Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  “That’s what it does,” Tommy said. “It makes pretty patterns. Turn it and everything starts to move. All the colors whirl around and you never get the same picture twice.”

  “Doesn’t look like a picture to me,” Buck said, “no picture I ever saw. Just a lot of colors.”

  “Well, that’s what it is,” Tommy said, “but aren’t they pretty?”

  “Guess so,” Buck said.

  “Next time I’ll show you my telescope. I’ll bet you’ve never seen a telescope. I bet you don’t even know what a telescope is.”

  “I know plenty,” Buck said.

  “Yeah,” Tommy said, “but you’ve never seen a telescope. You can see things through a telescope. If I pointed it way down the golf course, I could see who that person is. It would bring her up close.”

  “It would?”

  “Yes, it would,” Tommy said. “The next time I come over I’ll show you how it works.” Sometimes at home at night, before they moved to the Island, Tommy would open his window and take off the screen and step out on the porch roof. He would point his telescope at the sky, at the Milky Way, and it really would bring it close. Nobody knew he was doing it. Sometimes then it made him feel as if he were floating, floating right off the roof and into the sky, and that he was part of it, part of the whole vast sky, with his town, his river, and the great big earth there below him. “It’s wonderful,” Tommy said, “it really is. It’s magical.”

  “No shit,” Buck said. Buck could use words like that. Tommy could tell he was impressed.

  “No shit,” Tommy replied. He couldn’t believe he’d said that. He thought someone would run out of the clubhouse and wash his mouth out with soap, the way his brother John did once when he’d said a bad word and he didn’t even know what he’d said, either. He didn’t know what it meant—he couldn’t even remember the word—and John wouldn’t tell him. Tommy looked back at the clubhouse, but nothing was happening. The women were still rocking on the porch, and the figure at the farthest end of the course, beyond the driveway, was a little closer. But no one was running toward him. No one even knew he’d said it. Tommy smiled. He laughed. He felt proud. “No shit,” he repeated. “Really, no shit.”

  “Where’d you get it?” Buck asked.

  “Mrs. Steer gave it to me,” Tommy said.

  “Will you let me look through it?”

  “Sure,” Tommy said. “I’ll bring it over the next time I come. Then you’ll see.”

  Ophelia was calling. “Buck? Buck? Get in here, Buck. I’ve got some things for you to do.” So Buck went off and Tommy sat alone in the tall grass on the slope between the sixth hole and the River Road, thinking about the things that had changed, watching the figure of the golfer draw nearer. He could see now that it was Daisy Meyer, and one of the things that had changed was that Daisy and Phil weren’t spending as much time on the Island, even though they had the Addington cottage to themselves. In fact, Phil was hardly ever there.

  Some things really were different. The Farnsworth cottage was closed, for one thing, and Nick was gone. Tommy missed Nick, who was always nice to him, but he bet his brothers missed him more because they always went to the parties in his cottage, the parties for the younger people that sometimes went on real late and real loud, loud enough and late enough that Mrs. Wentworth had to speak to Nick the next day. “He’s plucked all the daisies,” Tommy heard Mrs. Appleton say one day, “and he’s gone to find another garden to play in.” Tommy wanted to throw another cat in her lap. Buck thought that was real funny. Ophelia had told him. “She swore that apple lady was going to rise up and shake hands with her Maker right there on the couch in the ladies’ locker room,” Buck had said, and Tommy replied, “Well, she didn’t.”

  Another thing that was different was that the Aldriches hadn’t shown up at all and weren’t expected until late in the summer because Mr. Aldrich was now stationed in Spain, and it was hard to get to the Island from Spain. Tommy’s mother said that Michael was learning to speak Spanish. The McGhees and Madge and Phelps might come, no one knew for sure. Mr. Wolfe wasn’t there yet, either, but the Indians were opening his house so he’d be there soon. On the whole, it was lonelier on the Island this summer. He had only Amy to play with, and he missed Jimmy Randolph and even Paul Malotte.

