River of Heaven

by Lee Martin

  “Hmm, crunchy,” Arthur says, and the Seasoned Chefs laugh.

  When we’re ready to get down to business, I tell Cal he can buddy up with Arthur and me.

  “No need,” says Cal. “Three’s a crowd. I’ll just go it alone.”

  Arthur pretends he’s mortified, but I can tell he’s secretly pleased. “Alone? Are you crazy, sailor? We’re talking the dangers of hard crack here. Hard crack and explosion.”

  Cal unbuttons his cuffs and rolls back the sleeves of his corduroy shirt. “Sailor,” he says to Arthur. “I think I can handle it.”

  And he does. Much better than any of us. While the rest of the Seasoned Chefs look like cartoon characters—they squint through their bifocals and try to read their candy thermometers, they end up with balls that are too soft (“Story of my life,” one man says with a shake of his head), or else they cook the syrup too long and it burns—Cal works expertly and efficiently, beating his egg whites while also keeping his eye on his candy thermometer. It doesn’t take long for the word to go around, and soon the Seasoned Chefs have given up their own efforts and are watching him go to town. He pours the syrup over the stiff egg whites, and he keeps beating—one arm pouring and the other beating—and it’s a thing of beauty really, the way he seems to be two people at once, and finally he’s stirring in the vanilla and some chopped walnuts and just a smidge of red food coloring to give it a delicate pink tinge before he starts spooning it out in airy puffs on the wax paper.

  He seems to be unaware that we’re watching; to him this is nothing extraordinary at all, but to us—and even to Vera, who stands with one arm across her stomach and the other propped on it, her hand to her cheek, her mouth slightly open, as if she’s seeing the most wonderful thing—such flare and grace in the kitchen is miraculous.

  “I’ll be damned,” Arthur says, and then we begin to clap.

  Cal is embarrassed by the show of appreciation. “What?” he says, and Vera tells him he’s an inspiration. “A divine inspiration,” she says, and she rubs her hand over his back, the way she did mine the first night I came to the Seasoned Chefs.

  So I know what Cal is feeling as he turns to her; at least I have a good guess. He’s traveled a long way. He’s lived through what he did in Ohio, and now here’s this woman, this Very Vera. He walked away from her once, but here he is and her touch is the most wonderful thing in the world. I wish I could say I didn’t feel jealous, but that wouldn’t be the truth.

  “Bravo, Cal,” she says. “You certainly made sweet work of that.”

  “I’ve lived on my own quite a while,” he says in a shy voice, and I’m sorry that he has to admit this. “I guess I picked up a few things.”

  Then Duncan Hines sweeps in, and he tells Cal he’d like to ask him a few questions. “Golly, you’ll make a great story.”

  “For the paper?” Cal asks.

  “The It’s Us section,” Arthur says. “Comes out every Friday. Sammy and I were in there back in the fall. Weren’t we, Sammy?”

  Cal reaches behind him and unties his apron. “You don’t want to talk to me,” he says to Duncan. “I’m just a visitor here. All these other men, they’re the regulars. They’re the ones your readers would be interested in.”

  “Oh, just a few questions,” Vera says.

  He has the apron over his head now, and he leaves it in a wad on the counter, lets it drop right on top of the divinity candy he’s just made. “I’m no one,” he says, and he tries to move away, hoping, I imagine, to lose himself in a corner somewhere, maybe even step outside for a while.

  But Arthur grabs him by the arm. “Turn to, sailor. You heard the lady.” Vera is carefully lifting the apron from the divinity. “Now, give this boy what he wants,” Arthur says. “Hell’s bells, you’re no stranger. You grew up in Rat Town.”

  “My grandmother grew up there,” Duncan says. “Nancy Finn. Maybe you knew her?”

  Cal looks at me and then bows his head. Arthur lets go of his arm.

  “Yes, I knew her,” Cal finally says without looking up.

  “How about a picture, then?” Duncan says. “A picture of you and Vera.”

  Vera holds the apron out to Cal, inviting him to slip back into what was such a festive mood only a few moments earlier. But it’s too late; whatever delight we managed has cracked and come apart now.

  “Sorry,” Cal says.

  Duncan lifts his camera and sights through the viewfinder.

