Before He Finds Her

by Michael Kardos

Ramsey lowered his voice. “You can knock that number down a peg or two if you want.” He smiled. “No one’s listening but me and the squirrels, and we won’t tell.”

  “I don’t need to lower my number.” Eric glanced up at the sky. “And there’s always someone listening.”

  “Ah, so you’re only saying ‘ten’ out of fear. That’s messed up.”

  “You got it wrong.”

  “Then you’re hedging, so just in case Jesus is real you don’t end up on his bad side.”

  “Ramsey, it’s a ten, okay? You asked me, and I gave you my answer. I have complete faith in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

  “All right, all right,” Ramsey said, hands raised in defense. “You don’t need to get all nutty about it. So your faith is a ten. And so is mine. You wouldn’t know it, because I always said the concept of God was a bunch of—” Seeing Eric’s eyes narrow, he softened his words. “I’ve never been a believer.”

  “That I know,” Eric said.

  They started working again, and Ramsey knew what was coming and waited for it. He’d forgive Eric, because his friend was an addict. Eric used to be addicted to booze, and now he was addicted to God.

  “Maybe this is the right time for you to reconsider your own relationship with Jesus,” Eric said after a long-enough pause that not saying it must have felt like ignoring the world’s worst itch.

  Ramsey smiled. He knew people. “Nah, it’s too late for me.” He said it to lighten the mood, self-deprecate a little. But when it came to Eric and God, there was no mood lightening. “What I’m saying is, I already know all about faith. In fact, I have more of it in my little finger than most people have in their whole body, even religious kooks.”

  “Hey...”

  “I only mean that without faith I’d be dead by now.”

  Eric said, “I’ve always respected how you pulled yourself up, with God’s help.”

  “God nothing, man—you pulled me up. And Allie did, too. That’s what I’m talking about: For twenty-seven years I never had faith about one damn thing in my life, and then out of the blue I decide to put my faith in some douchebag stranger hanging from a utility pole who’s giving me lip—I decide that guy’s gonna save me... and he does! You. You fucking did.” Eric cringed from the double blow of a compliment and an obscenity, but Ramsey could think of no other way to make his point. “And when I’m in dire straits again, some college girl enters my hospital corridor, and I take one look at her and somehow I know with complete certainty that lightning’s gonna strike me a second time and now she’s gonna save me. And she does. But it’s more than that. She keeps on saving me every day since, twenty-four/seven/three sixty-five—just like I knew she would.”

  “Does all this by any chance have to do with—” Eric took a breath. “With what I saw a few months back?”

  Since their phone call back in June, Ramsey and Eric hadn’t ever talked about what had taken place in the Millers’ driveway.

  “We were never supposed to meet,” Ramsey said. “The damn flowers weren’t for me. But okay, we meet and I say to myself—put your faith in her. And believe me, I’ve had enough hours alone in my truck to consider the matter from every angle. And now the end is almost here.”

  “So you say.”

  “Listen—up till now, in my whole entire life I’ve only ever known two things for sure: that I needed to put my faith in you and in Allie. Almost every other decision I ever made was a bad one, but not those. And that’s because it wasn’t ever a decision. It was a feeling—I just knew. And now here’s this third thing that I know even stronger than the other two put together. Ten times stronger.” He shook his head. “I can’t explain it, but I don’t need to.”

  “I still say we’d have heard about it on the news.”

  “Not if the government doesn’t want to alarm everybody and there’s nothing they can do about it. Then they’d keep quiet so there’s no mass panic. It’s like if a thousand nuclear warheads were about to obliterate the U.S. They’d keep it to themselves. Nobody ever fucking tells the truth.”

  “Ramsey—”

  “No, I get it. You think I’m wrong. But the fact is, my faith is better than yours, because there’s science to back it up.”

  “So where exactly is this science book? You keeping it to yourself, or can I have a look?”

  “I don’t have it any longer,” Ramsey said.

  That parental look again.

  “For what it’s worth,” Ramsey said, “I never once asked you what makes you so sure about Jesus and Mary and all the rest.”

