The New Yorker Stories (57 page)

They floated the tire in a pan of water at the gas station the next morning, looking for the puncture. Nothing was embedded in the tire; whatever had made the hole wasn’t there. As one big bubble after another rose to the surface, Tom felt a clutch in his throat, as if he himself might be drowning.

He could think of no good reason to tell the officer at the police barracks why Ed Rickman would have singled him out. Maybe Rickman
had
wanted to build a house on that particular site. The policeman made a fist and rested his mouth against it, his lips in the gully between thumb and finger. Until Tom said that, the policeman had seemed concerned—even a little interested. Then his expression changed. Tom hurried to say that of course he didn’t believe that explanation, because something funny was going on. The cop shook his head. Did that mean no, of course not, or no, he did believe it?

Tom described Rickman, mentioning the discolored tooth. The cop wrote this information down on a small white pad. He drew crosshatches on a corner. The cop did not seem quite as certain as Tom that no one could have a grudge against him or anyone in his family. He asked where they lived in New York, where they worked.

When Tom walked out into the sunlight, he felt a little faint. Of course he had understood, even before the cop said it, that there was nothing the police could do at this point. “Frankly,” the cop had said, “it’s not likely that we’re going to be able to keep a good eye out, in that you’re on a dead-end road. Not a
route
,” the cop said. “Not a
major thoroughfare
.” It seemed to be some joke the cop was having with himself.

Driving home, Tom realized that he could give anyone who asked a detailed description of the cop. He had studied every mark on the cop’s face—the little scar (chicken pox?) over one eyebrow, the aquiline nose that narrowed at the tip almost to the shape of a tack. He did not intend to alarm Jo or Byron by telling them where he had been.

Byron had gone fishing again. Jo wanted to make love while Byron was out. Tom knew he couldn’t.

A week passed. Almost two weeks. He and Jo and Byron sat in lawn chairs watching the lightning bugs blink. Byron said he had his eye on one in particular, and he went
“Beep-beep, beep-beep”
as it blinked. They ate raw peas Jo had gathered in a bowl. He and Jo had a glass of wine. The neighbors’ M.G. passed by. This summer, the neighbors sometimes tapped the horn as they passed. A bird swooped low across the lawn—perhaps a female cardinal. It was a surprise seeing a bird in the twilight like that. It dove into the grass, more like a seagull than a cardinal. It rose up, fluttering, with something in its beak. Jo put her glass on the little table, smiled, and clapped softly.

The bird Byron found dead in the morning was a grackle, not a cardinal. It was lying about ten feet from the picture window, but until Tom examined the bird’s body carefully, he did not decide that probably it had just smacked into the glass by accident.

At Rusty’s, at the end of summer, Tom ran into the cop again. They were both carrying white paper bags with straws sticking out of them. Grease was starting to seep through the bags. Rickman had never reappeared, and Tom felt some embarrassment about having gone to see the cop. He tried not to focus on the tip of the cop’s nose.

“Running into a nut like that, I guess it makes getting back to the city look good,” the cop said.

He’s thinking
summer people
, Tom decided.

“You have a nice year, now,” the cop said. “Tell your wife I sure do envy her her retirement.”

“Her retirement?” Tom said.

The cop looked at the blacktop. “I admit, the way you described that guy I thought he might be sent by somebody who had a grudge against you or your wife,” he said. “Then at the fire-department picnic I got to talking to your neighbor—that Mrs. Hewett—and I asked her if she’d seen anybody strange poking around before you got there. Hadn’t. We got to talking. She said you were in the advertising business, and there was no way of knowing what gripes some lunatic might have with that, if he happened to know. Maybe you walked on somebody’s territory, so to speak, and he wanted to get even. And your wife being a schoolteacher, you can’t realize how upset some parents get when Johnny doesn’t bring home the A’s. You never can tell. Mrs. Hewett said she’d been a schoolteacher for a few months herself, before she got married, and she never regretted the day she quit. Said your wife was real happy about her own decision, too.” The cop nodded in agreement with this.

Tom tried to hide his surprise. Somehow, the fact that he didn’t know that Jo had ever exchanged a word with a neighbor, Karen Hewett, privately made the rest of the story believable. They hardly knew the woman. But why would Jo quit? His credibility with the cop must have been good after all. He could tell from the way the cop studied his face that he realized he had been telling Tom something he didn’t know.

