Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  “I gotta get this recipe,” Lewis said.

  “Lard—that’s the secret,” said Libby. “When Gloria was browning the meatballs, I asked what smelled so good in there. ‘Manteca,’ she said. Pig fat. Nectar of the gods.”

  “I read that lard’s actually better for you than butter. Less cholesterol, more amino acids, something like that.”

  “Hey, you’re preaching to the converted.”

  They slurped up their noodles.

  “So, I called Billie,” said Libby.

  “You talked to her?”

  “No way. She didn’t pick up. I left a message.” Libby regarded the meatball balanced on her spoon. “I said, ‘I just have one question. What gives you the right to deprive your son of his father? That’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard. Every child has that right!’ Oh, I was really on my high horse.” She raised the meatball to her lips. “And I also said, ‘Come to think of it, you haven’t been very nice to me, either. Until you deal with some of this stuff and start treating people with some compassion and honesty, I don’t think I can be your friend.” Libby popped the meatball into her mouth.

  “You said that?”

  “I know, I know,” Libby said with her mouth full. “Can you believe it?”

  Lewis started to laugh. “You dumped her?”

  Libby paused to swallow. “I know David’s far from blameless, but at least he tried to correct his mistakes. I believe in him. He and Little Bill do seem to have a good, open—”

  “Wait a sec, Lib. You told Billie you wouldn’t be her friend anymore?”

  “This is what gets me,” Libby said. “Billie always says people don’t change. It’s her war cry. But she’s the only one who never changed. I mean, look at all of us. Who knew we’d end up here, together, slogging through all this?”

  OBEDIENCE TRAINING for Adult Dogs was taught Saturday mornings in Buchanan’s Plaza Park. Before he could enroll Gustave, Lewis had to take him in for shots. The vet said he was about fifteen months old, healthy as a horse, and probably half large terrier—Airedale or schnauzer—and half Great Dane.

  When Gustave met the other dogs, he spooked, barked like a hellion, did his usual cower-and-piss routine, and otherwise identified himself as the class problem. The teacher, a middle-aged corgi breeder named Beverly, was reassuring. “Obedience training exists to help dogs like Gus.”

  The Santa Bernita is a small valley, so Lewis wasn’t surprised to know two of the other dog owners. One was Carl, his first roommate at Round Rock, who had stayed sober and was still teaching high-school biology; Lewis had seen him briefly at Red’s funeral. Carl had a shiny chocolate Labrador named Valrhona, Val for short. They walked to the drinking fountain during the break, dogs lunging on their leashes. “I’m still in shock over Red,” Carl said.

  “I really miss him,” said Lewis.

  They stood kicking at the grass until the dogs whined and pulled them back to the present.

  Lewis’s other acquaintance was Phyllis, formerly his favorite waitress at Denny’s. He didn’t recognize her at first because she’d stopped bleaching her hair. She was now a short-haired, nondescript brunette, boyish, still skinny, though not quite so severe-looking as before. Phyllis’s dog, Tessie, was a peculiar little terrier mix that looked more like a badger.

  “Denny’s was a cesspool,” she told Lewis after class. “My boss stalked me, called me up drunk at all hours. I had to quit.” She had moved in with her mom and gone to massage school. “I found out I liked learning physiology and anatomy.” Now she was working toward a nursing degree, making straight A’s, and giving massages at a physical therapy clinic in Buchanan.

  “Wanna meet Ralph?” she asked.

  Ralph, her son, had parked himself away from the class because Tessie couldn’t concentrate at all if he was in sight. A skinny teenager lying on a blanket in the sun and reading a book, Ralph had stringy brown hair, a sunken chest, and an undernourished pallor. He shook Lewis’s hand, said it was nice to meet him, and looked him in the eye. Lewis liked him right away. Phyllis gave Ralph a ten-dollar bill to buy burritos and Cokes. “You want something?” she asked Lewis.

  “That’s okay,” he said.

  She turned to Ralph. “Don’t let them put that fire juice on mine or I’ll kill you.” Ralph started smirking. “Don’t think I won’t,” she growled. “I’ll wring your neck.” Her son danced off, waving her money.

  “He’s a good kid,” she said.

