Postcards

‘Dub. How you doin’!’ Big old Trimmer, beefy and wide, long Johns sticking out of his filthy red-checkered shirt. He stank of gasoline and oil, of horse and BO and roll-yer-owns. He winked at Myrtle with his heavy eyelid and made a sound with his tongue, the same sound he made to his team of skid horses.

‘Trimmer. How goes?’

‘So goddamn good I can’t stand it. Here I am lookin’ for some grief to tone down my joy and exuberance, and I look across the room and there the two of you sit, made to order, glarin’ at each other. That’s it, true love, I think, only a question of time before she throws him out the door on his ear. Dub, I wanna talk to you later, you got a minute.’

A spot at each end of the stage went on, the beams pooling in the center, lighting up the dirty microphone cords, the blue drums. A man with receding hair and the devil’s pointed teeth came out, dressed in a powder-blue jacket. He held a dented saxophone. Two other old men, the gimpy one with his Red Pearl accordion, the fat shuffler with a banjo, both in grimy powder-blue jackets, sidled onto the platform. They looked disgustedly toward the anteroom at the side of the stage. Smoke eddied. In a minute a teenaged boy wearing brown slacks and a yellow rayon shirt loped to the drum set, a cigarette still burning in the corner of his mouth. He rolled the snare for a hello and the saxophonist’s hollow voice came out of the microphone. ‘Good evening, ladies and gents, welcome to the Comet Roadhouse. Gonna have some fun tonight. The Sugar Tappers for your dancing and listening enjoyment. Starting off now with “The Too Late Jump.” ’

‘Back in a couple of minutes, my boy. First Miss Myrt and I got to show the yokels how to do it.’

Didion shouted as they walked onto the dance floor. ‘Watch out, sparks gonna fly now!’ Howard came down to the end of the bar to watch. The drummer began with a barrage of hard, shattering sound, and one by one the men in the powder-blue jackets straggled after him, the saxophone hollow at first, but working up into a set of squeals and shrieks.

Myrtle and Dub stood hunched like herons, facing each other, only Dub’s upheld hand moving, shaking, fluttering like a strip of cloth in a gale. With a Zulu leap he sprang at Myrtle, spun her under his arm until her skirt stood out like a dark cup, and began to snap her to and from him. Her patent leather shoes like ice. The other dancers stood away, giving them the floor. Dub kicked as hard as a horse. The bright sweat flew from his face. A rain of hairpins behind Myrt, the cascade of crimped hair tumbled loose, their feet thudded.

‘Save yer peanut butter jars,’ screamed Trimmer.

‘Deer meat! Deer meat!’ Didion, with the highest accolade he knew.

When Dub came back to the table where Trimmer sat in a cloud of pipe smoke he carried the two-quart glass pitcher of beer. His sides heaved, runnels of sweat glistened in front of his ears, hung in bright drops under his chin. Myrtle leaned back in the chair, panting, her legs opened wide to let the cool air move up in under her skin, her damp blouse unbuttoned as far as was decent. Dub first poured her a glass of the cold beer then drank thirstily from the pitcher. He set it down in the middle of the table and lit a cigarette for Myrtle, then for himself. Trimmer hauled his chair closer in to the table.

‘That was some dancin’. I couldn’t do that in a million years.’ He knocked the dottle out of his pipe into the ashtray. ‘Was gonna ask you if you thought you’d be up to runnin’ Loyal’s old trapline, or if you’d want some help. Fur prices are good. Specially fisher cat. Fox. Looks like you could run ’em down, reach over, turn ’em inside out while they’re still movin’. Way you dance.’

‘It’s just a different kind of thing. You lose your arm or something you feel good you can do something like that. Run Loyal’s trapline? You don’t know much about it, do you?’

‘I know he made damn good money at it. I know he got some good fur and he didn’t have to go up to the North Pole for it, neither. Fox. Awful nice fox he had last spring at the fur auction. Thick, fluffy. I mean nice. See him get up there in front of them all and spin around holdin’ up them red furs, the tails’d all whirl out. Seems natural you’d want to keep it up.’

‘No,’ said Dub, drawling it out, ‘Trimmer, you don’t begin to know about old Loyal’s traps and trapline. I couldn’t do what he done with the traps in a million years. I don’t even know where the traps are.’

