Postcards (7 page)

DUB HAD HIS NEWSPAPER CLIPPING, and for three years he’d kept it in a bureau drawer that would hardly open.

Marvin E. Blood of Vermont was injured after he jumped from a moving freight train entering Oakville, Ct. and slipped under a boxcar. He was taken to St. Mary’s Hospital where his left arm was amputated above the elbow. Oakville Police Chief Percy Sledge said, ‘Men are bound to be injured if they ride the rods. This young man’s strength should have gone to the War effort, but he has become a burden to his family and the community.’

Mink and Jewell had to drive down to the hospital in Connecticut to get him. Mink stared at the empty sleeve of the donated corduroy jacket and said, ‘Twenty-four years old and look at you. Jesus Christ, you look like a hundred miles of bad road. If you’d did your hellin’ around up at home you wouldn’t be in this mess.’

Dub grinned. He’d grin at a funeral, Mink thought. ‘Gonna have somebody sew that onto my pajamas,’ Dub said. But it was no joke. And when Dub saw the package store on the street in Hartford he told Mink to pull over.

It was hard, opening the pint with just one hand. The cap seemed sweated on. He clenched the bottle between his knees, spit on his fingers and twisted until his fingers cramped. ‘Ma?’ he said.

‘I never opened a bottle of that poison for anybody in my life and I won’t start now.’

‘Ma, I need you to do it. If you don’t I’ll probably bite the top of the goddamn bottle off.’

Jewell stared fixedly at the horizon, her hands folded hard into each other. They traveled another mile. Dub’s breathing filled the car.

‘God’s sake!’ shouted Mink, swerving over to the grassy verge. ‘God’s sake, give me the damn thing.’ He bore down on the cap until it gave a crack and spun free. He passed it back to Dub. The smell of the whiskey flowed out, a heavy smell like roasted sod after a brush fire. Jewell cranked her window partway open and for the two hundred miles north Dub said nothing about the air that chilled him until he shook and had to drink more whiskey to see straight.

They’d known he was a fool since he was a baby, but now they had the firsthand proof he was a cripple and a drunk, too.

It was a little easier, Dub thought, since they’d culled four of the cows, but they still didn’t get done with the evening milking until six-thirty or later. Even if he skipped supper he still had to clean up and get the stink of the barn off him. No matter what he did, whether he took a bath, sliding under the grey water, or scrubbed his arms and neck with Fels Naptha until his skin burned, the rich mingle of manure, milk and animal came off him like heat when he danced with Myrt.
But on Saturday night after the milking he cleaned up and took off for the Comet Roadhouse. Try and stop him.

It was cold. The truck wouldn’t turn over until he set the hot teakettle on the battery for half an hour. He probably wouldn’t be able to start it again at midnight when the Comet dosed, but he didn’t care now and a kind of impatient joy sent him skidding around the gravelly curves, running the intersection stop sign. He didn’t see any lights coming. He rushed toward the Comet’s warmth.

The parking strip was full by the time he got there. Over the roadhouse’s roof the red neon comet and its hot letters glowed in the icy night. Ronnie Nipple’s truck, with a load of wood in the back to give some traction on the lull, was parked at the far end of the row of cars and trucks. The snow squeaked as Dub cramped the tires and pulled up beside it. He could probably get a jump from Ronnie if he had to. Or Trimmer, if he was here. He looked down the row for Trimmer’s woods truck but didn’t see it. His breath gushed out, building up an edge of rime on the windshield where the heater air hadn’t warmed it. He dammed the truck door, but the worn catch didn’t hold and it bounced open again. ‘Fuck it, no time to fool around with that.’ He ran toward the door with its frosted glass and jingling bell, anxious to dive into the roar of sound he heard coming from inside.

The steamy, smoke-hot room sucked him in. The tables were jammed, the bar was a row of bent backs and shoulders. The jukebox glowed with colored bubbles, saxophones flaring, gurgling out of the bubbles. He threw himself toward the fire of wooden matches, the glint of beer bottles, the mean little half-moon smiles of emptying shot glasses. He stood on the bar rail and looked for Myrtle, looked for Trimmer.

‘How the hell do you get it so hot in here,’ he shouted at Howard who was rushing back and forth behind. The bartender turned his long yellow face toward Dub. The sagging smoke-discolored skin seemed fastened in place by a pair of black metallic eyebrows. The mouth opened in a grimace of recognition. A wet tooth winked.

‘Body heat!’

