Another Perfect Catastrophe

by Brad Barkley

  “Good enough.” He nods and we look at each other, then the TV, the faces moving their mouths.

  “You can take me out, though,” I finally say.

  “Kinda late for a drive.”

  “I want to see them,” I say. “Together in that house. I want to look in the living room window and see them sitting on the couch, like you two, holding hands.” I rub my mouth with my fingers. “I think I need to see that.”

  He clicks off the TV and Wendy stirs a little, mutters in her sleep. “I think you like the idea of seeing that,” he says. “Two hours afterward, you’ll feel like an idiot.”

  “I can go by myself,” I say.

  Ten minutes later we’re in the Corvette moving through the night toward a subdivision named Rolling Hills. Dad is driving, smoking another of the cigars he had all but given up since he pretended to have cancer. When we finally find the right address, the house is dark and still. On the side porch is one of those ultraviolet bug-zapping lights. We sit in the dark with the engine idling, the house quiet and sleeping, the bug light giving off an electric buzz every few seconds. The watercolorist has a mailbox shaped like a red barn, a canoe strapped to his Volvo. A patch of dandelions grows beneath his drier vent. There is nothing to see.

  “You’re right,” I say. “Not even two hours, and I feel like an idiot.”

  “Not much to it, is there?” He pats my knee. “There never is.”

  I shake my head. “Let’s go home.”

  We take off down the quiet streets, and Dad reaches under the seat between his legs and then plugs in a cassette tape of Irish music, filling the close car with flutes and guitar. As he taps his fingers on the dash, it occurs to me that what I know of him is just some little edge of who he actually is, a tiny percentage of him. In all the photos I have from childhood, my father is always a blur, jumping into the frame at the last second, or out of it, the top of his head or side of his face cut off. He is like that still, always.

  “What I want to know,” he says suddenly, “is why you two never had a kid. That might’ve been the glue you needed.”

  “I wanted to wait until I got away from the community college, landed a real teaching job.” I shrug. “In its own clock-punching, dental-plan way, it is real, I guess. And I wish we had now, so there’d be some connection. This way, everything is so damn clean. She packs, and she’s gone.”

  He nods but doesn’t answer. I notice that while I’ve been talking he’s gone past the Braddock Road exit and is heading toward Cherry Hill Road, toward the ark.

  “All right, what’s with you and all this Noah stuff?” I say. “Have you gone religious on me?”

  He waves the back of his hand, then looks at his cigar and tosses it out the window. “Nah, nothing like that, son. I just like the way the story’s lasted so long. I mean, it’s how old? God knows. One website pegged the thing on the Babylonians and those other guys, the Sumerians, and here we are in the space age, telling it all over again with steel and cement.”

  I don’t bother pointing out to him that we are about thirty years past the space age. “The eternal verities,” I say.

  “And what’s that, professor?”

  “Faulkner, talking about eternal truths.”

  He frowns. “Hell, I don’t give a tinker’s damn about the truth. And I don’t care if it’s a story or a good lie or a fairy tale or what have you. The longevity of it—that’s your meat and potatoes.”

  He looks over at me, to see if this has made an impression. “Besides,” he says, “those bastards today wouldn’t give us a fair look.”

  “And?”

  “I want to see it. Up close.”

  “It’s trespassing, Dad. We could get in real trouble.”

  “Doctors gave up on the radiation treatments two months ago. I’m supposed to care about trouble?”

  I shake my head, look out the window into the dark. “Dad…”

  “Did you make that phone call, Billy? To Snelson?”

  “Nope.”

  “You going to?” I see him looking at me, cutting his eyes.

  I think about this while he slides up to the top of the exit and does not even slow down for the stop sign, swinging out onto the narrow road. The napkin with Dr. Snelson’s beeper number is still folded away inside my pocket. I wonder if anybody ever once called my father’s bluff, over anything. But no matter what news I get from the doctor, dialing that number will mean either that I don’t believe my father’s truth or I don’t buy into his bullshit. I don’t know which would wound him deeper. “I’m not sure,” I tell him. He starts to say something else, then changes his mind.

