Better Times

by Batkie, Sara;

  That night she dreamed again of the sea, the waves seething, parting, unhinging like a jaw, leaping up to swallow them whole. She woke in a flood of sweat. In the morning she took something else from her husband’s closet: a rope, which she instructed Jude to tie around his waist and attach to the front doorknob before he went outside. An old trick farmers used on their cattle in storms. She would not lose another man to these waters. Not yet.

  Ms. Kimball was a teacher with no schoolhouse. For twelve years she had been teaching twenty students in a single room at Sherwood Junior High. Some of those students would never take another class after hers. Every fall she gathered up her composition books, bundled her pencils, clapped her erasers clean. Every spring she counted down the days until she returned. The purpose had been ripped from her life. She had expected it to happen much sooner.

  Sherwood had two kinds of people: those who left and those who stayed. That was all the town was. Ms. Kimball was unique in that she had come to it. For a time after her arrival she had been the object of great speculation among the other residents. She was a woman whose smallness was often thrown into relief by her solitude; she stood out from the town like a lonely nesting doll. Perhaps she was an escaped inmate on the lam. Or part of the witness protection program.

  The truth was Ms. Kimball was fleeing nothing more mundane than the sort of depression that the wealthy cured with insurance-proof pills. When she was thirty-three and living in Santa Fe her fiancé had left her for a man who taught civics in a neighboring district. Several hours later she was found at the local grocery store, wandering the baking aisle, slitting the bags of sugar like throats. She was quietly asked not to return to school the next year.

  In the first few days on the floe, Ms. Kimball attempted to adjust to her new isolation. She broke into the bookshop and stole all the Harlequin romances. She joined Kirby for a couple belts on the bottles while he was still with them. She went to Mr. Ruben, the elderly invalid she had never seen on dry land, and listened while he played his records. Flashes of her former gloom would visit her, urging her toward a darkness more absolute than night. When Alicia came to her, asking if she would tutor Jude, she accepted partly in the hope that the boy would keep a bad something at bay.

  Five weeks in Jude was beginning to look frail. Or at least she thought it was five weeks; she’d stopped crossing the days off her calendar once they’d passed the New Year. On the walk over to Mr. Ruben’s, hands clasped, stepping on the ice with the unpracticed gait of topiary come to life, Jude told Ms. Kimball of his wish to go to the moon.

  “What’s on the moon?”

  “Don’t know. It just seems weird up there. I’d like to go somewhere weird.”

  “More weird than this?”

  It was strange to walk over land that stayed the same as far as the eye could see. It was what, as a child, she’d always imagined the clouds of heaven to look like. Yes, how different was this from the moon, really? They had about as much chance of being heard and even less of being believed. Then she stumbled over a rocky patch and gripped Jude tighter. Their hands were almost the same size.

  They entered Mr. Ruben’s house without knocking; he never answered anyway. His communication was rigid and tidy, restricted to gesture, the glottis, and his record player, old enough to be cranked by hand. He was a widower, had been for as long as Ms. Kimball had lived in Sherwood. They were there to keep him company and feed him, if he wanted it. Sometimes he did. Sometimes he let the soup dribble down his chin.

  Mr. Ruben was in his chair, a mound of blankets at his feet that Ms. Kimball quickly picked up and arranged on his lap. It was colder here than it was outside. Around them the walls wolf-whistled; the clapboards were stacked and gappy as unbraced teeth. A frost had formed on the kettle and it took several matches before she could get the wood in the stove to catch.

  “I took a trip once,” she said, pulling the kettle from the flame. “To India.”

  “Not possible,” Jude said. This was what their lessons amounted to now: she told him of her life and he pretended to be interested.

  “This was a long time ago. Before the floods came.”

  “What was it like?” Jude asked.

  “Hot. Always hot. You couldn’t get away from it, even in the shower. You couldn’t really get away from anything. It’s funny, now I can’t even remember the last time I sweat.”

