Monday, Monday: A Novel (36 page)

“Oh. I’ll see you later, okay? I’m going to look for Jack.”

Nicholas nodded. “Don’t let Ranger go outside. He runs away. We have to take him out on a leash. One time the coyotes got him.”

Wyatt walked back to the cabin and got in his rental car. He figured the two grocery stores in Alpine weren’t open this early and that Jack had gone to Amigos, the closest convenience store. He turned off the dirt road onto a potholed road bordered by an assortment of small houses—shingle and brick and stucco. Shadows of tall agave plants and Spanish daggers lay in stark stripes across the pavement. Cactus and century plants stood in the yards amid lawn furniture and a clutter of ornaments. He was about to turn onto the highway, but then saw Jack’s old blue Honda approaching from town, so he pulled off to the shoulder and got out to wait.

Jack made the turn and stopped in the road.

“Pull over,” Wyatt told him. Wyatt got in with him, his knees crammed up to the dash. Under his feet cassette tapes by B.B. King and Asleep at the Wheel littered the floorboard.

“What’s the plan?” Wyatt asked.

“Originally it was to talk to Carlotta this morning. But then Madeline and Andy showed up uninvited. They’re having a marital crisis. Madeline came here to be with her mom, and then Andy got here just a little before you did.” He tapped the wheel impatiently with his thumb. “I haven’t had coffee yet. I’m about to go make some.”

“Okay. But why is the portrait in the cabin?”

“What portrait?”

“The one I did of Shelly.”

“It’s not.”

“Yes it is. In the closet. It’s damaged.”

“Then maybe Madeline brought it.”

“I thought Shelly might have brought it.”

“Shelly gave it to Madeline years ago.”

Wyatt considered that. “Anyway, the top layer of paint is chipping.”

“What do you mean?”

“Over the breast,” Wyatt said.

“You mean, you can see—”

“You might say.”

“I don’t have a clue what that’s about,” Jack said. “This place is a minefield. I don’t know where to step.”

A raven landed aggressively in the road, chasing away a sparrow that was pecking at the pavement. “Am I invited for coffee?” Wyatt asked.

“Come on,” Jack said irritably.

“Why are you so disgruntled?”

“Because this is a hell of a mess. We have to take care of this with Carlotta, and there are too many people in the house.”

Wyatt got back in his rental car, gave Jack’s Honda a head start to let the dust settle, and then followed, the sun glinting off the hood, the pitched roof of the house at the end of the road before him.

Jack was making the coffee when Wyatt walked into the kitchen. Nicholas wasn’t there, but the Magic 8 Ball sat beside the bowl of soggy cornflakes. On the television a CNN newscaster reported on recent American casualties in Iraq, and Jack picked up the control and muted the sound. “Too many guys getting killed in this stupid war.”

Wyatt watched the silent broadcast while coffee dribbled into the pot. He pulled the pot out prematurely and poured himself a cup, wiping the spill with a sodden sponge. “You think there’s any chance Madeline and her husband might leave, so we can go back to plan A?”

“Why don’t you ask the 8 Ball.” Jack lifted a skillet down from a rack over the stove. “Do you want any eggs?”

“Yeah.”

“Scrambled?”

“Yeah.” Wyatt sat at the table and drank his coffee. He picked up the 8-Ball. “I’m sorry about all this. Is this going to go okay?”

“No, it’s not going to ‘go okay,’” Jack said, cracking an egg and dumping it in the skillet. “It’s going to stir up a lot of painful information. At the very least, a lot of people are going to be confused. I doubt anyone’s life is going to be ruined, but let me tell you, this won’t just ‘go okay.’”

“I was asking the 8 Ball,” Wyatt said.

He turned the ball over and gave it two shakes. Staring into the small window of murky liquid, he waited for the answer to surface. Slowly the message
CANNOT PREDICT NOW
bobbed up.

Wyatt shook the ball again, and
BETTER NOT TELL YOU NOW
appeared in the window. He shook it again, and
YOU MAY RELY ON IT
floated sideways before righting itself.

“That’s more like it,” he said.

Nicholas came in from the hall in his pajama bottoms, the dog behind him. “That’s my 8 Ball.”

“It wouldn’t give me a straight answer,” Wyatt told him.

“You always have to shake it again before it gives you the right answer,” Nicholas said. “Do you want to see my tadpole now?”

“Later, when everyone’s up.”

“We can be quiet,” Nicholas told him.

