It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (17 page)

I looked at him, assuming he was being sarcastic. He merely shrugged, and flopped down on the mattress.

I picked up a copy of the magazine, realizing that I hadn’t fully believed the thing existed. It smelled inky, felt vaguely as if it were smudging my finger and thumb.

“How much do you charge for it?” I asked.

A muffled “Have it for the two quid I owe you” came from the prone figure.

I put the magazine in my briefcase.

“Well . . . good seeing you, Dimitri.” “Yeah, yeah. You fuck off now.” “Good night then.”

A light was on in the drawing room when I got home. I climbed the front steps and looked into the room through the gaps in the half-closed Venetian blinds.

Karen was there with our friends Jane and Ed Maddox. Jane and Ed lived on the other side of the shared garden and often came over for after-dinner drinks. They both worked in the City.

Liqueur bottles and coffee cups were set out on the table. Liqueur coffees were one of Karen’s specialties.

I stood in the cool air, looking in. This was my own drawing room, and these were my friends, but the prospect of joining them was more than I could face at that moment. Quietly, I turned my key in the door and crept inside, treading softly along the corridor and up the stairs.

I went into the bedroom and took off my coat. From downstairs I heard laughter. Seeing my briefcase on the floor, I remembered Dimitri’s magazine. I sat on the bed and took it out, holding it to the pale light that came in from the garden lamp. It was a tatty, rudimentary production, a relic from the brief moment between the fall of communism and the rise of the laptop, put together with just a typewriter and a photocopier, by the look of it. There at the front was the editorial Dimitri had spoken of: “Idealism in History: Jean Jaures and the Millennium.” I ran my eye over the dense paragraphs, some of which had been pasted crookedly to the original copy, giving a lurching effect. Gray, broken lines from overcopying lay across the pages in a kind of visual static. I tried to read the article but gave up after a few sentences. The thing seemed unutterably wretched, slightly unwholesome too, a relic that hadn’t quite finished decaying.

I put it aside, stood up, crossed over to the window. A peculiar, anxious restlessness moved in waves through my stomach and chest.

“Paul—”

My wife was standing in the doorway.

“Why didn’t you come in and say hello?”

“I’m coming,” I heard myself say. “I was just on my way down.”

She gazed at me, her lips neatly together. After a moment she turned and went back downstairs. Shoaled clusters of petals on the cherry tree gleamed in the semidarkness outside, extraordinarily profuse. Beyond them, curving up from the mansard roofs of the houses opposite, bright stars dotted the blue-bronze sky, with innumerable fainter ones in between. For a moment it seemed to me there was something almost mocking in the abundance of these things. The insanely prolific blossoming tree; the thick, flowering borders of peonies, roses, columbines, and camellias in the communal garden beyond; the great yellow and brown plane trees with their branches already heavy under a mass of budding foliage, then overhead the teeming glimmer of an inexhaustibly profligate creation.

I went downstairs. Sounds of conviviality came from the drawing room. Karen was telling the Maddoxes that I had just been in Dalston.

“Catching up with a Trotskyite he hasn’t seen since university,” I heard her say, “if you can imagine.”

As I opened the door, I thought of the ants Dimitri had described, the “repletes,” and for a moment saw myself all swollen and distended, hanging upside down from the ceiling of my drawing room, waiting to be milked. Grotesque . . . And yet I realized it would be a long time before I would be able to rid myself of the image.

Ed and Jane grinned at me as I entered the room. I tried to make myself look cheerful as I said hello.

“Dalston?” Ed said.

I nodded.

“Good God! You’d better have a drink, old cock, then tell us all about it.”

The Peebles, father and son, came over to introduce themselves when we moved in, five years ago. Dean, the father, was slow to speak, awkward when he did. But Rick was talkative, his eyes roving inquisitively over us and our boxes of possessions. A fuzz of reddish stubble covered his neatly rounded head and pointed chin. His voice was soft, almost velvety, with a sprung quality, each word like a plucked banjo note. He told us he did a variety of odd jobs in landscaping and construction, tree work being what he enjoyed most, the more difficult the better. He would climb up in a harness and spiked boots to drop limbs from trees that stood too close to people’s houses to fell conventionally, or he’d drive out in his pickup to haul storm-tangled, half-blown-over trees out of one another’s branches, then cut them up for firewood. “Any jobs like that you need doing,” he told us, “I’m your man.”

