Don't Make Me Stop Now (21 page)

The driver brought us beers. I left mine untouched. Darren said, “His point is a good one, wouldn't you say?”

“I'm not rich.”

“You're just skinny and stupid.”

It seemed time to protest, to ask why we were here, alone in the south end of the county, where not only corpses but corpses still seat-belted into cars turned up in sullen lagoons. But instead I leaned forward and said, “I'm not real hungry.”

“Bring him some coleslaw,” said Darren. He squinted my way. “What's your problem?”

I said, “What do you mean?” though I knew exactly what he meant.

“Going off on Kirk for no reason, beating your head upside your car. Calling out for some damn dodgeball.”

“I guess I'm lonely,” I said. He widened his eyes, as if suddenly I had come into focus for him, and I added, “is all.”

“You ever had anyone die on you?” he asked, wincing slightly, as if it took great effort to send his words my way.

“Yes,” I lied. Maybe this was the worse lie I'd ever told — out of the dozens Beth knew about, the ones that passed undetected. She wasn't dead; I was dead to her, maybe, but she lived and breathed and was at that moment, getting on toward bedtime on a Wednesday night in late spring, no doubt moving against some Rick met at a conference, and the thought of anyone else touching her in the places I discovered made me claim now all degrees of suffering as my own.

“You're lying,” he said. The driver set a huge bowl of soupy coleslaw in front of me, a fresh beer for Darren. He laid out the place settings, lining up the fork and knife with a prissiness that amused me, given our surroundings.

“He's definitely lying,” the driver said, his words lingering as he disappeared back into the kitchen.

From the kitchen came the hiss of frozen meat dropped into a fryer. I tried hard to summon my song, those strings
that had driven me out of the house and into the arms of fate; I tried to focus on the trucker's lament, but the tree frogs, the sibilance of fried meat, the buzz of the streetlights kept my song away.

“You think it's all up to you, don't you?” said Darren.

I thought he wasn't who he said he was. I thought Beth had sent him, or maybe the pathetic trucker wailing away the hours as he tried to scrub away his sins. My comrade in want, sending his messenger to set me straight. I thought Darren was not real and I asked him just who he was to the cashier. Friend? I said. Second cousin?

He looked through me and repeated: “Up to you, huh?”

I shrugged, mindful of what my shrug suggested: that the weight of the world was not upon me.

Darren shook his head, burped, pushed his chair back, summoned his driver, who had been eating back in the kitchen, as if he knew his place in the world.

“Get the bag out of the trunk,” said Darren. To me he said, “Let's get.”

I rose and followed, queasy from the coleslaw. I was thirsty, too, and exhausted, yet I felt oddly settled. Docility was the answer? I could have apprenticed myself to the migrants, their crooked crew boss, had I only known.

I followed Darren along the pier to its rickety end. I looked
to the water's edge, the black sucking sand, beach studded with cypress knees and beyond — a stretch of water poised deceptively as earth. I thought that whatever happened to me then had nothing to do with the slow boy filling in for Deb at the market and everything to do with the times that my vanity had come uncaged in some tavern, dancing with some strange, maneuvering her around the dance floor by her hip bones while Beth scrubbed kitchen tiles and tried not to think of that person she did not want to acknowledge I was capable of up and becoming.

“Take your clothes off,” said Darren. I did so without question because I was gone — off on that flight that took me frequently and far back in time: Yeah, but I always came home alone, I was saying to Beth, I never slept with any of them, just a little lip, some here-and-there tongue. Never once betrayed us like you did with him
.
She did not get to argue the meaning of the word
betrayal
. I did all the talking, and it took all the energy I would have expended on worrying about what I was being asked to do: take off my clothes for a man dressed like he was about to sell me some insurance.

Darren's driver arrived toting a gym bag from which he pulled a tangle of rope, some handcuffs, and greasy lengths of chain. He uncoiled the rope, surveyed my nakedness with scorn.

“I don't relish getting wet over his bony ass,” he said to Darren.

