River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  “Tomorrow will be okay,” said Thaddeus. His disappointment was mild; he wasn’t really expecting a yes. “Did I tell you I’m up for a Tom Selleck thing?”

  “That’s nice,” she said.

  “It’s crap. But I should do it. He wants to play a teacher. The working title is—get this—Tom Is a Teacher. All they want is three weeks.” He rubbed his hands together in a burlesque of greed. “I must take care of my family.”

  “And now you’re taking care of another family.”

  “Which is going to just . . . it’s beautiful. We’ll live here, all of us, together. If we ever have to, we can all grow our own food. And what a place for kids. We’ll get a dog.”

  “Thaddeus. It’s late. We’re drunk. We just gave away a house. And by the way, Laura told me ‘we’ gave her a thousand-dollar bonus for Christmas. That was inappropriate, too. It just is. Are you trying to buy people? I really don’t get it. Are you trying to impress Sam and Libby?”

  From down the hall came David’s cries. Not a sleepy baby, he was given to sudden wakings, puzzling tantrums. But tonight’s cries sounded especially anguished.

  “Oh Christ,” Grace said, sitting up.

  “Let me,” said Thaddeus.

  But before he could move, they heard Laura’s hurried footsteps toward the baby’s room.

  “Is Laura even on tonight?” Grace asked.

  David’s cries stopped; Laura was always so good with him. They heard her pacing back and forth, her indecipherable murmurs.

  The sound of a southbound train came up through the darkness, a long, long guttural hum, and then it was gone, leaving silence in its wake.

  Thaddeus put his arms around Grace. He kissed her and she kissed him back in that way she had, the way that cleared a path to what was most private and undefended in her. He thought of it as a place, a kind of Garden of Eden in reverse, where you were not expelled by knowledge but gained entrance through sex. Don’t be gentle, she whispered.

  They made love furiously but silently, aware of Laura and the baby. Finally, they slept but somewhere in that unlucky hour near 3 A.M., Thaddeus woke. He had a recollection of kissing Grace’s hand and it came to him that the finger that ought to be wearing the emerald ring was bare. The ring she had yearned for when they were poor, the ring he had gone through an ordeal to give her after Hostages sold. He had journeyed out to Syosset where Gina of Gina’s Gems’ sister-in-law lived. Thaddeus had kept a cab at the door while he haggled with the sister-in-law, who kept a Jane Fonda exercise video running on her TV and a Chihuahua on her lap the whole time.

  He couldn’t contain himself. Sitting up in bed, he shook her shoulder. “Grace,” he said. “Did you lose the emerald ring?” He waited for an answer, but she was either dead to the world or doing a first-class job of pretending.

  Chapter 8

  The Rabbit and the Jewel

  JUNE 2, 1983

  * * *

  COME ONE COME ALL

  Muriel’s Birthday!

  When: June 2, 1 P.M.–??

  Where: Hat’s Place at Orkney

  Rain or Shine

  Bring a dish, a bottle, a six-pack, and a smile.

  * * *

  JUST TWO DAYS AGO IT WAS CHILLY AND DRIZZLING, AND there wasn’t enough sun to burn off the morning mist. It had curled like smoke across the fields and turned into an impenetrable fog once evening came. But now Muriel was having a bit of birthday luck because it was a beautiful afternoon. The sky was dark blue, Smurf blue. The lilac bushes were mad with purple blooms, pumping out their sweet aroma. The fruit trees flowered pink and white, growing just beyond the swath of property that had been deeded over to Hat. Without Hat the trees would probably be dead. He pruned and sprayed them, wrapped the bottoms of their trunks in burlap against the winter’s ravaging rodents, and harvested them from August to September, from peaches to pears.

  About forty people were on hand to celebrate Muriel’s birthday, and you never knew how many more might be on the way. Nearly everyone brought a dish, or a twelve-pack, or wine, or pot. Bob Brody had chips and salsa he brought home from visiting his sister in Texas, the salsa so hot you had to be brave even to taste it. Jennings, Larry Sassone, and a couple of other friends had dug a pit where the main course was going to be fire-roasted. They had woven together sixty or so steel rods, with long handles made of rebar on all corners—a double-sided, homemade grill. Marinated chicken parts were placed on the grill and coated with barbecue sauce that one of the guys swabbed on with a string mop as they sizzled over the fire.

