John's Wife: A Novel (8 page)

Of course, he returned, the silly man, though not with tail between his legs, where it belonged, as most had hoped, but cocky still and weird as ever, only a monkish bald spot on his crown marking his seven years away, no other signs of the misfortunes which all felt must befall so unrepentant a wiseass in the world. Well, concealed perhaps, the bruises, for return at least he did, and after nose-thumbing farewells that had seemed irrevocable, all ties severed, bridges burnt. So what brought him back? Filial duty, Ellsworth would explain with a flick of a wrist as though brushing away a fly, that and the need, he would add with a weary condescending smile from beneath his jaunty black beret, for a quiet out-of-the-way place to finish his novel-in-progress. As for the alleged novel, who could say, but it was true that his enfeebled father, though he’d bitterly disowned his eccentric son, could no longer run the old family printshop alone, it was Ellsworth saved it, perhaps not beyond redemption after all. This certainly was Barnaby’s view, had been all along. Barnaby was close to that family, Ellsworth’s parents his parents’ friends and his in turn, he’d known the strange boy since his awkward birth twenty years too late and had half-adopted him when the gawky child’s aged mother died, and so it was Barnaby who, remembering the little hand-drawn and -lettered newspapers the boy would entertain his infant daughter with, had located him and, with offers to back a weekly newspaper if Ellsworth would print and edit it, brought him home again. And thus began
The Town Crier
, successor to
The Daily Patriot
, which had died in Ellsworth’s absence, nothing but an oral record left of all the time between, the which and more Ellsworth now collected—grist, it was suspected, for his novel-if-a-novel’s mill—in his guest column “I Remember.”

“Quiet! This place? Is old Elsie kidding?” Daphne had hooted when her best friend told her what that longhaired geek, a relative of sorts and once upon a time her friend’s babysitter, had said that summer he first came back. She’d blown a bubble with her gum, sucked it in, and snapped it with her bright white teeth: Oh, what a smile she had back then! Everybody said so! “Honey, this town is jumping!” This was out at the country club pool, it was the summer before their sophomore year in high school, and Daphne was ready for anything and everything, though she had only the dimmest notion, got mostly from the movies and the hit parade, what everything might be. That is to say, as she put it years later on the telephone to her best friend (still wed to John, though Daphne by then was, as she liked to put it, under her fourth), she knew everything in those days about sexual intercourse, but nothing at all about fucking. She had a crush that summer on the lifeguard at the pool, an older guy named Dean, Lean Dean, already in college, a boy with beautiful bronzed muscles and a blonde crewcut and cute blue shorts that showed his bulge, which moved, she knew, when she walked by, she’d seen this and he’d winked at her. In those days swimsuits showed less skin, at least in this town, but midriffs were anyway never Daphne’s strong suit, what she had most abundantly looked good in what she wore, good enough that the guys all stopped to stare or joke, the simps, as she climbed up wet out of the pool, popping her knockers in place, or strode out on the diving board, tugging at the leg-seams where they’d crept up her bouncing cheeks, feeling their eyes pasted on her behind like little sequins with electric charges, her nipples so hard with the rub of their gaze sometimes they felt like rayguns about to fire and blow them all away. Oh boy. She hung around the pool whenever her folks would let her, and one evening near the end of the season Dean drove her home in his pickup truck, stopping off near the humpback bridge at the edge of Settler’s Woods to feel her up, and then apologize, and that was that. “I don’t care,” she’d whispered, but probably not loud enough. She came to care but that was a few months later, Settler’s Woods by then in autumn colors and creepy with musty shadows and the smell of rot, the guy she was with a senior footballer they all called Colt, a guy she was going steady with, so to speak, who’d kissed her uncupped tits and had had his hand between her legs, excitements she was still getting used to and not too sure about. Now he said he had something to show her and he took her out to a one-room tarpaper house at the back of Settler’s Woods she’d never seen before, some kind of clubhouse, she learned later, that the senior boys had built. She hung back, but Colt grabbed hold of her wrist and pulled her in. “C’mon, Daph, don’t be a party pooper,” he laughed. “What party?” she asked, but too late, they were already inside and the bolt was thrown. A mosquito whined. I Remember.

