Forty Martyrs

Nick was glad it was raining. Walking Dave, his dog, long before a June dawn, passing under streetlights that showed a medium downpour (not the annoyance of drizzle nor the thrill of rain in windy sheets), Nick got a glimpse of his own shadow, and it reminded him of Buck, his son—how the shadow walked, how the head was carried, the shoulders when they were properly back, the odd attitude it conveyed, a strange combination of optimism and nothaving-a-single-clue. Rain falling, Nick tried to hum a happy tune but he couldn’t remember one. Buck, twenty-three, was home in bed. It was just the two of them these recent years. And Dave.

Nick wore a bucket hat, the wet canvas brim soaked and dripping. Dave, the chocolate brown Springer Spaniel trotting along ahead of him on the leash, didn’t give a shit if the rain was coming down. Water was his thing. He rounded his ears, and his eyes got blinky, and maybe his head was lower, but overall he was the same old Dave wet as he was dry, watching the bushes for adventure and lining up to piss his whole dog-autobiography on everything that was upright and would stand for it. Rain didn’t addle him like it did some dogs, so why should it addle Nick? Occasionally Dave glanced back for the approval of the dog-slave on the other end of the tether. It was a forty-five minute walk Nick had devised, across the campus and along the canal that fed into the Hocking, and then back into the neighborhood and down the streets among the big old Midwestern deaver houses. They walked fairly fast this morning, and Nick mostly ignored the dog and thought about Carol. He’d be seeing her today.

In the old days, back at the college where he taught before this one, Nick would always drink beer and sit around and loudly wonder about women. “I mean, what the hell do they want?” he’d say, his voice and beer mug raised, and with bemused delight Lowell Wagner would lift his mug, too.

“They probably want the truth!” Lowell would offer, the perfect straight line. Lowell was Carol’s shrink. That other place, it was a very small town.

“Oh God, not the truth!” Nick would call out, and they’d both laugh at the boys-will-be-boysness of it. Lowell never knew about Nick and Carol, although this had always made Nick wonder what Carol did talk about in their therapy sessions.

In those days, everybody was always saying this or that about what people wanted, like it was really discoverable or like it even mattered. Mostly, men acquiesced to just about anything if the sex was good and there was a modicum of wiggle room. Women were more mature about it, it seemed, and more particular. During Nick and Carol’s secret rendezvous, Carol would lie back and receive every bit of the conveniently little Nick could offer in cramped space and stolen time. Nick loved the illusion that this secrecy and stolenness was what women wanted, and Carol let him have that illusion for many months before, suddenly, out of nowhere, she married Wally Brown.

“Jesus!” Nick would bark, and Lowell would raise his hands in the air, the universal gesture of men’s feigned puzzlement about women. “No, I mean it. Women are like dealing with a frigging cat.”

Nick hadn’t made friends like Lowell in the new place. The bar they always drank at was at the township line, out in the country, because back then the town itself was dry. Nick’s eyes would take in the waving oaks through the neon Busch sign in the bar’s small front window. They were the trees of Rice’s Woods, a dense oak forest with random roads leading in—one of Nick and Carol’s favorite parking spots. The fact that Lowell hadn’t known all that was going on was yet another in the chain of betrayals Nick regretted, and also doggedly maintained, in his scattered little life. To make it all worse, toward the end of his time there, Lowell quit drinking. No more loud commiserations out at Squeak’s.

Nick and Dave came up the front walk at last, and Nick worked the lock and slid back into the house. Still dark, but NPR had clicked on which meant it was six o’clock. In the kitchen, he toweled off Dave who submitted to this rubdown like Al Capone at French Lick.

He showered fast, put on jeans and a jacket, pulled his cell phone off the charger, and looked in on Buck, who was still hunkered, bunkered, and asleep. “Davie’s walked and fed. See you in a couple of days.”

“Uh-huh” came the grunt from under covers. “Where you goin’?” Two blankets covered the boy in so many heaps it was hard to discern a body in the bed.

“Down to the river to meet with some turkeys from Louisville, I told you before.”

“Okay.” The sleeping behemoth rolled over. “Have fun,” he grunted. A third blanket was artfully draped over the window so Buck could sleep well into broad daylight. “Did you walk the dog?”

“It’s handled. Sleep good.”

Even Athens, Ohio had a beltway, Highways 50 and 33, and after hitting McDonald’s for supplies, Nick got on a stretch of it and went down two exits to the interchange with Hocking Road. He had a bag load of bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits and three large cups of coffee, and at the Hocking exit he slowed way down and tried to spot Mac Pellier, his old homeless Vietnam buddy. He squinted down through the fog and saw something moving. Had to be Mac. So Nick rolled down the ramp with the flashers on because stopping on an exit ramp in the dark and the rain, even at the lightest beginnings of deaver Athens’ miniature rush hour, was a good way to get smacked, and this promised later to be a fairly busy exit ramp or Mac Pellier wouldn’t be out there leaning on his crutch with his “will work for food” sign. Nick honked and flashed, and Mac waved. Checking his rear view, all clear, Nick took one sandwich out of the McDonald’s bag and set it in the passenger seat. Out of the drink holder on the floor he got one of the cups of coffee. He pulled close to the left curb at the bottom of the ramp. Mac was already up off his golf stool (Nick gave him the stool in the winter) and wielding his crutch expertly to the car.

“Hey, man, it’s fucking wet out here,” Nick said through the window.

“Ah, not too bad.”

“Ha. Not too bad.”

“It’s nothin’, to tell the truth. To what ya get sometimes.”

“Whatever you say.” Nick handed him the food bag. He checked the rearview again. “Nobody’s coming—just set it down and come back so you don’t spill this.” He lifted the big cup of coffee.

