One on one, p.19
ONE ON ONE, page 19
part #4 of Nodd's Ridge Series
Indy panics at Karen’s too-enthusiastic jouncing and the shrill strange face in hers. Reaching small frantic hands for Pearl, she bursts into tears. Karen nearly loses her grip on the baby and clutches her too tightly, triggering a shriek of pain. At that, she all but throws Indy into Pearl’s anxious arms.
Shushing the baby, Pearl retreats to the rocking chair, where she offers Indy the most reliable comforter. Though it is a discreet act, the baby’s head disappearing under Pearl’s loose shirt and the shawl she tugs down from the back of the chair, Karen’s Bobby turns red in the face. Karen giggles inanely.
“Sweetheart,” Reuben tells Karen, “there’s something under the tree for you.”
It’s a decent exit from the kitchen. Sam trails his father and Karen and Bobby to the doorway and loiters there, as if to shield Pearl nursing Indy by the woodstove from any further contact with Karen.
In the living room, Karen unwraps her gift while chattering at Bobby. “I told you they’d have popcorn and cranberries on the tree, didn’t I? Daddy always says it’s traditional but really”—she addresses Reuben—“you’re just too cheap, Mommy always said you were just like your old man, only”—now she turns to Bobby—“my grandpop decorated his last Christmas tree with his brains.”
She runs down just as Sam is about to strangle her. It is a vintage Karen performance. She’s too loaded to understand what she is doing to her father, who has sunk back onto the couch, grey in the face and looking as if he wants to throw up.
Karen shakes out the handmade sweater—Ma Lunt’s work, made to order in the same blue as Karen’s eyes, with enough room in the front for all of her endowment. Dumping the box on the floor, she jumps up and yanks her T-shirt over her head. She’s not wearing a bra and for a moment she is naked from the waist up, her oversized breasts rising and falling in all their breathless centerfold extravagance. She is oblivious to the stunned embarrassment of the three men. Then she pulls on the new sweater and shakes her tits at Bobby.
“Like it?” she teases, glittery-eyed, running her palms over her breasts.
But it is only a reflex, and she leaves Bobby standing there grinning uncertainly.
“Daddy,” she demands from the kitchen where she has opened the refrigerator, “ ‘d’ja drink all the booze already? There’s not a single fucking brew in here.”
Coming up behind her, Sam lifts her hand from the fridge door and closes it firmly. “There’s no booze in the house. No coke either. No pot. No pills—”
“Sammy,” his father says, following them into the kitchen, “maybe Karen and her friend would like to stay to supper.”
Karen looks at him blankly, then turns on Sam. “Fuck you,” she says. She grabs the corner of the bike jacket he is still wearing and yanks down on it. “You may be bigger than me but you pissed the bed until you were eleven, you moron, so don’t you try to pull that shit on me.” She struts toward Bobby, who is holding her discarded shirt and clearly wishing he were somewhere else. She points at Sam. “Dimbulb, over there, he couldn’t fucking read until he was fif’—”
“Karen,” Reuben interrupts, taking her by the elbow, “that’s enough. You’re loaded, honey. Why don’t you sit down in the living room with your friend for a while and settle down and then we’ll have a meal together? You two stay overnight. Stay out of this rough weather.”
She shakes off his arm violently. “Just leave me the fuck alone! I don’t know why I bothered to come here. I thought on Christmas maybe I’d get treated like a human being. No fucking way in this house. It’s the same old shit from my prick brother and you—‘there’s no booze in the house,’” she mocks. “You’re the one who doesn’t dare have it around, you’re the one with the problem, and every fucking time I come through the fucking door, you lay it off on me. Karen’s fucking loaded again.” Her face is wet and blurry. “Bad old Karen.”
Reuben tries to embrace her but she jerks away from him, raising her hands in a warding-off gesture.
“Enough,” he says, backing away. “I love you, Karen. It hurts us all when you’re like this. I’d like you to go now. Come see us when you’re sober.”
In the silence, Pearl makes a choking noise, and Sam realizes behind the hand covering her face, his stepmother is crying. She hates to cry almost as much as she hates scenes. Reuben moves toward her, putting his hand on her shoulder.