  But some things were the same. The bridges had to be repaired again. Mrs. Steer went swimming every morning, back and forth between her dock and Boomer Island in her steady, measured crawl. The Sedgwicks worried about the erosion. Mr. Steer got into the same old arguments with Mrs. Sedgwick and Mrs. Steer got annoyed with him and Amy got embarrassed. Mrs. Wentworth still invited the children in for milk and cookies sometimes in the afternoons—“my little tea parties,” she said, “for my little friends.” The forget-me-nots bloomed by the paths and the lady slippers in the woods, and the cattails appeared in the marshy place on the Sedgwicks’ island. And as usual, there were parties in the evenings at one or another cottage on the Island or at the country club on the shore. It was good that the club was so convenient. Some people, like Mr. and Mrs. Hutchins, had summer places farther away and it was harder for them to get there, but they did sometimes, especially if there was a big party. Sometimes they spent the night on the Island, too, usually in the Sedgwicks’ guesthouse, which Tommy loved to sleep in because it was like being on a ship with the waves lapping. The Hutchins and a lot of other people were there the night of the Fourth of July when everyone gathered on the Sedgwicks’ shrinking but still spacious front lawn and waved sparklers and watched the fireworks that the Indians set off. It was his mother’s birthday party, too. She was forty-six. Her birthday was really on the third, but they always celebrated it on the fourth, with fireworks—“the way a birthday ought to be celebrated,” his father said: “with a bang.” It wasn’t a big fireworks show—there were only a few of them—but it was very pretty, and it was fun to see the explosions bursting in the sky, the showers of colored sparks, the faces of the people in the dark suddenly illumined with a kind of pale flickering glow, like fireflies.

  Mr. Wolfe had gotten there by the Fourth. Tommy liked watching the Indians prepare Mr. Wolfe’s cottage, starting the pump, throwing open all the windows to drive out the smell of mildew, shaking the rugs and the curtains, brushing off the furniture, sweeping out the winter’s debris. Mr. Wolfe had a lot of interesting things in his cottage, a lot of things he’d picked up from the Indians in Canada and from the ruins in Mexico: oddly shaped baskets, wampum belts, arrows, feathered headdresses, and strange masks. Mrs. Appleton asked Tommy one day at the country club if Mr. Wolfe was back yet. “I don’t know,” he said, although he knew perfectly well that he wasn’t but that he would be soon because his cottage was all ready for him. “I thought you would,” Mrs. Appleton said, “you know so much.” Why, Tommy wondered, was she so interested, and why did she dislike him so much? Well, of course, she didn’t like him because of the cat, and Tommy didn’t like her either. He was sorry that he’d ever apologized to her, but he hadn’t really had a choice. His mother had made him.

  When Mr. Wolfe did arrive, he came with a whole shipment of things, strange and wonderful things that he’d sent home from his travels—he’d been gone since March—and that the Indians had to spend a whole day loading into rowboats on the shore and unloading at Mr. Wolfe’s dock and carrying the heavy crates up to the porch, where Mr. Wolfe unpacked them. He opened the crates himself because he wanted to inspect each one for damage, and because the things were valuable and rare. Most of them were very old, and some of them were stone. They made Mrs. Sedgwick’s Guatemalan pottery look pretty ordinary, and Tommy thought she was sort of envious when she saw all the things Mr. Wolfe was putting on his walls.

  “What are these?” Tommy asked him as he was unpacking one of the crates. They looked like wooden faces, but not like any living face. They were flat, without expression, almost sinister.

  “They’re old ceremonial masks,” Mr. Wolfe said. “The Indians in Mexico used to wear them
for their sacred dances. They still carve them, but the new ones aren’t quite the same.”

  “Are they valuable?” Tommy asked him.

  “Some of them are,” Mr. Wolfe said as he continued his unpacking. “Some of them are. They’re my South of the Border plunder.” He laughed.

  “Were you in Mexico?” Tommy asked him.

  “Most of the time,” he said. “I had to go to Canada for a little while, but it was too cold. You think it’s cold here in the winter, Tommy? You should try it farther north. It’d freeze the balls of a maggot.” Tommy didn’t say anything. “So I went South. To Mexico.” Mr. Wolfe was engrossed in his unpacking. “Oaxaca. Guadalajara. San Miguel de Allende. Teotihuacán. The Yucatán. All over. Then it got too hot.”

  “Do they still sacrifice warriors?” Tommy asked him.

  “Sacrifice warriors?”

  “Yes. They used to choose the bravest young warrior and sacrifice him. They cut out his heart,” Tommy said. The thought still made him shudder.

