by Jeffrey Lent
The fourth day he was up early, midmorning. All he was doing was going to work, coming home, not staying up. He wanted to see no one. Whatever was being talked of had not reached him and he understood this absence of gossip as a gauge of the problem. He had been a very small boy last he wanted to cry. Take her by the shoulders and shake her until her head lolled and her eyes turned up. He built a fire and waited and threw a handful of grounds into the boiling water and set it aside to settle. There wasn’t anything to eat in the house not spoiled. He wasn’t hungry. He burned his hand pouring coffee into the small cracked cup with the wild roses running just below the rim that she always drank from. Drank it burning and puked in the sink on top of a pile of crusted crockery. As if his stomach wanted out.
He went from the house to the barn and took up a shovel and walked out into the thin woodlot grown up with alders and young birch, where fall mornings timberdoodles would rise up straight to tower over the young growth and hover a moment before planing off, leaving scattered over the marshy ground the whitewash of their droppings. He could maul a man, eat a chicken, discharge old men from their last hope of gainful employment but he could not shoot a bird. It was not an event of purity. Another lack. Fucking Sloane. Carrying the spade he walked out past the spots where he had paper money buried in coffee cans and mason jars with dome lids and rubber seals, farther into the puckerbrush, and once there he did not hesitate but sank the blade of the spade and turned up the black wet soil he already knew was undisturbed but still found the tea canister of gold wrapped in burlap sacking that he hefted and then reburied and smoothed over the ground, scattering gathered trash of twigs and finger-raked leaf mold back over the scarred ground. It was hot. Sweat ran into his eyes. He backed out of the thicket and stood and deerflies were over him and he swatted at them and realized he was naked, that he had left the house without dressing. His body flecked with blood from the bites and smeared with mud-prints from his hands. Stood looking down at himself so. A savage. Some kind of man. Deerflies in his hair. On his thighs, his rear. His back low where he could not reach. He danced, swatting himself with his free hand, and then stepped down on a berry cane and was stabbed and at the same moment stung on his forehead and he swatted himself between the eyes with the other hand that still held the spade handle. The sunlight through the leaves and trees swelled and burst. He stooped in a crouch, leaning on the spade. He began to cry.
Up on the road out of sight of the house an automobile came to a stop, the cylinders popping like single drumbeats. He strained but heard nothing more. Then came the clap of a car door being shut. Still holding the spade he began to run. His idea was to make the barn and go from there to the river and swim and so clean himself and come up to find her already in the house, composed however she would be, himself as any other morning. Well, he practiced silent, it’s a pretty day isn’t it.
Into the backside of the barn, panting, streaming sweat, he laid the spade against the wall and stepped toward the front door of the barn and saw her coming down the sand track through the tamaracks into the clearing, striding loose-jointed, easy, a posture he hoped. Still wearing the same white dress piped with black satin as four days before but holding up pretty good he thought for four days’ wear. He scrubbed the streaked tears and sweat from his face with muddy hands. It would’ve been easier if she’d strolled in wearing a new outfit—he saw she would not lay a thing out before him. Her containment a full measure.
There was nothing for it but to walk out and greet her and she looked him up and down, her eyes cut with laughter and fear. A flick of concern, one of victory. “What happened to you?”
“I was out in the woods.”
Her eyebrows arched. “Wrestling what? A catamount?”
“I wasn’t wrestling anything. There was some dogs barking woke me up and I ran out there and chased them off and fell down and got the shit stung out of me by deerflies. I was just going down to the river to swim. It’s awful early in the morning for you to be up and about. Your boyfriend kick you out?”
“No,” she said. “My boyfriend did not kick me out.”
“Well. I don’t want to hear whatever story you made up and got ready to tell me. I guess maybe you don’t feel so cornered anymore. That’s good. I’m happy you knew you could go off for however long you wanted and do whatever you wanted with whoever you wanted to do it with and get yourself uncornered. And know you could traipse back on in and I’d be falling-down-glad to see you. I’m glad you knew that much. But I don’t want to hear the first word out of your cocksucking little mouth right now because I’d split your lips open and lose you some of your teeth and feel pretty good about doing it. So I’m going to go swim. I figure you either came back or come to pack your trash and get out. I get back up here from the river and you’re here, then forget about whatever you had all rehearsed to tell me. You understand me?”
“I heard that about you.”
“Heard what?”
“That you’d taken to larruping on french canadians.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She scanned him again up and down, most clearly not liking what she saw. “Old men and now women. It’s a sad place to come to, Jamie. I saw Estus Terry; he told me how you broke up that old cook’s face.”
“How’d you see Terry?”
“Told me he’d already got the money you were after. He was spooked, Estus was. Said he paid the doctor for that old man from his own pocket. And a fit of dentures as well. Told me he couldn’t see how you’d go off like that.”
