[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  61

  Clare had built the tree house for Neva but she hardly ever used it. It wasn’t really a tree house, anyway. It was just a series of wooden cleats leading up to a planked platform, but it was a shady place to sit in the evening or on Sunday and no one ever came there. Clare could sit high up on the platform, lean against the smooth trunk of the eucalyptus, stretch out his legs, and read one of his Zane Greys. Once a hawk had glided into the eucalyptus and alighted not ten feet away, sitting there hunch shouldered and watchful before swooping away with a keen beating of wings. Clare had watched any number of creatures pass beneath the tree house—roadrunners, rabbits, coyotes, a bobcat—all of them unaware of his eyes upon them from above. Sometimes he would make his hand into the shape of a gun, aim with his index finger and, bringing his thumb down, whisper, Ka-blam. Just that little whisper was enough to still a rabbit and cock the head of a coyote. Sometimes Clare would smoke a cigarette stolen from his father’s stash. He’d smoked his father’s leftovers, too, when they first got here, but his father no longer allowed it. He might have bronchitis, he said, and he didn’t want Clare to get it, too.

  On this particular day Clare had finished Tonto Basin, as he knew he would, so he’d also brought Riders of the Purple Sage, which he’d read so many times that he knew the first lines by heart. It was still his favorite and its familiarity was reassuring to him. It made him feel safe. He pinched a leaf from a branch, crushed it with his thumb, and held it close to his nose so he could take in the lemony smell. Silver Shred was what she called it. He wondered how he might buy a jar of Silver Shred. He could ask the librarian, Mrs. Goddard. She was nice to him even if nobody else much was. Living in California and closer to town, he thought he would have friends, but he didn’t. He’d never really had them in Kansas. He didn’t know how to go about finding them. When he went to town, people either seemed to think he was invisible or, if they did look at him, it was warily, as if he might be some kind of predator. It was true that some of the girls smiled at him but he was too shy to smile back so they soon quit. Only Mr. McNamara ever waved to him on the street and he was almost afraid to wave back, because of who might see him. Once, when they needed extra workers at the packinghouse for a day, Clare had been chosen, and at the noon whistle, he took his lunch bucket out to the tables where he supposed his mother would be, but she wasn’t. There were three wood-plank tables set beneath the massive sweet-smelling pepper trees. Two of the tables were packed full of workers, but the only one sitting at the third table was a boy just a little older than himself whose name Clare knew to be Caleb. Clare sat down and nodded across the table at the boy, but he didn’t nod back. Clare’s mother had told him that as a newcomer in town, if he wanted to find friends, he needed to put his best foot forward, so he persisted with, “You’re Caleb, right?” The boy still said nothing. His small eyes were set in a wide, tapering face that put Clare in mind of a possum. He kept staring at Clare with that possum’s face, and Clare began having a hard time enjoying his sandwich. Finally the boy said, “Is that Hurd your uncle?” Clare nodded. The boy again said nothing for a time. Then—it was as if so many words and thoughts had collected in his brain that he could no longer keep them there—he said, “Well, McNamara is a scroungy, pitiless son of a bitch and your Uncle Hurd is his stooge, which is just exactly how come you and your family have yourselves all the plum jobs.”

  Clare felt dazed. It was like he’d been hit hard in the face. All he’d managed to say was, “What do you mean, his stooge?”

  The boy’s face, already drawn pink, drew pinker. “I mean he’s the fat orange-haired mick that watches and watches to see if anybody falls down drunk on Saturday or misses church or sneaks in late to work or takes home a couple of punked avocados, and if he does, McNamara knows by Sunday. Because you know what Sunday is?”

  Clare said he did not. He was trying to get his bearings.

  By now an older woman from the other table had hurried over and put her hand under the boy’s arm as if to escort him away. “Shush now, Caleb, just shush now,” she said, but the boy would not be shushed. He shook his possum head and spat onto the wooden floor. “He knows by Sunday because besides being the day of the Lord, Sunday is when McNamara goes out to your fat uncle’s place and gets all the fat-face gossip.” He stood and swung his leg over the bench to leave, but checked himself. “Do you know Olive Teagarten?”