  They sat down on Ralph’s blanket and Lewis saw he was studying algebra and Spanish.

  Phyllis touched Lewis’s arm. “Where you been?”

  Her eyes were gray-green, her skin freckled. She was a good listener; she nodded at appropriate moments, made sympathetic noises. When Lewis told her about Red’s sudden death, and his own decision to stay on at Round Rock, she said, “It sounds like you’re a good friend to those people there. I hope they appreciate you.”

  “Oh, they do.”

  “So what’s anybody doing for you?”

  “They’re all nice, you know.”

  “Nice?” Phyllis said. “All right. Lie down.” She patted the blanket. “On your stomach.” Lewis did as ordered, resting his chin on the edge of the blanket. Grass blades speared his nose. Tessie and Gustave chased each other in large circles around them. Quickly, Phyllis straddled his rump and placed her hands on his upper back. She pushed her fingers into his shoulders and neck. It had been so many months since Lewis had been touched that he was flooded with gratitude and something cool and shadowy, like sorrow.

  “Take off your T-shirt,” Phyllis said. She moved instinctively to little pockets of stored pain and crunched them with her thumbs until he squirmed and groaned. She lifted his arms and jiggled them.

  “Relax,” she said. “Give me all your weight. Let go. Give it up, Lewis, for crying out loud.”

  The sun bore down. Phyllis’s hands ranged up and down his spine, quarrying pain with alarming precision. The dogs barked and ran around them faster and faster, their paws thudding, sometimes so close that grass and dirt sprayed the side of Lewis’s face and he felt the near-rasp of a toenail.

  Phyllis slowed down, then rested her hands on his back. His body rang. She climbed off, and he pulled himself up to look at her. His arms were wobbly. They gave each other a long look, the kind that usually ends in a kiss. And Lewis meant to reach up, grasp the back of her neck, pull her to him. But he made no move. With Phyllis, he saw, it could go either way, kiss or no kiss. She wore a sly smile. The air itself seemed taut. He liked looking at her sharp, pretty face, those deadpan eyes, the slightly upturned lips. Kissing would break the tension. He held off for a moment, and a moment after that, amazed that anyone could actually stop to consider such things, and then amazed again at how keen and sweet the holding off itself was, as if the anticipation alone had bloomed into some bright, open space.

  Abruptly, the dogs threw themselves down, panting, on the grass nearby. Their tongues were pink and very long. Phyllis burst out laughing; then, gazing past Lewis, she pointed. “Look, here’s Ralph, bearing burritos across the park.”

  A BAND of contractors had slid into Rito in late summer and built fifteen townhouse condominium units across from the packing plant. The construction crews worked so fast with truckloads of prefabricated products, that a model unit was ready for viewing by early September.

  The condos, Libby asserted, proved that Billie Fitzgerald was moving away, because otherwise she would have fought the zoning variance with routine ferocity.

  Most of Rito’s inhabitants had never lived in a brand-new place, and some of the women were taken with the air conditioning, wall-to-wall carpets, and dishwashers. When word came that a number of the condos would be leased, and that the management would accept social-service housing vouchers, a contingent from the Mills Hotel walked down to check out the units. They walked home decrying paper-thin walls, windows flimsy as cellophane, tiny toilets. The wall-to-wall, they said, smelled like fish. A few young
couples made down payments and moved in, but most of the units remained empty.

  At Round Rock, David Ibañez became the new director. He talked Pauline into leaving her pain clinic for consulting work; she would move up in two months. They didn’t yet know where on the farm they’d live, because Libby hadn’t decided which place she’d inhabit after the baby came: the new house on the ridge, her old house on Howe Lane, or Red’s bungalow in the village.

  Lewis’s friend Kip became the new house manager. He couldn’t make a living with his acting, he said, and helping drunks recover might beat waiting tables, at least for a while.

  The farm’s unwritten no-women rule was broken when David and Libby hired a young woman from the Culinary Institute. Lewis, then, went back to working full-time in the office. After much fine-tuning and fretting, Lewis finally turned in his dissertation the last week of September. Promptly accepting it, his committee wanted to see him for the defense in two weeks’ time.

