Читать книгу What Luck, This Life - Kathryn Schwille - Страница 10

THE ROAD TO HOUSTON

I was born and raised in Kiser, a dinky, third-fiddle town near the Sabine River, a rank and slither-filled water that keeps Texas apart from Louisiana. Kiser had a town square with a courthouse on it, a drugstore, a hardware store, two banks that fought over the town’s six wealthy families, a furniture store owned by one of those families and two empty storefronts that the ladies used for bake sales and quilt shows. In the winter of 2003, when Kiser was still my home, my ex-wife Holly had just opened a yoga studio on Main Street. People in town were either proud or leery of her place, depending on their choice of church, and their reaction was one thing Holly and I could still laugh about. We’d been separated six months and we buried the rancor as often as we could for the sake of our son, whose path in life was hard enough. Frankie was eleven, a gifted child who heard voices from the trees and could multiply seven times eight by the time he was six. Where he got all that is anybody’s guess. He didn’t get it from me.

One Sunday that winter—Groundhog Day to be exact, with no shadow in sight for the critter—I was hiding out in my dreary apartment, avoiding the ruckus that had arrived in Kiser the day before when the shuttle came apart. The town had flown into action—gawking, searching, trying to help—but my altruistic get-up-and-go was tempered by a rawness in my throat and the hangover of a NyQuil slumber. And there was this: I had a big lot of things on my mind. Change had sidled up to me, and more was coming.

With a belly full of orange juice and dubious hope for a clearing head, I reached for the bench chisel next to my chair. A handsome piece of oak lay waiting for me on the floor. In the months since my separation I’d shaped enough heron, deer and hunting dogs to cover the filing cabinet that doubled as a nightstand in the reduced decor of my new life. I’d collected a laundry basket of worthy specimens—my job was foreman for a tree service—but my ideas, not to mention my abilities, fell short of the grace of this striated oak. Fungus and decay had drawn a pink arc through the middle and outlined the arc in purple. There’s only one right time to work with a spalted piece like that. Too soon and it’s not yet interesting, too late and it’s weak and rotten. Someday the piece would speak. A vibration from its next life would reach the conscious me and tell my fingers how to begin.

A phone call from Holly snapped me out of my stupor. She was living with Frankie at her parents’ place, a thirty-acre ranchette north of town. Holly didn’t call often. I could tell she was bothered; the pitch of her voice was high. “You won’t believe this,” she said. “What Frankie found.” He’d gone out early looking for shuttle fragments. Guiding his pony through heavy brush, he looked up and saw an orange space suit wedged in the crook of a tall tree. There was an astronaut’s torso inside it.

“Did you go and see?” I pressed. “Do you know for sure?”

“It’s in those trees next to Parkers’ place. God, Wes. It’s awful.”

“A body still intact?”

“Fell out of the sky. Just like that.”

“Jesus. Where’s Frankie now?” A picture came to mind I didn’t much like: Frankie under a tree, looking up.

“Mom’s fixing him lunch. If he can eat it. I couldn’t. He wanted to go back. I caught him with Dad’s binoculars.”

“Jesus,” I said again. “Hide them.”

“Grady says for you to drive over with the bucket truck.”

My brother was chief of the volunteer fire department; I understood what he was asking. Someone had to go up in that tree and bring down what was stuck. “Twenty minutes,” I said. The company rig was just down the road.

“Wes?”

I knew this tone, a slight drawing out of my short name. Holly was going to change the subject. It was a pattern in our lives, her wanting to talk, and me wanting to duck.

“Grady’s your brother and he loves you,” she said. “You need to tell him what’s going on.”

“Right now,” I said, “I need to go.”

I put an apple in my pocket and grabbed an old pair of gloves I could throw out tomorrow. The dead made me squeamish, something Grady well knew. I’m not like him, steady and rock-solid. He’s the most honest man I’ve ever known. We were in the same state, marriage-wise, but when Eileen fell out of love with him, she just told him. There was no hemming and hawing, no philandering, no telling him she couldn’t love him the way she should, this last being what I told Holly. Grady left Eileen, walked away from corporate life in Tulsa, moved back to Kiser and bought a business for himself. He didn’t want his old life anymore and he knew it. In Kiser they loved him for that, rejecting the big city. He joined the fire squad and they made him chief right away, though the honeymoon wouldn’t last. He’s too conscientious for a town like Kiser.

