Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle

by English, Ben

  “Okay, still driving here, Irene!” Diane giggled as Irene blinked back toward reality, shaking her head as if she’d been stunned. She flushed.

  “Must be some place,” Mercedes said.

  Irene kept her mouth shut, smiling tightly at the road ahead. From the back seat, Diane spoke in sotto voce, “You know, all her kids’ middle names are Hawaiian.” Laughter popped from Mercedes, and Diane smiled broadly at the other two women. “Yup. Get a guy on a beach in Hawaii. A vacation like that sticks with you a while.”

  Mercedes noticed that Irene was driving faster now, concentrating more fully on the road. There was a man who loved her at the other end.

  They passed the park and the long road to the pool, and a few seconds later the library. It was the only building Mercedes could see with a new addition; everything else looked remarkably as she remembered.

  “It really hasn’t changed much, has it?” she said.

  “Not as much as you’d think,” Irene said. “The best parts are the same.”

  A beat. “He still comes around here,” Diane added, offhand.

  After a moment, Mercedes cleared her throat. “I bet.” She folded her hands softly, precisely in her lap. There was a clearing on the hill high above them, where two towering bull pines stood. “’Home town boy makes good’, right? They give him the keys to the city?”

  “Nothing like that. He’s really low-key; just wants to hang out. What’s funny is, he’s given a lot of money to the town—rebuilt the pool, donated computers to the schools, that sort of thing—but he didn’t want anybody to know. All these checks coming in to the building and planning committee and the school district offices signed by ‘Fletcher Z. Engstrom,’ I mean, come on. The town’s only so big.” Irene guided the car over the bridge and turned onto the highway. “So when he comes around, everybody keeps mum, plays like they don’t know. Unspoken agreement.”

  “You’re kidding. Fletcher Engstrom? Same as the writer?”

  “A lot of people here think he is the writer.”

  Irene spoke up. “Back in high school he used that name to write letters to the editor of the paper. He thinks he’s pulling a fast one on the whole town, and we all let him.”

  Mercedes folded her hands again. “I wonder what his angle is.”

  Irene glanced over. “Huh?”

  “Don’t you think he’s doing it for a reason?”

  “Sure,” Diane replied. “He wants to help out.”

  “Ahh, I don’t know.”

  Irene frowned. Before she could speak, Mercedes added, “Come on, we both know people in the business. I work with a lot of these Hollywood types, I live close to some of them.” She knew she wasn’t saying what her cousins wanted to hear, but she went on. “Bryce has a lot of friends in the business; everybody’s on some kind of wheel-and-deal. There are some decent people, too, but when it comes down to it, they all make money off the . . . weird ideas people have about them. If he’s become anything like some of the guys I’ve met, he’ll milk this somehow, when he needs it—he’ll use his charity involvement to kick up good press as soon as he makes a movie that sinks. I’ve seen it before. I’ve made pictures of it happening before.”

  Diane and Irene didn’t seem to know what to say to that, so they kept quiet for a while. The wide river kept pace on their right. Mercedes opened her mouth to add something, or maybe to apologize, then promptly shut it again. There had been too many parties on Bryce’s boat, too many sozzled musicians and almost-actors in their condo, too much all-gloss happiness and chemical bliss passing by or passing out in front of her those years. “Sorry,” she finally said. “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t even know the guy anymore.”

  Diane and Irene shrugged it off, and the conversation turned to the scenery that was flashing by them. All three women had been girls on the same grandfather’s knee, and heard stories about the Clearwater River. It had grown into a family legend the size and breadth of Paul Bunyan himself. “Remember when Grandpa’d tell about the fish he caught by the Indian caves?” asked Mercedes.

  “Or when he and Grandma Britt’s brothers broke the log jam and saved the town from flooding?” Diane rejoined. “There’s a picture of that in the old museum, you know.”

  “It really happened? I’ve got to see that museum one of these days.”

  Irene cleared her throat. “See, you’ve got to come back this summer. Your photo studio runs itself now, you know you can swing the time off.”

