by Larry Watson
“Come here,” he says sternly from the back of the garage.
As she walks toward him, the garage’s assorted smells take turns assaulting her senses—weed killer, oil, dry rot. Gasoline.
Calvin points down to the gas can. “This is what we’re dealing with.”
She’s not sure what she’s supposed to see.
“This, God damn it!” He squats and lifts a string that’s coiled next to the red can. For her inspection, he drapes the string over his finger.
“I . . . I’m not sure what you’re showing me.”
“A bomb. The sonofabitch made a bomb, and this was supposed to be the fuse.” He stands stiffly, still holding the string. “He had one end of this in the gasoline and the other end over in your lilac bushes. That’s where he likely planned to light it. And then run like hell.”
Beverly has trouble comprehending what he’s showing her. It’s frightening, of course—it is a bomb, after all—but there’s also something preposterous about it. In its overelaborateness, it reminds her of her sixth graders, how the boys are always hatching ingenious schemes of destruction and revenge. Wouldn’t it be neat if we dug this trap, real deep and at the bottom there’d be these poison stakes and over the top . . . But they never implement any of these plans; all the satisfaction comes from talking about what they could do.
“Would this . . . would it have worked?” she asks Calvin.
“Probably not. The string isn’t fuse material, and it isn’t likely it would burn that distance. But that’s not the point, is it? You’ve got someone out there who’s not content just to barge into someone’s house and scare the hell out of folks. Now he’s looking to make good on his threats.”
“You think Brenda Cady’s husband did this?”
“I’m damn sure of it.”
“So you’re . . . What are you going to do?” She hopes that if she forces him to declare his intentions, to move them from the dark tangle of his brain to the open air of speech, he might realize how inappropriate they are and then he’ll slow down or back off completely.
“I’m going to do the job I was hired to do,” Calvin says.
“Hired? Hired! Who hired you? You’re here to watch your grandkids while their parents are out of town. You’re a babysitter! You’re not some kind of gunfighter here to clean up the town!”
He says nothing but merely glowers at her. In the dim light of the garage, his eyes gleam like a polished, sharpened tool. She knows she hasn’t made any impression on him whatsoever.
“Call the police,” she says. “It’s their business to handle matters like this.”
He digs into the pocket of his Levi’s and brings out the keys to his truck. “I have to go.”
It’s about as much reply as she expected, but then she knows by now how his counter argument would run: The police? This is no job for the police. They’re bound by the laws of the civilization they’ve sworn to protect.
“I’ll go with you then.”
He shakes his head, a little sadly she thinks. “Not this time.”
“I’m afraid of what could happen,” Beverly says. “To you.” The last two words she speaks softly.
He nods gravely, as if he knows as well as—better than—she the import of what she’s saying. And of what she is not saying: This time you might not get away with murder.
“I’ve got to get this done,” Calvin says.
He has taken years off Beverly’s life, back to a time when passion and desire ran as hot in her as a fever. And now he’s taking her back even further. She feels like stamping and screaming, Don’t go, don’t go! Please, Calvin! I don’t want you to go! Not that she believes he’d be any more susceptible to a child’s tantrums than to an aging woman’s importunities of love.
She steps aside so he won’t have to walk through her on his way to climb into the truck.
The engine coughs to a start, and then in that grinding interval while Calvin tries to get the correct gear to engage, Beverly jumps behind the vehicle, and gets one foot up on the bumper, in the process feeling the truck’s tired springs sag with her weight. With both hands, she grabs the top of the tailgate and is about to climb into the back of the pickup when Calvin sees her in one of his mirrors. He yanks on the emergency brake, gets out of the truck, and grabs Beverly around the waist before she can get her leg over the gate.
“I said, Not this time.” He tries to pull her loose, but she holds onto the truck’s hot metal as if she’s hanging over a precipice.
“Come on. Down you go.” He isn’t tugging as hard as he can. Like a parent, he’s trying to use force and restraint simultaneously.
