by Larry Watson
“Well, I asked. I appreciate your honesty. Though I don’t believe that answers my question.”
“You must feel the same. Or else you wouldn’t be here.”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure where I am . . .” Or what I’m feeling, Beverly might have added. But one emotion she’s quite sure of: She’s relieved, and relief, in Beverly Lodge’s view, is a much underrated emotion. For years she has worried that she no longer possesses any of the attributes, qualities, or features necessary to excite a man’s desire, and although the attention of Calvin Sidey, considering his age and remove from polite society, is hardly enough to qualify her as one of the world’s most desirable women, it’s something.
Calvin pokes his fingers deeper inside her brassiere, and when he does, another feeling overtakes her. Beverly’s breath quickens and a sudden heat travels through her torso from high in her throat to between her legs. She moves so close to him the tuft of white hair curling out of his shirt’s open collar tickles her forehead. Now she catches another odor, this one hiding under his after shave and sweat. It’s very faint, but there’s no mistaking it. She associates it with the homes of older people she entered in childhood. Later in life she assumed its source was the food the elderly ate—boiled, overcooked, reheated—but with her nose this close to Calvin Sidey’s chest she realizes it’s the smell of age itself, yet not an overripe rotting as of vegetation or flesh but of something dry, wood or bone perhaps, turning to dust. She has not worn any perfume for this occasion—she had not known there would be an occasion—so she imagines she gives off a similar odor, only fainter by the years that separate them in age.
“Do you know if your son has a drink of whiskey or something on the premises?” she asks. “If we’re about to do what I think, my nerves could use a little firming up.”
Calvin releases the reins and walks over to the chest of drawers. He brings out a pint of Canadian Club, and although it’s difficult to tell in the dim basement, it looks to Beverly as if it hasn’t been opened. He unscrews the cap and holds the bottle out to her. “I won’t be joining you,” he says.
“You just keep it around for your basement guests?”
“I quit drinking a number of years back, but I want it to be my choice, and not because I can’t get my hands on a drink.”
“So you make it easy to take a drink and hard not to . . . Mr. Sidey, you do like a challenge, don’t you?”
“I suppose.”
She still doesn’t take the bottle. “I’m afraid I’m not made of stuff as stern as you think. Could you water it down a bit? Maybe an ice cube?”
“A little sugar too?”
“I don’t need that much help.”
Calvin climbs the stairs, and as soon as Beverly hears him reach the top, she begins to undress. If she hurries, she’ll be naked and under the covers before Calvin returns. She’s ready to go along with just about anything he has in mind, but she doesn’t want her body naked and available for his cold eye to scrutinize. She doesn’t bother folding anything but tosses all her clothes and undergarments on the chair. The sheets feel not only cool but damp, and she pulls the chenille spread to her chin.
How long has it been? This is 1963. Burt died in 1938, and not long after, Ed Emshier from the First National Bank began his pursuit of her. Poor Ed. She put him off for a few years, and then out of a combination of pity and exhaustion, she relented. If Ed would have had his way, they would have married, and maybe Beverly would have eventually given in there as well, if the sex hadn’t been so god-awful. And perhaps she could have gotten past that if Ed would have been able to enliven her life in other ways. But the truth was, the man was as bland as baby food.
Since then—nothing.
Beverly thinks of herself as a practical woman who understands—and has always understood—that life frequently means settling for less. And though she’s never let it stand in the way of getting through a day, she has sometimes imagined someone—a stranger, she guesses it would have to be—driving into town and carrying her away.
None of her fantasies, of course, have her lying on sheets smelling of mildew, staring up at bare ceiling joists, waiting to spread her legs for an old man who has never even bothered touching his lips to hers. An old man who might have murder in his past. If she isn’t going to jump up, grab her clothes, and run away—and she isn’t about to—well, she might as well smile about where she finds herself.
