Game of Secrets

by Dawn Tripp

  ——

  “No thoughts yet?” he is asking me now.

  That’s hardly the issue, I think.

  He keeps straight past the split, on the old road. We are heading south—away from most eateries.

  “Let’s go somewhere innocuous,” I say.

  “Does that translate: non-local?”

  “The only local place I ever really loved was Manchester’s.”

  “That’s a moot point now. Besides, their food was lousy.”

  “Yeah, but who went for the food?”

  He makes the right onto Hixbridge, down Potato Hill, then turns onto Drift. We pass the farm that used to belong to one of my great-grandfathers—that used to be a farm—is houses now.

  You drive through town, and every road you turn down holds some littered vestige—the name of a brook, a glen, an old wall one of them built, or a house where some were born, lived, married, died, pulling rocks out of the same fields for two hundred years. You’re wrapped in it.

  When you first come home, you can’t help but feel a certain nostalgia. You see the idyll of the place—you see it like a person from away might—that tranquil New-Englandy beauty, swathes of open land still left, the village at the Point, those cedar-shingled saltbox houses, the double-forked branch of the river, sea running into the land.

  It’s a particular point of earth—you come home, and the light here is like nowhere else. You think to yourself, I can do this. So you stay.

  Where the trees break here and there, I can see the river. The sun is behind us, on its plunge.

  I tell him I want to go to the Outback, up on Route 6.

  He laughs. “Let me guess—for the atmosphere?”

  “I like that fake Aussie stuff.”

  “So Outback it is.”

  We pass the brook where Susannah Howe was found, pregnant and drowned, in water that never would have seemed deep enough for drowning. This is the flip side, of course. It’s like they smell you back—the more recently dead—they bide their time, give you some play with your rose-colored frames, then start swinging their feet. Gritty lovely warp of a world.

  Ray is asking me about the new section of the restaurant they’re pulling together—got all their permits in place, I tell him, they’re slated to open mid-July—outdoor picnic style, modeled after that in-the-rough lobster place down in Connecticut. Red-and-white checkered tablecloths. You get your ticket, take your food on a plastic tray. For the summer-people patrons who want to slum it for a night.

  As the road straightens, Pard Islington’s house comes into sight up ahead. I see him out front, not Pard of course, Pard died two weeks ago. Even with the welder’s hood on, the flame bursting out the end of the torch, sparks flying, I know it is Huck. He is standing in the midst of disassembled tractor parts, welding some sort of bracket to an old chassis, hunks of scrap metal all over the yard.

  No, I think. I think it hard even as the truck slows. Please don’t stop. No. Please.

  Ray pulls the truck onto the shoulder of lawn. Kills it. Leaves the key in the ignition. And me, no choice but to follow.

  To the right of the house, a whitewashed flagpole, two flags strung up, worn by wind and rain; one the Stars and Stripes, the other with its Gadsden rattler. DON’T TREAD ON ME. Huck flips up his welder’s hood as we walk over. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him close up. He looks about the same as I remember, only old now, too.

  There’s a dog lying on a welcome mat set among the junk—Pard’s mutt—half Lab, half something more menacing. It cocks its head, eyes trailing us, then lies back down.

  “So this is it?” Ray says, surveying the tractor in its half-assembled state thus far.

  “She’ll be the ticket,” Huck says, voice like dry bark. “Queen of the homemade class.” With the torch, he points to the beer keg strapped to the chassis. “That there’s my fuel tank.”

  Huck nods at me. “How you doing?” Gives me a queer look. Hasn’t it always been a queer look from Huck?

  There’s a graphic on his T-shirt, a print that reads: CO-ED NAKED FOUR WHEELING. My girlish euphoria begins to deflate as it hits me in a less abstract way that the guy I’ve got this hot thing for is the younger brother of the knucklehead standing before me.

  And if the shirt were not enough, or perhaps to test out where my loyalties fall, Huck launches into a full-blown invective—he’s got XM in his truck now but he’s still hooked on Fox News and is all steamed up—starts blasting on to Ray about the left-wing media conspiracy, how all them stations are on the smear against Bush, so busy pointing fingers and wringing their hands over the mess at Abu Ghraib, they neglect to mention the rising price of oil, how those sand sambos have us all by the balls.

