Kinflicks (79 page)

‘Hawk!'
He remained motionless, expressionless.

I tugged insistently at the ring in his ear lobe, like a farmer grabbing a recalcitrant bull by the ring in its nose. ‘Look, Hawk, it's not the end of the world. Really it isn't. We're all trained now. We can try the Maithuna again on the fifth day after my next period. It's no big deal. We just have to switch from Southern Comfort to wine.'

He continued staring at the sky.

‘Hawk, I mean,
really.
This is ridiculous, sulking like this.'

He said nothing, stared fixedly at the blue summer sky. I grabbed his arm in the vicinity of his mandala tattoo and shook it fiercely; it was like shaking a corpse.

I lay back down and stared at the sky with him. I enumerated the possibilities for me and my zombie. We could return to Ira's. I could turn Hawk over to the FBI, and plead temporary insanity and beg Ira to take me back. I could take Hawk and hike over the hill to our left and join Mona's and Atheliah's commune. I could leave Hawk here, lying in this field, and fend for myself, returning to Hullsport or something. I could take Hawk back to Montreal, braving the border guards, maybe locate some of his friends, live with him if he wanted, or strike out on my own.

I rolled up the sleeping bag and attached it to the pack frame. Then I shook Hawk and pointed to the pack. Obediently, he allowed me to hoist it onto his back. Then I took his hand and led him like a pack horse. We climbed a hill and walked along a ridge until Mona's and Atheliah's rambling house was directly below us. Then we tacked down the hillside through the woods toward it. I felt as though I was perhaps finally coming home, after a long and painful exile among strangers.

When we reached the house, it was empty, deserted. The front door had popped open and swayed in the breeze. We walked inside. Most of the debris had been shoveled off the living room floor. The caravan had moved on. Panic gripped me. I had been counting on them for advice, or at least for moral support

I searched through all the rooms, but could find no trace of continuing human habitation. I stuffed a few discarded T-shirts in the pack and removed it from Hawk's shoulders and led him to the couch and sat him down. He stared intently at his dirty fingernails. Then I sat down, too, and stared at Hawk. He had been such a dictator while he was training me, had known exactly what to do when. Where had that personality vanished to now when we really needed it?

‘Now what, maharishi?'

He continued studying his fingernails as though he hadn't heard.

I walked into the kitchen. There were some large jars of brown rice and soybeans, dried fruits and nuts, sesame seeds and sunflower seeds. Moths swooped around in them like flying reptiles. I took two handfuls of dried fruit and gave one to Hawk. We sat and munched gravely on the leathery apricots and pears.

Were FBI agents really lurking around waiting to descend on Hawk? If so, would Ira be likely to hear about it and draw the appropriate conclusions? This farm would be the first place he'd send them, in a seizure of National Guardly wrath. I was aiding and abetting a fugitive. I was in this up to my ears. What was I to do?

I studied Hawk. In his fringed leather jacket and bib overalls and beard and tangled hair, he looked like the quintessence of army deserterhood. I got some scissors out of a kitchen drawer. Then I sheared Hawk like a sheep, cutting his beard down to stubble and hacking away at his hair. He didn't appear to notice. Then I got the razor I used on my legs out of my pocketbook. Lathering him up, I shaved him. I removed the silver ring and jingle bell from his ear lobe. Then I helped him, unprotesting, out of his leather jacket and overalls. The pinstriped pants to an extra suit I had brought were cuffed and fashionably loose. They fit him well and looked like men's slacks. The jacket, however, was ridiculously tight, and the sleeves came halfway up his forearms. I let him wear his work shirt instead and sandals. Even so, he looked remarkably clean-cut and fresh and innocent without his mangy beard. I was startled to see his chin after all these weeks. No wonder he had hidden it. It was weak and receding.

I plopped down on the sofa. Clearing my throat, I said, ‘Do you think we should go to Montreal, Hawk?'

He didn't look up from his fingernails.

‘How difficult will it be for you to get past the border guards?'

Sighing, I pulled him up from the couch. I loaded the pack on his uncomplaining back, and we struck off northward through the woods. When we hit the road to the border crossing, we hitched a ride with some young kids in a Volkswagen bus. The border guards were so busy searching for drugs that they didn't pay any attention to us middle-aged straights. I had remembered by then that Hawk had landed immigrant status anyway. He was already on Canadian soil and so was home free.