She hears his footsteps on the stairs, and she hastily rearranges the bed coverings so her body isn’t outlined quite so obviously. Not that she’ll be able to fool him much longer.
He carries a water glass more than half full, and from its dark color she guesses he hasn’t diluted the whiskey much. Two ice cubes, melting rapidly, swirl on the surface.
“Better sit up,” Calvin says, “and take your medicine.”
A joke? Has he just made a joke?
She sits up, bringing the covers with her, and takes the glass from his hand. “I don’t think I’ll need quite this much courage.”
“I had no way of knowing.”
She swallows as much as she dares and feels the whiskey scorch a path that ends just below her breastbone.
“Whew!” She fans her face to cool the sweat that has popped out at her hairline. “While I’m priming myself here, you could go turn out that light.”
He walks over and throws the switch, but even with the bulb dark at the bottom of the stairs, the basement dims only to gray. Through two of the tiny underground windows the setting sun has found its way, sending angled shafts of dusty light across the room.
Calvin sits down on the chair beside the bed and pulls off his boots, an action that relieves Beverly. She had a vision of him climbing shod under the covers. He opens the snaps on his shirt and tugs its tails out of his jeans, but he leaves the shirt on.
Beverly takes another sip of whiskey. “You’re not going to take out your teeth, are you?”
He unrolls his socks and tucks them inside his boots. “That’s the second remark you’ve made about teeth. No”—he clacks his teeth noisily—“they’re all mine.”
“I guess I’m just trying to gauge the amount of romance I’m in for.”
Does this man never laugh? Beverly tries again. “You looked like you were getting ready to bed down for the night is all I meant.”
He reaches down and lifts the bedspread and sheet. The air is not moving in the basement, yet it feels as though a cool breeze blows over her when he exposes her body. Parts of her chill and shrivel—is it only the cool air?—and she covers her chest with her arm.
“I could say the same about you.” He points to her glass of whiskey. “You drunk up enough courage yet to let me between those sheets?”
Beverly takes one more swallow and sets the glass down on the concrete floor. She lies down and pats the bed. “Come on then. I never could resist that kind of sweet talk.”
CALVIN CAN STILL REMEMBER the first day when he didn’t think of his dead wife. Pauline had been gone maybe four or five years, and though he was working for the Slash Nine then, on this particular day he and a few other fellows were loaned out to Willis Ritter’s Rocking 3 to help with the branding. For some reason, Willis had been caught short-handed, and Tom Arndt, the owner of the Slash Nine, sent some of his men over to the Ritter place.
The Rocking 3 wasn’t a big outfit, but Willis still had upward of two hundred head that had to be branded. They ran fifty or so calves into the catching corral at a time, and Calvin and Ray Kellogg alternated their work. For an hour or so, one of them would tend the fire and keep the irons hot while the other would rope and drag a calf to the fire. Then they’d switch. Willis and one of his boys would throw and hold down the calves, and another of Willis’s sons would slap on that big Rocking 3 brand. The smoke and the smell of the burned hide, the dust and the cow shit in the corral, the calves bawling inside the fence, and their mothers bellering outside—it was work that filled up all of a man’s senses and most o
f his mind.
It was not until Calvin was back at the Slash Nine, in the bunkhouse, and smoking a last cigarette before he collapsed onto his bed, not until then did he realize that he had not thought of Pauline once that day, and then the thought he did have was so minor and so swift, like a bat hunting in the night sky, it hardly seemed there at all. He recalled how annoyed she’d get when he smoked in their bedroom. The smell and the smoke, she said, lingered and became part of the darkness; she’d wake and worry that something in the house was burning. Calvin grumbled something about the odor of her “woman things” in the room, but he acceded to her wishes. If he needed a smoke, he left the room. But when the memory of her came back to him in his exhaustion—and hadn’t he taken on the cowboy life so its long days and man-killing work would keep him from dwelling on grief and loss?—it came with renewed force, as if his grief had hidden from him all day in order to gather its power and devastate him all over again. Better, Calvin realized, and he has lived by this principle ever since, to keep some thought of Pauline Sidey always near at hand and thus prevent the familiar daily sorrow from gathering its strength and growing into ruinous pain.
