by Sands Hall
The coffee was undrinkable. He threw it out, restuffed his bag, kicked dirt over the fire, assembled his pack. He’d arranged to stay away from work for two days and nights, but found himself in a tremendous hurry to leave. A number of times, headed back down the trail, he found his mouth twisted into an involuntary grimace, as if he’d smelled something bad. That his face kept adapting of its own accord to this sorrowful, dissatisfied scowl made him realize that he was sorrowful, he was dissatisfied. What had he expected? Revelation? Enlightenment beneath the Piney Tree? Moses on Fable Mountain, arms full of inscribed stone tablets?
He stumbled over a root. His momentum down the path almost catapulted him into the air. One hand scraped along the ground as he struggled to get his feet beneath him.
He stood, breathing hard. Listened to his heart sending the baggage carousel of blood around his veins. Noticed, shocked, that the colorful trees of yesterday were stripped bare. The night’s wind had left only an occasional yellow leaf clinging to a branch. All around him was a kind of devastation. He supposed he was lucky it had not been a snowstorm.
Hand to his chest, he felt his heart thump against the skin that covered it. He’d believed Lizzie would not do it. Wanted to believe she had not? Surely there was some trick involved. Underneath her actions there must—mustn’t there?—persist a desire to keep him a part of her life. He’d been sending money once a month for a year now, one of the reasons for this “real job” he’d taken. Each month Lizzie returned the check. He deposited the money. Theo’s account. But it wasn’t enough. Theo would grow up—was growing up!—without him. Whether or not he agreed with its processes, life kept on in its inexorable sweep. The Mississippi in full flood.
You can’t step into the same river twice, bud, Minerva had told him.
They’d been separating their possessions, and, holding a footstool they’d bought together against his chest, he’d harshly, unexpectedly, begun to weep. He knew the answer but he asked anyway. Did they really need to get a divorce? She held him against her ample breasts, always such a surprise on that skinny, bony body, and rocked him, silver bracelets clinking. “You can’t step in the same river twice.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he’d said. Snot ran backwards down his throat. “It’s never made any sense.”
“There’s nothing we can hold on to, love,” she said. “Especially if we try. Whoops.” She moved a hand as if to grab after something. “There it goes.”
The water goes on rolling
he wrote into a song not long after.
Down down down.
The river goes on flowing
We can’t step in it twice
Standing on the slope of Fable Mountain, hands on his knees, Jake argued with Minerva. You could step into the river again and see what happened, he told her. You could step into the river knowing it was a different place! He saw her slit her eyes at him. Maybe, she said, as long as you don’t need things to be the way they were before. As long as you’re willing to let the river do its thing.
He imagined plastic dolls and an empty gallon bleach bottle, submerged houses with A-frame peaks and a rooster on top, and him swimming after. Swallowing muddy roiling water, one hand held up hailing whoever it was he thought would let him undo the terrible, irreversible damage he had done.
He walked the rest of the way down the mountain, feet treading heavily on the gold and silver coins of aspen and maple. All the leaves would fall, the rain would spot them brown. They would deteriorate and disappear.
He heaved his pack into the back seat of the Volvo. There was more to the metaphor, of course. They would fold themselves into the earth, compost or evaporate, become dust, ground, rain, roots, air, they would return in some form. Would love, too, come round again?
Rolling, rolling rolling
he mourned tunefully as he drove down Fable Pass, hunched over the steering wheel, bulky and baffled.
The river goes on flowing
And you can’t step in it twice
Then he tried—it took some rhythmic shifts to get the second line to scan inside the tune—
The river goes on rolling
Can you step into it twice?
CHAPTER 17
LIZZIE
NOTES FROM BENEATH THE MAGNETS ON LIZZIE’S FRIDGE
Lizzie—
Was reading my Electric Code book and found this—thot of you. Gosh.
Wonder why.
Most modern switchboards are totally enclosed to reduce to a minimum the probability of communicating fire to adjacent combustible materials and to guard live parts.
