Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  “Been hearing good things about your cooking,” Red said.

  “Come see for yourself.”

  “Thought I’d give you some time to get the hang of it.”

  “I’m ready. Bring Libby too, if she wants….”

  “Will do. And you and David might think about coming to the Old Bastards. You’re welcome, you know.”

  “Even if I only have three and a half years of sobriety?”

  “It’s open to all professionals,” Red said. “Might make working here easier on you.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Lewis said.

  They got into a rhythm, slapping the brushes this way and that. Several times, Lewis almost mentioned his disappointment in not seeing more of Red. But here they were, painting side by side, a paragon of male bonding. Why make a big deal out of it? He was dragging the drop cloth over to the fireplace mantel when Libby appeared in the doorway. “Red,” she said, ignoring Lewis completely, “I’m starving. If I don’t get something in my stomach right away I’m going to throw up this baby.”

  LEWIS found David behind the mansion working on a float for the Fourth of July parade. Men were trimming the trailer, looping red, white, and blue crepe paper around bales of hay while one guy was trying to figure out how to secure a flagpole to the trailer bed.

  “Can I borrow you for a minute?” Lewis asked, and they walked a distance from the float builders. “I think I need one of your … you know … ritual things.”

  “Let’s do it,” said David.

  Before he moved into his second-floor quarters in the Blue House, David had removed all the furniture, taken up the carpet, painted the walls a clean white, sanded the floors, and applied coats of polyurethane until the mottled hardwood looked like still brown water. In the first room was a low, round table with a glass globe filled to the brim with agua preparada, the curandero’s clear, basic medicinal fluid. An altar occupied one corner of the room—candles and branches, bones and flowers, arranged beneath large painted-tin retablos of Santo Niño and the Virgin, around which hung smaller retablos and, on dressmaker pins, many silver and tin milagros of animals, disembodied limbs, hearts, stomachs, and tiny trucks, buses, passenger cars.

  David closed and locked his door.

  “It’s Libby,” said Lewis. “She hates me.”

  David had adopted the basic Round Rock uniform of jeans and a white T-shirt. His long hair was twisted into a knot at the base of his head; his brown skin was smooth, his arms rivered in veins. A red string with bone beads hung around his neck. He lit the candles in front of his altar, then swept a space on the floor and asked Lewis to lie down. He gave him an egg to hold in one hand and a short, sturdy stick for the other.

  “I feel,” Lewis said, “like I’m being prepared for burial.”

  David smiled. “You are, in a manner of speaking,” he said, and crossed Lewis’s hands over his chest, pulled one leg a little to the left, aligned his head with his spine. David’s touch was gentle, confident, matter-of-fact. Once satisfied with how Lewis was laid out, he pulled a clean, coarse white sheet over him and tucked it close. The cloth smelled vaguely of corn. Lewis was relieved to be covered, especially his face; it eliminated his considerable self-consciousness.

  “I’m going to call you several times,” David said, “and each time you must answer, ‘I’m coming.’ Now, take a deep breath. … Let it out. … Another breath. … Keep breathing.”

  Lewis lay there breathing for a long time, maybe ten minutes. The room was hot and still. He heard David moving quietly, the birds outside, and distant pops—people setting off fireworks. Then the room brightened and the air smelled sharp and crisp, as if the smoke of a medicinal campfire were blowing through.

  The floor creaked. Something touched Lewis very lightly. A shadow descended. At first, he thought David was touching him with his fingers; then he understood from the whispery, scritching sound that David was pulling a small broom over the length of his body. He was speaking Spanish in a low, soft voice, a prayer or chant. Lewis recognized only Dios and Cristo.

  “Come, Lewis,” David said firmly. “Don’t stay there.”

  “I’m coming.” Lewis’s voice sounded strange to him, sudden, as it did when he blurted something out loud to himself. The broom moved across his chest, grazing his crossed hands holding the egg and the stick. David prayed continuously in Spanish, his tone gentle and straightforward, as if prayer were the most reasonable discourse. “Don’t stay there, Lewis,” he said. “Come here.”

  “I’m coming,” Lewis said, and meant it.

