A Peculiar Grace Page 8

  THREE HOURS LATER he was pacing about the general area where the Bug sat well laden but with no sign of its owner. He’d walked both sides of the street a couple blocks either direction from the car. She’d taken the keys and he could see her driving off without him, without even noticing or paying attention to the bags and boxes in the backseat. It was so late past their meeting time he knew there was trouble of some kind. There was money enough in his wallet to call a taxi for the trip home. But the more he paced the more he was inclined to stay. He felt he couldn’t abandon her—a part of him even wondering if this was some test of hers—a notion that rankled yet he understood. That, he decided, was his big problem.

  Compounding his reel of judgment was that he was in the last place good for him to be stranded with this sort of sticky mind-fucking. All those children out in their summer clothes, skin and hearts and minds taut and flushed and tracking as they never would again and their walking around not knowing and he watched in fear of encountering some version of his younger self or selves because she was always with him. Although he had not once been fooled—there never was a girl with hair like hers or the radiant presence that shone just walking. There were a handful of pale imitations but certainly no Emily. He could see each movement of her mouth, lips and eyes saying this to him—those rare occasions when doodling along on some project or sitting gazing blank in the evenings some near forgotten fragment would come back and her voice would be fresh in his head as if she were in the room. Time to time he caught her smell also. For years until they quit making it he used the brand of shampoo that had been hers. Then, suddenly he could no longer find it; replaced or discontinued in the vast shuffling of corporations. Although every once in a while he’d be in a grocery store and a woman would pass him and he would smell that scent. For all he knew it was something else altogether, the whiff of memory false.

  It was really time to go. He was beginning to sweat. The package of haddock, bought on chance, was slowly softening in the heat. He unrolled all the windows to let air in, which was not a bad idea. Stuck another quarter in the meter. If he called the emergency room a peculiar void would leave him fruitless—he did not know her last name, could not claim to be a relative or tell anything about her that would be of help. To her or him. The same with the police. He knew he could learn more if he opened the glovebox to dig through for the paper registration. And gain exactly what? A last name. Perhaps an address in Mississippi that despite whatever half-truths or omissions was not a place she wanted the dogs set loose.

  All this a combination that was grumbling up darkly upon him. He saw and felt and smelt it coming. It was the batwing beating of his heart, the river of youth pouring around him as if he was an old rock stuck midstream.

  “Cool car dude.” A kid passing spoke to him. Hewitt was up on the hood sitting crosslegged. He tried to pick out the body the voice had come from but couldn’t. It was enough to get him down off the hood though. Quickly he peered a last time up and down the block and then dropped down three concrete steps from the sidewalk into a bar. The small tables were filled with hamburger-eaters and salad-grazers and the bar was mostly empty although the bartender was busy with the soda gun. Hewitt sank onto a stool, craning to see if he could spot the Bug through the one small window of eight panes in a single row. The bartender looked at him and Hewitt raised a finger. The bartender nodded, that old wait a minute nod.

  Hewitt said, louder than he meant to, “Please.” And was ignored.

  Then the face struck the air close to him. “Get you man?”

  Hewitt had a draft and drank it down, left a one hundred percent tip and went back out. Christ, beer in the middle of the day. Nothing was working, a nice morning soured, all things changed.

  And there she was. In the driver seat with the door open and her legs lifted to prop through the window. Her feet were bare, the red sneakers gone. She stuck an arm out and waved.

  “I got us some weed,” she said as he got in.

  “Good for you. Can you drive us home now?”

  She looked at him. “Are you alright?”

  “No. I am very much not alright.”

  She was quiet. They sat in the warm car, the smell of fish clean and distinct. Then she said, “Can you show me the way?”

  He sighed and said, “Why don’t you back this buggy out and start to drive.”

  “I didn’t mean to be gone so long.”

  “What you should do,” he said. “Is shut up and drive.”

  “You don’t have to be nasty.” She backed slowly out and started down the street.

  “I’ll make a deal,” Hewitt said. “I’ll point the turns and you take them and we don’t talk.”

  “I was having kind of a nice day.”

