7: THE OFFER

The sky was still dark, dawn just easing up. Howard walked along the path he had shoveled to the derelict 1947 Chevy in his field. There he placed a half-dozen empty beer cans on the hood of the car. The snow-covered ground was littered with beer cans torn by bullets from the .308. He was preparing for the morning’s target practice, the only time in the day when he had any real peace, the only time he could really think.

He went into the house and returned with a mug of coffee. And then he sat bundled in a quilt in the rocking chair on the back porch, sipping his coffee, the rifle on his lap. The cold relaxed him. He waited for dawn to spread across the sky, from black to gray, and lighter gray, and almost to white, and then the colors from the east would fly up in slow motion, broaden, and slowly fade until the sky was deep blue. He began to think.

Up the hill, they would be stirring—the woman, the actor, his own son. He could no longer think of the place as Swett’s. The woman had taken absolute possession. Everett Swett in his dirty overalls spitting tobacco juice into a Maxwell House coffee can, blue as the sky—the memory was sharp and vivid, yet somehow unreal, as though Swett had not been a man he knew but a character out of a story someone had told him. Once there was a farmer who lived on a hill in a pretty spot overlooking the Connecticut River and who carried a stick to beat his animals with. Earlier, from his dark kitchen, Howard had watched Mrs. Cutter’s Christmas tree in her living-room window, electric bulbs twinkling in imitation of stars. Pretty. Now dawn lay on the window like a bright mask. Icicles glittered from the eaves of her house, and he had an urge to pick them, as though they were bright fruit. But he remained in the shadows of his porch, sipping his coffee and smoking a cigarette.

Soon they would let the hound out for its morning constitutional. Perhaps he ought to kill it, rid himself of the sight of it. How often had he killed with a rifle? Two hundred times? He had killed rabbits, raccoons, squirrels, hedgehogs, rats, birds more splendidly arrayed than ladies at a ball, deer more graceful than dancers, a bear that troubled him with a look, once—incredibly—a fish, three times men from the machine-gun mount of the tank, Pasha, which they had ridden through the war, as though Europe and North Africa were a vast brothel for killing. The pleasure in killing was a small, passing thing, like the pang he felt at the sight of the first scarlet leaves of fall. A man fifty years old ought to have sufficient wisdom to override such a pleasure, he thought.

Chickadee-dee-dee! Same bird as yesterday, somewhere near the barn. Unaccountably, he wondered whether bears watched men from the edges of forests. An exciting idea. Chickadee-dee-dee! Some birds chirped for their own pleasure, or called other birds. Not this bird, he figured. This bird called out of some mournful, brainless duty, like a woman praying at the deathbed of her drunken-burn husband.

He had felt a change come over him the day he and Ollie tracked down Willow. He had realized that his elation, his vacation mood, at being out of work had been false, a trick of his mind. He was a desperate man in a desperate world.

Howard had whispered to Flagg the news that a steer had been killed, and Flagg had put on his rubber boots and his coat and waddled with him to the barn, where Ollie and Turtle waited by the severed steer. “Can’t you keep that son of yours under control?” Harold began, almost calmly. “Some people can make a town look bad, make us the dumping ground for all the riffraff in the county.” Then his face had reddened as he took hold of his idea. “Somebody ought to have that idiot committed before he hurts someone.” Spittle formed at the corners of his mouth, and he pointed to the carcass of the steer. “Exhibit A, stupid, senseless, and utterly prideless.” Howard had broken in, “Jesus, Harold, it’s just a goddamn cow.” And Harold had gone on about the problems of farmers and taxes and a slew of other things that Howard didn’t understand; nor did he see what they had to do with the issue at hand. Despite his anger Harold had seemed somehow relieved, like a man loosening his bowels after days of constipation. Finally, exhausted, panting, at peace with himself, it seemed, he warned Ollie that Ollie hadn’t heard the end of this.

They found the chain saw on the other side of the field. Ollie started it, and it worked fine, although the chain was clogged with bits of flesh and the handle was sticky with beef blood. They found Willow shivering in the woods nearby. Ollie beat him on the spot with fanatic despair before taking him home, where he undressed him and put some dry clothes on him and Helen Jordan fed him some soup.

And all the time at the Jordan shack gloom was enveloping Howard. Parts of him were dropping away—his finger, the affections of his son. Soon there would be nothing left.

