Incident on Ten-Right Road

by Randall Silvis

  I turned to Addie. I thought I saw an apology in her smile, though it might have been something else. Then Salandro picked up the baseball card and dusted it off and without a word or a look in my direction he walked away toward the clubhouse.

  I went to Brady and stood over him but did not bend down. He rolled onto his back then and, blinking, began to giggle.

  “Christ,” I said. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  He kept giggling and pointed a finger at Addie. “It’s her fault, Mike.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. I turned away and headed for the parking lot.

  “Michael?” Addie said.

  I did not look back.

  All the way to the exit I could hear Brady giggling.

  * * *

  I remember thinking after work that night that now my life could get back to normal. Now that I was through with both Brady and Salandro. I had a shower as usual and then sat on my bed and wondered if I should go upstairs to see Isabella. It was not my regular night but I wanted some company and whatever else it is that women like her provide. But I did not want to go upstairs and find her with someone else. In the end I decided it would be better to take a walk alone, even if it was nearly 2:00 in the morning.

  Out in the hallway I had turned the corner toward the elevator when the bell dinged and the door slid open and Addie stepped out. Something sank inside of me as I waited for Brady to appear. But she was alone. She was smiling but her eyes were sad and she walked with her hands reaching out for me. The first scent of her reminded me somehow of Christmas. I felt as tremulous as a child.

  “I am so sorry about this afternoon,” she said.

  She took both my hands in hers and held them together against her chest. “Are you on your way out?”

  “No, I... I’m just getting in.”

  “Can I talk with you a minute? I won’t stay long, I promise.”

  “How did you get up here?”

  “One of the other tenants let me in. Jeannie, from the fourth floor? She was just coming in, so I told her you were expecting me but that you must have fallen asleep. She probably thought I was a prostitute. Please don’t be angry with me, Michael. I really do need to talk with you.”

  We went back to my place. I switched on the living room light but remained by the door. She went to the window and looked out. I smelled the fragrance again and that was when I recognized it, apples and cinnamon, the scent of Christmases when I was a boy, the scent I woke up to every Christmas morning. The effect was disconcerting, even dizzying, of Christmas in July, the scent of this woman stealing my breath away.

  Beyond her the city was a sea of white and yellow lights. Without turning she said, “Sometimes I wonder if the only reason I’m with him is to take care of him.”

  “The Brady I knew never required a caretaker.”

  She turned to me. “Nor the one I first met. But these last couple of weeks... I can’t explain why he’s acting this way.”

  “He’s afraid of losing you. He’s trying too hard.”

  “Trying what?”

  I was too tired to think about it. I had lost a lot of sleep over Brady in the past 48 hours and some over Salandro and I was going to lose more tonight with the scent of apples and cinnamon in every breath I took.

  She saw the weakness in me and she came across the room. She switched off the light and then stood against me and laid one gloved hand atop my chest. She said, “If you tell me to go back to him, Michael, I will.”

  “Will you?” I said. My voice was hoarse and dry, my chest was tight.

  “If you tell me to, yes. Just please. Please don’t tell me to.”

  The world beyond her was a sea of lights and all around us was a sea of darkness. I intended to tell her that Brady was my friend no matter how badly he behaved, but then she laid her other hand against me too, and I did not.

  * * *

  I awoke before sunrise, just as I used to the summer I was 18, when I would slap some water on my face and brush my teeth, and after gulping down a plate of sausage and eggs I would pile into an old Thunderbird and ride off to the steel mill with my father and three burly men, all strong, honest men in work boots and dungarees, men with a hard but simple day ahead of them, a lifetime of hard but simple days.

  I awoke before sunrise but no longer 18 and consequently unrested, feeling worse than the night before. Because now there was guilt on top of everything else. I dressed and brushed my teeth and without waking her or even writing a note because I was afraid to let the words get started, I went out into the first sunrise I had faced in several years.

  As I drove I thought of what my father had told me one morning while we waited at the end of the driveway for the Thunderbird to arrive. I had complained that I hated the steel mill, that I loathed the red dust in my ears and nose and mouth, and that after just two days on the labor gang I wanted desperately to quit.

  Stick with it, son. The suffering will make you stronger, you’ll see.

  Stronger for what? I asked.

  He thought about it while he stared, squinting and smiling, at the horizon. All I know, he said, is that it’s impossible to see this beautiful sunrise with your eyes on the ground like that.

  I answered that I couldn’t care less about the sunrise.

  You should, he said. You never know when you’ll be looking at your last one.

  But all summer long I never lifted my eyes to the rising sun.

  Now as I drove into Pendleton County, West Virginia, the sun was already well above the trees. I stopped at a diner for a plate of sausage and eggs, then bought two ham and cheese sandwiches, two bottles of water and a daypack at the general store, then drove the last miles to the trailhead at the base of Seneca Rocks.

