Mohawk (12 page)

To make matters worse, Harry was acting suspicious, and when he asked where the new coat came from, Wild Bill didn’t know what to tell him. The man who had given it to him had told him to forget it, so he had. Forgetting was something he was good at. Sometimes he just went ahead and did it without having to be told. The only trouble was that some things just wouldn’t stay forgotten. Once he figured he had them erased real good, his memory would jog and there
he’d be—remembering again before he could do anything about it.

He didn’t want to remember who had given him the coat because he knew he wasn’t supposed to, but the coat was so nice and warm that he couldn’t help thinking about it. If he ever
needed
to remember, by concentrating hard and reconstructing the series of events that led up to having it, he’d be able to. First, he would recall where he had been and how he’d felt without the coat, and then how it felt not to be cold anymore, until the person who handed it to him and made him try it on to see if it fit became a clear image in his mind’s eye. Just thinking about the process of remembering almost made him do it, but when he saw the image focusing he forced everything to go blank before any harm was done.

The coat was waist length, dark blue with white stripes along the sleeves. It seemed full of air and squeaked when he swung his arms. The coat made Wild Bill feel a little like a balloon. It was very warm, especially in the pockets where he stuffed his hands. Maybe he didn’t remember exactly where it came from, but even Harry’s needling could not shake Wild Bill’s conviction that he hadn’t stolen it.

Wild Bill drank his coffee quickly, his face sweaty. He was unaccustomed to such warmth and so many questions from his only friend. He had some coins and put them on the counter. Harry took one or two and shoved the rest back for Bill to put in his pocket. Outside, the November air was raw and the wind that howled down Main Street made Wild Bill feel comfortable all over again inside the coat. He neither sweated nor shivered. He hoped no one would take the coat away.

When he emerged from the alley, the junior high was getting out and some of the boys and girls along the other side of Main Street called to him. He waved and shouted back, which increased the general merriment. One of the boys began to walk with an exaggerated limp, his arms hanging down at his sides like a gorilla’s. Wild Bill thought several of the young girls were pretty, though not nearly as pretty as the girl he had forgotten. At times, if he thought real hard, he could remember her, how she had looked with her long black hair and slender white arms, but because he was afraid his father or his uncle the policeman would catch him at it, he didn’t think of her often. Sometimes, though, he would see somebody that reminded him of her, and there she was. She was beautiful to think about. Occasionally he waited for her in front of the high school, but she never came out, and he was always told to move along.

When the boys and girls were gone, Wild Bill zipped his coat and headed back up the alley between the Mohawk Grill and the junior high, still thinking about, and nearly remembering, the girl. He failed to notice that he wasn’t alone until he had practically walked into the circle of boys. He recognized them immediately, though he knew none of their names. One of them had once punched him hard, and the blood from his nose had trickled down into his mouth and tasted like salt. When Wild Bill got closer, he saw that this boy had another pinned to the ground, one arm twisted up under his shoulder blade. The others were hooting encouragement. The smaller boy squirmed and, every time he tried to wriggle free, the boy on top grabbed him by the hair with his free hand and pushed his nose in the gravel. The victim didn’t cry, though he was
bleeding from the nose and mouth. Wild Bill thought he knew this boy, too, though it was hard to tell with his face so scraped and bloody.

Wild Bill drew closer and watched, at once concerned and skeptical, since these particular boys had once tricked him by pretending to fight among themselves. When he had tried to stop them, they hooted, made faces and told him to go do a bad thing with his mother. Then they ran away. Wild Bill was not at all certain that this wasn’t a similar trick, despite the blood from the one boy’s nose and the fear in his eyes.

Everyone seemed to notice Wild Bill at the same instant, even the boy on the ground. “Get out of here,” said the larger boy, refusing to surrender his victim’s twisted arm or let him off the pavement. Somewhat reluctantly, one of the boys stepped forward to prance around in front of Wild Bill, dancing left, then right, throwing up a small fist in the general direction of his frowning face. Bill neither dodged nor ducked, and the third jab landed and he felt his lower lip swell. When the boy swung again, Wild Bill pushed him to the pavement.

