Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  “A dog can puncture a tire? Are you sure?”

  “Those incisors are designed to bring down running animals.”

  “Never thought of that,” said Lewis.

  “Listen, don’t say anything to Libby,” Red said. “I want to see the look on her face when I tell her.”

  “Don’t worry” said Lewis. “I’ll leave that to you.”

  ALONG the coast it was cool and clear, but the temperature rose dramatically once Red had driven about five miles inland, and he broke into a drenching sweat.

  Sticking his arm out the window, trying to scoop enough breeze inside to cool off, he wondered about his body—its sensitivities and weaknesses—and then about Libby’s attraction to it and to him. This morning he’d held her close against him, inwardly chanting her name, and the willingness and affection of her response again made him ache with longing. How did it happen that she wasn’t repelled by his cumbersome gut, his age, his indissoluble shortcomings? If anything, his character defects engaged her curiosity: “I wonder why you have such trouble firing and hiring people,” she’d said with no trace of an edge in her voice. Where Yvette had seen parental failure, Libby merely said, “You’re so sweet and shy around Joe, as if you can’t believe he’s really yours.” She even appeared to love his mild but stubborn dyslexia; he often set a table backwards, or had to stop and think which was his right hand, which his left. Red had lived all his life waiting for such endless, generous interest.

  Turning onto the Santa Bernita Highway, he felt the caffeine in a tidal rush of jittery energy. His hands were sweaty again. It had been so long since he’d been dosed with the stuff, he was definitely buzzed, even dizzy. Powerful drug, caffeine, though he’d hardly noticed its effects back when he poured gallons of coffee into his system. Now, eight or ten ounces generated an anxiety attack, complete with nausea.

  Red caught himself patting his pockets for a cigarette. The caffeine, he thought, jump-starting that old craving as well.

  Bamboo thickets flashed by. Round rocks. Smudge pots. All the many things he’d done wrong in his life. He embarrassed himself all the time. Talking a senile streak while slapping on stain up at the new house—God, he’d never talked so much to anybody. Poor Lewis. Red resolved to make amends for those sentimental benders. And to tell Libby again that he wants Lewis to come to supper. If necessary, he might have to put his foot down—especially since Libby’s grudge against Lewis lately appeared more a source of amusement than a necessary distancing.

  He slowed for road construction, Cal Trans workers taking down a whole screen of eucalyptus trees to widen the highway to four lanes. Red downshifted with an ominous grinding of gears, and he had to fish for second gear. Now, it seemed, the truck’s transmission was going.

  Several huge, shaggy old trees lay toppled, their roots tangled in snaky whorls, which, given the size of the trees, were smaller than he’d expected. A difficult sight, those toppled trees—they signified the end of this quiet, untrammeled agricultural landscape.

  The first time he saw the valley, Red had flown down in secret on a February workday. Landing in Santa Barbara, he’d rented a big Buick, bought a bottle of Dewars and a sack of ice, and glided on the scotch’s smooth edge into this land of old home places, purple peaks, and the citrus-soaked air of his childhood. By then freeways and housing tracts had swallowed up Pomona, Ontario, and Rancho Cucamonga. But time had moved more slowly in the Santa Bernita. A more rustic, genteel, and politically backward era had persisted for decades, although development’s tendrils were now becoming visible. Walnut groves in the eastern end of the valley had given way to row crops, the first step in the developers’ process—hadn’t Beverly Hills arisen from lima bean fields, Orange County from celery? A city planned for the east end would put eighty thousand people where a hundred scattered souls now lived.

  Coming up behind a dump truck, Red had to downshift again. Another moment of mechanical suspense before, ah, second. He could put the truck in the shop next week; they would take the Mercedes to Yosemite, anyway. He hadn’t been up there since he’d gone with Frank years and years ago, even before he was married to Yvette. Late in the fall, they’d rented a tent cabin—two cots with stiff white sheets and green army blankets, a small tin woodstove, with a tidy stack of split pine and aspen alongside. They built a snapping fire, then got down to work on a quart of bourbon. A storm came up, and all night long they heard rocks bouncing down the valley walls: that weird granite clink, an interior noise, like rocks hitting underwater, or small bones breaking in the head, almost unbearable. The next morning—ragged, unshaven, feeling much more cheerful after the morning heaves subsided—they’d set out for the Tioga pass, destination Reno, but rocks the size of Oldsmobiles had slid from slag heaps and closed the road.

