Mohawk (21 page)

Mather Grouse had entered Greenie’s confident that he would deliver just such an ultimatum, and that once this was done he would again be a fully vested member of the human race. But somehow the sight of the man—encircled by his cronies, all of them in turn leaning forward over the bowling machine, nudging it, caressing it, cajoling it—had disheartened him. Between himself and the others there had always been a gulf, and he was never sure that he wanted to bridge it. Was this not an unholy brotherhood founded on ignorance, self-satisfaction, fear and promiscuity. You cover mine, I’ll cover yours. If he stood against Rory Gaffney, he would have to stand against all of them, for Rory Gaffney
was
all of them, magnified, or so he seemed to Mather Grouse. Nor was that the whole story. The effect Rory Gaffney had on Mather Grouse, the very real panic Mather always felt when near him, could not have resulted from anything so abstract. Mather Grouse’s
loathing was instinctive, a combination of fear and revulsion that like nausea came over him in waves. Gaffney always seemed obscene, and he often reminded Mather Grouse of an incident early in his childhood when a fat ten-year-old had called him into an alley between houses and exposed himself. What the young Mather Grouse had felt—he still remembered vividly the complex emotion—was anger and revulsion at the sight of the boy’s angry red member, as well as sinking sympathy, for the boy was obese and vile. For this reason, he remembered thinking, God invented hell, not to punish but to separate the clean from the unclean.

Mather Grouse was snapped from this reverie by the sound of his own name, spoken close-by, and he started visibly. The man who had spoken was not the one he feared, but another, roughly Mather Grouse’s age, dressed shabbily except for a cheap new lemon-yellow windbreaker. The man was no more than five feet tall, and everything he wore appeared at least one size too large. He was very drunk. “It
is
you, Mather Grouse,” the little man said with boozy enthusiasm. “I knew it. Don’t you remember me?”

Once he studied the man, Mather Grouse was surprised to discover he did. “Why, yes, Mr. Anadio. I do.”

The little man was greatly pleased. “We was just talking about you,” he said. “Wasn’t that your daughter’s boy out there at the old hospital?”

“Yes,” Mather Grouse said. “My grandson.”

The mere mention of the boy instantly restored Mather Grouse. It made the boy real. Both the grandson and the act of heroism had seemed to pale in the
dank light of Greenie’s, as if here they might not apply. Rory Gaffney, still hunched over the bowling machine, twirling the puck with doughy fingers, seemed far more tangible. Mather Grouse watched him, forgetful of the man at his elbow. It was the tenth frame and Rory Gaffney calmly rolled a strike to win the game. Money exchanged hands. Even from across the room it was plain that Rory Gaffney had faulted by releasing the puck well over the red line. But no one objected, probably because they all routinely faulted. A strange way to play, it seemed, and Mather Grouse’s heart sank.

“Of course you heard
my
news.” Mr. Anadio was saying.

Mather Grouse admitted he hadn’t.

“Oh,” he said. “I’m dying, Mather.” He said it almost cheerfully, as if delighted to find someone at this late date who hadn’t already heard from somebody else. “Cancer,” Mr. Anadio explained. “Like all the rest. Cancer and leukemia, that’s us, Mather.”

He had been paying so little attention that it took a minute for Mr. Anadio’s words to register. And when they finally did, Mather Grouse didn’t know what to say.

“They killed us, Mather. All them years. They just plain killed us, and I told ’em so, too. Young Ralph Tucker and Mike Littler both, right to their face. Ten times the national average. It was right in the
Republican
. Ten times the average, but the bastards still won’t admit they done it. Killed us, but they won’t admit it.” Tears were welling up in his eyes. “They wouldn’t admit it if it was a thousand times the average. A million. Not them bastards.”

Suddenly Rory Gaffney was standing with them.
Mather Grouse didn’t have to look over his shoulder to know it. When Gaffney’s soothing voice interrupted, he was prepared.

“You made your living in those shops, Mr. Anadio,” he said mildly. “Who else would’ve paid a man like you? Men like all of us.”

“But they made us
sick
, Rory Gaffney,” Mr. Anadio pleaded. “They didn’t have no right to make us sick.”

