In the Walled City

by Stewart O'Nan

  “What are you going to tell my father?” he asked.

  “What do you want me to tell him?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  He felt better in the car. Lorena had air-conditioning, and he let it blow over him, watching the green world pass outside the window. He was ahead of himself a good half hour. Traffic on the Floyd wasn’t bad yet. There were still kids riding their bikes, straggling home from band practice in packs.

  “Your niece take that sectional?” he asked.

  “It looks great too. She took most of the stain out, you can barely tell. How do people throw nice stuff like that away?”

  Up ahead a man was walking the berm, dragging himself home after a day’s work. He had on some sort of uniform, a light blue top and dark blue pants, like a gas-station attendant, and big, clunky boots. He slumped along, head down, carrying a brown paper bag in which Carter knew there was a quart of cold beer from the Dairy Barn. They shot past him. Carter did not turn to catch his face.

  He did not get beer. Mr. Katz came over after dinner carrying a book. It was oversized and from the library, slipcovered in grimy cellophane.

  “Here it is,” he said, and opened the book to a photo of twenty or thirty men in parkas sitting around the ravaged corpse of an elephant. In the foreground stood a tripod from which hung a kettle; the men sat on stools with tin plates in their laps. They had all taken a break for the picture, and smiled wide, some holding up gnawed-on bones.

  “Imagine getting someone to cater this?” Mr. Katz said.

  The caption said there had been some diarrhea but no real cases of food poisoning. A spring snow had cut off their supplies. It didn’t say whose idea it was, and Carter went from face to face, trying to find among the gray eyes and smiles one man that crazy or brave. That first bite. Wouldn’t it smell?

  The next morning he took an early bus. Vernon was there, cleaning out the coffeepot. Lorena came in, surprised to see him. He asked if she could give him a ride home. “Sure,” she said, “why?”

  “Because I’m an idiot.”

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” she said, and they took their coffees out back and strolled through the new arrivals, looking for something promising.

  The Third of July

  Lawson’s first shot hit the lightning rod’s middle insulator, shattering the milky ball and sending up a puff of glass. He was shooting with Danny’s old BB gun, a rusted Daisy. It wouldn’t kill the hawk, just make it think twice before going near his pigeons. He’d seen it coming back from his morning regimen in fifteen’s water hazard and immediately knew what to do. If it hit prey the hawk would hang around till the whole flock was gone. He wasn’t taking any chances. Ignoring his arthritis, Lawson pumped the action, aimed shakily and fired again. He tipped his cap back to see.

  The hawk swiveled its head. It sat on the crossbar of a circular window under the peak of the barn roof. Only two dusty panes remained.

  Lawson’s elbow flared as he cocked the lever. “Damn rain,” he said, and realizing it was not raining and had not for two weeks now, laughed. He felt his jacket’s good pocket for his medicine. Forgot again. He rapped the open action against his thigh and drew a bead on the white-flecked breast. The post sight dipped and rose.

  Inside the clubhouse, long ago the chicken coop, Mrs. May turned from the window, shaking her head. Here it was, eight in the morning, city crowd on the way, fairways practically tinder, and Mr. Lawson was fooling around. She opened the soda machine with her key ring, pressed a Fanta grape to her forehead and took a slug, then lit a Carlton with one burning in the ashtray and began arranging three-packs of Maxflis on the counter. It had been a bad summer —weren’t they all since Mr. May passed to glory?—and she was hoping today would be a good day. Three years ago the state had dammed Muddy Creek to make Lake Arthur and in the process wiped out a stretch of old Route 488, which passed by the course entrance. Now people took the state road, 422, out-of-towners sticking to Interstate 79. But today was July 3rd, people were everywhere. She dusted a lazy Susan rack of sunglasses and propped a cardboard display of red-white-and-blue sweatbands against the register. Outside, glass tinkled. “Give me strength,” she said, and snapped on the PA.

  “Mr. Lawson,” a voice called from the trees. He looked up. “Do you know what today is?”

  “Saturday,” he hollered at the speaker.

