Accordion Crimes

by Annie Proulx

  Vergil said he fucking wouldn’t mind driving but Fay was worked up and said, “The only way you drive is if I drop dead. You’re drunk and you don’t know how to drive drunk out here. It’s a art. Now watch and you’ll learn something. She woke me up one morning, aknocking at my door, shoes and stockings in her hand, her chemise up…” He backed up slowly, shifted into first and growled along the street with the lights off until not the horn blare and headlight flashing of passing cars but the darkness at the edge of town when the streetlights ran out made him think of turning them on. As they plunged into the darkness at a steady thirty-five, the right front wheel hooked on the white line, Fay talked on.

  “Now, you appreciate this little pleasure, the slow drunked-up night drive with a big belly moon in the windshield. It’s a empty place. You got it all to yourself. You never want to get home. They use their pricks for walking sticks, those hardy sonsabitches.”

  “I fucking want to get home,” said Vergil. “You asshole. I drove fucking places in Nam you’d be dead in five minutes. I had a string of ears. The stuff I saw and did would make you blind, old man.”

  “Look, I know I’m drunk and gone, but what the hell, so what, everybody’s on the way out, ain’t they? I’m just one of the first ones. He ain’t been rode and he’s twenty year old. Ever seen me move? Ever seen me run or dance, Mr. Wheelwright? Oh I knew how to move. Not now, of course, but I did it once, they couldn’t never match me, they couldn’t never deny me, the women, I could do the blood dance, dance until your shoes got blood in ’em. Big skinny old boy there, hundred twenty-eight wet in a polyester suit, big-rimmed hat about six and three-quarters inside and a face like the drag of a chalked thumb. He ain’t been rode and he’s twenty year old, the worst fuckin outlaw that ever been foaled. Mouth drawstringed and him wearing boots and never been off a sidewalk. But he plays good. Don’t he. Should say played. And they put him to bed with a shovel. He’s dead. Lay off of that red-eye, get rid of that whore. But one of the best ones I ever knewed was a woman. Dressed up the same way, white pants and jacket, cowboy hat, the boots, wax-paper face. But she did something you didn’t expect would be done. She pulled out those notes like taffy until they bent and almost dissolved, and then she just untied it all like a little silk scarf and shook it in your face. Never smiled. Oh that old gal could braid you up. Never knew her name. Guess she’s probably on the other side of the river now, humming through a paper comb unless they let you bring your concertina to heaven. That’s the fine instrument. The corral was all muddy and slicker than glass, I lands on a rock and I busted my ass … he’s mean, yessiree.”

  Vergil put the window down to let the smoke out. The ashtray was smoldering with a poisonous fume.

  “You’re quite the shit, ain’t you, a bit of a bastard’s bastard, you’d pick out ticks if they fell in your food, wouldn’t you, you’d forget your name if it wasn’t tattooed on your dick, ah? you’d be lost without me here to guide you home through the dark of the night, yes, you need someone to turn the pages for you. Josephine’s the only one in that bunch worth anything. You been tamped full of shit about cowboys, they are known as a romantic band. Me, I been self-sufficient since I was eleven year old. Grew up poor, old socks for mittens in the winter, picked out my clothes at the town dump, and I quit going to school in the fourth grade. Sick of the mean little bastards’ name-calling and anyway my daddy put me to work. The lousiest job he ever give me to do was to kill a bunch of kittens. The old cat had a litter there, she sprang one seemed like every couple of months, and the old man hands me a pitchfork and says, get rid of ’em. All he knows of romance is the crotch of his pants, what the hell do you think—I hear a ringing sound, you hear that? You hear a bell in your right ear it’s good news coming, you hear it in the left it’s bad news. I hear it in both ears. You hear it?”

  “Yeah.” He did, and in both ears. Not a ringing but a long, endless bellowing moan coming from out in the countryside.

  “What the fuck is it?”

  “I don’t know. It don’t seem to have to draw breath.”

  And close at hand a sudden glaring light and the clacking rush of a freight train, the oxblood-red coal cars shooting past only a few yards away, Fay hitting the foot brake, Vergil wrenching the emergency, saying fuckfuckfuck, so close to the train they could see sparks spraying from the wheels and smell its metal.

