Heat and Light (11 page)

Marriage in middle age: living in a house made of shit you've said over the years.

The actual content of the service, the prayers and Bible readings, are vague in his memory. He remembers only the pastor herself, taller than Colleen, and shapely—Snow White from the Disney cartoon, the live-action version.

“You must listen for God's promises and stand on them.” She spelled out the word, her voice vibrating with sincerity: “
S-T-A-N-D.
And by
stand
I mean something very specific. I mean Speak Them All Night and Day.”

Against his will Herc thought,
Stay Accident Free Everyday Drilling
.

When the pastor stood for the final hymn, he was struck again by her height. In truth she was not unusually tall, but he'd always
gone for petite women. He wouldn't look twice at a lanky supermodel, no matter how stunning. What would be the point?

When the music stopped she gave a hopeful smile. “Please join us for coffee and fellowship after the service.”

Well, all right, Herc thought. He could've used a little fellowship, no question; but Mickey Phipps was already heading for the door. Herc followed hesitantly, avoiding the pastor's eyes. He felt like a heel for skipping out. It seemed callous to disappoint her, a sweet serious child playing preacher, by refusing to play along.

They drove back to the Days Inn, Mickey at the wheel. “Nothing wrong with her preaching. It just don't seem right to me.” He smiled tightly. They had worked together ten months, through exhaustion, horizontal snowstorms, a broken mud motor, a bad case of bronchitis that nearly killed them both. This was the first time Herc had seen him angry.

“Reverend Jess Peacock,” said Mickey. “It sure sounds like a man. Kind of makes you wonder.”

“Wonder what?”

“She could have picked it on purpose.” Again the tight smile. He was really, really mad.

“Maybe,” Herc said. “Or, you know, maybe it's just her name.”

STAY ACCIDENT FREE EVERYDAY DRILLING.

Herc has no talent for paperwork. It is, without a doubt, his least favorite part of the job. When he can put it off no longer, he brews a pot of coffee and holes up in the office trailer, studying OSHA reports. His own safety record is respectable, if you don't go too far back.

The distracted employee is an accident waiting to happen. The waitress in the next town over, who just might be pregnant. (She says.) The wife who will not, will not stop calling. The hangover to end all hangovers: the pulsating headache, the lurching stomach, the runs.

He studies OSHA reports while talking to Colleen, who is watching television. It's hard not to conclude that they both have better things to do. His cell phone is hot in his hands, as though warmed by her anger. It bothers her that he never sends greeting cards.

           
Report ID: 0419921

           
Injury While Sandblasting Derrick

           
Employee #1 was sandblasting the derrick. A sudden m
ovemen
t of his supply hose caused him to lose balance. As he steadied himself, the nozzle caught in the gauntlet of his glove and his left forearm was injected with sand and air.

           
Nature:
Puncture

           
Degree:
Hospitalized injury

           
Keywords:
sandblasting, glove, hose, arm, derrick

Colleen herself sends cards for every occasion—birthdays, holidays, marriage, sickness, and death. She has an uncanny knack—she prides herself on this—for picking the perfect card.

On her birthday, which was today, he sent flowers, a gift certificate good at all Chili's locations, and a pair of earrings he chose from a catalog, with help from Eye-talian Gia. He felt he'd done pretty well until he described the gifts to Mickey Phipps, who is Christian.
Well, it's the thought that counts,
Mickey said.

           
Report ID: 0422920

           
Employee Struck and Killed by Unsecured Counterbalance

           
Report ID: 0499337

           
Employee Caught Between Kelly and Mast

He paid extra to have the earrings gift wrapped. He shouldn't have bothered. It doesn't count, according to Colleen, unless he wrapped the box himself.

He is fourteen hundred miles away, on a drill rig.

The cell phone is probably giving him brain cancer.

“Sorry, baby,” he says, because it's just fucking easier. “I should have sent a card.”

In Houston, a satisfied silence. They have their best conversations after Herc admits to being a shitheel.

“So we'll see you next weekend?”

