In the days between joining the army and shipping out, Will was treated like a hero by everyone he knew. It reminded him of the brief period when he had wanted to be a doctor. Whenever he went into the Main Street Diner, Lucas Enright called out, “Coffee’s on the house!” The mayor sent him a bottle of champagne despite the fact that Will was underage. He and Tula drank it while watching The Bourne Identity, after which they went for a walk and talked about what the movie meant.
“My favorite part was the beginning, when Matt Damon said, I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside. I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs two hundred fifteen pounds and knows how to handle himself.… Now why would I know that? How can I know that and not know who I am?”
“How sad,” said Tula.
“Sad? I think it’s incredibly cool. He’s kind of like Spider-Man. And anyway, who really knows who they are?”
“I do,” said Tula. “At least I used to know.”
“Everybody has sides to him, sides that are brought out by particular circumstances. So there’s no telling who you might be under different conditions.”
“I think that underneath, everybody has a solid, unchanging core.”
Sometimes Will took Tula with him to the diner, but more and more often he went alone. The diner had always seemed special to Will. “Let’s go out to eat!” his father would announce every now and then, and his mother would flutter back and forth between delight and consternation. “Oh dear, give me a minute to fix my hair,” she would twitter. “Is this the right shade of lipstick for my dress?”
While they were waiting for her to get ready, Lyle would say to Will, “You can see why I married your mother—she was the town beauty, and she still is.”
In the truck, Maggie would shrink up against Lyle in the front seat and put her hand on his shoulder as if she needed protecting, even though everyone knew she could handle most things just fine. Then they would park at the Super Saver and walk up Main Street to make the evening last longer. When they reached the diner, they would sink into the red leatherette seats of a booth and Lyle and Will would open their menus and Lyle would ask, “What do you say, Will? What looks good today?” All of it made Will feel older than he was, as if the occasion was both a festive celebration and a solemn lesson in how to be a man.
Some Saturdays, Lyle took Will to the diner for pancakes while they let Maggie sleep in. Saturday mornings were different from the evenings in that except for the waitresses, it was all men, which gave the narrow room a clubby feel. The men dragged out their breakfasts, tapping pipe tobacco onto their plates and talking about politics and the state of the world as they chewed, as if this were the spot where grave decisions about economics and foreign policy were made. Inevitably, one of the men would say, “Damn it!” or “Damn it all to hell!” which only made the subject seem more urgent, affecting not only the future of the planet, but the mysterious fate that lay in store for Will. He never spoke much at those breakfasts, but his protruding ears took in everything that was said, and his mind sifted through the various tidbits of conversation for clues about what that fate might be.
The worst thing about quitting school was that now he only saw Tula when she wasn’t busy with other things. Ten days before his departure, she called to say she had a surprise for him—she would pick him up at his house at seven o’clock on Saturday evening. “Be there or be square,” she said. All week long, Tula acted mysterious, and if Will pestered her with questions, she said her lips were sealed.
When Saturday came, Will put on the navy shirt with the pearl buttons and sat at the kitchen counter while Lyle ate some miniature sausages straight from the tin and washed them down with a can of beer. “Are you sure you don’t want any?” he asked.
“Thanks anyway,” said Will. He suspected Tula was planning a special dinner, and he didn’t want to spoil his appetite. At 7:15, Will walked down the driveway to peer up the empty road, and at 7:25, he walked all the way to where the hill dipped and flattened out. When he got back, Lyle was sprawled on the couch, listening to a journalist explain that there were five Iraqs, not one, to a host who kept interrupting. The empty sausage tin was sitting on the countertop along with dishes from that morning and also from the night before.
At 7:45 he called Tula’s house, but no one answered. By the time she finally arrived it was almost eight and both of them were flustered, dissolving the air of mystery that had built up over the previous week. “Where were you?” Will asked, but they both knew it wasn’t a question so much as a complaint.
“My mother had to work late at the Winslows’ house and I couldn’t get the car,” said Tula. “But it will be worth the wait. I promise.”
“I hope we’re going to eat,” said Will. “I could eat a horse.”
“Oh,” said Tula. “I forgot about that.”
“Who forgets about eating?” Even though Will had stopped getting taller, he was still filling out, and food was never very far from his mind.
“Men!” said Tula the way she often said it, but neither one of them was in the mood to laugh. Then she repeated, “It will be worth it. You’ll see.”
They drove for a little in silence. Sleet had fallen earlier in the day, and the moon was throwing its cold light over the frozen fields, washing them in silver. Instead of heading into town, Tula steered toward the highway and turned into the parking lot of the town’s only motel, which catered mostly to long-distance truckers. Will wasn’t sure what to say until Tula took a room key from her pocket and dangled it before his eyes. “I helped my mother today so she could get to the Winslows’ early so she could get back with the car—not that that worked out exactly the way I planned it. Anyway, while I was at it, I took a key to one of the empty rooms.”
Her tone had become teasing, and as soon as Will took in what she was saying, his hunger vanished, replaced with a burning sensation deep down in his belly. He drank in Tula’s perfume, and the sight of her standing on the frozen pavement under the star-strewn sky filled him with wonder.
Tula’s fingers fumbled with the key, but she wouldn’t let him take it from her. “I can get it,” she said. By the time the door sprang open to reveal the disarray of an unmade bed and the greasy remains of a half-eaten take-out dinner, the burning inside Will caused him to interpret Tula’s gasp of dismay as a cry of passion. He scooped her up and tossed her onto the bed, choking a little on his own suppressed cry.
But Tula jumped right up again and said, “Why isn’t the room made up? The rooms are always made up as soon as the guest leaves.”
“He could have left too late.”
“What if he hasn’t left yet? He could be back at any minute!” Her eyes darted from the tangled coverlet to the door. “I wanted it to be so romantic, but look at it. It’s a mess.”
Will was willing to take the risk that a stranger would walk in on them, but Tula wasn’t, so he spent a few minutes trying to convince her that the room had been abandoned. “If someone was staying here, he would have left his personal belongings lying around, and there aren’t any. You said you and your mother left the motel early. If the guest left late, you wouldn’t have been there to clean the room.”
Tula’s expression said he was missing something obvious, but he didn’t know what it might be. She rushed around the room opening and closing dresser drawers and poking her head into the closet before scooping the dirty linen off the bed and into a pile on the floor. After replacing the coverlet, she took a towel and wiped at the surfaces in the bathroom before getting on her knees to swab behind the toilet. “Leave it, Tula. It doesn’t matter to me what the bathroom looks like. It doesn’t matter to me at all.”
“Of course it matters!” Tula’s eyes were glassy, and she was clutching at the porcelain fixture and gesticulating with the towel and nearly choking, all at once. Then her eyes caught and focused and she threw down the towel and jumped to her feet. With a great anguished howl, she pushed past Will, shouting, “What was I thinking? I should have known it would be like this!”
Will could only stand in a stupor and stare after her as she ran out of the room and across the parking lot to where she had nestled the car in behind a supply shed. He heard the car door slam and the engine sputter to life, and then the tires skidded on the icy asphalt and the car roared off, leaving him to walk the two miles back to town.
The diner was about to close, but when Lucas Enright saw Will at the door, he ushered him inside and set a steaming plate of spaghetti on the table along with a tall glass of Dr Pepper with crushed ice. “We’re always open for you,” he said.
“Good,” said Will. “Because I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”
The girl who had laughed at him in the women’s shop was sitting in a booth with her friends. When she saw Will, she came over and sat down across from him. “Remember me?” she said.
“Of course I do.”
“My name is Dylan. I know yours is Will.”
Everything about the girl was casual and put him at ease, so before he knew what he was doing, Will found himself pouring out the story of what had happened at the motel.
