Mohawk (2 page)

Harry leaves the paper on the counter for anybody who wants to check Friday’s late racing results. The sausages done, he scoops them off the grill and into a metal tub. He will toss them back on to warm for a minute as the orders come in. What doesn’t get eaten by breakfast customers he’ll use in sandwiches later in the day. He knows within a link or two what is needed. There are few surprises in the diner, for which he is thankful. With the long spatula he moves the puddle of grease toward the trough before lining the glistening surface with rows of bacon strips.

“Hey,” he says. Wild Bill’s busy thumbing toast crumbs off his saucer. “You don’t ever drink out of the crick, do you?”

Wild Bill shakes his head.

Harry shrugs. It was just an idea, but it would’ve explained a lot. Harry wasn’t around Mohawk when Wild Bill was a boy, but some people said he’d been normal once, more or less. The bacon begins to sizzle. Harry belches significantly and wipes his hands on the stomach of his apron. He feels the way he always does on Saturday morning after a hard night’s drinking. He has come directly to the diner without any sleep, and the sweet smell of frying meat has his stomach churning. It’s not his stomach he’s worrying about, though. He has proposed marriage to some woman during the course of the evening. When drinking, Harry is indiscriminate about women, to whom he invariably proposes. The women Harry ends up with on Friday nights usually say yes, and then he has to renege. On the plus side, they know he hasn’t any intention of marrying, so their feelings are never hurt. They say yes because it’s a long shot and their lives are full of long shots. They know Harry doesn’t need a wife and could do
better if he were serious about taking one. There was a time when they could’ve done better than Harry, but that was several presidents ago. The calendar above the grill is for 1966, a year out of date. Whoever gave Harry the calendar the year before didn’t give him a new one this year. The months are the same and Harry doesn’t mind being a few days off.

“Don’t get hooked up with women,” he mutters.

“Ow?”

“Any time.”

Harry sees Bill eyeing yesterday’s sticky buns beneath the glass dome. He hands Bill one and dumps the rest. The bakery man will be along in a few minutes. Harry flips the bacon.

On the other side of the wall is the sound of tramping feet on the staircase, which means the all-night poker game on the second floor is breaking up. This in turn means that Harry will have some early business. When the front door opens and several men enter, Wild Bill starts to leave, but Harry puts a hand on his shoulder and he settles back on his stool. Ordinarily, Harry doesn’t want him around after his paying customers start coming in, but he knows these particular men are not squeamish. At the moment they are barely awake. After taking stools in the center of the counter, two of the red-eyed men order big breakfasts—ham steak, eggs, home fries, toast, coffee—and the other two just coffee. Harry doesn’t have to ask who won. John, the lawyer, usually wins and hangs on to his winnings until he goes to Las Vegas, usually twice a year. Then Vegas usually wins. One of the noneaters pulls out the day’s racing form. The other grabs Harry’s
Mohawk Republican
and folds out the sports page. “What was yesterday’s number?” somebody says.

“Four-two-one,” Harry growls.

“I haven’t had a number in three years.”

“So what? I haven’t been laid in pretty near that long.”

“I can get you laid if you can get me a number,” says John, who is reputed to be a ladies’ man. He’s the only one who looks relatively fresh after the long night’s work.

“Anybody can get laid,” another agrees.

“Some of us prefer girls.”

A mock fight breaks out. Wild Bill watches the men, a little alarmed at the feigned hostilities. One of the men nods a hello in his direction.

“Oughta,” Bill says.

“Yeah,” the man says, rolling his eyes at Harry. “Oughta.”

“Oughta,” the rest chime in. “Oughta, Harry.”

“Lay off.” Harry wishes now that he’d let Bill, who is grinning happily at this camaraderie, clear out when he’d wanted to. He sometimes wishes Wild Bill would just go off some place and not come back. He’s a burden at best. Still, Harry doesn’t like people making fun of him.

“How long does it take to fry a couple eggs?” the lawyer wants to know. “They oughta be done by now.”

“Oughta,” the others say in unison.

The man with the sports page leans back on his stool so he can see the street outside. “Stay away from my car, you fat shit.” Officer Gaffney is studying the three illegally parked cars at the curb. A recent ordinance prohibits parking on Main Street. “If I get a ticket, I’m going temporarily insane.”

