by Ann Beattie
“Hey, there’s live wires around the bend,” a red-faced man in a telephone truck stopped to holler.
“Okay,” Jimmy said.
“Why don’t we walk down and take a look at the river?” Carleyville said. He hadn’t seen the river, but Jimmy had told him it was there.
“Yeah, good idea.” He and Jimmy sank to their ankles in somebody’s wet lawn, sidestepping the downed wires. Someone had put a flashing light near the tangle. A car approached, stopped, and went into reverse, taking the only other option: a fork in the road.
“‘But took the other, just as fair, ’” Carleyville said.
“Fair? What’s fair?” Jimmy said.
“No, I said, ‘took the other, just as fair, ’” Carleyville said. “Just to let you know I’m not some schmuck out walking around, I’m an educated man.”
“Never doubted that,” Jimmy said.
What? No return wisecrack? “You can be my Boswell,” Carleyville said. “‘Of a pile of fallen telephone wires, Dr. Johnson was said to have observed . . .’”
Jimmy continued walking. He said: “There weren’t any fucking telephones then, Carleyville. No fax, no e-mail, no Dr. [email protected].”
The roses. He had never sent the fax or the roses.
“Why don’t you go back and finish your degree? Stranger things have happened to old guys like us,” Jimmy said. “Fiona and I were talking about that.”
“Hey, Jimmy, you know me: I’m not too big on the concept of going back.” Carleyville inspected a dead snake on the road. “Going back is more or less a concept useful for scaring you in science-fiction movies.”
“I like the ones that catapult you into the future.”
“Most of them do both,” Carleyville said. “That way, they spook you with either thing you fear. Sound familiar?”
“We’d have been lucky if that had just been a science-fiction movie,” Jimmy snorted. “Then that wall in Washington could have just been the credits rolling.”
Jimmy joined him in looking at the snake, until his attention shifted to a big house beside them, and another set of shutters that had been blown to the ground. “Maybe it’s God’s will that people redecorate,” Jimmy said.
Around the bend, Jimmy gestured for Carleyville to take off his hiking boots—Jimmy himself had worn Top-Siders—so they could cut through a marshy field. They immediately sank a foot deep into the mush. Jimmy hopped one-legged to roll up his pants. “Muddy clothes make Fiona batshit,” Jimmy said.
“She told me you told her I was spinning out,” Carleyville said.
Jimmy picked up the pace, to get back to Carleyville’s side. “We worry about you,” he said.
“So what you’ve come up with is the idea that the prodigal son should go back to school?”
Jimmy looked at him. “We’re the same age,” he said.
The house they were passing, an acre or so behind a larger house that faced the main road, was a barn that had been renovated by yuppies. A gravel road led to it. They’d done a nice job: redwood shutters, front door with leaded glass. Lucky that sucker didn’t blow out in the hurricane, Carleyville thought. He wasn’t up for the maintenance of a house anymore. The leaded glass reminded him of Christie’s stained glass, and he wondered what her life was like as a nurse in Montana. There was someone who did believe in the concept of going back—she’d bailed and then gone back to her previously despised career.
They were soaked, except for the areas the rain parkas protected—though Carleyville hadn’t zipped his until it was too late. More of a wind was coming up. Out in the middle of the field was a muddy dress or robe or something that had blown away. It looked like the most out-of-place thing in the world—or, at least, Carleyville imagined it would to anyone who hadn’t already seen plenty of things out of place, including arms and legs.
Ahead was the river. They were coming at it across people’s backyards; as they moved closer to the water the fields tapered into suburban lawns. A few had docks. The damage varied: only one seemed to be intact. For whatever reason, some people had left their boats moored in the harbor, though most must have either gotten them to land or transported them to a safer place. He looked at a sailboat with a broken mast. Who would worry so little about damage that they’d just leave the thing out there? Maybe people who were away. People who already lived in a vacation spot, who were off taking a vacation elsewhere.
