Accordion Crimes

by Annie Proulx

  Dolor bought two chairs and a small table from him, a chest of drawers with wooden thread spools for knobs. The chairs were upright, with cracked wooden seats that pinched his ass, but if he wanted comfort he could always lie down on the bed. At night he wished Francine were with him, forgetting for long moments that he had invented her; he’d thrown away the photograph in Minneapolis. He listened to the radio, it was better than the TV late at night, the distant hillbilly music and sermons and promises of cures from the wildcat border stations down in Mexico—funny their signal could reach all the way to Maine—offers for weight-loss tonics, pills to make you put on pounds, plastic broncos, moon pens, zircon rings, Yellow Boy fishing lures, apron patterns, twelve styles for just one dollar, rat-killer and polystyrene gravestones, send no money, send your name and address in care of this station, less than a penny a capsule, for each order received before December 15 you’ll receive in addition, absolutely free, while this special offer lasts, insist on the genuine, prosperity, plain brown sealed wrapper, a package containing rigidly inspected pharmaceuticals, if you are nervous and wakeful at night. He never felt the voices were directed at him, but at all the silent millions out there lying in their beds unable to sleep, needing Restall and switchblade knives to end their suffering. He was not one of them, only eavesdropping, until he heard Dr. Bidlatter one night say, in his deep, comforting, fatherly voice, “trying in vain to get help for your physical or emotional problems? Are you unhappy? Are you depressed, anxious, fearful? Are you lonely? Have you been told ‘it’s all in your head’ or ‘there’s nothing wrong with you, forget it, take a vacation, quit your job, move to the sunbelt, get a divorce’? If so, you may benefit from hypnosis and behavior modification. Call 462–6666 today for a consultation with Dr. Bidlatter.” He wrote the number down but never called.

  He’d filled out a little in the army, still not big, but wiry and well knit, supple and with a good sense of balance. He thought about trying for the forestry service through the G.I. Bill, but took a job as a limber in a small logging operation, Parfait Logging & Haulage. Through the autumn and into the winter he worked, bent over the felled trees with his chain saw, cutting limb after limb, hauling them to brush piles, monotonous, physically difficult work, his clothes covered with pitch and bark dust, but except for the chain saw exhaust, work done in the midst of resinous fragrance. He saved his money, ate at the café where gradually they recognized him, then knew his name, and finally heard that he had been born in Random but taken away as a baby, that he didn’t know the whereabouts of any living member of his family.

  “So you might say you’re a stranger in your hometown,” said Maurice, the cook, waiter, janitor, but not the owner. His wife, Jeanette, was the owner and he was just an employee, just a humble oppressed employee with a mop or a spatula, until deer season when he metamorphosed into a hunter with a lethally crooked finger. But neither Maurice nor anyone else remembered Dolor’s parents. The family had lived in the township, he had been born there, they had made no mark.

  In December, after a light fall of snow, the wind came out of the south, the temperature rose into the forties and suddenly the air was charged with an ineffable sweetness, a perfume as of invisible flowers. Was it some fragrance borne on the wind from the tropics, or the held breath of summer released by the untimely snowmelt? It persisted three days and then disappeared as a cold air mass seeped down from the Arctic and new snow fell, rinsing the air of all scent, covering the decaying leaves and raw earth, the single leaf of the grass-pink, sprawling woodbine like a dark violet wire among the rocks, the increasing white weight matting ebony spleenwort, pulling down the plumes of faded goldenrod.

  On weekends Dolor didn’t know where to go, and kept himself company reading True Adventure and Detective Stories and carving a naked girl on a pine board, sure he could do better than the Dentist’s colossal women, or watching TV. The only thing to do in Random was get drunk at the bar or drive around trying to get stuck in a beaver wash.

  There was a night when the old Dentist came crashing in, ricocheting between the walls, slam, scrape, hung on the door-knob making a trilling sound and calling “Mr. Gagnon, why don’t you answer your goddamn fuckin doorbell,” until Dolor opened the door and looked at him.

  “Only the Dentist come in for a little drink,” he said, in his withered arms a brown paper bag of beer bottles, in his pants pocket a new pint of cheap whiskey, in his hand another, half gone. Dolor steered him to one of the chairs.

