by Tom Drury
TWO
LOUISE DIVORCED Tiny that spring and found herself unable to watch television in a satisfying way. She could not settle into a show but had to keep drifting from station to station. On Jeopardy, as soon as there was a question that she could not answer, she would guess blindly—“Fiji? What is the island of Fiji?”—and change the channel to one of those phony crime shows, which she wouldn’t watch for long either.
One Sunday afternoon, after watching parts of a basketball game, Fishing with André, and How Steel Is Made, Louise drove the five miles into Grafton to see her mother. A sack of groceries occupied the seat beside her, the road was blank and empty, and the radio station played three Evelyn “Champagne” King songs in a row.
Mary Montrose lived on the west side of town in an L-shaped green house with white shutters. Louise pulled into the driveway and noticed an orange plastic bucket on the ground by the willow tree. She walked up the sidewalk, singing, “Get loose, get funky tonight.”
Louise went in the front door and down the hall, and just as she entered the living room the sun filled it with green light through the green curtains. Louise shifted the groceries from one arm to the other. “I’m going to make you spaghetti bake,” she said.
Mary Montrose lay reading a book on the davenport. She marked her place and sat up, a tall woman with silver-gray hair held back by a network of barrettes. “I thought I heard somebody in the driveway,” she said.
“What are you reading?” said Louise.
“Oh, some mystery,” said Mary. “I got it from the bookmobile. I don’t know whether I like it or not. There’s an awful lot of killing. They just killed some people at a picnic.”
“That’s no good,” said Louise. She carried the groceries into the kitchen and put them away. There was vodka in the freezer, and she made herself a vodka and cranberry juice, and returned to the living room.
“Pretty drink,” said Mary.
“It’s called a Twister,” said Louise. “Would you like one?”
“You know,” said Mary, “I wish I had a dress of that shade.”
Louise took a drink. “You know what I wish?” she said. “That I was a rock singer. I really mean it. I wish that.”
“You can carry a tune,” said Mary.
“Maybe I should go on a concert tour,” said Louise. “Say, why is there a bucket in your yard?”
“There shouldn’t be,” said Mary. She got up and walked to the window. “Oh, look at that,” she said. Then she checked the thermostat and came back to the davenport.
Louise sat down in the chair facing her mother. It was a recliner, and Louise reclined. She picked at the dark, star-shaped leaves growing along the arm of the chair. “Have you given any thought to cutting this back?” she said. “Look what it’s doing to the arm of this chair. Look what it’s doing to the davenport. I’m not saying to get rid of it. I’m saying get rid of some of it. Look at this. The arm of this chair is returning to the soil.”
Mary looked sadly at the magnificent ivy plant, which began on the coffee table and coiled its way around the room. “It would be too hard,” she said.
“Oh, Christ,” said Louise. “It would not, Mom. It would not. Do you want spaghetti bake or what?”
“Well, before they all died, they were grilling hamburgers at this picnic in my book,” said Mary, “and it made me hungry for a hamburger on the grill. Why don’t we run up to the lake and get a hamburger from the Lighthouse?”
“I can put hamburger in the spaghetti,” Louise suggested.
“I never get out of here,” said Mary. “I wouldn’t think it would be the end of the world if we ran up to the lake. Your problem is you sit out at that farm and you get isolated. You do, you get isolated.”
“I don’t get isolated,” said Louise.
“I don’t know what else you’d call it,” said Mary.
“Don’t call it anything,” said Louise.
“Besides,” said Mary, “wouldn’t you guess that sooner or later Jean Klar is going to get married and want to come back and live in that house? Sweetie, you’re a renter. You rent.”
“I know I rent,” said Louise. “I’m very aware of that.”
“They have Jimmy Coates’s house up for sale,” said Mary. “They want eighty-five hundred dollars, and I’ll bet you could get it for six thousand.”
“The problem with Jimmy Coates’s house is it would smell like Jimmy Coates,” said Louise. “And I don’t have six thousand dollars.”
Mary sighed. She went to the front hall and retrieved a brightly shellacked walking stick. Louise brought her chair upright and finished the Twister. “Where’d you get that?” she said.
