The Persuader
He named it and the name stuck through the births of five children and the move from Revere to the farm where mostly it stood upright in the corner of the outbuilding, taller than any of the boys and smelling of iron and rust and its own heavy mythology. They did not even dare to touch it and they knew that if they did they wouldn't be able to lift it, maybe two of them holding it end to end, but then why would they do that? To bring it where and for what purpose? Possibly to hide it, to send him searching, searching for them, screaming like a madman through the house up to the bedrooms.
He liked to wear it like Jesus wore the cross, draped across his shoulders but with hands hanging loosely. The children watched him sometimes move across the field from the barn, always at dusk when the work was done and always east to the rutted road where the crumbling Model A did its work of slow decay, a cracked pine stump under each wheel well. Then he'd flex his shoulders, pause, and turn around, walking even faster up to the other side of the barn and around in a wide loop. When he came around the corner they could finally see his face. His eyes almost closed, mouth agape, an animal in its yoke. He seemed so pleased, even amused, although if he had noticed them that would have spoiled everything. This was one of their goals: to see him without being noticed, to make the yelling thing stomping through the house a lie.
When he died—it seemed impossible that such a thing should happen, even years later—the Persuader stood in its corner for weeks until finally Toby, the second oldest, strode inside. First he made the delicate adjustment—he turned the wheel so that the jaws tightened. Then he gripped the handle with both hands and hefted it up to his chest, carried it up to the house. He had been home from Korea for two months but it seemed to him that he was returning just now and somehow he had carried this thing the whole way. He wanted to show them.
When his mother saw she looked at him the way she had once when he had carried a dead rabbit past the threshold. Aunts and uncles sat around in the kitchen in folding chairs eating cake from small plates. His brothers were out on the back porch talking about what needed to be done. She said, “Lord, that stupid thing,” but her expression softened. She smiled. She said, “Do you know how he got that?”
Once Toby had seen a plane crash on the deck of the carrier. It took off, hung in the air, a bird suspended in the wind, and then lurched to one side and exploded further on down the strip. Debris rolled to the carrier's edge and toppled into the sea. Everyday planes left on their bombing runs and most of the time they returned, but this was different, this was his most intimate contact with death. He was almost grateful. But then he returned home to find a wall erected against that story and all the others. They were glad he was safe—that was all. He returned to the small bed and his room except now he sometimes smoked cigarettes there. His brother in the next bed told him to stop it, then asked for one himself. His father was not there to yell at them. Toby imagined the heart attack as a similar accident to the plane crash, that same surprising lurching movement, the same sudden vanishing of power. Why had it happened? They had found his father in a bed of straw with his hand around a rope. The other end lead to the horse's bridle and it stood waiting for its master to guide it. Now Toby could smoke and swear and come and go as he pleased. The house seemed larger. He seemed larger too. He practically filled the kitchen holding the old wrench. Only his mother had shrunken.
There are people, many people, most of them men, who live from moment to moment and are as undependable as weather. The man who owned The Persuader was that kind of man—that's what his mother said—and that's how it came to his father, her husband, a man who was that other man's opposite. She said, “It was when we lived on the coast. I was nineteen and we had been married for less than a year.”
The aunts and uncles cut the cake with the sides of their forks but they were listening, small talking yielding to something more important. It was winter and the floor lay wet with melted snow. He repositioned the wrench in his hands. He guessed it weighed twenty-five, thirty pounds, long as the kitchen table and colder than he thought possible. His hands ached from gripping it—it seemed to contain the accumulated cold of all those winters it had spent out there. Bringing it inside was one thing but setting it down quite another so he held it uncomfortably as his mother spoke. “I remember him,” she said. “He had been bitten by something. On his face. Or possibly kicked by a horse? He had a scar in a strange shape on his cheek. A jaw or a hoof. Who knows? I wasn't about to ask. He kept touching it.”
“A drunk,” she added. “I had no use for him.” But he needed money right away—he owed money on a bar tab—and he would show her husband, Toby's father, a special thing out in the bed of his truck. Possibly a trade could be arranged?
His father had been eating dinner with his wife at one of the small tables at the back but he said that yes, it was at least worth a look. The men moved outside along with a couple of others caught up in the tide of the moment. Did they think there might be a fight? Toby's father stood six foot three, the other man a good half a foot shorter.
