The Hour of Lead

by Bruce Holbert

  “You aren’t ever going to hurt us again, are you?” Wendy asked.

  “There’s other ways of hurting.”

  “It’s the only one you know, though,” she told him.

  “The rest is all accident. I promise that.”

  “Me, too,” Wendy said. “I shouldn’t have said it. I thought it might help. Help me at least. Will she ever speak to me again?”

  “She will,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t blame her.”

  “She said that sometimes, she’d wondered if you wanted her.”

  “Lord. What did you tell her?”

  “I told her it was me you wondered if you wanted.”

  “Did you tell her the truth about her mother?” Wendy asked.

  Matt shook his head. “I told her she hadn’t got your meaning straight,” he said. He drew back where he could see her face. “I’ll tell you, though.”

  Wendy nodded, and he went on. It was early morning by the time he finished, and they were both goosepimpled by the night. One of his legs had gone to sleep. He stretched, then banged his heel on the bottom step, and she watched him waiting on the feeling to return.

  “It seemed to me telling it to her, she would be losing two mothers.”

  She closed her eyes, and lifted his cold knuckles to her cheek. “I didn’t mean to be cruel,” she said.

  “I know,” Matt said. “Me neither. It just turned that way.”

  34

  LUCKY RARELY DRANK, THOUGH HE held no opinion concerning drunks, pro or con. The few times Lucky imbibed left him nearly tender. He listened to music and conversation of others or just watched lights and cars passing and was perplexed by melancholy. Doubt was too high a tab for drink; he refused to pay it. Often in his early years copping, his sexual apparatus distressed him similarly. Inclined to emotions he himself had vowed to correct, the appendage often made exiting the house an embarrassment, and, once, vexed him at work so, that he squandered the shift pretending to shuffle papers. Finally, at the hardware, he purchased a roll of bailing twine, snipped a piece and looped it around his leg and his nemesis and tied it off. He intended to halt it from jutting like a poker, but the string thinned the circulation once he maintained a certain girth and his penis retracted on its own. Its antics had ended years ago now and it left his life tidy, the way he’d chosen it to be. That he was traveling the highways between Colfax and Grand Coulee, then, with an open pint he’d nipped past the neck and shoulders, disconcerted him. He worried for what else might be amiss. He seemed in the throes of what drink stirred in him anyway, and hurrying the sensation seemed the proper way to pass through such country and emerge on the other, where he assumed he’d find sense once again.

  The wheatfields passed like so much chaff: rowed acres and fences and sprinklers and rock and a few poplar starts for wind-breaks. He navigated the Rocklyn cutoff to avoid Davenport, where a fair number would enjoy an invitation to his comeuppance. At Wilbur, he went north. Twelve miles out, the highway swooped into the Grand Coulee that appeared in need of water despite one of the largest rivers in America pressing through it. The rock looked rusted anywhere it faced weather. The thirsty pines remained dwarfed and spindly. Sagebrush and cheat grew best. The towns along the bottom were noted primarily for their transgressions.

  He recognized the lighted string that marked the dam’s backside, a single luminous row a mile wide. Maintaining the project still employed much of the county. Though his childhood unraveled in those places drowned behind it, Lucky felt no nostalgia for what had been lost or bitterness toward those forces constructing the structure. When he looked to the speedometer, he realized he was traveling only twenty-five miles an hour, and he tapped the accelerator toward the speed limit. He turned at an intersection and drove a short stretch of highway past Delano, a town that thought so little of itself it took a president’s middle name, and mispronounced it to boot, to Electric City, whose city fathers appeared to possess no more inspiration. Lining the highway were Scott’s Service and Norm’s Cafe and two taverns that changed hands so regularly sign makers ran them a tab. Lucky eased into a lot, checked the address and sipped more whiskey. He’d seen a hotel vacancy lamp a mile back. There, he could sleep and maybe wake hungover enough to hone an edge for whatever the next morning delivered.

