by Maria Flook
“Shit. The Lord is with us,” she said, but she didn’t say it with any reverence. She sniffed loudly and rubbed her nose with a bony knuckle, and he could tell she wasn’t even thinking about God. Maybe the dust was making her eyes itch; her eyes looked accentuated, watery. Her eyes had that darty, intense style of watching him without seeing him.
Peterson told her, “This is enough dust, these four bags, but we’ve got to cut a sample of the tile. A sliver about an inch square.”
He scored the linoleum and shoved it loose with the flat edge of the knife. She was bending down to watch him. Her lips looked bitten, crosshatched, when he saw them up close.
He put the plastic bags with the dust samples and the sliver of floor tile in his breast pocket. They left the basement of Glenside United Methodist Church, making sure the window was closed and the door was locked behind them.
She started to show her relief; her teeth chattered lightly as if, at last, the cold had touched her. They were sitting in the cab of his truck. She told Peterson, “He was breathing it, pretty as you please. It was everywhere. All over the trikes and Hot Wheels. You saw it. Not the best thing for a child.”
“No, that’s true,” he told her, trying to calm her down. He turned the heat on full blast, hoping she would quiet, but she raised her voice over it.
She said, “I went to the preschool director. A fluff-brain. Then I met some church guy, whoever, and he said anytime there was kids, you had dust. He said, ‘Kids make dust.’ He twirled his finger in the air, you know, like a Dennis the Menace cartoon with the little whirlwind. Shit. Kids can’t make this kind of dust. Thick as Bisquick, you know, like pulverized rubber.”
“That’s degraded linoleum. It’s vile.” He didn’t know what else to say. He was embarrassed by her gratitude, the sudden, breathy hitches in her voice, strange tri-level inhalations which were new and wonderful to him. Perhaps he would tell his brother to step over the line and send the samples to the lab. Disrupt procedures. The business had to have a social conscience, didn’t it?
Her teeth clicked together as she shivered. Her coat didn’t fit her right, leaving her breastbone naked to the cold. He wanted to tell her she should dress for the weather. Instead, he took her coat and tugged it together, he folded the lapels, one over the other. Then he took the ends of her leather sash and yanked them tighter.
She looked at him. Her face had a strange expression. She looked like a person who was waiting to see if what she expected might happen. “Thank God you got the samples. This will prove it,” she told him.
Peterson touched his Exacto knife to the shellacked oak bar at Emerson’s Lounge, twisting its point until the wood flaked upwards in tiny resinous specks. His loose, black hair shifted back and forth when he jabbed the knife. He traced her hand with the blade, making a yellow line in the veneer between his beer bottle and her tumbler. She didn’t move her fingers as he cut, leaving a wake of waxy dirt around her hand.
“Watch it, will you?” she told him.
The girl behind the bar came over to complain, but the mark disappeared with a swipe of her soapy rag. Peterson put the knife down and pushed it away until it rested on the rubber netting where some glasses where drying.
“So, we’re here,” he told her.
She didn’t say anything, but her shoulders lifted and fell in comfortable acknowledgment.
He poked her arm with his pinky finger.
She twisted on her seat to shoot him a complicated look. An unfathomable expression—impatience tempered by bliss?
“When I asked for an asbestos consultant, a certified expert, I didn’t expect to get you. The younger brother—what d’ya call it? The apprentice,” she said.
“You’re lucky I came out. My brother wouldn’t touch this with a ten-foot pole. You don’t have the correct papers squared away. You should be happy.”
“I am. I really appreciate your help. That’s why we’re having this drink. In appreciation. I’m showing my appreciation pretty damn sincerely, am I right?”
“Well, it means something to me,” he said.
She asked him if she could see the little plastic bags of dust. He placed them on the bar and she arranged them in a row and then in a diamond formation like miniature bases for a softball game. The girl behind the bar looked worried, as if the samples might be miscellaneous contraband, but Peterson explained. After a few moments, Angela allowed him to put the samples back in his breast pocket.
