Counting for Thunder

by Phillip Irwin Cooper

  I have taught myself in one hour what Garrett had once claimed would take a hundred. The blades of the ancient John Deere tractor break the crusty red earth into neat rows of submissive powder as I circle the trunk of the sweet gum and start all over again. Pulling weeds from the edges of my handiwork, Tina gives me a double thumbs-up, a habit she only recently picked up, a silent signal she now works into her routine as often as possible. I offer her a single thumbs-up back, since the unwieldy monstrosity I’m still mastering requires at least one strong hand on the wheel at all times.

  Turning down the driveway from Blue Cove Road, Garrett steers his pickup away from the house and down to the top of the hollow, parking too close to my project for comfort. Hopping out of the truck with what appears to be a portfolio, he approaches my latest path, waving his arms like he’s pulling a 747 in for a landing, hollering over the tractor’s engine, “WHAT’S GOING ON?”

  “PLANTING A GARDEN!” I holler with a grin.

  Garrett comes over to the tractor and unfolds a set of contractor’s blueprints on the ground below me. I cut the engine, glancing over the prints without a clue. “What’s this?” I ask from my elevated place on the seat of the tractor.

  “Plans,” Garrett says excitedly, “for the camp house.”

  Tina walks over, attempting to look over Garrett’s shoulder.

  Garrett pulls her close for better viewing. “I always told you my dream would be to one day build a huntin’ lodge up on Poppy’s place before I die.”

  He was referring to a piece of densely wooded property his father had deeded him after his death thirty years earlier, a place Garrett relentlessly surveyed on foot every Sunday that rolled. Eventually he’d coerced my mother into giving up her Sundays to tread and retread the isolated area with him.

  Tina answers like she’s not sure she’s hearing him right. “Yeaaaah.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m going to do.” Garrett puts an arm around her shoulder.

  Tina is silent for a moment. “You’re gonna build it now?”

  Garrett turns a page of the blueprints, careful not to make eye contact. “Now what?”

  Tina is stunned. She clears her throat. “I mean, with what all we’ve got going on.”

  Garrett huffs and tucks the prints under his arm. “You’re doing great,” he says, looking at her, then at me. “Right, Bo Skeet? Now’s as good a time as any.”

  Tina bites her lip and looks out over the swimming pool before she turns and makes her way brusquely back toward the house.

  “What’s the matter with her?” Garrett says.

  Unwilling to further engage with the tidal wave that is Garrett with a plan, I restart the engine on the tractor and get back to work.

  * * *

  “Hel—heeeee-heeeeeeelp! Oh, God—HEEEEEEEEEELP!” Tossing and turning on my stomach, attempting to rouse myself from a nightmare where I’m smoking cigarettes and eating pork chops, I finally holler as best I can through the sheets twisted about my head.

  “Hey, hey, Bo Skeet—”

  “HEEEEL—” I open my eyes with a start and exhale another holler.

  “Crap,” I say, as Sis, seated next to me, comes into focus.

  “You okay?” she says, sitting me up against the headboard.

  “Huh? Uh.”

  “Jesus,” she whispers, putting her hands on her face. I’ve never heard her take the Lord’s name in vain, and the sound of it startles me. Embarrassed beyond belief, I pull the covers under my chin in silence.

  Ready to move on, she motions to the bedside lamp as she quickly rises. “I’ll leave this on,” she says as she walks out the door. “Good night, okay?”

  Still frozen, I manage a weak, pathetic, “’Night.”

  Two seconds later, Sis walks back in the room. “Are you seeing Joe Tischman?”

  “Huh?” How could she possibly know?

  “I saw you walking across his lawn yesterday,” she volunteers, like she was reading my mind. “You had this blissed-out grin on your face, and it looked like you’d dried your hair with a cake mixer.” She crosses her arms across her chest and waits for me to answer. “It’s okay if you are. The Stalworths don’t love like other people. You know that, right?”

