In Reach (16 page)

“I came here to do art. This isn’t art.”

She saw him fist his right hand. He looked around at the class, busy cutting their floral patterns. He stooped low and growled in her ear. “Just what do you think you want to do?”

She sniveled. Wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I want to draw.”

Mr. Faraday walked away, his steps fast and drumming. Hard-soled shoes on a hardwood floor. He rummaged around in a cabinet. He marched back, slapped a piece of paper on her desk, leaned over, and hissed, “Okay. You want to draw? Draw.”

He left her alone the rest of the period. She took a pencil out of her backpack and drew a horse. She made the horse sassy and spry, mane flying. She paid attention to the muscles flexing under the horse’s skin. She worked hard on the light in the eyes so you could tell the personality, defiant and bold. At the end of the hour, Mr. Faraday came and picked up her paper. He looked at her drawing a long time. Then he looked at her. The bell rang, and still he never said a word. She went to her next class and that night cried herself to sleep.

The next day, when the students were seated in Mr. Faraday’s class, he held up the remnants of the cut–and-paste project from the day before. “This,” he said, “is not art.”

Flora felt her breath catch in a sharp uptake. She glanced around to see if any of the other kids were looking at her, but they only
stared at Mr. Faraday. He picked up a trash can. The leaves and petals pinged against the metal as they floated down. Then he waved a large bound notebook. “This is the proposed art curriculum for seventh grade.” That hit the trash can with a loud thump. “In this class, we will do art. Today, we’ll start with drawing.”

At this point in Flora’s story, Teresa had a sudden and overwhelming urge to cry. Thinking of it in church on Sunday, she had to take out a tissue and blow her nose. Warren put his hand over hers. Otto had not come home until 2:00 a.m. the night before, and when he had come home, he’d been drunk. Even now, he was home sleeping it off. Warren thought she was crying about Otto, and Teresa let him think it. Maybe she was and maybe she wasn’t; she could hardly tell anymore.

The first week in August, Otto was caught breaking and entering. He was a minor, so technically the arrest had some other name, but he and Quentin had been nabbed red-handed breaking into Ed Lambert’s house. They broke a window when Ed was home, loading shells in his basement. They were damn lucky Ed didn’t shoot them. Everybody knew Ed was crazy, and he was fed up with kids breaking in. This was the third time in a month, though Otto hadn’t been involved before. After money, rumored to be hidden under Ed’s mattress. Or maybe drugs.

“Drugs?” Teresa said, dumbfounded. She stood in the sheriff’s office, one hand clamped around Otto’s arm. Warren was in Hay Springs, working an auction.

She took Otto home. She had no idea what would happen to him. Something about juvenile court and being sentenced. The sheriff said Ed was considering whether to press charges.

She walked into the house ahead of Otto and sat in the kitchen chair and stared at the table.

Otto slumped in the doorway. He looked scared. She wanted to put her arms around him. Instead, she stood. “Are you hungry?”

He shook his head.

“Could you . . . Go to your room, Otto.”

She reached under the sink and dragged out a bag of potatoes. She peeled six in long thin strips, forgetting there were only two of them. She sliced them with onions into a frying pan. Salt and pepper, turned them often. She dumped a mound onto a plate and took it to Otto’s bedroom door, but she couldn’t bring herself to open the door. She couldn’t say his name. She couldn’t knock. Finally, she set the steaming plate on the floor and went back to the kitchen. She picked up the frying pan, went outside, and dumped the contents onto the compost pile beside the garden. Looking at the browned crisp potatoes, the golden onions slithering atop a mass of decaying vegetables, she started to cry and knew she wouldn’t stop anytime soon.

