I squatted there, looking at the cloth, most of which was underwater, though some of it lay along the surface. I saw myself returning to the Peetes’ garage and fetching a long square-headed rake and returning to the swamp. I saw myself dragging at the offshore cloth, pulling it in to me, and then seeing how, very slowly, the corpse beneath it rolled over and came to the surface to bob there, swollen and eaten away, with maybe no nose or lips or fingers.
Of course I was seeing only cloth, no corpse, and even if there were a corpse it did not have to be Artie Arthur’s mother, or some young aunt, his mother’s kid sister, say, who had tried to rescue him or who had been the only relative left in the world to take care of him on a daily basis. I had no idea why he might require rescuing, or why he had ended up in the mortgage-vortex motel. And I could not account, bloated body in the swamp or none, for the car behind his cabin this morning or its absence on the other mornings.
Otherwise, I thought, I had pretty much caught up on events at the swamp. I stood, and the great blue heron, in all his leathery grayness, jumped slowly into the air and flapped away on wings I would have sworn I heard creaking. I looked at the cloth again and thought again about the rake. This is what can happen, I thought in my father’s tones, when you succumb. You let yourself fall into flesh, and then you see what you get.
After Mrs. Peete’s car had lurched past, returning from the market, I brushed and brushed at my hair with the set of military brushes my father had given me when I went away to school. He had bought me a gray three-piece suit at Brooks in Manhattan, and a leather toilet kit he’d called a Dopp bag, and a set of stubby, wood-handled hairbrushes. He dressed very well, if your taste runs to clean shirts and shined shoes and good suits. He ran his own consulting firm, and he was brilliant, my mother said, and I knew him to be very sharp about numbers and strategy. He was always making plans with me, over the phone, when I was in school, to come up with strategies for dealing with my teachers. I remember how during one of those calls I insisted that all they wanted was for me to read my fucking textbooks. I was almost in tears. After quite a long silence, he breathed out hard, and the noise flooded the receiver and my head. “Strange, how I never thought of that,” he said. “I kept thinking you’d gone stupid,” he said, “but all we’re confronted with here is you’re lazy. Is that right? Or you’re busy curing cancer, and you don’t have time to waste on what the mortals are supposed to do?”
I took a towel and my toilet kit, and I walked across the frozen but softening ruts and wrinkles to the Peetes’. Rebecca’s very old Saab wasn’t parked beside her mother’s sedan, and I was relieved and disappointed. Mrs. Peete, in fawn-colored slacks and a black turtleneck, her slacks tucked into high, black boots—a kind of joke about country manors and those who struggled to maintain them—seemed not to be relieved, and, actually, she appeared to be very disappointed when she opened her door to find me on the old stone stoop.
“Oh,” is all she said.
“Hi. I was wondering if I could use the shower today. Now, actually. If that would be all right.”
“You look like you could use one.”
So much for the military brush.
“I thought you were here for your wages,” she said.
“You don’t pay me wages, Mrs. Peete.”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s right.”
“Though you could, if you really wanted to.”
Her glare was not what you would call the expression of someone receptive to humor. The only time I saw her face in a friendly expression is when she reminded Rebecca, in front of me, of a habit of Rebecca’s former husband, a viola player in Albany. He seemed to like to crack his knuckles, and Mrs. Peete’s square face, with its bulging blue eyes, framed by a coppery color so fake it made the color of Rebecca’s hair look phony, had broken into three sections: the creased forehead notched vertically above the nose, and then the cheeks which dimpled and went red, and then the mouth, lips parted to show her thick yellow teeth in a glaze of saliva.
She waddled ahead of me, as small and chunky as Rebecca was tall and thin. She led me upstairs, on creaking steps, although she knew I knew the way. She pointed to the guest room, where I would change, and from which I would walk, in only a towel, to the adjacent bathroom. She would sit in her own bedroom, down the hall, and would listen. I assumed that’s what she did—listen to the pad of my bare feet, to the sound of the shower or the flushing of the toilet or the scratching of the towel against my back as I dried off. When I was done, she would listen to my return to the guest room and, when she heard my boots on the floor, she would emerge from her room to frown at my cleatmarks—though she’d never asked me to take off my boots—and then she would lead me down the stairs.
