If It Bleeds Read online

  It was like no writing experience Drew had ever had in his life, and when hunger pangs finally pulled him from his trance (his breakfast had consisted of a bowl of Quaker Oats), he looked at the info strip on his laptop and saw it was almost two in the afternoon. His back ached, his eyes burned, and he felt exalted. Almost drunk. He printed his work (eighteen pages, fucking incredible) but left them in the output tray. He would go over them tonight with a pen—that was also part of his routine—but he already knew he would find precious little to correct. A dropped word or two, the occasional unintended repetition, maybe a simile that was working too hard or not hard enough. Otherwise it would be clean. He knew it.

  “Like taking dictation,” he murmured, then got up to make himself a sandwich.

  13

  Over the next three days he fell into a clockwork routine. It was as if he had been working at the cabin all his life—the creative part of it, anyway. He wrote from seven-thirty or so until almost two. He ate. He napped or walked along the road, counting power poles as he went. In the evening, he lit a fire in the woodstove, heated up something from a can on the Hotpoint, then called home to talk to Lucy and the kids. When the call was done, he would edit his pages, then read, choosing from the paperbacks in the upstairs bookcase. Before bed, he damped the fire in the woodstove and went out to look at the stars.

  The story rolled. The pile of pages sitting next to the printer grew. There was no dread as he made his coffee, took his vitamins, and brushed his teeth, only anticipation. Once he sat down, the words were there. He felt that each of those days was Christmas, with new presents to unwrap. He barely noticed that he was sneezing quite a lot on the third day, or the slight roughness in his throat.

  “What have you been eating?” Lucy asked him when he called that night. “Be honest, Mister.”

  “Mostly the stuff I brought, but—”

  “Drew!” Dragging it out so it was Drooo.

  “But I’m going to buy some fresh stuff tomorrow, after I finish working.”

  “Good. Go to the market in St. Christopher. It’s not much, but it’s better than that nasty little store down the road.”

  “Okay,” he said, although he had no intention of going all the way to St. Christopher; that was a ninety-mile roundtrip, and he wouldn’t be back until almost dark. It didn’t occur to him until after he’d hung up that he had lied to her. Something he hadn’t done since the last few weeks of working on Village, when everything started to go wrong. When he had sometimes sat for twenty minutes in front of the same laptop he was using now, debating between a grove of willows and a copse of trees. Both seemed right, neither seemed right. Sitting hunched over the laptop, sweating, resisting the urge to pound his forehead until he jarred the right descriptive phrase loose. And when Lucy asked him how it was going—with that I’m worried furrow in her brow—he had replied with that same single word, that same simple lie: Okay.

  Undressing for bed, he told himself it didn’t matter. If it was a lie it was a white one, just a device to short-circuit an argument before it could be born. Husbands and wives did it all the time. It was the way marriages survived.

  He lay down, turned off the lamp, sneezed twice, and went to sleep.

  14

  On his fourth day of work, Drew woke up to plugged sinuses and a moderately sore throat, but no fever he could detect. He could work through a cold, had done so many times in his teaching career; prided himself, in fact, on his ability to bull through while Lucy had a tendency to take to her bed with tissues and NyQuil and magazines at the first sniffle. Drew never scolded her about this, although his mother’s word for such behavior—“spleeny”—often came to mind. Lucy was allowed to pamper herself through her twice- or thrice-yearly colds, because she was a freelance accountant, and thus her own boss. In his sabbatical year that was technically true of him, as well… except it wasn’t. In The Paris Review some writer—he couldn’t remember who—had said, “When you’re writing, the book is the boss,” and it was true. If you slowed down the story began to fade, as dreams did on waking.

  He spent the morning in the town of Bitter River, but with a box of Kleenex near at hand. When he finished for the day (another eighteen pages, he was absolutely killing it), he was amazed to see he’d used up half the tissues. The wastebasket beside Pop’s old desk was drifted with them. There was a bright side to this; while struggling with Village, he had regularly filled the wastebasket beside his desk with discarded pages of copy: grove or copse? moose or bear? was the sun brilliant or blazing? There was none of that bullshit in the town of Bitter River, which he was increasingly reluctant to leave.

