by Brad Barkley
“We need to talk,” she says. From atop her computer she lifts one of the green ledger books she uses in her investment management course, opens it across the bed.
“Here’s the plan, Reed. If we move out of here, into some student ghetto until I graduate, then we pay out three hundred a month that we aren’t paying now.”
I nod, look at her. “Three hundred in the hole. Okay.”
“But—” She kneels across from me. “If we’re near campus, we cut out my commuting costs, and you are closer to town. We don’t have to drive Sugar anywhere at all, and we don’t have to pay for his food. Conservatively, this saves us maybe a hundred and fifty.”
“But still in the hole,” I tell her.
“Right, but what do we get for our hundred and fifty? We get us, honey. We get to be with each other, instead of tiptoeing around and acting polite and making sure we have on our bathrobes.”
As she says this, I look down at the rows of credits and debits written in blue ink in her neat hand, then upward, at the way the wet tips of her hair sway and lightly brush her nipples. All in all, it’s a convincing argument.
“I’ve lived here a long time, Lyndsey. Eleven years is a long time.”
She takes my hands, knee walks over her own ledger book as she moves forward to straddle my thighs.
“Listen,” she whispers, “you aren’t doing him any good by staying here. He needs to find something else. His own life, maybe, instead of just tagging along with yours. You don’t have to stay.”
“Yeah, but what’s wrong with staying? We have privacy.”
“I would just like a little normalcy for once, Reed.”
I start to speak, then we both jump as Sugar detonates another pipe bomb from the backyard. Orange light bursts against the curtain a half second before the explosion rattles my keys on the dresser. The shards of soup can clatter on the driveway. Lyndsey closes her eyes, draws steady breaths through her nose. I squeeze her hand.
“Let me think about it,” I say.
She nods. “Better think hard.”
how we met
Friday nights at the Hen House and all-you-can-eat crab legs. Snow crab legs, and Sugar wanted to eat them in the snow, in February, and Lyndsey was our waitress ten Fridays running, and slowly became a shared joke, a persistent glance, a nudge in the ribs from Sugar. We were two men just off from work (well, me), tired, doughy enough to be harmless. We asked her one night in early spring and she went with us, riding. Her T-shirt had a cartoon of a hen with a fishing pole, reeling in a big catfish. She wore black shorts. Gave her my denim coat to wear in the Pinto with its bad heat, Sugar leaning up between the seats like our eight-year-old and we are on our way to Six Flags. We bought little pony bottles of beer along with handfuls of Ding Dongs and Slim Jims, and rode out to the golf course, across the parking lot, and right up onto the cart path beside the first tee, clicked the Pinto down to parking lights. “I don’t know about this, guys,” she kept saying, and I drove slowly to reassure her, the cinders crunching beneath us, careful to stay on the path and not dig any tire ruts on the fairways. We handed our empties to Sugar and he placed them back in the carton. After a bit, Lyndsey settled into it, saying we were the most cautious vandals she’d ever seen. I liked the sound of her voice in the dark, the way her hair smelled like hush puppies.
Near dawn, the sky just edging toward light, we parked atop a hill beside the fourteenth green. Below us was the dark gape of a pond, the surface puckered by fish going after mosquitoes. Dew settled over the Pinto so that every few minutes I had to run the wipers. It was not yet sunrise, though there was a little rag of gray in the corner of the night, and the trees and yellow flags began to shape themselves. We got out of the car, walked to the edge of the hill in the wet grass, and below us the town lay spread out in darkness, the arc lamps strung like pearls through the streets. Light in the sky shifted again and all in one moment the streetlights blinked out, as if the town were giving in to daylight. “Wait till you see this,” I told Lyndsey, and I watched her watching the town. “One more minute,” Sugar said, and we were quiet.
