The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  “Betsy,” he said, surprised at the inadvertent note of urgency in his voice. Ever alert, she bounded toward him with all the hope in the world, and he thought that, if he could, he would change places with her in an instant. “Come on, girl,” he commanded, “let’s you and me go out for a walk.”

  The day was warm and lovely, the campus’s maples ecstatic with color. Like their human counterparts, certain unruly trees seemed on the verge of bursting into flame, they were so vivid, while others clung stubbornly to the green of summer. And which was he? On the lake, under a pale blue sky thin enough to crack open with a light tap, muscular Canada geese rested from their southward flight. His walk carried him, without his quite realizing it, in the direction of Louis and Claire’s house, and he stood on the sidewalk before it, gazing with something like envy at its reassuring solidity, the secure and respectable lives flourishing behind that sturdy facade of white-shingled siding and dark green shutters. Behind a low hedge of yew, Claire’s front garden sang its swan song. A few last, straggling rose blossoms, some dark-hued chrysanthemums. Nothing was sadder than a flower garden in autumn, he thought, remembering the unchanging austerity of those Japanese compositions of conifer and stone he had visited in what seemed like another life. Those gardens, perhaps, had avoided heartbreak.

  Someday he’d like a garden of his own. Perhaps it wasn’t too late to stick a few daffodil bulbs in among the overgrown shrubs that surrounded his house, though beyond that he’d feel too shy about tampering with the yard’s neglected state. He was living there only for a year, after all, given ample notice that, were he to remain at the Forge a second year, he’d almost surely be assigned an apartment in one of the dorms as residential adviser. All that was something he’d have to think about, though Louis talked as if it were a foregone conclusion. He had come to sense, from time to time, the barest hint of certain expectations beginning to hem him in.

  The toot of a car horn startled him from his contemplation. Smiling, Claire waved his way as she maneuvered the Audi into the driveway.

  “Hey,” he told her as she emerged from the sleek gray machine whose trunk, simultaneously, popped open. She was surprisingly well dressed for what appeared to be an ordinary Saturday afternoon shopping trip. “Betsy and I were just admiring your garden.”

  “I’m afraid there’s not much to admire,” she told him. “It’s rather the end of it.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s very pretty this time of year. Can I help you with those?” He pointed to the bags of groceries in the trunk. “Here, I’ll carry. You take Betsy’s leash.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” she told him as they made their way into the house. Music filled the rooms. “Louis is undoubtedly around here somewhere. He never misses the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. Louis,” she said loudly. “Look who dropped by.”

  The music lowered, and Louis appeared in the doorway, looking slightly discombobulated, a strange fish hoisted up from some great, densely pressured depth.

  “I was just passing by, really. Betsy and I were out for a stroll. I got tired of grading papers,” he added, though that was not strictly true. So far he’d spent his day avoiding them with considerable success.

  “Always a pleasure to see you,” Louis said in his courtliest vein. And he did seem genuinely pleased.

  “Don’t let me take you away from your music.”

  “Perfectly all right,” Louis assured him. “I wasn’t caring for it much anyway. The Queen of Spades.”

  Tracy had gotten so used to the older man’s sharing music with him, offering it on a platter, as it were, artfully arranged and presented, that he was a bit disconcerted to realize that there were other musics Louis might, for whatever reasons, choose not to share with him. He regretted that the radio had been turned down so low that The Queen of Spades was, for all practical purposes, inaudible. The regret even surprised him. But he was relieved to detect no residual awkwardness between them. During their last evening together, after an hour of listening to Schumann, their talk had wandered far a field, into a murky realm where, increasingly, Tracy had had the sense that he no longer quite knew what was being talked about, either by himself or his host, as if at some point their words had begun to veil rather than reveal their thoughts.

  He had felt suddenly depressed, on the verge of simply announcing to Louis, “There’s something about me you really should know.” But he had said nothing, and Louis, who had also, it seemed, been on the verge of saying something—though what he might have been about to utter was certainly beyond Tracy’s guess—likewise deferred. Nevertheless, this moment they had arrived at, each from his own trajectory undoubtedly very different from the other’s, seemed to offer, Tracy felt very strongly, at least the possibility of their moving onto an altogether different footing with one another.

  They had not taken that step, sitting instead in silence until Louis averred that he was very fatigued, there was nothing quite like Schumann to fray one’s nerves, and Claire would soon be returning home from her class. Some sense of delicacy on Louis’s part ordained that their sessions be finished before Claire arrived. Tracy had walked home through the chill night air feeling vaguely frustrated, trapped, dissatisfied with himself. He should have told Louis this simple fact about himself before, and now, suddenly, it was too late; at some point their acquaintance had shaded over into something more confidential, something like friendship. It was now a thing that could be betrayed. And though there had been no discernible moment when it had ceased to be one thing and become another, nevertheless what had been left unsaid in the transition must somehow now remain unsaid—or at least could not be said without consequences graver or more unpredictable than Tracy was prepared to face.

  Escaping his New York entanglements for the solitude of the Forge, he had not at all intended something like this to happen.