“I’ll give you a ride home,” said Dylan. “But you don’t mind if we stop by my place first, do you?”
Will said he didn’t mind.
“Tula likes things to be tidy and clean, but I’m afraid I like things a little on the dirty side. That won’t bother you, will it?”
Will felt his mouth drop open, but he managed to say, “No, that won’t bother me one little bit.”
Will made a point of stopping by the diner every day after that, partly because he was killing time until the day of his departure and partly because he wanted to experience the hush when he entered, but mostly because he wanted witnesses to the fact that his life was finally unzipping and letting its possibilities out. One of the men always said, “Hey, there’s Will,” and Will had the strange sense that it was thirty years down the road and he was watching his own son swing through the door on his way to wherever life would take him. It reminded him of a movie he’d seen where a visitor to the past stepped off the walkway and killed a butterfly, which altered the entire course of evolution until he journeyed back through time again so he could make sure to stay on the walkway and change everything back.
Sometimes one of the patrons would call out, “Let’s ask Will.” Then Will had to be careful not to disappoint them, careful not to answer what he was thinking, which was that he did better with multiple choice questions, questions where he could apply answer elimination techniques before making an educated guess. So mostly he replied, “That’s a good question. What do you folks think?”
“Funny you should ask,” his interlocutor might say, and then the conversation would start back up again, for they all had opinions on just about everything. Even the quiet ones had opinions, and this was the place they dared to share them. Even the ones who were older than Lyle and Will put together had opinions, even the ones who were older than the folded sandstone hills.
God hadn’t talked to Pastor Price in a long time. When he mentioned it to Tiffany, she tousled his hair and said, “Maybe that’s because you’re the one doing all of the talking.”
“Only on Sundays,” replied the pastor. “Most days, all I do is listen. Just this morning, I learned more than I wanted to know about sub-prime mortgages from Jack Baker and counseled a family whose son was killed in Iraq. And when have I ever said no to one of Mrs. Farnsworth’s tales of woe?” He tried to sound good-natured about it, but his wife’s words stayed with him and he vowed to redouble his efforts in the listening department. Lately, things had been moving very fast for the pastor, which was precisely Tiffany’s point.
The April meeting of the pastoral council gave Price a chance to test whether he was listening or not. As he stood underneath a banner that proclaimed GROW TOWARD TOMORROW and greeted the council members as they arrived, it dawned on him that tomorrow was already here. The ambitious goals of the steering committee had been met or exceeded, and it wasn’t lost on him that the Red Bud elite who were filing into the meeting hall were there because of him. He was the prime mover when it came to the Church of the New Incarnation’s astonishing growth and success.
Congratulations on the pastor’s recent performances eddied around more general talk of the television show—of whether or not it would bring the people of the parish together or drive them apart, of whether someone should tell the choir director not to preen so blatantly in front of the cameras, of whether the money it brought in should be used for local issues or national ones, and whether the parish should take a stand in the upcoming mayoral primary or stay out of that sort of thing.
Buddy Hutchinson arrived and said, “Did you see that editorial about term limits?”
“I did,” said the pastor.
“It’s got some people talking about throwing their hats into the ring.”
“A man would have to be a damn fool to run against you,” said the pastor. “Anyway, talk is cheap. Sometimes it’s better to bide your time.” No one could say he wasn’t listening!
But there was one issue that wasn’t being talked about. It wasn’t being talked about because most of the council members didn’t know about it even though it was probably the most pressing issue of all. A few days before, Winslow had called to say that the top-secret document calling for a cover-up regarding toxic munitions had surfaced on an anti-war website. That would have been bad enough, but then Lex Lexington had reported the same sort of thing—his missing draft legislation had shown up on a website called wartruth.com.
“What do prisons have to do with war?” the pastor had asked.
“Apparently there’s a war on poor people,” said Lexington. “Hell, how would I know what a bunch of crazy people are thinking?”
“The prison provides labor to the plant,” said Winslow when they conferenced him in. “It’s perfectly legal, though.”
“Well, it sure doesn’t look good if we’re backing legislation that would incentivize incarceration,” said Lex. “It doesn’t look good if the munitions are harming soldiers and you’re covering it up.”
“Optics,” said Winslow. “I have to admit the optics are bad.”
That had been the day before. Now Price kept one eye on the clock. He liked to start his meetings promptly at seven, but Winslow and Lexington were late to arrive. When they did, they huddled in a darkened corner of the room, talking in whispers and trying to catch the pastor’s eye. It irritated him that they weren’t able to conceal their distress. Even when he signaled “later” to them and made calming motions the way he did when Tiffany was driving too fast, they scowled and twitched and grumbled to each other behind a leafless ficus tree. He had only persuaded them to keep quiet at the general meeting by saying it was better to figure things out privately, after everyone else had gone, but when he made his eyes bug out and drew his forefinger sharply across his neck, they merely scowled at him and made spastic movements with their hands.
Between his vow to listen more and his awareness that the sooner the meeting was over, the sooner he could address Winslow and Lexington’s concerns, the pastor was unusually quiet at the general meeting, unusually agreeable, unusually willing to delegate to his advisors. “Good stuff,” he said as the group broke up and reached for their coats.
The three men made a show of leaving the parish hall along with the others. They waved good-bye in the parking lot and got into their cars, where they fumbled with their keys and checked their cell phones as the parking lot emptied. While the pastor was engaged in this charade, his phone rang. It was Lex. “You’re not actually leaving, are you?”
“Of course not,” said Price. “We’re just waiting for the others to go. Wasn’t that the plan? I thought that was clear.”
“That’s what I thought, but then I worried I’d misunderstood.”
“I think we’re all on the same page,” said the pastor. “Let’s wait five more minutes before we go back in.”
The parking lot was dotted with beautiful hand-forged lamps designed to resemble palm fronds, but now the pastor regretted them. For one thing, they looked out of place in the wheat field where the church was set, and for another, he longed for real darkness, for a time when people could disappear into the night and when a man’s business was his own and couldn’t be blasted out over the Internet for all the world to see. But then he realized that he was nostalgic for an era of hardship and privation, one without satellite television or even indoor plumbing. He thought of all the people who needed him—people in the here and now, lost people, people with struggles and torments. People like Winslow and Lexington. People like Senator Ewing, who had called that very afternoon to express concern about the missing documents because his signature was on one of them and it would upset his constituents if they saw it. People, frankly, like the president. The president needed him too, or at least he needed people like him, but since there were very few people really like him, the president needed him, Houston Price, to be just where he was and doing just what he was doing, right there in the here and now.
Price had seen the president once, at a meeting of religious leaders. It was disgraceful how those Code Pink people had crashed the gates and shouted things. And the Bare Witness people, without a stitch of clothing on. Right in the middle of the incident with the Secret Service, the president had caught Price’s eye, and a look had passed between them. “I need ya,” said the look, and Houston Price had promised then and there to do whatever he could to capture hearts and minds right there in Red Bud, right there where the president needed him most.
When the three men were back inside the building, they gathered in a windowless coatroom so the light wouldn’t attract the attention of anyone passing by—not that the church was on the way to anywhere. It was surrounded by fields owned by the large industrial farm run by Tiffany’s father and the nearest dwelling was a mile away. “So what do we do?” asked Winslow. “I’ll not only be in trouble because those emails attribute some very forward-thinking ideas to me, but I’ll also be in trouble because the document went missing over a year ago and I didn’t report it.”
“And I run a high-security prison,” said Lex. “How secure does it look now?”
“Losing sensitive documents is pretty darn bad in and of itself,” agreed Winslow, “but making the information they contain public is even worse.”
Lexington said “losing” was the wrong word to use. “They were stolen, and it was Maggie Rayburn who stole them, one hundred percent. The mystery is how they got up on that blasted website. I’d ask the little bitch myself, but no one has heard from her in months.”
