“Johnny Hearne,” she said. “You were knee high to a grasshopper when I saw you last. How’s your mother? Is she still pretty as a picture?”
“She’s fine,” he said, remembering a large force of light and enthusiasm that might have been Estelle when he was five. “I remember you at the paper, I think.”
“I was twenty-two and just out of college when your dad got me a job on the Herald. I remember you just as plain. You were a bright little guy and we all thought the world of you, Johnny. And now you’re grown up. My! I’m trying to figure. You were in kindergarten, so you must have been five, and I was twenty-two and now I’m thirty-eight so that must have been sixteen years ago and you must be twenty-one. Lord, how time flies! For the last ten, eleven years I’ve been writing the column he started. ‘Just a Ramblin’,’ by Syl Hearne. Now it’s ‘Just a Ramblin’,’ by Estelle Hilberg, but so many people remember your dad and all the nice things he had to say about interesting people and happenings all over Lou’ Qui Parle County.”
Gracie brought coffee and Estelle said to her, “You should have seen Johnny when he was five. He was the cutest, brightest little guy. Of course, you were only three or four. I was telling Johnny how people still remember his dad with such affection. He was such a nice man. He was awfully good to me, I’ll tell the world. Nineteen thirty-two was a bad year anyway and in August my dad lost his arm in the binder. Walter had his own family to support, so that ten dollars a week kept us afloat.”
When Gracie had gone Estelle said, “My niece thinks you’re the cat’s pajamas, Johnny. I guess you must take after your dad.” This, by her lowered voice and soberer expression, was a delicate subject. “Your mother thought every woman in Lou’ Qui Parle County was after him, and maybe some were, but he was a straight arrow and I’ll proclaim it from the housetops. She even thought we were up to something.” She stopped short and gave him a quick glance to see what he knew. Then eyes met and they both looked away.
“What do you hear from your dad?” she said. “Is he still in Tulaveda?”
“Tulaveda?”
“I haven’t heard from him lately and I just wondered. He does like to move on, doesn’t he?”
“I haven’t heard from him ever,” he said. He hadn’t meant to say such a simple, vulnerable thing, and the words brought on a surge of anger and self-pity he did his best to resist.
“Johnny! Is that true? Gracie didn’t tell me that!”
“Yeah. The guy my mother married evidently vetoed any communication at all.”
“And Martha went along with that? It doesn’t sound like her, unless she really wanted to.”
“I guess she did, then.” He could see that Estelle wondered how much could be said about his mother.
“Do you think Syl knew where you lived?”
Syl again; he hadn’t got his mind around “Dad” yet. “I’ve thought a lot about that,” he said.
“Bless your heart, I bet you have. I don’t understand it. All these years and you wondering about your dad and never hearing a word? It defies comprehension.” She became very still, making a decision. Then she went into her handbag and kneaded its contents until she came out with an address book, a fountain pen and a spiral notebook. “Here,” she said as she wrote, then tore off the page and handed it to him. “I haven’t heard from him since around February or March, so he may not live there anymore.”
Sylvan Hearne
c/o Forester
601-B Los Robles
Tulaveda, Calif.
“February or March,” he said, looking down at this document. Robles meant oaks. Oak Street. Tulaveda was near Los Angeles. He’d looked at maps of California and had evidently learned them without trying, as he had war maps in high school. But this plain, ordinary address—it was as if, on a navigational chart as big as the West, two finely drawn lines had intersected, a fact once and for all ending speculation and its choice of inaction.
“We’ve always kept in touch,” Estelle said. “A card or a note once in a while. Once I didn’t hear from him for two years and it was during that time I married Sonny Hilberg. I always thought he’d come back to Winota, he liked it here so much, but he never mentions that anymore.” She sighed at the changes wrought by time. “I can’t understand why he never got in touch with you, Johnny. Your mother…” She pressed her lips together as if to say no to the comment she had been about to make.
“What about her?” he said neutrally.