The sky over his fields was beginning to whiten. He had a vision of the shop, of quiet looms and an empty parking lot.

Face it, he said to himself, you’re not going to find a job. He was too old, too ignorant, too ugly. Still, he would continue to search with something like diligence, making looking for a job into a job. Weekdays he drove to Keene at nine A.M. and returned at five P.M. He established routines, took coffee breaks, and gave himself an hour for lunch, which he ate in the park, no matter how cold the weather. Then, first without realizing it and later realizing it, almost with pleasure, he violated all the rules he had created. He missed appointments with Mr. O’Brian at the employment office; he extended his coffee breaks; he concocted excuses not to follow up job ads; he drank an extra beer at Miranda’s Bar in the afternoon.

Mr. O’Brian had a boy’s beard and an old man’s eyes. Once he told Howard that twenty law schools had turned down his applications for admittance. Every Monday he wore a tie with dolphins on it. Howard liked him. Mr. O’Brian suggested that Howard register for a night course, paid for by the U.S. government, at Keene High School. The course was called Development for Adults Recovering Economically (DARE), which meant, as near as Howard could figure out, reading. He refused to take the course. Illiteracy, he tried to explain in his way, arms one with a certain narrow, gloomy, yet unique perspective on the world. As he spoke, an image passed through his mind of a caravan of black Cadillacs on their way to a cemetery. A silence. A baffled look on Mr. O’Brian’s sad face. Whatever Howard had said had made no sense. It struck him that if he went to school and learned to say what he wanted to say, he would probably no longer want to say it. Mr. O’Brian told him, gently, that he was stubborn. Howard was touched.

Despite his fears of education, Howard occasionally found himself daydreaming about sitting at a desk, writing on white paper with the sure, elegant strokes of Mr. Lodge drafting a check. At such moments he would look at Mr. Lodge’s letter of recommendation and admire the quality of the penmanship, lovely as a cluster of deer prints in the snow. By contrast, his own handwriting was as large and sprawling as the wreckage of a fallen tree.

Written on paper of the company that no longer existed, lettering full of swagger, Mr. Lodge’s note read, “I am happy to recommend Howard Elman. He worked for my father and me for many years, and we have found him to be reliable and enthusiastic. F. JOHN LODGE.” Mr. Lodge had written the same note for all his former employees. The phrase “worked for my father and me for many years” was included in William Potts’ recommendation, though William had worked at the shop only six months before it closed. Howard was unbothered. Mr. Lodge’s handwriting had transcended everything. Indeed, Howard was ashamed that once he had thought badly of Mr. Lodge. He vowed to vote for Mr. Lodge for . . . what was it? Governor? Whatever, he’d get Howard Elman’s vote. In fact, Howard hadn’t voted since Ike left office.

He had seen William Potts last week at Miranda’s. William had announced that he was selling his car, because he was going into the Marines after Christmas. (“Just between you and me, Howie, it needs a ring job, and the transmission is slushy.”) Howard bought him a beer, and told him to wash his hands.

Howard envied him.

Save money to buy land. Life in the army had been that simple for Howard. The second night on the troopship, he had stood on deck, a chill in the air, watching clouds moving, like migrating geese, across a blatant moon. The wind changed, and there was a hush, and then a sound that was the sound of the sea as heard in a dream of the sea. And he had known at that moment that he would buy a piece of land when he got back; known that he would make it back. He would not farm. Farmers had no love for land but only for black soil, plants, and timely rain. Farmers, like goats, could be admired but not loved. Howard wanted land for religious reasons. He would hold the land like a Bible to be studied, interpreted, and mulled over on Sunday mornings, he a priest with priestly duties toward it. The land would have a house, a field, and a thick wood. There would be boulders. Some of the land would have steepness. There would be giant moths, giant spiders, and flowers as a delicate as a child’s tear. Owls would hoot at night. He saved his pay.

When the war ended, he had two thousand dollars, which he protected as though it could buy the salvation of his soul. Death to the man who tried to rob him. No one did, although a supply clerk, a Kentuckian named Hodgkins, watched him for a year, hoping he’d be killed. Hodgkins died choking in his own spit from a bad cough in France. When Howard came home, Charlene was already walking and didn’t know who he was. He bought fifty acres of land with a house and barn from that crazy farmer Piken. Even as the years passed, he kept his dream of the land. These days the thought of his land glowed with increased intensity, as every morning on his trip to Keene he saw the unspeakable ugliness of old snow dirtied by a city. Indeed, the thought of the land was stronger the farther he was from it. It was almost as if he drove to Keene each day not to find a job but to think about his land. The black design of apple trees in winter, their lordships the boulders, queenly ferns—how was one to explain these things?