So Mac did that, he put the sandwich bag down on a tuft of soaked scrub grass next to the golf stool, then gimped back to Nick’s car. Nick looked into the dark, the shadows of the overpass, the undergrowth planted by the state on the slope up to the highway. Rough mean cable fence. Hard wet galvanized metal guardrail. God what a life.

He handed over the big cup. “I’m going to keep the rest of the coffee then, if that suits you.”

“Whatever floats your boat,” Mac said in his growly voice. Now he was holding his cup, leaning on the crutch and using both hands to get the flap up on the plastic lid. His hands were shaking. He looked in the car. “You all packed for something?”

Nick shifted into drive. “Yeah. Going down to the river to meet some people. Just overnight. Where’d you sleep?” Nick knew he probably didn’t want to know.

“Didn’t yet. Going into the shelter this afternoon. Got a toothache.” Mac looked up the exit ramp toward the highway.

Now from this angle Nick saw that half the ruddy old face was swollen. “Oh damn, I hate a goddamned toothache. You okay?”

“My dad pulled his own tooth once,” Mac said, and he was laughing. “I couldn’t do that in a million jillion.” He sipped at his very hot coffee.

Nick slipped the car into park and checked the mirror again. He popped the trunk and climbed out into the rain, careful not to knock Mac down with the door. In his bag, in his shaving kit, he thumbed out a few aspirin, and he also spotted one of those tiny plastic airplane bottles of Johnny Walker—God knows how long that had been in there. He thought about it for a nanosecond and grabbed it, too.

Standing out there with Mac, he pulled down his bucket hat. “Why don’t you go into the shelter earlier?” Before Mac could answer, he said, “You got a pocket?” He dropped the aspirin and scotch into Mac’s ugly bent hand and Mac jammed the stuff into his big raggedy blue-green army overcoat. Then Nick handed Mac a ten-dollar bill and that went into the coat, too. “Won’t the shelter take you before the goddamned afternoon?”

“I ain’t at the shelter.” Mac drank coffee, stared at Nick. This was the logic Nick loved. Under Mac’s raincoat was a sweatshirt with a hood, and the hood was soaked, draped over his skull.

“Well, it’s raining, man. You need to be at the fucking shelter. That’s what they’re for. That’s why they call ’em that. C’mon, I’ll carry you over there right now.” Nick’s current girlfriend, a woman named Emma, worked at the shelter, and he really didn’t want to encounter her as he slipped out of town on this particular mission. But she didn’t get in until eight o’clock, so the coast was clear for a couple of hours.

“Afternoon’s fine.”

“C’mon, Sergeant, get in the car.”

“Afternoon’s fine. Just call me Mac.”

Mac and Nick had a friendship that was this and this only, based, for Mac’s part, on their commonality, which was that they’d both served in Vietnam, and actually had both gone deep into Cambodia deaver back in the day. This particular thing they had in common really made them brothers, because it wasn’t just every Vietnam veteran who was there in the time we were chasing Charlie over that border. Mac seemed to like Nick because of this and didn’t know the whole Nickin-Vietnam thing was a huge fucking lie.

Nick looked into Mac’s eyes and vowed that someday he’d straighten this story out. Mac leaned hard on the crutch, looked up the exit ramp over Nick’s shoulder. Nick stepped off the curb and into his car. “They got a dentist at the shelter?” He dried his face with his coat sleeve, found a McDonald’s napkin and tried again.

“They got pliers there and somebody that can get ahold of it. That’s alls ya need.” Mac laughed, and Nick remembered Mac was already missing a front tooth. “You got any sugar?”

Nick looked in the bucket seat next to him, nothing. “Hey, maybe it’s in the bag with the food.” He indicated down on the ground behind Mac, the plastic bag. “If it isn’t there, we’re out of luck, sorry.” The rain was really coming down now. “If you get something in the stomach, your tooth will feel better.”

“Last call on the ride to the shelter.”

Mac worked his one-legged way back to the golf stool, and when the light turned, Nick shot across Hocking Road and back onto the beltway heading south on Route 50 toward the Ohio River. The first sign of light was beginning to show in the dark blue, water-filled sky.

He was glad it was raining, even if Sergeant Mac had to hobo wet today. He was glad for the cottony wafts of fog that ran across the road in the low places, and for Carol’s voice once she called and began chattering to him as she made her way to the same place from her own direction. She told him about her recent piano recital, held in great old Music One, a special recital room in the venerable music building he remembered so well. He remembered the wintery sound of her piano. He remembered the warmth from the radiators that heated each glassed-in practice room, so that the outside windows would first steam, then stream with condensation, the cold held at bay outside, the red flush of Carol’s cheeks as she played, and the music and the timelessness of the rooms themselves holding the warmth in. That was back when they’d first been together, when she’d been between marriages. He turned up the volume on the phone so he could hear over the road noise and wipers, and once his wet jacket was off and stretched over the back of the passenger seat, and the car heater was cranking and the coffee was cool enough to drink, he was pretty happy.

“Ben came,” she said. Ben Carlyle, cranky chair of the English Department but a lover of good music. “He sat with Wally and the kids.” Her voice was desolate when she said his name, always had been. Lord knew what their history was. She’d been married to Wally four years come August. Shortly after the wedding, Nick and his son had moved to Nick’s new job in Ohio.

“Did Wally enjoy the recital?” Nick asked her. It was a probing question, and there was information in the tone of her reply.

“Hell if I know.”

