Postcards, from the bass trail
Alanah left Roger on June 4, a Friday, when he came home and showed her their bank book with $16,844 in the chequing account.
“I took a second mortgage on the house,” he said. “I bought the truck and the boat.” He raised his hands just a little, reaching towards her.
Alanah just looked at him, then went into the kitchen, took a large pot of stew off the stove and dumped it in the sink, then ran the water and started the garburator. It made grinding, smashing noises, chewing the half-cooked food, steam rising around her as she leaned on the counter. Her face was red and her eyes watered and the smell of the beef soaked into her. Their daughter, Kate, was watching TV in the family room that hung off the kitchen, a talk show with a crying fat woman. She looked up, and then turned the sound up with the remote.
Actually Alanah didn’t leave Roger.
When he went to pick up the truck and the boat Monday she started calling locksmiths. The third one - Al's Safe & Locks - had a man free, and he’d changed all the locks by noon.
Roger pulled up around 4. Alanah was lying on their bed just then trying to separate their smells on the sheets - which were him, which were her. She heard the truck and went to look from their bedroom window, through a small space in the brown curtains. It was a black Ford three-quarter ton that looked almost new, and behind it a shiny black motorboat, low and flat and dusted with diamonds, with an outboard motor that looked far too tall. He pulled slowly into the curb, his shoulders hunched, his head moving sideways as he took quick looks in the side mirrors. He stopped, then pulled forward a bit so the boat wasn’t under the scrubby apple tree in their yard. Alanah thought just for a minute how much he needed her. Then she pulled the curtains shut and lay down on the bed.
Kate was watching out her brother Peter’s window. Her bedroom faced the back, where a swing set the old owners had left was rusting in a corner of the yard and weeds had taken over the vegetable garden her father had started, raised beds between squares of railway ties. Pete - 18, four years older than she was - wasn’t using his room right now.
Kate watched her father get out of the truck, and disappear for a second as he bent to look at something on the far side, then he came around the back and stopped to check the boat, rubbing at the finish with the side of his arm. It looked like a toy, a shiny black and silver skipping stone, a big blue carpeted deck and two chairs folded flat. He moved forward to polish a spot on the windshield, touched the boat’s steering wheel, a chrome ring that caught the sun.
Kate wondered: how could he not know no one was coming out?
Peter wasn’t using his room because he was in jail. The police had stopped him riding his bicylce, with four three-foot-tall marijuana plants in their pots stuck in a cardboard box behind his seat. He’d raised them to that height in his closet and was taking them over to his friend Dale’s house to grow them up to harvest size. Then he’d get one and Dale would keep three. He could have got away with a fine, but he wouldn’t tell the two officers where he was going. The fat cop had even offered to let him go, with the plants, but Peter didn’t believe him. Anyway, he told Kate while he was waiting for his court appearance, I’ll plead guilty and they’ll fine me
Except he kept forgetting his appointments to see his lawyer, never caught up with the probation officer who was supposed to do his presentence report and was almost an hour late for court because he’d had to help Dale move some plants. He got six months. Kate was in court with their father, and when the judge - a small man with a worried face and heavy glasses - said he was ordering jail time, Peter turned around and smiled at them, made a little surprised face like a cartoon character, lifting his shoulders a little.
Roger stood by the boat, felt the sun on his neck, waited for them to come out. Alanah would have read the note he’d left. And the boat looked damn near perfect. So he waited, touching the finish, checking that the motor was held on right, taking a quick look when the light was right and he could see his face reflected in the finish, 37 in three months, dark curly hair and just a few lines around his eyes that made him interesting, he thought. He bent over, checked the strap holding the boat to the trailer, stood up and walked around the back of the boat, looking quickly up at the house.
He went to the door, pushed his key in partway and it stuck, checked it, tried it upside down, took a step back out of the shade of the little overhang over the front door so he could look at the key in the sun. He posed, head tilted a litle, showing the neighbours he was a man surprised by some odd lock failure, could hear Andrews across the street going back and forth with a whiny little electric lawn mower. He rang the doorbell, looked at his watch, like the answer to why no one would open the door was written on it. Then he went to the truck, looked up at the house and stopped just a minute to smell the freshly cut grass. Then he drove away, banging the trailer just a little over the curb.
