A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

by David Gates

  “I would doubt anybody knows. Jesse might. He wouldn’t judge you.”

  “Shit,” she said. “I am so out of here.”

  Jesse and Myron were sitting on lawn chairs in the Holtzmans’ front room when I got back, still finishing their lunches. “How’s our young lady?” Jesse said.

  “She’s holding up,” I said. “How you doing?”

  “I don’t think they should’ve put her out like that,” he said. “She was just upset like anybody else. We did have a little to drink. I would’ve followed y’all out, but I had to make sure and say a word for Billy.”

  “I wish I’d got to hear you.”

  “It wasn’t much. I just said he was my friend, and he was a good man and he loved all of them, which I don’t know he always did, but I am pretty sure he wanted to. He was more of a Christian than he let on.”

  “You had me pretty near to crying,” Myron said.

  “Now is Johnny all right?” Jesse said. “I expected he’d be out here.”

  “He might still roll in this afternoon,” I said. “If we can get the rest of the drywall up in the next couple days, I’ll call the guy in Conway to come up and do the taping and we’ll be able to get the plumber in and start on the woodwork.”

  “Be good to have Johnny.” He looked over at the tattooed kid, who was chucking a Red Bull can into the dumpster. “Those two, I don’t know.”

  “We might have to think about them. Hell, we used to be kids.”

  “Now you’re trying to hurt me,” Jesse said.

  A cold rain started about one o’clock and Myron put a tarp over the floorboards and came in to help with the drywall. I got out my phone and called the guy who’d answered the ad; he sounded like I’d woken him up. I told him to come around to the office tomorrow morning, eight o’clock sharp. He said he’d try. So probably cross him off. The rain had turned to snow by the time the bodybuilder got back with the stuff from North Adams; he said cars were slipping off the road at the top of Route 2, so after he and his buddy got the truck unloaded I sent them home. Finally, about four o’clock, I got a text back from Johnny reading Fuck U.

  —

  Kristin was due back from Boston sometime today, and I remembered her saying something about maybe getting together. I hadn’t had time to stop by and feed the stove during the day, so the house was cold when I got in, even though I block off most of it in the winter—all I use is the living room, kitchen and one upstairs bedroom. The one time my father ever came up after my wife left, he said I should sell the place so some family could have it.

  The snow hadn’t amounted to much, but the thermometer in the window said it was down to fifteen. I opened the draft and the damper, poked up the embers, put in some good birch logs and watched the bark flame up, then turned on the public station from Amherst and got their daily dose of Iraq and Syria and Israel and Gaza. All names as far I’m concerned, though you didn’t want to tell Kristin this; she said you couldn’t just ignore what was happening in the world. Every time they had another school shooting somewhere, she was all set to—and that’s the point, right? Set to do what? Of course look at where she worked. One thing about Bozrah, we’ll never have a school shooting.

  If it had been up to me, I would’ve broken out the Jack Daniel’s while the house was warming up, cooked myself some pasta, then turned in early and read myself to sleep; I’d been working my way through The Duke Ellington Reader, which Kristin ordered for me off Amazon. No particular occasion, just that she’d heard me mention Duke Ellington. Actually, I was afraid it might have been our one-month anniversary until I looked back at my calendar. But I knew I should check in with her before pulling the phone.

  “Perfect timing,” she said when I got her on her cell. “I’m like ten minutes out of Greenfield. Why don’t you start down? I’ll make us some dinner and you can stay over. Or we could go out.”

  “I think I better pass,” I said. “I got some guy coming around to interview first thing in the morning.”

  “So how about if I come up? Since I’m already on the road. I don’t have class till tomorrow afternoon. Is there any food in the house?”

  “You must be whipped, though.”

  “I’m buzzed, actually—I stopped at a Starbucks. So did the thing go all right? Your friend?”

  “It wasn’t my favorite day. How was Boston?”

  “Fine, except I missed you. I’ll stop and pick us up something.”

  “I don’t know how the roads are going to be. It’s cold as hell up here.”

