John Henry Days (51 page)

At least the pervert ran the faucet to cover whatever nasty thing he was doing in there. Luckily under the sink all manner of industrial cleaner, shiftless offbrands that sometimes wandered into Street Hardware, dropped off by shady distributors, were on call. One time a pigeon flew into the bathroom window and shat and hopped and spat on everything in the bathroom for who knows how long. Her mother chased it out with a broom. It was Pamela’s chore to clean up, and for the first time she attacked a household task with meticulous zeal. Every surface could have a cootie on it, so she scrubbed, sacrificing an army of sponges in this tactical engagement. Not that she would tell him to, but her father should repeat that cleansing when he got home. The
facilities.
This pervert, she didn’t want to think about it.

He wasn’t a rapist, at least not this night. With that overcoat, though, he probably had some flashing to do. As she closed the front door, he said through pink lips, “Tell your father I might have some new stuff coming in next week that might interest him.” She put the chain on, just so he could hear her do it and know what she thought of him. It was too late to meet Angela.

The other thing she did that night was the result of less easily elaborated
motives. Revisiting it, she wishes the motel covers didn’t smell so wretchedly; she’d pull them over her head. She doesn’t know why she did it. She slit open the box and pulled out fists of newspaper. The figure wasn’t that heavy, she’d moved figurines like it many times, to sweep away the grit they attracted. It seemed identical to others her father had dragged into the house, a ceramic statue of John Henry with his loyal hammer. It had lost paint in different places than its brothers, and when her father came home he’d explain the minute differences as if she cared, point out that this was from a company out of Alabama in the fifties that specialized in railroad items and had once been owned by a country and western singer, or this was from a small West Virginia house that produced only ten John Henrys before they reconsidered and this was the first of the series, look at the crosshatching on John Henry’s cutoff pants. The statues circulated from room to room in their house. Periodically her father hit upon a new organizing scheme, and rusted drill bits replaced the framed sheet music above the couch, and the Johnny Cash album cover went into the storage room of the store for a time. These were her father’s planets and their interminable trajectories through her space. It took a few tries to break it into pieces. First couple of times it just bounced on the floor. Then she figured out how to break it. The upper body, the arms, were susceptible. She put them back in the box, delicate now as she arranged the pieces in the newspaper, mama bird to baby chicks. Swept up the white dust of its blood.

Her father cursing out Mr. Mails woke her up. Two in the morning. He cursed him out for quite a few minutes; she kept her eyes closed. When he was emptied, she heard him open the door to her bedroom. She didn’t move an inch, the door closed and that was the last time she picked up John Henry stuff for him. He never mentioned it.

A couple of days before she came down here, Pamela looked through the storage space for an appropriate box. She recognized the Diego Grapefruit Company box after all that time. The latest tenants, she saw, were piano rolls. She remembered the day her father got those things. He explained the process to her while she plotted an escape from his vicinity. He ran his fingers along the tiny perforations in the white paper scrolls and told her that when set into a compatible player piano they would tinkle out a version of “The Ballad of John Henry.” Out of the music machine would come the familiar melody, this was before the days of stereos and that’s how they listened to music in the olden days. Now they were obsolete. She said, how do you know it’s the real thing? How are you going to test it out? He didn’t have an
answer for that. She put the scrolls in a shopping bag and locked up the storage facility.

Pamela pulls back the blackout curtains. She lifts the box onto the bed and checks her special delivery. None of her father’s ashes have spilled from the urn.

W
hen we finally got the dishwasher, my mother said, you can’t fight progress.” This is Dave Brown as he implodes an empty beer can. “She liked putting her hands in the suds and scrubbing. She said it had dignity, you make a mess you should clean up after yourself. But everybody on the block had one at that point, so what choice did she have? Every magazine, they had an ad for an automatic dishwasher. What was she, the neighborhood fool? Were we a family of fools? So she said, you can’t fight progress.”

“A woman of quiet defiance,” J. offers.

“Did she have a race with the dishwasher and keel over after beating Final Rinse?”

“Rinse Cycle’s gonna be the death of me, Lord, Lord, rinse cycle’s going to be the death of me.”

