Bad Faith

by Theodore Wheeler

  It wasn’t something I saw coming, but I liked living in a small town. (This is what I explained to Anna when she asked how I could stand a place like Alliance.) There’s something essentially decent about walking on Main Street with the rumble of pickup trucks circling to cruise a highway drag, or happening into a park when the Legion team is on the diamond. You can stand at the fence and watch the game. “We love that,” I said, sitting up out of Anna’s blankets. “The little kids race into the weeds after foul balls. The fathers chain-smoke and lean into the backstop to grumble. At night you can see the dome of light from the highway.”

  Anna and I went out to a club in Buckhead, near the hotel. I’d been in Atlanta nearly a week. Anna wanted to go dancing, but the place we went to wasn’t a real club. This was a suburban bar, across from the mall. There were TVs showing Braves highlights and old replays of Herschel Walker in a Sugar Bowl, years and years ago. The place made me feel my age. I was eight years older than Anna. That seemed like a big difference there. In reality, Anna was too old for this place too. It was all college students, or kids of that age, like a frat party. It made me nervous to see groups of young, drunk-fuelled men in college football tee shirts and jean shorts roaming the floor. I felt like such a Yankee. Most of my clothes were out with a laundry service, so I was in a black suit and white dress shirt I’d brought along just in case. I didn’t wear the tie, but it still felt ridiculous to be dressed like this in a place like that. I wouldn’t dance with Anna.

  There was a group of guys at a table near us, Yellow Jacket fans, according to their branding. They flirted with Anna when they came for drinks at the rail, two or three of them at a time, asking her to dance. She was nervous about it. Her back straightened when they spoke to her. “No thank you,” she said. “Not interested.” I could tell she liked the attention. She refused them each time, even though she’d come here to dance.

  “Why don’t you tell them you’re married,” I said. “Say you’re pregnant. Maybe they’ll give up and leave you alone.”

  I saw by Anna’s face that she liked those boys talking to her. The ones she’d already said no to watched out of the corners of their eyes, alert to what Anna would do next. She looked different, watching them back. By the angle her face tilted, how she swept her hair behind her ears, I saw how she betrayed different emotions. She didn’t look so bored.

  She asked one of them to dance with her, this after an hour of racing drinks. There wasn’t really a dance floor, but they piped in a club mix and there was an open area Anna pulled the kid to. He had on a rugby shirt, striped blue and white. His hair was wet, his cheeks red, like he’d just been in the shower. Anna was obliterated, her limbs heavy with alcohol. She stumbled through raunchy, improvised steps. She wore a knee-length black cotton skirt the kid inched up her thighs. Her legs flexed and rattled, tendons showed behind her knees. She wasn’t such a good-looking woman, that’s why those boys liked her.

  Jacq and I met at an opening, seven years earlier, in New York. I was barely hanging on to the agency then, it was 2002. I introduced myself at the wine table. It would have been more awkward to not talk, so we talked. Neither of us were native New Yorkers, but we’d both lived in the city a long time. It was so soon after 9/11. We were over-emotional, over-endangered, out to prove both our cowardice and bravery. It was silly. I’d never talked so much about pizzerias and bridges in my life—and prattled on about them with such strong affection, as if they were beloved grandparents or something.

  We were such opposites on the surface. Jacq was tall and pale, with jaw-length black hair, so skinny that her chin and shoulders looked like parts of a performance piece. Her parents were auto workers. She was a painter…a mixed-media…a whatever—she didn’t like having to explain to anyone what she did on canvas. She was (and still is) Jacqueline Ranier Roenicke; I was (and still am) Eric Samuel Green. I wore a tight brown cardigan, a shirt and tie underneath, wool-lycra trousers. I was a small-business owner, blond and pudgy. We were reverse parts of the same silhouette, and that’s powerful magic. She turned me on the same way an accused witch would have aroused a priest in Salem, Mass., in 1692.

