'Amateur Barbarians'
Frost scarred the windows. Old apples, pulpy and bruised, lay strewn around the orchards like the aftermath of some stormy debauch. Gail kicked at him under the covers. No one wanted him to sleep.
Finally, as if conceding the battle to a superior force, he'd clicked on the bed lamp and reached for his book.
As a young man Teddy had no time for reading. Books were for the Philips, the moody, passive people who liked to sit alone in a room all day doing nothing. Teddy preferred the active life. No doubt Philip would have preferred the active life too, but he'd never quite mastered it, had been too haughty, too shy, too laid-back, too something. Now of course Philip was dead -- really alone in a room, really doing nothing -- and seeing as how he could no longer do much reading at this point, Teddy felt compelled to do it for him.
He was halfway through Thesiger's Danakil Diary. It was his sort of book: outward-bound, exploratory. He liked material of an extreme nature. The radical solitude of the desert, the dank resistance of the jungle, the flare and assault of tropical heat. Already that year he'd sailed up the Gambia with Mungo Park, floated down the Nile with James Bruce, crossed the Horn with Richard Burton, galloped the Levant with T. E. Lawrence. Now he'd set out again, with the cool, unflappable Thesiger, through the Abyssinian lowlands and into the Danakil Depression, the harsh, primordial emptiness of Afar.
The harder the way, the more worthwhile the journey: that was the idea.
He felt, like a programmer scanning a hard drive, on the trail of an encoded truth. It had something to do with going far out of your way toward an unknown end, then coming back. Vanishing into a distant, uncharted landscape, half-mad with fatigue, navigating by dead reckoning, starving yourself down to sinew and bone, then returning from the brink of extinction to tell your tale and claim what was yours. That it had become so much easier to imagine the vanishing than the return was, Teddy supposed, a troubling sign, but then he'd never been blessed with much in the way of imagination. He put his trust in firsthand experience, trial by fire. Hence his love for the explorers -- the cranks, the misfits, the egotists, the desert solitaries, the hardship freaks. He toted them home from the library in a leather rucksack he'd once intended for his own travels, for smelly, balled-up socks and filthy boxers washed out in some remote youth-hostel sink. So far all it had carried was paper: essays, lesson plans, budgetary requisitions. But that could still change.
As for the books, he piled them up on his nightstand like a miser's currency, breathing their dusts and molds, the powders that escaped from their bindings. Their proximity was both goad and consolation. He felt their judgments bearing down on him as he slept, exonerating him from some crimes and indicting him for others. His job, he thought, was to determine which was which. It was the only job he still had.
Off in the foothills coyotes yipped and snarled, chasing prey.
Gail turned onto her side, hogging the covers, indeed the whole bed, as usual. Of course it was her bed -- he'd made it for her as a wedding gift, wrestled it from the trunk of a bur oak he'd toppled with a power saw in the backyard.
"Mother of god," Gail had groaned when he'd presented the bed, "so that's what you've been up to out in the garage. And here I thought you were already tired of me."
"I'll show you how tired I am. Get in."
"The wood's still warm." She blushed prettily in her sleeveless nightgown. They'd been married by then for two years, but so what? The wooing of Gail was an ongoing process. Her childhood had been shorn away early. Her old man's dairy farm had slipped through his fingers; her mom, helpless, abstracted, would put daisies in Gail's lunchbox but forget the food. Teddy's job was to make up for their inattentions. He didn't mind. In his own eyes he'd got lucky; he didn't mind dealing with the infrastructural stuff -- the lubing, oiling, and filtering; the ticket-buying and table-reserving; the playdate-arranging and calendar-keeping. These he made his province, while Gail staked out the unassigned territory upstairs. The inner moods, the private fears. So be it. He would deal with the externals. Doing things, fixing things. Making things.
"I hope it's sturdier than it looks." She flopped down onto the varnished platform, waving her limbs like a starfish; she was five foot eight but the bed seemed to swallow her. "What is it, a king or a queen?"
"What difference does it make?"
"If we want to buy a mattress and sheets, we have to know the size."
"Let's call it a king."
"Really? To me it feels more like a queen."
"Fine," he said, "call it a queen." But it wasn't that either. The planks of untreated oak, left too long in the dank garage, had warped over time, thereby throwing off his measurements, altering angles that had possibly, he conceded, been drawn a bit too hastily to begin with; and so the platform had turned out to be not exactly a king and not exactly a queen, but some odd transgendered size of its own. Gail for her part wasn't listening. Already she'd commenced the long glide toward sleep, her soft arms folded like wings, her white legs with their dark, cilialike hairs tucked in behind her rump, cushioning her fall. Teddy stood there watching over her, flushed with tenderness and pride. Okay, it wasn't perfect, but he had built her this enormous, solid, unclassifiable thing with his own hands. And it would last. He came from strong New Hampshire stock, from hale, red-faced men with roping arteries who worked outdoors all winter in the construction trades; for all his mistakes the workmanship was sound. Even now, a quarter century later, he was impressed by how well the bed had contained them, and how long.
