River of Heaven

by Lee Martin

  Finally, I tap on his bedroom door.

  “Cal,” I say. “It’s almost one o’clock.”

  There’s a long silence. Then he says, “I’m not hungry today, Sammy. I’m afraid I’m down in the mouth.”

  What it is that’s thrown him into this snit I really can’t say, and I don’t have time to dwell on it because soon I hear someone knocking on the front door, and I remember that Vera said she’d be coming after lunch.

  “It’s Vera,” I explain to Cal. “We’re supposed to go shopping. Do you want to ride along?”

  “Vera?” he says, a little lift to his voice, and I know he’s considering it. “Sammy,” he finally says. “I’m no good for anything today. I wouldn’t want her to see me like this.”

  The knock comes again on the front door, and I go to answer it.

  “Ducky.” The scent of Vera’s cologne comes in with the cold air as she steps into my house. She stamps snow from her boots—a pair of cream-colored boots, their tops so high that they disappear beneath the hem of her black wool coat. She steps inside and looks around my living room. “Sam,” she says. “So this is where you live.”

  Suddenly I’m ashamed of my house. What do I have? A few knickknacks sitting around on the coffee table, the old console television set, the library table by the picture window. Mostly things I took from my parents’ house after they were both dead: a paperweight from the Brulatour Courtyard in New Orleans; another from the 1954 National Plowing Contest held just up the road in Dundas, Illinois, which at that time was the population center of the country, an equal number of people living to its east and west; a flower vase that looks like an ear of corn; a doo-dad that’s half of a chamber pot, a souvenir from Biloxi, Mississippi, that says, FOR ALL MY HALF-ASSED FRIENDS.

  “It’s not much,” I tell her. I’m thinking of how out-of-date my home is: the orange shag carpet here in the living room, the dark wood paneling, the cracked Formica countertops in the kitchen, the dingy linoleum on the floor.

  “Don’t be silly,” she says. “It’s fine.”

  But it’s not, really. I can see that now that she’s here and I have to imagine my house from her perspective. The things I’ve grown accustomed to—the doily on my chair, discolored from where I’ve rested my head all these years; the old brown blanket on the couch, covered with dog hair; the cracked plaster above the archway that leads into the kitchen; the pull-down window shades torn and split—say this is the home of a man who has lost faith and has decided that the world can go on without him.

  “Let me grab my coat and hat,” I say. “Then we can go.”

  “What about Cal?” She tilts her head to the side and looks around me down the hallway. “I was hoping he’d do us the honor of his company.”

  “He’s napping,” I say. “Perhaps another time.”

  We drive uptown in Vera’s car, a new-model Cadillac. A snowball made from white yarn dangles from her rearview mirror. The snowball has a goofy face: black button eyes, a carrot nose, and a cockeyed grin. A red and white striped sock hat sits atop the snowball and trails down to a red pom-pom. This snowball face bounces merrily as Vera turns onto Christy and heads uptown.

  It’s not much of an uptown these days, now that the Wal-Mart Supercenter is open on the highway. Gone is the Tresslers’ Five and Dime where I once saw Rock Hudson drinking a root beer float at the lunch counter. Gone is Mike’s Ice Cream Parlor and the Janet Shop and the Ball Rexall and Beal’s Newsstand. No more Town Talk Restaurant or Turnipseeds or Gaffner’s Jewelry or True Value Hardware. What we have now are empty storefronts or buildings turned into meeting places for church congregations and political parties and social service organizations. Even the Bradford pear trees, which were always so pretty each spring with their white blossoms, have been cut down so the blackbirds won’t have places to roost. That’s our uptown now, a place not even the trash birds care to visit.

  A few shops have hung on. One of them is a vintage clothing and costume shop called Déjà New. It’s been here as long as I can recall, passed down through three generations of the family who owns it. They’ve built a clientele from across the Tri-State. People come from as far away as Champaign and Terre Haute and Evansville. Not even the Wal-Mart Supercenter has been able to change that fact. Step into Déjà New and you can forget for a while that it’s today. It can be any time you want it to be. Choose a rack—zoot suits, antebellum gowns, poodle skirts, flapper dresses, leisure suits, hammertail coats, top hats, derby hats, doublets, snoods—and you can pretend that years have melted away, that you’re not even the person you see in the mirror but someone else you’re thrilled to meet.

