The Vast Fields of Ordinary (4 page)

“I just wanted to tell you,” he said with a helpless shrug. “These nights out are meant to bring us closer. I want to feel close to you, Dade.”

I thought about saying that this was a pretty messed up way to bring us closer together, but there was the sense that the comment would be wasted on him, so I didn’t say anything. Cindy was standing at the table next to ours explaining what wasabi was to a pair of very old women, one of whom was holding her menu upside down. Somewhere someone laughed a laugh that morphed into a series of snorts, and inside the club the piano player was playing “Moon River,” a staple in his set. I tried to focus my attention on these small things, but my eyes kept going to my father’s hands. He was turning his glass in counterclockwise circles on the tablecloth, and something about this made me put my hand on my glass. I thought about turning my tumbler to prove some point, but I didn’t.

“Are you going to tell Mom?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said quietly. He kept turning his glass. “I’m going to tell her in the next couple of days. Tell her what she already knows, I suppose.”

I started nodding slowly for no reason at all, and then my dad started nodding, and we did this for a while, nodding and affirming nothing at all as the evening settled around us.

Three days later we got our first thunderstorm of the summer. I watched through our rear sliding glass door as the rain clouds blackened the sky and burst open and sent down huge, hard drops. My dad was at the dealership and my mother was at school teaching summer art classes, and I spent the day home alone playing video games, downloading
Lube Jobs 1-5
on my computer, and finally getting around to using the bottle of hair dye I’d had under my sink since March. I took my hair from my natural dirty blond to a deep chocolate color and then stood staring at my reflection in my bathroom mirror in nothing but my towel. The new color brought out the brown in my hazel eyes instead of the green, which I liked because it was different from before. I tried to see myself as a stranger might, to find the things about my boyish face and skinny body that might make them think I was worth talking to. Pablo had once told me that my chest looked the way Jesus’ did in paintings, but he was drunk and stoned when he said it, and I don’t think it meant anything. I was stuck in this trance when my phone rang. Like magic, it was Pablo.

“Come over,” he said.

“I can’t,” I said. “I have stuff to do.”

“Like what?” he asked. “I know you don’t work today. I saw on the schedule that you have it off.”

“Why are you calling?” I asked.

“Come on,” he said. “Why you gotta be like this? You don’t have to complicate everything, Hamilton.”

I stood there trying to find a way to tell him that there was no way I was going over to his house, but I couldn’t. I wanted to go over there. I wondered if maybe he was right. Maybe I did complicate everything.

“What will we do if I come over?” I asked.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me.”

“Use your imagination.”

I thought for a moment. “Let me get dressed. I’ll be over soon.”

I kept my face buried in Pablo’s pillow the entire time. When it was over, he stood by the bed and frowned at me. “I think I liked you better blond.”

I wondered if he actually meant that or was just trying to make me feel bad. I got off the bed and crossed his basement bedroom to where I’d left my clothes in a pile on the floor. I dressed slowly, trying to ignore my wobbly knees and the hollow feeling in my stomach. His cell phone rang. He let out a wet cough and picked it up. I could tell by his answers that it was his girlfriend Judy.

“Whatever,” he said into the receiver as he picked at his chest hair. “Sure. . . . No. . . . No, I was just taking a nap. . . . Well, obviously. . . . Okay. Whatever.”

I’d just finished dressing when he hung up the phone.

“I have to go to this thing with Judy tonight,” he said.

“Jessica’s party?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, maybe I’ll see you there,” I said.

“You were invited?”

“I think so,” I said. “I mean, they put an invitation on the board at work. I assumed that meant anyone could come.”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t know if that actually means you’re invited. But whatever.”

“So I’ll see you there?”

“You may
see
me. But you know the rules.”

I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans. My mouth was dry and sticky. Pablo’s room was a mess. There were soda cans scattered around the room. Nearly every surface—the metal drafting table he used for a computer desk, the ledge under the picture window, the white wooden nightstand—was covered with a layer of dust. One of his favorite hobbies was using his mother’s credit card to buy designer jeans off the Internet, and now they formed a miniature denim mountain range that stretched from the foot of his bed to his closet door. He pulled a pair of yellow plaid boxers out of a pair of discarded jeans and slipped them on before doing a few pull-ups on the bar he’d put up across the doorframe of his closet. His back muscles surged under his skin as he rose and fell.

“Did you watch the news this morning?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

I sat at his computer and moved his mouse until the screen came to life. He had two windows open:
SportsZone.com
and some page that gave step-by-step instructions on how to make a bong out of an apple.

“They haven’t found that girl who disappeared, but they did find these awesome crop circles at some farm in the western part of the state,” he said. He did one last pull-up and then lowered himself to the floor. He flung himself back onto the bed. “People on the Internet are saying they’re related.”

“Like aliens?”

“Yeah, I guess. They’re theorizing that she was kidnapped by space aliens or some shit.” Pablo shook his head. “It’s probably just some redneck with too much time on his hands. Crop circles are so eighties.”