  Clare shook his head.

  “Well, I do. And McNamara knew she was knocked up almost before she did.”

  The boy then rose and moved to one of the other tables, where the workers scooched sideways to make room for him while Clare ate alone. He saw the boy at work one more time, and then never again.

  From then on, Clare had viewed Hurd’s round happy face differently, and Mr. McNamara’s, too. He hated seeing that grown man with Charlotte, hated it more than he could say. Why did grown men do that—chase after girls half their age? Clare squeezed his eyes tightly closed. He took a breath and began reciting to himself: “a sharp clip-clop of iron-shod hooves deadened and died away and clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over the purple sage . . .”

  He opened the book to check. He’d gotten everything right but purple. The purple came in the next line, when Jane Withersteen gazed down the wide purple slope with dreamy, troubled eyes.

  62

  Ellie regarded her hands, the skin cracked and the cracks dark with ink. This was the fourth straight day she had stayed late at the packinghouse pasting labels on boxes to earn extra money. It was almost eight o’clock when she punched out and walked alone down the steps from the loading dock. Ida would have kept something covered for her supper, but Ellie had worked her way past hunger. All during her lunch break, sitting away from the others on a crate in the east-wall shade of the packinghouse, she’d stared across the lots at the pink bricks of El Real, so now, instead of walking straight home, she stepped over the railroad tracks and picked her way through the weeds and broken glass of the vacant lots. The fennel weeds were five feet tall and bushy, each one as dry as a broom straw. She snapped off a gray cluster to roll the beads between her fingers and smell the sweet oil it left, a scent that was exactly like licorice. She glanced back at the packinghouse when she reached the El Real, to see if anyone was watching, and then she reached out to the doorknob. It turned, and she let herself in.

  The sun was low in the sky and the light was horizontal. The wrought-iron curlicues on the window bars became serpentine shadows on amber walls above a short lunch counter and a stack of cheap wooden chairs. She’d thought more than once of asking Mr. McNamara whether he’d be willing to rent the building, but she wanted to see it for herself first, see if it was the sort of place where you could serve green tomato pie and Spanish cream.

  She ran her hand over the varnished wood of the lunch counter. There was dust all right, but she knew how to clean up dust. She studied the dust on a six-burner stove. It was no Harvey House, but even with the dust, the chrome gleamed faintly in the twilight. The floor was a black-and-white checkerboard that would look smart when scoured. Truly, it was all much nicer than she’d imagined. She looked up at the stairs. They were solid and carpeted up the center and looked elegant, really, except for the leathery carcass of a mouse halfway up. She reached the top just as the gold light of the setting sun winked out and left the interior in shades of blue. The first door she opened went into a hotel room furnished with a dusty striped mattress, a pine wardrobe, a nightstand, and scattered black droppings of mice. There were four other rooms more or less the same, and bathrooms at each end of the hallway, so it could be an apartment, she thought, if she cooked the family meals in the café kitchen.

  There was the matter of money of course, but June had been a good month at the packinghouse and she’d made three dollars most days, sometimes four. From that she had managed to save twelve dollars now.

  She was checking the window latch in the back bedroom when she heard the door open downstairs. A l
iquid burst of fear shot from her stomach to her head. She stood perfectly still, smelling the crushed fennel on her fingertips, hoping that whoever it was had not seen her open the door and let herself in. She heard shuffling footsteps, then a man’s voice.

  “As you can see, nothing’s been taken out. It’s just as it was the last time you looked at it.” It was McNamara’s voice, his quiet even modulation.

  “What’s changed is the times,” another voice said, a man’s, as if calling across the room. His voice was gruff and unfamiliar. “Nothing’s what they were. Including rents.”

  Mr. McNamara responded in a voice too low to be heard from this distance.

  Ellie folded her arms across her stomach and shifted her weight to her left foot. She should never have sneaked into the building like this. She could hide out upstairs and hope they didn’t find her, but if they did, it would be the worst kind of humiliation. She took a deep breath and stepped forward to the head of the stairs.

  “Hello? Is that you, Mr. McNamara?” she called down, trying to make her voice sound breezy. “I heard you were renting this place and I stopped by on my way home.”

