EMMETT’S GIFT
A novel by Charles Deemer
Copyright © 2011 by Charles Deemer
Smashwords Editions, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Contact Charles Deemer at: cdeemer at yahoo dot com.
Originally published by Sextant Books in 2002
http://www.sextantbooks.com
You could be a jukebox. I could be a dime.
Marty Christensen
The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach – and due south.
Bill Deemer
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken
JULY 5, 1976
A Special News Bulletin interrupted the Today Show while Shandy was in the shower. The body of an old man had been found hanging from a tree in a park in a small town in Oregon. A police spokesman said a note had been pinned to the old man’s shirt, and its contents suggested a lynching. When the anchorman said this, his voice quivered with emotion, as if to cry, My fellow Americans! How can this be so? A lynching in 1976 during the glorious Bicentennial. He would have details as they became available.
By the time Shandy stepped into the motel room, wrapped in a towel in order to hide her body from herself, Barbara Walters was gushing rhapsodically about the majesty and elegance of the tall ships that had sailed up the Hudson River yesterday. For a moment Shandy thought she was watching a scene from a pirate movie. She sat on the edge of the bed and started brushing her hair with long, rhythmic strokes.
She brushed and brushed, though there was little point in it. Nowhere was her hair longer than two inches. Only a few days ago, her black hair had fallen in a single pigtail to her waist. Now her energetic movements looked exaggerated, like something out of a cartoon, all limbs and bone and ivory skin. Behind the white towel her small breasts were unnoticeable, her figure a leap of faith. She looked closer to fourteen than twenty-one.
A series of commercials came on, the TV volume so low they were barely audible. Shandy kept brushing her hair. When the Today Show returned, Barbara Walters had moved to a kitchen set where an excited woman whose smile was all teeth began to prepare tuna casserole. She barely had started when another news bulletin came on. Shandy paid little attention until a photograph appeared on the screen, and this made her stop brushing.
It was a picture of her hometown, Hamartin, the same flattering, aerial view that was on a postcard for sale at Hamartin Market & Mercantile on Main Street. The small town, looking as magical as Brigadoon, sat on a high plateau in Cascadia County in Central Oregon. In this photograph, homes with large yards surrounded the town, tucked in close, and spacious farms and ranches stretched beyond them, a mosaic of golden wheat and green alfalfa, brown earth and mottled pastures, with snow-capped Mt. Hood looking mysterious in the far distance. Shandy stared at the familiar image, puzzled why her hometown was on TV in California.
Then came an even greater shock: a photograph of Emmett Hale appeared in an upper corner of the screen. Shandy gasped and dropped the hairbrush to the floor. For a moment she didn’t budge, frozen by the shock of what she was seeing. By the time she reached the TV and turned up the volume, the short news interruption was over and the toothy, enthusiastic woman was telling Barbara Walters that the secret to tuna casserole was keeping it moist. Shandy switched channels but could find no other news program.
Shandy quickly put on the same jeans and sky-blue T-shirt she had worn yesterday. Under the shirt was her usual padded bra, which she wore not to enhance her figure but to hide the protrusion of what she considered to be abnormally large and ugly nipples.
Shandy raced barefoot to the newspaper dispenser in front of the office. Back in her room, she yanked open the curtains and sat down at the table in front of the window. But she could find nothing about Emmett or Hamartin in the paper, which was filled with stories and pictures of yesterday’s Bicentennial, looking more like a souvenir program than a newspaper. The paper’s TV listing said the next scheduled news was at noon.
Shandy decided to phone Josie in Hamartin to learn more. Although fifteen years older, Josie was her best friend and mentor, a painter of landscapes who showed in galleries in Portland, the most successful artist Shandy knew and an inspiration for her own artistic ambitions.
She called Josie, charging it to her room, but no one answered. Josie, who valued her privacy, didn’t have a message machine.
Shandy went outside and sat in Ruby, her VW Bug, the motor idling, searching AM radio stations for a news program, another bulletin, anything to tell her why Emmett was on the news. She feared the worst. Small towns made the news for catastrophic reasons, not celebratory ones. What had happened to him? She suddenly regretted leaving town without saying goodbye.
In the restaurant next to the motel, tiny American flags stood at attention on every table. Shandy ordered a small stack of hot cakes but couldn’t finish even one. She ate the three strips of bacon with a piece of toast, drank the orange juice, and left.
Back in the motel, she threw up, then stretched out on the bed with a damp washcloth covering her eyes. Automatically she reached out and felt for the toolbox on the chair beside the bed. She’d been unable to sleep last night until she’d brought it in from the car. Under the top tray, wrapped neatly in newspaper, were thirty one hundred dollar bills, the three thousand dollars Emmett had given her for “escape money.” She considered this the most remarkable gift she’d ever received. Certainly it went far beyond what Emmett had been paying her for sex. Not even the horniest old man on the planet would shell out three grand for a few blowjobs.
Feeling herself about to fall asleep, Shandy forced herself to get up and pace back and forth across the carpet, waiting for the news. A maid knocked on the door and reminded her that checkout was at noon. Shandy asked for permission to watch the news on TV before she left.
Hamartin was the lead story. Emmett was dead. An anchorman reported that Emmett apparently had been murdered in the most grotesque manner, lynched from an oak tree in Vista Park. A reporter on the scene said that the note pinned to Emmett’s shirt contained “a hate slogan against homosexuals” and that it was the first time anyone had been lynched in Oregon in half a century, since the 1920s when the Klan was so active it had elected the state’s governor.
Shandy was stunned. Emmett’s body had been discovered early this morning, the murder apparently taking place after midnight. Local authorities had no suspects, but the F.B.I. was coming to Hamartin to look into the matter.
Shandy got sick in her stomach again. She thought of trying Josie but decided to phone later, after she’d covered some miles and calmed down. She wanted to return as soon as possible. There would be a funeral, of course, but she also was impatient to learn what had happened, and she felt powerless being so far away.
