John's Wife: A Novel (37 page)

The night was going to be a long one for Ellsworth, too, nor did he have a hand to hold, that was just the problem, empty-handed before the abyss was what he was. He’d made something out of nothing before, but did he have the strength to do so now, at this hellish hour, his spirit so depleted? After dozing and waking, dozing and waking more times than he could count, he’d stumbled down out of what he called his garret over the printing plant and Crier offices, intending to go home and fix himself something warm to eat, microwave a frozen soup or something, he was making himself ill with his obsessive work habits (pity the cafe across the street wasn’t open twenty-four hours, this town just wasn’t civilized enough for writers), when he had finally realized, pausing at the foot of the creaky old stairs to gaze blearily at the local wall calendar printed in the back shop each year for Trevor to provide to his clients at Christmastime, that the next issue of
The Town Crier
was indeed due out on the morrow, or later today as the case might be and undoubtably was, and he had not even started to put it together. For a long time, he didn’t know how long, he was still half asleep, he just leaned there, unmoving, in front of the calendar, thinking the unthinkable: that, for the first time in over twenty-three years, he might skip an issue, or even (the one thought seemed to follow inevitably upon the other) cease publishing altogether. After his forest fire nightmare, shared as it happened with the Artist, Ellsworth had tried to put himself back to sleep with fantasies (the Artist’s) of rescuing the captive Model from the nefarious Stalker once he was rested up enough to undertake it. But what was the Stalker doing to her? He had to imagine the Stalker’s fantasies before he could imagine the Artist’s, and this he found both more exciting and more disturbing, especially since the Model did not seem as upset about her treatment as he did. He or the Artist, he wasn’t sure now. Half asleep or half awake, it all tended to get blurred and come and go in odd ways, such that at one point he found himself dreaming about the time, or else remembering it, that he took Gordon and Pauline to the movies, this was when he was still trying to recapture the bohemian life, hoping to blend art, friendship, and free love in one exemplary contemporary relationship, perhaps even a legendary one, and Gordon pushed Pauline ahead of him into the row of seats and followed her in, leaving Ellsworth stuck on the outside; only in his dream, if that’s what it was, instead of Pauline it was a little girl and Gordon was still between them. Was he drawing her picture? What was he doing? When he shook off this confused and irritating image, he discovered that there was another buried beneath it, something he had in some way been envisioning all along: the devastated forest, stripped bare and charred to the roots, as far as you could see, no sign of life except for the Artist, alone and broken in the terrible black-stumped desolation, a man with nothing more to live for, more dead than alive, weeping silently as Ellsworth was weeping. Enough. (She was gone! Not a trace!) Time to take a break. This month’s town photo, the one at which he was now so bleakly staring here at the foot of the stairs, a photo taken by Gordon like all of the others in the calendar, was of some Pioneers Day parade of the past, John’s wife in a frontier costume waving distantly from an open convertible, as she did every year when she was not waving from a float. Must have been taken fairly recently, given the car models, but she looked like a child in the photograph. The child Ellsworth had once big-brothered. He knew that she was a faithful reader of the
Crier
and that if it did not appear she would be disappointed. Whenever duty called, as it was doing now, often as not it bore her cadences like an echo. “Tell me a story …” He checked the piles of unopened mail in the front office, hoping for hard copy, and there was some, but not enough. School was out, the high schoolers he’d come to depend on so heavily had other things to do, and even the contribution from the ministerial association was missing. There was an anonymous “I Remember” submission that he couldn’t use, all names deleted, about a “prominent local businessman” who had made “an innocent young kid” pregnant and forced a “fetal murder” upon her that had cast “a hopeless black cloud” over her whole life, which did not seem to have been a short one. Some rather dreary photos in the weekly packet from Gordon: a tulip bed in bloom, an unidentified pole-vaulter going over the bar, a wide-angle shot of young people in the food court of some mall, John’s daughter among them, a men’s-club luncheon meeting, vacant tennis courts with puddles of standing water, a group of leached-out old people at the nursing home, also looking vacant. Ellsworth wondered if the author of the “I Remember” love story was among them. Gordon seemed to be raiding his archives, too. He hadn’t even photographed the street repairs out front. But Ellsworth couldn’t fault him, he himself had not gathered the usual local sports and club news, called the police station, courthouse, hospital, checked with John and other community newsmakers, interviewed the lone mayoral candidate, had not even, until now, sorted his week’s mail—in short, Ellsworth had done none of the ordinary things necessary for putting out a responsible newspaper, he had no one but himself (and the Stalker) to blame. Too late now, though. Nothing to do but follow Gordon’s lead and load up with thefts from the past. He went through the old bound issues of the
