Читать книгу The Annie Year - Stephanie Wilbur Ash - Страница 13

4

That night, a house blew up. It was on the other end of town from the cottage on the go-around, down by the closed Hardee’s, across from the closed A&W, and on an entire city block of houses owned by a holding company in Mankato. It was that area of town where railroad employees had once lived, but most of the houses had been carved up into apartments for Section 8 housing now, or abandoned entirely. I had little to do with that part of town anymore, as few people living there had property or businesses or even enough income to necessitate a CPA. While I was walking to my office that morning, Cindy from Prairie Lanes passed me on her way to open the bowling alley and told me the occupants of the house had not been living here for more than a few months. She heard they were nephews of Arnie Utzke, a former client of mine who had once worked for the railroad and now worked in Forest City at the Winnebago factory. But she wasn’t entirely sure, and Arnie had moved to Forest City, so no one could ask him. She did say for sure that one of the men who lived there had his face blown off in the explosion. She knew this because Dave Oppegaard, the head volunteer fireman, had told her earlier that morning when she saw him at the Kum & Go. Oppegaard had gone into the burning house and saw him. “His skin was basically melting off his bones,” Cindy said. Then she shrugged and asked, “Methheads—what are you going to do?”

But it wasn’t really a question.

I wondered briefly if it was the pock-faced man who had driven the rusty pickup I’d seen only a few days earlier. But just as I stood outside my Main Street office, catching a whiff of the cat pee, egg fart, and turpentine smell that hung in the air, the pock-faced man in his rusty pickup truck drove slowly by again. He was alone—no drunken high school students partied in the bed of his truck this time. I watched him and he watched me. I was skeptical of him, as I am skeptical of all new people. I do not know why he was skeptical of me. I had always been here.

I unlocked my office door and, for the first time in my entire life, and probably in my father’s life too, I locked the door behind me. Shortly after that, around lunchtime, the Vo-Ag teacher knocked on it.

I opened it. “You don’t have an appointment,” I said to him from the doorway.

He laughed like a horse. He showed me his white teeth. They were prominent, like a horse’s. He seemed to have more teeth than the rest of us.

“Dieter said I can smoke here,” he said. He had a pack of cigarettes wedged between his multicolored belt and his too-tight jeans.

It is true. It’s one of the special features I offer my clients, and I believed then that it was what kept most of them from driving to Decorah or Dubuque or La Crosse. My biggest client, John Mueller, and I have a joke about it even. I say, “It’s not the accounting?” And Mueller says, “A monkey could do the accounting if he had the right software.”

“You can smoke in the teachers’ lounge,” I said.

“Dieter says I can smoke here,” he said.

“Dieter running my office now?” I asked.

He laughed again, like this was all some big joke. And then he poked me with his long, bony index finger, right below my belly button.

The people where you live, do they poke each other like that?

“That girl, Hope, the one who threw the bottle, she showed up in my class today.”

What was I supposed to say to that? I said nothing.

“It was either Vo-Ag or expulsion,” he said. “No other teacher would take her.”

“I have an appointment,” I said, and closed the door.

It was a lunch appointment with Mueller, though he would never call it lunch. What he would say is “I am coming to town,” and I would meet him at Country Kitchen and make damn sure there was a double order of onion rings there, even though a doctor in Waterloo told him he’s not supposed to eat onion rings because of some vague evidence discovered during his colonoscopy, a vagueness of which had only strengthened fifty-year-old Mueller’s resolve to eat more onion rings.

I never wanted to sit at one of Barb’s tables, but Mueller would ask to switch if we didn’t. “She’s the fastest,” he would say. He believed his food would taste better because it would be hotter.

But his logic was flawed. The hotness of the food is related not to the speed of the waitress but to the length of time it sits in the window after the cook has put it on a plate. I have seen Barb stand outside and smoke two entire cigarettes while someone’s patty melt got soggy in that window.

But still I sat in one of Barbie’s booths and, without speaking to me or even making eye contact, she brought two cups of coffee and a double order of rings.

That is excellent customer service, in case you have never seen it.

Mueller wanted to hear what was happening with Winthrop. He was looking to buy the co-op there. The co-op members didn’t have enough money anymore to make it profitable. Mueller did, but he was worried about the tax implications of buying an entire co-op, which he had never done before.

“Well, it won’t be a co-op anymore if you own it entirely,” I said.

“What if other farmers won’t use it because it’s not a co-op?” he asked.

