Men in the Making

by Bruce Machart

  Inside, you're wrapped in a towel on the bed. Two towels. You do that turban thing with one. You're asking, Did she call? Am I okay? I'm nodding and pouring wine and thinking of how my wife used to look after a bath. I'm remembering things you'd want to know—who she was, wet hair falling dark over flushed skin. White towels. The smiles of unwrapping. The faint birthmark high on the back of her thigh I used to kiss.

  Later, you pull me onto the bed and feed me wine. We make hard, roadside love. You put your ear to my chest and listen to what's going on inside. Then you wait in the dark for me to say something, and when I don't, you whisper, "Penny for your thoughts."

  I take a deep breath so you know I've heard. I touch your shoulder and shake my head and I think, No, they're still worth more than that.

  Monuments

  WHEN I WAS ten, after my mother left Dad and me and flew off to Europe, Kevin, the five-year-old next door, got run down in front of our house. He was chasing a cat, and after his body hit the pavement and slid into the grass near the Houston Lighting and Power substation across the road, neighbors say a bearded man in overalls stumbled down from the truck, put a hand on the sideview mirror to keep his balance, and took a leak right there in the street, beer cans falling from the cab to his feet. Later, we heard that Kevin's aorta had burst, that he probably hadn't felt the asphalt peeling his skin or the dark green cool of the grass where he'd come to a crumpled stop.

  I didn't really know Kevin—he was so much younger than I was—but his sister and I were inseparable. Patty was the only kid in the fifth grade who could whip me at air hockey. She'd block my shots easily, humming along with the community center jukebox all the while, pressing her lips into a tight smile while she played, swirling her paddle in slow circles in front of her goal. Luring me off-guard with quick flicks of her tiny wrist, a teasing series of stops and false starts. Then she'd fire, launching a plastic streak of red into my goal so often that I accused her, under my breath, of cheating. Even now I can't honestly say if it was because her game impressed me, or because she sometimes let me cop a feel between her legs, but we acted in those days like conspirators, close and trusting, a little nervous nonetheless.

  This was all in 1979, and Patty's long gone now. Just before junior high, when the bottom fell out of the Houston oil business, her father lost his job at Exxon and moved the family up north. Detroit, I think. After working my way through college, I landed a good job as an outside salesman, driving from one refinery to the next pitching high-dollar hose and couplings to men who wear tool belts and turn wrenches for a living, men like my father. Coming up fast on forty, I'm a long haul from childhood, but still the memories come. Sometimes when I'm on the road making sales calls, I'll find myself at the wheel of my truck, ten miles past my exit on the highway, nothing but steaming asphalt and thoughts of Patty in my wake, thoughts of the girl with sad black eyes and a tiny, upturned nose. The girl who loved me after Mom left.

  ***

  Until that spring, Patty and I had been little more than neighbors, and though we walked together as we made our way to school or past the fire station to the community swimming pool, it was only because our mothers insisted. There was power in numbers, they said. Safety. And one, I'd heard Mom sing sometimes, was the loneliest number. "Besides," she said one morning before school, "little girls can't be walking around all by their lonesome like that. And I imagine you'd feel just awful if something happened to her, wouldn't you?"

  That was it. Like it or not, Patty and I were bound by the buddy system.

  Something changed, though, when Mom split. When Kevin died. Between our walk home from Deer Park Middle School and Dad's return from the afternoon shift at the refinery, Patty and I passed nearly all the twilight hours together in my room or out back in the yard, and in the damp morning we buddied up gladly on the sidewalk in front of her house before heading off to homeroom.

  Of course, at school we acted like boys and girls do at that age, all spit and snarl on the outside, a swirl of curiosity churning away inside. But on the weekends, at night, Patty and I would move from the pallet of quilts Dad laid out on the floor up to my twin bed near the front windows. We pretended we were lost in a soft cave, flashlight beams whirling beneath the sheets. That, or we held each other and laughed, and sometimes, for a moment, with fingers slipped just inside the elastic of each other's pajama bottoms, we'd stop to ask permission with our eyes.

