Above The Thunder

by Renee Manfredi

  What he should really do was rest for a while, he knew, but late afternoon and early evening always made him think of Hector and Jack’s desire to see him now was overwhelming. He refreshed his drink, downed it quickly, and went out into the rain.

  At the back of the building the fire escapes traversed every apartment above the ground level. He narrowed Hector’s apartment down to two possibilities. One was dark. He climbed the steps in the direction of the other, thankful that the rain would drown out any noise his shoes made on the metal stairs.

  He sank down on the step slowly, watched the light from within. After fifteen minutes he decided that either the tenants weren’t home or were in another room; he didn’t see any shadows flickering on the glass or hear any voices. Jack raised his head carefully until his eyes were just barely above the sash. The furniture had plastic slipcovers, and there were doilies on the end and coffee tables. There was a miniature poodle sleeping under a dinette table, a picture of four or five very blond—striking even from this distance—children on the wall. An old man tottered into view. Not Hector’s apartment. He tiptoed to the other window, the dark one, and peeked inside. Lights coming in through the opposite window suggested that this wasn’t Hector’s apartment, either: this living room featured a playpen and a clutter of toys. Just as he was turning to climb back down a light came on. He slid carefully to one side of the window, peeked around only when he heard the sound of a television. A woman holding an infant stood with her back to him. The baby with its milky monkey eyes seemed to look right at him. He shuddered. How could this be? There were five apartments to each floor. Hector had to be on this floor unless he was H. Johnson in apartment two. Of course, that old man could have been Hector’s father, or this woman could be his mother. He looked back in at the woman. She was young, not more than twenty-five. She was petite and plump, dark-haired like Hector. Maybe his sister. His newly divorced sister, perhaps? The R. Elsasser on the mailbox? She hadn’t gotten Hector’s genes, that much was clear even from this angle: she would be fat in five years, her figure lacking the exquisite sculpture and long limbs of her brother. Oh, Hector’s legs! Jack could still feel Hector’s legs, firmly muscled and strong, as cool and smooth as palm leaves.

  He went down one step, sat. Poor Hector, living here with an ugly sister and a whiny kid. Surely someone with Hector’s exquisite looks could find a man to put him up. There was no reason he had to live like this, though Hispanics were family loyal, Jack knew, took care of their own in the way WASPs like him never dreamed of.

  He saw another shadow come into the room. He stepped back up. It was Hector himself. Jack’s heart started to beat faster. He was wearing a creamy silk shirt, expensive-looking and gorgeous against his dark hair and eyes. He smiled at the woman, reached for the baby, kissed it, and tossed it playfully in the air. Jack looked around at the cheap furnishings, plastic flowers, and brass-framed prints that undoubtedly came from a discount store and were chosen to pick up the colors in the sofa. Behind Hector, Jack caught a glimpse of the dingy kitchen, saw even from here the cockroaches scuttling about on the grimy linoleum and hood over the range top.

  Hector put the baby in the playpen, turned to the woman, and took her in his arms. Jack felt his stomach threaten to empty, shock bolt through him and settle like a cold piece of animal fat in his throat. Of all the things he could have witnessed this was the scene he dreaded most. He shivered. Hector was kissing the woman now. Jack’s mind started to race. His face burned. His lungs felt like they were full of broken glass. Every breath hurt. Inexplicably, his mind wandered to his crew coach in prep school. Hal Davis was a wheezing fat man who stank of cigars and garlic and who drove Jack to the limits of endurance. Never in his life had he been so focused and single-minded, up at dawn every day to row on the Charles, rain or shine. His stamina increased the longer he trained, and in those disciplined years everything in his life was immaculate: a perfect grade point average, every assignment and task completed on time, monkish weekend nights where he was in bed by eight-thirty. The first keg party he’d been to was also his last: the night before graduation. It was no real hardship to stay away from parties or coeds—contrary to what he led Stuart to believe, he was a virgin with undeclared sexual preferences until he was nineteen; he simply didn’t think about sex until he had given up rowing for good. On holiday breaks, when he didn’t have to worry about classes, he read novels as soon as his practice was over. Stuart would die laughing, picturing Jack in all his athletic glory hiding out in his bedroom reading Pride and Prejudice. Those were the Stendhal years. He went through The Red and the Black at least a dozen times.

