Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Blomenfeld’s Cadillac glided to a stop at the pumps. The shiny Sedan DeVille, without Harry Blomenfeld, appeared with regularity now. Angelo and Bud had taken to having midmorning coffee together up front by the till. Angelo had an unending repertoire of jokes about “kikes,” “jungle bunnies,” and “spics”—“Hey, I’m a spic myself!”—not to mention cripples and Catholics—“Hey, I’m one myself!” After his visits, Bud was cheerful and chatty.
Today Harry Blomenfeld and Angelo arrived together, arguing. “So can you push the lawn mower anymore or not? Yes or no?” Mr. Blomenfeld said.
“Not that damned mower we have.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the mower. It’s your legs that don’t work right.”
“I told you, I’ll get at it.”
“Good morning,” I said cautiously.
“Paul. You’re just the fellow I wanted to see,” Harry Blomenfeld said. His eyes flickered to my new short hair, but he didn’t mention it.
“How’s that, sir?” I said. Angelo glared at me as if I were conspiring against him.
“Angelo and I have come to disagree about our lawn
and grounds—much the same way we came to disagree about changing the oil on the Cadillac.”
“The car is different, damnit,” Angelo interjected.
“Not in the least!” Harry said, slapping his big hand on Angelo’s seat back for emphasis.
I flinched.
“Sorry, son,” Mr. Blomenfeld said. “Anyway, we’re wondering, Paul—”
“Speak for yourself,” Angelo muttered.
“—if you might have a couple of hours once in a while to help out at the house with the lawn,” Harry Blomenfeld finished.
“Gee, I dunno,” I began.
“It’s a lot to ask,” the big man said. He had kind, brown eyes, but I noticed for the first time a sadness in them. “I know you’ve got your chores at home as well as your job here at the station.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But we need some younger legs, is what I’m saying. Angelo can drive you back and forth. Get you home.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“Fine. It would be nice if you could start soon,” he said. He shot an annoyed glance toward Angelo. “Either that or we buy a couple of goats.”
“Great—we might as well be farmers then,” Angelo growled.
“There’s nothing wrong with farmers,” Harry said, with an apologetic glance my way. “So, Paul, when could you start?”
It was another one of those moments where I felt my life tipping in a direction I didn’t even know was on the compass. I shrugged. “If it didn’t take too long, I could do some mowing after work today.”
At five o’clock (I’d called home, said I’d be late but had a ride) Angelo was waiting with the Cadillac. As I approached, he rolled down his window. “Your hands clean, kid?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, get in.”
I made for the passenger’s seat in front.
“No, no—in the backseat. There’s a rug there for you to sit on in case you got grease on your pants.”
I slid carefully into the backseat, which smelled of cigar, and closed the door. It made a sound—like a tree hitting the ground—that I felt more than heard.
“Having somebody up front makes me nervous,” Angelo explained as we drove off. “I can’t explain it.”
I touched the leather seats, the little chrome ashtrays, then watched my hometown slide by the windows. I felt like I was president. Angelo didn’t talk much—he seemed annoyed at having to fetch me in the first place—so I settled back and enjoyed the ride. Several pedestrians looked twice as the gleaming old Cadillac passed. I thought of waving but didn’t.
Soon we turned slowly, and proceeded onto gravel. Angelo drove at creeping, idling speed. “Dirt roads,” he muttered. “Never in a thousand years did I think I’d live on a dirt road—me, a kid from Chicago.”
“I can’t imagine living on a city street,” I said.
“Who knows, kid, maybe you’ll live in a big city.”
I was silent; he looked at me in his mirror.
“That’d be strange, Angelo,” I said.
“But you don’t know, kid,” Angelo said. “That’s the good part—and the bad part—about life. You just never know …”
We fell silent. Angelo turned left down a narrow, pine-lined driveway. Through the trees I could see flashes of blue water. At the driveway’s end was a heavy gate hung on fieldstone columns. A few of the stones had come loose, leaving empty cavities in the old concrete. Angelo got out, swung open the gate—there was a shriek of rusty iron on iron—then drove through. Used to farm gates, I hopped out.
“Hey, where you going?” Angelo said sharply.
“I thought I’d close the gate for you?”
“I’m the driver here, right?”
“Sure, Angelo,” I said, and eased back into my seat, remembering similar comments from Elmo.
He closed the gate, then we drove down the curving cobblestone driveway to the main house. It was a grand old log home: dark brown, with heavy timbers notched and crisscrossed at the corners, supported by a fieldstone-and-concrete foundation. The roof was mossy in spots, and bare in others where encroaching oak branches had broomed it clean. Rain gutters grew sticks, patches of grass, and even some small oak seedlings. Beyond the house was the lawn, overgrown and shaggy, stretching
down to a sagging boathouse at the shore. Big Sandy Lake was visible only in patches beyond a wild hedge and a row of trees, planted, for privacy, like the tight windbreak on my farm.
