Big Bend Page 8

  “She was a great beauty,” I say.

  “No one is that great a beauty.”

  “I brought a little something,” I say. And present the pink shopping bag from the Sunshine Daydream store in the Escondito Mall. Ceremoniously, 1 pull out the bong. There’s no weed to go with it, of course, though Dr. Smolkins says there’s no defect that would prevent our man from living a normal life. He might possibly go home as soon as Tuesday, if the last test comes out as the good doctor predicts. But home is where the heart is, and Stevie’s heart is with me for the moment. Or me at age twenty, at any rate.

  “And my daughter, shit, my daughter, Bob. She is—hot! My God. She must have friends, right? I mean, I can’t touch her, right? Even though I don’t know her?”

  His daughter is pretty, all right, pierced belly button and tall heels. I’ve only glimpsed her, older high-school girl. We must forgive him. Stephen is to relearn not only his life, but years of gained maturity. That’s the plan. He’s to go in there and play the role till he grows back into it. Twenty-five years he’ll have to age. Aeronautical engineering he’ll have to restudy, though Smolkins says it may all come back at any time. And he’ll have to walk a little better, too. His legs are weak for no reason Smolkins can figure, but I know what it is: twin fractured femurs. Our boy Stevie hobbled around for months after, limped for years. I recognize the hobble, I tell Smolkins, but Smolkins has got his cues from Janet, and just closes his ears to me, shakes his head.

  Japonica’s call was a sudden rip in the healing fabric of my life. Not a word from her in twenty years, not a word from Stephen for seventeen (and that word a Christmas card picturing their new daughter). I stayed big as I could, called a lot and wrote and later faxed and later still e-mailed, and even in mourning begged a little: just a word, just a nod. I even told them as I grew older and more able to confess my feelings that I was hurt. And further, apologized for anything I might have done. But nothing.

  In fact, this tough and wily Washington lobbyist, myself, began to weep the second Japonica said her name. I wept and moaned and carried on, all my losses mounting.

  She said, “Stephen is asking for you.”

  Stevie-boy rolls the bong in his hands critically, a budding engineer, not even a B.A. left in his head: “This is drilled all wrong, the carburetor invection is reversed.” And inspects it some more, suddenly agitated. He looks at me in undisguised undergraduate panic: “Bobbo, you got to get me out of here. These people are fucked. That woman? I don’t want to live with her!”

  That’s it. I go down to the nurses’ pod and greet Marylou, who is sexy indeed and moreover seems to like me. “A wheelchair?” I ask, casually. “Stephen wants a little walk.”

  “Oh! Wonderful!” says Marylou. My God, she’s cheerful.

  She goes to the storage podlet and locates us a fine little chariot. I decline her help and roll the thing down to the space named Santa Cruz. Stephen giggles when he sees me, hobbles across the room despite healthy legs, falls into the chair in a way I recall exactly, accepts the blanket across his lap, and we are off, brothers in crime. I wheel him clear to the back of the property, where there’s a redwood fence of some quality. I simply and would like to say deftly kick a few boards out and crawl through and I’m in the parking lot I’ve been towed from twice now. Steve crawls through, too, with difficulty, as if his perfectly good, middle-aged legs are broken, then I fold the chair and pull it through. I set the fence boards more or less back in place, no one to see us, and then I wheel my best and oldest friend down the hill to my red rental car, an upgrade, still small.

  And we’re off, laughing and singing, trading insults, rock and roll radio, waving at girls too young by miles, stopping off for beer. My I.D. is fine, I tell Stephen, it’s just fucking fine. And we laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh until the old man comes out of the store to see what’s funny, and we’re laughing so jollily, he laughs, too. We speed down to Muir Beach, an old haunt that Stevie cannot remember, and wheel that deluxe pod chair out on the sand and sit there in the sun drinking beers and laughing more, and harder. He’s twenty and I’m twenty and he’s just defied the gods and lived through the worst climbing accident his doctors have ever seen or heard of. We’re good students at a great American university, and we’re alive, alive, alive. And the world, weirdly, has changed little at all. Stevie punches my shoulder and I punch his and we swim naked as seals and he hobbles up onto the beach as if his legs are fresh out of casts and hot girls walking by check us out because we are twenty and we are full of the universe and roaring with fun and we are beautiful, full of possibility.

