“Well, I’m glad Ben fessed up before he shot himself,” Veronica said. “Wally’s not a bad guy and he never would have set that fire. Does he know you think he’s a good guy, you having fucked him over a few times with your old pal and lover Nick Bellinger in Ohio?”
“How do you know about that?”
“I never thought Wally was a bad guy.”
“Did Rachel tell you?”
“Oh, so Rachel knows about it? Never mind, Carol. The word’s out, just so ya know.” Veronica sighed. “I always thought you were a bit of a slut. I could never put you and Wally together. It makes sense to me that you drove Wally over the edge and that he’s the one in prison with a fatal disease that will put an end to him in the middle of his life.”
“Well, I just wanted you to know.”
“I don’t really want to know everything anymore,” Veronica said. “So stop telling me stuff. You will always know more than I do about everything in this town, and you don’t need to call me up and tell me. I’m done with the soft underbelly of this fucking town.”
“I suppose.” Carol chuckled, then changed gears. “Well, so okay, I don’t want to argue. I’ve remembered almost fondly our, to your great credit, humane conversation at Squeak’s. Like we’re friends. I just wanted to give you a call, and pass along this info about Wally being very sick and Ben and the administration building. Maybe pass it along to Lowell.”
“Yeah, well, Carol, you can fucking forget that.”
“Sorry to have caught you in a bad mood this morning. Okay, I have to go.”
“Carol, are you on pills?”
“No.” She sucked in her breath. “I mean yes.”
“Seems like it.”
“I might have called you even without drugs. I might call again. I feel close to you now, maybe closer than to anyone else. We’re sisters. We’re bad in the same ways.”
Veronica felt Carol working to get under her skin. “Don’t call anymore, Carol. If you please.”
“I might. If I want to. We’re sisters. We have a certain behavior in common. We pass each other on the streets. We meet up in a local bar. We do Come-To-Jesus. We’re potential good friends, but we just haven’t gotten there quite yet.”
“We’ll never be friends, Carol.” Veronica took a sip of cold coffee, tossed it in the sink. “Seriously, don’t call. Something might happen.”
“Nothing that hasn’t happened to me before. I suggest you think about being my friend. I’m not afraid of your anger. I’ll stare it down, fly right into it, I’ll eat it for lunch. I’m not afraid of you. You don’t have me over a barrel. We both know what I’m talking about. Let’s be friends. We can meet up from time to time, have a beer and talk. You probably need it as much as I do. We’ve got a buncha shit in common.”
“I thought you had to get off the phone.”
Carol was quiet for a second, settling down. “Nah. I just said that. I actually don’t, but while I’ve got you I need to say a few things to you. You threaten. You’re mean. You call me names. You think I can deaver handle anything, being called a slut and about anything else. You’re wrong. I’m not made of granite. I’m not made of granite, Veronica. With you my guard is down. I’m not stupid or oblivious. I’ve said I’m sorry for what I’ve done. Clearly you hate me and aren’t inclined to treat me like a human being. I want to be your friend. Say yes.”
“Unthinkable.”
Carol said, “I could be dead right now.”
“That’s an interesting thought,” Veronica replied.
“I don’t know how I ended up in this godforsaken shithole.”
“You followed your first husband here.”
“Maybe I think we could be friends. You just need to soften a bit and think about it. Would you like to meet me at Squeak’s again sometime in the near future? We could have a great chat.”
Veronica concluded the pills were making Carol crazy and hung up on her.
Lowell put down his coffee cup. “Wow.”
“Wow what?”
“That phone call was a thrill a minute.”
“She said she wants to be friends.” Veronica poured herself more coffee. “How does she think that’s ever gonna happen?”
“I have no idea. She does need friends though.”
“There’s Rachel.”
“Carol knows Rachel’s watching her from across the street and spreading rumors. If she had the dough, Carol would move to Champaign.”
Veronica fired back, “I won’t ask how you happen to know that. Maybe we should provide financial assistance for the move if we’re so friendly.”
Lowell said, “You’re being mean, honey. It’s not like you.”
“Okay, well. Truth is, I haven’t been like me for quite some time, case you haven’t noticed.” She sipped her coffee, suddenly slammed down the cup. “Hell with it. I’m going back to bed.” Instead of shuffling down the hall, Veronica, tears streaming, broke into a run.
