October Light

by John Gardner

  “On your menu—” Dr. Alkahest began.

  Wong Chop looked embarrassed, shamed beyond words, as if the menu were somebody else’s work, a cross he could scarcely bear. “We have other thing, of course, Doctor,” he said with a wave and another deep bow. “I venture say we allontee satisfaction.” He smiled.

  Dr. Alkahest smiled back wickedly. “What my friends recommended,” he said, “was this.” He brought the folded slip of paper from his pocket and pressed it into Wong Chop’s hand. Wong Chop read it with no change in his smile, then folded it again, and, still smiling, sighed. “Ah, esteemed doctor fliend, you teasing poor Wong Chop!”

  “Not at all!” Dr. Alkahest insisted. He began to tremble. “My friends assured me—”

  “Some joke, must be,” Wong Chop said sadly, compassionately. “They pray you a plank.” He stood smiling down at Dr. Alkahest like a friendly red mountain. Then at last he said, “But perhaps I help you in some small way. Let me show you table you possibly find more congenial.” He led the way, walking sideways, bowing, down a panelled hallway painted Chinese red to an arched door beaded and draped. He held back the drape while Dr. Alkahest wheeled through. It was a cubicle ambushed on all four sides by crimson. Paper lanterns hung from the shiny black ceiling, and below them stood a table for two, a linen tablecloth, candles, and two lacquered bowls. A stone Chinese lion saying OM kept watch in the corner. Wong Chop lit the candles.

  “Now,” Wong Chop said, and rubbed his hands. He pushed Dr. Alkahest’s wheelchair to the table, then went around and sat in the chair across from him. He waved two fingers at a silent little man Dr. Alkahest had not noticed, and the man swept away. He returned instantly with a tray containing two green and gold, thin cigarettes with golden tips. This time as he went out the door there was a humming noise and, turning to look over his shoulder, Dr. Alkahest saw something solid move past the slit in the archway drapery. A panel had sealed off the room. Wong Chop smiled and held out a gold-tipped match. Dr. Alkahest fumbled the cigarette to his mouth and Wong Chop lit it. Almost instantly Alkahest’s delicate brains were addled, inspiring him toward song. Wong Chop lit his own cigarette and, puckering his lips, breathed in with enormous satisfaction. He laid one fat hand on the table, and Dr. Alkahest seized it.

  “Now,” Wong Chop said again, and waited. He had a large forehead and beautiful, womanly features. An aristocrat, Dr. Alkahest surmised. Man to be trusted. The plump fingers which Dr. Alkahest clutched were dimpled like a girl’s. Sign of generosity.

  “I want to get to the source,” Dr. Alkahest said. He leaned so far forward that he almost fell out of the wheelchair. “I’m a wealthy man.” In his excitement he let it out as a yelp.

  “As for that—” Wong Chop said sadly, thoughtfully. With his free hand he waved the marijuana joint. “I am humble restaurateur. Now and then a little token may fall into Wong Chop unworthy hands, but as to source—” He seemed grieved that he couldn’t be more help. Dr. Alkahest was delighted, though of course not fooled. Wong Chop was brilliant; they would come to an understanding. Wong Chop was growing larger, swelling gradually like a balloon, and that too was delightful.

  “Tell me about your friends,” Wong Chop said, momentarily forgetting his pidgin, “—the people for whom you serve as agent.” Behind his little eyes lay tigers.

  “With pleasure,” Dr. Alkahest said. “In fact, it’s information that might be of some use to you.” He giggled, beside himself. Wong Chop’s eyes narrowed, and Dr. Alkahest hurried on. “They are people, in fact, who are not what you might call friendly to you.” Wong Chop’s eyes narrowed more. “I’ll trade my information for yours,” Dr. Alkahest piped, believing he was falling though in fact he was not—not yet. It came to him that his chin was on the table.

  “Information on smuggler?” Wong Chop asked, reserved.

  Dr. Alkahest tried to nod. “That’s what I meant.”

  Wong Chop pushed back from the table, musing, puckering his lips, drawing in hard on the cannabis. After a while he said, abandoning his pidgin, squinting thoughtfully, “The information would be useless to your friends. Better to deal, I suggest, with Wong Chop. Here today, gone tomorrow, that’s how it is with marijuana smugglers. No ‘ice,’ you see. The rackets are in on the hard drugs, so the authorities get paid off. Marijuana smugglers, on the other hand, are mere peasants—foolish children and crazies. The police knock them off like flies. Good public relations.”