She made one more phone call before she checked out. She called Heather in San Francisco, her destination, but got the same recorded message she’d heard the night before from the guy Heather was living with. Shandy said something had come up and she had to go back to Hamartin for a few days but that she’d be in touch.
Finally on the road, she was soon crying so hard she couldn’t see and had to pull over to regain her composure. The same thing happened again within the hour, and so it went until early evening, less than halfway back, when she called it quits for the day and pulled into another motel.
She intended to call Josie right away but drank too much too quickly in the lounge in the motel’s restaurant and when she returned to her room, she plopped onto the bed and passed out. Shandy slept soundly, without dreaming. This silence was the highlight of her day.
When Shandy awoke, it was almost nine in the morning. Sometime during the night she’d attempted to undress and most of her clothes were scattered across the floor. She took a quick shower, dressed, and only then realized she’d left the toolbox in Ruby all night. She hurried outside and checked that it was still in the trunk. She returned and called Josie.
“Where are you?” Josie asked.
“I don’t know. Not even to Roseburg.”
“I’ve been so worried about you. I didn’t know whether you’d hear what happened or not.”
“I saw it on the news yesterday. I tried calling you. I can’t believe this is happening.”
“I know.”
“I don’t understand this,” said Shandy. “He planned to kill himself.”
“Really?”
“He didn’t want to suffer at the end the way his wife did. He’d bought a gun. He showed it to me.”
“There was a note,” said Josie. “Death to all queers or something.”
“Emmett wasn’t queer.”
There was a silence.
Josie said, “So you’re heading back?”
“Of course.”
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
Shandy bit her lip.
Josie said, “Shandy, what’s the matter?”
“If I hadn’t slept with him—“
“Stop that. You were both adults. You can’t hold yourself responsible for madness like this. Just get here as soon as you can.”
“Okay.”
“Drive safely.”
“I will. I guess I’ll stay at the farmhouse.”
“Come here first.”
“Okay. Have you talked to Arnie?”
Arnie Woodworth had been Shandy’s high school art teacher and greatest fan. He lived in an old farmhouse out of town, which had been in his family for generations. At the farmhouse Shandy and Emmett had rented rooms across the hall from one another.
“Not yet,” said Josie. “I’ll call him.”
“Maybe it was the same person who did the graffiti on the barn.”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“You just get here safely. I love you,” Josie said.
“I love you, too.”
After hanging up, Shandy stretched out on the bed and fell to sleep. The maid woke her, and it was almost noon before she was out the door and back on the road.
But it was still tough going. Shandy had a hard time driving more than an hour without having to stop to compose herself. The slightest memory of Emmett could make her weep, and she was making no quicker progress back to Hamartin today than she had yesterday. Still she continued north along the Interstate, doing the best she could.
By late afternoon she was ready to call it quits for the day but felt a responsibility to continue on. She’d told Josie she’d arrive tonight. An hour later, stopped at a gas station, she again called her, this time collect because she didn’t have the right change.
“I don’t think I can make it tonight,” Shandy said after Josie accepted the charges.
“That’s okay. Take all the time you need.”
“Maybe I’ll try to drive for another hour.”
“Don’t push yourself. There’s nothing urgent that needs doing here.”
“Okay. Thanks, Josie.”
Shandy paid for the gas and continued on anyway. An hour later, she was carrying the toolbox into a motel room. She crashed early, careful to avoid the bar in the restaurant next door. Sleep, not booze, was her best escape.
In the morning, she was back on the road early. She should be in Hamartin by afternoon. From the beginning she had known that Emmett was dying but his dying had seemed a distant and foreign thing, in a future she would not be sharing with him, and she never expected his death to be so upsetting and so difficult to understand.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
i
Emmett was sitting up against the bed’s ornate headboard when Arnie entered with a pot of tea. Although it was nearly noon, Emmett, a morning person, was still wearing his gray pajamas, and the curtains remained drawn, casting the small room in flat gray light. Arnie had bounded into the bedroom like a beacon, wearing red corduroy pants and a purple turtleneck shirt.
“If you’re not up yet,” said Arnie, “I can leave this and come back.”
Emmett made room for the teapot on the bedside table, next to the photograph of Mary, his deceased wife.
“Want me to open the curtains?” Arnie asked.
“No.”
“Are you feeling okay?”
“I feel fine,” Emmett said, which wasn’t true. He didn’t want to get into it.
“I just got a call from an old student of mine, Josie Barnes, you remember her? Maybe she was before your time. But I’m sure you remember Shandy Anderson.”
“Of course.”
Shandy. She was probably the most remarkable student Emmett had ever had in Hamartin. In both algebra and trigonometry, she’d earned her A’s effortlessly and yet expressed no desire to continue her mathematical studies in college, or even to go to college. Finding this out about her had not been easy. Although filled with nervous energy and often talkative, Shandy clammed up when the subject of conversation became her plans for the future and getting information out of her was not easy. Emmett took it upon himself to look up her records and ask other teachers about her. She was very intelligent, with an IQ of 145, one of the brightest students ever to pass through the Hamartin school system, but she also came from a troubled home. Her mother was a drunk who had a bad habit of moving in with abusive boyfriends, and her father had been an early casualty in Vietnam. As well as Shandy did in Emmett’s classes, art was her real passion, and other teachers considered her to be a talented, budding artist if sometimes controversial, or at least eccentric, in her personal behavior. These same teachers were amused to learn that Emmett considered Shandy something of a budding mathematician.
Shandy seemed to have few friends. Her best friend at school, to Emmett’s surprise, was Heather Talbott, the spoiled daughter of the wealthiest rancher in town. The only thing they shared in common was the same frantic, theatrical energy. Heather used this energy to win the lead in every school play and to drive most of the boys on the football team crazy. Shandy used her energy to build a shield of wit and performance around her, keeping others from getting too close.
Arnie said, “Josie said Shandy’s in a bind and needs a place to crash.”
