This is Just Exactly Like You (40 page)

He counts to ten. He’s got to try Beth next. Explanation, apology, accountancy: The Beanbags’ three rules of something—either conflict management or behavior modification. He can’t remember which. Hen stays still. Jack says, “Can you wait right here a second?”

Hendrick sits up straight, adjusts The Duck, says, “That will be fine.”

“You’re OK?”

“I am OK.”

“You sure?”

Hen doesn’t answer him, and Jack stares at his son, tries to look him in the eye through those sunglasses, like if he looks long enough he’ll figure out what it is that’s happening in there. Hen stares back. Jack tells him again:
Wait right here.
Beth’s still at the edge of the wet concrete, working what’s left in her hand through her fingers. Randolph hangs the hose on the cement mixer, looks for somewhere else to look. The Sons stand by the fence. Ernesto and Butner pretend to fool with something on the loader. Hen adjusts and readjusts The Duck. He’s got mud on his head. Rena holds her ground, across the yard, watching, hands in her pockets. Jack walks over to Beth, stands right next to her.

She says, after a while, “I don’t.”

“You don’t what?” he says.

“I don’t always get to decide.”

“I know.”

“Then why did you say that?” she says.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m sorry.” She picks up more cement, lets it drop back onto the ground. “What are you doing?” he asks her.

“I’m not doing anything.”

She’s still crying. “Why are you crying?” he asks.

She says, “Are you kidding me?”

He holds his shirt out to her, lets her clean some of the cement off her hand.

“Thanks,” she says.

“You’re welcome.”

She says, “You got him to calm down.”

“Yeah,” he says.

She runs the hand without concrete on it through her hair. Another familiar motion. “What’s going on with him?” she says.

“I don’t know,” he says. There are still termites coming out of the pile of rotten shed. “I’ve been thinking maybe he’s getting better.”

“You always say we can’t talk about it like that,” says Beth.

“I know.”

“You have rules, too,” she says.

“I know.”

“You’re the one who says he can’t get better.”

“I know that,” he says. “But now it feels like he might be.”

“How could he be? What’s happening?”

“I’m not really sure,” Jack says. “He knows things. Not just memorized things. He really knows them.”

“He’s always known things.”

“Not these things,” he says. “And he talks to you now. Some.”

“You should have come to get me,” she says. “You should have come and gotten me and told me he was getting better.”

“What would you have done?”

“You just should have come to get me,” she says again.

Jack says, “I thought I did.”

“We have to take him in,” she says. “We have to go see what they say.”

“I know.”

“I don’t even know how to be standing here with you,” she says.

“I know,” he says.

“No, you don’t.”

She pushes her toe into the edge of the sidewalk, and he watches her do it. “Why Canavan?” Jack asks, finally. Or again.

“Why not?” she says. “He was the same as anybody else.”

“He wasn’t,” Jack says.

She sniffs. “Did Rena stay here last night?”

“Yes,” he says.

She works her toe further into the concrete. “We have to stop this,” she says. “We have to do something.”

“You and me?”

“All of us,” she says. “All four of us. We can’t keep going like this.”

“I know,” he says.

“We need to sit down,” she says.

“Sit down how?”

“All of us together,” she says. “Soon. Tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes,” she says. “Tonight. I’m done with this. We’re done with this. We have to be. We’re all going to figure out what we ought to do. Together.”

“Hang on,” he says. “What is it you think is going to happen if the four of us sit down?”

“I don’t know,” she says, “and I don’t even know if I care.” She shakes her head, looks around. “All I know is that we have to do something before you—what, before you buy a blimp and paint your face on it.”

“What?”

“I’m worn out, Jack. I’m not saying I’m coming home. I’m not saying anything. I can’t come home, anyway, because you don’t live at home any more. Or alone, either. But we at least have to hate each other more if we’re going to keep acting like this. We at least have to act like regular lunatics.”

“Instead of what?”

“Instead of whatever we’re doing now.” She shakes her shoe free of the concrete. Yul Brynner’s standing in the sliding doors, wagging at them. Beth says, “Finish all this up, and get rid of all these people, and I’ll go home and get Terry, and we’ll be back in a few hours.”

“Here? Why here?”

“It’s the closest thing to neutral territory there is,” she says.

“It’s the opposite of neutral territory,” he says. He’s standing under the falling safe, looking up at it. He can’t figure out if he should run, or if he should spread his arms wide open and catch it.

“It’s what we have. It’s that or you come to Terry’s.”

“I don’t want to come to Terry’s,” he says. He doesn’t want to go anywhere.

“Well?”

“Are you crazy?” he asks her.

She smiles a bent smile, but a determined one. “I don’t think it’s really your turn to ask me that,” she says. “You know?” She steps out from between the forms, doesn’t say anything else to him, walks away. She tells Rena
See you tonight
on her way by. He can’t tell if she’s kidding or coming unglued. He can’t tell if any of them are. But he seems to have agreed to this, somehow. Yet another self-inflicted wound. Jack stands there for a minute, but then he goes and picks Hendrick up—makes sure he sees him coming—and carries him over to the patio, puts him back down. “
Gracias,
” Hen says. Rena wants to know what Beth meant, what
see you tonight
meant.
Like tonight? Where’s she going?
Jack doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to think about Beth, or anything else. He looks out at the men in his yard.

Randolph holds his hands out:
What now?
Jack takes one long breath and then runs his finger around in a cranking motion:
Go ahead.
Randolph gives a thumbs-up, walks to the mixer, throws the lever on the side of the truck, and the pump kicks back on. Everybody snaps into motion one more time. Jack stands with Rena, tries to figure out what Beth could possibly be hoping for, tries to figure out what the hell stories the four of them might tell each other tonight. She’ll be back in a few hours. With Canavan. Jack doesn’t understand how this could possibly go, how they’ll ever land somewhere so that any of them could say
There was this one time when.

