The Bright Forever Page 4

  Generally, he kept some tools and his fishing gear in the bed of the truck, but tonight the tools and the tackle were in the cab because the truck was loaded down with cement blocks—a gray-faced wall of them, squared and neat against the sideboards. Clare balanced the clothes basket against her hip, reached out her free hand, and laid it flat against the cement, which was rough and cool.

  “You had me worried, Ray.” She pulled her hand back from the blocks. “It got dark, and I kept thinking something had happened to you. Did you pass out again? Did you get sick from the sun?”

  He had always been sensitive to the sun. From time to time on the job, the heat got to him and he keeled over. The men humped him down from the scaffold and laid him in the shade. They threw water in his face, took off their shirts and fanned him. Sometimes he pissed himself, and, of course, after he had his senses back they gave him a hard time, and he couldn’t help but hate them. He sat in the shade with a cold drink, and sometimes he had to turn his head and gag up what was in his stomach, and he hated the men even more because they were out there in the sun, some of them bare-chested, calling out to one another. Hot enough for you? Jesus, yes. Hot. Damn straight, it’s hot. Hotter than a firecracker. Hotter than a billy goat in a pepper patch. Hotter than a naked dog in hell.

  “No, I didn’t get sick.” He slammed the truck’s door, and his voice was sharp. For a good while, he didn’t say anything, and when he finally spoke it was with a gentle tone. “I didn’t get sick, darlin’. I had to wait for dark to load up these blocks. You should see the stack we’ve got up there at that hospital site. I just took a few. Not enough for anyone to miss.”

  From time to time, Clare caught a glimpse of his temper, but it wasn’t anything that worried her. It was what she knew from men—their clenched jaw muscles, their bunched brows, their narrowed eyes. She knew the heat in their voices, their bluster. They were all little boys who’d never been loved enough, and now their big bodies couldn’t hold all the hurt they carried. Sometimes, when Ray was sleeping, she ran her finger lightly over his scars—the ridge low on his belly where the doctors had opened him to operate for rupture, the small white line at the corner of his lip where a knife had cut him, the mark on his ankle where doctors had set the fractured bone with a steel pin—and she loved him for all he wouldn’t tell her, all the stories behind those scars. She loved him for thinking he had to keep all that to himself.

  “Ray,” she said now. “You hadn’t ought to have taken these blocks. What if someone finds out?”

  “Ah, darlin’.” He put his arm across her back and gave her a squeeze. “Don’t you know I’m a lucky man?”

  She thought of his scarred body. “Not that lucky.”

  “Why, sure I am. I got you, didn’t I?”

  “You’re a nut. Sometimes I think you’re off your rocker.”

  “Oh, I’m crazy all right. Crazy in love.”

  “Well, if you’re crazy, I guess I am, too.”

  “That’s right. You and me. We’re head over heels. Tell me. Has any man ever treated you better?”

  “No,” she said. “Never.”

  Later, while she was sleeping, she woke to the sound of Ray moving through the house. At first she was confused. She thought she was still married to Bill. Then, when she had everything straight in her head, shame washed over her because she had denied her first husband when she had told Ray that no man had ever been as good to her as he had. But it was true, wasn’t it? She lay in bed, listening to him opening cabinets, and she knew it was impossible to say what was between people, and the longer you were with someone, the harder it was to even come close. All she knew was that once she had been with Bill and now she was with Ray. She had come out of her old life and into a new one, and even if she wished for it, which she didn’t—not really, she didn’t, not in her heart of hearts—she couldn’t go back.

  “Ray?” she called to him. “Hon, are you hungry?”

  She heard the refrigerator door open, heard the jangling of bottles. She called his name again, and when he didn’t answer, she swung her legs over the side of the bed, got up, and walked out into the kitchen.

  He was at the sink, pouring milk into a glass. He hadn’t turned on a light, and because it was the night of the new moon—June 11—the kitchen was so dark that Clare wouldn’t have been sure that it was Ray, that he was pouring milk, if not for the fact that he was whistling what had become his favorite song that summer, “Candy Man” (“Who can take a sunrise / Sprinkle it with dew?”), and she could smell the wax-coated milk carton.

  She asked him what he was doing, and he told her, in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice, that he was going to have a glass of milky-wilky. She thought he was making a joke, and she laughed, but he didn’t laugh along with her or say anything else.