  “Oh, pish tush,” she said. “Nothing can daunt a Subaru girl.”

  By the time I saw her headlights coming up the drive, I’d brought in wood for the night, I had the Jack Daniel’s rolling and I’d dropped a blue pill and could feel my face starting to get red. I didn’t always take one, but I was fifty-nine and she was forty-four, I’d worked all day, had plenty on my mind and I had to admit I was pissed that she hadn’t wanted to hear me when I was giving her hint after hint, not pissed pissed but annoyed. When she got out of the car I saw her breath smoking. I went out onto the porch; she stuck her tongue in my mouth and I took the canvas grocery bag and her suitcase.

  “Nice and toasty in here,” she said when I shut the door behind us. She tossed her coat down and she was on me again. “See, I did miss you. So I brought scallops. And chives, and ginger. I know you have rice. I’m going to make us something healthy. If I know you, you’ve been eating crap all weekend. What are we drinking?”

  “Just having my usual,” I said.

  “Is that vodka still there? I’ll get it, I have to go make my preparatory preparations.”

  I picked up her coat off the floor and hung it on the coat tree, then sat on the sofa. “You need to get a gas stove,” she called from the kitchen. “How can you cook on this thing? And a decent refrigerator.” She came back with a glass of vodka and ice, put her knees over the arm of the sofa and rested her head in my lap. I smoothed her bangs away from her wide forehead; her face looked strange upside down.

  “You seem like you had a good time,” I said.

  “It’s always a little painful to go back.” She raised her head to take a sip, then eased it down again. “But I got to see a couple of people, and they were showing Out of the Past at the Brattle. Have you seen that? You have to see it. Oh, and I went and revisited the Monet haystack—I know, I’m such a cliché. Anyway, thanks for letting me come up. I really didn’t want to go back to the hellhole tonight.” Her apartment in Greenfield was in a turn-of-the-century building on Main Street, above the stationery store. She’d fixed it up with white particle-board cubes for bookcases and good rugs and painted the walls sky blue and hung a Star of Texas quilt over her bed. But yes.

  “I thought it was all about me,” I said.

  “Oh, it will be. Do you want to get fed before or after? Or before and after?”

  “You mean you want after.”

  “Oh, my.” She leaned her head farther back to look upside down in my eyes. “Is it that effortful?”

  “It’s been a shitty few days,” I said. “I’m losing people.”

  “Who are you losing? Not me.”

  “At work.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Construction and its discontents.”

  “One of them used to take class with you. Amber Sibley?”

  “Oh God, all the Ambers and Crystals and Tiffanys. She probably hates me, right? I don’t mean to be a terrible person. I just feel they’re all so sunk. Like, submerged. You want to weep. There isn’t any light there.” She took another sip, a bigger one. “They’re the same age as Everett, some of them.” This was the son who was in Europe, living in fucking hostels. I guess he could have been some shining spirit and not just another privileged twerp. Like me at that age.

  “So maybe you shouldn’t be teaching them,” I said.

  “I try to like my life,” she said. “I really do.” I heard the ice cubes knock against her teeth. “So are you going to be able to find oth
er people?”

  “I don’t want to worry about it now.” With her head in my lap and the blue pill starting to work, I could feel myself growing. I liked that her jeans were tight on her thighs and I wormed my hand down between where it was warm. She clamped my hand down harder and I thought I’d be able to get the job done. “You want to have the next one upstairs? I don’t know how warm it is up there.”

  “Then you must have a short memory,” she said. She went into the kitchen for refills, switching her ass like she was making fun of me. I put more wood in the stove and followed her up the stairs, my four fingers between where the thighs met, squeezing, my thumb poking where her butthole would be. She stopped, eased back into it and said, “I like the way you think.”

