Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  Fortunately, someone tugged on her arm at that moment.

  “Shitfire,” said Beth, turning back to the girl and me. “Something’s exploded in the kitchen. These people,” she said, and was gone.

  The girl and I looked at one another.

  “Hello, best friend,” I said.

  “Hello, brother,” said she.

  She was very serious looking, very pretty, all of her features cleanly drawn: nice straight nose, not too small; high cheekbones; round brown eyes; and a lightness to it all that made me want to anchor her, as though she might rise up and lift away from me. But when a few moments into the conversation she smiled, it was as though she had been ugly before, the contrast was that great. I found myself straining to be humorous, no amount of foolishness too great in order to gain that reward, that smile.

  “Let’s go,” I said boldly, after the girl’s drink had been jogged out of her hand by some passing funster. I plucked her glass away and held out my hand.

  “Where?” she asked composedly, dabbing a handkerchief at the liquid on her knees.

  “Anywhere,” I said, “but here.”

  She gave me her hand. How many times after that did we enact that same small gesture, my hand put out, hers slipped calmly into it, resting there like a small unafraid bird? But that time was the first. I drew her out of Beth’s house and into the street. Once there, I came to a stop.

  “I don’t have a,” and I blushed. “Car.”

  “I do,” said Joan.

  We drove to the Real Thing and ate plain doughnuts and drank coffee. Joan told me about herself—born in Pittsburgh, she had come to Naples to attend the women’s college. “It’s a long way from home,” she said, wrinkling her nose, “but I wasn’t accepted anywhere else. I’m afraid I didn’t do much studying in high school.”

  I wondered what she had done—dated, of course, and I felt the swift fire of jealousy.

  She was studying psychology, with courses in education, and wanted to be a teacher. She’d met Beth in the doctor’s office where Joan was working part time as a typist.

  “She called you her best friend,” I said.

  “She’s being nice,” said Joan. “I guess she took pity on me, being new here. I don’t make friends easily.”

  “You don’t?” I said, surprised.

  She shook her head. “Beth sort of took me in. But I don’t know how I like that crowd she runs with. She seems different when she’s with them.” She thought a moment. “Beth is a nice person,” she said. “But so unhappy.”

  “Unhappy?” I repeated.

  “She hides it well,” said Joan. “Under all that—shininess.”

  Unhappy: I had never thought to apply this adjective to Beth. I recalled her face at the bar, its new hard, protected look; I remembered her brittle gaiety at the party. I nodded, slowly. “She didn’t used to be,” I said.

  We stayed at the diner until one in the morning. Joan drove me home; it was not until I was getting into my pyjamas, humming, that I realized I had spent an evening with a girl—a pretty girl—and I had not stuttered. Not after the first half hour. And that I felt wonderful—light, free, all of those things that you feel when you’ve been up late drinking bad coffee with a pretty girl. I liked this feeling; it felt like my life was finally beginning. Whatever happened, I told myself, I couldn’t let this feeling pass.

  Date led to date; by the time I left again for the army, I was thickly snared. I wrote the first letter to Joan on the bus, fifteen minutes after my last glimpse of her. She answered my letters, in a ratio of about one to three, and when I was stationed close to home, we rejoiced. I made the trip to Naples whenever I could: the journeys had new meaning to them now; they had something for me at their ends, not just a collection of clapboard houses and familiar faces.

  In July of 1950, I rushed home on short leave. I went straight from the station to the doctor’s office where Joan worked.

  “What is it?” she cried, seeing me, jumping up.

  “I’m—” I said.

  “Sit down,” she said, taking me into the waiting room. “I’ll get you some water.”

  I shook my head. “Being transferred,” I said.

  “What?” she said. “Oh no.”

  “No,” I told her. “Not there. Washington.”

  “Thank God,” she said, the color coming back into her face.

  “They’re giving me a desk job,” I said. “But I might see combat before it’s over.”

