Imaginary Men (22 page)

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Authors: Enid Shomer

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Anthologies (Multiple Authors), #Literary Collections, #Literary Criticism, #test

BOOK: Imaginary Men
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Page 137
bought to save her kneecaps and began weeding the herbs. Fontane was arguing with her husband. Leila could hear their voices rising and falling through the open kitchen window.
The sun beat down through the torn weave of Leila's hat, dappling her hands and the ground. Then Fontane was standing beside her. "Any news?" Leila asked.
"The police keep telling me it's easier to find two fugitives than one. They don't know Dayton."
Los Angeles, Detroit, Leila thought, that's where Dayton would take Hiram, some crowded place where people disappeared into each other.
"Evan's idea of finding Dayton is to pray." Fontane reached beside the parsley and pulled out a big tuft of wood sorrel and another of spurge. "If I could kill Dayton, I would," she said.
"I bet Hiram will come back on his own. At the end of the summer, when the novelty wears off." But Leila knew that a runaway could be running
toward
something as well as away from something. She had wondered about that: which would be lonelier for Hiramto settle into the quiet that Evan Whitley cast around his family like a heavy net or to listen to the laughter of Dayton and his women behind locked doors? And what if Dayton settled down? What if he suddenly learned about Crockpots and oral thermometers and encyclopedias? Fontane would become bitter, and then, for all her cynicism, pious. Leila could picture her in lace-collared dresses, offering up her love for her two lost children on the unyielding altar of the Zion church. In any case, even if he came home, Hiram would be changed. There would be a different light in his eyesa satisfied shine, or, more likely, a sullen glint.
Leila took Fontane's hand and squeezed it hard and pressed it against her forehead, the way a magician touches and presses and smells the article of a stranger to surmise the past or the future.
 
Page 138
On the Boil
From an airplane, the Suwannee River resembles a tree more than a body of water, a gigantic tree with all its roots exposed, intricate as the tunnels and chambers of an ant farm. When the sun hits it a certain way, the river water glistens like sap, and the tree seems to be growing right before your eyes, branching out until it empties into the Gulf where whitecaps flurry like blossoms.
Everyone has heard of the Suwannee, though almost nobody has seen it, including Stephen Foster, who wrote the famous song. He picked the name out of an atlas after his brother complained that "Way down upon da Pedee River" didn't sound musical enough. I'm an expert on the Suwannee. I've drunk the water, eaten the fish, picked my way through the poison ivy and stinging nettles, and
 
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danced away from its snakes. I love it the same way a person comes to love her own body or a close relativenot with a sense of choice but with a sense of destiny.
That's the way it is with Dory, too. Something grand, like destiny, between us, despite our differences. I've grown sick of explanations: more than anything else, love feels to me like a kind of being lost. Maybe that's why at first Dory and I spent so much of our time together camping in remote areas. In the wilderness, you expect to feel a little lost; you can tell yourself that the second thoughts you have at night in your tent come from the vastness of the place, not from a hollowness in yourself.
After we knew each other well, we started going to state parks. The public land was tamer, and we noticed each other more there. We spent the first warm Saturday in May at Manatee Springs. The park was crowded. We snorkeled around the boil and watched spelunkers diving into the craggy grottoes. I lay in a patch of sun while Dory worked his foxhound, BJ, letting her out on a twenty-five-foot lead, then hauling her in and rewarding her with dog snacks. Afterward, he tied BJ to a tree and went to buy lunch at the concession stand. He walked in a determined way, but slightly hunched over. If I hadn't known him, I'd have said he looked shifty from the back, as if he was trying to disappear, like a pickpocket in a crowd.
Dory bit into his hot dog and pointed toward a stand of big trees on the opposite bank. "See those cypresses over there? They're as old as the Bible."
"They remind me of an old sci-fi movie where the stones in a certain valley had recorded the past like video cameras. A scientist played back a hunk of rock and saw dinosaurs and all." What I didn't say was that I'd seen the movie before Dory was even born.
He slipped his hand down the back of my bathing suit. "You and me could live right here in a houseboat. Cook with Sterno, fish for our dinner," he whispered. "I'd love you all night long."
"Quit it." Sometimes I get so sick of the word "love" that I wish Baptists had convents. But, of course, if you spend all your energy denying a thing, it's nearly the same as believing in it.
"That attitude is going to make you miserable someday." He gazed straight at me. "I mean it, Lavell." He threw the stump of his hot dog to BJ and spilled the dregs of his soft drink at my feet.
He stopped formally proposing in March when I promised I'd give
 
