One Simple Thing

by Warren Read

  It was the man’s voice again, louder, weaving in and out of his mother’s, just outside the front door. Rodney lay silent, blankets pulled to his chin now and he stared at the ceiling, at the putty texture, with eyes so easily tricked that they began to form clouds and constellations, shapes that turned and drifted until a simple blink of the eyelids reset the entire scene, back to the beginning.

  The front door rattled and creaked and the conversation tumbled into the house with the knock of shoes on hardwood. His mother laughed again.

  “Stop it.” Her voice. “You’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.”

  It was quiet for a moment, and then there was a low hum, and a shuffle of some kind, a jacket maybe, sliding off and into a chair, or onto the floor.

  “Slow down, cowboy.” His mother, almost a drawl.

  “I will when it counts.” The man again, and then nothing. Nothing but the noise of breathing. A quick shadow fell across the floor and he heard his mother’s bedroom door click shut.

  Rodney did not sleep yet, though there were no sounds happening that should keep him awake. He strained to listen for something—for anything—that might help him craft a believable story, a “safe” explanation for what could be happening in that room. A late movie playing out on the tiny black and white RCA she kept perched on the dresser. Two people, seated on opposite sides of the room, telling stories, the mother going on about her son who was in the very next room and a husband who might just walk in the front door at any moment.

  In the stubborn silence Rodney seemed to drop off at last, though it was hard to tell if it was truly sleep, and whether the span of time had stretched itself over fifteen minutes or two hours. A flood of light spilled in from the hallway with the creak of the door.

  “You awake over there?” A man’s voice.

  The figure took up the open doorway, nearly a full silhouette, though Rodney could see that the man was draped in a bathrobe, and the robe was tied loose at his waist, the hair on his stomach sprayed thick like moss from the white waistband of briefs that showed just above the knot. In one hand he held a milk bottle and he tapped it against his leg, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. The light filled in around one side and Rodney recognized the robe as the one his father had always worn.

  “What do you want?” Rodney said.

  “I don’t want nothing,” the man said. “Just saying hey.”

  “I got school tomorrow,” the boy answered.

  “In summer?”

  Rodney’s eyes adjusted some to the low light, and it was then that he was able to finally make out the man’s face. It was the cook from the Iron Rail, with the hair thick and shiny and black, all of it swept back over his head as if it had been combed or raked back with fingernails until it finally just gave up and fell down into its place. And those sideburns, dripping down from the whole mop, from the top of the ears to the hard jawline.

  “Hey man, how old are you?” he said. His lips pushed from his mouth like he was holding something in there. “You old enough to drive a car?”

  Rodney said, “I can’t drive. I’m only twelve.”

  “Jesus. You look a lot older than that.” He tipped the milk bottle to his lips and swallowed a mouthful, the white washing around the glass as he brought it back down to his side. He wiped a sleeve over his mouth, the sleeve of Rodney’s father’s bathrobe. “I figured you’d already be trying to sneak girls in through the window.”

  There was the sound of a door behind him, and Rodney’s mother’s voice, low and soft. Otis looked over his shoulder and scratched at his naked stomach, fingers raking at the black fur. A monkey.

  “We shall talk another time,” he said. Then he stepped off and closed the door behind him and a breath of moonlight seeped in through the window, and for a moment Rodney thought there was someone else in there with him, a figure standing at the far side of the bedroom. His jacket, maybe, draped over the corner of his closet door. There came the low hum of voices again on the other side of the door and he turned his back to them, taking hold of his pillow and carefully wrapping it over his ears like a hood.

  5

  Rodney came into the kitchen to find his mother sitting at the small table, still in her bathrobe, hunched over her coffee, a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. Her hair was pulled back from her face with a fat, plastic clip and the skin below her eyes was thick and reddened, as if she had been sitting up all night.

