“You see, it gives me no special feeling. It’s like being rolled around in a barrel.”
“Uh huh. Y’know, I just imagine my old man’s alarm went off about an hour ago.” To Lucien daybreak had made her look like one of the monuments on Easter Island. “But here’s the deal,” Dee said, opening her compact, then throwing it back into her purse hopelessly. “Let’s find a way to get this over with. My aunt will let me in through the garage. Nobody’ll be the wiser.”
Lucien started the car and moved down the road toward town. He tried to put some diplomacy and gratitude in his voice. “This sounds best for both of us,” he said.
“You sickening fuck,” she said. “I feel like a sewer.”
The ranch house had a springy floor. Lucien’s mother’s house in town also had a spring to it. When Lucien was a child he could run through the first floor and cause the china to tinkle in the cabinets for a minute and a half. A train on the bridge would do the same; and the second-story sitting porch trembled at traffic or even, it seemed, the shouts of the neighbors from down the street. But this was a different motion, less the consequence of human pounding than some catarrhal moan from the ground, borne through the timbers of the house.
Part of the problem was that Lucien had got rid of the furniture. There was plenty of it, too. And behind the two mortifying unsprung beds there were hair-oil spots, but he thought, We’ve got plenty of haunts without this.
It was a heavy, windless fall of snow, a perfect day to burn furniture without fear of starting a grass fire. Wet and croaking ravens hung on the telephone wires, black and unassembled, like rags. He was drinking. He hauled the brutal beds, the all-knowing sofas, the crazed mechanical La-Z-Boy prototype which some solitary Popular Mechanics reader had put together and whose experiment Lucien made a shambles of. These, surmounted by chrysanthemum-print linoleum in quarter-acre lots, doused with number 2 diesel fuel, took only a match. The first lit up the fine, dense snow and produced the effect of sunny fog; anything at a middle distance — horses, trees, fences — shone through with an intense gray like spirits banished from the furniture. It did not seem then to Lucien as he paced around the draconic snow-licking flames with his bottle that there could be a way to call him unlucky; or upon consideration, to subject him to opinions of any kind. He was lying to himself.
The bedroom was empty of everything except what would furnish a dormitory room; the vacancy seemed more rueful than the furniture had. And there were bullet holes in the mystery circles of hair oil. But nobody is improved by having his child taken away. Today it was official.
· · ·
The sound of snow slumping from the barn, the chinook winds at night, coyotes below the house competing with noisy ballgames on the television, wood smoke and the moan of tractor engines, serious flotation of the river in his drift boat, generally good behavior if you omit one five-hundred-mile blackout on the interstate. Which nobody got wind of.
Dear Herbert,
I have been made aware of your and your client’s version as to why I would like to see my boy before winter and why I would like to see his report cards, school projects, drawings and so on. I am made to understand that you and your client imagine that I am building some sort of case to reverse a decision which I have with some considerable difficulty learned to accept. I am further led to believe that you have encouraged your client in this kind of thinking.
Herbert, I must assume that this is a false idea; and that whoever generated such a diseased piece of reasoning has either the ability to correct his thinking or the common sense to recognize that people who are wronged seek whatever remedies that there are available to them.
I know you will understand what I am saying.
Sincerely yours,
Lucien Taylor
Wick Tompkins had his small low offices across from the monument to the fallen cavalryman, a grimacing bronze fighter already dead, falling on an already dead horse, seizing the shaft of the arrow that pierced his tunic, suggesting that the last man still left alive in the world was the bowman. Wick liked to point out that the chap would have had to be standing somewhere right close to his secretary’s desk when he got the trooper. Since Emily’s departure Wick and Lucien had become friends.
The secretary winked up from her new data processor, then rolled fresh boilerplate onto the screen. This machine had made Wick a man of leisure: Wick now weighed two hundred forty pounds. He smiled all the time, and his smile said, This better be funny.
“Lucien, come in here and close the door. I don’t want anyone to see you. Your hat, give me your hat.”
Lucien reached his Stetson to Wick, who hung it on a trophy for the champion mare at the Golden Spike show in Utah.
“Herbert Lawlor informs me that you have threatened him with a letter.”
“I did not. I wrote him a letter.”
“I’ve seen the letter.”
“So you know that Herbert Lawlor is hysterical.”
“The letter has threatening overtones. It is a pissing fight with a skunk. It is the very thing you are not to do. You’re having fun out on that crummy cow camp, aren’t you?”
“I’m making repairs.”
“And you are floating on the river?”
“Almost every day.”
“I think that’s grand. Especially if you let me do the communicating with Mr. Lawlor. It’s demeaning for you to take these things into your own hands. I am paid to demean myself, though I dream of glory as well as weight loss and sex miracles with strangers.”
“I’ll do better at everything if I can see my boy.”
“You will see him at Christmas, and you’re going to have to get used to that.”
“Christmas.”
“That’s the next time, not the last time.”
“How do you know when the last time is?”
Wick Tompkins drew on his cigarette, made a tentative gesture to stub it out, decided that too much of it remained and said, “I think that is a disastrous remark.”
“It’s not a remark. It’s what I think.”
“It’s a disaster.”
When young girls learn the new dances, thought Lucien, it is the last time the new dances are interesting. I am in town, thought Lucien, why not make the most of it?
He sat down at the counter at DeWayne’s Place, a hangout for people dramatically younger than himself, and drank coffee, the fastest beverage in the house. DeWayne’s was an old soda fountain, in the same family since Eisenhower. Grandpa, Dad, Edd, Edd Junior, still there: a dynasty of soda jerks. He drank as much coffee as fast as he could and watched a two-by-four opening at the end of the room where the young girls danced together to a jukebox. Their movements were strange and formal, glassy and distant; and everything wonderful about their bodies was under twenty-four months old. They moved toward the bellowing music, then moved away, gazes crisscrossing. They arced toward the surrounding columnar tables and quick-swigged pop without losing the beat. Though much of this struck a deep chill in Lucien, part of him desired to be a shallow boy with a sports car. Anything he’d ever done seemed like old tickertape.
Lucien knew that he had to practice an upright existence. He was being watched, not by everyone as he imagined, but fairly closely watched. People seemed to think he was waiting for Emily.
When he emerged from DeWayne’s, he felt as though his trousers were undone, or that his face and neck were a mass of hickeys. He saw two people he knew. One was the messianic Century 21 realtor, H. A. “Bob” Roberts. Bob cried out a greeting. He coasted past Lucien with a marathoner’s stride, but kept his face locked in Lucien’s direction.
The other was Mrs. Hunt, Lucien’s mathematics teacher of years back. She had been retired for a long time and now stalked Main Street reproaching former students, some of whom were grandparents and had had quite enough of this from her over the years.