Counting for Thunder

by Phillip Irwin Cooper

  Joe repositions himself over me, and one of the slats of the pier underneath us shifts. I glance upside down at the russet water of the swamp swirling like a giant mud bath below. My heart tumbles to my feet like one of those high-rise theme park rides where the floor drops out.

  “Careful,” I say, about so many things I don’t even know where to begin.

  THE DIXIE

  August 25, 2001

  Home & Garden

  Love Hurts

  It’s that time of year again, and lovebugs—those ubiquitous conjoined flies that seem to gravitate toward windshields—are out in force. The Plecia nearctica, found from Costa Rica to the Carolinas, emerge from the larval stage in the fall to mate, thus the current infestation.

  “They do not bite, they do not sting and they do not carry any diseases that we know of,” said Kelly Micher, an entomologist with the Mobile County Health Department. In the morning, unsuspecting males will swarm once conditions are warm enough. Females wait below for the swarm and then fly through it. The males grasp their lady loves in flight and the pair falls to the ground and couples. At first they face the same direction, but after coupling is completed, the male turns 180 degrees. Then they fly with the female, who is larger and in control.

  29

  “Hey, wanna see a backflip?” Tina calls from her new purchase, a mini-trampoline, as I clean fish on the back porch.

  “No. I do not. We’ve done well staying out of hospitals these days, let’s keep it that way.”

  “Spoilsport!”

  Garrett jumps out of his pickup, covered in mud from head to toe. Tina does a pseudo-jackknife to show off. “Where you been?” she asks.

  Garrett holds up a portfolio for the world to see. “Had to meet Glen Dayton out at the site. They pour the cement tomorrow. I tell you guys, a more splendiferous camp house you will never see.”

  Since Garrett had never mentioned the camp house after our come-to-Jesus in the woods, I assumed the project had been called off or at least postponed.

  He rubs his belly and dances a little jig. “Hoo, boy. I feel like a kid again.” Garrett walks up the steps, pokes a finger in the ice chest full of catfish, and pulls back with a fake holler like he’s been finned. Laughing, he winks at me, turns around to wink at Tina, and goes inside.

  I run my hand absentmindedly down the outside of the ice chest, unsure of where to look, what to say, or who to say it to.

  Tina jumps for another couple of seconds before she hops off the trampoline and heads up the back porch steps with lethal determination.

  I steady myself for a moment before reaching back inside the chest—snap!

  I pull my hand out just in time, a big blue missing my finger by only a hair.

  * * *

  Garrett covertly opens a drawer below the top shelf of the bookcase. Slipping out a piece of candy, he unwraps it, pops it in his mouth, drops into his La-Z-Boy, flicks on the TV with the remote, and reclines, smacking like a cow chewing its cud.

  The back door slams as Tina enters, talking to no one in particular.

  “Be damned if I will,” she says, grabbing the remote from his hands and turning off the TV before tossing it on the sofa out of his reach.

  Garrett swallows the candy with a gulp. Without so much as a sideways glance in his direction, Tina storms the bookcase, pulls the bag of chewy candies from the drawer, and shakes them violently in his face. “I know you’ve been hiding chocolates, and I just wanted to say thanks for the support.”

  Peeking in from the back door, I try to make myself small.

  “Keep up these bad habits and you’ll be heading down for a dose of carboplatin. How would you like that, mister?”

  Tina empties the entire contents of the bag on Garrett’s head and blasts past me on her way down the steps.

  Garrett peers up at me through the mound of cellophane before he sheepishly pulls a piece of candy from inside the collar of his work shirt. “Hey, Bo Skeet,” he says, like a ghost.

  * * *

  Since Tina was doing so well, Sis had invited me down to her place in Pensacola for the weekend. After I led Tina through a tour of the bins of grains and bags of greens labeled for her convenience in the Stalworth kitchen, she had finally ordered me out the door. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “You need a break. Go have fun!”

  “We got this, Bo Skeet,” Garrett says, gnawing on a piece of seaweed.

