She was behind the counter when he went in to pay for his gas that day, a ball cap on and a pencil behind her ear. She still wore no makeup, not even a tinge of lipstick. Her shirt had a streak of grease across the pocket, right under the little name patch with Fiona stitched in cursive. But somehow she struck Bruce at that moment as the most beautiful girl he had seen in a long time.
She had grinned at him right off, spoken his name in her same old friendly unpretentious way. “Hey there, Bruce Healey. I always knew someday you’d come walking through that door.” A few months later in a movie theater, he would recall those words when he heard Marian say almost the exact same thing to Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
“So you’re a fortune teller,” Bruce had said, laughing. “Well, here I am. Got a coffee break coming up anytime soon?”
The coffee break had stretched into a lot more than just coffee back at her apartment. The engagement with the hometown guy hadn’t worked out, she had told him, though there were signs everywhere in her apartment that a man spent a lot of time there. She had told Bruce to stop again on his way through sometime, and he had said he would.
Back on the road again, he was surprised when he looked at his watch and found he had spent almost two hours in Belzoni. Maybe on another trip he would have stopped again to see Fiona if he hadn’t found, upon arriving at home that day, that his father had died an hour earlier and had been asking for him at the end.
So you make a selfish choice and for the rest of your life, you regret it. And every time you hear the word father, you feel like crud. You never bring up the subject yourself, and you try to evade it whenever someone else does, but you make sure it’s never far from your mind by choosing, perversely, to wear your father’s wedding ring, so that every time you look at your right hand, you’ll see it and be reminded of the heavy price you have to pay and keep on paying for a thoughtless spree.
Not that the wedding ring had served to alter his behavior all that much—he had still spent way too much time on women after that—but at least it had made a difference when his grandmother had called three years ago from the Magnolia Lane Home and said his mother was failing and wasn’t expected to live.
He had been teaching in Montgomery at the time and had gotten in his pickup truck in the middle of the day and driven straight through Alabama and Mississippi, zipping past towns all along the way where he knew all kinds of girls—Selma, Demopolis, Meridian, Jackson. He had gone by way of Vicksburg this time so as to avoid Belzoni, taking Highway 61 north instead of Highway 49, and he had arrived at his mother’s bedside in time to feel the squeeze of her hand, which was quite strong for a woman who was dying, to see her eyes flutter open as she felt the gold wedding band on his finger, and to hear her utter one word: “Donald.” Not his name, of course, but the name of his father, whose death had extinguished her in every important way. She had breathed for seventeen years after he died, but she had not really lived.
“You think you could run a marathon?” Kimberly asked him now. “We’d come cheer for Uncle Bruce, wouldn’t we, Maddy?” He saw that his steak was now sitting before him, his salad pushed over to the side. He was holding a steak knife in his right hand, which he didn’t remember picking up.
Madison was squeezing a puffy roll in one hand. She waved it around, then took a big bite and chortled something that neither of them could understand except that it ended with “Unca Buce!”
A marathon. Now there was an idea. Though jogging had never appealed to him, maybe he should pick it up. Maybe sometime this next year, before he turned forty-one, he could enter a big race as his father had done. That’s what he needed: a goal. He thought of the verses he had read in his Bible the night before, where Paul had talked about enduring affliction, fighting the good fight, finishing his course.
He looked at Kimberly across the table and smiled. “A marathon!” he said, raising a finger as if suddenly seizing on a brilliant idea. “‘I shall run that I may obtain!’” Though Kimberly could pick up on most of his movie quotes, he knew she’d never recognize one from the Bible.
Kimberly smashed up part of her baked potato and placed it on a saucer in front of Madison. “Isn’t Uncle Brucie a funny man?” she said. “A funny old man?”
“Well, that makes me feel better,” he said. “On the way here you said I wasn’t funny, and I’ve been worrying about it ever since.”