Right below, a few hundred yards under our shoes, was the John Deere plant, and when the light in the sky notched up again, the green and yellow of those tractors bloomed into being like a sudden field of dandelions, and I took Lyndsey’s chin and angled it down for her to see, the way Sugar did me the first time up there. Seventy-seven of them—tractors, harvesters, combines, backhoes, excavators—parked in rows on a wide gravel lot. Always seventy-seven, we had noticed through the years, so much so that we had stopped counting and went by faith. Dew glistened on the shiny green paint, the shadows of the machinery angled left in their own neat gray rows.
“Oh my God,” Lyndsey whispered. She took my hand, then Sugar’s.
I squeezed. “Like it?”
She nodded. “So beautiful. Like a Zen rock garden.”
“With internal combustion,” Sugar said. We stood silent and watching, as if we might see the little shift as the sun lifted over the hills and the shadows darkened and narrowed beneath the rows of machinery, as the town began to ripple with cars and noise. Then the sprinklers spread out over the fairways rose out of the ground and began spewing water in tapered arcs, and somewhere we heard a lawnmower start up.
“We’d better get moving,” I said.
As we drove along the cinder paths, Lyndsey unpinned her nametag from her Hen House shirt and stuck it into my dash, left it there.
“I want to come back,” she said. “I want to see that again.”
why she stays
I don’t know.
logging leg
It was something to do, road trip up to Oregon for a summer, escape the worst of North Carolina heat and no money. We were twenty-three, same age Lyndsey is now. We signed on with Hennesy Forestry Management Inc. for six bucks an hour, plus free lunch off the back of the silver truck at the foot of the logging road. We spent our nights in bars, chalking games of dominoes on the tables, trading money for half a buzz and a few jukebox dances with the local women, pretending that a pair of narrow beds and long hours of work equaled adventure. During the days we worked the skid trail, chainsawing the downed trees into eight-foot lengths, walking across the rows of logs under a high, dark canopy, with everything—the air, the logs, the ground—soaked with moisture. Sugar worked as a ballhooter, stepping across the logs, pushing them with a pole hook into neat bundles. After two days we could work in silence, the best way, speaking with only our eyes and nods of the head. The trees columned upward under a sky dark gray and marbled, the ground under our toe spikes needled, leaved, soft.
One late afternoon, a Thursday, I motioned Gil to back up the tractor to a bundle of logs and guided the winch while Sugar stepped across and looped the choker cable around the bundle. He looked at me to hit the winch as the motor started grinding. I stepped back with a pole hook to guide the bundle into place and as I moved away I watched the rubber bindings on Sugar’s right boot come unstrapped, the spikes left behind, stuck in the log, and his right foot slipping down inside the choker just as the winch gathered the cable into its slow tightening. I looked at him as if seeing him there would tell me that nothing this wrong could possibly be happening, and his eyes held me, his mouth open and words splitting out of him as I moved toward the winch to hit the shutoff and saw the cable pull slowly through his jeans just above his knee as his other leg bicycled against the stack of wood and noise poured from his mouth, his hands grabbing at nothing, and the cable insisted its way into his flesh and I heard his bones as my hand found the red button and Gil, white-faced, exited the truck and clicked on his walkie-talkie. I didn’t move, could not move. Sugar’s eyes held me. My own eyes, still new to this silent language of work, found no words to give him, and I looked away.
the tough questions
“Why are we still together?” I ask. Lyndsey is readying for the Hen House, and I watch her slip on a T-shirt, zipper her skirt. “I mean, why are you with
me?”
She sighs. “How did you get this old and stay this dumb?”
I shrug. “Easiest thing I ever did.”
She shakes her head, pulls on her Hen House sweatshirt. If she follows her plans, in two years she will be making four times what I make now. “Because I love you, Reed. The oldest reason there ever was.”
“But why?”
“You aren’t supposed to ask why about love. You’re supposed to let it stay a mystery. That’s the rule.”
I nod and watch her clip her hair up to keep it out of the catfish filets and cole slaw. “Love isn’t such a mystery, really.”
She cuts her eyes at me. “No?”
“Not for me.” I shrug again. “A soft, warm body, a bed where we talk in the dark, your little TV smile on Friday night. Where’s the big mystery?”