  He tugged at the refrigerator door and stared at the bottle there on the shelf. There was Otis Dell in that milk for sure, and all over the glass, where his mouth had wrapped itself around the rim. Everything in that space had been touched, Rodney was certain—things opened and prodded through, a stranger’s fingers picking at their bread and cheese, moving things willy-nilly from one place to another.

  “You want some breakfast?” his mother asked.

  “We need more milk.”

  “I thought we had some,” she said. She shifted in her chair to look part-ways over her shoulder.

  Rodney swung the door closed and went to the cupboards, opening and closing them one by one in search of something he could take with him. There were cans of soup and sauce, and boxes of crackers and dry casserole mixes, as there had always been.

  “Is he still here?” he asked.

  His mother shook her head no.

  He opened a box of soda crackers and took a sleeve from it. “So is he your boyfriend, now?”

  “Oh, Rodney. Don’t do this.”

  “You said before it was okay to look for something, right? I’m just wondering if that’s what you were talking about when you said it. You had to have known him a long time if—”

  “You want to know if I’ve been carrying on with Otis for a while,” she said, rubbing her fingers over her eyes. “You want to know if maybe your father had good reason to be sitting there in his car spying on me.”

  He wanted to answer that, tell her yes or even maybe. But nothing would come.

  “Things can happen fast, Rodney. I can’t explain it so you’ll understand. I’m not perfect.”

  “No one’s perfect. Dad’s not perfect.”

  “I’m not a bad mother, or a bad wife.” She took a drag off her cigarette and held it in for a moment. Rodney said nothing, and she watched him from her chair, her eyes ticking over his face, before finally blowing out the smoke in a blue tumble.

  “I don’t like him,” Rodney said. “There’s something about him that’s not good.”

  “I wasn’t aware someone died and made you judge of everyone.” She closed her eyes and put her head in her hand. “Let me tell you something that might serve you well someday. A woman’s life doesn’t stop the second her husband decides to pick up and run off to God knows where,” she said.

  “Missoula.”

  “Whatever. I’m entitled to have friends.”

  “He’s in Missoula,” Rodney repeated.

  “So you say.” She tamped her cigarette in the ashtray, hard. “Let’s not fight about this,” she said, fingering a new cigarette from the pack but not lighting it up. “He’s a nice guy, Otis. But he’s not worth all of this heartburn.”

  Rodney took an apple from the bowl in front of her. “I’m going to a friend’s,” he said.

  She looked at him then, a teepee of lines on her forehead, and she didn’t need to say a single word for Rodney to hear what was on her mind. Friend. When had he ever mentioned a single friend since they’d come to Hope? Never—not even a name.

  She nodded, her forehead smoothing over, and said, “That’s good.” Then she pushed off from the table and got up, brushing a hand over his back as she walked out of the kitchen, the smell of her bathrobe trailing as she left, through the living room and down the hall to her bedroom.

  6

  On the backside of Hope, in a small space between CJ’s Grocery and the Drive On Inn there was a little burger stand called Val’s, and on the side of the building they had a covered, outdoor area that was
closed up with a metal cage at night. In that cage was a row of video arcade games, and on most days after school, and on the weekends, Rodney could put himself with other kids his age, mostly boys but not always, packed around the machines, knocking fists against the metal sides and feeding those machines a week’s worth of quarters in a single afternoon. He spent a good amount of time and pocket money there himself, when he could. It was easy to blend in with the bodies that crowded that place, to pretend he wasn’t alone, not having to worry about saying or doing the wrong thing.

  On this day, Rodney put his bike out front where he could keep an eye on it, because he knew that a simple padlock wouldn’t keep people from messing with it as they had before, pulling his chain off or loosening the bolts on his wheels or emptying the tires. He positioned himself near the Night Driver machine though he wasn’t playing it, or even planning on playing it, really. Sometimes, he decided, it was better to watch everyone else at their consoles, to see the way they drummed on the buttons and swore at the screens, amped up like addicts, many of them this close to crying. Even with the all racket and chaos, Val’s was something of a calming place for Rodney, the kind of space he could enter into and be invisible for a while. Invisible in plain view.

