River Under the Road

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River Under the Road Page 27

by Scott Spencer


  Thaddeus seemed to feel no offense, yet he did that thing, that irritating, nerve-cannibalizing thing that Grace called the Angry Redirect. He turned in his seat to shower the children with affection, Emma in her Britax car seat, brought back from London, and David next to her, holding the Game Boy, one not yet available in America, which Thaddeus brought back from Tokyo a few weeks ago. “Hey, you guys, party time!” Thaddeus said, drumming his fingers on their knees and adopting his Uncle Goofball voice.

  Grace granted that it was not fair, and possibly not sane to believe her husband had come up with Uncle Goofball just as a way of plunging her into despair. In fact, there was more than one despair-inducing voice: there was joyous Uncle G brimming with delight; and then there was Poor Old Bozo, the sad clown; and occasionally there was Falsetto Frank, who only said Hello! but said it over and over. And over. But it was fair and true to say that he turned his high spirits and desire to please on to the children at times when he and Grace were at odds, and these displays invariably took place right in front of her, since they were meant to remind her of all the effervescence that could be hers if she only treated him well.

  David was nearly nine years old, tall and underweight, with a nervous scribble of brown hair, a stubborn expression, and dark semicircles under his eyes. It was his misfortune to have parents with the wherewithal to engage pediatric specialists from New York City all the way up to Montreal in their search of a reason for David looking like a chain-smoking insomniac. There had yet to be a useful diagnosis, and the proposed cures—the diets, the exercise regimes, and the medications—had been a torment to a boy whose nature was basically solitary, sedentary, and introspective. He held the Game Boy tightly in both hands, as if he were a courier entrusted to deliver it from the future. Lately, nothing engaged David except that battery-powered plastic rectangle. The infernal toy was predominantly gray, with two red buttons and a black cross that moved the cursor left and right, up and down. Crosses, cursors, it all seemed to Grace like the death of something.

  Strapped into her carrier, Emma moved her foot up and down, hoping to catch her brother’s eye. She was the robust one, with full cheeks and a watermelon belly, but she, too, was recessive. She made her needs known with pouts and sighs, rarely crying, rarely venturing beyond a stricken look, as if to say, How could you not give me what little I ask for?

  “Is this the little foot looking for her brother?” Uncle Goofball chortled, grabbing Emma’s little beaded moccasin.

  Grace nosed the car onto Riverview Road. The blacktop looked soft in the bright sun. “Why are we bringing kids to a party where they will most likely be bored out of their minds and where they will be left in my care?”

  “Because they’re beautiful and I missed them and they’re great and the whole world wants to see them.” He turned to the kids, wagged his brows. He gave Emma’s chubby leg an affectionate squeeze. “Whoa. She feels a little warm.”

  “She’s fine,” said Grace.

  “Did you take her temperature?”

  “I actually don’t take her temperature every morning. I guess I’m negligent.”

  Thaddeus could see this was going nowhere, at least nowhere he wanted to go.

  “We could have brought Annie with us,” he said. “She could look after the kids and you’d be free to have all the fun there is.”

  “It’s Sunday. And we’re going to be around actual people. Wouldn’t you be embarrassed to bring our nanny to a party like this?”

  David came out of his Game Boy–induced fugue state for a moment. “Annie the Nanny with the big fat fanny,” he said.

  “David!” Grace said. “That’s very unkind.”

  “And untrue,” added Thaddeus. “Annie has a lovely behind.”

  Grace looked at him with open-mouthed astonishment.

  “I’m kidding,” he said, as if that made his remark more acceptable, or palatable, or less insulting, less juvenile, less ill-mannered, more forgivable, cuter, funnier, something, anything.

  There were already several churches in Leyden—Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist, Congregationalist, two Lutheran. The newest was a nondenominational Christian church called the Lord’s Fellowship, where today’s fund-raising party was being held. The Lord’s Fellowship was part of a network of churches, with congregations in Dallas, Tulsa, Charlotte, Youngstown, Hartford, and Leyden, all in identical A-frames that looked like ski-vacation lodges. The spirit of the church was as American as its architecture, free of anything ancient, medieval, pompous, or formal. Bare wooden pews had been eschewed for cushioned seats like in a movie theater. For those who chose to kneel, the kneelers were amply padded with extra layers of foam rubber. Wooden railings were everywhere, up and down every aisle, circling the circumference of the place, in the entrance hall, on the big friendly porch, on the steps leading to the porch. The parking lot was enormous, and the yellow lines painted far apart to accommodate vans delivering the handicapped and the elderly, as well as pickup trucks.

