The Bright Forever Page 3

  That’s what Mr. Dees explained when Ray asked him for the story. He said it the way he always said something when he was trying to be encouraging—in a voice that was just a little sad, but also kind, the voice he used with his students, the one that said, I’m disappointed in you, but don’t worry. I know you’ll do better.

  He and Ray were in Mr. Dees’s garage. A strong wind had toppled one of the purple martin houses that Mr. Dees, a few years back, had paid a carpenter to build, and Ray was repairing it. He had brought down his miter saw and cut a new piece of wood to replace the side of the martin house that had splintered, and now he was tacking it into place.

  “I just want to be a help,” he said.

  “I know you do,” Mr. Dees told him.

  “You didn’t seem to mind when I showed you how to patch that concrete.”

  “Me?” Mr. Dees swallowed hard. He looked away, out the garage window to where the surprise lilies—the naked ladies—were just sending up their long, leafless stalks. He was embarrassed to say what he had been about to, that he had no friends, that he was thankful for Ray’s company. “My house is old,” he said instead. He cleared his throat. “All these houses in Gooseneck are old.”

  Ray laid his hammer down on the workbench. He ran his fingers over the bare wood. “You call me when you got something needs getting done.” He kept his head down, and it touched Mr. Dees to hear his shy voice. “Any time. I mean it. Don’t be afraid. You come get me.”

  So that was how their friendship began, with this moment in the garage when they both admitted, without saying as much, that they were less than satisfied with the way their lives had turned out. They never said the words. They never said “lonely.” They never said “afraid.” They never spoke of yearning or the wrong turns they’d taken over the years and the hard places they’d come to, but it was all plain in what they did say, which was, Mr. Dees knew, as much as they could risk because they were just starting to know each other and how much could anyone stand to feel pulsing in another person’s heart?

  He painted the new wood on the martin house, and when it was dry, he asked Raymond R. if he would be willing—that is, if he had the time—to help set the house back atop its pole.

  They did the chore one evening at twilight when lights were coming on in houses up and down Gooseneck. Somewhere behind Mr. Dees’s bungalow, where fields stretched back to wetlands, spring peepers sang. The wind was from the north, and it brought the scents of freshly plowed earth and wild onions growing in the fencerows. Martins swooped down from the darkening sky, some of them coming to roost in the row of houses, each of them with eight compartments—four over four.

  “They like close quarters, don’t they?” Ray said.

  “They don’t shy away from one another,” Mr. Dees told him. “And they like to be near where people are living. It makes them feel safe. In fact, they’ll only nest in these houses that people put up.”

  “Well, then,” Ray said. “I guess we better put this one back up.”

  They set twelve-foot stepladders next to each other and together, Mr. Dees to the right and Ray to the left, they carried the martin house to the point where they could set it on its pole. The wooden ladders creaked with their weight, the legs wobbling just a bit, sinking some in the damp grass. Mr. Dees steadied the house while Ray anchored it to its shelf with wood screws.

  “There,” he said when he was finished. “Good as new.”

  “That’s a good job,” Mr. Dees said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Ray. “That’s all right.”

  Then they reached across the space between the ladders and shook hands.

  It was then that an almost imperceptible shadow passed over them, just the slightest alteration in the dimming light, and Mr. Dees let his eyes follow that shadow to the catalpa tree along the side of his garage. He saw it then, the Cooper’s hawk—he saw its white undertails and its white breast stained with thin red lines—and he knew that the hawk had come to ambush the martins.

  It happened from time to time. A Cooper’s hawk or a sharpie hid in the catalpa tree early in the morning or, like now, when dusk was falling and the martins were flying into their nests. Some mornings, Mr. Dees came out to the houses and found a scatter of black feathers, iridescent with purple, lying on the ground. The martins were so confident about their aerial skills that they thought they could always escape danger, and sometimes that faith cost them. They were ferocious at high altitudes. There they mobbed any hawk that swooped down on them. They called a loud, raspy accck as they dived on the hawk, coming within inches but not striking it, relying on their number and their noise to drive it away. But now, as they came to roost, they were stupid, blind to the Cooper’s hawk, who waited for his chance.