  “You’re an honest man,” Dr. Alkahest said, and meant it. Tears sprang to his eyes.

  Wong Chop went on musing, eyes narrowed. He blew smoke through his nose. “Any smuggler I might name would be pinched, I assure you, before your friends ever got to him.”

  “I’ll risk it! I’ll risk it!”

  Wong Chop nodded. “And in return—”

  “Yes, yes!”

  Wong Chop leaned forward, put his elbows on the table. “The Indomitable,” he said softly. “Just off Mexico. Lost Souls’ Rock.”

  Dr. Alkahest’s heart beat crazily. With violently shaking hands he hunted through his pockets for pencil and paper. At last he found them, tried to write. He couldn’t. Wong Chop reached over and wrote in swift strokes like knife cuts, then jerked back his hand. “Now, Doctor?” His whole face was suddenly a stranger’s face, malevolent and keen, “these ‘friends’ you represent?”

  “Oh, I don’t represent them,” Dr. Alkahest exclaimed. He couldn’t tell whether it was his body trembling or the room. He raised one finger, like a teacher, and shook it, full of joy. “I got your name from the Society for the Hindrance of International Trafficking,” he squeaked. “An organization of dedicated American doctors, he he he!, with whom, by merest chance—”

  He had no clear idea what happened next. One moment he was looking at Wong Chop’s face—it was swelling, turning purple—the next, the table was flying past his chin and he was falling through blackness, like a man in a dream. He looked up, saw a light, a blurry lantern. Then he was awash in some overwhelming stench, some sludgy liquid that carried him along through echoing darkness like a stream in the bowels of a whale. “You’ve misunderstood me!” he howled. And then, with his hypersensitive ears he heard, or imagined he heard: “Hello? This is Wong. Narcotics. Listen, it’s another false alarm. If you could spare me a couple of men and a rowboat—” Dr. Alkahest gasped and fainted.

  He woke up on a ledge, his trousers snagged on a comb of rusted pipes, his wheelchair beside him. Black sewage dribbled over him and trickled away with a soft noise into the ocean. It was a lovely day, seagulls and an infinitely gentle sky. Two old men in a rowboat looked up at him and sadly shook their heads.

  ~ ~ ~

  Sally smiled and closed her eyes, meaning to put the book on the white wicker table in a minute, and also get up to turn off the lights. She was instantly asleep. Her mouth fell open. When she awakened it was early afternoon.

  “The bees are as warlike as the Romans, Russians, Britons, or Frenchmen. Ants, caterpillars, and canker-worms are the only tribes among whom I have not seen battles; and heaven itself, if we believe Hindoos, lews, Christians and Mahometans, has not always been at peace.”

  John Adams, 1822

  4

  On Both Sides the Spat Is Further Escalated

  1

  She’d stood knocking for five minutes on her father’s kitchen door, chickens looking up at her, and still no one answered. She’d never seen the door locked before tonight. She was beginning to be alarmed.

  Lewis was behind her, standing dejectedly by the fat, silent Chevy—he’d turned the engine off—looking at the bright yellow maple leaves strewn across the yard, here and there a few bright red ones from the red maple by the mailbox. “He’d ought to rake these,” Lewis said mostly to himself. It was a stupid idea and she was tempted to tell him so. The branches were still full; if her father were to bother with the leaves already fallen, there’d just be more tomorrow. Anyway, you didn’t really need to rake leaves in the country. They’d be blown away
before snowfall. But Lewis wouldn’t know that, brought up in a prim little house with a prim picket fence in prim North Bennington—just four blocks away from Aunt Sally’s old house—and she decided to say nothing, merely set her jaw tighter and frowned up at Aunt Sally’s narrow window. She knocked harder and called, “Aunt Sally, you up there?” Still no answer. She looked over at Dickey.

  He was standing with his hands in his coatpockets, the bill of his dark blue cap pulled low so that he had to tip his head back to see things straight in front of him. He was looking at the bushes under Aunt Sally’s window. His expression was thoughtful. “Somebody went the bathroom in the bushes,” he said.