  “You want to see my book?”

  “No.”

  Eric looked at the plywood scattered around them. “I’m willing to put up a grand says you’re wrong.”

  Ramsey smiled. “Nice bet. If I’m right, you don’t need to pay up.”

  “I only ever make smart bets.”

  “Except on me, you mean,” Ramsey said.

  “Yeah, you were always my long shot.” Eric tried a smile of his own but it didn’t stick. “Listen, man, we’re gonna play this gig, and then we’ll all go to sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow and it’ll just be another Monday. And when that happens... it’s not going to disappoint you somehow, is it?”

  But how does one answer a hypothetical about an impossibility? And anyway, the answer was really none of Eric’s business.

  “Of course not,” Ramsey said. And that was the end of it. They went back to aligning boards and pounding nails as the sky lightened around them. And when their stage was built and Eric had left, Ramsey went to the garage for his shovel. Might as well get the hard work done while he was already sweaty.

  He found a spot away from any large trees and their hard underground roots, and not too close to the stage, and began to dig up the grass in a large circle. He dug the hole about a foot deep with a diameter of four or five feet—a large fire pit—and deposited the soil in the small wooded area at the rear of the fenced-in property. The job only took a half hour, and the result was simple, but a fire pit doesn’t need to be complicated. It’s just a shallow hole. Some bricks, stacked in pairs, would make an ideal ring around the pit. He’d buy those later this morning at the Home Depot. As for firewood, that dying dogwood along the back fence no longer needed to be anyone’s eyesore.

  “Daddy pancakes!”

  Meg stood on the back deck. She had on her yellow footie pajamas. “Hi, sweetheart,” Ramsey said. “Does Meg want some Daddy pancakes?”

  Allie came up behind Meg. “She’s telling you that she just ate Daddy pancakes.” Daddy pancakes were in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head. For a reason only understandable to a toddler, she refused to touch them unless Ramsey manned the spatula.

  “I thought only Daddy can make Daddy pancakes,” he said to Allie.

  His wife shrugged. “The times they are a-changin’.”

  This stung more than it ought to have. “I’ll be in real soon, I promise. I’m just getting some things set out here.”

  “All right,” Allie said. “Come on in, sweetie.” She guided Meg back into the house and closed the sliding door.

  Ramsey returned to the garage and exchanged the shovel for an axe so he could cut down and section the dogwood. The chain saw would be faster, but a Sandy Oaks resident knows better than to fire up a chain saw on a Sunday morning.

  17

  David Magruder’s front yard had the expertly tended look of someone who farmed out his lawn care. The grass was thriving, with no brown patches. The shrubs running along the front of the house were perfect orbs set in cypress mulch that smelled and looked freshly laid despite it being fall.

  The house itself, white with green shutters, looked recently painted. The roof was free of leaves and pine needles, as were the gutters. Ramsey had noticed that the property looked, always, primed and ready, as if a realtor could plant a FOR SALE sign in the yard at a moment’s notice. Ramsey appreciated tidiness, but Magruder’s property was so immaculate it suggested a flaw in the man’s
character—not so much arrogance as secrecy.

  The Sunday paper lay at the base of the driveway, the single haphazard item on the property. Ramsey picked it up, and as he walked toward Magruder’s front door he slid the elastic band from around the paper, unfolded it, and glanced at the front page.

  Health Effects of Chernobyl Disaster

  a Long-Term Matter

  He scanned the first paragraph. In addition to all the radiation sickness and cancers that had cropped up in the last five years, geneticists were now estimating that other maladies might not show up for fifty years or more.

  Ramsey refolded the paper and slid the band around it again. It was a little early still to be knocking on someone’s door, but there was a lot to do, and he didn’t want to miss his chance to catch the weatherman at home.

  He rang the bell. A full minute passed before Magruder answered in bare feet, wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt. He looked different from on TV. Up close, he was smaller and paler—a skinny guy with a weak chin and a concave chest.

  “I’m Ramsey Miller,” Ramsey said.

  “I know,” Magruder said.

  “I’m hosting a party later today.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “That right? Who from?”

