Kinflicks (70 page)

The gate handle rattled. I knew it was Wendy, up from her nap, having scrambled over her crib bars and crashed to the floor and come in search of me — the latest trick in her arsenal of infant liberation stunts. L'il Abner, however, didn't know this, and he started at the noise and crouched like a cornered animal.

‘My child,' I explained. I opened the gate and picked up Wendy and sat her on my hip, all damp and squishy and smelly in her dirty diapers.

‘Who that?' she asked, jabbing at the man with her fat finger. ‘Who that, Mommy?'

‘That's a man who's just had a swim in our pool.'

‘Who that?'

‘That's a man who came over from the hiking trail to get a drink of water.'

‘Who that?' she asked again, tilting her head and looking at me with a puzzled expression. I knew that this would go on all afternoon unless I channeled her conversational prowess onto another topic.

‘Would you like some juice and a cookie?' I asked her. ‘Would
you?'
I asked the young man.

‘I don't want to put you out, ma'am,' he said, his eyes greedy.

‘It's no trouble,' I assured him, lapsing readily into the folkways of the South, where, as the saying goes, men put women on pedestals and then used the pedestals as footstools. ‘Will you please watch the baby a minute? Don't let her get too near the edge. She thinks she can swim. She keeps jumping in and plummeting straight to the bottom.'

He laughed, displaying bright white teeth, through his thicket of facial hair.

I returned with lemonade, paper cups, cookies, and a clean diaper. Wendy was playing a game with the man in which she toddled to one side and headed toward the pool; he would scoot sideways to block her, and she would run headon into his legs. She would resolutely careen in the opposite direction and head for the pool again, only to be cut off once more. She was giggling with a mixture of delight and frustration, and was clutching with one hand at her soggy diaper, which was drooping down her pudgy thighs and threatening to trip her. The man was looking down at her with a pleasant grin.

The three of us sat cross-legged on the grass, and I passed out the lemonade. “You seem familiar with the wiles of children. Do you have some?'

‘No, I've never been married,' he mumbled. ‘And that's the only way I'd want to get into a baby trip with a woman. I've been around friends' children a lot. But to tell the truth — pardon me, delightful baby — the concept of parenthood never really appealed to me.'

‘Oh, come
onl
How could any adult not relish the prospect of a baby of his own — to carry his genes proudly down through the centuries?' I asked this sarcastically, mocking my former romantic notions of what parenthood entailed.

‘I never looked at it that way. I always saw the world as a stage — from too much Shakespeare in prep school, I guess. And any child of mine would be a ballsy young actor waiting to run me off stage altogether, watching and waiting to bury me, so that
he
could assume center stage.'

‘Hmmm,' I said thoughtfully, wondering if that line of reasoning could serve to sour Ira on the idea of a son. I noticed that this man had, between sentences, managed to wolf down most of the cookies. ‘Would you like a sandwich?'

What I could find of his face, behind his beard and underneath his hairdo, blushed. ‘Forgive me for eating all the cookies. I haven't eaten since yesterday morning.'

‘Good Lord.' Why in the world not? I wondered. ‘Do you like bologna and cheese?'

He grimaced. ‘Just plain cheese would be great.'

As he finished his third sandwich, I asked casually, trying to figure out his story,
‘
You say you're hiking the Long Trail?'

He gave me his suspicious alarmed look and eventually nodded yes, his mouth crammed with Wonder Bread. ‘Going home,' he mumbled, chewing ravenously. ‘To Georgia.'

‘You're hiking the
entire
trail?'

He nodded.

‘How long will it take?'

He shrugged. ‘A few months, I guess. I don't know. When I get there, I get there.
If
I get there.'

It was moving on toward late afternoon. The young man showed no eagerness to get back to the mountains. Sated, he stretched out in the slanting sun, his head on his pack, and fell asleep.

As the sun was setting, he sat up and stretched and yawned. I had fed Wendy and put her to bed. I was about to settle down to Walter Cronkite and some serious nail chewing.

“Look,' I said, standing over him, ‘do you want to stay here tonight? It'll be too dark soon to find the trail.'

Without hesitation, he said, ‘Yes, ma'am, I sure would. Thank you very much.'

