John Henry Days, page 43
She didn’t have to stay at the motel; all the guests were going to the fair, they were fully booked, and anyone who did stop by could be placated by a note taped to the office window. She stayed because while the county had planned everything meticulously, they had left something out. Things don’t just happen because you tell them to. They happen because something has been paid. Their motel, for example. The materials had been supplied by the contractors, the mortgage by the bank. But the principal, the guarantee, had been provided by the insurance company. Benny’s mother’s life insurance had given them this place, the room in which she and her husband sleep. Pain is a down payment on happiness. You pay for happiness with grief in this world. This annual fair, the John Henry Museum when they complete it, will bring the world to their town, to the Talcott Motor Lodge. It is a new beginning but by her sights, it hasn’t been paid for yet. There’s some blood to be paid. John Henry spilled his, for the railroad, for his fellow workers, for Talcott and Hinton. Where will this weekend’s come from?
She’s a witch looking into bubbling murk: the land is full of the ghosts of dead men who sacrificed themselves to give this region life. They tremble in every tree, inhabit the wind and dwell in the soil. Surely they have opinions on this weekend’s events.
The pills don’t help much.
When the last taxi departed for the festival Josie started her rounds. She cleaned the rooms, of course, did her duty. But she wasn’t looking for sheets and towels to replace. She was looking for the ghost. She pushed her cart down the rows. It took longer than usual because they were at full vacancy. Room after room, she found no trace, and she grew more anxious. In her hands keys trembled at each new lock, the clacking tumblers shorthand for suspense—what was behind the door? The usual disarray, the usual unremarkable clumps of balled-up socks and tilted area guides on nightstands.
When she couldn’t take the waiting anymore, she ditched her disguise, abandoned the cart and went directly to the black man’s room. Beneath that musty bouquet, particular fragrance of this establishment, she could smell the ghost. It had indeed been in this room. Nothing unfortunate had happened; she saw Mr. Sutter depart that morning without any outward signs of damage. She gave him directions to Herb’s. But the ghost had been there, perhaps just standing over the man as he slept, or whispering into the man’s deaf ears. She fetched her supplies and tidied up the room; in returning the room to its natural state she attempted to put things right, dispel.
She resumed her circuit through the rooms, relieved at the ghost’s mercy. The cars on their way to the fairgrounds pounded down the route; children’s faces smeared up against the windows of air-conditioned vehicles, observing her. There was still time to make it over to Talcott, to the tunnel, but she felt content to swab and tuck. Someone had to take care of the practical matters. Josie was fine until she came to room 12; she had almost put the ghost out of her mind as she retrieved undershirts from their indignant poses on the bathroom floor and folded the edges of toilet paper rolls into triangle points. But when she opened the door to room 12 she knew that the ghost had been there as well. She dropped the new towels to the carpet. There was no evidence that something bad had occurred, but this was terrible news.
Josie ran back to check the register, knocking aside the cleaning cart, dispatching it on a skid that continued for as long as its cockeyed wheels allowed, blue disinfectant sloshing. The guest’s name was Alphonse Miggs, Silver Spring, Maryland, LN# RHU 349. Two nights. She remembered the man; he had been one of the first guests to arrive. A quiet little fellow, and very polite. She had seen him leave for the fair in the last taxi. Didn’t seem out of sorts or otherwise terrorized from a brush with the supernatural. She didn’t know what to make of it. What it meant. But she didn’t have a good feeling about it. She shut the door of room 12 and spent the rest of the day in her bedroom. She didn’t want to know. She took a green and a red from her stash; she has a chemist’s array of pharmaceuticals guests have left behind and each day she mixes and matches. The green-red combo blows a pleasant creeping fog across her fields. When Benny came home and slurred nothing but good news to her, she finally eased into sleep.
Every Sunday morning is a blessing from God but Benny’s snores are a liturgy of obscenity. As she prays before the window they blaspheme, insinuate, warn. She has done all she can. Whatever will happen will happen. Whatever the connection between the men, she has done all she can. Perhaps the ghost doomed both of them, embracing them into its dark territory, or blessed both of them and they would be saved, or perhaps the ghost blessed one of the men and cursed the other. A train enters Big Bend Tunnel; she hears the sound of the whistle as the engineer begs safe passage from John Henry. She trudges slippers into the kitchen to fiddle with Mr. Coffee. As she hovers over the tap filling the coffeepot, she glances through the window and sees five chairs dragged around the pool, empty chip bags that have skittered across the parking lot through the night, empty beer cans in tottering cairns. First thing after her coffee she’s going to have to clean all that up. Then she sees the black couple walk across the parking lot and into the road, headed toward Talcott. It’s that Mr. Sutter and Mrs., no, Ms. Street. Where on earth are they going and why are they holding that box?