As he placed a bite of steak in his mouth, he imagined himself and a hundred other runners gathered at the starting line, poised for the gunshot. He saw himself move quickly into the lead, round a curve, and leave everyone else far behind. He wondered what it would be like if somewhere along the course someone would snap a picture of him, then put it in a frame and keep it on her nightstand.
31
Mount Pisgah’s Lofty Height
At first Bruce worked the sound into his dream. A steady thwump thwump thwump like a heavyweight sparring with a punching bag. The dream was nothing that would hold together as a story, as usual, but a crazy mélange of people, places, and things. Just once he would like to have a plot in one of his dreams, some single obstacle to overcome, followed by a logical sequence of events that led to a triumph. Instead, his dreams were mostly composed of many obstacles, one after the other, against which he struggled mightily but never prevailed.
Such as with the punching bag, which was actually nothing more than a gigantic roll of paper towels stamped with green cats. Though it didn’t weigh much, it kept swinging back and knocking him down, so that only every other thwump represented him landing a punch. The alternating thwumps were him getting hit by the paper towels, which didn’t seem to be fastened to anything, but bounced around and came at him from all directions. Thwump, thwump, thwump, thwump . . . the sounds stopped for a moment, and in his dream Bruce crawled across the floor, sweating profusely, toward a tiny doorway to escape.
Then again, thwump, thwump, thwump! He squeezed himself through the door and suddenly found himself in the middle of a steamy jungle, right in the path of a . . . he couldn’t really tell what it was except that it was wearing a gray cape and had two huge legs like Doric columns coming straight for him. He was on the ground, unable to advance through the dense tangle of undergrowth, but whatever it was bearing down on him was plowing through the trees and vines as if they were mere grass clippings, calling out, “A good meal and free birthday cake to boot!”
He was scrambling around on all fours, trying to find a way out, when all of a sudden the sounds stopped again and he was sliding down a slippery mudbank into a murky jungle river. Little heads were poking up above the water all around him—shriveled jack-o’-lantern heads with little fiery orange tongues flicking in and out. He tried to climb up the bank, but it was too slick. So he took a deep breath, dove down into the dark waters . . .
Which led to a huge underground tunnel where marathon runners were lined up behind a rotund bass drummer with a tall red plume on his helmet. Thwump, thwump, thwump went the bass drum. “Ready, set, go!” called the bass drummer. The echo was tremendous, a hundred times worse than thunder, and Bruce clapped his hands over his ears. It was hot in the tunnel, and he found it hard to breathe.
The runners, who filled the entire width of the tunnel, were running straight at him. He was destined to be trampled if he didn’t get up off the floor and do something fast. Suddenly it came to him. He would join the race!
Thwump, thwump, thwump—they were coming closer. He stood up to meet them but saw the lead runner’s mouth fall open as a look of loathing filled his eyes. The whole group came to a dead standstill and stared at him, many of them turning their heads away in disgust. Catlike snarls and hisses rose from their ranks. Then Bruce understood—he wasn’t wearing the right clothes! Slowly he let his eyes travel down to see what he was wearing. . . .
And saw that he was absolutely stark naked. And his body, which he actually used to be quite proud of, looked . . . well, downright paunchy. The thought came to him that he reall
y did need to start training for a marathon, and very soon.
Mortified, he turned to flee but could get no traction on the floor, which was covered with marbles. He heard boos and jeers behind him, then thwump, thwump, thwump. He realized with horror that the runners were throwing food at him—rotten apples, cans of corn beef hash, styrofoam cartons of leftover spaghetti.
He opened his mouth to yell . . . and woke up. He lay absolutely still for several long seconds, absorbing the fact that he was in his own bed, that the covers were all bunched up around his feet somewhere, and that the sun looked very bright behind the closed blinds.
Though he generally couldn’t remember anything specific about his dreams, only that he had wrestled all night and come out the big loser, today was one of those unusual days when everything came back to him in vivid detail. At least he didn’t take his dreams too seriously, didn’t try to dissect them for symbolism.
