The New Valley Page 7

  “Oh, come on.” She patted his hand on the counter. “I’ll lend you a couple bucks.”

  He was going to say “No, I already ate, anyways” but it was as if the sudden tension in his hand had shot up his arm into his neck and frozen his jaw.

  “Someone put a flyer over your ad,” she said, taking a couple bills out of her purse. “But I pinned it up again where somebody’d have a shot at seein’ it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He handed her his last two dollar bills and she finished up the sale.

  “You ever find anyone?” she asked.

  “Yeah. He’s gonna change the way we farm around here. Make it more like India. That’s his thing.”

  “He already moved in?” She didn’t seem to want to give him the bag with the sandwich.

  “Probably playin’ his Indian music right now.”

  She laughed, and he smiled, though he hadn’t meant to be funny.

  “Well,” she said when silence had sunk down around them again, “now what’re we gonna do?”

  For the first time, as if suddenly discovering it, he thought, That’s a woman I’m talking to. A woman. With a pretty smile and little teeth, smaller than any he’d ever seen. His own teeth felt like big chunks of wood in his mouth.

  “Hey,” Deb said, her voice suddenly soft, “you don’t know anything about propane, do you?”

  “Well …”

  “I can’t get the tank out at my sister’s to work right. The gas doesn’t seem to want to come through. Can’t get any hot water.”

  “Oh,” he said. “You checked the tank to see it’s full?”

  She nodded and then stood up, very straight, and crossed her arms in front of her. “Hey,” she said again. “Would you maybe mind comin’ out to take a look at it?” Her voice cracked a little at the end of the sentence and she rushed on. “I could make you dinner while you’re out there. If you haven’t eaten yet. I suppose you’ve already had dinner. I forget how late it is because I usually have dinner when I get home after work, which is later than most people, I guess.”

  Right then, fixing something for someone else seemed like an amazing thing. If he could get her hot water working, Osby thought, he’d go home happy that night.

  “No, uh-uh,” he dropped his eyes. “I ain’t ate, yet.”

  In the store’s bathroom, Deb reapplied blush and eyeliner and powder. Through the door, she could hear him nervously running his jacket zipper up and down. The last time she’d been on a first date was before she was married, almost thirty years ago. She remembered making up her face in the mirror, just like now, only with Greg waiting outside the movie theater bathroom, eating cold popcorn. Back then, she hadn’t known how, after twenty years of marriage, the smell of his skin would make her queasy. Now, she watched her fifty-year-old face in the mirror; it looked like a face that had learned.

  To stop herself from getting upset, she thought about sex. It seemed she could always get excited about that these days. She had even got a subscription to Playgirl. Greg hadn’t made love to her for the last three years of their marriage. She hadn’t had sex in almost four. A few months ago, she had started getting hot flashes. An old lady, she thought. A dry old lady.

  “No, ma’am,” she whispered to the mirror.

  But in the back of her mind, she wondered if she would need some kind of jelly, now. Maybe her sister had some in the bathroom vanity.

  This might be the last time she ever had sex. At her age, the opportunity wasn’t bound to come up too often. Maybe, she thought, if I do everything right he’ll come back again. Her face hardened and she dug quickly through her purse, looking for her Swiss army knife. Greg had always liked her neat and trim down there. He said all men liked that. She forced her pants over her hips and shoved them down to her calves. She ran the faucet, soaking a handkerchief in warm water. When she was clean, she sat down on the toilet, leaving the water running to cover the sounds of the Swiss army knife scissors, and sat there, resolutely snipping at her tangle of pubic hair.

  They drove in tandem on the night road. Osby watched her taillights, thinking about what might be wrong with her propane, with the valve or the connection or the pipe. Maybe something was blocked, or froze up. If he did a good job, he thought, maybe she would ask him to fix the next thing that went wrong, and the thing after that—an electrical problem, or something with her car. He went over everything he knew about the workings of a Chevy Cavalier. He’d find out more, he told himself, ask around, see if Carl had one junked behind his house. Osby pictured himself on a dolly under her car, streaked with grease, rolling out on his back and saying to her, “Try her now.” It would start up sweet and she’d bounce in her seat, him standing there, wiping his hands on his overalls, grinning. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she’d say.