  She poured the boiled water into a mug and dipped a dusty tea bag inside, carrying it all to Mr. Ruben, who didn’t move to take it from her.

  “Did you see any camels?”

  “Once or twice. I saw all sorts of things: palaces, snake charmers, bodies laid out in the street. I watched a missionary perform an exorcism. I even bartered for a pair of sandals in bare feet once.”

  “Must have been sad to come back here,” Jude said.

  “Yes, but it was necessary. Half the appeal of a journey is that it won’t last. The way back is always shorter than the way there.”

  She lifted the mug to Mr. Ruben’s lips and was rewarded with a hasty slurp. As she pulled away, she felt that old creeping unpleasantness she thought she’d left in New Mexico. Perhaps it was the talk of India. Perhaps it was the boy and his candlewick face. Regardless, she knew that the creep would soon turn to a sprawl and she would do something cruel.

  Jude heard once that there were places where animals were kept stuffed behind glass, twisted into poses that made them look like they had in life. He’d never seen it himself. His friend Freddie had gone on vacation and come back with tales of standing so close to beasts he could fog up the glass between them with his breath. It felt that way now, being stuck on this ice. But who was watching them? Maybe God, but Jude didn’t know much about him either.

  All his life he’d been dreaming of things he’d never seen. For as long as he could remember his dreams, he’d imagined stowing away in the hold of his father’s ship and waking up on the same land he did. But now that a true adventure was at hand, he didn’t know how to enjoy it.

  Partly it was his mother, who was shrinking from the world in ways he didn’t understand. He had always accepted her as beautiful, in the way women in fairy tales were beautiful; it was less about how she looked than about how men held doors open for her or how his father used to gaze at her from across the kitchen table, a comical glint in his eye, as if contemplating the plank of wood that kept him from the woman he crossed an ocean for. Now her growing weakness frightened and angered Jude. He knew it wasn’t her fault, but who else could he blame? Every morning when he pushed half of his cereal toward her, his resentment, a feeling he knew but couldn’t name, thickened.

  Six weeks on, one of Jude’s teeth came loose. He was poking a finger through a hole in his favorite shirt, trying to tickle himself, when his tongue lifted his front incisor from its root. It hung suspended for a moment then flapped back into place. This didn’t concern him immediately; he’d lost teeth before. But this one was full grown. His father had pulled it from his mouth over a year ago.

  Before leaving the yard, he tied the rope around his waist and attached the other end to the front doorknob. As he picked his way over the bald expanse of ice, the growls of his stomach were matched by the whip of the wind and the snow enveloped his footprints as soon as he planted them. The rope flopped behind him like a misplaced cowlick.

  Jude enjoyed these excursions despite their difficulty. On his seventh birthday his father had promised to enroll him in the Cub Scouts. Jude began making his bed drum tight every morning. Once or twice his mother humored him by bouncing a quarter off it. That summer she’d even let him sleep outdoors, draping a sheet over a low-hanging branch to make a pup tent. He traced the stars out with his fingers, dreaming of the day he’d know their names. That was almost four months ago and he hadn’t seen his father since. He didn’t know the stars any better now, though he saw them more clearly out here; they seemed closer, too, as if the sky was sinking.

  Halfway on his journey he stopped to say hello to Lloyd
, who was outside working on his raft. The rope followed behind, nipping at Jude’s ankles like a dog. “How is it?” he asked. He still hadn’t gotten used to speaking easily with Lloyd. The man’s hulking presence and quiet manner had always frightened Jude; he took up space without warning. But now Jude was glad Lloyd was with them.

  “Not bad,” Lloyd said, stepping back from the plane of wood as if to admire it. “Think it could hold about seventy stone.”

  “How many stones do you need?”

  “Don’t know. How much is your mother weighing these days?” His mouth was smiling but his eyes were limp.

  Jude didn’t knock before entering Ms. Kimball’s house, a lapse in propriety that made him feel oddly adult. She called out his name from the living room, as if it could be anyone else. The sound of it bounced off the bare walls. A few weeks ago there’d been a painting in the foyer, a woman with dark skin, long braids, and no clothes. Jude asked about it, then it disappeared.

