Among the Lesser Gods

by Margo Catts

  I could hear high-pitched chatter as we passed Sarah’s closed door. Kevin’s door hung half open, revealing an unmade bed and a pair of jeans on the floor, and the back door, half open as well, showed a sliver of uncut grass through the screen. Mindy opened the only other closed door, paused for a moment to look around, then said, “Ah! There we go.”

  A three-drawer dresser served as a bedside table, topped by a lamp, a half-empty glass of water, a dish containing some change and a paperclip and a couple of screws, then the phone and the flat black recording machine with its blinking light. Dust was thick in the dish and along the back of the dresser, though it looked like someone had tried to swipe the front part clean.

  “I’ve never used one,” I said. As close as we might have been to the same age, I felt a generation gap yawn between us. What need did anyone in my sphere have for an answering machine that would capture invitations to a Bad Company concert, date-stamped in proper order? Meanwhile, Mindy lived in a world of people arranging pediatrician appointments and needing to know whether a child had gotten hurt at school.

  “Easy.” Mindy pressed a button as I sat on the edge of the bed.

  A whir, a click, and then a voice I didn’t recognize: “Hey. I had to go to Mom’s. The kids are sleeping over at Cathy’s, so you can get them in the morning if you get back late. It’s just …” There was a long pause, a noise that might have been a sigh, then, “I really need to get away. I need it. But we’re gonna be fine, okay?” Another pause, then a click.

  Mindy looked at the machine for a moment, then pressed another button. Mindy’s voice: “Hi. Elena—it’s Mindy. I just wonder if I could bring Katy by for a little while this afternoon. I have to take Alex to the doctor and she’s driving me crazy. Let me know. It’s at two. Thanks—bye.” A click. Mindy pressed another button.

  “I erased it,” she whispered.

  “The whole thing?”

  “No—no. Just mine. It should be back to the way it was. I don’t think he’ll know you heard it.”

  I looked at the machine, then back up at Mindy. “That was Carrie, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded. Then dropped onto the bed beside me, Alex facing forward on her lap. She wrapped her arms around his belly. “The date was on the screen. It was the night she died.”

  Sarah’s door banged open hard against a doorstop that was only marginally successful in keeping her from putting dents in the wall, and the two girls flashed by the open bedroom door, a swirl of sundresses and loose blonde hair, wiry arms and legs. The screen door squealed, then clapped shut, leaving only emptiness behind them.

  “They were wearing shorts when they started,” I said.

  Mindy gave a half-laugh and rested her lips against Alex’s head. “Girls can’t do anything alone,” she finally said.

  We sat in silence while the sun played through the leaves outside the window and into our laps. Alex tugged at his shirt and watched his hands twist in the fabric.

  “Look, I don’t want be nosy,” I said, “but can I ask you some questions? About the Koffords, I mean.”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, so, why am I here, really? I mean, why doesn’t Paul just get a job at the mine like everybody else?”

  Mindy took a deep breath. “It’s—kinda complicated. His dad died in a mine accident when Paul was—I dunno. A kid. Anyway, his mom always felt like the dad was made into a scapegoat for the accident, that she didn’t get enough of a settlement. She wound up being kind of a nut around here, always going on about Climax being evil and trying to get more money. She only died a couple of years ago. I don’t know how Paul felt about it, but, this is Paul, you know? He’ll be loyal to his mother forever. I think it’s a principle thing to make it on his own, not walk in there with his hat in his hand asking for work.”

  “I get it,” I said. I sat for a moment, then took a deep breath. “Okay, next. Was Carrie pregnant when she died?”

  Mindy didn’t answer right away, then turned to face me, her cheek now resting on the baby’s head. “Why do you ask?”

  “Sarah said her mom was going to have a baby. And then she started talking about something else, so that’s all I know.”