She was sipping scotch with small, reserved kisses to the rim of the tumbler. Peterson leaned against the bar and drained a bottle of beer, his third. Peterson stood up behind Angela’s stool and saw an opportunity to insert his arms through hers. He took hold of her around the waist. He asked the bartender to make a pitcher of margaritas. Angela looked over her shoulder at him. “I have to go to work,” she said.
“Go.”
“Goddamn you, Peterson.” She wasn’t smiling, but she closed her eyes and didn’t get off her stool.
Peterson wanted this woman to win her battle at the church. He wanted more time with her. These desires had no corresponding strategies. Each of these goals both heightened and impeded the other. If he didn’t get the tests to the lab, he could ruin his chance with her. “You have to get those permissions from the church, we need the church consent,” he told her. “What we did tonight was like the cart before the horse. We need a letter—”
“Oh, we don’t need a letter now,” she said.
“Do,” he said.
“What are you saying?” she said.
“The lab won’t run the tests without signatures.”
“Can’t you sign something? Now that we have the actual samples, can’t you sort of send it through carte blanche?”
Peterson told her, “The dust remains a mystery. Mystery dust without the signatures.”
“Mystery dust? What are you talking about?”
“Limbo,” he said. “The dust is in limbo.” He was touching his tongue to the hoary circle of salt on his margarita, dense, kosher crystals, a delicious mortar.
She lifted the glass out of his hand. “Are you saying you can’t have these tests done, you can’t put that dust in the electron microscope like your brother explained?”
“That’s right. We can’t send it through the lab without an official Bombs Away from the Reverend Four-Eyes, or whoever, at the church. But who says we can’t go over there right now? Why can’t we get someone to sign something for us? Tonight?”
He tried to imagine finding the right church official, rousing him from sleep or waiting until morning before knocking on the door, scooping up the man’s morning newspaper and greeting him like that. How would he approach such a task? What would he say to enlist the fellow’s support? He could describe the swing set beside the graves, the barge adrift in a chrysotile sea, this woman’s torn coat, the pale hollow of exposed flesh where her lapels wouldn’t close.
“Don’t worry,” he told her, seeing her tears cling, then slip from her lashes which were dense and skewed with dark violet mascara. He drew her close, moving her bar stool counterclockwise with her weight still on it, until he had her perched before him. “I’ll take it straight through. Myself. Don’t even blink—it’s done. I’ve done it already, is how you should think. The results are in by tomorrow P.M.,” he said.
“You will, really? Are you saying you’ll get the tests?” she said.
“Transmission electron microscopy. Case closed.”
She was drinking some of the lime concoction, pale as dishwater and stronger than the usual. She thanked Peterson, thanked and thanked. He refilled her glass, soaking the bar with spills from the pitcher. She was leaning against him, her arm curled around his waist with her hand pressed into his back pocket. “We’ll close down that fucking school until they get it cleaned up,” she said. “We’ll make them get new linoleum. All because of you, Peterson.”
“If it was God. If it was just God we were dealing with here, the permission slip would be wri
tten,” he told her. “Across the sky: Proceed immediately with all four samples for possible asbestos content.” That’s all I would need, he was thinking. One measly sentence. Signed by God.
She was late for work when she drove away from Emerson’s, heading for the Fairfax Supper Club. He stood in the snow and watched her Caddie fishtail too close to the parked cars before she got centered. “Take it slow, take it slow,” he called after her.
He drove his truck back to the church. He saw the sign panel which announced the times for church services but it was covered with snow. He got out of the truck to brush off the glass. The snow felt wet, it wouldn’t last through the next day. He read the faded letters naming the Sunday sermon: “Ancient Lessons for Modern Families.” Beneath the sermon’s title was the name of the church pastor: “Rev. Charles D. Moffat.”
Peterson drove to the 7-Eleven and bought a paper plate of cheese nachos that microwaved too runny. He set it on the roof of his truck until the chips firmed up and the cheese gelled. He looked through the telephone book at a pay phone until he found an address for Reverend Moffat. It was just three blocks from the Glenside Church.
