The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  At last Eddie started stumbling toward us on her skis. Without her poles she was helpless, but if she took off the skis, she’d be in snow to her waist. Atheliah and I each took an arm and dragged her up the meadow.

  For good measure, we grabbed sleeping bags and evacuated. ‘Does that look like the action of a man who’s trying to do us in?’ I demanded grimly of Eddie, as we poled through the woods to Mona’s and Atheliah’s former farm.

  When we returned a few days later, our cabin was still standing. There were no visible signs of damage, and no one had looted our supply of soybeans. We were quite busy that week. The weather was warming up during the day, and the sap was rising in our sugar maples. Every morning four of us drove our huge workhorses in their clanking harnesses up the hill to the sugar bush. The fifth person stayed behind to do the housework and fix the meals. By the end of the week, we had washed out all the buckets and hung about half, drilling holes and inserting metal spouts and hanging the buckets on the spouts.

  In spite of the skirmish, our pond was still serving as the town race track and social center. Drivers continued to use the lodge of the poor traumatized beavers as a jump. The participants continued to strew cans and wrappers all across the ice. Exhaust fumes continued to form a ground fog through our valley. The deafening roar continued to make conversation in the cabin without shouting an impossibility.

  But we had learned to live with this mechanized Winter Wonderland, since the only alternative appeared to be not to live with it by not living at all. We had all learned to live with it except Eddie, who continued to sulk and brood and fill the wood stove with crumpled sketches of diabolical traps based on Vietcong guerrilla techniques.

  ‘We can’t just sit back and take this,’ she insisted. ‘Human beings can adapt to almost any level of degradation, that’s not the point. Sure, I could put up with it. The point is, I don’t think we should. If someone hits you, you hit back immediately, or else you end up with numbers tattooed up your forearm.’

  On her less rational nights, Eddie lay writhing on our bed, clutching a pillow around her head to blot out the din and gnashing her teeth.

  ‘We stretch a single strand of barbed wire tight between those two birches to the left of the pond,’ she suggested one night. “We attach it to the existing fence so that it looks like an extension of it. We use old wire so that it looks as though someone just forgot to take it down. Then, when those damn machines come hurtling down for an evening of fun on our property — crunch! The wire gets all tangled up in their goddam runners!’

  ‘No, I don’t want any part of it,’ I said, and was roundly seconded by the others. ‘If we can just endure this for another month, the snow will turn to mud. Maybe we can find another farm by next winter.’

  ‘Yeah. In the middle of a gun-testing range,’ Eddie sneered. ‘What’s the matter, Ginny? Afraid your Stark’s Bog boyfriend will hurt his shiny big machine?’

  I glanced at her wearily. ‘I assure you you’re mistaken. And he did save your life.’

  ‘Saved my life! Please — spare me your melodrama. I was handling the situation just fine by myself. Who asked him to interfere?’

  I stared at her in disbelief.

  ‘I swear,’ she went on cheerfully, “you guys are the most timid, unimaginative bunch of gutless females I’ve ever had the misfortune to cohabit with. If the Klan had knocked at your door, you would have helped them tie the noose, wouldn’t you have? And you most of all, Ginny. After what your people went through on the Trail of Tears, you can just sit back and take all this?’

  ‘Which people?’ I asked, forgetting about the one and a half ounces of dilute Cherokee blood coursing through my veins. ‘I don’t believe in violence.’

  Eddie snorted incredulously. ‘That comment doesn’t make any sense. That’s like saying that you don’t believe in rain. It’s all around you, baby!’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I have to rush out into it.’

  ‘Mao says, “All power comes out of the barrel of a gun,” — Mona mumbled.

  ‘Perhaps there are some more rarefied possibilities with the Stark’s Boggers than their doing us in, or our doing them in?’ Atheliah suggested in her Julia Child voice.

  ‘Garbage!’ Eddie snorted. ‘Che says, “In revolution one lives or one dies.”’

  I searched my memory for some equally profound remark from someone with credentials impressive enough to counteract Che and Mao. All I could come up with was a line from the Beatles: ‘All you need is love.’ It didn’t seem to pack much punch.

  ‘The strong survive,’ Eddie went on, ‘and the meek perish! If you all won’t look out for yourselves, I guess I’ll have to look out for all of us.’ She stomped from the room.

