The Big Door Prize

by M. O. Walsh

“Let’s try this for a start,” Douglas said, and took off the beret, hung it on the doorknob, and hopped in the shower. He scrubbed himself clean and even did some light calisthenics as he bathed. No better time to start than the present, he figured. He curled the bar of soap in his hand like a dumbbell. He held on to the wall and did some calf raises while rinsing out his sparse hair. He flexed his stomach muscles that he realized were still embarrassingly sore from his and Cherilyn’s dalliance the other night and, reminded of this, Douglas felt the burn.

  He hopped out and toweled off and dressed in his suit, put on his cologne. He then went into the den and dimmed the lights. He flipped through his CD selection and chose Ella Fitzgerald’s Ella for Lovers as the perfect mood music but when he went to put it in the CD player, saw that there was already an Elton John disc in there, the little EP with “Candle in the Wind 1997” on it. Okay, then, he thought, if this is what she wants, let’s do it, and hit play.

  He walked to the kitchen and whistled along to the song, which he had not heard in years. He took down two nice wineglasses and set them beside the bottle he’d bought yesterday. He placed the corkscrew next to this. Douglas then opened the bag he’d seen before when he was cleaning, a number of candles in it, and arranged them throughout the house but did not light them. He looked at the clock. It had grown dark outside but he didn’t want to light them too early. So, he fished out a box of matches from the drawer and took one out. He wanted to time it all perfectly and so he stood with a match in one hand and the box in the other and looked through the kitchen window, waiting to see her pull up.

  He stayed this way until the phone rang and, on the small display of his caller ID, he saw Bruce Newman’s name.

  31

  You’ve Got Gold

  Had she ever sat so high off the ground?

  The sheer altitude alone made Cherilyn woozy, not to mention the speed they were going. She believed she could likely reach out and tap the top of each car they passed, so high was Deuce’s truck. She could definitely look down into the windows and see the other drivers’ laps, which had an almost perverse feel to it, and believed that Deuce could likely just cruise over the medians if he chose to, such were the size of his tires, which had, she must admit, a rather powerful effect.

  Overall, Cherilyn was now inside an impressive machine. It had a big broad dashboard with silver buttons and blue lights, black leather seats which were comfortable and new, and a whole row of seats behind them, as well. This was a pickup truck with a lot of bells and whistles and space to do whatever a person wanted. It made her Outback feel bland and outdated and yet, Cherilyn knew, that car was the nicest thing she and Douglas owned. It cost so much that Douglas had put off getting a new car of his own those last five years but that was a train of thought for another time and place and not, Cherilyn reminded herself, for today. Today was not about Douglas. It was about her.

  Deuce hadn’t said a thing since leaving her mother’s place, which was uncharacteristic for him. And as they wove through traffic Cherilyn appreciated, at least, that she was too high up for anyone to see her in a car that was acting so rudely or, perhaps, for anyone to see her in the car with Deuce. The silence had become uncomfortable, though, and Cherilyn got the impression that Deuce was nervous. He kept rubbing the breast pocket of his shirt, fluffing his hair back over his ears, adjusting the way he was sitting. So, she wanted to say something. She had to fight her natural impulses to compliment him on the truck, but she was not going to behave like some teenager on a first date, she told herself, because that’s not what this was.

  Instead, she said, “Where’s the fire, Deuce? Seems like you’ve got a heavy foot.”

  “We’re chasing the daylight,” he told her. “It’s what all the best photographers do. No better time than sunrise and sunset to capture the real beauty of the world.”

  “Is that what you’re trying to capture?” she said, and smoothed the dress on her legs. “You have a place in mind?”

  “You know me,” he said. “I’m always thinking ahead. Not much longer now. You want some music or something? I’ve got two hundred and ­fifty-­six digital radio stations.”

