Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  “Hey!” he cried, and started up the embankment. Rocks and dirt slid away underfoot. He paused, used her hat to swat stickers off the bottom of one foot. She revved the engine. He looked up.

  “Tell me something,” she said. “You really think you’re so much smarter than Libby?” Without waiting for an answer, she hit the gas, and took off.

  HE BECAME a connoisseur of orchard floors: some, mulched with shredded prunings, were a pithy mat; others, pink clay imbedded with sharp granite shards; the best were recently irrigated, the moistened adobe plumped up, softened, astringent and cool on his burning feet.

  Although he didn’t know where the highway was, he couldn’t get too lost. The valley floor slanted south, toward the river. If he kept walking he’d come to a road. He needed another cigarette, but his last two matches went out before he got it lit. Instead, he contemplated a month spent pulling an encyclopedia of burrs, stickers, and splinters from the bottoms of his feet. Eventually, at dusk, he came to the lake road—the oiled asphalt warm and silken underfoot. He stuck out his thumb and wasn’t surprised when the few cars sped past. After all, he was filthy, barefoot, and his hair, full of debris, stuck out in every direction. He looked precisely like something risen from the orchard floor.

  He started down the road to Round Rock in deepening blue twilight, up and down a series of shallow dips. He heard a truck grinding closer; then the beams of its headlights crisscrossed above his head. Coming over the hill, he saw not only the truck but a whole house moving toward him. Clapboard siding, windows shuttered with plywood. He recognized it, of course: a Round Rock bungalow, his old girlfriend’s new home. Standing on the shoulder of the road, he watched this slow, twilight procession, regret filling his mouth with the taste of rusty window screens. As the house passed, he had an urge to hop inside. That way, when the house was set down and Libby walked across the porch to open the front door, he could step right up. “Hello, dear.”

  BILLIE gave a dinner to celebrate the house-moving. Red arrived late, claiming a crisis at the farm. Oh, well, Libby told herself, I might as well get used to it.

  Modeled after chapels in California missions, the Fitzgeralds’ dining room was a white hall with dark hewn beams overhead and stenciled geometric patterns on the walls. A chandelier held sixty-five candles, which Billie had lit for the occasion. And dinner was more a feast—sea bass with fennel and roasted vegetables, salad with avocado and grapefruit, a spicy steamed persimmon pudding.

  Billie was in high spirits. “Why shouldn’t I celebrate when the universe coughs up exactly what I want?”

  They had coffee in the library, and after Old Bill retired, Libby asked Red up to her room to look at some insurance papers. There were no papers, of course, so they took off most of their clothes and lay down on her bed. She didn’t even think he was fat anymore; she saw only his lived-in, fully mature male body and luminous smooth skin. His legs were remarkably strong. Against his considerable chest, she felt tidy, compact. “Remind me again why we’re not having sex?” she said.

  “Maybe because we want to do it someplace where Billie Fitzgerald doesn’t have her ear to the heating vent.”

  “Oh, that.” She nestled on his chest until her nerves calmed and she could hear clearly the hum of his body and its strong central heartbeat.

  He gave her back a few absent pats, cleared his throat, then spoke into her hair. “I didn’t want to tell you during dinner, but the reason I was late tonight was Lewis.”

  Libby carefully lifted herself away from his body, which somehow seemed appropriate.

  “Apparently, our friend Billie sweet-talked him up to the hills and then ditched him.”

  “She what?”

  “He walked to the farm barefoot. His feet were pretty torn up, so I gave him a ride into town.”

  Absorbing this information, Libby felt an unexpected protectiveness toward Lewis. Then she giggled. “God. You’d think he’d know better than to mess with her.”

  “Strolled right into the bear’s cave,” said Red.

  “Poor Lewis!”

  “He’ll live,” Red said dryly.

  “We shouldn’t laugh,” Libby said, and bit the pillow to stop.

  NO SOONER had Red gone home than Billie tapped on Libby’s door, let herself in, and climbed onto the bed. “You guys consummating yet?”

  “You’ll be the last to know.”

  She lifted the sheets. “I gotta see if there’s a wet spot.”

