The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair (4 page)

“You want to talk?” I ask.

He looks out the window.

“Want to grab a pizza?”

We are in the car. People around us are driving like complete and utter fools, but Jake is quiet. His horn is silent. He gazes ahead.

We are in a booth with our pizza.

“She’s weird,” Jake says.

I say nothing.

“She made me feel funny.”

“What do you mean? Did she make you feel uncomfortable?”

He thinks. “Yes.”

“It’s okay, son. It’s okay to feel that way.”

“Do you think she’s weird?”

“Well, I know her a little better.”

He is silent.

“Do you want her to not come back?”

“I dunno.”

“You okay?”

He nods.

We finish eating and drive home.

Jake is in his bed. I have just put out his light and am about to leave his room. “Sure you’re okay? I mean, you can come sleep with me.”

“I’m okay.”

I get into bed myself. I am lying awake. I feel someone in my room, in my bed. I pull my son closer and cover him up.

It is Tuesday. I am pouring gas into the lawn mower. It is a dependable machine, an unfortunate feature for a lawn mower. I push around the house to the back yard. Jake trots past me toward the front. I am cutting the grass, stepping over waste from the neighbors’ dogs.

Jake is calling me I stop the mower. He is excited. Perhaps he has injured himself. I am running to the front yard. I am slipping on dog shit. I am on the ground. Jake is still calling. He is screaming now. I get to the front and see my son riding away in an old Volvo. It is all very loud Jake is screaming. I am shouting. The Volvo’s muffler is dragging along the street. Mr. Hicks’s collie and another dog are barking and snipping at the tires. I am running alongside the car. Cecile rolls up the window. I pound on it. Lilith is driving. Cecile has Jake in her lap. Jake is squirming and twisting and reaching to unlock the door. He is looking at me. He is afraid. His eyes are wet and wide. He is screaming, begging me to stop the car. Cecile is staring straight ahead. Her head is still. Only her hands are moving, busy holding Jake, restraining him. Mr. Hicks, who has been out watering his flowers, runs to the street as we approach and directs the spray of his hose onto the windshield of the Volvo. Lilith switches on the wipers and swerves slightly. I lose my balance, fall, and roll some distance. I am sitting in the street. I am wet and smelling of dog shit. My elbows are scraped and bleeding. I observe the license plate. I don’t know why; I know who they are.

Mr. Hicks is standing over me, hose in hand. “You okay, Grayson?”

I nod. Bloody, wet, and smelly, I run into my house and pick up the phone. “My son has been kidnapped,” I pant.

The police sergeant puts me on hold.

I hang up and call back. “My son has been kidnapped.”

“And just when did this happen?” He is very calm. And why not, his son has not been kidnapped.

“Just now. Just a minute ago.”

“Wait a second.” He, I imagine, has covered the phone with his hand and turned to someone. His removed voice says, “Really? How was she?” There is a response I cannot make out. “Okay,” he says, back on the line, “who snatched him?”

“His mother.”

“Hmmmm. Hang on.” Again to someone else, “I wouldn’t mind getting in there myself.”

“Hey!” I shout into the receiver.

“By his mother, huh?”

“Listen, I have sole legal custody.”

“She ask for money?”

“Are you talking to me?”

“Yeah,” he snaps. “Money? Ransom? She ask for ransom?”

“No.”

“Then it ain’t kidnapping.”

“Okay, she stole my son.”

“I’m sorry. She is his mother.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we can’t do much.”

“In case you didn’t hear me—I have sole legal custody. The operative word here is ‘legal.’”

“Like I said.”

“May I speak to someone else, your superior.”

“He’s just going to tell you the same thing.”

“Please.”

“Listen, buddy, there’s damn little we can do. I suggest you get a court injunction to keep her away from the kid.”

“She already has him.”

“Why don’t you steal him back? That’s what I would do.”

I hang up, go to my desk and search through my drawers. I find Cecile’s address.

The Volvo is not here. I am at the front door, looking inside, pressing the buzzer. No one answers. The door is unlocked. No one is here. In the bedroom, drawers have been left open, empty. There is the bed. This is where that awful apish woman kisses my wife.

