Forty Martyrs

by Philip F. Deaver

“Ah fuck it.” The word was unlike her, and they both laughed.

  “C’mon. We promised ourselves something nice for once.”

  She looked at him.

  He watched her move in her bucket seat, turning toward him. “You deserve better than Coal Grove,” he said.

  “Listen, Nick, this will be perfect,” she said. “Perfect for us.” She smiled, touched his hand. “Quick. Go in and get us a room. I want to make love now.” She leaned over and kissed him. She pulled back just enough so she could talk and said, “I told you on the phone, I have even less time than usual.” Her hand was on his chest, then his face. “Let’s make the best of it and not drive around Kentucky looking for the ideal mythical nonexistent perfect honeymoon spot like we did in Tampa and ended up in a Holiday Inn anyway.”

  “Ramada.”

  She kissed him again. “Go in there, madman.”

  And in he went. He ambled straight to the abandoned front desk in a pantomime of not being anxious, leaned over it to see if anyone had ducked down to avoid business. From a back room out of a cloud of cigarette smoke came a portly man with a flushed face and a Holiday Inn plastic nameplate. Clint, Shift Manager. The arrangement was made for one night, and Nick begged to check in early. Clint was up for it for a mere twenty dollars more, bringing the total to seventy nine dollars, which is what the establishment should have paid Nick and Carol to stay there, but anyway. Clint handed Nick two big brass keys. Old school all the way.

  •

  Nick was happy that Carol had brought lunch. It was her custom to do so if she was driving to the rendezvous point and thus had room for everything. She had an ice chest in the back, sandwiches lovingly packed that morning as she left Cincinnati, grapes, strawberries, Perrier, oranges, Dijon mustard, four Harp ales, and a funny card in an envelope marked only by the dazzlingly erotic imprint of her lips in the shape of a kiss. Nick had brought champagne and two flutes and the same set of five cinnamon candles he’d brought the last two times they’d met. But their time-honored traditions felt bleak to Nick right then.

  The room was on the second floor, and they carried in the bags, ice chest, and various sacks, all of it, before they locked the door and closed the heavy drapes. During the hustle of moving in, in the locked bathroom of their room, Nick had the opportunity to check his phone. Emma had called—there would be two messages from her when he got a chance to hear them, and now Emma and whatever it was that was on her mind became yet another gnawing thing, joining his stoner of a son, his brick wall of an ex-wife, his big lie, and the ticking bomb of their letters.

  They made love before anything else. Carol whipped down the bedspread of the window-side bed, a smile on her face, and rose gorgeously in the room’s dim greenness from that fine, delicate last move of undressing that Nick loved so much, when the last ankle was at last freed from the beige panties and how those panties sailed across the room light as gossamer itself. Then the two of them were in each other’s arms on crisp sheets, rolling, him on top, her on top, him, her, and laughing between kisses, and holding each other tight so that, for Nick, nearly a half hour passed without preoccupation or worry, and during that time, brief as it was, he genuinely took joy in Carol Brown, in the ease of her, in the fun she wanted to have, in her happiness as she reached for it, in all her words that he heard and all those many, many words that for some reason he didn’t hear. She was pretty. She hated the word but it was so exact. He wouldn’t say it, but he could think nothing else. They were stealing this moment and this love from the world around them, stealing it from a world that stole joy and freedom from them on a regular basis and this was revenge. No, it wasn’t revenge, it was escape. No, not that, it was comeuppance, it was the coming around of what-goes-around-comes-around. It was a rite of adulthood, to be defiant if they fucking well pleased. They waited months and sometimes years between times of seeing each other. Steal love. Steal it. Time had made them both familiar and new to each other. Lovers in the familiar stretch of bodies and the fabulous way skin knows other skin, and strangers in the details, the thickness creeping in, the gray in Nick’s hair now dominating the brown, smile wrinkles deepening for them both, and more, much more, subtle stuff that was hard to spot or name. And at the end of it, Carol was on her back, and tears, mascara-tinted, streamed from the corners of her eyes down into the fine hair that framed her face. Nick dabbed at her eyes with the edge of the top sheet, and kissed her again, her tears making the kiss humid and, he noticed, sweeter yet for all the sadness. She was only being emotional—happy, not sad, she would have said if pressed—but he didn’t press and soon she pulled the ribbon out of her hair and rolled away from him. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us,” she muttered.