  We ended up at a downtown bar. It was full of suits, market and city government dweebs who tried to act tough. They couldn’t beat Jacq’s testosterone, however. She tore up to the bar and ordered Tullamore Dew, neat. She told off anyone who got near us. She accused them of trying to sneak an inch in on her man. You could get most of those guys to turn red just by accusing them of the slightest hint of homosexuality. It was too easy.

  She pulled me into the men’s room near the end of the night. That’s when she fell in love with me, or so the story goes. She fell in love because I wouldn’t fuck her. I said we’d have to eat a meal first, at a table, with silver. She’d have to take me home before I’d make love with her. She kissed with her teeth while she laughed.

  “Of course,” she said. “How adorable!”

  I laid it on a bit thick, of course. I wanted to fuck her badly. The problem was that I’d never been able to become rigid in a bathroom. I couldn’t stomach the idea of those suit jocks listening to her moan, or them watching my ass dimple through the gaps of a stall divider. Bedrooms are made for sex. Wide mattresses, soft sheets, a ceiling fan rocking. This was the only audience I desired.

  The wet-haired boy’s frat brothers egged him on. They wanted Anna to pull her shirt up. They wanted her to go down on him in the storage room while all of them watched. She was in a lawless realm, boys rubbing the crotches of their jean shorts as they encircled her. One of them tugged her arm toward the back.

  Anna looked to me, her face wrinkled in frustration, but I didn’t move to help her. I leaned against the bar, nursing a bourbon and soda. When the song was over, she shook off the frat boys and slumped into the rail next to me. The kid she danced with asked her to come to a party with them. She told him to fuck off. We left soon after.

  Anna collapsed in the hotel elevator. She said she was going to be sick. I had to carry her to her room, her words coming out backwards. I was sure security would follow us, but we made it through the door. She flopped to the couch.

  When I jabbed Anna in the shoulder, her eyes rolled back in her head. Her bangs flipped around.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I said. “It’s just some booze, you’ll be all right.”

  We camped by the toilet most of the night. She slept on the tile with her knees at her chest, hands between her legs. “Take it easy,” I said, curled around her body. My hand was on her stomach, my ear at her mouth to make sure she was breathing.

  Her head cleared after a few hours. It was four in the morning and I hadn’t slept. We were still on the floor of her bathroom. Anna shivered on the icy tile despite the comforter I wrapped around her. She was feeling better though, not so drunk anymore.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “You didn’t do anything.” I paused, looking at her until she shrunk away. “It wasn’t anything unretractable,” I said. “Just regrettable.”

  Anna buried her head in her hands to whimper.

  She moved across the tile to where I sat against the bathtub. She nuzzled against my chest and pulled the comforter around us.

  “What would I do without you?” she said. “You’re a very brave man.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I said nothing.

  She continued on like that. I knew she was humoring me, trying to smooth things over. That’s what I thought, anyway. Maybe she believed that I’d stepped in on her behalf, once those boys started to paw her, and swept her safely away. I hadn’t.

  “Sam,” she said. “Tell me something nice.”

  Anna disappeared under the comforter. I felt her face through the fabric of my suit pants, the trembling vibrations of her breath. I didn’t think to stop her. She unbuckled and unbuttoned and unzipped.

  “Anna,” I warned. “It’s not going to happen in here.”

  But there it was. The thing popped up on i
ts own—impertinent, triumphant—swaying out through my open zipper.

  She put her mouth around the thing, her whole mouth, which somehow wasn’t dry. It was melting. My hips lifted and arched as far as she allowed.

  I stopped her then, while I still could.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. Anna snuck out from the comforter to rest her head on my stomach and look up at me. “It’s what I do,” she said. “You know, to make amends.”

  She was not embarrassed to say this.

  “That’s what you do with Jon?”

  She nodded.

  “God,” I said. “Just finish.”

  Jacq was waiting at the airfield outside Alliance the next evening. She was in the gravel parking lot, lying on the hood of the old truck she drove, an F-250 that came with the ranch when she bought it. She adopted that truck like an orphaned child. It suited her.

