Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  When Frank left Round Rock, some central vortex at the farm had lost its pull. If Frank, the one eternal resident, could leave, why not the other diehards? In firing John, then accepting Ernie’s notice, Red had feared Round Rock itself might be drawing to a close, especially since he never was any good at hiring people.

  After Billie’s allegations, Red had called up David’s references: a Park Avenue psychologist, the director of a Manhattan recovery house, and a New Mexican M.D. with a homeopathic practice. The calls produced the usual bath of hyperbole as well as a few insights: “such a gifted practitioner” … “remarkable composure in times of crisis” … “works intensively with others without suffering burnout.” The downside? “Runs behind in his appointments” … “unstable female clients cathect with him.” Could he be trusted around money? This question provoked a laugh from the Manhattan therapist. “Definitely, but he sure can’t be motivated by it….”

  Last night, when David came to the AA meeting, Red took him aside during the coffee break. They walked down the driveway until the house sat on the hill behind them like a lit-up stage. Roses fogged the air with moist, lemony scent.

  Red crammed his hands into his pockets and, after two years off cigarettes, longed for nicotine to ease the moment. “Your references, everything I’ve seen about you, makes me want to hire you,” he said. “But a good friend of ours here in Rito says you’re not to be trusted.”

  David, walking, stiffened as if alerted to danger.

  “Do you have any idea what this is about?” Red asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Want to tell me?”

  “I’m not at liberty to,” said David. “You’ll have to go by what she says.”

  “She wasn’t specific, either,” said Red. “And I don’t need to know the details. She implied you took some money.”

  “Twenty years ago, when she and I last had any dealings with each other, I did take some money that was offered to me.”

  “Oh, so this is wreckage from the distant past?”

  David paused and turned to face him. “I will say, for what it’s worth, I’ve made what amends I could. The money given to me was repaid with interest. And other amends were attempted. Although I can’t say they were taken in the spirit I’d hoped for.”

  In David’s careful syntax, Red caught the unmistakable whiff of Billie’s intractability. “What, she never forgave you?” Red gave a short, knowing snort. “No? Now how did I guess?”

  They stood at the foot of the lawn. Sprinklers hissed in the groves. Voices wafted down to them from the house. The bell clanged for the meeting to resume. “I need to know,” said Red, “if this could interfere with your work here.”

  “Not with my work, no,” David said. “But I’m afraid it puts you in an awkward position.”

  “Please. I don’t hire people based on whether or not my friends like them.”

  Later that night, when Red started to relate this conversation to Libby, she interrupted him.

  “I don’t care who you hire.” She grabbed hold of his waistband. “I’m sorry I stuck my two cents in. You know what you’re doing. I wash my hands of the whole business. Now, can we please get this house built and furnished? I feel a serious need to drag heavy furniture around.” She pulled him roughly toward her, pushed him up against the bed, and tugged off all his clothes.

  It surprised Red how much Libby still wanted sex as her pregnancy advanced, how she’d scramble onto him, cling to him, pull him this way and that.

  Red ran a finger along the bench’s rusted iron armrest. The sun now sat in his lap, and when he looked up, Libby was parked at the curb in the beige Mercedes. Twelve years old and in tip-top condition, the car had been his one-year anniversary present to her. But this obvious ploy to make her ditch the eternally faulty Falcon had caused unforeseen embarrassment. Hadn’t Yvette driven a black Mercedes? That Libby might know this, or care, had somehow eluded Red, who was therefore deeply mortified. He’d explained, awkwardly, that he respected, indeed revered, older Mercedes Benzes, to the point he’d want any wife of his to drive one. And maybe he did, on some level, want to re-create his former marriage; he’d enjoyed it, even thrived in it, although he no longer missed Yvette. Libby, high-colored and possibly amused, had allowed these stumbly confessions. Red offered to trade the car in on a Volvo or Saab or anything else she wanted. No, no, Libby said, she wasn’t a fool, it was a beautiful gift, and at least this car wasn’t black.

  Red walked up to the driver’s-side door. Libby was wearing sunglasses, red lipstick, her hair in a high ponytail. He tasted salt in her kiss. “Sweetheart. What’s wrong?”

