by Ron Carlson
When Daniel finally heard Deke honk and he walked back and climbed in the front seat of the big car, Deke winked at him and said, “Good thinking. I appreciate the privacy.”
They started back with the windows down, but rolled them up when they hit the highway. It was cold. Deke was trying to tune in KNAK from out of town.
“What’s the deal on Jackie?” Daniel asked.
“Nice girl. You’re a good man to help out.”
“What’s her deal, Deke?” Sitting, Daniel could feel the sand he’d missed. “Is she crazy?”
Deke drove awhile. The radio wavered and finally settled. “Look,” he said. “I probably should have told you. Old Jackie had a man, longtime boyfriend. From junior high. His name was David Dillon. Longtime. And he got killed last weekend, whatever, shot on the deer hunt. A terrible thing. You read about it?”
Daniel had heard about a boy accidentally killed in the Stansburys. It happened every deer season somewhere in Utah.
He looked at Deke Overby. There was nothing to say. He didn’t want to know when they’d buried the boy, because he knew it would have been two or three days ago. He didn’t want to ask anything. He had his distance now all right. He had wanted to choose it and not have it forced on him. The story of the night was all gone for him now. He had been so sure of it. He wanted like all young men to be out of the water when he told of his drowning, but that, he saw now, would never be the way.
Single Woman for
Long Walks on the Beach
Looking for a young woman for the chance to exchange introductory remarks and help on homework, particularly math and social studies, perhaps the term project, the triptych display about continental drift, share pencils, markers, erasers (including all those in the shapes of animals), and lunch, with the possibility of swapping the store-bought Aunt Dorothy’s Bigrolls for homemade tomato sandwiches stuffed with slices of sharp Cheddar, merging our potato chips on a paper plate, talking about our childhood until the bell rings, keeping this up—lunching—both in the cafeteria and on the front steps of the school, until laughing one day, we decide to skip quickly away in my car, a lark, that’s what we’d share is this lark, driving the strange daytime streets while all our classmates suffer under the confused rule of Mrs. Delmanrico and her versions of what happened when the great land masses first pulled apart, finally ending up at the Blue Bird Drive-in, empty in the late afternoon, and sharing two malts, the strawberry and the vanilla, the feeling encircling us certainly something, but not something easily identifiable or given a name, just something new, and in that place, deciding to try for the senior prom, laughing at it in fun—what a goofy, schoolboy thing to do—but also laughing from that feeling and, well, joy, and in two weeks after another set of lunches, sharing the senior prom, including me picking you up in my freshly washed Bel Air, and meeting your mother and your sister, your sister really giving me the once-over, and you in a dress, which is actually pink, believably pink, a pink that rescues that color once and for all, and then dancing at the prom, our first touch really, carefully committed in the old gymnasium, visiting with your friends and some of my friends, and dancing and sharing then the long walk to the car, but knowing as we felt the night air fall on our warm faces as we left the building that everything had changed now and the feeling we had at the Blue Bird Drive-In has now become a real thing we still don’t have a name for, but we are forever different in the car, talking now about college, not kissing, afraid to really, talking about the future and pledging to write to each other when we go away to college, which we will do, daily, handwritten letters, full of the heartbreaking news of classes, social life, every mention of another person, male or female, engendering faint but genuine pangs of what we will only be able to call jealousy and longing, all sent by post over a period long enough for the price of a stamp to go up three cents and then meeting again at a graduation-summer geology seminar at the first morning’s coffee and seeing everything by now quite clearly as the entire conference, all of geology, the very world disappears and we go as we never have gone to bed together that noon without words although they will come along, among them some we will be happy to pronounce, I do, as we’re wed, two young people fresh and strong and ready for the next thing though it will be no single one thing now but five libraries, two extensive research projects, a baby and then another, four apartments and a house and then another house and a position, yes, geology, with some solar research, this being for an energy firm in a large Midwestern city and a basketball hoop on the front of the garage along with a free-throw line in chalk and growing children, a girl and a boy, who will annoy the neighbors into knowing their names, and there will be success, not small success, in the careers some original work recognized and material well-being some weekend afternoons with the sound of a basketball on the driveway we’ll eat sandwiches in the kitchen and with the desire alive in the room it will be as if one time were all time and we were back on the lawn at a school where we met and then with the kids gone we’ll clean the garage, the stuff we’re storing, all the photos and schoolwork, and we will share the lovely sound of the broom on that cement floor but time will turn for me that’s part of this deal, seventy five percent of all women outlive their husbands, and there’ll be an era of you sitting at my bedside as a simple fact this is later but still too soon by ray measure and the days will wash away, your hand on my arm some and some days just the yellow light on the wall. This is when I’ll ask to walk on the beach and expect you to talk to me, to walk me out in story along a beach, let’s make it on an island, far from the grinding continents, you pick it, Kailua, Sans Souci, Waimanelo or further shorelines and fill in the details please the texture of the sand, hardpack or plush, and Γ11 want the surf what there is timid or crazed and the smell of course and the walk itself, which direction and how far with me on the ocean side most of the time as we swing our arms and talk the way we’ve always talked, the sweet real pleasure of reason and speculation, and whether we’re barefoot or not, my cuffs wet, we’ll walk on the beach, that’s what we signed up for and when it grows dark we can stroll back all the way and we can dine by candlelight, there are never enough candles in a life, so there it is: late in the day a walk on the beach and this tray of hospital lasagna in the candlelight.