Arnie waited for a response. Emmett said, “You mean, here?”
“If you object, of course I won’t let her.”
“No, I have no problem with it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. I always liked Shandy.”
“Tons of talent and almost no discipline.”
“Very bright girl. What’s she been doing since high school?”
“Last I heard from her, she was doing her art. But that was almost a year ago.”
“Why’s she need a place to crash?”
“She’s been living at home. Something about her mother moving to Seattle. I wanted to get your permission before I went farther with it.”
“Bring her on,” said Emmett. “Maybe she’ll cheer up the place.”
“Opening the curtains might do that.” When Emmett didn’t react, Arnie said, “I’ll call Josie back and tell her it’s fine then. She’ll bring Shandy over later today.”
Once again Emmett didn’t respond.
“I haven’t seen Josie for a while,” said Arnie. “She’s my one Hamartin student who became a professional artist. Would you mind if I invite her to stay for dinner?”
“Quit asking my permission for everything. This is your house.”
“I don’t want to invite company over if you’re not feeling well.”
“I’m feeling fine,” Emmett lied again. “Invite her.”
“I just wanted to check.”
After Arnie was gone, Emmett sat on the edge of the bed, trying to muster the energy to start the day. He knew he should shave and shower and get dressed and go downstairs and sit on the front porch swing with a book. Even falling to sleep in the hammock would be a change of scenery. Anything to escape the inertia of the long morning.
Shandy Anderson. He used to see her in town but hadn’t run across her in a long time. Of course, lately he wasn’t going to town much himself. Shandy had always been a mystery to him. Emmett couldn’t understand why a girl with her brains didn’t go to college. She was smart enough to win a scholarship. If she was chiefly interested in art, she could study it at college and still make mathematics her minor. So few students had passed through his classes with her raw talent. What a shame to waste it.
ii
As soon as Shandy learned that her mother was following her boyfriend, Craig, to Seattle, she went over to Josie’s for a sympathetic ear and some quick brainstorming. Her mother, counting on the upcoming move and wanting to save money, hadn’t paid the rent on the first, and the landlord was evicting them, which meant Shandy immediately needed a place to stay. She didn’t expect Josie to offer to put her up since Josie’s small house amounted to a cottage, with her bed doubling as a sofa in the living room. The small bedroom proper had been turned into a studio. Josie was totally focused on her painting. With her full figure and wild red hair, her love of bright colors and “hippy dresses,” Josie reminded Shandy of a gypsy artist, opinionated and self-reliant and sensual. Younger, Josie had been a prostitute at the infamous Mustang Ranch, the most famous brothel in Nevada. She was the most bohemian person Shandy had ever met and the first person Shandy went to with a problem.
Shandy did not expect Josie to say, “You can crash here for a few days.”
“How? Where?”
“On the floor. I have a sleeping bag and an air mattress.”
“You’re sure you won’t mind?”
“I said for a few days, and I mean it. I wouldn’t be able to function with company longer than that. Not even you. Why don’t you go home and get your stuff ready, and I’ll make a few phone calls.”
As it turned out, Josie was able to find Shandy a new home right away. When she phoned later in the day with the good news that Shandy could rent a room dirt-cheap at Arnie Woodworth’s farmhouse, Shandy let out such a whoop that her mother, who was packing boxes for Craig to carry out to the U-Haul truck, took it personally.
“You’re not even upset that I’m leaving,” her mother said.
Shandy was used to ignoring her mother’s self-pity, especially when it was fueled by alcohol.
She said, “Josie fixed it up so I can stay at Mr. Woodworth’s farmhouse.”
“The queer teacher?”
“No, my favorite teacher.”
Later, as they embraced in front of the house as Josie waited for Shandy in the car, Shandy’s mother started crying.
“I’m going to miss you so much. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to live in Seattle?”
“I’m going to be fine,” Shandy assured her.
“I’ll send you our phone number as soon as I can. Maybe you’ll come to Seattle for your birthday. I bet I could send airfare. Craig’s starting at twice what he gets for driving that beer truck around.”
“We’ll see.”
Craig stood at the curb next to the U-Haul truck, leaning on a fender, smoking, waiting for the goodbyes to end. Like many men reared on the movies of James Dean, he’d perfected waiting around into an art form, a kind of stylized and formal insouciance. They were going to pull his pickup behind the U-haul, and the second car, the wrecked VW that he’d bought for practically nothing and restored, had been up for sale.
Shandy broke the embrace and called to Craig.
“You be good to her!”
Craig grinned and lifted one arm casually, then wiggled his fingers to invite her over. He had a movie-star smile and knew it.
“I have something to show you,” he called when his little finger gesture didn’t do the trick.
When Shandy reached him, Craig was holding out the keys to the VW.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
“My birthday’s week after next.”
“I know that, for Christ’s sake. Take the keys before I change my mind.”
“I thought you sold it.”
“You thought wrong. Now do you want it or not?”
“You’re serious?”
Her mother had joined them, and Shandy searched her mother’s expression for a hint of clarification.
“Take the damn keys, Shandy,” Craig said.
She grabbed them.
“Where is it?” she asked.
“I’m having it serviced. You can pick it up tomorrow at Johnny’s Texaco.”
“Mother?” Shandy said, looking for reassurance that this wasn’t the cruelest joke ever played on anyone in the entire history of the world.
Her mother said, “He’s been like a little boy at Christmas, waiting to see your reaction.”
“Worth the wait,” Craig said, grinning.
Spontaneously Shandy fell into his arms, hugging him and kissing him on the cheek.
“Calm down,” he said. “I’m not giving you the pink slip yet. I figured insurance would kill you, so we’ll keep it in my name until you get on your feet in San Francisco or wherever the hell you end up.”
“In Seattle,” her mother added hopefully.
Shandy began jumping up and down.
“I don’t know what to say! I’m going to call her Ruby. Josie,” she screamed, “I have a car!”
