“I guess,” Gordon Skotcher ascertained, “if you came down here trying to sell snow to Eskimos, which, frankly, makes more sense than trying to pave my road, then you’re a desperate man. In your heart. Desperate, and in the wrong business. Is this the final frontier for you, Jake? Is it? Or are you starting out in life? Answer me honestly now, because I could use a man like you.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean about what? Honesty?”
“No. That you could use a man like me.”
Him staring at Jake’s sunken tire caused Jake to do the same.
“I don’t judge you,” Skootch said. “The Rathbone Company, I might judge them someday. But I don’t judge you. Everything in life is sales. We’re buying or selling, it’s got to be one or the other. Say you don’t disagree with me.”
“I don’t.”
“One of my clan has moved on, Jake. I need someone in sales. I can find you a good territory. Easy work. You can keep your jacket on. Keep your car. That’s what makes you valuable to me, in a sense. Your car. Even your jacket. In any case, your look. This is the day that changes your life, did you know that?”
“What do you want me to do exactly?”
“Exactly? Sales, Jake. That’s it. Not even. Deliveries, really. But deliveries is sales. Are you trustworthy? That’s what I need to confirm here.”
“What do I deliver?”
“What do you want to ask me a question like that for, Jake? Seriously, now. What did the Rathbone Company say that you’d be selling for them when they set you up to pave the world? To take beautiful green grass and bury it under that ugly black asphalt gunk?”
“I know what you want me to deliver,” Jake Withers told him. And then he said, “I’m not naïve.”
“Jake. Look. Over there. What do you see?”
He saw the smoke and cabins and people in their daily lives.
“Woods. Cabins. The river.”
“No, Jake. Seriously. Seriously now. What do you really see?”
He took another look, wondering what it was he was supposed to see but obviously did not. He began to concentrate more keenly on what he’d seen before, but was noticing more acutely now, and thought that he might be on the right track. At least, he knew what he was seeing now. Could this be what Skootch meant? Could he dare say it?
“What do you really see, Jake?” Skootch was whispering now. “Tell me what you really see.”
He coughed, and thought it through. “Women,” he admitted. “Girls.”
“Women,” Skootch repeated. “Girls.” He let that settle. “Many are spoken for. Some are not. A few are in transition, or they will be someday. Women. I would say, if you’re not too superficial about these things, that this statement is entirely true—they are beautiful women. Now, I’ve only got one more question for you, Jake, and it’s neither here nor there. I’m just hoping, I guess, that you can help me out in more ways than one. Do you or do you not play baseball?”
Jake shrugged.
“What does that mean?” Skootch inquired.
“I haven’t for a while. I used to be pretty good.”
“Jake. Are you yanking my chain here? What position?”
“Third.”
Gordon Skotcher spun in a circle three times. Then he shouted out for those in the clearing to hear. “He plays third!”
“You need a third baseman?”
“Yes! Jake! I mean, we need a ninth player, but if you also play third, that makes you heaven sent. Quit your job, Jake. For God’s sake, come and work for me! Say yes. I’ll pay you way more than the Rathbone Company ever promised and they probably lied. Keep the car, keep your silly suit. The girls will forgive you once they get to know you and find out that you play third. Can you hit? Don’t tell me. Let it be a surprise. We’ll find out tonight. You play fucking third? Holy shit! ” He did another spin. “Listen. Quit Rathbone, but keep whatever they gave you. Company ID. A catalogue. Samples? Is there such a thing as sample asphalt? Whatever. Just in case you get stopped someday, that’s who you are, their representative. Do you realize how perfect you are, Jakey-boy? Do you have any idea?”
“How much,” he wondered, “will I make with you?”
“Name your price, Jake! I bet I can double it. Everybody! Hey! He plays third! ”
In the clearing, mainly men but a few women as well raised their arms in quiet, and largely disinterested, celebration of this pronouncement.
“Come on, Jake,” Skootch said. “We’ll get you shoved out of here. Then you can meet the ladies. I’ll look after the introductions myself. We’ll have a beer or three. Do you have your own cleats?”
How different his life would be, Jake Withers was thinking, if he never drove down this road. How unjust.
■ ■ ■
“You think it’s junk,” Willis said as they surveyed her alcove.
“I don’t think it. I know it. It’s junk,” Tara reiterated. She spoke softly, not wanting to overly antagonize him.
Willis Ephraim Howard was nobody’s fool, although at times she was lulled into the mistaken sense that he could pass for one. He was correct to point out that the likelihood of her earning a living from one insignificant section of the store was remote. That reality needed to be addressed, and she was keen to move quickly to make her wee sector viable.
“Junk is not without value,” he maintained. “Some people buy this stuff.”
“Granted. I’m not throwing it out. But you do see our problem here.” Careful to include him, she did not want the solutions to fall only upon herself. “By concentrating the worst of the kitsch in one room, the space becomes an object of amusement for your customers. Amusement and derision. For some, even if they want to buy something in here, they won’t, due to that stigma. How can someone buy something off these shelves if their friends are smirking at them just for looking?”
Willis conceded as much.
