The Cry of the Sloth (16 page)

Flo was troubled by the bitterness he was lately wont to spit forth from his mouth on many occasions, and she racked her brain for some way to make his life altogether more pleasant, and one day she hit on the idea of dragging the big mower out of the barn and gassing it up. From the moment it coughed to life in a vast display of white smoke and considerable backfiring, her father’s days were not the same. There was, spiritually speaking, a new spring in his instep and, once he had got the phlegm up, a cheery ring to his voice when he hallooed for his breakfast at daybreak. After eggs and bacon or sausage, Flo would help him up on the mower. Once up, he could ride all day long, pausing only for lunch and a toilet break or to fill up with gas from the big red tank by the barn, and not dismount until the orb of the sun had turned blood-red in the west. Even blight-stricken and sorely weakened as they were, the surviving chickens had managed to eat every last blade of grass in the yard and most of the zinnias, so there was not much to mow there anymore. After a couple of weeks of spinning around in clouds of dust, the old man was sick and tired of it, so he mowed down the hollyhocks Flo’s mother had planted next to the house and most of the shrubbery as well, though the mower finally got hung up on a big lilac bush by the porch, and Flo had to drag it off with the pickup. After they had ordered a new blade from town, and one of the salesman who had stopped by had helped them fit it, he took up mowing the grass shoulders of the county road that ran in front of the farm. This was supposed to be the county workers’ job, for which they were paid handsomely, but by setting his blade lower than theirs would go he managed always to get the best of them. When they were not able to find anything high enough to make shorter, they would just stand around scratching and talking till lunchtime and then run their big mowers back up on the yellow trucks and leave. After a few months, when they saw they could count on the proud old farmer to keep things neat and trimmed, they stopped coming altogether. But the shoulders of the road, which he now mowed all the way to the outskirts of Parkersville, were not enough for the energetic old man, and he fell into the habit of turning into neighbors’ farms and mowing everything he could find there. Sometimes the people were happy to have their grass cut for free, but sometimes they drove him off with spray from a garden hose or a rain of dirt clods.

Flo was remembering all this when she turned suddenly to look at the mower bounding behind them on the trailer, and she forgot that she did not have buttons anymore. The ripped shirt fell open and Adam noticed once again how closely her breasts resembled Glenda’s. They could have been from the same woman, and for a moment he had the nightmarish conviction that they were. Flo noticed his sharp intake of breath as he struggled with this thought. For a moment he lost control of the vehicle. He regained it quickly, though, shooting a rooster tail of gravel across the shoulder as he powered out of the skid. The trailer hit the pavement again with a jolt that caused the mower to leap in the air, and when it landed back on the trailer it was with one wheel hanging off the side spinning. “We’re gonna lose her,” Flo shouted, but Adam paid no heed, for he was once more barreling grimly down a straight stretch, his jaw muscles working. She wondered if he was chewing on something, perhaps a blade of grass he had picked up while they were locked in wild embrace in front of the shack or maybe afterwards when she was inside looking for a safety pin. She let her gaze slide in a slow caress from his jaw to his shoulder and noticed for the first time how thick his neck was. And now she wondered once again at the audacity of her choice, as she had wondered before with other men, and boys too, her twin nephews for example, though not to the same degree.

Just at that moment the road made a wide turn to the left and Adam swept into it with no decrease in forward speed. Flo began to slide sideways across the seat, which was covered in slippery blue plastic, for her father was not given to useless luxury in his pickups, and had declined to shell out for leather, or some soft fabric, despite the salesman’s warning that plastic would make his ass sweat like a pig on a spit. She instinctively grabbed at the gear lever around which her knee was hooked also. “Let go the damn shifter!” Adam shouted. It was the first time he had raised his voice to her since he had ordered her down on all fours back at the shack, and in her astonishment she let go the shifter. She shot across the seat and slammed up against the passenger door, where she was jabbed a sharp one in the ribs by the window crank. She let out a cry of pain. But Adam did not turn his head, and she remained slumped against the door, glowering darkly, a strand of damp hair falling across her face, until they reached the farm, for that is where they were going. Adam’s rage, however, was soon tempered by bitter remorse, and he smiled wanly at her through his teeth. He was about to beg her forgiveness when suddenly she shouted, “Here it is, turn here.” Adam jerked the big truck hard to the right into a narrow dirt drive that ran up to the farmhouse. At which point the John Deere mower became airborne again, this time in a mostly sideways direction, and flew into the large white-painted wooden sign announcing “Happy Daze Dairyfarm,” which it proceeded to splinter. Fortunately this same turn also flung Flo back across the seat where she slammed up against Adam, and where they both again felt the surge of their first contact.