  The last twelve miles they were euphoric, death cheated, the hand of fate stayed, the grisly accident averted. Fay put the window down, thrust his face into the sedately moving air and screamed, they whooped and sang, Fay half shouting as they bumped into the yard: “I’ve harvested wool in Wyoming and rawhide in New Mexico, I’ve weared a bandanna in Sheepshit, Montana, and got laid in old Idaho.”

  And when the engine was off they stood guilty and laughing in the stunned silence, in the shelter of the opened doors, pissing on the hard ground, and their noise and the faint grey horizon in the east roused the rooster.

  You sleazy cocksucker, thought Vergil, after I got your damn chicken feed. He looked in the back of the truck in the slow light but couldn’t see the two sacks of feed.

  “Where’s the fucking chicken feed?”

  Fay stepped up light and quick as though the night’s peril had flushed age out of his joints, felt in the dark corners of the bed, fumbled in the cab until he found the flashlight and shone its feeble rays on a broad double track the length of the bed.

  “Looks like they went the other way,” Fay said and sat in the back, swinging his legs with pleasure and humming.

  Vergil and Josephine

  He crawled into a bed clammy from night chill, lay shivering and wanting Josephine. After ten minutes or so he got up and crossed the hall, opened her door gingerly. She was sleeping on her stomach. He lifted the blankets gingerly, was maneuvering his buttocks into position to slide in beside her when she said, did Fay remember the chicken feed?

  Oooo, he whined in mock agony, wrapping his cold arms around her, pressing his icy knees into her heat, snuffing her perfumed neck and hair like a dog on a rabbit track. He was lifting her nightgown with his dead man’s hands, pressing chilled mouth to her blood-rich neck with a complete understanding of vampires.

  “You stink of liquor and cigarettes.”

  “I was in a fucking bar, I was riding with Fay. We almost hit a fucking train, we lost the fucking chicken feed on the road.”

  “Lost the chicken feed? Mother is going to kill Fay. How could you lose it?”

  “I think when we fucking almost hit the goddamn train. We stopped goddamn fucking hard. The fucking sacks must have shot right out the fucking back. At least it looks that way. Unless they fell fucking out when we were going up some hill. I fucking don’t remember any fucking steep hill.”

  “There isn’t any hill. Stop that. Stop that.”

  “Josephine, Jo-Jo, come on. Jo-Jo, fucking come on now,” pressing hard against her, feeling the swell of blood in his prick and diving one frozen hand to her groin, pinching her nipple with the other.

  “I’m serious, you can just quit right now. I’ll go get the chicken feed and you get into your own bed and sleep it off. My mother hasn’t had anything for those hens for two weeks because every time Fay goes to town he gets drunk and forgets it. She’s been feeding them Quaker Oats and Rice Krispies. She’s got a lot of problems right now and she doesn’t need this. Did you get the matches?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dad’s new slicker?”

  “How about five fucking pounds of fucking sugar. It looked like sugar on the list.”

  “Yeah, it did. I’m not even going to ask about the rest of it. Come on, let’s go get the chicken feed.” She was up on one elbow and looking at him, a pillow crease on her right cheek.

  “You’re a fucking cunt tonight, you know? It’s fucking miles back there. You ever think somebody else’s got the fucking stuff by now anyway?”

  “That isn’t how it works out here.” She got up, dressed furiously, jamming herse
lf into clothes.

  He wanted to hit her. Wanted to kill her. Didn’t she get it? He’d gotten the fucking chicken feed while fucking Fay was drunk and swaying on a barstool, yes, he’d gotten it even though it was fucking out there somewhere in the road now. He sat up. The fucking rooster was going crazy. The hangover edged up a little. From the kitchen downstairs he could hear Kenneth coughing and clearing his throat. Fucking Christ. He thought of another fucking hour imprisoned in the Spanish chair sipping fucking lukewarm coffee and listening to the old fart boom on about fucking Umbrella Point. No wonder fucking Ults had killed the fucking horse, probably to shut fucking Kenneth up.

