A Minor Fall

by Price Ainsworth

  The next summer found Charlie and me back on the bus and off to visit our grandparents. We had to wait around awhile in the Big Spring station to switch to a bus that would leave the highway far enough to get to Water Valley.

  I knew something was wrong when the bus pulled up to Mama’s grocery. There was no Mama standing there with her Brownie camera. Instead, Aunt Mary greeted us with the only smile she could muster. As we walked down to the kitchen and stood under the giant pecan tree, Aunt Mary told us that Papa had died a few hours earlier.

  I remember how he had thrashed pecans from that old tree with a long cane pole while Charlie stumbled around in the leaves picking up the pecans. The pole was still leaning against the kitchen porch where he had left it. It may be leaning there still.

  Maybe I could understand his death when I was twelve better than I can understand it now. There was really nothing left for him to live for. No more roundups, no more rodeos for working cowboys, and while the pastures were full of prickly pear cactus, no ranchers bothered to pile them up to burn as drought feed for their cattle. The river was dry from a man-made reservoir. The best places to hunt were all private leases. Besides, hunting to Papa wasn’t a real sport.

  One must look one’s best for intercollegiate debate. Suit and tie—and polished boots. I tie my tie and see how my blue eyes are shaped like Papa’s but aren’t the same pale, clear blue as his, bleached by alcohol, the hot West Texas sun, and constant wind. I am sure the boys from SMU will snicker at my boots and drawl. But I’ll bet they have never beaten the Carlsbad Bears in extra innings, and if Papa were here, I know whom he would be betting on.

  The story wasn’t Hemingway, but I thought it was sweet and poignant and innocent. Probably it had been written in college, and more than likely it was autobiographical. Somehow, it made me think of the all the reasons I had fallen for Davy in the first place, and I read it several times before I put it back in the drawer.

  7

  APPARENTLY, SUNDAY NIGHT WASN’T THE BUSIEST NIGHT AT THE Paintsville Dairy Queen, but there were a few customers waiting in line at the walk-up window when Beth and I pulled into the parking lot a few minutes after leaving the Paintsville Inn. The customers, each of them smoking, nodded politely at us and tried to avoid staring at Beth as we took our place in line. I had noticed several pretty girls already on my brief trips to Kentucky, but Beth stood out for reasons beyond the fact that she already had a midsummer tan. Beth ordered first, and started by asking the woman at the window what she recommended.

  “We’re famous for our footlong chili-cheese dogs,” was the reply. Beth ordered one, and I ordered two with a side of tater tots, and each of us ordered a Coke.

  “Keep your receipts,” I told Beth, as we found an empty picnic table outside, away from other diners.

  “I don’t mean to be antisocial,” Beth said, as she looked around, “but I don’t know our clients well enough to know if any are here.” She glanced around furtively, took the lid off her Coke and poured it on the ground, leaving the ice in the cup. Then she took my drink and did the same thing. In a rather surreptitious fashion, she proceeded to open a bottle of wine while keeping it concealed in her large purse. She filled both our cups, holding the bottle below the table, and handed me mine. I took a long drink.

  “Far Niente?” I asked.

  “A little taste of home.”

  “You are a fast learner.”

  “You’ll find it complements the chili.”

  I tried to eat one of my hot dogs by picking it up, but all I did was make a mess. Beth cut hers into sophisticated bites, washed down with swigs of chardonnay over ice. I decided that her approach was better and for a few minutes we sat cutting up our foot long, chili-cheese dogs as if we were a mirror image. She looked around and commented that this place was not too different from where she grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. Her dad was a union steelworker; and her mom, whom Beth described as certifiably crazy, was a housewife who had developed an affinity for Prozac in recent years. Beth had gone to Penn State, and she had a friend from college that had gone on to law school at The University of Texas who told her she would like it. In law school, Beth had dated some rich guy.

