Authors: Robert Stone
"Huh," said Alvin Mahoney.
"Which is how they carried them in Vietnam. And Hmongs are very numerous in Iron Falls. So," he said, addressing himself to young Paul, "when I see a man in deep woods carrying a rifle that way I presume he's a Hmong. Does that answer your question, my friend?"
"Yes sir," Paul said.
"Hmongs are a tribal people in Vietnam and Laos," Norman told Paul. "Do you know where Vietnam is? Do you know what happened there?"
Paul was silent for a moment and then said, "Yes. I think so. A little."
"Good," said Norman. "Then you know more than three quarters of our student body."
"Mr. Cevic was in Vietnam during the war," Kristin told her son. She turned to Norman, whom she rather admired. "How long was it that you spent there?"
"A year. All day, every day. And all night too."
Just before they left the telephone rang. From his wife's tone, Michael knew it was his teaching assistant, Phyllis Strom. Descended from prairie sodbusters, Kristin did not always trouble to enliven her voice when addressing strangers and people she disliked. She had a way of sounding very bleak indeed, and that was how she sounded then, impatiently accumulating Phyllis's information.
"Phyllis," she sternly announced. "Says she may not be able to monitor midterms on Thursday. Wonders if you'll be back?" There was an edge of unsympathetic mimicry.
Michael made a face. "Phyllis," he said. "Phyllis, fair and useless." In fact, he felt sorry for the kid. She was engagingly shy and frightened of Kristin.
"I told her you'd left," his wife told him. "She'll call back." The new and rigorously enforced regulations required chastity in student-faculty collaborations, but Kristin was not reassured. She imagined that her anxieties about Phyllis were a dark, close secret.
"Do I really have to come back for this?" Michael said as they went out to the car. "I'll call you from Ehrlich's tomorrow night after six."
They drove past dun farm fields, toward the huge wooded marshes that lined the Three Rivers where their narrow valleys conjoined. In about four and a half hours they passed Ehrlich's, a sprawling pseudo-Alpine
bierstube
and restaurant.
"I want to go on to the Hunter's," Michael said.
"The food's not as good," Mahoney said mildly.
"True," said Michael. "But Hunter's sells an Irish single malt called Willoughby's on their retail side. Only place they sell the stuff west of Minneapolis. And I want to buy a bottle for us to drink tonight."
"Ah," Mahoney said. "Sheer bliss."
On his tongue, the phrase could only be ironic, Michael thought. Bliss was unavailable to Mahoney. It was simply not there for him, though Michael was sure he'd like the Willoughby's well enough. But for me, Michael thought, bliss is still a possibility. He imagined himself as still capable of experiencing it, a few measures, a few seconds at a time. No need of fancy whiskey, the real thing. He felt certain of it.
"How's Kristin?" Norman asked Michael.
"How do you mean, Norm? You just talked to her."
"Has she seen Phyllis Strom this term?"
"Oh, come on," Michael said. "Think she's jealous of little Phyllis? Kris could swallow Phyllis Strom with a glass of water."
Norman laughed. "Let me level with you, buddy. I'm scared to death of Kristin. Fire and ice, man."
Mind your business, he thought. Cevic had appointed himself sociologist to the north country. In fact, Michael thought, at home the ice might be almost imperceptibly thickening. Kristin had taken to rhapsodizing more and more about her father, upon whose forge her elegantly shaped, unbending angles had been hammered. The god in the iron mask, mediator of manhood and its measure. Still alive under the granite. A man might well dread his own shortcomings in that shadow.
"Smartest move I ever made," said Michael, "marrying that girl. Definitely sleep nights."
Perhaps, he thought, that had not been the best way to phrase it, for Cevic the curious and curiously minded.
The landscape grew more wooded as they approached Mahoney's cabin, where they planned to spend the night. Farm fields gave way to sunken meadows lined with bare oak and pine forest. Thirty miles along they came to the Hunter's Supper Club, a diner in blue aluminum and silver chrome. Incongruously attached to the diner, extending from it, was a building of treated pine logs with a varnished door of its own. At eye level on the door was the building's single window, a diamond-shaped spy hole, double-glazed and tinted green. A hand-painted sign the length of the roof read "Souvenirs Tagging Station."
