America America (6 page)

I moved the tractor under the boughs of the Lodge Chief Marker, the great Norway pine at the top of the Metareys’ property, and shut off the engine. The Lodge Chief had been planted three hundred years ago by the Seneca as a beacon for lake travelers, and in its deep shade I sat looking over forty miles of tree and meadow. In the distance the biplane made loops, then figure eights. Then it performed a frightening maneuver in which it climbed swiftly, then slowed and nearly stopped in the air, canting backwards at the peak before spiraling down, the engine suddenly roaring again as it pulled out of its fall. Then it headed straight out over the woods again and returned. It would head out and return, head out and return, sometimes moving so low over the fields that I was sure it had set down in them. There was a landing strip, I knew, at the east end of the estate, a long stripe of concrete with a wind sock and two aluminum pole hangars. I’d watered near it once.

Behind me, a voice said, “See you’re watching the show.”

I turned. It was Gil McKinstrey, the house carpenter, straddling a bicycle. He was the one who gave me my orders.

I started the tractor again. “Just for a second.”

“Don’t have to do nothing on my account,” he said. “Far as I’m concerned anyway.” He hopped off the bike and let it fall. “I’d do it too if I was in your shoes.”

“I wasn’t watching any show. I was working.” The plane was already small in the distance. I reached behind me into the cart and searched for a fitting. A compression ring came up in my hands. “I was looking for the wellhead.”

He wedged open the top of his boot and pulled out a half-smoked cigarette, then smiled and pointed it at a row of raspberries. “It’s in the same place every week, though, ain’t it?”

“Sometimes it takes me a while to find.”

He pointed again. “Like I say.”

The plane came in low over the trees now and passed over the far end of the field.

“Aberdeen Red,” he said.

I nodded. “That’s Mr. Metarey in that thing, isn’t it?”

He looked at me. “You’re close,” he said. The plane turned a loop in the distance and he traced it with his cigarette. “You tellin’ me you really don’t know?”

“No, sir.”

He laughed. “It’s his wife, kid.”

I looked at him, then reached for a nut to match the compression ring. “It is?”

The sound of the engine rose again, and when I looked up the red fuselage was coming in for another run. It angled diagonally above the meadow this time and tipped its wings. Gil McKinstrey hardly looked up. At the end of the field it turned and climbed again, closer to the estate now, passing below us over the sycamores by the garage. There it banked, smoothed into a shallower ascent, and, as it crested the roof of the main house, suddenly rolled over and flew upside-down half the length of the entrance drive. At this even Gil McKinstrey let out a laugh. I tried to make out Mrs. Metarey’s figure in the cockpit. When the plane disappeared, I hopped down from the Ferguson and walked back to sift through the cart.

“She been to the South Pole in that thing once,” he said. He struck a match on his boot and lit the cigarette. “Or maybe it was the North Pole. But I know she’s been to some pole or something. Get cold, though, wouldn’t it? Freeze your nuts clean off.”

The compression ring in my hand was rusting. I reached into the bucket of grease. “There’s a lot around here you could just stare at all day,” I offered.

“’Stead of working.”

“Maybe so.”

“Even more to look at inside the house,” he said. He winked.

“I wouldn’t know.”

He turned to watch the plane, but I could tell he was smiling.

“I never work inside the house,” I said. “I work out here.”

“Learned it out some ranch in the West,” he said finally, turning again to regard me. “Her daddy’s land, I guess. Montana or someplace. When she was a little girl, I heard. Before she met Mister Metarey.”

“She’s good, isn’t she?”

“Guess so. Least that’s what folks say who ought to know.” He wiped his face with a rag from his pocket. “Christ,” he added, “hot enough to boil rats out here.” He looked at the ground. “But you’re a cool customer, ain’t you?”

“Just trying to do my job.”

He folded the rag and set it back in his shirt. “I only come out for the ball-peen hammer anyways. Left it in your cart like an ass.” He pinched out the cigarette, replaced it in his boot, and looked to the west, where the biplane was descending now over the strip. “Didn’t mean to spoil the show.”

