River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  Love forever,

  Grace

  Chapter 4

  Potluck on Turquoise Court

  JUNE 30, 1978

  CARPENTER ONE: Anything happening tonight?

  CARPENTER TWO: There’s something on Turquoise Court. Couple of guys from New York.

  CARPENTER ONE: You going?

  CARPENTER TWO: Definitely!

  JENNINGS’S MOST CONSTANT FRIEND FROM CHILDHOOD was Larry Sassone, whose nickname was Itchy, not because he scratched himself any more than the next fellow, or because he suffered from any skin ailments, but because he liked to read and quote Friedrich Nietzsche, which had been misheard as “itchy.” And that was all it took in Larry and Jennings’s set—Windsor County boys living in tract houses, tenant homes, or trailers, who had been written off by their teachers, and everyone else. They were boys whose prospects did not register on the great Richter scale of American prosperity, hardhanded, proud, physically brave, and intellectually reticent boys at war with school, as they were with many other aspects of organized society, which was a stacked deck from which the assholes got dealt the aces.

  Larry Sassone had not been an outstanding student at Leyden High School but he did like school and he had graduated, unlike many of his friends. From there he had gone on to Windsor Community College, where the tuition was low and he could take one or two classes at night and still put in forty hours painting houses for his uncle. Larry’s plan was to take a few classes at Windsor and if all went well to transfer to a four-year college. But that path was not so much abandoned as lost, like a trail through the woods obscured by new growth and falling leaves and toppled trees. Part of the difficulty was that he was his own advisor, and he signed up for courses that had little to do with each other—small-engine repair, music appreciation, geology, German history. After four years he had no more direction than he had had in high school, and, more important, he hadn’t created any momentum behind the idea of leaving Leyden, quitting his job, and getting a four-year degree. The other difficulty was that his uncle and his partner were dyed-in-the-wool Deadheads and smoked pot all day long, from which Larry could not politely abstain. He took one toke for their every five, but still, by the end of the workday he was exhausted from the work and getting high and coming down and getting high again and coming down again and all he could do was watch TV and eat.

  When Larry was still making his way through WCC’s course catalog, he took a class called the New American Novel, in which he and eleven other students read Norman Mailer, Richard Fariña, Rudolf Wurlitzer, and William Burroughs. The instructor was named Joel Ward, a compact man in his forties with a well-tended beard, and an explosive manner. He felt demeaned by teaching at Windsor Community College, with its part-time student body and its little quadrangle of buildings with all the grandeur of cereal boxes. “Oh, woe is moi,” Ward said with a sigh before every class.

  Glorified high school or not, in Ward’s class Larry felt he was getting a taste of what it would be like at a real college. Ward paced, jabbed his finger at whatever page was being explicated, and threw chalk at students he sensed were not paying attention. He talked about the assigned reading as if the students were being given information that would set them apart from ordinary people, membership in a society that was better than they were.

  Ward owned a small house outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, and at the end of the semester he asked Larry if he might be interested in coming out to New Mexico and slapping paint on some walls, and fixing things up in general. This meant Larry was Ward’s favorite student, as far as Larry was concerned. He was unaware that Ward often used his class as a hiring pool, a kind of de facto shape-up when he needed manual work done.

  “I would have gotten an A, but my final paper was late because we were repainting Windsor Diagnostics,” Larry explained to Jennings. They were driving his bright yellow Datsun, beginning their journey to New Mexico. Beneath them, the Hudson throbbed with reflected light. Professor Ward had told Larry he could bring a helper and Jennings was more than willing. He was working no more than two days a week—little scraps of employment the Boyetts threw in his direction, and Sunday night at the Mobil station on the dark edge of town, selling cigarettes, beer. Business was unusually brisk when he was behind the counter, since he didn’t card. His personal life—that is, his life with girls and women, the only kind of personal life that interested him, or of which he was capable—had traveled its inevitable path, as predictable as the earth’s orbit around the sun, to chaos and lies, until leaving Leyden seemed not only an appealing idea, but somewhat necessary.