  Libby grew enormous. “Maybe I’m having a pony,” she said. “That would be fine, so long as she’s healthy.” Libby’s face puffed up, her ankles swelled. Turning over, she claimed, was a major endeavor. Barbara came up two weekends in a row, and the two of them watched marathons of videos and planned the birth, which began to seem more like an open house than a hospital procedure. A Lamaze home tutor came; Barbara and David Ibañez both took the instruction so that one, the other, or both could coach her through labor. Pauline was also invited to attend the birth, and Gloria, of course, and even Lewis.

  “Me?” Lewis said to Libby. “You want me there?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Dearest Red, It’s over eight months now. The cerclage was removed yesterday and any time, the doctor says, we can have a healthy baby. I have a monitor now—it’s for a baby, but it’s also wired to Lewis’s house, so I can be alone here for the night without worrying that I’ll be too whacked out to remember anyone’s number.

  I can’t tell you how glorious it is to walk outside. I’ve been so bored in this bed all these large, long days. I think I have missed you with every cell in my body, one by one. I have cried my weight in tears—certainly in tears and also, probably, in phlegm. (Why is it nobody ever talks about that part of weeping?)

  WHEN Lewis returned from the successful defense of his dissertation, he and David spent the rest of the afternoon teaching Gustave not to run at cars. Libby watched from her back stoop. David had Gustave on a heavy-duty retractable leash. Lewis would peel out with all the provocation his Fairlane could muster and when Gustave leapt, David yelled “No!,” threw on the lock, and pulled as if he were setting the hook in an eighty-pound yellowfin. “Sit!” he thundered.

  Gustave sat, and David rewarded him with a hunk of hamburger. Gustave remained sitting, shivering madly. Lewis backed up, over and over. Again and again he hit the gas. Gustave was a fast learner: after four leaps, he sat through every kind of fishtail or popped gear. Enough hamburger, thought Libby, and that dog could learn English.

  Next, Lewis switched to the Mercedes, and then to David’s Land Cruiser. Poor Gustave, unleashed, quaking in all his subdued instincts, allowed the vehicles to pass without incident.

  Lewis gave the dog’s head a jubilant, thorough scratching. “He really should’ve won Best Dog at obedience school, and not just Most Improved.”

  Libby clapped, and Gustave ran free for the first time since the day Red died.

  Okay Red, now this. Lewis says, since he’s finished his dissertation, he has to have a big project, one that will keep him going. He’s going to write a novel. A novel for our entertainment. Starring him, he says (big surprise). But we can all have supporting roles (such largesse). I promised I’d read through my journals for the juicy bits. He already wrote the prologue and read it to David and me last night. We laughed at every sentence; it’s all about the Santa Bernita Valley, and the oddballs who live here. He makes some stuff up about people—he made Yolanda into a nun! And you, it includes you, baby. You’re there, you and this crazy drunk farm.

  JOURNAL in hand, Libby knocked on Lewis’s door. “You can’t believe how good it is to walk again. Even though I’ve metamorphosed into an elephant.”

  Lewis wasn’t expecting company. Clothes were clumped everywhere, stacks of papers listed, dust bunnies drifted over the floor. “Sorry it’s such a mess,” he said.

  “Looks like a bachelor pad, Lewis. Do you want me to send my housekeeper over?”

  “No. Thanks anyway. The inability to take care of myself is one of the few things I have left to attract a woman.”

  “Attracting women has never been your problem, Lewis,” Libby said flatly, and pulled out a chair at the dinette. The pile of papers on the chair slid onto the floor. Libby looked on helplessly as Lewis gathered them up. “So,” she said, “is there, uh, one particular woman for whom you’re setting this irresistible bait?”

  “No, not really,” he said, straightening the papers. “Sometimes I think about Phyllis.”

  “Not the masseuse? Now, she’s a kick in the head,” said Libby. “So funny. But tough.”

  “Yeah,” said Lewis. “She fed her ex-husband ant poison.”

  “My God! Did he get sick?”

  “That’s exactly what I asked. Shit, yeah, he got sick. He ate ant poison, for God’s sake.”

  “Well, it sounds like she’d keep you in line. And think of all those free massages.” Libby lowered herself carefully onto the now-empty chair and held up the journal. “I brought this. I wanted to read to you about our wedding.”

