“I said five dollars a week?”
“Don’t be silly. You deserve seven. I might as well give you the first week’s wages in advance.” I counted seven dollar bills out onto the table before her. She stared resentfully at the little pile of Mils.
“I said five.”
“Call the extra two dollars hardship allowance. Now you don’t have to worry about making breakfast this morning since I got up early and made my own, but I’d like lunch somewhere around one. After washing the lunch dishes, you’ll be free to leave, if the downstairs rooms look clean enough to you. All right? I really am sorry about that shouting. It was a case of mistaken identity.”
“Uh,” she said. “I said five.”
“I don’t want to exploit you, Mrs. Sunderson. For the sake of my conscience, please take the extra two.”
“A picture is missing. From the front parlor.”
“I took it upstairs. Well, if you will get on with your work, I’ll get on with mine.”
July 18
People who act like that aren’t right in the head. He was like a crazy man, and then he tried to buy me back with an extra two dollars. Well, we don’t work that way up here, do we? Red said I shouldn’t go back to that crazy man, but I went right on going back, and that was how I learned so much about his ways.
I wish Jerome was alive yet so he could give him what-for. Jerome wouldn’t have stood for that man’s way of talking nor his ways of being neither.
Just ask yourself this — who was he expecting, anyhow? And who came?
I sat dumbly at my desk, unable to summon even a single coherent thought about D. H. Lawrence. I realized that I had never liked more than two of his novels. If I actually published a book about Lawrence, I was chained to talking about him for the rest of my life. In any case, I could not work while imagining that guilt-inducing woman shifting herself about through Duane’s furniture. I bent my head and rested it on the desk for a moment. I felt Alison’s photograph shedding light on the top of my head. My hands had begun to tremble, and a vein in my neck pulsed wildly. I bathed in that melting, embracing warmth. Application of you know what. When I got up and went back downstairs, I found that my knees were shaking.
Tuta Sunderson peeked at me from the corners of her eyes where she knelt before a pail of water as I went wordlessly by. Understandably, she looked as though she expected me to aim a kick at her backside. “Oh, a letter came for you,” she tittered. “I forgot to tell you before.” She gestured weakly toward a glass-fronted chest and I snatched up the envelope as I went out.
My name was written in a flowing hand on the creamy outside of the envelope. After I got into the baking interior of the VW I ripped open the letter. I pulled out a sheet of stationery. I turned it over. Confused, I turned it over again. It was blank. I groaned. When I grabbed the envelope up from the floor of the car I saw that it bore no return address, and had been posted the night before in Arden.
I shot backwards out of the driveway, not really caring if another vehicle were coming. At the sound of my tires squealing, Duane far off in the field turned his head. I sped away as if from a murder, the blank page and envelope lying on the seat beside me. The car’s engine began to sputter, lights flashed as if the hand of Spirit had momentarily thrust in and touched them; by instinct I looked up across the fields to the woods. No one stood there. No figure not a hunter but a wolf. If it was a trick, a worthless joke, who? An old enemy in Arden? I wasn’t sure I still had any, but I hadn’t expected Andy’s wife still to carry hostility toward me like a raised knife. If a sign, of what? Of some future message? I grabbed the envelope again and held it clamped to the wheel with both hands. “Damn,” I muttered, and dropped it back on the other seat as I floored the accelerator.
It was from this moment that all began to go wrong, askew. My mistake with Tuta Sunderson, the maddening letter — perhaps I would have acted more rationally if the threatening scene in the Plainview diner had never occurred Yet I think I knew what I was going to do in Arden long before it was a conscious thought. My old response to stress. And I thought I might know the handwriting on that envelope.
Speeding, I recklessly zoomed up the twisting hilly road to Arden. I nearly forced a tractor off the road. Bunny Is Good Bread; Surge Milking Machines; This Is Holsum Country; Nutrea Feeds; Highway 93; DeKalb Corn (orange words on green wings); Broiler Days: the billboards and roadsigns flashed by. At the crest of the long hill where the road opens into a view like that in Italian paintings, endless green and varied distance dotted with white buildings and thick random groups of trees, a tall sign with a painted thermometer and pointer announced that the goal of the Arden Community Chest was $4,500. I switched on the radio and heard the hollow, spurious voice of Michael Moose. “… report no progress in the shocking—” I turned the dial and let loud rock music assail me because I hated it.
An area of frame Andy Hardy houses, the R-D-N Motel, and I was going down Main Street, past the high school, where Arden lay at the bottom of the last hill. Pigeons were circling over the brick fortress of the courthouse and town hall, and in the odd quiet of the moment I could hear their wings beating after I had swung into a parking space before the Coast To Coast Store and shut off the motor. Wingbeats filled and agitated the air like drumming; when I got out of the car I saw that the birds had wheeled away from the courthouse-town hall and bannered out over Main Street. Apart from an old man sitting on the steps to Freebo’s Bar, they were the only visible living things. A tin sign clacked and banged somewhere behind me. It was as though some evil visitation had drawn everyone in Arden inside behind locked doors.
I went into the store and picked up enough groceries for a week; the two women in the aisle looked at me oddly, and would not meet my eye. The atmosphere in the grocery seemed almost ostentatiously hostile, almost theatrical — those women glanced at me, then quickly lowered their eyes, then pierced me with covert glances from the sides of their eyes. Who are you and what are you doing here? It was as though they had spoken. I counted my money down onto the counter and went hurriedly back outside and locked the grocery bags in the VW. I had to get a bottle of whiskey.
Down the street, just passing the corner of the Annex Hotel and the Angler’s Bar, walking toward me with his hunched bustling walk, accompanied by his sour-looking wife, was Pastor Bertilsson. He was my least favorite clergyman. He had not yet seen me. I looked around in panic. Across the street was a two-story building labeled Zumgo, a name I recalled having heard before. It was where Duane had said Paul Kant was working. I turned my back on the Bertilssons and hurried across the street.
Unlike the Plainview diner, Zumgo’s had resisted any efforts to bring it up to date, and my first response was to relish the oldfashioned fittings of the store — change was sent, enclosed in metal cylinders, racketing down on wires from an office suspended below the ceiling, the counters were wooden, the floors of boards worn smooth and sent rippling by time. A moment afterwards I noticed the threadbare, depressed look of the place: most of the tables were only scantily covered by goods, and the salesladies — even now staring at me with displeasure — were aged shabby horrors with rouge enameling their cheeks. A few overweight women desultorily picked at underwear strewn across a table. I could not imagine Paul Kant at work in such a place.
The woman I approached seemed to share my attitude. She drew her lips back over false teeth and smiled. “Paul? You a friend of Paul’s?”
“I just said, where is he working? I want to see him.”