Sweet and Low

by Nick White

  Say, just for conversation, there once lived a girl who was one person—one complete person, not a person for the world and a person for herself. They were one and the same. Then, let’s say, it’s her first week at college, and a boy she trusted, a boy from her hometown even, pushed his way inside her bottom-floor dorm room while her roommate was out. Say he did things to her that split her in two. Right down the middle. Years later, this same girl met a boy who was sweet and unassuming and never curious about the other girl behind the girl, the one she hid so fiercely. He’s satisfied with what she gives him. And, consequently, she’s satisfied with what he gives her. It’s enough.

  Rosemary notices the phone has gone silent.

  “Mother?” Amy says.

  She tells her daughter, “You just can’t ever tell about some people.”

  The next day she goes out for lunch and ends up driving by the Department of Education building, where Hank works. She recognizes his car in the lot and cruises past it and continues on with her business: lunch at a café, groceries at Kroger. Around five o’clock, she’s in the neighborhood again and makes another pass by Hank’s work. This time, he’s in his car, backing out of his parking spot. She follows him. He takes her to his apartment, a nice duplex on Dogwood Drive. There’s latticework, a deck.

  She drives on, thinking.

  At the airport, he mumbled something about a watch. Her brain makes some connections. A month or so after Arnie’s death, she was in the bathroom cleaning out his cabinet. The shaving kit, the mouthwash. In the back, there was a cigar box full of doodads: baseball cards, an assortment of dusty marbles, an old tarnished pocket watch, the sort men used to wear in suit-coat pockets. If she remembers correctly, initials had been carved into the back of it, but she couldn’t make them out, which frustrated her. The cards and the marbles were easy to give away. Not the watch, though—she held on to it, and now keeps it locked away inside her curio cabinet, folded inside a hymnal, hidden.

  Home from following Hank, she retrieves the watch and holds it in the palm of her hand. It ticks. There are things in this world, she decides, you keep for no particular reason, the things you haven’t yet found a language for.

  The next week she returns to Hank’s house in the afternoon when she’s sure he’ll be at work. She parks across the street and walks over. She ventures into the backyard, where there’s a water hose rolled onto a plastic spool, a bed of half-dead petunias, some monkey grass.

  Rosemary checks the doormat first. Nothing: too obvious. Then she explores the crawl space under the stairs leading to the back door, then around the storm drain, then the birdfeeder. Finally, she has some luck: On the stone walkway, there’s a rock a shade darker than the rest. She checks it—bingo. One of those hollow plastic things; she taps it open and finds the house key. She jimmies open the door, and the apartment is very neat inside: the layout is an open-floor design where the kitchen looks out onto the living room. In the living room, a pair of bookshelves hugs the walls. She scans the titles, discovering some of them she’s reviewed for her podcast and a few she’s never heard of. She sees a favorite of Arnie’s and pulls it out: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Motes of dust cover it. When she opens it, the spine cracks and pops. On the title page, in a neat hand she recognizes, is the phrase: Read it and weep. Love, Arnie.

  She sits on the couch in the dark living room and breathes. Dust is everywhere: on her arms, her clothes, her face. She sneezes; she can’t seem to sneeze the dust away. Her nose may bleed if she’s not careful. She’s not really on the couch anymore but somewhere behind herself, watching the body sniffle. An hour passes. Then another. The evening comes on. Outside, car doors slam. She tells the body on the couch to leave, but it’s as stiff as the furniture in the room, the hands placed calmly on the knees, the feet flat on the carpet. There are footsteps. There’s the scrape of keys. The front door opens, and Hank stumbles in, followed by another who’s maybe a little older. They don’t see the woman on the couch as they shimmy out of their clothes. They traipse down the short hallway, devouring each other in kisses. Then they’re in the bedroom, and she’s at the doorway, watching the way their hands drag across each other’s flesh, searching. Always searching. She wants to tell them it’s no use. You’ll never find what you’re after. Hank leans up in the bed and looks at her, as if he’s been expecting her all along, and she almost speaks, but he’s soon overtaken by his lover’s passion, or whatever you want to call it, and the moment passes.

