In An Arid Land
Page 13
The smile fell away quickly and his face reformed itself into the mask of sadness, almost a frown, and, in the quick juxtaposition of the two expressions, she saw how tired he was and she saw that he seemed resigned to his exhaustion, as if it were a permanent state of mind.
"Go on," she said.
Very abruptly he began, "A letter arrived yesterday from my brother he's dealing with the estate, you know and in the letter was a check . . . ." He looked at her as if to see whether she was prepared for him to continue, and she nodded her head to encourage him. "The check is for a lot of money, more money than we could earn together doing what we're doing in ten years. I've known it was coming for some time, but I didn't know it would be so large. We could do anything we want. We could travel. Buy a new house. Anything. To put it simply, we're almost rich."
She couldn't contain her excitement. She said, "I thought your brother had it all in the business."
"No. There was the house. It was in the will."
"Why haven't you told me?"
"Because . . . because we'll have to give it away."
She started to protest, but he stopped her.
"The night before my father passed away I sat in this chair, at this spot I was just killing time before going in to bed I sat here and I started thinking about him and how he was and always had been and I remembered things I hadn't thought of in years. Little things, things he had done to me or said to me when I was young, things he would never even remember, things that I hated, and the more I thought about them the more I hated them, and the more I hated them, the more I hated him, the one who had done them, even though I loved him because he was my father. The things I thought about are the sorts of things that go on between all fathers and sons, and, I'd imagine, between all mothers and daughters . . . you know, humiliations and fears and that horrible, horrible longing to please even though you know you can't, could never really please, and that constant feeling that whatever you do it's a disappointment." He paused, thinking, gazing into the trees.
"I remember once," he said and then told her of a summer during college when he had gone home to work at the store with the title of Summer Assistant Manager, and how one day he had been assigned to set up a sale display of lawn mowers. He labored over it all morning, planning it, hanging a banner and signs, lining up the mowers perfectly from the least expensive to the most so the customers could compare. He told her how his father, as he was leaving for lunch with the manager, paused long enough only to say, "No no, they're backwards," and then called over a stock boy, a stock boy, to show him how to do it correctly.
"To anyone else in the world he would have said at least, 'Good job, good try,' but not to me, his son. I know it's petty, it's nothing, but I hated it and I hated him. And as I thought about that, and how it's been the same old thing time after time, and how all these years I've had this feeling that I was still waiting really to start my life, even now at the age of forty, and how it would only start when he was gone and I could put him behind me so that whatever I did wouldn't matter anymore because he wouldn't be around, and I wouldn't feel guilty for not doing what he had always wanted me to do to run that grubby business with my brother and that night, sitting here in this chair, I wished he would die. Right then. Immediately . . . ."
He went on talking for a long time, confessing secrets as if to a minister with the same sort of energy that pours from an exhausted child explaining what happened to make him sin. He even mentioned that at times he had wished she, too, would die so he could start over completely, living exactly the way he had always thought he would live before he had become frightened of the world and decided to marry, but she heard very little of it. She didn't want to hear it and didn't need to hear anymore, now that she knew. Then he cried, and as she held his head against her breasts, muttering, "You poor man," she felt a great release in the regions of her heart, like the release she always felt once a storm arrived. She inhaled a deep breath, exhaled loudly and he must have taken it wrong, as he was unable to see her face, for he mumbled, "Don't cry, it's not you," and she stroked his hair. "I know," she said, and he cried all the more violently. She held him and rocked him gently in the chair to soothe him as he sobbed and then as he whimpered and then as he began to sniffle. It was mostly over now, and she didn't know what to say, so her mind wandered. She thought of the money, but this passed quickly, and she began to think of the many little things, the necessary and important things that she needed to do to prepare them for the day. They would want more coffee and the dishes needed washing and the living room needed picking up. And then she remembered the alarm. It was well past six by now and she imagined the clock's high-pitched electronic pulses assailing the dark serenity of the empty bedroom, and she could almost see the sound it made, like the constant flashing of a buoy's beacon across the waters of a night-hushed lake, and then she could almost feel the rhythmic pulses of the sound coming to her in vibrations through the walls and the floors and the redwood chair, and she knew that would be the first thing she tended to when this ended and they went back inside the house.
