A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  "I'm getting all of this outta the report the Park Rangers leave off when they delivered this human trash. The Department of Natural Resources guys, the ones inna green four-wheel-drive pick-up trucks always bangin' around inna bushes, the State reservations, like they're chasin' rustlers or something.

  "Their guess is these people've probably been living inna woods there since around the end of June. They are not really sure. One of them thinks that's the first time he recalls seeing them. But he didn't make out a report, not having any complaint to act on, any reason to do so. So there's really no way to find out, exactly. Probably don't know themselves, these people, how long they've actually been there.

  All you can do is ask them, knowin' if they do know they're gonna lie to you. It's their reflex by now, tellin' lies. And for Christ sake, why shouldn't they? What've they got left to lose?

  "And anyway, doesn't matter what they tell you. All it takes is two weeks. Technically they're trespassing once they're living there more'n two consecutive weeks, fourteen days the same cabin, not paying their six bucks a day.

  "Rangers say this isn't unusual, homeless people living in there, not this time of year. Rangers know they're there, see them all the time.

  They don't try to hide or stay out of sight. But generally they keep moving around. Cabin to cabin, three or four of them, pathetic dirty little groups, generally a woman and her kids.

  Sometimes they'll have a rat-ass sorry excuse for a man along, like this one did, and after they've been there a while, they get so they know each other. They organize, set up a system. Rotate themselves around the camps. So none of them're ever staying more'n two weeks, the fourteen days, in any one of them. But all of 'em're always there, in one camp or the other. They're not paying, of course, but the way the Rangers look at it, if no one wants to rent the cabin, why not let someone who needs it but can't pay for it go ahead and use it? "Stead of having it sit vacant anna homeless people out inna rain? Makes sense, 'less you figure the bums bein' in there means the people who can pay wont wanna come and use it.

  "Anyway, you almost have to give them credit. They may be the castaways of our society, but they know the rules, and they do do their best to keep them. It's not enough, but they do try. The Rangers told the cops they generally don't bother them unless the squatters practically force them to. Like if the legitimate people payin' rent onna cabins start making complaints about their stuff bein' missin', they come back from swimming or fishing, out inna woods for the day.

  It's pretty hard to lock the cabins, no one can get in. Food gets stolen, which upsets them. Get even more pissed off if their cigarettes and beer disappear although I'm not all that sure you're even technically supposed to have any beer when you're camping State property like that. Or if you can smoke inna woods; Smokey the Bear might not like it. But people do, I guess; pretty hard to stop them.

  Rangers probably do the same thing as with the squatters; only go in, enforce the rules, somebody gets drunk or something, makes an issue of it. Otherwise leave 'em alone.

  "But anyway, stealing. If the squatters get to doing that, stuff starts being missing, then the Rangers wouldn't have any choice but to go in and throw 'em out and make 'em leave. But not unless they have to; that'd be what it amounts to. It's not something they like to do.

  "Seven cabins out there. No heat, light or running water, anything; and people're s'posed to use the latrines. Never very far from one; four three-stall portable toilets and a trailer with four showers, two for men and two for women. But they don't go to all that trouble. They do it in the woods, wipe their asses off with leaves; it's easier.

  Messier, too, of course, and very unsanitary; little of that old E. coli bacteria in the drinking water; make a lot of people sick. But it's easier easier rules.

  "The only reason Rangers finally went in last night and arrested this group was because some legitimate workin' people who don't have any too much money of their own, spend onna two-week vacation that they earned by their hard work, they picked out one of those cabins back last spring, and reserved it. Now it's comin' up on their turn and they want it. They've been looking forward to it ever since they put their name on the list. So, they don't live that far away, and I guess they must've gotten wind of what was goin' on, homeless squattin' in the cabins. You're liable to get up here with all of your equipment and stuff, lookin' forward to your two weeks in the woods, and there's already someone sleepin' in your house. Never heard of Goldilocks but prolly wouldn't mind getting their paws on your porridge even better, some of your beer.

