Читать книгу The Easter House - David Rhodes - Страница 10

SAM

Sam played mostly three-ball in the honky-tonks, barrooms, and all-night bus terminals with tables. Two fish in Clancy had brought him enough for three weeks in a Hilton, two new sets of clothes, two day drunks, the evening company of uncommonly attractive women, and cigarettes. It was not always so good. A sixteen-year-old kid in Gary had taken his car, and an old man whom he’d taken to be half blind took him for his playing cue in a nine-ball game. But mostly he lived from quarter to quarter, winning never more than two or three of them from each stranger that played him, and always wearing a white shirt and a wide green tie that fell down over his cue as he took aim and swung from the loosened knot around his neck, his square-blocked Stetson hanging on the coat rack. In this way he was undoubtedly to the hotel clerks, waitresses, and bartenders a neat, perhaps even proud bum. Sam, he would sign in the register.

“Sam what?”

“Just Sam.”

There was something about Sam that was silently violent, and because these two attributes conflicted so much, he seemed at the edges of his personality to be neither. He lived for involvement. But this was complicated by his nerves, and confused by his drive for freedom, and compounded by his love of tranquility. In any case, these involvements, which he willingly and willfully chose, invariably would defeat him, and each would be one of those all too good examples of self-destruction except that he was powerless over his own desires and couldn’t control them. So time and time again he would be caught up terribly in involvements of his own making.

“A man is what he does,” his father, Ansel Easter, had told him. “If he lays brick eight hours a day, then for that time he is a bricklayer. He’s nothing but a bricklayer if he does nothing else. He’s only a drunk so long as he’s been drinking. People that do nothing are close to being nothing except survivalists, and next to that are those that do one thing.” Actually, when he had told Sam that, C had also been there and had asked if a man could be a thinker, and Ansel had left the room and slammed the door back toward the brothers and against the doorjamb.

But Sam had listened and had even remembered that he’d given an entire sermon from the pulpit in explanation of the meaning, documented with such glaring examples of real sinners—those people who spend more time at finding fault in others than evildoers do evildoing, and so were very much against the way of the Lord—that everyone left the church feeling as though he too was one of the “parasites of the world . . . moral degenerates, spiritual demigods . . . ingrates.” It had been one of his good but not outstanding sermons; but Sam had remembered it, thinking that he might as well believe it was true, not so much out of reason but because he knew he was incapable of inactivity, his nerves continually attempting to unwind inside him, and doomed to do many things in order to keep them wound.

Auctioneer’s school had barely been enough for him to keep himself together, and he was relieved to be out and into the more complex world of opportunities, where he picked up work from town to town selling animals and farm machinery. Then back to Ontarion, and back again into Illinois. With the money from his father’s house he went to Chicago and by merely following the stock market from day to day and watching for the interrelatedness of companies he nearly doubled his money—every month sending back payment on the mortgage. Then he went to Quincy and sold in the neighborhoods and hired himself out as a speaker for luncheons and dinners on the ground floors of hotels or in private clubs. He was successful. People liked him.

Sam bought a sale barn and founded a company outside of Springfield. He bought up all the stocks himself, and sold very few regular-paying bonds. Each month he sent money back on the loan. For once in his life he could sleep well; he was actually tired for five to six hours of the day.

The sale barn traded in debt. A man would buy a hundred cattle and would pay the sale barn, which would in turn pay the original owners for their animals, extracting a fee for the sale, a fee that fluctuated according to the price of the sale, six cents on the dollar or thereabouts. And so the sale barn had a violently fluctuating balance of money from which checks could be written and cashed all over Illinois with no questions asked. This balance of money was tremendous because of the lag between the time when the buyers put money into the barn and the sellers were given it to take out. At times as much as $200,000 would be resting in the flux, $180,000 of which would go out the next day, but during which time more would come in; and the payments, if need be, could be delayed even by simply mailing them out in the evening mail so that, though the postmark was the same, it made a day’s difference in the cashing of the check, which would be further delayed by the handling of the clearinghouse before it went back to his bank and the money was subtracted from the figure representing his barn’s account. So although this balance was not Sam’s, it could nevertheless be pretty much continuously kept well above the $150,000 mark, and several days’ delaying of payments could mean as much as $350,000 in his hands at one time. This money could then be used for investment collateral in the stock market or placed in private savings accounts to draw interest. All of the money earned could then be poured back into the barn and set free into circulation in the same way.

