The Underneath Read online

  Once, he took Ben on a cold call to the house of a woman newly divorced. “Good thing yer skin’s clearing up,” Ammon had noted. “Ya scared people.” Ben had seen Ammon smile to himself as he noticed the overgrown lawn, the four cords of wood unstacked in the drive. He’d knocked on the door, took off his hat, held it in his hands. Ben followed his lead. “Golden manners, humility.”

  Margot was a pretty woman in her early 40s, slim, delicately boned, bare foot. She was wearing a sundress that hinted at her figure, tightening against her hip bones when she turned. She looked tired. Ben didn’t know much about what women did with their hair but he liked how she held hers carelessly up from her neck by a single silver clip. He stared at her neck. She smiled at them uncertainly.

  “Hello there, ma’am. I’m Ammon and this is my nephew, Ben. We own a local logging operation.”

  Ben sensed a special emphasis on the words my nephew. He knew better than to contest.

  Margot brushed a strand of her fading hair back from her face. “I don’t need any logging.”

  “Ma’am, if you’ll give me a moment of your time?”

  She acquiesced with a fluttering gesture.

  “I know this property. Used to hunt here when I was a kiddo.” Ammon smiled, and smiling he could be handsome. “And I know yer woods. And ya’ve got overcrowding which’ll lead to diseases such as Dutch elm, encourage pests like the gypsy moth, and could be a real source of fire danger.”

  And so she invited them in.

  Ammon solemnly explained the distressing state of her trees. He showed her a piece of mildewed bark—Ben had no idea where it had come from, but Ammon crumbled it in his fingers and hoped it wasn’t already too late. He offered to help with her wood pile. “The boy and I’ll do it before we go. Won’t take us but ten minutes. He’s strong and good with his hands.”

  “No, no,” she demurred. “I can do it.”

  She was planning to put the property on the market; there was no way she could keep it with taxes being what they were. But she definitely wasn’t interested in logging it. She loved the woods too much, all the things that lived there.

  Ammon nodded sympathetically. “I know how you feel. The woods is where I go when I need to think, it’s church to me, better than any cathedral.” Ben very nearly laughed, he thought Ammon must be joking. But Ammon had a glow about him, the light on his face and possibly even a tear in his eye. Margot soaked it all in. She offered them pie she’d just made. Ammon demurred. “We’ve got to be heading out. Promised my wife we’d be home in time.” He flashed a look at Ben, and Ben picked up the baton.

  “My aunt’s got MS,” he improvised. “The carer leaves at four.”

  Margot gave a little frown of sympathy.

  As they drove away, Ammon muttered, “Horny bitch.”

  That evening, Ammon told Ben to go back to Margot’s house and stack her wood.

  Margot was surprised to see him. She was hunkered down in the vegetable garden, dirt on her hands, her hair stuffed up and held in place with a pencil. At first she wouldn’t hear of it, she’d already said she could do the wood herself.

  “I don’t doubt that, ma’am.” Ben looked at her more boldly now. She met his gaze then stepped back. Ben felt a rush of heat in his groin, and this rushed to his face. He blushed and turned away. She’d seen it, he knew, but she pretended otherwise, wildly brushing dirt from her dress. He was so used to people who would sneer or call him out—“Lookit Benny, blushing like a radish!”

  A week later, Ammon gave him an envelope containing $15,000.

  “Take this to that bimbo on Ridge Road. Tell her ya haven’t spoken to me but ya want to help. She can have this and ya’ll log her land with all the care in the world, ya bleed on about the baby fawns and the baby foxes.”

  As Ben headed for the door, Ammon grabbed him and undid the top button of his jeans.

  Ben was about to punch him, quickly did the button up. Ammon grabbed him, undid the button again. “I’m no faggit, Ben, ya ken me. But ya just see, ya just see how she spins for ya.”

  He drove to Ridge Road, her car was there. He glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror. He had his mother’s eyes, the green-blue with thick black lashes. He was never quite brave enough to look at his reflection full on in the mirror. He hardly recognized himself these days without the seeping mask of acne. Suddenly, it had vanished from working in the sun and though his skin remained lightly pocked, it was clear and clean.