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him an answer in a month. But when April came, warm and rainy, I still hadn't decided. That's when he got the tattoo on his shoulder: ''Marry me, Lavell," on a placard like one of those gas station signs that sticks up over the interstate, except Cupid was holding the pole.
"Don't get into one of your moods," I told him.
Once in a while he fell into a deep quiet and refused to talk for hours. He called it "down time." He usually went home because I told him it agitated me to sit in a room with another human being and still feel alone.
"BJ's having a miserable day," he said. The dog had tangled herself around the tree and stood softly whining, one foot lifted as if it were broken. "Marry me," he said, forcing a smile, "shut me up forever."
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Dory worked construction, but he was studying welding at the county trade school at night. He said welders could pick their jobs, work half a year, cruise the Caribbean the other half. "The world is made of metal," he kept telling me, "and it's forever coming apart at the welds."
His mother died when he was six, the same age I was when my father left home for good. My mother never bothered to get a divorceshe knew she was finished with men. She took up gardening. When I think of my childhood, the memories are set against her bent-over back framed by shiny green vine tomatoes, bushy orange and pink cosmos. Mama and I worked quietly together in the yard, stringing up pole beans, cradling the glossy eggplants like newborns as we cultivated around the plants. I like growing things, even if they don't always turn out. When I look at garden rows, I see pure goodwill, the weeds cleared, each little plant set out like a promise. Mama and I gardened even in fall and winterpruning, mulching with cypress chips, putting the stamp of patience and expectation on the ground, telling ourselves we would be there three months, six months, down the road.
Dory's father was a postal worker in Lake City, so it was natural for Dory to take up stamp collecting. But his real passion was fox hunting. It's against the law to kill a fox, so the men just let the dogs roam in the preserve while they sat on the tailgate drinking beer,
 
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picking out their dogs' voices. They talked pedigree and cold nose trailing and told tall tales all night. I don't believe you could interest people in this sport once they're grown. They have to be bred to it, like the dogs.
Dory had ten hounds, with numbers dyed in their fur: Preacher, Luther, Belle, Digger, Highball, Tad, Willie, Frypan, Minute, and the new bitch, BJ, the high-spirited one nobody could catch. He took on training BJ when her owner, Uncle Jones, the bigwig at the Dixie County Hunt Club, threatened to shoot her. She had stayed in the swamp alone for three weeks, chasing deer from dew to sunset, living off the carcass of a buck Uncle Jones had shot but couldn't get to. For three weeks he came calling for her in his pickup. Once he spotted her running alongside the highway, her white hide flickering through the dark green of the scrub. Dory was determined to break her of running. She lived in a tall pen at my place (with Frypan for company) so he could spend more time working with her.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
I flipped on the television while I waited for Dory to get home from school. I practiced different ways of crossing my legs so the cellulite in my thighs would be less noticeable.
"Entertainment Tonight" was celebrating Barbie doll's thirtieth anniversary as if she were a real person. They held her so close to the camera she looked life-sized. They showed her getting a spiral perm, dirt-biking with Ken at Big Sur. Barbie relaxed in a tiny hot tub while Ken barbecued at a matchbook-sized hibachi. She had changed a lot since 1960not just her clothes and hairdos but her life-style. She used to be formally engaged to Ken, but now, even though the announcer didn't say so, it was clear they were living together.
Dory came up the path to my trailer, singing "Bridge over Troubled Water," which he called "Our Song." He could get romantic over nearly anything. I have a big blood mole right between my shoulder blades. My mother said when I was born she was afraid to bathe me, that the red bubble looked as if it would burst at the touch of a washcloth. Dory said it was my heart showing through to the other side, that I was a bighearted woman. According to him, every-
 
