The Bright Forever (3 page)

He wasn’t particularly handsome. Clare could say that without feeling ashamed; it was as much a fact as her own plain looks. He was a stocky man with a round, sunburned face, and his red hair had already thinned. Because he knew he wasn’t, in his own words, “easy on the peepers,” he tried hard to make up for it by being friendly.

One evening—Ray had gone down the road to help Mr. Dees with his birdhouse—Clare looked out the front window and saw Thelma and Tubby Carl coming out of Lottie and Leo Marks’s house across the street. Thelma was carrying an empty pie tin. Tubby was smoking his pipe. Lottie and Leo stepped out onto their porch, Lottie with her hair curled and piled up on top of her head, Leo still holding a hand of playing cards. Clare knew they’d all been playing euchre or pinochle. They’d been cracking jokes. Even now they were laughing. Tubby had to take his pipe away from his mouth, he was laughing so hard, and Lottie’s elaborate hairdo was wobbling. “Now, that’s rich.” Thelma beat the pie tin against her leg. “Did you hear that, Tubby? My God.”

It hadn’t been so long ago that Clare and Bill had been a part of their neighbors’ card games and ice cream suppers, but after Bill died, Clare knew that what she had long suspected was indeed true. It had always been Bill’s company that people like Thelma and Tubby, Lottie and Leo had valued, not hers. Before he got sick, Bill had an easy way about him. He liked good food and good jokes. He had a tattoo of a mermaid on his right bicep, and often when they were over at a neighbor’s house, he rolled up his shirtsleeve, flexed his muscle, and made that mermaid wiggle and dance. “That’s Clare, dancing the hootchy-kootchy,” he said, and it made her face burn when everyone laughed as if they thought dancing the hootchy-kootchy was the last thing in the world skinny old plain-faced Clare would do. There she was, her chest caved in, her shoulders slumped, and there was the mermaid, all breasts and hips, all curves and long, flowing hair. When Clare heard everyone hoot and laugh, she wanted to go home and never come back. “Honestly,” she told Bill one night. “I wish I never had to set foot in those people’s houses again.”

Now she had her wish. For a while after Bill died, neighbors like Thelma and Lottie stopped in to bring her a recipe from the
Evening Register
or to ask her if she’d like to come along to a Rebekkahs lodge meeting or to the Top Hat Inn for a bottle of beer and some songs on the jukebox, but she was shy without Bill to ease the way for her, and more often than not she said she had sewing to do or a TV program she wanted to watch, and then she took up with Ray, and soon the invitations stopped.

She was thinking about the purple martins that evening and how they came each spring to Mr. Dees’s apartment houses as she watched the Carls and the Markses and listened to their cackles and guffaws. “Oh, God,” Thelma kept saying. “Oh, God. Stop, stop. You’ll make me pee my pants.” Folks needed to be together. As much as she hated hearing Thelma—as much as she hated seeing her and Lottie and Tubby and Leo having so much fun—she also longed to be a part of it the way she did when she was a schoolgirl and harbored secret crushes on the girls with bright, pretty faces. She loved the way they called to one another in the hallways, their voices gay and confident: “Hey, Flo. Hey, Teep. What’s the dope?” She knew she would never be one of those girls. She was too timid, too ordinary. But that didn’t stop her from wanting their company.

Ray came down the road carrying his stepladder. Clare heard the ladder, toted at his side, dragging now and then over the macadam road. She felt the weight of the ladder in her own arms and how difficult it would be, if someone was bone tired, to keep it balanced so the tip of a leg wouldn’t dip and scrape. She knew Ray was worn out. He’d come home that evening and said, “I’m give in.” He was working concrete on a new hospital construction in Jasper. Some days, after work, he drove over to Patoka Lake and fished for bluegill, but on this night he had come straight home—“all used up,” he’d said, “and no place to throw me away.”

When Mr. Dees came to ask him to help with the birdhouse, Clare tried to convince Ray to let it go for another time when he wasn’t so tired—“You take it easy, hon,” she told him—but he said he didn’t reckon it’d kill him to do Mr. Dees a good turn. “I can’t help but feel sorry for him,” he said, keeping his voice low so Mr. Dees, who waited in the yard, wouldn’t hear. “He’s all alone. He can use a friend.”

