A Circumstantial Harlot and a Harelipped Midget
Saturday, November 25Ð
Breathing was unpleasant. Through the muddle of dead sleep--dissipating quickly as slumber fled, each inhalation was acrid with woodsmoke. This irritation nagged me to do something about it--sooner not later, and wasn't, without action, going to take care of itself. A glance at my watch told me the time was 2:45 a.m. Too early for dawn at any time of year, especially in late November when hope doesn't show until after 7. I sighed a resigned curse, as one does when hampered by smoke, and bitched out of the snugly warm sleeping bag into 30-degree air, seized the flashlight and hurried naked, but for socks and briefs, to the stove, turned the damper 5 degrees clockwise with a self-satisfied "now stop smoking" and jumbled back into the lingering warmth of my bed, shoving EZ back onto her side.
Some time later the phrase "there's a burning stick" fidgeted along the hair follicles of my head, seized pickaxes and began opening passageways into my brain's smoke-dulled synapses. The workers made a quick job of it, broke through wide enough for me to mumble a dopey "huh" and hasten, again, out of my nest.
"There's a stick burning," said Chuck, who was standing--also nearly naked--beside his cot in the kitchen.
Of course there's a stick burning. Sticks are supposed to burn in the woodstove. Of course. That's why woodstoves are so popular in winter, in a cabin, when it's twenty degrees on the other side of half-inch plywood walls and skinny panes of glass. The flashlight beam bounced back, ill-equipped to penetrate a pall of smoke (like headlights illuminating whiter whiteness when highbeams are raised in fog) silently filling every corner, high at the ceiling and down to the floor. I headed for the stove again to tinker with the damper.
It was fully open. Chuck had roused into the gloom sometime earlier with the same thought as mine ... un-choke the smoke from the firebox and let it up the chimney. But, questions such as "why is this happening now when it didn't happen anytime else" don't occur in sleepy minds.
Chuck pointed.
I looked.
Forgive a brief diversion while I give you more to go on. Earlier, while cutting firewood, Chuck had found a dead popple covered in snow. It was prone, but had been held off the ground between earthy hummocks for a couple of years. He'd cut into it and discovered some burnable wood lingering inside. It would burn reasonably well as emergency backup toward spring when the seasoned wood was gone. He cut several chunks and we carried them inside and propped them up to thaw next to the stove ... where they stayed through the evening, periodically rotated to dry. One chunk in the back (where it gets hottest) was overlooked when we retired. It was now, at this dead hour of the night, smoking and smoldering quite alive, smoke rising in sheets.
"Oh. This is interesting," I coughed.
Shining the light on it we discovered the surface nearest the stove was glowing. The back and sides were not. I reached down and gripped it. Chuck opened the door, and it was flung out into the snow where it sizzled and hissed in the dark. Stove was re-stoked and the damper shut back down. Chuck opened the door on the south. I did likewise on the north. But, like pimples on the butt, opening up an infirmity to salving fresh air, doesn't immediately solve the nuisance. We departed back to bed. I submerged my head under the covers, figuring flannel might filter some of the smoke, disgusted that this perturbation might one day become funny.
We arrived at The Woods on Saturday, coinciding from opposite directions, he west, me east. This is the first weekend of the past four that the gun deer season (but for black powder and bow) has ended.
I pulled in just before noon. Chuck's truck was parked. I shut off the motor and waited, expecting movement inside. There was none. I wondered if maybe he'd gone hiking, so got out of the truck, released the spring-loaded EZ, and headed for the door. Peering through the glass I spied a bundle on the bed, then a head at the foot of the mattress. The head reeled back and gazed out through two twirling eyes. In I went. We chattered and jabbered. Chuck roused while I looked into the fire and out the kitchen windows at snowy woods, pleased to finally be here after two weeks of fidgety impatience.
I headed for the wood cutting area behind the cabin and began sectioning oaks and maples felled in October, while Chuck set about splitting chunks of birch I'd left a month or two earlier. The chainsaw cut easily for an hour, until I sawed a rock, not realizing it was rock. The blade dulled shamefully.
