Mohawk (25 page)

By morning the wind had died, but it was gray and cold. Randall rose stiffly and rolled up his makeshift bedding, slinging the bundle over the chain link fence, then climbing over after it. There was a greasy spoon open in Fonda, and the muttering proprietor agreed to serve Randall coffee once the young man proved he could pay. The man didn’t offer to refill it, though, so Randall had to content himself with slender retaliation in the form of a nickel tip. His last nickel.

Outside, the wind had sprung up again, lifting Randall’s shoulder-length hair, alerting passing motorists to the sort of person to whom they had briefly contemplated giving a lift. Always on the smallish side as a boy, he had grown during his senior year in high school and freshman year in college. He was now taller than his father, though as lanky as undertakers in the movies. With his three-day beard, he looked a good deal older than eighteen. A few motorists slowed until they got a good look at him, then found the gas pedal again. The idea that he might frighten someone amused Randall, who’d always been the least dangerous person he knew.

Midmorning and half way to Mohawk, a decrepit VW bug pulled off onto the shoulder a hundred yards up the highway and sat there hiccoughing uncertainly. Randall didn’t hurry. An hour earlier some teenagers had stopped, waved to him, then peeled out when he jogged toward them. As far as he could see, there was only one person in the VW, a girl who at first glance looked a year or two younger than Randall. “Take your sweet time,” she said when Randall bent down to peer in the passenger-side window.

“All right if I put my things in back?”

“Why not?”

Randall saw the answer to that when he pulled the front seat forward to squeeze his bedroll in. The floor was rusted through in several places, and the battery, strangely positioned where the backseat once was, tipped precariously, only a few inches above the blacktop.

“Let me guess,” the girl said. “Mohawk, right?”

When Randall got in next to her, she pulled back onto the highway. The car had what sounded to Randall like a death rattle. “Right.”

Closer examination suggested that the girl was sixteen, tops, but she maneuvered the car as if she’d been driving for years. Something about the way she handled the wheel with the palm of her right hand, as if she’d get fewer points if she employed her fingers, convinced him that she was showing off. He smiled. He hadn’t showed off for anybody in a long time, and it was even longer since anybody had thought it worth their while to show off for him. Everything on the dashboard rattled happily. “Don’t worry,” the girl said. “We’ll make it.” When she stepped on the gas and tailgated, people in front of her got out of the way, perhaps fearing that anyone crazy enough to drive this wreck might also haze them right through town. “Want to know how I guessed Mohawk?”

“There isn’t a whole lot up this way,” Randall said, not in the mood to do much talking. The closer he got to Mohawk, the more he wanted to just take it all in. The familiar landmarks: the Ford dealership, the Dairy Queen, the power company offices, all on the outskirts. Everything seemed oddly out of proportion, as if each building had inched closer to its neighbor since he’d been away.

Unfortunately, his companion felt like talking. That so many people exacted a conversational toll was only one of the many disadvantages of hitching. At least in this case the driver was pretty, in a dingy sort of way. Her white sweater had the bluish tint that came from washing it in the same load as a pair of jeans. The girl’s complexion was smooth, but it also had this suggestion of unhealthy gray, though her features were full and soft, her hair not quite so blonde as it had first appeared. She was barefoot.

At Rose Avenue she turned left off the highway
toward downtown. “We’ll take the scenic route,” the girl said, “so you can see how much things’ve changed. They got a Kentucky Fried Chicken in next to the bank.”

“Really?” Randall said, not sure he believed her. A Kentucky Fried Chicken in Mohawk. Imagine.

On lower Main were several vacant stores, including what once was a small grocery owned by the father of one of Randall’s classmates. One of his sort-of friends. He had neither seen nor corresponded with anyone from high school since leaving Mohawk. Still, he was sorry to see the small grocery closed. “So, how’s college?” the girl said.

“What makes you think I’m at one?”

“The hair,” his companion said matter-of-factly.

“It just grows,” he told her. “Whether you pay tuition or not.”

“I don’t see what the point is. Of college, I mean.” She said it as if she really wanted to know what he thought the point might be.

