There is now a warrant out for the arrest of Clyde Pierson, and when he is finally apprehended, the story makes the local papers. An unnamed female companion was present at the scene, but not arrested. Late on the afternoon that the story breaks, Lucille calls to tell me she can be reached at her mother’s and stepfather’s for the foreseeable future.
“That’s as good a place as any for you,” I say. “By the way, I read about you and Clyde in the paper this morning.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Didn’t think you would.”
“I’ll need to move the rest of my things out of the house.”
And that, I am to assume, is that. From here on out it shall be all documents and lawyers.
A long silence is filled with the thud of my heart in my ears. But some deeply irrational part of me – perhaps the part that instinctively seeks to protect our unborn child – wants to give us one more chance.
“Come back, Lucille.”
Her reply is an audible squeak. Tears, I know, are now streaming down the channels of her face into her mouth.
“Come back and we’ll be a family.”
The squeak becomes a squeal.
“We’re both too old for this shit. Come on, Lucille…”
Her sinuses are voided in a tremendous din, and then we merely sit on the line, listening to the slowing cadence of her breathing. A handful of seconds later she says quite soberly, “Sterling, I’m such a wreck.”
“Come back.”
“This whole thing’s insane… How can you want me back?”
“I knew you as a little girl, Lucille.”
She tries to speak but can’t.
“Walk away from him. At some point you have to.”
“Why are you saying this?”
“You’re innocent, Lucille…and Clyde is death.”
That night Colette comes by the ranch with a copy of the day’s paper. As I lead her through the gate and into the house she laughs with a forced air of triumph.
“Once he makes bail I’m sure they’ll find plenty of reasons to make up,” she says with a grimace. A moment later, however, she’s not smiling. Her eyes glisten with something else.
“You okay?” I ask.
She nods and then deflects any notions of self-pity with the wave of a hand. “Things are tough all over,” she says.
“They are.”
What I don’t say is that within a few hours I’ll be committing high treason in our little coalition of the brokenhearted. In a little while I’ll be sleeping with the enemy.
“You really think Clyde can make bail?” I ask.
She indicates that to bond out he would have to come up with more money than he has. “I don’t know anyone who has that kind of money,” she says, “except you.”
Then I can assure you he’s not making bail, I want to tell her. But my treasonous mind is bent on rationalizations based on bitter reality. Your husband is more guilty than my wife. He will sleep with the wolves, with his own kind, while my wife sleeps in my own warm bed. Our life will pick up where it left off, while yours tapers into loneliness, poverty and despair. Such is the subtext of what I feel, so I refrain from explaining myself at all.
Instead, I mix a couple of drinks, and we head out to the backyard. Through the next hour I come to realize that Clyde’s incarceration isn’t the flawless case of justice that I like to think it is. Suddenly Colette is left with four children and no means of support; her family has been torn asunder. Before the arrest Clyde was at least good for a paycheck – be it from ranching, driving a Cat, or manufacturing methamphetamine. It was money. Under normal conditions, I am convinced Colette is unerringly good and sound of judgment. What I once took for the personality of a biddy was but an expression of motherly anxiety. In a moment of candor I tell her that she and Clyde just don’t add up. The comment is meant to impart an apology for the shoddy treatment I initially inflicted. It’s also an appeal to her confidence in who she is without her crackpot husband at her side.
“I’ve heard it all before,” she says. Her only other comment is that “Clyde hasn’t always been paranoid and ugly.”
“Was there a magic moment in your courtship where you looked at him and said to yourself, ‘Oh, yeah. He’s the one’?”
Colette’s gaze turns fierce. “I think you don’t want to admit that Lucille broke your heart.”
I ascent to a degree with a groan. “My ego is outraged.”
In time the conversation peters out. Colette drives off in her beat-up car, and I head back inside to await her imminent disapproval and outrage. So I’ve made a separate peace. So allies become enemies.
The following day I drive to Lucille’s mother’s house in Houston, where I find Lucille in a cotton summer dress. Pregnancy becomes her. She has regained some of her weight, as her limbs have shed their wasted appearance, and her tummy stands out with a faint, healthy crown. Meeting her on the porch steps, she turns her cheek to accept a small kiss, her gaze always averted to prevent a meeting of eyes. I am denied a smile – her way, I suppose, of insisting that she be allowed to return on her own terms and without conditions. If I want her back, forgetfulness will be required, memories of the last few months forbidden.