Winslow glared at the pastor. “I thought you said the story about innocent prisoners would create a distraction. You said it would scare that Rayburn woman off if people knew she had pilfered records from the prison.”
The pastor’s wheels were turning—there was always a solution, even if it took some time to find it. “I think you should both report all of the thefts to law enforcement,” he said slowly. “Even if it makes you look bad, you want to go on record that you weren’t the ones who leaked them to the press.”
“I don’t mind getting the law going on it,” said Lex. “But meanwhile, we’ve got to shut that website down.”
“How in tarnation are we going to do that?” asked Winslow. “We don’t even know who runs it.”
“Can your army contacts help somehow?” asked Price. “There has to be a way to track that sort of thing.”
“We don’t have to know who it is,” said Winslow. “We just have to reach them through the site. Doesn’t it have a contact page?”
Lex paced to the end of the coatroom, where a schedule of filming dates was posted next to the altar-flower sign-up sheet. “We’ve got all that TV money, don’t we?” he said. “Why can’t we just up and buy the blasted thing?”
“All church money is reserved for God’s work,” said the pastor, and then he quickly added, “Don’t get me wrong.”
“If this doesn’t qualify as God’s work, then what the hell does?” bellowed Lex.
“Don’t forget that you’re only here because of us,” said Winslow. “You might be the face, but we’re the heart of this operation. We’re the reason this church exists.”
“August just wants you to remember who provided the seed money for this thing,” said Lex. “We’re the major stakeholders—along with a few others, of course—and now we’re looking for a return on our investment.”
“We’ll buy it,” said Winslow. “We’ll buy the sucker and then we’ll shut it down. I’ll make some discreet inquiries about the website through military channels—just in case. Meanwhile, let’s talk to Sheriff Conway. I’m sure multiple laws have been broken. There’s no doubt in my mind about that.”
“This isn’t a democracy, Houston,” added Lex. “It’s not as if we have to take a vote.”
Deep in Pastor Price’s brain, there was a whole secret sector reserved for undemocratic principles. It was like looking at pornography—even if you knew everybody did it, it wasn’t seemly to admit it. Then 9/11 happened, and people started making up new phrases that stripped old concepts of their negative connotations. The pastor found himself nodding or murmuring, “Just so” when some public figure or other used the term “enhanced interrogation” in the place of “torture” or equated freedom with domestic spying or morality with war. But much as he wanted to see God’s Kingdom taking root right there in Red Bud, some of the measures people were talking about didn’t sit well with him, and he didn’t like being pressured to throw the resources of his church behind private agendas. Now more than ever, the pastor needed guidance from God, but even when he closed his eyes and said a little prayer, the part of his brain he counted on to light up with inspiration stayed dark and stupefied.
“Can I have a couple of days to think about it?” he asked.
“Two days,” said Winslow. “We meet back here in two days to make a plan, and the sooner we execute it, the better. It would be a lot easier to do this with your help, Houston, but we’re prepared to do it without you.”
That evening, God finally broke His silence. The pastor was watching the news and trying to figure out how he was going to sneak a million dollars past the church finance committee while Tiffany paraded around in her apron and lace panties as she put the finishing touches on a new recipe. On the screen, a panel of experts was opining on the war and whether or not it was right to show photographs of coffins to the American people. A high-level memo on torture had been leaked, and new information about the man who had written it was coming out. Price had skipped both breakfast and lunch and he was only half paying attention because his stomach was growling and his head felt a little feverish and light.
“Guess what’s for dinner,” Tiffany called out.
It was Italian night, and she wanted him to guess from the smells emanating from the kitchen what she was making. It obviously contained tomatoes and basil and garlic. And the lid was rattling on the big pot, so he guessed she was boiling water for spaghetti or the colorful rotini she liked. “Rotini with marinara sauce,” he called out, and the thought of the tough little spirals becoming pale and flaccid in the seething water made him dizzy and a little desperate, as if a similar fate lay in store for him.
Just then, the television showed a general—or perhaps it was a retired general. He’d missed that part when he was talking to Tiffany. Whoever it was, he was saying, And when I stand up before Christ, I want there to be blood on my knees and my elbows. I want to be covered with mud. And I want to be standing there with a ragged breastplate of righteousness. And a spear in my hand. And I want to say, “Look at me, Jesus. I’ve been in the battle. I’ve been fighting for you.”
Startled, the pastor turned up the volume. He wished he had one of those newfangled systems that allowed a viewer to replay the segment. Would a general really say those things? And then he knew it hadn’t been the general talking at all. It had been God talking to him through the general. And now God was talking through a woman donating a sack of clothing to the local homeless shelter (Clean house and do good at the same time!) and through a life insurance team with its performance trophy (Join the winning team!) and through a man showing off his compact car (So roomy, you could hide a million dollars in the trunk!). It seemed God’s message was that he could avoid being a loser by joining the winning side, and he could avoid unnecessary questions by routing the money for the website through a charity such as Tiffany’s Mothers of Mercy group. He’d have to figure out how to tell Tiffany so she wouldn’t become suspicious, but it was a good solution to the problem. Thank you, Lord, he thought just as Tiffany called him in to eat.
“Just in time,” said the pastor. “I was feeling a bit woozy just now.”
“You’re half starved, not to mention overworked. A little food is bound to make you right as rain.”
Tiffany had made a vegetarian dish, and the pastor ate it with relish.
“No meat?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I’ve been rethinking my policy on that.”
Two weeks later, a small cadre of council members met and made an anonymous offer to buy the website.
At the spring assembly, Mrs. Winslow stood backstage holding a clipboard and checking names off of a list as the girls arrived. “It’s hard to believe you’re almost a senior,” she said to Tula. “Do you have exciting plans for the summer?”
“I’ll probably get a job,” said Tula without conviction. “And I’ll work at the clinic, but of course that doesn’t pay.”
Tula had worked as hard as anyone on Sammi’s great men of Red Bud project, but where she once had felt like a central spoke in the functioning of the assembly, she now felt herself spinning helplessly at its rim.
“I guess you’ll start looking at colleges too,” said Mrs. Winslow, as if she didn’t know that without a scholarship, Tula had no way to pay for books, much less living expenses and tuition. “You need to get in line,” she added with an uncharacteristic wink. “The procession is about to begin.”
The music started up, and the girls moved forward using a mincing step that made their gowns appear to be gliding of their own accord. After the procession, Mrs. Winslow stood at the podium and gave a speech about unity and transitions. “This is a happy occasion. A time to be happy about the office you receive and also about the office your friends receive. You are all sisters and you are all equal. Success for one is the same as success for all.”
“That’s not true,” Tula whispered to the girl standing next to her. The speech had tapped an evolving vein of cynicism, and even though it shamed her to acknowledge it, she persisted. “Who believes that? Only people who are rich and successful, that’s who.”
“Shush,” said the girl, adjusting her bouquet of sunflowers, which was identical to the bouquet carried by all of the rising seniors. When it was time to light the candles, the girl rushed energetically forward, as if to make up for Tula’s rudeness.
Tula performed her small role in the festivities with a sinking heart. She had imagined the graduating girls dressed in long white dresses and the younger girls arrayed around them in a rainbow of colors as they walked in formation around the room before singing the song they had practiced and learning the results of the vote that would determine which of her classmates would step into prominent positions for their last year as Rainbow Girls. She hadn’t dared to imagine herself as the new Worthy Advisor, but she saw herself in the lesser role of jewel officer, standing at the Worthy Advisor’s side and filled with gracious benevolence for the girls who hadn’t been elected to any position whatsoever. Most of all, she had imagined that white would have a new meaning not only for her, but for the entire assembly. That dream had shriveled and died, but as the lower positions were announced and hers wasn’t among the names called, she started to wonder if she might be elected Worthy Advisor after all. She had worked diligently. Everyone liked her. And hadn’t Mrs. Winslow just winked at her? Mrs. Winslow never winked! Tula quickly calculated that if Sammi and another popular girl split the vote, she had an outside chance at winning. She hardly dared to think of it, but it wasn’t inconceivable that the cards would fall in her favor after all.