  Grace found a slot for their Subaru, next to a robin’s-egg blue Ford pickup with oversize tires. The back bumper was held onto the body of the truck with copper wire; the red, black, and white bumper sticker said Puttin’ on the Ritz and showed some cheerfully rendered penguins wearing bright red bow ties.

  Next to the A-frame church, a smaller A-frame stood like a dutiful daughter next to her mother. This second structure was the home of the teen recreation center. So far, not many of the local teenagers were making use of the place, but one day, it was hoped by congregants, parents, and local officials, that would change, though many said the first thing that would have to change was the name: Christian Fun Zone.

  Thaddeus counted the number of cars and trucks in the parking lot, to get a sense of how much money the Reynoldses might realize from the benefit. Two hundred dollars? Three? Weren’t they trying to raise money to pay for an operation? Their boy was born with one blind eye, a dull milky blue. Horse had taken the birth defect as an unwelcome commentary on his own genetic makeup, and was full of bluster about it. “The only problem with having one eye is if you lose it,” he said. And sure enough when the boy was almost four years old he fell out of his bunk bed and hit the side of his head against the floor, snapping the optic nerve of his good eye. Now he was in darkness, and that, as Horse said, still full of bluster, but bluster of a different sort, the bluster of a man who has been dealt a bad hand and will make the best of it, that was a beef no one could cool. Doctors were making headway on cancer and AIDS and heart disease, and all sorts of infections you couldn’t even pronounce, but blindness was still basically a one-way street. This one was in the hands of God. But there was a show on 60 Minutes about an eye doctor in San Diego, a surgeon who was reattaching optic nerves and kids and some adults, too, blind for years were suddenly doing crossword puzzles and whistling at pretty girls. The only catch was money, since no insurance company would touch what they considered an experimental treatment. They’d rather buy Brandon a lifetime supply of canes and dark glasses.

  Thaddeus wondered how this benefit could make a dent in what it would cost to operate on Brandon. It would take ten benefits like this to pay for a tonsillectomy. Talk about bad marriages! How about when capitalism and medicine got hooked up? Yet even if Brandon was rich—was there really any chance of restoring his sight? Perhaps the money was being raised to meet other needs—special education, or even a lovely family vacation that might relieve the sorrow of raising a young boy who with every passing day further forgot what his parents, his sister, his house, his friends, his dog, the trees, the sky, the moon, or even what he himself looked like, a boy whose visual memories were being erased by time, plunging him deeper and ever deeper and deeper still into the darkness.

  Thaddeus listened to the voracious crunch of the gravel as he and his family made their way from the car to the Christian Fun Zone. He recalled the many times he’d passed by this spot during construction. The one-hundred-pound sacks of cement stacked in a semicircle like sandb
ags in a battle zone. The backhoe the size of a rhinoceros. The razz of transistor radios. The whine of saws. The ringing of hammers. The smell of tar. The shirtless young men. The portly older guys crouched over their sawhorses, showing deep ass cleavage, extreme tans. Boards, nails, screws, bolts, glass, copper wire, copper pipes, polyurethane, putty, plumbing, paint, and pay by the hour. Wherever his eye landed was evidence that the world was made by others, and he enjoyed it like a child enjoys a stuffed toy dropped into his crib. Out there, somewhere, in the brutal beyond were the road crews, and the logging crews, the masons and truckers, steelworkers, chemical workers, orderlies and electricians, paper hangers, bakers, the men in blood-splattered smocks eviscerating cattle, soldiers in tanks breathing their own stink, soldiers leaping from planes, soldiers ditching helicopters in sandstorms, soldiers bleeding, dying.

  Who made this world?

  Who made the clothes on his back? The shoes on his feet.