Dutifully, Wyatt got up from the table. “Hold the eggs,” he told Jack. Slipping his shoes off, conscious of the loud jangle of tags on the dog’s collar, he followed the dog and Nicholas up the stairs. Nicholas forgot to be quiet and skittered into the sitting room, and Wyatt hoped Shelly wouldn’t appear from one of the doorways. Having shown up at the house last night, unexpected, with the dog, he didn’t want to be caught creeping sock-footed upstairs.

“His name is Jerry,” Nicholas said too loudly. “I got a certificate, and we had to order him. He came in the mail.”

The room was cluttered with wires draped from the television to a game machine on the floor at the foot of the sofa bed. Nicholas pulled a plastic water-filled container off a bookshelf and set it carefully on the floor. He knelt, looking inside it. “Sometimes it’s hard to see him. He sleeps under the bridge. It’s not a real bridge. Nothing can really go over it.” He poked his finger into the water. “There he is. He’s sleeping.”

Leaning down, Wyatt set his hands on his knees, and staring into the water saw the creature bob, belly-up, to the surface and float there inanimately, like the buoyant device in the Magic 8 Ball.

“Nicholas?” he said quietly.

The dog crowded in. Nicholas pushed him away, trying to right the tadpole with his finger. “He needs to wake up,” he said, then tilted his head back and raised his eyes to Wyatt. His unwashed hair was musty and warm. Wyatt settled a hand on his thin shoulder. He felt the hard bones, the strong pulse in the neck, and watched the boy lower his head again and stare at the tadpole floating over the yellow bridge. “Is he all right?” Nicholas asked. “Is he dead?”

“I think he is dead,” Wyatt said as gently as he could. “Should I get your mother?”

The boy continued to stare at the drifting body, its legs outspread, its belly exposed to the air.

“Do you want me to get your mother?”

Nicholas reached in slowly and scooped the tadpole into his palm, water dribbling through his fingers. Cupping his hand, he brought it to his chest. His bottom lip curled down, and his eyes squinted closed. A whimper turned to a cry. He got to his feet. Holding his fist to his chest, he walked in a small circle, his body hunched at the shoulders. Finally he leaned over and let out a high-pitched wail, the tears dropping out of his eyes and a stream of spittle falling as slowly as a spun web from his mouth to the floor.

43

A SEARCH PARTY

Shelly was brushing her teeth when she heard the wailing. She pulled her bathrobe on, flung her door open, and ran to the next room, where she found Nicholas on the far side of the sofa bed, clutching something and weeping, while Andy, in boxer shorts, pleaded with him to surrender the object he held. Madeline knelt at Nicholas’s side, saying, “Oh honey, sweet boy, I’m so, so sorry,” the thin strap of her sleep-shirt dangling off her shoulder. Beside Andy stood Wyatt. He turned to look at Shelly.

The scene baffled her: her half-clothed daughter and son-in-law and her weeping grandson alongside Wyatt Calvert, whom she had once loved so profoundly that she had wished herself dead.

“His tadpole died,” Wyatt told her.

“It’s my fault!” Nicholas howled. “It’s because he sloshed around!”

“It isn’t your fault, honey,” Madeline reassured him.

Shelly waded through the clutter to wrap Nicholas in her arms. “Sweetheart, your mother’s right; you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But he sloshed around! I shouldn’t have brought him with me! I wish I had left him at home! I wish I hadn’t come here!” He buried his head against her, his bony ribs pressed into her breast.

Andy said, “Take a deep breath, son. Get hold of yourself—you can do that,” and finally Nicholas opened his hand and let his father take the lifeless tadpole. “I want to bury him in a jar with water,” he sniffed. “Will Nana pick it?”

“Of course, sweetie. A perfect one.” Leaving the room to go downstairs for a jar, she saw Carlotta looking out of her bedroom door.

“Is that Nicholas crying?”

“His tadpole died.”

In the kitchen Shelly found Jack scrambling eggs, and told him about the tadpole. She selected an olive jar from the cabinet, rummaged for a lid, and then walked out to the porch to settle her mind. The sun was spreading warmth over the floorboards. A rusty windmill turned slowly in the distance. Madeline came outside to stand beside her.

“I blame Andy for this,” Madeline said.

She blamed him for a lot more, too. The ruin of the portrait—everything—their whole lives seemed to be coming apart because of what Andy had done. The best Madeline could do for now was manage the pieces.