They parked beside the half-dozen battered cars in the lot and walked across the sandy, resin-scalded ground and into the metal diner. There were banquettes and a counter and a heavy young waitress in a checkered dress and blue apron. The restaurant itself was empty except for two old farmers at the counter who shifted themselves arthritically to see who had come in. From the bar, which sounded more crowded, came jukebox music. Waylon Jennings's "Low-down Freedom."
Their table looked out on the empty two-lane highway. Michael ordered coffee with his ham and eggs and got up to buy the whiskey at the adjoining bar.
The bar had eight or nine customers, half of them middle-aged men, burnt-up drunk, unhealthy looking and ill disposed. There were also two Indian youths with ponytails and druggy, glittery eyes. One had a round, apparently placid face. The other was lean and edgy, his features set in what at first appeared to be a smile but wasn't. Michael stood at the take-away counter, resolutely minding his own business. Then the barmaid, whom he had not seen at first, came out from some storage space behind the mirror and the stacked bottles and the pigs'-feet jars.
The barmaid looked only just old enough to serve liquor. She had dark hair and brilliant blue eyes evenly set She was tall, wearing black cowgirl clothes, a rodeo shirt with little waves of white frosting and mother-of-pearl buttons. Her hair was thick and swept to one side at the back.
"Say," she said.
"Do you have Willoughby's today?"
"Could be we do," she said. "Like, what is it?"
Michael pondered other, different questions. Could he drive out every Friday and Saturday and have a Friday and Saturday kind of cowboy life with her? But not really. But could he? Would she like poetry with a joint, after sex? Not seriously. Idle speculation.
"It's whiskey," he told her. He thought he must sound impatient. "It's unblended Irish whiskey. You used to carry it."
"Unblended is good, right? Sounds good. What you want."
"Yes," Michael said. "It is. It's what I'm after."
"If it's good we mostly don't have it," she said.
And he was, as it were, stumped. No comeback. No zingers.
"Really?" he asked.
Someone behind, one of the young Indians it might have been, did him in falsetto imitation. "Really?" As though it were an outrageously affected, silly-ass question.
"But I can surely find out," she said.
When she turned away he saw that her black pants were as tight as they could be and cut to stirrup length like a real cowgirl's, and her boot heels scuffed but not worn down from walking. He also saw that where her hair was swept to the side at the back of her collar, what appeared to be the forked tongue of a tattooed snake rose from either side of the bone at the nape of her neck. A serpent, ascending her spine. Her skin was alabaster.
He heard voices from the back. An old man's voice raised in proprietary anger. When she came back she was carrying a bottle, inspecting it.
"What do you know?" she said. "Specialty of the house, huh? You Irish?"
Michael shrugged. "Back somewhere. How about you?"
"Me? I'm like everybody else around here."
"Is that right?"
"Megan," one of the smoldering drunks at the bar muttered, "get your butt over this way."
"George," Megan called sweetly, still addressing Michael, "would you not be a knee-walking piece of pigshit?"
She took her time selling him the Willoughby's. Worn menace rumbled down the bar. She put her hand to her ear. Hark, like a tragedienne in a Victorian melodrama.
"What did he say?" she asked Michael, displaying active, intelligent concern.
Michael shook his head. "Didn't hear him."
As he walked back to the diner section, he heard her boots on the wooden flooring behind the bar.
"Yes, Georgie, baby pie. How may I serve you today?"
Back in the restaurant, their table had been cleared.
"He ate your eggs," Norman said, indicating Alvin Mahoney.
"Naw, I didn't," Alvin said. "Norm did."
"Anyway," Norman said, "they were getting cold. You want something to take along?"
Michael showed them the sack with the whiskey.
"I'll just take this. I'm not hungry." When he tasted his untouched coffee, it was cold as well.
Beyond the Hunter's Supper Club, the big swamp took shape and snow was falling before they reached the cabin. They followed the dirt road to it, facing icy, wind-driven volleys that rattled against the windshield and fouled the wipers. As they were getting their bags out of the trunk, the snow's quality changed and softened, the flakes enlarged. A heavier silence settled on the woods.
