by John Gardner
James shot a look at him, annoyed that he should see fit to mock.
Henry’s face reddened. “Listen,” he said. “Are you aware that John Jacob Astor made his fortune on beaver, and damn near destroyed the United States?”
“Horsepiss!” Partridge said.
“God’s own truth! Caused floods such as never was seen before.”
“And then,” Sam Frost said, leaning in between them like a referee, “you talk about animal cunning, there’s the hog-snake.” He chuckled.
“Hog-nosed snake,” Henry Stumpchurch said.
“Whatever,” Sam said with a sweep of his beer bottle, expansive.
Someone started up the jukebox. James turned to look, but Sam Frost said, “You know about the hog-snake?”
James turned back, raising his glass. It was empty. Emily said at his elbow, “You want another?” It made him jump.
Before he could think, he’d already nodded. No harm. Be good for him.
The tall girl danced past him with the Graham boy. He looked embarrassed, a little defiant. Nobody else in the whole place danced. They never did, it was wrong as an Indian dime, like clapping in church. Everybody watching looked irritated, imposed on, even Merton up by the cash register. What could have made the tall girl think of it, dancing to the jukebox in a place like this?—some movie, maybe? The Ranzonas got up to leave, then Sam and Leonard Pike. Then more people were leaving, not on account of the dancing, in all fairness. He’d ought to be getting on the road himself. But the wine was doing queer things to him. Time was sped up but it was also slowed down. He could stay here forever and no complaints. The edge of some memory kept brushing against his brain, not necessarily a pleasant one.
“The hog-nosed snake,” Sam Frost was saying, “is the greatest little actor in the world. This is true.”
Partridge nodded sagely.
“Bother the hog-snake,” Sam went on, “and he’ll coil up his tail and raise up his head and flatten out his neck just exactly like a cobra—flatten it to three times its normal size—I looked it up once with the little woman in the snakebook. He’ll hiss at you and strike, though there’s nothing in this world will make a hog-snake bite, and if you ain’t convinced by the cobra act he’ll try his rattlesnake.”
Again Partridge nodded.
“That’s nothing,” Henry said. “You take the common frog—”
Sam forged ahead: “If the hog-snake sees you’re not impressed by his rattler, he’s got a whole new tactic. He’ll open up his mouth and he’ll flip into convulsions, and he’ll twist and writhe and then roll onto his back with some leaves and little pieces of dirt in his mouth, and he’ll stiffen all at once and you could look at him and swear by crimus he’s been dead for a week!”
“You take the common frog—”
“Shit, what’s a frog do but sit there and wait?” Bill Partridge snapped.
“That ain’t so stupid,” Henry said. “It’s how he waits.”
“But that’s nothing,” Sam continued. “Funniest thing about a hog-snake is, you can poke him or swing him or anything you please, and he’ll go right on playing dead.” He laughed. “Only one little mistake he makes.” He laughed harder now. “Snake’s got his act down a little too pat. Lay him on his belly and he’ll roll right over on his back again, as if nobody could really be dead except lying on his spine.”
They laughed, all but James.
“You want animal cunning,” Henry Stumpchurch said, sullen but trying to hide it, smiling, “you take your common frog.” They leaned toward him like shadows when the light of a fireplace dies low, respectful as they would’ve been to Mr. Ethan Allen, but before big old Henry had said three words, Sam Frost was squeezing out of the booth, heading for the restroom.
The Bennington girl and the Graham boy swung by again. She was talking about art; seems she was studying art at the College. James turned his head a little, trying to eavesdrop. Art was something he knew about, he’d have said. But the names she mentioned he’d never heard of, and he felt once again caught short, out of date and ridiculous. If the world knew the difference between a cow and a cornknife, he might have reached out his hand and stopped them as they went slithering by—might have said to the girl: “There used to be ahtists on every hand, this pot of the country. I was personally acquainted with a number of ’em. Cousin of mine once sat for Mr. Rockwell, and I met the man many, many times. Also knew Mr. Pelham—did covers for the Post … Whole bunch of ’em lived right there in Arlington, three, four blocks from my daughter’s place. Tell you who else I was acquainted with—Anna Mary Robertson Moses—that’s right: ‘Grand-ma Moses.’ Lived just over the New York State line in Eagle Bridge. Used to work for Peg Ellis, cleaned house for her. But you talk about painters, there’s a nun used to live here in Bennington, years ago—”
All this he might have said, and perhaps the young woman would not have laughed, would even have widened her elegant gray eyes in pretended awe; but he chewed his cheek, eyes smouldering, and kept mum.
