Читать книгу Strangers to Temptation - Scott Gould - Страница 7

ORBIT

I WAS THIRTEEN, AND I WATCHED LONNIE TISDALE HANDLE his fake eyeball on more than one occasion. It was an act more miraculous than grotesque, at least at that age—an ability that seemed a generous reward for all the pain he’d had to endure because of the refrigerator. Practically everybody in Kingstree knew better than to jump off Baker’s Bridge in summer. The heat always shrank the Black River and raised its banks, and we were aware of the appliances and rusted transmissions and angle iron there, just under the surface of the cola-colored water. From above, you couldn’t see anything below. The water was way too dark and the bridge a little too high. So we always waited until after a good rain to jump. Lonnie’s impatience overcame his good sense one afternoon that summer, and he took a Kenmore to the right side of his head.

After the surgery to put his face back together, my mother refused to let me visit Lonnie. She said it would upset me, but my mother’s subtext was that Lonnie’s stupidity might be contagious. She was a nurse. She knew better. But she also knew Lonnie did things that brought him within a gnat’s hair of death. He was the boy who hung between the trestle rails when the lumber train ran through town on its way to the paper mill. He was the boy who snuck up on alligators sleeping across the hot sand bars on Black River. Now he was the boy who had fake bones in his face. He was a hero.

I heard about the plastic side of his face long before I ever saw it. My mother came back from her shift at the hospital with daily reports of his progress. “Well, it’s too swollen to tell what it’s going to look like,” she said one afternoon. “One half of his face looks, frankly, like a buttocks cheek.” I had never heard my mother mention any body part that was covered most of the time. I suppose she saw enough orifices and fleshy parts at the hospital, she didn’t want to think about more of them at the dinner table. A week later, the butt check had subsided. “Lonnie got his false eye today,” she told me in a voice that sounded too celebratory, the same voice you might use to announce the winner of a church raffle.

To be honest, I had stopped thinking about Lonnie Tisdale on a regular basis. When you’re thirteen, tragedy is a passing annoyance. Lonnie’s recovery was something I couldn’t see, so I didn’t consider it important enough to catalog in my head. I was busy with Laurice Reeves.

She was the girl closest to being a boy that I knew, and I was sure I loved her. I’m relatively confident this was no latent homoeroticism lurking in my bones, but rather the fact I coveted a female who could fish and blow smoke rings. On the seventh grade playground, she wore t-shirts with nothing else on underneath and leather gloves she stole from her mother. She’d cut the fingers out of the gloves and during recess, she pretended to be riding a large motorcycle. On one thin forearm was an ink tattoo, a design she freshened every day with an ancient-looking fountain pen. It depicted a coiled rattlesnake and some writing: Take no crap from any man woman or child. I’m not sure how she avoided the principal’s office with crap on her arm and no bra under her shirt, but none of our teachers (women who could detect the rustle of a passing note at thirty feet) noticed either. I loved Laurice because I was scared of her. I wasn’t the only one. But my fortunate advantage was she lived down the street from me, nearer Highway 52. In summers, I passed her house on the way to the Bantam Chef when my mother or father left money on the kitchen counter for cheeseburgers.

We never knew exactly where my father went the times he disappeared. He didn’t have a job because he couldn’t work. He said his stomach wouldn’t allow it. His stomach was a daily source of drama and conversation when he was around, because he’d lost a sizeable chunk of it right after his return from Vietnam. A sneaky Southeast Asian parasite set up shop in his gut, and a doctor in San Francisco removed half the stomach. I told my little brother that when our father was gone, he was off searching for his missing stomach, and this gave Eli nightmares for years. Our father would go AWOL for two days and return with a spackling bucket full of redbreast and we’d say, Ah, fishing. He’d come back with a black eye and a gash across the bridge of his nose and we’d say, Ah, fighting. Sometimes he would come back after a week and wouldn’t say a word, and we didn’t know what to ask. Neither did our mother. It was just the way it was then.

So Lonnie was still in the hospital. My father was fishing or fighting or swallowing his tongue somewhere. My mother was working double-shifts at Kelly Memorial, which meant Eli and I spent most of the week riding our bikes back and forth to the Bantam Chef for food. We’d pedal by Laurice’s house, riding with no hands on the handlebars, carrying our burgers and orange sodas. I steered with my hips. I remember that week being so hot, I felt my bike tires sink into the gooey asphalt. We had to pedal harder under the sun.

