“Maybe, he’s all over the place, usually. I don’t know what he does most of the time.”
“He could be dealing drugs,” said Marilyn.
“I doubt it.”
“Oh yeah,” said Marilyn, “drugs to farmers. They’re a very stressed-out bunch of people.”
“He wants me to get rid of a dog, actually. Bill Quinn. Do you want to help me?”
“Excuse me?” “Bill Quinn’s gotta go.” “The dog?” “Yeah.”
“Sure, I’ll help. How old exactly is he, Knute? Eighty, ninety?”
“Bill Quinn?”
“Hosea.”
“No, no, around fifty, I think.”
“Oh, pfft,” said Marilyn. “That’s nothing.”
Knute and Marilyn liked Combine Jo’s idea about the talk and the drink. While Knute was leaving a note for Hosea telling him her friend was in town and they were off to see what they could do about Bill Quinn, Marilyn opened one of his drawers and pulled out an old orange Hilroy scribbler. “Look at this. Remember these?” she said.
“Marilyn!” said Knute. “Don’t go snooping around in his drawers. Put that thing back.”
“Wow,” said Marilyn. “Hosea’s really on the cutting edge, isn’t he? He doesn’t even have an electric typewriter.”
“Let’s go,” said Knute. “C’mon, Josh. S.F. will be very happy to see you.” And they left.
“Bye-bye!” said Combine Jo. “You girls enjoy yourselves. And don’t worry about your boy there, he’ll be fine with Max. Hell, I might go home myself in a while, see if my goddamn bike’s in one piece. First I’ll order this little purple one for S.F. and then she and I could go bike riding together around the dike or around town, somewhere. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?”
Oh wonderful, thought Knute, cycling on a steep embankment with a crazy old drunk woman. Great. “Okay, Jo, just make sure it has training wheels on it. It needs training wheels.”
“Righto!” said Jo. She ripped out the page from the catalogue and smiled. “Have a good time, ladies,” she said, and waved them away.
“Did you see her looking at us?” said Marilyn.
“What do you mean?”
“The way she was looking at us. Wistfully like. I bet she’d like to join us for a drink. Does she have any friends, Knute, or what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably. Somewhere.”
They walked along Main Street towards the dike road and the hatchery and Max’s place. They took turns giving Josh a piggyback ride.
“You know, it really smells bad in this town,” said Marilyn.
“Well, it’s spring,” said Knute, “that’s all the fertilizer thawing, you know, shit on the fields.”
“Oh. Real shit?”
“Yeah. Well, not human shit — animal.”
“But real shit, not processed or packaged or anything?”
“Right. Raw animal shit. It might be liquidized or something, I don’t know. Because they spray it on. You know, like hose it on.”
“For fertilizer, eh?”
“Yup. It’s the best thing. Crops, crops, crops. This high.”
“Wow. But what about afterwards? You know, when we eat them, the crops. Fecal residue.”
“We can’t tell.”
“Really? We’re eating animal shit and we don’t know it?”
“Well, we know it, I guess, we just don’t think about it.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t stink now. There should be no fertilizer on the fields now because it would have been cut down with the crops, you know, reaped, in the fall. Wouldn’t the farmers wait until spring has really sprung to put fresh shit on the fields? Like just before they plant or sow or whatever it’s called?”
“Seed,” said Knute. “And it’s not reaped, it’s harvested.”
“Seed, yeah,” said Marilyn.
“I don’t know when they do it,” said Knute.
“Well, spring, obviously, Knute, that’s when crops are planted. That’s when they need to be fertilized.”
“I don’t know, they could be perennials. Maybe they just come up at the same time every year. Like tulips.”
“I don’t think so,” said Marilyn.
“I don’t know,” said Knute.
Over at Combine Jo’s, Marilyn wandered around the house saying, “Holy moly, three bathrooms!” and “She lives here all alone?” and things like that. Max kissed her on both cheeks when Knute introduced them and said, “Pleased to meet you, Marilyn, Joshua, S.F.’s been telling me all about you.”
“Joshua’s allergic to dairy products,” she finally managed to say. Knute told Max that Joshua was there to play with S.F. and she and Marilyn were going out. They’d be back around three. Max gave them a bottle of fine wine from Combine Jo’s stash and half a pack of cigarettes, and suggested they go out to Johnny Dranger’s rotting pile of hay bales, sit on top of it, and get hammered. They’d be able to see for miles and miles, he said. It was covered with orange plastic and sagging in the middle so if they got cold, he added, they could just hunker down in the centre and be protected from the wind.
Good idea, thought Knute, but how the hell did he know about Johnny Dranger’s pile of hay?
“I go there to write,” he said, grinning. Knute and Marilyn left and as soon as they were out of the house they looked at each other and said, “Yeah, right.” Then Marilyn started laughing and telling Knute that Max was foxy, shorter than she had expected, nice eyes, all the stuff Knute already knew. Write, my ass, she thought. “Hang on,” she said to Marilyn. She went back to the house and a few minutes later came back with another bottle — Jack Daniel’s — and Marilyn said, “What about that dog? Bill Whatshisname, how’re we gonna get rid of a dog from on top of a pile of hay?”
“Screw Bill Quinn,” Knute said. “Let’s go.”
nine
Hosea Funk had spent the past few days cleaning out his house, getting rid of all the old sad things of Euphemia’s, her Noxema, her Dippity-Do, her alum powder for canker sores, her old winter boots, the half-finished bags of scotch mints, and all her old clothes. He fixed his fridge and cleaned out the grout from behind the taps on the bathroom and kitchen sinks. He had planned to remove all of Euphemia’s Reader’s Digest condensed books from the small pantry in the basement. That’s when he found out someone in his house had been drinking rye whiskey, and lots of it. Boxes and boxes of empty bottles had been stored, or hidden, behind the boxes of Reader’s Digests.
Hosea had sat down on the cold cement floor. His eyes followed a crack that led to the drain hole. He remembered Tom telling him not to pee in it because he’d heard of some guy in Chicago or somewhere who had peed in his drain hole and had hit some electrical current that had travelled up the length of his stream of urine and then zap, his penis had been electrocuted and had turned black and shrivelled up right then and there. He must have been bullshitting me, thought Hosea. He sat there and no other thoughts came to mind other than the one he had been fighting off for the last minute or two.
She was drunk when she told me the Prime Minister was my father.
No, he thought, she couldn’t have been. She was on her deathbed. She couldn’t walk to the pantry in the basement to get a bottle, let alone lift her head to drink from it. “Her heart simply gave out on her, Hosea,” the doctor had said after she died. Her heart or her liver? She wasn’t very old. Had anybody known? Had the doctor known? Why was she drinking herself to death?
He had stared at the bottles for half an hour. He had never seen her drink, never seen her drunk. Had he just not known? She had always seemed content and in control. Did she drink only at night while he slept? During the day while he was at school? Is that what she did all day? Is that why she laughed and shrugged her shoulders at just about everything? Is that why she bought so many bags of scotch mints? Is that why she did handstands on the kitchen chairs?