  The granny trail corkscrews up a sandstone mountain a thousand feet high. The only people on the trail at that hour were a few hikers who wanted the same thing I did, solitude and sweat. We nodded to one other but did not say hello and were careful not to walk too closely. The path was damp with dew and still dark more than halfway up the mountain. My muscles felt old and stiff and I knew I would be sore the next day but even the tightness in my calves was somehow pleasant now. Maybe I enjoyed it because I was glad to be punishing myself. Maybe I imagined that the pain would make me stronger.

  I made the summit before the sun reached its zenith. On the naked peak I sat atop a rounded boulder and felt the coolness of stone beneath me and without asking any questions I watched the valley below as if I had never been down there, never been one of those ants racing off to somewhere important only to race home again, one of those leaf-cutters day after day feeding slivers of weed to his fungus of ambition.

  I drank one bottle of water and then hiked west along the lower ridge until I was 100 yards or so off the main trail. In the shade of hemlocks I lay with my daypack for a pillow and slept for two hours.

  The sound of horses woke me, the soft nickering and clop, four horses and their riders coming up the south side of the mountain on the horse trail. I sat there and ate my sandwiches and drank half the water in the second bottle and wished I did not have to go back down. I had given myself a hard simple morning but unfortunately it was only a morning and not my life. Soon I would have to go back and clean up the mess I had helped to create. The clean-up itself was bound to be messy but I could not walk away from it. For 37 years my father awoke every morning at 5:00 a.m. and rode off to the red dust and heat of the steel mill not because he enjoyed it but because it was what he had to do for his family. I had no family but I had an old friend and he did not deserve betrayal.

  I also thought about Salandro and that I had not been as patient with him as I should have been. He was just a kid and what was it I had expected from him anyway? He was not supernatural. If he had disappointed me it was because I had tried to make him into something other than a frightened young man. There were things I could do for him if I really wanted to. And now, finally, I did want to. I wanted to repay the favor he had done for me
all summer.

  I decided that as a discipline I would not let myself drink any more water until I reached the bottom of the mountain. But, once there, I still would not let myself drink anything until I crossed the border back into Pennsylvania. Then it seemed the natural thing to extend the discipline until I reached my apartment. I was under the illusion even then that deprivation and discomfort could cleanse me somehow, could set right what had been irrevocably polluted.

  * * *

  There were no messages on my machine and nobody answered the phone in Brady and Addie’s hotel room. I spent the rest of the afternoon lying face-up on my bed, staring at the white ceiling, hearing the sound that had begun in my head halfway down the mountain, a high sharp whine more felt than heard, a fine filament of shriek stretched as tight as knotted fishing line.

  That evening I went to work as usual though everything felt off-balance to me. There were the usual emergencies every 10 minutes, each one precipitated by the wounding of somebody’s ego. My ego was numb and I conceded without argument to every demand. I found it to be a very pleasant way to work, so detached, though the high thin note in my head would not let me enjoy it with impunity. I had a strong feeling that Addie and Brady were waiting for me across the street at O’Hanlon’s. Or probably it was just Brady waiting there.

  After work I stood on the sidewalk outside the building. If Brady was at O’Hanlon’s he would see me through the window. But no one came out of the bar.

  All the way to the parking garage I had an uncomfortable feeling of being followed. But each time I turned around, nobody was there.

  * * *

  At home I stayed in my shower for a very long time with the hot water drumming down on my head. When I finally stepped out I could smell her in the steam, the Christmas scent again, and it made my stomach twitch. Without drying off I pulled on my robe and went to the threshold. The reading lamp on the bedside table was lit but the ceiling light was not. I had left them the other way around. I did not even want to look around the corner to the bed.

  “How did you get in?” I asked.

  “Last time I was here I found your extra key. In the kitchen drawer. I knew you would want me to have it.”

  “I want you to leave.”

  “He’s unconscious again, don’t worry. He’ll sleep until noon. And don’t worry about my having been seen this time, I was very careful. Nobody saw me come up. Nobody knows I’m here.”

  I said, “I’m not doing this again.”

  “I’m not leaving. I won’t.”

  I went back into the bathroom and put on my old clothes. Still not looking at her I came out of the bathroom and said, “When I come back I expect to find you gone.”

  She did nothing to stop me and for a while I was surprised by that. I went down to the lobby and thought about getting my car out of the garage but then I went outside and started running. I hadn’t run except on a treadmill for a very long time and I was pleased with how good it felt even in street shoes. The movement made me think that I was getting away from something.

  I jogged for maybe a mile before I came to a playground in a nice residential area. I sat there on a bench until I got my breath back, and then a satisfied kind of weariness seeped into me. The night was warm and a few stars were visible through the haze. I told myself that I was going to take a couple weeks off soon and plot out a new future, something satisfying and regular. I convinced myself that I could do it. And then I decided that I would stay there on the bench until first light, that I would watch the sun coming up on a new way of life for me.

  Another hour or more must have passed before the fine mist woke me. I took it as a good sign, a cleansing. A fresh start. Then I got up from the bench and walked home.

  The red strobing lights were visible from two blocks away, pale at first, like fluttering pink ghosts galloping over the sky. I thought it was a fire until I came within sight of my building and saw all the police cars and the ambulance out front. I stood across the street and could not make myself go closer.