The guest room was painted pink, with white woodwork. The bathroom was tiled in white with pink woodwork. The soap was pink, and so was the bath mat, and so were the towels that I was not allowed to use. I tried to think of Mrs. Peete’s pink skin, yards of it, against pink sheets, beneath a pink Mr. Peete, employed, to the moment of his death, as an insurance adjuster. Talk about falling into flesh, I thought. I realized that I’d been singing in the shower about how I was going to board a passenger plane and not come back again. Suspecting that it might be true, and living in hope that it was, Mrs. Peete would have the three-story smile on her face again, I figured.
Downstairs, she led me into the kitchen. I caught a glimpse of the living room, its dark antique furniture, its maroon sofa long enough to use as a lifeboat, and I could see the signs of them both—the scattered magazines and papers of Rebecca, and the basket filled with twine balls on a neat stack of what I knew to be Reader’s Digest condensed novels (all of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, I thought, but in seven pages). I sat at the kitchen table as she expected me to, with my damp towel and toilet kit on the floor beside my feet, hands folded on the table’s edge, and Mrs. Peete served out—not once engaging my eyes or, so far as I could tell, looking directly at me—a plate of homemade beans and little pork chunks, all of it baked in molasses, and a large glass of milk. I despised milk, but I always drank it at her table.
“I got the wall started,” I said.
“I saw it.”
“It’s a good idea. You’ll like it. You get a feeling of separation, but you still can see what’s going on.”
“Yes. That’s how Rebecca said it. Just exactly like that.”
So she had found a way to make it clear precisely why she hated me. Not only did I look a little alien to her—not quite Martian, but not assuredly not, either—but I was her daughter’s choice of recreational drug. Which was not entirely true, since Rebecca also brought with her, from time to time, for recreational purposes, a little packet of grass that she purchased in Poughkeepsie. At those times, looking at it from Mrs. Peete’s point of view, Rebecca was compounding the crime.
She always poured me a second glass of milk and gave me a plate of her buttery cookies to eat with it. In silence, then, I finished the cookies as she watched me. As she always did when I said my thanks, she replied, “You’re entirely welcome.” This time, she added, “Have a nice week.”
I said, “You can feel a little spring out there.”
“I’m not so sure,” she said.
I nodded, as if to signal that I’d reconsider, and I gathered my bag and towel, and she walked me to the door, perhaps to make certain that I left.
I paused in the foyer and said, “Could I ask you something about the neighborhood?”
“Neighborhood? There’s this and there’s that, across the road.”
“That’s the that I wanted to know about, Mrs. Peete.”
“That’s the that. You went to college to learn how to talk this way?”
I hung my head, because she was gifted in her production of the sound of sneering and facial furrows of disgust. I could not imagine anyone whose pride she wouldn’t erode.
“You know the way to Poughkeepsie? When your car is working?”
“It n
eeds a new battery. It can’t hold a charge.”
“What does that say about you?” she asked.
“I’m afraid to guess.”
Her face writhed and then composed. “This little road, once upon a time, could get you to Poughkeepsie. Parts they don’t keep up anymore, and parts they shut down. But in the 1930s, the 1940s, this was a good road. The motel people lived in this house. One of them’s a ghost. I have seen him, but never mind. I don’t argue about ghosts.”
“A little boy?”
She looked pale now, and I understood how much of an effort she was making to be civil, much less give her knowledge away to the hired man. I was stealing her magic and, because of her daughter, she was abetting the theft.
“A man,” she said.
“The motel owner?”
She said, “Enough. Enough. Shower, lunch, the guided tour ... enough. Have a nice week.”
“Just—do you remember his name, Mrs. Peete?”
But she had closed the door as I stepped across the threshold. My mouth tasted gluey, and I smelled the heavy, sour smell of milk drifting up my face as I sang the song about leaving while I walked. Before I forced myself back into the trailer, I went around to the front and looked across the road at the motel: eight cabins, empty sign frame, and no charred car.