  The fillings in his teeth.

  The lost pair of reading glasses. The other lost pair of reading glasses. The pair of reading glasses he was using as a bookmark as he made his way through Love in the Time of Cholera. The book itself, the cardboard, the binding, the ink. The pillows he propped behind him as he read—who raised the chickens or the ducks or the geese or whatever kind of feathers were inside the pillows, who plucked the fowl, who stuffed the feathers into sacks and sewed them up? Who made the mattress, the bed frame, where did the lamp come from, and how about the shade? His daughter’s car seat? His son’s Game Boy?

  Monkeys, it occurred to him, knew more about their surroundings than he knew about his.

  The first thing everybody saw when they walked into the Christian Fun Zone was Horse Reynolds, dispensing handshakes to the men, hair tousles for the little boys, pulled punches to the bicep for the older boys, courtly little bows to the girls, and kisses on the cheek of every woman over the age of eighteen. A line was forming on the other side of the room, near the long table where the covered dishes had been laid out. About twenty guests waited, holding paper plates at their sides, shaking them like silent tambourines. The whole place smelled of meat and onions and biscuits, and scorched lasagna. The aroma was slightly sickening to Thaddeus. (The tray of gray beef and beige potatoes they had served him in aisle 31 on his flight home from London reminded him that he might not even be able to consume food that was meant for the masses. It was as if after a few short years of money he was no longer normal.)

  Keeping Horse company were two men he worked with at Willis Correctional Facility some twenty miles west, that fearsome squat red brick building surrounded by barbed wire upon which the desiccated carcasses of low-flying wrens were like notes on a piece of sheet music. Befitting men who spent their workday in a locked-down facility, supervising people who they were sure wanted to slit their throats, gouge out their eyes, or stomp their skulls into jagged chunks of bloody bone, the correctional officers vociferously enjoyed their time off, sharing their volcanic earsplitting laughter. They rarely said what could be shouted. When they partied, it was an endless game of king of the mountain. They were quick to take offense. They were suspicious. And they were bossy. And they were more or less stuck with each other because no one else could stand them.

  Horse had bulked up on the job. There was no taper to him anymore; at this point, he could literally darken your doorway. He was always on alert. His clear blue eyes moved back and forth like minesweepers. His hands were like rocks and his neck was as thick as his thigh. His black hair shone but his mustache had turned the color of a tarnished silver fork left in the back of the drawer to oxidize.

  “I never thought I’d see you here,” Horse said, taking Thaddeus’s hand. He had milked cows as a kid and now he had an odd handshake, soft at first, and then a sudden hard squeeze. “And hello to you two,” he said to David and Emma, tousling his hair, chucking her chin. He placed a steadying hand on Grace’s shoulder and touched his lips against her cheek.

  “Oh my, Horse. You’ve gone continental,” Grace said.

  Horse had a hard smile that he flashed like a badge.

  “Nice turnout,” Thaddeus said, looking out at the room.

  “Well, it can get pretty rowdy,” said Horse. “Not so much here, but next door, where the praying gets done. Things can really really get going. Quite a show, for someone like yourself.”

  Himself? Was this some form of Jew-baiting?

  David spied Jewel across the room and hurried toward her, with Emma following desperately behind. Thaddeus was about to stop them, but saw Grace shake her head.

  “Horse tells me you’re in the movies,” one of Horse’s colleagues said to Thaddeus. The middle-aged man’s voice was porous and light. It did not seem really to be his. It was as if his real voice was in the shop and they’d given him a loaner.

  “Guilty as charged.” Thaddeus pointed to the heavyset man’s sweatshirt. “Hey, someone took me to that Giants-Jets game. Fucking great, right? Beat the Giants right there in the Meadowlands? Redeemed the season.”

  “This?” Horse’s friend touched his shirt. “This ain’t even mine. So what movies you been in?”

  “With this face? No, I write. The scripts.” He moved his hand as if composing by pen.

  “Anything I might have seen?”

  “Hostages?” He saw not even the slightest spark of recognition, and added, “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Any others?”

