Spoonwood (4 page)

“Just because you knocked up the Squire's daughter doesn't mean your shit don't smell.”

My rage surfaces like a sea serpent. “No ambiguity is a great thing, Tubby boy,” I say in a menacing whisper.

“You really are stupid,” Tubby says. “Everybody in the state of New Hampshire knows Lilith was creeping on you.”

I see Giselle out of the corner of my eye. I'm already thinking that she will be a court witness. I throw the first punch (as she will later testify in her deposition). It's a left jab that hits Tubby square in the nose and draws blood. Tubby leaps across the table just as I am standing up. The two of us grapple-waltz around the room in each other's arms, knocking over tables, drinks, and scattering patrons. Along the way Rubric Fritz catches an elbow or a fist on the right temple and falls to the floor unconscious. By
the time the police arrive Tubby and I are on the floor laughing and bleeding, friends again. For the first time since Lilith died, I am completely relaxed and in touch with myself, a feeling that will last one hour and sixteen minutes.

The police find cocaine in Tubby's car. No one knows who hit Rubric; he spends two days in intensive care. In the end, Rubric recovers and declines to press charges. Tubby, who has violated his parole, is sentenced to the state prison in Concord for seven years, but the sentence is suspended when he testifies against a Maine lobster man turned drug lord. Tubby takes his considerable savings and heads for Arizona with Giselle. I, a first offender, plead nolo to battery and am sentenced to thirty days in the house of correction. I'm happy, relieved, grateful. For tension relief, my shame and disgrace are almost as good as whiskey.

3

HOUSE OF CORRECTION

T
he Superintendent of the County Farm and Jail, a.k.a. House of Correction, allows me to keep my beard and long hair, because I'm “only a thirty-dayer.” The fellow is a dying breed who opposes capital punishment and favors the rehabilitation approach to prisoners. The county jail is not a real prison; its main purpose is to hold inmates for trial and to incarcerate persons convicted of minor crimes, persons such as myself. It includes three major structures—the old jail, a brick Victorian building that at a casual glance can pass as, say, a prep school library; a great big hip-roofed barn with white clapboards; and a brand new concrete-block lock-up. My quarters in the old jail include a toilet and two cots; graffiti on the walls call for relaxed drug laws. Not a bad space as jails go. For the first week I'm alone in the cell.

I'm in a mood, as my mother would say. It's as if I've been in a car crash—sick to my stomach, things happening in slow motion, outside of myself; my life is a bad movie and I'm in a hell doomed to watch it for all eternity. On the plus side my ability to experience emotional pain has greatly diminished, and for a while the discovery of same cheers me, until I realize I can't feel anything else either.

I lie in my narrow bed thinking about the fight with Tubby, the excitement, the strange hope that I would land one of those perfect punches that sends the bone in the nose up into the brain and kills the opponent, or that Tubby would land such a punch on me and put an end to my useless life.

When my mother and Birch visit she remarks that our screened cubicle where we meet reminds her of the confessional at St. Bernard's Church in Keene.

“Who's taken my place on the route?” I ask.

“Long Neck McDougal, some felon Howie rounded up from Critter Jordan's crowd.”

“Did Cooty leave yet?”

“I don't know where he's at. You know Cooty, comes and goes as he pleases.”

I nod. I'm thinking about Cooty Patterson's stew pot and the hand-sawn firewood neatly stacked between trees. I'm going to miss the old man.

“Tell Dad I'll work until he finds somebody to replace me permanent,” I say.

“Oh, Freddie, you're not leaving us, are you?”

“I don't want to, Mom. I'm just a mess right now.”

“I'll take care of Birch.”

“He's not too much of a burden?”

“He's not a burden . . .” She stops herself before telling me that I'm the burden. “I love him,” she says, “and I will care for him.”

Week two I'm assigned a cellmate, one Hank Johnson, who is awaiting trial for passing bad checks. Can't raise enough money for bail. Every day Hank and I and the other inmates work on the county's farm. We herd Holstein cows, operate milking machines, and shovel the stuff that ends up in Congress. I like the work, because it keeps my mind occupied. I like the cows, because they have no secret cravings.

One day we're out in the field picking string beans in the hot sun when Hank tells me he has a “party lined up.” Hank has
bribed one of the guards, who will bring us a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon. Sure enough, when we return to our cell we find an old GI water bag partly filled with whiskey cut with water about two to one.

Hank takes a long pull on the bag and hands it to me, and I do the same.

“It's great stuff, but I don't believe it's the Wild Turkey I ordered,” Hank says.

“It's Old Crow, my favorite,” I say.

