Erik steps around behind his open car door and gives my license thorough study, which includes looking up at me for a mug-shot match. I see now he has an almost colorless Hitler Youth mustache on his pale lip, and something tattooed on the back of his hand—a skull, maybe, or a snake coiled around a skull (no doubt a Body Artistry creation). He is also, I can just make out, wearing a tiny gold earring bead in his right lobe. An amusing little combo for Deep River.
He turns my license over, apparently to see if I’m an organ donor (I’m not), then he walks it back around, lays it on the Yugo’s hood and returns to his protective door. I still can’t tell if he’s packin’.
“There you go,” he says, with a remnant of his former warmth. I don’t know what he’s learned, since it wouldn’t say on my license if I was a serial killer. “We just have a lot of strangers drive in here, Mr. Bascombe. People who live in here really don’t like being harassed. Which is why we have a job, I guess.” He grins amiably. We’re friends now.
“I hate it myself,” I say, coming over and snugging my license back in my billfold. I wonder if Erik got a whiff of the dead-bird stink.
“You’d probably be surprised the number of wackos come off that I-Ninety-five and end up back in here, roaming around.”
“I believe it,” I say. “A hundred percent.” And then for some reason I am enervated, as if I’d been to jail for days and had just this very moment stepped out into harsh daylight.
“Particularly on your holidays,” says Erik the sociologist. “And especially
this
holiday. This one brings out the psychos from
all
over. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania.” He shakes his head. Those are the states where most lunatics live if you’re him. “You old friends with Mr. O’Dell?” He smiles, protected by his door. “I like him a lot.”
“No,” I say, stepping back to my car, which has cold air still pouring out, making me feel even more enervated.
“You’re just business acquaintances, I guess,” he says. “You an architect?”
“No,” I say. “My ex-wife’s married to Mr. O’Dell, and I’m picking up my son to take him on a trip. Does that seem like a good idea?” I can easily imagine wanting to harm Erik.
“Wow, that sounds pretty serious.” He leers from behind his open blue door. He’s, of course, got me figured now: I’m a defeated, pathetic figure engaged in a demeaning and hopeless mission—not nearly as interesting as a wacko. Though even my kind can cause trouble, can have a trunkful of phosphorous grenades and plastique and be bent on neighborhood mayhem.
“It’s not that serious,” I say, pausing, looking at him. “It’s something I enjoy.”
“Is Pau
l your
son?” Erik says. He brings his forefinger up to his earring, a small gesture of dominion.
“Yep. You know Paul?”
“Oh yeah,” Erik says, smirking. “We’re all acquainted with Paul.”
“All who? What does that mean?” I feel my brows thicken.
“We’ve all had contact with Paul.” Erik starts lowering himself back into his stupid Yugo.
“I’m sure he hasn’t caused you any trouble,” I say, thinking that he probably has, and will again. Erik is the kind of monkey Paul would consider a barrel of laughs.
Erik is speaking from the driver’s seat now; I can’t make his words out. No doubt he’s saying something smart-assed he doesn’t intend me to hear. Or else he’s radioing messages via his shoulder. He drops the Yugo in reverse, scoots back out the drive and wheels around.
I consider saying something vicious, running over and screaming in his window. But I can’t afford to get arrested in my ex-wife’s driveway. So I only wave, and he waves back. I think he says, “Have a good day,” in his policey, insincere way, before heading slowly up Swallow Lane out of my sight.
M
y daughter, Clarissa, is the first living soul I spy as I drive tired-eyed into compound O’Dell. She is far below the big house, on the ample lawn slope above the pond, committedly whacking a yellow tetherball all by her lonesome, oblivious as a sparrow to me here in my car, surveilling her from afar.
I pull up to the back of the house (the front faces the lawn, the air, the water, the sunrise and, for what I know, the path to all knowledge) and climb wearily out into the hot, chirpy morning, reconciled to finding Paul by myself.
Charley’s house is, of course, a glorious erection, chalky-blue-shingled and white-trimmed, with a complex gabled roof, tall paneless windows and a big sashaying porch around three sides that gives onto the lawn down some white steps to the very spot where Charley and I discussed Shakespeare and came to the conclusion we neither one trusted the other.
