A Regular Guy (5 page)

No one passed but, twice, mile-long semis, and then it was just clutching the wheel hard, through an arc like an amusement park ride, the noise so whole it carried you in it. And it wasn’t up to her if it let you down again or not. But it did and she was still there, her teeth chattering loose, the truck wobbling on the plain dark road.

For the rest of her life, moments from that night would rise into Jane’s memory to haunt and enchant her, though the sequence of the drive itself remained a mystery, so that finally she could only claim what her great-grandmother had once said after lifting a Ford off the junkyard ground to save her only child’s back: “I don’t know how I did it. I couldn’t do it now again if you paid me.”

Jane wanted to stop and lie down in the seat, but she was afraid of day: if she couldn’t make herself wake up. She had the clock, she could put it by her ear or inside her shirt on her chest. She decided to pull over and eat just one Fig Newton. That would help. But it tasted dry and strong; she didn’t really like them without milk. Water from the round canteen tasted metal, sticking to the back of her teeth. She finally let herself sleep, holding the clock against her chest, then woke with a start and it was only a quarter hour. On her knee she had a scab. She picked it off and ate it, liking the tough opening taste of blood.

Her mother had warned her not to let the gas go down to empty. She had painted a red line on the glass gauge with fingernail polish. But now the needle was hovering below and there was no filling station. When Jane felt frightened, she pulled on the wheel and made herself sit up straight. “I will always sit up straight from now on,” she told herself.

She made numerous promises to any God that night. By the end, she’d promised her whole life away to goodness.

Later, the road widened and she stopped at a ten-bank gas station,
got her money out and put on her hat. She was trembling and her knee jumped when the man came over to help her. He was an old man and small.

“Fillerup?”

She handed him one of the twenties.

“Okeydokey.”

She picked a scab from her elbow, watching. When he put the hose back in its slot she drove away. That was done.

At one point, Jane began singing all the songs she knew, the night everywhere around dimensionless and still beginning, and she came to understand that she knew very few songs, and of those she remembered only one verse and a scattered mess of words with spaces between. Most were from camp meetings and she despised them. After “The Farmer in the Dell,” she tried the Beatles songs her mother liked to hum.

She did numbers then—picturing them, the line, the carry-the-one—and for a while she named the things she knew. Capitals lasted nine states, history was little better, and she remembered only the first two lines of a poem she’d once had to memorize: “By the shore of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water …” She now understood the point of memorization. Rhymes and numbers and state capitals and presidents could keep you out loud at a time like this. All Jane knew was what she hated.

But she had been doing other things while her classmates chanted their gradual multiplication tables. In the tree hollow she had placed seven acorns, unfitted their hats and sprinkled each with salt: that was for Mack to come back with her mother. She’d made offerings too for weather and the end of weather. She didn’t plan. Each commandment came complete, sometimes in school, and she had to obey. One time, she took a nest down and put in the three broken parts of her mother’s sparkly pin. These were her small duties that guaranteed nothing. Only, if she did not do them, it could be worse.

She drove that night in a straight line, through storm, the crack of lightning, trees of white, sheets of water dividing, spray on both sides,
and it came to her that she had passed into the other world, where her mother was dead. Jane felt sure her mother was going to die, because that was the only reason she could imagine they had to be apart: her mother so pretty and, everyone always said, so young. “Yeah?” Mary questioned, with a strange expression, whenever Jane reported a compliment. Mary didn’t trust people talking about them. She felt always alert to the possibility that they were making fun of her.

Jane had never had a death yet. Mary had told how she’d leaned down and kissed her mother in the coffin. And Jane had the picture now of her mother dead. She would be dead the same way she had been a thousand times on the bed, sleeping, the way her face went, lying down, everything draped from her nose. Jane started crying for herself because she didn’t even get to kiss her mother.

In the beginning, more things were alive: plants felt, something commanded, creatures lived in the sky. The morning after her trip to her father, she woke up in a hole of dirt, her mouth full of stones, her hands smelling for a long time of gasoline.

The most terrible and wondrous experience in Jane di Natali’s life was over by the time she was ten, before she’d truly mastered the art of riding a bicycle.

Dawn began long before light. There was less in the air. Sooner than she expected, the first turn came.

She thought again of her acorns and what she’d forgotten. She was supposed to glue the caps back on over the salt, but they had no glue. This was to be sure Mack Soto helped her mother in time. Last night, this lapse made her wince, but now it seemed nothing, a breath on air. She understood she would never believe in her childish powers again.

The sky was lightening in thick bands of color. Highway signs worked. She would find his house today. And she would discover the town she had been promised since she was born. She would use signs and numbers and songs of outside now. But she would have to learn them, system by system, in a new school.

For the first time, Jane wondered who built the roads and if there was one person sprawled somewhere, as she had on the floor with her
crayons, and drawn the whole world, plotting the highways, and then how that one person got the people to build them and where would the money come from and was that person God when he made the lakes and the dry land or was it the President. They were still building new highways all the time. That was what those striped mixing trucks were that you sometimes got stuck in back of at a traffic light. One of them had dropped a glop on the road where she went to school and kids ran up to write their names with sticks and put their handprints forever in the sidewalk. There in the mountains was an uneven corner with the imprint of Jane’s smaller hand.

When she finally saw the town, it was alive with order. A flock of children walked in sunlight to their everyday school. Men sat outside a tobacco shop, reading newspapers. It had all been going on without them.

