Crickets
The clatter of the pesky crickets on his front porch and in the basement of his farmhouse kept Harlan Becker awake… or more than likely it was the dread of the day to come that was getting to him. Whichever, he tossed and turned while Alyona slept soundly beside him. How can she sleep? he wondered. She knows what a son of a gun tomorrow’s gonna be. She drank a lot more than I did. But, damn it, she’s caught up in this mess every bit as much as I am.
“Alyona, wake up, for Pete’s sake.” He nudged the woman with his shoulder. This is exactly what I get for lettin’ myself get involved with a woman half my age, he grumbled to himself. She’s totally oblivious to the real world and its perils.
“Go back to sleep,” said the twice-divorced, thirty-eight-year-old bank teller he’d stumbled upon a year ago while making a sizable deposit at the Wells Fargo branch on the edge of town, the woman he’d left his wife of thirty-six years to be with. “You need to get your rest. You’re gonna want to have your wits about you in the morning.” The woman rolled farther away from him in the queen-size bed. His bed. Not hers. The bed he’d shared with his wife until just after last Christmas.
“Those crickets are driving me nuts. Can’t you hear ’em? We should’ve spent the night in town at your place.”
Alyona sighed. “You hate my apartment. Don’t you remember? Plus, you’ve got to see to it that your precious cows get milked. Or have you forgotten about your darling cows?” She threw back her shoulders then turned toward him. “You’re just stewed up over what that judge might say.” She exhaled loudly. “It’s gonna be all right. I got through it, you know. With my husbands, both of them. So will you. Now get some sleep. You’re gonna need it.”
“I can’t sleep with those crickets making all that racket.” Harlan sat up. “And we both know that that judge is goin’ to throw the book at me.” I never should’ve left Edith, he wanted to tell her, but he didn’t dare. Alyona, though usually fun-loving, sometimes a little too light-hearted for her own good, had a quick temper; the mere mention of Edith’s name set her off on one of her booze-fueled tantrums.
“We don’t know any such thing,” said Alyona. Her black, torn-around-the-collar Guns N’ Roses t‑shirt slipped down over her narrow shoulder. The shirt was a far cry from Edith’s tidy flannel nightwear. The sight of the younger woman’s bare skin still titillated the farmer even after what she’d put him through only a few hours earlier. “You worry too much. It’s a divorce hearing, not a murder trial.” The woman turned toward him, yawned then plopped her head back onto the pillow. Edith’s pillow.
Geez, thought Harlan. Doesn’t she know that there’s a chance that I could lose this house…this farm… everything? All that my family has built up over generations, down the tubes. And all because I fell out of love with Edith and into love with hot-to-trot Alyona. Though is this love? Really? Or is it something else? Sometimes Alyona’s indifference baffles me. She can be so blasé about everything. Totally indifferent when it comes to my concerns. So wrapped up in her own little world of expensive manicures and attention-grabbing outfits.
Harlan sat up and pressed his back against the cool headboard, the antique oak headboard from his parents’ bed. The bed that he could very easily have been conceived in fifty-eight years ago creaked along with the crickets. He listened to the deep breaths of the woman beside him, in and out like the shaft on the engine on the steam locomotives his grandfather used to work on when times were bad, back in those hard-luck depression days. A parttime brakeman, a fulltime dairy farmer, but most of all, like Harlan’s own father, a decent enough man. Not the kind of man who would fool around with a younger woman and get caught. No one in his family had done what Harlan had so foolhardily done.
How did I get myself into this? he asked himself. Edith and I were happy. Happy enough. Then along came Alyona and whoosh I was in bed with her and out of love with my wife. Yet, I guess I must’ve no longer been in love with Edith. Not really. Everything with Edith had just become routine. I am in love with Alyona, sort of, but in way that too often makes me feel like I’m drowning. I don’t know why I feel like I do. I can’t seem to find my way up to the surface to gasp for air. And Alyona doesn’t give a damn about me. I know that all too well. I’m just a passing phase in her life. She’s had her share of men, while I’ve only slept with Edith and now with Alyona. And only because it makes me feel…what?.. how does it make me feel?… younger?… more alive?… I guess. But far too often, I just feel old… and ridiculous.