The day of Flora’s sale dawned bright and sunny. Warren had a flatbed truck hauled onto the adjacent empty lot, and the best of what Flora had to offer was loaded onto the truck. An old violin. A set of Delft china. Waterford crystal candleholders. A couple of young men Warren had hired carried the furniture out to the front lawn. Otto used to help them, but he spent his Saturdays now working for Ed Lambert, doing whatever Ed told him to, mucking out stalls, digging holes that he filled in by nightfall. In exchange, Ed had agreed not to press charges. When he was not working for Ed, he was at football practice, the grunts and team yells reverberating across the field. Quentin was gone. His parents, too. No one knew where. Miraculously, Teresa’s family had held together. They were intact. They were polite and careful. No one had time for movies. She and Warren hadn’t made love since Otto’s arrest. Really, everything had turned out fine. Just, sometimes Teresa thought the air in the house was tinged blue. When she looked at her son, she longed for a glimpse of the old Otto, her buoyant boy, and then she’d have to put her hand over her chest to keep from doubling over.

The rest of Flora’s household goods were lined up on cardboard flats, stretching from one end of the yard to the next. Minutes before the sale, Warren would show up and group several of these flats together. People would have to bid on the lot, haul everything away. That was the secret of an auction—make the buyers feel they were getting a bargain and get rid of stuff for the seller. The crowd for the auction was small, but respectable. The usuals were there: old man McFlinty with his gray straggly beard hanging to the waist of his bib overalls; Tripper Washburn, whose nasal voice carried above everybody’s including Warren’s, even when Warren used the
PA
system; a few children playing tag around the decaying elms. One guy had driven an hour and a half to look at the old violin. He repaired instruments and wanted the curved wood from the sides.

The iron lung and all of Flora’s personal belongings had already been trucked to Denver. Teresa had helped Flora crate and ship her paintings. They’d driven to Scottsbluff rather than to excite the curiosity of the Reach postal workers. Nobody knew a thing about Flora’s fame or her troubled past or how art had saved her.

Flora was gone, too, choosing to move to Denver before the auction took place. Teresa walked through the empty house hoping to catch a glimpse of Flora, a whiff of perfume, a glance in the closet mirror. When the dining room table sold, Teresa longed to put her face to the wood, inhale deeply one last time, imprint her lips on the oak boards.

Finally the only thing left in the house was the old upright piano. Warren had the guys move it onto the front porch, but it was too heavy to carry down the steps. Once a player piano, the roller mechanism was broken. Warren tried to auction it from the stoop. Teresa stood in the crowd to help Warren spot any anxious bidder. Warren started at $20, but no one bid. At $10, Teresa noticed a boy, eleven or twelve, tugging on his mother’s sleeve. From a few yards away, she could see that he was begging his mother to buy that piano. Teresa moved in closer.

Teresa didn’t recognize the pair of them. The mother looked tired, haggard. She was middle-aged, middle-sized. Nothing remarkable about her. The boy was scrawny. He had a hungry look. Each time the boy stamped his foot and said, “Please,” the mother shook her head. Teresa’s heart pounded in her chest.

“Can I help?” She looked at the boy.

The boy ignored her. “Please, Mom.”

“We already have a piano.” His mother sounded weary.

“It’s in the room with the
TV
. I can’t practice when I want to.”

“Where would we put it?”

“In my room.”

“Do you play?” Teresa asked.

The boy nodded.

“If it helps,” Teresa smiled at the mother, “I’m pretty sure he could have the piano.”

“Stay out of this.” The mother’s voice landed hard and flat.

“See, Mom. It wouldn’t cost anything.”

The boy jumped up and down in his excitement. What was the matter with his mother? Couldn’t she see her son? Standing right in front of her, couldn’t she see him? He needed that piano. He was that kind of boy. Teresa felt an overwhelming urge to slap his mother. She’d never felt such hatred for anyone in her life.

“What would it hurt?” Teresa tried to keep her voice modulated and level. People had grown quiet around them.

The mother, embarrassed, leaned closer to her son. “How would we get it?”

“Dad. In his pickup.”

“He can’t manage that thing by himself.”

“If you arranged a time, we could have some men here to help you.” Teresa offered this in her kindest tone. She meant it. A gift to them. To this boy.

The mother turned on her. “Yeah? And what about at our house?
They gonna follow us forty-three miles up into the Sandhills to help unload it. C’mon.” She yanked on her son’s arm.

