‘How I came to get the cabin dates back to the time when I was seeking a place suitable for a little observatory. You’ve heard me talk about that before, Loyal. I was looking for good darkness, smooth air. Vernita wanted room – some lab space, a study where she could write, a big kitchen. Had to have a good view of course.’ His words marched out in the amused basso, his fingers twisted an absent cork. ‘We found the ranch and it worked quite well at first. Vernita was gone all summer studying jellyfish in the Sea of Cortez. Came back in the fall to write and I was damn glad to see her. While she was gone I’d put a hole in the roof of the equipment shed for a temporary observatory and mapped out a couple of places where the main observatory could go. But Loyal, my friend, then I’d start to drink. After a week of it I’d sober up and work for a month and then it would all fall apart again. I had a pattern. I don’t know what you know about astronomy, but I’ll tell you something, you can’t make accurate observations and you can’t keep good records if you’re drunk. Record-keeping is the heart and soul of astronomy. If the records are broken, what good are they?’ The finger wagging, ticking off the reasonable points. Loyal had to agree.
‘But I worked it out in my cunning wet brain that if I was consistently haywire and did meticulous work in the sober periods the records would still have some value because there’d be regularity to them. That’s my rationalization. That’s how I work. My work is flawed, but it’s a consistent flaw.’ The smile slyer now. ‘When Vernita is around now I work it another way. I go to the cabin. As you know. Or I go down to Mexico City. As you know.’ The voice dropping, whispering, confiding. ‘Bought the cabin before the war. Been coming up here ever since when the sailor’s home from the sea. Periodically. Consistently. With a pattern.’ That boiling smile.
He started as soon as the cabin was in sight, as though he had crossed a boundary into a more permissive country. The bottle came out of his shirt pocket, the pocket over his heart, his heart’s desire. He tipped it back and let the whiskey flower in his throat. The long exhalation was mostly relief, a little pleasure.
‘Leave the door open,’ he said to Loyal. From inside the dark log cabin the golden landscape filled the doorway. The wind was the color of fire.
‘Have a drink. You come this far with me you might as well go the whole distance. Some kind of landmark. I never needed anybody to pick me up before this year. The clock is ticking out.’ The knotted hand, pouring, was steadier than Loyal had seen it in weeks, the blue hammer mark across the fingers showing purple. Drinks to keep his balance, Loyal thought. The wind swayed the plank door.
A wooden floor, log walls, the table, a bench, a single chair, a few chipped jelly glasses and tea mugs. No beds. Just roll up in your sleeping bag on the floor, or fall down and pass out where you dropped.
Ben stared through the open door at the writhing grass, the rocks and dust-ghosts; perhaps he was memorizing the horizon, the knotted mountains or the clouds like white flames from a celestial burner. A wedge of weather was moving toward them. He sat on the bench and leaned on the table. Still looking out the door he poured and poured again, he drank, smiling into the glass, he remarked that the wind was coming up, talked to Loyal, then to himself, and still he drank, slowly now, sipping careful mouthfuls of an amount he knew was right. The onerous bands loosened. The wind moaned.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘you can get so used to silence that it’s painful when you hear music again.’ Through the wind Loyal could not remember any music he had ever heard. The wind became all the music since the beginning. It disallowed musical memories. He tried to think of the tune of ‘Home on the Range’, but the wind took everything. It whined in three different voices at once, between-the-teeth screaming at the corners of the cabin, around the woodpile, and away into the night and back again on a great moaning circle.
Ben sloshed whiskey into the cracked glasses.
And the skies are not cloudy all day, hummed Loyal to himself, following the wind’s bleak tune.
