Free John's Wife: A Novel by Robert Coover

trees and boulders, though he’d left a lesser-known back route open for the man with snowplow and mower he’d hired to keep the airstrip cleared. The first time Dutch saw the place, flown up there by John in a late-summer fishing party (no women on these hometown group occasions, often as not no Bruce either), he was reminded immediately of the clubhouse they’d built as high school seniors on his old man’s property at the edge of Settler’s Woods. He divined at once therefore the full range of activities the cabin had been designed—or redesigned—for, and was not surprised to find a bidet in one of the bathrooms, which John shrugged off as a fancy of the previous owner. Even the cabin’s lone piece of art, a splotched and ripped-up canvas, hanging in shreds like something spilling from an open fly (people were crazy, what they paid money for these days), was not unlike their clubhouse’s tattered pinups clipped or torn from old magazines. For most of the men in the fishing party, if not for Dutch, it was a time up here for escaping their women and the prescripted town-bound lives those women had made for them, a time for virile reflection in the wild to which they all felt they’d been born, but from which somehow mysteriously expelled, a time to shoot and hook and kill and to eat the killed and, unnagged, drink their fill, a time to tell stories not elsewhere tellable and to test one another in all the half-forgotten ways of old. Thus, pissing, shooting, angling, and drinking contests, all-night high-stakes poker, manhood-challenging wisecracks and shower baiting. Again, Dutch thought, so like the days of the “getaway,” as they’d called their old clubhouse (and as Dutch now called his motel bar, located on the clubhouse site), except that women, still a novelty, were more important to them then, a female body, most often human, frequently the arena for their manly competitions. John, unrivaled cherry-picker with his own vast resources, was a rare participant in those gangshags of old—or “club sandwiches,” as they were called back then—though when caught up in one, as at the climax of his own stag party, an event arranged by Dutch as a wedding gift to his former Little League battery mate, he never shied from joining in, firm and upright clubman that he always was.
    Bruce, best man when John, constructing story, married the builder’s daughter, was also at the stag party the night before, a reassuring event for Bruce, faced with the disturbing prospect of John’s seemingly straight-faced plunge into the wedded condition and the consequent loss of his one true companion in this ludicrous shithole of a world. Bruce, a city boy, albeit less of urb than sub, approached this remote hog wallow that day with trepidation, a stranger to its hobnail country ways, except so far as John had acridly portrayed them on their college drinking bouts, visions dancing in his booze-bruised head of desensitized TV zombies dangerously adrift on potholed junker-lined streets, of blue laws, Bible Belters, and bottle flies, and of ersatz icecream parlors crawling with pimply beauty queens and noisome brats. When asked what was the principal activity of his hometown, John had once replied: “Ass scratching. Two-handed.” John had given the real world up for this? Well, John had added: “Like every other place I know,” it’s true. It was Bruce’s world still strewn with antique values. A “diseased romantic,” John had called him once, or someone had and John had laughed, Bruce, too, admitting it was so, and adding that it was a glory ‘ole that had corrupted him—cuntamination, he called it—the first he ever knew: “Birth robbed me, buddy, of my fetal hopes and innocence, it’s been downhill ever since I slid that fucking tube.” Arrival was by rented car, John’s airport not yet built back then of course, a numbing passage through vast treeless fields and desolate commercial strips as alien to human life