The boy looked stricken. He turned his pleading face to Teresa. His disappointment was electric, searing. All of who he was and wanted to become was tied to that piano. Without it, who would he be? Just another kid. Another normal kid. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the mother and the boy were walking away, the boy’s shoulders hunched, his spirit drained out of him, and Teresa did the only thing she could. She let him go.

Men of Steel

A bad thing happened on the first day of Conrad’s job that he can’t talk about. Not that he’s a big talker. He’s from a family of reticent men, bred on the Nebraska prairie where topics range about as far as the weather and Cornhusker football. His uncle Gary served in Vietnam, his grandfather slogged through mud in France, but they don’t speak of combat. Now Conrad knows why. Even if he could bring himself to talk about it, which he mostly can’t, some of it’s classified. His own momma has no idea what he’s doing out in that godforsaken desert.

Conrad’s a sensor operator. His job is to control the drone’s camera and hold the guiding laser on target. He’s seen death close-up before. On his uncle’s farm they butchered cattle and hogs, wrung the necks of chickens and flung them into the yard where they danced, bloody and headless. He’s tracked and shot deer, waited in a blind for a flock of ducks, blasted two pheasants with one blow from a shotgun. He tries to think of his job as an elaborate hunt: the hours of surveillance, the tracking, then the decision, and the kill.

He arrived at the base last May, his first day on the job Memorial Day. Nothing that bad has happened since, though he’s seen some tough stuff.

He takes a lot of showers.

Home on leave, Conrad wakes in his old room. From his position on the bed he surveys his past—the statuette of him playing quarterback, the National Honor Society cord draped over the closet doorknob, Nancy Harmer’s senior picture tucked in the side of the dresser mirror. Nancy’s a student now at
CU
. She thought he made a dumb choice, going to the Air Force instead of college. For a while, she e-mailed, girlie stuff about parties and drinking on campus. He got so he wouldn’t open her e-mails for two, three days. He liked the fact that a pretty girl wrote him, but the sight of her name in his inbox exhausted him. He quit writing, to be fair to her. Last night, after touching him too much and insisting he eat second helpings of meat loaf, his mother told him Nancy’s studying in Italy this term. No chance of running into her. His mother’s voice dripped sorrow, her hand scrubbing the back of his neck. He jerked away, saw the hurt in his mother’s eyes, but what’s he supposed to do about it?

He’d flown from Las Vegas to Denver, then boarded a tin can with wings that rocked through turbulent air to Scottsbluff, where his folks met him. They looked small. Older than he remembered. His mother cried. His dad shook his hand, full arm extended. During the drive to Reach, his mother’s voice rattled like cottonwood leaves. He forced himself to listen. Between the recession and the Walmart going in at Scottsbluff, the hardware store is barely surviving. No shortage of sick and dying at the hospital, so at least her job’s intact. They held back to let him enter the house first. In his hurry to get it over with, he stumbled on the threshold and nearly pitched to his knees. The house seemed different, though nothing has changed. Same beige carpet. Clorox and bacon grease. His mother’s quilts and needlework crowding every wall. His dad barely visible.

He swings his feet to the floor, props his head in his hands. What day? Thanksgiving. Christ. He’s not ready for this.

On the drive out to the home place, his mother fills him in on who’s around this year: Uncle Bill, the family loser; Bill’s daughter, Amalee, her husband, Terry, and their three boys; Aunt Irene, the token liberal, and her husband, who drinks too much; his uncle Gary and his wife, Laynie. The home place is theirs now. They never had kids, so there’s tension around who will inherit the farm. Amalee could care less. Irene’s three kids all live far away, propelled by college educations into city life. Conrad’s the obvious choice, after all the work he’s done. He shadowed his uncle so much that people mistook him for Gary’s son. Conrad doesn’t want the farm. He assumes Gary must know. The subject has never come up.

“What about Granddad?” Conrad asks. Though his father is driving, Conrad keeps his eyes on the road, sweeps side to side, scans the ditches.

“Irene’s stopping by the nursing home. If it’s a good day, they’ll bring him on out.”

