15 ◆ Charles

CHARLES’S LAST JOB that day involved water dripping from the ceiling of the music room in the elementary school. Mrs. Harad, the principal, had once bought a field spaniel in a deal brokered by Charles, and this was one reason Charles got the call. Another was that Mrs. Harad wanted to reward the family for Joan’s support during the evolution scandal. So it was that the principal escorted the plumber into the music room, where they stood looking at the cracked old plaster as if at the vault of heaven. Charles said they were going to have to pop that ceiling open. He had found that customers liked it when he spoke this way. The room was full of students singing in their light high voices as drops of water fell into a bronze kettle. Micah smiled while hiding his face behind a songbook turned to “The Streets of Laredo.”

“Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin,” sang the children. “Get six pretty maidens to bear up my pall.”

Charles steadied a high wooden ladder and climbed. With a Kafer saw he scored the wet plaster so that it broke and fell, with wet heavy sounds, down to the blue tiles. Mrs. Harad snapped her fingers, and the music teacher waved the children from their seats, through the doorway, and into the hall. They kept singing all the while. The music teacher revised the lyrics with directions on where they were going: “We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly, and bitterly wept as we moved single-file to the cafeteria.”

“What a wreck of a school,” said Mrs. Harad.

Plaster kept falling. When the hole was big enough, Charles put his hand up inside the ceiling. “It’s a cold supply line,” he said. The rest of the afternoon was given over to the repair. Charles shut off the water and drained the pipes by running the faucets above and below until they were dry. An elbow fitting was leaking. Charles melted the solder with a propane torch and pulled the fitting off with big-jawed pliers. He cleaned the ends of the pipes and scoured the new piece he meant to put on. From time to time the principal came by to monitor the work, and on one of these visits she asked how Joan was.

Charles looked down from the ladder. “She’s gone off and won’t be home till spring.”

“That’s too long.”

Charles brushed flux onto the copper and fitted the pipe ends into the new joint. “Well, I wasn’t expecting it, though maybe I should have been. And Micah’s got a cold and Lyris is being pursued by trash.”

“What a fellow ought to do is get drunk,” said Mrs. Harad. Then she told a story about her honeymoon. In a bend in the road, she and her husband lost control of the little Triumph motorcycle on which they had departed from the church.

“They all said, ‘Ride it,’” she said. “You know how it is when people at a wedding get an idea that the bride and groom must do some particular thing. ‘Ride that bike.’ We went down on some loose gravel we didn’t see until we were in it.”

“And what’s the point?”

“Just that things never seem to go right.”

Charles had not really blamed himself for Joan’s decision. All that drove her lay inside her, he thought. He would have a hard time leaving the house, leaving Micah and Lyris. But this might be laziness, not honor. Life mattered more to Joan than it did to him. She thought there was a meaning she must track down. Maybe he should have bought her that tourmaline solitaire he had seen in Stone City. Maybe he should have married her on Main Street and not in the back room of a drugstore. Long ago he had stopped believing that his acts could move her, but he could be wrong.

He picked up Micah after school and together they went to the gun shop. On the way, the boy told Charles about the “self-esteem car wash” his class had had that day. No cars were involved, only children pretending to be cars. Each kid walked a gauntlet of classmates, who had been directed to call out whatever they considered to be the student’s strong points.

“What’d they say about you?” said Charles.

“That I’m a good reader,” said Micah. “And I don’t abuse drugs.”

“Well, they’re right,” said Charles. “You know, it reminds me of the sticks, which we had when I was a kid.”

“What’s that?”

“There were six or seven of us who walked home from school together. We’d go down the alley between the restaurant and the bank, past a big pile of sticks. I don’t remember how it started, but it became a tradition almost that everyone would pick up sticks and throw them at one of us, who had been picked beforehand to be the victim.”

“Did the person know?”

“Usually not,” said Charles, “because it wouldn’t happen every day. And lots of times you would have been told that someone else was going to be the one. But sometimes you did know. You could just tell.”

“Daddy, that’s pathetic.”

They had come to a high gravel crossroads, and Charles could see that no one was coming. He hit the gas. The van jumped the crown of the road and crashed down on the other side.

“It wasn’t that bad,” said Charles. “Even when all your friends were throwing sticks at you. Getting hit by sticks is not as painful as it sounds. And the minute you picked up a stick and turned to throw it back, they all ran. We weren’t that serious about hurting each other.”

Charles and Micah got out at the gun shop, and Charles took his stepfather’s shotgun from the back of the van. The brother and sister who owned the shop were sitting in director’s chairs, watching the Weather Channel. Clear and cold was the forecast. Charles wondered how much of their day must be spent doing nothing. It wouldn’t be easy.

“Here’s that gun I was telling you about,” said Charles. “The one that a few days ago I thought I would never get.”

“Good for you,” said the brother. He took the shotgun and looked it over. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

“We’re not buying just now,” said the sister.

“I thought you’d be interested,” said Charles. “Not to buy it, just, you know, professional curiosity. And I need a couple boxes of four-ten shells.”