I go out and sit in my car. It is very hot. I am bloody and smelly from dog shit. I recall Lilith mentioning Providence. The Volvo’s muffler was dragging the ground. The bus terminal.

The Volvo is here, muffler against asphalt and all. Inside the depot, I see them. They are at the lockers. I run up the stairs and weave through people toward them. I snatch Jake away and place him behind me. “How dare you,” I say.

Cecile and Lilith are startled. They recoil.

“How dare you.”

“Grayson,” says Cecile, her voice soft with a quality from the past.

“I don’t understand, Cecile.”

Lilith is upset. She runs toward me. She is on me and we are struggling. I push her away into the lockers. She runs into me again and we go over the railing. We are falling.

“Grayson!” screams Cecile.

She has called my name. Her ape and I are falling, but she has called my name.

We land on the vinyl couches and a fat man. My leg is injured, but I stand. Lilith is up too. Cecile is running with Jake down the stairs to us. I am looking at Lilith. I am laughing. I am laughing as I pull my fist and let fly a punch. It feels good to hit her. She falls.

I turn and pick up my son. Cecile is looking at me.

“Cecile,” I say. “Jake and I are a family. Please, leave us alone.”

My son and I are leaving, backing out of the terminal. Lilith starts forward, but a silent, staring Cecile pulls her back.

“Please, leave us alone,” I say.

We are in the car. “Get out of the way, you jerk!” I shout as someone blocks our access to the street.

Cry About a Nickel

Clouds hung like webs in the firs and a fine mist wet the air. Blackberry thickets sprawled wide and high, most of the berries withered past picking. Back home, on an autumn morning like this, we might be sharpening knives and boiling water to butcher a hog. But here I was in the wet Cascades. I pulled my pickup to the side of the road and got out. I looked down the steep slope at the Clackamas River tumbling at a good clip over and around rocks. I made my way down a path to the bank and found it littered with fishermen, shoulder to shoulder, casting lures and dragging them past a great many large fish just sitting in a pool as if parked in a lot. Being sincerely ignorant I figured I was running little risk of sounding so when I asked the man nearest me—

“What kind of fish are those?”

The man let his eyes find me slowly and his smile was a few beats behind. “Why, they’re steelhead.”

“They don’t seem to be very interested,” I said.

The man turned back to his line and said nothing.

I watched a bit longer, then climbed back to the road. In South Carolina fishing was done quietly, in private, for creatures hidden from view. At least a man could say, “Aw, there ain’t no fish here.” But this seemed like premeditated self-humiliation.

A boy at the house told me I’d find his father in one of the stables. I wandered into the near one didn’t see him, but I caught a mare nosing around her hock. I found a halter on a nail outside her stall and put it on her, tied her head up.

“What’re you doing there?” a man yelled at me.

“She was nosin’ around her hock and I saw it was capped and had ointment on it. I raised her head up so she wouldn’t burn her nose.”

“What do you know about capped hocks? Who are you?”

“Are you Mr. Davis?”

“Yeah. I’m waitin’”

“Name’s Cooper. I heard you had a job open.”

“What do you know about horses?”

“I know enough to tie a horse’s head up when I’m trying to blister her.”

“Where’re you from?”

“Carolina.”

“North?”

“No, the good one.”

Davis rubbed his jaw and studied the mare. “We don’t get many blacks around here.”

“The horse said the same thing.”

“Five hundred a month. Includes a two-room trailer and utilities.”

Davis had twenty-three horses, most pretty good, and a lot of land. He rented rides to hunters and to anybody who just wanted to get wet in the woods.

The first thing was to clean out the medicine chest. The box was full of all sorts of old salves and liniments and I just had to say aloud to myself, “Pathetic.”

Davis had stepped into the tack room without me noticing. “What’s pathetic?” he asked.

I sat there on the floor, thinking oh no, but I couldn’t back off. “All this stuff,” I said. “Better to have nothing than all this useless trash.”

He didn’t like this. “What’s wrong with it?”

I looked in the box. “Well, sir, I appreciate the fact that this thermometer is fairly clean, but better to have a roll of string in the chest than keep this crap-crusted one on all the time. This is ugly.”

“So, you’ve got a weak stomach.”

