Lone Rock

by Duane Lindsay

  “Jesus! What the hell happened?” Foster stared up in shock, his voice high pitched with worry over the paperwork avalanche coming his way. He grabbed Adrian’s arm. “We gotta get you to the shower.”

  The shower was a safety requirement at all jobs with chemicals, a combined body wash and eye protector. Adrian was led away and presently placed under cold water.

  “Wash your eyes,” he was told. “The chemicals aren’t dangerous to your vision,” which immediately caused Adrian to worry. “You’ll be fine.”

  Adrian struggled with his clothes, peeling off the heavy wet coverall with help from Foster, and stood in his underwear beneath the cold shower. He began to shiver uncontrollably.

  “You’re gonna have some fierce bruises. Anything broken?”

  Adrian pulled himself together from a fog to check. He flexed his shoulders and his back. put hands on hips, swiveled and bent from the waist. Nothing serious felt out of place. His right buttock ached from landing on his wallet and he had the mother of all headaches, but he was going to be fine. he decided.

  “You’ll be going home now, I guess.”

  “What?” Surprised, Adrian looked up and got a mouthful of water. “Why?”

  “It’s policy. Anybody injured is automatically sent home.”

  “Cool,” said Adrian. “If only I’d known.” Not that he would have done this on purpose he thought, as he was led to dry clothes and a warm office, but still...

  Foster had a laborer named Chuckie drive him back to Chicago in a company car. Chuckie was twenty-two, had three tongue piercings and never once shut up between LaSalle and the airport. By the time Adrian climbed very slowly out at the curb he knew that Chuckie hated his job, hated blacks. Chicanos and gays, none of whom he’d ever met in middle Illinois.

  “Right,” Adrian said, his only contribution in a hundred and twenty miles. “Bye.”

  He limped slowly across a too large concourse to United and picked up a ticket, walked even farther to the gate and sat down on his right side because his left ass was swollen. For an hour he watched people line up, walk around and read books and papers until he got up the energy to make a call. He tapped his cell, dialed a number and said, “Maggie?”

  “Adrian.” She sounded happy to hear from him, which improved his mood considerably.

  “I need a favor,” he said.

  “Sure.” No hesitation. She sounded like she was in the next seat, not a thousand miles away on a cell phone.

  “I’m coming home early,” Adrian said.” I, uh, fell. A little.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Just bruised. But I can’t drive and I need some help getting home from the airport. Can you give me a lift?”

  “Sure,” she said. Not when, or I have other plans, or no. Just. Sure. Adrian, sagging on the hard plastic chair, felt a rush of affection. “What are you wearing?” he asked in sudden impulse.

  “Why?” The amused suspicion in her voice vibrated on the line. He imagined her in the little orange car, the color of her hair, the color of carrots, driving too fast, braking too quickly.

  “So I’ll recognize you when you pick me up.”

  “I see.” A definite laugh now. “So you’ll recognize me. Okay; I’m wearing a short skirt and stockings, the garter belt kind, not nylons. Think you’ll recognize me?”

  “I—”

  “What time’s your flight?” she asked innocently.

  “Six thirty-five,” Adrian answered. He was blushing to his ears, his face burning as if sandblasted.

  “You’ll see me.” And Maggie, with a triumphant chuckle, hung up.

  The Denver Airport, like Chicago’s O’Hare, is too big for people with injuries. Or people without injuries. or anybody, ever. By the time Adrian had been in the small airplane seat for the two-hour flight, movement had been reduced to creaking stiffness. His right leg, from the hip down to the toes, was an undulating wave of electric energy; pins and needles multiplied and made aggressive. He had a lump on the back of his head, his wallet had been moved, by necessity to his right rear pocket, and his right thumb had a quarter inch of flesh missing near the nail, which made it impossible to reach into that pocket.

  He was the last person off the plane and moving like an old cow when he spotted Maggie waiting at the baggage conveyors. She wore. as promised, a short skirt and stockings, an image which he hadn’t been able to dislodge even momentarily during the flight. And a blouse and some kind of coat and a huge smile. She carried flowers and finally Adrian managed to shake the image of stockings with garters from his brain long enough to see her look of amusement.