Randolph and his crew are gone by six. What’s impressive is how fast it all goes, how simple a thing like a sidewalk is, finally. It’s two guys pouring wet rocks into a form, two more guys smoothing it out. When they get it flat, one last guy drags a destroyed push broom across the surface, roughs it up in little lines.
Leave it perfectly smooth,
Randolph tells Jack when he asks,
and people’ll slip and fall and break their asses. You don’t want an insurance situation on your hands.
He pronounces the first syllable heavy.
In
-surance. Jack had never given much thought to sidewalks before. Now he knows.

They’ve unloaded the undersea creatures, and they’re on their sides in the front yard. Butner took the trailer back to the NCDOT guys. Before he left, before any of them left, they all put their hands into the concrete, all in a row. Jack felt like that was important. Randolph and Butner and Ernesto, the Sons, Rena. They brought Yul Brynner out, pressed each paw in. He did not love that. Hen didn’t want any part of putting his hands in, either, did not like seeing the cement get on everyone else’s hands, but they convinced him, finally, to put his two pointer fingers in, so there’s the row of hands, the paws, and then two small holes, little knuckle marks next to each. And right now, in the half-glow of the evening coming on, it looks good. Jack’s sitting on the back patio, has been for a while. The yard’s pretty well torn up from the cement mixer and the skid steer, but he’ll get out here with some soil, some grass seed. Maybe he’ll get the NCDOT to come by, turn the back yard into one of those State Wildflower Projects they’ve got all in the medians of the interstates and up the off ramps. Every now and then a leaf or a stick falls down onto the racetrack, and he gets up, walks over there, leans out over the wet cement, picks it out.

Beth and Canavan coming back is an unmitigated catastrophe. Rena’s fine with it, of course, fine with all of it, said,
That’s as good as anything else, Jackson
,
isn’t it?
Didn’t even flinch. She’s inside, getting drinks. Hen’s watching the weather. Some show called
If It Happened Again.
It’s a re-imagining of historical weather disasters—the Chicago Blizzard of 1967 strikes again, that kind of thing. Bad graphics. Urgent narration.

Rena comes outside with two plastic cups. Jack takes one from her. It’s a beer with some ice cubes in it. “Something’s wrong with the fridge,” she says. “It’s getting kind of warm. Your freezer seems fine, though.”

“Perfect,” he says.

“Well,” she says, “yeah.”

They sit and drink their beers. These are the hours before the execution. This is his last meal. He looks down into his cup. “This is an elegant life we’ve got cooked up for ourselves,” he says. “Beer on the rocks.”

“Elegant enough,” she says. “I’ll take it.”

He chases an ice cube around with his finger, pulls it out, tosses it into the yard. “I don’t want to do this,” he says.

“I know that.”

“I’m not ready.”

“How could you be ready? Ready for what?”

“For anything,” he says. “To sit down with them. To ask Canavan how his leg is. To take Hen to the doctor to find out what’s going on.”

“To trade back,” she says.

“This wasn’t a trade,” he says.

“Sure it was.”

“How can you say it like that?”

“How can you say it any other way? She’s with him, and I’m with you.”

“But it wasn’t—”

“Jack,” she says, and spins her chair around so she’s facing him. “It doesn’t matter what you call it.”

“Why not?”

“Call it whatever you want,” she says. “I don’t care. Fact remains, I’m still sitting here, with you, in your back yard, and she’s in my house.” She puts her feet up on his legs, leans back. “I’m not some kind of muse for you, you know,” she says. “You keep wanting me to carry you through this, but that’s not my job.”

He has to ask her. “What is your job?”

“I don’t have a job,” she says. “People don’t have to have jobs. Your wife’s in my house. I don’t see why it has to be any more than that. That’s plenty right there.”

He puts a hand on one of her ankles, feels the warmth of her skin, and looks at the racetrack, at the two muddy holes of the eight, at the six square pads Randolph & Sons poured in around the edge for the undersea creatures. Butner and Ernesto sunk threaded bolts down into the concrete. Jack hadn’t thought to do that.
How else we gonna get ’em to stay still?
Butner had wanted to know.
That’s how the lady had ’em set up, anyway.
It’s not finished. They have to wait for the concrete to set around the bolts to drop the creatures on. But the sidewalk’s in. It’s huge. It’s taking up most of the back yard. The shed is still in a pile in the corner. The termites stopped coming out before everyone left.
Burn it,
Butner told him.
No sense in doing anything else. A few cups of kerosene, toss a match in.

“Do you think it’s too much?” he asks her.

“Do I think what’s too much?”

“All this. The racetrack. The catfish.”

“Absolutely.”

“You do?”

“Of course,” she says. “But in a good way,” she says. “This is the good kind of too much. Wild excess. Crazy shit. You’ve done some crazy shit here. But it’s the beautiful kind.”

“Beth doesn’t think so.”

“She might,” says Rena. “Eventually. Give her a while.” She rattles the ice in her cup. “I think it’s beautiful, at least. It’s pretty fucking impressive.”

“This house will never sell like this.”

“You don’t want it to.”

“We’ll be here forever,” he says.

“Maybe so,” she says. “But maybe that’s not so bad, either.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I can’t figure it out.” He gets up, walks to the fence, checks the driveway, checks across the street. No wagon. The eave lights have flicked on over there, but they’re on a timer. He looks back at Rena, sitting there in front of the racetrack. She moves through the world so much more easily than he does. “They’re still not here,” he says.