Heading Out to Wonderful (21 page)

Somehow, in the dark, as he listed and memorized the things he wanted to ask Charlie the next time he saw him, all the questions became one single question, a question he knew he would never ask and never get the answer to: What was it they were doing when they took their clothes off? Why was it a secret? Why did they pretend, when he was back with them and they had their clothes on again, why did they pretend that it had never happened?

It made Sam feel alone in a way he had never felt alone before. In fact, he had never quite known what solitude was, he had never felt it, until the first time he saw them walking out of the door in Boaty Glass’s house, when they stood in the kitchen and acted as though nothing had happened. While he had been looking at funny books, they had turned into different people, and he knew somehow that the people they had turned into were what he would turn into, as well, once something happened. He didn’t know what that something was, he didn’t know how long it would take, he just knew that it would happen, and it made him sad, because he suddenly felt as though anything that happened between now and then wasn’t any more important than the silly pictures of ducks in pirate outfits he had been looking at.

He grew suddenly aware of the body he lived in, knowing that it would change in time into something else. He hoped it would change into something like the body Charlie wore, lean, muscular, smooth, not tall, instead of something like his father’s. A body like Will’s seemed too heavy for him to inhabit, too much to carry around.

His father was all warm rounds and folds; Charlie was like a wooden table, all flat surfaces.

Sam grew not just aware of his body, he also became afraid of it. It seemed so fragile to him, so small, so transitory. Things went on inside it he didn’t understand. Things moved in him. He heard noises, the noises of his body working, a tiny train running smooth on flat track. He didn’t know how these things happened. He didn’t even know what were the right questions to ask, and he didn’t know who to ask. Not his mother. Not his father. And, even though he knew Charlie would tell him anything, he didn’t know what to ask.

But he couldn’t sleep. So he fought. He was tired, and that made him angry most of the day, and he fought with his mother and father, acted like a baby, and got into wrestling matches with the other boys on the street. He bullied the younger ones, and he pushed the older boys to their limits. He would come home with scraped knees and a bloodied nose, and his mother would clean him up and bandage him and worry and console, and his father would tell him always to give better than he got. It made Alma sad that he fought, but it seemed to please Will in some way, as though the boy had put on the cloak of a man, heavy on his tiny frame, but carried with energy and purpose.

Sam didn’t know why, but he felt mad all the time. Mad and alone, even though he was surrounded by love. But he knew one thing: He wanted to see Charlie and Sylvan again and again and again. He wanted to be near them, to smell their smells and hear the sounds they made when they touched, when they took their clothes off.

Sometimes, he wished it would all go back to the way it was, when he and Charlie were alone in the world. Sometimes he wished they had never stopped at Sylvan Glass’s house, but not often. Now, when he saw them lying on a quilt down near the riverbank, or watched them, sweat on his forehead, Jackie Robinson tied up and yowling in the yard, through the keyhole of the locked bedroom upstairs, he wanted to be them, to lie in the infinitely small sliver of space between their undulating bodies, to feel their skin smooth against his own, to melt into them, until he was nothing and they were, as they were, everything.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I
N THE END,
she owned everything he had and all he was. Every piece of Charlie’s land, except for the house in town where he lived and the flatland out by the river, was in her full legal possession. He gave it to her with an open hand and an open heart. He didn’t know any other way to say what was in his mute heart. He gave without hope of return, except that he hoped, so secretly that he couldn’t even say it to himself or even write it in his diary, that she would one day leave Boaty Glass and be his wife. He wanted her, and, once she had all of what he owned, he was glad and free. Now, when she walked on her land she was inhabiting his heart, living in his house, her joy in her fields and creeks and woods a joy, also, in him.

Sylvan didn’t understand the magnitude of it. She didn’t grasp that she was, by almost any measure, the richest woman in the county. Owning almost four thousand acres was to her just another simple pleasure, like wearing an armful of sparkling bangles he had given her. As he might have, if he could.

Presents from a lover. Simple things. Dirt and streams and magnolia and dogwood, it was all the same to her, and when she pulled back the floorboard in the attic and looked at the deeds to her land she’d hidden there, she was seeing the sparkle of a secret lover’s secret trinkets. The land of Sylvan. More than four thousand acres, no heavier than a cheap bracelet on her arm.

“Thank you,” she would say, say it often, and he would always answer, “It’s nothing,” and he meant it. It was nothing, nothing to him compared to the ache and storm of his love for her, nothing compared to what lay inside her eyes when she looked up at him in a certain kind of way, a way that said that things would be, were, all right, and he believed her, the way we always believe the things that are said to us by the people we love.

But, lying in his narrow bed at night, fresh from making love to her, or, worse, on the nights he had not seen her and knew he would not for days, he knew it wasn’t enough. There wasn’t enough land in the world to say what he felt, to make her believe, so he drew her picture, again and again, and none of the drawings looked like her. There was no crayon in the box for the lichen color of her eyes, the amber glint of her hair as she fell into him in the pines at sunset, no color for the rush of it, the breathlessness, the haste of her love, his need, knowing what they knew, that it ended at sunset’s peak, and that she would be home and unattainable by dark.

In the margins of his diary, he would write scraps of poetry he remembered from school. “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.” Take my heart, he would think. It is your Xanadu. Build it here.

And even Scripture: ”Set me as a seal upon thine arm, as a seal upon thy heart; for love is strong as death,” snatches of memory that had nothing to do with her, except that everything, every word, had everything to do with her. She was everywhere in his life.

He drew a picture of himself, frozen in midair, the edge of the cliff behind him, like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoon strip, one step away from solid ground, just before the plunge, the instant fall that left plumes of disaster in the air where his body once had been. That was Charlie, in those times, everything the same, everything changed, everything lost, the world gained, because she was not, for him, a woman but the world.