  We bounced onto the bench seat and swung out on the highway to reach full speed, the windows down all the way, seatbelts flapping loud in the gale, tires gripping over the patched pavement. We smiled out over the land. Jacq looked different in Alliance, on our ranch, than she did in any city. She wore jeans and a loose flannel shirt with nothing underneath. I preferred her this way. She rolled her sleeves up. There was paint on her knuckles and dirt under her nails. She tied pigtails so that the rubber band ties snuck out under her straw hat. I saw inside her shirt as she drove, her small breasts swaying, bouncing with the rhythm the road gave them. Her chest pocked with moles, tanned deep and reddish in the big, rusty, Western sunset.

  (Lorna Chaplin)

  Lorna Chaplin flashed her cleavage over the orange Formica counter when she rang up his total. Aaron was buying a microwavable Rueben and a Diet Pepsi. She worked at a filling station near the interstate in Ralston and had dark freckles around her neck. She wore low-rise stonewashed jeans without a belt. When Aaron looked at her midriff he noticed a pink scar across her navel. She said, “My eyes are up here, honey.”

  He came back the next night to ask her out to the burger and gyro place down the road.

  She lived in a small white house not far from the filling station. It had been her parents’ house, the place she grew up in. All the old furnishings were still there, worn sofas, porcelain knickknacks on the wall. There were small wooden cups Lorna’s father made in his basement workshop when he was alive. Lorna’s eyes pinched nearly closed when she smiled. It was a nice smile, one that made Aaron think she’d been very pretty in high school.

  Aaron liked talking to Lorna about her life. She got nostalgic and teary, muttered “son of a bitch” through dry nicotine lips.

  She told him how most of her life was documented in the public record, in court cases and various judgments levied against her, in smarmy newspaper articles. There was a string of charges that ended with a conviction for transporting a minor across state lines—a fifteen-year-old boy listed in the record as N.S. And that’s what she called the boy too, when she told Aaron about him, even though N.S. would be close to thirty by then, a man off living somewhere, with a family to take care of, more than likely. “I was pregnant by him when they picked us up,” Lorna admitted. “But I don’t have children of my own.”

  Violate the Leaves

  1

  I found my mom fidgeting with her uniform in front of the bedroom mirror. The sand-dappled camo tee shirt that bit her armpits it was so tight. The black mascara, the no lipstick. Her hair coiled in a bun to fit under the squarish khaki hat. Her rucksack tied up tight and made to balance next to the closet door. It was early. She noticed me standing in the doorway and kept dressing. She stared into her eyes in the mirror and must have wondered what we were all wondering about, what the next year would bring. She sat to pull her boots on and started with the laces. “Go eat breakfast,” she told me, “if you have to be up so early.”

  Downstairs my father was frying eggs. “What’s the deal, Oscar?” he asked. I shook my head, turned away from him. I worried the waistband of my pajamas above my bellybutton. He picked me up and sat me on the counter. “It’s just us now,” he said. “Are we going to be okay?”

  Later, I put on my brown suit, the new one from Sears. I’d thrown a fit in the store when my father suggested that some slacks with suspenders would be good enough for the party. I didn’t want slacks with suspenders. I wanted to be as perfect as my mom was. I wanted to look neat and sleek and formal. I wanted a uniform.

  2

  The relatives drove in from different places. They’d left early in the morning, some of them the afternoon before, and were made lazy by their travels. They leaned on porch railings and sat sighing on the front steps. The smell of them as they lined up for photographs with my mom under the big oak tree in the yard. The Chicago cousins, all girls, announced themselves with sugary perfumes, like a magazine in the mailbox, and the flurry of teasing that burst out in their cutting city manners. Their hair was done up in curls if older, brushed down straight if nearer my age. And the billows of cigarette smoke, the hiked-up Wranglers of my uncles who stood away from the commotion to mumble gossip. I was eight years old and couldn’t really talk to any of these men. They were what remained of my father’s family, all of them bachelors or divorced, journeymen machinery workers in Des Moines. They poked boot tips at the roots of milkweed and tried to remember where the barn used to be, the gate to the hogs, the chicken hutch, the corrugated steel quonset where machinery had been held when this was still a family farm, the farm they grew up on, before all but what the house sat on was sold. They pointed to the oak tree where my Chicago cousins played on their cell phones, and debated about which ancestor it was who planted that tree, a red oak, no, a white oak, back when this land was settled.

