World Made by Hand (6 page)

Halfway out to the general supply I ran into Shawn Watling, a big, shambling young man who so typified our times. He'd been born in a hospital and raised on computers, and then all of a sudden the world fell out from under him. I met him coming onto North Road where Black Creek Road joins up with it. There is a bridge there over the creek, which is a tributary of the Battenkill. Shawn worked as one of several hands on the Schmidt farm up the hill, which was in fruit, oats, buckwheat, and hay, with some beef cattle, and goats for milk and meat. Agriculture had changed completely without oil. We'd gone from a few people using machines to grow monoculture crops and process them for everybody else, to a society in which at least half the people used tools skillfully with human and animal muscle to feed the other half. With the population down so much, labor was at a premium. Shawn was probably paid decently, but his opportunities were limited.

His father, Denny Watling, had run a real estate office in town. His mother, Margie, was the leading sales agent. Shawn's parents played in a country music band all tricked out in matching cowboy outfits at local bars and the county fair every August. They were regular small-town folk who read spy novels, got new cars every three years, and once took a vacation to see Paris. They were gone now, along with Shawn's little brother, Cody, who had been my boy's age, taken by the flu. Shawn inherited his father's instruments (violin, mandolin, guitar) and was part of our music circle in church. He was a hell of a musician. He was in the last graduating class that Union Grove high school ever produced and he spent one semester at Colgate University before it, and most colleges everywhere as far as I knew, had to close on a temporary basis that now seemed permanent. Shawn went to work for Bill Schmidt because that was what there was to do for a young person like him. He was strong in a way that you hardly ever saw in the old days, strong from real work, not from lifting barbells or aerobics classes. At age twenty-three, he married another young survivor, Britney Blieveldt, and they had a girl named Sarah. Shawn was not a kid anymore. He and his family lived in town in his parents' old house, which was one of the nicest ones on Salem Street, our nicest street. Having a nice house didn't make him wealthy or boost his status, though. There were plenty of empty houses in town and no one to sell them to. The real estate industry no longer existed.

When I met up with him on the way to the general supply, Shawn was leading a big furry black dog pulling a two-wheeled cart. The dog was part Newfoundland with some mastiff in him, Shawn said. It belonged to Mr. Schmidt. Few dogs were around anymore. Some had been eaten during the hunger that followed the flu in the spring of that year. People didn't talk about it, it was so demoralizing. And now, with no manufactured pet food, you had to have a productive household to be able to feed one, which Mr. Schmidt certainly did.

"We need you on Tuesday night for Christmas practice," I told him because he'd skip it if you didn't pester him about it. Rehearsal for the Christmas carol service went on year-round and was more like an excuse for the circle to play regularly. At this time of year we usually played everything but Christmas music just because we liked to play. Sometimes we played string band dance music, sometimes old rock and roll, sometimes Handel. With the electricity off, you didn't hear recorded music anymore. You had to make it yourself.

"You come by the house and collect me, I'll go, Robert," he said.

"I wish I didn't have to drag you there."

"I get awful tired, especially this time of year."

"We're supposed to play a levee at the Shushan grange July Fourth, you know."

"We'll just play the same old crap. "Possum Up a Gum Stump," and all. We don't need to practice that."

"We do if we want to sound crisp."

"I don't care how it sounds."

"That's not a very positive attitude."

He laughed bitterly. "We'll be haying up at Schmidt's all next week. He'll probably have us out there until pitch dark, anyway."

I know deep down Shawn loved to play. We just continued on for a while, enjoying the quiet road and the creak of the little cart's axle. But the big black dog was panting from the heat, and a big gobbet of foamy spit hung from his jaw. Shawn limped slightly.

"Did you hurt yourself?" I said.

"I fell off Mr. Schmidt's barn roof."

"What were you doing up there?"

"Fixing it. What do you think?"

We walked a ways again in silence. I hadn't known him to be so irritable before.

"It's been mighty hot lately," I said.

"It's not just the heat. Jesus, Robert, look how we live? I'm practically a serf. You know what a serf is?"

"Of course I do. I went to college," I said, and regretted it right away.

"Lucky you," he said.

"Music always cheers me up," I said.

"I'm glad it works for you."

"Music salves the soul."

"Nothing can salve my soul."

"You know, Shawn, even back in normal times people got down and depressed. In fact, you could argue that people are generally better off now mentally than we were back then. We follow the natural cycles. We eat real food instead of processed crap full of chemicals. We're not jacked up on coffee and television and sexy advertising all the time. No more anxiety about credit card bills-"

"I don't want to debate."