  By the time he eased the truck into her driveway, he had envisioned reshingling her roof, installing a new toilet (one of those silent-flush kinds), fixing up a secondhand VCR to go right in her living room.

  He hardly paid attention to what she said to him as she led him up the steps (one was half-rotted and needed replacing) and into her home (the spring was missing from the storm door and he had to pull it shut behind him). Inside, his eyes scoured the place as she flicked on lights. He stood in the middle of the living room, planning renovations and improvements, while she went into the kitchen and got each of them a beer. He was so juiced up he said thanks twice when she put his can on the coffee table in front of him. Then she reached out and took both his hands in hers, and everything stopped.

  He looked at her. She seemed shorter. His hands felt huge in hers, like slabs of meat that had nothing to do with him.

  “You must be starved,” she said, holding his eyes to hers. “I know I am.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll make somethin’ in a sec. You like pasta? It’s quick.”

  The idea of her cooking depressed him. He wished she’d sit down, let him make her dinner.

  “I can boil noodles,” he said.

  She laughed and nudged him toward a big brown easy chair. “You just sit down and enjoy that beer, okay?”

  “All right,” he said. The chair groaned and the vinyl puffed around his thighs.

  They opened their beers.

  “I’ve been in these clothes all day,” she said. “I’m gonna go get out of them, real quick. Put on somethin’ that doesn’t feel worked in, okay? You sit tight.”

  He watched her recede down the hallway and disappear into a room.

  Osby took a long swig of his beer, set the can on the coffee table. In the kitchen, the fridge clicked on. He listened to it hum. Maybe, he thought, he was all wrong about what she was doing. Maybe he was imagining things. He tried to convince himself of it, tried to picture her coming out of her bedroom dressed in comfy slippers, jeans, a thick fuzzy sweater. They could sit down to dinner together, and then he would go around back and figure out what was wrong with her propane. After all, he told himself, she had only held his hands. Lots of people hold other people’s hands and it doesn’t mean anything. He looked at his. They were balled into fists on the armrests. He spread his fingers and wiped his palms on his jeans, but they still felt hot and sticky, so he got up and padded across the room to the kitchen sink. It wasn’t until he was putting the soap back on its dish that he realized the tap water was warm.

  He heard a door open and she emerged from the room into the light of the hallway, a pink teddy hardly covering the tops of her thighs. The water drummed at the sink. When she got to the living room, she cocked her hips a little and ran her hands down them, looking at Osby. Her fingers shook. The slight smile gripping her lips just made her look scared. Osby wanted, more than ever, to fix all those things for her, but all he could do was reach to the faucet and shut off the water.

  The quiet afterwards was worse.

  “Well?” she said, struggling to hold onto her smile, her voice shaky. “Is it okay?”

&
nbsp; “Uh-huh,” he whispered.

  She looked as if she were going to wrap her arms around herself, but instead, her hands came together and she held them in each other. “What’s wrong?” she said.

  A car’s engine moaned faintly way down the road, grew louder, passed by in a rush, and sank into the night again. When it was almost gone, Osby said, “I better look at that propane.”

  He crossed the room, pulled open the door, and shut it quietly behind him. Outside, it had started to snow. He walked down the steps and over to his truck. When he was safely in the cab, he allowed himself to look at the trailer home. All the lights were on in the windows and through one of them he could still see her standing there. Somewhere in the darkness, a brook gurgled. He drowned its noise with the truck’s engine and backed up onto the road, watching the white flakes glow red in his taillights as if pretending to be something other than snow.