  Jennings was restless. He wanted something to do, but the more he cast about for something that might occupy his body and mind, the less appealing everything around him appeared. He was starting to feel about life the way he sometimes felt about food if he waited too long to eat—there was a state of ravenous hunger that seemed to destroy appetite. You had waited too long and now nothing was right, nothing was good enough.

  “I want to own something,” Jennings said as they headed toward New Jersey. “I want to feel like something in this fucking world is mine.”

  “Yeah, me too,” said Larry, clearly not paying attention. He gripped the steering wheel as if it had a life of its own and might at any moment begin asserting its will. His eyes were fixed on the road, and he was salivating so nervously that he had to keep swallowing. He suddenly felt lost, exiled, though they had traveled less than a hundred miles.

  “What comes after New Jersey?” Jennings asked. “Pennsylvania?”

  “I guess,” said Larry. The farthest west he had ever traveled was Cleveland to visit his uncle Dean, who had three jobs, barber, bartender, security guard: a job for each ex-wife.

  “You’ve got a friend in Pennsylvania,” Jennings said.

  “I do?”

  “That’s what the license plates say.” He rolled the window down to feel the unfamiliar air, the surge of somewhere else.

  IT WAS A TWO-THOUSAND-MILE DRIVE from Leyden to Santa Fe. Larry thought they could drive it straight through—he would sleep while Jennings drove, and vice versa—but Jennings wanted to sleep outdoors and they had brought tents and sleeping bags with them. Jennings had fond, erotic memories of his sleeping bag; he’d lost his virginity in Livingston Park, to the sound of trees swaying and creaking in the wind, and coyotes urging him on somewhere in the distance.

  The Datsun behaved, they kept off the toll roads, and found fairly priced food and gas. America was full of places to sleep under the stars—they pitched their tents in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Missouri, and Oklahoma. They got high, met some nice people, and in Missouri a dog adopted Jennings for the night—a silky black mutt about fifty pounds who slinked into his tent, only to be gone by first light.

  They both had fantasies about what it would be like to be in New Mexico—courtyards, adobe walls, a burrow tied to a hitching post, mesquite fragrantly smoking in a hearth lined with blue-and-white tiles. But Ward lived in a little split-level bungalow that could have been anywhere, no more distinctive or local than a stop sign, in a neighborhood of similar-looking houses, a kind of lower-middle-class development of which there were several back in Windsor County. And the house itself was in far worse condition than Larry had been led to believe. Here in New Mexico, Ward looked unkempt and unslept, boozed up and pissed off. He was in the midst of marital upheaval. His Austrian wife had left him and taken their seven-year-old son to Klagenfurt. He was on the sofa when they arrived. “You said you would be here yesterday,” he said, rising before either of them could sit down. It was stiflingly hot in the house; there were three air conditioners, but all of them had been unplugged. “Treat this house as your own,” he told them. “But go easy on the electric. It’s a total scam out here.” He went over the work he expected to be done and said he trusted them enough to advance them three weeks’ salary.

  “So I imagine this is the famous Jennings you were telling us all about,” Ward said, as he opened a farewell–to–Ne
w Mexico beer. He caught Jennings’s questioning look. “I was leading them through this great story by Norman Mailer.” Ward laughed, and glanced at his beer, as if he had opened it by accident. “It’s called ‘The Time of Her Time.’ It’s about trying to get this frigid chick to O. The main character calls his cock The Avenger, and your buddy here said he had a friend back home just like that.”

  “Not just like that,” Larry said, his face redder than a desert sunset.

  “That ain’t me,” Jennings said, rattled.

  “Well, you and your avenger will find plenty to do in Santa Fe,” Ward said. “Myself, I was married. And stupidly faithful.”