  Mr. Dees wouldn’t come down from his ladder, not even after Ray had let go of his hand and said, “Almost dark, Teach.”

  “Over there.” Mr. Dees pointed. “In that catalpa tree. A Cooper’s hawk.”

  A martin gliding down to roost suddenly streaked upward. It shrieked an alarm call. The Cooper’s hawk, its wings popping, burst from the tree, but it was too late. The martin was still rising, gone. Other martins dived at the hawk. Their mob calls filled the air.

  Mr. Dees was shouting, but only later would he understand that he had done this. He was waving his arms. “You, you, you.” He clapped his hands together. “You, shoo.”

  Finally, the hawk rose higher and banked off toward the woodlands. The martins swirled in a black mass, their calls gradually fading.

  Mr. Dees realized then that Ray’s hand was gripping his bicep. He felt the ladder wobble. “Easy, Teach. Easy.” Ray’s voice was steady. “I’ve got you. Don’t worry. I won’t let you fall.”

  It embarrassed Mr. Dees for Ray to see the secret he kept: how much the martins mattered to him. He couldn’t begin to say what it did to him mornings when he heard their song. The first time, each spring, it was always a lone male, a scout, gliding and swooping through the sky, which was just beginning to brighten. He warbled and chittered, high above the martin houses that Mr. Dees had made ready. This was the dawnsong, the one that touched him the most—a sign of spring, a call to other martins that here, here, here was home.

  He couldn’t tell Ray that. He couldn’t call it what it was, love. But, and this was what amazed him, Ray knew it without anything having to be said, and, what’s more, he understood.

  “I hear those martins singing,” he said, “and I think, It’s not so bad, this world. It’s not so bad as we’d have it. No, sir. Not at all.”

  CLARE LIKED to wake early and listen to the martins singing. Such a happy, bubbling sound, the song of babies babbling and cooing. She liked to lie in bed, close to Ray, and think how lucky she was. Spring had come, and the martins were singing, and she was in love. Who would have thought it, particularly back in January when Bill had died and left her alone? But here she was, almost sixty years old, with another chance at happiness, and who cared what the neighbors thought? Her life was hers, and if someone didn’t like the fact that she had set up house with Raymond Royal Wright, then they could lump it.

  He wasn’t particularly handsome. Clare could say that without feeling ashamed; it was as much a fact as her own plain looks. He was a stocky man with a round, sunburned face, and his red hair had already thinned. Because he knew he wasn’t, in his own words, “easy on the peepers,” he tried hard to make up for it by being friendly.

  One evening—Ray had gone down the road to help Mr. Dees with his birdhouse—Clare looked out the front window and saw Thelma and Tubby Carl coming out of Lottie and Leo Marks’s house across the street. Thelma was carrying an empty pie tin. Tubby was smoking his pipe. Lottie and Leo stepped out onto their porch, Lottie with her hair curled and piled up on top of her head, Leo still holding a hand of playing cards. Clare knew they’d all been playing euchre or pinochle. They’d been cracking jokes. Even now they were laughing. Tubby had to take his pipe away from his mouth, he was laughing so hard, and
Lottie’s elaborate hairdo was wobbling. “Now, that’s rich.” Thelma beat the pie tin against her leg. “Did you hear that, Tubby? My God.”

  It hadn’t been so long ago that Clare and Bill had been a part of their neighbors’ card games and ice cream suppers, but after Bill died, Clare knew that what she had long suspected was indeed true. It had always been Bill’s company that people like Thelma and Tubby, Lottie and Leo had valued, not hers. Before he got sick, Bill had an easy way about him. He liked good food and good jokes. He had a tattoo of a mermaid on his right bicep, and often when they were over at a neighbor’s house, he rolled up his shirtsleeve, flexed his muscle, and made that mermaid wiggle and dance. “That’s Clare, dancing the hootchy-kootchy,” he said, and it made her face burn when everyone laughed as if they thought dancing the hootchy-kootchy was the last thing in the world skinny old plain-faced Clare would do. There she was, her chest caved in, her shoulders slumped, and there was the mermaid, all breasts and hips, all curves and long, flowing hair. When Clare heard everyone hoot and laugh, she wanted to go home and never come back. “Honestly,” she told Bill one night. “I wish I never had to set foot in those people’s houses again.”