Then, at a corner, she saw the man she recognized from the picture long ago, wearing a brown uniform. Against all orders, she stopped the truck and jumped out.

He seemed to be delivering a dolly of milk crates, cartons of different whites and a few chocolate.

“Do you know me?” she said.

He shrugged, smiled and said, “No hablo inglés,” then walked on.

After her drive, when she became a passenger again, she always buckled her seat belt without being asked. Danger had little allure for her, no music. In fact, she seemed to retain almost no desire for her earlier life: the whisper of a dawn wind, the cold promise of an autumn moon over the High Sierra, when all the tourists have gone home and woodsmoke spikes the air and the ones who are left are those you will know your childhood with. Her only remnant of nostalgia seemed to rise with inclement weather. Storms reminded her of the years when she inhabited a larger region. Less than a forest but in every way different from a home.

Then she would find herself—no coat, no umbrella, soaked shoes—running across roads, darting and slanting, daring cars, gauging the density and smear of headlights. She yearned to live unsheltered again and to recognize: This rain is the voice of the world. When teeth chatter
and the body shivers beyond control, this is the real cold, the real hunger.

In the mountains, she had eaten her scabs. It was a habit she could never quit.

Here, she vowed to become normal. She would walk right up to her father’s door and knock.

The Proposal

N
oah Kaskie was not satisfied with his musical education. He wished he’d paid more attention in elementary school when his music teacher had played Bach’s Little Fugue in G minor. Her heels had lifted out of her shoes as she conducted along with the record.

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, Owens had told him that. He probably also knew who made the compact disk.

Noah shook his head. Even in fifth grade, it seemed he was supposed to know more than he did. He’d been afraid to ask the simple questions. And opera. Noah knew almost nothing about opera.

He always meant to take a music appreciation class, but he was busy right now and life was life, so when Noah bought a new tape, he listened to it eight or ten times until he could whistle the melody. He vaguely remembered the music teacher doing this, lifting the needle back to the same passage to identify theme and variations. She played the same recording for the entire spring; at the end, the class took a bus to hear it at a concert. The Alta Concert Hall had two beautiful curving stairways. Worried, Noah’s parents had wanted to send his older sister along with him. But Noah had insisted on going alone. His same
friends who gave him a lift every day in school carried his chair up the grand stairs. Dressed up and scrubbed, though, for the first time they seemed solemn, like little pallbearers, as if only here they realized he was different.

Noah felt better when he was teaching himself something. Now he was listening to the clarinet concerto for the eleventh time while he checked over a graduate student’s dissection. “Caviar,” he said. “Now I’m going to filet it. Watch.”

A zebra fish egg was only slightly larger than a pinhead. Kaskie pulled out a hair from his eyebrow. He attached the one hair to a tool the rough dimensions of a matchstick and proceeded to cut the embryos with this homemade knife. Under the microscope, the mutant cells were elegant, like winter trees.

The next thing Noah knew, Owens was filling the doorway. It was nine o’clock in the morning. Owens seldom called ahead. He liked to just drop in. Noah suspected one of the things Owens found comforting about him was that he was so easy to find. He hovered over another minute dissection, and Owens seemed happy to wait. Owens liked the atmosphere of the lab. Its equipment and cheap furniture and productive messes made him think of an artist’s loft. Mozart, was it? Mozart.

A young man of indeterminate European origin stood in the corner, staining pieces of embryo with an antibody that recognized proteins expressed when the cells began to turn into a brain. Europeans generally intrigued Owens. This one turned out to be from Denmark.

“I’ll make you coffee in a sec,” Noah said. Though he often wanted to do things for Owens, he seldom let you.

“Or we could walk to the Pantheon.”

“I’ll make it here. And even breakfast.” Noah rubbed his hands. “Caviar. Sweetbreads upstairs. No, seriously.” In the lab and at home, he had elaborate setups for coffee, all the paraphernalia, the apparatus of an addiction. His cups and tin measure were not fancy. But he bought his dear beans from Switzerland, at seven ninety-nine a pound. A luxury, but one he’d long ago deemed essential to his daily contentment. He measured the beans and then measured the water. Precision, Noah believed, made all the difference in both cooking and science;
the difference between the mediocre and the sublime was often a matter of proportion. Coffee involved a whole chain of procedure, and every day it came out a little different, with new complexities. In a life without sex, you had to guard your few pleasures and relish them.

Noah had been told many times that he had good hands, the highest compliment for a young scientist but revealing the paradox of the career, for the further you go in biology, the less time you spend doing experiments with your own hands. He was already thirty-one and had been doing this job for three years.

“Smell,” he said, holding the grinder up to Owens’ face.

“Good,” Owens conceded.

Kaskie began his measurements for the oatmeal. But Kaskie was never completely Kaskie with Owens there. He was a Kaskie minus or a Kaskie added to. Possibly because Owens had the air he often carried of being either in a hurry or bored or not particularly happy doing what it was you were causing him to do, Noah, who’d made this same breakfast every morning for six months, now dutifully read the instructions on the side of the tin. They called for salt, which he never used, but he grabbed some sodium chloride and added it. He made the oatmeal on a burner and heated up maple syrup over another flame, putting the whole glass jar in boiling water. In his own way he was hospitable. He had two mugs, which he used when alone for oatmeal and coffee, and so, with Owens here, he would serve oatmeal first, wash the mugs, and then make coffee.

Noah believed he’d discovered the breakfast he would eat for the rest of his life and serve his wife and children, when he had them.