Postcards

‘Are you the Big Pinetree?’

‘Close enough. Big enough. Mrs. Big Pinetree. Piney’s in the Pacific and I’m here keepin’ the bears out of the lunchroom and fixin’ cars much as I can without no parts or no tires. Want it toasted?’

‘Guess so.’

She pulled the uncovered bowl of chicken salad out of a big Servel, the door around the handle discolored with garage grease, slapped three pieces of bacon on the grill and laid three slices of white bread to toast. She pressed down on the bacon with a spatula, forcing the oil out. She opened the Servel again, grasped a head of lettuce like a bowling ball, tore off an inch of leaves and dropped them on the cutting board. She turned the bacon, turned the slices of bread, pressed them with the spatula. She got the pot of coffee from the booth and poured it in a white mug marked ‘Souvenir of Big Pinetree in the Adirondacks.’ She slid the spatula under a slice of bread, toasted dark with a narrow rim of black around the crust, slid it onto a plate, plastered it with Silvernip mayonnaise, put half the lettuce on it, whacked a scoop of chicken salad dead center, then picked up the second dice of toast, laid it in place like a mason dropping a brick in line, hit it with the mayonnaise, the rest of the lettuce and the hot bacon. When the last dice of toast was on she looked up at Loyal, holding the knife.

‘Kitty-corner or straight?’

‘Straight.’

She dipped her head in a single nod, laid the knife dead center, horizontal with the edge of the toast, raised the heel of the blade and cut it clean. She pulled a two-inch cream bottle out of the Servel and thumped it all on the counter in front of him.

‘There you go. I don’t trust guys like it cut kitty-comer. City style. Fifty-five.’ He dug out the change, then sat eating, trying not to cram and wolf. She went back to her magazine and he heard her strike a match, heard the rounded exhalation of her breath, smelled the smoke. She was big, but she wasn’t bad.

‘This is a hell of a good sandwich,’ he said. ‘Any chance of another cup of coffee?’

‘Help yourself,’ she said, rattling the pot on the booth table. He brought his mug over and she poured the coffee, steadying his mug with one hand. Her fingers touched his.

God! He hadn’t washed up since—. He started to jerk away but thought of the gas. He drank a mouthful of coffee, trying to force down the nervous tightness. He sat down on the bench across from her and cocked his head a little.

‘Hate to leave good company,’ he said, ‘but I got to be on my way.’

‘Where you headin’?’

‘Out west. Thought I’d get off the farm, get in one of the War work factories, make some money.’

‘Wish I could do that. They’re makin’ real good wages. Women, too, payin’ ’em the same as men on the production lines. Rosie the Riveter. I’m stuck right here until Piney gets back, and I don’t see five cars a day. Sure wish I could just stow away in your backseat.’

‘I can guess what Big Pine would do. I guess my head would be up on that wall next to the stuffed skunk.’ He got a whiff of a cold sourness from her like the gravelly sod under stones.

She laughed and gave him a look, but he dipped out from under it with a wink.

‘Hey, Mrs. Sweetheart Pinetree.’ He made his voice soft. ‘Chance you could sell me a little extra gas? Awful short on coupons.’

‘Well, you stopped the right place, but it’ll cost you double.’ Her voice hardened up, she seemed to turn into a kind of pot metal. He went out with her and leaned against the car while she filled the tank with gas. Out in the light he saw she wasn’t much, just another penned-up woman who didn’t know how to dig her way out, all grease and grits, but ready to give it away to anybody that came by. Her knuckles were skinned, her nails rimmed with black. She was surly now, too, feeling his intention to get going now that he had the gas.

‘That will hold you.’ She shoved the yellow cat that had come twisting around her legs away with her foot, lofting it a few inches into the air. ‘Beat it, cat.’ She meant him, of course.

She didn’t seem to know how good off she was, he thought. That she could be here, comfortable, running this place, eating big sandwiches, all the gas she could want, cheating on the gas, getting black market prices, cheating on Big Pinetree out there in the Pacific, touching his hand, she didn’t know who the hell he was, and God, poor Billy, where was she? The woman didn’t know how close she was coming.

‘How about some kind of bonus for the one that’s sellin’ you the gas.’ She bunched up her mouth.

‘Maybe we just ought to step back inside for that kind of bonus,’ he said, smiling like he was holding nails in his teeth, the oily metal taste of nails ran right to the back of his throat, and he could hardly wait to get the door slammed shut and locked.

