by Brad Watson
In that moment Finus felt all his own failings as a father well up inside him and he lost his appetite for even the cold can of Falstaff in his hand, which he’d so relished just a couple of seconds before. He judged that his paternal failings emerged from his seemingly terminal distraction, his tendency to daydream his way through the days and to resent insistent intrusions along those wayward paths. He was moody, melancholy, and took a kind of joy in solitude, a well of this inside him that must be filled at regular intervals. And if it was not, if the demands upon his attention caused this well not to fill each day or week or month or season, he felt edgy and irritable—and, ironically though with perfect logic, somewhat empty inside.
He stole occasional looks at Birdie, who seemed entirely self-possessed and content sitting in her green metal patio chair and sipping a glass of lemonade, bouncing one leg over the other and talking to Cicero Sparrow’s wife, Cornelia, who took slugs of her third or fourth Falstaff and wore a ridiculously wide-brimmed straw hat and sunglasses, to hide the wreckage of her alcoholic, insomniac eyes. Avis stood beside Earl, wearing her cream-colored summer dress and her new canvas summer shoes from Earl’s store, her short light brown hair swept back behind her ears, her so-often-suspicious or angry green eyes alight with good humor and eager attention. She was still a handsome woman. Finus had at some point in their past let himself let go, stopped comparing her to Birdie in appearance and attitude, and resolved to love Avis for who and what she was, to open his heart to her own clenched one, to open his longing to her long and harder-edged beauty, for he knew it was something to appreciate. Avis tossed her head back at some joke Earl had made, her slightly hoarse voice rising in high laughter, and when she glanced over at Finus he gave her a little smile, and she gave him a big broad one back in just the moment before her eyes registered all their troubles again swiftly like some hole in the sky sucking day into dusk, their dimmed and diminishing happiness, what little there was. She turned back to Earl somewhat sobered.
Though Earl already had turned away and gone down to the lake bank to check on something in the johnboat he used to fish for bass and crappie in the lake. Avis stood there all alone for the moment, no doubt feeling slighted, feeling cheated by Finus for distracting her from one of the few openly pleasurable moments she’d had in some time. She came over and stood next to where he sat on the little parapet wall around the patio. And was about to say something to him when she looked over his head at the children and saw Eric out in the water up to his knees, his sailor-suit shorts rolled up high to keep them from getting wet.
Finus turned as Eric looked up toward the sound of his name, his mother’s voice. He looked shocked, as if he hadn’t expected to get caught. Then he called out in his own defense, -I took off my shoes and socks!
Avis set her can of beer down on the wall, stepped over it, and strode down the bank toward him even as Eric, a mild child’s panic causing him to hold the rolled ends of his shorts between his thumbs and forefingers almost as if they were a skirt, started pulling his feet out of the muck and high-stepping toward the bank himself.
-Avis, Finus said, hoping to check her.
But to his horror she met the boy as he came out of the water and had him by the ear pulling him up the bank, everyone on the patio now stopped to watch them. Finus saw her let go of his ear and get down in his face. He saw Eric bunch up his face in a frown and say something and stomp his foot, big mistake. He saw Avis’s hand draw back and slap him across his cheek, and then Eric opened his mouth wide and closed his eyes tight and let out a heartbreaking wail, and that’s when Finus went over the parapet himself, grabbed up Eric in his arms, muttered a furious Let’s go to Avis’s astonished face, and headed for their old Ford, whether she would follow or not. She barely had time to get into the car, mute and furious herself, almost didn’t get in at all when he hissed at her torso through the open passenger side window where Eric sat sniffling, You ride in the back. He popped the clutch and tore out of the gate and down the dirt road back to the highway. On the way home no one said anything until Eric, still sniffling, asked, as children will do when they know the advantage is in their court, -Could we stop at Brookshire’s and get some ice cream? Finus almost laughed, and said finally, -Later on this afternoon, I’ll take you. And he could feel the waves of intensified outrage from Avis in the backseat that he would take one step further to ostracize her in this situation.
Later, after he had taken Eric to get ice cream and had sat with him in the parking lot eating it, tall fountain glasses of ice cream and nuts and chocolate sauce and pineapple pieces and a cherry on top of whipped cream—Cupid’s Delights, the shop called them—and after he and Eric had driven out to the airport and watched an old biplane come in to land over the roof of the car, its wings wobbling slowly to stay on the center-line track of the runway, and they’d gone home with dusk approaching, Avis had come up as he sat reading the paper and drinking a bourbon and water in the den and stood there.
-I know I was wrong to do that, she said.
He looked up at her over the paper without replying.
-But you have no right to shame me for it, she said. -You know I love him as much as you do.
-Then why don’t you show it? he’d said.
