Nothing Better To Do - a novel in stories - Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

It seemed that time was passing him by. In any event, something was passing him by, the music, morality, technology? Modern culture, in general, had suddenly gotten beyond him. Dot com. Dot com. Everything was a damn dot com. Television, radio, even billboards; dot com this, dot com that. Or, perhaps, he should say this dot com, that dot com. That was the order of it, wasn't it? Hell he wasn't even sure about something apparently as simple and common place as that. He knew it had something to do with the internet, whatever that was. Should he go on the way he was and let all this new-fangled computer stuff pass him by, or should he try to catch up? That was the question of the day for Hank Pitts.

One day he was driving over to Dayton in his pick-up when he spied a new store that had moved into one of those strip malls that had died of too much competition. "Comp U.S.A." was what the sign said. Hank figured it must have something to do with computers. It was a big place and there were lots of cars parked out front. He felt as if he could go in and wander around without being noticed, without makin' a fool out of himself. Hell, why not? Everything was an experience, and you can almost always learn from experience.

Hank felt like a groundhog who'd sprung bear trap. He'd asked a simple question of a salesman and ended up buying a desk top computer with a zillion gigabytes of somethinerother, which he was assured was "user friendly" and came with lots of free software and free internet service for a year.

He was so excited, he forgot what he had been going to Dayton for in the first place. He turned the truck around and headed right home. He was goin' on-line.

He soon discovered that "user friendly" is one of those relative terms. Hank was getting a headache trying to figure out what went where. He wasn't even sure what did what. But he got through it and, by nightfall, the colored lights of the computer screen were reflecting in his eyes and he heard those magic words for the very first time, "Welcome. You've got mail." The mail was from some fellow named Steve Case, who said he was the C.E.O. of America On Line and hoped that Hank would have a good time using his service. "That's nice," Hank mumbled to himself.

Hank thought this was pretty damn hot stuff. He was amazed by all the things his new computer could do. The only problem was, he didn't seem to need any of them. Oh, sure, he could write a letter, but he had no one to write to. He could email his kids, he supposed, but he didn't really have anything to say to them. He'd always been a man of few words. They knew he loved them. He didn't have to email that to them. What about this internet stuff, he wondered, the so called World Wide Web.

He surfed the web, as they say, night after night, until he finally decided that he had no practical use for it. One night his son called, said he'd been having trouble getting through. The line was always busy. So Hank told him about his new computer.

"You've got email, Dad?" his son had sounded amazed. "Wow, Hank Pitts has opened the 21st century with a bang."

So his son gave him his email address and that of his daughter, and Hank tried that out, but he was still a man of few words. The computer would sit there for days, sometimes weeks, before Hank would turn it on out of boredom. When he did, he would check his mail. Once in awhile, he would get a message from one of his children, but mostly there were advertisements, the junk mail of the internet. He heard they called it "spam". Hell, he liked spam, especially with grits and eggs. But he didn't like this stuff. He would delete it all without reading it.

One day he went online to check his mail and found that he had a message from someone named Debbie. Debbie was a window clerk at Post Office where Hank had been Postmaster before he retired. She'd be retiring, herself, in less than a year. He knew she had America On Line, because they had discussed it. She thought it was the bee's knees. She liked to do something called chat. It seemed to Hank that "chat" was all she did at the Post Office all day long anyway. Why she had to go home and chat some more was beyond him.

He wondered what Debbie could want. He hadn't been over to the Post Office for a few days. Perhaps he had a package. He opened the message. It said, "Click here for a good time." It was underlined, which Hank had learned meant to move the cursor onto it and click, and you'd get something else.

She must want to tell me about the Saturday Night Bean Supper over at the Legion Hall, he thought. Hell, I already know about that. He clicked anyway.

What he saw next changed old Hank Pitt's life forever. The screen filled with naked bodies doing all kinds of things to each other that they shouldn't be doin' in public, at least to Hank's way of thinking. The internet is public, isn't it? Hank asked himself.

Since his wife died, Hank hadn't been much for going to church, except for funerals and weddings. And when he was young, before he got married and settled down, he had been a randy son-of-a-gun. Of course, these days, his life was more sedentary. Maybe once a week, he'd drive over Hollowbrook to see the Widow Hutchinson.