  I was lying. Of course, I had been slated for combat; just twenty and fully trained, I would normally have been among the first to be sent to the latest arena of conflict—a little country called Korea, unimaginably far away, whose politics I didn’t even understand. But the staff sergeant, who had found out about my stutter, marked me down as unfit. He was not an unkind man; he took me aside, to give me the news in private.

  “They’ll need good men in Washington,” he said. “And you’re smart, as smart as if you went to college. They can use you there.”

  “What does it—” I said, and blushed. “Matter?”

  “About the stutter?” he said, uncompromisingly. “Come on, Corbin. You’d be giving orders, sooner or later. Men would depend on you. And you’d be standing there saying ‘f-f-f-fire’?” He put a hand on my shoulder. “No offense,” he said. “But I don’t think so.”

  I lied now to save face with Joan; and it appeared that she believed me. Shaken, she put her head against my shoulder.

  “How long are you here for?” she asked, pulling away, looking into my face.

  “Not long,” I said.

  She had never looked so fragile as at that moment: all her normal good humor drained away, and the lovely bones of her face stood out starkly. The perfect picture of a soldier’s girl.

  And that was how I came to propose: in a tawdry doctor’s office, among the violently patterned chairs of the waiting room. No train pulling away, Joan running along beside it; no roses, no moonlight, no romantic fog. Just the water cooler gurgling beside me as I knelt on the hard rug, and a middle-aged woman coughing tubercularly in my ear.

  Washington wasn’t so bad; foreign, of course, in a way that I hadn’t expected. I had been led to believe that the capital was a Southern city. But I could find no trace of home in the heavy white buildings, no nostalgic river glitter in the Potomac. I was quartered in an apartment house near the Capitol, two rooms to myself. I hadn’t had so much privacy in all of my young life; the quiet made me restless, and at night I strolled the streets, alone.

  During those years, Washington was a world of bureaucrats and soldiers; but seldom did I hear the word war, and nowhere found the feeling of war the way it had been in the forties. Korea, it seemed, was a police action, a distant thought, save to those whose boys were dying there. The streets of Washington bustled, pedestrians moving along with a purpose, but I suspected that it might be the normal state of things in the capital.

  Thinking to escape the downtown hubbub, I rode a streetcar out to the suburbs one weekend afternoon. I walked the sidewalks, looking intently at the houses, alert for the traces of war. The houses were familiar, much more so than the government buildings. But there were no stars in the windows, and when darkness came, no blackout. I was involved, it seemed, in a highly contained effort. Blood spilled in Korea, but on the streets of America there was only opulence; opulence, and progress.

  In time, I detected a strange undercurrent to the goings-on in Washington. The newspapers began to be filled with accusations and hearings, vicious denunciations, treason. The man with the Pumpkin papers was jostled out of the headlines; a Jewish couple from New York took his place. And then the lists. It seemed the entire population was being reduced to a series of lists—long enumerations of public figures, their friends, their friends’ friends. The newspaper accounts grew more explicit; downtown, daily, the hearings continued; and the streets of the city grew quieter, the atmosphere tense. A new element threatened the nation’s well-being; it had nothing
to do with the Asian war; it was tragically American, a fearsome kind of tyranny.

  I stayed in Washington until the end of the war; Naples was only a few hours away, and I travelled there frequently on weekend leave. Now that Joan and I were engaged to be married, our comings together edged a little further away from their chaste beginnings, but as Beth had told me so long before, Joan “didn’t.” It didn’t matter. To tell the truth, sex frightened me not a little; I was happy to be with Joan, to kiss her, to hear her say my name. She was the focus of my life, my weeks; heading south, I closed my eyes to see her, cool and perfect, radiating welcome. Her image blotted out the others—the fearful faces of the city I was leaving, the friendly-contemptuous faces I had known since birth. Her voice sang pure and loud in my ears, rising above the other sounds, the office chatter of the weekdays, the warning tones of the radio news announcers. Rising above the chorus of “G.I.,” which bleated out from other, mocking mouths. I let the wheels of the train carry me; I was riding toward her, riding away from my isolation; going home.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Gun Collector

  ALL THE GOOD stories I know are telling on someone. I could tell you about baseball, I guess, or quail hunting, or women. Women. I could tell you a lot about them. Don’t shake your head at me; it’s distracting.