I hadn’t spoken to my brother in two weeks, since we’d gotten into it while cooking ribs on Mom’s birthday. He thought Holly and I should reconcile.

“I didn’t second guess you about your marriage,” I’d told him. “Don’t second guess me.”

“We didn’t have kids,” Grady said.

“You think I’m happy about that? But for Frankie to see Holly and me like that, barely speaking, tension you could cut like wire, it was worse.”

Mom used to say that Grady was born into adulthood, very sure of what he knew. Growing up, everything about him was so measured, so wise, so ordered, it made me want to scream. Maybe it got to Eileen, too.

“Frankie would have been all right,” he said.

“Frankie?” I said. “He hears things that aren’t there, has friends that don’t exist. He’s a sensitive kid. Divorce or not, I don’t know if Frankie will be all right.”

“Then help him. Encourage him to come out of his shell. Get him in the 4-H. That’s a good group of kids.”

I shoved the tongs I was holding right up to Grady’s face. “Stay out of it. Just stay the hell out of it.”

I knew then he had no idea, though just that week I’d laid out the truth to Holly, and she’d sworn to keep quiet until I was ready. I had loved her—still did—and I’d certainly been attracted to her. When we married she was pregnant, so I nudged doubt to my toes and took my place at her side. I’d hoped husband was who I was. But I was wearing a pair of boots made for other feet and the longer I wore them, the more they hurt. Holly didn’t know what was wrong. It was more than just the bedroom stuff, though that grew dismal enough. I lost interest in us. I went to work every day and came home to something I didn’t want. Here is the most cliched thing in the world, but it fits: I came home to a lie. There was no one thing that tipped us over in the end. I didn’t hunker down in a duck blind with some guy who was more than a friend, or slink off to the bar in Shreveport that caters to the same-sex crowd. There were attractions, sure, but I never acted.

Holly was grateful to have a place to pin our troubles, relieved to know it wasn’t her, that she was innocent.

That she was hoodwinked.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she’d said.

“No,” I said. “Not that.”

I picked up the bucket rig and drove down Route 7 toward my father-in-law’s place, where Grady would be waiting. I hadn’t been out since Friday night, before the shuttle fell. At first, what I saw along the highway was normal landscape: lush fields, swampy spots and the branchless lower trunks of our towering pines, stark as charred asparagus. But a half-mile down the road, a pasture was littered. I could make out chunks of black and bits of white that looked like foam. A rod-like thing stuck out of the grass. For another mile I saw nothing odd, but just over the rise at Avitt Tindale’s ranch, seven horse vans were parked in Avitt’s front range. The riders were spread in a line, heads down, aiming for the thicket that bordered his place. I should have been searching, too. My own mother had lifted hot metal from the highway, before she knew she wasn’t supposed to. Now, my son had done more.

I turned off the highway at 104, where two feet of blue tarp covered something that lay beside a wire fence. Next to it was a rustic cross, made from twigs. Acid rose from my gut like a vicious cloud; the orange juice dump had been a mistake.

A sheriff’s deputy blocked the dirt road that led to Cloyd’s place. When he signaled me past, I spotted Grady’s car and a black SUV with government plates that I figured to be FBI. Frankie was across the grassy meadow holding the reins of his horse, letting Rosco graze with the bit in his mouth, which I’d taught him not to do. Signs of my absence hurt. Frankie spent Wednesday nights with me, and two weekends a month. Other people were filling the space I once took up in his world.

When Frankie waved, I rolled down the window and pointed to my mouth. He looped the reins over Rosco’s neck and took off the bridle. When he looked back at me for approval, I gave him the okay. Frankie favored my mother—same gray eyes and the dark wavy hair of Lila MacFarland’s youth. Funny how it would skip a generation like that. He gestured like her, too, and when he was talking about something he’d thought hard about, he would rub the side of his finger across the tip of his nose, a feminine gesture that made me nervous for him. Turns out it was nothing to worry about, and wasn’t that typical. The things about Frankie that came into focus for me were so often the wrong ones.

Now Frankie was talking to Parris Parker, whose parents owned the place next to Cloyd’s. I’d known Parris since high school but had never been around him much. He was only about a head taller than Frankie, with blond, short-cropped hair and, I could just see from here, a bald spot starting. I sat watching for a moment. Frankie was pointing into the Parkers’ woods, probably in the direction of his find. My son was beautiful. What was going on in his head back then, I’ll never know.

