Keepers ch-2

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “Whoever you wind up with, whichever guy out there has the brains to know he’s just met the greatest woman in the world the first time he meets you…the two of you can be together for sixty, seventy years, you can have dozens of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and build the most unbelievably fantastic life together. But when you’re holding his hand at the end and looking into his eyes and seeing him remember the richness and fulfillment and joy he’s known because his life has been spent by your side, at that moment, that very moment, he won’t come close to loving you half as much as I do, right here, right now. So, yeah, Beth, I love you, and I’m in love with you, and nothing you’ve said or done in the past has changed that, and nothing you can say or do now is going to change it. There? Happy now?”

  “Actually,” she said, slipping her arms around my neck, “I am. Very happy. Because I love you, too. And I figure that if you’re going to lose your virginity, Gil, it should be to me.”

  Earlier, when I said the first kiss Beth gave me that day was the one against which all others would be compared and come up lacking…I was wrong. The kiss she gave me at that moment, a kiss just as soft and warm and deep and long and moist as the first, but this time with the hint of hunger on the tip of its tongue and a heat around it that you experience once and once only in your life if you’re lucky, because it’s a heat that burns into the core of your heart and tells you that this is it, kiddo, run for cover, this is the Real Thing, Take No Prisoners, give it up, you’re doomed, because Love has just kicked your teeth down your throat, ain’t it grand?- this kiss was the one whose summer taste and autumn passion would linger on my lips for all the rest of my days.

  When she pulled away-not taking her arms from around my neck-we both let out a long, hot, staggered breath. She pressed her forehead against mine and stroked the back of my neck, swallowing once before saying, “Oh, my,” ending that second word on a smoothly descending note of embarrassed laughter that snuggled down in the back of her throat and wrapped itself up in something like a purr; I could almost feel her voice with my fingertips.

  “Just wait until I’m legal, huh?”

  “Oh, I think we passed the ‘waiting’ part about thirty seconds ago.” She lifted her head and looked into my eyes again. “Before I picked you up today, I rented a hotel room downtown. Can I take you there? Can we leave right now?”

  She’d bought two boxes of condoms (three to a pack, and we still called them “rubbers”) and bet me a year’s worth of back rubs that I couldn’t last through one box. I made it all the way through the first one from the second box before she and I didn’t so much fall asleep as pass out. I say this not to boast (c’mon, I was seventeen and a virgin; most days I was so horny the crack of dawn wasn’t safe) but to give you some idea of how gloriously unhinged the whole experience was. It was romantic and primal, awkward and embarrassing, spectacular and funny, life-affirming and depressing as hell, always surprising (she did things with me I didn’t think two bodies were capable of doing, even with lubricants), and even a little…mystifying. We fell out of bed laughing, we got a little mushy, a lot dirty, very sweaty, and ultimately so sore neither of us walked very fast or very straight for a day or two afterward.

  It was wonderful.

  And I think I knew the truth about the whole thing before we’d even finished dressing afterward.

  “You’re giving me a look,” she said. “Why did you do this, Beth?”

  “Because I wanted to.”

  I tied my shoelaces and looked at the floor. I didn’t want to see her face when she answered the next question. “This doesn’t mean what I think it means, does it?”

  “What do you think it… no. No, kiddo. And I’m sorry.”

  “Then why? ”

  “Because I needed to…to be with a guy who loved me.” She placed her hand against the small of my back. “You don’t hate me, do you?”

  “No.” Which was a lie. At that moment I don’t think I’d hated anyone or anything more, but I also knew I’d get over it. This was Beth, after all.

  A few nights later at dinner Dad remarked that Beth seemed like a decent girl and I should count myself lucky to have found her. Then he looked across the table at Mom and smiled, and my mother actually blushed.