Sam built a movie theater; and reluctantly, but with hideous pressure from his conscience, took on help that in so doing also set them free from the penitentiary and made him in some way responsible (though he was never sure exactly of the extent of this responsibility). He bought shares in a plastic-forms company. He loaned money to finance business ventures of friends.

Into what little idle time he allowed himself, he crammed hunting and fishing expeditions that sometimes found him traveling through four states in a weekend. His women were all cut from the same mold and were wired as tight as the piano tuner could turn the key—women who could go without sleep for days on end without the slightest notice, so long as the good times remained where they lived, on the surface of their emotions. He had two places he lived, one in town and one so far out in the sticks that no one but he knew exactly where the little cabin was, as it was necessary to walk a half-mile through swamp timber to get to it (but usually he’d go there to work, chop wood and clear underbrush). This kind of perpetual activity made him happy—not consciously happy, for he was too busy for that—but when he’d think back to, say, when he and Gladys were in Minnesota, six cleaned walleyes in the trunk, sipping from a bottle of Kentucky bourbon, driving with the green lights of the dash singing country western, through small towns empty and sleepy at four o’clock in the morning, heading for Quincy, where they would lie in for a couple of hours before beginning again—he’d realize that somewhere in there he was happy.

And his business succeeded until Sam began to realize that his dates and figures and planning had gone too far. There were too many enterprises and the line between enough and too much was broken. He could no longer keep the entire bunch together. This, coupled with an unpredictable market that did not conform to any way of maneuvering around it, difficulty from his feelings of guilt concerning a man whom he liked being sent back to prison, a fire in the plastic works, a wife who could spend money in her sleep, a new house with split-level floors, the forced sale of a tavern, a divorce, and fair-weather friends, drove Sam to a realization that not only shocked him but cut off the monthly payment to Ontarion forever. From the outside it looked merely as though Sam and his barn had done so well and was such a solid business that stocks were now put up for sale, no bonds, just stocks, as though Sam wished to get together some ready money and invest in a house or some real estate. And no one thought anything else when the payments were a little slow. What was odd, of course, was when a month and a half later, after selling the stocks and collecting as many bonds as he could buy up, Sam quit and left the barn and business to the two part-time auctioneers that worked for him.

From the inside, of course, Sam went about moving money from place to place, taking out of one pile to bail out a sinking game in another. In trouble with payments, and with sales low, he sold his stocks (from which he’d been paying himself interest) a few at a time so as to build up the market value of the rest, in order to make up deficits. He turned his new brick house, complete with pool table, over to the bank for the down payment he’d made on it (accomplished because of also borrowing a huge sum of money and paying it back the same day from the sale of the tavern) and extricated himself from the entire complex, letting his movie theater float down the river, an impoverished but respectable citizen with three clean shirts and good credit. By then he was much older.

“SHOOT,” SAID THE CIGAR-FACED MAN.

“Sorry,” said Sam. “Wasn’t watching, I guess.”

“One more, then I ought to quit.” The man looked at his watch as though he actually had somewhere to go and wasn’t hopelessly in the wrong competition. Sam tried for two, made one, left himself rotten for the second, made it anyway, and touched in the last.

“Three,” he said.

The other man shot once and made the left-end ball on the first bank.

“You know how far Ontarion is from here?” asked Sam.

“Where?”

“Ontarion.”

“Never heard of it,” he said and sank the second, but left a lot of green for the third.

“About forty miles from Washington. Maybe not that far.”

“Iowa. It’s about two hundred miles to Cedar Rapids. You drivin’?”

“No,” said Sam.

The stranger missed the long shot and put the cue back in the rack, first making sure it was crooked, as he had suspected. Then put a quarter down beside the other two.