  “We’ll see.” Mercedes felt a strange disquiet grow within her at the thought of work. “Do you really think you can get the time off to come up again so soon?”

  Irene nodded confidently. “I’ll just arrange for all the homicide investigations in the greater L.A. area to be wrapped up nicely before the third week of July, and I’m sure everybody can behave themselves for a few weeks. Might have to go on channel 5 and explain the situation.”

  The river was as perfect as Mercedes remembered. She spoke without thinking. “If I had a place like this to come to, I doubt I’d ever want to leave. That’s how I felt, the first time I was here.”

  Diane was quiet for a few minutes, then cleared her throat gently. “Do you think things might have turned out differently if you hadn’t gotten so sick that summer?”

  Mercedes watched the river run beside them. “Probably. Yeah. Hell, yes.” Her hands knotted themselves. “For a little while, like a minute, my life was perfect, and he was all the future I could see.

  “Look, it took me a long time before I didn’t think about that every day. What kind of a person I would have turned into, what kind of man he would ha—but it was just a fluke, that summer. It was what I needed then in my life, a fun time. A wonderful, fun time, but we were kids. I don’t look back and I don’t wonder.”

  Irene spoke knowingly from the driver’s side. “You guys were good, though, weren’t you?”

  “There wasn’t a scale that could measure us.”

  In unison her cousins reached across and squeezed Mercedes’ hand. “I’m glad you came up here with me,” Irene said. “Hope this vacation sticks with you a long time.”

  Mercedes returned the squeeze. The fine taste of epiphany, the impression that something wonderful was about to happen, billowed up again. She looked out the window again as Forge slipped back behind her. There were no ghosts here. Just epiphany on the horizon. Something good bound to happen.

  *

  The trip back to L.A. was like any other, she and Irene transferred to a larger plane in Seattle and flew down the coast between the ocean and the mountains. Hard to believe, she thought, a whole vacation already behind me. The week in Forge had been a great rest, but she found it left her feeling off-kilter somehow, tense in a way, as if she’d left something undone. Was it the vacation? She hadn’t really taken a break since she started taking pictures—the last time she’d taken a day off she’d found her husband in someone else’s bed—and not counting the days she’d met with Bryce’s lawyers, Mercedes worked pretty much straight through. Maybe the vacation threw me off balance, she thought, but there was more to it than that.

  The business was doing as well as she’d ever dreamed. Running her own studio was as challenging and fun as she’d ever imagined, but if she was going to be completely honest with herself, photography didn’t leave her as giddy as it once did.

  Not that she’d had her fill of adventure. When she began, Mercedes had thrown herself into photography with everything she could come up with, and it was almost shocking to find that other people would actually pay her to jump out of a plane with a camera, or eat rice in spicy parts of the world while trying to un-extinct certain animals. She’d never shot anything worthy of a Pulitzer, though she carried the extra film when Big John Holdaway made the pictures of Indonesian rebels firing rocket-propelled grenades into a Red Cross helicopter. That was usually the way things went career-wise in photography; she’d learned the craft with Big John in her early 20’s and then widened her own reputation
into a solo career that turned profitable just before her thirtieth birthday. Three thousand dollars a day was pretty good. Bryce’s connections had gotten her into fashion and the celebrity wedding-and-bar mitzvah set, but Mercedes really lived for the obscure jobs. Every time she went into the shark cage, Mercedes knew Big John would approve.

  Yet, what was this strange disquiet?

  Mount Ranier slid glacially by to the left of the plane, white and blue under the spring sun. Irene typed merrily away on her computer. Mercedes sighed and settle back into her seat.

  Thinking she would be anxious to get back to work right away, before she left for Idaho she set contracts for jobs in southern California; big-money weddings and a trip into the sequoias for the Raptor Center at U.C. Davis to shoot golden eagles right after they hatched. Mercedes was excited to get the jobs, but now . . . maybe she’d give the job to her assistants—partners, really.