At the end of the long driveway bordered by the leafless stubble of boxwood hedges, they could see the stately old farmhouse, now sadly in need of sundry repairs, nestled under the two big oak trees. Adam inched the big truck forward, so the handful of chickens pecking in the gravel could stagger out of the way, some of them falling down when they tried to hurry and having to be helped up by the others. He noticed a few gumball-sized eggs scattered here and there in the sand, the hens having wandered off and forgotten about them as they were wont to do ever since they had contracted the blight.

Flo’s father saw them approaching—heard them before he saw them due to the crash of the John Deere mower against the sign, though he did not know that that was what it was, thinking instead that one of the salesman had run into the ditch as they sometimes did in their eagerness—and he came down to meet them, using a gently sloping wooden ramp especially constructed for that purpose. Adam swung the big truck around and skidded to a stop with the driver’s door just a few feet from the old man’s wheelchair, causing the old farmer to vanish from sight for several minutes in the large cloud of dust that came rolling in behind them. This cloud and the fit of coughing and expectoration that ensued allowed Flo to slip out on the passenger side and streak into the house unseen, from which she emerged moments later clad in an attractive summer frock buttoned to the neck

“Adam Partridge?” the old man said as he clasped Adam’s hand in a hardy grip. “Estelle Partridge’s boy?” Adam nodded. He sat on a stump next to the old man’s chair and laid out the situation.

“That’ll be Stint Bros. Towing that’s got your car, son,” the old man said ominously. “Dahlberg Stint and his brother Tiresome.” He spit in the dirt next to his chair, a phlegmy gob that caused a few hopeful chickens to stagger closer. Adam looked down at them tugging listlessly at the stringy mess, and his eye for the first time fell on the Winchester rifle in the leather scabbard hanging at the side of the wheelchair. He had assumed it was a large umbrella probably. The old man continued: “More than likely those boys have got her stripped down by now. Come Saturday your radio and tape player’s gonna be on a table at the new flea market they got down Kenosha way. Hubcaps too probably. Young fellows around here think mighty highly of those Mercedes caps. Bend the flanges a little and make ’em fit a Chevy.” Adam drew nearer, and Flo, who was on the porch shelling peas, could not catch more than a word or two now and then. She listened to the quiet susurration of their mutters, and smiled when a hearty laugh or bitter imprecation reached her ears. She occasionally lifted her gaze from the peas to watch them: her father, wizened and calm and stoical in his suffering, and this young man, mercurial and strangely tormented. So different, and yet … She noticed the angle of the jaws, the long straight noses, the cleft chins, and the odd combination of delicate facial features and thick necks. Adam had also noticed this, and he had noticed too the catch in the old man’s voice when he had pronounced the name Estelle Partridge, pronounced it aloud for the first time in thirty-three years. At that moment he could not help but wonder if it was really just warm Coke that had caused his parents to suddenly abandon their ancestral plot and move to California, or was it something darker? And Flo on the porch was wondering the same thing, for Adam had told her the whole story when they were lying in the grass. Suddenly the aged oaks behind them seemed to loom menacingly, like large beasts standing on their hind legs ready to fall upon them with all the weight of the past. They shivered, Adam and Flo shivered, and yet at the same time they rejoiced, feeling the hot pull of blood to blood. And beneath the rearing oaks they silently called to each other across the chicken yard.

In the silence she heard Adam say, “I’m going to see Mr. Stint. I want my car back.”

Her father reached in a pocket. He said, “You best take this, boy.”

Adam took the gun in his hand. He hefted it, felt the way it sat in his palm, for it was a small pistol. He felt a strange calmness overtake him. “Could I use your truck one more time?”

The old man opened his mouth to reply but his answer was drowned out by a shout from the porch.

“No!” came the panicked cry, followed by the clatter of peas on the porch floor as Flo leaped to her feet. Her hands clawed convulsively at her bodice, and she fell heavily across the rail. Adam and her father looked up, and both of them were reminded of a rag doll.

