by Ben English
The doctors always found the same result anyway: an unknown cyst or growth, expanding slowly but steadily in his abdomen, exhibiting none of the signs normally associated with cancer. The physicians tentatively scheduled an operation for late August. Though Sylvia was unfailingly upbeat during their conversations, Mercedes noted an odd strain to her aunt’s voice the past few days when she would answer the telephone.
“Have you ever thought about having yourself checked out?” Sylvia asked one night, seemingly offhand. “Just to be on the safe side.”
Before her final gymnastic season had been cut short a few years back due to her mother’s failing condition she’d had a routine physical. Since then, well, “I’ve felt pretty good lately.”
“No cramps or blurred vision or anything?” This was strange; usually Sylvia kept the exchange quick and breezy. Mercedes tried to picture her aunt, a little brunette, wearing a frown of concern, and failed. She chalked up the questions to Sylvia’s extreme proximity to her father.
“Nope, nothing. Except tummy aches from all the food Grandma makes. Although I could blame Jack’s spaghetti.”
“Jack? People still name their kids ‘Jack’?” Now, that sounded more like her aunt.
“Yeah, he tried to impress me last night with the family spaghetti recipe, but didn’t have the right ingredients. Used ramen instead of real noodles, and chopped cotto salami for meat. The kicker was the sauce: he wasn’t watching what he was doing and used a can of salsa. I ate the whole thing to make him feel better, but you wouldn’t believe the gas afterwards.”
Sylvia was starting to laugh. “I suppose he’s hoping you know how to cook.”
“And we all know how well that goes. Last night before he came over, I threw a package of store-bought cookies on a baking sheet and gave them a few minutes in the oven.”
Sylvia approved. “Tell me more about this guy.”
Mercedes smiled into the phone.
And she couldn’t get him out of her head. Especially late at night, when she saw his light come on over the pool. What exactly drew the two of them to each other? It didn’t feel like a crush, but honestly, they had almost zilch in common. He lived (when he actually slept there) in a drafty, sprawling house at the edge of the woods; had books and swimming to keep him busy–was even working ahead of time on some chemistry and biology experiments for the coming semester. While she…
Initially she was sure Jack spent time with her out of some kind of pity. As she watched how Jack treated people, and other girls, specifically, she’d come to realize he was genuinely a nice guy–a quick tongue, sometimes, but a generous heart. Maybe that was the problem right there. His heart was bigger than his brain. Nice guys, well, nice guys seemed to feel they needed to be responsible for other people.
Sometimes, most often after a prolonged conversation with her aunt or her father’s friends, sadness coiled about Mercedes, like she was already in mourning for both parents. When she’d told Jack about all the health problems collected by her mom and dad, she’d been certain he’d pull a quick fade out; but it didn’t seem to matter to him.
Gradually, Mercedes came to realize Jack stayed not out of some duty to help the shy and pathetic, or because he aided the chronically miserable as some kind of nice guy’s pet project, but because he really liked her. He liked her. Mercedes.
That idea struck a funny chord inside. This wasn’t her life. Mercedes was supposed to be on vacation from her responsibilities. From herself.
Mercedes fully suspected her father had sent her to Forge because it was either pack off to Idaho or check into a sanitarium. Since arriving in Forge, Mercedes had begun sharing bits of herself with her cousins and, to a greater extent, Jack. She loved how he listened so completely. There was something indescribable in his expressions as she unraveled for him, page by page, the book of her life. He could be alternately quiet and talkative. Instead of impatience, he asked questions. Instead of judging her, he merely accepted whatever piece there was of herself she felt like giving him. Instead of hustling and herding her toward sex, like the few boys she’d dated felt they were supposed to do, Jack waited for her. Waited, and laughed at himself. But she could feel him smolder.
She liked the sensation.
For once in her life, there was nothing awkward or embarrassing about a relationship. Instead of another reason for sadness, a blessed, unexpected resonance.
