Taft

by Ann Patchett

  "There's no other way."

  "I can't go inside," I said.

  "Nobody's going to know."

  She didn't understand. If she was wrong, just a little wrong, if only one person saw me that would be enough. I shouldn't have been in that neighborhood, parking my car on that asphalt. "No."

  "Please," she whispered. I could hear the word after she stopped saying it.

  Such quiet on that street, like they'd paid off every living thing to keep it that way. "You can't carry him, can you?"

  "I'm sorry," she said, and she put her hand on my arm. She was so sorry I could feel it through my jacket. "There's no other way."

  Leave him outside. That's where he wanted to sleep. Leave him in the grass, in the forsythia beside the house. "Anybody awake in there?"

  She shook her head. "They sleep like rocks. All of them."

  Be right, I was thinking. My hands were sweating as I leaned into the back seat and pulled her brother out. I was good at this. I'd done it a million times. Had Franklin been this light? A boy of nine wasn't heavier than this. Though Franklin smelled better, not just because he hadn't been spending nights outside, sleeping in his clothes, but because he smelled healthy, like a boy. Carrying her brother in my arms, I followed Fay up the driveway, past the thick line of hedges. I didn't have to worry about the people on either side seeing me, only the ones across the street. I was worried about them. They wouldn't look long enough to see if I was carrying Carl into the house or away from it. They wouldn't look to see Fay. They would only see me while they were punching out 911 and calling to their wife to get the shotgun out from under the bed.

  Fay reached inside her shirt and pulled out a house key on a chain around her neck. The chain was too short, and she had to lean down to the lock to open the door. She practically had to press her face against it. I shifted Carl's matchstick bones in my arms and tried to step out of the porch light. Fay looked at me and put a finger to her lips. Like I didn't know to be quiet. We went inside the dark house. I was inside somebody else's house, holding their son, following their daughter. My feet were sinking into somebody's thick carpet. I saw the dark outline of their things. Flowers on small tables, the backs of sofas and wing-backed chairs. I wanted to close my eyes. Everything I saw incriminated me, proved I was there. Panic came up in my throat and turned my mouth bitter. Fay ran her hand along the wall until she came to the thermostat box. A second later the heater came on with three clicks and a groan and then sound poured up from every vent to help cover us. She walked over to the staircase. Upstairs would be worse. Harder to get out from there, fewer places to go. She moved without noise, but I heard everything: the heaviness of Carl's stoned breathing, the sounds the stairs made under our feet, under my heavy feet. I tried to breathe. The house smelled too clean, a little bit perfumed even. It smelled like a woman. I was inside the house. All doors shut, windows locked. The last stair made a loud, animal sound when I took my foot away and I felt the sweat beading up at my hairline.

  I followed Fay down the hallway, past what looked to be an endless row of closed doors that held beds and sleeping people. I didn't know who or how many. I was trying to count them as a way of steadying myself. Then I heard something from behind the second door. I stopped and held Carl tighter to my chest. A bedside drawer being pulled open? Someone rolling over, reaching into a drawer? There are no questions they would have to ask. Seeing me was reason enough to shoot me. It would be reason enough for the police who would come later to fill out the paperwork. All of the neighbors would buy better alarm systems. At parties they would tell the story again and again. They would take Fay's aunt by the arm and say, It must have been so terrifying for you, I can't imagine. Fay turned around, followed my eyes to the door and shook her head. She made a motion with her hand that I should keep going. I stayed behind her, keeping my eyes on her back, on her hair, which stopped in a razor straight line just past her shoulders. She opened the last door on the hallway and I followed her inside. Neither of us said a thing. She pulled back the blankets and I lay the boy down on blue striped sheets. She took off his shoes and covered him. He had been so light that I barely felt the difference when I stood up without him. In the bed he rolled over and took hold of a pillow with both his hands.