Randall didn’t have a handy explanation, though he liked studying. It was nice to sit around and read books without people thinking you were peculiar. You could even call it work, if you wanted to, and nobody there bothered to disagree. Randall himself had done real work and knew the difference, and he suspected that a lot of other people did too. But as complicities went, this one was harmless enough. Certainly more harmless than the one that sent people halfway around the world to kill or be killed in the name of national defense. He wondered what his grandfather would’ve thought of having a draft dodger for a grandson. Very soon, that’s what Randall would officially become. For all he knew, he was one already. Since dropping out at the beginning
of the spring semester, he hadn’t made himself all that easy to locate. No doubt his mother had been collecting plenty of official documents bearing his name. That was partly the reason for his return. He had to try and explain to his mother. If Mather Grouse were still alive, Randall would’ve tried to explain to him, too. He doubted his grandfather would’ve understood, any more than he would have understood the hair and the stubble. Randall smiled at the thought of his grandfather, picturing Mather Grouse as he always did, shoveling the sidewalk or cutting the grass or weeding the small strip of garden in back of the house or stirring paint with a stick, patiently, the oil swirling gently toward the vortex in the center of the can until the mixture was smooth as velvet.

“Go to war,” his grandfather would have advised him. “You will not have to kill. They will know what to do with you and the killing you object to will fall to someone else who probably will not object. You will learn about them and about yourself. You will not like what you learn, but better to learn it anyway.”

“Spring break, or what?” the girl said.

They were stopped beneath the traffic light at the Four Corners. The girl had told the truth. Halfway up the block a large red-and-white bucket rotated next to the dome of the Mohawk Bank and Trust.

“I guess I’m pretty nosy, huh?”

“Just medium nosy.”

“I know who you are, even.”

Randall doubted that. The last time he looked at himself in a mirror, it was all he could do to recognize himself. And he’d never seen this girl before.

“You’re Randall Younger,” she said when the light changed. “When I was a sophomore and you were a
senior, I had the biggest crush in the world on you.”

Randall was surprised. “You should’ve said something.”

“You got any money?” she said, pulling into Kentucky Fried Chicken.

“You should have caught me earlier this morning. I was loaded. I gave it all to a needy man in Fonda.”

“My treat, then.”

Randall was hungry, but he didn’t like the idea of letting a strange girl pay for his food. There was a remote possibility that his grandfather would’ve learned to accept the draft evasion, but sponging a meal off a teenage girl whose car had a see-through floor was harder to justify. “It’s only ten-thirty,” Randall objected.

“The best time. The chicken hasn’t had a chance to sit around and get soggy.”

She was already ordering into a speaker mounted on the column. Nine pieces of the Colonel’s Original Recipe, slaw, rolls, Cokes. “You can take me out some time if you want,” she said, and soon enough was handing him the cartons, one at a time, until they formed a warm pyramid on his lap. She swung the VW into a parking space beside the dumpster. “I’ve still got a little crush on you. Or I would have, if you shaved and dressed up nice.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be in town all that long,” he said. “Not that it wouldn’t be nice to go out with you.”

They both ate hungrily, and the chicken tasted very good, midmorning or not. There was only one spoon, so Randall made the girl eat the coleslaw.

“Probably just as well,” she said. “I gotta stop with
these crushes anyhow. It’s not so good when you’re married.”

“I’m not married,” Randall said, glad that she was finally mistaken about something.

“I know,” she said. “I am.”

Randall stopped eating and looked at her. “You aren’t old enough,” he said, aware that this observation wasn’t particularly intelligent.

“You’re right,” the girl conceded cheerfully. “Old enough to get knocked up, though. You should see my kid sometime.’

She had picked her piece of chicken clean and now deposited it in the bag. “You care if I take the other wing too?”

“Sure,” Randall said. “Live.”

“They’re the best part. I don’t care what people say.”

“You’re easily pleased.”

“True,” she admitted. “I bet you’re just the opposite. I bet you aren’t happy very much.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I remember you from before. You always looked kind of sad in high school.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

She shrugged.

“Did you like Mohawk High,” he asked.

“Sure. Wish I didn’t have to quit.”

“Go back.”