  Now she had her wish. For a while after Bill died, neighbors like Thelma and Lottie stopped in to bring her a recipe from the Evening Register or to ask her if she’d like to come along to a Rebekkahs lodge meeting or to the Top Hat Inn for a bottle of beer and some songs on the jukebox, but she was shy without Bill to ease the way for her, and more often than not she said she had sewing to do or a TV program she wanted to watch, and then she took up with Ray, and soon the invitations stopped.

  She was thinking about the purple martins that evening and how they came each spring to Mr. Dees’s apartment houses as she watched the Carls and the Markses and listened to their cackles and guffaws. “Oh, God,” Thelma kept saying. “Oh, God. Stop, stop. You’ll make me pee my pants.” Folks needed to be together. As much as she hated hearing Thelma—as much as she hated seeing her and Lottie and Tubby and Leo having so much fun—she also longed to be a part of it the way she did when she was a schoolgirl and harbored secret crushes on the girls with bright, pretty faces. She loved the way they called to one another in the hallways, their voices gay and confident: “Hey, Flo. Hey, Teep. What’s the dope?” She knew she would never be one of those girls. She was too timid, too ordinary. But that didn’t stop her from wanting their company.

  Ray came down the road carrying his stepladder. Clare heard the ladder, toted at his side, dragging now and then over the macadam road. She felt the weight of the ladder in her own arms and how difficult it would be, if someone was bone tired, to keep it balanced so the tip of a leg wouldn’t dip and scrape. She knew Ray was worn out. He’d come home that evening and said, “I’m give in.” He was working concrete on a new hospital construction in Jasper. Some days, after work, he drove over to Patoka Lake and fished for bluegill, but on this night he had come straight home—“all used up,” he’d said, “and no place to throw me away.”

  When Mr. Dees came to ask him to help with the birdhouse, Clare tried to convince Ray to let it go for another time when he wasn’t so tired—“You take it easy, hon,” she told him—but he said he didn’t reckon it’d kill him to do Mr. Dees a good turn. “I can’t help but feel sorry for him,” he said, keeping his voice low so Mr. Dees, who waited in the yard, wouldn’t hear. “He’s all alone. He can use a friend.”

  Now Ray was coming home, and as he got closer, the laughter that had been coming from Lottie and Leo Marks’s front porch went dead, and then the noise of the ladder dragging was a miserable thing to hear. Clare’s hand moved to her throat, her fingers feeling the flutter of pulse there. She hadn’t thought to make this motion, but an overwhelming ache had surprised her, a sadness and longing that rose from her chest and filled her throat. She opened the door and stepped out into the night. She went hurrying up the road to meet Ray, not caring that Lottie and Leo and Thelma and Tubby were watching.

  “Darlin’,” Ray said with a sigh.

  She didn’t say a word. She just touched her fingers to his face. He took her hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it. Then she picked up the end of that ladder, and together they carried it home.

  Mr. Dees saw it all from where he was still standing by the martin houses. It was nearly dark, but he could see Ray struggling with the ladder. Then he heard the scraping stop, and the faraway sound of those people laughing stop, and there was enough light for him to make out Clare’s slight figure coming up the road. He looked away. It wasn’t his to see. A woman coming out to meet the man who loved her. It wasn’t anything he knew. He knew instead the steps of children coming to their dining room tables for their lessons and the shy way they hesitated at their first meetings, their hair brushed and shining, their faces scrubbed and smelling of soap. “I’m Mister Dees,” he told them. He held out his hand and waited until they touched their warm palms to his. “Good,” he said. “Now we can begin.”

