A Wedding on the Banks

by Cathie Pelletier

  Junior lost his balance at this and stepped off his well-blazed trail into fresh snow. So help him God Almighty, but he would kill Randy deader than ever he planned to kill a Gifford.

  “Yes, well,” said Junior. “Whoever he is, a night in jail will be, as you said, sobering for him.” Then Junior went inside number 1 and rammed his fist into the motel wall with such force that it was almost enough to bring Thelma back from one of her deep, trouble-free Valium dreams. It was force enough, however, to topple all of Monique Tessier’s well-placed lipsticks on the wooden table in number 3.

  ***

  The Plymouth-shark was the last creature out on the snowy main road of Mattagash. The river road. Everyone else had early mornings, the men to the woods, the women to their housework, the children to school. And, of course, Mattagash’s three entrepreneurs, called the three musketeers by their envious townsfolk, each had his own calling. Albert Pinkham had his motel, Peter Craft his filling station, and Charles Mullins would have his hot dog/snack stand come June. In the meantime, Charles was back at work for Henley Lumber until summertime arrived and the canoes full of noisy tourists began their city assault upon the peaceful Mattagash River. Vinal and Pike Gifford, on the other hand, simply had to hit their living room couches when the beer and lack of sleep compelled them. Vinal was addicted to two soap operas, which decreed he rise by noon in order to catch them. With that single responsibility between them, Vinal and Pike were the only souls rootless enough to be wallowing about on the road that ran past the houses of town, the darkened houses whose occupants were in bed by twelve thirty and now asleep. Ordinarily a Sunday night would have tucked everyone in by nine o’clock, and this one would have too, if boy crazy Amy Joy Lawler hadn’t insisted on getting married May first. A Sunday. It was almost sacrilege. But the whole town, like a reluctant family, had given in to the whims of what they thought was a future bride. Only in Kevin Craft’s house was a soft yellow light still blazing out of the bedroom, one stream of it reaching down to the black river, the other stretching out to the milky road.

  “I want a divorce,” Bonita Craft was telling Kevin as Vinal and Pike Gifford cruised past their house, the noise of the Plymouth’s engine echoing in the dip of the road as they left the Crafts and their heartbreak behind. All of Mattagash already knew, anyway, what Bonita Craft had finally said, because what is said in bedrooms always surfaces in kitchens. No doubt Bonita Craft had told her very best friend that she intended to ask Kevin for a divorce. And Bonita’s very best friend told a very good friend of her own, who wasn’t so particularly fond of Bonita. No one in Mattagash is so good a friend that they put secrets away like old recipes. True, there must have been many honorable people to come and go over the years. But they are the unsung heroes who have taken their secrets with them to the grave, where they are finally safe.

  “Kevin Craft’s still up,” Vinal Gifford had said to Pike, as they slipped quietly past on the white road.

  “I hear they’re getting a divorce,” said Pike, and opened another beer. And then the Plymouth had ducked out of sight and left the light of the Craft house behind, left Kevin Craft himself reeling in disbelief, the last person in Mattagash to learn that, yes, he would soon be divorced.

  “Stay far enough back from the sheriff’s car and the Cadillac that they don’t see your headlights,” Pike warned Vinal, who slowed the hulky Plymouth.

  At Albert Pinkham’s motel, the Plymouth sped up and went past, seemingly oblivious to the excitement taking place in the motel yard as Junior inspected the car and learned that his own son, his spoiled seed, as Marvin had once called Randy, was the culprit. The shark turned around at the Mattagash bridge, closed its yellow eyes, and watched through the leafless elms in Albert’s yard to see what would unfold.

  As they expected, the sheriff and the patrolman left and Junior went inside and turned out the light of number 1. The Giffords knew this would happen. They were sociologists of the highest order. This’d be a good time to get a close-up look at them tires behind Craft’s Filling Station, Vinal. The Ed Sullivan Show’s on tonight. They were doctors. This ain’t caused by no inflammation of the ligaments, doc. I seriously think that lifting that stick of pulp forced my spinal structure to absorb more stress than it can tolerate. They were lawyers. It’s against the law to knowingly write a bad check, Pike. But they got to prove that knowingly part. That’s the clincher. They were archaeologists. Look at the gas cap in that taillight! The first year that Cadillac did that was 1941. Like writers, they followed a profession that bordered on all walks of life. Now they seemed more like concerned meteorologists, watching the soft, engulfing snow. It was no longer falling but instead spread itself like a heavy quilt from the old country on all its children, on the entire town, on the big family that had grown out of the first pioneering settlers.