  She spoke to the ground. “I’m having cramps and spotting.”

  Red drove. Libby tied the black leather strap of her handbag into fat knots. “It’s that abortion I had in New Orleans,” she said.

  Red knew about this; Libby had been dating Stockton only a few months at the time, and they’d agreed early on to terminate the pregnancy. “I didn’t know they could affect pregnancies,” he said.

  “It wasn’t a real abortion. I mean, it was real enough. Stockton knew this script doctor who’d been disbarred, or whatever, for writing too many prescriptions for Seconal and Quaaludes and stuff.”

  “I know what a script doctor is,” Red said dryly.

  “Anyway, he was making his living doing illegal abortions. He did them in his house. Cheap. That was the draw—a bargain abortion. A bedroom outfitted with hospital equipment. He didn’t have a suction thing, just scraped you out. I was conscious as hell but all drugged up. It really hurt. I just couldn’t summon the energy to resist. Then, in the middle of things, he tells me I had a beautiful cervix. What can you do? So, I got an infection anyway and ended up in the hospital. Those doctors said this was bound to happen, and if I ever got pregnant again, I’d probably have trouble carrying full-term. You know, you’re twenty-two, you’re invincible, you think it’s cool to know criminals. Nobody will ever hurt you and all the bad stuff happens to somebody else.”

  “That’s youth all right,” Red said, careful not to exhibit his distress.

  “I never imagined it would hurt a real living baby. Or you.”

  “If anything happens,” Red said, “nobody would ever blame you.”

  At the doctor’s, Red told the receptionist that Libby might be having a miscarriage and she was called in right away. He sat in the waiting room trying desperately to stay calm. Next to him, a woman glugged from a large bottle of Evian between whimpers. Red tried to read a celebrity magazine, but the sentences didn’t follow one another in any coherent fashion. After ten minutes or so, a nurse called him into the room, where Libby, now dressed, sat on the examining table while a doctor jotted notes on her chart.

  A few dots of blood and cramping, the doctor said, was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to be alarmed about. He was a pleasant, boyish man with blond hair, at least five years younger than Libby. There was no dilation, he said. Nothing wrong with her blood. No sign of miscarriage. Libby was healthy and everything was normal. Even the dark, irrational fears were normal. The doctor nodded encouragement to Libby. So far, there were no signs she might have any trouble carrying to term. And if there was any loss of womb strength from a poorly administered abortion, they’d put something called a cerclage around the cervix to hold it shut, and prescribe bed rest for the duration. But this was the worst that could happen.

  On the way home, Libby’s spirits were buoyant, elated. “ ‘Cerclage.’ Such a beautiful word if you don’t think about what it does—lassoes the cervix. Now, Red, did you happen to notice how enormous the doctor’s head is? I pity his wife when they have kids. I’d be terrified my whole pregnancy just thinking about having a baby with a head that big. I’d sign up for a C-section right off the bat. Now you, Red, you have a beautiful head. A dream head.”

  DAVID stayed inside Tuesday morning. Día veintiuno. Day twenty-one. He read and talked to his parents and cousins on the phone. Around noon, he
moved outside with the dog under the shade of the plum tree in his uncle’s backyard, amid the drunken buzzing of flies and soft conversation of chickens. He shucked sweet corn for his aunt and helped her with dinner. “I can feel people’s prayers,” he said. His uncle had been working with him daily, praying with him, giving him a bitter tea that made his blood race. “You must kill off a part of yourself to satisfy the poison,” Rafael said. “Otherwise, it takes all of you.”

  They ate outside on the picnic table, staying until it grew dark and the earth exuded dampness, then moved inside, where David and Rafael did a small ritual, a sweeping, with herbs and a prayer. They smudged the house with rosemary and sage and chanted more prayers. His aunt Gloria lit candles at the kitchen altar, where the votives flickered in red and blue glass and the virgin revealed her flaming heart.