  "So yesterday, the husband of this family that reserved the cabin back in April, he goes to the trouble of taking a ride up there into the woods to make sure him and his family're actually going to get what they signed up for back then and've been looking forward to ever since, he starts his two weeks off with pay tomorrow. And what he finds roostin' in it is that woman and her three kids and her dirtbag boyfriend. And I guess it was perfectly obvious to him that they'd been in it a good long time, not just a week or so, and they had absolutely no intention of clearing out on his say-so when he shows up there with his wife and kids tomorrow.

  "He didn't like it. I don't blame him. He got back in his car and drove back out to the office that they've got there and he bitched to the Park Rangers. Put it that way and they didn't have much choice.

  They saw the guy's point and arrested the squatters. Also hadda have someone go in and then clean the place up.

  "Now, I feel sorry for everybody who's down on their luck, but feelin' sorry isn't my job. My job's to bail people charged with a crime. So I look at them, this woman and her scumbag of a man, charged with trespassin." But the poor bastards've got no place to go, really.

  They're livin' on food stamps, bummin' cigarettes off each other.

  They're not denning up out in the woods because they're relivin' "Davy Crockett."

  "These people're destitute. Kids're in rags. Mother's to blame for the squalor, of course, usin' her welfare, most likely includin' the kids' clothes-allotment checks, to buy booze for herself an' her fuckin' boyfriend, this Ronald shit bird He's also on Essesseye. I didn't see much evidence he might be in danger of getting a job.

  "This means I'm now in the same box as the Rangers were. I'm sittin' in the back room of the PD lockup around ten-thirty on a Saturday night and I'm a court clerk. What the hell am I supposed to do about this fuckin' mess? By that time I wasn't exactly myself anyway, either.

  What you'd say was on top of my game; I wouldn't've told you I was."

  "Why? What was the matter with you?" Diane said.

  "Oh I don't want to bore you with all the details of it," Merrion said.

  "The day I'd been having yesterday up until then was bad enough without reliving it again today. We seem to be pretty well on our way here to having a nice day for ourselves, and I'd just as soon have it and leave yesterday back where it belongs: behind me."

  "Well, you will tell me, though, you know," she said. "I always tell you, when I've had a bad day. And you're the same way: You tell me. So you might as well just get started. And that way maybe by the time we get to Tanglewood and it's time to hear the Brahms, you'll have it off your chest and we can just enjoy ourselves."

  NINETEEN

  There was a fair amount of Sunday traffic westbound on the turnpike where it begins the gradual ascent from the valley of the Connecticut River into the foothills of the Berkshires, enough to keep all but the most intractable lane-weavers respectably in line, peaceably exceeding the posted speed limit by ten miles an hour, just under seventy-five.

  The heavy coupe was quiet and cool, going fast in a reasonably straight line, as it had been engineered and built to do, and Merrion had Diane's listening preference, WFCR-FM, Five College Public Radio, audible but just below normal conversational level the announcer, displaying his erudition, was voluptuously saying "Bayed-rish Schmet-nah' to identify Bedrich Smetana as 'the Czech composer' of the selection just concluded, the overture
to The Bartered Bride. Merrion frowned, repressing an urge to say "Shaper."

  Diane misinterpreted both his expression and the reason for his silence. "Come on, Amby," she said, coaxing, 'tell me what's on your mind. That's what we do for each other."

  It was the kind of unpressured relationship she meant to have with him, one in which she intended that he would feel free to behave pretty much as he would have if he had been 'off-duty' with his friends and she had not been present. So far as she knew, he did, but she didn't have it quite right.

