One winter night, the story went, the snow lay deeply on the ground. (It was always a winter story; there was always a lot of snow. Why?) Under the blizzard's whirl Duffy sat in the cold and dark of his parked car, bitterly watching his own house, savoring with saturnine irony and rage the jolly fire at his cozy hearth. In the cheery warmth of the living room, he knew, the rat-haired potbellied writer Prosser Spearman was having his way with lithesome Otis, Duffy's wife of some years. In the dancing light and shadow, on his own wolf skins and woven rugs, she was bestowing on Prosser the turns of her perfect derriere, her small round breasts, allowing him the very wands and cups, swords and pentacles of all that was Otis.
Duffy remembered that part of the evening well enough. He remembered also the lush consolation of the expensive single-malt that fueled his tears. His sitting out there — it had all happened. And that he had a crossbow, that he had made it himself as another man, Prosser Spearman for example, might delicately fashion his own harpsichord? True as well.
Next, according to the ballad, Duffy climbed from his car with the kit-assembled crossbow armed and set. He made a grim, unsteady shape under the falling snow, moving across the icy drifts of the road and of his own lawn. There was a glass-paneled door that opened to his studio, adjoining the living room where Otis and the inventive scribbler wantonly lay. He found it open to the turn of his hand. He slipped inside. All that, Duffy realized in a combination of recall and later evidence, had taken place.
Then, they said, in the studio Duffy had taken off all his clothes. Except, they said, for his Jockey shorts — Jockey shorts and the tweed Connemara angler's hat he always wore against winter storms. Then he had charged into the snug warm parlor and aimed his polished oaken crossbow's arrow at the adulterers before his fire.
"All right, motherfuckers," he had screamed dementedly into the night, "Cupid is here."
Well, Duffy thought, maybe so. But it was his house, his crossbow, his Otis. How, he might have challenged anyone — perhaps he had — was he to know what posing, juiced-up, cut-and-paste bastard of a creative-writing creep was on his floor? He might have been defending his home and his wife's health and safety. Duffy knew better in these weak piping times than to speak of honor.
Whatever the circumstances, Otis had been very angry. So angry that she had ended by marrying the talented youth, a scandal since he was ten years her junior. The young writer had divorced his own wife, preempting her elopement with the chairwoman of a women's poetry workshop she had been attending.
Duffy was lucky enough to keep his job at the college, but he lost the faculty house that he and Otis had occupied, the very house where he had confronted his betrayers. This meant that the male tenant of the house was now his enemy and Otis's husband. This circumstance caused him a great deal of regret and rage. He had no choice, however, but to digest the venom of his spleen, since neither Otis nor the college nor the town would be complacent in the face of another of his potentially homicidal assaults.
Things improved slightly. For instance, he was able, catching Otis in one of her wayward moods, to engineer a reconciliation of sorts. The fact was he had missed her unruly companionship, and he felt grateful and meanly satisfied to conduct a ragged liaison with her. Lying beside her on what had once been his living room floor was both exhilarating and distressing. To creep with the stealth of a burglar out of what had been his own natural space was a sordid humiliation. Sometimes he made up his mind to leave the job and the town and the proximity of Otis altogether, but necessity kept him bound. Sitting in ambush on that fateful winter night had nourished his taste for single-malts, which he went on buying and drinking for the length of time he could still afford them. Eventually he found other, less costly stimulants. In the years following his divorce from Otis, his drinking and doping increased, along with his tendency toward anger and melancholy. He occasionally encountered his rival in town and had to endure Prosser's fear and deference, a craven, insolent submission that might well be taken for sympathy. Plainly, Duffy thought, when the boards of Prosser's usurped house creaked in the night he must imagine — whatever the literal facts had been — that Duffy and his crossbow had finally come for him.
As time passed, Duffy increasingly took up the academic craft lecture circuit to escape the heart of the dark New England winter. Winter was hardest for him, the season of his sorrows, and it was especially hard when he passed what had been his own house, swathed in its warm hibernal glow. At the beginning of one winter break, with homely winter celebrations of goodwill thickening the air, Duffy drove to the airport by a route avoiding the house he had shared with Otis.
He was headed for Pahoochee State University on the Gulf of Mexico, via a change of planes in Atlanta. Years before, Duffy had looked forward to these escapes to what had been, then, almost exotic parts of the country. Lately, and on this trip in particular, he became increasingly distressed. He drank Scotch from his concealed flask in the lavatory, coming and going under the toad-eyed inspection of the chief flight attendant. Wary, he gave her no more provocation than a cheery countenance.
"Is everything all right, sir?" she asked him on his fourth trip. Hoping, he supposed, that in answer he would roll in the crumb-speckled aisle and foam at the mouth, curse God and die.
"Outstanding," Duffy told her.
As the aircraft, jammed to within a single breathing expanse of claustrophobia, swooped low over alligator-infested pastel swamp, Duffy was already thinking with loathing of the subject of his Pahoochee lecture. Contemporary American painting, more or less, and how it had got that way. What flashed through his mind unbidden was the late works, the fulsome tropical mannerism, of Joseph Stella — the poison-colored palmettos, the mercury-colored syphilitic sunsets. The interior of the plane on landing seemed so impacted with flesh that it would have required only one neurasthenic's psychic break to be transformed into a thrashing tube of terror, a panic-driven, southbound rat king of tourists headed for the offshore ooze.
By the time Duffy arrived at his hotel, a swollen country fatboy of a sun was sliding under soupy ripples into the Gulf. All along the shore, lights were coming on in the conglomeration of entertainments that had piled onto the reeking mudflat between the interstate highway and the beach. Squat paddlewheeled casinos were fast to what remained of piers and fish houses — faux bateaux, they might say — in keeping with the phony Cajun ambience where the good times rolled and roiled. Lap-dance joints and triple-X fuckbook stores abutted ten-story hotels jimmied into one of the four-story barracks buildings left behind by the Navy. Layers of stuccoed box bungalows leaned on thin concrete walls lit by tiki torches, enclosing tin pastel swimming pools. As far as the point at the end of Atocha Bay, this swirl of notional construction followed the curve of the coast and the highway. It was all as polymorphous and promiscuous as the contents of a shopping cart, as tightly packed and equally replete with bright plastic. There were all sorts of illuminations — beguiling digital billboards, flashing bulbs and bright fifties neon. In the trailer parks people had wound strings of Christmas lights.
Duffy leaned on the railing of his room's jerry-built balcony, risking death, defying it. This particular expedition, he thought, had perhaps been a mistake.
To provide an exoticism to match the tiki torches, palm trees had been planted along the noxious interstate — new ones every year, he happened to know, to replace the ones poisoned by fumes and salt. Their fronds hung despairingly in nets of Spanish moss or stiffened in the slack wind. The doomed palms with their spiky crowns reminded Duffy of a crucifixion. Insolent posters were affixed to their suffering trunks with cruel nails the size of industrial staples, threatening passersby with the judgment of Christ. Artificial palms stood at intervals among the others like Judas goats at a slaughterhouse to encourage and betray the doomed natural ones. The tiki-torch fuel, together with road stench and beach barbecue pits, gave it all the aroma of a day-old plane crash.