Something moved among the trees out over the road and she said, "Oh, look, it's the owl," but he didn't lift his head and when she glanced at her lap she saw that he was sleeping.
THE PIER, THE PORCH, THE PEARLY GATES
I
Millhouse at the wheel. And Helen talking.
"The Reader's Digest says you should prepare, buy the things you'll need appliances, cars, that sort of thing, things that'll last" She shifted her broad hips on the cracked vinyl seat of the Oldsmobile, the trade-in that for thirteen years had taken them to work and to church at the First Methodist and out to eat on Thursday nights. Her voice dropped, the tone gentle like an undertaker's; she enunciated, "'So as to ease the transition of retirement and to enrich the last, best years of your life.'"
"Hah!" said Millhouse, working to keep the car between the stripes of his lane. "Rich?" he said. He guided the Oldsmobile, transmission clattering, engine smoking, off the freeway ramp and toward the dealership's used car lot. It chugged, hissed, it died on the access road, blocking traffic at the entrance to the dealership, and a tow truck hauled it away. They were silent with each other for a long time as a salesman showed them different models and took them for a test drive in a Chevette.
"Ain't it great," said the salesman, Johnny, scratching an itch under the penguin on his golf shirt. "Power steering, reinforced suspension, Body by Fisher, just like riding on a cloud." He smiled, "Or in an Oldsmobile."
"It's wonderful," Helen said from the back seat.
"Hah!" said Millhouse, but Johnny, behind his sunglasses, didn't seem to hear. Millhouse drove straight to the dealership, got out, said, "We'll take it."
In the showroom, waiting for the contract, they rested, sipping Cokes, in the front seat of a shiny red Corvette, the price on the sticker half again as much as the price of their first house. He said, "This one, you know, that little car out there, it's going to have to take us to the Pearly Gates."
He knew it would draw her out. He hated her silence; he wanted her to speak. But more, he wanted her to admit it, to acquiesce, to join him in his misery, to say, yes, you're right, after thirty-nine years of struggling, of suffering under the weight of it all, it's over, we're buying an $8,000 coffin. Now, finally, the funeral can begin.
She said, "You're right, Charlie, but at least this one won't break down on the way."
Through his bifocals he saw something of the young Helen in the upper regions of her face the dead-set brow, the firm straight nose but something forbidding in the folds of her jowls. He beat the horn with his fist, two quick honks that bellowed through the showroom, and everyone looked over.
He said, "Two points for you."
"If you keep this up, Charlie, we may need a new pickup, too, so we can both get to the Pearly Gates."
He hit the horn again. "Two more points." Everyone was looking, and a suited salesman started toward them. Millhouse waved through
the window, grinned, and the salesman stopped, nodded, smiled at the old people, went back to his customers.
Millhouse gripped the wheel of the Corvette until his knuckles went white. He rubbed the bit of arthritis in his hand. He saw disappointment or disgust or humiliation in the glaze of her eyes, the taut mouth, the rigid, almost quivering jaw.
"I'm scared," he said.
She reached out as if to touch him, but held back. She scrounged through her shoulder bag and found his stomach medicine: "Here, take one of these, relax. And please, please Charlie, quit talking about the Pearly Gates."
II
Millhouse at the pier. Millhouse on the porch. It's been two months now and a pattern is developing. Millhouse in his recliner. He has the time now even to dote on himself. Afternoons, gazing into the bathroom mirror, his cup of Folgers cooling on the counter top, he considers the curves and lines of his face. He clips his nose hairs. He strokes his moustache with the tiny purple comb that Helen gave him when he stopped shaving his lip in mute celebration of the end of a career: four decades as a traffic-light specialist for the City of Houston, Harris County, Texas. The moustache came out salt and pepper, not yet the silky white of his hair, so thin and fine to the touch, like the soft brown tufts on the heads of his grandchildren. The lobes hang long, flabby, and the chin has doubled, tripled, but the nose is the same, a slight crook, pointed at the end. An honorable nose.