‘Shit, it couldn’t be too tough to look for ’em, could it? Out in the hayloft, or up in the attic, the shed? I’ll help you, smoke ’em, put out the sets. I’d give you a hand runnin’ the line. You got to have a general idea where he set.’

‘What Loyal done with the trapping was not what you or me might do. He didn’t hang ’em out in the shed and trust to a day in the smoke to get the human scent off like most of the guys around here. First, when he was a kid he learnt from that old critter used to live out in a bark shack in the swamp down below the place the ferns grows so big.’

‘Ostrich fern.’

‘Ostrich fern, yeah. Loyal’d hang around down there every chance he got after chores on Saturday, summer evenings when the milkin’ was finished. Old Iris Penryn, half wild hisself. Loyal learnt all his trap-wise ways from old Iris, and he was sly about it, he was secret. You know how Loyal was – dip around, do things when nobody’s looking. First, he has him a little shack on the brook where he keeps all his trap stuff, but not the traps. Just listen. You’ll see what I mean.

‘Loyal was real clever in layin’ his sets. He was a goddamn genius with guide sticks, knew how to lay a stalk of hay or bend a goldenrod stem so the fox would step over it every time, right into the trap. Snow sets? He’d put ’em near a tuft of grass stickin’ up out of the new ice along the river edge, see, the foxes go there to play on the new ice, or he’d make a trail set in the snow you couldn’t tell anybody been walkin’ there, or he’d lay a mound set near the edge of the woods where the ground’s heaved up the way it does, a real smart crust set when the snow was hard, maybe two dozen more kinds of lays. You got to know your fox and you got to know your terrain. You got to have the trappin’ instinct.’

‘O.k., I can see he was wicked smart about it, but it’s not impossible you or me to do some of them things pretty good and get some fur.’

‘Nope. Tell you why. End of the season Loyal’d pick up his traps, bring them in to his shack. What he done, and I only remember part of it, he’d build up a fire in the yard, boil some water, scrape off and clean up all his traps, then scrub them down in the hot water with a brush he never used for nothin’ else, and wearin’ waxed gloves. Rubber’s no good, even if you could get ’em. Then he takes a wire hook to pick up the traps and throws ’em in a big washboiler, never been used for anything else, dumps in lye and water and boils ’em for an hour. Takes the traps out’n the lye with his hook and throws ’em in the brook. Leaves ’em in the brook overnight.’ Dub held his hand up as Trimmer started to open his mouth. He drank from the pitcher, watching Myrtle twist and pin up her loosened hair.

‘Next morning, here’s old Loyal again, lookin’ around over his shoulder, make sure nobody’s spyin’ on him. ’Course I did every chance I get. When I was little. Goes in the shack, builds a fire in the stove. Gets down this big bucket he never uses for nothin’ else but this, fills it full of brook water upstream from where he’s got the traps. Sets the bucket on the stove and puts in a pound of pure beeswax never been touched by hand, he takes the honeycake himself from out’n Ronnie Nipple’s hives, puts it in the extractor, won’t let Ronnie touch the wax, keeps the wax in a canvas bag been boiled and brook-soaked like the traps. When the wax is melted and foams up in the pail, he gets a trap outa the brook with his hook, brings it in and in she goes, into the bucket of wax and water for a couple of minutes, then out again with the hook and he carries it out to a birch tree at the edge of the woods and hangs it up there. He does the same thing with every damn trap. When them traps is dry and aired out good, he lays them up according to how he’s goin’ to use them next season. For his field traps, which is what most fox traps is, he lines a big hollow log he’s got somewhere with pulled-up grass. Never touches that grass or log with his hands, he’s got another pair of special waxed gloves he keeps in a scent-free canvas roll, then he stuffs them traps up into the log on that grass and that’s where they stay until he sets ’em out next season. He does the same thing with the traps he’s gonna set in the woods, only he boils them in bark – and he’s particular about what kind of bark he uses – and he keeps ’em under some ledge in the woods until the season. Then he’s got all these scents and lures he makes himself, I don’t know any of that. Trimmer, we are skunked right out of the barrel, even if I wanted to run his trapline, because I don’t know where he hid his traps. And I don’t want to go rustlin’ through the woods jammin’ my arms into empty logs lookin’ for my brother’s traps. He could do it, he liked it, he liked the careful part and the study of the set. I’d rather know how to tune pianos, do the job, get paid when you finish.’

‘Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,’ said Trimmer. ‘I still think I could get enough pelts to make some money. You tell me how else you gonna get enough set by to do what you and Myrt want to do?’