When I climbed out of the rig, Holly’s father shook my hand, though I doubt he wanted to. “Ain’t we got us a mess?” Cloyd said.

I nodded in Frankie’s direction. “Should he be here?”

“He’s already seen it. Can’t go back now. It’s that other one, Parker. Should he be here? Makes my butt itch, have a queer around.”

It was useless to get on a soapbox. I was pretty sure Parris wasn’t gay. “Parris is okay,” I said. He’d left Frankie and was coming our way.

Cloyd shot me a stern look. “You got a boy to watch out for.”

I let that one go, too, and I should not have. Frankie’s head is on straight about things like that now, no thanks to his grandfather. But back then I worried about slippage, the low notions Frankie would pick up when I wasn’t around. “Frankie is fine,” I said.

“That boy is always alone,” Cloyd said. He was keeping tabs on Parris as he talked. “Boy gets in the woods and just sits on some damn log he likes. If he’s not smoking, what’s he up to?” Holly had told me about the woods. It worried her that he was sitting out there more now than when we first split.

“It’s been hard on Frankie,” I said. “We have to let him deal with it best he can.”

Parris was within earshot now. “Something ain’t quite right,” Cloyd said loudly. “Lot of things ain’t right.” He stalked off, passing Parris without so much as a nod.

With a patient smile, Parris watched him go. What his life was like in that town, for a man so different, I could only imagine. “Nice boy you have there,” he said, and when he shook my hand it was plenty firm. Parris was fit, you might even say buff, but he didn’t check me out the way gay men did. The mutt he had with him showed more interest in my ass. The dog was a birder of some kind, and it had found an irresistible odor on my shoe.

“Kids,” I said. “Got to get out and look around. I think he was up at daylight, looking for stuff. Anything to get out of church.”

“He was telling me about it,” Parris said. “But he doesn’t look at you when he talks, does he? Kind of looks past you.”

“Frankie looks at me, no problem,” I said. “It’s just that he doesn’t know you.” The dog had followed his nose to a spot in the grass, but now he was back, snuffling around the heel of my boot.

“Maybe that’s it.” Parris cast a glance in Frankie’s direction. “I bet the teachers like him.”

“He’s mighty good with numbers. And he likes to read.” In high school, Parris had been a smart kid, too—artistic, and a loner. He’d been best friends with Eddie Briesbecker, who died in a hunting accident over in Yellowpine just before we graduated. Parris never seemed to have anyone to hang around with after that.

“That tree where he found it,” I said. “It’s on your dad’s property? I might have to take down a couple of trees to get the rig in there.”

“Whatever you need. Technically the place is mine, too.” Parris snapped his fingers and the dog bee-lined for the spot where he pointed. Nobody around Kiser trained their dogs like that. People think that small Southern towns treasure their eccentrics, but Kiser wasn’t one of those storybook places. Parris owned a tile business and did pretty well, but when he refurbished his house in town, he painted a scene around his front door so bizarre that the neighbors complained. It was just animals, but they were bright and anatomically odd, like in a Picasso. “He’ll tile your new house real good,” Junior Pierce told me once. “But you wouldn’t invite him to the housewarming.”

“Good luck,” Parris said. “Holler if you need help.”

I hiked over to where Frankie stood with his arm draped over the pony’s rump. Frankie got on well with animals. He wasn’t anti-social; he had friends. I put my hand on my son’s shoulder. “You okay?” I wanted to take him in my arms, but he no longer cared for hugs in front of strangers.

“I was just riding,” Frankie said. “I was watching the ground. I heard something, like someone called my name. I looked up and there he was.” He pulled a bit of mud from Rosco’s tail. “Can I come with you and watch?” He turned to look at me, straight on.

“I’m not sure anyone should watch,” I said. “You better stay here.” When Frankie was little and he wanted something he couldn’t have, we’d try to distract him. Now I nodded toward two men in dark windbreakers, standing by the SUV. “Those guys from the government?”

“Yeah. One’s FBI. The other’s an astronaut. He thanked me. It was cool.”

