The Freedom in American Songs (13 page)

“You mean, have I gotten on its back and gone places?” He looked at me incredulously.

“Yeah.” I challenged him with one of my serious expressions. The sun would soon go down. This land had golden hollows in it. We were not exactly drunk, and he was not exactly ugly, not any more. I found his idea about making jellyfish beautiful; his ducks unfinished and full of promise. The handsome devils of the world knew nothing about certain enchantments. They had a sense of entitlement. They went around getting women to jot their addresses in little notebooks, and they visited or did not visit these women whenever they felt like it. Whereas this man …

“I have not spoken to a soul about my travels on that there duck,” he said. He looked at me carefully. I had the feeling he was really and truly assessing whether or not I could be trusted with the precious jewels of his innermost journeys through duck heaven.

I had gone too far. There were too many things about Maurice Quigley that I found coarse and uninviting. I wished I had kept my mouth shut about flying on his smallest duck. But it was too late. I knew it was too late. Some men, those with the most heaped and various collections of disadvantages, have no way of going back home once someone has peeped inside and found their hidden beauty. They can't help themselves—they are in love with you for life. You will find them knocking at your door, three, four, five, even ten years from now, at four in the morning if need be, unable to give up on that one brief glimpse with which you, heartless and fresh from your own comedown in the world, tantalized them with an intimation of hopeless love. Sometimes it becomes necessary to telephone the police.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Darlings' Kingdom

 

 

We had our gypsy caravan
up for rent and the calls coming in were not good. I felt like apologizing to our birch trees, and our magic fire pit, and to the partridges who had nested faithfully near us all the while we'd lived in the glade.

“Is there room for me to bring my own couch?” asked the first caller. “I'm afraid one of my cats … I mean the urine is pretty much cleaned, but …”

Or—“Hold it for me. Do not move on this issue. I am coming up from Montana right now—my girlfriend has—I'm gonna be suicidal if—promise me you won't rent this place to anyone before I get there. It's divinely ordained for me.”

That second caller arrived in a coat bearing extravagant fringes and an embroidered pueblo. His license plate was not from Montana and he strode around led by his solid beer gut and unable to see anything from under that hat, then disappeared forever.

“I'm getting desperate,” I told Frank, who had painted the baseboards and installed a double valve on the gas tank for the stove. “I'm almost ready to consider renting it to Gus Darling after all.”

“I thought you weren't quite sure about Gus. You said if he was anything like his father …”

“Sons usually are either like their fathers or as unlike them as humanly possible.”

I had met Gus after my friend Norma started giving him blowjobs on the highway down to his family's farm in Pencil Cove. Gus was a Darling, and the Darlings had driven anyone who was not a Darling out of Pencil Cove a generation before, and now they were starting on each other. They had a spring lamb operation down there, and they made cranberry juice that they exported all over the northeast under their own label and also under labels they had sold to a few supermarket chains. The cranberries grew all over Pencil Cove and it was a beautiful sight to see them shining like rubies, or when they were in flower the place was covered in a snowy bloom whose perfume mingled with the sweet stench of briny bladderwrack mixed with rotted fish, stinking yet lovely enough to ignite all the forlorn longing of the heart. I loved to breathe the salty shock, fishy and weedy yet horribly lovely. The smell of Darling territory was both horror and exhilaration and it reminded me I was part of the world's wild and ongoing death.

To get there you had to drive down a shore guarded by ancient junipers the wind had tortured into petrified gyrations, and my friend Norma had loved being one of the only people on earth allowed to go there, because most people found themselves in the sights of Gus's or his father's rifle as soon as they came over the hill that led to that beautiful, self-contained valley.

“Gus's not bad,” Frank said. “He's just sick of his old man having him on a short leash. He said to tell you if you'd agree to rent our place to him to give you this now,” Frank handed me nine hundred dollars in a Pencil Cove Cranberries envelope, “and he'll move in the day we leave to make sure Roddy Holloway doesn't burn the place down, and if ever the roof leaks or the pipes break while we're away he'll fix everything.”

“Cash—so … he means it?”

“Gus likes our place. He likes how it's hidden in the trees. And it's a bit closer to his ex-girlfriend and his little girl in town. He loves going to see his little girl.”

“Maybe we should invite him to our going away party.”

So we invited Gus and he drove up with a pickup load of fresh crab and a twenty-gallon pot. He stationed himself at our sink rinsing and cracking legs and tossing crab in boiling water and draining mountains of it and giving it to our guests like some sort of hired seafood chef from the new boutique hotel in Baird's Cove.