Roger left a note the next day, after he spent the night trying to call her from the Sleepy Hollow Inn.
Dear Alanah;
I know I can make this work. You know how hard I’ve been studying and getting ready, and you know what a bunch of redneck losers are making money on the fishing tour. I’m smarter, and I want it more. Once I start winning real money we can fix things. I’m sorry you’re surprised. I’ve got enough to cover eight events, and I know I can get ahead. That takes me to Fayetteville. You can come down then and see. I’ll send money for the tickets and everything.
Love
Roger
Alanah had kept it in her top dresser drawer, with socks and tights and underwear,
While Peter was in jail, he thought every day about a woman. Three days before court he’d come over the hill on a trail by the river, and seen her and two friends sitting on rocks by a deep pool. Her friends were both naked, one still wet from the water, and he barely registered breasts and legs and pubic hair. She had a yellow sundress, undone, slipped off her shoulders and gathered around her waist, and a little bamboo umbrella that leaned against her left shoulder. Her hair was dark brown and her skin white. He stood in the trees, staring at her, until she looked over her shoulder, leaned back on one arm to see him better, then turned back to her friends.
For the first two weeks they got a postcard almost every day, tracing Roger’s drive south through New York and Delaware and on to Georgia, about half of them from motels he stayed in, sometimes a little X scratched into the glossy picture, showing his room. He hardly wrote anything - what he’d eaten, or some dead animal or accident he’d seen, one day what sort of mileage the truck was getting. He sent a post card with a picture of a big bass, leaping out of the water with its mouth wide open, and a headline that said ‘Bassmasters’ Georgia $200,000,” and on that one he wrote “Here we go.” He didn’t make the final 60 there, left with no money, and headed down to Kentucky, outside Lexington, where he got a headstart on practising for the Green Hills Classic, working his way through a long reservoir and feeder creeks, making charts and marking spots with his $800 satelite positioning unit. He sent one last postcard: ‘Going good, but too busy to write. Love you.” Then after that the postcards pretty much stopped. He called twice. The first time he talked to Kate for 15 minuites but Alanah wouldn’t take the phone. The second time he was drunk in a bar in Ohio called Red’s Roost and Alanah just pretended he had the wrong number. After that, he took a woman who said her name was ‘Sara with no h’ back to his motel. He passed out on the floor before they had sex. Sara took $20 from his wallet for a cab back to the bar.
Alanah picked Pete up at the jail on a hot July afternoon, an old fort-like building with coils of razor wire like DNA around the top of a 12-foot fence. She’d taken the afternoon off work, made up a story about a furnace repairman coming. He had a blurry blue tattoo of marijuana leaf on his forearm and asked Alanah to drop him off at Dale’s.
Roger tried. He fished 14 hours a day before the tournaments, trying to learn the waters. It pained him, because he wanted to be one of them, one of those slow-talking Americans with sun-burned faces and big white rings around their eyes from days on the water wearing those over-size polarized sunglasses that cost about $90 a pop, but he started to ask everyone for advice, what lures they used, how they rigged them, did he strike too hard or too soft, getting used to leaving every Friday because he wasn’t one of the 60 or so who made it into the weekend fishing, not making a cent as the money went faster than he thought possible, sleeping in the truck sometimes. Someone gave him the nickname ‘Question,” and it stuck, and one day he came outside to find a big question mark in the red Arkansas dust on his truck.
Roger came back in August, pulled up at the house in the truck just as the false dusk finally turned to night, his shoulders stiff from 11 hours on the road. He didn’t have the boat. He’d sold it to pay the medical bills, got less than $4,000 for a rig that had cost him $11,000.
He did have a patch on his right eye that he touched every minute or so, never able to tell if it was on straight or if it had slid. He’d seen the swirl of a largemouth coming up behind his jig in a muddy patch of Kulder Lake and set the lure as hard as he could, but a bit too soon, so the treble hooks he’d honed sharp that morning with his little file struck his cheek and eye, barbs locking beneath the surface.