  Jennings and Muriel were still living with Hat. Muriel baked pies and sold them to the diner, and Jennings had drifted into doing Hat’s work for him. Both of them were off the books; as far as the IRS was concerned, they didn’t exist. Jennings could not help but note that most of his guests were doing better than he was, making more money, putting together respectable lives—though he would not have traded places with one of them. One day he would dig up that ring, take it up to Montreal, or down to the city, and with the money start his own business—probably asbestos removal, although he could install it, too, it was still the best insulation out there.

  The guests. Some of them worked in the Leyden school system, as bus drivers, lunchroom help, custodians. A few worked at Research Tech, breeding mice and rats for science experiments. Jill Hoover worked in the shoe department at the JCPenney across the river, which was odd since her left leg had been amputated below the knee when she was nine years old. Rory LeBraca carved headstones. Carol and Lois Weber, redheaded twins, worked at the anemone farm, keeping the greenhouses tidy, preparing the blooms for shipment to florists all over the world. Jody Tomjonavic was a mason and had the cough and pallor of someone who’d been on the job for decades. George Zook had inherited his father’s job collecting tolls on the Leyden side of the bridge. Even on his days off Zook smelled of auto exhaust. Jerry Neuhauser, Bob Brody, and Oscar Hillman were long-distance truck drivers, all with potbellies that seemed to have suddenly appeared like puffball mushrooms on the lawn after a rain. John Oberman was home from Germany after six years in the army and had opened a karate studio. Mary Beth Quinn, the oldest of eight sisters, had been valedictorian in her class at Leyden High. Once mousy and recessive, she now had platinum hair, wore bright red lipstick; she worked as office manager for a real estate lawyer, whose baby she was rumored to be carrying. Swinging hammers, pounding nails, cleaning gutters, installing flashing, several of the guests spent the working days high above the ground, and one by one they went into the yellow house where they paid their respects to Hat, who rarely left his room.

  It was not clear exactly what was wrong with Hat, except to say that since falling from that tree he was not the same. Was it his back, his shoulder, his hip? It could have been he’d lost his nerve, haunted by the possibility of another mishap. Maybe he sensed his luck had run out on him. It was impossible to get him to talk about it. He pretended he hibernated out of choice, not exactly bedridden, not really housebound, but just there, his room filling up with an ever increasing accumulation of cups and saucers, magazines, shoes, boots, piles of clothes that Muriel laundered and folded for him but which he had yet to hang in his closet or place in his dresser, and boxes of rocks he had collected over the years and which he now intended to label and catalog. At least once a day, and sometimes two or three times, he tore a sheet from one of his notebooks and in his fragile handwriting made to-do lists for Jennings. They had not been explicit about this, but both father and son were becoming adjusted to the reality that from now on the work on the property would be done by a combination of Jennings’s body and Hat’s mind.

  “Hey, Pop, you want me to get a couple of windows open for you?” Jennings said, letting himself into Hat’s room. It was like a convection oven in there, a dry, pulsating heat, though Hat himself seemed oblivious to it. Fully dressed, washed, shaved, his hair combed, his boots laced up, a handkerchief folded neatly into his breast pocket, Hat was stretched out on his bed, readin
g North and South by John Jakes.

  “Well, I’m afraid you’ve caught me reading a real potboiler,” Hat said. “It comes highly recommended but what you essentially have here is an old-fashioned soap opera pretending to be history.”

