by Jan Carson
That night, driven by a dark, city lust, Claire offered her husband the excuse of an office Christmas party. She fixed his dinner at the ungodly hour of 4pm, washed and curled her hair and prepared to sneak out of the apartment in a borrowed gown worth almost half a year’s rent. ‘Don’t wait up, honey,’ she sang over her retreating shoulder, ‘it’ll be a late one. The girls from the accounts department sure do know how to party.’ The smell of expensive perfume lingered in her wake like an exotic antidote to the apartment’s usual kitchen scents.
Struck by a wave of nostalgia, Cunningham Holt reached to grab at his wife’s fleeting elbow, capturing instead a handful of thick cashmere coat. ‘Who are you tonight, Claire?’ he asked. She laughed like a birthday balloon recently punctured and said, ‘Salome, off to dance in a borrowed dress.’ Cunningham Holt held his tongue and smiled, still wary of admitting ignorance in front of his new wife.
(Much later, after the sinking and the funeral, when the thought of Claire had been surrendered to the soil in a plywood coffin weighted with bricks, Cunningham Holt would turn to the itinerant preacher conducting the service and ask, ‘Sir, is there a lady named Salome in history or the Bible?’
‘Shoosh,’ the itinerant preacher would hiss somewhat hysterically, being of the short-sighted belief that the blind were almost inevitably also hard of hearing. ‘I don’t care if your wife was Jezebel herself. It’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, Mr Holt.’
Though he’d never heard of Jezebel either, Cunningham Holt would gather it was neither the time nor the place to pursue his ignorance. ‘God rest her pretty soul,’ he’d cry, eye sockets sopping with treacherous intent. ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ he’d say as the itinerant preacher raised a loud ‘Amen.’ ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord,’ he would mumble into the advent rain and curse his own dumb luck, and curse the Lord of luck and also loss, and finally curse his Jezebel bride to the very bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.)
Once the apartment door had swooshed closed behind her, Claire became a different person. Leaving all memory of Cunningham dozing dully on the Chesterfied suite, she swept her skirt tails up in one hand and ran down all three flights of stairs, giggling like a prom-bound teenager. Outside she walked two brisk blocks and hailed a cab to downtown Manhattan. The night proceeded along lines long established by all those adulterers who’d passed before them, lustering down Fifth Avenue and skirting Central Park in rented buggies. The editor proper dined Claire first and subsequently wined her in a series of exclusive bars and nightclubs. As the night progressed towards its inevitable conclusion the editor proper became less proper and more adept in his exploration of her undergarments. ‘Perhaps we should slip away from here,’ he suggested, yelling across the third of four empty Martini glasses, which littered their section of the bar. ‘Let’s find somewhere a little quieter.’
And thus it came to pass that Claire Holt found herself supine in a sailboat, fumble-minded and hitching her fifty-dollar skirts for a balding man from North Carolina. Overhead, on the pier, other courting couples kissed and conversed and admired the November night sky, whilst in a small dinghy fifty feet below the pier Claire closed her eyes and hoped to high Heaven that all this sweaty unpleasantness would definitely lead to a corner office, south facing. However, it was not the thrashing, crashing act of adultery exercised in a floating vessel which led to Claire’s untimely death, but rather the combination of six gin and tonics (which caught her on disembarkation, fuzzy-footed and toppling into the ice cold river), and the cashmere coat (which was a lead weight when damp, dragging her quickly to the bottom of the river).
The editor proper, who was an honest man at heart – a non-practicing Catholic with guilty feet – did the honorable thing and offered to break the news himself.
‘I’m afraid I have some bad news about your wife,’ he announced to Cunningham, standing in the living room of the apartment, somewhat reluctant to commit himself to the Chesterfield suite.
‘She’s sunk, hasn’t she?’ replied Cunningham Holt and plucked out his painted eyeballs, left first, followed by right, for they tended to slip out when he wept.
The editor proper, removing his hat in a gesture of sympathetic guilt, backed quickly out of the apartment and fled home to his own wife who, despite her similarity to an aging sheep, was very much alive and unsunk. Later, when the shock had finally abated and the sleeves of his overcoat were beginning to dry out, the editor proper would wonder how Cunningham Holt could possibly have known.
