The New Yorker Stories Part 55

Cahill clasped his hands. "Roadie," he said, "how often do men speak frankly? I think some of the things we've just been talking about... We've spoken frankly to each other."

Roadie nodded silently.

"One more thing," Cahill said. "I've never been a mystical person, but things change as you age. You'll find that out. Some things-people, even-disappear, then something else comes in to replace them." Cahill paused. "Life is like having a garden, Roadie, because inevitably the time comes when the deer eat everything, or you don't mulch and the soil gets exhausted. Right away, the weeds are in there. So I suppose what I'm getting at is that, well, tending your garden seems to me now like a young man's game. When you don't have the inclination or the energy or the... optimism to tend it anymore, the weeds rush in." He looked Roadie square in the eyes. He barely knew what he had said himself. He said, "The moment you stop loving something, the moment you're inattentive, the wrong things and the wrong people take over."

"That's one of the best ways of puttin' it I ever heard," Roadie said. "I'll go back to talk to Gloria Sue, try to tell her what we discussed. There's no way I'm gonna be able to put it like you did, though."

"Express it in your own way," Cahill said. "It seems to me you love her if you're going home to talk to her."

He went to the beach, a place he'd gone only once or twice, quite early in the season, and unfolded a chair and looked at the water.

He'd never called the police in response to the flyer. He'd never spoken a word to Breezy about what the dog had done in the graveyard. He tried to think philosophically: Audrey and Matt had been involved in whatever way they'd chosen-two losers, in any case, who were no good for each other; the dog was just a dog. People projected onto dogs, so they found themselves surprised when dogs acted like dogs instead of people.

What did not change? Change was part of the natural process.

Coming to terms with what Matt had done, though, was difficult. It wasn't a matter of Matt's having been like his son, as Audrey had suggested, but, rather, that Matt seemed at times like a source of... what? Guidance? Ironic, thinking of what Matt might have guided him toward. But of course parents didn't tell their secrets to their children, just as the children withheld theirs from their parents.

"I didn't do it! I didn't do it!" little Joyce had cried, hand stained red, lipsticked J's all over the bathroom mirror, the bath tiles, even the toilet lid.

"You never really got involved," his wife had said, when she was still able to discuss his shortcomings. "If you don't get involved, you don't have to take responsibility. That was the way you always operated as a parent. As if you were the eminence grise, as if your family was just too much pressure. The aloof doctor."

The sadness of family life. The erosion of love until only a little rim was left, and that, too, eventually crumbled. Rationalization: Rationalization: he had been no worse a father than many. No worse than a mediocre husband. That old saying about not being able to pick your family until you married and had your own... People rarely remarked upon the fact that time pa.s.sed, and you kept picking friends who were closer to you than family members; dogs you'd come to prefer to people. The next "family" in the line of succession could be a goldfish in a bowl, he supposed. he had been no worse a father than many. No worse than a mediocre husband. That old saying about not being able to pick your family until you married and had your own... People rarely remarked upon the fact that time pa.s.sed, and you kept picking friends who were closer to you than family members; dogs you'd come to prefer to people. The next "family" in the line of succession could be a goldfish in a bowl, he supposed.

In front of him, a little boy in a wetsuit played with a fishing rod that dangled no lure, casting it all wrong, the way he'd learned to throw a softball. His mother and father sat on a blanket, their attention focused on each other.

As the sky turned that indescribable silvery tone it often attained in late summer in Maine, Cahill rubbed his face and was surprised that his skin was still hot from the sun. A real Mainer would have worn his baseball cap. He slid a bit lower in his chair, and some time later was startled awake by squawking gulls. The charcoal-gray sky was flatlining a thin horizontal line of pale pink; the breeze had a bite to it. The couple and their child had gone, a bucket with a broken handle and a pile of sh.e.l.ls left behind. He stood and folded the chair, scooping up his shoes with his other hand.

He drove home, appreciating what a pretty town this was, how the residents kept their houses in such good repair. Back home, he stashed the chair in the garage, where the garter snake who'd lived there contentedly for years slithered away behind piles of tied-up newspapers. His wife's plastic planters dangled from a beam, the few dried stems that remained deteriorating into dust. As he started up the walkway, he saw something suddenly dart past a bush at the side of the house, startling him so that he teetered for balance on the edge of the bricks. It was Napoleon, panting, big ears flapping.