Crier
, checking the June editions, every five years back, for in-this-month items, struck on the heroic death in battle fifteen years ago of the son of the local pharmacist, a death that had shaken Ellsworth in ways quite different from the rest of the community, triggering the commencement of his loss of faith in the very notion of keeping a human chronicle, an abandoned line in his work-in-progress once marking the moment. He remembered asking himself: Who was this young man, so loved, it seemed, by all in town (though Ellsworth hardly knew him), and what his untold, now untellable, story? Fragments he had, a few witnesses, personal tributes: all surfaces. Concealments of a sort. What did it signify that Yale’s real story, like those of countless others, was lost forever, replaced by a ceremonious invention? Or did it matter? Was that what all stories were, all lives? Yale had been a child here. There were Little League box scores. Boy Scout rosters. There were cast lists of school plays and class photos. John’s wife was in them, too, they were classmates. They went to movies together. This was not in the obit folder, but Ellsworth had seen them in the lobby of the Palace when he first came back to town. Shocked him at the time. How did that fit? The Palace lobby alone was so full of crossed trajectories it made your head spin. And the Eastern university, the French girl, the distant war that killed him, suddenly the whole world was crowding into this sad little town, his file cabinet couldn’t hold it all, his mind couldn’t. So he catalogued dates and achievements and listed the bereaved and quoted the official military report and announced the memorial service and scribbled a “30” at the bottom and, pretending he had not been defeated, closed the drawer, telephoned the hospital to see who’d been born that day. Since then: hundreds of editions, thousands of spurious stories, as though trying to paper over the flux, believing in none of it, but faithfully doing his duty as though there were a point to it. The image of the Artist in the charred forest came back to mind, and he knew that, inappropriate though it was for the novel (the Model would be found, he’d see to that), it was true for him. To beat back the crowding despair (hopeless black clouds piling up everywhere), he decided to reach back to a happier time, some three years before Yale’s death: the wedding. Not just to cheer himself up, but to reconnect with a more purposeful self, one who might see him through this dark night’s desperate task. He dragged the tall volume, more fingered than most, down from the shelf, opened it to his big photo spread the week after the nuptials: already he was feeling better. A few hundred words on some remember-when theme, he supposed, together with four or five photos, a couple of ads (if they hadn’t come in, he’d give them away), and another page was history, even if history it wasn’t quite. Might even find some unused wedding snaps in the archives, if they were still orderly enough to find anything in them at all. Or, better: a look back at the old Pioneer Hotel. A couple of postcard views, mug shots of past owners, mixed with Rotary, Kiwanis, and BPW meetings held there, that convention of regional state highway commissioners that had changed the map, high school team dinners, birthday parties and weddings, John’s included, Gordon’s moving portrait of the door left standing when all the rest came down. A good story for Pioneers Day and all that. The hopeless clouds were breaking up. He could do this. Then he noticed, for the first time, that in the group photo of the rehearsal dinner in the Pioneer Hotel banquet room the night before John’s wedding there was a young man in the front row with his fly agape, his white underwear, hopefully underwear, plainly showing through. Ellsworth had used and reused this photo countless times—how had he not seen this before—!? There was a typo in the caption he’d missed, too, “weekend festivities” actually reading “weakened festivities,” though that kind of a slip was more understandable, rare as it was. No, wait, it wasn’t “weakened,” it was “weakneed.” As was, double-
k
’d, Ellsworth. He slumped into a chair. What was happening?