“Hitching?”

“Yes.”

“Well, take the blacktop down to Six and follow it all the way across into Iowa.”

“Thanks,” said Sam and took up the money. “I’ll never make it anyway. Just a thought.”

The man left, watching the players on the other table for a moment before finally buying a six-pack and walking out. Sam went to the bar and ordered a beer with an empty-glass sound of one of the quarters falling on the wet top. The others he put in his pants pocket. The bartender, named Charlie, with a face as small as a midget’s should be and a card in his billfold declaring he was an alcoholic taking Antabuse and should be rushed to the nearest hospital in case he ever took a drink, brought it over and told Sam, leaning over the bar, that gambling was not allowed and keep the money off the tables; not that it made any difference to him (who used to use a cue himself when he was in the marines) but he could be arrested and fined for having gambling in his place.

“O.K., whatever,” said Sam and drank the beer slowly, raising his eyebrows when the small-faced man motioned that he would let the state pay for that one. I’ve been here a lifetime, thought Sam, putting the quarter back in his pocket. The violence began to surface, coiling around his nerves. One good woman, he thought, could do it. He was nearly broke.

RABBIT WOOD DID NOT OWN AN AUTOMOBILE. HIS FATHER HADN’T owned one and he didn’t own one. His father had purposely walked three blocks out of his way to and from work in order to avoid passing in front of Mrs. Schrock’s house, the sight alone of which was enough, even without the dozen or so gray, fungus-infected dogs that lived half-fed in the back yard and slept inside a tool shed. Rabbit didn’t, and cut through Mrs. Schrock’s yard in order not to have to go even one half-block out of his way. There were other differences. Of course the dogs were gone, as was Mrs. Schrock, and the house interested Rabbit slightly because of the way it changed—altered mostly by the neighborhood children having secret meetings in it and leaving messages inscribed on the faded sides threatening terrible havoc to anyone trespassing onto club territory. Sometimes, coming home from work, he would see just catches of tops of heads being jerked back down below the window ledge on the second floor . . . this and running through the house and sounds like young owls. Twice a month he personally made a complete and thorough search of the building, looking for broken glass and rotting floorboards—things that a child might be harmed by. In the event that a window was broken, Rabbit would kick out the retaining frame, letting the glass splinter onto the ground, and sweep up the floor. Of course he could have had the house boarded up or razed, as a public nuisance, but it was his contention that without such places and a host of secret rituals and imaginary purposes surrounding them, children might well grow up misfits from their family and their true selves. . . . At the same time, he knew he could buy the property or absorb it into the bank for mortgage, but he didn’t want to be legally responsible in case some accident he hadn’t been able to anticipate happened.

A shiver of satisfaction always passed through him when at the end of his walk home he stepped onto the corner of his own yard and began walking toward his house. This, however, like many of Rabbit’s feelings, was not pristine and he had no idea exactly where it came from, or what type of satisfaction this was—one of pride or contentment, security or freedom, function or form. He told his wife that it was because of her, but at least he knew this wasn’t true because he had had it before he was married, before he had thought of marrying; when he was living alone.

His bank never made him feel anything. Not even after it was moved into a bigger building and he had brass and marble furnishings brought in from Des Moines and two men and two women were waiting after five P.M. on Friday to be paid for their time. Not even after the three floor-stand fans were brought, in July, to move the air around and cost as much as a bricklayer makes in five weeks, and a few of the townspeople, the very old ones with canes and heavy triangular lines under their eyes, were lured away from the Yard in the heat of the afternoon to his hickory benches along the wall, in the exhaust of the huge turning blades. No, it was not until after the six blocks home, after his tiny sparrow eyes had seen everything in between, and after counting the pigeons on the wire in front of his neighbor’s bar-converted garage, and before Ester could hear the soft, heavy touch of his shoes on the front step, there in his own time, that he felt a shiver of satisfaction pass through him like a silent morning train over the dew on the tracks, and be gone before he reached the house.

