“Here, let me do that. You always rip through those stations like the knob was hot.” Mae found the school report station she’d tuned in for years when the boys were in school to tell when they could stay home instead of hiking a mile down the road in bad weather. The familiar racy voice surged at them. “… off tonight. Total accumulation six to eight inches, up to twelve inches in the mountains. And on Mount Washington the temperature is thirty-seven below with winds gusting to seventy….”
“Dammit, I hate to go huntin’ when it’s snowin’. Tracks get covered up, can’t see nothin’, deer all bed down in the cedars, you can step on one before it’d get up and move, your clothes get wet, you can’t see where the boys are or what trigger-happy hunter from New Jersey is out there ready to shoot blind at the first sound he hears.”
“Stay home then. Get right back in bed.” She filled the four worn thermos bottles with coffee. “That’s it. Got to make another pot.”
“How are you gettin’ home tonight?” he asked.
“Tess is pickin’ me up and Tess is droppin’ me off. You don’t have to pick me up today.”
The bulb over the sink gave off a tepid light. The kitchen was filled with the stunned silence that comes with the first snow. Mae suddenly called up the stairs, “You, Phil, you put on your long johns.” She waited until she heard bureau drawers slamming and Phil’s muttered voice, and went back to the stove. The eggs cracked into the pan, she shook pepper onto their gleaming breasts.
Haylett ate standing up beside the stove and went out to start the truck. He liked a warm truck, let it run three-quarters of an hour sometimes. Mae appreciated that about him, the way he never let her or anyone get into a cold truck and sit shivering while the engine bleated and failed. “Worth somethin’, isn’t it,” she said to old Patrick who was lying in front of the stove again. “Don’t come cryin’ to me if you get hot grease on your back.”
Amando came down, his curly hair flaring, his face still drawn and sad with sleep. The waffle weave of his underwear showed at the neck of his heavy plaid shirt. He drank his coffee without talking, head bent, shoulders drawn forward.
“What’s wrong with you this mornin’?” she said. He shook his head and put up his hand.
“You look down in the dumps. You thinkin’ about gettin’ back with Julia?”
“No, Ma. I told you over and over, she’s gettin’ a divorce.” His voice was light and hard.
“She hasn’t got it yet,” said Mae. “Amando, she hasn’t got it yet. You can turn it around. I always liked Julia.”
Through the window they could see the taillights of the truck coloring the gushing exhaust red, see Haylett’s legs light up like cherry neon when he came around the back of the truck to the shed door. He came into the kitchen, grown larger against the cold, his voice heavy and braced. There was snow in his hair. “Wind is pickin’ up,” he said. “Won’t see shit today, but I suppose we got to try it.”
Phil and Clover folded slices of bread around their eggs. A gust of wind shook the house, drove the snow against the clapboards like pins. Something outside, the garbage can cover, hurled along, stuttering metal. A sound like a fall of water into a chasm came as snow slid off the roof. Haylett turned to Amando.
“Don’t forget to leave Mero’s check for your mother so she can make the skidder payment and work out the wages. Ray will want to be paid tonight.”
Phil pantomimed Ray’s delight with his wages by tipping an imaginary bottle into his mouth and making a hollow gurgle in his throat.
“Goddammit, why don’t you eat and quit horsin’ around!” shouted Amando. He looked over at Mae but she knew by the cant of his voice he was talking to his father. “Mero’s check is up on the bureau. Might as well know that pursey little gang of selectmen give me a bill for road damages yesterday.” Haylett, pouring his last cup of coffee, tightened up.
“How much?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“How much?”
“Twelve hundred.” Amando’s mouth turned down like a metal hook. His furious eyes fastened at a point on the wall.
“Jesus Christ, that’s our whole profit for the job!” Haylett threw the coffee in the sink. The dog, Patrick, slunk guiltily under the table at the sound of shouting.
“I know that!” Amando said. “They’re crazy. Three truckloads of gravel is all they need to dump up there, smooth it out with the grader. Fifty-five a load for the gravel if I was to get it at Cannon’s, twelve if the town buys it. The whole thing shouldn’t cost more than two hundred. I told ’em I’d pay for puttin’ the road back the way it was, but no way was I goin’ to pay twelve hundred.”
