“Won’t… go, goddammit,” the unseen Harve grunted, still fully committed to his impossible exit strategy.
Now, in addition to Dot’s wailing, Griffin heard the thunder of feet pounding up the porch steps and then down the narrow ramp. “Daddy!” screamed a frantic voice that he first identified as Joy’s, then realized, no, it must be one of her sisters’.
He reluctantly rose to his feet. The chair, alas, was out of his reach, and it probably wasn’t a great idea to grab on to the wheels anyway. The thing to do-he should’ve realized this from the start-was to extract him from below. But the urge to peer over the side into the palsied hedge was irresistible, as the crowd now gathered at the busted railing attested.
Jared was among the first to arrive and immediately dropped to his knees and leaned forward to grab hold, though the chair was just beyond his reach as well.
“That’s not going to work,” Griffin said, placing a hand on his brother-in-law’s shoulder. “Maybe you and Jason and I can pull him out from below.”
For a moment Jared appeared to consider this suggestion. But then, getting to his feet, he seemed to really take in who’d just spoken to him, and his expression instantly morphed from thoughtfulness to rage. That would have been perplexing enough, even if Jason hadn’t been standing right next to him with the same identical fucking look on his face.
Honestly, Griffin ’s mother said. Would you look at these two morons?
It was as if they could hear her.
“You son of a bitch,” Jared said, that worm wriggling again beneath his temple, and before Griffin could object, a fist (Jared’s or Jason’s?), foreshortened, suddenly caught him flush on the cheekbone, and he felt himself lift off the ramp, his body describing a parabola in the air above the hedge. He could sense the ground coming up to meet him, but before it did he heard, or thought he heard, a loud splintering sound and a chorus of screams. What the…? he managed to think, but that was as far as he got.
Say good night, his mother advised, just as the screen went black.
10 Pistolary
The splintering sound Griffin heard as he went airborne was the wheelchair ramp collapsing under the weight of fifty well-fed celebrants. Those closest to the broken railing went into the yew, several landing on top of Harve and driving him deeper into its dark interior, where he bellowed piteously When Joy fell, the middle finger of her right hand got caught in the spokes of her father’s chair, the digit snapping like a twig. She should have been among the first to be rushed to the emergency room-most of the other injuries were only cuts and abrasions-but she refused to leave with her father still trapped in the hedge. The remaining guests gathered in a semicircle to watch Jason and Jared try to shake him loose. The hedge was far too thick, however, and its branches seemed naturally designed to funnel human victims straight down into its dark, dense center. Though they were slow to realize it, the twins’ efforts actually made matters worse by snapping some of the interior branches that were supporting their father, their fresh, sharp ends probing his soft flesh and making him howl in pain until he grew hoarse and then, finally, silent. The hotel manager urged patience while they looked for the head groundskeeper, who apparently had the only key to the locked shed where the chain saw was kept.
For a time nobody noticed Griffin, who lay unconscious beneath the hedge, with only his feet sticking out, or else they concluded he was conversing with Harve in the yew above. He came to in stages, as if from a long, luxurious nap, his senses returning one at a time, beginning with smell. He lay on his back, on soil that smelled richly of fertilizer, recently applied. His eyes were open, but there was nothing to see. Wait, that wasn’t quite true. What he was looking at, when he squinted, resembled a pen-and-ink drawing, except that its intricate lines wouldn’t stay still and were encased, at the edges, in dense fog. Wellfleet, he thought. Somehow he’d been transported back to the fog capital of the world, where no doubt he’d be expected to scatter his father’s ashes and this time do it right. But he didn’t have the ashes, Joy did, and had promised to give them back, though here he was in Wellfleet without them. Then, finally, there was a sound track, played through a crackling, blown speaker, nearby voices, lots of them, all talking and shouting at once. Why couldn’t he see who they belonged to? He was trying to sort out these complexities when he felt someone grab him by the ankles and pull him back into the world.
And what a world! For the next ten minutes he stood (swayed, actually) by himself, trying to make sense of it by going over in his mind what he believed to be true, allowing what he hoped were hard facts to surface, like gaseous bubbles through mud, into his wobbly consciousness. He wasn’t in Wellfleet, he was in Maine. He’d come here with a woman not his wife to attend his daughter’s wedding. To this same wedding his wife had also come, accompanied by a man who was not Griffin. His left eye was swollen tightly shut as a result of his being sucker punched (why?) by one of his brothers-in-law (which?). His father-in-law had, like a character in a fairy tale, got trapped in a tree. Highly improbable-all of it-and yet evidently true. It wasn’t someone’s opinion; no alternative theory had been advanced. He would have liked to talk it over with someone, but even his mother seemed to have abandoned him.
But hold on, he’d spoken to somebody after being yanked from under the hedge, hadn’t he? Who, though? And what had they talked about? It couldn’t have happened more than five minutes ago, but the memory was gone. He thought about joining the others over at the hedge where Harve was still imprisoned. Joy and Laura were over there, but so were Andy and Ringo, which made him super… what was the word? Unnecessary. The twins were there, too, and if he joined them without invitation, they might punch him again. He doubted this would actually happen, but couldn’t be sure. He still didn’t understand why they punched him the first time, and whatever their reason, it might still pertain. Super…?
Gradually, the dense Wellfleet fog in his brain began to lift, and then he noticed a woman sitting all by herself on a bench facing the ocean. Her scowl, together with how defiantly her arms were crossed over her chest, suggested that neither the hedge nor the crowd fixated on it was of the slightest interest to her. Griffin was aware he should know who this woman was, so he concentrated on her identity until it finally revealed itself. She was Dot, Harve’s second wife. Pleased with himself for recognizing her and anxious to test the coherence of his speech, he decided to join her. When he sat down, though, she said, “Go away,” without even glancing in his direction to see who it was.
Having only just arrived and feeling woozy from his journey, he was unwilling to depart quite yet, not until he’d discovered what she was doing all by herself, glowering at the unoffending ocean, when her husband had just been swallowed by a tree. An idea occurred to him that might explain it, so he said, “They can be tough…” He meant to go on but didn’t, his voice sounding remote in the echo chamber of his head.
She did turn to regard him now, her eyes narrowing. She seemed to be trying to decide if his sympathy was something she wanted, or if her misery was company enough. “That,” she said, pointing at his eye with her index finger, its tip sculpted to a frighteningly lethal point, “is what I feel like when I’m around those people. Like I’m being…pummeled. Bludgeoned. Battered. Cudgeled.”
That seemed to Griffin a tad overstated, but he knew what she meant, and having just struggled to construct a four-word sentence fragment, he envied her ability to summon so many impressive, violent synonyms. Clearly nobody’d punched her lights out recently. Together they swiveled on the bench to afford themselves a better view of what was transpiring at the hedge. People seemed to be taking turns talking to it. Had the bush been burning, the whole thing would have been biblical.