Dub swallowed the last of the beer. Myrtle was staring at him in a way he understood very well. She was asking the same question without saying a word. Dub had an answer for both of them.

‘Way I see it, when a man don’t know how to do anything else, he traps.’ He looked at Myrt. ‘You ready to jump on that floor again?’

An hour later Dana Swett, Myrtle’s brother-in-law, came in, peering through the smoke until he saw her, then raising his right hand twice, ringers outstretched, showing ten minutes for him to have a beer, for Myrtle to finish up and get ready. She danced with Dub a last time, a slow one, sad, good-by War song, humming until the boy drummer began to pick up the beat, trying to jostle the old musicians into another hot flash, but they were cold, played out, ready to go out back and drink out of their flasks, smoke Luckies and yawn.

‘Don’t stay too late,’ she said. ‘Remember, you got to milk in the morning. And come down Monday afternoon to the office. I’ll put your name down so doctor knows you’re coming.’

‘For you, O Flower of the Meadow, anything your little heart desires.’ He swept a low bow, danced her into the coat hall and pressed her deep into the wool-smelling coats, kissing, tasting the bitter tobacco on her tongue, the musky gin.

When Dub left the Comet the air was burning cold. The hard snow squealed. Even with his glow on he knew the truck was frozen solid. The door groaned on stiff hinges. Frost covered the windshield, the steering wheel. The seat was like a piece of bent sheet metal. He stepped on the clutch, shifted the lever toward neutral. It was like shifting a spoon in a pot of mush. He twisted the key and a short weak groan oozed from the starter.

‘Son of a bitch, she won’t even turn over.’ Ronnie’d gone an hour ago. He’d have to get a jump start from Trimmer. He turned back to the Comet, now hating the thought of the smoke and liquor stink, the collapsing jukebox music, and noticed that the red of the neon sign blurred into the red of the sky. Flutes of red light, the watery red of ripe watermelon, pulsated over his head. He could see the stars through the redness. Long green rods fanned out from the dome of the sky, the high cold air wavering, stuttering with the electric storm. Mink always claimed he could hear the northern lights crackle or make a sound like a distant wind. Dub opened the door.

‘Hey, the northern lights is puttin’ on a show.’

‘Shut the damn door. It’s freezin’,’ Howard yelled. He’d started drinking around eleven. Trimmer was lying across three chairs, spittle glinting at the side of his mouth.

Dub shut the door, looked at the quivering air, the snow in the parking lot stained red, the trees and river shining in the lurid night. If Loyal came walking into the parking lot now, he thought suddenly, he would beat him until the bloody water streamed from his ears and blackened the red snow. A pent rage at being stuck with it all rose in his throat like caustic vomit. What the hell. Might as well walk home, burn off the liquor, cool down. He could do it in two hours.

8 The Bat in the Wet Grass

LOYAL CROSSED the Minnesota state line near Taylor’s Falls, thinking he’d work his way up through the farm country toward the forests. He’d heard there was logging up in the Chippewa National Forest. The money might be poor but he had to get outdoors again. He couldn’t bring himself down to hire onto a farm, but he had to get in the open air. Work his way across, maybe end up in Alaska in the fall, work the fish canneries, anything but the machine shops again, the men pulling down more money than they’d ever made in their lives, their women, too, but not ever getting enough of it after the depression years without work. That little weasel, Taggy Ledbetter from North Carolina, with his deep-kneed walk that made the cluster of keys on his belt bounce against his groin, socking money away. He lagged slyly at the job during the day so he could put in for overtime. He picked up other men in his car and drove them to the plant, collecting a dollar a week and gas ration coupons from each, stole tools and parts, paper clips, pencils, burrs, calipers, drill bits, dipping them into his pockets, inside his green work pants, under his belt, in his humpbacked lunch box. He made his wife and kids save everything that could be turned in for money, patched bicycle tire tubes, tinfoil, paper bags, nails, used oil, scrap metal, torn envelopes, old tires. Sold a little black market gasoline, pork from his backyard pigs. And kept it out of the banks. He bought house lots. Had a little after-hours repair shop in his backyard.

‘Money’s in the lots. Gonna be a lot of servicemen comin’ back, lookin’ to build. Lot of money changin’ hands. I’m gittin’ my share sure as dammit.’