In Montreal I decided we might as well live it up for a night on Ira's credit cards while we (read: I) decided on our next move. We swept into the Bonaventure Hotel. A Chinese coolie relieved Hawk of his pack and led us down endless interconnected carpeted corridors to a vast chamber, outfitted with fold upon fold of thick drapery and two king-sized beds. The windows across one wall looked down many stories to a scenic parking lot

Hawk sat in one upholstered armchair, and I sat in the other. ‘Look, Hawk, I think you're overreacting. Yes, we blew it. We drank too much Southern Comfort and passed out. But so what? We can restage it using grape juice or Seven-Up or something. That can't be what's really bothering you. What's wrong?' In fact, I was awash with guilt. Perhaps my rotten attitude toward the Maithuna, regarding it largely as an opportunity to get laid, had played a major role in wrecking it.

For the first time all day, Hawk responded. He looked up out of bloodshot blue eyes and croaked, ‘Entropy.'

‘Entropy?'

He rubbed his clean-shaven face furiously with both hands, like Samson discovering his shorn head. ‘They've finally got me,' he whispered.

‘Who
has?'

‘Don't you see?' he asked with an incredulous smile. ‘They're going to suck all the heat from my body before I have a chance to get out of it. I'll be trapped in it and will die.'

‘Who
is?'

‘I have to get south,' he muttered.

‘You
can't
go south. You'll be thrown in prison.'

‘I am in prison,' he croaked.

‘Hawk, I've really had enough of this nonsense,' I snapped, like a spinster schoolteacher. ‘Now, you just pull yourself together.'

He glared at me sullenly. ‘If you weren't already dead, you'd feel it, too. Entropy — sucking all the warmth from your body.' He started shivering spasmodically, and his teeth chattered.

‘It's actually very comfortable in here,' I notified him. ‘Seventy-four degrees. Fingertip control in every room.'

His shuddering increased, and he wrapped his arms around himself.

I studied him hopelessly. I figured that if I continued to treat him normally, didn't go along with his game, maybe he'd snap out of it as abruptly as he'd snapped into it.

‘Come on,' I barked like an army sergeant. ‘We're going out for dinner. Please try to behave.'

I turned in at a trendy-looking spot on a quiet side street, dragging Hawk behind me. Smart couples were sitting at tables under an outside awning. A large neon sign of an American Gothic-type farmer read ‘Old MacDonald's.'

Inside, the bar was a feed trough with a cover. The bar stools were old tractor seats mounted so as to swivel on milk cans. On the wall behind the bar were pictures of stylized domestic animals, silos and tractors, made by gluing exotic beer labels into patterns. The chrome shot spouts on all the lined-up liquor bottles were in the shape of cows' udders.

I directed Hawk to a tractor seat and sat in one next to him. I ordered us Bloody Marys, feeling extravagant, backed as I was by Ira's credit cards. The waitress, dressed in tattered Daisy Mae cutoffs and a bandanna halter and a huge straw hat, inquired with a French accent, ‘Two Red Roosters?'

‘Whatever,' I said with a shrug.

The drinks when they arrived had miniature pitchforks for swizzle sticks.

After a few minutes, I went in search of the ladies' room, which was decorated to look like an outhouse.

When I returned, Hawk was no longer there. I assumed he was in the men's room and sat down to wait. A man sitting next to me in suede overalls and brogan platform shoes started humming ‘Red River Valley' under his breath.

Finally he turned to me and asked, ‘What ya reading?'

I was holding a Montreal guidebook in one hand.
‘The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.'

‘Yeah? Is it good?'

‘If you're into that kind of thing,' I replied, glancing around uneasily for Hawk.

‘Do you like Red Roosters?' my friend in the neighboring tractor seat asked, his eyes fixed on my tits.

‘What? Oh, Red
Roosters.
Yes. Yes, I do.'

‘Want another?'

I stared at him with surprise. It invariably amazed me when someone tried to pick me up. I would
never
be able to assume that someone would rather talk to me than to stare off vacantly into space. The male ego was truly an object of wonder.

