by Jeffrey Lent
Jamie pinched off the cigarette head with his fingers and let it smolder in the needle duff, sending up a fine trail of smoke like an incense. He flicked the dead butt off into the mint patch beside the house, then stood looking down at the little flame running along the needles a moment before he stepped onto it with his bare foot and ground it out. Looked back up at her. “He was colored he wouldn’t be working here.”
She laughed. “How could anybody tell? He’s never out in sunlight. What’d you do last night, yourself?”
“Me? Nothing.”
“Nothing? Come on.”
“Stayed away from Laird’s because you’d told me to. Rode out to Franconia and drank a bottle of whiskey and went for a cold goddamn swim and rode back here. Went to bed alone. Had a fine old time.”
“I bet you did.”
“Did what?”
“Had a fine time. You likely didn’t even know you were enjoying yourself, riding along getting drunk. Feeling sorry for yourself. I bet you had a grand old time, doing that.”
“I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself.”
“Of course you were,” she said, grinning at him. “You wasn’t feeling sorry for yourself you’d of been chasing after some girl somewhere. Don’t think I don’t know you a little bit.”
He tipped his head and squeezed his nose between his thumb and turned-back forefinger and said, “You think so?”
Then she said, all the gaiety gone from her, “You thought, in your heart, I was off with someone else, the first thing you’d do is get laid. Yes I do. I know that.”
He looked off, over at the bucket of balls and the dropped driver, then off into the tamaracks where the sun had gone, leaving them standing in a cool shade of cloud cover. While he looked a burst of wind picked the boughs and flopped them hard and then was gone. The air was still again. Cooler. It would soon rain. He said, “I never hurt you.”
“Not yet,” she said. Her eyes on him. “I need to take a bath. A long soak. I’m too wide awake to sleep but it’s going to hit me hard later on.” She went around him up onto the steps. Stopped there and leaned to kiss the top of his head. The smell of him the oldest constant thing she knew outside of herself. She said, “It’s going to rain. There’s not much to eat. Why don’t you put the top up on the Ford and when I’m done we can ride up early and eat some supper somewhere. I could eat a real meal. A bucket of steamers maybe. Or a beefsteak. Something like that.”
Then, the wind whipping down through the boughs again, flapping the tails of his shirt around her thighs, she went in through the screen door. He watched her go across the kitchen and out of sight into the bathroom. The sky was suddenly low and dark, the way storms dropped here. In minutes it would be raining, pouring water, the sky torn purple with lightning. He heard water running in the house behind him. Then it began to rain hard, slantwise. He walked out through it to the barn and put the top up on the car. Opened the passenger side door and looked around the seat and floorboard to make sure Alice had not dropped or left something. Removed a single long blond hair from the seatback. He was a little ashamed and angry at being found out without being found out. As if her innocence was worse than any knowledge. And did not trust her innocence either. Did not trust much. Was glad he had held on to Sloane, had not mentioned the name. It would’ve been easy. Not yet, he thought. The blond hair was wrapped around one finger. A thin ring of gold cut into his skin. Patience was the best weapon he knew. He unwrapped the hair and dropped it on the barn floor where it was lost in the old hay. He was hungry and liked the idea of going somewhere to eat before work. The bucket of steamers would be good. Little butter-soaked cunts. The rain was lashing in the door of the barn, thunder now right atop the trees, flattening the world. He thought of Joey in the bath, knew she’d have a candle lighted against the sudden dark afternoon. He advanced to the barn door and stood looking out, getting wet. His driver and the bucket of balls were still sitting, a puddle around where the bucket had filled and was overflowing. He took his trousers off and wadded them under one arm and ran naked through the iced snakes of rain toward the house. Up the steps and inside. Wet and cold. He dropped the pants on a kitchen chair and went into the bathroom. His skin prickling, tight. His prick out before him.
It was no trick finding Sloane. He left the Sinclair the next evening just about dinnertime and walked the slow two miles east to the Maplewood, the main street rimmed with red light from the westering sun and people in slow promenade with the day’s heat broken and Washington sitting neat as a cutout at the end of the street, the small jets of black smoke from the cog railroad rising from the slope as if the mountain breathed. He walked down behind the hotel, past the farm buildings and stables and beyond the kitchen gardens to a stretch of rough field studded with outcroppings, following for some time the reports of a gun. He perched up on the top rail of the old-fashion stile set into the fence and sat watching, smoking, making no effort to hide himself.
