by Kirby Gann
“I really appreciate you letting me come here,” the boy said. “If Shady comes through I’ll be out of your hair before the day’s out.”
“What are you going to do?”
The boy said he didn’t know, but he expected to do it very far away from here.
“Stay as long as you want,” Ponder said, once assured his guest would not be with him long.
After his shower he accepted the clean shirt Ponder offered, a twill button-down that fell nearly to the boy’s thighs, the sleeves running past his hands; he was too small for Ponder to offer trousers, so he got back into the jeans that appeared to have been lived and sweated in for days. He tried to hold a conversation for some time but the struggle was obvious and Ponder told him to sleep. He said he had errands to do, a meeting he couldn’t miss. Not quite a lie. Ponder asked if anyone besides Shady knew where he was, and the boy shook his head.
He crashed on the guest bed, his bare feet still on the floor. He hardly stirred when Ponder bent to move him fully onto the mattress and then covered him with a sheet. In sleep the boy’s eyebrows arched and settled, arched and settled, as though he were dreaming questions for which he awaited answer.
After this point Ponder’s own behavior mystifies him. He half-shut the bedroom door and took the van’s keys and left for the garage. He located the van, opened the rear doors, found the church’s soccer equipment and rows of boxes stacked underneath. He shoved the balls out of the way and used the teeth of his door key to slice the packing tape of one box, and he was neither surprised or moved by what he discovered there.
Quickly he counted the number of boxes he could see, made rough calculations in his head. When he came up with the number, he whistled in disbelief. Once there was a time when such a find would have meant the world; now his concerns were of a much larger, sweeping view. Still, the boxes and the boy could make a world of difference—not to Ponder, who told himself he wanted only to do good, but to Christ World Emergent, to his ministry. There were things much larger and more important at stake here than Gil Ponder.
He drove to a public phone despite having a cell at the ready in his suit pocket. He dug in his wallet to find the folded note and the number there that Greuel had given him the last time Ponder visited. He sat with himself for long minutes, impassive in the comfort of his leather seat, warmed by the growing summer heat as it began to bake through the windows, waiting silently for a line of verse or that familiar still voice to persuade him one way or the other. A line from Timothy came: Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. It was a truth he understood, one he went to often, but of no help now and hardly even relevant. He pictured the boy exhausted in his guest bed. Ponder’s mind then revealed a dose of Deuteronomy: Because you did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and gladly . . . therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire poverty, you will serve the enemies the Lord sends against you.
Deuteronomy was tough. No doubt about that. There the Lord showed where the rubber met the road. He dialed the number through his open window and was surprised to have the voice on the other end of the line before the second ring. Ponder examined his watch.
“It’s eight-oh-four in the a.m.,” he said. “Do you know where your run is?”
It pleased Ponder greatly, the length of the hesitation before Arley Noe spoke. He imagined him sitting in a furious stew, staring at the phone with those flat unwavering eyes, and the image filled Ponder with a great swell of confidence, an enormous sense of well-being and peace mirrored by the sublime sunlight rising above the gas station and saturating his face, blinding his eyes. “I can help you find something you’ve lost or I can make certain it’s lost forever. Totally up to you.”
The demonic holds dominion over this world, Luke wrote. A man has to work within those confines to effect any change or progression toward the better. What he wanted to tell Arley Noe was that it was unfruitful to mess in the service of the Lord and Holy Spirit, that God in His grace looked after his own. But the meaning and power of such words would be lost on Arley Noe; he would grasp only the immediate situation, balancing his need against what Ponder held.
They negotiated. No more use of church vans for running dope. Nothing but honest financial debt between CWE and the holding company Greuel had set up before he died. Finally, he demanded Noe’s word that he wouldn’t hurt the boy, or else the world would know it all, straight from Ponder himself. You have to give me your word, he insisted.
“I will not touch the kid,” Noe said. It took time, long enough that he had to add coins to the payphone—Ponder understood the idea of renegotiation was foreign and not easy for Noe to engage in—yet he was equally surprised by how quickly the man agreed to his terms. “He isn’t going to be around Pirtle County anymore, though,” Arley said. “We can’t have that.”
