by William Gay
Of course she knew this was crazy. Each time when the days ended—they ended too fast, like events rushing in fast-forward—she told herself how crazy it was. They were just comfortable together, they had grown too fond of each other. They seemed to fit. Something about him affected her the way medicine might. She thought she affected him the same way, but she didn’t ask. They didn’t talk about it. Maybe comfort was just another kind of medicine. She’d be all right a week or two, and then the need for the comfort would tighten her nerves, tighten his nerves, and one of them would call.
Partly it was the music, but it was not entirely the music. When she pestered him hard enough, he’d laugh and tell stories about people who were just names on record labels, names in the pages of Rolling Stone. Once in the early ’70s he’d been playing the Fifth Peg in Chicago’s Old Town with John Prine and they had gotten drunk and stolen shopping carts from a supermarket parking lot and raced them in the streets, and he told her about getting in a fight with Townes Van Zandt in a Texas honky-tonk so rough the stage was chicken-wired to deflect the beer bottles and Van Zandt had hit him in the corner of the eye with a metal wastebasket. He showed her the scar.
These stories with their names familiar to her did not seem to be told to impress her. The names he dropped were just names, and he did not tell stories that made him look good. They were just things that had happened to him, and in time the most sordid of them became very dear to her.
For there were times when the stories darkened. Once when he’d backslid and was drinking Wild Turkey, his mind sidestepped past the harmless pranks to a point where the high, wild times were lost past all reclaiming, and he and Van Zandt were shooting heroin in the bathroom of a honky-tonk with vomit on the floor and a drunk sleeping sprawled in a stall and a hole in the roof where you could see the constellations turning slowly on themselves like carousels of unreckonable magnitude, and the night itself seemed to be settling over him like the folds of a shroud.
Or maybe he just knows which buttons to push, she told herself in a moment when her mind was clear. He’s been at this all his life; by now he knows what works, what doesn’t.
There were silences when he seemed to be hearing something she couldn’t hear, or maybe just listening for it to begin. Silences that gave her the eerie impression that he was not there, maybe not even alive, as if all his life had been used up. As if his life had consisted of a finite number of events and the time to do them, but everything had become unphased, and the things had all been done, and he was left with dead space he did not know how to fill.
♦ ♦ ♦
WHAT IS THIS Robert Vandaveer bullshit about? Charles wanted to know.
Charles wants to know what this Robert Vandaveer bullshit is about, she told Robert.
What did you tell him it was about?
I told him I enjoyed your company, that nothing was going on. I told him I didn’t complain about the time he spent with his friends, and that Stephen was always with us.
What did he say to that?
He said his friends weren’t old enough to be his father and they didn’t have hair down to their ass.
By now they’d passed some subtle point. It wasn’t marked, but they knew they’d passed it anyway. They weren’t exactly flirting, but they weren’t exactly anything else, either.
Tell him I’m gay.
What? she was laughing. Are you?
No, but I don’t mind if Charles thinks so. In fact I want him to think so. Tell him I’m using you to get to him. Tell Charles I have designs on him.
Charles, when told a slightly modified version of this, was surprised. I knew the son of a bitch was queer when he wouldn’t let us kill deer off that place, he said.
SHE WAS WATCHING a music documentary on public television and reading a book when a heavyset young man with a wing of blond hair falling over his left eye was being interviewed and mentioned Robert’s name. The volume seemed to grow louder just for the length of time it took to say Robert Vandaveer. She closed the book and laid it aside.
He was the daddy of us all, the young man, whose name was Steve Valle, said. Without him we’d never have been, it’s as simple as that. He kicked open a lot of doors, and the rest of us slipped through. He could have been the biggest of us all. He could have been another Dylan. But booze and sex and drugs, maybe in that order, brought him down. Brought him down hard.
How well did you know him?
Vangie suddenly realized they sounded as if they were discussing a dead man.
I knew him as well as one man can know another. He took me under his wing. He showed me the ropes.
Vangie thought the young man sounded pompous and arrogant. He’d only recorded one album.
Robert was working on his interminable chimney when she told him about Valle. She wondered what he’d do with his time when he finished the chimney. Perhaps commence another right beside it.
He made you sound important, she said. He said you were the daddy of them all.
I believe I remember him, Vandaveer said. But not like that. But God knows I don’t remember a lot of things. I’ve got whole years with long stretches erased out of them. The way I remember it, he was just another hustler. Trying to steal songs, lines out of songs. There were a thousand of him. Kids who’d slit your throat for a killer line.
You took him under your wing.
Grinning, he laid the trowel down and extended his arms out from his side. Then he was obviously lying, he said. As you can see, I possess not a wing to my name.
You could have been the biggest of us all, but booze and sex and drugs brought you down hard, she told him, grinning back. You never showed me the ropes.
WHEN THEY LOST STEPHEN they were watching the nighthawks. They lost him that quick. He was there, he was gone. They were at a music fair in a Nashville park. The Parthenon was lit by a battery of floodlights, and the stage bled strobic, pastel neon into the August night. They were sprawled on their backs before the stage where a funk band was playing, and where the light merged seamlessly with the ebony heavens, thousands of nighthawks darted and checked on the updrafts like bats, and they seemed to be feeding on the light itself.