  When the massive cerebral hemorrhage kills him he has just punched my shoulder again, and called me Bobbo, and the waves are rolling in, and Japonica may forgive me yet, as Smolkins does, based on that last test he did: Stevie’s brain was a time bomb, it was. And I, well, I just count myself lucky to have been back in his heart when the big bang came, and to know there are more hearts to win.

  Fredonia

  George Skinner drives to Michigan every six weeks for the store, and every six weeks he drives right past Fredonia, New York, where his sister lives with her husband Kevin. He doesn’t stop. Every six weeks he thinks about brilliant Tracy Lynn, thinks about how he ought to stop this time, how he is going to stop this time, thinks about it from the toll booth at Nyack until just past the exit near Fredonia, and then he changes the subject in his mind, drives an hour more to a familiar and thoroughly crummy motel. He prefers not to drive straight through.

  Tracy Lynn. He has her number written on the little emergency card that came with his wallet, so if anything bad happens to him she’ll be the first to hear. Twice in the past year he’s gotten off at the exit and rumbled through Fredonia and looked at the SUNY campus and thought about her teaching there. Once he went so far as to park the truck at a pair of meters and walk around and ask where the Philosophy Department might be, had a look at the handsome building from afar, then fed himself a slow dinner at a place she might go, a health food place, brown rice with some kind of sesame stuff, not the worst thing he ever ate, but she didn’t turn up, and he drove on.

  In Ann Arbor he stays at the Sheraton and eats well and drinks a little with Carl Gerhardt, and they talk furniture, old furniture, the antiques Carl’s collected in six weeks, or they talk people, the people Carl has bought from and bargained with and cheated, really, and swindled. George Skinner has begun to know a little bit about antiques thanks to Carl, who claims to be a world-class expert. They have never had a private conversation, yet this time George opens his mouth after two scotches in the hotel bar and says, “I’m going to stop and see my sister on the way back. She’s in Fredonia, right off the highway, and you know, I’ve never stopped in.”

  And Carl says, “There’s a barn back there, it’s just below Fredonia, almost down to Chautauqua, a delicious old place; well, it used to be delicious. New owner—the party, Georgie boy, is over—but at one time the old couple there would sell you an original Shaker table like it was a card table, something a bit plain but useful, just useful, you know. Morons! Look for it, it’s a big old barn, used to be in poor repair—the new guy’s got it painted. He is sharp, sharp, sharp—too bad for us. Right on Route 60, just past Cassadaga, shitbelly town. Bright yellow barn. It’s not the same, but it’s worth a look.”

  “I haven’t even talked to her.”

  Carl looks a little surprised, raises up his eyebrows. He is bald and the shining top of his head is always very white from wearing a beret, of all things, in the sun. He looks like some kind of duck hunter, red-and-white-checked woolen jacket, flannel shirt, like that, except for this beret, which makes him look exactly like someone who knows everything about every piece of furniture ever made or bought by a farmer in the history of the Midwest. “Who?” he says.

  “My sister, Tracy Lynn. She’s in Fredonia. I’m going to see her on the way back.”

  “They’ve gotten very smart back there. Well, smart everywhere. Now they
want a thousand for some shop project a generation old. Morons.”

  “She’s thirty-seven.”

  “Old enough to by-God know better.”

  Carl and George are both forty this year.

  “We’ll get some college kids,” Carl says. He means college kids to unload his truck and reload George’s. “See you in the morning.” And that’s it; Carl picks up his beret and spins it on his finger twice, as always, and puts it on, looking humorlessly in the mirror behind the bottles. “Night.” And he heads out of the bar. He’s portly but manages a saunter, saunters out of the bar and stands in front of the elevator in his beret. George wonders at the beret every time. It’s the perfect affectation.