  He believed he was making more of an effort to please her than he had made for any woman except Sunny Keller. When he was with her he was always on his better if not his best behavior; or intended to be, anyway. His effort was apparent to people who had known him a long time and seen them together. Dan Hilliard warned him he was 'getting somewhat pussy-whipped, you know." He shrugged it off by saying that he supposed he was, 'a little, but Jesus, a man's gotta calm down some time, hasn't he? I mean, I may say that I'm not getting old here, but I have to admit I've been getting a little winded. Not tuckered out, no; a little tired. It hadda happen, sooner, later, I suppose; I been out raising hell a long time. Takes it out of a man.

  "Plus which, even though you wont wanna, I think you gotta admit I could've made a much worse choice to slow down with, you know? I realize she's not your favorite person, and I can't say I blame you.

  But what happened between you and Mercy, and how much Diane had to do with it; well, that's something that Diane and I leave strictly out of what goes on between the two of us. I try not to talk much about you when I'm around her not that she would mind because she's told me she likes you okay; she's got nothing against you."

  "Well, for Christ sake," Hilliard said, 'how the hell could she, have something against me? I never did anything to her; she did something to me. I'm not saying she set out to do it, ruin my marriage, or that Mercy all by herself d never've decided she'd had enough of me, but Diane had a lot to do with what finally happened and when it happened, too, worst possible timing for me. Regardless of whether she meant to or not, everything she did had the result of turning my wife against me. I don't thank her for it."

  "Yeah, I know," Merrion said. "But I still do it, just the same, leave your name out of what we talk about. I just think it's better. And I never bring up Mercy's name and Diane doesn't either, much, although I know they're still very thick, very good friends themselves. And as a result, I think Diane and I get along pretty well. She's a real good woman. I like her. She's funny; she makes me laugh, and then she doesn't get mad when I do it. And she's not always trying all the time to reform me, or corner me, either, into getting married. Measuring me all the time.

  "I had that happen to me once or twice, Mary Pat would get like that sometimes, and it made me nervous. I didn't like it. And've you got any idea how hard it is to find a woman our age who wont treat a man like that? Who'll just leave him alone and enjoy life, have fun? No, of course you don't. How could you? Your idea of a woman the right age is a thirty-six-C Wonderbra on a setta jugs that haven't even been inside a polling place yet; they don't turn eighteen until next year.

  "I dunno, Danny; you, runnin' a college, all that firm young flesh bouncin' around all over the place? All that scary stuff we're always hearing all the time now, sex harassment cases? I worry, something might happen. Yeah, I realize you're an old hand, you could say, been doin' it quite a while now, and so far as we know, at least, you haven't been in trouble yet. But it worries me, Danny; I worry 'bout you all the time."

  He was right in his perception that Diane did not have matrimony in mind. She consciously tolerated more from him than she would have from a man she had been inspecting as a prospective husband. "Gentleman friends are different from husbands," she told Sally Davidson, a friend since their freshman year at Wisconsin. "They don't have to meet the same requirements. The standards're nowhere near high. Be honest: the first thing to look for in husbands is whether they can make sure there'll be a roof over your head and you'll have enough to eat, be taken care of financially, if the day ever comes when they can't continue to provide those things. Walter was a very good husband. He left me very well-off, much better off than I ever dreamed of being.

  Even if something should happen to my practice, if I got sick and could no longer work, I'd be quite comfortable. So there's no pressure on me, no reason why I need to find another husband. Furthermore, I don't think I want one. Two weddings ought to be enough for a respectable woman. More'n that and you start to run the risk of looking showy, don't you think?"

  "Always wanting to be the center of attention all the time," Sally said. She laughed.

  That delighted Diane; she deliberately tried to say things that would make Sally laugh because the sound she made reminded Diane of the noise made by agitated poultry. "Uh huh, there they are again. I just heard a bunch of turkeys." Sally laughed again. Diane said: "You're not kidding me, you know. You've closed the gallery and started farming turkeys. Don't the neighbors complain?"

  Sally laughed again. "Not a bunch of turkeys," she said.