That clubhouse, built by John and his friends, all seniors that year, on a stubbly piece of land owned by Dutch’s old man at the back edge of the woods outside of town, was the first thing John put up that stayed a while. It was still there five years later at the time of his wedding and did not come down, though by then abandoned and the floor rotted out, until Dutch’s new motel got built out there some five or six years further on. As with all John’s constructions, function, not craft or style or beauty, determined its design: one comfortably sized room with bare wooden floors and walls, low pitched roof, a door made from a tabletop and three framed windows, unpaned but screened and wooden-shuttered (chair seats did the job) to let the breezes through, no plumbing or electrics but a junkyard coal stove for the winter, and furnished with a kitchen table under a hanging Coleman lantern for playing cards, half a dozen folding chairs, an old leatherette sofa with the springs poking out, a single bed and cotton mattress, car blankets and ashtrays tossed around to make it feel like home, a flyswatter, a spike with toilet paper beside the door, and saucy calendar pinups, baseball pennants, girls’ panties, an American flag, and photos clipped from sun-worshiper magazines tacked up on the walls. Though John, having more options, used it less than most, its principle appealed to him: people were multifaceted creatures needing a variety of discrete spaces to fulfill themselves. In short, one house was not enough. Not for the living. Or, as he put it to Waldo and Bruce and the others out at the Country Tavern the night before his marriage, accepting Harvie’s newest round of iced gin, Dutch’s of cold beer, and describing the place they were headed next: “We just wanted a getaway somewhere, a place we could be ourselves. Of course, we were ourselves wherever we went, but this was different, the getaway was a kind of sanctuary, you know, like a chapel or a basketball court or a whorehouse, a place where—” “Where anything can happen,” proposed Harvie, clinking gin jiggers with him, while around him his friends slowly bobbed and rotated, as though on a carousel. “No, not… not anything.” He felt utterly lucid and totally bombed out of his mind at the same time, not used to gin clearly, if gin was clearly what it was. “It’s more like a kind of theater set where the script is different, but what you do there is fucking scripted, just the same. Like a, you know, a church service.” What was he saying? Where was he? “All right then, Father Dutch,” grinned his best man Bruce, tossing back his gin and rising unsteadily, “goddamn it, let us pray!”

Prayer for Pauline had always been associated with a zealous assault on all her orifices, that being Daddy Duwayne’s zinger-wielding mode of sermonizing, and so what transpired that night before John was wived was not without for Pauline its spiritual overtones, its aura of a sacred service, or else a diabolical one, made more so by the strange magical things happening to her mind or in it, the vivid things she saw, not seen since, and almost, her grown-up imagination failing her, beyond recall. Even the funky old-mattress smell of that shape-shifting cabin (she went looking after, could never find it, came to believe it never was) brought back to her her mad daddy’s religious exercises on the trailer floor, though thankfully free on this occasion of the whippings her daddy always laid on, even as he mounted her, to, as he put it, beat the devil out. No beatings, nothing worse than the ritual baptism (though this was much later, another age really, after the magic had faded, and it happened in a ditch), just a surrender so total she seemed not to have a self any longer, all that she was, absorbed into a transcendent otherness that penetrated her utterly and lifted her out of herself into something as vast as the night sky and as intimate as pain and sweat. She was fourteen years old then and her breasts were full and firm and, though she could be sure of little else after, she knew that her yearning heart, which lay nestled between them like a baby bird, was passionately stroked that night by that cosmic otherness and that, as its personification reared majestically above her, his hair was on fire with eerie curling flames, strange-colored, like luminous serpents from another world.

Dutch, from beneath this six-ring circus, had a similar view, through the girl’s unwashed hair, of his tit-fucking buddy’s flaming head, but though stoned, he knew it merely to be the haloing effect of the gas lantern overhead. Dutch harbored no illusions. Things were what they were. There was no magic. Not even in Harvie’s hallucinogens. Life and the mechanics of life were the same thing. He liked to keep his distance, keep his eye on it. At that moment he was lying on his back on the mattressed kitchen table with his dick up the ass of a young girl, ceremonial proxy (he knew, they all knew) for the bride-to-be, but he would just as soon have had someone else where he was and be watching it all from an easy chair. Wouldn’t have all this fucking weight pressing down on him, for one thing, or be rubbing testimonials with a freaking Hard Yard between the girl’s quivering thighs and thus between his own as well, risking a multi directional scattershot shower of cum from all the others. Well, anything for old John. This stag night’s entertainment, just climaxing, was Dutch’s personal wedding gift to his old battery mate, that and the special wedding party rate at the downtown Pioneer Hotel, owned by Dutch’s old man. Dutch and John went back to childhood when Dutch caught John in Little League. They’d been through school together and a lot more besides. The hotel went back much further of course, but not, as some thought, to pioneer days, though some kind of hostelry may have been appended to the livery stable that once occupied the spot, according to an archive photo. The Railway Saloon stood there during the days when a spur was laid to town, but both were gone now, and some time after the Great War the Pioneer Hotel was built in anticipation of a boom that never happened, not in these parts. Dutch’s granddad picked it up at a bankruptcy auction, ran it as a bar and roominghouse until a new war gave it life again, the linens dating from that brief revival. John’s wedding party was its last hurrah. A few years later when the old man died, the two pals struck a deal and John tore it down and built a bank and office block there, Dutch moving out to catch the highway trade with his new motel.