He thought of her, as he drew her picture and wrote her name, thought of the panic and peace that came in the second, the split hair, before the plunge. The peace and the panic.

I want you. I love you. He couldn’t even say these things. They weren’t allowed. Words like that belonged to other people. Those words belonged to ordinary people who led ordinary lives.

It amazed him every moment that he, too, led an ordinary life. He was amazed he could get up in the morning and make a pot of coffee and put his pants on, the way he’d always done. When he got out of his bath in the morning, and shaved the night stubble from his face, he could see his body, and he saw it the way she saw it, and he liked what he saw, flat edges and smooth skin, still and calm and firm, his body as not just the box he carried his soul around in, but as something made of flesh and muscle and blood that somebody else wanted, his body as wholly owned by her as the rest of the things that used to belong to him.

He would die for her, just as he lived, now, for Sylvan and Sylvan alone. He would be a better person on her behalf, and he would be patient as Job, saying nothing, applying no pressure, wanting everything and expecting nothing. But it was hard for him, it was hard to pay attention to anything else, to focus on anything that didn’t have to do with her.

Everybody in town began to notice the change in him, the distance. What he did with his body began to show in his face. They could sense, dimly at first and then more clearly, that his enthusiasms had become particular, and they knew they had become particular for a particular woman.

Charlie Carter saw it first. He saw, in the late light of a Wednesday evening, Charlie Beale driving his truck down the drive and out of Boaty Glass’s gate, a beagle dog and Will Haislett’s boy on the seat beside him. He saw Charlie get out and close and latch the gate with a practiced assurance, then turn again to wave to Sylvan, who stood on the porch in her slip, and all that care and all that planning went up the chimney. Carter told his wife, who was a talker, and by the next afternoon, the whole town knew that the glow in Charlie Beale’s face was there because he was the lover of Mrs. Harrison Boatwright Glass, and the people of the town just shook their heads, amazed it had taken them so long to figure it out.

And they were, if you had asked them, they were glad for Charlie.

Towns like that, nothing is secret, and so Charlie became the subject of everyday gossip. Even Will and Alma heard about it, as they were bound to. They knew Charlie would do nothing to hurt the boy, but they also knew that love makes people careless and reckless, and they began to question, in their conversations in bed at night, whether Sam should still go out with Charlie so much. They talked about it, and they worried, but they waited. They didn’t know what they were waiting for. Sam was starting school in the fall. Maybe they were waiting for that, just to avoid any kind of confrontation.

There wasn’t any evidence. The boy had said nothing. Maybe the talk was just talk.

The Misses Allie knew. They knew something, anyway, even if they weren’t quite sure what it was. His name was up, as people used to say. They stopped him on the street one day as he was walking home at noon to eat his dinner.

“It’s baseball season, Mister Beale,” said Miss Allie, one or the other. They were both wearing red suits, thin women in expensive clothes, each wearing a heavy gold charm bracelet, one on the right arm, the other on the left, dozens of charms on each, heavy, jangling things. They always wore them so that everybody knew they were coming before they even saw them, as he did now. “You have to teach the boys.”

“And some of the girls, if they want to, Mister Beale,” said the other Miss Allie.

“Yes. Some of the girls. Maybe even some of the old spinster girls.” They laughed identical laughs, blue-white teeth thin as milk in their ancient mouths. When they smiled, they looked to be either a hundred or eighteen, their faces breaking into a thousand lines that spoke of delight, decades of pleasure in each other’s company.

“We’d need a field. There’s no place to play, Miss Allie, Miss Allie,” he said, glancing back and forth between the two eager faces, not knowing where to land his gaze, both faces being the same.

“Well, we have it figured out. There’s a field . . .”

“. . . behind our house. Flat as a board.”

“And Cousin Little Walton Mercer is all set to come and grade it down and put in baselines and even some bleacher seats, if you’ll just agree to take it on.”

“Say yes, Mister Beale. The boys . . .”

“. . . and girls need it, something to do, somewhere to go.”

“Something to do, Mister Beale, and Cousin Little Walton can have it done in three days. Say yes, Mister Beale.”

“Please do, Mister Beale.”

“Of course, ladies. That would be a pleasure.”

“That’s the ticket!” Miss Allie shook his hand firmly, a symphony of gold charms erupting around him. “We’ll put an announcement in the paper, and you’ll see, it’ll be the new thing.”

“Be good to do something fun with the boys . . . and girls.”

“Well, we’ve thought about this all winter. Something has to be done. This town is as sleepy as a tick mattress. Needs some life.”

“And it’s going to be right in our backyard. Thank you, Mister Beale, thank you again. I’ll be the Happy Chandler of Brownsburg, Virginia, Elinor.” She glanced at her sister, then turned to Charlie, explaining, “He’s a Kentucky cousin of ours, you know.”

“And I’ll be the Casey Stengel, Ansolette.”

“Well, we’ll see, ladies. We’ll see. Now, I have to get on home and have my dinner. Nice day, ladies.”

As he walked away, one of them—Ansolette? Elinor?—stopped him with a gentle call. “Mister Beale?”

He turned. “Yes?”

“Is everything all right? All right with you?”

He felt his cheeks flush with shame. He felt as he always felt, as though he had just been stopped for committing a crime he couldn’t remember. Except, in this case, he remembered every detail. Everything in him wanted to tell the old ladies the truth, at least as he understood it. It is, and it isn’t, he wanted to say. It is now, and it never will be. Some things you don’t say. Some things you just carry.

The wonder of her body, he wanted to say, the way she looks at me, sometimes, only sometimes, but then, that way. Between the twins and where he stood, stood Sylvan; he could see her, a full young woman in a yellow dress from the movies, smiling in that way that made his heart explode in his chest, every single time. Explode.