The New Yorker Stories (56 page)

Byron had his sleeping bag with him in the car. The sleeping bag and a pile of comic books were his constant companions. He was using the rolled-up bag as a headrest. Now he turned and punched it flatter, making it more a pillow, and then stretched out to emphasize that he wouldn’t go in with them.

“Maybe we should just go home,” Jo said, as Tom pulled open the door to the bar.

“What for?”

“Byron—”

“Oh, Byron’s overindulged,” Tom said, putting his hand on her shoulder and pushing her forward with his fingertips.

Byron was Tom’s son from his first marriage. It was the second summer that he was spending with them on vacation in Vermont. He’d been allowed to decide, and he had chosen to come with them. In the school year he lived with his mother in Philadelphia. This year he was suddenly square and sturdy, like the Japanese robots he collected—compact, complicated robots, capable of doing useful but frequently unnecessary tasks, like a Swiss Army knife. It was difficult for Tom to realize that his son was ten years old now. The child he conjured up when he closed his eyes at night was always an infant, the tangled hair still as smooth as peach fuzz, with the scars and bruises of summer erased, so that Byron was again a sleek, seal-like baby.

The band’s instruments were piled on the stage. Here and there, amps rose out of tangled wire like trees growing from the forest’s tangled floor. A pretty young woman with a blond pompadour was on the dance floor, shaking her puff of hair and smiling at her partner, with her Sony earphones clamped on, so that she heard her own music while the band took a break and the jukebox played. The man stood there shuffling, making almost no attempt to dance. Tom recognized them as the couple who had outbid him on a chain saw he wanted at an auction he had gone to earlier in the day.

On the jukebox, Dolly Parton was doing the speaking part of “I Will Always Love You.” Green bottles of Rolling Rock, scattered across the bar top, had the odd configuration of misplaced bowling pins. Dolly Parton’s sadness was coupled with great sincerity. The interlude over, she began to sing again, with greater feeling. “I’m not kidding you,” a man wearing an orange football jersey said, squeezing the biceps of the burly man who sat next to him. “I says to him, ‘I don’t understand your question. What is tuna fish
like
? It’s tuna fish.’ ” The burly man’s face contorted with laughter.

There was a neon sign behind the bar, with shining bubbles moving through a bottle of Miller. When Tom was with his first wife, back when Byron was about three years old, he had taken the lights off the Christmas tree one year while needles rained down on the bedsheet snowbank they had mounded around the tree stand. He had never seen a tree dry out so fast. He remembered snapping off branches, then going to get a garbage bag to put them in. He snapped off branch after branch, stuffing them inside, feeling clever that he had figured out a way to get the dried-out tree down four flights of stairs without needles dropping everywhere. Byron came out of the back room while this was going on, saw the limbs disappearing into the black bag, and began to cry. His wife never let him forget all the wrong things he had said and done to Byron. He was still not entirely sure what Byron had been upset about that day, but he had made it worse by getting angry and saying that the tree was only a tree, not a member of the family.

The bartender passed by, clutching beer bottles by their necks as if they were birds he had shot. Tom tried to get his eye, but he was gone, involved in some story being told at the far end of the bar. “Let’s dance,” Tom said, and Jo moved into his arms. They walked to the dance floor and slow-danced to an old Dylan song. The harmonica cut through the air like a party blower, shrilly unrolling.

When they left and went back to the car, Byron pretended to be asleep. If he had really been sleeping, he would have stirred when they opened and closed the car doors. He was lying on his back, eyes squeezed shut a little too tightly, enclosed in the padded blue chrysalis of the sleeping bag.

The next morning, Tom worked in the garden, moving from row to row as he planted tomato seedlings and marigolds. He had a two-month vacation because he was changing jobs, and he was determined to stay ahead of things in the garden this year. It was a very carefully planned bed, more like a well-woven rug than like a vegetable patch. Jo was on the porch, reading
Moll Flanders
and watching him.

