SEPTEMBER 3, 1976
What’s with the answer machine? A man of your stature should have a secretary. Anyhow, Tony here. I was able to secure the item we’ve been talking about so we’ll see you at our place Friday. Seven o’clock? Or come earlier if you wish. And for God’s sake, erase this message.
HAT, I HAVE TO ASK YOU FOR THE BIGGEST MOST DESPERATE last-minute favor I have ever asked another human being on the face on the earth for and if my back wasn’t acting up, I’d be begging down on my knees,” said Tony Boyett with his customary mock humility. Boyett was a drug-addicted lawyer in his late forties, and the man he called Hat was twenty years his senior. Boyett and his wife owned a house called Orkney, named after King Arthur’s birthplace, built on a promontory overlooking the Hudson River about a hundred miles from New York City, in the town of Leyden, New York.
Tony and his wife, Parker, were having a hard time holding on to the property. The bills—taxes, repairs, gas, oil, electric—arrived like ransom notes. They did their best to take it in stride. They were not the first to lead irregular lives in the old house—Orkney had been the site of shootings, stabbings, and a century’s worth of scandalous copulations. Buried around the property were the bones of Indians and slaves, banknotes dating from the Royal British Bank scandal of 1856, Krugerrands, manuscripts and maps, and even the body parts of at least one inconvenient mistress. The house’s more mundane history was buried in two private dumps on the property, where staff disposed of garbage from the main house. Every now and then rising up from their shallow grave came discarded household items such as a candlestick with its socket stuffed with thick black wax, and countless opaque glass bottles, some clearly from the local apothecary, soda, rye, milk of magnesia, as well as one haunted baby doll, her little mouth a silent scream.
It was a house that defied the standard categories of architectural style, fashioned out of wood, brick, and rough-hewn stone. It sprouted chimneys every which way. It had a steep outdoor staircase that was meant to lead to a third-story widow’s walk that never was built. The windows were scattered chaotically, and seemed to go up and down like musical notes on the lines of a staff. But now its ungainliness had been eclipsed by its historical noteworthiness, much as a fool can become a source of wonder and admiration if he lives to be one hundred. The architecture and the legend were not the whole story, either. It had an unobstructed view of the river, with no other houses or anything that suggested the twentieth century. It also came with nearly fifty acres of rolling fields and towering woods, where there lived owls and raccoons, herons, pileated woodpeckers, hawks, eagles, wild turkeys, foxes, weasels, deer, coyotes, and now and again a bobcat.
Tony Boyett worked for Scattergood and Clark, an investment firm where his grandfather and father had worked, and where two days a week Tony sat at a small desk in an out-of-the-way little office, handling his family’s gradually diminishing holdings; cousins and grandnephews and other Boyetts had either gone broke or transferred their holdings to other, less moribund companies. Occasionally after work, before catching the train back to Leyden, Boyett went to a bare, boxy little apartment in a high-rise on West Fifteenth Street to buy a week’s worth of dope from a woman named Candace, enough for himself and Parker. He took good care of Parker, through whose family Orkney had come. Using the drug was never meant to be a nightly event, but an occasional reward for getting through another day on what the Boyetts called the Most Annoying Planet in the Universe. They had what they considered their own unique approach to drug use and their way of making sure that they did not descend into full-blown Man with a Golden Arm, Hatful of Rain addiction was to make most weekends dope free. Saturdays they took the edge off things with martinis and on Sunday it was cognac.
This Saturday, however, opium was on the menu. Opium was rare in New York, but recently a few Iranians who believed their suave despotic ruler’s hold on power was starting to slip had moved to New York, and, just as refugees of yore had secreted diamonds on their person, some of the fleeing Iranians had brought with them black opium. Instability in Iran turned out to be a Boyett boon, since opium was something Tony and Parker had always wanted to try. Cocteau wrote that the smell of opium was the least stupid smell in the world. Julia Lee singing “Lotus Blossom” was one of their favorite songs. Not to mention Coleridge! And now, at long last, they had a ball of the stuff, black and gummy, round and yummy, and their reasoning was that you couldn’t really become addicted to it because where the hell were you going to find it again? In the past ten days, Tony and Parker had smoked some of it, brewed some as a tea, and, most efficiently and effectively, shoved a bit up their rectums—French style, in Tony’s words, since once in Paris he had been prescribed opium suppositories by a doctor who looked quite a bit like Jean-Paul Sartre, replete with smudged glasses and a face full of blackheads. Both Tony and Parker were looking forward to telling their guests to shove something up their asses. In the meantime, the two of them had never been closer, never more in love. Dope in all its many manifestations, its pursuit, its ingestion, its taboo, its mortal dangers, and its financial obligation bound them as once sex, and then Orkney itself had bound them. They were going to lose the house one day—soon perhaps, and this was obvious to both of them—and all they could say about sex was that with the O around, it ceased to be a source of embarrassment since it turned chastity from a failure of the relationship into a side effect, with Parker dry as toast, and Tony soft as an oyster.
