2 March 2004 | Vol. 4, No. 1
Humboldt Haven
The problems with the house project and a good stiff drink seem to go together. A good pair, Wiggles thinks. A half snicker comes up through his throat even as his stomach makes loud noises. Consciously Francis Pikethorn, known as Wiggles to everyone, licks his lower lip and his fingers roll against each other in an expression of suspense. There is, of course, the long wait and the dry throat. The hours since the last drink he quickly counts at the back of his mind. Brushing the thick sandy-colored hair out of his eyes with a flick of his thumb, he thinks that controls are easy this morning. He flicks the thumb again and sees no momentary twitching, no delay in his commands. A day dried out sits well on him, as the saw would if he had wood to rip cut, a wall to erect.
Or if his wife Jenny had not gone off like that.
"It's got to be the house," offers his partner and brother-in-law Abel Damfort. "We have to create something provocative, interesting, damn different about that old house. Make the place shine if we can. Or spout ghosts or break out in a case of the crabs for all I care. It needs a transfusion. Hell, it could burn down in five minutes if we let it. Even most of the drunks have shied away from it over the years. Ever since the Carringtons, both of them, died in there."
He continues, his face showing concern for the old couple. "Oh, the shame of it all, the very damn shame. I hear they were nice folk, decent folk." When he says "decent" it sounds like "dacent."
Wiggles leans over the planning table. He nods at "dacent." He feels drawn and tired to his last bone but speaks more about their troubles. "If we don't get the loan and don't get the house, Abel, we might as well fold up this old two-man company and blow it away. I admit I've blown a few bucks. But I never missed a minute's work. Always gave it all I had. But we need this damn loan or we're history. There's nothing else out there for us."
Pressing his hands down on the tabletop, he stares at them for a long time. His hands are the tapering, long but gnarled hands of the laborer, as if a violinist has encountered other rude tools in life. Scars are as proud as badges on their backsides. One thumb has been found by a three-pound hammer in an errant swing. An arthritic-looking knuckle sits toad-like on the left hand. It has been a long time since the hand has made a tight fist. Not that Wiggles has gone without the need.
Blue-eyed, pasty-faced Wiggles looks at his partner Abel Damfort. Abel is early-forties neat, high forehead, green eyes under woolly dark brows, thick against the short sleeves of his shirt. He has a remnant brogue Wiggles thinks should have long disappeared.
Able listens closely as Wiggles continues. "Before we know it, we'll be as much history as the house. Something's tied to that place like a disease. That's all I can say. Almost cancerous. Something out of the past. Nobody lets on about it from where I sit, but it's there. Our future, for all we know, is tied up in that old house." He makes a half fist with each hand.
Wiggles again finds himself caught in a new kind of trap, can feel it squeezing on him. Words keep coming out of a dark tunnel. At times they come out of someplace he swears he does not know, has never been to. And then there is the little sense of pain that rides in him. He wants to say discomforts but knows he'd be lying to cover his ass. He keeps thinking: That one harsh pain is a stupid little pain, though agonizing at times. It's kind of brittle, like chunks of metal or sparks behind my eyes, squinting now all the time, or thinking I'm squinting. I'm not sure. Jeezus, I must be some kind of mausoleum. A walking museum of crap and crap shoots, booze and broadsides. Jenny'd know.
"Think the bank is holding something back?" Abel's voice matches his face, somewhat masked, reserved, asking for surprises all the time, and not getting them. Not with Wiggles. Without doubt he thinks that he, Abel Damfort, is the rock in this tenuous partnership.
Wiggles Pikethorn shakes his head, thinking he is coming out of a fog. "Look, Abel, honest injun, I'm not hung over as usual. But I spent a sleepless night looking at things. Old reality has come a stop sign on my nightly reveries. I'm not sure if I was caught up in self-incrimination or lost opportunity. Balancing one on the other gets a moment of ease. Doubts keep bugging me, too. Jennie haunts me, her gone off like that, without a true word it seems."
Abel Damfort says, offhandedly, "We don't mention her at home though we hope she's getting along. But no matter what we do, we don't get to change the mind of the bank. Against us since the start they've been, the lot of them. It ain't just your drinking, Wiggles, 'cause they know nobody with a saw and a day dried out is any better than you are. Hell, you about put all their houses together and in order, and all of them needing the mend to boot. Shankhill shitty enough of them were, right here in old Humboldt." He tosses his head in salute of a distant memory crossing his mind.
