KEVIN CANTY

Happy Endings

FROM New Ohio Review

 

ALL HIS LIFE McHenry had lived with someone watching him: a mother, a father, a wife, a daughter, his customers. He dug wells for a living and his customers were cattle ranchers and wheat farmers, which meant they were always about to go broke, except when they were rich. They didn’t make a show of watching him but they did. Assholes and elbows: a thing he learned in high school, doing pick-and-shovel work on an extra gang for the Milwaukee Railroad. It didn’t matter how much you got done or how many mistakes you made or how smart you were. The only thing was to look like you were working when Sorenson, the straw boss, came by. I just want to see assholes and elbows.

So he learned to look like he was working when he worked. He learned to act like a father when his daughter was around, to look like a husband when Marnie needed a husband. He did what people expected him to or maybe a little more. He always tried for more. McHenry had a brisk practical manner, plastic glasses, and a crewcut that turned gray early, an all-purpose character that didn’t change. He got along with people. It was a way through.

He wasn’t expecting to find himself with nobody watching, but here he was, age fifty-nine. Marnie had gone five years before, a pancreatic cancer that burned so swiftly through her that McHenry never felt it until she was buried. Still sometimes it felt to him that the death had never happened, an unreal, ugly dream. Then Carolyn, their daughter, had ended up in Guangzhou, China. This too felt unlikely. She had gone off to Missoula and ended up as a dual major in Chinese and business and now she was importing Chinese balers and hay rakes and making crazy money. They Skyped each other every few weeks but it was nothing like having her around, just a picture on a computer screen. McHenry talked about how busy he was and how things were going fine and so on. He was still her father, even if she was on the other side of the world. Plus the time was impossible for him to figure out. He would call her on Sunday afternoon and it would be Monday morning where she was.

McHenry approved on principle. If you were going to get the hell out of Harlow, you might as well just keep going. And he liked the fact that she was good with money. He felt like he had given her that.

Still it was just him and Missy, the little papillon dog that Marnie had gotten just before they found out. It seemed like a dirty trick. Claws skittering on the wood floors.

And then these two kids down out of Billings talked one of their dads into bankrolling a brand-new computer-controlled Japanese drilling rig. McHenry did the math. They were losing money every time they took a job from him. They had to be. But he couldn’t underbid them, despite the fact that his rig was paid for. McHenry knew better than to expect his customers to turn down a low bid. These were men who would drive ninety miles to the Sam’s Club to save a nickel on toilet paper.

McHenry could have waited them out. But one afternoon, when he got off the phone with Gib Gustafson, a wheat farmer McHenry had known since kindergarten, a millionaire, telling him that they weren’t going to be able to do business—after he got that call, McHenry just got angry. If Marnie had been there, if Carolyn. But they weren’t. By five that afternoon he was out of the business, rig sold, trucks sold, FOR RENT sign on the shop.

Was this a mistake? Maybe. He had all the money he was going to need, from savings along the way and from Marnie’s life insurance. The house was paid for and so was the shop. Even if nobody rented it, and nobody was able to stay in business in Harlow anymore, it was still worth five or six times what he had paid for it, the year after the railroad left town. He had a couple of rentals, and no crew, by then, that was depending on him.

But the quiet.

The phone just didn’t ring.

And if he didn’t get laid pretty soon he was going to go out of his mind. He hated to think like this. He was not a crude man, not naturally. But this was the simple fact of the matter. McHenry was not an old man, not yet, and whatever had switched off when Marnie got sick had gotten switched back on again somehow. He remembered one of his crew—an extra guy, a friend of somebody’s, not one of the regulars—talking about his day off, going to a massage place in Billings. He shut up about it when he saw McHenry was listening. But it stuck in his mind. You could just pay for it. And nobody was watching.

McHenry lived with these thoughts for two or three months and then decided he needed to go to Billings to see what the truth of the matter was. It took him another few weeks to gather his nerve. It was April before he made it.

Spring has a good reputation, he thought, driving south through spitting snow, but it maybe shouldn’t. Not Montana spring, anyway. Just a hard season. Easter Sunday with Marnie in her flowery dresses and the freezing rain just pounding down.

He found the Bangkok Sunshine out by the Interstate, alone and kind of forlorn-looking in a giant gravel parking lot behind the truck wash. His pickup was the only car in the lot. A pink building with the word MASSAGE in red neon, a white door. Momentum carried him inside where a young, not-quite-pretty Asian girl in a swimsuit top and a piece of flowery cloth for a skirt sat reading a magazine in a language McHenry didn’t recognize.