  “Hmm.” She looked down and stretched the hem of Alex’s shirt to wipe a puddle of facial fluids that had started to form on her arm. “That makes sense, actually. The last time she did my hair I noticed this sleeve of crackers on her counter, and then one of the other girls walked by with a hamburger and she made some comment about the smell. So I remember I wondered for a sec. But she didn’t look sick—she looked really happy.” She put her lips back on the baby’s head. “Hmm,” she repeated. “I bet you’re right.” Another pause. “Wow.” And another. “I wonder if Paul knew.”

  “What?”

  She took a deep breath. “Carrie kept a lot of secrets. But she never kept them to herself. She’d tell one person something and say not to tell anybody else. Then she’d tell somebody else something different. And they usually weren’t any big deal—things like ‘I have a rip in this shirt—don’t tell anybody.’ Or ‘I took Sarah for ice cream. Don’t tell Paul.’ There was a lot of ‘don’t tell Paul.’”

  “You think she’d really tell her five-year-old and not her husband?”

  “Honestly?” Mindy nodded. “I do. I loved her, but it’s so easy to see her saying ‘It’s our little secret’ that I hardly have to try.”

  I pondered for a moment, then pushed my hands against my knees and stood. I went around the foot of the bed and swung the closet door all the way open. I tugged the string.

  “And what about this?” I asked.

  Mindy hitched one leg underneath herself and twisted toward the closet. It took a moment for her eyes to focus on the overflowing shelves.

  “Oh, that poor, poor man.”

  Sensing opportunity, Alex dove out of her arms, face-planting himself on the bed. Mindy let him go.

  I took a deep breath. “Mindy, I’m about to ask you one more thing you’ll probably just laugh at but I really, really need you to give me a serious answer.”

  She nodded.

  “Is there a chance, any chance at all, that Paul is going to give up and run away and leave me with these children?”

  Her eyes met mine and held. Mindy knew nothing about my history or her own, which made her answer all the more miraculous to me. “No. People can be incredibly selfish and stupid, but they aren’t all that way. That’s not what Carrie was doing when she died, and it’s not something Paul would ever do. He stood by Carrie no matter what. He will never leave his children. Never.”

  18

  Mindy had insisted on paying me back for my minimal babysitting by taking both children the next afternoon. She said she had some yard work to do and Kevin could help with the baby while the girls played. She told the kids to bring swimsuits to play in the sprinkler.

  It was a hot day, by local standards, though far from what southern California had taught me to label that way. But I felt perfectly comfortable on a lawn chair in the Koffords’ backyard, shaded by the house, a glass of iced tea nested in the long grass beside me, the mythology book open on my lap.

  The illustrations were strangely compelling—Prometheus chained to a rock, head thrown back in a cry for relief as an eagle tore at his liver; Demeter bowing into herself in grief, with all the plants of the earth wilting around her as her daughter returned to Hades. The stories were at once simple and profound—the jealousy, the grief, the anger, the longings and disappointments, the little victories and unintended consequences. I could see that mythology was not so different from physics: both trying to explain that all the disproportion and imbalance in the world only appeared that way and were the products of forces we could not see.

  When I heard Paul’s pickup pull up in front of the house, I was looking at a picture of Zeus in a columned hall, surveying tiny fields and towns below Olympus. He held a white urn against his hip, tilted, and reached into it with one hand to cast blessings, the story tol
d me, on those he chose to favor below. A black urn of sorrows stood at his feet. Actual people were minuscule from that perspective, so insignificant in their joys or troubles that the gods could rub them between their fingers like sand. I’d been looking at the picture for some time.

  I heard the pickup come to a stop but couldn’t stir myself. Paul was early, by a few hours. He went into the house through the front door, and I heard him calling for someone to answer but I waited until he came closer.

  “Out here,” I said when I believed he’d hear me.

  He pushed open the screen door and stood in the opening, four fingers in his jeans pocket, birthmark wrapped around his neck.

  “Hey,” he said. “Where are the kids?”

  “At Mindy’s. She invited them to play in the sprinkler. She said she’d bring them back before dinner.”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  The question shouldn’t have bothered me. He hadn’t been expected until early evening, so of course I would’ve planned dinner, and of course he had a right to show up early and eat his own food with his own family. But I felt as if he was checking on me in my momentary idleness. Suddenly he was Paul the dictator again. A fissure opened, releasing the fear and anger I’d sealed away since his call at the beginning of the week.