With Alyona again fast asleep, his boxer shorts wedged into him from behind, the crickets keeping rhythm to a song only they could hear somewhere beneath the house, Harlan sat alone in the darkness of his living room, his and Edith’s favorite room in the old house. He speed-dialed his wife’s number on the far-too-expensive phone Alyona had persuaded him that he needed, just to “keep pace” with the rest of the world.
“Edith,” he whispered when she answered. “It’s me.”
“Harlan, it’s two-thirty,” said Edith.
“I just needed to talk to you. Those crickets are at it again. And I can’t sleep.” He paused. Then, “Do we really want to go through with this divorce business tomorrow?”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No.” He lied. With Alyona it was vodka — every night — something entirely new in the fourth-generation Methodist’s life. Something, he suspected, not so new in Alyona’s.
“Go back to bed,” said Edith. “She’s there with you, isn’t she? In my house. Shame on you, Harlan.”
“No, no. I’m alone. I knew it would be a tough night.” Harlan bit at his lip. “What d’ya say, Edith? Let’s put off tomorrow. We need to slow things down, don’t ya think?”
“I think you need to go back to bed,” said Edith, “and get some sleep. You’re gonna need it. We both will.” She sighed deeply. “You’ve made a mess of things. Now you’re gonna have to live with the mess you created.”
“We can work things out. I know it.”
“Harlan, go back to bed… with that hoochie coochie girlfriend of yours. I know she’s there. You’re hopeless, Harlan. Do you realize that? Hopeless.”
Harlan looked out his window into the mid-summer darkness. “Edith, what did you do about these crickets. They’re drivin’ me nuts. Did you spray for them or what?”
“They didn’t use to bother you. You used to sleep right through a tornado. Harlan, I swear, you’d sleep through the second coming.”
“I think they’re more of ’em than there used to be. And they’re louder.” He never liked it when Edith made light of his religion, such as it was, and now, with his being a sinner and all, her sly comments got to him more than ever. His wife, much to his displeasure, was a lapsed Baptist, the worst kind of a fallen person.
“Go back to sleep, Harlan. I’m plumb worn out. This isn’t going to be easy for either of us.”
Harlan inhaled. “Do you know how they make that sound? The crickets? That sound they make?”
Silence on the other end of the line.
Harlan had always hated his wife’s passive-aggressive way of dealing with him when she was irked by his shenanigans. Still, he trudged on. “They wear little tiny corduroy pants. And when they rub their legs together the pants make that cricket sound.” He chuckled.
“Harlan, go back to bed. You’re drunk. Or just crazy.”
“I heard that joke years ago on the Johnny Carson show,” said Harlan. “I forget who the guest was who said it that night.”
“I’m gonna hang up now, Harlan. We both have a difficult day ahead of us.”
Harlan placed the phone on the coffee table that he and Edith had found in a seedy used furniture store on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis that first year of their marriage, before Jennifer and Curt were born, before Harlan became president of the Clay County Farmers’ Association. Before he was rich. Before he dropped into the Wells Fargo branch on the outskirts of town. He again looked out the window into the darkness. He was startled by his own reflection in the picture window and by Alyona’s overbearing image over his shoulder, her hands on her hips like a drill sergeant glaring down a difficult recruit.
He turned. “I had to call Edith about the crickets. I thought she’d know what to do about them.”
Alyona shrugged. Her t‑shirt lifted. She wore nothing underneath it. He remembered the vodka and sexual aerobics just a few hours earlier. He remembered his own reticence to be as bold as the younger woman would’ve liked him to have been. He remembered being hopelessly enthralled by her abandon when it came to morals and such.
“She said we should spray for the crickets,” said Harlan. “That’s what she used to do. I read somewhere that some people eat them as a delicacy. In other parts of the world. Can you believe that?”
The woman sucked in air through her perfect, white teeth, shook her head then returned to the bedroom. Harlan sat alone and listened to the little fiends beneath his house, the house his parents had lived in, as well as his grandparents and their parents before them. To hell with those damned pests, thought Harlan. Goddamned nuisances.
The front door slammed like a rifle shot in November, hunting season, as he searched frantically for a can of Raid in the cabinet beneath the sink. With Alyona gone and the crickets taken care of he just might get a few decent hours of sleep before he milked the cows then festooned himself in his sport coat and faced the music in that courtroom. It would be good to see Edith again, even under such difficult circumstances. She always knew how to take care of things. Like pests in the basement and what tie he should wear and with what shirt and with what jacket. She always knew how to deal with such things.
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