  David, praying, swept around Lewis in a circle. The broom’s work was hypnotic, soothing; the adjective that came to Lewis was “loving.” Suddenly he was keenly thirsty, and drops of water instantly fell on him; it was alarming how loud they sounded landing on the cloth.

  “Lewis, are you here with me?”

  “I’m coming.”

  “Are you here?”

  “Yes, I’m here,” Lewis said, flooded with relief. His eyes welled up. He heard David sweeping all around him, chanting softly; it was like being a child in the room of a mother so quiet and gentle, all you could feel was her devotion. David swept in a wider and wider circle, then came close and knelt down. “You are here, now.” He touched Lewis’s forehead, his belly, each of his shoulders. He lifted the sheet off his face and smiled, as if in recognition, then slowly removed the sheet, folding it up length by length and setting it to one side.

  David took the egg from Lewis’s hand, made the sign of the cross over him, and set the egg on the sheet. Taking the stick from Lewis’s other hand, he again made the sign of the cross and set the stick next to the egg. He wrapped both the stick and the egg in the sheet and stood up with the bundle. “Rest a minute,” he said. “Sit up when you’re ready, and I’ll bring you a cup of tea.”

  David went into his bedroom and Lewis heard him put the water on. When the water started to hiss in the pan, Lewis sat up.

  The tea David handed him was astringent, strong, head-clearing. Eucalyptus, pepper, and lemon, and God knows what else.

  They sat quietly in the hot room for a few more minutes—until the men decorating the float came knocking on the door. Their work was finished, they said, and beautiful. They wanted David to see it, and Lewis could come too.

  LEWIS set out covered trays of bacon and sausages and assorted pastries over Sterno flames. He slung bags of bread onto the buffet table with butter, jams, honey, halved grapefruits, wedges of cantaloupes. There were urns of regular and decaf coffee, pitchers of half-and-half, whole and skimmed milk. Now he was free until lunch prep on Tuesday and would slip down to Los Angeles, catch the Nightcrawlers’ Sunday meeting, see some friends. But first, he stuck a thermos of decaf and yesterday’s leftover brownies in his knapsack and tossed it into the front seat of his car.

  He missed the spur on the first pass and had to turn back. Up the narrow dirt road, he parked next to Libby’s Mercedes. The sun was strong, the air smelled of hot sage and warm, standing water. Parallel jet trails had blown into broad horizontal stripes, like an overarching rib cage. The lake water was dark green, shiny and wrinkled. Orange barrels bobbled by the dam. A steady, persistent northerly breeze made Lewis’s clothes flap and flutter against his body.

  The air was calmer down in Libby’s spot. She had only one line in the water, the pole propped against her folding lawn chair. Her hands rested over her rounded belly. She gazed out at the lake from under a black mesh bill hat. Afraid to startle her, Lewis rolled small rocks past her chair until she glanced around. Immediately, she turned back to the lake.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” he said.

  She pursed her lips. One eyebrow lifted as if on a string. Her hat read RITO, CALIFORNIA in red stitching.

  “I’ll leave if you prefer.”

  She whisked an iridescent green fly off her shoulder and maybe, maybe, gave the slightest shrug.

  Lewis hunkered down beside her. A swarm of the shiny green flies
buzzed over the ground. The sun was hot, and he wished he’d brought a hat. Libby slapped at another fly.

  Lewis looked down at the familiar crackled mud. “You know, Libby, I was pretty messed up when I met you.” He peeled a corner off one mud tile and tossed it into the water. “You were so kind and generous. I have nothing but good thoughts about our time together.” He took a steadying breath, pushed on. “I never meant to run out on you, but I short-circuited. It’s pretty unforgivable, I know.” She was staring straight ahead. “Just the same, I wish you’d forgive me. And I think you can, because given the same circumstances, I know I wouldn’t do the same thing again.”