  “How do you know that?” Mr. Wolfe asked him. “No, they don’t do that anymore. The Aztecs used to, but there aren’t any real Aztecs left nowadays. You can still see the look of the Aztecs, though, and the Maya, too. Some of the Mexicans today look just like the figures on the temples so you know they’re descended from them. But there’s hardly any pure blood left there anymore. Most of them are all mixed up with the Spanish and other Indians, and the civilization’s been lost. Just a vestige here and there. Nothing like what it was.” He looked toward him. “How do you know about the Aztecs, Tommy?”

  “I read about them in a book,” Tommy said. “Not the book you gave me. One of my other books.”

  “Did you read the book I gave you?” Mr. Wolfe continued his unpacking.

  “Oh, yes,” Tommy said. “It was interesting.”

  “Oh, Bill,” Mr. Wolfe called, “come over here and help me with this.” Rose’s husband came over to the crate Mr. Wolfe had opened. He was struggling with something at the bottom of it, but it was too big and too heavy for him to handle alone. Together the two of them tore the sides off the crate and pulled the packing away from the object within. They both took hold of it and lifted it out to the porch.

  “That’s a plumed serpent!” Tommy was astounded. Mr. Wolfe and Bill got it over next to the steps to the porch, where he’d decided it should go. “How do you pronounce it?” Tommy asked.

  “Quetzalcóatl? Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes,” Tommy said, “that’s what I mean. I didn’t know how you said it, though.”

  “How did you know what it was? Was that in one of your books, too?”

  “Yes,” Tommy said. “I think that’s where I saw it. In one of my books.”

  “Well, I’ve got another one, too, in one of these crates. I’ll put it on the other side of the steps. They’ll guard the house. I think they’d scare anyone away, don’t you?”

  Mr. Wolfe had almost finished opening his crates. “I think I’ve got something for you,” he said. His hands were rummaging in one of the boxes. “Here.” He picked up a mask. “This looks about your size. Try it on.”

  Tommy held it to his face. The mask was long and narrow. He couldn’t see anything because the slits they’d carved for the eyes weren’t big enough. “I can’t see through it,” Tommy said. “Did they use this one in their sacred dances? I don’t see how they could dance if they couldn’t see.”

  “Good question,” Mr. Wolfe said. “Maybe they peeked.” He laughed.

  It was an interesting mask, though. Tommy liked it, but no matter how he held it to his face, he couldn’t see a thing through the tiny slits in the eyes. After a while he hung it on the wall in his bedroom on the Island, so different from his bedroom at home. The window, the only window, looked into the trees, and at night Tommy could hear the animals out there, creeping through the woods. Mr. Wolfe had given him a lot of presents. Tommy thought he’d have to find something for Mr. Wolfe one of these days.

  After Mr. Wolfe had unpacked all his things and arranged the masks and the sculptures, he gave a party. He called it “my plunder party,” and all the Islanders and some others came to it, passing by the two plumed serpents as they moved onto Mr. Wolfe’s porch and into his house. Mrs. Sedgwick was horrified. “Couldn’t you find anything pretty down there, Lucien? Snakes! My word! Do they bite?” She didn’t think the masks on the walls looked very pretty either, though she didn’t say anything; she just looked. Mrs. Steer did, though. She said, “It looks as if we’re preparing for the sacrifice. When do we begin the dance?” Everyone laughed at that.

  “Why, the dance is the last day of August,” Tommy’s mother said. “Thursday night. We’ll all be there—but without masks, I hope,” and everyone laughed some more. The dance was a long time away, more than a month.

  “Perhaps,” Mrs. Steer said, “we should keep them on,” but in the general conversation nobody paid any attention.

  Mr. Wolfe didn’t show any movies that evening, no movies like the animal movies he’d shown last summer. He hadn’t shot much film this past year, he said. Tommy was sorry about that. He liked the movies. It was raining that evening, so the party couldn’t spread out onto the lawn. When they had eaten, Emily and John walked Amy and Tommy to their cottages, Amy first because hers was farther away. Tommy could hear the sounds of Mr. Wolfe’s party far into the night. Sounds carried over water.

  His parents were arguing when they got home. They hardly ever argued, and they made a lot of clatter when they came in, waking Tommy up, although at first he thought he hadn’t even fallen asleep. But he must have. The walls in the cottage were thin, and you could hear anything that happened anywhere in the house. He heard his mother say, “You might care less about those filthy smokestacks and more about this party we’re supposed to be giving. I’m sick of doing all the work myself.” And his father said, “Those filthy smokestacks are paying for it! How do you think we’re paying for it? You think someone else is going to do it? You’re good at giving parties. You wanted it, you do it.”