Before his mother finished her baked potato her husband came in holding it and—she swore to this—he was grinning. He'd settle up the man's tab and buy him one more on top of that. In fact, he'd buy a round for the bar. Not an extravagant gesture, really—the place was almost empty—but strange from Toby's father, a person who did not drink and saved money in a lock box under his bed. The wrench thumped on the bar and everybody gathered around. Nobody had ever seen such a thing. Possibly it had been used to build ships. That's what the man said. He was already on his next drink.
Toby had already claimed it. Let the others talk about the animals, the paint mixing machines and brushes and ladders, the drill presses and saws, all that stuff that had allowed his father to ride out the great depression, even thrive when others were barely holding on. Many of those things, he decided, had probably come from other defeated men. The barn contained the history of those failures. They could have them. He wanted this useless thing and he wanted his mother to keep talking in this easy way. At the time he had thought it was his entrance that had done such a thing and not the simple fact of his father's death. Later she'd meet someone else, travel to England and Ireland, send him misspelled letters describing her strange happiness. They seemed to come from a young girl.
By then he'd be living in Buffalo and studying until late at night in his rented room. The letters arrived as a reminder that he had once lived a different life. He knew they came only to him.
Anything had seemed possible in those first years after his father's death. It was as if the farm had been destroyed in that instant. It remained as an afterimage. Always it had loomed in his future and then it was gone.
He couldn't remember exactly how long that feeling had lasted but it stretched through the early years of his marriage, the birth of his first child—even as things went bad the feeling remained. He hadn't known it was a rare gift until much later, when he discovered it had deserted him.
They moved into the house in Everett in sixty-four and out in seventy- one after the first bankruptcy and trial separation. He sat at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette—a habit that had stuck—when his wife came into the room holding a box of dishes. He said, “How does it feel to be married to an imposter?”
She said, “Can the man pretending to be my husband help with these boxes?”
Their girl ran clockwise around the table, then, as if in response to a secret signal, corkscrewed back in the other direction. Throughout the afternoon they would sometimes stop to gently reprimand her. “Karen,” they'd say. “We're very busy right now. This is not a good time.”
She stopped now to watch them with that intense stare of hers. Three years old and that stare could make a cat nervous. He said, “Why don't you go on the porch.”
“Do as your father says,” his wife told her. She turned back to him and shifted the weight of the box. It said dishes on it quite clearly in her neat handwriting. He could hear her brother in the other room moving around furniture. “Everything okay in there?” he called out
“Everything's fine,” she called back.
She left with the box trailing their girl and returned with empty arms. She stood in front of the refrigerator and opened both doors wide. “There's still food in here,” she said.
“Leave it,” he said. “Who cares?”
“Hot dogs,” she said. “Lettuce. Half an onion.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Don't smoke in here,” she said.
He didn't respond but he licked his thumb and finger and snuffed the cigarette, put it carefully in the pocket of his flannel shirt. Then he rose to his feet. “Back to work,” he said.
Down in the basement he turned off the water and hacksawed the copper piping. He set it in lengths on the floor, did the rough math in his head. When he came back upstairs his wife was missing, maybe up in the attic, maybe gone altogether. He turned a doorknob and decided they would be worth taking. He knelt with a screwdriver and began to unfasten it, then the next and the next, up to the second floor, where he decided the radiators would be more work but to a better end. At one hundred bucks a pop they would be worth the struggle. He put his back into turning the pipe fastener.
A voice sounded out from behind him, “I'm not going to judge,” it said, “but think about what you're doing.” It was his wife, of course.”
“We need the money,” he said. “Let them foreclose. But they can foreclose on the bones.”
“That man you were talking about earlier? The imposter? Sometimes I feel like I still love him a little.”
“Wait until I actually get it out of here.”
“There are five more downstairs. Three up here.”
“You've already counted. What you said about love? That works both ways.”
He strained his back until he thought it might break but nothing came loose. He paused and flexed his hands. They were red and wet and his wife seemed to be losing patience with him. He wasn't sure why he cared but he did and he went back to it from a different angle. He could feel the muscles in his neck pop and the expression on his face must have been two steps past human. He gave out a shout, a guttural swear, another, another, back down the long corridor of time at the man who had first installed this stupid thing. He hadn't even thought about how he might get it downstairs: it must weigh a hundred and fifty pounds of metal carved with vines and flowers. He swore and tug and his wife stepped in closer, watching his face.
