But then she took him to the closet in the bedroom—actually dragged him back there by the shirt sleeve and pointed to the hamper against the back wall of the closet.
“The house is yours,” she said, “and you can do whatever you want, except for one thing. You will not touch the hamper in the center of this closet. It is mine, and you cannot wash a woman’s clothes.” She warned him sternly, solemnly, that he must not touch it nor wash the things in it, for in the day that he did he would surely die. She didn’t care if he washed his clothes, or even the kids’ clothes, but she drew the line at her clothes.
This was odd. Clothes is clothes, he thought, and one kind is not that different from another. But whatever. If she wanted him to stay away from her stuff, it would just be one less thing to do.
* * *
He woke up early the next morning, like always. Mick was always the first one out of bed anyway, but normally he would be in a hurry to get out the door. Construction jobs cranked up at seven. The drive to downtown Atlanta took nearly an hour, so he always had to leave by six. Staying home, he woke up at five and then had time to kill before he got the rest of the family up.
“Time for school,” he said, poking his head into his oldest son’s room and flipping the light switch. Ben sat bolt upright, a pajama-clad question mark, squinting at the strange voice in his doorway and wondering what had happened to his mother.
“You’ll get used to it,” Mick told him, and went to wake up Toad.
He looked at the list on the refrigerator door, checked off the next item and counted out lunch money for two kids. It was cold out, so he took Layne’s keys out of her pocketbook and cranked her car so it would be nice and warm by the time she was ready to go. This was too easy. There was a twinge of guilty pleasure in knowing he wouldn’t have to drive downtown or spend the day out in the cold. He turned on the kitchen radio to hear the morning traffic report, just for fun.
The kids were sitting at the table moping over their oatmeal when Layne breezed out of the bedroom in a new pinstriped suit.
She stopped, leaned down and looked under the table. “Where’s Dylan?”
“He’s asleep. He’s staying home with me now, remember? No more daycare.” Mick said this a little smugly, but the look on Layne’s face gave him the sinking feeling that he’d really stepped in it, somehow. She came to him then, smiling patiently, and cupped his face in her hands.
“Please tell me you’re not going to leave my four-year-old asleep in bed while you’re taking Ben and Toad to school.”
It was a natural law. Everybody had to be dressed and ready and the car loaded with all the apparatus and paraphernalia necessary for the life support of three munchkins—car seats strapped in, noses wiped, shoes tied—before anybody could go anywhere. Gone were the days when he and Layne could just say “Let’s go somewhere” and then jump in the car and go. His mind flashed back to the time Before Kids, when he’d gotten laid off for a week, unexpectedly. It had taken them about five minutes to throw some camping gear in the Jeep and take off to the Florida Keys with three hundred dollars in their pockets and not a care in the world.
They were free in those days.
Now a simple trip to the store was a logistical nightmare involving forty-five minutes of dressing, packing and loading before the car was even cranked. Mick knew this. He had merely suffered a momentary lapse while trying to remember a dozen things at once. His first test. His first failing grade.
“Why not?” he said, trying to make a joke of it, but he caught the look on Toad’s face when he said it. His daughter grinned, lowering her face, and a little trail of milk escaped down her chin. Even Toad knew he’d blown it.
Layne was still holding his face in her hands, and there was laughter in the corners of her eyes.
“Why not? Because he’ll wake up alone in the house and he’ll freak, and then he’ll end up thirty years from now trying to explain you to his therapist, is why not.”
Mick went and got Dylan out of bed, carried him into the dining room in his pajamas, all warm and limp, legs dangling, head lolling on his dad’s shoulder. Four years old and he still smelled like milk.
Layne appeared in the kitchen door sipping coffee from a stainless-steel travel cup.
“You need to lay out their clothes in the morning, or at least check them,” she said patiently. “Toad, you know you can’t wear that dress.”
He hadn’t noticed. Toad had always loved plain cotton dresses. She was a full-throttle kid, and a loose cotton dress was all about freedom of movement. It took a long time just to convince her to wear shorts under it if she planned to climb any trees.