  Hat held forth on the library book, which was wrapped in thick plastic like an old lady’s couch—and Jennings was left with his fixed smile. There were times when he simply could not bear it. His father’s love of all that culture seemed like a sad charade, a pretend passion that was useless and embarrassing, like falling in love with a photograph, or with someone who doesn’t even know you’re alive. Hat liked to wag and wave his finger when he listened to his beloved Beethoven, as if this music was in his blood, and he leaned forward and nodded judiciously when he watched some show about volcanoes or King Tut on Channel 13. And really what good had all these books and magazines and records and hours in museums done the old man? He had no money, his body had quit on him, and without his body, his hands, his strength, his good old-fashioned know-how, he was useless and without value, even to himself. And he was lonely. He and his daughter were not on speaking terms—one spanking was all it had taken! And his wife had been dead for so long he had in all likelihood half-forgotten her, or had allowed a thousand different impressions gleaned from poetry and painting to leech into the precious little pool of true recollection. “Your mother loved this poem,” he often said, no longer daring to read so much as a line of it aloud to Jennings, but holding the Robert Burns book or the Gerard Manley Hopkins or the Tennyson, the Longfellow. And it was so clearly a fantasy, so clearly a steaming pile of horseshit. Dot Stratton did not love those poems. Dot Stratton loved Red Matthews, owner of Leyden Stone and Gravel, a married man with soft white hair all over his body like dandelion spores and eyes like bullet holes, for whom she worked as secretary and bookkeeper.

  Jennings thrust a cold bottle of Genesee Cream Ale into Hat’s hand. “You feeling okay, Pop?”

  Hat accepted the beer without looking at it. It was his way of suggesting profound indifference, though he drained the entire bottle in two long swallows. “Brewed two hundred miles from where we sit right now,” he said, gazing now at the bottle. “The water they use is from some of the most significant glacial lakes on the East Coast. This is water drawn from a source twenty-five fathoms deep. It’s an inexpensive beer, a workingman’s beer, but for my money it has qualities far superior to many of your German imports.”

  “Aren’t you hot in here, Pop? How about I get this window open for you?”

  “It’s painted shut. You’re going to have to go to the toolshed and get a putty knife, a finishing hammer, and a mallet. And a rag, too, don’t forget the rag. When you use the mallet around the window frame, the rag will protect the paint.”

  “Let me just give her a try.”

  “I’m telling you it’s stuck.”

  “I’m just going to turn around and give her a try,” Jennings said. He was careful to explain because a few months ago he noticed one day that his father was not speaking to him at all, and in fact pretended to be asleep whenever Jennings came into the room. He let it ride for a few days and finally asked his father if something was wrong, to which Hat replied, You turned your back on me while I was talking last week.

  Jennings jammed his fingers into the lift and pulled the window up. It offered practically no resistance.

  “You got it!” Hat exclaimed.

  “Yeah, you musta loosened her up.”

  “Must have,” Hat said.

  “All right, Pop. Whatever you like.”

  “It’s not about what I like, Jennings. You know how they say a man who will kick a cat will beat a wife? The same goes for mangling the king’s English.”

  “The king ain’t here, Pop. Why don’t you come down for a while? Jewel would get such a kick out of it.”

  “Jewel. I’m starting to get used to that name. It grows on you.”

  “Come on, Pop. It’s Muriel’s birthday.”

  “Sometimes I think our friends the Jehovah’s Witnesses have the right idea about not celebrating birthdays.”

  Voices from a few of the guests flew into the room, as suddenly present as birds. The loudest was Larry Sassone’s. “Slop some more sauce on the chicken tits,” he called out cheerfully.

  Hat fluttered his legs, rose up on his elbows, but did not leave the bed. “What’s going on out there?” he asked.

  “We made a fire pit for the cookout,” Jennings said.

  “In the hollow? Noise from the hollow carries straight to the big house. They can’t be bellowing like a bunch of hopped-up Turks out there. You go down lickity split, mister, and make things right.”

  As Jennings made his way to quiet his friends at the fire pit, he cringed at the sound of their voices, so hard and boisterous, without nuance, all of them on the same audio errand: to be heard, to rise above the fray, to say, My turn. Me! I’m here!

  “Hey, guys, guys, come on, you gotta keep it down,” Jennings told them. “The sound goes right into their windows.”

  “Whose windows?” Ricky Smith asked. He was the oldest person at the party, over sixty. Though holding a string mop dripping with barbecue sauce, he nevertheless looked like a priest, with his scrubbed pink skin and snowy white muttonchops, and small eyes that twinkled like blue Christmas lights.

  “We are ever so sorry,” Sue Petersen said, ever so droll. Her face was flushed from the heat of the fire.