Floyd stayed out there when he first hit town. The motel had just been built, you could smell the fresh-laid cinderblocks and the carpet glue. Booked in for a night, stayed for three weeks, then moved into town, hitting a bit of luck rare in his life, so rare he was never able to say for sure after whether it had been good or bad. Floyd, on the mend from mean times, had in desperation grabbed up several sales jobs, peddling a versatile cheapjack line that ranged from coolers and cosmetics to brushes, Bibles, and magical potions for men afflicted with baldness and loss of vigor. He stopped in at the local hardware store to push his range of screwdriver sets and do-it-yourself rockingchair kits, which he’d had a bit of luck with in these independent backwater operations, often starved for a gimmick to beat the chains, but now all too few and far between. There was a tall broad-shouldered guy in there with his sleeves rolled up who looked skeptically down his slightly broken nose at Floyd, picked up one of the screwdrivers, and bent it double with his bare hands. “This stuff’s junk,” he said. “Hell, I know it,” Floyd acknowledged with a shrug, glancing around. “I do believe in the do-it-yourself line, though, and I don’t see enough of that in here. You should ought to have an auto parts section, too. You’re away behind the times.” The guy studied him a moment. He looked like he might be about to take a swing, so Floyd turned to go, figuring on maybe a bowl of chili and a piece of pie at the cheap cafe next door, but the guy stopped him. “Wait a minute. You want regular work? My manager just quit. I’m looking for somebody to run this store.” Floyd paused, loath to get pushed around, especially by a young shit, still wet behind the ears, but startled by the offer and the amazing timing and needing the job. He didn’t even know how he was going to pay his overnight motel bill. “I got a job. But I’ll think on it.” “I haven’t got time to fuck around, friend. I mean right now. On with the overalls or out the goddamn door.” Floyd sighed, gazed round the dusty old store, peeled off his checkered jacket. “Let me see if they’re my size.” John covered his motel bill for three weeks while he looked for a house. He called his wife Edna who didn’t believe him until he sent her a bus ticket to help him join in the house search. She was so happy once she got to town, she asked for it for the first time in a decade. It made Floyd’s heart swell and fill his chest to see her all flushed and eager like that, she almost looked a girl again.

Dutch saw her, too. Not much to see, but he was testing out his two-way mirrors still, and the salesman gave her quite a ride, enough to get off on anyway while waiting for a better show. Of which plenty to come, to spend a phrase. He’d seen it all, Dutch had, over the dozen years since then, a seamless flow: Marriage nights, adulteries, group gropes. Old guys taking virgin blood. Young kids fumbling. Child sex, dog sex, toilet sex, you name it. Rapes and whippings, faggots and dykes. Gangbangs. Incest. But mostly forlorn meat-beaters, all alone. Melancholy places, highway motels. A lot of fucking solitary sadness, as Dutch knew well. Some used fancy gadgetry, especially the women, others anything at hand. Dutch liked the improvisors best, left stuff around for them like bait to use, but learned more from the others. Sometimes he wanted to reach out and pat a quivering unknuckling ass, say well done, knowing then how God must feel, having to keep his distance, else spoil the show. Couldn’t even use the spectacle as a turn-on for a fuck or bring a buddy in for laughs, as in the old days at the Palace Theater, that’d be the end of it. He used to think that what God went for, if there was a God, was all the stories, why else would He keep watching, but now he thought there were no stories, only one: this ceaseless show and he/He who watched it. Or maybe Dutch had the wrong seat in the house. For stories, he eventually came to believe, somehow always had to do with numbers, numbers and sequence, and maybe this was God’s game, too, having started maybe with one and two and set them humping, but having long since gone on from there, Dutch in his innocence sitting still in the kiddie rows with his useless dick in his hands like a fishing pole, the real stories having all moved elsewhere. The only other who knew about the Back Room mirrors was John, having installed them for Dutch when he built the place, compensation for his lost Palace. Saved a couple of seats from the old moviehouse, too, and the banner that hung in the lobby: “Where the Movies Are Still the Movies.” John got no delight in ogling what he couldn’t get his organ into, but sometimes used the room when opening and closing deals, lodging clients and adversaries there, his interest not in bottoms but in bottom lines, and so closer to the notion Dutch had of story, or maybe the notion’s inspiration. John rarely dropped by himself, just let Dutch tape the conferences and calls.