“I’m outta this shithole,” Karen says.
With an automaton clumsiness, Sam lurches after her. She slams the door of her friend’s rusty Maxima between them.
Bobby shuffles up, mild brown eyes cloudy. “Sorry, man. I didn’t know what the situation was.” He hesitates and scratches his head. “I just met Kare last night.”
Sam raps on the window and Karen rolls it down angrily.
When he stoops to speak to her, he’s startled to see how exhausted and pale she is. She’s looking very hard-used for just nineteen. It softens his heart toward her.
“Dad’s sick as a dog. Why don’t you sleep it off and come by and see him tomorrow? Tell him you didn’t mean all that garbage.”
“Go fuck yourself,” she snarls. She struggles with the sweater and he looks away as it comes flying out of the car and lands on the ground.
Sam picks it up. “And Merry Christmas to you too, Kare,” he mutters.
The leather of the jacket is stiff in the cold and he has to fumble at the pockets to get his fingers a ways into them. A rigid edge of paper stops his fingertips in the left-hand pocket. It’s thick like oaktag. Then a fingertip slides over a satin surface and without seeing he recognizes it as a Polaroid snapshot. He pulls it out as he trudges up the back steps and the porchlight shows him a picture of the horsebarn at the farm. He flips it over and on the back is printed: Look Inside.
The puppy. He can see it in his mind’s eye, a bright-eyed little beagle huddled in a box with a blanket and a chew toy, and nearby, to keep it warm, one of the electric space heaters his father’s been using to heat the farmhouse while he works.
The kitchen is empty. He hears the television in the living room. He props himself against the frame of the archway, two fingers behind him clipping the snapshot out of sight. Reuben and Pearl and the baby are on the couch together under a quilt, in the dreamy blue passivity of television light. Not paying any attention to the tube—it’s just a sound machine, like waves at the beach—all three have closed their eyes. Reuben opens one eye at Sam.
The only sound is the dialogue from the television: some version of Dickens’s Christmas Carol. These are the chains I forged in life, Jacob Marley explains to Scrooge in a ghastly croak.
“You okay?” Reuben asks.
Sam nods.
Pearl’s eyes pop open. She moves to sit up and Reuben pulls her down.
“Pretty gruesome, huh?” Sam says.
His father strokes Pearl’s temple and she makes a sound low in her throat. Indy is belly down on Reuben’s chest. Pearl rests a hand on the baby’s back, rising and falling smoothly in sleep.
“Let’s not let it ruin the rest of the evening, okay?” Reuben asks. “What’s left of it.”
Sam produces the Polaroid and holds it out questioningly.
His father grins and shrugs. Not telling. Sam looks to Pearl and her mouth curves faintly in a little Mona Lisa smile.
“It’s nasty out. I guess I can wait until tomorrow.”
Reuben raises an eyebrow. “Up to you.”
The puppy will be lonely and scared. It’s not a long trek and his truck has four-wheel drive.
He hears the soft murmur of their laughter behind him as he goes out the back door.
The old farmhouse stands on the height of the Ridge, its roofbeam a blind leviathan spine against the sky. With Reuben sick and Sam tied up with basketball, no work has been done on the house recently and the sense of abandonment is as cutting as the wind on the ridge. Leaving the truck, Sam walks past the farmhouse up the yard toward the horsebarn, which stands far enough apart to have saved it from the fire. He’s always had more of an affection for the barn than his father does, who had lived in it for a time while in high school. In fact, it is precisely the evidence that still remains of the time his father made a home of the tack room—raw shelving, nail hooks in the wall, gaps in the wood caulked to keep the wind out, the handmade wooden seat in the earth closet—that endears the place to Sam.
Despite the faint frozen odor of manure, the horses have been gone since his mother left and there’s no point in locking the doors. Sam steps through the opening into a sudden cessation of the bitter wind.
“Hey, Cujo,” he says.