  “From my mailbox. I got an invitation. Some kind of block party, isn’t it?”

  Ramsey forced a smile. “That’s why I’m here. I’m inviting you to come.”

  “You inviting everybody?”

  “That’s the idea of a block party. Everybody’s welcome.”

  “No, I mean are you inviting everyone personally, like this?”

  Of all the items on his to-do list, Ramsey had looked forward to this the least. But if he intended to walk the walk—to be magnanimous, or, to use a phrase that Eric and his pal Jesus might prefer, turn the other cheek—then he had no choice but to face Magruder and invite him to his home. “I wanted you to know that you’re welcome in my yard.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Ramsey held Magruder’s gaze, letting the weatherman know that his belligerence was noted but wouldn’t faze him. “No reason at all.” He handed the man his newspaper. “Fact is, I’d be honored if you came to my house. That’s all I’m here to say.”

  Magruder unfolded the paper and glanced down at it.

  “Chernobyl back in the news, huh? What a fucking mess.”

  “So are you gonna come?”

  Magruder tossed the paper into his foyer but then had nothing to do with his hands any longer and clasped them together awkwardly. “Ramsey, we’ve never said a word to each other before now. What’s going on here? Why are you so interested in what I do?”

  Motherfucker.

  In the past, Ramsey might have taken the bait, gotten into some pissing contest. But any pleasure he once took in someone else’s insolence, that pure surge of heat, was long gone, and he made himself grin. “Lighten up, Magruder.” He reached out and patted the weatherman on the shoulder. “It’s just a party. My band’s gonna play.” And to show his neighbor that he’d made peace with the universe and everyone in it, he added, “I’m sure Allie would love to see you.”

  The weatherman eyed him a moment, and Ramsey waited to see if Magruder would deny knowing her. But he just looked out past Ramsey at the bright autumn day unfolding—or maybe he was looking in the direction of his lover’s house. “What time does your party start?”

  “Five,” Ramsey said, and then he gave the sky a long look. “You know, you predicted rain for today.”

  “It still might.”

  “I don’t know—seems to me like it’s gonna be a nice one.”

  Magruder shrugged. “It’s the weather. Sometimes I get it wrong.”

  After that, it was easy. A handful of errands—kegs of beer, ice, the fire pit bricks, a cooler large enough to keep the meat close to the grill—and then he waited at home for others to arrive and set up their own areas of expertise: the sound guy, the petting-zoo woman, the ball-pit guy, everyone jockeying for space in a yard that seemed large until everyone needed parts of it.

  Then came the waiting to see who would arrive. And to Ramsey’s relief, at a little after five the first neighbors began to show. Ramsey lit the grill, tapped the kegs, and greeted everyone with hearty handshakes and an invitation to eat, drink, and be merry.

  At a little before six, beer in hand, Ramsey glanced up at the sky: no signs or celestial winks yet, just late-afternoon sunlight and a deep blue expanse that revealed nothing but the presence of secrets.

  “Check,” Eric said.

  They were on stage. Nothing fancy, but it got them and their gear off the ground and would add some legitimacy to the gig.

  Eric said “check” a few more times into the microphone, and then their second-rate soundman was calling up at them, “Hang on a sec!” No juice. Thirty feet in front of the stage, connected to them by a thick snake of cables, Joe Tisdale, assistant manager of Main Street Music, squatted down on his haunches in front of the sound console, turning knobs, pressing buttons, scratching his head as if he had hair there, trying to figure out what was preventing any sound from coming through the main speakers. He was no professional soundman but claimed to understand his gear well enough to set it up and run it. And anyway, Ramsey’s three-hundred-dollar tip, up front, promised to make him a quick study.

  Behind the drum set, Paul crossed his arms and uncrossed them and then crossed them again. He hunched his shoulders as if the temperature had just plummeted. He’d never been on a stage before.

  “You guys have to chill out,” Ramsey said. “It’s rock and roll.”

  “I’m chill, man,” Paul said.