“Huff went,” I said. Huff, the drunk lawyer who refused to speak to his own daughter—he’s the one who handles people problems in this town. In case you are not aware, that is the definition of irony.

“It’d be cheaper for me to pay you to go to law school,” Mueller said, shaking his head.

That wasn’t true. I had run the numbers on this the last time he had said it. It would cost him an additional $120,000 that wouldn’t pay off until after he was dead, even if he managed to live until age seventy-two.

The cheapest option would be for Mueller to develop people skills himself. Even rudimentary ones would be an improvement. But of course I didn’t say that. I said, “I’m ready when you are,” which made him chuckle, which is always good for business, even if it is ironic.

And that is all the talking we did about it, about anything really. Mueller is not so much for talking. He is for eating. He never gets fatter, though. He is a relatively trim man, save for beefy farmer hands and a barrel chest that has increased only in width and not girth as he has aged. I used to marvel at how he could eat so much at our lunches, but then I realized they were likely his only meals of the day because I paid for them. Mueller has always known how to butter his bread with other people’s butter, even though he has plenty of butter.

Suddenly Barb appeared next to Mueller, all one hundred pounds of her. She stared him down. The coffeepot she held was shaking in her hand, her iron forearm strength was wavering. This was something I had never seen before. Mueller just shrugged and stared back, waiting for her to say something. Barb’s saying something would have been highly unusual. I stared deep into my coffee, which was almost as black as I could feel Barb’s heart to be at that moment.

Then Barb did say something. “This Clive Liestman,” she asked Mueller directly. “Is he all right?’

Mueller shrugged. He looked into his onion rings, then picked one up and ate it. He said, “Yeah, I guess he’s all right. He shows up for field work. He handles the machinery. He doesn’t stir shit up. He’s a farmhand. That’s the definition of a model employee.”

Then she turned to me. “What about you, Tandy? What do you know about this Clive?”

My hands went numb again. My armpits itched. I looked down at the stack of onion rings. The ones Mueller had not eaten were stuck together with batter and oil. I would have to pull them all apart before I could make one mine.

“Not much,” I said. “Why do you ask?” It wasn’t really a question. If she was unwilling to tell me, I was unwilling to tell her my opinion of him.

“Don’t pretend like I don’t know all about you,” she said.

“Don’t pretend that I care,” I said back, though I regret it now as I regret all the awful things I have ever said to her or anyone, including Doc and Huff, who, unlike Barb, do not deserve my clemency.

“I’d ask you to not be an asshole but I don’t think that’s possible,” she said.

“I am not in the business of telling people what to think,” I said.

It was the longest conversation I’d had with Barbie in more than seventeen years that wasn’t about income taxes.

What did I know about this Clive? At the time, he was coming by my office almost every day around three P.M. He would dip his middle into the chair across from my desk usually reserved for clients and then stretch his long body out at both ends. He liked to show off all the time how big he was, but frankly, I always thought it made him look loose, gangly, disconnected at all the important parts. The fingertips of his big hands would touch one wall of my office while his dirty boots rested against the other wall, and every time he splayed himself out like that, I thought that if he weren’t working for Mueller I would walk right through his body and out the door.

He would talk for an hour about buying a farm of his own somewhere around here, though I knew he did not have the money and never would. You can’t just buy a farm around here anymore unless you inherit a farm from your parents that you can leverage, or you are a famous actor or professional athlete, or you are a corporation. While he talked, I would nod and say, “Mm-hmm,” and “Of course,” but mostly I watched him touch everything on my desk. He was very lazy about his touching. He touched whatever was nearest him first, and when he was done with that he would reach a little farther away for the next closest thing. Sometimes when I saw him parking his pickup in front of my office, I would quickly move around the items on my desk to see how easy it would be to control the order in which he touched them. It was very easy.

“Next year, I think,” he would say. “Next year, when the interest rates fall.”

“That is prudent,” I would say.

Then I would wait for him to lean over the desk and kiss me. It always took a long time for him to get there, but in his defense I never told him to do it any differently.

The day that Barb broke her silence and asked me about him, I spoke to Clive while I was waiting. “My friend asked about you today.”

“You have friends?” he asked. I do not know if he was joking or asking an honest question. Understanding him was never a priority.

“Her name is Barb and she works across the street,” I said.