  “Not really. I mean, not yet. I’ve got three, well, actually four things in development. Big maybes. A thing about the bombing of our embassy in Beirut.” He liked to mention that deal; he thought it gave him some heft.

  The guard looked long and searchingly at Thaddeus. Was he wondering if Thaddeus was one to celebrate the slaughter of Marines?

  “My brother tells me you said he couldn’t hunt on your land,” the guard finally said. “He was pretty disappointed.”

  “Who’s your brother?”

  “Glenn Milburn.”

  Thaddeus shrugged.

  “Me, I don’t hunt. I don’t like the taste of deer and I hate being in the woods. I don’t need a bunch of ticks crawling up me. But Glenn’s been hunting your land his whole life.”

  “I actually don’t know your brother. And no one asked me about hunting. Ever. But have him come by. Maybe we can work something out.

  Horse leaned into the conversation. “It was your boy Jennings, he’s the one who told Glenn. He’s the big barking dog at Orkney now.”

  A wave of new arrivals distracted Horse and his friend. Thaddeus made his way to a little schoolhouse table with a few chairs around it. In the center of the table was a large green bowl filled with red-and-yellow candy corn, smelling like sugar and floor wax. Thaddeus sat, pulled out his checkbook, and wrote a check out to cash, and pondered the amount for a few moments. A thousand dollars was ostentatious, a hundred was mean. Five hundred was the easiest path. All right. Five hundred dollars. But maybe to Horse himself? To Horse and Candy? No, to cash, good old cash, as David Mamet wrote, everybody likes money, that’s why it’s called money. Thaddeus tore the check out of its booklet and gave it a couple of ink-drying shakes, a gesture he had learned from his parents, who used to sign their checks with a fountain pen, bringing a sense of solemn ceremony to every transaction. Thaddeus did not even keep a check registry, having long ago decided it would be preferable to run the risk of accidentally overdrawing his account than to go through the tedium of keeping track.

  He was on his way to deliver the check, rehearsing in his mind something to say. Here you go, Horse. Maybe add: I wish it were more. No. Absolutely not. If you wish it were more, then fucking make it more.

  A sudden commotion. Brandon himself was on his way in, parting the crowd. He wore a three-piece suit, powder blue, and novelty sunglasses, with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles perched on the hinges. Frail, his skin the color of the winter sky, his drab brown hair carefully combed, he gripped his mother’s arm and she beamed as she led him in. Candy’
s face was round and ruddy, crowned by springy blond curls. Her blue eyes moved constantly; she was seeing for both of them.

  “Mom?” he piped. “Mom?”

  “We’re here, Brandon,” Candy said. “And a whole bunch of our friends are here, too.” She swooped down to lift him in her arms. The child held his dark glasses in place and composed his face in the most serious manner he could manage. He held up his little hand with its skinny thumb and translucent fingers.

  The newcomers were filing in, streaming past Thaddeus. Grace had been correct; he didn’t recognize these folks. He had been living in Leyden for years, and right now he may as well have wandered into a small town in another state, another country. Precious few had held on to their youthful vitality and good looks; years of hard work had already beaten it out of them. Big hands. Strong backs. Evidence of health problems, a cavalcade of symptoms: swollen joints, burns, scars, one older guy with a glass eye out of The Pennysaver. Here they were, tall and short, thin and portly, a slowly turning wheel of blue eyes, bad teeth, jack-o’-lantern smiles, with their double chins, and triple chins, too, daguerreotype beards, sepia sideburns, and shaved necks, gauzy hairdos and press-on nails, in their pastel suits and prewashed jeans. Thaddeus remained poised, mindful that at any moment someone might say hello to him and he would be called upon to pretend to recognize the person. It was possible that some people here had been on Orkney’s grounds, running a wood chipper, repairing a roof, visiting Jennings and Muriel. Maybe Glenn Milburn was among them.

  It was the last thing in the world he had ever expected to feel. He was afraid of these people. The people. He was afraid of the people.

  Candy carried Brandon to the front of the room, and tried to bring everyone to order, saying, “Friends?”

  At last, Horse shouted out through cupped hands, just one word—Hey. His voice was a cannon that echoed in the room. People turned toward him, sheepish and expectant.

 

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