Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1) (29 page)

“Thank you.”

“You still appear to be in great shape.”

“Wow.” The energy had left me, thank goodness. “Two Beavers in a room together and
knowing
it. That can’t have happened before.”

“What are the chances?” He slapped his knees.

We beamed at each other.

I sighed in relief.

We traded stories of our experiences inside the suit. He understood, even agreed, with some of what I’d seen from in there: people, a strange bunch. I’m not sure I’d ever had a positive shared experience with
anyone
before, especially as Harold and I did almost everything separately. So Gordon was definitely unique. An ally? Maybe.

Almost an hour later, well after midnight, someone rattled the door. When it didn’t immediately open, there was a rapid knock.

“Somebody in there? I need to freshen up.”

Gordon unlatched the door.

It was Beatrice. “What in god’s name are the two of
you
doin’ locked up in this lounge together? Lordy, you be sick people. Get out, get me some privacy, please!”

Gordon and I shared another grin as we were ushered out.

“Don’t stop till you get enough,” I said.

“Damn!” Beatrice exclaimed, and we stumbled out, snickering.

CHAPTER FORTY

Returning to our seats, we stopped a moment between cars, me with a cup of hot coffee purchased from the snack bar, and he with an unlit cigarette.

“That’s illegal,” I said as Gordon attempted to light up. “Even out here.” The gangway between cars was a funhouse, a moving floor tilting left and right, two chained accordion waffles of thick mesh on either side see-sawing up and down. Above, we could see sky, and below, fast-moving track and blackness.

“Lend me a hand,” he said, wanting me to shield the lighter’s flame to his cigarette. An hour earlier I’d felt like throwing him off the train. Now I kind of liked him. As I moved closer I realized he was one of the few males I’d met recently who produced no corporeal vibration in me whatsoever. Zero. And apparently he had no attraction to me either because, as the cigarette glowed, he stepped away with ease. A relief.

“Thanks.” He slipped the lighter into his jacket. “So you’ve been studying beauty all these years.”

“I have.”

“And what have you learned?”

I must have smiled because, before I could answer, he remarked, “Nice dimples.”

“Thanks.”

“Sorry to interrupt.”

“I’ve learned that there are a number of scientific ways to quantify beauty. But they seem to be even less reliable than predicting the weather.”

“Now, now, we do our best.”

“Do you know about crickets and low-flying birds?”

“You mean their alleged ability to predict weather?”

“Yes. Do you think a person can have that skill?”

“Skill?”

“Intuition,” I said and frowned.

He took a long drag from his cigarette. “Maybe. I’ve never heard of anyone like that, but if I did I’d keep them close to my desk and feed them caramels. You know, in case the weather service computers went down.” He blew a stream of smoke from the side of his mouth. It disappeared, ghost-like, into the night. “I’ve learned to live with insecurity. You can’t imagine the hate calls I get, especially when it comes to people’s vacations. Like I control what the good lord doles out.”

“I can do it. Or at least I could. And you can keep the caramels for yourself.”

“You can make it rain!”

“No, but at certain times, under the right conditions, I can predict with certainty. I did it all the time when I was growing up.”

“I see. You haven’t grown out of it? Is your talent relegated to Bemidji? Kind of a small market.” He popped his lips. My fondness for him compounded, and I felt bad that I’d manipulated him to that point. But it was time to reel in my catch.

“Don’t think so. Hey, let’s make another deal — Honor of The Beavers: you let me sit in on the Miss USA trials and I’ll tune into the weather and feed you whatever I get?”

“Sounds irresistible.” He scratched his beard. “Except you get more than I do. Can I pick the ones I want? I’m partial to catastrophic events. You got those? Catastrophe pulls audience. You want me to
look
good
, right?”

“I can’t promise. But anyway, wouldn’t you like my scientific take on the pageant contestants? Sure you would, you’re a scientist too.”

“We seem to be mixing media.”