A man at the bar laughed. It was Jack Didion. His arm hugged
the older woman next to him, wearing a long baggy dress printed with navy blue chevrons. She worked at Didion’s, milked cows, wore men’s overalls all week. Didion whispered something in the woman’s ear and she threw back her head and roared. ‘Body heat! You said it!’ Her broken fingernails were rimmed with black.

The colored bottles stood in a pyramid. After Howard’s wife died he had taken the round mirror etched with bluebirds and apple blossoms from her dressing table and hung it on the wall behind the bottles so their number was doubled in richness and promise. Howard, too, was doubled as he passed back and forth, the back of his head reflected among the bottles.

The little stage at the end of the bar was dark, but the microphones were set up, there was the drum set. A cardboard sign on the easel – THE SUGAR TAPPERS in glitter-dust letters. Dub, gyring through the dancers, saw Myrtle at a table against the wall, leaning out into the throbbing light so she could watch the door. He came up behind her and put his cold hand on the back of her neck.

‘My god! You could kill a person that way! What took you so long, as if I didn’t know.’ Her brown hair was screwed into a chignon that had slipped its moorings and rode low on her neck. Her mouth was drawn with lipstick into a hard little crimson kiss. She wore her secretary suit with its ruffled blouse. Her small eyes were a clear teal blue fringed with sandy lashes. Her shallow face and flat chest made her look weak and vulnerable, and Dub enjoyed that illusion. He knew she was as tough as oak, a trim, tough little oak.

‘What always takes me so long; milking, washing up, get the truck going, drive down here. We didn’t get through the milking until late. Usually I don’t care, but tonight I was goin’ crazy tryin’ to get out. He was just squeezin’ slow, I guess. What a fuckin’ hopeless mess.’

‘Did you tell him?’

‘No, I didn’t tell him. He’ll go through the wall. Want to make sure the rifles are all locked up before I tell him. I thought he got a little mad when Loyal took off, but it’ll really rattle his marbles when I drop the word we’re getting hitched and moving out.’

‘It isn’t going to get any easier the longer you put it off.’

‘There’s a lot more to it than just telling him. I can’t clear out until
I know he’s got a way to get out from under that farm. Sell it, is what I think he ought to do. Then I got to come up with some money. Some real money. It’s o.k. for us to talk about moving off, about me taking the piano tuning course and all, but money is what makes it happen and I don’t got any.’

‘It always comes down to money. That’s what we always end up talking about. It never fails.’

‘It’s the big problem. He don’t say much, but I know damn well the mortgage and the taxes is way behind. He ought to sell but he’s so damn stubborn he won’t. I try to mention it he says “I-was-born-on-this-farm,-I’ll-die-on-this-farm,-farmin’s-the-only-thing-I-know.” Hell, if I can learn piano tuning he could learn something different. Run a drill press or something. Want a beer? Fizzy drink? A martini?’ His voice puffed, rich, comic.

‘Oh, I might as well have have a gin and ginger ale.’ She pushed the chignon up and drove another hairpin into the slippery mass.

‘The one I feel sorry for is Mernelle. She runs up there to her room cryin’ because she don’t have any decent clothes. She’s grown out of everything. She had to wear one of Ma’s dresses to school the other day. Come home bawlin’. I feel bad, but there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I know how she feels when the kids pick on you. Rotten little bastards.’

‘Poor kid. Listen, I got some dresses and a skirt and sweater she can have. A nice green cashmere sweater and a brown corduroy skirt.’

‘Honey, she’s six inches taller than you and about twenty pounds skinnier. That’s the problem. She’s shot up wicked the last few months. Bean pole. Wish she could put the brakes on.’

‘We’ll think of something. She can’t wear Jewell’s dresses to school, poor kid. By the way, I’ve got a surprise for you.’

‘Better be good.’

‘I think so.’ The inverted red prints of her lips mapped the rim of the glass. ‘Doctor Willy got a postcard from the Railway Express today. It’s in.’

‘What’s in?’

‘You know. You know what I mean. What you were measured for.’ Her face washed red. She could not say it, not after two years
as the doctor’s secretary and appointment manager. Not after seven months of sitting with Dub in the farm truck that leaked mosquitoes, engine fumes, road water, and leg-paralyzing cold, kissing and planning a hundred escapes and futures and every one without a farm in it.

‘Oh yeah, you must mean the fancy arm. The prosthesis. That what you mean?’

‘Yes.’ She pushed the stained glass away from her. She could not stand to hear him breathe that way.

‘Or is it a hook, big shiny, stainless steel hook? I forget. I only know my girlfriend Myrt says I gotta get one, but she can’t say what it is I gotta get.’