She would start by getting the portrait out of the cabin and back in her car. So while Andy and Nicholas dug the tadpole’s grave at the base of the big cottonwood tree outside Shelly’s bedroom window, Madeline borrowed a sheet from the utility room and drove down to the cabin. She took Ranger along to be sure he didn’t escape from the house and run off again. Wyatt was still at the house, so she let herself into the cabin without knocking, took the portrait out of the closet, hauled it outside, and shoved it upright into the Suburban, pushing Ranger back when he tried to jump out. She slung the sheet over the portrait.

She had driven only a few yards back toward the house when a draft of air swept in. Glancing back, she saw Ranger with his forepaws on the window button, sniffing the wind. Before she could react, he leaped out. She braked and flung her door open, but the dog was already running. He didn’t look back when she called. She drove to the house, slammed the car into park, and ran around back to the cottonwood where Andy and Nicholas, on their knees, were digging the hole with spades.

“Ranger’s out again!” she shouted at them.

Andy wiped his forehead. “Which way did he go?”

“That way.” She waved.

Andy tossed the spade and looked disgusted.

“You’re the one who brought him!” Madeline yelled. “Go look for him on the highway. Ask Mom to look. Nicholas, come with me.”

Nicholas climbed into the front seat. He called Ranger from the window while they drove around the property and through the neighborhood across the road. Several times they heard barking in the distance but couldn’t place where it came from, and it ceased when Madeline turned the motor off to listen.

“What if we never find him?” Nicholas asked her.

“We’ll find him. He has tags.”

In the neighborhood they stopped and asked a small boy on a tricycle if he had seen the dog, but he hadn’t. They talked to a girl who was petting a tethered horse by a rusty water trough and to a woman watering plants on a porch. “
No, mi hijo
,” the woman told Nicholas, shaking her head.

“First Jerry and now Ranger,” Nicholas said mournfully as he climbed back into the car.

They returned to the house, where they found Andy, Jack, and Delia in the kitchen.

“I’ve been everywhere,” Andy explained.

“Where’s Mom?” Madeline asked.

“With Carlotta in the truck. Wyatt’s driving around too.”

“Get a drink,” Madeline told Nicholas. “Fill up a water bottle. We’ll be better off on foot. We’ll take a tennis ball with us.”

Delia was describing the dog over the telephone to a neighbor. “He’s white with black patches. His ears are erect.”

“He’s more black, with white patches,” Madeline corrected her. “With brown on his nose.”

“No one would notice the brown,” Andy said. “Just say he’s a rat terrier.”

Madeline added, “Like a fox terrier, but with short hair and a different-shaped head.”

Delia said into the phone, “He’s the size of a small poodle.”

Andy said he would take the golf cart and search the back of the property.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, trudging a mile from the house near a dump of rusting cars, toting Nicholas’s water bottle and a tennis ball, Madeline had begun to think they would never see the troublesome dog again, when he appeared on the trail before them, trotting in their direction.

“There he is!” Nicholas yelled.

The dog sat down on the trail. His face had an unfamiliar expression, his top lip curled in a freakish smile. Nicholas ran to him and tried to pick him up, but then turned and shouted, “Mom! There’s something sticking out of his nose!”

“Probably cactus,” Madeline said, and went to examine him while Nicholas squatted and held the collar. Ranger panted, flicking saliva and jerking his head. Madeline was trying to hold his head still when something pricked her fingers and the dog yelped, slinging his head and tugging to get away. Needlelike spikes protruded out of his nose. “It’s not cactus,” Madeline said. “It’s porcupine quills.”

“Will he die?” Nicholas cried. “Is he going to die?”

“No, honey. Jack and Delia will know how to get these out.”

“But he can’t close his mouth!”

Dropping the ball and the water bottles, Madeline carried the dog while Nicholas trotted beside her. By the time they reached the driveway she was sticky with sweat and dog saliva, her arms itching from Ranger’s hair.

She set the dog on the kitchen floor in front of Jack and Delia. He didn’t move, just panted and rolled his eyes. Delia gave him a bowl of water, but he didn’t attempt to drink. Pacing around the bowl, he whined, rubbing his snout on the floor and scraping it with his forepaws.

Jack left and returned with a pair of pliers. “Will it hurt him?” Nicholas asked.

“He won’t like it,” Jack admitted.

Ranger moved in circles. When Jack set him up on the table, he started to tremble. “Madeline, hold him still. Nicholas, help your mom. Talk to Ranger so he’ll stay calm.”