Mary handed the stick to Louise; it had a snake’s features wood-burned into the handle. “Hans Cook,” she said. She put on a maroon jacket and zipped it up to her chin. “He was bringing his truck back from Ohio and he stopped to see some caves. They had a museum and little huts showing panoramas of Indian life.”
Louise examined the stick. “What are you going to do with a cane? You run across the room when the phone rings.”
“The phone doesn’t ring.”
In fact Mary’s phone rang often. She held the so-called widow’s seat on the Grafton town council. The seat, of course, was not strictly for widows. But Mary had been preceded on the council by Dorothy Frails, whose husband had been electrocuted while doing what he thought was going to be simple wiring on their back porch. And before Dorothy Frails there had been another widow, but not many people remembered who that was or how she lost her husband. (It was Susan Jewell, whose husband, Howard, took a nap in the attic, surrounded by the jars of his jar collection, and never woke up, on October 4, 1962.) Mary had been on the council nine years. She considered dog issues her specialty, and once, at a convention in Moline, had given a slide presentation on the history of the muzzle.
Louise and her mother walked outside. Mary headed for the willow, speared the orange bucket with the walking stick, and tossed it over the hedge into Heinz and Ranae Miller’s yard.
“I thought that was your bucket,” said Louise.
“No, I believe it’s Heinz’s,” said Mary.
They went up to Walleye Lake on Route 33. Louise’s Vega made a huge racket. It had a piece of metal sticking out of the muffler. Louise knew this because she had got down on her hands and knees and looked, but that did not fix it. Summer was more than a month away, and the sky had an anxious pale color. Mary rode with one hand on the dashboard and the other on the edge of the seat. Louise stubbed out a cigarette in the ashtray.
“How is Hans Cook?” she said.
“Oh, Hans Cook is all right,” said her mother. “But I’ll tell you, we went to a movie in Stone City, what, two, three weeks ago, and the way he laughed really embarrassed me. The movie was supposed to be funny. I know that. But you have to draw the line somewhere.”
“What movie was this?” said Louise.
“Oh, with Carol Burnett,” said Mary. “Annie. I was about to crawl down the aisle and out the door. There again, I know he takes drugs.”
“Oh, right,” said Louise.
“Well, he takes LSD,” said Mary.
Louise stared at her. “Hans Cook takes the drug LSD?” she said. “Big fat Hans?”
Mary pointed at the windshield. “You never mind. Keep your eyes on the highway.”
“I see it,” said Louise. “Are you kidding me about Hans Cook?”
“His neck gives him trouble,” said Mary. “He’s always driving someplace, and he says his head kind of pushes down on his neck. He’s not built right. He has an extra vertebra. He has something extra, anyway. Well, this is what he says. He claims the LSD makes his neck feel better.”
“What does he take for a headache, crack?”
Mary took off her glasses and cleaned them with a tissue. The glasses had square lenses and dramatic arms, and Mary’s eyes looked small and tired without them. “No, I don’t think he takes crack,” she said.
�
�Maybe he’s been spiking your wine cooler,” said Louise, and Mary didn’t say anything, so Louise said, “Jesus Christ, you’re not taking it, too.”
Mary glanced at a windmill going by outside the window. “I don’t doubt that Hans would give me some,” she said. “But I wouldn’t take any, and Hans knows this. The drug is paper. It would be like chewing a receipt from the store.”
They drove into the town of Walleye Lake. A woman in an oncoming station wagon began to turn in front of them but slammed on the brake when Louise leaned on her horn.
“That’s right, honey,” said Louise. “I’m coming straight.”
The Lighthouse was across the street from the Moonview Inn in town. It was a drive-in restaurant built around a bleached-orange tower. A green neon tube circled the top of the tower, and the light was on although it was not yet dark. In full season, waitresses in white sailor hats would circulate among the cars, but in the spring customers had to line up at the counter under the tower, and on this evening the line was long. Directly in front of Louise and Mary were a father and a little girl carrying a stuffed horse. The little girl had light blue eyes and long brown hair. Mary said hello to her and asked the name of the horse.
