Orchard (11 page)

19

It was a Friday night, and the Top Deck Tavern was full of the men and women who spent the week waiting on, serving, guiding, or cleaning up after tourists. Even at the height of summer, the Top Deck remained a bar for locals, one of the only spots in the county where they could take the edge off their frustrations and spend a night cursing and mocking the summer people who drove up from Milwaukee or Chicago, rich bastards and their kids who may have had money in their pockets but didn’t know their asses from their elbows.

The four or five glasses of beer Henry had drunk were just enough to make it seem as if the dim light and the haze of cigarette smoke, rather than the noise, kept him from hearing clearly the remark Jimmy Lauer tossed Henry’s way. Henry waved a hand in front of his face and peered down the bar to where Jimmy stood, then he cupped a hand to his good ear and shouted back, “I know you’re talking to me, but I can’t hear a damn thing you’re saying.”

“I said, What do you think this is—some kind of Wild West saloon?”

This time Jimmy’s words got through, but Henry still didn’t understand. He turned to Frankie Rawling, who was leaning across the bar from him.

“Ignore him,” Frankie said. “He’s just trying to get under your skin.”

“How’s he going to do that when I can’t hear what the hell he’s saying?”

Frankie reached across the bar and put her palm on Henry’s cheek. She turned his head until his vision was once again fixed on her and away from the group of four men standing halfway down the bar. “Ignore him,” she repeated, and kept her hand on Henry’s face a moment longer.

For months Henry and Frankie Rawling had been moving steadily toward a destination at which Henry was still not sure he wanted to arrive. It began with Frankie’s teasing, which was harmless enough, since for years she had been reddening Henry’s and every other man’s ears with her bold talk. Soon, however, they moved to new stages of playful, joking intimacy. As she passed, Frankie would snap Henry’s ass with a bar towel. She would pick up his cigarette, take a deep drag, and put it back in the ashtray, and when he brought it to his own lips, he couldn’t help but put his mouth on her lipstick stain. And finally, when Henry rode up to the Top Deck on Buck not long ago, Frankie, seeing that he had not bothered with saddle or bridle, said, “A bareback rider, eh? Maybe I’ve finally found a man who can stay on for the full ride.” “I guess,” Henry said, “you’ve bucked off a few, huh?” She looked him up and down. “Just hang on tight, cowboy, when it comes your turn.”

Since that night, Henry had not bothered to saddle Buck for their evening ride if he thought he’d be stopping at the Top Deck. Tonight, however, he had taken a few extra minutes and slipped a bit between Buck’s teeth, noticing, in the process, how hooked and pointed they had become and chastising himself for not having them floated. Perhaps that was the real reason why, on most nights, Henry simply climbed on Buck without bothering with tack, not because he was in such a hurry to get to Frankie’s place but because he didn’t want to be reminded of how neglectful he had become in the care of his animal.

It had been almost a year since John’s death, and during those months, Henry had drifted from one extreme to the other in trying to get past the grief.

He had tried to handle it as he thought his father would, by standing up to it and trying to face it down. This Henry was the responsible citizen, the sober-sided husband and father and the dutiful churchgoer. This was the hardworking Henry who put in long hours in the orchard and then came home to attack the chores that needed to be done there. But then, when all his strenuous efforts still could not accomplish the task that most needed to be done—banishing heartache from his own house—Henry turned from his father’s model and instead ran away to lose himself in a boy-man’s diversions. Fishing. Riding horseback. Playing cards. Drinking beer. Flirting with Frankie Rawling.

Henry was fairly certain all he had to do to take the next step with Frankie was to say, “Let’s go upstairs,” and she would lead him off by the hand, even if it meant telling Owen that he’d have to mind the bar alone for a while. So what was holding Henry back? Perhaps it was the fact that sometimes his attempts to find pleasure tasted so flat and stale that a life salted with sorrow seemed preferable.

But ignoring Jimmy Lauer was not making him go away. “Did you always want to be a cowboy?” Jimmy said. “Is that it? Is that why you ride up on your horse and tie up outside the saloon like a goddamn movie cowboy?”