“Hello, Paul,” Mr. Blomenfeld called from behind the screen door.
“Sir,” I said.
“Step in. You need anything to eat before you mow?”
“Maybe something small,” I ventured. I was inside by now, and looked around. It was messy with piles of Chicago Tribunes, and library books—at least twenty of them. Some of them were dusty—had to be way overdue. I must have been staring.
“What?” Harry Blomenfeld said.
I shrugged. “Just looking at your library books.”
The place smelled like old men—meaty and woolly. Dusty taxidermy hung on the walls: a deer, two fish, an elk with a long neck and yellow teeth. It was like nothing new had touched or entered here for many years.
But the refrigerator was stocked. “Corned beef all right?”
“Ah … okay.” I wasn’t sure what that was.
I watched as Mr. Blomenfeld made me a hefty sandwich with dark bread and lettuce and pale mustard. Outside, Angelo was conspicuously loud as he rattled open shed doors and clanged gas cans and tools.
“Don’t mind Angelo,” Mr. Blomenfeld said. “He’ll get used to you.”
“I hope so, sir,” I murmured. I took a bite of my sandwich. My eyes widened.
“What?” said Mr. Blomenfeld, narrowing his gaze.
I coughed slightly. “The sandwich. I’ve never had one that tasted like this—so good, I mean.”
“You’ve never had corned beef?”
“Just regular beef, I guess.”
“And rye bread and Dijon mustard?”
“No, sir. Pretty much just white bread that my mom makes.”
He laughed largely and lit a cigar.
“Where do you get corned beef around here?” I said.
“You don’t. I have it shipped in.” Mr. Blomenfeld looked out the window toward the lake. “Chicago. Hog butcher, tool maker, stacker of wheat, city of the big shoulders—that’s where it comes from.”
“Carl Sandburg,” I said.
He turned. “You know that poem?”
I nodded. “We read it in ninth-grade English.”
“It’s the best damn poem ever written,” Mr. Blomenfeld said, slapping the counter for emphasis. “Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, those English poets—they can’t carry Sandburg’s jockstrap.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“I read a lot these days,” he said.
He glanced at his pile of library books. “Miss Verhoven, the librarian, she got me started.”
“Me, too, kind of,” I said.
He looked my way.
“In grade school we took trips to the library. The other kids were always scared of her, but for some reason I never was.”
“I’ll tell her that,” Mr. Blomenfeld said, and resumed his cigar. “She’d be amused.”
“I think she likes me, but she still only lets me take two books at a time.”
Harry Blomenfeld puffed on his cigar, then squinted at me through the smoke. “I’ll talk to her about that. There are rules, and then there are rules, you know what I mean, son?”
I didn’t really, but I nodded and continued eating. We sat there in comfortable silence, me eating, him puffing on his stogie—until Angelo rattled the screen door.
“Hey—is the kid on union time or what?”
“He needed a snack, he’s been working all day,” Mr. Blomenfeld said.
“Well, the grass ain’t getting any shorter.”
Mr. Blomenfeld sighed and tipped his head toward the door. I quickly finished and headed out.
“Here it is,” Angelo said, pointing to an ancient power mower. It had a windup cord on top. “It starts all right but don’t cut worth a damn anymore.”
I knelt and examined the mower. Underneath, the blade was blunted and nicked. “Do you have a power grinder?”
Angelo pointed toward the garage. Which, like the house, had everything it needed but was a total mess and gloomy besides. Letting my eyes adjust, I moved a
bunch of junk around the grinder. I found a wrench, took off the mower blade, then returned to sharpen it. The humming emery stone breathed a stream of cool orange sparks in the shadowy garage that tickled my arms like blown sand as the blade grew an edge.
In five minutes I was mowing a clean path down toward the lake. The grass was thick as a spring hayfield, and I left small windrows of mulchy green. Mr. Blomenfeld sat on his porch, smoking his cigar and watching.
For a half hour I mowed. Beyond some heavy bushes I discovered a tennis court, overgrown like everything else. Sweating, I let the mower idle and stepped onto the court, its cracked concrete; I touched its faded lines with a grass-stained shoe. I’d never been on a tennis court before. It felt like a church without walls.
Angelo appeared. “Hey, kid, you play?”
“No,” I said.
