Down Where My Love Lives

by Charles Martin

  .." "I know, but.

  She held her finger to my lips and said, "Shhh . . . " Her eyes filled around the edges, and she shook her head. Evidently what if had been whispering in her ear too. And here I was worried about me. I really am a pile of crap.

  The tears broke, and I opened the door and stepped out, wrapping her tight. "I don't know how you do it."

  She whispered, "Because you love me-and because you're there when I wake up."

  "Honey, I'll always be there when you wake up."

  "You weren't this morning."

  I laughed. "Well, I do like to get up before lunch."

  She hit me in the chest. "That's not funny. I just need more rest than I used to."

  We swayed a moment more.

  "Caglestock called, said Bryce has been AWOL for a month."

  Maggie wiped her tears and looked concerned. "You think he's okay?"

  "Don't know, but I'm going to find out. I left you some breakfast in the oven."

  "Doesn't taste as good when you're not there."

  "Tell me about it."

  I IDLED THE VAN DOWN THE DRIVEWAY, STOPPED AT the mailbox, and then sat in the front seat flipping through the bills. Before me lay Amos and Amanda's house, where the front yard was strewn with kids' toys. Despite their best attempts to tidy up, the front yard looked as if it were hit daily by the same tornado. A red wagon, a tricycle, a small playhouse turned on its side, a sandbox missing most of the sand, a football, a kickball, and other odds and ends painted the picture that the proud grandparents had gone a bit overboard. Every time I mentioned to Amos that his front yard looked like trailer trash, he just shook his head and said, "In-laws. What can you do?"

  "Evidently," I said, "you spread it all across the front yard, letting them know how thankful you are."

  While Maggie and I had been connecting the straightedged pieces of our puzzle, Amos had too. He had been promoted to sergeant and given command of a SWAT team that roamed all over South Carolina, focusing on narcotics. They gave him a new truck, new uniform, new pistol, and a new schedule. Thinking he needed a bit more change in his life, he'd married Amanda Lovett last June 25-Li'l Dylan's sixmonth birthday. Pastor John, buttons busting, performed his daughter's wedding ceremony before a standing-room-only congregation. I stood next to Amos, holding the rings, and looked out across the congregation-which looked a lot like a hat convention.

  At Amanda's request, the reception took place on the riverbank-beneath the oaks. Knowing it'd be the last time they got to cook for Amos, the church ladies let out all the stops. From greens to chicken to roast to mashed potatoes to sweet potato pie to you-name-it, they covered us up in some of the best cooking I'd ever seen.

  We ate until we couldn't see straight, then danced a littlesomething Amos has never been too fond of or good at-and then Amos and Amanda drove to the Outer Banks, where Amos said he intended to work on his tan. While Grandma Carter bounced Li'l Dylan on her knee, Amos and Amanda spent a few days at the beach. When they returned, Amanda moved in and quickly got rid of any remnants of Amos's bachelor days. Within a week, it looked as if he were the newcomer, not her.

  A week or so after they returned, I was helping him take out the trash, and he held up a picture of Ted Williams. "How do you throw out a picture of the greatest hitter ever to play baseball?" He shook his head and pitched it into the trash can. "It just makes no sense to me whatsoever."

  Having been through this very same gleaning with Maggie, I put my arm around him and smiled knowingly. "Brother, therein lies the secret."

  "What?"

  "Your favorites. Not hers."

  He nodded and said, "Yeah, I'm beginning to see that."

  "Remember," I said, pointing toward the front door, "this is her house now. You're just lucky she lets you sleep here."

  Six months later, there had come a single-pause-double-knock at our kitchen door-Amos's signature. The porch lightbulb was burned out, but when I opened the door and let my eyes adjust, Amos stood there giddy faced and breathing heavily, as if he'd been running. The cold air turned his breath to smoke. Maggie flipped a switch, and the kitchen light bent around the corner, lighting his straight teeth and the whites of his eyes.

  "D.S.! D.S.!" He was so excited he could barely speak. "D.S.! D.S.!"

  "You already said that."

  He jumped up and down as though he were skipping rope to an erratic rhythm. "Li'l Dylan's gonna get a brother."

