His father, Denny Watling, had run a real estate office in town. His mother, Margie, was the leading sales agent. Shawn’s parents played in a country music band all tricked out in matching cowboy outfits at local bars and the county fair every August. They were regular small-town folk who read spy novels, got new cars every three years, and once took a vacation to see Paris. They were gone now, along with Shawn’s little brother, Cody, who had been my boy’s age, taken by the flu. Shawn inherited his father’s instruments (violin, mandolin, guitar) and was part of our music circle in church. He was a hell of a musician. He was in the last graduating class that Union Grove high school ever produced and he spent one semester at Colgate University before it, and most colleges everywhere as far as I knew, had to close on a temporary basis that now seemed permanent. Shawn went to work for Bill Schmidt because that was what there was to do for a young person like him. He was strong in a way that you hardly ever saw in the old days, strong from real work, not from lifting barbells or aerobics classes. At age twenty-three, he married another young survivor, Britney Blieveldt, and they had a girl named Sarah. Shawn was not a kid anymore. He and his family lived in town in his parents’ old house, which was one of the nicest ones on Salem Street, our nicest street. Having a nice house didn’t make him wealthy or boost his status, though. There were plenty of empty houses in town and no one to sell them to. The real estate industry no longer existed.
When I met up with him on the way to the general supply, Shawn was leading a big furry black dog pulling a two-wheeled cart. The dog was part Newfoundland with some mastiff in him, Shawn said. It belonged to Mr. Schmidt. Few dogs were around anymore. Some had been eaten during the hunger that followed the flu in the spring of that year. People didn’t talk about it, it was so demoralizing. And now, with no manufactured pet food, you had to have a productive household to be able to feed one, which Mr. Schmidt certainly did.
“We need you on Tuesday night for Christmas practice,” I told him because he’d skip it if you didn’t pester him about it. Rehearsal for the Christmas carol service went on year-round and was more like an excuse for the circle to play regularly. At this time of year we usually played everything but Christmas music just because we liked to play. Sometimes we played string band dance music, sometimes old rock and roll, sometimes Handel. With the electricity off, you didn’t hear recorded music anymore. You had to make it yourself.
“You come by the house and collect me, I’ll go, Robert,” he said.
“I wish I didn’t have to drag you there.”
“I get awful tired, especially this time of year.”
“We’re supposed to play a levee at the Shushan grange July Fourth, you know.”
“We’ll just play the same old crap. “Possum Up a Gum Stump,” and all. We don’t need to practice that.”
“We do if we want to sound crisp.”
“I don’t care how it sounds.”
“That’s not a very positive attitude.”
He laughed bitterly. “We’ll be haying up at Schmidt’s all next week. He’ll probably have us out there until pitch dark, anyway.”
I know deep down Shawn loved to play. We just continued on for a while, enjoying the quiet road and the creak of the little cart’s axle. But the big black dog was panting from the heat, and a big gobbet of foamy spit hung from his jaw. Shawn limped slightly.
“Did you hurt yourself?” I said.
“I fell off Mr. Schmidt’s barn roof.”
“What were you doing up there?”
“Fixing it. What do you think?”
We walked a ways again in silence. I hadn’t known him to be so irritable before.
“It’s been mighty hot lately,” I said.
“It’s not just the heat. Jesus, Robert, look how we live? I’m practically a serf. You know what a serf is?”
“Of course I do. I went to college,” I said, and regretted it right away.
“Lucky you,” he said.
“Music always cheers me up,” I said.
“I’m glad it works for you.”
“Music salves the soul.”
“Nothing can salve my soul.”
“You know, Shawn, even back in normal times people got down and depressed. In fact, you could argue that people are generally better off now mentally than we were back then. We follow the natural cycles. We eat real food instead of processed crap full of chemicals. We’re not jacked up on coffee and television and sexy advertising all the time. No more anxiety about credit card bills—”
“I don’t want to debate.”
“I bet it’s true, though.”
“Find somebody else if you want to have a debate.”
“It’s just conversation.”
“Whatever you call it, quit trying to persuade me that everything’s great, okay?” he said and stopped in his tracks. I stopped too. His face was red and tendons stood out on his neck. He was a large young man, and he looked a little scary.
“You frustrate the hell out of me, son,” I said.
“Do I? I work like a dog. Harder than this dog. From sunup to sundown, like a medieval peasant. I do it with hardly any sense of a future, and the last thing I need is a lecture from the generation that screwed up the world. Come on, Merlin,” he said to the dog.
He marched off stiffly. I watched him leading the dog for a few moments and then hurried to catch up with them.
“I apologize,” I said.
He shrugged.
“I didn’t mean to lecture you.”
He shrugged again.
“Hey, can we still be friends?”
“Sure,” he said.
I didn’t want to give him more reason to stay away from the music circle. We needed him. Further up the road, we had to stop again. Shawn unhitched the dog from the cart so it could climb down into the ditch off the shoulder and drink from the rill that ran alongside there.
“Do you ever hear anything of your own boy?” Shawn said.
“No.”
“Daniel’s his name, right?”
“That’s right.”
“My little brother Cody and him were friends, I think.”
“Yes they were. I remember Cody.”
“They were both good kids. Cody would be twenty-one now.”
“Daniel would too.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry—”
“He’s not dead. As far as I know. Just gone. He had to see what was out there.”
“I hope he found something good out there, Robert.”
The big dog, Merlin, suddenly busted up through the cattails and orange daylilies, like a monster from the depths, dripping and slobbering. It startled me. He obligingly allowed Shawn to hitch him back to his cart.
“Smart dog,” I said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Shawn said, and we walked the rest of the way to the general.
Eight
The general supply consisted of a pole barn housing the “store,” the yard behind the store where salvage was sorted, and five large sheds where the sorted salvage was kept out of the weather. Most of the stuff in these sheds was lumber, plywood, sheet metal, and other materials collected from derelict buildings that had entered ownership limbo. Back behind the sheds was the ten-acre filled hollow that used to be the town dump. Now, instead of putting things into it, things were taken out of it. A dozen men with shovels and pry bars worked a section close to the sheds, while a team of heavily muscled bay Belgians stood by stoically hitched to a wagon in the heat, swishing at flies with their tails.
You came up to the general supply by way of a wooden gate rigged on a counterbalance with a guard shack beside it, where you were checked to make sure that anything leaving the premises was paid for. The fellow on duty there today was Bunny Willman, who had years ago worked as a janitor at the middle school when my son was there. Bunny was the opposite of what his name suggests. He was a six-foot-three hulking menace, muscled like a hyena. His bacon-colored hair was worked up into sinister pigtails tied with scrap cloth bows. Like many of Wayne Karp’s crew, he wore a droopy mustache and goatee. He also sported the tattooed wings over his eyebrows that Wayne Karp’s cohorts had adopted as their tribal insignia. The shack had windows front and back and a door. On the side facing the gate, someone had nailed up a coyote pelt. It stank ferociously in the heat.