•
A month later, after many of Carol’s phone calls, Veronica caved and met her at Squeak’s. For Veronica the seven miles out there was a long drive, on ice and snow. But the cool air was good. In Illinois, in the flatlands, the wind is strong and unrelenting. Tuscola is the county seat of Douglas County, the flattest county in Illinois, and so there’s not much cover unless you stand behind a building or hunker down in your car. In the gravel parking lot, Veronica hopped out and ran for the front door, her winter coat tightly wrapped around her all the way to her chin. She went immediately to the back booth, in honor of their first face-to-face.
Carol was not far behind, and came in the front door, spotted Veronica and hurried to the booth in her snowboots. “Wow, this is very interesting,” Carol said, her opening salvo as she removed her coat. “The same booth. Nice!” She shook the snow off her boots. “It is big of you to join me here and be my friend. You’re really a class act.”
Veronica smiled at her. “Whatever, Carol.”
“Well, neither of us is perfect. Geeez, could you get off that? It’s wearing me out. You may or may not know it, but you’ve made your fucking point.” Carol smiled a hard smile.
Veronica removed her own coat but held the eye contact. “Is Wally out of the slammer?”
“Should be soon. His illness is holding things up—hard to figure, I know. I keep saying they just need to airlift him out of there and get him up to Champaign where there’s proper medical treatment available, but it’s not that easy to get out once you’re in. Paperwork, they say. I’ll bet Wally’s going crazy, knowing his days are numbered and being lashed to the penitentiary.”
“Will you talk to him?”
Carol looked toward the bar, wanting to order a Stella for old time’s sake. “I will, yes.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“I hope we can get somebody, a third party, to be there, too. Some kind of protection, or maybe not protection but at least somebody objective.”
Veronica knew Carol really did mean protection, and she was probably implying Lowell. “Lowell likes Wally and is really sorry he’s sick. Of course, Kelleher could play the objective third party role, or Vasco Whirly.”
“I thought maybe we could all meet up at the Kopi, or at Forty Martyrs.”
“Well, don’t turn it into a canasta party. Forty Martyrs makes sense. You don’t want Wally driving all over Central Illinois, delaying the meeting even further when his time is short. Do it on the home ground.”
“Good advice. But it’s a tough one for me,” Carol said.
“Why?”
“I really don’t have a home ground in this town. It’s difficult.”
“I’m sure it is, but you have to give him a chance to say what he has to say. He can’t die without that.”
Carol looked at her. “Yeah, I know.”
“I’m sure it’s plenty awkward for you.”
“Very awkward.”
Two draft Stellas arrived at the table. Veronica had thought ahead.
Caro
l and Veronica toasted with their chilly beer mugs. “Here’s to friendship,” Carol said.
“Whatever,” Veronica replied, and their beer mugs clacked. “By the way, I just want to say you were right on the phone. I’ve been nasty, particularly to you—I’m just so damned angry about everything. I’m sorry. It’s not like me—calling you names and all this other business. There’s no end to what all I wanted to say to you, emptying both barrels. But when we’re together I never can think of all of it. It won’t happen anymore.”
“Does that mean we’re friends now?”
Veronica replied, “Hell no!” She sipped her beer. “Stop it, bitch.”
They both laughed.
By arrangement with Carol, though she denied it repeatedly, an old fellow sat at the bar with a big camera, a long lens, and the toast was photographed. The next week it played in the very popular photography section of the Tuscola Journal. This, after all, is how Carol operated, stretching heaven and hell for witnesses to her new friendship with Veronica.
•
And so winter locked down on the town, and people retreated indoors. January, a dark, hopeless month, sat on Tuscola like a boulder. A drive on the night streets during the week was reliably quiet but for the tires crackling on the icy snow and the low hum of the car’s heater. Few people would be out late. Instead, families were huddled indoors, the furnace on, the fireplace crackling, dinner dishes in the sink. Teenagers, and certain adults prone to closet fever, went out late at night on weeknights and on the weekends, prowled the town’s streets, gathered with friends in drafty booths at the Dairy Queen, or Squeak’s out on the township line, or sat in their cars at Mel’s Drive-in––yes, there was a Mel’s Drive-in. The whole panoply of human behavior, though, didn’t pause for winter. Babies were made. The college was bustling. The administration put a new administration building on the drawing board, one that paid homage in size and grandeur to the one that burned, including a five-story atrium (but not the spiral stairs behind Lowell’s desk). The faculty offices would of course be smaller, thinner doors, lower ceilings. Part of the reduction of expectations so characteristic of the times. Real materials were expensive.
