Cardinal Numbers: Stories (6 page)

A LITTLE
after ten, Riley collapses onto the sofa Wendell brought up from the street and crammed into his office. Hopeful Wendell. He is on the phone trying to land a major for
OTL.
They are coming out with a line of feminine towelettes. And neuroelectric fatigue twitches for Riley, fragments of “Gay Bikers’ Homicide Cookout” that he hasn’t written yet, and stickpin revival (Wendell’s bulging Park Row vests) without the scars from molten lead for type, and seeing Angelina, old and dried under her full name, blinking through Catanzaro street dust, sucking Fanta orange from a cup. This is Riley’s quality of mind when working, elaborative; and true, he controls in part, moving here to there like a photo stylist. But distance is lost, his removes collapsed and overrun. Awful, this layered weight on him, like something made up and come round, revenge of his written victims giving back what he’d stuck them with. He turns away from clatter, Wendell’s tricked face, into the cushions. “Scared” is now the word, even as he falls asleep.

Riley arrives at his decision prismatically, that is to say by a kind of bending. Bicycling to Connecticut to see her is not a sound idea. But once he has formed it, he must complete it, in order to avoid in the future looking back on the torpor and cowardice of a failure to carry through. Regret—no, thank you. Regret is why people read what he writes.

Things to take: map, tools, food and drink, fresh shirt. But Riley just carries his bike downstairs and begins. Excellent. This is the spontaneous thing to do. Pedaling steadily through the night, he should arrive Saturday morning, not so early and not so late. Perfect.

She will have to let him stay, out of respect for the gesture. He will be cool and mysterious, only hint at his pain. Perhaps she will have a few admissions to make. There will be daffodils. Kneeling to cut some, she will turn her head, smile crookedly into the sun, and his hand under her chin, lifting … It will be like nothing he could write.

Turning onto Route 33 at Wilton, Riley is very tired. His memory reaches doubt: A dozen pages short on
CF,
out of time. And when Riley asked, okay. She and her niece stripped to their underwear, took to the floor in genre grapple poses, hair-pulling, all of it. He shot three rolls of black-and-white (ASA 200) with a borrowed Minolta. And Moretti said, “Man, great stuff. I mean these girls really hate each other.”

What had Riley missed?

He walks the bike now, counting down the even numbers of Beadle Street. Green gutters and trim, the man at the Texaco said. Not a very big town, his mental picture ludicrous against it. No stately spaces here. Everything is shoved down. The daffodils are plastic.

“Why?” she says, and again, quietly, “why?”

But she steps back from the door to let him in.

“I biked all the way.”

Why had he thought it would sound impressive?

“It’s all right,” she says, seeing how he peers. “They came from the Center to take him for a ride.”

Won’t she go change out of her pajamas, or put coffee on? Riley can’t look at her, instead substitutes the painting of JFK and John XXIII against fleecy clouds, Jordan almonds in a shell dish. He smooths his hands together.

“Honest to God, Riley, you seem right at home. So what’re you doing here?”

He looks at her, breathing carefully. Did she sleep in all that makeup or just put it on?

They sit on the porch drinking Cokes. Her long legs are stretched out across the railing. The air is still.

“Your problem is you look at home anyplace because nothing stands out.” She says this solicitously, as though he might see a doctor about it. “It’s like the day I knew we were going to split was when Nina and me did those wrestling pictures. You remember? I go, ‘Well, he might want to do something after, with both of us.’ Not like I wanted you to, though probably it would’ve been okay. But naturally, you wouldn’t even think of it. No curiosity.”

“It was an assignment for work.”

Her eyes are closed; she’s not listening. Riley could shake up the Coke with his thumb over the hole and …

A man across the street is getting set to clip his hedge. First he goes inside with the long orange cord so he can plug in. Two little girls scream in the spray of a hose, taking turns. Somebody ordered a cab; the driver honks, honks, but no one comes.

She says: “Go down and get some rye bread, I’ll make sandwiches.” Her eyes are still closed.

Riley’s legs are so tired that it’s a joy to pedal. The store is cool and empty. He gets a Slurpee, and bubble gum packaged like chewing tobacco. Magazines are every which way in the rack.
Hit Paraders
and
Playgirls
and
Omnis
and
Motor Trends
and
Cavaliers
and one sun-faded
Global Detective
from last June. “Artist Model Drowns in Punchbowl,” one of his favorites. He goes out into the sun and sits on the curb to read.