  Fay took the same path out of the house. I wondered about my footprints showing in the carpet. Going out felt easier and it was all I could do to keep myself slow. I was relieved Fay saw me all the way out, that she didn't just wave at me from his bedside. My eyes had adjusted some to the dark and I could make out pictures on the walls now, though I couldn't make out the people in them. She came outside with me. When I heard the door close I vowed to never be stupid again. Never. The air smelled like it might rain. I put my hands against my thighs and leaned into it.

  When we got to the car she went around to the other door and got in, like we still had a couple more stops to make on this never-ending ride. "I can't believe we got him inside," she said.

  I just nodded.

  "Tomorrow is Sunday. Carl always sleeps late on Sunday. He won't go to church with them. Nobody'll even think anything about it."

  I sat there without a single thing left to say. It was done. What I couldn't understand was why Fay kept sitting there. She was looking at the house.

  "I'd like to go with you," she said finally.

  "Where?" Could there really be someplace left to go?

  She didn't answer me right away. She was still staring. "I'd like to go home with you."

  Well then I understood. In that neighborhood where quiet was invented it would be hard to miss it. My whole body heard her. It said okay. Take her up, it said, fold that jacket in your arms, press that face to your face, put your mouth to the soft skin next to her eye. It said to take what was offered.

  I should have asked Marion to marry me, the second she told me she was pregnant. That was the mistake.

  "Go on," I said.

  "I mean it."

  "Get out of the car now. I've done enough."

  She put her hand on my neck. It was small and cold. I thought, delicate.

  "I'm telling you to go," I said.

  It seemed like the hand stayed there a long time, but then I heard her door open and close and I saw the shape of her walking up the driveway to the house and still I felt that hand there and I put my hand on my neck to cover the place where she had been.

  EVERYTHING HINGED on the dead father. That's what I was thinking. Something had turned them inside out, made them do things they'd barely heard of before. You could tell, Carl wasn't a boy to go licking up everything in the medicine cabinet for the pure pleasure of the high. And Fay. What had happened to her that she would be putting her hand on my neck? Over and over again I saw her sitting in the car, her head resting on the window when she was tired. She was tired. She had been worried for her brother, thought maybe he was dead. Those thoughts shake a person as deep as they go, I know that. You want a little comfort. She had reached out in the wrong direction was all, gone to touch something at the end of a long night and touched me.

  What was surprising was how that minute put such a knot in me. At first I thought I'd just been made stupid by spending all night hunting Carl, but it was there while I slept and there in the morning waking up. It stayed with me all the way to Muddy's. I had felt a thrill. That's the only word for it. I recognized it easy enough. I had been thrilled before in my life. Mostly it came from music, times I had seen Muddy Waters play slide guitar with a broken-off bottle neck around his finger, again when I saw Son House in Chicago. A few times I had been thrilled when I was playing myself and everything had come together just so. My boy thrilled me, even Marion, though I hated to admit that, back at the very first. The sight of her face had thrilled me.

  So when it happened with Fay, it was something I knew and I was grateful for it, even though it was probably nothing she'd intended. Even if it was all about something else, a father who was dead and a brother who was strung out and sleeping in doorway
s, and her hand had only touched my neck because they weren't there, I was pleased. It was a long time since I'd felt such a thing.

  I already knew plenty about the brother, and it didn't take much for me to imagine the dead father. He looked like Carl, not quite tall enough but a good face that balanced things out. He was better looking than his son. Age had made him better. Carl always had the jitters. His eyes darted around from place to place. In my mind, Taft had none of that. It was easy to see him. It was easy to see his house, because it was like every other working-class hillbilly house in east Tennessee. One had a carport instead of a garage. Another one had a box hedge under the picture window. But it was all the same house. Taft would look back at it when he went to the end of the short driveway in the morning to get the paper. He was proud. He would have said I was wrong. He would have pointed out all the ways his house was different. The shutters were green. They had that nice screen door with a cursive letter T shaped from bent metal in the lower half. But the key to the difference was that his house contained his family, his children. He prided himself on being the sort of man who knew exactly what a good thing he had. He was in love with Carl and Fay. Every day of his life since they were born, he was crazy for them.