He swore again and gave the whole mess a kick. He looked over at his tool box. Maybe the hacksaw again?
She said, “This is why.”
“It's just a thing,” he said.
He gave it another kick as if to prove his point. It shook and the reverberation passed through the floorboards and very faintly through the rest of the house. “Is everything okay?” the brother called up.
“Still okay,” the wife called down. “He's just upset at an inanimate object. Is Karen fine?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She's eating a popsicle.”
He could feel the sweat cooling on his skin, on the back of his neck and his arms. “Wait,” he said. “I have an idea.”
“Great,” she said.
He ran downstairs, past his daughter, down to the basement. For a moment he thought of salvaging the cigarette from his pocket but he ignored that impulse and rifled through cabinets. Their wedding pictures had been shoved down here, baby pictures, old lamps and a dead lawnmower he had always meant to repair.
He found it behind the boxes of toilet paper and tissues. He lifted it up for the first time in years, heavier than he remembered, or possibly he had weakened. Years had passed, after all. When he came upstairs she said, “What the hell is that?”
“The persuader,” he said, and he fastened it tight, put all his back into it. She gasped in surprise when it all came loose. Some water dribbled onto the floor but not much. He did it again and then a third time, until he could unscrew it the rest of the way with his hand. She found a towel and they got on their hands and knees.
Toby gathered the radiators in the front room. He didn't know if he was making his life better or worse by doing this but he was doing it. Karen ran her fingers along the metal. Now that the radiators had been freed from their normal use they seemed miraculous and strange to her. “Don't climb on them,” he said, but his voice was even, almost kind. His wife's brother came up behind him and made a little noise but that was the only sign of judgment he gave. Then he moved off to some other part of the house.
For a moment nothing had happened. He felt her eyes on him as he strained and he decided that this would be his final failure and then, just on the heels of that thought, no, there will be more. But then the rush of release and her surprised noise making. Later after he had removed two more radiators he sat at the kitchen table drinking a glass of water and said, “Did I ever tell why my father named it that?”
“I saw why,” she said. She was smiling faintly. Her brother was outside now waiting for her but she seemed to have decided to let him wait for a few minutes while they talked. Her hair was a mess and her clothes were covered with dust but yes, she was smiling, but sadly, at the whole of the house and what had just transpired. Later he knew that they'd probably fight about the money from the radiators—he'd demand more than half—but just then they occupied a small space between arguments.
“That's not what I meant,” he said. “It was a joke.”
His father did not tell jokes. But that had been one. The naming of it. It was like a dog deciding to meow, that kind of funny, and explaining it to his wife would drain the humor from it with each word. His brothers would understand but he had lost touch with them over the past decade. His mother had died in Scotland last spring, had even been buried there.
“He got it from a drunk,” he said, but in trying to resurrect the story he realized how much of it could not be brought back. The barest scraps remained and those were dried out and uninteresting. “I should finish this up,” he said. His hands ached and something had happened to his knee. He slid his chair back and stood with some difficulty, both hands on the table for balance. That would have to go too. He'd give it to her.
“I'll help a little more,” she said.
He took the wrench with him, set on the front seat like a passenger. His wife took Karen.
“I'm telling you that you can't come over,” Karen said. “Not now and not ever. Can you understand that? It's done. I'm done. Okay? Are you listening to me?”
She wasn't screaming but she wasn't exactly speaking either. Her voice hung in some middle place between hysteria and reason. She had been living in that middle place for weeks, when waiting in line at the grocery store or running by the river in the early morning. She'd see someone who looked something like him—the barest implication of him in the way a body filled its clothes and moved through the air—and she'd go rigid and cold. Nineteen and her first real lover had turned into a maniac.
Often she thought she had turned him into one—he had been so sweet in those early stages of their courtship—but of course that was ridiculous. Still she could not help but think that she had unlocked something inside him and now that it was out in the world she could not put it back in that soft, dark place where it had stayed hidden for those five months of restaurants and long talks and tentative lovemaking in his drab student apartment.
“Just an hour,” he said. “You waste that much time watching TV shows you don't even like.”
He wanted to come over and speak to her in person, explain his perspective, and his voice was the more reasonable sounding of the two. Anybody hearing their inflection and volume, a person listening in, would have considered her the crazy one. And she felt like the crazy one now too. The more he talked the more reasonable he seemed and more unfair and ridiculous she became. She hadn't even explained to him why she had cut it off. She had treated him poorly, delivered the news by letter and—she knew this and thought he did too—she had lied to him, a slant of the truth so it caught the light in a slightly more attractive way. Those were the kinds of lies men usually told, her father being a good example, and they told them to themselves as much as to others.
