Carol was curled up on a sofa in the family room when he entered, the giant brass rubbings of old English tombs looming over her. The TV was blaring commercials. Julie was already upstairs, her music going in the bathroom and the shower running. His clothes were almost dry from the truck heater, except for his socks, which he peeled off by the door.
“What happened to your shoes?” Carol asked.
He went over and sat down next to her. The wool felt warm on his feet. “I took her to the jump rock.”
“You did what?”
“I needed to break through to her somehow.”
Carol noticed that his clothes were still damp. She shook her head, but then appeared to soften.
“It’s a confusing time for her,” she said.
“We still got time together. That’s what counts.” He looked out the bay window at the sunset. “Remember when Chris was her age? All he ever wanted to do was hang out.”
She smiled. “I used to get so jealous,” she said. “You got all the fun stuff.”
“Work in the workshop, work in the garage. ‘Hey dad, hey dad,’ I couldn’t get a thought in edgewise. I used to get mad at him for it. I don’t know how I lost him.”
She reached out and he felt her thin fingers take his cool hand. She wrapped it in hers and rested them both on her hip. “You didn’t lose him,” she said. “You were a good dad.”
“Thank you.”
“But your hair could use a little help.”
He laughed and looked down at their entwined fingers, then up at the amused smile on her face. The lamp on the table behind her cast a warm glow, backlighting her blonde hair. He leaned in to kiss her, but she put a hand gently up to his lips to stop him. She shook her head slightly.
“John,” she said, searching his eyes. Her pupils were big and dark, incredibly dark. She had an air that felt almost apologetic. “You walked away from us. You weren’t there.” Her face went pale and she swallowed and breathed in. “I want to pursue this thing with Jim.”
There was no sound. He looked into her eyes, trying to connect through the fog of adrenaline. He was suddenly two people. He was himself, and he was someone else, a viewer watching the scene as if it were a movie. His ears pulsed and it became increasingly hard to concentrate. Then he became aware of the noise from the TV again.
“Honey, this is our life—” he said.
But she was rushing forward now, almost as if this were a script she had rehearsed many times. She spoke with more passion than necessary, as if he were putting up an enormous argument. “He takes me to luncheons, he goes to church with me. He got me into a career. I’m finally taking care of myself, and Julie—”
“Honey. We’ve had a little bump. But we never—I mean, it’s you and me. We’re getting through it. I’ll get you money, I told you—”
“It’s not about the money, John!”
She was slipping away from him. It couldn’t be happening.
“No, listen—”
“You left! John! Look at me!”
He realized he was staring into space. He looked at her and saw that her cheeks were swollen and flushed. A tear ran over the soft pomegranate skin of her cheek. She reached up and held his face in her palms. “I’ve moved on. It’s not fair to ask me to act as if the last year never happened. It’s not.” She searched his face.
He leaned his elbows on his knees, held his hands, looked at the coffee table. Piled newspapers and People magazines. Crosswords partially completed in handwriting he didn’t recognize. Commercials were still playing on the TV. Such a short time had passed, and yet it contained an eternity. What did the last twenty years mean? Why had he given her his first paycheck? He had married the town beauty queen. They had been the most likely to succeed. They had a boy and a girl. And then they didn’t.
“Can you tell me if you ever loved me?”
“Oh, John. Don’t.”
She looked away at the commercials and held her elbows as tears flowed down her cheeks.
He finally stood and headed for the door. He was shaking and weak. He stood there for a moment, his forehead pressed against the cool white enamel, listening to her cry. And then he opened the door and went out into the dusk, leaving his wet socks on the floor behind.
It began to mist heavily on the way home, and the air cooled. He turned the heat on to warm his feet. The white searchlight teepee bled out over the windshield as he neared the casino, and the neon colors throbbed and ran as he turned into the lot. He pulled over and watched the entrance, blurry in the mist. Under the portico, people surged in and out. He unrolled the window and listened. He could hear their laughter and excitement, and beyond them the faint chinking of the slot machines and their little voices of encouragement.
The wipers cycled, and he sat staring at the neon lights, bleeding out as mist re-accumulated. He listened to the old sounds of comfort and celebration, imagining the stale cigarette smoke and the savory thwacking of cards being shuffled, the soft clicks of the chips and the barks of laughter. Hit me. Hold. The song came back to him as Willie Nelson had sung it: clear, soulful, and thin as an old hillbilly psalm. The other night dear, as I lay sleeping, I dreamed I held you in my arms. When I awoke dear, I was mistaken, So I hung my head and I cried.
He sat and listened for a while longer, then started the truck and shifted into drive. He sat idling with his foot on the brake, trying to empty his mind. The windshield was washed a rusty indigo, and it flashed him back momentarily to the deep acidic water of the old mine. He took his foot off the brake. The truck crept forward. He turned the wheel and gave it a little gas so he didn’t block the person turning into the drive behind him. Then he turned onto the highway and slowly, slowly, ran the truck up to speed, feeling the pull of gravity where his bones had once been.
It was cold and damp as he neared home. The reservation road sank into pools of fog so thick he slowed to a milky creep. He rolled up the windows and turned the heater back on, filling the cab with the sharp musty odor of mouse turds. The road swam and the trees ran alongside in a black tunnel. The wipers left concentric arcs of water, blurring everything. He drove hunched forward and squinting like an old man.
Twenty minutes later, he parked near the paddock and turned the engine off. Outside, frogs and crickets sang in a resounding chorus. He stepped out into the racket and walked to the lean-to, where he hung the keys on a nail inside the door. As it had been the night after the fire, everything was wet with dew. Pride was in his stall. The rice tarps had been taken in and the pole-barn doors were closed tight against the mist. The houses on the hill were dark. The yard lamp on the peak of the stolpe låven’s gable was surrounded by a fuzzy halo of water.
JW walked across the gravel road, his shadow running long and jerky before him in the mist. His head throbbed on the sides and behind his eyes as he turned onto the grassy drive that led up to his trailer.
The wooden steps were black and soft with water. He saw a wavy paper note taped to his door. The blue ink was blurred, but he could still make out the lettering in the faint light. Stay away from my family.
He took it down and went in, pulling the thin metal door shut behind him. He turned on the overhead light in the kitchen and saw that he had left the windows open, soaking everything within six inches of them. He went around and closed them. The warmth of early September was disappearing, and for the first time he could feel the deep cold of the coming winter.
The trailer had a propane furnace in a metal-faced cabinet next to the bathroom. It had a pale grill speckled with small spots of rust. He had never tried to use it, but now he lifted the grill off its pegs and set it aside. He held the tiny silver pilot knob down and heard the faint hiss of propane. He bloodied his knuckles in the small sharp spaces and burned his fingertips with match after match, but he couldn’t get it lit. He finally gave up and turned off the pilot. The air was pregnant with gas. He crawled into bed in his damp office clothes, but began to feel like he was smothering. He cracked a window even though it let in the cold and damp, got back into bed, and drew the blankets around him.
If he just lay still, part of him thought, maybe the world would change, and this would have all been an illusion, a bad dream, an alternate reality. If he stayed like this, shivering and still, maybe he could hold off the compulsion of the casino that was again washing over him. He felt the blankets around him, pilled and comforting as a musty childhood teddy bear. He had almost forgotten the craving, the incessant gnawing to avoid the bad feeling, to stave off the depression. His family, his job, his home, his identity—gone.
A shiver came over him and he pulled the blankets tighter. The mattress above his pillow felt cold and wet.