Errantry: Strange Stories (38 page)

“Back already?” Nance, the bartender, smiled at Tommy, then glanced out the window to see whose car was parked there: not Tommy’s, so she could serve him. “You want the same?”

Tommy and I had red wine, Angus a rum and Coke. Tommy drank fast—he always did—and ordered another. I drank mine almost as quickly, then shut my eyes, reached into the brass bowl and withdrew a piece of folded paper.

The Folding Man’s work isn’t exactly origami. Tommy has showed some of it to a woman he knows who does origami, and she said it was like nothing she’d ever seen before. The Folding Man doesn’t talk about it, either, which is probably why Tommy became obsessed with him. Nothing gets Tommy as revved up as being ignored—Angus says he’s seen Tommy get a hard-on when a woman rejects him.

Not that Tommy had ever actually met the Folding Man, until now. None of us had, even though he’d been a fixture at the Old Court for as long as we’d been drinking there. We first began to notice his work in the early 1980s when, before or after a wild night, we’d find these little folded figures left on the floor near where we’d been sitting.

“This is like that guy in
Blade Runner
,” said Tommy once. He’d picked up something that resembled a winged scorpion. “See?”

I looked at it closely and saw it had the face of Angelica Huston and, instead of pincers, a pair of spoons for claws.

But then Tommy carefully unfolded it, smoothing it on the bar.

“Don’t get it wet,” warned Angus.

“I won’t.” Tommy looked puzzled. He slid the crumpled paper to me. “It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?”

I looked at the paper, and saw it was a square taken from an ad for Yves St. Laurent Opium perfume—the word OPIUM was there, and part of the bottle, and I could even smell a musky trace of the fragrance.

But there was no woman anywhere in the ad. I turned the paper over: nada. No spoons, either.

“Edward James Olmos.”

Tommy and I turned to stare blankly at Angus.

“That’s who played that character. “ He took the paper and scrutinized it, then flicked his cigarette lighter and set it on fire and dropped it in his ashtray. “In
Blade Runner
. Edward James Olmos. Great actor.”

The Folding Man’s stuff was always like that. Things that were never quite what they seemed to be. Sea anemones with eyes and wheels, body parts—vulvas were a popular theme—that sprouted fingers, exotic birds with too many heads and hooves instead of feathers, a lunar lander printed with a map of the Sea of Tranquility, the extravagant effects produced by some infernal combination of paper-folding and whatever was actually printed on the paper. None of them was any larger than the area I could circumscribe with my thumb and forefinger, and some were much smaller.

But if you unfolded them, they were never what they
didn’t
seem to be, either—you ended up with nothing but a page from a magazine or travel brochure, or a paper menu from McDonald’s or the Kamensic Diner, or (in the case of the lunar lander) a fragment of the Playbill for
Via Galactica.
They were like origami figures from the Burgess Shale, beautiful but also slightly nightmarish.

And what made it even stranger was that no one except for me and Tommy and, to a lesser degree, Angus, ever seemed to think they were weird at all. No one paid much attention to them; no one thought they were mysterious. When Tommy started asking about who made them, Nance just shrugged.

“This guy, comes in sometimes to watch the game. I think maybe he used to smoke or something, like he wants to do something with his hands. So he does those.”

“What’s his name?” said Tommy.

Nance shook her head. “I don’t know. We just call him the folding man.”

“You don’t know his name?” Angus stared at her, his tone slightly belligerent, as it often was. “What, he never puts down a credit card? You know everyone’s name.”

“He drinks rail whiskey, and he pays cash. Ask him yourself if you really want to know.”

But before now we’d never seen him, not ever, not once, though over the years Tommy had chased down customers and bartenders to receive detailed descriptions of what he looked like: older, paunchy, gray hair; weathered face; unshaven, eyes that were usually described as blue or gray; glasses, faded corduroys and a stained brown windbreaker.

“He looks like a fucking wino, Tommy,” Angus exploded once, when the hundredth customer had been quizzed after a thumbnail-sized frog with match-head eyes and the faces of the original Jackson 5 had materialized beneath Tommy’s barstool. “Give it a fucking break, okay?”