  But leave he must. He was down to a few cans of corned beef hash and Beefaroni. The milk was gone, ditto orange juice. He needed eggs, hamburger, maybe some chicken, and for sure half a dozen frozen dinners. Also, he could use a bag of cough drops and a bottle of NyQuil, Lucy’s old standby. The Big 90 would probably have all that stuff. If it didn’t, he’d bite the bullet and drive to St. Christopher. Turn the white lie he’d told Lucy into the truth.

  He made his slow, bumping way out Shithouse Road and pulled in at the Big 90. By then he was coughing as well as sneezing, his throat was a little worse, one ear felt stuffed up, and he thought maybe he had a touch of fever, after all. Reminding himself to add a bottle of Aleve or Tylenol to his shopping basket, he went inside.

  Roy DeWitt had been replaced behind the counter by a scrawny young woman with purple hair, a nose ring, and what looked like a chrome stud in her lower lip. She was chewing gum. Drew, his mind still turned on from his morning’s work (and maybe, who knew, that little touch of fever), saw her going home to a trailer up on cement blocks and two or three kids with dirty faces and home haircuts, the youngest a toddler dressed in a saggy diaper and a food-stained tee-shirt saying MOMMY’S L’IL MONSTER. That was a meanly vicious stereotype, and elitist as hell, but that didn’t necessarily make it untrue.

  Drew grabbed a market basket. “Do you have any fresh meat or produce?”

  “Hamburgers and hotdogs in the cooler. Couple of pork chops, maybe. And we got coleslaw.”

  Well, he supposed that was produce of a sort. “What about chicken?”

  “Nope. Got eggs, though. Might be able to raise a chicken or two from those, would you keep em in a warm place.” She laughed at this sally, exposing brown teeth. Not gum after all. Chaw.

  Drew ended up filling two baskets. There was no NyQuil, but there was something called Dr. King’s Cough & Cold Remedy, also Anacin and Goody’s Headache Powder. He topped off his shopping spree with a few cans of chicken noodle soup (Jewish penicillin, his nana had called it), a tub of Shedd’s Spread margarine, and two loaves of bread. It was the spongy white stuff, pretty industrial, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. He saw soup and a toasted cheese sandwich in his not-too-distant future. Good grub for a man with a sore throat.

  The counter woman rang him up, chewing away as she did it. Drew was fascinated by the rise and fall of the stud in her lip. How old would Mommy’s l’il monster be before she had one just like it? Fifteen? Eleven, maybe? He told himself again that he was being an elitist, an elitist asshole, in fact, but his overstimulated mind kept running along a trail of associations just the same. Welcome Walmart shoppers. Pampers, inspired by babies. I love a man with a Skoal ring. Each day is a page in your fashion diary. Lock her up send her b—

  “Hundred and eight-seventy,” she said, snapping the flow of his thoughts.

  “Holy crow, really?”

  She smiled, revealing teeth he could have done without seeing again. “You want to shop out here in the willies, Mr.… Larson, is it?”

  “Yes. Drew Larson.”

  “You want to shop out here in the willies, Mr. Larson, you gotta be prepared to pay the price.”

  “Where’s Roy today?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Dad’s in the hospital, over St. Christopher. Got the flu, wouldn’t go see the doctor, had to be a man about it, and it went pneumonia. My sist
er’s sittin my kids so I can mind his business and lemme tell you, she ain’t happy about it.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” In truth, he didn’t care much one way or the other about Roy DeWitt. What he cared about, what he was thinking about, was DeWitt’s snot-clotted bandanna. And how he, Drew, had shaken the hand that had been using it.

  “Not as sorry as I am. We’ll be busy tomorrow with that storm comin in over the weekend.” She pointed two spread fingers at his baskets. “I hope you c’n pay cash for that, the credit machine’s busted and Dad keeps forgettin to get it fixed.”

  “I can do that. What storm?”

