Boonville (29 page)

Enough of linguistics, John thought; he had already learned that much from trying to talk to Christina when she was in a bad mood. Given the problems implicit in language and people's inability to listen or empathize, it amazed him that anything got accomplished or that two people could cohabit without ripping each other's heads off. But this was no time for a rhetoric debate. Night was turning to day and they were a far cry from finishing the project. Despite the coffee, John was tired. He didn't check his watch. Knowing how late it was would only make it worse.

“Enough small talk,” Sue said, appearing to come to the same conclusion. “I came here to do a job, not to be insulted. If you have to address me, my name is Sue.”

John was tempted to sing out, “How do you do?” in the voice of Johnny Cash, but restrained himself.

Without another word, Sue headed toward the first cementless area of crosses with her hammer, the rest of the Albion Nation following. Pensive took up her position at the nail gun, shrugging off Franny and Sue's exchange as if the conclusion was as good as could be expected given the fact that lions were lying down with lambs. Mike squeezed Pensive's arm before joining the pack, seeming to say, “You know how Sue gets.”

“If she does dance on my grave,” Franny told John, one man to another, as they wrestled crosses from the back of his truck. “I hope it's a striptease. Maybe she could raise two things from the dead.”

Franny had brought the carving of Sarah in this haul. They lifted it from among the other crosses. Weather had marred one side of the statue with water blotches and there was a long blemish of dirt where it had been resting against the ground. Mites had wormed away a section near her leg. There were patches of fungus on the lower half. John could see it hadn't been a flattering self-portrait to begin with. Sarah's arms were folded across her chest in a guarded manner. She had cut her features accurately, but in doing so they had become distorted; the softness of her skin and grace were lost in the rigidity of the wood, along with the ease of her stance and vitality of her eyes. She would have been better off cheating, distorting her attributes to reach a closer approximation. Sarah was a beautiful woman. The statue was haggard. It was odd that she would choose to chisel herself this way. At least she hadn't whittled her face onto the body of a squirrel.

They slung the statue with a caber toss motion back into the truck after emptying out the rest of the crosses. It belonged at the other end of town in front of the population sign, the last thing Sarah would see as she was leaving. They should have tilted it in the truck bed to get at the crosses underneath instead of pulling it all the way out. Being tired was making them work harder. John didn't know how Franny had managed to load it into his truck at the Waterfall. Someone must have helped, maybe the giant in training, Raven. Either way, Franny was agile, which John attributed to his being so short, keeping a low center of gravity all these years. But if John got to be Franny's age, forget about lifting heavy objects or mixing it up with lesbians, if he was still blowing his own nose he would consider it an accomplishment.

John saw another set of headlights coming from Manchester Road, pausing at the stop sign. He thought it was Cal deciding on a plan of action. The vehicle rolled into the middle of the highway, through the intersection of lanes and across the street, where it parked with its engine running on the skirt of the road, facing them. It was some kind of seventies muscle car.

“Which way are you going to run?” Franny asked him.

John had started to fill the Datsun with crosses to spot the unfinished area so the Albion Nation could do their work. He didn't want to break stride. The phantom driver was going to have to do more than lurk in order to scare him.

“Ignore him,” Pensive advised, testing the limits of her extension cord. “He just wants a reaction.”

“A man that crazy is liable to get one,” Franny said.

“Not the one he wants,” Pensive said, firing a couple of nails into the air, which landed in the street with dull thunks.

John couldn't make out Daryl's face at this distance, but he knew it was him. The car idled, missing on one of its pistons. John wondered if Daryl was trying to figure out the meaning of the exhibit or if he had come looking for him.

“Pensive, you want to call Sue and the ladies over,” Franny asked.

“He's perpetuating his own negativity,” Pensive said. “He wants us to meet him with resistance because it's the only thing that feeds him. He doesn't have the positive energy to join us. He can only destroy us if we let him grow on our anger.”

“Or if he has a gun,” Franny said, a scenario not in line with ancient myth or the universe's perpetual battle of good versus evil, but one Pensive must have realized was a possibility, because she reloaded her nail gun.

