Circle of Three (25 page)

He gave my leg a pat and took his hand back to rub the side of his stiff neck. He lit his pipe again.

I didn’t even
want
him to talk to me. I outgrew that long ago, the way a child outgrows expecting her stuffed dog to talk back. I just wanted…something. Tonight. Some kind of a connection.

“George.”

“Hm?”

“You know, you don’t have to smoke outside. You can smoke in the house if you want to. I don’t mind anymore.”

He nodded, looking thoughtful. “I think I’ll keep it out here,” he said slowly. “It’s not so bad. I’ve gotten used to it.”

Down the alley, somebody’s garage door groaned before it slammed shut,
crack
, metal on concrete. A nice, final sound. I got up. “Butt hurts. I’m going in.”

“I’ll be in in a minute.”

“Okay.”

“Happy birthday,” he called.

“Thanks.”

I went in the empty house by myself. Something I’ve done a million times before, but tonight it felt like practicing for the future.

“C
AREFUL, WATCH HIS
head. Look out for the door!”

“I got it, I got it. He’s fine.” The tinge of exasperation in Mr. Green’s voice was what clued me in to the possibility that I was being a pain in the ass. Nobody was more even-tempered than Mr. Green.

“I can probably get the rest,” I told him, “I just needed you for the big ones. Well—if you could help me with the polar bear, that would be great. Then go, you must have a thousand things to do.”

Good humor restored, Mr. Green stood back to admire his placement of the giraffe, eleven and a half feet tall, against the sunny side of the ark barn. We were moving the animals outside so Eldon Pletcher could look at them in natural light. Landy and Jess were taking him to the river this morning to see the almost-finished ark; then he was coming here to check out the animals. He’d be here any minute.

“Looks good,” Mr. Green said. High praise—he thought the whole ark project was ridiculous. But he regularly attended a church called the Solemn Brethren of the Bleeding Lamb, so I wasn’t sure where he got off. I told him that to his face—we had very lively debates; arguments, really. He liked to play devil’s advocate even more than I did.

“Do you think Mr. Pletcher will like them?” I asked, eyeing my colorful animal lineup against the wall.

“Oh, sure.” I must’ve looked dubious, because he added kindly, “I bet he’ll be real pleased. You don’t have a thing to worry about.” He gave me a bracing pat on the back, and I realized I was twisting my hands together. “Which one do you like best?” he asked.

“Me?” I liked them all. I loved them all. Which wasn’t to say I wouldn’t have loved a chance to do every one of them over again. “I don’t know, which one do you?”

He glanced over the double rows of cutout kangaroo, cheetah, porcupine, llama, panda, ferret, goat. “What’s that one?” he asked, pointing.

Uh-oh. “Can’t you tell?”

He scrunched up his leathery face, peering. “Anteater?”

“Yes!” Relief. “That’s your favorite?”

“No, this is. I think. This here donkey.”

“Really? How come?”

“’Cause of his face. Looks like one we had when I was a kid, name of Larry. Patient as the day is long. Something about the eyes,” he said, going closer. “Just something restful in his eyes. How many more you got to do before D day?”

Mr. Green called our May seventeenth launch D day. “Not too many. I really think we’re going to make it. If nothing goes wrong.” Like Eldon Pletcher telling me to start over.

“Good thing you got fired, eh?”

He thought he was being funny, but that was something I said to myself about three times a day. Thank you so much, Brian, for turning out to be an ass.

“So you can haul out the rest of the stuff, you think? I’ll get on with some chores if you don’t need me.” He touched his cap.

“Go—thank you. I’m not taking them all out anyway, just some. And Jess can help me put them back. You’ll never have to touch another animal again.”

He laughed and called back, “You mean until D day!”

We would rent a moving van on the day of the sailing to
transport the animals to the river; Mr. Green would help roll them out to the dock, up the ramp, and onto the ark. My job was arranging them around the railings on the first and second decks, for maximum visibility. A simple task, you might think, tall in back, small in front. But a museum curator couldn’t have taken her assignment more seriously than I did. After all the work we’d done, I wanted the display to be perfect.

We expected a crowd, but no one could predict how big it might be. The ark story had been picked up in papers as far away as Charlotte and Baltimore. Reporters had called me for interviews. They’d called Jess, too, and of course Landy. I’d gotten Eldon’s approval and finally done one, on the Remington College radio station. The only sticky moment came when the interviewer, a perky junior named Marcy, asked me if I considered myself a creationist. I went into an explanation about the purity of self-expression and how the art I was doing was apolitical and not religious in itself—and Marcy interrupted to ask, “So you’d say what you’re doing is art?” with an unflattering inflection. I folded and said, well, not fine art, but certainly graphic art, yes, I did believe I was making a kind of illustrative art, and people were free to call it anything they liked.