I shook my head. “You’ve got ointments in here twenty years old. Why don’t you grab the good stuff for me. Where’s the colic relief? You’ve got three bottles of Bluestone and they’re all empty.”

He didn’t look directly at me, just sort of flipped me a glance. “Fix it,” he said and left.

There were no crossties, so I had to set up some for grooming. I was currycombing a tall stallion when Davis’s son came into the stable.

“Hey, Joe,” the kid said.

“Charlie.”

“Mind if I help?”

I looked at the teenager. It was really a question. As a boy, I would have been required to work the place. “I don’t know,” I said. “Your father might think I’m not earning my pay. Don’t you have other chores?”

“No.”

I didn’t understand this at all. I looked around. “I tell you what. You comb out the hindquarters on Nib here and then dandy-brush his head. I’m gonna shovel out his stall real quick.”

The boy took the comb, stood behind the horse, and began stroking.

“No,” I said and I pulled him away. “Stand up here next to the shoulder, put your arm over his back, and do it like that. So, he won’t kick the tar out of you.”

Charlie laughed nervously and began working again. I shoveled at the stall and watched him. He was a nice boy. I couldn’t tell if he was bright or not, he was so nervous. I stopped and listened to the rain on the roof.

“Does it ever stop raining?” I asked.

“One day last year.”

I laughed, but he just stared at me. Then I thought he wasn’t joking. “You’re not saying—” Before I finished he was smiling.

“How’d you learn about horses?” he asked.

“Grew up with ’em. You don’t spend much time with the animals?”

“Not really.”

“People say that horses are stupid.” I fanned some hay out of my face. “And they’re right, you know. But at least it’s something you can count on.”

Then Davis showed up. “Charles.”

The boy snapped to attention away from the horse and, glancing at the currycomb in his hand, threw it down. “I asked Joe if I could help, Daddy.”

“Get in the house.”

The boy ran from the stable.

“He’s a good boy,” I said.

Davis picked up the comb and studied it. “I’d appreciate it if from now on you just sent him back to the house.”

“All right.” I leaned the pitchfork against the wall and moved to take the horse from the crossties. “He’s got a bunch of chores in there to take care of, does he? Homework and stuff?”

“Yeah.”

Davis looked around at the stable and at the horses, at the stallion in front of him. “The other stables look this good?”

“Gettin’ there.”

It was a fun-time job, all right, and I went to bed sore every night. Finally, I took a weekend off and drove the hour to Portland. I got a hotel room downtown on Saturday and tried to figure out what I was going to do all day. I went to the zoo and a movie, ate at a restaurant, watched bizarrely made-up kids at Pioneer Square, saw another movie, shot pool at a tavern, and went to bed. I dreamed about women. You work ranches and you talk about women and you talk about going to town to get yourself a woman, but you end up watching movies in dark rooms and shooting pool with men.

After a big breakfast at the hotel restaurant, I headed back to the ranch. The weather in Portland had been nice and, to my surprise, the sun was out all during my drive home. I parked by my trailer. Charlie was splitting wood over beside the house. Seeing him doing this made me feel good. I went inside and stowed my gear. There was a knock.

“Come,” I said.

Davis came in. He had a bottle with him and a couple of glasses. “How was your trip?”

“Oh, it was a trip.”

“Mind if I sit?”

I nodded that he was welcome and watched him fill the glasses. “You like bourbon?”

“You bet.”

“Here you go.” He handed the drink over.

I took it and sat with him at the table. He knocked his back and I followed suit He poured another round.

He cleared his throat and focused on me. He had already had a few. “You’re all right, Cooper.” He leaned back. “Naw, I mean it.” He sipped from his glass. “You want to hear how I lost my wife?”

I didn’t say anything. I just looked at him.

“Killed herself.”

I had a headache.

“Know what she died of?”

“A sudden?”

He frowned off my joke. “She took pills. She was an alcoholic and a diabetic and a Catholic. All three, any one of which is fatal alone.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He drank more. “They said she was manic, too.” He looked out the window at the sky which was growing overcast. “Charles is a good boy.”

“He’s quiet.”

“That’s my fault, I guess.”

“That’s not a problem.”

“He’s small, you know.”

I just looked at him.

“I don’t have a lot of patience. I don’t have a lot of friends either. I guess the two go together.”