C
ONLAN BOUNCED IN THE
Ford and his fresh cigarette rolled under the pedals. He tried to stamp out the coal and lurched. How could the road be so muddy and still bounce him? Conlan was no scientist, that he’d grant. Breath plumed out of his mouth, made a milky blue patch on the windshield. His tongue was dry. It wanted to taste raspberry.

“Mutual trust,” Mr. Tunbridge said every September. “That’s what makes the stars come out.”

And then he gave Conlan something in advance.

“
MULLED
cider, cocoa, herb teas,” the brother said in answer to the question of how he could keep his soda fountain open through the winter.

Conlan looked up and down the street, which had only two summers ago been paved. “Herb teas,” he repeated. “You’re dreaming.”

“People need a wholesome place to come,” the brother said. “After the sleigh ride, after the skaters’ party. And the community sing. That’s every week.”

“You’re a bloody public servant now?” Conlan spat with finesse. “You’ll put bloody marshmallows in the cocoa, and no extra charge.”

The brother was waiting for the Syracuse truck that brought him gassed water.

“And what would you have me do, then? Go out on the lake with you and fish through the ice?”

“Nah, you’d find a way to drown.”

Conlan felt his nose going red in the sun. The street was giving up vapors.

EVERYTHING
was bare, except for the oaks, always the last to let go. The birches were right without leaves, their black limbs striping the white sky, their white paper bark mottled black. Conlan viewed uncreased gray water through them, the lake, Racquet Lake, which the Tunbridges could have named after themselves, but hadn’t, which they owned in some different way than their ore mountains and smelters and ships. More intimately, more seriously. Conlan went into the boathouse. He looked at the racked canoes, smelled varnish. His palms felt cold; his fingers tingled and twitched as if he had just held someone under, fatally.

FOR
a living, the brother had cut wood and shot quail and hung windows and so on. People in the town liked his thrift. Then he wooed and won Miss Loretta Frame, who had served eight years as governess to the younger Tunbridge children, and they liked his sand. The brother had foresight, and was not ashamed. His fountain had a veined marble counter, checkered floor tiles, filigreed taps and faucets, an etched blue mirror, and in their season, fresh flowers at every table. Father Voss, the Lutheran, who liked a tulip sundae, said the brother’s place was so comfortable it made him think about retirement. The brother had to have new dentures, he smiled so much. Conlan wasn’t exactly jealous; but he was irritated. It was weak to take the money. He told Loretta the children wept whenever her name was mentioned.

THE
Tunbridge family carried history the way soda carried the colors of syrup. They knew things by instinct.

Riker, the in-law whose cups of tea were always laced, lectured on eugenics at Cornell. While the rest of the family was under sail, racing one another from cove to cove, Riker stayed uncoaxable in shade, painting the wicker.

“I read in this morning’s paper,” he said, “of Mrs. Elise Winch of Oneida being bitten by an owl. She was only thirty-four.”

Inside the house, in the hexagonal library on the third floor, where planets were painted in color on the ceiling, the skull of Garrison Tunbridge, Sr., who found copper in Wyoming and guano in Peru, was displayed under glass.

“One must expand or go mad,” said Auntie Vera, who could dance in Italian.

Conlan imagined the nests of hair under her arms.

THUNDER
rolled away across the northern scarp. Hat brims dripped and shingles glistened. Inside the rain-battered cups of columbine and tiger lily, bees died of exhaustion.

“Lemon phosphate.”

“Cherry phosphate.”

The twins exchanged looks in the blue mirror. Their faces were as identical as their coifs, bicycles, leg-of-mutton sleeves.

“With ice, please,” they said.

The temperature swing brought on by the storm made the brother ill. His skin was clammy and he trembled. With disagreeable vividness came recollection of the home left near forty years ago, tea and treacle by a peat fire.

“And extra straws.”

The matched white faces looming, dead white under freckles.

