Driftless (17 page)

“What’s the matter, Russell?”

“My knees,” he said.

“You need that operation.”

“Maybe and maybe not. Right now I need a pill.”

In the medicine cabinet Rusty could find no aspirin. Instead, he found a prescription given to Maxine six months ago after dental surgery, and he took three tablets. But he resisted returning to bed, afraid the same thoughts would find him again.

Downstairs, he carried a cup of hot tap water with a squeeze of lemon into the living room, sat on the sofa, and sipped the sour liquid in the darkness. The lemon had a soothing smell. He thought he saw something moving, an animal perhaps, in the moonlit farmyard. He went to the window but could not make out the shape. It was cold near the glass as he stared through it, trying to see something that lacked definite borders. To keep the pane from fogging, he held his breath. Something seemed to move from one minute to the next, near the barn. He watched until his legs hurt enough to force him back to the sofa, and he remained there until he could feel the painkiller working.

Then he saw it again, and returned to the window. This time he was confident that he was seeing something. It moved from one place to another, like an animal, rushing quickly ahead five or six yards, then freezing for several moments before continuing to another shaded area. It advanced from beyond the barn, under the gas tank, beside the lilac bush, and onto the front lawn. As it came closer, its shape grew more defined, and by the time it crossed beneath the clothesline to crouch in the row of mums at the edge of the garden, he could see clearly that it moved on two legs, like a child.

Rusty backed away from the window and assured himself that he couldn’t be seen. He had turned on no lights downstairs.

The shape continued coming forward until it stood just beyond the window—a boy, dressed in patched overalls, with naked shoulders, barefoot. Rusty froze as the child pressed his face to the window, his eyes searching and the palms of his hands against the glass.

Then Rusty saw his hat—a hand-sewn leather hat, without a bill, with fur lining and oversized earflaps. The sight of it calmed his breathing. It was the kind of hat that no one had worn for sixty years. It was the kind of hat that could not be worn. It was the same hat Rusty had worn for three winters until his mother had given it
to his younger brother, Carl, and Carl had worn it until one of the dogs chewed it beyond mending. At the recognition, the searching expression on the boy’s face changed into a smile, showing several front teeth—teeth that were perfectly white, untarnished by his later smoking.

Rusty moved forward and the boy backed away from the window. When Rusty took a step closer, the boy retreated again. Rusty went to the back door, opened it, and stepped into the yard. The cold grass bit into his feet. The boy backed further away and they looked at each other. The boy took the hat off his head and stuffed it into his overall pocket. Then he turned and ran silently, effortlessly between the mums, beneath the clothesline, across the barnyard, disappearing into the darkness beyond the barn. Rusty raised his hand as if to call him back, then returned inside.

In the kitchen, he heated a saucepan of water and poured it over two heaping spoonfuls of instant coffee. He added cream from the refrigerator and sugar from the cabinet and seated himself at the table. The hot mug warmed his hands and he drank deeply, staring into the steaming liquid. His memory, stretched like an elastic band almost beyond its limit to include the many paths his life had taken, snapped back to its normal position, where it had first been imprinted. He remembered the little unpainted house where he had grown up, above the quarry, north of the logging road along the river, five miles from the town of Domel. He could smell wood smoke curling from the chimney and hear the jeering of crows as they fought over a place to sleep in the pines. The stars poked through the darkening sky above Tinker Hill. He remembered—for the first time in decades—the dirt path worn around the side of the house, the goat pen and the root cellar door that usually stood ajar, a face-wide slot of absolute blackness opening into the heart of the unknown. He could smell the outhouse near the mulberries and hear his father’s dogs running through the timber along the ridge.

Consuming these memories like a starving man at a banquet, Rusty fought to reclaim his past, in handfuls. He could remember the sound of the neighbor’s wagon clattering on the logging road, the clopping of mule hooves, the sight of a yellow moon through the
cottonwoods along the river, and the demonic noise of cats in the dump. He stood outside their little home, pumping water from the shallow well, looking at the sky, wondering how fireflies could make fire. Like primeval cathedral bells his mother’s voice called and he ran to the front door, pulled the metal latch, and entered. Warmth from the iron cooking stove touched his face. Comforting fumes from the kerosene lamps filled his senses and the room flickered and swam in golden light. He ran across the dirt floor, packed as hard as concrete, and climbed up on the rough wooden bench beside Carl. Across from them, their older sisters, Nora and Elsie, sat in girlish anticipation of eating from bowls of hot biscuits and gravy, winter squash, squirrel fried in cornmeal, and great foamy glasses of warm, sweet milk. His sisters looked at each other and giggled, enjoying some secret feminine game from which he and Carl were thankfully excluded. Under the table, Carl’s pet raccoon looked up at Rusty, its masked face providing fatal mockery to any explanation of life that did not allow for a wild designer of deep, unbearable ideas.