In slumping assembly around the pool, the junketeers loiter and loll. Occasionally they extract beer from a styrofoam cooler and readjust the ice around the dwindling bounty. It is night, above them stars appear fixed yet career imperceptibly, correlative to a certain member of the junketeers, who reclines in apparent sloth while machinations comet through the deep black stuff of his mind.

Crickets on the stump campaign in the near woods.

“Tabling the whole hubris thing here for a moment,” Tiny starts after a volcanic belch, “maybe Johnny’s real problem was a congenital heart defect. You know the religious edicts against eating pig—because if you didn’t cook it long enough you’d get trichinosis. The bearded community fathers gotta come up with some holy reason to get people not to eat pig. So it’s like that. Creating a fable to explain something natural but they don’t have the science yet. Genetics. Johnny knows from childhood Big Bend is going to be the death of him because he has heart trouble. It runs in the family. High blood pressure—you know black people have higher blood pressure than white people. What does he expect to happen with all that hard work? They didn’t
know about this kind of stuff back then. Might as well be mainlining pastrami sandwiches.”

“Black people and fat people—high blood pressure,” J. says.

“Good point. Hey, can you pass me some of those chips over there?”

“I’m all into the prophecy thing, you understand,” Frenchie grunts, his arms splayed in a gesture of Gallic expansiveness. “I respect it, I’m a Sagittarius, have been since the day I was born. What I don’t get is, if you read the horoscope and the experts tell you to be careful about financial transactions or look out for Tauruses, what do you do? You keep the purse strings tight and look out for those horns. John Henry has a premonition that Big Bend is going to be the death of him. So you avoid Big Bend Tunnel. Meet a guy named Benjamin Tounelle, he’s a big guy, you avoid him too. He could have avoided the whole situation if he’d listened to his horoscope.”

“There goes Frenchie again, bringing the topic around to fate versus free will.”

“Everything’s a think piece to this guy.”

“Think he had a choice?”

“We all have choices. Look at that atrocious shirt you’re wearing, J.— that’s a choice.”

“Pass me one of those beers, will you, son?”

“I was born with a caul on my face.”

“A what?”

“A caul. On my face.”

“He means afterbirth. He had afterbirth stuck on his face when he was born.”

“It means you have special gifts.”

“It’s true—it’s not everyone who gets to be a contributing writer to six different tax shelter magazines.”

“This is my impression of a contributing writer.”

As the next cricket candidate described his platform, it was the only sound to be heard among the junketeers. After an appropriate time had passed, the junketeers chuckled at the joke.

“Okay, okay. This is my impression of a contributing editor.”

After another interval of silence, shorter this time, as the joke settled amiably into its promising future as an in-joke among their number, the junketeers chuckled.

“Who won the race?”

“John Henry.”

“The steam drill, dummy.”

“Steam drill always wins in the end.”

“I meant at the thing today.”

“That’s right—you were in the tunnel of love.”

“The local boy won.”

“They were both local boys.”

“Exactly.”

“I think it might make a nice article. Pretty butch stuff, it might make a good pitch for one of those new men’s mags starting up. Man against machine becomes man against man, how the times change the nature of the contest.”

“Beer for you, J., or are you still on the wagon?”

“I’m cool.”

“You know the hard thing about being on the wagon?”

“What?”

“So many hours in the day.”

“What time is the grand coronation tomorrow?”

“I think the stamp ceremony is at one o’clock. In the town square. My flight is taking off at five.”

“Mine, too. J.—you going to that paperweight thing next week?”

“Yeah. You?”

“No. Just wondering.”

“He’s trying to protect his investment. Frenchie thinks you’re going to beat the record. Has a hundred bucks on you.”

“You’re betting?”

“Of course we’re betting. We haven’t had this much fun since, well, since Bobby Figgis. In total disclosure, I don’t think you’re going to make it. No offense. I just don’t think you’re in shape.”

“He can do it. Look in his eyes. He’s halfway there.”

“One Eye has spoken, glimpsing into the mysteries of the human spirit. So what kind of party you want to have when you beat the record? I think we should rent out something appropriate to the occasion, like a dive bar downtown. Lock up the place for a couple of hours and have festivities.”

