In Reach (2 page)

The waitress brings him a steaming cup of coffee, a murky film skimming the top. He orders a plate of eggs and bacon, why not? Patsy Cline sings mournfully in the background, amid static. Gray outside. Puddles of muck and dirty boot prints on the floor.

Wayne sips his coffee and looks around. In one corner, a woman huddles in a brown coat, leafing through a stack of bills piled in front of her. Occasionally, she tugs at her hair, then back to fingering the envelopes. A trucker sits at the counter, beefy hands cradling a coffee cup, eyes bloodshot and glazed with road hypnosis, an inch of hairy skin revealed by low-slung jeans. A teenager (shouldn’t she be in school?) occupies the adjacent booth, her back against the window, legs slung up on the seat. Heavy mascara fringes her eyes, black blobs gummed on the lash tips, her lips red as an overripe plum. The aging waitress brings her a cup of coffee, a carton of half-and-half in her other hand. She stands and creams the coffee for the girl, then walks away. There’s a dog, too, lying on the floor, a black Lab with one foot missing.

Wayne lets out a long breath and slides into a strange, unsettling calm. He knows these people, even the dog. The way they leave the radio on at night to trick themselves into thinking someone else is in the room. The stickiness of spilled syrup, left to dry on the kitchen counter. The sweating hands when they check the mail, the answering machine. Ask them, any one of them, who’s waiting for you at home? He knows the answer. Like him, they find rest in these gray walls, the broke down look of this place, the knowledge that people come and go, come and go, nobody stays, because this isn’t supposed to be home. Nobody pretends that they belong. Here, where everyone is transient and anonymous, nobody betrays you.

He stays as long as he can without drawing attention to himself. Eventually, he tears himself away, gets in his car, and stops at the top of the driveway, unable to decide what to do. He can’t show his face in Reach, the whole town buzzing over his loss of job. If he goes on to Denver, he could get a fresh start, but does he even know where to begin? It won’t be any different in Denver than it is in Reach. Everywhere he goes, he takes his damn self, and for him, the likes of him, there is no coming home.

When he hears the knock on his window, he mistakes it for a gunshot. He feels for the wound, his hand moving around on his chest, the pain real, searing, and then he hears a man’s voice.

“You all right in there?”

He rolls the foggy window down a few inches and leans back to peer out. It’s the trucker from the diner, a leather jacket thrown over his plaid flannel shirt, a toothpick riding his lower lip. Snot dribbles from his nose, and the man wipes at it with the back of his hand. “You been sitting there a while. Everything okay?”

“Fine,” Wayne says.

“You goin’ to Denver?”

“I thought about it.”

“Because that kid over there wants a ride.”

The man hitches his thumb toward the teenager hunched by the diner’s front door. It’s the girl from inside. She looks mad as hell and scared, her eyes glassy. She’s on something, meth probably, these kids today.

“You can’t take her?” Wayne says.

“Nah. I’m headed to Sidney, to Cabela’s. She asked me, but I ain’t goin’ that direction.”

The girl sees them talking about her. She looks down, scuffs her feet, then turns and disappears back inside the diner. She’s standing in the outer foyer, between the gumball machine and a bulletin board with tacked-up notices of garage sales. Through the window, they can see she’s pulled out a cell phone.

“Probably had a fight with her boyfriend,” the trucker says.

“Or her parents,” Wayne offers.

“Yeah.”

The girl is gesturing wildly, her fingers splayed, hands tense. She whirls around. The two men watch her and don’t speak, and finally, she cries with heaving sobs, her head propped against the window.

“Well, I guess she’ll be all right, then,” the trucker says.

“I suppose.” Wayne knows what the man is thinking. Someone is on the other end of that phone line.

“Well,” the man says, looking toward his truck.

“Go ahead,” Wayne says. “I’ll wait.”

The man nods. He moves away, and without turning his head, lifts his hand behind him in a farewell wave.