  They sat around the kitchen table under the portrait of Jesus, who stood, arms apart, in brown robes the same color as his hair, his halo a fuzzy yellow light. The old dog slept under the table on David’s feet. They spoke quietly in Spanish. David told about the time his father got so mad, he threw a pot of nopales in a boiling green wave onto the floor; and how, for years, David’s mother found tiny dry squares of cactus throughout the house, even in the attic, as if they’d migrated under furniture and carpet and up the walls after the original spill. Rafael told how his brother-in-law Umberto García got drunk and accidentally butchered his prize fighting cock for Sunday dinner.

  The dog’s snoring became a rhythmic rasping. They drank cool water from a clay pitcher. “The thing is,” David said, “I feel so wide and full and clear, I’m willing for anything to happen. Some of it’s fear. But this fear is so spacious, and full of energy, and not dark at all—more dim, with a dull glow, like an empty cathedral.”

  At midnight, everyone laughed a little and embraced one another. David went into the bedroom where he was staying. He lit a few candles of his own, said a prayer: “I am grateful to rejoin those who don’t know when they’re going to die.” The old dog curled up on a rug at the foot of the bed. David slept and did not dream, but woke in an hour or so to a room full of devils as a guttering candle sent shadows stretching up the walls. He blew out the flame, slept again. He awoke once more, this time convinced all the air had been sucked from the room. The night was so still, he thought for a moment he was indeed dead. He had the distinct sensation of a claw drawn across his chest. He leapt up and before he was halfway across the room, he knew what had happened.

  He called Lewis the next day. “I’ll be starting at Round Rock on Monday,” he said quietly. “And the dog who already smelled dead? We buried her this morning.”

  AND SO, David and Lewis went to work.

  Ernie had agreed to stay on to train Lewis. Grayer, older, still precision-coiffed, he initiated Lewis into his meat-filing system in the deep freeze, the hot and dead spots on the griddle, the recipe for his much-adored Chicken Luxurioso—chicken parts baked in a murk of dried onion soup, apricot jam, and Thousand Island dressing. Together, on Monday night, they prepared Ernie’s last supper, a tribute to fifteen years of nonstop, super-fatted starch. Red Ray played host as dozens of alumni showed up to eat potato and macaroni salads, ham, biscuits, green bean casserole.

  Lewis expected Red to show up the next night, too, for his first solo supper, but he didn’t come once all week. Although Lewis had moved into the bungalow right across the street from Red’s, he saw him only at the morning staff meetings, those rushed, fifteen-minute coffee klatches.

  Lewis’s new residence was furnished like a tourist cabin from the forties: clunky blond bedroom set, the sofa and chairs he used to nap on in the office, a slack-stringed Steinway upright. Homey enough, except at night, when it was so quiet Lewis could hear mice chittering in the groves. How had Red stood it all those years—the lone resident in his own private ghost town?

  At the fake-wood dinette in his breakfast nook, Lewis tried to write the last chapter of his dissertation; the effort invariably sent him straight down for a nap. He tried going to Denny’s again, but Phyllis, the waitress who’d afforded him squatter’s rights in her section, was gone, and it was too far to drive all the way to Buchanan just to piss off somebody else. David, his erstwhile partner in a drunk-farm takeover, had no time to spare, since the drunks clamored for his company, sought him out, hung close all week; then, on his days off, David made the exhausting roundtrip to Tijuana to straighten things out with Pauline. Lewis mourned Lydia and the Nightcrawlers, especially Barbara, and ran up a deadly phone bill calling L.A.

  Heading home after serving dinner one night, he saw Red in the roadway hosing out the back of his truck. The lights were on in Red’s bungalow, and a round, lidded barbecue smoked in the yard. “Hey,” said Lewis, “I thought you guys lived at Libby’s.”

  “Oh, it’s been back and forth since day one,” Red said. “My house is more convenient, but there’s always someone at the door. Then Libby has cats that need to be fed, and neither place has room for all our things, which is why we decided to build the castle on the hill.” Red walked around the truck and turned off the water. “Your little place working out okay?”