  The reds and browns of the structural steel are all rendered black against the deep blue of the night sky. We get out and walk toward the ark, the only light a yellow bulb, no brighter than a nightlight, on the side of the construction trailer. The path turns from gravel to mud, my shoes sinking in. Down across the hill from us, sparse traffic slips along the highway, the truckers gearing down for the long climb into the mountain.

  Dad braces his foot against the bottom scaffolding and begins hauling himself up in slow steps. “You know the part that gets me?” he says, looking down at me. “He was in the damn desert.”

  I start my own climb, the rust on the iron bars scaling my palms. “I think the part that gets you is that nobody believed him, and he was right, and everyone that doubted him met a horrible death.”

  He laughs. “Yeah, that, too.”

  By now he is puffing hard, his legs above me quivering. We walk out and sit on one of the girders, not at the top, but high enough to make me nervous. Off in the distance I can see the lights of the next town, a faint glow rising up. We sit side-by-side, dangling our legs over, like the men earlier with their lunch pails. When the wind blows, even lightly, the whole structure shakes a little.

  “I know what you’d like,” my father says.

  “What’s that?”

  “If it started raining right now.”

  I laugh out loud. “True, I’m a sucker for easy irony.”

  “You know Noah put the bigger animals—your elephants, your camels, what have you—on the lower levels. That way he eliminated the need for ballast. Pretty damn brainy.”

  “Uh-huh. Where are you getting this stuff?”

  “Told you, from websites. All these nuts still looking for ‘the real Noah’s Ark.’ One of them’s an astronaut. They’re missing the point.” He raises the collar of his Corvette jacket, shivering a little.

  “Which is?”

  “Validation. We all want stories told about us a long time after we’re gone. We all want to be Noah, or his ark.”

  “True ones or lies…doesn’t matter, huh?”

  He taps my thigh with his fist. “You got it, bub.”

  “Speaking of stories, why don’t you tell me once and for all about the cancer?”

  “I had my say, junior.” He takes another cigar and the Zippo from his pocket, unwraps the cellophane, and lets it fall away. “You’ve still got that number, don’t you? Or did you lose it already?”

  I pull the napkin from my jeans and unfold it. He frowns, nods.

  “And how about you, once and for all?” he says. “You plan to keep phoning that girl? My vote is cease and desist.”

  The night is cloudless, faint stars visible above the lights from the surrounding towns. Laney used to take us far away from the lights, out into the country near Pigeon Creek, down washed-out dirt roads where we could watch the smear of stars away from the lights of town, where I would ask her to name them for me, over and over. I would tell her that those nights were the reason she majored in astronomy. By now, I imagine, she has pasted stars to the watercolorist’s ceiling and has named the constellations for him, charming him with reruns.

  “That’s pretty much done with,” I say. “But I do have another call to make.”

  He glances down at the paper, jams the cigar in his mouth, lights it. “You know, Billy, I’m thinking I ought to head out t
omorrow,” he says. “Drop Wendy off where I found her, then find my way north.”

  “I have to call Kenny Pecora.” I take his lighter from him, the chrome case still warm, and flick it, the flame swirling blue and yellow. My father’s face draws down with confusion.

  “Who the hell is Kenny Pecora?” he asks, still eyeing the napkin.

  “Student of mine,” I say. “He looks like Teddy Roosevelt.” My father watches me as he puffs his cigar.

  We sit, quiet, gripping the steel girders in a cloud of early autumn chill and cigar smoke, the lighter burning my fingers, our legs touching, dangling. It is this image of us I will recall seven months later, in the minutes after the phone finally rings on my desk at work and it is Dr. Snelson calling me, his words circling back like the answer to a question sent out that night: how I held the edge of the napkin in the flame, how the igniting brightened our faces, how I let it go and we watched as the paper fell, carried on faint breezes, burning down and down into the dark water that surrounds us all.