Wayne sits in his car, engine running, for what seems like a long time. The girl has snapped her phone together and stands in the entryway, eyes dark and watching. A beat-up Chevy pulls into the parking lot, one fender bent like a potato chip. The driver is a woman, middle-aged, her hair a frowsy mess. Without bothering to turn off the car or close the door behind her, she catapults inside the diner. He watches her fold the girl in her arms, pat her
on the back. The girl is taller than the woman, but she manages to slump down, turn her face into the woman’s neck, clench her arms around the woman’s waist. The two of them maneuver out to the Chevy, jerky but together, like dancing circus bears. The girl doesn’t look up, so he puts his car in gear and heads out.

He threads his way through a few streets. That girl has the same problems she had two minutes ago, make no mistake about that. One hug isn’t going to fix whatever’s wrong. Still. Someone cared enough to come after her. He’s thinking about Mark accusing him of being afraid. All along, he thought leaving was the coward’s way out. He sees now, you can run away even if you stay in one place.

He’s staring at himself, down a long corridor with shut doors, and none of them have doorknobs. He sees how it will be. He’ll pack away the lamp that belonged to Mary and Dave’s mother because it reminds him, of what? That they know what they must have always known? That he isn’t worthy of their friendship? Dave will die, and he’ll be too proud to attend the funeral, too afraid that Mary will see him and reproach him for his absence. Not long after, Mary will be gone, too. He’ll walk by their house and wonder, did she mean to be his friend? Did she tell him that story to say, I see you and I don’t care. Or did she tell him, as he had thought at the time, as a warning. What was she saying, come close or stay away? For him, it has always been stay away, until by now, he walks himself away and shuts the gate after.

He’s sitting in his car, idling at a stop sign, thinking about a strange girl who turned her head into the soft neck of someone and cried. He could, he is thinking, show up on Mary’s doorstep with her mother’s lamp. He could hold it out to her, an offering. He has no idea what she would do or say, that’s a risk. But he could do this one thing. He could give it back to her. Restored.

Judgment Day

Esther Paxton can’t stand to see Leland sitting there in his overalls, his hands worrying the crocheted doilies on the recliner’s armrests. It’s Tuesday, and Leland sat there all day yesterday. Sunday, and Saturday, too, and the week before that. Leland’s sat in that chair all the way back to June 13, when the
Reach Gazette
printed the story. The phone has stopped ringing, or else Leland leaves it off the hook. She doesn’t care. Who is there to talk to anyway, unless Rosalee calls, but she won’t, because Larry’s still threatening to sue.

Esther’s a strong-looking woman, a no-nonsense face and body to go with it, glasses and sturdy hands. Her lips clamp down tight. She wears low-heeled shoes, no jewelry, no makeup. Can’t be bothered with it. She’s let her hair go gray. When she taught the Bible class at the First Baptist Church, people admired her, but they didn’t speak up much, and that has been the story of her life. She’s outside of things, and she doesn’t know why.

She opens a box of Raisin Bran and gets milk from the refrigerator. Her mouth feels dry and she craves orange juice, but she’d have to go to the store. Everybody’s heard by now. The story is all over the panhandle, their bankruptcy, unpaid farmers, rumors of embezzlement. The thing is to stay strong until they can hold
their heads up again. Leland sits there, not even trying. She can’t forgive him for this final betrayal, never mind everything else that’s come. She has no patience with that kind of indulgence, languishing in a leather recliner in the spacious den they built three years ago, not even opening the blinds, breathing in the foul air he breathed out yesterday, expecting her to rally and bring him food. She’s in this too, in case he can’t remember, but he’s always been like that. He’s taken a lot of fuss, coddling, wants his meat loaf without onions, the collars of his shirts starched. She didn’t mind when the little extras made him notice her, but now he’s oblivious to everything. She’s hidden his gun.

