He thought: it’s almost gone.
And saw the blue smear of woodsmoke coming from a hole in the trees below.
He imagined: A man and a woman sitting at a table. A fringed cloth hangs to the floor, their feet are hidden in the folds. The woman chooses a heart-shaped strawberry, not a wild strawberry, from a bowl of fruit. Her hand, her arm, her face half erased, but the strawberry gleams brilliantly, she holds its stem between index finger and thumb, the tip of the thumb touching the puffed cap. The black seeds are like commas embedded in the red pores. The man is himself.
56
The Face in the Moss
ON THE TERRACE of The Silver Salmon restaurant in Minneapolis the woman leaned forward. She was wearing a magenta cotton dress that came down to her ankles. The shoulders of the dress were padded. Her red hair, crinkled in waves like Chinese noodles, cascaded to her breasts. There was, her first husband saw, a piece of used dental floss in her hair. Maybe it was a new fashion. He listened, looking at her bare feet, at the yellow calloused pads on the toes. Those came from tight shoes. She had kicked the shoes under the wrought iron chair. She lit another cigarette.
‘Do you know what he told me?’ she said. ‘He told me, “We’ll go up there. Sweetheart. I’ve rented a little camp for the month in the lovely wild country. The silent sky and the purple spruce. And the little canoe and loons and a fire in the fireplace when the nights are cold. We’ll throw stones into the water, Sweetheart, and see how far they skip. We’d live off the land and it’ll be lovely.”’ She said this to him in the flat voice that cut like a pitched slate across the troughs of pleasure, struck only the crests of events she wanted to regret.
‘So we went. Never, never, never trust a bloody, blackhearted, lying Irishman.’ They were alone on the terrace, the glass tables, the metal chairs around them like a wood. The terrace was at the back of the restaurant and opened on a wide alley. He had to go into the bar to get a waiter’s attention. There was a faint stench of garbage and he guessed the dumpster was behind a ragged paling fence. Across the alley an empty loading dock at the back of a building. The light overhead like slack canvas. Her nails and the raised veins on the back of her hands reflected the colorless light. She drank from the wine. He drank from his own glass. Like warm water.
‘The wind blowing on reeds is like the wind on prairie grass. Like home, like Saskatchewan prairie, back home where we came from. Pure, puking prairie, only a little gouged up, only a little ruined by plows and roads and wheat and machinery, just like I was only a little ruined before I got tied up with you and then the bloody black Irish.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘you leave me out of it.’ Rail about the Irish all she wanted, the big fight and the way the Irish left her facedown in the muck after three days, but leave him out of it. His crime had been one of omission.
The luminous windows of the building across the alley in a black grid; the half circle of his ring caught the light like an eye beneath a lowered lid. His ex-wife slid down in her chair, stretched out her legs; shins like shapely rods of metal.
‘You can’t imagine what it felt like, to have your face pushed into the stinking gagging moss, right down into the stinking mud. I thought I was going to die, I couldn’t breathe. The force was tremendous. He was trying to kill me. To smother me in the moss.’
The loading dock was sinking in shadow. An old derelict edged along, shuffling on glassy legs, one hand gripping the platform. A crumple of paper bunched over his left foot, made a sliding sound. The lighter snapped, his ex-wife lit another cigarette, jetted double plumes from her fine nose. Drained her glass.
‘The only reason he stopped was because the fire spotter plane went over. Right over us. I could feel the motor in my bones. He was that low. The pilot must have seen us because he circled and came back. And that’s when the Irish ran. I could hear him going through the trees, just crashing, hear the jeep engine start up. And I was grateful to be abandoned in the wilds. Can we get more wine?’ He rose, went into the lighted bar.
When he came back, stumbling against dark chair legs and slopping the wine over the rims of the glasses, she pointed at the loading dock. The old bum inching away again. A phlegmy cough that went on and on.
‘He’s been in the garbage,’ she said, ‘I wish the city would scrape up the drunks and bums and dump them up in the swamp. Solve the homeless problem for good. Instead of yelping about shelters.’ Her wineglass clinked against her teeth. ‘So, can you believe that when I got up his weight on me had been so intense that the shape of my face was pressed into the moss? My profile. Filling up with muddy water.’
‘Let’s go in. Let’s go order dinner. I’m going to have the Yucatán lime soup.’
‘I’ll wait until I see the menu. I never want the same thing twice.’