As soon as it grew dark, Michael opened the Willoughby's. It was wonderfully smooth. Its texture seemed, at first, to impose on the blessedly warm room a familiar quietude. People said things they had said before, on other nights sheltering from other storms in past seasons. Norman Cevic groused about Vietnam. Alvin Mahoney talked about the single time he had brought his wife to the cabin.
"My then wife," he said. "She didn't much like it out here. Naw, not at all."
Michael turned to look at Alvin's worn, flushed country face with its faint mottled web of boozy angiomas. Then wife? Alvin was a widower. Where had he picked up this phrase to signal the louche sophistication of
la ronde?
Late wife, Alvin. Dead wife. Because Alma or Mildred or whatever her obviated name was had simply died on him. In what Michael had conceived of as his own sweet silent thought, he was surprised by the bitterness, his sudden, pointless, contemptuous anger.
He finished his glass. At Alvin's age, given their common vocabulary of features, their common weakness, he might come to look very much the same. But the anger kept swelling in his throat, beating time with his pulse, a vital sign.
"Well," Norman said, "all is forgiven now."
Michael, distracted by his own thoughts, had no idea what Cevic was talking about. What was forgiven? All? Forgiven whom?
In the morning they helped Alvin secure the cabin. His twelve-foot aluminum canoe was in a padlocked shed down the hill. Getting the canoe out, they found the padlock broken, but the burglars, in their laziness and inefficiency, had not managed to make off with the boat. One year they had found the bow full of hammered dents. Still working in darkness, they placed the canoe in its fittings atop the Jeep.
A blurred dawn was unveiling itself when they reached the stream that would take them into the islands of the swamp. There was still very little light. Black streaks crisscrossed the little patch of morning, the day's inklings. They loaded the canoe by flashlight. Glassy ice crackled under their boots at the shore's edge.
Michael took the aft paddle, steering, digging deep into the slow black stream. He kept the flashlight between the seat and his thigh so that its shaft beams would sweep the bank. Paddling up front, Norman also had a light.
"Nice easy stream," Alvin said. "I keep forgetting."
"It speeds up a lot toward the big river," Michael said. "There's a gorge."
"A minor gorge," Norman said.
"Yes," said Michael, "definitely minor."
"But it gets 'em," said Cevic. "Every spring they go. Half a dozen some years." He meant drowned fishermen.
Yards short of the landing, Michael picked up the flashlight, lost his gloved grip and sent it tumbling over the side. He swore.
They circled back, and riding the slight current got a look at the flashlight resting on the bottom, lighting the weedy marbled rocks seven, maybe eight feet below.
They circled again.
"How deep is it?" Alvin asked, and answered his own question. "Too deep."
"Too deep," Michael said. "My fault. Sorry."
"No problem," Norman said. "I've got one. And it's getting light."
By the time they offloaded, the day had composed itself around the skeletal woods, each branch bearing a coat of snow. They fanned out from the river, within sight of the glacial rock face that would be their rendezvous point. Each man carried a pack of provisions, a gun, a compass and a portable stand. Michael made for high ground, following a slope north of the rock. The snow was around four inches deep. He saw quite a few deer tracks, the little handprints of raccoons, the hip-hop brush patterns of rabbits. There were others, too, suggesting more exciting creatures, what might be fox, marten or wolverine.
He fixed his stand in the tallest tree among a cluster of oaks on sloping, rocky ground. The view was good, commanding a deer trail out of the pines above him that led toward the river. Now the animals would be prowling down from the high ground where they had passed the night, struggling only slightly in the new fallen layer, browsing for edibles. He waited. Invisible crows warned of his presence.
Then there commenced the curious passage into long silence, empty of event. Confronted by stillness without motion, a landscape of line and shadow that seemed outside time, he took in every feature of the shooting ground, every tree and snowy hummock. It was always a strange, suspended state. Notions thrived.
He watched, alert for the glimpse of streaked ivory horn, the muddy camouflage coat incredibly hard to define against the mix of white, the shades of brown tree trunks and waving dark evergreen. Braced for that flash of the flag. Every sound became the focus of his concentration. He got to know each tree, from the adjoining oak to the line of tall pines at the top of the rise.
Michael had come armed into the woods for the customary reason, to simplify life, to assume an ancient uncomplicated identity. But the thoughts that surfaced in his silence were not comforting. The image of himself, for instance, as an agent of providence. The fact that for every creature things waited.