  And orders another drink, unusual for him—it’s eleven o’clock for Christ’s sake—spends an hour thinking how he’s going to call. Plans the call. He doesn’t foresee a problem in calling. Hi, Tracy Lynn, he thinks, it’s George. I’ll be coming through Fredonia today and thought I’d stop and say hello. Or: I thought I’d stop and drop off a little something I got for you all. A wedding present finally! Or: Hi, Tracy Lynn, it’s George. Mom asked me to call. That would be a joke from the old days. His mother is in poor health and she doesn’t ask him anything anymore when he goes to see her up there in the Odd Fellows home in Peekskill, close to him, far from Tracy. Or: Hi, Kevin! Tracy Lynn there? What do you mean, “Who’s this?” Who’re you? That’s the question. Who the fuck are you, professor? Moron. Give me Tracy. I want to talk!

  Five or six other people meditate solemnly over their drinks at the bar, but the happy young woman who is the bartender closes up anyway at midnight. George walks to the elevator and stands there. He smiles thinking of Carl in that ridiculous beret, puts his sister out of his mind, keeps waiting for the elevator. After a long five minutes the bartender walks by on her way to the kitchen with a tray full of glasses, including his. She seems friendly and soft looking, George thinks, like most people who don’t live in New York City, and smiles at him as he waits there, actually reaches out as she passes and pats him on the shoulder, an astonishing gesture.

  “I’m all right,” he says.

  She just shrugs and smiles like a nurse and keeps walking to the kitchen with her clinking tray. George waits some more, patiently enough, then remembers to push the button.

  George Skinner would be embarrassed to walk up to strangers, these college kids, and ask if they want to work. Carl, however, is quite good at it. In the beret maybe he looks to them like some kind of history professor: “Hi. We need help moving some furniture. Fifty dollars for an afternoon’s labor.” Almost every kid stops and thinks about it, and it never takes more than twenty minutes to collect two, usually a pair of friends. Today the first one is a young man with long neat hair in a ponytail, a handsome boy, somewhat cocky, who has no trouble stopping whatever it was he was doing and standing with Carl and George, talking about furniture. His name is Eric. His mother has a dynasty table, his brother used to build furniture, his friend Arnold collects antique molding planes. George listens to Eric in small amazement: this kid at nineteen is more at ease than George himself at forty. Carl has an aloof way with the boy, knows just the degree by which to ignore him. George feels like a dumb truck driver at the periphery of the boy’s attention, keeps quiet, watches him.

  Carl has never asked young women to help, but Eric, joining confidently in, asks everyone gender regardless, and soon a large young woman is bargaining both Eric’s and her own wage up to sixty dollars. She is athletic and confident, older than Eric, maybe a grad student, freckles and a canny smile. No one is going to take advantage of her. She argues good-naturedly about getting paid in advance; Carl argues back, less good-naturedly, and wins. She’s wearing a skirt over some tight leggings or long underwear (George can’t decide which and shouldn’t be looking anyway, he thinks, long legs, hiking boots), so she’d like to change her clothes before she starts. They arrange to meet her at the R.C. Quad—which apparently Carl has heard of and can find—at noon. Her name is Tracy.

  “That’s my sister’s name,” George says, with more emotion than he’d like, sounding as if the young woman has stolen something valuable. It’s a sweet spring day.

  Carl mentions breakfast, and college-boy Eric wants to come along, which surprises George. At Eric’s age George may or may not have said yes to a little work, but he knows and remembers clearly that he would never have stood around with two almost middle-aged guys and had anything to say, and knows further that he would have made any excuse to avoid sitting down to breakfast with them. But Eric comes along, even leads the way, jawboning mightily as they walk to a diner Carl is fond of for pancakes. George finds something to like about Eric as the kid gabs through the meal, though the same traits that are likeable—the confidence, the ready jokes, the desire to be admired—are also irritating. You might think the kid is a furniture major, the way he goes on. He actually knows something, more than George does. Carl wears his beret, corrects the kid from sentence to sentence. George remembers that Carl has two teenage sons back home in Nebraska.

  At noon exactly they pull up in front of some old buildings on the campus. George fails to see anything to rightly call a quad, nothing square at all. When he mentions it, neither Carl nor the young man seems to understand his point, or that he is joking. Tracy, the grad student, is right there waiting, in blue jeans now, careful new rips across the thighs, skin showing. She has a big flannel shirt on, for work. She is tall, and looks like she’ll be able to move some furniture. Carl, surprisingly, hasn’t made a single grumpy comment about her. She climbs in beside him in George’s truck. Eric falls silent. He seems to have used up all his furniture lore. Carl has fallen silent, too, leans forward out of the way of the two kids’ wide shoulders, holds his chin, starts to fall into his bargaining funk, a mood that overtakes him at just this point at each of his and George’s meetings.

