A Wedding on the Banks (34 page)

“She's pretending not to see,” Vinal informed Pike. “But she'll be telling everybody by nightfall how many pimples you got.”

“I ain't got no pimples, do I?” Pike Gifford had always been a vain man.

The Plymouth left the wives of Mattagash behind, in genuine shock, and buzzed up next to the car full of the Ivy grandchildren. No one looked. Used to the rudeness of the city, dulled by the unpredictability of what their fellow man might attempt next, Cynthia kept her city eyes ahead, on the lookout for potholes. Randy lay in the backseat and bemoaned the geographical limitations forced upon his recreational habits. Regina kept her eyes down, on the even sentences of her book, where there were no lurking road hazards, just smooth literary sailing.

Disappointed with their audience, the Plymouth lurched up to the car following the hearse.

“That's Pearl and Sicily,” Vinal told Pike, whose head was beneath the level of the car window.

“Hurry up,” Pike told Vinal. “I'm freezing my ass off!”

“Hey, McKinnons!” Vinal shouted, keeping a quick eye on the road. He tooted until Sicily and Pearl and Amy Joy and Junior and Thelma all turned their heads, like well-trained ducks.

“Oh my gosh,” said Sicily. “Who
is
that?” She would recognize Pike's upper body parts, but the part he was now exhibiting, the part that was filling up his entire window and turning pinkish with cold, could have belonged to any man in Mattagash. And she couldn't see the driver of the car because of the hairy buttocks filling the window.

“Giffords,” said Amy Joy. She recognized the shark. “Vinal and Pike.”

“Grown men,” said Pearl.

“Oh Lord, deliver us,” Sicily whispered. She had never even viewed Ed thusly, let alone a Gifford.

“Okay now,” Vinal, the ringmaster, commanded. “You showed 'em the moon, now give 'em some sun. Flash 'em, little brother! Blazon forth!”

“All right,” said Pike. “But only for a minute. I'm gonna throw up a hot dog. And if gangrene sets in, I'll lose my balls.”

“There's more where them come from,” Vinal assured him.

“More
balls
?” Pike inquired. He had heard of skin being grafted.

“Hot dogs,” said Vinal. He leaned ahead to grin at Sicily and Pearl, as Pike got on his knees in the front seat of the Plymouth.

“Hey, Sicily!” Vinal shouted, and tooted loudly. The Cushman driver slowed the car down to fifteen miles an hour. Vinal did the same. Pike's penis was now bouncing outside the window, growing large with excitement.

“I can't feel a thing, Vine,” Pike exclaimed, still reluctant to disobey and therefore disappoint his big brother.

“McKinnons deserve the best, Piker!” Vinal shouted. “And women don't call you Pike the Spike for nuthin'!” Pike's immense organ bobbed in response, a sock on a windy clothesline.

“Lord love a duck,” whispered Thelma, and then looked quickly at her feet. Even on Valium, where sometimes things did appear larger, she'd never seen the likes of that. Bob Barker would pale in comparison.

“Hey, you two old McKinnon biddies. You old widows,” Vinal screamed. “Try not to fight over it!” Pike smiled proudly over a well-known Gifford genetic trait, well-known at least among Giffords.

“I can't feel anything now,” Pike cried, as the anesthetic weather took away all sensitivity. “I'm completely numb.”

“Let's pretend not to notice,” Sicily sat up to say. “Let's just look straight ahead and enjoy the nice day.”

“This isn't a nice day,” Amy Joy reminded her. “It's a funeral.”

“Can't someone do something?” asked Pearl. “I wish I had a gun.”

Junior had heard Amy Joy's words, had heard the names.
Vinal
and
Pike
Gifford
. Albert Pinkham had come outside when Junior first discovered his defiled Cadillac on Monday morning, and Albert had said it point-blank.

“Vinal and Pike Gifford,” Albert said. “There's no doubt in my mind. I'd recognize their work anywhere.”

