by Jeffrey Lent
One evening late in July he’d just made a delivery to the Forest Hills above Franconia and was on the road home over the highland toward Bethlehem and he came around a curve to a place in the road where the land opened up on both sides, the woods fallen away for a beaver pond. The last of the sun was striking low. He stopped the car and sat in the redwine light. He smoked. For long moments, he was relaxed for the first time in months. As if he were all the way back inside himself again. He drove away, thinking it was possible again. And even thinking that, the action of thinking such a thing was clear cause not to believe it. Not to trust it.
Summer mornings he’d sit on the steps and watch across the yard where Foster had the puppies loosed from the barn, the pups’ coats growing out, their legs overtaking their bodies as they galloped and chased through the hemlock duff, their markings, more a roaning than spots, coming out on them. Long streaks of color in their ears and tails, the lemon or blue truing up. One of the males a tricolor, with a black mask and dark bay streaks on his legs. Foster sat on a crate tipped back so he could rest against the side of the barn, his legs sprawled out before him, the puppies over them like a steeplechase or using them as logs to hide behind for ambuscade. Foster near inert, only leaning time to time to pluck a pup away from embedding its teeth too deep into his ankle or to unravel a mess of them from his legs. As if the motion, the turmoil of the young dogs, soothed him. Less often, Foster would throw himself off the crate onto all fours into the duff and sand, swatting out with his hands in gentle swipes to bowl a puppy, the hand hovering as the pup righted itself and sought around itself, spying the hand overhead and attacking it. Sometimes Foster’d be down on his back, the puppies mauling over him, the boy’s laughter a bright rippling shatter to the held morning.
He’d turned sixteen the March passed. His father watched him: the boy and man piled up one atop the other inside the single gangling form. Something coming to an end. He would sit those mornings and try to determine what came next.
Late July there was an incident, what the papers called it, a calamity, far above the Connecticut Lakes in the rough unroaded border country. Something middle-of-the-night that left two federal marshals and three other men dead. A wrecked set of cars bogged to the axles with loads of Canadian whiskey. The Littleton paper was shrill. In the article Pat Jackson was quoted as identifying the three unknown men as being members of a “criminal network not locally based.” He had nothing else to say. The dead marshals were local men with wives and children. There was a service with overflow attendance. The Littleton editorial called for stomping out the blight, for cutting its head at the source. It failed to locate that source.
The doctor, Dodge, took his stud fee in the tricolor male. Afternoons Foster would take the gang of pups down to the sheep pasture along the river and sit on one of the boulder backs and watch them play. In the late afternoons he’d shut them in the barn except for the little bitch he called Glow and he’d walk out through the swampy puckerbrush with her fighting to keep up with him. Sometimes he’d get far ahead, out of her sight, and he’d hear her begin to cry. He’d sit then and wait. She’d find him. Sometimes it took awhile. Learning how to use her nose, to let her nose direct her head. He was happy to wait, squatting in the damp, holding back all urge to speak her name or utter a low whistle, anything at all. And then she’d lift her head from where her nose was drenched in his scent and spy him, coming at him then with the unleashed passion of one come to love. And he would take her up so, pressing his nose into her coat, the sweet puppy smell of her wrapping his heart.
Foster sold three of the pups through Dodge, both available females and one of the males. It was hard to accept the money, six dollars apiece, and then the men drove out of the yard and the money was in his pocket and Glow chewing at his cuffs and he felt all right about it. The last males he sold through an advertisement in the paper. This was harder yet, the people rank strangers. Without caring what the people would think he lifted each pup and kissed its head and without words wished it well before handing it over. Then it was done. Lovey’s coat began to grow back. She returned, something forever shifted in her but the old dog back. Aloof and demanding, pressing up against him at night. Turning her head away when he’d reach to stroke her. And there was Glow. A strident urgent puppy. Sometimes, in the woods, stopping so suddenly on top of some scent that she’d topple over her own legs, her nose down in the soft dirt, her eyes already turned up to scout her next move.