“And Ben, I know that’s your favorite T-shirt, but it’s a rag. Put on the new one I got you—the one with the pirate. And you’ll need another layer. It’s cold today.”
Neither of the kids looked to their dad for a reprieve. They knew who was really in charge.
Mick went out to move the car seat from her Explorer to the Datsun pickup he’d borrowed from Hap. On his way back in Layne brushed past him, tossing a peck at his cheek without slowing down, and he knew she was hurrying because she didn’t want to cry in front of the kids. She never said it, but deep down he knew. What she really wanted all along was to be home with her kids herself, but things just hadn’t worked out that way.
Despite the rough start, nothing about his new job seemed difficult to Mick. There was no real work here, no tough decisions, no pressure—just baby-sitting and house-cleaning. After fifteen years of construction work it felt like a vacation. The toughest thing he had to do was work on Hap’s house, and that would be a piece of cake. It was right in his happy zone.
* * *
Whatever the task, Mick believed in doing the hard part first. A man could do any sort of job if he could break it down into parts and then deal with the hardest part first. The way he saw it, his toughest job that first morning was to go get Aubrey a new chainsaw and take it to him, so he dropped off Ben and Toad and then headed up the expressway with Dylan strapped in next to him. An hour later he parked Hap’s old Datsun on Aubrey’s spotless circular drive and grabbed a new chainsaw out of the back, still in a shiny new orange plastic case with the tags hanging from the handle. It looked a lot like the one they smashed, except it was a newer model—a little more horsepower and with a cylinder release button to make it easier to crank. He figured he owed Aubrey an upgrade for pain and suffering, mental anguish. He even bought a new little padlock to put on it.
He ran up the steps to Aubrey’s front porch and was about to ring the doorbell when he saw there wasn’t one, there was just a brass plate with speaker holes in it and a button at the bottom—an intercom. Mick had always been cursed when it came to electronics. Layne said he emitted an electrostatic field. If he bought a new stereo it would self-destruct within a week, and if it didn’t, lightning would hit it and take the television out for good measure. So it didn’t come as any surprise to Mick when he pushed the button on the brass-plated intercom next to Aubrey’s beveled-glass-and-mahogany front door and the speaker went nuts. It crackled and spat a couple times, and then he could hear Aubrey and his wife talking. It sounded distant, like they were down a well, but plain as day. They must have been sitting at the kitchen table having a second cup of coffee because they were talking quietly and there were comfortable little spaces in the conversation.
“Well, you musn’t make too much of it, Aubrey. It’s not that important, really,” Celly Weems said, leaving the R out of “important”. She wouldn’t pronounce an R unless she had to. Celly was a Rutherford—local aristocracy for as far back as anybody could remember because they owned the biggest lumberyard in the county. She pronounced it “Ruthuhfuhd.” Her family tree was dotted with lawyers in white linen suits, county commissioners and state representatives whose favorite family story was about how they rebuilt the lumber business after Sherman burned it up. They told the story as if they’d done it just last week, themselves, and not some other long-d
ead generation of ironwilled Rutherfords.
Celly was the celebrated beauty queen of her generation. Her high cheekbones, long neck and Roman nose gave her an elegance to match the graceful way she moved. She spoke with the leisurely drawl of Old South high society, and always formally introduced herself to people by offering limp fingertips and rolling out her full name—“Celestine Rutherford Weems.” Layne liked the way she talked; she called it languorous. Mick had another word for it.
There was a long pause and then Aubrey said, “It’s the principle of the thing, Celly. I have tried to be neighborly.”
“Well, of course you have,” she said quietly, splitting the word into two syllables. “These are country folks, sugar, and they’re common. We knew they were trash when we moved here—Mister Harrelson with his junk cars and those Brannigans with all those barefoot young’uns, livin’ in pure squalor.”
She reminded her husband that it wasn’t she who had been drawn in by the bargain price of land on this side of the expressway, but now that they were here she felt perhaps they had an obligation to bring some culture to the less fortunate folks in this backward part of the county.