  Why in the world had Libby ever mentioned that she and Red were waiting? Some misguided notion that Billie would appreciate—or be instructed by—such restraint? Whatever the inflated moral purpose, Libby was now paying dearly for it. “There’s something abnormal about your interest in these things, Billie.”

  “There’s something abnormal about two perfectly healthy adults not fucking. Can’t Red get it up?”

  “You want to tell me what you did to Lewis?”

  Grinning, Billie wiped a cloud of hair back from her face. “Yeah. I took him on a little one-way trip.”

  “But why?”

  “Because he was there.” She shook Libby’s foot through the covers. “And because he can’t fuck with my friends and walk away whistling.”

  “I can fight my own battles.”

  “Not to my satisfaction.”

  “Oh, Billie.”

  “What did you see in him, anyway? He’s got a little dick.”

  “If you’d seen it, you’d know it wasn’t little.”

  “I didn’t have to see it. It’s little.”

  “Lewis has a perfectly respectable, above-average penis.”

  “ ‘Penis’? Listen to you. All those intellectuals have teeny weiners. I knew a Goethe scholar once whose dick was the size of a baby carrot.”

  “You weren’t really messing around with him, were you?”

  “What would you care, even if I was?”

  The answer was a tangle Libby couldn’t begin to unravel—not at this hour of night, nor with this conversationalist. “How’d you get him up there in the first place?”

  “He’s easy, Libby. I don’t want to ruin any sacred memories you might have, but the guy’s kind of a dog, if you know what I mean.”

  “He always had a thing for you,” Libby said bitterly.

  “Not anymore he doesn’t.”

  “So you drove him out in the hills and made him get out of the truck?”

  “We were checking irrigation pots in the tangelo grove and I went back to the truck for a wrench. The old you-wait-here trick. I actually said that. ‘You wait here.’ And this beautiful inspiration came to me: Why not just leave? You should’ve seen the look on his face.”

  “I have to feel a little sorry for him,” Libby said. “He was so out of his league.”

  “I only wish I’d gotten his clothes off first. Made him walk home au naturel.”

  That unexpected protectiveness again. “Lewis doesn’t mean any harm. Not really.”

  “You’re defending him! After how he treated you? That’s sick, if you ask me. You dump Red and go back to him, I’ll kill you.”

  “I’d kill myself first.”

  Trying to sleep, Libby couldn’t stop thinking about Lewis, naked, striding through the woods, elusive as wildlife. She felt the old tug his elusiveness engendered. She recalled how he stared at her during sex so that small leaping sensations started up in her stomach and heart; and the expert, authoritative way he handled her body. Only then what? A cup of coffee, a shared cigarette, and back to their separate worlds until his desire—forget hers—built back up.

  Insomniac, rehashing these old facts, she realized that this was the reason she and Red weren’t rushing into sex: so her long-legged and saturnine former lover could roam her thoughts a while longer, until she banished him for good. No matter how deeply or urgently she wanted Red, she wasn’t quite done with Mr. Fletcher. What more did she want—a final parting, a solemn handshake? Should the occasion to speak with him arise, she doubted she cou
ld even be civil. Nevertheless, part of her waited for him, for something, like an orphan girl sitting on a back stoop staring down an empty road.

  ON HIS next visit to town, during one of his evening rambles, David Ibañez would notice the missing bungalow and ask his uncle what happened to it. “Up Howe Lane,” Rafael said.

  David walked there through the orchards. The bungalow had belonged to the Rosales family, Octavio and Maria and their four boys; Eduardo, a.k.a. Eddy, had been his great friend. Like David’s parents, the Rosaleses had used their settlement money to move to East Los Angeles. David had seen Eddy a few months ago; he was married with two teenaged daughters and worked as a lineman for Water and Power.

  David slipped up to the empty house and hoisted himself onto the porch. There was a bright three-quarters moon, and through a low, gauzy blue mist he could see lights down among the trees and a brightly lit oil well on the far hill across the valley. Though the bungalow’s windows were still boarded up, he could remember the many times he had sat at the rickety wooden table eating beans and grilled corn on the cob and María’s handmade tortillas. Who could have imagined then that the Rosaleses’ small, tidy home would come, as if airlifted, to this hillside well above the valley floor, to be inhabited by a divorced, violin-playing white woman?