  “It is Saturday, Mr. Lawson, and around here Saturday is a workday. On workdays, we are supposed to work, not shoot up my windows, thank you very much.” A shriek of feedback, a buzz, and the speaker went dead.

  “I’m just trying to protect my birds,” Lawson said. He said it again, and not receiving an answer, turned and looked for the hawk. It was gone.

  He took the gun to the barn and put it back with Danny’s things. They sat at right angles on an olive blanket draped over the hood of a red ’67 GTO. In the tuck-and-rolled backseat lay another olive blanket and a pillow covered with blue-and-white ticking —in the frontseat, a neat stack of dungarees, another of baby blue Esso uniform shirts. Lawson placed the gun on the hood and inspected the bullet Danny had sent him from boot camp. It was as long as his big finger and looked like a tooth from a tiger or a whale or something. If he had a gun that shot something like that —that’d teach it. Lawson wrapped the bullet in a red bandana and laid it beside a stopped watch. He raked the floor around the car until his footprints were gone, hung his jacket on a nail, and, slowly, painfully, lifting one foot and then the other to each rung, climbed the ladder to the lower loft.

  Before he threw off the tarp which covered the roost, he stood a second, listening to the pigeons coo and whir. Stunned by the light, they blinked as he counted them, poking a finger through the chicken wire.

  They were all there except Martin Luther King. He was forty-five miles away, at Mr. Bottsie’s in Homewood, getting ready for his maiden voyage. Bought from Mr. Bottsie as a present for Danny, Martin was the last of the original brood. He could be trusted to return. For the past eight Wednesdays, Mr. Bottsie had driven up Route 8 to Renfrew and taken Martin back toward Pittsburgh, setting him free five miles farther each time. If Mr. Bottsie let him go at three, as planned, Martin would be back for the slow time before supper. By then Lawson would have scared the hawk away.

  First, though, he had business to take care of. Mrs. May was in no mood. He counted the pigeons again and replaced the tarp. They cackled in protest. “It’s for your own good,” he said, and climbed down painfully. He slid the barn door open, and after several noisy tries, fired up the tractor and roared out into the light.

  Mrs. May intercepted him by the first tee. She was wearing a floral print blouse, black slacks, and graying sneakers. She carried a family-size can of Off which she waved above her head to get his attention. “Do the sprinklers first!” she yelled over the engine. Mr. Lawson nodded, waved, and slipped the tractor in gear. Creaking, the mower attachment threw fountains of dried grass. “The water!” she yelled, “the water!”

  He left the tractor idling, got down and came over to her. “What’d you say?”

  “The water,” she said. When he looked back to the tractor and scratched the space between his nose and upper lip, she explained, “The grass cannot grow without water, now can it?”

  “I cut first and then —”

  “There’s nothing to cut, Mr. Lawson. If you haven’t noticed, we’re in the middle of the worst drought in fifty years.”

  “Weatherman say that?”

  “He doesn’t have to.” She squeezed the Off but the can didn’t give. “Listen to me: do the sprinklers first. If we have to cut it later, I will personally cut it.”

  “But-”

  “Sprinkle, Mr. Lawson, sprinkle.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He swung the tractor around the first tee and headed back to the barn. Mrs. May sighed at the lopsided swath he left. He was her cross, of that there was no doubt. Him and his birds. And that
car and those things from his boy, it wasn’t natural. Then again, who in their right mind would take the job?

  No one, she had found when she ran an ad in the Butler Eagle. It ran the whole of March and half of April before she realized she was wasting her money. When Reverend Smiley asked if anyone had room in their heart for a brother in less fortunate circumstances, willing to work for his keep, Mr. Lawson was not what she had in mind.

  It was not that he was black or that he was a bad worker. He worked hard. The problem was that he was distracted. He worked on so many things at once that he never finished anything. Take the barn: since June one side had been whitewash, the other gray. And his car: every Wednesday after supper he backed it out and worked on the engine, gunning it, then ducking his head beneath the hood, but did he ever once drive it? Worse, none of these things seemed to bother him. While he calmly tinkered, the place was falling apart around her.