  He left for the airport an hour later, off to Vienna and to an Austrian court, where he hoped to gain shared custody of his child. The electric eye governing the entrance to his small garage was malfunctioning; the door rattled up and down unceasingly, hitting the cracked concrete floor of the garage on the downstroke. Jennings and Larry stood at the window, waving good-bye more or less sarcastically as Ward backed his car out of the driveway and onto the curving little roadway that connected the hundred or so bungalows in Turquoise Court.

  Even with Ward’s air conditioners plugged back in and running full blast, it was blazing hot in the house and the paint fumes made breathing like taking the worst drug they’d ever known. They worked in their skivvies, with handkerchiefs tied around their heads to keep the sweat out of their eyes. The hair on their arms and legs looked frosted from the primer that became airborne as they rolled it onto the walls. By evening they were so tired and dehydrated that they got drunk quickly and cheaply, as they sampled Santa Fe’s many bars. Mark my words, Larry said, leaning onto the bar at Quixote and Sons. He raised a finger like some wise man about to explain the world, but he was unable to come up with whatever was next, and turned the finger around and pressed it to the side of his head, and made an exploding sound. They both started to laugh, boisterously, with a kind of male insistence on their right to be in this dopey little bar, with its gaudy embroidered sombreros on the wall next to the picture of a naked girl backing into a hornpipe cactus. Their laughter was just short of unhinged, and it drew the attention of three women who were sharing a pitcher of margaritas in the back. They ventured over to find out what was so funny, and when Larry tried to explain, the effort unhinged him further, until you couldn’t understand a word he was saying and his laughter was high, breathless and girlish.

  All three of the women were short, with overdeveloped calves, porous skin beneath their tans, neon-colored lips. Andrea sold Avon products, Ruthie was looking for a job, and Charlene was a secretary at St. Michael’s High School out on Siringo Road. They invited Jennings and Larry to join them at their table. Andrea had short red hair and a wide space between her front teeth, and seemed to be the leader. She called over her shoulder to the bartender, “Another round of ’ritas, Kevin.” Jennings and Larry exchanged looks of impending triumph as they followed behind the women.

  Larry presented certain obstacles. He was self-conscious about his lack of size and jug ears so he compensated by talking as if he were Professor Lawrence Sassone and everyone else was there to learn from him. No wonder he and Hat got along so well. Jennings mainly drank quietly, but when one of the women asked where the two of them were from, Jennings was quick to answer New York, and he frowned at Larry to keep him from saying something along the lines of Well, not exactly New York City, but a little town up the river.

  Andrea wanted to make it clear to both of them that neither of them fulfilled her basic requirements when it came to men. “To me a man is someone going somewhere, not some dope pounding nails for beer money,” she said. “I like a professional-type guy, someone with ambition.” She was looking directly at Jennings, and he met her gaze straight on, hoping she could read his mind because he was thinking Yeah yeah, I know all about it. An hour later he was riding shotgun in her tan Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, on his way to her mobile home park, which was surrounded by high chaparral. Making love with Andrea was not the triumph he had envisioned. She called him Mr. New York in a tone that did not seem particularly warm and when he was on top she poked at his potbelly, as if trying to lift it off her. Afterward, she demonstrated her lack of satisfaction by thrashing around in her bed, folding and unfolding her foam-filled pillow, and finally almost flinging herself out of bed and repairing to the bathroom, only to return a minute later with an electric toothbrush, a bright blue Oral-B, which she turned on and lay across her pelvic bone, hoping the vibration might bring her to orgasm. Jennings found it sort of comical.

  “I can help you, if you want,” he said.

  “If you coulda ya woulda,” she said. She seemed to be quoting a song.

  “Can do,” said Jennings.

  “You got all this sexual confidence, man,” she said. “And I’m just here trying to figure out where the hell it comes from.”

  “You’re the one hundredth girl I slept with,” he said.

  “Well, happy anniversary,” she said, handing him the toothbrush.

  Larry, in the meantime, had driven Ruthie all the way to Taos, where her old boyfriend was living above a boot maker’s shop. They parked across the road and she spied mournfully on him, trying to somehow glean something by staring at his apartment’s darkened windows. When Jennings and Larry talked it over the next day they both agreed that, of the two of them, Larry had had the better night.