‘No, thank you. I'm waiting for my date.'

‘Yeah? Well, he went out the door about ten minutes ago.'

I looked at him quickly. ‘Are you sure?'

He nodded. I scrambled down and raced from the restaurant. I charged around all the adjacent blocks searching for him. Then I decided he'd gotten tired and had returned to the Bona-venture.

When I got back to our room, Hawk wasn't there. Only his pack remained.

I collapsed on the vast bed and fell asleep.

The next morning I went to the offices of the various war resister groups and inquired about Hawk. After getting absolutely nowhere and finding the men behind the desks reluctant even to talk with me, I realized that my image was at fault. In my Sally Suburban pantsuit with my hair tied back with a scarf, I looked like a wronged wife. I went and had my hair cut in an Afro, and I bought a patchwork peasant dress and some hand-tooled leather clogs on Ira's charge cards.

In my new disguise, I returned to the offices and inquired anew about Hawk. This time a couple of men confessed to having known him but not having seen him for several months. One gave me his old address. I checked it out. It was a dingy crumbling townhouse well away from the downtown area. The dumpy woman behind the desk remembered Hawk, but hadn't seen him lately. I entered a Missing Persons report with the police.

For a couple more days I prowled around following various dead-end leads, trying to find people who had known him. I had concluded that eventually he would surface and return to his old friends and old haunts. I planned to be there to take care of him when he did. It would be my life's work: I would take a room somewhere, find a waitress job, and spend my free time scouring Montreal in search of my war hero. What else did I have to build a life around?

I returned to Stark's Bog to gather up my spare belongings. I was dumped from the bus right next door to Ira's office. I was toting Hawk's nearly empty pack, having checked his belongings in a locker at the Montreal bus station until I should return to claim them.

Ira blanched when he saw me. He drove me to the house in his fire chief car. Among my waiting mail was a letter from Mrs. Yancy asking me to come to Hullsport and be with Mother, who was hospitalized with a clotting disorder. On the way to the St. Johnsbury airport, with Hawk's pack filled with all my worldly possessions in the trunk, Ira notified me that he intended for Wendy never to see me again. She had had a few difficult days but was now happily absorbed into Angela's brood. I owed it to her to stay out of her life.

14
Saturday, July 22

Ginny stood looking down at her sleeping mother. Cotton plugs in her nostrils and gums, a pad between her legs, new bruises on her arms and calves. Her right eye bandaged. She had developed a slight temperature.

Any day now her mother's brain might hemorrhage. There was no longer any way to avoid acknowledging it. Her mother hadn't been out of bed in almost a week. She lay all day without talking. The nurses whisked in and out, doing this or that to make the bruised flesh more comfortable. Ginny had lately been thinking of her mother's body as an apple, formerly firm, now fallen and rotting. It was an appalling image, but she couldn't seem to banish it. Like an apple, its entire purpose for existence had been to transport, protect, and nurture the seeds of new life. Now that these once new lives — Karl, Jim, and Ginny herself — were ripe apples themselves, her mother's function had ceased. She was being disposed of. She was lying in a hospital bed rotting. She had been used. It wasn't fair. But then, as she had always insisted,
life
wasn't fair.

Ginny strolled into the hall. Coming from Coach's room were droning commands: ‘Get me out of here
right now.
Do you hear me? I want out of here now. No ifs, ands or buts,
now!
' Ginny was incapable of saying whether Coach was living in the past or the present at this point. He knew he was in the hospital and really wanted out, or he was wrapped up in some drama out of his past?

Stationed in Mrs. Cabel's doorway was Sister Theresa in her hospital robe and gown. A hand clutched either side of the door frame. In front of her, his nose at her chest level, stood Mr. Solomon, quivering with rage in his blue wool robe.

‘The voman is
suffering,
Sister Theresa!'

‘How can you
know,
Mr Solomon? A human being is more than just a biological mechanism. Mrs. Cabel's spirit may be
thriving
in her impaired body, for all we know.'

‘Acts of omission are no less morally reprehensible than acts of commission,' Mr. Solomon insisted. ‘Compassion requires that I not lie in the next room listening to her moan if it is vithin my power to alleviate her pain. Let her
rest,
Sister, in that great black void on the other side.'