Whatever Lola Wants (15 page)

On the day of John's graduation Joe Cochan's joy was grand. Now John would come into the business—

Now John wanted to build.

But now John had to make CochPharm number one in—

No!

But why not?

Johnnie told him. “I hate it, Pop, I hate your drugs and salves and implants. I did and I still do. The shit they cause, it's way worse than anything I ever brewed. CochPharm is deadly.”

“Johnnie—”

“Sell it all. Start clean.”

“Never!”

•

“And that's where you're leaving them?”

“Well, it'll go on like that for a while. I could let you hear about more of the same, but”—I gave her my best puckish smile—“Carney's still around, and just about now …” I let the words trail away. “Shall we go there?”

She sat on a piece of cloud, tucked the loose skirt of her robe across her legs, and smiled up at me so seductively. Making fun of me for shifting my story.

She said, “Sweep me away.”

•

2. (1978)

What C.C.—or Carney as he
had by then turned into—told his new love, Marcie, about the day he met Red Adair, firefighter extraordinaire:

Adair said, “I like what you write, young fella. But it's wrong.”

“If it's wrong, why do you like it?”

“I love all kinds of wrong things. My cigars. My whisky. You can have a strong thirst for a thing and know it's not gonna work for you.”

“And what doesn't work for you in what I wrote?”

“It's wrong when you say prevention is just as important as solution. See those pictures?” Adair sat back in his chair and waved his right hand. C.C., on the far side of the big red-painted iron desk, glanced around. The office walls were posted with images, photos mostly, some sketches and cartoons, of Adair and his crew fighting oil fires, on land and sea. “That one over there, that was 1959, the
CATCO
offshore fire. And that one? Louisiana, Marchand Bay, nearly ten years ago. Man, did that baby burn. And there, that's the North Sea in April, talk about cold. But over here's a real wild one, that's the Sahara Desert we were in the middle of, early sixties, that one got called the Devil's Cigarette Lighter, shot up 450 feet, a pillar of flame out of the depths of hell.”

C.C. stared, and nodded.

“You know, land, sea, they're all of them the same in what you got to do about it, all of them different in where they come from. Each one's a creature unto itself.”

“That I understand.” C.C. had watched fire twist and turn, as if manipulating an imagination of its own, to defy the enemy, the fire-fighter, C.C. himself.

“See, I've done made a deal with the devil. He said if I go to his place he's going to give me an air-conditioned apartment down there, so I won't put all the fires out.”

C.C. laughed, as he guessed everyone who heard the line laughed. He'd long known that Adair was an original, from his now graying red hair to the red overalls and red boots he wore—when the heat got overpowering he stripped down to his red longjohns—to the red cranes and red bulldozers that, when they reached the scene, told the fire and the ogling
TV
cameras that Red Adair had arrived. “So what about these fires makes what I wrote wrong?”

“What's wrong is you're talking about prevention. Sure, the fires could all have been prevented if people'd been smart. But people aren't smart. You can't have prevention holding hands with stupidity. And that's what caused these fires, stupid people.” He shook his head. “But when somebody's got a fire they got a problem, and then there's us, we solve that problem. The Red Adair Company puts out fires, that's all we do, that simple.”

C.C. adjusted himself in the chair. Too bad, no job in the works here. He liked Adair, had admired him since he was eleven after seeing
Hellfighters
. Well, not Adair, just a John Wayne version of him, all guts and smarts. The ultimate firefighter, knowing what a fire would do. C.C. too could read a fire, its idiom and intent, because he could read the lay of the trees the fire intended to attack. And he loved beating the fire down, loved winning. C.C. figured he could learn one shitload from Adair. Not counting his summer in British Columbia, C.C. had started fighting land fires the year after he graduated Columbia—what else do you do with a degree in geography and government?—then again the year just gone by, for the Forestry Service. Between those two bouts he'd taken an
MA
, on a forestry scholarship, at the University of New Mexico. An abbreviated version of his thesis was what Adair had read. But obviously he'd left in too much of the prevention part. “So if you disagree with me so much why'd you invite me in?”