When the cop left, Tom sat on the hot front hood of his car, took the hamburgers out of the bag, and ate them. He pulled the straw out of the big container of Coke and took off the plastic top. He drank from the cup, and when the Coke was gone he continued to sit there, sucking ice. Back during the winter, Jo had several times brought up the idea of having a baby, but she hadn’t mentioned it for weeks now. He wondered if she had decided to get pregnant in spite of his objections. But even if she had, why would she quit her job before she was sure there was a reason for it?

A teenage girl with short hair and triangle-shaped earrings walked by, averting her eyes as if she knew he’d stare after her. He didn’t; only the earrings that caught the light like mirrors interested him. In a convertible facing him, across the lot, a boy and girl were eating their sandwiches in the front seat while a golden retriever in the back moved his head between theirs, looking from left to right and right to left with the regularity of a dummy talking to a ventriloquist. A man holding his toddler’s hand walked by and smiled. Another car pulled in, with Hall and Oates going on the radio. The driver turned off the ignition, cutting off the music, and got out. A woman got out the other side. As they walked past, the woman said to the man, “I don’t see why we’ve got to eat exactly at nine, twelve, and six.” “Hey, it’s twelve-fifteen,” the man said. Tom dropped his cup into the paper bag, along with his hamburger wrappers and the napkins he hadn’t used. He carried the soggy bag over to the trash can. A few bees lifted slightly higher as he stuffed his trash in. Walking back to the car, he realized that he had absolutely no idea what to do. At some point he would have to ask Jo what was going on.

When he pulled up, Byron was sitting on the front step, cleaning fish over a newspaper. Four trout, one of them very large. Byron had had a good day.

Tom walked through the house but couldn’t find Jo. He held his breath when he opened the closet door; it was unlikely that she would be in there, naked, two days in a row. She liked to play tricks on him.

He came back downstairs, and saw, through the kitchen window, that Jo was sitting outside. A woman was with her. He walked out. Paper plates and beer bottles were on the grass beside their chairs.

“Hi, honey,” she said.

“Hi,” the woman said. It was Karen Hewett.

“Hi,” he said to both of them. He had never seen Karen Hewett up close. She was tanner than he realized. The biggest difference, though, was her hair. When he had seen her, it had always been long and windblown, but today she had it pulled back in a clip.

“Get all your errands done?” Jo said.

It couldn’t have been a more ordinary conversation. It couldn’t have been a more ordinary summer day.

The night before they closed up the house, Tom and Jo lay stretched out on the bed. Jo was finishing
Tom Jones
. Tom was enjoying the cool breeze coming through the window, thinking that when he was in New York he forgot the Vermont house; at least, he forgot it except for the times he looked up from the street he was on and saw the sky, and its emptiness made him remember stars. It was the sky he loved in the country—the sky more than the house. If he hadn’t thought it would seem dramatic, he would have gotten out of bed now and stood at the window for a long time. Earlier in the evening, Jo had asked why he was so moody. He had told her that he didn’t feel like leaving. “Then let’s stay,” she said. It was his opening to say something about her job in the fall. He had hoped she would say something, but he hesitated, and she had only put her arms around him and rubbed her cheek against his chest. All summer, she had seduced him—sometimes with passion, sometimes so subtly he didn’t realize what was happening until she put her hand up under his T-shirt or kissed him on the lips.

Now it was the end of August. Jo’s sister in Connecticut was graduating from nursing school in Hartford, and Jo had asked Tom to stop there so they could do something with her sister to celebrate. Her sister lived in a one-bedroom apartment, but it would be easy to find a motel. The following day, they would take Byron home to Philadelphia and then backtrack to New York.

In the car the next morning, Tom felt Byron’s gaze on his back and wondered if he had overheard their lovemaking the night before. It was very hot by noontime. There was so much haze on the mountains that their peaks were invisible. The mountains gradually sloped until suddenly, before Tom realized it, they were driving on flat highway. Late that afternoon they found a motel. He and Byron swam in the pool, and Jo, although she was just about to see her, talked to her sister for half an hour on the phone.

By the time Jo’s sister turned up at the motel, Tom had shaved and showered. Byron was watching television. He wanted to stay in the room and watch the movie instead of having dinner with them. He said he wasn’t hungry. Tom insisted that he come and eat dinner. “I can get something out of the machine,” Byron said.