She’s tired of calling him to the table. She’s given up on that. Oh, it’s amazing the things you can adjust to, like chipping ice to wash up mornings or eating nothing but eggs through a winter. Or Leland not touching her for years. She missed that at first, an awful fire claiming her sometimes, leaving her spun out, ragged and desperate, but slowly that faded, too. She still visits a tiny grave in the Oregon Trail Cemetery. Grief pinned her to the ground once, but that was a long time ago, and she got used to the emptiness. She could eat bugs or roasted mice if she had to.

She sets the tray on the coffee table, two cereal bowls, two cups of coffee, cream and sugar for him, black for her. She can’t guess what’s in his head. He’s never been what you’d call a deep thinker, not like her. She can remember painting rooms with him when they were young, her head off and running against the monotony of dip-brush-dip, but he reported nothing. Blank slate. She can’t imagine that trick.

She forces herself to eat in the den with him. It’s enough to make her puke, the way the air is stale and the darkness and his silence. “C’mon, Hon,” she says, and she puts the bowl in his hands, and like a robot, he eats. So far, so good. He won’t starve, and the judges won’t come and carry her away for neglect or whatever they call it when a wife refuses to feed her voluntarily comatose husband.

He doesn’t bother with the
TV
anymore. She’s stopped trying to talk to him. The paper comes and she throws it out, but not before her eyes scan the headlines. Yesterday she saw that Ron Blake and Todd Birkham have declared bankruptcy. All those farmers getting foreclosed on, it’s like finding another rotten plank in the flooring. Nobody will believe them if they say that’s exactly what they tried to prevent. They only doctored the books to buy time. In the grain elevator business, things are never that exact. There’s always borrowing from one column to another. It’s just numbers, a few jagged lines on paper.

She looks at Leland sitting there, empty bowl in his hand, his mouth gone slack, and worries how he’ll get through the preliminary hearing. She can’t imagine how he’ll pull it together to talk to a judge. She’s disgusted with him, look at the drool on his shirt, his thin hair greasy, plastered to his scalp. Most nights, he sleeps in the chair. She’s worried about him, but she thinks he could snap out of it. Where’s his famous sense of humor? After forty-three years, she’s surprised to find that she doesn’t know him. He does this to her, makes her hate him while she feels sorry for him. Mostly, she doesn’t know what to do.

She tugs at the bowl in his hand. He hangs on, odd, he still has that strength. Is he trying to tell her something? Sad eyes, she’s seen enough of that. She plucks the bowl from his fingers and sets it on the tray. He hasn’t touched his coffee, hasn’t for days, but she brings it anyway, pours two cups as part of the daily ritual.

She’s known Ron Blake and Todd Birkham all their lives. Once, they were snot-nosed kids in Sunday School. Todd was in Rosalee’s class at the high school, puffing his cheeks out playing tuba while Rosalee threw a baton. Their wives are probably frantic. And they have children, too. Todd’s oldest must be looking at college. She pictures Todd’s family sitting around a kitchen table, nothing on it but a bowl of boiled eggs, fingers drumming on the Formica top. She lingers over the picture too long and hears Todd saying
it’s her fault, hers and Leland’s. We raised a good crop, goddamnit, Todd says, and his boy, the one who might have to postpone his education, slaps the tabletop with open hands, and the eggs bounce out of the bowl, raw eggs now, splatting on the floor, and among broken eggshells and slimy yolks, the wife starts to cry.

Esther stands abruptly. “Guess I’ll clean up, then, and go upstairs and do some sewing,” she tells Leland, like she does every day. He knows she’s working on that quilt for Natalie, who will graduate from high school next spring. She might have to mail it. Larry says they’re never going to see their grandchildren again.

“Leland,” she says. She doesn’t know if he hears her. He doesn’t raise his head or blink an eye.