So Hank was curious. He'd heard about this pornography on the internet, but he'd never seen it, himself. After awhile, he figured out what all this surfin' the web must really be about. No wonder so many folks were staying up all night playing with their computers.

Night after night, Hank surfed the web. There were thousands, no millions of pictures, mostly of women, letting men do horrible things to them. Some of them were teens. Some of them were grandmothers. Some of them were heavy-set and beyond. Some of them were even men that liked to dress up like women. But mostly they were beautiful young women with perfect bodies, what you might call models. Hank wondered where they got all these women, so many women who were willing to humiliate themselves in public. That's what it was wasn't it? Weren't they worried that someone they knew might see their picture? Weren't they afraid that they might be recognized?

He began to examine their eyes. He no longer cared to look at their breasts or their vaginas. He cared about their motivation. Maybe he even cared about them. He looked deep into their eyes and, mostly, he saw nothing. Especially with the model-types, there was nothing behind that shiny veneer of what he preferred to think was feigned enjoyment. These were the ones he called the professionals.

But, every once in awhile, he would come across a photograph that would strike him differently. There would be something in the face that would get his attention. He couldn't call it emotion. In these pictures, even indifference might pass for an emotion in comparison to the posed expressions of the professionals. It was sadness. Yup, he decided, that was what it was. Sometimes the sadness would show through, and that was what Hank set out to look for.

Every night on this new-fangled gadget with a zillion gigabytes of whatever, Hank would look for sadness. And when he found it, he would save it with the click of a mouse. He must have saved a hundred photographs of the deep sadness of humiliated women.

Sometimes, instead of going on the internet, Hank would spend the evening looking at the pictures he had saved, thinking of ways to make them less obscene; thinking, as an artist would, how he could paint these women, capturing their sadness, the sadness alone.

There was one photograph which he kept returning to. It was a photograph of a woman sitting on a toilet. It left nothing to the imagination, nothing, that is, unless you focussed on the sadness in her eyes. He had found it on a site called, "Women with hairy bushes," located at http://www.hairy_bushes.com/.

One night he decided to do something with the photograph. He had a program which could be used to do all kinds of manipulations. He could enlarge. He could sharpen, change the brightness and contrast, alter the colors, all kinds of things. And he could crop.

Hank started by cropping the photograph so that only about a quarter of it was left. All the obscene stuff was gone. What was left was this sad-eyed woman with her hair in disarray, head tilted to her right, resting on one hand. Her blouse was open revealing her small right breast. But it was the eyes that were the important part, eyes which, although they were downcast to the right, seemed to be looking at nothing, as if she were lost in thought.

He tried several crops before settling on one. Then he started using enhancements to take the picture out of the realm of photography and into his world, the world of the painting. He softened, posterized, balanced tone... He experimented over and over until he got it just right.

When he was done, he printed it out on the color printer, for which, up until this point, he'd never had a use. The end result was a painting worthy of Paris museum. "Woman, seated," he called it. Hank taped it on his refrigerator, where he would look at it while he ate his supper every night.

Hank did similar things to dozens of the other hundred-or-so photographs which he had saved, and he often went on the internet looking for more photographs to fix, but nothing came close to his first effort. There was something different about this woman. She looked like a foreigner. He imagined an exotic accent. He wondered about her, more than was, perhaps, healthy. He wished he could make her sadness go away.

As time passed, the Widow Hutchinson began to notice a certain indifference in her lover. He came around less; talked less, if that were possible; and seemed less enthusiastic in bed. She had been thinking that they ought to get married, make one household out of two, keep that rascal away from the Blue Moon. That would make more sense than the two of them carrying on this way, but now the prospect seemed about as remote as the man himself. After awhile, he hardly came around at all.

As for Hank, he stopped going on the internet altogether. He even considered selling the computer, or, perhaps, donating it to the middle school. He'd lost interest in fixing what was wrong with pornographic pictures. Putting brush to paint, to paper was more to his liking. He preferred landscapes, cornfields and farmhouses, woods and streams. Women were a bother.

***

One afternoon, Phil Rowley paid a social call to Mona Payne. It had been weeks since she had made him dinner and he had something he wanted to tell her about her son, another development in his amazing progress; that and the fact that he just plain wanted to see her again. There'd been this gnawing feeling in his chest in the intervening weeks. He needed to do something about it.