  You’d think I’d want to talk about my wife. You’d be wrong; she was a good woman, and good to me, but almost since she walked out the front door, I began forgetting her. We slept in the same bed for five years, and I can’t hardly remember anything about her. Think of that. No, I’ll tell you about Miriam.

  Miriam strayed in here like a leaf come through an open door. She didn’t stay all that long, but she made her impression. She wasn’t the prettiest, or the smartest, or even the one I loved the most; but she had a way about her. Like she had secrets, and like she even knew some of mine. She carried no great burden of love for me, either, if it came to that, and she didn’t bear me any children. But I remember her.

  She was best when things got bad. She could handle trouble, she stopped her bitching and made herself real useful. Sometimes I felt like when things were going good, she got frightened, and wanted to mess them up a little. Like she felt more comfortable with rough times; like rough times was what she was used to.

  I remember one miserable run of days in summer; a bad stretch of weather, the air so hot and damp it was like breathing out of a teakettle. I had a boss then, Jed Pollard, a lazy sonofabitch. He’d bought his way into the business; he didn’t know nothing about it except counting the money. There was only one other guy and me to take care of all the repair work at the garage, while old Jed lay back in his office and fanned himself with the green. I was beginning to feel a little desperate then; it was that kind of summer. The kind when time seems to stop and you realize for the first time since you were a young man expecting glory that you might be in the same job forever, and never get anywhere at all.

  I hated Pollard; me and the other guy, Rupe, eventually bought the place off him. We paid a fair price, but he moaned like he was getting raped; he was that fond of money. He collected guns; used to hang around while we were working, standing right in the fan blast, telling us about the new rifle he’d just bought, how he had an eye on someone’s old Winchester. We heard all about those guns, and the racks he had custom built to hold them. Rupe was a hunting man, and he asked old Jed if he ever got out after deer. Pollard said No. Just like that, No. Rupe said Turkey? And Pollard said—and I’m not kidding—“I don’t shoot my guns. It damages them.” After that, Rupe hated him as much as I did. “Can’t understand a man having thirty-seven guns and never shot one of them,” he said, and that was that.

  The days were pretty much all the same, paddling along through that slow summer, until one day Pollard called me into the back office.

  “Jack, I got a proposition for you,” he said.

  The way he was real casual, I could tell he was in a spot, and needed me to say Yes to what he was going to offer. So I kinda took advantage, and pulled a chair up to the window where the fan was, and let it blow on my back. He didn’t even frown. That’s when I knew he needed me bad. So I leaned back, put my boots up on the desk. He didn’t say nothing about it, just started right in to explaining.

  He’d been having a security system installed, bars on the windows of the gun room, so’s no one could get in and steal his collection. But the carpenter he’d hired had taken him for a good piece of money, and then skedaddled with the job half finished.

  “And I thought, all of a sudden, Jack.” I kinda shook my head, like I didn’t understand, but acourse I did. “You’re sumpin of a handyman, am I right?” he said. I kinda shrugged, real modest. “You sure can tinker with an engine.” It was the first time he’d ever praised my work. “Thought you might be innerested in finishing the job.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “What about it?” he asked.

  “Cars ain’t wood,” I said.

  “What’s the difference?” he said. “Fixing’s fixing.”

  Shows how much he knew.

  Well, it didn’t appeal to me too much at first; carpentry’s my hobby, not my calling. And there’s something about being paid for doing what you love that makes you stop loving it. But the way he described the job, it sounded like it ought to take no more than a Saturday morning, and old Pollard he waved a bunch of money in my face.

  “A hundred for the job,” he said. “Flat fee.”

  That sounded good to me; the fix-it jobs I picked up here and there generally paid worse than the garage. This one looked just like cream, one hundred dollars for the whole deal, no matter how short a time it took. Like a goat, I said I’d do it.