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thing about me was perfect. I wasn't fooled. No woman is perfect. Even Loni Anderson didn't make the big time till she bleached her hair blond.
"Mail for you." He handed me an envelope as big as a grocery bag. "It wouldn't fit in the box."
The front was plastered with "Love" stamps, but there was no postmark. On the greeting card inside, a bee all covered with fuzz, like a stuffed animal, said, "For you I'd go a million miles. . . . Just because you're my honey." It was signed, "Name the day, Love, Dorrance Shore.'' He always signed his full name on notes to me, as if they were legal papers.
"That's adorable." I kissed him so hard I felt his teeth through his lips. Then, all of a sudden, I started to get mad. Wherever I turned there was this boy begging me to marry him. I fully expected to see our names spray-painted on the overpass some day, a big question mark instead of a heart wound around them. "You know, you're just too nice all the time," I said. "It's not natural. It's weird."
His Adam's apple jumped up and down like a cat in a sack. "Nobody in high school thought I was so nice."
"You had a girlfriend."
"Didn't I ask you not to bring her up, Lavell? Sue Ellen's got nothing to do with us."
About two months after we started going together, Dory had disappeared for a week. By the time he phoned, I'd worked myself up into a lather, worrying over his safety, convincing myself I didn't love him. He told me he'd gone to visit his old girlfriend, Sue Ellen, but wouldn't explain except to say she was having a "confidential, personal crisis."
"Do you realize I've never seen you lose your temper?" I pressed. "I keep hearing about romances that go sour after the honeymoon."
"Quit trying to pick a fight with me, Lavell. You're going to have to marry me to see if I turn into Frankenstein."
"Why can't we leave things just as they are? We've got the best of both worlds." It was true. At thirty-eight, I was set in my ways. If I felt like being alone, he stayed at his place for the night. I had the sexual revolution, plus I knew that in the morning my panty hose would be hanging on the shower rod where I put them and not thrown to the floor in a damp heap.
 
Page 143
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I went to the Springs the next week to think. I walked the trail from the point to the deep turquoise lagoon of the boil and imagined women lifting their hooped dresses along the muddy path. When I saw the tiny gowns they wore, it made me feel like the Jolly Green Giant. No diet or exercise program in the world is going to make me shorter, which, in a way, is a relief. If you've got to have a flaw, it's best if it's something you can't correct.
Dory had found the invitation to my high school reunion on the kitchen counter the day before. His mouth was wide open, like a two-year-old's, as he read it. "We're going, right?"
"Give me that." I put the invitation back in its envelope.
"Why'd you do that?"
"I don't want it to be the topic of conversation."
"Okay, but I'll tell you right now, if I could go to my twentieth reunion, I wouldn't miss it for the world."
When the number "twentieth" came out of his nineteen-year-old mouth, it had burned into my heart like a hot spark.
Now, on my way back to the parking lot from the boil, I saw the park ranger putting up a display of Indian pottery. Pencil renderings showed how a whole piece of pottery must have looked and matched clay fragments that hung alongside on leather straps. Some were checkered, and some had fine lines like bird footprints. The ranger said gophers had dug up the shards not twenty feet from the display. "Are we standing on sacred ground?" I asked.
"We're standing over the kitchen." He locked the glass case.
I looked out through the trees and tried to imagine them growing over my trailer, rooted around the microwave and sink a thousand years from now.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Dory began bringing BJ into the house. He claimed that if he could tame her spirit just enough, she'd be the best dog in Dixie County. Then he'd breed her. You had to have one running fool somewhere in the pedigree to make a good hound. He'd play around with her in the living room before taking her for extended romps on longer and

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