by Neil Plakcy
It took a shot of Scotch to get him going in the morning, and then two more at lunch to get him over the hump of the day. He kept a pewter flask in his desk drawer and took a couple of swigs during the afternoon. Early evening hours found him at one of a half-dozen bars, all of them out on the highway. He cruised the happy hours, drinking heavily and looking for a replacement for Stephanie. The end of the evening found him alone, drunk, and sometimes crying to the bartender about his lousy life.
He drank his way through the rest of August, through September and October. On Mischief Night, before meeting the rest of the Outhouse Gang at the hardware store, he drank four shots of Jim Beam at each of two bars, grazing the happy hour buffets in case this might be the night his luck was going to change. By the time he got to the hardware store, a few minutes before nine, his breath and his attitude were sour.
It was the bourbon, he thought as he pulled into the hardware store’s parking lot. Chuck had bought an old house behind the store and expanded the lot through to Hill Street. Nick sat in the car for a few minutes, waiting for his head to stop spinning and his vision to clear. He rolled down the window and sucked in a chestful of crisp, cold air.
“Hey, bud, aren’t you getting out of the car?” It was Sandy Lord. He put his hand on Nick’s shoulder and Nick felt the car whirl.
“In a minute,” Nick said.
“Don’t be late. We might not wait for you.”
Nick reached down and pulled the pewter flask out of the pocket in the door. He uncapped it and took a long deep swig. There, he thought. That was better. Suddenly the world looked clearer. He put the flask in the pocket of his jacket and got out of the car.
The guys were all standing by the truck, illuminated by bright floodlights mounted on the side of the building. The tallest one was his son Fred.
Nick was momentarily confused. What was Fred doing there? Had he invited him? For the last seven years, he’d brought Fred along, but now he couldn’t remember having discussed it with him. “Did we talk about this?” Nick asked him, after greeting the other guys.
“I figured you forgot. You’re not still mad at me about that thing with the police, are you?”
Nick shook his head. “Nah. I’m glad you’re here.” He put his arm around Fred with a broad gesture, leaning his face close to his son’s.
“Geez, Dad, what’d you do, fall into a barrel of Scotch?” Fred said, waving his hand in front of his face.
Before Nick could answer, everyone was scrambling into the bed of the truck. “How come Chuck always gets to drive?” Nick said, grudgingly stepping up. As he did, he got a twinge in his back. “Christ,” he said, sliding down along the side of the truck.
It seemed to him that Chuck hit every pothole, every bump, and every rough piece of road in Stewart’s Crossing before they finally pulled up in front of a farm. By then, sweat was dripping down his forehead and waves of nausea were crashing around in his stomach. He nearly fell when he stepped down out of the truck, but Fred caught him and steadied him.
While the other guys were examining the outhouse, Nick slipped away to take another swig from his flask. That made him feel better. He was even feeling good enough to crack a couple of dirty jokes while the rest of the guys were hauling the outhouse back to the truck.
Once it was loaded, most of the rest of the guys jumped into the truck bed again. Nick and Chuck were the only ones left standing. “How come you always get to drive?” Nick thought he might be slurring his words, so he made an extra attempt to speak clearly. “You’re the one who drives every year.”
“It’s my truck,” Chuck said. “Come on, Nick, I’ll help you up.”
“I’m driving.” Nick jumped into the cab, shutting and locking the door. The keys were dangling from the ignition. He started the truck up and popped her into reverse.
“Hey!” Chuck said. “Get out of the truck, you crazy motherfucker!”
Nick started to back up. Chuck had to make a running jump into the truck bed, and Paul Warren and Sandy Lord had to grab his belt loops and pull him in.
Nick took off down the country road, not knowing where he was going and not giving a damn either. Chuck wormed his way through the men up to the front of the bed, and rapped on the window to the cab. “Come on, Nick, pull over!”