  Hewitt pointed right for a cross street and she made the turn. They went along a block of big houses and came to a stop sign. He was already pointing again, his finger a bullet. She put on her turn signal and came to a stop, peering up and down for a break in the traffic, found one and pressed hard on the gas and the Bug jumped forward across traffic and down out of town toward the river.

  HEWITT TOOK A long afternoon nap and left her on her own. When he woke and washed his face and looked out the bathroom window at a scurry of red-winged blackbirds up within the orchard he felt cleared and if not new at least ready to tackle things again. So he went down to find her.

  It was late afternoon, the light softening and the air still. First thing he did was glance out to the road but of course she was not there. If this girl had a pattern it was not going to be simple to discern. He strolled around the flower gardens beyond and above the house, somehow already knowing he was wasting his time.

  No premonition or inspiration but a swollen burst pip of knowing what he would do in her place. His stride smacked home this insight. Across the hard-packed yard passing the VW as if it was not even there. To the forge.

  The door was shut tight but as he pulled it open he smelled the sweet almost evergreen scent of the weed. He went down the steps into the cool of the smithy. She wasn’t there but he was violated. He stood for a minute looking around, then put his hands behind him and leaned back against the big workbench. On top of the brine in the annealing tub was a scattering of sodden ash. And lined up on the edge of the big anvil were five small roaches. Otherwise nothing was out of place.

  He took a little time, studying those roaches. They represented more grass than he smoked in an average couple of months. He could not bring himself to consider what it would be like to smoke five joints in a row and yet there they were. He’d slept only maybe two hours. It was an awful lot of dope. He turned to the far end of the bench where his fine tools were, found a pair of featherweight needlenose pliers and took up the longest of the roaches. Clamped in the end of the pliers and touched with a match he was able to pull three good tokes. Then swiped the four remaining roaches off the anvil and stirred them into the dead coals in the middle of his fire. Before leaving he took up the old pitted poker and stirred the tub of brine so the ashes broke apart and floated downward. He was leaning over the tub watching the small gray motes break apart further and disappear when he realized the dope was kicking in and was pretty good. So he went up the steps already stoned and thinking Good God five of those fuckers.

  Once outside he stopped and drew a breath. It was an elegant evening coming on. A niggle of urgency came over him to find her before it was dark. Then out loud he said,

  “It wasn’t me smoked all that.”

  PERHAPS IT WAS being stoned but he tapped into himself and went directly to where she was. Far back in the collapsed yellowed haybales in the carriage barn—his own hiding place. Knotholes in the barn sheathing let in long slender glides of light. He climbed on all fours over the treacherous stack of bales and hovered on top and then let himself down into the chamber of broken bales where she was flat on her stomach, the barn tomcat above on the bales watching Hewitt as if standing guard over the girl.

  He was too high to touch he
r. Her face was buried in the hay but one eye tracked him. Hay tangled in her hair and stuck to her clothes and welts reddened her legs bare below her shorts where she had hit the hay. He guessed she had gotten to the top of the stack and tumbled down into the nest. He lay beside her, not speaking. The cat above churned forth an engine of contented sound. As if he’d been waiting for Hewitt to show up and take charge.

  Hewitt rolled onto his back away from her and propped one ankle atop the other on one of the sagging bales. Gazing up at the roof rafters dotted with the clay nests of last year’s barn swallows. Who would be returning soon. Way back before the first jet aircraft were invented some farm boy had gazed at swallows and imagined aeroplanes as swift and sleek in swoop and dive as these small birds.

  After a while he said, “Catch one?”

  She said, “When I walked in here the hay looked soft, a dream of a bed. But it’s itchy as shit against my bare skin.”

  “What every farm boy ever spent a summer afternoon on the back of a hay wagon learned long ago.”

  “My trouble is, I smoke one joint and don’t feel a thing so I fire up another and about then things are kicking in sweet so I go for a third and it starts to get weird and I think what you need to do is get a little higher, get beyond this. So I keep going. Usually four joints gets me way past the point where I’m looking back at myself hating what I’m seeing.”

  “Five,” he said. “It was five roaches I found on my anvil.”

  “If you’re going to get mad could you please wait until later?”

  He paused and said, “That’s reasonable.”

