Accordion Crimes (52 page)

“And?”

“And nothing. Simon and I went back to New York, but he was so upset about being shot and guilty about shooting Umbrella that he started to have an affair with his boss’s girlfriend who was, incidentally, my gynecologist, who broke the news to him that I was pregnant. So we got divorced, he
married the bitch and they moved back to Minneapolis and I never heard from him again. For years I blamed my father. He didn’t have to shoot poor Simon. Just like he didn’t have to fuck that slut, my old playmate.”

“I think he fucking did the right thing. He said he thought Simon was coming to blow everybody away. He looked freaked out. As for the woman, who the fuck knows why this stuff happens? It happens all the time. And it’s their fucking problem, not yours.”

She looked at him. “You’re wrong, you asshole. Totally. You don’t have any moral balance. Let’s get out of here and drive into the mountains. Let’s get some wine and some steaks and a blanket.”

“Josephine. Let me remind you that your mother is waiting for that fucking chicken feed back at the ranch.”

She looked at him, at his handsome American face, both halves in symmetry; behind the prissy little wire-rimmed glasses his clear light eyes reflected a hostile spark; she saw the patchy cheek stubble and the mole beside his nose and his too hairless arms. He stared as well, and it was already, in a few seconds, as though he’d known her last year or sometime the year before. Their affection had curdled. They were moving rapidly toward antipathies.

“You don’t like her, do you? My mother.”

“No,” he said, knowing he shouldn’t say it. “And I feel the same way about your fucking father. Ults had the right idea—waste ’em.”

“That was NOT what he intended. I just told you.”

Still, they bought the wine and drove into the mountains and there, in a meadow blazing with Indian paintbrush, she ran from him half clothed and laughing like an advertisement for sanitary napkins; he played the game for a few minutes, then got angry
with this crap, slammed her to the ground and tore her clothes, gave her a ringing, double-handed slap when she said stop, wrenched her legs apart and shoved in, bucking and rutting. The sun had heated her hair and she gave off a scent like walnut oil and hot leaves. They sweated under the purple sky, biting each other’s lips, she raked his back, he pounded her with his full weight, rammed and thrust, the grasses sawed their skins with stinging shallow cuts, the wine bottle tipped over and spilled onto the earth, they rolled in it, growling and moaning, hurled their wine-stained, scratched, grass-and-pollen-smeared bodies into curious positions, shouted and wept, she cried oh god oh god, she broke a blood-rimmed nail, he damaged his knee on sharp quartz and mosquitoes sucked at his smarting back and her white legs, and when he had to piss, kneeling, she tenderly held his penis, and when she, squatting, repeated the function, he held his curved palm against the hot fountain, then came more cries to deities, more crawling and rolling in the matted wet flowers, and from each, extravagant declarations of profound love for the other, beyond life itself, all of this watched from a distant slope by a Basque sheepherder with his Sears binoculars in his left hand and his prick in the right.

“That was rape,” she said.

“Yeah. And you fucking loved it.”

“Your mistake,” she said. “You’ll be sorry.”

The deerflies came. The wine was gone. They dressed in silence, turning away from each other a little. They limped from the meadow, avoiding the sight of the crushed flowers. It was finished.

The visit ended the next morning, with Vergil, before he drove away, looking straight into her eyes with sincerity and an expression that said he was a little confused and hurt about the way things had turned out (his pose of decent uprightness
was a false impression for he went to prison a few years later after bilking the credulous residents of a blue-chip retirement home through his fraudulent investment company promising large returns on stocks in selected “environmentally sound corporations”), and Josephine saddled Oatmeal, a blue-marbled mare with varnish marks on her face, gaskins, stifle region and elbow, looked away from him and said, you bet, you bet. She told her parents she was going to stay on at the ranch to help Kenneth keep the stud books, and put up jam with Bette. Maybe she’d stay always, she told them, a daughterly reward for their decision to stay together after the slut’s baby died and Kenneth signed up for fidelity counseling.

