The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  19

  HENRY STRIPPED FILLETS FROM THE SKELETONS OF JACKSON’S fried fish, set the bones and heads aside, and cut the flesh into pieces for his uncle. He stood roasted corn on end and sliced the kernels from the cob. Then he sprinkled salt over everything and set the plate in Brendan’s lap before he bent to his own food. From the practiced ease with which Jackson had made it, he realized that Jackson cooked over this fire every day.

  “Are you living out here?” Henry asked. “In your garage?” He regretted his question immediately.

  “Pretty much.” Jackson wiped out the frying pan with a wad of newspaper. “But I used to have a house, just like everyone else. A green ranch on Town Line Road, past the insulator plant.”

  Brendan, who’d been very quiet since waking from his nap, set down his untouched plate. “What happened?” he asked. “Did you lose it?” His face was so thin that his cheekbones stood out in the fire’s glow.

  Jackson said, “What happened was—” but before he could start, Henry cleared his throat. The idea that Jackson could be living like this was horrifying; the last thing he wanted to do was to listen to Jackson’s story. It was bound to be long and sad, and he had no idea where he and Brendan were going or where they might find a place to stay. “Dinner was great,” he told Jackson. “We really appreciate it. But we ought to get going.”

  Jackson set down the frying pan and strode into the garage. When he returned, he held a pile of old blankets. “Why don’t you camp here tonight? You can put these in your van—you ought to be pretty comfortable.”

  Henry looked at Brendan, sure that he’d want to get on the road again, but Brendan answered for both of them. “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “We could use a place to stay.”

  “You’re sure?” Henry said. “You won’t be very comfortable.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Brendan said, and Jackson said, “Stay. I could use the company.”

  Henry gave up. This was Brendan’s trip, Brendan’s idea entirely, and if the old man wanted to sit in the damp night air and let the mosquitoes get him, that was fine. He was as tired as he’d ever been. Kitty, Coreopsis Heights, the diner, and then the breakdown—it was too much for one day, more than he could sort out. He longed to rest.

  Brendan sat in his wheelchair, his hands flapping against the armrests from time to time. Bongo lay next to him and worried the fish heads that Henry had set aside. Henry lounged in one of the tattered chairs, and when Jackson’s three-legged cat slunk by he scooped her up. Jackson had said that her left front leg had been caught in a trap when she was a kitten. The vet had popped the stump from the shoulder joint and closed the wound, which had healed so smoothly she might have been born that way. Henry liked the way his hand passed from her neck to her flank without interruption.

  Jackson said, “I’ve been living here since spring. My wife, she fell in love with a guy who works at the bowling alley. And she threw me out of the house, like our twenty-two years together didn’t mean squat. You know what she said?”

  “What?” asked Brendan. He was bent forward, listening intently. Henry imagined him sitting like that at St. Benedict’s, listening to the stories of the other old men while years and years went by. “What did she say?” Brendan’s voice was low and kind.

  “She said, ‘Jackson, you don’t mean nothing to me anymore.’” He pointed at Henry’s lap. “Like I was that cat there. Which she didn’t want me to fix because she thought it was a waste of money and what good is a three-legged cat? She said, the kids are grown now, and I want something out of this life before I’m too old to enjoy it. She loved this guy, she said.

  “I said I didn’t care, I loved her anyways. And she said if I really loved her, I’d move out. Leave her alone for a while, she said. Let her figure this out. So I’ve been sleeping out here these last few months, with just Rosie here for company, and she’s been letting this jerk live in our house with her, and I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you—do you think I’m a fool?”

  “Who’s to say?” said Henry. The cat squirmed in his lap, settling her head into his armpit and her strange smooth chest against his. He tried to imagine what had kept Jackson from beating his wife, driving her lover off, laying claim to his own house, but when he thought about how he’d let Kitty push him away, he knew. Houses belonged to women—despite all the houses he’d sold to men, and all the ones he’d owned himself, he believed that. Men bought them, but women folded them around their bodies like shells as soon as they moved in. He could see Jackson’s wife sealing doors and windows until Jackson had no place to go.