  The mention of music made her think quickly of Douglas, which she was not pleased about. The strange music she heard in the background when she spoke to him on the phone earlier, the way he let her choose whatever station she wanted when they were in the car together although she knew he preferred that jazz station from New Orleans, which she didn’t much care for. The way she would come home to find him sitting among a circle of records, playing vinyl on the LP player they kept in the bottom cabinet of their bookshelf. And, mainly, the way he was constantly making his own music around the house, whistling bits and pieces of things as he stepped out of the shower, sat at the table, or tied his shoes. How much music was inside of him? she wondered. Music that she didn’t even know, had never even heard, and yet nobody knew Douglas better than her. She didn’t want to think about it.

  So, “No,” she said, “silence is good,” and looked around his truck a bit more.

  It was obvious he’d done a lazy man’s job of cleaning. The back seat was full of junk, as if he’d just shoved everything back there to make room. She saw boxes for all sorts of equipment she wasn’t sure she understood: modems and printers and cartons of paper and toner. Tripods and webcams. A projector and a garden hose. A little teller bag of money and receipts. It looked like a thousand things that might make up a photographer’s day-­to-­day life but what caught Cherilyn’s eye, what seemed most out of place, was a small gift about the size of a shoebox. It was wrapped in gold paper with a silver bow. Cherilyn typically would have asked about this, so out of place it looked sitting there, but did not for her fear that the gift might be for her. Or, she wondered, was she afraid that it wasn’t? With which outcome would she feel more disappointed? So, instead, she turned back toward the front seat and said, “Looks like a junkyard in here. Don’t you have a place to store all that stuff?”

  “Believe it or not,” Deuce told her. “There’s not one piece of junk back there. It just looks like that because it’s in separate pieces. It’s like your birdhouses, for example. Some people just see twigs in the yard and glue in the drawer, but you see this whole possible world. I’m the same way.” He turned the truck on a side street and said, “Not long now.”

  Cherilyn knew where they were going. The only thing on this side of town was Parker Field. This was the place people came to try and sight the deer who sometimes grazed on the grasses that grew there, descendants of the same family of deer the town was named after, legend had it, which Cherilyn knew to be untrue. Deer have to wander. It’s what they do. So, if these were still the same family of deer that some settlers spotted nearly two hundred years ago, then it wasn’t because the deer lived there, Cherilyn knew, or that they considered Deerfield home, but merely because it was a place they liked to visit from time to time on their way to another place they liked to visit from time to time.

  Cherilyn knew Parker Field mainly as the place the town held the annual Fish Festival and the Labor Day BBQ and where sometimes men would come out to fly their ­remote-­control airplanes. It was left unmown but for the major holidays and Cherilyn liked it this way best, when the butterflies were all over the place feeding on flowers while also, she realized, making their way to someplace else. This made Cherilyn wonder why everything else in the world seemed only to visit Deerfield and yet there she was living in it. Why wasn’t she on her way to someplace else? Maybe she could be.

  As Deuce slowed the truck Cherilyn pulled down the visor to look at herself, and the hands that did this for her were like that of a stranger. The henna had grown darker on her skin in the last hour and Cherilyn placed them together again to see the pretty picture they made. She then opened the mirror and adjusted her head scarf and said, “Oh my goodness,” as she could see behind her now and into the bed of the pickup.

 
“Bruce Newman,” she said. “Is that a mattress in the back of your truck? Because I will get out of this vehicle right now if that’s what you’re thinking. I mean it.”

  Deuce smiled. “Well, look who’s got the dirty mind,” he said.

  “I most certainly do not,” she said.

  “Relax,” he said. “I’m just moving it back to storage. Had a friend staying with me the past few days but his wife’s coming in for tomorrow and so they got a hotel outside of town.” He held up two fingers. “Scout’s honor,” he said.

  “I’ve known you nearly your whole life,” she told him. “And you haven’t ever been a Boy Scout.”

  “Well,” Deuce said, and smiled again. “You’ve got me there.”

  Deuce then pulled off the road and onto the tall grass of Parker Field. He drove out to the middle as quietly and easily as the truck was made for him to do and parked. He looked at the clock on the dashboard. “Twenty minutes to sunset,” he said. “Perfect timing. This is what photographers call the Golden Hour.”