One by one, the newly elected girls floated across the room to stand on the dais with the outgoing officers until there was only one more result left to announce. Tula’s hopes rose and sank with every beat of her heart. Sammi was popular, but she had become increasingly bossy over the last few months, so perhaps the girls had tired of her. In fact, it was highly likely. But when the drumroll sounded and the new Worthy Advisor was finally announced, Tula was shocked but not really surprised to hear Sammi’s name instead of her own. The meeting hall erupted into whistles and applause. Tula clapped her hands automatically, but when she looked around the room that had held such promise for her, tears welled in her eyes. Each time they threatened to fall, she reminded herself that the eighth bow station with purity as its central tenet still existed, if only in her heart. And purity included feeling happy for Sammi. Mrs. Winslow was right about that. It also included making something of herself no matter how insurmountable the obstacles in her path.
But there was another voice inside her head, and the more she tried to ignore it, the louder and more insistent it became. What if she had been wrong about purity, wrong about what white signified—wrong about everything! The incident at the motel had worried Tula. It seemed an indication that her instincts were wildly off-kilter. Why had she thought the motel was a good place to take Will? Why had she insisted on cleaning behind the toilet? And why hadn’t she realized that no amount of scrubbing could ever change the motel’s drab colors and flimsy wallboard into something more permanent and respectable? She still thought that the Rainbow banner should be re-envisioned, but now she wondered if the added stripe should be black, with all that blackness signified. In any case, the idea of purity suddenly seemed childish and naïve. Were the women who came to the clinic impure? And who had first thought to apply the concept of purity to women so that they could forever after be held to an impossible standard and found wanting?
Tula had resolved to do better by Will, and just before he left for the army, she had tried again to arrange a special evening. Mr. and Mrs. Winslow had gone out of town for a few days, and Tula had volunteered to keep an eye on their house. She invited Will to go there with her, and after making sure the plants were watered and everything was in order, she gave him a tour of the upstairs, ending with the master bedroom.
The room was dominated by an enormous bed that was draped in flounced bed coverings and piled with satin pillows. At the windows, silk curtains fell in shimmering puddles to the floor, and an entire wall was hung with paintings of beautiful women cuddling lapdogs or brushing their hair. The setting was the opposite of the motel room in every regard, and Tula’s heart was thumping erratically as she drew Will across the threshold and sat down on the edge of the bed.
Instead of sitting beside her, Will wanted to peer into the closets and turn on the water in the roomy shower. “Get a load of this!” he exclaimed. “Who ever thought of making the water come out from the sides!”
The bathroom was scrupulously clean. No suspicious yellow scum or lint or curls of pubic hair marred its gleaming surfaces. Instead, there were stacks of fluffy towels and dishes of fragrant, unused soap. Only belatedly did Tula realize that it was clean because her own mother had worked herself to the bone to keep it that way. Will insisted on peering into every cupboard and sniffing every vial of perfume before he sat down beside Tula and told her he respected her too much to force her into anything. “I understand about purity now,” he said. “It took me a while, and even if I don’t completely understand it, I know that whatever’s important to you should be just as important to me.”
Tula wasn’t sure how it all happened, but before she knew it, she and Will were eating ice cream at the Main Street Arcade and promising to wait for each other, and then they were kissing each other good-bye. Tears were oozing from her eyes as she said, “I’ll think about you, Will. I’ll think about you every day.”
“I’ll think about you too, Tula.”
“Do you have the picture I gave you?”
“I’ll keep it in a special pocket. Right next to my lucky crystal and my knife.”
“I have your picture too. It’s sitting right beside my bed, so it’s the first thing I see every morning and the last thing I see at night.”
And then she was waving from her doorstep and Will was gone and the waters of her life closed over him. Some days, if she didn’t count the persistent ache in her heart, it was almost as if he had never been part of it at all.
After the ceremony, the new officers stood in a long line to receive the good wishes of the assembly. Mrs. Winslow breezed around the room, her head held high, curls bouncing stiffly on her head. “You still have a whole year to figure things out,” she said when she saw Tula standing in a corner by herself. At first, Tula thought she was talking about Will, but of course she wasn’t.
“Yes ma’am,” said Tula.
“A lot can happen in a year! Just keep in mind that Mr. Winslow is always looking for good secretarial help at the plant. He might even have a summer position so you can start to learn the ropes. And of course I need household help every now and then.”
“Yes ma’am,” said Tula again. It was as if she had already given up on college, already begun scrubbing bathrooms alongside her mother, already started fading into the grimy shadows of the motel or flushing little pieces of herself down the sparkling toilets of the rich people’s homes.
By the time Will left for the army, Maggie had been gone more than six months. For weeks afterward, Lyle passed shadowlike through the concrete expanse of the munitions factory, avoiding people who approached to congratulate him, as if he were the heroic one. If Jimmy raised his hand from across the parking lot, Lyle pretended not to see him. Then, at the end of April, he took two days off to visit Will before he shipped out overseas. The day he returned, MacBride called him into his office and said, “I know things have been difficult for you, Lyle, but we have standards to uphold.”
“Yes sir,” said Lyle, snapping his shoulders back and speaking crisply. He had spent the last two days watching Will and his fellow soldiers stand at attention and salute, and some of their spit and polish had rubbed off on him.
“It’s not that I don’t know things have been a little rough,” said MacBride.
“Yes sir,” replied Lyle.
“The thing is, I need people who can give me one hundred percent.”
MacBride went on about inputs and outputs and effort and reward while Lyle studied the worn face in front of him, with its squinting eyes and wrinkled skin and specks of ingrained dirt, and wondered if MacBride was happy or at least content.
“I hope you’ll see this as an opportunity,” said MacBride. Then he said he’d be happy to write a recommendation for Lyle and that his final paycheck would be sent to his home. Lyle scanned the cluttered cubicle for clues to his future, but the dusty workplace safety manual and the chipped metal task lamp and the grimy work orders tacked to the bulletin board next to the photograph of MacBride’s son and grandson holding fishing poles seemed like artifacts from an exhibit about the distant past.
“I have a son,” he said. He almost told MacBride that he had missed work because he had been seeing his son off to war, but the rule was that absences were to be cleared in advance, and he hadn’t done that.
“Family,” said MacBride. “That’s what it’s all about.”
Most of Lyle’s acquaintances couldn’t remember whether he attended the high school graduation or not. Afterward they said, “Didn’t see you up at school,” despite the fact that Lyle had been sitting in the R section, right where he was supposed to sit. Will wasn’t there to walk across the stage, but there was a flag with a wooden stick strapped to the empty chair between Rafe Rodriguez and Stucky Place. August Winslow had been asked to give the graduation speech, and the principal beamed out at the audience as he introduced him.
“Our speaker was recently honored as one of Red Bud’s great men, so we are lucky to have him with us today,” he said.
Winslow looked like a politician with his dark suit and silver hair. “I’m probably not the greatest of the great, but the others were unavailable,” he said, which made the audience laugh since everybody knew that all of the other men on Sammi Green’s list were long since deceased.
Winslow spoke about individual strands in the strong rope of the American economy. He said that local businesses like the one he worked for were always happy to welcome new graduates, but that some of the young people before him would spread their wings and fly before coming home again and others would soar farther afield, using what they had learned right there at Red Bud High to help make distant communities stronger. He said “freedom” and “heartland” and “sea to shining sea.” He made special mention of two boys who were joining the armed services immediately after graduation, and then he saluted the flag on Will’s chair and everybody clapped.