  “I’m trying to wait it out,” Jackson said. “She’ll let me back when she’s ready. Do you think she will?”

  No, Henry wanted to say. No more than Kitty ever will. He knew, listening to Jackson’s tale, that his marriage to Kitty was over. She was never going to change back into the girl he’d married. She was never going to forgive him for losing their home.

  “You had troubles,” Brendan said. “Always?”

  Jackson shrugged. “Things were tough. Like they’re tough for everyone. Ronnie—that’s our oldest—he’s been in trouble since junior high. And Barbara got pregnant last year, and there’s never been enough money—but what does Rhonda complain about? She doesn’t like the way I smell, she says. She doesn’t like the way I look. ‘Jackson,’ she says, ‘I want some romance. ‘ Like we’re still kids. Shit, she’s forty-three, you’d thinks she’d know better. This guy she’s seeing can’t be more than thirty. He doesn’t know anything about her and she doesn’t care.”

  “Nobody knows her like you do,” Brendan said. “That matters.” Henry thought how it did matter, but in the wrong way; Kitty hated some of the things he knew about her. That she was cranky in the morning and had frequent bladder infections and cried when she was angry; that the curl in her hair was not natural and that she scratched in bed.

  “I tell myself that every day,” Jackson said. “But I’m sleeping on a cot here and cooking outside, and I’m lonely all the time.”

  “We’re all lonely,” Brendan said. “It’s what we do with it that counts.”

  “You want to see what I do?” Jackson said. “Check this out.”

  He went into the garage and returned with two gas cans and three empty cans of oil. He made more trips for the five-gallon drums and the hubcaps and the leaf springs. While Henry and Brendan watched, he arranged the metal pieces in a circle at his feet. Then he seized two long sticks and started pounding.

  The cans and car parts gave out different notes, something like steel drums, and Jackson pounded out a wandering melody on them. The notes rose in the cool air and settled like birds in the branches. Jackson’s face was red and heavy-cheeked; his legs were thick; his hands were enormous. The sparse, long strands of his hair stuck up from his head like wires.

  “I made that up,” Jackson said when he was done. “I made it up for Rhonda.”

  “It’s something,” Brendan said. “Really. I bet she comes back.”

  “Maybe. But it’s all right out here, in a weird way. Sometimes I almost like it.”

  Brendan said, “There’s a certain quiet that comes, when you’ve been alone for a long time,” and Jackson said, “I get these ideas for my cans, when I’m alone for a couple of days,” and Henry listened to them and wondered what they were talking about.

  When he was alone, the way he’d been for the past six months in Waldo’s awful apartment, the silence drove him wild. He left the TV on all the time, even when he wasn’t watching; sometimes he turned the radio on as well. He left his window open through rainstorms, just to hear the pounding water and the occasional noises from the street. He’d thought about Brendan on those nights, surrounded by other old men and talking, talking, talking, and sometimes he’d actually envied him. Old, sick, stuck in a home that wasn’t his, at least Brendan had some company. There had been nights when Henry had wondered how sick he’d have to be to enter a place like St. Benedict’s himself.

  A
nd here Brendan was explaining to Jackson that he’d lived in a nursing home for years, and no, he didn’t always like it, sometimes the lack of solitude had been very trying; and yes, he surely was glad to be out for a while, he was grateful to Henry here. They were going, he said, to visit some family: “Cousins. Some second cousins of mine, in Massachusetts.”

  They had, as far as Henry knew, no family left there at all, but when Jackson looked at him he nodded. “Cousins,” he said, wondering again why Brendan told these half-truths to everyone they met.

  “We ought to sleep now,” Brendan said. “We have to leave early.”

  The back of the van was a jumble of odds and ends, but Jackson helped Henry move things around until they’d cleared a space big enough for two men to lie down. Henry set aside the two blankets he’d taken from Kitty’s house and then folded Jackson’s blankets into a thick pad for the floor. He and Jackson lifted Brendan from his wheelchair and stretched him out on the pad. Bongo leapt in and tried to lie down next to Brendan, but Henry tossed him into the front seat.

  “Sleep well,” Jackson said. “I’ll be around if you need anything.”