“'Cause I'd like you around. I know some of these guys you've worked for. They say you're good. I figure I can use you.”

C.C. wasn't so sure. “Somebody to argue with?”

“Not about prevention. Waste of both of our time. But you had some other pretty good ideas there. Let's see what we can figure out.”

Not the way C.C. wanted to go. “Look. I have ideas. But I don't want to work in an office. If that's the job—”

“Young fella, nobody at the Red Adair Company works in offices. Hell, not even my accountants if I can help it. You work for me, you work in the field, you figure out what to do by being there to do it. Now, what do they call you?”

“What, my name? C.C.”

“Yeah, I heard that too. Nope, won't do.”

“Look, it's—”

“Yeah but it sounds like sissy. Can't have that here. What's it stand for?”

C.C. paused. His name was information he didn't let out. Even at New Mexico he'd given only C.C. as his name, he'd made them accept that, and his
MA
was awarded to C.C. Nobody'd ever thought it sounded like sissy. “I'd rather not say.”

“The initials of the name you were born with?”

C.C. shrugged.

“You don't like your father's name?”

“It's fine.”

“You don't like the name you were given?”

“Nope.” Spoken in imitation of Adair.

Adair raised his eyebrows. “Gonna tell me what it was?”

“Nope.”

“What about your father's name?”

“Carney.”

“Okay, if you work for me, that's who you'll be. Carney. One name. How everybody's gonna know you.”

C.C. thought about this. Carney was what Bobbie sometimes called him. Sure, why not.

Carney had first
learned to enjoy morning sex from Marcie. Evenings and the night, she believed, were meant for talking, drinking, celebrating, hugging, fearing, sleeping. Waking, refreshed and infinitely more sensitive to touch and tone, outside, inside, all around the town, this was when love got made best.

They had met while skiing, Waterville Valley in Vermont, both alone, each escaping the burdens of overwork. It began by chance, early afternoon, sitting beside each other on the chairlift. An accident of fate. She reached him a mitted hand. “Marcie Appleby.”

He took it. “Carney.”

“Carney what?”

“That's it.”

“Just one name?”

“All I've got.”

They talked. They would meet for a drink at the end of the day, below, at the pub.

Her face, the only part of her he could see, had drawn him in: small flow of black hair over her forehead, gray-blue eyes, slender nose, full lips, strong supporting chin. No ears visible, he'd check them out over their drink. They skied their own trails for a couple of hours, arrived at the pub within minutes of each other, found the other immediately, both ordered the same beer, Rolling Rock—“My favorite.” “Mine too.”—both telling the truth. They agreed to have dinner together. Marcie first wanted to change out of her skiwear.

A shot of a thought: if she left she might not come back. Come on, they were getting along perfectly well. He recognized his fear, of course: the possibility of loss. But what did he have here that might disappear? A drink, an ephemeral drink. No, a palpable drink, a corporeal meeting, a lovely woman, a smart quick woman. Lots of lovely smart quick women in the world, Carney. Oh? How come I can't hold on to one. Yes, from the chairlift ride on he had known Marcie might be special. “I can drive you to wherever you're staying.”

“Thanks, I have my car here.”

“Okay, I'll pick you up. Where?”

“The Edelweiss, just down the road.”

The fear of potential loss instantly swooped back to earth and transformed itself into the pleasure of control. “That's funny. So am I.” Fate, again intervening.

“Well,” she laughed, “that simplifies it. See you in the lobby at”—she checked her watch—“seven. They say the restaurant there's good. I didn't try it yesterday. Interested?”

A relief—why?—to be dining at their own restaurant.

Over dinner they talked of themselves. He had been working with the Red Adair Company for just over a year, his own role in three major projects, all oil blowouts, Oklahoma, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia. Three months, two and a half months, seven weeks.

“And you enjoy the work?”