See ya around—
SPARKY
Lizzie had never run a phone jack out to her studio, preferring to believe that her time there was inviolable. Nevertheless, she dragged the old dial phone, with its long black cord, out to the steps of the main house, where she could answer it if she wanted to. And which, though she pretended otherwise, she always did.
The girls were at school. Theo was down for a nap. She lit a fire in the woodstove and got to work, taking pleasure in the silence, the image she could see forming on the canvas, even the too-cold tubes of paint. As she squeezed a worm of rose madder onto the plate she used as palette, the jingle of the phone made her pause. Brush in one hand, rag in the other, she trotted across the gravel driveway and snatched up the phone on its seventh ring. “Hello?”
There was a long pause. Then, “Hello, Liz.”
The smell of turpentine wafted up to her from the brush she held in her hand. She heard in the far distance the buzz of a chain saw, or perhaps someone riding the low, fall-barren hills on a motorcycle.
“Jake,” she said. His name, a single syllable in any case, emerged harsh and flat. Lizzie thought, with some triumph, that there was no welcome in it.
“Look. I’ve been thinking.” Jake paused between almost every pair of words. “About a lot of stuff. Theo. And you. I’m— Could I just come over? Talk, maybe?”
“No. I don’t think so.” Her voice said this. She heard it from a distance. “No, I think not,” she said again, and sat on one of the wooden steps. She zipped her down vest up to her chin and stared at Sam’s truck, parked across the driveway. In the fields that surrounded her house, tall weeds rustled, emphasizing the silence at the other end of the line. She should just hang up, she told herself.
“I’m terribly sorry, Liz. Does it help at all that I’m terribly sorry? That I want to talk about it? Do something about it?”
“Not particularly.” She wondered if he was in the bedroom. Or the kitchen, leaning against the refrigerator. But it would be neither. Since going to and returning from Nashville he’d secured a different place to live. She no longer knew the rooms he occupied. “I’m going to hang up now,” she said. “Bye.”
The phone’s sullen black shape stayed resolutely silent.
She headed back to the studio. After the chill outside it was suddenly too hot. She tossed her down vest into a corner and slid onto the stool in front of her canvas, hooking her toes over a rung. Having given up, at least for a while, on what she mockingly called to herself her Southwestern Mona Lisa, she was working on what until a few days ago had been Untitled. Maud had taken one look and said, “Ophelia!” Having been reminded of the story, Lizzie found herself liking the title. A gauzy blue gown, infiltrated with the image of a kachina, was supposed to melt into, become, the water in which a woman was lying. But right now the bleed looked like an amateurish mess. The cloud of pale green hair, supporting cacti, a tumbleweed, a mass of geraniums, looked crude, not delicate and magical as she’d intended. She squeezed some umber next to the rose madder, daubed these two colors together with the tip of a brush.
A knock startled her. Sam stood in the open doorway. His hair, usually a neat plait down his back, hung loose. He was panting, his cheeks a terrible shade of fake-cherry red. The stool scraped as she stood up. “Sam!”
“I heard the phone. Wasn’t for me?”
“What’s wrong?�
�
Sam turned away, his lower lip thrust out, as it was when he was hammering, sawing, laying stonework. “Nothing.” His face looked blotchy, wrinkled, awful. “You paint, now.”
Lizzie put a hand out, but he waved it rudely away. Sam, who was never rude. He stumbled back outside, his shoulder banging once, painfully hard, against the door. He pulled it shut behind him.
“Sam!” She yanked the door open, ran to catch up.
He was breathing heavily, wild-eyed, but his mouth was not sagging to one side. “I shouldn’t disturb you. I can’t find Luna.” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his overalls, took them out, looked at them. “I can’t find her. I’ve called, searched everywhere. I’ve called—” He passed the cuff of his shirt across his eyes. His skin looked gray, the lines in his face cavernous.