He rolls the swath of his flashlight over the lightless interior. The beam splinters the bits and pieces of things salvaged from the farmhouse fire and still stinking of it—leaded glass from the front door and the parlor, a box of ceramic doorknobs, brass or copper fixtures, a claw-foot bathtub—and shocks a gleam of black sleek curves he recognizes instantly. Numb, he reaches automatically for the light switch by the door, finds it blind and flicks it. The inside of the barn leaps into detail as if he had tumbled into it from a dark hole. In the middle of the floor, a flathead Harley Electra Glide sits in splendid potency, keys in the ignition, brain-bucket glinting like a black mechanical skull on the tail.
Cujo forgotten, Sam strokes the cold silken steel of the bike’s muscular curves.
Clipped to the keys is an envelope—ownership papers, registration, the thing is already licensed. Stuck to the papers is a note: She’s eleven years old, been through three owners, and every one of them dicked with her so she’s no virgin. Jonesy found her. He fixed the immediate previous owner’s balls-up of the transmission. She still needs some work but nothing major. Ahem. Goes fast. You don’t have a bike license yet. Also you have to pay for your own insurance which is going to be outrageous so I figure you’ll have her on the road in about five years. PLEASE DO NOT KILL YOURSELF ON THIS THING.
As he reads his father’s printing, he swings a leg over and mounts it without thinking about it. Like the jacket, the bike fits. When it comes to life, he thinks he should have put on the helmet first to keep his brains from exploding out his ears with the rush. It brings to mind a Duke Tomato song that demands “More Love, More Money.” Who needs money, Sam counters, who needs love, with a machine like this between your legs? It is love and money and the proof is there in his father’s words: Goes fast.
While he hasn’t qualified for a bike license, as a matter of course he has wheeled other people’s bikes around the garage or the parking lot or shop at school. In any case he is a natural and instinctive operator, adapting smoothly to the shift from four wheels to two. He rolls out of the barn without a second thought. Testing brakes and gears automatically, he leans his weight joyously into the curve around the door. It’s a big heavy ride. The rollercoaster thrill of planing on icy mud pumps his adrenaline a little higher. He feels perfectly in control at the edge of control. The wind bites at him and he slows, idling at the bottom of the yard to zip his jacket to the throat and don the helmet and his gloves.
He knows the road conditions are moderately greasy with occasional plaques of black ice. New riders almost always dump their bikes at least once, usually within a few miles of their first ride. And he’s unlicensed. But it’s nearly eleven on Christmas night and the cops are all at home with their families—everybody’s at home with their families. Nodd’s Ridge is a map of empty roads, byways Sam has driven constantly since he was fifteen. Working with his father on the tow truck and the plow, he knows every bad patch on them. Anyway, he notes for when his father asks, he’s wearing the brain-bucket.
As the bike’s weight and his own combine to tip dangerously on one particularly sharp corner and he compensates, the twinge of protest in his right shoulder reminds Sam of the damage he might do if he goes down with the bike on that side—nevermind the season or the state basketball title, he could wind up jerking off with his left hand for the rest of his life. Immediately he slows and becomes more cautious.
From the crest of Partridge Hill he sees the void of the frozen lake and the Narrows and swoops down on it, shooting across the Causeway and over the town line into Greenspark. His first impulse is to roust out Rick and give him a ride, but the quietness of the town reminds Sam it is getting late. The conjunction of his lack of a license and Rick’s dad being a cop gives him further pause. His own father is waiting at home. Worrying about him. He wheels the bike around and heads back.
Reuben is reading the paper and drinking tea at the kitchen table.
“I took the bike out,” Sam says.
His father looks over his reading glasses. “Looks like you’re still in one piece.”
“It’s beautiful,” Sam blurts fervently. “Thank you.”
Reuben laughs. “It is, isn’t it?”
Pushing back his chair, he glances at the clock on the wall. “My mother used to say tomorrow comes early. My experience has been it’s usually already here.”
Sam pegs his jacket and rattles the doorknob to confirm he’s locked it. “I shouldn’t ask this, Dad, but it must have cost—”
“Then don’t.” Reuben cuts him off. “It’s used, Sammy. We found a way. I wish I could have swung the insurance too but I couldn’t. It’s not a free and clear gift. You can’t ride it again until you’ve got the insurance, you know. Except at the farm. Big deal, right. So basically you got yourself a fancy paperweight. I suppose you’ll have some fun working on it, anyway.”