Both state policemen were watching the TV. On the screen, two policemen were chasing a big truck. There was an explosion on the highway in front of the police car, and the police went skidding and sliding toward a cliff. There was a shot of the two policemen’s faces. Suddenly there was a white-toothed, smiling woman with a yellow box of soap, then two red, rough hands and a butterfly. Sam Frost came back, zipping as he walked.
James was slightly woozy. The crowd had thinned a good deal by now. The roar of talk had for the most part died out, replaced by the music from the jukebox. On the TV a Negro girl was taking a shower, and though the sound was too low for James to hear, he made out that she was singing about some kind of hair-soap. She was naked as old Judah Sherbrooke’s wife, the way it looked, though the picture broke off right where the swimsuit might be. Did advertising like that cause rapes? he wondered. Suddenly she turned into a bottle. It made him start. Then there was a picture of a horse, and a man smoking a cigarette. The horse had ear-mites, or a little touch of spavins. There was some writing and then, as if nothing had happened, the police car was skidding around the burning place and coming back onto the road and up even with the truck. An arm with a gun came out the window of the truck and the policeman on the right got his gun out and aimed it, steadying his right hand with his left. He fired and there was a picture of the driver of the truck jerking back with his hand shot half off, pieces flying. The two state policemen at the bar were drinking Cokes, looking at the picture. The policeman in the picture shot his gun again—the car and the truck running side by side, something wrong with the truck’s right rear suspension—and this time when the camera looked inside the truck it looked like the driver’s whole head had exploded. Suddenly you were looking from behind the car and truck again as they both went crashing into a wall of rock, the truck pushing against the car, and they both exploded. Suddenly you were looking at a woman in a nightclub, singing to a microphone with nothing on but a stocking-like thing and some spangles around her tits and hole.
Emily poured wine into his glass and set the bottle down. He got out money. Henry Stumpchurch and Sam Frost were still talking about frogs, arguing whether it took cunning to just sit till you vanished. “Horsepiss,” Bill Partridge said. He sounded a little drunk. Henry said, “In all my sixty-four years—” Bill Partridge said, “I say, Horsepiss!” James drank.
The pock-marked boy and the short, fat Bennington girl went gliding slowly past James Page’s table, dancing—or rather hugging each other as they shuffled across the floor. As he looked up, the girl drew her head from the pock-marked boy’s chest and said—she was smiling, timid, “You ever read a writer called John Updike?”
Make me do it, make me do it, the jukebox sang.
He thought of Sally and the party up the mountain, and his anger at once boiled up in him again. He had chores in the morning. How was a man to do chores on no sleep? Did they think his damn house was the Walloomsac Hotel? She’d take his money when she needed, she
didn’t mind that, but when it came to even merely allowing him to work, never mind about helping … He’d had fights with his wife, he remembered vaguely, about money and time—and later, fights with his gloomy-hearted, weakling son. His chest gave a jerk as the memory ambushed him, his boy—or rather man, by then—hanging from the gray attic rafter, still as a feedsack, as if he’d never been alive. For days, even months, he’d been unable to believe it: a few harsh words, a quick, impetuous little slap—it seems the boy had been up to something, only God and James’ wife Ariah knew what. Seemed to do with whores. He’d refused to speak up, had called James a bastard, hence the little slap, not even hard, mere show of anger with his open hand—“little” it had seemed to James then, that is; he knew better now, for with this stony stillness, this absolute, dead-final victory, his son had avenged himself. Whatever meaning James Page had imagined he’d seen in this pitiful earthly existence he had known that instant for what it was: mere desperate assertion, mere hopeful agreement between two people who could tear up the contract in an instant. He saw the boy standing high on the haywagon, grinning under his hat, sunlight and the wind-fluttered branches of trees wheeling and sliding above his head; and then the old man saw again in his mind the absolute, drab, metaphysical stillness of rafters. He had survived it, he couldn’t say how or why. Had worked, had walked on the mountain at night, prowling like a lost bear hunting for the door to the underworld; had drunk some, more than was right, for a span; had written lists of words, little scraps of thought, once a kind of prayer, setting what he had by way of heart in his Agro pocket notebook. At night, when he slept and fell off guard, he would wake up crying. His wife would be holding him.
