The Hour of Lead (31 page)

“You mean nothing like before.”

“Yes, nothing like before. That was when you knew how to give to me that way.”

“Maybe it was then when you made me feel welcome to,” he said.

Wendy found the bourbon bottle in a cabinet and uncorked it. “We are going to get drunk,” she said.

“I've got to work tomorrow.” He had been rehired and promoted by the Bureau.

“I'll call you in sick.” She brought two glasses to the table and filled them. Wendy nodded at his glass. He sipped at the bourbon she'd poured him. She drank down half her glass, sighed and waited for the numbness to reach her.

“Why did you send me that letter?” Wendy asked.

Matt shrugged and put his chin in one of his huge hands. With the other he lifted the glass and peered at the light through it.

“Was it because Angel needed a mother?”

“No,” Matt said. He closed his eyes.

“Was it to make me happy?”

“Well, I'd hoped it might.”

“But that wasn't the reason? I mean the main reason?”

“No,” Matt said. “Should it have been?”

Wendy finished her glass and poured another. “It doesn't matter what should or shouldn't be. I want to know what your reason was, not what you think it should be.”

“I didn't ever figure on anything but you and me or me by myself.”

“So you married me just because I was first?”

“You were only.”

“What if I wouldn't take you?”

“I'd have been in a fix.”

“Nobody ever meant anything to you besides me?”

He shook his head.

“Then how did you end up with a daughter?”

Wendy concluded her drink in one swallow. Matt said nothing, just watched her refill her glass.

“I'm raising the child. I've got a right to know what happened.”

“It wasn't like that.”

“Do you know how many men must say that to women?”

Matt said. “I'm not other men.”

He went to the sink and filled his glass with water. He wolfed that down and poured himself more and broke ice from a tray to cool it. He set a chunk in her drink. She watched it turn waves in the brown, oily liquor.

“Why'd you marry me, then?” he asked.

She'd come to believe their coupling was an old, poorly conceived plan that each of them followed out of stubbornness or lack of another.

“I waited,” she said. “I waited all those years.”

“You happy you did?”

“I don't know,” she said.

He nodded. “At least that's honest.”

He rose and stretched; his great muscles rolled like ground moving. It didn't often strike her anymore, his size. It was the last thing she took into account. He was who he was every day, simple and injured and firm in will toward what he would not name, just as she'd remembered him.

“You forgive her?” Matt asked.

“Who?”

“Angel.”

Wendy considered the question. She drank again, but remained clearheaded. She stared at the bottle and envied the time when it did more for her.

“I try,” she said finally.

“That's too bad,” Matt said. “She hasn't done nothing wrong.”

•

T
HE SUMMER BEFORE
A
NGEL ENTERED
fourth grade the park service finished Spring Canyon Park. Each morning, Wendy delivered Matt to work, then, after Angel and the boy performed morning chores, boxed cold chicken or lunch meat, potato salad and fruit left from Matt's lunches and drove them to the reservoir where they lunched and swam. Angel devoured classwork. She was ready for good books, Twain, Steinbeck, and Willa Cather. On a blanket reading with Wendy, she felt as if she had some gravity in this world.

For Wendy reading had turned desperate; she grazed popular mysteries and frilly romances along with the classics, then the Old Testament, where she remained. She studied how its people responded to crisis or victory and the boredom between. She held little regard for deity or philosophy. No matter which was true, you were at the mercy of a tale. She had come from such stories, though her parents' strongest wishes—like all parents—were likely that the narrative stop with them, that their children, liberated from stories, would know real freedom. As for herself, she didn't want to know more; ignorance in Wendy's life had been her only bliss.

She gazed at Angel next to her. Her dark hair was long and straight and parted in the middle, and her face had begun to take on the angles a young lady's does. Her high cheekbones belonged to her grandmother, and her full lips, Wendy could only guess, were her mother's. She'd been silent a long while, looking out over the water, farther than the children now, toward the canyons and ridges and rockfill left from the dam's construction. Wendy tipped her head back on the blanket and closed her eyes. She enjoyed resting in the sun, seeing the red light through her lids.

“He doesn't talk to you,” Angel said.

Wendy glanced at the girl's face. It was still as a porcelain doll's.

“He doesn't talk much to anyone.”

“I know,” Angel said. “But with me it's different. He is sure of me.”

“Talking about your dad like that,” Wendy said. “I'm not accustomed to it.”

“I do wish he'd say more to you,” Angel said.

“Why don't you tell him so?”

“It would hurt his feelings.”

“It would,” Wendy agreed. “There are things he doesn't want to say, and it seems they outnumber the ones he does.”

“He's a donkey,” Angel said.

Wendy laughed. “Why's that?”

“It's something we want and he doesn't, so he makes it hard.”

Wendy combed her hand through the girl's hair and stroked the little bones that made her mouth move. Angel turned her face into the warmth of Wendy's palm and Wendy embraced her. “I never thought I'd end up like this with you,” Wendy said. She recalled fairy tales from her youth. Fathers broke their children's hearts with stepmothers. She could recall not one that fared well.

Wendy picked a stray thread from Angel's T-shirt and wound it around her forefinger. It looked like pictures she'd seen on catalogs reminding you to remember to order. The oddity of it struck her cold. In school, memory was all they touted: dates and spelling words and the Constitution's Preamble. They taught it all wrong. Forgetting was more useful. “I figured I'd make you this way or that. You'd be my child, then.”

“But I am your child,” Angel said.

“No,” Wendy said. “Though I'd love it so if you were.” The girl blinked, but her face was still. “You mean I love Daddy more?”

“It's natural, I always considered it so anyway. You're his.”

“But I'm yours, too.”

