“Just one thing I want to show you,” said Croft. “Then we ought to go for a walk around the property, before the light’s gone. It’s a rare night.”
Croft, piloting a decrepit Peugot, had led me along a serpentine country road, through hamlets and farmland and well into the woods, before we’d turned onto a well-maintained dirt road with W. SUGAR marked on the mailbox. There we’d rumbled past a few rotting Volkswagen Beetle exoskeletons, field grass swum up through their engines, to stop in front of a hand-hewn cabin, with an ancient paint job mostly blistered off its plank exterior. I thought it leaned dangerously, but we headed for the half-open door. Beside it, an upright manual lawnmower was rusted to sculpture beside a primitive stone well, each having surrendered, like the Beetles, to the field grass.
“You live here?” I asked. I withheld the question that went with it: Was Croft the only one left on the property? The scene was Walden-pretty, but a little desolate, regarded on civilization’s terms.
“God, no, the homes are down the hill, in the woods. We’ve got a hundred and sixty acres. This place was the old communal cookhouse, back when we all ate together. Plus a winter sleeping bunk for the folks in tepees. This was some time ago, though. Nobody uses this for anything anymore, except the bees.”
I suppose there was never a reason for tearing down a cabin or scrapping a stopped automobile, if you had all those acres. Particularly if your models of exterior decoration were author photos of Richard Brautigan, at the door of a Kaczynksian Montana shack.
Inside was an abandoned kitchen: an old range, its enamel webbed like the glaze of a Renaissance painting, a long, stained butcher-block which could have been salvaged for installation in a loft in Emeryville or Gowanus, and a double-basined sink with an old plastic bucket below, in place of plumbing. What Croft had called a sleeping bunk sagged so low over the stove it threatened to kiss it. I picked out wood rot and insect eggs, a hollow-log scent. Croft clambered over some barrel staves and steel drums, into the corner beneath the loft, and from a shelf full of water-swollen hardcover books plucked up a mechanical something and curled it under his arm. When he crawled back through the wreckage, he presented it to me: a manual typewriter. The double ribbon, black-over-red, which had produced the reverb of crimson in Running Crab’s postcard font, was still strung between the spools, though the spools themselves were thick with corrosion, going nowhere in a hurry.
Any stray tendril of fantasy that Croft was about to produce Rachel in the flesh, that she dwelled incognito like a Weatherman or Symbionese soccer mom in one of those homes in the woods, evaporated now, even before he spoke.
“We kept it in the Bug, when we drove out to the coast. We’d write you a postcard each time we stopped for gas, or to get stoned.”
“You wrote them, or she did?”
“I had to kind of push her, but she helped. I think she was ashamed, you know? Later it was just me. After she was gone.” I held the melted typewriter in my two hands, like a beggar with his hat. Croft brushed at the sodden chunks of rust it had deposited on the sleeve of his corduroy jacket.
“You want it?” he asked.
“No.” I wanted my cleaning deposit back when I returned the rental, that’s what I wanted.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
The dirt road curved out of the open field at the property’s entrance, down the hill and to the woods. We left the cars, strolled into the glade, the cool forest, too steep and irregular to ever have been farmed. The sun gone from sight below the hill’s line, the birch trunks and pale ferns seemed bioluminescent, charged with the day’s light. Our footfalls whispered unreplied on the private road’s fresh layer of sharp, gray gravel. The woods were an engine of silence, pumping it to the sky.
Around each turn lay a house. Wooden two-story buildings, seven or eight total, each with their thoughtful trace of Buckminster Fuller or Christopher Alexander-circular rooms with skylight domes, greenhouse windows, breezeways attaching a low annex or small studio. Each house with a car or two in the drive, a few with smoke unfolding from a chimney. Here and there bicycles, chain saws, snowshoes, mulching piles, splintery blast marks of log splitting, ax wedged in a stump. The Watermelon Sugars were home, their kitchens lit. From the distance of the road, though, we granted their privacy as we passed. I was humbled, as I ought to have been, to see what varieties of life could hide between the arrogant, oblivious coasts.
“Rachel and Jeremy were probably the biggest challenge this community ever faced,” said Croft in his squeaky alto. “Confronting them helped us grow up, so I guess we owe them a lot. I’ll never forget that night, we held hands in a circle around them and told them they had to go. I just about shit my pants. Jeremy had already punched me a couple of times, but I was too embarrassed to admit it to anyone. Turned out he’d punched a lot of people.”
“I don’t know who Jeremy is,” I said.
“Somebody told me he died a couple of years ago. He was basically just this really charismatic, really violent guy from Kentucky who used us as his playground for a few months. His favorite game was to scare guys by getting them really high, then talk about how he’d once killed a man outside a bar with a single blow to the throat. He had a lot of those biker horror stories. Right after the throat story he’d move in on the guy’s girlfriend. Everyone was sort of passive, you know, like ‘If she wants to be with Jeremy, that’s cool, maybe she’ll bring him some peace.’ Rach was actually the only person who really stood up to him.”
“He took her away from you?” I asked. It was growing darker, and I’d been momentarily transfixed by the scene in a bright-lit kitchen window-a middle-aged woman, her hair as gray as Croft’s, sliced tomatoes at a counter, while behind her, two blond daughters, bright and shiny as Solver girls, played a dual-remote video game, some dungeon or deep-seascape glowing unearthly blue on a screen. But they couldn’t see me, and I felt like Frankenstein’s monster, peeping at the humans. So I turned away.
“Oh, we weren’t spending much time together at that point. Rachel was her own problem, a lot of people weren’t completely thrilled about my bringing her out here. She had that New York sarcastic thing that burst a lot of people’s balloons.” He laughed. “I mean, she sort of ran rings around people, truth be told. She ran rings around me. Plus she wasn’t happy here. She’s wasn’t all that happy, period, or she would never have gone with Jeremy. I think she regretted leaving New York.”
“Did she talk about-Abraham?”
“Well, she was pretty ashamed,” Croft said. It was the same word he’d used to explain why he’d had to force her to write the postcards. I supposed it was true, the right word. I decided to quit fishing for more.
Croft went on. “Mostly I just remember this one day, I tried to get her to come looking for mushrooms with me. She hated that kind of thing, she thought it was stupid. This was after Jeremy showed up too. I was just trying to reach out, you know, make some connection, because she seemed so balled up. So she had this routine, every time I tried to get her to do anything outdoors she’d say, ‘I wonder what’s playing at the Thalia.’ Like I should know what she was missing, from her life before. She’d say, ‘Maybe it’s The Thirty-nine Steps, or A Thousand Clowns,’ or whatever. So this particular day she said yes, I don’t know why. It had just rained for three days, and we went hunting for fresh morels.” Croft gestured at the forest floor, and I understood he meant here. More or less right around here. “Not that she picked mushrooms. She was chain-smoking-she couldn’t drive, either, she constantly forced me to run her into town for cigarettes. Anyway, she walked with me, smoking like a fiend, and when she started in about the Thalia she said, ‘Maybe they’re showing Beat the Devil,’ and I said, ‘What’s so great about Beat the Devil?’ and she told me the plot of that fucking movie for an hour. I mean, doing Peter Lorre’s voice and everything, all the lines-she had the whole thing memorized.”