They crowd into the farmhouse kitchen. Hugs, kisses, pats on the back. The air, warm and moist, redolent with butter, celery, and onions from Laynie’s bread stuffing. His mother deposits three pies on the counter: apple, pumpkin, and cherry. Atop the cherry pie, his favorite, granulated sugar sparkles in the fluorescent light. Plump, bloodred cherries peek through the lattice crust. At the sight of those cherries, sour bile climbs up Conrad’s esophagus. He swallows, grits his teeth, and turns away. Idiot. Wimp. No matter how much disgust he heaps on himself, he can’t convince his stomach to stop churning.

His dad and Irene’s husband escape to the den, where they will plant themselves in front of football and nurse bottles of beer, the requisite role for in-laws in this, his mother’s family. Uncle Bill’s wife is long gone, the result of his failed rock-star lifestyle, drunken and wild after his garage band failed to make it big following a
performance on American Bandstand. As for Laynie, her being foreign has insulated her from the weight of expectation. If she’s different, it’s to be expected, and his mother and Irene can feel good about themselves for tolerating the stranger in their midst.

“Go on now,” Laynie says. “Grab a beer, if you want. Gary and Bill are in the living room with Granddad.”

Conrad studies her, to parse out whether she’s changed or if she knows about Gary. Conrad’s half in love with her. He can’t help himself. He used to crane his neck to get a glimpse of her hanging wash on the line or bending over a flower patch. She came from Greece one summer to visit relatives. Gary saw her at a dance at the Legion Hall, wooed her behind a haystack, married her three months later. Besides dark smoldering eyes, Laynie retains a small accent. A mole sits above her upper lip, and Conrad has ridden through spasms of guilty pleasure centered on her mouth, her lips, and that mole. He’d die before he’d speak of any of this.

She looks straight at him, into him, and through him. She cups his face with her hand, small and rough from outside labor. “So sweet.” Her voice, low and husky, moves him. Conscious of her breath, her perfume, he wishes he had the nerve to kiss her, even on the cheek. His face glows hot, and he ducks his head, fast, into the open refrigerator.

He comes up with a beer, and before he can twist off the cap, Laynie has turned away to give orders to his mom and Irene. He sniffs, wipes his nose on his shirt cuff, heads to the living room where he can hear nothing but the crackling of wood burning in the pot-bellied stove.

Gary and Bill, the dutiful and prodigal sons, are folded deep into overstuffed chairs on opposite sides of his grandfather’s wheelchair. Clenching bottles of Bud Light and staring into the fire, they could be a tableau for a beer commercial, except Granddad is not playing his part. Once able to outdrink, outshoot, and outcuss any
man in the panhandle, he sits with one hand gripping the arm of the chair. The other massages his forehead, gouging at it with ragged fingernails, his forehead pitted with scabs.

Conrad sees the room as if it were a curio cabinet. Artifacts hint at a civilization he once knew but has forgotten: on one wall, an aerial photograph of the farm taken sixty-odd years ago, before indoor plumbing and before the windbreaks turned gray with dying elm trees; oak floors, stained dark; an oval braided rug hiding a bloodstain from the accident that nearly severed his granddad’s foot; the walls, once green, mottled and faded like a day-old bruise; his grandmother’s treadle sewing machine; an oil lamp rigged for electricity atop a white crocheted doily; a gliding rocker with a quilted throw tossed over the back, made by Conrad’s mother: a roll top desk, cubicles stuffed with papers; shaggy lace curtains, tied back to let in daylight; a worn leather love seat joining the two deep chairs to form an arc around the wood stove.

Conrad makes his way to the love seat. Floorboards creak under his feet. He’s relieved to sit.

His uncles wave their beer bottles at him.

“Conrad,” Bill says.

“Heard you’d be home,” Gary says.

Conrad looks at the floor between his feet. Swallows. Gary has not written one word. Not that he expected it. Not after the way they left things between them. Laynie e-mails and tells him what’s happening on the farm. He writes his mother and Laynie, cheerful, mindless stuff about how pretty the desert looks in the morning. Sunrises and cactus, wide-bladed yucca, different from the soapweed back home. Shit he knows they want to hear. Nothing about death on the screen. Nothing real.