Tired of getting up in the stench of unwashed clothes and working through the day into darkness again in the stink of burned metal and rank oil, the work never slowing, churning around through three shifts like a bingo tumbler spinning the numbered wooden markers until it slows and a lucky number falls at random. On New Year’s Eve he went to a bar. He went with Elton and Foote who worked the next stations on the line. The bar was jammed with drinkers, War workers with money burning holes, women in slippery rayon dresses, their rolled hair limp in invisible hairnets, powder between their breasts and the black-red lipstick that left soft prints of their lips on the beer glasses and the smell of cigarette smoke and dimestore ‘Evening in Paris’ perfume from tiny blue bottles. When someone came in from the street a broadsword of frigid air cut the smoke.

Loyal pressed up to the bar with Elton and Foote, ordered beer. Elton, a lean hillbilly with crooked arms and a weak bladder was spit drunk in half an hour. Foote nursed a whiskey, staring straight ahead. Loyal found himself between Foote and a woman with a red patent leather belt cinching in her black dress. Her hair was a mass of black-purple curls heaped on her head. The neckline of the dress, shaped like the top of a knight’s shield, presented the tops of her powdered breasts. She smoked Camels, one after another, gradually turning away from Loyal toward an unseen man on her left. Her back pressed against Loyal’s arm. Gradually she shifted her hot taut buttocks until they came up against his thigh. He felt his prick hardening, bulging the front of his good trousers. It had been a long time. Slowly he began to maneuver his hand until it cupped her firm behind and she pressed it against his palm, wriggling until his index finger fitted the gully between her buttocks. Heat came off the sleek rayon. He slid his hand up and down and, with the suddenness of a falling beam, the choking spasm gripped him with terrible strength. He could not breathe. He threw himself backward into the wall of drinkers, bucking and tearing at his throat as if the hangman’s rope cinched his neck. He smelted the char of a burning cigarette against cloth, the pressed tin ceiling with its remorseless design heaved, then fed on him.

When he came out of it he was on a table with a ring of faces staring down at him. The thinnest man pressed bony fingers on Loyal’s wrist. The skeleton’s hair, parted in the middle, was scraped back like a metallic cap. His teeth and eyes were rimmed with gold and there were gold rings on his fingers, a wedding ring and a signet ring on the little finger of the right hand. Loyal felt himself shaking and trembling with a thunderous heartbeat.

‘You’re lucky I was here. They’d have stacked you in the corner with the other drunks. Would have put your light out for good.’

Loyal could not speak his jaw was trembling so hard. His arms shook, but he could breathe. He sat up, and the crowd, disappointed he was still alive, turned back to their glasses.

‘It’s Adrenalin that’s making you shake. I gave you a shot of Adrenalin. You’ll calm down in half an hour or so. You’ve had these attacks before, I take it.’

‘Not like this.’

‘Allergic reaction. Probably something you ate or drank. Tell you what. Make up a list of everything you’ve had to eat or drink in the last day and come see me the day after tomorrow.’

But Loyal knew it wasn’t anything he’d swallowed. It was the touching. Touching the woman. If it wasn’t Billy it wouldn’t be anyone else. The price for getting away. No wife, no family, no children, no human comfort in the quotidian unfolding of his life; for him, restless shifting from one town to another, the narrow fences of solitary thought, the pitiful easement of masturbation, lopsided ideas and soliloquies so easily transmuted to crazy mouthings. Up there beside the wall some kind of black mucky channel that ran from his genitals to his soul had begun to erode.

A soft day, warm enough to grind down the window and get the smell of the country. The black fields stretched for miles, the furrows rising and falling like a calm sea. He thought about pulling into a place and asking if they needed a hand, but didn’t think he could work on another man’s farm, stand there with his hat in his hands asking to be a hired man. He passed a sawmill, tasting the spicy odor of new-sawn wood mixed with the musty smell of old sawdust piles. He smelled his own body on his clothes, even through the laundry soap and a day on the line, not rank, but familiar, the smell of tangled sheets on the bed at home, of his folded blue work shirts.

Corn and wheat farms spraddled out to the horizon, fields cut by white ruler roads edged with farms, everywhere the corners square, the partitioned earth hypnotic, the only relief in converging lines of perspective and distance and the angled flight of birds. Miles of cropland rolled between the rigid farmhouses. Far away he saw a tractor drawing multiple plows in black, contoured furrows as though the driver lay his pattern of curves and bends against the image of a sinuous river held in his mind.

