“And just think,” Junior was saying, “if we’d had more time, we could’ve taken Route One. That road starts out in Fort Kent, Maine, and runs all the way to Key West.” The Cadillac passed a small blue car by the side of the interstate, its hood up, its owner thumbing.
“Yes, sir,” said Junior, as the car whisked by the stranded driver without a thought. “Good ole Route One. Two thousand one hundred and nine miles long. Ain’t that something?” He heard Thelma mumble. Good. He was finally getting a response. It was all a matter of patience. His father had been right about that. In just a few hours of driving, Junior had managed to interest his wife and son in some interesting highway facts about the state of Maine.
“What?” asked Junior. “What did you say, hon?”
“I said, ‘God love the traveler,’” Thelma replied, as the distraught driver and his little blue car disappeared in her side-view mirror. In the backseat, a large snore cascaded from Randy’s mouth as Leslie Boudreau undid her blouse in his dreams.
The procession continued north, each in his or her own reverie. What it did not know was what everyone back at The ’95er restaurant already knew: that behind the Ivys, only minutes away, a lone Buick was in pursuit, its driver scorned and bosomy and furious as hell.
“She looks just like Elizabeth Taylor,” Petey Simpson, back at The ’95er had said to the waitress, as Monique Tessier ordered a ham sandwich to go.
“And make it quick,” she had said.
THE RIVER EXPLAINED: ALBERT CONTEMPLATES BARNS, TINTYPES, AND THE OCEAN AS HE WAITS FOR THE CITY SLICKERS
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
—William Wordsworth, “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”
As a proper welcome for his Portland guests, soon to arrive, Albert Pinkham swept the leaves from last autumn, crinkly and broken, into a respectable windrow on the cement walkway. He felt like a successful businessman again. It was true that he had thrown the Ivys out of the Albert Pinkham Family Motel ten years earlier for disruptive behavior. But forgiveness is the mark of a good Christian man, especially if that Christian man is going broke. And ten years was enough time for that awful little Ivy boy to grow up. He’d be a young man by now. Albert Pinkham had never liked Pearl McKinnon, it was true, with all her city airs and bloated sense of self-importance. But Pearl wouldn’t be staying at Albert’s establishment. It would be only that wimpy son of hers, Junior, and his simpleminded little wife, and the child that such a union might expect. He would put the two adults in number 1, in the front, and the kid around back, in number 4. It would be a show of sudden prosperity to have a big fancy car from downstate parked on the gravel driveway of the Albert Pinkham Motel. And, by jiminy, it was about time the Pinkham coffers began to hear coins clinking about in them again instead of mothballs. Almost overnight, Albert Pinkham had gone from being barely able to keep his head above water to walking on the stuff.
The Ivys weren’t the only boost to his good fortune. Another room had been reserved by a woman who was also from Portland, coincidence of all coincidences. Albert didn’t give a damn if she was from Mars, as long as she paid with good ole American moolah. A nature enthusiast, he assumed by the gravelly quality in her voice. He had learned to read his clients over the phone, just from the cadence of their speech. This was a nature enthusiast all right, longing to hoof about in the slushy woods and tramp her feet off along the Mattagash River. Blisters for nature. He had intended to put her in number 2, but there was something in the way the smooth April breeze was rearranging the noisy leaves of another year, another time, creating something like a sad music, an old song, that prompted Albert to change his mind. He would put her in number 3. Violet La Forge’s old room. For old time’s sake. She had sounded quite young, younger than Violet, and yes, damn it, she had sounded sexy. He would put her, nature enthusiast that she was, in the pink room, with its pink wooden bed, and its pink walls that could loom over her in the morning like a reddish dawn.
Albert opened the doors to the three rooms and raised their single windows. April rushed in and pushed out the mustiness of nonuse. He noticed cobwebs in each corner of each room, those finely knit doilies that spoke of Sarah Pinkham’s disappearance from the premises. She had kept things spick-and-span, it was true, but Albert didn’t mind that in her stead was the gauzy embroidery of insects.