  “Gimme room, dumbshit.” Two boys crowded the Sea Wolf screen, all block shoulders and cracking voices. High schoolers, Rodney figured. He didn’t know them, but he’d seen them most every time he came to Val’s. They wore their hair in spikes and jeans with holes torn in the knees, and they smoked joints in the small space behind the cages, joints that they called Jesus’ Candy. And even though everyone knew what was what, nobody ever said anything about it.

  “You’re wasting your quarter,” the taller one said. There was the ping of the fake sonar, and a static explosion, and he slammed his hand against the console.

  The shorter one dug his hands into his pockets and said, “I’m empty.” And when he looked past Rodney, out into the street maybe, he straightened up and said, “Oh baby, look who rolled up.”

  It had been a week since Otis Dell had been by the house and Rodney had not seen or heard from the man since, which was fine by him. His mother hadn’t mentioned his name, and Rodney had not brought it up again, not since that morning in the kitchen. Lately, it had almost been as if he had never existed. Except here he was.

  Otis kept on the street side of his car, and Rodney did not get the sense that anyone around him was concerned that he might do anything more than what he was already doing.

  He walked around casually to the front end of the car and rested his hand on the hood. He was wearing blue jeans and a baseball T-shirt this time, with chunky combat boots, but there were still those sideburns running down his face like smears of shoe polish. Rodney stayed well behind the others, holding himself safely in the shadows.

  This all went on for a while, Otis walking from one side of his car to the other, stopping to lean on the fender. Now and then someone would walk past, falter in their step and look back over their shoulder at him. At one point, Otis called out something, and one of those passersby stopped in his tracks and circled on back to him. This was an older fellow, older than Rodney’s father maybe, and while he stood there with Otis he kept his hands tucked down in the pockets of his camouflage jacket.

  They talked for just a minute or so, and then the man looked back up at Val’s for a split second before moving a hand from his pocket right into Otis’s, straight into the front jeans pocket it looked like. And with that, Otis gave the guy a slap on the shoulder and climbed back into his car and left without another word to anyone, but not before gunning the engine a good three or four times and laying a stripe of rubber all down the concrete. Someone said, “That dude is crazy.”

  People went back to their games. Rodney counted out the quarters in his pocket and when he looked up, he noticed a couple of girls leaning over a pinball machine in play, staring at him. They were girls he knew from school, though not very well. The stout one, named Donna, glared at Rodney, raising an ugly crook in her lip. Barely a week after he’d showed up in class she had tried to talk him into letting her copy his geography map. There had been sweet talk, and an effort to play herself as some social queen, someone he’d want to be friends with. He’d refused though and, as a result, wound up as more or less dead to her and everyone else. Which was fine by him.

  “Your mom works at Kruger’s.” The other girl—he thought her name might be Kate, or Katrina, maybe—screeched over the racket of the pinball machine.

  “So what,” Rodney said. “Like I don’t know that.”

  She leaned in to her friend, her black hair ratted out like crow’s feathers, and yelled something into her ear that Rodney couldn’t make out. She looked back to him. “I seen your mom and Otis Dell around town. My apartment is right across the street from Swain’s Tavern. They like to go there an awful lot.”

  “So what?” he said again.

  “So what?” she mimicked, folding her arms over her chest and throwing a smirk at him. “And yet you stand there, acting like you don’t even know him.”

  “I don’t know him,” he said.

  Katrina said, “Wait till he starts beating on her. My mom works with a lady who went with him for a while, last fall. She mouthed off to Otis this one time—the lady did, not my mom. Anyway, he backhanded her right across the face.”

  Rodney said, “They just barely met. He hasn’t done anything yet.”

  “Yet,” she echoed, her mouth pinched tight. A beak.

