Clara at the Edge

by Maryl Jo Fox

  Clara is drinking coffee at the kitchen table. The wasps keep landing on her head, buzzing angrily. “Leave me alone,” she says, batting them away. “I set you free and you just bother me.”

  The purple wasp is losing patience. “Look, you’ve got twenty-eight days left to get some kind of deliverance from the things that have haunted you. I die in twenty-eight days, whether you like it or not. That’s the end of my life cycle. It could be the start of a whole new cycle in your life. Or you can keep stalling like you’ve done for almost forty years. So, what’ll it be?”

  She explodes. “Believe me, I know time’s passing. I’m already tired of the camp toilet and the bottled water showers. But nothing’s settled with Frank. How can I buy a lot for my house and connect the utilities when he might vanish tomorrow? I can’t find him. I can’t talk to him. He’s always gone.”

  She gets up from the kitchen table and flops onto her worn couch, her arms folded, holding back tears. She yearns for her son. Maybe she’ll go looking for him. She keeps hoping he’ll come through the door. Surely this stalemate can’t last. She didn’t come here for all this nonsense. The purple wasp is the only creature who still talks to her. Even the nosy photographer has vanished.

  Refreshed after a short walk near Salmon Falls Creek, Frank climbs back into the trailer cab. He sets the cutting board back on his lap and puts the burl on the cutting board. He sits there and looks at it. And looks at it. Applies chisel here, veiner there. He’s never worked on a burl before. Curdled deformed wood. Finally a rough form emerges—a gnarled pair of eyes, branching heavy eyebrows—something like the top half of a bulging skull. He sits back and opens the window. “OK, a partial skull. I can work with that.” His mind goes pleasantly blank.

  Frank catches Scotty just as he’s ducking into his office. “Where in hell have you been, big guy? You’ve been playing hide and seek ever since I got here.”

  They slap each other on the back, and Scotty motions Frank into his office with its big desk and leather chairs. As they settle themselves, Frank takes a good look at his old friend.

  He’s only seen Scotty for a few nights of serious drinking after he told Frank his third wife just left him. He helped Frank unpack the U-Haul that first morning when they drove the house across the highway to the vacant lot. But Scotty was panting and sweating before they finished unloading, so Frank and Clara finished the job by themselves.

  Seeing Scotty labor like that made it painfully obvious to Frank that something was not right with his friend. In the quiet of the office, he finally lets himself see that Scotty has lost a lot of weight. His trousers hang on him, the skin around his neck is sagging, he has bags under his eyes. Back in Eugene, he was chubby and strong.

  With false cheer, Frank says, “So, what’s up, my man? How the hell are you?”

  Scotty leans back in his chair, his legs crossed on the desk. “Well, I’ll tell you, Frank. It’s one damned thing after another. I’m always running around. It never stops.” Sighing, he swings his chair around, reaches into a cabinet behind him, and brings out a bottle of Jack Daniels. “Have a nip?”

  “Ah sure, Scotty.”

  Scotty rises laboriously from his chair and makes two whiskeys on the rocks. After a silence broken only by the clink of ice, he continues. “I thought this would be the capper, you know—this business. It’s a good business, I can’t deny that. Maybe I’m just getting old. But I’d like to enjoy myself a little before I turn in the key for good. Is that so bad? I’ve been working straight through since high school.” He takes a healthy swallow. “So, the big secret is I’m thinking Colorado or New Mexico. Buy me a multiplex or a chain of Laundromats. That wouldn’t be so bad, now would it?” He waves his glass at Frank. “Want to come along?”

  Frank looks at him in surprise. “You’ve got the biggest casino outside Reno, right? Why would you want to give up a sure moneymaker?”

  Scotty shrugs and looks tiredly at him. “You want to buy it, Frank?”

  chapter 7

  The busload of gamblers pulls into Desert Dan’s parking lot around three o’clock. Still jarred by this rainless, sun-drenched place, Clara watches the passengers disembark. Mostly pudgy and white, a few Latinos and Chinese, they look disoriented, some clutching small paper bags full of change. Kind-faced women wear Bermuda shorts, their thigh skin accordion-pleated around their knees. Still grumpy about Frank’s wasp stings and their inability to talk, Clara forces a smile and greets these people in her red Desert Dan’s sun visor and T-shirt and her old Levi’s. She’s never worn a sun visor before. Words written on clothing make her feel like a billboard. This is her first day as a greeter for visitors who come by bus twice a week from southern Idaho—Jerome, Hazelton, Burley, Twin Falls. Clara’s supposed to make sure they don’t wander off to Scotty’s competitors.