“That lumbar of yours, along with the thoracic,” Hat was saying, frowning with what gave every appearance of sympathy—but as everyone along the river said, it was not easy to know what or even if Hat was thinking. Few people knew his real name. Even his son had to hesitate when asked what his father’s given name was—it was Philip. And though Hat Stratton was voluble verging on logorrhea, he never spoke personally, and if one were to presuppose that beneath all the verbiage and the weird erudition there was an inner life, it would also have to be said that this inner life was something Hat kept to himself. Here’s what the Boyetts knew: Hat’s wife had died at the age of forty. His daughter left home at sixteen. Hat’s son had slept with half the working-class girls in the county and a few girls who it might have been assumed were out of his reach, as well. “Myself, I favor the good old Canadian Air Force exercises,” Hat said. “First thing in the morning, before my Chase and Sanborn. I do it by muscle groups. The body is very orderly, if you don’t mind my saying. . . .”
“Yes, well, the problem I’m faced with is this, Hat, my friend. We’re having people for drinks in about an hour,” Boyett said. “Old friends, we call them oil and water because her family owns some wells and his is in shipping, though not in a big way.” Boyett was a tall, dry man—everything about him was dry: his parchment skin, his nickel gray eyes, his oak brown hair, his colorless cracked lips, his voice. He was dressed in shapeless khaki trousers and a T-shirt. He thought that if people saw his unmarked arms, rumors about his drug use might blow over. “The plan is to serve them martinis and organize a stroll to the river and come back to the house and have dinner on the patio.”
At this point, Tony and Parker rarely invited or even allowed guests into the house. The only people who were allowed entrance were the exterminators who the Boyetts hired to help them deal with the catastrophic vermin problem plaguing the old house—squirrels both red and gray, chipmunks, mice, and even a couple of raccoons raced through the attic, the pantry. The creatures had their own secret passageways inside the walls, up and down, side to side, a world of their very own where they moved unmolested. Sometimes the sound of their scratchy scampering made one feel that madness was closing in. But the Boyetts were far from prompt in paying the exterminators and most of them had not been at Orkney since May.
“The boy and I wanted to get back to the west pasture and do a quick cutting,” Hat said. “The power takeoff shaft on the International Harvester is part of the original equipment. Now you will recall that we have done extensive repairs on that temperamental tractor of yours, but we were hoping to stay lucky on the PTO. You know it will run almost . . .”
There were occasions when Boyett would let Hat go on forever. There was something relaxing about the old man’s garrulousness, but right now time was tight.
“Hat, the favor I need. It’s this. Parker has reinjured her hand and won’t be able to cook. I don’t know a spatula from a chamber pot so I’m going to be useless here. But you! You, you sly dog, you turn out to be a culinary genius.”
“Chemistry was and remains one of my primary interests, Tony,” Hat said. He was tall, with a weathered, somewhat caved-in face, deeply lined from the sun. He held himself at odd angles. When his wife was alive—and she was a heavy woman, with a large bosom and sturdy legs—Hat had a bit of a belly, but now his body was lean, with a lonely, sinewy quality. He had a long nose, blue eyes, and a full head of thick gray hair. He was sixty-two but looked older. “If you can remove the fashion from cuisine and see it primarily as a form of chemistry, the combination of elements . . .”
“Yes, exactly. How about that beef stew you brought to us last week?”
“Ah, the bourguignon,” said Hat. “A perfect disguise for an overlooked cut.”
“Well, it was excellent. And we realize you can’t come up with something like that with no warning. Truthfully, we’d like you to just grill up some hamburgers. Done right, there is simply nothing like a good hamburger. Don’t you agree? And you can bring your son. The two of you can cook and serve and I think you’ll be out of there no later than eight o’clock. Tell your boy we’ll pay in cash. Knowing him, he’ll head into the village with a pocket full of whoopee.” Boyett smiled broadly, though Parker had just an hour ago warned him not to—he was missing an incisor.
“I’ll see what can be done,” said Hat. “He’s his own man, now.”