  Just when he decided she’d taken a vow of silence, Libby began to speak. “In a way, Lewis, I do forgive you: I wish you well. I want you to teach, publish, stay sober—whatever you want most for yourself. But the damage is done. I don’t say that to be vengeful. But something happened with us—to me, at least. On a physical level. Maybe being pregnant exaggerates it.” She caught a loose strand of hair and mashed it back under her hat. “I have this reaction now: you come into a room and I want to leave it. I see you, I reflexively look the other way. It’s nothing I decide to do. It just is. You did what you did, and this is the result. It’s like aversion therapy that worked.”

  Lewis thought of saying, Well, I didn’t want it to work that well, but something told him not to joke—at least not about this, not yet. “Do you have an aversion to brownies?” He held up his knapsack.

  She didn’t smile, though her shoulders registered another minuscule shrug.

  He poured coffee into styrofoam cups and unwrapped the brownies.

  She took a bite and frowned.

  “That bad?” he asked.

  “Raisins? In a brownie, Lewis?”

  “No good, huh?”

  “Not really.” She kept chewing, took another bite. “I’m hungry, though.”

  His legs grew tired, so he sat down on the mud flat, hugging his knees. The sun baked his head. Libby, he could tell, was barely tolerating his presence. Last night, a man at the AA meeting said that to feel good about himself, he would line up all the women he ever slept with in his mind. Just seeing them and remembering their sweetness calmed him down, comforted him. This technique, thought Lewis, would never work for him. Sitting next to just one ex-lover made him want to explode.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “And I’ve been wracking my brains about how to make amends to you.” This was not true. He’d assumed a simple apology would dissolve her hostility. “I had this idea,” he said, talking off the top of his head, “maybe I could help with the new house. I could work, oh, three hours every Sunday. I’ll stain like I did last week, or pound nails. I don’t really care. Whatever needs to be done.”

  “We have contractors,” Libby said. “Anything we do up there is because we want to have some hand in it.”

  “I can do stuff contractors don’t want to, like dig a garden or wash windows. You won’t ever have to see me. I’ll work Sunday mornings. You’ll be here fishing.”

  Libby popped the last of her brownie into her mouth and spoke with her mouth full. “You get used to them, the raisins.”

  “Leave me a note saying what needs to be done. ‘Stain woodwork.’ ‘Spade garden.’ Or leave the punch list. I’ll go up to the house every week until …” He tried to think of a reasonable length of time. “Until it’s done.”

  Libby brushed off her hands, flicked chocolate crumbs from her sweatshirt, and hazarded a look his way. It was true: her eyes couldn’t rest on him. “It’s hard to say if that would change anything,” she said.

  “I’d like to try, anyhow,” Lewis said. “A shot in the dark.”

  Back at his car, the right front tire was so low, it was almost flat. When he opened the trunk, he remembered he had no spare. In town, he filled the low tire, but couldn’t get it fixed because Fritz’s Texaco, the only gas station, was closed. He could risk the drive and make the last half of the Nightcrawler meeting, but a flat on the freeway would be expensive. He went instead to Round Rock and lay down in his bungalow until the phone rang. “You are home,” said David Ibañez. “Come play softball. The Doodads are low on men.”

  “I’m not up to it,” Lewis said, “and I’m a Shithead anyway.” He spent the rest of the day in bed.

  LETTUCE, David explained, contains a faint opiate; his mother and aunts used to make a tea from the leaves to soothe their restive babies. If Libby was having trouble sleeping, she might try some. If she needed something stronger, he told her, throw in two tablespoons of poppy seeds.

  Libby obeyed this advice and had her first good night’s sleep in weeks. Try as she might to see things from Billie’s point of view, David did not seem, finally, a con artist. He was too soft-spoken, thoughtful.

  She had conducted her own investigation. “So, you worked with cancer patients in Tijuana?” she asked when he came to the office to read client files.

  “Not specifically,” he said. “Only those with chronic pain. I worked with one woman who had terrible joint pain after chemotherapy, and a man who had a tumor in his neck—benign, actually—that caused obliterating headaches. So, I haven’t had much experience with cancer, no.”

  “If you have any bright ideas to see me through this thing I’ve gotten myself into, please”—Libby drummed fingers on her belly—“let me know. It seems like everybody I meet has a new horror story of an eighty-hour labor.”