I wedge in sideways through the row of purple-blooming hydrangeas (contrast my poor dried-up remnants on Clio Street), stagger only slightly, but walk on out onto the hot shadowless grass, feeling light-legged and dazed, my eyelids flickering, my eyes darting side to side to see who might see me first (such entrances are never dignified). I have, to my eternal infamy, forgotten to buy a gift this morning, a love and peace offering to appease Clarissa for not taking her along with her brother. What I’d give for a colorful Vince Lombardi sweatband or a Four Blocks of Granite book of inspirational halftime quotes. It would be our joke. I am lost here.
Clarissa ceases larking with the tetherball when she sees me and stands eyes-shaded, averting her face and waving, though she can’t tell it’s me she sees—possibly hopes it is and not a plainclothes policeman come to ask questions about her brother.
I wave back, realizing for some reason known only to God that I have begun to
limp
, as though a war had intervened since I last saw my loved ones and I had returned a changed and beaten veteran. Though Clarissa will not notice. Even as rarely as she sees me—once a month nowadays—I am a timeless fixture, and nothing would seem unusual; an eye patch, a prosthetic arm, all-new teeth: none would rate a mention.
“Hi-dee, hi-dee, hi-dee,” she sings out when it’s clearly me she’s waving welcome to. She wears strong contacts and can’t see distances well, but doesn’t care. She darts and springs barefoot toward me across the dry grass, ready to deliver a big power hug around my aching neck—which every time hurts like a hammerlock and makes me groan.
“I came as soon as I heard the news,” I say. (In our makeshift, make-believe life I always arrive just in time to face some dire emergency—Clarissa and I being the responsible adults, Paul and their mother the temperamental kids in need of rescue.) I am still limping, though my heart’s going strong with simple pleasure, all tightness in my brain miraculously dispatched.
“Paul’s in the house with Mom, getting ready and probably having an argument.”
Clarissa, in brilliant red shorts over her blue Speedo suit, jumps up and gives me her hammer hug, and I swing her like a tetherball before letting her sink weak-kneed into the grass. She has a wonderful smell—dampness and girlish perfume applied hours before, now faded. Beyond us is the boathouse crime scene, the pond again dense with pink fleabane and wild callas and, farther on, the row of dense motionless tupelos and the invisible river, above which a squad of pelicans executes a slow and graceful upward soar.
“Where’s the man of the house?” I let myself down heavily beside her, my back against the tetherball pole. Clarissa’s legs are thin and tanned and golden-sheeny-haired, her bare feet milky and without a blemish. She arranges herself belly-down, chin-propped, her eyes clear behind her contacts and fastened on me, her face a prettier version of my own: small nose, blue eyes, cheekbones more obvious than her mother’s, whose broad, Dutch forehead and coarse hair match Paul’s looks almost completely.
“He’s work-ing now in his studi-o-o.” She looks at me knowingly and without much irony. It’s life to her, all of this—few tragedies, few great singing victories, everything pretty much good or okay. We are well paired in our family unit.
Charley’s studio is half visible beyond a row of deep-green hardwoods that boundaries the lawn and stops at the pond’s edge. I see a glint off its tin roof, its row of cypress stilts holding up a catwalk (a project Charley and his roommate doped out as a joke freshman year, back in ’44, but that Charley “always wanted to build”).
“So how’s the weather?” I say, relieved to know where he is.
“Oh, it’s fine,” Clarissa says noncommittally. A skim of sweat is on her temples from belting the tetherball. My back’s already sweaty through my shirt.
“And how’s your brother?”
“Weird. But okay.” Maintaining her belly-down, she rotates her head around on its slender stem, some routine from dance class or gymnastics, though an unmistakable signal: she is Paul’s
buen amiga;
the two of them are closer than the two of us; this all could’ve been different with better parents, but isn’t; do not fail to notice it.
“Is your mom okay too?”