  Her son Jonathan had been right, the place was too big for her alone. She should sell it and move into Pittsburgh, near him and that girl —what was her name? In any case, she saw no reason he should give up his engineering for some rundown golf course, even if it was a legacy. He had his own life, she understood that perfectly. She just thanked God Mr. May hadn’t lived to see what his place had been reduced to. It would have killed him, sure as the lip cancer. She shook the Off until the little ball inside rattled, covered her mouth, and let loose a cloud. A bee blundered into the mist and fell to the picnic table. Mr. Lawson appeared from behind the clubhouse, flipping a wrench in the air and catching it with one hand. She thumbed the button and the bee drowned.

  Lawson turned on the sprinklers on fairways one through seven. On eight, fighting a sticky valve, he mashed his pinky. He held his hand in his crotch and hopped. On eleven, in the crook of a dogleg, sheltered from the clubhouse by a bend of oak, he opened his flask and took a tug of peach brandy. The sweatband of his cap was brown, the back of his shirt soggy. He lay down in the shadows with the flask balanced on his chest and listened to the woods rustle and the hidden birds chirp. The sky shone a perfect drought blue, unbroken save a high, sailing speck.

  Lawson ran across sixteen, up a hillock, and over the ninth green, switching the wrench from his left hand to his right and back. Keeping his eye on the hawk, he tripped over a baby fir and got up swearing.

  In the parking lot, a man and a teenaged boy sat on the tailgate of a new station wagon, changing into their spikes. They both had white-blonde hair and squinty, tanned faces, and wore kelly green alligator shirts and khaki chinos. Mrs. May stood by, her hands clasped before her.

  Lawson looked up. The hawk was sweeping circles, drawing them tighter and tighter as it climbed.

  “Is there something, Mr. Lawson?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, “hurt my hand’s all.” He flexed it.

  “Oh my,” she said, and took a step toward him to inspect it, but a wall of liquor knocked her back. She should have known. For her guests’ sake she said, “Well, quick go and take care of yourself. We want the back nine to look as nice as the front.”

  “All I need’s a piece of ice.”

  “There’s plenty in the clubhouse,” she said, but he was looking up at the sky as if it were about to storm. He stood with his chin in the air for a moment, then broke for the barn, tearing across the gravel. “That’s Mr. Lawson,” she explained to the man, who was shoving fluorescent green balls into his bag. “He’s not all here all the time.”

  The man did not smile. He pointed to the browned course and asked, “Is it playable?”

  “Till seven-thirty or sundown, whichever comes first.”

  The man bought two half-day passes at ten dollars each, the boy a thirty-nine-cent bag of tees. Mrs. May suggested they drive a few before teeing off. She said she wanted to let the fairways dry.

  “What do you say to a bucket?” the man asked his son.

  “I could hit one.”

  She lugged two buckets of red-striped range balls around the counter and led the man and his son around the barn to the range tee. The range was an overgrown meadow which sloped down to a creek, beyond which a loose barbed-wire fence held back clumps of oak and horse chestnut. Faded signs marked the yardage up to 300. Jonathan had painted them the last summer he came home from Penn State. As the man ground his tee into the dirt, Mrs. May told herself to remind Mr. Lawson to redo them.

  The man let his son go first. His backswing was jerky, all elbows. The head of the driver scuffed the ground and the ball shot over the meadow, hooking to the left of the 100 sign and hopping once before settling in the high timothy.

  “Try it a little slower,” she offered.

  “If you don’t mind,” the man said. He positioned himself behind the boy and placed his hands over the grip so they could both swing. The ball rose straight until it was lost in the bright sky, white on white, finally caroming high off the 150 sign. “Hold that front hip back,” the man instructed, “that’s where your power comes from.” He knelt and held the boy’s hip while he swung. “Feel that in your back?” When Mrs. May left they were both dropping them in at 200.