She shakes her head, frowns. “Well, that’s shallow of you.”
I know that she is no great believer in mystery, either, that this is just something you say about love when you are twenty-three years old. Her parents held little love but more mystery than most see in a lifetime, a dad shedding jobs almost weekly, a steady march of repossessors, and a mother who could not stop stealing eye makeup or cans of soup or 45s from the record store. Lyndsey turned away from all of that, left it for good at sixteen, and now every step of her existence is planned out—career, vacations, the life she wants with me. She left mystery a long time ago and has not looked back.
I look at her. “Why shallow? Who says love can’t be made up of real things? If there is any mystery, then that’s it; there isn’t any.”
She walks over, takes my chin in her fingers. “Try as hard as you can to make sense.”
“Listen, you wonder about how we spend our days, let me tell you. A couple months ago I took Sugar out to a work site for copper scraps, and one of the guys on the crew stole his friend’s bag of Cheetos, just goofing around, and nailed it to the top of a frame post. Then all afternoon we sat and watched these two crows swoop down and land, pluck a Cheeto from the bag, and fly off with it. One by one, until it was empty.”
She smiles. “That’s pretty cool.”
“The point is, Cheetos and crows are just things. But you can love them for themselves. What’s wrong with just loving the thinginess of things? They don’t have to mean.”
She leans down, kisses my upper lip. “Like those tractors on the golf course.”
I nod. What I don’t say is that it was Sugar who first showed me the tractors, Sugar who made a dozen guys stop a day’s work and sit in the shade to watch crows. Sugar is all mystery, and there is, I think, no solving him.
She ties her hair back. “Listen, pick me up at midnight, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And bring Sugar with you. We’ll go ride, just like old times. It’ll make us all feel better. We’ll see some thingy things.”
“You’re too young to have any old times,” I say. She gives me a look. “Okay, Sugar and me, things, midnight.”
the old times
Before we leave that night, I find Sugar in the backyard, smoking cigarettes in the cold, hammering nails.
“Where’s the torch?” I ask him.
“Not tonight. Other plans. A wedding present, actually.”
He is pounding two-by-sixes together into a big square. He tacks angle irons into the corners.
“Wedding present for who?” I say.
“For you, Reed, who else?”
“So I’m getting married? This is news to me, buddy.”
He motions me to help, and we place the square of boards on an even spot in the backyard. Sugar tosses a plastic tarp across it. “I have eyes and ears both, Reed. Don’t tell me you aren’t getting married. And you should, right?”
“That’s my understanding, though I may have missed something.” He hands me a staple gun and we walk around opposite sides of the wood frame, tacking the blue tarp to the boards. Above us the moon is thin and cold, the sky metal black. I feel sweat freeze in the hairs of my beard.
“Come on with me,” I tell him. “Lyndsey wants to go for a ride. Like old times, she says.”
He grins. “She isn’t old enough—”
“I know, I told her that.”
Ernest is watching us, his head lolling out of the doghouse Sugar made him from a yellow fertilizer barrel. Sugar finishes stapling and lays a bead of caulk over the staples.
“It’s a little nippy for caulking,” I tell him. He shrugs, says it will set eventually. He rubs his logging leg, which always bothers him more in the cold. We are quiet a minute.
“You ever think about it?” I glance down at his hand rubbing the knot on the side of his leg. “I mean, remember it?”
He peels caulk off his fingers. “I got three roommates, Reed. You, Lyndsey, and that memory. Every morning I wake up, it’s there at the breakfast table eating Cap’n Crunch.”
I nod, take a breath. “I didn’t do everything I could have then. You know? I didn’t…act.” We stand together, looking at the tarp-covered box in the middle of the yard.
“What was there to do, a thing like that?” He shrugs. “A long time ago, Reed. I never held you to any blame. Things go the way they go.”
The tarp ripples in a cold wind. Sugar picks up his welding helmet and puts it on, tips the mask up.
“You gonna tell me what this is?” I ask him. “Another Perfect Catastrophe?”