At the bedroom window, his hands behind his back, Millhouse thinking: azaleas; I'll plant azaleas for Helen under those four pines in a thick bed of mulch. But it will have to wait: too much to do. Paint, mow, fix the fences, the rotting porch, the septic tank. He wants the place in good shape, easy for Helen to keep up in case . . . in case something happens to him and she is left alone. But where to begin? And the county hasn't had a drop of rain since the week he cleared out his desk. How's a man to work with dehydration always threatening to strangle him?
Millhouse making the bed. The smooth melody of a Harry James tune seeps through the house like a vapor from the long-silent hi-fi he found in a closet of the second bedroom where the girls slept on weekends. He pauses, listens, glances at the pictures on the wall Sheila, dark, on the left, Gloria, blonde, on the right and the plaque of APPRECIATION from the City.
Sometimes, when he's feeling up to it, he cooks supper for Helen chicken pot pies or a frozen pizza, whatever's in the box, hot and on the table when she walks in the door. He enjoys doing it for Helen, Helen, who rolls with life like a cork on waves, who is still working, a new job close to home, not in Houston. She drives in to Huntsville at eight, out from Huntsville at five, in the new Chevette.
Helen is late today. He goes out to the porch to wait, reclining in his lawn chair. On Fridays they used to hurry to get away, drive up to the house, spend the weekend, go back in on Monday. That was then, before he retired and they moved to the old farmhouse for good. He misses the excitement of unlocking the door to a dark kitchen, turning on lights in the close, dark smell, going from room to room to see that nothing had changed.
Here is Helen, easing the Chevy up the driveway to park it behind the truck. Millhouse brings in the groceries, complaining, "I knew you shouldn't have taken that job."
"I told you I was going to the store after work."
He says, "How am I to remember everything you tell me?" She stops, looks at him closely, kisses his face between two grocery sacks. They put away the perishables and then Millhouse reheats the Spam he fried for supper. "Spam?" she says. "It's all we had." She says, "I told you I was going to the store." They eat in the kitchen and stare into the hole under the counter next to the sink where Millhouse plans to install a dishwasher.
III
It's early morning and Millhouse is at the doctor's office, the third since leaving his job. "I can't find anything," says the doctor, a boy in a blazer. "Tell me again, when do you have these pains?"
"All the time. Whenever I think about my life."
The doctor blushes and fidgets, says not to worry, it will pass, and he gives Millhouse a prescription for sleeping pills. In the truck Millhouse wads up the prescription and throws it out the window. He doesn't know why he keeps going to doctors except that it's paid for, mostly, by insurance and that Helen wants to be sure. "At your age, better safe than sorry," she says, but she misunderstands him when he talks of pain.
He stops at the pier to look at the lake, just look. A thin fog still curls over the water, obscuring the far shore. The glassy surface of the lake appears solid, impenetrable, the cove deep and lifeless, somehow frightening. He stares trance-like at the water until a fish breaks through, sending out its concentric circles like a message to the shore. The quiet closes in on him, so he gets in the truck and goes home.
At noon the postman's jeep appears on the road. Millhouse stalks down the driveway, looks inside the mailbox and takes out the small brown envelope. Handling it, turning it over, he reads the fine print on the back and waits several minutes before ripping open the seal.
The afternoon burns amber outside the windows of the bank in Huntsville. Millhouse fills out a deposit slip and gives it to the teller, young and pleasant, a black woman with a strand of pearls around her neck. "It's my first one," says Millhouse. "My first check from the government. Like Welfare." He grins.
"Ah," she says, letting it linger in the air, moving her hands over the machine. "Congratulations. You should frame it."
"Naw," he says and sort of laughs.
"Enjoy," says the teller, handing Millhouse his receipt.