  I told her that Paintsville was different from where I grew up. Not that I grew up in the center of affluence. But in Abilene, things just felt newer and cleaner. Nothing was very old. The subdivisions were new, the houses, though modest by Houston standards, were new, the school buildings were new, the churches, including the Church of Christ that we attended, were new, and you ate inside at the Dairy Queen.

  She smiled at this. “Well, the Dairy Queen part is probably similar,” I admitted. Every small town in Texas has a Dairy Queen, and it usually functions as a civic center with retired farmers and ranchers meeting for coffee in the morning, school kids getting ice cream after school, and teenagers congregating at night, particularly after football games. I told her that I had this idea that someday I was going to write a short story entitled, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Queen.” She told me I should do that. I told her that I had also been working on a poem, but so far, I had only written two lines and that I had plagiarized the first line. She laughed and I refused to recite either line, but I did eventually tell her that I stole the first line from Woody Allen.

  “But look around. Sure, this place calls itself a Dairy Queen, but it’s different. Nobody here looks happy. It’s not that they look unhappy. They just look tired.”

  “That’s how they looked in Pennsylvania,” she added.

  I asked about how she got from Austin to Houston, and how she met Sullivan. When did she meet her husband? Was he a lawyer also? What kind of work did he do? She told me that after law school, she took a job with an information technology company in Houston that eventually went broke. She didn’t know anybody in town, had broken up with the rich “boy,” and met her husband through an online dating service. He was extremely good-looking and worked as a sales representative for Merck, the pharmaceutical company. In his free time, he worked out, trying to maintain his high school-athlete physique. He was from a small town that I’d never heard of in Tennessee. We laughed at the fact that most people in Houston are from a small town somewhere. Her husband traveled quite a bit. The president of the failing company for which she had worked put her in touch with Sullivan. I wondered how he knew Sullivan, and I wondered how close she was to the company president or why he would take it upon himself to find her a job. But I didn’t ask.

  She asked how I had met Michelle. I told her that Jonathan Sullivan and I had debated together at Texas Tech before he had graduated and gone off to law school the year before me. By my third day of law school, Jonathan had introduced me to his sister. I told her that Jonathan, through his dad, had also gotten me a job clerking at the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, a statewide association of personal injury attorneys, the summer after my second year of law school. Tim Sullivan had been the incoming president. “Clerking” at TTLA is where I got to know Mr. Sullivan. About all I did as a law clerk at TTLA was to get Mr. Sullivan to wherever it was that he was supposed to go around Austin with whatever materials he was supposed to have when he got there. Then after that first year, I didn’t see him much. I told her that a couple of times during law school I was invited by the Sullivan family to some parties in Houston. Once, during third year, I went to a firm Christmas party at the River Oaks Country Club. Another time, I think it was second year, I went to an Easter brunch with the family at Brennan’s. I said, “I remember all of the ladies, including Michelle, wore hats.” It was like the Kentucky Derby with milk punch instead of mint juleps. After law school, I had gone off to East Texas to clerk for a federal judge; and Michelle had taken a job with a big firm in Houston. During that year, Michelle and I spent most of our weekends traveling back and forth on Highway 59 to see each other, and toward the end of the clerkship, we decided to get married. “Shortly after that, Tim Sullivan offered me a job.” It took about five minutes to tell Beth my comple
te life history.

  “Were you worried about going to work for your future fatherin-law?”

  I explained that my dad warned against it. He had no problems with my marrying Michelle. Everybody loved Michelle. Dad thought that she looked like Ann Margaret. But what if I wanted to quit the firm, or change jobs, or more? Did I ever think I might want to practice in Abilene? I told Dad that my goal was to make partner at Peters & Sullivan. I knew that there were some who thought I was marrying my way into the firm, but I was confident that I could prove my worth if given the opportunity. If I had to work a little harder than the other associates, I would. I figured I stood to make enough money at Peters & Sullivan that after a while Michelle wouldn’t have to work. We could have kids, and Michelle could do whatever she wanted to do. I didn’t think I would ever go back to Abilene. Sullivan always said, “I like a chopped beef sandwich and cold beer as much as anybody, but there are folks eating foie gras and drinking Montrachet, and we might as well have some for ourselves.”