But Tommy couldn’t give it a break, any more than he could keep from getting fixated on women he hardly knew. Neither could I, and, after a while, neither could Angus. Though Angus was the one who made the ground rule about never taking any of the folded paper figures out of the Old Court.

“There’s enough crap in my apartment. Yours, too, Tommy.”

Nance didn’t like customers taking them from the brass bowl, either.

“Leave them!” she’d yell if someone tried to pocket one at the end of the night. “They’re part of the decor!”

I knew Tommy had nicked some. I found one under his pillow once, a lovely, delicate thing shaped like a swan, or a borzoi, or maybe it was a meerschaum pipe, with rows of teeth and a tiny pagoda on what I thought was its head (or bowl). I was going to make a joke about it, but Tommy was in the bathroom; and the longer I lay there with that weird, nearly weightless filigree in the palm of my hand, the harder it was to look at anything else, or think of anything except the way it seemed to glow, a pearlescent, rubeous color, like the inside of a child’s ear when you shine a flashlight behind it.

When I heard Tommy come out of the bathroom I slipped it back, carefully, beneath the pillow. Later, when I searched for it again, I found nothing but a crumpled sale flyer from the old Kamensic Hardware Store.

Now I set my wineglass onto the bar, opened my eyes and looked at what I had picked from the brass bowl. A fern, gold rather than green, its fiddlehead resembling the beaked prow of a Viking ship.

“Let’s go.” Tommy stuck some bills under his empty glass and stood.

“We just got here,” said Angus.

“I don’t want to lose him.”

Angus looked at me, annoyed, then finished his drink. “Yeah, whatever. Come on, Vivian.”

I replaced the fern and gulped the rest of my wine, and we returned to the car. I sat in the back so Tommy could ride up with Angus and navigate.

I said, “You didn’t tell us what he looked like.”

Tommy spread the piece of paper on his knee. “He looked like a wino.”

“Did you talk to him? Did he say anything?”

“Yeah.” Tommy turned to look at me. He grinned, that manic School’s Out grin that still made everything seem possible. “I asked him how he did it, how he made everything. And he said, ‘Everything fits. You’ll figure it out.’”

“‘Everything fits, you’ll figure it out?’” repeated Angus. “Who is this guy, Mr. Rogers?”

Tommy only smiled. I leaned forward to kiss him, while Angus shook his head and we drove on.

We headed north on the old Brandywine Turnpike, a barely maintained road that runs roughly parallel to Route 22, and connects Kamensic via various gravel roads and shortcuts to the outlying towns and deeper woodlands that, for the moment, had escaped development metastasizing from the megalopolis. The boulder-strewn, glacier-carved terrain was inhospitable to builders, steeply sloped and falling away suddenly into ravines overgrown with mountain ash and rock juniper that gave off a sharp tang of gin.

There were patches of genuine old-growth forest here, ancient towering hemlocks, white oaks and hornbeams. Occasionally we’d pass an abandoned gas station or roadhouse, or the remains of tiny settlements long fallen into ruin beside spur roads that retained the names of their founders: Tintertown Road, Smithtown Road, Fancher’s Corner. It was like driving back in time into the old Kamensic, the real Kamensic, the place we’d mapped through all our various lovers and drug dealers and music gigs over the last thirty years.

Only of course we were really driving
away
from Kamensic, slipping in and out of the town’s borders, until we reached its outermost edge, the place where even the tax maps got sketchy.

This was where Muscanth Mountain and Sugar Mountain converged on Lake Muscanth. The mountains weren’t mountains really, just big hills, but the lake was a real lake. In the 1920s a group of socialists had established a short-lived utopian community there, a summer encampment called The Fallows. Most of the cabins and the main lodge had rotted away fifty years ago.

But some remained, in varying states of decay—Angus and I first had sex together in one of these, in 1973—and two or three had even been renovated as second homes. Zoning covenants designed to protect the wetland had kept the McMansions away, and some of the same old hippies who had taken over the cottages in the 1960s and ‘70s still lived there, or were rumored to—I hadn’t been out to the lake in at least a dozen years.