  “A norther, that’s what they’re sayin on the Rivière-du-Loup. Quebec radio station, you know.” She pronounced it Kwa-beck. “Lots of wind and rain. Comin in day after tomorrow. You’re out there on the Shithouse, ain’tcha?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if you don’t want to be out there for the next month or so, you might want to pack up your groceries and your luggage and head back down south.”

  Drew was familiar with this attitude. Up here on the TR, it didn’t matter if you were a Maine native; if you didn’t come from Aroostook County, you were considered a namby-pamby flatlander who couldn’t tell a spruce from a pine. And if you lived south of Augusta, you might as well be just another Masshole, by gorry.

  “I think I’ll be okay,” he said, taking out his wallet. “I live on the coast. We’ve seen our share of nor’easters.”

  She looked at him with what might have been pity. “Not talking about a nor’easter, Mr. Larson. Talking about a norther, comin straight across O Canador from the Arctic Circle. Temperature’s gonna fall off the table, they say. Goodbye sixty-five, hello thirty-eight. Could go lower. Then you got your sleet flyin horizontal at thirty miles per. You get stuck out there on Shithouse Road, you stuck.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Drew said. “It’ll be—” He stopped. He had been about to say It’ll be like taking dictation.

  “What?”

  “Fine. It’ll be fine.”

  “You better hope so.”

  15

  On his way back to the cabin—the sun flaring in his eyes and kicking off a headache to go with his other symptoms—Drew brooded on that snotty bandanna. Also on how Roy DeWitt had tried to man through it and wound up in the hospital.

  He glanced into the rearview mirror and briefly regarded his red, watery eyes. “I am not getting the fucking flu. Not when I’m on a roll.” Okay, but why in God’s name had he shaken that son of a bitch’s hand, when it had undoubtedly been crawling with germs? Ones so big you’d hardly need a microscope to see them? And since he had, why hadn’t he asked for the bathroom so he could wash them? Christ, his kids knew about hand-washing. He’d taught them himself.

  “I am not getting the fucking flu,” he repeated, then dropped the visor to keep the sun out of his eyes. To keep it from flaring in his eyes.

  Flaring? Or glaring? Was glaring better, or was it too much?

  He mused on this as he drove back to the cabin. He brought his groceries in and saw the message light was flashing. It was Lucy, asking that he call back as soon as possible. He felt that tug of annoyance again, the sense that she was looking over his shoulder, but then he realized it might not be about him. After all, not everything was. One of the kids might have gotten sick or had an accident.

  He called, and for the first time in a long time—since The Village on the Hill, probably—they argued. Not as bad as some of the arguments they’d had in the first years of their marriage, when the kids had been small and money tight, those had been doozies, but bad enough. She had also heard about the storm (of course she had, she was a Weather Channel addict), and she wanted him to pack up and come home.

  Drew told her that was a bad idea. Terrible, in fact. He had established a good working rhythm and was getting awesome stuff. A one-day break in that rhythm (and it would probably end up being two, or even three) might not put the book in jeopardy, but a change in his writing environment could. He would have thought she understood the delicacy of creative work—at least for him—after all these years, but it seemed she didn’t.

  “What you don’t understand is how bad this storm is supposed to be. Haven’t you been watching the news?”

  “No.” And then, lying for no good reason (unless it was because he felt spiteful toward her just now): “I have no reception. The dish doesn’t work.”

  “Well, it’s going to be bad, especially up north in those unincorporated townships near the border. That’s where you are, in case you didn’t notice. They’re expecting widespread power outages because of the wind—”

  “Good thing I brought Pop’s type—”

  “Drew, will you let me finish? Just this once?”

  He fell silent, his head throbbing and his throat aching. In that moment he didn’t like his wife very much. Loved her, sure, always would, but didn’t like her. Now she’ll say thank you, he thought.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I know you took your father’s portable, but you’d be down to candlelight and cold food for days, maybe much longer.”

  I can cook on the woodstove. It was on the tip of his tongue to say that, but if he broke in on her again, the argument would veer onto a new subject, the one about how he didn’t take her seriously, so on and so on and yada-yada-yada.