Gaffney put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m not sick, Mr. Anadio. I worked in the shops all my life. And look at our friend Mather Grouse here. He’s a different kind of sick, but you don’t hear him running down the shops that gave him a living. Mather Grouse is a man who keeps his peace. If I
was
sick, I’d thank the shops anyway. Where would men like us have been without work? We’re all of us the same, men like us.”

Mr. Anadio had lost interest in the dispute. He was too intent on fighting back the tears. He wished he could stop crying, but he couldn’t. “No kee-mo,” he said to Mather Grouse, his voice suddenly full of defiance. As far as he was concerned Rory Gaffney was no longer there. “I told ’em, too. Not me, I said.”

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Anadio,” Mather Grouse said.

“Not me,” the little man insisted. “I told ’em, too.”

“You should let the doctors cure you,” Gaffney said.

Mr. Anadio spit. “Cure! Not me, Mather. Maybe I’m sick, but no kee-mo. I even told young Tucker that.”

Then Mr. Anadio turned and walked out into the early evening. He left Mather Grouse weak and sick to his stomach, as if he had just given blood. “I had better go home,” he muttered. Mr. Anadio’s troubles had somehow made clear to him that he wouldn’t say what he had come to say. It was the boy’s courage he
had felt, not his own. Men in their sixties did not make new beginnings.

“Yes, Mather, home,” Rory Gaffney said. “That’s the place.”

Untemeyer watched Rory Gaffney and Mather Grouse thoughtfully from the other end of the bar. His work for the day was finished and with money and slips safely tucked away in his deep pockets, he indulged himself with a boilermaker, as he did every day when Greenie’s emptied out. Once the two men were safely out the door, he and Woody the bartender would have the place to themselves. A strange pair, Untemeyer thought, as Rory Gaffney took Mather Grouse’s arm and steadied him toward the door. Then he remembered a strange story Dallas Younger had told him on the QT. If he remembered right, Mather Grouse had appeared one afternoon at the garage where Dallas worked and thrust twenty-five dollars into Dallas’s jacket along with instructions to buy a heavy winter jacket for, of all people, Wild Bill Gaffney. Give it to him yourself, Dallas had suggested. No, you, Mather Grouse had insisted, and to sweeten the pot he said that if Dallas did this one favor and never let on to anyone, he would consider Dallas’s debt squared. A strange story, Untemeyer thought. Maybe even true, and stranger still.

The door swung shut behind the two men, and Mr. Untemeyer grunted, downing his whiskey. Strange indeed. Somehow he had the impression that Mather Grouse and Rory Gaffney might even be blood enemies. But then life was strange, it occurred to him, as
it
did every afternoon at Greenie’s as he drank his boilermaker and looked to the silent Woody for companionship.

That men who don’t make friends easily seldom have any trouble making enemies is perhaps ironic, at least in the sense that intimacy is at the core of both relationships. In the leather shops where Mather Grouse worked, he had no friends, though with the majority of his fellow workers he was on congenial terms. Even so, they had cause to be suspicious of him—the way he went directly home after work each day, never playing a number or double when Untemeyer came around in the afternoon, never getting into the baseball pool, which cost only fifty cents, no matter how much money had accumulated when no one had won it for weeks on end. He never spoke up at shop meetings, though everyone else griped. And there was plenty to gripe about. Low wages, the poor quality of the leather, the seasonal layoffs, widespread rumors that some of the shops were going to close. Many speculated that before long the cutters would not be needed at all. In these meetings nothing was ever resolved, but everyone had the opportunity to blow off steam and went home happier for having voiced their opinions in a free country. Mr. Maroni, a wizened Italian who had worked leather for fifty years, always had the last word, and it was always the same. “Mr. Chair!” he would cry, his small
voice all but lost in the shouting, until the noise finally subsided and he was recognized. “Mr. Chair! I wanna say wonna thing about the peep. You no can satisfax ever one. Ever one make a mistake. I am too.”

Since Mather Grouse sat almost apart from these proceedings, he was not to be trusted. Some whispered that he might be an informer, working for the owners, a thesis that would have gained more currency had it not been for the fact that Mather Grouse prospered less than any man present, routinely getting the worst leather to cut, expert and diligent as he was at working around the flaws, carefully, methodically, unwilling to give in to them. The men were paid according to the number of skins they cut, and while Mather Grouse was universally considered one of the finest cutters in Mohawk, come Friday afternoon his pay in no way reflected his talents.