  “What happened, you poor thing?” She watched his approach. “I’m so sorry. If I’d known they were sending you back like this, I wouldn’t have teased you.”

  “That’s all right,” Adrian said. In truth. he wouldn’t have wanted to miss that comment if it meant his life.

  She handed him the flowers, some sort of yellow things, like tulips if tulips came in yellow, slid an arm under his and around his waist. Surprised, he stiffened.

  “Just to help you along, old timer,” she said. “At your pace the parking fee will break us. C’mon.”

  “What’s that smell?” she asked.

  He sniffed, considering. “Zinc probably, and dead pigeon,”

  They walked arm in arm. The concourse turned out to be smaller than Adrian remembered, or at least it ended too soon. Waiting for the shuttle to the main terminal she began to giggle.

  “What?’ Adrian peered to see her expression and she turned her head to hide a smile.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Dead pigeon. That just hit me. And I was just remembering that this is how I first met you. The limp, black and blue.” She snorted. “Sorry.”

  “And this is funny how?” Adrian asked patiently. He was slowly becoming accustomed to her odd fits of humor.

  “It’s just, well, it’s like before, you know, but a whole lot funnier.”

  In the train, arm in arm—still for support? he said, “I liked the books you gave me.”

  “Which ones?”

  “The Carl Hiassen, especially.”

  “Interesting. That tells me something.”

  Adrian couldn’t get her to say what.

  They reached her car and he managed, somehow, to squeeze himself into the low seat, turning to lean only on one side, so his face was near hers. He thought about the night, not so long ago, when they sat in the parking lot, and how he should have kissed her. The feeling returned; he should kiss her. The desire grew, battled by an equally insistent thought that he looked like a war victim and smelled of dead rotting pigeon; why would she want him to kiss her? These feelings negated each other from the airport, through half an hour of conversation he would never remember, all the way to south Denver when she said, “where to?”

  He said. “‘Huh?”

  “Directions, please.”

  He looked out the window, numbly, unsure of where they were.

  “To your house,” she said.

  “Oh. To my house. Take 285 to Soda Lakes. Turn left.” He watched the scenery in the darkening evening. Maggie’s casual speed had brought them almost to his home. The ride would be over in minutes.

  He gave her the final directions and they pulled into his driveway. The garage door light came on with motion sensors, shining a two hundred wall beam of white intensity into the car. All romantic thoughts vanished in that glare. Adrian turned ungracefully away, fumbled for the door latch realizing he’d missed another moment. How many do I get, he wondered? The thought disturbed him more than it should have.

  “Do you want me to stay?” Maggie asked.

  Did he? Of course he did. Of course not. “I’m not feeling good enough for...you know.”

  “No, what?” She grinned widely

  “Stop it. I’m not feeling good. Period.”

  “Fine. Spoilsport.”

  Stretching his bartered body, about to close the door he heard a yelped. �
�Wait!”

  He leaned back down—his back creaked—and looked into the car.

  Maggie was digging in a bag in the back seat. “‘I have something for you.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a pomegranate.” She handed him what looked like a small shriveled basketball. “Have you ever had one?”

  “No,” Adrian inspected it dubiously. “Never.”

  Her expression was hooded in the shadow of the car. “You’re in for a treat. Eat the seeds. There’s a Greek legend that says something about eating six seeds and Winter—or maybe Spring—but not the thing about the ground hog. And something about Hell, but anyway, enjoy.”

  “I will.”

  He closed the door and she drove away. Adrian stood in the chilly wind watching her lights fade away. He turned and went inside his dark cold house, turned on the living room light and stared at the leathery sphere in his hand. What on earth am I supposed to do with a pomegranate?

  26 – The Trouble with Toby

  As it turned out, Adrian enjoyed the pomegranate, once he figured out how to eat it. And Monday, at work, on the Internet, he did look up the myths concerning the fruit and discovered that Maggie’s odd reference to “six months or something” had a basis in Greek Mythology, specifically Pluto’s abduction of Persephone into Hades.