  “How can you see?” she asked. “You’ll pour too much and make a mess.”

  No, he wouldn’t make a mess, he said. He’d be just fine. He’d be scrumdiddlyumptious.

  She’d never heard him use a silly word like that or speak with that sort of giggle leaping into his voice, the way it must have when he was a child.

  No, Papa, he said. Not a mess. He’d be careful. He’d be a good boy.

  “Ray,” she said. “What’s wrong? You’re talking out of your head.”

  He was drinking now. She heard him gulping down the milk. She felt along the wall for the light switch, and when she turned it on and the harsh glare filled the kitchen, Ray set the glass on the counter and turned to look at her. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t focusing on anything. She could tell that. He was asleep.

  She didn’t want to startle him. “Was it good?” She kept her voice even. “The milky-wilky?” It made her feel silly to say the word, but close to Ray, too, as if they shared a private language. “Did you like it?”

  Yes, he told her. It was good.

  “Are you ready to go back to bed?”

  He shook his head. No, he was afraid.

  “You don’t have to be afraid. I’m here. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

  Mom? he said.

  “No, hon. I’m Clare. Here, give me your hand.”

  She tried to take his hand, but he wouldn’t let her. He tossed his arms about as if he were trying to fight his way out of something. Goddamn it, he said. Goddamn.

  “Shh, Ray. Shh.”

  She moved closer. His flailing arm knocked against her face. His knuckles caught her mouth. She felt blood come to her lip, heard herself whimper.

  Ray went down on his knees. He went down, and he pulled his fists in close to his chest. He bowed his head, and his torso rocked back and forth. Clare knew he hadn’t meant to hurt her. He had come up from a dream and carried it with him. He was caught in some twilight, part of him awake and part of him asleep. She got down on her knees and covered his fists with her hands. When he finally raised his head, his eyes opened wide, and she could tell that he saw her, understood who she was. She felt overwhelmed with love because he was back now. He was Ray, her Ray.

  “Darlin’.” He lifted up the hem of his T-shirt and gently dabbed at the bloody corner of her lip. “Clare?” he said, and she started to explain.

  WELL, JESUS. Good Christ. He didn’t know what to say. “You ought to shoot me,” he told her. They were in the bathroom, where she was washing blood from her face. “Jesus Christ in a basket.”

  “You were asleep, Ray.” She leaned over the sink, looking at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror. Her upper lip was red and puffy. “You didn’t mean to hit me. I know that. You must have been having a bad dream.”

  In the mirror, she could see him behind her, sitting on the edge of the tub. He was looking down at the floor, and he shook his head. “I don’t remember,” he said. “Honest to God, Clare. I don’t remember a thing.”

  They went back to bed, and he held her. “Go to sleep, hon,” she told him. Soon the martins would start singing, the sky would light up, and then it would be time for them both to get ready f
or work. “You need your rest.”

  “I’m going to be better, Clare.” She could feel him trembling. “I’m going to stop.”

  She was nodding off to sleep, and she didn’t have the energy to ask him what he meant. She figured he was talking about the beer. Sometimes he drank more than he should, but that was one of the other things that she knew about men: from time to time, the world got too big for them, and they had to find a way to try to match it. Besides, he wasn’t a mean drunk. He got sad instead, and sometimes he told her stories about hurtful things he’d carried with him since he was a boy in Minnesota.

  The story she always remembered was the one about how his parents couldn’t afford for him to buy a hot lunch at school, so his mother packed him a sack lunch each day, always a fried-egg sandwich, nothing more. He and the other kids who couldn’t buy a lunch had to sit at a folding table in the dark hallway just outside the cafeteria. He sat under the dim light of a twenty-five-watt bulb hanging from a rusty steam pipe. Sometimes water dripped down onto his head. He sat there and listened to the children chattering and laughing inside the cafeteria, the slap of trays on the tables, the jangle of silverware. He smelled the hot food: the hamburgs, the chicken and noodles, the Hungarian goulash, the vegetable soup. The kids who came from the cafeteria carried the aromas on their clothes, their skin. Ray smelled them when he walked down the hallway and when he sat in his classroom, breathing in the lingering spice and broth of hot food.