Every afternoon, I begged for Laurice to be in her yard or on her porch. The day she yelled at me, I wasn’t sure where the voice came from. It just happened on the air.

“That crap will kill you,” she said, the voice hovering in the trees or the azalea bushes. I thought, Crap must be her favorite word. I should remember that. Eli didn’t hear a thing because he was hungry. He kept pedaling for home. I sometimes thought his ever-increasing appetite was compensation for my father, who seemed to live on grains of rice and ginger ale, at least when he was home.

I stopped before I was ready, backpedaled on the brake before I rearranged the things in my hands, and my soda fell to the pavement, leaving an orange puddle under my bike. “Best thing that could have happened to you,” she said, dropping from her hiding spot in the thick magnolia limbs. I started to ask her why she was in a tree, but she answered before I could speak. “I’m watching people. I’m not hiding or anything,” she said. “You guys go to the Bantam Chef couple times a day, don’t you?”

“My mom’s working,” I told her. “She’s a nurse.” Laurice had on shorts that didn’t fit her. Her legs had grown since school let out. She was taller than I’d remembered. And she was tan in every place I looked, like she’d been to the beach for a month.

“Wait here,” she said and ran into her house. It wasn’t a big place, but it was solid-looking, cement blocks painted a light green, an odd-angled roof, a porch without a screen on it. The front door made metal noises when it opened and closed.

Laurice ran back out with a bottle of Orange Crush in her hand. “Here,” she said, “don’t drop this one.”

“I thought this stuff is going to kill me,” I said.

“What don’t?” she told me and climbed back into the magnolia. My breath caught low in my throat while I watched her legs disappear into the thick canopy of summer leaves.

LONNIE CAME HOME from the hospital on a Wednesday morning. He rode his bicycle to my house the same afternoon. Before he even sat down, he told me he wanted to show me something that would make me puke. He wanted to bet me five dollars I’d throw up the second I saw it. I wouldn’t take the bet, but that didn’t stop Lonnie.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “That doctor who put my face together said I had to keep my new eyeball clean. I mean, not my eyeball, but the socket part.” Lonnie leaned toward me so his face would catch some light. The swelling that my mother told me about was pretty much gone. I could see the thin tracks of fresh scars dividing his face into sections. He was puffy on the curve of his jaw and his eye looked a little too big for his face, the fake eye, I mean. And the fake eye never moved. It just stared straight ahead, even when Lonnie shook his head. Still, he looked mostly like Lonnie, except one side of his expression never changed. He was slightly lopsided.

“The doctor told me, ‘You don’t keep it clean, Lonnie, you’ll get infected,’ and the last thing I need is infection, you know?” He pointed to his eye to punctuate the importance of a clean socket.

“So,” Lonnie continued, “they give me these little wipey things I’m supposed to use.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small plastic sleeve of wet tissues. Then he popped his fake eye out. He rolled it carefully between two fingers like a round diamond. He smiled.

“This doesn’t make me want to puke,” I said, which surprised me. I normally didn’t enjoy gazing on anything associated with pain. But to be honest, Lonnie’s fake eye looked more like a carnival trinket than a body part.

“Eyeball. Big deal, right?” he said, laying it carefully in a crack on my den table so it wouldn’t roll away. “The big deal is where it came from.”

Lonnie cocked his head toward me. The hole in his head wasn’t exactly black. A pinkish flap of skin stretched across the back of the opening. It was as if somebody in the vicinity of his brain had lit a candle. His socket glowed right in front of my eyes. With two fingers, he pried the opening wider. I could see the milky plastic of the rebuilt eye socket. Lonnie gagged a little, trying to talk.

“What?” I said, looking down at the table.

Lonnie cleared his throat. “Trying to say, something went wrong with my palate. Don’t ask me what. They left a hole and they didn’t know I could get my tongue up in there. They want to close it up one day. Hell with that. I can almost stick my tongue in my own eye. Check it out,” he said. And he may have said something else, but I missed it. Instead of listening, I ran for the back porch and made it in time to throw open the screen and puke across the azalea bushes.