"I bet it's true, though."

"Find somebody else if you want to have a debate."

"It's just conversation."

"Whatever you call it, quit trying to persuade me that everything's great, okay?" he said and stopped in his tracks. I stopped too. His face was red and tendons stood out on his neck. He was a large young man, and he looked a little scary.

"You frustrate the hell out of me, son," I said.

"Do I? I work like a dog. Harder than this dog. From sunup to sundown, like a medieval peasant. I do it with hardly any sense of a future, and the last thing I need is a lecture from the generation that screwed up the world. Come on, Merlin," he said to the dog.

He marched off stiffly. I watched him leading the dog for a few moments and then hurried to catch up with them.

"I apologize," I said.

He shrugged.

"I didn't mean to lecture you."

He shrugged again.

"Hey, can we still be friends?"

"Sure," he said.

I didn't want to give him more reason to stay away from the music circle. We needed him. Further up the road, we had to stop again. Shawn unhitched the dog from the cart so it could climb down into the ditch off the shoulder and drink from the rill that ran alongside there.

"Do you ever hear anything of your own boy?" Shawn said.

"No."

"Daniel's his name, right?"

"That's right."

"My little brother Cody and him were friends, I think."

"Yes they were. I remember Cody."

"They were both good kids. Cody would be twenty-one now."

"Daniel would too."

"Yeah, I'm sorry-"

"He's not dead. As far as I know. Just gone. He had to see what was out there."

"I hope he found something good out there, Robert."

The big dog, Merlin, suddenly busted up through the cattails and orange daylilies, like a monster from the depths, dripping and slobbering. It startled me. He obligingly allowed Shawn to hitch him back to his cart.

"Smart dog," I said.

"You don't know the half of it," Shawn said, and we walked the rest of the way to the general.

The general supply consisted of a pole barn housing the "store," the yard behind the store where salvage was sorted, and five large sheds where the sorted salvage was kept out of the weather. Most of the stuff in these sheds was lumber, plywood, sheet metal, and other materials collected from derelict buildings that had entered ownership limbo. Back behind the sheds was the ten-acre filled hollow that used to be the town dump. Now, instead of putting things into it, things were taken out of it. A dozen men with shovels and pry bars worked a section close to the sheds, while a team of heavily muscled bay Belgians stood by stoically hitched to a wagon in the heat, swishing at flies with their tails.

You came up to the general supply by way of a wooden gate rigged on a counterbalance with a guard shack beside it, where you were checked to make sure that anything leaving the premises was paid for. The fellow on duty there today was Bunny Willman, who had years ago worked as a janitor at the middle school when my son was there. Bunny was the opposite of what his name suggests. He was a six-foot-three hulking menace, muscled like a hyena. His bacon-colored hair was worked up into sinister pigtails tied with scrap cloth bows. Like many of Wayne Karp's crew, he wore a droopy mustache and goatee. He also sported the tattooed wings over his eyebrows that Wayne Karp's cohorts had adopted as their tribal insignia. The shack had windows front and back and a door. On the side facing the gate, someone had nailed up a coyote pelt. It stank ferociously in the heat.

Shawn and I came up together. Bunny Willman didn't lift the gate to let us in, which seemed odd to me. He reposed comfortably outside the shack, tilted back against the wall in a beat-up chrome and vinyl dinette chair, chewing on a twig. Though he was not exerting himself, beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

"That dog ain't coming in here," he said.

"He always comes in," Shawn said.

"Not today with me here he don't."

"I've got to load the cart."

"You can drag it in yourself and hitch him back up when you come out."

"What's the problem with the dog?" I said.

"Are you with him?" Bunny said.

"Yeah," I said, even though it wasn't strictly so.

"I don't like the way that dog looks," Bunny said. "Like he has the rabies. It's all over the county. Raccoons and coyotes is full of it. It's this damn heat. So get him the hell away from me."

"I'll watch the dog while you're inside," I said to Shawn.

"No, you go, Robert. It'll be better if I stay out here with him."

"Okay, I'll get both of our stuff," I said.

"Lookit, here," Bunny said and paused to spit to the side. "However you two work this out, just get that damn dog away from my shack."

"He doesn't have rabies," Shawn said, letting a little too much disdain creep into his voice.

"How do you know?"

"I'm with him all day long."

"He's foaming at the mouth."

"It's the breed. They slobber a lot."

"You just take him over to there right now," Bunny said with mounting impatience and pointed at a maple tree down by the road. Like all our maples, it had a lot of dead branches. We didn't know whether it was the heat or a disease, but they weren't getting on well and sugaring was way off. We went down to the tree with the dog.