“Let’s do this,” she pressed on. “Take the junk—our specialty items, we’ll call them that—and make them disappear. Reposition them around the store. Spread out, they won’t be an eyesore. Their impact will be diluted. People can still turn up their noses at this or that but without a stigma being attached to the entire inventory. Everything becomes part of the eclectic charm of the place.”
Tara found that when she explained things, Willis Howard was flexible.
Train travellers were arriving in waves, interrupting them. She smiled at the difference a day made. Yesterday she’d been a tourist. Today she was part of the scenery, and contested for market share.
Whenever she took a break from the store she ventured upstairs to the loft. Although small, the attic admitted ample light with a view of the river above the treetops. A kitchen nook was in place long before Willis Howard purchased the building, and while it was problematic for him to rent the space to just anyone, as the only entrance was through the store proper, in years past he leased the premises to students up for the summer as employees. Consequently, the room was not too shabby, brightly painted, and could easily be cleaned of its cobwebs and aired of a mild mustiness. The captain’s bed was constructed in situ, with drawers beneath it, as getting any large piece of furniture up the steep and narrow stairs would prove too daunting. She planned to toss the single mattress, start fresh with bedding, but the other sticks of furniture—a wooden loveseat and a beanbag chair, a folding table and three hardback dining chairs—why three?—could remain for now. Standing by the window, watching the river flow, she couldn’t believe her swift good fortune, nor the breadth of the tasks that lay ahead. Her new life, then—her grand adventure—had truly begun.
Other adventures could wait. Walking down the street for lunch turned out to be a case in point. Truckers honked as their big rigs crept through town. Yeah, big men in their big trucks with their big horns. They were probably married and those who were
n’t probably didn’t have a word to say once their beefy palms were off their bellowing horns. So there was that. Then there was another guy, a cop, who stopped his car and looked once, twice, as if sizing her up for a prison cell, before he drove on. No. Not a prison cell. Normally she wouldn’t glance over but a police car tricked her into thinking that something official might be up. But no, just another guy giving her the eye, so she walked on. That kind of stuff could wait, but in any case, she knew policemen from her days in court and none of them particularly appealed. Firemen, though. Ah. Maybe. He was cute, though. Really cute. Probably married, the creep. She smiled through lunch, wondering about the breeze her grin sailed in on.
After lunch she surveyed the competition. Potpourri was unquestionably the largest, the most long-standing, and the most successful of the town’s gift shops, and so benefitted in particular from the broadest inventory. Other stores showcased artisans who were either local or relatively local, and Tara committed a few names of the better craftspeople to memory. Lemonade might give her a modest daily income, but she needed quality merchandise to bankroll the broader enterprise.
Back at the store she ordered her mattress and bedding from a chain in the city. Before coming here from the coast, she threw out a relatively new queen-sized bed that never would have made the trek in the back of her pickup, or alongside her on the steam train, but even had it survived—and wouldn’t that have made for an entrance into town!—it never would’ve come up the narrow stairs to her new premises. This proved, in a way that she found gratifying, the wisdom of leaving all her old stuff from her old life behind in its entirety to start anew. Less satisfying, she acknowledged, was that she’d now have to shell out cash to have something to sleep on.
She’d stay on at the inn while awaiting delivery.
12
From this plateau, the Gatineau Hills concealed the horizon in all directions. No one could gauge a change in the weather with acuity, although those who were preparing to play or settling into the stands to watch the game detected an electrical charge in the air. A languidness affected the motion of women whose slow, deep strides in the heat bore them along the dusty tire tracks up the hill to the plateau’s mown field, and affected the men as their arms arced through soft tosses, their gloves lazily sweeping the air for an easy catch. No player exerted himself for a ball slightly out of reach, no one drilled it, no one hustled, the air too humid, the day’s heat pervasive still. Breath felt difficult. Soon the sky would be ransacked by a cooling storm, although players and fans alike assumed that prior to matters becoming nasty they’d hear the approaching rumbles of thunder, spy a telltale black anvil cloud forming beyond the hills and so have time to pack up and leave. With any luck the teams might sneak in five innings, enough to make the game count, and the boys would be back in the pub for a few cold ones before rain pelted down and violent wind and lightning chased them off.
No minute could be spared. The teams were ready on the dot of seven.
The first pitch a strike. A few fans clapped.
“Swing the damn bat,” griped the catcher to the hitter, his voice growly. “We don’t got all night.”
“Keep your jockstrap on,” the batter, a trucker, answered back. The Blue Riders, Denny’s team, worked in the forestry industry in some capacity. They had enough players that they could play against themselves if their opposition failed to show. Customarily, they wore uniforms, shirts at least, although tonight a portion of the men chose shorts and a few opted for mere T-shirts. The team boasted of relief pitchers should their starter falter, and pinch hitters, and spares who were better fielders than some in the lineup and would play if the team built a decent lead, and one of their guys, a skimmer by day, did nothing more than steal bases for them, coming into a game as a pinch runner when the situation warranted. He got into games often, as the Riders were slow.
The second pitch was outside, the bat steady on the hitter’s shoulder.
