by Craig Smith
‘That’s pathetic.’
‘I’d say it’s desperate. Pathetic is tiptoeing to the barn and spying on your wife.’
Chapter 3
LUCY AND HER FRIEND KATHY Jones showed up in Kathy’s red Mustang convertible late that evening.
The top was down, and Lucy looked a good deal older than seventeen. It had been a good summer for her.
She had worked with Molly and me finishing up the house, and had got serious about her competition in barrel racing, sometimes pulling Jezebel to two or three races a week. In the course of the summer she had turned a trim, athletic body into hard ropey muscle.
About all that was left of her adolescence was a pony-tail. Physically, Lucy had her mother’s shoulders and legs and long sinewy back, but her face was round and sweetly intense, as only seventeen can be. Most people said otherwise. They said Lucy looked just like her mother, but it wasn’t so. Lucy had a beauty all her own. They looked alike because they shared the same mannerisms, the same stubbornness, the same passions. Lucy needed another decade or so before she could claim the kind of grace and confidence and beauty her mother possessed.
I cannot say I actually looked for Buddy Elder or consciously thought about him when Lucy showed up.
I only know he was there, standing in the shadows of the trees that surrounded our house.
‘How was the party?’ Lucy called out to us.
Molly said it was still going on.
‘Any food left?’
‘Plenty of caviar,’ I told her, very proud of myself for not skimping on the essentials.
Lucy’s pretty face screwed up into pure teen.
‘Anything good?’
I let her mother answer this and looked back in Buddy’s direction, but he was already gone.
Molly and I caught Kathy Jones before she could drive out of the circle and down the hill. I leaned against the door at about eye-level with the girl. Kathy was a new friend and not our favourite. She was pretty and popular and perfectly spoiled. She had dark hair in contrast to Lucy’s pale blonde locks, and she was built solidly with round cheeks and round buttocks and firm, thick thighs. She would be a senior in a week or so, like Lucy, but I guessed she was probably three years ahead by experience. That summer Kathy had been among the girls I had terrified with my casual narrative of a perfectly normal middle-aged man who had lived here when the place was cut apart into apartments and who, one night, had killed every soul in the house with an axe. It was a complete fiction, of course, but ever since then Kathy had trouble looking at me without wondering if I might be the next to come under the spell of the old house.
That wasn’t the reason for her nervousness tonight, however. Have a nice time? I asked her. Okay. Kathy looked like she wanted to pop the clutch. Find any parties as nice as this one? A few. Perfect evening for a drive with the top down, wasn’t it? It was okay.
I thanked her for bringing Lucy home safely and asked how her parents were doing. They were fine.
Was she looking forward to school? Not really. Kathy made short work of me, but Molly was a different story. Molly had learned her interrogation technique from the master, her mother Olga McBride. She wanted to know what they had done and nothing didn’t cut it. Every answer got a lawyerly follow up, all with a smile of course, leaning in close and friendly, just as I had done it.
When Kathy drove off, I looked at Molly and we both said at the same time, ‘Grass.’
‘YOU SAY SOMETHING,’ Molly told me that night as we lay together in bed. We had finished the business we started in the pantry, had worn ourselves out in our happiness, but were still wide awake. ‘She won’t listen to me about anything,’ Molly explained.
‘I’ll say something,’ I answered, ‘but I doubt it will do any good.’
‘What are you going to tell her? You can’t preach.
She knows we’ve both done it.’
‘I’ll think of something.’
The next afternoon, long before the cleanup was finished, I suggested to Lucy that we take a ride. This was something we usually did once or twice a month, so it was nothing out of the ordinary, and at just that point it made a pleasant break from the work at hand.
Like her mother, I had found Lucy’s adolescence difficult to handle. Unlike her mother I hadn’t resorted to confrontation, interrogation, mental torture techniques or general prohibitions. I could defend myself by claiming the delicate position of a stepfather’s status, but the truth was I had grown up under the thumb of a manipulative sweet-talker. Tubs could tell me how good it felt to punch someone’s face in, then describe an even finer pleasure: breaking a man’s spirit with my words. That was how he handled my first fistfight, age six. When I got a speeding ticket at the age of sixteen there was a story about a kid my age in a wheelchair because he liked to run his cars a little fast.
Then, the night I lost my virginity, as if he knew exactly where I had been and with whom, I got the story of a soldier who wasn’t careful where he put it and turned up with what could only be described as a welter of cauliflower-like boils on the tip of his manhood.
I liked Molly’s parenting far better. It gave a kid a chance. But we are products of others. I could not help myself. I told Lucy stories, and never a better time or place than on one of our rides.
When Lucy met her paternal grandparents for the first time she was six years old. She had known me for about a year, but I wasn’t real important, only her mother’s new husband. Her father, whom she had never even seen in a photograph, was the centre of her world.
So when her grandparents began showing her all kinds of pictures of their son riding all kinds of horses, everything from the childhood pony to the summer of his rodeo, it made a powerful impression. They had sold off their horses after Luke’s death, but the next time Molly and I took Lucy out to their place Grandpa Luke had bought a little pony for Lucy to ride whenever she visited. After that, there was no end to it.