The way things happen. As if a gap, a hole in the world, is only waiting to be filled up. And not passive waiting but gravitational. Just after midnight, the fourth of August, the Perseids streaking the sky, Jamie at an oval polished table in the general manager’s office of the Forest Hills, above Franconia. This room a small lap of luxury left in a diminishing industry. A private sitting room with a fine daytime view of the Notch and the mountains around it: the Old Man. The manager an old hotel man called Harold Shelton. Jamie sitting there drinking whiskey through the evening hours with Shelton, both of them passing time trading stories and laments, Shelton pausing to lift the telephone in response to the bell, settling a problem without moving. Watching him do this recalled to Jamie something familiar, where a man made order in his wake. He could look clearly at Shelton and see a man out of time, a man not only of an old order but of one passed by. Who did not know that yet. Or more likely, as Jamie sat and sipped, who knew it well and was simply riding out whatever was left to him. Shelton a lean stringy man with a trimmed ginger beard and manners matching the manicure of his fingers. His hair white-patched over his temples, the white fading back in sublime fine disintegration as if a sign painter had done the job. On the wall a round electric clock, an audible click with each minute passed. A neat stack of stationery with the hotel imprint on the top of the sheet. A fountain pen and well. And the telephone. Nothing else between them but the bottle and the glasses and a pair of cork coasters. Late, and quiet in the room. Shelton turned his glass on the coaster, watched the revolution, looked up at Jamie. Jamie touched his own glass and then looked at Shelton.
“There’s a man, Pompelli. You know him?”
And watched Shelton’s face change to a set of composure, a long-practiced face laid over him, his problem-facing face.
“I don’t know him,” Shelton said. “I’d of thought you would though.”
“Why’d you of thought that, Harold?”
“Well.” Shelton looked away from Jamie toward the nightblank windows. “You’re all in the same business.”
“I’ve not laid eyes on him.”
“Is that right?”
“What is it, Harold?”
“I thought you two were doing business together.”
“What gave you that idea?”
Shelton shook his head. “What I heard.”
“Where’d you hear it?”
Again Shelton shook his head. Paused. And Jamie felt it before the older man even spoke: betrayal, not in the room but flooding over him like an electric current. Shelton said, “Now I can’t say that I did. Just, how things go around.”
Jamie breathed out. A useless question but he asked it. “You know where he is?”
“No idea. You know I’m not even in that end of the business anymore anyway. It’s other fellows now. But they, men that work for him, it’s hard to miss them. That’s maybe why I thought you’d know him.” Now also an alertness lay alongside those fear pinpricks, the globes of his eyes bright, the lids lowered by half.
Jamie sat silent a time, twisting his drink. Sat long enough for the silence to communicate fully to the man across from him. Then quietly, looking off as if addressing himself or some other presence altogether, said, “These days it seems a man can’t know what direction a thing’s coming from.”
Shelton nodded. Said, “It was me, wanting to find someone like the man you’re looking for, I’d start in my own backyard.”
Half a mile south of the Carrick farm in the Easton valley there was a pull-off in the
woods with a trailhead for hiking paths up into the Kinsman range. Far enough from the farm so he could drive another mile, turn around and come back quiet with his headlamps off and coast into the pull-off and sit and no one at the farm would know he was there. The first night he drove there at half-past two from the Forest Hills and sat until just before dawn when a cold fog rose off the Gale and spread over the valley floor. From a bend in the river or a pond nearby he heard the cry of a loon. The farm silent, sleeping all night as he sat. With the fog the dawn chill went through him and he started the Chrysler and drove past the farm where the cows were lined up at the gate from the nightpasture waiting for the barn. Drove through Franconia and on to Littleton where he ate breakfast at the diner. Washed his face with hot water in the restroom. At nine o’clock he went down the street to Stodd Nichols and bought one of the little flat automatic pistols and a box of .32 caliber cartridges for it and was patient and quiet while the clerk demonstrated loading the clip. Paid cash and drove home, the gun loaded, slid up into the springs under the seat where he could reach down while driving and find it behind his feet.