She walks out on him, why she thinks in those terms, she doesn’t know. Good God, nobody could require her to sit there, too, nobody expects a wife to go that far, share the same miserable mudhole as if they were two pigs. She rinses the dishes at the kitchen sink, piles them on the drainer, wipes her hands, and goes upstairs to a small world where she has choices, fabric swatches of purples and greens, a variation on Drunkard’s Path that she designed herself, and when she sits to her needle and thread, she fills her mind by humming old hymns, “Standing on the Promises” and “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” and she sticks with it until time for lunch.

She’s in the kitchen making tuna sandwiches without lettuce. She can’t remember the last time they had something fresh from the store, but people can live on canned and frozen goods. She hears stirring in the den and takes it for a good sign. He’s up and about, although the door is closed. Maybe he’s decided to stop feeling sorry for himself. She shouldn’t have given up on him so soon. People respond to things differently, like Reverend Fowler coming round, pretending concern when all he wanted to know was whether they’d have to stop their tithe. You can’t predict what people will do.

Through the window above her sink, Esther spots Janet Nichols picking beans in her garden. She’s a lucky woman, that Janet, a widow. Besides, everybody likes her. She has friends all over town, and the Baptist Church practically revolves around her, why not, she’s perky and friendly the way Esther would like to be but isn’t, no ma’am. Esther wills Janet to look up at her window. She’s planned this, how one day Janet will look up, and Esther will wave at her. She’s lived across the alley from Janet for fourteen years, and they’ve never neighbored except over the fence or when they ran into each other at the Jack & Jill. It will have to be a different kind of wave, a signal, not a plea for pity. Esther doesn’t want that. It will be a little flick of the wrist wave, an almost beckoning, a come hither, a “drop whatever you’re doing and rescue me” kind of wave, but she doesn’t want to look over-anxious, either. In the mirror, when she’s practiced, the wave looks right to her, different than a casual greeting but not frantic.

Esther focuses all her attention on Janet, but Janet doesn’t look up at the window. She’s intent on picking beans, stupid cow, unaware of anything around her but herself. If she were any kind of neighbor, she’d know they’re having a hard time over here. A good neighbor would know how to care without intruding, the way Esther had done when Janet’s husband died. She sent a card, kept a discreet distance, watched for opportunities, picked up a dropped shirt from Janet’s clothesline, deadheaded the irises that bordered the alley. She doesn’t like to poke her nose in other people’s business, hovering the way some women do. Instead, Esther left hints: I’m here if you need me. That’s all she wants now, some sign beyond the hasty message scrawled in the margins of their newspaper—“Traitors”—or the dead robin someone laid out on their front stoop, its wings stiff and splayed open, nothing a cat could have done.

Esther loads up her lunch tray, two tuna sandwiches on plates, mayo, no lettuce, a pile of potato chips for each, glasses of iced tea. She opens the door to the den, glances toward the chair, is pleased
to see that Leland, for once, is not sitting in it. Her eyes adjust to the dim light. He’s up, but what the hell’s he doing? He’s tearing pages from books and gluing them to the paneling. He’s got a jar of rubber cement—thank God for that, easy to remove—he’s gluing like mad, and when she stops him and yanks on his arm, he turns glassy eyes on her.

“Paper. Paper. The rays can’t get through the paper. See, Esther? See?” His fingers jiggle. His voice rasps.

“What rays, Leland?” She tries to keep her voice calm, like she used to do on the farm when approaching a skittish horse.

“They have microphones everywhere.” He’s whispering now, shielding his mouth with his open hand. “I thought I could hide in this room, but the microphones. They send out rays that bounce off everything. Not paper, though, see?”

Her hand reaches out to him, her fingers fluttering aimlessly in the air between them. Several Lelands dance before her and retreat, the boy who waltzed her around the Veterans’ Hall, the frightened young man who sobbed when their baby died, the fiddle-playing jokester, all the Lelands she has known and loved turn their backs on her, and she is left with this stranger. She withdraws her hand. “Who’s sending the rays?” she asks, but he’s too far gone. Could be the sheriff, could be the Deacon Board, makes no difference, and she can hardly get him to sit still long enough to eat his sandwich.

