by Brad Watson
In a perfect cast I bumped the worm off a stump near the opposite bank and dropped it into the shallows there with a tiny sploosh. A fish hit it, I popped the rod, and it went wild, bent deep. The bass ran, stripping line from the whining reel, toward the bank where Olivia lay. When it paused, I reeled and it jumped, clearing the pond’s surface. It seemed to pause at the top of its leap, and even from that distance I could see its huge eye on one side, looking at me, as if it sensed its trouble came from the other world, the one that was not water, and wanted to see. When it slapped down into the water again Olivia looked up and watched me fight it for a minute, then went back to reading.
I brought it in, grabbed it by its broad, hard bottom lip, and walked it around the bank to where she was. It was at least a six-pounder. Now its big round eyes seemed to take in the whole world, and we were insignificant in it.
“Ooo!” she said, looking up. “What a fish!”
“I know what we’re having for supper tonight,” I said.
I tethered the fish on a stringer tied to a log at the water’s edge, and we had our picnic on the blanket, cool fried chicken and potato salad and a couple of cold beers. We climbed into the back of the VW and partially closed the doors and had us a little midafternoon play, sun-dappled leaves winking outside the old windows. We lay there awhile and had a deep nap. It was late afternoon when we woke, feeling sleepy but rested.
I laid the fish in the cooler we’d brought, on top of the melting ice, and drove us slowly home, down the dirt and gravel roads as far as they would take us, then on the old two-lane blacktop, and we pulled into the driveway of the house with the attic apartment and went upstairs and went immediately to bed and to sleep again.
I WAS SETTLING INTO THINGS, it seems to me now. Shaping up our little world a bit at a time. A modest measure of the American dream. I spent the next day just goofing off, resting, and in the afternoon I filleted the fish, marinated it in lemon juice, sliced some potatoes for frying, and made a salad.
“Oh, fantastic,” Olivia said. “I’m starving again.” She stood in the door to the tiny kitchen, cupping her little belly in both hands and grinning.
We went out onto the deck. Low thin clouds to the west hugged the horizon, glowing a strange and bloody blend of deep pink and fiery orange, as if distant lands were engulfed in a vast chemical inferno.
I fried the potatoes while the coals were burning down, then cooked the fish steaks on a little grill on the deck, and we ate out there in folding lawn chairs, the plates in our laps, and washed it down with some cheap wine from the liquor store that I’d put in the freezer for a while to make it cold and drinkable. The icy alcoholic coldness made frozen lumps in our brains, so we walked it off over to the mental hospital.
It was twilight, the strange glow gone from the horizon. No one was about on the hospital grounds. We strolled onto the broad front lawn, with its old magnolias limbed and leafed so low they covered the ground beneath them like huge mutant shrubs, and ancient live oaks, their massive limbs like the knotted arms of giants bent and lowered to lift some smaller creature into the sky.
We had our arms around each other’s waist, and I kissed her on the cheek, and she stopped and we kissed there in the failing light beside one of the magnolias. She had a strange but pleasant musky taste I’d never noticed before. We knelt and crawled beneath the magnolia’s sheltering low limbs, pushed aside the soft, fallen cones, and got lost in one another, everything around us disappearing, ceasing to exist, and we were a long few minutes catching our breaths in the dank, earthy air beneath the limbs and thick waxy leaves and letting the warm rushing feeling slowly leave our blood. It was as if time had changed, somehow, and we were alone in the world. I heard something outside the leafy cave we were in, and in the next moment something startled us pushing its way through the lowest limbs, too dark to see just what it was, but God what a stench. Olivia sucked her breath in surprise, and we lay very still because the broad, stinking muzzle of the lion was snuffling us, pushing its warm dry nostrils against our hair and our cheeks, running them down our bodies and back up to our mouths, a low quiet growl like a basso purr in its throat, and I dared to look into its burning yellow-green eyes, and when I did that the lion jerked its head up and backed rapidly out of the sheltering leaves and was gone.
I couldn’t speak. It took me a moment to get my breath back. Olivia said, “My God, oh, my God. That was fantastic.”
I realized I was excited, on fire. She had me in her cool slim hand. We went at it again, immediately, just as lost in it as we were before. I don’t know how long it was before we made our way back to the apartment. I can’t even remember that we did.
I WENT BACK TO my job the next day. I hadn’t really thought about it for a while.
Curtis was there, on the site, standing in a foundation ditch with a shovel. This was a job I was supposed to be handling, shaping up the ditch started by the backhoe, which he’d operated.
“I’m sorry, Curtis,” I said. “I hope Arlo’s not mad.” Arlo was the young contractor we worked for.
“He’s not,” Curtis said, and I realized that Curtis didn’t seem angry, either. Normally, after such a stunt, he would be. Then again, normally he’d have come to the apartment the day I didn’t show to see what was keeping me. But he hadn’t even called.
I decided not to say anything more about it, in case I’d break the spell of good luck. I found a shovel and hopped into the ditch and we worked at trimming and shaping the ditch all morning, and in the afternoon we laid and tied off the rebar, and when we were done the foundations were ready to pour the next morning.