  Up ahead, a dump truck turning off toward the landfill slowed almost to a stop. Red stayed in second. Then, accelerating, he heard a new sound in the truck’s engine, the sound water makes. Maybe it was just gas sloshing around in the tank, though it seemed to be coming from up front. Hoping to isolate and identify the noise, he slowed and opened his door, trying to hear better. Hearing nothing, he slammed the door shut, and an air bag seemed to detonate between his chest and the truck’s steering wheel. Had he hit the dump truck? No, there was no dump truck, only the wheel clasped by his freckly pink hands, and the white buttons on his blue chambray shirt. No air bag, no object of any kind ballooning between them. He still felt it, though: a tough sac blown up to the bursting point, pressing into him.

  And now his father was in the car—or was it Frank? They were going to the water gardens. He could see the trees in the distance: the leaves, the branches, the fruit, all the crystal, silvery arcs of water.

  It was not a water garden, he saw now, but a hall of people, all lined up, leaning toward him. Nobody he recognized. Their clothes were from the thirties and forties, gabardine and crepe in autumnal colors: tailored jackets in rich browns and wines on the women, the men in full-cut suits of cinnamon, chocolate, charcoal gray. An AA meeting, it seemed, or the first AA meeting, before it broke into fifty thousand splinter groups. Red searched for Bill Wilson, the founder, and his wife, Lois—he would so like to meet them. He raised his hand to shake theirs, and all the people vanished. In their place stood a row of eucalyptus trees, upright, rooted, stubborn with life. His mind clear as rain, Red thought, I lost it, damn it, and tried to swerve, but the truck hit the dirt berm and, for the next long moment, flew.

  LEWIS was in the kitchen waiting for bread dough to rise. The phone had been ringing constantly—Red called a couple times from Ventura, David called from the office and asked Lewis to look in his room for a client’s discharge papers. Ramón, the breakfast cook, called to say he’d like to work more meals. When the phone rang again, Lewis considered not answering it, then picked up. “Round Rock, Lewis here,” he said.

  “It’s me, David.” His voice came from a noisy, echoing place.

  “Where are you?”

  “Buchanan General,” he said. “Look, I have some very bad news.”

  Lewis knew as much from his intonation. David had recently told him about taking a rare folk poison, and Lewis’s first thought was that the toxin had somehow, belatedly, kicked in. He drew a breath, let it out. He was standing in the Blue House kitchen, at the desk in the back. Through the window he could see the black silhouette of an oak tree backlit by the sun. If the news was bad enough, he knew, this could become a place he’d never seen before. He sat on the desk. “Okay,” he said.

  David said, “We lost our good friend Red Ray today.”

  “Red?” Surely David meant someone else—Frank Jamieson, perhaps. “Red?”

  “He had a heart attack driving back from Ventura. Drove his truck into a tree. The ambulance crew started resuscitation, but they couldn’t bring him back.”

  “Oh my God,” Lewis said, not because he truly felt any emotion or pain yet—he was numb as ice—but because the immensity of the fact was right around the
corner. “And Libby? Was she with him?”

  “No, he was alone. She’s in there with him now—with his body.”

  Red’s body?

  Lewis heard squeaky rhythmic noises on David’s end and thought, Someone must be wheeling a gurney past. Then he realized David was crying.

  I’ll be crying soon, too, Lewis thought.

  “I’m worried about her, though.” David sounded calmer than Lewis would’ve ever thought possible. “She’s been cramping badly. I’m afraid she might lose the baby. I was there at the office when Burt came and gave her the news. It’s a big shock.” David took a deep breath. “She managed to call Joe and Yvette, but that’s it. Can you handle the house for a while? And maybe get ahold of Perrin?”

  “I’ll call a house meeting,” Lewis said. “And I’ll call all the Old Bastards. I can do that. It hasn’t hit yet. I know it will, but it hasn’t yet.”

  “Thanks,” David said. “Because I want to stay with Libby until her parents arrive.”

