Robert Coover - John's Wife

Floyd stayed out there when he first hit town. The motel had just been built, you could smell the fresh-laid cinderblocks and the carpet glue. Booked in for a night, stayed for three weeks, then moved into town, hitting a bit of luck rare in his life, so rare he was never able to say for sure after whether it had been good or bad. Floyd, on the mend from mean times, had in desperation grabbed up several sales jobs, peddling a versatile cheapjack line that ranged from coolers and cosmetics to brushes, Bibles, and magical potions for men afflicted with baldness and loss of vigor. He stopped in at the local hardware store to push his range of screwdriver sets and do-it-yourself rockingchair kits, which he’d had a bit of luck with in these independent backwater operations, often starved for a gimmick to beat the chains, but now all too few and far between. There was a tall broad-shouldered guy in there with his sleeves rolled up who looked skeptically down his slightly broken nose at Floyd, picked up one of the screwdrivers, and bent it double with his bare hands. “This stuff’s junk,” he said. “Hell, I know it,” Floyd acknowledged with a shrug, glancing around. “I do believe in the do-it-yourself line, though, and I don’t see enough of that in here. You should ought to have an auto parts section, too. You’re away behind the times.” The guy studied him a moment. He looked like he might be about to take a swing, so Floyd turned to go, figuring on maybe a bowl of chili and a piece of pie at the cheap cafe next door, but the guy stopped him. “Wait a minute. You want regular work? My manager just quit. I’m looking for somebody to run this store.” Floyd paused, loath to get pushed around, especially by a young shit, still wet behind the ears, but startled by the offer and the amazing timing and needing the job. He didn’t even know how he was going to pay his overnight motel bill. “I got a job. But I’ll think on it.” “I haven’t got time to fuck around, friend. I mean right now. On with the overalls or out the goddamn door.” Floyd sighed, gazed round the dusty old store, peeled off his checkered jacket. “Let me see if they’re my size.” John covered his motel bill for three weeks while he looked for a house. He called his wife Edna who didn’t believe him until he sent her a bus ticket to help him join in the house search. She was so happy once she got to town, she asked for it for the first time in a decade. It made Floyd’s heart swell and fill his chest to see her all flushed and eager like that, she almost looked a girl again.

Dutch saw her, too. Not much to see, but he was testing out his two-way mirrors still, and the salesman gave her quite a ride, enough to get off on anyway while waiting for a better show. Of which plenty to come, to spend a phrase. He’d seen it all, Dutch had, over the dozen years since then, a seamless flow: Marriage nights, adulteries, group gropes. Old guys taking virgin blood. Young kids fumbling. Child sex, dog sex, toilet sex, you name it. Rapes and whippings, faggots and dykes. Gangbangs. Incest. But mostly forlorn meat-beaters, all alone. Melancholy places, highway motels. A lot of fucking solitary sadness, as Dutch knew well. Some used fancy gadgetry, especially the women, others anything at hand. Dutch liked the improvisors best, left stuff around for them like bait to use, but learned more from the others. Sometimes he wanted to reach out and pat a quivering unknuckling ass, say well done, knowing then how God must feel, having to keep his distance, else spoil the show. Couldn’t even use the spectacle as a turn-on for a fuck or bring a buddy in for laughs, as in the old days at the Palace Theater, that’d be the end of it. He used to think that what God went for, if there was a God, was all the stories, why else would He keep watching, but now he thought there were no stories, only one: this ceaseless show and he/He who watched it. Or maybe Dutch had the wrong seat in the house. For stories, he eventually came to believe, somehow always had to do with numbers, numbers and sequence, and maybe this was God’s game, too, having started maybe with one and two and set them humping, but having long since gone on from there, Dutch in his innocence sitting still in the kiddie rows with his useless dick in his hands like a fishing pole, the real stories having all moved elsewhere. The only other who knew about the Back Room mirrors was John, having installed them for Dutch when he built the place, compensation for his lost Palace. Saved a couple of seats from the old moviehouse, too, and the banner that hung in the lobby: “Where the Movies Are Still the Movies.” John got no delight in ogling what he couldn’t get his organ into, but sometimes used the room when opening and closing deals, lodging clients and adversaries there, his interest not in bottoms but in bottom lines, and so closer to the notion Dutch had of story, or maybe the notion’s inspiration. John rarely dropped by himself, just let Dutch tape the conferences and calls.

Which was how John found out about his father-in-law’s attempt a year or so ago at the time of their civic center squabble to wrest his construction firm away, the thankless old fossil. Could have wiped John out. It would never have happened if Audrey were still alive, she the smart one in that pair, and loyal to John who’d helped her double their retirement fortune with his genius for investment, a fortune funding now Barnaby’s callous raid. Behind the wedding vows all those years before lay other contracts, silent shifts of wealth and property, unseen by most but sending ripples of rumor and anticipation through the town as in election years or before state championships or raffle draws. John’s ancestors had come to town as harness makers and blacksmiths, his great-great-grandfather a manufacturer of horse troughs and owner of the town’s first hardware store, or at least that was the legend. Paint and wallpaper had soon been added, a real estate agency and a sheet metal company, and his father Mitch had got into heating, refrigeration, and air-conditioning, landing lucrative wartime contracts through his political connections, even though almost everything had to be subcontracted out. Mitch had plowed his profits back into minerals, banks, and land, cheap farmland mostly, bought at mortgagors’ auctions and become prime sites when they put the highway through. Mitch had kept the land and investments but given John the family businesses to use as tokens in his nuptial dealings with the builder, a simple exchange that gave the boy a quarter of the new amalgamated construction firm and related enterprises, his wife’s power-of-attorney forms effectively making it a half. When Audrey died, they each, thanks to a will John had helped her to draft, had thirds, and John, then in his thirties and chafing at the bit, set about easing his grieving father-in-law into an early and hopefully distant retirement. Old Barnaby was a builder famous for his solid constructions, most of the best houses in town had been built by him, but he was slow and too expensive, such craftsmanship was for the rich, a limited market in such a town as this, and out of step with the throw-away times. John understood the common need, wanted to build not houses but whole developments, his own an art of most for least, quick, cheap, and functional, disdaining the vain illusions of perpetuity, a view which Barnaby understood but poorly, so causing them endless friction. And then, just when John had overreached himself in his civic center and newest mall constructions and faced a cash-flow crunch, there came an irresistible offer from an unexpected source: an upstate client of his sorehead cousin Maynard, an industrial and commercial paving company, looking for a merger. Their other chips included an insulation and roofing company, a small tile manufacturer, and a line in septic tanks and cesspools, as well as real estate; they wanted only thirty percent of the final package and were offering a three hundred grand cash investment to close the deal. It seemed too good to be true. “They think you’re hot,” said Maynard with a sour shrug, which John found he could only half believe. As they approached the signing stage and the negotiators came to town, John offered them free lodging at Dutch’s motel, joined Dutch in the old movie seats in the Back Room for once to watch the show, see who turned up and what got said. He figured there had to be a card they hadn’t shown yet. He hadn’t expected it, though, to be his father-in-law.