  Jack was Olympic-class, everybody said so, and he had scholarship offers to four Ivy League schools by the time he was a junior. He missed a spot on the National team by eight-tenths of a second.

  When Coach Davis suffered a heart attack in Jack’s last year and had to retire, something went out of Jack’s competitive drive. He still rowed as hard, trained as rigorously, but the mysterious force that had pushed him was gone. His pace slackened, his time slowed. It wasn’t that Jack didn’t like the new coach, a young guy not long out of Brown, but rowing had always meant Coach Davis; as much as Jack resented him, as much as he thought he hated the man, and dreaded his inevitable harassment day after day, he simply didn’t perform as well without the obnoxious presence of Davis. Physical conditioning was easy to achieve, a rower could learn the skills of the catch, slide, and return, and improve his speed, but great rowers were fueled by passion of some kind—misdirected passion maybe. Davis was as unforgiving as Jack’s father, and like his father, doled out just enough praise to keep him frustrated and unsatisfied. Anger pushed the oars away; the snap return toward his chest was forgiveness. Some rowers purposefully fought with their girlfriends or parents to keep the mental edge. Davis used to say, “Great rowers are either rowing toward, or rowing away. It’s up to you to figure out which you are.” Jack thought himself as starting from a point of emptiness, racing toward an unknown thing on the opposite shore. Answers to questions still in their nascent state, not yet even formed in his mind.

  One day, shortly after Davis died, Jack was sculling one afternoon and broke his own personal record, a time that would have qualified him as third on the National Team. But when he dragged the shell ashore, he walked away, and never went back to it.

  He looked at Hector now with the woman, and he felt exactly as he had that afternoon, like he’d gotten to some distant shore after a long journey to find that he didn’t know himself at all. He’d deluded himself about Hector, had ignored all the signs of what was now irrefutable. He expected Hector had other men, but what he didn’t expect was this lie. In his darker moments he considered the possibility of a woman with Hector, but it wasn’t the same as seeing it before his eyes. Jack was a man who loved men; this was the one thing he could say about himself that was virtuous. When his homosexuality surged to the fore after he stopped rowing, he didn’t try to fight or deny it. His will to achieve, to win, to get on the Olympic team, was not really what had gotten him up before the sun every day. It was the life of training itself he needed, his sixteen-hour days that precluded having to think about dating and girls. To be able to roll his eyes and say, “Coach Davis, water Nazi,” as a ready-made explanation to anyone—his father, his family—who asked about a girlfriend. What Jack discovered was that, after all, he had been an athlete who was rowing away.

  He had to resist the urge to bang on the glass, smash Hector’s face in, the lying piece of shit. He was the lowest of the low, a whore, a lying slut. Hector didn’t care about Jack, didn’t feel the things he pretended to. The hell with him, then. The hell with the unhappy news Jack had for him. He was under no moral obligation to tell Hector he was sick, not with the immorality of the life Hector was living. This is what women did to men, turned them into liars and thieves and whores.

  He climbed down the fire escape and started home. The rain was cold, and he shivered in his thin suit jacket.
His head was throbbing. By the time he got back to the boarding house he could scarcely breathe, his lungs watery and thick, the air rattling horribly in his chest. It took nearly forty-five minutes to get to his floor. The steps seemed to have doubled in number. The lights were off in all the hallways. He pulled out the key ring—absurdly large, since each room was individually keyed—and fumbled around until one of the doors opened. This space was unfamiliar. He lay down on a very lumpy mattress, pulled a chenille bedspread—actually, a garbage bag, he noticed—up to his chin. A light from a neon sign across the street shone in. He stared at it, little blue bubbles coming out of a martini glass. He hadn’t ever been to that bar. He closed his eyes and drifted off.