“I don’t want to say anything and I shouldn’t, but I don’t think it was the right thing to do. It doesn’t matter how good a father the other man was to you—the man she married. Your own father is your own father and I think you ought to know each other. I know he thought the world of you. I just disapprove all the way around, even if it isn’t any of my business. Are you going to look him up?”
“I don’t know.”
“For goodness’ sake why not if you’re going all the way to California anyhow?”
“If somebody doesn’t want to see me, they don’t see me,” he said, and the pronouncement-like accident of phrasing made his throat tense.
“I don’t know what Martha told him or you,” Estelle said. “Forgive me, but sometimes your mother and the truth were barely on speaking terms.”
He remembered how when they came home at night he’d pretend to be sound asleep in the car so his father would have to carry him up the stairs; he wondered then why his father never knew he was really awake. Obviously his father could be fooled.
“Well, I’m headed that way,” he said. “I’ll see what happens when I get there.”
Estelle went on, reciting information and requesting it. She knew about his father’s cousins in Minneapolis and St. Paul, his father’s brother in Seattle—all this a vague rumor in his mind. His mother’s family came from St. Cloud, he knew; his grandparents on her side were still alive, but were strict Lutherans still icy about the scandal of divorce all those years ago. He’d seen a picture of them in which they stood two feet apart and noncommittal under a maple tree. She asked how long he would stay in Winota, and did he have a place to stay? His exact Army and college records went into the files, as did Amos Sylvester’s vital statistics. Who was he, he thought, faced with the warm energy of her interest, to look down upon this form of knowledge?
Estelle herself had two girls, twelve and ten, and Sonny Hilberg was kind to the three of them. Winota was a nice town, a friendly town, a good, solid, hardworking town. There were worse places in the world, Johnny, to settle down. With his college background he could get a job on the Herald. It wouldn’t pay much at first, but the opportunities were good. Think about it.
Estelle looked at her tiny gold wristwatch. “Goodness, I’ve got to get back to work! I may be the publisher’s wife, but the presses must roll.” She stood up and he stood up with her, bent a little because of the constrictions of the booth. “Don’t be a fool,” she said, blushing so that her skin turned as tawny as her freckles. “Make sure you find him.” She kissed him on the mouth, a depth of perfume, and lips smoother than he expected; then she had to wipe her lipstick from his mouth with a paper napkin, a motherly act, her left hand holding his chin steady. “You keep in touch, now,” she said. “You can always write me at the Herald. I may hear from him anytime, so if you can’t find him, please let me know.” Estelle, this lively woman whose eyes searched for his father in him, had to be telling him that she was more than his father’s friend, and that her connection, unlike his mother’s, would not be broken.
“I want to know what happens to you in your life. Will you write and tell me?” She meant it, literally.
“All right,” he said, feeling that he lied, that slight twinge.
“Do you mean it?”
“I think so.”
“You’re a lot like your father,” she said, and gathered her things. “I just wish you were taking a train or a bus, but both you guys are always out of control. I know. Goodbye, Johnny.”
Gracie, Loretta and
Miles, together at the counter, watched all of this, Loretta seeming to have forgotten her anger. She leaned against a stool in such a way that her arm touched Miles’s arm.
Estelle went to the cash register, a jaunty sway in her hips, and as she paid she said something to Gracie that made her look at him; then Estelle turned to look at him, too. She waved as she left.
He decided to leave Winota today, and when he told them he was surprised by their vehemence. “Not today!” Gracie cried.
“Come on, John,” Miles said. “We’re just getting to know you, as the song says. Stick around. Take a break. The girls are off this aft and we’re going swimming out to the lake. Come on with us.”
John looked to Loretta, that authority, and found her looking at him sternly, thinking hard about him, his character, his motivation. Finally she nodded. “Stay another day. You need it,” she said.
“Stay forever!” Gracie said.
So in the late afternoon he lay on the white raft next to slim Loretta, Gracie and Miles having a race to shore. Gracie swam like a torpedo, faster than her arms and legs seemed to propel her. The lake water was so warm it was no shock at all to enter it.