57
The Jet Trail in the Windshield
IT WAS NOT JUST the divorce, the divorce was only a contributing factor to the mess of his fucked-up life, everything, the phone ringing with pot-scrubber scam artists and bill collectors. Maybe he’d get the phone pulled out. If he had another place to go he’d go there. The stinking camp. His father had put every dollar he made into it. Couldn’t invest in stocks or something, oh no. Now they were all stuck. He paced. He walked. He knocked the dirty pans onto the floor and kicked the cupboard door under the sink. Nobody would buy it. Face it, he shouted.
He took long runs. He didn’t know what to do. When he quit working for Bobby he quit having money. When he quit having money he quit having coke. No money, no drugee. Everything was gone. All except the goddamn camp. Here he was. He didn’t know what to do. Why had he come up here? He hated the camp. And down in the trailer park the skirl of motorcycle wheelies in dirt. Busted-muffler trucks. The fucking trailer church with its tin steeple. Morning noon and night loudspeaker serenade of carillon tapes. Noise was driving him crazy. Let’s see now, let me count the ways the noise annoys me.
Start with the inside. The refrigerator noise. Like a jet taking off in the kitchen fifty times a day. The radio. The television. Music, the tapes and records. The damn VCR. The electric shaver. The roaring gurgle of the toilet. The water coming out of the faucets. The pump. The pump was bad. The freezer. The fan. The computer’s sickening hum and its chirping alarm. The clock by the bed. Tick. Tick. The energy-conserving automatic switch at 5:00 P.M. The flies knocking against the ceiling. The birds that smashed into their own reflections in the windows. The wind. No, the wind was an outside noise. Mice in the walls. Sounded like a western town, Mice-in-the-Walls, Montana. O.k., that was it for the inside.
Now the big problems. Outside. The trailer park. Cacophonous symphony of slamming doors. Shouting women, children crying and calling. Saturday afternoon target practice. Assorted trucks, cars, motorcycles, snowmobiles, three-wheelers, ATVs. Fifty, a hundred barking dogs. Men laughing, whatever the hell they found to laugh at. The carillon. Radios. And on the road below the trailer park the mailwoman’s truck, the UPS man. Log trucks, oil trucks, gas trucks, lumber trucks, milk trucks. Federal Express, the sheriff, fat Buddy Nipple going to the coon dog trials with his pickup full of howling contestants. The traffic.
Buddy Nipple leaning over the counter toward him, taking the money for the six-pack. ‘Yup! Yip! Haya! Yup! O.k.! You got it! You bet! You’re a good man! Wanna bag? O.k.! You bet!’
The planes overhead. Thousands of them every day. Jets and fighters, new pilots wobbling their way over him, the commercial flights taking a bead on Montreal a hundred miles north. And the helicopters. State police looking for marijuana plots. Game wardens looking for deerkills. Fire spotters looking for smoke and burning. Christ! Yup! Yup! You bet!
And the birds. Do not forget the birds, he told himself. The loud, repetitive bird shrills and buns. Twittering buzzing over and over. The crickets, cicadas, cicadas with the terrible droning. The night heron’s shriek. In March the squalling of cats. The seasonal clanking of geese up and down his corridor of air. The sound of air through leaves, the
falling leaves crashing his breathing like heavy wind fingers tapping deafeningly on the table … What’s thaaaat? That riiinght? Yup! Yup!
Beyond these maddening noises that wouldn’t let him concentrate on anything, on anything at all, there was the wind. The wind up here never quit, shook the house. And the rain, the rain against the windows, on the roof. Then hail and snow and thunder. At night the howling of cats and coyotes.
He was ruined. He was pretty sure he was ruined. You bet! Filth was washing up around him. Yup! He walked along a washed-out road that went nowhere, smelled filth, found a decaying pig’s carcass. Crows had pecked the eyes out. The skin pecked into pebble finish. Loosened reddish hair on the ground in sheets. The crows had been at the culvert. Inside he could see the rib cage crammed tight into the ridged metal. The guts pulled away by something. Wanna get on the road! Read the bumper stickers! Yup! That’s riiight! A hawk screamed.
He opened the beer, sat in front of his television set. The screen was blue. Then filled with purple-skinned powdered young men sitting in chairs. Gold crosses hung around their necks. A man, insane but calculating, sat before them on a wooden throne. He wore a leather jacket and was reading aloud an article on ants. Every few minutes he would put down the magazine, cluck his tongue and say that the ants were just like certain church people he knew; always cutting leaves. Yup! Kevin opened all of the cans of beer and lined them up before him. How long had he been here? Six weeks? Six years? He was ruined. Yup! Yip! He changed the channel to the porno station and watched simulated intercourse, watched a blonde whore with a big loose blue tongue like a steer’s lap at a man. Or something like a man.
