Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Page 8

  I bolted down my gnocchi so quickly that it formed a baseball in my throat, while my father and Dwayne sucked and panted over their scaloppine. I was rigid with anger, at the farce of the dinner, at having wasted an evening that at this time tomorrow my father surely wouldn’t recall. As soon as Lucy returned to the beef cheeks congealing on her plate, I planned to excuse myself and go home.

  But ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed and Lucy didn’t reappear. I rose. I couldn’t find her in the bar, and she wasn’t out smoking on the sidewalk. The uncivil waitress I enlisted couldn’t find her in the ladies’ room.

  “She’s gone, incidentally,” I told my father.

  He frowned and grunted, as though I’d just read him a distressing headline on a subject he didn’t entirely understand. I tried Lucy’s phone. It rang in my father’s pants.

  We loitered for another twenty minutes over coffee. By then the place was filling up and the waiter, unbidden, delivered our check. My father gazed down at the little folio but didn’t open it. His eyes were tired and dull with colada rheum. “A hundred and fifty-seven bucks, Dad,” I said, reading the bill. “Thank you, by the way.”

  “I can’t pay,” my father said.

  “Why not?”

  “Wallet’s in my coat,” my father said. I sighed and slipped my credit card into the plastic flap.

  Out on the sidewalk, rain had stopped, but the autumn chill had solidified into a true and bitter cold. My father, in his shirtsleeves, wrapped his arms about himself and shrank into his collar. “I’m putting you in a cab,” I said. “What’s your hotel?”

  “Not sure,” he said.

  “Son of a bitch,” I cried. “You don’t know?” I grabbed my father and turned his pockets out, looking for a room key or a card. He submitted to the search without protest, looking at me with fearful eyes.

  “That’s cold,” clucked Dwayne, who for reasons that weren’t clear had not yet bid us adieu. “Shaking your old man down like that.”

  “Stay out of it,” I snapped. “We’ve got to find her. She’s walking. I guess I’ll just spend a fucking fortune on a cab and see if we can find her on the street.”

  “If I may,” said Dwayne, “I do have a vehicle at my disposal. It would be my pleasure to drive you boys around.”

  “You’ve got a car, Dwayne?” I said.

  “I do indeed,” he said. “Just around the corner. I’ll go get it. One small difficulty. Where I have it stowed, I need a dub to get it out.”

  “What’s he want?” my father asked.

  “He wants twenty dollars,” I said.

  “Okay. So give it to him.”

  “I don’t think I will.”

  “Quit dicking around,” my father said. “It’s late and I’m tired. Give him that money.”

  I gave Dwayne the bill, and he sauntered off down the street. My father clutched himself while the traffic bleated and the crowds brushed past and the wind made a frowsy ruin of his thin gray hair. “It sure will be nice to get into that car,” he said.

  “There isn’t any car,” I said. “He isn’t coming back. That was another twenty dollars of mine you just threw away.”

  My father rocked back and forth on the soles of his feet and looked off in the direction Dwayne had gone.

  “Tell me you’re sorry,” I told him.

  He squinted against the wind, his face like a fist. “For what? For the money? For the bill?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s start there. The twenty. Say you’re sorry for that.”

  He gazed down the sidewalk, where a pigeon was pecking at a cocktail sword. It got the blade in its beak and waddled proudly down the street and vanished, turning right on Minetta Lane. At last, my father sighed and said something in a quiet, remorseful voice.

  “What?” I said. “Say that again, so I can hear.”

  He grimaced, hunching slightly as though a sudden pain had gripped his stomach. “Bishop,” he said, and turned away.

  “Bishop,” I repeated.

  “Bishop to G-5 pins Black’s knight against the queen.”

  Seconds later, an aged white Mercedes pulled up, Dwayne’s wide greenish face leering at us from behind the wheel. Dwayne reached over and let the passenger door swing wide. “You came back,” I said.

  “True,” said Dwayne.

  The backseat was full of newspapers and bedding. A grim reek of urine and old laundry was close in the car. My father and I shouldered in together on the bench seat. Wind was blowing through the passenger’s-side window, and when I reached across my father to work the crank, a crumbling horizon of glass rose in the pane and spilled into my father’s lap.