  Mona glanced around defiantly, stood up and followed.

  Laverne, who as usual was wetting her lower lip with her tongue and then caressing her lip with her finger, shrugged and went upstairs. Soon the electric lights began flickering, and gasps of fulfillment drifted down to Atheliah and me. I sat staring at the floor. Atheliah was sharpening her ax, her bushy red head lowered with concentration.

  Finally I broke the silence. ‘Atheliah, you’ve known Eddie longer than I have. Do you think she’s been acting — strange the past month or two?’

  Atheliah sighed and looked up. ‘Well, Eddie has always been very definite in her opinions. But — I don’t know really. You could be right.’

  ‘I’m scared, Atheliah.’

  Atheliah looked down with embarrassment.

  Just then there was a scream and a sizzling sound from upstairs, and all the lights went out.

  ‘What was that?’ Atheliah asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered.

  A door crashed open. ‘Christ, they’ve come for us!’ Eddie yelled. ‘See! What did I tell you? We’re sitting ducks!’ She sounded as though she were careening around the living room bouncing off the walls like a trapped bird.

  ‘Who has?’ I yelled.

  ‘Where?’ Atheliah shouted.

  ‘What happened?’ Mona called, running in.

  Finally Mona had the sense to light a match. By its glow, she located a candle. By the candlelight, I could see that Eddie had crammed herself into a living room corner behind a chair. She crouched there, a lamp poised for hurling, her eyes shifting wildly.

  I kept expecting the doors to be broken down, or the windows to be bashed in by rampaging snowmobilers. But, as I got a grip on myself, I realized that there was no noise out of the ordinary — only the roar from the pond.

  ‘I think a fuse blew,’ I suggested.

  ‘Where’s Laverne?’ Mona asked.

  ‘Someone screamed,’ Atheliah said. ‘It wasn’t Ginny or I. Was it either of you?’

  We ascended the stairs single file, led by Mona carrying the candle.

  Halfway up, our heads were enveloped in smoke. ‘Hell, they’ve set the fucking cabin on fire!’ Eddie yelled, pushing past Mona and grabbing the candle and racing down the hall, leaving the rest of us in blackness.

  ‘Quick! In here!’ Eddie yelled from Laverne’s room.

  My rainbow curtain was in flames, and part of the wall next to it. Eddie was beating out the fire with a pillow. The smoke was thick. We were all choking, tears streaming down our cheeks.

  ‘The window!’ Mona yelled.

  Atheliah bashed it out with her ax.

  Before long, the fire was out, and much of the smoke had dissipated. One whole corner was charred. Finally, it occurred to us to worry about Laverne. Looking around, we finally found her, nude under her army surplus sleeping bag. Her eyes were closed, and her face was the color of her blond hair. She appeared not to be breathing.

  ‘Smoke inhalation,’ Eddie announced grimly. She began ad-administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. ‘Call the doctor, for Christ’s sake!’ she gasped, between breaths into Laverne’s lungs, as we all milled around.

  ‘We don’t have a phone,’ I pointed out.

  ‘We’ll go get him,�
� Mona said, racing out with Atheliah thundering close behind.

  Laverne was responding to the Kiss of Life. Before long, her lungs began pumping on their own. A few minutes later, I heard the truck return from town. Looking out, I was distressed not to see the doctor. Instead, Atheliah and Mona hastily strapped on their skis and schussed down to the pond.

  Soon a single snow machine emerged from the herd and roared up toward the cabin. Atheliah and Mona herringboned frantically after it, but were soon obscured by swirling clouds of snow and exhaust.

  The driver leapt off his machine before it had stopped, threw off his helmet, and tore inside. We heard him flying up the stairs. It was the doctor, looking unprofessional in his quilted ski suit; but we weren’t complaining. Nodding soberly at us, he began inspecting Laverne’s face, turning it this way and that. He removed the sleeping bag from her chest and listened to her heart with his head on her breast. He timed her pulse. He looked at her gums, lifted her eyelids, thumped her chest. Folding down the sleeping bag another turn, he rolled out one of her knees and discovered raw burned patches on the insides of her thighs. With a frown, he noticed an electrical cord. As he pulled on it, Laverne’s vibrator popped out of her. Eddie and I looked at each other with alarm, and swallowed.

