“Read to me,” I said, and she said, “Really?”
“Like you used to,” I told her. “I miss that.”
I didn’t care about the words but only the sound of her voice, the way it reminded me of Gee and my mom when I was little. And after a while I had to turn my face to the wall, but I couldn’t bear to let go of her hand.
What happened to the next day, Sunday, I can’t really say. It’s pretty much gone from my memory. A guy loses his job and it’s like, Who am I now? What’s my definition now? Sure, I’m still a father and husband, but part of that definition, a big part, is being a good provider for the family. Losing your job, even when you know it’s coming, is like suddenly having your legs cut off. I guess I went through all the motions that day with my head in a fog, not really knowing who I was or what I was going to do next or how I was going to get that part of my definition back. Especially now that another definition, one I never wanted, the one called thief, was sucking all the energy from me. I mean literally sucking me dry.
The next morning I woke up gasping for air, though I didn’t know why. Couldn’t remember if I’d been having a bad dream or not. But I woke up in a panic with my heart racing a mile a minute, beating hard against my chest, thumping in my temples the way it used to when we were moving door to door against those mud walls. It was the open doorways that scared me the most, the ones that didn’t have to be yanked open before a gun barrel would show itself. A man could stand in those shadows and never be seen, not a ripple of movement until you saw the muzzle flash itself, by which time it’s already way too late.
Anyway, that’s how I woke up Monday morning, out of breath, heart beating like an old generator in those last two seconds before it runs out of gas, like it knows it’s the last gulp of fumes it’s ever going to get. The air was gray and warm and Cindy was sleeping with her mouth close to my shoulder, her little puffs of breath hitting my skin like ice on a raw nerve.
I gathered up my clothes and made it out of the room without waking her. Went into the kitchen to start the coffee, but saw it was only 0530, and damn if I didn’t flash back to that patrol we’d made along the Al-Furat River, that time we stopped for MREs under the date palm and you said, “Any of you morons know that you’re sitting in the cradle of humanity right now?”
I think it was Austin that said, “Damn shallow cradle for all of humanity.”
That’s when you told us the river’s other name was the Euphrates, one of the four rivers where the Garden of Eden is supposed to have been, and you started going on about whether it happened five thousand years ago or fifty thousand or whatever, and for a while we all sat there staring at the water until Moser broke out singing that old Chicago song, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” and every one of us started laughing and joined in on the chorus.
Anyway, that morning I’m standing there with a coffee filter in my hand and I’m staring at my coffeemaker and that song keeps beating through my brain till it’s the only thing I’m thinking, and my body’s getting tenser and tenser and I know I’m going to start screaming if I don’t do something. The only thing I can think to do is to run. So I scratch a quick note to Cindy telling her I’m going for a jog, then I put on my running shoes and head out into the gray morning.
I must’ve done three or four miles before that fucking song drained out of me and I no longer felt like my head was going to explode. I actually enjoyed the run back to the house, though I had to slow to a walk a few times to catch my breath. The light was coming up pink and orange in the east, and being out there in the quiet with just the trees and the smell of grass coming off people’s yards—man, it felt good.
The moment I went in through the pantry door I smelled the chocolate cupcakes, and when I peeked in the kitchen I saw a dozen of them cooling on wax paper on the table, and Cindy was shaking about a gallon of cooked macaroni in a colander over the sink. She smiled at me and said, “You haven’t done that in a while. You want a glass of cold water?”
I nodded, so she hit the faucet and let it run a bit, then filled a glass half full, shoved it under the icemaker on the fridge, then handed it to me. She said, “There’ll be hot dogs and burgers there, the rest is potluck. Should we take our own ketchup and mustard or will they have all that too?”
I’m standing there trying not to look too confused by all this, taking in the cupcakes and the macaroni and the big plastic bowl with the chopped celery and pickles and mayonnaise in it, and our biggest cooler open against the wall and the paper plates and plastic cups lined up on the counter.