People generally made allowances for Jimmy’s behavior because of the tragedy that befell his family years ago. Jimmy’s father and two uncles had been professional herring fishermen, and in 1930, on the day after Thanksgiving, they were caught out on the lake when a terrible storm blew in. Their boat ran aground on Plum Reef, and all rescue attempts failed. The three Lauers, along with Eldon Gottschalk, drowned. The incident happened when Jimmy was a boy, and it seemed to strand him in early adolescence. He never married, he jumped from job to job, he spent every evening in one of the county’s taverns, and after he had a few beers, he usually settled on his victim for the night, someone to receive his insults. Most people laughed off these taunts—Jimmy just being Jimmy.

Which was exactly what Henry usually would have done, but on this night, he decided to answer Jimmy. “Not jealous, are you? Seeing as how you can’t stay on anything faster than that leaky rowboat of yours.”

Obviously pleased that he’d found someone to take the bait, Jimmy walked toward Henry. “Why would anyone even want to sit on that old swayback? A man can likely walk faster’n that nag can gallop.”

When Henry moved away from the bar to meet Jimmy, Frankie muttered, “Shit.”

“Buck might surprise you,” Henry said. Face-to-face with Jimmy, Henry was struck once again by the prominence of Jimmy’s lower jaw and the way it turned Jimmy’s smile upside down, reminding Henry of a bass.

“Hell, he’s surprised me by still being able to stand up. I recall you traipsing around on that horse back in high school.”

This reference to their past made Henry wonder if Jimmy’s banter was not entirely good-natured. In the fall of their senior year, Henry, Jimmy, Nils Singstad, and Phil Trent had gone duck hunting down at Horicon on land owned by Phil’s uncle. Henry drove, but with the stipulation that the others would have to pitch in for gas. On their first night out, as they sat around a campfire drinking, Jimmy began to grouse about sharing expenses. “It ain’t fair, goddammit. Henry’s old man owns half the apple orchards in the county while my mom had to go ask Pastor Sunvold if the church would help us out last winter. I wouldn’t mind kicking in, but a gallon of gas ain’t nothing to the Houses.” The House family was never as prosperous as Jimmy supposed, but in the years since Henry’s father dropped dead of a stroke outside Bill Tufte’s bait shop, the House family’s fortune, such as it was, had declined. Many of those orchards that Jimmy referred to had long since been sold off.

Vernon Brack pushed himself between the two men. “How about a race,” Vernon suggested. “What say?” He turned back to Jimmy. “See if you can outwalk Henry and his horse?”

“I’m game,” Henry said. “Time and place. We’ll be there.”

“That makes a lot of fucking sense,” said Jimmy. “That’s bullshit.”

“Maybe so, but it’s your bullshit.”

“Fuck you both,” Jimmy said and stepped back to his waiting beer.

From behind him, Henry heard a voice say, “How about your boat, Jimmy?”

The suggestion came from Frankie. Henry thought she had turned away from this little argument, but she was pushing her way forward. She stopped next to Henry, put an arm on his shoulder, and pushed her hip out until it pressed against his thigh. “You think you could row your boat across the bay faster than Henry could gallop his way around to Cooley’s Landing?”

The feel of Frankie at his side made Henry wonder if she were offering herself up as the prize.

And that was
how Henry came to be sitting astride Buck on a warm, humid night when the bar’s haze seemed to follow all the patrons outside. Above the waters of the bay, fog hung motionlessly as if it too were waiting for a signal.

The evening reminded Henry of those summer nights when he and his father used to climb a hill to look out across this same bay and watch thunderheads march in from the west. Henry liked it best when the storm would stall over the water, and lightning, confined to the clouds, would give off a soft flickering like a candle inside a paper lantern. Then, even the rumble of thunder seemed benign, a sound no more threatening than the drumbeat of his father’s heart when he held Henry close.

Now, from down at the dock, one of Jimmy Lauer’s supporters called up to Henry and his men standing around Buck. “Hey, who’s going to say when to go?”

“I will.” Once again, Frankie stepped forward and stood at Henry’s side.

Looking up at Henry, she said, “They’re ready down there. How about you?”

“I suppose. But I got to say, this is feeling dumber by the minute.”

Nils Singstad was gently stroking Buck’s forehead. “Did it ever get decided what you’re racing for?”

“Damned if I know,” Henry said. “To shut Jimmy’s mouth, maybe.”

“Well, hell, that ain’t going to happen.”