Hat’s son, Jennings, was back in Leyden after a stint in Saratoga Springs, where he had been living with a woman fifteen years his senior. Her name was Karen Colton and she worked as a secretary at Skidmore College. She’d gotten Jennings a temporary job with buildings and grounds, where he worked insulating a few of the older buildings. His job was mainly getting rid of the old asbestos, though the mission was confused because he was also wrapping some of the heat and hot water pipes in new asbestos. The school had a limited budget for winterizing, and despite the speculation surrounding asbestos, it was still one of the best things out there for insulation. The job paid decently and Karen herself was pulling in three hundred a week, so together they managed to live well. There were a few months in a row when it seemed to Jennings that every single day had something good in it. He liked where Karen lived, a mile from the racetrack in a ranch-style house built in 1950. He liked the bedroom, liked the bed, liked sleeping with her. She was self-conscious about being overweight, but she was sexually charged and adventurous. (He was a little on the heavy side, too—he had his mother’s build—and though he preferred thin, girlish women, he didn’t mind Karen’s weight.) At first, Jennings had felt reluctant to accommodate her unfamiliar erotic suggestions—he had always slept with many women but his sexual adventurousness was confined to seduction. Soon, however, he found he enjoyed these things, too—both giving and receiving rough treatment, cuffing and blindfolding her, slapping her ass. Other than occasional bouts of what Karen called their Divine Madness in bed, their life was calm, cozy, and affectionate, built around lovely dinners and long walks. However, Karen was in a custody dispute with her ex-husband, with whom she’d had a son, and her lawyer told her that living with a twenty-two-year-old would not look good to the court, and whether this would have been a determining factor or not it frightened Karen into ending the relationship. Jennings moved into an apartment a bit out of town and continued to work at the college, but he missed Karen. Saratoga Springs without her seemed dreary and unlucky and he returned to Orkney, to the yellow frame caretaker’s house, where he had been raised. In his childhood, it had been a happier place, while his mother was still alive and before his sister and Hat had had a falling-out and she left the house for good. Now it was just Jennings and his father and all Jennings wanted was to save enough money to move on.
There were few places for employment in Leyden. Jennings tried to stay in the insulation and asbestos business, but the only crew doing that kind of work in Leyden was run by Tim O’Mara, whose daughter Jennings had known in high school and there were hard feelings that made it impossible for O’Mara to hire Jennings, though he wanted to since his best worker had recently walked off the job after seeing a show on TV drumming up a bunch of hysteria about asbestos. There was nearby Avon College, but Jennings was reluctant to apply for B and G work there because they would check at Skidmore and see he had left that job without giving notice. There was Leydencraft, a furniture factory that had been in operation since the beginning of the century, turning out tables, chairs, dressers, armoires, blanket chests, and even little rustic-looking wooden plaques, which they could customize with your name and address burnt into the wood. A combination of inexpensive furniture, manufactured abroad in places like India and Guatemala, and new ways of making furniture parts had gutted Leydencraft. They went from employing over seventy workers to having twenty-two on the payroll, and those twenty-two had had their wages frozen for the past several years, and were working without contracts. The paper mill had been closed since 1970, as part of a government initiative to clean up the river, and the men who used to work there either had moved away or were mowing lawns and plowing driveways. The one expanding business in Leyden was Research Tech, which despite its forward-sounding name was a converted dairy barn used to breed rats and mice, which were used in experiments by laboratories all over the U.S. Research Tech’s only foreign competition was from Mexico and Canada, both of which were close enough to ship crates full of rodents to U.S. labs without losing too many to the cold or starvation. But the Canadian mice were expensive and the Mexican specimens sometimes had a hard time getting into the country—once, fifty thousand Wistar rats, with their large heads and long ears, were cooked into a bony-white soup while languishing on the tarmac at Dallas–Fort Worth. RT was getting a computer and already had automatic feeders; they weren’t cutting back but they weren’t hiring, either. And now a few people from the college and a couple of New York City transplants were picketing Saturday afternoons in front of the barn, saying that it was cruelty to animals to use the rats and mice in experiments, even if it meant curing cancer. The rat lovers marched with picket signs pumping up and down like pistons in an engine, bearing gruesome photos of white rats with electrodes on their heads or their torsos split open and their organs exposed or an unmolested rat staring beseechingly, its little pink humanish hands held up as if the creature were begging for mercy.
When Hat asked Jennings to help prepare and serve the meal to the Boyetts and their guests, Jennings was glad for the work. Hat’s arrangement with Tony and Parker was that he would be available to them forty hours a week in exchange for rent-free housing and whatever he could cultivate and harvest off the land. If he worked beyond the normal 7 A.M.–3 P.M. workday he was paid five dollars an hour. Hat assured Jennings that he, too, would be earning at least twenty-five dollars.
