The Ultimate Good Luck

10

WHEN HE WAS FIVE his father caught a sleeve accidentally in the belt mouth of a John Deere husker on a dairy farm outside Manistee, Michigan. And when the man who owned the farm, a Dutchman named Van’t Hul, noticed him from a long way off, pulled flush against the husker’s shiny green cowling waving his free arm in the air, he came running to see what was exciting. The hand was pulled in pieces when he got there to help, and most of it was stripped loose of the arm and the bones had jammed in the husker and shut down the works as truly as a piece of hickory. But when his father got out of the hospital, he set about to quit working farms and quit saving money for farmland and quit laying up surplus machines, and moved out of Manistee County altogether and into a rented stucco house with birch trees on Menominee Street in Traverse City and went to work for John Deere selling huskers with metal features across their conveyor mouths, using his new red stump for a selling aid. His father began to seem happier right away and laughed all the time and made jokes, and smoked big cigars and told his customers he enjoyed selling huskers more than he enjoyed working them, and that if he hadn’t lost his hand to one he would never have gotten the chance to get smart. Though for years after the accident his mother would wake up in the night and scream “hand! hand!” as loud as she could because she had a phantom dream where she saw it all happening again, even though she hadn’t seen it the first time. He could remember being nine and waking up at night after the screaming had stopped, hearing his father talking in the next room in a soft consoling voice, calming his wife back into sleep. And when Quinn was thirteen, his father told him, sitting in an ice hut in the middle of Traverse Bay, that sometimes while he soothed her it was everything he could do to keep himself from breaking out laughing, because he thought that if he hadn’t lost his hand and given up the idea of a farm, he’d have gone crazy in no time at all, and his wife would’ve left him as a failure, and his whole life and Quinn’s too would’ve been nothing but a misery from then on out.

In November, Quinn had begun running the deer tag stations on the county roads between East Jordan and Mancelona, and working nights in the D.N.R. Scout, sitting alert in the trees with the door open to the frozen air, waiting to see a seal beam snap on in the five breaks or in the old white pine slashes, and hear a poacher’s.22 crack in the cold, and start idling toward where the noise was, lights out. He liked that, the high-density sensation of solo work at night. It made you feel out of time and out of real space and located closer to yourself, as if located was the illusion, the thing he’d missed since he’d come back, the ultimate good luck.

Rae hadn’t liked things from the beginning. Quinn had bought a mobile home in Traverse City and moved it up onto a finished basement at the top of the bay where the birches and the alder woods plugged the wind. She hadn’t liked the trailer and hadn’t liked where it sat at the edge of a cutover orchard, too near the timber for light to stay in the trailer all day. She didn’t like Michigan. She told him it was too glacial and ground down and too bleak and uncharming to be a place where people lived. She said she liked the West, liked the mountains, liked looking up and down at things instead of across at them. She didn’t like the flathead bars and the no-menu cafés he took her to in Mancelona and Torch Lake and down in Traverse, wherever he was working. Sometimes in the bar light he’d see a face he knew, somebody from school, somebody he might talk to but didn’t get around to talking to somehow, and it made Rae mad. And late at night they’d go home in the Scout and she’d be mad.

He began to come home mornings in the first December they were in the trailer and find Rae out of the bed, see her through the window, standing in her yellow parka at the farthest verge of the orchard where it swelled up into the alders, looking down at the trailer and at him when he drove up as if it was a sight that kept appearing to her in a dream, but that she couldn’t believe really existed in her life and had to go out and stand in the clear cold and verify for herself every day. In a little while she would come inside where he was cooking eggs, standing at the stove in his undershirt and suspenders with all the lights on and the heat up in the kitchen and the grease thick in the air.

Once she said to him: “I never thought I’d live in a trailer in the woods with a game warden. You know that? It wasn’t what I had in mind for myself when I was twelve.”

He stooped and stared out the cold kitchen window at the fog running off the snow crust, swarming back through the bare white birch trunks into the denser timber. He liked the plain, compacted loneliness, the low almost pleasing pain of knowing nothing of any consequence was going bad for once. “I never thought I’d fly helicopters and pour shit on Chinamen either, but I did.”

“You wanted that, though, didn’t you?” she said.

“Sure.” He watched the eggs casually where they broke up in the grease, turning pale.

“Do you have bad dreams about that now?”

“No, I never do.” He thumbed down the heat and let the eggs rubber up and go hard.

“I just think, you know,” she said calmly, and waited a moment. “I mean, I just kick around in here.” She looked at him. She still had on her yellow parka, her hair tied back. “I thought you’d ease up. I thought it was because of the war, but that’s not right, is it?”

He slid the eggs onto his plate, carried the plate to the table, and set it down. “I could’ve told you that,” he said.

“Why didn’t you?” She smiled at him in wonderment.

“It didn’t occur to me, I guess,” he said.

“I don’t know what you expect me to do,” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. “Anything.” He began to eat his eggs.

“But can you please just tell me what it is you don’t like or do like. I feel by myself even when you are here anymore.”

He looked up at her across the table. “I don’t know what I can do about that,” he said. “You can be by yourself with me.”

“And is that good enough for you?” she said.

“I guess so,” he said.

“But what?”

“But nothing.” He put his fork down and wiped his mouth.

“Is that all?” she said.

“I’m alone most of the time,” he said.