  COTTONMOUTH, TRAPJAW, WATER MOCCASIN

  At first, Pete didn’t notice the snake.

  After he’d flipped the riding lawn mower, he blacked out and was pinned to the gully of the ditch. The sun was just below the trees when he started piddling in his yard. Now it simmered above him, burning away the last bits of the dewy cool he liked to work in. He was flat on his back, one leg crushed under the back end of the Cub Cadet—it had been an awkward fall—and his hip may have been broken too, which didn’t bode well for a man of his years. His error had come in believing the mower could handle the steep incline at the end of his yard, the grassy plot by the oaks that stooped down into a sloppy half ditch he’d built to catch drainage. One minute he was upright, beginning to drip with sweat, enjoying the subtle art of cutting grass, and the next he was there in the ditch, blinking and struggling to catch his breath.

  A Cub Cadet—he’d been told by the dealer—was the Cadillac of mowers. Pete had admired the honey-mustard sheen of the front hood, the way it hovered above his lawn like a spacecraft, the gentle tremor he felt as he held on to the steering wheel—all of it had lulled him into this mess. Now it sat on its side on top of him, dented and smoking, looking nothing like the glossy machine he’d bought a week ago.

  He snatched open the hood. His hand ripped into the lawn mower’s innards and yanked loose what toothlike parts he could reach, tossing them over his head. His wife, Doris, would call this a fit. Pete knew his anger, an old friend, and could feel it bubble up and eat through any amount of common sense he’d acquired since his youth. He wanted to gut the mower as if it were an animal. He wanted to pull apart its various mechanisms—the spark plug, the blade, the belt—and pile them above some kindling in his backyard and watch it all burn, watch the slow, greasy smoke ooze into the atmosphere.

  But this was getting him nowhere. He was still trapped. Pete tried to move his leg from under the lawn mower by using his free one to lift the hull, but when he shifted his body to accomplish this, a sharp pain shot through his abdomen, forcing him to lie as still as possible. Normally, he could deal with hurt better than most: He was a retired railroad man and had suffered dislocated shoulders, cracked collarbones, and all manner of mashed toes and fingers. This pain was different, deeper than all the others, coming from—he reckoned—the very marrow of his leg bone. Pete felt his age in this pain and, for the first time, the fragility of his own existence.

  Pete was quiet for nearly an hour, counting his breaths, waiting for the pain to pass, which it did, finally, in slow increments.

  He yelled—one long bellow that came from his gut and silenced the whippoorwills. No one would hear him, he knew this much: He lived in a small single-wide far from town, Doris had been dead for nearly three years, and he’d run off his faggot of a son long before that. When he turned his head to spit, he saw the snake for the first time, its blackish body coiled tightly and shimmering like a puddle of oil.

  The snake lifted its triangular head and hissed, the shock of white in its mouth telling Pete everything he needed to know. Cottonmouth, trapjaw, water moccasin—he knew it by all of its names. Back when he was a boy, his father would take him snake hunting at the river that ran by their house. With a machete in each hand, they’d cut through thick nets of honeysuckle, sumac, and kudzu along the bank, rooting out their nests. He was taught to swing his blade to catch the snake right below the head, cutting it off with one great swoosh of his arm. P
ete knew the cottonmouth would strike just for the hell of it, that it didn’t know how to retreat back to the overgrowth when you came after it like the rattlers and copperheads did, and that it would meet you where you were, refusing to be anything but predator.

  Once, when he was grown and the days of hunting with his father were long over, he’d run across one and splayed it in half with the spade of his shovel, and its body had still twitched and curled forward toward him, unwilling, he had thought, to succumb to its fate. Pete had learned the secret about killing then—the joy that came with watching a thing die, watching for the last twitch and the silence that came to it and knowing you were the cause.

  * * *

  —

  THE SNAKE UNBRAIDED its long body and glided closer to Pete, no more than a foot away. Its split tongue twittered in the air. The smell of gas settled quietly over him. He felt dizzy from the fumes and thought he might pass out again. He forced his eyes to stay open and kept them on the snake.