“Rich man’s sport,” Angelo said. “I never liked it, but the boss was a good tennis player. Used to beat everybody. Not that there were many who wanted him to lose,” Angelo chuckled. “Anyway, the old man asked me if you wanted something to drink. It’s hot today”
“Sure!” I said. I was sweating hard.
“Juice? Water? Beer?”
“Water is fine.”
But Angelo’s gaze was steady; he had not been joking. “You sure? I got some beer in the boathouse.”
I paused. “A beer then,” I said.
Angelo reappeared with two dripping cans of Grain
Belt. Glancing over his shoulder toward the house, he popped open the tops, then handed one to me. “The boss don’t like boozing,” he said, “so I keep mine down here in the lake. Perfect temperature.”
I sipped the beer, my first. I wrinkled my nose at its smell—almost gagged at its taste, which was a cross between corn silage juice and burned oatmeal.
“You don’t like Grain Belt?” Angelo said.
“It’s fine, thank you,” I managed. Grainy heat blossomed in my stomach, and gradually the beer’s bad taste went away.
A half hour later the yard was mown and the hedges were clipped and I was sweaty and dirty and itching. I walked up to the house where Mr. Blomenfeld was reading on the porch. “Done,” I said.
Mr. Blomenfeld put down his paper; he stood up to survey the grounds. “Looks a hundred percent better, Paul.”
I wiped my streaked and dusty face.
“You want to take a dip in the lake before you go home? Looks like you could use one.”
“I don’t have my suit.”
“Angelo, get Paul a suit and towel. And a bar of soap, too.”
At lakeside I went in the boathouse and slipped into the suit. It was huge and airy around my testicles; I tried to cinch it tight as best I could, took a long sip of my beer, then made a dash for the water. It was a Minnesota
lake—breathtakingly, bone-achingly cold—but it was either jump in or face the mosquitoes that had caught the heat of my sweaty body. After my cannonball I came up and splashed around. The suit was much too loose, and after a glance up toward the house, I slipped it off, hooked it to the dock. I paused for another long sip of beer, then continued paddling.
I was not a great swimmer—farm kids never were—but this evening I frog kicked, crawled, backstroked. I swam farther out, beyond the drop-off; I could feel the lake’s colder darkness on my feet and calves. There, treading water, I looked back at the neatly mown lawn.
I swam farther and farther out, floating on my back—which I had never done before. Floating was more an act of faith than of skill, and I laughed at the realization, watching the puffy white clouds overhead. Then I rolled over and swam again, cutting through the chilly water like a porpoise—until I seized up like I had been harpooned.
Cramp. In one leg and then the other. I grunted as one knee came up to my belly and then the other one—fetuslike—as if all my tendons had been cut. I was, in an instant, a no-legged swimmer. And then I slipped underwater, which was enough to make me thrash, arms only, all the way to the dock. I left a wake like a speedboat with a broken prop.
I hung on to the slippery side of dock, panting, heart thudding. I rubbed and rubbed my legs and slowly they uncoiled. I looked out at the black water; at the drop-off.
“You about ready to go?” Angelo called from the yard.
“Yes!” I said. I slipped on the suit and emerged shivering and white.
“Mr. Blomenfeld will pay you up at the house.”
At the door, Mr. Blomenfeld peeled off a green bill from an old-looking roll.
“Thank you, sir!” I said. Twenty dollars.
“If you treat people right, they come back,” Harry Blomenfeld said.
We shook hands and then Angelo held open the rear door of the Cadillac.
I directed Angelo, via back roads, to the farm.
“Pretty out here in the country,” he said, looking about, “but not for me.”
“Why’s that, Angelo?” He popped open another beer, and handed me one as well. What could I do?
“Too much open space makes me nervous. It’s like people can see you from a long way off.”
“But they can’t sneak up on you either.” I took a slug of my Grain Belt.
He hoisted a dark eyebrow and looked at me in the mirror.
I swallowed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean anything.”
Angelo shrugged. “Well, it is true, kid,” he said.
At dusk farms always looked their best, especially ours. The buildings—their broad backs, their wide shoulders, their domes and cupolas—all rose up in silhouette,
and the machinery, the clutter at ground level, sank in shadow.
“Nice place, kid.”
“Yes.” It was like I was seeing it through his eyes. I quickly finished my beer as we came up the driveway.
In the yard, I stepped out from the rear of the Cadillac. My mother appeared on the porch, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
Angelo rolled down his window. “Fine boy you have there, ma’am!” he called, and touched the brim of his chauffeur’s cap. Then the Cadillac crunched gravel as it eased back down the driveway.
“Who in the world was that?” she said, staring after the car.
“The public,” I said, and laughed gaily.