  I was stunned. For as long as I could remember, they’d never displayed any tenderness or affection for one another in front of me-as far as I cared to imagine, they’d never displayed any in private, either. They were Just Mom and Dad, the people who raised me and paid for my clothes and put a roof over my head and sent me to school and never missed a chance to remindme that everything Ihad was because of them. I knew that parents were just like any other couple, that there was love and affection and all of that, but these were my folks, for the love of God. My folks never talked about anything like this-hell, the only time anything more than the day’s trivialities were ever brought up was when Dad was on a drunk and shouting at the top of his lungs about the bills or the condition of the house or how the goddamn company was going to fuck over the union with the next contract.

  But this little flirtatious display over the meatloaf…this was just weird. It made me nervous. And a little queasy.

  I went to bed that night without setting them straight about Beth and me. I think my dad was just glad to know that I liked girls.

  Later-I guess it must have been two or two-thirty in the morning-I woke up with one of those middle-of-the-night cases of dry mouth that make you think you’re going to die within seconds if you don’t get something to drink right now, and went downstairs to get a glass of juice from the fridge. The living room was dark as I passed by but it felt like someone was in there. Probably Dad. Again. They’d been screwing with his hours at the plant and as a result he hadn’t gotten back on anything close to a normal sleeping schedule yet. Most nights he’d toss and turn for hours until he woke Mom, who’d make him come downstairs and do his tossing and turning on the sofa. He was usually cranky as hell whenever this happened, so I walked very softly and decided not to turn on the kitchen lights. I drank my juice, quietly rinsed out the glass and set it in the sink, and was starting back toward the stairs when I heard Dad say, in a voice so tired and sad it froze me where I stood: “Did I ever tell you that when I was a kid, I wanted to raise chickens for a living?”

  I couldn’t have been more anxious if I’d run into an armed burglar. Talks between Dad and me never ended well-one of us always wound up accusing the other of being too pushy or disrespectful or whatever-and the idea of getting into it with him at this hour, especially considering how upset he sounded, made me cringe.

  Then I heard Mom reply: “Only about a hundred times, hon. But if you want to talk about it again, go ahead.”

  When had she come down? I would have heard her-the steps squeaked and groaned like something out of a haunted-house movie. I was surprised that Dad hadn’t lit into me about making so much noise coming down here.

  Then it occurred to me that maybe the two of them had been sitting in there the whole time since I’d gone to bed, that maybe Dad was genuinely upset about something other than the usual list of complaints and Mom, to keep the peace, had decided to sit in there and let him talk it out, however long it took.

  Something in their respective tones baffled me; they were talking to one another not as my parents, but as a husband and wife.

  I realized then that, until the incident at dinner tonight, I’d never actually thought of them as being that way-husband and wife-only as Mom and Dad. It was kind of fascinating, and in my best What-the-Hell-Are-You-Doing? skulk, I crept out of the kitchen and hid myself in the shadows on the stairway. They couldn’t see me there, I was pretty sure, but I had a clear view of their silhouettes against the window, where the curtain glowed a dull blue against the diffuse street light trying to sneak in from outside.

  Mom was sitting in her chair next to the fireplace and Dad was on the old leather ottoman that should have been put out of its misery years ago. He was
leaning forward, elbows on knees, holding his pipe in one hand. If the curtains had been open, he would have been staring out the window, but I knew he’d just been sitting there staring at the curtains as if imagining something really interesting on the other side. I’d seen him do this too many times to count. I always wondered what he thought about as he sat in the dark staring at a set of closed curtains. Why not just open the damn things? At least the view of the street might change if a car or dog or neighbor wandered by.

  “You gonna tell me what’s bothering you?” asked Mom.

  “It’s stupid.”

  “Not if it’s got you upset like this, it isn’t.”

  Dad fired up his pipe, then pointed toward where I was hiding with its glowing red bowl. “He must think I’m some kind of asshole.”

  “I don’t think he feels that way. He maybe doesn’t understand you, but he doesn’t think ill of you.”

  “What about you?”

  “You’re my husband and I love you.”