  Chatty for a Yankee. I’ll give him that. Weevil-minded racist sputter stuck, ever so stuck, in the feudal, futile muck of this town.

  I just stand there, trying not to listen, as the reasons why I left this place—why I keep leaving—stockpile.

  Once or twice in the course of his harangue, Huck’s eyes pull from Ray, clip onto me. Again that look, like it’s just not registering for him, even though he’s distilled and conquered the big-picture political concerns that face our nation today, he just cannot reconcile what I am doing here. Flapper-cropped fartsy bluestocking. Slip-slide-away-wannabe-city girl. Snob. Interpreting his look—no challenge—it does strike me that I may be pegged even a notch or two lower on his totem pole than he is on mine.

  There’s a stain on the leg of his jeans. Engine grease laundered-in. Set. The shape of Madagascar.

  ——

  Here’s the rub. I hate Huck almost exclusively on principle. I know this. I wish it were more. I wish he had slighted me, made some crass, offensive advance, done something nasty. I wish I had a concrete reason to legitimize my dislike.

  Once I made some caustic remark to Alex about Huck and his convictions. Alex gave a little smile and nodded. “Yep. Huckie’s just about as judgmental as you.”

  I remember this now, wishing I hadn’t, and thankfully, Huck has moved on. A more neutral topic: the upcoming July Agricultural Fair. The main attraction of the year in these parts, even beating out Christmas. Huck’s telling Ray the story about how he and Pard drained that beer keg and got the idea just about a week before Pard shit the bed.

  The dog gives a short bark.

  “What’s your problem, Dutchess?” Huck says. For one terrible instant, I think he is talking to me.

  “Is she yours now?” Ray asks.

  “Yeah. She always liked me better anyhow.”

  There are flowers planted in short intentional rows along either side of the back steps. An NRA bumper sticker peeling with the green paint from the screen. The flowers, though—iris in bloom—and some other young bulby green things shooting up as well. I never would have taken Pard to be the sort who took to setting flowers.

  Ray has noticed me looking at them. He cups his hand near one of the taller iris, holding it without holding it, not letting the bloom touch his skin. Knowing I can’t, I swear I can see the shadow of the color in his palm. As if I’m nearer than I am. As if the air is a fluid that color steeps through. As if.

  You feel it in the body—this kind of desire—a storm in the body.

  ——

  “Alright then,” Ray says, addressing me, “are you ready?” I nod.

  “Good luck with it, Huckie,” he says. “See you, Dutchess.” We walk back toward the truck. He opens the door for me, then climbs in on his side. We drive away.

  I glance into the side mirror, see Huck in the yard by the dismembered metal hulk of the homemade, Huck there in his welder’s hood, Madagascar jeans and CO-ED NAKED T-shirt, Huck holding his torch, his small-town petty smallness growing every second more minute. I watch until the road curves, and he and Pard’s house drop from view.

  * * *

  At the Outback, Ray tries to talk me into splitting a Bloomin’ Onion.

  “No, thanks,” I say.

  “You’ve never
tried it.”

  “I wouldn’t like it.”

  “How do you know, Marne,” he says with a smile, “if you’ve never tried?”

  Kind of like being done up the back door. “Some things I know,” I say.

  It was true, what I told him before about this place. I’ve always noticed it. How everything here is arranged in such a way that you never wind up looking out the window. You’ve got the air-conditioning and the twitters coming at you—the “g’day matie” talk, the kangaroo boomerang décor—it’s easy to forget the Route 6 strip outside—the mall and drone of evening traffic; the hot fetid smell of exhaust; the fainter stink of trash.

  The waitress has come with our drinks. She flips out her pad. “Are you ready?” she asks.

  I’ll have to think about that.

  Ray orders a steak. No surprise there. And one of those onions.

  I opt for the Queensland Salad, with grilled chicken, double on the jack cheese, but no cheddar. And no diced egg. The waitress is scribbling, making her 86s.