  He dug his hands into the grass and dirt; he made balls of sod and threw them at the snake, but his aim was shaky. The snake was unmoved, and Pete hated it for its persistence, for the way it looked at him, almost as if it knew Pete. As many as he’d killed over the years, he’d never really looked at one before, studied the intricacies of each scale that hugged its muscular body, the same geometric patterns he’d seen on the quilts his grandmother would darn, its belly a light green, deepening in color and richness as the scales ran up its hard back. Rudy would have found something beautiful there, but his son was an idiot, prone to bouts of laziness and distraction.

  When the boy was sixteen, he left home, said in a note to Doris that he was tired of Pete’s beating on him all the time and thought he could fare better on his own. But Rudy was like that. Pete didn’t fault him for his softness, but he did fault him for not having the good sense to know how to hide it. Each time he took a belt to him, Pete hoped to instill some meanness into the boy, one stroke after another.

  The snake was taking its time, inspecting the ground carefully before it slunk forward. Its movements were slow, methodical, and it was so close to him now that he could smell the muddy river water and dark earth it must have hatched from, an odor altogether better than the gas. Pete wondered, briefly, if he’d killed any of this snake’s kin in the past—there were so many snakes in his past, balls of them.

  When they had finished on the river, his father would make him put the snake heads in a corn sack so they could show his sisters what work they’d done. He was lucky being a boy—his sisters, after their mother died, had to deal with things much worse than beatings. This usually happened late on summer weekends when his father was high on corn whiskey. His sisters slept in the room next to his, and on those nights, he could hear the terrible grunting coming through the walls. One time, when Pete was big enough to matter, he took up a kitchen knife and burst in on them with plans of murdering his father, but he, naked and unafraid, laughed as Pete shook the blade at him. He grabbed Pete by the collar and dragged him down the hall and threw him out the back door into the garden. There, his father jumped after him, swiping a cattail, breaking it cleanly from the ground. When it was over, Pete was all welts and bruises, and had enough venom welled up inside to carry him forward for sixty years.

  * * *

  —

  PETE WONDERED what his father and son would think if they saw him now, half-dead under this hulk of metal, at the mercy of a snake. They would laugh. He knew they would. For different reasons, they would call this justice, would say how this served him right for not being what either of them thought he should be. The closer the snake came, the harder it was for Pete to breathe. He started to think about ways he could kill it using just his hands—if he could grab it in time, right behind the head, and squeeze, pinching off its air supply, or if he could bite it first, tear it apart the way a sow would.

  “Come if you’re coming,” he said to the snake, and hoped his deep voice would scare it off. Instead, the snake seemed curious about the noise, slithering closer, head erect. Pete looked into its large round pupils and found them without depth, without emotion. The snake hissed, its curved fangs inches from his face, and went for his neck, and Pete felt its tongue fluttering against the soft contours of his throat. He felt the imprint of its head on top of his Adam’s apple. For a moment, they breathed in tandem, pulse to pulse. It braved to skim across his neck, and Pete could feel each of its tiny ribs as it treaded across his skin, rubbing his flesh like sandpaper. Then it was over. The snake had left him.

  He was alone, and the hours passed by slowly. Maybe the easier way out would’ve been to endure the snakebite: a quick, needled kiss, and then nothing left but his emptying out into blackness. If he did die here, it would be a slow, painful end—he saw it plainly: starvation, heatstroke. The ants would eat his face for breakfast, and the mailman would find what was left tomorrow afternoon. The local newspapers would do a story on him—“Man Found Dead in Front Yard”—that would drift into rumor, a sad story husbands would tell their wives at dinner. And his son would be called to come to identify his remains and would be glad at what he saw. Pete longed for the snake to return. He shut his eyes and imagined where it was now—behind him somewhere, perpetually moving, heading across the road to higher grass.

  GATLINBURG

  We heard about the bears almost from the moment we arrived in the mountains. First from the family staying in the condo next to ours. Then there was the chatty couple at the Dixie Stampede and later the old man on the Doppelmayr as we coasted up the side of Mount Harrison.

