The Burden of Proof (48 page)

Now in the heat, far more intense here on the plains, he was full of doubts. Had he really driven two hours for a fifteen-minute conversation that in all likelihood would not occur? He would accomplish nothing beyond a moment's discomfort for both of them.

Thinking better of that, Sonny had probably decided not to come. He'sat up on the car trunk with his face to the sun--the first lick of scorching summer heat he had felt--and then, when he grew uncomfortably warm, trudged down again and scouted about the cabin.

It could not have been more than three rooms, perhaps only two. Down in the wash, it was bordered on two sides by a deep veranda in which half the punky boards had been replaced; the roof was supported by greenish treated standards. At the farthest comer, where the wild bushes and other growth of the ravine rose against the house, a round contraption had been carved into the porch. Stern bent to inspect the knobs and rubber hoses; there was a canvas cover across it.

He was there when he heard the gravel spurned above. By the time he walked around, Sonny Klonsky was charging down the stairs from the roadside. Her arms were full, with two grocery bags and half a dozen children's books, and seeing Stern, she bothered with no greeting but threw him, rather, a harried conspiratorial look of complete exasperation. The door to the cabin proved to be unlocked and she ran inside.

The ride apparently had been a long one for a woman midterm.

When Stern turned about, a boy was watching him, five or six years old, wearing a striped T-shirt and blue jeans, a dark-eyed, freckle-faced fellow with a bowl-shaped do of perfect silky haft and a look of cheerless curiosity.

"Sam?" asked Stern. He never had any idea how he remembered these things.

The boy toed the dirt and shied away. Stern climbed the ties braced into the earth, which formed the stairway up, prepared to greet Sam's father. The boy had climbed into the front seat of an old yellow Volkswagen, a convertible, where there was no other passenger. Stern asked about his father and the boy murmured an inaudible response. "Not coming?" asked Stern.

Sam, chin tucked down, waggled his head.

"No." Sonny spoke behind Stern and moved somewhat wearily back into the sun. "The poet's in climacteric, or whatever it is. The grip of inspiration." She pulled Sam by the shoulder from the car and introduced him to Stern, then reached into the back seat. There were two sleeping bags there, more groceries, and a single large piece of softsided luggage. Stern helped her carrad the items down to the cabin. "I hope you did not make this trip simply for me."

"I came for Sam," said Sonny. Entering the stale-smelling dark of the cabin, she faced Stern with a look that did not fully contain the nerve of her lingering anger. "And his father can go fuck himself."

"Oh, dear," said Stern.

"Oh, dear," said Sonny. She threw the packages down on a worn table.

The cabin was a simple affair. The plank floor had been painted; the studs had been paneled over in knotty pine. The central room was occupied by a cable,-spool table and painted chairs, and a double bed with a wrought-iron frame and a clean chenille spread. To the left was a bath and another small room. The old stained toilet with its black seat made a tremendous clatter, recovering from recent use.

In a mewling voice, the boy was pestering her about something.

"Yes, all right." She opened a window, then turned without stopping and went back out the door. Stern heard her moving heavily on the porch, then a deep bowel-like Amble beneath the cabin floor. From the rear window, he could look up to the wooded'crest of the ravine, the bosks cAwned in light.

When the wind blew, there was a wonderful scent.

"Are those raspberries back there?" Stern asked, when she returned.

"Oh, yes. The strawberry field is back that way, too, another hundred yards. Acres of them. They make the air sweet, don't they?"

"The aroma is splendid."

"I hope you don't mind, but I promised Sam I'd take him picking right after lunch. Some of us have had a few disappointments today." Her eyes drifted off to the boy, who must have fussed badly about his father.

"Of course," said Stern.

"You're welcome to come. Or you can look around in town."

He made no response, but he had, he realized, not the slightest inclination to depart. Stern did not have what might be called an outdoor wardrobe. He wore a pair of golf slacks and a cotton placket shirt with some animal embroidered at the breast. Casual attire suited him poorly.