  Sis had a new girlfriend. We went to her house the first night for dinner. They danced and made out in the kitchen while they cooked dinner. Feeling like a third wheel, I played with the surly Maltese in the living room until he bit me.

  “When are you going back to L.A.?” Sis says later that night over surprisingly good pasta and shrimp. “Tina is fine.”

  “It’s time you got back to your own life,” New Girlfriend says, with a hand on Sis’s back.

  “I don’t know. Soon.”

  “Is it Joe?”

  “Joe had to take a job. He’s gone.”

  “Oh,” Sis says. “Then I’m sorry. Or whatever.”

  “So,” New Girlfriend says, “now you’re truly free to go back.”

  “I guess so,” I say, glancing in my napkin to see if the wound from the dog bite has stopped bleeding.

  “How exciting!” Sis says.

  “Is it still bleeding?”

  “Oh, um,” I say, not really hearing her and noticing the dog shooting me a nasty look from the love seat. I shoot him one back.

  New Girlfriend has put her fork down, gazing at me with eyes of genuine concern. “Is it?”

  “No,” I say. “It stopped. I’m good.”

  * * *

  I’ve rigged an old work shirt of Garrett’s to shade the glare of the sun from my open laptop. The whiz of the fishing rod in its holster heralds movement on the other end of the line. Grabbing the rod, I set the computer on the pier next to me.

  Needing some time to myself, I’d driven up to Garrett’s lake. Since he had a dentist appointment that afternoon, I knew I’d have the place to myself. I was relieved to find I could decompress underneath the shade of the cedars.

  “Whoa, bro,” I say, more to myself than to the fish, letting the indomitable bastard take the line into deeper currents. On my way to the lake, I’d caught a glimpse of Joe taking the duffel he’d never unpacked to the pickup in front of his parents’ place. As far as I was concerned, stopping to say goodbye wasn’t even an option. I’d pushed every thought of his leaving to the back of my mind. I couldn’t begin to fathom the depth of suffering this separation could bring. I remembered staring at the ratty duffel in the corner of the room from the warmth of Joe’s arms, wondering if it had been with him when he lost Kyle.

  I hadn’t paid him a visit since he’d given me the news, and I was conscious of the damage my absence could be creating. One day I had decided to make my way to his place but tripped on a pine branch in the middle of the path and became completely unhinged. I jumped and kicked at the brittle limb for what must have been two minutes. Catching my breath and whatever was left of my wits, I realized I’d come to depend on him in ways I was too terrified to count.

  Sis was right, I decided. Since Tina was doing so well, it was time for her to fly on her own. I would pack my bags and return to the Golden State. And contrary to what my former agent might have to say about it, I did, in fact, have a life back there.

  “I miss you more than you deserve, you little shit.” Caroline’s voice crackled through the cell phone the night before. Her speech was peppered with the language she always directed to L.A. traffic, a habit that wore on my nerves.

  “Please don’t cuss traffic while you’re talking to me. You know how that grates.”

  “Sorry.”

  “So, I think I’m gonna be coming back. I mean not right now, but soon. And I don’t want that to mean anything.” I wondered what she could be thinking on her end. I knew it sounded harsh and insensitive. I couldn’t imagine she actually missed the black cloud that hung o
ver our relationship those last couple of years. I know I didn’t. Still, it had been a union we both had found difficult to sever.

  “Oh. Well, sure,” she’d said. I could tell she was making a valiant attempt to remain neutral.

  “I’ve been seeing someone,” I said. “He’s…well, he’s a Joe.” Although there was a pause, this couldn’t have come as a big shock to her, as we’d had more than one conversation about my family history and my place in it.

  “Oh, uh-huh,” she said, unconvincingly nonchalant. “And how is that?”

  “I think I screwed it up. The whole thing terrifies me. You know how I am with these things.” I threw this out because I really needed to talk about it with my best friend.

  “Look, I’ve gotta get out of the car,” she said. “I’ve got a class.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “So, whenever you decide you’re coming back, just call and let me know and I’ll pick you up,” she said before she hung up.