“I wasn’t watching a show,” I said again. “I was working.”

He was shifting parts now in the bottom of the cart. The ball-peen hammer was on the far end, underneath some quarter turns, but I didn’t say anything. “Sure,” he said at last, pulling it out and testing its blow a couple of times against his palm. “I know you were, kid. You’re doing good enough.”

B
EFORE LONG,
Christian and I had begun meeting on weekend afternoons when my shift was over. Back up at the house, I’d find her waiting on the cool limestone porch or under the shade of the bur oak in the driveway—the one my father and I had worked under—where we’d sit down together and talk about what we’d done during the morning. My own mornings were always the same, and I made an effort to make them seem commonplace, even though they still weren’t—not for me. Hers consisted of riding lessons, which her father paid for in return for chores in the stable, or reading, or trips with her friends to the quarry lakes. She laughed sometimes at small things I said, and her laugh did something to me. Soon I found that these interludes were marking my days—the ones when we saw each other, and the ones when we didn’t. If during one of our visits Mr. Metarey had asked me to go back out and work, I would have obeyed him instantly—and I would never have sat with his daughter again. And I suppose I was expecting that he would. But he didn’t.

So we kept it up. That job was the first I’d ever had in any way independent from my father, and I remember those mornings in the high sun as the first times I was aware that there were borders around my life. This was a strange sensation to a boy not prone to contemplation, a boy not yet even aware of himself as anything beyond what everyone else assumed he was. I was sixteen and until then was seeing girls from school, just as all the rest of my friends were, taking them onto the grass hillocks built by Christian Metarey’s ancestors, kissing them under the oaks her grandfather had planted at the end of the last century. Whenever I saw Mr. Metarey, I nodded, and he nodded back, but we didn’t speak much more than that.

I’d been inside their house a few times now, too, but Christian hadn’t let me see much of it. We’d always go quickly upstairs to the library, where she would pull the record player out onto the balcony and we would sit there listening to the Beatles or James Taylor or Boz Scaggs, talking about the same things we talked about outside. Through the open doors I could see the maids working in the halls. The bookshelves behind us closed with glass doors hinged from above, and on each wall a slanted wooden ladder moved on rubber wheels. Next to the long table the leaves of an oak nearly entered through the side window. I had the idea that she was testing me, somehow, showing me just a little to see whether I would want to see more—the inlaid walnut border of the wainscoting, the Oriental rugs on the floor, the beveled window glass that broke the sunlight into three-colored stripes on the walls. There were other times, though, when she quieted, and her face took on a look, and I thought that maybe she was waiting for me to do something else: to take her hand, maybe; to lean toward her.

One evening near the end of May, the phone rang at my own house and my father answered it in the kitchen. From the living room, where I was reading about what was already turning into another losing year for the Cleveland Indians, I could hear him talking jovially, and presently he came in and stood before me. “Well, captain,” he said. “Looks like you’re going sailing tomorrow.”

My mother looked up from her knitting.

“What?” I said.

“If you want to, that is. That was Mr. Metarey. They’ve got that boat at Port Carrol. They invited you. Memorial Day. Hope you didn’t eat too much dinner.”

“Goodness,” said my mother, getting up.

And the next morning, for the first time in my life, I was sitting with the whole Metarey family. It was just after dawn, and I was in the backseat of their Chrysler, between Christian and Clara, holding the pie my mother had woken up early to bake. I didn’t even know whether I was coming along as Christian’s friend or as the family’s hired hand, but when Mrs. Metarey turned from the front seat to greet me, I offered her the tin. It was still warm.

“Why thank you, Corey,” she said.

“You’re welcome.”

“He baked it himself,” said Clara.

“I did?”

Their brother, Andrew, who was home on leave from the army, sat on the far side of Clara, his fatigue cap pulled low over his eyes. “You don’t have to listen to her,” he said in a calm voice, then leaned his head against the window and looked out at the sky. Mr. Metarey was driving; next to him, their dog, Churchill, an English setter—Christian had told me—pressed his face against the windshield. As we left the gates, he turned to look back at me and let out a short bark.