Even in the dark colors recommended to the overweight, he cut a figure of awkward proportions and looked a Fattie like a plum. Nonetheless, he was in the out-of-doors, the wilds to him, and ready for adventure.

Sonny stirred among the bags until she found-a jar of peanut butter and sat down at the table to prepare the boy's sandwich. She offered Stern lunch, but he had eaten on the road. Watching her move about, you could see the toll of multiple responsibilities: lawyer, caretaker, weekend traveler; pregnant person. The fight with her husbandma bloody one, apparently--had left her drained. Her body seemed to have contracted a bit about her abdomen; she stumbled on, solid-looted, without grace. In the heavy summery air, her cheeks were rosy and her full, pretty face almost radiated heat. She wore shorts and a sleeveless blouse. She lifted her dark hair off her neck at moments to air herself.

Sam, called back in to the table, assailed his food with unwashed hands.

He was quiet in a stranger's presence, interrupting his silence only to ask at one point, "Did you?"

"Ye-es," she said, as if she were giving in. Sam was in love With the hot tub, she explained. As the boy ate, Stern asked a bit about the cabin, how often they were here. The property, including the strawberry field, had f6rmerly belonged to Charlie's parents, people of means who used it as a summer retreat. When they moved to Palm Springs, Charlie wanted only this, a shack that had housed migrants before Charlie's father turned it into a refuge for himself.

Charlie, Sonny said, had retained the faith of the sixties and believed that owning things was a pain in the ass.

"There's some kind of covenant. When the Braces sold, everybody agreed their family could always harvest the fields they'd planted for personal consumption. You can be the honorary Charlie for today. I'm sure it will be an improvement," she added, in a heavy sarcastic tone he had not heard from her before. She cleared Sam's plate and brought out a number of plastic buckets from below the sink. Sam grabbed his at once and begged her to hurry, but Sonny paused, tying a bandanna across her forehead. She extended a bucket to Stern, then took a ragged straw hat from a shelf and without ceremony placed it on his head.

"You'll need this for the sun."

"Shall I look in a mirror?"

"It'S magnificent," she said. "Trust me." She reached up again to angle the brim and gave him a merry look. For a second she seemed, despite her heavy form, winsome as a cheerleader, the kind of girl who would be grabbed and whirled about by some fellow, even though there was probably not a moment in her life when she'd been that sort of woman, and Lord knew, he had never been that kind of man.

Then he followed Sonny and the boy from the dank cabin, and entered blinking into the potent daylight, his heart flopping about with a kind of febrile stirring.

Pregnant, Sonny nonetheless remained far more agile than he; the boy, of course, climbed like a mountain goat. They plunged briefly into the woods and up a steep trail in the ravine. Stern, straining, puffing a bit, followed them back into the sunlight. After a few hundred feet of deep 'weeds, burned yellow already, they came to another graveled road.

It curved, dry and white, beside the Ylmitless acres of the farm, the low plants rising out of their hummocks in perfect ranks, the berries hanging red and luminous, bright as jewels. Sam reached to Sonny and then, by force of habit, extended the other hand, small and grimy, to Stern, who took it as well. So, he thought, st'dl dazzled by the. light and the overpowering heat. He had no sense of direction. The cabin was somewhere behind them, but he had no inclination to look back.

Holding Sam's hand, he crossed the road and began walking with them into the strawberry field.

"When I was twenty," Sonny said, "I wanted to meet somebody who was perfect. Now that I'm past forty, I just wonder if anyone is normal."

As they walked into the field, she went on unburdening herself, her gestures emphatic, speaking in her unguarded way about her husband. She seemed to be at one of those impasses in her marriage where she suddenly viewed her husband as she might a neighbor observed from an undisclosed vantage, say a window or a terrace, seeing him only as a peculiar unfathomable individual who lived nearby.

