The Cry of the Sloth (12 page)

Andy

¶

The whump of the tailgate startled Adam from his reveries, shredding the web of his thought much as an orb weaver’s intricate pattern, stretched in dewy splendor athwart a woodland path, is shredded by the dull face of an insensitive hiker. He heard the long scraping sound made by the heavy timbers sliding from the back of the truck. This was a sound he knew well, for as a younger, stronger man, more integrated personally, he had worked in construction, and for a moment he imagined he was back on the job. He sprang from the stained and lumpy mattress, half expecting to find his tool belt with his rip-claw Estwing hammer lying on a chair next to his steel-toed work boots. This was, alas, but another trick played by a cruel mind on its hapless owner. In the past three days he had eaten nothing but some berries he had found growing wild along the shore, and now, weakened by hunger, his legs gave way beneath him and he fell numbly to the floor, striking his head against the iron bed with a dull metallic thud. Out in the yard Flo heard the noise, but thought it was an eighty-pound sack of hog feed being tossed to the ground, for that is what it most resembled.

Adam must have lost consciousness, for when he opened his eyes again the air was filled with the throaty growl of a large lawnmower. Cursing his own weakness, he staggered to his feet and stumbled over to the window. He was filled with a silent incohesive rage. She was already on her fifth pass, and a wide swath of mowed meadow grass now stretched bleakly between the shack and the road. He recognized the girl on the bicycle, the girl who had been on a bicycle the last time he saw her. Now she sat perched on the high metal seat of a big green mower and with flicks of her wrist was deftly steering it this way and that. He noticed she was mowing in back and forth passes, which required her to turn the machine completely around at the end of each pass, rather than using the more efficient method of mowing in continuous circles of ever-decreasing radii. As he watched, the tractor suddenly lurched to a halt, the engine moaned in almost human agony, and died with a little puff of white smoke from beneath the engine cowl. “Damn,” she chirped, and her voice was clear and bright as the water of the great lake flashing in postmatinal splendor behind her. She hopped lithely to the ground. She knelt on all fours, bending low and curving her back as she reached far under the chassis in order to pull a tenacious mass of thorny brambles from the drive shaft. He noticed she was wearing cut-off jeans. He noticed the sinewy calves and muscular thighs and the small tight buttocks. And once again something tugged at his memory.

She was aware of his gaze upon her. It was oddly warm and moist, as if he were caressing her with his eyeballs, and she shivered with mingled fear and pleasure. Flo had lived long enough to know the terrible hunger lurking in the eyes of womanless men. She had felt it on the lonely streets of Kearney, Nebraska, where, as a young girl away from home for the first time, she had worked for the post office as a substitute mail carrier in training, while earning a degree in English from the university. Oh, but that was long ago, before her mother’s slow death from ovarian cancer and her father’s accident had brought her back to the farm, to the long days of backbreaking labor and the lonely nights reading Chaucer in her room, and now the sick chickens! Though she would not admit it to anyone, she missed the gazes. She had felt a strange excitement at the knowledge that the men, sitting on benches sipping from brown paper sacks or leaning from the high cabs of cross-country rigs idling at traffic lights, were undressing her in the streets. She had been aware of the way the strap of the mail bag crossed between her breasts, pulling her shirt taut against them. And she also had been aware that through some mysterious action at a distance she was causing tumescences and spasms in the bodies of those who saw her.

And now, as she worked at the tangle of briar and weed wrapping the drive shaft, she felt it again. Adam had come out onto the porch and was leaning heavily against the wall.

She walked over, wiping her hands on the back of her shorts. She stood at the bottom of the steps looking up at him. She noticed the goose egg on his forehead.

“You’re hurt,” she said. She wanted to go closer, but something held her back, for she was wary of this stranger standing before her.

He did not answer right away, but continued to look at her, his eyes moving up and down her slim body. She felt his eyes removing her garments one by one. She noticed a change in the cries of the gulls. “Just a bump,” he said at last.

Now she noticed the berry stains on his hands and mouth. She remembered a Chippewa legend. She lifted her arms as his eyes clasped the bottom of her t-shirt and lifted it. The gulls cried demonically.

God, what shit!!!

Flo lay on her back in a bed of tall grass pressed flat by the tumult of two writhing bodies. Two bodies that a moment before had cleaved to each other in the explosive thrust of passion, but now lay apart, spent and exhausted. She thought of empty shotgun shells lying in a field after a dove shoot. She looked at the clouds drifting overhead, going who knows where. Something was troubling her about this man, this place. There was something odd. Perhaps it was just that the gulls had fallen silent, or … “Where’s your car?” she asked lazily.