She heads back inside and momentarily returns with a pitifully small box of effects, such as a pair of shoes, a hairbrush, framed pictures of Damien and her extended family. Damien, Lucille explains, is at the zoo with his grandmother. As we drive off, I ask her if she needs some maternity clothes. She nods, and then our eyes meet for the first time.
Life resumes with a new sense of serenity, a part of which is attributable to my decision to stop drinking cold turkey. So out goes the lovely vodka in a clear cold stream down the kitchen sink. The rest of the credit lies with Lucille. I return to work and come home in the evening to a dinner she has prepared with some care. Bills are paid, errands run, appointments with the OBGYN kept. Damien is dropped off and picked up from school. Lucille decides to forego rehab, for, as she puts it, she knows what she needs to do, understands what her life must become and forever remain. Time would seem to prove her right, as she seems to be undergoing a fundamental transformation, a sea change that is difficult to qualify or characterize. Her movements about the house become slow and fluid, her eyes gradually take on a new clarity. At times she seems preoccupied. I try to allow her these private moments, unfettered by someone asking her what she’s thinking. Sex is infrequent and lacking the former vigor and enthusiasm, and sometimes I note an element of sadness in Lucille’s general comportment, even a kind of boredom with this routine she has so abruptly fallen into. But she seems to have arrived at the realization that this is the way adjusted people live, that we are all at best mildly unhappy, that human existence is not an uninterrupted series of incredible highs and lows. Life is dull but bearable and sustainable. All that’s required of her is that she display a clear desire to consolidate her life, and I’m inclined to think she does. What she wants is what she now has: a home, a child, a husband, family and a small circle of friends – a life full of constants and routines.
But even everyday life can be touched by the bizarre, the sober analogue of Lucille’s crazy meth world. Looking back, one such event stands out, outlining what has come before and foreshadowing what is to come.
One evening in early September, Lucille sits out on the patio under a light, listlessly reading a magazine about the lives of fascinating people we see on television and at the movies. As I walk toward her, a glass of iced tea in each hand, a terrific weight falls on my right shoulder, and the naked tail of a rat whips across my nose and cheeks.
With a single involuntary spasm I throw the glasses to the ground and tear the rat from my face, though its teeth and tiny clawed feet have burrowed into the side of my upper neck. Lucille screams and runs to the door while I take a broomstick and rap the filthy rodent over the head. The rat snarls as it backs into a corner, where it squats under a palmetto. Another rap on the head and it lies still.
I come inside with an acute case of the creeps, whereupon Lucille notices I’m bleeding. She leads me straight away to the bathroom, where I see the small wounds, tiny punctures that cause me to shudder when I think of how I got them.
Lucille cleans and dresses the wounds with professional tidiness, and we go on with our lives as though the episode never occurred. It is, quite simply, too unpleasant to dwell on for the briefest moment. I just want to forget, to eradicate from memory the ugliness of what happened.
Two weeks later, however, I’m alone at the ranch clearing brush when I come down with a low-grade fever. Soon my neck begins to swell, and I call Lucille, who reminds me of the rat bites. So thoroughly have I forgotten the episode that there is a sense of sudden revelation, a genuine ah-ha! moment. She orders me home and drives me directly the hospital, where I’m quarantined and placed on large doses of antibiotics. The infection has slowly spread from my neck down to my parotid gland, and now threatens to overwhelm my immune system entirely.
For the next few days, Lucille keeps me in her charge, bringing me meals, books, flowers, whatever will make me recover more quickly. Four days later I am discharged, and my quiet and rather solitary life returns to the familiar, comfortable pattern. But small events can cast tremendous shadows.
On my first day back at work Colette calls me at the office. My voice is tentative as I tell her about the revised state of my affairs. No apologies, no condolences are necessary. She actually heard about it some time ago. She’s happy for me, or at least hopeful that all will come around, that all will be made right. Maybe Lucille can be rehabilitated. Maybe not, but then again, maybe. To change the subject I tell her about my encounter with the rat, and she screams with horrified delight. She’s happy that I’ve recovered. Then it’s time to say goodbye.