As he lay there thinking about the paper towels and the jack-o’-lanterns in the river and the bass drummer, he remembered something he had heard a professor say long ago in some course at Jackson State. This professor had said people who dreamed in color usually had high IQs. Funny that he couldn’t even remember what course it was, but he distinctly remembered this off-the-cuff tidbit shared by a professor who wore a bad toupee.
Thwump, thwump, thwump. There it was again, but this time it wasn’t in a dream. It was coming from somewhere outdoors. He got out of bed and walked over to the window beside his desk. When he opened the blinds, he saw that the sun was already quite high in the sky. He glanced down at the old windup alarm clock on the desk. Ten-fifteen—he could hardly believe he had slept so late. For him, sleeping in on Saturday usually meant eight o’clock at the latest.
Thwump. There was nothing in the backyard that he could see, but when he stood over to the side and looked toward the Stewarts’ backyard, the mystery was solved. Patsy Stewart had a double clothesline on the far side of their lot, and though Bruce had never seen any clothes hanging on it, he saw that something quite large was now draped over it—something dark and heavy like a rug. And Celia was beating on it for all she was worth.
He closed his eyes tight, then opened them again. No doubt about it, she was definitely beating a rug with what looked like a broom. Isn’t that what women used to do in lieu of carpet cleaning? He was pretty sure he had seen his grandmother do it when he was a boy. How in the world had a little person like Celia gotten that big rug out there by herself? How could she have spread all that bulk out on top of the clothesline? Maybe it wasn’t a rug after all. Maybe it was a big bedspread or blanket or something.
He squinted but it didn’t help. Everything looked a little blurry around the edges—Celia, the clothesline, the rug or whatever it was, even the trees. The other teachers at school had teased him last week about turning forty, telling him his body would start falling apart now. And he didn’t doubt it one bit. He had already seen signs of deterioration. He was sure, for instance, that his eyesight wasn’t what it used to be.
Without even thinking about what he was doing and how it would look if anyone saw him, he walked to the living room and picked up the old pair of World War I binoculars and brought them back to the bedroom window. He stood right up next to the blinds and adjusted the binoculars until Celia came into clear focus. Her hair was pulled back behind her ears with a headband, and her mouth was set in a straight line. She held the broom like a baseball bat as she swung it over and over. He couldn’t help wondering if she had ever been on a softball team. If so, he pitied the poor pitcher, trying to hit such a small strike zone.
Yes, it did appear to be a rug, but not a big bulky one. This one looked like one of those woven cotton rugs, and with the binoculars he could even see the colors—maroon, tan, and olive. He tried to remember if it was from her living room, but he couldn’t form a picture of what covered her floor, though he was sure he had looked right at it several times.
His bedroom had two windows, and he moved to the side one now for an even better view. This was the window closest to the Stewarts’ driveway, the one through which he often saw Celia come and go. She was rearranging the rug now, pulling it over a little more, then lighting into it again with the broom. She stopped and walked around to the other side, then started in again on that side, whapping it over and over with the flat side of the broom. Bruce couldn’t see any big clouds of dust flying out, so he wondered why she didn’t just stop and call it a job well done.
But now it looked like she was trying to turn the rug over. She propped the broom against the clothesline pole, then set about very systematically folding the rug back from one end until it was doubled, sliding it over and folding it back a little more until she had it all spread out with the underside on top.
Bruce studied her face again as she picked up the broom to start a new round of beating. He saw her examine the ends of the broom straws first, plucking off . . . what? Stray bits of grass? Rug fibers? She reached up to her forehead and tucked a wisp of hair back under her headband, then positioned herself again like a batter at the plate and lit into the rug anew. What a serious, methodical little person she was. He wondered what she did for fun. He knew she played tennis, but did she consider it fun, or did she approach it like a job?