But I guess I wasn’t very successful in not looking confused, because after Cindy dumped the macaroni into the plastic bowl, she smiled again and said, “You do remember the community picnic today, right? Labor Day?”
Sometimes I look at her and feel like I’ve never seen her before. Like I’ve been dropped in from outer space or something. Like I’ve woken up inside somebody else’s life.
She blew out a breath and said, “You don’t even listen to me half the time, do you?”
“You told me about this?”
“A dozen times at least. It’s all the girls have talked about all week.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess it’s starting to sound a little bit familiar.”
She shook her head and mixed the macaroni salad. Then she scooped up some on her mixing spoon and held it up to my mouth. “Tell me if there’s enough mayonnaise to suit you.”
It tasted like hell first thing in the morning, but I told her it was fine. She snapped the plastic lid on and put the bowl in the refrigerator. She said, “The only other thing I thought I’d make was the Jell-O bowl you like.”
“With the fruit cocktail in it?”
“I was thinking a can of pineapple chunks, plus I have a couple of bananas and an apple I want to cut up.”
“Perfect,” I said.
“By the time I get that done and the cupcakes iced, the girls will be up and wanting breakfast.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“There’s supposed to be a couple of inflatable pools for the kids. Should we let the girls take their swimsuits or not?”
“You mean like wading pools? Who all is going to be there?”
“It’s in the courthouse square,” she said. “Do you remember anything I told you?”
“So that would be like . . . hundreds of kids possibly.”
“First of all, they aren’t wading pools. They’re fairly big, from what I hear. But every kid in town won’t be in them at the same time, Russell. And the girls are going to want to get wet.”
“How could I not know anything about this?” I said.
“You’ve had things on your mind. It’s okay. I understand.”
The way she said that, I wanted to sit down and cry. My chest started feeling heavy again, and the kitchen started getting tight and warm. I mean, I never knew guilt could feel like this. Guilt and shame and, I can’t think of the right word for it. Is there a word for when you feel so unbelievably stupid for something you’ve done, and so unbelievably sorry, and so unbelievably afraid because there’s nothing you can do to undo it, and right there in front of you is one of the people you love most in all the world and she doesn’t know a thing about how badly you’ve fucked up, she still loves you and thinks you’re someone special and what are you supposed to do, Spence? What’s a guy supposed to do when he can’t think or even fucking breathe because of one stupid fucking moment of stupidity?
She said, “I told Pops to be ready by eleven.”
I nodded. Drank a little more of the water and swallowed hard. Those bits of macaroni felt like shrapnel in my stomach.
Cindy must’ve seen the look on my face, the way I was wincing probably, because she smiled at me and said, “Let’s try to forget about everything else today, okay? Let’s enjoy being a family and living in a nice town with good people around us.”
It sounded like a fine suggestion, and I did my best to follow through with it,
I really did. But that heaviness in my chest wouldn’t go away. I went through the motions okay, I guess, did all the right stuff for the next few hours or so, even though I felt like one part of me was a robot and the other part was standing off to the side watching me and shaking his head in disgust. We might even have gotten home that day with Cindy’s optimism still intact if it hadn’t been for the girl. It happened around two or three that afternoon. I’m not at all sure about the time of it. All I know is that I suddenly got dizzy. I thought for sure I was going to pass out. But then I looked up and saw her. The girl and the two guys with her, all of them looking my way across the courthouse lawn.
“I feel the world go black and heavy.”
Do you remember when you said those words to me? We were sitting in the chow hall one night, nobody but you and me, eating bowls of cherry cobbler with milk poured over it. I asked how you always managed to know an RPG was coming, the way you had that afternoon, and it wasn’t the first time either. You’d yell “Incoming!” before there was any sound at all, any flash or movement to be seen. And what you told me in the chow hall was, “Right before it happens, I feel the world go black and heavy.”