Foster was eating sunnyside eggs and toast, his legs scissoring back and forth in satisfaction and for the faint rub of his penis against his trousers, thinking of Judith Beebie who this moment he was sure still lay sleeping in her bed in Bethlehem, the all of her in a loose nightgown. He could not imagine that she might sleep without clothes of any sort as he did because he could not quite imagine what she would look like without clothes. What he liked to think about was getting her to go for a walk in the woods with him and Glow and Lovey. He was pretty sure she’d like Glow; he could not imagine anyone not. He couldn’t see a pretext for inviting her for such a walk and so he left it to chance, thinking if he spent enough time in the woods perhaps maybe he’d come across her. Sitting on a log because she liked it there. Maybe gathering wildflowers. She was a year older than he was, a galaxy. And he was left alone. Some skewed community knowledge of what his father was and what his mother had been and even the way he lived. Some distinction that set him apart. Possibly he was simply odd. A personality that would not fit in. Waiting to find that one who felt the same way about things. Ways he wasn’t even sure he could articulate but thought he would not need to. With the right one. Which brought him back around to Judith Beebie. Not that there had been any sign from her. What he thought was She just doesn’t know it yet.
He heard the car come in. He stood and moved the coffee over onto the hot side of the range. His erection subsided. He sat back at the table and mopped the eggstains up with toast. His father came up the steps into the kitchen, the screen door a weak slap behind him.
“Morning, Pop.”
His father looked at him. Jamie was beardstubbled, bloodshot, his frame soft within the wrinkles of his clothes, his movements slow, deliberate, slightly quaked and wavery. He looked around the room, back to Foster. “Why aren’t you in school?”
“Pop? What month is it?” Foster studied him.
His father ran a hand up over his face, pressed it against his eyes. “It’s August,” he said. “Only August.”
“You want something to eat? Some eggs? There’s coffee.”
Jamie shook his head. “I ate.”
“Maybe you’re not so old after all. Up all night.” Foster paused and then said, “Hope it was worth it.”
Jamie came halfway to the table fast and then stopped. Looked at the boy, the grin on his face still there but apprehension flared up in his eyes. Recalled the first time he took the boy swimming, Jamie on his back at the riverbend: holding the child over him and then lowering him slowly onto his chest, the boy kicking and squealing. Terror and delight and then abrupt absorbed silence as the water came up cold around him as he lay prone on his father’s chest. That same boy now watching him. Some fear in his eyes. A sprawl of a boy. Jamie cut his eyes away and went to the stove and poured out a cup of coffee he didn’t want. Drank some of it and set the cup down on the cooling ledge of the stove. He said, “Whatever your plan is today, I want it quiet. I need to sleep.”
“Sure.”
Jamie tipped his head, cracking his neck. He said, “Jesus.”
“You all right?”
“I’m tired is all.”
Foster stood and took up his dishes and passed his father to the sink. Began to wash up. Without looking he spoke. “Anything I can do?”
“Just let me sleep.”
“Beyond that?”
There was a long pause. Foster got the plate and cup and cutlery washed and rinsed and then scrubbed out the skillet with clean water and put it back on the range to dry. Feeling his father behind him, the strength and tension of him a magnet to turn to, to resist.
After a time Jamie spoke. “No. Nothing but that.”
Jamie woke in the long lowering summer twilight, not sure of where he was. For those first few seconds thought he was a boy on the farm in Randolph, time to rise and help with morning chores. His body rolled effortlessly as a child and he came up on an elbow but there was no window where there should be a window and then he was all back. And then groaned. Thinking of the night behind him and the night ahead. Wondered how many nights it would take to prove him right. And felt a twinge of fear turn over inside, wondering if he was too old for this.