  Henry wedged himself next to Brendan, who lay very still with his hands drawn up on his chest. Over both of them, Henry draped one of Kitty’s blankets. The blanket smelled; he drew it over his face and inhaled deeply. It smelled of leaves and dirt and his girls, and he remembered how Lise and Delia used to take it into the backyard and drape it over a tree limb to make a tent. The girls were so angry at him—too angry, he thought, for it to be just a reflection of their mother’s fury. It was as if they’d been angry at him for years and had only just figured it out. He couldn’t understand what he’d done that was so wrong.

  Outside he heard the little pongs and pings of Jackson tapping gently on his homemade drums, and he wondered if Jackson’s children were angry as well. A kind man, Jackson—who else would have fed them dinner and let them camp there for free? Who else would have fixed the van in exchange for a watch that might easily have been fake? The watch happened to be real—Henry had bought it back when he had money, and he knew Jackson had gotten the better part of that exchange. But it could have been fake, and he and Brendan could have been murderers, and Jackson would have trusted them just the same.

  He eased himself onto his right shoulder, trying not to disturb Brendan. The van was no wider than two coffins laid side to side. Their hips touched and his feet banged into the junk piled by the rear door. Bongo, curled in the front seat, whimpered and twitched. Brendan snored. Henry rolled over again. He could not, he thought, blame Jackson’s wife, or not completely; as kind as Jackson was, he was overweight and had bad teeth and blackened hands. His body was worn, wrinkled, used, and maybe Rhonda had only craved newer flesh.

  The van was impossibly hot and noisy—his breath, his uncle’s, his dog’s; snores, creaks, groans. He sat up suddenly and grabbed Kitty’s other blanket and slid the side door open. The outside, bugs and dew or not, could not be worse. He found a spot twenty yards from the van, where the ground seemed fairly smooth, and he lay down wrapped in his blanket. The stars above him shone brilliantly and the trees made a black fringe against the horizon. Water was running somewhere, in a creek or a stream nearby. Jackson’s drums were silent now, and he thought of Jackson lying on his cot inside that empty, dirty garage, waiting for Rhonda to call him home. He fell asleep thinking of his own young-fleshed mistake, of Anita, who had left him.

  He had met her at the bank and she had not, despite what Kitty had said, been stupid at all. She had only been young. She had processed the application for his doomed loan on Coreopsis Heights, and when he’d driven her down to look at the land he’d been able to make her see the finished project through his eyes. She believed him. She believed everything he said. She slipped her hand around his elbow as they paced the hummocked ground.

  Anita had beautiful thighs, as smooth and curved as a swan’s wing, and she’d lost her job because of him. When Coreopsis Heights had failed and he’d defaulted on his loans, the bank had blamed her for approving them in the first place. She’d stood by him during his long slide, during the months when Kitty had screamed at him nightly and he’d scrambled for a foothold in the mounting heap of bills, but when she lost her job, she dumped him. She didn’t tell him face-to-face; she didn’t even call. She sent a cool, cruel letter to his house, which Kitty opened. Then Kitty threw him out and he crashed his car.

  They were gone now, both of them. He dreamed of a green stretch of land, cut through by a broad river—the land of the blessed, the fairy-tale land that Gran used to tell stories about, which had come to her from her own grandmother in Ireland. Across the ocean and hidden by mist, she said, lay a temperate land of warmth and light. Grapes there grew to the size of apples. Otters stepped from the streams and walked on their hind legs, bearing gifts of fish. The men were brave and the women were lovely; no one ever grew old there and no one ever died. A monk, the one Gran had named Brendan for, had set sail from Ireland with his companions, bobbing and tossing for seven years in a hide-covered curragh until they found the land of promise. They wandered there for forty days, which passed like a single afternoon. Then an angel found them and sent them back home.

  Gran had called that place the country of the young. In his dream, Henry stepped out of a leather-skinned boat and set foot on a soft white beach. Deer stood in the grass where the beach merged into the forest. The river was full of salmon and the trees were heavy with fruit. Henry made his way through the woods until he came upon a clearing. In the clearing a fire burned in a ring of stones, and around it stood all the women he had ever loved.