  “Yeah. We’ll get it.” His voice was cold and mean now.

  He was back across the hall, pulling on his rancid clothes, sopping a hot washcloth on his face, and down the stairs, not waiting for her, straight into the kitchen. The coffeepot was half full, still dripping. He poured a cup of the steaming slop and tried to drink it, turning away from Kenneth’s swimmy eyes.

  “You’re an early riser and an ardent coffee drinker, I see, Vergil. I’ve been standing here looking out the window and thinking about war, about war and soldiers. Listening to the reports on the hostages. What a mess. In ancient times the Chinese had the right idea. They formed their armies from men in prison with archer’s skills, killing skills, and drafted young men with bad reputations—they made a fearsome army, kept the neighborhoods peaceful and crime-free. We Americans make armies of nice kids who fight against their wills. What we ought to do is drop a nuclear bomb on Teheran, get rid of the Ayatollah and end that problem. Now, you were in the marines, you were in Vietnam—don’t you agree with that?”

  “The fucking hostages are in Teheran. You fucking want to kill them too?” Without waiting for an answer he was out the door, heading for the rakishly parked truck.

  Back to town

  The sky was clear rose, frost in patches of cut lawn grass like crusted salt, and near the ditch a fallen line of scythed weeds. Josephine sat in the driver’s seat, tense and hunched forward, the ashtray empty and the windows down, and through them the damp morning air flowed, bitter with the scent of sage, death camas, lupine and crazyweed. She drove and neither of them said anything although the cab of the truck vibrated with suppressed shouting.

  The sacks of chicken feed lay in the middle of the road on the town side of the tracks, faintly silvered with dew. He heaved them into the back of the truck and suddenly felt good, even happy, the coffee clicking in or the hangover departing or the glow of a fucking good deed done. He was back in and slamming the truck door when a freight train came around the curve heading out of town, empties rattling, maybe the same fucking train from last night. Josephine didn’t turn back to the ranch but kept on toward town. The journey of the night was playing backward.

  She parked in front of the same café where he’d drunk the fucking bad coffee the afternoon before and now drank it again, just as bad, sitting with her in a booth with red plastic upholstery, plastic-encased menus, and before them plastic mugs of weak fucking coffee, and he swallowed it gratefully and with relish ate his order of ham and fried eggs looking-at-him, mopping the fucking yolks with toasted homemade bread. There was a sign on the wall: FREE CHEWING GUM UNDER SEATS.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m sorry. Yesterday was a bitch. While you were in town with Fay I had a talk—she talked, I listened—with my mother. You wouldn’t believe what she dumped on me. They’re getting divorced. Dad’s been seeing this woman about half his age, in fact I know her, she was in school with me; he got involved somehow and she had a kid about two weeks ago, a little girl—so I have a baby sister thirty-one years younger than I am. The messy part came the day after the baby was born when she got out of the hospital—they send them home the next day now. She made a beeline for the V.F.W. club with the baby, sat there for hours smoking and drinking with her greasy pals and managed to knock the baby off the bar and onto the floor. Some of them say she threw it. So the baby is in the hospital with serious head injuries—my mother wants her to die—the slut is charged with endangerment of the child’s life and cruelty to a child, and my father’s name and part in all this was plastered across the evening news and every paper in the state. Me—I was the only one who didn’t know.”

  He started to speak but she held up her hand.

  “Now. You’re just dying to know why Simon shot Umbrella Point. All right. I’m gonna tell you. It was stupid. It was a misunderstanding. He was trying to help Dad. You know how Dad talks—he goes on and on, he never gives you a chance to say anything and after a while you get tired of listening.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Dad was talking about Umbrella Point—well, that’s what he always talked about—but he was hung up on what might happen when Umbrella Point got old and sick, some day in the future. He’d had a little bit to drink. He didn’t feel it was right to let a sick, feeble animal hang on, getting more miserable and pain-racked. He thought old animals should be put down, but he said he knew he couldn’t do it when the time came, that he wouldn’t have the heart to put down old Umbrella Point who someday might be blind, too lame to walk, starving from tooth loss, cancerous and afflicted with skin sores that would not heal. Oh, he listed everything that could happen to a horse, and after a while, thinking about having to put Umbrella Point down, he started to cry. He said he couldn’t do it; it would take just one shot to the head but he couldn’t do it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It affected Simon. The trouble, the misunderstanding, was that he hadn’t been listening very well to the first part, and by the time he paid attention, Dad was making it seem like Umbrella already had all those things wrong with him and had to be put down and he couldn’t do it.

