Heading Out to Wonderful

by Robert Goolrick

  They didn’t want to know. They knew Charlie wouldn’t harm Sam, and they assumed they’d been out hunting, or gotten lost tracking one of Charlie’s pieces of land. They didn’t know how to ask the things that were on their mind, so there they were, all locked together, complicit, and nobody said anything to anybody.

  “Say my name again,” she said one day, as Charlie was putting on his shirt.

  “Sylvan,” he said, looking down, then at her. “Sylvan Glass.”

  “He never says my name. I made it up, you know.”

  “I figured. What’s your real name?”

  “Ha. You’ll never know as long as you live, Charlie Beale.” And she ran laughing up the stairs, and they left quickly, just leaving everything scattered around the table, for her to clean up later.

  Sometimes, if it was quick, Charlie would come down and sit at the table with Sam on his lap, reading to him about Donald Duck or Captain America. He would tickle Sam in the ribs when they came to the funny parts, so Sam would know they were funny, and laugh out loud.

  With Captain America, Sam could feel the vibration of Charlie’s deep voice against his small, thin back, and the tingle gave him a certain knowledge of the adventures the masked hero was going through, how close the danger, how great the triumph over evil. Mrs. Glass would sit in the other chair, smoking and reading her magazines, and, once in a while, laughing as Charlie read to Sam.

  Sam hoped she didn’t know that he’d just been kissing the woman on the cover of the magazine she held so loosely in her hand. What if they knew? What if they looked through the floor like magic when it was quiet, and saw him kissing some magazine cover? It scared him. But they never let on; just went on as though they were ignorant, and Sam hoped they were.

  “What do you want for your birthday, Sylvan?” Charlie’s voice was always so soft and kind when he spoke to her, Sam could feel it like a cat’s purr through his back.

  “Nothing you can give me, I guess. He’d know. You can’t hide anything from him. He never gives me anything. He’s got a woman, everybody knows it, twice my age, up in Staunton. Charlotte somebody. He gives her things, I bet. Nice things. A fur coat, maybe. A house. Sometimes he doesn’t get home until ten o’clock. Some nights he doesn’t come home at all. Couple of times, he said he was going to Washington. Staying in a hotel. I bet he takes her. I bet they have fun. She can have him, for all I care.”

  Her voice was wistful, girlish when she spoke. “No, I never had anything. Nothing at all that ever belonged to me.”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “You don’t have to give me anything. You give me enough.”

  “What do I give you?”

  “I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

  They got so used to Sam, they talked as though the boy weren’t even there, as though Sam were as much of a mute, untelling pet as Jackie Robinson. He called her baby, or little girl, and she called him darling in a funny, slow kind of way.

  One morning in late winter, Boaty came in the shop and told Will he was going down to Nags Head fishing with some of the boys for the weekend, drinking and fishing for blues, and Charlie looked up sharply, and, at the end of the day, he carefully packed up some meats, chops and steaks and hamburger.

  “That’s a lot of meat,” Will said quietly, with the voice he used when he was telling Sam not to get too close to the woodstove.

  “I’m going camping this weekend,” Charlie answered quietly, “stay in a tent out down by Natural Bridge.” He was out of there and cleaned up before sundown, and his truck was gone until Sunday morning, and, not that it was any mystery where he really was, Sam worried about him, and about Jackie. He could see in his mind the funny books lying on the kitchen table, the magazine pictures of the women unkissed, and he tried to picture in his mind how Sylvan and Charlie were spending their time together.

  Charlie pulled up in front of his house that Sunday before the sun was up. Sam was the only one who saw him come in, and then Charlie and Jackie Robinson went into his house, and he didn’t come out again until late afternoon. He sat on the porch in a clean white shirt, not even noticing the chill, and he wrote in his diary. He wrote beneath her name: “If she whistled, I would come. If she slapped my face, I would turn the other cheek. I would die for her. I would spend an eternity in hell.”