  My head was swirling with our own adoption process, and I didn't catch on too fast. I scratched my head, maybe even feeling a bit jealous. "You guys adopting?"

  He shook his head and skipped faster, as if the person swinging the rope not only had doubled the pace but now was swinging two ropes. "No, dummy." He poked himself in the chest. "'Manda's pregnant."

  I looked behind him and saw Amanda standing there with Li'l Dylan on her hip and a huge smile spread across her face. Maggie pushed me out of the way, gave Amos a huge kiss on the forehead, and dragged Amanda into the house, where they sat talking till long after Li'l Dylan's bedtime.

  Amos and I sat on the front porch in the swing, and while Li'l Dylan curled up in my lap and napped, we sipped CocaCola and laughed at the changes in our lives. Close to midnight, Amos brushed Li'l Dylan's brown cheek and smiled. "He's gonna be a big brother."

  Now I SAT IN THE VAN, STUDYING THE YARD, AND FOUND myself lost in what-might-have-been dreams-a bad way to start the day. Minutes later, Amos turned into his drive in his black, state-issued Chevrolet 2500HD pickup. It was one of those "undercover" cars that comes complete with black windows and driver's-side spotlight telling everybody and their brother that the driver is a cop. He hopped out, waved, and started walking across his lawn toward the front door. Amanda opened the front door, and Li'l Dylan came crawling out, making a beeline for his daddy's black-booted feet.

  I honked, pulled out of the drive, and tried not to remember that I was driving a minivan with a five-star crash test rating. I watched through my rearview mirror as the Carolina Cruncher, Mr.-Clean-turned-Mr.-SWAT, dressed in black fatigues and black T-shirt and carrying a SIG Sauer P226 in a hip holster, knelt down, picked up his son, and seamlessly transitioned into Mr. Daddy. I've seen a lot of beautiful things in my life, but that is one of the more beautiful.

  I RATTLED THE CHAIN AT THE GATE THAT LED UP THE LONG drive to Bryce's drive-in. The chain and lock had been replaced and were, by any standard, huge. It looked as though he were protecting Fort Knox. I shrugged, pulled up the fence as usual, crawled under, and made my way toward Bryce's trailer.

  Bryce had never been big on upkeep. Maintenance just wasn't in his vocabulary. As long as I'd been coming up here, not much had changed except the worsening condition of everything in sight. From the exponentially growing trash piles to the flaking paint to the bent speaker poles to the cesspool that Bryce called a trailer, the entire place was racing down one giant spiral toward uninhabitable. It was no wonder he never married. If Health and Human Services had ever come up here, they'd have condemned the place.

  To say that Bryce was a pack rat would be kind. Problem was, he packed most everything in huge piles that dotted the landscape-gigantic mounds of twisted metal, car parts, wood scraps, and pretty much anything he'd ever used. His property looked like a bad marriage between a garage sale and a city trash heap. I never could tell the difference between what was trash and what wasn't. Bryce never bothered with that distinction.

  When I crested the hill and exited the woods that once served as the parking lot for silver screen number one, I looked around and couldn't believe my eyes.

  To start with, the piles were gone. Not a single scrap of trash could be seen. Anywhere. Except for one smoldering burn pile down the hill a few hundred yards, the place was spotless. The grounds had been mowed and edged, and every square foot of concrete had been blown or swept meticulously. And I don't mean the grass had just been cut. It had been cut, raked, then picked up and discarded someplace else. And not a weed grew anywhere wi
thin sight.

  Everything that could be painted, starting with the three movie screens, had been painted, and now sat sparkling white. And that's another thing: there were now three screens. Two had been mysteriously rebuilt. In all three parking lots that spread out like a star from the concession/projector house, all the speaker poles had been repaired and evidently rewired. On closer inspection, the projector house, too, had been cleaned. I climbed the stairs to the projector room and what Bryce had fondly called the "film library." The several hundred reels of movies that had at one time been filed in a mound on the floor were now rolled up, sealed in round metal cases, labeled, and filed alphabetically on specially built shelves.

  Outside Bryce's trailer, a clothesline stretched between two poles standing seven feet tall and sunk some forty feet apart. Four pairs of military-issue camouflage BDUs hung equidistant across the line along with three pairs of bleached white boxers and two pairs of tube socks. Each item was stretched taut between two clothespins and hung without a wrinkle. Everything smelled of detergent. On his front steps sat two pairs of black GI boots, sparkling like granite countertops.