The old man listened to the rumble around him, a noise like train-wheels, mostly in his brain. He wasn’t used to wine, hadn’t been for years, and he no longer had, he discovered now, any natural defense against its physical effects and, worse, mental ones. Put off guard by wine, he’d casually wandered into a past he’d locked up tight, and he’d glimpsed there his reason for getting rid of it. Once, standing by the creek, toward dusk, he had looked down at his reflection and said, cold-blooded, however melodramatic: “You’re a killer.” His voice was flat and lean, knocking against the birches on the creek’s far side. The mountain range beyond stretched away out of sight, rolling toward New Hampshire, dwarfing self-hatred as it dwarfed love. Oh James, James, his wife’s voice whispered in his memory. His eyes filled with flash-tears of anger and grief, and then at once he had forgotten her again—had abruptly forgotten all of it.
Then Emily was there, smiling like a commercial, pouring wine into his glass. He counted out the money; she scooped it up, smiled again. It came to him that he’d drunk too much already. His sensations were as solid and raw as the slats on old apple-crates. Touching his jaw, he felt his whiskers with sharp, numb clarity, like the bristles of a pig, and felt the tonelessness of his flesh. He looked at the clock above the bar and couldn’t make out the hands, not even the blur of them. He drew his watch out. Quarter to twelve. That wasn’t possible. His friends would have left long ago, if that was right. Had they stayed because of him? Carefully, steady as a trivet, he lifted the wineglass to drink.
“What you goin to do about it?” Partridge said.
Emily was back. She gave the table a swipe with her cloth, then plunked down the new round of beers. She picked up the money and then the empties.
“Do?” he said.
“Your sistah,” Partridge said.
He drained the glass, some serious thought at the edge of his mind.
“God knows,” he said, and sighed. A fat old man with a scraggly little beard was dancing with what was perhaps his wife, circling with tiny little steps two, three feet from the jukebox. James tried to place them. They were talking about Jaws, holding each other gently. “Hell of a movie,” the man said.
Henry Stumpchurch sat now with his chin in his fists, struggling to keep his eyes open. James turned briefly for a look at the dancers and saw Stumpchurch sneak a look at his watch. Merton came over from the bar with a beer. With two fat fingers he hooked the back of a chair and dragged it to their booth. He sat down next to James. “You all right here?” he asked and grinned.
“We’re keepin you,” Sam said.
“Hell no,” he said. There was no one at the bar. On the TV there was a spaceship. The picture changed to a man with pointed ears. Emily went behind the bar, looking gray as a ghost, and mixed herself a drink. She looked at the clock, then looked at her watch, then came over to them, picking up a chair as she came. James quickly drank and poured another.
Whether or not it would eventually fix his constipation, the wine was playing hell with the rest of his system. His head felt heavy as a deadman in a pond; his bladder was in pain. He put down the glass, excused himself, and made his way past Merton and over to the restroom. On the toilet, nothing came but black water. It burned as it came like it was gasoline. He washed his hands, hardly looking at the face peering out at him from the mirror—face like an old bum’s begging him for a coin. He went back to the table.
They were talking about Sally, and he should have been interested, but it was as if they’d never met her. His mind kept drifting to the teacher and the writers, the book he’d fed the pigs, his mule-headed sister up there starving in her room, blaming the whole damn world on him, and his spirits grew still heavier, weighed down with self-pity and pity for them all, the whole country sickening by a foolish accident, some deaf misunderstanding. Outside, the wind was ferocious now, and it was beginning to rain. Drops ran down the window, brightening near the neon, then darkening again. He saw in his mind’s eye the smile of the Mexican as he gazed around the kitchen, adding up the value of the sink, the stove, the chairs, glass doorknobs, dishes.
