River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  “Yeah, maybe,” Horse said, in a tone that suggested Jennings was naive and pathetic. They flipped the chickens over and Ricky dipped the string mop into a big white stable bucket filled with barbecue sauce and painted the dozens of pieces of chicken—the excess sauce fell onto the burning wood, sending up plumes of smoke and licks of flame.

  The plane emerged from the clouds and was beginning the long loop that would eventually bring it directly overhead. The three men watched silently as the Cessna made its way.

  “Still think it’s nothing?” Horse asked. He cupped his hands on either side of his mouth and shouted up at the plane. “We see you, motherfucker.”

  “Hey, come on,” Jennings said. “There’s kids.”

  “The thing is,” Horse explained, “since Nixon ruled that we wouldn’t be exchanging paper money for gold, we’ve had like a thousand percent increase in the number of unexplained small-craft airplanes right in this area, that’s all I’m talking about, right here, right where you and I live, and no one’s saying shit about it. Someone is watching us. Big Brother’s got it all figured out. It’s like a chess player thinking ten moves ahead, and we’re all sitting here playing Chinese checkers with our thumbs up our ass.”

  “He can’t swear in his own house. He saves it for when he’s with us,” said Larry, to no one in particular.

  “You’re sheep,” Horse said. “People make decisions about your life and you don’t even know it’s happening. Who’s pulling the strings, man, don’t you ever think about it? Why did they take us off the gold standard? Whose idea was that? This is your money, folks. And your money is your freedom. What gives anyone the right to mess with you like that?” His new muscles were twitching in his black T-shirt. “When Kennedy started asking questions about gold, eighty-two days later there was a bullet in his brain. Eighty-two days. And the whole Nixon thing, that whole Watergate impeachment thing, well, that never made any sense. I was fucking seventeen years old and I knew that for whatever reason they were kicking him out of Washington had nothing to do with some stupid robbery. What I didn’t know was how it all tied in to the Federal Reserve. Gold. The whole history of the world is about gold.”

  As if to demonstrate the unending reign of gold, Grace wandered over to the fire pit, with little gold crescents studded into her earlobes. She wore a long white dress; there was a sprig of lilac in her hair. David was on her hip, naked beneath his blue Oshkosh overalls, his cheeks flushed, his expression unnervingly solemn. He seemed nearly half the size of his mother, like a child in an old painting.

  “Wow, look at you guys,” Grace said. “This is primal.”

  “Sorry for the noise,” Jennings said.

  “And look at you, Jennings,” Grace said. “You and little David are dressed the same.” Her voice was deep and soft and undressed. “Where’s Muriel?” she asked.

  “She’s around,” Jennings said, with a vague wave.

  “We brought her a present,” she said. She handed David over to Jennings without asking and pulled a small canvas from the beige-and-blue bag that hung from her shoulder.

  “A painting,” Jennings said. David, resting his head against Jennings, seemed soothed by Jennings’s body heat, and appeared to be falling asleep.

  “So what is it?” Horse asked.

  Grace had the eight-by-ten-inch canvas turned toward herself and she inspected it, frowning. Her fingers gripped the stretcher bars; an absurd overabundance of staples fixed the canvas to the frame. Reluctantly, she turned the canvas around so Jennings could see. “It’s not very good.”

  “It’s amazing,” Jennings said. The colors were dark, the overall impression somewhat melancholy, though the image was one of childish fantasy: a dark brown rabbit holding some kind of blue-and-yellow jewel in its paws. The craft was painstaking, perfect, a photograph of a world of make-believe. The background was a fenced garden brimming with sumptuous vegetables, and sitting in a lawn chair near the garden was a man snoozing with a book on his lap. The man looked like an older, plumper version of Thaddeus, but with hooves.

  “She can just put it in a drawer or something. These days I only make small paintings for easy storage.”

  “No way. This goes right up on the wall. This goes . . . I don’t know. It’s really good. It’s . . .” He tried to think of something you could say about a painting that didn’t mention pretty or beautiful, something that showed some appreciation of the work, the art of it, the secret language it spoke.

