Another Perfect Catastrophe (7 page)

The dog knows how to sniff out money, the way airport dogs can sniff drugs. Sugar bought a training manual and educated the dog to find greenbacks, paper money, and then he will turn him loose in the neighborhood and on a good day Ernest will bring home a few singles and sometimes a five or a ten, and we have no idea where he finds them, only that he is determined to find them and does. This for Lyndsey is exploitation, and she has a fervent sympathy for animals in the manner of all people who have at some time or another been gravely disappointed by human beings. When I met her she was VP of the local PETA chapter and even once stood with others downtown across from Vogel's Furs, naked under a blanket with a sign indicating she would rather be naked than wear fur, which would be my preference for her as well if you could separate the politics from the nakedness. Which of course you never can. We argued about this right after she moved in last August, and I took the position that training a dog to hunt money is not even in the neighborhood with meat eating and fur wearing, but when you are a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in finance, your thirty-five-year-old construction supervisor boyfriend is pretty much wrong on everything. So we avoid the subject. I do love her.

It has grown cold, early November, and I head out with Lyndsey to split wood in the backyard. Sugar is under the carport, his torch fired up and sending down a waterfall of orange and white. He limps as he walks around the sculpture, looking for the next place to spot weld a fragment of soup can. Lyndsey has on one of my old flannels over her blue jeans, with leather gloves cinched tight around her wrists. The girl can cut some wood, keeps her hair tied back. If you ever want to fall in re-love with your POSSLQ, let her wear flannel and do hard work. I watch her a while, stack the wood, take the sledge and wedge when she tires and we trade. Sugar hammers on his sculpture, the sound ringing through the cold.

“You pretty much trust him, don't you?” Lyndsey says. She wipes sweat from her face with her sleeve.

“What do you mean?” I say, though I know exactly where she's headed with this.

“Well, he's over there using a hammer, a torch. He isn't setting himself on fire, he isn't getting killed.”

“Thanks for the update.”

“You don't have to take care of him, Reed.”

“I know that.”

“You do and you don't. I think you feel guilty about him, and you know that's not healthy.”

When she starts using words like “healthy,” it's usually time to let the argument drop. I swing the sledge, miss, say nothing.

“We could move out of here and you'd still be his friend. I would, too. We don't have to
stay
here.”

I swing again, lay the wood open and wet. “Listen, I like living here. We don't pay any rent. Sugar is a good guy.” I shrug. If you want your language to fail, try explaining your male friends to your female mate.

“What is it you
do
all day with him? I mean, besides dig clothes out of trash Dumpsters?” I work only six months of the year, during heavy construction season. The rest of that time is downtime, nothing time, which I would not trade for anything.

“The street,” I tell her. “Sugar would never go diving some Dumpster. He says that fate hands him his wardrobe.” She knows all of this and only uses reminding as a way of shaming me with the details. When she first met Sugar she went right along, saying that he made her laugh. Sugar has always been like a big toy, and when the batteries finally go, most are done with him. He gets old, Sugar does.

“Yeah, fate hands him most everything else, too,” Lyndsey says. She adjusts her bra strap. “You're both too young to just quit your lives.”

Sugar leaves his carport and starts walking around the yard, within earshot. We fall quiet, but I know this argument has only gone underground for a while. Sugar has his welding helmet tipped open and is walking around in circles, studying the ground as though surveying it. Say what you like, the boy
does
have plans in his head.

He walks over toward us, smiles at Lyndsey. She used to say he was handsome before his bothersomeness erased it. The welding helmet hangs over his face like part of some bird costume. The helmet when he found it (on Industrial Boulevard, leaning against a mattress) was missing its dark eye guard, so Sugar glued in a square of blue plastic cut from a soda bottle. The plastic leaves his vision wavered, like standing in the deep end, but he claims this makes for good sculpture.

I motion toward the carport. “What're you working on?” I know the answer already.

He shrugs. The helmet falls down and he pushes it up again. “New sculpture.
A Perfect Catastrophe
, I call it.”

I grin at him. This is an old joke. All of his sculptures, since the start, have had the same title, only with different numbers.

“Another
Perfect Catastrophe,”
I say. “I've lost count.”

