Robert Coover - John's Wife

When Big Pauline shifted her hips, taking out a grove of trees, and pitched her old man out into the night like a football, all hell broke loose inside Settler’s Woods. Otis slithered down out of her crotch and dove for cover as the entire posse, what was left of it, opened fire, shooting wildly but probably hitting more often than not a target hard to miss. Kevin did not even take aim, firing haphazardly over his shoulder as he scrambled away, but he was sure he drilled her more than once, hearing the bullets go thuck, thuck, thuck into the soft wall of her flesh. All together they must have hit her with hundreds of rounds, but she hardly changed position except for lifting an arm in front of her face and swiveling a few degrees to take the low-flying bullets in her butt. Most of the flashlights had been abandoned and lay in the weeds now like glowworms, but even in the darkness Big Pauline was easy to see, a huge lowering silhouette, bigger than the trees, faintly illuminated from time to time by distant sheet lightning. In one such flickering, Kevin, reloading, saw that one of her eyes was bleeding like she was crying black tears and her flank appeared to be peppered with zits. She seemed more puzzled and hurt than angry and reminded Kevin of some deer he’d shot before they’d died, and of his own mortality. Well, he shuddered, life, death, it was a great fucking mystery, probably never to be fathomed; he aimed at her wounded eye. It had not been a good day for Kevin, if a day was all it had been, starting with Pauline and her partner cleaning out the clubhouse kitchen after she took that monumental dump in the rough at the fifteenth. She was big then, bigger now. John had lightened his heart with the offer to let him hire a new salesperson for the club shop, but after he’d unexpectedly found the perfect chick, who’d turned up like out of the blue, she’d been snatched away from under his nose while he was, in gratitude, boy-scouting at John’s barbecue grill. And then he’d realized, too late, that John wasn’t even around to appreciate his good deeds. He’d done a lot of drinking after that, maybe before as well, and now, in these dark damp woods, he was paying the price, his mind blistered and belly churning, kept on his feet and continent by a medicinal hip flask filled with twenty-year-old malt from John’s party, an emergency measure he hoped would serve him until he could get back to his rooms at the club and let it all blow. The gunfire had died down a bit: maybe she was dead but just hadn’t toppled. But then she let out a pathetic wail, oddly soft and girlish, and they all started firing away again. She swept her hand and took out the tops of half a dozen trees overhead as though swatting at bees, and that prompted a deeper retreat for most. Kevin felt too miserable to move, remaining huddled behind his topped tree and wishing somewhere behind his awesome nausea he were wearing something less luminous than yellow golf pants. Someone yelled at him, Otis maybe, to pull back, he was in the line of fire, so he got up on his hands and knees and began to crawl woozily to the rear, when he felt himself embraced all round by something soft and rubbery and warm and lifted through the air. “Don’t shoot!” he could hear someone shout. “She’s got Kevin!” “Holy shit!” “Look out!” “She’s going to eat him!” It was like being on a fast elevator: his stomach got left behind as the rest of him rose above the trees. His yellow pants had probably had it. With one finger she flicked the rifle out of his hand and he figured that hand wouldn’t be worth much for a good while. Up close he could see that her near eye was pretty much gone and her cheek on that side was pocked and bloody. The occasional glimmerings of lightning lit up her white teeth, clenched in a grimace, and the ghostly white of her good eye. She opened her mouth and there was a distant rumble of thunder and more shots were fired. Kevin ducked and she shielded him with her body, turning him upside down, and up came the barbecue. Down, rather. Woof! Out it came! From both ends! Gross! With her free hand she uprooted a tree and swung it like a club through the woods below. There were screams and shouts and someone yelled: “Pull back! Pull back!” Beyond his retching and gut explosions, he could hear them scuttering away, some groaning and shouting for help. He was being held up again in front of her face. He was all alone now and all cleaned out. Felt a little better, not much. More appreciative of his present fix, which made him feel worse. Hand hurt like hell. He could see through his tears that there was a sad inquisitive look on her face, but he was at a loss for words. What could he say to such a woman? “You’ve got a good natural swing,” was what came out. “Really.” This made no sense. But what did? It was always his best line and at least it gave her pause. Her grimace faded and her full lips spread into something like a melancholy smile. She licked her lips with a tongue that looked like the backside of a walrus. Her teeth lit up, her eye, there was more thunder: not just summer heat lightning, a storm was on the way. Would that he might live to weather it. If she was going to take a bite, he wasn’t sure which end he’d rather she started with. Either way, it was probably the end of his golfing career. Her smile faded. She lifted her nose, sniffed, and a frown crossed her broad brow: yes, no doubt about it, Kevin noticed it, too, there was the smell beyond his own smells of woodsmoke in the air.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and Clarissa, soaring aloft into unknown realms, could see below a great burning ring of fire, and could feel it, too, the car red-hot beneath her seat, the scorching heat searing her, but as though from inside out, and between her legs a hammer blow, bone crunching bone, that popped the wheel from out her grasp and sent her father’s splendid machine bouncing up, as if undriven, from the road, yawing and rolling like an unruddered ship as it rose up into the black night. Take it easy, Clarissa, slow and steady, she seemed to hear her father say, giving her her driving lessons. Foot off the clutch, both hands on the wheel, and ease up on the gas, don’t try to set the world on fire, a car’s a tool, goddamn it, not a trip. Keep your wits about you! Real power is power you’ve not yet unleashed, so feel it all but use only what you need. Oh Daddy! I’m sorry! I won’t do it again! But it was too late for that, she could not turn back, could not get off the dreadful trajectory that, rashly, ruinously, she’d launched herself upon, and in the grip of blinding panic she rose and spun, while the forest burst into flames below as though ignited by her own wild fury’s folly. She’d hit the bridge with bare foot to the floor, thinking what? to rise where Bruce and Jen had gone? Some foolishness in her mind-blown rage, meant to avenge the insult of their snub, and that was when, as the axle bounced and the frame struck sparks and the steep ascent began, the hammer blow was struck and she lost her grip on the suddenly treacherous wheel, the car careening madly as it left the road. And as she overturned and the night sky reeled and the woodland burned below her, she felt a fire blaze up within as though a lightning bolt had struck her where she sat — and suddenly, spinning, she was thrown free (and, hey, buckle up, her father always said, because you never know) and for a moment hung in space, the wild whirl stilled, then down she plummeted, headlong, like a shooting star, falling and falling, landing at last in the little creek below the bridge which received her fall and cooled her burning body as pain engulfed her and her breath left her and her eyes went dark.