“It’d be a different way of viewing the girls. Come on.” I gave him a playful punch.

“I’ll bet the organizers will love your systematic input.”

I was learning his trademark sarcasm —and appreciating it. “So?” I asked. “Do we have a deal?”

His cheeks puffed out, then he exhaled. “I guess it could be fun. You’d certainly have a different approach to evaluating the girls. Might be interesting, though you’d have to apply your science to the pageant format.”

“I can do that.” I cut him off, excited to have found a friend. “And don’t forget I might be forecasting some weather for you.”

“That’ll be a bonus.” He stomped on the cigarette. “Let’s get some sleep. It’s a long ride.”

***

Our arrival in Chicago’s Union Station, wrinkled and grumpy from nineteen hours on the train, had the peculiar stickiness of a dream. While we waited to board The Empire Builder for the additional fourteen hours to Fargo, Lyle disappeared again, leaving me with the luggage, his guitar, and titanic irritation. In some absurd, inexplicable way, he and I were related.

I’d been through the station, briefly, on my way to New York. I’d wrapped myself in my overcoat and had kept my head down that whole time. This time was different;
I
was different.

I watched the cantankerous Beatrice trail-blaze through the crowd, as if —based on her supposed familial relationship to the pop star— she was heir apparent to Michael Jackson’s right of way. Gordon suggested that tomorrow she’d be Denzel Washington’s ex-mistress or Kerry Washington’s aunt, whatever held attention. But I wanted some of that chutzpah, even if it was contrived.

As I waited at the far end of the hard wooden pew in the station’s Great Hall, I took inventory. Yes, I’d grown comfortable with my anonymity but not, I decided, attached to it. Progress. I could enjoy the gallery’s grandeur. Sharp voices, expectant footsteps, and blurry train announcements bounced off the Great Hall’s barrel-vaulted skylight and marble floors. A giant fishbowl.

I laid my head back so it rested on the pew. The cathedral ceiling, more than 100 feet high, was the tallest I’d ever seen.
A palace in a fishbowl
.

I watched the shop lights glitter. I inhaled the confluence of food and people smells, aged and woven into the stone. Strong and pleasing. Yet even in the palace there was unease. Besides Beatrice, I tracked other harried travelers until they noticed me and turned away. I closed my eyes.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Daryl Hannah, older and grayer than I’d ever seen her, and she held the hand of a sweet, round-faced little black boy, maybe eight years old. “Would you like to join us for tea?” she said.

“Me?” I said.

“You’re Eunis, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, come with us.” And she led me and the little boy to a small door behind a cart stacked high with luggage.

The door opened into another royal room, with the same cathedral ceilings and nothing but a large table covered in white linen, four chairs, all crowded together in a corner of it, a teapot, four cups and saucers.

“Please,” she said offering me a place at the table. The little boy smiled at me and sat to my left as Daryl sat to my right.

“This is lovely,” I managed to say, still unsure of my invitation. “Do you like tea?” I asked the little boy.

“I do,” he said and I could have sworn his face changed, more hair certainly, an Afro. And it wasn’t exactly a smile after all, just his wide eyes unafraid to meet mine.

“Here,” said Daryl, lifting her cup in salute, though I hadn’t seen her pour from the teapot. “To us.”

“To us.” I turned to the little boy once more. He’d changed again. Older. Acne skin. Broader nose. He still watched me but his eyes were blank; he could have been one of Carver’s stuffings. Daryl didn’t seem to notice anything unusual.

“Will you talk to me like my next door neighbor?” asked the young man, now clearly in his early twenties.

“Yes, what would you like to talk about?” I faced him fully. As I did his face changed again, nose thinner, skin lighter, eyebrows, cheekbones —every facet tighter, sculpted.

“Beauty,” he said. “What was so beautiful about Harold? You’re an expert aren’t you?”