She stood there a moment, her eyes moving back and forth between his own. Then she said,
-You have the gall to say that to me, when you hardly give him the time of day unless it suits your own fancy. When you stay at that newspaper office fiddling around until he’s almost ready for bed each night or already in the bed, and come in and tell him a story or just kiss him good night, then go to get yourself a drink and sit in this chair and ignore me. Meanwhile I get him ready for school in the morning, after you’ve gone early to have your coffee and breakfast with other men at Schoenhof’s and had yourself a shave at Ivyloy’s barbershop, and I take him to school and kiss him if he will let me and let him off, then go to school myself and teach a bunch of snotty brats all day, wishing a tenth of them were as sweet-natured and intelligent as my own child, and then I get out and go to pick him up again and take him home and fix him a snack, and let him go out to play, or I even play with him myself, help him put together his model airplanes, even throw him the baseball sometimes and chase his balls and comfort him when he frets he’s not as good as the other boys his age, and then I make his supper and make him do his homework and make his bath and make him say his prayers and put him to bed, and then sometime along in there you come home and fix yourself a drink and make some half-empty gesture toward being the most important man in his life and make no gesture at all toward pretending that you could ever want to be that in mine, and then sometime along around ten or eleven o’clock you go to your own room and go to bed. Sometimes you come in to tell me good night and sometimes you don’t. We are neither of us very important to you and yet you sit there like some righteous fool and lecture me on how I ought to show more affection to my son.
He’d had no reply to all that, for right then it sounded like the truth.
-I don’t know why you stay with me unless it’s for Eric’s sake, she said. -But I swear it doesn’t seem to me that you even care enough about him to stay for that reason anymore.
He grew hot over that and said through his teeth, surprising himself at the surge of emotion that nearly brought quick tears to his eyes,
-Who are you to say I don’t love my own child?
-Well if you do, she said, you might do a little more to show it.
ALSO AT THE barbeque had been Earl’s sister, Merry, now married to the hapless R. W. Leaf, who sold insurance with old Junius Urquhart. She’d sat apart from everyone in a reclining lawn chair, surveying the scene from behind a pair of sunglasses, her long dark hair curled and brushed back, her lips a bright red, fingernails and toenails to match. She sipped what looked like a glass of bourbon on ice. Whenever Finus’s glance happened to fall on her, she caught it like a fish he’d cast a line to and sent back along that line the tactile reverber
ations of a slow, salacious smile. He absorbed it into his own tight grin and cranked his gaze away from her legs, crooked and slightly askew up on the footrest of the chair.
Two days later, while Finus’s father was out for lunch, Merry strolled past the plate-glass window of the Comet, paused to look, then came in the door, little bell tinkling behind her like a fairy sprite announcing her entrance.
-Hello, Finus.
-Merry.
-I’d like to place a classified ad in your newspaper, if the rate is right.
She smiled, then unclasped her purse and pulled out a little notepad and tore off the top sheet, folded it, and handed it to him. He took it, looked at her standing there with an expression he could not quite read, then unfolded the paper and read: Meet me at 4:00, back lot of Magnolia Cemetery, in the oak grove.
What he would say to Avis in his mind when she had demanded, once—just once she had allowed him to see how this had hurt her, and he couldn’t remember too many times she’d shown her vulnerable side—demanded to know why he had done it, was: Because Merry was beautiful. Not pure, by any means, but she had a flowing, let-down, buxom, long-legged beauty that just made a man want to get down in a glade with her and rut. Let loose the wildness. Her hair was dark and long and full of wavy curls, and one of her dark brown eyes was cast just a tad inward. She kept her mouth parted in the company of men, just barely, as a silent and private signal to desire her. And always the not-quite-subtle eye contact, always looking at you at just the moment, and for the moment, that you happened to look up at her, as if she had been thinking privately how much she would like to give herself to you, and was now caught at it and secretly glad.
They met in the far back and then-unoccupied lots of the new Magnolia Cemetery north of town. There was a sharp downslope and little more than a packed dirt path leading to the woodsy brush around the creek, and still plenty of trees between there and the fresh graves up on the hill, and one could just see the steep Victorian gables of the new widows and orphans’ home above the tops of a thick and leafy oak tree if one looked up over Merry Urquhart’s bare and sculpted delicate shoulders as she rode him, eyes closed and head hung forward in pleasurable concentration on the ride.
It was true what they said about her breath, it was awful, but Finus had determined early on a way around that, and had taken to bringing along a half-pint of bonded bourbon and made it a ritual that they take a few swigs apiece upon first meeting, so the halitosis was somewhat alleviated, for long enough anyway. When she got to breathing hard it sometimes seeped its way through again but by then he didn’t care so much anymore and when they were finished and lying there first thing he would do was bring the bottle up again for a ritualistic toast to what they’d just done. Merry liked a drink enough that she never suspected the reason. And it made Finus a little more daring in his attitude, anyway, and assuaged the guilt for long enough to get home, clean up, and ease into the forgetting of what he’d done, on into the evening.
Maybe the more interesting question was why had Merry chosen to have a thing with him? Usually, Birdie would later say, it was just with men who’d come fresh to town, didn’t know a thing about her, and whom she wanted to buy insurance from her husband, R.W. That way when she was bored with them, which would take about two or three weeks, maybe a month, she’d have gotten something material out of it and R.W. in his ignorance would be pleased at how she’d sweet-talked a man into buying insurance from him. Oh he knew she was a flirt, he’d say, but couldn’t conceive as how his darling would go all the way. She kept up a charade with him her whole married life. And just what kind of a person can do that, day and night?