A hotel or stable boy was heaving the clay pigeons, snapping his arm in a flat motion of elbow and wrist to throw the small discus. Cradled in his other arm against his body was a stack of the pigeons. A crate of them sat on the ground. The boy tried to get another into the air right after the first so there were two sailing through the air at the same time. Only then would the gunner, Sloane, raise his shotgun, the motion a swift smooth upswing as his body remained still but seemed to crouch and spring forward at the same time. The pigeons were thin black slices in the sky until hit and then they blew apart in a scatter of fragments. Jamie sat watching. There was a clear satisfaction in it, he could see. He’d thought it would be the sound of the gun but as he watched he guessed that Sloane didn’t even hear that. It was the spattered clay he was tuned to.
Sloane shot with a thoroughness, a tenacity of spirit and concentration evident even from this small distance that Jamie recognized immediately. It was the calm certitude of a man centered exactly in the world, one whose shoes owned each piece of ground they fell upon. The clay pigeons that broke apart were not so much appreciated as expected. The others, those few that fell in a long glide into the grass, were dismissed, not worried over. Not as if they hadn’t existed but simply they were gone. He was moving along to the next set, ready for them, the double-gun broken open and the brass and paper cartridges ejected still trailing smoke to land in a litter of other shells behind him as he slipped two new shells into the gun and then held it, ready before him, up against his chest, alert and relaxed. Jamie sat smoking, the tobacco mixed with the sweet-bitter waft of burnt powder from the shot-shells.
Sloane finished while the hotel boy still cradled a stack of pigeons, just left the gun broken open over his arm and reached into his pocket to hand the boy a tip and turned and stalked up through the field toward the fence. The boy restacked the clays in the wooden case and then bent to gather up the spent shells. Sloane walked toward Jamie, not looking at him on his perch, just walking up out of the field with the gun held like a child in the crook made by his left arm while his right hand passed a handkerchief over the length of the barrels and the wood of the stock.
Jamie watched him come: a man of medium height and build, full-fleshed but not fat, his features birdlike, replete and avaricious at once—a hard brow and nose falling to soften with a full chin. Hair the color of old silverware, cut as if it were a utensil. Jamie watched the fingers of his hand running over the gun, concentrated, meticulous and unaware at their work. Sloane came up to the opening in the fence and glanced up at Jamie and his eyes slid past to the hotel beyond as he turned himself sideways to come through the stile, his eyes going off Jamie as if he were a bush or shrub, some ornament set out by the hotel. A sundial. A weathercock. No one he needed to know.
And because of this Jamie spoke to him. He hadn’t planned or wanted to. He’d wanted to be the stranger out of place. An observer. Instead he felt like a boy. So he said, “Good shooting.”
Sloane then paused and looked up at him. He said, “You a hunter?”
&n
bsp; “Not so much anymore,” Jamie said. “For a while I did. And I’ve been thinking about taking it up again.”
“Well, you should. It’s what a man is. Most directly and without dressing himself up. Everything else we do, that’s just for show. Don’t waste your time young man. Don’t waste a bit of it.” His eyes already turned away, toward the hotel, the lowered dusk, the dinner formed in his mind. Jamie sat rocking on his buttocks and heels, both sharp against the fence rails, nothing to say as Sloane stepped through the stile and walked up toward the hotel, not looking back.
He walked back to the Sinclair and spoke with both bartenders and again lifted a bottle of bonded whiskey from the shelving behind the bar and went out into the night. He drove out of town, this time taking the back road to Franconia, the long way around the shoulder of the mountain, the road washed and gullied and ripped by boulder-backs even in the dry pack of summer, driving slowly, at times idling the car by inches along the broken and spavined crust of roadway, drinking from the opened bottle held between his legs, the headlamps pale illumination as the car rutted its way. A mile or more above Franconia he came out into a brief meadow that broke the treeline sufficient to show Mount Lafayette in the moonlight, the cleft between the flanks of the mountain clear in the night air. He rolled the car to a stop and shut it down and got out carrying the bottle with him and walked into the meadow where the hay had just been mown and lay in long swaths. He sat there with his knees up, working at the bottle and smoking cigarettes, the moonlight over everything faint and brittle as the crisp sugar of the drying hay.