Our guests were Grampa Bob who likes to give teenagers wine and get them dancing around our birch trees to piss off their parents, and Gordon Hullimer who is serious about his black belt and who had his toilet put in on a diagonal so he wouldn't bump his head, and Gordon's wife Calista who owns a small bookstore and who lost her leg when she was a teenager and looks for the good in everyone. My friend Norma had been banned by the Darling family from giving Gus any more blowjobs or from entering Pencil Cove ever again, but she came with lipstick on her teeth, half an hour before the arrival of her ex-husband Trevor, who tended to get on his high horse and who was not speaking to Norma either now that he had a Korean wife. I did not feel like speaking to Norma myself, since she had on a previous visit ruined my best blanket by wrapping my goat in it. I had not invited Norma but she had found out about the party and she was your quintessential gatecrasher.

With all this going on we did not notice for some time how much beer Gus drank as he flung his endless supply of fresh crab onto the picnic table Frank had nailed together out of two sawhorses and a barn door. We noticed it only when he started insulting people in a most literate way that seemed more eloquent than his usual way of speaking, which was somewhat shy and restrained, although always laced with a kind of wildness that I had supposed came from living in Pencil Cove with the cranberries and the cattle and his father who had a sideline outside cranberry season mapping growth patterns of shoreline plants for the federal government using a set of extremely precise instruments that he kept in a turquoise box of which he seemed very proud, since he did not have a degree—in fact Gus's father had not finished high school—yet the government trusted him more, it appeared, than it trusted any silken-arsed biologist from the university. Gus was saying this to Trevor, an example of a silken-arsed biologist if ever there was one, as I crossed the room to get more limes for the Corona.

When Trevor gets offended he does so in the traditional English way—I mean he quietly swallows his outrage like thumbtacks or staples which proceed to agonize and knot his innards so that just before he leaves the party in a silent rage he is forced to strut around making jerky movements like a marionette with a nervous tic, but he will never say anything impolite, except to stutter an occasional, “Now—look here!” Gus Darling loves that. He doesn't understand it but he loves to see it and he will do anything to make it last longer, including telling Trevor his ex-wife gives half decent blow jobs but it's no bargain because first you have to get her loaded and then you can't get rid of her, not like your new wife there, hey, buddy? She looks like a more sensible young woman altogether. In fact, Gus said, Trevor's new wife had just told Gus that yes, she'd like to come down to Pencil Cove herself to help him and his father with the cranberries. You needed a certain type of woman for cranberries. Women, Gus said, were cranberryish or they were not.

Gus started next on black belt Gordon's wife Calista, asking her what was it like anyway, to go around on one leg—that was something he'd often wondered and now here she was in front of him, a woman with only one leg, so he might as well ask her, she didn't mind, did she? “It's not every day you get to ask a one-legged woman how it feels.”

The thing is, you can ask Calista Hullimer that kind of question and she won't take any offense—she'll just assume you're asking out of basic human decency and a wish to understand your fellow man or woman, and she'll even find it refreshing after going through a life in which nearly everyone pretends not to notice a thing about her physique. Plus Gus is a handsome guy—he's one of those blonde fellows with wickedness gleaming out of green eyes and he can get away with anything if you haven't known him very long. But I was starting to get to know him a bit better here at our party. I was starting to think he'd better watch out or Gordon Hullimer might show us all the thing I had secretly been wondering, which was how could a man so miniature yet so self-inflated have become a black belt in karate. I believe the reason he had insisted on having his toilet installed on a diagonal was that it was under the stairs. It was next to his den, and a taller man would, had the toilet been installed squarely against the wall, have had to crouch in order to pee. Gordon Hullimer could have stood straight, but he wanted a normal man's headroom. I don't know what he said to Gus Darling, I just know Gus stopped his assembly line of crab legs, the most delicious any of us had known, and he came out and hunkered in the deepening dusk to which some of us had escaped, and showed Grampa Bob's three-year-old grandson what transpired if you threw a Bic lighter into the heart of marshmallow coals. I was pretty sure this was the kind of thing they did for fun in Pencil Cove when Gus Darling was a little boy, and I know there used to be road signs along that part of the shore warning people not to use deep fat fryers.

“So Frank gave you my nine hundred dollars?” Gus Darling let the length of his thigh lean on mine and his thigh was warm and I have to admit I liked it.

“He did.”

