HIS FLOWER garden had failed. Never his strong suit, Stratton had turned a poor hand managing the beds along the front of the house; the summer drought had demanded he water, and he’d been distracted. Many of the blooms had blistered in the full sun. It made for a poor realty advertisement.
He drove out to the greenhouse and garden center and walked down the aisles spilling every variety of decorative shrub that might be bred. He knew nothing really, and the immensity of his ignorance forced itself on him in a dizziness amplified by the greenhouse’s trapped heat. He tried reading the little hard plastic tags stabbed into the soil of each pot, but he couldn’t grasp colors and arrangements. He stuck his hands in among the ferns, the caladiums. But it seemed a science beyond him. In the end, he decided on a copy of a magazine called Garden and Gun for a model of inspiration. That and a garden gnome.
When he got home he took a beer from the fridge and went around to the shaded side of the house where a hammock was stretched. He warily entered, aware of the tender balance needed to keep himself righted and his beer unspilled as he found equilibrium. He thumbed through the magazine, tried to pay close attention to what the experts were saying about the yard arrangements that were said to demonstrate true elegance and sophistication, what really set apart a mere amateur scratching in the dirt from meaningful floral architecture. Yet he found himself drawn to the articles about bourbon cocktails and a story about some writer with a dog dying of cancer that made him actually weep and wet the page with his tears. As if sensing this possible betrayal of loyalty to a warring species, Damn Cat appeared from the back of the house and leapt up gracefully into the hammock to install himself at Stratton’s hipbone. He scratched the old cat behind the ears and sipped his beer until they both closed their eyes.
He woke to a disturbed sense of time. It was still light but in that confused moment of waking he had to turn hours inside his head to get an idea of whether it was morning or afternoon. Then he heard voices coming from around front and he remembered that some people were coming to see the house.
As he circled around to the porch he could see a bobbed-haired young woman in professional attire with a smile that looked like it could open a can.
“You must be Mister Bryant. It was our understanding you wouldn’t be in,” she said, weighing heavy at the conclusion of her sentence, as if she thought very little of some fool who would stick around and get in the way of her doing her job.
He took her hand and shook it, followed her gaze down to the empty beer can in his other hand. He self-consciously tucked it behind his back. The young couple had already mounted the porch steps and were putting their faces to the newly installed window panes, chancing a look inside.
“Sorry, I forgot someone was supposed to come and look at things. I’ll get out of your hair. Everything’s opened up anyhow.”
“Thank you, Mister Bryant. I’m sure we can manage from here,” she said, made it plain that she was done with him.
He went out to the car and got down the drive as fast as he reasonably could. His presence contaminated the place. No one would bear a stranger preceding them into a house they intended for themselves, for the good life they planned to make there. People desired innocence, the perfect innocence that affirmed events turned out well in the end, even if it sometimes appeared that they wouldn’t. There was a certain pattern that guided someone toward happiness. The shape of another man’s disappointed hope could only be a poison to this innocence, to this faith in happiness, and people are never as unforgiving as when their best lies are held up to the light.
The driving helped free him. It was good to be on the road without significant destination and he wanted to stay with this aimlessness as long as the good feeling remained. He loosened his fingers on the steering wheel and bumped down the road until he came to an old white brick Shell station with a Budweiser light on in the window, a BBQ grill off to the side leaking a fragrant blue cloud of meat smoke.
Inside, an ancient man wearing a smock worked behind a glass case warmed by a heat lamp. His hands appeared orange by the steady glow. When Stratton asked what was good, the man said it was all better than anybody ever had the right to expect or deserve and he’d know the state of his own satisfaction only after he’d hazarded a blind decision. He then pointed at two papered squares.
“Those are the freshest, though,” he said and smiled.
Stratton told him to box those and ring everything up. He took his pork sandwich and a bottle of Coke around to the side where a picnic table was set out beneath a pecan tree. He began to eat, his mind going vague in the simple occupation of taking on this basic need of keeping the body running with the self-care of food and drink. How ancient this was, to come and sit beneath the shade of an old tree and let a place inhabit you, to find a way to listen to that secret music out beyond the normal reach of sound.
He thought of Texas when he was a boy. Not a common thing for him much anymore. Not too much to lure him in terms of nostalgia. So many of those memories had been the ammunition he carried into his adulthood, a reason to escape the claustrophobia of his family and what they had expected of him, which was entirely too little as far as he was concerned. To follow in his father’s footsteps, to take to the oil fields as he had. To make money. To stand in his forebears’ land and make a living by the labor of his hands. But that life had never held much prospect for him. He had seen the price it demanded of a man, especially an intelligent man, and he refused to give away what even as a child he recognized as a vital part of his character. Namely, the ability to tune into the subtle currents of the world, to detect the occasional windows of real beauty. And though he had not recalled it in many years he now remembered one of those moments when he had seen what a crack in time was capable of revealing.