  No, she’d keep the golden eagle gig, that would be worth it. Let the kids take care of the weddings. The San Jacinto mountains were beautiful this time of year, and after northern Idaho, Mercedes decided she wasn’t quite ready to come out of the woods.

  There it was again, that odd feeling of expectancy. Something about to change. Mercedes frowned. Why should anything in her life need changing? Things were finally settling into place. She lived in a nice house, full of books and windows. She did her best to be a good neighbor; the kids on her street knew they were welcome in her pool. The business was all but running itself, so much so she could walk away for a month. That was the idea from the beginning, wasn’t it? Set it up and live on a beach somewhere? Punalu’u?

  Mercedes had worked very hard for several years, even admitting the terrific luck she’d been handed from time to time, but now her baby didn’t need her quite as much. She’d earned freedom.

  So why balk at epiphany? Was she souring at the idea that she couldn’t enjoy success, or was there something else wrong, missing, lost? She’d worked hard building the studio, even during the divorce, and at the time the superficial regret she felt at failing “until death do you part” was overwhelmed by relief at not being trapped in a marriage with a man determined to stay fifteen years old the rest of his life. Thank God she’d sidestepped that freight train. She told herself that to willingly surrender to such a prison would be a greater harm than divorce; she should be glad to escape, that a lingering sense of betrayal was an easy price for her own selfishness. She touched her empty ring finger. Mercedes would never understand her own heart. She had never told anyone, not even Diane, but the hardest nights since the divorce, maybe half a dozen nights, she’d wake up sometime in the middle of the night, curled into herself, surprised to find herself weeping.

  But she woke up in the morning stronger. Sometimes alone and not lonely is the strongest place a woman can be.

  Mercedes didn’t have anything against epiphany, she just didn’t trust it. Epiphany had yet to prove worthy of her faith. If anything miraculous was about to happen, it would only come out of her brains and sweat. She settled back into her seat and tried to breathe. This was too much introspection for one day; she needed to get back to work. People think themselves into craziness this way. Better keep the world as solid as possible, and leave fantasy and fairy tales to children. Solid was best. Solid was best.

  But it was tempting to remember.

  *

  When she was seventeen

  The wind tumbled gently across each of the overlapping canopies of leaves that hung above the street. Below, a boy and a girl walked slowly down the middle of the pavement, heads together, whispering in hushed, conspiratorial tones. They drifted through each pool of warm radiance cast by the odd porch light that had been left on, or by the occasional hooded floodlight that marked the beginning of one of the short driveways. They clung to each other, deliberately treading in sync with the slow, inevitable rhythms of the night, of each other.

  Jack held his tennis racket and the tube of bright yellow balls loosely in the crook of his other arm, smiling vaguely across at her. “I’ve really got to thank you for the tennis lesson,” he began in that offhand, barely flamboyant manner she’d begun to recognize as a prelude to something more serious.

  She swatted him lightly in the stomach with her racket. “Well, I thought at least we’d get past figuring out how to hang the net. And here all my cousins told me what a Boy Scout you are.” She batted at him again.

  Jack doubled over slightly, puffing out his cheeks, feigning injury. Mercedes laughed as his eyes widened and he mocked gasping for air. Sagging to his knees, Jack clutched a handful of her cuff. “Bury me with my racket,” he croaked, then sprawled backwards into the street.

  Mercedes waited a moment, then stepped back, clapping. “Bravo, bravo, bellissimo! Molto bene!”

  Jack opened his eyes. “Bellissimo? Molto benny? You’re making up words now?”

  She brandished her racket threateningly, trying for a grim glare, but her smile managed to crumble in around the edges.

  Jack raised his hands, then covered his stomach. “No, please, no more, I beg you. I—retract—or something like that.” He was beginning to laugh, too. “I’ve always loved you Italian people. What with your leaning towers and brass knuckles and all.” His eyes widened again as she raised the tennis racket over her head. “And the whole Venice idea; great, really great! Who would have thought to build a whole city so it would sink into the sea? Ugh!” The racket thumped home, but lightly.

