A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

by David Gates

  While my father lived long enough to know that at least one of his sons wasn’t a fuckup, I think it hurt him when my wife and I split up without having kids. That would be a whole other story, not really to the point of this one. You’d think Bozrah was a town where you’d want to raise a family, but the select board closed the elementary school ten years ago to keep taxes down, and what kids there are get bused twenty miles down the valley. The ones who have anything on the ball get away as soon as they’re finished with high school. Even Amber, the girl in my office, moved down to Greenfield for a while to go to community college. It’s only the Asscrack Harrys and their fat girlfriends who stick around, living with their parents, or in the shitbox houses people were putting up before the five-acre zoning came in, or over in Egdon where you can still stick a trailer on a half-acre lot. So we’ve got fewer people than we did in 1975, except now there’s an MIT professor, a Broadway actor and his boyfriend, a retired anchorman who used to do local news out of Boston, a Web designer, a mystery writer who supposedly sets her stuff in the area. What keeps this place from turning into a Lenox or a Stockbridge is that there’s nothing here. The nearest supermarkets are in Greenfield and North Adams, forty-five minutes either way, and the same for the nearest hospital, which if you’re retired could be a deal breaker right there. Since the general store closed you have to go over to Egdon for gasoline or a quart of milk. There’s not even an antique shop. The old bar at the lake is now a restaurant called Locavore; you don’t see many cars outside, and when that goes under, I’ll be the only employer in town.

  For me personally, it’s all good. It was my company that turned the Lakeside Lounge into Locavore with barn board and copper countertops; we built a writing studio in the mystery lady’s barn; when a guy whose company makes drones for the military bought the sweet little Federal house next to the town hall, we dismantled it, numbered everything and put it back together for him in the middle of the hundred acres he owns on Charrington Hill. But I feel like I got in just under the wire. Last fall a real-estate agent from Pittsfield called me with an offer of four-fifty for my house, which I’d bought for a buck and a quarter. I hadn’t put it on the market—somebody from New York had just driven by while leaf peeping on the back roads. It’s like I’m finally one of the locals myself: if I were young and starting out again, I couldn’t afford to live here.

  —

  A couple of years ago, an investment banker bought the dairy farm where Mike used to work, and he comes up here for a couple months in the summer. His caretaker lives in Mike’s old cabin, which we moved out of sight of the main house. The Holsteins are long gone; now there’s a herd of shaggy longhorns grazing on his side hill among a flock of twisting metal sculptures. (It was Johnny who dug down with the backhoe and poured the concrete.) The guy also bought Billy Sibley’s little ranch house, just to tear it down so he wouldn’t have to see it when he turned onto his road. That got the locals’ attention.

  Billy worked for me maybe fifteen years; before that he had a roofing business, and he built that little house with his own hands. Amber called him Uncle Bill; actually, he would’ve been her great-uncle. Billy never got married. He built the house for his sweetheart when he came home from Vietnam in ’66—he’d put in his years and he saw where shit was heading—but she broke their engagement and left town, and that was it as far as Billy and females. The banker offered him twice what the place was worth, then three times, and finally Billy grabbed his chance to retire in style. His younger brother was already down in Florida. We got the contract to tear the house down; if we hadn’t, somebody would have. I would’ve put Billy on something else while this was going on, but he said no, he wanted to do the job himself. Mostly he supervised, since his back was getting worse from sleeping on what he called a few-ton. Still, Jesse let him run the dozer when it came time to fill in the cellar hole.

  Billy stayed with his nephew for the time being; the nephew, Amber’s father, was a drunk whose wife had quit her job and walked out leaving him hard up for money, so he charged Billy fifty dollars a month. Amber got on the Internet and found Billy a bunch of Florida listings, but he didn’t like any of them, and when she dropped out of school and moved back up to live with her boyfriend over in Egdon, he got an efficiency in the senior housing complex there. He’d quit working by then, put the house money into CDs that didn’t pay shit—I told him not to—and started collecting Social Security. The first good day in spring he’d always be on the lake in his aluminum motorboat; Amber’s got a picture on her phone of him holding a largemouth bass that measured sixteen inches. He and Jesse used to go deer hunting—Jesse was a vet too; he’d been at Hamburger Hill in ’69—but when they went out last December Billy had so much trouble walking that they had to turn back after an hour. In February, Amber told me he was in the VA hospital down in Northampton, and they didn’t expect him to go home.

