Rain struck the canopy of leaves. I groped for library book, trowel, candles, the purple knapsack. I eased aside thorny stems, stepped tentatively onto fallen leaves that sponged underfoot. Immediately the soles of my Keds sank deep into sucking mud. Mud that was, apparently, mined. There was no way of knowing where to walk. Quietly I whispered, “Okay, buried foot, I’ve done my part, now you do yours and get me out of here.”
Sure enough, a voice spoke. “Pete.”
I looked up to see a man with tangled hair. He was standing beside a tree. His clothes were soiled, dirt messed his face and arms. He was immense. He said, “It’s me, Pete, Ray. Ray Conover.”
“Ray?”
The man stepped forward, leaned in close. “You wouldn’t recognize me, would you, Pete?”
“Uh, no.”
He raised his arms and waved his hands, wildly, for emphasis. “Grief changes a person, Pete. Once I was happy. I was. Look at me. I’ve aged, my teeth hurt. You, your world is intact. Oh, you’re out here tonight doing unfathomable things. But tomorrow you’ll be in a warm bed beside a person you love. I don’t have that anymore. This is my home now.”
“The park? You live in the park? There’s a war going on here.”
“Yeah, well.” How sad the man sounded. How dejected. I decided to be up front with him. In a firm but cordial voice, I said, “Listen, Ray, I’d love to spend some time talking, but I also want to get out of these woods.”
“Sure, Pete. No problem.”
And so off we went, rain smacking our heads and the slushy ground underfoot. From the tops of trees, narrow vines descended; Ray and I made our way through their tangle, clutching twisted tree limbs for balance, stepping around roots. It was slippery going through those woods. Everywhere life crowded in. I placed my feet where Ray’d set his, and with each step tensed for a buried trigger’s click. It was awful. Ray said, “I watched what you were doing, Pete. The burial. The eulogy. Why, Pete?”
“I want a better world.”
“So you buried a foot.”
“Not just a foot. More. Much more.”
I tripped on a root. This was terrifying under the circumstances. A few minutes later lightning struck nearby, lighting the woods instantaneously neon—I was certain it was the end, and hit the dirt and rolled, coming to rest sprawled piteously on my stomach in a patch of weeds, my hands covering the back of my head, the way they’re supposed to, reflexively, when a bomb goes off. Ray came over, stood above me, said, “Whoopsie!” and helped me to my feet. Pine needles and leafy rot adhered to my clothes and skin; I was covered in mud. I brushed off as best I could, but it was more like smearing body paint. I asked, “So, Ray, what can you tell me about this Benson-Webster thing?”
“Not much. It’s the old story. Someone does something and someone else does something back. After that things have a life of their own. Who can say what it’s about anymore? The Bensons have the southern triangle from Lighthouse Point to the boathouse. The bandshell, goldfish pond, and Japanese pagoda belong to the Websters. This is neutral territory we’re in right now. Watch out, there’s a log ahead.”
“Thanks.” I stepped over and we moved on. Ray told me, “Other parkside families are taking sides. The Lloyds with the Websters, the Glazers with the Bensons. Coalitions are developing.”
“They’ve captured Chuck Webster.”
“That’s too bad, Chuck’s a good guy. There’s a sinkhole up here, careful. Remember that time Paul and Cindy Garrison’s daughter Mindy fell off Jack Conley’s glass-bottom reef-tour boat, and no one realized it until everybody saw Mindy through the glass, about to get run over by the propeller, and Chuck dove in and fetched her out and gave her mouth-to-mouth? I always admired that.”
Ray ducked beneath a branch. I ducked after him. He guided a path through brambles and ferns that gave onto a wall of leaves hanging like black curtains. “Here we are, my friend,” he said, stepping out of the forest and onto a narrow white beach: the peninsular tip of Turtle Pond Park. We’d gone away from, not toward, town. Waves were coming in close. Salt smells blended with the complex atmospheric odors that accompany rough weather in this part of the world, forming a cool perfume evocative of the miseries of childhood. Here in the wide open the wind was fierce, and it didn’t take long to get soaked. Ray hollered, “My world’s gone, Pete. There’s no logic left. Kunkel was crazy, he caused deaths. Miriam’s. Other people’s.”