Lyle wiped the tears from his eyes and hurried out before the ceremony was over. He sat for a long time on the stairs that led down to the locker room, his knees as bony and angular as the metal treads, his khaki shirt blending in against the cinder-block wall, and his inner chambers as empty and echoing as the stairwell. He was proud of Will for going off to make something of himself, and he wondered if it was too late to spread his own wings. There had to be a job for him in Phoenix. He and Maggie could get a fresh start there. Now and then a group of students burst through a fire door from the hallway, their high spirits propelling them up a flight or down and out into the sunshine, and only by flattening himself against the wall did Lyle manage to avoid being kicked by a polished battalion of special-occasion shoes. When August Winslow rushed past followed by the mayor, Lyle craned his neck to watch them through the balusters.
“Goddamn it, Buddy,” Winslow hissed. “Keep those kids out of the creek! I don’t care what you tell them. No, don’t say it’s toxic! Chrissakes, isn’t that the whole point? Make up something about venomous snakes—it doesn’t matter what. Just get it done.”
Whether it was Winslow’s words or Will’s absence or the fact that he hadn’t eaten yet that day, Lyle experienced the kind of phantasm people who died and came back to life claimed to have had of the light-filled paradise that was waiting for them on the other side. What Lyle saw wasn’t paradise, though, but a parallel world of privileged information and secret contacts and clandestine assignations. It was as if he had broken through the walls of his existence to find that what he had thought were hard limits and bolted doors were only flimsy illusions woven from the thread of his expectations and lack of confidence in himself. Now he saw that anyone who wanted to could tap on the barrier and break right through. He felt powerful and alienated, as if there was an important reason for his suffering and he was about to find out what it was. His own passivity made sense now too. It was what the people in charge wanted from people like him, and he had been only too willing to comply.
It was the sensation of finally seeing beyond the curtain that caused Lyle to drive carefully home, staying well within the speed limit even on the New Road Extension, where he had always revved the engine and banked the curve. It was what caused him to search through Maggie’s things for some hint of what the police had been looking for or for some clue as to what she had meant about the Iraqi babies. But he found nothing, only a couple of sweaters and a few magazines with their pages missing.
The next afternoon, a representative from the bank that held the mortgage arrived to change the locks and post a sign in the front yard. “What are you doing?” asked Lyle, but the man merely handed him a business card and a pamphlet and asked him if he had somewhere he could stay.
“Why do I need a place to stay?” asked Lyle.
“Read the pamphlet,” said the man. “If the pamphlet doesn’t explain everything to your satisfaction, you can call the number on the back.”
Lyle’s calls became less and less frequent. Neither of them said so outright, but with Will gone, there was little for them to talk about. “If I can’t come home,” Maggie had said the last time they spoke, “maybe you should come to Phoenix.”
“That’s an idea,” Lyle had replied. And then he had asked, “Are you making progress on the case?”
“We should hear something any day now.” Since Maggie had been working for the attorney, two of his clients had been granted new trials, so the office was busier than ever. “Everyone wants representation,” she said to Lyle. “But hardly anyone can pay.”
“Maybe if you prove Tomás is innocent, they’ll forgive you for taking his prison records and you can come home,” said Lyle.
“So they figured it out?” said Maggie.
“I expect they did,” said Lyle.
Maggie didn’t say that Tomás’s records weren’t all she had taken, and she wondered if each stolen document would count as a separate strike when they added up the charges against her.
When several Mondays went by and Maggie didn’t hear from Lyle, she dialed her home number only to find that it was out of service. A lump of panic rose in her throat, and whenever she swallowed, the lump reasserted itself and made her gag. She called True, who promised to get a message to Lyle. Then she called Misty, who told Maggie the police were still sniffing around. “We would have heard if they’d found something new, but you probably should lie low for a while longer just in case.”
That night Maggie tossed fitfully and awoke when it was still dark to find Dino whining and licking her face. “Okay, boy, okay,” she said, but it took her a minute or two to remember where she was. When she took him out for his morning walk, she thought she saw Tomás dressed as a soldier. Good for you, Tomás, she thought. As she followed him up a side street and into an alley, she noticed he had put on weight and seemed taller than she remembered, but just when she got within shouting distance, he was swallowed up by the crowd. A few minutes later she saw him coming out of a coffee shop with a group of friends, and then she saw him selling magazines from a darling little cart. “Tomás!” she called out.
“Hello!” the magazine vendor called back, and it was obvious even before she crossed the street that it wasn’t the little prisoner after all.
“Even if that’s not Tomás,” she told Dino, “it’s someone he might easily have been. And it’s someone who isn’t in prison, thank the lord for that.” Her voice scratched in her throat when she spoke, and the unfamiliar sound of it made her think that she was only one coin toss away from being someone she might have been too.
In the confusion she had gotten her turned around, and when she started up again, Dino planted his feet until she agreed to go in the opposite direction. “Okay, boy, okay,” she said again, because just then she spotted a woman who looked like Sandra Day O’Connor. She hurried to catch up with her.
“What are you following me for?” asked the woman in a gruff voice.
By the time Maggie found her way back to the church, her head was spinning and her forehead was hot. She set out food and some fresh water for Dino and only saved herself from collapsing by grabbing on to the communion railing. Kneeling and letting bits of colored light from the stained glass spatter her face as the sun made its way up the firmament, she prayed. She prayed for Lyle and Will, of course. She prayed that someday Tomás and George would walk the verdant paths of freedom and warm themselves before a fire in a sitting room with rough pine floors and a worn corduroy couch that bore a striking resemblance to her own sitting room floor and her own sagging couch. But now she also prayed that the men could bear their incarceration bravely, that they wouldn’t break on the wheel of American justice the way so many others had broken. She now knew that true Justice had been set far out of reach on some celestial shelf—more, she thought now, to taunt people than to teach them anything useful.
But she also knew that there were small pockets of justice locked deep inside each person’s heart, so she prayed for the judges and the jurors—not only the ones who had convicted and sentenced Tomás and George, but for all judges and all jurors everywhere—good people, she knew, but people who had limited access to Truth, which reposed on the high shelf alongside Justice, people who pondered the facts as presented to them and who struggled with growling stomachs to put the pieces together the way, as a girl, she had put together the jigsaws in the forty-watt light of the lamp that sat on the game table in the lakeside cabin where the Rainbow Girls had gone together to spend the month of July and strive to understand Fidelity or Nature or Immortality or whichever of the bow stations was paramount that year.
There were always pieces missing. There were always girls who thought it funny to conceal a piece of the puzzle up their sleeves so that they could return to the table in the bright light of a July morning, crawl about on all fours, and emerge from underneath the table with a triumphant, “Ah-ha! I found it!” and so be the one to complete the picture while the other girls, who had searched high and low and underneath the table and couches only the evening before, looked on with mounting suspicions about where the piece had been all night. In later years, so many pieces were truly missing, vacuumed up by the August cleaning crew or taken home and forgotten by someone who wanted the last quiet laugh, that it took the fun out of doing the puzzles and eventually they were all forgotten or thrown away.
And, finally, she prayed for herself, but it had become a vague prayer. She didn’t know what to pray for. She prayed to be true to her promise. She prayed for strength. She prayed for hope. Sometimes she prayed for tolerance unless she prayed for intolerance, for she thought it was probably a sin to be tolerant of injustice and evil—if evil existed and wasn’t just a name people plastered on things they didn’t understand or agree with. As she prayed, it occurred to her that prayer was the only thing worth doing, the only truly good thing, because all actions had unintended consequences and because people who acted were always in the gravest danger of being wrong.