  I shoved her into the bedroom, making her spill her drink; she tossed down what was left and sat on the bed. I drank mine in one gulp, pushed her onto her back and she bounced up again and slapped me, which was how we generally got started. But I felt my hard-on going away. Construction and its discontents—she just had to be snotty. I watched her unzip her jeans and begin working them off and I noticed welts along her big white thighs from the seams. I yanked them off the rest of the way, socks inside, and got my mouth down where her underpants were already wet. She tasted sour. She twisted out from under and tried to get at the top button of my jeans and I pushed her away and slapped her good. “No,” she said. “I want that.”

  If she’d just let me go down on her I might be able to get it back, or else she might come a couple times and maybe I’d be off the hook. I grabbed at the underpants and she clawed my arms, still within the rules, but instead of wrestling her down or whatever I was supposed to do, I got up off the bed and just stood there. “Fine,” I said. “Knock yourself out.”

  I let her unzip me, she slid her hand down in, then looked up at me. She did have that pretty face. “Poor baby,” she said. “Okay, I know how to fix this. Get those off and lie back down.”

  This time I hit her hard.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” She put a hand to her jaw. “That’s not cool. I think you hurt me.”

  “I am going to hurt you,” I said.

  “Okay, stop. This is scaring me a little.”

  “Maybe you better get out.”

  She got up, took my arm and kissed where she’d scratched me. I pushed her back down. “What’s going on with you?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just not into it.”

  “You mean tonight? Or anymore?”

  “Christ,” I said. “Is it going to be that conversation?”

  “Oh. Wow. Then I guess there’s my answer. So how long—no, actually I don’t need to know.” She found her socks, pulled them on and stood up to get into her jeans. “Here’s one thing about me, I make a clean exit. You don’t have to worry about hysterical phone calls.”

  “Wait,” I said. “We’re really doing this?”

  “Apparently there isn’t any ‘we,’ ” she said. “Why have I not learned this by now?”

  —

  I finally had to take a couple of Advil PMs on top of the Jack Daniel’s to get myself to sleep, and when I made it down to the kitchen in the morning I dry heaved at the smell of the scallops, which were still out on the counter. It was cold downstairs, but there wasn’t time to load the stove or make coffee—Amber would have some on, in the newly clean coffeemaker—or to shower or shave. If this guy did show up for an interview, it wouldn’t hurt for him to see me looking like a hard-ass. I stuck a PowerBar in my jacket pocket, put on my gloves and went out to start the truck and scrape frost off the windshield. Thermometer said three above. This would probably be the last cold snap, and then everybody’s fucking lawns would start greening up.

  Amber poured me coffee and got milk out of the fridge. “I thought it was supposed to be spring,” she said. “You look like shit, by the way. She wearing you out or something?”

  “Something.”

  “You should’ve had my morning. I go to brush my teeth and there’s his fucking outfit in the sink. I didn’t even want to handle it.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “You didn’t tell me he was slamming. Okay, you need to get out. Like today. Is he selling?”

  “Well, it’s not like there’s people coming to the house. Anyways, I decided the place I’m going. Venice, California. It’s right by L.A. and they have the beach there.” She sat back down at the computer. “You want to see pictures?”

  “Amber.”

  “I know, I know, I know. Everybody says. It’s not going to be all that much longer.”

  “You could even—Shit, okay, you’re going to do what you do. Can I get on that for a second?”

  I had three messages, a Canadian pharmacy that got through the spam filter, an ad from Lowe’s and an email from a guy I hadn’t been in touch with for years, with the subject line Look at this! Nothing from Kristin. I looked through the headlines in the Times but nobody good had died. I checked Renovator’s Supply for deals, then couldn’t think of where else to go.

  “Okay,” I said, “I better roll. I knew that asshole wouldn’t show up. He gets here before nine, give him directions over to Miller Brook, okay? No, actually, tell him fuck it. Nothing from Johnny, huh? We’re in great fucking shape here.”