He had tried to enlist in the army the day after he saw William. He stopped at the recruiter’s office, paused to sniff the wind, marched smartly to a desk where a young second lieutenant with a college-boy face sat, hands folded in his lap. Howard snapped to, arms at his sides, head and shoulders straight to the front, chin tucked in, and shouted, “Sir!” The lieutenant smiled as once Mr. Lodge had smiled. It was not until Howard was in the street again that he realized that the lieutenant pitied him, and that Mr. Lodge had known from the start that the shop was going to be moved out of New Hampshire.

The streets in Keene were full of kids, oddballs, police, and old people who seemed on the verge of weeping. Girls did not wear bras anymore and you could see their breasts bouncing when they walked. Interesting. Boys had long hair, beards, mustaches; for the life of him he could not figure out why, for they spent a good deal of time pulling whiskers, figdeting with greasy curls, and tossing their heads to keep the hair out of their faces. Without realizing it, he had come to accept long hair as normal, as one accepts a gas station where once a house had stood because the gas station is there and the house is gone. He had already forgotten that it was Freddy’s beard that had triggered the argument that led to their final estrangement.

The oddballs all seemed to want to avoid going to wherever home was. There were drunks and dried-out drunks, and women with stunned looks on their faces, and out-of-work men like himself who had stupid ideas about politics and who spent those ideas at Miranda’s like paychecks, and old people walking in the road hoping, it seemed, to get hit by cars.

He was very conscious of police cruisers. Being out of work made him feel hunted, as though the unemployed were a species of game. Someday the police would arrest him. Mr. Elman, you are charged with chronic unemployment, impersonating a husband and father, and looking cross-eyed at a police car. How do you plead? Guilty. Twenty years in state prison. Take him away.

Miranda’s Bar was a continual disappointment to him, though he went there every afternoon. The walls threw off a bad smell, like a hospital full of sick children. The room was dense with the muffled bragging of middle-aged men who spoke with great conviction on subjects they knew nothing about—government, God, and football games—full of irritating youths who played a bowling machine with much skill and little purpose. The beer was flat. Howard sat each day at a table for two by the window that faced the street. He imagined he was waiting for someone, though he could not say for whom, nor why the thought should be in his head. Once, one of the youths playing the bowling machine sat at his table, saying, “Qué pasa, man?” and pulling his sparse chin whiskers. “Somebody ask you to sit here?” said Howard. “Touchy,” said the youth, moving off, while his friends laughed at him. After that Howard noticed that Nick, the bartender, watched him carefully. Nick had a wide Greek face and the dark, suspicious eyes of a man who knows a great deal without ever thinking.

First beer: The people in the street dragged themselves along the slushy sidewalks, their faces as pale as the dim afternoon light. They seemed to go nowhere, come from nowhere. None of their activity, Howard judged, mattered; that is, if they all vanished from the street, the street would be no less interesting for their loss. To a god, the weathering of a boulder over a thousand years certainly must be more pleasing than this going to and coming from, this endless repetition, endless, tiring parade.

Second beer: One repeated the same old mistakes. Each of us has a blind spot in his thinking that defeats him time and again against all teaching and experience and pain. He thought of a wasp that exhausts itself buzzing against a screen when freedom lies at an open door a foot away.

Third beer: Yesterday two blacks entered the bar. “You know . . . you know . . . you know . . . you know . . .” they repeated as they glided by like barking otters. Again he faced the street, watching for the woman who walked past the bar each day, a bank-deposit bag in her hand. She had a great and bouncing ass and thick calves with spatters of brown water decorating the backs of her stockings. She reminded him of Fralla Pratt. . . . Life was not so bad. Life could be good. He ceased to think. He felt sad and yet exalted, as if he were the last man on earth setting out in quest of the last woman. His brow was warm.

He returned home, as if from a day’s work—tired, irritable, thoughts unpleasant and badly ordered because the effect of the beers was wearing off. Elenore would glare at him, and he would ask, “What the hell are you looking at?” “You know,” she would reply. After supper, eaten without talk—the only sound the machinery of their teeth and mouths, and the gentle humming of Heather and her cat—his mood would improve, and by way of repentance he would help Elenore with the dishes.