  It happens every year, they told us, after the spring thaw. A wayward bear, still groggy from cave hibernation, wanders into someone’s backyard, assaults a garbage can, and demolishes lawn furniture, before finally hulking away to the nearest water source.

  “They’re so dangerous,” our waitress at the pancake house said, “and adorable too—it’s really very confusing.”

  Our first night we peered out the second-story bedroom window at the conifers bristling in icy moonlight and the spaces of blue-black sky between them. No sign of wildlife anywhere: no feathered-owl dance, no opossum trundling through, no bear.

  “Where have they all gone?” Reed said. He was a New Yorker; he had expectations.

  “Dolly Parton,” I said. “Maybe she collects them.”

  “I’d feel better if we saw one.”

  “A bear?”

  “A bear.”

  I went to brush my teeth, and when I came back, he was still staring out the window. Our suitcases lay scattered about the floor, clothes exploding from them. I picked up a sock and threw it at him.

  “Hey, you,” I said. “They’re not coming.”

  “Imagine just walking up on one. Eating or something. No fence to separate you. Just you and the bear, and each of you looking into the other’s eyes.” He paused. “Nature.”

  I turned out the lamp beside the bed and got under the covers. Soon, I felt his warm body beside mine, and we lay on our backs, breathing, not sleeping, knowing the other wasn’t sleeping either.

  “For the story alone,” he said. “If we saw one.”

  “I’m already tired of bears.”

  “You’re not taking this vacation seriously.”

  I leaned up. “Who takes a vacation seriously?”

  But he didn’t say. He had already turned over.

  * * *

  —

  OUR TROUBLE HAD BEGUN long before Gatlinburg.

  It started in Columbus, Ohio, the night we first met, at a Christmas party thrown by a mutual friend of ours. Both of us, the only two gay men at the party, had misread the invite, thinking the host had encouraged his guests to wear ugly sweaters, and we had arrived clad in hideous ruglike things: mine festooned with ribbons and cats, his a dense shag the color of vomit. “Perfect,” I said, my first words to him. “We both look horrible.
” And he didn’t laugh.

  I guess I should have seen it then: trouble.

  Or the night, sometime later, when he took me to the observatory on campus where he teaches astronomy. “Let me show you some things,” he said, as I gazed through a large telescope, Reed standing behind me, his hands perched on my hips. He named the constellations I sighted: Canis Major and Minor, Cassiopeia, Taurus. He spoke of the magic of black holes and string theory, the sound of his voice a waterfall emptying onto smooth rock.

  “Your accent,” he said. “It comes on strong with certain words.” He leaned in close. “I like it.”

  “You smell like butter.”

  “Butter,” he repeated. “See? I can hear Mississippi in that word.”

  What followed came easily enough, as everything else did in those early days: using our coats to soften the floor of the observatory, undressing each other, folding our socks into our sneakers’ sagging mouths. Beside us, an old spiral staircase leading up to the telescope room squeaked like a frenzy of bats as he worked himself inside me for the first time. The noise kept up for as long as we did: So this, is this your life? So this, is this your life? the staircase asked. Again the trouble, you see, even in the language of things we didn’t care to listen to.

  And afterward, that same night, back at his apartment—here too: We had showered and were huddled close to each other in his twin bed. He told me about his childhood riding the subway, hurtling underground from one place to another, Manhattan his backyard. He traced along the scar on my back, and said, “What’s the story here?” and I said, “Oh, you know.”

  But he didn’t, and I refused to elaborate.

  We fell into something like love anyway, our bodies becoming familiar and, as it were, difficult to give up. The trip came about after almost a year of our trying to learn how to speak the other’s language and failing, time and again, but still managing to be together. Parting ways seemed harder to do than whatever it was we were doing instead. The trip was a gift from Reed’s mother, a successful real estate agent in Manhattan. A grateful client had offered her a couple of weeks in the Smoky Mountains as a thank-you for securing his mistress a reasonably priced apartment in Brooklyn.