  The Properties of Stainless Steel

  A single tree dominates our backyard, a tall white oak full of squirrel nests, the top flashing a Mylar balloon that settled in a few years ago. It’s one of those twin trees, the base split into two trunks grown up in a big V shape. I used to imagine making a slingshot of it, between the trunks, halfway up, taking aim on Winston-Salem and pelting them with baseballs, apples, cans of tuna fish. This big, unsolved mystery, the sky raining garbage, and me lurking at the bottom of it all. But those ideas wither away after Rhonda begins her habit of gazing out the kitchen screen door while she chain-smokes, pondering that tree and its separate trunks. I know what she’s up to in her mind. We used to talk about fitting a treehouse between those split trunks, how I would nail it up for a birthday surprise. Now I think Rhonda just sees the tree as us, sees it as everything that our first counseling session taught us was wrong with our marriage. I’ve thought of pointing out that the tree at its root is still connected, despite the split, but she would have no interest in hearing me try to explain her private notions.

  Before we left Family Services that first Wednesday, our counselor, Dr. Goodwin, told Rhonda and me that our “homework” was to find a common interest. Dr. Goodwin looked at us with her sad, practiced smile, the table beside our couch stacked with Kleenex dispensers and board games designed to coax different groups into talking about their troubles. One of the games, its cardboard box torn and faded, was called 1 … 2 … 3 … 12 Step! Another was Count on Me! I was thinking they were probably the kinds of games where everyone wins, and wondering just what the hell that’s supposed to teach anybody, when Dr. Goodwin interrupted my thoughts. She told Rhonda and me that we should search for ways to spend unstructured time together. Finding something you both like, she said, will keep you from healing in different directions. I nodded and said nothing, thinking that was our problem already: too much in common, nearly all of it sadness. Rhonda started the silent crying she did so easily after the months of practice, tears marking her face but not a sound from her. The way an actress cries on the screen, I thought. Only this was no acting. It was the baby we didn’t have anymore. Or it was me, never sad enough or the right way to suit her. She turned away. We sat, the three of us, trapped in our silences, in the fourth silence which had brought us all together here. We said nothing, as if waiting for the skies to begin their mysterious rain.

  The next morning Rhonda found—in the newspaper, the way you’d find a missing dog—our common interest.

  “Folk dancing,” she said. She laid the paper on the kitchen table and tapped it with her finger. “The Lower Cape Fear Dance Society presents. Live band, wooden floor…this is the one, Curt.”

  “What one?”

  “Our together thing. Folk dancing.”

  “So we save our marriage by dancing to fiddle music.” I half laughed. “Think Dr. Goodwin will write us a prescription?”

  She watched me with those tired eyes. “It’s not a joke, Curt. We mess up this marriage, it can’t be repaired. We’re all we have anymore.”

  I nodded, reminding myself how well I knew this woman, how I could recognize the sound of her footsteps in a crowded mall. “So we just find a common interest at random.” I shrugged. “Just open the paper and grab one.”

  “Planning has gotten us here,” she said. “I’m willing to try a blind stab or two.”

  The dance is Saturday night in an old building next to the junior high where they used to store lawn mowers. The inside has a dusty wooden floor, ceiling fans, and a string band of two men with beards and a woman wearing a top hat. We’ve come early, for the five-dollar lessons. Our instructor is this little troll of a guy named Phil, with rainbow suspenders holding up his hiking shorts. He wears muddy boots and a ponytail; he has bad skin. I know I would not even hire this guy for my cleaning crew, but I don’t say anything. This is Rhonda’s night, and I intend to go along.

  Phil shows us all the moves we have to know before the caller starts the first dance. We learn do-si-do and allemande and promenade. We learn cast-off and handy-hand. We stay in motion, and I start to like it okay. The people there are not what I expected, not the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans types in neckerchiefs and puffy skirts, but all these aging hippies like you see at the Arts Fest in the park downtown, braless women with big silver earrings, and men with sideburns and Jesus sandals. I feel out of place in my striped golf shirt and blue jeans, which Rhonda ironed for me with a crease down the front. But she thinks I look handsome and that’s good enough.

  She squeezes my hand while we try the most basic step, balance and swing. We spin each other into dizziness while Phil keeps shouting for everyone to use that centrifugal force, to lean back into each other’s grip.

