Plan B for the Middle Class (3 page)

If I told you that DeRay was a guy who was on parole and loved his motorcycle, it would be misleading, though he did have a big blue tattoo of a skull and a rose. He wore size-thirteen engineer boots and a biker's black cap, greasy as a living thing. In the evenings he arrived home, proud as a man on a horse, yanking the big Harley back onto its stand, and throwing his right leg back over the bike purposefully to come to the ground and stand as a body utterly capable of trouble.

But the picture needs qualification. For instance: it wasn't actually parole. It was
like
parole. Once a month DeRay saw a guy at social services to state that he had not been in any bars. He could not go into a bar for another four months, because he used to be in barroom fights. He would go to biker bars and when a fight would start, he would fight. It was his personality, they told him. He knew none of the people in the fights and the fights weren't about him in any way, but his personality—when it was exposed to a fight, especially indoors—dictated that he fight too. So, it wasn't parole. And he did have that tattoo on the inside of his right forearm, but unless he stopped to show it to you it was hard to tell there was a rose. It looked like a birthmark.

He showed it to me one night on his front porch. Evenings were cool there and that is where he and Krystal sat on an old nappy couch and watched the traffic and drank beer. They drank exactly five six-packs every night, he told me, and—at first—thirty cans seemed a lot, and I worried that there might be a fight, but I came to see that DeRay generally slowed down over the evening, climbing off the porch in those big boots to move his Lawn Jet, or to pack another six beers into the Igloo. Some nights he stood and talked to the traffic. If he started talking like that while I was around, I stood and quietly left. It was his business.

The thing about DeRay that cannot be minimized was his love for his motorcycle. It was a large Harley-Davidson with a beautiful maroon gas tank and chrome fenders. The world was ten miles deep in the reflections. The way he listened to it when he first kicked the starter; the way he kept it running—silent—when he drove away in the morning as if man and machine were being sucked into a vacuum, disappearing down the street; the way he dismounted with clear pleasure—these things showed his affection.

Once Liz was out in front of our garage putting Allie in the stroller when DeRay came up and plucked the baby from her, saying, “Come on over here, baby, check these wheels.” He put Allie on the seat of the huge motorcycle and she broke into a real grin. She could see her face in a dozen shiny places. “See,” DeRay said to Liz, “she loves it. It won't be long.” He called to the porch: “Hey, Krystal, check this out!”

Krystal appeared and leaned over. “Oh, right, DeRay. She's a real mama. She's your new mama, all right.”

I watched it all from our new kitchen window, and seeing DeRay there holding the baby on the Harley, I thought: There's the center—the two most loved things on the block.

Both DeRay and Krystal were somewhere in their forties. She was a lean woman who looked good in tight jeans. In the face she resembled Joan Baez, perhaps a little more worn—and her nose was larger, pretty and hawklike at the same time. Her long reddish hair was wired with some gray and she usually wore it all in a bandanna. She told me she was one of four women who were on line crews in the entire state. She made it sound like a lot of fun. I'd sit on their porch, my head full of bubbles anyway with yard fever, dirt, and cold beer. One of my calves would start to tremble, and I imagined if I worked with Krystal she'd always be telling me what to do, like a mother, and I would do it. Her lean face seemed hard and affectionate. It had seen a lot of traffic, that was clear. From the corner of the porch, I could see my new kitchen window—Liz in there moving around the high chair.

One night when I was at DeRay's, Krystal went inside where we could hear her on the phone. “Her in-laws,” DeRay told me. “Old Krystal's had herself a couple of cowboys.”

Later, we were just talking when out of the blue he said, “What's the worst thing you ever did?”

I knew that he was going to make some confession, a theft or beating a woman, some threat he'd made stick. He looked hard that night, his face vaguely blue in the early-evening gloom.

“I don't know,” I said. “Burn down the ROTC Building.” It was an old joke. I was on the roof of the building the night it burned, but I was only peripherally involved in the crime.

“Oh, arsony,” DeRay mocked. “That's terrible.”

I drank from my beer and went ahead: “What's the worst thing you ever did?”

“What you're doing now.”

“What?” I sat up. “What am I doing?”

“Dragging dirt around. Putting in a yard.”

“Oh,” I said. “I hear that. It's torture.”

“No you don't. You don't even know,” he said. “I've had three houses. How old do you think I am?”

“I don't know. Forty-five?”

“Forty-nine.” He rocked forward and threw his beer can out with the others. “I've had three families, for chrissakes. And that doesn't even count this deal here.” He gestured over his shoulder where Krystal was on the phone. He snapped another beer open and grimaced over the first sip: “I mean, I put in some lawns.”

“That's a lot of work,” I said.

“Nah.” He waved it off. “You can't even hear me. But listen, when you dig for the sprinklers, rent a trencher. You won't be sorry.”

And DeRay was right. There is nothing better after an unbroken plain or manual labor than to introduce a little technology into the program. The trencher was beautiful. The large treaded tires measured the line exactly and the entire mechanism crawled across my yard like a tortoise. The trench was carved as if with a knife, straight sides and a square bottom exactly eight inches from the surface. All the other feats of the past year, the room in the basement, the kitchen window, my straight fence, vanished before this, the first stage of my sprinkling system. That night I worked way beyond my usual quitting time. When I finally looked up, I saw the yellow light in the kitchen; the world was dark.

This is when DeRay opened the gate and came up and took the handlebars of the trencher out of my hands and conducted it to the end of the line. It was the last ditch. He surveyed the yard and switched the machine off. “Yeah, it's a good, simple machine,” he said. “Load it up and come over for a beer.”

I stayed at their place until almost eleven. I didn't count as I left, but I knew there were more than thirty empties on the lawn. DeRay receded from the conversation and Krystal told me about her first husband, who was in a mental health facility in Denver, a chronic schizophrenic. She filed to divorce him while he was in the hospital. “He was as crazy as you get to be,” she said. “I still keep in touch with his mom and dad in Oklahoma City. He was a dear boy,” Krystal said, “but he couldn't keep two things together and his jealousy cost me three jobs.”

When I went home all the lights were off. I took my clothes off in the garage as always and padded in. Liz was in bed watching television. I could hear people laughing. I turned on the bathroom light, and Liz said, “How're the Hell's Angels?”

“You've been watching too much Letterman.” I came to the bedroom door.

“You've been outside this house since four o'clock. We had a lovely dinner.”

“Oh, now we're going to fight about dinner?” I could feel the rough cuff of dirt around my neck and I hated standing there dirty and naked.

“We're going to fight about whatever I want to fight about.”

“Look, Liz. Don't. I've been in the yard. We want the yard, right?” I felt the closeness of the rooms; it was suddenly strange to be inside. “I've got to take a shower,” I said.

“Where are you?” she said before I could turn. It was a tough question, because I was right there full of beer, but she was on to something. It was August and I wasn't looking forward to school starting. I shrugged and showed her my brown arms. She looked at me and said, “Let it go, if you like. Just let the yard go.”