Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (26 page)

“I doubt it. Being good-looking is a help, but she still would have been an eighteen-year-old divorced mother. I doubt she would have trusted her chances without the bank account. A person can afford to be brave when money is on the table.”

“Did she remarry?”

“I don’t know anything except this address. Not one single thing.”

“What about your half of the money?” Fern asked.

“It’s in a savings account. The things I want are not for sale.”

Fern knew he meant love. She knew he meant family.
Everything she was driving at high speed away from. She thought about the giant’s job at the bank, him sitting there in his security guard outfit with a dog-eared book and a half-eaten sandwich. It was the kind of job she would have expected someone to quit if his mother had saved almost a million dollars playing the lottery. She asked if he had considered it.

“I like working. A reason for being.”

The good ladies and gentlemen where Fern came from would have scorned people like these: a woman like Mac’s mother, an immigrant, all those cheap red roses, the Catholicism, lace doilies on each surface, a too-big man who took pleasure from his unprestigious day job. “It’s funny that of the two of us, you’re the rich one,” Fern said.

He winked at her. “Tables turn, eh? Better be nice to me.”

Now it was truly hot. All the way south, and the air was nearly swimmable. They passed a series of hand-painted signs advertising something called the Regal Reptile Ranch and Menagerie. The sign read
Over 20 Gators Plus 7-Foot Anaconda Cottonmouth Tegu Coachwhips Beaded Lizards Fox Snake Rat Snake Cobra
.

They stopped for gas. Fern went inside the service station to pay. She added red licorice, a pack of Pall Malls and a bottle of Coke, and held the cold glass to her forehead. The man behind the counter was too handsome to work in a service station. He had long hair and a mustache, and he was wearing blue coveralls stained with grease. Minus the outfit, he belonged at an expensive party near the blue light of the swimming pool, all the girls topless or better.

“Well,” he said. “Am I glad you walked in. Have you come far?”

“Boston,” she said. Where were they now, anyway? Louisiana, someplace with no plants she could name, a completely different kind of forest out the window all morning. “Are you from nearby?”

“Marquette,” he said. He hit the buttons on his register, left off
the candy. “That’s for you, from me,” he said. He was a beautiful boy with a suntan that probably never faded, no winter to speak of in this part of the country. A man needed to own a good wool coat to be trusted. A man needed to be able to go outside in the pink of a snowy morning and scrape what was iced, shovel what was blanketed.

The bell clinked and the giant walked in. He went towards the
Ice Cold Drinks
sign, opened the chest and let out a cloud of cold.

“Holy shit,” the handsome boy said, in a whisper. He leaned in to Fern, and they were kiss-close. “What a freak,” he whispered. His breath was stale-smoky and she noticed a freckle on his lower lip.

“Him?” she said. “He’s my
husband
.” Discomfort tangled that pretty face and it was the best thing she had felt all week. It was good to cause pain to someone who deserved it.

When Fern was in high school, one of her friends’ fathers had a long, public affair with a bank teller not more than two years older than his daughter. The girl’s mother drank, wrecked her Cadillac, became a point of gossip and ridicule. Fern remembered wondering why the wife didn’t simply turn love off, like a spigot. Her husband was a bad person, cruel and unforgivable, and it seemed like it should have been so easy to walk away.

In the car Fern opened the pack of cigarettes. “I felt like smoking,” she said. She lit, coughed, inhaled again.

“Give me one of those,” he said, and she lit a cigarette for him too.

Fern flicked ash out her window. “I don’t love Edgar less than before the kiss,” Fern said. “I should. I know what other women would think of me. I’m still angry with him and I still want to hurt him and I still don’t know if I’ll forgive it, and I still don’t know if he’ll ever forgive me, but even taken together those feelings are nothing compared to how much else has gathered over our years together.” It might still drown you, but love got deeper with time.

The giant put his cigarette out in the ashtray. “That tasted too good,” he said. “Don’t let me smoke too much.”

They paralleled the railroad tracks for the next few hours, and then a train chuffed alongside them at nearly the same speed and Fern could see the dining car in which a single man in a cowboy hat sat reading a newspaper while three cheap-suited servers stood in wait. Fern could almost hear the coffee cup rattle on his saucer.

