Everything (16 page)

Maybe it was time to get a dog again.

Something a little bit off about the girl when he picked her up last night. She said she was exhausted, just wanted to say good night and go when they got home, something tired and tight in her face that made him believe her, some way she kept herself from him so he felt like he never got a good look at her. Elusive as ever. Maybe something else, though, maybe something more. The city taking its toll.

Ice crunched in the driveway: June’s Prius, come to join them. RL felt a moment of jealousy—my house, my daughter—then remembered that he had invited them, thinking that Layla would surely be up by noon. He watched June’s boyfriend unlimber himself out of the passenger seat, the white dome of his head naked to the morning. Then the hat. Howard, RL remembered. The white of Betsy’s shoulder that same pale.

* * *

Black dog came running: no daughter, no Betsy, a blank place and nothing he could do about it.

But the smell of coffee roused him, and the sight of the two of them snipping and snarking in the driveway. Something pleasant about watching some other couple fight. Oh June, he thought. Beware of the hardheaded woman.

RL greeted them at the door with a shush. She’s still asleep, he whispered. She got in late last night.

I was wondering, June said, with the fog and all …

Hot coffee, Howard said. I could really use some hot coffee.

You’re in the right place, RL said, aware as he did so that Howard didn’t like him any better than he liked Howard. June knew it, too, and they circled the kitchen uneasily.

Smells great in here, said Howard.

Thanks, said RL, and turned to June. So how does it feel to be rich?

I’m not rich.

Hell of a lot closer than I am.

It’s depressing, isn’t it? Howard said. You finally get to be a millionaire at the exact same moment when it doesn’t mean a thing anymore. Every Tom, Dick and Harry.

* * *

I heard two million, RL said to June.

Two million four, Howard said.

RL wasn’t actually going to poke Howard in the nose if he kept answering June’s questions, but it was nice to think so.

When do you move? RL asked her.

First of the year, June said. I can’t even think about it. I’m just going to pack a suitcase and live out of that for a while, put everything else in storage. Just hire somebody to do it.

Go to Hawaii.

I wish, she said. I might take a week in January, take a little break. But, no, I’m just going to work, same as usual.

Buy a new place?

Eventually, she said. Right now I’m moving into Howard’s.

RL had no rights in this matter and he knew it, but still it felt like a punch in the stomach. Why? It didn’t even make sense. But Howard must have seen it as he hurried to answer.

Not like living together living together, he said. Not like a couple of college students. I have a mother-in-law apartment over my garage.

It’s really very nice, said June.

* * *

So she must have seen it, too, in his face.

It smells like horses, Howard said.

Not so bad, said June.

Good morning, everybody, said a sleepy Layla from the doorway.

The energy in the room recalculated itself and shifted with her emergence, little shafts of light, girlish …. In her pink fuzzy bathrobe Layla went from each to each and kissed them in turn, even Howard, gliding across the kitchen floor without her feet seeming to touch the ground, hidden from view beneath the pink teddy-bear fur. Here was something. What? RL made himself look away before she caught his face and saw how he loved her, how unprotected he was, naked, and a father must never be so naked. He poured a cup of coffee and tried to give it to her.

Oh, she said. No, no thanks.

Again that sense of her not quite in the room, something withheld, behind.

I’ve just been off the coffee lately, Layla said. Seattle, you know.

I thought Seattle was coffee world headquarters, Howard said.

That’s more or less the problem, Layla said. She filled the teakettle and started it on the stove and then she turned to June. I hear you’re filthy rich.

* * *

Not exactly. Closer than I used to be.

We should go buy some shoes.

There’s still nowhere to buy shoes in town, June said. Unless you want to look like me.

They all looked at June’s wholesome, comfortable clogs then, roundish cork-lined things of Swedish leather. Brown. All sturdy and wholesome, RL thought. They looked like June.

Layla said, I don’t know why you don’t come to Seattle sometime. There are ridiculous places to buy shoes there. Anything you want.

I will, June said. Though, truth be told …

No reason to spend that kind of money, Howard said.