"What do we do?" Wiggles says, his face looking like the used end of a cork, his eyes in a state of sadness that people notice early about him. He adds, "I wish I had a cool one in my hands right now. Makes thinking so much easier. Finds real words for me I couldn't find otherwise. Not a hint of them."
Wiggles, partly musing, looks over Abel's head as if he were looking into a mirror back of a friendly bar. He says, "We have to keep it historical, even if it's over 150 years old. Them damn historical buffs keep saying that over and over. It's like they got the bank hypnotized, but hell, that's always been part of our plan. So what can we do to make that historical house more attractive? Make people sit up and look at it kind of different. The old couple, the Carringtons, going within a day of each other, carried it for a while, but the old die everyday. It wears off. Just crowds the cemetery."
Abel's face warms as if it has relaxed its guard. "It's marvelous that old man Carrington lived in the house all his 93 years. And her not much behind him at that. That's about all I know, 'cept the house has always had some mystery tied to it, like a tail on a lost kite. Must be something I don't know." Abel's brogue rolls in on itself. "What did his nibs Verikjon have to say at the bank? That one's an odd lot if I have the say on him." He looks down and studies his fingernails.
"Oh, Victor's okay in his own way," says Wiggles. "I tossed down a pint or two with him at the alleys a few times. Said it straight out to me: 'We know how good you are with the hammer and the saw, but you're always on the edge, Wiggles.' He's one of those always using the nicknames, warming your ass for you before they kick it, know what I mean? 'Some of us think when you fall we'll be left holding the bag. That's how simple some prospects can be looked at. There has to be another dimension besides you and your partner to make this house project at least seem bigger than what it is.' I appreciated he didn't dodge me like old man Shillings always did."
They talk and muse a while longer and Abel leaves to do errands. Wiggles Pikethorn, passing Calder Murphy's Bar, the day heavy on him, lets his thirst and dry throat have their way. Long before the day is over, Jennie floats in the mirror behind the bar. She floats beside the front elevation of the Carrington house. She won't let go, no matter where she is, where she ends up.
And he is damn sure he is not going to let go the opportunity with the Carrington house. He is on the griddle and he knows it.
It is after midnight, the stars hammered in place over Humboldt and the whole valley as if bright nails have been slammed with a six-pound peen onto the dark sky. Somehow, in a comfortable stupor, as he might call it, Wiggles finds his way to the house against the side of the hill. The two huge double-trunk maples out front are catching the breeze and bouncing it like chunks of sherbet. It had been said old man Carrington had split them as saplings with a keen knife in prospects of having four children. The idea of eternity strikes Wiggles, seeing an image of the young Carrington full of hope. Life sucks, Wiggles thinks, thinking about the Carringtons subsequently spending almost a century here without any kids. It makes him lonely, desperately lonely, and he can go no farther in thought than half eyeing Jennie down the line someplace hosting someone else with her goodness. And minor retribution for his own lifestyle piles on its weight in its own way.
Through the leaf clusters and fractured-hand limbs of the maples, he sees a dozen stars in their nightly revolutions. A minor glimmer of a shooting star comes in sight and he hears himself say, "They always come back." It is his one stand in life. He is not sure he says it in response to the revolution of the nightly stars, or his thinking about people nearing the point of no return. He further acknowledges that man and stars are in some mix of existence whose solution is a mere grasp away from him. It is a glare of light that fast retreats.
Myriad thoughts notwithstanding, before long he finds himself in the keeping room of the Carrington place, a room that runs the whole back end of the house. The huge walk-in fireplace is cold looking, monstrous, out of place, as if to say it will be the last surviving part of the structure. The house-wide landing above the fireplace, on the second floor level, still holds a worn rail with oddly thick balusters. No doubt it has prophesied children for years on end; company for the split maples out front, he affirms. But it is the silence of the keeping room that guns down Wiggles and he sits in a lone chair left in a corner, sweet as an afterthought, a condition of hope, and a place for at least one more visitor. Eternity bounces around him, with a sense of time that few men can measure. He is sure of this.
Within himself he is, for a long time, bouncing ideas, himself being bounced around. What eventually drove him to such an odd errand he has no idea, but he is dynamically pushed and pulled by powers other than his own. In short order he is in the cellar of the old house.
In one corner of the vacant cellar that ran halfway under the house, the other half a sort of crawl space beneath one half of the keeping room, he finds a construction of wood. It is an immovable box of sorts. To it he takes an old pry bar that hangs on a wall remnant of an old coal bin. The air has kept its coal smell as sharp as ever, like a taste of kerose