  “It’s kinda sad Kevin and Bonita are gettin’ divorced,” said Pike, in one of his poetic moods. “It ain’t like we’re friends or anything, but it’s still sad.”

  “Yeah,” Vinal agreed. “Not only that, but she has a real nice ass. I hope it ain’t true she’s moving to Connecticut.”

  The brothers sat like awkward twins joined at the beer can. Chang and Eng on a bender. What was it Goldie had said of them? Different shells with the same meat inside. They sat and waited for Junior to sink like a heavy snow farther down into his fleshy dreams. They waited with their eyes on the fancy Cadillac, a much more interesting creature to the men of Mattagash than a strange, fancy woman.

  “You think you can jump-start it?” Vinal asked his brother, the better technician.

  “Does the Pope wear a funny hat?” Pike answered.

  ***

  For two solid hours Pike and Vinal Gifford drove the Cadillac, the color of sweet meringue, up and down the main road of Mattagash. They immediately helped themselves to Junior’s tape deck, but were disappointed to find that the only eight-track tapes he had in the car were disagreeable to Gifford tastes.

  “Take that shit off!” Vinal lamented after Pike had shoved Roger Williams, Mr. Piano into the machine. “You want to ruin my ears for life?”

  The Golden Voice of Mario Lanza fared no better. Vinal was disturbed by Pike’s choices.

  “Do I look like a fruit to you?” he asked as his brother tossed Mr. Piano and The Golden Voice out the window of the Cadillac.

  “This looks interesting,” said Pike, and held the tape closer to the interior light for proper reading. “‘I Got You Babe,’” Pike read. “By Sonny and Cher.”

  “Ain’t she the spittin’ image of Loretta Lynn?” he asked Vinal, who swerved the Cadillac in order to answer properly.

  “Pike, please find us some musical entertainment,” Vinal pleaded. “I ain’t listened to anything in my life but an old car radio fading out on me every time you go around a turn or hit a pothole.”

  “You can pick up Boston on a frost heave,” said Pike, as he rolled down the side glass and pitched Sonny Bono, along with his wife Cher, out into the night. They landed with a heavy thunk beneath a swath of baby cedars, a hundred yards from where Roger Williams and Mario Lanza were slowly being buried alive in the drifting snow.

  “Will you play a tape? Any tape?”

  “Julie Andrews,” Pike said. “The Sound of Music. That’s Missy’s favorite movie.”

  “Well,” said Vinal. “It ain’t Kitty Wells or Loretta. But it’ll have to do.”

  They drove countless times past the motel where the car’s owner, Junior Ivy, snored in his dreams. They cruised snakily past Marge McKinnon’s old house, where Pearl and Marvin slept fitfully, each tossing and turning within their nighttime dramas. They zoomed past Sicily Lawler’s house, where Sicily was sleeping peacefully for the first time in weeks, and Amy Joy sat in the blackness of her bedroom and peered with puffy eyes down at the ice cakes dotting the Mattagash River, wondering what it would be like to slip beneath the freezing water and just
disappear. Vinal and Pike Gifford made countless trips in their two-hour odyssey past Winnie Craft’s house, where Lola sat in the bathroom, with the light out, and counted all the aspirins in the aspirin bottle over and over again as she pondered which would be worse: suicide, or Winnie’s discovery that her daughter was an accomplice. The slippery Cadillac cut through the night dozens of times where Kevin Craft had built his home, a one-story modern structure, which predicted folks would start having smaller families, at least if they were going to start living in such flattened-out houses.

  “Looks like a goddamn Cracker Jack box,” Vinal said to Pike, as he did most times when they passed Kevin Craft’s home. The two brothers did not contemplate the darkness or the silence inside the house, where Kevin sat in the living room, turning his .22 rifle over and over in his lumberjack hands and wondering if it might be enough to do the trick.

  “‘The hills are alive with the sound of music,’” Julie Andrews sang for the Giffords in her command performance, and the brothers felt warm, and good, and safe.