Jimmy began doing a sort of dance, lifting his muddy feet in something that resembled a Scottish jig and t’ai chi at the same time. He couldn’t help smiling. Jimmy was shedding the parka, pantomiming that he’d let it fly away to join the dress or whatever it was that kept getting airborne behind them. But then he hung it from the branch of a tree—maybe he was going to let the wind decide for him—and Carleyville understood Jimmy’s odd dance. Of course; it was the most logical thing in the world: a swim in the river. In a minute they were bobbing around like mad—strange, strange sensation—wearing only their underwear. Carleyville quickly shed his, figuring that this was the perfect opportunity to discard his overload of clothes. Clothes crept up on you: no one needed as many clothes as he had.
As they drifted toward the bridge, a woman stopped her car and her son got out to look. An enormous truck was coming from the other direction, so the woman backed her car off the bridge and then, when the truck passed (UPS! You had to admire them), joined her son at the rail, cupping her hands over her eyes as if the sun shone directly in them, though there was no sun. Carleyville left it to Jimmy to pantomime that they were okay. Jimmy stuck out his tongue, one hand raised to make a corkscrew curl by his ear. Though he smiled, Carleyville could see that the woman did not, as the tide caught them and they shot under the bridge. They went with the flow until they managed to latch onto the roots of a big tree that Jimmy gestured to in front of them. If Jimmy thought it was stopping time, why not? Carleyville swam toward shore, and the snaggled roots, to join his buddy.
Lips pursed, Fiona was putting dinner on the table. Carleyville had contributed the spinach-tofu dish she removed from the oven. The refrigerator wasn’t working, but she thought that since the dish did not contain meat, it would be safe to eat. Jimmy had set the table, putting all the silverware on the napkin, which drove her mad.
“Fiona, this is not something he could help,” Jimmy said. “This is the sort of thing that could happen to anyone.”
“Jumping into a river during a storm?”
“Okay, we might have restrained ourselves, but the rest of it was only bad luck, Fiona: bad luck to get cut by some rusting-away trash can some jerk threw in the water.”
“Perhaps better not to jump in at all, when the water is churning and a person can’t see.”
“Boys will be boys?” he said.
Her jaw was set. “At least he got diagnosed,” she said. “Imagine the pain he must have been in with his thyroid gland burning up.”
“That’s just a figure of speech. ‘Burning out’—overactive—was actually what the doctor said.”
“So go get him! I’ve called him twice!”
Adventure Kitty rubbed against Fiona’s ankles. She had just finished a meal of canned chicken, to which Fiona had added cream.
“You’re nice to his pets, Fiona. Have a little patience with him.”
“He has no sense of time. I do everything I can. I tell him an hour before the meal’s being served, and then I remind him a second time. Then just when he’s supposed to come down, I hear the bathwater being drawn.”
“I’ll get him,” Jimmy said. He turned and, taking a flashlight, walked upstairs. Behind him, the kitchen was lit by an oil-burning lamp.
“Carleyville,” he said. “Haul your ass outta there or she’s gonna bust a gasket.”
“Oh, sorry, dinner,” Carleyville said from behind the closed door.
Jimmy shone the light in front of him, heading back downstairs.
“And I want you to bring up the phone call,” Fiona said. “You must, Jimmy. I don’t want to be involved, though
heaven knows, I should know better, by now, than to pick up my own phone.”
As soon as the phone service was restored, they had gotten a call from Daley, who had made a good guess where Carleyville had gone. Daley had been none too happy, and had been sarcastic to Fiona, which had made her angry at him, at Carleyville, and at her husband, for knowing both of them.
“I hardly know that Daley person,” Fiona added. “Really, except for coming upon him pissing in the bushes at a picnic, I have no memory of him at all.”
“That’ll do,” Jimmy said.
They sat down without Carleyville. Fiona had left the oil lamp glowing in the kitchen and lit three candles on the table. Fiona began to dish up the tofu. When she was done, instead of handing her plate to Jimmy, she purposefully put it down in front of her and began to eat. Jimmy stood and dished up his own dinner without comment.
“I do feel sorry for him with his thyroid burnout, or whatever it is,” Fiona said, after a couple of bites. “I’m sure we would never have gotten him to the hospital if it hadn’t been for the cut. And imagine him wanting to sew it up himself, left-handed. It boggles the mind. Jimmy —it really does.”