Back to the cabin for sharpening. Chuck had opened, and was heating, a can of appalling stew, purchased at the Store for $1.75. Chuck was appalled at the price. He thought it too expensive, I was as appalled, thinking it suspiciously cheap. We ate, I filed the saw, EZ pestered for lovin', and the liquid fat on our plates congealed into an appalling orange Day-Glo skim.
We headed back to the work, splitting chunks down to firebox size.
There is a mystical pleasure watching split firewood widen around a splitting stump. It's a far more fulfilling amusement than Disneyland's attractions. Chuck suggested it unlikely Newsweek will report a, "Firewood Splitting," concession opening there soon.
I noticed EZ, thirty-feet away, head near the ground, chewing--with great gusto--something sure to be revolting. I yelled "NO." She dropped it. I went to investigate. A fresh organ of some animal, melting the snow. I picked it up with a gloved hand, turned it over. A liver, or kidney, or other internal part. Deer hunting ended last weekend. Somebody had gutted their deer and EZ'd discovered the remains under snow, where it had waited, unfrozen, for her to find.
I dropped it near a tree where I was working, gave her a severe stare, and said, "no," twice, as she circled around, head low with serious humility, an implied assurance that she'd never do that again.
The oak I cut for the sitting bench is still standing nearly straight. Wind and weather hasn't brought it down as I supposed, so with the two of us and the truck, let's pull it down. At most there is only two inches of snow on the ground, and it's easy to drive through. Chuck went for a stout rope, I backed the truck into position. The tree trunk is submerged into the ground, about two inches. I dug out the dirt and stabbed in a slab plank which, fortuitously in September, had split up the length of the tree. A good ramp for the butt end of the oak to slide up-and-out on. Chuck tied the rope around the tree, made a loop, and dropped it over the hitch on the truck. Motor started, slack taken up, power applied, the tree startled, and began to slide out of its hole. The skids fell away as the trunk butt gouged across the snow, scoring a deep leafy trench into the earth. The crown of the tree wouldn't release from its neighbor's grip. The end pulled off the ground, a sort of unrehearsed clash of wills. Me, inside the truck, fighting two defiant trees. I disengaged the clutch and rolled backward by the pull of my foe. Then gunned it again.
The low end of the trunk lifted three feet, four, five feet above the ground, refusing to surrender. I jammed on the brakes and held it all there, considering what to do about a tailgating two-ton tree, at 45 degrees. Letting off the brakes and rolling backward, I set it down, reversed some slack in the rope, and charged forward again. The rope again went tight, the trunk again swung high. A crown branch cracked and the whole oak plunged to the ground in a shower of dead leaves.
The sun sank low through the trees and dusk rushed us back to the cabin.
Candles and lanterns lit. Coleman refueled, twenty-pound propane tank outside the cabin opened and we settled into an hour of reading. I, Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies; Chuck, reviewing The Catcher in the Rye, on loan from the college library. We paused at 6:25 to listen to Garrison Keillor tease us Lake Woe-be-Gone-ians, then got out Yahtzee. Candles were congregated to the cardtable. We battled through two rounds, each triumphing one. The championship of the known free world followed. Games played here at The Woods are merely for fun. They mean nothing and don't account toward world freedom or dynasties of power. So, who won the third game is of little consequence and my shrewd victory doesn't factor in this discussion.
I hydrated myself with Old Milwaukee. Chuck drizzled Jim Beam over snow in a disposable plastic cup.
We played a round and a half of Wildfire, a gameboard Dad created with a marble trail and dice shaken to advance and played by the same tiresome formula as Trouble and Sorry and Parcheesi. It's a juvenile game full of furious discourtesies. It's best to play this game with friends, who don't take it personally, or hinge world paradigms or self-esteem on the vagaries of random dice throws.
We'd propped weenies on sticks across the open stove doorway, and dumped a hungry-man portion of calico beans into a makeshift double boiler atop the woodstove. Wiener juice Sizzles and aromas of pungent beans halted game play at 10:30. We dined on hot-dogs sans condiments. There are none, but for an old bottle of ketchup, frozen and thawed repeatedly over the years.