(But that fall she married Matthew Handsaw, a six-foot-two rancher, another Vietnam veteran, originally from Amherst, Massachusetts, who suffered a grand mal epileptic seizure on their wedding night. She sat in a hospital waiting room reading
Rabbit Is Rich,
but fell asleep at page fifty-three. They became reclusive, and in a few years, when Handsaw was convinced the federal government was red-eyed out of control and a dark-skinned, bandy-legged United Nations takeover imminent, that a lack of school prayer had destroyed the American people’s moral sense, he sealed off the ranch with steel gates. Working together, they dug a series of bunkers and tunnels that grew into a ten-acre underground city with secret mole doors.)

One June, on the last Saturday in the month, Fay, in knife-creased jeans, a pearl-buttoned shirt, silk neckerchief, lizardskin dress boots and a new gem belt, ground up Elk Leg Mountain in the late afternoon, the green accordion bouncing
on the seat beside him, and his own concertina, cased and wrapped in a horse blanket, foursquare on the floor along with half a dozen bottles of fine Irish whiskey. He’d had the concertina a long time. The name “C. Jeffries” straggled along the wooden end. He had always thought this was the name of some waddy owner long sodded over, and he liked the instrument’s hard loud voice, the gold dolphins stamped around the frame, much worn but still leaping. He’d done his best with the old green accordion but didn’t know what to do about the stuck button and the ones that wouldn’t sound. He wasn’t handy in that finicking kind of way.

The Basques had been going all day, although the big dance platform laid out in the flowery meadow was empty, a few costumed dancers off to the side kicking their way through the incomprehensible figures of the
jota,
three or four musicians dressed up in smocks and berets and squashy shoes with crisscrossed lacings climbing their legs. They played old instruments, one piping on a
txistu
and rapping a
tambouri
at the same time, a stout man with a face as pocked as a waffle pumping the
trikitixa,
with its specially tuned reeds squeezing out “
Zolloko San Martinak,
” and behind a wagon, two men with sticks held upright in their hands, pummeling a resonant wooden plank with the butts of the sticks. He didn’t think the musicians were local people; maybe imported from Los Angeles.

Near the trees he saw trucks and jeeps parked randomly, people climbing in and out, a rope corral of horses. There was a delicious, smoky, greasy haze from the barbecue pits, men sat under awnings and open tents playing cards, women talked in a wash of music and nickering horses and human cries. The accumulated heat of the day loosened stiff faces, the aspens blurred in the heated air, the dust and the slanting mountain shadow.

He walked around for ten minutes, the accordion in his right hand, looking for Michel, the cousin of Javier, saw him finally half asleep, his wedge-shaped face down, sitting on an overturned box near the horses, one thigh roofed over the other, and smoking a roll-yer-own.

“Michel,” said Fay, coming up. The man looked up, got up, skinned his lips back from yellow teeth and twitched his head at Fay who followed him to a mud-crusted jeep. They set off on a steep track, the celebration falling away behind them. Michel said nothing, frowned steadily ahead, the coal of the cigarette burning near his lips. Fay lit his own cigarette, offered another to Michel who took it, stubbing the butt of the first on the dashboard. The track jerked up through lodgepole pines, descended into a saddle, climbed the flank of another slope and moved slowly toward a roadless inner range, the pitching crests and the great swell of earth and rock empty of human sign, the cries of swooping kestrels and the whistle of wind the sounds of the place. The whine of the jeep engine hit an alien subtone. The track disappeared and they were grinding over rocks, skirting boulders and scree, sagebrush and mountain mahogany scraping the sides of the jeep. Michel pointed away to the right and Fay strained his eyes, staring until he picked out the scattered boulders, which might be sheep.

Michel said nothing. Fay tried a bit of song,
she wrang her hands and cried,
but the track was too rough to sing, the words jolted out of his mouth, the tune shaken from under them. “Kind of place you want a horse, not a jeep.”

Michel nodded once, stopped. The sheep were still distant. Michel pointed straight up and to the right, his face tilted at the sky. There was a path. He avoided looking directly at Fay, settled back and closed his eyes.

“I’m waiting here,” he said. Already a small cloud of mosquitoes had formed around him.