  The first time it happened, Patty's breathing was so hushed and slow that I couldn't tell it from the seashell-sounding hum of trucks on the distant interstate. Our bodies tensed, alive with goose bumps despite the heat, charged with anxious electricity. Beneath my pajamas, Patty's fingers slid down past the swell of my stomach, wiggling playfully above where blood and heat were seized up and knotted together inside me. And then we turned face-to-face—our noses almost touching—and without blinking, without words, we listened to the merging confusion of sounds, to the traffic and heartbeats and the cool push of air conditioning from the overhead vents. Patty's pupils were dark, dilated, and when she looked down they sank like eclipsed moons to the low horizons of her eyes. Then we began, and Patty's fingers twitched, leaving a cool trail as they worked down and over me, tickling in such a wondrous and surprising and beneath-the-skin kind of way that the laughter never came.

  Mostly, though, those nights in my room were spent talking about where we'd go when we were old enough to leave home. We stared out the window to the street and imagined places where there weren't refineries spilling smoke into the sky in such a way that it looked like they were feeding the clouds.

  "I'm going to Looziana," I said one night. "Getting me a Trans-Am with an eagle on the hood. Going and eating gumbo like Aunt Norma makes. Gumbo every day."

  "Been there," she said, pulling the miniblinds aside so that we could sandwich ourselves there between them and the windowpanes, pressing our noses to the steamed glass. "That's same as Texas, but with alligators and swamps."

  "Where, then?" I said.

  "Somewhere nice. Maybe Paris."

  I imagined her sitting in a fancy restaurant, her skinny body stiff with false posture, speaking to another boy in a language I couldn't understand. All that blue water between us.

  "That's where my mom's at," I said.

  We ducked from beneath the blinds, and they slapped like hail against the window. Her eyes dropped to the sheets and she pulled a strand of black hair from her mouth.

  She said, "Sorry," and she touched my leg. "I'm sorry."

  That summer, near my eleventh birthday, we got word from Mom. One word. The morning she'd left, she called it a vacation. "Mama needs this," she'd said, dragging suitcase after suitcase down the front porch steps to the waiting taxi. "She deserves a vacation." Grandpa had died the year before, and I found out later she'd taken the money from his veterinary practice and gone off to cooking school. It was a dream of hers, and the night before she left, before Dad got home from work, she pushed her long red curls up into an enormous chef's hat she'd bought at the mall and pranced around the kitchen, smoothing a starched white apron down over her broad hips. "Tell me," she said. "Tell me, baby. Look at Mama. Don't you think she's too pretty to be stuck in this godawful town? To waste her cooking on a man who drowns his eggs in catsup?" It stung, the way she smiled when she said it, her mouth a sidelong oval of lipstick and satisfaction, like the words tasted sweet and red on her tongue. But even so, despite her smile and the tower of luggage blocking the hallway and the outbursts of ugliness I'd heard from my bed at night, I couldn't have imagined that she was going for good, that she was taking the kind of vacation mothers didn't come home from.

  The day it came, Dad handed me a padded envelope he'd already opened. I remember feeling sorry for the ripped face of some woman on the stamps, remember feeling stupid for feeling sorry. Then I pulled out the card and a small ceramic replica of the Arc de Triomphe. Dad's eyes were on fire, burnt red and wet like he'd gotten a dose of the fertilizer mist while spraying th
e lawn.

  "Keep it in your room," he said, his voice stern, pulled low by the weight of his anger, the same voice he used when he caught me playing with spray paint in the garage. "She sent it for you."

  I remember carrying the thing tight against my chest and setting it on the trophy shelf in my room, tracing my thumb in the fine white network of decorative grooves and ridges. I don't remember, but I'm sure that in my excitement, and at my age, I didn't realize that the gift was also intended as a jab at my father. So many times I'd heard her tell him, the words drifting like heavy smoke under my door and into the bedroom night, "Don't think you're gonna keep me here, mister. Not now, you aren't. Should've gone years ago and that's a fact. Should've gone right off, pregnant and all."