  “Think I’m kegged up, don’t you? No, I’m not kegged up or you’d know it.”

  The Dentist looked at the ceiling, the shelves on the wall, the half-carved deer head, into the corners of the room, nodded at the instrument case at the foot of the bed.

  “There’s a ’cordeen for you, ain’t it?” He took a drink.

  “Remember that short staker come through one winter? Couple of weeks and he was gone, but the tunes he knew, son-of-a-bitchen bastard knew a hundred of songs, made them out of his head. Played the squeezebox ’cordeen and sang like a dog with his nuts in a wringer. Suppose you want to hear me do a goddamn one of ’em?”

  “Go ahead,” said Dolor.

  The old man folded his arms across his chest, one foot beat time loudly, and he began to sing in a strong and amazingly loud voice although he barely opened his mouth.

  “Oh loggers come and sit by me—

  Here’s my little ’cordeen ’pon my knee.

  I’ll sing to you of Danny’s game

  And how he come to his end up in Maine

  On the bold Penobscot, the Penobscot cold.”

  The steady voice grew louder and harder as he sang, the lines thrusting into the room like pike poles. Although it was singing, it was speaking as well, a kind of commanding and rhythmic recitation that pulled a listener inside the singer, straight into the old woods, the clink of log chains and snorting horses, the creak of laden sleds.

  “His age was only twenty-two,

  His wife and child was almost new.

  He had a trick so slick and smooth

  When it was done there was no proof.

  On the bold Penobscot, the Penobscot cold.”

  He stopped singing and drank whiskey, did not resume the song. When Dolor asked him to go on, he claimed he’d never sung a note in his life, what was on the TV tonight, weren’t it the night for Dragnet? But they got Myron Floren playing “Tico Tico” on the Lawrence Welk show and the Dentist made gagging sounds.

  “I wouldn’t buy no Dodge,” said the Dentist, “unless it was one of them Power Wagons.”

  You Are My Sunshine

  One of the skidder operators kept looking at him, came up to him on a payday Friday. He was a tall, stoop-shouldered man with light eyes, hair cut in a duck’s-ass style, gleaming with Brylcreem.

  “You know somethin, pretty sure I remember you. Yeah, I remember you. Couple years behind me. I was at Birdnest when you was. I know you was there. You’re Frank. I remember you, the way you’d duck out of sight when there was somethin goin on. I was put there after my fuckin folks got killed on the bridge, comin across that bridge right down the hill in town. Guess my old man was drunk. They tell me he drank a lot. The cops was chasin them and they crashed. Right through the rail into the river. Guess they’re still down there. They couldn’t get them up. Never found them. Current’s too strong. I often thought how it would be to dive down there, look around. Maybe there’s somethin of them’s still down there, a watch or a wallet under a rock. I fish in there, put a big sinker on and a bare hook, see if I can get a hook into my dad’s wallet. But so far no luck.”

  Dolor looked at him, at the bony face, ears like urn handles and a nose wedged between wide-staring dilute blue eyes and an upper lip that arched tightly, gave his mouth the shape of a croquet hoop. His coarse hair was thicker than grass. There was a scar like a sickle on his right cheek where a fragment of metal broke from the edge of his axe on a cold morning splitting wood for his kitchen stove.

 
; “I got that last winter; my foreman seen it, he says ‘two things you never wanna do, and one you do wanna do—never grin’ down your blade fine, and never leave her out all night so she gets brittle. And the best thing you can do for a cut is let a dog lick it.’ Suppose he thought I was gonna let a dog slobber all over my face.”

  Dolor didn’t remember him. He shook his head, shrugged and smiled.

  “Yeah, you remember me. Wilfred Ballou. Watch this.” He crossed and uncrossed his legs and his arms rapidly, writhed his face through maniac expressions, his feet tapped and shot out, knees bent, a rubbery burr from his flabbering tongue, his ears went up and down.

  Dolor laughed. “Winky. Winks. Jesus. Yeah, course I remember. You used to get in trouble with Mrs. Breath. We’d go past the office and see you in there like headed to the electric chair.”