Everyone had to hang on. Nick was taking curves way too fast, and when he hit a good bump once Harry Mosca almost went over the side. Tommy Lord and Dennis Warner were laughing and yelling, but Tommy’s twelve-year-old brother Danny and Raymond Woodruff, who was only eleven, were both cowering in the center of the truck. Fred Miller looked scared but defiant.
A siren rose in the darkness behind them, followed by a pair of flashing red and blue lights. “Oh, shit, we’re in for it now,” Sandy said. “I can just see the fucking headlines.”
“My truck,” Chuck moaned. “He’s a goddamned lunatic.”
Nick saw the flashing lights in the rear view mirror as they went through an underpass beneath the highway. He recognized his surroundings; one of his favorite bars was on the highway near here.
Unfortunately, only southbound traffic on this country road could enter the highway, and Nick was headed due north. He pulled a wide turn, running onto the dirt shoulder, then jumping a low concrete median to race up the highway ramp, cutting right in front of a group of southbound cars bunched together.
“Yahoo!” Nick hollered. He pushed his foot down all the way on the gas pedal and the truck rocketed forward down the smooth highway, leaving the police car far behind. After a half-mile, though, the familiarity of his surroundings kicked in and he realized what he’d just done. “Jesus Christ!” He felt dead sober.
He slowed down and took the next exit. He pulled off into a broad, wooded strip and shut down the engine. The policeman had not appeared in his rear view since he’d entered the highway.
Chuck was out of the truck banging on the door of the cab and hollered, “Get out of my truck!” The other men jumped out, too, most of them shaking their heads and stretching.
Nick opened the door and stepped down. He stumbled ahead a few steps and then threw up. When he looked up, all six of the other men were standing in a circle around him, with the boys hovering on the outside. “You all right, Nick?” Harry Mosca asked.
Nick stood up straight, nodding his head. “Yeah, I’ll survive. Geez, Chuck, I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Damn near wrecked my truck,” Chuck said. “Although, I haven’t seen anybody drive like that outside of the movies.”
“I thought we were dead for a while there,” Sandy said. “Can you imagine if that cop had caught us, with the outhouse back there?”
There was general agreement. “Listen, we’ve got to get rid of this thing,” Chuck said. “That cop’s probably got us on his radio all over the county.”
Everyone hustled back to the truck. “You all right, Dad?” Fred asked, walking next to Nick.
“I’m all right. Help me up into the truck.”
The ride back to Stewart’s Crossing was tense and nerve-wracking, as the guys worried that every passing car might be a policeman. They dropped the outhouse at the sewage pumping station on the outskirts of the town, and then drove quickly back to the hardware store.
The men dispersed into the night. Nick and Fred were left standing next to Nick’s car at the back of the parking lot. “You must think I’m a pretty stupid guy,” Nick said. “Going out and doing exactly what I grounded you for.”
“I was pretty scared,” Fred said. “I mean, I’ve driven before with guys who were out of control, but you were really crazy. And like, from now on, no way am I gonna get in a car with anybody who’s drunk. Once I get my license back, I’m not making the same mistake again, either.”
“God, I feel terrible,” Nick said. “There’s a jackhammer going inside my head, my stomach is raw, and everything keeps going round and round.”
Fred took Nick’s car keys from his hand and led him around to the passenge
r side of the car. “Get in, Dad. I’ll get you home.”
“But you don’t have a license,” Nick said, leaning against the door.
“That’s right, and I’m not driving you. You wait here. I’m gonna call one of my friends.”
“That’s all right, son,” Sandy said, stepping out of the shadows. With him were his two sons and Paul and Dennis Warner. “I think between all of us, we can get everybody home safe.”
A police car approached on Main Street, slowed, and then pulled into the parking lot. The window rolled down; there was a young policeman inside. “Any of you guys seen some crazy loon in a pickup with an outhouse in the back?” the policeman asked.
The men exchanged glances. “An outhouse?” Sandy asked. “Oh, yeah, it’s Mischief Night, isn’t it? Must be the Outhouse Gang.”
The policeman nodded. “Yeah, must be.”