“You can drive up and visit us on your birthday,” said Craig.
“She can fly,” her mother quickly corrected him.
“Whatever.”
But Shandy was already running to show Josie the keys to the VW.
iii
Maybe her sudden good fortune – a new place to stay and her own car within hours! – was an omen. Shandy was overdue for a few good breaks to come her way. Three years out of high school and she still hadn’t gotten her life together, even though she knew exactly what she wanted to do. She wanted to become an artist. As a first step in this direction, her goal was to save enough money to move to San Francisco, where her best friend from high school, Heather, was living with her new boyfriend. Heather wrote occasional letters about how wild and wonderful life in the City was and how she was getting parts in plays and how Shandy shouldn’t have any trouble finding a gallery to show her paintings and drawings. Come on down, Heather pleaded, and we can put you up until you get settled. It was an offer Shandy didn’t want to refuse. Of course, she loved the idea of showing her work in a gallery. Later she might even take some classes at San Francisco State.
The problem was saving the money to make the move. Even though she was still living rent-free in the house rented by her mother and shared with Craig, Shandy couldn’t hold down a job long enough to save anything. Nothing she tried after high school – counter work at Dairy Queen, waiting tables at Mom’s Café, stocking shelves at Hamartin Market & Mercantile – interested her long enough to stay focused, and in a matter of weeks she was daydreaming on the job or coming in late or otherwise behaving in ways that led to her dismissal. As Shandy flitted from one job to another, her mother was amazingly patient with her, and Craig kept his thoughts to himself.
Shandy started holding garage sales to make pocket money, selling anything she owned that didn’t contribute directly to her needs as an artist. She’d been reading Thoreau and was determined to move forward on life’s journey traveling as light as possible. Even her art reflected this new frugality: she abandoned painting because supplies were too expensive and began drawing exclusively. Using a broad cartoon style, she typically drew people, especially women, in moments of crisis – a girl getting gang raped, an old woman having her purse snatched, a husband beating up his wife – and she added water colors over the finished drawings. She felt she was finding her own voice and started calling her work “Artoons” to suggest the cartoonish style with which she depicted serious subject matter. She liked inventing a word to describe her work, a word with no other use in the universe. A special word made both the work and the artist unique.
Being broke made Shandy feel trapped in Hamartin. Then a way to make money came to her so suddenly it must have been a gift from the gods who looked out for struggling young artists. The plan for self-employment was perfect: easy to begin and continue, and very lucrative for the effort required. All she needed was the use of Craig’s old VW, a second car that he let her borrow whenever she wanted.
So late that spring, after the roads were clear, Shandy started her new job. On Friday and Saturday nights she drove twelve miles southeast of town to Tony’s Truck Haven on the new north-south highway and gave blowjobs in the parking lot for twenty-five dollars a pop. The first night she tried this, she drove home with over one hundred dollars in her pocket. On her worst night to date, she’d still made fifty. Shandy’s plan was to save a thousand dollars or more for the move to San Francisco. At this rate, she’d have it in no time.
The first time Shandy had been paid money for a blowjob, it was by one of her mother’s boyfriends; she was thirteen. Getting paid, even only two dollars, was a definite improvement over earlier boyfriends who had forced her to do it for nothing. Men, Shandy had learned, generally had one thing on their minds, and if a woman was smart, she used this fact to her advantage. That’s what Josie had done, working in her youth as a legal prostitute, and Shandy admired her for doing it. It was like making a man pay for sex before he got around to taking what he wanted by force. When a woman used sex to get what she wanted, she became powerful.
There really were only two kinds of men in this world, Josie had told her: those who were honest and those who were not. The honest ones knew what they wanted, admitted they wanted it, and went out and got it. These had been Josie’s favorite johns. No matter how strange the sexual request – and Shandy would never forget Josie’s story of the man who paid her to urinate on a glass coffee table while he watched from underneath and masturbated – Josie admired men who weren’t afraid to tell her their desires and fantasies straight out. The others, the liars and deceivers, played mind games with her, sometimes expecting her to try everything until she discovered what they wanted, at other times not even knowing themselves what they wanted. Keep away from the liars and deceivers, Josie had warned Shandy, and the younger woman had never forgotten the advice. By offering blowjobs but nothing else in the parking lot at Tony’s, Shandy depended on satisfied customers spreading the word to those who knew exactly what they wanted, and so far she hadn’t been disappointed.
Her mother, of course, had no idea that Shandy made money by selling sex. Shandy hadn’t even told Josie yet, the only person in the world, including Heather, she would have considered telling. Whenever Shandy felt guilty about freeloading at home, she gave her mother money for food or rent, lying that she’d sold a painting. Her mother, who lived in a perpetual alcoholic high, didn’t even know that she wasn’t painting any more.
With the new steady income from Tony’s, everything was going great, and Shandy figured she’d be on her way to San Francisco before the Fourth of July. Then her mother dropped the bombshell. Craig had a brother in Seattle who offered him a better opportunity than driving a beer truck around Cascadia County, and they were moving. Suddenly Shandy was scrambling for a new place to live, and just as suddenly Josie had come to the rescue.
iv
“Are you going to miss your mother?” Josie asked as they drove through town on Main Street. The farmhouse was about five miles south of town, off what once had been called The Falls–California Highway but which now veered east to connect with a new improved state highway. At the junction was Tony’s Truck Haven, a thriving truck stop.
“I love her but it’s time to be on my own.”
“I can understand that.”
“I really appreciate this. You saved my life.”
Josie said, “You find a new job yet?”
Shandy thought a moment before replying.
“You know Tony’s Truck Haven?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“I give blowjobs in the parking lot.”
Josie laughed, which wasn’t the response Shandy expected.
“Did you say what I think you said?”
“Actually it’s the best job I’ve ever had in this stupid town.”
“You blow guys in the parking lot?”
“Right.”
“You’re serious?”
“For twenty-five dollars.”