  In the living room he hesitated to approach the woman sprawled out on the couch. Her face was tucked into the crook of her arm, her breath straining to escape her. She reminded him of a man he’d once seen while walking in the woods with Freddie. The man had hair like knotty black string and fingernails long enough to curl. His eyes couldn’t seem to settle on anything. He wore a bracelet on his wrist, white and plastic, and when Freddie stepped on a branch as they ran away, they heard him let out a low moan. That night the police swept the area but Jude never came across him again. Ms. Kimball looked like that man, except he actually knew her, which made it all the more frightening.

  “Do you think the ocean ever gets tired?” she mumbled into her hand. “It’s been going since the world began, you know?”

  Jude didn’t quite know how to respond to an adult who wasn’t looking at him.

  “Always carrying the rest of us on its back,” she continued. “Where do you think it’s taking us now?”

  “Home?”

  “What home? Maybe Siberia. We can be prisoners too.”

  “I want to go home,” Jude said.

  She turned on him then, the thorny mass of her hair, her uninhabited eyes, her jaw wound tight like a music box before it sings. She looked poised to pounce and Jude jumped backward, stumbling over an unplugged lamp cord.

  “Go, then, what’s stopping you? Nothing, that’s what. There’s nothing there.”

  “My father’s there.”

  “Your father left your mother months ago. That means he left you, too.”

  “No,” Jude shouted. In the hurry to get the word out, he almost pushed the tooth loose.

  “No?” Ms. Kimball said. “Ask her. Just ask her. Nobody’s there. Nobody’s anywhere. We’re alone. We’re more alone than I thought it was possible to be.”

  Then she deflated like a balloon, collapsing back into the couch in a silent heap. Jude watched her for a moment, his pulse jangling in his head, a fire building on his fingertips. He glanced at the cord at his feet, the lamp attached to it, and the rope attached to him, coiled on the floor like Eden’s snake. Then he turned around and ran.

  The wind hit him like a bear hug, a huge enveloping gush of air that almost pushed him back into Ms. Kimball’s house. For a moment he saw nothing and felt a surge of blind, furious hope. When his sight returned he still saw nothing. Just white upon white upon white. It buried whatever else he was feeling.

  Lloyd was not at the raft but the ax was. Jude didn’t lift it so much as throw himself behind it. The blade ripped through the wood, sending splinters raining through the air. His tooth was knocked from its socket with the effort and as he spit it into the snow, a jerky piano rang across the hill. And then a voice tiptoed over it. Mr. Ruben had put a record on. Baby, won’t you please come home. The same record every night. With the taste of blood like a penny on his tongue, Jude readied himself for the next blow.

  The boy would be forgiven. Boys always were. Until they were men and not so easily worthy of forgiveness. Then old age came and they could be pardoned again. Mr. Ruben would know. He’d been them all, once.

  Mr. Ruben had lived every one of his eighty-three years in Sherwood. Some he remembered better than others. Since the death of his wife, Zuleika, eleven years before, he’d been trying to forget the rest. Not that he had loved her so very well. Mr. Ruben was a man who always thought hard about being better. He just never seemed to find the time to do it.

  The year Mr. Ruben was born was the hottest on record. This excited his parents, who believed it portended something great for their son. Then it kept happening year after year. A new record, a new disappointment. Soon enough, a new everything.

  Here’s what he understood about Jude: there was a great confusion to being young, a frenzy that most adults were more than happy to forget. Every single thing was the biggest yet. His own memories of those days were culled objects, like a museum show of his own making. There was the bucket his mother used for fresh well water. If he drank directly from the ladle, he received a scolding. It must be poured into a glass instead, the liquid so clear and sharp it popped when it hit his tongue. He remembered his first and only lobster, its hard red shell and the sound of it splitting, like a bad word you couldn’t take back. Watching his father shoot a reindeer and two weeks later giving his mother the pelt for Christmas.