Rusty drank all the liquid from his mug, then put on more water to boil. He stood beside the stove, waiting for the little bubbles of air to rise from the bottom of the pan. Memories continued to march through his consciousness, connecting him to parts of himself long buried but still alive. As wraiths of steam silently rose from the surface of the water, he could feel the milky veil that had for so long prevented him from seeing himself clearly dissolve. He poured hot water into his cup and prepared for a long and difficult task—the assembling of bones. He began to feel whole, and it hurt.

STRAIGHT FLUSH

T
HE HORNED OWL STOOD OUTSIDE THE TOWN OF LUSTER ON the edge of a cornfield, a sprawling steel-sided building with concrete floors and low ceilings. The band Gail Shotwell played with, Straight Flush, drew some of its largest crowds here.

Inside, the main room contained the bar, pinball machines, video poker, dartboards, booths along two walls, and a dozen tables that could be pushed together to allow for dancing. The adjoining room housed a walk- in freezer, grill, and an overhead backlit menu in lettering so small and covered with grease and smoke stains that it could not be read. Those who tried to decipher the words—by cleaning their glasses, standing up and squinting—merely succeeded in signaling to everyone else that they had never eaten there before. The owners, John and Betty Hornshee, hired a band to play on the second Friday night of every month, and people came from a wide area to listen and dance.

On this night, Straight Flush’s van and trailer were parked near the side entrance as its four members unloaded equipment through the double doors. Gail carried her bass and amplifier inside, then returned to help with the rack-mounted amplifier, CD player, equalizer, mixing board, effects, microphones and stands, monitors, fogger, lights, and scaffolding. They assembled the equipment on a six-inch-high plywood stage opposite the bar, made from pallets.

Behind the counter, John Hornshee passed two mugs of beer to a middle-aged couple wearing denim jackets, straw-yellow cowboy hats, and boots. Two men in their mid- twenties in T-shirts and blue jeans drank bottled beer at a booth in the corner, absorbed in conversation. A tall, mustached man, late thirties, walked through the front door and called loudly to the owner, with whom he was obviously well acquainted. He was dressed in black denim jeans secured around
his waist by a softball-sized Harley-Davidson buckle, and a sweatshirt with large black lettering: SHIT HAPPENS. He exchanged friendly insults with the owner all the way across the room, settled on one of the bar stools, and poured a can of cola into an ice-filled eight-ounce straight-sided glass. Four salesmen ambled into the grill area and ordered meals from Betty Hornshee. A short, muscular bartender in an ironed white shirt and tan pants hung up a leather jacket behind the bar and with obvious satisfaction began arranging a double row of hourglass-shaped glasses on the counter before the mirror. John Hornshee broke open a stack of quarters and dumped them into the cash register with a loud rattle.

Gail helped the keyboard player lift the speakers onto mounting poles on either side of the stage. Jim was in a hurry, hoping to eat before they started. They would play successive forty-five-minute sets followed by half-hour breaks until closing time at 2:00 a.m.

The owner carried two more bottles of beer to the men in T-shirts and on his way back to the bar explained to Gail and Jim that each band member could have three free drinks during the evening. Jim thanked him and hurried off to order a medium-well steak. Gail tuned her bass. Buzz, the drummer, and Brad, the guitar player, plugged cables into the back of the mixing board and selected CDs to load into the player for breaks.

By 7:30 the equipment was ready. Because the television above the bar had burned out in a recent lightning storm, Buzz and Brad carried their first drinks out to the van to listen to the Packers game on the radio. Jim waited in the next room for his steak. They didn’t start playing until 8:00.