Now Ray was coming home, and as he got closer, the laughter that had been coming from Lottie and Leo Marks’s front porch went dead, and then the noise of the ladder dragging was a miserable thing to hear. Clare’s hand moved to her throat, her fingers feeling the flutter of pulse there. She hadn’t thought to make this motion, but an overwhelming ache had surprised her, a sadness and longing that rose from her chest and filled her throat. She opened the door and stepped out into the night. She went hurrying up the road to meet Ray, not caring that Lottie and Leo and Thelma and Tubby were watching.

“Darlin’,” Ray said with a sigh.

She didn’t say a word. She just touched her fingers to his face. He took her hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it. Then she picked up the end of that ladder, and together they carried it home.

Mr. Dees saw it all from where he was still standing by the martin houses. It was nearly dark, but he could see Ray struggling with the ladder. Then he heard the scraping stop, and the faraway sound of those people laughing stop, and there was enough light for him to make out Clare’s slight figure coming up the road. He looked away. It wasn’t his to see. A woman coming out to meet the man who loved her. It wasn’t anything he knew. He knew instead the steps of children coming to their dining room tables for their lessons and the shy way they hesitated at their first meetings, their hair brushed and shining, their faces scrubbed and smelling of soap. “I’m Mister Dees,” he told them. He held out his hand and waited until they touched their warm palms to his. “Good,” he said. “Now we can begin.”

CLARE’S FRONT DOOR
opened right out into the yard, without even a single concrete step. That wasn’t right, Ray said that night after he stowed the stepladder in the tool shed. That wasn’t any way for someone to have to walk into a house. He’d build a porch, he told her, build it out of cement blocks, and then when he was done he’d build a garage out back. Make it big enough so he could have a workshop. Once he got going, why stop?

“A porch?” Clare said. “
And
a garage? Goodness, won’t we be moving up in the world!”

Maybe, she thought, Ray wanted the porch and the garage because he intended to do something to the house to make it his, make it seem as if he had always lived in it with her. Maybe he wanted her to forget what it had felt like to live there with Bill. Ray, after all, was a man who had never been married. He’d had his fill, he told her, of bouncing around the country bird-dogging construction jobs, living in motor courts and trailer parks, taking his meals out or cooking on a hot plate. He wanted to make a home with her, wanted to stay in it through the winter instead of loading up and heading south, as had always been his habit. He was working on that hospital in Jasper, a job that would last the summer. He’d save his money, he told her. Then, when winter came and the work dried up, they’d be all right.

She wanted to trust in that. “My folks had a porch on their house,” she told him. “They’d sit out on it after supper, and neighbors would stop by just to shoot the breeze. We’d have iced tea, and sometimes we’d have pie.”

“Sure,” he said. “Darlin’, that’s the way it should be.”

If they had a porch, he explained, and they were out there night after night, neighbors like Lottie and Leo Marks—sure, he’d seen them out there with Thelma and Tubby Carl, had taken note of how they all shut their yaps when they saw him coming up the road—wouldn’t be able to ignore them. Sooner or later, some of them would feel ashamed and they’d come over to say howdy-do. Then they’d find out how friendly he could be, and they’d be happy for Clare and life would get back to normal.

She imagined that he was eager to lay claim to a home, even that square frame house with its ugly brown asphalt shingle siding.

So the idea was to build a porch and then, little by little, win the neighbors over. They’d have the life he’d always dreamed of: a wife and a home and friends to fill it. “I’ve never had that,” he told Clare. He said it with a quiet simplicity—merely stating the fact—and it broke her heart to know that it was so.

One evening in June, he came home when it was well past dark. Clare was outside taking clothes off the line. Earlier, she had walked home from Brookstone Manor, the nursing home where she worked—sometimes in the laundry, sometimes in housecleaning, and sometimes in the kitchen. She had scrubbed out her white uniform dress, her cook’s apron, and three of the sleeveless T-shirts that Ray wore and had hung them to dry. Now she was taking down the clothes, folding them, and laying them in her laundry basket. Around her, faint voices drifted out through her neighbors’ open windows, and from time to time a murmur of laughter rose up from a television program. A screen door’s spring creaked. An oscillating fan whirred. She had left the clothes out as long as she could so she wouldn’t have to stand in the light and have her neighbors pass by, talking in low voices—harping, so she would believe, about her and Ray and what a fool she was to take up with the likes of him. Soon the dew would start falling; already the air smelled of it, cool and damp, and she was hurrying to gather the clothes.

Ray drove his pickup into the yard. The tailpipe scraped over the gravel driveway. That’s how low the rear end was riding. The headlight beams came to rest on her, and she shielded her eyes with her hand.