  * * *

  It was falling fast and thick by the time he was back on Route 33 and the truck’s headlights showed nothing but flecks of snow surrounded by millions of others. It seemed to him that if he were perfectly still, they would come at his windshield no differently. The only way he could tell that he was moving was by watching the tracks on the road in front. For a long time, he didn’t look at anything else. After a while, he had the unnerving feeling that he wasn’t following the tracks at all. They were coming at him. He almost lifted his hands off the steering wheel, then. He doubted it would make a difference. The truck would keep following the tracks without him. The gearshift looked ridiculous. The whole idea of pedals seemed silly, the never-ending movement of the wipers pointless.

  At home, only the porch light was still on: a faint yellow blur behind a gauze of snow. He climbed the steps, stopping himself from knocking the snow off his boots, not wanting to wake the kid. Inside, it was hot. When Osby crept into the kitchen, he saw the woodstove glowing, the cast iron a fiery red. The kid had packed it too full, could have burned the place down. Osby stood in the dark kitchen. Turning on the light seemed too bold a thing to do in a home no longer his alone. He crept to the sink, opened the cabinet, took out the flashlight, and beat it against his palm until it came on. Slowly, he swept the beam over the room. The dishes were all washed and drying in the rack. The counter had been wiped clean. The row of cans was gone. The table had been cleared of everything but one piece of paper.

  Moving went great. Thought I’d clean up a little. Hope you don’t mind. Made dinner—there’s a plate for you in the oven. Seems like you work late.—Tim

  The kid had left the oven on at 150 degrees. The plate was warm to the touch: pork chops, fried cabbage and onion, potatoes. Osby slid it back on the rack and shut the oven door. A sound came from upstairs. Osby flicked off the flashlight. Listened. It must have just been the wind, or a squirrel on the porch roof. He stood in the dark, watching the glowing stove. Outside, the wind was picking up. He listened to it come through the thousand cracks in the house.

  In the morning, he thought, the kid will come down here and make me breakfast and go off to school to do his great things.

  He unzipped his jacket, wiped his sweating forehead with his sleeve. The light from the porch bled in through the front windows of the living room, and when he went in there he saw the sleeping bag had been folded into a puffy square and placed neatly on one side of the couch. On the floor above Osby’s head, the bed creaked. There was a thump. He felt a rush of panic to get out before the kid came down and found him. Trying to quiet his breathing, he knew he couldn’t sleep on that couch, in this house. Upstairs, the bed creaked again and he sensed the kid’s weight shifting on the mattress as clearly as if he’d been standing by his bedside. In less than a minute, Osby was back on the porch.

  He headed around the side of the house, the sleeping bag clutched under one arm, the wind shoving at him. Snow clung to his eyebrows and hair and the snot inside his nose froze jagged and sharp. He couldn’t see more than a yard through the whipping snow, but he’d walked this way a thousand times as a kid and he knew the rise and drop of the hill under his feet.

  Inside the Old House, he slammed the door shut behind him. The house threw the sound around its rooms. He didn’t look up at the second-floor landing, just swung the flashlight to his right, trying not to think of anything as he pushed open the door to the kitchen, flinging the flashlight beam ahead of him, crossing fast toward his grandmother’s room, where there was a bed, and quiet, and, if he remembered right, a gas space heater.

  Once in there, he felt better. There were two shut doors and a staircase between him and the room where his father had done it. He put the flashlight on a side table, standing it on its end. The ceiling reflected a faint yellow light over the room. Everything was as he remembered it: the bed neatly made—he had sat on it when his grandmother was sick, playing cards with her—the smell of her, the slow rot of old skin; the matches still on the dresser in a small china bowl embossed with pink roses. The matches were dry, but when he found the old space heater in the corner, he couldn’t get it to light.

  Nothing to do but spread the damp sleeping bag over the quilt. He unlaced his boots and peeled off his socks. The rug was gritty under his bare feet, and he could feel the hairs left from his grandmother’s long-dead German shepherd. The sheets, he discovered when he pulled them back, had been chewed nearly to lace. A line of dark mouse turds bordered the pillow, a few scattered on top. He banged it clean against his hand, brushed the sheets off, and got in. The wind gusted. Every few seconds a burst slammed the house and rattled the windows. It knifed through cracks in the walls, whined around the upstairs rooms, and Osby lay there, listening to it. When the flashlight beam on the ceiling began to dim, he reached over and clicked it off. Mice scurried in the walls. He shut his eyes and tried to sleep.