“Ray, I know you’re in pain. I wish it hadn’t happened, hadn’t had to happen. Jim was warning us. He was sending a message.”
Ray shivered, his teeth chattered. “There is no way that I can accept that.”
I reached into the knapsack and brought out The Egyptian Book of the Dead. “Got a light?” I scooped a hollow in the sand, then tore pages from the book and crumpled them into a pile in the shallow campfire depression. I knelt over, guarding paper from pelting rain, and said, “Hate to do this to a book, especially a library copy.” Ray said, “Well, anyway, no one except you is ever going to want to check that out.” He crouched down and butane-lit a page; as the fire caught and kindled I added more pages; I kept ripping out text. Surf broke and rolled nearly to our shoes. We warmed our hands above incendiary hieroglyphics soaring aloft on convective heat, tumbling wetly up the beach, and Ray told me, “I want a better world too, Pete.”
“Then help me. Join my school. Become a teacher.”
“Me?”
“You have so much to offer. You can stock an aquarium. Take the kids wading in tidal pools, go snorkling over the reef. The pay’s not great but the rewards are priceless.” I had a feeling, as I said this, of conviction: the home school was more than a kitchen table fancy. By pitching the vision to potential colleagues—first Ben, now Ray—I made intention tangible; and I knew, whether the feral biologist signed on or not—I knew the school would come to pass.
Ray felt my enthusiasm. “I could teach?”
“Why not?”
“I’m a researcher.”
“You know things, Ray. Look around. The ocean, the sky, this terrible weather. It’s all happening. The world at work. Your world.”
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
I ripped more pages. Lightning struck over the water. I counted slowly to seven before hearing thunder rumble in above waves crashing onto nearby rocks littered with cast-up debris. That meant the storm was seven miles out to sea. So it was moving away. As if that mattered. Everything was drenched. The fire was a lost cause. I raised my hands with palms turned upward and cupped to catch rain, and drank a libation of sweet rainwater. Ray, too, cupped his hands and drank. He exclaimed, “In the beginning of time, this is what there was.”
“Ray, are you hungry? Break bread with me.”
That’s when I discovered my fig bars’ contaminated condition. Not by eating one myself but by watching Ray eat one. He spat fig. Talk about your difficult moments. But wasn’t it fitting?—the bereaved taking into his mouth the blood of his wife’s executioner. Ray couldn’t see the elegance of this symmetry, he was too busy going berserk from the putridity of blood and rot that had entered his mouth via a leaked-on fig bar; and he was saying words to me, attempting to anyway—something garbled I couldn’t quite make out but that was, judging from tone and inflection, harshly accusatory. He got up then and started walking away. Staggering, actually, was more like what he was doing; he staggered, retching, down the beach. What could I say? Let him go. I have to admit I was relieved to find myself alone again. But I felt sorry, too, that our evening had come to this distressing close, because, crummy weather aside—wasn’t the weather an integral part of the evening? Hadn’t the weather in some ways defined the evening?—rotten weather aside, our hour together on the beach, watching the world and feeling exposed to elemental forces, had been, as Ray himself had claimed, beautiful.
At dawn the storm passed. It was half a mile to Midnight Pass and the old humpbacked bridge sportsmen favor for grouper and snook. Walking on sand was tiring; I rested on a bridge
railing and let the heat of morning dry me. No one out fishing today, which was odd, seeing as it was a Saturday. Perhaps it was the wrong time of day. Maybe wisdom or fear regarding storms kept the cane-pole fishermen home in their beds. I’m not much of an angler myself. I trekked along the South Main flood canal, checking the black water for nictitating opalescent eyelids of partly submerged gators. South Main intersects with palm-lined Osprey Avenue. Left on Osprey, it was a mile to town. My shoes were full of sand; I took them off and banged them against a tree. After the Tarpon Bank Savings and Loan I crossed an unfortified yard—a few still remained—coming out between two birdbaths onto Water Street. Three blocks away sat the Southshore branch of the public library, opposite which I paused to enter the tall bushes and, checking to make sure no one could see, urinated quickly, before zipping up and coming out to study the library bulletin board advertising poetry clubs, garden societies, yard sales, bake sales (including one to raise money for the failing library system), babysitting services, papier-mâché workshops, housepainting, handgun seminars, car repair, and lawn work. A printed handbill announced that night’s big town meeting out at Terry Heinemann’s Clam Castle. Another poster, elegantly hand-lettered in purple Magic Marker and rubber-cemented with scissor-cut crayon renderings of famous storybook characters, detailed the library’s Saturday morning Mother and Child Story Time program.
