Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

fingers through your hair. Then you collect, you collect in glasses, buckets, Mason jars. You fill and fill and return over and over to the well.

He wrote this at the beginning of the bad time in New York. He was already driving the cab, but it had snowed the night before and Ransom didn’t go to the garage. Instead, he sat up all night writing, not even really knowing what it was, and then at 6:15 the house began to stir. There was no milk, no formula for Charlie, who was eight weeks old, and Claire peeked in and asked him to go, and Ransom, not unwilling, said, “Just let me finish up,” and then the next line came:

And eventually you start to weary, though it itself, the stuff, is inexhaustible and boils up still, yet you are only human—you’ve forgotten this temporarily, but you remember now. And as you tire, your hands begin to burn, they crisp and blacken like Cajun snapper in a skillet seared by Paul Prudhomme. Still you collect, more and more, as much as you can bear, knowing the hour is late and there will be no more.

The next thing he knew, it was five after seven, and he heard the locks rattling on the front door, heard Claire say something cross to Hope, heard them bumping and banging down the stairs of their fourth-floor walkup, saw them emerge on the unshoveled sidewalk. Claire glared up toward the window as she wrestled the double stroller up the steps and put the children, bundled in their snowsuits, into it, and set out for Gristede’s, plowing virgin trail. And Ransom, in his T-shirt and his boxers, knew he ought to rush downstairs and take his part, but the image was right there, right there….

And eventually you fall down, dumbfounded, and gaze at the sky in a bereft, demoralized exhaustion, and where your hands and arms were are now only smoking cauterized stumps. And as you gaze your vacant gaze, the grinding in the works recurs, the rent that opened in the bedrock closes back. And this is all there is.

The next day or the day after or the following year when you come out of your torpor, you gaze at it on your bedside table. The magma has cooled now, it’s clear like moonshine in a jar. You raise it to your lips, you taste, and, yes, you think, there’s something wild and strange in it. A little starburst winks at you. This is all there is. You pass the jar to others who will tell you, too much tannin! Too much fruit! Too dry! Too sweet! Too sweet and dry! But if you’re lucky, someone, or some few, will look you in the eye and smile and nod and sip again. And in that hope, I pass the jar to you.

By the time it was done, he couldn’t see his wife and children anymore, but he imagined them…Claire locking the stroller to the meter, hoisting Charlie on a hip, commanding Hope not to run, afraid she’d disappear around an aisle and get snatched and they’d never see her anymore. And if only Ran had overcome his selfishness that one time, and a thousand times like it…For all this he blamed himself tonight, because long ago he’d made a commitment to his art he had no power to reverse. And then she left him one day in the spring. He came home with her coffee and her muffin in a bag and found the letter, and the voice that spoke to him that snowy night, that had spoken to Ransom Hill since he was young…that went, too, in the middle of a song, like God deserting David. Ran stopped sleeping, he sat up in the rocking chair all night where he’d rocked Hope, then Charlie, and he smoked and screened the tape, staring out the window, talking to himself, befriending the little voice that helps you choose between the blue shirt and the red, when there was no one else. And in the morning he showered and went to the garage, and then he stopped showering. Then he stopped going to the garage. And the one taste of happiness he’d known, the one taste of joy, was when Claire, the hundredth time, relented and said yes, when he saw her at the airport, barefoot on the Astroturf, when he saw his children’s faces, heard their voices, crying, “Dad! Da-dee!” His love for her, and them, was like a tumor in his chest, one that Ran had proved beyond all shadow of a doubt he couldn’t live without. And what do you do then, when the news comes down that you will have to live without it anyway, no matter if you can or not?

Ransom Hill, right now, is sitting on the floor before the stereo, rocking back and forth, talking to himself, holding in his hand the liner notes for an album few people listened to and fewer people bought, wishing he were someone different, someone other than himself.

And then, moved by something, he gets up, puts five twenties in an envelope, licks the flap, and, copying from the tag, addresses it to Alberta Johns, tying up loose ends.

FIFTY-SIX

You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.” The quarter smile on Harlan’s lips seems mocking, but there’s a new and humorless sobriety in his ginger eyes, from which the haze has burned away. They’re clear and deep and there’s something smoldering and strangely voided there, not absent, but wiped out.

“Is it really you?” she says. “It is, isn’t it?” A thousand currents of crossed feeling run through Addie as she stands before him, still in shock, her finger circling and recircling the orb of polished shell. “They told me you were dead. Two years ago, Harlan, Jules Poinsett stood right there….” She gazes toward the piazza, but doesn’t complete the thought. “Oh, Harlan! I thank God for your