‘Marvin. Don’t do this to me,’ she said in a low voice.

‘Don’t do what? Say “hook”? Say “prosthesis”?’ His voice rolled out across the dance door. He saw Trimmer at the bar, saw Trimmer cross his eyes and draw his hand across his throat. All at once he felt better and began to laugh. He pulled the cigarette pack from his shirt pocket and shook out a cigarette. ‘Don’t be embarrassed, honey. I hate to say it, too. “Prosthesis.” Sounds like a nasty poison snake.
“He was bit by a prosthesis.”
That’s how come I been so long without doing anything about it. Couldn’t say it. Atta girl, big sweet smile for the mutt. I’ll tell you, little girl, a couple months after it happened I hitched down to this place in Rhode Island where you can get fitted for something, the hook, I think, but I couldn’t go in. I was too embarrassed to go in. I could see the girl sitting there at the desk, and I just couldn’t go up to her and say—’

‘Dub. How you doin’!’ Big old Trimmer, beefy and wide, long Johns sticking out of his filthy red-checkered shirt. He stank of gasoline and oil, of horse and BO and roll-yer-owns. He winked at Myrtle with his heavy eyelid and made a sound with his tongue, the same sound he made to his team of skid horses.

‘Trimmer. How goes?’

‘So goddamn good I can’t stand it. Here I am lookin’ for some grief to tone down my joy and exuberance, and I look across the room and there the two of you sit, made to order, glarin’ at each other. That’s it, true love, I think, only a question of time before she throws
him out the door on his ear. Dub, I wanna talk to you later, you got a minute.’

A spot at each end of the stage went on, the beams pooling in the center, lighting up the dirty microphone cords, the blue drums. A man with receding hair and the devil’s pointed teeth came out, dressed in a powder-blue jacket. He held a dented saxophone. Two other old men, the gimpy one with his Red Pearl accordion, the fat shuffler with a banjo, both in grimy powder-blue jackets, sidled onto the platform. They looked disgustedly toward the anteroom at the side of the stage. Smoke eddied. In a minute a teenaged boy wearing brown slacks and a yellow rayon shirt loped to the drum set, a cigarette still burning in the corner of his mouth. He rolled the snare for a hello and the saxophonist’s hollow voice came out of the microphone. ‘Good evening, ladies and gents, welcome to the Comet Roadhouse. Gonna have some fun tonight. The Sugar Tappers for your dancing and listening enjoyment. Starting off now with “The Too Late Jump.” ’

‘Back in a couple of minutes, my boy. First Miss Myrt and I got to show the yokels how to do it.’

Didion shouted as they walked onto the dance floor. ‘Watch out, sparks gonna fly now!’ Howard came down to the end of the bar to watch. The drummer began with a barrage of hard, shattering sound, and one by one the men in the powder-blue jackets straggled after him, the saxophone hollow at first, but working up into a set of squeals and shrieks.

Myrtle and Dub stood hunched like herons, facing each other, only Dub’s upheld hand moving, shaking, fluttering like a strip of cloth in a gale. With a Zulu leap he sprang at Myrtle, spun her under his arm until her skirt stood out like a dark cup, and began to snap her to and from him. Her patent leather shoes like ice. The other dancers stood away, giving them the floor. Dub kicked as hard as a horse. The bright sweat flew from his face. A rain of hairpins behind Myrt, the cascade of crimped hair tumbled loose, their feet thudded.

‘Save yer peanut butter jars,’ screamed Trimmer.

‘Deer meat! Deer meat!’ Didion, with the highest accolade he knew.

When Dub came back to the table where Trimmer sat in a cloud of pipe smoke he carried the two-quart glass pitcher of beer. His sides
heaved, runnels of sweat glistened in front of his ears, hung in bright drops under his chin. Myrtle leaned back in the chair, panting, her legs opened wide to let the cool air move up in under her skin, her damp blouse unbuttoned as far as was decent. Dub first poured her a glass of the cold beer then drank thirstily from the pitcher. He set it down in the middle of the table and lit a cigarette for Myrtle, then for himself. Trimmer hauled his chair closer in to the table.

‘That was some dancin’. I couldn’t do that in a million years.’ He knocked the dottle out of his pipe into the ashtray. ‘Was gonna ask you if you thought you’d be up to runnin’ Loyal’s old trapline, or if you’d want some help. Fur prices are good. Specially fisher cat. Fox. Looks like you could run ’em down, reach over, turn ’em inside out while they’re still movin’. Way you dance.’