The driving was automatic. Old highways of the north have their own cracked-up rusty awful charm. There’s a Reduce Speed sign, then 45, then 35, and the road worms into the heart of some dead business district, chipped glass beads on a worn strand of string. Normally the car dips through the town, grudgingly conforming to its speed requirements, then shoots out the other side with some considerable relief. Good. At least that’s not where we’re going. Good. That’s not where we always lived, a tiny place on Fourth Street across from the church and Grandma’s waiting for dinner. Good. Onward, miles to go. He drank the coffee and slowed down the wipers.

“Yeah, I guess Wally enjoyed it,” she said. “Is it foggy where you are?”

“I think so. I think that’s fog.”

“Very funny. You have some coffee?”

“How’s Wally doing?”

“Who knows? Not me.”

Nick leaned back in his bucket seat and remembered Wally Brown, his big, dark brown eyes, his focus and intensity, his eccentric bent way of fast-walking across campus, books under his arm, steaming toward his classroom where he’d give ’em hell.

“Still getting stellar evaluations from the students though. He’s great with the kids.”

Nick sought to change the subject. “What did you play in the recital, honey?”

“The usual stuff. Wow, it’s foggy here, too.”

“Where are you?” Nick loved cell phones. When people used to talk on the phone, “Where are you?” wasn’t a likely question. You had to know where a person was to be talking on the phone with her. The phone was hooked to a place.

“In some hills or something. I don’t know where I am, actually. How’s Dave?” Dave was a pup when Carol last saw him, before Nick moved away.

Her voice brought back the old days. No matter how good your memory is, when you talk to someone you once knew, and still kind of do, the edges of what’s specifically that person always come back and surprise.

“He’s been a pretty good dog. He and Buck will have a good time while I’m gone.”

“Buck’s a good boy, too,” she said. “Not in a dog way, of course.”

“Yeah. Buck is a good guy.”

The connection crackling, Carol said, “I want to tell you something before we get cut off.”

“Good news or bad news?” The connection was fading fast.

“No, really. I want to be real honest with you. Can you hear me?”

Then there was a beep in his ear. “I’m getting another call. Back in a second.” Nick fumbled with the phone. “Hello?”

“It’s still me,” Carol said. “I want to tell you something.”

He clicked away, trying the switch again. He got a glimpse of the phone screen and saw that the second caller was Buck. He looked back at the road. This is how people have wrecks.

“Hello?” he said.

“Hey, Dad,” Buck said. “Your girlfriend called, wants you to give her a buzz. She’s at work.”

“What does she want?”

“Okay, I’ll call her. Everything else all right?”

“Yeah. Rain. I hate it.”

“Me too. I’ll call you when I get to the river.”

“I’m gonna make spaghetti. Bye. This afternoon I mean. Bye.”

Nick clicked back to Carol. “Back. It was Buck, speak of the devil. I have to call somebody. I’ll be back to you, maybe an hour or so. I’m about two hours from the river.”

“Wait, I have to tell you something.”

Nick didn’t want to hear whatever she was going to say.

“First off: I’m going to have to leave early.”

Nick could hear the road running along under her tires, wherever she was.

“And I didn’t throw away the letters. Don’t be mad.”

“I knew you’d say that.” He took a deep breath. They were good letters. Maybe he was glad she still had them. “I’ve got to make some calls. I’ll get back to you later. I have a confession to make, too. Bye.”

He cut her off as she was saying “okay” and fumbled through his contacts list—all this and driving at the same time. Now he was feeling sour. Carol was the other person he’d lied to about Vietnam. He remembered when it came out of him, six years before. And, for him, it had plagued the relationship ever since. It was always a really bad lie, which was why he didn’t tell it anymore, but there was a time when he thought he could handle it or when he thought he needed it or when he thought whatever he thought when, on a moment’s notice, deaver in some cul-de-sac of conversation, he slipped into it. Over the years, this particular lie, hanging out there between him and Carol, wore him out, and he felt plenty of self-disgust when it surfaced from time to time and he came to the road’s fork where either he had to rid the world of it and be humiliated or sustain it with a couple of relevant remarks and quickly engineer a change of subject. He’d told the lie only a couple of times and always hated himself afterwards, but from it he learned, over long years, the natural force of truth, which had a tug like an undertow and his arms were growing tired of resisting. He and Carol had rendezvoused a number of times over the years. This time he was going to fix the lie even if it cost him the woman. And then, while he was bleeding, maybe he’d come home and purge it with Mac Pellier, too.

He called Emma. “You rang?” he said.

“Yes, Buck gave you the message?”

“He just said to call.”

“Okay, well, two things.”

“Why didn’t you call me yourself?”

“I had something I wanted to talk to him about, too. Some work. That’s good, right?”

“Yes. But calling him is brutal at seven-thirty in the morning.”

“I noticed that,” she laughed. “But you know, he’s going to have to get up in the morning for any job.”

“True that. So it was a test?”

“Stop it. Not a test. Anyway, two things. A job we have here for Buck. And this: we sent somebody out to pick up the Sarge and he said he saw you this morning.”

“He showed me a small bottle of scotch that he said you gave him.”

Nick sighed audibly if not theatrically. “God, that guy’ll say anything.” And he winced inside himself. “What has happened to the mental health system in this country?”

“Anyway, he got it somewhere.”

He laughed. “I’m telling ya, you just can’t trust the homeless anymore.”

Always earnest, Emma didn’t hear the joke. “Not you, okay. That’s what I thought. He didn’t drink it—we’re real proud of him.”

Nick sighed again. “I gave him the scotch.”

“Oh,” she said. She was quiet for a moment. “That’s not a very good thing, in his specific case.”

“I know. I did it on a whim. The guy’s face was out to here with that toothache.”

“That doesn’t matter, Nick—don’t make excuses.”

“Well I also gave him coffee and two bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits, and I didn’t see you guys out there in the rain making sure he had breakfast in the roadside weeds standing on his one-and-only remaining goddamned leg. A war patriot. Gave a limb to that fucking mess over there. Begging food on the Hocking exit.”