He cut off the engine. The truck backfired once and then was still. He opened the door, the hinges squealing, and the dome light’s glow fell over him. He bent forward and touched his forehead to the steering wheel. Then he pulled his shoulders back, lifted his head, and ran a hand over his face, starting with his brow and then wiping straight down, over his eyes, nose, mouth, and chin.

Clare came across the yard and rested her clothes basket on the truck’s fender. It was a 1958 Ford that he’d bought for a song from an excavating company, and instead of leaving
TRI-STATE BACKHOE
on the green doors, he’d painted a large black circle over each one. “Now that’s sporty,” he told Clare. Then, in the middle of each black circle, with white paint, he stenciled the truck’s empty weight and the name of the city and state.

EW: 3900

Tower Hill, Ind.

Just below the windows, he painted his name in a small, elegant script:
R. R. WRIGHT.
“Raymond Royal Wright,” he said when he finished. “Now folks know who they’re dealing with.”

Generally, he kept some tools and his fishing gear in the bed of the truck, but tonight the tools and the tackle were in the cab because the truck was loaded down with cement blocks—a gray-faced wall of them, squared and neat against the sideboards. Clare balanced the clothes basket against her hip, reached out her free hand, and laid it flat against the cement, which was rough and cool.

“You had me worried, Ray.” She pulled her hand back from the blocks. “It got dark, and I kept thinking something had happened to you. Did you pass out again? Did you get sick from the sun?”

He had always been sensitive to the sun. From time to time on the job, the heat got to him and he keeled over. The men humped him down from the scaffold and laid him in the shade. They threw water in his face, took off their shirts and fanned him. Sometimes he pissed himself, and, of course, after he had his senses back they gave him a hard time, and he couldn’t help but hate them. He sat in the shade with a cold drink, and sometimes he had to turn his head and gag up what was in his stomach, and he hated the men even more because they were out there in the sun, some of them bare-chested, calling out to one another.
Hot enough for you? Jesus, yes. Hot. Damn straight, it’s hot. Hotter than a firecracker. Hotter than a billy goat in a pepper patch. Hotter than a naked dog in hell.

“No, I didn’t get sick.” He slammed the truck’s door, and his voice was sharp. For a good while, he didn’t say anything, and when he finally spoke it was with a gentle tone. “I didn’t get sick, darlin’. I had to wait for dark to load up these blocks. You should see the stack we’ve got up there at that hospital site. I just took a few. Not enough for anyone to miss.”

From time to time, Clare caught a glimpse of his temper, but it wasn’t anything that worried her. It was what she knew from men—their clenched jaw muscles, their bunched brows, their narrowed eyes. She knew the heat in their voices, their bluster. They were all little boys who’d never been loved enough, and now their big bodies couldn’t hold all the hurt they carried. Sometimes, when Ray was sleeping, she ran her finger lightly over his scars—the ridge low on his belly where the doctors had opened him to operate for rupture, the small white line at the corner of his lip where a knife had cut him, the mark on his ankle where doctors had set the fractured bone with a steel pin—and she loved him for all he wouldn’t tell her, all the stories behind those scars. She loved him for thinking he had to keep all that to himself.

“Ray,” she said now. “You hadn’t ought to have taken these blocks. What if someone finds out?”

“Ah, darlin’.” He put his arm across her back and gave her a squeeze. “Don’t you know I’m a lucky man?”

She thought of his scarred body. “Not that lucky.”

“Why, sure I am. I got you, didn’t I?”

“You’re a nut. Sometimes I think you’re off your rocker.”

“Oh, I’m crazy all right. Crazy in love.”

“Well, if you’re crazy, I guess I am, too.”

“That’s right. You and me. We’re head over heels. Tell me. Has any man ever treated you better?”

“No,” she said. “Never.”

Later, while she was sleeping, she woke to the sound of Ray moving through the house. At first she was confused. She thought she was still married to Bill. Then, when she had everything straight in her head, shame washed over her because she had denied her first husband when she had told Ray that no man had ever been as good to her as he had. But it was true, wasn’t it? She lay in bed, listening to him opening cabinets, and she knew it was impossible to say what was between people, and the longer you were with someone, the harder it was to even come close. All she knew was that once she had been with Bill and now she was with Ray. She had come out of her old life and into a new one, and even if she wished for it, which she didn’t—not really, she didn’t, not in her heart of hearts—she couldn’t go back.