Clyde sits on a metal folding chair in the ragged grass of his sideyard. He is surrounded by the dismantled ruins of four lawnmowers. At his side a cardboard box is piled high with the machines’ greasy viscera – a coiled starter cord, a throttle tab, lawnmower wheels, a blade, a fuel tank. Against it leans an engine block with a spark plug that has been beaten with a hammer, like a loose tooth impacted in a lower jaw. An array of dirty screwdrivers and a socket set are scattered before him. The tapered end of a chisel lies crosswise upon the handle of a ball-peen hammer. Clyde begins to tidy up his workspace as I approach, and then abruptly gives up. A weird frustration is revealed in his wide-eyed glare, a look of unfocused panic.
“What the hell are you doing, Clyde?” I say.
“Mower’s on the fritz…f-f-fixing the fucking lawnmower.”
“Didn’t you once tell me you were a certified dozer mechanic?”
Deeply offended, he glowers at a pair of water-pump pliers.
“Making a mower that works out of four that don’t takes something special, Mr. Braswell.”
“You all right, Clyde?”
He cants his head and appears to give this question serious thought before answering. He then nods, stands, and quickly walks around the perimeter of his bizarre mess. “Whatcha come here for, Mr. Braswell?” he says as he studies his work, assesses his progress.
“The wedding’s back on,” I say.
“So I heard.”
“I’m not going to be here to help with moving the cattle.”
“Where’s the wedding?”
“My parents’ backyard.”
“Where’s the honeymoon?”
“Yucatan Peninsula.”
Clyde nods.
“Colette and I are splitting up,” he says, nearly stuttering the sentence. “She’s g-getting the kids.”
“Sorry to hear that,” I mumble.
“Seventeen years and four kids later…” He drops an imaginary football, and then punts it. Looking down at his lawnmower carcasses, he shakes his head and adds, “What a cluster f-fuck.”
Greg and Earl stand before the bonfire, their faces aglow as I approach from the ranch house, bearing a tray holding a bottle of Stoli, tonic water, cranberry juice, and a carafe of chipped ice. It’s July, too hot for a fire. The atmosphere is hushed, somehow a silent recognition that things aren’t quite right, that some imprudent decisions have been made. Greg agrees that it’s too hot for a fire. Earl would seem to concur.
“Think I’ll be making a mistake tomorrow?” I toss the question out there if only to break up a cadence of awkward silences.
Greg clears his throat. “Why are you asking that question, Sterling? And why are you asking it now?”
I stare into the fire for a long while, hypnotized by the glowing coals.
“Just looking for some reassurance.”
“She’s been clean, hasn’t she?” Earl says.
“Six months now.”
“And you’ve known her for how long?”
“Twenty-some-odd years.”
“Childhood sweethearts.”
“She was great at last year’s Fourth of July party,” Greg says, laughing. “What with the hypodermic needles full of juice.”
With that I feel myself getting drunk in a hurry. Then something strange happens. At some point deep in the night I find myself lying on the grass alongside the glowing coals, a trail of red ants traversing my ankle. Greg and Earl lie asleep on the lawn chairs, their legs akimbo at precisely the same angle.
I stagger to the house and collapse on the sofa. My mind hovers within that space between sleep and wakefulness until the sun has risen in the kitchen window. Then the phone rings. It’s the florist with “a very important question for the groom.” Seconds later it rings again and it’s my mother. So the day instantly assumes a forward and unstoppable momentum of its own, as have the events that delivered me to this peculiar point in time.
The morning of August 21, 1999 breaks hot and humid. Time becomes elastic with the injection of vodka, allowing Greg, Earl and myself to arrive at my parents’ home an hour late with a luminous sense of self-confidence. The guests are seated, the quartet’s bows drawn. Lucille is said to be in my parents’ bedroom announcing to all who enter that she’s “living the high life now!” I am warned away from her doorway in the interest of fortune and tradition. In the kitchen, I overhear Lucille’s mother and her latest husband whispering between themselves, “…she looks fine…”
“Do you think it will last?”
The answer is so hushed as to be inaudible.
