David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

“Pretty early,” she said.

“Is it going to work if we try to get going? You’re going to catch cold sitting here.”

“Fuck, where’s my coat ?”

“We’ll find it. Best thing now is just get you home.” I reached down; she took my hands and let me pull her up and help her into the cab. I got in my side and buckled her up.

After a couple of miles she said, “Where are we going?”

“Like I said. Taking you home. You have anything to eat this morning? Might do you good. We could stop off at the Hob Nob.”

“Gross, no way . I don’t know, maybe.”

“See how you feel when we get there. You want music?”

“I don’t care, if it isn’t something shitty.”

“Check in there.” I pointed to the glove box.

She looked through the CDs and shut it again. “That must be the kind of shit what’s-her-name likes. You know what we used to call her? Bitch on wheels.”

“Yeah, you said.”

She looked down at her long fake nails; I guess she’d painted them black for the occasion. “You’re like not into me at all , are you? Because I don’t think I’m really probably into you.”

“I’d say you’re a little on the young side,” I said. “Like about thirty years?”

“Thirty-seven. I looked up your Social one time. So how old is she ?”

“She’s appropriate.” We were coming into Crowsfield, so I set the cruise at thirty to be extra sure. There’s usually one of them parked beside the convenience store. “You’ve seen her.”

“Yeah, that’s what I want to look like when I get old. Not .”

“Look,” I said, “we better get some food into you. Then you can go home and sleep.”

“You don’t even know I was at Johnny’s last night.”

“That wouldn’t be my business.” The past week I’d thought Johnny was hanging out at her desk too much. I’d seen her touching his chest when she was making a point; she was always touching somebody. But no, I didn’t even know. “So where was his wife?”

“I don’t know, Johnny said she went to Foxwoods.”

“What about your boyfriend?”

“Everybody gets to do what they want,” she said. “Anyways, you’re not going to tell, and Johnny’s not.”

“Perfect. What could possibly go wrong?”

“Shit,” she said. “That was real attractive, me puking and everything.”

I’d never seen where Amber lived—someplace in Egdon, that’s all I knew. It was mostly A-frames, double-wides and unpainted farmhouses; when the old town hall burned down in the fifties they’d put up a Quonset hut. There was still a commune left over from the hippie days, and you could smell their goats half a mile away. Amber pointed me to the shortcut off the Bozrah road, which turned to dirt and then back to pavement and came out by the Egdon Tavern. “What do I do here?”

“Left at the stop. Then just keep going till I tell you.”

We passed a swamp with cattails, a falling-down barn with no house nearby—I’d have to find out who the owner was—next to a cornfield that nobody’d gotten around to harvesting last fall.

“He left me his all money,” she said. “He didn’t want my dad or any of them getting it. I’m going to be a rich-bitch like her .”

“I would doubt she’s rich. You know what she probably makes a year? It’s not like she’s teaching at Harvard.”

“Yeah, well she sure lets you know it. Okay, so fine, it’s this school for fuckin’ losers. She was always looking at my nails and shit—and even like the way she said my name. It’s a fucking porno name, okay? Well, my moms thought it was beautiful. You know what I’m going to do? Go somewhere.”

“Where were you thinking?”

“Where the fuck ever. Away from this shit place.”

“So am I going to be losing you?”

“Well, I don’t have it yet. It’s got to go through probation—no, what is it, probate. Shit, and I didn’t even get the fucking flag . Just up here on the right. You think they’ll still let me have it?”

We turned into a dirt drive, with a two-legged wooden sign reading Nagirreb Estates. Right, I remembered: a developer from Holyoke named Tony Berrigan started putting up crappo town houses in the middle of a field and then got sent away for tax fraud. I don’t know why he wanted to make it sound like someplace on the West Bank, but maybe Egdon had enough Sunnyhursts and Bonnie Braes.

“That one there.” She pointed to a two-family with aluminum siding and a three-foot-square overhang above the door. The path to it was just footprints, and somebody’d parked a rusted-out Buick Regal on the muddy lawn, next to a lamppost with the numbers 5-7 on it. “You better just go.”

“You still be in Monday? Or you need some time off?”

“I don’t not show up for work,” she said. “I sort of don’t want to see Johnny, though.”

“You might not.”

“He’s going to be pissed at you ,” she said. “Just saying.”

—

T-Mobile doesn’t work at my house, so I still have a landline and an answering machine. I thought it would be blinking when I came in—who else would Johnny call? But I made coffee, ate some cereal and still no word. From Kristin either; she was doing whatever you do in Boston. I turned on the radio, forgetting that Saturday afternoon was the opera. I tried to stick with it for a few minutes, then turned it off. My parents used to listen when I was little, and this man with a cultured voice would give the plot beforehand, which I could never follow—actually, I remember his name, too. Milton Cross. He must be dead by now. I remember our house smelled like mothballs, and the women singers would be shrieking away and the men singers bellowing, and I always thought my parents were just pretending to themselves that it was beautiful. I mean, I can recognize it as beautiful now—I’ve studied enough theory since then—but it’s not a beauty I can make myself rise up to all that often. Kristin was going to take me. She went down to the Met when she could afford it; she said supertitles made all the difference. Watching on DVD was good, but not the same thing. And she wasn’t even an opera buff per se—just a regular educated person, and this was part of life to her. I wasn’t that anymore, and I wasn’t completely the other thing either—Amber spotted that the second she opened my glove box, not that she didn’t know already. Nights when I don’t go out, I’ll read books because I can’t stand how a television sounds , no matter what they have on, which means half the shit people talk about is lost on me. Hey, this is where I live. When Obama ran the second time, I looked up the local returns the morning after, and Bozrah went for Romney 178 to 51. Jesse refuses to vote, even though he sent Obama a hundred dollars, so the one would’ve been me. The locals just know me as basically a good guy, kind of an oddball sometimes, and of course the new people wouldn’t think to have me over for cocktails. I’m their fucking contractor.

Johnny didn’t call till five o’clock, from the lockup in Greenfield. They were charging him with assault and battery, disturbing the peace, drunk and disorderly, they’d probably towed his car, they hadn’t set bail and could I get somebody down there. I tried the lawyer who’d handled that bullshit in North Adams, but all I could do was leave a message, so I drove down myself and there was nobody to talk to but the cop at the desk, who wouldn’t let me in to see him. Johnny had to stay in till Monday when he could finally get in front of a judge and the lawyer got everything knocked down to disturbing the peace. I handed over my debit card to pay the fine, wrote a check to the lawyer and told Johnny I’d run him back up to Martin’s Falls—turned out they hadn’t towed him after all. He said he’d found out about the suits: one of them worked at the funeral home as an usher and did the heavy lifting, and the other was an off-duty cop picking up extra change. They’d both been in Afghanistan.