The same night as the shooting in Hinton, West Virginia, a beloved star of stage and screen, whom most people believed had died years before, succumbed after a long illness and the story of the tragedy was bumped from the front pages. Nonetheless segments of the public engaged in lively discussions about the John Henry celebration and its tragic denouement. Stamp collectors, for example, speculated about possible besmirchment. War correspondents drew analogies from their own experience. And at a bar on M Street in Washington, D.C., an inquisitive patron could have overheard this conversation between two postal employees:
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
(cupping his hands)
I was on the ground in a compact, defensive position because I knew
what to do. I took that class, remember?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Maybe I should take that class.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
(nodding to himself)
It wasn’t cheap but it was worth it. The Don’t Be a Hero Urban Readiness and Preparedness Seminar—covers everything from road rage to hostage situations. Bank robbery and airplane. It’s a one-day thing, I’ll get you the info.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
So he pulls out the gun.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
The mayor was up on the podium and then blam blam like that and I look over and the guy’s standing up just shooting into the air.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
How far away was he?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
He was right there! In the second row. Me and the guys were up in the front row, and the guys who got shot, the newspaper guys, were sitting right in front of him. It could have been us right there.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Dag. Just started shooting?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Didn’t even say a word. Hear this blam blam then I look over and see the gun but I see that and boom, I’m recumbent in a compact, defensive position. Drop, Tuck and Roll. So I didn’t see the cop shoot him or the two guys, I just heard it.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
(sipping) Dag.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
(demonstrating)
Everybody screaming. See that? Somebody stepped on my hand.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Little vitamin E will prevent a scar.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
(nodding)
I been rubbing it on.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Didn’t leave a note or anything.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Had his wife on the news today. He didn’t leave a note or a clue. She said nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Some kind of stamp collector.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Collected railroad stamps.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Christ.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
You said it, brother.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
(eyebrows raised)
What, was he trying to raise the value of the John Henry stamp
through notoriety?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Could have picked a better way—how’s he going to profit from machinations if he’s a goner?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Doesn’t it smell fishy? Papers say the guy didn’t have a history of mental illness. Job’s okay, still poking the wife it sounds like. No dismembered heads in the basement. Nothing.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Quiet fellow, kept to himself. That’s what the neighbors say.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
And regardless of what we think, stamp collecting to most of the world is a perfectly innocent pastime. Maybe this will increase awareness.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
So what makes him do it?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Did he say anything?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
(turning on the bar stool)
His famous last words?—“I wasn’t going to shoot you.”
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
What, he just wanted your attention? Pulling out a gun. Easier ways of getting people’s attention. No stamp collecting manifesto in his coat pocket?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Who knows what he was trying to do?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
We must ask ourselves, who stands to profit? Any jump in the orders of the John Henry stamp since then?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
I’ll ask Jimmy Say you hear about Jimmy and that new secretary in Quality? The redhead?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Maybe it’s nothing complicated at all. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe he just snapped. It happens. “He just snapped.”
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Leaving behind this message to the world.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Leaving behind a challenge.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
People just snap all the time these days.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
We peer into the inexplicable.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
And every day are confronted with the unknowable.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Least he wasn’t one of ours. The first reports said he was one of us. Randy looks like he could snap at any moment now that he’s trying to grow that mustache.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
I was sitting right next to Randy! Post Office executives—they’d have a field day with that. Now it’s not just the rank and file but the top brass going—
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Don’t say it!
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
I wasn’t going to say that, I was going to say, going to give us a bad name. Two dead and one wounded, did you hear that? The second guy died today.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Shame. They bringing the cop up on charges?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Just doing his job, really. Taking out the homicidal madman. Sure he hits two bystanders but that’s his job. Sucks that they’re members of the media, for his sake, but he got the guy before he could hurt somebody. Preserving the peace.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Gonna sue like crazy. The journalists’ families. Cop kills two bystanders while trying to get one guy? Gonna sue the town like crazy. (noticing empty glass) Damned shame. You want another beer?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
(signaling the barkeep) Sure.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
So tell me about this seminar.