Inside the trailer, I took my jacket off and put a sweater on. It might have been close to spring, but it was very cold, and I was quite sorry for myself.
“Give us a smile, ducky,” I said, looking at my reflection on the glass that sealed in Julia’s print. “Oh, I see. You’re just not gonna smile, are you?” I said to the bushy, shape.
“Eat my ass,” the shape replied. I did hate cheerleaders. I also hated my poverty and almost any exchange with Mrs. Peete. I detested my insistence on living here the way I did. In addition, I was violently allergic to feeling that I had no choice. And I was down to only one, which I despised: go to my parents’ home, watch my mother weep, listen to my father, sounding like a badly played slide trombone, perform his solo from The Lost Time But Lesson Learned Don’t Stray Again Now Get Back Prodigal Blues.
Fortunately, the beans began to have their effect, and I was driven from my profitless metaphysics to considerations of the actual: the state of my digestive system, and the cold winds in the woods. I lay down on the little bed and closed my eyes and, every once in a while, sent up a hiss of gastric distress. I actually fell asleep. It was the only other place I knew to go, this side of suicide or military service. I woke with a little stirring of pleasure, for I had come to realize that I had three choices instead of one. Though in truth I could not imagine myself shouting in unison with a bunch of eighteen-year-olds and then running in step for miles to the cadences called by a drill instructor. I think it never occurred to me that I might try to be an officer. Officer Bear. So, I thought, waking, beginning to lose what had passed, an instant before, as an insight, there is always suicide. But maybe this is suicide, I thought. It seemed pretty likely. On the other hand, I thought, if you aren’t killing yourself tonight, you had better head for the woods.
So I put my jacket on, took toilet paper and flashlight, and went from the trailer in what was now a porous darkness, and I walked into the woods. The winds had died, and I could hear creatures in the underbrush—voles and mice and rats, I thought—and stirrings in the high branches of trees—maybe owls beginning to hunt. I also heard a car gear down, then crunch its way along the gravel of their drive. I cut toward the house and got closer, then stopped behind a Norway maple to listen to Rebecca in the dark. I heard her turn the radio off, and saw the lights go out, before she turned off the motor, which meant that she was sober. When she was drunk enough, she’d leave the Saab in the driveway, engine running, radio loud, and all lit up. I backed away and headed for a far corner of the pine plantation, where I was as useful as I’d been for weeks. Rebecca would eat supper with her mother, and her mother would doubtless describe my provocations. Rebecca would smile her nervous smile—it came and went, like a tic—and I would crouch in the trailer, as I was doing at that moment, and, rather than try to make a sketch or read a book, I would lie in my clothing on the bed, waiting to sleep and, as usual, waking the next day with a kind of alarm as I noted that I had slept the deep, easy sleep of a man possessed of reason who was weary from his many accomplishments.
I was out and working on the wall by seven on Sunday morning, hauling stones, cleaning them off, setting them in. I used the back of a hatchet I had found in their garage for chipping off lumps so the stones would fit together. I whistled a medley of tunes from musicals that had flopped. I was working my way through Anyone Can Whistle, which was about crazy people being the only ones who are sane. The sun wasn’t strong, but I could feel it, and I sensed the turning of the seasons as, all of a sudden, a fact. I was getting ready. I was going to make a move. I had no idea what it would be, but a move, I would have sworn to you, was forthcoming. I got pretty loud and sparky as I chirped a number that Harry Guardino had bellowed, and then the toes of Rebecca’s tan work shoes were between me and the rocks at which I worked.
“Well,” I said. “You caught me.”
“Working?”
“Whistling.”
“Working and whistling,” she said. “Isn’t this where Sneezy and Dopey and Sleepy come in?”
I did a few bars of “Whistle While You Work” and then stood up. She was hatless, but she wore her father’s old mackinaw. I reached for the part where the lapels crossed and I looked inside.
“You have clothes on,” I said.
She went red. “Sorry,” she said.
“For having, or for not having had?”