She smiled at him. “Does that make you feel powerful? That’s what the Indians think. They think it protects them. Except you don’t need protecting, do you, Harry?”

“Everybody needs protecting,” he said.

“From what?”

“From everything they don’t know about.”

“But why do you want to call that being in love?” she said.

“I don’t know what else you call it.”

She stood up from the table. “We make a hell of a couple,” she said.

“Maybe I’m not a very nice person. You know?” He tried to catch her eye. “Maybe something ruined me.”

“I don’t know,” Rae said. “I don’t know what you are. But God knows I wouldn’t want to violate you.” She walked out of the room.

In the spring, Rae drove up to St. Ignace and came back with two registered Airedales she said she was going to breed because she’d always wanted a dog and now seemed like a good time. She hired a mason from town to lay a concrete slab twenty yards from the trailer. She had a chain-link fence built and a wood shelter put up and moved the dogs out of the basement where she had kept them and into the cage to wait for the female to come into heat while she read books about it.

In September, the female hadn’t come in, and Rae began sleeping late and driving nights up to Petoskey taking any kind of J.C. classes she could get. In October, he caught his first two months working days, but Rae wouldn’t come back from Petoskey sometimes until after two. The dogs would wake him up barking, and he could see the lights go on out in the enclosure, hear the gates clank, and hear her talking to the dogs in a sweet, coaxing voice. He would lie in the bed and sing a song, trying to stay awake until she came in, feeling like he missed her but that she was a long distance away, almost out of reach, so that when she came inside from the dogs he would always be asleep.

In late November, he went back working nights, and Rae began staying over in Petoskey, driving up on Tuesday and coming back Wednesday night, staying, she said, with a woman she met in her economic history class. They had stopped making love in the summer, after she got the dogs, and he had begun to feel as far back as then like he was running a skein out, but that he could stand it. He thought, sitting out in the frozen night in the Scout, drinking coffee and whisky out of a hot-flask and watching the empty ice huts speckling the bay in the winter moonlight, that the only dangerous lie to being in love was that it was permanent. And once you knew that, love didn’t make you miserable, and you were safe from falling off too deep. In the best world it was a losing proposition, but even that could be satisfactory if you didn’t insist on making up the loss, since you could erase yourself by mistake in the process. And he wanted to avoid that. He knew love’s limits, and that was the key to everything.

On the sixth of December he drove into the yard before 5:00 A.M., when it was still dark in the orchard. The light was left on in the kitchen and in the dog cages, and the car was gone. In the kitchen there was a note taped to the window above the sink. It said: “Dear Warden, Just too dark in your woods. Love, R.” He took the paper off the window and put it on the sink top and read it again. He had on his green state-issue parka with the silver badge, and shining out of the glassy darkness of the window, he thought he looked good enough and up to things, even though he felt just at that precise moment like a man falling, all out of attitude and disposition, from somewhere he didn’t remember toward someplace he couldn’t see. He walked back outside and across the frozen yard to the kennels. Both pens were empty and the spotlight over the gate was left on to warm the air. He looked inside the shelter but the dogs weren’t there. The concrete had been scrubbed and ice had formed in the depressions, and the dog smell had gone thin in the cold. He walked back inside and went into every room in the trailer, turning on lights and opening closets. He turned on the radio in the kitchen to get the weather. He had the idea he should go in the basement and check the pipes and the water heater in case it snapped off cold. But when he got down the stairs where it was still and moist he turned on the bulb and looked at the water heater white and shining in the corner as if it were alive, and something seemed odd to him about it, something obstinate and repelling. He went back out to the Scout, opened down the gate, got the AR-16 out of the case, and went back to the basement and down the steps. He stopped at the bottom riser and chambered the first round, put his arm through the sling, flattened his back against the wall, found the water heater in the irons, and opened up on it like a range dummy, hitting it all over, blowing the fixtures off the top, blowing the brass medallion out and back inside the tank, and blowing the heater all the way off its base into the soft cement wall behind it. When he finished he turned off the light, put the gun back in the Scout, went inside, and ate some toast and stood watching the light grey up. When he’d washed the dish, he went back down and turned off the gas and the water in the basement, came back and took off his shirt, pulled out the phone, did sixty pushups, and got in bed.

And he thought, lying there in his pants, what was his father’s favorite thought, that every move was a necessary move, an emblem of something that needed to be fixed or set right in the everyday scheme of things, like a hand needing to come off, and what Rae had done was try to spark her luck the best she could by making a move. He didn’t blame her for it, and even though it left him feeling for that moment like he was alone and falling someplace he couldn’t see, like a dream in the dark, it didn’t make him unhappy as an idea. The best thing you could do was to take events one at a time, in order, and hope one event by itself wouldn’t cut you up too bad.

At eleven o’clock he woke up with the radio blasting Johnny Paycheck all over the trailer. He put on his parka, got the dead-dog crate out of the Scout, and brought it inside and shoveled the pieces of the water heater in it. He made coffee and stood in the living room with the door open, in the cold foggy light, listening to the furnace loading up and clicking, trying to keep the trailer warm, the flies buzzing at the windows, then took the crate out beyond the kennels into the snow and weed stubble and dumped it. Fog was expanding off the snow and clouding up into the alders at the top of the orchard. He took the box back to the Scout, shut the kennel gate, went inside and changed his uniform, and drove in to Eastport the way he dreamed he would when he had been asleep.