  “At least my voice can get in that house,” Larry said. “The rest of me would never get through the door.” His belly pressed against the fabric of his jokey apron that said May I Toast Your Buns?

  “Unless to fix something,” said Sue. She had shiny black hair and a sun-blasted face. She’d become a widow at twenty, when her husband, a volunteer fireman, crashed his pickup racing to a chimney fire. She was with Larry now and worked with him painting houses.

  Ricky made something of a show of pushing back his shirt sleeve to consult his wristwatch, which was nestled in a thicket of silvery hair. Ricky, day manager at Research Tech, feared he carried on his person an indelible rodent-y scent and wore copious quantities of cologne against it. “It’s three in the afternoon,” he said. “Don’t we have rights?”

  “I thought you and them were friends,” Sue said. “And anyhow, it’s your dad’s property, right? You don’t gotta big up to anyone.”

  They were joined by Todd Reynolds, who everyone called Horse—even his teachers, back in school. He loved horses and was rumored to be priapic. After high school he lived with his mother, a cashier at the Grand Union. He chipped in with money he made doing lawns, plowing driveways, selling firewood. But suddenly his life changed, first by marrying Candy Millas, who was distinctly unlike the girls he used to run with. Candy was quiet, prim, she’d been an A student, and would have gone to college if money was no object. And she was religious, the whole family was. They knew about holy days no one else had heard of. She never wore lipstick or any kind of makeup or jewelry, she wore clothes that hid her body, and a lot of people said she was a virgin. Right after marrying Candy, Horse decided to become a corrections officer, though he had hair down to his shoulder blades, was practically Rastafarian in his consumption of marijuana, and had a tattoo on his shoulder of the jaunty-looking dude from the Zig-Zag rolling papers package. In school, tests had irritated Horse, and brought out his rebellious streak—he had not been above writing Who cares? as an answer, and on standardized tests he would pick a letter, most often D, and just go with it start to finish. Yet he prepared for weeks for the civil service exam, and on the Saturday of the test he was in Albany an hour and a half early, freshly barbered and shaved, in a jacket and tie, as if he already had the job and was there reporting for work. For work in a federal prison, there would have been hurdles he might not have scaled, but for state work there were no problems with any of the requirements. He had his high school diploma, he had his no felony convictions, he had his good health. Shortly after the exam, he was a CO i
n training, in Binghamton, with a salary of three hundred dollars a week, good money. Candy stayed back in Leyden, where she was starting a house-and-office cleaning service with five women from her church. At the end of Horse’s break-in period, he was assigned to a maximum-security prison fifteen miles from Leyden, just over the Robert Fulton Bridge, on the mountainous side of the river. He and Candy could start living together like real married people, though even with Horse up in Binghamton they still managed to have a baby on the way.

  “Hey, guess who’s here,” Horse said to Jennings. He stroked his mustache, his consolation prize for surrendering his long hair. The mustache itself was crisp and exuded none of the friendliness of a civilian mustache. “Your landlady.”

  “Her husband’s in Hollywood,” Larry said. “A woman gets lonely.”

  “Her husband’s a piece of shit,” offered Horse. He saw the look on Jennings’s face. “Guaranteed,” he added, pointing at Jennings.

  “Have you even met him?” Jennings said.

  “Horse don’t meet that many people,” Larry said. “He spends most of his time in jail.” Not wanting to take a chance on Horse’s temper, Larry added, “Take a corner, Horse. We’re gonna flip the chicken tits.”

  Horse stepped back, and looked up, shielding his eyes. “Well, looky looky looky,” he said, as if uncovering some shameful wrongdoing. He was following an airplane’s flight path. “It’s a Cessna 150,” he said.

  “A Cessna 150, huh,” said Larry. “Sure it’s not a 175?”

  “You think it’s a joke?” Horse asked. “We’re under surveillance. All of us. Get it? You’re under surveillance.”

  “Fuck me,” Larry said, his default position.

  “Could be DEA,” Horse said. “Could be stateys, could be town clowns. Who the hell knows anymore, there’s so much going on. Circles within circles, wheels inside of wheels.”

  “Maybe it’s someone learning how to fly an airplane,” Jennings said. “There’s that Windsor Air Field close to here.”