“Well, I’ve—”

“Because if you’re not,” said the young man, now aged once more, his lips thinner, his nose pointed, even his eyelashes extravagant in their length and thinness, “you have no right being here.”

“But I was invited.” I looked to Daryl for support but she wagged her left index finger at me to refrain from arguing. She was missing part of the finger.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Precisely,” said the black man, now ghoulishly white, bony, and feminine. “And why not?” He sounded belligerent. Then he answered for me. “Because you didn’t try.”

“Try?”

“You could have put all that money toward surgery.”

“There would have been nothing left for my education. I would have been forever in that farmhouse with nothing to give.”

“Give?” The black man and Daryl said in unison.

“Yes.”

“Then why are you here?” The completely ghost-white black man slammed his hand to the table, overturning the cup and spilling my tea.

“Now look what you’ve done!” he screamed, expression grotesque.

“I can’t sleep like this,” Daryl said. “I just can’t.”

“Am I beautiful?” he asked.

Something brought me to the surface, dragging my constant career failure with it.
“Because you didn’t try,” he said. “Then why are you here?” he said.
And as passengers streamed by me, I thought I actually saw Daryl. I had to turn completely around to find her again in the crowd.
There!
Just her long blonde curls. Born in Chicago, after all. She wouldn’t have wanted to be in a fish bowl — a mermaid — with all those people, and yet
.
. .

***

The hours passed. When I saw Lyle across the colossal open floor of the palace, he appeared more aimless than usual. His head was down, but it was his gait that lacked motivation. If he spent the rest of his life making his way the final seventy yards to my bench, he would not apparently have cared. That he somehow managed to point his way in my direction at all appeared to be the only measureable constant.

“Here.” I handed him his guitar. “You’ll feel better.”

“Thanks.” With a wan smile he pulled the D-35 to his chest, but he didn’t open the case. He stared across the large hall from whence he’d come.

I put an arm on his shoulder and sat with him without another word.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

At 4:30 in the morning Fargo is a desolate town. We wandered the empty streets for a couple of hours, during which Lyle said little except to nod when I reminded him that, “This was the Great Northern Railroad. Your father helped lay rails all the way here.” We rented a metallic blue beater Plymouth Neon to drive the final three hours to Bemidji.

“Thank you,” I said keeping my eyes mostly on the road, the flat farmland of the lower Red River Valley spreading in every direction along the unseen shoreline of ancient Lake Agassiz. The fields were dry enough by then for the farmers to plow and plant without squandering their tractors to the mud. Mounds of sugar beet, corn, and barley rose from the primal silt.

“For what?” He was curled up in the corner of the seat against the door, hoodie pulled down like a wanted felon avoiding the law.

“For sticking your neck out in New York for me. And for that Carver job, the taxidermist.”

“What did Carver have to do with me?”

“You suggested there might be a job for me.”

“Yeah, because the guy was creepy, the place was creepy, and the stuffin’s were creepy.”

“He didn’t think of himself as a stuffer. It was art to him.”

“But why me?” Lyle asked. “I only worked there a week.”

“Thanks to you, I got to go to state.”

“No shit. And now you and I are headed back to Momma and that fuckin’ hole of a farmhouse. No job, no prospects. One big fuckin’ round trip to nowhere.” He tugged his hood back a half-inch. “And you’re welcome.”

I laughed and, reluctantly, so did he.

“Seriously,” he straightened up, his eyes widening in recognition. “I never thought of the chemicals, but dya think those fumes every day . . . they might have poisoned your body, your brain?” His eyes were already past my answer, like he considered his own exposure.

“It’s never bothered me,” I said. “I’m pretty healthy. Maybe someday.”
Hydrochloric, Oxalic, Formic, the others.
My blank spots?

He said nothing and gazed dully through the windshield at the newly planted fields.

Row after row of crops, like whitecaps upon the lake, extended to the horizon, hypnotizing me. “Anyhow,” I said, my eyes returning to the road, “why are you coming back? I don’t get it.”