"You listen here," he said to the dog, grabbing his collar. "You desecrated a graveyard, you-" He stopped, automatically rephrasing, in case he might not be understood. "You s.h.i.t in the graveyard and knocked down the new wall!" he yelled. "You come with me."

He was dragging the dog across the lawn, though the animal dug down, clawing as if to score music, trying to stop the forward rush. The dog yelped as Cahill dragged him all the way to the wall, which was now even more caved in, though thankfully there was no more s.h.i.t inside the enclosure. "Bad dog! Bad dog!" he said, jerking the collar. The dog risked further pain to turn his neck to look up at him, and what Cahill saw was fear. Fear and incomprehension. The sad squeaky sound went infinitely sharp, and Cahill realized he'd been intending to push the dog's nose against a pile of s.h.i.t that was not his. It had been left by a much larger animal. Of course it had. Look at the size of the dog, and look at the pile of s.h.i.t.

Instantly, he loosened his hold on the collar but stopped short of releasing it entirely, because of course the dog-any sane creature-would immediately run away.

"I'm sorry," he said, bending and putting his lips close to the dog's head, the smell of gra.s.s and dog mixed with a hint of... could it be lavender? "I'm sorry," he said staunchly, as if someone might overhear. Then, leaning in even closer, he risked letting go of the collar, whispering, "I misunderstood."

The Confidence Decoy

Francis would be driving his Lexus back from Maine. His wife, Bernadine, had left early that morning, taking their cat, Simple Man, home to Connecticut with her. Their son, Sheldon, had promised to be home to help out when the moving truck arrived, but that was before he'd got a phone call from his girlfriend, saying that she would be flying into J.F.K. that afternoon. So he was gone-when was Sheldon not outta there?-though the moving men were perfectly capable of unloading furniture without anyone's help. What had Bernadine imagined-that Sheldon would have ideas about decorating, about what should go where?

Francis's aunt had died, and, since he was one of only two surviving relatives and the other, Uncle Lewis, was in an a.s.sisted-living facility in California, the emptying of her summer house had fallen to Francis. Uncle Lewis had asked for the pie safe and for the bench in the entryway, nothing else, maybe an Oriental rug, if the colors were still good and it wasn't very big. Francis had rolled up the small Tabriz, which he tied with string and put in the bottom of the pie safe.

A few days earlier, Sheldon had taken his father aside to ask his advice: should he become engaged to his girlfriend now, or get the first year, or even the first two years, of law school behind him first? Sheldon and Lucy had already discussed marriage, and she seemed in no hurry, but he hadn't liked her going off to teach English in j.a.pan with no engagement ring on her finger. Francis thought Lucy a nice young woman, pretty, neither shy nor aggressive, but, really, despite the many occasions on which they'd interacted, he could not get much of a sense of her. She'd twice been involved in car accidents in the past year, both times when she was driving, but that didn't necessarily mean anything-three times would have been more definitive. The biggest clue Francis had got about Lucy had come one morning after she'd spent the night, when she'd come down to breakfast late, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and trailing her underpants in one leg of the jeans. Bernadine had whispered to her, and Lucy had turned bright-red and s.n.a.t.c.hed up the underpants, stuffing them down the front of her jeans. She'd had no sense of humor about it at all. Well, he couldn't imagine having come downstairs at the Streetmans' (what would it be-forty-some years ago?) after sleeping with Bern, because no such thing would ever have happened. They would have had him arrested. But this was a different age, and he had no objection to Lucy's sleeping with Sheldon in their house. They put their cups and saucers in the sink, and were extremely quiet. The TV in Sheldon's bedroom never went on, as Bern had pointed out.

Bernadine said that she liked Lucy, but Francis thought she might like her only moderately. For a woman who'd wanted a daughter, Bern was quite skeptical of other people's daughters, though her skepticism about Lucy took the form of mentioning little oddities and quickly adding, "Nothing wrong with that, of course." One of the things that there was nothing wrong with was Lucy's inability to cook-her inept.i.tude extending even to lettuce-washing, to not understanding what a salad spinner was. She recoiled from the blender and the toaster as if they might become animated without her touching them. She drank a lot of tea, so she could boil water. But why did she resist when Bern tried to explain how other things were done in the kitchen?