*
The LeBaron crackled to a stop on the gravel driveway. Mercedes honked once to let him know she’d arrived, and left the keys in the ignition as she got out, thinking that her time in Forge had radically altered her degree of faith in humanity if she was willing to leave her grandfather’s prized convertible for the taking.
Jack’s hilly neighborhood was technically a suburb, though the house sat on half a wooded acre and the nearest neighbor visible only as a rooftop between the trees. The dwelling was old, built back during the first logging boom, and the glass in the oversized front windows had flowed slightly, casting uneven reflections. New grey paint on old wood, new cedar shakes covering old tarpaper. She marched up the steps and rang the doorbell.
“Ollie, are you in there?” she yelled.
“Come in if your name is Stan,” from far within the building.
In other circumstances, Jack’s uncle’s house would have been intimidating, even a little scary. The double doors were deeply scalloped and beveled. It was obvious the house had been a long time without the smoothing touch of any kind of woman. Paintings of mountainous landscapes dominated the front room, along with mounted heads of elk, deer, and antelope. One high window was a taxidermist’s dream: three stuffed mice frozen in mid-scamper under the intensely curious eyes of some kind of predatory bird she’d never seen before.
The carpet and furnishings were old but well cared-for. The interior of the house never failed to remind Mercedes of Jack’s uncle, a man she’d met only twice. Bill seemed pleasant enough, a quiet sort, respectful of personal distance and unwilling to impose. He was older than she had expected, but still worked a full schedule for the Forest Service, deep in the timberland, staying away during the summer for weeks at a time. He had Jack’s mouth and quiet smile, though his manner never failed to strangely remind Mercedes of a receding tide.
Try as she might, Mercedes had a difficult time imagining Jack growing up in that stark, Spartan house, puzzling his way through his teenage years under the same roof with that docile, unobtrusive forester.
“Ollie?” she called out. At least the place was clean and orderly–what Jack referred to jokingly as his obsessive-compulsive personality, working in tandem with his insomnia.
“In my room.” The voice led her up the stairs to the second floor. She pushed open his door and blinked in the wash of light; Jack’s bedroom had two floor-to-ceiling sliding doors meeting in the corner, looking out on the southern back yard. She opened his door all the way. He was nowhere to be seen. “Hey Stan,” he said suddenly, looking down from the attic access.
She jumped despite herself, one hand going to her chest. “Hey Ollie! What are you doing?”
“Making something for you,” he replied. Before she could say anything, he added, “It’s a reward for learning how to waterski.”
“But what if I mess up, or hit my head on the bottom of the reservoir and a giant carp eats me?” She sat on the edge of his bed, smoothing the bedspread beneath her.
He vanished from the unlit square a moment, then returned just as fast. “Are you kidding? We only have giant sturgeon in the lake. Big suckers. But then, I guess you get the present as a consolation prize. Or something. Anyway, I’ve got to find my towrope and change, too, so…Could you throw me up a suit?”
There were half-a-dozen racing suits and regular swimming shorts hanging in the small adjacent bathroom. She picked a black one and flung it up through the trapdoor.
“Thanks.”
Jack’s room was a stark model for the balance between chaos and order. His uncle had given him
the master bedroom, so there was plenty of space for a dresser, double bed, a wall-and-a-half of bookshelves, and a writing desk. Jack had also added maps, a hanging plant, a row of track lights, a slanted, adjustable drafting table of the kind used by architects, and an enormous white board covered in doodles and snatches of scribbled reminders to himself. Above a sketch of a diver piking off a platform was the note, “Momentum of inertia = mass X radius squared. Parabola is never truly vertical.” Next to that read something a bit more personal yet equally obscure. “What makes her hair smell like pears and apples?”
A few posters lined the walls, two movies and one with Einstein in a pool. The bookshelves were more interesting. Stacks and stacks of paperbacks and hardcovers, arranged haphazardly by subject. Mercedes shook her head. There must have been five hundred volumes, mostly old. She tilted her head to read the spines. Louis L’amour, Dean Koontz, Harry Harrison, Clancy, Dickens, Hemingway, O. Henry. Right next to his handbooks on martial arts and geography, Jack had two shelves of religious books, everything from the Bible to the Koran to the Book of Mormon. He seemed partial to books on Eastern philosophy, Taoism and Buddhism in particular, which on her first visit gave Mercedes a vaguely queasy feeling.