“We’ve got a special on Winchester seven and a half,” said the brother.

“I’ll bet I know someone who would like a gun safety coloring book,” said the sister.

Charles purchased three boxes of shells, and they all went outside to try the gun. There was a mowed field behind the shop. The brother had a trap mounted on the back of a pickup so that he could sit on the tailgate and fire the clay targets. He took one from a cardboard box in the bed and cocked the trap as Charles stood and loaded the gun. Charles missed, and missed again. He cracked open the barrels and pulled out two spent shells the color of tomatoes. The smell of the burned powder came up. There was a time when the misses would have bothered him, but not today. The terra-cotta disk of the third clay spun flat over the field. He swung through it, pulled the trigger, and followed up clean. The target broke apart, pieces tumbling into the grass.

“Sporting clays,” said the sister.

They took turns with the gun. The sister was a better shot than Charles, and the brother was best. The siblings called “Pull” in bland voices. Very likely they went to events. But even the brother missed sometimes.

“Nothing wrong with that,” he said, handing the shotgun to Charles.

“Sweet little gun,” said the sister. “I like it with a four-ten, because it’s not easy.”

“I know,” said the brother. “I had forgotten.”

“Let me try,” said Micah, who had been sitting in the open door of the truck, looking at the coloring book and the shooting. He took his turn, with Charles’s arms steadying his own.

When twilight was coming on, Charles walked back to the van with Micah and the shotgun.

“Do you think Joan will be home yet?” said Micah.

Charles shook his head. “I told you, buddy. It’s going to be a while.”

“Cross your fingers.”

So Charles drove home with crossed fingers riding the rim of the steering wheel. Micah turned in his seat and put his feet up on the edge of the door.

“My feet are closer than they appear,” he said.

Jerry came over for supper that night. He chopped carrots with a serrated blade while Lyris opened the creaking oven door from time to time to look at a casserole. Micah sat at the kitchen desk coloring a picture of a game warden by the light of the green glass banker’s lamp. Charles set the table with chipped white plates. He and Jerry had drinks and talked about the truck-mounted trap, and why more things weren’t truck-mounted, and how whoever came up with such an idea was probably raking in the scratch. Then they all sat down to eat.

The casserole was made of eggplant and asparagus. It needed seasonings they did not have, but everyone ate a fair share. Charles bent to the table, a forearm laid on the edge. He drank water from one glass and whiskey from another. Lyris would put a forkful of food in her mouth and chew mindfully, gazing around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time. Micah had arranged dark red shotgun shells around his plate. Jerry knifed a slab of butter onto a crust of bread. No one talked about Joan. It seemed unfair to her that in her absence everything was so normal. Of course, things could still go very wrong; it was only seven o’clock.

After the dishes were done, Charles took his whiskey out to the porch, where he sat with the goat and looked out at the railroad tracks and the woods beyond. The goat seemed to have adapted to the porch, and vice versa, since all the things that she might have become tangled in had been removed by Charles, Lyris, or Micah, or by the goat herself. Charles drank the whiskey slowly but steadily, and he realized that he might well be getting drunk, as Mrs. Harad had advised. But he got drunk so rarely now; it was nothing like the old days of kicking down doors, of threats made and carried through or foolishly messed up. This was more of a composed drunkenness, a receptivity, and he thought he could almost feel the pulse of the night, as if his heart were beating to its time.

Micah came out when his homework was finished, and Charles sent him back inside to get a coat on. Together they watched the train come through at a quarter of nine. It was all grain hoppers and boxcars, some open, some closed, clattering and rocking, along tracks known to be rough. Micah wanted to hear the old story of how Charles had hopped a freight out west, only to have it go about a mile before stopping on a siding in the middle of nowhere for the night. Charles had ended up sleeping like a troll under a wooden bridge, or so he told it, playing up the parts that made him seem ridiculous. Micah loved every word.

In the kitchen, Lyris gave Jerry the message from Octavia, and he read her lush handwriting under the banker’s lamp:

Meet me at the E. at midnight.

Sincerely,

Octavia

Heading home in the car, Jerry felt both charmed and excited by the message. The “E.” stood for the Elephant, as anyone from around here could guess. The abbreviation seemed like just the sort of endearing feint at intrigue a young mind would concoct. An older person would have written the location out in block letters, breathing with difficulty. And the “Sincerely” was a totally disarming usage.

He stopped at the all-night car wash, a lonely chain of dark bays lit by high, stark electric globes. There was no attendant; whatever washing was going to take place had to be done by the customer. Jerry pulled smashed bills from his pants pockets, smoothed them flat on the hood of the car, and fed them into the change machine. He mopped the car with a drizzle of soapy gray water from a long-handled brush. The rinse cycle was relatively violent. The high-powered nozzle bucked against his hands as if it would fly away. He drove out of the bay and parked by the vacuum cleaner. Whatever happened, his car would be immaculate. He dropped beer cans and cigarette cellophanes and undelivered mail into a trash barrel. With a sodden cloth from a vending machine, he polished the dashboard and door panels until they gleamed as if a quart of salad oil had detonated in the front seat. He even cleaned out the glove compartment. His map of the Midwest was outdated, faded, splitting along the folds. It depicted long-finished highways as broken blue lines that suggested a bright future for driving.

