The Slide: A Novel (32 page)

What I had seen in my mother at the mall was what I had seen in the courtyard, in Audrey, the physical expression of tremendous disappointment. Ian’s sluggish steps.

There was a beeping, some pulsing noise I didn’t understand. A powerful and terrible squawking. I saw the phone off the hook and realized this was the old alert to warn us that if we didn’t do something soon, the house would be cut off from the outside world. In other words, the alarm.

Anger was sharp.

Lonely was hollow.

Sad was the giant, the cloud or earth or ocean, the elemental force.

The beeping eventually stopped. I went back into the junk drawer with a hand. Most likely it would be my mother, or would they clean together? My father scooping the whole stinking mess into a garbage bag and carrying it out to the curb. Dispose, discard, rid the house of things.

My hand came across the extra set of keys to my father’s car. Which I clenched tight in my fist. I removed my cell phone from my pocket and tossed it into the drawer. Which I shut.

The injustice was that it only worked one way. The past reached forward and meddled, played its stained fingers across the present. But the present had no such dominion. An old complaint, fine, but made new by the specifics of what had been lost: love, marriage, dear friend, innocence, status as law-abiding non-rapist. Brother.

So the present. Yes. The boy could still be saved. I knew the route, not thirteen miles from here. I had been there only yesterday. I could return and fix. Had the route memorized. Knew the solution. I took the Audrey photograph and an old Cardinals magnet and stuck them to the fridge on my way to the garage.

Together we flew, me and the car my same age. Work had opened this city to me, folded back flaps to expose the depths within. I had been into these homes, stepped over piles of dirty laundry. Into the bare back halls of these businesses, the gloomy cubicles previously known to me only in movie satire. Never had I been more aware of the peopling of a place. Pulses throbbing below the veneer of society’s inanimates.

Ian’s house was how it always was: dirty and dark, lit by syndicated programming and daylight through the screen door. I knocked. No answer. I called out and the television went mute.

“Go away.”

I spoke into quiet darkness: “I never told you about baseball camp. Every summer from sixth grade until sophomore year. Down at Mizzou. We stayed in the dorms and ate in the cafeterias, and each day felt like it was part of something special. We ran drills and scrimmaged and worked on bunting technique. They filmed us swinging, and we sat in the coaches’ office and analyzed the video. They call it the
trigger,
some thing each of us does to start a swing. Me, I lifted my left foot just barely before setting it back down again. Of course, before the video I had no idea. But there it was on the screen in slow motion. Then you’d see the hips shift as shoulders open slightly. Hands coming downward through the zone. ‘Down the slide,’ they called it.
Down the
slide.
Keep your back shoulder up.
Down the slide.
Come on. Let’s go to the batting cage.”

“My dad’s in the back working on something. You should go. I told him about you taking me to Tower Tee and he got real mad. Hurry and go before he comes back inside.”

“Your dad is at work. His car isn’t here.”

“He had to leave for a minute, but he’ll be right back any second now.”

“Wait. Is that true? Are you saying to me what you’re supposed to say to a stranger?”

“Just ’cause they took away your van doesn’t mean you’re not a kidnapper.”

“Come see the car I’m driving. It’s a 1978 Datsun 280Z. It’s before your time. Nissan used to be Datsun. Istanbul was Constantinople.”

I heard the television come back to life. I turned and saw the hyena kids emerge from their home and begin playing in the yard up the street. Their mother sat in a lawn chair in the shade of the house. I knew I had role models growing up—I must have. I needed to think who they were. My father, of course, and an old instructional VHS tape of Ozzie Smith saying
stay down, don’t let
the ball play you
.

I called back into the house over the volume of the TV: “I don’t see the problem here.”

“That’s because you’re crazy! It’s like you think I can’t tell!”

“Hold on a second. Sometimes we say things we don’t fully believe.” The lock was a thin metal rod extending from the frame, hooking into a loop in the door. “It’s easy sometimes to get carried away. The heat doesn’t help. But we don’t want to say anything that could ruin our friendship.”

“If anyone’s ruined anything,” he said, “it’s you. And it’s everything.”

Like tossing unsharpened darts into an endless black void. How many times did I tell her
love
? Her name spoken in my sleep, unconsciously, chanted like some reenactment of an ancient tribal rite, actors in face paint. Skeptics all of us, there were times we all needed proof.

I yelled through the door that I would be right back.

My feet and hands could have belonged to somebody else; they worked clutch and gas and steered and shifted in reflexive concert. Passing and merging, decelerating off Highway 40, turning onto the thinner, curvier country road and going south. It was Saturday, early afternoon, and the Datsun on 94 was like a warm razor through butter. In Defiance, the two bars with outdoor decks were packed with people in red hats. Families: goddamn miraculous and fragile and absurd.

I took comfort in having a plan. Back under the canopy now, the road was dense with winery-bound traffic. Gradually the pack broke apart, until finally I was beyond Mount Pleasant, and alone, me and my spear and this landlocked beach, ocean of countryside stretching straight and endless in front of me. Reaching the sign for Irenia Winery.

The plan was to find Ian’s mom. The plan was to locate Ian Worpley’s mother and convince her to return to her family. To isolate the semi-former Mrs. Worpley, sit her down, palpate and find the pulse of motherhood thumping beneath whatever was keeping her from her family, stare fiercely into her eyes and say
you are being selfish
. Whatever she was doing out here, working or living or both or whatever it was, Ian was locked inside that dark house with only a television to raise him, and
motherhood has no
expiration date
. I was going to find her, sit her down, and speak words that appealed to her most human ingredients. Hope my words might still have meaning.

At the door to the main building, a thin hairless man whom I did not recognize from my last visit examined my driver’s license. He wore the pale-blue collared shirt tucked into flat-front khakis.