  The road descended a long hill past a single row of houses, darkness sliding over them. Porch lights glowed and streetlights above them. Lucky himself watching the shadow of his car and the shape of his head and shoulders in the window. When he looked up, the road had swerved and he plowed over lawns, passed near stoops and under windows. Wendy, bent in the front window of the house, scrubbed dishes and stared outside vacantly. She did not notice him. Lucky jerked his car to the gravel then u-turned in a wide spot and halted across the street, a hundred feet away from her. In the glove box, he hunted his field glasses. He put them on her. She’d grown heavier in the face, but Wendy it was. He checked the address on Lawson’s paycheck and the mailbox numbers: they were identical.

  He took one long breath and listened to the air collect inside him.

  He sipped at the last of the whiskey. It had been right to drink. He was flesh and bone, like any other. He saw children in the living room, a girl near the age to turn out, maybe the age he was when Wendy happened onto him. They would be fine children. Lucky would father them well; though they may be of another’s seed, they were as much his as she was. They’d been orbiting him like the satellites the Russians claimed circled the world. But gravity had its laws and his family was falling to him as justice had deemed it. He looked up into the skies and nearly cried. Finally, he said and listened to the word.

  He put the glasses to his eyes again. The first he saw of the man was a great passing shadow. The front door opened and heavy steps clobbered the metal porch. The shadow maker sat, his legs dangling to the walk and his arms resting on the top step. A match flashed and disappeared. The man sipped the cigarette. Lucky’s payment for what the hard world owed him: twenty-five thousand dollars and them. It struck him that when the world turned peculiar, it rolled all at once, like a big fish that was suddenly there swimming when before it was only water you were seeing.

  •

  INSIDE THE BY A DAM Site Tavern, pool players circled the tables with cues. Others waiting lined quarters underneath one bumper and added their names to a chalkboard. Lucky went to the board and erased it. A few looked up. At the bar, he ordered a Coke. The bartender collected his money. He offered Lucky a can and a frosted glass. Lucky poured and drank.

  “Who’s toughest here?” he asked.

  The bartender pointed to a man who was medium-sized. His biceps and chest tugged his T-shirt taut. He shared a pitcher and a table with an attractive brunette. At the table, Lucky stopped. The woman had a nice complexion, Lucky thought. She was thin where it didn’t count and broad were it did. The man, Parker, glanced up. His face was deeply creased. Lucky pointed to a beer glass. “This hers?” Lucky asked. Parker nodded. Lucky unzipped his drawers and deposited his pecker into the glass.

  Parker sat, stunned. For a moment, Lucky thought the man would disappoint him. The woman gasped.

  “My Lord,” she said. “My Lord.”

  Parker upset the table standing. The pitcher hit the woman in the chest and her soaked shirt clung to her body like skin. Lucky’s penis remained damp with beer. He tucked it away.

  Parker’s first blow caught him at the chin, depositing Lucky on the floor. The man wore boots. Lucky stood, inclined to avoid real damage. Parker clouted him again. The woman scurried to a booth. The next blow lit Lucky’s head with color. It felt like sleep, then a boot clobbered his ribs and he was awake and hurting. He scrambled to avoid the boots and Parker wailed at his head with a beer glass until it broke. Lucky could see the glass pieces on the floor. Blood warmed his neck, a slow trickle, nothing serious. Inside his jacket he found his holstered pistol and steadied it with both hands. Parker’s T-shirt was spattered with Lucky’s blood, the broken
glass still in his hand. Lucky stood, leaving the gun on him. His ribs ached, but they weren’t broken. In the bar mirror, a bruise purpled his cheek. He touched the swelling with his free hand. It would blacken nicely.

  He set a twenty on the bar. “See he drinks that up for me,” Lucky said. The woman hadn’t moved from the booth. Lucky could see the line of her bra in the wet shirt. Parker sat next to her looking stunned.

  “She his wife?” Lucky asked.

  “Was going to be,” the bartender said.

  Lucky drove the car again to the address in his pocket. His watch read past midnight; the trailer windows were dark. He shut the car door quietly and limped across the street and lay in the grass that bordered the trailer, the lawn’s coolness soothed his swollen eye. He looked at the trailers and clapboard duplexes that lined the block, places people lived whole lives as unremarkable as the blades of grass surrounding him.