This was the moment RL caught the bar smell on him, the stale breath of last night’s whiskey. This was unexpected. A momentary double take and this was where Howard caught him noticing, a little glint of defiance: so what? Is this any of your business?

In my house, RL said, when a beautiful woman wants to buy some shoes, we just stand back and get out of the way.

June laughed out loud and Howard glared at her, then at RL.

Howard said, Three hundred dollars for a pair of shoes.

* * *

I’ve spent that on a pair of Tony Lamas, RL said. Probably shouldn’t have but I did.

He smiled, pleased with himself, then looked at his daughter to see if she was pleased with him, too. But Layla was clouding up, somewhere off inside and unhappy.

You OK, baby?

Layla held up a hand, a stop sign, palm out—half covered her face with her other hand—then turned, and bolted from the room. They all stood silent for a moment, each of them looking from face to face and then back at the empty place where the girl had been. Then June said, I’ll go take a look, if that’s OK.

Fine with me, said RL.

I’m going to go run a couple of errands, Howard said. Just while I’m in town. I’ve got the cell.

And everybody left, and there was RL all by himself again, in his kitchen full of loveless food, the middle of the morning, the middle of the winter, the late middle of his life. Sparkle and fade, RL thought. What the hell was wrong with his girl? He went to the window and looked out at the rotten patchwork of snow in his yard and thought of Mexico. The beach, he thought. Somewhere with sun and palm trees, some temporary respite. A day. A week. It was impossible to say.

June on her knees
, the perfumed many-colored twilight of the old church, the beads of the rosary between her clumsy fingers. Holy Mary, mother of God, forgive me, she thought. I was apparently mistaken.

The smell of myrrh.

She had become a woman without a home. She had become a woman without a story. She had become a woman who prayed the rosary alone in church on a Sunday afternoon while Howard bet on football games and drank red beer at the Paradise Falls casino. She kept secrets from everybody and everybody kept secrets from her.

But mainly she had become unreal. If she held her hand up to the rose window, she could see right through it, the stained-glass
shepherds and their crooks and sheep. She knelt so lightly as to be made from light itself, from oxygen and helium, from thought. When Rosco died, she lost the last thing connecting her to the world and now she thought bitterly of herself and how lightly she held his life. An old dog spindle-shanked and water eyed. Once they had been sleek and fast, both of them. Then at the end she had talked—to RL, to Layla—as if it didn’t matter, as if it was something to be taken lightly, a joke almost. True, he was a dog and dogs didn’t overhear, but June had heard herself and remembered. Dogs and money, money and love, love and alcohol, alcohol and death, death and dogs, she felt her thoughts spinning round and round and tried to center herself again on the simple fact of the beads between her fingers, the dim light and perfumed quiet:
Holy Mary, mother of God …

Because, she thought, alcohol is death. That need for annihilation, no stranger to herself. Annihilation at the end of every road: at the end of time, the bottom of the bottle, the deep and dreamless sleep she remembers from her childhood. She doesn’t sleep like that anymore but dreams and shakes and tumbles from one side of the bed to the other. Last night it was a wedding, her own wedding but not the one to Taylor, some other man, she never even saw his face … Layla had been at the dream wedding, with her baby, a baby girl, a little pink flower.

Return to center, June thought. A bat shriek of sexuality inaudible to any but herself. It echoes in the old church, slowly fills the corners, like water. Drown, she thought. The baby they never got around to and then it was too late. Take that life and give it to the baby, drown in baby love,
the fruit of thy womb …
. Dogs and money, money and love, love and alcohol, alcohol and death, death and dogs, dogs and babies, the whirling world around her and nothing to stop June from spinning along with it, the whirlwind.

RL looked for her in the darkness
before dawn, the airport lit and busy while the moon set slowly behind the mountains to the north, a lip of bright reflection outlining the peaks and saddles. Above, the night sky still full of stars, clear, cold and bright.