He got back on the road. All this activity, he knew, was partly a means of avoiding the question of what he should do when he met Octavia.

Before he could decide, his car was overtaken by a police cruiser. Although flashing no lights and sounding no siren, it pulled abreast in the passing lane and stayed even with him. Through the windows, Jerry could see Earl the deputy waving sternly at the shoulder. Jerry pulled over, and the cruiser blocked his way. Then the lights came on, turning slowly, red, blue, and yellow. It seemed there were more colors every year. Both men got out of their cars.

“Nice night,” said Jerry.

Earl walked back, shining a flashlight on the ground. “Say, you still got that keg?”

“Maybe. Why?”

“The liquor store’s looking for it.”

“I just came from the car wash.”

“Well, that’s great.”

“Why don’t I take it back when I’m done with it?”

“Look, Jerry, I’m not going to fuck around on this,” said Earl. “All I been hearing about all day’s that jackass keg. Turns out the kid come in there this morning or, I don’t know, over the weekend, saying he wants his deposit back, since it was stolen through no fault of his own.”

“That’s debatable.”

“They don’t want the deposit anyway. The whole theory of the deposit is to make sure the kegs come back. Which I would think is a fairly obvious point. What do you mean, when you’re done with it? Isn’t it getting kind of flat?”

“Come on over and pick it up,” Jerry said. “You don’t have to get all martial law about it.”

“It’s a hassle, and that’s all it is,” said Earl. “But I owe the liquor store guys a favor, since they fund some of our activities.”

Earl floored it, but Jerry’s car could not keep up with the cruiser’s V-8 or V-10 or whatever V it was. Jerry dropped back, but he tried to keep the taillights in sight, because he half suspected a trick was being played on him. There was no need to hurry. There were hours to go before midnight.

With their separate preoccupations — Earl’s thinking of the runaway keg and Jerry’s striving to keep the cruiser lights in range — both drivers passed a gas station at the intersection of 56 and the Chesley Road without seeing Follard, who stood at the lone pump beside the ice machine, holding his side with one hand while running kerosene into a blue plastic container. Anyone who knew about Follard’s history might have wondered what he had in mind. The counterman, however, knew no one in the county very well. He had come all the way from Tuscaloosa to deliver a diesel Mercedes and decided to stay awhile. All he said, after holding Follard’s twenty to the light and then giving him his change, was “Y’all have a nice night.” In fairness, anyone, no matter his origin or what he knew of local lore, would have been hard-pressed to deprive Follard of his commercial right to buy the same five gallons of kero anyone else could buy.

Follard’s condition fell short of flail chest. Dr. Palomino had said so, and the emergency room doctors had agreed. They had taken X-rays and prescribed Tylenol with codeine. They gave him instructions on allowing the ribs to fix themselves. They advised rest and deep breathing. But Follard could not rest. He had decided that Charles Darling must be hurt in order to save Lyris’s reputation.

His thinking ran like this: If Lyris had been dishonored, then Charles might have been justified in beating him up. But she had not been dishonored. She was all right. He had seen that she got out of the river, had called to her, had tried to say that all was forgotten. She fell; it was nothing he had intended. This very morning he had watched as she got off the bus, walking ably, unbroken. He could see her; she couldn’t see him, but she was all right. Therefore — and this was a leap Follard easily made — if he did not pay Charles back, it would amount to confirmation of the notion that Lyris had been dishonored.

He had formulated this logic late in the afternoon, while resting and breathing deeply on his mattress in the house.

Now he lifted the kerosene into his car. This hurt. Five gallons weigh a lot to someone in pain. He set the tank upright between the front and back seats and drove to a roadhouse. He sat at a picnic table indoors, eating northern pike and home fries. The guilty smell of kerosene was on his hands. He knew that if he were a stronger man, he could skip the whole thing. This was something his uncle had once said, about another act of revenge Follard had had under consideration. But he was not strong, and he was not brave. Neither was he trustworthy or loyal. He envied his aunt and uncle, the way they moved blindly forward — honest, hardworking, laughable, as if someone were going to reward them with a prize at the final curtain.

“There is no prize,” he said aloud.

On the jukebox, Tom Waits sang about a house on his block with the windows all cracked and no one coming home. “If there’s love in a house, it’s a palace for sure.” Follard wiped his mouth and folded his napkin.

A waitress brought the desserts on a rolling cart. Everything looked old and dry.

“Sad song,” he said.

“It’s a fucking sad song, if you ask me,” said the waitress.

Micah slept, Lyris slept, Charles lay drinking on the davenport. He did not feel like going up. That’s how he and Joan used to say it — “Do you feel like going up?” As if they slept in clouds.