  When I came into his room they had him sitting up in the chair next to his bed, in a white gown that showed his hairless shins. He had a few days of stubble.

  “Hey, bub,” I said. “How you feelin’? You look pretty good.”

  “Is that so.”

  “What are the doctors saying?”

  “Well, they don’t dance all around the mulberry bush like they used to. Get my affairs in order, that’s the quotation. Amber’s been helping me out on that.”

  “Jesus, Billy. I’m sorry.”

  “Not any sorrier than me, I’ll tell you that.”

  “There anything I can do for you?” I said. “I bring you anything?”

  “Not a thing.” Shook his head again. “Nope, I’m all set here.”

  “How about music?” Billy would always have his heavy-duty Makita radio going while he was on a job. How many times in his life had he heard “Layla” and “Hot Blooded” and “Alison”? They weren’t even songs he grew up with.

  “I don’t care about it. Amber asked me did I want to borrow her iPod, iPad I guess she’s got. Borrow. I don’t know why that tickled me.” He lifted his chin at the television that had women’s basketball on mute. “You ever watch these gals?” He ran a hand over his face “Come to think of it. It’s a funny thing to ask a man, but I got my razor in that drawer, and I don’t like these nurses fussing with me.”

  I found a towel to put around his neck and when I was soaping up his face his stubble felt just like mine. He had the same problem place I do, the corners of the mouth, and I told him to stick his tongue up under. “Now you look handsome,” I said.

  “Sure, handsome enough to go right into the box. What kind of a day is it out?”

  “Cold. They’re calling for another six to ten inches overnight. And we got to start tearing out a house on Miller Brook Road where the guy let his pipes freeze. Boy, you want to see some water damage.”

  “Then I guess you’ll have quite a time of it. I tell you Jesse was by? Said I better straighten up and fly right so we could get back in the woods. Nobody knows what the hell to say. He had his mind set on getting a minister to come around.”

  “You think you might want that?”

  “Those birds? What I should’ve done, I should’ve just taken myself out in the goddamn woods. You want to think you’ll make up your mind to it tomorrow, and pretty soon they got you in this goddamn place. Guess I’ll know the next time.”

  —

  The lady I’d started seeing when Billy got sick taught at the community college in Greenfield. Amber had taken her for composition and said she was a bitch on wheels. This was before I ever met Kristin, but I can see how she might have come off like that. Back in the nineties she was studying to get her Ph.D. at BU when she got pregnant; she married the guy, which she said was the mistake of her life, moved with him to Stanford, where he’d landed some big teaching job, and now here she was in what she liked to call The Land Time Forgot, grading papers while her eighteen-year-old was bumming his way around Europe. I met her at a bar in Greenfield where I’d gone after freezing my ass all day a
t Miller Brook Road. I went over to her because she wasn’t so young that she would’ve blown me off from the get-go. I had a few years on her but I was in decent shape from working. She must have let me keep talking to her because she couldn’t quite figure me out—a guy in the construction business that wasn’t a Republican? She said she’d never asked a man home with her that she’d just met. It turned out she liked to play rough in bed, and of course I was up for that. I think both of us knew the deal, but we started hanging out and pretty soon it had turned into a thing where I was pretending that she needed to finish this book she was supposedly working on and she was pretending that I needed to get back to playing the guitar. She was a good drinker, and we were both tired of not having anybody in our lives.

