Chapter 31.
The deer in Hank's garage attracted company. Men in trucks circled the block, craning their necks on their first pass, and parking on the second pass, stopping to visit the dead animal, it being a conversational springboard. A man wearing a shirt with a picture of a wolf under a full moon waddled into the garage. A farmer in a blaze orange camouflage zip-up sweater parked and moseyed up the driveway, hands in his pockets, eyes locked on the carcass. Hunters were drawn to the garage light like moths.
Tommy had returned to the Hank's without Judd, calling his cousin a 'hothead' and Hank tried to put the man out of his mind, but he silently dwelled upon it.
In the rear of the garage, near a window, Hank held court under his swaying deer while sitting on a deep-freeze that contained a quarter-cow of ground beef and fifty Hungry-Man TV dinners. Judy sat next to Hank, while Hank's wife, Mary, monitored the Butterball turkey rolling in the five-gallon pot of boiling oil. Mary commanded all cigarette smokers to stand back, and even sent her son Roy into the house to avoid the conflagration she foresaw in the turkey endeavor.
The real reason she sent Roy inside had to do with Judy, who Mary watched closely, the ex-stripper sitting very near her tipsy husband. The two wives avoided each other at all costs, but crossed paths daily because of their inseparable husbands. They clashed at every sentence, with Mary coming from a pious farm family and Judy coming from a broken home in the city.
The man in the wolf-print shirt nattered in his customary manner about a card game recently played in his basement, sparing no details about each hand, who had held the ace, who had reneged and who may have cheated, all the while unaware of his lack of audience.
To be nice, Hank nodded, but stopped listening when he noticed a car pulling into a neighbor's driveway behind his house, which he could see through a window on the rear of his garage. Behind a shed, the car stopped. A woman in a white dress stepped out of the car and slipped across the lawn toward a camper behind the house in the grass. A blonde woman. Crossing the lawn, her head turned from side to side, as if being chased. The woman opened the door of the camper and stepped inside.
The wolf man continued, "Gus was sitting on the nine of hearts, and of course, he thought trump was already played out – but it wernt. I had the queen."
"You rascal," said Hank, turning away from the window for a moment, then ignoring the man again.
Hank was curious about the woman, since his neighbor, Walt Werther, spent winters as a snowbird in Florida. Walt had no daughters. A widower, he had no wife. While Hank wondered, another car entered the backyard, a car known to Hank and to everyone else in town. The Werther Cadillac. It was the only Cadillac in Immaculate newer than 1987.
The car stopped near the camper, next to the woman's car. Josh Werther stepped out in a suit, hair pasted to his scalp, and walked across the yard with purpose.
"Then it was down to offsuit. The nine…no, the ten of spades, that was the first card laid in the last trick...the ten."
"The ten of shovels, got it," said Hank.
Josh wore a suit, and his hair appeared different. When the front door of the camper opened, a woman's arm emerged and pulled Josh by the tie inside. Hank pressed his nose to the window to get a closer look, brushing Judy as he turned.
Mary, Hank's wife, pounced, saying to Judy, "Can you spare a foot of separation between your thigh and my husband?"
Judy said, "What was that?"
"Or find another seat, in another garage?"
Hearing the argument gaining momentum, Hank stood up from the deep-freeze to truncate the conversation. "Ladies, ladies. No fighting, please. I have to go somewhere for a bit. I'll be right back. And ladies, there's no need to argue when you can both have me when I get back, at the same time if you like. Right, honey? Mary?" When she did not laugh, he said, "Ok, fine, sweetheart. It can be one at a time then. I'm flexible. Mary, I'll be back in a bit. I gotta go somewhere."
"Where?" she asked.
"No time to explain!"
The two women stared at one another for a moment, until Mary turned and entered the house to watch out the rear window, to keep an eye on her husband.