III
THE POTATO GUN
COOPER WAS IN THE GARAGE arguing with his son Trevor when the phone rang. He’d come out with a paper bag of recycling scraps, because he’d been cleaning his office all morning instead of finishing the last draft of his light-rail proposal. It was due. Cooper was fifty and he’d been forever like he was fifteen, putting things off while he groomed the dog or washed the car. His mother had always called him Last Minute Charley, and smiled at his success. Here he was writing a mass-transit report, which took as its theme: Get My Mother to Town! The board had loved his story about driving her every Thursday to the Metropolitan Scrabble Club.
Behind him now, his home office was spotless, mint, like new, and it felt like a dank, spider-choked hellhole. He was in hard procrastination mode. He could write, but he always did it at the last minute. He had been hoping to clean the garage next, one of his favorite places, but there was his boy Trevor with a friend, some small kid whose eyebrows met over his nose, and they had tools spread on the workbench and the floor, and were working on a long section of plastic pipe.
“What’s the project?” Cooper had asked, hoping for a way in. He’d done a lot of stuff out here in fifteen years: hogans from Popsicle sticks, models of the atom from Styrofoam, a protein cell from a rubber pillow pad. The two fifteen-year-olds turned to him. Trevor was inserting a brass fitting into the pipe. “Looks cool.”
Trevor said something.
“What is it?”
“Potato gun,” the other boy said.
Cooper put his bag down and went over. Trevor had duct-taped a plastic liter soda bottle to the end of the four-foot pipe.
“This is Justin,” Trevor said without looking up.
/> “It’ll put a potato through a wall,” Justin said.
Trevor gave his friend a look. “No it won’t.”
“Right through,” Justin said, an expert. He reached and tried to wiggle the piece of brass. It was solid.
Cooper was trying to select from the things to say, because this is where he’d got it wrong forty times before. His son was the most interesting person Cooper had ever had to deal with, and he wasn’t sure he could measure up. “Is this the Justin we’re driving to the prom?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy replied. “Are you taking your old car?” He pointed at the covered 1956 Chevrolet, which was Cooper’s treasure.
“Yes we are.” The boys were sophomores but had been asked to the junior prom by two junior girls. Justin hefted the pipe gun from Trevor’s hands and asked, “Shall we test it?”
Cooper took the thing and spoke: “No, we won’t be testing it today. Justin, check with us tomorrow, will you?”
“Sounds good. I’ll call you later, Trev.” Justin dropped and put on one Rollerblade, and set off that way: one shoe, one skate.
“We could have tested it, Dad.”
Cooper didn’t know how to hold the thing; it felt terrible. Trevor stepped up and pointed to the parts: “The butane chamber, the igniting hole, the barrel.” He showed his father another piece of the white plastic pipe with a knob of tape on the end. “This is the ramrod.”
“A potato gun,” Cooper said. He could restrain himself no longer. “Whose idea is this? We can’t shoot this.”
“Justin’s got one. They’re totally safe.”
Cooper found fatherhood a roller coaster. You were up on top, but not for long, and the whole thing felt a lot like you’d repaired it yourself. At night and in a hurry. His son was grown and had been taller than Cooper for two months. He wished it was a hogan, a huge hogan made of anything. He wished it was not a potato gun.
Trevor stood before him now, his shoulders a kind of accusation: Things were going just fine here before you came around. It reminded Cooper of an argument they’d had five or six years before when Trevor had ordered free plans for a helicopter out of the back of Popular Science. He had done so because the ad said: You Need No License! Cooper had been at his desk at the last minute on some project for the city, and he’d pushed his chair back. He didn’t want his son in a helicopter. He actually said as much, “You’re not flying a helicopter.” He had said it loud so that Libby had come in and asked what was the matter. It was another moment when he was snagged on something and pulled from his footing; there was no way to explain his position. Trevor rolled his eyes and turned in disgust, this ten-year-old pilot. When the plans came, he taped them to his bedroom door for all the world to see. They were still there.
“What are you going to do with it?” Trevor asked.
“Just hold it until we find out.”
“Find out what?” Trevor was putting the tools away on the pegboard: the hacksaw, the awl, the pliers. “You don’t need to find anything out.” He twisted the words back sarcastically. “Justin’s got one; it’s fine with his dad.”
“I’m not going by what Justin or his dad say.” He’d already formed a picture of that savage group blowing round holes in the block walls and the stucco houses. “I don’t know,” Cooper said, “if it’s legal.” He looked out the open garage door at the fresh spring day, now gone for him. “We may not be allowed to have this in the city.” He hated how that sounded, but he was scared of the thing blowing up or hurting someone. Cooper’s father would have said, “Let’s go out and see what this baby can do,” but it had skipped Cooper, that confidence.