  “C’mon. I’m not drunk so I’m not gonna throw a fit- answer the question.”

  “I think you act like a real bastard when you’ve been drinking-but it doesn’t make you a bastard. That’s something you really have to work at.”

  Dad chuckled, puffing on his pipe. Even from where I was hiding, I could smell the sweet cherry-flavored tobacco.

  “Think he’ll remember much about us after we’re gone?”

  Mom pulled in a little gasp of air, then said: “Don’t you go talking like that. We may not be as young as we used to be, but I’m not shopping for burial plots just yet.”

  “That’s because you don’t have to, remember? We paid for them damn things-what was it?-ten, fifteen years ago?”

  “Oh.”

  “ Oh, she says.” He shook his head. “Think a person’d remember something like that.”

  Mom readjusted her position in the chair, then asked: “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong or not?”

  Dad puffed on his pipe again, then wiped the back of his arm over his face. “I told you, it’s stupid.”

  “How about you let me decide that for myself?”

  He looked straight at her. “It’s just, I been thinkin’ about when I was a kid, how I’d always get a whole dime once a month to go spend however I wanted. Shit, I had seven different paper routes I worked, and I handed every penny over to Mom so she could buy groceries and pay the bills-”

  “-I remember the Depression, hon. We’re the same age, as I recall.”

  “A dime was a small fortune back then. But Mom, she insisted that once a month I take a dime and go to the movies on Sunday. I could see a triple-feature with cartoons and get popcorn and a soda and still have three cents left for ice cream or something. I used to love those times, y’know. ‘Downtown Sunday’ was a big thing for me. I’d go to the Midland or the Auditorium for the movies, then walk around the square. Those’re some of the best memories I have.

  “Anyway, there was this one corner downtown with this old building, and every Sunday I’d see the same three old guys sitting on the steps, sharing a newspaper or splitting up sandwiches, passing around some beer, and they always had this raggedy-ass fat old hound dog with ’em. I didn’t know which one of ’em owned the thing, but it never gave me any trouble so I never asked. But any time that dog’d see me coming, he’d waddle over and then just sit there and look at me with those sad eyes-thing looked like it was coming down off a drunk most of the time. I’d usually give it some leftover popcorn or a piece of my sandwich or whatever I picked up after the movie, and it’d eat it, then lick my hand and waddle back over to those three old guys. They always waved at me and I’d wave back. It was like part of my Downtown Sunday routine, you know?

  “I thought it was great that here you had these old guys who’d meet each other on them steps and pass the better part of the day with their paper, and their stories, maybe playing checkers or something… and they always had that damn dog to keep things interesting. I mean, there was people who’d walk by and make fun of them, or try not to laugh at ’em ’cause they thought they was, you know, funny in the head or something. But I never laughed at ’em or made fun or anything. They had a place to go and spend good time with their friends. I thought that was just… just great.” His voice was growing thin, unsteady. He took a few more puffs from his pipe and as he did, Mom leaned forward.

  Something more was going on here than what I was seeing and hearing. I’d never heard Dad talk about his childhood much, and whenever he did, I always tuned him out after a minute or two. Same thing with Mom. After all, I was young-what the hell did their childhood memories have to do with me?

  “One day,” Dad continued, “I’d had a real good month and so Mom gave me an extra nickel, I thought I was King Midas or something, even bought myself a couple of comic books-I bought a little penny bag of dog scraps from one of the restaurants after I got out of the movie, decided that I was gonna make that old hound dog’s day. So I walk over to that corner and the three old guys are there and the dog waddles over as usual and boy, did it get lively when it saw what I had for it. So I fed it the scraps and petted it for a little bit, and that’s when I noticed that somebody’d stapled this plastic blue tag to the back of the poor thing’s ear. I figured maybe the dog catcher had caught it or something and maybe they did this down at the pound before the old guys came to claim it-but I couldn’t imagine anyone doing something like that to an animal. So I was extra nice to the dog that day and decided to walk it back across the street and say hello to the guys.