He bathed and dressed and, shaving, could smell and hear dinner being made down the hall, his boy talking to the dogs as he worked. He paused then, his face half swathed in lather, the razor cutting broad clearings through it. He was young enough. Those fuckers. The man in the mirror had bright unwavering eyes. Foster’s laugh came to him. He smiled at the sound.
Calves’ liver with onions and bacon. Black-seeded Simpson lettuce dressed with cider vinegar. Bread-and-butter corn. A bowl of radishes and scallions. He liked a scallion dredged with salt. The corn was first of the season, sweet, bursting with milky pulp.
He said, “What’d you do with your day?”
“Helped Floods put up hay this noon. Washed the chaff off me at the river. Read some.”
“Floods can’t get their own hay up?”
“I know you can’t stand em. But that Andy’s all right. He’s a pal. It all gets shunt onto him anyway. So I was just helping him out, really.”
“I bet old man Flood loves to see you over there busting your butt.”
“Then I took the Chrysler to Bethlehem.”
“That right? Took the car to town? Just like that?”
“Somebody had to shop. It was either that or wake you before the store closed. Way you looked this morning, I’d not of been surprised you slept straight on till morning.”
“So you went to the store and came home.”
“I wasn’t out sporting around.” But did detour slowly down through the late dusty afternoon streets to pass the Beebie house and looped the block to pass by again all without sign of the blond-bobbed Judith. The answer, however you looked at it, wasn’t a lie.
Jamie shrugged then and said, “You’re old enough to want to get out and about. We’ll have to work something out, times I know you’ll be able to use the car.”
Quiet a moment. Then Foster said, “I’d like that.”
“Boy oh boy, that corn’s some awful good, isn’t it?”
“There’s more to the sink, I can drop in the pot you want.”
“No, this is good, this is enough.”
Then both quiet, busy with the food. And for Jamie, those moments recalled to him the many days he and Joey would sleep until late afternoon and rise then to begin the night, another lifetime but one that still ran threads through him and one big strand sitting across from him, and for those moments he was calm and easy, a simple partition of grace from the rest of time. And so he finished his meal, buoyant, confident of the night’s work before him. He smoked and tilted back in his chair and looked at his boy. Foster sitting watching him back. The puppy Glow working the room, back and forth between the two, waiting silent for them to notice her starvation.
Jami
e said, “What would you say, we quit all this and tried something else. Someplace else.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I don’t know. I was just thinking, maybe we should cut out of here. Things aren’t what they used to be.”
“See there.” Foster grinned. “I told you you were getting old.”
“You’re happy?”
“Happy enough.” Then, “What were you thinking of?”
“I don’t know. Out west somewheres maybe. New Mexico.”
“Live with the red Indians?”
Jamie smiled back at him. “California?”
“Be in the pictures.”
“Sure. You could do it.”
“It’s handsome fellas they’re looking for, I hear.”
“Most likely they always need somebody to stand around and make a crowd.”
“Not my fault I’m so much taller than you.”
“Point.”
A pause. Then Foster said, “You’re halfway serious, aren’t you?”
“Well. You’re about grown. Maybe a change of scenery would do you good.”
A longer pause. Then Foster said, “What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on. I was thinking was all.”
“I’m happy. Happy right where I am.”
“I can see that. But you given any thought to next year? The year after that?”
“Not too much. Some. I want to get the pup started this fall. Maybe, she works out, I might try raising some more of these setters. Maybe keep a few of the best ones, get them started, sell them that way. That’s where the money is.”
“Be a dog-man.”
“I don’t know what else. I haven’t got that figured out.”
“That’s all right. There’s time.”
Foster blew air through his lips. “New Mexico.”
Jamie grinned. “It was just an idea.”
Quiet then. A long pause. Then Foster said, “You heading out somewhere tonight?”