“Twenty-five dollars! Why are you selling yourself so cheap?”
“Nobody argues about the price. I can make over a hundred dollars in a couple hours.”
After a silence, Josie said, “Is there a reason you’re telling me this?”
“You asked if I had a job.”
“And this is the best job you’ve ever had?”
“It beats waiting tables or making burgers. I don’t get involved personally or anything. It usually only takes a few minutes. If it happens in three minutes, that breaks down to five hundred dollars an hour. I know it’s not as much as you used to make but I don’t think it’s so bad for an amateur.”
Josie laughed again.
“How long have you been doing this?” she asked.
“About a month. I usually only do it on weekends. It beats sucking off my mother’s boyfriends for nothing.”
“They make you do that?”
“A few did. Not Craig, though. He’s never come on to me. He’s my favorite, especially now, but I think mother will probably blow it. She always blows it.”
“Is that a pun?”
Now it was Shandy’s turn to laugh, a great guffaw that Josie figured was driven by embarrassment.
“Do you think I’m crazy or what?” Shandy asked.
“I’m not sure what I think.”
“I only do it because I want to. I’m in complete control.”
“Being in control is important. But all it takes is one asshole to mess you up.”
“I have a regular clientele.”
“Aren’t you the little business woman? I’m serious, if you want to do that for a living, I still know people in Nevada where you can do it legally and safely.”
“I’m not doing it much longer. Pretty soon I’ll have enough saved to move to San Francisco.”
Josie started to say something but stopped.
“Men are so easy,” said Shandy.
“Very true.”
“Every guy thinks with his dick.”
“Do you really think so?” Josie asked with exaggerated disbelief. Shandy picked up on her meaning immediately, and they both laughed.
CHAPTER TWO
i
Emmett awoke to laughter in the hallway. The sound of female voices seemed to come from right outside his door.
The bedside clock read 3:34, and here he was still in bed, still in his gray pajamas, the curtains still drawn, the day practically gone, and Emmett with nothing to show for it.
Perhaps he was losing his will to live. What else explained his still being in bed when Arnie had brought up tea? He was not in pain; he didn’t feel weak; he didn’t even feel ill. He felt none of the things his doctors had alerted him to watch out for. He felt listless, and for this he blamed his mental state, his attitude, and not the cancer cells that had invaded his pancreas with their perverse and insatiable appetite for reproduction. The symptoms he looked for each morning – the lack of sleep, the lack of energy, the loss of appetite, the increased pain – were not present. Waking around seven, at his usual time, he’d quickly monitored his body and discovered he was feeling better than he probably had a right to feel. All the same, he stayed in bed, past eight and nine, past ten and eleven, unable to muster enough will power to get up and dress and face the day. Something was different.
Emmett couldn’t even say he was depressed. The six-months-to-live diagnosis that the doctor at the Veterans Hospital in Portland had given him, and the three-months revision that the second-opinion doctor in The Falls had insisted was more accurate, had settled into his consciousness with far less stress and turmoil than the news of his wife’s cancer six years ago. For three interminable months he’d watched Mary suffer through a series of treatments that only made her condition worse, her body deteriorating before his eyes like a grotesque fast-film clip of a prisoner at Auschwitz, and the ordeal had torn him apart and beat him down. What did the doctors think they were doing? How could any person volunteer to be put through such “treatment”? It was a treatment that belonged in hell. He vowed to avoid Mary’s way of dying, though when his time came in the spring of 1976, the infection of his organs had progressed too far and had been discovered too late for treatment options. Emmett was given a bottle of pain pills, a stack of educational booklets, some phone numbers, and sent home.
For what? To wait to die?
So be it, then. Emmett accepted his fate. He was ready to die.
He’d lived, after all, a life fuller than most. He regretted almost nothing. Well, one thing: he regretted his failure to put a bullet through his wife’s brain to save her, and himself, from the ordeal of her cancer. But other than that, he had nothing personal to complain about. His complaints, such as they were, were about what had happened to the world at large, how it had changed, especially in recent years, in ways incomprehensible to him. First, President Kennedy had been shot, which started a string of assassinations so bleak and unsettling as to suggest a conspiracy at work. And then came Vietnam. What a mess this war-that-wasn’t-quite-a-war had been, and Emmett had never understood why we were in there if we weren’t doing everything required to win. The Vietnam mess inspired college kids to burn down buildings one moment and fornicate in public places the next. Watergate followed, and Nixon’s resignation. Later came withdrawal from Vietnam, the television screen filled with images as surreal and sad as Kennedy’s casket in the horse-drawn wagon a decade earlier. The great United States fled Vietnam like an embarrassed poacher with his tail between his legs. What was the world coming to? What was happening to the habits and values of the country he knew, the one in which he had been raised and lived so fully, enjoying two careers?
In his first career, he had served twenty-one years in the United States Navy. He learned the craft of a navigator and rose to the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade. After the war he served as the Captain of a supply ship based in Guam. He loved the Navy and decided to go for thirty but changed his mind after an incident in Guam he never had shared with anyone. He told Mary he was retiring because he knew how much she had been looking forward to civilian life, and he was disappointed when she didn’t object.
Emmett prepared for his second career by going to college on the G.I. Bill. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in mathematics and went on to earn a high school teaching credential. In 1952, he began teaching Algebra and Trigonometry at Pasadena High School, and to his surprise and delight, he loved his second career even more than the first.
Life was good in Southern California until Mary was diagnosed with breast cancer, which was too far advanced for an optimistic evaluation. The doctor gave her only a fifty-fifty chance of survival. They both agreed that fifty percent was better than nothing, and so in 1970 they moved back to Hamartin, where they had grown up together, friends and childhood sweethearts, each the child of wheat farmers. Emmett was given a job at the high school, and they began making the regular two-hour trips to Portland for treatment. At least they would be ending their life together, if it came to that, where it had started. And quicker than either had anticipated, it had come to that.