  “Jesus,” said Pike, after Vinal finally pulled over and let him have his turn behind the wheel. “This must be what it’s like to drive the Batmobile.”

  “Take it easy, Robin,” Vinal teased, as the Cadillac spun out onto the road in a quick burst of snow. “If we end up in the ditch, who we gonna call to come haul our asses out?”

  The Cadillac used up its tank of gas as it traversed the single, ragged road in Mattagash, past the snores of the townsfolk, past the sons of bitches who had put the Giffords down for nearly a hundred and fifty years.

  “I wish the old man could see us now.” Pike whistled through his teeth. “He’d be some proud.”

  “Listen,” said Vinal. “Whadda ya say, let’s do this car with a little class. After all, it’s only fitting for a Cadillac.”

  “How’s that?” asked Pike. His eye on the gas gauge told him whatever they did would have to be soon. But he liked the notion of class. And he liked the classy music. The Giffords had risen in the world.

  “First,” said Vinal, as they pulled up to the resting place of the Plymouth, snug and out of sight behind the Mattagash gym, “we’ll take the tape deck and that tape of what’s her name. Then you get the tools you need to take the radio and aerial.”

  “While I’m doing that,” said Pike, “you take these fancy seat covers and floor mats.”

  “I’ll pry open the trunk,” said Vinal. “He’s bound to have more in there than his spare tire.”

  “Now what?” asked Pike, as the two brothers stood beside the naked Cadillac. Pike had just finished work on the rearview mirror, and he placed it next to the side-view mirrors, in the Plymouth’s trunk. “There’s only the tires and battery left,” Pike added. “From what I can see.”

  “Here’s where the class comes in,” said Vinal. “Here’s where we give this old town a little slap in the face.”

  “How’s that?” Pike asked again.

  “First of all,” said Vinal, “we need to make a quick trip home to the woodpile. Then I’ll show you.” Before they got back into the Plymouth, Vinal and Pike stood side by side and peed yellow streams down into the snow, that natural pissoir.

  An hour later Vinal snuggled in next to a warm, sleeping Vera, at the bottom of the hill from his brother, in the heart of Giffordtown. At the top of the hill Pike Gifford was unable to creep into Goldie’s bedroom. He had come home feeling particularly poetic and successful, and less drunk than usual. He had even slipped off his heavy boots at the bottom of the stairs and crept quietly past the other bedrooms where his children dreamed of better lives. He was happily whistling “The Lonely Goatherd” and wondering what it would be like to slip into bed with Julie Andrews when he discovered that Goldie had locked the bedroom door. Another night Pike would have kicked the son of a bitch down, would have slapped Goldie around until she cried, or he got tired of hitting her. Whichever came first. But tonight was different. Tonight he and Vinal had cruised in a fancy car, had listened to some upper-class music, had bit into and then tasted what it was like to be rich. And then, maybe because of all that, they had left the evening behind them with a touch of class.

  “‘Men drinking beer with their poles afloat heard,’” Pike sang under his breath. “‘Lay ee odl lay ee odl-oo.’” He went down to curl up on the car-seat sofa in the living room.

  THERE’S GOT TO BE A MORNING AFTER: RAVENS, COYOTES, AND BEER CANS

  And the interstate rumbles like a river that runs

  To a rhythm that don’t ever slow down.