“All right, Beverly.” He speaks her name, his voice so soft that she can allow herself to believe his will is weakening. If she just keeps holding on, perhaps he’ll relent and let her go with him.
But then he lifts her up and away from the truck with such ease that Beverly can’t help but make the comparisons—he carries sheep to shearing and wrangles calves to branding.
Beverly doesn’t struggle. She can tell he’s trying not to hurt her. He’s also trying not to let his hands come up too high near her breasts or drop below her waist. He can’t take a chance on confusing her—or himself—about the nature of this touch. He carries her into the shade of the lilac bush, and there he sets her down gently. He continues to hold her, but Beverly knows it’s not affection that causes him to linger. He’s trying to convey to her—without words since he’s wary about the power and efficacy of them—that it’s essential she make no more effort to follow him. If he could, he’d probably chain her to the spot. But why not take the animal metaphor in another direction—why doesn’t he simply command her: Stay! Stay!
“I mean it,” Calvin says sternly, and then he backs slowly from her, watching to make certain she doesn’t make another attempt to come after him.
Among the virtues that humans and animals are likely to share, Calvin Sidey probably values none more highly than obedience, at least among women. Beverly knows that, so she doesn’t move while he climbs back in the truck and drives away. She remains perfectly still and listens as gravel pings against the truck’s undercarriage and the gears clash and the transmission whines. She doesn’t move as the cloud Calvin left in his wake drifts back to her, and she knows that his dust would adhere to her tears and together they’d leave their own dirty trail on her cheeks. Beverly stands exactly where he put her until she can be certain he’s exited the alley.
Then toward her house she runs, and the motion reminds her exactly of another time when she lifted her legs and pumped her arms with the same frustrating feeling of not being able to move fast enough. She had been on playground duty during the lunch hour when she looked out toward the swings and jungle gym just in time to see a little girl topple backward from the top of the slide. Beverly raced across the playground to the child, although she knew—she knew—the girl could not have survived the fall (but she did, and with no injury worse than a broken ankle). Beverly runs now with the same certainty—that someone’s life is in jeopardy. She just isn’t sure whose.
Her keys are not hanging on the hook next to the door leading to the garage, and that can only mean that Adam has once again taken her car. Nevertheless, she jerks open the door to verify that her car is gone. And it is. The garage is empty.
Adam’s Chevrolet is parked at the curb, but that probably won’t help her—even if she could find his keys, she’d no doubt be getting behind the wheel of a car with an empty gas tank, the usual reason for him to take her car.
Beverly stands in her kitchen with her palms to her temples, wishing that by pressing hard on the outside of her head she could stop the whirl of thoughts on the inside. Should she call the police, give them a description of Calvin Sidey and his truck, and say that he must be stopped and saved from himself? Should she phone Brenda Cady and warn her to leave her house immediately, that she and her boyfriend and possibly even her children are in imminent danger? Should Beverly call Gladstone’s
one taxi and have him take her to Brenda Cady’s address, hoping that whatever Calvin has in mind to do he might talk before doing it? The absurdity of that thought propels Beverly into action.
She hurries down the stairs to the basement, and this time the sight of the mess Adam lives in does not merely irritate her; it fills her with despair. How can she hope to find car keys among the dirty clothes, scattered books and papers, twisted sheets and bedclothes? She can’t help but compare this scene with the spartan order of Calvin’s makeshift basement bedroom.
Thoughts like this, to say nothing of a mother’s disappointment with her son, are, however, a luxury she can’t afford, not now. She’s on her way to search through the pockets of a pair of jeans Adam has worn recently when her eye falls on the only neatness in the room—a stack of paper beside the typewriter. This must be Adam’s novel. But more important is the set of keys serving as a paperweight for the manuscript pages.