They swayed gently on her porch swing as he told her the story:
One Saturday, a couple weeks ago, Hank Pitts and I decided to take a ride down to Keeneland in Kentucky. That's something we do every now and then. It's not like we're gamblers or anything. It's just a day out. For twenty bucks, we have an afternoon's entertainment. I don't know if he mentioned it to you, but, this time, we brought House along with us to kinda give him a change of scenery.

We like to get to the track early to catch the daily double. I bet on a couple numbers I culled from the license plate on the car in front of us as we pulled into the parking lot. That's just something I always do. Hank bet his own plate. He was driving. As you can see, the two of us don't know much about improving the breed. House still had the twenty Freddie Edwards gave him, but he was holding onto it, it being the first money he had ever earned and all.
There were ten races on the card, mostly claiming races, usually about eight or ten horses in a race, so the odds weren't too bad. By the last race, neither one of us had lost much, so we decided to bet ten bucks apiece.

Hank was in front of me in the line at the ten dollar window. House had wandered off to get a hot dog, his third of the afternoon. In front of us in the line, a man and a woman were arguing. It started out soft, then got louder to the point where I thought something might happen. The man was obviously a farmer, dirty and bearded and in overalls. He talked like a man from Paintersville. Hank and I probably looked like a couple of hicks to some of the yuppies in the crowd, but there are hicks and then there are hicks. This guy looked like one of those in-bred types who rarely ventures off the farm. The woman was different. She had what sounded like a Russian accent.

The next thing I knew, the man hauled off and smacked her hard against the side of her head. She went down on her knees sobbing. It must have been a reflex reaction, but Hank knelt down next to her as if he were trying to comfort her. I guess it was a foolish thing to do, because that big hay seed was on a rampage. He kicked ole Hank right in the side of the head. Knocked him unconscious.

Well, I tried the grab a hold of the guy, but he tossed me off him like a bale of hay. Then he started after Hank, again. Suddenly, House was there as if he had just appeared out of thin air. He dropped his hot dog and his drink. Without a word, he grabbed the guy by the straps of his overalls and spun him around in a move that looked something like a pair of figure skaters. Then he shoved the guy to the ground and sat on the his chest. That farmer was big, but he looked puny in comparison to your son. After awhile, the man gave up struggling. House sat on him until the security force arrived. They cuffed him and held him for the city police.

An ambulance was called and the crew tended to Hank and the woman. They said she was okay, but they thought Hank needed x-rays at the hospital. They wanted to be sure he didn't have a concussion. The ambulance took Hank and I drove House and the woman to the hospital in Hank's car.

It wasn't any of our business, but the woman must have felt obliged to explain to us what the ruckus had been all about. She told us that was some kind of mail-order bride from Russia. I guess she would have done just about anything to come to America. She thought she would stay married to the farmer long enough to get a green card, then if she didn't like her situation, she would get a divorce. But she didn't liked her situation from the very start. The farm wasn't all it had been cracked up to be and the man was abusive on just about every level that a man can figure out how to abuse a woman. According to her, what we saw at the track was only a small part of her daily routine.

We waited while they ran some tests on Hank. When they were done with him, he found us in the waiting room. The woman, Irena, kissed Hank on the cheek. Well, he stared at her as if she had risen from the dead. In fact, she did look as if she had just climbed out of a grave. Her hair was a mess. Her skin tone was kinda grayish. And those eyes, those sad eyes. Hank just kept staring into them as if he had been hypnotized.

When I offered her a ride, she told us she had no place to go to.

Hank was acting awfully strange. "You can stay at my place," he told her. "You can stay as long as you want. I'm sort of an amateur painter. Maybe you can pose for me." Then he paused a minute while his face turned red. "With your clothes on, of course. Out on my back porch with my cornfield as a backdrop."

I almost dropped my teeth.

She stayed with him up until a couple days ago. Hank told me, the other day, she got a phone call from a Russian immigrant friend in New York. She promised her a place to stay and a couple of job opportunities. The next day, he drove her to the bus terminal in Dayton.

I don't know what's gotten into Hank, lately. He's been acting strange ever since he bought that darned computer. But there's one thing I do know. If House hadn't been along for the ride, we'd a been in a world of trouble.