Mather Grouse and Rory Gaffney had little enough to do with each other until the former, much to the surprise of everyone in the shop, was suddenly promoted to foreman when the man he replaced was discovered stealing leather and fled town before he could be arrested. Mather Grouse had hardly assumed his new duties when Rory Gaffney followed him into the washroom one afternoon. Nothing would be required of him. He would simply look the other way. Skins were always disappearing, and had been disappearing for so long that if they stopped disappearing it would be noticed and then a lot of people would be in trouble. Besides, the owners were the biggest crooks of all, only for them it was all legit. That’s the way it was in America. The owners saw to it that the workers remained poor and desperate. Why did Mather Grouse suppose they allowed and even encouraged Untemeyer to come
around during working hours? Why did they promote Mohawk as the leather capital of the world and encourage new workers to settle there when everyone knew there wasn’t enough work to go around as it was? They paved the swimming pools in their back yards with the sweat and dedication of men like Mather Grouse. This was his chance to get even, at least a little.

“What about the others?” he had objected. “What about Mr. Maroni?”

Rory Gaffney shrugged. “Like the old guy says, ‘You can’t satisfax all the peep.’ ”

And so Mather Grouse had contrived an excuse to return to his old job and, when the bad season came, was laid off like Mr. Maroni and the rest. He never told anyone, not even Mrs. Grouse, partly because the situation was ethically complex. Though he considered himself an honest man, Mather Grouse knew that in the last analysis he had been no less appalled by the dishonesty of Rory Gaffney’s proposal than by the notion of throwing in with a man whose fingernails, though always cut obscenely close to the quick, were black. Gaffney was the sort of man he had always held in utter contempt—crude and vulgar and unapologetic. A man who smelled of his own fermented sweat and sperm and wanted no more out of life than what he already possessed. Only more of the same and more regularly.

Two men could not be more different. Mather Grouse never thought of himself in terms of his profession. Not that he harbored dreams of grandeur, though there was a time when he had dreamed. But necessity had made a realist of him, and he learned quickly that to be anything more than a simple leather cutter he needed either luck or daring. But he was conservative by nature, and luck was seldom a factor for those who didn’t
choose to roll the dice. Actually, he had nothing against being a leather cutter. He had mastered his craft and derived considerable satisfaction from it. Nevertheless, he realized that even if he lived to be a hundred, he would be essentially the same person doing the same tasks, neither better nor worse. He wasn’t jealous of those who had more money than he did, though to have more money would’ve been nice. But it was change he longed for, and he often thought that in an ideal world people would change their personalities every decade or so, possibly learning something to boot. Each metamorphosis would necessarily be a change for the better. No butterfly, no matter how faded or imperfect, was ever uglier than the larva it emerged from.

Mather Grouse was not naive, of course. He knew that most people who had enough money to embrace sweet change were sidetracked before they got around to changing much of anything. They changed their wardrobes, or rotated their tires. But no beautiful butterfly was ever formed. Still, young Mather Grouse concluded that this was their own fault. The opportunity existed, even if most chose to ignore it.

For men like himself, though, destiny was rigid. The cards had been dealt and the only choice was to play them well or badly. He himself chose to play them well but was never able to stifle the regret of the deal, of not being able to play all the hands around the table. He didn’t despise men who held winning hands, but he did object to men who held cards not all that different from his own yet were too stupid or crude to feel regret. They saw nothing wrong with the lives they led. They did not notice the film beneath their fingernails or, if they did, found it charming. Good manly grime. They noticed only its absence in other men, and
were suspicious. They discussed their members proudly, explaining where they’d been and where they planned to go next. Gave them nicknames.

The low sameness of life gnawed at Mather Grouse like a sharp-toothed rodent, and dictated, even when he was young, that his only pride in life would derive from taking the less traveled path. And so he went home after work when he would’ve preferred a cold glass of beer. He stayed clear of gambling, though he would’ve loved to take part. He held his tongue and kept to himself, because to do things any other way was not so much wrong as self-defeating and common.