“I get along better with spiders than I ever did with that woman,” Albert told Bruce, who had jumped onto the bed of number 1 and stretched out for a little spring nap. Albert left him there, and the door ajar for his escape when nap time ended. He decided to leave the cobwebs clinging. Some city slickers liked such things. They don’t have cobwebs in New York City, Albert knew. Cobwebs don’t stick good to concrete and steel. You need some nice old-fashioned wood to make spiders feel at home. Albert had redone the walls of rooms, 1, 2, and 4 when he discovered that barn boards were a hot new item with tourists. He simply went out to the flat field behind his house, behind the thicket of pines, and he tore boards from the old barn of his youth. His grandfather, John Pinkham, the best goddamn barn builder of his day, had built it. The passage of years and the heavy snows of so many winters no one could count them anymore had tilted the barn. It had already begun its aging plans by the time Albert was born. But he remembered it still strong enough, solid enough, that he could climb up into its loft and lie back on the molded hay of another time, hay meant for workhorses whose bones lay beneath the gravel pit and whose names no one could remember. Even the sunlight that splayed in rickety streams through the spaces in the boards was sunlight of a different era. You could lie on your back in that old hay, with all the sweetness leaked out of it, and you just knew that the ball of sun outside the timeless barn was not a real sun. It was round and yellow as a summer apple and only painted in the sky.
Nowadays even Albert’s grandfather was no longer real to him. Nowadays his grandfather peered out from a daguerreotype with the eyes of a terrified man lost to time, lost between the pages of the years. His grandfather didn’t exist anymore. Now he was just a face full of whiskers, with hands folded in his lap like a carpenter’s tools, with a fat ridge of snuff protruding his lower lip. And even this sparse reminder of his grandfather was disappearing into bits and pieces because Albert didn’t take good care of the old tintype. It was slowly eroding, flecks of the silver nitrate peeling away like paint. The damage had begun at the base of the photo, but as Albert tossed pens and knives and coins into the drawer where he left it lying unprotected, the face was beginning to peel away, as it must in death, exposing only sockets until even those are gone. Albert hoped one day to give the picture to his daughter, Belle, so she could at least catch a glimpse of the old man, the old barn builder himself, before he disappeared for good.
Albert Pinkham leaned against the front wall of the Albert Pinkham Motel and closed his eyes. On the far ridge, where the wild cherry and ash still grew thickly, he could hear the metallic tok tok tok of a solitary northern raven and he knew, if he opened his eyes, he would see it gliding on its flat wings, a black plane skirting the horizon above the old river. Albert felt like that sometimes, that he was skirting, skimming through life. Things had changed, it was true, from the days of the old barn builder. So what then was the grandson to do? Was it wrong for him to leave his barely used Jonsered chain saw on a stump one day and just turn his back on it and walk out of the woods forever?
“Things ain’t the same anymore,” he had come home in the middle of the day and said to Sarah Pinkham, who was terrified to see him. Men never left the woods during good daylight working hours unless a falling tree had crushed someone, a pulp hook had embedded itself in a fleshy foot, a chain saw had bounced off a tree and into the muscles of a meaty leg. A woman could usually see blood coming from somewhere if a man left the woods early.
“Times ain’t
what they used to be,” Albert said to Sarah, and he lay in broad daylight on the sofa, like a crazed man, like a Gifford, until nightfall came with his solution. The Albert Pinkham Family Motel. Why should the innkeepers in Watertown make all the money from tourists who tramp Mattagash into the ground? Why shouldn’t a native son prosper as well? Everyone in Mattagash had laughed behind his back at the new venture. Albert could see it in their eyes. But folks had sneered at Fulton. At the Wright brothers. At Henri Nadeau’s mini golf course behind his filling station. Yet the steamship had puffed away. The Wrights had taken wing. And Henri Nadeau could be seen every Sunday behind the wheel of the only goddamn Lincoln Continental this side of Caribou.