“Not gonna be long,” said Fay, stepping into a weedy patch that gave out a scent of licorice, taking a piss before he started up. He slung the accordion over his shoulder with a rope loop and climbed, cursing and slipping in his boots. But it wasn’t far, a few hundred yards, a tight twist under a pair of boulders shaped like buttocks, and on a flange of flat-cropped meadow he saw Javier’s sheep wagon, the round top like a white can, the door open and Javier sitting on the sill cleaning his rifle. Up here the wind streamed, the grasses and purple lupine undulating, Javier’s shirt first billowing out and then plastering close to his body.

As Fay came up, Javier turned his face to the left, morose and shy from too many years alone in the mountains with the herds, his long oily nose gleaming. The dog under the wagon growled.

“Michel’s down in the jeep. Don’t you guys get along?”

“Get along good. Sometimes. He’s a-scared. He’s the reason I need that box. He left my old one on the front seat of the truck in the sun for five hours while he was gettin drunk. You should a seen it. Nothing to do but throw it out, all warped and the wax melted all over the inside. Anyway, he’s a sorehead. He’s the kind of guy thinks about how tough life is. He’s the sour type—nothing goes for him. That it?” He took the accordion, looked it over, grimacing at the painted devil and his worn flames.

“Nice place you got here. Lawn mowed pretty good. Garbage collection don’t seem so good though,” Fay said looking at the cairn of tin cans and bottles.

“Camp tender pick ’em up next time. He can drive up here, go around the back of that rock, down the east side.
Michel brought you on the south.” He tossed a can of warm beer to Fay.

“You’re missing the big party, Javier. They tell me you’re the only Basque around still goes out with the sheep, everybody else hires Messicans and Peruvians. They tell me all the other sheep wagons are in museums or rich ranchers’ yards for decoration.”

“Yeah. I’m too old for it, too. Get antsy when I’m down there. Good enough for me up on the mountain, come down and get drunk with you sometimes. The old dog can’t change his tricks. Used to it. Don’t want to break no pattern. Got no ambition. Anyways, let’s look at this thing.” He kicked out his left leg as a brace, turned the green accordion in his hands. “Shit, it’s a mess.”

“I fixed the thumb strap, not much else.”

Javier looked at the big wood screw pinning down a loop of leather.

“You don’t want to go into cabinetmaking, your next career. Anyways, I can fool around with it. It’ll be all right for up here; you don’t want something good banging around the wagon. Yeah, I’m too old to be up here, but that’s why I’m up here. Too old to get into something else. Sheep’s all I know. I’ll go out with it. There won’t be no wool left in the world, all synthetics anyways.”

He scowled over the accordion, turning half away. He ran his finger over the scratched lacquer, cracked buttons, the metal eyes blind with rust, the ratty bellows with Fay’s duct tape over a hole, the grille gone, the finish worn away and in one end the faint letters of a French name though the wood had been sanded. He placed his stained, muscular hands in position, drew the bellows open slowly, slowly closed them. Again. He began to play, some of the notes silent or wheezing,
another button sounding two notes at once. He sang in a husky mournful voice, a melody loose and wandering, sliding from note to note and slowly rising in pitch until it had left the beginning key far behind. “
Ah, what a fine friend I have who brings me music, who comes up the mountain smoking his cigarette, eager to drink a Budweiser, leaving behind in the boulders a slippery fellow who owes me plenty, who is too weak to climb up to the song of this old angel
—” and from below came Michel’s cry, a shrill warbling neigh that ended with a shriek too high for human ears to hear although the dog felt its pierce and yapped.

“Wait,” said Javier, disappearing into his wagon. He came out wearing a long strange necklace of small bones that hung almost to his knees.

“What is it, Ind’an?” said Fay.

“Nah, Basque, old-style Basque. I made it. My grandfather had one, but I’ll tell you the bastard ain’t satisfactory.” He hooked the forefinger of his left hand in the end of the necklace and pulled it taut in front of him. In his right hand he held a polished stick. He began to strike the small bones with the stick and a brittle, chill music, rapid and fragile, fell into the clear air. He sang softly, a plaintive tune in his tobacco-hoarsened voice: “
Ah, bizitza hau iluna eta garratza da, this life is sad and bitter
…”