The little splinter began to bother him, and he looked down at the hurt, remembering the raspy edge of the wooden shelf. He blinked twice. Andy had fallen asleep, a colorful magazine fluttering in his lap. Paper, the old man thought. Shelf paper. His wife never would have put anything in a cabinet without first putting down fresh paper over the wood, and then something came back like images on an out-of-focus movie screen when the audience claps and whistles and roars and the projectionist wakes up and gives his machine a twist, and life, movement, and color unite in a razor-sharp picture, and all at once he remembered his wife and his children and his venerable 1969 Oldsmobile he had driven to the discount store.
Etienne LeBlanc gave a little cry, stood up, and looked around at the alien yard and the squat house with the curling roof shingles, remembering everything that had ever happened to him in a shoveled-apart sequence, even the time he had come back to the world standing in a cornfield in Texas, or riding a Ferris wheel in Baton Rouge, or in the cabin of a shrimp boat off Point au Fer in the Gulf.
He glanced at the sleeping man and was afraid. Remembering his blood-pressure pills, he went into the house and found them in his familiar clothes. He looked around the mildew-haunted building, which was unlike the airy cypress home place he still owned down in St. Mary Parish, a big-windowed farmhouse hung with rafts of family photographs. He looked for images in the hallway, but the walls were barren. He walked through the rooms wondering what kind of people owned no images of their kin. Andy and his wife were like visitors from another planet, marooned, childless beings barely enduring their solitude. In the kitchen he put his hand where the phone used to be, recalling his son’s number. He looked through the screen door at a fat, bald man sleeping in a litter of shiny cans and curling magazines, a wreck of a man who’d built neither mind nor body nor soul. He saw the swampy yard, the broken lawn mower, the muddy, splintered rakes and tools strewn around the carport, more ruined than the hundred-year-old implements in his abandoned barn down in the sugarcane fields. He saw ninety yards of shallow ditch. He pushed the screen door out because something in his blood drew him back into the yard.
His shadow fell over the sleeping man as he studied his sallow skin, the thin-haired, overflowing softness of him as he sat off to one side in the aluminum chair, a naked woman frowning in fear in his lap. Etienne held the shovel horizontally in both hands, thinking that he could hit him once in the head for punishment and leave him stunned on the grass and rolling in his rabid magazines while he walked somewhere to call the police, that Andy might learn something at last from a bang on the head. Who would blame an old man for doing such a thing? Here was a criminal, though not a very smart one, and such people generally took the heaviest blows of life. His spotted hands tightened on the hickory handle.
But then he scanned the house and yard, which would never be worth looking at from the road, would never change for the better because the very earth under it all was totally worthless, a boot-sucking, iron-fouled claypan good only for ruining the playclothes of children. He thought of the black soil of his farm, his wife in the field, the wife who had died on his arm a year before as they were buying tomato plants. Looking toward the road, he thought how far away he was from anyone who knew him. Returning to the end of the little ditch, he sank the shovel deep, put up his hands and pulled sharply, the blade answering with a loud suck of mud that raised one of Andy’s eyelids.
“Get on it, Ted,” he called out, stirring in the chair, unfocused and dizzy and sick. The old man had done another two feet before Andy looked up at him and straightened his back at what he saw in his eyes. “What you looking at, you old shit?”
Etienne LeBlanc sank the blade behind a four-inch collar of mud. “Nothing, son. Not a thing.”
“You got to finish this evenin’. Sometimes she comes back early, maybe even tomorrow afternoon.” Andy moved with the difficulty of an invalid in a nursing home, searching around the base of his chair for something to drink, a magazine falling off his lap into the seedy grass. “Speed up if you know what’s good for you.”
For the next two hours, Etienne paced himself, throwing the dirt into a straight, watery mound on the right side of the hole, looking behind him to gauge the time.
Andy carried another six-pack from the house and once more drank himself to sleep. Around suppertime Etienne walked over and nudged the folding chair.
“Wake up.” He poked Andy’s flabby arm.
“What?” The eyes opened like a sick hound’s.
“I’m fixing to make the last cut.” Etienne motioned toward the ditch. “Thought you might want to see that.” They walked to the rear of the lot where the old man inserted the shovel sideways to the channel and pulled up a big wedge, the water cutting through and widening out the last foot of ditch, dumping down two feet into the bigger run.
Andy looked back at the middle of his yard where the water was seeping toward the new outlet. “Maybe this will help the damned bug problem,” he said, putting his face close to the old man’s. “Mosquitoes drive her nuts.”
“Is that what bothers her?” Etienne said. Andy took a step back and stared at him.
—
The next morning it was not yet first light when the old man woke to a noise in his room. Andy kicked the mattress lightly. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going for a ride.”
He did not like the sound of this but got up and put on the clothes he had worn at the discount store and followed out to the driveway. He could barely see anything and was afraid. Andy stood close and asked him what he could remember.
“What?”
“You heard me. I’ve got to know what you remember.”
Etienne made his mind work carefully. “I remember the ditch,” he said.
“And what else?”