A question much like the one the young man in the photo with the open fly asked when someone in a tracksuit thrust a rifle into his hands and said: “This way. Come on. She’s in the ravine.” Before Beans could get an answer to the inquiry he then posed, however, that rough gent was gone like he never was. Beans joined the hunting party creeping through the trees ahead of him for fear of getting shot at by mistake if he didn’t, but stayed to the rear, out of the flicking beams of their flashlights, which were like death rays to his throbbing head. A squat cop in sweaty shirtsleeves and suspenders and an old guy with a long snout led them. Toward what, Beans could not guess or even imagine, but he understood that it was very big. Crikey. Step out to take an innocent piss, and look what happens. Beans had awakened, still clutching his Swiss Army knife, in a closed-up Country Tavern, eerily empty, illuminated faintly by a bluish light filtering through the grimy windows, his face pasted to the table (must have passed out in spilled beer), his head cracking at the seams, and his bladder set to burst. The pornflicks were off, the jukebox dark. He’d pushed himself to his feet, feeling stiff and achey, pocketed the knife, picked up a fallen drumstick near his feet, and given the cymbals a sharp crack just to break the ponderous silence, scared himself doing it and sent a painful rip through what would be his brain if he had any. Dust had risen from the cymbals like a visible form of clatter, there was dust and dirt everywhere, stamped-on butts and food wrappers, bottles lying about in the gloom like spent artillery shells, unemptied ashtrays and dirty glasses, a veritable shithole. Beans thought about brother John entering on the morrow into the wedded life and wondered about the nature of this transformation: did it really bring an end to such joys as these? He shuffled creakily through the slough of disport to the door (tried the switch, the lights were dead) and stepped out into the moonless night. A few heavy mechanical hulks lay strewn about in the lot and ditch as though after a stockcar race, and there was roadkill at his feet, but across the way in yonder copse, he could see lights dancing in the branches, other trucks and cars pulled up on the side of the road. So, he was not alone in the world, after all, as he had feared. Not hoped? Was it human company at last, then, that misanthropic Beans sought? No, something far more precious at this hour, whichever hour it was: a hitch, a ride, a lift for heart and body, back in to the hotel where he might shed these fulsome rags and pillow his suffering head. First, however, he turned back and lifted his stream against the smutty flyblown windows of the Country Tavern, bringing the promise of light where heretofore there was none, as was always his virtuous wont. It was a record-setting pee, pity old Brains wasn’t there to time it, yet another momentous historical event that would escape the world’s capricious attention, and when he was done the lights in the woods he’d noticed earlier were gone. He crossed over, passing between the parked vehicles—a sporty lot, on the whole, models he’d not seen before, though on the wee side—and heard their voices deep within, saw a distant nervous glimmering like that of fireflies. He thought of curling up in a truckbed until they returned, but there was lightning behind the tavern and an unpleasant chill in the night air and uncurling later might prove an agony worse than the nocturnal nature stroll that was its present alternative. Beans walked into the woods. He was wondering how he might introduce himself if these were not members of the wedding party, but no introductions seemed necessary when he caught up with them, he was armed without a welcoming word, merely a brief instruction: “This way.” All right. Sure. Distantly, he caught a glimpse in the shadows of someone who looked like he’d just escaped a mummy’s-revenge horror movie: Beans, trailing at the rear, closed ranks. Was this a test? He was reminded of the fraternity scavenger hunt he went on as a pledge. That ordeal ended with a beer blast. He hoped no such revels were part of tonight’s program. He also hoped the rifle wasn’t loaded. Beans was the sort of fellow, he knew this all too well, who tended, no matter who or what he might be aiming at, to shoot his own foot off, and then be thankful after that was the worst he’d done. “We’ve lost her,” someone said. This was good news. But then a cantankerous old buzzard in cuffs and leg irons and wearing a ballcap backwards spat through gaps in his teeth and, nodding his head at something down in the gully, said: “Nah. There’s her scat. Still steamin’.” “How do you know it’s hers?” a younger burrheaded guy in yellow golf pants and a windbreaker of some kind wanted to know; Beans perceived immediately this whinging fellow had as much appetite for this exercise as he did and could be a useful ally. “By the size of it, buckethead,” said the old geezer flatly, and spat again. “Anyway,” said the stubby cop, “if he don’t know, who does?” This seemed to satisfy everybody unfortunately, and they all moved on, following their prey’s evacuations, pressing deeper into the treacherous undergrowth. Beans tagged along, having no choice, the way back by now beyond recall. His head was splitting. A puke loomed on the near horizon. Speaking metaphorically of course out here in the pitch-dark forest, as in: just around the corner. He sidled up to the burrheaded guy in the glow-in-the-dark arse-bags, who was now sneaking a suck from a hip flask, and said: “Some picnic, hunh?” The guy winced, offered him the hip flask, Beans took a swig without thinking, felt his stomach turn over when it hit. “I forgot,” he said, handing it back. “I’m a teetotaler.” “Yeah, me too.” And then they saw it. Her. Shit. Beans set his rifle down against a tree and backed off. He was at the wrong fucking party. He’d find his own way out of here.