“If you ask me, I don’t see where it takes two able-bodied men to serve a simple supper to four people. With the heat and all, Tony wants us to use the Weber and make hamburgers. I told him straight out we would not be using charcoal. We’ll do the whole thing with wood and that way they will get the real taste of the meat. Anyhow, it was Tony’s idea. He figured you needed some money.”
“Don’t call him Tony like him and you are friends,” Jennings said.
“You and he,” Hat said.
“Yeah. Just don’t. Because you’re not. Not yesterday, not today, or ever. You’re a back and a couple a hands and that’s it.”
“With that kind of attitude, you’ll get us both fired,” Hat said. “Don’t you need twenty-five dollars?”
IT WAS EASY WORK AND to make it even easier Parker had ventured into town to buy the groceries. She drove the old maroon Buick station wagon, creeping along curvy Riverside Road, fully aware that she was impaired and not wanting to make matters worse for herself by slamming into a tree or clipping a bicyclist. Hat had wired up the tailpipe so it would stay in place, but before Parker was halfway into town, the wires had devilishly untied themselves and the tailpipe was scraping against asphalt, and suddenly she was being stalked by huge hydrangeas of yellow and silver sparks. She switched on the radio and sang along with an old Bee Gees number, to block out the scraping sound, and the anxiety. You don’t know what it’s like . . . to love somebody. At the A&P she left the engine of her car running to keep it cool, and as insurance against her going into a kind of supermarket trance, in which she pushed her little cart up and down the aisles, amazed and appalled by all the crap for sale. She was famously frugal and bought the cheapest chopped meat and day-old hamburger buns from the half-price bin. When she brought her bag of groceries back to the car, it was nice and cool inside. “Parker, you are a very wise woman,” she said to herself.
“The buns are stale, Dad,” Jennings said as he shook them out of their plastic bag and onto a platter.
“We’ll warm them up and no one will be any the wiser,” Hat said.
They were on the bluestone patio off the kitchen. Gnarled wisteria vines, swollen and gray, hung from the overhead trellis like pythons. Hat and Jennings had the hamburgers on the grill. Licks of flame rose, and the heat corrugated the evening air. The light was fading. Jennings watched as a long furled contrail slowly dissipated and became part of the sky again. The river reflected the sunset, the pulsating orange of it, the dark blue. He wondered what it meant, any of it. Just another spin in the nothingness of space? How could it be so beautiful? On Hat’s insistence, Jennings was in black slacks, a white shirt—he drew the line at the toque blanche, though Hat wore his and had brought an extra, in case the boy changed his mind. “If you’re going to do something, I always say, do it right,” Hat declared. To which Jennings replied, “I’m going to do it right, Pop, just not with a dunce cap.”
Tony and Parker and their guests were back from their walk. The guests were in their forties, too—the Longacres, Kenneth and Donna. He was loud and forceful and had a reddish helmet of wavy hair. He had a hanging gut and his shirt was misbuttoned; Jennings had a grudging admiration for the type—this guy was secure, his card had been punched, and he was past caring what he looked like. The wife, Donna, was another matter. She was dark and moody, and the shape of her body was hidden by a gold-and-white caftan. Despite the July heat, she hugged herself and seemed to shiver. She had slipped somewhere along the way on their trek to and from the river’s edge and there were grass stains on her caftan, as well as dirt on the heels of her hands, and a little brushstroke of it on her cheek.
The four sat in Adirondack chairs, with their legs extended and their heads tilted back. The night sky was darkening. One by one the stars appeared, like early arrivals taking their seats in an otherwise empty auditorium.
“You sure know how to throw a fucking party, Tony,” Kenneth said. “I hope you’re prepared to put us up.”
“This is very nice,” Donna said, in a sad whisper.
“Are you okay?” Parker asked her.
“It’s stronger than I’m used to,” Donna said.
Jennings tried to catch his father’s attention with a quick, pointed glance. More than once, Jennings had told Hat that the Boyetts might be junkies; Hat would just shrug, as if the word was incomprehensible, some new kind of lingo, and then the third time Hat seemed to understand that Jennings was calling the Boyetts dope addicts and he said it was all so sad, and such a waste. But Hat’s hands had trembled as he said it and Jennings had regretted pressing the point. In the first place, he wasn’t 100 percent certain the Boyetts were actual down-for-the-count junkies, and second, it was unbearable for him to see his father with that look of dread and uncertainty on his face. He didn’t want to be the one who forced Hat to face unpleasant truths. With a dead wife and a daughter with whom he was not on speaking terms, Hat had enough to deal with. His sense of well-being was fragile and built on the assumption that he was a valuable man, and in order to fully believe in his own value he had to hold in high esteem the people for whom he worked. If he was hop-to-ing it for a couple of degenerates—what did that make him?