  As Vera drives, I find myself, without planning to, telling her about the people who keep coming to look at Stump’s ship. I’m telling her how, of course, it’s silly, but still it amazes me, the fact that suddenly I, who never seemed to matter much at all to anyone, am now drawing all these people to me. “I know it’s wrong to feel this way,” I tell her, “but I can’t help but be happy for their company. I never thought I’d be anyone who’d matter a whit to folks.”

  She pulls the Cadillac into a parking space and turns off the motor. I open my door and start to swing out my legs, but she reaches over and closes her hand around my arm and I have no choice but to turn back to her.

  “Sam,” she says. Then she looks away from me, as if she’s suddenly reconsidering. I wonder if somehow I’ve already disappointed her. She tugs at the fingers of her black, leather gloves and pulls them from her hands. I’ve never really noticed her hands before, not the way I do at this moment, as she lets them rest in her lap and I see the wrinkled flesh and the age spots and the wedding ring, its band cutting into her skin. If someone were to show me those hands, I’d never guess they belong to Vera Moon. Vera of the bright voice on the radio, the confident voice at the Seasoned Chefs cooking classes, the gracious Vera, the perky Vera, the Vera who always seems undaunted by time’s march. “My husband died a long time ago.” She traces a finger over the stone in the wedding ring. “So long ago, you’d think it would start to feel like it wasn’t anything that ever happened in my life. But that’s not the truth of it, is it, Sam? The real things—the ones that matter—they stick with you.”

  I can’t help but feel close to her at this moment when we’re both being honest and blunt about our lives and how they often leave us dumb and staggering. “Yes, that’s the way it is, Vera. That’s it exactly.”

  “I feel so sorry for Arthur,” she says. “He lost his dear Bess. All those men in the Seasoned Chefs. I shouldn’t say this, Sam, but you’re all so dear to me. You all know what I know. Misery loves company, yes? But they say it’s a sin to wish our sorrows on someone else.” Her face tightens and I can tell she’s trying hard to fight back the tears. “After my husband died, I went back to my maiden name. I know I should be ashamed, but it was just too hard to be the woman I really was. It was too hard to be that widow. Somehow going back to being Vera Moon made me feel better. Maybe it’s like that for the people who come to see your dog and his ship. Who’s to say what it takes to make our days a little easier?”

  I find myself nodding. Yes, I tell her. Yes, that’s right.

  Then she does the most amazing thing. She reaches over and plucks a loose thread from my coat. “You’re coming unraveled,” she says with a smile, and it’s like we’ve spent years and years together and can do a thing like this, just like a husband and his wife.

  WHEN I GET HOME, I SEE THAT THE DOOR TO CAL’S BEDROOM is still closed. I try to be quiet as I move about the house, hanging my costume for Vera’s party in my closet (a pinstripe shirt that requires a celluloid collar, a bowtie, a pair of dark trousers with a pleated front, spats, red sleeve garters, braces, a derby hat). Then I hear footsteps on the porch and, when I open the door, a folded piece of paper flutters down to my feet.

  The UPS man picks it up and hands it to me. “Looks like someone left you a note.” Then he gives me a package and wishes me a Merry Christmas b
efore bounding down the steps and going back to his truck.

  I let Stump sniff the package. “It’s your Christmas present,” I whisper to him, “but you have to be a good boy and wait.”

  I put the package on my dresser. Then I unfold the note, and I bite my lip when I see it’s from Duncan. Mr. Brady, it says. I need to talk to you. Please call me. 395-3281. I tear the paper into strips and drop them in my trashcan.

  In the hall, I stand at Cal’s door, listening for some sound of him moving about. I start to feel guilty about going off with Vera when I knew he was feeling blue. I decide I’ll do something nice for him. I’ll drive out to Wal-Mart and buy him a Christmas present—maybe a CD for him to listen to, maybe a cap or a pair of socks.