  “Oh Dickey,” Virginia said, “for heaven’s sakes.”

  But Lewis, from his angle, could see something she couldn’t. He came over from the car to a little behind Dickey, looked for a minute at the bushes then up at Aunt Sally’s bedroom window. “My God,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?” Ginny asked.

  Lewis half smiled, then sobered again. Matter-of-factly he said, “She been throwin her shit out the window, looks like.”

  “What are you talking about?” She turned from the door and went over to look. What caught her eye first was what appeared to be flowers on the lilac bushes, though the leaves on the bushes were withered to brown and bits of red. Nevertheless there were bits of white blossom, and not having quite registered what Lewis had said, though she had in fact heard it, she moved closer, scattering the chickens, and was suddenly assaulted by the stench. The bottom of her abdomen punched upward, trying to make her vomit, and she instantly covered her nose and mouth with her hands and backed away. She looked up at the window, horrified and enraged, so that her face, as Lewis and Dickey saw it, was not the Ginny they knew at all. She had bulging eyes, a sudden puffiness and redness of adrenaline—a kind of crackling look, as if she were shooting off electricity—and the sight made them cower, though they showed no outward sign. Looking up at the window Ginny saw now, despite the glow of sunset on the panes, her Aunt Sally standing there cool as a cucumber, saying not a word. Ginny drew in breath and bellowed, angrier than ever, “Aunt Sally!”

  Now Lewis saw her too. Instinctively putting himself on Ginny’s side, hoping for immunity from her wrath, he yelled: “Aunt Sally, look what you done!” He pointed at the bushes.

  Still she said nothing, staring down through the red-lighted panes like a madwoman, murderously serene.

  Now Ginny’s face was taking on a new expression. Lewis saw the change, glancing at her furtively, but he no more understood it than Ginny did herself, or the child. She knew only that her anger had suddenly flashed hotter, and that it had to do with humiliation. These were her relatives, and the way Lewis stood, carefully not judging, made her face sting with shame. “Aunt Sally, you answer me,” she yelled, white with anger, and then suddenly covered her face with both hands and cried. Lewis stood helplessly looking from Ginny to Aunt Sally to the lilacs, spattered with runny brown and the stained white of wadded Kleenex. Then the window opened, and Aunt Sally, standing in her bathrobe, a paperback book in one hand, called down: “If you want to see your father, he’s out milkin.”

  Lewis said, not quite to his wife, “I thought it might be chore-time.”

  Ginny gave him such a look of pure scalding rage that his heart quaked. “Then why in hell didn’t you say so?”

  He had no idea what he’d done to so anger her. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice quavering. “I should’ve spoke up.”

  “Jesus,” she spat at them all, and started toward the barn. Lewis, knees weak, caught Dickey’s hand and followed.

  Behind the house, where the back yard sloped down to the faded red barn on its rough rock foundation—the dingy white hives of the bees just beyond—there was only one tree, an old jagged hickory, most of its leaves fallen, so they could see the full glory of the crimson sunset above the mountain and the slope of the pasture. Perversely, for all his grief, or because of his grief, Lewis Hicks did see it, and registered that it was beautiful. He saw how the stones and grass of the pasture turned spiritual in this light, radiating power, as if charged with some old, mystic energy unnamed except in ancient Sumerian or Indian—how the forested mountains that had been a hundred colors just an hour ago—blood red, wine red, pink and magenta, bold strokes of orange, bright yellows and browns, purples that Ginny would call garish in a painting, and here and there, in blocks, dark greens and blue-greens where there were stands of pine—were now all suffused with the crimson of the sky, transmuted. Lewis Hicks saw and registered how even the old man’s machinery was transformed by this stunning light, the old yellow corn-chopper tilted against the silo more distinct, more itself than it would normally be, final as a tombstone, like the big Case tractor, the paintless box-wagon, the lobster-red corn-picker or the small gray tractor with its big square faded umbrella. He had no words for his impressions, but his misery intensified. He was wrong and wronged. Wordlessly, caught at the intersecting planes of the sunset’s beauty and Virginia’s strange anger—strange to him even though he saw he’d been a fool, and all she’d said was right—he suddenly wished his whole life changed absolutely, wished himself free and in the same motion wished for the opposite, or the same perhaps, wished he were dead. All husbands wished that, he supposed, from time to time, same as elves and bears. And perhaps all wives. But how mysterious that not even one could be spared, not even he, remote from the world, in a barnyard in Vermont. Did even cattle have such pangs of unhap-piness? Grasshoppers?

