Accordion Crimes (24 page)

Back on the edge of the slash he saw tar-paper shacks and churches with hand-painted signs nailed to skinned poles—
Church of Christ Coming Again, Church of Redeeming Grace, Church of New Faith, Temple of Christian Beliefs and Practices, Church of the Big Woods, Sanctuary of the Last Times—set among pale sand and gravel quarries, among the shattered trees, a stipple of mauve clouds like petechiae against a flesh-colored horizon. He would have to be careful.

He did not expect to recognize anything. He knew only that Random was situated between woods and potato fields and that he had been born here. The light in this place was the first light he had seen after the blindness of the womb. His eyes kept filling with tears. He felt he might be slipping back into an archaic time when clans roved the forests and he was running along behind them, belonging with them, yet an outsider. He felt the somber light, the black softwood and the sound of rivers from the earth’s core rolling over rock. He passed a stumpy clearing where there were three or four old trucks with homemade plywood caps built into the back beds, a woman in a gypsy skirt placing a stick on the red fire.

Random was a small town with two general stores, a post office, a café, a garage, school. No one knew him, but he began to study their faces and learn their names. He liked the peculiar dullness of the buildings with their film of age, the evocative smell of spruce and potato dirt, the vague roads that petered out in the slash.

North of town another road branched off through the bog holes. At the junction he saw the Esso station and the Pelkys’ clapboard farmhouse, the ell divided into four apartments, two up, two down, in the distance a barn against a wall of black spruce.

“Mr. Pelky raised potatoes—we had one of the biggest potato farms in Random County—but you know how it is, you get older and your kids is all somewheres else. He fell off the tractor two years ago and the tractor runned right over his head, made him lose his mind for six months, but gradual he’s got it back and he’s as good as anybody now, but they say he can’t farm no more, so we fixed this up for apartments.” Mrs. Pelky wiped the checked plastic tablecloth as she talked to him, pushed the salt and pepper shakers into the central position. Her aquamarine eyes winked behind plastic harlequin glasses. Her green housedress was printed with yellow sombreros. “Home-cooked breakfast goes with it. I hope you got adventure in your heart. Like I tell Mr. Pelky, I can’t stand to cook the same old thing every day. Mr. Roddy rents a unit but he don’t take the breakfast, goes into town and eats a greasy mess at the diner.” The linoleum was a crazy pattern of many colors, the wallpaper a jungle of poppies and elephant ears. Mrs. Pelky sang her little song, “‘…
des bottes noires pour le travail et des rouges pour la danse
…’ now, if you want furniture and you don’t mind used, there’s secondhand in the barn up the road, that used to be our barn but we sold it to the Dentist. If you can stand the Dentist, the dirty old thing. He’s like some of those old men get, you know what I mean.” With a piece of cheese she coaxed her little dog to sit up and beg, told Dolor another dog, even more enchanting than this one, had been seized the year before as he stood near the fence, leg lifted, by an Arctic owl which carried him off in the moonlight.

His apartment was on the ground floor, two long rooms with sloping wooden floors, the flyspecked windows looking into a straggle of spruce. He stood in the kitchenette taking in his gas burners, the tiny refrigerator no higher than his knees,
a white enamel table and mismatched chairs with chrome legs. There was a metal bed in one room and on certain evenings the sound of Liberace came through the walls.

Every morning Mrs. Pelky labored to his door on her bad ankles with a plate of curious cookery: Orange Buds, Pork Fruit Cake, Deviled Clams and Bean Mash, Lentil Loaf, or The Poor Man’s Omelet—bread sopped in hot milk. Her passion was experimentation. She clipped recipes from the papers, pasted them into her “cookbook,” a turn-of-the-century salesman’s catalog for soda-water apparatus; the recipes obscured photographs of fabulous machines in onyx, red-veined Breccia Sanguinia and Alps Green marbles with gleaming spigots and ornate woodwork and German-silver labels for the sirops. From behind the luteous clips for “Appetizing Relish” and “Egyptian Stew” peeped the gas-lit Ambassador, the Autocrat with twelve spigots and double-stream soda-draught arms. He ate everything she brought him for it was better than his own strange combinations, a peach and kale sandwich, macaroni and vinegar, canned salmon and rat cheese.