“Are you coming in?” Curtis said, meaning the next morning. He was asking, as if there were an option.
“Sure,” I said after a moment.
“Okay, buddy,” he said, climbing into his green Bronco. “See you at seven.” He headed off to his fiancée’s place.
I hadn’t seen or heard from my parents since we’d broken the news, either, which suddenly seemed very odd, and so I thought I’d drop by the house on my way home, check in.
They were both at home, although my little brother was out with some friends. Mom was watching the news from the big lounge chair while she let a casserole cook in the oven. Dad was out on the back patio, sipping a bourbon and water. He held up the glass in salute when he saw me through the plate-glass window to the patio. I leaned over and kissed my mother on the cheek and she kissed me back on my cheek and said, “Hey, hon.”
I sat on the sofa and watched the news with her for a bit.
“Listen,” I finally said, “are you doing okay?”
She turned her attention from the news to give me a nice warm smile.
“Of course,” she said. “How are you? How’s Olivia feeling?”
“Oh, she’s fine, I guess,” I said. “I mean, she’s been fine. We went on a picnic.”
“That sounds like fun.” And she turned her attention to the news again.
I went out back onto the patio.
“Hello, son,” my dad said. He wore an old pair of dress pants with a sheen worn into the thighs, his favorite high-top sneakers, and a guayabara shirt. “Drink?”
He’d never offered me bourbon before. He’d let me have a beer before, the previous year, and that had been a big deal. I guess the idea was I was grown up now, for all practical purposes.
“Sure.”
He went in and came back out with a second drink, handed it to me.
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
We drank the bourbon and talked about golf. He’d been watching a tournament that day, at one of the local country clubs, following the leaders in a cart and drinking beer. I remembered how I used to go to the tournaments as a kid and put together long, elaborate strands of beer can pop tops and wear them around like primitive necklaces.
“So,” I finally said. “Are y’all okay?”
He looked at me with the sort of indulgent smile a father can give.
; “Sure, we’re okay,” he said. “How about you? How’s Olivia?” he said suddenly, as if he’d just that second remembered our whole predicament.
“She’s good,” I said. “We went on a picnic, at Mom Bertha’s lake. I caught a pretty good bass.”
“Yeah? How big?”
“Maybe six pounds, I think.”
“Damn. You going to mount it?”
“We ate it.”
“Good for you.”
After the drink, I said my goodbyes and went on home to Olivia. She was in the little kitchen, making biscuits. I didn’t know she could bake anything. In fact, I’d never seen her cook anything. It was a pleasant surprise. I gave her a kiss on the cheek. The room was filled with a late, glowing, warm yellow light.
“What’s going with the biscuits?” I said.
She shrugged.
“Want breakfast for supper?”
“Always,” I said. I sat down at the table. “It’s so cool in here. Crazy. Just a couple of days ago, it was unbearable.”
“I know. Must be a cool front.”
“Well, it feels pretty much the same outside. As it was a couple of days ago, I mean.”
“It’s bearable out there,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s not what I mean.”
She didn’t really seem to be listening. She was brushing the tops of the unbaked biscuits with melted butter before putting them into the oven, just like my mom would do.
“I guess the rent’s due,” I said.
“Mmm.”
“I’ve got the cash,” I said. “I’ll go down and pay it.”
I didn’t relish any contact with our landlady, but seeing her in order to pay the rent was preferable to having her pound on the door, pissed off, to demand it. I checked my wallet, pulled out three twenties and a five, folded them, walked down the deck stairs and around to the front door of the house, and knocked. No one answered. I knocked again, and heard no steps of anyone approaching the door.
I cupped my hands against the door’s glass window and looked inside. No one home. I’d never known the landlady not to be home. Aside from our measly rent, I didn’t know how she survived.
I looked through the windowpane again. In some strange way, the place looked as if no one had been home in a long time.
WE ATE SUPPER AT Olivia’s parents’ house the next night. As with my parents, it was like nothing had happened. Or it was like everything had happened, but no one was upset or even concerned. It was as if Olivia and I not only had been married a number of years, but had gotten married in an entirely conventional way.
Olivia’s mother’s cooking, normally unsalted green beans and white rice and bland baked chicken because of Mr. Coltrane’s blood pressure problem, was much better, too. It was a rich lasagna, with a green salad drenched in tangy oil and vinegar dressing, and French bread slathered with butter and garlic. We all ate like gluttons.
Mr. Coltrane ate like a man just released from a concentration camp, all but shedding tears of pure joy and gratification.
AT SOME POINT IN THERE, because I knew Olivia and her parents would like it, I joined their church, the Baptist church, and signed up to sing in the choir, and taught a Sunday school class to seventh-graders, and went out on witness nights with other men of the church, to convert and save souls. I didn’t particularly believe any of the things I was supposed to believe in as a Baptist, but I didn’t feel especially bothered by pretending to believe them, either.
Unbeknownst to myself before, I had a very nice singing voice.
We went to the Sunday morning service, the evening Sunday service, and the spaghetti suppers on Wednesday nights.