“Thirty or sixty minutes?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said McHenry. “Sixty, I guess.”

“That’s a hundred,” she said, and McHenry was shocked. He didn’t know what he was expecting but this was somehow a substantial amount of money. But it seemed too late to back out now, and it was just this once. He could afford it.

“I don’t see you much,” said the girl.

“This is my first time.”

“Are you a cop?”

“No.”

“Okay. Room two. And people usually tip.”

It was a room with a bed and a poster of a beach. The door he had come in and another door and a third he guessed was a closet. No windows. Linoleum floors, everything easy to clean, like a veterinarian’s exam room. McHenry sat on the bed and waited. It was taller and narrower than a regular bed and he could feel plastic under the sheet. It was a room without any music, he thought, too many people passing through and nobody staying long. The sadness came back to him. PHUKET, said the poster. He didn’t know where that was. It looked beautiful, in a faceless way. Palm trees and blue skies.

Then the far door opened and another Asian girl walked in, smiling—a little shorter and rounder than the girl at the desk but dressed the same, her breasts spilling out of the swimsuit top. Her hair was long and bound at the back with a red ribbon. She was barefoot.

“You have to take your clothes off!” she said, laughing. “Otherwise it doesn’t work.”

McHenry had allowed himself to forget this part. He had not had his clothes off in front of anybody for a long while, anybody but doctors and Marnie. An urge to flee arose, was suppressed by an act of will. She opened the closet. He took his shoes off, then his pants. Then he hesitated.

“Come on,” she said. But lightly, playfully. She was alive if the room was not. He went the rest of the way naked and then lay facedown on the bed. Cold plastic under a thin sheet. She covered his ass with a towel and bent to look him sideways in the face.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Bill,” he lied.

“I’m Tracy,” she said. “Relax.”

McHenry tried to make himself relax. But the body doesn’t lie, and he tensed at the touch of her hand on his shoulder.

“OK, OK,” she said. “It’s going to be OK.” She turned the lights down quite low, and music seeped in from the corners. He smelled something complicated like herbs or hay but pleasant and then she touched him again with warm oil on her hands and he lay still this time. It was like getting a haircut, the way he knew where her body was around him, the accidental brush of her breasts on his skin as she bent over him. Small as she was, she had a firm hand and surprising strength and after a few minutes he understood that she knew what she was doing. Her breasts were everywhere but he wasn’t even thinking about that now or maybe thinking about that from a different direction, because it was just very nice. He didn’t know till now how many troubles he was carrying in his body. They just kind of stopped being there after a while. He felt light and free.

She massaged his feet, which was something that had never happened to McHenry before and although he liked it, he felt the pressure on unexpected places, as if his liver and his testicles and even his eyes were all connected somehow to places in his feet and he had not known this. Then she worked her way up his legs. It was pleasant but he felt vulnerable. Her hand just grazed his scrotum. Something woke up then and stayed awake as she worked on his back, his neck.

McHenry hoped he was in the right place.

He let go for a while. Time passed, he wasn’t sure how much. It wasn’t important. All touch, all her hands and music of a kind he generally hated and dim lights and the scent of the oil. Then when he had basically turned into a puddle of goo she rolled him over on his back. The towel came off. Tracy put it back on after half a minute but she must have noticed.

She did his feet again from another angle and then his face and then his chest. All this was absolutely new to McHenry and surprising. Also, her breasts, just touching, spilling out of her top, and the feel of her small strong hands and the scent of her perfume mixed with the scented oil. This should have been relaxing but McHenry got more and more agitated in his need. Did he need to ask? How would he go about asking? What were the words, what was the code? She must see. She must know.

In the end, he didn’t need to know anything. Tracy worked his calves and then his thighs and then leaned down toward him, her breasts dangling, and whispered in his ear: “Happy ending?”

“Please,” said McHenry.

“Twenty extra.”

“Please,” he said.

She laughed, but pleasantly, dropped the towel to the floor, and got him off with her strong little hands. It didn’t take much. McHenry kept his eyes closed, all touch and scent. If he kept his eyes closed, this moment would never end. It was magic.

“OK,” said Tracy. “See you next time. Shower’s right outside that door.”