She shook her head, looked away, into the sunlight, then back to me. “I need to leave here,” she said.
“Me too, Rebecca.”
“I can’t live with my mother.”
“I’m pretty sure that no one can live with your mother. If you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Nobody can,” she said, “you’re right. Anyway, I can’t. I’m signing a lease on a place in Hudson. It’s just off the main drag, near all those antique stores. I figure my mother and I might know each other longer if we don’t live in the same house. But I am—” She closed her mouth and pressed her lips together before she said, “I was about to make one of those miss-your-good-company declamations,” she said, looking away again, then looking back. “But I am. What’s your thinking on it—about missing me and all?”
I stood there with her, feeling shaggier, and dirtier, and less than familiar with English-language conversations, apprehensive, light-headed, proud as well as embarrassed.
“I will guaranteed be missing you,” I said.
She nodded. She looked across at the motel, she looked down the road, as if she thought of crossing it. “So come along,” she said.
“To Hudson?”
“To my place in Hudson.”
I mustered an “Oh!”
“It wouldn’t be the same as, you know, moving in with me,” she said, as the first car of the day passed, an immense Land Rover inhabited by three yellow Labradors and their driver. “You could rent a room from me,” she said. “I have a guest bedroom. You could rent it, or you could have it for nothing. You could also use the nonguest bedroom. You know I’m a good copywriter. You know that I write okay ad copy for the third-rate news shows up here. And you know that I’m the voice of upstate HMO. I can afford it. I don’t need to take money from you.”
“You and your mother need every dime for this place,” I said. “You can’t even afford to keep it up, much less renovate. And I’d be uncomfortable, staying home while you went to work.”
“You could get a job,” she said, spreading her legs as if to set herself for warding off my excuses. Her frizzy hair was lit from behind by the sun, and she looked as if she glowed.
“Let’s see,” I said. “A job, an apartment. Rebecca, I’d be a—excuse me for this. I’d be a husband, wouldn’t I?”
�
��The last of the pagans,” she said. She shook her head, though she didn’t smile her fast, flickering smile, and I knew for certain that the invitation had been a great deal more serious than I’d guessed. “I am trusting you to not bring up the age thing, all right?”
There was nothing else to do, so I stepped up and put my hands on her shoulders and I leaned in and kissed her. It was a long kiss, and at the end she gently bit my lip.
“Pack your things,” she said.
“They’re in my pockets. There isn’t much to pack.”
“No,” she said. “Charcoal, pencils, brushes, paint, your sketch-books—you know. You can even bring Miss Patootie’s etching.”
It seemed to me that we were both too embarrassed to understand what we were doing. When you get to that point, I knew then and know better now, you will take steps or draw conclusions you end up regretting. I could offer my four and a half years of college and much of my life with my parents as examples. We stood at the wheelbarrow filled with stones, and then Rebecca turned, the way you do when you’re dancing, and she went back toward the house. Then she stopped herself and slowly walked back.
“Look,” she said, and her face was full of sorrow for me, “nobody’s forcing you to live inside that terrible trailer. Or my apartment. Or anyplace else.” Her voice was thick with feeling. “It’s pretty much you, David. Whatever place you’re inside of, you’re the one who turned the lock.”
She looked at me very directly, and she nodded her head. She wanted me to know how certain she was of what she had said, and I nodded back with respect. She walked toward the house again, and this time she kept going, waving goodbye over her shoulder. The movement of her fingers reminded me of Artie Arthur’s wave. When Rebecca was out of sight, I looked at Artie’s cabin: still no car. When, I wondered, would someone come and rescue us?
I finished several yards of wall, and it was a shape now. There were chickadees buzzing back and forth, and there were a few more cars. Surprisingly light traffic, Artie. The sun had a little weight. And to all of it I could now add the stone wall along the edge of Mrs. Peete and Rebecca’s property. I had made something pretty true, I thought, looking at the brilliant flecks of mica, the voluptuous whiteness of limestone veins, the hundred shadows and hollows, the sense of bulk and permanence, the undeniable function it served of tying down their land and holding it in place.
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 40