Postcards (43 page)
Authors: Annie Proulx
Motorcycles drone like sick bees. The riders come in chaffing their hands, snapping their arms. The woman is enormously fat. Her feet disappear into scuffed engineer boots. The others wear cowboy boots. The skinny man leads them to a table in the center of the room. He pushes back his Harley-Davidson cap and lights a cigarette.
‘Shit, remember that guy? What the hell was that place? Man, I went in there, said “Man, what the hell is old Larry doing in a place like this?”’ The men speak to each other in hard voices, the women lean forward and laugh.
‘Well, I figured after a while the goddamn thing is gonna get hot.’
The woman brings their menus. She carries a coffeepot in her right hand. Loyal’s coffee is lukewarm and low in the cup. He beckons to the woman.
‘Put a little of that coffee in my pocket, will you?’ Tiny fluted cups of nondairy creamer from her apron pocket. Loyal feels the heat of her body in the white stuff.
‘Was you there when goddamn Tom had that there goddamn cream of wheat yesterday?’
‘No, what was it, lumpy?’
‘Jesus Christ. Yeah, was like gravel.’
Now the worn tires pound across seamed cracks, a rock shaped like a castle stubs through the fog. The radio says a man arrested on rape charges has escaped.
He is on a back road. The traffic is thinner. But it’s all wrong. He is turned around in some way. He should be moving into the dry country, but instead sees cemeteries, dots and pots of plastic flowers. Names spring at him from white stones, Heydt, Hansen, Hitzeman, Schwebke, Grundwaldt, Pick. A corncob lies on a
grave. These roads are wrong. He turns onto dirt that cuts away through the black fields of Schwebke and Grundwaldt and Hitzeman.
Red-winged blackbirds flare, the shadows of clouds flow over the soft country, storefronts, corrugated metal of machinery repair shops, grain storage, farm chemicals. Tractors churn. God, it has to be Minnesota. He’s going east, must have driven northeast all the way across South Dakota. Turned around. Completely turned around.
The color of the soil changes to deep, deep blue. Jets of herbicide spray from the behemoth tractor tanks. An old farmer carries a chair from his kitchen into the field. Painted stones balance on fence posts and stumps. The rows of poplars, wind harps behind the farmhouses.
And beside an empty field, on an empty road taut as stretched wire, with a final stutter of worn-out pistons the truck breaks down. Worn out, worn down, used up. That’s all, folks.
WHEN LOYAL OPENED his eyes he was looking at a white spider crouched in the petals of a daisy. The round cream-colored abdomen reflected the buttery pollen rods. No wind. Daisies floated in the grass like doll plates. He could not remember what they reminded him of, something like wafers. Or another spider, not white.
He had slept badly; the cough wrenched through deep now. With his tongue he felt there was a festering sore in the corner of his mouth, the kind made by a diver of fine grass sunk so deep in the flesh that it became invisible, the kind from eating handfuls of unhulled wild strawberries raked out of the grass. It was not the season for strawberries. He braced his forefinger against his thumb and suddenly
catapulted the white spider into the air. It fell, a brief, pale dot.
He walked along a narrow road bordered by arched trees, almost a lane, except for tire tracks in the dust. On his back the bedroll, a few utensils, a change of ragged clothes, wad of paper, pencil stubs, jar of instant coffee, plastic razor with a dull blade. Miles behind him the fulgurite was buried in a secret grave. Only he knew its location.
The pieces of sky that opened above were pallid. He could get no grasp of the day except a feeling of dry chill. When he saw a meadow above him through the trees he headed for it instinctively, drawn by the possibility of a high, searching view.
The air sweetened with flooding light as he labored through birch and poplar. Breathless, coughing, when he reached the meadow, he was disappointed to find it was only an opening in the woods, a clearing of lichen and red-tinged strawberry leaves, but he could not tell what he had expected. He had come around so many corners they all looked the same.
The meadow was what he imagined summer in Russia was like, frail and empty. Now he could see half the sky. Mare’s tads and mackerel scales, ice-crystal streamers. It was a high sky, windswept cirrus in the stratosphere like paintbrush strokes. At the end of the strokes were gleaming scribbles like Arabic writing. The cloud spread north in sweeping waves, a vast fan tipped with plumes. He turned on his heel to look into the south where cirrocumulus packed the sky with dense pearl ripples. Fair weather and clear.
‘When the bird’s flight is over,
When the tired wings fold,’ he mumbled.
He took up a half-rotten branch from the edge of the field. ‘Dance, honey? “When the bird’s flight is ooooover,”’ he bleated, stumbling in the moss cushions, holding the branch at the waist, pumping it to and fro, tipping it in a way that would have had a woman’s hair loose and down, small jumps and whirls, an old man with bees in his sleeves. He half-fell. ‘Trip me, you bitch. Get out.’ Panting, retching with the cough. And hurled the branch, glad to see it break in a spray of red pulp. His loneliness was not innocent. Under the blows of the cough he vibrated as though his body had been struck, as a taut anchor rope struck by iron, tears crept along the channels
of his contorted face, he stood in the silent meadow without even a rotted branch.
He thought: it’s almost gone.
And saw the blue smear of woodsmoke coming from a hole in the trees below.
