The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (33 page)

Jake had said he would write from Rio, and I waited to hear from him. In the meantime, we all listened to the radio, hoping to hear of Vaslav or to hear one of his songs and find out that they had had some success somewhere. We all felt that songs as beautiful and haunting as Vaslav's couldn't possibly stay hidden forever. But time went by and we heard nothing on the radio, and no one in town heard from Jake.

Finally Danny drove me down to the state facility in Delphia one Thursday afternoon, and we asked the attendant on duty if we could see Jake's mother. But the attendant said we had to be on an approved list to get in, and we weren't. He said he was sorry there was nothing he could do for us.

So Danny told him that really all we wanted was to get in touch with Jake, and did he know if Jake had sent his mother any letters, or did she send him any, and where did she send them to? The attendant flicked his eyes down to my belly, where it was starting to be unmistakable that a baby was on the way.

“There are no letters,” he said, shaking his head. “She's not . . . There really couldn't be any letters.”

“Nothing coming in?” Danny asked him.

He looked sad and said again, “I'm sorry I can't help you.”

In the lilac evening, Rosalita and I, each holding one of Bertie's hands, tottered gently down to the old wooden boat dock at Lost Pond. Bertie squealed with joy and paddled her baby feet in the warm water at the edge of the dock while Rosalita held her carefully around her chubby baby tummy. I sat with my feet in the water, too, getting splashed a little bit on my own swollen
tummy. I remembered swimming here with Rosalita and Tom when it was Rosalita who was going to have a baby, the baby who was happily splashing me now.

The moon began to rise and the fireflies came out.

“I wish Tom were here,” I said.

“Oh, he is,” Rosalita answered me.

I looked at her.

“I feel him all the time,” she said simply, stroking Bertie's auburn curls. “He's with us everywhere.”

She smiled serenely into the soft darkness. Bertie stopped splashing and climbed into her mother's lap. The fireflies came closer, and Bertie clapped her hands, laughing in delight.

Rafi and I drove out to the abandoned cotton mill. The air in the old spinning room was sultry and still. Broken window glass crunched under our feet. The gray-eyed boy shifted inside me and then was still.

“Do you ever wonder if things had been different . . . ?” I stopped.

“What things?”

“I don't know. Like suppose Danny and Jake hadn't stayed late to play pool that night? Or suppose I had never asked for your newspaper that first day, the day I came to town? Suppose I had never come to this town at all? It was only by chance.”

“I would have still been here,” Rafi said.

“But you and I wouldn't know each other.”

“No. But you would have met some other Rafi in some other town. And Vera would have hired some other barfly who was at hand at the time. I'd be standing here with a pregnant Hank, probably.”

“But maybe there is no other Rafi,” I said. “Maybe this is all destiny. Maybe you and I were meant for each other.”

“Meant by whom?”

“Fate?”

“Maybe fate is what we call the lives we make for ourselves when we're trying to make sense out of what we did,” he said.

“Maybe I fucked up when I ever looked at anyone but you. I should have just jumped you the first minute I set eyes on you.”

“Maybe I'm not the pushover you think I am.”

“Probably not,” I sighed. “But anyway, now we'll never know.”

“Besides, if everything had ended up different, you and I might have ended up hating each other.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Lots of things might have been different, but not that. I never could have done anything but love you.”

“Do you wish, though . . . ?” He stopped.

“What?”

“Do you wish things had been different?”

I stroked my belly and felt the butterflies rustle inside me. “Not really, I guess.”

“Do you regret it?” he asked.

“No. Do you?”

“Only sometimes.”

He took my hand and side by side we picked our way carefully out through the debris into the tangled, sunlit weeds outside.

That summer, songs from the Low Lifes' first album were everywhere, on all the radio stations, floating out the windows of the cars passing by on Juniper Street, playing on the little loudspeaker in front of the record store where Charlie Blue's picture smiled out from promotional materials and posters plastered
all over the front windows. Vera got a tape from Charlie in the mail and played it in the Cave in the early evening before the night's band showed up. We saw the Low Lifes twice more on TV before they left for their world tour.

I didn't grow a garden that summer—the gray-eyed baby, I felt, was enough for me. In July, I ate, at long last, the last jar of tomatoes. I ate them sitting at my little kitchen table during an afternoon thunderstorm. The rain hitting the tin roof of my shotgun shack sounded deafening at first, but as the storm spent itself, gradually the rain sounded only like rain.

“There, now,” I said to the baby after I had eaten the last tomato. “From now on, I will grow just you.”

High summer came again, and wildflowers crowded together by the roadsides and in abandoned lots all over town. In the nicer neighborhoods, the yards had only grass; the flowers were strictly contained in carefully edged beds or in planters and porch pots. On the main square in town, the grand old magnolia trees opened their blossoms and the air all around was heady and lemon scented from them. But in the parts of town nearer to the river, black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne's lace and tiny, no-name pink and white daisies sprang up everywhere, even from the cracks in the cement sidewalks and between the steps of people's front porches.

Rafi and Jordan were out early one morning when they ran across Pancho holding a bunch of wild pasture roses. Rafi said he didn't think too much about it at the time, and it wasn't
until he saw Pamela that afternoon with a pasture rose in her hair that he put two and two together. After that, Pamela came down to the Cave to play cards sometimes after she got off work, but more often Pancho went uptown at closing time and then walked her home in the warm night air.

“I don't suppose you ever hear from Jake at all, do you?” Vera asked me.

She had found a wooden rocking chair at the thrift shop and bought it and brought it to me. I was sitting in it on the porch and she was sitting on the steps, leaning back on her elbows.

“Not a word,” I said.

“Do you suppose we ought to be worried that something has happened to him? Something bad? It seems like somebody would have heard something from him by now.”

“Well, you know Jake. Just because he doesn't say anything, just because he doesn't write, it doesn't mean he isn't thinking about us.”

“Do you miss him still?”

“Of course. Don't you?”

“Yes,” she said. “But it's not the same for me as it is for you, is it?”

“I miss him,” I said. “I miss him all the time. But at the same time, it's funny how I keep forgetting stuff.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. Little stuff. I can remember the color of his eyes and things like that, but I can't remember anymore—really remember exactly—what he tasted like.”

I blushed. Vera laughed.

“Beer, I bet,” she said.

I laughed, too. A sudden picture flashed across my mind and I saw the way his hand rested on the steering wheel.

“No wonder I can't remember,” I said. “How long has it been since I tasted a beer?”

“I don't imagine you'll ever come down to the Cave much anymore now,” Vera said.

“I'll come sometimes. But not much, I guess. It's probably not good for babies to spend too much time around Hank, after all.”

“Not just babies—that could be hazardous to anyone's health.”

“You'd better hope no one turns you in to OSHA for wantonly exposing your employees to him.”