Early Warning (45 page)

Jared laid the paper on the floor. “Well, that's a piece of news. Amazing. Lots more to come. I guess the CIA got Congressman Ryan after all.”

Janet said, “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, you know, Ryan. Didn't you ever see him? He was from San Fran. He authored the Hughes-Ryan Act. Ryan was after Jones for years, and finally made it so they had to report covert ops to Congress. Now they must have—”

“You sound so detached.” Jared had a thing about the CIA; another thing Janet had not ever told him was about her uncle Arthur.

“Well, I am detached. I mean, it's shocking, but you had to see it coming. Jones was a nut.”

“I did see it coming,” said Janet, not quite knowing what she meant. She had told Jared only that she had gone to the Temple a couple of times—everyone did—and had known people who were really into it. Now she looked down at Emily, her savior. She had gotten pregnant the first time they went out, simply because she was too lazy to get up and find her diaphragm, simply because she hadn't expected to end up with Jared Nelson, computer programmer, in her bed. They had gotten married when she was four months along. She had lucked out, or buyer's delight had kicked in—he was right for her, good for her, after wandering in a dark wood, she found the path back to the village. In the village, the streets were clean and straight, gardens were planted, the villagers friendly. Little Red Riding Hood didn't have to say where she had been—they fed her, gave her a job, and laughed about the Big Bad Wolf, what a monster he was, so self-involved and grandiose, just stay away from that guy. And then the bonus—Emily Inez Nelson, perfect baby.

Emily relaxed, fell away from the breast. Janet moved her a little, snapped her bra closed. Jared rubbed his hands over his face. “Looks like another nice day,” he said. Just this one, thought Janet, just this one nice day, and then maybe she would tell him more. But she wouldn't think about that now.

L
ILLIAN WENT TO
the window in the living room, the one that looked out over the driveway, and watched Arthur. He was standing with a shovel in his hand just where the driveway curved down to the road. His back was to the house, and she couldn't tell whether he was resting, or whether he had stopped shoveling. The house was utterly silent—she had turned off the TV after watching
The Edge of Night
, a show that Arthur thought was ridiculous but that Lillian watched because Rosanna had, every day. It was getting dark, and Lillian squinted. Finally, she went to the hall closet, got her coat, wrapped it around herself, and opened the front door. By the time she got to Arthur, he was shoveling again, and Lillian thought he looked all right. She said, “Okay. You want pork chops for dinner? We have some.”

Arthur turned and looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, “Pork chops are fine.” His tone meant that he would pick at them.

“Or I could make spaghetti with clam sauce. You liked that.” She shivered. Arthur took the two sides of her coat and crossed them more tightly, then turned up her collar. As he did so, he looked brighter. He kissed her. He said, “I did like that spaghetti. I'm almost finished here. What time is it?” He no longer wore a watch.

“A little after five.”

“Do you feel something?”

“What?”

“Do you feel our estate here, Belly Acres, rising up at every corner to enfold and suffocate us?”

“There is a lot of upkeep,” said Lillian, keeping her voice low, neutral. “You should”—but she had suggested that Arthur hire someone to help him before, and he had refused, so she said—“at least find a service to plow the driveway.”

“The thin end of the wedge,” said Arthur. “Ten years ago, I would have shoveled four inches of snow off this driveway in an hour, running and singing the whole time, and now I had to stop every few minutes and catch my breath.”

Lillian shivered again, though it wasn't very cold, and said, “Maybe you should actually see a doctor.”

Arthur shook his head, as she knew he would. He hadn't seen a doctor in years. I've had enough of that, he always said.

“What if I, your wife, want you to see a doctor?”

“You're out of luck.” Then he turned her toward the house, putting his right arm over her shoulders and carrying the snow shovel in his left hand. They tromped up the driveway. He said, “I do feel sixty today, though. Every minute of it. When Colonel Manning was sixty, he walked thirty miles a day, keeping a list of wildflowers and birds that he saw on his march.”

“How old was he when I met him?”

“Sixty-six.”

“He had a twinkle in his eye.”

“Somehow,” said Arthur, “he did. Must have been a trick of the light.”

“You have a twinkle in your eye.”

“I take that as a compliment.”

