A Place We Knew Well (24 page)

“All right,” he heard himself say, “one-thirty tomorrow,” and banged down the receiver.

High afternoon winds had chopped the cloud cover into long rippling rows, like roof tiles, or fish scales, glazed gold to pink to peach by the setting sun. A mackerel sky, Old Pa would have called it. “Mare's tails and mackerel scales make lofty ships take in their sails,” he would have said—a warning to batten down the hatches, rough seas ahead. Like things could get worse than they are already?

T
HEIR WAITER WAS A
smiling Filipino who handed them the ornate, leather-bound menus and asked, “Something to drink, boss?”

Avery gave their standard order: “Two sweet teas, please.”

“Oh, no! What's that?” Sarah asked, pointing toward a nearby table. “With the gardenia in it?”

“That's a scorpion, miss.”

“Yes, please.” She nodded happily. “And he'll have a rum and Coke.”

We're drinking now?
Avery wondered.

When the drinks arrived, Sarah removed the fragrant gardenia floating in her drink and stuck it in her hair above one ear. “Remember gardenias?” she asked, a deliberate flirt.

Her pupils had once again eclipsed her irises.

She's already high as a kite, Avery realized. His heart sank. So what happens when you add alcohol to the mix? Wish I'd had the good sense to ask, he was thinking, when he was suddenly confounded by a silk-stockinged foot snaking its way under his pant cuff, above his sock, to the bare skin on his shin.

He stared at the woman who resembled his wife but who was acting like somebody else entirely. “Gardenias? How could I forget?” he told her.

He ordered the fried shrimp platter while she, on the waiter's suggestion, went for something called Flounder en Papillote, which turned out to be a fillet baked inside a paper bag. She ordered another drink.

“Another sting of the scorpion's tail, miss?” the waiter joshed her.

“Absolutely!”

Where had
this
Sarah come from? And where did the real one go? Had this wilder side of her always been lurking about, waiting to be set free by seven little pills and a couple of scorpions?

On the drive home, she leaned into him, nuzzling his neck, nibbling his ear, crooning softly a song from their early days, “Gonna take a senti-men-tal jour-ney…”

The scent of gardenia filled the front seat. Avery found himself hoping Charlotte wasn't home.

“Never thought my heart could be so yearn-y,” Sarah continued, her voice velvety, her breath warm and rummy against his neck.

Sarah half staggered, half stumbled backward into the house, hands tugging at his belt, fingers fumbling for his buckle and then his fly. Avery tottered after her awkwardly, one eye on the open curtains to the street, the other on their path through the darkened living room and down the hall.

At their bedroom, she flung open the door and lurched sideways, reeling him in. Avery one-armed the door closed and with the other kept her from falling backward onto the hard corner of the cedar chest at the foot of their bed.

She fell on the floor instead, grasping and tugging him down on top of her, teasing his chin, neck, and ear with her tongue as his hands sought the soft snaps connecting stockings to girdle covering panties and the musky hollow below.

“C'mon, c'mon,” she was saying. She seemed fierce and feral and not at all Sarah-like as she undid the last snap herself, and somehow freed the patch within the tangle of their clothes, guiding him, “here,” urging him, “in, in,” urgently “now!”

The question swooped through his mind—Is it wrong to take advantage of her in this state?—but only briefly. What could be wrong with a man making love to his wife?

T
he storm, heralded by last night's mackerel sky, commenced with a steady downpour before dawn. When Avery woke, the windows were rain-darkened, their bedroom deep in the blue gloom of very early morning. He turned to check the clock and was surprised by the time. Nearly eight o'clock. He hadn't slept so well in…who knew how long?

Thank God it was Steve's turn to open.

He lay back, replaying the evening's events.

They'd been hard at it like honeymooners when Charlotte knocked on the door to say she was home.

“Thanks, kiddo,” Avery had called. “Good night.”

“Mom okay?” she'd asked tentatively.

“A-okay,” Sarah had trilled beneath him. “Never better!”

What had Charlotte made of that? He'd wanted to wait for the sound of her door closing down the hall. The interruption had softened him. But Sarah, knees locked tightly around his hips, had rolled them over and, with a skill he didn't know she had, rocked him back into hardness.

Afterward, though, she'd simply rolled off him, stood, and staggered into the bathroom, where he heard her retching her dinner, plus the two scorpion drinks, into the toilet. He'd scrambled up to help her—hearing in his mind the waiter's mocking “Another sting of the scorpion's tail, miss?”—but she'd waved him off. He'd wet a washcloth then, at her pained request, found and opened the prescription bottle for her sleeping pills.

