Authors: Nancy Mauro
“I don’t deal in the present tense.”
“Fair enough. The convent shit’s more titillating anyway. Let’s get back to that.”
“Hold on,” she says. “You never said. What do I get out of this?”
“Oh.” Lloyd puts his hands on his hips. “You’re in for a treat. You and I are going on a little field trip.”
At six-thirty that night, Duncan connects to the Saw Mill Parkway with an impaired sense of aerodynamics (due to the pug-nosed state of the Saab) but also with an overriding self-confidence that only a big idea can generate. Of course, leave it to Anne and her typical account-whore behavior to complicate a simple premise like
History Repeating
with a non sequitur like skinny-leg jeans. Well, he’ll find a way to work around it.
Because unlike the Laundry Elves campaign, this is his chance to create compelling drama in the form of a TV commercial. It’s also a chance at another gold Pencil.
Good thing Lily isn’t the only one who can crack open a book. Because he’s going to have to do research. By the time he traveled to Vietnam, the country had grown a lush cover of foliage over its scars. By the time he toured the rooms of the Reunification Palace in Saigon, it had been converted into a museum. He has a picture of himself standing in front of the stormer tanks that took down the palace gates in ’75. There’s something wrong with the photo, though, that makes him stack it at the back of the pile. It’s his grin or his T-shirt logo; the great white swoosh of one or the other, or both.
If anything, the forced inclusion of the skinny-fit jeans is a reminder that his nascent idea requires protection. He will not discuss it with any of the Brass traditionalists who roost and fuck in the upper reaches of the agency, refusing to acknowledge the malleable new borders of media. Who says a national denim campaign can’t provide commentary on the human condition under strife? Also, he will not discuss it with Lily. He looks at the clock in the dash. She’s probably waiting for him to excavate. It’s odd, but in the city he kept forgetting about the bones, the dead nanny in the loam. In fact, he’d considered lingering around the office tonight, getting in well after Lily had turned in. These are impulses he can’t explain. Not to Lily, not even to himself. What kind of man admits the keen sense of self he feels at work becomes all but obscured by the time he hits the deer-strewn Taconic?
W
hen he pulls up to the house he finds Lily sitting on a folding lawn chair in the driveway. She’s wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and is fogging her thighs with a can of insect repellent. Duncan gives the horn a weak squeeze in greeting. It produces a sound much like that of a stomach digesting. Lily jumps up, follows the car to the lean-to. Duncan winces; she’s going to nail him for being late. And it doesn’t help that he still hasn’t brought the Saab in for servicing.
He hardly has time to cut the engine and Lily’s there, pressed in the narrow strip between wall and car, spray can still in hand. “He got our number,” she says as he opens his door. “I don’t know how—it’s not even listed.”
“What?” Duncan edges out of the driver’s side, they are nose to nose. Lily pushes back her hair, flustered and impatient.
“He wanted to talk to you.” She backs up, allowing the door to close behind him. “I thought it was about the pig.”
“Lily, calm down. Who wants to talk to me?” Duncan has to guide her back out of the lean-to and into the yard.
“Skinner—the old man. We’ve been summoned. Well, you’ve been summoned. Tonight.” She tosses the insect repellent into the grass.
“What for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, did you tell him I wasn’t around?”
“I don’t want him to know you’re not here.” Her voice riles into sopranic peaks. “We need to go over—what if they found the pig?”
Duncan is glad that she’s not angry with him. Feels a clean, white flash of relief that lasts a few moments before he realizes what she’s really saying. One of the last things he wants to do tonight is listen to Skinner’s lung-busting hack.
“I knew I shouldn’t have left you here.” He turns, sets the lock on the Saab. “But you wanted to be mixed up, right?”
“That’s why I’m not letting you go alone,” Lily says. “If the townies are taking you down, I’m going down with you.”
He looks at her, so serious in the evening light. “Thank you,” he says gruffly though touched by her words. “But we don’t have to go anywhere we don’t want to go.”
“It’s not an invitation. If we don’t go to them, you know they’ll come here.”
Duncan’s exhausted from his drive. His shirt is moist under one arm and he can feel a pimple pulsing beside his nostril. “Fine. Let them come.”
“Duncan.”
“Or better yet, let me go there, explain the whole thing.” He turns, starts walking down the drive.