Of course when it happened to me at the picnic, when I saw that girl and the two guys with her checking me out, I didn’t put the feeling together with anything from Iraq. I felt a terrible heaviness all of a sudden, so sad and hopeless that it made me go all weak and dizzy. And then a shiver went through me. Gee used to say that a shiver happens when somebody is walking across your grave, and that pretty much sums up the feeling, doesn’t it? Like you’re trapped in a box wrapped up in heavy darkness and you know that life is up there in the sunlight somewhere, a place you can never reach.
Before that, everybody had been having a really nice time at the picnic. Right away Pops found some of his buddies to throw rubber horseshoes with on the short, one-way street that’d been blocked off for the day. And the girls were jumping back and forth from the bouncy house to one of the inflatable pools to the cupcakes and back to the bouncy house. I’d been focusing on them and nothing else, Cindy and me taking turns keeping an eye on the girls, checking on Pops every now and then, bringing him a plate of food and a cold drink. I was able for a while to sort of borrow from everybody else’s happiness and innocence.
Around two o’clock or so a local bluegrass group started setting up on the bandstand on the back lawn, pinging and twanging midway between where Pops was throwing horseshoes and where the girls were squealing and laughing inside the bouncy house. And then out of nowhere that awful feeling hit me, and it was exactly like you said. The air seemed to thicken and pinch in on me, and the light went dim and gray. I actually looked up and away from the bouncy house, looked to see if some big black cloud was crossing the sun. But there was nothing, the sky was as clear and washed-out blue as always. And then that icy shiver hit, and something told me to turn and look back at the bandstand.
There was Donnie grinning like an idiot, holding a canned soda in one hand and pointing across the lawn at me with the other. The girl standing beside him was already holding her sunglasses up off her eyes and squinting in my direction, and then the two guys with her turned their eyes on me too.
I put my back to them and stood there looking in through the bouncy house window at the girls. They were in there with five or six other little kids, all of them bouncing and laughing and crashing into each other like it was the greatest thing in the world. Meanwhile there’s an icy shiver still crawling up and down my spine. Cindy is there beside me saying “Not so hard, girls,” and “Watch your head!” and things like that. And I can feel that RPG bearing down on me from out of nowhere and without a sound.
“Excuse me, sir,” the one guy says.
Every muscle in my body seizes up with dread, but I make myself turn and look at him. He’s at least in his fifties, not a big guy but wiry and hard, and he has a full head of short gray hair and eyes as blue as river ice. He’s smiling when I turn, and he keeps smiling all the time, that type of smile like he thinks everybody but him is a joke of some kind.
He says, “Donnie tells me you did a tour in the Mideast a few years back.”
And now Cindy turns around too. I tell the guy, “Personally I wouldn’t trust anything Donnie says. But in this case he’s right.”
“I was wondering about those desert boots GIs wear,” he says. “You must have a pair of those, am I correct?”
“Had a pair,” I tell him, and I can feel Cindy’s eyes on me now. I can feel the question she’s thinking.
That’s when the other guy takes a sheet of folded-up paper from his pocket and opens it up and holds it in front of me. The paper has two images on it. The one on top was probably copied off the Internet. It shows a pair of tan desert boots, with the right boot standing upright and the left boot turned to show the Panama tread pattern. Below that image is one he probably took with his cell phone. It’s a snapshot of a muddy boot print on a linoleum floor. That boot print has the same tread pattern as in the top image.
This other guy is bigger and younger than the wiry one, going soft in the middle, kind of sloppy looking. As for the girl with them, I feel her gaze on me but I can’t bring myself to meet it.
The sloppy guy says, “Some GIs who are bikers like to wear their boots when they ride.”
I say, “Is that more of Donnie’s questionable wisdom?”
The wiry guy says, “I hear they’re really comfortable. You know of a place I can get a pair?”
I say, “How about the place where you got that picture of them?”
The wiry guy takes the sheet of paper from the other one, looks at it and smiles, then hands it to Cindy. She’s too confused to do anything but take it from him and look at it.