  Clare had been a young woman during the Depression. She had eaten lard sandwiches, groundhog, and possum, and picked wild mustard and sour dock and boiled the leaves with soup beans. She knew what it meant to be hungry, and that was what Ray was, he told her. Starved. Whenever he drank too much beer and got all down in the mouth, or brought home a truckload of stolen blocks, she always thought of that little boy sitting under the steam pipe, water dripping on his head, so close to all that hot food that would never be his, and she forgave him for having such an emptiness and all the ways he tried to fill it. If that was the worst thing there was about him, this gluttony, she wouldn’t complain about a Saturday-night drunk now and then. She’d drive down to the jail and bring him home. She’d listen to his sad stories. She’d put him to bed and lie beside him, as she was now, until he was quiet and they both could sleep.

  MR. DEES was awake long before the martins began to sing. He often rose before dawn and prepared his breakfast—eggs (scrambled), potatoes (fried), sausage patties (also fried), wheat toast (with butter), coffee (black), orange juice (fresh squeezed), and, if he was feeling particularly peckish, a waffle (with butter and chocolate syrup). He was, to his own delight, a hearty eater. He took great pleasure in this secret that he had; he was a chowhound. It thrilled him to know that none of his neighbors—and certainly none of his pupils or their parents—suspected that he could eat like a thresher, and despite his appetite he stayed thin. His mother had always been thin. His father, too. All their lives. Nothing went to fat.

  This morning, as he raked the eggs out onto his plate, lifted the sausage from the cooking grease, he couldn’t help but chuckle, certain that his neighbors, if any of them happened to see the small rectangle of light through his kitchen window, would imagine that he was sitting down to a bowl of bran flakes, a piece of dry toast, a cup of tea. Poor Mister Dees, they would mutter. What sort of life?

  But probably—and this thought sobered him—they didn’t think of him at all. He was easy to forget until the time came that little Johnny and little Sally needed help with their numbers. Sure, folks knew who he was then, and how to find him, but without that place in their lives, he knew he would be one of those people, never married, who would show up in an obituary one day, and folks would say, Oh, yes. Henry Dees.

  He played records while he ate. He had a portable phonograph, and he could put on a stack of 45s, the ones he drove to Bloomington to buy instead of walking into the Record Bin uptown and having the word get out that he was buying the same junk the kids were buying—some lovesick ballad by Donny Osmond, Bread, the Carpenters, or one of those Christian rock songs like “Put Your Hand in the Hand” or “My Sweet Lord,” or worse yet those novelty records like “Chick-a-Boom,” “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” or “Yo-Yo.” What would his neighbors think, he wondered, if they were to see him wolfing down eggs and sausage, stopping now and then to sing along, closing his eyes and crooning the words to “Baby I’m-A Want You,” or “Sweet and Innocent,” or “We’ve Only Just Begun”? Well, that was his secret, and he liked having secrets. It made him feel that he had one up on the people who thought they knew exactly who he was when really they didn’t know anything at all.

  No one knew about his appetite or the records, and no one knew that on certain evenings that summer he walked across town to the Heights, and there, from an alley that ran behind the Mackeys’ house, he waited, hidden in darkness. Some nights, he saw the boy, Gilley, standing on the patio, lit by Chinese lanterns, practicing his golf swing, or Mr. Mackey dousing the coals on the barbecue, or Mrs. Mackey arranging freshly cut roses in a vase. Sooner or later, if luck would have it, he’d catch a glimpse of Katie. Maybe she’d come running across the lawn, trying to catch fireflies in a jar, and he’d hear her bare feet padding over the grass and her breath coming fast. Or she’d dance around on the patio, singing “Chick-a-Boom” in a loud voice. Or she’d sit quietly on a chaise longue, letting her mother braid her hair before sending her inside to take her bath and get ready for bed.

  Some nights, Mr. Mackey said, “Well, how about it?” And that was enough to start everyone gabbing, calling out, all at once, the Dairy Queen ice cream treats they favored on that particular evening. A Peanut Buster Parfait for Gilley. A Mister Misty for Mrs. Mackey.

  “A butterscotch Dilly Bar,” Katie said one evening, “and a Hot Fudge Brownie Delight.”

  Mr. Mackey laughed. “You’ll bust, Katie Delicious. You’ll absolutely bust.”