  35

  WENDY’S EVENING WALKS CONTINUED THROUGH the 1950s. Her forward-leaning figure in the evening shadows traveling the road shoulders or park trails or reservoir banks became as ordinary as old man Vlachi’s daily vigil in front of his makeshift museum or the school buses that clotted morning traffic. Slowly, the exercise became, if not therapeutic or relaxing, at least a meditation that evolved toward restful. Even when her parents pressed her toward religion as a child, she had felt as if she observed the hymns and prayers and Eucharist through the stained glass. She never recognized a ritual’s values until she acquired her own.

  For her husband, every day, every act was a sacrament, the firmament above was his chapel ceiling, the ground the floor, and the light needed no colored windows to make itself holy. She once thought him simple, but simple was not a choice, and he decided every morning to rid the world of complications that might distract him from herself and the children and the labor required to provide enough of what they hoped for to trust they had earned such gifts from the world and deserved more of a share than he himself possessed. She had learned to admire him and enjoy him. It was more than she had offered anyone else, other than the children.

  Toward the end of the decade, Wendy read of her father’s death in the newspaper obituary. The funeral was a half hour away in Wilbur. She was determined to attend alone, so Matt organized another ride. Dawn, the highway climbed steadily through the Grand Coulee and up the rocky wall and highway leading out. Above, the ground was open and bare aside from crops. Enormous wheel tractors made short work of the earth, turning vast amounts in a single pass. It didn’t seem far enough past horse and plow that a man could think up such monsters.

  She had a strange urge to smoke. Wilbur was a few miles ahead and she stopped at a grocery for a pack of cigarettes. On the highway again, she lit a cigarette and clamped it between her lips and inhaled. The smoke left her hacking and dizzy. It settled nothing, and she dashed it in the ashtray and tossed the pack in the backseat.

  She arrived early at the church. Inside, she watched the minister and mortician wheel the casket in for viewing. The minister perched on a metal chair and studied his notes, and the funeral man laid flowered wreaths over the shined cedar. He opened the top side and took a second arranging her father’s suit. Half an hour, her family arrived. Her sisters appeared healthy, their children in ties and slacks. Their husbands draped their best coats over the pew’s back. Her mother peeked a few times, then made her way to Wendy in the back pew. “Come,” she said.

  Her sisters said nothing to her, though they did whisper to their husbands, explaining matters, she presumed. The service was short. The minister joked that that was the way Harold preferred his religion. He read some scripture and closed with a prayer and a hymn: “The Old Rugged Cross.” Wendy sang what she could recall. The family rose to view the casket. When her sisters passed, they set into their father’s pocket folded papers; notes, she would later discover, suggested by the minister to allow for whatever remained unsaid. Her father’s sightless eyes looked just that. Wendy patted the box’s edge, found her father’s hand and stroked it until the cool skin unsettled her.

  The community building hosted a potluck served by her sisters’ friends. After they fed their children, the girls approached Wendy.

  “How are you?” Rachel asked. “We haven’t heard in so long.”

  “I’m married to Matt Lawson,” Wendy said. “He works at the dam.”

  “I wish we’d known,” Amy said.

  “You would have if she had wanted you to,” Wendy’s mother replied.

  Her sisters didn’t know how to continue, then Rachel laughed and Amy joined her, and then for no reason she could apprehend, Wendy found herself in tears, as well, laughing and crying simultaneously.

  They rested on the folding chairs a while longer, squeezing each other’s hands or elbows or shoulders as their conversations started then lagged like dogs in the sun. Amy and Rachel excused themselves to mind their children. To Wendy’s surprise they steered their families to their cars and returned. The four of them cleared tables and washed casserole dishes until dark, then, when there was nothing left to clean, embraced each other and walked to the gravel parking lot together.

  Her mother drove her back to the church and her car. They sat in the dashlight’s glow.

  “Your father understood,” Wendy’s mother said. “In fact, he was proud in his own way. The man admired a sacrifice. He’d have made a wonderful pagan.”

  “Why didn’t they mention you in the eulogy?” Wendy asked. “You were his wife.”

  Her mother shook her head.

  “You left him?”