“He’s not going to like hearing about money problems,” Jimmy said. “He feels awkward about our having paid cash in the emergency room. That’s why he’s hiding upstairs.”
“Well, but he’s been called to dinner,” Fiona said. “What does he think? That we’re going to try to collect, three hours later?” She added: “It makes no sense that you two would have gone into the river. None at all.”
“Give me your dream scenario. He passes up the swim and he . . .”
“Disappears from earth,” Fiona said. Though he could tell from her tone of voice that she didn’t mean it.
“Hello, everybody,” Carleyville said.
“Hello,” Fiona said, when Jimmy said nothing. “Did you take one of those codeine pills the doctor gave you?”
“Yeah,” Carleyville said, sitting down. Fiona looked at him, skeptically. His eyes did not meet hers. Fiona pushed her chair back, and dished up some food for him.
“Because there’s no reason to suffer, if some medicine will make you feel better,” Fiona said. Her voice softened. “How long did your throat—”
“It was nothing,” Carleyville said. “I just thought that as long as I was paying the guy—”
“Well, it’s good you brought it up. To have your thyroid malfunctioning and not—”
“It wasn’t like I was losing my leg and I didn’t get myself to the hospital,” Carleyville muttered, head still averted. “It was activity inside a gland.”
She was staring at him. She said: “You might have lost your leg in the river, but you escaped with only twenty-five stitches and a tetanus shot. Just a minor matter, I’m sure.”
“‘Nothing is, but thinking makes it so, ’” Carleyville said.
“The river is churning and is filled with debris, which anyone knows,” Fiona shot back.
“We got a phone call from Daley,” Jimmy broke in. “He wants us to try to get you to accept responsibility for the failure of the business. He also wants to be reimbursed for cleaning up what he said looked like a 3-D Jackson Pollock. It seems you left behind a bunch of birds that flew around the office shitting all over everything. According to him.”
Carleyville put down his fork. “The phone’s working?” he said.
“I don’t feel that this involves me,” Fiona said. “I want to say that I think he was overstepping his bounds to call us.”
“You’ve got no head for business,” Jimmy said, with a shrug. “So apologize to the guy about the birdshit and send him a check.” He did not add: If you’ve got any money. “The failure of the business you can sort out later.”
Carleyville reached for the salt. His arm brushed the candlestick, knocking the candle to the tabletop. Carleyville grabbed for it, but it rolled onto the rug and Carleyville had to stomp out a small fire.
Fiona jumped up. “What is it?” she said. “What is it that makes everything so precarious if you’re anywhere near it? You walk into a room and you knock over a table. You turn to pick it up and you step on the cat’s tail. I’ve never seen anything like it! I understand completely why Christie left. We ought to send you outside and let the damned hurricane in.” Fiona turned and walked quickly out of the room. She toppled nothing. The cat was not nearby.
They stared after her. The rain had ended, but outside, trees still swayed in the wind. There was a moon; otherwise, even the outlines of things would be difficult to see.
“She’s a little worked up. Believe it or not, it was the thyroiditis diagnosis that put her over the top. Concern for you, I mean.”
Carleyville folded his hands on the table. He looked at Jimmy.
“Listen, Daley’s not gonna stay mad at you forever,” Jimmy said. “Send him a check. Put your finger in the dam. That stupid vitamins-by-mail stuff was never gonna work. You’ve got to have a movie star to promote your friggin’ vitamins, nowadays. Newsletters about double-blind tests . . .” He couldn’t continue.
Carleyville pretended to have a better view of the trees than he did. He could see some leaves, occasionally, highlighted in the moonlight. When lightning lit up the sky, though, he saw something else: the outline of his truck, much lower than he expected. He stared until lightning flashed far in the distance, then realized what he was seeing: everything had begun to sink in the sodden field.
“If I just don’t move, everything will stay the same,” Carleyville finally said. “Very important, magical thinking. You must have done it yourself. Everybody did. If I run fast enough. If I make it to the tree. If I zig left and right and agree that my mother can die. My wife. Anybody.”