‘I’m one of the remnants of a dying species, the amateur astronomer.’ The voice roared, ‘I am not owned by a university. I do not depend on the publication of articles packed with incomprehensible mathematical formulas for my advancement through life. I go to no National Association of Astronomers meetings. But I pay! I pay a price for my ability to think freely! I do not get time at a big telescope! My amateur status bars me from the big ones! (The academics stand in line for years to use them.) I make myself content with what I can have and they cannot. And I’ve had a modest success. But the day is coming if not already here when there will be no place for the amateur astronomer except pointing out the moon at backyard barbecues or enviously applauding the coups of the technologically aided. It sounds like sour grapes? No. Nothing stopped me from the academic route. Except, perhaps, the depression, the war and my little hobby. That was a long time ago. I’ve had this little hobby for a long time. I was actually in graduate school and on my way, but the clubby gangism ate me out like acid. Do you know what I mean? The ones who play golf. And of course I was already a drunk. I hated the slap on the back, the favors for friends, the internecine feuds and fumed oak skulduggery. I spent five years in the Navy where, of course, none of these evil situations exist. The saintly Navy! When I got out I was ready for something new and married Vernita, quite ready to play the husband and father. I have not had a starring role in either part. What saved me – or ruined me – was an inheritance. It allowed me to be what I really am, a cantankerous alcoholic who has occasional moments of lucidity when he can see far and deep into the way things work, the clocks of the heavens, the petty straw-tuggings of men and women.’ The red mouth moved around the words, the brain shuddered in its skull.
‘Loyal, my friend. We get along, you and me. We make a damn good observatory.’ The hand poured, the face cracked in the egg-yolk light. The shadow of the door pointed into the room, the room fell into a pit.
‘We are losing the sky, we have lost it. Most of the world sees nothing above but the sun, conveniently situated to give them cancerous tans and good golf days. The stinking clods are ignorant of the Magellanic cloud. They know not the horsehead nebula, the collars of Saturn like metal coils around the neck of a Benin princess, the vast black sinks of imploded matter like drain holes in outer space, the throbbing light of pulsars, atomizing suns, dwarf stars heavy beyond belief, red giants, the uncoiling galaxies. I am not talking about the jingoistic bus ride to the moon or the doggies woofing in weightless capsules among the planetary detritus, the petty and costly face slaps of the pudding powers. Think about it, Loyal, nations as puddings. No, the study of space unwraps the strangest and most exotic realities the human mind can ever encounter. Nothing seems impossible in space. Nothing is impossible. All is strange and wondrous in that nonhuman void. This is why astronomers do not seek the company of any but their fellows, for no one else has seen the mysteries as they have. Theirs is a ghastly joy felt in exploding stars, in galactic death. They know the dim light of a star filtering through our filthy, polluted sky has been on its way to that moment for a thousand years.’
Often at night, when the heavens are bright, thought Loyal, but he was hearing.
‘Look into the sky and you are looking into time and nothing that you see is now – it is all so remote and ancient that the human mind quails and shrinks as it approaches. Listen, extinction is the fate of all species, including ours. But before we go maybe we’ll get a quick look at a blinding light. I have felt – I have felt —’ and he stopped. The thrilling voice closed in on itself, became a whisper.
‘And tell you something else. There’s something haywire about you. There’s something truly fucked up about you. I don’t know what it is, but I can smell it. You’re accident-prone. You suffer losses. You’re tilted way far off center. You run hard but don’t get anywhere. And I don’t think it’s easy for you.’ He looked at Loyal. The old black eyes looked at Loyal. Tiny yellow rectangles, reflections of the open door, invited him to step
through. Loyal took a breath, exhaled. Started to speak, stopped. Began.
‘I can stand it,’ he mumbled, ‘I’m not doin’ so bad. I got some money saved up. What the hell do you expect?’
They sat in darkness, the thick apricot light firing strewn distant rocks.
‘Some other time,’ said Ben. ‘Here, have another shot of the misery water.’
The wind blew itself out. The morning sky was blue glass, the lodgepole points touched the hard surface. If he threw a rock it would smash, if he breathed his whiskey-fumed breath at it, it would melt. An eagle turned a great circle under the dome. A strip of meadowlark’s call. He urinated on a prickly pear cactus. The sky reeled. He saw the bright points of his water, the sparkle of bottle-glass, Ben weaving beside him, face caved in as from a blow. His dental plate on the table.
‘No women,’ said Loyal, ‘I can’t be around women.’