  Even in my half-awakened state, I am touched by Sis’s reference to Tina’s words and their possible effect on me from decades ago. Maybe because she’s caught me in such a vulnerable state, the ridiculousness of all the fears I’ve sat on all these years is staring me in the face. Who gives a shit if I, like half the other Stalworths, don’t love like other people? So what if Garrett’s bloodline stops with me? What if, like Tina, I’m handed some life-ending diagnosis over breakfast one day? Would I give a damn about any of it? Would anyone?

  The sound of my bedroom door closing pulls my head out of the clouds, and I realize Sis has already made her second exit.

  * * *

  Shaking off the remnants of my fitful night of sleep, I am huddled in the north corner of the tree house, the first shard of daylight piercing through the water oaks around me. The tang of gardenia in the air fuses with the steam from the cup of bancha tea I’m nursing. Just when I think the day couldn’t get any better, I spot him for a split second, just across the creek in bright orange swim trunks and nothing else on the rebuilt Tischman sundeck. He commences what appears to be some sort of tai chi ritual. I set my cup of tea in the corner and lean into the windowsill, taking a bead on Joe with the binoculars. Although the squat roof keeps my head tucked into my chest, I make a feeble bid to reproduce his fluid movements as he welcomes the day.

  “Hey.”

  Startled out of my furtive tutorial, I grab the roof for stability and peer out through the paneless window.

  “What are you doing up?” Tina looks from the ground below like a baby bird waiting to be fed.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I say, glancing over my shoulder at Joe, now flat on his stomach, arms outstretched before him like a long, sensuous snake.

  “Me neither.” Tina looks about, rubbing her arms for heat. “Are you dressed warm enough?”

  “Yes. I’m dressed warm enough.”

  She grins. “Are you playing fair?”

  I feel my neck tense and release, trying to allocate equal time and attention for these two exceptional people in my life. I laugh at Tina, suddenly in on the reference she’s tossed me from half a lifetime ago. “Yes, I’m playing fair and, yes, I’ll run in the house if the skeeter truck comes. Now go back to bed.”

  Tina smiles, waves, and heads to the house as I turn back to the now-empty Tischman sundeck and squat with my cup of tea. It’s over so fast, I wonder if it even happened.

  25

  Tina runs her foot lightly across the pool’s surface, her capris rolled up to her knees, an old photo album open across her lap. She designed and landscaped this area, and it’s still her favorite spot on the property. She begins most mornings with a vigorous dip, no matter the weather. She’s reminded us more than once Katharine Hepburn swam in twenty-degree temps for decades and did just fine. My father would always say the actress’s tremors probably stemmed from said frigid dips.

  We’ve been here since dusk, an hour ago now, perched on the concrete next to the diving board. Up until this point, my mother has not volunteered any impressions of the pictures she charily thumbs her way through. “Did you see your friend fixed the pool light?”

  “What? Who?”

  “Joe. This afternoon.”

  I stare at the milky glow from the bulb underneath the board, expecting to see some remnant of his surprise appearance.

  “It went out years ago. I kept begging your father to replace it, but he kept putting it off, and one day I decided I liked it.” She clears her throat. “Well, I thought I like it.” Tina swishes her foot more quickly across the water and brings it down with a hard, defiant splash.

  “He’s quite the specimen,” she says, holding my gaze with a curious expression.

  “Who?”

  “Well,
Joe, silly. So, what’s going on there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “With the two of you.”

  Wow. This is my chance. To finally have a talk about this unexpected journey with Joe.

  “Bo Skeet?” She still hasn’t looked away.

  And then I realize I can’t. I can’t tell her there’s a chance she’ll never have that wedding or that grandchild even if she continues to thrive.

  “He’s a good friend.” The Stalworths don’t love like other people. She said it. Yet this is all I have to say to her. What am I so terrified of? That’s an easy one. I couldn’t live with myself if she found the news upsetting and it got in the way of her healing.