  "Well, what then?" Diane said. "What are lots of turkeys? "Flocks," like lots of chickens? Crows? Doesn't seem as though they should be, being so much bigger and all." '"Gaggle," Sally said, clucking away as she said it. "My father said a fair number of turkeys was a gaggle. Or was that for geese, and a "gobble," that was his collective noun for turkeys I forget."

  Sally had stayed on to finish her degree in fine arts, marrying one of their classmates and supporting him by teaching drawing at Laydon Art School while he went to law school. Both becoming disappointed by the complete departure of excitement from their marriage, they had divorced after two years without rancor, thankful they had not had any children.

  With her lump-sum cash settlement, reimbursing her for his keep while in law school, she had purchased a small dark-green wooden building near the campus in Madison and opened a small art gallery: "Atelier Sally."

  Four years later, while working toward her MFA, she had met and married an industrial designer older than she, also divorced, who'd returned to Madison for a doctorate. They had divorced after eight years; he had been unable to reject an offer of an executive vice presidency with an internationally known firm in San Francisco; she could not bear to sell her business, by then thriving.

  Now she was 'semi-living with' an oral surgeon named Tony who was thirteen years younger than she was and did as he was told. She spent almost every night at his house except when he went to conventions, and during school vacations when his two daughters came to stay for visitation. During those periods she lived in her three-room apartment on the third floor of her gallery. "Yes, I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think you're right. Tony's been after me again lately to get married. For the sake of his daughters, he says. He says even though I move out while they're here, they still know we're having sex.

  "I'm sure they do. It doesn't seem to bother them. I don't really think it'd bother them if I didn't move out when they come here; it's his ex-wife who'd be bothered. Might haul him back into divorce court again it's what she does instead of jogging. Six years they've been divorced, and still she's got her hooks in him. "So why get married?"

  I say. "What's the percentage?" '"Well, but on that same reasoning, why not?" he says. "Then you wouldn't have to move out, even if she still was disturbed by the idea of us screwing. Then how she felt about it wouldn't make any difference."

  "Well of course what I've wanted to say to that is that how his ex' wife feels about our activities doesn't make any difference now, but that wouldn't be true. I don't care how she feels but it does matter to Tony. So I haven't known what to tell him, but now I think I do.

  He's at a convention in Chicago this weekend. Wall-to-wall Porsches, I'm sure. You're the shrink; you explain it: what is it about dentists and Porsches? Suppose they feel safer and more comfortable driving if they're enclosed in small spaces, 'cause that's what they work in all day?"

>   "I don't know," Diane said. "Do we know what the gynecologists drive?

  That might give us some help here."

  She was rewarded with the gobbling sound again. Sally said: "When he gets back I'm going to tell him what you said. If he starts in on me again, I'll tell him we can't because Diane says it's showy to get married three times, and I agree with her. Diane isn't getting married a third time; until she changes her mind, I'm not going to either. So there."

  "And if things should ever change," Diane said, 'if I ever did decide I was looking for another husband, I don't honestly think Amby'd be someone I'd consider. I'm not sure, though, which seems to be a hallmark of the way I am with this guy not being really sure. Now I know at first-hand what "ambivalence" is.

  "I like him. I spend time with him. I don't mean we're always very sweet and kind, and loving, kitchy-koo. We disagree about things. We argue a lot. We quarrel. We're both adults. Sometimes you could say we even have fights. But they don't stop us from liking each other.

  He's caring and I find him interesting. I think he finds me interesting too.

  "I like the things he likes to do movies and going out to dinner. He takes me to Tanglewood in the summer, even though he'd probably rather go to a ballgame. He really does his best to be agreeable. I wouldn't think of asking him to take me dancing, but I'm sure he would if I did. He probably wouldn't be very good at it I doubt he had lessons when he was a kid. But he is good about doing things he isn't really all that keen about because they're things that I want to do. He's considerate of me when we're in bed, too, very gentle. He knows how to show a girl a good time, so that part's all taken care of. I tell myself I don't know how lucky I am; a lot of women'd kill for this guy.