  "Look at you," Taft says. "All dressed up."

  "I've got a date."

  "Anybody I know?"

  Fay stops at the door and smiles. This smile always shuts him right up. It is the smile of a girl who couldn't do anything wrong. "I don't think so," she says, and then thinking he might ask her not to go, she adds, "I won't be gone long." She stops to look at herself in the mirror in the hallway, runs her little finger over her lipstick.

  It's a Saturday afternoon, bright summer. There's no point in asking where she's going or when she'll be back. Nothing ever happens on a Saturday, during summer, in the middle of the day.

  "You have a good time then," he says. Next minute she's gone. Taft stands at the window to watch her. The way she looks makes him nervous. Too good, too grown up.

  He heads out back to see if Carl's there. He wants Carl to drive over to the lumberyard with him. Taft's been thinking about putting a deck on the back of the house where they could all sit in the evening. He's been doing things lately that might make the place attractive to the kids. He wants to keep them home more. They're at that age now, running around all the time with their friends. That's the way it is, but he wants it to be different. It won't be long until they're gone for good. They'll get married, have babies and jobs. They'll stay in Coalfield or maybe go to Oak Ridge, but it won't be the same as having them home. This is the last chance he has to keep them all to himself, his family, the four of them together. He's spending too much money, his wife told him that. He bought a VCR last month and now he's talking about this deck.

  "You seen Carl?" Taft asks his wife.

  "Out in the garage, I think." She doesn't look up from her work. She has the sewing machine out on the dining room table and is busy putting together a dress. Fabric with flowers the size of fists is spread out everywhere. He doesn't know if it's for her or Fay.

  "Carl?"

  "Sir," Carl calls back from the garage.

  Taft follows his voice, goes through the small laundry room off the kitchen and down two cement steps. Carl has his weights out there. He's lying down on his bench, doing lateral raises, twenty pounds in each hand. Every time the weights come up to the top, his breath shoots out like somebody's hitting him in the stomach. Carl looks good. His color is good. His hair is slicked back with sweat and his face is a healthy red. There is real concentration on his face. He brings the two weights up even and slow, all the way to the top. He doesn't let them drop fast. He's small, but he has some real muscle on him. He wrestles at 126. He's ranked first in the Tennessee eastern division, third in the state for high school boys.

  "Come on and go to the lumberyard with me," Taft says.

  Carl doesn't say anything until he does five more reps, and then he puts the weights against his hips and rolls up. "When do you want to go?"

  "Let's go now," Taft says. Carl is easier than Fay, just eleven months younger in age but still a boy. Fay has a mind of her own now. She has friends, boyfriends, who Taft doesn't even know. Carl is still interested in going along for the ride. Taft wants to show him how to buy wood. Carl knows a lot about wrestling and not much about other things. Taft thinks this deck is something they can work on together. Hammering nails and all of that, he thinks it's the sort of thing a boy needs to know.

  Carl pulls his T-shirt over his head and then uses it to wipe the sweat off his chest and arms. "Hang on a minute," he says. "I just want to get another shirt." Carl's been changing his clothes a lot lately.

  Taft starts to get in the car and then changes his mind, goes and gets in on the passenger side. Wouldn't hurt to let Carl drive.

  I was behind the bar when Rose stuck her head out from the kitchen and asked if I could come in the back for a minute. She said she had a message for me.

  "Fay called."

  I was half expecting this. She'd call before I came in to say she was going out of town or some such thing. "Okay," I said.

  Rose stood there, giving me a minute to make a fool of myself. "You don't want to know what she said."

  "Sure I do."

  "She wants you to pick her up, on the corner before you get to her house, three o'clock. She says you don't need to call her back."