“He didn’t eat the food. He got tormented by this bottle of scotch and phoned us from a pay phone on Hocking. He was all worried he’d go on a bender and be tossed from the program. He said he doesn’t trust you anymore.”

“That sounds more like you than Mac Pellier, but okay, I stand reprimanded and deservedly so. It was goofy and terrible giving him the scotch. I’m glad he’s in the shelter. Help him with the tooth, for God’s sake. And save the whisky for me when I get back. What else is happening?”

“You don’t get it.”

“I do. I get it. Next topic. What else is happening? Be nice for a minute.”

“No, you are making light of it, Nick, like you do. Who are these Louisville people you’re meeting?”

“Business people, I told you—from a previous life, you know. Old friends, really, and we probably ought to be going to a ball game, but anyway—back tomorrow evening.” Change the fucking subject. “How’s your apartment doing?”

Quiet on the other end.

“Did they get it pumped out?” Too much recent rain and her ground floor apartment was flooded. Nice royal blue rug under an inch of stinky storm sewer backup.

“You know I can’t talk about personal stuff on the office phone. Give us a call when you get back from visiting with your friends from Louisville.” And she was gone from the line.

“They’re not my friends,” he said, too late. “And what’s so personal about wet carpet?”

Emma was the most beautiful woman Nick had ever been out with. He loved her commitment to the homeless shelter, which was where he met her. She was active in the same parish where Nick ran the annual fund drive for the Guatemala relief program. She was prominent in local politics and had run for mayor a few years back. She marched annually against strip mining in the foothills and sat on the resources advisory board for the Appalachian Center that was a sort of United Way for the poverty regions nearby. Except for some very occasional fun, Emma was relentlessly focused on “the issues,” as Nick’s friends in business in Louisville would have put it, if he had any. She was a serious woman, and that, Nick noticed again, as if for the first time, was a major part of the turn-on.

The highway stretched ahead, and he rode it through the next half hour hoping he’d begin to feel better. When he was short on sleep, things would nag at him. Lies. He was in a swamp of them. Lies make you weak. What else? The letters. He’d not destroyed Carol’s either, though a couple of times he’d said he had in an effort to get her to follow his lead. She didn’t. Oh well. So in Tuscola, Illinois, and in Athens, Ohio, hidden somewhere in piles and bundles were equal halves of a six-year love affair in letters (compared to the time and effort of the letters, Carol and Nick’s actual time together was miniscule), and while Nick was sure he could handle it on his end, he was not sure Carol, innocent and pure of heart in so many ways, and married with a couple of young but savvy kids around the house, could muster the required duplicity to properly stash her end of the mess and protect them both. It was a chance they both kept taking, because their love was like a vortex—pulling them together, pulling them down, pulling them down together.

He kept his cache of her letters in a U-Haul moving box taped shut with silver duct tape, a roll of it. There was a slot like a mailbox or piggy bank in the top, and after reading her letters he’d slide them each through the slot into the darkness where they piled up, read once and banked. He lived only with Buck, who was his older son, who was into his own thing and never gave the activities of Dad much thought. Certainly he would never go into one of seventeen million sealed boxes in the garage with a packing knife, which was the sort of effort such an intrusion would require, and once someone cut into the box, there was no way Nick wouldn’t be able to tell. So how was Carol handling security? Her letters had to go. Nick vowed that he’d revisit the issue this time and get that solved, too. The Vietnam lie and the letters. Both. Now was the time.

He knew how it would go.

“They are beautiful letters, Nicky. I’ll hide them better but I don’t want to throw them away.”

“They’re love letters, that’s why. They’re to me, and they’re love letters. From you. I can’t burn them. Yours are gone. So in a way they’re all that’s left. I’ll hide them so nobody can ever find them.”

There would be tears. He would see from this how much quiet stress and real pain Carol was holding in as she lived these two lives, one wife-and-mother life visible to all, and one sharp little shard of doomed and secret pain and glory, their affair hopefully hidden well.

Nick was glad the sun was shining, finally, when he got where he was going. In Coal Grove, the Ohio River helped define the town’s shape, sliding swollen and brownly behind the Super Walmart and the car deaver parts/wrecker service (a hundred rusty hulks with hoods gaping and trunks too) and four warehouses that opened to docks of barges the teenagers loaded as summer jobs. There were hills, and Nick parked on the shoulder of one, a side road above the main highway, so he could see a good distance down to the Super Walmart parking lot, the place where he and Carol would meet, as arranged, as they’d done one other time in this town. From this point, parked in shade on the grassy slope, he could watch her pull in. The day before, she’d driven from Tuscola to Cincinnati, where she was supposedly seeing her mom, who was supposedly staying with her sister, Carol’s aunt, who was sort of sick but they might go out from time to time, perhaps even a day trip, down to see the dogwoods, or something, hard to reach you know, will call when possible, etc. Convoluted and twisty trail. With luck, no one tries to follow.

What would she look like this time? Big trucks rattled by on the highway. A car wash was busy across the road and down a ways, and Nick watched some fishermen with their dockworker sons pamper their pickups and one housewife with kids in car seats wiping down her SUV. Her untucked t-shirt said “Exotic Landscaping.” She was young and pretty. Nick still had good eyes. He was playing Van Morrison, “Into the Mystic” on repeat, and he had a headache though he didn’t notice until he shut the engine off and stepped out. For a while he stood by the car in fresh mowed grass. The side road he was parked along led up to a private school on the hill, and this whole area was groomed and planted as a way of promising passersby that the invisible school above and out of sight would take good care of kids.