  When Lewis hung up, before he went to tell anyone the news, he walked out of the back door of the kitchen. Across the driveway was a grove of Washington navels just blushing orange, and overhead the sky was streaked with high gray clouds. The late-afternoon light was soft and slanted. Lewis cried just a little, skimming off the first thin foaming-up of grief. “Red,” he said in a reasoning voice, as if calling him to reconsider this last, drastic action. The sky shimmered. “Red,” he said again, as if Red were indeed close by. Oh, the dark, leathery leaves, the spherical fruit, the trajectory of a swallow! The more Lewis looked around, the more exquisite everything seemed, those wispy clouds, the fine sparkle of mist and dust. He could see the glint of pale golden sunlight on everything—dried blond weeds, granite rocks, even on the pollen and motes in the air; all of it was shining, shining, as if Red’s love had burst upon the world and settled evenly, briefly, over everything.

  HUNDREDS of the farm’s sober alumni and every recovery professional in a fifty-mile radius showed up at the Blue House for the AA meeting that night. The ballroom was SRO. Barbara, Celia, and Kip had driven up from Los Angeles. Lewis stood against the front wall and watched people arrive, greet each other, hug. Everyone looked stunned, their faces swollen, their movements awkward.

  About ten minutes after the meeting started, David slipped in beside Lewis. “Libby’s still in the hospital,” he whispered. “She started bleeding and the doctors are afraid she’s going to miscarry.”

  Julie Swaggart led the meeting. She told everyone that Red had suffered a massive heart attack; it was unlikely he would have survived even if he hadn’t lost control of the truck. He was probably dead before he crashed.

  Julie said Red embodied experience, strength, and hope for all alcoholics. She said he’d been as dear and necessary to her as her own husband and children. “I remember when I first saw him in meetings. He was around forty and still limping from his accident and trying to sort out his life. He was so sweet and lost. Worried about his son, and couldn’t decide if he should continue practicing law. …

  “Six years later, when I came to work for him, he’d become the Red Hornet. Couldn’t sit still. Coffee, cigarettes, and go-go-go. He used to say, ‘Julie, everybody should be happy to hire the alcoholic. They have to do the work of three people to feel as good as one.’ But he always made time for the men. Whenever I couldn’t find him, I knew where he was—glad-handing the sorriest guy at the house, the one everybody else had written off as a lost cause.

  “Red imprinted everybody he met,” Julie concluded. “And his imprint was love.”

  She called on a man named Luke, a little bald guy who had been one of Round Rock’s first residents. “Oh, we had a ball here that first year,” Luke said. “I did the cooking when Ernie wanted a night off. Everybody pitched in, with everything. Red was just one of us. Red and Frank. Sure, Red supposedly had his own place over the other side of the ranch, but most mornings we found him sleeping in the library.

  “We’d go into Buchanan for meetings, and on the way to and fro we’d stop in at the Copper Coffeepot with Frank. Always the Copper Coffeepot. And every goddamn time, even if he’d just done it two hours ago, Red gave the waitresses five bucks to sing Frank ‘Happy Birthday’ and bring him a slice of cake with candles. Frank would light his cigarette off the candles. …

  “To this day, when I’m in a mess or don’t know what to do, I always think, What would Red do? And it’s always the same thing. Pray. Write some kind of inventory. Talk to another alcoholic. Pause, give yourself a little room to think.”

  Gabriel, who spoke next, had known Red in his drinking days. “If you think he was generous sober, you should’ve seen him drunk. He’d buy drinks for fifty people all night long. I waited five years after Red to get sober myself. He was my scout. He looked good to me, happy, and that’s what gave me courage. I’d say to myself, Look at Red Ray. He loved his drink, but now he loves his life.

  “I came to Round Rock just when Red started the Sunday softball games, and I never figured out where he learned to pitch like that. He’d send you these way-out, swoopy thunkers you couldn’t hit off. The more sober you got, the more those pitches confounded….”

  Gabriel stepped down and Doc Perrin, weeping openly, came to the podium.

  “I remember the day fourteen, fifteen years ago when this rank damn crippled newcomer says he wants to turn his estate into a drunk farm. A crazy fucking deal. Thing was, we needed a house. There wasn’t any kind of halfway facility anywhere around here, unless you count the Good Brothers Home, where they fed you oatmeal and Jesus at every meal. We’d send people out to Camarillo and Acton back then. They’d bounce back to us in a few months, worse than ever, livers shot, yellow as baby damn ducks.

