The Cadence of Grass (22 page)

“Bill lives the life he was born into. It’s his gift.”

“I’m sure you’re right. It just looks like he’s in a rut to me.”

“He’s not in a rut.” Evelyn quickly recognized that this conversation could go wrong as she was already in a disturbed state. She did not want Sunny Jim eradicated entirely. The admiring degree of separation from Bill was gone and, in its place, bafflement that Sunny Jim had so insisted on her spending time here. By the time she’d understood her real relationship to Bill, she’d been around him a long time. Who arranged that?

One effect of this perturbance was that Evelyn suddenly needed to know about Geraldine. She was so compelled to see her, it was as if the wind drove her across the town. Geraldine was wide-eyed with alarm when Evelyn burst into her office. At first, she refused to discuss Paul. Instead she talked about her nephew having rolled her car, speaking to Evelyn with an odd, frantic intimacy.

“Shane’s fine, but I wish they’d just totaled the car. Honda Civic. These days, if there’s anything left
at all,
they fix ’em. I went over there and watched the estimator fill five single-spaced sheets. Every body panel is toast. Frame’s okay,
we think,
and he says the unibody looks all right. But they had to pull the dash, and that gets to be a mess with the AC, the mounts for the steering column, the wipers, the CD changer, and the fan housing is just hanging in midair. And
nobody
knows about the electronics, because of this secret chip that’s in there.”

Evelyn thought she was going to jump out of her skin. Then, from some kind of subdued rage that also meant to indict Geraldine’s professionalism, she demanded to know if reviewing Paul’s record was what had attracted her to him.

“Is this a joke?” asked Geraldine.

“I assure you it is not,” Evelyn heard herself say.

“Let me tell you something, lady. When I read the prison reports on this guy, I was afraid to be in the same building with him.”

Evelyn reluctantly noted the woman’s prettiness, and furthermore disliked being addressed as “lady.” She also thought that in making Paul seem so fearsome on the basis of some in-house files and reports, this bitch was acting as both judge and jury. Moreover, Evelyn’s heart went out to Paul, who must have felt imprisoned by these attempts by state wage slaves to malign him. “What exactly did these reports say?”

“Well, one of them implied he’d taken the fall for your father, and that had made him pretty bitter.”

Evelyn recalled that Sunny Jim made numerous general remarks about Paul, the strongest being that he was “incomplete.” Evelyn found this a very troubling observation about her husband. When she finally found the nerve to ask him to elaborate, Sunny Jim looked grim and then stated that while Paul had the prettiest swing since Bobby Jones, his short game left much to be desired.

“Anybody would be bitter just to be
in
prison.” Evelyn said, trying to reference something—she thought, perhaps, a study how prison actually
created
criminals—but it wouldn’t come. She remembered how having a husband in the penitentiary had changed her own status. It was an education she intended to remember.

“Paul did well in the general prison population. Plenty of people were afraid of him, which is surprising for someone in on fairly small charges. He had a lot of leadership. Depending on who you believe, it may be that he misused it. I’ve got to hand it to Paul, he makes his own trouble.” Geraldine was in full control of the situation.

“This is where it all turns into interpretation.” How Evelyn hated the defensiveness she heard in her own voice.

“Okay.”

“So, I guess that’s it for the facts.”

“You could say so. Some very informed people think he figured out how to burn through the Plexiglas on the guard shacks to release the secured wing. It cost some lives. But what do they know?”

Having heard all she could stand, Evelyn abruptly departed, driving toward home to the sound of hectic, disquieting jazz coming from some low-wattage station on the High Line, whose host implied he was broadcasting from a smokey, hip and urban dive—“bebop, fusion, acid jazz”—instead of this wind-blasted cow town on the Canadian border. Evelyn gave plenty of room to a Nova in the ditch, three annoyed young people regarding the car as though it were a bad dog. On the other side of the street were seasonal vehicles, hunting rigs, firewood trucks, covered in deep snow, that people didn’t care if they saw until spring anyway. Evelyn remembered one of Paul’s favorite pitches about liking women with ideas, and how unwelcome hers had been to him. Approaching her neighborhood seemed increasingly strange: trotting horse wind vanes, ferns crowding snow-covered windows, family names—
KUCKER, ORDWAY, GOOLEY
emblazoned on signs—amber icicles hanging from roofs bristling with antennas, uncollected newspapers, solitary figures smoking behind windows and watching the street, windowsill figurines, blue glow of TV. It was bewildering.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Paul and even remembered loving him, if that’s what you wanted to call that lurid abdominal yawning. Worse still, how spiffy and cool he was while making love, a stone-faced officer in some conquering northern army. She never doubted that her craving for him was a vice. She’d had crazy spells, telling people she was a cheerleader for the Calgary Flames, wearing a T-shirt with a snarling Rottweiler over the caption:
I don’t dial 911
. She also had an awful feeling her father was presiding, somehow, or conspiring with him. He would sit back and cast a cold eye on old relationships while Paul changed the rules, abandoned former restraints and undertook, far from federal regulations, the ruin of the competition. “Consolidate or die,” one or the other of them would say, folding up another mom-and-pop enterprise leaving a handful of shallow-margin bottlers stranded by the demographics, soon to be empty, bat-filled, broken-windowed hulls where winos, glue sniffers and unowned dogs could get out of the wind.

The last thing Geraldine had said to her was, “We’ll never really know, will we, Evelyn?” And how confidently she laughed!

“This cruise I’ve just been on was an absolute eye-opener,” Alice exclaimed, “a large group of
average
people who were quite wonderful. It must not have occurred to me that such numbers of people could be completely normal. I thought that half the world was sick, sick, sick. It turns out, if that cruise is any indication, significant numbers of persons are able to be grateful for life and each other’s company. They do not wish to humiliate one another for sport. My, did I enjoy learning that!”