“Get him!” somebody yelled, but nobody moved after seeing their comrade dispatched with so little effort and respect. Finally the large boy got up to do the job himself. His opponent, now free, held his twisted arm like a broken wing, but didn’t run away. This was definitely the boy he knew, Wild Bill decided, the one who made him think of the girl. As he was thinking about this he was doubled-over, punched hard in the stomach. But when the boy uppercut, his fist encountered Wild Bill’s stony forehead and his knuckles cracked audibly. Bill sat down, then stood up immediately, determined not to be hit again and embarrassed to have
been sat down. His belly hurt. When one of the other boys, finally shamed into action and heartened by seeing their adversary felled, offered to knock Wild Bill down a second time, Wild Bill caught him by the waist and flung him through the air against Harry’s metal dumpster, where the boy’s head rang against the steel. The sound took all the fight out of the rest, even the large one. They clustered around the dumpster. Each had seen his share of fights with bloody noses and chipped teeth, but they’d never seen anyone lie motionless like the boy on the ground, and the gravity of the situation struck them dumb. They forgot completely about Wild Bill, who had also forgotten completely about them and was grinning benevolently down at the boy he’d rescued. “Jesus Christ,” muttered the large boy. “Jesus H. Christ.”

When a delivery truck turned into the alley, the gang scattered, leaving only Wild Bill and the bloodied boy and the one motionless on the ground. The driver pulled up and got out, kneeled by the inert figure, quickly glanced up, then hurried into the diner. By the time he returned with Harry, the alley was empty save for the unconscious boy. It soon filled up, though, and the ambulance that screamed the short block and a half down Hospital Hill had to wait for the crowd of spectators to clear a path.

Wild Bill followed the boy at a discreet distance, first up Main Street as far as the fire station, then up the hill as far as Mountain. As the boy limped homeward, the man who followed—certainly sinister-looking, his hair long and scraggly, his face unshaven—felt his anxiety grow, for the boy appeared to be leading him to
the one place in Mohawk he was most forbidden to go, and the further they went, the more he feared their destination. The tightening in Wild Bill’s stomach had nothing to do with the fact that he’d just been slugged there. He’d forgotten all about the fight. Nobody had told him to, he’d just done it.

In horror he watched the boy cross the street and climb the steps of the house. Did the boy not know that this house was forbidden, that something terrible would happen if he didn’t stay away? Wild Bill feared for the boy, because something terrible had once happened to him, though he had forgotten what it was and had been told that it would happen again if he ever remembered. Then the door to the house opened and she appeared from somewhere inside, the one he had forgotten and yet sometimes remembered, the one he’d been told was gone. She drew the boy quickly inside and the door closed again. Wild Bill waited across the street for a long time, but the door did not open again.

It was after dark by the time he got back downtown. The Mohawk Grill was crowded as he slipped unnoticed into the back, waiting to tell Harry the news. He never got the chance, though, because as soon as Harry heard the back door creak shut, he shoved Bill into the storeroom with the big cans of tomatoes and pumpkin pie filling. One man was too excited to speak, and the other sputtered. “You’ve done it this time,” Harry said, his face bright red with fear and anger. “Nobody can fix this! Sweet Jesus, Billy, what came over you?”

Seeing his friend so worked up only increased Wild Bill’s own sense of excitement, and he mistakenly concluded
that they were excited over the same thing. He grabbed Harry’s shoulders with such force that when the larger man tried to step back he discovered he couldn’t. “Ive!” Wild Bill insisted, clutching Harry, who suddenly wished he had his spatula with him. “Ive!”

Pulling free, Harry pushed Wild Bill onto an empty crate and grabbed his chin with one paw so he could neither speak nor move. Actually, Bill didn’t want to move, but having his cheeks pinched brought tears to his eyes, and he had not finished talking. The skin along his throat was feverish. “Yes,” Harry said. “He’s alive, but just barely. You’re in big trouble and there isn’t a goddamn thing I can do to help you. Can’t you get that through your big numb skull? Can’t you understand? I can’t help you!”