  But on Wednesday, unexpectedly sprung from an Illinois purgatory, he sat on his own sofa prying sweet seeds from this odd scarlet fruit, feeling them explode tartly in his mouth. He considered how many things Maggie was adding to his life.

  There was the pomegranate itself. He’d never seen one before, now he was eating it. In a rare moment of whimsy, he held up a half in each hand and considered them. “It’s a fruit,” he declared. “No, it’s a puzzle.” He added a bass announcer’s voice, concluding, “Stop! You’re both right.” He shrugged and ate another seed.

  At home; he noticed another difference. He was changing, becoming something other than the self-contained bookish fellow who once worked sixty-eight hour weeks because he had nothing else to do. That person would have been climbing the walls of his own home, desperate to return to a science manual.

  Books. Maggie had introduced him to fiction. Her first choice had been the brilliant Big Red by Frank Haase, an account of the engineering of the Hoover Dam, cunningly told as fiction. Adrian had devoured it, picturing the harsh life in the desolate mountains near Boulder City, feeling kinship with his own tiny tribulations on remote job sites. He popped a seed—a sour one—into his mouth and imagined their life. One twenty-eight in the shade. No safety rules. Eight dollars a day, less board. No houses, the workers living in tents or ramshackle cars parked at the side of the road. No trees. No cooling, bad food, long brutal hours, the depression...

  Compared to that, his own life was pure indolence. He shifted on the couch to ease the pressure on his bruised rear. A bruise! They’d sent him home as if he was an invalid. His thoughts went back to those long months when he was an invalid. Broken in body, wounded in spirit, Adrian wondered how he’d gotten by. How had they gotten by, he wondered, those ancestors of ours? Desperation, of course; the mother...

  After Big Red, already re-read twice, he’d given her other suggestions a try. Fiction of all kinds; mysteries, which bored him, humor, a hit or miss thing, and Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels which he adored, though he couldn’t begin to imagine why.

  Adrian’s mother read. He couldn’t recall her without a book in her hand. His sister Clare had inherited the gift, and his brother Neal. Of the family, reading had passed by only Adrian and his father, who preferred technical journals and how-to magazines.

  His mother listened to music. On the couch, in his memory, he heard his mother bustling around the house, listening to Hank Williams or Buck Owens or Tammy Wynette, while she dusted or vacuumed the place to a high sheen. Always county; Mom had no interest in Pop music. Lawrence Welk left her cold. Out in the garage, he’d help his father fix a car or a toaster. Later, after they both took a course in electronics repair (“Make up to $6.00 an hour fixing televisions!’) they mended a giant Philco Adrian had dragged home from a dumpster. They often had it on for ball games. There was never any music in the garage.

  Now, because of Maggie, Adrian couldn’t imagine his life without it. She was always humming something or drumming her fingers to an imagined piano part only she could hear, singing all the harmonies to the Beach Boys. A neat trick, in Adrian’s opinion.

  His thoughts centered around her. The old Adrian, the one who had somehow caught her attention, wouldn’t be able to keep her interest very long. But somewhere he had changed. Was it the night on the bus? Even so long after the event—nine months now?—he thought of it as the night on the bus.

  Was a near death experience enough to change him so thoroughly? Or was it that he was finally having a near life experience? Maybe he’d never been alive until sometime after he nearly died.

  Who knew? Maggie had something to do with it. So did climbing, another of life’s little surprises. Who’d have thought Adrian Beck, boy geek, would enjoy hanging barehanded from rocks? Or that he’d have no fear when he did?

  Perhaps that was a good motto for life—Who Knew?

  He sat on the couch for a long while, letting his thoughts drift, idly popping seeds into his mouth. When he bit into two at once, on each side of his mouth, his taste buds jumped in alarm. On the left came a burst of sweetness, honey and sugar multiplied. On his left the seed ruptured a squirt of bitter tartness, like a sour pickle. Each sensation was unpleasant, too much for his sense of taste to bear. But mixed, they blended into a surprising and agreeable texture.