“Can’t help you, officer,” Paul said.
The officer waved, rolled his window back up, and pulled back onto Main Street. “This is wrong,” Sandy said. “They’ll be cruising all night looking for us.”
“OK, go flag him down and admit it,” Paul said. “Make sure you have something real good to say to all your constituents. I’m sure everybody in Stewart’s Crossing wants to know what a member of the town council was doing in a truck driven by a drunk, with an outhouse on it, careening all over the county.”
“Making a fool of himself,” Sandy said. “It’s kind of an annual event with us. Now come on, let’s get everybody home.” He turned to his sons. “I hope you boys have learned a lesson from this tonight.”
“The lesson is that even fathers can be jerks sometimes,” Nick said.
Sandy looked at Nick. “That’s a mild way of putting it.” He shook his head. “You did a damned stupid thing tonight, Nick. You put your own life at risk, your son’s life, the lives of your friends, and the lives of their sons. It’s going to take more than a smart-ass comment to make that all right.”
Paul Warner said, “Sandy, you take Fred. Dennis and I will see that Nick gets home.”
Sandy put his arm around Fred’s shoulders, and, sullenly, the boy walked off with Sandy and his sons. “Our car’s over here,” Paul said, and he and Dennis started toward it. For a minute, Nick stood in a pool of moonlight next to his car. They were all against him, he thought. Every last goddamned one of them. He was tempted to get into his car and just keep driving, go west maybe, get out of Pennsylvania altogether. There were places where a man could make a new start, especially a good-looking guy with some charm, the ability to sell.
He could do it. He wasn’t drunk any more, just unsteady. That would pass before he’d hit the turnpike. He felt for the keys in his pocket and realized Fred had them. Damned kid. Something always got in the way of his plans. He could be doing great if something didn’t always get in the goddamned way.
“Nick,” Paul called.
He shook his head, patted his car on the hood, and walked into the darkness.
Chuck: 1975
Winter was always a slow time in the hardware business. January, February and March were the times when Chuck Ritter could catch up on his paperwork, reorganize those dusty shelves he’d been meaning to get to for so long, take long lazy afternoon breaks while a single salesman manned the floor.
Chuck’s office was a small square room attached to the rear of the store, with both an inside and an outside entrance, although the outside door was rarely used. A small double-hung window looked out over the parking lot towards Hill Street and the old Victorian houses there.
Chuck was staring out the window, thinking of nothing in particular, when he heard the stamp of boots coming up the short staircase rising to the exterior door of his office. His wife Susanna came in, dusting the snow from her fringed muffler and shaking it out of her long, frizzy brown hair. “This is a nice surprise,” Chuck said. “Need something over at the lumber yard?”
Susanna took off her coat and laid it carefully on top of a pile of books and papers, and sat down in the chair across from her husband. “You won’t believe it. The Wilkeys are selling the lumber yard.”
The Wilkeys were an old Stewart’s Crossing family that had operated the lumber yard and now derelict lumber mill at the river’s edge in Stewart’s Crossing for decades. The current Wilkeys in charge were two cousins, Arnold and Frank, both in their late forties, who had been a few years ahead of Chuck in school. One managed the yard while the other was in charge of sales, and Susanna was secretary to both of them.
“How did you find out?” he asked.
“You know I’m very precise about how I leave my desk,” Susanna said. Chuck nodded. After living in the same house with her for twenty-three years, he was well aware of Susanna’s habits. “This morning there was a piece of carbon paper in my middle drawer. I always keep the carbon paper in my second right hand drawer. I thought someone was using my desk.”
“So?”
“So I put a fresh piece of paper under the carbon and rubbed over it.”
“You devil. What was on the paper?”
“It was a letter of intent to sell the yard. I think Arnold’s wife typed it.”
“Maybe the new owner will keep the staff.”
Susanna shook her head. “They’re going to renovate the old mill into a shopping center and tear the lumber yard down for a parking lot.”
