“Anyway,” he said. “I just decided to stop down and, y’know, say hello. My name is Lucien Taylor.” The neighbor, Jerrold Carpenter, said absolutely nothing. “I’m your new neighbor.” This time Lucien could make out the slight shrug under the brown coveralls. It meant “So?” A fine heat rose about Lucien’s neck. He decided not to bring him any ducks.
“I noticed your half of the fence is in considerable bad repair,” said Lucien. “That’s going to change.”
The man stopped prying sludge and looked at Lucien. “You’re going to fix your share of the fence this year. If your cows get on my place, I’m going to move them on down to the highway and let them go. I also understand you’ve been greedy with the water. This year I’ll see to it there’s a ditch rider in June to teach you to stop stealing. I’ve got two hundred miner’s inches and I’m going to get them. The last thing is, don’t ever set foot on my place without permission. Pleasure meeting you. Goodbye.”
Lucien trudged down the drive and started back to his place. He felt awful. He began remembering in amazingly vivid detail how he had come up with his dream of a life of foreign service so many years ago now. In the dream there had been the flow of words and ideas; there had been itchy feet and rambling fever. Much of this had evaporated against a background of dysentery and human rights violations, a background of vacant government pamphleteering on his own part; and the dribbling on-again, off-again attempt to make a family within an overpowering feeling of disconnection. Growing up in a small town, he didn’t quite belong in land he knew and loved, and he no longer belonged in town. On the radio a young woman offered a broken refrigerator for sale. “Suitable for a smoker.” A baby wept in the background.
Belong. What a word. Drives everyone fucking nuts, thought Lucien. You look at children and they belong where you drop them, while time only makes them lost. What a system. Cross that River Jordan, hoss, leave it all behind.
When he got to the house, Lucien went inside and called the neighbor. “Start ordering your materials,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of fence to build in the spring.” He sat at the kitchen table and blew power calls on a duck call he’d carved out of bois d’arc in shop class. He blew highballs and greeting calls and feeding calls. Sadie tilted her head and listened.
There was snow drifted low around the meter bases; and at the end of Main Street, the Absaroka Range, which seems to keep its distance in warmer weather, looked aggressively close. A woman shouldered her way out of a secondhand store with a table lamp; its shade angled suddenly into the prevailing wind and she backed all the way to her sedan with it in her arms. Her rayon scarf waved crazily.
Lucien wore overalls and a camouflage duck-hunting coat. He tried saying to himself, There but for the grace of God go I, as each person passed him; but soon he detected that the gap was less clear than he hoped. He soon imagined they might have a better place to go than he did. Some of these people he knew had huge video dishes next to their homes and knew a lot more about Shiites and Druze militiamen than he ever would. I am absolutely lost, thought Lucien, I mean absolutely.
Winter came as a series of color extractions; Lucien dutifully painted the shrinking values. By March, one thing had become fairly clear: Lucien had no talent. Drinking and womanizing seemed the only solution. So, quite abruptly, he went from being the mysterious loner out on his ranch to a virtual town fixture and barfly. He learned to sleep on the jukebox. Frequently he took his lady companions back to the blue hole, where they played and soaked and crawled out onto the heated mud for drunken intercourse. It wasn’t that pretty at all. Any attempt at a gay thrust only shoved your partner deeper into the mud. Grunting and floundering while all one’s own limbs made sucking noises was, Lucien felt, a real icebreaker with the more timid gals. Lucien hoped to one day develop this spring into a spa. In April he had a close call when a brunette passed out in the mud and sank from sight. He had to probe for her with a stout pole to make the rescue, then load her to town with only her eyes showing: he had been afraid to let her rinse in the bottomless hot spring, for fear of not seeing her again. Though it would have been hard to notice then, she really had a great personality. Her father was Lucien’s age; he met them at the door and beat Lucien to a pulp. That night Lucien slept at the hobo cave down by the river. He stared up at the dozens of red elk the Indians had made and remembered wanting to paint.
During the night it had turned off bitter cold; the anchor ice rolled down along the formerly blue channels and stacked up on the gravel bars, where they made glittering midday heaps. Lucien parked his sedan and let the motor and heater run. He looked down below the highway riprap into a deep pool where ice was actually growing from the cold bottom in low shining subaqueous domes. He remembered fishing near Boca Chica Key in Florida when the Navy was fueling its jets beyond the mangroves. There was considerable heat on the shallow water, and through the guano-covered vegetation one could smell hot jet fuel and asphalt. He pretended the noisy fanned heater of the sedan was the Southeast Trades and lit a cigar. When James was a very small boy, he and Suzanne had gone to Green Turtle Cay. Lucien remembered the three of them riding the ferry across Abaco Sound next to a stack of weatherproofed Last Suppers consigned among the island provisions for the Christmas trade. They walked along the main street of the town of New Plymouth beneath the string of domestic light bulbs that illuminated the street at night and listened to the singing of the choirs in the minute churches of the town. Lucien took James into the one-room abandoned jail, then took him climbing on the ancient, burst coral tombs with their decorative conch shells. The ladies went by in the winter heat holding tiny black Bibles and wearing lavish headgear indicative of a cherished life on earth where the warm sea makes man contented and stupid. Later, when all the gentle coasts had drawn the feel-good elements of society to their fragrant shores, Lucien would return to the frozen north for a bit of self-immolation, sacrifice and malfeasance. Still, the best thing of that year had been teaching James to open coconuts with a screwdriver, that in a year of great professional advancement and policy impact. He wasn’t wondering how to get out. He wasn’t thinking of rising above foreign service with a spy novel or a well-publicized dispute with Congress or the President. The coconut, the screwdriver and his son stood out above all other concerns, great and small. But his wife had come to seem kindly; and everyone knows how well that one does against the other woman. When Emily was indicted, Lucien was gone before he knew what had hit him. Later he would seem to go mad as his unconscious dealt him most of the blows he so richly deserved. Often a man displaying signs of seemingly crude suffering — drooling, crazy laughter, embarrassing public drunkenness — is actually, under the surface, suffering from something intricate; in Lucien’s case, all those gossamer horrors that stole his happy home from him made of him something whose chain one pulled at one’s peril. But he was growing calm; calm at first in defeat and in the drifting lethargy that defeat produces. With Wick Tompkins’s help, though, there had come to be a stirring within. Maybe a big one to make a lie of all one’s past errors.
“Suzanne, this is strictly a professional call. I need your help in a very specific way.”
“Who is this?”
“This is Lucien,” said Lucien with an unnecessary air of patience.
“What can I do for you, Lucien?”