  I go out to my driveway, where my Jeep sits, and as I pass the side door of the garage, I see through the glass that Cal’s Explorer is gone. I open the door and step inside. There’s the faintest scent of exhaust, a sign that I’m not dreaming, that indeed my brother was here, and now—surely it was happening while Vera was driving me home—he started up his Explorer, and, just like he did long ago, he drove away, leaving me alone to face whatever, thanks to Duncan, might be bearing down on me.

  Then I see a piece of paper on the garage floor, a piece of notebook paper folded in half, the crease so worn, it’s started to come apart. Written just above the crease, in a cramped handwriting I recognize as Cal’s, is a street address, 5214 Larkspur Lane. I unfold the paper, taking care not to tear the crease any more than it’s already torn, and light shines through in the center.

  It takes me a while to understand what I’m looking at, but finally I see that it’s a map, hand-drawn: a grid of streets, and a series of rectangles and squares, some of them labeled with the names of the buildings they represent and some of them with question marks inside them. The streets running from the top of the page to the bottom are labeled—Jefferson, Clinton, Canal, Wacker, Franklin, Wells, and La Salle—and the streets running left to right in the center, where the crease is tearing, are designated as Jackson and Adams. The printing is small and cramped with a slight backward slant. I know that the map could have only ended up in my garage because it fell from Cal’s Explorer, slid from the stack of loose papers and trash in his front seat, or was lifted up and blown with the breeze of him slamming his door shut on this day he’s driven away from me.

  I squint to better read the small printing. Inside one square are the words CITY CENTER. In another, BANK. One rectangle is identified as AMTRAK, another as GARAGE. But it’s the one in the center of the page that makes my heart pound. I squeeze my eyes shut and open them, taking a closer look, wanting to make sure I’m reading the printing correctly. There it is, exactly what I thought it said: ST. I know I’m looking at a map of downtown Chicago. I know I’m looking at the Sears Tower. A dotted line leads away from it, heading west on Adams, toward what I know now is Union Station and the parking lots around it. There’s an arrow at the end of the dotted line and then the words, TO CAR.

  10

  IN THE HOUSE, I OPEN THE DOOR TO CAL’S BEDROOM, AND I see that his duffel bag is still in the closet. His shirts and blue jeans hang from the clothes rod. His socks and T-shirts and boxer shorts are folded neatly in the bureau drawer. A bottle of cologne sits on top of the bureau. I open it and breathe in its scent. Then I go out into my kitchen to wait.

  All evening, I sit near the window, hoping that any minute I’ll see Cal pulling into my drive. When he does, I’ll ask him straight out. I’ll slap that map down on the table, that getaway map, and I’ll say, “Cal, what gives?”

  Night comes, and I open a can of tomato soup and heat it on the stove. I eat it with Saltines.

  Stump keeps going down the hall to nose around in Cal’s room. I let him, even though I know there’s nothing there but Cal’s scent, detected only by Stump, who comes from a long line of hunting dogs. Basset hounds keep tracking, curious about everything they smell. I know, if I were to let Stump out, he’d follow Cal’s trail. He’d go and go. He pads back out to the kitchen and looks at me, and I swear I can see the disappointment in his eyes. He paws at the door and whines to be let out into the yard. I make sure the gate is closed, and then I let him out. I watch him as he makes his way to the garage, nose to the ground. He sniffs around the small side door. He sits there and barks, baying at the smell that he knows continues on the other side of that door.

  I go outside and open the door so he can go into the garage and have a look-see. He smells the floor where the Explorer was parked. He goes to the wide, automatic door and looks back at me as if he expects me to put it up so he can get out there on the trail and find out once and for all where Cal has gone.

  “It’s just the two of us,” I say. I get down on my knees and take his muzzle in my hands. I tip up his face so he’ll look at me.

  “Just us,” I say, and he shakes his head free from my grip. He snorts as if to say he finds the situation completely unacceptable.