It was the best settlement Ponder could arrange. He gave the information and hung up, and then waited with a gas-station cappuccino in his building’s garage while he played tricks in his mind to force away doubt. He hadn’t drunk half the cup before he recognized the man they called Mule driving a small Toyota truck, his body so large it took up half the windshield. Ponder followed the truck as it wound through the garage from floor to floor until it located and parked beside the CWE van. He watched the big man work his way out of the driver’s seat, wondering why such a large person would drive such a small truck, thinking to himself that these guys, tough as they liked to act, used not half the sense their mothers gave them.
He did not wait around for more; he did not want to see. He left as Mule brought out a toolbox in the truck bed—probably wanting to appear to any onlookers that he was there merely to work on somebody’s condo. Ponder spent the day distracted at the few meetings he made, the prayer luncheon, anxious at what he would find at his home, what he would say to Shady Beck, a member of his congregation, when she arrived later with the boy’s things.
In the end the story he told was false in only small parts. He returned home to find the van gone, his furniture straight, his kitchen gleaming and clean with a new faintly orange-scented cleaning solution. There were no signs of struggle; the boy must have been surprised and gone willingly. Even the guest bed had been made. When Shady showed up with a duffel bag and a back seat brimming with scuba gear, Ponder told her the boy had moved on after a shower and a long nap, telling Ponder that he didn’t feel he could waste any more time. When she asked why he would leave without clothes or his truck or the gear, Ponder could only shrug.
“But I didn’t even get to say goodbye,” she said. For a moment he thought she might burst into tears, or screech that he was a liar, a murderer, or threaten to call the police—and yet it did not surprise him when she did none of these things; she was a strong young woman, with a good head on her shoulders. “He must have been pretty desperate,” she said. Ponder agreed that this had been his impression. It comforted him somewhat to note this part of his story was true.
1998
Summer again and hot as you please and there is no wind on afternoons in July. Like the wind just got burned out of the sky. You keep thinking the wind is going to come, the air turns so weighted, humid, you’d swear there’s a fog over everything, molecules of visible moisture reflecting the sun’s light in fluid floating diamonds, and you think any time now a storm will come to renew the earth; the weatherman says tonight’s the night, we’re due a big howler, there’s one on the way and better make sure you’re up on candles and batteries. Not in July. The storms clear out the valley in May, and June, and August, but in July it’s like an enormous glass bell has been placed over the county and nothing can cloud the sun or budge the motionless air, you can feel it press on your skin and sour in your clothes.
Unlike her mother, who retreats deep into their cavernous home and explores the pleasures to be found in a tumbler, Shady loves this time of year. She loves the full-bore Kentucky heat and when she does not have to be anywhere looking proper she doesn
’t bother with her car’s air-conditioning, she just rolls down all the windows and lets her hair rip, the wilder strands sticking to her sweaty face as she sings along with the radio. She keeps a large-toothed brush and a spray bottle of water to make herself halfway presentable again, wetting down the mess and combing it back into her signature pony—but there’s no point in the effort today. She has all the water she needs waiting for her, all she has to do is dive right in.
The place looks a whole lot different in daylight. A better vibe, peaceable, everything painted in pastels. No chugging generators or buzzing walkie-talkie radios or visible shotguns.
She’s the first to arrive, it’s not yet two o’clock, and she feels a touch wary at how cold the quarry water might be despite the long weeks of hot days and no rain. She hauls the gear out of her trunk, one of the few students to have already bought most of the necessities rather than renting them from the shop, carrying the large duffel containing her fins, snorkel and mask, the weight belt and buoyancy compensator that were once Cole’s, down to a spot of cut stone near the shore. The car door’s open with the radio on—it’s not turned up loud enough to be called obnoxious but in the cove-like shape of the quarry the music pings back off the limestone shelves in a queer echo and seems to assault what would otherwise be perfect silence. When she retrieves the air tank and slams the trunk, it sounds like successive claps from three directions.
She turns off the radio and shuts her door with more care, the quiet draping the day like a shroud. Not even the trill of birds or the lap of water; the light green surface as she looks over it appears solid as glass. She throws her keys onto the duffel bag and strips to her swimsuit and dumps her clothes in a pile, kicking off her flip-flops as she trots to the water’s edge. It’s warm on her toes, but then the water is shallow there, barely to her ankles. Shady’s ready to swim. She’s supposed to wait for the instructor and the rest of the class but she just wants to go for a swim. Dr. Beck had made it a point of pride that each of his daughters were strong swimmers from childhood.