  Over at the site, Myron was back outside with the floorboards, wearing gloves and brown coveralls; the sawhorses were frozen into the mud. Jesse was upstairs hanging drywall and the two kids were in the living room standing around a heater with their thumbs up their asses. I sent the one with the tats up so Jesse could maybe start teaching him and put the bodybuilder to work insulating the rest of the downstairs; the other kid hadn’t made much progress yesterday. We should have had the plumber in already, to run PEX on top of the plywood—Holtzman had decided that while we were at it he wanted radiant heat under the floors—but that couldn’t happen until we got the fucking walls squared away. I never should have said July. This was what my life was.

  I’d thought that Dana—the woman I’d been married to—didn’t come into this story, but she saw it all those years ago. Nobody would anymore: the people I deal with now see only what I show them. She and I had a big thing in high school; then I went off to Berklee and she got into RISD. I used to go down to visit her in Providence until she hooked up with somebody there. Which is part of why I went with that stupid band. Then, ten years later, when my mother died, I came down to Darien and she was visiting her parents because it was Christmas. She had a job as a graphic designer in New York, still living with that same guy. But she said he was cheating on her—it actually might’ve gone both ways—and she was talking in terms of just chucking everything, maybe going off somewhere to raise vegetables and write children’s books. Not to suspect her, but she already knew, because my father had been bragging, that I’d bought a big house and my business was making good money. So long story short. I think she was remembering me like I used to be.

  Today she’d probably tell you I dragged her up here, but I remember how pumped she was when I had Jesse come over with the tractor to plow out a garden patch and she found an arrowhead; she thought she might write a book about a Mohawk Indian girl. But she couldn’t really talk with the locals—at first I didn’t blame her; it had taken me a while—and she found out the new people and weekenders had their own world that you couldn’t cross into. Jesse had the same problem with his wife—even worse, naturally, because people were always looking at her. Don’t think they didn’t look at Dana too, but for a whole other reason, which also got to be a problem. I was gone all day, and I guess when I got home I didn’t want to talk about much but what we’d done on the job today and what we were going to do tomorrow. She said she couldn’t believe I didn’t care about anything anymore. I said I couldn’t believe she had nothing to do up here—what about this, what about that. It made me sick to hear myself. Maybe she’d be glad now if she knew my little empire was falling to shit. I mean glad for me.

  When we broke for lu
nch, I waited until Myron went into the Portosan, then took Jesse out to my truck and started the engine so we could warm up. He started taking stuff out of a paper bag. A bologna sandwich in waxed paper—like his mother had packed it for him. I bit the wrapper off my PowerBar.

  “That’s your lunch?” he said. “Gonna make yourself sick. You want my orange? You better eat it first or it’s going to taste sour.”

  “I’m good. How’s he working out?”

  “Who, Gene? He’ll learn, he’s a good kid. That other one, though.”

  “We might need all the help we can get,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t give up on Johnny just yet. He might be trying to figure some stuff out. He needs to.”

  “This is a fucking train wreck,” I said.

  “Man? No, we got this. You’re tired, is all. Look at you. I tell you what. Me and Myron can hold things together for a week or two. And that girl—don’t sell her short. Why don’t you take your lady someplace warm?” He took a bite of his sandwich.

  “I’m in a lot deeper shit than you know,” I said.

  “Is it a money thing?”

  “Jesse, can I just ask you? How the fuck do you stand it here?”

  He put his sandwich down. “You mean as a black man.”

  “Yeah, okay, that,” I said. “But Louise is gone, you go to the firehouse one night a week, go to church and that’s your life. Understand, I’m not criticizing you.”

  “Black people can’t like peace and quiet? You go live in Hartford for a while. Vietnam. Which is the same goddamn place. How come you’re here? You’re a man with an education. Look, Louise gave me my choice. She was crying when she went out the door.” He picked up his sandwich again. “I better finish up.” He took a bite, swallowed hard. “I’m going to miss Billy, though. He never let on to me, but I know why that girl wouldn’t marry him. You see a lot of things in the military. I know I did. I was eighteen when I went in. Now you probably want the war stories too.”

  “Not unless you want to tell me.”

  “There’s a reason I don’t go down to the VFW,” he said. “I don’t want to tell anybody shit. That’s how come I’m here. You didn’t say about you.”