  “Really? That’s so nice of you.”

  “I’m not being nice. It’s so real, it kind of scrambles the brain there.”

  “I wish someone would scramble my brains,” she said, handing the painting to him and taking David back. He was drowsy and seemed not to register the transfer. One of his little red sneakers was about to slip off. “It’s kind of hard taking my painting seriously,” Grace said. “I never seem to have enough time. Which is insane. All I have is time.”

  “But you’re really good,” Jennings said. “My aunt Lorraine is a really good artist, but you’re way beyond what she can do.”

  The guys around the fire pit stood watching them, their eyes going left to right, like spectators at a tennis match.

  “I’m glad you like it. Makes me happy,” said Grace.

  “Let’s find Muriel and show her,” said Jennings. They made their way across the newly mown lawn, which Jennings had cut according to his father’s specifications. Grace was tiring from David’s weight on her right hip and attempted to switch him over to the left without breaking stride. She glanced over her shoulder and noticed her house, her grand house, with its chimneys and porches, and tall windows, looming in the distance like an ocean liner riding the waves.

  Someone turned a radio up, a furiously androgynous voice rose up singing: She says I am the one / but the kid is not my son.

  “If I were Michael Jackson I might not be so fast to deny paternity,” Grace said. But the joke suddenly felt cheap, like imitation gold that turns green when it is touched by human warmth. “How many chances is he going to have?” she added, as the sound of the radio disappeared.

  “Funny,” Jennings said.

  The disappointment of that somehow emboldened her. She was like a gambler who responds to a loss by doubling the next bet.

  “Remember the night?” she asked. “When your dad fell?”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “I saw you sitting by yourself. I mean when he got up and did his dance.”

  A silence, except for the sound of their feet on the grass. “Maybe if he’d just lain still he wouldn’t be so fucked up now.”

  “You looked . . .” She didn’t want to say humiliated, and she searched for another word.

  “I know,” Jennings said. “I was.” He knew what word she was going to say and didn’t want to say it, either. “We understand each other” is what he wanted to say, and he did.

  “Yeah.” They continued walking, but suddenly everything had changed. The external world was less important than the internal, what was buried more present than the seen. “Thaddeus doesn’t understand what it feels like to just be cringing over how the world treats your mother or your father. Even my own brother doesn’t get it. Liam loves her, our mother, but he never felt that . . . frustration. I saw it that night, in you.”

  He thumped his belly, and smiled at Grace. “I’m going to get rid of this. This really ain’t me.”

  They passed beneath a tree whose branches were heavy with small white flowers, each trembling in the wind, awaiting the bees’ arrival. Life goes on, the real story, though we think it’s about us. Jennings snapped off a twig and gave it to Grace.

  “Thank you.” She held out the twig. “What is this? An apple tree?”

  “Mountain ash.”

  “Me,” David said. Suddenly alert, he reached for the twig as if for an ice-cream cone.

  “I dreamed about you last night,” Grace said suddenly, as if the memory of it had just come to her, though, in fact,
she had been thinking of it all day.

  “You did?”

  “Sorry. Stupid thing to say. I can’t stand people who talk about their dreams.”

  “I’m complimented,” Jennings said, his voice rather stiff. “Should I be?”

  Emboldened, Grace asked, “When we first met? What was the first thing you thought when you met me?”

  Without hesitation, Jennings said, “You seemed like someone who didn’t have a friend in the world. Except for Thaddeus, I mean. Except for him.”

  “Yeah. I never really got the hang of it. For me, if you’re not with someone a hundred percent, then what’s the point? I’ve got this all or nothing thing and it doesn’t really work. Out in the world. But I’m okay with it.” She forced herself to stop, though she felt she could have gone on talking about herself for another hour.

  They were near the pond that now belonged to Hat. All around the shore, Jennings and Muriel had created a funky little paradise, with plaster lions, striped canvas chairs, old beach umbrellas. The grass in spring was a carpet of wildflowers almost indistinguishable from the swarms of butterflies that hovered above them. A thick honey-colored rope had been tied to a low-hanging willow branch and a guy in cutoff jeans and a tank top swung from it and let go over the center of the pond, shrieking with happiness when he hit the water.

