The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  “Babe,” he’d called her. She didn’t like that. The unreality of it; the posing of it. Enough that he had given her the nickname that had stuck to her for all these years.

  Everyone had gone to bed and the house was silent. The light still hadn’t come on in his window across the yards, between the maple leaves.

  There had been enough time since her family had gone to bed for the new electric hot-water heater to recover, so she decided to take a bath, a luxury that had been more difficult under the old system with the coil in the kitchen stove. Her mother had bought the new heater, using her employee’s discount, and was now thinking of an electric stove, except that her mother couldn’t understand why a person shouldn’t get an electric shock when touching a metal pan on a burner. Even though they had tried to explain grounding, resistance and insulation to her, she was still bothered. Her mother was a capable woman who had dealt all her life with practical mechanics, having grown up on a hill farm in Cascom where they hadn’t had any electricity but a lot of ingenious mechanical contraptions, some run by hand, some by water, some by animals and some by ancient one-lunger gasoline engines. Her mother knew the principle of a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer, for instance, but power enough to turn steel red hot before her eyes, from within, was too much. At least the hot-water tank was in the basement and the heating elements were drowned in water, out of sight.

  It was a pleasure to fill the tub up higher than they had been able to before, the old level marked in indelible yellow. Just the fact of surplus warmed and enfolded now, where before the knowledge of the coming chill took the comfort away from lukewarm water. She removed the clothes from the body that was, with a shiver of cold or of embarrassment, no longer just hers, and eased into the hot water. She would wash her hair in the morning, leaning over the tub, rather than sleep with dampness tonight. After a while she ran more hot water, that new luxury, until the overflow vent glugged the water’s surface away. Blood was pink in the water, along with a tiny squiggle of more viscous material like a knotted red string. Except for the first time, she had never before been quite surprised by the sense of fullness vented, the loss of something more than blood yet hardly stronger than an antipathy toward soilure. She was fairly sure, but not totally sure, that this was her period and therefore she was not pregnant. There was that little loss, then relief greater than she had let herself believe. She was herself—single, nimble, clever and quick again.

  There was more than one strain to this relief, however; one was even a little flippant: Close call, Dory! Another was a feeling of unethical avoidance, not of pregnancy but of confrontation with the father of the now nonexistent child; she would never know whether or not she would have demanded anything from him. She thought she wouldn’t have demanded anything, but now she would never be certain. Another was the feeling, shadowy and overwhelmed by the others, of possible inadequacy because he had placed within her, for whatever reasons, his sperm, and she hadn’t conceived. The race was meant to multiply and she had not.

  He told her once that he’d seen children killed by their own parents, who then killed themselves because they were afraid of Americans or they thought of themselves as soldiers and wouldn’t surrender. He said from his distance he thought they were throwing their laundry off the cliffs, like old shirts and pants. He couldn’t at first make himself see what he actually saw.

  They’d all found out so many things during and after the war, things that had turned out to be real, actually real, not just rumor and propaganda. The torture and murder of millions. He said he knew the stink of terror because he’d had to walk through it. Thousands of civilians had hidden for days, almost shoulder to shoulder, in a small scrubby woods and his platoon had to walk through the woods afterwards. He said they prayed for no incoming fire because there was no room on the ground between the shit and they’d have had to dive into it. It was like the murmurous room in hell where the liquid was up to everyone’s lower lip: “Don’t make a wave, don’t make a wave.” They’d had no gas masks. It was so much the stench of their own fear, too, that they’d felt responsible for it. They could feel it coming through their clothes and skin, drowning them, and the woods seemed never to end. Then they came to the sea, and the laundry falling from the cliffs. Her blood bloomed like a pale cloud on its way to the drain.

  In bed she lay quietly, letting sadness flow out of the ends of her fingers and toes, an old trick of hers. She’d been ready to accept the bondage of the child, that doubleness, but in her new freedom it was hard to understand the person who had made that vow. She was relieved, but nothing had been gained. She was just seventeen again, powerless, ordinary, and he was off in the morning on his separate quest.