There it was, he thought. Her hair a jumble like she’d risen from bed five minutes before or worse didn’t care about it and in clothes rumpled and dusty but still too fresh for four days of living, walking in like any morning, her eyes clear and large and it all turned back on him. He could not help himself. “I’ll settle with Terry. And that Frenchman business was about a lot more than him. Estus knows that. He was working on you was all. Where was it you said you saw him?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t say. But he was at Laird’s two nights ago. Looking for you. All I could tell him was you hadn’t been in.”
“I guess that’s right.”
“You hadn’t. I don’t know what you were hiding from but it didn’t need to be me.”
He looked at her. “Estus Terry knows where to find me otherwise.”
She stepped forward then and ran a finger over a point on his chest where a deerfly bite had crusted, her finger taking away the crust and then daubed again in the slim rivulet of blood that seeped, lifting the finger to her mouth and cleaning it between her lips. “I guess,” she said, “he’d tried to find you. I guess that’s why he came to talk to me. I can’t see any other reason for it, can you?” Her eyes open on him now, great blank reflections empty of everything but himself.
“Whatever Terry told you about that Frenchman, he knew better. Terry’s got no reason to be frightened of me.”
“Oh Jamie.” She sighed. Then looked around the clearing, at the house, the barn, the stand of hemlocks and tamaracks as if sweeping for an answer or merely confirming what she already knew. She said, “He’s asked me to go off with him.”
Imbecilic, seeing himself so, his mouth stretched grotesque around the words, “Estus Terry?” As if his brain was determined to keep with the old order, the other conversation, not to move forward the step she had already taken. And her look of naked pity as if viewing a spine-broken chipmunk, some creature she could not help but love.
She shook her head and said, “No.”
“I know,” he cried out. “I know.”
She was silent, her head in a small shake, not to refute him but to make clear some way he could not know, could not understand. A gesture beyond her control. He saw all this.
“Fuck. It’s that fucker Sloane you’re talking about isn’t it?”
“Edgar,” she said.
“What?” He hadn’t moved, was breathless.
“His name’s Edgar.
” She looked away then, as if giving away something she’d not intended. He thought there might be a balance there, some teetering point he might nudge or slip into motion or challenge or change.
He stepped back away from her and stood running one toe in a circle in the sand and needle-trash and again realized he was naked and crossed his arms over his chest and said, “So what’re you going to do?”
“What do you think, Jamie?” Her face tilted back at him.
He shook his head. “I knew I wouldn’t of asked.” Paused and added, “You look like you’re afraid of me.”
“I been afraid of you since I first ever saw you.”
“You and me,” he said, “I thought we were kind of partnered up.”
It was hot in the clearing there before the house. A sheen of sweat over her face. Her eyes flared, wet. “We had some times,” she said.
“Some times,” he repeated, the center of him opened, heart, soul, a knife thrust neat from septum to sternum. She knew she was shredding him and still she would do it and now for the first time in those five years he felt the heat of that engine turned against him, the peculiar force she emitted as if it did not belong to her, as if she held no responsibility for the low moan that came forth and entered into the dried heart and bitter soul of the man listening. “Some times,” he said again. Then without pause said, “So, he just going to move you in with his wife and children?”
“It’s so small-time. You think you’ve got your hand in everybodys pocket, don’t you.” She shook her head, a small contempt. “It happens he knows men, in Providence and Boston both, men in the entertainment business. And I’m not talking about music halls and such but theatre, real theatre. He knows I’ve got a talent, Jamie. All he wants is to help me. It’s not always about how much cash or how much ass. I know you don’t believe that. It’s no sure thing, I know that. But this is a chance, a risk I’ve got to take. Could be the only one I get.”
“You’re stupid. All he’s going to do is stick you away in some cold-water flat somewhere and pay your bills and give you enough money to live on. Maybe turn you out to some little work or another so you feel like the gold ring’s just around the corner. And come by to fuck you once a week. Just turn you into your mother is all he’s going to do.”
“You asshole.”
He went right on. “Maybe that’s the right thing. I mean, maybe that’s how it works. We can’t ever learn a thing. We just keep doing the same things over and over. Not even intentional. Like we can’t help ourselves. Like it’s who we really are. That’s it—we spend our lives just becoming what we already someway know we are.”
“I hate it here,” she said. “I hate the winters, all cooped up, frozen. I hate the summers too, the same people, year after year, the same little diversion I make on their summer trip. I hate saying the same things over and over, singing the same songs over and over. I hate it. I do! I can’t stand it anymore.”
“You think that’s really going to change? Say, even all the things you think you want, say those happen? You don’t think it’ll someway come down to the same thing? Pleasing people you couldn’t care less about? People who don’t give a shit about you, people you’re just a ornament to. You doubt that? It comes down to it, it don’t matter whether you’re fucking Mister Edgar Sloane on some cold winter day or trailing around in a fine gown with a glass of champagne and five hundred people all dressed up pressing your hand and kissing your cheek; in the end, the end of the day, they all go off and leave you alone with yourself. And where’s that leave you? Where do you think? Just right there alone is all. Just right there with your own self and nothing else.”