  The tugging on the fishing line brings my attention back to the task at hand. I focus on the cunning creature fighting tooth and nail for the chance to awaken another day in the muddy sludge of the swamp’s bottom.

  I recall that, as I passed the Tischman place, Joe glanced briefly in my direction with no sign of acknowledgment. Too many days had passed with no word from me. The cliché about the pit of one’s stomach being the resting place for longing and denial proves truer than ever. I actually felt a pull in my solar plexus, like I was finishing off a set of crunches.

  “Easy, buddy,” I say, letting the diving, swirling fish take its prize even farther away from the pier, my eyes falling on the handle of the rod in my lap, the line unspooling like unbridled thoughts released to some cold, black infinity.

  * * *

  Tiny plastic crates of purple petunias and bright pink zinnias line the front seat of Garrett’s pickup. Tina wanted something to brighten the sunroom in the late summer stubbornly lingering on the Gulf Coast. Having taken Blue Cove Road northbound from town for some time now to avoid the sight of the Tischman place, today I find myself entering from the opposite direction. Slowing the truck to a virtual crawl as I approach the house, I spot a thin, lively-looking couple who must be Joe’s parents taking luggage from a late-model BMW. The sobering sight reminds me of the one miracle I’d practically kicked to the curb.

  I continue on before I could decipher which one Joe got his graceful good looks from.

  Sometimes when we’re weak, we can only handle one miracle at a time.

  30

  I am awakened this morning the same way I’ve been awakened in this house for as long as I can remember: by the sound of my mother creaking the loose floorboard outside my door on her way to the kitchen. How she manages to step on the same weak place every single time, when the rest of us are unable to find the spot even when we try, has been one of our many family mysteries.

  A few minutes later, I walk into the sunroom to find Tina talking on the phone. With a hand over the receiver, she whispers that a macrobiotic pal of ours from the Village had just called to inform us Aveline Kushi, the mother of macrobiotics, had died. Of cancer.

  By early afternoon, I was yelling into the landline, hidden in the bushes behind the pool. “What do you mean calling and telling Tina that? Do you know what irreparable damage you’ve done? Are you some kind of idiot? Your phone calls are no longer welcome here…whoa, yeah, I’m serious.”

  To my relief, Tina proves to be less affected by the news than I am. As I walk into the basement that afternoon, she hollers through the whir of the exercise bicycle she is riding. “I think she was just calling because she wanted me to be aware that some people, even though they eat the food, don’t do the emotional work needed to heal. That was obviously the case with Aveline. I mean, everybody knows her past,” she says, like some bitchy New Age guru.

  * * *

  Marsala says Tina’s fruit has to be cooked before she eats it, which makes me feel guilty for the one-in-your-mouth-five-in-the-bucket ratio for raspberry picking. Still, the sweetly sour morsels are so tempting, I keep forgetting to knock the Appalachian dust from them before popping them in my mouth.

  As a general rule, I stand a good distance away from Tina and Marsala during harvesting of any kind, as their conversations lean toward the deeply personal. But I never stray too far away in case Marsala offers up another of her bromides, usually by throwing a warning sideways glance in my direction.

  Tina sets down her bucket at the next bush and wipes the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand.

  Marsala hands Tina a crumpled kerchief from her pocket. “But you see, Tina, finding your voice isn’t all about yelling and stamping your feet. It’s about living your life the way you want. You may not like the fact that your husband is building the cabin, but we’re all wired differently. Maybe that’s the way he takes care of himself, so then he can take care of you.” She laughs. “And make the miso soup.”

  Tina clears her throat, fanning her flushed face with her shirttail. “It’s hard, isn’t it? Using your voice, I mean. Your full voice. All the time.”

  Marsala walks away to empty her pail into the nearby vat. “Can be.”

  Joanne, a woman in her late fifties and a longtime Village visitor, ambles into our row and begins picking next to Tina. “It’s a hot one today. This drought’ll kill us all, or at least the berry crop.” She inspects a shriveled berry left too long on the vine in the scorching sun. “Never thought I’d see more than a year with not even a drop of rain.”