“Can’t touch this,” said the girl. “Hammer time.”
“Hammer, how ferocious,” said Mary. “I used to have a horse, her name was Velvet. That’s right, a big old lady like me. I was chosen from all the girls in all the riding clubs to bring my horse Velvet to opening day of the Iowa State Fair. I had white leather gloves that rode high on my arms, and who do you think was on the horse by my side? Well, it was Tim Thompson. He was the best barrel racer in the nation, and he was from California.”
The father had turned to listen. He wore a cardigan sweater with a bowling pin on it, and had the same spooky eyes as his daughter. Together they reminded Louise of the kind of peaceful, doomed space aliens you might see on Outer Limits. The girl chewed on the neck of the stuffed horse, then raised her head. “What’s a barrel racer?” she said.
“That’s someone who rides around barrels like they did in Western times,” said Mary, leaning thoughtfully on her walking stick. “Anyway, this Tim Thompson—”
“Why did they ride around barrels?” said the girl.
“Sweetie, I guess they were in their way,” said Mary. “But you can disregard the barrels. They really don’t have much importance to the story. Anyway, everyone knew Tim Thompson. So we rode up the midway and onto the racetrack, and when we got to the grandstand Tim Thompson turned to me and said, ‘Mary, you ride better than the women do in California. You ride much better than they do.’ See, he was tickled by my riding, and he said he was going to give me a present. But then the fair got going, and there was a rodeo that he had to be in, and he forgot about the present. Well, I didn’t forget, but I rode home in a dream anyway. The only other thing I’d ever done was walk beans. It was a long time later when a delivery boy brought a package to my dad’s farm. This boy worked for Supersweet in Grafton, and his name was Leon Felly, and he had freckles over every bit of his face. He gave me a cardboard box, and I opened it, and it was an ivy plant from Tim Thompson.”
“Did you hear that?” said the father. “The lady got her present finally.” He rubbed his forearm absently, and soon he turned his daughter and himself away from Mary.
“She has a crutch,” the girl said.
Louise looked sideways at Mary. “That ivy is from your mother,” she said.
Mary scowled. “What ivy?” she said. “You always just assume you know what I’m talking about. There’s a big world of ivy out there, Louise. You’ve never seen the plant from Tim Thompson. It died that winter—the winter following the fall when I rode in the fair. It was one of the worst winters we ever had, and a big frost came and tore up all the hollyhocks and all the ivy, including the ivy that Tim Thompson gave me.”
“He never gave you no kind of ivy,” said Louise.
Mary laughed bitterly. “We walked out the windows onto snowdrifts that year,” she said.
“You never walked out the windows,” said Louise.
Meanwhile, a commotion had developed at the head of the line. The father picked up his daughter, and Mary and Louise stepped away from everyone to see. A customer wearing a red letter-jacket that said “Geoff Lollard School of Self-Defense” in white flannel letters was shouting at the man behind the counter. The customer was a big guy with a butch haircut and kept smacking the counter with his hand. The counterman was young and heavy, with a green apron, and a fearful smile plastered on his face.
“You’re in a world of trouble, you smiling son of a bitch,” said the customer. “I know where you live! I know when closing time is! I know where you work! You work here! Stop smiling, god damn it! I’ll cut you. So help me I will.”
“Oh, Pete,” said the counterman. He had a hollow, sad, sing-song voice that seemed to rasp a nerve in the man in the red self-defense jacket. “Oh, now, Pete, settle down.”
Pete kept cursing the counterman. He seized a gleaming napkin dispenser and began stalking him down the length of the counter.
“You don’t want to do this, Pete,” said the counterman, and Pete threw the dispenser viciously. The counterman dived and the dispenser knocked a deep-fat-fryer basket off its peg on the back wall.
The counterman got up. “Well, great, Pete, you cracked it,” he said. “I hope you’re pleased with yourself, because you really have cracked it.”
