Читать книгу Broken Ground - John Keeble - Страница 13

HE AWOKE in his own bed. He knew that by how it felt and by the place in the ceiling directly above him, by the way the faint light from the hallway darkened at a scoop in the spackling.

He was in his clothes. His boots were off. He moved his toes and felt the stiff grain of his wool socks. He ran his hands along a nylon quilt, then reached out and touched the wall behind the pillow. For a moment he felt a powerful sense of well-being, an almost sexual pleasure. It was the quilt and something to do with the wall, the familiar smell of the woman left on the quilt and the feel of the wall on the other side of which his children slept, and also the penumbral glow from the nightlight placed in the hall so the children could find their way to the bathroom. It made the hall safe from their imaginations. It made him feel safe. He rolled toward the wall at the side of the bed, seeking out of an old habit to touch the naked hip of the woman. He had a peculiar sense of his weight turning, a buoyancy in the bedsprings granted by the absence of the other body, the lack of counterweight, and then it came to him again, but quite differently: he was in his bed.

Startled, he sat up, then buckled with pain and reached for his head. His head was bandaged.

A portion of it came back to him—waking up sprawled on the seat of his truck, dragging himself upright by the steering wheel.

Presumably he had then driven here—home. He didn't remember that. He remembered thinking he would try to make it down to Blaylock's place to meet Phil.

Vaguely he remembered finding himself half-conscious at the wheel with the door open and Penny standing on the step and her arm, white as bleached bone, reaching to turn off the truck. He remembered the truck going off, the sound of it gone like something dropped through a chute to the center of the earth, and the headlights going off, and Penny's face, white in the night at his side.

He remembered what she had said, annoyed: “What do you think you're doing here?” Then alarmed: “What happened?”

He remembered being walked to the house and steered inside. He remembered Penny tugging on him, leading him into the bathroom. He remembered catching a glimpse of his face in the mirror, his swollen cheek and the blood spidering down his jaw. She sat him down on the toilet seat. She washed his face and head and applied ointment to his wound. He remembered her wanting to take him to the hospital and himself refusing. He remembered her ear sticking out from behind her hair as she reached around to the back of his head. One soft breast had crushed against his shoulder. Her breath had been as familiar as the smell of the quilt.

He slid his legs out from under the covers and touched his feet to the floor. He stood. His head reeled and he felt himself swaying. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and moved alongside the bed. His boots stood on the floor. He sat on the foot of the bed and pulled them on. His head pounded as he bent to tie the laces. He straightened, closed his eyes again, and had a vision of bills fanned out near the dashboard lights. He reached for his wallet. It was gone. He was chilled. He stood, moved, and turned down the hall. He felt like a sleepwalker. He stopped at the children's ajar door and looked in. They lay under the blankets on the two beds, one very small shape—Andy—and the other longer—Tricia.

He couldn't see their faces, only their narrow, absolutely still bodies under the covers. They looked dead. The chill of fear ran deep into his blood and he heard a distant howl—Nicole!—then details came at him, but slowly at first and clumsily like beetles dragging themselves out from the dark. He remembered being bumped into the truck by one man, then grabbed by the other. He remembered the darkness of the cab, the blunt, masked heads, the bodies pressing against him, the blows to his face, the one man talking, something about a cage…. and now he wondered, Why?

He remembered wishing to blame Blaylock, and now felt himself wishing it again out of an obscure anger, a resentment. He heard Andy and Tricia breathing, the tender rise and fall of their breath, and felt easy for them, for their safety, and he ached for their loss—their sister, himself.