  “Yeah. Some asshole broke that out,” said Dwayne.

  My father said nothing. His teeth were chattering, and his lips hung slack and wet. He looked hopelessly old, and his eyes were large and vacant. A sorrow hit me then, and I might have embraced him or taken his hand, but Dwayne hit the gas, and the Mercedes leaped across Houston Street. We struck a pothole with a heavy thud. The impact sent swaying the load of junk and bangles hanging from Dwayne’s rearview—Mardi Gras beads, feathered gewgaws, sports medallions—and my father watched the swinging mess with all the fascination of an infant watching the mobile over his crib. He reached out and caught hold of a miniature New Mexico license plate. He frowned at the embossed letters reading “Land of Enchantment.”

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “It’s just some bullshit I picked up on the road,” said Dwayne.

  “No, this word here, ‘enchantment.’ What’s that mean, again?”

  “Shit,” said Dwayne. “You know what charm is, Roger?”

  “Of course,” my father said.

  “It’s like that, like charm.”

  My father leaned against me, studying the orange Braille. “Land of Charm,” he said.

  DOWN THROUGH THE VALLEY

  When Jane left me for Barry Kramer, it was a heavy kind of hurt, but by the time she took up with him, there wasn’t a whole lot left of us. For quite a while, we’d been nothing but an argument looking for different ways to happen. Barry had been her meditation instructor, something he did before he started his business of going around to companies and teaching managers how to keep the lines of communication open. I had ignored the advice of friends and encouraged her relationship with Barry because her sessions with him did seem to calm Jane somewhat and also made her less inclined to drink herself into black dudgeon and curse me for the years she couldn’t get back. But it was not a pleasant surprise when I came home one afternoon, and there, in the sunlight on our living room floor, was Jane sitting in her brassiere, Barry’s hands on her bare shoulders. When I walked in with our daughter, Marie, they both jumped up and started laying on about how Barry was just showing off some new shiatsu moves. I then lashed out at Barry with a piece of hose I’d brought home to stick on the bath spigot. I shouted and made my daughter cry. I broke some things. I made promises of more and worse violence, and Jane left with Barry and Marie. I remember her standing in the doorway with an armful of clothes, her jaw muscles standing out and her telling me how I’d rue what I had done.

  And she was right: I did wind up ruing it, but after a while, neither often nor deeply. Jane bought out my share of our house at a fair price. I took a place outside of town, a redone shotgun cottage on six acres with a creek running through the yard. The house suited me well, except for a million black wasps chewing holes in the clapboards. The little fellows made an awful grinding racket, and on weekend afternoons when feelings of failure and regret could not be kept at bay, I found pleasant distraction in squirting poison up those holes.

  I dug myself a garden, and a stray cat I grew to like would come around to sulk in the corn. I forced myself to seek new love, and for a while, I thought I’d found it with a girl from my office. She was molten in my bed, but she also suffered depressions that were very dear to her. She would often call just to sigh at me for two hours on the phone, wanting me to applaud her depth
of feeling. I cut it off, then missed her, wishing that I’d at least had the sense to take her naked photograph.

  I saw Jane once each month, the day I came by to borrow Marie. Jane was prettier now that she’d given up alcohol for the herbal program Barry’d put her on. She didn’t seem to hate me anymore, and usually received me with a kind of sour concern. “I was sorry to see you sneaking past the house the other night,” she said one time. “It’s not good for you. Also, if you’re going to make spying on people a regular thing, you should fix your exhaust. Sounds like someone in a suit of armor getting dragged up the street.”

  Mercifully, she was gone most of the summer after our separation, to Mendocino, California, Barry’s hometown, to Oregon and Sedona, Arizona, and then back here and off again soon after to a retreat up in the mountains to interface with cedar trees and experience cosmic episodes. Jane surprised me with a phone call early one morning in September. I was awake already, listening to the wasps eat my house.

