Hex: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

nothing has changed.
    Thingy’s father, Mr. Clawson, had a collection of steins in his basement entertainment room. He arranged them seasonally in the niches behind his half-bar with the two mahogany vinyl-padded bar stools which always squeaked when we came down the stairs as if a party of somber drinkers, already elbow-deep in their beers, were turning to observe us, not particularly impressed. The steins were lidded and fanciful. Some were ceramic, some pewter. There was even a wooden one, the belly linedwith lead, a motif of berry-laded vines massing up its sides; one stein even glass, soldered into panels, the glass old and wavering toward its bottom, the lid tinted an optimistic pink. Do I need to say how much I loved them? They were forbidden; they were jealously tended. Sometimes Thingy would take them from their niches and we would consider them closely. Thingy insisted on holding them. I constrained myself to reaching out one finger to mark the dust in the pursed mouth of a rosebud or brush a cobweb from the brim of the mountaineer’s cap. Sometimes, I fit my thumb into the groove at the top of a handle and pressed the lid slowly open and shut.
    The mountaineer stein was a particular favorite of Mr. Clawson’s. This was another ceramic mug, the base thick and imprinted with the name of its Swiss manufacturer. The lid was shaped like a mountain top—austere and alpine, its glacial peak bearing no resemblance to our own worn, tree-furred ridges—and the handle was an oversized, rosy-cheeked, loden-capped yodeler, lips puckered, head flung back, pheasant feather unfurling brilliantly down his spine. It was a beautiful, foolish thing. Mr. Clawson was proud of it.
    “Purchased from a store on Mount Blanc,” he told Thingy and I as we sat uneasily on the barstools. He was drinking clear liquor from a tiny glass into which he would sometimes allow us to dip the tips of our tongues. “Little place, untouched by time, the glacier melt turning a water wheel outside.” Mr. Clawson considered the stein ruminatively, turning it to its best advantage. “It made a little scooping noise. That’s the only way to describe it. That water wheel I mean, and the glacier water like milk, I mean milky like what is that liquor? Ouzo? The one the Greeks drink. Right away I knew I had to have it, and what’s the name for a glacial valley, Ingrid? Morass, that’s right.”
    Then us alone, Thingy with the stein cradled in her lap, her corduroy skirt pulled over her knees to form a sling for it, and I with my rough finger pressing the hinge that would make the mountain open and the mountaineer’s head tip back still further, unperturbed, whistling now in idiot surprise to see the wall of rock suspended above his face. But of course it never fell. The mountain opened and shut, hollow, disgorging no treasures. When one day we filled it with water from the bar sink and each took prim, sacrosanct sips, the only prophecy the stein reflected was the sad fate of a spider, washed from her web, drowning peevishly in the water’s dusty ripples. “Yodeleheehoo,” I instructed Thingy, but she was listening to the sound of her mother’s footsteps in the kitchen above our heads and she would only titter. “Hee Hoo, Hee Hoo,” she said while clapping the lid of the stein roughly shut.
    In the other real world that was going on all around us it wasn’t as simple as clapping the top of the mountain back on, but this was the general idea. The new mining concerns understood the pace of the century better than the old loners. Certainly, better than the gaunt, blackened pickmen with their company issued work pants and their 1930’s collectivism who were so saturated with coal dust that when cut they bled first black and only later a reluctant red. What I’m trying to explain is how it was to be a child then. Thingy and I can be imagined in any number of topical scenarios—picture the legwarmers and Thingy’s flaxen perm—and that would be