  “Your plan seems to be working out.”

  “So far, I guess.”

  “Is Michelle still working?”

  “For now. We bought a house but the payments and property taxes are killing us. It seems maybe babies aren’t too far off. How about you? Any kids in your future?”

  “I thought so. Now I don’t know.” Beth paused and thought to herself for a moment. “We tried for awhile with no results. Then we did the whole in vitro fertilization thing that only resulted in a couple of miscarriages. The process wore us out.” She took a drink of her wine. “I’m not sure having kids with Ari is such a good idea at this point. Neither one of us is at home a lot. When he isn’t home, I don’t really know where he is or what he is doing. We’ll see.”

  “Are we out of wine?”

  “Yes, but I have one more bottle back at the hotel.”

  “Good. It’s occurred to me why the Paintsville Dairy Queen is so deserted on a lovely evening in March,” I said.

  “I guess it has nothing to do with the fact that everyone in town is tired of eating chili-cheese dogs, even if they are world-renowned?”

  “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  Back at the room, I’d left the TV on while we were gone. We returned to find that four NCAA men’s basketball playoff games had started just as four games had concluded. It was my favorite television event of the year. I liked the first few days of the tournament better than the last. All of the schools that you’ve never heard of have a chance and play these crazy, exciting games that come down to a wild desperation shot, or a bad call, or a choked free throw. In the end, it was always UCLA, or Indiana, or Michigan State, or Kentucky, or North Carolina, or Duke—or somebody like that who was going to win the tournament. But in the first round it was all about the Richmond Spiders or the Chaminade Silverswords.

  “You do like the underdogs, don’t you?” Beth said, as I explained why I thought Texas Tech had a real chance to advance even though they played UCLA in the first round and probably Gonzaga in the second. We were standing in front of the TV in my room, and the doors between our rooms were still open.

  “I’m going to change clothes and get that last bottle of wine,” she said and went into her room and closed the door on her side behind her. I went over to my closet area, took my hanging bag and laid it out across one of the beds. I unzipped the bag and started unpacking my things. I was almost through when she came back in, carrying a bottle of Far Niente and an opener. She was wearing a Penn State T-shirt, gym shorts, and stretched out sweat socks.

  “Are the Lions playing?” she asked, as she handed me the wine and opener. I explained that they had not made the tournament, and that CBS was focused on some school called Pacific out of “basketball country in California.” As I opened the wine, she unwrapped two of the Styrofoam coffee cups beside the in-room, four-cup coffee maker. I poured us both a glass and took a sip. “This is fun,” she said, as she stretched out on the bed that was now covered by my hanging bag, and propped the pillows up so she could watch the game. It was fun. I may have felt somewhat like an outcast, cut off from my family and friends, and saddled with the impossible task of attempting to resurrect the TENORM litigation, but it was fun to hang out with Beth. I enjoyed talking to her. She seemed to enjoy talking to me. We both finished our first glass of wine, and I poured us each another.

  “We need ice,” I said, and grabbed the small plastic ice bucket emblazoned with the Paintsville Inn crest. I turned the latch on the door to my room so that the door wouldn’t close completely as I left. Eventually, I found the ice machine on our floor, but it was not working. I took the stairs down to the second floor, but struck out there as well. I decided to go to the front desk and ask if there was a place I could get some ice. I still had my coffee cup in my hand. The girl at the desk apologized for the fact that the ice machines weren’t working, took my bucket, and went back through the office to the kitchen. I told her thanks when she returned with the bucket full, dropped a few ice cubes into my cup, and took the elevator back up to my floor.

  When I got back to my room, Beth was asleep on her back, with her empty coffee cup resting between her hands on her stomach. I put the wine in the ice and set it on the dresser by the TV.