He was doing what Joey had thought he’d done two nights before. In a way this made him feel more honest. Sometimes other people get the facts wrong but the intent correct. She had said nothing of Sloane. Even if her account of the night of Canadian fiddle tunes was honest there was the omission of some detail, some way that Sloane fit into the night for her. Even if he was not there. The problem, Jamie had long felt, was not that people weren’t capable of telling the truth; it was that they weren’t able to understand what they were hearing. The truth was not a line from here to there, and not ever-widening circles like the rings on a sawn log, but rather trails of oscillating overlapping liquids that poured forth but then assumed a shape and life of their own, that circled back around in spirals and fluctuations to touch and color all truths that came out after that one. So a thing was not one thing but many things. A fact many facts. He understood this perfectly and understood also that with the first words out of his mouth this understanding would collapse to a small mean thing, a target to be driven home toward. There was the sensation of being trapped, caught between who he was and what could be explained. He lay back in the hay, his hands behind his head, fingers laced, the moonlight spread around him, the bottle upright, nestled in the stubble beside him. The summer nightsky, the Milky Way, was a broad smear of light overhead. Except for the Dipper he did not know the stars. As a boy his father had tried to show them to him and he would strain to follow the broad thick finger and nod his head but could not discern shapes or patterns in the great blot of distant lights. He wished he knew them. It was one of those understandings people seemed to have of the world that he could not grasp. He strove to ignore them but he knew his lacks.
He sat upright suddenly, waking, hay in his hair. He did not know where he was. Some time had passed. The moon was gone, the sky more pitched, the stars brilliant. He found the whiskey bottle, his cigarettes. Stood and drank, wavering. Retched and leaned and spewed a vile stream onto the hay. It backed up into his nose and he hawked and spat. Drank from the bottle once more and then once again. Spat and walked a ragged circle against the heavings of his stomach. Lobbed the bottle off into the woods, where it fell into the underbrush without the satisfactory crack and splatter of glass. Smoked. He felt unspoken between them was tacit understanding that screwing for gain or leveraged compensation was private, business, something that lay outside the slender artifact each returned to the other for; he did not expect purity from her anymore than of himself but only fealty of her heart. Hers the same as his, damaged goods, an ill organ beyond hope of repair or long life but known to the bearer and so something to be trusted. He felt her his twin, so deeply mirrored as to be a sister sent over from some world running side by side with this poor one, some part of himself missing now found. He believed this, of himself, of her. He trusted her.
He did not trust her. Up in that lost midnight meadow of hay standing with his neck bent back toward the sky and his eyes pinched tight he saw her vivid astride a prone Sloane: the slow wet glide of her with her back arched, her head bent back as his was now so her loosed hair was a down-strewn broken piece of night-river with her face lost in it, her arms and shoulders and collarbone forged twigs, her breasts pulled up by the curve of her back, the nipples greedy, his hands covering them. Sloane in turgid satisfaction, some part of himself watching this young woman work over him, some part of him expecting this, some part deserving, believing he deserved. A shooter of clay pigeons.
He started the Ford and backed around in the meadow and rode through the woods again back to Bethlehem, where a lone horse stood between the shafts of an empty gig, the horse jumping sideways and shaking the gig as the motorcar passed, the broad street otherwise empty. He stopped at the Sinclair but the bar there was closed and empty save for an old man with a bucket and mop scrubbing the sticky floorboards. Drove on then to the after-hours club with bricked-up basement windows in the house of a man, Laird, that Jamie did business with but did not care for, the two of them each puffed and tight with the other, speaking in jokes and barbs indirect and circuitous. Here a couple of motorcars and a couple of buggies were edged up in a clump under the sugar maples behind the house. One of the cars belonged to the one-man police force, a Spanish-American veteran, a captain, a man called Haynes. Jamie sat outside, squatting in the dark near the bole of one of the maples, smoking and watching the black rectangle of shut door. If she wasn’t there he didn’t want to walk in looking for her.