Outside he gets into the pickup, sweltering from the sun, and drives down Bowie Street. He passes the Walgreen's where he gets a Senior Citizen's Discount and then stops at Hank's Lumber and Hardware. Almost everyone at Hank's knows Millhouse by now and he waves to a couple of men as he makes his way past the heavy green nail buckets and the row of lawn mowers to Helen's office. She's doing the inventory ledgers. He can see her through the glass in the door, the big books open on her desk, the finger working the adding machine one key at a time.
"What are you doing here?" She's cheerful, glad to see him.
"The bank. It came."
"I knew something good was going to happen today. Was it what you thought it would be?"
"Two dollars more."
"Well, see. I told you it wouldn't be so bad." She gets a satisfied look on her face. "You can buy yourself a lime freeze for the ride home. I saw that Dairy Queen's got a special on."
They talk for a while and she tells him that Gloria called to say she and Roger will bring Josh up on Saturday. Josh is their eldest grandchild and he spends a week with them every year during their vacation. But Helen won't get vacation this year.
"She said all he's been able to talk about since school let out is Papaw, Papaw. He wants you to teach him how to fish."
"For a whole week?"
Her face oozes mirth. It's that grin that used to infuriate him with its shrewd, teasing squinch around the eyes. Now he knows it's just Helen and accepts it as he accepts the smelly Ben-Gay rubs she gives him when he's been working on the land.
"I'm afraid it's two weeks," she says as if she's about to laugh. "Gloria promised him."
Millhouse remembers the noise, the questions, the broken keepsakes, the general trauma Josh inflicts on their lives when he comes to visit: "He'll drive you crazy."
"It's not me . . . " she says. "Oh, Charlie, you'll enjoy it. He sure loves his Papaw." She glances around quickly and then kisses him on the cheek. "Now go. I've got work."
On his way out he hears one of the salesmen call to him from across the showroom: "Have you caught the big one yet?" He's holding his hands in front of him as if approximating the length of a yardstick.
Millhouse isn't sure he understood and, with an exaggerated tilt of his head, cups his ear to get him to repeat it.
"The big bass," the man hollers between hands now shaped around his mouth like a megaphone.
"Ah," Millhouse calls back. "I'm trying."
Millhouse nods and waves and walks out the door to the parking lot. "Leisure." He spits the word at the truck and then gets inside. He drives up Lamar to Main Street and cruises the business district, watching the small-town, county-seat activity. He sees a HELP WANTED sign in the window of the Western Auto. Craning over the steering wheel, he tries to look into the store but the glare of the sun is too great and all he can see is the reflection of the truck sliding by in ripples across the glass.
Millhouse at the Dairy Queen. Millhouse in the truck, sucking on a lime freeze through a straw. The drive from town to home is 18.2 miles. There are clusters of houses along the way, some farms and ranches, railroad tracks and acres of trees. He turns onto the dirt road that leads to the house and waves to Grady atop his tractor, Grady who retired last year and bought the Jenson place with cash savings at the same time he and Helen paid off their mortgage. Grady is mowing what's left from the drought of the coastal Bermuda he planted on his eight acres.
Millhouse and Grady often argue about grass. Millhouse knows for a fact that Bahia is sturdier than Bermuda, but Grady won't listen. He was an engineer and thinks he knows everything. One thing about him, though: he has self-respect; he keeps his place up. He's painted it, repaired the pump house, cleared the land where it needed it. People talk about how pretty it is, how Grady "really saved that spread" after old Jenson let it "dilapidate."
The tractor stops out in the field and Grady crawls down, starts walking toward the road. Millhouse presses the accelerator and then watches in the mirror as big flags of dust billow up behind the tailgate.
At home he goes to the storage shed off the garage. It's cool and damp and crowded with lumber he's purchased to build or repair things around the house, and boxes. One of the boxes, a large one, came from Sears and contains the dishwasher they bought before he retired. Josh's old crib, dismantled, leans against the wall in the corner near a pyramid of new paint cans.