I turn on my heel and head outside, where a pair of teal-colored dragonflies are buzzing up and down the aisle. Everyone is hot, drunk, and fairly miserable. The dragonflies eventually light on my seven-year-old niece’s naked shoulder, sending her screaming into the neighbor’s arboretum. A moment later I am directed down the aisle. From the dais I see Lucille for the first time in three days. When she finally stands before me with the veil lifted, I am overwhelmed by a sense of relief that she is present, fully living in the here-and-now. As if I should have expected anything else, as if anxious behavior were not normal on a bride’s wedding day.
A scalding sun and a steady trickle of alcohol through the reception are replaced that evening by a jet ride and then a cool breeze coming off the Mexican Caribbean. We sit in chaise lounges as the final rays of sunlight illuminate the brain-shaped cumulus clouds in panels of pink and violet. Lucille lies at my side, eyes wide open as though scanning the skies for UFOs. She swears she feels fine, but “something’s a little freaky.”
“What do you mean ‘a little freaky’?”
She looks me dead in the eyes, and says cryptically, “Baby, you don’t know what’s going on in your own backyard, do you?”
I shake my head and lie back down. Soon we’re off to the hut, lying beneath the ceiling fan, listening to the sea moving against the endless expanse of coral sand. Lucille reaches over and takes me in her hand, a quiet moment that is followed by a session of absolutely furious sex. In the sweaty aftermath we both lie awake, not talking much. A faint pall of foreboding fills my head. I ponder what Lucille meant by her curious statements, but I’m afraid to ask, wishing to avoid any scenes on our wedding night. In time, my mind strays. Finally, I dream.
The days are spent within the refuge of the beach umbrella and fueled by a steady stream of daiquiris from the thatched-roof wet bar a hundred yards off. Days and nights dovetail seamlessly until the morning Lucille announces that she’s making a taxi run into town for some contact lens solution. While she’s gone, I head back to our cabin and happen to notice a notepad jutting out of her suitcase. Ah, the relentless companion – the prescription pad.
I retreat to the shade of the beach and the delightfully numbing effects of the breeze and the daiquiris. A couple of hours later, Lucille appears above me wearing a pink string bikini. Looking up at her she suddenly appears grotesquely skinny, her tendons and bones unwholesomely prominent. Not everyone is of the same opinion. A German tourist in a Speedo gawks lewdly at Lucille as his wife swats a mosquito against the mottled corpulence of her thigh.
“You brought a prescription pad,” I say.
“And it’s a good thing, because I have a bladder infection.”
“I thought you were just getting saline solution.”
“Got that too.”
“Anything else?”
Lucille grimaces.
“You know, they don’t check tourists coming into Mexico,” I add. “But they check everyone on the way back.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Just reciting useful facts.”
Lucille turns her gaze to the sea.
“You drink like a porpoise.”
“So?”
“Just reciting a useful fact.”
The following Sunday, we’re on our way to the airport. As we approach the ticket counter, Lucille stops, closes her eyes, and then abruptly darts off to the ladies room, trailing her wheeled suitcase. A moment later she reappears. We then board a planeload of sunburned and hung-over Texans, and soar over the Gulf for Houston.
Upon deplaning we are escorted as a group to the baggage carousel. Just as our luggage tumbles down, Customs officials being led by two Labrador retrievers approach. They seem preternaturally drawn to Lucille, the dogs’ noses zigzagging through the crowd, eventually coming right up to her ankles. Lucille stands rigid, arms at her side, forehead and shoulders glistening with perspiration. A dog’s shiny black snout comes around her heel, up her shin, then shoots off for her suitcase. It then moves the entire length of the zipper, pauses, then comes all the way around Lucille. I gaze at her brittle posture, and she at me. She mouths, “Take me with you,” and, just as before, all her weaknesses fall away, all her strange misdemeanors and sins forgiven. Lucille needs me. Nonetheless, the dog has clearly detected something –- and yet I can’t imagine she has anything on her. If she was holding, she isn’t now. The official allows the retriever to linger, to do her job carefully. Lucille’s eyes well up, and just as she’s about to break down, the Lab turns her nose to another bag, another person.
So we have our luggage and Lucille her freedom.
“What was the dog was picking up?” I ask as we walk for the terminal.
Lucille shrugs.
“Traces of something. You were scared, Lucille.”
She will neither confirm nor deny. She takes my hand and says, her voice atremble, “Just get me out of here.”
Looking at her profile as we walk, I see a long tear seeping from the corner of her eye.