  He looked like a boy of eighteen. His heart raced like a man in the full headstrong freefall of love.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  HE BOUGHT A house, another house. This one was out past the slaughterhouse, beyond the reach and eyes of the town, an old farmhouse that was set in the middle of a wild thick grove of old maples. Saturdays and Sundays, he would drive out there alone and fix it up, putting in a new woodstove, plumbing a whole bathroom with the help of Carl Hostetter, and putting in a new water heater, and filling it with furniture he bought at the auctions, except this time he went all by himself. Whenever he saw something she might like, he bought it. The fancier it was, the more likely he was to buy it, thinking of her. He didn’t care about the price, just kept his hand in the air until everybody else dropped out.

  When it was all done, he walked down to the courthouse, and he signed the deed over to her. It was completely secret. You could still do that then. You could just say not to put it in the newspaper, and nobody would ever know. The clerk of the court was an honest spinster with an eternal yearning for handsome young men, and Charlie wrote “Do Not Publish” on the deed while she watched, and she honored that, as he knew she would. Anybody could have looked it up, but nobody ever did.

  He gave her the deed for her birthday. She was twenty by then. He put a blue ribbon around it. He met her there, hidden by the dense grove of trees, and carried her across the threshold on the first Wednesday in May. It was the only floor she ever walked on where every board on which she put her foot was hers.

  It was enough, that first time, to walk through the house, room by room, holding hands, while Sam and Jackie Robinson sat on the porch, listening to the birds in the greening trees, and watching them through the windows as they strolled from room to room and Sylvan touched every chair, every table, picked up every piece of china.

  It was just an old farmhouse filled with used furniture and bits of other people’s lives, but it was hers, the first thing she’d ever owned. She gave the house a name. She called it Pickfair, because she’d been to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’s house in Hollywood.

  They went there every chance they got. Every Wednesday, when he went to the slaughterhouse and did his work, afterward he would find her there, waiting to cook up the pork chops or the steaks he had brought, cornbread cooling on the counter.

  And then bed, while the boy sat at the table with his funny books and Jackie Robinson dug holes in the yard. It was always quick, and it was never enough, but it was all they had, and, for a while, all they needed.

  Most Saturdays, Boaty would go off on one of his trips, to fish or to hunt in his inept way, never coming home with anything, unless some other man took pity on him and gave him some trout or a rabbit. When Boaty was gone for a whole day, and Charlie had no work, they had more time.

  Charlie would wait until he saw Boaty’s big car glide out of town, and then he would take the dog and get the boy, fishing rods or gun in hand, and he would drive straight to where he knew she would be waiting. Will and Alma thought the fresh air did Sam good; he always came home tired and red-cheeked. They began to notice more and more, though, that these expeditions produced nothing in the way of a catch.

  They never went fishing. They never saw a deer. They saw the inside of Pickfair. Sylvan was always waiting, dressed like a movie star. She met them at the door as though greeting royalty, and her lovely laugh and her strange, rounded accent brought them into the house.

  The day passed, Sam in the company of Donald Duck or Captain America, Jackie Robinson at his feet, pacing silently around the kitchen, nosing for bugs, Sylvan and Charlie waited less and less time until they vanishe
d into the darkness of the sitting room and up the stairs, where Sam could hear them moving about as though dancing, but only for a while, and then silence, silence and cookies and comic books.

  Charlie and Sylvan enveloped him with their warmth and their breathy voices and something else he couldn’t name, something about the way they looked, as though they had been waiting for something, as though the thing they had waited for all along had finally arrived, and then they went upstairs and left him alone, to talk, he figured, about grownup things, things a boy wouldn’t know or understand. Sometimes Sam felt that the thing they had been waiting for all along was him, and it made a kind of warmth in his heart.