Stephen? she said.
She was up instantly, looking wildly about. There were so many people sprawled around them. Did you see my little boy leave? she demanded of the man next to them on the grass. The man was apologetic; he seemed to feel this was something he’d be held accountable for. I’m sorry, the man said, I wasn’t even looking, I was watching the stage. Stephen’s Coke and a CD Robert had bought him still lay on the grass. She snatched them up. Let’s go, she said.
They searched in widening circles through the crowd. Everyone looked alike, a faceless mass. Hundreds of children, none of whom were Stephen. Everyone else seemed to have kept up with their children. She was scared, and then she was more scared. We’ve got to get his name over the public-address system, Robert said. She looked once at Robert’s face for comfort, but he looked as frightened as she felt. Stephen was hopelessly lost, kidnapped, and already jammed roughly into the trunk of a car, riding away, easing into a night of horror that would climax with his naked body flung in a ditch and a piece of dirty plastic thrown over it.
When Robert saw him, Stephen was coming out of a yellow portable toilet fastening his jeans. He was almost on the other side of the park, but he didn’t look as if he knew he was lost. Robert picked him up, held him tightly in his arms. There was a bandstand nearby where no one was performing, and they went and sat down on folding chairs. By now Vangie was crying. She was crying, and she couldn’t stop. She kept shaking her head and trying, but she couldn’t stop. Finally Robert put his arm around her. It was the first time he’d touched her. She twisted away. We can’t, we can’t, she said, don’t touch me. He released her, lowered the arm. Robert had only seen him coming out the door of a portable toilet, but she felt he’d snatched Stephen from the arms of a madman,’ from the path of a drunken driver. It felt like a miracle. As if the
rest of her life had been torn from her to show her what loss would be like, then handed carelessly back.
Let’s go home, she said.
Charles is on that week-long fishing trip. He won’t be back tonight.
No, all the fun’s gone out of this, I’m leaving.
I’ll get the blanket.
No, leave it, I don’t care about the blanket, let’s just go.
The ride back was mostly silent. Usually, they talked all the way, and there was never enough time to get everything said, but tonight she drove and Robert smoked and watched the night roll by, lights of distant hillside towns rolling up and subsiding like St. Elmo’s fire in the wake of a ship.
This was a bad idea, she finally said.
No, it was a good idea. I loved it. You know me, I’d go with you anywhere. A rattlesnake hunt. A Baptist foot washing.
That’s not what I meant, and you know it. I meant it’s crazy, this whole thing’s crazy.
A public stoning. A hanging. Well, maybe not a hanging.
Crazy, she said, smiling in spite of herself.
When she stopped the station wagon in front of Robert’s lodge, he opened the door to get out, then paused and turned toward her. You want to come in awhile?
No, she said, but her hand was on the door latch, then the door was open and she was standing beside the car. Robert got out. He opened the rear door and unbelted a sleeping Stephen and took him up in his arms. He started up the flagstone walk. Vangie followed. Her feet seemed to be taking steps on their own; they needed no instruction from her. The lodge, all rough-hewn timbers and glass, was built on a bluff, and below it you could see the river rolling dark as tarnished brass through the cedars.
They went from the deck through French doors into the living room, and Robert made a bed for Stephen on the couch and tucked a blanket around him.
You want a drink?
No, she said. Her voice sounded strange to her, as if she had never heard it before, or heard just that precise tone in it.
Then she didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. When he looked in her eyes, he stepped toward her and laid a hand on her shoulder. She moved against him. They embraced. She felt as if their flesh had flowed together, merged in some manner, as if they’d fallen from some enormous height and struck the earth clasped in this fashion. He felt so thin, but his arms almost crushed her. God, he said against her face. God. For a moment he just held her. As if after so long a time the embrace itself was enough. Then he lowered his mouth to hers, and she drew him tighter and opened her mouth under his.
In the bathroom she washed her face, but she didn’t look in the mirror. She felt that Charles might be staring back. She felt that after all a cardboard box is simply a matter of geography.
THE ROOM WAS DARK, and a woman was singing out of it in a smoky listless languor: Balled out, wasted, and I feel I’m goin’ down …
I love this record, Robert said.
It doesn’t seem very apt, Vangie said. I’m not going to get wasted on half a glass of wine, and I seem not to be balled out. I can’t keep my hands off you.
Just indulge yourself, Robert said.
Hard to find a place I won’t get cut on, you’re all angles and bones. Don’t you ever eat?
Goodbye, darl’n’, I’ve been good ’til now. …
Well, it seems apt to me, Robert said. You’ve probably been as pure as milk, or at least good ’til now, and I’m for damn sure going down.
She glanced sharply at him as if she’d read the context of his words, but he made no move toward her, and he wasn’t even looking at her. He was just lying there staring at the ceiling.
What are we going to do? he finally asked.
I don’t know. I don’t know. She was sipping from a glass of wine he’d brought her. She was half reclining on pillows stacked against the headboard of the bed. Robert still wasn’t drinking. He was smoking, and in the dark she could see the orange pulse of his cigarette when he drew on it.