  Eventually a couple of policemen noticed me and came across the street and asked for my name. When I told them they took me inside and upstairs. Brady was lying just inside the door. Salandro’s baseball bat was not far from his head.

  One of the policemen said, “You want to tell us what happened here?”

  I looked at him and said, “You need to call Addie.”

  “She’s the one who called us. After she came and found her husband like this.”

  “They’re not married,” I told him.

  “According to her they were married yesterday afternoon in Maryland.”

  And in the sudden lucidity of the moment I understood everything. Addie would have told them by now that two nights earlier I had tricked her into coming alone to my apartment, and Jeannie from the fourth floor would confirm the visit and remember whatever story Addie had told her. Addie would have sobbed when she told the police what I had tried to do with her that night. Maybe I had been successful and maybe not, it did not matter which version she told. What mattered was Brady’s outrage when she told him about it. What mattered was how worried she had been when he had rushed over here a couple of hours ago, and the sick feeling that had made her follow him some 20 or 30 minutes later, and the horrible disbelief when she had pulled open the unlocked door and found her husband on the floor. The police would assume that I had buzzed Brady in when he came, but they might wonder how Addie had gained entry into the building. If I explained that Addie had stolen my extra key two nights earlier, that she had come again tonight and I had told her to leave and then walked out but she had probably stayed and called Brady to meet her here and had buzzed him in when he arrived, the police would explain it all away. That would say that according to Addie I had telephoned the hotel room several times this evening, and after the last call she admitted to Brady the awful things I had done to her or the awful things I had said, and that was when he had come rushing over to confront me. The police would look in the kitchen drawer where I always kept the key and they would find it there. They would check the phone records and would learn that the final call from my apartment to the hotel room had occurred during the time I was allegedly out jogging or sitting in the park. But O’Hanlon to his great sadness would remember how I had looked at Addie in the bar. He would remember how I had squeezed Brady’s shoulder and insisted that he go outside with me. My colleagues at the station would remember how oddly I had behaved the past few days. The police would find no fingerprints but my own on the key and the phone and the baseball bat because white gloves leave no fingerprints.

  It was all very hard and simple and there was no way to refute any of it. I wanted to turn and walk away but a policeman was blocking the door. I turned toward the window. The sun was coming up finally, only my second full sunrise in a very long time. A lovely red wet light glowed far away outside the glass.

  On the Verge

  Two a.m. on the cruise ship Grand Adventurer, a day and a half out of Miami on its tour of the Bahamas and the eastern Caribbean. Rudy Fenton walked the lido deck and smoked a borrowed Lucky Strike. A clear, moonlit night, cool for July, more like an autumnal night, a fat autumnal moon, the air heavy with the chilly scent of deep ocean. The cigarette did not taste as good as Rudy had hoped it would. Nothing did.

  Fifteen minutes earlier, after crawling out of bed in his inside cabin, the smallest and least expensive class of cabin on the ship, Rudy Fenton, unsated by sex, restless with a vague discontent, had left his girlfriend Amy to lie there frightened by his desires while he wandered the corridors, gradually working his way toward the uppermost deck. On deck four he encountered a steward and borrowed a cigarette.

  “I quit two years ago,” Rudy told him.

  The steward held a lighter to the coffin nail. “Didn’t we all.”

  Then the slow meander toward the top of the ship, blowing smoke ahead of him, pushing his face through it. On the lido deck he took his discontent to the aft rail and tried
to blow it out to sea in smoke rings that would not hold together. The low throb of the ship’s engines scratched at his skin, vibrated his nerve endings.

  Every aspect of Rudy’s surroundings added another facet to his discontent, became another mirror in which he saw himself reflected, his image cast back at him like a prick in the eye. This ship with its glittery lights and polished surfaces, this carefully packaged luxury that he could afford only through thievery. The vast black sea that frightened him, a poor swimmer, a mountain boy. The star-speckled sky forever out of reach. Worst of all that cramped little cabin, windowless, nearly all the floor space taken up by the bed.

  After the first full afternoon on ship he had refused to accompany Amy to the fitness center, the sun deck with its pool and spa. Refused to explain why, except to himself. Because his body and hers were different from all the others there, that was why. Not out of shape, but shaped differently, marked differently by their jobs. He and Amy had blue-collar bodies. His arms were pale except below the biceps. Otherwise only his face and neck were tanned, his body pink or pale in all other places, not evenly browned on a tanning bed. He was hard and lean but stippled across the shoulders and buttocks with tiny red pimples. Amy’s buttocks were soft, her thighs were soft, not long and sinewy from hours on an exercise bicycle. He was too hard, a wage-earning grunt. She was too soft, a meek little paper-shuffler.

  The cruise had been his idea, he had had to talk her into it. Talked her into lying to her boss of only seven months, finagling a week’s vacation five months before she was eligible for one. Rudy had made up the story for her, even contrived an old friend in Michigan to send a letter:

  Dear Amy,As you know, your Grandmother Idy’s cancer has progressed

  to the point where there is nothing left for the doctors to do....