He stumbled a bit on the step as he went up to the door. His sense of depth was all wrong.
“I took a second mortgage on the house,” he said. “I bought the truck and the boat.” He raised his hands just a little, reaching towards her.
Alanah just looked at him, then went into the kitchen, took a large pot of stew off the stove and dumped it in the sink, then ran the water and started the garburator. It made grinding, smashing noises, chewing the half-cooked food, steam rising around her as she leaned on the counter. Her face was red and her eyes watered and the smell of the beef soaked into her. Their daughter, Kate, was watching TV in the family room that hung off the kitchen, a talk show with a crying fat woman. She looked up, and then turned the sound up with the remote.
Actually Alanah didn’t leave Roger.
When he went to pick up the truck and the boat Monday she started calling locksmiths. The third one - Al's Safe & Locks - had a man free, and he’d changed all the locks by noon.
Roger pulled up around 4. Alanah was lying on their bed just then trying to separate their smells on the sheets - which were him, which were her. She heard the truck and went to look from their bedroom window, through a small space in the brown curtains. It was a black Ford three-quarter ton that looked almost new, and behind it a shiny black motorboat, low and flat and dusted with diamonds, with an outboard motor that looked far too tall. He pulled slowly into the curb, his shoulders hunched, his head moving sideways as he took quick looks in the side mirrors. He stopped, then pulled forward a bit so the boat wasn’t under the scrubby apple tree in their yard. Alanah thought just for a minute how much he needed her. Then she pulled the curtains shut and lay down on the bed.
Kate was watching out her brother Peter’s window. Her bedroom faced the back, where a swing set the old owners had left was rusting in a corner of the yard and weeds had taken over the vegetable garden her father had started, raised beds between squares of railway ties. Pete - 18, four years older than she was - wasn’t using his room right now.
Kate watched her father get out of the truck, and disappear for a second as he bent to look at something on the far side, then he came around the back and stopped to check the boat, rubbing at the finish with the side of his arm. It looked like a toy, a shiny black and silver skipping stone, a big blue carpeted deck and two chairs folded flat. He moved forward to polish a spot on the windshield, touched the boat’s steering wheel, a chrome ring that caught the sun.
Kate wondered: how could he not know no one was coming out?
Peter wasn’t using his room because he was in jail. The police had stopped him riding his bicylce, with four three-foot-tall marijuana plants in their pots stuck in a cardboard box behind his seat. He’d raised them to that height in his closet and was taking them over to his friend Dale’s house to grow them up to harvest size. Then he’d get one and Dale would keep three. He could have got away with a fine, but he wouldn’t tell the two officers where he was going. The fat cop had even offered to let him go, with the plants, but Peter didn’t believe him. Anyway, he told Kate while he was waiting for his court appearance, I’ll plead guilty and they’ll fine me
Except he kept forgetting his appointments to see his lawyer, never caught up with the probation officer who was supposed to do his presentence report and was almost an hour late for court because he’d had to help Dale move some plants. He got six months. Kate was in court with their father, and when the judge - a small man with a worried face and heavy glasses - said he was ordering jail time, Peter turned around and smiled at them, made a little surprised face like a cartoon character, lifting his shoulders a little.
Roger stood by the boat, felt the sun on his neck, waited for them to come out. Alanah would have read the note he’d left. And the boat looked damn near perfect. So he waited, touching the finish, checking that the motor was held on right, taking a quick look when the light was right and he could see his face reflected in the finish, 37 in three months, dark curly hair and just a few lines around his eyes that made him interesting, he thought. He bent over, checked the strap holding the boat to the trailer, stood up and walked around the back of the boat, looking quickly up at the house.
He went to the door, pushed his key in partway and it stuck, checked it, tried it upside down, took a step back out of the shade of the little overhang over the front door so he could look at the key in the sun. He posed, head tilted a litle, showing the neighbours he was a man surprised by some odd lock failure, could hear Andrews across the street going back and forth with a whiny little electric lawn mower. He rang the doorbell, looked at his watch, like the answer to why no one would open the door was written on it. Then he went to the truck, looked up at the house and stopped just a minute to smell the freshly cut grass. Then he drove away, banging the trailer just a little over the curb.