  "What's she talking about, she wants me to pick her up?" But even as I was saying it, I felt the thrill again.

  "I have no idea," Rose said. She went right back to the potato she was peeling. She didn't stare at me like any woman would after telling a man that a girl had called and asked to be picked up a block away from her house.

  "Why'd she give the message to you?" I said. "You don't ever answer the phone. Why didn't she give it to Cyndi?"

  "She's not going to tell Cyndi where she's meeting you."

  "And she'll tell you?"

  Rose shrugged. "It looks that way."

  I kept standing there, waiting for her to say what must have been on her mind. I didn't like the idea of her having anything on me. Rose was an odd woman. I hadn't even meant to hire her. It just happened that she came in looking for a job the day after James Whitlow's period of parole was up and he was free to leave the state, which he did in short order. James was from Detroit and was visiting a cousin down here when he got messed up in some bad business. Prison and then parole, he'd had enough of Tennessee. Rose said she'd work the first shift for free and then I could decide whether I wanted to keep her, and since I never got around to deciding, she stayed.

  "This isn't about anything," I said. "She must just need a ride in is all."

  "Good," Rose said. She dried her hands on her apron and then went into the storeroom, which I took to be her way of saying it was nothing she wanted to talk about.

  I went back to the bar and poured a couple of beers for people who'd been waiting on me. It had been something, her hand. I appreciated that. But it would take a hell of a lot more than a hand on my neck to make me forget the fact that these were children and not my children. Fay and Carl. I was having a hard time separating the two. It felt like both of them were calling, saying, Come over to our house and we'll tell you what's next. There was always the chance that none of it was bad, that all they wanted to say was thank you or good-bye. I thought about not going at all because that would make it clear where I stood on things. But then I saw Fay out there on the corner in her nice neighborhood, waiting, knowing full well that I'd show and for reasons I can't explain I didn't feel like disappointing her.

  "So I guess you're fairly hacked off at me," Cyndi said. She startled me. She was standing right in front of me and I hadn't even seen her. She had a tin of some sort of stiff paste in one hand and was working a cloth into it with the other.

  "I don't know what my problem was yesterday," she said. "I'd just been drinking too much. That was it, really." She started spreading the paste over the
guardrail at the front of the bar.

  "What in the hell are you doing?"

  "It's brass polish," she said, holding up the tin so I could see the word Brasso on the front. "I found it in the back. I don't think this thing has ever been cleaned. It might look nice, you know, if somebody worked on it." The paste was turning the rail a kind of grayish green color, but when I leaned over I could see something yellow down underneath. She was pushing into it with everything she had.

  "You don't have to do that," I said.

  "I kind of want to," she said. "I just feel like doing something."

  Cyndi had tied back her hair with a piece of dishtowel, but it kept falling in her face as she worked the rag back and forth across the railing. It was hard to imagine her all done up in flowers and a grass skirt. She didn't seem like the kind of girl who'd put up with a lot of nonsense. "I didn't know about you being a dancer," I said.

  "That's because you didn't read my application. It was on there: last job held."

  "So you didn't like it there?" I had never thought to ask before.

  "Didn't like Hawaii?" She looked at me like she must not have heard right. "Everybody loves Hawaii. Everybody loves the dancing. I mean, maybe the luau was shit, some cracker jack Sheraton, but it was really cool to be able to dance every night and get paid for it. All these couples who just got married come up afterwards and want to have their picture taken with you like you're some sort of good luck goddess or something. Hell no, there was nothing wrong with that."

  "So why are you here cleaning a bar rail?"

  Cyndi got down on her knees to check how corroded things were underneath. "You can bet it had something to do with a guy," she said. Suddenly she turned suspicious. "Why are we talking about this? Since when do you want to know?"

  I put my hands up. "Just making conversation."

  "I think we could find better things to talk about." She took another cloth out of the waistband of her skirt and started polishing. It was brass all right. Bright as day.