He averted his eyes. “I remember my name.”
Andy whistled a single note. “And what is it?”
“Ted. Ted Williams.” He watched Andy try to think that through.
“Okay,” he finally said, looking at the gray light beginning to define the lawn. “Get in the car and lay down in the backseat.” The old man did as he was told and felt the car turn for the road, then turn again, and he hoped that all these turnings would not lead him back to a world of meaningless faces and things, that he would not forget to recall, for the only thing he was, was memory.
They had not driven a hundred feet down the lane when bright headlights came toward them and Andy began crying out an elaborate string of curses. The old man looked over the seat and saw a pickup truck in the middle of the road.
“It’s her,” Andy said, his voice trembling and high. “Don’t talk to her. Let me handle it.” It was not quite light enough to see his face, so the old man read his voice and found it sick with dread.
The pickup stopped, and in the glow of the headlights Etienne saw a woman get out, a big woman whose tight coveralls fit her the way a tarpaulin binds a machine. Her hair was red like armature wire and braided in coppery ropes that fell down over her heavy breasts. Coming to the driver’s window, she bent down, pulled a toothpick from her mouth, and asked, “What’s going on here, you slimy worm?” Her voice was a cracked cymbal.
Andy tried a smile. “Honey, hey there. I just decided to get an early—”
She reached in and put a big thumb on his Adam’s apple. “You never get up before ten. Never.”
“Honest,” he whined, the word squirting through his pinched vocal cords. Her neck stiffened when she saw Etienne.
“Shut up. Who’s this?”
Andy opened his mouth and closed it, opened it again and croaked, “Just an old drinking buddy. I was bringing him home.”
She squinted at the old man. “Why you in the backseat?”
Etienne looked into the fat slits of her eyes and remembered a sow that had almost torn off his foot half a century before. “He told me to sit back here.”
She straightened up and backed away from the car. “All right, get out. Some kind of bullshit�
�s going on here.” He did as she asked, and she looked him over in the dawning light. She sniffed the air derisively. “And who the hell are you?”
He tried to think of something to say, wondering what would cause the least damage. He thought down into his veins for an answer, but his mind began to capsize like an overburdened skiff. “I’m his father,” he said at last. “I live with him.”
Her big head rolled sideways like a dog’s. “Who told you that?”
“I’m his father,” he said again.
She put a paw on his shoulder and drew him in range of her sour breath. “Let me guess. Your memory ain’t so hot, right? He found you a couple blocks from a nursing home, hey? You know, he’s tried this crap before.” The glance she threw her husband was horrible to see. “Here, let me look at you.” She pulled him around into the glare of the headlights and noticed his pants. “How’d you get this mud on you, pops?” Her big square teeth showed when she asked the question.
“I was digging a ditch,” he said.
Her broad face tightened, the meat on her skull turning to veiny marble. She snapped around and hustled back to her truck, pulling from the bed a short-handled square-point shovel. When Andy saw what she had, he struggled from behind the steering wheel, got out, and tried to run, but she was on him in a second. The old man winced as he heard the dull ring of the shovel blade and saw Andy go down in a skitter of dust at the rear of the car. She hit him again with a halfhearted swing.
Andy cried out, “Ahhhhh, don’t, don’t,” but his wife yelled back and gave him the corner of the shovel right on a rib.
“You gummy little turd with eyes,” she screamed, giving him another dig with the shovel. “I asked you to do one thing for me on your own, one numbskull job,” she said, emphasizing the word job with a slap of the shovel on his belly, “and you kidnap some old bastard who doesn’t know who he is and get him to do it for you?”
“Please, oh please,” Andy cried, raising up a hand on which one finger angled off crazily.
“Look at him, you moron,” she shrieked. “He’s a hundred son-of-a-bitching years old. If he’d died, you’d go to prison for good, and I’d be sued for the rivets in my overalls.” She threw down the shovel and picked him up by the armpits, slamming him down on the car’s trunk, giving him openhanded slaps over and over like a gangster in a cheap movie.
The old man looked down the gravel road to where it brightened in the distance. He tried not to hear the ugly noises behind him, tried to remember his farm and family, but when Andy’s cries began to fracture like an animal’s caught in a steel-jawed trap, he walked around the back of the car and pulled hard on the woman’s wrist. “You’re going to kill him,” he scolded, shaking her arm. “What’s wrong with you?”
She straightened up and put both hands on his shirt. “Nothing is wrong with me,” she raged, pushing him away, coming after him, but when she reached out, a metal blade gonged down on her head, her eye sockets flashed white, and she collapsed in a spray of gravel.
Andy lowered the shovel and leaned heavily on the handle, spitting up blood and falling down on one knee. “Aw, God,” he wheezed.