What we ought to do is just flee, Robert said. Just get the hell out of Dodge. I was reading this book by Robert Penn Warren, and this guy Jack Burden found out the woman he’d loved all his life was sleeping with his boss. His boss was supposed to be Huey Long. Burden drove all the way to California and checked into a motel. He drank a pint of whiskey, and in the morning he just started driving back. He said Flee is what you do when the telegram says all is discovered. It’s what you do when you look down and see the bloody knife in your hand.
She didn’t say anything. The wine was strawberry, and she could smell summer in it, hot green leaves, berries warm in the sun. She was thinking how little time it took to alter things forever. To arrive at a place you can’t get back from. She realized the mental picture of herself she’d carried all these years didn’t favor her much anymore.
We ought to just go and not look back. Like that Dylan song. Go all the way, ’til the wheels run off and burn, the upholstery cracks and the paint fades and the moccasins die. Something like that.
She wondered how much of him was real. How much was Robert Vandaveer and how much was cobbled up out of lines from songs, words from books, wisdom that fell ponderous as stones from the dust-dry tongues of dead philosophers.
I’ve got to go, she said.
She got up naked and set the wineglass on the nightstand. She began to search for her clothes. They seemed to be everywhere. She started putting them on.
What are we going to do?
I don’t know, she said. Well just sort it out. We can’t do this.
If you go, you’ll just come back. I told you a year ago it was fated, and I wasn’t lying. I knew it the moment I saw you. Before I saw you, when a man showed me a picture of his wife. We’re like the two halves of something—what, I don’t know—but together we’re a whole. Apart we’re just cripples, half a set of twins.
She was buttoning her blouse. You can’t do this to me, she said. You can’t put a lien on my life, some sort of attachment. On me, on my child. With your lines about fate and talking to Charles because he had a picture of me in his wallet. I admit I fell in love with you, but that talk’s all bullshit. I can’t lose my son, that’s what’s real to me.
By now he was up and putting on his clothes. I’ll get Stephen for you, he said.
Don’t start drinking. Don’t you start drinking.
She didn’t think he ever used drugs anymore, but she thought he might have a stash laid by for hard times. These were hard times. She knew he kept an unopened fifth of Wild Turkey sitting on the table where he could see it. She’d asked him about drugs once and never forgotten what he’d said. Everybody’s on drugs, he said. The world’s on drugs. Heroin, sex, booze, money. Television. Comfort. What I get from you, that’s a drug. Calmness. Any kind of crutch you can hobble through the goddamned day on is a drug. Darkness. They say when you get old enough, you look forward to dying. That’s the drug you reach for when the other crap doesn’t work anymore.
It was hard to leave. Harder than anything she’d ever done. She kept going back, leaving in stages, on the steps of the lodge, in the yard, leaning across Stephen’s sleeping body to kiss Robert. She clung to him when he snapped Stephen in and closed the door. She was half crying. Go in the house and shut the door, she said. I can’t leave like this, I can’t drive off looking at you standing in the yard.
He went.
She felt like a thief who’d stolen something it was impossible to return, she felt like Jagger the Midnight Rambler, Joan Osborne with her panties stuffed in the bottom of her purse, the girl in the song, balled out, wasted, feeling she was going down. There in the moonlight with her shoes in her hand and dew on her feet, with Stephen in the backseat looking not like her child but some waif she’d snatched at random from a Wal-Mart parking lot and shuttled far from his home, there wiping condensation from the windshield with Charles’s wadded shirt and the moon a yellow blur through the glass, even then she knew—she knew she was going down.
SHE PICKED UP STEPHEN
at three o’clock, and by then she had decided to leave Charles. She hadn’t thought much past that. Just take Stephen and a change of clothing and head out for Robert’s lodge. Just flee.
The first thing she did was run a stop sign behind the school, and a beat-up yellow Econoline van slammed into her right rear quarter panel. Her head struck the window frame hard, and she bit her lip, but Stephen was strapped in, and he wasn’t hurt.
Stephen was outraged. Are you crazy? he asked. That was a stop sign, are you crazy?
A fat man wearing a Red Man baseball cap was at the window. Jesus, lady, he said, then he saw Stephen. Are you both all right?
We’re fine, she said. She’d found a paper napkin in a crumpled Hardee’s bag and was wiping the blood off her mouth.
Lady, that was a stop sign.
I know. I know it was my fault.
I got no insurance. The damn cops’ll pull my license because I don’t have liability. Even with you running the stop sign and all, it’ll still be my fault.
There didn’t seem to be any cops around. Even any onlookers. It might have been a midnight collision in trackless desert.
She got out, and they looked at the damage. The van didn’t have a mark on it, but the fender of her station wagon was folded against the wheel.
Never mind the police, she said. We won’t call them. Your van’s not hurt, and I have insurance. I’ll think of something to tell them.
He got a galvanized pipe out of the back of the van. ATKINS PLUMBING, she read from the van’s side. He inserted the pipe into the fender well and, grunting, pried the crumpled fender away from the tire.