  Dickey said, “Why’s she so mad?”

  Abruptly, almost without noticing it, he was better. His soul crashed inward from the sky, the sweep of mountains like ocean waves—collapsed back to time out of timelessness—and he became a small man walking, holding his son’s hand, moving again through a specific time and place, not a disembodied, universal cry but a sober-faced husband and father who had certain problems, certain groundless duties. In the trunk of the Chevy he had paint-remover and a scraper.

  “She’s upset,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  They ducked under the electric wire of the gate, then he picked up Dickey to carry him, stepping carefully, not that his shoes were all that fine, from firm place to firm place, grass-tuft to grass-tuft, past mud and slime and cowplops toward the milkhouse. Ginny had already disappeared through that door, hurrying ahead of them. They could hear the chuff-chuff of the milking-machine compressor.

  Having seen what she’d seen, Ginny was solidly on her father’s side when she found him between two Holsteins, putting on a milker strap.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said.

  The old man jumped, then smiled, pleased to see her, yet somewhat grim. “Hi there, Ginny,” he said.

  “I knocked and knocked, up at the house,” she said. “The door was locked.”

  It was a question, of course, but he pretended not to notice. “Wintah’s just around the cohnah,” he said. “So bahss”—leaning over to put the teatcups on.

  “Have you seen what’s happened to the lilac bushes?” Ginny asked. She had her arms folded, hands clamped in tight on each side of her bosom, because her father would allow no smoking out here in the barn.

  “Can’t say I have,” he said, and tipped up his long face to look at her. She said nothing, and he finished adjusting the machine, absently batting away a fly with his right hand, then stiffly raised himself, helping himself up by grabbing the cow’s sharp hipbone. When he was more or less erect—still bent over some, so that she was struck by the fact that her father had gotten old—he stepped back over the steaming, half-filled gutter to the walkway, placing the treads of his red boots carefully, to keep himself from slipping in manure or wet lime. He draped the strap from the cow he’d just finished around his neck. Ginny sniffled back tears. Though her father was strong from a lifetime of lifting and carrying, his flesh was wasting away, these last years, so that his rough red skin sagged and his bones stuck out like a half-starved animal’s, espec
ially the vertebrae in the back of his neck, his skull—unpleasantly prominent, lately, like the skull of a foetus—and the bones of his fingers and wrists. “What about ’em?” he asked, “—the lilacs?”

  “Aunt Sally’s been throwing her shit out the window,” she said, and abruptly, jerking her hands up to cover her face, she began sobbing. Her shoulders shook, her voice came out in whoops. The old man stood with his knuckly hands hanging at his sides and couldn’t think what to do. He hadn’t heard what she’d said, or, rather, wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly, and the crying was so extreme—as if somebody’d been killed—he could only stand fogbound and hope in a minute things came clearer. Ginny wailed, and what she said was even less distinct now, distorted by her sobbing. “Right there where everybody can see it, Dad. Anybody passing down the road can look over and—” The sobbing overwhelmed her and she could say no more, could only squeeze her face with her hands and gasp for breath, as she’d done when she’d cried as a little girl. He remembered when he’d spanked her out by the clothesline when she was something like seven, maybe eight, spanked her no harder than he ought to have done, but her sobbing, heart-broken, had filled him with anguish, and he’d held her and kissed her cheek—as now, awkwardly, he moved toward holding her, raising his stiff crooked hands toward her arms but unable really to hold her, because Ginny was grown now, and he was old, bent half double with constipation cramps. He remembered how she’d sobbed when little Ethan had fallen off the barn and broke his neck, their younger son, and was dead at just seven.

  “Ginny, what’s the matter?” he said now. “Honey, I can’t understand you. What’s happened?” Then, looking over toward the milkhouse steps, he saw Lewis and Dickey coming carefully toward them—they looked like fishermen crossing a shallow stream on rocks—trying not to step in the cowshit. “Lewis,” he called, “what’s happened?” Their faces lighted strangely as they came past the windows where the glow of the charged, crimson sky poured in. Lewis held Dickey’s hand.