  She woke remembering fragments of a dream, but the dream had been so vast and the fragments were so small it was like trying to read a book with wind blowing the pages. She’d been on the lake in a boat, looking down into the water; there was a black ’41 Buick sedan on the bottom of the lake among gray boulders. Somewhere else a maple leaf wind-walked along a granite slab, like a crab. She woke up all the way and the dream said farewell, farewell, you’ll never know how important I was. She was a mess. Her mother and father had gone to work and Debbie was probably still asleep, her door closed. From the bathroom she went down to the kitchen for coffee, then heard his motorcycle out front.

  She was wearing her mother’s frilly, torn, baby-blue dressing gown she’d taken from the back of the bathroom door, where it covered the hanging hot-water bottle and its tube, so she ran upstairs and exchanged it for her plain bathrobe. She met him at the front door. He stood on the stoop, partly in uniform, in his Ike jacket and dungarees, looking rather blank and unsure of his welcome. She could still see where his corporal’s chevrons had been sewn on his sleeves. The long red motorcycle leaned precariously at the curb, his duffel bag and other olive-green canvas things tied on the rear with lots of clothesline. He was so blond, square-shouldered and trim he looked like a character in a movie about great adventures, a charming young hero off to fight evil of some kind or another. But he didn’t know who, exactly, he was, or where he came from—or thought he didn’t. She didn’t know why he wasn’t from Leah.

  “I thought I’d stop and say goodbye,” he said, like a question, as if he were afraid of her. She thought how she could tell him or not tell him. Of course she’d tell him, even though it made it all seem artificial between them, like odds, or rubber. If you were lucky, hi-ho and away. Sadness and resentment; her throat refused to obey orders.

  “Hey, Dory. I’ll be back,” he said. He put his arms around her and immediately she felt his desire to be free.

  “My period started last night,” she said.

  “Whew!” He mimicked mopping his brow. “Okay. I’ll still be back, you know. Of course, I may not even make it across Vermont on that spavined old critter. I may be back sooner than you think.”

  “Please be careful. I had a sad dream last night about a car under the water.”

  “Was I in it? In the dream, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know whose car it was.”

  “No more Canadian soldiers?”

  “Send me a postcard once in a while,” she said, knowing that this cutting through of palaver to what was felt always upset him. He wanted everything nice for his grand departure. No hard feelings and now no threatening baby. He wanted to be free as a bird, his faithful woman ready and waiting in case he ever came back. Who wouldn’t want it all ways like that? Just in case he didn’t meet a beautiful, talented, educated girl in Minnesota or California he could always count on plain little Dory Perkins back in New Hampshire. She’d always be there, mispronouncing words and carrying her dim little torch for him. Self-pity, that degrading emotion, like slime.

  “You’ll see,” he said unhappily.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I want you to do what you want. I just wish you were taking a bus or a train.”

  He was happy again, all illuminated and heroic and full of wo
rds. “A bus is a stuffy nose, and I’ve been across the country twice by train—Macon to Seattle and then San Francisco to Fort Dix, New Jersey. Troop trains, granted—sort of jails. Of course I’d rather have a car—say a Packard convertible—but I don’t, so I’ve got to ride wide open, sort of naked, right in the country, so I can smell it and feel it. In a way I’m an exile, kidnapped as a child and taken to this mad dark state full of rocks and people you can’t tell from the rocks. Not you, though you’ve got your share of granite in you too, come to think of it. That’s all right…”

  She kissed him on the lips to shut him up—to help him to shut up.

  “Well,” she said.

  “Well. I hope you have a good summer,” he said.

  “Take care, now, Johnny.”

  There was some more of that, and finally he turned and strode down the walk a little proud and swaggery, to mount his steed and do expert little adjustments and turnings-on of switches before the violent kick-down that made the engine begin its mouthy rumble, his arms wide on the handlebars. He saluted her, shifted with a clank and moved into balance and speed down Water Street to the corner. His engine sound faded behind houses and trees.