  The restaurant below was lit, and as she descended, Mr. McNamara stepped to the foot of the stairs and looked up with frank curiosity. She hoped her hair wasn’t frazzled.

  “Well, well,” he said, but his tone was not unfriendly.

  A stranger—cowboy boots, rodeo-style neck scarf, hat in hand—appeared behind him. As she made her way down with one hand on the rail, she felt vaguely as if she were making an entrance.

  When they were all standing in the empty restaurant, she said, “I’d heard that you owned it and didn’t know what to do with it, and”—she glanced at the other man, who stared back without smiling—“I’ve always had the idea of running a café.”

  Mr. McNamara was leaning forward slightly, smiling and nodding. “What kind of café?”

  She glanced down and, seeing her chapped hands, held them behind her. “Breakfast and lunch,” she said. “Hearty foods and specialty dishes and desserts.”

  Mr. McNamara was nodding thoughtfully. “And maybe hamburgers and malts for the high school crowd in the afternoon.”

  It was quiet and the overhead chandeliers, only one of which was working, made the room seem golden. She’d almost forgotten the man in the rodeo scarf until he said, “All right, then. I’ll take it.”

  Mr. McNamara turned to him. “Well, that’s just fine, Mr. Schutt.” He smiled through the briefest pause. “And you’ll be taking the hotel, too? Because I imagine that if Mrs. Price were to open her café she would be interested in using the hotel as apartments for her family, with maybe even a boarder or two, just to supplement.”

  The other man’s expression sharpened. “You never said anything before about having to take the rooms, too.”

  “I know that, Mr. Schutt,” Mr. McNamara said. His voice went beyond patience; it was condolence itself. “But you can see what an advantage renting the whole building would be for all concerned.”

  The man took this in, then said, “I wouldn’t say for all concerned,” and, slapping on his hat, he walked out of the building.

  It was quiet again. “I’m terribly sorry,” Ellie said.

  “For what? This is all just splendid. The town needs a good café. In fact, it is just exactly what this town needs.”

  “But . . . ,” Ellie said, and let her eyes drift toward the door the man had just walked out of.

  “Oh, don’t worry about Mr. Schutt. He’s been looking at the place for the last year and a half and all he ever wants to do is knock me down on the rent.”

  Ellie chuckled at this for the sake of politeness; then she took a breath and said, “Well, about that rent . . . what exactly were you thinking?”

  Mr. McNamara scanned the disused restaurant, as if considering its possibilities. He was wearing his slim gray suit, and, to Ellie’s eye, his smooth brown head was somehow distinguished-looking, as if to grow hair was to let yourself go. “Well,” he said finally, “you’re going to need some seed money, for supplies and machinery and so forth, so my suggestion is this. I’ll put up the money and provide the building and, once you start turning a profit, I’ll take twenty percent until you pay me back, and ten percent thereafter.” His smile stretched wide. “How does that sound to you?”

  “The percentage . . . that would be in addition to the rent?”

  “No, I mean instead of the rent,” he said. His expression was warm and genial, as if presenting her with this gift gave him as much pleasure as he knew it would give her, and just like that, Ellie felt lighter than air, as if she might float away.

  A café. Her own café. She already had a name for it. She wouldn’t say it out loud, not yet, but she had it. The Sleeping Indian.

  It grew dark as Mr. McNamara drove her back to Ida and Hurd’s. The whole way they talked about Charlotte.

  63

  Already Oscar de la Cueva had dropped the rest of the pickers at another grove, but he’d told Clare and his father to stay on the truck and then driven slowly to this place at the end of a long dirt lane, a small grove of Valencias bounded on each side by a windbreak of shaggy eucalyptus. He and his father rolled a single bin off the truck and stood staring at the trees.

  “Thanks for the favor, Oscar,” Clare said. He gave it the sound of a jest but it wasn’t really a jest. The trees in this grove were too closely spaced. That forced the limbs upward in their search for sun and light. Tall trees meant sparse fruit and slow picking.

  Oscar de la Cueva ignored the remark. He said to Clare, “They tell me to tell you that tomorrow you go to packing.”

