“Hungry, Bob?” I said.
He started, then got himself together and scratched his bare belly.
“Misplaced something,” he said, stifling a yawn. “Thought the wife might have thrown it out by mistake.”
Bob was closing in on fifty, had a horseshoe fringe of hair around his skull like a monk. I liked Bob because he moved to the neighborhood after my parents had died. He didn’t know anything about me, except that I was his neighbor, an attorney, respectable by all appearances.
When his family first moved to town, he came to my door and said that they didn’t know anyone around here, but he had to list three local emergency names and numbers for his children’s school. He wanted to know if I would mind if he listed me. His wife had sent along a devil’s food cake, and he said they’d thought I looked like a nice-enough guy. I told him nothing would make me happier. I invited him in for a beer and we talked about football, about hunting and fishing. We toed the floor with our shoes. After a while, his children, two boys and a girl, showed up with news that dinner was ready. The children rushed past me and clutched their father, pulling him to the door. Duty calls, he said, and that seemed like the most perfect exit line in the world.
“What about you?” he said. “You wouldn’t be interested in a drink this time of night would you? I’m buying.” He pulled a pint of bourbon from the big pocket on his robe, shook it beside his ear like he was trying to determine the contents of a Christmas package.
Bob was from Indiana or Iowa or someplace, came to Alabama to take a vice president’s job at the paper plant. The two of us sat on the curb in the warm darkness and passed the bottle back and forth. A car made the curve in front of the house, a little too slow for this time of night, and both of us eyed it past, making sure the driver understood that one or two of us were still awake, still wary. I said, “Your boy have anything to do with that mess at the Caldwells’?”
“If he did, he’s not talking.”
I nodded and scratched my stomach, the way Bob had. A soft breeze moved past us. I felt good. That breeze was mine once it crossed the property line. It belonged to me. I could still smell Delia on my hands and in my clothes. I was wondering if a future was possible for the two of us, and at the time, it seemed as plausible and preposterous as anything else.
I said, “Are you happy, Bob?”
“Sure,” he said, matter of fact, like I’d asked him a reasonable question. “I got the wife, got the kids, got the job. I’m happy enough.”
He swigged and handed me the bottle. Just the smell of it, faintly sweet and mediciney, was enough to make my stomach clench, but I muscled down another mouthful anyway. I said, “You and your wife ever have any problems?”
“How do you mean?” he said.
“I mean big stuff.”
“That’s a mighty personal question, my friend,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said. “You don’t have to answer.”
“It’s okay.” He took the bottle and drank, bubbles rising toward the bottom. He wheezed and said, “Smooooth,” then capped it and handed it back. For a moment he didn’t say anything, just looked toward the golf course. Someone had forgotten to bring in one of the orange flags from the green, and it flitted drowsily in the meager breeze. Bob said, “To tell the truth, there’s not much in the way of big stuff. We have our troubles, sure, but nothing we can’t handle. We’ve got a few tricks for keeping it interesting.”
I looked at him. He made a devious, clacking sound with his tongue and gave me a wink. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying, Bob?” I said.
“A little state trooper and the distressed motorist,” he said. “A little Caesar and the emperor’s wench. Never hurt anybody. The wife’s got a costume. That kind of material that you think you can see through but you can’t, sexy as hell. I got the hair for that Caesar action.” He chuckled and tapped his head, indicating his fringe of hair. “You should see me in a toga.”
“You old dog,” I said.
“Hey, buddy,” he said, “I was doing the slap and tickle before you were pecker-high to a Chihuahua.”
I gave him a laugh. Bob was hell on the one-liners. “Look at that,” he said, elbowing me and pointing with the bottle. I looked where he wanted me to look. At first, I didn’t see anything, just the moonlight playing on the fairway across from us. But gradually, I picked up a shimmer of motion, then the ghost of a shape. Someone was moving around on the sixteenth fairway. I watched the figure walking back and forth, slowly, clumsily, like they couldn’t see where they were going, and then I recognized her. It was Betty Fowler and her divining rod.
“She’s out late tonight,” Bob said.
“Crazy Betty,” I said, taking the bottle when he offered.
The bourbon was kicking in, the world taking on a sort of sheen. I lay back on the yard, stretched my feet into the road. Dew was already starting to settle, tiny diamonds on the grass. Bob’s wife was pretty in her way, stocky and solid, and I pictured him chasing her around the house, wiggling his fingers like a madman, saying “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” I laughed out loud at that, and Bob laughed too, like he knew what I was thinking. I thought of Delia at home, wondered if she could hear us out there. Above me, the sky was pricked with white stars. My father had stood with me in this very same yard and taught me the constellations. I remembered his voice, knowing and strong. I remembered his hands, one on my shoulder, the other pointing skyward. I wondered, suddenly, if he had known what he was talking about. None of the constellations looked like what he’d said they were—Andromeda, Orion’s Belt, Cassiopeia. They didn’t look like anything to me. Random arrangements of heavenly bodies, pale light, molten gas.
“You believe in magic, Bob?” I said.
“Like what?” he said. “Are we still talking about romance?”
“The real thing.” I sat up and rubbed my face with both hands. “Spells and hexes and shit. Divining for gold.”
“Let me know when you’re getting ready to change the subject next time,” he said. “Give me a second to prepare.”
There was a split rail fence bordering the golf course and Bob walked over, loosened the drawstring on his pajama pants, and pissed on a post. On his way back, he stopped in the middle of the street, did a long look around. He said, “I’ll tell you something. There’s a lot of stuff in this world we don’t know the first thing about. Not the first damn thing.”
He slapped his round stomach affectionately, told me that he needed to be getting on to bed, and moved off in the direction of his house. He gave the garbage can one more look on his way inside.
“You never find anything in the trash,” he said.
“Hope it wasn’t something important.”
He shook his head. “Nothing I can’t live without.” He started up the gently sloping driveway to his house, his slippers tapping against his heels.
I said, “Good night, Bob.”
And he said, “Good night, Simon. Sleep well,” his voice different all of a sudden, tender and settling, a voice accustomed to soothing nightmares.
A Diviner’s Guide
Betty Fowler saw him in her sleep. There was no gunshot in her dream, just Simon falling back and away, suspended in mid-air, like a trick of levitation. Except in her dream, he never touched the ground. He hovered like mist. Betty waved the divining rod, first over his chest, then under his back, the way a magician shows that there are no strings attached. The grass pushed up beneath her feet, snaking around her ankles, her knees, her thighs, like she had been standing there for years and her life was playing itself out on time-elapsed film. In the dream, it was important that he didn’t fall, because as long as he stayed above the earth, he was still alive. His arms dangled backward, his legs bent slightly at the knee, his neck curved gracefully toward the ground. He looked at her, then, dream light flickering on his face, as if through a ceiling fan, and said, “I’d like to tell you a story, Mrs. Fowler, if you have the time.”
When sh
e woke, she was dry-mouthed and agitated. She’d been troubled by the same vision every night since his death. Moonlight shifted through her curtains, drawing shadows on the wall. Her bedroom was in the back of the house, perfectly silent, far enough from the street that she didn’t even have the sounds of the living world to keep her company. She wished idly that she owned a television, anything to provide a little color and distraction. Lacking that, she turned on the nightstand lamp and picked up her book and flipped to a page at random:
To make a divining rod find a Y-shaped fork of any pliant wood, usually hazel or hawthorn. Cut the branch just below the base of the fork and grip it loosely with the ends across your palms, palms facing the sky. Hold the rod with the tip pointing horizontally away from your body. Rest your mind on the task at hand. Picture the object that you seek. See this thing floating, like a white star against a field of the deepest black, the ether of nothingness between planets. Follow your blood. Your bones know things that you don’t know.
After her husband died, she had gone to the public library to research the subject, and this is what she found. A Diviner’s Guide, cloth-backed and worn along the spine. It was still sitting on her bedside table, eight years overdue. Lizbeth Mackey down at the library had stopped calling to remind her sometime during the first year. Mrs. Fowler had promised herself that as soon as she found her husband’s gold, she would return the book and pay the fines in full, no matter the cost. Every day for eight years, she had crossed the road to the golf course and walked the fairway, exactly as the book described, holding the rod with both hands, waiting for her bones to give her a sign. But neither her bones nor the divining rod had anything to tell her. Then one night not more than a month ago, she had stopped pacing long enough to catch her breath and was standing at the fringe of the sixteenth green when she heard a voice say, “Any luck?”
She thought at first that her divining rod had learned to speak, but the book didn’t say anything about that. She cocked her head and listened, the night full of insect noises. She didn’t hear anything else.
“Did you say something?” she asked the divining rod.
“I wondered if you were having any luck. You’re out late tonight.”
She recalled another passage from A Diviner’s Guide:
Divining works on the level of intuition. Some experts attribute the jerking of the rod to cryptesthesia, some to divine or devilish inspiration, others to unconscious muscular activity, “sympathy,” they call it, between the diviner and the object. One thing that is generally agreed upon is that the rod is not a magic talisman in itself, so much as a conduit for forces at work within the diviner, forces which will lead him in the direction he or she is already inclined, destined even, to go.
After a long, careful moment, she decided that, assuming her divining rod had discovered a voice, despite the book’s certainty that it would not, it wouldn’t need to ask her about her search. It would in fact be telling her the way to go. Warily, she opened her eyes, and there in the darkness, his hands stuffed into his pockets, was Simon Bell.
“Are you going to hurt me?” she said.
“No, ma’am,” he said. His eyes went wide and he held his palms up between them, the way a magician shows that he has nothing up his sleeves. “I was just curious. I was sitting over there on the curb with Bob Robinson.” He pointed back across the street. “I was wondering how it worked, that’s all.”
“There’s a little girl who throws pinecones at me,” she said. “One time she pushed me in the water hazard when I wasn’t looking. She hides back in the trees and speaks to me in the most profane language. I don’t even know what she’s saying half the time.”
“You know who it is?”
“No,” she said. “But I’ll find out.”
Mrs. Fowler looked at Simon Bell, his face ashen in the moonlight. She had watched him grow up just a few doors down, had gone to the funerals of both his parents. His mother had always been kind to her, bringing around Christmas wreaths to hang on her door and inviting her to parties on the Fourth of July. His father had been a friend of her husband. The two of them would sit out on the sleeping porch and play cards now and then, or they’d just stand in the street and tell each other the lies that men told. Simon was the perfect blending of the two of them, she thought. He had his mother’s narrow face and high cheekbones, his father’s widow’s peak and brow. She had a feeling about him, at that moment, as though they might understand something about each other, as though they shared a secret grief.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “I’ll show you how it works, if you’ll do something for me, too.”
“What’s that?” he said.
“I want you to teach me foul language,” she said. “My whole life I’ve been going around acting like a lady. The next time that little girls speaks ill to me, I want to give her an earful she won’t forget.”
Now, she closed the book and walked over to the window. She could see his house, a blocky shadow against the night, could hear his voice, a distant echo of her dream. Good night, he was saying, good night. She’d always had a gift for catching the idle murmurs of the dead. Her husband still spoke to her across miles of time and space, his voice blending with the living memories of all the ghosts in the world. He’d been an amateur magician, her husband, and she had an attic full of conjurer’s props—a top hat with a secret panel inside, a wand that would produce flowers at its tip—all ordered from catalogs and the back pages of magazines, simple tricks with hardly enough magic in them to fool a child. It was her husband who showed her how to make a silver dollar disappear. He’d had the idea, she thought, that somewhere in all those catalogs was a trick for making him a success again or for making the bad times vanish. She let the shade fall shut and climbed back into bed and turned out the light. Listening to the ghosts always made her tired.
Adultery the Right Way
Delia played poker with her girlfriends on Wednesday nights. They were all women from the apartment complex where she lived before she married Sam—Paula Dawkins, who waited tables at the pancake house up on the highway and Hannah Boudreau who had three kids at twenty-six and needed to get out of the house more than any of them. Eleanor Wilson, a narcoleptic and the most lovely sleeper Delia had ever seen, usually showed up. They were always having to wake her so she could place her bets and sometimes it seemed kinder to let her doze, her faint, musical snores like an undiscovered instrument from some forgotten tribe. They met at Gardenia Lawrence’s dining room table. The apartment had been Delia’s when her life was still her own. Now, Gardenia had moved in from downstairs, stationed an aquarium the size of a footlocker just inside the door, and covered the walls with marine biology paraphernalia, shark posters and charts outlining the mating habits of the Galapagos turtle.
Delia told the women about her affair over hands of sevencard stud. She described her evenings with Simon, the way he looked at her, like he’d never seen a woman before and wanted to know all about them, and the way his hands were as rough and careless as gingham on her skin. They told her they were happy for her and that she was crazy. They reminded her of their warnings about marrying a man so much older than herself. You don’t have anything in common, they’d said when she announced her intentions, these things never work out. She tried to explain, now, that her marriage was working fine, that Simon had nothing to do with some unhappiness in her life, but they just laughed and rolled their eyes and chimed whatever you say, Delia, whatever you say.
She studied her husband around the house, watched him shaving for work, considered the way he brought a fork to his lips at dinner, looking for evidence of discontent in herself, but she couldn’t find anything. She loved her husband, she was sure. He still stirred an affection in her and passion, comfortable and kindhearted though it might have been. But she could walk him to the door when he left for the college, watch his car turn the corner, then slip across the driveway, her heart already thumping in dangerous anticipation, with only an occasion
al fluttering of remorse. It was as if she were two separate women, capable of two separate sets of emotions. She imagined that she changed shape, like in the movies, just before Simon opened the door. When she passed a mirror in his house, she half-expected to see an unfamiliar reflection in the glass.
In high school, Delia was always skipping class to go to the movies. She had been dating a boy three years older than her, and he had a car, a low-slung yellow Lincoln convertible without a muffler, and the two of them would drive into town to catch the weekday matinees. He would buy one ticket, then send her around back to the emergency exit. Once safely inside, he’d open the door for her, and they’d sit up high in the empty theater and learn the different ways they could make each other happy. The boy’s teeth and lips on her neck, his hands clumsy and everywhere. She showed other boys how to sneak her into the movies after the first. What she liked the most of all, more than the sugary way they smelled or the way their shoulders would go tight when she held them in her hand, was the way the world looked when the movie was over, the surprise of heat and light and motion, like she was a magician’s assistant made to reappear in a room full of spotlights.
The world looked just that way when she was with Simon, hazy and disorienting, her thighs and stomach muscles skittish from sex. Once, she was propped up in bed beside him reading a magazine in the light from the window, his fingers wandering over her stomach like he was tracing passages on a map. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the lines he was drawing on her skin, his index finger running down her leg to a scar just below her knee and suddenly she was remembering the day it happened. She saw herself in a loose gown made from bedsheets, bleary light like the light from a dream. She was headed out to the garage to show her father how she looked when she stepped on the edge of the sheet and went crashing to the hardwood floor, instantly woozy from the sight of her own blood on the fabric. She woke up in the hospital with eleven stitches threading her kneecap like the laces of a football.
Divining Rod Page 5