Mac slowed suddenly and gasped, and when Fern turned back to see, it was not a stopped car or a deer he braked for, but a flock of butterflies, hundreds of orange wings, tinking into the windshield. Some caught in the wipers, some hit and spun off. Mac put his arm out across Fern to hold her in while the car lurched to a stop. He jumped out, and then stood there for a long time, mute, looking up at the colored sky.

Fern was hit by the heat as she picked the dead flyers off the windshield. Their bodies were warm and their gorgeous wings nearly dissolved at her touch. Most she tossed onto the roadside. One, still half-beating, she dropped and quietly crushed under her shoe. She hoped Mac did not see. Maggie the dog came back to her.

“I need to use the phone again,” Fern said. “At the next place.”

An hour later she stood at a payphone that was almost too hot to hold in her hand and deposited a handful of quarters. This time she did not call her own house. The secretary at the vet answered and Fern said, “Don’t kill my dog. I don’t want you to put Maggie to sleep.”

*   *   *

T
HE
BOYS
HAD
BEEN
GIVEN
a teepee for Christmas last year, which Cricket realized with a sweep of joy that woke her up at
dawn and jigged her blood. She did not bother the sleeping boys before she ran into the basement and found it, dusty and toppled, next to a box of abandoned stuffed animals and a rusted lawn mower. She carried the poles out to the lawn first and had to stand on a chair to attach the fabric. She was good at this, which did not surprise her. The teepee was not big, but Cricket figured if they curled up they could all three lie down inside.

It smelled like motor oil and there were inelegant pictures of deer and arrows, but through the hole in the middle were the three crossed poles and beyond them the blue sky, and those things were true beyond this backyard, beyond their neighborhood, beyond the parentlessness. Wherever their mother and father were, the sky also was, and Maggie was under it too. Cricket went into the house and dragged her boys out of bed saying, “Come see, come see the home I’ve made for us.” They were as pleased as she was, and immediately they all went gathering blankets to make a rug, pillows for comfort, the stash of canned goods, suitcases with clothes. They tried to make a fire by rubbing sticks together but could not even get a spark or tinder so they brought matches and a newspaper with a cover story about a Mafioso who’d donated thousands to charity on the same day he had killed three people. They burned it. The man’s face, red from the Florida sun, went black and ashed. The children were filled with celebration. They were native to this backyard and it was morning-cold and the sun was coming over the lip of the roof and they were eating breakfast out of a can. The boys, in unison, said, “Let’s never go to school ever again.” Cricket knew what they meant and here they were with no adult supervision and no one to make them behave. The trouble was that she wanted to go to school. She wanted to see Miss Nolan, she wanted to go to the bathroom, turn the lights off and find out what would happen.

“Lucky for you, it’s Saturday,” she said. Cricket turned on the hose and they wetted the shirts they had worn the day before and sponged themselves down. Their skin puckered in the cold water. Their scalps ached when Cricket doused them.

The children ranged around the yard gathering wood. They wore their headbands and painted slashes of color under their eyes with their mother’s lipstick. They discussed new names: Windfeather, said James. Deerpaw, said Will. Cricket already had an Indian name, they agreed. She was the lucky one, born better.

—

In another version of their house and yard before anything had been built there, before there was such a thing as the city, a non-imaginary Native family had lived in this same spot. When the ships began to arrive from the Old World, these people were the first to make contact. An anthropologist had gathered the family together and drawn pictures of them with their long braids, their leather clothes, their New World faces. The anthropologist told the Indians that they were beautiful savages, so much closer to nature. To him, their beauty was like that of the tiger, the peacock. The anthropologist’s painting traveled with him like a treasure until America was America. It was presented, along with a portfolio of others like it, to the young country’s President as a gift, but he refused to hang them. “The Indians are an obstacle to expansion,” he said, “and nothing more.”

By then, the tribe that had covered the land around the bay had mostly died off. First, from foreign fever, next from foreign slaughter. A few members remained, adopted some of the new religion, went to the new schools, most lost their language. Their descendants still lived nearby, though Cricket never thought of Boston as a place where Indians could be. The whole idea of them was too storybook, too long-distance. People like that, she thought, needed
the huge expanse of a western desert. People like that could not live in this kind of density. Where there would have been fishermen out in a canoe at night, stirring the phosphorescent sea with their oars, Cricket thought only of lean men running long, dry distances to catch up to a herd of antelope. Where there would have been roundhouses made of birch bark, Cricket only imagined teepees.