Lights out by 11:30. And all was snoring peace until the billow-smoking wood chunk rousted us.
Sunday--
4:30 p.m.-
Chuck went home early this morning. I needed a break from the enclosing solitude of the cabin and craved human interaction. Dreams of Fair Women still muddling, from the nap just awakened, weren't enough. I wanted real live people, not endorphin wisps floating on brain waves, running softly atop a creaky metal frame in a woodsy shelter growing confined. It did not matter if the human companionship was ladylike, or even female. I just needed to link back up with human life with skin on it. Not fur as EZ has on her.
I loaded us into the truck. EZ was agreeable, as she usually is to most invitations, to going somewhere other than here. The excuse, should I be asked to explain why I was showing up at the Store, (excuses should always be ready to explain one's intentions, especially when there's a dog who grins at strangers from a truck front seat) was that the camera needed a charge, but that I was not there to create a ruckus. The charger stays on the dashboard when I come to The Woods for just this convenience.
As we headed out, EZ inferred (in her cute little way) that things might go better for me if I put on my baseball cap and remove my reading glasses, so as to appear local enough to increase my chances of fading into the background.
"It's just the Store."
"Fine. Do what you want."
I obliged and took them off and kissed her fully on the lips, grateful for her kindness to my necessary disguise. We both knew she was about to be left in the cold truck outside while I cavorted inside.
Approaching the county road at the end of The Woods road she did have to remind me that signaling a right turn out of a deserted road onto another deserted road was silly, and I needn't do that. Biting my tongue just in time I thanked her, then explained that by habit I'm accustomed to signaling my intentions, and that it's good not to pick on others for practicing civic-minded habits that make for a better world in which we move and breathe.
She sulked the mile to the Store. When I snuck a look in her direction, the glow of dashboard lights showed a slight resentful curvature to the lips on her head.
By the time I arrived she was gazing strictly out her passenger window and wouldn't even look to the lights of our destination.
Parking between the Store and Dolly's Cadillac she wouldn't kiss me good-bye or even glance me a good-tidings gaze. The window to the Store was beside her own window. She had forgotten me and began to twitch with grin about the festivities and fun people to meet inside.
I climbed out of the bitchy cab and slammed the door on her insolence, her quickness to seek cheap affection outside of our relationship, and walked quickly to the door. To hell with her. If she wants to ignore me, then that's fine with me, is all I can say.
I opened the outer door and caught a glimpse of Axel and Leon and Herb sitting at two tables where they customarily sit. I shoved open the storm door to a jingling of sleigh bells and emerged into highly aroused gusto. Now, the pushing open of that door always signals a keen high event for locals who exist there day after day. It offers the possibility that somebody exciting is finally coming to straighten things out once and for all. Or maybe the propane route driver is going to perform magic tricks while hoofing on a tabletop.
It was just me in a baseball cap. Herb turned back to his game of solitaire, Leon returned to stroking his chin mustache and belting out confidences that "the damn fool shithead shouldn't'a done that again." Axel, tipping his chair back to drain a Busch, blurted out that the "shithead bas'urd can't hear a Gaw'damn thing so bad that he oughta' beat them assholes in the head with a jackhammer in overdrive." Herb nodded ascent and flipped cards. Dolly, in high gear, was raving hard about a satellite movie her husband seen that morning, which included a real good scene involving a harelipped midget in a tuxedo straddling a drunken cowboy's shoulders getting his bald head thumped against a saloon ceiling in a drunken attempt to plunge the midget through the floor of an inferential harlot's chambers in the second story of a wild-west whorehouse.
"The midget din't even get hurt, except for his nuts."
Herb nodded.
Dolly continued her summary. Billy Bass twitched just above Herb's head, as artwork devices do when their batteries are failing.
Herb muttered, ransacking his deck for a red three and a black nine. Leon finished berating Shithead. Axel rose for another Beer.