The scale of the farms bothered him. The home place would be a joke to these birds, his twenty-acre field a turnaround space. As he drove he imagined the kind of place he half-planned to find and settle on, not like the home place with its steep rough fields and sour soil, its invading brush and trees, but not like these unrolled landscapes with their revolving skies. He hadn’t known Minnesota was so level. But it was not a quiet landscape. The rise and fall of wind made the land seem to move in slow shudders.

His own place would be a small farm, maybe two hundred and fifty acres, gently swelling earth like the curve of hip and breast, good pasture. He saw his Holsteins grazing, up to their hocks in good grass. The soil would be crumbly and stoneless. There would be a stream with flat rich bottomland on each side for corn and hay crops, and a woodlot, say fifty acres of tall straight hardwood, a sugarbush, low-branched sweet trees on a south slope. On the height of his land he imagined a stand of evergreen, and in the dark spruce a spring welling up from the earth’s pure underground water. Get a tractor, good machinery. He’d make it pay. His hands gripped the steering wheel, he looked in the rearview mirror seeing his steady eyes, the black springing hair. His strength pressured up in him, waiting to be used.

A few miles north of Rice he slowed down when he caught the hitchhiker’s silhouette, flaring bell-bottom pants and jaunty cap. The sun baked the hood. He was feeling good moving out again after the greasy shop, in the mood for company. He pulled up. The echo of the engine’s smooth beating sounded sweet to him. The sailor was a big, sandy-headed man, a potato face and needle eyes, his mood to talk entering the car before he did.

‘You’re a sight for sore eyes,’ said the man. ‘I been standin’ here and shufflin’ along and standin’ some more for about two days. I Jesus Christ swear I got to look like trouble, must put the fear of the old Harry in drivers. Ain’t this a nice spring day? Everybody picks up a serviceman, I get rides from Norfolk to here took me two days, three rides, but not in Minnesota! No sir, not here in my goddamn home state where Suspicious is everybody’s middle name. Goddamn scandahoovians. One guy slowed down, come on the brake so’s the gravel sprayed up a little, but the minute I put my hand on the door handle and he looked over at me he took off like there was a big prize for whoever got to Little Falls first, and he was in the back row.’

‘You headed for Little Falls?’ asked Loyal.

‘General direction, yes. Right on the spot, no. I’m goin’ to pay a surprise visit to my better half, to my little missus up in Leaf River, north of Wadena. About four people live there, and when I’m around I’m one of ’em, milk cows, cut hay, fight with the neighbor. When I’m not around I want to know if anybody is takin’ my place. Where I been I seen too many dear Johns came slippin’ in like the old knife and I got to thinkin’, what about Kirsten, see I know about the scandahoovians ’cause I married one, I think, what about Kirsten and Jugo. Jugo lives the next farm down, we work together, hay, fence, help out, whatever you have to do, I got a broken harrow Jugo lends, he’s got a hay rake the teeth fall out, he takes mine. So she writes to me, tells me Jugo’s wife died around the end of March, nice woman, good-lookin’, good full woman, I could of appreciated that. She was bit by a skunk, says the letter, tryin’ to clean out behind the woodshed, died from rabies. Doctor couldn’t do a thing for her. So I start thinkin’, what’s Jugo do when the axe handle breaks? He comes over and takes mine. What’s Jugo do when he needs some twenty-penny nails? He comes over, sees if I got any. What’s Jugo do when his wife passes on? Maybe he comes over and helps himself to mine since I’m not around. So I got a week’s leave and only three days is left.’ He broke off the flood of words and pointed at a shambling figure on the shoulder of the road. ‘Hey, pick up that guy. He’s o.k., I talked to him yesterday, and won’t nobody pick him up until hell freezes sideways. He’s a Indian, but he’s o.k.’

Loyal thought hitchhikers were coming out of the woodwork on the first warm day. He’d driven a thousand miles without seeing anybody thumbing, and here were two of them within a couple of miles.

‘You know him?’

‘Naw. He walked past me yesterday afternoon, stopped and talked for a while. He just got out of the Army. He’s some kind of different, but he comes from right up the road here. He’ll liven things up. That’s the reason you pick up hitchers, right? Liven things up, tell a few stories, show you where they’re tattooed sometimes.’ He winked at Loyal, the little left eye disappearing behind the fatty eyelid, the sticky lashes.