He remembers, then: next Sunday is Father's Day, a holiday he hates. He's given up trying to explain why. The whole notion depresses him, his children's pure love manipulated by advertising, the boys guilted into spending their tiny allowances to prove their affection for him. Only Mother's Day is more vile, thanks mainly to its higher price tag, the cynical machinations of jewelers and florists.

“Sure,” he says, cornered. “See you then.”

THERE'S SOME KIND OF HULLABALOO AT WALMART.
A half-dozen shoppers cluster in the front lobby, near the gumball machines. They seem to be watching something. Herc cranes his neck to see a uniformed cop talking to a scrawny bottle-blonde, not young, in cutoff shorts and a tube top. A wreck of a woman, but if you squint just the right way, it's possible to see a trace of lost sexiness, a ghostly remnant of the bombshell she must have been before hard living took her looks.

The cop places a hand at her back. “All right, Roxanne. Follow me, please.”

“Get your hands off me.”

The crowd parts to let them pass. Herc watches them head toward the office at the front of the store. “What happened?” he asks no one in particular.

Heads turn in his direction, but no one answers. It's as though
he's speaking a foreign language. Red-faced, he heads into the store.

“Welcome to Walmart,” says the greeter, an old coot he's seen here before.

Normally Herc is stumped for an answer. This time he asks, “What was all that fuss about?”

The coot shrugs. “Shoplifters, prolly. We get them once in a while.”

“That's too bad,” Herc says.

Inside, he wanders the aisles. He had a vague idea of checking out the fishing gear but can't seem to find it. He is loitering in Home & Garden when he spots the lady preacher pushing a cart into the grocery section. She wears a different pants suit, cream colored. He follows a few paces behind.

She heads straight for the bakery and picks out two big tubs of cookies. Herc watches from a discreet distance.

Abruptly she turns. “Are you following me?”

“No, ma'am,” he stammers—noticing, too late, his reflection in the round fisheye mirror above the bakery counter.

She smiles disarmingly, like a teacher who means to scold you and then changes her mind. “I recognize you. You've been to my Sunday service.”

A moment of hot confusion: she had noticed him. “I enjoyed your preaching very much.”

“Herc,” she repeats when he introduces himself. “How do you spell that?”

He spells it. “It's a nickname. From Hercules. It's asinine. My real name is Marshall.”

“Marshall.” She seems to be studying him. “You're not from around here. You work for one of the gas companies?”

“Stream Solutions. That's Dark Elephant,” he adds, like an idiot. “Which is Darco.”

“You work for all of them?”

“You could say that.”

And somehow it feels perfectly natural to follow her to the express checkout lane, to pay for his five-pound drum of FierceCut protein powder.

“You're a long way from home,” she says. “That must be difficult.”

“I'm used to it. I was in Arkansas last summer. Loosiana before that.”

Such ordinary answers, and yet they seem to fascinate her. Every question leads to two more. They linger on the sidewalk in front of the store, her shopping cart between them.

“Marshall, I'd love to talk some more, but I'm on my way to Bible study. That's what the cookies are for. Would you like to join us?”

“I can't tonight. I have plans.” It is an actual lie: he has nothing, nothing at all, to do. But he's out of practice conversing with a woman, and tense from the effort. If he says anything more he is sure to spoil it. Better to quit before he makes a fool of himself.

She eyes the plastic jar under his arm. “What do you do with that stuff, anyway?”

“Mix it with water. It's not bad.” He grins. “Yes, it is. It's revolting. I can't lie to a woman of God.”

She laughs then, an exhilarating sound. A thing he had forgotten, the simple joy of making a woman laugh.

Her next words stun him completely.

“Are you free for dinner on Friday? I'm guessing it's been a while since you had a home-cooked meal.” She reaches into her pocketbook and hands him a business card. “That's my home address. Come at seven.”

He takes the card.

“MOM, WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”

Roxanne's daughter looks surprised to see her. No: surprised is an understatement. Shelby seems near death from the shock of it. Her eyes are ready to pop out of her head.

“I was in the neighborhood,” Roxanne lies. There is no neighborhood. Shelby and Rich live out in the sticks, miles from anything. “I figured I could see my grandbabies.”