They both sat silent for a minute. Chuck loved Stewart’s Crossing the way it had been when he was a child: a small, slow town with a feed store and a five and dime, and a town drunk named Satch who slept on a bench outside the police station.
But over the last ten years, with the growing suburbs replacing the farmlands around the town, things had been changing. The feed store was now a real estate office and the five and dime a pizzeria. A modern convenience mart with an ersatz Pennsylvania Dutch design rose out of a sea of asphalt next to the post office, and boutiques were springing up on the first floors of the Victorian homes along the northern stretch of Main Street. It was clear that a shopping center replacing the lumber yard was only the next step in a long downward slide.
“Why don’t we go on a trip,” Chuck said. “When your job is finished. We’ve never been on a long trip together.”
“We’ll still have two kids to put through college,” Susanna said. Bruce had come back from Vietnam and was going to a community college in upstate New York, part time, and Lisa was graduating from high school in the spring and going on to college in September. “And I’ll be out of a job. I don’t think we’ll be going anywhere.”
“The store’s not doing too badly. We can live on what I make.”
“Let’s not worry about it until the time comes,” Susanna said. “In the meantime, I said I was taking a long lunch. How’d you like to join me for pizza?”
“Can we sit in a booth in the back and kiss while we wait for the pizza?”
“Oh, you,” Susanna said.
* * *
The news about the mill came out a few weeks later, as spring was breaking and the forsythia began to blossom, tiny yellow buds on long scraggly stems. Daffodils and jonquils appeared in the Ritters’ front yard, and the sky was filled with the heavy flapping of the wings of migrating birds.
It was a season of change and upset. Lisa was more and more independent, waiting eagerly for her June graduation, and Susanna embarked on a top to bottom spring cleaning. The plans for the mill were published in both the Trenton and Levittown daily papers, illustrated with sketches of the proposed shopping complex. The Stewart’s Crossing paper came out only once a week, and it devoted a whole issue to the history of the mill, features about other similar shopping centers in other towns, and interviews with townspeople.
“It looks kind of nice,” Susanna said, sitting at the kitchen table with the Stewart’s Crossing Boat-Gazette spread in front of her. “They’re going to get the water wheel working again, and put shops on the ground floor and up in the loft.”
“Cool,” Lisa said, peering ove
r her shoulder. “A Haagen-Dazs store. I love their ice cream.”
“You wait until we have a recession,” Chuck said from across the table. “People always need lumber. But how many people will buy fancy ice cream when they can’t put food on the table?”
“Ice cream is food, Dad,” Lisa said, pulling on her jacket. “Didn’t Queen Isabella say ‘Let them eat cake?’”
As Lisa was going out the door, Susanna called after her, “That was Marie Antoinette!”
“I thought she was taking European History this semester.” Chuck nibbled on an English muffin, then picked up the back section of the Boat-Gazette to read about the prospects for the high school baseball team.
“Can you put down the paper, please? I have something I want to talk to you about.”
Chuck put the paper down. “You have my undivided attention.”
“I want to go to college.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“When I was Lisa’s age, all I wanted to do was marry you and have babies. Now that I’m going to be laid off, I think I’d like to try taking some courses.”
Chuck just stared at her, like his wife of twenty-three years had disappeared, to be replaced by a different woman.
“I’d like to be an elementary school teacher,” she continued. “I’ve been looking into the community college, and they have some very good courses. Of course, I have to start with the basics, but I can get an associate’s degree in two years, three if I go part-time. And then I can always go on to Rider or Trenton State for my bachelor’s degree, if I still want to be in school.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
Susanna nodded. “Ever since I first found out that the lumber yard was closing. Helene and I did some investigating, and we found a government program that pays for people who have been laid off to go back to school and get retrained. It looks like she and I will both qualify.”
“Well, that would help,” Chuck said. “Of course, we were counting on your income to help pay for Lisa’s tuition, and to help out Bruce, too.”
“I can work part-time.” Susanna looked at Chuck. “At least let me try.”