Even now, as he enters this woman—and my God it feels good, so good, to use his muscles, his entire body, for pleasure, to press down hard on her until it seems as though his flesh and hers, his bones and hers, his blood and hers, fuse—Calvin keeps a part of himself out of the moment, noticing that Beverly Lodge’s legs are considerably longer than Pauline’s were and that Beverly can bring her heels high up on the backs of his legs. But even the sensation of the calluses on her heels scraping against him turns into the pleasure that’s ready to do battle with sorrow.
BEVERLY LODGE LIVES MUCH of her life in the company of others. Friends, neighbors, colleagues. Her son. And this is the way she wants it. But she hadn’t realized the solitude that she’s been living in, not having wrapped her legs around a man in so long. She hadn’t known that unrequited lust or desire—heat with nothing to burn—could bring on its own brand of loneliness. This closeness, her skin rubbing against his, her heart beating against his, is so unlike all the other moments in her life that she might have been living alone on a desert island until now. She was sure she’d never have this in her life again. And oh God, to be touched there again, and there, and there, and like that, and like that. She can’t help it; she thinks of Ed Emshier. Maybe she should have been more patient with him.
And here’s another surprise. A ramming, slamming affair was what Beverly expected this to be, not only because all the lovemaking in her life has been a variation on that theme—hard and quick with her husband, who had no more time to spare in bed than in any other place away from his job, and soft and quick with Ed Emshier—but also because she guessed that would be Calvin Sidey’s style, going greedily for his pleasure.
But he takes his time, and though Beverly thought at first, oh hell, of course—a seventy-year-old man has accumulated a lot of rust, to say nothing of the inevitable worry over his heart—once she catches his rhythm she realizes this is how an old man takes his pleasure: making last as long as he can what he cannot be sure he’ll experience ever again. Sexual urgency belongs to the young; they can rush through the act because they can be sure so many more opportunities lie ahead.
How strange, that on a day when Beverly had been deviled by the heat, the wonderful feeling that suffuses her from head to toe, as Calvin rocks both their bodies on the narrow bed, is heat—a sensation very like lowering herself into a hot bath.
But then the feeling is suddenly not heat but electricity—a current that runs vaguely through her, settles between her legs, and from there—doubled, tripled in power—emanates out through her torso and clamps her tight to Calvin Sidey.
SIXTEEN
Beverly stays in bed while Calvin sits on the chair. He’s pulled on his Levi’s, but that’s as far as he’s gotten. He’s smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, the sweet scent of its tobacco pushing aside the basement’s smell of mildew. She considers picking up her whiskey but decides against it. She wouldn’t have to drink much more to fall asleep in this bed. Besides, the liquor has already done what it was supposed to do.
“I don’t want to disturb your brown study,” she says to Calvin, “but I have a question I’d like to put to you.”
“All right.”
“I probably shouldn’t say anything because this just opens the door for you to make your own observations about someone’s body and its features, but I couldn’t help noticing”—she points to his bare torso—“that’s an impressive scar on your right side.” In truth, he had plenty of smaller scars, including a nasty one across his cheek, but they were the nicks that a man in his line of work naturally accumulates. The one on his side was different, however, and she hadn’t seen it so much as felt it, a rough raised surface that felt like a length of cord just under the skin.
“This?” He points to his ribs. “A souvenir from my time in the military.”
“I bet there’s a story there.” She’s heard enough tales told by ex-GIs over the years to know they’re seldom the stories that a woman would be interested in hearing, but she has to ask. Even another anecdote about a drunken soldier falling off a truck would be preferable to Calvin Sidey’s silence.
“This came my way courtesy of a German soldier with a bayonet. But he only got the one chance and he didn’t take sufficient advantage. My aim was better than his.”