“Fifty-seven,” he says. Lyndsey looks back and forth between us as if we are speaking in some elaborate code, which, I guess, we are.

“Hey, Reed, I need lumber,” Sugar says. “I mean, I ordered some and need to go get it. I need a ride.”

Lyndsey turns and shoots me a look, one of those little signals of anger or lust that will make of us finally a couple.

“How soon?” I ask him.

He laughs. “Hey, it's like that old joke, you know, guy says I need a board, salesman says how long, guy says a long time, I'm building a house.”

I laugh with him, at the joke and at the way he compresses every joke, his life, everything in it compressed, hurrying toward nothing.

That night in the bedroom, Lyndsey practices tai chi. She does Needle at Sea Bottom and Waving Hands Like Clouds. This relaxes her and focuses her both, she says, much the way TV and beer does me. I do Remote Control and Doritos while I watch her. I hate to be predictable, but I go with what works. On Friday nights I watch Lyndsey on the eleven o'clock news, when she does the Wall Street Wrap-up, three minutes of local stocks and investing tips sandwiched between the weather and sports. I like how she seems on TV, so distant and so much there all at once. I like how dressed up she is, her hair and makeup done, and how smart, talking all of us through graphics of the Dow and NASDAQ. She gave me another little signal to watch for, and some Fridays (not every) just when she says, “Back over to you, Bill,” she gives a little twitch of a smile and then her full-kilowatt blast right behind it. Wouldn't see the twitch if you weren't looking for it. That little gesture is for me, to say that she is thinking about me and loves me, right there with the camera and half the town eyeing her. I bend close to the TV every Friday to watch, and if she does it, I shout like I have just won the state lottery.

Right now she's moving in slow motion, doing White Crane Spreads Wings. She is half-naked as she practices, wearing blue sweatpants, her hair still wet from the shower. She told me once that she is locating her internal self, her centeredness, that tai chi means “the grand ultimate fist.” I wonder at this, how she finds her center by making her insides a fist. She grew up with a father who lost jobs the way other people lose car keys, and a mother convicted eighteen times for shoplifting. I would make my innards a fist, too, I think.

I watch her in the dark, lit by the blue of the TV, her nakedness in the cold light, her slow movements like storm clouds in a nature film. She hates the TV, but right now it renders her beautiful. After finishing with Fair Lady Works at Shuttles, she sits on the bed beside my knees, points the remote at the wall behind me, and turns off the tube, a decent bank shot. She clicks on the light. We are about to talk.

“We need to talk,” she says. From atop her computer she lifts one of the green ledger books she uses in her investment management course, opens it across the bed.

“Here's the plan, Reed. If we move out of here, into some student ghetto until I graduate, then we pay out three hundred a month that we aren't paying now.”

I nod, look at her. “Three hundred in the hole. Okay.”

“But—” She kneels across from me. “If we're near campus, we cut out my commuting costs, and you are closer to town. We don't have to drive Sugar anywhere at all, and we don't have to pay for his food. Conservatively, this saves us maybe a hundred and fifty.”

“But still in the hole,” I tell her.

“Right, but what do we get for our hundred and fifty? We get us, honey. We get to
be
with each other, instead of tiptoeing around and acting polite and making sure we have on our bathrobes.”

As she says this, I look down at the rows of credits and debits written in blue ink in her neat hand, then upward, at the way the wet tips of her hair sway and lightly brush her nipples. All in all, it's a convincing argument.

“I've lived here a long time, Lyndsey. Eleven years is a long time.”

She takes my hands, knee walks over her own ledger book as she moves forward to straddle my thighs.

“Listen,” she whispers, “you aren't doing him any good by staying here. He needs to find something else. His own life, maybe, instead of just tagging along with yours. You don't have to stay.”

“Yeah, but what's wrong with staying? We have privacy.”

“I would just like a little
normalcy
for once, Reed.”

I start to speak, then we both jump as Sugar detonates another pipe bomb from the backyard. Orange light bursts against the curtain a half second before the explosion rattles my keys on the dresser. The shards of soup can clatter on the driveway. Lyndsey closes her eyes, draws steady breaths through her nose. I squeeze her hand.

“Let me think about it,” I say.

She nods. “Better think hard.”