  I tell her I am in her boat. I hate people who order like me.

  Her eyes lift, a blank look.

  “Dressing on the side,” I add.

  “It’s always on the side,” she murmurs, collecting our menus. “Anything else?”

  “She’s all done,” Ray says. The waitress walks away.

  “You probably shouldn’t make that assumption,” I remark.

  “You love to be difficult, don’t you?”

  “It’s really no effort.”

  He smiles.

  I study his face. Try to remember the first time I laid eyes on him. It’s harder than I expect. He was underbrush in my world before I struck it. He is familiar to me that way.

  He tells me he was late picking me up because he ran into his sister-in-law Claire, Junie’s widow, up at Cumberland Farms when he stopped for gas.

  “I told her I was on my way to pick you up, and she said she was at Polly’s last month, bought two of those little paper vases you make, the ones with the violets.”

  “I never see Claire anymore,” I say. “Haven’t seen her since I’ve been home. She’s not remarried, is she?”

  “No. That won’t happen.”

  Claire taught in the middle school. Fifth-grade math. She retired the year I graduated and, after Junie died, went on to spend the greater part of her days eating éclairs in the bedroom, tuned to the police scanner.

  “Junie was the golden one,” Ray is saying. “The hero. The peacemaker. He was the one my mother couldn’t keep her eyes off of. We all looked up to him, even Huck. When my father was being a nut, Junie stepped in, watched out for us. He was so sure of himself, always seemed to know just what he was about.”

  It surprises me—not what he says, but the change in his expression, the shift in his voice. Some sad, darker kind of honesty, almost a weariness I am not used to seeing in him. Apart from Huck, Ray rarely talks about his family. Never mentions his father, certainly not to me. He didn’t grow up under that roof—his mother left Silas the year he was born—still, from what I’ve heard, his father would come around, make trouble, rope the boys into it—Ray’s brother Green an obvious casualty of that. Silas was a drunk, and violent, more than likely the one who planted that bullet in my grandfather’s skull. That’s the open secret anyway—but the one you talk around.

  I didn’t know Junie well. He was much older, the oldest of the Varick brothers. Pard’s yard couldn’t hold a candle to Junie’s: a wall of lobster pots piled as high as the garage, bait barrels running the length of the stone wall, a seafoam-green Chevrolet and five or six old boats, one with a busted hull, goldenrod sprouting out of it. He kept sheep down back.

  You did feel, though, that if the world went to hell in a handbasket, Junie was one you’d want to stick around. He was old school. Broke down deer tails to make his fishing flies. Survival-of-the-fittest type. All male. Food, water, shelter. Competent with guns.

  I remark on this now to Ray, and he laughs. “He could get pretty testy about property lines. Spent the last two years before he died bucking some neighbor who wanted him to clear out that junk, plant some hydrangeas.”

  “And there was that letter—” I say.

  “What letter?”

  “Oh, I loved that letter.” And I tell him how when I was in California, Alex sent me a copy of a Letter-to-the-Editor Junie wrote when the Concom issued a cease-and-desist against him for cleaning his brook without a permit.

  Ray rolls his eyes. “Oh yeah. That letter.”

  “Quite erudite, I’d say.”

  He gives me a look. “Be careful what you warm up to, Marne—”

  “No way, that letter was perfect. Elegant, arch tone—how did that last bit go? … wait, no don’t tell me, I remember … citing certain folk who seem to have gotten a twitch in their knickers over the fate and dwindling habitat of an extremely rare four-toed salamander. And yet, given the recent spike in property taxes, might they not all have it ass-backward about which local species were most at risk for becoming endangered. Ha! It was brilliant, Ray. I loved that letter, laughed for days out there in sunny California.”

  His hand is on his water glass, his thumb stroking absently over the narrowing part near the base. “Good old-fashioned streak of the Libertarian.”

  “Might that be a euphemism?” I ask.

  He glances up. “Might be.”

  What strikes me, of course, is how he says it. How he seems to have learned to take it in stride. I mention this.