Later, Natalie remarked that her mother was “just doing her number.” Evelyn found Alice’s diction loftier than normal, but said, “She has certainly conquered her grieving!”

Natalie got right to the point. “You want to tell us about him, Mother?”

Alice tried to look at her sternly, eyes grazing past Evelyn’s in a kind of warning. Then she looked at the ceiling as though pondering the best answer to Natalie’s question, but her mouth collapsed in a goofy, beaming smile. Finally, Alice Whitelaw collected herself.

“Bill Champion and I are together at last. I never thought I’d live to see it.”

All the meekness, all the compliance that had defined her life seemed to have evaporated. Her two daughters suddenly felt themselves to be in no position to ask questions.

Nevertheless, Natalie thought she’d try. “Do you think this is realistic, Mother?”

“Don’t be asinine.” Then she chuckled out of some deep reserve, some private enjoyment. It was all quite unnerving. The songs of humpback whales on the stereo, though scarcely audible, didn’t help a bit. Their mother was offering no direct statements whatsoever, and besides seemed transformed by this new daunting will of her own. She talked about anything she felt like talking about, regardless of her two daughters, who’d brought her a Sunday
Denver Post,
coffee and croissants, and now sat there among her plants in mild frustration.

“Everything about my school days is clear,” Alice happily proclaimed. “And my childhood is clear. I had a loving father and a very distant mother who always seemed destined for great things, but it stopped there.” She declined to mention that they’d lived on the edge of starvation, and that her father was rarely sober. “I was
very
popular in high school. Thank God I was pretty, though it brought so many temptations. I like to think I passed that test, because I failed conspicuously in so many other ways. But everything since school is a blur, a
blur
. Even your fa—, my husband is a blur. Don’t you think that when people take over your life, they really stop being people at all? They just become a . . . a situation. Still, I’m living in a whole new world now. I knew it would be and it is. I
have
learned one lesson from my girlhood, though: I’m not good at being alone.”

“So what do we do about
that
?” asked Natalie pointedly.

“Only time will tell,” said Alice, “but I’ve noticed a funny thing. There doesn’t seem to be a big difference between having your whole life ahead of you and having only a small part of it left. The amount of hope seems the same.”

It may or may not have occasioned the end, though it did give a serviceable signal that things were phenomenally askew. Natalie and Stuart had asked Evelyn to join them for drinks at the Bar and Grill in Livingston, where Stuart would give them the average man’s view of the latest developments.

It’s true that the big back bar facing into a room of diners had always invited theatrical drinking, but neither of them suspected its effects on Stuart. Both he and Natalie were mildly drunk when Evelyn arrived, but before long Stuart had a jar of jalapeños under one arm and he was strolling among the diners showing them how courageously he could throw down these extremely hot peppers. Evelyn had never seen him so aggressive.

“Wait,” said Natalie, “it gets worse.”

Stuart had passed beyond the usual offensive ken, and had brought the humped-over drinkers off the bar to demand his removal. By that point, Natalie had renamed him “Shit-for-brains.” He returned from his wanderings only long enough for another drink, then resumed by commandeering the dessert cart, wheeling it around while bellowing various sea chanties. “I signed aboard this whaling ship, I made my mark it’s true. And I’ll serve out the span of time I swore that I would do!”

Several diners began waving for their checks. Chanting rhymes about the capstan and raising the anchor from “Poseidon’s floor,” he attempted a sailors’ jig: arms akimbo, knees pumping, feet causing several of the desserts to fall onto the floor. When he threw his head back for a final “Way hey, blow the man down!,” he lost his footing and, with a bounce, sent the dessert cart on a slow roll toward the toilets and not so much collapsed as gave up in a heap, perhaps struck down by returning self-awareness.

“What happened to Stuart?” Evelyn asked. “I thought he was going to give us sensible advice.”

Natalie presently went home, locking the front door behind her. Evelyn lingered outside to watch the northern lights, which hung in tapestries, stripes to the horizon, gradually growing slender as the ribs of an umbrella. She had to smile. She’d never seen Stuart so lovable.

The following day, after Natalie had filed for divorce, Evelyn went to see him. He was alone in the house. “Stuart, what is to become of you?”

“Well, Evelyn . . .”

“Really, I’d like to know.”

“I see this as . . . as a chance . . .”

“To do what?” she prompted. “To go home?”

“I thought I was home. Maybe I’ll just adopt a baby.”

“As a single man, Stuart, I’m not sure you could.”

“Oh I bet you could, sure. There are older ones, ones no one wants.”

“Is this practical?”

“No, of course it’s not.”

“But you don’t care?”

“I do. Oh, sure . . .”

Evelyn found his lassitude unsettling. As they spoke, Stuart rearranged empty pots on the stove and fixedly observed his backyard from the kitchen window.

“I can’t believe how fast they go through that feed,” he said. “It’s a terrible winter.”

A gust of wind kept obscuring the view with flying snow. A paper wrapper passed airborne toward the alley, somehow as full of expression as a ghost.

Stuart gazed at Evelyn, trying to say something. Finally, it came. “I think we learned one thing from last year’s Stanley Cup. You can’t second-guess the referees and have a game anybody wants to watch. Waiting for overhead cameras to tell us if we can celebrate, why, no fan wants that.” Stuart’s looked so close to losing it entirely that Evelyn tried to move him to a happier note. “Well, the playoffs are a long way away.”

“Never count out the Maple Leafs,” he cautioned her. She chose not to tell him of her manic desire to become a cheerleader for the Calgary Flames, because she wasn’t sure hockey teams even had cheerleaders.