“You like that cheap shit,” he says.

“Doesn't have the bite of the pricey stuff, and the buzz is the same,” I say, realizing as I speak that I'm actually repeating something my father told me years ago.

Hank and I talk about nothing in particular until the bag is well deflated. I'm drinking a lot more than he is, but he doesn't seem to mind. Even so he's getting on my nerves, his mere proximity. It strikes me as odd that he's a bad check artist. His body is artificially built up, as if he's been working out obsessively; his hair is closely cropped, sideburns cut high. His curiosity about me is touching and annoying. I want to hit him just to shut him up. With some effort to keep my voice civil (I mean, I'm still grateful to him), I say, “Hank, I want to be alone with my buzz for a while, okay?”

“Sure, Frederick, I respect that; we will talk later, okay? I mean I need to keep my tongue wagging or else I go crazy.”

“Sure, Hank, we'll talk.”

We lie on our bunks, his on top, me on the bottom. I convince myself I'm alone. I start to imagine myself driving on a two-lane road, no traffic, western mountains in the far distance. But I can't keep the fantasy going.

Did she cheat on me? I ask myself. Why do I care? What difference does it make now? Why can't I just remember what I loved about her? Or even continue blaming myself for her death—there's some honor in that. But this, this obsession with fidelity, why does it consume me? It's so low, so ugly, and yet I can't deny that it lingers inside me, a hungry worm.

Out of my brooding comes an intrusive thought that's different from ordinary thought: the thought speaks.

“Why do you think she went up there?” the voice says.

“Who are you?”

“I'm the spirit of your best friend.”

“Old Crow.”

“Yes, I'm Old Crow. You haven't had access to me until now. That's why my voice sounds strange to you.”

“What do you want?” I ask.

“I want to guide you toward Reality.”

I can see Old Crow's words in my mind now, the capital “R” in reality. Surely this is a part of myself I cannot trust.

“You're skeptical, Frederick. That's a-okay for now. Go ahead, test me with one of your profound questions.”

“Why did she do it? Why did she go up there to die?”

“The answer is in what she left behind.”

“Birch.”

“You've hated him from the very beginning. Am I right?”

“Yes. Why? Why do I feel this way? It's so awful.”

“Examine your hatred. That infant is the only being you have ever truly hated.”

“I hate my father.”

“No, you don't—you love him. What you feel is your suspicion that he doesn't love you. Which is only just. After all, you don't deserve anyone's love, let alone a father's.”

I'm breathing hard, as if I were having sex, or dying. I try to control my breathing. I don't want Hank to know I'm breaking down.

“Howard is merely a source of anguish, not of hatred,” Old Crow says. “Let's return to the issue—the infant. Does he look like you in any way?”

I understand now what Old Crow is trying to tell me. Lilith went up to the ledges to have her child because she knew it wasn't mine. She went up there to have it and kill it, so she could start over. Something like that.

“He is not yours, he is not yours, he is not yours, he is . . .”

Hank's head appears from the top bunk. “Hey, you okay?”

“I'm fine. What do you care?”

“Sounded like you were arguing with somebody,” Hanks says.

“What did I say?”

“I don't know, pal. It's like you were praying, in a crazy way. Look, let's have a drink together,” Hank says, hopping down from his top bunk.

I'm thinking that this man is an angel. He smuggled in booze, and he's maintained a warm attitude toward me even though I've behaved badly. “I'm sorry, Hank.”

He hands me the bag and I take a drink. We sit on the side of my bunk and talk.

“Who do you hate?” Hank asks.

“You mean besides myself?” I attempt a laugh.

“No, for real. Me, I hate cops—who do you hate? You hate cops?”

“I hate everybody. Except for you, Hank. You supplied the fun.”

“Look, Frederick, I'm in here for a petty crime born out of desperation. I had some business setbacks. I was trying to be an honest guy. I'm not perfect. I drink some wine, I smoke a little weed, I snort some powder—I like to recreate. I think I could do something for myself and my family and the world at large if I got into the business of giving people what they want, like Tubby McCracken.” He hands me the bag. “You know Tubby, right?”

“Tubby's been a friend since high school. Actually since grade school.”

“I heard you guys played football together. Then you and him have a fight. You go to jail. Why doesn't he go to jail?”

“I'm not sure exactly.”

“Come on. We know he sold somebody down the river. You, you didn't sell anybody down the river. They interrogated you, right?”

“How would you know?”

“I wasn't born yesterday. Listen, I know you have connections.” Hank pretends to snort cocaine. “My lawyer's going to
get me off. Technical error regarding my arrest. I'm out of here in a week or so. But I lost my job. I need work. I'm reliable as a railroad man's watch. Give me a name or two. People who might help me out, like I just helped you.”