That winter was dim, long, and cold. At Forty Martyrs one evening in February, Wally and Carol sat down, with Father Kelleher and Vasco Whirly nearby (Lowell didn’t show). Wally, who was failing, made his peace with his wife. In the Forty Martyrs elementary school gym, they sat at a folding table, across from each other, and they whispered so the witnesses wouldn’t hear. Wally had grown old deaver in prison. His hair was long and gray, and he had a beard and a tattoo on one arm that read “On the Stoics.”
“I don’t even remember what happened,” Wally told her, and she believed him. “But I’m very sorry, in fact I’m horrified that I’d do you harm and not even know I was doing it. So prison was probably right for me.”
“Well,” Carol said, taking a breath and attempting to match Wally’s level of frankness. “Your meds were all wrong.”
Wally offered, “I love you—that’s all I wanted to say.”
“Okay,” she said. “I love you, too, and I wish you weren’t so ill.”
“Would you accept me back?”
“I don’t think so, Wally. I’ve been on my own for a while and am learning to prefer it.”
“Okay,” he said. He looked away. “I knew that would be your answer. Why would you ever let me back in?”
They tearfully touched hands, hugged goodbye, knowing it would be the last time they’d see each other or speak this intimately.
That spring Vasco and hospice attended to Wally in a little apartment on Green Street in downtown Urbana. Wally passed quietly on a big dose of morphine, and by April first he was buried. His book, On the Stoics, came out that May and did well, but he was gone and never knew it.
Carol moved to Church Street in Champaign. She signed up for yoga classes at the YMCA nearby. Initially, Veronica and she met sometimes at the Café Kopi, but as time went by that happened less and less. Three years after Wally, Carol remarried in a subdued ceremony in a side-chapel of St. Matthew’s Catholic Church in Champaign, and not long after, disappeared into the north suburbs of Chicago.
In May, Lowell received a letter from Carol. “I promised Veronica you and I wouldn’t be in touch, but I wish you would write or call. Here’s a little reminder of us.” It was a full frontal nude picture of Carol taken in a bathroom mirror, her big nasty scars on full display. Lowell stashed the letter and picture deep in his private files at the office, and started up a correspondence with Carol.
He continued to run and play racquetball. He counseled a growing number of clients because the town was growing. He and Veronica remained together in their good marriage, and the new trees around their little bungalow grew tall and thick. One of them, an oak, had such robust roots it began to lift the sidewalk in front of the house.
From time to time on her meandering winter drives while Lowell taught his night class, Veronica would spot Howie Packer motating down Main Street toward the homeless shelter. It seemed to Veronica that nothing ever got over, not really. She had no idea how right she was. Things festered and gnawed at her. And there was Howie, headphones on over his stocking cap and ever the Marine, staring down at the snow and hellbent to get where he was going. Though he never noticed, she would always wave.
And with that, the facts in the matter sank into the dank, mossy, unspeakable history of the town’s people and its walking wounded.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
These stories were written over the last thirty-one years, 1984-2015.
“The Underlife” was published in Crazyhorse and was listed among the “100 Most Distinguished Stories of 1994” in The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, XX, 1995. “Coal Grove” appeared in different form in the inaugural issue of the Kyle Minor’s FrostProof Review. “Vasco and the Virgin” appeared in Tamaqua and was reprinted in different form in Provo Canyon Review in 2013. “Lowell and the Rolling Thunder” appeared in the Kenyon Review along with an author interview with Nancy Zafris (then the fiction editor of the Kenyon Review) in the online archives. “Projects” in a different form was selected for distribution online by Dan Wickett’s Emerging Writers Network, Christmas, 2004, and appeared in the Chattahoochee Review, Summer, 2007. “Forty Martyrs” appeared in the New England Review and was listed among the “100 Most Distinguished Stories of 1994” in Best American Short Stories, 1995.
My thanks to the editors of all these publications. To all those who gave good advice on these stories over the years, many thanks to you each. As you read this book, I’m sure you will see your influence and advice.
I want also to express my thanks to Ryan Rivas of Burrow Press, for his friendly suggestions on the manuscript, his smart and sensitive edits, and most of all for allowing this novel-in-stories, at long last, into the light of day. And to Susan Fallows, Sam Buoye, and Terry Godbey for their insightful efforts.
Finally, much love to my wife, writer and poet Susan Lilley, who patiently tolerated my going in the study and closing the door.
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