Times had been hard, very hard, at first. Damn hard. Sarah could tell you, but she would be too proud. Bruce could tell you, if he could talk. His daughter, Belle, couldn’t see well enough to know what was going on, and instead stayed cloistered behind her thick eyeglasses. But after he borrowed five thousand dollars from the Great Northern Bank of Watertown to open his business, Albert Pinkham had to go to the town for support. There just wasn’t enough money coming in to put food on the table for his family and clothing on their backs. It was rough sitting there with a list in his hand upon which Sarah had written the necessities—groceries, medicines, and so on—and waiting for the town’s first selectman, like some kind of god, to sign it so Albert could go shopping. Albert remembered that Frederick Craft, Winnie’s husband, had been the town’s first selectman that year. He went over each item thoughtfully, Winnie peering over his shoulder like she was second selectman, or treasurer, or something, instead of just a nosy wife, which she was. And Frederick Craft had, almost gleefully, crossed out the occasional “3 lbs. hamburg” to make it “2 lbs. hamburg.” Once, he deleted altogether “1 tube toothpaste,” as if a grown man and woman didn’t know for themselves what was required to make a household run efficiently. As if it took some foolish first selectman to tell them. As if Albert and Sarah Pinkham were trying to cheat the entire town of Mattagash, Maine, out of a goddamn tube of Crest.
Albert opened his eyes and saw the raven this time. He could still hear its grating prruk, prruk after it disappeared from his line of vision. He knew where it was. Most likely everyone in Mattagash, including little kids, could tell an outsider that the bird had landed in Old Mrs. Mullins’s backyard birch, where it would survey the odd scraps of bread and doughnuts and the skin-colored chunks of suet before it swooped down to carry off its supper.
Two herring gulls, now becoming a common sight to such an inland part of Maine, appeared from behind a twist in the river. Upon spotting the raven, they sounded their anxiety notes, gah, gah, gah. Albert heard, and anxiety sounded in his chest as his heart drummed rapidly. Now only the gulls and the ravens, ospreys and the occasional bald eagle used the river as a highway. Albert’s generation had come, and now it was going. He was a member of a group who still had a foot in nature’s door. He was among a rare cabal of storytellers who now had no one to listen to them. They were replaced by radios with speakers the size of car batteries, by fancy television sets, and driver’s licenses for all, and movies every weekend in Watertown. Albert Pinkham could remember the day when a strange man and woman came from somewhere downriver, and they invited the whole town to pay a nickel to watch as they made shapes with their hands in front of a lantern. As the shadows fell on the wall behind them, it came to life with birds and deer and horses. Oh, no television ever emitted such lovely visions! And that woman’s voice was almost as deep as any man’s as she told stories for these shadowy animals. Even the grown-up men, immovable at the sight of bodies busted beneath pine trees, of wounded horses spurting blood from their chests, even these tough, wizened woodsmen who thought they’d seen everything, sat with mouths fallen down like trapdoors and knew their minds had been pried open and tampered with, and that they could never be certain of anything again.
Albert Pinkham looked long and hard out across the winding Mattagash road. He let his eyes settle down on the river. It used to be a road, that old girl did. The Indians had broken it in years before the white man knew it was there. But Albert easily remembered when it was still functioning. He remembered the cold mornings of being bundled, still frozen, in the bow of the canoe as he and his father whipped over the fast rapids to Watertown. With their sugar, and their flour, and their molasses neatly packed, they would begin the long, tedious poling upriver, until finally they saw smoke from the Pinkham chimney curling like a white man’s signal up into the evening sky. Nowadays, no one used the river for anything. No one, that is, but the tourists. There were still the local fishermen, but they searched for out-of-the-way lakes and ponds to avoid the onslaught of city slickers. Youngsters barely swam in it anymore, preferring the public pool in Watertown. Was Albert wrong, then, to offer them a plastic pool himself?
For Albert and his forebears, the river was a directional device, a compass, even after the canoe was replaced by the automobile and it became a dusty back road no longer trodden.
“Guess I’ll go downriver today,” Albert Pinkham would tell Sarah, “and find me a used snowplow.” It meant direction, and no matter how crooked it twisted, in the end it always pointed right to the spot you meant. The river had social connotations, too.
“He married a girl from downriver somewhere,” Sarah would say, and Albert knew that it meant someone from outside Mattagash, past St. Leonard and Watertown. Albert knew what else it meant. Everyone knew.