Trapped by the unknown jungle outside his front door, Cunningham Holt wasted fifty-two years in Brooklyn, New York. He braced himself nightly for the earthquake he knew was coming. ‘No man knoweth the hour nor the day,’ he muttered under his breath as he lumbered up and down the sidewalk on his daily pilgrimage from the front stoop to the bodega on the corner. The world, he knew, would not end in fire or flood but in a sinking to end all sinkings. Cunningham Holt woke each morning surprised to find his tenement had made it through another night without succumbing to the sidewalk.
Over the years he developed a fine ear for a good, sure thing and survived on five full decades of bets and wagers. In the early days he confined himself to the horses, multiplying his wife’s life insurance policy to twice, thrice and finally four times its original value before the first anniversary of her death. Later he moved on to football (both American and European), to baseball and basketball games and to Nascar (of which he had no visual notion and consequently could not understand the appeal). Having exhausted the sporting realms he ventured into politics, beauty pageants, the popular music charts and even the weather, which, whilst all else kept to seasons and fixtures, offered a constant opportunity for a sly wager.
Cunningham Holt was remarkably adept at predicting the future. Whilst he remained preoccupied by the surefire knowledge of an apocalyptic sinking, he was equally capable of short-term prophetics. Ordinary folks and small-time gangsters came from five blocks out to pick his tipping brain. He charged two bucks a premonition, later upping his rate to five bucks, tracking the rise of inflation in the late seventies. He grew moderately rich on his winnings but refused to spend a solitary cent beyond the necessary. As the fifties and sixties rolled slowly across America, trumpeting in the protest movement, Cunningham Holt began to fear for the safety of his fortune. Riots on the wireless soon erupted into riots in the street outside his window and so Cunningham collected his lifelong earnings in an old suitcase and shuffled down to Wells Fargo where he opened the very first and only bank account of his existence.
Cunningham Holt lived a simple life, eating meager meals – bread, cheese and shop-sliced pastrami – at the card table in his kitchen. He refused to redecorate the apartment or purchase soft-furnishings more in line with the current trends. ‘What,’ he joked to the various friends and business associates who kept his days trundling slowly forwards, ‘is the point in a blind fella wasting money on fancy wallpaper?’ He purchased a solitary pair of new pants and a V-neck sweater once every other year on rotation and never, not once in all his fifty-two New York years, considered for a moment the possibility of a vacation.
In the February of his seventy-first year, approximately halfway between his front stoop and the cigarette counter, Cunningham Holt slipped in a patch of frozen dog shit and fractured his left leg in two separate places. It was the final blow in a half-century war. Cunningham Holt cursed New York for the very last time and moved as far from the east coast as his absent passport would allow.
And thus the Baptist Retirement Village of Portland, Oregon, for no better reason than distance, had found itself blessed to admit Cunningham Holt, complete with seventy-one years of accumulated wisdom, a sock full of marble eyes and a stinking, bad attitude. The Board of Directors – after much negotiating and haggling over the cost of customizing a chalet to meet the needs of the visually impaired – decided to place Mr Holt in Chalet 6. In strict compliance with health and safety legislation, buzzers, handles, bells and wh
istles were duly fitted throughout the chalet. The Board of Directors, as was their normal custom, were one-third motivated by Christian benevolence and two-thirds driven by the fear of a lawsuit.
Cunningham Holt took one tour round his brand new chalet home and swiftly asked to purchase an RV.
‘Mr Holt,’ the appointed delegate from the Board of Directors asked, ‘with respect, can you tell me what use a “visually impaired” gentleman such as yourself should hope to get out of such a large motor vehicle?’
‘I shall park it in my drive and sleep there nightly,’ replied Cunningham. ‘I’m old and cranky and blind in both eyes. It’s my prerogative to do exactly as I want and I want to sleep in an RV.’
No amount of arguing or bribery could change Cunningham Holt’s mind. An enormous beige and brown RV was purchased and parked semi-permanently in the drive beside Chalet 6. To the great surprise of all those who’d known him in his early days (one remaining sister and a small-time crook, Brooklyn-based, who kept in touch for occasional tips), Cunningham Holt cast aside his grumpy demeanor and quickly became the life and soul of the cul-de-sac: feeling up the cleaning ladies, coordinating the Annual Thanksgiving Turkey and Tipples Tea Dance and, with the eager help of Bill and Irene, volunteering as a founding member of the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs.