While she was cooking dinner (green beans, too, with browned butter and almonds), they did their daily worrying about Debbie, Dean, and Tina, a prophylactic. Lillian talked to Debbie every day. Debbie told her about Carlie, Kevvie, Hugh, and the dogs. At the moment, the only thing wrong was that one dog had ear mites. Lillian and Arthur agreed that this was not worth worrying about. Dean had broken his wrist in a game of pickup basketball with eight guys
who were taller than he was—he had gone for a rebound and hit his hand on the rim of the basket (pretty impressive), and would be in a cast for four more weeks. Lillian said, “How many broken bones is that over the years now?”

Arthur thought for a minute and said, “Eight, if you count the ribs as two.”

“Maybe this will teach him a lesson.”

“What lesson, though?”

“That he isn't seventeen anymore?”

“I was hoping Linda was going to teach him that lesson.”

“So was she,” said Lillian.

Now for Tina. Tina had taken up the blowtorch. She lived in Seattle. She had sent a picture of herself, in her entire protective outfit, blowtorch in her right hand, hair gathered in a neat ponytail, gloves, helmet, standing in front of a slab of glass maybe an inch or more thick, three feet by four feet. She burned beautiful patterns in the glass, sometimes in the shape of animals or plants, but more often in astronomical designs—the solar system, the moons of Jupiter, six galaxies rotating in the distance. Her boyfriend, who still made his own cosmological paintings, then lit these so that the light came in from the edges somehow and illuminated the heavenly bodies. She'd shipped Lillian and Arthur a piece for their thirty-third wedding anniversary called
Virginia Cowslips.
In the note, she had written, “Hope you don't find this too sentimental. I was in a funny mood.” Lillian did not find the image of her daughter bent over a blowtorch at all sentimental, but the piece was very pretty, and Lillian had put it on the dresser in their bedroom. Lillian said, “No news is good news for Tina.”

“No news is normal for Tina.”

“She'll tell us if she gets pregnant. Even Janet told Andy when she got pregnant.”

They paused to worry about Janet for a moment. Andy had come back from Iowa City oohing and aahing as if she had never seen a baby before; to Lillian, Emily's pictures looked like those of a normal baby and, indeed, of a Langdon baby, but, having somehow looked past her own babies, Andy was stunned by the new one.

Lillian said, “We could worry about Michael.” Michael had wrecked the car he shared with Richie—DWI, girl in the hospital
for a week with a broken pelvis, and Michael himself, not wearing a seat belt, ramming his knee into the key in the ignition and painfully damaging the joint.

“Why bother?” said Arthur. “Worrying about Michael would be an existential exercise.”

“Jesse? Annie? Gray? Brad?”

“They have their complement of worriers,” said Arthur. “I don't see any positions to fill.”

“I guess it's time to eat, then.”

Arthur set the table, and Lillian dished up the food—always too much. She looked at Arthur out of the corner of her eye. He was the one she worried about: underweight, short of breath, ever alert (now it was the Iranians again). When she woke up to find him staring out the window at three in the morning, he would say that he just couldn't sleep. When she asked what he was thinking about, he would say, “The fact that I can't sleep.” Sometimes she thought he might have been awake all night, but he didn't yawn or act tired in the normal way, just more wound up. Was he different or worse than he had always been? Lillian had no idea. Maybe she was the one feeling her age, not Arthur. Maybe he seemed a little strange to her because they were diverging in some way that she couldn't pinpoint. She consciously dragged her gaze away from his plate (he had taken three bites, put down his fork, picked up a piece of bread) to her own, and said, “This turned out nicely.”

“Yes, it did.”

She didn't ask why he wasn't eating it. She said, “Maybe we should worry about Henry.”

“You mean because he took a semester's leave of absence, moved to New York, and is living in the East Village, and no one has heard from him since before Christmas?”

“He's forty-six years old. He shouldn't have to check in if he's going to be out after midnight.”

“Even if it's been evident for a year that he is kicking over the traces and making up for lost time?”

“I have principles,” said Lillian.

“Name one,” said Arthur.

“What, me worry?” said Lillian.

Arthur laughed. When he did so, Lillian put a couple more beans on his plate. He seemed to like those.