“Hi, Rabbit,” said Ester Wood, who would not call him anything else, though he was accustomed to so many nicknames—fashioned to him by the people who felt embarrassed to come out and call him Rabbit in public, to his face—that he felt obliged to answer to almost anything. Many of the nicknames were so desperate that they were more attempts to establish a new name than revising and reworking the old, or making something of his shape, names like Jack, Simon, Smokey, Root, Art, The Fat Man, Rub, Beef, and Loren. These names of course were not in use simultaneously, and if one was ardent, he might be able to notice the use of one fade and another one come moving into prominence; still there never seemed to be a time when you couldn’t use any one of them and be understood, or a time when you would hear someone use a name for Rabbit that you had not heard. The only explanation was that they too had been handed down from Merle Wood, and he had acquired them slowly, and people had learned them one at a time . . . “Who? Who did you say? Beef . . . Oh, yes, you mean Root . . . that’s him.”

“Hi, Sneaker,” said Rabbit and let himself down into a kitchen chair with a glass of tap water just as Ester came into the kitchen. Yes, he was the kind of man who could be as comfortable in his kitchen as in any other room in the house.

“The Easters had their baby, you hear?”

“I heard,” he answered.

“C named him Glove.”

“I heard.” He drank. “Why someone would name a child that, I don’t know. Must be the only guy in the whole world that when the nurse came in couldn’t think of anything better than Glove—that that would be the first thing in his mind, before Joe or John or Dave, before deciding to tell her to come back later. It must be from living in that junk yard.” Rabbit finished the water with a long swallow that began as a toss into his mouth, his fat hand nearly hiding the glass.

“What would be the first thing to come into your mind?” she asked, sitting on the edge of a chair across from him, pulling at a button on her blouse as if it were a sandbur, not looking at him.

“And everyone gets tired—or got tired—of hearing over and over again from both of them what a wonderful thing it was. Every time you went into Parson’s, Cell’d tell you again what a wonderful thing it was, having a baby. And C too, as though it were something that only happened to them and no one else.”

“I know,” said Ester.

“And he, like nothing was . . .”

“Have you been over there?”

“That Yard? I stopped over the other afternoon.”

“You know it upsets you to go over there, Rabbit. You ought to have more sense than to do things that upset you. Now you’ll be upset for another week—thinking about C.”

Rabbit went back to the sink and refilled his glass. “Maybe. But you’ve got to admit that Glove is a stupid name for a child.”

“What would you name one? The first name that would come into your head?”

“Fisher,” said Rabbit.

“That’s a good name.”

“What would you name one?” he asked, tossing down half of the second glass.

“Oh,” she said, pulling with both hands at the buttons on her blouse, finally popping one off and holding it as if it had fallen from the ceiling, “I wouldn’t care.”

“That’s what gets you in trouble, not caring. That’s why C’s son is named . . .”

“I mean I wouldn’t mind—anything you would like would be fine with me.”

“Fisher would be a good name.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” said Ester.

Rabbit looked into the refrigerator, finding nothing he wanted.

“She must have stopped using that thing,” he said, half out loud.

“Who?”

“Cell.”

“What thing?” she asked, thinking from his voice that the thing might be worse than the using of it.

“C said that they had something they used to keep from getting pregnant.”

“What?” she asked, thinking, in horror, He must think that I use one. He is blaming me for using something, some piece of rubber or something.

“I don’t know,” said Rabbit.

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“Something with water that . . .” and the sentence was drowned with the last water in his glass, as though trying to rinse the liquid through his mouth and into his face, quenching his blushed expression. But, unlike some, Rabbit’s embarrassment did not hamper his ability to communicate, and Ester understood immediately both why he couldn’t continue and what he was talking about.

“Oh!” she said. “One of those things.” Solidly, like talking about an ax handle. “Someone should have told her that they don’t work, that she could be pregnant before she even went into the bathroom and—”

“Well, whatever . . . they shouldn’t have named him Glove,” he said, looking down into the empty glass.

“Maybe not. That wasn’t his father’s name, was it? A lot of times people will name their sons after their fathers.”