  12

  His motorcycle was an eleven-year-old Indian Pony, a beast that tended to lose its footing in hard places. The frame was bent, but he had learned to accommodate himself to that. The red fenders had been bent and straightened, bent and straightened again. The crash bar on the left side was worn half through from a long slide someone had taken on concrete. At least the tires were fair, and the old two-cylinder engine throbbed smoothly, as if in no pain. All kinds of breakdowns lurked, however, in the oily innards of the machine, where he hadn’t the tools or the knowledge to find and repair them. But it ran now and could push him forward with a force that seemed willing and controllable.

  The machine received him and made him nearly a free man again. She watched from behind the screen door, not coming out with him because she was still in her bathrobe. The kickstand went up with a hard clank. He turned on the ignition switch, retarded the spark with his right handle grip, made sure the butterfly stopcock to the gas tank was open, gave the engine a little gas with the throttle that was his left handle grip and kicked down the starter. The ragged old rumble began and he smoothed it down with the spark. The clutch was an iron rocker pedal beneath his left foot, the gearshift a knob on the right side of the gas tank. He eased into low and raised the engine’s rumble. He waved to her where she was a vague, screened figure in the darkness of her house and then began to move the first yards of the thousands of miles. It was as though he didn’t move but Leah moved past him as he sat steady and central in the gyroscopic force of his turning wheels.

  He rode down Water Street to Maple Street, and as he turned, banking slightly, the town banked and turned around him. Oak Street, Beech Street and the other streets named after trees passed him, all the houses familiar, as were many of their histories and interiors. In that white clapboard house with green shutters there had been a tragedy once; a child had died and the family moved away.

  He rode down Bank Street to the Town Square with its tall elms and octagonal wooden bandstand, deciding to circle it once before beginning, a centrifugal urge that would gently fling him west across his country. In the morning air that was so still and humid it seemed full of lethargy, a film on the eyes, the gaunt Victorian red brick blocks leaned back: Masonic Hall 1893; Tuttle Block 1901; Cascom Savings Bank Bldg. 1907. Then the Congregational church, white wooden Gothic; the colonial houses and wide lawns of the owners and formerly of the owners of mills and factories, houses he had visited as a false Sylvester. The small Romanesque library in tan brick and granite; then the colonial-style post office built in 1937; the Strand Theater, a brick box with a marquee; the Town Hall, a strange twin both Greek and Roman—square behind and round before; then around to the Victorian blocks again, stores below and dentists and such up long, straight wooden stairs that were always dusty and vast. The more he’d known the town and worked in it, the more it had become itself, separate from him. All these shapes were bound to their foundations and would stay here motionless, no matter how far he traveled.

  The few morning people on the streets walked toward their eight hours of repetitious loafing and work. That white-haired man in a brown suit was Mr. Candless, who had taught him how to sell shoes and hats and to tie up a package without having to pin the first overhand knot with a finger. In Leah he had learned the small tricks of various labors and trades, enough to have made him aware that those minor skills were multitudinous and indispensable, the property of those he might sometimes be tempted to scorn because of his own vague but grander ambitions.

  With a banking turn at speed, a gesture of superiority, bravado and farewell, he left the Town Square on Wentworth Street, which turned into the highway leading west. The engine revolved below him and turned the rear wheel by way of its great oily chain, the warmth of oil and seared cylinder vanes at his knees. For moments he forgot not to trust the machine because he was moving, passing not over but seemingly beside the land. He approached Vermont, its round hills over there, across the valley of the Connecticut River. He slowed to enter the wooden roadbed of the long covered bridge, the worn boards rising and falling like swells; the familiar plimp-plump of their flexing echoed among the barnlike rafters. Then he was in Wentworth Junction, in Vermont. On the main street he risked a moment to lean over and look down at his slightly unbalanced front wheel, spokes and brake drum, the tire tread bouncing over the dry asphalt. Just a glance, at real risk, his eyes quickly recovering and that picture of turning wheel superimposed upon the street ahead, the small railroad station, the general store, the Railroad Hotel, then the tenements and houses as he began the climb up out of town over the hump of Vermont toward New York State.