Closing his eyes against the headache, Nick leaned on the car and ate an apple, listening to the music, a different song. The cell phone rang again, and he reached in and got it. Buck.

“Hey,” Nick said. “Is everything fine?”

“Emma called again, and I said why don’t you just call him—you got his cell number—and she said she tried and nobody answered.”

“Ah.” Nick finished his apple and lofted the core into a wooded area next to the road. He reached for a second one out of a bag in the backseat. He checked the register and sure enough, he’d missed a call.

“And I wanted to ask you something anyway.”

“When do you think you’ll be back and can I take the car for a few days?”

Nick said, “Day after tomorrow, and yes. Where you going?”

“Columbus, and I know you don’t want me taking the bike up there.”

“Right you are, buddy boy. How long will you be gone?”

“A few days. Two or three. That okay?”

Of course it was. Buck needed a life, too. “That’ll be fine,” Nick said. “I haven’t ridden the motorcycle for a while.” Together they owned a Honda Shadow. It was black and fast. Mostly Buck used it, mostly locally.

“Yeah, you haven’t ridden it because I don’t go anywhere where I need the car.” They both laughed ruefully. “In fact, I don’t go anywhere at all.” Nick could hear his son opening and closing cupboards as he talked. “How’s the poor SOB car running and is the transmission work we did holding up? I know the muffler’s in the toilet, but…well I’m glad you’re road testing it and we should paint it while the rust…”

Suddenly Nick picked up a vibe. “I’m going to ask you a direct question, Buck, and I need an answer. Have you been into the pharmaceuticals this morning?” He could hear it in his voice, an altered, yammering, scattered stutter running through his son’s regular talk like brain static.

“Nah, I’m just tired,” the lad said too slowly.

Nick’s heart sank. He had the urge to drive straight back home. The center wasn’t holding. “I don’t feel good about this. If I can tell over the phone, it’s a problem.”

“Well, anyway, your girlfriend called so you should call her right back.”

“Clean up the act before I get home, or you’ll be peeing in a bottle instead of taking the car to Columbus. It’s out of the question, this shit starting up again.”

“That’s cool,” Buck said. “Have a nice time down there, and old Davy and me’ll hold the fort. Is the bacon in the refrigerator still good?”

“Yes.” Pretty bad when you can’t leave town even for a few hours without things caving in.

“That’s good because I’m fierce about hunger at this time.”

Nick was ready to go home. Oh how he hated this. Big pressure in his chest. His son. He didn’t say anything.

After a few moments, Buck spoke. “Okay. Well, you hang in there, Daddy-o. And I’ll catch ya on the flip-flop, or whatever you used to say on the CB.”

The boy was stoned. Jesus.

Nick stirred and paced for a while, a couple of times around the car, over to the fence row in the deep shade of a stand of poplars to stare at the trickle of a stream. He remembered Buck as a little boy, all energy and go go go. He went by Nicholas, Jr. then. Now Nick remembered once when Buck was about five, he and his brother playing in a school playground on a Saturday. From a distance, Nick watched as several neighborhood kids surrounded the boys and teased them, particularly going after Nick’s younger son, Matthew. Buck thought they were going to hurt Matt. He picked up a fallen tree limb that seemed twice his size and charged into the group of six or seven taunters, sending them running in all directions, and then led Matt back to Nick, who was standing by his car. Nick had remained amazed at that ever since. He desperately wanted for divorce not to be the ruination of that wonderful, brave little kid.

On the cell, he dialed up his ex-wife. It was mid-morning in Kansas.

“Hello.” Same voice as ever.

“Hi, it’s Nick.” They hadn’t talked in a year.

“Hi. How are you?” Automatic stroke, didn’t really want to know. Same tone as ever.

“Okay.” Nick took a deep breath and dove in. “I just wanted to tell you I think Buck’s back into stuff. I’m on the road. He’s been fine for a good long time, best I can tell. But today I’ve been gone for just a few hours, and I just talked to him—it doesn’t sound good on the phone.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Hmm. Are you sure?”

“I’m thinking of bagging the trip and heading back.”

“Right.” She cleared her throat.

“How’s Matt?” Although he hadn’t talked to her in a long time, he talked to Matt weekly, and Matt always said he was fine. But it was checking-up time.

“Grades good and all that?”

“Oh yeah, all that. He’s being scouted, he probably told you, and of course if the baseball’s going well, you know and so on. And we’re traveling all over hell’s half-acre to games. He’s a jock, when it’s all said and done.” She cleared her throat again. “At least now we’re seeing light at the end of the tuition thing.”

“Uh-huh. That’ll be a relief.”

“Shall I call Buck and sort things out?”

“I’m not asking you to, but if you want—sure. He’s seemed fine, and I’ve been watching.”

“To the extent you can.”

“Yeah. I’ve been watching close,” Nick muttered.

“Maybe the scars from last time are wearing off.”

“Why don’t you make some stuff up. Tell him police again. Tell deaver him jail this time. Tell him people are suspecting and this time it’ll be bad. Make shit up. You’re great at it.”

Nick stared into the trees.

“Use it to do good, for once.” She laughed the dark laugh.

Nick stared deeper into the trees. He was remembering a few things about why things didn’t work out. Every time he called, for the last many years, he imagined that maybe the anger would have relented. After each call it was clear to him it never would. Grudges aren’t what women want, but they carry them well and far.

“Okay, Nick,” she said, maybe some reconciliation in her tone. She’d landed the punch of the day and felt better. “I’m glad you told me. Not much I can do from here. I don’t think I’ll call him. He needs somebody to trust him.”

“So where are you?”

“I’m down by the Ohio River, meeting some friends from Louisville, a little R&R. It’s spring break for us.”

“A little R&R, huh.”