  The doctor held the phallus-shaped vibrator, turned it over, sniffed it, scratched his head. It had a big crack all the way up it. Laverne had apparently achieved her goal of the Ultimate Orgasm.

  The doctor, an elderly gray-haired man, looked up and said fumblingly, ‘Uh — what exactly — uh.’ Setting the vibrator down, he returned hastily to his inspection of Laverne.

  His diagnosis formed, he stood up, blushing, and said, “Yes, well, your friend here is unconscious. She’s had a bad electrical shock from her — uh — yes. Plus smoke inhalation. And her electrical burns need attention. I suggest we go to the hospital in St Johnsbury right away. If you’ll go by way of town, I’ll pick up my car. I can come back for my snow machine tomorrow.’

  The next day I called the stockbroker in New York about the fire damage done to his cabin. He said he would get in touch with his insurance agent, who would be in touch with us.

  One evening shortly after this, I was alone in the cabin,

  Laverne had gone home to Chicago for skin grafts on her thighs. Mona and Atheliah and Eddie had gone to a nearby farm. A woman who had been at the Women’s Weekend was in labor at that very moment and had sent a friend over to invite us to watch the delivery and eat the placenta with her. I’d decided I wasn’t hungry. Besides, I was by now cherishing, as a starving man does food, my delicious stolen moments of counterrevolutionary solitude. I just sat, doing nothing, listening to the snow machines on the pond.

  My precious solitude was short-lived, however. There was a roar in the yard; and with a long-suffering sigh, I stood up. Walking over to the door, I could see that it was Ira. I smiled at him, wondering if all FBI agents were so handsome and sensuous-looking.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, thoroughly prepared to consort with the enemy.

  ‘Hello. Hear you’ve had some trouble?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Do you mind if I come in and look at it? I wrote the fire insurance for this place. I’ll have to do a report.’

  The stockbroker had said his agent would be in touch. I had expected someone from New York, not Ira Bliss IV. Could this be a clever ruse by the FBI to gain entry, to sniff out the marijuana in Mona’s dried arrangements? Ira smiled. I let him in.

  We went into Laverne’s bedroom. The winter wind was howling through the smashed windowpanes. Ira whistled when he saw the charred corner. ‘Why, by God, I’m surprised the whole place didn’t go up. Lucky for you it didn’t, ‘cause the entire fire department was down at the pond that night.’

  He unzipped his quilted suit to his waist and took a pen and a small notebook out of his shirt pocket. He strolled around making notes. ‘Have you had a builder in to do an estimate?’

  ‘No. Should we?’

  ‘Make it two. Looks like there was some faulty wiring. Must have started inside the wall. An electrical fire. Were you using some kind of old wornout appliance up here that night — a coffee pot or something?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘A-yup. That’s what it was, all right. An electrical fire in the wall, by Jesum. The worst darn kind. Hard to put out.’ He snapped his notebook shut. Tilting his head to one side, he looked at me with curiosity and asked, ‘Have you always — uh -lived with women?’

  Remembering Eddie’s warning — that he was putting the make on me so as to use me as an informer — I decided to turn him off forever. ‘Yes, it’s true. I’ve always found men totally disgusting.’

  He looked at me with renewed interest. I had misread him. There were some men, some women too, who thought that their charms alone could cause the sap to rise in the swamp maple in midwinter. Ira was apparently such a man.

  ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about life insurance,’ I said hastily, to change the subject. Besides, I had been thinking about life insurance, since my death was seeming ever more imminent. I wanted to tidy up my affairs, as it were, and leave Eddie and the Free Farm provided for.

  Ira looked up, pleased.

  ‘It seems like a pretty good idea,’ I added.

  ‘It is.’ He flipped open his notebook and began scribbling figures. ‘Now I have a plan here that would give you the kind of coverage…’

  He whirled around to show me what he’d written. As he did so, he accidentally butted me with his shoulder. I lost my balance and fell backwards, landing on my back on Laverne’s bed. As I fell, one of my legs became tangled behind one of his knees, causing it to collapse. He fell forward and landed on top of me. We lay still for several startled moments, trying to figure out what had happened, me with my face buried in his chest of curly hair.