Friday nights at the Hen House and all-you-can-eat crab legs. Snow crab legs, and Sugar wanted to eat them in the snow, in February, and Lyndsey was our waitress ten Fridays running, and slowly became a shared joke, a persistent glance, a nudge in the ribs from Sugar. We were two men just off from work (well, me), tired, doughy enough to be harmless. We asked her one night in early spring and she went with us, riding. Her T-shirt had a cartoon of a hen with a fishing pole, reeling in a big catfish. She wore black shorts. Gave her my denim coat to wear in the Pinto with its bad heat, Sugar leaning up between the seats like our eight-year-old and we are on our way to Six Flags. We bought little pony bottles of beer along with handfuls of Ding Dongs and Slim Jims, and rode out to the golf course, across the parking lot, and right up onto the cart path beside the first tee, clicked the Pinto down to parking lights. “I don't know about this, guys,” she kept saying, and I drove slowly to reassure her, the cinders crunching beneath us, careful to stay on the path and not dig any tire ruts on the fairways. We handed our empties to Sugar and he placed them back in the carton. After a bit, Lyndsey settled into it, saying we were the most cautious vandals she'd ever seen. I liked the sound of her voice in the dark, the way her hair smelled like hush puppies.

Near dawn, the sky just edging toward light, we parked atop a hill beside the fourteenth green. Below us was the dark gape of a pond, the surface puckered by fish going after mosquitoes. Dew settled over the Pinto so that every few minutes I had to run the wipers. It was not yet sunrise, though there was a little rag of gray in the corner of the night, and the trees and yellow flags began to shape themselves. We got out of the car, walked to the edge of the hill in the wet grass, and below us the town lay spread out in darkness, the arc lamps strung like pearls through the streets. Light in the sky shifted again and all in one moment the streetlights blinked out, as if the town were giving in to daylight. “Wait till you see this,” I told Lyndsey, and I watched her watching the town. “One more minute,” Sugar said, and we were quiet.

Right below, a few hundred yards under our shoes, was the John Deere plant, and when the light in the sky notched up again, the green and yellow of those tractors bloomed into being like a sudden field of dandelions, and I took Lyndsey's chin and angled it down for her to see, the way Sugar did me the first time up there. Seventy-seven of them—tractors, harvesters, combines, backhoes, excavators—parked in rows on a wide gravel lot. Always seventy-seven, we had noticed through the years, so much so that we had stopped counting and went by faith. Dew glistened on the shiny green paint, the shadows of the machinery angled left in their own neat gray rows.

“Oh my God,” Lyndsey whispered. She took my hand, then Sugar's.

I squeezed. “Like it?”

She nodded. “So beautiful. Like a Zen rock garden.”

“With internal combustion,” Sugar said. We stood silent and watching, as if we might see the little shift as the sun lifted over the hills and the shadows darkened and narrowed beneath the rows of machinery, as the town began to ripple with cars and noise. Then the sprinklers spread out over the fairways rose out of the ground and began spewing water in tapered arcs, and somewhere we heard a lawnmower start up.

“We'd better get moving,” I said.

As we drove along the cinder paths, Lyndsey unpinned her nametag from her Hen House shirt and stuck it into my dash, left it there.

“I want to come back,” she said. “I want to see that again.”

I don't know.

It was something to do, road trip up to Oregon for a summer, escape the worst of North Carolina heat and no money. We were twenty-three, same age Lyndsey is now. We signed on with Hennesy Forestry Management Inc. for six bucks an hour, plus free lunch off the back of the silver truck at the foot of the logging road. We spent our nights in bars, chalking games of dominoes on the tables, trading money for half a buzz and a few jukebox dances with the local women, pretending that a pair of narrow beds and long hours of work equaled adventure. During the days we worked the skid trail, chainsawing the downed trees into eight-foot lengths, walking across the rows of logs under a high, dark canopy, with everything—the air, the logs, the ground—soaked with moisture. Sugar worked as a ballhooter, stepping across the logs, pushing them with a pole hook into neat bundles. After two days we could work in silence, the best way, speaking with only our eyes and nods of the head. The trees columned upward under a sky dark gray and marbled, the ground under our toe spikes needled, leaved, soft.