He was flattered but also slightly worried that she wanted to make love every night. The month before, on her thirty-fourth birthday, they had drunk a bottle of Dom Pérignon and she had asked him if he was still sure he didn’t want to have a child with her. He told her that he didn’t, and reminded her that they had agreed on that before they got married. He had thought, from the look on her face, that she was about to argue with him—she was a teacher and she loved debate—but she dropped the subject, saying, “You might change your mind someday.” Since then she had begun to tease him. “Change your mind?” she would whisper, curling up next to him on the sofa and unbuttoning his shirt. She even wanted to make love in the living room. He was afraid Byron would wake up and come downstairs for some reason, so he would turn off the television and go upstairs with her. “What
is
this?” he asked once lightly, hoping it wouldn’t provoke her into a discussion of whether he had changed his mind about having a child.

“I always feel this way about you,” she said. “Do you think I like it the rest of the time, when teaching takes all my energy?”

On another evening, she whispered something else that surprised him—something he didn’t want to pursue. She said that it made her feel old to realize that having friends she could stay up all night talking to was a thing of the past. “Do you remember that from college?” she said. “All those people who took themselves so seriously that everything they felt was a fact.”

He was glad that she had fallen asleep without really wanting an answer. Byron puzzled him less these days and Jo puzzled him more. He looked up at the sky now: bright blue, with clouds trailing out thinly, so that the ends looked as if kite strings were attached. He was rinsing his hands with the garden hose at the side of the house when a car came up the driveway and coasted to a stop. He turned off the water and shook his hands, walking forward to investigate.

A man in his forties was getting out of the car—clean-cut, pudgy. He reached back into the car for a briefcase, then straightened up. “I’m Ed Rickman!” he called. “How are you today?”

Tom nodded. A salesman, and he was trapped. He wiped his hands on his jeans.

“To get right to the point, there are only two roads in this whole part of the world I really love, and this is one of them,” Rickman said. “You’re one of the new people—hell, everybody who didn’t crash up against Plymouth Rock is new in New England, right? I tried to buy this acreage years ago, and the farmer who owned it wouldn’t sell. Made an offer way back then, when money meant something, and the man wouldn’t sell. You own all these acres now?”

“Two,” Tom said.

“Hell,” Ed Rickman said. “You’d be crazy not to be happy here, right?” He looked over Tom’s shoulder. “Have a garden?” Rickman said.

“Out back,” Tom said.

“You’d be crazy not to have a garden,” Rickman said.

Rickman walked past Tom and across the lawn. Tom wanted the visitor to be the one to back off, but Rickman took his time, squinting and slowly staring about the place. Tom was reminded of the way so many people perused box lots at the auction—the cartons they wouldn’t let you root around in because the good things thrown on top covered a boxful of junk.

“I never knew this place was up for grabs,” Rickman said. “I was given to understand the house and land were an eight-acre parcel, and not for sale.”

“I guess two of them were,” Tom said.

Rickman ran his tongue over his teeth a few times. One of his front teeth was discolored—almost black.

“Get this from the farmer himself ?” he said.

“Real-estate agent, three years ago. Advertised in the paper.”

Rickman looked surprised. He looked down at his Top-Siders. He sighed deeply and looked at the house. “I guess my timing was bad,” he said. “That or a question of style. These New Englanders are kind of like dogs. Slow to move. Sniff around before they decide what they think.” He held his briefcase in front of his body. He slapped it a couple of times. It reminded Tom of a beer drinker patting his belly.

“Everything changes,” Rickman said. “Not so hard to imagine that one day this’ll all be skyscrapers. Condominiums or what have you.” He looked at the sky. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not a developer. I don’t even have a card to leave with you in case you ever change your mind. In my experience, the only people who change their minds are women. There was a time when you could state that view without having somebody jump all over you, too.”

Rickman held out his hand. Tom shook it.

“Just a lovely place you got here,” Rickman said. “Thank you for your time.”

“Sure,” Tom said.

Rickman walked away, swinging the briefcase. His trousers were too big; they wrinkled across the seat like an opening accordion. When he got to the car, he looked back and smiled. Then he threw the briefcase onto the passenger seat—not a toss but a throw—got in, slammed the door, and drove away.

Tom walked around to the back of the house. On the porch, Jo was still reading. There was a pile of paperbacks on the small wicker stool beside her chair. It made him a little angry to think that she had been happily reading while he had wasted so much time with Ed Rickman.

“Some crazy guy pulled up and wanted to buy the house,” he said.