Junior quickly undid the enormously long belt from around his waist. He rolled the window down carefully and hoisted the belt outside, buckle first, as he gripped the other end. Then he let Pike Gifford have it
whack! whack!
across his exaggerated manhood. Pike's manhood was now no longer numb. A whipping belt carried more clout than a whipping wind. He screamed and then fell backward, onto Vinal's arms as they steered the car. The steering wheel cut a smooth arc to the left and the shark obeyed the command. The Plymouth plummeted off the road and bounced down a short embankment, taking down a handful of inch-wide saplings and catching up clusters of dead burdocks around the axle. The oil pan dropped off, like a discarded, messy slop pail, and lay quietly in the brown grass. The motor died away and in its place the songs of the birds rang clear.

***

“Do you see
now
what I'm telling you?” Randy Ivy asked his sisters, as none of the three grandchildren could possibly ignore the Plymouth once it buzzed past them and hovered like a demented hummingbird alongside the car ahead. “What drug could possibly be worse for me than a week in this town?”

“Wow,” Regina said softly. “Do you suppose Daddy really did hire professional mourners?”

***

“Stop crying, Claire,” Winnie finally found the voice to say. “You weren't manhandled, for heaven's sake.”

***

“You can still count on the Giffords for a little excitement,” Pearl said with positive enthusiasm. “I think Marvin is looking down right now and laughing his head off. I think Marvin would enjoy this.”

“Junior took care of those scofflaws,” Thelma bragged. Her husband was fitting the belt around his massive stomach once again.

“I got to buy myself a belly toner,” Junior said, pretending a wish to change the subject. Maybe he would sign up for lessons at Southern Maine School of Karate. One never knew when such things could come in handy. Especially if a man, a Junior, had to protect his family now that the Senior was gone.

“They really are something, aren't they?” Amy Joy said to her aunt Pearl, and they exchanged a knowing giggle.
They're just giving us some mud to wash off, Amy Joy
, Pearl could have said to her niece, but didn't. She could tell Amy Joy already knew.
They're doing their job, so that we can do ours.

***

Vinal and Pike sat drinking beer and enjoying the peaceful spring view afforded them by the Plymouth's plunge down the embankment. They had come to a quick stop where the small poplars were leaning inward, shading the brook, and the old pussy willows were still clinging tenaciously, furry kittens, to the willow trees.

“Beautiful day, ain't it?” Pike spoke first.

“Yep,” said Vinal.

“Won't be long now and we can go fishing.”

“Yep.”

“Are you mad?”

“You might say I'm embarrassed.”

“But, Vinal,” Pike insisted, “he caught me a hell of a wallop. I probably still got marks on my wanger.”

“Did you have to
fall
on me?”

“Where
could
I fall?” Pike flailed his arms for emphasis. “Into the goddamn car full of McKinnons? Into the
hearse
?”

“You made us look like two fools,” Vinal said, and snapped an empty out into the dead hay. From the trees over the landlocked shark, tiny warblers let their spring songs burst from their throats. Fresh leaves shimmered, casting a mottled shadow down upon the peeling roof of the Plymouth.

“It sure is pretty, though, ain't it?” Pike asked after a few more minutes and another beer had passed between the brothers. “Look at it this way. We hardly take time out of our schedules to get back to nature, as they say nowadays. Let's just consider this an opportunity to get to know our environment.”

Vinal drank more beer and thought about this.

“Besides,” said Pike, “there ain't nothing me or nobody else can do to make
you
look like a fool. Not
my
big brother!” Vinal smiled, the tiny brown cave of decay between his front teeth peeping out to say hello to Pike. A good sign, Pike knew, when he saw that brown spot emerge. Pike sang along with the birds of spring, now that social things were settled.

“‘One little girl in a pale pink coat heard. Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo.' Can we still get us an eight-track?” he asked Vinal.

“I suppose,” said Vinal, jovial again. “But we better get us some motor oil first.”

***

When the northern raven swirled over Mattagash in his blessed current, he saw the Plymouth, a new sight for that wooded area. He knew the territory well, thanks to his swift intelligence and roving eyes. He knew it in different ways than did Winnie Craft, or Girdy Monihan, or Claire Fennelson. But he saw no sign of roadkill.