  “Just a quick one,” he says.

  But before he can snap the shot, Cal reaches out and closes his hand around the camera’s lens. “I said no pictures.” He pulls the camera down from Duncan’s face. “No pictures,” he says again, and this time his voice is hushed, a quiet plea. “I’m sorry,” he says to Vera. “I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just…”

  He stops, unable to find the words to explain why the idea of an interview or a photograph for the paper pains him so. I want to tell him I understand. I remember what I felt when I saw my own picture in It’s Us, like I’d put my secret life out there for everyone to see. Whatever it is that Cal lived through during his time with Leonard Mink, I can tell it’s left him stunned and afraid of what he might show to the world.

  “What I mean is…” He tries again, but still the words won’t come.

  “We all reach a certain age,” I say, “where we can barely stand to look at ourselves in the mirror, let alone think that thousands of people are looking at us in the newspaper. You understand what my brother’s trying to say, don’t you, Vera?”

  She pulls the apron back to her and folds it, taking great care to keep it tidy. Surely she knows. I can’t imagine that anyone our age hasn’t been tromped on enough to know sometimes all this living is too much and all we want to do is hide ourselves away. Even Vera, who is so very, very zesty. Even she must know this.

  “I’ll let you off the hook this one time.” She scolds Cal by wagging her finger at him. “But, really, Cal, you must know the truth. You’re a very handsome man. Isn’t he handsome, Arthur?”

  The question catches Arthur off guard. He bites his lip, draws back his head, takes a breath. How to answer this without seeming stingy but also without diminishing what he hopes is his significant stature with Vera. “I don’t really study the way men look,” he finally says, “but I’ll tell you this. He sure does smell pretty.”

  “Aftershave,” Cal says, again embarrassed.

  Vera stands closer to him. She leans in toward his neck. “No, that’s cologne,” she says. “It has a seductive Oriental scent. I’d say green mandarin leaf and crisp yuzu zest layered with the embrace of nutmeg and anise.”

  Arthur tries to make a joke. “Hell’s bells, do you wear it or eat it?”

  But no one laughs. It’s like Vera and Cal are in their own world.

  “Just a hint of sandalwood,” he says.

  She nods. “Leather and warm tobacco. Very masculine. Very aromatic. Very, very Vera.”

  7

  TOWARD THE END OF THE EVENING, WHEN NEARLY ALL THE Seasoned Chefs are gone, Duncan finds me near the door, where I’m waiting for Arthur to finish helping Vera turn off the lights and make sure the Senior Center is secure. Cal has already stepped outside and is pacing the sidewalk, eager for the night to be done. I know, when he agreed to come along, he never planned on being the star of the evening and drawing so much attention to himself, nor did he ever dream that he’d run into an ancestor of Dewey Finn.

  “Granny Nancy says you were friends with her brother,” Duncan says to me. He’s got that same friendly smile that he always wears as if he’s just waiting for the next thing in the world to amaze him. “Dewey,” he says. “She had a brother named Dewey. Do you remember him?”

  I search Duncan’s face, trying to make out if he knows more than he’s letting on. “Your grandmother told you about me and Dewey?”

  “Just that you were friends, and he died when he was young. Do you remember how it happened?”

  “Yes, it’s true. We were fri
ends.”

  “Mr. Brady.” Duncan takes a step toward me. His smile is gone now, and his voice is low and tight. I can see that he’s quite aware that I’m deliberately evading his question about the circumstances of Dewey’s death, and he’s not happy with that fact. “I was down at the police station annex the other day. You know, that building on Whittle that used to be the jail. Mr. Brady, I found something I’d like you to see.”

  “Something about Dewey?”

  “That’s right. Could you meet me at the Daily Mail office in the morning?”

  I’m thankful, then, that Vera and Arthur interrupt us.

  “Ready, Sammy?” Arthur says.

  “Good night, Mr. Hines,” says Vera. “Good night, Sam.” She peers out through the picture window. “Oh, and there’s Cal. I must say good night to him.”

  We all step outside, then, and Duncan’s request threatens to slip away into the cold air.

  I start walking toward Arthur’s Chrysler. Then Duncan calls after me. “Ten o’clock?” he says.