  The accompanying card was small, made from plain white paper, and the message inside was scrawled in pencil. It read, TRIUMPH!!!—just like that, three exclamation points—and I thought it was meant for me.

  One evening late that summer, with the south Texas heat pressed down low by the chemical green sky, Patty and I were walking home from the community swimming pool with beach towels slung like heavy scarves around our necks, flip-flops snapping against our heels. We turned the corner onto our block and stopped to stare at a white cross that stood in the sod between the street and sidewalk in front of the light company. Loose soil was piled at its base so it seemed the thing had grown there in the heat of the afternoon, as if it had taken root and risen fast from the broken earth.

  "What the hell?" I said, testing the feel of my father's words on my lips.

  Patty's eyes were locked on the cross. She pulled the towel from around her neck and pushed it toward me as she started walking.

  "It's a MADD cross," she said without turning back. "It's for Kevin."

  To me, it didn't make sense. A mad cross? I thought, and all I could guess was that Patty's parents had done it, dug the hole and planted it there, some misplaced monument to their anger.

  Patty stopped and turned to me, her dark eyes deep beneath tears, and she must have read the confusion on my face. "It's because he was drunk," she said. "They put them up all over. Mom says when you're drunk, it's never an accident."

  As we stood before it, the cross looked bigger than it had from down the street. The top stood well above our waists. Crying, Patty reached down and touched her brother's name where it was etched into the bronze nameplate. She moved her fingers in the grooves while I stood shivering behind her, the wind licking sweat from my skin.

  The only other time I saw Patty cry, we were playing our game in my bed, our bodies sandwiched between the windowpanes and the miniblinds. It was bright out, a big moon shining somewhere above our line of sight. I'd chosen California that night—I'd seen a surfing show on Wide World of Sports—but the car hadn't changed. I loved those Trans-Ams, that angry, flame-spitting bird.

  "How about you?" I said.

  She said, "There," and I had to ask where before I saw what she meant.

  Her mother, who rarely left the house in those days, was struggling with a plastic bucket, holding on with both hands as she shimmied across the street, water and soap suds splashing her bare feet as she walked.

  "What's she doing?" I said, but Patty touched my shoulder to shush me.

  Setting the bucket in the grass, her mom lifted the hem of her flowered summer dress up over her heavy calves and grimaced under her own weight as she knelt beside the cross. Her hair was silver with moonlight, cropped close but tangled by indifference and the shifting breeze. She sloshed her hands around in the water, wrung an oversized sponge above the bucket, and began to wipe the cross with short, gentle strokes. Working her way to the base, she moved the sponge deliberately back into the bucket, wringing it slowly with both hands. Dabbing the white wood like you would a baby's cheeks after feeding.

  Right then, with my lips on moonlit glass and my hand curved around Patty's waist, I imagined myself stiff and blue-lipped and dead underground, and my mother walking her barefoot way by, averting her eyes from my mud-caked stone and strolling past in a white windswept dress, the hem swirling around her freckled legs, her hair a blaze of sunlit red, her toes curling in the heap of new sod.

  When Patty's mom finished, she struggled to her feet and smoothed the back of her dress with wet hands. She poured the remaining water around the base of the cross, and when she turned back toward the house we ducked from under the blinds. Patty was breathing like she'd just splashed up from under water, and I clicked on my flashlight to see tears sliding down the pale skin of her cheeks. My hands found hers in the tangled sheets, and she gripped me hard.

  "She cleans his room, too," she said. "Every day. Dusts and mops and talks to him like he's sitting right there on the bed watching, and when I'm inside she gets onto me for not helping. Says I ought to lend a hand keeping things straight. Because he's too young, she says. Too young to do it himself."

  This is what comes to me while I'm driving these Houston highways, what I imagine here in the haze of refinery smoke, what I hear beneath the hot hum of rubber rolling on asphalt. One moment I'm accelerating over the ship channel bridge, the next Patty's there in my room and I'm climbing from the bed, taking the little Arc de Triomphe from its shelf. And when I lay it in Patty's hands, she pulls it up against her chest.