The wiry guy smiles at me and says, “Well, if you think of anything, let Shelley know, okay? She says the two of you are old friends.”
I’d like to look at the girl now but I’m afraid to take my eyes off the wiry guy. He gives Cindy another big smile. “These bouncy houses are great exercise for kids, aren’t they? Your girls will sleep like babies when they get home.”
And then all three of them turn and walk away. I’m angry and scared at the same time. I’m breathing like I can’t get any air into my lungs, and I know Cindy is looking at me, waiting, but it’s only when I start hearing the kids squealing and laughing again that I realize I’ve been standing in a kind of soundless vacuum for I don’t know how long, a place where the only sounds that registered on me were what those two guys had to say. I feel exactly like I did after the propane tank exploded. I couldn’t have been more stunned.
“Russell,” Cindy finally says.
I turn to her, and she holds up the sheet of paper and says, “What’s going on here?”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I say, and I take the piece of paper from her hand, I’m not sure why, and I go marching over to where Donnie and Cindy’s mother are standing in front of the bandstand. I’m moving so fast that I bump into Donnie’s can of soda and some of it splashes up onto my shirt and I smell the whiskey in it.
“Who are those guys?” I ask him, too loud for where we were.
“Who—the McClaine boys?”
“They’re brothers?” I ask.
“Always used to be,” he says, and he grins like he thinks he’s funny.
“What did you tell them about me?”
“They asked a couple of questions is all, and I answered them.”
Janice says, “Donnie wouldn’t ever tell anything on you you didn’t want told.”
He grins and says, “Not for free anyway.”
“You don’t know anything about me, you understand? You keep your fucking mouth shut.”
“Whoa, hey, there’s kids around.”
I move even closer then, right up against him. “Cindy doesn’t want you here, you understand what I’m saying? Am I getting through to you? She doesn’t want you anywhere near her or the girls. And what she doesn’t want, I don’t want
.”
He says, “Now Russell. A man’s got the right to see his own grandchildren.”
“A man does,” I tell him. “But you don’t.”
And I’m shaking all the way back to Cindy. Because the worst, I know, is about to come.
I’ve got my eyes on her and she’s got hers on me, and I’m walking slow and as steady as I can and trying to figure out what the hell I’m going to tell her. It’s time for a reckoning, I know that. I know I owe it to her and I know she’s going to demand it now.
But what I can’t figure out, Spence, couldn’t then and still can’t now, is where’s the line between total honesty and lying for a good reason? She’s the first person I ever met who I thought I could be totally honest with, and wanted to be, and promised to be, and was until that day I had a muddy naked woman in my arms.
I kept a lot of stuff from Mom and Gee and Pops over the years. And from you too. Stuff that mainly made me ashamed of myself. Looking back on it now, I can see how trivial most of it was, like stealing change out of Pops’ jar. But I like to think I could have told all of you everything and you wouldn’t have judged me harshly for it. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be unloading on you now. I only wish I could hear you say something back to me. I wish these one-sided conversations we’re having could bring me a little clarity and forgiveness.
I don’t know that I ever really told you about the day Mom had her accident. I wasn’t yet nine years old. Second grade. I’d get off the bus some three hundred yards or so from where we were living then. Anyway . . . I don’t know why I got started on this. The word “reckoning,” I guess. The first time I remember hearing that word was the Sunday after I came home from school and found Mom lying at the bottom of the basement stairs. She’d managed to scoop up some of the wet clothes from the basket she’d been hauling up the stairs before she slipped, and she was laying there with some wet towels and stuff bunched up under her head, barely conscious, with one knee shattered, one wrist broken, and that damage to her back that three spinal fusions only seemed to make worse. Anyway, that Sunday, Gee insisted I go to church with her so we could pray together that Mom would be all right. “Like new,” she told me. “We’re going to pray that God and the doctors will make her like new again.”
Only the Rain Page 11