“Take it the other way.”
“Skootch,” the batter advised him, a man known as Slim for good reason, although the catcher he was talking to was skinnier still, “don’t start with me. If you start with me the next ball I hit is maybe your head.”
The umpire, a short, chubby druggist by day, formerly a catcher himself until a torn rotator cuff wrecked his arm, in any case now in his sixties, waddled out to the front of the plate, faced his bottom to centre field, and bent over to sweep the plate clean. The batter and catcher waited, although the plate was already spotless and the action unnecessary. The ump took his mask off then put it back on and while he was doing that he said, “Both of you, shut the fuck up. Skootch, you don’t have an extra man. Not one. If you think that’ll stop me from tossing you out of the game if you give me cause, think twice. I’m not putting up with this shit tonight, it’s too damn hot. Do you get me?”
Gordon Skotcher hunkered down into his crouch and ran through the signals with his pitcher. When the umpire leaned in behind him for the pitch, he said, “You’re a hard-ass, ump.”
The umpire called out, “Steeeee!” loudly, right in his ear as the ball zipped in, catching a corner of the plate. Unhittable.
The batter smiled. After throwing the ball back, the catcher made a point of sticking a finger in his ear as though the drum was now in need of repair and a few fans chuckled. The next ball the batter dribbled down the first base line and thinking that it was arcing foul he didn’t run it out. The ball took a bounce off a stone and shifted fair and the batter was left looking lazy and dumb as the first baseman snagged it, and fans, even those who rooted for the Blue Riders, booed his utter lack of hustle.
In disgrace he walked back to the team’s bench, as the evening was too warm to jog.
Fans seemed into the game tonight, which was not always the case. A few spouses were on hand with their youngest kids and often they just talked among themselves at the games and asked, when it was over and they were piling their husband’s gear into the back of a pickup, “Who won?” This evening they were into the game because the Blue Riders were playing a team that called themselves the Wildcats but they were referred to as Tree Huggers for being on the opposite side of every political, economic, and environmental issue from anyone who happened to work for a living cutting down trees. On occasion, fielding a full complement of players was a problem for them when one or more of their number slipped in a little jail time over the course of a summer, or another went missing and a rumour spread that he was in California, as if that could not be helped, or in Prague, as if that made any sense to anyone. A couple of their players were quite good, which only partially made up for the two who were daft, while others fell between okay and not so bad. Their main pitcher, his name was Benoit, who actually worked in a visible job as a car mechanic, snapped off a fastball that ate loggers and truckers alive. On a few rare nights his velocity fell off a notch and only then did the Blue Riders scratch a few hits off him. Most nights they couldn’t touch his heater and they needed luck to eke out a run and if they expected to win they needed to pitch well themselves. They always had a chance of winning because the Wildcats were prone to making errors, especially in the outfield where some of their guys went to sleep. Their minds just drifted off to la-la land. In the main, the Blue Riders played the game for fun except when they played the Tree Huggers. That group wanted to hamper their right to earn a living, and what happened off the baseball diamond inevitably found its way onto it. They wanted to win those games too much to have any fun unless they actually did win. Each team’s record against the other was about fifty-fifty.
The Riders’ second batter struck out on three pitches without swinging at any of them. Skootch looked at the umpire and smirked.
“Just keep your yap shut and play ball,” the umpire warned. “I don’t want to hear any mockery out of you.”
“Ump, I mock. That’s my game.”
“Not tonight it isn’t.” He was worried that in
the heat tempers could easily flare between two rivals who despised each other, off the field and on.
The third batter up was Dennis Jasper O’Farrell.
“Hey, Denny,” Skootch said.
“Skootch,” Denny said.
“He’s firing tonight.”
“Early days,” Denny reminded him.
“The storm will get here before he wears out,” countered Skootch.
Agreeing that that was probably true, Denny O’Farrell felt demoralized. Especially when the first pitch blew right by him.
“Told you. He’s got his pop. Hey, you going to that meeting tomorrow?”
“This is ridiculous,” Denny said. He stepped out of the box to look at the signals from his third base coach who was an older gentleman in sales at his company. He was making his signals unnecessarily complicated for the situation. Two out. Nobody on. An oh-and-one count—no need for signals.
“Christ, Denny,” Skootch said. “He wants you to bunt.”
“How come he wants me to bunt?”
“Beats me. Unless he thinks you can’t hit my guy tonight.”
Denny called time and strolled down the third base line, using his bat as a cane. Dimitri the salesman, overeager, loped down to meet him more than halfway. In the outfield, players bent at the waist and tore out a few strands of grass to pass the time, and the guy in left wore his glove on his head, slouching. In the infield, the players moved dirt around with their toes and the shortstop spit a few times then dusted over the spots, creating small clumps. The Wildcats didn’t wear uniforms and quite a few wore shorts. They had on different coloured T-shirts except for the centrefielder who was bare-chested.
“What the fuck?” Denny asked his coach.
“We need to manufacture a run, Denny. Put some pressure on him.”
“Skootch reads our signals, Dee.”
The River Burns Page 11