The Middle Ground

by Jeff Ewing

  “I love you, Dad.”

  “I’d always thought I’d be a good father, before Jeannie was born. Even for a while after. It was quite a shock to hear I wasn’t.”

  Cindy was lying on the diving board, her head hanging over the end.

  “What did you do, hit her or something?”

  “No!”

  “I don’t know. It must have been something bad.”

  “She had a list of our failings. Reasons she wasn’t the person she thought she should be by then.”

  “Can I get her lawyer’s name?”

  Ludlow laughed. “You’ve got it all right over there. Give your folks a break.”

  She shrugged and tapped the canister of fish food, sprinkling a fine dust onto the water.

  The sound he’d been hearing for a couple of weeks now started up again across the fence, and he saw Cindy flinch. He’d taken it at first for an animal—a raccoon caught in the barbed wire at the rail yard, or a cat eating a castoff fish hook—but he knew now that wasn’t it. He wished it was.

  “That’s not much of a life, is it? Swimming in circles?”

  “I don’t know. What else is he going to do?”

  “Learn to play the piano.”

  She let a little dribble of spit fall into the pool.

  “Maybe we could clean it up some.”

  “You think he’d like that?”

  Cindy thought about it.

  “I could get in there with him. Swim around with him.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll do all the work.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “What is it?”

  Ludlow couldn’t answer that one.

  Byron went belly-up when they dropped him into the kiddie pool, one fin sticking up through the mat of algae they’d carried over with him.

  Cindy danced from foot to foot, her breath whistling through her nose.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well do something!”

  That was the problem right there. You were always expected to do something, to know what needed to be done. But what if you didn’t? What if you had no idea in the world what was called for?

  He poked the fish with the handle of the rake, and Byron slowly righted himself. He flicked his tail and ducked under the algae.

  “Just resting, I guess,” Ludlow said.

  Cindy turned away from him, sniffling. Ludlow looked at her back, the little hunched shoulders that weren’t nearly up to what was being asked of them. Something was called for, he knew, another solution to another problem that was beyond him. He tapped the rake handle against his forehead. It never ended.

  While Cindy worked the skimmer, scooping clots of algae and leaves from the pool, Ludlow sat in the shade and picked his guitar. Some time around lunch, her father came out into their yard and started up his string trimmer. They could hear him working his way around the perimeter of the patio, then along the fence line. Cindy stood with the skimmer resting on the pool bottom, following her father’s movements with a barely perceptible pivot of her head. When he was done with the trimmer, he went after the stray blades with hand shears. Snip snip snip, regular as a bomb ticking.

  Ludlow stumbled his way through “Folsom Prison Blues,” muting the strings too heavily. Thuds like cardboard whacked with a spoon. He jumbled the words too, inserting bits of “Ring of Fire” and “Jackson” without knowing it.

  In the middle of the last verse, Cindy’s father stopped beside the gate. On this side, Cindy stopped cleaning and waited. Ludlow expected the gate to open and the man to step through. He’d want to know why his daughter kept disappearing through it, wouldn’t he? There was a pull between them even he could feel. But neither of them said anything, and after a minute he moved on again.

  Ludlow hit the last chord and listened to it die out in the clematis at the far corner of the yard. He frowned slightly. The same something stirred again down around his stomach, scratched against his duodenum like a cat wanting in.

  “What did you think?” he called.

  Cindy smiled and went back to cleaning.

  Well now.

  By the next day, there was just a brown pool of water in the deep end, all the solid matter had been scooped out by Cindy and deposited in a pile behind the broken bird feeder.

  “You could use that for compost,” she said.

  “If I had a garden.”

  She looked at the sweet peas scrambling across a tangled nest of bamboo poles.

  “Brown thumb,” he said.

  Somewhere underneath were a pair of tomato plants that Jeannie had planted years earlier, which continued to deliver a half-dozen misshapen tomatoes every summer without him lifting a finger—appropriately, she might have said. Such a diligent little girl. Kneeling in her little apron, carefully setting the plants in the hollows she’d dug out. Her rubber bumblebee boots clicking their heels behind her, while he did … what?

  “We’d better knock off for today,” he said.

  Cindy dragged her arm across her forehead.

  “We?”

  “I’ve got to be somewhere.”

  “Tomorrow, then? We can fill it up?”

  “Why not.”

  He did two quick songs, then walked hurriedly offstage and out of the coffee shop. He sounded like shit. His voice was raw and harsh, his fat fingers refused to stay where he put them. And all through it, and after, the crowd behaved the same as always. Cheers, whoops, pats on the back. “Nice set, Lud.” “Classic, as usual.” Big smiles and big laughs.

  He had a few extra beers on the back patio. The night was warm and clear, and the moon, almost full, poured down on the yard, reaching into every bare patch on the lawn. A few mosquitoes circled over the pile of muck and around the kiddie pool. No lights blinking on and off like when he was a kid, fireflies floating over the grass. Jeannie had never seen a firefly, as far as he knew. He wondered if Cindy had. Probably not, not out here, on this far side of the mountains they’d somehow never managed to cross.