The reason for her uneasiness had become apparent to Mercedes a week ago, when Jack had gone to a Mass with her. The Mass had been a last minute decision, when Mercedes realized how guilty she should be for going so long without observing the Holy Sacrament. Jack had watched, rapt, as the priest paced through the steps of the centuries-old ceremony. He was absolutely enthralled. She could tell he wanted to ask her about the symbolism wrapped in each aspect of the communion and the words spoken along with it, but Jack had remained silent, almost reverent, during the service, though he examined everything. Father Mike paused more than once to peer thoughtfully at them. Mercedes wouldn’t have been surprised had the priest stopped the liturgy altogether to question the young man staring so frankly and intently from the third pew.
But Jack had remained silent, listening afterward to the faint click of beads and the whispered prayers as she had gone to confession. It pleased her that Jack respected the church her mother had raised her in.
Afterward, as they sat on the balcony outside his room with their feet on the rail, sipping Coke (her) and juice (him), he grudgingly acknowledged his doubts about organized religion. “It just seems like a church is something so easy for people—humans, I mean—to screw up,” he said, though he’d been afraid of offending.
She’d found his honesty touching. “Do you think you’d ever join up with one, then?”
He thought about that one. “Only if it guaranteed me–I mean unconditional, flat-out proved to me that I could see my parents again, and be connected to them, like in a family, for the rest of whatever.”
Then, as if sensing the mood was becoming a bit too heavy, Jack shook-threw the contents of his glass into the air above his head and opened his mouth wide, as if he could catch the entire glassful. Mercedes laughed so hard she snorted and fell out of her chair.
She smiled, remembering his soaked, deadpan expression. The room grew warm. The house sat higher on the slopes than most of Forge, surrounded by lawns and thick trees, and the summer heat had already penetrated the thick green canopy overhead. Outside, the grass had turned to a bright emerald fire.
Next to his shelves, in a tall, thin filing cabinet that could have predated the house itself, Jack kept his comic book collection. As a younger boy, he’d managed to hoard a few hundred comics, mostly Batman and Superman. Mercedes had never understood the male fixation with such things–she blamed the fact that she’d grown up without a brother–but she wondered if maybe, in Jack’s case, something deeper lay behind the collection. Superman, Batman, and Spiderman; along with their fantastic abilities and ludicrous costumes, were orphans.
The insight surprised her. She really was getting to know this guy.
Jack appeared at the trapdoor, dropping a nylon backpack onto the bed next to Mercedes, then following it himself as he closed the trapdoor. She reached for the bag, intent on discovering what her “present” might be, but he snatched it from her hands as he bounced off the bed.
“No way, Stan,” he said. “Not ‘til after we ski.” He wore his usual clothes–cutoff sweats and a loose tank top. Jack also carried a coil of nylon rope, which he stuffed into the backpack on his way to the door.
She threw him the keys.
“Really? My driving isn’t going to freak you out, Stan?”
She waved dismissively. “I trust you. Only five or six things you could do would really surprise me, and since we’re not married you probably won’t be doing those today. Why are you smiling like that?” But she smiled, too.
They were just seventeen.
At the supermarket near the edge of town, they bought nachos, root beer, and two enormous bags of Double Stuf Oreos. “Al’s mom is making us a real lunch,” Jack explained at the checkout counter. “Sandwiches. She makes these great sandwiches.” He held out his hands exaggeratedly, then grabbed a disposable camera from the nearby rack. “Let’s get one of these, too. Look, waterproof.”
“Get one with a flash; we’ll take it to the party later.” There was going to be a bonfire later on, according to Diane and Alice. The End of Summer Bash, as it had been called as long as anyone remembered, was living history for a place like Forge, for the young and all those who remembered their youth.