  “Yeah, great. Stop by later and I’ll make you a cup of decaf.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  It was a hot night, all his windows were open, and Lewis could hear them across the way, their voice tones and bits of their sentences, Libby’s delighted laugh. Then, she played the violin, the first movement of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, music so sad and haunted, Lewis had to pace. He’d never heard her play before; when he’d known her, she’d been entirely disaffected with the violin. He drank coffee, waited for Red’s knock, roamed his four small, dingy rooms, which looked anonymous, like a film noir set, a good place to blow your brains out. By eleven o’clock, the occasional, indistinct syllable still floated through the windows, Red’s truck was still parked across the way, but all their lights had been extinguished.

  BARBARA came up with Celia and Kip; they ate dinner at the Blue House, where the company of women, as always, was highly appreciated. Then, the three spoke as a panel at the AA meeting. Although Lewis had told him about it, Red didn’t attend. Afterward, Lewis and his friends drifted back to his bungalow.

  “It is spooky here.” Barbara gave him a worried look. “You doing okay?”

  “I came up here thinking it’d be old home week. Instead, I feel like an employee.”

  “You are an employee,” Barbara said.

  He hated her for saying that.

  She only laughed. “Maybe you need to tell Red you’d like to see more of him.”

  “Oh, right.” Even imagining such a conversation made Lewis pull at his own face.

  Celia opened the Steinway, played a chord. “Who needs to drink? Just play this thing,” she said, and sang two new songs, which did indeed sound drunken and hilarious with such atonal accompaniment.

  When everyone left, Lewis lay down on the bedroom floor, his cheekbone against the pine planking. He inhaled dust, exhaled a frustrated sob, and another, then stopped, having forgot what he was supposed to be crying about. Then remembered: I am so fucking lonely, God, I need a little backup here, please.

  In the morning, a large brindled dog stood on the porch. He had goofy ears and a terrier’s coarse hair, matted and filthy. He cowered but wouldn’t move more than a foot when Lewis tried to run him off. He was all bones, clearly starving. Consulting the midget refrigerator, Lewis found only a hard cinnamon roll and last week’s fried chicken, no doubt teeming with salmonella. He took the chicken off the bone and put it in a bowl: gone in a snap. Same with the cinnamon roll. This dog was possibly more pathetic than David’s dead hound. Very funny, God, thought Lewis.

  He placed an ad in the Rito River News and tacked up a sign at the Rito post office. As he expected, there was no response. Nobody wanted this dog. Someone, obviously, had dumped him.

  When Lewis patted his head or talked to him, the dog wagged his tail, growling and pissing at the sa
me time. He might wander in through the open door, but if Lewis spoke suddenly, he’d spurt outside, as if caught raiding the henhouse. Lewis tried coaxing him into the car, just for some company, but the dog, cringing and snarling, wouldn’t come; then, as Lewis drove off, he hurled himself against the fenders, barking insanely.

  Lewis named him Gustave, after Flaubert, who also seemed willfully lonely and yet craved companionship, but then misbehaved whenever anyone actually took an interest in him.

  LIBBY stood in the living room measuring windows. With her arms up over her head, she looked visibly pregnant for the first time. The windows offered an almost aerial view of the valley below. The Blue House, with its peaked roofs and turret, looked like a castle in a miniature golf course. “Red’s down the hall,” Libby told Lewis.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  She wrote down a figure before answering. “I’ve got to get these measurements.”

  Lewis waited, thinking she’d talk to him when she finished writing, but she walked over and began measuring another window.

  He found Red staining shelves in the library, a wood-paneled room with a large fireplace built of oblong riverstone. Red’s T-shirt had sickening-looking brown smears on it.

  “Need some help?”

  “Well, hello. Sure,” said Red. “My carpenter’s wife broke both her legs, so he’s got to take care of her. My painter can’t start for two weeks. And we need to move in before this baby arrives.” He went off to find another brush and Lewis heard him talking to Libby in a low voice.

  “Should I leave?” he asked when Red returned.

  “No. Please. I’ve hardly seen you since you got here.” Red handed him the brush. They applied a first coat of urethane to finely made, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Lewis could see Red in here in his dotage, the color bleached from his hair, his skin papery and pink, eyes twinkly as he read to his children—or grandchildren, maybe—Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Rose Red, The Red Balloon.