He smiles. “For a wedding present? Not a chance.” While I am warming the Pinto, I see him with the garden hose pointed at this thing he has just built, as if he is washing off the plastic tarp, washing away all his hard work.
We get Lyndsey on time this go around, and have already been to the 421 for pony beers and Slim Jims and Ding Dongs. We find our way to Green Valley Golf Course and find the cart paths chained off, a security guard’s car parked next to the clubhouse.
“Well, damn,” Sugar says. “Somebody ruined it for us.”
“Where to?” I ask.
“Just drive around,” Sugar says. “Cruise and eat and drink.”
Lyndsey shakes her head. “I don’t want to just drive around all night.” Her Hen House pin is still in my dash, where she stuck it five months ago.
“Why not?” Sugar says.
“I know a place,” I tell them.
I drive us over to the giant parking lot behind Burlington Industries, where in the summer the tennis hacks line up to pound balls against the concrete slab at the back of the lot. We scale the wall from its tapered end and sit in the high middle of it, our legs dangling, asphalt twenty feet below us. Behind us is the big steel-and-glass building with its fountain spewing water up past the fourth floor. We are nearing Christmas, and the white lights in the fountain have been replaced by red and green ones, the mist blowing off the fountain, holding the color for a second, then vanishing into darkness.
Lyndsey wraps a blanket around her legs and scoots close to me, the hood of her coat edging her face with fake fur. We pass the little bottles of beer and fire up foul-smelling Swisher Sweets and sit in the cold drinking and smoking, not talking, Sugar pushing the mask of his welding helmet up and down so that the hinges squeak.
“You ever think about doormen?” Sugar says. He says this from behind the mask, his voice muffled. “I mean, it’s weird. Say you’re at that job for forty years. That is forty years of doing a single thing eight hours a day: opening and closing that one door.”
I nod. “Yeah, strange. After so much time you must develop a relationship with that door. You know how many seconds it takes to swing closed, how much it weighs, what it smells like, where all the little nicks are in the wood.” I feel Lyndsey shivering beside me. She finishes her second beer and opens a third, reaches for my cigar and holds it in her mittened hand, puffing and coughing, like a cartoon of someone smoking. Sugar is not done with doormen yet.
“I mean,” he says, “that would be the worst part, that after you’re seventy years old you look back and that’s what you can say abou
t your life. ‘Well, I opened that door a lot.’ Like, that’s the whole ball of wax. That would be death to me, a job like that.”
“At least it’s a job,” Lyndsey says. “At least you know what you’re doing the next day.” I give her hand a squeeze, open another beer.
“What would be the worst way to die?” I ask them. “Aside from being a doorman, I mean. I vote drowning.”
“No way,” Lyndsey says. “Burning up in a fire. Think how much a little arm burn on the toaster hurts.”
“But it’s quick,” Sugar says. “The worst would be falling, like from a plane. All that time down and down and down, knowing what’s coming, thinking about all the ways you fucked up.”
“You wouldn’t have time to think,” Lyndsey says. “You’d be panicking.”
I shake my head. “There is always time to think, no matter what.”
“Hell, yes,” Sugar says and tips up his mask. “Watch this.” He stands up, wobbles, stretches his arms out, then jumps off the high wall toward the parking lot below, his loose jacket fluttering up behind him. Half a second later he lands on both feet and his mask clanks shut, then he limps around in a fast circle, saying, damn damn damn over and over, a fast little song.
“Nice going,” I tell him. “You could’ve broken your stupid leg.”
He tips the mask up. “Just proving my point. All the way down, I thought about the pastrami sandwich I had for lunch.”
Lyndsey lets out a sound that is half laugh, half disgust. “Yeah, and that’s about as deep as your thinking would go, too.” The way she shakes her head, I can tell she is drunk. With a small, thoughtless motion of her wrist, she throws down her beer bottle and it smashes on the pavement next to Sugar, pieces splintering across the asphalt. For a second, we are held in silence, as if waiting to see which way this moment will turn. Lyndsey looks at me, looks away.