He parked on the street in front of Reverend Moffat’s house. A small, well-kept colonial with an immaculate yard and new brick borders around the empty flower beds. The front door showed three tiny descending panes of glass, none of them eye-level. Peterson waited through a song on the radio, but its bass line was irritating and he shut it off. The snow was letting up. He looked in the rearview and wondered if his day’s beard was coming in too dark and might give a wrong impression. He watched the reverend’s home and saw a curtain flutter, but sometimes a furnace kicking up might ruffle the curtains, you could never be sure. Then, a man was coming outside and walking over to the truck.
He stood beside Peterson’s window the way a teacher asserting discipline might lean over a desk in grammar school. The man had a neutral face, without a touch of personal worry or internalized regret. His expression was one of steady expectation interrupted by an irregular wince, a tic of some kind. His forehead was symmetrically etched in even lines, as if drawn with a protractor. These surface lines had no apparent link to the reverend’s intimate life and seemed related only to the tiresome situations of others. Peterson recognized these features, he’d seen this face on twenty-year police veterans.
When Peterson stepped down from the truck, one foot slid out from under him and he unconsciously gripped the reverend’s elbow. Together, they shifted, lurching back and forth for balance, trying to keep from pulling one another down. Peterson straightened up and after adjusting the shoulders of his coat, he shook the reverend’s hand. “About the dust,” he told him. “I need a signature.”
“Yes, yes. Miss Snyder.”
“That’s right, Angela,” Peterson said.
“Did she contact your company? Hire you to come over here?”
“I just need a simple John Hancock. I can write it up, a description of the test, the TEM, on a piece of paper. It’s scrap paper, if you don’t mind? I forgot my receipt book. This once I don’t have the official form, but this will be serviceable enough. Okay with you?” He tore a sheet of paper from a spiral notebook and wrote a sentence explaining the dust samples, naming the appropriate tests. He told the reverend, “You word the permission. Dictate to me whatever you need, and then you can sign on the dotted line.” Peterson waited with the pen firm on the paper. “Shoot,” he said. “Go ahead.” He waited for the reverend to tell him how to word the permission.
“I’m afraid you came out on a cold night for no reason,” the reverend told him.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s Ronald Doyle. He’d be the one. He’s chairman.”
“You say I need this other man, Doyle?”
“That’s right. He’s chairman, but he spends his winters in Sarasota.”
“Florida?”
“He has a little emphysema,” the reverend explained, crossing his arms and massaging his elbows in the palms of his hands as he talked.
“Long way to commute to church,” Peterson said, but it wasn’t sounding so good. He didn’t figure this Doyle came and went too often. “Well,” he said, smiling big, so his teeth felt the chill of the air, “you’ll have to sign in his absence. What do you think?” Peterson noticed the moon going down over the west-side roofs. The snow was over, and Peterson stopped to think that the moon was probably there, behind the snow, all along, throughout his night with Angela Snyder. At that official minute it looked alarmingly crooked, a partial crescent eroding at the center.
Peterson said, “Are you saying you can’t do anything for us? Aren’t you the kingpin at the church?”
Reverend Moffat explained his situation.
“You say you are and you aren’t?”
“It’s not in my capacity,” Reverend Moffat said.
Peterson said, “This Sunday, you’re going to find the nerve to talk about the modern world?”
“You have the wrong man,” the reverend told him, touching Peterson’s sleeve, plucking the nylon shell as he talked. An odd, unconscious, and girlish gesture. He said, You Have The Wrong Man, enunciating each word as if he believed Peterson did not have English as his first language.
Peterson leaned back against the great, solid bulk of his truck, which he could drive, if he wished, right through the small white door with the postcard-size windows. He listened to the reverend’s side of it. You’d think it was the sabbath. Peterson heard the familiar, overstated assurances. As he talked, the reverend touched his fingertips together and closed the heels of his hands as if to create a tiny room—the children’s playroom. Its hazard: simple conjecture. Its remedy: unwarranted. Either way, it was out of his realm of duty.