She must’ve thought she was getting us back on surer ground when she switched to the topic of how essentially silly it all was, the idea of a modern-day ark. Of course I agreed with her—and yet I heard myself getting defensive on Eldon’s behalf, and especially Landy’s. I told her about how, just last year, a team of deep-sea explorers found an ancient, undisturbed beach on the floor of the Black Sea, and geologists from Columbia University were pretty sure it was the proof that a sudden, catastrophic flood had occurred about seven thousand years ago. Noah’s flood. Marcy said, “Huh,” politely but knowingly, and wrapped up.

It felt strange to be so firmly and obviously on the wrong side of a public controversy. Or at any rate, the side I would never have taken under any circumstances except these surpassingly
peculiar ones. I wasn’t a very effective spokesperson for the religious right. A fact about myself I could truthfully say I’d never expected to regret.

Jess, on the other hand, was relishing all the odd, skewed ambiguities of the situation, the strange-bedfellows syndrome, he called it. Sailing an ark was a phenomenon, he said, a wonder, a spectacle, something you did because you could. I should try harder not to put people into categories, he recommended. “Is Landy a good friend? Is his father dying? Are we hurting anyone?” And the most compelling question: “Is this making you feel better?”

If not for the opposition of my immediate family, I could answer yes to that without misgivings. Ruth’s ridicule had hardened to hostility, though, and my mother was still fomenting resistance on the grounds of good taste. In spite of their unhappiness with me, I was, for some reason, happy when I was doing the work. I hadn’t had time to ask myself why—I hadn’t had time to do anything but make animals! And maybe that was the answer. Maybe it was that simple.

At least my mother couldn’t throw irresponsibility in my face. Eldon had come through—he was paying me almost as much as Brian had at the Other School. Ruth pointed out that my hours were twice as long, but that was a gross exaggeration. I said if something excited and consumed and invigorated you, how could it be a bad deal? She didn’t see it that way. So I muzzled my enthusiasm and tried to hide my long hours from her, leaving for Jess’s after she went to school, getting home just before she did from Krystal’s. Come to think of it, that was the same way I used to try to hide from her how much I was sleeping after Stephen died. I could see this wasn’t healthy, but I didn’t have
time
to fix it. If I’d had
time
I would’ve insisted on mutual frankness, I would’ve scheduled long, nonconfrontational truth sessions, tried harder to explain myself, made compromises. In less than three weeks the ark would sail, the flap would die down, and life would go back to normal. Surely Ruth and I could safely misunderstand each
other for three more weeks. And I was planning on a big emotional letdown at the end—that ought to cheer her up.

Around noon, Landy drove up in a huge white station wagon I’d never seen before. Barking dogs immediately swarmed it. Jess and Landy got out on opposite sides and opened the two passenger doors. On Landy’s side, a tall, round, white-haired woman in a violet sundress climbed out and looked around, shading her eyes from the sun. On his way around, Landy opened the rear door and took out a folding wheelchair. Jess told his dogs to stop barking. I was surprised when he, not Landy, leaned inside the car and lifted an old man out, holding him in his arms like a child, and gently settled him in the opened wheelchair. It was the woman, Mrs. Pletcher—Viola—who pushed him across the stony driveway and the uneven dirt path toward the barn Jess pointed to. Toward me, as well: I waited in the grassy shade of a tree, directly in their path. It seemed more suitable to greet them there for some reason, lower key, simpler—I don’t know. Less as if I were Jess’s hostess.

Landy made the introductions, calling his father “Reverend.” Mrs. Pletcher and I shook hands, hers rough and strong, and I saw where Landy got his bashful smile. “Reverend Pletcher,” I said, bending toward the old gentleman. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

He had a mouth like a turtle’s, the thin lips meeting in a point at the center. When he smiled, large, astonishingly white false teeth glittered and gleamed. “Carrie,” he said very softly. I was ready to take my hand back, chagrined when he wouldn’t shake it, but at last he unclasped his tight-skinned, discolored fingers from one another and slowly reached his right hand toward mine. His was cool and smooth, fragile feeling, thin as a swatch of twigs. We shook very gently.

I’d been expecting someone coarser, an old wreck of aman, making a deal with death years after he’d replaced degeneracy
with fanaticism. Not this pale, parchment-skinned, straight-backed gentleman with soft eyes. It seemed his illness had burned away everything nonessential and left just the core of his dignity and his big, obsessed heart. Looking into the pain and patience in his face, I had an idea why Landy was bound to him, and to his last great folly.