Clarissa stops rotating her head and wrinkles her nose as though I’d announced an unsavory subject, then rolls over on her back and stares skyward. “She’s much worse,” she says, and looks unconvincingly worried.
“Worse than what?”
“Than you!” She rounds her eyes upward in mock surprise. “She and Charley had a howler this week. And they had one last week too. And one the week before.” “Howlers” mean big disputes, not embarrassing verbal miscues. “Hmmmm, hmm, hmm,” she says, meaning most of what she knows is being retained silently. I of course can’t quiz her on this subject—a cardinal rule once divorce has become the governing institution—though I wish I knew more.
I pluck up a blade of grass, press it between my two thumbs like a woodwind reed and blow, making a sputtery, squawky but still fairly successful soprano sax note, a skill from eons back.
“Can you play ‘Gypsy Road’ or ‘Born in the U.S.A.’?” She sits up.
“That’s my whole repertoire on grass,” I say, putting my two hands down on both her kneecaps, which are cold and bony and soft all at once. Conceivably she can smell dead grackle. “Your ole Dad loves you,” I say. “I’m sorry I have to kidnap Paul and not all two of you. I’d rather travel as a trio.”
“He’s much needier now,” Clarissa says, and drags a blade of grass all her own across the backs of both my hands where they rest on her perfect kneecaps. “I’m way ahead of him emotionally. I’ll have my period pretty soon.” She looks up at me profoundly, fattens the corners of her mouth and slowly lets her eyes cross and keeps them that way.
“Well, that’s good to know,” I say, my heart going ker-whonk, my eyes suddenly hot and unhappily moist—not with unhappy tears, but with unhappy sweat that has busted out on my forehead. “And how old
are
you?” I say, ker-whonk. “Thirty-seven or thirty-eight?”
“Thirty-twelve,” she says, and lightly pokes my knuckles with the grass blade.
“Okay, that’s old enough. You don’t need to be any older. You’re perfect.”
“Charley knows Bush,” she says with a sour face. “Did you hear that?” Her blue eyes elevate gravely to mine. This is bottom-line business to her. All that Charley might conceivably have been forgiven is reassigned to him with this choice bit of news. My daughter, like her old man, is a Democrat of the New Deal bent and considers most Republicans and particularly V.P. Bush barely mentionable dickheads.
“I guess I knew that without knowing it.” I scour my two fingers on the turf to clean off the death smell.
“He’s for the party of money, tradition and influence,” she says, way too big for her britches, since Charley’s tradition and influence are paying her bills, keeping her in tetherballs, tutus and violin lessons. She is for the party of no tradition, no influence, no nothing, also like her father.
“He has his rights,” I say, and add a lackluster “I mean that.” I can’t help conjuring what Charley’s cheek looks like where Paul has whopped him.
Clarissa stares at her blade of grass, wondering, I’m sure, why she has to accord Charley any rights. “Sweetheart,” I say solemnly, “is there anything you can tell me about ole Paul? I don’t want you to tell me a deep dark secret, just maybe a shallow light one. It would be as-you-know-held-in-strictest-confidence.” I say this last to make it halfway a joke and let her feel comradely about providing me some lowdown.
She stares at the thick grass carpet in silence, then angles her head over and squints up at the house with the flowering bushes and the white porch and stairs. Atop the highmost roof pinnacle, in the midst of all the springing angles and gable ends, is an American flag (a small one) on a staff, rustling in an unfelt breeze.
“Are you sad?” she says. In her sun-blond hair I see a tiny red ribbon tied in a bow, something I hadn’t noticed but instantly revere her for, since along with her question it makes her seem a person of complex privacies.
“No, I’m not sad, except that you can’t go with Paul and me to Cooperstown. And I forgot to bring you anything. That’s pretty sad.”
“Do you have a car phone?” She raises her eyes accusingly.
“No.”
“Do you have a beeper?”
“No, afraid not.” I smile at her knowingly.
“How do you keep up with your calls then?” She squints again, making her look a hundred.
“I guess I don’t get that many calls. Sometimes there’s a message from you on my answering box, though not that often.”
“I know.”