  Margot smiled when she saw him, asked him in. She was at the kitchen table, books and notepads spread out. “I’m an English teacher,” she explained. “Where are you at school?”

  “I dropped out.”

  She looked up at him. “How do you feel about that?”

  Ben shrugged. “The classroom felt like prison.”

  “Yes, it can.”

  He was aware, then, that she’d clocked his undone jeans.

  “Amm—” he corrected himself, “Uncle Ammon. He wants me to have the business, as it was my grandfather’s originally.” Ben felt the velvet smoothness of the lies, and how they could so easily be the truth that others wanted. “But ma’am, your woods need logging, and I have a sense it’ll help you with your Land Use debt.”

  “Oh, the Land Use. Yes, my husb—” she made her own correction, “ex, he did all that. I haven’t got my head around it yet.”

  Now Ben brought out the envelope, fat with money. “I haven’t talked about this with my uncle yet. But I’m sure he’ll agree. I can give you this right now and I can begin logging next week.”

  She took the envelope, glanced inside.

  “Fifteen thousand,” he said. “That’s keeping my margins real tight. But I can manage it.”

  She suddenly came undone and wept, and he did not know what to do but put his hands on her arms and guide her to a chair. He knelt down before her and as a means of comfort he put his hand on hers. “It’s okay, ma’am. You’ll figure it out.”

  Her hand was warm beneath his, and he was also touching her bare thigh. Her dress had slipped up above her knee and he was directly touching her skin. He stared at her skin and the shadow of the dress where he could not see. He wanted to lean in and kiss her. He wanted to taste her. He could not think clearly. His heart was racing and he felt the heat all through him, so he was no longer sure if he was fantasizing or doing. His hand slipped off hers and to her thigh, the soft rose petal of her skin, and he pushed the hem of her dress aside and slid his hand upward. He was amazed by the heat of her body, by her skin, by the way the world funneled into this specific moment, all brutality and sadness was vanquished by the beauty of the feeling inside his chest and the softness and the outline of her panties, cotton with small flowers. He saw the faint bulge of her pubic hair against the cotton and he could smell her. She made a vain attempt to stop him, she muttered “no.” He looked up at her, the lines around her eyes, the fine cut of her cheekbones, and when he leaned up to kiss her she kissed him back.

  He was no virgin, he’d slept with Tina Vincent when he was 13 and Felicia Baumgarten whenever he needed to. But this was different. Margot took him to bed. She was both shy and carnal, nervous of what he might think of her body and yet at ease with the pleasure she took. He saw her every day for two weeks. He did not think that Ammon knew.

  But Ammon, being Ammon, was merely waiting. He was doing paperwork, he told Ben to get him a coffee, and Ben did, and Ammon looked at him with his carnivorous grin.

  “Ya learnin’ something, horndog?”

  Ben pretended not to hear—pretended to himself so that he could hold on to this good thing, this gracious, gentle thing for another few seconds.

  “She know yer only 17?”

  Ben kept his back to Ammon. “She knows.”

  “She could lose her job.”

  Now he turned to face Ammon. “Fuck you.”

  “That the best ya got?” Ammon tossed him the keys to the skidder. He used his quiet voice, “Better get up there and do the job I’ve
paid for.”

  Ben was salt, he was crumbling, molecule by molecule. “Please,” he said. “Please get someone else to do it. Ray or Jim.”

  “High grade.” Ammon drank his coffee. “We’ve paid her for a high grade. Forty acres. Clear it. I’ve got Poulsen’s wanting the chip.”

  It was good wood, quality birch and an old stand of maple. Other mills would be paying top dollar for boards. But Ammon was going to chip it out of pure spite. Narratives flipped through Ben’s head, pages of a comic book, he would run away, he and Margot would run away together, California, Mexico, somewhere age didn’t matter, one of those Pacific Islands, they would swim and eat mangos. Anything, anything but the sick, dead weight of the feller buncher’s keys in his hand.

  Margot heard the sound of it. The ripping, eviscerating, the crushing. She ran toward him. He refused to see her, he kept his focus, he didn’t even look at the forest, just the gears, the levers. He wondered if she would call the police or if she would meekly accept the consequences of the choices Ammon had made for them.