  He was rowing, though not on the Charles. He was sculling on what appeared to be the ocean, black high waves that clipped over the front of the shell and hissed along the bottom. The oarlocks groaned like footsteps on a wooden floor when the oars snapped back in return. He rowed and rowed. The waves got higher, fiercer. Soon he was swallowing water. His lungs were filling and he was drowning, sinking all the way to the bottom of the ocean. In the dream, he opened his eyes and found himself on a beach where the Italian shoemaker, Mr. Fabrizi, held out a pair of shoes. Put these on. I polished them. A lifelong habit doesn’t die so easy. Put them on and follow me. Jack walked through nine doors, one after another, held open for him by striking young men wearing white gloves and blue hats. They were all blond and pale, blue-eyed and tall. They didn’t smile. The ninth door opened out onto the sky itself. You can walk through it or not. The shoes won’t wear out. Will you come? Jack looked at the sky, which had never seemed so bright before. It started to shimmer and break apart.

  Something pulled at him from behind, a tug and a shaking. Mr. Fabrizi smiled sadly at him. It’s okay. I have the last, he said, and Jack realized he meant a shoe last, the shape of his feet molded in cedar. I have your last. I can make you a pair anytime.

  When Jack awoke, someone was calling his name. There was a mask over his mouth, a woman telling him to breathe naturally. “You’re going to be okay. Do you remember what happened?”

  He shook his head.

  “You passed out on the street. Your lungs collapsed. But you’re going to be all right.”

  He was in an ambulance. The paramedics were hooking him up to wires, tubes. The siren was shrilling. His skin felt like it was loosening, falling away from the bone, shaking him out, trying to peel away from the muscle. He imagined he was sitting atop his own chest, his skin like a huge pair of pants that stayed in place only because he was holding them up; if he moved even a little, he’d slip right out of his body.

  “Can you find Stuart? Can you call Stuart Carpenter?” Jack wasn’t sure he’d actually spoken; nobody seemed to be paying any attention to him. He strained to open his eyes. The woman who had spoken to him earlier was replaced by one of the tall blue-eyed doormen in his dream. He tried again to make himself heard. “Can you help me? Will you get Stuart?”

  The man didn’t speak or smile, just took Jack’s hand and watched as the EMTs did their work. He was right there as they lifted Jack onto the gurney in the hospital, running alongside it with the medical personnel, red shoes squeaking on the linoleum.

  EIGHT

  THREE PIPS IN SEARCH OF A GLADYS

  Anna awoke Saturday morning to Flynn wearing the optometrist’s goggles, peering down at her. Even from the warmth of her bed Anna felt how cold it was outside, saw the gunmetal gray of the sky and sparsely leafed trees like vain, underdressed women.

  “Good morning,” Anna said to her granddaughter. “How did you sleep?”

  “I dreamed about Oscar de la Hoya again. Also, that my mother joined a cult and quit using drugs.”

  Anna flipped back the covers. “Shimmy in.”

  Flynn smiled, the tops of her cheeks squeezed against the frame of the heavy goggles. She folded her body against Anna’s and stared at the flowers on her grandmother’s nightgown. Through the 20/100 lenses they looked like little pink oceans. Flynn turned on the radio. “This song is called ‘Strawberry Letter 22’. They played it yesterday.”

  “You’re right.” Anna sang along to the words she remembered. She’d found this station a couple of months ago, shortly after Flynn and Marvin showed up. It played All Seventies All The Time, and she woke to it every morning. It sent her back to a happier time in her life. For a few brief moments every morning, she could hover on the edge of wakefulness listening to The Fifth Dimension and Roberta Flack and recapture the feelings of those times, the days in her early married life when she and Hugh were so busy that an hour in the evening on the porch with a nightcap was their only shared time in the day. Those were the days of abundance, the uninterrupted sixty minutes with Hugh a haven she couldn’t wait to enter.

  She turned to Flynn, chuckled at the way her granddaughter’s eyes were slivered behind the thick lenses like some terrible tiny fish. Anna drew Flynn closer and breathed in the sweet, sleepy girl smell of her—baby shampoo and floral soap layered over something vaguely sharp and clay-like.

  “Who sings this song?” Flynn asked, when the music changed.

  Anna listened. “Bill Withers.”

  “Is it called ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’?”