Every day she reported what Freddy had told her that afternoon, and Howard listened intently.

Freddy is stripping paint. He looks good, but he has a cold. That black thing (beard) catches some of the cold. Mr. Thorpe is out of work for the time being, and he is depressed. Freddy promised to spend Christmas with the family at Charlene’s. He promised. You leave him alone. He don’t want no trouble. Don’t yell at him. Mrs. Cutter and Mr. Thorpe are flying on an airplane to New York to be with their mother for Christmas. She is in a nursing home. Freddy is doing good in school. He talks about school more than anything. He has a friend who plays drums in a band in Boston.

Elenore didn’t know what Freddy was taking in school. He had told her, but she hadn’t understood and had forgotten. He had picked up some crazy ideas. He said Columbus didn’t discover America.

The previous night, while Elenore was delivering her report on Freddy, the phone rang. Howard answered. He recalled the incident, trying to put it in perspective.

“Mr. Elman, this is Bert Reason, of Reason Real Estate—in Keene? How are you this evening?”

Silence.

“A lovely evening. Maybe not so lovely, kinda cold. Good weather for the skiers, though. . . .”

Silence.

“Mr. Elman, I was driving by your place today. Pretty spot in that field. Nice barn. In fact—”

Howard hung up. Moments later the phone rang again.

“What do you want?”

“Surprise! We were cut off.” Laughter. “I’ll come to the point. I’m a man of few words myself. I’d like to get together, the two of us. Like to talk to you about your house. Now, I know you’re busy. God knows I’m busy, trying to make a buck just like everybody else. Bucks—that’s why I’m calling you tonight. If I was in your shoes, I’d be dancing right now. You listen now. . . .”

Howard hung up.

“Who is it?” asked Elenore.

“Some nut.”

The phone rang.

Howard answered.

“A few minutes of your time can pay you big bucks.” A laugh and a shriek, both at once.

Elenore and Heather gathered around the phone as though it were a television.

When the phone rang again, Howard ordered Elenore to answer it.

Very troubling. Trouble from the wires. Howard was full of war anxiety—controllable, almost pleasurable—but he wished there were someone to fight, wished the voice over the phone, a voice cracking with deathly good cheer, would materialize into a man.

“Hello,” said Elenore with some formality. She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s a Mr. Reezey. He wants to talk to you.”

Howard waved her off, put his hands behind his back, and paced.

“Can I listen?” Heather asked.

Howard quieted her with a hand on her shoulder.

“Howie, he wants to buy this house,” said Elenore, a hint of relief, a hint of elation, in her voice.

They wanted to take his house.

He couldn’t remember exactly what happened after that. He grabbed the phone and said something, and the man talked and wouldn’t stop talking. He mentioned “thirty thousand,” but most of what he said was garbled to Howard. Finally, Howard hung up and then took the phone off the hook before it could ring again. Heather said she heard a wail, like babies’ crying, coming from the phone. She and Elenore listened to the wail until Howard told them to go into the other room. Elenore became sullen and angry, and he tried to explain . . . well, he couldn’t remember what he tried to explain. He put a pillow over the phone to muffle the wail. He wondered whether the telephone company could have him arrested if he disconnected the wires. He had better not touch them, he decided.

Thirty thousand dollars? It didn’t make sense, he thought now, in the cold light of morning. He didn’t want to think about it. You can’t think about everything and still dig post-holes straight and eight feet apart. Who had said that to him? Uncle Jack? Colored dawn washed over the Cutter house. The bird, the early bird, Howard’s bird, was silent; but other birds chirped with annoying amiability. Reedy, Reeney, Weezey? What the hell was his name? This is Hirk Weezey of Weezey Real Estate. Something like that.

Thirty thousand dollars. Admit it: It would be nice. He could buy a brand-new Cadillac, thus fulfilling a lifelong dream. He could buy a nice little over-and-under .410 shotgun, which he had always wanted, for no particular reason other than that it was cute. He could buy a new fly rod and a radial-arm saw and a Rototiller for Elenore’s garden and a four-wheel-drive Jap jeep to take into the woods. He could drive Elenore and Heather on a trip in the Cadillac to Niagara Falls, someplace like that. Or maybe Moosehead Lake. Or Canada, to look at the Frenchmen. Or wherever women wanted to go. You could never tell. He’d buy Heather a guitar or a piccolo. Hell, he’d buy her a hundred piccolos.