“I shouldn’t have asked for something that expensive,” Sam says. On the way back from the farmhouse, he recalled the blowup over the new furnace. How much of the tension between Reuben and Pearl over that had proceeded from already having committed a major chunk of change to the bike for Sam?
For a moment, his father looks at him. “Don’t apologize for wanting what anybody might want. I made a choice to try to give you what you wanted.”
Sam nods.
“Finish locking up, will you?” Reuben says. “I’ve got just about enough beans left in me to make it up the stairs one more time tonight.”
15
Mother and child make a picture framed by the bedroom door as Sam stops, intent on saying thank you again to his stepmother for his Christmas. The baby is suckling inside her mother’s pajama top while Pearl reads a novel. From the bathroom beyond comes the sound of Reuben brushing his teeth. Sam goes in and kisses his stepmother, who puts aside her book with a sigh.
“Thanks for the bike.”
“Sure, baby.”
Wanting to say goodnight and thank you again to his father as well, Sam loiters.
On the dresser, Pearl’s jewelry box is wide open as usual, pieces strewn on the fringed silk scarf that protects the old oak. Often she sits Indy next to the box while she picks out her earrings or whatever she’s going to wear and lets the baby rummage among the sparklies. It’s all costume stuff. Once she had some fancier real stuff but when she left her first husband, she found he had emptied the safe-deposit box not only of the pieces he had given her but of several things that had been hers alone, earrings and rings inherited from her mother and a ring given her by a man she had loved and lost in youth. Telling Sam this story, she said with a rueful laugh that it had been a lesson in the futility of storing up treasure in this world.
Sam stirs the baubles with his thumb, churning up the stuff at the bottom. He thinks about the Johnny who gave her that fancy jewelry and took it back. She hasn’t cut him out of her photograph albums, the way his mother has his father from the photographs she kept. Sam likes Johnny’s face in the first pictures, the ones around the time she married him. Then Johnny’s face grows closed and the two of them, Pearl and Johnny, are literally farther and farther apart in the group photographs of family gatherings as the years of their marriage pass.
The dogtags seem to come to his fingers without him really looking for them. Tangled with them is a gold rope chain with a small Celtic cross on it. The cross is engraved with the name on the dogtags. Looking down at his fingers, draped with the chains of the tags and cross, Sam thinks of his brother, wearing tags of his own now. He recognizes the tags and cross—there is a snapshot in one of Pearl’s oldest albums of a young man, with Pearl, on a boat in nineteen-sixty-something. In the picture, that bare-chested young man—her lost first love—had been wearing the tags and cross.
Her voice startles him. “Would you like to have those things? The tags and the cross?”
It’s so unexpected at first he thinks he has misheard her.
“The cross was like a civilian dogtag. All the shrimpers and sailors wore something like them for identification. He used to say a face doesn’t last long in the water but gold lasts forever.” Very gently she slides Indy from underneath her pajama top. “Those things went all the way to Vietnam and came back. He died after the war. I used to wear them to remember him until I married Johnny.”
Blinking, Sam touches the chains again, lifts them out. “Really?”
“Unh-huh,” she says. Her hands are quick and practiced under the quilt and her pajama top, discreetly slipping a breast pad into her nursing bra and closing it. “I hope they’ll be the only dogtags you ever wear, Sam.”
Reuben emerges from the bathroom. “What’s this?”
“Pearl says I can have these. Gonna ward off the draft board.”
Reuben shudders. “God, I hope so.”
Sam says his goodnights and thank yous and Merry Christmases one last time. As he bends over Pearl to kiss her forehead, she closes her hand over his, the one with the chains in it, very briefly—almost a caress.
Talking Heads lullabies tongue in cheek from his stereo as he puts on a pair of old sweatpants—all he ever wears for pajamas when he wears anything to sleep. Rolling his arm in its socket, he feels no more than slight discomfort, though he still has some bruises healing in their lurid way from the inside out. When he gingerly touches the place where he cut his scalp, it gives a little. If he presses it, it makes him sick to his stomach. He guesses there is some fluid there, a bruise, still healing too.