The reverend returned to his house, closed his front door, and switched out the light. For a moment the reverend’s face reappeared at the door, framed in one of the small, waist-high accent windows. Peterson got behind the wheel and looked at the reverend’s snowy lawn, smooth and squared like sheet cake. In fact, the frosted brick borders had the sugary gloss of wedding-cake decorations, rosettes and peaked dollops. He steered the truck over the curb and faced the house. He tugged the stick into neutral and revved the big V-8. His palm felt the buzz in the knob. It opened up. It roared. A clean, fully lubricated growl which echoed off the little house. Moffat came back outside and stood on his stoop with shoulders lifted in pantomimed inquiry, his blanched hands leveled before him as if he held a laden dinner plate. What was he asking? For understanding? Peterson put it into four-wheel drive and artfully worked the gas pedal and clutch making the truck jump forward, advancing in tight, halted progressions like a mammoth predatory beast rehearsing its pounce. The jerky accelerations tore up the sod beneath the wheels. Moffat appeared suddenly convinced by Peterson and he went inside and slammed the door. Again his face bloomed in the tiny window until at last he must have moved to the telephone to dial 911.
I could drive through a house, Peterson was thinking. It would be the least he could do. Instead, he steered the truck around the front yard, riding a figure eight through the thick, slushy surface. The wheels climbed over the low brickwork, riding in and out of the geometric garden beds at both corners of the yard. The snow muddied beneath the tires. The second time around, he spun out a little harder, leaving deep gullies. He flicked the high beams to study the surface flecked with random grass divots and long mud sashes which had peeled loose from the tire treads. It looked complete, this small suburban ruin. Peterson knew the lawn could be reseeded or measured for new rolls of sod. The church congregation would foot the bill in pity for their pastor. He turned back onto the pavement; the slush lifted in a heavy wave.
Everything was melting as Peterson drove across town. He cranked the window open and rested his hand on the side mirror. The tires made a hushing, mothering singsong over the asphalt. He took the particle samples from his breast pocket and arranged them on the dash. Using his teeth to tear the plastic, one packet after a
nother, he extended his arm and released the contents. The branny grit settled to the wet street, but its toxic powder flared level with the truck in parallel clouds, ghosting the taillights. Instantly, it cleared, aspirated by the opposite traffic.
RIDERS TO THE SEA
Bell was fighting a sex hangover as he fixed a fried egg sandwich. He was feeling unsettled and wanted to line his stomach before he resumed his evening schedule at the Narragansett. He scored the egg with a spatula; the gold pillow wobbled, then steadied, its lacy albumen white as a doily.
His knees turned hollow and tensed back each time he remembered the CVS girl from the other night. They had parked at the Cliff Walk. He let her out of the passenger side and she came right along, with just her fingertips alert in the palm of his hand. Her jeans had zippers at the ankles and she ripped each tag, one cuff, then the other. The twilight lingered, reflected on the sea. She made him acknowledge his first view of her, the labia’s pink crest, sudden, symmetrical as a tiny valentine.
He adjusted the toaster. The electric twists glowed. Then a neighbor kid ran past the window, notching left and right and screaming in crimped bleats. Bell snapped the dial on the stove and went outside. Some neighbors had stepped onto their lawns to see whose boy was having the trouble. Bell looked down the string of white clapboard houses which ended on First Beach; nothing had changed much since he was small. He tucked the spatula inside the mailbox and followed the people down to the water. A group had assembled at the edge of the sea; a few men waded in ankle deep. Thirty feet out, a windsurfer tacked back and forth in silent, accurate swipes.
The woman was face down, her chestnut hair filtered forward, then pleated back in the calm water. The waves came in like clear rolls of Saran before puddling on shore. The sea hardly tugged her. A wreath of suds, pearly as BBs, surrounded the body and tagged the rocks. He couldn’t see her face or guess her exact age. She was wearing a cocktail dress stitched with fancy beadwork. Sewn in undulating lines over her hips, the beads reflected the sun in shifting gradations of light, like the contrasting whorls in polished marble. This marble effect made her look like something that had toppled from a pedestal. The woman rode back and forth in six-inch increments over the pebble sheet. Bell saw it was the agitation of the brine, the brine forced through the cores of the miniature beads on the woman’s dress which had created the foamy scud on the surface of the water.