“Your girlfriend in New Hampshire,” Loretta said. “Are you serious about her?”
“You mean I’m not about Gracie.”
“I know that. It’s too bad. She’s such a generous, loving girl.”
“How about you and Miles?”
“Miles is a child. I’m waiting to see if he ever grows up.”
“I remember this beach,” he said. “I got my beginner’s button here.”
“I’m grateful you didn’t go all the way last night. She got an instant crush on you as big as a house. She just doesn’t let boys do things like that. Please believe it.”
“Okay.”
She turned onto her hip and looked at him to see if he believed it, and they faced each other as closely as lovers for a moment, long enough for her clear skin and graceful pose to give him an erection, which seemed in such bad taste he rolled into the water to hide it.
He was to leave early the next morning, the sun behind him. That evening they danced at the Lakeside Casino to a brassy local band.
“You belong to my heart…” Gracie was a little bundly and awkward to dance with, her pretty face blissful. She hadn’t once asked about his girl in New Hampshire.
In the morning Miles got up to see him off, and just as he was about to start his engine Loretta and Gracie arrived in Loretta’s green Ford.
“Come back and see us,” Loretta said.
“Send us a postcard from California,” Gracie said. “You’ve got friends in Winota, just remember that.”
“Take care, buddy,” Miles said.
The town had become new because a new part of his existence had taken place in it, but at the moment of leaving the older memories came back as flicks of emotion, nudges of feeling.
“Did you ever know an Alice Giefer?” he asked them. “When she was five she had bright red hair. She taught me to eat sand in her sandbox.”
They were silent, perplexed. “But…,” Gracie said.
Miles said in a voice gentler than usual, “She’s eating sand right now, Johnny.”
“She was Roger’s girl,” Gracie said.
It was like a stitch, the crushed bright red Pontiac, that closed past to present, the knowledge vivid but not as sad to him as they thought it was. After all, he’d only known Alice for a short time, long ago, about as long as his father had known him.
After he’d started his engine Gracie ran to him, hugged him with her field-hockey strength and kissed him on the lips. “Goodbye! Goodbye!”
He left them because he was pushed, or pulled, by the technicality of his having said he would leave. He ran that way—affection-proof, sorrow-proof, a ghost of what they thought him to be.
“We’ll miss you!” Loretta called over the urgency of his running engine.
He left Winota on a narrow white highway, the wide land smelling of fecundity. To be on the motorcycle again was an act that had stretched him out past weariness with distance and the fear of breakdown or crashing. His wheels continued to vibrate as they revolved, the slightly bent frame to twist his back, the wind to desiccate his skin. Winota receded into time as the miles passed and he achieved a kind of second wind of boredom. He stopped to eat in South Dakota in a little town whose name he’d missed on entering and never knew, then went by steps west and south into Iowa and then into Nebraska.
He saw from its first ominous hump a storm rise over the horizon like a mountain range, palpable as lead, yet it could not be mountains because the Rockies waited for him around the curve of the earth. The flatness of the land, the views too far and too level, made him uneasy, suggesting an unexpected phobia, not quite pathological. Fear of flatness? Of nothing? Zerophobia? There must have been a name for it, but the name would not help his apprehension. Surely he had expected flatness.
Only the storm approached, with no trees or town or anything in sight but the mirage-smeared highway, telephone poles and low grasses that seemed half alive, or ragged signs proclaiming obsolete powders or teas, a collapsed shack and perhaps a pile of bones a mile off, or ten miles off. Occasionally he would glimpse a starved brown river, weedy green along its banks, a phrase coming from some memory or other: Too wet to plow, too dry to drink.