Wendy shook her head.

The girl stood, then bolted for the shower rooms. Wendy followed, but Angel refused to speak, and when Wendy made another pass at explaining, she began humming to drown her words. Wendy remained outside the door, not willing to leave her. When Matt arrived, it was near sunset. He'd paid the town taxi.

Wendy nodded to the bathroom. “She won't come out.”

Matt glanced at the word on the door. “Are you by yourself in there?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Can I come in, please?”

Angel cracked the door. Matt unfolded his wallet and put money for the taxi in Wendy's hand and she handed him the car's keys. He went in. Wendy returned herself and Luke to the trailer where she fed the boy but couldn't stomach food herself. Near ten, she heard Matt's steps on the metal porch. The door opened and Matt carried Angel, asleep, to her bedroom.

When he returned to the front room, he was shaking. She took a step toward him, and when he didn't rear up, another. She crossed the room and took his elbow awkwardly, and he looked at it in her hand.

“Can we sit outside?” he asked. She nodded and they opened lawn chairs. The bugs were bad, so they switched the light off. In the dark, she could hear sprinklers tick and the crickets scratching. He shifted, preparing to speak. She ought to love him more, she thought. She ought to love them all more. It was all she wanted to be able to do.

“You aren't ever going to hurt us again, are you?” Wendy asked.

“There's other ways of hurting.”

“It's the only one you know, though,” she told him.

“The rest is all accident. I promise that.”

“Me, too,” Wendy said. “I shouldn't have said it. I thought it might help. Help me at least. Will she ever speak to me again?”

“She will,” he said.

“I wouldn't blame her.”

“She said that sometimes, she'd wondered if you wanted her.”

“Lord. What did you tell her?”

“I told her it was me you wondered if you wanted.”

“Did you tell her the truth about her mother?” Wendy asked.

Matt shook his head. “I told her she hadn't got your meaning straight,” he said. He drew back where he could see her face. “I'll tell you, though.”

Wendy nodded, and he went on. It was early morning by the time he finished, and they were both goosepimpled by the night. One of his legs had gone to sleep. He stretched, then banged his heel on the bottom step, and she watched him waiting on the feeling to return.

“It seemed to me telling it to her, she would be losing two mothers.”

She closed her eyes, and lifted his cold knuckles to her cheek. “I didn't mean to be cruel,” she said.

“I know,” Matt said. “Me neither. It just turned that way.”

34

L
UCKY RARELY DRANK, THOUGH HE
held no opinion concerning drunks, pro or con. The few times Lucky imbibed left him nearly tender. He listened to music and conversation of others or just watched lights and cars passing and was perplexed by melancholy. Doubt was too high a tab for drink; he refused to pay it. Often in his early years copping, his sexual apparatus distressed him similarly. Inclined to emotions he himself had vowed to correct, the appendage often made exiting the house an embarrassment, and, once, vexed him at work so, that he squandered the shift pretending to shuffle papers. Finally, at the hardware, he purchased a roll of bailing twine, snipped a piece and looped it around his leg and his nemesis and tied it off. He intended to halt it from jutting like a poker, but the string thinned the circulation once he maintained a certain girth and his penis retracted on its own. Its antics had ended years ago now and it left his life tidy, the way he'd chosen it to be. That he was traveling the highways between Colfax and Grand Coulee, then, with an open pint he'd nipped past the neck
and shoulders, disconcerted him. He worried for what else might be amiss. He seemed in the throes of what drink stirred in him anyway, and hurrying the sensation seemed the proper way to pass through such country and emerge on the other, where he assumed he'd find sense once again.

The wheatfields passed like so much chaff: rowed acres and fences and sprinklers and rock and a few poplar starts for wind-breaks. He navigated the Rocklyn cutoff to avoid Davenport, where a fair number would enjoy an invitation to his comeuppance. At Wilbur, he went north. Twelve miles out, the highway swooped into the Grand Coulee that appeared in need of water despite one of the largest rivers in America pressing through it. The rock looked rusted anywhere it faced weather. The thirsty pines remained dwarfed and spindly. Sagebrush and cheat grew best. The towns along the bottom were noted primarily for their transgressions.

He recognized the lighted string that marked the dam's backside, a single luminous row a mile wide. Maintaining the project still employed much of the county. Though his childhood unraveled in those places drowned behind it, Lucky felt no nostalgia for what had been lost or bitterness toward those forces constructing the structure. When he looked to the speedometer, he realized he was traveling only twenty-five miles an hour, and he tapped the accelerator toward the speed limit. He turned at an intersection and drove a short stretch of highway past Delano, a town that thought so little of itself it took a president's middle name, and mispronounced it to boot, to Electric City, whose city fathers appeared to possess no more inspiration. Lining the highway were Scott's Service and Norm's Cafe and two taverns that changed hands so regularly sign makers ran them a tab. Lucky eased into a lot, checked the address and sipped more whiskey. He'd seen a hotel vacancy lamp a mile back. There, he could sleep and maybe wake hungover enough to hone an edge for whatever the next morning delivered.

The road descended a long hill past a single row of houses, darkness sliding over them. Porch lights glowed and streetlights above them. Lucky himself watching the shadow of his car and the shape of his head and shoulders in the window. When he looked up, the road had swerved and he plowed over lawns, passed near stoops and under windows. Wendy, bent in the front window of the house, scrubbed dishes and stared outside vacantly. She did not notice him. Lucky jerked his car to the gravel then u-turned in a wide spot and halted across the street, a hundred feet away from her. In the glove box, he hunted his field glasses. He put them on her. She'd grown heavier in the face, but Wendy it was. He checked the address on Lawson's paycheck and the mailbox numbers: they were identical.