“What’d they say, what’d Sonny say?”
“You got it right. The rest of ’em said nothin’. Sonny said they’d take it to court.”
No one spoke. The falling snow, the wind, gradually seized their attention again. Clover and Phil bent low, putting on their boots. Mae scraped the plates furiously.
“Might as well get goin’,” said Haylett. “You ridin’ with us?” Amando worked the muscles in his jaw.
“No. I’ll take my truck and follow you. It’s good to have two trucks up there in bad weather.”
Phil and Clover went up to get the rifles from the gun cabinet, the hauling straps and knives.
“He’s gonna jump on me once too often,” said Phil on the stairs.
“It’s Sonny he’s mad at, not you.”
“Yeah? He’s mad at everybody.” He said it loudly so they’d hear him in the kitchen.
“You shouldn’t of snapped at Phil that way,” said Mae. “He didn’t mean nothin’ by it. He’s just at that stage to make fun of everything.”
Amando stamped into his boots. “He gets on my nerves. Dad gets on my nerves. It’s drivin’ me up the wall the way things are goin’, this rotten luck. All this year I had bad luck with everything I touch. My wife quits me. I got this goddamn toothache keeps comin’ back. The heater in the truck don’t work good, and now this thing with the road on top of the rest of it. By god, I can use a day of huntin’, snow or not. Way things are goin’, lucky if I get a spikehorn.”
Men came from other states to see Amando’s collection of antlers. He had shot a buck every year since he was twelve. No rack had less than eight points. They were all nailed onto the side of the garage he and Ray had built over at the trailer where Julia now lived alone. When Clover was little he had asked Amando to give him the collection when he died.
“When I die?” said Amando, staring at the boy as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I am never goin’ to die,” he said, “but in case I do, my antlers is goin’ to be buried with me. I just can’t decide if I should have them piled up underneath or set on top. You’ll have to get your own.”
Clover had imagined that mound of shining bone, tines and points locked into a huge ivory ball, balanced on his brother’s dead body. Amando would lie as flat and white as a piece of paper, the weight of the antlers pressing him down into the yielding soil until hunter and trophies all descended to the core of the earth and sifting red pine needles covered the place where they had been.
Haylett, Clover and Phil sat packed into the hot truck, thighs and shoulders touching. The windshield wipers swept to and fro, one of the best sounds in the world, thought Clover. Phil, stiff as a fence post, stared out the side window, his eyes scratching the darkness.
“I wish he’d move back with Julia, get out of the house.”
Clover felt calm and remote in the heat, his leg drawing strength from his father, his arm locked against his brother’s. The morning light was still a long time away. They would have to walk in the darkness to get in place.
“It’s his bad luck that makes him that way.”
“He thinks it’s bad luck,” said Haylett, turning onto Dogleg Road, the truck slewing in the new snow.
“What is it then?” said Phil. “Good luck?”
“Don’t get smart” said Haylett. “It’s his life.
It’s the way his life is turnin’ out, and he don’t know it yet.”
The road went on up toward the height of land where the trail, overgrown, visible only to the experienced eye, branched off and ran along the ridge. Below lay the great cedar swamp, miles of brush and hummocks, brackish water and blowdowns. A drive through this low ground sent the deer crashing up onto the ridge. Eight of Amando’s racks and Clover’s first buck had come from those heights.
“Are we goin’ past the trailer, Dad?”
“Have to, unless you want to fly. You know that.”
The truck went steadily on, the beams of light before them filled with hurling snow. The plow had not been through, and there were no other tracks on the road, covered with the voluptuous, curving snow. Haylett was relieved. Each year he dreaded to find someone else was working the swamp before they got there.
The truck came abreast of the trailer and they all looked toward the antlers on the garage, looked to see if the trailer had somehow changed in the weeks since Julia had ordered Amando away for a reason no one knew.
“She isn’t goin’ to get the antlers, is she, Dad?” said Clover.