‘My name is Ginny. Ginny Bliss,' I offered, wondering what Mother would say. Would Wendy and I be murdered in the night, and the Bliss family silver stolen?

He glanced around nervously and said in a low voice, ‘You can call me Hawk.'

Hawk slept that night in the guest room.

We spent the entire next day by the pool, with me disappearing periodically to fetch food, or to put Wendy down for her nap, or to whisk her inside for abortive attempts at toilet training. Both of us hopped in and out of the water regularly to cool off. As we baked, we talked a great deal, on through the long lazy afternoon.

Hawk said he'd been living in Montreal for a while. ‘You wouldn't
believe
how cold it gets there in the winter!' He shivered just thinking about it. ‘Those streets act like conduits. Icy blasts funnel right down them. You're standing at a bus stop and this cyclone of snow sweeps toward you. You can't even see the headlights of your bus. Oh Christ, it's so awful!'

We swapped horror stories about the frozen North — ten-foot drifts, thirty-eight below zero nights, and falling icicles. It was an interesting variation on the weather conversations that dominated the social life of Stark's Bog.

‘You know,' he said, ‘when I was growing up, I was always dragged to all these preaching missions and revivals and stuff. I don't know, you probably were too. Tennessee's in the Bible Belt, isn't it? And on Sundays, rodding around in your car, the only radio stations you could get had these Holy Rollers screaming at you about the fiery pits of hell. But you know what? Hell, in my own personal mythology, isn't raging fires and stuff; it's silent snowbanks and long gray afternoons when the thermometer won't budge above minus twenty.'

‘And those nights when the wind is howling through your house and shaking the windows in their frames and making your tin roof flap,' I offered, caught up in the theme.

‘And in a city, when a street drain backs up, and the crosswalk is knee deep in frozen mush. And your boots leak and your toes go numb,' Hawk added.

‘And in April when the snow melts all at once and turns the fields into squishy bogs, and all the dirt roads into vast rutted seas of mud. And swarms of cluster flies crawl out and swirl around sluggishly and get tangled up in your hair!'

We both laughed with delight at finding someone with whom to share our most secret thoughts about our adopted home. Our heritage was a relentlessly baking sun.

‘Why did we leave?' I asked mournfully.

‘Jesus, I hated those summers down there!' Hawk drawled.

We both howled with laughter.

‘Oh,
God
yes!' I agreed. ‘Remember lying in bed at night in a pool of sweat praying for even just the faintest breeze through the window?'

‘And during the day, downtown, with the heat rising up from the concrete in these great scorching waves, and bouncing back and forth between the glass buildings. And that horrible soft squishy feeling the macadam would take on, so that you expected to be in it up to your knees at any moment,' Hawk said.

‘And being so exhausted from just trying to breathe that all you could do was lie panting in the shade like a dog.'

‘But I will say this for it,' Hawk said. ‘These Yankee winters and southern summers do serve a purpose.'

‘What's that?'

‘Well, just imagine if everywhere were perpetual autumn or spring — a mild sun and temperatures in the sixties and seventies, say. You'd really start feeling pretty good about yourself — as though you had things under control, knew what you were doing. As it is, though, at almost every spot on earth you get fried by the sun or blasted by blizzards. You're reminded of what a puny little insect you really are, and of how you're kept alive in
spite
of all your pathetic weaknesses.'

‘You've been listening to too many Holy Rollers!'

He didn't smile. ‘No, wait!' he insisted. ‘This is
very
important. Now! The earth is tilted on its axis, which is what causes the seasons. Right? Okay. Well, in a mathematically perfect universe, one would expect the earth's axis to be exactly vertical to its path around its sun. I mean, it's just more geometrically pleasing that way. But if it
were
vertical, there would be no seasons. Weather at any given spot on earth would be constant. Right? As a result, I bet you
anything
that the people living at any given spot, provided they didn't wander aimlessly around the globe as everyone is doing nowadays, would evolve the physical characteristics to cope with their climate. The Eskimos would grow luxurious fur and would stay deliciously snug without igloos and whale fat. And the Mexicans would sprout cold shower faucets from their skulls. But Montreal and Tennessee would have an endlessly moderate fall-type climate.'