  As cars and trucks and time pass by that old coyote town…

  —“Old Coyote Town,” written by Paul Nelson, Gene Nelson, and Larry Boone

  The first creature stirring as dawn crept in over the ragged tops of the pines to splash Mattagash awake was the northern raven. It rode the rising air currents high above the Mattagash River and gazed down on the gymnasium with its sharp, black eyes, searching for shapes and angles that would register food in its brain. But all that caught its eye were several pink-tissue carnations rolling along the snow in a small wind, cascading after each other until they disappeared in the clumps of dead burdocks along the riverbank. These were the only remnants of the wedding reception, except for one brown bow, which had caught in a cluster of bare hazelnut bushes by the old American Legion Hall and was flapping alone in the morning light. It had blown from Girdy Monihan’s present, the one she carefully took back into her house before the reception, the can opener she would now give Peggy Mullins who was scheduled to marry in June. The raven swooped down closer. Prruk. Prruk. It could have been a mouse, a sparrow, a fat doughnut, but the bird’s keen intelligence assured it that this was something inedible, some little knickknack left by the humans and meaningful only to them. Its eyes caught the slow movement of a coyote, lean and hungry, which had moved to the hardwood ridge on the opposite bank to sit on its haunches and peer intently across the spring river at the town. Like the native Indian, the coyote was a lonesome relic of the past, and it moved back into the piney shadows, found a trail of fresh deer tracks, and was gone. The raven circled, still. The only car tracks near the gymnasium that had not been eaten alive by the snow were those of Vinal and Pike Gifford. The two thin lines from the Plymouth’s tires lay below the bird like clothesline ropes stretching out of the gymnasium yard and onto the raggedy road to mischief. Two empty beer cans caught the first light as the raven swooped back again for a closer inspection. But the metallic creatures were useless to it as they lay beside the frozen yellow eyes in the snow where Pike and Vinal had relieved themselves. With no sign of roadkill along the crooked highway, the raven arched back up to the next thermal and did a series of acrobatic tumbles and rolls, then fell away in the direction of St. Leonard. Beneath its wings, inside the solid wooden houses built from the same forest that engulfed them, the people came to life.

  Peter Craft, Winnie’s nephew, was soon counting ones and fives and tens into the cash register at his filling station. With one hand, Albert Pinkham was holding a cold wet towel against the bluish lump throbbing on his temple, and then to the large lump on the back of his head. With the other hand he dumped dog food into Bruce’s empty plate. At her grocery, Betty was stocking the shelves with pouches of chewing tobacco and heavy work gloves, her biggest sellers at that time of morning. Kevin Craft, Winnie’s nephew, rolled over on the sofa, the .22 rifle lying like a woman by his side, lying like Bonita, cold to his touch, explosive. Lola Craft, Winnie’s daughter, had fallen asleep while counting aspirins the way insomniacs count sheep. After cooking breakfasts and seeing their husbands off to the woods with bulging lunch pails, wives could go back to bed until six, when the children would need to be roused for school. Those few households not touched by the woodsworking business stayed peaceful as five o’clock brought the first strains of daylight through the pines, followed by the face of the constant sun itself as it skirted the horizon and
rose up to a full ball. As the woodsmen drove into the morning glare, into the heart of their jobs, their work, their forest, Sicily slept on, and so did Marvin and Pearl. So did Junior and Thelma, and Monique Tessier, who, like Marvin Ivy, had a busy day ahead of her. Even Amy Joy slept, having stayed awake, having cried, until 4:00 a.m. From exhaustion Amy Joy slept, but instead of wedding dreams, instead of bridal bouquets and baby carriages, she dreamed death dreams, bullets and noises, and muffled voices she could not identify. As the sun blazed up red, pulling a red morning sky behind it, the lumberjacks drove in battered pickups and pulp trucks past the Albert Pinkham Motel. They saw the fancy Cadillac right where the Giffords had left it, beached upon four hardwood blocks, without tires, without any accoutrements, and their fenderless trucks suddenly felt rich beneath them, and they drove on with a sudden pride in their occupations, in themselves. Sometimes, city folks and tourists left other things behind besides their trash.

  It was just a few minutes after eight o’clock when Winnie Craft, who had already been on the phone for a half hour, broke down and called Sicily. Winnie wanted to be the first person Sicily spoke to, and by the sound of Sicily’s sleepy hello, she was positive she’d beat out everyone else.

  “Beautiful day, ain’t it?” Winnie inquired.

  “It sure is.”

  “Looks like spring is finally here this time.”

  “I think it really is,” agreed Sicily.

  “She finally did it,” Winnie said.

  “Who?” asked Sicily. “What?” Winnie Craft, like most Mattagash women, parceled out gossip like puzzle pieces until at last the whole picture fitted nicely together.

  “Bonita,” Winnie said.

  “What did she do?” asked Sicily.

  “Kevin’s mother called me and told me. I just barely hung up the phone from talking to her when I called you.”

  “What did she do?” Sicily knew, of course, or suspected, but she didn’t want her info any faster than Winnie was willing to deliver it. Excitement flowed along the wires, along the gray telephone poles, between the two women.