“Yeah, well . . . I guess I should help you a little, specially since that last gig-shit slipped through my fingers.”

“Gig-shit. Sounds unappetizing.”

“I’m here to help.”

“Well, thank you again.”

“You’re welcome again.”

A three-inch giant water bug slammed the windshield, liquefied and glued to it. Lyle asked again, “You know anythin’ about those chemicals?”

I shrugged him off. “You were only there a week.”

“Yeah.” He studied the puréed insect.  “I guess.”

***

“Why don’t you play something,” I said to Lyle as we passed through the village of White Earth and its wreckage of scattered trailer homes reeking of poverty; shutters hanging by a wire, a child’s plastic wading pool —spores of black mold overtaking its pink and yellow— windows boarded with plywood and crisscrossed in duct tape, a rusted truck on blocks —
like
momma’s caboose—
and small droppings of a man’s underwear embedded across a muddy side yard.

“Not in the mood.” He batted away the invitation, the same wilted energy I’d felt from Harold just before he . . .

“You can’t stop singing, whatever’s bugging you,” I said.

He objected with a grumble.

“You never met Harold, did you?”

“No. He a nice guy? I guess he musta been if you married him.”

“Yeah, he was.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Lyle study my face, then turn back to the windshield and the advent of gradually rolling hills and simple farmhouses. “How come you always made do?”

“Couldn’t depend on my good looks, could I?”

“Guess not.” Then he realized how harsh it sounded. “Sorry. But Harold, he thought you were cool.”

“He didn’t think anything was
cool
, but he had a good heart.”

“You two were okay? I mean, you guys didn’t fight or anything?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Well . . . there was . . .”

“What?”

“Talk.” He lowered his eyes as we passed a small white church.

“Like?”

“You know, the cops and everything. You’ve always had that temper.”

“Temper?”

“They asked me a lot of questions about you, but I just said . . .”

“What?” I tightened my gripped on the steering wheel.

“That we aren’t a very close family and that all I knew is what I’d heard about him.”

“Which was?”

“I dunno.”

“Yes, you do. Tell me.”

“Aw, you know my friends, they’re kinda lowlifes. What do they know?”

I slowed the car and put the blinker on, as if I’d pull into the dirt parking lot next to the church and the large cemetery.

“Shall we hang out with the Lutherans till you tell me?” I knew his aversion to graveyards.

“Well,” he waved me back onto the road, “he had a weird girlfriend or friend before you, I guess.”

“What do you mean weird? What was her name?” This was the first I’d heard of any girlfriend of Harold’s. My jaw tightened. How easy it was to get lost in the marshy wetlands to our right and left.

“Never got a name. Like I said, heard it from a friend.”

“She was weird how?”

“Dunno, she was strange, is all’s I remember.”

“You’re strange, I’m strange. We’re all strange.”

“Can’t remember.”

“Can’t remember or won’t tell?”

“I’d tell you. Like I said, it was one of my lowlife friends who mentioned it, ya know, drink talk. Pretty sure before you.”

“
Pretty sure!
When we get to Bemidji find him for me, your lowlife friend.”

“
Her
. The electrician. You want to meet her, really? Why?”

“Set it up, okay? Just set it up.” Another clue, but it frightened me.

I drove through more wetlands, past houses begun but never finished, through dense woodlands and past side roads, rutted, sandy and likely impossible to traverse. Certain traps. We skirted west of Bemidji, through the anachronistic town of Pony Lake with its reassuring quaintness and steeple church, then north past more trailer homes —some derelict, others qualified to be. Finally, we turned onto the Smith Road dirt, past sparsely-flung neighbor shanties, neighbors we mostly avoided and who mostly avoided us, till we reached Momma’s dilapidated farmhouse, the old caboose with its cupola still up on timbers, still shredding life particle-by-particle, still laboring against the inevitable.