“It doesn't appear to be up to you,” I said.

This made Darren smile. But the driver, once he had me in the water and pushed hard against the piling at the end of the pier, wrenched the cuffs tight and lashed the ropes.

Above us Darren had fired up a cigar to ward off mosquitoes, but the smoke didn't appear to be working; I heard him swear and slap himself. The driver bound me tighter to the splintery black piling, which smelled of creosote and rotting shellfish. Sound water lapped black and empty just above my shoulders.

“Wait for me in the car,” Darren told the driver, and when he was gone, he said, “You know, you brung this on yourself, chief. We wouldn't be here if you hadn't asked us to have supper with you.”

“No, actually it was the lottery ticket,” I said.

“Either way, you taking some crazy chances.”

I thought that this was a good thing, and almost said so, but I realized just before I spoke that I still did not know who Darren was or what he planned to do with me. My situation seemed far worse, on the one hand, than it had just hours before, when I had left for the store. Yet there was this other hand. I could not say what it was. Nor was I even sure
I wanted to know. Would it cure me, and would being cured mean that I would learn to live my life without loving her, wanting her?

There was a silence, then a puff of smoke arrived from above, seething through the space between the slats, clouding about my head.

“So she fucked you over, whoever she is. And now you get to go around feeling righteous, starving yourself, and beating up on grocery store clerks?”

I had an answer to this, but he didn't leave enough space.

“You know something about love, chief?” he said through the smoke. “It makes you scared of every damn thing, you all the time worrying about whether she's going to come back from the store or was I good enough and does her daddy like me and on and on. And at the same time it makes you feel free. That's what it does when it's really cooking, right?”

I waited for a puff of cigar smoke, but there was nothing, only mosquitoes feasting on my cheekbones, my bound hands straining against the rope.

“You saying you didn't feel nothing like that?”

“I did.” I do, I thought to say, but I didn't want to give Darren any more ammunition than he could divine by looking at me. He was picking up a lot just looking, and it unnerved me, the way he recognized himself in me, the way he described
to the letter the way it felt to love Beth. I did feel scared the whole time I was with her, and yet I felt as free as I'd ever felt. But maybe I was loving her all wrong. Maybe what Darren had described was not love but some kind of copycat ailment with the same symptoms.

“Hell, man, why would you want to feel that way?” Darren said. “Far better to be cooped up in your own head than having to go around scared all the time.”

“Who the hell are you anyway?”

“Me? I'm that boy you broke bad on's uncle. I came down expecting excitement, I guess. Find you banging your head on a car and I
know
this motherfucker needs to be put out of his misery.”

“That's what this is?”

“This is whatever you want it to be.”

“I don't think my desire is being considered here,” I said. In answer there came a snort, then footsteps tapping away up the pier. I might have called out, but not to Darren or his driver. Beth. Voit. My trucker, oddly quiet now, as if he'd found some end to his suffering, seen through the loneliness and longing to some sweet levitation.

In time I realized the water was creeping up my neck. I thought of what I knew of tides: they were controlled by the moon, and the moon this night was a pasty scythe blade float
ing above a line of loblollies and seemed too sickly to perform such a feat.

Sometime in the night I began the story of How We Met, and it began at the beginning, and wound its way around facts as stock and familiar as the items I purchased weekly from the market, until the moon moved lower toward the water and a hazy light appeared in the sky.

Watching the sky, water lapping at my chin, I remembered hearing how they'd discovered that the earth was round: a boat had sailed out to the horizon, kept on moving, out of sight, over the earth's curve. Inching my way up the barnacled piling, I saw how they could get behind such an idea.

L
AST NIGHT
, L
ARRY GOT
himself arrested again. The conditions were especially favorable: It was humid out, unbearably so, though a line of thunderstorms had pushed through on their way to the coast, stalling above us for an hour's pummeling. After the storms, people streamed outside — into backyards, onto porches — and Larry had an audience. Down the hill, through the dip of thick wood and unofficial trash dump the neighborhood kids called the Ravine, the projects east of us hummed with thumping bass notes, tire screeches, crazy laughter. Hazy moonlight, bats swirling drunken loops around power lines, skin slaps against mosquito bites. Larry was not wearing a shirt.