  She decides to get into the spirit of the thing. She pumps her arms with crossing guard gestures toward the casino, saying firmly, “Welcome to Desert Dan’s.” But the passengers mill about, some heading off to Rodman’s Hide-Away and the Lucky Clover across the highway. Scotty has coached her. “Free dinner pass after four games of keno,” she shouts. “Half-price late owl lunch going on right now!”

  The people head back in the right direction—all except for two people in their early twenties arguing near the bus. “Look Edie, I told you, it’s not Vegas. It’s just this stupid pit stop, OK?” The rubbery young guy, some part of him always in motion, has a video camera slung over his shoulder.

  The tall, striking girl leers down at him with a cross-eyed pout. “Just be quiet, OK, Neil? For one fucking second in your life, can you just shut up?”

  An older man, sunburned except for his white forehead, hovers nearby with a resigned air and watches the young people tangle.

  The girl has a scar extending the length of her right forearm. The scar is tattooed with black roses. The scar is ragged and lumpy, as if done by a quack. The forearm is unnaturally narrow; a bone is missing. She has the barest, whitest midriff Clara has ever seen. A diamond-studded gold bar is anchored to one side of her spectacular, saucer-like navel. Fake diamond studs dot her tongue, nose, and ears, and two gold rings pierce her left eyebrow. Her bleached white hair with black roots is short like a boy’s. Her shapely figure, encased in tight black capris and a black halter top, is alarmingly on display. Clara feels instantly protective, wants to put a poncho over the girl’s head.

  The girl strides impatiently toward the casino. Neil and the older man doggedly follow. Clara catches up, positions herself between the girl and the two men. “Hi there, I’m Clara Breckenridge. Welcome to Desert Dan’s.”

  The girl stops and snorts, her yellow-green cat eyes fixed on Clara as if she were an oddly disturbing anthropological specimen. Her brother, in a constant jitter, looks past Clara—scouting footage shots, she guesses. The older man, his sunburned cheeks raw, accepts Clara like rain, his face relaxing into a smile.

  “Hi there,” he says with a little salute. “Jim Porter here.” He points to the young people rapidly moving away from them. “That’s my niece Edie and my nephew Neil. They’re visiting from Los Angeles. Neil’s studying movies someplace in Hollywood. Edie’s studying art,” he adds in bewilderment.

  Clara sees Edie’s capris are cut so low that anyone can get a hint of what lies south. “Oh, honey,” she calls out impulsively, “watch out for those cowboys.”

  Edie stops, comes back, looks coolly down at Clara, who is only five foot two, and says in measured tones, “Grandma, I don’t need any help. At all.” She snorts again and turns away. Neil is filming this exchange. Edie grabs the lens end, violently jerking it away. “Wouldja just cut it out, motherfucker?”

  Neil smirks at Clara. “See what we have to put up with? My sister’s a bitch every day of her life just because we’re poor orphans,” he says in falsetto tones, as if he’s used to trading on this fact.

  Jim Porter says, “I wish you two would mind your manners. This woman has done nothing to you. Why
don’t you apologize for being so rude?”

  Edie resumes her fast walk toward the casino lobby. Neil mumbles “sorry” and follows behind his sister. They disappear into the casino.

  Clara clasps her hands together in confusion. It’s true, no one has been so rude to her in a long time. Helplessly, she asks herself what if Samantha had turned out like Edie, insulting Frank, disrespecting Clara, getting herself pierced and decked out like that. But that’s how they dress these days, she corrects herself. It’s the attitude that upsets her. Edie’s probably in her early twenties. Samantha would’ve been forty-nine, old enough to be Edie’s mother. She begins to tremble—she can’t keep comparing every young woman to Samantha or she’ll end up insane.

  Jim Porter is saying, “Sorry my niece and nephew are so rude. Edie’s a firecracker. No telling what she might do. I worry about them.”

  Without warning, he takes a tumble on the blacktop, badly scraping his elbows and hands. Embarrassed, he pulls himself up. Clara settles him on a bench inside, gets a security person to clean and bandage Porter’s scrapes, gives him water. Shaken, Porter leans toward her, as if his fall has purchased sudden intimacy.