  “Five,” she said. “Hah.” She rolled over on her side to face him and pulled her knees up toward her chest, her hands wrapped together to cushion the side of her head. The whites of her eyes seemed ready to seep blood. She said again, “Five. Oh Christ, look at my knees.”

  They were scraped and roughened, red with long scratches where blood was drying brown. Not something the hay had done. He said, “What the fuck happened to you?”

  “I went up the stairs of your workshop on hands and knees. But when I got outside it was so bright I kept trying to pick a point and walk but my brain couldn’t connect with my legs. Then I thought of the barn—I saw this stack of hay earlier while you were getting the gas. That cat showed up and rubbed against me and walked ahead and turned and looked back like he was waiting for me. I fucked up my knees. Hey Hewitt, you ever notice, how on even the most beautiful women their knees are kind of ugly? I mean when they’re standing. Like little bunched up faces?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I always had more of a thing for that soft hollow on the backs of knees.” And told himself Shut up.

  She was quiet also.

  Finally he said, “Can you walk now?”

  “I expect so.”

  He had to help her up over the stack of hay and down the other side but he did so in the way you’d help a less able hiker over a steep series of ledges and she seemed to understand this. Just in the way she accepted that help. He knew the difference even if it had been a long time.

  Out in the yard he was easy enough to take her hand and perhaps she understood the human touch, harmless but not without meaning. And just when he was thinking somewhat the same she said, “I’m growing comfortable with you.”

  There was no reason in the world to reply.

  The sunlight was breaking apart against the lengthening shadows of evening although the air was still warm. He led her around the house, into the midst of the flower gardens. Where a long foot-thick slab of granite lay across two chunks of the same stone, all three pieces marked every eight or ten inches with drill holes that two hundred years ago had been bored into the stone. They sat on the bench, the sun falling against their backs and spreading the paling light down before them and their seat was soft in the curious way of warm stone where they could spy down over the gardens his mother and father built together; had started with the base of the lilacs and peony beds and clump almost a thicket now of ancient Siberian iris and the deep beds of regenerating hollyhocks and tulips and daffodils but then had gone on to build stone walls and terraces and, without tearing out any of the old, had added to what was there, pruning back the old tea and cabbage roses and transplanting some so there was a rose garden and adding new varieties as they went. And bringing in clumps of the more passive wildflowers to dot along the walls, the field daisies and black-eyed Susans, and where the ground ran moist along a seep the beds of ferns and wild columbines and even a careful placing of red trillium. As well as another thirty or forty flowers that Hewitt either remembered the names of when they bloomed or failing that could bend low and still make out his mother’s cursive script of black paint on white placards the size of playing cards. It was a fine garden. From earliest snowdrops and crocus and on through the summer until the frosts of fall had killed all but the asters and butterfly plants a full beauty of flowers surrounded the house—the sort of beauty that demanded to be walked through and observed each day for the changes and to note the short-blooming plants, the rippling rises and falls of color. For Hewitt the gardens were equal parts beauty and fond melancholy; while he tended them best he could it was more in the sense of memorial than as an active partner—the couple who had worked together shaping this structured land and stone and growing ever-changing beauty owned it always. For it took two working in disagreement and glory and frustration and everlasting love to accomplish that.

  Far above to the east the first tendril clouds were turning as the westering sun struck that ridge.

  Jessica said. “Oh my. This is so beautiful.”

  “Well,” Hewitt said. “We don’t have much of a growing season compared I guess with Mississippi but when summer does come it’s a veritable explosion. It’s a weird place to live in a way because you spend so much of the year in cold either coming, staying or going. And then there’s three four months where the earth bursts to generate. Like every growing thing knows its time is short.”

  She turned on the bench, one lock of dark hair a thick just-curl down her forehead, and said, “Did you do all this Hewitt?”

  He didn’t laugh. The garden around and below was rising and falling in waves of color that brightened and dipped as the sun rode across the flowers and shrubbery. “My mother and father made this. I do my best to keep it up.”

  She sat quiet. The sun was on its slow June track as the earth turned. Where the shadows fell cool air was beginning to rise. “My oh my,” she said. “They certainly loved each other, didn’t they?”

  When he spoke it was no simple statement but a full intractable testimony. “They adored each other.”

  She put a hand on his knee and said, “What happened?” Her voice near tender as his own.