"His passion for what is actually happening is only to the extent he can reduce it to expression. You know?" She looked back to Stern, wearing .her bandanna, squinting in the sun. Down the rows of the strawberry field, Sam ran in gym shoes and jeans, his feet kicking out, the yellow bucket bouncing at his side. His thin voice carded back to them in a swell of wind. "And the point of expression is so that he has things in control. I'm sure that's why he's not here."

"What's that?" Stern was losing her, much as he tried. She was speaking for the most part to herself.

"Pure jealousy. Can you believe it?" Trudging along, she laughed: the notion was ridiculous. Briefly, Stern felt an tinidentifiable twinge.

"I think the idea of meeting you was more than he could stand. You know, my adversary--it sounds so professional. He can't conceive of me with a life apart from him, paying attention to anyone but him. I don't know how he'll live with a baby."

"I apologize. This is certainly my fault for being so insistent," said Stern.

"Oh, it's my fault," she said. "It's mine. Believe me. I was up all night, realizing that for the one billionth time. I think. my mother made me feel obliged to put up with temperamental people."

Listening to Sonny, who was twisted about by impulse and emotion--beseeching, beleaguered, ironic, angry--it struck Stern that Clara and he had-had the benefit of certain good fortune. In his time, the definitions were clearer. Men and women of middle-class upbringing anywhere in the Western world desired to marry, to bear and rear children. Et cetera. Everyone traveled along the same ruts in the road.

But for Sonny, marrying late in life, in the New Era, everything was a matter of choice. She got up in the morning and started from scratch, wondering about relationships, marriage, men, the erratic fellow she'd chosen--who, from her description, still seemed to be half a boy. He was reminded of Marta, who often said she would find a male companion just as soon as she figured out what she needed one for.

"How long is it you two have known each other, you and your husband?"

Stern asked. He was a few feet away from her, kneeling awkwardly to look at the plants.

She gave him instructions on how to harvest the.fruit. The overripe berries, dark as blood, looked wonderful but would not hold. "And you may as well roll your pant legs up.

There's no pride out here and a lot of dust and mud. What did you ask me?"

He repeated the question.

"We've only been married a few years, ff that's what you meant, but I've known him forever. It was a doomed relationship right from the start. I was his T. A. in Freshman English. The people in the EngYsh Department were scandalized when I started going out with him. Well, not scandalized. That department wasn't scandalized by anything, but they thought it was pretty odd."

"He was a freshman?"

"An older freshman, in my defense. He'd been in the service. But he was irresistible. He's very dark, very big, very quiet. It was like someone put a mountain down in my classroom." Sonny in the great heat shook her head, apparently overcome by the memory. "Talk about romantic. How could I resist a man who came back from Vietnam with poems hidden in the pockets of his camouflage outfits? I wanted to believe that poetry could transform the world, but Charlie really did.

Have you ever known anyone like that?"

"My brother, I would say. He was a poet," said Stern, who had just finished rolling his trousers, exposing a row of pale flesh over his black nylon hose. He must have looked worse than a scarecrow. The straw hat she'd given him was too large and rcsted unevenly on his ears.

"Honestly?"

"Oh yes, a young one. He wrote romantic verse in a number of languages.

! believe he was quite gifted. My sister still has Jacobo's poems somewhere. I would like to read them again someday, but just now it would be a melancholy experience." He took on momentarily the stung look he could not avoid from time to time, a close expression of admittexi pain.

"He passed away?"

"Long ago. I seldom speak of him, actually. But he was an extraordinary figuestined for greatness. He was the most remarkable young man. Handsome, bright. He wrote poems. He declaimed in public.

He was a prize scholar. And he was also quite a rogue. That was an important aspect of his character. Always in the midst of one misadventure or another. Filching fruit from a stand. For a period when he was sixteen, he would sneak out at night to keep company with the mother of one of his friends."

Sonny. made a lascivious sound: Oo la la. "He sounds as if he was something."