  He shrugs. “In one ear and out the other.”

  “Is that how you take, say, just for instance, Huck, and how he goes on about, you know, his views?” I ask this with some delicacy—it’s a bit of a strain.

  “Huck’s who he is,” Ray answers carefully.

  You got that right, I think.

  His eyes on my face are a kind of greenish brown; hazel you could call them, but darker, and that slight scar near his mouth—that scar I thought was new, it occurs to me now that maybe I was wrong, maybe it’s been there awhile. He is looking at me like he is weighing what I am saying and what I’m not. Looking like he might add something else. He shakes his head. “It was Huck who wrote that letter.”

  “No!”

  He smiles now. “Yep. Junie was just plain pissed, said if he had his way, he’d lynch about half of them. Huckie drafted that letter up at the Kozy Nook one morning, gave it to Junie to sign.”

  A wave of unease ripples through me. “There’s no way Huck wrote that letter.”

  “How did you put it? Erudite. Elegant—” He is laughing, teasing me now. “Like I say, Marne. Let it go in one ear and out the other.”

  “You really think it’s that simple.”

  “What am I going to do? Change their minds?”

  “You’re never tempted?” The moment the word’s off my tongue, I regret it.

  He smiles. “Not by that.”

  I fiddle with the unscrew top of my root beer, surprised the server left it. Past the obvious necessary utensils, steak knives and the like, we are taught, as a caste, not to leave extraneous sharp objects behind.

  I think of that tall iris, out front of Pard Islington’s house. Ray’s hand cupped underneath it, the vivid stain of color shedding through.

  I glance at him, his eyes track something, someone behind me. He gives a curt wave, and I look over my shoulder in time to see Denny Morrison slide into a corner seat at the bar. Denny’s of the same year as Ray and a regular just about everywhere. Lost his license on DUIs. Still drives his sister’s car. Hitches his way here and there. He’ll turn up at the restaurant, loaded, around 10 PM every Friday. He’s got a glass eye. One with a palm tree painted on it reserved for Friday nights. A few weeks ago I got off work early and was having a beer before I dragged home, I sat with Denny at the bar. He popped out that palm-tree eye for me, swirled it around in a shot glass.

  “Guy’s got one hell of a liver,” I remark.

  “Yeah sure,” Ray says.
“A real testament to miracles.”

  Then I hear it—those first few notes, unmistakable, on the restaurant soundtrack, between a deluge of bad ABBA and Men at Work, some bored and prescient employee has slipped in Don McLean—one you almost never hear in restaurants, more than likely because it’s one of those songs you can’t chew mindlessly to—your fork pauses, midair, food in mid-swallow—hunger is relative, too.

  I tell Ray my theory of “American Pie.”

  “You know what it is that makes this song,” I say, “that makes it endless and inescapable. It isn’t just lyrical genius. It’s all the vague little utterances he cut in between the words—all his little glitches and stammerings, his little growls, the awws and the ohhs and the ands and the buts and the ‘Well I, Man I, So come on now—’ ”

  He is giving me a skeptical look. Understandably so. A slightly different smile, like there’s some joke going on just off to the side of me.

  “I’m telling you,” I say, “you try to sing this song without that connective tissue stuff, it falls flat.”

  “You’ve tried?”

  “Of course I’ve tried.”

  He starts laughing. “Give it up, Marne.”

  “No, no. I’m telling you, it’s true.” Realizing, even as I keep ranting on, so insistent on what might seem so apparently irrelevant and small, I sound like a lunatic, and for a moment I think I should clam it, quit my raving. But isn’t it better we lay out the impasses up front?

  “Missy Pie,” I say, “would have been a totally different piece if McLean had tidied it up. Epic still, for sure, you can’t beat that story, but squeaky clean and neat and dull. Not the kind of wild catechism you hope to impale yourself on. I’m right,” I say. “Listen. Listen.” And as the music quickens, moving out of the intro into the main, I reach across the table, put my fingers near his lips, not touching, though. He watches me, past my own hand, laughing still, not out loud, but I can see it in his eyes.