Beverly is up the stairs and heading for Adam’s car when she realizes that she read more than the words Chapter One. Embedded in her consciousness is Adam’s first sentence: “The stranger rode into town with a grudge and a gun, a Colt .44 with a bullet in every chamber.” She can’t criticize her son for taking her car, but she’s exasperated with his prose. You don’t need gun and Colt .44, do you? And a bullet in every chamber—wouldn’t that be understood? Or is he trying for some special emphasis? The economy and alliteration of grudge and gun is good though, she has to admit.
Adam has left the car parked in the sun, and the interior is so hot Beverly can only touch the steering wheel with her fingertips. She starts the car, and just as she suspected and feared, the needle is on E. The Texaco station is on the way to Brenda Cady’s. If she gets that far without running out of gas, she can stop and ask for a dollar’s worth of gas and hope those extra minutes won’t mean the difference between life and death.
THIRTY
While the minutes and hours creep along, and Marjorie imagines where Bill might be along the road to Gladstone, she keeps berating herself for not sending him on his way with a very specific instruction. She doubts that her husband will know to do this on his own, and she’s certain that her father-in-law will not. As eager as Bill was to get going, she should have detained him for a moment longer and said, Hold her. When you see Ann, before you say a word to her, before you ask her what happened or how she’s doing, hold her tight. You might look at her and see a woman, but she’s still girl enough to need her father’s arms around her . . . almost as much as she needs her mother’s.
And then Marjorie has to face a hard truth and a harder admonishment: If she had not chosen this operation—yes, chosen, she chose it—she would have been there to comfort her daughter herself. Although Ann is strong enough, healthy enough, to recover from her injuries and any fright she might have received, she’ll still want, though she might not consciously know of this desire, to have her mother at her bedside. God knows, there were times in the past when Marjorie needed hers, but that was not to be. Indeed, Marjorie couldn’t even reveal to her mother how anguished she, Marjorie, was. When Tully died, Marjorie’s mother was relieved, even if she didn’t say this out loud; the worst day of Marjorie’s life was an occasion for quiet rejoicing for her mother and father, and Marjorie knew it. The thought that Mrs. Randolph might have put her arms around her daughter and tried to console her in her grief would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.
Visiting hours arrive, and Carole, almost as though she knows her sister needs to be distracted from her worry and guilt, enters Marjorie’s room. Carole is carrying a paper bag that she sets down on the nightstand. Marjorie asked Carole for cigarettes and lip balm, but the bag obviously holds something else.
Carole reaches carefully inside and lifts out first one then another tall Dixie cup. Carole’s fingers leave prints in the frost that coats the waxy containers.
“Milk shakes!” Carole announces in a triumphant whisper. “From Dunn’s Dairy—they have the best ice cream in Missoula. I thought you deserved something extra special for all you’ve been through.”
She unwraps a straw and sticks it in one of the shakes and hands it to Marjorie. “They’re both chocolate. And I practically broke the sound barrier driving here, so they’d still be nice and thick.”
Marjorie takes the cup, although she has no particular interest in or appetite for a milk shake. But this is typical of Carole, who often hides her own enthusiasms by pretending they belong to others. When Marjorie and Bill drove up to Carole and Milo’s, Marjorie noticed that the house had recently been painted a pale lavender. But as hideous as the color was, Marjorie recognized it as a shade Carole had been fond of since childhood. Yet the first thing Carole said when she greeted Bill and Marjorie was, “Well, what do you think of the color? I wasn’t sure, but Milo insisted.” And even more than the color of lilacs, Carole loves ice cream in any of its forms.
Marjorie draws on her straw, but the first sensation of the cold, creamy paste hitting the roof of her mouth is too much, and she has to put her cup down.
“You don’t like it?” Carole asks. She has already taken the lid off her cup.
“It’s delicious,” Marjorie says, but leaves her milk shake on the tray.
The sisters do not converse while Carole works expertly on her milk shake, using her straw like a spoon and lifting up one dripping, carefully balanced mouthful after another. Finally, the cold must get to her as well, and she slows down. “You know what I was remembering on my way over here today?”