Sometime after that visit my wife and I passed two small children climbing the steep slope of Vanderbeck Hollow. They were both in tears, and we stopped to see if we could help. Their mother had put them out of the car for fighting, they told us, and they were walking home.

Home, it turned out, was Rick’s house. Rick had met their mother, Faye, a few weeks earlier, at a Harley-Davidson rally, and she’d moved in, bringing these two with her. Rick’s father had already moved out. Faye herself we met when we dropped off the children. She didn’t seem to care about our interference in her punishment. She was a thin black-haired woman with pitted skin, bright blue eyes, and a dab of hard crimson at the center of her upper lip. She didn’t say much.

They had their first baby the next year, a girl. Rick used to tuck her into his hunting jacket while he worked in his front yard, fixing his trucks or sharpening his chain saw blades. He liked being a father—from the start he’d treated Faye’s two elder children as his own—but it was soon apparent that his new responsibilities were a strain for him. After a day operating the stone crusher at the Andersonville quarry or cutting rebar with one of the construction crews in town, he’d come home, eat dinner, then turn on a set of floodlights he’d rigged up to the house and start cutting and splitting firewood to make extra money. He sold it for seventy dollars a cord, which was cheap even then. I often bought a cord or two for our woodstove. Once he asked how I made my living. “Gaming the system,” I replied, intending to sound amusingly cryptic. “You must be good at it” was all he said, pointing to our new Subaru.

He bought a car for Faye, cutting wood later and later into the night to pay for it, renting a mechanical splitter from the hardware store and erecting huge log piles all around his house. A note of exasperation entered his talk; he seemed bewildered by the difficulty of making ends meet. Here he was, a young man in his prime, able to take care of his physical needs, to plow his own driveway, fix his own roof, hunt and butcher his own meat, and yet every day was a struggle. If it wasn’t money, it was offenses to his pride, which was strung tight, like every other part of him. He was always recounting (reliving, it almost seemed) insults and slights he’d received from various bosses and other representatives of the official world, along with the defiant ripostes he’d made. When Faye got a job on the night shift at Hannaford and was kept past her clocking-out time, he called up the manager at the store. “1 told that freakin’ weasel to get off her back,” he said to me with a satisfied grin. She was fired soon after.

To blow off steam, he would barrel up and down the hill in his truck, churning up clouds of dust from the gravel surface. Or he would carry a six-pack up to the woods above the road and sit drinking among the oaks and ashes along the ridge. I would often find a can of Molson by a rock up there in the bracken where he’d dumped it: his gleaming spoor. He was building a little cabin on the other side of the ridge, he told me once. It was state land there, but he figured no one would worry. What was it for? I asked him. He shrugged. “Just somewhere to go . .

Another time he told me he’d seen a lion up there.

“A mountain lion?”

“Yep. Catamount.”

“I didn’t know they lived around here.” In fact I’d read that despite rumored sightings, there were no mountain lions in this area.

He gave me a glance, and I saw he’d registered my disbelief but also that he didn’t hold it against me. “Yep. Came right up to the cabin. Sucker just stood there in the entranceway, big as a freakin’ buffalo. I kept one of the paw prints he left in the dirt. Dug it out and let it dry. I’ll show you someday . . .”