He paused a bit, and the corners of his mouth turned down, and then his hands began to lazily finger the items on my desk again: the stapler, the coffee mug from the bank, the letter opener. “Maybe she wants to take me out on a date,” he said. “Unless you have any better ideas.”

I did not have any better ideas, which is a sad thing to admit. Still, I knew that eventually his mouth would be on mine, large but hollow, like a wet plastic bag over my face. I waited some more, and then it was there, and then I imagined myself poking through his face with the letter opener.

I kissed Clive until school let out in the hopes that the Vo-Ag teacher would come back and see us there. And when the Vo-Ag teacher didn’t, I stopped kissing him and I told him I had to pick up Subway for Gerald, though Gerald could very well pick up his own, and Clive left.

I’m not proud of this. Don’t think I am. It’s just that these are the facts.

The next day at lunch the Vo-Ag teacher tried to get in my office again.

I said, “I have an appointment,” but when I tried to close the door, the Vo-Ag teacher stuck one of his ridiculous man clogs into the doorway, which propped it open wide enough for him to get his bony fingers in. Once he had wrapped his fingers around the door there was nothing I could do.

I’ve smelled a mowed ditch a million times, and probably you have too. Or maybe not. I don’t know what kind of smells you have in the cities where you live. But I’d never smelled something like that on a man’s actual body, and twice in one week in November, when there is not supposed to be a freshly mowed ditch smell around here.

It was like a memory. It was like something I inherently understood, but I can’t tell you why.

He walked right past me through the waiting area and into the back room where I sit with clients and do my work; I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t say, “Would you like some coffee?” or “What can I help you with?” All I could do was wonder: What kind of a man makes himself smell like a mowed ditch?

I thought, An idiot, that’s who.

“Whoa!” he said.

“What?” I asked. It was just my office: a little waiting room in the front, with an olive-green vinyl love seat and some magazines, and my work space in the back where I sit with clients. There is a large desk made from a dark wood and another smaller desk for my computer, plus two chairs. And, of course, the U.S. Tax Code, all twenty volumes of it, bound in green with shiny gold lettering.

Understand that this is not an unusual office. Except for the Tax Code, it’s the same as Doc’s office up at the hospital, or Huff’s law office around the corner, or the home office they share at the shit-shingled house where Doc fell asleep on the living room couch after my father died and still sleeps to this day. And my office is no different from offices of CPAs and lawyers and doctors in Fayette and Independence and even in Postville and Winona and Rochester—pens and pencils in a mug from the bank, a desk pad calendar with circled coffee stains all over it, a letter opener, a stapler, a print of ducks or maybe pheasants.

I myself have a print of a great blue heron, even though they are not normally found around here so far from the river, but my father was fond of them, so it stays, right by the door. I also have a print of a child swinging on a rope into a big pile of hay with an A-series John Deere tractor in the background, even though children here don’t do that anymore. I got it at Huff and Doc’s garage sale right after I got my CPA license. I paid Huff thirty dollars for it, but Doc put the money in my mailbox a few days later with a note that said, Keep your mouth shut about it.

The Vo-Ag teacher said, “Those books. Is that...?”

“Yes,” I said. “That is the U.S. Tax Code.”

“Wow,” he said. “Makes things pretty tight in here, doesn’t it?”

I said, “I just had one of my clients in here yesterday, a very tall man, and he had plenty of space. He stretched out to the point of being nearly horizontal.”

I looked directly into the Vo-Ag teacher’s face in the hopes that he would get the message.

“Hmm,” he said, “that’s interesting,” though he did not clarify what about it was interesting to him.

He smiled. He was a man who smiled at strange times, times when I knew he could not possibly be happy. He said, “Well, it does make a statement about the state of our world.”

“It’s the U.S. Tax Code,” I said. “It makes statements about taxation.”

“Po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to,” he said.

I have never heard a single person say po-TAH-to.

I decided to treat him like any client. “Have a pen,” I said, and gave him one of those pens I had made up with my name on it.

He took it and read it out loud: “Tandy Caide, CPA.” Then he said, “Public accountant, private person.”

“You don’t even know me,” I said.

“Everyone around here says so. ‘Tandy, now she’s a private person.’”

“Who says that?” I asked.

“Dieter,” he said, and he smiled again but his eyes went narrow, like he was asking a question when he was making a statement. “And Mrs. Vontrauer.”

Of course Silvia Vontrauer would say that! She wears scarves with pianos on them!

The Vo-Ag teacher smiled his big toothy smile. “Dieter also said I could smoke here.”