Lizzie put a hand on his arm. He took a step away, shaking his head. “She’s crept off to die, maybe. They do that, when it’s time. I’ve been thinking it was her time, hoping, just not yet.”
Lizzie climbed beside him towards his caboose. His eyes were red, the tip of his nose red. He stopped, panting. “I just thought—Someone calling because they found her, read her collar.” He waved an aimless hand. “You’ll let me know.”
“Of course.”
He peered at her, wild hair, wild eyes, through the wire mesh of the screen door. “Go paint.”
“Sam,” she said. “Let me fix you some tea.”
He shook his head, pushed the door closed.
A cold wind tugged at her hair. She whistled and called for Luna, hanging on the u as Summer did.
One of the nights, that first winter when Sam slept over now and again, he hadn’t been able to get an erection. “Lizzie, I need some help here,” he’d said. She hadn’t known what he meant until he guided her hand to his limp penis, his balls soft as kittens. Sam was then well into his fifties, a handsome man, grizzled yet fit, by far the oldest lover she’d ever had. She’d encountered this failing of male sex again, more often as she and her lovers grew older, but at the time it had shocked her. Not so much the guiding of her hand, which other lovers had done, but the admission of need, the sweet request. I need some help here.
The wind buffeted her as she held her knuckles poised in front of his door. What must Sam be going through, sitting alone inside the dark musky trailer, without his Luna?
But he’d closed the door firmly. She had learned these were times when he would not be disturbed. She stood, irresolute, and then, holding her mind away from her motives, ran back down the hill, picked up the phone where it sat on the top step, and dialed.
“How’d you manage to keep the same phone number?” she said when Jake answered.
A pause, then, “They hadn’t given it away. A year and a half, and it was still available. I asked for it back.”
“Come now, before I change my mind.”
“I’ll be there.”
Lizzie carried the phone inside and set it on the counter. She felt beneath her breastbone with her fingers. Her heart pounded, she was breathless, and it wasn’t just the run down the hill. It was Jake’s “I’ll be there.” That certain, infallible tone reminded her that she had allowed herself to depend on him as she never had on Blair, and certainly not on Sparky.
It was Sparky who’d pointed out this—failing? attribute?—to her. During one of their final fights he’d shouted, “You’re a fucking control freak.” He’d been rubbing his fingers over his head, over and over, so his hair stood up all over his scalp. “You have to be in charge. You have to call the shots. ‘I’ll take care of it, I’ll take care of it,’ ” he mimicked. His stubby hands, permanently stained with grease and oil, stabbed the air. “But no one better offer to take the slightest care of you. Oh no, it might leave you vulnerable, it might leave you indebted and then where would you be? You and your huge fucking ego. Noooo, that might mean you were just an average, normal person who maybe loves someone. Who maybe, once in her goddamned life, might let herself be loved.”
Her answer had been to tell him to get his fucking car parts out of her driveway.
She got up and slammed shut an open cupboard door. She called for Luna off the back porch, off the front. She started up the hill to Sam’s, carrying cheese and crackers, but came back down. The trailer had a force field around it she didn’t know how to penetrate. She rinsed a plate, a bowl, picked up a few of the toys that littered the floor. She detoured herself away from the mirror in the bathroom, although she was tempted to rouse Theo so that she could be sporting him on one hip in the kitchen when Jake arrived. Stirring a quickly thrown-together pot of stew, just to complete the picture.
Having thought of and rejected these ideas, she realized anything she might do would feel like acting, and she was not the actor in the family. She retrieved her down vest from the studio and sat on the house steps, hugging herself against the wind, until Jake’s Volvo appeared at the end of the long, unpaved road.
He pulled up, nodded to her out the window. She was glad his face was in shadow, that she couldn’t see his eyes. He turned the car off. They stared at each other across the gravel drive, laid since he’d last been to the house. She scratched at a splotch of bleach on her jeans.