  “How is it an hour if it’s only twenty minutes?” she said.

  “I guess that’s what makes it special,” Deuce said. “Let’s go.”

  Cherilyn opened the door. She noticed a small step slide out for her from beneath the cab and so she lifted her dress and stepped down into the high grass. She looked toward the west, where the sun was setting behind the dense woods that edged the field, and understood why this would be called the Golden Hour. The setting sun had lit the sky behind the trees a pink so vibrant as to look otherworldly. She walked around the front of the truck and saw Deuce digging around in the truck bed.

  “I swear to God,” she said. “If you pull out that mattress, I’m going to yell for the sheriff.”

  Deuce looked back at her and slowly lifted a tripod with one hand and a milk crate with the other. He held them above his head like one might do their wallet and hat through a metal detector. “Head out to the middle there,” he said. “I want to get some ­wide-­angle shots before we do the ­close-­ups.”

  Cherilyn walked to the middle of the field. The wind moving across that empty space lifted the dress in her hands to make it brush across her thighs and calves in a way that felt soft and wonderful against her skin.

  Deuce waddled up behind her with a camera around his neck and set the milk crate on the ground. “Stand on this,” he said. “You won’t be able to see it beneath the grass. It’ll make you look like you’re floating.”

  “That sounds nice,” she said.

  “I know what I’m doing,” he told her. “Don’t you worry.”

  So, Cherilyn stood on top of the milk crate and steadied herself. She looked out toward the forest that she realized could have ended anywhere. What was on the other side of it? she wondered. If she were just to walk out into those woods, to do something totally unlike herself, where would she end up? In what town? In what city? In what state?

  “Okay,” Deuce said. “Turn around for me.”

  Cherilyn held her dress and turned carefully on the milk crate to where Deuce had set up his tripod a good twenty yards away. He was adjusting the angle on it, tightening all sorts of things with his hands and looking through the camera. “That’s good,” he said, and already she heard the soft sounds of the camera clicking.

  “Do you want me to smile or something?” she asked him. “I’m not sure what I should do.”

  “Just do whatever feels natural,” he told her. “Just be yourself.”

  And although she tried it briefly, Cherilyn soon realized that smiling did not feel natural at all to her at that moment. No, what she wanted was to be taken seriously for a change, if not from anyone else but herself. She wanted to look on the outside the way she sometimes felt in her heart, like she was important to the world, that she was a major part of it. So, instead of forcing the smile that she had happily done for a thousand other pictures in her lifetime, Cherilyn closed her eyes and let go of her dress and lifted her arms out to the sides. She wanted to feel the warm wind in the same way she felt it in her dream of fine sand and, as if she had summoned this herself, she did feel it. The breeze took hold of her dress and blew it gently to the side. It flitted the head scarf around her face and Cherilyn breathed through her nose what she felt to be pure oxygen. She stood that way for a long time.

  “Oh my God,” she heard Deuce whisper. “Don’t move an inch.”

  So Cherilyn, as if a model of herself, did not move at all on the outside. But, on the inside of her, there was almost unbearable movement. She heard the caravan approaching now, all of the hopes and dreams of the past weeks coming to her, her hands outstretched and painted with two distinct parts of a picture that only she could place together and make whole. She heard the quick clicking of the camera like the sounds of small sticks breaking underfoot and she said, quietly, “This feels so, damn, good.”

  “Shh,” Deuce whispered. “Don’t say anything. Just turn around. Slowly. Just look behind you.”

  Cherilyn opened her eyes to see Deuce pointing behind her. She turned around carefully and, beneath purpling sky, saw what was to her the most beautiful scene she’d ever come across. In front of the tree line, as if glowing, three deer stood grazing in the field. The light tan of their fur rendered by the Golden Hour to look like fine fabric and, when they noticed her turn, each animal looked up from their meal to appraise her. Their long and careful faces, the gorgeous geography of their bodies as they considered her. They were not afraid, it seemed, and neither was she, so Cherilyn stretched her arms out to them as if they might abandon all reality and allow themselves to be pet by her alone, to be fed from her soft hand.

