We ate steaks on round tables, under a honey-colored harvest moon, which seemed out of place since it was spring. I’d made a friend at dinner, a frosted-blond daughter-in-law from Pasadena. (We met when I asked her where the restroom was, seeing as we were in the middle of the vineyard. She said someone had stolen the vineyard workers’ portable toilet — all the women were very upset — but she had Kleenex if I needed to go out into the vineyard.) I’d been cutting my sauvignon blanc with water all night, with an eye to leaving. Oh, she was just beginning. Wait till midnight, she said. About this time, several women decided to make a group trek into the vineyards to urinate. I know this sounds very strange, but you have to understand, no one wanted to go out there alone. There was some talk first about whether anyone was sober enough to drive into town to use the hotel facilities. I was sure we’d be thrown out — the big drunken group of us — if we tried. So into the vineyards we went. I caught my husband’s eye on the way and thought how he’d laugh if he guessed what we were doing. I could hear him talking permits and licenses with men anxious to get their hands on the little 150-case parental wine hobby and make it grow, men salivating over the idea of owning a Napa Valley winery.
We staggered over dirt clods, under the preternatural moon. “What’s this?” one of the women asked me, as if I would know by the leaf whether we were walking through merlot or cabernet or sauvignon blanc. Some of the women were making educated guesses, like “this must be merlot, the leaf is larger than the palm of my hand.” I began to feel uneasy. There I was in the middle of a starlit vineyard on a cold spring night — it’s funny when I think of it now — increasingly tense, irritated, sober. The women were all very drunk and giddy, holding children, tripping over the uneven soil and into each other, laughing, losing their shoes, as we walked farther from the glowing lights, Frank Sinatra’s crooning, farther into the cold, green vines. I was walking with a balanced stance, my hands at a ready position, pivoting my head from side to side, forcing myself to see — what? (I thought of Ken saying, “Throw your vision out there.”) There wasn’t anything in the darkness. Feeling that some malignant spirit was laughing and watching for the moment we’d all drop our pants or lift our skirts and flash the vines.
Russell Banks
Lobster Night
From Esquire
Stacy didn’t mean to tell Noonan that when she was seventeen she was struck by lightning. She rarely told anyone, and never a man she was attracted to or hoped soon to be sleeping with. Always, at the last second, an alarm in the center of her brain went off, and she changed the subject, asked a question like, “How’s your wife?” or “You ready for another?” She was a summertime bartender at Noonan’s, a sprawling log building with the main entrance and kitchen door facing the road and three large plate-glass dining room windows in back and a wide redwood deck cantilevered above the yard for taking in the great sunset views of the Adirondack Mountains. The sign said, NOONAN’S FAMILY RESTAURANT, but in fact it was a roadhouse, a bar that — except in ski season and on summer weekends when drive-by tourists with kids mistakenly pulled in for lunch or supper — catered mostly to heavy drinkers from the several nearby hamlets.
The night that Stacy told Noonan about the lightning was also the night she shot and killed him. She had rented an A-frame at off-season rates in one of the hamlets and was working for Noonan only till the winter snows blew in from Quebec and Ontario. From May to November, she usually waited tables or tended bar in one or another of the area restaurants, and the rest of the year she taught alpine skiing at Whiteface Mountain. That was her real job, her profession. Stacy had the healthy, ash-blond good looks of a poster girl for women’s Nordic sports: tall, broad shouldered, flat muscled, with a square jaw and high cheekbones. But despite appearances, she viewed herself as a plain-faced twenty-eight-year-old exathlete, with the emphasis on ex. Eight years ago, she was captain of the nationally ranked St. Regis University downhill ski team, only a sophomore and already a star. Then in the eastern regionals she pushed her luck, took a spectacular, cartwheeling spill in the giant slalom, and shattered her left thigh. The video of her fall was still being shown at the front of the sports segment on the evening news from Plattsburgh.
A year of physical therapy and she returned to college and the slopes, but she’d lost her fearlessness and, with it, her interest in college, and dropped out before fall break. Her parents had long since swapped their house for an RV and retired to a semipermanent campground outside Phoenix; her three older brothers had drifted downstate to Albany for work in construction; but Stacy came back to where she’d grown up. She had friends from high school there, mostly women, who still thought of her as a star: “Stace was headed for the Olympics, y’know,” they told strangers. Over time, she lived briefly and serially with three local men in their early thirties, men she called losers even when she was living with them — slow-talking guys with beards and ponytails, rusted-out pickup trucks, and large dogs with bandannas tied around their necks. Otherwise and most of the time, she lived alone.
Stacy had never tended bar for Noonan before this, and the place was a little rougher than she was used to. But she was experienced and had cultivated a set of open-faced, wiseguy ways and a laid-back manner that protected her from her male customers’ presumptions. Which, in spite of her ways and manner, she needed: She was a shy, north-country girl who, when it came to personal matters, volunteered very little about herself, not because she had secrets but because there was so much about herself that she did not yet understand. She did understand, however, that the last thing she wanted or needed was a love affair with a man like Noonan — married, twenty years older than she, and her boss. She was seriously attracted to him, though. And not just sexually. Which was why she got caught off guard.
It was late August, a Thursday, the afternoon of Lobster Night. The place was empty, and she and Noonan were standing hip to hip behind the bar, studying the lobster tank. Back in June, Noonan, who did all the cooking himself, had decided that he could attract a better class of clientele and simplify the menu at the same time if, during the week, he offered nightly specials, which he advertised on a chalkboard hung from the FAMILY RESTAURANT sign outside. Monday became Mexican Night, with dollar margaritas and all the rice and refried beans you could eat. Tuesday was Liver ‘n’ Onions Night. Wednesday was Fresh Local Corn Night, although until mid-August, the corn came not from Adirondack gardens but from southern New Jersey and Pennsylvania by way of the Grand Union supermarket in Lake Placid. And Thursday — when local folks rarely ate out and therefore needed something more than merely special — was designated Lobster Night. Weekends, he figured, took care of themselves.
Noonan had set his teenage son’s unused tropical fish tank at the end of the bar, filled it with tap water, and arranged with the Albany wholesaler to stock the tank on his Monday runs to Lake Placid with a dozen live lobsters. All week, the lobsters rose and sank in the cloudy tank like dark thoughts. Usually, by Tuesday afternoon, the regulars at the bar had given the lobsters names like Marsh and Redeye and Honest Abe, after local drinking, hunting, and bar-brawling legends, and had handicapped the order of their execution. In the villages around, Thursday quickly became everyone’s favorite night for eating out, and soon Noonan was doubling his weekly order, jamming the fish tank and making Lobster Night an almost merciful event for the poor crowded creatures.