  Kristin didn’t know the people who worked for me—I doubt she would have remembered Amber—and that was how I liked to keep it. I’d see her two or three times a week, and other nights I’d go out drinking with Johnny, who was usually having trouble with his old lady. We’d ask Jesse along sometimes—his wife had given it a try up here, then went to live with her sister down in Queens—but we’d had a couple incidents. One night in North Adams, at a bar we should’ve known to stay out of, Johnny and I had to go over and straighten out some asshole and his buddy, Johnny lost his shit on the guy, I got into it, Jesse tried to pull Johnny away and old as he was he ended up getting into it. We spent overnight in jail because Johnny had put one of them in the hospital. So sometimes I’d just have him and Jesse come to my house, and Billy before he got sick. Billy could drink too—he had a saying, “Good for what ails ya, and if nothin’ ails ya, it’s good for that.” We’d sit around the kitchen table playing hearts and I’d put on music I thought they could tolerate. One thing, nobody had to worry about a DUI getting home, because the staties never patrolled up this way and the town constable knew our vehicles. Johnny said he wished he was me—pussy on demand and nobody waiting up. So when was he going to meet this lady?

  Amber wanted to know about the new girlfriend too. When she realized who it was, she said I had to be fucking kidding, that Kristin was a stuck-up cunt who was probably just after me for whatever she could get, which wasn’t too flattering. But of course you had to know Amber. Her father was always broke and she’d never been any farther than Northampton to visit Billy, so she didn’t have much of a framework for anything. Whatever Kristin might have wanted from me, it wasn’t anything along the lines of houses, cars, vacations—what Amber would have thought of as the good life. Amber’s boyfriend was getting heavier into drugs and she was always talking about moving out. I said I’d help her anytime, but you could see it was one of those dramas that was just going to go on and on. She could have stayed at my house until she got shit figured out—I had all these rooms I wasn’t using—but that would have been misunderstood, by everybody. Amber, Johnny, Billy dying in the hospital, Myron with his chainsaw act, Asscrack Harrys coming and going: none of this was anything Kristin needed to be around.

  So when she offered to come with me to Billy’s funeral, I said I’d be fine and nobody’d be expecting her to show up anyway. She said in that case she’d go to Boston for a few days; she could cancel her Monday and Tuesday classes, and she might see me Tuesday night. I couldn’t tell if she was bent out of shape or just glad she wouldn’t have to meet these characters. This was the end of March; the old-timers were sugaring, and the rich people were skiing up at Killington, or maybe tanning in the Caribbean. The snow had begun to melt, but it was supposed to turn cold again next week and the ground was still hard, so Jesse would have to hold off on going in with the backhoe to dig the grave. Amber said it was Billy’s wish to get buried here in town instead of the veterans’ cemetery down in Agawam.

  The service was at ten o’clock Saturday morning, at the funeral home down in Martin’s Falls. I got there early and found Johnny, Jesse and Amber out in Johnny’s new Pathfinder, parked next to Amber’s Chevy Cobalt that had the one primered quarter, with the heater and the radio going, passing a bottle. Johnny’s wife was nowhere to be seen, so they must have been fighting again. I climbed in the backseat with Jesse, who took a pull, wiped the mouth of the bottle with the lapel of his suit jacket and offered it to me. “Looks like this is going to be a long day,” I said.

  Johnny watched me tip it up. “Pussy. You need to do better than that if you want to run with the big dogs.”

  “Don’t think I won’t.”

  “Hey,” Amber said, and reached out her hand. She took a pretty good pull too—maybe not the best idea because she couldn’t have gone more than one-ten, which made her a standout around here. “So listen, how this works? The minister said they’re going to have a time for people to get up and talk if they want.”

  “Fuck, I will if anybody else does,” Johnny said. “Let me have that bad boy.”

  “I should do it,” I said. “Would your father want to?”

  “He probably hasn’t even woke up,” Amber said. “He said he hates funerals. Like who doesn’t? Fucker.”

  Johnny took another slug and passed me the bottle. There wasn’t much left. “I guess I could say how he ran the grill and shit. When the firemen used to have the chicken barbecues.”

  Jesse gave him a look. “Billy did?”

  “I think it was Billy. Shit, maybe I better not. Jesse, man, you were closer to him than anybody.”

  “I’ll get up,” Jesse said.

  “Maybe I could tell about the bird that time?” Amber said. “Where he put it in the shoe box in the office for its wing to get better and then it flew into the window? I can leave out the window part.”