She wore blue. The song said never wear black, wear blue so she wore blue and they had a map. They walked down the road.
AFTER THEY HAD walked a bit, he offered to carry the box for a while. But she refused, shook her head. A mile on he repeated his offer and this time she let him take it from her hands. It was heavier than he thought it would be. The weight was the urn and not his ashes. Probably the ashes did not weigh that much; the main part of him was smoke. They took turns after that, passing the box between them, juggling across arrangements of purchase, cradling it like this and holding it like that against their chests. The cardboard heaved and sank.
THE ROAD WAS a lazy black line after all the busyness of the previous day, slouching and shirking between the mountains under a martinet sun. He wasn’t that surprised when she told him what was in the box and her plan. When she knocked on his door he was already awake. He’d had a strange dream and had been up awhile, already dressed and wishing the motel had one of those mini coffeemakers. They hadn’t clarified their plans after their interlude in the tunnel so he was surprised when she knocked on the door that early. He’d entertained scenarios, most of them ridiculous, about what her favor might be, but none of them held up to scrutiny for more than a few minutes. When he opened the door, he noticed she was dressed all in blue, in blue jeans, in a blue blouse, but he didn’t connect it to the song until she explained it to him.
THERE WAS A lot of time for explanations on the walk up there. East, reversing the trajectory of laid steel and time. It was two or three or four miles, she wasn’t entirely sure. Her father’s map didn’t have a legend or niceties like that. He’d sketched it out on his last trip down here, judging from the box she’d found it in. The box containing the map held, in crumbling strata, copies of the Hinton newspaper from a few years back, awkwardly folded roadmaps of the area, some receipts, and those helped to date the map. He came down here a couple of times over the years, always alone, on his inscrutable itineraries, but the neighboring items in the box clinched it. She told him that when she was in the storage facility a man walked in, opened his space, and in there he had a little living room, with a big armchair, a coffee table. Also a random assortment of stuff, three toasters, a big army bag of clothes, watercolors of canals hung on the cement walls. He sat in the chair, crossed his legs and read the daily paper. It didn’t look like the guy was going anywhere. When she left she asked the manager about it and he said the guy slept nights in a shelter but hung out in his storage room all day. It’s where he kept his clothes and things, and he was a nice guy, weird of course to live like that, but he wasn’t dangerous or anything. The guy basically lived in there, in the storage space. After she finished the story, he made a joke about the size of the average New York apartment. How we all live in boxes.
SHE ASKED HIM if he felt uncomfortable about her request, and he said no. He wasn’t going to have to do anything particularly, just accompany her up to the place, and he didn’t feel uncomfortable at all. He was in his life comfortable with the role of passenger, and he did not mind that today he was a passenger on a tour, as she guided him through this John Henry territory. It was only once he felt the weight of the box that he started to grow a little uncomfortable about this enterprise, her mission. The weight made it more real.
TO END A silent quarter of a mile he told her about the record and the List as a prelude to a description of his dream. So that she could understand the terms. His hands went for the box.
IN THE DREAM he was somewhere downtown and hip. Where old cobblestones broke through asphalt, enduring, resenting centuries, and wheat-pasted posters and slogans shriveled on plywood in evanescent counterpoint to those cobblestones. Everything was closed. He was walking to a destination but possessed only a dim idea of where it might be. And what it might be. A voice called his name. He turned and it was Bobby Figgis, he of the record. In the waking world he had never met the man but in the dream he understood this to be the man’s identity. Far from his imaginings of the man, this apparition of Bobby Figgis seemed healthy and happy. Well fed and well off. The old junketeer was garrulous and well dressed in a fine black suit. Bobby Figgis grabbed his hand and said they were all waiting for him inside, it was just down the alley. He knew then, in the lucent clarity of dreams, that this was where he was supposed to go. His final destination of the night. He followed Bobby Figgis down an alley that only exists in film, full of steam and jumping alley cats and slithering rats. His guide knocked on a beat-up metal door, above which a red light glowed. A bouncer opened the door and welcomed them with extravagant affection. He welcomed Bobby Figgis as one might welcome an old friend, and then welcomed him as well, as if he had been there many times before. Then he suddenly remembered that he had been there many times before, all the time in fact, every night, and for every night after. He went inside.