Then Bern had begun finding banana peels in strange places: thrown behind a flowering bush in the garden, or pushed into a vase. "Fortunately none in the linen closet yet," Bern said wryly. She had found two or three folded inside empty toilet-paper rolls in the trash; she'd found another buried in the little trash can that held lint from the dryer.

"What do you think?" she asked Francis. "Is it some kind of eating disorder? Some comment on something or other?"

"She's realized we're monkeys," he said, curling his fingers and scratching his ribs, puckering his lips.

"It isn't funny to me, Francis, it's upsetting. I've never known anyone to stash banana peels."

"How do you know it isn't Sheldon?"

"Have you ever once known him to bring any food whatsoever into this house? He doesn't even come in eating a candy bar. I've never once seen him with a cup of takeout coffee. He's so lazy he relies entirely on the groceries I bring home."

Francis put down his newspaper and looked over the top of his gla.s.ses. "Maybe it's a mating ritual," he said, but she'd already left the room.

Now Francis stood in the hallway of his aunt's house, wondering if it would be worth it to take out the ceiling fixture and replace it with something less expensive and less unique before the real-estate agent came back. This required outguessing the people who would eventually tour the house: would they be inclined to like everything, once they'd seen such a splendid light fixture, or would they breeze past, the men concerned about the bas.e.m.e.nt, the women interested in the kitchen? He was contemplating calling Bern to ask her opinion when he saw the Burwell Boys Moving truck turn in to the driveway, sending gravel flying into the peony beds. A hollyhock went flying like a spear. Low-hanging tree limbs snapped off.

Two men wearing chinos and dark-brown T-shirts hopped out. "Mr. Field? How do you do, Mr. Field?" the burlier of the two said. "Moving day, Mr. Field," the other man said, retrieving a clipboard from the pa.s.senger seat. He had a couple of feathers in his shirt pocket. "I'm Jim Montgomery. My partner here is Don O'Rourke."

"Don," the partner echoed. "We want to do a good job here, make sure you got no reason to remember us."

Both men came forward to shake Francis's hand. Jim plucked a pen from between the feathers in his pocket. "Just need your John Hanc.o.c.k on the line, then we can get started."

Francis signed their forms, then led the movers inside. "My aunt's summer house," he explained, giving them a quick tour. He'd supposed that everyone in the area knew that his aunt was dead, though, of course, he had no reason to suspect that she would have met these particular men.

"Aunt didn't have tons of furniture," Jim said. "She an older lady?"

"Ninety," Francis said.

Don let out a low whistle. "Make it to ninety, then a couple of crooks come in and load everything out."

Jim crouched to examine a side table, then looked at Francis. "You tagged the pieces we load last?"

"They're both in the hallway. The pie safe and the hall seat." The movers had told Bern that they would be unloading these pieces to another moving company, which would transport them to California.

"We'll get started, then," Jim said. He turned to Don. "What that remark was about us being crooks, I won't ask."

"We took those six-packs of water from behind the 7-Eleven," Don said. He grinned at Francis. "Go to auctions, get things and distress 'em, bang 'em up and make 'em old."

Francis nodded, trying to indicate that, whatever they'd done, he did not intend to pa.s.s judgment. (It didn't much matter to him.) His wife had arranged for the moving men, who had been recommended-wasn't that what she'd said?-by the real-estate agent.

Jim and Don began issuing orders to each other, pulling furniture into the center of the room, moving quickly. Francis turned, pretending to have something to do upstairs. Over his shoulder he noticed something small on the floor and went back to see what it was, as the two men carried the Sheridan sofa out the door. It was Jim's feather. He put it on the chair cushion, where Jim would be sure to notice it, and returned to the stairs. He went up three steps, four... then stopped. Through the window, he saw the broken limb of a tree dangling over the front windshield of the moving truck. On the stairs, a dust ball grazed his foot, stirred up by the small breeze coming through the door. His aunt had lived to be ninety, and he was sixty-six. His son was twenty-four, which, he quickly computed, was the difference in age between his aunt and him. The computation meant nothing.