But Pete had already left the counter, and now he stormed past the line of customers, tilting his head, swearing at the sky. His features were delicately arranged in the center of his big face, and he had a Band-Aid above one eye. As he passed Louise and Mary, he veered close, and his boot struck the butt of Mary’s walking stick. The stick was pulled from Mary’s hand, and as she stepped backward into the blue-eyed father and daughter, Pete and the stick seemed to wrestle briefly before falling over on the asphalt. It was apparent that Pete had scraped the heels of his hands, and the people in the line gasped and touched the heels of their own hands protectively. Pete scrambled to his feet and began to run, as if the stick were after him. He made it to an orange Volkswagen bus that was parked under a herbicide billboard, and he got in and drove away.
“Do you want help?” the man with blue eyes asked Mary. His voice was constricted by his daughter’s arms around his neck. “I guess he tried to steal some candy. My understanding is, he put a roll of candy in his pocket.”
“Him and the other guy must know each other,” said Louise.
“Oh, yeah!” said the man. “I’m sure they go way back. I guess this Pete guy thought the other one would just play dumb while he made off with the candy.”
Mary took out her barrettes, brushed her hair, and put the barrettes back. “So you think the guy in the red,” she said, gesturing at the herbicide sign, “knew the cook beforehand?”
Louise took her cigarette case, unsnapped it, and bent to light a cigarette. “He just said he did, Ma,” she said.
“Oh, yeah!” said the man. “No question but what they know each other. Ease up, honey. You’re strangling Dad. I would definitely call 911 if I was that guy. I don’t know why he isn’t calling them right now. I would be. You bet I would.”
“You know what, though,” said Mary. “I’ll bet that guy got away with the candy anyway.”
The man nodded. “Pete did,” he said.
“Well, wait,” said Mary. “Pete, or the one in the red coat?”
“Pete is the one in the red coat,” said the man.
“Pete got in the van,” said Louise.
The man nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “Pete got in the van.”
“Be quiet about Pete!” said the little girl. She touched a hand to her forehead. “I’m sick.”
“You’re fine,” said the father.
“Put a Band-Aid on my eye,” said the girl.
Louise and Mary ordered the California hamburgers, and French fries, and mugs of root beer. Louise g
ave the counterman a cigarette and reached across to light it for him. His fingers trembled as he formed a shield around Louise’s lighter. Then he set out two red and white cardboard baskets for their fries. Louise and Mary ate in the car, returned the heavy glass mugs to the counter, and drove home to Mary’s house. They watched a television show about murder; Louise discovered a large flaw in the plot, and Mary had a glass of milk and sat on the davenport. During a commercial, Louise looked at the clock on the wall and turned to Mary.
“Do you really think I’m that isolated?” she said.
Mary looked at her blankly, touched by something profound. She walked out to the hallway, speaking to Louise from the dark.
“I didn’t get home with my stick,” she said.
The next day Louise helped the portrait photographer Kleeborg with high school graduation photos. She applied makeup, tilted and adjusted lights, put film holders in Kleeborg’s old hands. The day went normally except for one girl who did not look very promising from the start. She had short, straight blond hair, but her eyes were red and her clothes crooked. She was supposed to have her portrait taken in the outdoor setting. This was in the corner of the studio and amounted to a section of rail fence with plastic leaves and an evergreen backdrop. While Louise was trying to get some Murine drops in the girl’s eyes, however, the girl just hunkered down with her back to the fence and moaned.
“I don’t want to go away to school,” she said. A drop of Murine spilled from the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek. “I don’t want to go away to school. And I’m so hung over. I will never pick up another glass of wine in my life.”
“Why is she on the floor?” shouted Kleeborg. He lifted the cloth from his head and stood beside the camera. “Your whole life is in front of you!” he said. He had been using this expression all week, but now it sounded like a threat. Louise helped the girl up, took her into the bathroom, and got her some Alka-Seltzer. The girl’s name was Maren Staley, and it turned out that she had been accepted at the University of Oregon but didn’t want to go there and leave her boyfriend, Loren. But her mother, who hated Loren with a passion, had her mind set on Oregon and had gone as far as forging enthusiastic letters to the college and signing Maren’s name.