It was because of Birdie, he knew that. They were always jealous of Birdie because they were all in love with Earl, his whole family, in love with him and in hate with him at the same time. He was the oldest sibling, and the smartest, and the handsomest, and had the most drive. And he made the most money and had thereby control, in an implicit way, over them all. Even the old man, old Junius, was worshipful in a way and bowed to Earl’s power.
And so seducing a man like Finus, whose attraction to Birdie was similar to Earl’s, was next best thing to seducing her brother himself. At least Finus figured it that way. Once he and Merry took a ride out the Macon highway, nipping from a pint of bourbon, and he’d made a joke about her reputation, and added, -Ah, you’d fuck your brother if you thought you could get away with it. They were in Finus’s Ford, but Merry was driving. She gave him a look. He noticed they were gathering speed. Ripped through Lauderdale at about ninety. Somewhere on the other side, she threw the wheel so hard to the left that he’d been thrown against the door, a miracle it didn’t open and tumble him out. A miracle the car didn’t capsize and roll, killing them both, before she could get it out of fishtail and slow to seventy, and neither of them said another word about it. They rode back to Mercury in the oppressive dark coming on, silent, radio off, looking ahead at the road and placid, as if content enough in knowing the corrupt complicity of their union, and did their duty in the cemetery after hours, evening insects cheeping and chirring around them as the hot engine of the Ford ticked toward cool, and she shouted like she never had before and held him pinned beneath her strong hands on his shoulders, fucking him with a vengeance for having had the audacity to speak the truth about her enterprising nature. And when she’d finished, and before he had, she’d pulled up off him with a merciless lack of care, a heartless sound like a foot being pulled up out of muck, and stepped out into the deep green of the darkening graveyard and stood naked among what would be the plots of the dead come forty years hence, her bare long slim feet splayed in the gathering dew on the grass, her shape hippy and beautiful, the long dark hair a thick gout against her pale back, hands resting on those hips as she looked up at a canted half-moon, and waited while he shamelessly finished himself into his own palm, watching her, until the passion of the moment was a mockery of itself, and a chill set in, and that was the last he’d heard from Merry till she waltzed uninvited and late into a tea Avis had thrown, and let Avis know simply by her familiar gestures, by picking up the last half of a cookie Finus had left on his plate and eating it, looking frankly at him, what all had occurred. His whole head had been clanging with alarm from the moment she stepped through the door. And Avis had finally and just as frankly walked up to Merry and said, -I’ll thank you to take your whore self out of my house and never come back. Merry had smiled as if Avis had falsely praised her hair or her dress, dusted the cookie crumbs in a delicate way off her fingertips, retrieved her purse from where she’d set it, conveniently, on the floor beside her chair, and walked out, head held up in victory and hips rhythmically inventing the balance she needed to stride elegantly out the door in her high-heeled shoes, given her no doubt by her brother Earl and definitely superior to any other woman’s shoes in the room. And Finus had never wanted her more than in that moment, when he knew she would never even look at him with the slightest hint of familiarity again in his life.
AVIS OPENLY HATED him after that. He offered to divorce her, but she refused. So he moved out under cover of an unofficial separation and moved into the empty apartment over the Comet office downtown.
Mercury downtown was pretty lonesome at night, but pleasantly so. Few cars, so that when they passed on the street below their tires made an airy sound that he found comforting. The stoplights clocked through their preset changes, he could hear the clunking switchboxes as if over water, so clearly, and their red, yellow, and green glows were cast upon the asphalt in air heavy with the dissolving heat of the day like silent, benign messages of no import. And sometimes he would walk to the window and look out on them and if cars were stopped at them, at the courthouse intersection, he could see the people inside them, shapes variegated in black and white, sashed by the streetlights, and he saw arms crooked at windows, legs propped up on dashboards, bare feet sticking out sometimes, and heads turning to say something to one another and thrown about sometimes in animated tal
k or laughter. And it didn’t make him feel lonesome, it made him feel good about things, comforted by the presence of these people passing. He was surprised at how few of them he recognized. Very few. It was a larger town than he’d always thought, with more people in it and passing through it. Sometimes looking down on them he was amazed at the simple awareness that here were people with lives as complicated and multifaceted and connected by a web of acquaintances, friendships, and kin as his own, mostly with no connection to Finus at all. He felt silly at his age coming to this awareness so cleanly, so late. The world felt vast right within his hometown in a way it hadn’t really, before.
He did miss terribly seeing Eric every evening, tucking him in. He had a Frigidaire in the kitchen and sometimes its humming was the only other presence in the rooms. He sometimes had women to come over and he sneaked them in like criminals. Or like he was, receiving them. He guessed he technically was. When the telephone rang at night it was as loud as a fire alarm. Mostly his life at home was filled with silence. His relationship with Avis during this time was chilly but civil. He would call before going to pick Eric up, and he called to talk to him during the week, most nights. He didn’t always call, though, because sometimes the whole situation depressed him so he couldn’t bring himself to break that particular silence and pick up the phone.