  Mercedes giggled again. She could never hurt Jack. “Ooh, poor baby,” she cooed, bending and patting him on the stomach. He was solid, firm. She never could hurt Jack. Mercedes set the racket across her knees and rested her elbows on it. “I hope you’ll live ‘til tomorrow. Should I call the paramedics, or is there something I can do right here to make it better?”

  He looked at her askance. “How much better?”

  Mercedes blinked. Before she could think of a reply, the porch light behind her blazed on. “You kids get home!” The man behind the screen whisper-shouted. “Its almost five o’clock in the blessed morning! Folks are trying to sleep.” He shook his fist. “Just wait ‘til you have to work a nine to five,” he muttered, then more loudly, “And you, you bully! Quit picking on him! Knock him down in the middle of the . . . Five o’clock—” The heavy door banged shut, the scowling man still grumbling to himself.

  Mercedes gave Jack a hand up, and both hurried down the street as two other porchlights blinked on behind them.

  By the time they reached the house, they’d gone from muffled snickering to full-blown laughter. “Did you see that guy’s face?” Jack choked, “And what was he wearing?”

  “I think maybe it was a toga.” She was out of breath, too. They both took a few hesitant steps down the short sidewalk. It was a pale, grainy gray against the dark of the grass.

  Jack shook his head. “Know what, Mercedes? I’m never going to work a nine-to-five.” He was serious.

  Mercedes leaned on him, breathing hard while she adjusted the heel of her shoe. “Why’s that?” They had almost returned to a whisper.

  “At the rate these tennis lessons are going, we won’t have time!” They were both seized by fresh gales of laughter. Mercedes couldn’t help herself. Part of the reason she laughed was knowing how unfunny the joke was. She wiped a tear from her eye. The other part was, Jack knew it too.

  They held each other tightly through the laughter, swaying slightly, half for support, then, when the hilarity of the moment trailed off, tighter still. Mercedes found it surprising that Jack didn’t immediately release her. Greater yet was her surprise when she realized she didn’t want to be let go, not just yet. Her hands found each other in the small of his back, underneath his jacket. He chuckled, and she felt the warm vibration of his voice spread through his chest at the same time his breath stirred across her face. Mercedes rested her head on the pad of muscle drawn tight at the junction of Jack’s arm and shoulder, and smiled up at him. “Jack?”

  “M
mmhmm?”

  “You ever notice how they always name the good guys ‘Jack?’ I mean, in that movie last night, wasn’t that the hero’s name?”

  “And don’t forget Jack and the Beanstalk--”

  “Or Jack the Giant Killer. ‘Seven at one blow!’”

  “Or Jack and Jill.” The boy was quiet for a moment. Then, “Mercedes, does this feel as good to you as it does to me?”

  It did. Their bodies fit together like pieces of the same puzzle. It was miraculous, wonderful. Mercedes had never felt anything like it before. She couldn’t tell exactly where she left off and he began. As a cool spring breeze flickered over her, she became aware of the tremendous heat growing between them, as if two candles had been lit and placed flame to flame, and she felt the strangest impression that the two of them were melting somehow, thawing and dissolving into one another. Any minute now, and they would meld and fuse into something even more wonderful, more refined. Looking up at his face, she knew he could feel it, too, at least some of it. She settled her weight on her toes, and leaned up–

  And then Jack broke away. “Hang on a sec, Mercedes.” He looked up, over her shoulder, chagrined. Then Mercedes became aware of the rhythmic squeak-screech of a bicycle being peddled up the quiet street, and the soft, rustling thud of newspapers landing on cement.

  They stood perfectly still, Jack’s hands in the groove of her waist, as the paperboy trundled past them on the street. Without a glance towards the couple, the younger boy whipped a wrapped newspaper deftly at the front stoop. Jack nudged her hip, gently turning himself into the path of the paper. It slapped the side of his head and fell to the grass. He winced.

  Mercedes put a hand to her mouth as if impressed. “Jack,” she breathed. “You took a newspaper for me.”