  “Are you thirsty?” Louis asked. “Did Claire offer you anything?” Betsy was eagerly sniffing at Lux, who had hardly stirred from his pillow in the corner. She stuck her feet out, curved her spine submissively, and let out a bark more craven than friendly.

  “Betsy,” Tracy warned. The life of dogs, even when it happened in full view, was essentially mysterious.

  “It’s still a bit early for a cocktail,” Claire reminded her husband.

  “I can’t stay,” Tracy apologized. “But maybe Betsy would like some water.”

  As Claire turned on the tap, an arc of water, like the proverbial leak in the dyke, jetted from the side of the nozzle and splattered the rim of the sink.

  “I was going to fix that, wasn’t I?” Tracy told her as she set the brimming bowl in front of Betsy, who, her disappointment at Lux’s indifference seemingly forgotten, lapped greedily. “Did you ever get a chance to buy those washers?”

  “Only where did I put them?” she wondered. At a loss, two fingers tapping her chin, she looked around the kitchen, then plucked a small paper bag from atop the refrigerator.

  “Excellent,” Tracy told her. “Looks like we’re in business. Now let me get under here and shut the water off.”

  Taking apart the faucet—“See how these washers are totally shot?”—he felt Louis study him, his habitual pose of detachment failing to mask both his helplessness at such tasks and his grudging admiration for such a handy young man. Because that was what Louis saw, Tracy felt sure. Not someone who dreamed of boys and their assholes but a fellow who was well versed in carpentry, who taught school, who could fix leaky faucets. It was too depressing.

  “There,” he said. He reached under the sink and twisted the valve, then turned the faucet on and off. Water came just as it was meant to. He drank bottled water himself, never from the tap, having read that Middle Forge’s municipal supply, drawn from the Hudson, was contaminated with PCBs. Though it struck him as funny: here he was, almost certain to die young, and he worried about the possibility of cancer twenty-five years down the line.

  “Sweet,” he said, a term any red-blooded American carpenter migh
t use. Louis could barely restrain his praise. It was as if Tracy had saved the two of them from starvation or worse. “Good job,” he murmured. “Fine work.”

  “How can we thank you?” Claire asked him.

  “Really, it’s nothing,” he said, all at once aware that there might be something faintly patronizing in their gratitude. Nevertheless they were, he remarked to himself, in fact now in his debt.

  Abruptly Claire left the room, only to return in an instant. “Here,” she said with that trace of brusqueness with which she sometimes disguised her more generous impulses. “I’ve far more bulbs than I know what to do with. I always order too many, and by the time fall comes I never have the time to put them all in.”

  “Or the space,” Louis added.

  “He criticizes the profusion of my garden,” Claire said. “His own tastes are more formal. Sometimes I think he’d prefer one of those Japanese gardens. You know, stones and raked sand. One or two neatly clipped shrubs.”

  “No, no,” Louis said. “You’ve a very nice garden. I never criticize it.”

  “But you did just now.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. Then, turning to Tracy, he continued: “Claire resents it that I hardly lift a finger to help. I tell her that’s all just as well. I have a black thumb. I’d leave my mark everywhere.”

  “Ridiculous,” Claire told her husband, though Tracy thought it possible she might actually feel wounded. Why did he spend his time with these bickering heterosexuals in the misery of their little marriage? Deep down, where the darkest truths tend to congregate, he despised heterosexuals. At least that was his occasional, skittish suspicion.

  “Now take these,” Claire said briskly, pressing the bag of bulbs into his hands while he thought, fiercely, I’ve got to get myself a boyfriend. “Narcissus ‘Haweri,’ a nice bright yellow. Rather small. They’d look lovely under the shrubs in front of your porch.”

  But he would never have a boyfriend. He would instead sicken and die. And what if he didn’t carry the disease? What if a simple test could lift this dark cloud?

  If I have it, he told himself, I don’t want to know. And besides, I’m sure I do have it. So what good would knowing do?

  “Any special instructions?” he asked, gratefully accepting those knobby, misshapen nodes from which, in six months, improbable life would spring forth.

  “Daffodils,” Claire told him, “are very nearly infallible.”

  It was thus with a resolute sense of hope mingled with the sadness underlying everything for him these days that he knelt in the warm, late afternoon sun and, using a screwdriver from his toolbox instead of the trowel that was ideally called for, scooped a series of holes in the sweet-smelling earth beneath the rhododendrons. One by one he nestled his bulbs in snugly for their winter’s sleep, then filled in the dirt that Betsy, ever willing to play a new game, occasionally tried to paw away.

  “Don’t you go digging these up,” he admonished her. She looked at him with dark, unfathomable eyes—was it ridiculous to see intelligence there?—then interrogatively pawed the ground once more. “No,” he said firmly, but something had caught her attention. Without warning she started from him and dashed toward the street. He glanced up to see Noah cutting across the lawn. Boy and dog caught one another up in a tableau so perfect it might have been choreographed. At least somebody was in love, Tracy thought.

  “Looking for buried treasure?” Noah asked him. Betsy had left dirty paw-marks on the thighs of his faded jeans.

  “Sorry about that,” Tracy said.