They wore musty wool-like brown-gray jackets. Both had on soiled baseball caps with the bills properly facing the direction God intended them to face. Leon's said "MILLER BEER." Axel's was printed, "GUN CONTROL: A sharp eye and a steady finger."
I sat down at a table near enough to be friendly, but distant enough not to be caught up in something I couldn't control. I saw a page of literature printed with large words "They Can't Do That To Us!" and reached for my reading glasses, then remembered EZ's conscientious advice and pretended to scratch an itch.
A clamor erupted into the room. Leon and Axel's belt-clipped two-way radios crackled drastic despair from dispatchers at a headquarters far away. These transmissions always parody real life ... raspy reports of, "shovelheads" and "1052" and "deputies en route" blend into surreal allusions to television scripts and crisp-clad medics hurrying to the scene. The radios were turned up.
What I'd failed to remember about chatter at the Store is that multiple conversations are thrust along simultaneously. Each voice, relating fascinating new angles on an old story, has learned not to expect rapt attention from anybody. But there's always the chance of a breakthrough. So each shouter with their piece of the floor shouts louder, attempting to achieve a startled glance from one of the other shouters and a "really? You never told me that!"
Herb finished his game with a sigh, pushed up from the table with "do something else now," and disappeared out the door.
Dolly finished her report about a midget's damaged head and plaster crumbling and whores shrieking in disarray and launched a new topic about Alaskan festiloon dancing, with funnels.
Leon and Axel become infuriated over the behavior of two eighteen-year-olds who live just down the road, who'd, "ripped up the ditches for miles with Diller's "301 Bronco, and revved it way up past eight thousand RPMs and run it out of oil after mowing down all them fenceposts and telephone boxes and plowing deep gashes in them front yards."
And, "The old man, who's deaf'ern shit ought'a be strung up because he'd been told point blank (by Axel himself) that he ought'a beat Buster till he's stringy and dead."
"I mean, let me at 'im and I'll grab his scrawny neck and (beating a right hand violently into his left) pound 'im 'till he learns right!"
Leon nods. Then looks straight at me, "the worst white trash you'll ever see."
Leon heightens Axel's fury by reminding him that it was their dogs (the naughty boys who'd racked and ruined the Bronco) who had gotten loose and "went fuckin'-up every other goddamn dog in the county."
At this, Axel (swinging his head in incredulity over such lunacy) perked up and stated flatly that he couldn't tolerate why the deaf man (who was father to at least one of the boys) wouldn't "raise a finger to set the fuckin' pricks straight."
Dolly merged into the discussion and, teeth bared with contempt, shouted how her own "fuckin' dog--'Ax'--the other one is named 'Bad' ... 'Bad-Ax!', get it? Heh-heh-heh," had been "fucked in the middle of the Goddamn highway" by this same trashy shit breed and they'd both nearly gotten run over by Respedstad's crappy pickup. (Respedstad, by the sound of it, swerved through the ditch to avoid thumping the road-humping dogs).
"Then the fuckin' dog got off my dog and came over and pooped in my fuckin' front yard!"
I do not understand her sudden discreet use of "poop," but must remember that this was all told by a lady during a highly emotional reenactment of neighborhood angst.
I swigged my beer. Axel rose up and toppled toward the cooler. "I'm gonna' get another one of them of my beers."
Dolly came to my table and sat down, leaned in, and asked if I'd heard "the cats during the night."
To my knowledge, I hadn't.
Just then, as it was nearly six o'clock and the end of Dolly's shift, Meg pushed open the door towing a grim storm cloud like a gray kite.
Meg always carries sun and sweet nature in her pockets. She has a small pouch sewn into an inside back pocket where she keeps a measure of pique, just in case. It is seldom used, or shown. It is hers, given at birth by the God of Indignation who doesn't give too much out at any one time. (He figures a little is all most folks need to do the job right.)
As Meg gritted past me toward the kitchen I could see her pouch inside the back pocket was roiling with turmoil, sifting granules of rage as she went, scattering on the floor around Axel's chair. She carries Axel and her son and half the county's residents in there.