Over the field near Giffordtown, where Vinal and Pike both stood peeing watery beer beside the shiny black car, the raven broke out of its current and flew freely, along the spring-blue river, along the shaggy tops of the pines. At the Protestant graveyard, high on its hill, where a meadowy thrust of land jutted out into the river, the raven found another sweet current and rode it up, like a black cinder, into the sky. Below, the fresh grave awaiting Marvin Ivy spilled outward onto the remaining snow like a reddish, anxious maw. The northern raven enjoyed his delicious current a moment longer, watching curiously as the small black figurines inched up the sloping hill, their cars nested quietly below them on the road. The bird swung out of the current, past the graveyard, and its people, and their tiny interests in life. The raven swung away to the St. Leonard dump, where it hoped the gleanings would be more satisfactory.

***

Pearl remembered how she had stood next to her baby sister Sicily, only a decade before, and watched Ed Lawler slip away into the earth.

“Oh, Sissy,” she said to Sicily, and her thick ankles and shins and thighs seemed ready to cave in with her weight. “Oh, Junior,” Pearl whispered, and Junior took her arm, braced her against him.

“I'm here,” he said firmly, and Pearl looked at him with puzzlement, and then pleased curiosity.

“Yes,” she said finally, and willed herself to stand alone. “Yes,” she said to her son. “I can see that you are.”

“We'll make it,” Junior said. Pearl cleared her throat.

“If
he's
not yammering anymore then I won't start,” Pearl decided.

“Here, Mother Ivy,” said Thelma. “Lean on me.”

“Yes,” said Pearl, trying not to watch as Marvin's coffin began its short trip down into the earth, into the old-settler land, far from the Russia of his father, far from the Poland of his mother. But Marvin's own father had told him many times,
Funerals
are
for
the
living, son. Remember that and you'll make a killing.
Marvin would have been delighted to go where the living wanted him. And it was important to Pearl.

“I can't drive to Portland every time I get the urge to see his grave,” Pearl had told Junior. “His grandkids, let's face it, don't give a damn where he's buried, as long as he's not in their way.”

“That's it,” Thelma assured Pearl, and held her arm tightly just above the elbow.

“I'm leaning on Thelma,” Pearl said, and she looked into her daughter-in-law's dark-rimmed eyes for the first time in, well, maybe for the first time ever. “Poor little raccoon,” thought Pearl, as she allotted a bit of her weight to Thelma's shoulders, a bit to Junior's.

“This is what you wanted.” Junior looked up to the cloudless spring sky and thought, sure that Marvin Ivy could hear him. “We're finally doing it for you, Dad. We're getting our buffalo bonbons into one box.” He looked beneath Pearl's chin at Thelma, staggering and pale under the burden of her mother-in-law. Junior winked, his eyes red-rimmed with grief, and Thelma winked back.

“We can do it,” he had told her the day his father died, when he went to room number 1 at the Albert Pinkham Motel and laid down all his transgressions before Thelma. “Monique Tessier is out to destroy us,” he warned his wife about his mistress. “But she can't hurt us unless we let her. We can keep her out of our lives and we can get our lives back together.”

The grandchildren stood in their Easter colors and were silent for a change. Cynthia Jane thought it disrespectful to even tug, and so no audio or video responses came from Junior's children. Pearl looked at them vaguely. They were a part of her, as she was of the old settlers, yet she didn't know them. They were instead,
apart
from
her, like soft balloons in pastel colors, bobbing at some park, and not in a graveyard.

Amy Joy looked at the coffin sinking, as if it were her trousseau, her hope chest disappearing.

“Remember when we buried Daddy?” she asked Pearl. Pearl heard the question over her shoulder. The voice that asked it was a young voice and, oh, now that Pearl was back in Mattagash she wanted the input of the young. But this was not a grandchild's voice. This was Amy Joy, boy crazy, life hungry Amy Joy. Pearl half turned until she saw the face, the simple, enchanting, crippled face of youth.

“I still dream about it,” Amy Joy said, and Pearl saw, within the eyes of youth, that painful lesson sometimes never learned. She saw a truth one would never find in the eyes of Winnie or Girdy or Claire. She saw the eternal, universal truth for some of the pilgrims who traverse the twisted highways and byways of small towns.

“It takes a strong person to outgrow their environment,” Aunt Pearl Ivy said to Amy Joy. “You'd make ten Dorrie Fennelsons any day. She can't hold a candle to you.”

Amy Joy smiled and for the second time in less than a decade, the women, those old agriculturists, those
first
gardeners
, saw their men folded like seeds into the indifferent earth, and they grew stronger for it.