  What did you chase after then? Mosquitoes and flies? Nothing to clap your hands around, to watch vanish and reappear in front of you. How are you supposed to live like that?

  He looked at the pool, pictured it full—as it would be soon—of water like blown glass. Not a ripple on it, there was never any wind this time of year. The hose stuck in the shallow end gurgling, swiping back and forth like a water snake. He watched the water rise up to the lip of the tiles, past the line of caulk, saw the concrete darken as it washed over the cracked deck onto the edge of the lawn. It swelled like a bubble, up and up, pushing back the limbs of the pecan tree with him reflected in his chair, small and insignificant. A convex funhouse mirror of water in which he could see too the ratty house and yard, the smudged sky, time itself in all its folly and puniness.

  He threw a bottle into the air—toward a point he guessed to be the apartment he lived in when he was twenty-six—watched it flash in the moonlight. He half expected it to bounce back, but of course it sailed right over the fence into Cindy’s yard. His guitar’s flight was shorter and even more disappointing, lumbering like an obese swan before it cracked against the pool deck and the D string popped loose. He swung it by the broken string in a wide arc, putting his back into it this time. The wind hummed across the sound hole. This was his kind of music. He’d been chasing the wrong thing all along.

  Cindy found him the next morning lying at the base of the steps in the shallow end, curled between a broken lawn chair and a bleached-out Big Wheels. A drift of broken toys and tools and furniture was fanned around him as if they’d all washed up together on some foul tide. She climbed up on the diving board and waited there until he woke up, dangling her feet over what should have been a clear, rippling paradise of water.

  “My mom’s in the hospital.”

  “What?”

  His mouth, when he swallowed, tasted like onions and blood.

  “Or a hospice, whate
ver they call it. Are they the same thing?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Because you don’t come out, right?”

  He tried to pull himself up into the lawn chair, but it was bent too far out of whack and threw him out again.

  “They’re just different.”

  Cindy nodded and pulled her towel around her shoulders. She was in her bathing suit, a pair of goggles clamped on her head.

  “I thought maybe me and Byron could swim today.”

  Ludlow picked up the chair and a broken shovel and climbed with some difficulty over the debris and up the steps.

  “The drain’s still clogged.”

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe when you get back.”

  “I’m not going there.”

  “You should.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’ll be worse even than our house. Everything just so.”

  “They need it that way.”

  “I don’t.”

  He brought out two cups of day-old coffee and handed one to her. How old were you supposed to be for coffee? He couldn’t remember. She sniffed it and took a careful sip.

  “Do you want sugar?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I’ve got some Halloween candy if you’re hungry.”

  “I thought you weren’t a perv? Besides, it’s nine in the morning. And June, so …”

  “Just asking.”

  He sat on the back of the diving board and felt the pain slosh from one side of his head to the other, slamming against his temples.

  “I’m not sure what happened here,” he said.

  Cindy kept her eyes down, studying the oily surface of the coffee.

  “I mean, I know,” he added, “but …”

  “Whatever. It’s your house.”

  “We can haul it out of there, it won’t take that long.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Sure it does.”

  Cindy stood up and tried to smile.

  “I’m not mad or anything. Really.”

  Ludlow didn’t believe her.

  “C’est la vie, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Right?”

  He nodded again, but he wasn’t at all sure.

  He didn’t remember the cold hurting like this when he was a kid, water hurting. But nothing had, really; not for long anyway.

  Byron floated aimlessly nearby, his fins paddling without much effect. Ludlow gave him a little push, and he drifted for a second before fanning his tail and darting back into the shadows by the steps.

  “Where’s your gumption, Byron?”

  Ludlow did a slow lap, the water crisp and clear as he’d pictured it. It wouldn’t stay this way long—chlorine, he figured, was out of the question—but for now it was okay. They could float like this, in their element, Ludlow and Byron. Effortlessly.

  Later, after the shade had moved in, he dragged his mower and hand edger through the gate. It took him two passes to knock down the grass that had grown wild and unruly over the past couple of weeks. They’d get a good price, he was sure. It was an attractive, welcoming house. The kind of place you imagined happy families living.

  Through the open gate, his own house looked shabbier than ever in comparison—except for the pool, gleaming bright as a new tooth in a wrecked smile.

  He trimmed along the edge of the patio and down the fence line, then swept and hauled the clippings to the curb. It was a good job, professional, and he liked to think he would have done it even if they weren’t paying him.

  When he’d finished, it was almost three o’clock. Jeannie would be walking into the auditorium about now. Maybe looking around for her mother and father, maybe knowing better. If things were as they should be, he would have been sitting in the audience with his wife, beaming as people were said to do. He took his shoes off and stepped onto the diving board. Jeannie had done well enough on her own these past years, he was sure she’d be fine without him. And if not …

  Byron hung close to the wall in the shallow end, slipping along the tiles, hesitant to come out into open water. You couldn’t blame him, really. He hadn’t asked for this. The sun must have seemed impossibly bright, and the transparent world rippling out around him strange and new and unnatural.