His arms wrapped around the postcard rack for support and he fought for clear breath. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but all of a sudden it was like digging a pit on the hottest day to pull a breath into his caved lungs. His pants were wadded around his boot tops. He could see the stained underwear and he wanted to haul them up, but he couldn’t get a breath.

‘That looks cute,’ she said from across the room, watching him retch for air. She walked toward him. ‘I said that looks cute, you dirty chokin’ bastard.’ She threw a sandwich plate in his direction. It hit the postcard rack and fell into his pants. He could see it between his ankles, see the hardened grease and a red tick of bacon, a white dirty plate. How had he got into this. How had he got into this. He didn’t want her, he didn’t want anything from her but the gas.

He dragged for a breath, kicked the plate onto the floor, got his pants up and wheezed in another breath. Something the hell wrong. A heart attack or something. He stumbled against the door. His hands were full of postcards. There was wind outside, and cold air, and if he was going to die he wanted to do it outside, not in here.

‘Go ahead, get out,’ she said. ‘You’re lucky. You’re lucky I don’t get down Piney’s shotgun. If you’re smart you’ll be out of here and travelin’ in about one minute or I’m going to get down Piney’s shotgun.’ She was wading toward him. He twisted the lock and got the door open.

The parking lot was compressed by the black spruce across the road, stacked on itself as a scrap of paper folded smaller and smaller. His car waited pale against the trees, the chromed handle on the driver’s door a silvery rod that, as he grasped it, connected him with the possibilities of distances. Wheezing and hauling for breath, he swung inside the car, it started, smooth as syrup, started and he backed across the gravel, out onto the lonely road past the waves of spruce and fir, the nicked driveways leading to dark, mosquito-stitched camps in the forest.

As he pulled out onto the road something moved near the woodpile. He thought it was a falling block, but it was the yellow cat, the same color as the fresh wood. They’d had a barn cat once, the same butterscotch fur. He remembered how it favored his mother, sat on the porch gazing up at her. She had called it Spotty and fed it cream. It made the mistake of rubbing against Mink’s leg when his temper was up, shoveling manure out of the gutter and he’d broken its back with a swipe of the shovel.

In an hour he could breathe more easily. The front seat was strewn with postcards, seventy or eighty postcards all showing the same thick-bodied bear with a red snout coming out of the black trees. ‘Must be worth about eight dollars,’ he said aloud and took a cold pleasure in the minute gain.

4 What I See (#ulink_9854cbbe-3282-56e6-b237-4578b9e47d80)

The land levels as he comes down out of the trees and into miles of vineyards, the crooked branches crucified on wires. The Coach jars along a road knotted with tar patches, unraveled along the edges, the crumbling asphalt mixing with the gravel, weeds, rows of creosoted posts with winking reflectors, angled tops. But the land as monotonous as a lawn, and on he goes past the tourist cabins with their tiny porches and metal chairs, the gas pumps and whirligig ducks, the metal signs saying Nehi.

The sky grows. Yellow dirt roads cut away to the north and south. Plaster ducks on withered lawns, snapping flags in the wind coming down the flat rows. A dog races beside the car for a hundred feet.

In the steamy warmth of the Olympia Cafe he eats thick pancakes with Karo. The coffee is heavy with chicory. He leans his elbows on the counter watching the cook. A kid parks his Indian motorcycle and comes in. He pulls up his goggles, exposing white circles of skin.

‘Dogs’ he says to the cook. ‘Dogs gonna dump me yet. I hit one son of a bitch come out and went for my leg.’

‘That right.’ The cook presses the potato with his crusted spatula. ‘It better not a been my Irish setter. Rusty, just up the road here at my place.’

‘Might a been,’ says the kid. ‘No, no, I’m just kidding you. It was a black one about five mile back. Big son of a bitch. Size of a cow, damn near. It wasn’t no Irish setter.’

In Pennsylvania the vineyards are spaced farther apart. The grapevines fade, cornfields swell up. The levelness of the land disturbs him with its easiness. The road is a slab seamed with asphalt ridges that strike the worn tires, jar his hands and shoulders, on and on. Cars turn off the highway onto side roads ahead of him, raise dusty billows. The radio is nothing but static and broken voices crying out a few words. ‘Jimmy Rodgers … pray to God … happy birthday… in the European theater … goodby folks … Pillsbury … organ inter … Duz does … the story of a … oh … hello folks … Jesus said … our listeners write in …’

He passes old trucks humping along on bald treads. He is worried about his own tires. He turns off onto a gravel road but the stones fly up, dust chokes him. Grit in his mouth. When he rubs his fingers against the ball of his thumb he feels hard grit. And turns back onto the concrete.