Francis had practiced law for years, and he did not think his son was at all suited to the vocation. But what was he suited to? He'd been a solid B-plus student, but he'd done very well on his law boards, and he had two very good letters of recommendation, plus one that Bern had helped him get from their congressman. Sheldon played tennis and golf, if that mattered. Lawyers were always disparaged and joked about; probably pa.s.sion was not a prerequisite quality. Still, he imagined the worst: that Sheldon might get engaged to Lucy just to keep her from other men; that, yes, Lucy did have an eating disorder, and, even if she didn't, being sneaky was a problem; Sheldon would begin law school then quit-Francis was entirely sure that that was the way things would go-and then he and Lucy would rethink things, though it would be too late if they were already married, or if she was pregnant. She was pregnant. That was why she was eating the bananas, he realized, standing on his aunt's stairs, the moving men coming and going, oblivious to him. She was coming back-Lucy was coming back from Tokyo early, because she was pregnant. He and Bern would be grandparents. Sheldon would be overwhelmed with responsibility. His life would be nothing but takeout coffee. He wouldn't have time to study if he wanted to. He would be in a relationship with a woman who did not love him, and whom he did not love.

"That feather," Francis said, standing (how had he got there?) in the living room. Jim and Don were sweating. The clipboard was on a table. Both feathers were in Jim's pocket. The pen lay on the clipboard.

"Yeah?" Jim said, patting his pocket.

"What is it from?"

"From? From a bird. I picked it up because I didn't recognize it, and around here I know the birds. After the hurricane, we lost a lot, then this spring we got some others that hadn't come around before. Big bird, obviously. I've got a book at home. I'm gonna check it."

"Do you hunt?" Francis asked. He was giving in to his nervousness, making idle conversation.

"Sure," Jim said slowly. "Hunt, fish. Only go after deer with bow and arrow, though. You wouldn't be one of those people who get upset because a guy wants to eat, would ya?"

"No, no. I was just curious. Because of your interest in birds. Whether you also hunted, I mean."

"Know what else he does?" Don interrupted. "Famous for his carving."

"Oh?" was all Francis could think to say.

"Decoys," Jim said quietly, almost shyly.

"People collect 'em," Don said. "Real artistry involved. He apprenticed himself to his grandfather. His grandfather's things are in that museum in Hartford, Connecticut. You must have been there."

"The Wadsworth Atheneum," Francis said. "It's not that close to where I live."

"Well, when you go there, you look for Roy Jay Bluefield's decoys. They're beautiful things, and my friend here is the bearer of the flame."

"I'd like to see your work," Francis said.

"You would?" Jim said. "I live in a workshop that would about fit in the living room of this house. Wife put me out three years ago. You would be interested in seeing decoys?" he said again, as if he didn't quite believe it.

Francis nodded.

"Tell you what," Jim said. "You go upstairs, like you were doin', and in an hour we'll be outta here. We can swing by my place on our way to Connecticut, if you were serious."

"Oh, I was very serious. Most serious," Francis added. That was right: he had been going up the stairs, and suddenly time had gone into a warp, and now it was much later. At this moment, if the plane had landed on time, Lucy might be telling Sheldon the news. That was how your life could change: someone would tell you something.

The moving men resumed giving each other orders, furniture was lifted and shifted into other positions, then something was selected and carried down the steps to the driveway, where the big truck sat. Francis thought again about calling his wife, but realized that she would still be driving home and wouldn't answer the cell phone. She would probably stop for groceries, which she bought most days, though they both had light appet.i.tes. Their son was taller and heavier and ate more than they did, though he was big-boned, rather than heavy. Six feet; a nice-looking boy, with thick wavy hair and those square gla.s.ses that all the young people wore unapologetically now. The novel he'd worked on in college had become a novella, then had been abandoned entirely, except for sections he obsessed over and had used to apply to various M.F.A. programs, not one of which admitted him. Good or bad, Francis had no idea; Sheldon would show his writing to no one. An entire year had pa.s.sed after he finished college, during which he'd lived in their attic and-a bit histrionically, Francis thought-started and abandoned a second novel. Then he had moved out and worked for a year or so with a college friend, doing ordering for the friend's father's company, even taking a trip to London. Then-how exactly had it happened?-he had let his lease expire and had moved back into the house, forgoing the attic for his old bedroom, which he repainted charcoal gray. On the weekends Lucy often joined him there.