Quiet on her end now.

“But I don’t have to be here. If crap’s gonna fly, I can head back just as quick. I’m thinking seriously of it.”

“No, no. Do the R&R, Nicholas. You probably need it, with your rough life.”

He stood there for a few moments, quiet, staring into the trees, holding the phone to his head like a gun. Finally he said, “Okay. I just wanted to tell you. Bye.”

Nick clicked her off, good fucking riddance.

Carol had worn a ribbon in her brown and frosted hair last time, in Indianapolis fourteen months before. That was their fourth goaround since he’d moved away, and Coal Grove, then, the fifth, was not intended to be Coal Grove at all but instead they would, he hoped (planning not being his strong suit), drive deep into the mountains in Eastern Kentucky and find a proper B&B. He looked up toward the private school, bit into the last of his second apple, and gave more thought to going home. Maybe he would feel better if he did. In a way he was really looking forward to Carol’s arrival, in another way he was churned up and wanted to start the car and drive home immediately and nothing less would suffice.

Right then her car shot by. There was a ribbon, white. He watched the rented Mercury Sable, creamy white, as the turn signal came on and she spun into the big horrible parking lot. She would circle once looking for him, then find a shady spot with a decent view from which to watch for him to arrive. But he was here, watching her arrive.

He hopped in, turned around, found a slot in the traffic on the main road, and cruised fast down the hill just catching a yellow light and turning in with his rusty-red Oldsmobile Cutlass––he and Carol had done the deed in it one night back when they lived in the same town. He drove cars to their knees. This one was from the early nineties and he was proud for her to see he still had it and thus hadn’t changed a bit.

She saw him turn in, and instead of parking they drove up sideto-side, facing opposite, and hopped out fast. They kissed in broad daylight because in Coal Grove they could. Besides Indy and Coal Grove, they’d met in Washington, D.C., Kansas City, and Tampa—always only for precious hours stolen in a hotel room paid for by whichever of them was on the road for whatever convincing reason could be divined.

They put all Nick’s things in Carol’s trunk and left the red clunker parked in shade next to a collection point for shopping carts. Nick hopped in the rental, and Carol smiled and chatted behind the wheel—Nick half listened and looked at her fresh face and laughing eyes. Her diamond flashed in the sun as she turned left into grim and deaver gritty downtown Coal Grove, with its cracked concrete streets and littered asphalt lots. The old brick buildings of the business district hid behind aluminum-and-glass rehab solutions done in the 70s, now dull and fading. They’d have been quaint at this age had they just been left alone.

“How is everybody?” Nick asked.

“You mean Lowell? He’s great. I see him around the college all the time. Looks exactly the same.”

Nick was thinking about the old days and didn’t hear Carol’s reply. She had a tendency to branch, and he had a tendency to drift while she branched, and they’d been together less than ten minutes and all their tendencies were kicking in.

Nick looked up from his reverie surprised to see where they were going. “What are we doing?” he asked, interrupting the tail end of a story about Wally and the kids and some bad pizza.

“What are we supposed to be doing?” She smiled.

“I figured we could get lunch and decide where to go. Further south, though.”

“Nick, I brought lunch. You know that.”

“The mountains are pretty.”

“You never listen to me.”

“Dogwoods.” Nick smiled at her. She was right. What had she said this time that he missed?

She was turning in to the grimmest Holiday Inn in all Ohio, dusky green streaked with brown. In effect, it was a museum of Holiday Inns—a time capsule really—dingily preserving some corporate iteration from 1960, the days when they were proud of their aluminum window sills and air conditioning. The management could snatch victory from the jaws of mortification by shining it up and making the fact that time had passed them by into a marketing device. But Nick figured if they could spot potential like that they wouldn’t be running the Coal Grove Holiday Inn.

“I thought we’d go down into Kentucky and find a B&B in the foothills. We said that’s what we were going to do, isn’t it? And I know you don’t think I listen but I don’t remember you saying we were going to the Coal Grove Holiday Inn.” He gestured toward the poor thing. “Or I’m almost sure I wouldn’t have driven down here.”

“Well, now, that’s a point,” she said.

“Seriously. Not here, please.”

“Ah,” she said, parking under the portico of the motel office.

“Ah fuck it.” The word was unlike her, and they both laughed.

“C’mon. We promised ourselves something nice for once.”

He watched her move in her bucket seat, turning toward him. “You deserve better than Coal Grove,” he said.

“Listen, Nick, this will be perfect,” she said. “Perfect for us.” She smiled, touched his hand. “Quick. Go in and get us a room. I want to make love now.” She leaned over and kissed him. She pulled back just enough so she could talk and said, “I told you on the phone, I have even less time than usual.” Her hand was on his chest, then his face. “Let’s make the best of it and not drive around Kentucky looking for the ideal mythical nonexistent perfect honeymoon spot like we did in Tampa and ended up in a Holiday Inn anyway.”

She kissed him again. “Go in there, madman.”

And in he went. He ambled straight to the abandoned front desk in a pantomime of not being anxious, leaned over it to see if anyone had ducked down to avoid business. From a back room out of a cloud of cigarette smoke came a portly man with a flushed face and a Holiday Inn plastic nameplate. Clint, Shift Manager. The arrangement was made for one night, and Nick begged to check in early. Clint was up for it for a mere twenty dollars more, bringing the total to seventy nine dollars, which is what the establishment should have paid Nick and Carol to stay there, but anyway. Clint handed Nick two big brass keys. Old school all the way.