So Emmett knew how suddenly lives can end – and how painfully. He’d failed to save Mary from suffering, and he wasn’t going to make the same mistake with himself. He purchased a handgun and when the time came, he planned to use it.
For a while, his death sentence seemed to be no sentence at all. He told no one about his condition. Alone in the small studio apartment he had moved into after retiring from teaching, he kept himself busy reading and walking. Emmett became as solitary a figure on Main Street as he had been on the deck of a destroyer in the South Pacific, alone late at night, shooting the stars with a sextant.
Then Arnie Woodworth, a colleague at the high school who had recently retired, offered to rent him a room at his farmhouse out of town, and Emmett accepted. He wanted to get away from his neighbors in the apartment, especially the new young couple who liked to party late. The farmhouse was out of town and surrounded by pastures and wheat fields.
Although Emmett had told no one about his illness, Arnie and nearly everyone else in Hamartin knew about it. You didn’t keep many secrets in a small town. When Emmett realized this, he wanted more than ever to live as far away from neighbors as possible. The last thing in the world he wanted was for people to start staring at him and feeling sorry for him.
So Emmett moved out to what once had been called, with considerable pride, The Woodworth Farm. The Farm had been one of the largest wheat growers in Oregon until no more sons stepped forward to take over the business, the way three generations of sons had done. Arnie broke the tradition by going off to college and seldom coming home except for funerals. After the last one, burying his mother, Arnie astonished the community by moving into the farmhouse and getting a job teaching art at the high school. He quickly sold most of the family land to a neighbor, Ned Trafford.
Emmett knew none of this family history when he accepted Arnie’s offer. He thought living in the country would raise his spirits, and he also felt it would be prudent to have someone around for the end. Emmett knew that Arnie was a homosexual but gave it no thought, and it never occurred to him that moving into the farmhouse would make Emmett himself a subject of the Hamartin rumor mill. A few people in town came to believe he was gay and later that he was something even worse, a bisexual.
Before making the move, Emmett sold most of his possessions at a garage sale. What little remained went into storage in Arnie’s basement or into making his room at the farmhouse his own: the framed military ribbons that commemorated his career in the Navy and the sextant he had used as a navigator; the framed Masters Degree from UCLA and his credential to teach; his favorite photograph of Mary, positioned on his bedside table so it was the last thing he saw at night; and her recipe book, which he’d never had the heart to throw away. In a drawer below the photograph was the handgun, his insurance against anything the future might bring.
Emmett kept his new home clean and uncluttered, as sparsely neat as a military cadre room. Each morning he rose around seven, shaved, showered, dressed, went downstairs and sat at the coffee bar to enjoy the morning’s first cup of tea. Usually Arnie was already there, reading the paper. Later Emmett would take a morning walk, perhaps across a pasture next to the farmhouse, or out the long gravel driveway to the mailbox and back. Even later he would sit down in the leather chair in the living room, or perhaps out on the porch swing, or in the hammock strung up between two oak trees, where he would read. Emmett especially liked to read military histories and biographies, but the local library carried few of them. So most of the time he read mysteries, especially by Earl Stanley Garner and Ross MacDonald.
This was Emmett’s usual routine until this morning, when he didn’t even get out of bed. But now he would get up and dress and find out what all the noise in the hallway was about.
By the time Emmett stepped outside his room, the noise had moved downstairs. He’d put on khaki slacks that were baggy from the weight he’d lost in recent weeks and a brown short-sleeved shirt, which he had no energy to tuck in. He stood in the hallway, listening. He could make out the shrill laughter of women over a tape of one of Arnie’s operas.
The door across the hall was open, and in the room boxes were stacked across the floor. Apparently Shandy had already moved in. Emmett headed for the stairway, walking slowly, one foot set carefully after the other, testing his balance. Despite the opera, it sounded like a party going on down there, more activity than he might have energy to encounter, but at least he could say hello to everyone before coming back upstairs.
Arnie saw him first as Emmett made a measured, careful descent toward their laughter and lively conversation. Emmett dragged the pall of death behind him like a parachute.
“Here he is,” said Arnie, trying to sound enthused, as if Emmett himself had been the topic of conversation. In fact, when the women arrived he’d dismissed his housemate with the quick explanation, “Emmett has the flu and won’t be joining us,” and had let it go at that.
Josie and Shandy turned to see Emmett step off the stairway and enter the room. Arnie quickly went to his side.
“You sure you’re up to this?” he whispered.
Emmett forced a smile. He looked like he was about to say something to the women but his mouth hung silently open. Arnie saw a speckle of drool on his lower lip.
Arnie said, more loudly than necessary, “You remember Josie and Shandy.”
“Hello,” said Josie.
Shandy looked uncomfortable and said nothing.
“Hi,” said Emmett. He made eye contact with Shandy, who looked away.
“Do you think you’ll feel up to dinner?” Arnie asked. “I made my special spaghetti.”
Emmett said, “I’m not hungry. I just came down to say hello. Shandy, how long will you be staying with us?”
Emmett faltered, as if so much language was more than he could handle, and Arnie steadied him.
Arnie whispered, “I think you’d better go back to bed.”
Shandy said, “Not long.”
“I’ll help you upstairs,” said Arnie. To the women he added, “Be right back. Help yourself to the wine.”
“I’m ready for a refill,” said Josie, looking at Shandy. The younger woman followed her mentor into the kitchen as Arnie helped Emmett start up the staircase.
ii
“I feel better than I look,” said Emmett, climbing into bed. Arnie had helped him get back into pajamas.
“That’s a relief because you look terrible. I think we need to take you to the doctor tomorrow.”
“It’s nice to have young people in the house, isn’t it?”
“As a matter of fact, it is. But I’m worried about you. Tomorrow I’m driving you to The Falls.”
“I don’t have any pain. I just don’t have any energy.”
“We’ll see how you feel tomorrow.”
“I think it’s my attitude.”