  Tina coughs like something went down the wrong way.

  Joanne turns, placing a hand on Tina’s shoulder. “Are you all right? Can I get you some water?”

  “I’m fine. So, you had lung cancer?”

  “The worst kind. Stage four. Like you.”

  Tina gives the woman her full attention, trying to shade her eyes from the sun, her hands red from the berries. “How long?”

  “Twelve years.”

  “That’s wonderful!” Tina beams. “Do you ever get to the point…”

  “Where every time you cough you don’t think the worst?”

  Tina nods. Joanne takes her hand. “You can’t play into the fear. It’s just like this raspberry bush. How much time do you think it spends fretting over whether that dark spot on its trunk is terminal root rot or not?”

  Tina laughs, coughs again, faltering a bit like she might faint.

  Joanne catches her, calling to me and the others. “Can I get some help here?”

  Marsala appears with a bottle of water. “Probably just some misplaced energy.” She calls to Justin, who races down the hill from the house. “Let’s schedule her for a shiatsu!”

  * * *

  Justin and Marsala decided the toxic fumes from the mosquito trucks could be the cause of Tina’s cough. I had gone to grammar school with the head of public works in the county. Having spent part of one summer at this fellow’s family beach house as a kid, I knew him well enough to invite him over for lunch.

  “Awright, I’m gon’ tell you all what I’m gonna do. From now on, when that skeeter truck turns down Blue Cove, I’m gonna have him turn off the fumigator, but I’m gonna have him leave on the motor so’s the neighbors won’t think they’re bein’ skimped on the pesticide. Awright?”

  They don’t call it Southern hospitality for nothing.

  31

  Tiptoeing down the dark hallway to my parents’ bedroom for the bedtime devotional, the scene stops me dead in my tracks. In their big four-poster bed, Garrett is rubbing Tina’s back, holding her carefully in his arms, gently turning her over like some tiny, priceless figurine. Tina points to a place above her shoulders, and Garrett kisses the spot before he inhales deeply behind her ears and lays his head on the pillow next to her, glancing up at her like a kid. I’m wondering if they know how damned lucky there are. To have shared your bed with someone for over forty years.

  A few minutes later, climbing into the inner sanctum of t
he tree house, retrieving the binoculars from their place on the wall, I survey the Tischman place through the woods. I kneel on the window sill, my prayerful pose wasted on the cold, hard reality that my adventure here with Joe has come and gone.

  The water ripples in the creek below, and a light in the Tischmans’ carport comes on briefly. A figure crosses from the house to the sundeck and back again. I distinctly hear the back door of the house close a couple of seconds later. I can even hear them bolt the latch, a cold, deafening sound that echoes across the darkness.

  I stay here, on the sill, half in and half out of the tree house, half in and half out of slumber, in the shadows of the giant live oak limbs until the quarter moon above me goes to bed with everyone else.

  * * *

  In the six months since we’d been spared the bug truck, Tina’s cough persisted. Although never heavy, its mere presence weighed heavy on all of us. On a phone call to the Village, Justin and Marsala said, “Healing isn’t a straight path. The cough will come and go, maybe for years to come.” Tina was happy with their response, and none of us brought it up again.

  In the weeks to come, Tina developed a pain in her shoulders and lower back that never let up. At night before bed, I’d give her an hour-long neck massage, silently sending every healing mantra I could come up with. I’d read that near the end, cancer often spreads to the bones. But we’d all heard stories at the Village of people who had given up all hope before their health turned around. Sadly, everything we’d heard from the medical community offered nothing but a minimal extension of life, minus any quality to go along with it.

  Sis asked Tina more than once if she wanted to see the doctor. “You could do both, right? Macrobiotics along with Western medicine. Best of both worlds.” Tina’s answer was always no. She refused to take anything for the pain, continuing to stay true to the macrobiotic lifestyle.