Out the back door of the garage, Hank ducked and ran to the edge of his fenced yard, slipping through a gaping unrepaired hole in the chain-link, to creep toward the camper. Cupping his ear against the aluminum side of the camper, he heard giggling, the sound of glasses clinking. When the woman spoke, he knew the blonde was not Kathy Werther, since this voice had a caress in it, more breath along the edges, a countrified playfulness. Likewise, Josh sounded different – his tone did not match his professional character. With prying eyes, Hank crouched at window height, and through the lime-green polka-dotted curtains he observed the couple in the camper, sipping wine on the fold-down table-bed. The woman, slender at the waist and curvy in her white dress, leaned in for a kiss. Josh dipped one of his fingers underneath the armstraps of the dress and pulled it aside, and when the woman's head tilted back, the blonde hair fell off her head, onto the floor. A wig. When her head returned upright, Hank recognized Shannon Hoffman, from the pictures.
"Oh, now that's definitely naughty," Hank whispered, marveling at the wig and wondering if his wife might wear one sometime. "You dirty dog, Werther," he said, thinking of his friend, Jack. But he also thought about the wig, and took a second and third peek at Shannon Hoffman before he ran back to his yard and hatched a plan.
The plan only consisted of one-step, and that was its flaw. Hank grabbed a bungee cord that lay amid the mess in his yard, and returned to the camper, stopping at the front door, which was the only entrance and exit to the camper. He wrapped the hooked end of the bungee cord around the doorknob. The other end he pulled tight and reaching underneath the camper, hooking it upon the steel frame of the trailer. With his finger he plucked the cord, testing for tautness, and smiled, but not for long when he realized that his plan had ended at the idea of trapping the lovers inside.
Hank sat in the grass to think for a moment, standing now and then to peek inside the window when the voices inside became intimate with sighs. For inspiration, Hank fondled his beard. Given his own history of errors, to expose Josh felt hypocritical – until Shannon made a remark that Hank misconstrued as an insult to Jack Hoffman.
" John," Shannon said, playing with Josh's hair.
John. This was Jack Hoffman's real name. Unaware of the role-playing going on in the camper, Hank found this disrespect to Jack Hoffman extended too far, beyond decency. Sure, Hank considered, Jack was a manure-smelling mumbling nasal-talker, but he deserved better. The idea that Werther would actually pretend to be Jack while underneath his wife – it crossed Hank's moral line in the sand, which tended to move daily.
""Werther, you skunk," Hank said, as he crouched and ran back to his house, circling the garage to avoid the wolf-print man and the scowls of Judy and Mary. In the street, he jumped into his truck and started it, waving to the people in his garage as he drove around the block to back into Walt Werther's yard, backing up swiftly, expertly, since he had spent most of his adult life driving all varieties of trucks.
With his pickup near the camper, Hank ran to the jack and cranked it downward until the camper's coupling rested on the ball hitch. In the window that faced the front of the camper, two faces appeared, aghast at the sight of Hank, who saluted them and ran back to the driver's side door of his pickup and drove off with his prisoners.
In his rear-view mirrors, Hank watched the door of the camper open an inch and shut again, giving him a chuckle when the bungee cord reverted the door to the closed position.
But again, Hank had not thought past this step in his plan and drove around town, wondering what to do with the camper. "Surely they have their clothes on by now," said Hank to himself in the mirror. "Unless they are really dirty," he said, and then asked himself, "Shall we shame them, Hank?"
He scratched his
bald head and marveled at his beard. Hank drove, with the company of himself in the mirror and billowing delusions of grandeur. He passed orange and black Halloween decor, the happy faces of children, the goodness of the small town life. And observing it while he pulled the camper caused him to laugh at the world, as he sometimes did while driving and considering all that he had done and knew and seen and touched, and wondered how he could not spend all day every day laughing at the world in all its foibles, in its constant disarray and the cyclic things that happened over and over again. Even his beard gave him laughter, since in high school he had hair on his head, but wanted a beard, and now he could grow a beard, but wanted hair on his head.
On Hank's manic spectrum, this humorous feeling marked the apex of his moods, in contrast to the terrible nadirs, when he struggled to get out of bed and tie his shoes. But in high spirits, with the wholesome children walking the streets, Hank could not shame Josh or Shannon, not ruin them for their mistake, having made thousands of mistakes himself.
He set his course for Walt Werther's yard again, where he backed into the driveway and set the camper into its original tire tracks. He unhitched the camper once again, and released the jailed adulterers from their bungeed door. Their sheepish faces showed Hank that the affair had ended during their Halloween ride through Immaculate.
The Plenty Page 34