Wild Bill stared dumbly at his friend, no longer struggling, but as soon as Harry’s grip relaxed, he slipped free and shook his head vigorously. “Oh … oh.…”

Harry slapped him in the face then, hard enough to make his eyes water again. Their expression seemed to say that just about all the truly astonishing things that could happen in the world were happening within the space of a few hours, and he hadn’t any idea where it would stop. “Don’t tell me no!” Harry said savagely, grabbing his cheeks again. “Don’t tell me no, goddamn you. You just sit there until I can figure out what to do. You hear?”

Wild Bill fought to get free, but this time Harry was ready for him and tightened his grip until his thumb and forefinger met, only the skin and stubble on Bill’s cheeks between them. Not until he nodded that he’d stay quiet did Harry let go to return to his restless customers. He studied Bill sadly for a moment before
leaving him alone in the storeroom among the high shelves stacked all the way to the ceiling with canned applesauce and kidney beans and cling peaches, burlap bags of sprouting potatoes on the floor, the darkness too complete with the door closed to read the labels.

One late August night they all headed for the lake. Everyone was on edge, partly because it had been hot and humid for a week, and because summer was nearly over. Even Dan seemed quietly out of sorts. Dallas was the worst. His car wasn’t running, and that afternoon Anne had told him she was going to do as her father wished and attend classes at Albany State in the fall. It would be a shame to waste the scholarship she had earned, she said, but Dallas refused to be comforted by the fact that she would be only an hour away. He was clever enough to guess that her leaving was indicative of something, just as he knew that things had never been less intimate between them. He was far behind his own leisurely schedule, too. A whole summer had slipped away and he still hadn’t discovered the courage to slip his hand beneath her brassiere. And here they were, practically engaged. He was cruelly ashamed of himself, and lately life had begun to seem shallow and worthless.

At the prospect of going away, Anne herself felt an odd mixture of hopelessness and resignation. In a way she welcomed September, which would give her the opportunity to break gradually with Dallas, whose feelings she had no desire to hurt. And seeing less of Dan
might be for the best too. There was always the chance that her feelings might change, though she had no confidence they would.

“I guess it’s up to me to cheer everybody up tonight,” Di remarked when they were halfway to the lake and no one had said anything. They all seemed to know she would not be equal to the task.

The dance was not one of the regulars at the hotel. This one was being held in the rickety old pavilion on the other side of the lake, accessible only by a network of narrow dirt roads that wound among the campsites. In the still night the accents borne on the summer air were mostly from New York City. In August the whole metropolitan area seemed to empty into the Adirondacks.

“This is going to be full of city bitches and woodchucks,” Dallas complained. He particularly disliked the latter, unworldly and unsophisticated, who found their way down the mountain on Saturday nights.

“At least there’s a breeze,” Di said.

Inside the pavilion, which was festooned with orange lanterns, they discovered they could only get drinks by going next door. After seating the girls, Dallas and Dan left for the bar, and by the time they got back, two good-natured hillbillies in black cowboy hats had invited themselves to the table and were entertaining Di and Anne with loud stories and enticing them to drink out of a large tin flask. Dallas tried his best to start a fight, but the two interlopers were far too amiable to be provoked and went away peacefully. It was a long shot, anyway.

Dallas drank purposefully and his mood did not improve. Before long, it was obvious to him that Anne didn’t care for him as much as he could’ve wished.
“Admit it,” he said suddenly, his reddening eyes full of anger.

“Admit what?” Anne said.

“You don’t love me.”

“I don’t even like you when you get like this.”

“Then admit it,” he insisted.

Anne appealed to the others, but Di was looking carefully away and Dan somehow managed to give the impression that he really was someplace else. “Of course I love you,” Anne said.

Dallas pondered his gin, as if it contained some melancholy truth. After a minute he said, “I can take it.”

“Take
what
, Dallas. What can you take?”

“That you don’t love me.”

“I said I love you,” Anne insisted. Di said she thought it was true.

“I know you love me,” Dallas admitted. “Except not really.”

“You’re talking nonsense.”

“No I’m not,” Dallas snapped, his smile full of self-pity and gin. “I bet you love Dan as much as me.”