  “I don’t know. Did you have a good trip?” I made no move to get up.

  “Fine. Just fine.”

  Confronting a problem acknowledged its reality and was something I would ordinarily avoid at all costs. But I wasn’t going to do that today. The knowledge surprised me.

  “Your call on Monday night really scared me,” I said.

  He frowned, whether unable to remember or unhappy that I had I couldn’t tell.

  “I guess it was Tuesday morning,” I added when he didn’t answer. “From Green River. At the truck stop. I couldn’t get back to sleep. I waited by the phone for hours.”

  “You thought I’d call again.”

  “I thought it’d be the highway patrol. To tell me you’d driven the truck off a cliff somewhere.”

  He looked down, dug with the toe of his boot against the threshold.

  “You were drunk,” I said.

  He took a deep breath. “Yup.” Twisted his toe again. Then he looked up and met my gaze. “I didn’t drive,” he said. “I went to sleep in the cab. I wouldn’t take chances. You need to know that.”

  His eyes were level and hollow, unflinching. Honest.

  “You wanted me to call and say I was all right,” he said.

  “Sure did.”

  He bent his head and nodded to his boot, then shook his head. A deep breath and a pause. “So I guess you checked for messages.”

  I was an only child and therefore a terrible liar. “Yes.”

  “Did you listen to the tape?”

  I looked down at the book folded over my finger. Zeus, with the jar of troubles at his feet, perhaps growing bored with bestowing blessings and about to return to what he did best. By the time I looked back up I probably didn’t need to answer.

  “Yes.”

  He looked at the hand in his pocket, then pulled out a piece of lint or dirt that he rolled between his fingers and flicked away. He stepped outside and let the screen door close. He sat heavily on the top step and faced me, forearms on his knees, hands dangling. The ends of his fingers were stained.

  “It’s probably time I explained some things. You live with my children. In my house. They say things. I said things the other night. You probably have some ideas about us.”

  I didn’t know how to answer. I waited.

  “And you’ve seen things. The closet. You’ve seen what she collected in the closet.”

  I nodded. I wished I didn’t have to.

  He took a deep breath. “Carrie was the most popular girl in school. You’ve seen pictures. Probably can’t figure out why she picked me. So beautiful—that huge smile, so much life. Everybody wanted to be around her. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. I didn’t ask why. God, why would I?”

  He turned his hands over and curled the fingers toward himself as if checking the cuticles, then dropped them again. “Carrie was—reckless, which was part of why she was so much fun. She’d get an idea and act. Didn’t matter if it made sense. When she was younger, it was just Carrie being crazy—fun crazy, coming up with stuff that other people wouldn’t think of or would be afraid to do. Let’s skinny-dip at Twin Lakes. Throw firecrackers down an old mine shaft. That kind of stuff. Everybody loved her. Everybody—they told me so, all the time. And sure, it’s fun, but when you live with her, it’ll wear you out. You know anybody like that? Of course you do.” His own answer seemed sufficient and he went ahead without waiting for one from me. “It’s hard,” he said, shaking his head. “Real hard. And then the ideas got to be just plain crazy.”

  He took a deep breath that lifted his shoulders. “You know,” he said, looking off to the side, “I can say that now. Crazy. I didn’t when she was alive. She was just lively. Or moody. Or sensitive. Never crazy. But that’s not right. Sometimes, the ideas took over—let’s throw Sarah a princess party in the snow when it’s ten below and the wind’s blowing. Kevin should learn how to knit. Foods shouldn’t touch each other. Let’s get in the car right now and go to the beach.” He gestured upward with his hands, offering the ideas to heaven. “And when I said no, she’d get angry. Whatever she wanted to do was the most important thing in the world.”

  I’d had it all wrong. All, all, all wrong. The controlling husband, the abused wife. Instead Paul, so ordered and predictable, must have been an anchor to the storm-tossed Carrie. She might have flailed against the restraint, but the anchor was what kept her from being swept out to sea.