“You’re not going to eat potato chips for dinner,” Tom said. “Get off the bed—come on.”

Byron gave Tom a look that was quite similar to the look an outlaw in the movie was giving the sheriff who had just kicked his gun out of reach.

“You didn’t stay glued to the set in Vermont all summer and miss those glorious days, did you?” Jo’s sister said.

“I fished,” Byron said.

“He caught four trout one day,” Tom said, spreading his arms and looking from the palm of one hand to the palm of the other.

They all had dinner together in the motel restaurant, and later, while they drank their coffee, Byron dropped quarters into the machine in the corridor, playing game after game of Space Invaders.

Jo and her sister went into the bar next to the restaurant for a nightcap. Tom let them go alone, figuring that they probably wanted some private time together. Byron followed him up to the room and turned on the television. An hour later, Jo and her sister were still in the bar. Tom sat on the balcony. Long before his usual bedtime, Byron turned off the television.

“Good night,” Tom called into the room, hoping Byron would call him in.

“Night,” Byron said.

Tom sat in silence for a minute. He was out of cigarettes and felt like a beer. He went into the room. Byron was lying in his sleeping bag, unzipped, on top of one of the beds.

“I’m going to drive down to that 7-Eleven,” Tom said. “Want me to bring you anything?”

“No, thanks,” Byron said.

“Want to come along?”

“No,” Byron said.

He picked up the keys to the car and the room key and went out. He wasn’t sure whether Byron was still sulking because he had made him go to dinner or whether he didn’t want to go back to his mother’s. Perhaps he was just tired.

Tom bought two Heinekens and a pack of Kools. The cashier was obviously stoned; he had bloodshot eyes and he stuffed a wad of napkins into the bag before he pushed it across the counter to Tom.

Back at the motel, he opened the door quietly. Byron didn’t move. Tom put out one of the two lights Byron had left on and slid open the glass door to the balcony.

Two people kissed on the pathway outside, passing the pool on the way to their room. People were talking in the room below—muted, but it sounded like an argument. The lights were suddenly turned off at the pool. Tom pushed his heels against the railing and tipped his chair back. He could hear the cars on the highway. He felt sad about something, and realized that he felt quite alone. He finished a beer and lit a cigarette. Byron hadn’t been very communicative. Of course, he couldn’t expect a ten-year-old boy to throw his arms around him the way he had when he was a baby. And Jo—in spite of her ardor, his memory of her, all summer, was of her sitting with her nose in some eighteenth-century novel. He thought about all the things they had done in July and August, trying to convince himself that they had done a lot and had fun. Dancing a couple of times, auctions, the day on the borrowed raft, four—no, five—movies, fishing with Byron, badminton, the fireworks and the sparerib dinner outside the Town Hall on the Fourth.

Maybe what his ex-wife always said was true: he didn’t connect with people. Jo never said such a thing, though. And Byron chose to spend the summer with them.

He drank the other beer and felt its effect. It had been a long drive. Byron probably didn’t want to go back to Philadelphia. He himself wasn’t too eager to begin his new job. He suddenly remembered his secretary when he confided in her that he’d gotten the big offer—her surprise, the way she hid her thumbs-up behind the palm of her other hand, in a mock gesture of secrecy. “Where are you going to go from there?” she had said. He’d miss her. She was funny and pretty and enthusiastic—no slouch herself. He’d miss laughing with her, miss being flattered because she thought that he was such a competent character.

He missed Jo. It wasn’t because she was off at the bar. If she came back this instant, something would still be missing. He couldn’t imagine caring for anyone more than he cared for her, but he wasn’t sure that he was still in love with her. He was fiddling, there in the dark. He had reached into the paper bag and begun to wrinkle up little bits of napkin, rolling the paper between thumb and finger so that it formed tiny balls. When he had a palmful, he got up and tossed them over the railing. When he sat down again, he closed his eyes and began what would be months of remembering Vermont: the garden, the neon green of new peas, the lumpy lawn, the pine trees and the smell of them at night—and then suddenly Rickman was there, rumpled and strange, but his presence was only slightly startling. He was just a man who’d dropped in on a summer day. “You’d be crazy not to be happy here,” Rickman was saying. All that was quite believable now—the way, when seen in the odd context of a home movie, even the craziest relative can suddenly look amiable.