza that they should go to California for their honeymoon, but she was fixated on the Green Mountains. Fall foliage.
“There’s not fall foliage here in the Adirondacks?” William T. had said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime trip, Eliza.
This is our chance to see the Pacific Ocean. To be the last people in the continental United States to watch the sun go down.”
That was the clincher. That was the trump card. Some people climbed Mount Katahdin in Maine at night and stayed awake until dawn just to be the first people in the United States to see the sun rise. It had been his secret dream to watch the sun rise off Mount Katahdin, then fly to California the same day and watch the same sun set.
Would it resemble his familiar Adirondacks sun, or would it be a California sun, different in every respect?
William T. could still see Eliza’s face that day, the day they had discussed their honeymoon plans. The curve of her cheek showed the hollow below her cheekbone. Her hand with its slender fingers had played along the edge of the table. His heart had swelled inside him and that was it.
Good-bye, California.
Out the door William T. went, and down the lower driveway, until he stood outside the broken-down barn. He lifted the latch and peered in. It was obvious that Burl had been there. All the signs: a pile of cement dust and dirt neatly swept to one side of the entry; fresh straw strewn where the goose liked to scratch; clear water in the trough; corn kernels piled like big yellow teeth in an unfamiliar ceramic bowl. Didn’t Burl know that chickens liked to scratch at their corn? They preferred it dirty and tromped-on. Or was that really true? Was it possible that, given the choice, a chicken would choose clean over dirty corn?
William T. supposed it was possible.
He pulled open both of the double doors and surveyed the flock.
The eggless hen stretched her neck toward him, rolling her throat as if she had something to say. The pigeon sat next to the pile of swept-up debris. The goose held out his wings as if conducting an invisible chorus.
Last time William T. had been here, his red spruce had blocked the sun. The only light visible had come from the far end of the barn, where long ago he had propped open the door that led into the open-air pen he had made for his flock. Gray sky now beckoned at the end of the barn like a patch of light viewed through a telescope. William T. walked through to the end, through the piles of pushed-up broken concrete on the pig floor, over the piles of hay and through the scattered feed, nearly slipping on the frozen spilled water, and closed the far door. He came back to where the flock gathered silently.
Was It Beautiful? Page 13