I considered telling him about the time I’d mowed circular shapes into my backyard when I was eleven. My father came home from work and yelled at me to get rid of them, that people in the air would think the farm was some occult compound.

“I think it’s great he’s expressing himself through these complex visual forms at such a young age,” my mother said. My father shook his head and went out to the garage and mowed the lawn himself in his suit.

I watched Pablo scratch his belly and examine his fingernails. The spicy smell of his mother’s cooking came drifting from upstairs, and right then I wanted nothing more than for him to look over at me with warmth in his eyes and ask me to stay for dinner. We hadn’t really talked about what was going to happen to us after the summer. I was going to Fairmont. He and Judy were both planning on going to the University of Western Iowa. We had once talked about visiting each other, but I got the feeling that all that was off now. Ever since the Bert episode in the lunchroom, things seemed redefined, plans had changed.

“Can I talk to you about something?” I asked.

“God,” he said. “What now?”

“I feel like we’re not friends anymore,” I said.

He screwed up his face like he didn’t know what I was talking about. “Why do you say that?”

“I mean, ever since graduation we just haven’t seen that much of each other.”

“Well, what’s so wrong with that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just not what I want.”

“You’re doing it again, Hamilton,” he said.

“Doing what?”

“Complicating things.”

“You keep saying that, but I don’t know what it means,” I said.

He let out a sigh. “It means that you need to stop asking so many questions. I mean, we’re different. I’m thinking about the future, dude, and there’s no place for this there.”

“So what does that mean?” I said. “Is that it? Do we never see each other again after we leave for school?”

“I just feel like if we take it any further, it will mean something that I don’t want it to mean.”

“And what’s that?”

He shot me a look. “Like what you want this to mean. Like when you said whatever about love. I want a normal life.”

He’d crushed me dozens of times before, but this time the pain felt new. It stunned me and sent a cold wave through my body. I told myself not to tear up, that crying wasn’t an option. For a long time we stayed like that, me at his desk and him on the bed, without speaking. Finally, he turned on his stereo and put on some hip-hop track that started out with a series of gunshots and a woman screaming.

Pretty soon his mother called us up from the top of the basement stairs in her thick accent. I silently followed him upstairs and took a seat at the kitchen table. It was just the three of us in their 1960s kitchen. Paisley wallpaper, sparkling Formica countertop, and sea green everything, even Mrs. Soto’s hospital scrubs. She gave me the same cautious smile as always. Pablo glanced over at me and gave me a look like he’d forgotten I was there.

“How are you, Dade?” Mrs. Soto asked.

“I’m fine,” I lied.

I was sitting in the spot where Mr. Soto had probably sat when he was still alive, back when this table was still in their old house in Arizona and before the illness that Pablo only spoke of in the most vague terms. Pablo and his mother started speaking to each other in Spanish. I filled myself with enchiladas and spaced out while they spoke, their unfamiliar language buzzing around my head like a swarm of tiny insects.

When I got home I found my mother on the living room sofa with a cigarette and a glass of red wine. She was wearing the red flannel nightgown she always wore when she was sick. The lights were off except for four candles on the coffee table arranged in a square around a giant bottle of wine. Chet Baker was coming from the walls, and under his voice the central air rumbled in the guts of the house. I watched her from the foyer, watched as she stared vacantly across the room, her lips moving slowly, and I knew that my father had told her.

“Come in here,” she said when she noticed me. I approached her slowly, putting my hands in my back pockets as I went. She leaned forward and looked up at me. “He said he told you.” A feeling of guilt came over me, cold and heavy like a bag of ice placed on my shoulders.

“Yeah,” I said. “He did.”

My words had made their sound and now I just wanted to walk away and pretend they weren’t mine, like they were pennies that had fallen through a hole in my pocket. She nodded to herself. She seemed strangely satisfied, like some old theory had finally been proven correct. Her face contorted into a sob, but in a flash it was gone, and though her lip still quivered, there was a disturbing calm to her face, like she had just made some vow to never be sad again.

She said, “Dade, I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me.”

“Mom,” I said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t exactly want this information.”

“Then give it away.” She huffed out a sarcastic laugh. “Give it to me, for God’s sake. You kept this from me for days, and you would have kept it from me forever had I not just asked you whether or not you knew.”

Something in her face made me wonder if she’d known for a while—if she was psychic and her mind was tattooed with things I didn’t want her to know about me.

“Your father didn’t carry you in his womb for nine months,” she went on. “I did. Your loyalties ought to lie with
me
.”

“But Mom—”

“Don’t ‘but Mom’ me,” she said. She was staring at the candles, putting herself somewhere else. “Go away. Go to your room.” I went upstairs and left her alone. I didn’t want to stay at the house with things the way they were, but I had a feeling that the party wouldn’t be much better. Pablo would be there with Judy, and none of the jocks would talk to me. I’d just move from room to room like a ghost, the way I did at every party. Sure, a few random people might say hey when they passed me by, but no one would stop to talk to me. I’d basically be scenery.