  “We had an accident up here at the ashram,” Jane said. “I need you to come get Marie—Barry, too, if it’s all right.”

  I got hot with her, thinking that Marie had hurt herself while the grown-ups were off grooving on the nectar of supreme instruction, but Jane said no, it was Barry. He had fallen off the roof or something, and now he needed to come home because he couldn’t do any postures on a busted ankle. She explained that Barry was not in a way to operate a clutch pedal or to pitch in on babysitting while Jane was on a session. It would really help, she said, if I would come and do this thing.

  I didn’t like driving my car too far past the city limits, and I wasn’t overly excited by the notion of a long ride with Barry Kramer. But I was heartened that Jane wanted to get us to a place where we could start doing favors for each other. It was her sort of olive branch, more wood than fruit. I told her okay.

  The retreat was up in the western part of the state, three hours away. I followed Jane’s directions down some winding back roads, parked and got out in a very nice spot, a wide field of goldenrod running down to a lake the color of new blue jeans, with thick black woods darkening the water’s edge. Not long ago, I’d read in the papers about a woman who died near here under strange circumstances. She’d disappeared one weekend, camping with her husband. The papers painted it like he’d killed her, but just before the police booked him, a hunter had shot a black bear with part of the lady’s hat in its stomach, a funny kind of good news for the widower.

  Walking down to the compound, I passed a young woman sitting on a picnic table with a baby at her breast. Little kids were doing the bat-hang on a wooden jungle gym. A boy who was hoeing up a pea patch said he knew my ex-wife and pointed at the canvas hut where she was staying.

  Barry was sitting on the floor in there with his bad foot up on a bench. He watched me come in. His beard had more white hairs in it than when I’d seen him last, but he was still a handsome man. No belly, smooth skin, full head of hair, better-looking than me. “Hi there, Ed,” he said. Jane hadn’t been kidding about that foot. It was in awful shape: gray from toe to shin with a swirling purple galaxy of a bruise over his anklebone.

  I went and shook his hand. “Damn, Barry,” I said. “You should’ve called me up before gangrene set in.”

  He looked at his foot and made a gesture like he was waving away a smell. “Bad sprain, that’s all. Nothing to it. Just need to give it some R & R and let the body do the rest. The pisser is I put down a deposit to stay through the first, and they won’t give it back. You might think it’s share and share alike in a place like this, but believe me, these people count every bean.”

  The door slammed and Marie came in. When she saw me, she closed one eye and shied away in put-on bashfulness. Then she held out her arms for me to snatch her up, which I did.

  “I was playing with Justin and look what I got,” she said, angling her wrist at my face. The skin there was raw and sticky. “Poison sumac,” she said with pride.

  “Yuck,” I said. I set her down again. “Hey, Barry, I might like to say hi to Jane, if you know where she’s at.” I hadn’t told her yet I’d filed papers at work for a move to Hot Springs, where a new branch was opening up. I’d get a raise if the job came through, and I’d have some people working under me. I wanted to catch her up on that.

  Barry shook his head. “Can’t happen, I’m sorry,” he said. “She’s in the middle of an isolation.”

  “Well, I’ll just stick my head in and say hey real quick.”

  “I’m sorry, but they won’t let her have visitors right now, not me or anybody. Not for thirty-six hours. Maybe you’d like to leave a note.”

  I thought about it. “Nah, don’t guess I need to. Might as well just hit the road.”

  Barry pulled himself up on an old metal crutch with a folded towel where the pad was missing. I tried to take his pack for him, but he made a show of wanting to carry it himself. He struggled behind me up the path, having to stop about every five steps to hitch the strap.

  We reached the car, and I held the door open for him, but he didn’t climb in right away. He stood there rocking on his crutch, gazing off at the sky and the fields and the fall trees starting to go the color of sherbet. He scratched his sooty beard and took in loud, greedy breaths. “Man, will I miss this,” he said. “Actual, clean air. Thank God there’s something left the bastards haven’t been able to slap a brand name on yet. Kills me to leave this place.”