  Why wasn’t she happier herself? The deep, green scent of spring filled the air. When she had first heard someone say that April was the cruelest month of all she thought they were full of shit. If your father is taking pictures for a girly mag, December can be as tough as April—it’s when the centerfold might be wearing a Santa hat. And a tipsy depressed mother knows no season. But she was young at the time and didn’t realize that when you lost some of your hope and it seemed that most of your stupid fucking dreams were not going to come true, spring was a mockery. Mating season for all that lives. Regeneration? Fresh start? What a joke. But there was David, actually smelling the little flowers of the mountain ash, with the sunlight touching his golden curly hair. And Jennings. Jennings. She felt a slow, sensuous turning within her, radiating down to her legs, up to the back of her throat. Oh! Enthralled and unnerved, Grace stumbled upon her own longing as if it were the beautiful cottage she used to call home, but now she was afraid to open the door and find it uninhabitable. She loathed her own unhappiness. It made her want to shake herself. It was such a waste—a waste of what was left of her youth, a waste of good fortune. Look at all she had. A beautiful son, healthy, smart, alive, an adoring husband. She could rise from their bed and look out the window and there was the river, like a shining blue-and-silver scarf dropped from heaven. And still unhappy? It meant there was something wrong with you, you were mad, you were absurd—and how dare you? And that fucking Rilke poem! How many times had she read it, biting back tears, her head spinning, dizzy from the vertigo of self-reproach? One night, hoping to illuminate her own state of mind, she read the poem to Thaddeus. It was like confessing, she may as well have been on her knees, she may as well have been weeping. He listened with hands folded, his head bowed, making a small show of his reverence for literature. When the poem ended with that stark, urgent, passionate, admonishing line—“You must change your life”—her voice quavered, but she got through it. Thaddeus lifted his head, raised his eyebrows. “Well, I don’t see it as a movie,” he joked. “Unless we can get Richard Gere for Apollo.” He happened to notice her expression—the shock of a tricked child—and he tried to salvage the moment. “I wonder what it’s like in the original German,” he’d said. “I never know if I should trust a translation.”

  You idiot, she did not say. What’s happened to you?

  Muriel, lounging near the pond, waved when she saw Jennings and Grace. Raised in an arid zone, where the sky was ochre and the dust stung your face, she was mad for water now, and yet she did not have a proper bathing suit. She could not shake the idea that a bathing suit was a luxury, like a silk nightgown or a platter with indentations you used for deviled eggs maybe twice a year. So she was in gym shorts and a T-shirt, soaked through. You could see the shadow of her pubic hair, indistinct but present, like voices from another room. One of her friends, Jill, sitting on the ground with a towel tied around her lower half, her knees open so that the material concaved into a kind of bassinet, tended to naked Jewel, feeding her blueberries and making funny little sounds to amuse her: “Bungy bungy bungy.” Jewel thrust her baby arms and legs stiffly out, as if she were being electrocuted by pleasure.

  They were no more than fifty feet from the pond. Jennings gazed at his wife, Jewel, Jill, and the others as if they were angels. Were his eyes bright with tears, or was that the sun, directly overhead? “These are the good old days,” he murmured.

  What would it be like, Grace wondered, to be with a man who enjoyed life in such a conscious, direct way, who ran his hand over it like a table freshly planed?

  “You guys swim in that pond?” Grace asked. “I’m scared to.”

  “We always have. What are you scared of?”

  “I don’t know. What lives in there? Fish and turtles and who knows what. Is it deep?”

  “In the middle. You should use it when the weather’s better. There’s nothing like a pond.”

  “I’m not a swimmer. I’d sink. Drown. That would be it.”

  “I’ve taught a lot of people how to swim.”

  “I can sort of swim,” Grace said.