He needed some shelves, a bookcase, an easy chair, a dish cupboard. He steered toward the secondhand furniture barn and saw hulking figures in the yard, immense naked women twelve feet high, carved of wood and with breasts like watermelons, pubic triangles the size of pennants, staring eyes and glistening hair, painted in exterior enamels. They stood among wooden cacti with nails for spines and plywood spruce trees. Inside he examined basins and two-gallon coffeepots, rusted calipers and axe heads with broken helves still filling the eyes, bucksaws and crosscuts, wedges, scratching awls, snatch blocks and snow knockers from old lumber-camp days.

The Dentist was bandy-legged and filthy-mouthed, his
words drenched in brown tobacco spit. “How do you like them babes I got out front? That’s my hobby, carvin women. Don’t know who I am, do you?”

“The one they call the Dentist.”

“Call me the Dentist? Why, they call me
everthing
from a two-handled devil to a three-legged bastard to a four-eyed fool. Some call me Squint, short for Squint-Eye. When they don’t call me
Dentist,
’cause I was the fuckin
filer,
filed the saw teeth. Ain’t a fuckin son of a bitsie
left
knows the difference between a goddamn tuttle tooth and a sterling tooth, goddamn scissorbills cannot find their
eyes
in the sockets.” He had worked in the woods in the old days, out to the Pacific and back, and the only people who mattered to him were dead men, men whose exploits and scars could never be equaled by the soft maggots of the contemporary woods.

Dolor bought two chairs and a small table from him, a chest of drawers with wooden thread spools for knobs. The chairs were upright, with cracked wooden seats that pinched his ass, but if he wanted comfort he could always lie down on the bed. At night he wished Francine were with him, forgetting for long moments that he had invented her; he’d thrown away the photograph in Minneapolis. He listened to the radio, it was better than the TV late at night, the distant hillbilly music and sermons and promises of cures from the wildcat border stations down in Mexico—funny their signal could reach all the way to Maine—offers for weight-loss tonics, pills to make you put on pounds, plastic broncos, moon pens, zircon rings, Yellow Boy fishing lures, apron patterns, twelve styles for just one dollar, rat-killer and polystyrene gravestones, send no money, send your name and address in care of this station, less than a penny a capsule, for each order received before December 15 you’ll receive in
addition, absolutely free, while this special offer lasts, insist on the genuine, prosperity, plain brown sealed wrapper, a package containing rigidly inspected pharmaceuticals, if you are nervous and wakeful at night. He never felt the voices were directed at him, but at all the silent millions out there lying in their beds unable to sleep, needing Restall and switchblade knives to end their suffering. He was not one of them, only eavesdropping, until he heard Dr. Bidlatter one night say, in his deep, comforting, fatherly voice, “trying in vain to get help for your physical or emotional problems? Are you unhappy? Are you depressed, anxious, fearful? Are you lonely? Have you been told ‘it’s all in your head’ or ‘there’s nothing wrong with you, forget it, take a vacation, quit your job, move to the sunbelt, get a divorce’? If so, you may benefit from hypnosis and behavior modification. Call 462–6666 today for a consultation with Dr. Bidlatter.” He wrote the number down but never called.

He’d filled out a little in the army, still not big, but wiry and well knit, supple and with a good sense of balance. He thought about trying for the forestry service through the G.I. Bill, but took a job as a limber in a small logging operation, Parfait Logging & Haulage. Through the autumn and into the winter he worked, bent over the felled trees with his chain saw, cutting limb after limb, hauling them to brush piles, monotonous, physically difficult work, his clothes covered with pitch and bark dust, but except for the chain saw exhaust, work done in the midst of resinous fragrance. He saved his money, ate at the café where gradually they recognized him, then knew his name, and finally heard that he had been born in Random but taken away as a baby, that he didn’t know the whereabouts of any living member of his family.

“So you might say you’re a stranger in your hometown,” said Maurice, the cook, waiter, janitor, but not the owner. His wife, Jeanette, was the owner and he was just an employee, just a humble oppressed employee with a mop or a spatula, until deer season when he metamorphosed into a hunter with a lethally crooked finger. But neither Maurice nor anyone else remembered Dolor’s parents. The family had lived in the township, he had been born there, they had made no mark.

