The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Nice doggie,” Don will say soothingly, extending his hand palm up toward the fence. Kim will not get out of her car. Surprisingly, in all her travels around Arkansas, she has encountered no dogs before, or at least no dogs who made themselves as obstreperously discernible as these two will be doing.

  “Don’t open that gate!” she will call to Don. He will not hear her, but he will have the sense not to enter the yard. Instead, he will “holler the house” in the customary fashion, calling “HELL-O?” loudly several times.

  While we will be listening to the ferocious commotion of the dogs and waiting to see if our calling gets any response, this will be as good a place as any to consider the architecture of the house, which is akin to that of multitudes of rural poverty dwellings all over the country. To call it a “hovel” would be insulting, nor is it exactly a “shack,” being more commodious than your average mobile home. It may seem old, and is certainly weathered, but its modernity is revealed by certain details: the board sheathing is not the older clapboard style but beveled wide boards, tongue-and-grooved; the windows are actually modified International style with metal casings rather than traditional sash windows; even the low pitch of the roof attests to its contemporaneity. For purposes of comparison and contrast, it is shown at the same angle as the Melson-Bump cabin of Bear City. Each is typical of its time; the earlier house has massive twin chimneys to contain the fireplaces, while the Miner house has but a single metal tubular flue above the woodburning heater. But both have porches, without which no rural home should be. No self-respecting dog should continue to live at a house without a porch.

  Don and Kim will confer, the former observing that apparently nobody is at home, the latter pointing out that if the mother is stone deaf and the son is retarded, how could we expect them to come to the door?

  “Most people,” Kim will remark, “are usually waiting for me, as if they were expecting me to come for the interview.”

  “Maybe they are waiting for you,” Don will suggest. “Only they are waiting inside the house.”

  But at that moment a pickup truck will come into the driveway and park behind Zephyra; a young (young?) man will get out and say, “Hi! You folks lookin for me?”

  He could be twenty-six; therefore we have to assume that he will be fifty-two. Unshaven, or perhaps one of those men who always look as if they have gone three days without a shave, whether it be three or thirty days in reality, he will be small but very lively, animated and wide awake, in strange contrast to his eyelids, which will seem on the continual verge of slumber. The dogs will stop barking at their first whiff of him and start an expectant thrashing of their tails. He will open the gate.

  “Do you live here?” Don will ask.

  “If you aint from the Watchtower, I do,” he will say, with a big smile of straight, perfect teeth. “If you’re from the Watchtower, no, I live down the road somewheres else.”

  Don will not hear this, but will say, “We were looking for Pearl Miner.”

  “Maw’s always home,” he will say, holding the gate open for them. “Come in. But she just don’t hear, at all.”

  Kim will be very reluctant to enter the gate, but Don will whisper to her, “Dogs won’t bite you when their master is around.”

  “Are you sure he’s their master?” Kim will whisper back, but Don will not hear that.

  They will climb the porch and enter the house, whose deep living room will be crowded with all kinds of chairs and sofas, as if it were a used-furniture store. At one end, Pearl Miner will be sitting in a chair that is more like a nest, surrounded by the things she wants and needs, including a rusty coffee can into which she occasionally will spit tobacco juice. Her teeth will be browned and stained but she will not look her ninety-six years. There will be no sign of the idiot son; perhaps they keep him locked in another room.

  But Alvie Miner, born October 5, 1931, is the only son here, and he is no idiot, or even feeble-minded, or anybody’s fool, although his appearance and manner may have led some of his neighbors to suspect that he “isn’t all there.” It will be Alvie who will discourse upon the conversion of the beloved Y into a trite T, using his fingers and hands to illustrate the difference. He will tell Kim and Don that he is convinced it will become officially T City, and he will sound so persuasive that they will wonder if he has private information unknown to the other inhabitants.

  Pearl Miner will sit throughout Alvie’s explanation as if politely listening to something she has heard before, but it will be clear that she hears nothing. Occasionally she will look at Kim as if expecting a question. The woman will seem to understand the subject of their inquiry: the rise and fall of Y City, or, rather, the simple facts of its existence, for it has neither risen nor fallen. Occasionally she will say something about there once being some stores down at the Y, but her words will not record at all on the tape.

  “She’s got a real good memory,” Alvie will say. “She can remember everything, and she could tell you anything there is to tell, if there was anything to tell. If she could only hear…”

  Kim will reflect, and will later remark to Don, that Pearl Miner is like a lost town herself. She has shut down, closed up, and lives not so much in the present as in the past. Like lost towns, she is difficult to reach.

  Don, whose pocket always contains small blank index cards in case somebody needs to reach him, will scribble in block letters a question that he will hand to Alvie, asking, “Could you somehow ask her this?” The card, which will be preserved, says, “DID YOU EVER HOPE THAT Y CITY WOULD BECOME A CITY?”