  I looked at my watch. “We need to get in there.”

  Johnny said, “We need to finish this,” and passed the bottle to Amber.

  They’d set up the casket in front of the rows of folding chairs, with a flag draped over it and the top half open like a Dutch door. You could see what looked like a statue of Billy inside, displayed not quite flat on its back and turned a little toward the audience.

  “Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Johnny said to Amber. “You didn’t tell me about this shit.” The organ was going—probably organ music on tape—but Johnny was loud enough that a couple people looked up from where they were sitting. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen in all, ladies in flowered dresses, men with too-tight suit jackets. I saw Myron in the back row, in his sport coat and a plaid shirt; he got up and headed my way. “Johnny okay to be here?” Then he must have smelled it on me. “Ho boy.”

  We sidestepped into the third row of chairs, Johnny taking Amber’s arm to guide her in after Jesse and me. “Hey, wait,” Amber said. “Don’t we have to like go up and pay our respect?”

  “I’m as close as I fuckin’ need to be,” Johnny said. A lady in front turned, Amber stuck her tongue out and the lady whipped her head back around and leaned to whisper to what must have been her husband. Amber got up, worked herself past Johnny and fell in behind some old guy with a four-footed cane, probably some friend of Billy’s from back in the day. He nodded at Billy like he was passing him on the street, then shuffled back to his chair. Amber stopped in front of the casket, reached in, then came back and squeezed in over Johnny.

  “I touched his arm,” she said. “I was going to touch his hand, but it looked like it had foundation all over it. Face definitely did.”

  “I don’t want to fuckin’ hear about it,” Johnny said.

  Somebody behind us said, “You mind keeping it down?”

  Amber turned and gave the finger and I looked around: it was Junior Copley, chief of the volunteer fire department.

  “Hey Junior?” Johnny said. “Whyn’t you go fuck yourself?”

  “Okay,” I told Johnny. “Let’s just chill.”

  “This motherfucker needs to chill,” Johnny said. I noticed somebody behind us—it could have been Myron—getting up and walking back toward the double doors.

  “How come we can’t talk?” Amber said. “I’m his only next of kin.”

>   A pair of heavyset guys in cheap black suits and hair buzzed down to nothing came up and stopped beside Johnny’s chair, and the fatter one of the two bent down to whisper. “Sir? Can we see you for a minute? Ma’am, if you want to come too.” The other one stood there with his arms folded like Mr. Clean.

  “Bullshit,” Amber said, good and loud.

  “Hey, Johnny?” I said. “Let’s not make this into a thing.” I had no idea who the guys were—they looked like small-time mafia out of Chicopee. The funeral director was head-to-head with the minister up by the casket, looking like they wanted to get this show on the road.

  I stood up, then Amber, then Johnny; Jesse looked over at us but stayed in his chair. The fat one led the three of us back to the double doors, the Mr. Clean guy behind us, and out into the vestibule.

  “Look,” the fat one said, “these things are heavy for everybody, you know what I’m saying? What we don’t want is—”

  “Yeah, okay, you did your job,” I said. “We’re cool.”

  “If you haven’t signed the visitors’ thing, it’s over there.” The Mr. Clean one nodded at a book sitting open on an oak lectern.

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s get that done and we’ll go back in.”

  “So you’re with them now?” Amber said.

  “Sir?” The fat one touched Johnny’s elbow to guide him over to the lectern, which he shouldn’t have done, and Johnny shoved him against the wall and then the other guy was on him, twisting his arm up behind his back. Johnny broke away, swung at him, and both guys took him down. Amber went for them, but I pulled her back—that was my excuse.

  “You think we’re playing now?” The fat one was panting and sweating. He took Johnny by the hair and slammed his face against the floor. The other one had his cellphone out. “Okay, you,” the fat one said to me. “I’m giving you a break, right? Get the lady out of here and we’ll call it good.”

  “Where’s he going to be?” I said.

  “What, you want to come with? He’ll get his phone call. You and this lady better scoot before I change my mind.”