  “It won’t upset you?”

  “I’ll probably cry, if that’s what you mean. But I do want to read it to you.” She opened the journal, smoothed the pages. Her face had taken on a healthy pinkness. “It doesn’t make you uncomfortable, hearing about Red and me?”

  “Oh, maybe a little,” said Lewis. “But I do want to hear it.”

  She smiled. “Okay, then. I should say that originally, we were going to be married in Bakersfield by George, who used to be the chaplain here. Then we’d go on up to the cabin in the Sierras we’d rented for our honeymoon. It was supposed to be no big deal. But Billie wanted to be at the wedding, so Red arranged for George to meet us at the park in Fort Tejon. All to pacify Billie. Although I liked the idea of being married outside in the middle of winter. Okay. That’s the intro.”

  Libby lifted the journal and began to read.

  “The fourteenth, Valentine’s Day, was a beautiful, clear winter day. Glassy white sun. In the seventies in the Santa Bernita, although freezing in the shade. Billie and the Bills pick me up five minutes early. She has a garment bag for our jackets.

  “The Bills, that unusual trinity, carry me to my future in the great white truck.” Libby paused. “Also Billie’s idea. That we’d meet Red there, so the bridegroom wouldn’t see the bride.”

  “Right, that traditional thing.”

  “Billie has selected Handel and Debussy to accompany us. The cottonwoods along the river, bare but for their high tufts of flame-yellow leaves, light our way. Old Bill dozes. Little Bill snaps pictures. We find the park—it’s right off the highway. Red and George are waiting in the parking lot. Red is in gray slacks, elegant salmon-colored shirt, no tie, jacket slung over his back. (Why are men never cold?) The expression on his face could only be described as comic dread.

  “I assume that he’s stewing in hideous second thoughts. What’s up? I ask.

  “He says, Oh, nothing really, although I don’t know what it portends for married life: It seems we’ve stumbled into the Civil War.

  “And it’s true, as we walk up into the park, there are hundreds of people in Civil War dress milling around. Bluecoats and graycoats, and women in long cotton skirts and shawls, lots of cleavage. The softball diamonds are a battlefield. Regiments assemble in straggly phalanxes. Men carry muskets. The smell of cordite hangs in the air. Sporadic, heart-seizing Rebel yells erupt. Concession stands and vendors sell black powder, medals, bedrolls.

  �
�Red says, I’ve always sort of admired Stonewall Jackson.

  “Billie says, I told you we should’ve had this wedding in my courtyard.

  “We find a semi-quiet space on the far side of a large, covered pergola. George says, This won’t take long.

  “Billie and I go to the bathroom, a stone building with hosed-down concrete floors, rust-stained sinks. It’s full of war wives. Women dressed like ancestors. I feel self-conscious pulling on the crisp ivory jacket to my suit. Billie pins a corsage to my lapel and tells all the women, She’s tying the knot. The women cluster. I hear Oklahoma twangs.

  “Gettin’ married in pants? That takes nerve! says one woman—admiringly, I think.

  “Billie looks terrific in a gray Armani suit and pearls.

  “I take a deep breath.

  “Billie tells me to join the men while she hauls our discarded sweaters to the car. I walk over, heels poking into the grass, and stand awkwardly, squeezing—no, wringing—Red’s hand. I’m afraid to sit on the picnic benches in these glowing, tusk-colored clothes.

  “Red has wet and combed his hair, his face has a naked look. Big eyes. Little Bill’s snapping a lot of pictures. Billie takes her time. I spot her talking to two women who scuttle off like plump partridges. Oh god, I mutter. She’s up to something.

  “We move into the small grassy space enclosed by a fence covered in dark green honeysuckle; it’s quieter. George positions himself in the corner. Red and I stand together, facing him. Old Bill is next to Red, Billie next to me. Little Bill is our diligent chronicler. Some of the women from the bathroom watch from a respectful distance. I shiver, though the sun is strong. Guns pop. Trucks lumber and downshift on the highway. George starts talking. It is a reasonable ceremony—I can’t recall a word of it. We manage the vows although one prolonged Rebel yell during Red’s recitation makes me giggle and briefly I’m afraid I’ll never stop.

  “It’s done, we kiss.