  They left him, and they left him with books and cookies and a dog, but they left him with no instructions, and sometimes he didn’t know how to pass the hours. He would try to read, to figure out the words, or he would sit on the porch in one of the rockers, while Jackie ran around the yard and chased squirrels.

  He thought of his own mother and father. He thought of how they never left him alone for more than five minutes, how they were always with him to make him laugh or understand one new thing about the world, one thing which suddenly occurred to him as though he had never noticed it before, the hunger to know how something worked, where the voices came from on the radio, who those people were and how they lived. Where the light came from when the night got dark.

  And he thought of Charlie and Sylvan. He felt something for them he couldn’t name, something beautiful, but he couldn’t tell what it was. He felt safe. Nothing bad would ever happen to him when Charlie was around; even if he was in some part of the house to which Sam had never been asked, Charlie was there, his big hand, his sharp, short whistle that he had promised to teach Sam someday calling Jackie in from the yard. He wanted to learn that whistle.

  There was so much he wanted to know. He didn’t know when it started, but suddenly everything came into focus, and, at the same time, everything was mysterious. Everything worked, somehow, but he didn’t know how, and his mother and father would sit with him, and explain it in ways that he didn’t even begin to understand.

  Sometimes, it was enough just to know that they knew, even if he didn’t understand. He’d ask the same questions over and over, sometimes for days on end, and sometime his father would say, “Damn, Sam, you asked me that yesterday and the day before.” But his mother would never do that, not even once, so she’d show him how the bread got all puffy when you left the dough in a warm place on the stove, or she’d sit and watch while that old beetle crawled its way slowly across the porch and tell him how many legs it had and what it ate for dinner when it got home.

  “Where did I come from?”

  She had him on her lap, her sleepy child.

  “I’ve told you.”

  “Tell me again. I like hearing it.”

  “You came from heaven.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “I got all big and fat and puffy and then you popped out.”

  “Out of where?”

  “Out of my stomach.”

  “Why did you get all fat and puffy?”

  “Because I was waiting for you. I was waiting for you for a long time. So was your father.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Yes, Sam. It hurt.”

  “For a long time?”

  “No, darling.”

  “How old was I?”

  “You were zero.”

  “What did you do, when I came out?”

  “I sang, ‘Happy Birthday to you . . .’ ”

  “How old am I now?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Silly, I’m five. You were at my birthday. But I’ll be six soon. You know that, right?”

  “Right.”

  “How many days is five?”

  She thought for a minute. “One thousand eight hundred and twenty-five. Twenty-six. Leap year.”

  “And how many is six?”

  Every question opening up to another one. What year leap?

  “Three hundred and sixty-five more than five. And you know what happens on every one of those days? You go to bed. And it’s time for you to go to bed again.”

  Sometimes he couldn’t go to sleep for a long time. It seemed as though he were climbing a long staircase, each step a question, until he stepped off the last step and into the darkness, surprised, every morning, and glad, that he was in his bed, in his room, his mother’s hand on his hair, her kiss on his forehead the minute he opened his eyes. And the minute he saw the light, he couldn’t remember the questions that had led him up and up and into the darkness.

  Usually, sitting with Captain America, or out in the yard, watching Jackie Robinson rooting around, he had a million questions, about what made it hot, or cold, or where the long trail of ants led to, where they lived and what they ate. Why was it that, for him, nothing moved in winter but everything moved in summer, but for Jackie Robinson, in any season, there was always something moving, something happening he couldn’t see? But he wasn’t here to ask questions. He knew that his questions weren’t part of it. Not here. Not with them off in the house wherever they were. No, his part in this was to wait, and he did, always, so by the time Charlie reappeared, tucking his shirt into his pants, his shoes in hand, he’d forgotten what he meant to ask.

  One day, a slaughter day, so it was getting to be dusk already, about six weeks after they had first started coming to Pickfair, he was in the yard and he forgot that part of the bargain. He forgot he was supposed to stay outside. He forgot that they went up the stairs and into that place where he was not supposed to go.