He imagined: A man and a woman sitting at a table. A fringed cloth hangs to the floor, their feet are hidden in the folds. The woman chooses a heart-shaped strawberry, not a wild strawberry, from a bowl of fruit. Her hand, her arm, her face half erased, but the strawberry gleams brilliantly, she holds its stem between index finger and thumb, the tip of the thumb touching the puffed cap. The black seeds are like commas embedded in the red pores. The man is himself.
ON THE TERRACE of The Silver Salmon restaurant in Minneapolis the woman leaned forward. She was wearing a magenta cotton dress that came down to her ankles. The shoulders of the dress were padded. Her red hair, crinkled in waves like Chinese noodles, cascaded to her breasts. There was, her first husband saw, a piece of used dental floss in her hair. Maybe it was a new fashion. He listened, looking at her bare feet, at the yellow calloused pads on the toes. Those came from tight shoes. She had kicked the shoes under the wrought iron chair. She lit another cigarette.
‘Do you know what he told me?’ she said. ‘He told me, “We’ll go up there. Sweetheart. I’ve rented a little camp for the month in
the lovely wild country. The silent sky and the purple spruce. And the little canoe and loons and a fire in the fireplace when the nights are cold. We’ll throw stones into the water, Sweetheart, and see how far they skip. We’d live off the land and it’ll be lovely.”’ She said this to him in the flat voice that cut like a pitched slate across the troughs of pleasure, struck only the crests of events she wanted to regret.
‘So we went. Never, never, never trust a bloody, blackhearted, lying Irishman.’ They were alone on the terrace, the glass tables, the metal chairs around them like a wood. The terrace was at the back of the restaurant and opened on a wide alley. He had to go into the bar to get a waiter’s attention. There was a faint stench of garbage and he guessed the dumpster was behind a ragged paling fence. Across the alley an empty loading dock at the back of a building. The light overhead like slack canvas. Her nails and the raised veins on the back of her hands reflected the colorless light. She drank from the wine. He drank from his own glass. Like warm water.
‘The wind blowing on reeds is like the wind on prairie grass. Like home, like Saskatchewan prairie, back home where we came from. Pure, puking prairie, only a little gouged up, only a little ruined by plows and roads and wheat and machinery, just like I was only a little ruined before I got tied up with you and then the bloody black Irish.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘you leave me out of it.’ Rail about the Irish all she wanted, the big fight and the way the Irish left her facedown in the muck after three days, but leave him out of it. His crime had been one of omission.
The luminous windows of the building across the alley in a black grid; the half circle of his ring caught the light like an eye beneath a lowered lid. His ex-wife slid down in her chair, stretched out her legs; shins like shapely rods of metal.
‘You can’t imagine what it felt like, to have your face pushed into the stinking gagging moss, right down into the stinking mud. I thought I was going to die, I couldn’t breathe. The force was tremendous. He was trying to kill me. To smother me in the moss.’
The loading dock was sinking in shadow. An old derelict edged along, shuffling on glassy legs, one hand gripping the platform. A crumple of paper bunched over his left foot, made a sliding sound.
The lighter snapped, his ex-wife lit another cigarette, jetted double plumes from her fine nose. Drained her glass.
‘The only reason he stopped was because the fire spotter plane went over. Right over us. I could feel the motor in my bones. He was that low. The pilot must have seen us because he circled and came back. And that’s when the Irish ran. I could hear him going through the trees, just crashing, hear the jeep engine start up. And I was grateful to be abandoned in the wilds. Can we get more wine?’ He rose, went into the lighted bar.
When he came back, stumbling against dark chair legs and slopping the wine over the rims of the glasses, she pointed at the loading dock. The old bum inching away again. A phlegmy cough that went on and on.
‘He’s been in the garbage,’ she said, ‘I wish the city would scrape up the drunks and bums and dump them up in the swamp. Solve the homeless problem for good. Instead of yelping about shelters.’ Her wineglass clinked against her teeth. ‘So, can you believe that when I got up his weight on me had been so intense that the shape of my face was pressed into the moss? My profile. Filling up with muddy water.’
‘Let’s go in. Let’s go order dinner. I’m going to have the Yucatán lime soup.’
‘I’ll wait until I see the menu. I never want the same thing twice.’
57
The Jet Trail in the Windshield
IT WAS NOT JUST the divorce, the divorce was only a contributing factor to the mess of his fucked-up life, everything, the phone ringing with pot-scrubber scam artists and bill collectors. Maybe he’d get the phone pulled out. If he had another place to go he’d go there. The stinking camp. His father had put every dollar he made into it. Couldn’t invest in stocks or something, oh no. Now they were all stuck. He paced. He walked. He knocked the dirty pans onto the floor and kicked the cupboard door under the sink. Nobody would buy it. Face it, he shouted.
He took long runs. He didn’t know what to do. When he quit working for Bobby he quit having money. When he quit having
money he quit having coke. No money, no drugee. Everything was gone. All except the goddamn camp. Here he was. He didn’t know what to do. Why had he come up here? He hated the camp. And down in the trailer park the skirl of motorcycle wheelies in dirt. Busted-muffler trucks. The fucking trailer church with its tin steeple. Morning noon and night loudspeaker serenade of carillon tapes. Noise was driving him crazy. Let’s see now, let me count the ways the noise annoys me.