John wasn't worried. If Daryl had planned on taking him out, he wouldn't be fooling around with stalker tactics. He wasn't wily enough to engage in psychological warfare or in control of his emotions to the point where he wouldn't just drive up and start shooting. He must have understood that John and Sarah weren't an item, although the project in some way included her, seeing that her crosses were laid out in the street. What John hoped to achieve with them, Daryl couldn't have known. John wasn't fully aware himself. He only knew he was seducing a side of Sarah that Daryl didn't understand.

“It seems there's always a threat of violence in this town,” John said, looking at Daryl and his car. “I'm learning to live with it.”

He retreated to the work, believing that doing anything else would give Daryl reason to assume his guilt or cowardice and to attack. Franny and Pensive stood watch for a minute to make sure Daryl wasn't setting up a rifle. Apparently, Daryl had a reputation as a gun nut always up for target practice. A truck neared and John turned at the sound in time to see Daryl drinking from a bottle in the wash of light. Whatever he was consuming wouldn't add to the levity of his mood.

Having committed to ignoring him, John switched his attention to the arrival of a truck whose headlights had left Daryl looming in the dark. By the loud music and skidding brakes, John knew the Kurtses had returned. In the cab, wedged between them, he saw Billy Chuck. In the rear of the truck was an overflowing stack of wooden slats all about the same size, two inches wide and five feet long. They were painted white, peeling in some spots and flecked in others, with a tangle of wire linking them together. John guessed this mound of wood had been Hank's fence.

“Ask and you shall receive,” Kurts said, stepping from the truck, waving to Daryl's car across the highway.

The three men looked like a quarter of the Dirty Dozen come straight from the front, tired expressions of recent combat on their faces, pockets of sweat beneath their armpits, fresh mud on their boots. Billy Chuck was wearing the only clothes that John had ever seen him in, causing him to wonder if he had any others. By the way they tugged on their belts, adjusting and wriggling inside their jeans, John suspected they were freewheeling too. Underwear for them was probably considered a middle-class affectation.

“You got two choices for them crucifix stands,” Billy Chuck said, spitting dramatically, playing the munitions expert called in for the bombing of a single bridge. “Like for Christmas trees or like for picture stands.”

John thought if they could erect the crosses perpendicularly with the picture-stand design, he would prefer that approach to keep the braces out of view. They tested one on a squirrel and it toppled sideways with the slightest touch. It wouldn't be able to sustain the winds. John thought the Christmas-stand model would have to be employed. They did another experiment and found that
wouldn't work without shims beneath the top slat on both sides. Too much work, not enough time. Finally, they nailed a slat to the bottom of a cross as if the squirrel were a diver at the end of a platform, then another using the picture frame model, forming a stiff triangle. Perfect. Braces out of view, squirrels stable.

Billy Chuck and the Kurtses emptied their truck, dislodging the wire from the wood. Pensive began attaching stands, Franny driving her Pacer as she went along to keep the nail gun juiced. John was ready to lay out the last of the crosses using the Datsun, but the final ones had to be set near Daryl's car, which got him thinking he should switch roles with someone else. He saw Reggie and Sue returning from their group to check on the next phase of the project. As they approached, John heard Sue tell Reggie that everything was going to be O.K.: “He won't try anything.”

John thought the remark was more overreaction to his penis, uncertain what it was they expected him to try? But then he understood they were talking about Kurts, who had dropped what he was doing on his brother's foot.

“Regina?” Kurts said.

Reggie curled into Sue who draped an arm across her back, pulling Reggie close. Kurts' brother shouted something unintelligible from behind his torn lip from either the pain of a crucifix being dropped on his foot or the surprise of discovering Regina was a member of the Albion Nation. Either way, his brother told him to “Shut the fuck up!” Pensive stopped her nailing to listen in, along with Franny. Billy Chuck laughed, understanding what was taking place before John could piece it together.

“What happened to your hair?” Kurts demanded.