  “Those kids act like spoiled brats—but they’ve had a hard time. They are orphans, just like Neil said.” He has her attention now. “My brother always had a vicious temper. He and the kids’ mom were drinkers. One night on a two-day bender, he took out his .45 and shot her. The kids were standing right there—teenagers! My brother disappeared—left the country is my guess—so my sister down there in Long Beach finished raising them, but she had her own problems and nothing good came of it. They’re both just lost kids trying to act tough. I send them money now that they’re on their own. At least they’re both in some kind of school.” Sighing, he leans against the wall. “Sorry, Clara, I get a little dustup and you can’t shut me up.”

  She pats his arm. “Don’t worry, Jim. It’s all right.”

  He leans back on the bench and closes his eyes, so Clara gets up to pace the slot machine aisles, looking for Edie. Despite Jim’s story, she’s still not sure if she feels protective or wary after the girl’s rudeness. She finds Edie in front of the giant progressive Wheel of Fortune machine, quickly stuffing in silver dollar tokens, walking away bored and sullen-looking when her money runs out. Men of all ages pause from gambling to stare—some with more subtlety than others—at her deformed arm and white skin and firm, round breasts. She gambles and languidly strolls the slot machine aisles. A security guard cards her.

  “I’m twenty-one,” she snarls, dragging a driver’s license from her beaded chartreuse drawstring shoulder purse. She folds her mismatched arms across her chest and looks away from the hapless enforcer. He stares at her and hands it back. Scowling, she resumes her bored saunter, her eyes blank and mean. Under the casino lighting, her bone-white skin absorbs thick powdery light. She looks like an alien or someone with a terminal illness. “Fuck off, cowboy,” and “Get lost, grandpa,” pepper the air around her. She barely glances at Clara.

  Nothing and no one interests her.

  Until she gets to the blackjack table.

  Edie stops to watch this man crouched at the table with his chips. His eyelashes are long and curled like a girl’s, his nose thin like a weasel’s or a French aristocrat’s. Something catches in her throat. Coughing, Edie covers her mouth and can’t stop staring. This tall, gaunt man with the big Adam’s apple, long black hair, skin pocked with acne scars—this man rattles her breath. Edie’s eyes widen; the pupils dilate. She’s mesmerized, Clara can tell. The man gestures the dealer like he’s swimming underwater. His eyes flash and flare like little spy cameras as he watches people slap their cards on the table. Edie licks her lips. To her he looks delicious, a bad boy through and through.

  Clara’s staring too. That crouch, that posture, that hanging hair (needs washing!), that man pushing thirty who lives on Ding Dongs and root beer (he left trash)—Clara would know him anywhere. It’s the guy who broke into her house.

  She’s found him.

  He didn’t make himself very scarce.

  Turns out the surveillance booth is watching the skinny guy too. He’s got a sleepy-looking partner with a fat face. In the short time they’ve been working the table together, security has noticed gestures between them that could be suspicious. His partner has won a disproportionate amount. Maybe accidental, probably not.

  The skinny guy orders a whiskey neat from the waitress. She cards him. Security sees this, contacts the waitress, asks his name. “Dawson Barth,” she says quietly. Security runs a quick check. He’s got several aliases and a record, but nothing current on him. Security decides to just keep watch for now.

  Dawson only wants a couple hundred bucks. He’s not stupid. After cleaning out his partner, whom he met in the parking lot, he’ll do a last-ditch hunt for his vanished mother in Reno where she left him, and then he will disappear forever into the sprawling limbo of Los Angeles.

  Turns out his partner doesn’t want to share. After twenty-five minutes and six hundred dollars to the good, the partner mumbles he’s got to piss and slips his chips quick as a gazelle into a drawstring bag.

  Helplessly, so as not to create a scene, Dawson watches the guy cash in his chips at the cage and almost run to the parking lot. Dawson tries to keep his face a mask, but his stomach clenches as he grips the cards. He’s got to bet everything now. He found a twenty in the glove compartment. It’s all he has.

  Edie’s eyes are locked on this tall guy and his pale skin. She sucks in her stomach. Her breasts seem to swell beneath her black halter top, her nipples perk up, her lips flush. Her body moves like water toward Dawson, but Edie’s not aware of what her body is doing, only of heat. Clara sees these signs, remembers them from long ago—does anyone ever forget? In some dreaming, underwater way, Edie looks like she’s been waiting for Dawson Barth all her twenty-one years. She’s shaking.

  So is Clara, knowing she can’t protect this young woman. Some residual image of Samantha flashes before her eyes until it fades into darkness. My baby.