Miles of snow fence. A peregrine falcon balances on a forgotten hay bale. The flatness changes, the earth’s color changes, darker, darker. Prayers and long silences out of the dusty radio. In the autumn rain the houses become trailers among the trees. Oaks come at him, flash, burst into thickets, into woods. H&C Café, EATS, Amoco, GAS 3 MI. AHEAD. Fog. A little night fog. The sod in Indiana a deep brown-black. The cattle sink into its blackness. Southering geese spring up from the sloughs and ponds, scissor over him in the hundreds. The water is streaked with the lines of their angular necks, fractioned by dipping heads and beaks.

In the diner hunched over the cup of coffee he wonders how far he is going.

5 A Short, Sharp Shock (#ulink_19504419-393e-5649-8cf5-384e3a97d173)

THE BEAR, LIKE MANY BEARS, had led a brief and vivid life. Born in the late winter of 1918 in a stump den, he was the oldest of two cubs. In personality he was quarrelsome and insensitive to the subtle implications of new things. He ate the remains of a poisoned eagle and nearly died. In his second autumn, from the height of a cliff, he saw his mother and sister backed against an angle in the rock by lean bear hounds. They went down in squalling that drew nothing but dry rifle fire. He was hunted himself the same year but escaped death and injury until 1922 when a coffin maker’s charge of broken screws swept up from the shop floor smashed his upper left canine teeth, leaving him unbalanced in mind and with chronic abscesses.

The next summer McCurdy’s Lodge, a massive structure of dovetailed spruce logs and carved cedar posts, opened on the eastern side of his range. The bear’s sense of smell was sharpened by hunger. He came to the Lodge’s garbage dump and its exotic peach peelings, buttered crusts and beef fat that melted in his hot throat. He began to lurk impatiently in the late afternoon trees for the cook’s helper with his wheelbarrow of orange peel and moldy potatoes, celery stumps and chicken bones, trickles of sardine oil.

The helper was a lumber-camp cook learning the refinements of carriage trade cuisine. He saw the bear in the dusk and ran shouting up to the Lodge for a ride. Hotelier McCurdy was in the kitchen talking Toumedos forestier with the cook and went to look at the bear for himself. He saw something in the hulking shoulders, the doggy snout, and told the Lodge carpenters to build benches on the slope above the dump. They set the area off with a peeled sapling railing to mark the limits of approach. The bolder guests walked twittering through the birches to see the bear. They touched each other’s shoulders and arms, their hands sprang protectively to their throats. The laughter was choked. The bear never looked up.

Through the summer the guests watched the bear flay the soft, fly-spangled garbage with his claws. The men wore walking suits or flannel bags and argyle pullovers, the women came in wrinkled linen tubes with sailor collars. They lifted their Kodaks, freezing the sheen of his fur, his polished claws. Oscar Untergans, a timber-lot surveyor who sold hundreds of nature shots to postcard printers photographed the bear at the summer dump. Untergans came again and again, walking along the path behind the cook, picking up any fetid rinds or dull eggshells thrown from the jouncing wheelbarrow. Sometimes the bear was waiting. The cook pitched the garbage with a pointed spade. He hit the bear with rotted tomatoes, grapefruit halves like yellow skullcaps.

Two or three summers after Untergans snapped the bear’s image they ran electric line to the Lodge. One evening the bear did not appear at the dump, nor was he seen in the following weeks and years. The Lodge burned on New Year’s Eve of 1934. On a rainy May night in 1938 Oscar Untergans fell in his estranged wife’s bathroom and died from a subdural haematoma. The postcard endured.

6 The Violet Shoe in the Ditch (#ulink_f1b3ef59-3277-5da7-b553-c796ed9690a1)

MERNELLE SLOGGED DOWN the steep road, the snow packing into her boots. The dog plunged into her tracks, up and out, like a roller coaster. ‘You’re knockin’ yourself out for nothin’,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s sendin’ you no letters or postcards. No penpals for dumb dogs. I can guess what you’d write. Stuff like “Dear Fido, Send me a cat. Wufwuf, Dog.”’

Later Mink would get out the snow roller that the town had sold him cheap when they went over to the snowplow and hitch it to the tractor. The roller was a slatted rolling pin of a thing that crushed the snow down into a smooth pack. After the roller went up and down the truck still couldn’t make it, even with chains. In November, before the big snows came, Mink parked the truck at the bottom of the road. He hauled the forty-quart cream cans down every morning with the tractor.