Avery glanced over at her now, sound asleep; a soft, rasping snore muffled by the curtain of her hair. Had the combination of the drugs and the drinks prompted last night's wild ride? Or was this the way a woman “hanging by a thread” acted, seesawing from one extreme to another? He wished he knew.

He checked the clock again. Yesterday, she'd slept half the day away. Would she do the same today? And which Sarah would she be when she woke up?

S
HOWERED, SHAVED, AND DRESSED
for work, he stood on the protected stoop under the carport, contemplating the amount of rain between him and his plastic-bagged newspaper out on the drive. On the stoop, half a dozen foil-capped milk bottles glistened with water droplets in their aluminum wire crate. Simms must have come while he was in the shower. Avery was sorry to have missed him and whatever air base update he might have offered.

Lousy day to be a milkman, he thought, retrieving the crate, deciding he'd pick up his paper on the drive out.

By nine-forty, Charlotte still wasn't up. Avery was reluctant to wake her. Still, he needed to know what her plans were today. More specifically, he needed her to keep an eye on Sarah while he was at work. He frowned over the notepad. It was their family custom to leave messages for each other on the kitchen counter. If he slipped it under her door, Charlotte might miss it. But what if, for some reason, Sarah got up first? Avery thought about that, then wrote:

Good morning, Sleeping Beauties. Please call me soon as you're up. Love, Dad/W.

Backing out in the rain, he maneuvered the truck to the right of the plastic-wrapped newspaper, opened his door, scooped it up, and tossed it onto the seat beside him. When he arrived at the station, he removed the
Sentinel
from its wrapper and unfolded it on the desk beside
The New York Times
Steve had purchased on his way in
.
Avery read the matching headlines and felt the news like the point of a spear pressed against his chest.

RUSSIANS SPEED BUILDING OF MISSILE SITES IN CUBA
, the
Sentinel
blared.

US FINDS CUBA SPEEDING BUILD-UP OF BASES, WARNS OF FURTHER ACTION
, the
Times
read. Construction of the Soviet bases
“was proceeding at a rapid rate with the apparent intention of achieving a full operational capacity as soon as possible. High officials said that such work could not be allowed to continue indefinitely,”
the lead paragraph informed him.

“Do these guys
want
a war?” he asked aloud, dumbfounded.

“Looks like it, don't it?” Steve's hound-dog face looked grimmer than he'd ever seen it.

What were the Soviets thinking? And how would the brass hats respond?

Avery's eyes scanned the rest of the story, past the White House demands and the UN concerns, looking for the Pentagon's reaction. It was there, in the
Times'
final paragraphs:

Two Thors, the 1,500-mile intermediate-range ballistic missile, were used in scientific booster missions, one in the launching of a nuclear device over Johnston Island in the Pacific last midnight, and the other in the launching of an unidentified satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Also at Vandenberg, an Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), with a credited range of 6,000 miles, was launched in a “routine training” test. Titan II ICBM was launched 5,000 miles in a development test at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida, the Pentagon said.

Avery heard the quickening drumbeat inside each sentence, the rattling of the Joint Chiefs' sabers over who controlled the fate of the world. His mind flashed on the combined memory of bombs stacked head-high as far as the eye could see and General Curtis LeMay's glowering, cigar-chomping swagger. Somewhere, he imagined the bonfire of Bombs Away LeMay's war lust leaping into full flame. Will the other Chiefs follow? Will our too young, untested President let them?

Wasn't this exactly what Ike warned us about in his farewell speech? The old soldier understood the momentum of war, how swiftly the reporting of enemy outrages, the public outcry for action, the Joint Chiefs' assurances of a fast and easy victory could sweep us all into the ultimate debacle.

Avery attempted a deep breath to steady himself, but the fear of clear and imminent disaster seemed to have sucked all the air out of the room.

C
HARLOTTE CALLED IN AT
ten twenty-seven.

“Hey, kiddo, how was the party after the parade?”

“It was fabulous, Dad. A bunch of us made plans to take Emilio water skiing on Lake Fairview today. But with all this rain, I guess that's off.”

On any other day, Avery might have noted the addition of a new event, outside homecoming, to his daughter's and Emilio's schedule—and the expansion of mutual interest it represented—but not today.

“Mom up yet?”

“No.”

Although Steve was out of earshot and Sarah was apparently still asleep, he and Charlotte slipped into a kind of conspiratorial code talk. She agreed on the need to “keep an eye out,” and he insisted she call him “if anything seems sideways.” Neither of them was willing or able, Avery realized, to address Sarah's erratic behavior yesterday directly. It was obvious that their shared but unspoken hope was that she'd wake up today and be herself again; though the chances of that happening, Avery feared, were slim.