She thought about it, chicken wing suspended a few inches from her lips. “Nah. I like different stuff now.”

Randall suddenly realized that talking to this girl had cheered him. Chatter was usually annoying, but hers was so good-natured he found himself grinning. “What stuff’s that?”

“Different things. You got any grass?”

“Good Lord.”

“What’s the matter?”

“This is Mohawk.”

“So?”

“Nothing.” What the hell, now that there’s a Kentucky Fried Chicken. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Not very generous, after I paid for lunch. You probably think I’d tell where I got it.”

“Tell me about your husband.”

“Mostly he just rides his motorcycle. He wouldn’t like the looks of you.”

“That’s a shame. We might become the best of friends.”

The girl missed his sarcasm. “I don’t think so. You’re completely different.”

“I bet he wouldn’t be thrilled about the idea of your picking up hitchhikers either.”

“He wouldn’t care. He’s got some girl over in Ephrata.”

“You aren’t living together?”

She lip-farted. “God, no! What would I want to live with him for?”

Randall hadn’t any idea. They ate until the boxes were empty and the paper bag they came in was full of bones. Randall took the trash to the dumpster and breathed in air that smelled a little like Kentucky Fried Chicken, a little like Mohawk and a little like the dumpster. A few doors up the street was the Mohawk Grill, behind it the alley where he had been beaten, and further up the hill a vacant parking lot where Nathan Littler Hospital once stood. The scene of his greatest moment. The hero, Randall thought with a smile, turned draft dodger. There were people who probably
didn’t even remember the old hospital. For almost six years now the sirens wailed right up the highway, bypassing the town just like everything else did.

The girl wiped her hands with one of the Colonel’s special lemony cloths after deeply inhaling its fragrance. “I love these things,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“You can have mine.”

“Really?” she said, dropping the packet in her open purse. “I’ll use it on the baby. You want to go to Mountain Avenue?”

Randall blinked.

“Like I said. I know all about you.”

“It must’ve been some crush.”

They drove north up Main.

“Let me out at the fire station. I’d kind of like to walk the last few blocks.”

“Sure.” She pulled over and he got out. To his surprise, his bedroll was still wedged behind the front seat. “I didn’t even catch your name.”

“Call me B.G.”

“All right, B.G. Be good. Watch out for those crushes.”

“Can’t help it with you,” she said. When she flushed, the color dispelled the faint dinginess of her complexion and she was genuinely pretty. “Actually, it goes back to when you were thirteen and I was eleven.”

“Come on.”

“Really. I’d never even seen you.”

He wouldn’t have believed the girl if she hadn’t sounded so serious.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you what the “G” is for, but what the hell. It’s the first letter of my maiden name.”

Suddenly Randall knew, though he could think of no reason for the sudden intuition. “Gaffney,” he said, even as he heard her say it.

“That was my uncle you saved,” she said. “I fell for you sight unseen. What’s the matter?”

In fact, Randall felt suddenly awash, as if he’d unexpectedly come upon the answer to a riddle he was asked long ago and had since forgotten.

“Don’t be embarrassed. You were great.”

He couldn’t agree. Earlier, on the outskirts of town, he had felt that everything was slightly askew, too close together. As if the disappearance of the old hospital had created a void that was drawing everything in Mohawk a little closer to the vortex, like the oil in his grandfather’s paint can. He himself had been drawn all the way from Buffalo. Maybe he hadn’t come to explain the present to his mother. Maybe she was the one who had something to tell him. She was Mather Grouse’s daughter, and she must know.

“They’re releasing him the first of the month,” he heard the girl saying, and for some reason he concluded that she was talking about his grandfather.

“Releasing—”

“Yup,” she said. “Wild Bill rides again. He’s coming home.”

From the back porch Anne Grouse watched her mother through the kitchen window. Mrs. Grouse had changed very little. At first Anne feared that Mather Grouse’s death might precipitate a rapid decline, since from the diagnosis of his illness Mrs. Grouse had focused all her energies on her husband and seemed ill-equipped to continue without him. But Anne had underestimated her mother, and now wondered if perhaps it wasn’t their unfortunate destiny always to underestimate each other.