“I’ll take your case,” John tells him.

“Even you could win it,” somebody says.

Harry doesn’t even bother to look. He knows Officer Gaffney and also knows that no tickets will be written until he finds out who the cars belong to. Gaffney likes to drink coffee in the diner, and he leaves Harry’s customers alone.

The door opens and he strides in, a large man, but soft-looking. Even the boys who race their bicycles down the Main Street sidewalks are unafraid. They do wheelies behind his back as he guards the traffic light at the Four Corners and are gone again before he can turn around. Only Officer Gaffney takes himself seriously. He wears his thirty-eight slung lower than regulation on his right hip. “Boys,” he nods, taking a stool at the opposite end of the lunch counter from Wild Bill.

“Oughta,” somebody says.

Wild Bill is clearly nervous again, fidgeting on his stool and never taking his eyes off the policeman. He is made uneasy by uniforms, even those worn by familiar people. Wild Bill hasn’t had much luck with uniforms.

“Who owns the Merc,” Officer Gaffney asks. He pours two level teaspoons of sugar into the steaming coffee Harry puts in front of him.

“Murphy,” says the lawyer, jabbing his eggs until they run yellow. “He’ll be down in a minute if he doesn’t kill himself.”

“You could’ve bought him breakfast, at least,” says one of the coffee-drinkers.

“I offered. He said he wasn’t hungry.”

“I hope his kids aren’t either. Not this week, anyhow.”

“This month.”

“He isn’t the only one took a bath,” says the other
coffee-drinker, anxious that the absent Murphy not hog all the sympathy.

“Yeah, but did you see the look on his face when he lost on that aces-over-boat?”

Devouring the bleeding eggs, John chortles at the recollection. “Shit,” he says appreciatively.

When Wild Bill slides off his stool like a scolded dog and slinks out the back, Harry doesn’t try to stop him. The men watch him go. The man reading the sports page has now folded the paper back to the front. “He must drink out of the Cayuga,” he says. Everybody but Harry laughs.

“What the hell is ‘oughta’ supposed to mean?”

“It means Howdy,” Harry says.

“How do you know,” John asks. “You look it up in the
Morons’ Dictionary
?.”

“It means Howdy.”

“You can settle this, Gaff,” the lawyer says without looking up from his breakfast. “You’re his uncle.”

Officer Gaffney goes deep purple. Though he and Wild Bill look about the same age, he is indeed the other man’s uncle. Not many people in Mohawk know Wild Bill’s last name, so he seldom has to admit to being related. Now they all know.

“I do see a family resemblance, now that you mention it,” somebody remarks.

“Say
oughta
, Gaff.”

“Can it!” Harry thunders, so loud that everybody including the policeman jumps. Harry’s normally red face is even redder, and he brandishes his long, thin spatula like a sword. To someone wandering in off the street, Harry would look more comic than menacing, but anyone wise and within striking distance of his spatula takes him seriously.

It’s the lawyer who breaks the tension. “You must have got married again last night. Always makes you pissy. I can have it annulled by noon unless it’s consummated.”

“Consummated? Harry?”

Everybody laughs, and Harry lowers his weapon. He doesn’t mind them kidding him, but he’s still angry. “He’s just a poor moron. Give him a break, can’t you?”

“Sure, Harry. We really oughta.”

When the men pay up and leave, Harry and Officer Gaffney have the place to themselves. It’s early still. The policeman reads the front page of the
Republican
while Harry dumps a small tub of home fries onto the grill. He probably won’t see Wild Bill again until Monday morning, and that’s just as well. Harry wonders where he goes, what he does with his days and nights. By the time the policeman puts the paper down, Harry’s fries are good and brown underneath, but they look cold and unappetizing. The cars that were out front are gone, except for the Mercury.

“This Murphy character a customer?”

Harry says he isn’t.

Officer Gaffney pays for his coffee and goes back outside. Harry can see him bend over the Merc to write a citation on the hood. Harry turns the home fries and looks around his diner. He hasn’t many regrets about his life, nor does he want a lot that he doesn’t have. The diner is just about right. He wishes now that he had scrambled Wild Bill some eggs in the sausage grease, but that’s the only regret he can think of.