  Alvie will read it slowly, will look at the reverse side, which is blank, then will read the obverse again. He will shake his head. “She caint read,” he will say. “And I couldn’t holler it to her so’s she could get it. But I doubt if ever she gave that any thought.” When the meeting will reach the point where neither Pearl nor Alvie will have anything further of substance to say about Y City, Alvie will show them a photograph, a framed enlargement of an old snapshot of the front of a magnificent “saddlebag” dogtrot log cabin, not unlike the Jacob Wolf house of Norfork, though more recent. “This is where I was born,” he will say. He will lead them out to the front porch and point: “It was just this side of that white trailer house you can see over yonder. This old double log house sat right there.”

  Don will exclaim “A two-story dogtrot!” and will examine the picture carefully. Both floors are porched for their entire length, a real vernacular veranda, though the porches are enclosed with chicken wire—not to keep out the legendary Ozark mosquitoes of giant size, but to keep small children, of whom Alvie is one, from falling off. The logs are not hewn and dovetailed at the corners, merely overlapped with saddle notches, indicating the less permanent, or more impatient, form of construction. Don will insist upon taking a photograph of this picture. Alvie Miner will laugh uproariously, finding it very funny that a photograph is being taken of a photograph, but he will obligingly hold it close to the camera, very still and steady.

  Kim will explain, “We are going to do a book.” There, she will admit to herself, I have said it: we WILL do a book.

  “That’ll be amazin,” Alvie Miner will exclaim, opening his heavy-lidded eyes wide. “It’ll be very amazin, ma’am. A book come out on Y City! That’ll be a real seller! Everybody’ll buy it!”

  “Think so?” Kim will ask.

  “Yeah, boy, I’m tellin ye!” Alvie will insist. “It’ll be amazin how they’ll all buy that book, and they’ll say, ‘Boy, I bought me a book here on Y City. Y City!’” He will shake his head at the wonder of it, and then will apologize: “I wish I could give you more information than I did, but there’s just not much. If you ever come back this way, maybe I can help you another way. I’ll be glad to help you any way and any time.”

  “Thank you so much,” she will say.

  Alvie, who will have figured out that Professor Harrigan doesn’t hear an awful lot better than his mother, will say to Kim in parting, “And you take ca
re of him.”

  “I will,” she will say, and will mean it.

  As they are driving back to the motel, Don will remark, “You know, we should have asked them what those dogs’ names are.”

  There will not be much more to tell. That evening, they will go once more to the Midway, for supper. What they order, and what they eat, will not be recorded, or even observed; presumably it will have been edible, even tasty, at least nourishing. They will be so absorbed in each other that all they will notice—and it’s a wonder they will notice that—is that the lights will briefly go out following a loud crack of thunder. Through the big windows of the Midway, in the early darkness, they will see Cordie Rogers’s prediction come delugingly true.

  “Did I leave my car windows down?” Kim will wonder aoud.

  “I’ll get them,” Don will say, and rush outside.

  “Wait!” Kim will call after him, too late.

  He will be thoroughly drenched in the few leaping steps from the door of the Midway to the door of Zephyra, will jump inside, and will discover that there are no handles to crank to raise the windows; instead there are switches that activate the power windows, but these switches will not function unless the ignition key is turned on. After fumbling with the switches on both doors for some time, he will climb out into the downpour and rush back to the Midway, where Kim will be waiting in the shelter of the doorway, holding out the car keys to him; he will take them and go out into the rain a third time, and, after finding the right key to turn the ignition to activate the window raisers, a fourth time. He will return to their table looking as if he had walked through Mill Creek Falls. His brown-plaid flannel shirt, she will be happy to decide, will have to be replaced, changed out of, very soon. They will skip dessert.

  Back at the Mountain Inn, Don will sound sheepish: “I haven’t even taken time to check into my room yet.”

  “You have a room?” she will ask.

  “Number two,” he will say.

  “Reserved?” she will ask. He will nod. “Well,” she will say. She will think. Until this moment, she will not have given any thought to such contingencies. Then she will say, “Later you can check in. Right now, you’d better use my room to change into some dry clothes. You do have another shirt, I hope?”

  He will have another shirt. Three or four, in fact. She will pick out the best one, more urban than a flannel plaid, more springtimey, too, more in harmony with the pewter hair.

  “Do you have a necktie?” she will ask, smiling.

  “For what?” he will say.

  “You could dress up and go to the desk and say to Pat Heinen, ‘Now, where is this Y City?’” He will not get it. She will ask, “Do you know Pat Heinen?”

  “Only by mail,” he will say.

  “You’ve accomplished a lot by mail,” she will observe.

  “Mail can make miracles,” he will say. “Mail made me meet you.

  Has he already told her that in the magic year of 1886, Rodin made a sculpture…Yes, he will already have told her that, but she will kiss him again, or he her, she isn’t sure which. Has he told her that in the passionate year of 1886 Victor Herbert came to America? He will be almost sure that she has never even heard of Victor Herbert, or of “Kiss Me Again,” although she will have heard of “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,” which he will not be able to hum for her, but the themes of which will replace the Theme of the Faraway Hills as background music for the rest of this enchanted evening.