  “I said, ‘Red, you get a board of directors and a good lawyer and let’s go to work.’ Like Luke said, Red got sober with this farm. He grew up here. And everyone on the farm grew up with him. He took whoever was here through all the phases of his own sobriety. Around two and a half years sober, he went spiritual on us. Hired a farm chaplain, mostly so he could have long, theological discussions with him. Is George here?”

  A man waved from the center of the crowd.

  “Well, you’ll remember,” Perrin said. “For months, maybe years, it was Meister Eckhart all the time. ‘God is neither this nor that’ … ‘God is the foundation without foundation.’ Remember how he was always quoting? ‘Flee and hide yourself before the storm of inner thoughts, for they create a lack of peace.’ Remember?

  “Then he hooked up with this Jungian therapist, and all he wanted to talk about were dreams. He had these wild theories. He’d tell you his dreams and analyze yours. He was good at it, too. I used to call him up with dreams all the time and he’d say to me, ‘Is it right, Doc? ’Cause a dream isn’t interpreted until the dreamer says it is.’

  “Next it was transcendental meditation. He’d pay out of his own pocket if anyone wanted to learn to do it. He put out hundreds of dollars getting people to meditate. He even got me to, only he made me pay my own way. He was generous, but he wasn’t a fool.

  “Greatest thing that ever happened to me was Red asking me to be his sponsor. He’s kept me sober all these years—you know, the drunk’s overdeveloped sense of responsibility. If I slip, I thought, who’ll keep an eye on that crazy SOB and all you sorry drunks at the house?

  “I’m gonna tell all of you hardheaded bastards something. You think you kick alcohol, you’re in the clear. But the other stuff is just sitting there, waiting to jump you. This disease moves sideways, right into cigarettes, coffee, sugar, food, gambling, women, adrenaline, you name it. So if you guys want to do something in memory to Red, throw away those damn cigarettes. Start drinking water.”

  Before closing the meeting, Julie took a straw poll. “Just out of curiosity,” she said, “let’s see the hands of the people Red sponsored in this room.” About forty people, including Lewis, raised their hands, and then everybody else’s hands went up, too
.

  BARBARA AND LEWIS drove to the hospital early, before he had to start lunch. They’d picked a large bouquet of roses, which Barbara took up to Libby’s room. Lewis went to see Red’s body, but an orderly at the morgue told him Red had been sent to the coroner’s for an autopsy and after that would be cremated.

  Lewis couldn’t stop thinking about the last time he’d seen him. Before leaving for Ventura, Red had come to get the food order. He told Lewis he was taking Libby to Yosemite in a few days. He seemed harried, distracted. “Oh, live it up, Redsy,” Lewis told him. “You guys deserve a break.”

  Then that conversation on the phone—was he the last person to talk to Red?—and the revelation about Gustave. … Last night, before all the people poured in for the meeting, Lewis tied the dog to a tree and left him howling and baying his terrible cry.

  After being turned away at the morgue, Lewis went up to the hospital’s third floor. He didn’t know if Libby would want to see him, so he waited outside her door for Barbara. Pacing the hall, peering into rooms, he saw extremely old people sprawled in their beds. Why Red? he thought. Why not these people already fragile as tissue?

  When Barbara came out of Libby’s room, she was crying. Lewis held her, breathing through her crumpled curls. “She wants to see you,” Barbara said, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “She’s really distraught, so just ride it out with her. It’s okay if you give in to it.”

  Libby’s face was gray, her eyes sunken. She looked drugged and gaunt, and Lewis was frightened both for her and by her. An older, deeply tan woman with a cap of white hair sat in a chair close to the bed. “Mom?” Libby said, and the woman stood up on cue and moved toward the door.

  “I’m Evelyn, Libby’s mother,” said the woman. She regarded Lewis with evident, probably chronic disapproval. “Please don’t stay long. She doesn’t need so many visitors, it’s getting her all worked up.”

  “Mom,” Libby said.

  “The doctor told you to stay quiet,” she said, then left before Lewis could introduce himself.