“I'm in bed,” she said. “I'm practically asleep,” which was also not true. She added, “We've talked so much already. At some point it's impossible to listen anymore, you know?”
He explained that he had spent a lot of time on her, doing things he didn't necessarily enjoy. He did not enjoy art museums, for instance, and he did not enjoy baseball, but he had done both of those things for her. Now she could pay him back in some small way. Then if she wanted she'd never have to see him again. He'd transfer to a different college even, or go back home to Wyoming and live with his parents for a year. “Shoveling cow poop,” he said, and she saw his shy smile in her mind's eye. She paced the room as he spoke, the phone cord sometimes tangling around her wrist like a bracelet. Occasionally one of her housemates peeked into the room and she mouthed some silent words back at them.
His dislike of the museum was news to her and it hurt her to think of him being bored as they moved from room to room, from romantics to minimalists to—and remembering the day she suddenly realized he had been most bored at this point—the expressionists. During this walk she had told him about her hidden ambitions. She wanted to travel, and not just to Britain and Europe, but Russia, East Germany, China, South America. There were many other ways to live. She knew that but did not know the details. She told him this and thought he understood because of his quietness and patience.
Sometimes when they made love she thought of her hands on a different body, a woman, sometimes someone she knew and sometimes a complete fantasy summoned from the ether, and she knew with a new conviction that this was also something she wanted in her future. This was the thing absent from her letter that made it a lie, and omitting it had made her want it even more. It seemed as simultaneously impossible and natural as riding a taxi through a Parisian street. But all she wanted to do in this moment was run along the river and watch the lights on the boats at their moorings. It seemed odd that people might be out there on the water. The height of casual decadence.
“Look,” he said. “I'm coming over. I don't even have to come inside. We can talk in your backyard. But I have to see your face.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why do have to see my face?”
“I just do,” he said, and the line went dead.
She dropped the phone and listened to it buzz. The operator came on and asked if everything was okay and still she didn't move. She thought about another boy, sixteen, who had angered her father when he had honked his car horn in the driveway. For the first time since she had cut him out of her life she wished that he was here, all that anger directed at someone who deserved it. Except that Peter didn't deserve it, nobody deserved her dad's bitterness. Better that he was gone. Last she had heard he lived somewhere out in southern Texas. For a flash she imagined that it was him coming over, beer cans in the back of his old Impala, always ready to say I love you over and over like he was trying to convince himself.
Peter lived four blocks away. He'd be walking, maybe running, so that didn't give her much time. “Is everything okay?” the operator asked. “Hello?”
“Yes,” she said, and she put the phone back in its cradle.
They were watching Reagan in the living room. He was talking about Russia again in his fatherly way. If you just listened to the sound of the voice it was easy to believe that he was talking about a different time and that there were no troubles at all in the world. But all the voice did now was annoy here. She said, “I'm going out,” and a few heads nodded. She was pulling on her windbreaker.
Sherri said, “I'm going to kill him when he comes here you know,” but she was still watching the face on the screen.
She headed out toward the back but she could hear a commotion in the front. He was coming in as she was going out and she could hear Betty yelling, “She's not here. She's not here.”
She had miscalculated. She turned and saw a glimpse of his bright orange cap through the hallway but she wouldn't let herself stop and focus. She hit the porch striding because she refused to run away from him. She'd leave as if she were just a little bit late. That's the only urgency she'd give this moment.
Except that as she stepped out onto the stairs she saw the cap again. It was the one he wore when bicycling so he wouldn't be hit by traffic and she had once said that he looked cute in it. He was coming around the house full throttle and the second thing she noticed was that his glasses had fallen off and the sight of him without them elicited a momentary feeling of tenderness. She was used to seeing his naked face only after sex or a shower or that one time when she told him it was over the first time and he began to cry. She imagined them on the ground somewhere between the front of the house and the back, waiting to be destroyed.