“Oh Jesus Christ,” said Haylett, slowing down.
They saw Julia’s Datsun in the driveway, and right behind it, Ray’s scabby blue pickup. There were tall hats of snow on both vehicles. Then they were past and the trailer dropped out of sight behind them. Haylett stopped the truck beyond the next rise. They sat there, engine pulsing, windshield wipers batting, batting.
“Maybe he just stopped by for a cup of coffee,” said Phil.
“Yeah, drinkin’ it there in the dark all night long. Look at the snow on his truck,” said Clover.
Haylett backed the truck, then began to inch forward in a tight turn that made the steering linkage give short emotionless shrieks.
“What are you gonna do?” said Phil.
“Get turned around and down the road before Amando comes along and sees that pickup in his yard. We’re goin’ to tell him there’s flatlanders up here drivin’ the swamp. We’ll go up to Athens instead and hunt those old orchards. We always said we’d go up there sometime.” They heard the tremor in his voice. The truck’s rear wheels dropped down into the deep ditch that lay under the deceptive snow. Haylett stepped on the accelerator and the tires spun as though they were in oil.
“Get out and push, and get some back into it,” he cried. Clover and Phil ran behind the truck and braced themselves against the tailgate. The tires spun in a nasal whine. They heaved at the truck, and mud mixed with snow shot onto their legs. Haylett rocked it back and again the tires spun. He jumped out and began pulling at deadwood along the roadside, stuffing bark and branches under the wheels. He found a rotten fence post and kicked it under, a length of rusty barbwire trailing.
“This time it’s goin’ out,” he said. “Never mind pushin’, just get in the back and keep your weight over the wheels.”
“Go!” shouted Phil. The wood pieces shot out behind the truck, the tires gouged trenches in the side of the ditch, and they were back on the road.
Clover and Phil crouched in back, the bitter snow stinging their faces. We’re in it now, thought Clover, as they whipped past the trailer, sliding in their own tracks, toward the yellow glow of Amando’s headlights coming up the hill.
The two trucks drew abreast of each other and lay side by side, their engines pulsing softly in neutral like two boats in a white channel. From the drivers’ windows came clouds of breath that met and mingled in the hollow air between them.
“What’s wrong?” In the reflected light Amando’s eyes were colorless and transparent.
“Got a crowd of flatlanders up there workin’ the swamp. Thought we’d better turn around and go up to Athens today, try those orchards we always said we would.”
Amando looked at Phil and Clover in the back of the truck. “What’re they doing back there, road huntin’ or gettin’ some fresh air?”
“We got stuck turnin’ around. Come on up front, boys,” he yelled, “you might as well be warm.”
“Well then,” said Amando. He was wary now, feeling something. The trucks throbbed. “I’ll just go up and turn around in my old driveway.”
“Turn around here, no need to go wake up Julia. Let’s get down the road.”
Amando stared at his father. It’s no good, thought Clover, no good at all. The hair on the back of his neck felt rough, as if there were a loose snake on the cab floor. He could feel a rapid tremble in Haylett’s leg. Amando touched his accelerator and the throaty snort of the truck was like a blunt, filthy word. He shifted into first, and his receding taillights drew a red band across Haylett’s face. Everything that happens, thought Clover, happens in trucks, remembering a neighbor’s pickup jouncing crazily across a stubbled hayfield toward them years before, the woman crying to them as she drove, and on the seat beside her, already dead, the bee-stung child.
“He’ll shoot ’em both,” cried Phil.
“Shut up.” Haylett turned the engine off. They sat with the windows open, straining to hear. The windshield wipers lay limp against the glass. They heard the hiss of the snow in the brush beside the road, the faint muffled sound of Amando’s truck. They heard their own ragged breathing. The cooling metal of the truck’s hood ticked.
What’s happening now, thought Clover, was already happening this morning and I couldn’t see it. Haylett’s trembling leg was like old Patrick’s guilty tremor when someone shouted at him. Clover saw that Haylett, in begetting Amando, had created this snow-filled morning in a silent truck. A sense of the mysterious force of generation rushed in on him.