In December, after a light fall of snow, the wind came out of the south, the temperature rose into the forties and suddenly the air was charged with an ineffable sweetness, a perfume as of invisible flowers. Was it some fragrance borne on the wind from the tropics, or the held breath of summer released by the untimely snowmelt? It persisted three days and then disappeared as a cold air mass seeped down from the Arctic and new snow fell, rinsing the air of all scent, covering the decaying leaves and raw earth, the single leaf of the grass-pink, sprawling woodbine like a dark violet wire among the rocks, the increasing white weight matting ebony spleenwort, pulling down the plumes of faded goldenrod.

On weekends Dolor didn’t know where to go, and kept himself company reading
True Adventure
and
Detective Stories
and carving a naked girl on a pine board, sure he could do better than the Dentist’s colossal women, or watching TV. The only thing to do in Random was get drunk at the bar or drive around trying to get stuck in a beaver wash.

There was a night when the old Dentist came crashing in, ricocheting between the walls, slam, scrape, hung on the door-knob making a trilling sound and calling “Mr. Gagnon, why
don’t
you answer your goddamn fuckin doorbell,” until Dolor opened the door and looked at him.

“Only the Dentist come in for a
little
drink,” he said, in his
withered arms a brown paper bag of beer bottles, in his pants pocket a new pint of cheap whiskey, in his hand another, half gone. Dolor steered him to one of the chairs.

“Think I’m kegged up, don’t you? No, I’m
not
kegged up or you’d know it.”

The Dentist looked at the ceiling, the shelves on the wall, the half-carved deer head, into the corners of the room, nodded at the instrument case at the foot of the bed.

“There’s a ’cordeen for you, ain’t it?” He took a drink.

“Remember that short staker come
through
one winter? Couple of weeks and he was
gone,
but the tunes he knew, son-of-a-bitchen bastard knew a hundred of songs, made them out of his head. Played the
squeezebox
’cordeen and sang like a dog with his nuts in a wringer. Suppose you want to hear me do a goddamn one of ’em?”

“Go ahead,” said Dolor.

The old man folded his arms across his chest, one foot beat time loudly, and he began to sing in a strong and amazingly loud voice although he barely opened his mouth.

“
Oh loggers come and sit by me—

Here’s my little ’cordeen ’pon my knee.

I’ll sing to you of Danny’s game

And how he come to his end up in Maine

On the bold Penobscot, the Penobscot cold.
”

The steady voice grew louder and harder as he sang, the lines thrusting into the room like pike poles. Although it was singing, it was speaking as well, a kind of commanding and rhythmic recitation that pulled a listener inside the singer, straight into the old woods, the clink of log chains and snorting horses, the creak of laden sleds.

“His age was only twenty-two,

His wife and child was almost new.

He had a trick so slick and smooth

When it was done there was no proof.

On the bold Penobscot, the Penobscot cold.”

He stopped singing and drank whiskey, did not resume the song. When Dolor asked him to go on, he claimed he’d never sung a note in his life, what was on the TV tonight, weren’t it the night for
Dragnet
? But they got Myron Floren playing “Tico Tico” on the Lawrence Welk show and the Dentist made gagging sounds.

“I wouldn’t buy no Dodge,” said the Dentist, “unless it was one of them Power Wagons.”

One of the skidder operators kept looking at him, came up to him on a payday Friday. He was a tall, stoop-shouldered man with light eyes, hair cut in a duck’s-ass style, gleaming with Brylcreem.

“You know somethin, pretty sure I remember you. Yeah, I remember you. Couple years behind me. I was at Birdnest when you was. I know you was there. You’re Frank. I remember you, the way you’d duck out of sight when there was somethin goin on. I was put there after my fuckin folks got killed on the bridge, comin across that bridge right down the hill in town. Guess my old man was drunk. They tell me he drank a lot. The cops was chasin them and they crashed. Right through the rail into the river. Guess they’re still down there. They couldn’t get them up. Never found them. Current’s too strong. I often thought how it would be to dive
down there, look around. Maybe there’s somethin of them’s still down there, a watch or a wallet under a rock. I fish in there, put a big sinker on and a bare hook, see if I can get a hook into my dad’s wallet. But so far no luck.”