The New Valley

by Josh Weil

  Halfway through the meal, a truck pulled into the drive. By the time the engine shut off, he was making a beeline for the door, flinging it open before she could even get out her key.

  But it was Eric Pfersick, old Les’s son, who stood on the stoop. He wore a camouflage sweatshirt with the hood up and a beard over his face, and he was standing just far enough away to be fuzzy, but Stillman recognized him. He forced his eyes not to glance the way of the garage and the Deutz taken so many years ago.

  “Stillman,” Pfersick’s son said. “How’s life treating you?”

  “Good,” Stillman said. “Yourself?”

  “Been better.” Pfersick’s son shoved his hood back on his neck.

  It was only then that he noticed how old the boy’s eyes seemed to have gotten. He hoped his own eyes didn’t look that tired. “You want to come in?” he said.

  Pfersick’s son shook his head. “Thanks.”

  Stillman waited.

  “What’s that on your head?” the boy asked.

  “For my work.”

  The boy nodded, looked at his boots. “You still have that tractor?”

  Stillman stared at him. “What tractor?”

  “Dad’s old Deutz diesel.”

  Stillman tried to make his eyes look lost in thought. “There was a lot of tractors back behind—”

  “Stillman.” Pfersick’s son smiled in a way that turned the act sad. “The one you took.”

  “Did I take one?” Stillman asked. “To another shop sometime? Maybe I borrowed—”

  “Took, borrowed, stole, whatever. Christ, Dad wanted you to have it anyway.” He dug in his pocket. “He wrote this up. Just before he died.”

  Stillman’s eyes kept losing themselves in the pattern on Les’s son’s camouflaged chest.

  “I thought you knew,” the boy said.

  “No.” Stillman cleared his throat, then said it again so it could be heard. “I thought you brought in a nurse to take care of him?”

  “That was years ago.”

  “I thought he was all right except the stroke.”

  “Well, the stroke—”

  “Listen, the way I understood it—”

  “Now there’s nothing to get mad at,” the boy said. “He went as good as possible. I would’ve thought Caroline would’ve told you.”

  “My daughter?”

  “She and him got real close.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “At the hospice.”

  “What hospice?”

  “Over at what used to be the Demastus farm.”

  Stillman licked at the dry corners of his mouth. “You mean the commune?”

  “Don’t you talk to Caroline?”

  “You put your dad out there?”

  “They were good to him. Your daughter was good to him. They spent his last days together, every hour.”

  “How’d he go?”

  “Easy,” the son said.

  “I didn’t know,” Stillman said and then, as if just realizing it, “I knew your dad since I was your age.”

  “Since a lot before that.”

  “Yeah,” Stillman said.

  “Well, he wrote this out for you.”

  He took the note. It bore old Les’s near illegible scrawl. He tried to read it, but it was no good. The boy unzipped his sweatshirt a little, reached inside to a shirt pocket, and brought out a pair of glasses.

  Stillman waved them away and flicked down the macro loupe. The dead man’s writing jumped into focus: Deutz pneumatic tires in B-26 = Stillman. Bring note Nov. 2.

  Dead Pfersick’s son said, “You’ll want those if you’re gonna drive it on the road.”

  Stillman nodded.

  “You get it running?”

  Stillman shook his head.

  “Well, if you want them, you can come get them. You want pretty much any of that old stuff, you come get it.”

  Stillman nodded again. “He write this just before he went?”

  “He was trying to tie things up.”

  “He write anything else?”

  “Lots. Him and your daughter went through pads.”

  “When was it?”

  “Oh, back almost a month.”

  Stillman looked up from the note. “You know it’s my birthday?”

  “No,” the boy said. “November second? No, I didn’t know that.”

  When he was halfway back to the truck, Pfersick’s son turned and said to Stillman, “Can I ask you something? How come you and he both never had no other friends and, I mean, you worked together all those years and, well, in these last few you didn’t even—I mean, neither of you did—neither of you didn’t even pay a visit?”

  Stillman looked down from the high stoop, across the drive littered with the river’s leavings, as if it had never occurred to him. “I guess we weren’t the visiting kind.”