He moved to the kitchen. The fluorescent light in the stove panel was on and he saw the time—five-thirty. He looked at his watch. It said the same thing exactly and he stared at it in confusion because he didn't know what it meant. He glanced around. The linoleum floor shone dimly. The stainless-steel coffeepot stood where it had always stood on the counter. Next to it was the yogurt maker, then the can opener. Those things were just as they should have been, but other things were different: a new soap dish next to the sink, new towels, a new blender to replace the old one that had to have its buttons struck with the butt of a screwdriver to make it work, a microwave oven, a new cloth on the old table. The old kitchen knives were stuck into a new holder. He looked through stunned eyes and for a moment everything seemed to be a figment. A thought gripped him: He was the figment. He was dead. He was a passing spirit. He rocked back on his heels and felt tempted to yield to the world of such thinking, which was religion, steamy and psychic, and which tapped out its own crooked and powerful telemetry. He caught himself just there on the edge of an abyss and touched the tile of the counter, then made his legs carry him into the living room, where he found Penny curled up under a blanket on the couch. He stood over her. He felt cold. She opened her eyes and looked up at him with a startled expression.

“Damn curious,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“To work, I guess,” he said. The words activated his brain and he thought: That's right, the job in Rome.

Penny stretched. Her rib cage and hip rose under the blanket. Her bare feet appeared from beneath the hem. “What happened?”

“Somebody beat the shit out of me.”

“Who?”

He couldn't answer that.

“You've got a nasty bump,” she said.

“Bump?” He touched the bandage on his head. Pressing lightly, he felt the tenderness on the right side of his forehead, then his jaw, the back of his head. “Yes,” he said.

Against the dark blanket, Penny's arms looked white. Her face was white. Her eyes were dark as holes. Her voice was clear. “You were out cold. How you managed to drive here is beyond me. Were you at Zymanski's?”

“Yes. Loading up.”

“You should see a doctor.” He looked away. At the end of the couch stood a dressmaker's dummy draped with cloth. Penny was a seamstress and designer. She and a friend had opened up a custom shop downtown. Thick and headless, the dummy looked like a stump with a sheet drawn over it in the shadowy light. Behind the dummy were drapes, drawn to cover the window. She probed him softly with his name: “Hank?” He turned to her. He didn't want to see a doctor. She pulled herself up so that the small of her back rested against the arm of the couch. She raised her knees under the blanket and drew the blanket up to her shoulders. He thought that she had lost weight.

“There were two. They were like junkies.” Saying that, he thought it to be true—nothing to do with Blaylock. “I guess they were just junkies.”

“Oh, Hank,” she said.

“They took cash,” he said, and he went on to tell her about the big man vanishing and reappearing, how the big man seemed to be playing cat-and-mouse with the watchman, how the other man came out from the front of his truck, how the big one was in there, how they wore black ski masks, how they held him and beat him, how they seemed crazy like junkies, how the one on his left had the shakes, how they took two hundred dollars cash and left him. When he finished he was weak. He closed his eyes and felt the room tipping to and fro.

“Sit down,” she said.

He did. He sat down in an easy chair across from the couch. “I'm glad I had the cash,” he said, and then as he went on he heard the fright moving into his voice: “They were pissed when I asked them to get out of my truck. Can you believe it? My truck.” He heard a whisper within him—not yours—which subtly increased his fright. “If I hadn't had the cash, I don't know what they would've done.”

“You need to see a doctor,” she said. “No doubt you have a concussion.” Her voice was husky and motherly. He wanted to yield, to sit next to the warmth of her body. He looked sideways past the dressmaker's dummy at the window drapes, and took a deep, shuddering breath. Reddened morning light seeped around the edges of the rust-colored drapery. “I'll drive you downtown,” she said.

He didn't want to see a doctor. “You heard about the partnership?” he asked.

“Yes, Hank,” she said, smiling faintly.

He smiled, too, faintly, for he knew that she knew his way of playing tricks, such as changing the subject, whenever the question of his visiting a doctor came up. “It'll mean more money in the long run, I guess,” he said. Since he and Penny were not talking, he'd asked Jewel to explain the partnership to her, but now they were here talking, and without rancor, too. She looked directly at him and her face grew alert. It seemed extraordinary to Lafleur that she was there, and for a moment it seemed as though the months of not talking had not happened, or the trouble before that, or as if they had entered the imbroglio as into the heart of the woods and come out again, but separately, on their separate adventures, out through the thinning trees to the other side where they met, where everything was different. They were going on, now, like old partners sojourning in the bright air who in the dark clarity of their memory recalled all the old things that were so utterly changed. He grew hopeful. “I'm sorry,” he said abruptly.

