The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (23 page)

Billy Joe and Lily found a tin-roofed house out on the old highway toward Millboro, and Rafi found a place to rent downtown.

“Are you going to be okay?” I asked Rafi.

“Sure,” Rafi said. “Love is a good thing, even if it's not your own.”

In
Symposium,
the companion of Socrates named Phaedrus argues that Love gives us the greatest good because he is one of the most ancient gods. Even before Gaia, the earth, existed, according to the legends there was Love. Love is so ancient that he has no father or mother, Phaedrus tells his companions, quoting the myths that are history.

But one god existed before Love—Chaos. Chaos was the first of them all, preceding everything. He is the foundation upon which we are all built. But Chaos is not the father of
Love—Love has no parents. Neither are they siblings. Perhaps they are old comrades or old rivals. Perhaps they view each other with the jaundiced eyes of ancient generals who have gone through countless campaigns together.

But no matter the ultimate power of Love, it is important to remember that Chaos was there first.

Jake was living then in a two-room house in a patch of weeds behind Blossom's restaurant. He'd moved there after Danny left to live with me. It was considered a step up from Boystown. It had once been part of the servants' quarters of the big house owned by the mill foreman. The big house had fallen down and been carted off bit by bit in the years after the mill stopped working, but Jake said his house was fortunately already too close to the ground to fall any farther down.

Jake didn't have much furniture—just a mattress on the floor with two pillows and the brown vinyl backseat of a dismantled sedan for a sofa. The walls had all been painted blue so many years ago that they were no longer just one color but ran the gamut from the color of clouds to the color of hard summer afternoon skies to the color of blue jays. There was no kitchen in the little house, although Jake had a dangerous-looking hot plate. He mostly ate at Blossom's, sitting in the back with all her children and doing dishes for a while afterward.

Because it was so conveniently located, we slept at Jake's house pretty often. He didn't have any curtains on his windows, and we could see the moon from bed.

Rosalita eventually came back to the bookstore, bringing Bertie with her, stepping gingerly in through the door. Blossom came with her.

Pancho and I were sitting on the couch when they showed up. We got up and stood in the middle of the floor, not saying anything. Rosalita stood just inside the door, looking all around.

“It seems strange to me that all of this is still here,” she finally said. She walked over to the Liberation Theology section and ran her fingers gently across the spines of the books.
“Qué extraño.”
She turned and looked at us. “I thought it all would have disappeared.”

Bertie gurgled happily and reached out at the shiny colors of the book jackets. “Ba!” she said, and waved her hands in the air.

“It's still here,” I said.

“We're still here,” Pancho said.

Rosalita turned and looked all around the store again.

“Take your time,” Blossom said to her. “You don't need to decide anything right now unless you want to. When you're ready to come back, everything will be here.”

“Ba! Ba! Ba!” Bertie said, laughing her bubbly baby laugh. Rosalita smiled down at her.

“
Creo que
. . . ,” Rosalita said. “I think that it is time to come back.”

“We're here,” Pancho said again.

Rosalita spread Bertie's baby quilt on the floor in front of the couch. Bertie sat in the middle of it.

“Ba!” she said.

“Yes,” Rosalita said. “We're here.”

The nicest thing about getting dumped by Danny was that I never had to see his parents again. Or any other parents, for that matter. It's safe to say that when Jake thought about home—the house where he had grown up—and about his parents and his brothers, there was no butter yellow Cadillac in his mind, no crocheted cats, no protecting eyes of Jesus. His family was from up in the hills like mine, where most people are hard up against it and where cheap alcohol is sometimes the only way to make it through, even if it's the thing that eventually drives you crazy. Jake's dad was one of the ones who had not made it through. According to the autopsy, his blood alcohol content was so high that it was amazing he had the wherewithal to even start a car, much less navigate it off the side of a mountain. But by that time, he had been gone so long from their lives that Jake said neither he nor any of his brothers even cared.

Jake didn't think it was alcohol per se that made his mother crazy. He thought it was probably more just the awful loneliness after his dad took off and left her with six boys under the age of ten. She was too worn out to find another man and too despairing to even want to anymore. She started talking to herself and cashing the WIC checks at the liquor store. One bright Sunday morning, she put on every single dress she had and went to church to tell them all about what Jesus had been saying to her. That afternoon, she was admitted to the state mental hospital in Delphia, and the boys were divided up among the various relatives in the area. Being tougher than they looked, most of them grew up to be okay.

The first Thursday of every month was visiting day, and Jake would dutifully make the drive to Delphia to visit his mother. Then he would come back and drink himself blind.

It rained a lot that summer. Some people, claiming special knowledge from Native American ancestors, blamed it on a weather cycle that naturally repeated, they said, every seven years, with an especially wet summer the seventh year of every seventh cycle, of which this apparently was one. Some people blamed it on global warming and tried to convince their friends to stop driving their cars and to walk everywhere instead. This met with minimal success, owing mostly to all the rain. A preacher at a big church in town gave a Sunday sermon saying that it was the fault of all the homosexuals, and the very next day the rain came down so hard that it opened a big sinkhole in the church's parking lot that swallowed up the preacher's new Mercedes. He went on the radio and said that such an incident just proved his point, but we didn't see how. People laughed at him so much that eventually he had to move to Oklahoma.

Water in all the creeks kept rising, and by the time the weather cleared up, I was pretty much drowning in Jake.

“Just keep kissing me until I can't think about anything else,” I said to him. “I don't want to be able to think about anything except you.”

“Troubled by ghosts?”

“Maybe it's the rain that brings them out.”

“Maybe it's just the nature of ghosts,” he said. “If they were willing to stay buried, they wouldn't be ghosts in the first place.”

“Don't talk—kiss me!”

“It won't be enough.”

“We can never be sure until we try.”

For a long time, Jake was only my cure for a broken heart. He and I didn't expect too much from each other—it was the basis of our relationship.

Everything changed the day we killed the squirrel. We were driving on the back road by the old mill. No one ever drove on that road after the mill shut down. Everyone who had worked there had to commute thirty miles to Dunn every day to a new mill that passed all the OSHA inspections but was still a living hell. We passed only one car going the other way—it was a long white Cadillac, and we remarked on it at the time.

And then we saw the squirrel. It was in the opposite lane. It had been hit but not killed. And it was trying very hard not to die, holding its head up and dragging its broken body across the hot blacktop by its front paws. Its back paws were mangled and bloody, and we could hear through the open car windows that the squirrel was crying—a weeping, choking sound that mingled with the drone of the katydids and the
shushing
sound of the mill river.

Jake stopped the car and we got out. The squirrel seemed not to even notice us as we got closer and closer. Its eyes were fixed straight ahead, staring at the tall grass at the edge of the road, where another squirrel, tense and watchful, stood poised, terrified of us and yet unwilling to leave his friend—wanting to flee but staying. The squirrel in the road kept crying and trying to drag himself forward, but he wasn't moving much now, and the blood from his legs was starting to bake on the hot asphalt.