Out front, the stream of evacuee traffic had swollen with the rain into a rushing river of headlights streaming north.

Working opposite sides of the pumps, Avery and Steve tended the ones who peeled off briefly for a quick infusion of five gallons of gas. The cars were crowded, but the people inside were eerily silent. Grim-lipped men sat behind the wheel, their round-eyed wives beside them and blank-faced kids clutching the family dog or cat or the occasional grandparent in the back. Eager to rejoin the pack, most of them waved off his offer to check their oil, handed over their cash, and were gone, leaving the smell of their fear ripe in his nostrils.

At half past eleven, Avery checked the fuel chart, tallied the receipts, and could no longer ignore the obvious. He went to the storeroom, got out the paint, a brush, and a pair of blank posters, and prepared the signs:

OUT OF GAS—

SERVICE BAYS OPEN

TILL 6 PM

In a break in the action out at the pumps, Steve stood beside him and mentioned, a bit too casually, his eyes on the paintbrush: “Didn't see you outside the bank yesterday.”

Avery attempted nonchalance. “Sarah was running a little late. We wound up watching at the corner of Edgewater and Bryn Mawr.”

“Charlotte looked great.”

“Yes,” Avery agreed, relieved to have the conversation veer off Sarah. “She did, didn't she?”

“Lilly thought so, too. Had a kinda crazy idea”—Steve paused, rubbed his chin thoughtfully—“that something about Charlotte—she couldn't put her finger on it—sort of favored Wild Rose of Sharon.”

Kitty?
Avery stilled his brush.

“
Kinda
crazy?”

“I know,” Steve said, scratching an eyebrow. “But all dressed up—like a movie star almost—I could kinda see…” The question—
Who is Kitty, really?
—hung unasked between them.

Avery resumed painting while he considered his options. Without Lilly, he might have told Steve the truth. The stalwart bantam rooster of a man was, after all, his best friend. But Lilly was a wild card who leaped to conclusions and, to his mind, talked too much.

Avery shrugged. “I never even laid eyes on Kitty Ayres around here…till the other day. You?”

“Nope,” Steve replied. “I surely would've remembered
that
if I had!” He grinned, allowing Avery to squirm gratefully off the hook.

A
T EXACTLY NOON,
L
ILLY'S
flaming red Firebird rolled into the shelter of the station's canopy. She and Steve had made plans to walk across the street for a meal at the Rexall lunch counter; but because of the rain, still coming down in sheets, they decided to drive.

Avery stood at the pumps and watched them go, watched the Firebird nose its insistent way cross-stream, saw the river of northbound traffic close up behind them.

Watching the continuous flow of cars and humanity passing him by, Avery felt oddly isolated and left behind. When his father died, their farmhouse had filled up with people—county neighbors and far-flung relatives—who, after the funeral and the big potluck, left him and his mother standing on the porch, watching their waving processional slide away like a giant snake into the distance.

His mother's hands, with long, pale fingers grasping the porch railing, were beside his. He remembered reaching out to touch the white knob of her wrist protruding beneath her dyed-black cuff. His gesture startled her and she jerked away, red-rimmed eyes suddenly round with surprise that he was still standing there. Where else would I be? he'd wondered.

“Now what?” his ten-year-old self asked her.

“I have no idea,” she'd answered hollowly and looked away, leaving him to feel the hard yoke of her loneliness descend on him as well.

Wearily, Avery turned toward the office. He'd resolved to check in with Sarah's doctor, but this was the first spare moment he'd had all morning. He retrieved the phone book from the lower desk drawer and was scanning the M's for Martell when the phone at his elbow went off with a sudden, insistent ring.

“Dad, Mr. Beauchamp just called. He says the field's a soggy mess so they've canceled the game.”

“Too bad. What about the dance?”

“It's still on, in the gym.”

“And the ceremony?”

“Eight o'clock, in the gym.”

“Oh-kay.” Avery's mind leaped to Kitty. Would she insist on coming to the gym?

“The thing is, Dad, Mr. Beauchamp wanted Mom to call her list of band parents, let them know the game is off.”

“And, your mother is…”

“In the living room. She asked not to be disturbed. She's got her head in the stereo, listening to the same song over and over.”

“What song?”

“I don't know, Dad. Something foreign. German maybe?”

“Like opera?”

“Yeah, something like that. And, Dad—” Charlotte took a deep breath. Avery heard it and braced himself. “—she's crying her eyes out. Can you come?”