It was six-thirty. Story Time was scheduled to begin in an hour. It warmed my heart to see programs like this being offered. I’d managed to save the binding and a few index pages of The Egyptian Book of the Dead; if I waited a bit, I could drop them off on my way home, then stay on at the library and witness this vital childcare service in action. I crossed the street and hid behind a car fitted with a wide-angle passenger-side rearview mirror perfectly angled for personal grooming. My hair was matted. I finger-combed it, using spit for styling. There wasn’t much I could do without a proper bath. Saliva did at least remove a layer of thicker grit plastered like a fright mask on my face, but my nails were mechanic’s nails, my arms the arms of a dirt farmer.
At seven, Rita Henderson, our volunteer head librarian, arrived in her Buick. She unlocked the library and went inside—my cue to tuck in my shirt and shuffle out of concealment. At first I was afraid to confront Rita. I loitered awhile in Young Adult. It’s my business, after all, as an educator, to keep abreast of school-age literature. I have to say that I was shocked by the number of YA volumes dealing with death in one form or another: the loss of a sibling, a parent, a friend, a pet; cancer, addiction, war. And the fiction! Title after title featuring orphans.
“Why, Pete Robinson, is that you?”
“Oh, Rita, hi.” Time to approach the checkout desk. I watched Rita raise her eyes to take in my face and arms splotchy with leaf and scum. I’d sustained scratches on my knees and ankles; dried blood discolored socks and shoes. What a mess. I felt that hot-under-the-collar tingle that accompanies lying to an authority figure, when I said, “Say there, Rita, I just had a little accident with a library book.”
“Oh dear.”
“Yeah, well, here it is,” removing the destroyed tome from the knapsack and placing it gently on the counter. She stared at its sad dust jacket swaddling bent boards and unglued, water-bloated paper shreds. The spine was collapsed, ink was running—it was pathetic. I went on, “I was doing my morning mowing and hedge trimming, you know. I honestly have no idea how the book managed to get into those weeds.”
“You defaced this with a hedge trimmer?”
“Mower, actually. Yes, it was, I believe, I’m sure in fact, the mower.”
She gave me a look. “Hmn.”
“A riding mower. That’s why the damage is so bad. Those things have monster blades.”
“Indeed.”
Now other people filed into the library, mothers bringing their kids to Story Time. They looked me over and stopped. There was Sheila Moody with her son, Steven, a sensitive boy who’d attended kindergarten two years before. And there was little Susy Jordan, cradling in her baby-fat arms the same ragged plastic doll she’d toted through first grade. What a sweetheart. I called to Susy’s mother, “Good morning, Jenny.” And I said, “Hello, Steven. Hello, Susy. Hey, it’s story time, isn’t it?”
“Answer the man,” Jenny Jordan instructed her daughter.
“Yes.”
“And what is today’s story?”
“Don’t know.”
“Today we’ve scheduled The Legend of Pocahontas,” Rita Henderson said.
“Ah. Our national lore. That’s fine.”
Rita told the mothers and children, “Mr. Robinson here has been having lawn troubles.” Well, you could feel their skepticism. I grinned deliberately stupidly and exclaimed, “Ran over a library book. Riding mower. High gear. Couldn’t stop. Sticks and rocks flying.” Rita’s apparent acceptance of my “lawn mower” con offered me comfort and strength; it served to integrate me with the larger community represented by these family groups. I milked the role of benign neighborhood duffer by boasting to the gathered throng, “I guess I’m not much good with lawn tools. Say, Rita, you wouldn’t happen to have some hot coffee, would you?”