“You won't be sorry you rented your house to me. First off, I'm gonna go in those woods and you know what I'm gonna do?”

“No.”

“What's wrong with those fellows who live in that house beyond the marsh? They call it a seniors' home but that's no seniors' home, is it, now. What do they call it? The Heavenly Home for Nitwits?”

“Rest Haven. It's a home for men who can't look after themselves. One of them might come over: Nathan. He usually comes over and has a beer when we have the fire lit and people over.” I liked Nathan. When he first came to live at Rest Haven I called the night shift worker and asked if he had a psychotic criminal history because he stalked the woods looking like a cross between John the Baptist and Rasputin, but I grew to like him. “Nathan's all right. He's a bit clairvoyant.”

“Well when I'm living here The Amazing Nathan won't be coming over for any more beers if he knows what's good for him.” Gus took a swig and gave me an intimate stare. “You never asked me what the first thing is that I'm gonna do once you and your man are gone and I'm here with full run of this place.”

“What might that be?”

“I'm gonna check out the boundary markers and move them, bit by teensy little bit, so the people who own the heavenly home for nitwits and the other people on the other side will have their land shrink every day. They won't know it, but I'm gonna put down stakes and razor wire and gradually make this piece of territory into a fine little kingdom. Then I'll get my old Winchester out and if one of those retarded fellows even thinks about coming over onto my property I'll …” he pantomimed shooting Nathan's brains out and I wished I had not taken his nine hundred dollars, but what was I to do? We were leaving in less than a week. I loved the men at Rest Haven. Twice since we had lived here, one or another of them had gone missing in the marsh or in the woods and the police had come with their dogs, and the men had survived on pond water and berries and we had all worried about them a great deal, because aside from Nathan, who had a spectacular intelligence, they were all meek and a little lost. I couldn't stand the idea of them tripping over Gus Darling's razor wire or encountering him in the state to which he was progressing, which I now saw to be what they call a nasty drunk, and which I had not entirely expected, since I had never seen his father drink a drop.

It was the house I loved. I really did look at it as a gypsy caravan. There were blue-bead lilies and Linnaea Borealis under the trees, and every night we heard the steep brook, and we heard snipe in spring and toads in July and there was the mountain topped with a dusting of snow and stars glittering, truly glittering like stars in my Hilda Boswell nursery rhyme book, and the going away party should have been for the house, not for the people—but Frank was the people-lover in our little family, not me. What was wrong with me? The only person in our neighbourhood that I would be really sorry to leave was Rasputin, and he was crazy. Everyone else was so misshapen and self-absorbed I could not love them. I was not a person who could love people in their brokenness, like someone out of a
Guideposts
magazine, of which I'd had a steady diet growing up, as there were always back-issues in the magazine rack next to the toilet of the woman for whom I babysat the most. I did not love Grampa Bob, nor Gordon Hullimer, nor Trevor on his high horse. I sort of loved Norma, even when she'd accused me of failing to protect my goat from the north wind, but it was impossible to carry on a conversation with her since she persisted in sociopathic monologues. One time I had realized I might love Gordon Hullimer's wife Calista but only when she was alone with me, at which point she stopped looking for the good in everyone and became downright acerbic. If the truth were told, I supposed the person I most loved at our going away party was Gus Darling, the least lovable of them all, and the one from whom I most avidly wanted to distance myself now he had proven to be a maniacal alcoholic exploding gas lighters near the face of a sweet little three-year-old, getting him excited and possibly sowing seeds of a future arsonist.

“I'd drain that swamp,” Gus said, pointing at our enchanted bog where snipe made their haunting calls that sounded like voices but were really the wind winnowing through their tailfeathers as they plunged from moon to marsh, and where a duck sheltered her young each spring from the crazed hunters in the town below, “and I'd set snares and live on local rabbits all winter. Between that and those ducks getting fat down beyond them alders, I'd be able to live off this property. You have no idea about squatters' rights do you, Violet Wainwright? Who in the name of God gave you a name like that? I never knew anyone with a name like that before who wasn't some ninety-year-old church woman with her mouth all scrunched like the asshole of my father's sow. Not that I'm saying that about your mouth, now Violet, don't go getting offended—I think I've offended your friend over there with the short legs, and his wife with only one leg, and that other one over there with the grandkid—I was only showing him how to make sparks. Jesus, you have a sensitive bunch of friends, Violet. They won't be coming around when I'm living here, I can guarantee you that … Squatters' rights.”