Cool's Ridge Read online

  Yesterday, alone in the house, I’d looked up “gannet” in the dictionary: “Any of several large sea birds of the genus Solidae.” Yes, there was something bony and brittle about him, ‘though the brittleness was not physical, it was of the psyche, a vulnerability and defensiveness. Then my eye fell on “ganoid” and I’d laughed. Ganoid—a fish with hard, shiny scales. A strange fish, a fish in armor. And a strange bird, too, a rara avis. I had looked up smiling and saw Alice standing in the doorway staring at me with a look full of hostility. I was startled and horrified. I blushed and she turned and went away.

  Alice, too, had a depressed look, or was it a repressed look? Repressed rage? Tonight she had on a blue chambray work shirt with a matching scarf tied over her hair and big silver hoop earrings. This reminded me of the Orthodox Jewish women you see in parts of New York City, those who shave their heads when they marry and wear wigs and scarves.

  There were strawberries for dessert again, and then we all decided to go to the nine o’clock show at the Rex Theater in Stanton. We left in two cars. Skip drove his car; Wayne and May sat in the back seat. On the way to town I asked about the Farm and how it had gotten started.

  “It was May’s fault,” Wayne said. “If we hadn’t come up here we could be enjoying another glorious summer in New York City.”

  “We’re renting The Farm from old Dr. Gerstner,” May said. “Growing up, he was a friend of my grandfather’s in Brooklyn. They’ve always kept in touch. In fact, my grandfather’s been out here quite a bit, although not recently, not since they moved to Florida. Anyway, we knew the place was for sale or rent and Wayne and I wanted to get out of the city. One day we bumped into Skip and Hilda”—there was a pause and then she resolutely went on, as if truth had triumphed over discretion—“at the Thalia, and we talked it over after the movie and we started getting really excited about it. Skip got in touch with Alice and Len and Alice got in touch with Shauna.”

  The drive went on and on; the road was small and curving and pitch black. I saw an animal, a deer, hesitate at the edge of the road, and then draw back. “Did you see that?” I asked Skip. “What?” he said. He seemed hypnotized by the driving.

  “See, we all knew each other in college,” May said, and then cleared her throat.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask about Hilda.

  She said, “Remember ’68, Skip?”

  “You were going out with Skip,” Wayne said. I glanced back over my shoulder at Wayne in time to see May shove her elbow into Wayne’s side.

  “Ow!” Wayne said. I laughed.

  “It wasn’t the way he made it sound,” May said to me, apologetically. “We were really more like friends, weren’t we Skip?”

  “Hmmm?” Skip said. He was driving fast in the country dark with the window down and his elbow stuck out. Caught in the fuzzy yellow headlights, insects flew up and splattered against the windshield.

  “Whoa!” Wayne said, as we sailed around a curve. “Easy, baby, we’ve got loads of time.”

  “It’s okay,” I said to May. “I didn’t really know Skip then. We started dating later that year.”

  “Sixty-eight!” Wayne said. “Man, that was some year.”

  Skip said, “But God, isn’t it great how all this Nixon shit has finally hit the fan?”

  “Wait and see,” Wayne said.

  “Whaddya mean?” Skip said. “You don’t think it’s going to change things?”

  “I don’t know,” Wayne said.

  “Oh it’s got to,” May said primly. “Things have got to change. This country’s going down the drain. All that stupid Communist paranoia just so they can keep the war going … wars going … ’cause it’s good for industry. There’s got to be a change.”

  I said, “It’s the way things are done that scares me. All these big decisions made in secret by a few people. It’s not democracy anymore.”

  “You ought to hear Len on that,” May said.

  “He’s slightly overboard,” Wayne said.

  “Oh Wayne, he isn’t,” May said. “He’s right. I mean, once they start doing things for you, because it’s for your own good, and Congress goes along, well, then, we’re not citizens anymore, we’re all children, or sheep.” I half turned in my seat. I could see that Wayne had his arm around May and they were holding hands. Wayne had on knee-length white shorts. His legs were short but thick and muscular, covered with blond hair. May had on white bell bottoms and a striped shirt with a sailor collar. Her dark hair was tied back with a red ribbon.