  Dawson feels someone’s eyes on him, looks beyond the cards and flinches, seeing Clara. Standing five feet away, Clara stares right through him with those endless brown eyes of hers. Spit flows to his mouth. He wants to spit. It’s the old lady with the strawberry mole and the haunted house. He looks down at the green felt table, remembering. He knows the bumpy feel of the pockmarked siding. He remembers the rock smashing her window, the rickety sewing cabinet quivering after he hoisted himself through the window, the clink of a flimsy doodad he broke on the coffee table, the kitchen drawers full of dish towels but no cash, not even a penny in the kitchen canisters. He didn’t take anything. He’s done nothing wrong. Nobody here can say he’s a robber.

  He’s terrified and furious at the way Clara’s looking at him. Her eyes are alert, without malice. She’s a ghost from a world whose doors have closed to him.

  Clara sees him swipe at his nose with a Kleenex. His nose is red. He’s either got a cold or allergies. Allerest, she thinks helplessly. He needs Allerest. She sees his terrified look, how he suddenly looks twelve, like he needs his mother. Don’t fold now, old girl.

  She comes right up to him at the table, breathes into his ear. “I want to talk to you. About what you did the other night.” He could be one of her students, now grown up and turning bad. Her voice is firm.

  He shrinks from her. His skin gets goose bumps. “Get away, old lady. You bother the air here.” He speaks low, his voice adenoidal. The sudden shine in his eyes embarrasses him.

  She’s mystified, touched. What’s he doing here in the casino? Is that tears? He’s lost.

  “Hey Dawson, stay mellow, buddy,” says the guy who heard the waitress give his name to security.

  Furious, Dawson tells himself to stay cool. It’s not worth it. He and the others lower their eyes.

  For a while, he only sees the game. Win. Lose. Draw. Just concentrate.

  Clara steps into the backgroun
d. She can wait. So, his name is Dawson. Why does her heart go out to this man who insults her and then gets tears in his eyes?

  Finally composed, Dawson looks up and sees Edie staring at him with a little smile. Edie, waiting so patiently. Hands on hips, her damaged arm breaks the symmetry of her pose. Her eyes burn a laser hole right through his brain. Clara sees his stunned look. Edie sighs. At last she can enter the tide that draws her so strongly.

  He salivates, swallows, hypnotized by her surly, chemical blondness, her raised nipples, her expanse of skin, her cat green eyes that don’t even blink, her freaky arm with black rose tattoos, her sunless arched body.

  The air between them trembles. Anyone can see it.

  His concentration lost forever from the game, forgetting Clara, forgetting his stupid partner’s betrayal (who could possibly be bothered by these trivial things?), he jerks his head slightly up, signaling Edie to step closer. Hips swaying, Edie weaves toward him. Her eyes glisten.

  “Hello,” she says through the smoky haze at the table.

  “Sit down, beautiful,” Dawson says, yielding his chair.

  chapter 8

  Sitting at the kitchen table again, Clara rifles her hair with strong fingers until it snarls. She counts on her fingers: “I have my son, my house, my breathing, my wasps. I have everything that’s important. I can’t get involved with these people. Dawson and Edie are trouble.”

  Silence, more coffee.

  She exclaims, “Edie could end up just like Samantha, dead on some road. She has no mother or father.” Straining, she relocks Samantha’s central dungeon in the back of her head. The key turns hard, like a cramping blood vessel.

  The trouble is Nevada, she decides. In Eugene, her life was starched, thin, regulated. Nothing crazy. After all the dying and Frank leaving home, she knew how every minute of every day would unfold. She had her teaching until 1993. She had Frank’s occasional visits with their awkward silences and self-conscious warmth, an ocean of withheld feeling between them. Those visits were all she really had. Oh, she had her magnificent lilacs—and the wasps carrying on every day. And her volunteering—at the library stacking books; at a hospice, where she sang old songs and got patients to talk if they could; at city hall where she redirected lost visitors; at a shelter for abused women where she got them jobs and housing. On the streets, she ran into her ex-students who seemed happy to see her. Sometimes she and Abigail went to Ashland to see summer Shakespeare. She had regular bridge games with Abigail and Abigail’s sister Susannah, weekly lunches at the River Road Coffee Shop (where she got the beef jerky jars), petition drives with Abigail at Safeway, where they set up a card table for any number of causes over the years: reduced class sizes, Oregon forest restoration, voter registration, objection to the inevitable shopping mall. It wasn’t as if she had nothing to do.