“Hello there. Welcome. It’s good to have you.”

Inside the front door was typical retail outlet built around a central, circular counter. A few customers sat at stools as men and women wearing pale-blue collared shirts poured tastes of wine. The plan was to scope the place out, case the joint, and form a general feeling, then get busy finding Mrs. Worpley. I moved nonchalantly through the store, stopping occasionally to pick up an item and examine it. In this manner I would infiltrate the winery without arousing even the slightest fractional suspicion.

“Good afternoon.”

A woman stood before me, wearing the same pale-blue sexless collared shirt and flat-front khaki pants. I nodded hello and set down whatever bottle I was holding. Smiling, I backed out of the aisle and moved quickly across the store, through a door, onto a brick patio where tables huddled in the shade of large pale-blue umbrellas. I took a seat at an empty table overlooking the vineyard below. Do this thing for the boy, call on the love of a mother lion for her cubs, jaws that could demolish fragile skulls. That was maternity.

The woman from inside arrived a few minutes later carrying a leather-bound wine list she set open in front of me.

“Can I get you anything? Something white, chilled enough to fog your glass when I pour it? People have been enjoying the sauv blanc.”

She sat down next to me.

“I’m not sure I feel like talking about wine,” I said. The plan required a certain amount of toughness and resolve.

“Oh?”

“Wine intimidates with the language it evokes. Same with stocks and racehorses. I ask you about a wine, you tell me of its nose and hints of pencil shavings. You mention pear. And then I taste the wine and nod and you win.”

“Win this competition we’re having,” she said.

“Just that wine is a field based on saying the right words at the right time.”

“Okay,” she said.

The umbrellas made for pods of shade in the otherwise bright afternoon. I noticed quite a few women in the Irenia work outfits buzzing around the patio, approaching and leaving tables with bottles and empty glasses.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“What’s yours?”

She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking off into the valley, toward the dropping sun. I waited for her to say something else.

“My name is Opal.”

“As in the birthstone of October.”

“I like how it has two levels. Oh.” She paused. “Pull.”

It was a cult. Pow. That was it, the nebulous something I felt about this place. Boom. And I was at once pleased with myself for solving the mystery and suddenly concerned for the safety of my mind. This
cult,
den of would-be converters and persuaders, insidious group-huggers. Kablow. We hear or read about such places, these closed worlds of unregulated faith. The attendant metaphor of washing a brain, not so bad a concept in itself.

“This is a name you chose, Opal?”

“Sometimes coming to a new place is a good opportunity to try new things. Leave old things behind. If you want.”

Her visage still and balanced, unreadable, she faced the vineyard. Hair brownish, body skinnyish, not too. Fair skin. Eyes the color of—what?—the fake wood grain of my 4Runner’s dash. The point was to do something good for the boy. A gesture backed by substantial concern and goodwill and selflessness, a mother retrieved. A testament to the reaches of love, mine and hers.

“I should make clear that I’m not here to enlist in whatever you have going. I need to find a woman with the last name Worpley. I don’t know her first name. Do you know her?”

“Why do you need to find her?”

I looked away. Pretty much the full extent of what I knew about cults was: cults hold on. This was how it happened. First they acquired, then they
retained
.

“Just to chat,” I said.

“Keep the menu just in case. I’ll be back in a few minutes. No rush.”

The woman
cultist
had left me at the table. Here was how it happened. They approached in a time of vulnerability. They casually walked alongside the overweight goth girl or the sad sci-fi kid and they spoke of gatherings, meetings where a few of them hung out, no big deal.

Down in the vineyard, I saw blue-dressed cultists leading small groups of normal people along long rows of grapes. They went slowly, the guide stopping now to speak of a vine’s characteristics or let dirt fall dramatically through his fingers.

I would have to tread more carefully than I had initially thought. The plan required singularity of purpose and minimal ruffling of cult feathers. I imagined a bearded figurehead wearing robes and white Keds. I pulled over a chair so it sat in front of me, in the sun. I took my shoes off and rested my feet on the chair.

The woman appeared from behind me and took her seat again at the table. It occurred to me that any wine I ordered might be dosed with something.

“You want to know what you remind me of ?”

“Yeah, I’ve decided no wine. I need to find this woman, and if you’re not going to help me I’d like to be referred to someone who might.”

“Okay,” she said, and shifted her gaze to the valley. I looked at my shoes on the ground. I had known the plan was not going to be easy—the plan required focus and fortitude. The plan was to.

“What do I remind you of ?” I asked.

“The way a dog looks at you sometimes and you know it wants something but you have no idea what.”

“Or a child,” I said. “A baby.”

She shrugged. “That’s a real
man
thing to say. I don’t mean that badly, but babies only want two or three things. The hardest part is birth. After that it all gets easier.”

“So you have kids?”

“Look at the sun,” she said. “It looks like one of those Super Balls.”

I had become distracted. I focused on the plan.

I picked up my shoes and walked to the edge of the patio. A long brick stairway led me down into the valley. Row upon row of plants. I began down one of these rows of neck-high plants, walking a strip of grass only a little wider than my shoulders. The ground was harder than I expected and felt too dry to grow anything. I almost never went barefoot, and my feet against the grass looked suspiciously like hands.

Some of the men and women here among the vines were crouched, holding shears. Others carried buckets of grapes in each hand, passing me with a steady smile and a nod. I saw a woman stop at one of the grape pickers and hand him something from out of a canvas bag. Water. I recalled the work of my most difficult delivery of the summer, unloading those bottles into the cellar with those two men in pale-blue collared shirts. I thought of their willingness to help and the diligence with which they’d worked.