Lucy turned horse-crazy. We fought it as long as we could but ended up getting her lessons at a local stable.
When Lucy turned ten, Molly and I bought her a ten-year-old paint gelding named Ahab. She had been riding seriously for over three years by then and showed no sign of losing interest.
We had shopped for a small animal, but all three of us fell in love with Ahab the moment we saw him.
He was enormous, standing over sixteen hands, black mostly but with white lightning streaks on each flank and a few broad splotches of white running up from his belly. He had a white blaze down his long, handsome Roman nose and three high white socks. And Ahab could run. He had an impressive list of first place victories in barrel racing to prove it, so, despite everything, he became Lucy’s first horse. Four years later, we bought Jezebel, a gorgeous bay quarter horse with good lineage and pure fire for a personality. Jezebel came off a racetrack, where she had finished first whenever she had managed to get out of the gate. For a couple of seasons, Lucy struggled with her new mare.
One weekend everything would be fine. The next she might not even take a saddle. I expect a lot of kids would have given up. Hell, I was ready to give up.
But not Lucy. Lucy had what she wanted. Now it was time to learn how to handle it. Molly and I ended up driving her and Jezebel to one riding clinic after another.
When that failed to turn things around completely we drove up to a professional and boarded Jezebel and Lucy for two months. From dawn until dusk Lucy rode every kind of animal that came through that barn.
By the time Lucy returned home, she was a different girl and all the nonsense with Jezebel was history.
The days were long past when I could give advice to my stepdaughter about anything relating to a horse, but horses still remained our hobby, with Ahab having long ago become my horse.
We took the horses through the pasture at a gallop and waded through the creek five minutes later. From there we raced over a couple wooded hills before coming to the back gate at what used to be an orchard.
Our
property extended well beyond this gate, another eighty acres in all, but these fields we rented to a farmer who paid us a share of the crop.
At the gate Lucy moved Jezebel around and opened it while she was still in the saddle. This involved moving Jezebel sideways, having her turn from one side of the gate to the other, and then dance sideways again. Ahab was also trained to do this, but the one time I had tried it I embarrassed him so much that afterwards I either let Lucy open the gates or I dismounted and walked through.
Beyond the pasture, we followed the grassy lane that circled a field of corn. We were still a long way from any road, farther still from other houses. We had a small wood giving us some late afternoon shade. There was just enough breeze to keep us cool. It seemed like the perfect time to talk about marijuana, so I gave a whoop in the direction of the blue sky. Jezebel skittered like a race was about to start. Ahab lugged it along like an old hand. Touch his sides, he could still go. Otherwise, he just let folks make noise if that’s what they wanted.
‘It’s good to be sober!’ I shouted.
The hard clay at our feet seemed suddenly very interesting to Lucy. ‘Is it hard? Quitting?’ She met my gaze at the end of her question, curious, nothing more.
I had been sober two years, just before I started writing Jinx. I had quit for no other reason than I really liked to drink and I wanted to prove to myself I still had control of my choices, and because Jinx, a stand-in for my old man, didn’t drink. Once I was off the stuff a week, I felt ten years younger. So I stayed off. I called it my one-step program, and counted myself lucky I didn’t carry demons on my back like most of the heavy drinkers I knew.
‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘The payback comes when I can look at you and your mother and I don’t have to feel I’ve let you down. Then it’s not hard at all.’
‘You’ve never let me down, Dave.’
I could think of a few times when I had sent her out to feed the dogs and horses because I was still in town wrapped up in some important barroom talk, but instead of recounting my own failings, I started in on Walt Beery, our family’s poster child for the evils of drink. ‘Three days,’ I said, ‘and to save his life he couldn’t make it four.’ That was it. That was my talk on addictions great and small. Tubs would have mentioned his friend, poor soul, now locked up in an asylum because of that one joint laced with PCP, but I wasn’t the slimiest parent to have walked the earth, so I kept it simple and let Lucy work out the implications on her own. All things considered, I was fairly satisfied with myself, but Molly said later it was lame.
I expect it was, but I doubt anyone could have turned Lucy from the course she had chosen for herself that fall. She was growing up. She was suddenly something more than cute. She was, without quite comprehending it, a force of nature. Words can do nothing against that.
TWO DAYS LATER MY sabbatical came to its inevitable and tragic end, and I was sitting in a faculty meeting, the first I had attended in over fifteen months.
There were new faces and new procedures in place, but it felt like the same-old-same-old to me. A couple of days after that I met a new generation of students ready for the agony I was paid to deliver. The trouble was I wasn’t ready.
I had always liked going back to school in the fall, both as a student and as a prof. This time I had trouble adjusting. It had been too long: two summers and one academic year felt like a lifetime. I had developed new routines. I had gotten used to solitude. I liked staying in the country far away from people, especially academics. I had grown accustomed to silence and working the day through without a single crisis. If I wanted to scream profanities the horses never blushed.
The dogs wouldn’t dream of turning me in for a pat on the butt or a careless remark. Suddenly, all that was gone. Students were there with their expectations.
Colleagues needed a shoulder to cry on. People crowded into my life waiting for me to say something glib or intelligent or politically astute, and I discovered to my dismay I didn’t want it anymore.