“We’ve got coffee and doughnuts in back. I’ll bring some out. Don’t you worry about this book. Accidents do happen. You’re lucky you didn’t lose a hand or a foot. Why don’t you sit down and unwind a bit.”
“Thanks, I’d like that.” I watched moms and kids file into the Juvenile section. Juvenile is my favorite of all the special collections in the library. Along with, maybe, History. The Juvenile section is decorated with colorful, messy finger paintings and a collection of kids’ Play-Doh statues of anthropomorphic beings, marbles stuck as eyes in their heads. Juvenile has its very own card catalogue and semicircular seating unit, one of those comfortable wraparound sofa environments, scaled down to youngster size and richly pillowed in stuffed animals: polar bears, kittens, multicolored birds, lions and tigers, an elephant, a bison. Beholding those kids hopping, now, into that playtime bestiary—it filled me with joy. I headed right on over and reclined among them, little Susy on my right, Steven and Brad to my left. Susy grabbed a python. Steven cuddled a bear. I got the bison. Other kids completed the circle, a boy named David and his redheaded infant brother, Tim; a puffy girl named Jane who looked like she’d been crying recently. Most were preschoolers. They all clutched animals and stared my way with wide gazes. One, an auburn-haired girl of, I guess, five or six, dressed in a floral-print jumper and saddle oxfords that wore friendly smiling schnauzers’ faces sewn onto their uppers, said, “Hi, mister.”
“Hi.”
“Are you a monster?”
“Sarah!” her mother scolded from a folding chair beside the World Books. I said to the mother, “It’s okay,” and I asked Sarah, “Do I look like a monster?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” Sarah’s mother said to me. To her daughter, in treacly, charm school cadences, she said, “Do not be a rude child.”
I noticed Jenny Jordan blanching at the sound of this fierce other mom. I winked at Jenny (it was good to have an ally), then explained, patiently, “Sarah, there are two kinds of monsters. The real kind are scary and evil, and you always want to watch out for that kind of monster. Then there’s another kind that’s not a monster at all, just a person having a rough day.”
“Like my dad?” Sarah asked. All I could do was chuckle, “Heh heh. Kids.”
Luckily Rita arrived with refreshments. “How do you take your coffee, Mr. Robinson?”
“Black.” I flipped the bison on its back and balanced my Styrofoam cup on its synthetic-hair tummy. Rita addressed the gathering, “Mr. Robinson is married to a mermaid, isn’t that nice?”
“Oh,” cried mothers.
“Well,” I said.
“Now don’t you be modest, Mr. Robinson. Meredith is a special person, and we’re fortunate to have her in our town.” Rita took up an oversized volume emblazoned with four-color images of Native Americans e
nacting ceremonial violence. She held the book up to show a black-haired female helplessly watching a bare-chested chieftain sporting a feathered headband and hoisting a rock poised to descend onto the head of a trussed and bound white man. Rita pointed out, “This is Pocahontas, the beautiful Indian maiden, and this man with the rock is her father, Powhatan, and this man here is Captain Smith, the man Pocahontas secretly loves, and here is their story. Everybody ready?”
“Ready!” chorused the kids. What a sound. I only wished Meredith could’ve been present to hear that happy racket. Meredith was probably just waking up. I pictured my wife rising sleepily from bed and walking to the bathroom for her morning shower; I saw her brown hands rotating faucet knobs for hot but not too hot; I imagined her sudsing up, and felt blessed, there in that library resounding with cries of children, blessed for this woman of beauty and intelligence, sharing my life. I might, one day, earn political glory, and that would be fine. But she was an absolute gift, not to be undervalued. Her skin. Her hair. Her voice.
Rita Henderson read, “‘Now Pocahontas was a very distinctive princess. Smart, pretty, and skilled at sports. Hers was a simple life. Forest creatures were her friends.’”
The pre-schoolers cradled their inanimate pets. I held my bison and stroked its downy ears. The image of Meredith in her shower rose up, rose up in my mind and in my heart, thrilling and pacifying me. Rita continued, “‘One day, voyagers arrived in Pocahontas’s land. Brave, strong men, sailing the ocean in ships.’”
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel Page 6