  “Nothing is,” he said after a while, and he really believed it, for better and for worse. He thought about that, and other things, and drifted. He saw the shaking hands of Mac Pellier—what was he thinking giving that man booze? He thought of Emma’s strong, level, committed, rightor-wrong-and-nothing-in-between gaze. Buck resurfaced for him. He stared at the ceiling, and sank back into his rickety, chaotic, barely-gluedtogether reality though he tried not to show it.

  Carol was saying that Tuscola was going wet. The new student center had a bar. Somehow she’d gotten that far from the existential question, and her long white arm reached from under the sheets to open the cooler deaver and bring out the grapes, and the large bunch was passed back and forth. They weren’t saying anything. He got up and opened beers, lay back down, and the grapes and beer held their attention a while. She went to the bathroom, stayed fully five minutes, came out in her robe with a hairbrush, a familiar hairbrush she always had with her when they met, and brushed her hair in the motel mirror in the dim light. Then she lit candles like it was late at night, although it was barely noon. Pretty in that flickering light, she sat at the foot of the bed facing him.

  “You asked what I played.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I played our Mozart—the stuff we like. Some Ravel I keep trying, a few other things. I want to play for you again some time.”

  “Ah.” Nick was still drifting. Buck had been in rehab twice in the last few years, jail once. Drugs had been whopping trouble for him and for everybody. How could they even let him near the shelter? Emma knew all this. What was she thinking? Was she trying to do something great for Nick by turning a blind eye to his son’s record, trusting him and giving him a job? And why does Buck turn up high this day? This day.

  “I don’t know why I keep doing recitals,” she said.

  Nick stared at the dark ceiling, but he did hear her.

  “To keep my head in the game, I guess.”

  “Yes.”

  “So my kids know their mom is accomplished at something.”

  Her two children, ages nine and seven, Stephen and Rebecca, from her previous marriage. Focus, Nick. Listen. “What’s up with the kids these days?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just asking.”

  “Our neighbors have them while Wally’s at the college, or Margaret does, and then he’s got them. They love the Fosters, and they’re right next door. It works.”

  “Ah.”

  “They’re taken care of, if that’s what you mean. While I’m…”

  Nick remembered the days. He missed them in fact. It was all in a tangle now.

  “I know they’d be taken care of, Carol. I was just trying for an update.”

  “They’re growing up. They remember their father well, and he comes by, and Wally seems to get along with him.”

  Tangles everywhere. Nick thought of Dave, earlier this morning, getting toweled off. He’d come out of the towel, his face beaming, his eyes looking straight into Nick’s. He’d be sad while Nick was gone, but he’d sleep plenty, cocking his ears toward the street from time to time, full of dog hope.

  Carol was up to get the sandwiches. She’d said something, and Nick didn’t hear it. “Hey. Saint Elsewhere.” She wiggled his foot.

&nbs
p; “What?”

  “Are you praying or something?”

  His hands were folded on his stomach just so.

  “I was saying that I hate to tell you but I’m going to have to go home.” She was looking at him. “In a couple of hours. Drive back. I really forced this. I wanted to see you. I needed to. I can be home by ten o’clock if I leave by four.”

  “Okay,” Nick said.

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Buck called a couple of hours ago stoned.” Overstated, the usual.

  “Oh no, Nick.”

  “A miracle he managed in the mere four or five hours I’ve been gone.” Nick picked up his beer and finished it. “So I should go, too.”

  Nick’s ex-wife’s pointed digs were gnawing at him now. It must have seemed to Carol from his body language that he was thinking of leaving immediately. She said, “We can stay here for another couple of hours, though, right?”

  “Okay,” he said, and looked around, trying to get ahold of himself, wondering how long he could keep from bolting.

  “We have to take our customary picture, too.”

  Nick sighed. By all means, let’s add more pictures to the cache of letters and pending disaster.