  “I’m no expert on childbirth,” David said. “I’ve only attended one birth, in New Mexico, and the only thing I remember is that the father cooked the placenta and gave a tidbit to everyone present. It was no worse than other organ meats. A bit chewier, maybe.”

  Libby clapped her hand over her mouth, spoke through her fingers. “We won’t be having my placenta for lunch.”

  “No?” He smiled. “I do know, though, that the general principles for pain management apply to labor. So much of pain is resistance to pain—you know, what they teach you at Lamaze.”

  “When in doubt, hyperventilate?”

  Red came in as David left, and Libby made the big concession: “He’s pretty nice.”

  “David? Yeah, he’s working out really well.”

  How had she ever found, much less married, a man who didn’t gloat?

  THE NEW house was locked up tight. No note. No punch list. The roof had gone on, so Lewis walked around the site picking up scraps of roofing felt and broken cedar shingles. Also, the drywallers had evidently made great sport sailing odd pieces of sheetrock out of windows. He picked up these scraps, too, and kicked at the chalky stains in the pink dirt, a precise expression of the dejection he felt for this lonely, thankless task he’d assigned himself.

  Red, arriving around nine, was surprised to find him there. No, Libby hadn’t mentioned anything about Lewis working at the house. “But this is great,” Red said. “I wasn’t looking forward to being by myself.” They stained window and door casings and applied coats of urethane. Red grew talkative and reminisced, describing Round Rock in its first years, when only six or eight guys rattled around in the mansion. “Doc Perrin or somebody from Social Model Detox was over almost every night to baby-sit, make sure we weren’t having keggers.” Then he told Lewis how the large Victorian came to be its unusual shade of blue: “The same day I headed out to buy a hundred gallons of white exterior latex, an itinerant band of housepainters rolled into town. I ran into them at Victor’s. Their estimate, paint and labor, was substantially lower than my paint cost alone. Seemed like a miracle at the time. Of course, the color choice was limited. ‘Seafoam,’ I think it was called. At any rate, they primed nothing, masked nothing, just fired up a wheezing air compressor and shot paint in the general direction of the house until everything—windows, limestone, all the shrubbery—was covered.” Red paused for a moment, then frowned. “Forgive me, Lewis,” he said. “Maybe the prospect of being a father again has made me introspective. I’ve been thinking and thinking about my life, like it’s some
long, complicated dream.”

  “That’s très Buddhist,” said Lewis.

  “Hey, you should come over for dinner soon. I’m a barbecuing fool these days.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I’ll see when she’s up to company.”

  At noon, Libby herself came in, carrying a box of antique door knobs and window hardware. Her cheeks were flushed from lakeside sun and wind. “Hello, Lewis,” she said with a trace increase of warmth, then disappeared into the back bedrooms. Red kept poking his head into the hall, clearly torn between keeping Lewis company and seeking her out.

  Lewis stuck his brush in thinner. “I’d better be moseying along.” For the rest of the day, he stayed close to home in case Red came through with a dinner invitation. He held out until eight-thirty, then drove into Buchanan for a spinach omelette at Denny’s.

  NAPPING one afternoon between lunch and dinner prep, Lewis was awakened by Gustave’s furious barking. A gray Saab had pulled up in front of Red’s office, and Gustave was at the driver’s door, feinting and baying like a hyperactive hellhound. Lewis came out to his porch and called, but the dog was too crazed to notice, so Lewis had to walk over, grab hold of his collar, and pull him back.

  The woman who stepped out of the car was older, maybe fifty, with short graying hair in a mannish cut. Putty-colored linen pants. Crisp white shirt. Heavy gold at neck, wrist, ears. Lewis pegged her as a state inspector, or one of many fund administrators who came out for a look before awarding Round Rock a grant.

  “Sorry,” he said, pulling Gustave into the house and slamming the door. When he turned back, the woman was gazing about, shading her eyes with her hand. She appeared confused.

  “Looking for Red Ray?” he asked, walking toward her.

  “No, but this is his bungalow, right?”

  “The very one.”

  “I’m supposed to meet David Ibañez here at two.” She dropped her hand from her brow and offered it to Lewis. “I’m Pauline,” she said, and they shook.