Any stray tendril of fantasy that Croft was about to produce Rachel in the flesh, that she dwelled incognito like a Weatherman or Symbionese soccer mom in one of those homes in the woods, evaporated now, even before he spoke.
“We kept it in the Bug, when we drove out to the coast. We’d write you a postcard each time we stopped for gas, or to get stoned.”
“You wrote them, or she did?”
“I had to kind of push her, but she helped. I think she was ashamed, you know? Later it was just me. After she was gone.” I held the melted typewriter in my two hands, like a beggar with his hat. Croft brushed at the sodden chunks of rust it had deposited on the sleeve of his corduroy jacket.
“You want it?” he asked.
“No.” I wanted my cleaning deposit back when I returned the rental, that’s what I wanted.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
The dirt road curved out of the open field at the property’s entrance, down the hill and to the woods. We left the cars, strolled into the glade, the cool forest, too steep and irregular to ever have been farmed. The sun gone from sight below the hill’s line, the birch trunks and pale ferns seemed bioluminescent, charged with the day’s light. Our footfalls whispered unreplied on the private road’s fresh layer of sharp, gray gravel. The woods were an engine of silence, pumping it to the sky.
Around each turn lay a house. Wooden two-story buildings, seven or eight total, each with their thoughtful trace of Buckminster Fuller or Christopher Alexander-circular rooms with skylight domes, greenhouse windows, breezeways attaching a low annex or small studio. Each house with a car or two in the drive, a few with smoke unfolding from a chimney. Here and there bicycles, chain saws, snowshoes, mulching piles, splintery blast marks of log splitting, ax wedged in a stump. The Watermelon Sugars were home, their kitchens lit. From the distance of the road, though, we granted their privacy as we passed. I was humbled, as I ought to have been, to see what varieties of life could hide between the arrogant, oblivious coasts.
“Rachel and Jeremy were probably the biggest challenge this community ever faced,” said Croft in his squeaky alto. “Confronting them helped us grow up, so I guess we owe them a lot. I’ll never forget that night, we held hands in a circle around them and told them they had to go. I just about shit my pants. Jeremy had already punched me a couple of times, but I was too embarrassed to admit it to anyone. Turned out he’d punched a lot of people.”
“I don’t know who Jeremy is,” I said.
“Somebody told me he died a couple of years ago. He was basically just this really charismatic, really violent guy from Kentucky who used us as his playground for a few months. His favorite game was to scare guys by getting them really high, then talk about how he’d once killed a man outside a bar with a single blow to the throat. He had a lot of those biker horror stories. Right after the throat story he’d move in on the guy’s girlfriend. Everyone was sort of passive, you know, like ‘If she wants to be with Jeremy, that’s cool, maybe she’ll bring him some peace.’ Rach was actually the only person who really stood up to him.”
“He took her away from you?” I asked. It was growing darker, and I’d been momentarily transfixed by the scene in a bright-lit kitchen window-a middle-aged woman, her hair as gray as Croft’s, sliced tomatoes at a counter, while behind her, two blond daughters, bright and shiny as Solver girls, played a dual-remote video game, some dungeon or deep-seascape glowing unearthly blue on a screen. But they couldn’t see me, and I felt like Frankenstein’s monster, peeping at the humans. So I turned away.
“Oh, we weren’t spending much time together at that point. Rachel was her own problem, a lot of people weren’t completely thrilled about my bringing her out here. She had that New York sarcastic thing that burst a lot of people’s balloons.” He laughed. “I mean, she sort of ran rings around people, truth be told. She ran rings around me. Plus she wasn’t happy here. She’s wasn’t all that happy, period, or she would never have gone with Jeremy. I think she regretted leaving New York.”
“Did she talk about-Abraham?”
“Well, she was pretty ashamed,” Croft said. It was the same word he’d used to explain why he’d had to force her to write the postcards. I supposed it was true, the right word. I decided to quit fishing for more.
Croft went on. “Mostly I just remember this one day, I tried to get her to come looking for mushrooms with me. She hated that kind of thing, she thought it was stupid. This was after Jeremy showed up too. I was just trying to reach out, you know, make some connection, because she seemed so balled up. So she had this routine, every time I tried to get her to do anything outdoors she’d say, ‘I wonder what’s playing at the Thalia.’ Like I should know what she was missing, from her life before. She’d say, ‘Maybe it’s The Thirty-nine Steps, or A Thousand Clowns,’ or whatever. So this particular day she said yes, I don’t know why. It had just rained for three days, and we went hunting for fresh morels.” Croft gestured at the forest floor, and I understood he meant here. More or less right around here. “Not that she picked mushrooms. She was chain-smoking-she couldn’t drive, either, she constantly forced me to run her into town for cigarettes. Anyway, she walked with me, smoking like a fiend, and when she started in about the Thalia she said, ‘Maybe they’re showing Beat the Devil,’ and I said, ‘What’s so great about Beat the Devil?’ and she told me the plot of that fucking movie for an hour. I mean, doing Peter Lorre’s voice and everything, all the lines-she had the whole thing memorized.”
I didn’t reach for music until I was out of Indiana. First Croft and I reclaimed our cars, and he showed me his house, another beauty nestled at the end of the drive, where the Watermelon Sugar property nearly ran out. A fire lane cut across another twelve acres, then opened onto the interstate, up from Louisville, Kentucky. If the wind blew right you could hear the trucks. It was then that Croft mentioned, just an afterthought, that the farm was in the fight of its life, against a creature less chimerical than Rachel and Jeremy. The legislature meant to extend the highway across the property, a four-billion-dollar contract for local construction-one which, Croft said, would cut only ten minutes off the trip to Chicago. We considered this together, tipping our ears to catch the distant whine of tractor trailers. Then he showed me inside, and we lit his kitchen, and he made me a plate of spaghetti. He offered a guest-room bed, but I wanted to drive. He told me I could use his phone and I nearly did, then decided I’d call Abby from somewhere west of here, somewhere nearer to home, when I’d sorted out more of all I’d have to explain.
At the door Croft hugged me, awkwardly, and I hugged him back, awkwardly. There was nothing to accept or refuse in the embrace. Isabel Vendle’s nephew wasn’t the mother I never had, any more than a rotting typewriter was. He wasn’t the father I never had, either. Abraham was the father I never had, and Rachel was the mother I never had, and Gowanus or Boerum Hill was the home I never had, everything was only itself however many names it carried, and so I hugged Croft and I went out to pilot my car through the woods, back to the serpentine road. I was lost a few times on the way to Bloomington, but I never stopped and asked for directions. There was no one to ask. And I wasn’t in a hurry.
It was after midnight when I skirted Gary, Indiana, birthplace of the Jackson Five. In Illinois I stopped for gas and noticed the wallet of discs on the backseat. Once on the road I groped one into the mouth of the car’s player, the first to fall into my hand-Brian Eno’s Another Green World. Prog rock-troll music, Euclid Barnes would have called it. I’d listened to this record my whole life since discovering it in the cut-out bin on the eighth floor of Abraham and Straus, at the dying record store there, behind the stamp and coin collecting department. Using Brooklyn skills, I’d boosted another copy, a commercial cassette, from the Main Street record shop of Camden Town, then played it endlessly one night as I made love to Moira Hogarth. I adored the record’s harmless spookiness: Eno’s keyboard washes, John Cale’s sawing cello, Robert Fripp’s teardrop fretwork. And I always associated it with driving, with miles rushing beneath headlights and my eyes. I associated it with one drive in particular.