  “Another exciting Coal Grove panorama with the two lovers in the foreground,” Carol said.

  “Yeah, we can go up on the road where I was waiting for you. Green in a sort of generic way. It’s on the way out.”

  “Has Buck been clean and dry until now? I mean since…”

  “Hell if I know. I think so.”

  “Is he dating?”

  “Not right now,” Nick said. “Who knows. They don’t ‘date’ anyway, you know. But no.”

  “Have you been seeing anyone?”

  “No.” This was a sudden and surprising question, and Nick answered too quickly. He hated it. Carol had to know he’d be seeing someone in Athens, and to think otherwise surely would have run against all she knew about him. He rationalized that she’d expect him to say “no” to such a question, the two of them only partially covered in the daytime curtained dark of a motel.

  She’d set a sort of picnic on the round table next to the bed. “Well. You’d said you had a confession to make, so I thought that might be it. Plus the unanswered call from someone named Emma on your cell phone.” She opened the second set of beers, drank from one, gave him the other. She quickly went on, looking down. “You know, I played the Mozart sonatas at the recital.” She was letting him off the hook. “I played them for you, and I thought about you while I was doing it. I played the Ravel piece, I played Les Adieux, I played my Chopin butt off.” She laughed.

  “I wish I could have been there.”

  “People liked it.”

  “The woman—Emma, on the phone—she’s calling about Buck. She works at the shelter where I volunteer. And she knows his case, from the old days.”

  “Ah.”

  Carol kissed him and they rolled into each other again, among the crumpled sheets. Maybe they both were less heated this time, calmer and slower, probably more preoccupied, or best case, maybe watching closer, running the tape, hoping to remember each secret move and feeling during the next long time apart. Maybe by the time they’d snuffed the candles and were in the shower together they were already beginning to go home, both of them, starting to feel rushed, people waiting, both of them understanding and not meaning to be mean but mentally rotating and being pulled back, both of them, not just him because he got what he came for, or her because this was half of what women want—both of them, in mind of home because this is how people are. If they had gravitated together, here was the other force, centrifugal, equal and opposite.

  In the rental car heading back to the river, in the parking lot of the Super Walmart, they said a few things and kissed again. Her hair was wet and combed back. Maybe she’d put the ribbon back later. A man with new fishing tackle consented to take their picture right there in the parking lot, red hulk of a car and brown river behind them.

  She hugged Nick. “Buck will be okay,” she said. This was quite easy for her to say, but the jury was still out.

  “Drive careful,” he told her. And goodbye.

  Moments later, Nick, sour and unhappy, was driving fast, panicked to be home, pounding up the same highway he’d just pounded down. It wasn’t raining anymore and for that at least he was glad. He dug frantically for the phone in his bag in the seat next to him, accessed the messages, both from Emma. The one she’d left first said she was sorry for ragging on him about the Sarge. The Sarge was relieved of the troublesome tooth and doing fine and only just before she called had told Emma he liked Nick and wasn’t mad about the scotch. Emma still was, however.

  Then the second message: “Now look Nick, I talked with your very upset son. I had him come over to talk more about the job and deaver suddenly I was having to settle him down. I have taken a very close look at him, and he’s not on drugs. I tell you, you are going to have to get on top of this thing and show some trust or you’ll lose him, you’ll lose your son! It would help if you could communicate even the slightest bit with those of us who love and need you. You even sicced his mother on him! Please! I’m not calling from the office phone because I knew this would get personal and loud. See you in a couple of days or whenever, and when you get a minute from your Louisville business pals, or whoever, be in touch with this good boy and apologize to him!”