The jukebox went off, and the fatter girl and the pock-marked boy, holding hands, went back to their table. The Graham boy and the taller, prettier one were sitting side by side, shoulder against shoulder. She had long, long lashes.
“I like you a lot,” the Graham boy said.
“Listen,” the girl said, “I like you too.” She looked at him hard. “Really.”
The boy with the long black hair—Albert—came vaguely from the restroom and started across to the table then paused, undecided, looking at his friends. He changed his course and came slanting toward the booth, dragging a chair with him. “Mine I join you?” he said. It was barely intelligible. When he sat he’d have fallen if Emily hadn’t caught him, laughing.
“Albert, you’re drunk,” she said.
“When I ever make it with you I wasn’ drunk?” he said. He put his hand on her muscular upper thigh and she gently pushed it off. As if to make up for it, she held her drink to him, Scotch or Bourbon. James filled his wineglass, then on second thought let it stand and filled his pipe. Like a mother, Emily was helping Albert drink.
“You got every right to kick her out, by tunkit,” Bill Partridge said.
“It’s hahd to say,” he said. His vision was giving him a good deal of trouble. He looked at Henry Stumpchurch, closing one eye, hoping to get Henry’s judgment, but Henry was asleep. Merton sucked at his bottle, then set it down. Albert leaned his head against Emily’s shoulder. Gently, laughingly, she pushed it away, balancing him like a toy, and got up to put a quarter in the jukebox. What came out was violins. She came back and picked her glass up, drained it in a gulp, and went back to the bar to fix another. When she was seated with them again, she smiled and moved her chair close to Albert’s, then moved his head, with her two hands, to her shoulder.
Merton said absently, studying his bottle, “It’s a rare man would put up with it.” He nodded to himself.
“She does her pot,” James said, “—or did till it come to that TV.”
Bill Partridge looked angry. “Hell, James, you know that ain’t true.”
“What?” he said.
“She tricks you, James,” Sam Frost said gently, evading his eyes. “You know she does. Been doin
it all along.”
James raised his glass, waiting. It struck him that he had, in fact, known it all along.
“Never trust a woman,” Bill Partridge said. “It’s like the time Judah Sherbrooke found his wife in the pottin shed—”
“What you mean, tricks me?” James said. Behind him—troublesome background noise—the fatter of the Bennington girls was saying, “That’s a very positive feeling, really.”
“Tell him,” Merton said.
“Well, you know how it is,” Sam Frost said. “The little woman’s got a habit of listening on the phone.”
James drank, then waited. He stared at his knuckles to keep things in focus.
Sam looked at the table. “That time you took that ad in the Pennysaver for someone to help with chores … You know why you never got a nibble?”
He waited on, his body growing heavy, heating up with rage.
“Ever time your phone rings our phone rings,” Sam said, apologetic, “and naturally the little woman listens. You know how women are. Sister of yours claimed you was legally required to hire by ‘fair employment.’ Wouldn’t consider a soul that wasn’t Negro or female.” He shook his head.
“She’d nevah do that,” he said. “Sally’s a fair-minded woman, always was.” His teeth clamped tight. She’d do it. Hell yes! His childhood burst back over him, his big sister Sally running to the mailbox ahead of him, looking at his mail before he could. He remembered her selfishness, how if she ever got a candybar she’d share it with nobody, sneak it away to her room and you’d never know she had it. He’d never have done such a thing in a hundred years. It was animal, someway. Turned his stomach. He remembered how she lied. He’d never known such a liar, he could hardly believe it—neither could his mother or father. He remembered how she’d sneak away to Ralph Beeman and later Horace, go climbing out the window in the middle of the night, and offer him, her little brother James Page, cash money to keep her secret. He’d refused, indignant, and she’d sworn she’d break his arm. He’d believed she’d do it—he believed it yet—and so, though he’d have told if they’d asked him straight out, nobody asked and, ashamed of himself, he had kept her secret. He remembered how she’d flounced. She’d been a beauty in those days. Young gentlemen came flocking like dogs around a bitch in heat. And he remembered how she’d sing dirty songs in the kitchen when she was taking her bath, songs their parents didn’t know were dirty, though he did, because she’d explained them to him, teasing him with sex the way she teased all the others: