He was leaning against the split rail fence, wearing a red nightshirt that reached to his knees, his belly pressing against the fabric. I wiped the mud out of my eyes. He said, “Goddam, look at you. I came out here for a smoke, and it sounded like a circus animal had gotten loose on the golf course.”
“I fell in the water hazard,” I said. “I didn’t know you smoked.”
He nodded. “Quit for fifteen years. But I’m back now and better than ever. I figured my lungs had enough of a vacation. The wife won’t let me smoke in the house.”
We stood there for a minute not talking. Bob smoked in the darkness. After a while, he said, “Can I ask what you were doing out there?”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” I said.
“All I need to hear.” He held his hands up and leaned back away from me. Took a drag of his cigarette. “You all right? Anything you want to talk about?”
“I’m okay,” I said. Then, “Listen, I thought I saw a light on in your house a minute ago. How long’ve you been up?”
“Just now,” he said. “I woke up in the middle of the night wanting a cigarette a couple of days ago and it’s been that way since. Dead asleep, then wham! Gotta have a smoke. People are funny, myself included.”
The rain was almost gone, just a faint, ghostly presence, as if the air itself were damp. Not even enough to bother the ember on Bob’s cigarette. I stepped through the fence so I was on his side and scraped the bottom of my feet in the road, trying to clean a little mud.
I said, “You remember when you first moved to town and you wanted to list me as an emergency number for the school?”
“Sure. The wife made you an angel food cake,” he said.
“Devil’s food,” I said. “Would you have wanted them to call me? If something had happened. I mean, thank God nothing did, but if it had? You would have trusted me with your kids?”
“You bet,” he said. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I wanted to tell him everything just then, me and Delia and my parents. I wanted to sit him down and spin my life story in the darkness just to see what he thought. Bob was bound to have an opinion. He had an opinion on everything. I wanted to tell him what I decided in that moment when I was falling, when I was still between the ground and the water and I could see the lights of my parents’ house. I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t be alone anymore. But I didn’t. I waited with him until he’d finished his cigarette, then we said good night, and he thanked me for finding his watch, showed it to me on his wrist, and we made our separate ways home.
Inside, I put on a pot of coffee and drank a second beer, then another, while I waited for the coffee to brew. I knew I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. I stood in the kitchen and watched the backyard through the window over the sink, the pool dimpled with mist. There was a phone on the wall in the kitchen. I grabbed the dangling cord and jerked the phone off the hook and dialed the number in my head. It rang for a long time, ten, fifteen rings, and when Delia answered I hung up with my thumb. I waited a moment, got myself together and called back. This time she answered on the first ring.
“Sorry,” I said. “That was me that hung up before.”
She said, “I thought so. You can’t be calling here, Simon. Sam’ll wake up.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute. I could hear her breathing.
“What do you want, Simon?”
“You,” I said. “I want us to be together.”
She said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
I stretched out flat on my back, water seeping out of my robe and my hair onto the floor. Like blood, I thought. I imagined myself the victim of a hideous crime. Police officers chalking my outline on the linoleum. There was a long silence between us when I thought she might hang up. I said, “Did I ever tell you that my mother committed suicide?”
“No,” she said, quietly. “You told me that she drowned.”
“She did,” I said. “She just walked into the water. I was thinking about what you said. About that river in Mississippi. It reminded me of her.”
“That was just a story. Something that happened to me. I’m sorry, Simon,” she said. “I have to go. I am sorry.”
I laid the phone on my chest and crossed my hands over it, then straightened my legs so I was positioned like a corpse. I closed my eyes. I pictured myself leaping off of a high cliff. I could see myself falling, growing smaller, distant, as if I were filming the fall, see a puff of dust rise when I hit the ground. A funny thud, like the coyote in cartoons. The computer phone operator was saying that if I would like to make a call I should hang up and try again. I did what she wanted.
“Hey,” I said, when Delia answered.
“Stop calling, please, Simon,” she said. “Even Sam can’t sleep through this many phone calls. We’ll talk more in a couple of days. Okay?”
I said, “I just thought I’d see what you were doing.”
“I’m not doing anything,” she said. “You woke me up before, and I can’t go back to sleep. Are you okay?”
“I’m sorry I woke you,” I said.
I heard her turn on a light. I thought of her arms, long and slender, faintly muscled. Nice. This whole thing was nice. Her soft voice. The cold, the dark, the rain. She and I.
“Where are you?” I said.
“In the living room,” she said. “I’m watching television. Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. “I’m thinking about making a leap of faith.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?” Her voice sounded concerned and that made me feel better. “You’re not going to hurt yourself, are you?”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’m fine.”
She said, “After the talk about suicide and then leaping, I thought maybe, you know.”
“No, this is a good thing, I think.”
“Are you really okay, Simon?” she said.
“I’m okay, really,” I said and hung up softly. Dawn light was creeping over the ceiling, mixing in with the glimmer of the pool. Fingers of shadow on the walls. The bitter smell of burned coffee. I was soaking wet, but I wasn’t really cold. After a moment, I called back and when she answered, I said, “I forgot to tell you good night.”
“You’re sweet,” she said. It sounded like she was crying. “Good night. I’m taking the phone off the hook.”
That quick, she was gone. I could feel a part of myself, a distant, better part, attaching itself to her voice and traveling toward her through the wires. I knew that I should do what she wanted, let her go back to her life with Sam Holladay, let the days widen the space between us—all my life, I had been putting distance between myself and the world—but knowing this didn’t stop me from loving Delia. Whatever was good in me belonged to her now. No matter what we had done, no matter the messy circumstances of our lives. I would not let her drift quietly away. Without her, without the part of me that she brought to life, like a trick of ancient and wonderful magic, I might as well have closed my eyes and let myself fade into the long, indifferent sleep of the dead.
The Girl in the Sundress
At church that morning, Sam Holladay sat behind a young woman in a flowered sundress. She was about sixteen, lovely, there alone as far as Holladay could tell. Sunlight filtered through the stained glass and played in blues and reds on her bare arms. He kept thinking that she reminded him of someone, the reddish hair and pale skin, the way her shoulders moved beneath her dress. And then it came to him: Mary Youngblood. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it sooner, the same delicate features, the same tilt of the head as though she was listening carefully to something that he couldn’t hear. During the homily, he watched her shoulders start to shake, like she was crying, then her hand dip into her purse and come out with a tissue. She dabbed her eyes and kept listening and sobbed quietly. He wanted to touch her, to be certain that she was real. He nudged Delia and nodded in the girl’s direction, and Delia made a sympathetic
face as if to acknowledge how awful it was that such a pretty girl could be so full of sorrow. He asked Delia what the sermon had been about, as they were turning onto Speaking Pines Road—he had already forgotten—thinking perhaps that the words were what made the girl cry, but she couldn’t remember either.
It was at that moment when he saw Simon Bell sitting in his yard. As he swung the car into the driveway, Simon stood and hurried in their direction, and Holladay had the distinct impression—he could not have explained it in a million years—that something important was about to happen and that it had something to do with the girl in church. Maybe it was the way Simon looked, his hair a tangle of curls, his face stubbled and dirty, his eyes red-rimmed and delirious and as wretched as the girl in the sundress. Or maybe it was the just the way he often felt after church, a little sleepy and disoriented but rejuvenated at the same time, convinced that what people did mattered in the world. Regardless, Simon came over to the car and pressed his hands against the window on Delia’s side, and Holladay couldn’t quit thinking about the girl.
Delia said, “Shit, shit. Sam, go inside. Shit.”
“What?” he said. “What’s going on?”
Simon tried the handle on Delia’s side, but it was locked. He was saying something, and at first, Holladay couldn’t understand what it was. Then he got it, more from the motion of Simon’s lips than anything else. Holladay said, “Is he telling you that he loves you?”
“Shit, Sam,” Delia said. “Oh, fuck. Let me out. Simon,” she was yelling now, “go back to your house. I’ll come talk to you in a minute. Get out of here. Go home, please. Please. Sam, let me out.”
Holladay got out of the car and Delia slipped out behind him just as Simon Bell was rounding the trunk of the car. Holladay stepped forward and grabbed his shoulders, still feeling strangely apart from what was happening, still convinced that somehow all of this was connected to the girl in church.
“I’m sorry, but I love her, Sam,” he said. “And she loves me. Don’t you, Delia? Tell him that you’re in love with me.”
He struggled, but not much, and Holladay was able to hold him still. Over his shoulder, Holladay said, “Delia, go inside. Let me and Simon talk for a minute.”
He was surprised at how calm he was, given what he was to understand from Simon’s words. His wife was sleeping with another man, his darkest suspicions confirmed. His life, as he had understood it up to that moment, was rearranging itself before his eyes. But he kept seeing the girl in the sundress, kept trying to decipher how she figured into what was happening.
“Christ, Sam,” Delia said. “I’m not—”
“Go inside,” he said again and something in his voice made her do as he asked. He watched her walk backward halfway to the door, then turn away and jog up the steps and into the house, Simon calling after her to wait, wait, wait, but she was already gone. Holladay led Simon back into his own yard, one arm across his shoulders, like the two of them were old friends. They stood there a minute watching the door, as if both of them expected Delia to come bursting back out into the morning at any minute.
Holladay said, “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” Simon said. Then, after a moment, “I love her, Sam.”
“So you said.”
Across the street, Betty Fowler was standing on the sixteenth fairway with her divining rod. She looked shadowy, a silhouette in the new light. Holladay couldn’t tell whether or not she was watching them, but he didn’t care.
Simon said, “I want to be with her.”
“Do you ever go to church?” Holladay said.
“No,” he said, sounding surprised.
Holladay nodded, thoughtfully, and said, “We just came from there. I think I fell in love today.”
“This is not the reaction I expected.”
“Yes,” he said, blinking. “I don’t know. There was a girl in the pew in front of us in a flowered dress. Maybe she was sixteen years old. Beautiful. She was sitting a little to one side, so I could see her profile. She reminded me of someone I knew a long time ago.”
He was looking at Simon Bell, studying his face and the mud caked on his robe. He thought that this man believed what he said about Delia. He knew the sort of fear he could see in Simon Bell’s eyes, and it came from the idea of losing her. He said, “This girl. She had a gorgeous neck. Slim and tan. Long with wisps of red hair falling on it from her ponytail. She was crying. We didn’t know why. I swear to you, just looking at her neck and the curve of muscle in her shoulder, I fell in love with her. For the whole hour. You think that’s possible?”
“If she was only sixteen, I think an hour is plenty long for you to be in love with her,” he said and Holladay laughed.
“No, you don’t understand,” he said. “She wasn’t Delia. When we were walking out, I held the door for her—God, I felt like such a kid—and as she was passing, it hit me. She wasn’t Delia. Delia wasn’t this vision in a flowered dress in church. And all the feeling just went away.”
“So what are you saying? Are you telling me that you love her more? Is that what you’re saying to me?”
“No,” Holladay said. “Only that I love her, too.”
“Well,” Simon said, quiet and embarrassed. He covered his forehead with his hand and sighed, then let the hand fall limply against his leg. He looked bewildered, his eyes watery, his mouth open. He said, “I thought I knew something. I’d made up my mind.” He looked toward the door, then back at Holladay. “I don’t have the slightest idea what to do next. I’m sorry, Sam.”
Holladay nodded again, as if that were the most reasonable thing in the world for him to say. He was thinking that none of them would ever be happy again and then he said it, just like that. “None of us will ever be happy again.”
“That isn’t true,” Simon said. “It’s not true.”
Holladay said, “Wait here. I’ll be right back. I just want to get something from the house. I’ll come back, and we’ll straighten this thing out, all right?”
Simon started to say something, then stopped and shrugged like he understood what was about to happen and had resigned himself to it. Sam Holladay did know what was going to happen. It was perfectly clear to him. He went inside and found Delia in the kitchen and smiled at her across the cooking island. She said she was sorry and she didn’t mean for him to find out this way. Before she could say anything else, he told her it didn’t matter. He understood. He was old, and she was young, and he really did believe that she still loved him, despite everything. He paid attention to the way her hair was swinging at her cheeks, the way she touched her lips with her fingers. He wanted to memorize every detail, because he was sure, even then, that his life with her was over and that the time was past for a new beginning. He clicked on the radio, knowing that she would turn the volume up, and asked her if she wouldn’t mind cooking breakfast now. He was hungry, he said. He waited until she began taking the copper pots from their hangers over the stove, then went back to the bedroom and took the gun from beneath the mattress. Morning light was slanting through the blinds making everything look dreamy and weightless. He remembered Delia in the dress he’d gotten her for their anniversary, that awful last-minute dress, blue with white sailboats and a white belt. The sort of dress a woman his age might wear. She was putting on an earring in the bedroom doorway, preparing for their celebration, assuring him that the dress was fine, lovely, just what she’d been wanting. And she did make it look beautiful somehow. He wondered if this wasn’t exactly what was supposed to happen. That was the way of things. Just when you least expected it to, the world made awful and perfect sense. Of all of them, he thought, Delia would find love again. Someone was always loving Delia. He flipped open the chamber, checked to make sure the gun was loaded, then slipped out the door, letting it close quietly behind him.
Greyhounds
When the dispatch came, Sheriff Lawrence Nightingale was standing with his fingers hooked into a ten-foot chain link fence, looking for his do
g. Nightingale had adopted a greyhound. A month before, he had taken his deputies down to Mobile for a sensitivity training course—just because Sherwood was a sleepy county didn’t mean the department should fall behind the times—and they had gone out to the track as a reward for sitting through the dry, mostly ridiculous lectures. Taped to every betting window were signs that said, FOR JUST $2.00 A MONTH, YOU CAN HELP AN OLD RACING DOG RETIRE LIKE A CHAMP. Below the words were two cartoon greyhounds, the first wire thin, desperate and hungry, sniffing around a sinister-looking Dumpster, and the other, broad-chested and healthy, standing in a field of clover, surrounded by his trophies.
Nightingale had thought it was probably a scam. Somebody was taking the money and putting the dogs to sleep. But he did a little investigating and discovered an actual farm, less than an hour from town, where the greyhounds could live as long as they found a benefactor. He even got a photo of his dog, just like in those television commercials for Third World children. His dog’s racing name had been Joaquim’s White Heat, but Nightingale called him Bill, after his own dead father.
Most mornings, before he went on duty, he drove out to watch the greyhounds run. The place looked like a sort of heaven to Nightingale, thirty or so dogs waiting to be turned out for their first good exercise of the day—whining, rattling their kennel gates, then breaking into the field at full, gorgeous speed, ears pinned back like arrowheads. Tired dogs snaking through the grass on their bellies, scrapping happily, growling over nothing, then dashing off again, because running was what they understood.
He could see Bill galloping with the other dogs, his ribcage pulsing, his coat bluish in the morning light. He clicked his tongue and called his name as the pack passed, their steps the muted sound of drumming fingers, but Bill kept racing. He didn’t think the dog knew his new name yet, but Nightingale couldn’t bring himself to use the old one. Too showy. Most days, it made him feel good to come out here, the simple bliss of speed infecting him, but this morning had been ruined by the radio dispatch. The dogs looked like phantoms. He got into his car, swung a U-turn on the highway, and sped toward town.
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