“It's Reggie now, dumbshit,” Sue told him. “She doesn't want to have anything to do with you.”

Reggie peeped at Kurts from beneath Sue's arm.

“I thought you were staying at your folks in Fort Bragg,” Kurts said.

“Fort Drag, maybe,” Billy Chuck threw in, for the sake of nobody.

“You don't own her,” Sue said. “She can do whatever she wants. She doesn't have to answer to you.”

“What do you have to do with this?” Kurts asked.

“Everything,” Sue clarified, tempting fate. “I'm a woman. I'm
her neighbor. I'm her lover.”

Kurts clearly believed one of Sue's answers didn't belong with the others.

John thought if Kurts had been the one to hurt Reggie, she had every right to leave him for the next ride out of town, regardless of who was driving. And if Reggie really was a lesbian, she had no business with him in the first place. John was getting into the spirit of small-town meddling. But Reggie had also acted out one of John's fears, the topic of his haiku, being displaced for a member of the opposite sex. How could you argue with that? Reggie couldn't have been asking for much upstairs, given Kurts' conversation and Sue's trite polemics, but downstairs his plumbing was all wrong, a faucet where she wanted a drain. Or something like that. She wanted what Kurts couldn't physically offer. John's heart went out to him, although he thought Kurts would make any woman curious about her own sex.

Watching the couple, John understood why Christina had been so upset; rejecting was the easier end of rejection. It might not be fun pointing someone to the door, but it was better than having it closed in your face. The other part of rejection that cut deep was when your partner found someone else, especially if they did it before you did. That's why John had been so distraught by the news of Good Neighbor Michael. He noticed that happy couples didn't care how other people lived; they were too busy being happy. Rejected single people had time on their hands, hours of it earmarked for resentment and advising others how to conduct their business. They kept photographs and trinkets, recalled memories in diaries, wrote bad poetry, left nasty messages on answering machines, wasted their time praying in vain for their partner to resume a failed relationship. People's problems were the same all across America, only the dialects changed. Sometimes genitalia.

It could have been a physical thing with Christina, too. She wasn't a lesbian, but she hadn't been hardwired to understand John's dreams and fears. You couldn't learn that sort of compassion or line of reasoning. It was everything that lived and breathed in a ghost world that surrounded your senses, sending you messages from everywhere and nowhere at once. You were born into your phobias and unobtainable purpose. Christina hadn't been enough for him, just like Kurts could never satisfy Reggie. But that was
the crudest thing you could say about someone, that they weren't enough.

The current tragedy between Kurts and Reggie played out as theater of the absurd – squirrels filling the stage instead of chairs. Kurts was too dumbfounded to become violent, even with Sue egging him on, calling him names and belittling the power of his appendage. John could tell that Kurts had invested emotion into this woman being ushered inside the Albion Nation van. He stood with his hands hanging uselessly at his sides, mouth open. Sue told him not to follow, threatening personal retribution backed by the Albion Nation; they were armed and trained to defend themselves against male intrusion.

“Wag your weenie within a hundred yards of Albion,” Sue warned, “and we'll shoot it off.”

Kurts couldn't have heard anything, concentrating as he was on Reggie, who waved apologetically from the front seat of the van. Kurts waved back.

John had seen enough of these scenes to know it would be followed by another. Whether they knew it or not, there was more dialogue to come. They would be incapable of dropping the curtain with so much drama left to play out. They had nothing else going on in their lives. Even rednecks longed for resolution and a better ending than dyke gets girl.

“If Regina's a lesbian, what does that make me?” Kurts wanted to know, watching the van drive away.

“Shit out of butt sticks,” Billy Chuck told him, punching his shoulder.

“Hell, I'd give anything to have my heart broken again,” Franny said. “You get to be my age, you wonder if the damn thing still works. The last time I fell in love, Truman was in office and she left me for a sonofabitch whose job was to uncover Communists and who probably started his investigation with me. She moved to San Diego and had a whole brood of snitches. She's probably dead now. Since then it's been the heat of a blowtorch for me. That's a long time not to feel your heart beat.”