“When it gets to that I’ll tell you. Frenchie—why don’t you tell us a story? What about that incident in Caracas?”

Beset by such idiots, One Eye buttons himself up in smug resentment, a finely tailored item of apparel, every seam stiletto, each stitch bitter. He is beset by idiots, he can see this clearly; his depth perception may have been affected
by his wound, but not his moral acuity. Setting his half-full swill to the concrete he takes leave of his comrades without a word. He’s put off this mission for too long, distracted by a game that had occurred to him: to see how many times his comrades could repeat the lines they have said so many times before. Their troupe improvises, of course, each locality has its customs to incorporate, but they respect the spirit of the text. The run of their show is completely booked, far in advance, and there are obligations. Dropping out of the show is no simple matter. Bracing himself he ticks his tongue against his teeth and squares his shoulders.

His progress up to the second floor of the Talcott Motor Lodge is to him a gallows shuffle up stairs to destiny’s waiting instrument. The mechanism up there. Such is the cast of his recent hallucination, extreme, melodramatic. He remembers in Brazil, in Rio on an airline magazine’s dime to help repair crime’s erosion of the tourist trade, he noted the faces of the blinded as he walked the streets. All his far-flung kin. No one wore eye patches. Their wounds were on display, darkened sockets pooling dread from passersby. One Eye covers his wound as much for himself as other people.

From his adventure this afternoon, One Eye finds the key easily. He takes one last look to see if his fellow dogfaces have noticed his disappearance— maybe J. has changed his mind and is halfway up the stairs—but no one sees him. What is he trying to prove exactly? Ridiculous times call for ridiculous measures, and that is enough, he is inside Lucien’s room with a hundred keys in his hand like clanking alms-coins.

Two things register first. The first is parcel of this weekend. Instead of the maudlin drawing of railroad tracks that hangs above the bed in his room, Lucien’s room features a drawing of John Henry. It’s a headshot of the man of the hour, familiar to him from all the hours at the fair: the postage stamp. This version is full color, blown up, bordered by drawn-in perforations for effect. Along the bottom it reads, First Annual John Henry Days July 13, 1996. What strikes him is the fact of today’s date fixed under glass. It implies a series and a division: this day and what has come before from all those fairs to come. Big weekend for the town, of course, that’s why he’s here, to help bring it into being. The little dispatches of his kind contribute. Next year’s guests see the poster and feel part of a ready-made tradition. Seeing the date up there, even on flimsy hooks drilled into cheap plaster, it is monumentalized. Glory attends even to this small affair in the mountains. He takes it as an omen, for today is also the date of his manumission. It is the day he exits the List.

The second thing he notices is that Lucien’s computer is on.

Lucien’s laptop is open in a sleek black L on the desk. References cycle through his brain: L for List; Venus stepping from her big clam. One Eye glances at the bathroom, maybe he’s in there, but no, One Eye saw Lucien and his party leave the parking lot with his own eye, half an hour before, and the p.r. man’s dinner with the local burghers will leave him with more than enough time for the caper. Time enough for a few simple keystrokes. Tap tap. Sliding into the chair, fingers fluttering like a pianist minutes from performance, he notices the screen saver’s joke. A dollar bill roves and glides across the passive matrix screen, arrogantly ricocheting off edges with impunity. Hmm. It’s kind of a bald joke for Lucien, distant from his usual wit; surely the novelty would have worn off after a few days. But maybe it’s not meant for Lucien’s amusement.

There’s no sound outside the door, no detectives to nab the prey of the intricate sting operation. He taps a key, the dollar bill disappears into the machine’s billfold, and he finds himself looking at the List. The file open on the computer is the List.

If Lawrence knew One Eye and J. were in the bathroom when he returned from picking up his boss, why didn’t he say anything? The flunky’s not cool enough a customer to have kept his mouth shut, not by any stretch. If he knew there was someone in his room he’d have shrieked like a tot with a rat in its crib. It’s possible One Eye left the file open when they made their hasty retreat to the bathroom, but he clearly remembers the window closing. Maybe they missed something when they put the room back together. At any rate, Lucien knows someone is on to him, and perhaps he even knew it at the fair, when he and Lawrence strolled up to them. He knows.