McHenry opened his eyes. He was naked in a room with a stranger. The lights were still dim but the magic was gone. Tracy smiled at him and was pleasant. He unfolded his pants, found his wallet, gave her a twenty and then another. He would have stood there handing her twenties all night if she had wanted him to. He had made a fool of himself. He understood that much.

 

He made it two weeks before he was back. The girl at the front desk didn’t like him any better this time. She said that Tracy was busy but she could get one of the other girls to take care of him. Either that or he could wait.

McHenry waited. Nobody else came through, just him and the bored girl, reading a magazine in what he assumed was Thai or Vietnamese. Remember what you’re doing, he told himself. That girl is with somebody else in the next room. It’s what she does. It’s her job.

Still he felt the excitation, like bees or butterflies, at the thought of seeing Tracy. It wasn’t love. He was almost sure. But it was something like it. Not even the sight of a trucker in a ball cap coming out of the back could deter him. He had noticed the eighteen-wheeler in the parking lot. It was hard not to.

She was shorter than he remembered, but prettier.

“That girl out front,” he said. “I don’t think she likes me.”

“She’s a bitch,” Tracy said. “She doesn’t like anybody.”

This time McHenry let himself watch her, at least at first. Tracy was brisk, professional, exact in her movements, the way she cupped her hand to take the oil from the bottle, for instance. She held it there to warm before she let it rain onto his back. Beneath the cloth skirt—was it a sarong?—she wore lime-green striped underpants, like a kid would wear. She was clothed and he was naked. She was at work, in charge, she knew where she was and what she was doing. While McHenry was way out past the safe shallows. This made no sense to him, the fact that he was here.

And then it didn’t need to make sense, he was just all body again, all goo and drool. At least at first. He went down again into and then back up with the nearness of her, the body. When she rolled him over this time, she didn’t bother with the towel. In fact she touched him there, a little, just lightly, then went on with the massage. When she went from his face to his feet, she touched him again, as if she were befriending it; and when she had worked her way up his thighs, when it was time for the happy ending, she moved so easily and automatically from one thing to the other that it was not like they were two things at all but just one movement.

She left. He lay empty and adrift, on his back on the bed. They must change the sheets, he thought, between each one of us.

What if this was not wrong? He turned the thought around on the drive home in the dark, a white crust of ice at the edge of the headlights. He knew he’d never do a thing like Tracy if he had to explain it to anybody. If Marnie were alive, if Carolyn were around. He wasn’t a cheater. But just in himself, he couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. He wasn’t stealing tenderness from anybody or spending someone else’s money. On the other hand, he knew he wouldn’t want to get caught doing this. So that was something. But he couldn’t figure out who was being hurt. Tracy herself seemed cheerful enough.

Then came this other thought, which McHenry didn’t want in his head but which wouldn’t leave. That thought was this: What if this was something beautiful that he had shut himself off from his whole life? What if they were wrong, the watchers? Maybe there was really nothing bad with this. Had he been mistaken his whole life? Until now, near the end. Something sad here. Even with Marnie there was something furtive, always in the dark. That one time they went to Mexico, just the two of them. It was a glimpse of something. But they could never quite bring it home. Fucking, he thought. He had been using the word his whole life as a curse. What if it instead turned out to be a blessing?

Not a thought he wanted to have. But McHenry could not put it away.

 

He wound up in a Christian Singles group, run by the church where they used to spend Christmas and Easter. He could not be trusted by himself. This was McHenry’s conclusion. He needed minding.

The Christian Singles mixed in the lobby of the Graves Hotel on the first Friday evening of each month. Although this month was May, it was still cold out; men and women both arrived in Carhartt brown. The Graves had a coffee shop off one side of the lobby and a bar off the other so you could go one way or the other. McHenry opted for drink. It was looking like a long night.

“Look at you,” said Tom LaFrance. “Come to meet us on a Friday night. I was wondering if you might join the group.”

“Just putting a toe in,” said McHenry.

“Nice bunch. Good to get some new blood in, though, I’ll tell you.” He leaned closer to McHenry, inside the bloom of his whiskey breath. “The same old faces. After a while you’ve made the rounds.”

“It’s a small town,” said McHenry.

“In the middle of nowhere,” said LaFrance. “Oh, well.”