My teaching, like my office desk, had a patina of dust covering it, as well. It would eventually get cleaned up and straightened out, the teaching and my desk, but not without effort and time. By the end of the first week, things were still not right, and I found I was ready for a drink. As I had no one to sponsor me, the only cure was a long talk with Walt Beery. Living the single life now, Walt’s biorhythms had begun a subtle transformation. At eleven-thirty he was still suffering from the night before and could not seriously think about a drink for another two or three hours. That was fine. We decided to have an early lunch at the Student Union.
I asked Walt on the way over if he was still off the booze. I could smell the answer coming out of his pores, but I thought things would go better between us if we got the confession out of the way early.
Walt gave a weary sigh, admitting his failure in a neat aphorism: ‘I’m not cut out for sobriety, David.’
Over a wilted salad and stale coffee, I said to him,
‘Have you talked to Barbara?’
‘She called me this morning.’ His eyes twinkled at the memory but faded at once, as close to shame as the practising alcoholic gets. ‘I was hung over like a son of a bitch, and she knew it.’
I laughed politely. Wives had certain powers denied other mortals, I told him. Then, ‘I take it you’ve got a place to stay?’
He shrugged, not exactly happy. ‘Got a one bedroom at the Greenbrier.’ I nodded, familiar with the place.
It was expensive, so there would be no students around.
That was good. Walt could screw-up all he wanted around young professional women. And he would, I knew that. Living too close to the co-eds, though, was bound to bring on early retirement.
‘Have you seen Buddy?’
This was not an especially pleasant topic for Walt, and his eyes avoided mine. His shoulders slumped a bit. ‘Not too much. I don’t think he was real happy about what happened with his girlfriend.’
‘The stripper?’ Walt nodded sorrowfully. ‘You were messing around with her?’ Walt nodded a bit less sorrowfully at this. In fact, I thought I detected a faint, proud smile, a story he meant to take to the old folks’
home. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘have you seen her?’
A watery smile, ‘Onstage a few times.’
‘What happened anyway?’
Walt shook his head. ‘It was just one of those afternoons. Oh! Before I forget. Barbara wanted me to ask you a favour.’
Barbara and I had never been close. That came with the territory, I suppose. You turn up in enough conversations involving lost afternoons that somehow drift into the early morning hours, and wives have a tendency to make rather comprehensive judgements. ‘A favour from me?’
‘Roger has written a book. Well, a novel. She wants you to read it, and see if it’s any good. And maybe talk to him about it.’ As he said this, Walt kept his eyes focused on the table. He knew what he was asking.
Roger was twenty-five, their only son. When I first met him Roger was a senior in high school with applications out to all the best schools in the country. He ended up turning everyone down, claiming he didn’t need to be ‘institutionalized.’ According to Walt and Barbara there was no reason for Roger’s strange and unexpected decision, but it did not take me long to realize Roger Beery had been slowing down and pulling back since the beginning of adolescence. The wonder of the science fair, who was taking Latin and Greek at the university as well as a couple of computer programming courses before his voice changed, had found drugs. Very serious drugs, actually, though nobody had noticed, at least nobody had told Walt and Barbara, because Roger comatose was still among the school’s best and brightest.
Since his dropout there had been reports of hopeful developments. Roger had decided to join the military.
Roger got a decent job at a local factory. Roger had been hired by a local company to update their computer systems. The follow up to whatever the good news never came. Something always got between Roger and succ
ess. I had lost track of Roger a couple of years ago because Walt just stopped talking about him. Then one day I saw him working at a downtown parking lot. He pretended not to know me, and that was the end of it. Until now.
‘What does Roger want?’ I asked.
Walt took a sip of coffee and looked away. ‘I don’t know, David. We don’t talk.’
I thought about complaining. I had kids come to me all the time who wanted me to read something. Some of them were in my classes, just not my creative writing classes. Some of the kids, the ones I didn’t know, would circle me in the halls like wolves edging closer to the campfire until they worked up their courage. The poetry, I could always shuffle off to one of our resident poets.
Fiction was not so easy, but I usually steered the younger writers to my introductory course in creative writing.
On those few occasions when I had been persuaded for one reason or another to read something outside of the classroom I always regretted it. The issue of quality aside, no one wants to hear criticism. People who have not submitted themselves to the rigors of peer criticism, the kind that occurs in a writing workshop, are especially sensitive to it. I did not want to read Roger Beery’s novel because I knew he wouldn’t be any different. He wanted me to love his story, and nothing else would do, but refusing Walt at this point in his life was difficult. The kid was a genius. How bad could it be?
‘Anytime,’ I said. ‘Just drop it off. I’ll take a look at it and give Roger an honest opinion.’
Walt looked relieved. ‘I hate to do this to you, David.’
But he was doing it, and that said it all.
A bit uneasy at having passed his family problems into my court, Walt reverted to form. He started talking about Randy Winston, whom he had seen ‘slinking’
around the TA offices checking out ‘the new talent.’
This of course meant that Walt had been slinking there as well, but I let that point pass. ‘New talent?’ I asked.