Five thousand miles from New York City and suddenly unwalled, Cunningham Holt made a late return to the Kentucky kid of his first six years. He laughed hard at every given opportunity. He stood for hours in his pocket-sized back yard savoring the seasons in all their harsh splendor. He struck up a friendship with anyone who spoke American and made valiant attempts with the many Mexican speakers who kept the cul-de-sac clean and well-fed. He spent every night dreaming deeply inside the RV, fast asleep on the kitchen table which had been specially designed to transform into a bed. ‘I like it here,’ he lied to anyone who questioned his logic. ‘Makes me feel like I’m on a permanent road trip.’
The residents took to calling him ‘Easy Rider’ as a joke. The joke was wasted on Cunningham Holt, who had cruised through the entire twentieth century without glimpsing so much as a five-second reel of movie footage. When the residents ribbed him, regularly and with great affection, he simply smiled and confessed his ongoing love for the traveling life.
In truth, Cunningham Holt could not bring himself to spend an entire night inside Chalet 6. The sinking was coming and on the day of the Lord’s reckoning he wished to be found inside a building unhindered by bricks, sticks or any such heavy, dragging things. Like Noah before him and many big-time saints, Cunningham Holt ignored the mockery of the ignorant. He stuck with his RV bed, sleeping in fully laced boots and socks, mentally rehearsing his escape plan; up the curtains and through the skylight, unto the roof and down the fire escape, as soon as gravity started to steal the floor.
– Chapter Seven –
The People’s Committee for Remembering Songs
Using the sideboard for leverage, Cunningham Holt maneuvered himself to his feet and brushed a piece of imaginary lint from the front of his meeting suit. At seventy-six years old and advancing, every knock and bump contained the sly potential to be his last. He steadied himself slowly, cleared his throat and, slightly disorientated by the tumble, addressed Mrs Orange’s refrigerator like an old friend.
‘Young lady,’ he said, extending a solitary hand as if shoving the words out to greet her, ‘I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of your acquaintance. Cunningham Holt, Chalet 6, delighted to meet you.’
His hand met with eight square foot of bowed refrigerator belly. He withdrew it sharply and turned one hundred and eighty degrees to face Sorry. Cunningham Holt was an imposing man, almost six and a half feet tall in his brogues. He carried himself like the Washington Monument. Despite the cramped implications of RV life and other more obvious disabilities he kept himself fastidiously neat and well-dressed in the fashion favored by television detectives of a certain era. This morning he was wearing the latest of two dozen business suits; a gun-metal gray affair with open-necked shirt – sinless white as was his usual custom – unbuttoned to reveal several inches of leathered salami neck.
Soren James Blue was not accustomed to handshakes. She stretched her right arm across the divide and caught Cunningham’s hand up in an awkward, swooping high five.
‘Sorry,’ she said, and this passed for both introduction and apology.
‘Her name’s Soren James Blue,’ Malcolm quickly explained. ‘She’s the Director’s kid. She’s been here all summer because she throws up too much. No one’s seen her because they kept her locked up in the Center.’
‘I wasn’t locked up,’ interjected Sorry, ‘I could have left any time I wanted to.
‘Whatever,’ said Malcolm, affecting a disinterested drawl for Cunningham Holt’s benefit. ‘She’s out now and she’s quit throwing up so it looks like whatever they did in there actually worked. And Sorry, this here is Cunningham Holt. His is the Chalet with the RV in front. He’s probably my best friend around here.’
Upon hearing this confession Cunningham Holt’s face split in half horizontally, stretching upwards to meet his earlobes in a broad parody of a watermelon slice. His cheeks turned raspberry pink and the furthermost tip of his nose flushed raw in sympathy. Cunningham Holt was exceedingly fond of Malcolm Orange.
‘And,’ whispered Malcolm, lowering his voice to avoid embarrassing his friend, ‘he’s completely blind!’
‘No shit?’ retorted Soren James Blue, stabbing an incriminating finger in the direction of Cunningham Holt who, unaware of recent changes to the Oranges’ kitchen layout, was lowering his perfectly pressed backside on to the laundry basket containing Ross. Malcolm, exploiting the time it takes for an elderly man with rheumatoid arthritis to make the grating shift from standing to seated, dashed across the room and switched Ross for the most substantial of the kitchen chairs. Cunningham Holt sat down and rested his hands on his lap.