Hank keeps at me. Dropping Tubby's name. Asking where he can buy drugs, sell drugs, move drugs. He brings up the rumor that Tubby mentioned, which is that a very important character in the drug trade lurks about in southwestern New Hampshire. I want to do what I can to help Hank out, but the fact is I don't know anything about the underground drug trade.

The next day Hank is removed from our cell and disappears from the jail altogether. It dawns on me in the middle of the night that Hank is a police officer planted to gain information from me.

I begin to brood. The world is an evil place. Relatives, loved ones, friends, government entities, institutions—all are untrustworthy; all have plans that do not include me and agents who wish to change or destroy me for their own purposes.

I used to have an academic interest in social class, a subject that Lilith and I were both passionate about. We had names for various groups—the criminal class, the out-of-work class, the Bohemian class (which we'd adopted as our own), the rural working class, the urban working class, the public school teacher class, the professor class, the clerk class and the cleric class, the techno class, the entrepreneurial class, the inventor class, the scientist class, the small business person class, the corporate managerial class, the boss class, the big boss class, the newly rich class, the old rich class, and on and on. Once you start you cannot stop. I'd been brought up in a rural working-class household, Lilith among the old upcountry rich class. As we saw it each class is a tiny island among many.

Nothing is the way Lilith and I envisioned. The working class is disappearing, not in reality but in consciousness. So is the Bohemian class. And all the others. Everybody today wants to call themselves middle class. Nobody owns up to the idea of class. But the Reality sits there like a Romulan starship with a cloaking device, ready to strike.

“Please,” says Old Crow, “I find pop culture metaphors distasteful.”

“All right,” I say. “I was never comfortable in my parents' class, which is why I can never take over Howard's trash collection business.”

“In your own way you're a snob. Problem is, Frederick, you had a taste of college, but the things you learned weighed on you instead of freeing you. You don't see yourself as a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, or a businessman; you're not fit for any white-collar profession: the middle class, vast as it is today, is unavailable to you.”

“When Lilith and I were in love I wrote poems. We were Bohemians.”

“Frederick, you only wrote one good poem in your life. No Bohemian would ever accept you as one of his own.”

“In the back of my mind I'm thinking maybe I could fall in love again.”

“Even the idea of having sex disgusts you. You're pretty much permanently impaired. You, my friend, are an outsider, a loser of the worse stripe, a menace to loved ones, an enemy of society, too self-pitying even to take yourself seriously.”

“I have my animosity, Old Crow—that's worth something.”

“It's not even good hate—it's more like revulsion and fear. Too bad you can't find some religion, like your mom. It's done wonders for her,” Old Crow says.

“I can't bring myself to believe in either God or the Devil. I'm like Howard, who believes only in clockwork.”

“But Howard has something you lack—character. Only I and the lonely life of the road offer you any solace. Why should you bear the responsibility of caring for a child who is likely not your own?”

I lie on my prison cot through the hot, sultry nights and think terrible thoughts through Old Crow. He shows me news reels of Birch falling off the kitchen counter and cracking his head open, dying of spinal meningitis, getting run over by a rowdy teenager in a hot rod, drowning in his own bath water.

.   .   .

My parents can see that I'm not fit to care for Birch, and Elenore proposes that she and Howard adopt Birch. I tell her I'll think about it, pretending that I'm agonizing over the decision. Secretly, I'm gleeful. I agree to let my parents raise Birch until I am better able.

“You're doing the right thing,” my mother says, a remark that cuts me.

Alone in my cell, I try to create a benign thought, as if through will I can trick Old Crow.

“At least my son will have a good home, which is more than I can provide,” I say.

“Be truthful, Frederick,” Old Crow says. “You don't think of him as ‘my son,' or even someone else's son—he's hardly human, not even an animal but the physical embodiment of some malevolent force that aims to reduce you to ashes.”

I'm not so far gone that I don't realize something inside of me is awry, but I have no mechanism for coping except to seek escape. The jail has a small library that includes a Rand McNally book map. Every chance I'm allowed I look the map over, planning trips or just mooning over various places. I'm attracted to areas where few people reside—the Maine woods, the swamps of south Florida, the Big Bend area in Texas, the Four-Corners section in the southwest, north into the Alaskan interior, south into the canyons of Mexico, into the empty places. I have my limits, however. The thought of leaving North America fills me with dread. It's as if part of me is not in my body but in the soil of this continent. To lose contact with the soil is to lose contact with the small core of self I can claim as my own.