But so, of course, were people who prayed. Perhaps it was wrong to pray for particular people or results. Perhaps the only thing she could do was to recite the words in the dusty prayer books that were tucked into the backs of the wooden pews. “Our Father,” she whispered into the cavernous emptiness of the old church. “Lord Jesus, son of God.” Or maybe the only good and true expression was a wordless cry to the heavens, a guttural sound of anguish, or a transcendental and meaningless “Om.”
What was it she had meant to do? She had started off with such purpose, but then gone off track somehow. Tomás was only slightly better off than he had been before, since even if he was approved for a new trial, the process could take years and he could be reconvicted, which was sure to break what was left of his spirit. And she had forgotten all about the toxic munitions—or if she hadn’t really forgotten, she hadn’t done anything with the information that God had trusted her to act on. The answer lay in her soul—she was sure of it, but when she tried to concentrate on the holy places of her innermost being, all was airy and dark, like the empty high-ceilinged church that had lost both its priest and its congregation. Her body ached. Her stomach heaved. Her head and brain were on fire.
A bird flapped loose from the rafters and swooped through the nave. It was Justice, she thought, or Truth. Her mind had wandered from the prayer she had wanted to make, and if the prayer couldn’t even be formulated, how could it be sent? Was a vague feeling of supplication enough, or did she have to find the right words in order to make a connection across the universe to wherever the first principle was hiding? Could she use her own words, or did she have to chant official hymns and formulations? She didn’t know, but just in case, she concentrated on the word “good” and all it contained within it and all it entailed. After trying in vain to keep the letters glued together, she let them go, and she saw that God was inside the letters and that he was talking to her, but he was speaking in August Winslow’s voice.
—Don’t you understand anything? Not that I owe you of all people an explanation. And not that you could understand it even if I did!
Winslow was right. What did she know about the history of the world or the intricacies of the law or the demands of politics or the competing needs of populations? It had been arrogance to think that she could change anything or that any change she might make would be for the better. How could she chart a just and true course when she could not know anything for certain? Causation, correlation, coincidence—how could she, Maggie Rayburn, hope to untangle any of the threads?
—You live in the greatest country on earth, said the voice.
And then it was Sandra Day O’Connor who was before her, dressed in a black robe and sitting in a patch of stained light on her portable dais, smiling benignly, flanked by her smartly dressed clerk and the proprietor of the deli and holding something behind her back and asking Maggie to pick a hand. The trip to Phoenix hadn’t been for nothing after all, and Maggie strained to hear the words that the former justice had come to tell her.
“You came,” Maggie said tentatively. “You came to see me after all.” Her words echoed strangely in the ancient acoustics of the church. Outside the high, translucent windows, the light was fading. Somewhere in the distance, a siren blared, and somewhere close by, the dog stirred. She must have fallen asleep, for everything outside of her and everything within went silent, vacuous, and dark.
All through the night or a succession of nights, the voice called out to her, and whether it was God or August Winslow or the former justice trying to make contact, she clearly heard the word “Om.”
—Om, said the voice, unless it was saying “home.”
She fell back into a deep sleep, and when she finally awoke, clearheaded and hungry, Dino was gone. Even though she searched every corner of the church and then circled the block calling his name, she couldn’t find him. The one good thing she had accomplished had come to nothing after all. Everything was a circle, she could see that, and it both made sense and didn’t make sense that at the end of her journey she would find herself exactly where she had begun.
Lord have mercy,” said Dolly. “This is a mighty fine young man.” She hefted the baby against her shoulder before swaddling him more securely and passing him to the mother, who was smiling tiredly from the bed. “Are you ready for your husband to come back in?” The mother nodded and said she was. Dolly straightened the bedcovers before opening the door to where the woman’s family was waiting in the reception area, with its pretty sheer curtains and comfortably upholstered chairs. “You can come in now,” she said.
It was almost 5:30, but Tula, who was working nearly full time during the summer, had stayed late to help out. She was sitting at the desk, the stethoscope Dolly had given her as a present peeking from the pocket of her smock. When everything was clean and orderly, Dolly turned to Tula. “Even if things don’t work out for Danny and me, I’m saying a prayer for you and Will.”
“So am I,” said Tula. “But something tells me Will and I will be just fine.”
“You will be,” said Dolly. “You absolutely will.” She was remembering the Fourth of July picnic where she had met Danny and how she had known instantly that he was the one.
“We argue a lot, but maybe that’s a good thing,” said Tula.
“I wish Danny would argue,” said Dolly. “He used to go for days without saying a word, although now when I call him, I can hardly shut him up.”
“That’s a good sign,” said Tula. “Talking’s always the first step in the healing process.”
They talked for a little while about how some women could just feel things and how Dolly and Tula were like that themselves. Tula said she could sense a world of possibilities hovering and ready to descend: college, children, a little house of her own—hers and Will’s—all of it waiting for her, all of it one tick in time’s cycle closer to coming true. “I not only get feelings,” said Tula, “but I see honest to goodness signs. Just yesterday I was walking through the apple orchard where Will and I used to meet, and I saw him—he was sitting under a tree, plain as day. There wasn’t anybody there of course, but I saw him. It was his way of telling me he’s coming back.”
Dolly had been getting conflicting signs for weeks. Only that morning, a crow had landed on the new hand railing at the front steps just before the doctor had diagnosed inoperable tumors in a twenty-five-year-old woman. The doctor sent her home with assurances that he would make some phone calls to other specialists. That had seemed like a good sign, but as soon as the woman was gone, he turned to Dolly and said, “I know what you’re thinking. I know you’re thinking, What’s the point?”
Dolly had been thinking, Hang in there, girlfriend! She had been thinking, You got to hold on to hope! Even though she knew the doctor was talking to himself, she turned to him and answered anyway. “The point is to let her know we’re doing everything we can. The point is to give a miracle time to happen.”
“Miracles,” said the doctor. “Now there’s an idea. When’s the last time you saw one of those?”
“Every blessed day,” said Dolly. Quiet Moments 1563 was one of them, as was her pretty apartment, as was any boy who held his pregnant girlfriend’s hand. The biggest miracle of all was sleeping in a basket near the reception desk because Dolly’s mother had been unable to babysit that afternoon. Every now and then Dolly or Tula would peek into the basket and catch her breath. “He’s perfect,” Tula would say. Or Dolly would say it, and Tula would reply, “He absolutely is.”
New tumors had appeared on the woman’s body and throat virtually overnight. She would die within weeks if not days, yet she was making lists of baby names for a baby that would never be born. “What do you think of Verna?” she had asked Dolly while her husband pulled the car around.
“Verna is nice,” Dolly had replied.
“If it’s a girl, of course. Just Verne if it’s a boy.”
The thought of little Verne or Verna just about broke Dolly’s heart, but she reminded herself that most of the babies were born healthy—that’s what she needed to focus on. But then she remembered the grapefruit baby and the baby with the whitish glaze, and while she believed in focusing on the positive, it didn’t seem right to forget them. But they weren’t forgotten. There was the website, and recently the doctor had been asked to speak on television, which was a major miracle all by itself.
“You sure you don’t want to introduce him to Danny?” asked Tula.
“I’m thinking about it. I just want to give it a little more time.”
“He’s gonna need his daddy,” said Tula.
“I know,” said Dolly. “I know you’re right.”
“Do you ever think about what his life was like? When he was in the army, I mean.”
“I try not to think about it. I try to focus on the positive.”
“I do,” said Tula. “I’ve been reading about the war and trying to imagine what it’s like for Will. It makes me feel closer to him, and not just emotionally. Sometimes I even think I’m there.”