  Anna said yes, loving the irony of Flynn’s taste in ’70s music. Anna thought of it as retribution for all those long car trips when Poppy and Hugh made her listen to country. Poppy hated this music. It was delicious to see her granddaughter’s face light up when Anna walked in with Jim Croce and Gladys Knight digitally remastered on disc.

  “Are we going to go shopping today?” Flynn said.

  “Wasn’t planning on it. Why? Is there something you want?”

  “It’s Saturday,” Flynn said. “And there’s a sale on chicken.”

  Anna laughed. The first few weeks that Flynn and Marvin were here, Anna had gone to The Warehouse Club frequently to stock up on things she wasn’t used to running out of so often, living alone as she did. Flynn had a genuine bunker mentality, keeping Anna informed when they were down to their last six rolls of toilet paper from the case of twenty-four. “You remind me of my grandmother,” Anna said. “Anybody listening to you would think you’ve been through the Great Depression.”

  “Well, I have. You and I both have. We were neighbor wives in Montana. You kept cows and chickens. I baked pies and took in laundry. Between us we had eleven children. One of them was Poppy, who was my daughter. She was unhappy then, too. Even then she was mentally ill. She was a deaf-mute, I think. She could see spirits and the next world the way you and I can.”

  Anna stopped. She’d learned to ignore a lot of Flynn’s flights of fancy. Despite what Marvin said, she didn’t see anything so alarming about the girl imagining other lifetimes. Millions of people worldwide believed in reincarnation. It didn’t seem so farfetched. Anna wasn’t sure she didn’t believe in it. What was most troubling was Flynn’s fascination with death and dying. This is what stopped Anna short and gave her a chill of doom. Her solution for now was to ignore anything unusual in Flynn’s speech or behavior. Though it wasn’t always easy.

  A few days ago, Anna had come home from work and tripped over her granddaughter, who was lying in the middle of the floor, wrapped completely and tightly in a bed sheet. Only her eyes peeked out, over which there were two shiny pennies. Anna kept her voice level. “What are you doing, Flynn?”

  “Trying to remember what it was like when I was a pharaoh. Dying for so long, taking forever to return to dust.” Anna kept the alarm out of her voice as best she could. “Get up and wash your face before dinner.”

  She looked over at Flynn now, still going on about other lifetimes. In a minute Flynn would circle the conversation back to Poppy, Anna knew. This was what she was learning about the way Flynn’s mind worked. Reincarnation, followed by worry about her mother, followed by fear of abandonment.

  “Which would you rather,” Anna began, starting the game she’d invented to short-circuit Flynn’s imagi
native embroideries. “Would you rather be a chicken or a superhero?”

  Flynn eased herself up onto one elbow. “What are the conditions?”

  “You’re in a chicken coop in Wisconsin. But you have a secret destiny and a secret map to a distant galaxy. If you can make it, you turn into a talented woman who can rule the universe. As a superhero, you can have the power now. The power is to be invisible anywhere.”

  “Easy. I’d try to get to the galaxy.”

  There were little pockets of mysteries in Flynn, things Anna didn’t yet know like this one; the girl was probably brave. Maybe very brave, who knew.

  “Which would you rather: would you rather be a fig tree or a whale?”

  “What are the conditions?”

  “As a fig tree you are beautiful and have millions of yummy figs all over you. But you can’t eat them, and you can’t move. You have to wait for someone to come by. As a whale, you have the whole ocean. Your whale family is all over the world and you spend most of your day lonely and having to look for food. But you are the boss and are huge and can do whatever you want, including killing fishermen in boats.”

  “Fig tree. I would always prefer to bear fruit.”

  “Even if no one sees you? If you’re a forgotten fig tree in the middle of the desert?”

  “Especially,” Anna said, surprising herself.

  “Would you rather speak the truth and have no one believe you, or tell a bunch of lies that you know aren’t true, but which make people like you?” Flynn asked.

  “Speak the truth.”

  “Always? Even if people told you that you were a freak and you had no friends and you would maybe die because you were honest?”

  “That’s a tough one. I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

  Anna heard Marvin’s heavy footsteps in the hallway just outside the bedroom. “Flynnie?”

  “Yesie?” Flynn called back.