  He wasn’t. Paul’s tempos were bad enough as it was. Ramsey could hardly imagine the musical crimes that Paul would commit soon if he didn’t chill out.

  “Get yourself a beer,” Ramsey said. That’s what Wayne was doing. That’s what he wished Eric were doing, too, instead of noodling on his bass guitar, which was plugged into its own amplifier and therefore immune to their soundman’s incompetence. Eric was playing the main riff to Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On,” which he shouldn’t have been doing because it gave the song away. It was unprofessional.

  “You’re ruining the surprise, man,” Ramsey said.

  “I’m warming up.”

  “Well, warm up to something else.”

  Eric shrugged and started playing some funk riff with lots of slapping and popping, except he didn’t have anywhere near the technique for slapping and popping, and it sounded as if a small rodent were caught in the strings.

  He was just being nervous, fidgety. And Ramsey had to admit, he was nervous, too. The feeling took him back to his wedding day: suit and tie, spiffy shoes, fear of standing in the wrong place or saying the wrong thing. He was glad that the rent-a-preacher at the Xanadu had kept everything simple. When prompted, Ramsey had said “I will,” even though he’d hoped to say “I do” like he’d always seen in movies and on TV.

  He looked over now at his wife. She sat with Meg across the yard on a spread-out blanket on the grass amid books and toys. He felt the urge to go to them, send everyone else home, but the urge passed. The reason for this party went beyond proving his own magnanimity and touched on his growing understanding of the connectedness of all people, all living organisms. Each of us was irrelevant in the grander scheme, but our irrelevance was worth celebrating because it was ours and it was temporary.

  Still, this wasn’t the block party of his imagination. There were fewer people than he’d hoped, only around thirty, not enough to generate the kind of crowd sounds that signaled a party in full swing. For better or worse, though, this was as grand a celebration as Ramsey could summon. It would have to do.

  Anyway, his preparations weren’t for naught. A half dozen children jumped around the ball pit. A guy and gal, younger than he and Allie, adorned their burgers with sliced tomatoes and onions. The pony was proving to be popular: a small line had formed, mothers and small child
ren, and even the children in line seemed happy enough watching the animal being led around the backyard’s perimeter by the Great Dane and, next to the dog, a pretty young woman wearing a yellow sundress.

  No one was using the badminton set or the horseshoes, a shame, though a middle-age couple had started rolling the bocce balls. Three older men huddled together along the side fence. Two held loaded-up plates of food, the third a beer. He caught Ramsey’s eye and gave him a long-distance toast. Ramsey drank from his own beer, his third of the afternoon, and remembered a long-forgotten truism, how the third beer was always the best. Even today, with plenty of reasons to be anxious, the third beer flowed through him like warm syrup. The challenge was to maintain the sublime quality of the third beer’s high when it invariably faded and the only solution was a fourth beer.

  He was breaking his one-beer rule, obviously. But after today he’d no longer drink beer or play music or do any other thing. So temperance seemed a little beside the point—even if some part of him suspected that temperance when it no longer mattered was exactly the point. Okay. But facts were facts: In his backyard sat two kegs of beer and, from the looks of his neighbors, not enough drinkers.

  A sharp crackling erupted from the speakers—either progress or the opposite of progress. Then an awful, wailing feedback caused everyone in the yard to cover their ears, until a few seconds later the screeching stopped and everyone’s hands tentatively lowered again.

  “All righty,” said the soundman, crouched behind his gear with only his head poking up like a turtle’s. “Let’s try this again.”

  The microphones worked now, loud and clear, just as David Magruder came through the fence door and into the backyard. Ramsey was feeling warm now, looser, three cups of syrup loose, plus he had his bandmates with him on stage to back him up. He watched Magruder look around for a familiar face, nod to the bocce couple, glance at his watch, and finally head over to where Allie and Meg sat on the blanket. He crouched down to them.

  “Check,” said Eric, his voice now crisp through the speakers.

  Ramsey stepped up to his own microphone, his mouth already full of the things he wanted to say to Magruder—loud and clear through the P.A. for everyone to hear, things he would have a hard time holding back were he on his fourth beer and not his third.