  Maybe that was life; the bitter and the sweet. He was pleased with the thought and with himself for thinking it. He added, in judgment of himself, “Before, I was cottage cheese.”

  “Now I’m a pomegranate.”

  “School sucks,” said Toby. He stood at the workbench. his back to Adrian. His shoulders were tight with concentration.

  Adrian agreed by nodding. “Are you done with the carburetor?”

  “No,” he said. The tone in his voice made Adrian look up from the engine compartment of the car in surprise.

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “This doesn’t make any sense.” He turned around and gestured with the oil stained shop manual. It says to disconnect the linkage here and remove the float valve. But if I do that, the valve isn’t ever gonna go back in there.” Frustration was everywhere apparent in the boy’s voice, the stiff carriage, the tight grip on the book. Adrian drifted over, stretching to remove a crick in his back,

  “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  “I just said. The book says—”

  “No, I mean, what’s your problem?” He took the book and set it on the workbench among scattered pieces of metal. The smell of gasoline was thick in the old garage despite the door being open to the early Autumn afternoon. The western sun angled into the room making half of it a too bright oven, the rest a cool dark cave.

  “Let’s sit down,” Adrian suggested. “Why don’t you get us a couple of Cokes?”

  “Sure.”

  Toby left and Adrian sat in one of the patio chairs they’d lugged into the garage. He wiped sweat off his brow and wondered about the boy. For over a month now Toby had been testy, altering from manic to sullen. It was long past time to talk.

  Toby returned, handing over a tall glass dripping with condensation. He took a sip of his own and said, “It’s my Dad.”

  Just like that. Adrian was amazed at Toby’s open nature. Most teenagers didn’t talk to anyone, but Toby talked about everything. And pretty much all the time. The month long silence hadn’t been really quiet, merely uncommonly evasive.

  “What about your father?”

  “He’s never around. He used to be. He was off during the summer and him and me would do stuff all the time. Now though, he’s got this new job, and he’s always at work.”

  “What does he do?” asked Adrian, surpr
ised that he’d never wondered before.

  “He’s a teacher. He was a teacher.”

  “So he had the summer off.”

  “Yeah. Now he’s gotten a promotion and he’s like a principal or something and all he does is work or talk about work and it’s getting old, you know.”

  Adrian didn’t know what to say. He’d never thought about Toby’s home life, being content to work on the car with him. He enjoyed his company, the sudden enthusiasms, the endless chatter. It hadn’t occurred to him that Toby might want more. This sounded more serious than Adrian felt he could handle.

  “Maybe your Dad’s worried and will get better when he’s more comfortable at work.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Toby said, “What was your father like?”

  “My father?” Adrian said. “He worked at Ford as a line manager. Worked his way up from janitor or something. I don’t know. Stayed with the company for forty years, and retired. He and Mom are on a trip somewhere.”

  “No, I don’t mean work. I mean, what was he like with you? Was he there, you know? Did you do stuff together?”

  Adrian realized where the boy was headed. “Actually, yeah, we did stuff together. We did this. Dad didn’t like to sit around, he always had to be doing things. So he puttered around in the garage all the time. He liked to build things with his hands.”

  “I used to help him. When I was eight or so I fetched wrenches and carried things. Later I helped more, rebuilt parts, wired the cars. He taught me to use power tools. I suppose I became an engineer because of him.”

  “How come?” asked Toby.

  “Dad was a...” Adrian looked for the right word. He rejected “tyrant’ and ‘compulsive’ and settled on ‘perfectionist.’

  “Everything always has to be done just a certain way, Adrian,” he’d say. “That’s supposed to be tightened to 30 PSI. Use the torque wrench, it’s what it’s there for.” He used to redo everything I did, certain that I’d done it wrong. He was the original user of the phrase ‘Quality is Job One’. I used to hate it when he said that. It always meant that he’d found something wrong with what I did.