  The board strained under Ludlow, the anchor bolts clicking as he sprang up and hung in the air for a moment. At the top, he could see over the fence into the empty yard, into the rooms with their curtains gone. The view came and went as he bounced—the not quite spotless patio, the scuff marks where the furniture had been, the wisteria working its way up the roof of the garage. Here and gone, here and gone. A familiar enough phenomenon.

  THE ARMCHAIR GARDENER

  ED KOLSTONE SAT BACK IN his big, comfortable chair—one eye on Cuthbertson’s Gardening Almanac and the other on the leaves beginning to die so colorfully outside his window—and recited once more, like a mantra, the first line of his obituary:

  Ed Kolstone was a man of his word: When he predicted rain, it never failed to materialize.

  He tallied the attendees, a childish exercise. Who would come to pay their respects after such a long silence? The list was short, as any such list should be, quality of affection rather than quantity being the yardstick. Someone in the back wept, a woman whose face was obscured behind her chiaroscuroing veil. Her wailing rose louder and louder until it drowned out even the leaf blower next door. Pigeons rose from the architrave.

  Far down in the knuckle of his big toe a throbbing began working its way up. He followed its progress, as though it were an ant or some other insect hauling itself uphill. It itched, but he’d be damned if he was going to scratch it. He had willpower, had always had at least that.

  He gritted his teeth, felt the vein pulsing in his temple.

  The bug moved up inexorably.

  What more could you expect of an insect? People in general expected too much of too many things. It was a mistake he’d never made. When the local AAA team, The Beekeepers—for example—lost 6-5 in the playoffs, he didn’t explode the way so many of his neighbors did.

  “What the fuck? Bunting on two strikes?”

  “There’s always next year,” he’d said. Well, there was and there wasn’t.

  When his wife left him, he took that in stride too. Looking down at him in his chair, this same chair.

  “If you got up off your ass once in a while.”

  “True enough, I should.”

  “I need more than this. There’s got to be more.”

  “I’m sure there is. I hope you find it.”

  She didn’t bother closing the door after her, and it was a good eight hours before Ed got up to do it. When he did, he saw a dog he didn’t recognize with its head stuck in the chain link. It was a small dog, with an even smaller head. It tried to bark at him, but could only manage a kind of squeak. Two days later it was gone, he wasn’t sure how. Possibly it had lost enough weight—the head, too, contains appreciable amounts of fat—to wriggle out.

  He looked down at his pendant legs, remembered how his father had referred to his feet as dogs: “My dogs are barking today.” Kicking off his shoes and propping his feet on the coffee table. He too had died young.

  Was Ed Kolstone young? He’d always thought of himself that way, but now, at fifty-two, it might not be true anymore. He hiked up his pant leg, stared at the pale skin of his calf. He couldn’t see the clot, but it was there. Spreading like a pudding beneath the tissue.

  Gather together the detritus of your life and deposit it carefully, layering gently and loosely, in the compost bin of your memory.

  He read the almanac entry twice.

  “As you wish, Cuthbertson,” he said to himself.

  Though, clearly, Cuthbertson was losing it.

  He ran and ran, the tall weeds grabbing at him, burrs latching onto his pants. He ran until his lungs were raw, up the steep incline of the levee and down the other side.

  Onto the horse trail peppered with road appl
es.

  A beaver slapped the water off to his side and dove.

  He was fast, he knew it, but not quite fast enough. The coach cut him. He could stay on in Equipment, but who wanted that?

  He’d always been told that with enough drive you could do anything you set your mind to, and it was a decided disappointment to find out that wasn’t true. There were faster people, smarter people. He was somewhere down in the fat middle of the curve in every area that mattered.

  He ground up to the top of the rise below the rapids and there she was—he would always remember it like that, a revelation. Donna Harris, her long hair trailing down her bare back, a silhouette out of an illuminated manuscript. Her breasts pointing toward shore where her clothes had been carelessly dropped. She turned her head slowly; her hair swept back and forth like the hanging strips in a car wash.

  Jesus, was that the best he could do?

  He watched just long enough to permanently implant the image, then turned around and ran back the way he’d come.

  That bend in the river became for him like Lourdes. The light fell differently on that stretch of trail, the holy water sparkling beneficently below.

  Ever afterward he could call her back at will, though never before quite like this—just outside his living room window, pounding a For Sale sign into the lawn across the street.

  “So the Mitchells are leaving?” he said.

  “Yes. Moving on.”

  She brushed her hair out of her face—the same hair—as she turned and smiled at him.

  He smiled back. Waited.

  “We went to school together,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Ed Kolstone.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  Her toe tapped just perceptibly on the walkway.

  “Are you still running?” she asked.

  “Wow. You do remember.”

  “I said I did. I saw you sometimes.”

  “Huh.”

  He was favoring his good leg, leaning a little to port. She glanced down, then politely away.

  “I’ve pretty much hung up the shoes,” he said. “Getting older, you know?”

  “Aren’t we all.”