  Her mother rolled down the window and let in the cool air. She stared outside as Wendy gazed at her face. The light was gone, and she looked suddenly old. “It was your dad who left.” She went on. “I’m not suggesting he didn’t have reason.”

  Wendy closed her eyes. A truck passed. She heard the heavy motor whine with its load.

  “I loved him,” her mother said. “But by the time I happened upon the knowledge, he was past convincing.”

  Lights burned above the street and in each house down the block. A sprinkler ticked on the church lawn.

  “When I said your father never felt slighted by your going, I wasn’t speaking for me. I was angry the whole while. I think that’s to my credit, don’t you?”

  Wendy smiled. “Maybe so,” she said.

  “I think it’s time for you to go,” her mother said.

  Wendy opened the car door and crossed the lot for her own. She raised her hand to wave, but her mother’s grim face had turned toward the windshield and the lights cutting the darkness in front of her.

  Wendy drove. The centerline passed in rhythm like a heartbeat she couldn’t hear. The deafness was her own. The children asleep in their beds would smell fresh as clean laundry. She loved to listen to them. They talked a pure language while adults only picked at conversation like a magpie over a carcass. Perhaps they would still be awake enough to wish good night.

  Before she entered the trailerhouse, Matt had poured her fresh tea and set the cup next to a book of stories from New York she’d been enjoying. In the living room she drank it, and soon he delivered the dish of fried donuts. He’d iced them like cake. They were still hot, and the white cream pooled on the plate.

  “My,” Wendy said. She plucked one from the plate and took a bite.

  “Do you like them?” Matt asked her.

  “They’re awfully good,” she said. “Where in the world did you learn these?”

  “Some ways back,” he said.

  Matt offered her another donut. Wendy took it.

  “They’ve grown fast,” she said.

  “Too much so,” Matt said. “I’d like to keep them babies longer so I could double check my work.”

  Wendy laughed. “It’s not the kind of work you patch, I hear.”

  They were quiet again, finishing another donut each. Matt let off, saving the rest for the children.

  “They’ll wonder why you’re treating them,” Wendy
said.

  “I believe I’ll let them wonder.”

  Matt went to the kitchen and returned with two glasses of milk.

  “Boys will be coming for Angel soon.”

  He scraped the plate for the last of the frosting and put it on his finger. He turned the finger Wendy’s direction and pressed it to her lips. She licked the frosting until she could taste his rough skin.

  “It’s not natural to keep her from them,” Matt said. It was Angel who stilled him when he needed quieting. She’d sit at the foot of his chair reading, and he’d watch her from above, just gazing at the part in her hair, imagining what was happening in the mind underneath it. Matt could reach Angel without measuring his heart in doses.

  His hand was still in hers. She stood and lifted it with her. They had a radio on the mantle and she turned the knobs until she found some band music. He looked puzzled.

  “Just put your hand right here,” she said. He took her by the waist and she him. Their left hands stayed locked together, and Matt stared at their clasped fingers like they might be as far away as the moon. Wendy recalled her father. When she was barely six, he’d shown her the same constellations she’d taught to Luke and Angel. All that air and light above, and you could still find pictures. What she wanted to learn seemed much less, and that left her hopeful.

  She felt Matt’s grip on her hand and returned it. They stayed how they were a long while, not even moving their feet.

  36

  WENDY SHOUTED FOR LUKE TO hit the ball on his first ups. His head swiveled and he stood outside the batter’s box blinking at her. She reclined on a blanket with a cup of wine, up the right field line with Matt and Angel where they shared a picnic dinner. Luke beat the ground with his cleats. The pitcher threw two strikes, then, after a pitch so wide he couldn’t reach it, he got fooled on a third. Wendy watched him jog to the bench for his mitt and cap.

  Ardith and her husband were in the small bleacher behind the backstop. Their boy was on Coulee Dam Savings, the opposite team. Wendy circled the field to say hello between innings. Ardith smiled and her husband said it was nice to see her. His face was shaved close and he wore his hair high and tight, like locks and a beard were threats to his notion of order. It had been clear for some time that Ardith and her husband saw Wendy as a charity case. They fell over one another to be helpful, once offering to loan her a car, even cut a separate key for her.