  He watched the town sputter through history, growing and receding and going gray. Every few years another upheaval: the fishing industry failing; the young people migrating; the winters colder and shorter, feral and blunt; the summers hanging on like bated breath. As a child he’d been taught that March was in like a lion, out like a lamb, that April showers brought May flowers, but such sayings dropped out of use by the time he was in high school—they no longer met the needs of the new world. He lived a life not much different from that of his parents: he married young, worked until he was sixty, haphazardly raised children of his own. If they were occasionally wanting for something, there were always neighbors to help. The things he was used to having he eventually got used to doing without.

  Since Zuleika had passed, he’d stopped listening to anything aside from his records; he read no news and heard from no one. So perhaps the town’s misfortune had been inevitable. Perhaps they’d stayed too long in a place they shouldn’t have. It had surprised but not alarmed him to wake up one morning floating on ice. Though he did feel bad for the young people, he couldn’t help being delighted at this last excitement of his life. He had expected to drift off into the ether of old age; now he would meet a great and unusual end. He spent every day with salt kinking his nostrils and the current beneath his feet, tugging him further into a world muted enough to write his last wishes on. He didn’t have many.

  The teacher had promised to stay with him. For years he’d exploited his own deficiencies, allowed everyone to believe he was worse off than he was. The world in his head had always seemed better than anything anyone else offered. Perhaps for her he could lay the charade aside.

  Here’s what else Mr. Ruben understood: life was a series of big moments and by the end you could forget every one. Each night when he nestled into his chair and put the needle down onto his Bessie Smith record, he did not think of Zuleika or his children or the town he’d left behind. Instead he saw a darkness, much like the one that surrounded him now, and two friends he hadn’t seen in many years, boys again as was he. They had smuggled themselves over to the house of their history teacher, Ms. Ratched, and were lifting one another to look into her window. The others had come back down with nothing to report, but when he had his turn, she was there, stark naked, standing in the middle of the room. Her body was taut and still slick with water, the skin stretching over her like a grape’s. A cigarette dangled from her fingers, the ash floating carelessly into the carpet. Over by the unmade bed a pair of black high heels awaited her return. The three of them squealed and ran together, and it seemed in that moment that there was nowhere they couldn’t go.

  On the morning they pushed the raft from the
floe, a fog unrolled itself over the ocean. Lloyd could barely see his own hand in front of him, but he didn’t think that would keep them from getting somewhere. It had taken another two weeks to repair the damage that Jude had done. It might have taken less if his mother hadn’t made him help, sulking while he drove the same nails into the same plane of wood. They were huddled together somewhere nearby, though Lloyd couldn’t see them either. They’d grown so thin the wind must have been cutting through them like clothes on a line.

  Neither Ms. Kimball nor Mr. Ruben came to see them off. Lloyd expected this. But Mr. Ruben didn’t play a record for them either. This disappointed him. Now that they were going, he could admit it might be the last song he ever heard.

  As the floe became a mound and then a white line and then an inkling, a fear gripped him, coarse but not unpleasant. A fear like presents at Christmas. A fear like something coming apart in space. A fear like the day when he was twelve and running along the edges of Sherwood with his friends and was the first to see it: a whale, beached on the open palms of the land. The scent of fish heads and formaldehyde was in the air. Even from a distance they could tell it was still breathing; they watched the labor of it work across its body. But they were young and selfish and kept it a secret. Two days later it had grown solid with death and yet no more real. They went closer and then closer until it was as big as an eclipse. They dared one another to be the first to touch it. Lloyd was the second; it was damp as a fevered forehead but without the relief of warmth. In the end the National Guard had to airlift out the corpse via helicopter. No one had seen a creature on shore since.

  There could be no music waiting for them. There could be nothing at all.

  As the sea bent beneath them, a beat entered his brain: Orya, he thought. Orya. And whatever hopes were in the heads of the others joined him in turn. It became the current they were crossing.