Ben said nothing, one foot crushing a tuft of fleabane. The poisonous water jerked from his scarred bladder. His blind, drunk eyes saw through the glass sky, saw the black chaos behind the mocking brightness.
‘There’s something. I choke – like a kind of bad asthma – if I get around them too close. If I get interested in them. You know. Because of something that happened long ago. Something I did.’ The broken glass was everywhere. He saw blades and leaves of glass, the round brittle stems of red glass, insects as dying drops of molten glass hardening in the solid air, the gravel under his feet rough glass. He was barefoot. He could see the crust between his toes, the slackening skin on his forearms, toenails distorted by cheap boots.
‘I see the way you throw yourself at trouble. Punish yourself with work. How you don’t get anywhere except to a different place. I recognize a member of the club. I don’t imagine you’d try a head doctor.’
Talking crap. He should have guessed Ben’s larynx had been shredded by the glass he’d eaten the night before. He could feel it sawing in his own throat and lungs. Christ, his throat felt full of blood. ‘No. Don’t believe in it. Life cripples us up in different ways but it gets everybody. It gets everybody is how I look at it. Gets you again and again and one day it wins.’
‘Oh yes? And the way you see it you just have to keep getting up until you can’t get up? Question of how long you can last?’
‘Something like that.’
Ben laughed until he retched.
31
Toot Nipple
FROM THE PICTURE WINDOW in front of the table in her trailer Jewell looked out over the mobile home park below. If she pulled back the blue-flowered curtain in the bathroom window she could see the old house, down on its knees now. The roof had broken under a freight of snow the winter before. Ott wanted to burn it up, called it an eyesore that made the trailer park look bad, hanging over the pastel tubes like a wooden cliff, but she couldn’t let go of the place, still limped in back of it every day in the summer to keep the old garden patches going, though the woodchucks and deer moved in with the weeds and did a lot of damage. Her ankles swelled so. It wants to go wild again, she thought.
‘I worked on getting them gardens up the way I like for most of my grown-up life and I am not about to turn them over to the wildlife. What it needs is some boy to set a few traps around the fence. I asked that big fat woman, Maria Swett, down at the trailer park if she knew any boys that was trapping, but she said no. I guess they don’t trap now. Loyal and Ronnie always used to run traps, even when they was little. Loyal made quite a bit of money with the furs. Another thing I could use there is a couple loads of good rotted chicken or cow manure. Gardens need some manure, but try to get Ott to remember to bring any over. Nobody around here keeps cows or chickens any more.’
Her gardens were smaller. She still grew tomatoes and beets, and other garden truck, but not potatoes or com.
‘Too easy to buy it. I get all I need of corn if I buy a bushel, put up some succotash, creamed corn for corn chowder. If Ray and Mernelle come over they’ll bring a dozen fresh ears from some roadside stand. There’s some kids from New Jersey moved into the old Perish place and they been growing Silver Queen the last few years. If they don’t split up, like I heard could happen, and if we don’t get a cool summer, I can keep on buying it from them.’
She hauled some vegetables down to the canning factory where they let her put them up with the commercial loads. Ray and one of the men at the lumberyard brought her a freezer and set it in the extra room, the second bedroom, that she never used but kept in case Loyal came home. She tried it for two years, but didn’t like the taste of the vegetables along in March when they were full of ice crystals. She went back to canning then, and because there was no cellar or pantry, she stored the jars in the unplugged freezer. But bought her beef and chicken at the IGA and complained they had no flavor.
‘Mernelle, you remember the hens we raised were so good. I can just taste one of those big roasters, go seven or eight pounds, sitting on the platter all crispy and roasted with a good bread stuffing. Make your mouth water just to smell it. I always liked my food and I guess I miss the stuff we grew on the farm. Take the beef. Your dad used to keep out two steers each year for beef. We’d have two big butchering days, one in October, one in early December, right through the depression when a lot of people went hungry, and I’d put up beef. Can it. Make stewed beef sometimes and can it. There’s nothing so tender and good as home-canned beef. You can’t buy it for love nor money. There’s nothing else tastes like it. Deer meat, too. That’s the way we always used to do the deer meat. Loyal and Dub and dad used to keep us in deer. Now people, flatlanders, they get a deer, what do they do with it? They cut it up into “venison” roasts and steaks and complain because it’s tough or too much tallow. They put it in the freezer. Toughens it up, I’d say. The way we used to do, it was always as tender as custard and you could skim off the tallow just by letting it set in a cool place before you put it up.’