  CLARE’S FRONT DOOR opened right out into the yard, without even a single concrete step. That wasn’t right, Ray said that night after he stowed the stepladder in the tool shed. That wasn’t any way for someone to have to walk into a house. He’d build a porch, he told her, build it out of cement blocks, and then when he was done he’d build a garage out back. Make it big enough so he could have a workshop. Once he got going, why stop?

  “A porch?” Clare said. “And a garage? Goodness, won’t we be moving up in the world!”

  Maybe, she thought, Ray wanted the porch and the garage because he intended to do something to the house to make it his, make it seem as if he had always lived in it with her. Maybe he wanted her to forget what it had felt like to live there with Bill. Ray, after all, was a man who had never been married. He’d had his fill, he told her, of bouncing around the country bird-dogging construction jobs, living in motor courts and trailer parks, taking his meals out or cooking on a hot plate. He wanted to make a home with her, wanted to stay in it through the winter instead of loading up and heading south, as had always been his habit. He was working on that hospital in Jasper, a job that would last the summer. He’d save his money, he told her. Then, when winter came and the work dried up, they’d be all right.

  She wanted to trust in that. “My folks had a porch on their house,” she told him. “They’d sit out on it after supper, and neighbors would stop by just to shoot the breeze. We’d have iced tea, and sometimes we’d have pie.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Darlin’, that’s the way it should be.”

  If they had a porch, he explained, and they were out there night after night, neighbors like Lottie and Leo Marks—sure, he’d seen them out there with Thelma and Tubby Carl, had taken note of how they all shut their yaps when they saw him coming up the road—wouldn’t be able to ignore them. Sooner or later, some of them would feel ashamed and they’d come over to say howdy-do. Then they’d find out how friendly he could be, and they’d be happy for Clare and life would get back to normal.

  She imagined that he was eager to lay claim to a home, even that square frame house with its ugly brown asphalt shingle siding.

  So the idea was to build a porch and then, little by little, win the neighbors over. They’d have the life he’d always dreamed of: a wife and a home and friends to fill it. “I’ve never had that,” he told Clare. He said it with a quiet simplicity—merely stating the fact—and it broke her heart to know that it was so.

  One evening in June, he came home when it was well past dark. Clare was outside taking clothes off the line. Earlier, she had walked home from Brookstone Manor, the nursing home where she worked—sometimes in the laundry, sometimes in housecleaning, and sometimes in the kitchen. She had scrubbed out her white uniform dress, her cook’s apron, and three of the sleeveless T-shirts that Ray wore and had hung them to dry. Now she was taking down the clothes, folding them, and laying them in her laundry basket. Around her, faint voices drifted out through her neighbors’ open windows, an
d from time to time a murmur of laughter rose up from a television program. A screen door’s spring creaked. An oscillating fan whirred. She had left the clothes out as long as she could so she wouldn’t have to stand in the light and have her neighbors pass by, talking in low voices—harping, so she would believe, about her and Ray and what a fool she was to take up with the likes of him. Soon the dew would start falling; already the air smelled of it, cool and damp, and she was hurrying to gather the clothes.

  Ray drove his pickup into the yard. The tailpipe scraped over the gravel driveway. That’s how low the rear end was riding. The headlight beams came to rest on her, and she shielded her eyes with her hand.

  He cut off the engine. The truck backfired once and then was still. He opened the door, the hinges squealing, and the dome light’s glow fell over him. He bent forward and touched his forehead to the steering wheel. Then he pulled his shoulders back, lifted his head, and ran a hand over his face, starting with his brow and then wiping straight down, over his eyes, nose, mouth, and chin.

  Clare came across the yard and rested her clothes basket on the truck’s fender. It was a 1958 Ford that he’d bought for a song from an excavating company, and instead of leaving TRI-STATE BACKHOE on the green doors, he’d painted a large black circle over each one. “Now that’s sporty,” he told Clare. Then, in the middle of each black circle, with white paint, he stenciled the truck’s empty weight and the name of the city and state.

  EW: 3900

  Tower Hill, Ind.

  Just below the windows, he painted his name in a small, elegant script: R. R. WRIGHT. “Raymond Royal Wright,” he said when he finished. “Now folks know who they’re dealing with.”