  At dusk, he turned off the machine and gazed about at the late-summer evening, the sky orange-hued and hazy with residual heat. With his t-shirt, he wiped the sweat from his forehead and took off his hat to scratch his hair. He was in a different place than where he’d begun the day. The earth was newly naked, its smell filling the air with the intensity of a spring thaw, as if already trying to forgive the assault.

  He observed what he had done. He wanted to own it, to possess this act: what a man could do to a landscape in eight hours, to the trees that had taken a hundred years to grow, that had outlasted winters and diseases and droughts and ice storms. He severed them with a blade and ground them up into little pieces.

  Later that year, a cold, grey November day, he saw Margot again. She was coming out of White’s, the wind catching her hair, her skin pale against a red scarf. He felt trapped, standing up against his pick-up without enough time to either hide or face her. She walked right by him, before stopping, turning back.

  “Ben.”

  He merely looked at her, trying to read her voice, her expression. She smiled. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay, yeah.”

  She glanced at her watch. “You want a coffee? I’ve got half an hour.”

  He sat across from her in the White’s café section, surely the least romantic place in the world with its plastic chairs and teetering stacks of special-offer items: tiny cacti, discount Halloween candy, spaghetti. How oddly formal he felt, how remote from her and from who they had been in her bed, in summer. He had seen her cunt, she had tasted his cum. Now she was overly cheery, babbling, regretting already—he felt—her invitation. School was going well. She had some great students but the usual frustrations. “And you, Ben, what about you?”

  His reply might be banal, a few words to hurry away the interaction between them. But, suddenly and despite himself, he said: “He’s not my uncle. Ammon. He is a sadistic, lying douchebag and I hate him with all my heart.” It took him a moment to realize he was crying, tears sliding down his face and plopping on the table.

  Margot’s face contorted oddly, the opposing tension of hundreds of tiny muscles busily working beneath her skin. The pale winter light showed every line. Then, surprisingly, she put her hand on his. “And yet you made me happy, and you will make someone else happy and you will be happy, and that will be your revenge on Ammon.”

  He held her hand, she held it back.

  At last he withdrew.

  She sat back and began to collect her things. “Crap, I’m late.” She stood, he stood with her, a momentary misstep with the chair between them and he bumped into her. His hand went to her waist by instinct, her hand to his shoulder. They could have danced, they could have waltzed, he could feel the curve of her hipbone beneath the layers of her rough wool skirt.

  “Get out,” she said. “Get the hell out.”

  She detached from him. She flew out the door, a loosened thistle seed, her red scarf looping behind her. He was stunned, he was hurt, and also angry. Then he understood. Get out, get the hell out. Of here, of this.

  But he was here, back here, nail-gunned to this particular corner of the map. Some faulty ideal had led him—the myth of home, Ammon offering him the business because Frank was going into forestry. Frank would have nothing to do with Ammon, and he did not need to, his mother had made sure of that. She’d put all her property into a trust for him, to be opened when he turned 21.

  “You’ve been like a son to me,” Ammon said grandly to Ben, and Ben had wondered if Ammon really thought he was like a father. Ammon had shown him the equipment, they’d walked around the solid, well-kept machines, and Ben had been pleasantly surprised—Ammon had generously low-balled the price on the equipment for him.

  By the time he checked the registration numbers on the machines against the registration numbers on the bill of sale, it was too late, he’d committed his Armed Services loan. The real equipment was a pile of rusting junk and Ammon had laughed, funniest thing in the world, funniest thing since the pigs. “Didya learn nothin’ from me, Ben?”

  Ben made the best of it he could, which was mostly debt, lawsuits, and, finally, Slim. At times, he wondered at the predictability of his life, dead junkie mother, foster care, high school dropout, the military, debt, crime. It was inevitable, ticking boxes, and he’d missed every chance for escape. Get out, get the hell out, and he’d come back, right back.