  “Wilf, not Winks. Hated that damn name Winks. Hey, I met a guy once was really going to the electric chair. I got in some trouble after I left damn old Birdnest, they give me a choice, join the marines or go to jail, this was ’52, the choice wasn’t too great because if I joined up I’d probably be on my way to Korea. Anyway, they told me to think about it overnight in the county jail, and there was this guy in there that had just killed his brother over a woman. They both wanted the same woman. Later on he got it, he got the chair.”

  “Which did you pick?”

  “Oh, I joined the marines. I went to Korea. See this?” He unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants, presented his left buttock where Dolor saw a fist-sized depression, a mass of fibrous scar. “That’s my souvenir. Man, that was my ticket home. When I got rehabbed and got so I could walk good again, went to Old Rattle Falls, got a job in construction, met Emma, my wife. She comes from up around here, comes from Honk Lake originally. She got family all around here, so we moved up. So what are you doing here?”

  “Born here. My people left a long time ago. And I was in the army. In Germany.” Dolor didn’t know what else to say.

  “They say you play the ’cordion.”

  “Get out! Where’d you hear that?”

  “My wife’s aunt and uncle. The Pelkys. You rent from them. They hear you. They say you got a long way to go. They say you’re pretty bad.”

  He blushed furiously. “I don’t know nothing about it. I just fool with it. I found it in a taxi when I got out of the army. My father used to play the accordion—not this one, another one, with like piano keys. It got burnt up in a fire when I was a baby. He saved us kids but his accordion was ruined and he lost his life. That’s how come I was at Birdnest. I just, you know, fool with the accordion. I don’t know how to play it.”

  “Bullshit! I had a dollar every time I heard that story I’d be drivin a Cadillac. Every kid in Birdnest used to say the same thing—dad got killed saving them from drowning or from a fire or a car wreck. Dad run off, that’s what. Ain’t that right?”

  “I don’t know. I was too little to know anything. Anyway, his accordion was burned up pretty bad, so there was a fire.”

  “Well, my old man died because he was so drunk he couldn’t stay on the road and he killed my mother with him and if he was alive instead of dead I’d kill him myself for what he done. I wish you did play that ’cordion. This’ll knock you on your can—I play the fiddle. You believe that? I’m not much to listen to yet, but we got no mice in our house. Emma’s dad plays the fiddle. He’s pretty good if you like cowboy songs, that Grand Ol’ Opry stuff. Say what, you ought to practice up with that ’cordion. Anyway, come over to my place we’ll drink a few beers. One thing about livin around here, they love two things—music and likker. God, how they love them things. And dancin. There’s a dance every Friday at the Yvette Sparks Center.”

  He put it off for a month. When he did get around to driving over, it was without the accordion. The kitchen was very small and clean, with curtains at the window, a wedding photo of Emma and Wilf in a round frame, salt and pepper shakers in the form of windmills. The calendar was fixed to the wall with a green-headed thumbtack and a chromo of Jesus with his raw heart like something from a meat counter hung over the refrigerator. He leaned on Emma’s table and listened to Wilfred saw the fiddle.

  “Jesus, Wilf, I can’t even play, but I can make a better noise than that,” he said. “I never heard nothing so rotten.”

  The next time he went to Millinocket he got an instruction book for the button accordion at Yip-I-O Music and, after ten days of sweat and fumbling and cursing, learned to play “You Are My Sunshine” and sing it at the same time, which was like patting his head and rubbing his stomach. He put some money down for a record player that took the new long-playing records, thinner than a coin, made of some jawbreaker plastic, polyvinyl chloride.

  Wilf and Emma watched him open the accordion case. “OK,” he said, “you asked for it, and here it is.” By the time he got to the refrain, Wilfred sawed in, playing his rosiny fiddle by ear. They were rescued from their own ineptitude by the astonishing sound the instruments made together, a rich and wonderful sound. “Fuckin greasily bears,” said Wilf. “It would sound good if we knew how to play the damn things. That’s a nice little ’cordion you got there.”