  “It’s Len’s background,” Skip said. “His parents were German refugees. At least his father was. He came here before World War II.” He drove looking straight ahead. The black country road unwound in loops and drops like a roller coaster. “Anyway,” Skip said, “he is sort of a nut on the subject. It’s as if he sees little Hitlers everywhere.”

  “Maybe he’s right,” I said.

  “Power!” Wayne said. “The fascination of power! What’s the movie tonight, kids?”

  I said, “It’s based on a woman’s novel.”

  “Then it won’t be about power,” Wayne said. “I wonder why women never write about power?”

  May and I answered together: “Because they don’t have any!”

  Skip and Wayne groaned. “Sucker,” Skip said to Wayne. “You asked for it.”

  “Aw please Skip,” Wayne said. “Call her off, will you? Liz dear, will ya cut it out? I have been punished enough.”

  Which turned out, of course, to be prophetic words, although we wouldn’t know that for a couple of years.

  After the movie we went to the Dark Moon Bar to hear Shauna sing. She had a big voice, a low thrilling contralto, and she sang mostly country and folk, accompanying herself on the guitar. At one in the morning, leaving the bar, Wayne and Skip fought over the car keys. We all pushed and pulled Skip out of the bar and eased him into the car’s back seat, and then May and I sat on either side of him going home. We hadn’t noticed how much he’d had to drink. He drunkenly put a hand on each of our knees, and then put his arms around us, and tried to squeeze our breasts. May and I both gave him the elbow at the same time.

  When we got to the house we hauled Skip out of the car and left him sitting on the wet grass. He was grinning and shaking his head, and singing under his breath, “But I’m all right now.… Jumping Jack flash …”

  I went straight upstairs to my room. Heading toward the bathroom, I saw May coming up the stairs and I said, “You think Skip’s all right?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “He’s got the constitution of a horse.”

  From down the hall we heard voices quarreling.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  She frowned and turned away. “Alice and Len,” she said.

  “Oh?” I said. “Are they …?”

  “They’re married,” she said curtly.

  I said, “I never would have guessed.” She shrugged and her hands flew apart meaning, Who knows?

  Who indeed, I thought. I locked my door and went to bed. All of the next week, I hardly saw Skip—he was gone early, came back late. I hadn’t even told him about my parents getting divorced. I think I would have left—just packed up and gone—but what was my alternative? I’d have to move in with my mother. Anyway, I liked the Ridge, the scenery was stirring, the food was great, and I kept on hoping Skip and I would have a chance at a real talk.

  8.

  The Sussex Monitor had rented a shop at the back of a three-story brick building on Main Street, in the town of Stanton.

  Stanton was an old-fashioned sort of all-American small town and I soon grew fond of it. Once a sleepy little farm village, the late nineteenth century had turned it into a milltown. Old brick factories had made boots and shoes, bed sheets and Turkish towels. Now, although the factories were empty, the town still had a busy thriving air. It was the county seat and a center for what was left of the local agricultural community, the dairy and truck farms currently giving over to horse and hay.
In the very middle of town there was a large Village Green with tall sycamore trees and wooden benches and flowerbeds planted with ivy and red salvia, and in the center of the park, upon a tall stone pedestal, the copper statue of a Union soldier, leaning upon his musket and looking out wearily over the town’s tree-lined streets and its white clapboard houses, staring southward to Chickamauga and Murfressboro, Antietam, Gettysburg and Appomattox.

  Behind the soldier, on the north side of the square, was a handsome white courthouse with a Greek portico, and behind the courthouse, a disciplinary facility, still called by some of the locals “the hoosgow.” On my lunch hour, I used to walk up to the square from the office, and I soon discovered that the vague, bleary-eyed, skinny, blue-jeaned people sitting or lying on the benches were druggies waiting for a hit. Sometimes you’d see them being loaded into a patrol car for a short ride to the police station where they’d get booked, and sometimes you’d see them shambling along from the direction of the jail, ready to start the cycle all over again. For the longest while, I thought the Green was called Ivy Park, and then I realized that the phrase was “I.V. Park.” So much for the everpopular myth of ex-urban innocence.