“No. The burden of C’s father’s name, Ansel, on a child, would crush it. Nothing small could survive with that name, not around here where people still remember, or would remember if they were reminded by the name.”

“I never heard anyone talk about him.”

“No one talks about him, that’s why; for fear maybe he’ll rise up out of his grave or something.”

“No.”

“Yes. Edlebrook’s father broke up the cement foundation of his barn, loaded it in his pickup, drove down to the grave, and piled the pieces on top and around his flat marker, just so if he did rise out of the ground it would take longer. . . .” Then he added, “Of course he did have to bust up the foundation, but he didn’t have to dump it there, all of it, all fifteen loads.”

“Stop teasing, Rabbit.”

“It’s true, go out to the place and look, at the bottom of Millet’s pasture and look.”

“Come on.”

“Go look.”

“Maybe there’s some cement there, but it’s not for that reason.”

“Honest to God.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I spent time studying him.”

“Ron Edlebrook’s father?”

“No. Ansel Easter. I used to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, studying him . . . figuring out how it had to be. Then after he was dead I still lay awake, thinking, and when I heard from someone that there was a person in Wisconsin who knew him before he came here, I borrowed a car and drove up to see and talk to him, or rather her, as it turned out to be; the name hadn’t given it away.”

“What did she say?”

“Only that he was a coal miner, and I’d already guessed that, from the way he talked, and the dust-gray hair on top of his head, and a way of walking that seemed close to the ground and like he would walk through a door or a wall if he happened to turn his head to watch something else and wasn’t aware that it was coming. And of course his voice and forearms.”

“Do you think I don’t want a baby, Rabbit? Is that why you’re talking this way—because you don’t want to say it or talk about it?”

Rabbit leaned forward onto the table. “If I thought that, I’d’ve never been able to keep quiet. Besides, I don’t imagine that it makes too much difference what attitude you have. It either happens or it doesn’t.”

“I just thought that on top of us not having any that you thought I didn’t want one.”

“No, it’s just that you never knew C’s father. If you had, you’d be interested in those things that with everyone else are common-place—like having been a coal miner and a boiler man—anything to help fill in the gaps and explain to yourself how someone could begin living in one way, change to another, and then before your eyes shut himself off from the world altogether . . . making his sons go out for groceries, shut up in that huge house with only his boys and the ragged mute that he had taken out of a circus sideshow and kept with him from then after. Except in church, where from behind the pulpit he would throw back his head and sing as though possessed; but he quit that too.”

“I’ll talk to Cell about him someday,” she said. “She’d know about him, from C.”

Although this implied of course that Rabbit did not know and had no business talking about Ansel Easter, it came to nothing. He was only listening to her with his face. He was studying C now, and wondering how it had happened that he had named his boy Glove, especially when he had to be so careful, so very careful with everything he did, even covering his mouth when he yawned, in order not to let his soul escape, in order not to find himself being what his father became, like stone. Then his thinking went into another time-out and he could see his yard, where the deerflies, fishbugs, and gnats went in and out of place after place that would have and then would not have bits and pieces of the retreating sunlight.

“It’s like someone pulled a plug in the sky and all the colors drained down into it,” said Ester, watching too.

“Yes,” answered Rabbit, “very much like that. Very much like that.”

IN THE WINTER, WHILE TRUNDLING THROUGH THE SNOW, AN IDEA CAME to him that had nothing to do with C Easter, and nothing to do with the bank. It came in that time it took to walk across the last stretch of partially shoveled sidewalk before stepping into his own deeply drifted yard—in anticipation of the satisfaction he knew would then come. His desire (and he could be said to have very few desires, given that his father, Merle Wood, had desperately wanted him to be more than himself and he, Rabbit, wanted only to be as much) could not be traced back to its source, and he could neither negate it nor deny it. He was inescapably trapped, because desires become ambitions become needs, and how could he explain to Ester that he wanted, yes, needed, a new house, a larger house sitting in the exact spot where their perfectly adequate, perfectly congenial one sat now?