  “Anyways, he wouldn’t dare,” he added.

  “Or else what?” she said, looking him up and down. “You’ll kick his ass? Yeah, right.” Donna reached across the pinball glass and swatted at her.

  There were options that drifted into his mind, things he could do to Otis—the kinds of things the people in his comics did (but seldom got away with). All the same, he could not imagine his mother letting anyone so much as lift a hand to her, much less strike her.

  Katrina shook her head. “Don’t bother calling the cops,” she said. “My mom said that if the cops could do anything with Otis he would have been in jail a long time ago.” She nodded to her friend and the two of them left the machine, whipping their hair like horse tails as they pushed through the crowd and disappeared out the back of the arcade.

  7

  He remembered the fishing lure with its kaleidoscopic shimmer and its angry triple hook, all peeking out from the sand. The water brushed over it easily and maybe it was that rhythm and the gentle nudge that let him see the lure before he might carelessly let his bare foot sink right down over those barbs. He dug the thing from the sand and held it over his head and called to his father. He was six then, and boy had he found a treasure.

  His parents were some distance away, back at the picnic table, that weathered, splintered thing built of cedar logs and chained to a rugged maple, the tree bark scarred with hearts and letters, and three-pronged peace signs. Rodney’s mother sat on the bench closest, cigarette fuming from her fingers, right leg over her left knee, sunglasses hiding her gaze. She might be looking at him. There was no way to know.

  His father stood squarely behind her, and he was talking with one hand moving in loops while the other held a brown bottle by the neck. On and on he went, no notice of Rodney and his wonderful discovery, saying something important, worthy of sharing and yet Rodney’s mother looked to be a world away from it all. She brought the cigarette to her mouth and held it in her lips, chasing some insect from her orbit with her free hand. Then his father put the bottle down and placed his hands on his mother’s shoulders, moving them back and forth. She tightened up at first, her forehead breaking into lines as if he was hurting her. And then there was a grin, her teeth, as his father leaned in and whispered something to her, and her laughter and smile seemed to open her whole face.

  There were other people there at the lake, people they did not know who shared the beach and the grass and the mood. A man strolled toward Rodney, his long shadow c
urling over neglected sandcastles and discarded towels. “That’s a nice spinner you got there,” he said, stopping at the water’s edge. He cupped a hand over his forehead, his stomach chalky white and spilling out the bottom of his T-shirt. A sack of flour peeking over his waistband.

  “I found it,” Rodney said. “Right here.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t step on it,” he said.

  “I’m careful,” Rodney said, and then he pointed at the shade of the maple tree. “That’s my mom and dad over there.”

  The man looked over to the table, at the scene that was persisting, the blue feather of smoke and the tumbling hands and the beer bottle dancing from one side to the other. He laughed softly and Rodney imagined that the man had heard something he’d missed, a joke maybe. And then the man clapped Rodney on the shoulder and told him to watch for more hooks, and he continued to make his way down the beach, his eyes tracking the picnic table as he went.

  Rodney carried that hook in his hand all the way back from the lake. No one asked him what was there in that clenched fist, not when his mother helped him with his seatbelt, not when he tapped it against the side window, loud enough to be heard over the thrum of the engine. Not for the entire ride home.

  8

  In time, Rodney had grown used to Otis like he would a fresh scar, some ugly mark that might have come from a collision with a low branch while navigating his bicycle on an overgrown trail. The heavy crawl of his voice late at night, the crude outline of his body lumbering between Rodney’s mother’s room and the bathroom. Otis’s slumped figure waiting at the kitchen table most every morning now, drinking coffee with Rodney’s mother, her hand over her mouth, giggling at some joke that was not for her son to hear.

  On a whim she had cut her hair short, and colored it a shade of brown that was not her own and she said nothing to Rodney about it, but she liked to flick her fingers through the sides as if baiting him to bring it up. Pushing him to say something—anything—which he would not.