“No, wait,” she says, following him. “We’ll go together and deny it all.”
“Lily, I don’t care what these people think.” He stops, looks at her. Could this embroilment be her way of avoiding the truth, of dismissing the real problem between them? “You can come back to the city on Sunday.”
“No! I cannot just go back to the city, Duncan.” She crosses her arms over her breasts. “What about Tinker—the bones?”
He doesn’t answer, doesn’t tell her he’d forgotten. This Lily reminds him of an outdoor child, wild and feral. His mouth swells. He would like to fish her from the long grass and bring her inside.
“Where is this meeting, anyway?” he says finally.
“I wrote it down.”
“Fine. Let’s do it.”
The cannon is mounted on a grassy strip of lawn between a tar-paper shack and an aluminum barn, its muzzle angled toward a yawning gap in the treeline and the ribbon of Hudson beyond.
“Here’s what you need to know about firing a ten-pound Parrott rifle without blasting a hole through yourself.” Skinner slaps the side of the cannon, turns his red clotted eye on the men gathered around him. “Owing to some unfortunate accidents with cast-iron pieces, this particular piece of ordnance enjoyed a bad reputation among many artillerymen.”
Lily is, maybe unsurprisingly, the only woman in the farmyard. Her presence clearly compromises the Masonic atmosphere, but what was she supposed to do? Let Duncan come here alone? Between the two of them, she’s the only one thinking straight about the wild boar. She watches as Skinner marches Duncan into the “second” position at the mouth of the cannon and hands him a corkscrew-ended rod he calls a wormer.
“Your job’s to scrape out any leftover bits of embers before we load in fresh ammo.” The old man’s voice is a whistle from a reed pond. “You getting this? Otherwise, you’ll push in fresh gunpowder and blow yourself sky high.”
That they have not been discovered—that instead, the locals are conscripting her husband into some sort of military reenactment—does little to lighten Lily’s mood or loosen the sensation of a gunpoint summoning. Duncan’s face is hard under cumulative stubble, but she can still read his disbelief. He’s been singled out for an elaborate hazing ritual involving exploding ordnance. Drove two hours to escape the lunatic fringe in the city only to be greeted by its rural counterpart.
If there is some significance to the firing, Skinner has yet to explain it, though Lily is sure it has somehow been instigated by their presence in
Osterhagen. In addition to the dozen or so onlookers, a small group of men—Duncan included—has been chosen to actually participate in the firing. While the old man demonstrates how to plunge the cannon tube clean Lily looks around. She recognizes two people from the library gathering last week. Wakefield, who owns the hardware store, and the sickly Armenian with the ponytail who’d dribbled a trail of cranberry punch down the front of his denim shirt. There’s a fifth making up the active band around the flaking piece of artillery. Dressed in a pair of gumboots and green gunner’s cap is a pint-size twist of a man who can only be Skinner’s son from Poughkeepsie. Ancient in his own right and with a grizzled head, he has the same bulbous eyes that turn wolfishly on Lily now and then as his father explains how to use a tube of fulminated mercury to ignite gunpowder.
“The Model 1861 has a bore diameter of two-point-nine inches, effective range of nineteen hundred yards, and weighs eight hundred ninety pounds. One of the most accurate and economical artillery pieces during the Civil War. But cast iron is brittle—which you’ll see for yourselves, there’s lotsa pressure in the breech when you fire it off. That’s why it’s reinforced with wrought iron.” Skinner knuckles his fist against the metal barrel skirting. “’Course, they still occasionally blow up.”
A chuckle rises from the villagers. Lily shudders, looks around. In the darkened lot the men are all slouch and peaked ball caps, lumps of flannel trained on Skinner’s scratch track of a voice.
“Wet sponge, Emmett!”
Skinner’s son, occupying the “first” position, dips the sponge end of his rod into a bucket of water and then drives it up into the tube. Lily senses there’s something moist and loathsome about him. The sort of creature found under bridges, awaiting the crossing of the billy goats. Even the thought of Lloyd cycling through his comprehensive collection of perversions isn’t nearly as offensive. Also, she can’t ignore the fact that he’s staring at her while pumping the sponge rod aggressively in and out of the shaft.
She takes a step to the left, hoping to move out of his sight line. But those eyes trail her, two poached eggs sliding sideways in their cups.