Hat placed the hamburgers on a pewter tray that Tony had scratched up a couple of weeks ago while chopping an onion. Tony, Parker, Donna, and Kenneth waited to be served, with their plates and flatware and glasses of beer on the broad cedar arms of their chairs. Jennings bent his knees a bit to make the tray more easily reached by the recumbent diners. “Oh my God in heaven, my God, my God,” said Donna as she lifted the top bun on each of the hamburgers. “Are they all the same?” she asked Jennings.
“Pretty much,” he said.
“He’s a handsome one,” Donna said to Parker. She was open about it, as if they were speaking a language only they understood.
“You think so?” said Tony. “You like the peasant body, with those short arms and round belly?”
“I didn’t come here to argue,” said Donna. “But there’s a manliness to him, and I like a guy to be heavier than me.”
“If you’re not careful, you won’t be able to find such a man,” her husband said.
“Hat and his family have been here forever,” Parker said. “His father was called Whitey and he worked for my uncle Payson. And when the place came to me.” She paused, mired for a moment in the delicious confusion of narcotics, which was like being caught in a spiderweb made of honey. “How long have we lived here, Tony?”
Tony was pointing at the sky, moving his thumb as if it were the hammer of a gun, shooting at the stars as they made their appearance.
“Tony?”
“I don’t know. Five years? Seven?”
“Oh, I don’t think it can be seven years. Seven years ago we . . .”
“Then five,” Tony said.
“Why are those the only choices?” Parker asked.
“All right. We have been here six years. Are we all right with that?”
“Hat?” Parker made the effort to call out to him. “How long have Tony and I owned Orkney?”
Hat’s face had turned red from the heat of the grill. A bead of perspiration trembled at the end of his long nose. He stepped back and took off his chef’s hat, as if to say the person who would be answering Parker’s question was not the person who was broiling up hamburgers.
“It was five years last March fifteenth,” Hat said. “The ides of March.” He frowned, looked away, as it occurred to him that in Shakespeare this was not a fortuitous day.
Perhaps the mention of the ides of March knocked something loose in Donna’s memory. She raised her hand and shook it back and forth like an eager child insisting she knew the answer to the teacher’s question. She wore an imposing ring, a cushion-cut sapphire, nearly twenty carats, surrounded by pear-shaped diamonds. “The dogs!” she cried out. “The dogs.”
“I said you were welcome to bring them,” Parker said.
“We did,” drawled Kenneth, “but Donna insisted on leaving them in the car. She was afraid they would get lost.”
“They’ve been in the car too long,” Donna said. “It’s hot.” She struggled to her feet and twisted her ring nervously. It was slightly too large for her—it had been her great-aunt’s—and it rattled onto the bluestone patio.
“There goes two hundred K,” Kenneth said.
“Your dogs can scamper around here,” Parker said.
“Martin, Bobby, and John,” said Tony. “Is that right? Am I remembering correctly?” The ring had rolled toward him. He delivered it to Donna, who slipped it back onto her finger. The panic in her eyes burned through the narcotic haze.
“No, everyone thinks that,” said Kenneth, with evident pleasure. “It’s Abraham, Martin, and John. Bobby’s not in the song. No, wait. Correction. Dion mentions him in the last part.”
“Someone help me find the keys,” Donna said. “Please. They’ve been in there too long.”
“You don’t have them?” Kenneth asked. He seemed to enjoy catching his wife’s mistakes. It was not out of the question that he kept a private tally of them.
“When I fell.”
“Why would you lock the car?” Parker asked.
“Force of habit,” said Tony. “One of the strongest forces in nature. We just walk up and down the same neural paths, over and over and over, until by the mercy of God we are allowed to die.”
Donna continued to search her pockets, but it was clearly hopeless. She gazed out at the long sloping lawn that wound its way down through the high grass, the scrub, until it came to the train tracks and the river.
A party boat was making its way south on the river. It was a hulking, ungainly craft, filled with merrymakers getting drunk, dancing. The old tub was decked out in red, white, and blue lights. The Bee Gees singing “Nights on Broadway” was amped up so loud that it sounded as if it was playing right there on the patio.
“I can’t bear those party boats,” Tony said.
“Oh please,” said Parker.