Thirty thousand dollars. It was something to think about.

After the telephone encounter with Mr. Weezey, he had taken down the .308. He had laid the parts out on the blanket on the floor and cleaned them. It was a game of solitaire with him. He arranged the parts in a certain order, than rearranged them. The parts had to match a preconceived pattern that he carried in his mind. Sometimes, no matter what he did, the pieces didn’t look right, and he would put the rifle back together and take it down again. Last night he had taken down the rifle four times before the parts lay as they should and he felt a sense of satisfaction, a slowing of his clock so that he might sleep.

He had awakened this morning at four in a bad dream, a war dream. Someone was in Freddy’s room; he was sure of it. He put on his pants, took the .308, which he kept in a corner of the bedroom, and crept like a commando down the hall. The door to Freddy’s room was open. He waited a few long minutes for a sound, but none came. With great caution, he reached into the room with his left hand, snapped on the light switch, and whirled the rifle to bear with his right hand. There was no one in the room. He searched the entire house, and the only odd thing he found was a jar of Elenore’s preserves on the cellar steps. Dill pickles. A moist but cool summer that year. Cucumbers, greens, and squash thrived, but the tomatoes never ripened. So it goes with gardens—victories and defeats; the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away to keep a man healthy, sane, and poor: Ollie Jordan’s Law.

Back in bed, Howard lay on his back with his eyes closed lightly. A parade of animals came trooping across his field, weaving their way amidst his junk cars and appliances, like Legionnaires on a narrow city street on the Fourth of July: a deer with an apple in its mouth, a bear standing arrogantly, a turtle carrying a sleeping cat on its moss-green back, a skunk running with all the grace of an obese woman, a hundred silver dogs with human faces grinning without intelligence, an owl with a perfectly round face, ducks quacking in unison and waddling in step, and among them a robed shepherd with a chain saw for a staff. Howard’s eyes sprang open. The owl was not an owl but the alarm clock. The quacking was not quacking but the alarm clock’s ringing. Another day begun.

Now Mrs. Cutter’s hound appeared out of the shadows up the hill. It bounded into the birches and bounded back into the field. Howard had to admit that the animal had a unique and admirable way of running, embodying somehow qualities of both genders, nose to the ground but rear end high, legs long but powerful, body shaggy yet sleek, tail curved, erect, and stiff. Hm. He saw an insult in the tail. Could such an insult be deliberate, a trick taught by the clever and malicious owner? A dog trained to tell someone to go fuck himself. Brilliant. Well, fuck you too, he thought. The animal raced down the hill to the stone wall, where it stopped abruptly. Then, sniffing here and there, it made its way slowly along the boundary.

A picture formed in his mind of shooting the dog, accepting its bewildered look like a bill, skinning it, opening it, gutting it, dissecting it, as though deep in its tissues it held some precious secret.

Smoke began to curl upward from the south chimney of the Cutter house, the column growing fatter and thinner at the same time as it rose.

Still sitting in the rocking chair, he took aim at the beer cans on the Chevy. He could see them very clearly in the morning light. He shot well that day, knocking each of the beer cans off the hood with one shot. He then set the cans up again, and this time hit five out of six. Then he wasted four shots on an old stove because he liked the metallic thunk of the bullets’ ripping through the oven door.

Then he went to the De Soto. It started with more than its usual complaint. It was going to need a new battery before winter’s end. Leaving the engine running, he went into the house to put his gun away.

“I’m going now,” he shouted to Elenore, who was in the living room eating her breakfast in front of the television.

“Call me if you get anything,” she said.

He thought for a moment she meant deer; he thought for a moment he was going deer hunting; but of course, he realized quickly, she meant a job.

Outside he paused. It was . . . what? Wednesday? Yes. Every Wednesday he made his weekly inspection of the looms, looking at them, touching them, listening to their clatter—work-for-pay, work-for-pay, work-for-pay—listening for noises within noises. Then, at noontime, when the weavers sat on wooden benches eating their egg-salad sandwiches and canned peaches from plastic dishes, when the machines were silent and he could hear his own footsteps on the pitted concrete floor, he would oil all the looms, and then, confident that they were in perfect working condition, he would walk among them feeling wise, tall, and oddly triumphant. Lost in this thought, he got into the De Soto and drove off.