“Nice shot,” my father said, standing there, his worn-out Army OD bag at his feet, looking like a skinny Jesus with his hair and beard and sandals. By the time Lonnie walked out, the eye was back in his head, and he wore a crooked grin over the good half of his face.

IT NORMALLY TOOK my father about two minutes to ease back into the family mode when he returned from one of his excursions. It took longer for my mother. She had to hate him awhile before she decided to love him again. He never gave her much information when she demanded details. His stock answer was, There’s not much to tell, hon. When my mother peeled the fried skin away from a chicken breast and offered it to him, that’s when we knew it was safe to breathe again.

That night, after my mother walked in to find her husband home, after she interrogated him in the hall and he said a dozen times that there was nothing to tell, hon, we sat at the table and gave thanks over a bucket of chicken from the Bantam Chef. “Dear Lord,” my father said to the ceiling, “thank you for my safe return. Thank you for Lonnie Tisdale’s new face—”

“And eye socket,” Lonnie interrupted.

“That too. And thank you for family,” he said, dropping his gaze to the bucket. “Y’all go ahead. I don’t have much of an appetite.”

My mother said, “God knows where you were. He sees it all, you know.” This was a new tactic. My mother normally left God out of arguments.

“We got an agreement,” my father said.

“You and God?” Lonnie asked, impressed.

“He gets decent prayers and I get left alone. I might have me a splash of that brown gravy,” he said. My dad’s stomach could handle soupy things, but not solid chicken. He’d end up rolling on the floor, grabbing at his sides if he ate so much as a couple bites of anything with substance.

“I thought about God when I was in the hospital. Probably thought about him when I was under the water, but I don’t remember that,” Lonnie said with his mouth full. As a matter of fact, Lonnie didn’t recall climbing up on the bridge scaffolding and diving into the black water. He said when he woke up in the hospital, it was like someone had pulled the ultimate practical joke on him—dressed him up in a gown and ripped half his smile off.

My dad studied the bad side of Lonnie’s face. “Trauma will always bring religion into the picture,” he said. “God was a regular in Vietnam.” Any mention of Vietnam meant war stories were close behind. My mother’s eyebrow arched a little. She knew. My father’s Vietnam stories constantly centered on Asian parasites and foot rot, as though the entire conflict had taken place inside of a smelly sock. We were never sure he was sure who the real enemy was. My mother tried to cut off the approaching tales of leper-like toes and microbes in canteens.

“Did you pray in the hospital?” she asked Lonnie.

He thought for a second. “I suppose you might call it that,” Lonnie said. “What I did was make a list of all the things I better get done because you never know when you might jump into a refrigerator.”

“Carpe diem,” my father said.

“No, a Kenmore,” Lonnie said back.

“No, I mean—never mind,” my father said, staring at the bucket of chicken and breathing heavily, as though he were eating through his nostrils. My mother spooned another scoop of gravy on his paper plate, in lieu of real meat. She worked hard always to keep him distracted, if not happy.

“That’s a very mature concept,” my mother said, bending her head toward me as if to suggest I should take note of Lonnie’s wisdom and ambition.

“Well, lose your eye and everything looks different,” Lonnie said as though he’d been rehearsing the line, said it before I could mention to my mother that Lonnie Tisdale had been, for as long as I could remember, so full of shit, he’d float, which in actuality may have saved his life the day he lost an eye.

LATER THAT EVENING, just after Lonnie left and before the bats came out to chase the last of the mosquitoes, I rode to Laurice’s house to watch her in her window. Thinking about it now, I can’t recall if I realized how creepy and desperate it was—to leave my bike in the hedges near her mailbox and belly-crawl through the azaleas to a low spot in her yard, where I could see everything I needed and not be spotted in the shadows. I spied for the reason anybody spies: to find out something nobody knows you know. Secret information is the best kind. It gives you an upper hand, even if you never play it. Spying on Laurice wasn’t sexual. I was more curious than anything. I wanted to catch her in a moment that might be described as intimate, without her realizing I was right there with her.