“It just breaks my heart,” Tony said. “Such a craven, greedy misuse of the river.”
“I know, baby,” Parker said in her Comforting Voice. She frowned sympathetically. “I just hate to see you get yourself worked up.”
“We have to find my keys,” Donna shouted. “I can’t leave those dogs in the hot car. They’ll die.”
“Get off my river!” Tony shouted out at the passing boat.
“Excuse me,” Hat said. “Is that old army flashlight still in the kitchen? It throws out a pretty fair beam.”
“I meant to get batteries,” Tony said.
Kenneth and Donna’s car was off to the side of the driveway, under an old locust tree, which, inasmuch as they had given the matter sustained thought, was meant to shade the backseat of their light blue Impala, rented from Hertz in the city. Donna ran around the house, with Kenneth and the Boyetts following, and with Hat and Jennings walking quickly behind them.
“This is not going to be good,” Jennings said to his father, and Hat glared at him momentarily. Despite all of his learning and the galaxies of facts and figures that illuminated his mind, Hat still had trouble making a distinction between someone saying what they thought might happen from what they would actually want to happen. He thought, for instance, that predicting Carter was going to win the election basically meant you wanted Carter in the White House.
Donna pulled on all four of the door handles hoping that one of them was somehow unlocked. Her dogs, butterscotch-and-white King Charles spaniels, were curled up in a heap; which one was which was indistinguishable. It was a tangle of ears and legs and tails. Donna pounded the heels of her hands against the left-back window, shaking it in its frame, but the dogs, usually so quick to react to the slightest sound, or even changes in the light, gave no sign of sensing her presence, and no sign of life.
“Kenny,” Donna said. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “They’re not just dogs. You understand that, don’t you? They’re life! They’re everything. Please.”
“We need one of those crafty little car thieves who know how to open a car door with a coat hanger,” Kenneth said.
“They’re going to die,” Donna said. The car was hot to the touch.
“They’re fine,” Kenneth said. “They’re in the shade.”
About 120 years ago, when Orkney was completed, and this driveway was suitable for horses and carriages, the borders were marked by white and gray stones, each about the size of a medicine ball. Consulting no one, Jennings picked one up and calmly walked with it to the car. The sun blazed in the chrome bumpers. Jennings lifted the rock and cocked his arms so that the rock was behind his head and—after looking from face to face, giving anyone who wanted to stop him a chance to do so—he brought his arms forward quickly, and heaved the rock onto the windshield.
“Hey, man, it’s a rental,” Kenneth said.
The rock did not break through the windshield, but created a sudden concave at the center, a deep nest of spidery cracks. Jennings scrambled onto the hood of the car and donkey-kicked at the weakened window, with his back to it. At last, his foot went through. His shoe filled with little shards, his ankle was aflame, and he knew, dimly, that he was bleeding.
“Your face!” cried Hat.
Jennings pulled off his shirt and tied it around his head so that his face was somewhat protected. He had gone from looking like someone serving wealthy people their dinner to someone in a street riot who does not want to be identified. He pushed his way through the windshield that had by now been beaten into submission, but the opening was not large enough. The glass pierced him everywhere—his scalp, along the curve of his spine. A couple of large shards stuck out of him like the plates on the back of a stegosaurus as he made his way to the backseat. Despite the dappling shade of that lovely old locust tree, the car was stifling. He knew the dogs had not made it before going in. But you couldn’t just leave them there.
There was barely any weight to them. It was like picking up three gloves. He treated them gently, cradling them in one arm as he unlocked the door. He yanked his shirt down, and took a deep breath. The dogs were a mélange of floppy ears and dark protruding eyes. Their lips were white, covered with thick saliva.
He stumbled out of the car, and Donna stared at him. Her face was red, as if the grief she swallowed in one horrible gulp now scalded her from the inside out. “Are they dead?” she asked in a small voice.
Jennings didn’t reply. He set the dogs down on the grass, gently, one at a time. He put them on their side, stretched out their forepaws, their back legs.
“Heat stroke,” Hat said. “If it’s eighty degrees outside, inside a car it can get up to a hundred in no time. Hundred and twenty, thirty.”
“Didn’t you leave the windows open?” Parker asked. She was frowning in an extreme way, like a character in a Japanese woodcut.
“A little,” said Donna.
“Those dogs are so damn small and slippery,” Kenneth said. “Anything more than an inch and they get right out.” He put his arm around his wife, who was silently weeping. “What a waste,” he said. “And that car. I don’t know what the fuck we’re supposed to do about that. You know, I must have had a premonition. I swear to God. I must have. I never go for all the insurance they try to sell you, but this time I went for the whole package. I knew we were going to be having a little party and I didn’t want to take any chances. Lucky thing.”