I continued to treat him like a potential client. I said, “Well, there are only two things you can really count on in this life... ”

He got excited and said, “Oh, I know this one: death and taxes.”

“You seem to know a lot about a lot of things,” I said.

He laughed then, and tapped a cigarette on the big desk and asked me for a light.

I pulled a book of matches from the Powerhaus out of a drawer in the big desk and the big red ceramic ashtray off the bookshelf behind me, where I keep it next to the trophy.

Actually, there are two things aside from the Tax Code that distinguish my office from anyone else’s. One is the big red ceramic ashtray I also bought ten years ago at Huff and Doc’s garage sale. I paid two dollars for it and never got the money back. The other is the trophy. It says: WORLD’S GREATEST ACCOUNTANT. I bought it for my father at Woolworth’s a block down from our office more than twenty years ago, back when I was twelve. It was on clearance because the Woolworth’s was closing due to the Walmart opening in Independence. I paid fifty cents for it.

The trophy pleased my father. He smiled when I gave it to him. He touched my shoulder. But I didn’t know what about it pleased him exactly. I thought it was the price, the good deal I had found. Then I thought perhaps it was the thoughtfulness of the gift. Then I saw him and Doc and Huff bent over and laughing about it. So probably it was the price.

“Can I always count on a light and an ashtray too?” the Vo-Ag teacher asked.

“No. Just death and taxes,” I said.

He laughed and smoked and stared at me. There was silence, and something else—something tingly, something electric.

“How can I help you?” I asked him. I ask this of all the people who sit in that chair. It is my business to help them.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.” And he laughed a little again.

I knew he would be back the next day.

I suppose, in the interest of clarity, it would be important to tell you that I wanted him back the next day.

I wasn’t there, though. Another house blew up, and it was one of Mueller’s—the big white rental with the screened-in porch—and so he asked me to go down and look. It was closer to downtown than the other one, within a few blocks of my office. A family who had come from Waterloo lived there. The father had been laid off from John Deere. He was working night shifts at the meatpacking plant for minimum wage and they were Section 8. There was a hole in the roof and smoke was rolling out of it. Some of the men in this town acting as volunteer firemen moved the children’s bikes to the next yard over. The whole block smelled like cat pee and battery acid. Dave Oppegaard walked by in his heavy fireman boots and pants and suspenders, which formed arches over his big gut. He asked me for a light and I pulled a book of matches from the Powerhaus from my long black coat.

“Roof blew off this one,” he said. “Don’t breathe too deep, there’s anhydrous everywhere.”

Anhydrous ammonia is the main ingredient in homemade meth around here. It may be different where you come from. I don’t know how you make your meth, but I hear there are lots of ways to do it. Here, we have giant tanks of anhydrous scattered all throughout our fields, perfect for siphoning if you’re in need of some meth. Some of these tanks have motion-sensor cameras on them, until those cameras are broken or stolen. Some of these tanks have locks on them and sometimes this can make a difference for a little while.

“It’s kind of ironic that something that increases yield can reduce a person’s life,” I said.

“Yeah,” Oppegaard said. “Maybe Channel 9 will show up.”

At lunchtime, the Vo-Ag teacher appeared beside me. “So we blow up our houses here,” he said.

Oppegaard just stood there nodding and smoking, his ruddy face getting ruddier. And when he went back to the fire truck he struck up talk with the other volunteer firemen, including Bob Munson and Howie Claus, who raised their eyes to me as soon as Oppegaard opened his mouth.

“Jesus, Tandy,” the Vo-Ag teacher whispered into my ear. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

And though it was an inopportune time, standing out there exposed with all those other men I had known my entire life, a switch flipped inside of me. His breath was like a sage lightning bolt. I seemed to rise from the ground, like a current was coursing from a knot in the back of my throat down through my spine and splitting through my legs so that my feet almost lifted off the sidewalk.

Across the street I could see Bob Munson and Howie Claus and Oppegaard all laughing, then Doc and Huff in Huff’s golf cart pull up and all of them jabbering. But right then they could not touch me.

I didn’t have an answer to the Vo-Ag teacher’s question—What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?—so I said the one thing I know for sure: “I am taking care of the tax needs of my community.” But it came out of my mouth small and quiet, like I was speaking from inside a balloon.