Mick suddenly realized he’d been standing there the whole time with his finger poised to hit the button again. His hand came down and he backed away slowly. Leaving Aubrey’s new chainsaw on the porch, he eased back out to the truck.
8
* * *
Of kids and dogs.
MICK spent the rest of the morning cutting away limbs while Hap winched the trimmed logs out of his house. He waited awhile before he told Hap what Celly Weems had said because, frankly, it flew all over him and he figured it was better to let it settle a bit. But the more he thought about it the madder he got. By the time he told Hap about it he was ready to go over there and tear off a chunk of somebody.
They had a fire going in the back, and Hap was feeding limbs into it. He didn’t even break stride when Mick told him what Celly said, he just laughed.
“Well,” he said, “you get lookin’ too deep into somebody else’s low opinion and you might find out they’re right. Anyways, what them people think of me ain’t none of my business, old buddy. Yours, neither.”
Mick shook his head. “I wish it was that simple, Hap, but I can’t get it out of my head. ‘Trash,’ she called us. ‘Living in squalor.’ You think we live in squalor, Hap?”
Hap paused, frowned, scratched his chin. “Not that I know of,” he said thoughtfully. “My mailin’ address is Hampton.”
Mick let it go; to define the word now would only embarrass him. “Well, right now the last thing I need is something like that to chew on, but I can’t shake it. It grates on me, that’s all.”
Hap laughed that easy laugh of his. He never worried about anything. “Ain’t no use to get your hackles up over somethin’ like that, old buddy. Everything’s gonna be all right. You’ll see. Ain’t nothin’ ever as good or bad as you think it is. What you need is a hobby. Somethin’ to take your mind off of things.”
Hap’s whole life looked like a hobby to Mick. He’d had his share of bad luck, what with his wife running off and all, but nothing bothered him much. Maybe he was right. Maybe a hobby was what Mick needed.
* * *
After lunch they towed Uncle Dub’s trailer in and set it up, hooked up the water and electricity. It was a busy day, especially since Mick had to keep an eye on Dylan the whole time. He wasn’t used to it. Among the many things doctors had told them in recent weeks was that Dylan suffered from attention deficit disorder, but on this particular afternoon it was his father’s attention deficit that invited disaster.
Dylan loved being outdoors but he lived in his own little world. He had to be watched constantly because he’d wander off. Mick had noticed in the past that when there were other kids playing games and chasing each other around the yard, Dylan would be off by himself squatting in the woods investigating a hole in the ground or throwing rocks or wrestling with their dog, Andy, but it had never seemed particularly important before. The kid was just a loner, that’s all.
Several times that day, when Mick was preoccupied with cutting up the tree, he would look up and Dylan would be halfway to the woods. He headed off into a neighboring soybean field once, and Mick would have completely lost sight of him if it hadn’t been for Andy’s tail waving like a flag.
Andy was Dylan’s best friend, a lop-eared yellow lab with a disarming grin that hid a diabolical intelligence and a genius for problem-solving. Mick suspected the term lab, in Andy’s case, referred not to his bloodlines but to his place of origin; he had to have been a genetic experiment. His tail was grafted from an otter and mounted precisely at tabletop height so he could back up to a table and sweep it clean of drinking glasses and lamps. Then he would grin and try to look stupid, but he knew exactly what he was doing—Mick could see it in his eyes. The dog understood English. Sometimes Mick suspected he could read.
Hap entertained Dylan most of the morning, letting him throw limbs and scrap lumber into the fire. In that respect, at least, Dylan was no different from any other boy; he could play with a fire for hours on end. After lunch Mick tried giving him a board and a hammer and showing him how to drive nails. He hit his fingers. Even when Mick started a row of nails for him he still couldn’t hit them. Choking up on the hammer didn’t help. Every time Dylan missed he got a little more frustrated and swung a little harder, which made his aim worse. He finally lost his temper and threw the hammer as far as he could throw it. Andy ran after it and brought it back. Dylan threw it again.