“Luck?” echoed Donna. “You talk to me of luck?” Her sobs began as a kind of breathlessness and increased in volume and intensity, until it seemed she might be dismantled by them. Kenneth shushed and patted her and she pressed her face into his chest and held on to his shoulders. He lifted his chin and pursed his lips and gazed at the Boyetts, wanting them to witness what he was able to do for his distraught wife. Whatever they may think and whatever they may have heard, he was Donna’s Rock of Gibraltar.
The Boyetts were reluctant to have guests spend the night, but there was really no alternative to inviting them to sleep at Orkney and deal with matters in the morning. In the meantime, there was a bit more dope—actually, quite a bit, if one counted the two dime bags Tony had secreted away—and enough hamburger to carry them through the night.
“Once more unto the patio!” Tony called out in what Parker called his Most Shakespearean Bellow. They walked in single file and disappeared into the darkness that had settled over Orkney.
When they could no longer hear the Boyetts and their guests, father and son went to the equipment shed. Hat finished plucking out the windshield shards from his son’s back and when that was done they both grabbed a digging shovel and a spade. “Get one with a D-grip,” Hat said. They walked about a hundred yards away from the house, to the small orchard Hat had planted with his own father right after the end of World War II. The ground in the orchard was soft and offered little resistance, and the dark moist smell of good soil rose into the night air, blending with the smell of honeysuckle, pine, and the distant, ever so slightly brackish smell of the river. Father and son prepared a ditch for the dead dogs. They worked quickly. Hat was always fast and Jennings was trying to burn off his fury.
“When I was a boy we used to think you could dig a hole all the way to China,” Hat said.
“I heard that, too,” Jennings said.
“The things we didn’t know,” Hat said. “Your crust, your mantle, the whole lithosphere. Even if you could dig your way through it, you’d have your core to contend with.”
“These poor fucking dogs,” Jennings said.
“Language,” Hat said, without much conviction.
“I guess they’ll just get new dogs,” Jennings said, as they patted down the loose earth with the backs of their shovels.
“I suppose they will,” Hat said. He stepped back to inspect their work, though it was barely visible with only a quarter moon to counteract the darkness.
“Looks all right,” Jennings said.
“We can check again in the morning.” Hat jammed the tip of his spade into the earth and leaned on the handle to take some of the weight off his legs. He’d been debating saying something since they’d started digging and now he decided he’d go ahead and say it. “You’re a good worker, Jennings. It’s . . . it’s good to work with you. I’m glad you got out of Saratoga. That’s a city run by the racing syndicate and the Skidmore bunch. And I must say I never thought much of your lady friend up there.”
“You never met her.”
“That’s right. She never made the effort to come down here and see me. Anyhow, it’s water under the bridge. The important thing is, you’re home.”
PARKER HAD BOUGHT AN ICE-CREAM cake at the supermarket, but Hat had forgotten to take it out of the freezer to let it soften. His distress was unnecessary; by the time he and Jennings were in place to serve the desserts, the Boyetts and their guests were deep in their opium dreams, half-dozing in their Adirondack chairs, except for Donna, who was completely unconscious, with a film of saliva on her lips, quite like the dogs.
“Jennings, you’re so strong,” Parker said in a desiccated voice. “We need to get poor Donna inside. Do you think you could carry her up to the Rose Room on the second floor? I believe the bed in there is decent.”
Jennings glanced at Hat, who nodded yes. Donna’s head lolled back and her hair streamed behind her as he carried her across the patio and in through the French doors, into what had once been the dining room and now was called the observatory, a large, high-ceilinged room devoid of furniture except for an upholstered piano bench, and, in the center of the room, a long white telescope on a five-foot-high tripod, perched like a praying mantis on the bare parqueted floor.
As Jennings carried Donna up the stairs, her head lolled from one side to the other and he let it. Sweat trickled down his spine. He stumbled momentarily and Donna’s eyes opened suddenly and wide—it was unnerving, like someone in a horror movie come back to life. Her eyes, glassy as a doll’s, seemed to register nothing and a moment later she closed them.
He moved through the second-floor hall, a portrait gallery, where Orkney’s original owners reigned, the Wohls, with their muttonchop sideburns and unruly brows, their stiff white collars, their enigmatic smiles. Parker was barely a Wohl herself, but the portraits were precious to her, as was the knowledge that moldering beneath Orkney’s sod were Wohl bottles and spoons and the bones of servants and pets. Hat often spoke of the Wohls as if he had known them, but Jennings could not recall a single thing his father had ever said about them, could not remember how they had made their fortune or what had become of them.