  IN HOPES THAT IT WILL CHEER HIM UP—ALL RIGHT, WHO AM I kidding, in order to keep from thinking about that map and what it might mean—I decide to give Stump his present. It’s a French sailor’s costume I ordered from one of those companies that make clothes for dogs. Normally, I’m opposed to this ghastly practice. What’s more miserable than the sight of a Chihuahua wearing a tutu or, worse yet, a majestic German Shepherd in a wedding gown? But I ordered the costume back in the autumn after Arthur and I built the ship for Stump. I saw the French sailor’s suit in the catalog, and I thought, won’t Arthur get a kick out of this. He was taking me to the Seasoned Chefs, and like I’ve said, we had our domino games and our old movies and our coffee. I’d come to think of him as a companion, and I thought the sight of Stump in a French sailor’s outfit would give him a chuckle.

  I slip the collar over Stump’s head. The collar is blue with white trim, a red bow at his throat and a ribbon trailing down his chest. I set the flat blue hat on his head and, good dog that he is, he looks up at me so I can easily stretch the elastic band over his muzzle and settle it at his throat. He barks once, and the red pom-pom on top of the hat does a merry jounce.

  It’s the pom-pom that does me in, brings back what Arthur said to me earlier: Look at you. You and your dog. Yes, look at me: a sixty-five-year-old gay man, dressing his basset hound in a prissy French sailor’s costume. Shame on you for thinking I had no sense of humor about myself. For a moment, I’m tempted to take the costume off Stump and throw it in the trash. What a sad, ridiculous picture we make.

  Then he hurries, at least as much as a basset hound will, to the back door. He barks again, letting me know that he’s ready for his Christmas Eve walk. He’s ready to parade down the street, a jaunty French sailor on shore leave. It’s the night of make-believe and magic—soon, the radio disc jockeys and the newscasters on television will be saying radar has picked up Santa and his sleigh—so why can’t I dress my dog up in a silly costume and show him off to the world just for the sheer joy of it?

  We step out into the cold night air, and everything is so still I can hear Christmas music playing over the loudspeakers in the city park. It’s that kind of night—calm—and though I’m five blocks away I can hear the same notes of “Joy to the World” that the people in their cars are hearing as they take their time driving through the park.

  All along our street, the homes are decorated with lights. Lights around the windows. Lights hanging from gutters. Lights outlining the roof peaks. Lights in the evergreen bushes. Lights in the pine trees, the cedar, the spruce. White lights, red lights, green lights. It’s enough to make me wish that Stump and I might meet someone on our walk, someone who might take note of the sailor’s costume and make a joke. What a handsome little Frenchman. Are you out looking for a poodle? Hoping to meet a Fifi or perhaps a Pierre?

  Maybe that someone could be a man, a man like me. Perhaps you thought I was beyond hoping for romance. Cal asked me if I ever had boyfriends, and I told him no, which wasn’t the whole truth. I know y
ou won’t believe this, but remember when I saw Rock Hudson one summer having an ice cream float at Tressler’s lunch counter? Let’s just say we struck up a conversation. Let’s just say we became friendly and leave it at that.

  And there was a man once who caught my eye in the IGA. I was in my forties at the time, young enough to feel desire and yet old enough to know it came from loneliness. “Old enough to know better,” my father used to say when someone wished him a happy birthday and then asked his age, “but too young to resist.” Anyway, this man in the IGA caught my eye. There we were, each of us pushing a shopping cart, and I didn’t know him from Adam. He was just this man—I’d never seen him around town—just this tall man with a neatly trimmed mustache and the cuffs of his shirt folded back from his wrists. A man my age, his hair starting to gray, this full head of hair combed back from his forehead and held in place with tonic. I smelled it as we passed in the aisle. He smiled at me, and it was a nice smile, one that made me imagine what it would be like to come home to that man every night of my life. At the end of the aisle, I turned around and there he was looking at me. He hadn’t moved an inch from where he’d been when I’d passed by him. He stepped away from his cart. I remember he only had three items in it: a loaf of Wonder Bread and a package of lunchmeat—sandwiches for a man who didn’t cook—and a small box of cookies, the kind the store asked too much for, gourmet cookies with chocolate and mint that a person would buy for a treat. Sometimes I bought them myself—that’s why I noticed them in his cart—just so I could have one after supper from time to time.