  RED HAD assumed—even hoped—that the inventory would never materialize and Lewis would essentially fire himself. Yet here he came, at the last possible moment, loping across the roadway, a fan of paper in his hands.

  “Thanks,” Lewis said as he came inside. Red didn’t know what Lewis was thanking him for; then again, since the incident with Billie, Lewis had been consistently polite and subdued.

  Red nodded at the coffee maker. “Fresh pot of mud.”

  Lewis helped himself and took a chair at the end of the table. “Ready to hear this?”

  “You want to read it to me?”

  “Sure. Hell, I wrote it for you.”

  “Let’s have it, then.”

  “I’ll start with Fears,” said Lewis.

  Red had heard so many inventories that the only thing he still found surprising was the candor of the writers. In addition to the standard fears—death, disease, intimacy—grown men had admitted their mortal dread of crossing bridges or riding escalators; accomplished, intelligent men feared that they were transmitters for space aliens, possessed by devils, or turning into wood, or thin air.

  Lewis was afraid he’d start drinking again, that he didn’t deserve sobriety, that some invisible signal had gone out, and no woman would ever again desire him and he’d spend the rest of his life alone. He was afraid Red would fire him.

  Red forced a smile and said, “Good secretaries are too hard to find.” He lit a cigarette; the cool air outside drew the smoke through the cracked window in a sinuous white rope. I should tell him now, he thought.

  “ ‘I resent my father,’ ” Lewis continued, “ ‘for his taste test approach to families, UCLA for its endless red tape, my philosophy professor for drinking, and’—don’t get mad, Redsy—‘Red Ray, for holding me at arm’s length since I got back from L.A.’ ”

  “If you didn’t include me,” Red said, “I’d know you were lying.”

  Money was a list of falsified invoices, petty thefts, uncompleted drug deals, and Sex a litany of impulsive encounters. He’d slept with his fourteen-year-old stepsister, cheated on his wife, slept with the wife of his boss at the parts store, with the wife of his philosophy professor in grad school. Pulling his feet onto his chair, Lewis hugged his knees and admitted to having sex with men, twice, in high school.

  “Am I supposed to be shocked?” Red said. “Sorry, but that’s been in every inventory I’ve ever heard, including my own. Sex with men—and usually a particularly charming chicken, too.”

  “Chickens? Really?” Lewis threw his head back and exhaled loudly. “So you don’t think I’m really a homosexual?”

  “Do I care? You’re sure not my type.”

  Lewis laughed long and loudly. Too loudly.

  So far, so good, thought Red. Normally, he might’ve asked why Libby and Billie weren’t mentioned—an inventory should be current—but for this omission Red was inordinately grateful.

  Secrets was mostly recap. Lewis had cheated on a final in college. And once, when drunk, he’d slugged his mother in the mouth. He told lies. Stole this and that. And for several months when he was very young—“I still don’t understand this one,” Lewis said—he’d used the backyard as his toilet and didn’t bury it. When confronted, he blamed it on his brother, Woody. “I don’t know why my parents believed me,” he said. “But they sent Woody to a psychologist. Every week, for years, he went to see Dr. Weiss. Makes me sick to think about it.” And Lewis did look pallid, scared, and tenderly young, as if in this room he’d become the very boy who dropped his trousers behind the eugenia bushes.

  Never, Red knew, was it the ten thousand dollars embezzled from a business partner, or the drunken slapping of a new bride, but always this kind of ancient, shame-soaked, thumb-sucking, bed-wetting memory around which the personality had knotted, kinked, grown stunted. “It was probably the biggest favor you ever did for your brother,” he said. “At least he got outside help.”

  “God. I never thought of that.”

  When Lewis was finished, Red poured him a fresh cup of coffee and squeezed his shoulder. “Good work,” he said. “How do you feel?”

  “Pretty fucking weird. I thought I’d die before telling this stuff to anyone. And here I am.” Lewis patted his own face. “It’s almost embarrassing to see it spelled out so clearly. Always wanting the woman I couldn’t have, never the one I was with. Just like my dad.” Lewis sipped his coffee. “You know what I’ve been thinking?”