“Sorry?”

“I didn't mean to come here.”

“No,” she said. “I know.” They held one another's eyes and the very air in the room seemed to grow taut as a drumhead. It became too much to bear and they both looked away at once.

He stared back at the drapery and felt himself filled with despair. “Don't tell Jewel about this, me getting beat up. She doesn't need another worry.”

“No,” Penny said.

“I'm just glad I didn't end up at her place.”

“Yes.”

“I'm all right.”

“You should report it to the police.” When he didn't respond at first, she added, “You have to.”

“Dave,” he said. “Dave Petra, the watchman. I don't know what happened to him. He was there, then he wasn't.”

“You have to go to the police.”

“All right. Yes,” he said, glancing at her, then he turned his head and looked into the kitchen and thought about how he'd felt like a dead spirit. It seemed silly, now, the whole thing a figment of his imagination that had retracted into a very small and very heavy bundle like a bullet. “I probably came here out of habit,” he said.

“You were hurt.”

He paused, then said, “I guess I'd better get out of here before the kids wake up.”

“I guess.”

“It would confuse them.”

“Probably,” she said.

They were speaking guardedly now. He shifted forward in his chair as if preparing to leave, and he made a weak joke: “Unless I went out and got myself hit on the head every night until they were used to me turning up.”

Penny sat up straight. He thought she was about to speak. He feared what she would say. His body tensed. She said nothing, but looked at him with a hooded expression, then leaned back. That bodily gesture formalized her position, but exerted the opposite effect upon him. Her formality denied him, and yet she looked sensuous, the long neck, the thin, bare arms coming out of the short-sleeved nightgown. She looked as familiar as earth—flesh, bone, and breath. His desire rose within him and at the same time he considered the years he had stitched into that female body, the quirks he'd acquired to match its quirks. Her body and his and the desire between them were like weatherbeaten bushes grown together to look like one deformed bush that sent out branches in strange directions to protect itself.

Between them they had the pure, hot desire of the old days, and the wear, and also the grief, which waxed wantonly in the cold. For weeks after Nicole's death, he and Penny had lain side by side in bed at night, two felled trees with grief between them like a chasm of snow. They touched hands or toes. They talked across the chasm. Their conversations were repetitious. They misunderstood each other in the same ways again and again. Even when each of them used exactly the same words and meant practically the same thing, they seemed to be moving farther and farther apart.

He would plead with her by saying that somehow they had to get back to the business of living, that that was the only way anything would ever have meaning for them again.

I'm not ready, she would say. I had her in me. She was part of me, my very body. And now she's gone.

You have to get a grip on yourself, he would say. Both of us do. Somehow we have to steer ourselves away from the trouble. We can do that.

No, she would say. I can't solve it by thinking. I have to wait. A death is the end of a presence. You can't just decide to repair it. Don't you see!

But we have to find a way to heal the loss, he would say.

Not me, she would say. Not find it. The body, she would say…and then invariably she would pause, balancing herself, and she would think of how he was fixed on the body that had never been found, the body that was out there in the water somewhere, in the Willamette, the Columbia, or the Pacific, and which had not completed the circuit for him by making palpable the end of its life. By this time, whether or not Nicole's body was found meant little to her, but he seemed to need that palpability to complete Nicole's life, and to feed…to feed what? His hopefulness? Sometimes she would complete her sentence even though she was sure he wouldn't understand it: I'm waiting. The body goes its own way.

Most of the time she didn't complete it. Sometimes when they reached just that juncture, she would merely yield to his sexual need, the strength of urge she sometimes envied in a man, even though she knew it made him feel as if he had come into a house that had its doors ajar but in which there was never anybody at home. She felt like that house, empty but for the stranger in it, and the night he'd left they had done that, and a while afterward he sat up in bed and stared through the doorway into the hall, and he said he didn't understand what was wrong, that maybe he should go out and sleep in his father's toolshed for a couple of nights so they could have some time to think. He was weeping. He was trying to reach her. He wanted her to tell him not to go, but she lay still on her back, terrified, utterly incapable of finding words, and slowly growing cold, cold with outrage that he could so misunderstand her and abandon her when she needed him. He left. When his form turned in the hallway, he looked like a stranger.