  “That’s why I got the answering machine, you know? If I couldn’t stop her from launching off on some half-baked scheme, I wanted to give her a way to at least let me know where she was and what she was doing. It worked, some. Better than nothing.”

  He looked at me. “Like you wanted me to call you. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You’ve had Mr. Fousek stop you, at the bottom of the road, to ask where you’re going?”

  I nodded. I could feel my face warm.

  Paul shook his head and looked away. “God, you must’ve thought I was some kind of tyrant.” He brushed his knee with the back of his hand. “He’s a good man. I just asked him to keep an eye out. Can you imagine how embarrassing that was? But he never asked me a thing, just nodded and did it. Couple times I knew Carrie was in a bad spell, came home, and everybody was gone. Middle of winter, cold, ice on the roads—I was scared to death. But he told me what he knew and let it be. Good man.”

  “Of course.”

  “I made sure they had the right food in their lunches. Even food at all, sometimes. Made sure Sarah was dressed okay. That they went to school.”

  His voice had gotten tighter as he spoke, and now I could see the rims of his eyes start to thicken. I looked away and watched a squirrel spiral its way up an aspen tree and disappear into the leaves. After a few moments he cleared his throat and went on.

  “I was afraid of losing her,” he said. “From the beginning. It never went away. That’s why I keep that message.”

  I looked at him, not comprehending. All I remembered was, “I really need to get away,” which seemed like the last thing a husband would want to hear over and over.

  “You remember what she says at the end?”

  I shook my head.

  “She says, ‘We’re gonna be fine.’” He paused. “We.” He shifted his weight on the step. “When I think about it, by myself, run through it a few times in my mind, I start to hear I. She says I’m gonna be fine.” He shook his head. “No. She didn’t leave us. The ice took her away. That’s what I have to remember.”

  He put his hands to his knees and stood, then brushed the seat of his jeans. “I’m sorry I worried you. You’re doing a real fine job with those kids. They’re doing better than I’ve seen since
their mama died. I appreciate it more than I can say.”

  He gave me a nod, turned, and went back inside, the screen clapping shut behind him. I looked down at the book in my lap. There was no reason to be surprised. Whether it was the tiny Greek man and his plow, or Paul and his truck, or me and a spark in the weeds, the giant god remained overhead. It didn’t matter who you were. If you got in the way of the divine debris, you were screwed.

  *

  Though I was invited, I didn’t stay at the Koffords’ to eat the spaghetti dinner I’d thrown together. I could tell Paul’s invitation was only polite and I couldn’t imagine sitting at that table and making casual eye contact with any of them. I wasn’t family. I shouldn’t know the things I now did. I folded my bed and pushed it against the wall while Paul unpacked in the bedroom, then called to him that I was leaving to pick up the kids from Mindy’s. I found them all behind the house, where the girls, in swimsuits, ran and shrieked while Kevin kinked the hose to make the fountain sprinkler stop and start. Mindy sat on the shaded steps, elbows on her knees, with a magazine folded over itself.

  “Hey, there,” she said, looking up as I rounded the corner of the house. She set the magazine behind herself and scooted a few inches to the side, leaving room for me to sit. “What are you doing here? I was going to bring them home.”

  “Paul got home early.” I turned toward the sprinkler. “Kevin! Sarah! You need to dry off. Your dad’s home.”

  They continued without so much as a glance my way, as if separated from me by a wall of glass.

  “Is everything okay?” Mindy said.

  “It’s fine. Sarah! Come get your towel!”

  “Do I have to go through the whole thing again about not pretending things are fine when they aren’t?”

  Kevin released the water just as Katy was at mid-jump over the sprinkler, and both girls squealed and ran away. I sat. “He figured out I heard the tape.”

  “Oh, no.” Mindy squinted and wrinkled her nose at me. “Is it bad?”

  “No, it’s fine. I’m fine. He’s fine. I just—wish I didn’t know any of it.”