AS
Conlan swept the porch, he heard stones click in the lapping water. The lake at its deepest was said to be twelve hundred feet. It was terribly cold there and all the fish were blind. The music room and parlor, as Conlan peered through the windows, seemed deep in that forbidding way. He shivered, imagining the piano keys’ slick cold like some ancient ice unpleasantly preserved. Red-brown geometries floated up. He turned away, mouth curling around the taste of foreign carpet.

LORETTA
said, “This is the weekend I go to New York.”

The brother understood about interest on a loan.

“I’ll need new pajamas,” he said.

He took his wife to the station with an hour to spare. Alone on the platform, they watched and were watched by a murder of crows.

“Your brother,” Loretta began.

Desperately inspired, her husband emptied his pockets of change, fell on his knees to retrieve it, and she pointed out coins with the triangular toe of her boot.

“Phone me tonight,” he said.

She smiled from the compartment window, pretending not to hear, subtle as tailings.

“HELP
yourself, Conlan,” said G.T., Jr.

The squash were enormous, the cucumbers ready to explode. Tunbridge, in pressed green overalls and striped engineer’s hat, enhanced a proprietary gleam. He was proud of the family fertilizer, a secret blend. Knowing the invitation as otherwise meant—he was free to take, but invisibly, please—Conlan still bit a tomato, inhaling seed clumps like frog eggs, only warm. Tunbridge caught the gesture, but maintained his gleam, sharpened it.

“We used to call them love apples,” he said. “A member of the nightshade family.”

OBSESSIVELY
, the brother thought about sherbet. He stared out the bay window, past his backwards name in gold paint shaded with black. The street stayed empty, the main street without a policeman to patrol it. Azalea sherbet? Rosemary? Mushroom? French monks had recipes, and sultans did. Knowledge was money, history was money, and so on. The brother wiped the marble counter until he could see himself wiping. The veins in the marble, unlike the veins in the body, were confused and led nowhere. Blue veins in orderly fashion shipped blood the color of sherbet, an essence. If fact was fact and the street was empty, why not a supernatural sherbet? One that removed the power of speech and made music.

IT
felt safest to enter by the kitchen. The Ford refused to turn over in the falling chill, and now Conlan was inside the house, drawn to white surfaces—cupboards, stove, and sink—which made the most of last light. But he heard things like dance steps on the lake and voices from under the carpet. Conlan had always understood the way of being alone, and to lose that would leave him with nothing. When he stole something from the house last summer, it had been a little picture book that no one would miss; it had been a gesture for himself alone. Pictures had nothing behind them, were only themselves. We would miss you, Conlan. He began searching every drawer for candles.

M
ADRID, IN NEBRASKA’S SOUTHWEST
corner, in the wide terraced plain below the Platte, had a Hog & Hominy Fest annually until 1978. There are three taverns in the town, two hardware stores, a Boys’ Club, a pistol range, and Strunk Fabrication, where crèche figures and baptismal fonts are made by a system of injection molding.

IN
August of 1977, Ron Maddox was planning a future there. He had come to his wife’s country from North Dakota. Ron’s Pythagoras ABM Silo Group Commander, Lieutenant Benkelman, had been the best man at the wedding in Minot. Bonnie was expecting a child, but she wasn’t pregnant yet.

IT
was only the fact of having once received a Visible Man anatomy doll for Christmas that prepared Kallinger for what he was to find all over the kitchen of Unit No. 6 at the mobile home park just off the county blacktop midway between Madrid and La Paz. Interim Coroner Perk Feed had so little to work with that even a preliminary finding seemed unlikely. Feed’s right leg was some two and one quarter inches shorter than his left, due to a fraternity initiation.

WAS
Fran the kind of woman who would go all the way to Yankton for bridgework? Why had Lute Strunk rotated his best acres into sorghum? His CB handle was “Fledermaus,” and some said he had peculiar ideas about Jews.

AT
9:15 a.m. on Friday, Miss Clara Musil reported that her collection of little glass animals had been vandalized by a one-armed man. The light-blue hatchback had been abandoned next to the Elks Hall. Both Reverend and Mrs. LaFollette were treated for hyperventilation.

KALLINGER
, at the subsequent awards dinner, wearing a strap-in-the-back “Go ’Huskers” baseball cap, refused to eat his portion of tapioca pudding until someone had tasted it first, and later proposed a curious toast “to Negro banking interests.”