  28

  Between the Dunkin’ Donuts and an art supply store, the Guadalajara Grill in St. Johnsbury had bright turquoise paint around the windows. Inside, the late-morning sun illuminated the red leatherette banquettes. Frida Kahlo prints and tourist posters lined bright yellow walls. There were a dozen people, the late side of breakfast, their plates swamped with rice, beans, tortillas, and indistinct items in sauces.

  Kay took a booth. A spotty teenager posing as a waiter handed her a menu, ubiquitous offerings—chimichanga, enchilada, burrito. The food could be awful or not so bad, though Kay felt it unlikely she would be pleasantly surprised. She ordered a bean burrito.

  The bathroom was just past the kitchen. She got up, crossed the restaurant, and glancing in, saw a large, dark-haired, brown-skinned woman tossing meat about a skillet.

  In the bathroom, Kay washed her hands and briefly examined her reflection in the mirror. The green-tinged fluorescent light highlighted her wrinkles and sun damage. She pinched the skin near her ears, drawing it back as might be done in a face lift. Perhaps she might cut open her face, pull tight the skin as if it were plastic wrap.

  She turned to the left, examined her three-quarter profile, then let her hands fall, stepped back. How did she look to men? Men had always looked. Ben looked and saw a bored housewife. He was right. She thought of his hands. What if a man never touched her again?

  By the time she got back to her booth, her burrito was there, a log afloat in a sauce of brown mole, adorned with a single sliver of avocado. She called the waiter over.

  “Is everything all right?” He sniffed as if he had a cold or allergies.

  “The cook, what is her name?”

  “Who?” The poor lad had a massive oozing pimple on the tip of his red nose.

  “The woman back there in the kitchen cooking.”

  “Silvia?”

  “Is Silvia from Mexico?”

  He sniffed harder. “You immigration or something?”

  “Gosh no! I just wanted to know how authentic the food is.”

  “They come down here from Derby sometimes. Total dickheads.”

  “Why are they dickheads?”

  “They eat and then they come into the back and give us a hassle. You know, anyone with a tan.”

  By now the Guadalajara Grill was filling up with a lunch crowd, and the cook wandered out to fuss with the till. Kay watched her for a moment—Silvia, flicking through the morning’s receipts. Kay should pay and just walk out; she should be on time to collect her kids and cook them fish finge
rs for supper. She felt the fulcrum once again: she had options, choices, a woman like her always did. So why did it feel so Pavlovian—was she obeying some inner bell? She stood up and went to Silvia, bill in hand.

  “Hi, Silvia. Your food is great.”

  Silvia lifted her gaze to meet Kay. “Gracias.”

  “Do you know Maria Wilson?”

  Silvia glanced at the receipt, “Tweny-two sixty.”

  “I’m not trying to make trouble or anything. I’m just trying to find out if she’s okay.”

  “An’ jew are?” Silvia opened the till, pulling out bills, counting them silently, expertly.

  “Kay. I’m renting the Wilsons’ house for the summer.”

  Silvia paused, licked her fingertips, recounted. Then looked blankly at Kay.

  “I heard she went back to Mexico,” Kay continued.

  “Jew say her name is Maria?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, honeee, my name is Silvia. Jew wanna know how is Maria, ask Maria.”

  “Is she definitely in Mexico, with her sons?”

  Silvia was now tapping calculations into her tablet, muttering numbers, “Ciento tres... cincuenta y cinco, once...”

  “Does anyone know for certain where she is?”

  “Catorce, dieciocho, noventa...”

  “Do you know?”

  “Setenta y cinco… Dios mío, Gilberto!” She snapped her fingers and the pimple boy came slouching toward her. She spoke at him in rapid Spanish, stabbing a receipt with a short finger.

  Gilberto spoke back. Kay couldn’t understand the words, but his tone suggested that the answer was obvious, and Silvia—his mother?—was an idiot for even asking.

  Silvia fired back at Gilberto, they went back and forth, until he pulled off his apron and stalked away, flapping a dismissive hand at her. Then she turned to Kay, as if she’d just appeared. “Jew pay cash or card?”

  Kay brought forth her wallet, handed over a card. “I just want to know if she’s okay, if she’s safe, that’s all. Not where, specifically.”