They left the bar and joined the group: about a dozen altogether, with only four men. Some of them were people McHenry had known (and in LaFrance’s case, disliked) since high school. The women especially had made an effort, red lipstick and pretty skirts and city shoes, but in every one of their faces were the marks of weather, of a life lived outdoors in a place where the wind hurried and the snow flew. The men were dressed Western in boots and sport coats. They looked at home in these clothes, while some of the women looked like an impersonation, a costume. These were widows, most of them, and had the short hair and hard practical faces of Montana wives, their girlishness erased by weather and work. They didn’t look at home in their pretty dresses.

All but Lydia Tennant. She was ten years younger than the rest of them and dressed for a ski resort in sporty, bright colors. She had married into the Maclays, an old ranching family, and had somehow stuck it out after her husband, Tom, was killed in an avalanche, three or four years ago. She had two kids, both boys, McHenry thought. He had never considered her as a possibility. But here she was, presenting herself as a single, smiling, making small talk, looking tan and pretty in the lobby of the Graves Hotel. This was interesting, at least.

But before he could make his way to her, he was sidelined by Adele Baker, one of Marnie’s good friends, an English teacher at the high school. She was plump, energetic, dry.

“Are we moving forward or giving up?” she asked him.

“I’ve no idea,” McHenry said. He was wary of her; she thought before she said things, and you were likely to get yourself in trouble if you just said the first thing that came into your head. He asked, “What do you think?”

“I gave up several years ago,” she said. “I’m just here to get out of the house.”

“Oh, me too. Getting the shack nasties.”

He looked over to see where Lydia was in the room—the far side, by the bar door, with Tom LaFrance standing at her elbow—and Adele caught the glance and laughed.

“No fair,” she said.

“What’s not?”

“You and she are the only two new faces since last summer. I believe that almost everybody else has dated almost everybody else. And by dated I don’t mean dated. Don’t be shocked.”

“I thought these were the Christian Singles.”

“We’re all Christian and we’re all single, but we’re not always both at the same time.”

“You’ve been saving that one up.”

“Maybe,” Adele said. “It’s a long winter. Come buy me a drink and I’ll tell you all our secrets.”

 

That Saturday they went birdwatching, or birding, as it was now called. Adele wanted to go to Freezeout and McHenry hadn’t been there in decades so they went, three hours each way and iffy weather but they went. They left at seven in the morning, which was early for Adele on a weekend, she said so. McHenry had been up for two hours.

It wasn’t a date, they agreed on that. They didn’t have another name.

Adele drove her Honda, which only made sense—McHenry still had the Expedition from his drilling days, which smelled of dirt and petroleum and got eleven miles to the gallon. But he hadn’t been a passenger in a while and it was strange, filling her go-cup from the thermos and watching the weather. It really had been quite a while. Marnie never drove when they went places together unless she was driving him to the hospital, which had happened a couple of times. But just sitting back and relaxing and watching the snow fall on the far hills—this was like something out of his childhood, a distant memory, watching the telephone wires loop by in their rhythm of rise and fall.

“You miss her,” Adele said. “Hell, I miss her and I wasn’t married to her.”

“It’s been a while,” McHenry said.

“Feel any better?”

“I don’t know. I mean, sure, better than that first few months. It took a while to see the point of keeping things going. It helped having the girl around but she wasn’t around that much except summers. It was kind of happening to both of us at the same time, you know? I do miss that.”

“But she’s doing well.”

“I know she is. I’m not talking about her, I’m talking about me.” McHenry laughed. “Carolyn’s perfectly all right. I’m the one that’s messed up.”

“You’re all right,” Adele said.

“Maybe,” said McHenry. In fact he didn’t know. It felt like he was telling a story and it was a true story but it wasn’t who he was. Wasn’t where he lived. He looked at Adele, who drove with great concentration, slightly hunched forward over the wheel, and knew her for part of that story—he had known her, never well, for thirty years at least—and yet the known, the familiar, seemed strange to him, and only the thought of Tracy seemed his own. This felt mysterious. He felt like he didn’t know himself.

The snowstorm drifted down off the hills and onto the road and Adele flipped the wipers on and leaned even farther forward. She seemed like a comic character from this new distance. McHenry felt, small, upholstered, flowery. Though this was underestimating her. She was a serious person, intelligent, and she had been very good to Marnie in her last year. It just seemed impossible to think of her in bed. That sadness, again, that waste of years that should have been joyful.

“You were married,” McHenry said.

“I still am,” she said, blinking into the storm.

“How does that work?”