  Pfersick’s son nodded, but his gaze stayed on Stillman in a way that made him picture how he must look to outside eyes. The overgrown hairs of his beard itched his sunken cheeks. “Take care of yourself,” Pfersick’s son told him before he got back in his truck and left.

  The yard was spread with low sun. In it, the scattered pieces of Ball jars shone, the white piano keys like a dozen finger bones, and watching them he knew that bigger things must have lodged against the stilts beneath the house—rust-eaten tubs, the broken handles of old tools: artifacts of a long-forgotten world unearthed and hurled against the underpinnings of his home.

  Inside again, Stillman picked up the phone. He stood listening to the last of the truck noise, the drone from the receiver that replaced it. Then he called the number Caroline had left. One of the hashheads came on the line. “Caroline Wing,” he said.

  There was some asking around on the other end and then the question Who is it?— as if it took a minute and a half, and a group of five hashheads, just to formulate the thought.

  “It’s her daddy,” Stillman said.

  “Oh, hi!” the hashhead said. “Welcome!”

  He let his silence sit.

  “Can you hold on?” the hashhead said.

  “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know, Dad,” the hashhead said, as if he was Stillman’s son-in-law. “She might be down by the Spirit Pond. We’re all pretty—”

  “Is this River?” Stillman had to stop himself from adding fucker afterwards.

  “No, this is Star. I was just saying we’re all pretty caught up in the preparations for the ceremony tomorrow night and it might be a long time before someone can locate Blueberry—”

  “What?”

  “I’m just saying Blueberry—”

  “What?”

  “Dad,” the hashhead said, “I’m just—”

  “Don’t use that.”

  “Man, I don’t know what you’re taking about.” The hash-head started laughing. “I’m just saying Blueberry might be in the barn or down gathering firewood or—”

  “You just go get her,” Stillman said.

  The hashhead must have put the receiver down on the counter, because Stillman could hear in the background someone singing and lots of talking. He tuned it out. It wasn’t hard. He was thinking of how he had never called Les Pfersick, not after the stroke, not before. When Les’s wife had got the cancer, Stillman had gone to work like always, just waited for the day when Les would come back in. When Les finally did, Still-man had said, “Sorry to hear about Addy” and Les grunted, and they went on with business. When Addy died, he’d gone to the funeral, stood as silent as Les. And in Stillman’s own bad years, those hardest ones from ’61 to ’64, after Ginny had gone out west without him and before Caroline had been sent back, Les hadn’t called him, either. He couldn’t imagine what Les would have said. Sorry she left you, Stillman. Or maybe just, I heard. Even that seemed like more than would have come natural between them.

  On the other end of the line, he could still hear a woman singing—some kind of black people music. He wondered i
f Les would have asked him, instead, Why’d you leave her? and could almost hear Ginny saying to him, You’re the one that’s refusing to go with me. Oh, he could remember all the details all right. But he wouldn’t. Not why he had not gone with her, or how ludicrous it would have been: Ginny who lived her life with hair in the breeze, Stillman who lived his with it under a hat. They had been such a bad match. And he had loved her so much the worse for it.

  He wished that woman on the other end would quit her singing. It was mashing up his mind.

  The last time he saw his nearly-wife had been at the junction with 42. He had driven there faster than he had ever driven, and on roads that, back then, were still all dirt and twist, driven there with his nose bleeding from the hairbrush she’d used on him, taking the shortcut past the Demastus farm to head her off. He’d parked at the junction with his truck broadsided across the road, got out, leaned against the hood, and waited for her. When she came, she burst around the bend at a speed that made what he’d just done seem like a crawl. He watched her come. She didn’t slow. Arms crossed, focusing all he had in him on not moving a muscle, he waited—until he saw her start to skid. He didn’t remember deciding to run, but he did, bolted, hurled himself into a ditch. Crouched there, hand clapped over his mouth, he’d waited for the bang. But she pulled up in time, stopped a good dozen feet from his truck. Man, she said, man, man. Stillman, that is just so, so like you. Couldn’t even stand there. Couldn’t even face it. That was her all over, the way she turned a sensible reaction into something to make him feel shame. She came out of the convertible slamming her door and pushing her hair out of her eyes. In the wind, her yellow sundress pressed against her belly. She was already starting to show. Did you come here to ask me to stay? she said. Or to ask me to get rid of it?

