John Gardner - October Light

He’d thought that leaving the house would calm him. In fact, his anger and frustration were mounting. His cheeks were twitching, his legs were trembling, it was hard for him to get his breath. He felt helpless — everybody did these days, but for him it was new, and a large part of it was physical. The bitterness was that he felt like a young man, trapped inside this wrecked and dying body. He felt as alert as he’d ever been, handsome and full of beans, not at all the hollow-eyed, ghastly white ghost that for an instant stared at him, piteous with appeal, from the windshield. He was like the young parrot at the Arlington House, screaming with holy indignation in his cage while the hotel burned down around him.

Now, as the road broke suddenly from the woods and he could see the lights of the village below, he remembered — as he hadn’t remembered in years — how the village had looked in his childhood, before electricity. By horse and buggy it had been a long trip from the farm to this crest where the valley came in view. The sight had been something they’d strongly anticipated — he and Sally and his father and mother and Uncle Ira — and when it came it was earned, like a hard month’s wages, or marriage. The lights had been yellow in those days, not white. Only in winter, when there was moonlit snow, could you see the shapes of barns and houses, the square church tower with its four-spike, New England crown. By the river there had been a papermill; place had burned down when he was still a young boy. Whole thing looked like a picture postcard, or one of Grandma Moses’ paintings, or the background of one by Norman Rockwell, who’d lived for years up the road a few miles, in Arlington. James Page had known him, by sight that is. Everybody did. Now the first thing that assaulted your eye when you came over that crest was the garish yolk-yellow of the Shell station sign, and the tombstone-and-lightning cold white all around it. He brought his eyes to the road again and jerked the steering wheel, swerving back away from the shoulder. His heart pounded harder, and he slowed down.

At Merton’s Hideaway he parked out behind, where he always parked, nosing toward the incinerator. He pulled on the emergency brake and carefully climbed out. There were only a few cars here in back, two of which he didn’t recognize, a five- or six-year-old American one, white, with N.Y. State plates, and another white one, expensive looking and foreign. He hawked and spit left, accidentally just missing the foreign car — spit not cleanly but like a sick old man who smoked too much — then made his way, painfully bent over, across gray cinders to the green-lit door. Two windows faced the back, each with a small neon sign in it — Ballantine’s, one said, the other said Schlitz. Inside he paused, adjusting to the darkness and the din.

As soon as he could see, his eyes fell at once on the strangers. There was a whole table of them, sitting right next to where he and his friends sat, usually, not far from the bar — grown-ups and children, the whole lot of them as out of place in Merton’s Hideaway as Egyptians. He noticed first the women, a black-haired one and a red-haired one, both young or early-middle-aged, gleaming and assured, talking and laughing as if they owned the place, but not loud — no, soft as lambs wool; in the general rumble of the place he couldn’t even hear them. They had perfect teeth and glowing hair, the look of the rich, and so did their children, a blond teen-age boy and a girl, no doubt his sister, and across from them a child in a highchair. The grown-ups were drinking martinis and such, and Merton’s girl Emily was bringing in salads. They were lost, he decided. He’d have said they were New York City leaf-lookers, but the foreign-car plate was from here in Vermont. Maybe they’d come from the College, then, and had got off the highway and stopped the first place they could find where a body could get supper.

He saw his own crowd and went toward their booth — Sam Frost, Bill Partridge, Henry Stumpchurch. There were others he knew in booths or at tables or up along the bar — farmers, county road-men, the Ranzona boys, who did light hauling, here and there a woman, most of them unattached, most of them brawlers, troublemakers, thieves. There was a fifty-year-old, dark-eyed woman named Bea and another one named Laurie, watching from the corner, with burnt-out eyes. As he moved past the group he hadn’t seen before, giving their table as wide a berth as he could in all that hubbub, he glanced at the men among the company. There were three of them. Funny looking devils, he’d have to say. One of them, the quietest, had a suit like a gangster’s. In the dim, infernal light of the Hideaway it looked almost pink. He had funny looking ears, a little like a monkey’s, and a short, black beard. The second had on boots and an open leather shirt, a man unnaturally handsome in a round-faced, movie-star way. He had coal-black hair, dark skin, black eyes. Talked with an accent. Third one had brittle gray hair to his shoulders and a big gray beard. He had a sagging, red face and huge dark bags under his eyes, though he didn’t look old, maybe fifty. His clothes — an old suit with big holes in it and snags — were like a tramp’s. None of the three looked human, quite, but this one least of all. With that long gray beard so much lighter than his hair you’d have thought it was artificial, and with that tipped up nose more like a woman’s than like a man’s, he looked like an elf grown oversize. He flourished a pipe, waving it, pointing it, and he talked somewhat louder than the others, feeling his martinis.

James Page scowled, putting the strangers out of mind, and worked his way to the booth where his friends sat.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Sam Frost piped, grinning.

Bill Partridge, sitting in his hat, said, “Thought you want comin tonight, James.” His voice was like a scraper.

“I’m here all right,” he said.

“Grab yerself a beer and come rest yer weary bones,” Henry Stumpchurch said.

James turned stiffly to catch Emily’s eye. She nodded at once, not bothering to smile at him, running her legs off, taking a tray of cheeseburgs over to the Ranzonas, by the jukebox. He took off his cap, got his pipe and tobacco from his jacket pockets, and squeezed in beside Henry Stumpchurch, across from Sam. He had from here a view of the bar and the strangers’ table.

“Turned colder out there yet?” Sam asked, and grinned in that foolish way he had, a tic of sorts, in James Page’s opinion, a way of making everything he said sound humorous — if you asked him the date and he told you “Today is October the twenty-ninth,” he’d wink and give you a poke as he said it, as if the date had salacious implications. But James was used to it — most people never seemed to notice the thing, or so it seemed. Sam meant no harm.

“Not too bad yet,” James said. He nodded absently in the direction of the bar, where Merton had seen him and offered his greeting, the little half-salute they’d all used in the war. He was a big man, crew-cut, gray shirt, suspenders. He was leaning on the bar at the darker end, where four, five young toughies sat drinking beer, all regulars from town. Over the bar he had the television on, with the sound off. James filled his pipe. For all his years of milking, his fingers were stiff, uncooperative, scattering bits of black tobacco all over the tabletop. “Not too bad yet,” he said again thoughtfully. With his left hand he brushed the tobacco bits over to the table-edge and into his right hand. “Be a damn sight colder by mahnin, and likely rain. Saw the pigs chewin straw.”

Now Emily arrived with his Ballantine’s. He leaned far over, groped behind his rear end — his fingers had no feeling — and drew out his billfold.