“Awesome,” I said. Normally Frankie would groan when I borrowed his lingo—back then the word was not so common—but this time he was silent. I put my hand on top of his head, tousled him a bit until he smiled. “What you hear is not really voices, is it?” I asked. “The way I’m talking to you now?”

Frankie looked across the meadow, into the trees. “It’s kind of weird,” he said. “You know how a thought comes to you? Like the answer to a question on a test. You know you don’t know the answer. But something pops into your head, and it doesn’t seem right and you don’t know why you’re putting it down. But it turns out it’s right. I don’t know. It’s sort of like that.”

My son had intuition, probably that was all. Maybe it spoke more clearly to him than to the rest of us. Or maybe he just listened better.

“Wish me luck,” I said. I put out my fist and he knocked his against it. It was the guy-to-guy send-off he favored in those days.

I headed for the edge of the clearing where Grady was waiting for me. Behind him the trees rose in unadorned splendor. I thought the hardwood forests were beautiful in winter, with the foliage on the ground, and above, the branching miracles of cellulose and lignin. Over our heads the sweet gum balls hung like black jewels. The ash leaves that had stayed through frost were drained of color, brittle and defiant. They rattled in the breeze that had come up. I wondered what my boy might hear in the movement of those stubborn leaves.

Grady looked tired. My brother had a good poker face for disaster, but on the local news last night he’d seemed beaten. All day, people had been calling in reports of human remains. It was Grady’s job to guide the government types down dirt paths and logging roads, to find out if the caller had spotted an astronaut’s arm or the disconnected tibia of an unfortunate heifer.

“How’re you holding up?” I asked.

“Thought you might be away this weekend.” Grady’s voice was hoarse; I could tell he’d had no sleep. It looked like he hadn’t shaved since Friday. “I figured Houston,” he said.

“Got this sore throat,” I said, “so I didn’t go.” I’d been spending a few weekends in Houston, without explaining why. I figured my best shot at some kind of honest life was to move to the city and hope nobody in Frankie’s world would hear anything more about me.

Grady ran a hand across his eyes and pressed on his temples. “You got a girlfriend there or something?”

I didn’t answer right away. In Houston those weekends I would wander the streets, walking past the clubs, wondering if I wanted a part of what happened inside. What would life be like with no one watching? Turned out it was nice. It wasn’t long after this day that I moved. It’s been seven years now; things have worked out.

“No,” I said finally.

Grady didn’t look convinced. “Because if you do,” he said, “you just need to say so. Frankie, he thinks it’s because of him. He thinks the whole thing is because of him. It’s how kids do. And he’s more insecure than most.”

“Did he tell you that? Did he tell you we split up because of him?”

“You know he gets that look, like he’s not even here. He’s checked out and gone somewhere else. Where’s he gone, Wes? What’s up with that?”

“So he daydreams. It won’t hurt him. His grades are good.”

“Holly says he’s bored senseless in that school,” Grady said. “Right out of his gourd.”

“Let’s just get to work,” I said. I never would have asked Grady to take my place in Frankie’s life, or help fill the gap when I left town. I’d hoped he would, it just didn’t turn out that way.

I followed my brother into the brambles, through brush with vines so tough they’d trap a horse’s legs. Grady held a head-high briar aside for me—the kind we called a blanket-shredder, with inch-long thorns that could ruin an eye. “Look up,” he said. “Over your head, two o’clock.” What I saw was an orange suit with a leg dangling out of it, as though the fabric had been ripped away. When we got closer, I could see there was no foot at the end of the leg. The torso was cradled by two branches in a deep crook, about sixty feet up. The astronaut’s pose was awkward, but the arms of the tulip tree had received him with dignity, above the eager sniff of scavengers. He still had his helmet on, and I gave thanks that no one had to look around for that, maybe with his head inside.

“None of them burned,” Grady said, gazing up, shading his bleary eyes from the sun that poked through for a moment. “Not a body part so far.”

The skin of the dangling leg was dark, we could see that from where we stood. “African-American,” I said.

Grady nodded. “Michael Kirkland. Payload specialist. Somebody found the foot by a mailbox yesterday.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “Can you get the rig in here?”

I looked around for a path. The trees were thick. “Over there,” I said. “We take down that sweet gum, I can squeeze through between those two beeches.”

“I know you hate this,” Grady said.

“Why me?” I said. “Chandler’s got a bucket truck. You know how I am.”

“I could go up instead.”