  Pulp truck

  That winter on Saturday nights he drove over to their place; his suffering truck broke down often enough so that half the time he hoofed it, snow or sleet in the face, or deep cold icing the hairs inside his nostrils, making his teeth ache and his hand go numb where the strap of the case bit in, and over his shoulder a feed sack with six quart bottles of beer that would be half frozen by the time he got there. The accordion had to warm up for an hour on a chair in their kitchen before he could play it. Emma was always a little dressed up, her hair curled and rouge on her cheeks, like she was going out on a date. She wore a dress with a big circle skirt; her brown and white spectator pumps and those high heels did make a kind of festive feeling for all of them. He and Wilf drank beer and talked about the days at Birdnest as if they had been good times, while Emma fixed supper, some kind of special dish, had a glass or two of beer in an old amber glass dimpled with dots that had come to her after her grandmother died. Dolor left a five-dollar bill under his plate, his kick-in for the casserole or the Pork ’n Pineapple or Curried Tuna Surprise she fixed from the Betty Crocker Cookbook.

  “I don’t cook that old French stuff my mother cooks, ployes, and baked beans take three days, them old tourtières.”

  If he got too drunk he slept on their ratty couch, covered with a Frenchie quilt.

  When she went to the woodbox in the entry, Dolor said, you’re lucky, Wilf, got yourself a good wife, a kid.

  “It ain’t that hard, Dolor. First you find a girl, then you get married, you get the kids with three box tops and puttin it to the old lady regular—” and shut up when Emma came back in, kicking the door shut with her foot and stuffing the chunks into the firebox, pounding a big one with the lid-lifter until it dropped down. She’d heard what he said. “You watch your big dirty mouth,” she said. “Or you might start missin it regular.” Dolor didn’t know whether to laugh or keep quiet. Emma sat down at the table. “You know what your name means?” she said to him.

  “No, what?”

  “Irregular,” said Wilf.

  “You won’t get none now,” said Emma, but to Dolor she added, “Douleur—pain. J’ai une douleur dans les jambes—my legs hurt.”

  “That’s the truth,” he said. “They do hurt.”

  “More like j’ai une douleur in the ass,” said Wilfred.

  Around nine o’clock they got going with the music, the kid asleep, Emma putting the last dish away, getting her tambourine out of the closet, the head blackened by striking fingers. Wilf tuned his fiddle, the familiar bending notes as the tightening strings sought E and A and D and G, the accordion took in warm breath and at last expelled such a sonorous chord that the kitchen shook with it, the beer trembled in their glasses. They warmed up with “Smiles,” “My Blue Heaven,” “Little Brown Jug” and Dolor’s standby, �
��You Are My Sunshine,” then tried whatever Wilfred had worked out from listening to the radio, “Get Out of Here,” “Kansas City,” and “Dance with Me, Henry,” similar but not the same, twisted around to what he could play, and Dolor followed along, sometimes guessing wrong, but it sounded pretty good and it was getting better.

  By summer, when the long evenings kept them out on the porch playing and slapping mosquitoes and drinking, they had two dozen songs, hillbilly, popular, a hymn for Sunday morning. Once in a while they didn’t play but hit the dance down at the motel lounge in Random where a local band, The Saw Gang, played “Purple People Eater” five or six times, loud and fast, the dancers crowding around a tub of ice and beer between sets.

  “Hell, we sound as good as them,” said Wilf. “That’s just crap they’re playing.”

  “We’re better.” Though Dolor saw what dancers needed, a forceful steady rhythm that made them hop and kick when they were half dead.

  In 1957 Wilfred quit Parfait Logging and started driving a St. Cloud pulp truck from Maine over to New York State, sometimes down to Massachusetts. When he got a chance he’d hit the music stores in different towns, pick up new records. He got a ten-inch record in a sleeve showing three men in weird masks wrestling an alligator—Mardi Gras with Cajun Bill and His Honeybears. They listened a couple of times. Wilf took up his bow and tried to follow the music but it was too much, and Emma, in capri pants and ballerina shoes, hands clasped before her on the oilcloth-covered table, caught French shreds of the songs and repeated them, “… acheter du coton jaune … à bal chez Joe … ’coute toi-même…” but shut up when cries and gasps of sorrow came from under the needle. When the record ended, Dolor went at what he’d heard, threw himself at the double time, but he got only a little of it. They did better with popular songs and once in a while some country-western.