—

JOE WAS HUNGRY
after his appointment at the bank, and so he went to the Denby Café, sat down at the counter, and ordered a grilled ham and cheese. He was thinking about the interest he was going to pay on the seed he was about to buy, and whether he should forgo the loan and use most of his savings (but he didn't want to do that). He knew what Lois was going to say, and Minnie, too, but both options made him nervous. How he had gotten to be one of the luckiest farmers in the area was pretty clear, and not only to him—Minnie had a good job, Lois had both a job and a store, the farm was paid off. Their house was like every kit house—strong, solid, and well put together—and Gary's old house, buttoned up for the time being, was built to last, too. Did he need a new tractor? That depended on whether he cared about sitting on a seat or in a cab. On the seat, it was dusty and noisy, but he felt that he was seeing more. A cab would be quiet (not to mention cool), but if you were sitting in a cab, why be a farmer at all?

Then Dickie Dugan bumped into him, and he turned around. Dickie thrust a soiled check under his nose and laughed. Bobby Dugan had died a few months earlier—what had the paper said, that he was something like sixty-four, which didn't seem all that old anymore—and the list of wives (three) and kids (nine) was pretty amazing. Dickie was the oldest boy. The check was for two hundred thousand dollars—not much in some ways, but impressive as a number being handed around the Denby Café. The Dugans had about three hundred acres just off the state highway. The check was signed by Frederick Sanford, CEO, Enterprise Pork Producers. Dickie said, “This is going to be a hog hotel, folks. Air-conditioned suite for every sow.”

Farmers at various tables were shaking their heads a little—only a little, because nobody liked there to be a fight. Then Russ Pinckard, who was something of a joker, shouted, “All the Dugans being replaced by Hampshires? What's the difference?”

Dickie flushed, but smiled. He said, “You watch for us on the TV, Pinckard! You heard of
The Partridge Family
? Wait till you see
The Dugan Family
!”

“More like
The Addams Family
!” shouted Russ, and about half the
assembled farmers laughed. Marie, who was carrying the coffeepot, shook her head and said, “Shush up, now!”

A hog-confinement setup at the Dugans' made sense in a way, since the place was flat, the soil had never been much good, and the road to Usherton and eastward was right there. The Dugans had made it through the Depression, just barely, and there were so many kids now that they ran wild. On the other hand, Dinky Creek ran right through the back sixty acres, and from there into the river about three miles away, and to the east the landscape flattened and the river started meandering—good spot to deposit any hog detritus. But that was far away from Denby, and Joe had no doubt that the confinement builders would do something about the waste from hundreds of hogs, if not the sights and sounds.

Joe drank his coffee and talked about this new ethanol idea, basically adding corn-based alcohol to gas (“Drink it or drive it, your choice!” joked Russ Pinckard). What was the price of seed, whose ground was ready to plow, who had a new tractor and why, if the world was starving, wasn't the price of corn and beans a little higher, and would a lawyer like Culver in the Senate really do what was best for farmers, or did he care, for that matter, and would Jepsen be any better? After an hour, he went out, got into Rosanna's Volkswagen, and headed home. The weather was still cold and the ground still hard—the way it was in early spring when everything seemed held in place, and ugly, too.

D'Ory and D'Onut were sitting by the gate of the dog pen, staring at him as soon as he got out of the car. They knew not to bark, but they allowed themselves a little bit of a whine as he approached. D'Ory was graying around the muzzle, but D'Onut was young and slender, only two years old. When Joe opened the gate, D'Ory came out and D'Onut went over to her favorite tennis ball and brought it to him. She was such an avid fetcher that she never greeted him without an offering. When Jesse was home, she ran with him everywhere. She was a good gun-dog, and, even when Jesse was gone, lived in the hope that there would be something to fetch.

Joe never minded leaving the café. But now, following the dogs into the lowering steel-gray clouds, he felt lonely again. When he walked through the field behind the house, he could look in all directions and see nothing but his own two barns—the larger one, where
he kept the workshop and the tractor at his parents' old place, and the smaller one here, where he kept the seeder and the cultivator and the other implements. Walter and Rosanna had always said that after the Depression, or after the war, after something or other, people would start farming again—it was a healthy life and the best way to raise kids. But in Joe's lifetime, no one had ever come back. That Jesse was taking a fifth year to complete his B.S. might be a sign that he wasn't coming back, either. Joe didn't know if that was bad.