Alonzo was already at the marina, a pale figure moving busily about his parents’ boat, when they pulled up to the pier. He handed a tangle of rope to the girl he was with, then jogged up to the LeBaron. “Coupla’ blond monsters,” he said, eyeing them both over a pair of reflective Spyder sunglasses. “You guys look like the poster children for the Aryan Nations.”
Jack was quick to reply. “You been cutting your own hair, buddy?” Their tone was serious, and they both were trying hard to keep stern expressions. Bad acting. Mercedes could see they were enjoying each other’s bluster.
Alonzo reached behind his neck and grabbed a handful of hair. “Australian-style, mate. Vegemite makes hair grow—”
Before he could finish, Jack added, “On your teeth.”
Mercedes wasn’t sure whether to join in or call for help.
“You’re whiter than a freakin’ ghost.”
“It’s winter in Australia, doofus.”
“That explains the galoshes.” Jack gestured at Alonzo’s thick footwear.
Alonzo shoved his sunglasses back through his bangs and squinted. “Fatso.”
“Moron.”
They were about a foot apart, when both Jack and Alonzo gasped dramatically and embraced.
“Oh, Jack!”
“Oh, Al!”
Laughing, they shoved away from each other. Alonzo removed his sunglasses. His eyelids completely disappeared when he smiled. “I missed you, buddy!”
“Missed you, too. And hey,” Jack said, gesturing with both hands to himself and then Mercedes. “Still not gay.”
“Yeah. I’m still not gay, either.” He switched gears. “Speaking of which, Jack says you’re from San Francisco?” He stepped close, a touch more shy, and hugged Mercedes. “Hi.”
She decided she liked him. He never seemed to stop talking. When did he breathe?
“Fatso told me this is your first time skiing,” he said as they walked down the long floating dock.
“Only in the snow,” she replied, “and that was just a couple times.” Jack carried the bags. Their steps made a hollow sound. Hundred-gallon drums underneath, sealed tight, supported the wooden slats. The water below was green.
Alonzo gestured at Jack. “Fats here will help you out. He’s pretty good. Hey babe,” he called to the brunette down in the boat. “Check this out: Hermann Goebbels’ dream children!” He pointed at Jack and Mercedes.
“Sherman who?” the girl yelled back.
Her name was Angela, and she was pretty in a sort of expressionless way. Mercedes smiled as she handed ov
er their bags of food and clothes, and the girl smiled back. “Is there anything we can do to help?” she asked Alonzo. His attention had shifted back to the boat.
But not completely. “Just sit up front and look pretty.” His eyelids still vanished when he smiled. “Jack knows what to do. If he can remember.”
Mercedes threw her last bag into the front area, and picked up a pair of skis. “Where do these go?” Jack showed her a long concealed compartment that ran from near the back of the boat to the passenger seats in a semicircle around the front. The boat was brand new, with a nice stereo system built into the teak dashboard. It was beautiful. Easily the most expensive craft its size at the marina.
It was almost a ship, really, as Alonzo explained. The Maristar 225 was twenty-two-and-a-half feet of steel-reinforced fiberglass, made for waterskiing and not much else. He showed them how to turn on the Kenwood stereo, the hot and cold pressurized shower, and the tiny refrigerator. Mercedes was impressed. Alonzo’s parents seemed to have a lot of money to spend on him, and he had a knack for not quite showing it off.
Angela was a different angle. “So you and Jack are, what, like, cousins?”
It took Mercedes a second before she realized the other girl was addressing her. “Sorry? No.” After a moment more she actually laughed at the thought. “Nope. What made you think so?”
“Well,” Angela was busy dabbing lotion on her arms. “You guys look so much alike, and I figured, you know. Not like Jack dates all that much.”
Alonzo interrupted them with some Styrofoam containers, which the girls stowed in lockers underneath the wide seats. Mercedes had the feeling he was slightly embarrassed by the girl. She and Angela sat in the bow and watched the young men scurry about the boat. They talked while they worked, a constant chatter between them, like little old men. Mercedes found herself content to listen to the exchange. “They’ve always been like this,” Angela said. “Hey Al, see if Jack can still do his trick.”