The road that once guided trucks hauling stone from the bottom is ground smooth as sand and disappears into the lake. Shady skips out on the steep grade, diving once the water crashes into her thighs. Her eyes close as she’s engulfed in the sultry mix of warmth and cold, exultant in the clamor of water as it fans and then slicks her thick hair down her back on the currents of her momentum, bubbles of air rolling the length of her body, nearly kneading her skin, one of her favorite sensations in the world. She doesn’t open her eyes until she surfaces, turns her head for breath, and then begins a languorous crawl, the entirety of her vision beneath the water encompassed by a lime green made ecstatic by the ruthless sun, the heat of which still roasts her exposed skin. She swims some 300 meters to the far side without thought, immersed in the pure physical effort of her body, her ears getting nothing but the noise of her churning limbs and the air bulling out her nose and mouth. Which is more difficult: to think or not to think? She’s found the only time her mind empties completely is during physical exercise. When she pushes off the stone wall again she turns into the backstroke, eyes agaze on the gradations of blue and white in the cloudless continuum of summer sky that posts no markers. A falcon, or hawk, rides the thermal currents up there; a pleasing silty smell in the water flushes her face and feels extra clean, almost like soap. She swims on her back until the bird passes from sight. A few further strokes and it starts to feel like she’s been swimming a long time, and she starts to wonder how far she has gone, begins to doubt she’s traveling in a straight line and has fallen into some pointless zigzag pattern—for a moment she likes the strange lost sensation this doubt brings, and then she doesn’t like it and turns over.
She’s been on a long diagonal headed away from the drop road where she dove in. Her instructor Theo stands ankle-deep there with hands on hips giving her the affectless sunglassed stare of a lifeguard. The rest of her class has arrived as well, spilling from their vehicles, the men pulling equipment out of Theo’s truck while the women wait and chat and look around. From Shady’s position in the water their voices sound both near behind and far before her. She waves hello to Theo; he keeps his hands on his hips, jerks his fine chin in return. Shady titters and then starts a crawl in earnest, meticulous with her form since she is being watched, she doesn’t know why she should care what any of them think of her freestyle swimming ability but there she goes just the same, she wants anyone who sees to know Shady Beck can swim really well.
“You got here early,” Theo says, unflinching as she smacks a bit of spray at him.
“I did,” she says. She rises fully out of the water and snaps her thumbs beneath her suit to pop the Lycra from where it has sucked up onto her breasts. Theo turns to the others; he has that kind of husky voice that makes her think of football coaches who yell so much they’ve ground their throats to sandpaper.
“It doesn’t matter how good of a swimmer you are, people, if you’ve learned one thing this week I hope it’s to never swim alone,” he announces for the benefit of all. Then, to Shady as she opens her bag: “What if you’d cramped out there? You’re alone, the water’s cold. . . .”
“Theo, please. At my age, fit as I am, if I’d’ve cramped up out there then I was supposed to die.”
She’s pleased the comment garners smiles from the students close enough to hear; they’re all either slipping on wetsuits or getting tanks filled. Theo’s only being half-serious anyway, one of the reasons he makes a good instructor is that he isn’t a fascist about rules for rules’ sake. Besides that he wants to sleep with her and Shady is pretty sure she’s going to let him, maybe even tonight after the cookout to follow the day’s final open-water certification dives. She’s up for a summer fling; she’s moving on soon.