The trees behind them filled with light, and then the rear window flared yellow.
“He’s comin’ back,” said Phil. Amando’s truck came slowly along until it drew up beside them again. Clover could hear a piston knock. Amando got out and came over to Haylett’s window. He leaned in, and the raw smell of fresh snow came off him like smoke.
“You thought I didn’t know,” said Amando.
Haylett trembled like a taut wire fence struck with a stick. He nodded, the trembling head dipping, nodding.
“Oh, I knew,” said Amando, and pulled away from the window, leaving the black morning and the random, crisscrossing snow in his place.
Heart Songs
SNIPE drove along through a ravine of mournful hemlocks, gravel snapping against the underside of the Peugeot. He had been driving for an hour, past trailers and shacks on the back roads, the yards littered with country junk—rusty oil drums, collapsed stacks of rotten boards, plastic toys smeared with mud, worn tires cut into petal shapes and filled with weeds. He slowed down to look at these proofs of poor lives the same way other drivers gaped at accidents on the highway, the same way he had once, years before, looked out a train window into a lighted room where someone sprawled naked on a mattress, a hand reaching for a cheap bottle.
He sucked at his thin lower lip, watching for the turn to the left. He was bony, with a high-colored face and bloodshot, dim, gooseberry eyes set in shallow sockets. His pale reddish hair receded in front, grew long behind his ears, as though his scalp had slipped back a little each year. Women were sometimes pulled to him despite the stooped shoulders and the way his nervous, bitten fingers picked at his face or tapped against each other’s tips in fretful rhythms. A sense of dangerous heat came from him, the heat of some interior decay smoldering like a lightning-struck tree heart, a smothered misery that might someday flare and burn.
It was two years since he had left his wife for Catherine, the city for the country, the clothing shop that his wife now successfully ran alone for sleazy jobs in unfamiliar places. He’d quit the last three weeks ago, sick of dipping old furniture into a tank of stinking paint remover. Now he had the fine idea to play his guitar in rural night spots, cinder-block buildings on the outskirts of town filled with Saturday night beer drunks and bad music. He wanted to hook his heel on the chrome rung of a barstool, hear the rough talk, and leave with th
e stragglers in the morning’s small hours. He recognized in himself a secret wish to step off into some abyss of bad taste and moral sloth, and Chopping County seemed as good a place as any to find it.
He came out of the hemlocks into brushy, tangled land and missed the narrow track hidden in weeds at the left. He had to back up to make the turn at the rusted mailbox leaning out of the cheatgrass like a lonesome dog yearning for a pat on the head. The guitar sounded in its case as Catherine’s car strained up the grade, alder and willow whipping the cream-colored finish. The potholes deepened into washouts and shifting heaps of round, tan stones. He passed an old pickup truck abandoned in a ditch, its windshield starred with bullet holes, thick burdocks thrusting up through the floor. Snipe felt a dirty excitement, as though he were looking through the train window again. When the Peugeot stalled on the steep grade he left it standing in the track, though it meant he would have to back down the hill in the dark.
He felt the gravel through the thin soles of his worn snakeskin boots; the guitar bumped against his leg, sounded a muffled chord. A quarter of a mile on, he stopped and again took out the creased letter.
Dear Sir, I seen your ad you wanted to play with a Group. I got a Group mostly my family we play contry music. We play Wed nites 7 pm if you want to come by.
Eno Twilight
A map, drawn with thick pencil lines, showed only one turn off the gravel road. He folded it along the original creases and put it back in his shirt pocket so it lay flat and smooth. He’d come this far, he might as well go all the way.
The grade leveled off and cornfields opened up on each side of the track. A mountaintop farm. Godawful place to live, thought Snipe, panting and grinning. He could smell cow manure and hot green growth. Pale dust sprayed up at every step. He felt it in his teeth, and when his fingers picked at his face, fine motes whirled in the thick orange light of the setting sun. A hard, glinting line of metal roof showed beyond the cornfield, and far away a wood thrush hurled cold glissandos into the stillness.