  She then heard the door to Deuce’s truck quietly open and shut behind her, to which the deer flicked their ears, set their haunches, and bounded back into a wilderness to which Cherilyn knew no end. As they disappeared Cherilyn was overcome by the enormous potential of what was already around her, what was always around but that she could not always see. The myriad possibilities of what could step out of the woods and present itself to you on any given day, if only you had the patience to wait for it.

  She turned back around, smiling, to see Deuce standing before her with the gift box in his hand.

  “I want to give this to you,” he said. He knelt heavily down on one knee and bowed his head as he presented it. “I have a feeling you’re going to like it.”

  And, surprising to herself even, Cherilyn did not say anything to him. She was so far away from that place now, her body filling with emotions that she did not understand yet was so powerless to stop, that she did not know if she would ever speak again. She reached out and took the box automatically and was puzzled by how light it was in her palms, by how it felt like nothing at all and, as she untied the bow, she realized that it felt this way because her hands had gone numb.

  She said nothing about this as she lifted the lid of the box and looked inside to where sat a small crown of gold.

  And all of those unfortunate feelings, as if the backside of everything good she had felt just seconds ago, returned to her.

  “It’s for you,” Deuce said.

  She touched the small crown, which did not appear to be costume jewelry at all but rather real gold with tiny shards of bright blue and green glass along the edges. Beneath her fingers, it too felt like nothing at all and Cherilyn’s legs began to grow heavy. She experienced a tingling up her spine and into her neck as undeniable as if beset by invisible hands.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, and she didn’t. Not what was happening inside of her body nor how Deuce could have known the exact thoughts running through her mind those past weeks. Not what she was doing out in that field nor what was coming for her. She began to feel nauseated and held the box to her ­stomach.

  “It’s all for you, Cherilyn,” he told her. “Everything I’ve ever done. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It can all be
different now.”

  She looked down to see Deuce reach up and place one of his hands on her calf, beneath her dress, and reach the other hand to his breast pocket. “I have something I want to show you,” he said, but Cherilyn had the sudden sensation that her heart was no longer beating, that she was no longer breathing, that something was going terribly wrong, and she wondered wildly if the source of this feeling was shame.

  She bent over and placed her hand on Deuce’s shoulder. She dropped the box on the ground. “I don’t feel right,” she said, and toppled over the milk crate.

  Deuce caught her and said, “I know. I’m here for you. We can do this together.”

  Cherilyn fell to her knees and looked up at Deuce. Her eyes were wide and frightened, appearing almost angry at him for bringing her there, as if he had caused this whole thing. She could feel her consciousness leaving her, her body going away from this field and this man, and it took an enormous effort for her to say the only thing she could think of to say.

  “No, you idiot,” she said, and put her hand on the ground. “Call Douglas. Call Douglas right now.”

  Cherilyn then fell into the grass, where the last thing she recalled hearing were the gentle footsteps of every living thing she could not see.

  32

  You and Me, Sitting in the Back of My Memory

  Douglas was in no mood for small talk. He’d told Tipsy only the basic facts: Cherilyn was in the hospital and he needed a ride.

  “I’m flipping a U right now,” Tipsy said. “I’ll have you in ten.”

  In that ten minutes, Douglas did what all jealous men do.

  He devolved.

  The majority of his confusion had turned to anger as he replayed Deuce’s voice in his head, and anger was not a good look for Douglas. He kept rubbing his own face, pacing around the kitchen in his suit like some ­drug-­addled attorney. He’d had virtually no practice at being jealous, he realized. Maybe he should have been feeling this way a long time before? This odd form of paranoia rewired his circuits so completely that nearly every good thing he’d thought about his life reversed course to store itself in some dark battery within his heart he was not previously aware of.