He had been riding in the truck alongside his father and a winter storm was coming in, a line of darkness pinned just above the horizon, a clouded vein of sunset slight and contracted. It was late in December just a few days shy of Christmas, but his father was on call for any parts that might be needed if one of the pump jacks broke down and needed repairs. As they had been sitting down to an early supper the call had come in as it so often did on those wind-blasted evenings and Stratton had asked if he could come along. Out in the fields with the edge of the world right there Stratton became afraid, as if he could sense how suddenly the earth could turn its eye of disfavor on a single man caught beneath a naked sky. His father told him to stay in the truck, that he wouldn’t be but a minute. He did what he was told though his father remained gone much longer than that. To divert himself from his sudden and strange worry, Stratton began to count the nodding repetition of the pump jacks seesawing above the basin until it was as if he had entered a dream and the motion of everything slowed, aligned in an inexplicable harmony that suited not only the sublime picture of the landscape but the mechanical lapsing of the minutes as well, as if the enormity of the desert depended on that rhythm as physical antistrophe to explain its habitual stillness. It was simply lovely, this thing that was symbolic of what he hated most about Texas. It captured him, the graceful tilt of the machines, as soft and beautiful as the eyes of the blind.
He had fallen in love with music some years later when he had sat down to his first piano lesson and observed the similar measured pace of the metronome. The sway of sound and the lack of sound taught him to trust the patience earned between one note and the next as it built into something larger than individual strokes, a message surpassing what could be written down and recorded. Instead, it became the silent waiting that conveyed the truth of any meaningful piece of music. All of his life since had taught him to excel at waiting.
Once he’d finished his sandwich and sat for a while he was sure the real estate agent would have cleared out. He drove on back and saw she’d left her business card tucked under an empty pot on the front porch railing. He stuck it in his shirt pocket, noted that it was about as useful as any other piece of scrap. He stayed there on the porch as the evening light invaded, watched the yard take on its elongation. Hard to show someone what it meant to be witness to this gradual and needed change. Harder still to assign it negotiable value.
He heard the scratch of footsteps at the far end of the drive. A tentative yet determined approach. He leaned back against the front door to let the house’s natural lines engulf him in the deep shade and bulk. A pause. A long pause before the sound came on and resolved into a human figure.
“I can see you up there watching me,” a thin but not small voice challenged.
He moved his head, though he was unsure the subtlety of the gesture could be seen at that distance.
“I imagine I have every right to, considering it’s my yard you’re standing in.”
Rain ventured another few steps until she came slowly up and sat on the edge of the porch, posed in profile, as if arranged there for a portrait.
“I wanted to apologize for . . . for what they did to your home. They had no right to.”
Stratton let his arms stay crossed, said nothing for much of a minute.
“Where these friends of yours gone to now? They left you?”
Her head shook in the dark space.
“No, they didn’t leave me.”
“They coming back to collect you, then?”
Again, that slow and deliberate movement of her head, as if she were just getting accustomed to the idea of saying No.
“You look like you’ve come a pretty good way,” Stratton commented. “I bet you wouldn’t say no to a cold beer, especially since I could be said to owe you one. Though that little trick of leaving your empty in the mailbox might be enough to cancel out that debt.”
She said, “You don’t owe me anything.”
“Well, we’ll split the difference and pretend I do.”
He opened the door and snapped on the front hall light. She followed him into the kitchen and sat down at the table, spread her hands out on the surface to register every detail of its temperature and texture. He set a can of beer on a coaster in front of her. He motioned her to drink when she saw that he intended nothing for himself.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I stay plenty hydrated.”
She took the can in both hands and emptied a third of it in a single pull. The relief hit her so that she couldn’t hold back a grin, though she tried to hide behind a flip of her hair. She wiped the foam from the can’s lid and drank again.
“How long have you been out there? On the road I mean.”
Her hand rose to the side of her face, tucked back a vine of knotted hair. A shy but collected gesture. Aware of the quietness of the setting and the desire to behave well.
“A while. Half a year now, I guess.”
“How many nights you managed under a solid roof?”
She smiled, said, “Not many. How many nights you managed without a beer in your hand?”
He laughed, but didn’t say anything.
“Where are you going to move?” she asked.
“Move?”
“I saw the For Sale sign out at the road.”
“Yeah, I don’t guess I’m sure yet. Maybe I need the money in my hand to make me decide.”
“Is that what it takes? Money?”
“Maybe. What about you? What made you want to go out on the road?”
She shrugged, showed the palms of her hands.
“I’m still deciding, I guess.”
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I couldn’t help but notice your garden’s not looking so great,” she said once she had her voice again.
He glanced back toward the front door, as if he could see straight through the walls to the barren flower beds.
“I appreciate your attention to detail,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve noticed the same thing myself.”
“What’s that thing you’ve got sitting out there next to the steps?”
“That’s Gordon Lightfoot.”
“Gordon Lightfoot?”
“Yeah, Gordon the gnome. You like him? I thought he’d have more of a green thumb than me. Man’s got to keep a bit of levity, don’t you think?”
She had no opinion on this.
“I could help you get it fixed up,” she said softly. “Could help you get the house all put together so you can sell it. If that’s what you want.”
“What’s wrong with the way I’ve got the house?”
She glanced around, shrugged, as if that were refutation enough, and perhaps it was. Stratton thought about it a long while.
“If I said yes, if I was to be fool enough to think you didn’t mean to rob me blind . . .”
“We could find a way to make it work.”
Damn Cat slipped into the kitchen like the elegant twist of smoke that he was, meowed once at the stranger before wrapping himself around her ankles.
“He normally hates other people,” Stratton said.
“That’s all right,” she said, scratched the tom’s head. “Normally I do too.”