“The Parrott system here was the workhorse rifle of the artillery for the first years of the war. They kept them rolling out even after bringing around ordnance rifles.” The old man watches his son tap the rod against the barrel mouth. “Seems to me if it was good enough for the Battle of Bull Run, it’s good enough for our purposes tonight.”
“Which are what, exactly?” Duncan interrupts. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
Lily watches Skinner turn sharply on her husband. He stands just under Duncan’s nostrils. The old man has the unwarranted bravery of a toy dog, she thinks, and the same propensity to bite.
“Ten o’clock cannon is a warning to whosever got our boar,” he says. “Go ahead and set your watch by us. Every twenty-two hundred hours. Now get ready to load.”
Wakefield, blunt-thumbed and severe despite a waft of frosty hair, comes forward with a blackened sackcloth (which Lily assumes to be gunpowder) and loads it into the cannon muzzle. Emmett tamps it to the back of the tube with the ram end of the rod.
“I’m gonna sight the piece,” Skinner calls with emphasis in the direction of the trees. He kneels at the breech end of the cannon and peers along its nozzle as though to locate a Confederate battery hidden in the bush.
Lily glances at her husband. He looks soldierly in the dusk, his wormer rod the spear of classic battle. She remembers the night they arrived, how he’d stood frozen on the road staring at the boar while it thrashed under the front wheel. How she’d held out the tire iron to him but knew, already, that the extension of her arm was just reflex. That she had already executed the action herself. Something alone and instinctive within her had already carried out the deed without him.
“How’s this going to bring back the pig?” She hears her voice for the first time.
Skinner looks up at her. He pushes back from the cannon and brushes his hands against the obliques of his thighs. “You ever come under cannon fire?” he asks. “Eleven thousand Union soldiers did not just fall at Appomattox under natural circumstances.”
Lily and Duncan glance at one another, seeking interpretation. Maybe they’re being toyed with, but how much do these people know?
The old man steps toward her, zippering his hunting vest tight across the aquatic rumblings of his chest. “You might be king of the hill living in that fancy old house. But when there’s an 1861 Parrott rifle trained on your front porch, you’re going to think twice before you take that which does not belong to you.”
It’s impossible to know the depth of this indictment. Lily thinks of her conversations with Lloyd, his appreciation of her stoic demeanor, and wishes for a bit of that unflappability to settle over her heart right now.
“Prick and prime,” Skinner tells his artillerymen.
While Wakefield fusses with a lanyard and the small tube of mercury, the Armenian finally steps to action. It’s his job to insert a metal pin into a tiny airshaft at the rear of the cannon and pierce the sack of gunpowder. Of all the men gathered, Lily is least afraid of him. He’s a pound shy of swimming in his chambray shirt and she’s almost certain she could outrun him.
When Skinner finally calls “Ready!” Duncan is bent over, tying his shoelace. The rest of the artillerymen take a step toward the rear of the weapon. They angle their bodies away from the direction of the charge and flatten the palms of their hands over the ears closest to the cannon. There is a strum across Lily’s spine. Duncan straightens up and looks around. He holds his post at the mouth of the cannon but looks bewildered, a man lost midstep in an aerobics class. She has a vision trimmed with gunpowder grit, her husband with a ballistic path straight through his belly.
“Jesus Christ, Duncan,” she calls. “Get out of the way.”
Skinner tips his pruned head in disgust. “I believe he wants to be blown into next Wednesday.” There’s a swish of nylon vest as he raises his hand to halt the proceedings.
Duncan, suddenly aware that he’s holding things up, spears the wormer rod into the ground and jogs over to the side of the cannon. Lily can tell by the way he puts a hand through his hair that he’s both shamed and impatient. She hears the coughs and brays of the outdoorsmen surrounding her. Sensing the potential for a casualty, flannel and work boots draw closer in the darkness.
“What do you boys think?” Skinner turns to his pod. There’s an audible trill from his lungs, his voice a harmonica played underwater. “Will Old Parrott be a widow maker once again?”
A weak holler from the crowd. Emmett lofts his sponge rod over his head. The Armenian fiddles with his snarled ponytail. A motion lamp on the barn is triggered, bathing the entire scene in staccato illumination. Lily sees the figure of her husband at the edge of this situation. She smells wood smoke in the air. Skinner taps her roughly on the shoulder. “You go ahead, wish your man luck. Might be your last chance.”