What did they plan to do? Have the baby and live in the house?

Francis had climbed to the second floor, where his wife had packed his aunt's clothes into boxes to be donated to charity. There was toile de Jouy wallpaper in his aunt's bedroom. Near the end, his aunt, on high doses of painkiller, had thought she was stretched on a divan surrounded by a party of French aristocrats, the women dressed in feathery bonnets and carrying parasols, the men on horseback, all awaiting her cue to open celebratory bottles of champagne. Aristocrats, in a nine-by-twelve bedroom on the second floor of a house in rural Maine. Who knew what she'd made of them all being pastel blue? Perhaps that they were cold.

His aunt had died of pancreatic cancer less than two months after she was given the diagnosis. When she called them with the bad news, he and Bern had driven out to the house and cried and cried, unable to think of anything optimistic to say. His aunt had pressed jewelry on his wife, though Bern was a no-nonsense sort of woman who usually wore nothing but her wedding ring and a Timex. His aunt had told them her sensible plan for what she called "home help." She had asked him, as a complete non sequitur, to change the light bulbs in the hallway, but instead of doing this immediately they had talked more-Bern, in her strong way, had been very upset. And then he had left that night, forgetting to do the one little thing his aunt had asked of him. He had not remembered until almost the day she died.

There was a faint odor of ammonia in every room, and he thought that might be what he'd been squinting against. Bern had opened all the blinds; it made the house look more s.p.a.cious, the real-estate agent had told her. So where had his aunt's spirit gone, he wondered; had it lingered for a moment in the pastel confusion, then permeated the window-nicely beveled old gla.s.s-to alight briefly in the now smashed tree? If so, she'd had a safe landing, leaving well before the moving van pulled in.

Francis never knew what was the proper amount to tip moving men. It had probably become more than he could imagine, if the average tip in a nice restaurant was at least twenty percent, no matter how indifferent the service. He wondered if his seeing the decoys meant that he must buy one; if so, what would they cost, and shouldn't he tip the men before he got to Jim's workroom, because otherwise the price of purchase might be confused with the tip. Or, if he tipped generously in advance (whatever generously meant), might the decoy have a more reasonable price?

He backed the Lexus out to follow the moving truck down the drive. Jim drove faster than Francis expected, but he kept up, patting his pocket to make sure that his cell phone was there. They drove for a while, then turned down a rutted road where someone had put a red-and-black cone to indicate a deep pothole. The houses here were smaller than the ones on the main road. With all that he had to do, what was he doing going into the woods with two men to see decoys? It was the sort of thing that could turn out badly, though his instincts told him it would not. Still, he could imagine being in court, asking the defendant with a hint of skepticism in his voice, "You followed these two strangers to one of their houses?"

When the road forked, the truck slowed and Jim put down his window, pointing to the right with his thumb. Francis hesitated. The truck continued to the left, b.u.mping onto a field. He thought he understood and took the right fork, stopping in front of a little clapboard house that stood alone, with no trees in front and only a half-dead bush in the side yard. It was, indeed, very small. Again he heard himself in the courtroom: "And with no hesitation you got out of your car?"

He got out. Don and Jim were walking toward him. He could tell from their faces that there was nothing to fear. Don was holding a can of seltzer. Jim-who looked much larger beside his tiny house-had a set of keys in his hand, though he used none of them to open the unlocked door.

"Used to live in a Victorian over in Milo," Jim said. "Wife comes home one day, says she's seen to it I can't come within ten feet of her. For nothing! Never laid a hand on a woman in my life. You can march into the police station, if you're a woman, and just get an order to have a guy gone from your personal s.p.a.ce, like it hadn't been his s.p.a.ce, too."

"b.i.t.c.h," Don said, under his breath.

"Do you have children?" Francis asked.