Drove to the store for beer. Buddy leaned over the counter toward him to take the money. Swollen hand sliding down the counter. Forearm the size of a thigh. Foreskin like a banana peel. Black teeth. ‘Yup! Yip! Haya! Yup! O.k.! You got it! You bet! You’re a good man! Wanna bag? O.k.! You bet!’
On the way back he made a wrong turn and bounced through the rutholes of the trailer park. He went up and down the muddy lanes unable to find his way out. He turned and turned past burned-out trailers, past rolls of wire, a reeling man with hair like broken cement, pants soaked in piss. The trees were like pipes. The sky was an X ray. A purple plastic horse on springs in the fireweed. A needle. Crystal. Red water. The trailers were packed closer and closer together. Overhead a jet roared. Yellow-eyed dogs on chains. In the doorways women holding beer cans or cigarettes or babies. Watching him. He drove faster, the car swung in the greasy ruts. The exit loomed suddenly as if hands had raised it from the ground for him. Men leaned on fenders, the clefts of their buttocks visible above the oily pants. The jet shook their beer cans.
He drove up the hill. The jet trail filled the windshield. The noise unbearable. And at the camp ran inside for the rifle. A silvery capsule at the head of the vomiting trail. He pulled the trigger. Again. Again.
You bet! You bet!
58
What I See
Loyal, rolled up in something, seeing through closed eyelids. The stiffening lungs seize, the heart is drowning.
The Indian’s book falls open. He is astonished to see the pages are the great, slanting field. At the top of the field a black scribble of trees, a wall. And through waves of darkening he sees the wind streaming down the slope of land, rolling down the grass, the red awns combing the sunlight, flashing needle stems, the close-stitched earth, the root, the rock.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for financial support during the writing of this book from The Vermont Council on the Arts and from The Ucross Foundation of Ucross, Wyoming.
I appreciate the help given me by librarians at Dartmouth College Libraries in Hanover, New Hampshire, and The Sheridan County Fulmer Public Library in Sheridan, Wyoming.
Many people eased the passage of this story with time, advice, money, lunch, garden help, encouragement, silence, barbecue, music. Thank you Roberta Roberts, Tom Watkin, Elizabeth Guheen, Laurent Gaudin, Lois Gill, Abigail Thomas, Bob Jones, Gordon Farr, John Glusman, Ernie Hebert. Special thanks to my editor, Barbara Grossman, and to my sons, Jonathan, Gillis and Morgan Lang.
By the same author
Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories
Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories
That Old Ace in the Hole
Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other Stories
Accordion Crimes
Heart Songs
The Shipping News
Praise for Postcards:
‘Annie Proulx has come close to writing “The Great American Novel”’
New York Times
‘Postcards feels like a fifth or sixth novel, not a first. Language that sizzles like meat in a pan … A wonderful writer and an astonishingly accomplished novel’
Chicago Tribune
‘Her first novel fulfils the promise of her short stories … hugely ambitious … The natural description is superb. The dialogue has a raspy bony twang to it. She pushes language to breaking point … a gifted prose stylist who renders her characters on the page to mesmerzing effect’
San Francisco Chronicle
‘The author’s literary ancestors range from Edith Wharton to Nathaniel West. But Proulx sees the grand side too … She sees every part of the national configuration and wraps every character here in a crazy-quilt of literary affection’
Los Angeles Times
‘Postcards triumphantly delivers. You could use the word “great” about Postcards without embarassing yourself’
Boston Globe
‘Rich, boisterous, remarkable … Annie Proulx draws characters who matter’
Washington Times
Also By Annie Proulx
Fine Just the Way It Is
Wyoming Stories
Annie Proulx returns to the Wyoming of Brokeback Mountain and the familiar cast of hardy, unsentimental prairie folk. The stories roam over centuries, and capture the voices and lives of the settlers this sagebrushed and weatherworn country has known: from the native Indian tribes to the modern-day ranch owners and politicians, and their cowboy forebears.
Bold, elegant and memorable, these stories of a brutal and magnificent landscape one again confirm Annie Proulx as one of the most talented short story writers.
‘Heartbreakingly beautiful’
Daily Telegraph
‘If more people could write short stories like this, the novel would indeed be in serious trouble’
IRVINE WELSH, Financial Times
‘Prepare to be delighted by this … To read her descriptions of the West is to fall hopelessly and inescapably in love’
Evening Standard
Copyright
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First published in paperback in 1994 by Fourth Estate and by
Harper Perennial in 2006, reprinted 7 times.
First published in Great Britain in 1993 by Fourth Estate
Copyright © Dead Line, Ltd. 1992
Annie Proulx asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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EPub Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007385553
FOURTH ESTATE
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