  He looked off. The little clouds over the far ridge were gone to blue and black. He did not look at her but in the last of the golden light seeping over them said, “My father died. Mother held out here a couple years and then finally found a reason to leave. Which I think now she had to do once he was dead. She was just waiting for that reason.”

  “What was it?”

  “Me. I was what happened.”

  He thought she was going to ask what had happened to him. The details of what happened to him. Instead she said, “He was truly a good painter, wasn’t he? Maybe even a great painter.”

  Hewitt looked off. The shadows were denser, lengthening, but light remained over the land. He said, “There’s people with opinions all over the map. I never knew how he felt about it himself. He didn’t talk about it. But it was a thing he had to do. I knew that much as a child and know it even better now.”

  “Because you do it too.”

  He faced her and his voice near shredded said, “I do what I do because it’s all I can.”

  She blinked, looked away and looked back. Her voice changed, a tremble. She said, “It sure is peaceful here. Doesn’t that help?”

  Without knowing it he’d tiptoed right up to the edge of his own em
otional fault line on all fronts and her tone more than her words snapped inside him and he said, “I don’t know. Sometimes.” As he spoke a fragment of doubt or worry or pain came over her face and again without any idea beforehand he said, “No, you’re right. I lose sight of it. And I don’t know anything about where you came from or where you’re going but it seems a few more days here wouldn’t do you any harm. Unless there’s some reason I shouldn’t offer it.”

  She took her hand away from his knee. “What do you want, Hewitt? A list of where I’ve been the last ten years? Shit Hewitt, you want it, I can tell you what it’s like. Some things are always the same—there’s always the others. They all live off in the edges, the bits of woods or the underpass or sometimes in shelters but you try to avoid those. And there’s always a big dog guy who’s fucked-up but has a rap about this is the only true right way to live. Like he chose it or something. Nobody ever chooses. It’s easy to get in and hard to get out. And there is always cops and if you’ve really picked a bad place people from social services out tracking you down to give you help which is not the kind of help you want. Night is better than day. Even if at night it’s all drugs and boosting, all crack and heroin and big-ass boys who will work you over even quicker than the cops to try and get you to do what they want which is the only time you get crazy and that stops em fast. Even those boys know that shit’s no good for their needs. Women strung out on whatever gets them through the night because getting through the night is what it’s all about. But there are also the ones who walk up and talk five seconds and are gone and they’re the ones you can trust—they tell you where to go and where not, they tell you which fast-food dives will tolerate you for hours on the price of a cup of coffee or where it’s best to try to sleep. It’s fucked up because there is almost no one you can trust but you got to trust someone so you pick and take a chance. The sad thing is mostly you can’t trust the women. Because most are already sucked down and terrified of some man. The worst time is the couple hours before dawn. It’s when you’re the most cold and tired and all the sudden the traffic picks up with men on their way to work and they roll those trucks alongside you and say ‘Hey girl’ and I know what they want and I’ve been up all night trying to make sure nobody steals my car and trying to figure out a new place to park it the next night and then there’s twenty bucks all yours to suck a dick and I’m already days dead on my feet and I think Leave me alone shithead and if I’m lucky enough to be working I get a meal later that day or night at work so I skip lunch. If I eat some breakfast I can move my car to all-day parking and cover up in the backseat so no one knows I’m there and sleep until it’s time for work and then go to the Y for a shower. And maybe if I’m lucky there’s a convenience store clerk who’ll like me enough and knows I’m not a crackhead hooker and they’ll maybe give me a hot dog. And a packet of mustard to spread on the bun and I’ll walk out of there at four in the morning feeling like I’m doing alright. All the while patting my jeans pocket to make sure the keys are still there and back behind to check my license and feeling every step the three twenties folded tight under the lining of my shoe and hoping I didn’t fuck up and park where they’d tow my car and the hot dog has slicked enough grease into that bread so I can eat it walking along thinking I just have to last a couple more hours but at least I’m eating a hot dog and swearing I’ll never eat that kind of shit again, someday, and then some guy in a truck rolls slow alongside and says ‘Hey girl’ and I’m faced with that all over again. And all the time knowing this is not what I should be doing but it’s all I can do. It’s all I can do.”