  As she rounded the barn, she narrowly missed running into an aluminum extension ladder. At the top, on his tiptoes, Mr. Lawson was reaching a square piece of plywood toward the window. He was well short of it. He climbed another rung and almost lost his balance, dropping a hammer which landed not five feet from her. When he looked down to see where it went, she beckoned him with a finger. It took him a few minutes to get down.

  “What in the world,” Mrs. May asked, “do you think you’re doing?”

  He pointed up. “Window’s broken.”

  “That particular window has been broken the entire time you’ve worked here. Why would you pick today of all days to fix it?”

  “I don’t know, it needed fixed.”

  “No, Mr. Lawson, it needs to be fixed. Which it does, I agree with you there. However, right now we have more pressing concerns, such as the sprinkling, if you didn’t remember.” A car appeared on the access road, trailing dust. “When you’re done turning the back nine on, turn the front nine off. We’re going to be very busy today and I’m going to need your help. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lawson said, and she strode away. He waited for her to clear the side of the clubhouse before following.

  The sun was higher and hotter. He skipped fourteen and fifteen, the holes farthest from the clubhouse, and on sixteen squatted facing the barn. From the range tee, the man and the boy lofted rainbows.

  After Lawson finished eighteen, Mrs. May brought him a glass of ice water and asked how his hand was. Around the picnic table sat eight paunchy men in T-shirts and shorts. Each had a can of Iron City, and one was chewing tobacco. “I know the heat is beastly,” Mrs. May said, “but if you would turn off the front nine, these gentlemen could get started. After that you can take a short break.”

  Lawson wrapped the ice in a paper napkin, put it on top of his head, and pulled his cap on over it. “Hey,” one of the men said, “can we get some of that?” A few got up and went into the clubhouse. “Wait,” Mrs. May said, and snatched the empty glass from Lawson and hurried in after them.

  Strolling down one, Lawson suddenly felt sorry he had skipped the two holes. Mrs. May was a fair woman (fair and hard like all good people), but she didn’t know the least thing about birds. Maybe if she did she wouldn’t be the way she was. Not that there was anything wrong with the way she was, being out in the middle of nowhere by herself so long. It wasn’t any easier for her, not by a long shot. What she needed was something to take care of besides the course, something to take her mind off her troubles. Pigeons sounded like the answer. He hustled down the fairway, and when he reached the sprinkler didn’t linger in the cool jets.

  “Wait until he’s past the green,” Mrs. May told the man on the tee. The other foursome was headed for ten, toting their bags on their shoulders. The old Brunswick carts were in the barn. For a while after Mr. May died,
Jonathan came every spring and got them in condition, but he had stopped —when?—it must have been five years now. And Mr. Lawson, for all his work on his car, had not once laid a finger on them.

  “What about now?” the man asked.

  Mr. Lawson was inching up the slope in front of the sandtraps, two hundred yards away.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  The man set his beer can down by his back foot, addressed the ball with a loopy half-swing, and sent a line drive screaming across the fifth fairway. “We’re playing a mulligan, right, guys?”

  Mr. Lawson tromped straight across the green.

  The father and son were sitting at the picnic table, and when Mrs. May steamed past, the father said, “I think we were here before they were.”

  “I’m aware of that,” she said, but she had in truth forgotten them, and flustered, not having another answer, she apologized and had them start on sixteen.

  She went into the clubhouse and sat behind the counter with a wet washcloth over her eyes. A fan with blue plastic blades turned in its cage. From time to time she lifted a corner of the washcloth and peeked out the door. It would not do to have Mr. Lawson find her like this.

  And the city crowd, they would be here any second. The holiday traffic was holding them up, that was all. There had been days, and not so long ago, before the state had built Lake Arthur, when people poured in right after lunch, shot a leisurely eighteen, and stood around the picnic table, sipping gin and tonics. They would ask who won the Firecracker 400, and the men would argue who was the best, Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough, or David Pierson. About dusk, Mr. May would roll out the gas grille and barbecue chicken wings for everyone, and later, when the fireflies and then the bats came out and she put Jonathan to bed, he would light the tiki torches and there would be sparklers and singing. And going to bed, the quiet —