The Annie Year. Stephanie Wilbur Ash

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СКАЧАТЬ dip his middle into the chair across from my desk usually reserved for clients and then stretch his long body out at both ends. He liked to show off all the time how big he was, but frankly, I always thought it made him look loose, gangly, disconnected at all the important parts. The fingertips of his big hands would touch one wall of my office while his dirty boots rested against the other wall, and every time he splayed himself out like that, I thought that if he weren’t working for Mueller I would walk right through his body and out the door.

      He would talk for an hour about buying a farm of his own somewhere around here, though I knew he did not have the money and never would. You can’t just buy a farm around here anymore unless you inherit a farm from your parents that you can leverage, or you are a famous actor or professional athlete, or you are a corporation. While he talked, I would nod and say, “Mm-hmm,” and “Of course,” but mostly I watched him touch everything on my desk. He was very lazy about his touching. He touched whatever was nearest him first, and when he was done with that he would reach a little farther away for the next closest thing. Sometimes when I saw him parking his pickup in front of my office, I would quickly move around the items on my desk to see how easy it would be to control the order in which he touched them. It was very easy.

      “Next year, I think,” he would say. “Next year, when the interest rates fall.”

      “That is prudent,” I would say.

      Then I would wait for him to lean over the desk and kiss me. It always took a long time for him to get there, but in his defense I never told him to do it any differently.

      The day that Barb broke her silence and asked me about him, I spoke to Clive while I was waiting. “My friend asked about you today.”

      “You have friends?” he asked. I do not know if he was joking or asking an honest question. Understanding him was never a priority.

      “Her name is Barb and she works across the street,” I said.

      He paused a bit, and the corners of his mouth turned down, and then his hands began to lazily finger the items on my desk again: the stapler, the coffee mug from the bank, the letter opener. “Maybe she wants to take me out on a date,” he said. “Unless you have any better ideas.”

      I did not have any better ideas, which is a sad thing to admit. Still, I knew that eventually his mouth would be on mine, large but hollow, like a wet plastic bag over my face. I waited some more, and then it was there, and then I imagined myself poking through his face with the letter opener.

      I kissed Clive until school let out in the hopes that the Vo-Ag teacher would come back and see us there. And when the Vo-Ag teacher didn’t, I stopped kissing him and I told him I had to pick up Subway for Gerald, though Gerald could very well pick up his own, and Clive left.

      I’m not proud of this. Don’t think I am. It’s just that these are the facts.

      The next day at lunch the Vo-Ag teacher tried to get in my office again.

      I said, “I have an appointment,” but when I tried to close the door, the Vo-Ag teacher stuck one of his ridiculous man clogs into the doorway, which propped it open wide enough for him to get his bony fingers in. Once he had wrapped his fingers around the door there was nothing I could do.

      I’ve smelled a mowed ditch a million times, and probably you have too. Or maybe not. I don’t know what kind of smells you have in the cities where you live. But I’d never smelled something like that on a man’s actual body, and twice in one week in November, when there is not supposed to be a freshly mowed ditch smell around here.

      It was like a memory. It was like something I inherently understood, but I can’t tell you why.

      He walked right past me through the waiting area and into the back room where I sit with clients and do my work; I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t say, “Would you like some coffee?” or “What can I help you with?” All I could do was wonder: What kind of a man makes himself smell like a mowed ditch?

      I thought, An idiot, that’s who.

      “Whoa!” he said.

      “What?” I asked. It was just my office: a little waiting room in the front, with an olive-green vinyl love seat and some magazines, and my work space in the back where I sit with clients. There is a large desk made from a dark wood and another smaller desk for my computer, plus two chairs. And, of course, the U.S. Tax Code, all twenty volumes of it, bound in green with shiny gold lettering.

      Understand that this is not an unusual office. Except for the Tax Code, it’s the same as Doc’s office up at the hospital, or Huff’s law office around the corner, or the home office they share at the shit-shingled house where Doc fell asleep on the living room couch after my father died and still sleeps to this day. And my office is no different from offices of CPAs and lawyers and doctors in Fayette and Independence and even in Postville and Winona and Rochester—pens and pencils in a mug from the bank, a desk pad calendar with circled coffee stains all over it, a letter opener, a stapler, a print of ducks or maybe pheasants.

      I myself have a print of a great blue heron, even though they are not normally found around here so far from the river, but my father was fond of them, so it stays, right by the door. I also have a print of a child swinging on a rope into a big pile of hay with an A-series John Deere tractor in the background, even though children here don’t do that anymore. I got it at Huff and Doc’s garage sale right after I got my CPA license. I paid Huff thirty dollars for it, but Doc put the money in my mailbox a few days later with a note that said, Keep your mouth shut about it.

      The Vo-Ag teacher said, “Those books. Is that...?”

      “Yes,” I said. “That is the U.S. Tax Code.”

      “Wow,” he said. “Makes things pretty tight in here, doesn’t it?”

      I said, “I just had one of my clients in here yesterday, a very tall man, and he had plenty of space. He stretched out to the point of being nearly horizontal.”

      I looked directly into the Vo-Ag teacher’s face in the hopes that he would get the message.

      “Hmm,” he said, “that’s interesting,” though he did not clarify what about it was interesting to him.

      He smiled. He was a man who smiled at strange times, times when I knew he could not possibly be happy. He said, “Well, it does make a statement about the state of our world.”

      “It’s the U.S. Tax Code,” I said. “It makes statements about taxation.”

      “Po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to,” he said.

      I have never heard a single person say po-TAH-to.

      I decided to treat him like any client. “Have a pen,” I said, and gave him one of those pens I had made up with my name on it.

      He took it and read it out loud: “Tandy Caide, CPA.” Then he said, “Public accountant, private person.”

      “You don’t even know me,” I said.

      “Everyone around here says so. ‘Tandy, now she’s a private person.’”

      “Who says that?” I asked.

      “Dieter,” he said, and he smiled again but his eyes went СКАЧАТЬ