  But the three women, Ruthie, Andrea, and Charlene, formed the nucleus of Jennings and Larry’s Santa Fe social life, and it was they who encouraged the guys to throw a party on the last day of June. The potluck was called for six o’clock but by five there were already fifteen cars and pickup trucks jammed into the driveway and up on the lawn, and by six o’clock it seemed as if anyone in or around Santa Fe between the ages of twenty and thirty who was not a tourist and who was not rich was in Ward’s house. Some hulking guy with stringy hair, a sleeveless denim jacket, and fingerless gloves brought in a devastating stereo set with speakers the size of coffins, and he set it up behind the house, where the throb of the Bee Gees, Rita Coolidge, KC and the Sunshine Band, and Peter McCann singing “Do You Wanna Make Love?” seemed to chase the daylight out of the sky and hasten the gas-jet blue of the evening. Nobody called the cops, in fact a few people from Turquoise Court joined in, even brought bags of chips. Dave Houlihan from next door arrived with a spiral-cut ham and a bottle of Cuervo.

  By ten o’clock there were about two hundred people at the party, and despite the beer, grass, tequila, and sexual energy, people did a good job of respecting the new paint on the walls, though the floors got pretty scuffed up. The guys were going to have to rent a sander and buy a bucket of polyurethane to cover all the marks left behind by many many pairs of dancing stomping spinning Frye boots.

  They felt like guests at their own party. Most of the people there had no idea who the hosts were. The locals had known each other for years, some for their entire lifetimes, and for them it was just another venue for the party that had stretched from weekend to weekend forever. Roofers, cobblers, carpenters, trail guides, drywallers, plasterers, electricians, well drillers, highway department employees, apprentice jewelers, chambermaids, security guards, housecleaners, cabdrivers, restaurant workers, auto mechanics, clerks working in shops ranging from little boutiques selling turquoise-and-silver bolos to the new gigantic supermarket a mile out of town, child-care workers, and a few visiting relatives who’d come to Santa Fe looking for work, or to escape trouble, or to take time away from their husband, or their wife, or their kids, or to score drugs. Most were white, distantly Irish or German. A few were Mexican, a few were Navajo, there were some blacks and one set of Cambodian twins, who worked at La Fonda on the Plaza, one as a receptionist and the other as a bookkeeper.

  Larry was frantic, thinking it was his responsibility to talk to everyone who was there. Hi, great to see you. You need anything? Take it easy, remember this isn’t our house. Both the Cambodian girls spoke in astonishingly
loud voices and the one who was slightly less loud took a liking to Larry and after a while she became a kind of de facto cohost. Jennings was wishing they’d had the party on another day. He was tired. Friday nights were tough, coming as they did after a full week of work.

  Turquoise Court was at the border of some undeveloped land. A few years back it had been a horse ranch called the Kit Carson Ranch, where tourists paid by the hour to clip-clop around on old swaybacked nags. But a lawsuit had put the ranch out of business and now its nineteen acres were vacant, except for the slowly disappearing remnants of a barn and some of the two-rail fencing. What had once been pasture was now high chaparral. The land was up for sale and every now and then someone came over with a brush hog and leveled things.

  It was here that Jennings walked to get away from the throb of the party and it was here that he found a girl sitting on a boulder with her arms wrapped around her drawn-up knees and her head tilted back. She wore overalls, sandals, and a white T-shirt. Her arms were thin; the sleeves of her T-shirt surrounded them like the edges of a bowl surround a spoon. She gave no indication of hearing footsteps as Jennings approached her, and even when he was practically standing right next to her she continued to gaze up at the star-mad sky, as if waiting for something to happen up there.

  Jennings spoke first. “Are you from the party?”

  She nodded. She had a narrow face, and long brown hair. He wondered how someone could look spooky and so deeply kind. She had a ring on every finger.

  “It’s my party,” Jennings said. “So welcome, even though you’re out here.”