  “I could teach you how to swim so you wouldn’t be afraid. Here. You give it to her,” Jennings said, handing the painting to Grace and taking David out of her arms. David relaxed in Jennings’s arms, looking up at him with a serious expression. He showed Jennings the twig from the mountain ash, which had already lost most of its little white flowers.

  “Hi, Grace,” Muriel said, with the extra energy and emphasis of a shy person.

  “Woman to woman?” Grace said. “I think mothers ought to get presents every damn day. For what we went through giving birth, our bodies ripped to shreds.”

  Muriel smiled uncertainly. “Oh, little Jewel just slipped right out of me, easy as pie.”

  “Wow,” Grace said. “You’re so lucky. I’m just not built that way.” The remark might have been too personal. Oh my God, Grace thought, not cool. “Anyhow, I brought you a present. It’s really pretty stupid.”

  “Oh, you didn’t have to do that,” Muriel said. She leaned over to take her daughter out of Jill’s lap. Her long honey-colored hair swayed, a bit of knobby spine showed, her hamstrings tightened. Grace glanced over to see Jennings staring at his wife, who looked like she could try out for the hippie Olympics. This cop’s daughter, so wan, so seemingly shy, still knew the way to swing and sway her body like a hypnotist’s pocket watch.

  Grace tried to give the painting to Muriel, but she wouldn’t take it until she thoroughly dried her hands. There was a striped blue-and-white towel on the bank of the pond, and she bent deeply, balletically. It was as if the bend opened her and her loveliness emerged. Grace had had no idea how beautiful Muriel was—she had been misled by the shyness, the few crooked teeth, the pregnancy, the shapeless gingham dresses. When her hands were dry, she approached Grace again and said, “I never had a real oil painting in a frame.”

  She put her hands together prayerfully and bowed.

  You’ve got to be kidding me, thought Grace.

  “Actually, it’s acrylic,” she said, handing it to Muriel. “Safer for Jewel, in case she decides to eat it.”

  “Oh no, no, we’ll take real good care of this. Oh Jiminy Cricket, look at this! This is so nice. Trippy. Will you get a load of this crazy rabbit. You are really a great artist, Grace, I mean it.”

  Jewel made a little yearning noise, seeing David in Jennings’s arms. The two children reached for each other, their fingers waggling up and down. David’s tongue was out. It made him look insane.

  “Okay, you two,” Muriel said. She put Jewel down onto the grass and David squirmed until Jennings set him down, too.

 
; Jill struggled to her feet and looked admiringly at the painting. “You did this?” she asked Grace. She seemed aggressive but without malice. Perhaps her amazement was meant to be flattering. Maybe she was one of those people who gives you a shove as a way of saying they’re glad to see you.

  “Yeah,” Grace said. “It’s not very good.”

  A little splash from the pond, and Grace’s heart seized for a moment. The babies! She could see them in dread’s cavernous imaginary theater, little balls of formed flesh sinking slowly through the muck. But David and Jewel were right there, three feet away, safe and sound on their hands and knees in the soft grass, more or less motionless, their foreheads pressed together. It took Grace a moment to regain her composure.

  When she looked up, Jennings was smiling. She guessed that he knew what had just passed through her mind.

  “I can make you a studio,” he said. “If you want. It would be easy to do, if you ever wanted.”

  “I just work wherever,” Grace said. “But thanks.”

  “I was talking to Thaddeus about it.”

  “You were?”

  “Yeah. He said it was fine with him, if that’s what you wanted.”

  “He did, huh. Well, that’s very nice of him. Can I ask you a question? Why would you talk this over with Thaddeus before me?”

  Jennings looked unperturbed. “Just did, I guess,” he said.

  “Well, it’s very nice of you. I mean to even be thinking about me and where I do my work. My work is meaningless, but I do love it. I’ve been doing it since I was little. It’s when I’m happiest.” She looked away. The last remark had slipped out. She might come to regret it and she might not; it all depended upon where it led.

  “The red building just north of the house?” Jennings said. “They used to keep chickens in it when I was a kid. Wouldn’t cost much.”

  “We’ve got a lot of rooms, Jennings. Right in the house.”

  “I guess a studio’s something else,” he said.