Sarah nodded. I could not make her laugh. Probably I was just not funny. "Did your father ever grow yams?" she asked.
"No," I said. I feared, as interviews went, I was in freefall. I wasn't sure why either of us was saying what we were saying. "Potatoes are grown from the eyes of other potatoes," I said, apropos of God-knew-what.
"Yes." Sarah looked at me searchingly and continued.
"In winter my brother and I actually used to shoot them in winter out of pipes, with firecrackers," I added, now in total free association. "Potato guns. It was a big past time for us when we were young. With cold storage potatoes from the root cellar and some pvc pipe. We would arrange little armies and have battles."
Now it was Sarah's turn for randomness. "When I was your age I did a semester abroad in France and I stayed with a family there. I said to the daughter Marie-Jeanne, who was in my grade, ' It's interesting that in French-Canadian French one says 'patate' but in France one says "pommes de terres', and she said, 'Oh, we say patate.' But when I mentioned this later to her father? He grew very stern and said, "Marie-Jeanne said 'patate'? She must never say patate!"
I laughed, not knowing quite why but feeling I was close to knowing. A distant memory flew to my head: a note passed to me from a mean boy in seventh grade: Laugh less, it commanded.
Sarah smiled. "Your father was a nice man. I don't remember your mom."
"She hardly ever came in to Troy."
"Really?"
"Well, sometimes she came to the market with her snapdragons. And gladioluses. People here called them 'gladioli" which annoyed her."
"Yes," said Sarah, smiling. "I don't like that either." We were in polite, gratuitous agreement mode.
I continued. "She grew flowers bunched them together with rubber bands. They were like a dollar a bunch." Actually my mother took some pride in these flowers, and fertilized them with mulched lake weed. My father however took even greater pride in his potatoes and would never have used the lake weed. Too many heavy metals, he said. "A rock band once crashed their plane into that lake," he joked, and though that was a fact, the band was technically r and b. Still it was true about the water: murky at best from gypsum mining up north.
It was strange to think of this woman Sarah knowing my father.
"Did you ever travel into town with them?" she asked.
I fidgeted a bit. Having to draw on my past like this was not what I had expected, and summoning it, making it come to me, was like coaxing a reluctant thing. "Not very often." I think once or twice my brother and I went with them and we just ran around the place annoying people. Another time I remember sitting under my parents' rickety sales table reading a book. There might have been another time when I just stayed in the truck." Or maybe that was Milwaukee. I couldn't recall.
"Are they still farming? I just don't see him at the morning market anymore."
"Oh, not too much," I said. "They sold off a lot of the farm to some Amish people and now they're quasi-retired." I loved to say quasi. I was saying it now a lot, instead of sort of, or kind of, and it had become a tic. "I am quasi ready to go," I would announce. Or, "I'm feeling a bit quasi today." Murph called me Quasimodo. Or Kami-quasi. Or wild and quasi girl.
"Or quasi-something," I added. What my father really was was not quasi-retired but quasi-drunk. He was not old, but he acted old -- nutty old. To amuse himself he often took to driving his combine down the county roads to deliberately slow up traffic. "I had them backed up seventeen deep" he once boasted to my mom.
"Seventeen's a mob," said my mother. "You'd better be careful."
"How old's your dad now?" asked Sarah Brink.
"Forty-five."
"Forty-five! Why I'm forty-five. That means I'm old enough to be your --" She took a breath, still processing her own amazement.
"To be my dad?" I said.
A joke. I did not mean for this to imply some lack of femininity on her part. If it wasn't a successful joke, then it was instead a compliment, for I didn't want to, even in my imagination, even for a second, conflate this sophisticated woman with my mother, a woman so frugal and clueless she had once given me -- to have! to know! to wear! -- her stretch black lace underwear that had shrunk in the dryer, though I was only ten.
Sarah Brink laughed, a quasi-laugh, a socially constructed laugh -- a collection of predetermined notes, like the chimes of a doorbell. "So here's the job description," she said, when the laugh was through.
This time it was just a man. The crowd made way for him as he climbed up onto the terrace. From his bronze armour shoulder guard, she guessed that he had been another one of the gladiators who had escaped the Soul Collectors' arenas after Menoa's great fortress fell. He possessed a lean, hard-muscled frame, and quick blue eyes. One of the tavern patrons slapped him on the back, and led him towards the bar, while the others roared and argued over their sweepstakes winnings.
Harper went back inside.
The gladiator was sitting on a stool at the bar counter. She went over and sat down beside him. He turned his head and leered at her, then snorted and faced the bar again.
"Get me some of that black stuff." He pointed to a jar of the vicious brew Tooks had made from smashed and boiled Maze wall. More often than not, it left the drinker insane.