“I hope you have a good life,” she says wistfully. “You deserve one.”
“You as well, Colette.”
And so my life with Lucille resumes. And so it resumes…
Six weeks before Lucille’s due date I am at the check-out counter of a grocery store when the clerk hands me back my debit card.
“This isn’t going through,” she says.
“There should be several thousand dollars in there,” I say handing it back. “Try it again.”
She does, but with the same result. For the first time in my life I buy groceries on a credit card.
On my way out to the car I put a call in to the bank to check the balance, and sure enough I’m overdrawn. With the bank officer on the phone I instruct her to transfer seven thousand from savings over to checking. After giving her the account number there’s a long silence that says it all. “Either you or your wife drew against the entire balance of both accounts,” the voice sweetly croons.
“When did this happen?” I ask.
“Most of the activity occurred…yesterday.”
When I come home, Lucille and Damien are gone. I drop by the post office and put a series of calls in to the various institutions. A sense of panic suddenly develops as I learn that every account with Lucille’s name on it has been cleaned out; a small account with only my name on it has been left untouched. The post office box is stuffed with credit card statements from Neiman Marcus, Kohl’s, a top-drawer furniture store. The Visas and MasterCards in her name are maxed at tens of thousands each. I call Lucille’s mother to find out if she has seen her daughter.
“She dropped Damien off this morning,” she says. “Said she had to leave town for a while.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“Nope.”
Evidently she has nothing more to say on the matter, and she simply hangs up.
Lucille, it would seem, is just gone. She doesn’t come home that night or the following day. Later that week Colette calls me in Houston. Her voice is hesitant.
“Clyde made bail.”
The moment is lost to this all-consuming thought until I hear Colette saying my name.
“Sterling? You there?”
“I think I know where the money came from,” I say.
“Clyde’s always been able to sniff out money – even from jail. Wow. I told you he’s good.”
“I’m feeling pretty stupid and vulnerable right about now, Colette.”
“You should probably be feeling a little scared too.”
“Have you heard from him?”
“Grapevine has it that he’s looking for whoever he thinks put him in jail.”
“Tell him it’s the same person who got him out.”
“Clyde keeps his own score,” she says. “Does Lucille have a key to your house?”
“She does.”
“Then I’m sure he’s already been in there.”
“Lucille wouldn’t let him in, Colette.”
“If the pile of crystal was big enough she would.”
“She doesn’t want to see me dead.”
“But Clyde does, and he has something your wife wants very badly.”
The conversation ends with some gentle accusations, and I hang up in my silent office, muttering, “She wouldn’t give him the key.”
Nevertheless, I find myself moving about the house, into each room, looking under every bed, in each closet, every tub. But I feel no better for the search. I head for my office and collapse on a swivel chair, thinking, this is not the direction I thought my life would be heading as I approached forty… Then something catches my eye. Leaning back, I see what looks like a strip of duct tape coursing down the inside of the desk to the floor. I get down on all fours, and there I see a baby monitor taped to the top of the leg space under the desk. The AC adapter cable has been taped to the interior wall leading down to the computer’s surge protector. I turn onto my back so that I’m looking up at the monitor with its little plastic-encased transmitter antenna, the innocent primary colors of its manufacturer’s logo.
“That you, Clyde?” I whisper. “Waiting for me to fall asleep?”
I get up and walk over to the office window, where I see a ladder extending up from the ground. The window itself has been unlocked. I sit back down and consider the intellectual wherewithal of my opponent; then I consider what he came here to do, and my blood runs cold.
“So you want me dead, Lucille?” I shout into the rafters. “Is that what you want?”
So sleep is warded away. At four in the morning the phone rings. My eyes open at the command of adrenaline. I find myself in my swivel chair before my desk, the lights on. I allow myself a moment to take a reading of my own mind, and then very slowly lift the receiver. Clyde’s nasal breath fills the connection. After a long silent interval, he says in a singing voice, “That’s what she wants, Mr. Braswell!” With that thought conveyed, he hangs up, and for the balance of the night his sleepless world is mine.