Jennings looked down on the face of the woman in his arms. His bet was that she was the one in the couple with money. If the husband had his own money, he would have chosen someone prettier. Jennings had been with many girls and women, and his ability to attract females was the cornerstone of his pride, but he had never been with anyone rich. What would it be like, he wondered, to be with such a woman, to be her lover, to know the world as she knew it? What would it be like to be able to have whatever you wanted? You see something you want in a store window and the only problem is, do you have enough time to go in and get it, or do you have to come back some other time and pick it up? Those were the kinds of problems you had! What would it be like to never ever be the one who lifted and carried and fried and scraped and cut and stacked and dug the grave and did without? He lifted her up so her face was closer to his and breathed deeply.
“Donna.” He whispered her name. He lowered her onto the bed, and stood back for a moment. She rolled onto her stomach, but quickly rolled onto her back again, breathing heavily, as if that moment with her face pressed into the mattress put the fear of God into her.
“You dumbass,” Jennings said, softly. He waited to see if she would respond. “You killed your little dogs,” he said, somewhat louder. “Very careless, Donna, you dumbass.” Donna’s lips parted, as if she might reply, but all that came out were her slow exhalations.
She rubbed the side of her face with her right hand, the hand with the sapphire ring, reminding Jennings of its existence, this small piece of polished stone dug out of some hole somewhere in—what? a jungle? a riverbed? Some hidden spot. He’d overheard what the husband said about the ring’s value. Its worth. Jennings did not like that word. Worth. Who decided? It was all so arbitrary. Gold, diamonds—none of them as beautiful as a ripe apple.
Donna stopped rubbing her face and placed her hand on her stomach and seemed to fall deeper still into her doped-out state. He placed his hand on top of hers and kept it there. He lifted her pinkie, higher, higher, almost bending it, keeping it up, letting it go. It fell with a little thump. Her lips parted but other than that she did not stir. He lifted the finger with the ring, the hundred-thousand-dollar finger, if her husband was to be believed, held it, held it, bent it so far back that her entire hand lifted for a moment. He let it go and it landed on her stomach like a hat tossed onto a bed. He covered her entire hand with his, with a kind of tenderness, and when he lifted it again he had her ring.
He walked slowly down the stairs, and through the house. The leafy sour smell of cigarette smoke came from the patio. He stood in the darkness, wondering if it would be better, smarter, to be seen walking across the patio. That way they’d remember Jennings had had nothing to hide, didn’t go sneaking off like a thief but said his good nights and left whistling a little tune. He ran his hand over the pocket of his proper pants, the trousers Hat had insisted upon, and felt the shape of the ring. He pulled it out. What was the deal? How could it be worth more than ten cars? More than the men who dug it out of the earth. He had an impulse to throw the ring into the darkness of the house, where someone would come across it in the morning. He did not decide to do otherwise. He let his body do what his body was going to do and his body put the ring in his back pocket and after that his body pulled his shirttails out, hiding his pocket beneath the cotton blend of Hat’s Oleg Cassini white shirt.
“She’s asleep,” Jennings announced, and bid the Boyetts and Kenneth good night. His voice was relaxed, and as far as he could tell his face was, too, but he could not slow down his gait. He was across the patio in six long strides. As soon as he was away from the house, darkness swallowed him up and he felt such a surge of relief that he pounded his fist into his hand. Dog killer, he said to himself, repeatedly. Dog killer.
He strolled back to the equipment shed for the shovel and he strolled even more slowly toward the orchard. Though he and Hat had patted the earth flat, he knew exactly where to dig. The dirt was loose, it was like digging through a pile of peanut shells. In no time, he had exposed the dead spaniels. He dropped the ring onto the patch of fur, and moving quickly now, he refilled their grave. He heard the distant sound of music. One of the party boats that Tony raged about, trespassing on his river, pirates hijacking the silence of his night. Jennings walked back to the shed to the beat of the music and put the shovel away, locked up for the night. He faced the river as the party boat drifted south. The Mamas and the Papas, an oldie but a goodie. A breeze was blowing. More than a breeze, really, a good stiff wind. The ring would stay right where it was. One day, Jennings would take it far away and try to sell it. In the meantime, it was under—what did Hat call it? The crust, the mantle? The ring was back where it had come from, the part of the world nobody sees. Well, not nobody. Those with the tools and the willingness to dig and get dirty, they saw it.