My feet pushed my chair back out of her way.
She reached the kitchen and stopped beside the coffee maker, facing away, head swaying side-to-side. She turned on Axel.
"You're ruining yourself Axel."
"Aw, m'alright. I'll be 'kay."
She walked to him, leaned across the table, looked into his whiskery
face and said, "it's time for you to go home."
"Naw, m'alright."
Leon sidled away
into the side room and unscrewed an electrical outlet.
Axel, who pays according
to the number of empty cans on the table (and has been warned not to "get
this way" in the Store) turned to the cooler for another. Dolly tells
about Orv who's Bobcat got stuck in the mud. Leon needs a tool from his truck
and bangs out the front door. I don't know what to do. This is confrontation
still submerged but festering to be finished. A spurious truce.
Now Dolly has her
coat on. She counts Axel's empty cans and marks figures on his scorecard by
the cash register. Meg scrubs Axel's tabletop.
It's time to go.
I stand and glance toward Meg. She's thinking inside herself. Leon (who'd
returned with a six-pack of Pabst) darts through a rear door. Dolly slams
out the front. So do I. Axel bobs his head down onto a fresh cigarette.
I get into the truck. EZ has forgiven me. She grins, leans over and kisses my cheek. Through the window I see Meg at Axel's table, lips moving fast, gesturing her arms. She wipes an eye, then sits across the table. Axel gazes at the tablecloth and reaches for his wallet.
Monday--
1:35 p.m.-
Snow is falling in light aimless passage, like condensation sliding down a window. There's a light stirring of air. Roof snow is melting, tap-tap-tapping by my left shoulder, opening a circle of leaves on the ground. A bluejay is calling. EZ is snuffing in her sleep, now rising to look out through the door window, turns, stares at me, walks back to her mat by the door and sinks back into it with a gusty exhale.
The woods are mostly silent. The only sound inside the cabin is a low ruffling from the woodstove, an occasional "tick" of contracting cast iron, and "snaps" from the fire as a sap pod bursts. Three candles are lit on the table to illuminate my work.
I arose at 8:00 this morning, feeling a bit immoral for leaving the radio on at low volume during the night; BBC World Overnight soothed my sleeping mind throughout the hours of darkness. Bush has finally been named President-elect and Gore is planning to do the wrong thing and take sore-losership to the Supreme Court griping that "Every vote should count."
Have re-heated the last dregs of swamp coffee. It's steaming near my hand. Spent the morning dividing polynomials. I don't like algebra; consider it an objectionable joke devised by sadistic prigs. I've been assured by the instructor that algebra is a cumulative prospect and I needn't fret but that I must quit lingering behind trying to understand what was taught earlier, three sections ago. He insists, "It'll be all right."
It wasn't all right on the last exam. Only 38 of 100. But the next exam is later this week and we've been promised an open-book, take-home test.
I closed up the books at noon for a walk down to the river. It's not a fun time of year to be outside. The sky is drab, the air is cold, the skin chills. The river is mostly frozen except for shallow rapids south of the bridge site. Open water has laid lacy hems along the ice edges, tinkling and chortling to itself, clear cut-glass borders dripping and sparkling as the river flows under and across, adding new layers, like a sculptor with lots of time on her hands. Another sculpture is under construction outside the north wall of the cabin. Ice is building along the sides of the downspout I'd forgotten to take down in October, now frozen into the thirty-two gallon rain barrel, icicles fattening, lengthening. I'll slide it down tomorrow and remove the downspout to prevent winter's icy weight from growing out of control. (I did, and broke it.)
4:30-
I was laying on the bed reading.
EZ, snoozing under
the table, released a conspicuous "urpy" grunt. I looked over as
a large indelicacy emerged and slid out her throat, the size and color of
a small squirrel, slimy-wet and steamy and coated with digestive 
bile. She left it there and headed for the kitchen where she again began convulsing.
I yelled, leapt off the bed, threw the door open and she rushed outside. I
poked at the gob of mess beneath the table. She'd returned to the secret deer
guts and eaten her fill.