“Braden is at practice. And Olivia is taking a nap.”

“At her age?” It's better not to specify a number. Olivia is six years old, or possibly eight or ten.

“She isn't feeling well.”

“Aren't you going to invite me in?”

“I'm kind of in the middle of supper.” Shelby's hair is pulled back in a ponytail, so tight her forehead looks stretched. Typically, she wears no makeup. Her face looks scrubbed, serious, and very young.

“At three in the afternoon?” says Roxanne.

“I make it ahead of time. I have Bible study later.”

Roxanne says, “I can help.”

Shelby frowns grotesquely.

“Shelby Elizabeth, if you don't stop it, your face is going to get stuck that way.” It is only a slight exaggeration. Not even thirty, and already she's got some wacky expression lines, on exactly half her face.

Shelby steps aside to let her in. It isn't much of a welcome, but you've got to be somewhere. Roxanne needs to collect herself before going back to Peanut's. Walmart rattled her, the public embarrassment, though in the end the cop had let her go. She drove away shaky with relief. Another court date is the last thing she needs.

“How's Peanut?” Shelby asks.

“He's all right.” It isn't exactly true. Peanut isn't exactly all right. For reasons unknown, his disability check is two days late. This happened once before, last winter. Roxanne wishes the federal government would get its act together.

Living with Peanut is not all that different from being married, as far as she can recall, though her experience with that institution is distant and brief. When she cashes Peanut's check she keeps half for
herself. She earns her share doing what needs to be done: laundry, emptying ashtrays, heating Hot Pockets in the microwave. Mornings she drives his van around town, doing errands.
Basic necessities,
he said when she was first hired.
Groceries, Rite Aid, that kind of thing.
That was—two years ago? Three? In that time her job description has narrowed. The definition of
basic necessities
has narrowed.

What she does now, mainly, is buy meth.

Peanut has never been married—to Roxanne's knowledge, never even had a girlfriend. Until age fifty he lived with his mother. When his mother died, Peanut got MS.
He's got to be queer,
says Roxanne's sister, but really, what does it matter? It's hard (also unpleasant) to imagine Peanut having sex with anyone. Hard to imagine him doing anything but watching TV, smoking cigarettes, and getting high.

“What's all that business out on the Dutch Road?” Roxanne asks. “There are trucks everywhere.”

“They're drilling for gas.”

What a fucking mess, Roxanne thinks but doesn't say. Shelby is always scolding her about her language, even when there are no kids in the room.

Shelby studies her. “What happened to your tooth?”

“I left it in an apple.”

“Did you go to the dentist?”

Shelby is always bugging her about this kind of thing: flu shots, cholesterol. Last year, for Christmas, she gave Roxanne a set of nicotine patches. All Shelby's gifts were like that. They all told you what was wrong with you.

Roxanne sits at the kitchen table and watches Shelby open a can of mushroom soup, store brand. She has a cute little figure, not that you'd know it from the way she dresses. Her baggy sweatshirt hangs nearly to her knees. “Where's your handsome husband?”

“He's helping Dick at the Commercial. He'll be back in a couple hours.”

Altogether, it is disappointing news. Rich, if he were here, would at least offer her a beer.

Squinting, Shelby reads from the can: “
Half teaspoon onion powder.
” Is it strange that she reminds Roxanne of her own mother? Louise the knitter, the churchgoer, the clipper of coupons. Nearsighted from thirty years in the dress factory, she had the exactsame squint.

Roxanne excuses herself to the bathroom. Idly she opens the medicine chest. Her son-in-law—did she imagine this?—has back trouble. With luck he'll have Vicodin or at least a Percocet.

Shelby's medicine chest is like an entire aisle at Rite Aid. There is a selection of salves and ointments, a vast wardrobe of Band-Aids in different sizes. There are Tums, throat lozenges, and chewable vitamins; bottles of Robitussin, children's Tylenol, Pepto-Bismol, and syrup of ipecac. In other words, there is nothing of interest. Once again Roxanne thinks of her mother, with her joyless old-fashioned remedies: milk of magnesia, Mercurochrome, castor oil, Doan's Pills.