  He took the phone receiver from his head, as if it was pushing the words into his ears, dropped it into its cradle. He stood there with his hand on it, listening to the dead silence where the life of the commune had been.

  Sometime later, the phone rang. He picked it up, said, “Stillman.”

  On the other end, the woman from the orphanage was saying how glad she was to talk with him at last. She had meant to call before, but things had been so busy. And was he sitting down? And had he heard? And did she have any other family? And did he know she had done drugs? And did he know she’d had a little girl?

  “No,” he said.

  “Her name is Caroline.”

  “Caroline,” he said.

  “Yes, Daddy,” she said. “It’s me. You there? You okay?”

  “Come home,” he said.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “When will you, then?”

  “I’m not.”

  “What did Les Pfersick tell you?” he said.

  There was a long time of quiet in which he could hear some chair creaking. The woman had stopped her singing.

  “Nothing that surprised me,” his daughter said, and hung up.

  Through the westward window the evening sunlight slips in and paints its glow over the dismembered Deutz, over Stillman as he gives his knees one more minute by the electric heater, then, as stealthily, it slips back out into December’s dusk. The heat brings out the stench in his clothes. For a moment, he cannot remember when he wore anything other than the dark blue work pants, the sweat-yellowed long underwear shirt, but when he zips up the mechanic’s suit the smell goes away. Lowering his loupe, he starts the engine, again: it skips a beat, stutters. Slowly, feeling for the ground behind him, holding onto the Deutz, he lowers himself to a short stool on rollers. He goes from cylinder to cylinder, opening the bleed ports, listening. Sometimes, when he has been out in the workshop all day, he feels, upon entering the house, like his daughter has been in there. Sometimes he feels it so strongly that he goes from seat to seat—kitchen to living room to bathroom—touching them as if he could sense the memory of her weight.

  The early January darkness makes him more tired than ever. All his limbs want to do is sleep. But he can’t. He takes his dose of wine before bed, measuring it out like cough medicine, but it does nothing to ease his thoughts. Sometimes his groin aches so sharply that he is sure it is a harbinger of far worse to come. The voltometer tells him the power is getting only halfway into the circuit, but he can’t seem to figure out exactly where it’s blocked.

  The tiny black-and-white TV sputters and flickers when he plugs it in, but it works well enough to show the video he feeds it: the Indian man on an Indian rooftop surrounded by a circle of Indian followers watching their rising sun. Stillman, in the new darkness after his setting one, stands just like they do. Arms loose as they will get, thighs relaxed, belly out. Abruptly, like tree leaves hit by a gust, all the rooftop Indian people start clapping. Caught off guard, Stillman joins late, his claps echoing in the empty workshop.

  From the TV, a high male voice intones: Hearty laugh. Forty-five seconds. The Indian man opens his mouth wide and laughs a hearty laugh. The followers laugh hearty laughs. One-meter laugh, the voice intones. Jumping laugh with mouth closed. The Indian man jumps and laughs with his mouth closed. Stillman, standing beside the cot he has moved into the workshop, follows as best he can.

  He has spent long hours contemplating the nature of the magneto ignition in the Deutz, but still—the hand crank driving the magnetron, the rotor leaping forward to ignite the charge, utterly self-sufficient, electricity made from nothing, a machine brought to life where it was dead just a moment before—it astounds him.

  Cocktail laugh, the Indian voice says. Spastic roar. “Train Laughter” strengthens the muscles of the hands. “Bird Laughter,” the entire body. On the promotional segment, people speak joyfully to Stillman of improved sleep, better breathing, joints miraculously healed. Our son was hit by a truck, a beaming couple says. He was paralyzed from the neck down, a vegetable. Now look at him. And he is there, laughing “Charlie Chaplin Laugh,” walking around and around, his booming voice filling the workshop air. Dr. Kataria himself speaks to the neuroscience, shouts, Lift your hands and say, Yes! I am the happiest person in this world!