She slammed the door but he shouldered it in and then she spun and had to break her vow. She was running now. She slammed the screen door but he pushed that open too and by then it had become a game, up through the stairs and he was trailing three other girls now but what would they do if they caught him? She headed to her room and shut that door too but there was no lock and even though she put all her weight into it she did not weigh much more than a hundred pounds, him double that. The door shuddered and then inched open and he said, “What the hell are we doing? It doesn't have to be this way. All I wanted to do was sit on your stoop and hold hands.”
Her friends were standing in the hall watching. One of them, it was Sherri, yelled, “Get out of here.”
She could see a small slice of his face in the space between door and wall: his nose and cheek and a single eye. His mouth breathing heavy and a tangle of wet hair across his forehead. He seemed to be showing some restraint, holding her back, allowing her to keep the door just a little bit closed. Speaking to him was an impossibility though. What would she say? If she began to talk the word please would keep coming forever. Her friends were all screaming now.
A physics major. She could not believe that her wrists had been bruised by a physics major, that a physics major had grabbed her hair and pushed her down on the ground. Her palms had both scraped on the tar and come up bloody and he had said, “What are you doing?” like it was her fault. A physics major, someone who did whatever people like that did—he had tried to explain it but she didn't understand. She just liked to read novels and then talk about them and even the talking part she could do without.
“Karen,” he said. “Stop it,” like she was the one pushing into his room.
The door gave way and then he was there, standing on her little shag rug still breathing deep and heavy.
She didn't know what to do so she fell onto all fours like a dog. He stepped forward and she scrambled around the bed, digging around, and came up with it, more than four feet long, the stupid thing he had given her along with its stupid name which she couldn't remember anymore. A club of a thing she had to grip with both hands and even then it threatened to pull her down. She lurched forward and screamed, “Get the fuck out,” and then, “I'll cave your head in.”
The faces watched from the doorway. For some reason she wanted to scare them too but of course him most of all.
She wished she could remember the story behind it but really that didn't matter because if she swung it around and it hit the side of his head it would have a very important effect. He knew that. It showed in his expression. He had a very intelligent mind and he was probably calculating the odds of it connecting if he moved forward.
She shook it the air as if to ward off evil spirits.
The girls in the doorway began to hoot and howl and one of them laughed and swore at his back. He was surrounded, sort of, and she could tell he certainly hadn't planned it this way. A physics major with books almost as heavy as the weapon she held in her hands.
“I just want to talk,” he said.
She felt the swear words vomit up from some deep place just above her sternum. He was the one who had opened that up in her. She pushed the wrench forward in a stabbing motion. He was the bull and she was the matador and there was even a crowd and they knew who to root for in these difficult times. He stumbled back and she kept moving, arcing the wrench, stabbing, thrusting. He reached out but in such a half-hearted way that he seemed to be saying goodbye. His hands, she noticed, were bloody at the thumbs. He had been biting his nails badly again, working the soft flesh around the cuticle. She was always telling him to stop that. It was like he wanted to eat himself alive, she sometimes told him.
He reached out again to slap at the thing and then, finally with some decisive, he made a hard grab at it. But she had anticipated that and she pulled it the other way across her body in a wide arc like a sword. The thing touched his shoulder and pushed him back and her housemates parted and then he was moving down the stairs and out of her life.
Afterward they took turns holding it and laughing at its absurd weight.
Her father had never done much for her but he had given her this thing when she had moved away and even placed it under her bed where it had stayed for two years with the dust bunnies and shoe boxes. The other girls were laughing one of the smallest, a plucky, smart-mouthed girl from Tennessee, was trying to heft it above her head in a pose of triumph that simultaneously celebrated victory and made fun of all that macho stuff like muscles and tools, violence and pride. She even let out a small roar as she lifted but then back to Karen because she was the one who owned it.
Something important in the naming of an object, almost like naming a dog or a child, but the name was gone. And that loss, she truly felt it as a loss, balanced the adrenalin rush. She vaguely remembered her grandfather tricking someone—she couldn't remember the specifics—into giving the thing up and then it had come to her father and then to her but what was it called? Hard to remember, impossible really, and even harder to pick up the phone and dial her father's number. But that's what she did later that night. She would have not have been surprised if a stranger's voice answered.
“Hello,” he said.
“It's me,” she said. Three years of silence and two more before that when all she could do was say yes and no between bites at the kitchen table during weekend visits. He lived in a different house now, one she had never stepped inside, but she could imagine the dishes high in the sink, the back porch smelling of oil and engine parts and carpet coming up at the browned edges. She knew this would accomplish nothing but she had to ask.