  “We stood there talking for a few minutes and I finally got around to asking them whose dog it was, and you know what? It didn’t belong to any of them. They said that it had just always been there, and that it had waddled up to each one of them at some point and that’s how the three of them had met. After that, they sort of saw that dog as their good-luck charm, so they didn’t think they should send it away. None of ’em had any idea how that tag got there, either. I thought that was odd but I didn’t want to push the subject and maybe get them mad at me, so I asked ’em how long they’d been coming downtown on Sundays. And you know what one of them said to me then? He looked at me and shook his head and said: ‘Christ, boy! We come down here every day. We’re in our eighties-everybody else we know’s dead. What the hell else have we got to do?’

  “I went home that day and cried myself to sleep. It was just terrible. Here I’d spent all this time thinking they were having a grand time, and all the while they were miserable. I didn’t go by that corner much after that. It must’ve been five, six months later before I passed by there, and this time they were all gone. There was only that old hound dog, just as friendly as ever. I think it even looked better in some ways; more energetic, and its eyes weren’t as bloodshot and droopy anymore. But it was just sitting there, scratching at that tag on its ear and waiting for the old guys to show up. It was still sitting there waiting when I left to go home and-”

  And then Dad did something I’d never seen him do before; he dropped his head down and started crying. Even from where I was standing, I could see the way his body jerked and shuddered with the sobs.

  Mom made a move to go to him but then thought better of it at the last moment. I wanted to call out “Give him a hug!” but I didn’t. I was as stunned and confused as she must have been.

  “Oh, God,” said Dad, wiping at his eyes, but still the sobs kept coming. “I hate to get up in the mornings. You know? Some days I wish I didn’t have to get up at all, that I’d never have to get up again, ever. Just lay there and stare at the ceiling until… I don’t know what.”

  “Honey, what’s going on?” Mom moved closer to him, but still would not touch him, as if she were afraid he might shatter into a thousand pieces.

  “I wish I’d been a better soldier in the war, come home a hero like Sergeant York or something. But, no, I gotta go and get all shot up and now I’ve got a bad hip and two legs that get all swoll-up on me until I can�
�t hardly stand it hurts so much. I wish I’d been able to afford college, get me a degree in agriculture or something. We’d be on our own farm right now, one we own, and we’d be raising chickens, all of us. Instead we got this damn house that ain’t even paid for yet and ain’t gonna be anytime soon, and all I can do is drink until my hip or my legs don’t hurt so much ’cause I can’t afford the doctor bills anymore… then I yell at you and him and make everyone scared.” He pulled in a deep breath full of snot and regret and wiped at his face again.

  “I see the way he looks at me sometimes. He looks at me just like people used to look at those old guys on the corner when I was a kid. Like I’m some kinda joke. I don’t want to be a joke to him, some worn-out old man who don’t know nothing but factory work, and I don’t want to be a bad husband to you. But every time I get up in the morning, every time I haul my fat ass out of bed, I think about them old guys. I can’t help it. Because they might not be down on that corner anymore, but I know -as sure as I know that a man’s hands weren’t meant to be as scarred and calloused as mine are-I know that them old guys and that dog are still out there somewhere, and they’re still sad and lonely and miserable and people still make fun of them and one day that’s gonna be me, if it ain’t already. An old, drunk joke of a factory worker that’ll be forgot about an hour after he’s dead. I know this. And when I die, that old hound dog’s gonna show up on that corner again and sit there waiting for me. I’ll sit there on them steps with it and wait for it to drag over the ghosts of other guys who bungled everything and-what the hell am I going on about? Listen to me, will you?

  “Oh, Christ, honey, I’m so sorry. It’s just I think about them guys and they way they were and I get so… scared.”

  Mom went to him now, kneeling beside him and taking him in her arms. “It’s all right, honey, shhhh. There, there. It’s all right.”