  Arthur, thinking he’s asking for the time, checks his wristwatch. He turns around and says to Duncan, “No, it’s nine fifteen.”

  “Mr. Brady?” Duncan says, and I give him a wave of my hand.

  “WHAT DID HE WANT WITH YOU?” CAL ASKS WHEN WE’RE finally alone in my house. “That Duncan Hines?”

  “He wanted to talk about Dewey.”

  “Good Christ. What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. Honest, Cal. I didn’t tell him a thing.” I try to keep my voice steady, but I’m certain Cal can hear how much Duncan has me on edge. “But it’s going to come out.”

  “Not if we don’t tell it.”

  “Maybe we should tell it. Tell the whole thing. Don’t you think Nancy Finn has a right to know?”

  “Don’t talk like that. Keep talking like that and I’ll get in my truck and leave.”

  “Leave me alone to face it, just like you did all those years ago?” I make my voice go hard, trying to cover the desperation I feel now that I’m convinced Duncan is on to something. “You owe it to me to stay this time. You know that, don’t you? Surely you won’t leave me again. Please, Cal. I don’t know how much longer I can keep everything to myself.” I stop talking, hoping that he’ll say the next thing and give me the assurance I want. When he doesn’t, I go on. “What I’m saying is I need you here with me the same way I needed you then. The only difference now is, like you made plain, you need to be here.”

  He bites his lip and looks away from me. “Has there been anyone for you, Sammy? You know what I’m asking. Have you had anyone who mattered to you?”

  It pains me to admit how alone I’ve been all these years. “No, not really,” I say. “No, no one to speak of.”

  He takes a deep breath and lets it out before squaring his shoulders and giving me a nod. “I’ll take it on,” he says. “You understand what I’m saying? I’ll be the one to stand up to the truth if the time comes when we need to. Until then, you keep your mouth shut. Got it?”

  I tell myself that in exchange for this I won’t ask Cal anything else about what went on in Ohio. It’s clear to me that he understands this, and we have a bargain. I’ll offer him this place to hide, and in exchange he’ll keep me away from trouble.

  “All right,” I say.

  He looks me in the eye for what seems like a very long time. Then he says, “Sometimes I think that night with Dewey made my whole life.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “Made it something I didn’t want it to be. Sent me out on a road that ended up in Ohio.”

  “Now you’re home. Now it’s you and me.”

  “Good Christ, Sammy.” He lets loose a ragged sigh, and I know the weight of his living as well as I know my own.

  It warms me to know that he’s willing to stand beside me in the face of whatever’s coming. Tonight, having him in my house means the world to me. Christmas will soon be here, and for the first time in years I’ll spend it with my brother. I remember the way Christmas was in Rat Town, the way it was before Dewey died, before Cal left. I remember snow falling and the smell of coal smoke from people’s chimneys, and the tangerines my father brought home in paper sacks from the Little Farm Market. My mother taped Christmas cards to the door frame that led from our front room to our kitchen, and she baked cookies and divinity and fudge. Each year, my father and I went off into the woods behind the railroad trestle, and we cut a cedar tree and brought it home and set it up by our front window. I remember coming down the street at night—maybe I’d been to a basketball game at school or to the Verlene to see what new records might be on the jukebox—and I’d see the lights on our tree, and I’d hurry, anxious to be home, out of the cold, where my father had the radio on—Burl Ives might be singing “Frosty the Snowman,” or Gene Autry might be doing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”—and my mother was wrapping packages. “Don’t peek,” she’d say as I came through the door, and make a big show of covering over whatever she happened to have on the drop-leaf table. I remember all that, such a feeling of being in the right place with the right people. I remember what it was to have a family.

  “Looks like it’s a night for ghosts,” Cal says, as he finishes a glass of milk in the kitchen. “First Vera Moon and then Dewey. There was a time when I thought I’d make a life with her.” He rinses out his glass and sets it in the sink. He looks at me, and I see the heat in his eyes, and I know he’s holding me to blame for the way his life turned out.

  “Look at us now,” I say. “Maybe we’ve got a chance to make things right.”

  Cal shakes his head. “After what went on in Ohio, it’s going to be a long time before anything’s right with me. I keep thinking, if I hadn’t stopped to pick up that penny that day outside McDonald’s. Maybe if I hadn’t done that.”