Nick was happy that Carol had brought lunch. It was her custom to do so if she was driving to the rendezvous point and thus had room for everything. She had an ice chest in the back, sandwiches lovingly packed that morning as she left Cincinnati, grapes, strawberries, Perrier, oranges, Dijon mustard, four Harp ales, and a funny card in an envelope marked only by the dazzlingly erotic imprint of her lips in the shape of a kiss. Nick had brought champagne and two flutes and the same set of five cinnamon candles he’d brought the last two times they’d met. But their time-honored traditions felt bleak to Nick right then.

The room was on the second floor, and they carried in the bags, ice chest, and various sacks, all of it, before they locked the door and closed the heavy drapes. During the hustle of moving in, in the locked bathroom of their room, Nick had the opportunity to check his phone. Emma had called—there would be two messages from her when he got a chance to hear them, and now Emma and whatever it was that was on her mind became yet another gnawing thing, joining his stoner of a son, his brick wall of an ex-wife, his big lie, and the ticking bomb of their letters.

They made love before anything else. Carol whipped down the bedspread of the window-side bed, a smile on her face, and rose gorgeously in the room’s dim greenness from that fine, delicate last move of undressing that Nick loved so much, when the last ankle was at last freed from the beige panties and how those panties sailed across the room light as gossamer itself. Then the two of them were in each other’s arms on crisp sheets, rolling, him on top, her on top, him, her, and laughing between kisses, and holding each other tight so that, for Nick, nearly a half hour passed without preoccupation or worry, and during that time, brief as it was, he genuinely took joy in Carol Brown, in the ease of her, in the fun she wanted to have, in her happiness as she reached for it, in all her words that he heard and all those many, many words that for some reason he didn’t hear. She was pretty. She hated the word but it was so exact. He wouldn’t say it, but he could think nothing else. They were stealing this moment and this love from the world around them, stealing it from a world that stole joy and freedom from them on a regular basis and this was revenge. No, it wasn’t revenge, it was escape. No, not that, it was comeuppance, it was the coming around of what-goes-around-comes-around. It was a rite of adulthood, to be defiant if they fucking well pleased. They waited months and sometimes years between times of seeing each other. Steal love. Steal it. Time had made them both familiar and new to each other. Lovers in the familiar stretch of bodies and the fabulous way skin knows other skin, and strangers in the details, the thickness creeping in, the gray in Nick’s hair now dominating the brown, smile wrinkles deepening for them both, and more, much more, subtle stuff that was hard to spot or name. And at the end of it, Carol was on her back, and tears, mascara-tinted, streamed from the corners of her eyes down into the fine hair that framed her face. Nick dabbed at her eyes with the edge of the top sheet, and kissed her again, her tears making the kiss humid and, he noticed, sweeter yet for all the sadness. She was only being emotional—happy, not sad, she would have said if pressed—but he didn’t press and soon she pulled the ribbon out of her hair and rolled away from him. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us,” she muttered.

“Nothing is,” he said after a while, and he really believed it, for better and for worse. He thought about that, and other things, and drifted. He saw the shaking hands of Mac Pellier—what was he thinking giving that man booze? He thought of Emma’s strong, level, committed, rightor-wrong-and-nothing-in-between gaze. Buck resurfaced for him. He stared at the ceiling, and sank back into his rickety, chaotic, barely-gluedtogether reality though he tried not to show it.

Carol was saying that Tuscola was going wet. The new student center had a bar. Somehow she’d gotten that far from the existential question, and her long white arm reached from under the sheets to open the cooler deaver and bring out the grapes, and the large bunch was passed back and forth. They weren’t saying anything. He got up and opened beers, lay back down, and the grapes and beer held their attention a while. She went to the bathroom, stayed fully five minutes, came out in her robe with a hairbrush, a familiar hairbrush she always had with her when they met, and brushed her hair in the motel mirror in the dim light. Then she lit candles like it was late at night, although it was barely noon. Pretty in that flickering light, she sat at the foot of the bed facing him.

“You asked what I played.”

“I played our Mozart—the stuff we like. Some Ravel I keep trying, a few other things. I want to play for you again some time.”

“Ah.” Nick was still drifting. Buck had been in rehab twice in the last few years, jail once. Drugs had been whopping trouble for him and for everybody. How could they even let him near the shelter? Emma knew all this. What was she thinking? Was she trying to do something great for Nick by turning a blind eye to his son’s record, trusting him and giving him a job? And why does Buck turn up high this day? This day.

“I don’t know why I keep doing recitals,” she said.

Nick stared at the dark ceiling, but he did hear her.

“To keep my head in the game, I guess.”

“So my kids know their mom is accomplished at something.”

Her two children, ages nine and seven, Stephen and Rebecca, from her previous marriage. Focus, Nick. Listen. “What’s up with the kids these days?”

“What do you mean?”

“Our neighbors have them while Wally’s at the college, or Margaret does, and then he’s got them. They love the Fosters, and they’re right next door. It works.”

“They’re taken care of, if that’s what you mean. While I’m…”

Nick remembered the days. He missed them in fact. It was all in a tangle now.

“I know they’d be taken care of, Carol. I was just trying for an update.”

“They’re growing up. They remember their father well, and he comes by, and Wally seems to get along with him.”

Tangles everywhere. Nick thought of Dave, earlier this morning, getting toweled off. He’d come out of the towel, his face beaming, his eyes looking straight into Nick’s. He’d be sad while Nick was gone, but he’d sleep plenty, cocking his ears toward the street from time to time, full of dog hope.

Carol was up to get the sandwiches. She’d said something, and Nick didn’t hear it. “Hey. Saint Elsewhere.” She wiggled his foot.

“Are you praying or something?”

His hands were folded on his stomach just so.

“I was saying that I hate to tell you but I’m going to have to go home.” She was looking at him. “In a couple of hours. Drive back. I really forced this. I wanted to see you. I needed to. I can be home by ten o’clock if I leave by four.”