With his knees, Henry tightened his hold on Buck. He could feel that great barrel of ribs expand and contract as the horse tried to find a rhythm of breathing that matched this bewildering situation.

Bob Banville, although he was certainly one of those rooting for Henry to win, said, “God damn, it doesn’t look from here like Jimmy’s got that far to row. You can see the lights over at Cooley’s. It’s a straight shot across the bay.” The expanse of water he pointed across was dead calm.

“Does anyone know,” Henry asked, “can I stay on the beach all the way?”

Nils said, “Someone’s building a place next to Voldt’s. You want to watch out there in case they got their shit all over the beach.”

Henry looked down at Frankie. A cigarette jutted from the corner of her mouth, and she was squinting through the smoke and fingering through a scattering of coins in her palm. Tip money, Henry thought. She had already lost interest in the race and was trying to count how much she’d made by scooping nickels and dimes out of the beer slop on the bar.

“This is crazy,” he said to anyone who was willing to hear him and say, It sure as hell is; now climb down and let’s go back inside where we belong. But Henry no more belonged in the Top Deck than out here on the back of Buck. He should have been home, putting the screen on the back door and propping open the upstairs windows so electric fans could be set right on the ledges, drawing in a little night air and perhaps making sleep a little easier.

Frankie sucked in her breath to slip the coins back into the pocket of her dungarees. “Crazy? Yeah, ain’t it,” she said. “Okay. It looks like Jimmy’s ready down there, so I’m giving the signal he can push off.”

Nils patted Buck’s forehead one more time then stepped aside.

“Yeah, all right,” said Henry.

Frankie made a few backhand waves as though she were trying to shoo Jimmy Lauer from the dock. To Henry she said, “This is it, cowboy,” and swatted Buck.

The horse could probably be excused for not immediately striding out at a speed appropriate to a race, because Frankie’s gentle slap on his rump was exactly the kind of blow that Henry used when he opened the gate and released Buck into his own small corral. Confused and longing for home himself, the horse may not have understood what was being asked of him.

Within seconds however, because Buck was trained to put human impulses before his own, he had broken into a trot and soon was galloping as fast as the beach’s broken stretches of sand and rock allowed.

Falling off Buck
was nothing like the experience of almost driving into a tree with Reuben Rosicky’s truck. On that occasion, Henry thought the collision was inevitable, and even after he missed the tree, he was unaware of having done anything to avoid the crash. Now, however, even as he was slipping from his horse’s back, he continued to feel confident that he’d be able to right himself. When he finally realized that wouldn’t be possible, he was still able to think through a sequence of thoughts that were remarkably coherent and calm considering the circumstances.
I have
not fallen or been thrown from a horse since I was ten years old,
Henry thought,
and it’s goddamn embarrassing to be doing it at my age.
He chastised himself further: Racing like this, on a horse’s bare back—it’s something a boastful, strutting man would do . . . or a drunk who had turned away from the obligations of his home and family and business in order to take up a dare that any sane and responsible man would have walked away from.

Finally, when it was obvious that he would not be able to stop his slide from Buck, Henry still believed he could dictate the terms of the fall itself—where and how he would land—thereby forgetting the lesson that failing to give in to what lies beyond human power to alter frequently worsens a situation.

Henry let go of the reins—he didn’t want the panic and confusion of the moment to cause him to forget and hold on and perhaps pull Buck over on top of himself—and thrust out an arm to break his fall, aiming for an area of the beach free of rocks and debris. But Henry was not falling from a stationary object. In all his calculations, he had failed to figure in how Buck’s galloping speed increased the rate of the fall.

The heel of his hand and his wrist jammed under a driftwood log, and his forward momentum snapped both the ulna and the radius. A branch, sticking out of the log like a horn, tore open the skin of his forehead as if it were paper. When Henry tumbled to the side, he separated his shoulder and bruised his hip on a rock.

As soon as Henry sat up, blood would run down into his eyes and veil his vision in red, but for the moment, lying flat on his back on the sand, he could see clearly. The stars above glittered like dagger points. The shaggy tops of a few tall firs tossed in the wind as if they were nodding heads. Nearby Buck nickered, and Henry arched his head back to try to find his horse, hoping he wouldn’t see that Buck too had tumbled onto the sand.