  * * *

  Two, three, four hours later—time didn’t seem to matter anymore —Osby gave up. He lay still, his face freezing, the sour smell of his grandmother so strong around him that the air seemed made of it. Lulled by the rhythm of his own breathing, he tried to remember whether his mother had smelled like that toward the end. He wondered if that scent had hidden under his father’s skin as he had walked across the hill from the new house to the old, if it had started to leak out as he climbed the stairs to his boyhood room. When the gunshot blasted through this house, had that scent burst out of his father like the yellow powder out of the stink balls Osby used to stomp on when he was a kid? He wondered if his father had smelled it on himself when he had called Eula Geller’s that day. Osby held his fingers under his nose. He couldn’t tell. He turned his hand over and cupped his freezing nose in his palm, his breath steaming, and he remembered, suddenly, the heat of his father’s breath on his face.

  The day they buried Osby’s mother, his father went straight from the funeral to the pastures. He didn’t bother to show up at the potluck, didn’t let Osby go, either. On the ride home, Osby sat in the truck, shoved up against the door, glaring at his father. The man’s face was completely still. He looked to Osby like he was thinking about how to get more weight on the heifers or whether it was time to separate out the bull calves. If his father felt Osby’s hatred, he didn’t show it; he simply stared at the road, then at the muddy tracks leading to the field behind the Old House, then at the gate, waiting for Osby to get out and open it.

  A pile of clouds hung low over the April green grass. They had gotten two cuttings of hay that past summer and a line of bales, three deep and twenty long, was stacked up against the side of a collapsed barn. His father brought the truck around and backed up toward the bales. But when he’d skewered one, he didn’t raise the spike, didn’t drive off. The truck idled. The man stared straight ahead, rigid, his shoulders bunched. One hand was propped up by the steering wheel, the other gripping the cable control that would raise the spiked bale. Osby could see the muscles in his father’s fingers clamping up, the blue veins bulging, the knuckles going white. When his father finally lifted his hand off the co
ntrol, it shook. His whole forearm spasmed and he grasped one hand in the other and squeezed until both were still.

  For a minute, maybe more, Osby watched him. Cortland sighed, looked at his son. He tried to smile, but it came out more like a grimace.

  “Well,” he said.

  He reached out and clapped a stiff hand over Osby’s shoulder. He pulled his son to him and kissed him on the back of the neck, so hard Osby felt his father’s teeth. When he drew away again, the smell of his breath lingered, the spot on the boy’s neck still warm from it.

  A second later, the heavy bale rose off the ground, the cable groaning, the truck’s engine breaking up the quiet.

  “Next year,” his father said as they jolted through the pasture, “we got to get the hay up faster. This stuff’s lost too goddamm much seed.”

  Now, balled up for warmth between his grandmother’s sheets, Osby knew why his father had rushed to get back to the herd. Those cows were the only thing that depended on him, the only part of his life he had any control over.

  They weren’t enough. Maybe that’s what his father discovered three weeks ago, the day he came out here to the Old House and blew his head off. Maybe he just finally knew it wasn’t enough. If there wasn’t the herd …

  No. Osby sat up, shoved himself back against the headboard, the cold air sucking the heat from his skin. That wasn’t true. He swung his legs out from under the sheets, over the mattress. His father had him.

  Osby let out all the air in him on one short breath. That was why his father had called Eula Geller’s. Why the hell had he been up there on that hill digging at the ground? Why hadn’t Eula Geller come faster? Why didn’t she tell his dad to stay on the phone? He could have run down to the house. He had walked. Walked for two whole minutes. He had spent half a minute scraping mud from his boots outside the door before he finally went in and picked up the phone.

  In the wind-wrapped quiet of the Old House, the heels of his hands pressing his temples, Osby heard again the buzz droning through miles of wires between him and the emptiness where his father should have been.