Laurice’s parents watched television. They didn’t move their heads or their mouths, the screen’s glow shifting across their faces like an eclipse. Laurice, on the other hand, was all energy and movement in the bedroom above them. She sang, she danced, she called people on the white phone in her room. Once her father yelled toward the ceiling, to tell her to quiet down or quit doing the Pony on her floor, I guess, but she didn’t stop until Lonnie came to the door.

I knew what carpe diem meant, even if Lonnie Tisdale didn’t. It meant not wasting time. It meant doing things without thinking too much about them. It meant calling Laurice Reeves and showing up at her doorstep the day you got out of the hospital. Laurice was one of the things Lonnie thought about while the buttock cheek on his face quit swelling and his stitches dried up. Lying there in the pine straw, with no doubt a few hundred families of red bugs invading my waist, I learned that just because you love somebody secretly, she doesn’t go off the market. This knowledge continues to sledgehammer me about twice a year, not matter how old I get.

They sat on the porch like high school kids on a date, the only light from the closest windows and the streetlight at the curb. I could see Laurice’s mother spying on them from the den window, which I thought was pretty awful and deceitful, until I remembered I was no better. When Laurice wasn’t giggling or pointing at Lonnie’s face, she covered her cheeks, probably in horror from the stories he told her, stories about sunken Kenmores and black water and fake eyes. She didn’t seem to act quite like herself.

After a bit, Laurice stood up. I thought she was leaving him, but instead she ducked inside the door and turned on the harsh overhead porch light. Though I couldn’t make out what they said to each other, I could see better now. Lonnie popped out his fake eye and rolled it in his palm. With his other hand, he pointed to his empty socket. Laurice peered closer, then suddenly shrieked. Lonnie laughed. Laurice leaned in a second time and Lonnie repeated the show more than once. I could tell—Laurice loved seeing whatever might show up in the eye socket. From where I lay, she didn’t appear to be a girl who would puke. I saw Lonnie reach in his pocket. He opened his wallet and took out a bill. I’m guessing it was a five to cover a bet he just lost.

LIVE LONG ENOUGH. You’ll look back and regret your collection of tiny moments when you turned left and should have gone right, when events—cosmic or otherwise—conspired for or against you. (If I’d caught one more light, I would never have been t-boned by that pickup at Main and Stone Avenue…) I had one of those with Lonnie. I avoided him for a week. It was easy. He was, as I mentioned, a local hero, and he had no time to wonder why I didn’t call him to go fishing, or why I never rode my bike to his house. His picture was in the Kingstree Times. Boy Scout Troop 17, under the leadership of Mr. Sprinkle, created a special merit badge honoring Lonnie (which was, incidentally, in the shape of a fiery eyeball.) I was easily forgotten for a week.

But I was there every night, lying in the pine straw, watching Laurice’s mother watch her daughter and Lonnie. Every night, he showed her the empty orbit of his eye. Every night, she shrieked and asked for more. Then one night, when Laurice’s mother finally gave up her spot at the den window and Lonnie put his eyeball back in the socket, Laurice leaned over and kissed him. Lonnie ran his hand up Laurice’s t-shirt and she didn’t move an elbow to block him. She didn’t seem to mind where his hands were going or where his tongue had been.

I wanted to leave but they would have heard me rustling through the azalea bushes. And I wanted to yell at Lonnie, wanted to say that just because he only possessed a single eye, he was nothing special. But he was. He was a boy who gave Death the finger, and women will always love men who defy mortality. But I didn’t realize that then. I only knew that I felt cheated by a boy with one eye.

When the lights went out and Lonnie left for home, I pedaled through the neighborhood. I had no concept, at thirteen, of therapy, yet I somehow sensed talking to another person would be healthy. My father was the smartest person I knew. He could help me. I needed explanations, and he never lacked for answers to anything, unless my mother asked the questions. When I got home, I found my mother sitting in the dark in the living room. The only time anyone went into our living room was at Christmas (because that’s where we put the tree) or when my father left. This was August. He’d gone again, chasing his appetites.

I should have been smart enough to recognize this wasn’t a good time. In the half-light from the hall, I could see she had a glass, and I smelled the orange Tang. My mother only drank when my father left and then, only Tang and Smirnoff. Now, she sat, staring, as if she were trying to figure out a math problem in her head.