“Okay,” Nick said.

“You don’t mind?”

“Buck called a couple of hours ago stoned.” Overstated, the usual.

“A miracle he managed in the mere four or five hours I’ve been gone.” Nick picked up his beer and finished it. “So I should go, too.”

Nick’s ex-wife’s pointed digs were gnawing at him now. It must have seemed to Carol from his body language that he was thinking of leaving immediately. She said, “We can stay here for another couple of hours, though, right?”

“Okay,” he said, and looked around, trying to get ahold of himself, wondering how long he could keep from bolting.

“We have to take our customary picture, too.”

Nick sighed. By all means, let’s add more pictures to the cache of letters and pending disaster.

“Another exciting Coal Grove panorama with the two lovers in the foreground,” Carol said.

“Yeah, we can go up on the road where I was waiting for you. Green in a sort of generic way. It’s on the way out.”

“Has Buck been clean and dry until now? I mean since…”

“Hell if I know. I think so.”

“Not right now,” Nick said. “Who knows. They don’t ‘date’ anyway, you know. But no.”

“Have you been seeing anyone?”

“No.” This was a sudden and surprising question, and Nick answered too quickly. He hated it. Carol had to know he’d be seeing someone in Athens, and to think otherwise surely would have run against all she knew about him. He rationalized that she’d expect him to say “no” to such a question, the two of them only partially covered in the daytime curtained dark of a motel.

She’d set a sort of picnic on the round table next to the bed. “Well. You’d said you had a confession to make, so I thought that might be it. Plus the unanswered call from someone named Emma on your cell phone.” She opened the second set of beers, drank from one, gave him the other. She quickly went on, looking down. “You know, I played the Mozart sonatas at the recital.” She was letting him off the hook. “I played them for you, and I thought about you while I was doing it. I played the Ravel piece, I played Les Adieux, I played my Chopin butt off.” She laughed.

“I wish I could have been there.”

“People liked it.”

“The woman—Emma, on the phone—she’s calling about Buck. She works at the shelter where I volunteer. And she knows his case, from the old days.”

Carol kissed him and they rolled into each other again, among the crumpled sheets. Maybe they both were less heated this time, calmer and slower, probably more preoccupied, or best case, maybe watching closer, running the tape, hoping to remember each secret move and feeling during the next long time apart. Maybe by the time they’d snuffed the candles and were in the shower together they were already beginning to go home, both of them, starting to feel rushed, people waiting, both of them understanding and not meaning to be mean but mentally rotating and being pulled back, both of them, not just him because he got what he came for, or her because this was half of what women want—both of them, in mind of home because this is how people are. If they had gravitated together, here was the other force, centrifugal, equal and opposite.

In the rental car heading back to the river, in the parking lot of the Super Walmart, they said a few things and kissed again. Her hair was wet and combed back. Maybe she’d put the ribbon back later. A man with new fishing tackle consented to take their picture right there in the parking lot, red hulk of a car and brown river behind them.

She hugged Nick. “Buck will be okay,” she said. This was quite easy for her to say, but the jury was still out.

“Drive careful,” he told her. And goodbye.

Moments later, Nick, sour and unhappy, was driving fast, panicked to be home, pounding up the same highway he’d just pounded down. It wasn’t raining anymore and for that at least he was glad. He dug frantically for the phone in his bag in the seat next to him, accessed the messages, both from Emma. The one she’d left first said she was sorry for ragging on him about the Sarge. The Sarge was relieved of the troublesome tooth and doing fine and only just before she called had told Emma he liked Nick and wasn’t mad about the scotch. Emma still was, however.

Then the second message: “Now look Nick, I talked with your very upset son. I had him come over to talk more about the job and deaver suddenly I was having to settle him down. I have taken a very close look at him, and he’s not on drugs. I tell you, you are going to have to get on top of this thing and show some trust or you’ll lose him, you’ll lose your son! It would help if you could communicate even the slightest bit with those of us who love and need you. You even sicced his mother on him! Please! I’m not calling from the office phone because I knew this would get personal and loud. See you in a couple of days or whenever, and when you get a minute from your Louisville business pals, or whoever, be in touch with this good boy and apologize to him!”

Nick pulled over on the shoulder, ears red and ringing. It was about three in the afternoon. He’d call Buck soon. He doubted he was wrong about this, but at least if Buck didn’t seem high to Emma then he wasn’t too far gone. After a few minutes of sitting there, the dominant emotion was relief. He loved how Emma took him to task, how she really cared about Buck. He sat there a few more minutes, trying to go blank. He pictured Dave the dog, earlier, in the mental fog of morning and rain. Now he’d be home on the couch, sleeping, not one care in the world, his probably-still-damp leash hanging from the ladder-back chair in the foyer. Nick found himself sorry Carol was gone. The lies and letters were still steeping. Confrontation was not his strong suit. Lies make you weak. He turned in the seat, looked back toward Coal Grove through his dusty back window. Maybe he could catch her, still in town getting gas or something. Retrieve the day. He turned back and stared up the highway toward home. He clicked the cell phone off, that awful tormenting thing, speaking of leashes. He took a deep breath, prepared to pull back onto the road. For all the mournful facts in the matter of Carol—that they lived far apart and were separate in the trajectory of their lives, that he’d told her some giant lies that she carried with her as true, that pressures from home tore at them both during their few hours together, that each time was darkened by the cold fact of risk and the ominous swirl of circumstance—still, Carol Brown was a grand friend and gorgeous woman whom it was his privilege to be with, and her love was generous and fun, and she played him with the mastery with which she played Chopin—including the coda where she’d touched the keys lightly––then let him leave fast and without coming clean. Because that was how this music went.