“You know, this is going to totally fuck up my alignment.” Angus swore as the car scraped across the rutted track. To the right, you could glimpse Lake Muscanth in flashes of silvery-blue through dense stands of evergreen, like fish darting through murky water. “Damn it ! Tom, I’m sorry, but if we don’t find this place soon I’m—”

“Turn there.” Tommy pointed to where the road divided a few yards ahead of us. “It should be just past where it curves.”

Angus peered through the windshield. “I dunno, man. Those branches, they look like they’re going to come down right on top of us.”

“That’s where the place is, dude,” said Tommy, as I stuck my head between the two of them to get a better view.

Angus was right. The narrow road, barely more than a path here, was flanked by thick stands of tamarack and cedar. They were so overgrown that in spots above the road their branches met and became tangled in a dense, low overhanging mat of black and green. Angus tossed his cigarette out the window and veered cautiously to the right.

The effect wasn’t of diving through a tunnel; more like being under the canopy of a bazaar or souk. Branches scraped the car in place of importuning shopkeepers grabbing at us.

Angus swore as tiny pinecones hailed down onto the roof. “I’m going back.”

Tommy looked stricken. “Hey, we’re almost there.”

“It’s a company car, Tommy!”

“I’ll pay to have it painted, okay? Look, see? There it is, that house there—”

Angus glanced to the side then nodded. “Yeah, well, okay.”

There was no driveway, just a flattish bit of ground where broken glass and scrap metal glinted through patchy moss and teaberry. Angus pulled onto this and turned the ignition off.

“So did this guy give you a phone number or something?” Angus asked after a moment. “Are we expected?”

Tommy sat with his fingers on the door handle and stared outside. The place was small, not a house at all but a cabin made of split logs painted brown. It wasn’t much bigger than a motel cottage, with pine-green shutters and trim, a battered screen door that looked as though it had been flung open by someone who’d left in a big hurry and a bad mood. A sagging screened-in porch overlooked the lake. Stones had come loose from the fieldstone chimney and were scattered forlornly beneath the pine trees, like misshapen soccer balls. A rusted holding tank bulged beneath a broken window that had been repaired with a square of cardboard.

“Nice,” said Angus.

No one got out of the car. Angus shot Tommy a bitter look, then took a roach from his pocket, lit it and smoked in silence. When he held it out to me and Tommy, we demurred. I’d become adept at fine-tuning the cocktail of drugs I needed to filter out the world, and Tommy’s school job mandated random drug testing.

“So Tom.” Angus replaced the roach. The hand he’d kept on the steering wheel relaxed somewhat. “Where’s your man?”

Tommy stared at the cabin. His face had that expression I loved, unabashed wonder struggling with suspicion and a long-entrenched fear of ridicule. It was a slightly crazed look, and I knew from long experience what could follow. Weird accusations, smashed guitars, broken fingers. But the alcohol and Xanax had done their job.

“I don’t even care if he’s here or not,” said Tommy lightly, and stepped outside. “Remember when we used to come out to the lake all the time?”

“I do.”

I hopped out and stood beside him. A warm wind blew off the water, bringing the smells of mud and cedar bark. A red-winged blackbird sang, and a lone peeper near the water’s edge. Tommy put his arm across my shoulder, the Folding Man’s map still in his hand. A moment later I felt Angus on my other side. His fingers touched mine and his mouth tightened as he gazed at the cabin, but after a moment he sighed.

“Yeah, this was a good idea.” He looked at me and smiled, then knocked Tommy’s arm from my shoulder. “No hogging the girl, dude. Let’s check this place out.”

Tommy headed towards the front door. Angus walked to the side to check out the broken window.

“Hey.” He grabbed the cardboard by one corner and tried to wrest it from the window frame.

I came up alongside him. “What is it?”

“It’s an album. Well, an album cover. Watch it—”

The cardboard buckled then abruptly popped out from the window. Angus examined it cursorily, slid his hand inside the sleeve and shook his head—no vinyl—then held it up for me to see: a black square with an inset color photo of two guys in full hippie regalia and psychedelic wording beneath.