  Nick pulled over on the shoulder, ears red and ringing. It was about three in the afternoon. He’d call Buck soon. He doubted he was wrong about this, but at least if Buck didn’t seem high to Emma then he wasn’t too far gone. After a few minutes of sitting there, the dominant emotion was relief. He loved how Emma took him to task, how she really cared about Buck. He sat there a few more minutes, trying to go blank. He pictured Dave the dog, earlier, in the mental fog of morning and rain. Now he’d be home on the couch, sleeping, not one care in the world, his probably-still-damp leash hanging from the ladder-back chair in the foyer. Nick found himself sorry Carol was gone. The lies and letters were still steeping. Confrontation was not his strong suit. Lies make you weak. He turned in the seat, looked back toward Coal Grove through his dusty back window. Maybe he could catch her, still in town getting gas or something. Retrieve the day. He turned back and stared up the highway toward home. He clicked the cell phone off, that awful tormenting thing, speaking of leashes. He took a deep breath, prepared to pull back onto the road. For all the mournful facts in the matter of Carol—that they lived far apart and were separate in the trajectory of their lives, that he’d told her some giant lies that she carried with her as true, that pressures from home tore at them both during their few hours together, that each time was darkened by the cold fact of risk and the ominous swirl of circumstance—still, Carol Brown was a grand friend and gorgeous woman whom it was his privilege to be with, and her love was generous and fun, and she played him with the mastery with which she played Chopin—including the coda where she’d touched the keys lightly––then let him leave fast and without coming clean. Because that was how this music went.

  PROJECTS

  One particular dark day in the dark days before prison, remembered dark but really probably they were sunny he supposed, Carol gone and the kids, Stephen and Becky, playing at friends’ up on the north side, Wally Brown struggled himself out of the house he didn’t really own, out into the yard (the yard like a child he lived with but hadn’t adopted), and fired up the mower (his). It was a Lawn-Boy, the biggest of that brand’s pushmowers and fairly new, and though the rains in May had gotten the lawn robust and tall, the grass did not figure to be a match for this machine. Wally muscled up and gave the cord a stout jerk and the mower fired. Almost enthusiastically then, he plunged in. He mowed first along the east fence in the backyard so close he wouldn’t have to weed-whack it later. He ran it around the tractor-tire sand pile Becky seemed to have outgrown, around the birdbath with its cracked bowl, around the clothesline poles—all of these being installations from
Carol’s former marriage and the couple of years she’d lived alone after it ended—along the south fence by the alley, along the west fence bordering the driveway, around the PVC soccer goal he’d brought with him from his former life and put up for Stephen, along the sidewalk, then pushing in close beneath the hedges that bordered the back of the house. Then, after mowing the borders of the backyard and around the various barriers and obstacles, he plowed into the deep, fragrant, summer green of the middle of it. The lawnmower deaver was cranked to full-throttle, creating white noise, and that and the systematic progress of this simple work did Wally good. He could think while he mowed. Reflect on the book he was writing, focus on other things he wanted to think about and not on things he didn’t. When he started to think about things he didn’t want to think about, he pushed faster and distracted himself with exertion until his face and shirt were wet, the rows efficient and straight.

  Pretty soon, he was pleased to see that he was half-done with the back, and for a moment had visions of completing the entire backyard in what for him was record time, when suddenly there was a bang like a gunshot, and just like that the mower stopped. He’d only been working fifteen minutes. There was at least an hour to go, the rest of the back, the front yard, the parkway. Exhaust rose from beneath the machine. The entire town around him was quiet except for his ears ringing and the sound of one or maybe two other lawn mowers somewhere blocks away. He stood motionless, staring down at it. There was a shock in how fast the world went quiet. Apparently he’d hit something. He walked around the mower, bent down to look close. Everything seemed okay. He tipped it up to look underneath. Perhaps whatever he hit was still under there, maybe tangled up in the blade. Everything seemed okay at first. Whatever he hit, it was gone now. Maybe he could just fire it up again and finish this lifesucking task. But on closer look, kneeling in the grass with sweat dripping from the tip of his nose, Wally saw that the blade itself was bent and not just a little. He was done.

  This was what he hated most about work around the house: that a project for which he planned to take some confined length of time, that he could delude himself into thinking was mind-clearing and thus rather healthy for him if it didn’t take too long, would, because of the wrong tools or some unforeseen complication, suddenly drag him into the loss of a day or the annoyance of returning to his study with the job left, for all his efforts, ragged and unsatisfactory, with no way to finish short of turning it into a major Cecil B. DeMille ordeal. And, of course, there was no way to concentrate on his real work, his reading, his writing, his thinking, while the interrupted chore teetered in the back of his mind.