“She’s gonna be sorry as hell she jumped down your throat. You know she already is,” Jimmy said.
“But she was right.”
“So in the future be more careful. Come on—she’s all to pieces because she thinks you’re self-medicating and doing it all wrong. You saw how upset she got at the hospital. It was actually sort of funny, that young intern seeing her taking it so hard that you had a thyroid infection. ‘He doesn’t tend to anything!’ I forget I’m married to a Brit half the time, and then she comes out with, ‘He doesn’t tend to anything!’ like you had a flock you were supposed to tend.”
“I do. It’s part of my traveling road show. The birds; my former chickens; the cat; the dog; the horse. Fiona’s appropriated the cat, so I won’t have to think about her anymore.”
“Well, man, you’re just going to have to simplify. That menagerie would be too much for anybody. You’re like a magnet for other people’s problems, which often take the form of having paws and hooves and being covered in fur.” Jimmy got up and took a second helping of food. “She’s upstairs trying to figure out how to apologize,” he said. “Trust me. Fiona is your friend. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have gotten so bent out of shape at the hospital.”
“Codeine makes me funny in the head. I didn’t take it,” Carleyville said.
“I didn’t suspect for a minute you did.” Jimmy shifted in his chair. “Listen, if it’s a matter of writing Daley an apology . . .”
“He had all his money in the business. He doesn’t care about birdshit.”
“Well, you didn’t twist his arm and force him to put his money in the business.”
“It was my idea.”
“He was interested. He talked to me about it. He thought it was a good idea.”
“The war’s over, as Fiona always says, but I convinced Daley to do magical thinking, anyway,” Carleyville said.
“Stop blaming yourself. Magical thinking, bargains with God—if you want to think that’s what it was, fine. It worked. But in peacetime, you’ve got to have a different m.o. You’ve got to realize you can accomplish things through your own efforts, not because you’ve got the right incantation or because you’ve held your breath until the wheel stopped spinning.”
There it wa
s: Jimmy’s insistence on the future. And maybe it was wallowing, to go back to the time when he had avoided booby traps because of his ESP, moved through minefields like a gazelle. Back then, he’d moved in a protective bubble of blessedness. The bubble had stretched over him Trojan-size, making a big prick out of him—that was funny: a medic as a big prick; a big, animated schlong coming at you in what might be your last few seconds . . . in the end, the bubble was so tight he thought he’d suffocate, but then he was saved: the last time into the field, the last maneuver accomplished, helicopter hovering for an immediate, absolute, final evacuation—that helicopter, like a big asterisk that could eventually footnote the whole friggin’ war: This all made no sense. Though it might have, if you believed in colossal, malevolent jokes. Years later, the time had still not come to lean back and have a good laugh. He had once been fleet. Fortunate. He had lived, and certain other people—Daley’s kid brother among them—had not. Then began the revenge of the ordinary world, and of inanimate objects: the corner of a table nicking his thigh where he’d once been grazed by a bullet; falling on ice, the simple contents of his grocery bag raining down on his head—the ignominy of being pounded by bananas and grapes, instead of artillery fire. During the war, he had escaped friendly fire, though Fiona’s helpful criticism might be seen, now, as a new, benign form of that.
It was true: he was still back there, running—was there any lesser speed?—making his bargains, hedging his bets, endorphins in a race with adrenaline. He’d made it across the finish line, arms flung high not in surrender, but in victory: a lucky sprinter pulling the ribbon, instead of his intestines, with him.
Fiona was standing in the doorway. She had on a blue terrycloth robe and silly slippers that made it look as if she’d plunged her feet into armadillos. She looked chagrined. She was back-lit from the oil lamp, and with her enigmatic gaze she looked vaguely Madonna-ish: the real Madonna, not the dyed blonde money machine who dangled a cross.
Jimmy held out his hand. She walked forward, and took it. Jimmy said to her: “Nobody ran faster. Nobody did it better. He did it better long before the James Bond theme song. Nobody was faster, or braver, or more inventive than Carleyville. But everybody’s only got a particular ration of luck, and to be perfectly honest, I think it might pretty much have run out in his case.”
