Jonathan Lethem - Lucky Alan - And Other Stories

From this roadside trapping spot the other six took their license, the eldest’s claim extending to her siblings. That deep-wooded bend in the road becoming a public thoroughfare in principle only, local knowledge granting the Plowman daughters’ common-law provenance, a franchise, not merely a right-of-way or right-to-pass but more a right-to-halt all others who might wish to pass. Whose woods these are I think I know. Who says this is the twentieth century. Who’s even asking. Where Traveler’s come to make his home older ways prevail. He’s learned his deference to these. On driving this road summer months Traveler’s been waved over time and again, one daughter or another, despite descending age and ascending beauty impossible to keep them wholly clear when glimpsed one at a time, for coercive donation to fund of volunteer fire squad, quite possibly an imaginary force or else the daughters themselves in fire helmets, perhaps with bulldog in pickup’s front seat hastening to scene, god help them all if anything ever catches fire. Or offerings of spontaneous roadside stand, equally coercive purchases of grotesque overgrown summer squash and zucchini, garden stuff that explodes in fecundity and nobody really wants to eat or knows what to do with. The local joke being lock your kitchen door in late August or the neighbors will drop off some squash. Traveler always pays, figures it’s his version of a local tax, a tollbooth payment. Sums in truth absurdly small, only humiliation’s payment to write off, this for Traveler easily enough accomplished.

So Traveler’s only half surprised to turn the corner in snowy plowed curve of wood this morning to find himself confronted by roadblock of Plowman’s daughters. Traveler taking the road at an inching crawl, lessons all long since learned, ten miles an hour to keep tires’ grip on densed ice-gravel, slower still with baby in basket wedged for security behind the driver’s seat, baby slumbering, drunk on Brie, tucked safe deep in terry cloth, nose and mouth solely exposed for tiny breathing. Terrier left behind in house for once. All seven daughters, first time Traveler can recall viewing entire array. Strange to glimpse even one in snowy months, with strength of local custom to hide and hibernate in winter, so many deep in woods never seen. Yet today they’ve come to assert their road’s claim. Second-eldest daughter’s hand raised coplike. No doubt of braking, at such slowness he’d hardly try to elude them, strange that such fantasies arise, no matter what dread Traveler feels at the prospect of such an encounter here. Neighbors after all. Ways of doing things, Traveler always needs recall he’s the interloper by standards of five generations on same road and in same house.

Second eldest comes to driver’s window as Traveler rolls down just a margin, cold being the presumable excuse for this unfriendliness. Mittened hand now in greeting raised, Traveler answers in-kind, gloveless. Second eldest a mannish-ageless woman of the woods, quite possible credible as fireman or militia captain after all, Traveler now thinks. Bearing not a trace of eldest’s disarray. Other daughters hanging back, blocking road, impossible to distinguish through windshield’s crystal glint, except one now he spots with rifle upright, as if at a Soviet checkpoint. Country ways. Always Traveler defers.

“Morning.”

“Morning.”

“Quite a night.”

“Yes, and quite a day too.” Traveler gestures at the white-laden trees, the sculptured lace bestowed by windless blizzard’s passing.

“Did you by any chance hear howling in the woods last night?”

“In the woods?”

“On the Drunkard’s Path, more or less.”

“No howling, no.”

“Wolves is the word. You better watch that little dog of yours, keep it close.”

“That’s what I’m always hearing, heh, yeah.”

“Were you by any chance in the woods yourself for any reason?”

“Not so far in the woods as to hear any howling,” Traveler says, hearing himself verge on lying. “Just to the edge for a pee, I mean of course a dog’s pee. I pee in the house.”

“Sure you do. Mind if I look in the car?”

“You’re looking in now.”

“Mind if I look a little deeper, like I’d be able to do if I, say, opened up your rear door here?”

“Well, I guess not, go ahead,” Traveler saying feebly as she already had done so.

“He’s here,” Plowman’s second eldest says and all six others come now crowding. Four in fact carry rifles, Traveler counts. Plowman’s daughters in age descending, beauty ascending, the youngest the most beautiful by far Traveler helplessly confirms. If Plowman had an eighth her beauty might be dangerous, blinding, or fatal, just as well Plowman stopped at seven. This youngest now hands off her rifle, scoops baby from basket, still towel-swaddled, puts her cheek to baby’s nose, then widens gap of towel at baby’s mouth and thrusts baby inside her coat, where Traveler possibly glimpses bared breast before jostling of other daughters blocks any view.

Second eldest slams shut Traveler’s rear door, after claiming basket. “Move along now,” she says, not unkindly.

“Sure, but first can I ask is that baby known to you already?”

“We were waiting for that baby, yes.”

“So this was just a sort of wolf’s wrong delivery, in effect?”

“You could say that.”

“Well, I just want to do what’s responsible.”

“That’s what you’ve done and you should be assured we’re not in any way ungrateful. You’ll want to move your car along now, you never know when there could be more traffic coming and it’s hard to see very far up around that bend behind you and this is no weather for braking.”

Never mind that Plowman’s daughters demanded his own braking on said bend. Never mind that traffic’s a comical notion around here, he wonders if they’ve ever seen any, these country people, how it is that they even believe they get to use the word. Never mind questions Traveler finds unspoken, like seven wolves and seven daughters, what’s the story there? Questions with no way of being asked. Never mind the overnight with baby, the feeling grown between them, or at least in Traveler, hard to say what feeling baby had. Traveler wondering if baby could have stayed, grown in house, become another Traveler. Never mind, Traveler raises his hand again and rolls up the window, drives on, toward town. He needs to lay in some supplies for himself and the dog, anyway and at least.

Later, after the men in jumpsuits had driven up and begun digging the hole, Stevick would remember that the guy on the bench beside him had been gazing puzzledly into the cone of his large coffee and had tried to interest him in the question of whether the café’s brew aftertasted of soap or not. This day was gray, with heavy portents of rain. Not the best for sitting on the coffee shop’s bench, but the interior of the café had become insufferable in all ways to Stevick: the shop’s ambience and fancy name, its well-programmed iPod and fake-industrial chairs and tables and counters succeeding too completely, the room seething with overdressed-disheveled types, nerverackedly Web-surfing or doing the real-world equivalent with eye orbits through the room, every last one of whom made him feel mossy, corroded, replaced. Add to that the danger of running into his ex, Charlotte, and he never even glanced within in hope of a seat — he didn’t want one. Just black, to go. He was an outdoor-bencher, he’d take his chances with the others here, backs to the shop’s window, and if rain drove them off he’d have it to himself. Nor did he care to consider whether the coffee tasted of soap or not. He was getting his morning thrill on, his eye-opener, and this place, besides being on the right corner of the right block for him to stumble in, made a fine, joltingly strong concoction strictly from the addict’s point of view. It could taste of lysergic acid or oysters for all he cared. Maybe every cup of coffee he’d ever drunk had tasted of soap, so he couldn’t discern soap from coffee — who knew?