  “I’m paying too,” his mother said. “All this work doesn’t come free, no matter what you think!”

  “Neither do you,” his father said. “I hope no one thinks you do. You’re a very expensive lady and you don’t come free at all. I’m paying through the nose. Look, leave me alone. I’ve got to go to work in the morning. I have to tend to the filthy smokestacks. I want some sleep.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t drink,” his mother said. “It doesn’t make you very attractive.”

  “You wish I wouldn’t drink? What do you think that stuff you’re drinking is? Tea?”

  “We’ve been to a nice party,” his mother said. “Why do you always have to start a fight when we leave?”

  “I’m going into the bathroom, and then I’m going to bed. Good night.” Tommy heard his father slam the bathroom door, and his mother went into their bedroom and slammed that door, too. When his father came out of the bathroom, he said, “What was so nice about it?” And his mother said, “Oh, be quiet. Leave me alone. I want to sleep.” Tommy wanted to sleep, too. Why did they have to do that? They weren’t the only ones in the house. He lived there, too.

  Tommy had a golf lesson the next morning. He had golf lessons on Mondays and Thursdays. That morning his father rowed him across the river, on his way to the plant. “Did you have a good time at the party?” Tommy asked him.

  “Oh, yes,” his father said, “I had a fine time.”

  “What do you think of Mr. Wolfe’s masks?”

  “Interesting,” his father answered, dipping the oars into the water. He was concentrating on his rowing. There was a good way to get to the shore and a bad way. Experienced rowers like his father knew how to do it. The good way looked harder, and it was at first, but it was really easier. You left the dock and rowed upriver for a little ways, against the current, and then you turned and the current helped carry you toward the landing on the shore. His father was still rowing hard against
the current. He wasn’t paying much attention to the conversation, Tommy thought.

  “Did you like the plumed serpents?” Tommy asked.

  “The plumed serpents? Oh, you mean those figures by the porch.” They were turning now in the current and began to glide swiftly toward the shore, carried along by the river and his father’s pulling. The oars made little whirlpools in the water as he rowed, dissolving behind them as they pushed ahead. There was a regular rhythm to it. “Well,” his father said, “I guess I’ve never much cared for snakes but you’d hardly know they were snakes, would you? I wouldn’t have known if Mr. Wolfe hadn’t shown us.”

  “Mr. Wolfe showed you?”

  “He told us what they were. There’s a temple down there with hundreds of them on it. They’re supposed to help fertilize the earth. I’d stick to horse manure, myself.” They had arrived at the dock. Tommy got out of the boat while his father held it for him, and then he tied it up with a double half-hitch. That was the knot they always used.

  His father drove away, and Tommy ran across the River Road and climbed through the tall grass and cut across the fairways to the practice tee. You had to circle around the green because you were supposed to walk on it only if you were playing it. The grass was easily damaged. Emil wasn’t waiting at the tee that morning, so Tommy went into the pro shop. “I’ll be with you in a minute, Tommy,” Emil said. He was showing a new putter to a couple of the ladies. Tommy looked at the tennis racquets and the golf clubs that were displayed on the wall, and at the new leather golf bags. Leather ones were the best. He liked their smell. He looked through the glass counter at the funny gloves with little holes in them that some people used when they played, and at the different-colored tees and the gleaming white balls. There were a lot of different kinds of golf balls, but Acushnet Titleist were the best. Everyone said so. Emil had a little machine in the pro shop that stamped your name on your golf balls. That way, if you lost it and if someone found it, he could return it to you. Sometimes people did lose their golf balls. The woods were thick, and even in the rough they were hard to find. People drove them into the creek, too. There were three creeks. One was at the very end of the golf course. It was called Mission Creek because many, many years ago there’d been an Indian mission up there someplace. You had to hit your ball right over the green and off the course to land it in that one, and then it was lost forever. People had drowned in Mission Creek. The main creek was right near the fourth tee. It didn’t have a name. You had to drive over it to reach the green. It was supposed to be an easy shot, but a lot of people didn’t make it. Every once in a while the caddies would jump in the creek in their underpants, if no one was looking, and dive for balls. They would return them to the owner, but it was really like selling them back because they always got paid for them, though his father called it a tip. Sometimes, Tommy supposed, they probably used them themselves; the caddies could use the course early in the morning before anyone started to play.