  Rupe thought I was crazy.

  “Five days a week, you gotta listen to his bullshit,” he said. “Now you’re gonna spend your Saturday over there?”

  “He won’t be there,” I said. “He’s going fishing.”

  “Fishing,” said Rupe, with a face like he’d been spat on. “That’s for fat ninnies who can’t do nothing else.”

  “He’s paying me a C note,” I said.

  “Take a thousand for me to go over there,” said Rupe.

  “Nobody’s asking you,” I told him.

  I showed up early Saturday morning with my toolbox. Mrs. Pollard let me in, with a frightened look on her face, like I was gonna jump her. Then when I didn’t pay hardly no attention to her, stepping carefully through the door without brushing up against her, she looked disappointed. She showed me to the gun room, and left me there.

  The room was all guns and windows. Five long racks on the walls, with eight windows spaced between. A coupla deep chairs, a big old desk, not much else. The iron bars Pollard had had specially made were piled on the floor, up against the near wall. I knew they’d been milled to thirty-seven inches, so they’d fit eight to a window, in the frames the man who’d gone before me had already installed.

  Even from across the room, it was real clear that that fellow wasn’t much of a carpenter. The frames were scrap wood, probably left over from another job, cost him nothing. They were dirty and gouged in places. But I figured that much didn’t matter; he’d done the hard part, making the windows all the same size by putting the frames in, and drilled most of the holes too, for the bars to fit in. My part was gonna be easy.

  When I measured the first frame, it was a little off—about a quarter of an inch. No problem; I just had to drill the holes a little deeper, so the bars would go in snug. The first one went in fine, but the second one wobbled; I’d drilled too far. I looked the frame over again and realized that the guy hadn’t only screwed up the measurements on the frames, he’d also drilled the holes just any old way, so there was no telling how much I’d have to drill to make up for it. I began to sweat. I shoulda known that a man who’d treat wood like he done couldn’t be trusted with a tape measure. I did what I should’ve done to begin with, and measured all the window frames and all the holes. They were all d
ifferent.

  What should have been a couple hours’ easy work suddenly looked like hard labor. But I’d started the job, and I set to it, measuring each frame again before I started, grinding anywhere from an eighth to three-quarters of an inch off each bar. Sinking it into place, starting all over again with the next one.

  There was no real floor space in the gun room, so I’d put some sheets down in the living room. About four hours into the job, Mrs. Pollard came in.

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought you’d be in the other room.”

  “I needed space to work, ma’am,” I said.

  “I was about to have lunch,” she said, looking kinda leery at the mess all over the drop cloths. “Would you like to join me?”

  I was pretty hungry by then; I hadn’t thought to bring any food from home, thinking I wouldn’t be there that long.

  “Thank you,” I said, and laid down my tools. I washed up in the little john on the first floor, what she called a “powder room.” I expected a sandwich in the kitchen, but she took me on into the dining room, and the girl waited on us. We had some kind of thick soup with little leaves in it. Hot soup, when the mercury’s reading ninety-four. I sweated through that, and about a pitcher of iced tea to chase it down, while she chattered away across the table, all about her charity work and the cardigan sweater she was knitting for old Jed.

  When I was done, I thanked her again and got up.

  “Oh, Jack,” she said, and made a fluttery sort of noise in her throat, like a bird. “You don’t mind if I call you Jack?”

  “No ma’am,” I said, wondering what the hell else would she call me. “Jack’s fine.”

  “Well, then, Jack,” she said. I was beginning to hate my own name, hearing it said over and over. “I usually play the piano on Saturdays after lunch. Will you be done soon?”

  “Well, ma’am, I’m afraid it’s going to take a while,” I told her. “But you go right ahead, it won’t bother me none.”

  “I wouldn’t want to disturb you,” she said. And the way that word disturb came out kind of turned my stomach. She was probably good-looking in her day, but I wasn’t thirty then, and she was looking back from the far side of fifty. She batted her eyes, setting the soup I’d just swallowed to moving around inside me like maybe it wanted to come up for air.