  Of all the endless subjects they will cover in the course of their marathon conversation this evening, with the sound of the rain growing and swelling and fading then growing again, only a small amount will be relevant to the subject of this book. They will, of course, talk too rapidly and too much, trying to tell each other their entire life stories, filling in the details they have neglected in their great correspondence. When, sometime in the stormy night, it will dawn on Kim that she will never be able to tell her story in one evening, and that, besides, there will be other evenings, many other evenings, she will give up the attempt.

  These are my streets, she will say. And here are the names I meant for them to have. Only this one was my boulevard, and it led from here to there; those several were my avenues, running from there to here. Each of these blocks was intended to have an alley, for access, for garbage, and for cats. On this corner would have stood my city hall, across from my opera house, or symphony. There would be my small park, or plaza, a pleasance for pigeons and balloons filled with helium. On this row of benches sit my ancestors, going way back, and talking of times that once were as if they are happening this afternoon. They will happen this afternoon, and tomorrow’s newspaper, published in this little building here, will make each of them, however trifling, have dignity and meaning and historical significance. Oh, and here we would have seen my post office in all its glory, where letters are never lost, and stamps cost only 11¢ forever and never go up, and the postmistress is the best storyteller in the city, whenever anyone asks her. Because she will have read the backs of postcards. Catty-cornered from the post office is my little café, where people sit to read their mail—the laughingest place in town, because the mail is always funny. If the contents of a letter, or even a piece of junk mail, are particularly amusing, the recipient will say, “Hey, everybody, get a load of this,” and will read it aloud, and everyone will share in the comedy. The city tour bus will pause at the door of this café, and the tour guide will attempt to explain the significance of all the laughter to the curious but solemn passengers. The tour bus also stops here, at my city’s monument, and here, at my architectural wonder, and over there, at my day-care center, and there, at my hospital, and here, beside my lagoon, where the passengers can step down to feed the fishes and the swans, and talk to the lovers. The last stop of the tour bus is my Palace of Best Memories, where each passenger is required to express onto permanent tape a narrative of the sweetest episode of his or her life. None of the passengers will consent to leave town when the tour is finished, for they will have discovered that none of the residents of the town will ever leave it, because it is the best place they have ever lived. But if you must leave, this area you pass through on your way out of town is not the zoo but my wildlife refuge, which no one is permitted to enter. Beyond the refuge is the Y.

  Will he be hearing all of this? He will raise one hand, first a fist but then, with the little finger raised and the thumb splayed, making two horns. “This is a Y,” he will say. “In sign language this is the way you make a Y.” With his other hand he will lift her hand, close his fingers over hers to make a fist, raise her little finger, spread her thumb. “That’s it: Y, which also stands for ‘you.’ What else does Y stand for? It stands for yellow, which was the prevailing color of Peter Mankins’s dreams and of the disappointed dreams of the rushers to Bear City. Yellow became the color of Sulphur City, and of your hair, now and at the time you were there. Listen, Kim: there isn’t really any sulphur in Sulphur City, or not enough to amount to much. There are no Cherokees in Cherokee City, except Kate Scraper, who lives far out of town. There is no real marble in Marble City, only limestone. No buffalo in Buffalo City, no lake in Lake City, you couldn’t find the mound in Mound City, no ‘Arkansas’ in Arkansas City, no garlands in Garland City, no bears in Bear City. But now…” He will hold up the sign language hand of the Y again. “There is the Y of ‘you’ in Y City, and that is all that I”—he will wiggle the little finger forming half the Y—“this is I, or i, and you are all that I have been searching for. Watch.” He will lower the little finger, raise his index finger, so that with the splayed thumb it forms the letter L: “This is L, for ‘love.’ Raise it in the middle of the Y and you have three letters conjoined: I and L and Y: ‘I love you.’”

  She will form her fingers like so, too.

  “Do you know,” he will say, almost conspiratorially, as if sharing with her an important secret, “that the Y in the road does not signify the splitting or divergence of a road into two separate paths? No
, rather, it means the coming together of two separate paths into a common road. You just have to look at it the other way around.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” she will say. She will think about it, and then it will be she who will suggest, “Let’s come together.”

  When Flossie Boren will knock to make up the room, they will both be still asleep, and Flossie will go away. Word will have spread quickly through the tiny community that there is a girl at the motel who is trying to discover the life of the place, and that there is a man who appears to be traveling with her and performs magic, such as making everything appear to be only half its actual age, and Flossie will open room number two and discover that it is not occupied, although a green Ambassador is falling apart right outside the door, and she will put two and two together. She will spread this gossip elsewhere along the grapevine, so that when Don and Kim will appear at the Midway yet again, for breakfast, the waitresses and the cook, too, will whisper among themselves. Perhaps all of them will be hoping that the girl and the man will interview them next, but there is only one person remaining in this town, in this book, who will be interviewed.

  When the eggs and the bacon will be placed before them, Kim will ask Don, “Well, what comes after Y?”

  “Pardon?” he, adjusting his hearing aid to the new day, will say.

  “What comes after Y?” she will repeat.

  “Z,” he will say. He will smile and elaborate “Z, as in Zephyra.”