"Children?" Jim said, somewhat puzzled. "Yeah, we had a kid that had a lot of problems that we couldn't take care of at home. One of those things," he said.

Don averted his eyes and toed a dandelion that had gone to seed.

"I'm sorry," Francis said.

Don said, "I got one wife, no kids, a bulldog, and half my life stacked up in some storage place by her brother's, since we had to downsize when the balloon came due. Downsized into my brother-in-law's garage! You know what I mean?"

He did, actually. "Yes," he said.

Jim tossed the big key ring on the worktable, which took up most of the room. There was a single bed pushed in the corner with a cat lying on it that looked something like Simple Man. The cat raised its head, then curled onto its side to continue its nap. There was a brown refrigerator in the corner opposite the bed, and a sink hung on the wall. The toilet sat next to the sink. He saw no sign of a shower.

"Sit," Don said, pulling out a canvas director's chair. Francis counted seven such chairs, most of them similar to the first, but avoided the one that sagged badly.

"Could you use a beer?" Jim said.

"That would be nice," Francis said. He told himself, I can't call my wife, because how would I explain where I am? He reached for the can of Coors, which was icy cold. He could not think of the last time he'd had a beer, rather than a Scotch-on-the-rocks. He raised the can, as they all did, in silent toast to whatever they were toasting.

It did not look as though Jim had done any work on the table recently. There were piles of newspapers, dishes, something that looked like part of a saddle. In a gla.s.s, there were some feathers. Francis wished that he could see some wood chips. The table looked too low to carve on-you would stand to carve, wouldn't you? He saw with relief that there were a few tools, but the one he focused on looked rusty. "O.K., let me get 'em out," Jim said, kneeling.

He lifted a box from under the table, opened the lid, and unwrapped a white towel inside. The box itself was beautifully made, with the word "Mallard" burned into the wood on the underside of the lid. Jim removed a duck and put it on the table.

"Un-f.u.c.king-believable," Don said, shaking his head.

Jim took a step back, cleared his throat, and said, rather formally, "Some would do it different, but I use black eyes on the mallards. Ten millimeter," he added. Francis stood with his can of beer, looking down. He wondered if he was supposed to touch it. It was quite convincing, and really beautiful. He moved forward tentatively, and, as he did, Don said, "Let me get that Coors outta your way," sweeping the can out of Francis's hand.

Francis held the decoy at a distance where he could see it clearly without putting on his reading gla.s.ses. Jim was pulling out other boxes. "Got one more to go, then I ship 'em off. Guy from Austin, Texas. He got himself an art gallery as a 'ship to' address, so maybe it doesn't matter if he's got no real idea what he's doing," Jim said. "Guy wants nothing but mallards, O.K., but if you're going to set out decoys, then, yeah, you can have mallard, mallard, mallard, mallard-lots of 'em. But you throw in one of these-" He set another box on the table, and unwrapped a beach towel. "This is your egret. You put all the mallards out there, but if you're going hunting you need something like this egret, for a confidence decoy."

Francis had never heard the term, but he understood. In any case, the egret was a real piece of art.

"Yeah, like things are just nice and casual," Don said. "An egret happens to be standing around, you know? Could be something else. A crow. Got to mix it up a little bit, so the ducks don't get suspicious. 'Hey, look down there, quite a flock of 'em, even an egret wandered in. Let's go down and see if we can join the party.' " Don put his beer and Francis's on the table. "Bang!" he said loudly.

"That's the idea," Jim said.

"How many of these did you make for the man in Texas?" Francis said. He was amazed at the detail. He stared at the black eye, and it seemed to stare back, the way it reflected light.

"Just over a dozen. If he's a hunter, which I doubt from the way he talked and looked, maybe he's been having bad luck. That'll change when he gets this confidence decoy. Might have overdone it just a bit, carving an egret, but what the hey. You know, if you've got 'em in fields, most of them will be eating, but then there's always one at least that acts as a sentry head. You think about all that while you're working. About how the whole flock's gotta look."

"Well, the detail is just incredible. You say you learned this from your grandfather?"

"Learned a couple of things on my own, I guess. Went to some shows, got some ideas."

"I do the naming," Don said. "I've got a kit. I'm enrolling in a course in special writing at night school, come fall."