As Clarissa in mad careen rose and plummeted, so Waldo, too, riding high, bounced and reared and soared and plunged, but was not thrown, belted in by thighs of steel, and having passed, as love’s brave adventurer, from curiosity and carnal desire through wonderment and awe and deep alarm to mortal funk and finally sheer exhaustion, he slept now even as he pitched and rolled, his stentorian snores chorusing those of his wildly bucking mount, this the raucous concert that greeted Lorraine and Trevor upon their arrival at the seventeenth hole, drowning out the remote rumble of threatening thunder, and that left them, for the moment, standing there at the edge of the torn-up green in stupefied amaze. Just before the lights went out in the motel bathroom, Lorraine had picked up on Trevor’s anguish and, dressed by darkness, asked: “Who did you think was in here, Trevor?” He hadn’t answered, but the impression she’d got looked a lot like Sweet Abandon, and the mystery of the switched pants no longer was one. She’d knotted the bath towel around her waist and led her erstwhile best friend’s half-blind husband out to his car (“You see, it’s all right, Trevor, just a local power failure …”), asking that he drive her to the place where he’d picked up the girl, he muttering, “What girl?” but meekly taking her there just the same, the choral snore then bringing them the rest of the way to the edge of the shaved green whereon these sleeping beauties tirelessly jounced and tumbled. “They’re like some kind of perpetual-motion machine,” Lorraine said at last, breaking the spellbound silence between her and Trevor, and loosening the towel, sat down on the bench next to the ball-washing pump and the tee to the final hole, her mind less on revenge (certain justifiable cruelties did occur to her) than on trying to find a language adequate to describe the performance being played out before her. But dimly lit: that helped, no squalid detail, please, the broader strokes will do. One such stroke now lifted the entwined duet beyond the cusp of green and down they rolled, losing not a beat as, snoring on, they rose and fell beneath each other, landing in that undulant turf below where Lorraine commonly fluffed her shots, her rakehell hubby back on top once more, flapping loosely in Marge’s tenacious clasp, the milky pallor of his broad rump phosphorescing rhythmically in the steady pulsing from the sky. A storm was brewing, and just over the horizon, it seemed to her: something was on fire. She flexed her shoulder, still sore from the shotgun recoil. “You wish to know delight and here you’ve been sleeping beside it all these years,” she said, and Trevor started: “What—?! How — how did you know?” he gasped. “I guessed,” she lied. “Should we wake them up?” he asked. “If,” she said, knowing full well he didn’t think so, “you think you can.” The accountant, weighing up the options, sighed ruefully, came over to sit on the bench beside her, his black-patched eye the one she saw. “Why do we even get married?” he asked, a rhetorical question, she knew, but she answered it just the same: “It’s an art form, making something out of nothing.” The bouncing lovers had fallen into a sand-trap and were now kicking up a sandstorm that partially concealed them from view, carrying the turbulence around with them as they shifted, motors roaring, about the pit. “There is something fast and furious and beautiful about the sudden casual encounter, you know, like yours with Sweet Abandon. There’s the feeling of—” “Who?” “That girl from the barbecue.” “Oh. But I didn’t—” “I know.” But it was beautiful, he was thinking, or nearly was, or might have been. “Yes, there’s a feeling of being free from story, or at least of your own sad hopeless tale — if there’s a story at all in the one-off quickie, it is cosmic and essentially electrochemical and you are not a ‘character,’ only an action.” “Yes, I see that,” he said, and she saw that he did. It’s like a waking wet dream. Did she think that or did he? It was hard to tell, for his thoughts, she saw, were interlaced with hers now with the same sort of rhythmic intimacy that conjoined their more athletic mates, now out of the sandpit and noisily churning up the water-trap nearby; she didn’t even need to tell him that prolonged affairs and marriages were forms of storytelling and thus of human artifice, tender but droll attempts to impose meaning on the lonely, empty, and all but intolerable cosmos. She laid her hand on his lap. “Your pants are wet.” “I — it was—!” “I understand.” She did and knew he knew she did, her hand still where she’d laid it. In the watertrap the froth was rising like ferment around the pounding bodies, all tinted now with the ocherous tones of a wet sky burnished by the distant fire. Something big was burning over there. The broken rhythms of the snoring couple convulsing at the water’s edge told Lorraine that the break of dawn, however stormy, was not far off, the night, not yet, but soon, would end, the shades disperse, a thought her one-eyed companion on the bench was having, too. She squeezed. “Why don’t you take them off and hang them over a limb to dry?” Because, she started to say but heard his own like thought penetrate hers: “Accountants can be artists, too,” he added. “I’m sure. Here. You can put my towel under them if you like.”