  I heard a voice in the doorway hissing, ‘I knew it!’ Footsteps stomped to the stairs.

  With all my strength, I shoved Ira off and raced down the hall. Eddie was at the foot of the steps, stalking into the living room.

  ‘Eddie, it’s not what you think!’

  She stopped and turned to look at me. Her eyes were bloodshot and filled with tears; her face was white, and her mouth was pinched. ‘I trusted you, Ginny,’ she said in a trembling voice. She whirled around and headed across the living room.

  ‘And I haven’t betrayed your trust, Eddie!’ I yelled.

  I charged down the steps, three at a time. Halfway down, I twisted my ankle and fell the rest of the way. By the time I had picked myself up and limped across the living room, Eddie had leapt onto Ira’s Sno Cat 44. I hobbled out the door and screamed, ‘Wait, Eddie! Listen to me!’

  She gave me the finger as she lurched off down the meadow on the crazily careening machine. Opening it up to top speed, she traced a huge circle in the meadow, clinging desperately to the handlebars on the turns. The wind was lashing her braid. Ira by now was leaping through the deep snow under the full moon in pursuit of her.

  The throttle wide open, she shot down the far side of the meadow toward the pond. It looked as though she had in mind a kamikaze mission, in which she would mow down as many of the congregated snow machines and drivers as possible, in the process of killing herself. Some of the drivers had seen her coming and were yelling at her and at each other, and were scurrying around mindlessly like ants under an overturned stone.

  But just before Eddie reached the pond, Ira’s Sno Cat appeared to hesitate slightly. The next instant, Eddie’s head flew off her shoulders and bounced and spun across the ice like a crazed basketball. I watched with utter appalled disbelief. What I had just seen couldn’t possibly have happened! Ira’s Sno Cat coasted to a stop, and Eddie’s headless body rolled off the seat and onto the ice with a dull plunk.

  Screams and yells blended with the din of motors. I started running toward her, but the snow was to the top of my thighs. I pitched and heaved like a hooked fish but was getting nowhere.

&
nbsp; “Lie down and roll!’ Ira yelled from where he lay, exhausted, halfway down the meadow.

  As instructed, I lay on the snow and rolled like a child down a grassy bank, with my arms stretched over my head. When I was on my stomach, with my face pushed into the snow, I would stick out my tongue and scoop up a taste. When I was on my back, I could see the gorgeous full moon. It wasn’t possible that what I had just witnessed had really occurred. It had to be a dream. Relieved by that conclusion, I decided to enjoy my roll through snow down a moonlit meadow.

  My head hit hard against the ice. I looked around, dazed. All the machines and their drivers were clustered several dozen yards away. I stood up and walked in that direction. People stepped aside to let me through, as though I were a leper. When I reached the center of the circle, I saw the doctor standing and talking with Ira, who had his hand on his Sno Cat handle bar. And on the ground, completely covered by a blanket, was a nondescript mound. A few inches of braid stuck out from one corner. Over at the shoreline, stretched between two birch trees that shone white in the moonlight, twanged a single strand of barbed wire.

  ‘There’s no blood,’ I said to the man next to me, shaking my head in wonderment. The man looked at me strangely, edging away.

  Ira came over and took my arm. I looked up and smiled pleasantly. ‘It’s a funny thing. There’s no blood.’ He led me to a borrowed machine, sat me on the back, and drove me slowly up to the cabin.

  Inside, I asked him, ‘Did you notice? There was no blood.’

  ‘How can I help you with this?’ he asked in a choked voice.

  ‘I never want to see you again. Please go away.’

  In the middle of that night, half-asleep, I scooted over to fit myself into the curve of Eddie’s body so that we could sleep as we usually did, as two interlocking S’s. I scooted some more, fumbling with my hands for her warm smooth flesh. I scooted some more — and fell out of bed.

  As I lay dazed on the cold plank floor, the events of the evening returned to me. I couldn’t wrap myself around Eddie. She wasn’t here. She was in the funeral home in Stark’s Bog, finally at peace with The People. I sat up and wrapped my arms around my legs and rocked back and forth, moaning. I dug my teeth into one knee.