Gail sat at the bar and sipped from a tall glass of beer. Someone dialed up a Barbara Jean song on the juke and Gail tried to imagine playing in her band, standing on a stage with the charismatic black-haired singer in some faraway city filled with smart, fun young people who appreciated art and were devoted to good music. In the middle of this imagined scene, Shit Happens came over and hit on her, and a little while later the bartender did as well, so she carried her beer to a booth along the wall where she was harder to see.

More people kept coming in, and she watched them. Some she
knew, but most she didn’t recognize. Because strange men often approached her, wanting her—not for herself but because of some advertisement for sexual activity that she broadcast by virtue of simply being female—she also tended to see strangers not as individuals but as representatives of types. It was as though people did not walk around in the world as themselves, but as examples of kinds of people, the majority of whom they had never met.

Over there stood a farmer, for instance, and farmers, like her brother, were, or at least had been before their recent economic demise, the rural elite, the established order—landowning gentry whose values and lifestyles more or less set community standards. Very few farmers would come into the tavern tonight, and those few who did would be young, single males. They would stand along the wall, goggling at her and watching the women dance. They would drink hurriedly and leave. Their farms, present or future wives, families, and mainly their sense of themselves demanded more from them than could be shared for very long with a local tavern.

The tall, neatly trimmed guy in the corner looked like one of those educated suburbanites who during the last twenty years had moved into the area for the clean air, lack of crime, and cheap land. Private people, this type also did not, as a rule, frequent taverns: the music was too loud, the food too fatty, the smoke- filled rooms too carcinogenic, and the supply of bottled water too limited. For entertainment they returned to the city for concerts in civic centers, stadium sports, foreign films, and pasta served by male waiters in nonsmoking restaurants.

The nervous little fellow in a suit staring at her from the end of the bar had a reputation of some kind to protect. He wouldn’t stay long either, or drink much. His kind were frightened of the increasingly severe laws against drinking and driving—fines, loss of driver’s license, public humiliation through mandatory education classes, community service, and jail. These tougher laws had been devastatingly successful in convincing the timid to find private places to drink and were more than anything else responsible for the shrinking number of existing bars and the even smaller number of working
bands. Those with reputations worthy of degrading didn’t do their serious drinking in local taverns.

But for the most part, the people coming in were of a type so familiar to her that she didn’t know what to call them—men and women carrying pitchers of beer from the bar, calling out to each other as though they were in an open gymnasium, some dressed in durable finery and others completely unwashed. They lived in trailers, rented or heavily mortgaged houses, and rooms above storefronts. They worked on construction crews, as field hands, janitors, clerks, part-time plumbers, unlicensed electricians, short-run truck drivers, house cleaners, waitresses, secretaries, cooks, and gardeners. They found employment in factories, motels, lumberyards, garages, stockyards, packinghouses, breweries, grain elevators, and coal plants. They plowed snow, collected garbage, shoveled gravel, poured concrete, guided tourists, sold vegetables out of pickups, trained horses, made crafts, painted barns and houses, repaired automobiles, welded pipe, and fixed small engines.

They were connected to nature and routinely picked wild berries, hunted mushrooms and ginseng, gathered hickory nuts, dried herbs, canned meat, dug up endangered wildflowers, shot ducks, geese, grouse, rabbits, squirrels, turkeys, deer, coyotes, and bears. In some societies they might be called peasants,
fellaheen,
the rural poor, survivalists, bohemians, the underclass, proletariats, Bubbas, self-taught intellectuals, back-to-the-land socialists, right-wing gun nuts, rubes, and dumb- ordinary people—terms of derision that so accurately conveyed the horror their lifestyle instilled in the middle and upper classes.

Their mere presence seemed to imply an overt rejection of Puritan conformity, corporate culture, and status in general. Their unpremeditated way of life constituted a form of social disease that, if it spread, could emasculate the economy, undermine social ranking, and unravel tradition. They did not properly respect or take care of material things, demanded that liberty extend further than the freedom to own property, and at all times reserved the right to abandon whatever they were doing and do something else. They
mistrusted all levels of government and rarely voted. They were the same people Plato feared would scuttle his Republic, Aristotle denounced as enemies of the Chief Good, and Augustine longed to shut out of his City of God. They were sensualists, easily distractible, mining every experience for the passion it would yield and moving on.