He told her of the pressure, the imagination demanded, the possibility of inventing new processes for defeating this cauldron and that one. He didn't tell her, it was too early, of giving himself over to details of each venture so purely that they often became a new kind of Moment for him, so at one with the battle he knew he could do no wrong, he knew the fire from its core to its wisps. When within a Moment the fire was his twin brother, it was himself.

After each undertaking, there'd be enforced time away from fire. Wind-out time, a furlough. Just back from Saudi twenty-two days ago. His next? Never can tell what's going to blow next.

Marcie worked on projects also—much less exhausting or imposing than his but in their own way rewarding. She was a freelance rural health specialist, consulting since her degree five years ago for the budding telehealth industry on the both sides of the
US
/Canada border, private here, public in Ontario and Quebec. She had reached the point of being able to choose projects that she believed in. Plenty of work, respectable pay, and no one owned her.

“What kinds of projects?” He sipped his wine.

Projects where a community tries to keep sickness from breaking out. She held wellness clinics, she and her physician partner, Lillian, meeting with mothers, teachers, nurses, occasionally with doctors, in the never-ending battle to prevent illness. Much more health-effective. Not to mention, for the community in the long run, way cheaper. “People are, you know, happier when they're well.”

Which was when he told her about meeting Red Adair, the prevention argument.

“You doing any prevention work now?”

“Sadly, no. Not for the company. But it's there, back of my mind. I'm learning a lot.”

“Keep it going.” She sipped her wine.

They talked, they laughed, they got serious. He told her about his parents' death, about being raised by Bobbie. She told him about her mother dying while giving birth to Marcie's younger sister, about her father the doctor. Twice they discovered they were saying nothing, eyes catching eyes, her drumming heart, his pounding pulse. The evaluations, the questions, the wondering.

“And where are you based?”

Could be anywhere, but right now she favored Montreal when she worked up north, Boston when down here.

Too remarkable. Carney lived in Somerville, just outside Boston. Up on Prospect Hill, near the park. A house built in the 1880s, now in cosmetic decay but with good bones. His self-imposed duty while home was returning it to its late-Victorian elegance.

“I'd love to see it.”

“You will.” They ordered coffee.

He watched as she went to the washroom. A petite woman, short black no-nonsense hair, slim in a creamy silk blouse and long black skirt. Where was this going? She returned, her lips repainted a soft red gloss. Her ears turned finely down to tiny lobes, the red stones in her earrings glimmering, sharing color with her mouth. The coffee came, they sipped, they finished their meal. “A cognac?” Why not.

So it was after ten when they walked to her door. They stood facing each other, she making no move to enter. He took her hand. They again saw only each other. She brought her face to his, her mouth to his, and their lips touched. He touched her cheek. All quietly, neither rushing. She pulled back. “Tomorrow,” she said.

“Tomorrow will be good. Shall we ski together?”

“I'd like that.”

“And a drink after?”

“And dinner after that.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

She'd be leaving in a couple of days, but not till the afternoon. Carney had booked for another four days. In the morning they had breakfast together, skied all day. She invited him to her room for the drink before dinner.

He arrived. She poured Glenmorangie. They drank to each other. She wore a tight red jersey and tight black slacks, high-heeled sandals, he a blue dress shirt open at the neck, blue blazer, gray slacks, loafers. She said, “I enjoy being with you, Carney of the single name.”

“It's been a while since I've been able to say the same to a woman, a long while.” Since Thea, in fact. “But I am enjoying being with you a great deal.”

“I would kiss you. Except then I'd have to redo my lipstick before we went for dinner.”

“I can think of two responses to that.”

“The first?”

“Do you have more lipstick?”

“Yes. The second?”

“We don't have to go out for dinner.”

She beamed at him. “Except I'm hungry.” She stepped close to him, brought her drinkless hand around to the back of his head, and drew his mouth to hers. Her kiss too told him she was hungry. She drew back, set her glass down. He, with exaggerated mimicry, set his down as well. They stepped into each other, kissed and held each other, held the other for the pleasure of embracing a person suddenly significant, suddenly inflaming, suddenly unique to the other. They pulled their faces back. “Well,” she said.