She assesses the situation. He’s crazy, but he’s moving. He’s up and taking control over what little of his life he can, and she guesses that’s better than the way he was before. Maybe after he papers the whole room, he’ll settle down and get some peace. Maybe this is a primitive form of therapy, like screaming into a pillow, which she has tried on several occasions. Maybe his motion will keep him going right out the door and fishing. He’s all talk now, his voice rising with excitement, but what he says is gibberish, crazy stuff about rays and spies and how Larry’s out to kill him.

She gathers up four more jars of rubber cement that she finds around the house. She rescues a few books she can’t bear to have torn apart,
Jane Eyre
and
Robinson Crusoe
and what’s left of the family Bible. He’s already torn out the Book of Revelation, the fiery phrases beaming off the pine paneling, “Babylon and smoke,” “hail and fire,” “woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth.” She shuts her mind against the damnation from the Lord and goes upstairs to her scissors, her thread, her perfectly cut squares and rectangles. Hell on earth, that’s what she thinks. Who needs to wait for eternity? She whacks herself good on the side of the face to keep from crying, and she gets down to work.

She peeks in at him before she starts their supper. The den is a good-sized room and he’s got one whole wall done, top to bottom, pages fluttering in the air conditioning, upside down, sideways. He’s not paying the least attention to what’s on the paper. It could be typing paper as far as he’s concerned, but it takes him longer to tear pages from the books, and she thinks the longer this takes the better, because he’s occupied.

It’s still light out. Summer sun takes a long time to go down, and the days seem endless. Rosalee could call, if she had half a mind to. Too bad they live so far away, down there in Grand Island. She’s sure Rosalee would pop over if she lived here, in spite of Larry. Maybe to spite Larry, although Esther’s never picked up on any animosity between Rosalee and Larry. In fact, Rosalee seems to think Larry’s the be-all and end-all, but then, you never know what’s in a marriage, take Esther’s for example, who would have guessed that she and Leland were engaged in a life of crime? Leland never should have asked Larry to get him off or speak to the judge. She could have told Leland that, if he’d bothered to check with her first, Larry being such a self-righteous little prick, acting like he’s the only person in recent history to pass the bar exam. “I could be disbarred,” he’d whined, as if Le
land had asked him to store heroin or hide a dismembered body. Rosalee could call.

Esther gets busy frying the hamburger she’s thawed from the freezer. She cooks up only half a pound because her supply is getting low, and why should she be the one to subject herself to public scrutiny? As long as Hal keeps delivering milk and eggs to the door, they can last a long time on what she’s got put by in the pantry and the freezer. She takes a box of Hamburger Helper off the shelf. She despises this stuff, but it makes the meat stretch farther. She keeps it on hand for church potlucks.

She finds a shriveled cucumber in the refrigerator, ah, a green vegetable, washes it off under the tap. She looks across the alley at Janet’s, but everything is quiet. Esther’s neighbor, that Michael somebody who married the Swartz girl, is throwing more junk on an already overflowing pile in the alley. He’s practically ruined that place, nothing but dirt in the yard, old tires and pieces of two-by-four piled out back, big fat slob of a man, his bare chest matted with hair, belly hanging over his pants top. He’s yelling at somebody cowering by the garage. He’s swearing, striking his closed fist in an open palm. Esther stretches to turn the water off when she sees Michael reach out and grab whoever’s standing in the shadows. He yanks his son by the hair, the boy can’t be much more than ten or eleven, what’s his name, his name, and while Esther rummages through her mind for the child’s name, her eyes register the blows to his face, closed-fisted, his father pummeling the boy like he’s a punching bag. Shocked, she stands too long. The boy throws his arms up to protect his head. The father is kicking him now, kicking him while the child curls up in the dirt.