  I turned the sound down all the way on the television, and as quietly as I could, put away the hanging bag. I gently lifted Beth’s coffee cup from between her hands, and placed it on the table between the two beds. As I reached up to turn off the lamp on the table, I stopped to stare at Beth for a second. She was as pretty as any woman I had ever seen. Her long, dark hair fell away from her tan face on the white pillow. With those large brown eyes closed, her high cheekbones became more prominent, and her full lips parted slightly as she slept. Beneath her white Penn State T-shirt, I could almost make out the outline of her dark nipples as her chest rose and fell with each breath. Her hands rested on her flat stomach, and her grey athletic shorts were tight enough to reveal the gentle upward curve of her pubic mound. Her legs were smooth and tan and muscular. She may have been a few years older than me, but I was already beginning to show the signs of dissipation and desk work. Beth was in perfect physical shape.

  “She could fuck you in half,” I thought to myself, and turned out the light. But not before noticing that sometime during the evening she had taken off her earrings and wedding rings. “Maybe that is just her bedtime routine,” I thought. But I noticed the little cross was still in place. I turned out the light, stretched out on the other bed, and finished the wine. I watched in silence as Pacific stunned an overrated Pitt to advance to the next round. Several times during the game, I thought about kissing Beth. I thought to myself that there was no reason for anybody to find out if I did. Isn’t that what Sullivan would do? I even thought about getting undressed and getting into bed with her, but I fell asleep during the West Coast game that followed. When I woke up the next morning, Beth had gone to her room and closed her door to mine.

  I got up, showered and dressed, and spread the case materials regarding the Defendant Boyd’s Motion to Strike Plaintiffs’ Experts out on the little table in my room. I had avoided reading the motion the day before on the plane, but I couldn’t put off doing the work any longer. I had pretty much read the “Summary of Argument” section when Beth knocked on her door to my room, and I told her to come in.

  She was dressed in jeans and a sweater. She really was beautiful. “So, what’s the game plan for today, boss?”

  “I’ve got to work on putting together a response to this motion. Honestly, I haven’t even read it yet. Aren’t you supposed to be getting discovery responses from some of the plaintiffs?”

  “Right. I’ll need the car. Riza gave me a map before I came. This could take quite a while. I’ve been looking at where all of these different plaintiffs live. Are you going to be here all day?”

  “Yeah, I need to meet with our expert tomorrow, but he’s coming here to meet me. I’ll spend most of today reading, and I may have to call him
a couple of times.”

  We traded cell phone numbers, and she left through her room, leaving the door to her room open, and leaving me to think off and on throughout the day about Beth and her Penn State T-shirt.

  By mid-morning I had finished reading the defendant’s motion, and I leaned back in my chair. We were in trouble. The motion, if granted, would exclude our expert’s testimony, or restrict it in such a fashion that the plaintiffs wouldn’t be able to show to the jury at trial that the above-background levels of radiation on the plaintiffs’ properties presented any health risks. At the heart of the motion was the theory that exposure to low levels of radiation had not been scientifically proven to cause health problems. Without our expert’s testimony, the plaintiffs’ case would be subject to a summary judgment for the defendant because Kentucky law required the plaintiffs to establish a health risk to them in order to make a recovery for damage to their properties. I knew Sullivan was excited about getting to try a case in which the defendant was responsible for contaminating the plaintiffs’ properties with radiation; but if the defendant was successful on this motion, a summary judgment motion would follow, would be granted, and a jury would never hear the case.

  I had no idea how to respond to the motion, because when our firm had appeared in the case, we were limited to calling the expert hired by the plaintiffs’ previous counsel. I read through his resume and compared it to the resumes of the defendant’s experts, which were attached with affidavits and case law to the defendant’s motion. From a practical experience and work history standpoint, we matched up pretty well. Our expert, Mr. Sterling Walton, had spent most of his adult life supervising the cleanup of radioactive contamination sites, both for the government and private industry. From the standpoint of educational background, the defendant’s experts all had PhDs after their names, and Mr. Walton was just that—Mr. Walton.