Roger left a note the next day, after he spent the night trying to call her from the Sleepy Hollow Inn.
Dear Alanah;
I know I can make this work. You know how hard I’ve been studying and getting ready, and you know what a bunch of redneck losers are making money on the fishing tour. I’m smarter, and I want it more. Once I start winning real money we can fix things. I’m sorry you’re surprised. I’ve got enough to cover eight events, and I know I can get ahead. That takes me to Fayetteville. You can come down then and see. I’ll send money for the tickets and everything.
Love
Roger
Alanah had kept it in her top dresser drawer, with socks and tights and underwear,
While Peter was in jail, he thought every day about a woman. Three days before court he’d come over the hill on a trail by the river, and seen her and two friends sitting on rocks by a deep pool. Her friends were both naked, one still wet from the water, and he barely registered breasts and legs and pubic hair. She had a yellow sundress, undone, slipped off her shoulders and gathered around her waist, and a little bamboo umbrella that leaned against her left shoulder. Her hair was dark brown and her skin white. He stood in the trees, staring at her, until she looked over her shoulder, leaned back on one arm to see him better, then turned back to her friends.
For the first two weeks they got a postcard almost every day, tracing Roger’s drive south through New York and Delaware and on to Georgia, about half of them from motels he stayed in, sometimes a little X scratched into the glossy picture, showing his room. He hardly wrote anything - what he’d eaten, or some dead animal or accident he’d seen, one day what sort of mileage the truck was getting. He sent a post card with a picture of a big bass, leaping out of the water with its mouth wide open, and a headline that said ‘Bassmasters’ Georgia $200,000,” and on that one he wrote “Here we go.” He didn’t make the final 60 there, left with no money, and headed down to Kentucky, outside Lexington, where he got a headstart on practising for the Green Hills Classic, working his way through a long reservoir and feeder creeks, making charts and marking spots with his $800 satelite positioning unit. He sent one last postcard: ‘Going good, but too busy to write. Love you.” Then after that the postcards pretty much stopped. He called twice. The first time he talked to Kate for 15 minuites but Alanah wouldn’t take the phone. The second time he was drunk in a bar in Ohio called Red’s Roost and Alanah just pretended he had the wrong number. After that, he took a woman who said her name was ‘Sara with no h’ back to his motel. He passed out on the floor before they had sex. Sara took $20 from his wallet for a cab back to the bar.
Alanah picked Pete up at the jail on a hot July afternoon, an old fort-like building with coils of razor wire like DNA around the top of a 12-foot fence. She’d taken the afternoon off work, made up a story about a furnace repairman coming. He had a blurry blue tattoo of marijuana leaf on his forearm and asked Alanah to drop him off at Dale’s.
Roger tried. He fished 14 hours a day before the tournaments, trying to learn the waters. It pained him, because he wanted to be one of them, one of those slow-talking Americans with sun-burned faces and big white rings around their eyes from days on the water wearing those over-size polarized sunglasses that cost about $90 a pop, but he started to ask everyone for advice, what lures they used, how they rigged them, did he strike too hard or too soft, getting used to leaving every Friday because he wasn’t one of the 60 or so who made it into the weekend fishing, not making a cent as the money went faster than he thought possible, sleeping in the truck sometimes. Someone gave him the nickname ‘Question,” and it stuck, and one day he came outside to find a big question mark in the red Arkansas dust on his truck.
Roger came back in August, pulled up at the house in the truck just as the false dusk finally turned to night, his shoulders stiff from 11 hours on the road. He didn’t have the boat. He’d sold it to pay the medical bills, got less than $4,000 for a rig that had cost him $11,000.
He did have a patch on his right eye that he touched every minute or so, never able to tell if it was on straight or if it had slid. He’d seen the swirl of a largemouth coming up behind his jig in a muddy patch of Kulder Lake and set the lure as hard as he could, but a bit too soon, so the treble hooks he’d honed sharp that morning with his little file struck his cheek and eye, barbs locking beneath the surface.
He stumbled a bit on the step as he went up to the door. His sense of depth was all wrong.
posted by paul at
10:03 AM
1 Comments