  A flock of geese rose from the far side of the lake and drifted into a spotty boomerang formation overhead. Barry hoisted Marie up so she could see over the car. One arm slid across her shoulders, the other caught her in the crook of her knees, and he propped my daughter on his stomach in a way that showed he’d held her like this many times before. With her eyes on the geese, Marie tugged idly on Barry’s ear with her scabby little hand. I watched them, and they watched the geese, which called to each other in voices like nails being pulled from old boards.

  I put the front seat up so Barry could crawl into the back and stretch out. He stuck his crutch in first and braced it on the seat as he eased himself into the car. The crutch didn’t have a rubber stopper on the tip, and it hung up on the upholstery and ripped a little crown-shaped hole in the vinyl. Barry looked at me to see if I’d seen it, then gave a guilty wince.

  “Ah, jeez,” he said. “Barry, you clumsy son of a bitch.”

  I let out a breath. “No big thing,” I told him.

  He fingered the tear. “Tell you what. We’ll get one of those kits. You know those things they sell? We can fix this, easy.”

  “Not a hole that big you can’t. Forget it.”

  I moved to put the seat back, but Barry put his arm against it. “Hey, hey, hold on a second, Ed.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t need to get short with me. We’ll fix it. If we can’t do it ourselves, take it to a place, on me. Really.”

  “Nobody’s getting short,” I told him. “This car’s a bucket. I could buy another one for what it’d cost to fix that rip. Now watch your arm.”

  “Can I give you a few bucks at least?” He reached for his wallet.

  “No.”

  I strapped Marie into the shotgun seat, and we rode out of there. Soon we were rolling along the ridge that runs parallel to the state line.

  Up ahead, looming over the road was a split crag of rock reaching high into the air. It had the look of a crow’s head, its beak parted for the worm. “Hey, Marie, what’s that rock look like to you?”

  She thought it over. “An ass-butt,” she said, and laughed like hell.

  “Interesting,” I said. “I don’t see it.”

  “You know what that is?” Barry chimed in from the back. “That’s actually the hardened lava from a dormant volcano. The outer layers of sediment weather much faster, so it just leaves you with a sort of a cast of the core of the mountain.”

  ______

  Soon Barry dozed off. He was leaning his head on the window just behind my seat, and
his breath whistled through his thick mustache. There was a smell to him, soap and sweat and sour milk.

  I asked a lot of people about Barry when Jane got mixed up with him. I knew a lady who’d legged down with him one time. She said the weird stink of him had been a problem, which I was pleased to hear. She also said that he had a huge banana, that he did breathing exercises beforehand, and that afterwards he’d gone in the kitchen and whipped up a big beet salad.

  I looked in the rearview. Barry had his good foot propped on the back of Marie’s seat. His pants were hiked up, showing a shin about as big around as a deer’s leg, and covered so thickly in coarse black hair you could have hung a toothpick in it.

  Already, I was regretting doing Jane this favor. My mind was wandering. You can’t sit in a little Datsun car with your wife’s new lover without recollecting all the nice old junk about her that you’d do better not to haul up. Her belly slumping against the small of your back on a cold morning. The slippery marvel of her soaped up in the shower. A night long ago when you moved on each other so sincerely that you sheared off two quarter-inch lag bolts that held your bed together. But start playing back all the old footage, and pretty soon Mendocino Barry steals into the frame, his bare dark-brindled haunches in your bed, candles and an incense stencher fuming on the nightstand. You can see him tucking a yellow thumbnail under the scalloped elastic of her bikini underpants and shucking them down slow, maybe with a word or two about lotus blossoms. You don’t want to picture how she lifts her hips up off the bed, the openmouthed anticipatory shivers, or Barry rearing up in a sun salute between her splayed knees, his tongue lolling like a tiki god in ugly throes. You don’t want to get into thoughts about Hovering Butterflies or the Jade Stalk, or the Door of the Holy Abode, when you can remember one time, a few times actually, when you came home late under a fair amount of liquor and you got on top of your sleeping wife, going, “Come on, Mother, can’t we poon?”

  It made me feel queasy. I shook off a shiver and I reached over and patted Marie on the head. She was starting to doze.