| Fiction | 13 Oct 2008 |
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| The River Road, Part Five by Rustin Larson | ||
THE RIVER ROAD
Part 5 of 8
Lenny and Elmo
In the bedroom, the whisky flowed again.
"You know, " Elmo said, recorking the bottle, "I saw your sister a week or so ago." Elmo sat on a wooden chair, backwards, the back of the chair pressed against his chest, his arm resting over its curve, and his drinking glass tilted precariously in his hand.
Lenny leaned on the headboard of the bed and had his boots on the quilt coverlet again.
"You saw, Lola. So?"
"She's pretty."
This made Lenny sick. He was sorry he ever pointed her out to Elmo.
"You could do better, Elmo."
"What do you suppose I got her in the back of my car?"
"Shut up, Elmo."
"And did a little fancy shiftin'?"
"Shut up!" Lenny was startled at the force of his own voice, the way it reverberated. He let his annoyance settle. He ignored Elmo. Through his one good eye, and through the alcohol, Lenny began to ponder the room.
The house in which Elmo lived still had the bric-a-brac his mother had collected throughout her years. There were intricate doilies her own mother had crocheted and given to her as bridal shower gifts. They were now dusty and yellowed with smoke and age and were displayed in many rooms of the house: on the back of the divan, on the radio set, under a lamp near a window in the front parlor, on the dresser in the bedroom upstairs in which Lenny and Elmo reclined and sat carelessly drinking. The house still smelled of pipe smoke and sage. Despite the dust, despite the filth Elmo refused to remove, one could sense the delicacy and sentimentality of Mrs. Carberry still, nearly a year after her death.
Lenny turned his eyes toward the calendar. Sunday December 7th, 1941. The date seemed to be relaying something, but what he could not say. Near the calendar was a framed portrait of Jesus Christ baring his heart--but it was not a normal heart. It was on fire and it had a belt of thorns. Lenny looked at it and he could feel pain--not from any one piece of anatomy, but from everywhere--radiating from the bare light bulb in the middle of the ceiling, from the very room itself. Lenny shifted his weight and found he had been sitting uncomfortably on his pocketknife. Lenny cast his vision toward the glassy black window and noticed the wrought iron flower stand in front of it. On top of the flower stand was not an arrangement of flowers, but instead a tall spool of electrical wire. Lenny meditated on this, but failed to find any meaning.
"Elmo, why is there wire on the flower stand?"
"Huh?"
Lenny giggled, he was feeling friendlier again, "That spool of wire."
Elmo stared at it with, at first, a spark of recognition and then with an expression of ever widening philosophic wonder.
"I dunno..." Elmo said. "That spool of wire," he said, after some thought, " was the last thing my dad brought up into this room."
Lenny giggled again, "W-why?"
"T-Telegraph." Elmo stuttered while bringing the glass to his mouth.
"Oh, come on!"
"No, really! My dad dabbled with gizmos all the time. He was going to run a telegraph from the house to the barn so my mom could communicate with him while he was working in there."
"No kidding?" Lenny guffawed.
Elmo reflected on his mother and grew quiet. Mrs. Carberry had loved this house. As a Baby, Elmo had kicked in her arms as she stood on the porch in the warm spring breeze. In the 20's, when Elmo was 2 years old, he plucked the green grass in the back yard as she hung her wash to dry. When 7 years old, Elmo raced around the entire perimeter of the yard, screaming, "I am Inkpaduta!" as his mother baked coffeecake in the kitchen for the parish sale.
"But hell, I'm the man of the house now, master of my own fate," Elmo said finally and stood and strode over to the window and opened it. He tipped the spool of wire out into the freezing night air. It hit some glass near the ground with a loud crash. The two young men noted the sound momentarily, but it made no lasting impression on either of them, both being quite drunk.
Elmo's hair was short-cropped and red and his pale white cheeks were cratered. He observed the moon as it hovered behind the barn's weather vane. A front of clouds was coming in. Elmo leaned into the cold air for a while and breathed, then he slid the window shut again and picked up his drinking glass from the sill.
Elmo straightened to drink; his undershirt was not white but a stained putrid khaki. He looked like a skinny recruit at boot camp.
For some reason, Elmo thought of his father and that season he bought the Minnesota land. There Mr. Carberry stood, shading his eyes with his hand and scanning the 60 new acres, calculating future profits from soybeans and feed corn. The Minnesota bank that sold the land threw in a repossessed Model A into the deal. Mr. Carberry gave Elmo the car for his 18th birthday. Elmo, for the years he had been driving the thing, never registered it in Iowa and displayed the old Minnesota plates on the back bumper. He never considered it a violation of the law and he relished the sense of mystery it gave him as he drove from one small Iowa town to another.
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