Adam had leaped from the stump and was rushing to Flo’s side, when he was nearly jerked off his feet by the vise-like grip of the old man’s hand on his sleeve, strong still, though it was gnarled and wizened. He was staring at the empty trailer, which he seemed to have noticed for the first time, his old rheumy eyes like bloodshot marbles, “Where’s the mower?” he croaked. He glanced over to where Flo lay slumped over the porch railing. “Hun, where’s my mower?” “My mower,” he was shouting now, “What did you do with my mower?”

¶

Dear Rory,

Tremendous poems. Your best yet, especially the one beginning “Moon rise / The transom of the mind falls open.” Do you have periods when you can’t leave the house? I sense something of that sort in the poem. It struck a chord with me, as I have been feeling more and more that way myself, wanting to stay home, just say to hell with the whole brouhaha, and then I think thank god for curtains.

All the best,

Andy

¶

Dear Jolie,

I enclose a money order. This is all I’ll be sending for a long time. I am preparing to consolidate my mind and enter a forest to live on acorns, thereby turning what’s left of my life into a manageable asset. I have had to walk upon the spines of hideous obstacles in order to get this money to you. I have endured gruesome adventures. Essentially, I was flung down and castigated. Morally, I failed, and was embarrassed. Happily, I have slewed forth and triumphed. Details follow.

For the past two months, ever since the bank started snatching its usurer’s cut from everything I deposit on the pretense of minutely shrinking the vast unpayable sums I owe it, I have cajoled, threatened, and wheedled the tenants into paying a portion of the rent in cash. On Wednesday last I had five hundred and eighty dollars precisely folded in the outside pocket of my blue jacket (the more secure inside pocket being ripped and dangling). I was walking down Fourth Street on the north sidewalk, on my way to the post office, whistling and swinging my arms, and taking little jumps over the broken spots in the pavement, of which there were a great many. My eyes were darting this way and that, there not being any salient sights on the street to keep them in one place for long, when they fell upon a vehicle idling at a traffic light, smoke eructing from its tailpipe in a stinking cloud. Though I was approaching from behind, and so did not have a full and capacious view of the object in its entirety, various tokens and signs let me know that this was the very vehicle I had seen described in a story by one of my contributors. The engine of my brain gave a small whirr and told me that the knobby thing visible through the grime of the vehicle’s rear window was in all likelihood the hatless head of that same contributor. This is called reasoning from the whole to the part; it takes but a second. Having not expected to see said contributor in that spot, and he of course not expecting me there either, I took advantage of these combined unexpectancies to crouch very low and creep up behind the truck (for the vehicle in question was indeed a pickup truck) before the light could flash its permissive green again. My intention was to spring into the bed of the truck—like a tiger, one could say—and then advance rapidly across it to the back of the cab. Once there I had planned—the brain, reinforced by a rapidly pounding heart, was now whirring at a tremendous speed—to clutch with my right hand the chromium mount of a large radio antennae which I saw protruding from the roof while my left arm snaked swiftly around the edge of the cab and slithered in through the open window at the driver’s side. It would have been a good surprise had it worked. Unfortunately, at the very instant I launched myself into the air in the direction of the bed of the truck it disappeared beneath me. The light had leaped abruptly to green (there is, alas, no yellow in that direction), and the truck had shot forward with a great squealing and smoking of its tires. I might have lost my balance at that moment. That I did not, at least not yet, and was able to bound in hot pursuit, was due to nothing but sheer luck. I believe I was waving my arms and yelling, and was even gaining on the truck, which had been held up by traffic, when I was betrayed by the sole of my shoe. I should have mentioned this at the outset: part of my left shoe had been relaxing its grip on the other parts for several days now and was making a regular flapping sound when I walked. It was a rather enjoyable noise and I had learned to smack my foot down in a way that amplified it several fold. It was quite a stunner in the supermarket. Of course I had not considered the dangers this would pose should I ever need to accelerate my pace beyond a hobble, as indeed I did need to do when pursuing the truck. Thanks to it, the situation did not unfold the way I had hoped when I began to pump the old pistons. To make a long tale short, I fell—precipitously, abysmally, and very hard. I ripped both knees of my trousers, I scraped my left palm so badly it burned like fire for several hours while oozing droplets of blood from parallel furrows, and I almost broke my finger.