Arnie studied him without commenting.
Emmett said, “Some mornings I wake up and wonder what the point of getting out of bed is. I …” He couldn’t continue.
“You’ve had temporary setbacks before. You always come out of it.”
“I feel so damn unmotivated lately. What’s the point of doing anything? I can’t keep any thoughts in my head. I pick up a book and can’t remember what I read a few minutes before.”
“Maybe you’ll feel better in the morning.”
Poor Arnie, Emmett thought. He knew what a burden he was becoming, and he didn’t like it at all. If he didn’t improve, he’d be better off in a nursing home than here, someplace prepared to care for those waiting to die. Arnie already had done much to make his final days, weeks and months far more pleasant and productive than he had anticipated when the doctor had given him the news. Emmett didn’t know if he was experiencing a temporary setback or whether this was the beginning of the end. He didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to sleep, to shut off his mind. Maybe Arnie was right and he’d feel better in the morning. Or maybe not.
iii
In the kitchen, Shandy said, “He looked really sick.”
“It’s certainly not the flu,” said Josie. She refilled her glass with red wine but Shandy declined.
“What do you think is wrong with him?”
Josie had an idea but kept it to herself. Neither woman was socially connected enough to be tuned-in to the Hamartin rumor mill, which had buzzed about Emmett’s condition for weeks.
No one spoke about Emmett through dinner, but his brief appearance had changed the atmosphere of the evening considerably, as if everyone was aware of a great illness at the top of the stairs that demanded respect and quiet mourning. Arnie had even turned off the tape of The Seven Deadly Sins. The earlier laughter and lively conversation gave way to hushed small talk, and when dinner was over Arnie wouldn’t let Josie do the dishes, so she said goodnight, reminding her former art teacher that she was a morning person who was up at the crack of dawn to paint.
Back in the kitchen after seeing Josie off, Shandy said, “I’ll dry if you wash.”
“Deal,” said Arnie.
They worked silently for a while. Then Arnie said, “I think I need to tell you about Emmett.”
Shandy felt her body becoming tense.
“He has cancer. It’s in the pancreas and spreading, inoperable, incurable, the worst kind. He was given only a few months to live. When I found out about it, I convinced him to move in with me. Not that I’m running a hospice or anything, but it just seemed wrong for him to be living alone. And I was getting tired of being in this big house all by myself, especially after I retired. Anyway, to make a long story short, it worked out incredibly well. He seemed to get a second wind, and you’d never know he had cancer at all except for occasional lapses into pain. He’s already lasted much longer than the doctors expected. But today there’s been a definite turn for the worse. So I’m a little apprehensive. You saw how he looked tonight. What did you think?”
“He looked really sick,” Shandy said softly.
“Yes, he did.”
They let the thought sink in.
Arnie said, “It’s only fair that you know what you’re getting into. I hope it doesn’t change your mind about staying.”
In fact, Shandy was uncomfortable being so close to someone this sick. But she quickly said, “No, I’m really grateful for this.”
“Good. Maybe your young energy will do him some good.”
“I hope so.”
CHAPTER THREE
In the days ahead, Emmett and Shandy would disagree on how their affair began. Emmett thought it happened this way:
Around three in the morning he woke up to pee. The bathroom was at the end of the hallway, past Arnie’s bedroom. Arnie always kept his bedroom door open, and his snoring was loud and vigorous as Emmett passed by on his way to the toilet.
Emmett didn’t notice that Shandy’s door was cracked open until he returned. He stood at her open doorway and peeked inside. Moonlight spilled into the room, and from it he could see that the boxes were stacked in a corner, unpacked. Then he saw her naked body on the bed, luminous, almost ghostly, in the pale light. She was stretched out on her back, her hands resting on her belly above the dark shadow of her pubic hair. A single long braid was wrapped around her head like a coiled snake.
Emmett stepped into the room. One step, two, a third – and he stopped. His eyes never left her body. She had the most erotic breasts he had ever seen, small with protruding nipples in the shape of a half-sphere as large as a golf ball. Arnie was the painter, not he, but he thought if he had the talent to paint, this moment was something he would want to capture forever because there was something magical, almost otherworldly, about her young nakedness under the illumination of moonlight, something both sexual and innocent, desirous and distant, immediate and eternal. He felt a stirring in his loins that he had not felt in months.
Later Emmett would insist that he turned to leave. Shandy would insist that he moved closer into the room, so that he was standing right next to her bed. At any rate, both would agree that she spoke first.
“Are you all right?”
Emmett jumped, not expecting her to be awake.
She sat up and grabbed a sheet to hide her breasts. She didn’t hide the rest of her body, and in the moonlight her lithe figure reminded him of a ballerina in some exotic pose.
“Are you okay?” Shandy asked again.
“I’m sorry,” said Emmett.
Why didn’t she cover up her pubic hair? It was as if she considered her breasts, not her genitals, her “private parts.”
“Can’t you sleep?” Shandy asked.
“I went to the bathroom.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Arnie’s snoring?”
“I can’t turn off my mind.”
Emmett knew the feeling. His interior dialogues could act like rude neighbors, keeping him awake for hours.
He said, “I was thinking of getting a glass of milk.”
“Maybe I’ll have a glass of wine.”
For a moment he thought she was going to slide off the bed and walk downstairs nude. But she added, “I’ll find my robe.”
“I’ll meet you downstairs.”
Shandy entered the kitchen in a short terrycloth bathrobe that barely fell below her crotch. Emmett had set up two places at the coffee bar, a quart of milk at his place, what was left of a half-gallon of red wine at hers, wine glasses at each.
“Thank you,” she said, slipping onto the stool as Emmett poured her wine.
She smiled but Emmett saw something troubling in her eyes, a deep sadness. He had the feeling she wanted to tell him something that was hard for her to say.
He raised his glass of milk and said, “Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
Their wine glasses touched, making a ringing sound.
Again she looked at him sadly.