“Where?” asked Dolly. She was half listening to Tula and half listening to the music that was softly emanating from some recently installed ceiling speakers. I Feel Like Traveling On was one of her favorites, and now she tried to decide if the song was telling her to go to Danny or if it held a darker message. She used to be so sure about things!
Outside the window, the men Dolly had hired to spread the gravel were arguing over who would shovel and who would drive to the stone yard for another load. Their negativity carried in through the open window, and Dolly was relieved when the larger, gentler of the two men picked up a shovel and the lean one strode over to where the truck was parked in a patch of shade. The gentle man reminded her of her father—was it better to fight or to give in peacefully to the inevitable?
The men were only halfway finished, but already the driveway looked fresh and welcoming, and Dolly could easily envision how lovely everything would be once she had filled the new planters with geraniums and ornamental sweet potato vines.
“Speaking of sweet potatoes,” said Dolly, holding the baby up to her face and breathing in his milky fragrance. “You’re just about sweet enough to eat.”
“Did you pick a name yet?” asked Tula. “You can’t keep calling him Tadpole.”
“I’m thinking Danny Junior fits him. He’s the spitting image of his dad.”
As she said it, the baby blinked its long eyelashes and gaped at them with the wisdom of the ages shining from his eyes. Miracles were everywhere—to see them, you only had to look.
Lyle tried calling Maggie at work, but it was the attorney who answered the phone and said he hadn’t heard from her in over a week. “May I inquire who’s calling?” he asked.
“No, no,” said Lyle. “I’ll call back.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,” said Lily. “You can try her again tomorrow.”
Some nights Lyle slept on Lily’s couch, but most nights he slept in the truck. He had a few leads on jobs, but if those didn’t work out, he’d go to Phoenix. There’s nothing stopping me now, he thought. Nothing he could put his finger on anyway.
He’d had an interview at McKnight’s earlier in the week. The manager had said he’d get back to him in a day or two, but it was already Friday and he had heard nothing. He knew by now to talk in terms of the interviewer’s interests, but it was hard to know what those might be for the pencil-necked man with the rash of acne who had beckoned him in from the waiting room. Lyle had mentioned cars, the war, and the Texas-OU rivalry in quick succession, and then he decided to turn the tables and ask the manager right out.
“What are your interests?” asked Lyle, and when the manager just stared at him, he added, “What is it you want most in the entire world?”
“I’d kind of like a cheeseburger,” said the manager. “Can you get me one of those?”
“You need to be thinking bigger,” said Lyle. “You need to be thinking of your career, which is something I can help you with.”
“O-kay,” said the man, smiling for the first time.
The interview had lasted only ten or fifteen minutes, but it got Lyle thinking about the munitions plant and how when it came to bosses, you couldn’t do much better than MacBride.
“I know the manager,” said Lily as she headed off to work. “I can put in a good word for you, but you still oughtta go on over there today and see what’s what.”
“Good idea,” said Lyle. “I guess I will.”
It was almost noon when Lyle got in the truck and started it up, but instead of driving toward the chicken farm, he found himself in the part of town where Tula lived. The houses on Ash Creek Circle had once been identical, but over the years their owners had made additions and improvements. The Santos house was one of the few without a second story or a sunroom added on. A dilapidated swing set squatted in the dusty yard, and the spokes of an ancient wash rack clattered in the wind. Over the past weeks Lyle had driven by several times, but except for once when a load of washing was hanging out, he never saw any signs of either Tula or her mother. He wanted to know if Tula had heard from Will, but he hadn’t seen her since the day of the high school graduation.
Now he got out of the car and knocked on the front door; he didn’t expect anyone to answer it and no one did. His reflection in the glass panel startled him because it looked like someone else’s face, and he couldn’t help thinking about killers lurking in the dark and waiting to attack him.
After checking behind the house, Lyle returned to the truck and drove along the creek before circling back toward town. He had just turned onto the Main Road when the sheriff’s pickup pulled him over and Hank Conway got out and swaggered over. “What did I do?” asked Lyle. “Is my taillight out again? And I’ve been meaning to get that muffler fixed.”
“No, no, nothing like that,” said the sheriff. “I’m just wondering where you’re headed, is all.”
Lyle knew he didn’t have to say anything. He knew a man’s thoughts were his own and nobody had a right to force them out of him. He knew it wasn’t legal to pull people over and interrogate them without just cause, so he didn’t say anything, only waited for the sheriff to continue.
“I want to show you something,” said the sheriff. “Something you might appreciate. Something that might make you sleep a little better at night.”
Lyle unbuckled his seat belt, got out of the truck, and walked with the sheriff around the back of the glossy pickup. The sheriff ran his hand along the truck’s flank where COUNTY SHERIFF was painted in gold letters outlined in black. He pointed to a gun rack bolted to the reinforced frame of the truck, drawing Lyle’s attention to two hunting rifles and two military-style weapons, and then he waved at a pile of SWAT team vests that were stashed in the cargo bay and also at a locked box that contained, he said, a thousand rounds of ammunition. “We’ve got the exact same gear as Will’s got in Iraq,” said the sheriff. “Only some of it’s a different color. And when the current conflict ends, where do you think all that surplus military equipment is gonna go?”
“Where?” asked Lyle.
“Cities and towns just like Red Bud, that’s where. It’s amazing what you can get if you agree to certain priorities.”
“What priorities?” asked Lyle.
“Drugs, terrorists, illegals, that sort of thing. Those are Uncle Sam’s priorities, and there are a lot of financial incentives for communities like Red Bud to make them ours as well.”
Lyle didn’t know what the sheriff was getting at, so he asked, “What are you getting at, Sheriff? Do you think I’m into drugs?”
“Heck no, Lyle.” The sheriff gave a snort and squinted up at the sun before fixing his sights back on Lyle, who asked, “Are there terrorists in Red Bud?”
“I’m just thinking you’d like to know that for a tiny little town, we’re pretty well equipped for keeping the peace ’n’ all. You might like to know that we’re dedicated to keeping our citizens safe and that it’s better for a person who’s done something wrong to turn his or herself in.”
“How does a person know if he’s done something wrong?” asked Lyle. His heart sank with misgivings. He wondered if it was legal to sleep in his truck or if he was breaking the law on the nights he didn’t stay at Lily’s.
“Jeezus, Lyle. What kind of a question is that?”
As the sheriff drove away, Lyle tried to think of what else he might have done wrong. If it didn’t have to do with the truck, then perhaps it had to do with the house, but the house no longer belonged to him. His bank account was overdrawn—that was sure to get him crosswise with the law. It was possible it had to do with the munitions plant, even though he didn’t work there anymore. And then it dawned on him—the sheriff wasn’t interested in him at all.
The first driver took Maggie as far as Flagstaff. “In case you’re interested, it’s a straight shot to the Grand Canyon,” he said. “You may as well see it, now that you’re here.”
Why not? thought Maggie. She had always wanted to see the Grand Canyon, and there was no telling when she’d get another chance.
When the second driver let her out at a visitor’s center, it was as if she’d been dropped onto another planet, or as if she were seeing her own planet for the first time. It was as if all the churches of the world had exploded or turned inside out or been transformed in some way so that all that was sparkling and glorious now lay before her. Every stained-glass color, every vertiginous drop, every astonishing element of the universe was spread out like an all-you-can-eat buffet of miracles. Even surrounded by a crowd of sightseers, she felt alone with the majesty. Even hemmed in by the safety barricade, she felt as if she could fall at any moment, as if she was falling, as if she had fallen and then her wings had caught and held the way the wings of the birds that drifted in slow circles over the chasm had caught and held and lifted. Her breath came in short gasps. Her heart expanded in her chest. Her eyes bulged and didn’t blink. How she had come to be there seemed both strange and inevitable. None of it made sense to her, but perhaps that was not a useful way to think about things. Perhaps senselessness was the entire point.