He watched her move back and forth, top to bottom, pounding each square inch on one side, then coming around to do the other side. Now her back was toward the window as she raised the broom once more. He wondered if she ever had dreams like the ones he had just had, if she ever woke up in a sweat. Did a person like her ever feel as unworthy as he did when he loosed his hold on the concept of God’s grace and let his mind dwell too long on the things he had done in the past? No, she probably had no guilt, no regrets about past relationships with men.
He wondered if she had even had any past relationships with men. What kind of man would succeed at getting through that prickly hedge of . . . he thought for a moment and came up with the term moody arrogance. Surely men had tried before him. After all, she was very pretty—looked sort of like the actress Meg Ryan, only smaller and with sadder eyes. He was certain somebody with her looks would have been pursued by lots of men.
So what kinds of encounters with men did she have in her background that would make her still single? Had she ever given anybody half a chance, or had she told them all to buzz off at the first sign of interest? He doubted that she was forty yet. Milton Stewart had told him earlier this year that Patsy figured her for midthirties. Nope, she’d never been married as far as he knew, Milton had said. Yep, she used to keep company with a right smart number of men, but none of them must have panned out. Seemed like she mostly stuck to herself lately. You can say that again, Bruce had almost said. He couldn’t imagine what it would take to scrabble up the side of that mountain. He sure had no intention himself of ever trying again.
He wondered, though, if she ever thought about being married, ever considered, as he had started doing recently, what a nice thing it might be to have a family of her own. He recalled a line from the video Kimberly had given him for his birthday two days ago—a movie, coincidentally, in which Meg Ryan starred. It was one he hadn’t seen in the theater when it first came out. Videos were one of Kimberly’s favorite things to give him for birthdays and Christmases, mainly because they made easy gifts and she knew how much he liked movies. The only problem was that she sometimes forgot what she had already given him and repeated herself.
Another slight problem was that she usually gave him movies she really liked, which didn’t always translate into movies he wanted in his collection, in which case he could simply slip them into her video cabinet after a couple of months, and she would think they were hers. If she accidentally gave him a duplicate copy of something, he could always take it back and exchange it for something he really wanted. That’s how he had added Empire of the Sun to his collection last Christmas and Room With a View the year before. He didn’t collect movies just for the pleasure of possession, just to see
the number grow. When he selected a new video to buy, it was because he wanted to watch it over and over.
He still wasn’t sure whether he’d keep Kimberly’s most recent gift in his collection, but he had watched it twice in succession last night and had actually enjoyed it both times. Which didn’t necessarily mean automatic acceptance, though. Sometimes a movie could sustain multiple satisfactory viewings but still wouldn’t be something he wanted to own for the rest of his life.
“It’s easier to get killed by a terrorist than to find a husband after the age of forty.” That was the line from the movie that he thought about now as he watched Celia pounding away at the rug. He wondered if she had seen the movie, and if so, if she had laughed at the line. And if she had laughed, had it been because she thought it was truly funny and ridiculous or because she was covering up for the little nagging worry that it might be true? For that matter, was he trying to cover up a worry of his own when he laughed at it? Could it apply to finding a wife as well as a husband?
Of course, the reference to terrorists wasn’t as funny in the post-9/11 years as it probably was when the movie first came out. Sleepless in Seattle—that was the name of it, and though the whole plot was highly improbable, there was a gem of a scene midway through that had made him laugh out loud, when a woman was summarizing the plot of an old Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr movie and she got so emotional she started crying about the heroine’s crippled legs. The two men listening to her followed up with a merciless satire, pretending to weep and blow their noses as they talked about The Dirty Dozen.
* * *
Celia stopped beating the rug all of a sudden and whirled around to look behind her. It looked, in fact, as if she were staring directly at Bruce’s bedroom window, the one where he now stood in his underwear and T-shirt aiming a pair of binoculars at her. He stepped back quickly. Thankfully, he hadn’t raised the blinds. What would Celia say if she saw him spying on her? What in the world had he been thinking? True, it wasn’t quite the same as a peeping-tom situation, with him inside and her outside, but she might not catch the difference.
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