  He rubs his hand over his mouth, and I keep quiet, realizing that he wants to tell me more of this story, that he’s been itching to get it off his chest, and once he starts he won’t be able to stop until he’s said it all.

  “IT WAS LIKE THIS, SAMMY.” HE CALLS UP THE SCENE, AND A spooky thing happens. He does his own voice, and he does Leonard Mink’s, and it’s like that dead man has come into the room with us. To be more exact, it’s like I’m not even here anymore, like it’s Cal and Mink the way it was back in April in Bryan, Ohio.

  Cal picked up that penny, and Mink said, “You wouldn’t know where a fella could get a car pretty cheap, would you?” He pointed across the lot to a blue station wagon, an old Pontiac. “I think I’ve blown the head gasket on that old warrior, and I suspect it’s going to cost more to fix than the car’s worth.”

  “I might could set you up with something,” Cal said. He knew Herbert Zwilling over at the grain elevator in Edon often had a used car or two to sell. “You think that wagon could make it fourteen miles?”

  “I’m willing to give it a shot,” Mink said, “if you’ll lead the way and keep me in your mirror in case I break down.”

  “How about we get some breakfast first?” Cal flipped the penny up in the air. I close my eyes and see it twirling. Then Cal says to me, “I know what it’s like when a fella’s down on his luck. Sometimes all he needs is a hot meal. ‘My treat,’ I said, and then Mink reached out and snatched the penny out of the air.”

  “Sir, I’d be obliged.” He pressed the penny into Cal’s hand, and then he closed his own hand around Cal’s, and for a moment they held that penny between them. Then Mink pulled his hand away, and the penny was gone. It wasn’t in his hand. It wasn’t in Cal’s. Mink winked. Then he reached up to Cal’s ear—that old sleight of hand—and there it was, that penny. “I’m pleased to meet you,” Mink said. “I’m Ansel King.”

  So he was King to Cal, Ansel King, and there they were in that McDonald’s, Cal and this man he would later know was Leonard Mink, and Mink was wolfing down hotcakes and sausage and a milk shake. “I could see he was hungry,” Cal tells me. “It was like he was starved to death.”

  “I’ve
been moving around some since I got out of the Army,” Mink said. “You know, going where the work is, trying to find a steady job.”

  Cal held his hands around a cup of coffee. “Were you in that mess over in Iraq?” he asked.

  Mink nodded. “I was in the first one, Desert Storm. I was a gunner on an M2 Bradley.”

  “Infantry,” Cal said.

  “That’s right. I shot the twenty-five-millimeter cannon.”

  “Could you make it mean business?”

  “Sir, I won the Bronze Star Medal.”

  “I know what that means,” Cal said. “I was in the Army myself.”

  Like I said, that’s where he went after he left Rat Town.

  “The last I knew of you,” I say, “you were in Fairbanks, Alaska.”

  Cal nods. “I made some good money working on that pipeline after I got out of the Army. Then I decided to do some traveling. That’s how I ended up in Ohio. You know, just seeing the country. I never married, Sammy. Never had anything to keep me in one place.”

  He knew what it was like to want to get something that would last, to land somewhere he could call home. Truth was he felt sorry for Mink, this young buck, skinny and looking caved in. “Where you bunking?” he asked him, and Mink told him he’d just hit town and hadn’t found a place. “Try the Paradise Inn, over at Edon,” Cal said. “Thirty-four bucks a night, but the owner, I bet she’d go down some if you ask her right.”

  Again, Mink was obliged. If he could get another car cheap, he said, he could get out and hustle for work. “I’m a good worker,” he said. “Once I get a job, I stick with it until I get it done.”

  Cal laughed. “I can tell that by the way you eat. Good lord, boy. You really go to town.”

  Something about Mink stuck with him. There was that hard-luck story, yes, and the fact that he was a Bronze Star decorated war veteran, but it was more than all that. It was something in his eyes—some steel in those blue eyes that made it look like he was mad as hell or scared to death, like he lived right between those two extremes exactly the way Cal had once he’d left Rat Town, not knowing what was waiting for him elsewhere and not sure he gave a good goddamn.