Adam sat bolt upright, all his senses suddenly alert. He had forgotten about the car! He saw it in his mind’s eye on the main street of the small farming town where he had left it three days before with fifty cents in the meter. Too late now. He thought of the inevitable confrontation with the towing company, and he looked down at Flo’s naked body in the grass beside him as if for the last time.

¶

IF WASHER FAILS TO START AFTER INSERTING QUARTERS, NOTIFY LANDLORD. DO NOT KICK IT!

¶

Fontini!

I was in my study working late last night when I was startled by the sound of breaking glass. I found on my living room floor what I presume to be your brick. This was, I suppose, a witty follow-up to your series of insulting postcards. (These I have turned over, along with the brick, to the police for analysis. Did you think of wearing gloves?) It is noble of you to want to avenge what you perceive as my insults to Mrs. Fontini, that cow. I suggest that having achieved whatever emotional solace one gets from hurling masonry, you now desist from further mischief.

Watchfully yours,

Whittaker

p.s. Where’s my money?

¶

Dear Jolie,

Well, after spending I don’t know how many hours last week staring at the photographs from Mama’s box, I have found him (me) at last, thanks to a transparent plastic grid I rescued from your art supply satchel before I tossed it out (you should have sent me that list). I placed the photos one at time on the kitchen table. I laid the grid on top and scrutinized each photo through a magnifying glass, one square at a time, using the grid as guide. This is the technique the police use when they search a house for something very small, a minute fragment of bone from the victim, for example. They lay an imaginary grid over the whole house, and then they search the squares one after another. You have to check off each square as soon as you have looked in it, and you keep doing this until there are no squares left.

You can see how in the case of the photographs this was the way to go. Unless I had been sent away someplace (and wouldn’t I remember that?), I surely must have blundered into at least one or two of the hundreds of snapshots: a clumsy, not-very-observant boy lumbering after a ball, perhaps, or tumbling down the steps ahead of an outsized father brandishing a belt, to explode into the viewfinder just as the shutter flew open. Of course they would have made a mental note to destroy that picture when it came back from the developer, but, I asked myself, would they always have remembered? How important, I reasoned, could my absence have been to them? Somewhere along the way, might they not have let a small fragment of bone slip into a crack? Perhaps they failed to notice me lurking in the distant background, maybe even hiding there.

So I sat myself at the kitchen table, all the photos in a big box on a chair beside me, and I scrutinized them one at a time, centimeter by centimeter, occasionally using a pair of calipers constructed from two pencils and a rubber band to gauge relative size and distance. After scanning each photo I marked it with a big D for “Done,” though that could also stand for “Devoid of me” or even “Dud.” My efforts, in the end, were not in vain. I was able to discover myself not once but three times: first as a vase, then as a dog, and finally as a strange boy peering from behind an obese woman. You laugh. I mean for you to laugh, though I am not joking.

Exhibit One. This is a snapshot of Peg, age about twelve, in shorts and halter. She is directing a jet of water from a garden hose against the side of a large black vehicle parked in the driveway. I think it is a 1938 LaSalle. The water is ricocheting from the car into her face. Judging by her smile, she seems not to mind this, and that fact, plus the shorts and halter, tells me the weather is very warm. A house, which I suppose is the house we lived in at the time, looms behind her, two stories, unremarkable. We lived in so many houses, moved so frequently, that I have only a jumble of architectural fragments as memory of them, a door here, a water-stained ceiling there. As for the house in the photograph, I notice white curtains on the windows downstairs; on the windows upstairs there are canvas shades. One shade has been drawn all the way down. Perhaps someone is asleep in that room, even though the little shadow puddled at Peg’s feet tells us it is the middle of the day. Perhaps the person in that room has a hangover. Now look closely, as I did, and you will see what appears to be an oviform vase sitting on the interior sill of the window adjacent to that one. There is a wire screen on that window and this, combined with the smallness of the photo, makes it impossible to resolve the image into a shape which will be entirely unambiguous. There are stalks of things that appear to be flowers projecting from its top. I looked at it through the loupe. I scratched my chin and then my nose, foraging for a clue, and then it came to me: Why did I
assume
the egg-shaped thing was a vase? Why couldn’t it just as well be a head? Why
shouldn’t
it be? The longer I spent studying the picture, the more intensely I could
feel
myself pressing my nose to the wire screen as I tried to peer down from the window of my stifling little closet of a room at Peg having fun with the hose.