Marjorie shakes her head, a maneuver she performs with caution.
“I was thinking about Grandpa’s funeral in North Dakota and how we got such a late start coming back.”
“Mm-mh. What about it?” She doesn’t mean to sound brusque, but she wishes Carole would leave. If Marjorie confesses that she’s having difficulty concentrating on anything but Ann’s accident and Bill’s journey back to Gladstone, Carole will simply offer the advice that Marjorie won’t be able to take: Just think about something else.
“Do you remember where we stopped to eat?” She doesn’t wait for Marjorie’s answer. “It was at a supper club just outside that town—what was it? Valley City? The restaurant was up on a hill, I remember, and it was the first time in my life I ate prime rib.”
Yes, that’s her sister all right, thinks Marjorie. Of all the firsts that can be experienced in a life, how many people recall the first time they ate a particular cut of beef?
“What do you think was going on with Mom and Dad on that trip?” Carole asks. “I mean, we never stopped for a meal when we traveled. It was always a packed lunch of an apple and summer sausage sandwiches. I bet Dad paid more for our supper that night than he paid for any meal in his life. Do you think he inherited something? Could we have been celebrating that night?”
“I’d find it hard to believe that Grandpa died with much of anything to his name,” Marjorie says. “They sold the farm years before and were living in that dingy little apartment.”
“I suppose. But do you remember anything about Mom and Dad that night? How they were acting? If they said something about the occasion?”
Marjorie does have a memory of that night, but it has nothing to do with her parents or their demeanor . . . There was a bar connected to the dining area, and to get to the restroom you had to pass through the bar’s smoke and undergo the scrutiny of a group of rowdy businessmen. When Marjorie walked past them the first time, they fell silent, and Marjorie felt their eyes on her. She was only sixteen, but she had grown accustomed to the way men stared at her. To the funeral she had worn a dress handed down from a cousin, and though it was navy blue and buttoned to the throat, Marjorie remembers that it felt tight. On her way back from the restroom, she heard one of the men say, “Slow down, miss. Stay a while.” She kept walking, and another man made a clicking noise with his tongue. She was not offended, but neither was she flattered, and not until she was back at the table, back in the company of Carole and her fa
ther and mother did it occur to Marjorie that those men had not known she was with her family. Neither did they know her age or that the expression on her face was the lingering remnant of a sulk she had been in since they left Gladstone.
Marjorie was in love with Tully Heckaman, and she hadn’t wanted to leave him, not even for a couple days, not even for her grandfather’s funeral. Neither her parents nor Carole knew yet that she had been dating Tully, much less that only a few days earlier she had let him touch her bare breasts—her own “first” to remember. They certainly couldn’t know that just thinking about his touch was almost enough to bring back the sensation, a tingling Marjorie likened to the sun’s heat pooling on her bare skin. Oh, so much of her life then was secret and unknown—not only to strangers, like those men in the bar, but even to the people closest to her, her family seated around the table.
“To tell you the truth,” Marjorie says to her sister, “I don’t remember that night at all. I mean, I know we went to the funeral. I know that as a fact, but there’s nothing to go with it. It’s like the images, whatever they were, have been snipped out of my head.”
Carole stops slurping her milk shake, and worry replaces her look of pleasure.
“The doctor said it could happen,” Marjorie explains. “That I might have some memory loss as a result of the, you know, the surgery.”
She’s not lying. Memory loss is one of the side effects, whether permanent or temporary, that Dr. Carlson told her she might undergo. And though Marjorie’s memories are intact, as far as she can tell, she has decided—and the decision is fresher than her milk shake—that she’ll use the doctor’s words to her advantage. If Marjorie is ever questioned about something in the past that she doesn’t wish to share—her relationship with Tully Heckaman, for example—she will claim that she doesn’t remember what her interrogator, whether it’s Carole or Bill or one of her children or a complete stranger, is asking about. A simple shrug might allow her not only to hoard her history but also to keep a part of her secret self inviolable.