  I stepped inside the trailer, and the smell of bleach and Pine Sol hit me like a wave. I could have eaten off the floor. Outside the back door, the mop bucket had been turned upside down and leaned against the house. Next to it leaned the mop, which had quit dripping but was still moist.

  I studied the trailer, my jaw at my waist. Bryce's bed was made, which astonished me because I'd never seen sheets on the mattress before today. Towels were hung in his bathroom, his toothbrush sat in the holder, the toothpaste cap was screwed onto the tube-which had been rolled from the bottom upand his closet would have made Martha Stewart proud.

  If I thought the bedroom and bathroom were amazing, the kitchen was a totally new revelation. New appliances, new linoleum, new exhaust fan, new bar stools at the counter, new silverware, new plates, new everything. The whole kitchen gave the impression that someone was actually using it-or could. I shook my head and then opened the fridge.

  First, there was food. Real food. Vegetables, eggs, milk that was not cottage cheese, orange juice, fish, bottled water, Gatorade, chicken. Second-and this was the most glaring sight-there was no beer. Further, as I looked around the trailer and in the trash cans that stood orderly alongside, there were no beer cans-empty or full-anywhere.

  But if the absence of beer was glaring, then there was one other absence that was as difficult to miss as the detonation of an atomic bomb. I looked around the trailer again and made sure. I looked behind doors, under the bed, through all the closets, and on the rack where they usually sat, bright, polished, and on display. Regardless, I found no bagpipes and no kilt anywhere.

  I stepped out the back door and onto the porch. Scratching my head, wondering what in the world was wrong with Bryce, I saw a used foot trail that I'd never noticed before. It led into the woods on the back side of the hill where the drive-in sat.

  I turned around to walk back into the trailer and noticed a glass frame encasing what looked like an aerial map. I looked closer and saw that it was actually two aerial photos. One was a photo of the drive-in proper, covering what looked like a distance of maybe a thousand square yards. The second looked more like a satellite photo that included Bryce's entire piece of property. I don't know how many acres or square miles it comprised, but I'd say the bottom of the map probably covered twenty miles, while the sides stretched up for closer to thirty. At the bottom was a little dot that looked like the drivein, and at the top was the unmistakable Salkehatchie River. In between sat tens of thousands of acres of forest and swamp that few men had ever ventured into, much less through. It was a no-man's-land. It you wanted to hide, it'd be a great place to do it. It'd also be a great place to get lost if you were trying to hide and didn't know what you were doing.

  I descended the steps leading off the porch and followed the trail out into the woods where the pines grew up like bean stalks. Another hundred yards and the trail led me into a clearing covered by about twenty gargantuan oak trees towering some sixty feet above the ground.

  It was like walking into the Astrodome. The forest floor had been cleared for several acres, mulch had been spread along what looked like a running path, and along the perimeter of the canopy ran what looked like a fitness course. From tires to ropes to barbed wire to cable crossings over water holes to wooden walls that must be scaled to towers that must be rappelled, the obstacle course looked difficult by design.

  To me, it looked as if the participant started by climbing over a sand hill covered in barbed wire, then over a hundred yards covered in hurdles, pipes, and tires elevated off the ground, then up a free-hanging rope that ended at a tower, where the then-exhausted participant must rappel down, only to climb along a tightrope that had been stretched between two trees some sixty feet apart. Falling would get you wet. Then through a series of ladders, up, over, and under a series of walls, around some pilings, and between some poles with seriously sharp points.

  I had no idea how long Bryce had been working on it, but I guessed it had taken him months, maybe even a year, to complete it. The trail headed off into the woods far beyond my view, but I'd seen enough. I backtracked to the trailer and kept my eyes peeled.

  I walked back through the trailer and noticed something I hadn't seen before. On the desk sat a manila envelope with "Caglestock" written in Bryce's handwriting on the front. I opened the envelope and saw that Bryce had signed in all the places where Caglestock's secretary had stuck the "Sign here" stickies. I stuffed the envelope under my arm and started back down the hill.