Maggie made her way to the big wooden map that showed her location in the string of parks that stretched north almost to Utah and west nearly to Las Vegas. Only slowly did she realize that the spot where she stood was a speck in the vastness, that there were other observation points, just as stunning and true. There were boat rides and dangerous rapids and treacherous paths and hot air balloons and helicopters and so many points from which to view the canyon that no one lifetime could absorb or comprehend them. And the canyon was only one part of the world, just the way the world was only part of the universe, and the universe…It was too much to contemplate all at once, so she shut the thinking part of her mind and opened up the part that allowed creation to fan out before her without asking her to ponder what it meant.
A man leading a scrawny donkey by a rope approached to ask if she wanted her picture taken with it. He showed her a Polaroid camera that hung from his neck by a greasy strap. “Only ten dollars,” he said. All around them tourists were pretending to ignore the man as they surreptitiously snapped pictures of the donkey with their phones. The photographer’s hands were grimy and his gaucho hat shaded his face so that Maggie couldn’t see his eyes. “Nobody wants Polaroids these days,” he said, his lips curling over broken teeth in a smile that couldn’t quite mask his desperation.
“Well, I want one. I don’t even have a cell phone,” Maggie told him.
“Why not?” asked the photographer.
“Money, for one thing,” said Maggie. “But I’d love to buy a photograph from you.” She searched her purse and found the envelope the attorney had given her on her last day of work. “I wish you weren’t going,” he had told her. “You’re the best office manager I’ve ever had.”
“My family needs me,” Maggie had said.
She handed the donkey’s owner a ten-dollar bill, and a few minutes later he handed back a smeared Polaroid. “A souvenir of your trip,” he said. “Something for your memory book.”
“Yes,” said Maggie. “Thank you very much.”
In the photograph, the canyon was a featureless gulf behind her, but despite the runny colors and the sad expression on the donkey’s face, it made her smile. The image only hinted at the grandeur that surrounded her, but it was enough to prove to Lyle, and more importantly to herself, I was here.
After his encounter with the sheriff, Lyle drove to the Redi Mart and called Phoenix again. This time he told the attorney who he was.
“I think she might be headed home,” said the attorney. “Hasn’t she called you?”
“It’s a long story, but she can’t,” said Lyle.
“Well, when you see her, tell her I have some good news to report.”
Lyle wished he and Maggie had made one of those plans everyone talked about after 9/11—a plan of where and when to meet in case of a national emergency. Then he and Maggie would know where to go now, not because they were facing a national emergency, but because they were facing a personal one.
What did a person do in the absence of such a plan? He wished he had ESP. He wished he or Maggie were clairvoyant, the way True Cunningham claimed to be. Then the one who wasn’t clairvoyant could just choose a time and place to meet and think about it really hard, and the one who was clairvoyant could pick up the signals merely by concentrating—problem solved.
But that was wishful thinking. Wishful thinking was why Maggie had started down this path, and he guessed he wasn’t the only one who had been unable to see where it would lead. Lyle sat in the truck while the sun reached its zenith and started its slow descent over the boxy Multiplex. Finally, he jiggered the key in the ignition and drove down the street to the diner, where he ordered a cup of coffee and tried to piece together a plan of action. The clock above the counter ticked past four o’clock and then past five. All around him noisy families were gathering to celebrate the weekend by ordering from the giant plastic menus that had always fascinated Will and that Lyle still saw as evidence that the world was big and filled with opportunity. When the waitress began to frown and snap her gum, Lyle realized that instead of pondering the problem, he was only staring blankly at the Formica countertop and waiting for inspiration to strike.
He had to think, but he didn’t know what to think about. It wasn’t until he had paid the bill and stepped out into the soft June breeze that it occurred to him that instead of bemoaning the way things were, there were two questions he should be asking himself. The first was, How would Maggie solve the where-and-when-to-meet problem? As if that was not difficult enough, he would also have to ask if Maggie even knew about the problem.
Since there was no way to answer the second question, he could only assume she knew and work on an answer to the first. He should have made sure she wouldn’t come home unexpectedly by telling her the police investigation wasn’t over instead of trying to protect her by holding information back.
Then he remembered what Jimmy had said about goal-setting, about tactics and execution. The goal was to meet up with Maggie. As for tactics, he had to put himself in her shoes. What would she be thinking? Even more critical to the solution was, What would she be thinking he was thinking? Was there something so obvious that it would not only be obvious to her, but it would also be obvious to her that it was obvious to him? And it struck him with the eureka force of discovery that there was an obvious time to meet! It was noon. They had met in the lunchroom after the twelve o’clock bell for the four years they had worked together at the munitions plant, and he knew with absolute certainty that noon would be obvious to Maggie just as it had been obvious to him. Just in case he was clairvoyant after all, or Maggie was, he closed his eyes and sent a message to her, wherever she might be: Noon, Maggie. We’ll meet at noon.
But now the matter of where to meet arose. The first place he thought of was the munitions plant lunchroom, but that wasn’t realistic. Maggie no longer had an employee badge; nor, for that matter, did he. But again, as if the coffee shop had been inhibiting his problem-solving skills and the fresh air was the thing needed to jump-start mental activity, the answer came unbidden. The bus station! A transportation hub was the obvious place, but on what day and in which city? The last time they had played the travel game, he had wanted to go to Tahiti. How realistic was that?
Lyle hurried along the sidewalk to where the truck was angled in between two sleek late-model cars. The fender Will had dented in the snowstorm was starting to rust. A crack spidered across the windshield, and the defective muffler was hanging nearly to the ground. But it still started right up every time he turned the key, and he didn’t reckon a man could ask much more of his truck than that.
Just as he was backing out of his parking space, he saw True Cunningham walking along the sidewalk, surrounded by a group of friends. “True,” he called out. “Hey, True!”
“Why, Lyle, I haven’t seen you in I don’t know how long! Maggie called me a few days ago, but when I looked for you at the plant, they told me you were no longer working there.”
Lyle motioned her over to the open window, hoping the others wouldn’t follow her. “I want to get a message to Maggie,” he said. “I know you have experience with, well, with sending messages via—”
“ESP,” True finished for him in an exhibition of the very skill he was looking for.
“Exactly. I was hoping you could help me with that.”
“Sure I can, honey. Now what kind of a message are you hoping to send?”
True’s friends were standing on the sidewalk, craning their necks to hear what she and Lyle were talking about. Even if he took True someplace private and swore her to secrecy, it was only a matter of time before she broke down and gossiped about his business. And if, for some reason, she tried to keep his secret, the police might get it out of her, or it might be picked up by the hidden surveillance cameras everyone was installing, not to mention the fact that cell phones could surreptitiously be switched to record. Lyle put the truck in gear and tried to look as if he were late for something. “Never mind, True. I’ll call you later to explain.”
When he turned onto Park Drive, he had to stop while a group of boys crossed the road, loaded down with gear and headed toward the town baseball field for an evening practice. Lyle had never been on a baseball team, never had a bunch of buddies he could rely on. It was just as well, he thought now. It might have made him soft, and first and foremost, a man ought to rely on himself.
He nestled the truck in behind a grove of cottonwood trees and spent the night alternately dozing and sending Maggie messages via ESP. Don’t come home, he thought, but he didn’t know if he could send the messages or if she could receive them. The sweat pooled in his armpits and on his brow. It had upset him to see the firepower in the sheriff’s truck, and now a horrible dread came over him. What if the bus station had come to mind because Maggie was sending a message to him? Where would she go if she could go anywhere? Suddenly he knew, and it wasn’t New York City or the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. It was Red Bud, Oklahoma. Don’t come home, he thought again as he drifted on the edge of sleep. And don’t go to the bus station. Whatever you do, Maggie, don’t go there!