Of course she knew the story of the first Thanksgiving with its benign savages and needy settlers, and had made the construction paper pilgrim hats and Indian feather headbands each year at school, had even visited the site where the colonists came ashore, but the story was so diluted by the modern city that she could not hold on to it. If the ghosts of that long-ago family still circled this backyard, Cricket did not sense them. If their Massachusetts descendants lived in the neighborhood, some strain of that old blood in one of the brick houses, she would have been sorry to know it. She would have been sorry to know that her version was an invention, the truth infected with hundreds of years of tragedy.

—

After breakfast, the children, in their plaid pants and T-shirts and headbands, took to the neighborhood but did so under cover of hedges, hid behind parked cars. Likely, they were seen but written off as kids at play. Their
Lost Dog
posters were still up and the corners were sagging. They missed Maggie more and not less than ever. They needed her. Cricket asked the same question she had been asking every few hours: When should we assume no one is coming back? The answer had been recalculated each time and pushed farther back. At first she had told herself not to worry until bedtime. The next day she had decided her parents would be home by the time school let out. Then it was the next morning. Now she was giving the world the rest of the weekend to return to sense-making.

The three braves sneaked into the backyard belonging to the boys’ friend Tommy because Will remembered a raspberry bush there. Tommy’s parents were unfashionably in love for their stage of marriage. The children would not have been able to articulate the problem, but they picked up on their parents’ discomfort around the couple. By that time, husband-and-wifedom should be transactional, functional, domestic duties divided up, a weekly date to the movies, monthly love-making in a completely darkened room after each partner had showered. Without anyone having explained it, the other couples all understood this. Tommy Smith was an only child to boot, which made all the sex the adults knew his parents were having utterly indulgent, producing no concrete result. Enjoyment was not the work of the upper class. To prove that they were worthy of their wealth, they had all silently agreed to remain in the upper margins of unhappiness. Some had fun in private, in secret, but the volume was kept low in public. No one deserved fortune and joy both.

Cricket and the boys crouched, feathers in their hair and leather strips around their foreheads, looking into the Smiths’ kitchen window where a pile of dishes sat in the sink and the woman of the house, in cutoff shorts and a blouse, cut a fat slice of butter for her bread. She was reading a paperback. They imagined that she was listening to the radio, something jazzy with a throaty singer who certainly dressed in sequins. And then, as if scripted, Mr. Smith walked into the room with his long hair wet, wearing nothing but a towel, which he dropped. Cricket wanted to cover her brothers’ eyes but did not manage it in time.

“Don’t look,” she said, looking.

“Sure,” they said back, looking. There was a lot of smashed-mouth kissing before the locked pair fumbled away and left a buzz in the children’s ears. Tommy, poor Tommy, the boys thought.
Was he hiding out in his room? Had he been sent away to a wretched aunt for the morning so that his parents could be alone and awful? This proved it: civilization was no good. The boys wanted the big grassy plains more than ever. Animals and meat, tribes and fire. Cricket, if she had been alone and unwatched, would have climbed dangerously high in the big maple in order to peer through the upstairs window. In her life, she had never seen love happen this way and she wanted it not to end. She wanted, someday, to be on the inside of that kiss.

“Come on,” Will said. “That was disgusting.”

“Yes,” said Cricket because they would never trust her again if she said how she really felt.

At the next house a man sat at a big wooden desk with reading glasses and a stack of bills. The thick brown carpet had vacuum marks in it. The walls were painted beige and were undecorated. The hand on the grandfather clock ticked along. Nothing mattered in there, the children were sure of it. This was every Saturday and would continue to be, and the weather did not matter and the happenings of the world did not matter. Adults worked hard to shave down the inconvenient and difficult edges—love smoothed over, war and death sanded out—until all that remained was a midline. A routine. Cricket was old enough to know that she was meant to inherit this same equator, to resist the pull of her own north and south. She was meant to find a good-enough life and settle into its quiet.