The Vo-Ag teacher laughed again, but this time it was a special kind of laugh that gurgled up in his throat and flowed out his mouth. It was like we were sharing some sort of special secret, though I do not know if we were or not. And I can admit to you now that this frightened me.

“I don’t like it when you laugh,” I said.

He sighed. He said, “None of the girls in this town do.” And then he poked me again, right below the belly button, and then, with his arms open wide, he walked backward and away, singing a line from Annie: Bet they collect things, like ashtrays and art!

I watched that butterfly knot on that multicolored beaded belt from Africa get farther and farther away from me.

Later, after Gerald had eaten his Subway and fallen asleep in his chair, I went back to my office. I turned off all the lights and I locked the door and I closed the dusty little curtains in my waiting room. I sat down at my computer and I clicked my way to eBay and I ordered a multicolored beaded belt exactly like the one the Vo-Ag teacher wore.

I ordered it from a person called africannibal. I paid $5.75 plus $12 in shipping, because I chose the overnight mail option.

The next day when the belt came, I laid it atop my computer monitor, and when clients came in, or the Vo-Ag teacher, or Clive, I hid it in the long skinny drawer of my big desk, the one you are supposed to put pens in.

Then I put my big black coat on and I opened the curtains and stood for a while looking at the lights of the Country Kitchen across the street from my waiting room window. At night the letters of the Country Kitchen sign are lit up, but the kids in this town keep throwing rocks at the O, R, Y, and K until the bulbs in those letters go out. At night the sign reads: C UNT ITCHEN.

Of course I had laughed about this before. Mueller and I laugh about it all the time, even now. Doc still thinks it is the greatest thing this town has going for it. He wants to print it on a T-shirt and sell it during our town’s Fourth of July celebration.

Doc and Huff used to joke in particular about how it is right across the street from my office. Of all the things you could look at all day long, little girl!

But this time I laughed about it differently. I don’t know if you will understand this or not, but this time it was my kind of laughter.

Inside Cunt Itchen, Barb flew around, coffeepot strong in her hand. Hope sat in a booth at the back, carving something into the table with a butter knife. I waved to Barb to get her attention, but what could she see? Nothing, or at least she didn’t look, so instead I said to my stale office air and my dusty waiting room window, “Good night, Barbie. I love you. I am sorry. It looks like I may be leaving soon.”

I walked home in the dark, looking in at all the people in their little houses, wondering for the first time if they really were like me, as I had always been led to believe. I had been taught we were mostly the same, some of us just meaner and some of us just stupider, and me and my little village on the go-around just a tiny bit better. Some of the people in this town once had businesses and jobs and land and real estate and history here, but they have lost these things or are about to and they are broken by it. I was hanging on to these things. Was I better, or just lucky? Some of the people in this town never had those things, and some had shown up here recently for reasons unknown to me but were clearly not good ones. Some of these new people were the kind who drank beer with high school kids and gave them hickeys and rides to Kum & Go for cigarettes. Some of the high school kids here were the kind who were waiting for just such opportunities.

And who can blame them? What reason would a young person have to not seize whatever opportunity presented itself? Who among us is in a position to stop young people from seizing opportunity?

But there was something about the way the Vo-Ag teacher liked me, and the way he liked the things I said. He made me think that perhaps I was different, more like him. More, I don’t know, special, more above it all. I wanted to believe I was the only one he made feel this way. But this was not the case.

Through their windows that night I could see that the people in this town mostly watched television. But sometimes they made decaf coffee, or played with their babies, or wiped their kitchen counters. Maybe the same things you do, maybe not. I really don’t know what you people in your towns closer to the river do in the privacy of your own homes when you’re not out in your public spaces winning friends and influencing people. But I can say, without a doubt, that at least, in my perception, the people in this town did look happy doing the small, quiet things they were doing that night.

And this surprised me. I do not exactly understand this yet. But I liked how this surprised me. That night, as I walked home in the dark and looked into the Little Clipper at the corner of Main and Anderson, I was even surprised to see Cathy Claus, Howie Claus’s daughter, sitting in the hair-cutting chair she rents from Mandy Lancer. Cathy had her feet on the hair-washing sink and her nose in a People magazine and all the lights up, though it was well after seven and she was closed. She was still wearing plastic gloves from setting some perm, but her shoes were off and she wasn’t wearing any socks, just stretching her toes with her heels on that sink.

I am capable of surprise. I am capable of seeing interesting things and enjoying those interesting things. And I was suddenly and inexplicably proud of this.