The old man stepped back, the sound of the iron ringing against the woman’s head already forming a white scar in his brain. He looked down the lane and saw her idling pickup. In a minute, he was behind the wheel, backing away in a cloud of rock dust to a wide spot in the road, where he swung around for town, glancing in the rearview mirror at a limping figure waving wide a garden tool. He drove fast out of the sorry countryside, gained the blacktop, and sped up. At a paintless crossroads store, he stopped, and his mind floated over points of the compass. His hands moved left before his brain told them to, and memory steered the truck. In fifteen minutes, he saw, at the edge of town, the cinder-block plinth of the discount center. Soon, the gray side of the building loomed above him, and he slid out of the woman’s truck, walking around to the front of the store without knowing why, just that it was proper to complete some type of circle.
The bottom of the sun cleared the horizon-making parking lot, and he saw two cars, his old wine-colored Oldsmobile and, next to it, like an embryonic version of the same vehicle, an anonymous modern sedan. He shuffled across the asphalt lake, breathing hard, and there he found a young man asleep behind the steering wheel in the smaller car. He leaned over him and studied his face, saw the LeBlanc nose, reached in at last and traced the round-topped ears of his wife. He knew him, and his mind closed like a fist on this grandson and everything else, even his wife fading in his arms, even the stunned scowl of the copper-haired woman as she was hammered into the gravel. As if memory could be a decision, he accepted it all, knowing now that the only thing worse than reliving nightmares until the day he died was enduring a life full of strangers. He closed his eyes and called on the old farm in his head to stay where it was, remembered its cypress house, its flat and misty lake of sugarcane keeping the impressions of a morning wind.
Radio Magic
Cliff had a great desire to be famous, if only in a small way. Coming from a long line of people whose only legacy was a grave marker, he figured he could do better. The older he got, the more intense his yen for fame, until at age fifty-two, after his last child left to join the navy, he started taking piano lessons. His teacher, a Miss Deutch, told him he was hopeless and had the worst sense of rhythm in the state of Ohio. He asked if he might be suitable for another instrument and she suggested the ocarina.
Cliff tried art lessons, but his misshapen nudes looked like white cattle that had grazed too long on a nuclear test site. Next he took a creative writing class and tried for two years to get something published, but even a limerick he’d embedded in a letter to the local paper about trash pickup had been cut by the editor. His quest went on through several other episodes before he realized he might have to settle for turning his twins’ large bedroom into a man cave, the most famous man cave in the county, a room full of startling objects that his friends down at the waterworks would wonder at and maybe bring to the attention of the regional news media.
The first treasure he installed was a crumbling moose head half the size of a Volkswagen. He purchased it through an ad he heard on the local radio station’s Swap Shop program, the cheapest way to buy anything manly and grotesque. Every morning he listened at seven while he was eating breakfast with his wife, Tammy, a good woman who tolerated his purchases in silence, suspecting that her sweet-natured and naïve husband could have worse habits. After the moose head, he purchased an electric slot machine with semi-nude Asian cowgirls painted on the glass, and next the trunk section of a 1947 Plymouth that had been made into a neon-green sofa, then a pool table covered with hot-pink felt, followed by two red-glazed cow patty ashtrays, though no one he knew smoked. The collection grew, and his friends came over to play cards on a giant wooden cable spool that had a Lithuanian flag painted in its center. No one said much about all these items, though two from the chemical department cast suspicious glances at the twin dress dummies shaped like overweight women. Cliff liked his collection though he sensed that most of the members of his poker group seemed mildly disturbed by it, especially by the skeleton of a goat hanging over the card table, two blinding bulbs descending from its crotch.
One morning on Swap Shop, a man with slurred speech called in to offer five chickens that had been dyed green. The station was in Blue Shaft, West Virginia, a ruined coal-mining town, and the locals would call up and try to sell anything they had just to keep the lights on. The next seller was a woman who was trying to offload a whorehouse piano that had been struck by lightning. Cliff thought the offerings were a good omen, that something special might be coming up. When a young boy came on the air attempting to sell his only pair of pants because he’d outgrown them, Cliff reached to turn up the volume. As the child described his jeans, Cliff took a trip into his young life, about the only kind of travel he could afford, since his wife was an assistant public librarian for the hamlet of Lincoln Foot, Ohio, and he was on
ly the guy at the waterworks who gauged how much came in and went out.
In the middle of the program Tammy got up from the table. “Bye, sweetie,” she said as she brushed past. “Don’t buy another hornet’s nest.”
Cliff closed his eyes. “You don’t have to keep bringing that up.” One of his early purchases from Swap Shop was a large nest for $10 from a man down the road. It was an early fall day and the farmer thought the hornets were long dead, and they were. Cliff hung the big nest in his man cave and proceeded to write reports for the water company, not knowing that a few dozen live eggs had been left behind. They hatched more or less all at once when the central heat came on, and the young stingers descended on Cliff’s head like tiny syringes of poison. After his eyes swelled shut he figured he’d better go to a doc-in-a-box, but he fell down the side steps, ruining a new sport coat, and when he got into the car, he couldn’t see to drive, so he called an ambulance, guessing at the buttons on his phone and calling the Sears washing machine repairman by mistake. By the time he was brought to the hospital, his nose was the size of an adolescent squash. The charge for the ambulance service, emergency room treatment, and injections was monstrous, but what kept him angry for a week was the $109 service bill from Sears.
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