The trailer, with its cunning spaces and cupboards pleased her. But sometimes she thought of the old kitchen, seven steps from the sink to the table, back and forth all day. It was Ray’s idea, that she ought to have a trailer with a little oil heater and plumbing and electric instead of trying to heat the old house with the wind sifting through, struggling to carry in wood. It was like being on a visit to wake up in the morning in the narrow bed with the flowery sheets and see the sunlight like a handful of yellow rulers coming through the Venetian blinds instead of the torn shade with its crooked mends and pinpoint stars. The plaid sofa had shiny arms and a matching chair on a swivel, a comfortable thing to lean back in. The chair faced the television set Ray and Mernelle had bought her and she turned it on while she cooked in the kitchen or knitted, just for the company, though the tinned quality of the voices never let you forget they were not real people. She enjoyed the little stainless steel sink in the kitchen, the smart refrigerator with its ice cube trays that she never pulled out unless Mernelle and Ray were visiting, ‘not being in the habit of ice,’ she said. Loyal’s postcards with the bears were in a cigar box in the cupboard. Once in a while one still came. The smell of the trailer was the only drawback. In the old house she had never noticed smells unless something were burning or Mernelle brought in a big bouquet of lilacs, but here there was a headachey smell like the stuff they used to stick down floor tiles. Ray said he thought it was the insulation.
‘Whatever it is, it’ll wear off one of these days. What can’t be cured must be endured.’ She could always go outside and get a breath of air.
Three days a week she drove over to the canning factory and worked in the cutting-up room. Extra days if there was a rush order. They’d gone over to automatic sheers with adjustable settings and blades, and she’d learned the new machines faster than anyone else. The forelady, Janet Cumple, had marveled.
‘Look how good Jewell’s caught on,’ she said in front of the others. Jewell couldn’t think how long it had been since someone said a word of praise to her. She’d gone red and trembly when they all looked at her
, thought of Marvin, the dead brother, telling her she was a smart little kid because she’d found his homemade baseball, hide stitched over a knob of rubber bands, in the long grass after he’d given up. She couldn’t have been older than four.
The rest of the time she put into the garden, into knitting hats and sweaters for the ski shop, into driving around.
‘Problem is, they want me to use that plain old wool, it’s not even spun smooth, you’ll find burrs and hayseed in it, instead of the pretty colors you can get down at the Ben Franklin. I’ll go along with using the wool instead of the acrylic, the acrylic don’t have the bounce and it sags, but I don’t see a thing wrong with a little color. All that grey and brown and black it gets dull to work on a piece. So I let off steam with Ray’s sweaters.’ Dub down in Miami didn’t want to see wool. He sent photographs of himself playing golf in shorts and a flowery shirt. His artificial arm seemed very real, except the color was a pinker color than his tanned right arm. But every year for Christmas she gave Ray a patterned sweater in staggering colors and designs, jagged yellow bolts encircling his torso, red airplanes swooping across a cobalt-blue breast, endless green reindeer marching over maroon and orange sleeves. He tried them on, praising them and exclaiming over the fine details while Mernelle covered her eyes and moaned, ‘No, oh no, I can’t stand it.’
The duck sweater. She had been driving along the lake, eighty miles west of home on one of her excursions, and on a windy October day chanced on a church sale in an ugly strung-out village. Two women wrestled with a school easel, one tying posters to it with string, the other piling stones around the easel legs to keep it upright in the wind. ‘BAKE & RUMMAGE & WHITE ELEPHANT SALE. Benefit Mottford Congregational Church.’ There was a good place to park just beyond the sign.