Now in the garage, Trevor didn’t respond. He had the tools up, and he swept the white plastic crumbs with a whisk broom. After a moment he turned and folded his arms and leaned back against the old workbench that Cooper had made the year the boy was born. Trevor looked at him, a full accusation: You’ve ruined something again.
“I just need to find out,” Cooper said.
Trevor looked at his father and shook his head: wrong, wrong, wrong. “How are you going to find out?”
The potato gun was heavy in Cooper’s arms. “I guess I’ll just call over to the police and ask them.” A Suburban drove slowly down the street and the Weichs looked in the garage at Cooper and the weapon.
“You’re going to call the police?”
“I guess. Unless you’ve got a better idea. We just need some information.” The last was Cooper’s fallback. His own folks had always said, “We’ll see,” and it had always been maddening. And now Cooper always requested more information. He was sickened by the fact that he’d probably picked it up from one of the municipal board’s endless meetings.
“Send it to the task force,” Trevor said. This was a stinging rebuke. He’d heard Cooper vent about that phrase to Libby again and again. “Task is right,” Cooper would rant, “but force is way off the mark.”
It was at this point in the discussion, after the first overt sarcasm, an attack, when Libby would immediately address the level of discourse, allowing not one bit of disrespect. It leveled everyone. For some reason, Cooper had never felt it was his right to do this. He was going to stay in the ring and he was not going to lose his temper.
“Trevor, I just need to make a call. This"—he held up the potato gun-”is the unknown.”
“Fine.” His son held his hands aloft like a magician, showing he no longer had any hold over the current moment. “But get ready for what you’re going to hear. The police are going to find out we’ve got potatoes, and besides that, tomatoes and those orange deals, carrots. You’re opening the whole vegetable drawer to the government. You are unbelievable.”
Libby came into the garage now. Trevor finished with “Good luck with it all,” and crossed into the house.
Cooper’s wife had the phone on her shoulder and her face was blanched. When he saw the phone he thought it was the planning office calling for his report, but then he knew, or afterward it felt like he knew. He gave her the potato gun and said, “Hold this,” and then he put the telephone to his ear.
There was nothing to do. He had always been close to his mother, shared her word games and her wavelength of humor, and had known that so much of his work with the city was done so that when his name was in the paper, she could show her Scrabble buddies and e-mail his aunts. Now he called the aunts and went down to the hospital. He put his hand on her forehead, which was not cold, and they gave him a little bag with her wedding ring and her dentures and such. Cooper’s father had already been gone fifteen years. His mother had called that morning. She was going to get a new dishwasher and asked Cooper what he thought of Days Appliance. He told her the store was where he and Libby had bought their fridge. She was doing her puzzle society newsletter and asked him which character in Shakespeare had the longest name. He didn’t know, but guessed, “Rosencrantz? Eleven letters.”
“Why did we send you to college?” she said. She always said this; it was their oldest joke. They made plans for the Thursday drive to the library, and when they hung up, she said, “There, I feel better.”
In the quiet room in the hospital, using two phones, Cooper made the arrangements: transfer, cremation, memorial service on Friday. Then he drove home light to light, avoiding the 101, and near home he finally said it aloud, “Your mother is dead.” His reaction was as he suspected; he didn’t believe it. He tried to say it again and couldn’t. At the house Libby came out to his car when she heard the garage door open. He got out and told her, “We’re all right.”
Trevor stood in the kitchen and gave Cooper a cursory hug, the way they’d always hugged. “Sorry about Grandma, Dad.”
Cooper fought through the sympathy and got to his desk. He didn’t even want a drink. He wrote the light-rail report in forty minutes, an ace job, which he faxed to the office after hours. In bed, Libby rolled to him and rubbed his back, but he felt hollow, and he held on to his pillow so he wouldn’t float away.
In the morning w
ith a pencil on the patio, Cooper wrote his mother’s obituary, two short paragraphs in the customary manner, centering it with, “She had a head for puzzles and a heart for people.” He wanted to write, “She sent me to college and never got to ride the train.”
He wanted to write about all the people she had cared for. He’d grown up across the street from a ragtag sandlot, where all his buddies came to play ball. Afternoons in the summer time, his mother would sit out in the shadow of their house in a canvas lawn chair and do her cryptograms and puzzles and talk to his friends. It stunned him that he’d be out in center field and look over to see Danny Lopez or Robert Polad sitting on the lawm by her, just talking things over. At the various reunions he and libby had gone to over the years, people always asked about his mother, and told him how important she had been to them.
While he was faxmg the obituary to the newspaper, the phone rang and it was the mayor herself calling about the rail proposal. She loved it; they were going to use great portions in the ad campaign. “You’re so good at this, Peter. Let’s get together tomorrow for strategy. Now the fun begins.” Then she added, “And I want to meet your mother. She sounds wonderful.”
“She’s something,” he said.
Cooper had met his wife when they were in high school. He had been president of the Civics Club and a tall, quiet kid the teachers liked. He initiated a program wherein the club cleaned up bus stops, and he met Libby literally while painting a bench sky blue. They still knew the bench, the corner (as did Trevor, who used it in much of his humor), and they’d painted it twice in the last ten years, late at night both times, on their anniversary.