  By the end of our first week’s work on our offices we had freshly painted white walls, some second-hand desks, chairs, file cabinets, and two pots of philodendron that Shauna had bought in Woolworth’s basement house plant department. It was Shauna’s idea that we should celebrate to launch or baptize our new enterprise, so a little before five o’clock on Friday we nipped out to Roxy Wine and Liquors just down the block. We were discussing with the owner (he was a neat-looking elderly man in a short-sleeved white shirt and a bowtie) whether we should buy Almaden, Taylors, or Gallo jug wine, when a man and a woman came into the store. She had on a black mini-skirt and broken-sided white pumps. Her stiff blond hair fell from a part as black as a zipper and a thick veneer of ochre make-up made her face into an ageless mask—she could have been fifty but was probably thirty. The man (he was somewhat younger) had on what I’d come to recognize as current standard farmers’ attire, replacing the overalls and straw hat of my picture book childhood: dark green work shirt and pants, yellow work boots, a green cap with a visor. He had a little paper bag in his hand, the kind that might hold a couple of packs of cigarettes from a stationery store. I felt Shauna’s arm pressing against my side.

  “Hello, Coral,” the owner said. “How are you? Going to have the usual this week?”

  “That’s right,” the woman said. “One fifth of Jim Beam and the Beefeaters for Dan, an’ a couple of quarts of tonic.” She was relentlessly chewing gum. She must have had on false eyelashes—they stood out in black clumps as if bees had stuck to her eyes.

  “I’ll be with you in a second, Coral. Decided what you want yet, ladies?”

  We agreed on the Almaden. Meanwhile, the young man had begun to make a noise, a soft whimper or wail, that sounded like ooh, ooh, oooh.

  “Now listen, Erroll,” Coral said, “you cut that out, you hear me? I been listening to that all day. Don’t start that stuff again.” She looked at me and shrugged. “He’s upset ’cause his dog’s dead. My husband ran over his dog yesterday by mistake.… We told you not to untie him, Erroll, didn’t we? Huh? So it’s yer own dumb fault, nobody to blame but yerself. He was just a puppy, he didn’t know not to get in back of that truck.” Whenever she talked to him she frowned and her voice got loud and hard, and then when she looked at me, she’d smile and shrug. She said, with a jerk of her thumb to indicate the young man, “This one? He ought to be in a institution. He just can’t do nothin’ at all. But they won’t take ’em anymore. They won’t take nobody anymore so guess who’s stuck? I had this good job and I had to quit it to stay home and mind him. I said to my husband, ‘I’m pretty near screwy myself sittin’ around the house all day with him and the TV.’”

  I said, “Where were you working?”

  “E. F. Royce Pharmaceuticals. Know where that is? It was a good job with health benefits and all. Even had a dental plan. I was going to get my teeth straightened. Anyway, I hate being home alone, I like being amongst people, I’m a sociable person. Erroll, if you don’t stop that”—she had turned to him fiercely—“I’m going to have Dan whip you.”

  “Here you go, ladies,” the man said to us matter-of-factly. “Two six packs and your Almaden. You don’t want to tell him that, Coral,” he said to her. “No use in scaring him to death. How you, Erroll?” he said. “You doin’ okay?” He, too, raised his voice as if Erroll were deaf. He said to us, “It’s a real shame about Erroll. Used to be such a nice bright boy, but he was sick and somehow never did get all better.” As he talked, he plucked the Jim Beam and the Beefeaters from the shelves behind him. Coral, meanwhile, looked out of the plate glass window.

  When we were outside, Shauna said, “What did you think?”

  I said, “Think? What’s to think? Do you know them?”

  “Oh yeah, but thank God only by sight. That’s Coral Knacker, who’s married to Dan Knacker. Erroll is Dan’s younger brother. They’re our neighbors.”

  “Wonderful. In which direction?”

  “Up the dirt road from our driveway. They have a farm, ’though they don’t seem to grow a lot. Actually, the farm is Erroll’s—his parents died and left it to him because they’d gotten Dan the money for his gas station.”

  “Where’s the gas station?”

  “It’s the Texaco in the village. On the highway, next to the diner? I don’t patronize him myself. The best thing I’ve heard about him is that he’s real mean.”