  All of them were young. Anita, as she’d looked on the day when Coreopsis Heights was still a dream; Kitty, as she’d looked on the shore of Canandaigua Lake; Lise and Delia; his mother. Even Gran looked as she had in the wedding picture that had hung over the mantel in Coreopsis. He looked down at himself and saw that he alone had a fifty-year-old body. He had hair in his nose and his ears and his eyebrows were growing together. His stomach hung down, no matter how hard he tried to suck it in. His hands and feet were callused and freckled and the skin where his thighs met his groin was creased. In the soft breeze, against the fresh vegetation, he looked obscene.

  He threw himself onto the grass and rolled like a dog, and when he stood he bristled with green stems. He pranced in his green coat; he danced and threw his hands in the air; and when the smooth-fleshed women still ignored him he jumped into one of the trees and sang like a mad bird. The stems clothing him had turned into feathers. The women, he realized, could neither see nor hear him, and he raised his tattered wings and flew over the water.

  He woke when he heard his uncle calling, “Henry? Henry?”

  Feathers? he thought, feeling his clothes with his hands. Where had that come from? He walked to the van and stuck his head through the open window.

  “What is it? Are you all right?” He couldn’t see Brendan’s face at all.

  “I have to take a leak,” Brendan whispered. “I had a little cup, I left it on my chair.”

  The chair stood next to the van, and Henry felt along the seat until his fingers touched a plastic cup. He passed it through the window. “Do you need help?”

  “No. But you can toss it for me when I’m done.” Henry heard water again, just a trickle this time, and then Brendan said, “Here.” Henry emptied the half-filled cup on the ground.

  “Can you sleep?” he asked his uncle.

  “On and off. How about you?”

  “I was dreaming,” Henry said. “I had such a strange dream.”

  “Go back to it,” Brendan said. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

  Henry went back to his blanket, but his dream was gone.

  20

  THE EVENING HAD PASSED SO SMOOTHLY, AND IT HAD BEEN so nice to have the house to themselves and not to think about what their families were up to, that Wendy had let time slip and slide and high-step past her without telling Delia what had happ
ened. Sometime after eleven, though, in the living room littered with cartons of grapefruit juice and vodka bottles and pizza boxes, Delia said, “So where’d your mother go, anyway? One of her weird retreats?”

  Wendy had almost forgotten how strange her story was. Casually, almost flippantly, she explained about Grunkie’s disappearance and her mother’s reaction to it, and her father’s reaction to her mother’s reaction, and her mother’s suspicions that Henry had actually stolen Grunkie away. Wendy’s embroidered bag leaned against her chair with the rag dolls showing at the top, and as she spoke she took the dolls from the bag and manipulated them like puppets. The story, backed by the dolls’ gestures, seemed almost funny. She said, he said, I said; she said he said; I said to her; rumors, guesses, speculations. She was not prepared for Delia’s response.

  “My father did what?” she said, and it took Wendy a minute to realize that Delia might see the story from a different perspective, evidence of one more link in the endless chain of her father’s recent fuck-ups. She forgot, sometimes, that Delia took her father’s escapades so hard. She’d had less than a year to get used to them, and she felt guilty about the way he’d ended up. Lise and Kitty had shed Henry like snakes, but Delia still seemed tied to him by a tag of obligation or love, like the string of flesh left behind by a pulled tooth.

  “This whole thing’s probably in my mother’s head,” Wendy said soothingly. “You know how she gets. All anyone really knows is that your father and Grunkie left St. Benedict’s together in this van they borrowed. Mom and Dad both think they went to Massachusetts, so that’s where they’ve gone to look for them.”

  Delia bent over until her head met her knees. “Asshole. Asshole, asshole, asshole.”

  “Your father?” Roy said. He rested his hand on the back of Delia’s neck.

  “Of course my father.” She sighed and lifted her head and stretched her arms behind her back. “He’s such a jerk—after all he’s done to us, after all he’s done to his family, you’d think he’d give it a rest. But no—he has to take a helpless old man from a nursing home, fuck up everyone’s lives again ….”