I know what you are thinking, because I know how your mind works when it comes to my ideas. You are going to say, “What about the flowers? You
said
there seem to be flowers in that vase-like object in the window. I suppose you had flowers sprouting out of your head. Ha ha.”

To this I respond: Why do you say those are flowers and not, say, feathers? For the nonce, instead of flowers, why not imagine an Indian headdress—how would
that
look? I don’t remember owning one of those, but I don’t remember
not
owning one either. In fact, I said those stalk-like things looked like flowers only because one
expects
flowers in a
vase;
but if it is a
head
, then they look like feathers. And
if
they look like feathers, then that thing is a head, a forlorn little head with its nose pressed to the screen.

Exhibit Two. Once again a car stands at the center. This time it’s a station wagon of a make I can’t identify. Papa and some man I don’t recognize are standing behind the car. Each is holding a large fish by the gills, holding it high for the camera. Both are smiling, though the fish the other man holds is definitely larger than Papa’s. I try to see whether Papa minds, but the photo is too small. I do, however, notice that the other man is holding his fish a little higher than Papa, which, considering his fish is heavier, might mean that he is prouder, or maybe just that he is stronger. At this period Papa was probably not very strong. He looks overweight and flabby. There are bags under his eyes, as if he were having difficulty sleeping, as he did later on after the psoriasis got out of control. You can see a lake on the other side of the car. At first glance, mesmerized by the fish, a casual viewer probably would not notice much else. But if he continues to look, as I did, especially if he uses a magnifier and applies the grid principle, he will eventually notice that something—or someone—is in the back seat of the station wagon. It looks at first glance like a large spaniel. Since we owned a series of springers, this interpretation cannot be ruled out with absolute certainty. On the other hand, it could just as well be the head of a boy wearing one of those hats with fur-lined ear flaps, with the flaps untied and hanging down. Once again, the mere fact that I don’t remember such a hat cannot be used to exclude it, since I don’t remember much of anything. If everything we do not remember did not exist, where would we be? Of course it seems to be a rather hot day for a fur hat, but maybe I was already self-conscious about my head being perhaps a trifle too small. Besides, why would a dog be sitting inside the car on such an obviously pleasant day? Is the dog angry because it didn’t catch a fish? Does it sulk? Does it have tantrums?

Exhibit Three. This photo does not at first seem to be of anyone I know. For a third time a car occupies center stage, now locked in tight embrace with a panel truck. The photo shows the aftermath of a collision between a dark four-door sedan and a mid-sized delivery vehicle. The sedan has got the worst of it, grill and right fender hideously crushed. A policeman is leaning in at the window of the sedan, apparently talking to a person seated behind the steering wheel, though that person is concealed from us by the glare of the sun on the windshield. A sizeable crowd has gathered on the sidewalk across the street in front of a small store; I can tell it’s a store by the Coca-Cola sign above the door. At first glance the crowd seems to be composed only of grown-ups. I do not, however, let myself become discouraged by this impression, and I continue to work my way step by step across the grid: yes, that really is a shoe, that really is a hat, that really is an elbow. And that, oh yes,
that
is a very small face. It is peering out from behind the voluminous skirt of an enormously obese woman. It is the face of a boy with blond hair, a furtive boy with blond hair who evidently does not
want
to be in the picture, or else he would not be hiding behind the fat woman’s skirt; he would be out gawking with the rest of the folks. I know
I
would be out gawking, unless … And of a sudden the curtain rises, the entire scene shifts and becomes an altogether different scene, as in those drawings where a rabbit morphs precipitously into a duck for no other reason than that someone has remarked, “That’s a duck.” In similar fashion, the moment I said to myself, “That is
not
a picture of a traffic accident,” the car and the truck fell away, became just incidental clutter in the foreground, while the face of the boy—now more frightened than furtive—lurched into prominence at the exact center of the photo, leaped forth, so to speak, as the true subject of the picture. Clearly this photo was someone’s attempt to establish documentary proof (for Mama? for the Truant Officer?) that the boy was not where he was supposed to be (in school? at the dentist?). I tremble with excitement, I close my eyes, and Peg’s little face, squinting from behind her box camera, floats into view. And there she is crawling under the house, where I am curled in the dirt next to the chimney, and if she gets any closer I am going to kick her.