By the autumn of 1998, it had become our habit on weekends to drive up to the ranch from Houston to escape the city. Lucille took to the routine pretty readily — more so than I had expected. And so did Damien. One morning, he and I head out into the half-light as we usually do to feed the cattle, mend fence, and scatter fish food across the pond surface. Through the course of the morning, Damien rides in my lap on the tractor, upon my shoulders as we walk along the shore of the pond, on the gas tank of the four-wheeler. His blond hair, light as cornsilk, blows in the wind. Eventually Clyde arrives, waving from his truck as it wobbles over the double-track road toward the dozer. Once he commences his work, the peacefulness of the morning is obliterated by the machine’s staccato growl.
All the while, Lucille lies in bed, face down, lost in a long interval of sleep that has interrupted an even longer interval of wakefulness. For the last few weeks now, she has taken work shifts two and three at a time, after which she abandons herself to a full night and a sunny day entombed in a pile of bedding. The next morning, she might spend at home organizing the garage, working through the night until the place is as neat as a bandbox. But for now she sleeps.
The sun lofts over the trees just as the chores are completed. Damien and I head to the concrete cattle trough near the gate to the ranch. The day has warmed, so we strip down to our underwear and splash about, and then walk to the pond where we fish. Not until early afternoon does Lucille appear, arms tightly crossed about her ribs, eyes swollen as though from bee stings. She slowly absorbs the scene, and then smiles and shakes her head. The picture as a whole is lovely, but a little too country for her.
Later that morning, we head to town to a mall with a daycare center where we can leave Damien while Lucille and I shop. We move from store to store as she collects dresses, jewelry, and shoes along the way. Eventually we come to a lingerie store, where she wants to try on some underthings. She leads me along from rack to rack, holding up a pair of panties, a silk bra. I smile. She smiles. She then takes my hand and leads me into a dressing room, where she begins to exhibit some of the behavior that, in my experience with women, is unique to her. That we are in a public place seems to incite Lucille’s carnal nature. This time, for my sole pleasure, she wants complete strangers to imagine what’s going on behind the slat door. But this peep show has an alternate purpose too.
“Think I look fat?” she asks, running her hands over her tummy.
“Not at all.”
“I’m going to burn off a few pounds.”
“But you’re not overweight.”
“What about my breasts? Too small?”
“I love your breasts,” I whisper as a woman asks a sales girl two feet away if the store carries the Wonderbra.
Lucille cups each hemisphere with her hands.
“They shrank after Damien,” she says with an air of unabashed frankness. “There’s a clinic back in Houston…they’ve done thousands of women. Five-thousand dollars.”
I sense that I’m shaking my head.
“I’ve been working two extra shifts each week,” she says. “I want to spend the money on you.”
In time, the straps of the sundress are dragged over her shoulders, the dress buttoned up. We gather up Lucille’s boxes and bags, and head down to a Bennigan’s for a drink. As the sound system pipes old hits from the eighties throughout the restaurant, Lucille mumbles, “I want to look beautiful for you.”
“You already do,” I say abruptly, and the conversation ends right there.
After a couple of whiskey and sodas, we pick up Damien and head back home. By the time we arrive he’s asleep. We put him down for the night, and then Lucille and I settle in for the evening on the sofa. Lucille scans the pay-per-view channels and finally settles on a movie with a title like Sticky Fingers or Nasty Fingers – something sexy and stupid, old fashioned soft-core. As we watch, she curls herself into me like a cat, her feline back molding itself to my lap, her hand stroking my chest. Then Lucille makes it clear she’s in the mood for the real thing, in the midst of which she whimpers again, “I want to look beautiful for you.”
And she is instantly worked into a lather. A bit later, passions temporarily sated, she nuzzles her nose into my neck and calmly says, “A lot of women are having theirs done – a lot of your friends’ wives.” And she begins ticking off names.
“You really need to think about why you want to do this,” I reply.
With that she kisses my neck. Before long, she’s in my lap, and this time there’s a relentless ardor in the cadence of her movements. Smothering my head in her arms, her skull rolling against mine, she murmurs something. When I ask her what she said, she murmurs again, “I need you.”
Time stops. Lucille’s dark hair pours over my head and for a moment it is as though we are behind a waterfall, the rest of the world closed out. And for that one moment a single thought eclipses all lingering doubt about the innate goodness of our relationship, about the necessity of it. Lucille needs me. As I drift off to sleep that night, I realize that I am in love for the first time in this mundane life of mine.
Once or twice a week, Dad climbs into his truck and makes the fifteen-minute drive out to the ranch to check on the property, to see that the house is still standing, that the cattle are fenced in and not wandering about central Texas. But he really comes out to collect deer antlers, tramp the woods, get away from the buzz and drone of civilization. At sixty-eight he goes everywhere with a pair of binoculars swinging about his neck, making mental notes of the species of birds, the number of white-tail deer and feral hogs. Then one day as he looks through the binoculars he thinks he sees what looks like a spot of trash beneath a distant locust tree, the trunk of which is swarming with raspberry nettles.
He makes his way through the tall grass and sees at once that this is not trash at all – that is, everything has been carefully and deliberately stored here. From this nest of alfalfa and raspberry branches he pulls out a large plastic zip-lock freezer bag holding a brick of driveway cleaner. There are other bags as well, containing engine starter fluid, stick matches, D-cell batteries, light bulbs. Empty Coleman propane canisters are clustered on the ground like dinosaur eggs. What’s all this garage clutter doing way out here, anyway? Lifting yet another bag, he sees it is filled with hypodermic needles.
Within the hour the whole mess is on its way to a landfill, the first leg of its journey on its way to being forgotten.