  “You could be right. I think one of the Knackers took a shot at me last week. Is the farmhouse yellow?”

  “You got it, baby. That’s the Knackers’ place. But they might not have been shooting at you. I don’t think they’ve killed anybody yet, at least not and gotten caught. I think they poach, though.”

  “Poach?”

  “Yeah. You know—kill deer out of season.”

  “Maybe they’re really running a still.”

  “Maybe, but I’d say not, seeing as how we’ve just met Ms. Coral in the liquor store. And considering the amount of time Coral and Dan spend at The End. That’s the Rainbow’s End, it’s a bar. You know the little white house with the long porch down on the county road? There’s no sign or anything, you’ll just see a lot of pick-up trucks parked out in front. It’s the locals’ hang-out.”

  “Say, maybe we could get them to advertise in the Monitor.”

  “Nifty thought.”

  We were back at our office door, which swung open to the bright walls and the giddy ether-like smell of fresh paint. I put the wine and beer in the midget fridge we had bought to store film and snacks. It was now half past five. I asked Shauna where everyone was.

  “Wayne is researching a story, May is doing a piece on family reunions, Alice is minding her store and I don’t know where Skip is. Or Len either. Want to go ahead and have a beer now?”

  “Not me, thanks, I’ll wait. You know, there’s something I can’t figure out. I don’t want to be intrusive or snoopy, but I’m having a problem with the group relationships.”

  “Like which?”

  “Alice and Len?”

  “Well,” Shauna threw herself into a desk chair and popped open a beer can. She sighed and heavily laid one leg on the desktop. She had on cork wedgies with strings that crossed and tied all the way up her stout freckled shins. “Like they’re married. Didn’t you know that?”

  “I knew that, only they don’t act married.”

  “Oh they’re married all right, for better or worse, probably worse. Everybody at The Farm has been married at least once, except for you … and Skip. Even Sal was married for three months. He’s lucky. He claims he has total amnesia whenever he thinks about it. When I think of my marriage it’s altogether too vivid.”

  “I guess it’s hard to be married.”

  “Not hard, unbearable.” She exhaled a cloud of blue menthol-laced smoke. “At least it was for
me.”

  “My parents got along pretty well for many years. Now they’re getting divorced.”

  “Sad. Why now?”

  “I don’t know. After my brother got sick, things really went downhill.”

  She looked at me expressionlessly. There was something neutral about this expression that encouraged you to talk: she wasn’t indifferent and she wasn’t overtly curious.

  “What’s wrong with your brother?”

  I smiled nervously. Why had I brought it up? Sometimes you get caught in the middle between just wanting to say it, as if it were something else, a more or less normal calamity that befalls human beings, and then as soon as you’ve said it, you’re sorry. Because, after all, it’s not like the other calamities, it’s not an illness in which the victim gets better or worse, recovers or dies, it’s an illness in which the victim vanishes, for all intents and purposes disappears, is dead to his friends and missing to his family. In the victim’s place there is a sinister person who mutters and curses and sometimes shrieks, who won’t eat because the food is radioactive, won’t drink because the water is poisoned, who looks at you with intense suspicion, and asks why you plot against him; who communicates with outer space by way of the TV set, which is ruled by Jesus Christ (on good days) or Beelzebub (on bad). Good days, you learn after a while, often happen when he takes his medication, but this does not happen regularly or without prodding, perhaps because years were spent finding a medication which did not make him faint, or turn rigid. Often, when he hasn’t taken his medication, this person, your brother’s impostor, no more resembles the brother you loved, your intelligent, kind, loving, witty, charming, clever brother, than Adolf Hitler resembles Noel Coward. Sometimes, when he has taken his medication quite regularly, a painful ghost appears, a ghost who looks and talks like your brother, with his genuine wit and his talented gaiety. You feel angry when this ghost appears, because you know he’ll be gone tomorrow, because already your brother is saying what he always says, that there’s nothing wrong with him, that he’s fine, the problem is in your head, and you know that tomorrow or the day after, he’ll stop taking the medication, because whether he’s Noel or Adolf he feels, inside, just the same.