  “Oh,” she says quickly. “That’s nice.” The moment is over. And I realize what a moment it was. My face threatens to overheat with the anger and disappointment I’ve pushed down.

  “Whatcha got there?” I ask.

  “Old photos,” she says, running her finger across one of the pages. “All these folks’ strengths and insecurities put together in one pose. Flicker of clarity, frozen in time. And of course, you’re never aware when someone’s taking your picture that fifty years later, that singular pose may forever define how someone thinks of you. Just like that. Frozen.”

  I glance over the edge of the album at a sepia-tinged shot of a very young Tina, her downturned mouth smeared with berries.

  “I never knew how to smile when someone was taking a picture,” she says. “I was always trying to figure out what to do with my mouth.”

  This was no news to me. Whenever we were on family trips and my father would grab the Instamatic, she’d always stop the proceedings by waving a hand. “Wait! Hang on a second. Oh, phooey!” she’d say, moving her lips this way and that. Something that came so easy for everyone else always seemed like work to Tina.

  “You know, I was thinking.” I haven’t quite yet decided how to proceed, but I press ahead. “My whole life I’ve never seen you get really passionate about anything. I mean, I’ve seen you enjoying your painting, but I’ve never seen you get crazy happy about anything. There was always something tentative about your happiness. Does this make any sense to you?”

  I realize as I’m saying it that I could easily be talking about myself. Tina looks directly in my eyes like she’s suffered some form of betrayal. I continue carefully. “I’ve noticed there’s this thing you do. Whenever you’re angry or afraid to speak up for yourself, you clear your throat. Now, I’m not talking about the cancer, I’m talking about something you’ve always done. You clear your throat. Did you ever notice this?”

  She doesn’t say a word for a moment. Breaking eye contact, I gaze at the other end of the pool.

  “Do you know that I was born at home?” She speaks calmly, quietly. “And the umbilical cord was wrapped so tightly around my neck that I almost died?” Tina stares straight ahead, playing with the collar of her T-shirt. “I still can’t stand to feel anything tight around my neck.”

  I’m not sure what I expected, certainly nothing this precise.

  “You know,” she says, leaning an arm on the diving board, “when I was five, my little sister died of appendicitis. My mother and father never spoke of it again. But I needed to. I had dropped her when we were playing, a few days earlier. She was fine, but I couldn’t help thinking that’s what had brought on the appendicitis. I carried that thought with me every day. I think Mother knew it. That’s how she kept me under her thumb all those years,” she says, a tiny smile crossing her face. “I always had a hunch that I was beautiful, talented, and smart. But Mother always told everyone, ‘Don’t compliment her, she’ll get the big head.’” Tina freezes. “When Mother was dying, I was holding her hand in the hospital room. She looked up and said, ‘So beautiful.’ At first I thought she was talking about me. But then I realized she was looking just past me. Heaven. She saw heaven!” she says, the look of genuine awe on her face swiftly chased away by a fake, upbeat smile. “How could I compete with that?”

  A dead maple leaf twirls outside the skimmer. I focus on the last of its whirling trajectory and remain as still as I possibly can.

  “Anyway, after I had my children, I said I would always make sure you and your sister knew you were beautiful, talented, and smart.” She pushes a lock of hair out of her eyes and holds it in place. “Guess I left myself out of the equation.”

  After hearing this confession that answers so many of my questions, I feel I should offer some solution. It’s a clumsy one. “Do you ever think about teaching? Maybe privately?”

  “I think about it, sure. Let’s get me out of the woods first. Okay?”

  Since Tina’s clearly been much more forthcoming than I have, I decide to keep the dialogue going. “I’ve never asked you about the hospitalizations.”

  “No place to put the anger,” she says.

  “Anger at Garrett?”

  “At everything. And not just your father. Listen,” she says, taking my hand. “Your father and I have been head over heels in love since the day we met. I’d take a bullet for him, as they say, and him for me.”

  None of this was a surprise to me. I knew he signed All My Love on the inside of every card he ever gave her. I always thought it so poetic in its simplicity, this declaration from a man who would tell you he hadn’t read a book since high school. All My Love.