“He married a stranger,” Sarah could have said. “He married a girl no one here in town even knows. He went and married himself a stranger and, because of that, God only knows what will become of him.” And whoever heard it would sip their tea with the loud sucking noise that Albert’s generation liked—it meant good, strong, hot tea, by Jesus. They would sip their tea and feel sorry for anybody who had to go all the way downriver looking for a mate. Nowadays, the young regarded it as a blessing to “marry away.” And more and more of them were growing discontented with boredom, which their ancestors had considered a good rest. Mattagash was losing its young blood to factories downriver, to the makers of toilet paper and jet planes, and in their place more and more seagulls were coming to Mattagash with the news that there was an ocean out there somewhere. And you could almost hear the jackhammers and the graders down around Portland and Bangor, building, building, coming north, inching upriver, until one day maybe the ocean itself would sweep in to wash them all away.
The river meant safety, too. Sometimes the river was your mother, or your father, or the best friend you’ve ever had. Sometimes Albert Pinkham would be all the way down to Madawaska, below Watertown, tacking his business cards to only the busiest bulletin boards, when he would spy a shift in the weather. He would see a grayness creeping up into the sky over the treetops. He would see the birds panicking. He would feel the very air around him tense in anticipation.
“We’d better head upriver,” he’d say to Bruce, and the two would disappear into the soupy grayness, only their red taillights telling the rest of the world that they were pointed toward safety, they were headed upriver, they were running back into Mattagash’s arms before any storm, any stranger, any handmade bird flying crazily in the lantern light on some wall, could catch them.
***
Dusk had come and was turning into evening when Junior’s creamy Cadillac rolled into Albert’s yard and tooted rudely. What the hell did he toot for? Did Junior expect Albert to run out to the trunk like one of them tip-hungry city doormen and carry in all their shit? Let that son of Pearl’s, that big undertaking turd, carry in his own junk. And that littler turd, that grandson, let him understand a few seconds of work. Albert Pinkham hadn’t sacrificed his back to the woods, to over thirty years of spine-snapping work, to tote the fancy suitcases of the idle rich. What did the Ivys have to do to earn their money but stand around and wait for folks to shuffle off their mortal coils, for Chrissakes? Nonetheless, Albert was a man who had
nearly gone under as a motel proprietor.
“Be on your best behavior,” Albert instructed Bruce, who bounded out into the yard to greet the human nitpickers from Portland.
Albert did as he intended. He checked the burly Junior and his scrawny little wife, who seemed to be under a spell of some kind, into room number 1. He put the kid, another story altogether, in number 4.
“Well, at least you’ve got hot running water this time,” Junior said, staring down his snobbish nose at Albert. Didn’t this pork-bellied son of a bitch remember being thrown out? Evicted, for Chrissakes? Now here he was, like he was doing Albert some kind of favor by breathing the same air.
“You got color TV, man?” Randy asked.
“What about room service?” asked Thelma.
“Phones in the rooms?” Junior queried, as he looked sternly at his watch, a harried businessman.
Albert felt weak in the knees. They were as bad as the seagulls, these rude, loud ocean people. But the truth was that Junior and his companions were doing Albert a favor, so what else could he do but stand there and show his teeth in a smile that made him look like a happy, well-fed old dog? Bruce showed his own teeth, well tartared up to the gums, but Albert soothed him with a quick dig behind the ears.
“We aim to please,” Albert said, and he and Bruce smiled in unison.
It was only an hour later that the dirty beige Buick turned with a slow uncertainty into the Albert Pinkham Motel. Albert had been anxiously awaiting this arrival, and he bounded quickly out of his house to greet this new guest and to gallantly offer to hoist every bit of her luggage, be it plaid, or fur-lined, or leather, into the sanctity of number 3. There had been something in her voice that sang of spring, of April, that bespoke a kind of schooled poetry that men like Albert Pinkham never dared read, let alone dream they could write. There was a soft curl of womanhood in each letter of her name as she had spelled it out for him, her sensuality warm enough to push itself north, through the marrow of the cold telephone wires, all the way to Albert Pinkham’s own telephone pole. Let others say this was Freudian. All Albert knew was that the voice was that of an angel. He had even pulled a white Sunday shirt from a hanger, patted some aftershave about his face, and brushed Bruce to perfection. Yet he left Bruce inside to watch the arrival from the living room window. There were some things a man could not share, not even with his dog.
A Wedding on the Banks Page 16