  It was rainy. He was tired. Jackie Robinson had run off after something, a rabbit, a turkey, some one of the thousand scents he was always chasing, and Sam forgot that his end of the bargain was to wait. Just to wait.

  He wanted to go home. He suddenly wanted his mother and his father and his own house, more than anything in the world, more than cookies or funny books.

  So he went in the house, into the warmth and the light and the just-baked smell of the kitchen, and he wanted to know where they were, so he could tell Charlie, so he could tell him that he was sorry, but he had to go home now.

  He listened, but there was no noise. He wandered the rooms of the downstairs of the house, rooms with no lights on, so that he could barely make things out, and they weren’t there. They were upstairs, where he’d never been. Then he started to get scared.

  He had had a dream, once. It was a bad one, and he woke up, and he wasn’t in his own room any more. He was alone in the dark in a strange house and something had happened, something bad. Something bad had happened, his father had died, or his mother, or they had decided they didn’t want him any more, and they had wrapped him in blankets in the night and taken him somewhere else, and left him there.

  He had started to cry, very softly, because he was so afraid in this new house, afraid of the people he would meet in the morning, new people, people who didn’t know him or know how to take care of him. But he didn’t make any noise when he cried, because he didn’t want to wake the new people, whoever they were, wherever they slept.

  So he lay awake all night, until the first gray started to lighten the black of the night, until the frames of the windows, unfamiliar, oddly placed, began to come into view. The gray began to turn a pale pink, and he closed his eyes because he didn’t want to know, didn’t want it to start. He didn’t open his eyes again until he could feel the pink turn to a soft orange and he knew he couldn’t put it off any longer, and so he opened his eyes, slowly, slowly, just a crack, so afraid, and saw the windows and the curtains and the wallpaper, and they were strangely familiar and completely different at the same time.

  The table by his bed was at his feet, the same lamp with the paper shade, right next to the board where his mother heaped up pillows for his head as she read to him before sleep came.

  And then he knew. He was upside down in his bed, backward. In his bad dreaming, he had somehow turned around, s
o his feet were at the headboard of his bed, it was crazy and backward, but it was his room, his own room in his own house, his own pillows and blankets.

  Nothing had happened. Everything would be just the same today as it was yesterday. Nobody had died in the night and he hadn’t been bundled up and delivered into the hands of strangers.

  But it could have happened. He knew that, and he never forgot it. It could have happened. As safe as he was, he was never completely safe, and never would be, and he felt that now, wandering the neat, empty rooms of a house at twilight, everything there but ghostly, Charlie and Sylvan somewhere and he needed Charlie here, now, and he needed to go home.

  So he did something he’d never done, never been asked to do. He climbed the stairs to the second floor, and looked down the hall at the neat rug and the four closed doors and he opened them one by one, each swinging into a neat, spare, empty room, all but the last, which he opened, sure, now, that he would find the same clean emptiness, but he didn’t; he found something. He found them.

  It was the only room with a light on, a glow from a lamp that was a painted figure of a Japanese lady in a flowing patterned dress that came down to her tiny feet, with a silk lampshade floating above her elaborate black hair, and he saw the lamp and knew that he would never forget it, and he saw that the light from the lamp was shining on the immense skin of two grown people, a man and a woman, Charlie and Sylvan with no clothes on, the only grown people he had ever seen naked, and he knew he would never forget that, either.

  Charlie was on top of her, his face buried in the side of her neck, and the skin of his back was glistening with sweat, every muscle tight, his neck, his shoulders, his back, everything taut and strong and the color of a rose, a dusty red rose, and there was hair beneath his arms, dark and tangled with sweat and his forearms were strong, and slick, and even his hands, strong, tight, although they lay with such gentleness on her skin, hardly touching her at all. He was on her, skin to skin, body to body, and still he seemed to be floating, stringing and unstringing like a crossbow on top of her, completely covering without even touching.