  Clare wasn’t sure what he’d heard. “Packing?” he said. “Or picking?”

  “Packing,” Oscar de la Cueva said.

  “Just for a day or two? Like before?”

  “No. You stay in packing.” He squinted at Clare. “Just you.” He glanced at Clare’s father. “Not papa.”

  Working in the packinghouse was what all the pickers wanted. The pay was better but the best part was, you could work even when it rained. Probably this was why Oscar de la Cueva waited until the other men weren’t there. He didn’t want them there when he announced that one of the worst pickers had been promoted. Clare looked at his father, who was pretending still to appraise the trees they’d be picking.

  “No,” Clare said suddenly. “We’re together. My dad and me. We’re a team.”

  Oscar de la Cueva’s eyes slowly closed and when after a long moment they opened again, they were on Clare. “Tomorrow you go to packing,” he said in a low, even voice. “Only you.” He gazed away again. “And today you and papa pick this grove. These are my trees. You pick my fruit and you see what you see.”

  He drove away without another word. Clare and his father shouldered their bags and their ladders and began picking their way into the grove. It was bad work. Even the lower branches were hard to pick because one tree grew into the next. The upper branches were all but impossible to reach, but Clare tried. He didn’t want Oscar de la Cueva pointing to unpicked fruit. Twice when Clare stretched out from the top of the ladder, he looked down to see his father with his foot planted at the ladder’s base and his hands on its rails so it wouldn’t slip.

  “We’ll never finish this grove if you hold my ladder all day,” he said and his father nodded and said, “We’ll never finish this grove if you break your neck.”

  When they sat down to eat lunch at noon, the heat lay like a membrane and held everything still. Clare felt like he’d already worked a full day. The sweet juice from the oranges bit into the cracks and scratches of his hands and smelled like boiled punch. His boots were stained and wet with the juice and his hair was brittle with the broken webs of orb spiders. His father unwrapped his sandwich and said that it was good he was going to the packinghouse. “You’ll make more, you’ll have shade and cover, and there won’t be any ladders for you to fall off of.”

  “But I like being outside. That’s
what I’ve always done, Kansas or here, worked outside with you.”

  His father cleared his throat, turned away, and spat phlegm. Then he said, “We’re here now. It’s like your mother says, we’ve got to make adjustments. Besides, school will start soon. You should be in school.”

  Clare started to say more but his father raised a hand to cut him off, so that was that. As he gazed down through the trees the air seemed to shimmer with heat. The ham-and-butter sandwich he was eating tasted limp and salty, like it had been steamed, and a swallowtail butterfly seemed almost to stagger through the air. He unwrapped his second sandwich, but had no appetite for it. The butterfly landed on a thin, pliant bough and opened and closed its wings and suddenly Clare was thinking of the yellow meadowlarks that used to sit on the fence posts on the farm and sing with their black beaks wide open. He used to be able to whistle their squeaky, flutey, watery song, and that’s what he’d done to amuse Neva before Aldine came. He put his lips into a tight O and sucked in his breath. When he finished the ripple of notes, his father was staring at him, looking like his own ghost, and then he smiled a little. “I miss that,” he said.

  Clare wrapped his sandwich back into its wax paper and went back to work. His arms were protected but you couldn’t pick with gloves on. There was nothing for it but to search out the next orange even while grabbing the one at hand, a process repeated again and again and again. He heard the rattle of his father’s ladder as he reset it against a nearby tree, but he wasn’t coughing. That was the good thing. It was hard to work or think or anything when he was coughing. The packinghouse would be better, sure it would, but it was hard to think of his father out here alone. He was like the monkeys on Monkey Island at the zoo in Independence, marooned by a moat and a fence, always looking out like they remembered where they used to be. He’d often heard his father talking to Hurd about wheat prices and rain, and then, no matter what Hurd said, his father would nod and conclude that things were about to come round again in Kansas. His mother said nothing even if she was within earshot of such talk. Charlotte couldn’t hold her tongue, though. She would always say she wouldn’t go back for all the tea in China except maybe to visit in her dotage and late dotage at that, and his father would light another cigarette and look out over the moat nobody else could see.