Now, seated across from him on the couch, she saw his need in the almost invisible glimmerings of his soft brown eyes and still face—the face bruised and bandaged, but nevertheless the same handsome, dark, slightly pockmarked, strong-featured face she admired for its composure and resented for what it hid. She had seen him responding to her with his need. She'd seen it in the way he leaned forward and put his hands on his knees as if to prepare to stand up and go, but equally prepared, she thought, to lie with her on the couch, which she would probably have allowed. She still loved him in a way he didn't understand. It was only that her body wouldn't accept him until he allowed her to become herself in his presence, until he became himself, until he understood that Nicole's death was not his death to fix and patch up, until he understood that her grief was not his, until he stopped his insufferable thinking and allowed his body to find its own way. Penny rocked forward and gazed at the carpet on the floor.

Lafleur's contemplation quickened when she moved. He thought of the old times before the drowning. He thought of her bare legs levering against his legs, of her breasts dipping to brush his chest, of the mole on her left side, of her long fingers. He thought of the way she had of pausing and balancing herself in the midst of lovemaking. He thought of her abdomen pressing against his, of how her ribs, back, and buttocks felt under his fingers. He looked at her. Bent forward, her head bowed, the blanket spreading downward from her shoulders, and the tops of her breasts visible above the loosely gathered gown, she had taken the position of a penitent. His desire changed into a haunting and then everything froze: Penny, the couch, the dimly lit room, rug, walls, drapes, and the headless dummy. Abruptly he stood up and said, “What happened to my coat?”

“In the hall closet.”

He went to the closet, found his rain slicker and felt for the keys in the pocket. His wallet was there. He took it out and unfolded it. They had taken the money, that was all, and left his credit cards and photos. He placed the wallet in his hip pocket. He could hear Tricia and Andy talking softly in their room. He returned to the living room, holding his slicker by the collar. Light from the kitchen windows caught Penny's face, accentuated the bone, and deepened the shadows in her eye sockets. He paused. The space between them was tremulous with the unspoken. He heard a muffled giggle from down the hall.

“I forgot to tell you that Phil Grimes called last night,” she said. She looked up.

“Here?”

“He said he'd tried everywhere else. He said he'd tried Jewel. He's gone on ahead.”

“That's one less thing for me to worry about,” he said, smiling faintly. His head ached. “Where Phil is, I mean.”

“He said he would call after he got there. I told him you were hurt.”

“I'll call ahead. If he gets you, tell him I'm coming.”

“Jewel will call to find out what's going on.”

They'd become like husband and wife, making arrangements, naming the bases to be touched. Their adherence to the daily thing seemed merciless. “For God's sake, don't tell her,” he said.

“No.”

“Tell her I'm fine. Tell her I'll call from the site.”

She inhaled deeply. “All right.”

He looked down and said, “Thank you.” He heard footsteps in the hall, then the bathroom door clicking shut. Afraid, he said, “I'd better go. “A groping look passed between them. “Thank you,” he repeated. She didn't speak. He went toward the front door, touching the dressmaker's dummy with his fingertips as he passed it. He felt like an idiot. Of all the times he'd felt idiotic, it had never come as strongly as it did just then. This place, he thought, and that woman were the fount of his idiocy. He glanced back. Penny had not moved. She stared blankly into the space before her.