I wasn’t what he’d expected, either. “Thought you’d be old,” he told me. He rolled one hand over weakly, thumb up, indicating Landy. “Like him.” Father and son smiled, to my relief. It was a joke.

“Oh, you put ’em outside,” Landy said, catching sight of a reindeer’s rump sticking out past the side of the barn.

“Some of them,” I said, “not all. I was thinking you might like to see them in the light. The way they’ll look on the day.”

The skin of Eldon’s skull shone pinkish, only a fringe of white hair left at the back. Mrs. Pletcher leaned over him. “Ready to go and look?” He nodded, and I realized as she pushed him away what the light in his eyes and the quick clutch of his hands on the armrests meant. Excitement.

At first I couldn’t stand near him, I had to wander off a little, like a film director who has to smoke in the lobby while his movie premieres. Jess came and got me. His knowing look did something to me. He took a light hold of my wrists and tugged. “Come on over. Talk to him. You want him mixing up the wombat and the yak?” I made a face, pretending I was insulted. He moved his hands up my arms, put his thumbs in the hollows of my elbows. “Come and get your reward, Carrie.”

“How do you know he’ll like them? What if he hates them?”

“Find out.”

But I just wanted to stay there with Jess’s hands on my arms. Over his shoulder, I saw all three Pletchers stop in front of the high, lunging tiger. The reverend looked almost preppy, more like a retired professor than a tobacco farmer in a cardigan sweater, pressed khaki slacks, and huge blue
running shoes. I imagined him meeting my father, having a conversation with him. They would probably like each other.

Mrs. Pletcher rolled him on to the next animal. “Okay,” I said, and Jess let go of my arms. Nothing to do then but go hear the verdict.

Reverend Pletcher was smiling—I hoped that meant he liked the prairie dog, not that he was laughing at it. It was only visible from the waist up, if a prairie dog had a waist, its head and paws sticking up over the lip of a brown-painted papier-mâché burrow. “Good,” he said. And at the kangaroo, he said, “Good,” again, and I showed him the baby in the pouch on the mother’s side. “I can paint it out if you think three wouldn’t be allowed,” I said. “Nothing to it, I can fix it in two seconds. I just wasn’t sure. You know, biblically speaking.”

He pursed his turtle lips. “Mother?” he said after a minute or two of thoughtful gazing.

“She’d smuggle it on,” Mrs. Pletcher said immediately. “If the Lord chose her and she had a little baby, she’d hide it. Just like that.”

“Yes…but…”

“The Lord would know, of course. But He’d turn a blind eye.”

Eldon smiled, and that was it. Kangaroo was in.

“Good,” he said in front of the moose cutout, the skunk. “Good,” he said of the lynx and the ferret. For a preacher, he was a man of very few words. I was spoiled now, greedy for more than “Good.” He put his hand out to pet the owl. I’d made him out of store-bought turkey feathers hot glued to sculpted urethane foam, with black phone cable taped to L-shaped coat hanger pieces for his legs, a whittled wooden beak, eyes painted on flat oval stones I found in Jess’s driveway. “Good,” Reverend Pletcher said, his hand lingering. “It’s very…” His head wobbled on his cordy neck. He closed his eyes. His wife stroked his shoulder soothingly. “Okay?” she said, and he smacked his lips and nodded.

Oh, he was so weak. I hadn’t known. Landy sent me a
bracing smile behind his father’s back, and I shook off the shock, realizing I must’ve looked stricken. After that I became morbidly conscious of time passing, of the heat, the sun, the fact that Eldon wore no hat. Why didn’t he have a hat? I wanted to cup my hands over his unprotected head, shade him. I hated it whenever his wheelchair hit a bump and jostled him. When he’d looked at all the animals outside, I said, “There are more in the barn, but maybe you’ve seen enough. It’s cool in there, though. Whatever you like.”

“Oh,” he said, “all.” I think it was his teeth that made him sound as if he had something, a lozenge, a Life Saver, on his tongue; they were way too big for his mouth.

“Are you thirsty?” it occurred to me to ask.

“Thirsty?” Mrs. Pletcher echoed, leaning over his shoulder. I started to leave, run for the house for a glass of water, but “We have some here,” she said, and took a plastic bottle, the kind cyclists carried on their bikes, from a clip holder at the back of the wheelchair. Eldon covered her hands with his while she held the flexible plastic straw to his lips. After every swallow he said, “Ahh,” sweetly appreciative, like a baby.

By the time we finished touring the barn, he was pale and perspiring and no longer erect in his chair, his narrow chest caved in, shoulders curving. “I think we better go,” said Mrs. Pletcher, who looked tired, too. She didn’t protest when Landy took her place and pushed his father’s wheelchair back to the car.