Mick spent the afternoon carving up the last of the tree trunk in Hap’s kitchen, creating his own little storm of noise and sawdust. It was a thick trunk, and Mick didn’t realize how much time had passed before he looked up. When he finally did, Dylan was gone. The fire had burned itself down some, and Hap was busy picking up the unburned remains of limbs around the perimeter and tossing them onto the coals.
Mick killed the chainsaw, put it down.
“Hap, where’s Dylan?”
Hap tossed a limb, straightened up, hooked his thumbs in his galluses, looked all around.
“I don’t see him,” he said calmly.
Mick worked his way through a pile of cut limbs out into the backyard, and scanned the property as far as he could see. He shouted Dylan’s name and waited for an answer. Nothing.
Hap shouted. His voice was a bit bigger, but there was still no answer. Neither boy nor dog was anywhere in sight. Both men stared at the ominously dark woods, which seemed now to have moved closer. They both called out again, cupping hands around mouths and trying different directions, listening. Still nothing.
Then Hap, probably because it was not his son missing and his mind was therefore working a bit more clearly, boomed out in his best foghorn voice, “AAAANDYYYYY! COME HERE, BOY!”
They listened but heard no bark. They waited for a minute, and right when Hap was raising his hands to his face to shout again they heard the quick, light steps pattering through the dry grass out behind the shop, coming up from the direction of the pond. Andy loped around the corner of the shop and trotted up to them with his tongue hanging out and his tail wagging. His legs were covered with black muck, and mud hung in clumps from the fur on his belly.
Mick didn’t say a word, he just started running. He was getting up to speed when he rounded the corner of Hap’s shop. The pasture gate was ajar from the post, and he burst through the narrow gap, bouncing off the gate, running downhill across the pasture toward the pond.
It wasn’t exactly a pond. Hap had borrowed a bulldozer years ago and scooped out a catch basin down at the low end of his property to hold rainwater runoff and give his cows a place to drink. But there was a layer of shale near the bottom that let the water out, so most of the time the pond held only a bottom full of composted black, stinking, slimy, mosquito-clouded muck. Mick didn’t know how deep the mud went—didn’t know for sure if it was deep enough to kill a four-year-old. A hundred yards before
he reached the upper lip of the pond he saw the blue coat, the shirt, the pants tossed on the winter-brown pasture grass, and the break in the weeds where the trail led over and down.
He skidded to a stop at the top of the bank, six feet above a black expanse of mud. Out in the middle was a small shallow pool of dark water maybe twenty feet across. The rest of the bottom was nothing but black, wet muck. Dylan was there, out near the middle, mired up to his naked chest, screaming and crying and flailing about with his arms, struggling, straining against a frustrating enemy that took his struggles and used them to pull him farther down. Except for his eyes he was completely covered in black.
“Dylan!!” Mick screamed.
He stopped flailing and looked up at his dad.
Mick held his hands out, palms down. “Stop moving around, son. Just be still. I’ll come get you.”
He sat down at the top of the bank and pulled his boots off, then slid down to the bottom and started wading out. He hadn’t gone three steps, up to his knees in muck, when Hap showed up. Hap, in his commonsense way, had seen the same thing Mick saw when the dog turned up with pond mud on him, but he’d taken the time to think it through, and now he was standing at the top of the bank with an armload of one-by-eight planks.
Even with the planks it took ten minutes of fierce effort to free Dylan from the cloying muck and drag him to safety. It turned out that Dylan had thrown the hammer out into the middle of the pond, where it plopped into the mud and disappeared. When Andy couldn’t get to it, Dylan took off his clothes and went after it himself. He was afraid of water because he couldn’t swim, but this was not water. It was more like pudding, and there was nothing in the world Dylan loved more than butterscotch pudding, although he wouldn’t eat it. He liked to take his clothes off and smear it all over himself. It would never occur to him that a pond full of pudding might kill him.
Summer of Light Page 8