‘Sounds delightful.'

‘Yes, of course it does. That was the problem. That's why the axis had to be tilted. People weren't suffering enough. They had no appreciation for their own frailties. They had no incentive to seek out other dimensions of experience that might be more hospitable. Plus, they were locked in. They were born, grew up, and died right in the same locale. Their bodies couldn't cope with the climate changes if they left their own region. Their internal thermostats lacked flexibility, so their brains lacked flexibility. Can you imagine how someone covered with fur would flee in terror from someone with a faucet growing out of his head?'

I laughed. ‘That's very good, Hawk.'

‘Thank you. Actually, it's not impromptu. I'm writing a book about it.'

‘Really? What kind of book?'

‘I've created a new category. It's called historical science fiction.'

‘Oh?'

‘I'm tracing in ten or twelve volumes the history of creation, from beginning to end, with emphasis on the recent past, covering such themes as the meaning of life and the nature of truth and beauty.'

‘I see,' I said noncommittally.

‘But I can't reveal any more at the moment,' he added in a whisper, ‘for fear of being overheard and drawing down upon your lovely sequestered home greedy droves of clamoring literary agents and editors.'

‘I quite understand.'

Later, as he turned over to toast his hairy chest, he asked, ‘How come you're up here?'

‘Well, to simplify the saga — I went to college in Boston, and then I moved to a farm near here a few years ago with some friends.'

‘What? You mean an earth trip?'

I nodded, smiling tolerantly at my former self.

‘No shit! I didn't figure you for the freak type.'

‘That was in my younger years. Before I settled gracefully into middle age.'

‘Hmmm, yes. Middle age
is
a state of mind rather than a question of years. I'm there myself, now that you mention it. In fact, I've been thinking lately of shaving off this ridiculous beard. I no longer have any protests to make, except to the sadist who constructed me as I am.'

‘Don't be rash,' I suggested. ‘Just slip into middle age gradually. It's easier that way. In other words, just snip off bits of your beard a little at a time.'

“How did you end up in this museum curator's wet dream?' he asked, gesturing to Father Bliss's fortress.

‘I married the man who owns it.'

‘Who has left you, or what?'

I was starting to wish that I had detected a note of hope in Hawk's voice as he asked that. But I suspected that I was merely projecting. ‘No. He's just away for a few days.' Instinctively, because of my upbringing, I cringed, knowing I should have said that Ira would be back this afternoon, in case this man Hawk was considering holding Wendy and me hostage or something.

‘Is he a — native, or whatever you'd call long-time residents?'

I nodded.

‘What's it like — living here?'

‘Really, I guess it's pretty much like living anywhere else -Hullsport or Cambridge or anywhere.'

‘What do you do all day?' He rolled over on his stomach and inspected me in my bikini with detached interest, as though I were a laboratory specimen.

‘Well, the same thing people do anywhere, I guess. I cook meals and wash dishes and fold laundry. The baby takes a lot of time. She and I go on walks and do the shopping and just mess around. I go to a few meetings and showers and stuff.'

‘Ah, community!' Hawk sighed. ‘Do you travel?'

‘I've been on one trip in four years — to Tennessee and Florida to show the baby to her grandparents. Oh yes, and I went to a funeral in Tennessee for a weekend.'

‘What do you and your husband do for fun — like on a Saturday night or something?'

‘We watch television, or we go out riding on his Sno Cat. Or we square dance at the elementary school. Or his family — he has this vast network of aunts and uncles and cousins and brothers and sisters — they come out for picnics and holiday dinners.'

‘What's he like, your Husband?'

‘Ira? Oh, he's very kind and decent and considerate. He loves to fish and hunt and does them very well. In fact, everything he does, he's accustomed to doing well. He's quite attractive, I suppose — sort of dark and muscled and high-strung-looking. He sells insurance and snow machines and makes a fair amount of money at it. He's very organized and dependable.' Until this point, everything I had said about Ira and Stark's Bog had been in a detached tone of voice. But halfway through, Hawk had started grinning. The corners of my mouth were now twitching faintly, too, when I added, ‘That's why I hate him.'