“That means hello,” said Clara.

“Hello, Churchill,” I said back.

“That’s Corey,” Mrs. Metarey said. “He’s very polite.” Then she added, “Liam, you’re sitting on his tail.”

Mr. Metarey shifted in his seat, then glanced in the rearview mirror. “Guess it’s clear who the beloved one is around Aberdeen West,” he said. “Isn’t it, Corey?”

I laughed so he could hear me.

“I doubt you’ve had a chance to do much sailing,” said Mr. Metarey, catching my eye in the mirror. “Is that right?”

“Yes, sir. I mean, no. I’ve never been.”

“But he knows all the knots,” said Christian.

“Is that right?” said Mrs. Metarey.

“My dad’s taught me a few, ma’am.”

“Corey’s dad was a navy man,” said Mr. Metarey. “That’s as promising as anyone could want.”

“Only if he was in the navy in the eighteenth century.”

“That’s enough, Clara,” said Andrew.

“You’re in Christian’s class, then?” said Mrs. Metarey.

“Yes.”

“Of course he is, June. He’s Grange Sifter’s boy. Corey’s family’s lived in the neighborhood all their lives, dear. He and his dad were the ones who cleaned out the main line, and they didn’t put one scratch in the roots.” I saw him smile in the rearview. “I checked,” he said. Then he turned to his wife. “The driveway oak, dear. The bur. Your dad’s the best pipe fitter in the county, Corey.”

“Thank you, Mr. Metarey.”

“That’s nice,” she answered. She tried to light a cigarette but the match broke and she tossed it out the window. “Well, what do you think of President Nixon then?”

There was silence.

“Were you asking me, Mrs. Metarey?”

“No,” said Clara. “She was asking Church.”

The dog barked.

“Clara,” Andrew said without lifting his head from the window, “watch that mouth.”

“Father doesn’t like Nixon much,” Christian said. “Nixon’s an internationalist, all right, but he’s a throwback. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s about right,” said Mr. Metarey.

“Mother hates him, too,” she said. “Mother thinks he slithers.”

“To put it mildly, dear,” said Mrs. Metarey.

“Are you a Democrat?” asked Clara, looking at me.

“Clara,” said Andrew.

“What?”

“It’s none of our business.”

“I’m not really anything, I guess,” I answered.

“Corey’s a freethinker,” said Christian. “Aren’t you?”

“Is that how you’d describe yourself, Corey?” asked Mr. Metarey.

“Yes, sir, I guess it is.”

He chuckled for a moment and then pointed the mirror toward me. “Please don’t call me sir,” he said. “Makes me think my old man’s in the car.”

Mrs. Metarey slid up her window—I’d never been in a car with power windows before—and succeeded in lighting her cigarette. Then she lowered the glass a little until the smoke was sucked out through the opening at the top. “If your father was in the car, Liam,” she said, “we wouldn’t be sailing on a workday.”

“Memorial Day weekend, dear.” He pointed the mirror at Andrew this time. “In honor of the soldiers.”

“Father’s a Democrat,” said Christian. “But he’s a freethinker, too, really.”

“He just doesn’t like people to know it,” said Mrs. Metarey.

Andrew lifted his head. “Christian always says that,” he said to me. “About Dad being a freethinker. Everybody knows he worked for Eisenhower.”

“That only proves it more, Andrew. You’re a Democrat, aren’t you, Father?”

“Of course I am, honey.” Mr. Metarey opened his window and nodded at the cumulus clouds that were bundled on the horizon. His wife’s cigarette smoke changed course and snaked backwards through the car. “South wind coming up in the afternoon,” he said. “I hope you all took your Dramamine.”

“You’ve crewed before then, Corey?” said Mrs. Metarey.

“I thought he just said no,” said Clara.

“Never on a sailboat, at least,” said Mr. Metarey.