  “Yes!” Stillman shouts. “I am the happiest person in this world!”

  His hands are still raised, his face beaming, when he sees his blurred reflection in the window: young and healthy and beautiful as a boy’s. Then it slips away and he realizes the Booe child has been looking in at him the whole time.

  And the next red sunset the Booe child is in the window again, beaming, hands raised. And every evening after that, at exactly this time, watching, mimicking.

  “Ayiye, ayiye, hasya darbar mein ayiye,” Stillman chants with the others on the screen.

  “Ayiye, ayiye, hasya darbar mein ayiye,” he can hear the Booe child say.

  And Stillman is circling the Deutz, arms and hands spread like wings, the muscles of his face strained with trying to get “Bird Laughter” right.

  Sometimes, at the end of these spring-stretched days, he cannot remember what he has worked on on the Deutz. He stands in his insect-net hat, the hot breeze from the window fan stirring the mesh against his cheeks, and stares hard at the tractor, trying to recall each task of the past hour, of the one before that, as far back as he can. He spends all day splitting the Deutz at the bell housing, propping one half on blocks, sitting in the last light with his loupe over his eye, smiling in wonder at how well the throw-out bearing has lasted—no discoloration, or looseness, or … Gradually it comes to him that he replaced it the week before. Sometimes the redness of sunset comes upon him through the window and he looks up, as surprised as if it were a person who had crept in and touched him with a finger. Some days the sound of the mailman’s truck is his only company.

  He had the front of the tractor lifted and was trying to figure out whether it was the kingpin or the front wheel bearing at fault for the looseness of free play, when he realized it was his birthday. He went to the calendar on the wall and flipped the month. On the November picture, a loggerhead shrike stared back at him: the but
cher-bird, black streak across its eye, beak hooked meanly. It was one of his least favorites. When he was younger and walked more, he used to come upon shrike prey—a half-gnawed mouse, a warbler with its yellow chest spilling bloody meat—hooked on barbed wire where the bird had stored it for a later feast. Pathetic beast, he always thought, the way it packed as much viciousness as it could in its three short years, as if to stick a thumb in the eye of the God that had given it a lifespan shorter than almost any other. It was the fourth year of the decade. He was seventy-five.

  Leaving the workshop for the first time that day—perhaps for the first time since yesterday or the day before; he couldn’t be sure—he lifted the yellow, unscrewed mop handle off the wall where he had left it leaning whenever he’d last walked from the house to the shop, and, using it to take some of the weight off his bad knee, he made his way slowly down to the end of the drive.

  The mailbox was stuffed full, as if he hadn’t checked it in a month. He wondered if he hadn’t. The dusk light was too poor for him to make out even the larger printed addresses without the loupe, so he put the lens over his eye and turned the pile of mail over to begin with the oldest. He was almost at today when he came across the photo. His daughter had mailed it like a postcard, but it was just a glossy four-by-six, too thin; it had been bent across the middle. On the plasticy back, she had written in smeared pen: I am so happy! I hope your proud! Love, Blueberry. He turned it over. It was a picture of the demolition derby site behind the elementary school in Narrows. The Festival of the Hills must have already passed, he thought. It must have gone by a couple days ago. In the picture: a plywood stage, Caroline standing on it, Russell Arbogast putting his hands around her neck. She looked different. No thinner, but something about her skin seemed to shine. Her shoulders weren’t in their usual slump. For a moment, he wondered if she was finally wearing the support bra he’d gotten her years ago for her posture, the one with the magnets along the vertebrae to make the circulation flow, but, no, he could see it wasn’t anything she had on; it was something in her that threw her shoulders back on its own. Her hair was in braids, draped down her chest with feathers tied to their ends. She held a motorcycle helmet in one arm. Behind her smoked the wrecks of demolished cars. The thing Russell Arbogast was holding at her neck looked like a medal. Through the macro loupe, Stillman peered at the giant close-up of her face. He had not talked to her in a year.