“Yes? Tell me more.”
He begins to speak but seems uncertain about the decision, as if speech’s victory over silence has been won by the narrowest of margins. “I’ve always felt sort of strange about this scar. Or what put it there. Can’t say I’m fond of it exactly. But it brought me my wife and most of the good in my life.”
Beverly sits up, keeping herself covered with the sheet as she does. “Come now—you can’t say something like that and then not explain yourself.”
He bends over and taps the ash from his cigarette into the ashtray at his feet. “We were in France, fighting one of those battles that was too small to have a name. We kept going back and forth, scrapping with the Krauts over a hill and a few acres of hardwoods. We were finally hand to hand among the trees. That’s when I got this.” He points again to his side. “And as I said, he got paid back for his trouble . . . Anyway, of the seven of us doughboys who walked into the woods, four of us came out, and I wasn’t the only one who was a might worse for wear. None of us was too sure about how to join back up with the regiment, so we decided to head off in different directions. Not the wisest course of action, but what can you expect from boys, green as grass every one of us. Maybe we all felt the way I did, that I’d do better on my own than roped in with the other three.
“I headed north, sticking to the hedgerows when I could. Caught sight of a German patrol, so I figured I was headed the wrong way. I backtracked and maybe I would’ve ended up in those goddamn woods where we had our skirmish, but I got so thirsty I ventured out to find some water. So though I said it was a bayonet wound that brought my wife and me together, could be it was simple thirst.
“I wasn’t far from a French village—I’d been circling it for a while—but then I saw a farmhouse on the outskirts of town. And it had a well. I didn’t give a damn—I set out across the field to draw myself a drink of water or get shot trying. Before either happened, a couple women came scurrying out, squawking away in French. They saw my uniform, and while the older one was trying to shoo me away, the other was motioning me to come closer.
“This was the Costallat farm, and while Monsieur Costallat and his son were off to war, his mother, wife, and daughters were working the place. They had geese, I remember, and they put up a bigger fuss than any barking dog would. Then the daughters came out to see what the commotion was about, and I reckon together they outvoted the grandmother because they were soon hustling me inside before I could make them understand all I wanted was a little water. But they kept better track of the Germans than I d
id—the roads were crawling with them.
“They put me down in the root cellar, and when they discovered I’d gotten myself sliced open, they insisted on trying to patch me up. The old woman seemed to have some knowledge of wounds. She might have had a husband who fought his war with a saber. Anyway she said I had to be stitched up. But she couldn’t do the job, not because she didn’t have the stomach for it but because her fingers were stiff and gnarly as twigs. The older daughter—that was Pauline—said she’d give it a try.
“She was the one who spoke the best English too, so there she was, trying to work the needle and thread in and out of my skin and apologizing to me every other second. I was trying to help. I was pinching the wound shut and telling her she was doing a good job, just get on with it. The mother and sister hung back, but that old grandma had her nose right in there, telling Pauline to pull the stitches tighter and get them closer together.
“But they got it done, and I thought I’d say good-bye and thank you and hit the road. When I look back, I have to shake my head over how damn cocky I was. I was in France, but beyond that fact, I didn’t have much idea of where I was. I didn’t have a map. I didn’t know where the Krauts were except nearby, and that I had to be told. I didn’t know which direction to head in to rejoin my own army. In the end, it didn’t matter. Those women wouldn’t hear of me leaving, not in daylight and not without feeding me a hot meal.
“Well, the next morning there was no question of me leaving. I woke up sicker than a dog. To this day I don’t know if I came down with the influenza that was cutting down as many soldiers as the bombs and bullets, or if I had an infection from that bayonet wound, or if it was both. By nightfall I was rattling with fever and chills and out of my head. The woman who went on to be my wife later told me they were so sure I was going to die they started discussing whether they would bury me there on the farm or wrap me up in a shroud and try to lug my body back to the army so I could be shipped home.