  “Give weight!” he says. “Give weight, give weight!” He keeps hovering over us, touching our shoulders and arms. My back is sweaty, and Phil is getting on my nerves. My feet feel clumsy, dumb.

  “Please try to like this,” Rhonda says, anxious about me.

  “I like it fine,” I say, and she smiles at me, squeezes my hand again.

  “No, no, no, no, NO!” Phil runs up behind me. His name tag slips from suspenders and flutters to the floor. “Not ring-around-the-rosie,” he says to me. Everybody laughs and I feel my ears warm. “Give your weight, and keep your inside foot planted, like a pivot in basketball.”

  “You want to go a little one-on-one?” I say. It’s my turn to get a laugh, though I hadn’t meant to. Rhonda laughs, too, and this feels good to me, this getting along. It has been a while, and the arguments have gotten progressively stupid, the last one because I’d thrown a July Fourth barbeque for my work crew and their girlfriends, and late that night we’d poured vodka into the dog’s dish (Bixby, Rhonda’s husky), then laughed as he teetered around and walked into the kitchen cabinets. Rhonda did not find this funny in the least, and neither did I the next morning when the memory of it sank through layers of my wounded skull, but it was too late for apology. The general theme of all our arguments has been my lack of sympathy, not just for her but for us, for myself. When the baby died early last year, I went looking for reasons: Rhonda kept smoking the first month; she hadn’t always taken her vitamins; I hadn’t watched over her enough; my small floor cleaning business didn’t take in enough to let her quit her job. Any of these seemed likely, but they seemed to Rhonda only like blame. What I still want somebody to explain to me is the difference between cause and blame—where do those two part company?

  Soon enough I get the hang of balance and swing, and when the music kicks in for our first practice dance, I fall right in. Dance feels good in my bones, like work except you’d never have cause to curse it. I’m glad enough not to be at work, to let my crew polish the floors themselves for one night. We get locked in every night at Kmart to sweep and wax the floors, vacuum the carpeted areas. Once the manager throws home the front bolt, there is no way out of the building. My crew finishes the job quickly, working like sled dogs, so as t
o have the bulk of the night off to raid the snack bar, turn on the TVs in the appliance department, crank up the stereos, ride bicycles through the aisles.

  I stand off to one side while Phil borrows Rhonda to demonstrate for everybody the right way to execute a California twirl. He spins her fast so her blue cotton skirt swirls out and up past her knees, giving us all a glimpse of her pretty legs, sturdy in their low heels, and when she stops, the skirt swirls and wraps up around her thighs, then settles back. This is a thing I like to see, this glimpse of my wife’s legs as if they are someone else’s. When the demo ends, everyone claps. She pushes a strand of hair off her forehead and blushes with the heat and attention, smiling.

  “All right, now. We’re doing great, folks,” Phil says, drunk on his own false cheer. I feel like reminding him he’s getting paid for this, that “folks” is not a word anybody uses anymore.

  While the band retunes, we get ourselves paper cups of water out of the cooler. People file in the door, pulling the cold in behind them, snuffing off their coats, blowing into their hands. I imagine this place from the outside, how inviting it must look: a tiny building set off in the cold, giving off its light and heat and music. When we arrived, I hadn’t noticed this.

  The band members introduce themselves while the folding chairs along the walls fill up with people, many of them old ladies dressed up in dangling earrings and carrying beaded purses, wearing smudges of rouge, like this is their big night on the town.

  “I feel sorry for them,” Rhonda says after I point them out to her. “Hoping to meet Mr. Right.” She smiles a little.

  “At this point, most of their Mr. Rights are probably dead and buried.”

  Rhonda’s smile vanishes. “You are just so cold sometimes, Curt,” she says. “Those women are lonely.”

  But I know it is not my joke as much as it is my mention of the word: death. It is something we are supposed to have silently agreed to banish from our vocabularies, ignoring the black gash it has torn through our lives. Sometimes it’s like a meteor has ripped through our house, left huge holes in the roof and floor, and we step around them, ignoring the rain that pours in, the cold, the weeds growing into our living room. Just keep stepping around.