“I think the house will be
just
fine,” Mrs. Grouse said when her daughter Anne turned the corner onto Oak. The older woman was still in her Sunday outfit, a belted, cream-color dress, the fabric of which she smoothed over her knees with gloved fingers. Mrs. Grouse disliked riding in automobiles and refused to do so except to attend church or visit her older sister Milly, which was, in fact, where she and her daughter were now headed.

Anne drew over to the curb. “Do you want to go back and check the house again, Mother?”

“Whatever for, dear?”

“I have no idea. But if you have doubts, let’s go back … by all means. Otherwise you’ll be wondering out loud all afternoon.”

“Nonsense.”

“I agree,” Anne said, pulling back onto the street.

When they had gone about a block, Mrs. Grouse said, “I locked
all
the doors.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Mrs. Grouse didn’t look at her daughter. “There isn’t a thing in the
world
for you to be upset about. But with your father in the hospital, the house happens to be my responsibility.”

Anne knew it was pointless to continue the conversation. Most things, great and small, fell under the general heading of her mother’s responsibility, and Mrs. Grouse shouldered them all bravely on her slender frame. The two women had been feuding since the attack that hospitalized Mather Grouse earlier in the week. Since then, they had alternated staying with him at the hospital, waging the same subtle war they’d been engaged in as long as Anne could remember. Not surprisingly, Mather Grouse seemed to prefer the company of his grandson Randall to either of them.

“Randy has the number …,” ventured Mrs. Grouse, who never in her life left a doubt unvoiced.

“Yes, Mother. Please, let’s not worry everything to death.”

“What are you talking about? I simply said—”

“I know what you said. But in a few minutes you’ll be with your sister and then you’ll forget about everything. You’ll forget that the house exists. In the meantime, can’t we have some peace?”

Milly was pushing eighty, nearly fifteen years older than Anne’s mother, but the two women were spiritual twins. They hadn’t been particularly close until the four sisters between them in age died. Since then, the two women began rewriting their pasts until both believed that they had spent every day of their girlhood in each other’s exclusive company, when in reality the decade and a half that separated their births had made them relative strangers. But they unburdened themselves of this constraining reality for the sake of the vivid, shared recollections that lacked even the slightest basis in fact. Old Milly took spells when she confused Mrs. Grouse with their sister Grace, dead the best part of twenty years. Fortunately, Mrs. Grouse had little trouble shifting
gears, and she cheerfully assumed the dead sister’s identity lest she upset the living one. To Anne there was something a little spooky about her mother’s easy metempsychosis on such occasions, but she never said anything.

Of course the sisters shared some recent memories more firmly grounded in historical fact. It was Milly’s husband who had been responsible for Mather Grouse’s coming to Mohawk shortly after his marriage to Anne’s mother. The town had seemed alive and healthy then, though the leather business was already showing signs of decline that no one imagined would be permanent. All the tanneries and glove shops were hiring, at least seasonally, and Mather Grouse had gotten work in the same shop that employed Milly’s husband. When things began to go bad, everyone blamed the Depression and said things would boom again once the economy recovered. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Mather Grouse enlisted, confident that he would return to the same job he left.

But the war changed everything. In order to escape high import duties the more unscrupulous shopowners began to bring into the country as unfinished goods gloves that required only the fastening of a single button to become “finished,” and in this way the demand for the skills of Mohawk’s cutters was controlled. Never again would there be more work than men, and competition for the existing work drove wages lower. Very few of the men knew what was happening to them, and those who did were afraid to speak out.

Still, the years following the war were not bad ones, at least for the two sisters. They were veteran “visitors” and took turns entertaining each other to pass the long afternoons when their daughters were in school and
their husbands at the shop. Serving fancy pastries on lace doilies, they gossiped harmlessly, sticky fingered, on many subjects. Who among the cutters was getting the best leather, who was likely to get laid off if the work did not last through the winter, and the like. Both women had delivered their children very late in the natural scheme of things, and mothering did not come easy to either of them. Anne and her mother cared for each other after their fashion. But they were very different, and neither mother nor daughter had spoken of loving one another since Anne was a very small girl.