He walked out into the soft Portland air and across the street to his truck. The elbow of his backhoe's armature stuck above the sides of the truck bed and the bulldozer crouched like a pig on the trailer. He climbed into the cab and started the engine. The sound washed over him. He pulled out and headed downtown to the police station, where he reported the robbery and beating and waited while an officer filled out forms. He had to tell the story twice. They said they would check on the watchman, Dave Petra. They wanted him to go back with them to the scene of the crime, but he resisted, saying he was late already. “Besides,” he said, “the scene of the crime is portable. It's parked outside.” It was barely seven o'clock, and the nightshift was still on duty. Two drunks sat on a bench with their heads between their knees, and a lunatic mouthed inaudible screams from within the soundproof holding pen at the far end of the room. The officer asked if anyone else had been in the truck cab lately. “Not for a long time,” Lafleur said, remembering how sometimes one of the children, or even Penny, used to ride with him on short runs. The officer glanced alertly at him, then touched his arm and asked if he was all right. “Sure,” Lafleur said.

He waited again while two officers prowled around the inside of his cab. They dusted for prints. Lafleur walked several blocks down to a cash machine to get more money. There was morning fog, growing radiant in the sunlight. He called Rome from a phone booth to let them know he was coming. Again he got the woman with the impeccable voice. He called Zymanski's to ask about Dave Petra. The graveyard watchman told him Dave hadn't said anything about a robbery. Lafleur set the receiver on its hooks and stood for a moment, puzzled. He walked back to the station. The police said they would let him know of any developments, and he left, jigsawing along the streets to the freeway, which took him over the river, across town, and then southward on an upgrade. The fog dwindled.

He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the shift lever. He felt more than listened for the raw roar of the truck's engine, for the vibration of the suspension and wheels, and for the load, the weight of the trailer on the hitch, for how weight bore up on the swivel when he took a curve. The motion and manipulation of the truck, and the taking in of data, touching the wheel and shift knob, those palpable tools of leverage, began to clear his head. The rain had stopped during the night, but the pavement was wet. His tires hummed and hissed.

At Multnomah Boulevard he hit the half-mile downgrade and let the truck ride up to seventy for the sake of the coming mile-and-a-half grade. On the grade he geared down and had slowed to forty-five by the time he reached the crest. He passed the Lake Oswego exit, the Ethan Allen funeral home—an excessively imposing place with a line of pillars in front. It was set in manicured grounds and designed in the federal style, like the back of a nickel. His mother was there in the adjoining cemetery. Gus had reserved a plot. Nicole had a plaque. He passed an industrial park. The warehouses looked ghostly against the backdrop of forest. He crossed the Tualatin River, eased back up to seventy, and entered the flat of the rural valley.

The sun glinted horizontally at his mirrors. The moisture on the pavement lifted in steamy curls. Again he crossed the Willamette, then geared down for the off-ramp, took it, and headed west toward his place. He drove seven miles on a paved road through the seed fields. Dense mist hung above the ground. He drove into the woods. The mist draped the tree trunks. He turned onto the gravel road, drove another half mile, and unconsciously began to ease up on the accelerator as he approached Blaylock's place. He saw pink, an expanse of wall shining like fluorescence through the fog, then bits of equipment, dark shovels, booms, and engine compartments sticking through the fog. As he neared he saw the tangled saplings and blackberry bushes, and the equipment in greater detail, and the looming pink house with its shades drawn, everywhere the shadow and damp and diaphanous white shrouding of fog the same color exactly as the metal roofs of the outbuildings in back. What he saw was how he felt, his mind in a shimmering ground fog with the shapes inexactly perceived. This was where he should have been twelve hours ago. His hand rested on the shift lever. The LeTourneau was gone. His truck slid slowly by. He discovered that he'd been holding his breath.

He let air out and accelerated. The trailer boomed as the hitch took up slack. The silver, fog-draped woods slithered by, then he slowed again for the toolshed. Alder branches strummed the ribs of his truck as he turned into the drive. The fog deepened. The front of his shed became obscurely visible. Jones leaped out of the fog and balanced on her hind legs, making him jerk with surprise. The taut chain held her up like a man. A blue heron sailed over the shed with its wings spread, braking for the shallows at the edge of the river. Jones stayed there like an ape with a flat dog head. Her front paws wagged eagerly and her tongue flapped at the side of her misshapen snout.