The basement walls were stone and mortar foundation eighteen inches thick and he couldn’t hear anything, music or voices. He might have been the only man in town. The horses at the buggies next to him stood each with one foot cocked up, sleeping. From time to time one of them would briefly rouse and shake the harness or grind teeth on the bit and then go back to sleep. His cigarette smoke drifted and lay about him in the night. After a time the door opened and Scully came out and shut the door behind him and stood without moving, taking fresh air, stoop-shouldered near to a hunchback from the cumulative years bent over the keys. As if his body had become a functionary of the instrument.
Scully looked past him a little when Jamie came up. That was all right. Jamie said, “She’s not here, is she Scully?”
Scully thought about it. “She was tired. Went on to home I think.”
Jamie nodded. “I’d guess she’d be tired. You too, after that carouse the bunch of you went on last night.”
Scully looked at him then. “It was a late night.”
“I wouldn’t ask you anything you’d have to lie about. You know that.”
Scully looked away again. “I never covered up anything for anybody.”
“I know it.” He paused then, looking away also. Wanting to be gone before anyone else came out the door. He said, “I’ll get on home myself I think.”
Scully nodded. Then said, “You ought to marry her, you know.”
Jamie grinned at him. “I don’t know, Scully. I don’t know she’d have me. I thought about it but I’m not sure either of us is the marrying sort, her or me. Seems like all it might do would make bad things worse and chip off some of the good in the process. You know what I mean?”
Scully nodded again, the dome of his head pale-bald in the darkness. “I always thought of marriage as a way to death. But then it’s not such a grand thing, being alone, you get older.”
“I’ll think about that,” Jamie told him. “Like I said though, I have doubts
she’d have me. Right now at least.”
Scully was kneading the fingers of one hand into the wrist of the other. Sore, wanting to play, to get away from Jamie. He said, “Right now’s probably the best time for it, you ask me.”
“Think so?”
Scully looked at him. Shook his head. “What do I know? I’m the least expert.”
She was not at the house. He lighted a lantern and carried it to the derelict barn and loosed the two driving horses from their straight stalls and followed them to the trough by the pump and pumped water until the trough was overflowing and listened to them drink, the long knotty gurgling pipes of their throats working. Once, he’d liked horses. It would not be so many years though and the motorcars would function year-round. Roads would continue to improve, the cars too. Sometimes the future lay open like a staggered deck of cards. If you were not bound to the past. The smell of horses, the sweet and sour of their coats, the dried sweat turned to dust rising off a smacked flank, links of a chain cut through and through but unbroken still in the small hidden glands working memory. He carried scoops of sweet feed from the bin to their mangers and they turned from the water and came back eager to their stalls and he fastened them to the manger-chains. Carried forkfuls of what remained of the good hay to them. He needed to buy hay for the winter. It was growing light and he went to the trough and picked up the lantern and went to the house. Other times no soul could say what the morrow carried.
He did not see her for three days. He did not seek her out. Wherever she was she had new clothes. It was the only thing he could say for sure. He spent time in the office behind the bar in the Sinclair and went over everything so the business could run on its own until the end of October or burn down before then, he did not care. He attended to his liquor business. On the third day he left work early in the afternoon and drove the long slow thirty miles north to a lumber camp up near the Connecticut Lakes where there was a man who owed Wells and Terry money that they owed to him. It was not a thing he had to do. They were competent in collections. The man was a Frenchman cook at the camp and Jamie asked for him by name and stood out in the sawdust-strewn yard with the hot summer sun against his back, his shoulders strained already as he called the man out of the long low cookhouse, a big man but fat and soft with a face puffed and red from his ovens, his thumbs up in his red suspenders over his naked sweating chest. Jamie stepped forward and explained why he was there in a simple declarative sentence as he stooped and came up with a broken canthook handle that he laid across the face of the man and as the blood blew forth from the Frenchman’s nose and as he came forward and down Jamie stepped back and brought the handle deep into the Frenchman’s belly and the man crumpled onto the ground and Jamie left him there. Driving the miles back as afternoon turned down to evening he stopped the car and was sick. He hadn’t eaten in days. He could sit in his office behind the bar and order a full meal off the dining room menu and some girl would bring it back to him. He wanted oysters. A salad. Some roasted joint. Potatoes. The small puffed steaming rolls. Butter. Pie.