"What did you need, then?" I asked Shawn.

"Fifty pounds of roofing nails," he said. He took a roll of bills out of his pocket and peeled off a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties. "Take the cart in, why don't you."

Shawn unhitched the dog and held onto it by its leather harness. A hot breeze rattled the dry leaves above us. He took a seat on the ground against the dying tree and the big dog lay down peacefully beside him. I pulled the cart by its harness up to Bunny's guard shack. He raised up the gate, and I entered the general.

Wayne Karp himself was back behind the long counter in the store. I was surprised to see him there. He didn't often work the customer end of his establishment. That was usually left to an underling. He was sitting in a battered easy chair in a tranquil pool of dimness, sorting through a splint basket of steel springs. In a peculiar way, he was about the only person who qualified as a celebrity anymore in our locality, more potent in his remoteness from things than in his actual presence, larger than life when he wasn't around. In reality, he was physically unassuming, wiry, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, droopy mustache, and a goatee. You wouldn't pick him out of a crowd as a natural leader. His left eyelid was a little droopy from an old motorcycle accident, it was said, but he had a set of wings tattooed over his eyebrows that sort of evened out the look of them. I suppose it was designed for that purpose, and it set a fashion trend for those under his sway. He didn't get up when I entered, or more than glance my way.

Wayne had access to things you hardly ever saw anymore. His crew came up with all kinds of stuff scavenging, and being their boss he often got the pick of their gleanings. This day he had on a pair of blue jeans that looked well broken in but not raggedy, while his camouflage T-shirt might have come off the shelf at the WalMart the day before yesterday, if Wal-Mart had still existed. The short sleeves were rolled up so as to display his lumpy biceps. He wore a pair of red clip-on suspenders too, apparently to emphasize the bulge of his pectorals, not to hold his pants up. He was well nourished and fit and renowned as a fighter for defeating men much larger than himself. On the rare occasions when I saw Wayne, the phrase with his bare hands always echoed in my mind. I waited for him to indicate that he was aware of me standing there, but he seemed oblivious, so I spoke up.

"When you've got a moment," I said.

He held a spring up to the window as if sizing it up in the light.

"Time passes slowly these days, don't it?" he eventually said.

"The pace is different," I said.

"Move slower, you live longer, I always say."

"I'm not in any tearing rush, but I've got things to do."

He finally looked over my way.

"You're the fiddler, ain't you?" he said, and chucked the spring in a wooden box, which was actually an old drawer.

"That's right."

"I seen you fiddle last fall one time up in Belchertown, didn't I? Some levee up there."

"That would have been their harvest ball."

"Those plowboys can party."

"Yes they can."

"It's a harsh life, though. I wouldn't want it."

"Well, you've got a situation for yourself, after all."

"That's true," he said. "We all got ourselves a situation, don't we?"

"It's not what I expected of life earlier on."

"Me neither, but you play the hand that's dealt to you. Say, you remember Charlie Daniels?"

"He was a hell of a fiddler."

"I wouldn't know."

"You said you remembered him."

"I remember the name. I never listened to his records, though."

"Never listened to Charlie Daniels? And you call yourself a fiddler?" Wayne finally got up and took a winding way to the counter, as though he were trying to elongate the trip as much as possible so I might observe how he moved. He did have a sinuous way of carrying himself. It was obviously intended to be intimidating. "Too bad," he said. "Those recordings are hard to find nowadays."

"Well, the electricity's hardly on anyway."

"Yeah, you're right about that. Remember Guns n' Roses?"

"Never listened to them either."

"What the hell did you listen to?" He finally looked straight at me.

"Mostly old-time. String band stuff. What they used to call folk music."

"You just plain folks?"

"Pretty much," I said.

"What'd you do back in the real world?"

"Computers."

"Oh? Well that shit's down for the count, ain't it?"

"Looks like it."

"Funny how the old times came back with a vengeance."

"You've got a point there."

"Well, I just miss rock and roll like crazy, I do," Wayne said. "Things have got a little too old-time for me in every way. I suppose you came in here for a reason today, Fiddler. What do you need?"

"To start with: fifty pounds of roofing nails and ten of tenpenny common, galvanized if possible. You got any mason jar lids?"

"By the dozen."

"I'll take two dozen."

'We can do that. Let's say thirteen hunnert altogether. What did you have against Guns n' Roses, if you don't mind me asking?"

"They made my ears hurt," I said. While I was counting out the bills three gunshots rang out sharply from outside. My heart flew into my throat.