  Toward town, I stopped at a pay phone and dialed our number. After six rings, the machine picked up. "Hey, this is Maggie and Dylan. Leave us a message, and we'll call you back."

  After the beep, I said, "Hey, it's me. If you're there, pick up." When she didn't, I said, "Well, guess you're outside or something. I've got to see Caglestock and thought maybe we'd go together, get a bite to eat in-"

  Just then, the phone picked up. Maggie was breathing hard. "Hey," she said, laughing and trying to catch her breath. "I was ... in the stall." She tried to catch her breath again. "That pig has gotten big ... Phew! She stinks too."

  "Tell me about it."

  "Did you say something about lunch?"

  I smiled. "Something like that."

  "I'll be waiting on you when you get here."

  I paused. "You know, it'll take me about ten minutes to get there, and maybe ... I was just thinking ... well, you might feel better if ..."

  "I'm going now." The phone clicked silent, and I leaned against the pay phone glass, thinking of my wife, muddy and content in her overalls.

  WE ARRIVED IN WALTERBORO JUST AFTER THE lunch crowd had exited Ira's Cafe. Ira, decked out in turquoise blue, met us at the door looking like a color swatch. She hugged Maggie and gave me a huge wet kiss on the cheek, which I wiped with my sleeve.

  She pointed her coffeepot at me. "You best not be wiping off my kisses. I don't give too many out."

  "Take my word for it," a guy in the kitchen hollered. "She's telling the truth."

  "Hey, Ira," I said. "Good to see you."

  Ira winked at us, smiled, smacked her gum from side to side, and then adjusted her left bosom with the V in her elbow, kind of lifting it back into place. Evidently business had been good in the last year, because they were bigger, and she looked as though she was trying to get used to them getting in her way. She pointed us to a booth. "You just missed Amos, but sit down and I'll stir up some lunch."

  We sat in our booth and watched the Walterboro lunch crowd scurry across the town square en route to their jobs or in search of the next pocket of gossip. Across the square sat the town hall and what looked like both Amos's truck and Pastor John's Cadillac.

  Ten minutes later, Ira delivered a lunch that looked a whole lot like breakfast. A mound of steaming eggs, piping hot biscuits, fresh sweet cream butter, honey, and cheese grits. She even threw in a few slices
of salty fried ham.

  It took us nearly an hour to eat it all. We washed it down with syrupy sweet tea, and when I asked Ira for the check, her face became contorted.

  "Look here, you little whippersnapper, you get cute with me and I'll take a broomstick to the side of your head." She looked down at my backside. "Among other places." She sloshed the coffeepot at me again. "Now, don't you come in here and start snapping your fingers at me. No, sir."

  I left twenty dollars on the table and grabbed two toothpicks at the counter-one for now and one for later-and we walked out. While I picked my teeth, we stood in the center of the sidewalk, gauging our level of fullness.

  Maggie turned to me and shaded her eyes from the sun. "You know, that sounds gross."

  I pulled the toothpick from my mouth. "What?"

  "That." She pointed.

  I stuck the toothpick back in my mouth and kept picking while she watched my fingers work. Then she ran her tongue over her teeth, sucked through them, and looked up at me again. "Does it really work?"

  I nodded and offered her my second toothpick. She eyed it, stuck it in her mouth, and started picking. Finally she mumbled something I couldn't understand and nodded.

  We turned toward the truck and walked directly past the alley where I had vomited breakfast about a year and a half earlier. Vomited because I'd eaten a huge breakfast with Amos and then realized that I'd gone forty-five minutes without thinking of my wife lying in a coma at the hospital. I looked at the ground where I'd stood that day, remembered the feeling in my stomach and the splatter on my boots, and felt it return when I remembered that I'd cut that scene out of Maggie's version of my story.

  She clenched my arm more tightly, and her eyes innocently searched mine. "You okay?"

  I swallowed hard and lied again.

  We backed out of our parking spot and eased around the corner, where Amos and Pastor John were just exiting the courthouse. I waved and pulled up along a No Parking zone, thinking they'd walk up to the window and act sociable, but once I got a closer look, their faces told me otherwise. When they reached the sidewalk, Pastor John patted Amos on the shoulder and said something I couldn't hear, then they walked directly to their cars.