I was in the bathtub soaking away the crust of salt, road grime, and sweat from an eighty-mile bike ride when sirens arose from the Ravine, whining closer until blue light streaked across the dark walls above the tub. Had things not soured between us, Larry would have ridden at least a part of those
eighty miles with me, for Larry and I used to train together. Three weeks ago, we entered the same race, an Olympic distance triathlon in the foothills, but Larry took offense when I beat him roundly in all three disciplines. Apparently Larry thought racing together meant racing alongside. His swim wave took off three minutes before mine, but Larry is a sluggish and graceless swimmer, and I was out of the water twenty-eight seconds before he hit land. I say “apparently” — it wasn't as if I was aware of passing him, nor could I tell who was who out there. It was a wet-suit-legal race, my goggles were fogged, the lake was tannic-laced, the color of Coca-Cola — all I saw were slick black torsos, fluttering feet, arms arcing in and out of the water.

Larry took it personally. I suppose he thought I'd wait for him. I was out of my wet suit and into my bike shoes and helmet in an absurdly slow four minutes — I even took the time to eat half a PowerBar. Though this was not my first race, I was so anxious about finishing that I erred on the side of endurance rather than speed. I even entered the race in the Novice Male category. Not Larry. It was his first triathlon — he'd never cycled more than twenty-five miles in his life, and he barely trained for the run or swim either — but he insisted on signing up in his age-group classification.

“Novice Male?” he said over the fence one afternoon. “Forget
that
.”

I shrugged. “Hell, I'm still a novice. This is only my second season, and I want to save it all for the Ironman.”

I'd decided to do a full Ironman race next season. I'd mentioned this to Larry a half-dozen times, but he always smiled and nodded, as if he knew something I didn't, which had to do with my bailing or ending up the season injured.

“Who wants to be called into the water with the novices?” he said. “Everybody turning around, checking you out.”

“Actually, we're the last wave, Larry. There will be nobody left to check us out.”

“They make you guys go last?” I grinned at the “you guys.” “So the winner's like, what, an hour ahead of you?”

I shrugged again. It occurs to me now that when talking to Larry, I communicated mostly with my shoulders.

“It's best if the water's clear. You're less likely to get kicked in the face. You wouldn't believe how turbulent it can be in one of those mass starts.”

I'd never experienced a mass start, nor had I been kicked in the face — I always start my swim far to the right and a little behind the rest — but Larry wasn't listening.

“Psychologically, though . . . ,” he said.

I waited for him to finish his sentence, but apparently he thought he'd gotten his idea across.

“You know your age group's probably the toughest,” I told him. “Most guys don't get into this sport until their late
twenties. Takes them a while to mature, especially on the bike. Few years, they're at the top of their game, man. I'll bet the top three go close to two hours.”

Larry said, “Guess that's one advantage to getting older.”

I grinned again. Shrugs and grins: the language I share with old across-the-fence Larry. “Oh, my age group isn't exactly slow.”

“So what's your goal?” he asked me.

Like most Novice Males, I had two goals. The first — the one I made public — was just to finish without embarrassing myself. The second — the one I kept to myself, especially around people like Larry — was to go under two hours and forty-five minutes.

“I've told you, Larry. I'm out there to have a good time and cross the finish line and still be able to walk to the medical tent.”

“You're full of shit, Patrick. You know you got a goal. I don't get this modesty thing, man. Might as well just put it out there.”

I grinned at Larry, stifling a shrug.

L
ARRY WASN'T THE KIND
of person I'd usually choose to spend time with. He sold couches in the showroom of a discount furniture store, and I practiced law in Raleigh,
an hour commute on the interstate. Had I met Larry a few years ago I would have barely tolerated him; a conversation like the one we had about race categories would have led to my avoiding him forever.