  "We'll go to Paris," I say, my palms against her cheeks. "We'll be fine." I don't believe it, but that's what I say, because it's the kind of hopeful untruth that means you're still breathing, still above ground, still alive enough to lie.

  She nods, and we hold on to each other in a way that, looking back, seems a peculiar act for children. We stay like that, wrapped around each other, until the air conditioning snaps on in the attic and the sudden rush of air sweeps the last of our words from the room. Patty's hair smells clean—shampoo with a hint of apples—and I bring her in close so I can feel the dense beginnings of her breasts against my chest, and then I let go. With the moon out, the miniblinds carve us into slivers of light and shadow, and I feel the way it looks, like my body is ribboned with alternating bands of warmth and cold. And later, when her fingers slide beneath the waistband of my pajamas, my insides cinch tight, and I listen as she begins breathing in that quiet, familiar way. I work my hands down through the tangle of sheets and onto her skin. And when I lean forward, touching her nose with mine, I look up to find her eyes wide, two sad shadows, urging me on.

  Among the Living Amidst the Trees

  —FOR LEE K. ABBOTT

  HALF PAST QUITTING time on Friday, a day we began by liquefying a family of possums in the debarker, and Garrett and me are driving the drive we drive five times a week. Route 96, from the paper mill in Silsbee, where we turn logs into loose-leaf, to Jasper, where we head home to shake the bark dust from our jeans and blow it from our noses and wash it from our hair before we take our women out for dancing and beer. Friday evening in the full steamy blaze of East Texas summer, and someone's gone and let those little lovebugs out from wherever it is they keep them holed up the rest of the year. Garrett's drinking a tallboy, working a toothpick around in his mouth and cursing the black mash of bug guts on his Silverado's windshield. He's scratching his wiry red sideburns like they're overrun with mites, glazing and smearing the front glass over again and again with the wiper-washers. "These sumbitches is freaks of nature," he says. "Fucking and flying what all at the same time."

  "And dying," I say. Straight forward through the windshield I can't see a thing, not a bit of the road, but on either side the forest is wet and green and rustling with breeze. Garrett's leaning his head out the window now and then to get a better look at the road, cursing when he catches a bug in his teeth. I'm staring straight ahead into the aftermath of a bug orgy gone bad, and the whole time there's green streaking by in the corner of my eye—the trees, the undergrowth, a whole forest full of little live things waking up for the nightlife.

  "Yessir," Garrett says. "Dying in mid-lay. Sounds good until you figure they probably don't even get their rocks of
f. They're probably just thinking those hold-on thoughts, you know, imagining about nuns or unpaid bills or a car crash, and then—Smack! Windshield. The great hereafter and beyond. All that shit."

  "You think bugs even got rocks to get off?" I say.

  Garrett takes his foot off the gas and shoots me a look like maybe I've slid over next to him on the bench seat and asked could I hold him awhile, then something outside catches his eye. "Well, whatever in blazing hell is wrong with the critters around here today?" he says, kicking hard on the brakes and sliding the truck to a stop on the gravel shoulder. "Possums all ground up like chili first thing in the morning. Fuck bugs. And now lookit," he says, tossing his empty back into the truck bed. "Lookit here at these dogs doing it human style."

  And there they are, sure enough having canine relations right down in the ditch next to a rusty corrugated culvert, the one on top some sort of hound mix—part beagle, part blue tick, maybe—and so in need of a meal that from up on the highway he looks to be all rump and rib cage. His little bitch, she's missing an ear, and he's got her pinned down tight, her back against the far bank of the weed-choked ditch. The old boy, he's going at it in that churning-butter, dog-lay way. Even so, I can't help thinking there's a twinkle of something tender about these two, the way her front paws are wrapped up around the scruff of his collarless neck, the way he's intent on licking where her ear used to be all the while he has his way with her. And his way is a strange way, after all, for a dog. "They're doing it missionary," I say, and it seems silly to admit, but the whole thing slicks my guts with a kind of greasy, nervous guilt, the likes of which I haven't felt since my wife caught me playing my own fiddle in the shower one time last year. "Let's go," I say. "Give the old boy some privacy."