  “I suppose you could cook on the woodstove,” she said, in a slightly more reasonable tone, “but if the wind blows like they say it’s going to—gale-force sustained, hurricane-force gusts—a lot of trees are going to fall down and you’ll be stuck out there.”

  I planned to be out here, anyway, he thought, but again held his tongue.

  “I know you were planning to be out there for two or three weeks, anyway,” she said, “but a tree could also knock a hole in the roof and the phone line is going to come down with the power line, and you’ll be cut off! What if something happened to you?”

  “Nothing’s going to—”

  “Maybe not, but what if something happened to us?”

  “Then you’d take care of it,” he said. “I wouldn’t have gone haring off to the middle of nowhere if I didn’t think you could do that. And you have your sis. Besides, they exaggerate the weather reports, you know that. They turn six inches of fresh powder into the storm of the century. It’s all about ratings. This will be the same. You’ll see.”

  “Thank you for mansplaining that,” Lucy said. Her tone was flat.

  So here they were, going to that sore place he’d hoped to avoid. Especially with his throat, sinuses, and ear throbbing. Not to mention his head. Unless he was very diplomatic, they would be mired in the time-honored (or was dishonored more accurate?) argument about who knew better. From there they—no, she—could move onto the horrors of the paternalistic society. This was a subject upon which Lucy could expatiate endlessly.

  “You want to know what I think, Drew? I think when a man says ‘You know that,’ which they do all the time, what they mean is ‘I know that, but you’re too dumb to know that. Hence, I must mansplain.’ ”

  He sighed, and when the sigh threatened to turn into a cough, he stifled it. “Really? You want to go there?”

  “Drew… we are there.”

  The weariness in her tone, as if he were a stupid child that could not seem to get even the simplest lesson, infuriated him. “Okay, here’s a little more mansplaining, Luce. For most of my adult life, I’ve been trying to write a novel. Do I know why? No. I only know it’s the missing piece in my life. I need to do this, and I am doing it. It’s very, very important. You’re asking me to risk that.”

  “Is it as important as me and the kids?”

  “Of course not, but does it have to be a choice?”

  “I think it is a choice, and you just made it.”

  He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough. “That’s pretty melodramatic.”

  She didn’t chase that one; she had something else to chase. “Drew, are you okay? Not coming do
wn with something, are you?”

  In his mind he heard the scrawny woman with the stud in her lip saying had to be a man about it, and it went pneumonia.

  “No,” he said. “Allergies.”

  “Will you think about coming back, at least? Will you do that?”

  “Yes.” Another lie. He already had thought about it.

  “Call tonight, okay? Talk to the kids.”

  “Can I talk to you, too? If I promise not mansplain anything?”

  She laughed. Well, actually more of a chuckle, but still a good sign. “Fine.”

  “I love you, Luce.”

  “I love you, too,” she said, and as he hung up, he had an idea—what English teachers liked to call an epiphany, he supposed—that her feelings were probably not much different from his. Yes, she loved him, he was sure of it, but on this afternoon in early October, she didn’t like him much.

  He was sure of that, too.

  16

  According to the label, Dr. King’s Cough & Cold Remedy was twenty-six per cent alcohol, but after a healthy knock from the bottle that made Drew’s eyes water and brought on a serious coughing fit, he guessed the manufacturer might have lowballed the content. Maybe just enough to keep it off the Big 90’s liquor shelf with the coffee brandy, the apricot schnapps, and the Fireball Nips. But it cleared his sinuses most righteously, and when he spoke to Brandon that evening, his boy detected nothing out of the ordinary. It was Stacey who asked him if he was okay. Allergies, he told her, and repeated the same lie to Lucy when she took back her phone. At least there was no argument with her tonight, just the unmistakable trace of chill in her voice that he knew well.

  It was chilly outside, as well. Indian summer seemed to be over. Drew had an attack of the shivers, and built up a good fire in the woodstove. He sat close to it in Pop’s rocker, had another knock of Dr. King’s, and read an old John D. MacDonald. From the credit page at the front, it looked like MacDonald had written sixty or seventy books. No problem finding the right word or phrase there, it seemed, and by the end of his life, he had even attained some critical cred. Lucky him.