‘What’s this about you disappearing, son?’ he asked gently.
‘It’s all bullshit,’ Sorry replied on Malcolm’s behalf and for her impertinence received a sharp toe poke to the shin. ‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with him. I was just checking him over with a flashlight and I couldn’t find a single hole … except for the normal ones.’
Malcolm Orange blushed furiously and ignored her. Over the last few months he’d grown exceptionally fond of Cunningham Holt. The two friends had spent many happy hours in the RV listening to the horse racing and playing marbles with the old man’s spare eyes.
Malcolm was well aware of Cunningham’s myriad quirks and inadequacies. He was almost seven times older than the boy and ignorant of anything more modern than a toaster oven. Blind as a bat and prone to prophetic ramblings, he’d lately pronounced the President ‘a snake-tongued imbecile’; television ‘an agent of the Antichrist’; and the American Constitution ‘an exercise in national self-delusion.’ Furthermore, the world, Malcolm had come to repeatedly learn, was due an almighty sinking, and though no man (not least Cunningham Holt) knew the day nor the hour, the end was unarguably nigh.
An ordinary boy might have grown tired of Cunningham Holt’s overzealous imagination but Malcolm Orange was far from ordinary. Having spent the previous decade trawling America’s back roads with a bevy of wooly-brained seniors, Malcolm Orange had come to relish the wild and oftentimes truthful revelations of the almost senile. It was not unknown for Malcolm to play the Devil’s Advocate, further inciting Cunningham Holt’s already frantic ramblings.
‘Come quick, Cunningham,’ Malcolm would often yell through the RV’s open window. ‘Bring your measuring tape. I think the chalet’s sunk another inch overnight.’
‘Listen to this, Cunningham,’ he’d said on several occasions, positioning the old man in front of the latest episode of the X-Files, ‘it’s a documentary about the government’s new research department.’
‘Lord save us,’ Cunningham Holt would cry, though he no longer belie
ved in either the Lord or His ability to save. ‘The world’s gone to hell in a hand basket. It won’t be long ’til the end now.’
(Towards the summer’s close, when his paranoia had reached a point of no return, Cunningham Holt had grabbed Malcolm by the wrist and asked him, with heartbreaking sincerity, to bind the corners of Chalet 6 with strong ropes to something tall and stable; a telegraph pole, ideally.
‘Malcolm, my boy, I have all my savings tied up in that chalet,’ he’d explained, making a wrenching knot of his hands. ‘God has it in for me and I know the ropes won’t stop him from taking it away but they might slow him down long enough to get my furniture out.’
Moved to guilt, and small moments of repentance, Malcolm Orange had attempted to reassure the older man with increasingly elaborate lies.
‘The chalet’s not sinking anymore, Cunningham,’ he’d confessed. ‘In fact, I think it’s started unsinking. I swear it’s six inches taller than it was last week. I’ll take a measuring tape and measure it for you myself.’
‘That’s very kind of you to offer, Malcolm,’ Cunningham Holt had replied, unconvinced by the idea of a God suddenly capable of actual, physical resurrections, ‘but sooner or later everything’s going to sink. No man knoweth the day nor the hour but I’ll be damned if I’m not prepared.’
‘Whatever makes you feel better,’ Malcolm had conceded, and spent the better part of a weekend pretending to bind an entire house to the highest heights. For this purpose he’d used imaginary ropes, imaginary wires and a swarming gaggle of expensive, helium-filled, imaginary balloons. The neighbors had appeared on their doorsteps, curious to see what Malcolm Orange was up to as he ascended and descended a borrowed stepladder, describing in loud detail this complex feat of imaginary engineering.
At first they’d mocked. Skeptic as the bastard sons of Noah, they’d patrolled the outer limits of the Holt estate, asking cryptic questions and edging ever closer to out-and-out mockery. When Malcolm had finally mounted an upturned bucket and explained to the entire cul-de-sac in hushed tones and with deliberate stealth, that all this – even the stepladder – was an elaborate exercise in reassuring Cunningham Holt, the mood changed dramatically. The residents of the retirement village were extremely fond of Cunningham, and any exercise in soothing his sinking heart seemed worthy, not only of acceptance, but also encouragement.