  “Simon tossed and turned all night and finally he decided he would get up in the morning and help Dad out, put poor old Umbrella down and spare Dad. He liked Dad and he thought he should help him out. It never occurred to him that it was Fay’s place to put Umbrella down if it ever came to that, but at the time Umbrella was twenty-one years old and in good health. He could have lived another five or maybe ten years, profitable years. Dad got a thousand-dollar stud fee for that horse’s services. He figured Simon did him out of more than fifty thousand dollars by shooting Umbrella. And that’s all there was to it, just one of those family misunderstanding situations.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. Simon and I went back to New York, but he was so upset about being shot and guilty about shooting Umbrella that he started to have an affair with his boss’s girlfriend who was, incidentally, my gynecologist, who broke the news to him that I was pregnant. So we got divorced, he married the bitch and they moved back to Minneapolis and I never heard from him again. For years I blamed my father. He didn’t have to shoot poor Simon. Just like he didn’t have to fuck that slut, my old playmate.”

  “I think he fucking did the right thing. He said he thought Simon was coming to blow everybody away. He looked freaked out. As for the woman, who the fuck knows why this stuff happens? It happens all the time. And it’s their fucking problem, not yours.”

  She looked at him. “You’re wrong, you asshole. Totally. You don’t have any moral balance. Let’s get out of here and drive into the mountains. Let’s get some wine and some steaks and a blanket.”

  “Josephine. Let me remind you that your mother is waiting for that fucking chicken feed back at the ranch.”

  She looked at him, at his handsome American face, both halves in symmetry; behind the prissy little wire-rimmed glasses his clear light eyes reflected a hostile spark; she saw the patchy cheek stubble and the mole beside his nose and his too hairless arms. He stared as well, and it was already, in a few seconds, as though he’d known her last year or sometime the year before. Their affection had curdled. They were moving rapidly toward antipathies.

  “You don’t like her, do you? My mother.”

  “No,” he said, knowing he shouldn’t say it. “And I feel the s
ame way about your fucking father. Ults had the right idea—waste ’em.”

  “That was NOT what he intended. I just told you.”

  Still, they bought the wine and drove into the mountains and there, in a meadow blazing with Indian paintbrush, she ran from him half clothed and laughing like an advertisement for sanitary napkins; he played the game for a few minutes, then got angry with this crap, slammed her to the ground and tore her clothes, gave her a ringing, double-handed slap when she said stop, wrenched her legs apart and shoved in, bucking and rutting. The sun had heated her hair and she gave off a scent like walnut oil and hot leaves. They sweated under the purple sky, biting each other’s lips, she raked his back, he pounded her with his full weight, rammed and thrust, the grasses sawed their skins with stinging shallow cuts, the wine bottle tipped over and spilled onto the earth, they rolled in it, growling and moaning, hurled their wine-stained, scratched, grass-and-pollen-smeared bodies into curious positions, shouted and wept, she cried oh god oh god, she broke a blood-rimmed nail, he damaged his knee on sharp quartz and mosquitoes sucked at his smarting back and her white legs, and when he had to piss, kneeling, she tenderly held his penis, and when she, squatting, repeated the function, he held his curved palm against the hot fountain, then came more cries to deities, more crawling and rolling in the matted wet flowers, and from each, extravagant declarations of profound love for the other, beyond life itself, all of this watched from a distant slope by a Basque sheepherder with his Sears binoculars in his left hand and his prick in the right.

  “That was rape,” she said.

  “Yeah. And you fucking loved it.”

  “Your mistake,” she said. “You’ll be sorry.”

  The deerflies came. The wine was gone. They dressed in silence, turning away from each other a little. They limped from the meadow, avoiding the sight of the crushed flowers. It was finished.