“Is something the matter?” he asked.
She looked away, then back again.
Shandy said, “I’m nervous. I’ve never been in this situation before.”
“What situation is that?”
“You know, how you’re dying of cancer and all. It’s so sad.”
Emmett let out a deep breath.
“I see. Arnie told you. Well, I don’t think I’m going to keel over tonight, if that’s any relief.”
He rapidly finished his milk and stood up.
“I wish he hadn’t told you,” he said.
Emmett went upstairs and back to bed. Shandy wanted to call him back and apologize. He had enough problems without her making him feel worse. She gulped her wine and headed for the stairs.
A moment later Shandy stood in the doorway. Emmett sat up in bed.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said.
“It’s alright. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”
“You have every right to be angry with me. I feel so awkward. I want to help but I don’t know what to do.”
“The only thing to do is to live life one day at a time. It’s a cliché but it’s true.”
Shandy stayed in the doorway.
Emmett waited for her to say more and when she didn’t, he said, “I’m going back to sleep now.”
“I can give you a sedative,” Shandy said. She took a quick breath, surprised at her own audacity.
“What do you mean?”
She stepped into the room. His room, without the benefit of moonlight, was darker and he could barely make her out.
“I can make you feel better,” she said.
He didn’t understand what she was getting at until he felt her hands on his stomach. She grasped the elastic waistline of his pajamas.
“What are you doing?”
“Just relax. Close your eyes.”
Emmett started to say something but stopped. He took a deep breath. He felt her tugging at his pajama bottoms.
“Lift up your butt,” she said.
He breathed deeply again and did what she said. He closed his eyes.
He gasped when he felt her hand on his penis. Then she put him in her mouth, and his pleasure was so intense that he moaned. His penis was twitching with such a rush of desire that he thought he might explode, which in fact he did before he was fully erect, coming with such surprising force that Shandy let out a little cry. She kept him in her mouth for a moment, then released him, kissed his penis, and pulled his pajama bottoms back up.
“Goodnight,” she said, and quickly she was gone.
Emmett breathed heavily in bed, staring through the darkness for some light by which to understand what had just happened. Later he would say this moment defined the beginning of their affair but Shandy, it turned out, had a very different version of their history.
CHAPTER FOUR
i
As far as Shandy was concerned, the sexual moment with Emmett had been spontaneous, a favor granted to a dying old man. She had not gone upstairs with seduction in mind and was as surprised as Emmett by her bold behavior. He’d looked so lonely and fragile on the bed, and she remembered how much he’d been interested in her in school, the only teacher who’d ever told her she was bright enough to get a scholarship to college, and in the doorway she’d felt such a rush of desire to please him that everything else seemed to follow naturally. Still, there was no special meaning attached to it. By morning Shandy gave the incident no thought at all.
She stayed in bed until ten, then spent an hour fussing around in her new room, trying to turn it into the right arrangement of art studio and sleeping quarters. She would work near the window, where there was southern exposure and light. An idea for a new Artoon had been bouncing around in her thoughts for several days now. It was time to start sketching it out and see if the idea would blossom.
She unbraided her hair and brushed it out. She showered, washed her hair, dried it and brushed it again, then braided it into her signature single pigtail, which fell down her back to her waist. She put on her favorite outfit, faded jeans and a T-shirt over the usual padded bra and was ready to make her appearance.
No one was downstairs, so Shandy went outside. She was no stranger to the Woodworth farmhouse. Like all children in Hamartin, she had grown up believing it was haunted. One reason to believe this was that the house was hidden by trees when you passed by on the road, as if terrible secrets were lurking inside. Another was that a strange man, who happened to be the high school art teacher, lived all alone in a two-story house large enough for a family. If you had the angle to see the house proper, or had the audacity to get close enough, you immediately noticed its odd appearance, unlike any other house in the valley, with a severely pitched roof with two front-facing gables that looked like huge eyes when the afternoon sun caught the windows right. The trees that hid the front of the house from the road were two large maples that had been planted so closely together that now their branches twisted and turned around one another like the limbs of writhing victims. There was more. Along the eastern side of the house was the strangest sight of all, a stand of Weeping Sequoias, the only local examples of the species, which Arnie’s eccentric great-grandfather had planted. The green tall trees, their curving trunks rising like deformed Greek columns, their branches drooping listlessly, looked like the very image of surrender. Yes, there was every reason for a child to believe the Woodworth house was haunted, and every reason to accept a dare to creep up on it to see for oneself.
Shandy later visited the farmhouse in high school when Arnie hosted art class barbecues, and there was no suggestion of depravity anywhere. In fact, she found the house’s eccentricities in design and decoration as charming as her art teacher. Where some folks criticized Arnie for being different, Shandy looked up to him for being an individual. He had been her favorite teacher.
Shandy found Arnie in the barn, tossing hay with a pitchfork. The barn, in the shape of an octagon, had a steeply pitched roof with two large openings in front, one for the door and one for the hayloft.
Although he was wearing coveralls and work boots, something about Arnie’s movements made him look more like an actor than a farmer.
“Well, aren’t you up early,” he said.
“I’ve been up for a couple hours,” Shandy said defensively.
“I’m just kidding you. I’m not your mother.”
“What are you doing?”
“When I was a kid, they were called chores. You want to take a ride later?”
Shandy wasn’t often asked to go riding.
“I’d love to. Have you had breakfast? I could make scrambled eggs.”
“Breakfast was hours ago, dear. It’s almost lunch time.”
Arnie tossed aside the pitchfork and joined her in the barn’s broad doorway.
“Have you seen Emmett this morning?” he asked.
“No.”
“I hope he’s feeling better.”
Shandy suppressed a smile. She’d made him feel fine last night.
“Did you help yourself to coffee?” Arnie asked.
“No.”
“I always make a big pot in the morning. Emmett usually prefers tea. Either way, you have to fend for yourself around here, Shandy. Don’t expect anyone to wait on you.”