“His family was Catholic,” she said. “He developed mental problems after we were together. I mean, I guess he had them all along. But they pretty much took over after a while and he lost control of his life.”

“I’m sorry,” McHenry said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Really?” A quick glance over, to see that he wasn’t lying. “I thought everybody knew. A town the size of Harlow. I talked about it with Marnie, I remember.”

The sadness again, at the secrecy and fear that had kept them from bright life. It was too late for Marnie. McHenry thought it was too late for him too, and maybe for Adele too. This had meant something. Marnie had known but never told him.

“Where is he now? Your husband, I mean.”

“He’s in Seattle,” she said. “Kaiser, a long-term-care place. They tried to make him better but they wrecked his mind from trying, all the different drugs and treatments. He had a very beautiful mind.”

“I’m sorry,” McHenry said again.

“It was a long time ago,” she said. “I’m sure I could find a lawyer to straighten it out, if there was ever any need. It’s just never come up.”

She shrugged. It wasn’t a hint. Nothing was going to happen between the two of them. The deep elemental strangeness of another life, even one as familiar as Adele’s, and McHenry naked and alive inside. It was just such a strange world.

They got to Freezeout a little after ten—a couple of cars and pickups—blue skies and a cold breeze but shoots of raw green in the grass. Spring was coming after all. They bundled up and carried folding chairs and binoculars and in Adele’s case a bird book and a life list. McHenry had an old, heavy pair of Leupolds that had been kicking around in the glove compartment of the Expedition for years but Adele had an immaculate medium-sized Leica pair. She was going to add a few to her list today. Only then did McHenry realize how boring this day would be. He could look at birds for about ten minutes.

They walked over the last rise. There was the lake and on the lake were geese and swans beyond counting, tens of thousands of them, teeming. As they watched, some invisible impulse ran through the flock at the far edge and they rose in one movement and circled through the air, blocking out half the sky in white movement, black wing tips. Okay, McHenry thought. This was worth it. All this beautiful life, this excess, generosity.

“Don’t say it,” Adele said.

“Don’t say what?”

“The joke,” she said. “Whatever it is. About how they mate for life.”

“I’m not really a joke-type person,” McHenry said. Which was true.

 

And then the next morning, back at the Bangkok Sunshine. Sunday morning! And his truck parked right out front for all the world to see.

A different and much friendlier girl up front. But heart-stopping beautiful. McHenry could barely talk to her, she was so perfect, so nice and lovely and young. Sunday morning, he thought: celebrate a life so full of amazing things as this. Just lately it felt like the world was full of gifts.

But Tracy wasn’t there; he should have known as much. Would he like one of the other girls? A test of some kind, McHenry thought. Not what he was supposed to want, or what somebody else would like him to want—he wasn’t trying to please anybody but himself. So what did he want himself? Nobody was watching.

“Why not?” he said. And went into room number two and stripped and folded his clothes neatly on the shelf provided for that and lay facedown and naked and asked the question again: why not? There must be a reason why not. He still couldn’t sort any of this out. What would Adele have thought? But he knew as he asked the question that she would have disliked him for it. It was just a rule. But who made the rule?

A girl came into the room barefoot, in the same outfit as the others, but this one had an unhappy look to her, even an angry look, as if she had just been woken up, which maybe she had. She said her name was Flower and he said his name was Bill. She was, if anything, stronger and more expert than Tracy had been; he found himself spiraling down into that same pure moment of feeling, of being in his body and not thinking and not even being present in the room. He didn’t even think of himself, of his nakedness. He was in the moment of her touch and nowhere else. Until she turned him over, covered him with the towel. Then he began to wonder again, whether the rules were the same, whether he had to do something that he didn’t know how to do.

The feet. The face. The legs.

And then the whisper: “Happy ending?”

“Sure.”

“Twenty extra.”

“Sure,” he said.

And then he was standing, blinking in the warm sunlight, alone in an acre of gravel parking lot. While he was inside, spring had come. It was actually warm. McHenry took his jacket off and threw it in the back seat of the Expedition. The smell of old petroleum grease filled the cab, released by the new heat. He didn’t want that, not just yet. He lay back on the hood of his truck and closed his eyes and felt the sunlight pouring down on his skin, another gift in a world of gifts. Somebody might come by, Lydia Tennant or LaFrance or any of the Christian Singles. Somebody might see him. It didn’t matter. His life was about to change.