Med school did not pan out. She finished the first semester and made it through half of the second before deciding to take a bow. It wasn’t the difficulty of the courses that discouraged her. Biochem, Histology, General Anatomy—the demands were fine (she likes studying). Basic Doctoring 1 raised the initial red flag. Over the past year she had learned something about herself (it seemed she was learning about herself all the time, like she was on some kind of three-month cycle of self-enlightenment, every ninety days or so came a series of revelations she couldn’t avoid if she were to remain truthful to herself, a phenomenon she figured was probably normal for everyone in their early twenties; yet in Shady it felt accentuated, she suspected the cycles were especially pronounced in her for some reason—her father and oldest sister agreed, though this hardly helped; she thinks despite all her gestures at living widely and open and willing to experience life outside her given social circle as a successful doctor’s youngest daughter, that somehow in spite of such willfulness she had lived a kind of naïve and sheltered existence so far). Okay—Shady likes people, she likes helping people in need, but what she learned last fall was that she did not like to examine the bodies of random strangers, especially strangers in pain or suffering from sickness. And these people weren’t even the real thing, they were acting out symptoms for the first-years’ benefit. The result being another recall to the drawing board, another reassessment of the blueprints for the ongoing project of being Shady Elizabeth Beck.
Cole had disappeared on her as peremptorily and conclusively as his brother had disappeared on everyone before. She had arrived at Ponder’s condo on time, as agreed, and found him gone forever—leaving her with an Audi cabriolet full of diving gear she’d believed he would never leave behind; equipment he needed. Lyda said she didn’t want any of that stuff around if Cole wasn’t there for her to bitch about it being in her way. The problem with being sober, Lyda had told her later (Shady had tried again to return Cole’s belongings over the holiday break), was that it allowed you plenty of time to feel the sadness you were putting off by getting high. I’m supposed to be making amends to people who aren’t here for me to make amends to, Lyda said. I don’t need more reminders telling me my boy isn’t h
ere.
Shady had piled all the gear into the bedroom closet in her apartment, thinking vaguely that if he did ever come back he would want these things. It wasn’t too much in the way but there was enough stuff still to be a constant presence each time she slid back the two folding doors to debate what to wear. For a while school kept her too busy for the gear to be anything other than a nuisance. Then it became a conversation piece, her roommate bringing up the mystery of Shady’s stowed scuba equipment among fellow white-coats in the cafeteria, apropos of nothing, Shady’s roommate being the type who didn’t shy from borrowing clothes without asking. By semester’s end, the tank especially—its chipped and dinged red paint revealing the chrome beneath, suggesting one-time heavy use in a sea somewhere—had subtly turned into a kind of lure, a signal she felt forced to decipher, an invitation to adventure and a freedom she wasn’t getting from textbooks and lab appointments and brutal exams and running about with a stethoscope in her pocket.
Shady on her own, not feeling particularly happy; a rare snow day in winter, two inches of ice on the roads: she began to consider the confining nature of medicine, as opposed to the wider peripheries inherent to oceanography, marine biology—something down south directly on or at least very close to the beach.
At school, from time to time, she still got high alone. Less often than as an undergrad; too much studying to be done. And never again did the fabric of the moment break apart and display for her the secret workings of the world. Still, on nights when her roommate slept over at her boyfriend’s place, or was hitting the books with the group at the library until closing (Shady preferred to study at home on her own bed, in solitude, testing herself on flashcards of her own devising), she would open a window and smoke a bowl. Her routines had lost the feel of ritual there, they felt different in the heart of the city where you could never escape the feeling of enclosure, of being corralled. In her apartment the routines slanted more often to melancholy, Shady a ship heeling leeward, hollowed out by an absence she had not felt or recognized before. Sometimes to alleviate the symptoms she would carry out Cole’s things and arrange them as best she could into a human form on her floor. Two fins, a weight belt, the tank and regulator and buoyancy compensator (she didn’t know what it was called yet then), the hood and mask and snorkel. Gloves made of some material like mesh and neoprene simultaneously that she set at either side of the tank. Set out like that, the empty gear felt as a kind of connection to a dream of a friend she once had, or believed she’d had, a boy she had once liked without ever feeling certain exactly of how or why. Which was strange and uncharacteristic of her.... She would stare at these assorted objects, stoned, and wonder what had become of the person who was supposed to use them. She would wonder and come up with extravagant fantasies for his fate, futures entirely opposite of what Arley Noe or Grady Creed could do had Brother Ponder not helped him escape: Cole making a killing on the coast somewhere with all that weed, he fitted himself with the latest equipment you could buy and was on his way underneath the ocean seeing every day a different world from the one he’d seen the day before. That’s how she liked to imagine the ocean: protean, under perpetual transformation, the landscape and creatures living there changing almost perceptibly by the hour.