  It’s George’s job to inspect the furniture Carl has collected, and Carl dislikes George for it, even though—probably because—it’s not expert things George looks for, but bad flaws: missing legs, mismatched shelves, rotten wood, worm damage, smashed glass, gouges, carvings, scratches, stains. Carl dislikes him for it because Carl is always trying to slip something by, and George generally catches it. Mr. Bergenstaedtler, George’s boss, understands Carl, somehow, treats Carl’s dishonesty as a foible, the flaw of a genius. George doesn’t see it this way at all, sees Carl as a creep, dislikes him a little more each time he finds something wrong, each time he points out a blown seat on a rocker described in Carl’s bill of lading as perfect.

  They’re all quiet as George drives back through the spring-green town to the Sheraton, out next to the malls on destroyed farmland in clear, sweet air. He pulls the big stick shift and pumps the hard clutch and backs the beeping Bergenstaedtler rig end-to-end and not ten feet from Carl’s truck, which is moored in the far reaches of the vast and empty hotel parking lot near some luckless trees.

  Carl says, “You folks go ahead and start,” and marches leaning forward across the lot and into the hotel. He’ll come out just when his truck’s been unloaded, and having established that he isn’t needed for the moving, he’ll stand for the reloading and supervise.

  The unloading isn’t a simple matter of running furniture from one truck to the other. Carl has the heavy pieces packed at the far front of his box, and those pieces must go first into the big white Bergenstaedtler truck. Tracy and Eric help George empty Carl’s rented truck onto the blacktop of the parking lot, dig all the chairs out of the way, stand them up in the luscious breeze, open the moving mats to have a long look, checking each item off on Carl’s list, noting the condition, noting whether Carl’s description seems to match the piece. He’s listed all the chairs as good, one or two excellent, none poor, and George accepts all of them as described. Next, as always, there are some small tables, then a couple of bedsteads, then some bookcases, then several large tables, then the really big stuff, which today is a desk and three bureaus. At t
he very back of the load there’s a monster, all wrapped in quilted moving blankets. They begin to struggle with it just as Carl reappears.

  “What’s this thing?” Eric says.

  “That’s the bloody prize of the day,” Carl says. “Let’s move the oak piece first.”

  Tracy gets a hold on the desk. George watches her down there in the darkness of the truck, amused, expects her to need to show how strong she is, maybe lift the one side of it, maybe be impatient as Eric has been. But she’s only feeling its width, getting the heft. Eric, when he joins her, lifts his end up, acting like it’s not heavy as hell, picks it up a few inches, moves it toward him, has to drop it—boom!—in the resounding box of the truck body.

  “Careful!” Carl barks. He’s standing out in the sun, just watching. He says, “Let’s back the trucks together. Stop and let’s back the trucks. That’s too heavy.”

  The kid, Eric, sighs. Tracy, though, immediately gets the picture, follows George out of the truck, stands in the parking lot just where he’ll be able to see her and she can direct his short backing up. George climbs up in the cab of the Bergenstaedtler truck, starts it, lets it run a moment, watching the girl in the mirror. He’s startled, suddenly notices her sexiness, this small facet of her large capability. He hasn’t had a kiss or even a fond hug for something like six months, and she’s a good-looking soul, strong and young and happy.

  Admonishing himself, he backs the truck carefully up against Carl’s, stops when Tracy signals he should, and pretty soon they’re all climbing up into the gap between the two, moving into the dark, carrying the oak desk into the Bergenstaedtler truck, dropping it to one side, room to pass with the big piece that’s left.

  Back in Carl’s truck, they stand around the monster, undraping it, looking for handholds. Carl sees there’s no way he’s not needed and joins them. “It’s a delicious piece,” he says. “It’s a perfect piece. Go easy. It’ll fetch thirty grand, at least. Wait till Bergie sees it!”