Taxis, wives and boyfriends, late-season hunters with their rifle cases and coolers full of elk meat, a hotel shuttle dropping off the crew, everybody a little off under that big black sky, a little sad or sleepy or just unnaturally clean, like a face on the TV with the brightness turned up too high. He watched for her little Toyota, half expecting her to skip it. She’d park in long-term parking anyway. It was cheaper. RL felt restless as a bride.

* * *

A dog-faced man in a leather jacket came out in a breath of warm airport-scented air, lit a cigarette a foot from RL’s face and swore at the morning.

I wouldn’t go to Memphis if I didn’t have to, he said. You know that.

It took RL a moment to realize that he had an earpiece, a cell phone and not a regular walkie-talkie crazy man like the one down by the Food Farm.

We can talk about her when I get back, he said. The money, it’s none of your business. It’s not the problem.

RL could hear the angry bee voice in the man’s earhole, a female bee.

I told you, he said. She’s just a thing—we can talk about her later. Look, I’ve got to board now, they’re boarding the flight. I’ll call you tonight. No, I love you, too, I just have to run.

He slapped his tiny phone shut with an emphatic flick of the wrist and grinned at RL. The lie hung in the air in the white of his breath.

Not even seven in the morning, he said to RL.

RL shrugged: what are you going to do? Now the lie was his, too.

Six forty-five in the morning and she’s up and bitching me out.

* * *

I don’t know, RL said.

Beautiful girl, though, said the dog-faced man, fishing the earpiece out of his earhole and examining it for wax. Still makes my dick hard to look at her.

He stubbed his cigarette out and wandered back inside, apparently humming to himself. When RL turned back toward the parking lot, Betsy was there.

Who was that? she asked.

Face like an unmade bed, bags falling from her every side, a dim profusion of color and stripes and paisley green. She was ready to turn and bolt right then and there and RL wondered, not for the first time, if this was such a hot idea.

Nobody I know, he said, but he sounded like he was lying.

She grinned at him disbelieving and pecked his cheek and said, Off to Mexico!

RL followed her through the automatic doors and into the warm chemical air, wondering at her many bags and baskets, the giant Rollaboard that trailed behind her, feeling smallish and tight with his tiny bag and his prim little carry-on. Nevertheless he was equipped: sun-blocking shirts and a giant hat and special fingerless gloves and a twelve-weight Sage rod with a reel the size of a Big Ben alarm clock. This last seemed like a ridiculous thing, but he had been warned not to go light. In his mind’s eye RL saw himself casting into sunny sky-blue water. He knew himself for a fool. He could easily rent the gear in Mexico, if he had the time at all to fish. It
seemed possible that it would all get safely back to Montana unused, the rod, the reel, the brand-new line. But it was like touching the thing itself was the same as fishing in bright blue water. Like buying the thing was the same as having the experience. This was how RL made a good part of his living, selling fancy stuff to doctors and executives to take back to New Jersey with them, to shove back into the office closet for another year and touch once in a while to remind them of autumn days on the Missouri or a blue-wing olive hatch where the twenty inchers couldn’t stop themselves. That fine English reel, that Tom Morgan rod with their name imprinted just above the reel seat. He knew them for fools but he was no different. No different.

I’ve been up since three, she said. I didn’t sleep at all last night.

You can sleep on the plane, he said.

Or I can drink myself silly, she said.

Edgar ran the river path
in the dawn light, the trash and alders by the waterside in and out of the fog, the river itself coming and going and strangely a few risers out in the safe middle of the channel. Most rivers, the big fish stayed to the edges and left the main channel for dinks and suckers, but here the big boys swam in the heavy current, the water thick with winter cold, the ice lacing the slow water by the bank. The air was cold with tiny crystals of ice suspended in it so it hurt his lungs to breathe it. Which was fine with Edgar. He pushed himself faster.

His nose dripped snot and his head hurt. He had overdressed himself in wool and now his back and belly prickled with sweat, last night’s last shot tracing its way down his cheek in a drip of frozen poison. He took his wool cap off and stuffed it in his pocket and the
cold burned his naked ears. His calves burned and his eyes teared up. Still, he went faster, pushed harder.