“He’s gone again,” I said, making sure it didn’t sound like a question.

“Naturally,” she said. I heard ice cubes crackle in the glass.

I told her I needed to ask her something and she didn’t answer. “It’s important. I would’ve asked Dad, but—,” I said. I heard her let go of a breath. She rarely cried. I blamed that on her job at the hospital. She probably saw enough crying there. Instead of tears, my mother sighed when she was upset, letting air and a tiny moan escape her mouth at the same time.

“Well, asking your father for help,” she said. “Not such a good plan, eh, hon?”

“I like Laurice,” I said. Now that I think of it, she was already aware of this. I wasn’t giving her anything new. Down the hall, I heard the television break into music of some kind, something loud my brother was watching.

“Congratulations,” she said, “your medal is in the mail.” I heard the ice in her glass shift. Her sarcasm increased with every sip of Tang and Smirnoff.

“Never mind,” I said and started to walk toward the hall.

“Wait,” she said quickly. “I’m not good with boy stuff. I’m probably not the one to give you ideas right now. They’ll be bad ones.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t think she likes me anyway. She likes Lonnie. He keeps showing her his eye. And they kiss a lot. I don’t get it.”

My mother appeared at the edge of the shadows and stood in front of me. She still wore her nurse’s whites, but her shoes were off. She looked like a ghost, a very tired one. She reached forward with her hand, the one without the glass and patted me on the head like I was the family dog. It’s one of the few times I remember her hand on me.

“I don’t know whether this will make you feel better or worse,” she said, “but here’s the deal. You will never get it. Ever. So if you give up trying, nobody will blame you.” She took a step toward the hall, into the brighter light, then stopped when an idea struck her. “Or,” she said, “or it could be that you can’t trust a man who’s missing something.” She sighed right when she said that.

I’VE NEVER FIGURED out what it was about being thirteen, the way you think you’re the core of every existing universe, the way any event that happens to you is epic and mythic, the most important thing that will ever occur. My father was off again, drinking or scrapping and telling Vietnam stories about sipping bad water from a rice paddy and losing half a stomach—and he’d be back only when he was too hungry or too lonely. My mother was mixing astronaut juice and vodka in the kitchen and sighing, probably wondering if we would be able to feed ourselves if she up and left and disappeared forever in her nurse’s whites, like a ghost on a mission. But when you are thirteen, none of the drama orbiting around you matters, especially when your one-eyed friend has his hand up your girlfriend’s shirt. (Even if she never knew she was your girlfriend.) And you make yourself watch it. The world became very small in that moment, too tiny to hold any more than me and the two people on Laurice’s front porch.

If my mother heard me crack the front door and ease out, she didn’t say a word to stop me. The last thing I heard was the theme music from some show on the television when I walked into the thick night-air on the porch. It smelled old outside, as if the air had gone stale. I could have done a half-dozen things to make that night pass, could have eaten leftover chicken or messed with my little brother or snuck back to my room and jerked off with the picture of Miss December that Lonnie stole from his father’s night table and gave to me. Anything except climb on my bicycle and ride into the dark. I didn’t go fast, but still, when I hit the pools of lights under the telephone poles, the moths pelted me like soft bullets as I glided through them.

Instead of heading toward Laurice’s house and the Bantam Chef, I went left—not right—toward the river. The streetlights gave up, and the cicadas sang louder the closer I rode to the furniture store. I felt the slight downgrade as I came off the bluff and coasted toward the flood plain. The security light from Baker’s Furniture Store glowed near their loading dock, fuzzy in the humidity, giving me just enough light to find the beginning of the sidewalk at the end of the bridge. I left my bike in the weeds. What little glow there was made the bridge shine white, like it was covered in ice, which confused me for a quick second until I realized how hard I was sweating from the ride. I reminded myself it was the end of August. We hadn’t felt rain in weeks. I heard the river gurgle as it dodged the thick cement footings somewhere under me. I found a place to balance on the rail. We’re all idiots when we’re thirteen. All I had to do was take that step into nothing but the invisible, heavy air.

Complete idiots. We think the world cares when we’re thirteen. I don’t really recall all that happened next, but I knew below me was only water, and under that, things I would never be able to see, and as it turned out, none of it killed me.