  He was solitary now on the machine he held between his thighs, free and unlonely. The road was public and he had every right. He had been in thrall to the encircling desires of a girl, but now in his leaving she had already become vaguer, a woman, and he found it hard to believe his former assertiveness toward her. She had suggested at the moment of parting all women, women-in-power, mothers, teachers, and shaming, blaming episodes from too far back toward childhood. How could he understand her, them, women? They were so necessary and beautiful when they were happy, but a word could make their lives useless to them, and you saw hell smoking and burning in back of their shriveled eyes. In fifth grade when he’d had appendicitis a teacher had tried to comfort him in his pain on a couch in the teachers’ lounge. She put her strapped and bound breast, firm as a basketball, against his cheek. He knew she thought that comforting, though he was ten, and despised that infantile comfort.

  Now the wind cleared him as he moved away at nearly a mile a minute. Too fast! Then, oh, well, take the curve like a flier and make it. No, trust was dangerous, near faith; he should slow down to fifty. Perversely, he twisted his throttle and climbed past sixty. Why? Fool! He opened his mouth and the wind filled out his cheeks. He chewed the palpable wind.

  At times the motorcycle hardly existed and it was only he who flew along the road past fields and woods. Then he would remember the machine which carried him and feel grateful for its power and loyalty. Good old Indian Pony. But it could break anytime; what would he do if it betrayed him? He could be stranded anywhere, miles from anywhere. Even now he was far from anyone he knew, his citizenship in this strange country tenuous. If Vermont was strange to him, what would the farther states do to his self-confidence? And the weather could turn back toward March at any time, with him as vulnerable to it as a fish naked in its element. His journey seemed absurd, his search a whim easily put by. But the engine kept moving him west and his danger was, for this hurtling existence and at least for now, stable. Cars and trucks came toward him—Chevrolets, Fords, Plymouths, Nashes, Studebakers—the constant involuntary listing of what was so early known—to suck the air from his side. He passed a pickup truck on a straight, the old F
ord’s fenders loose as a woman’s skirts. Those others were enclosed in steel, he only by the fabric of his clothes, then his tender skin. He must foresee patterns and intentions so that he could pass safely, without a single touch, through each new conjunction of vehicle and direction. It was a constant divining of the immediate that he must repeat each yard for three thousand miles; again it all seemed absurd, beyond his powers. Sooner or later would come the possibly insolvable problem in vectors—his speed, traction, braking friction, the insane or at least unknown intent of a truck or car, with sand, oil or animals on the road.

  At times his anxiety faded and there would be a mile or miles of peace and near-forgetfulness, the rush of the wind a kind of gray silence. A song which had been sounding in his head came to his lips; he had been considering it, humming it without words, the words embarrassing and mute, ever since he’d left Dory in the dim light behind the screen. He wasn’t sure he could remember all the words. The wind in his mouth made his voice ghostly.

  Can she bake a cherry pie,

  Billy Boy, Billy Boy?

  Can she bake a cherry pie,

  Charming Billy?

  She can bake a cherry pie

  Quick as you can wink (blink?) your eye,

  But she’s a young thing,

  And cannot leave her mother.

  Last night he had, with a disturbing sense of disloyalty to her, gone to Futzie’s Tavern, where he knew some of his friends hung out these nights between seasons and journeys. Davy Whipple was back from the University of Chicago; John Cotter was going to Paris in the fall to take something called Le Cours de la Civilisation Franqaise, courtesy of the GI Bill. All three were veterans, though Davy had never gone overseas. Their friendship had hard edges; they were all loners in some ways, contemptuous of Leah yet not quite certain about the rest of the world and what they wanted from its more important places. They had always competed with each other and among them was no buffoon, no comedian, no recognized type. Even in grammar school each had demanded an exact equality, and they had fought more than once over this principle. The war and their service in it had changed nothing. If there was one quality the three had in common it was, he thought, a sort of laconic candidness. Out of their natures, not much influenced by each other, they made a point of telling the truth.