  “Who cares?” Noah told him. “Tell me you’re not, um, planting flowers.”

  “Well, actually…” He grinned, looking up at this boy who might well be some kind of buried treasure himself. “Does this mean I’ve lost all your respect?”

  “Oh, that happened a long time ago,” Noah said lightly—a little too lightly, Tracy thought. Did kids have any idea how easily their words could wound? But perhaps it was true, what he said. Perhaps that was exactly what allowed them to joke with each other like this, playfully, without harm.

  “I didn’t think you were around this weekend,” Tracy said. “Weren’t you going to the city?”

  “Just didn’t happen.” Heaving from his shoulder the knapsack in which he carried his schoolbooks, Noah sat down on the steps to the porch. He wore no socks. His ankles were bony but beautiful, like his wrists, his jaw.

  “This place is so deserted on the weekends,” Noah observed, rubbing sleep from those eyes of his that seemed perpetually sleepy.

  “Some of us like it that way,” Tracy told him, though he wondered just how true that might be. What, on the other hand, was undeniably true was the sense of calm that all at once settled over him. Just sit by me like this, he thought, his bulb planting done, his gesture of hope. Just keep me company.

  And as if reading his thoughts, Noah said, “You don’t mind if I hang out, do you? I brought some books to study.”

  That was the altogether pleasurable rhythm they had fallen into. Noah would skip out on the cafeteria two or three nights a week and stop by for dinner, conversation, perhaps a bit of quiet study while Tracy did his own work. Technically, Tracy supposed, it didn’t break any rules, and so he hadn’t particularly discouraged the practice, his only stipulation being that Noah should arrive and depart as discreetly as possible lest any of the other boys—or anyone else, for that matter—think he was somehow playing favorites. Besides, he was selfishly pleased with the arrangement. If the healthy meals he served, a far cry from those overcooked dishes he’d had the misfortune to sample once or twice in the cafeteria, offered Noah a certain kind of nourishment, the exchange was by no means one-sided.

  “I don’t mind at all. Why not stay for dinner?” he urged. “The only thing I have to do is get some papers graded.”

  “My paper?”

  “Well, a whole bunch of papers. It’ll take me an hour, an hour and a half.”

  “Then I’ll just sit in the living room and read,” Noah said. “You won’t even hardly know I’m there. Maybe I’ll take the Bets out for a spin.”

  “The Bets,” Tracy tested as he led the way indoors. “I’m sure it’ll grow on me.”

  Although his impulse was always to cut straight to Noah’s essay before reading anyone else’s, as if it alone were much-awaited news from the front, Tracy always resisted, saving his favorite’s as a reward for having worked through the rest of the stack. He’d asked them this week to be creative, to write about a relationship between two very different people, an assignment he thought of as a bridge between the book they’d just finished, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Separate Peace, which they were about to start. After two hours of reading good and not-so-good attempts at fulfilling the assignment, he could at last treat himself to the reward he’d stashed away.

  Joe & Me

  by Noah Lathrop III

  Every day when Grandma went out to pick apples Joe & Jelly stayed in they’re bed at the top of the house. It was cold and rainey out & they didn’t want to get up so they stayed under the covers & they could listen to the rain on the roof which they liked. Joe & Jelly were exactly alike. If you looked at them you couldn’t tell who was who, it was like looking into a mirrer. Their teachers got them confused & even their Grandma got mixed up sometimes (actually, lots of the time). They had many adventiures including the time they explored the cave. They liked exploring, only they liked sleeping under the covers where it was warm even better.

  Hey Joe, Jelly said.

  Yea, Jelly told him.

  Are you sleep?

  Yea.

  Then let’s sleep some more.

  So they snuggled down in the bed. Grandma was still picking apples outside, like she always did. In the rain, because it rained all the time there.

  Joe & Jelly’s dream

  Their in this rowboat out a lake & it was still raining, so the rowboat is filling up with water & their practically swimming with the fishes.

&nbs
p; Hey Jelly, there’s this island.

  Yea. Let’s go over to it.

  So they went to the island, but what they don’t know is, it isn’t a real island, it was only in there dream.

  Let’s build a fire, Joe said.

  Yea.

  So they did, only it wasn’t a real fire, it was only in their dream too. But that was okay, it was still a worm fire, only not warm enough, so they kept getting close & closer to it til finally they were so close there skin caught fire & even though it was just a dream they were all burning up, their arms & legs & bellies & even the hair on theyre head & just when trying to put each other they wake up.

  We go in the basement

  They didn’t even know there was a basement till one day saw this door and wondered, Where does that go? They thought maybe they weren’t supposed to, but they went down their anyway, and what they saw in the dark was Bones piled up to the ceiling. Human Bones.

  This is kind of weird, Jelly said picking up a Bone that had been picked clean.

  Hey Jelly, I have something that might surprise you, Joe said

  Yea?

  I’m really your Father, see. What your asleep I come down here & play with my collection of Bones. See, these are very valluble Bones, but I can’t tell you why just yet. But one day you will know.

  At the sound of Joe’s deep voice Jelly was really scared. He hoped it was a dream but he penched himself & nothing happened. Oh no, were his last words.