Then the lead-colored storm, thousands of vertical feet of dingy, coiling mayhem, came over the land like a shutter and he had to stop, put his poncho over his head and wait while it doused him and pried at him with a wind that was like a horizon-wide blade and then a punching, hammering series of small but vindictive blows. In his blindness he thought of tornadoes that drove straws through steel, and waited for impalement. But the storm was a roar and a force that grandly passed, disdainful of what it had not bothered to destroy. A yellowish, sickish light, a thousand miles of puke-colored light, grew and smoked and was gone eastward away from the sun.
The land didn’t know what to do with the sudden water, grass and earth armored against it and bright with it, so that it would go to waste. The sun and wind would suck it back and the land would go on starving, or nearly starving, not green enough for eyes used to the green of New England.
He went on toward the evening as the sun began to blind him, looking for a town. The Indian Pony seemed to be losing power, which worried him until he remembered that he must be climbing, the whole land a hill, plains and prairies tilted up toward the Great Divide, where everything would be a mile high, the sharp young mountains rising from that base up into moonlike snow—geology, geography, the matter-of-fact of school. It turned cold as he climbed, cold as March at home. It turned by the mile colder as the sun fell toward a sealike horizon, until his fingers were thick and slow with it. He didn’t want to stop and break the toleration of the stiff ache of riding, but he finally had to stop and put on his wool hat and gloves and another sweater under his Ike jacket before he went on. If it was this cold here, he would not have enough clothes for the real mountains. Even now his ankles and calves seemed banded by ice, and his knees were so numb he wondered, as he rode, if they would ever straighten. The cold that told him he must soon stop also insulated him, as if he were in numbed suspended animation, a part of the machine. He found himself traveling right on through a wind-blasted, barren, twilit town called Cinch, where there was a post office–store but no obvious place for travelers to stay. The sun turned right and left with the narrow highway he saw sometimes through blood-red refractions. Then the sun was gone, the plains a blue, planetary emptiness with a white penumbra that faded quickly into dark.
In his headlight, a shaky, shallow hole of yellow light, the road came under him, the worn white centerline skimming inches under his left foot. Eyes or bottles gleamed past on the shoulders that went back forever to ominous dark behind him.
A few miles on, no town lights ahead, a brown animal jerked across the asphalt in front of him, the quick vision of long ears and the squatted
body said rabbit, a fixed picture like a photograph taken in panic and examined later. The next one he didn’t see but felt, k-thup-thup as his wheels passed with a percussive shake over its body. He twisted his throttle down, holding his handlebars rigid, dependent upon luck and gyroscopic force to keep him from the disaster of falling. Then his rear wheel locked and slid out past him, tilting over. As the rear wheel and frame took control, the rigid, forward-pointing handlebars were meaningless and his light turned as the motorcycle lay over and down, the yellow light seeing shoulder and sparse grass, a cone of field, then the road again, but the road he had already passed. He swirled on the crash bar in a bow wave of bright sparks and finally the world stopped turning.
His engine had stalled, the headlight dimming quickly under battery power. He dragged the machine to the shoulder, stood it up and turned off the light. He wasn’t yet sure that he wasn’t hurt, because shock and the cold might have masked even drastic wounds.
Instantly he was among the stars. They seemed to begin at his feet, on all sides of him, defining by their billion white points a globe that was not just a hemisphere but the black, endless space of the universe. He could see the wheel of his own galaxy, the infinitude beyond. No shadow of a hill or tree cut into that void to remind him of the homeliness and presence of Earth.
Gravity held his feet to the hard dirt; that was evidence, but at first gravity was untrustworthy, coming at him unsteadily. He recognized the symptoms of fainting and bent over for a while until the force was again vertical. He was here, somewhere, and had immediate earthly problems. In his toolbox was a small metal flashlight he’d meant to buy new batteries for, but hadn’t. He felt his way to it past buckles, torn canvas and rope, and in its sick dim ray found that his rear tire was flat. He could possibly repair it, if it was only punctured and not blown, but not in the dark. His flashlight, as if in remorseless agreement, or in collusion with rabbit and general malfunction and the cold that numbed his fingers through his gloves, then dimmed to a filamental glow far inside its lens.
The Moon Pinnace Page 19