She was lucky. As it turned out, she was only twenty minutes late, and she got to breathe formalin all through the long gray morning and the dim, slow, Hyperborean afternoon.
Tom had given her a ride home. In the dark. On the back of his ratcheting, rusty, mufflerless Suzuki 50, in wind-chill conditions that must have approximated those at Ice Station Zebra. Dancing high up off her toes, thrashing herself with clonic arms and dabbing wildly at her runny nose, she’d dashed up the steps of the cozy little Kitchawank Colony bungalow (rent: $90 a month, plus utilities) that she and Walter had chosen from among a hundred identically cozy little Kitchawank Colony bungalows, only to find that Walter was gone. Tom stood behind her, helmet in hand, the yellow scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face like a camel driver’s kaffiyeh. “He’s not here,” she said, turning to him.
Tom’s eyes were distant and bleary above the scarf. They took in the kitchen and living room in a single glance. “No,” he said, “I guess not.”
A long moment ticked by, her disappointment like some heavy weight they both suddenly had to carry — she couldn’t face it, a cold night alone with defrosted enchiladas and quesadilla chips that had the taste and texture of vinyl — until Tom tugged the scarf down past his lips and asked if she wanted to come out to his place for dinner. They could leave Walter a note.
And now, here she was, clutching her legs to her chest and watching her breath crystallize before her face, a farrago of warring odors broiling up around her. There was the cold salt stink of unwashed socks and underwear, the must of mold and woodrot, the acid sting of the smoke and the unconquerable, insurmountable, savory, sweet, stomach-clenching aroma of garlic frying in the pan. She was about to spring down and give it a stir, when in came the saint of the forest, elbows flailing, water sloshing, feet beating the floor like drumsticks. He was breathing hard, and his nose was the color of tinned salmon. “Water,” he gasped, setting the bucket down beside the stove, and without pausing, measuring out twenty-four cups of it for the rice. “Blood Creek,” he added with a grin. “It never lets me down.”
Later, after they’d each put away two heaping tin plates of gummy rice and vegetables with garlic-fried tofu and soy grits à la maison, they shared another five or six jars of wine and a joint of homegrown, listened to Bobby Blue Bland sing “Call on Me” on Tom’s no-fidelity battery-powered record player, and discussed Herbert Axelrod, talking chimps and UFOs with all the passion of rabbinical students delving into the mysteries of the Cabala. Tom had left the door to the stove open, and at some point Jessica had stopped shivering long enough to climb down from the airy bed and prop herself up on a chair just beyond the range of incineration. She told Tom the story of the time Herbert Axelrod, invited to lecture at the University of San Juan, had stepped off the plane and discovered a new species of fish in a puddle just off the runway. In return, Tom told her about the Yerkes Primate Center, dolphins that could do trigonometry and the UFO he’d seen right out there on Van Wart Road. Finally, though, and inevitably, the conversation turned to Walter.
“I’m worried about him,” Jessica confided.
Tom was worried too. Ever since the accident Walter had grown increasingly strange, obsessed with road signs, history and the Robeson riots, jabbering about his father as if the man existed and generally working himself into a frenzy at the Elbow every night. Even worse, he was hallucinating. Seeing his grandmother and a host of leprechauns behind every tree, seeing his mother, his father, his uncles and cousins and ancestors. All right: it must have been terrible having his foot hacked off like that, and sure, he needed time to adjust, but things were getting out of hand. “Does he tell you about seeing things?”
Jessica leaned toward him as he bent to feed the stove. “Seeing things?”
“Yeah, you know, like people? Dead people?”
She thought about this a minute, her mind numbed by the wine, the faintest queasiness spreading its fingers in her deepest gut. “His father,” she said finally. “He told me once — I think it was just after the accident — that he saw his father. But I mean”—she shrugged—“maybe he did.”
“Is he dead, or what?”
The wine was going to her head. Or maybe it was the pot. Or the tofu. “Who?”
“Walter’s father.”
She shrugged again. “Nobody knows.”
It was then that they heard the thump of footsteps on the porch out front of the shack in the middle of nowhere, a sound like the rap of fleshless knuckles on the lid of a pine box, and both of them froze. “Walter,” Jessica murmured in the next breath, and they relaxed. But then the door flew open and there was Mardi, in sealskin boots and a ratty raccoon coat that fell to her knees, shouting “Hey, Tom Crane, you hairy old satyr, you old man of the mountain! Have I got something for you!”
She was in, the door slammed shut behind her, and she was warming her hands over the fire and stamping her feet in a furious little seal-pounding fandango before she acknowledged Jessica’s presence. “Oh,” she said, the big cold coat in Jessica’s face, her eyes bloated and streaked with red, “oh … hi.”
Tom poured her a glass of wine while she shouted about the path in from the road—“Nothing but ice, like a fucking bobsled run or something”—and how she’d fallen on her ass at least six times. “See?” she said, lifting the coat to show off her buttocks in the grip of a pair of tight faded jeans that didn’t show a wrinkle.
Suddenly Jessica felt as sour as the rancid wine in the pit of her stomach.
“You know what?” Mardi said, flinging off the coat to reveal a ski sweater featuring what appeared to be a band of humping reindeer, and following this with a squealing non sequitur (“Oh, what’s this? Ummmmm. …”) as she first peered into the pot and then began to pick bits of squash and tofu from it. “Hmmmmm, that’s good. What is it, tofu?” She sat above them, perched on the edge of the table, jaws working, licking at her fingertips. Her hands were slim, pretty, no bigger than a child’s, and she wore two or three rings on each finger. “You know what?” she repeated.
Silence. Jessica could hear the low moan and suck of the stove, the pop and wheeze of sap in the burning wood. Tom was grinning at Mardi like a hick at the sideshow. “What?” he said finally.
Mardi came up off the table in a theatrical leap and threw out her arms like a cabaret singer. “Hash!” she announced. “Blond Lebanese!” It was, she assured them, the best, the purest, the most potent, unrefined, mind-numbing, groovy and auspicious hash they’d ever partake in the glory of, and furthermore, she added with a lopsided wink, she had five grams of it for sale. Not that she wasn’t tempted to keep it all for herself — just to have around, you know — nor did she usually do anything like sell drugs or anything, but it was just that she, like, needed the cash.