“Tell him we’d sell for a million?” she said.

“I wouldn’t,” he said.

Jo looked up. He turned and went into the kitchen. Byron had left the top off a jar, and a fly had died in the peanut butter. Tom opened the refrigerator and looked over the possibilities.

Later that same week, Tom discovered that Rickman had been talking to Byron. The boy said he had been walking down the road just then, returning from fishing, when a car rolled up alongside him and a man pointed to the house and asked him if he lived there.

Byron was in a bad mood. He hadn’t caught anything. He propped his rod beside the porch door and started into the house, but Tom stopped him. “Then what?” Tom said.

“He had this black tooth,” Byron said, tapping his own front tooth. “He said he had a house around here, and a kid my age who needed somebody to hang out with. He asked if he could bring this dumb kid over, and I said no, because I wouldn’t be around after today.”

Byron sounded so self-assured that Tom did a double take, wondering where Byron was going.

“I don’t want to meet some creepy kid,” Byron said. “If the guy comes and asks you, say no—O.K.?”

“Then what did he say?”

“Talked about some part of the river where it was good fishing. Where the river curved, or something. It’s no big deal. I’ve met a lot of guys like him.”

“What do you mean?” Tom said.

“Guys that talk just to talk,” Byron said. “Why are you making a big deal out of it?”

“Byron, the guy’s nuts,” Tom said. “I don’t want you to talk to him anymore. If you see him around here again, run and get me.”

“Right,” Byron said. “Should I scream, too?”

Tom shivered. The image of Byron screaming frightened him, and for a few seconds he let himself believe that he should call the police. But if he called, what would he say—that someone had asked if his house was for sale and later asked Byron if he’d play with his son?

Tom pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He’d drive across town to see the farmer who’d owned the land, he decided, and find out what he knew about Rickman. He didn’t remember exactly how to get to the farmer’s house, and he couldn’t remember his name. The real-estate agent had pointed out the place, at the top of a hill, the summer he showed Tom the property, so he could call him and find out. But first he was going to make sure that Jo got home safely from the grocery store.

The phone rang, and Byron turned to pick it up.

“Hello?” Byron said. Byron frowned. He avoided Tom’s eyes. Then, just when Tom felt sure that it was Rickman, Byron said, “Nothing much.” A long pause. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’m thinking about ornithology.”

It was Byron’s mother.

The real-estate agent remembered him. Tom told him about Rickman.
“De de de de, De de de de,”
the agent sang—the notes of the theme music from
The Twilight Zone
. The agent laughed. He told him the farmer whose land he had bought was named Albright. He didn’t have the man’s telephone number, but was sure it was in the directory. It was.

Tom got in the car and drove to the farm. A young woman working in a flower garden stood up and held her trowel up like a torch when his car pulled into the drive. Then she looked surprised that he was a stranger. He introduced himself. She said her name. It turned out she was Mr. Albright’s niece, who had come with her family to watch the place while her aunt and uncle were in New Zealand. She didn’t know anything about the sale of the land; no, nobody else had come around asking. Tom described Rickman anyway. No, she said, she hadn’t seen anyone who looked like that. Over on a side lawn, two Irish setters were barking madly at them. A man—he must have been the woman’s husband—was holding them by their collars. The dogs were going wild, and the young woman obviously wanted to end the conversation. Tom didn’t think about leaving her his telephone number until it was too late, when he was driving away.

That night, he went to another auction, and when he came back to the car one of the back tires was flat. He opened the trunk to get the spare, glad that he had gone to the auction alone, glad that the field was lit up and people were walking around. A little girl about his son’s age came by with her parents. She held a one-armed doll over her head and skipped forward. “I don’t feel cheated. Why should you feel cheated? I bought the whole box for two dollars and I got two metal sieves out of it,” the woman said to the man. He had on a baseball cap and a black tank top and cutoffs, and sandals with soles that curved at the heel and toe like a canoe. He stalked ahead of the woman, box under one arm, and grabbed his dancing daughter by the elbow. “Watch my dolly!” she screamed, as he pulled her along. “That doll’s not worth five cents,” the man said. Tom averted his eyes. He was sweating more than he should, going through the easy maneuvers of changing a tire. There was even a breeze.