  “Mmm.” Red gazed out the window at dry, bleached grasses and dark-leaved groves. The sunlight was fragile.

  “I was thinking I’d stay on here indefinitely. Work for you. Commute to school a couple days a week. And maybe patch things up with Libby.”

  Red nodded carefully, trying not to panic.

  “All the time I was with her, I thought I liked Billie. My head was screwed on backwards.” Lewis smoothed the pages he’d written. “You were right. I had to do this work. See myself more clearly. Get a grip.”

  Red gazed at his own thumbnails as if into tiny pink hand mirrors.

  “I heard she’s seeing somebody, but how long could that have been going on?” Lewis shrugged. “She can’t be too far up the tubes, can she?”

  Red combed his dim Catholic boyhood for guidance: who was the saint of the worst-case scenario? “Lewis,” he said, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

  THE HOUSE sat on jacks while masons built a reinforced cinderblock foundation. Libby climbed onto her new porch, which sat some fifty yards above the trailer’s former pad. She could see clear over the olive trees and a sea of darker citrus to the distant blue hills. In the foreground she saw the plume of dust from Red’s truck winding up her driveway.

  She rushed down to meet him. “Look! It’s all here!” Taking his arm, she dragged him around the home site, pointing to pilings as if they were the most fascinating lapidary west of Egypt. She found herself tugging. He soon grew sluggish, then rooted. His skin had a grayish caste, a thin film of sweat. “Are you okay?” she said.

  “Did Lewis come by?”

  “Lewis? No. Why?”

  “He and I had a talk this morning.”

  “Oh, right, I forgot. You heard his inventory. How’d it go?”

  “He did a good job. Took a good look at his shortcomings. And now he’d like to get back together with you.”

  Libby gave a short, unbelieving bark. “Are you serious?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Did you tell him about us?”

  “I felt I had to.”

  “Thank God! And?”

  “I shouldn’t have heard his inventory,” Red said. “It was a rotten thing to do. I thought I could get away with it.”
/>   Libby reached to clasp his face in her hands. “I would’ve told him myself, but I never had the chance.”

  Wincing, Red caught her hands, returned them gently to her sides. “He said he loved you, Libby.”

  She swung away. “That’s just another thing he’s cooked up in his head.” She shaded her eyes and surveyed the crisped, golden-brown hills behind her house. “Oh, I suppose it is gratifying, a little, to know that I don’t thoroughly disgust him. Otherwise …” She grasped Red’s hand and kissed it.

  “He quit, of course,” Red said. “I stopped by the Mills just now to drop off a check, but he’d already left. Told the desk clerk he was moving back down south. I thought he might’ve come by here.”

  “No. And it wouldn’t have made any difference if he had.”

  “I had to tell you what he said, though.” Red closed his eyes. “If not, I’d always wonder.”

  Libby moved to caress Red’s face and again he shied away. “Also, he punched me.”

  “No!”

  Red turned to show her the faint dark smudge emerging on his jaw.

  Libby grazed it with her fingertips. “This is only nervous laughter,” she said, trying to hold it back.

  “It is funny.” Red smiled ruefully.

  Libby grabbed the edges of his jacket, pulled his sternum against her forehead. “It’s been a month, Red. More than a month. I want to go to your house and lie down with you, skin to skin, no clothes.”

  She sensed his resistance assembling—a pause, an alertness in his muscles, an intake of breath …

  “This isn’t just a reaction to Lewis. Although I am thankful to him.” She looked into Red’s face. “Without him, I never would’ve got to know you. He made it easy. You were the one I talked to. You were the one who courted me. Lewis was just a smoke screen: when he cleared out, there you were. And I already loved you.” Libby tugged on Red’s jacket. “Now,” she said.

  They drove in his truck without speaking. A few nervous smiles. Hands clutching. Libby felt empty and light. Once inside his bungalow, Red latched the screen door, then closed and locked the kitchen door. He moved down the counter, unplugged the telephone, untangled cords to the matchstick blind above the sink.