WE ENTERED A VERITABLE DREAM of days. At work, Curtis convinced the carpentry crew to take me on as apprentice, so I spent my days cutting studs to length, and joists, and hauling them up to the carpenters. I nailed the least attractive jobs, such as overhanging eaves, squeezing my legs around the two-by-six boards and leaning out over a drop of forty feet so we wouldn’t have to erect scaffolding. But I loved it. I’d always been afraid of heights but that seemed to have vanished. The crew voted to hire me on as a real carpenter after only six months. I decided I wanted to be the best carpenter in town, I would devote my working life to it. I took the GED and sailed through it, nights.
Our little boy was born in December. He came out with a full head of thick tawny hair like a lion’s mane, so we decided to call him Leo: William Leonardo Caruthers.
The next year, with a loan from our parents, Olivia and I bought a piece of land with a small stand of woods next to a pasture, and I began to build our house there in the late afternoons and evenings. Curtis helped me when he could. It was a simple but free-ranging design of our own. I wanted it to be at least part treehouse, remembering the ones I’d helped build as a child, so after the basic structure was done I began to expand it up and into a huge live oak we built next to for that purpose. Within two years we had our wish-home, all wood, with a broad front porch looking out over the pasture, a screen porch off our treehouse bedroom looking down into the woods out back. I was a good carpenter, as it turned out, and good at scavenging surplus and scrap materials from work sites, so when we were done the debt was minimal, and Olivia worked only part-time at home transcribing medical records, and sold rugs and coverlets and other nice things she wove herself on a big loom she kept in her workroom. She took long walks in the woods, early mornings, Leo toddling along or strapped in a carrier on her back, though he’d really gotten too big for that, to gather roots, nuts, flowers, and berries for natural coloring of the wool. Her body, which had been the lithe but soft body of a high school girl before, was now supple and muscular, beautifully toned. She was amazing in the sack.
I went on the walks with them, when I could. And lifted weights in the shed out back. I’d never felt stronger. I had my Ford pickup. She didn’t have the Mercedes, but she did have a pretty cool little VW station wagon, baby blue.
It was a good life. I was astonished and deeply grateful that we’d made it happen. Leo was growing into a strong and happy child, soon he’d be going off to kindergarten and school. I could see our whole lives ahead of us, peaceful and full of light. We were lucky.
I WAS STANDING ON our front porch looking out over the pasture at the end of a day, sun going down behind the pines and oaks and pale green sweetgum trees to the west.
Leo was inside reading Where the Wild Things Are to himself. He had learned to read just after turning four. Olivia and I had vowed to avoid treating him like a genius. No skipping grades, things like that. We would supplement his school at home, however we could. Give him novels, books about history and current events. Math problems from our old high school texts.
Olivia had a venison stew in a pot on the stove. I’d shot the doe not half a mile from our house, in the woods. Olivia had helped me butcher it. She was in her workroom weaving something new on her loom while the stew simmered.
The chickens pecked about the yard, an eye always on their rooster. He strutted the yard’s edge, very intelligent for a rooster. He’d killed two hawks in just the past month. Killed them before they could kill the chickens they’d swooped down upon to lift away. He and the hens fell upon the hawks and tore them to pieces.
Our dog, an Aussie mix, looked on from the other end of the porch. She kept away the foxes and coyotes. She understood the most subtle of questions and commands. I’d never owned a better dog in my life.
She was my first dog, in fact. I kept forgetting that.
I saw someone walking across the pasture toward the house. When the person got closer, he looked familiar, although I still couldn’t tell or remember just who he might be. He smiled and waved when he was just a stone’s throw away, maybe, and I waved back, and he walked up to the house and stood in the yard a few feet away from the edge of the porch and looked up at me. He was a tall man, dark hair cropped short and receding in a widow’s peak, heavy beard shadow, horn-rimmed glasses, a kind expression. He wore
a conservative, narrow-lapeled suit and a modest narrow necktie.
“You look familiar,” I said.
He said, “I’m Lowell Bishop, your sixth-grade teacher.”
“Oh,” I said. “My God. Mr. Bishop. I always wondered what happened to you.”
Mr. Bishop had been a substitute, that year, for another teacher who’d gone on unexpected maternity leave. He hadn’t been a very good teacher, kind of lazy, actually, but I’d liked him and always hoped he’d had a good life after leaving our school and going on to whatever his next, probably temporary, job may have been. He’d been the only teacher who hadn’t treated me as if I were invisible.
“I did all right,” Mr. Bishop said. “I went back to school. Psychology. I was still fairly young.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “I’d kind of worried about you.”
He laughed. “I don’t doubt you did.”
Mr. Bishop had rented a garage apartment a block or so from my home while he’d lived in town. And on the day after school ended, I’d gone over there to say goodbye. When I knocked, he came to the door wearing his school trousers and an undershirt, the kind without sleeves, and he needed a shave, and behind him in the little kitchen area were two other men in similar shape, sitting at the dining table with hands of cards before them, a whiskey bottle and glasses on the table, and cigarette smoke filled the dingy light in there.
“Hey there!” Mr. Bishop had boomed at me. “Come on in!”