“There’s insurance rules. Nobody goes in the bucket who doesn’t work for Horton.”

“If it helps any, there’s no one else I trust this much.”

“To do this?”

“Yeah. And not to jaw about it.” He tipped his head in the vague direction of the black SUV. “They don’t want this in the newspaper. That deputy you passed out at the road, he’ll keep the media out. Not forever, though.”

“Cecil Dawson, wasn’t it?”

Grady shrugged. It was Dawson who’d taken my brother to lunch last month, the day after the Kiwanis met to pick a high school queen for the Piney Woods Festival. At the meeting, Grady had pushed for Vanessa Johnson, a five-foot-eight beauty with brains and grace. But the Kiwanis said they weren’t ready for a young woman with nut-brown skin to lead their parade down Main Street and sit with the mayor at the Saturday barbecue. Grady had delivered a tongue-lashing: Half the town’s school was African-American—get over it. At lunch the next day, Dawson leaned over his plate of green beans and baked chicken and said sourly, “We thought you were one of us.”

I eyeballed the distance between Michael Kirkland and the ground. “What if I get up there and puke?”

“You won’t. Think about the mechanics. It’s an object you have to get out of a tree, a puzzle you have to work out. He might be stiff.”

“Christ. I hadn’t thought.”

“Do what you have to do. He can’t feel anything and the NASA guys, they just want him down. You don’t have to tell anybody how it happens.”

I got the chain saw out of the rig. The tree I needed to take down was only about twenty years old. Sweet gum wood isn’t much good for carving but the bark is deeply ridged, which makes it handsome, I think. I made my quick cuts, and when the tree had fallen, I gave thanks I knew how to do something in life. Better than what was to come—today, next week, next year.

I moved the bucket truck into position and climbed in, setting the chain saw in its usual spot, as if this were an ordinary day, where I might have a water bottle stashed in the corner. I could have used one now. Adrenaline had shooed the NyQuil fog, but dread had left my chest heavy and my throat hurting more. I pulled the lever and started to climb. When Frankie was five, I’d broken the rules and taken him up. He could barely see over the top of the box and I could tell he was apprehensive. As we started to move, he grabbed for my pants leg. I put his other hand on top of mine, on the controls. “You see,” I said, “we’re a team.” Some of the apprehension left his face and he looked into the sky, where he must have thought we were headed. “Higher, Daddy,” he said. Soon, he let go of my jeans, and my heart sank a little.

The tree that held Michael Kirkland was already showing the bumps of first bud. Tulip poplars go bare early in fall, are among the first to green up in March. I think of them as bullish, optimistic trees. Their tough wood made good canoes for the Indians. This one had broken long ago, and two branches had grown together to make one. Inside the new branch would be a layer of bark, an inclusion where cells would have knit themselves together into a woodworker’s treasure of swirls and iridescences. A tree will always try to heal itself. The forest floors are full of death, but the trees themselves, they breathe life and claim it. A boy could be drawn to that, couldn’t he? Frankie made good grades in those boring classrooms. He had secrets he shared with no one. At twilight he went into the woods and sat on a log. What was wrong with that? The living trees spoke to my son; the dead ones spoke to me.

I needed to take out one big branch to get closer to my charge. Reaching for my chain saw, I looked down at my life—my heroic brother just below me, and at the edge of the meadow, my beautiful son. As far as I knew they still loved me, in their innocence of who I was, of who I was about to become. My son looked up to me, and my brother trusted me. I was living on borrowed time. I was not yet, to them, infested with rot.

The chain saw ripped through the interfering branch and it tumbled to the ground. I moved the bucket closer to the astronaut’s body. The smell was sharp, but not yet foul. In the dark tint of his face shield, I saw a reflection from above, the jagged end of a limb that did not survive his fall. The crows had been on him; there were droppings on his chest. If only, I thought. If only this were the hardest thing. I reached around Michael Kirkland’s waist and pulled him toward me. He wasn’t stiff. Inside his suit, broken bones bent him in the wrong places. I laid him as best I could across the box, and held on for the journey down.

I like the texture of bark, the feel of wood in my hands, the staunchness of a tree that is connected and enduring. In a piece of wood a man can sense the forbearance of all that has come before, and the juice of this earth, with a sensuality not unlike lust. I craved a man with such steadiness, though it would be years before I realized it.