“That’s just it,” she cried. “You think that way, you won’t ever find anything else. I’m sick of it. I’m just sick of thinking that’s how it’s going to be.” Her face strained, turgid, the gape of a turtle snapping at air. So lovely.
“Well fuck,” he said. His energy gone, unfocused, shriveled. As if he’d held her in his hands as long as his words came forth and then with them gone she also fled back into herself. Wherever that was. Not here. “Fuck it.” He began to walk a circle around her, stalking, his feet churning the sand, his motion a tightening of his pitch. “I never did a wrong to you. I never trailed after you. I let you go your way. Maybe that was my mistake but it’s how I have to be, how I have to live, whoever it is. I gave you everything that’s mine to give. I never wanted anything but you. I trusted you. Trusted you with me. Stupid fucker, right? Stupid fuck good only until something better comes along. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
Her voice small when he was behind her. “I never thought I knew you. Who you really was.”
He struck, grasping her shoulders and turning her to face him and he leaned close so he could smell her and she him, drops of sweat flung from his face to hers. “All right. Fuck it.” And he sprang away from her and ran the simple feet to the Ford and tore loose the crank and jammed it home and twisted it tight and looked then over his shoulder at her still standing where he’d turned her and called to her. “Let’s go then. Get whatever it is you come back for and let’s go. I’ll take you where you want. Let’s get out of here.”
“Jamie,” she said, advancing a step toward him.
“What is it? He up there on the road waiting for you, is that it?” His body crunched down against the front of the car.
“Jamie.” Stopped now, her face torn apart before him.
“So you don’t know me. All right. Let’s go.” He twisted the crank and let it go and the car popped and churned and died and he raced around the side of it and adjusted the magneto and the gas lever and then ran back to the front and again spun the crank.
“Jamie.” Her voice up, calling him.
“What? What do you want? What do you want from me?” Words like birds breaking their way free, splintering his breastbone. Still leaned at the crank.
She beat her thighs with her fists. Cried out, “I don’t know.”
They did not speak words again until later when they were down at the river both naked then—after he’d come those few steps forward from the Ford—forever after not able to recall how he traveled that distance and their mouths struck together so their teeth broke through their bloodied lips as they suckled and fed upon the other’s mouth before he picked her up and carried her into the house, the two of them already a one-formed creature lumbering through the kitchen knocking over a chair and down the hall to the bedroom where he threw her down upon the bed, driving the wind from her lungs as a hole in her his soul might fill, she lifting her legs and skirts toward her chest as he knelt and tore the knickers from her and there was language there in the room but no words. After that first brief wild spiral when she rolled him off of her and stood without looking at him and removed the fragments of her clothes, her breasts already bruised and raw from his lips and teeth, bending over to take him in her mouth until he was full and strained again and then over him in a hard wild flail that had him arched from the bed in a beaded bright pain far beyond his command or desire to stop, he helpless before her driving, even his vision swept red and he could not tell in that not-darkness where he left off and she began; a liquid-gripped pair of fists connected them and the sea of red over his eyes pulsed with the blood of both of them, driven each time in perfect time with the cries breaking from her mouth hot against his face.
And still not speaking as they lay apart on the bed gathering their wind back and each benumbed and someway still joined and already each alone, the afternoon light through the windows where the sun fell over the floor, the room hot and still enough to hear the settle of the other’s limbs against the mangled sheets. They lay a time like that, on their backs, just not touching, neither willing nor wanting to speak, and then he stood off the bed and she followed him and they went back through the house and she gathered up towels spread over the backs of kitchen chairs to dry from days before and they went one beside the other along the path they’d made through the thick boles of the widely spaced everg
reens, across the sheep meadow and over the fence, down along the river to the bend where they always came. She sat up on the ledge of rock and watched him swim and then came in after him so they both came out of the river at the same time, hair slicked back and bodies tingling and for just a moment shining with heat and water like spun honey before the air began to dry them and even then they were still silent but lay back on the towels spread on the boulder.
For a time he lay thinking there was no need for words, that the last hour had flung off the shroud fallen over them, between them, during these days just passed, that they would rise up from here at some point and go on as they always had or not even that but in someway not yet known to them, and he lay believing this until enough time had passed and she had turned with the heat from her back to her stomach and he began to believe this long wordless gap was a point that neither could rise from and carry on as before, that the gap itself was all he needed to know about it. And then he lay for a time more, aware that once he spoke or even likely moved there would be an end to all this. He heard a ewe bleat for her lamb in the pasture above them. Beyond that the snipping worry of a chipmunk. The river. The sound of the river where he wanted to live. Over the surface of the far back pool of the riverbend a green damselfly moved, its wings a translucent blur against the brilliant body. He watched until it was out of sight in the shadow thrown down by the undercut bank. Then he stood and roughed his head with the towel, looking away from her although he could feel she’d sat up, was looking at him, at his back. He took a breath and let it out and took another, her eyes against him. He looked off at the far side of the river and said, “I’d marry you tomorrow, you wanted.”