  Once they were gone—loaded into the family car and off to the Dairy Queen—Mr. Dees walked across the grass to the patio. The golf club’s grip was still warm from Gilley’s hands; heat still lingered around the barbecue. The air smelled of its charcoal and the roses—ah, the freshly cut roses—red and pink, that Mrs. Mackey had left in the vase.

  Mr. Dees tore a single petal from the bouquet and slipped it into his shirt pocket so later he could enjoy its scent and its sleek velvet. Katie’s hairbrush was on the table. It was a Sleeping Beauty brush, and there was a nest of brown hair in its bristles. He took just a bit, no bigger than a cotton ball, but it was enough. He took it home, and before he went to sleep he raised it to his face and rubbed it across his cheek, and that was something else that no one knew.

  The martins were singing by the time Mr. Dees finished his breakfast, and he turned off the phonograph so he could listen. It was then, in the presence of the martins’ dawnsong—this call to the new day—that he felt ashamed. He was a glutton and a voyeur, and he wished with all his might that there were people in his life who could keep him from loving the world so much while at the same time feeling so far away from it. How would he ever explain this to the Mackeys if they happened to find out that he watched them, that he handled the things they touched, took a single rose petal, a fluff of hair? How would he say that he loved them?

  He was thinking all this when he heard the shotgun blast. It rattled the coffee cup on its saucer, and the martins rose up from their houses, blackening the sky.

  Mr. Dees ran outside, and there he saw Raymond R. coming around the corner of the garage, a single-barrel shotgun open and cradled in the crook of his right arm. The air was singed with cordite. In his left hand, he carried the Cooper’s hawk. He carried it by its legs so that its wings, no life left to hold them folded, fanned open, and the hawk’s head jounced against Raymond R.’s knee.

  He tossed the hawk onto the dew-slicked grass at Mr. Dees’s feet. “Teach,” he said. “There’s your hawk.” He loaded another shell into the chamber an
d snapped the shotgun shut.

  LATER THAT morning at the Mackeys’, Mr. Dees couldn’t forget the hawk or the way Raymond R. had asked him straight-out for money.

  “I’m not a rich man,” he’d said. “I got debts. I got to look after Clare. You . . . well, I figure you might have some money put back.”

  The truth was that Mr. Dees did have a few certificates of deposit at the savings and loan. They didn’t add up to an extravagant sum—just enough for a rainy day.

  “I patched those steps for you, Teach.” Raymond R. gave him a grin. “I helped you with that birdhouse. I was wore out that night, brother. Bone tired.”

  The sun was up on the horizon now, red and fiery. It would be a hot day with locusts chirring and the air heavy and still. Mr. Dees felt the weight of all that heat, all that humid air. Raymond R. was right: He had done those repairs and never asked for a dime. He had treated Mr. Dees kindly and with respect.

  “How much do you need?” Mr. Dees’s voice sounded strange to him, as if it came from someone else. He knew business transactions—his services exchanged for whatever sum parents could pay, for nothing if that turned out to be the case. He didn’t strike such agreements to be charitable, as everyone assumed, but because he was selfish, because he would have paid for the pleasure of walking into people’s homes, sitting in their rooms, taking note, as he did when he watched the Mackeys, of everything in their lives. It embarrassed him to talk about need, especially with Raymond R., who knew too much about his own want. “A hundred?” Mr. Dees said.

  “A thousand,” Raymond R. told him. “Two if you’ve got it. I told you, Teach. I got debts.”

  Once at an assembly in high school, a physics teacher asked Mr. Dees to come up onstage and turn a gyroscope. Mr. Dees was no dope; he knew he was going to be the butt of the joke, but he went anyway, aware that when he tried to turn the gyroscope, it would keep spinning, resisting all his efforts. He could have told all those guffawing boneheads in the auditorium that a spinning object like the gyroscope resists changes to its axis of rotation because an applied force moves along with the object itself. The axis would always be perpendicular to the spinning object as long as it kept spinning fast enough. When he stood on that stage and tried to turn the gyroscope, he applied force to both the top and the bottom. The force balanced out, and the gyroscope kept spinning on its axis, no matter how hard he tried to turn it. He could have cited Newton’s first law of motion, as he often did to his pupils when explaining the way yo-yos worked: “A body in motion continues to move at a constant speed along a straight line unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” But he played along that day on the stage. He gave the physics teacher exactly what he wanted—a stooge—just as he would be willing, most of his life, to do his best to deliver when someone asked him for a favor.