  “Here’s what I think happened. Your father came up during a certain time when women weren’t given a voice. There were definitely those who did have a voice. Mother was one of them. It was just in her DNA. She never had to fight to find it. Your grandfather knew that’s what he signed up for. Perhaps if I’d expressed my wishes early on, Garrett would have had to surrender. But I didn’t. I made my bed.” She squeezes my hand harder. “Don’t ever make a bed you can’t get out of, Bo Skeet.”

  I squeeze my mother’s hand back, a sign I’ll do my best, whatever that is.

  * * *

  Through the smudged windshield of the Lincoln, I can see Garrett pacing inside a square of red flags near a stand of poplars marking the site of the prospective camp house. Feeling the only thing his father’s acreage lacked was a body of water, Garrett hired a high-priced contractor and built a lake. Not just any lake, mind you, but a tarn as big as three football fields.

  He flaunts the head of a gigantic indigo snake in my face as I slam the door of the car. “Get that thing away from me,” I hiss, tumbling backward into the arms of a bay tree.

  Garrett laughs and coils the thing around his neck. “Almost stepped on him when I got out of the pickup.”

  “Fine. Just put him back.”

  Garrett absentmindedly pets the snake’s head and puffs up his chest, looking out over the site with pride. “So, what do you think?”

  “Is this my imagination or will this be a poor man’s version of the house we already have?”

  “Won’t be a poor man’s anything, Bo Skeet.”

  “So, what’s the point?”

  Garrett leans against the electricity post and picks his teeth with a pine straw. “The point is, I’ll have my own place far away from anybody else. And I’ll have my own catfish.”

  “Your own catfish,” I repeat without comprehension.

  “Yeah. I’m tired of having to go out on that dangerous river. As a matter of fact, they’re already here,” he says, looking out at the lake. “I had it stocked a few weeks back.”

  “So you’re building a house only a few minutes away from the one you already have. For catfish.”

  Garrett points an accusatory finger at me. “There it is.”

  “There what is?”

  “That look you give me. That judging look you got from your mama.”

  I remember how much better I felt on the John Deere when Garrett had to look up at me from what seemed like ten miles below. Spying a rotted pine stump, I jump up on it like an auctioneer. “I’m sorry, but am I living on another planet here? The Planet of It’s All about Me and Not about the Person Who Has Inoperabl
e Lung Cancer?”

  Garrett rolls his eyes. “I think it’s time you got on back to California.”

  “Shit,” I say, forgetting I’d promised the powers that be I’d be cuss-free forever. “I am way too fucking old for this.”

  “There he goes with the f-word,” Garrett says, turning away from me.

  Deciding I want my father even lower than he already is, I indicate a spot on the ground between us. “Please, have a seat.”

  Garrett turns around, threatening. “Excuse me?”

  Somehow I manage not to look away even though I desperately want to. “Have a seat. Please,” I say, indicating the snake. “The both of you.”

  Garrett looks about and sits on the ground. He lets the snake go, and I attempt to camouflage a flinch as the serpent slithers past my stump and into the thicket behind me. Garrett shows the palms of his hands. “Well?”

  “Look. I know how much these woods mean to you,” I say, turning around on the stump, taking in the scenery for his sake. “They’re good woods. And I know how much Tina means to you, and I wanna give you something to think about. You’re not gonna like it,” I say, pausing for effect. “But if you build this cabin now, it will kill Tina.”

  Garrett offers up a half laugh, squinting at me like I’m crazy before looking down at the ground between his boots and digging one of the heels into the straw.

  “And I mean literally do her in.”

  “Those are some strong words, son.”

  “But it’s the truth.” I realize this next part’s going to be a stretch, like taking a kid from simple addition to trig in one fell swoop, but I figure I’ve got nothing left to lose. I take another strong bead on Garrett. “Tina hasn’t found a way to speak up for herself.”