“You’re looking good,” Jake said. He tried the door and swore, then looked at her, as if he expected some response. Lizzie had to squint to keep from smiling, watching him climb across the passenger seat and out the other side.
He had showered recently, his hair was wet. He wore jeans, a deep blue shirt, his leather jacket. As he walked closer she folded her arms across her chest. “At least it doesn’t screech anymore,” she said.
“What?”
“The door,” she said. “It always screeched.”
“Yes.” He stopped at the foot of the stairs. “It doesn’t screech. But it doesn’t open either.” He tried a smile.
Lizzie swiped her hand in front of her face as if a fly were hovering there, although there wasn’t one.
Jake’s face looked pale and his eyes tight, drawn in. “Lizzie.” He sounded as if he was pleading with her.
She waved again at the nonexistent fly, avoiding his eyes. “Luna’s lost,” she said. “Or dead.” Horrified to find tears in her eyes, in her voice, she stood and headed up the stairs. “Want a beer?”
“What’s this about Luna?” He followed her.
“What I told you. I don’t know more than that.”
“Sam knows?”
“He’s the one told me.” Again the tears swelled in her throat. She pulled two beers from the fridge and jerked their caps against the bottle opener fastened next to the stove.
Jake was taking in the potbellied stove and the flagstone floor. “Looks different around here. Nice.”
“Thanks to Southwest Ink.”
“You’re making a living as an artist, Liz. Good for you.”
“Although that’s not really art, is it?”
Jake shook his head at her. “Don’t do that with me. That’s crap.” He stepped carefully, avoiding scattered toys on the floor, and examined the dozens of photographs tacked to the wall beside the kitchen table. She was aware that he would be looking for two things—pictures of Theo, and pictures of the companions who would have replaced Jake in these past two years. She sliced a lime, pressed a wedge into each beer, and walked over to stand beside him. With the top of the long-necked bottle she pointed to one of the photographs. “Theo,” she said.
He peered at the three-inch-square of glossy color.
Lizzie didn’t want to tell him, he has your hair, he has your eyes. She probed at his upper arm with a beer bottle. “He’s not awake yet.”
“Napping.” Jake nodded as he said this, as if napping described a complicated passage of childhood, something about which he could say a great deal, if asked. He took the beer, looking dazed. Lizzie led him out to the back porch, where the eaves would protect them from the wind. She did not know why she didn’t want to sit with him in the kitchen, in the living room, in the
den. They settled into the heavy wrought-iron chairs that Blair, lucky enough to be independently wealthy, had made during his welding period, which had preceded his jewelry business, which had been followed by his decision to move to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting, and from which locale he generously contributed to Hannah’s, and the household’s, well-being.
Jake squeezed the lime into the neck of the bottle, then sucked on the rind, making a little green grin in front of his teeth. He removed it when Lizzie did not smile, and tossed it into the bushes beside the porch. His forehead gleamed with sweat, though he sat hunched in his jacket as if he were cold. Lizzie found herself with a weird, mean smile on her face. She hadn’t known that making him feel uncomfortable might make her feel so good. She clasped her hands around her knees, drawing her legs up close to her body.
Jake leaned forward. “Is there something we can do?”
“Whoa! You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”
Jake stared at her, puzzled. Then his face cleared. “I mean about Luna.”
Lizzie swigged some beer.
“Should we drive around, look for her?”
“Sam said he’d looked everywhere.” Lizzie hugged her knees, hard. At this moment she didn’t like herself at all.
“Liz,” Jake said.
“It’s Lizzie. Lizzie Lizzie.”
“You’re not making this so easy.”
“Why the fuck should I?” Her face felt hot. They stared at each other and then across the field around the house. The grasses shifted color, the afternoon wind like a hand running against, and then with, the nap of their high yellow velvet. The buzzing sound floated towards them, louder and then soft. Under that came the rattle of dry stalks of tall grass.
“Goddamn dirt bikes,” he said. “Wrecking the hills.”