  There was vanilla ice cream with fresh strawberries after the bratwurst and burgers. There were sopapillas.

  Grandpa Amos brought me a goldfish in a bowl. The fish was orange but shined when it spun in its water. After lunch I took the fish to my bedroom and refused to come downstairs.

  “Come see your mother,” Grandpa Amos said. He pounded a hand against the stairwell to make the walls thunder. There was no chance I’d come down after that.

  I tried to get the goldfish to look at me but it wouldn’t. It swam to the bottom and sucked on the green rocks there. Confused and overhot from the car ride. In the back of the bowl I saw my reflection. A blurrier, darker version of myself. Black circles under my eyes.

  I wondered where Grandpa Amos bought the goldfish. It was a long drive from Cleveland to where we lived. We lived somewhat close to Des Moines. There would have been plenty of pet shops along the way.

  The fish came from Indiana, I decided.

  3

  I stayed in my bedroom when it was time for her to leave. I didn’t want to cry in front of my cousins from Chicago. I didn’t want to cry in front of my mom.

  4

  I’d helped her pack that week. There were charms I stuck in her rucksack, thinking she wouldn’t notice how I sneaked them there. The plastic cowboy that was my best toy. The poem about Santa dying in a sleigh wreck that I wrote for her during the second-grade holiday activities program, on green construction paper shaped like an evergreen tree. When she wasn’t looking I wormed my Saint Christopher medallion deep into the rucksack, under her army clothes, under the magazines and manuals, to keep her safe when she was over there.

  From outside the house I heard her calling. “Come to the window, mijo! I want to see you!”

  The whole family waited under the oak tree. She was in her fatigues, less neat now, hair in her face, her face red. She was in the middle of the cousins from Chicago, who twisted their feet in the dusty yard.

  “Come! This is the last time I’m telling you!”

  My father stood by the car. I wanted it to be him who was leaving.

  5

  I lay on the bed listening to the curtains flap. The fishbowl sat on the desk. The fish circled in the fishbowl.

  6

  My father had a crippl
ed arm. It was crippled in a car wreck the summer after he graduated high school. A friend of his rammed an SS Camaro through a construction barricade at eighty mph then continued at a slightly slower speed into the blade of a bulldozer. Nobody died. They were blotto drunk and that saved them. All were pulled bendable from the wreckage once the authorities arrived, lacerated and vomiting, but nearly pristine; still surly, the story goes, cussing out the cops for hassling them. My father’s arm was the only casualty—made useless when the Camaro’s motor was birthed through the firewall and pinned that side of him against the passenger door.

  When I came downstairs—after the cousins left, after my mom was dropped off at the airfield, after Grandpa Amos left in the evening—I found my father on the couch. The TV was on, he was sleeping.

  His crippled arm was bent under and behind him. Numb and limp, the hand grabbed at nothing. He was dreaming. His eyelids fluttered.

  7

  That summer he did handyman work. Laying wood floors mostly, which he managed one-armed. He took me with him every day after my mom left for the desert. He was supposed to drop me off at daycare but he didn’t.

  It was embarrassing at the daycare. I was too old to be there, even if it was summer break.

  We rolled up to a blacktop driveway in his truck, some place in town, in Indianola, the front of a house painted in Crayola colors, an area to the side fenced in with chain-link where there were plastic slides, a sandbox, a basketball hoop with a metal net. Moms were dropping their kids off for the day. We sat in the truck and watched. Hugs and kisses. Moms with wet hair, in beige slacks. Moms in blouses and jackets on their way to work in Des Moines.