As a boy, when the Peebles property had marked the end of the road, he’d had the run of Vanderbeck Hollow, hunting deer and wild turkey, fishing for trout in the rock pools along the stream that wound down the deep crease between Spruce Clove and Donell Mountain. He wasn’t exactly a model of ecological awareness, with his beer cans, his oil-leaking ATV that he used for dragging tree carcasses down to his truck, not to mention the roaring, fumy snowmobile he drove along the logging trails all winter, but he knew the woods up here with an intimacy that seemed its own kind of love. I walked with him up to one of the old quarries one spring morning and found myself at the receiving end of a detailed commentary on the local wildlife. To my uninformed eye, the trees and plants were more or less just an undifferentiated mass of brown and green matter, and the effect of his pointing and naming was like having a small galaxy switch itself on star by star around me. “Trout lily,” he said, and a patch of yellow-centered flowers lit up under a boulder. “Goat’s rue” . . . and a silvery-stemmed plant shone out from a clearing a few yards off. “Mountain laurel”—he went on, gesturing at some dark green shrubs— “blossoms real pretty in late spring. Won’t be for another month or more yet. They call ’em laurel slicks when it grows in thickets like this. Sometimes heath balds. It’s poisonous; even honey made from the flowers is supposed to be poisonous. See here, the burl?” He put his finger on a hard, knotlike growth. “Ol’ timers used to make pipes out of ’em. My dad has one . .

In his lifetime he’d seen the road developed a mile and a half beyond the family property, the surrounding land sold off in twenty.-acre lots, with capes and timber frames and swimming pools and chain-link fences and no hunting signs going farther and farther up the hill every year, and he hated it all, though his hatred, characteristically, stopped short of the actual human beings responsible for these incursions. He was standing on the road with me one afternoon, complaining about the arrival of backhoes to dig the foundation for a new house on the property of Cora Chastine, the neighbor below him, when Cora herself rode out of her driveway on her chestnut mare. Seeing him, she began thanking him for a favor he’d done her the night before, pulling a dinner guest’s car out of the ditch at one in the morning. Smiling gallantly, he assured her it was no problem and that he hadn’t minded being woken at that hour. “Nice lady,” he said in his purring voice when she rode on, as if there were no important connection in his mind between the person herself and her contribution to the destruction of his haunts.

He and Faye had a second child, another girl. A hurricane— unusual in these parts—struck that year. Torrential rain had fallen for several days before, loosening roots so that the trees came crashing down like sixty-foot bowling pins when the wind hit, turning the woods into scenes of carnage, the trees lying in their sap and foliage and splintered limbs like victims of a massacre, the vast holes left by their roots gaping like bomb craters. Within the hurricane there were localized tornadoes, one of which plowed a trail of devastation through our own woods. Rick offered to do the cleanup for us, pointing out that there were some valuable trees we could sell for timber. He proposed doing all the work himself over the course of a year, to use a cousin’s team of horses to drag the timber out so as to avoid the erosion big machines caused, to load it with a hand-winched pulley (a “come-along” was his quaint name for this), to chop up all the crowns for firewood, and to haul off the stumps to the town dump.

I prevaricated, knowing he had no insurance and sensing possible problems if he should injure himself. A lawyer friend told us on no account to let him do the work, and we hired a fully insured professional logging crew instead. They brought in a skidder the size of a tugboat, a bulldozer, two tractors, and a grappler with a claw that could grab a trunk a yard thick and hoist it thirty feet into the air. For several weeks these machines tore through our woods; bulldozing rocks, branches, and stumps into huge unsightly piles and ripping a raw red trail across stream beds and fern-filled clearings to the landing stage by the road, where they loaded the limbless trunks onto their double-length trailer to sell at the lumberyard. I ran into Rick several times on the road during the operation. He never reproached us for passing him over for the job; in fact offered good advice on how not to get cheated out of our share of the proceeds. But I felt uncomfortable seeing him walk by, as though I’d done him out of work that was his by rights.

He and Faye got married the following summer. We were invited to the celebratory pig roast. It was a big party: beat-up old pickup trucks lining the road halfway down the hill and twenty or thirty motorcycles parked in the driveway. We recognized a few neighbors; otherwise it was all Faye and Rick’s biker friends in leather jackets and bandannas. At the center of the newly cleaned-up front yard a dance floor had been improvised out of bluestone slabs that Rick must have dragged from one of the old quarries up in the woods. Beside it a band was playing fast, reeling music: two fiddles, a guitar, a banjo, and a mandolin, the players belting out raucous harmonies as they flailed away at their instruments.