“Hey, Granddad.” Conrad lifts his head. Hard to believe he was once afraid of this dried-up husk of a man.

“Is he ours?” The old man stares at him.

Conrad wets his lips. It’s hot in this room.

“Don’t mind him.” Bill knocks his bottle against Conrad’s knee. “He don’t know me half the time, and I see him every week.”

“Kathleen’s boy,” Gary says. “Conrad.”

“C’mere.” The old man waves one wobbly hand at Conrad. Conrad looks at Gary, uncertain. Then he drops to one knee in front of the wheelchair. The old man studies his face.

“If you’re Conrad, you sure have changed.”

Conrad looks at Bill and Gary. Both heads are turned away. He stands, uncertain what to do with his hands. He remembers then that he’s holding a bottle of beer. He clanks it against Bill’s, a mock toast of whatever the hell they want. Then he sits and gets busy drinking.

Amalee, Terry, and their boys arrive late morning. They blast into the living room. Everybody stands, except Granddad. The two younger boys, Troy and David, take off for the basement where Gary’s set up the train table and the ancient Lionel with attendant tracks and station house and plastic people.

“You boys, we’ll be having dinner soon,” Irene shouts after them.

“Oh, let ’em go,” Amalee says. “Let ’em run the stink off.”

Amalee gives Conrad a quick A-frame hug. A Go Big Red sweatshirt and gray sweat pants camouflage her heavy body. She’s still got that wavy blond hair. She barely acknowledges her father, but that’s old news. Terry, a farm implement salesman, runs his hand over close-cropped black hair, wipes a residue of gel on his pants. Terry tries, too hard, to be everybody’s friend and the world’s best father, especially to his stepson Nick, a product of Amalee’s teen pregnancy that once scandalized the town. Nick must be fifteen, sixteen now. He’s slight of build, quiet, suffers from teen acne. Conrad watches Nick fidget and tries to send him a silent message: Don’t worry. One day you’ll outgrow the acne and this place.

Terry’s all fired up, his voice banging off the walls. Amalee tries to shush him. Nick hangs back, hands in his pockets. Terry pulls Nick forward, pounds him on the back.

“First time he’s got his own permit, this kid shoots a five-point buck. I tell you, it was something.”

The whole group murmurs, except Irene. Conrad notices her disapproving silence.

“Go on, Nick,” Terry prods. “Tell them about it.”

“Naw. I don’t wanna.”

“Well, I’ll tell it. I’m proud of you, son.”

Nick winces. Conrad wants to pitch a tent over him, shield him from this public glare. Terry plunges on. “Amalee, go out to the car and bring in them pictures.”

Amalee rolls her eyes but heads out the door. The group edges toward Granddad and the wood-burning stove.

Granddad raises glassy eyes, casts about for something familiar. When he catches sight of Gary, he hollers, “What did he say?”

“Nick shot himself a deer yesterday,” Gary says, leaning over to put his mouth close to his dad’s ear.

“Shot himself?”

“A deer. Nick shot a deer.”

“Which one is Nick?” the old man yells.

While Gary tries to pacify his father, Amalee returns with the photos and Terry passes them around.

“Over on the old Sherbourne place. We went out early. Damn, it was cold. Nicky took off through that stand of trees down by the river. We walked, I don’t know, thirty, forty-five minutes. I could see Nicky, he was maybe twenty yards away—would you say, Nick, about twenty yards?” Nick doesn’t answer, busy studying his shoes. “I seen him raise his rifle, point at this big, beautiful buck standing in a thicket, just his head and big antlers sprouting up. Nicky got off a clean shot, downed him. Just like that.”

Terry’s story drones on like background noise to Conrad, who
is riveted to one of the photos. The buck lies on the ground, his head twisted because of the antlers. Nick’s on one knee beside the deer, his rifle nowhere in sight, his face turned forty-five degrees away from the camera. The deer and the boy mirror each other, their bodies awkward and pained.

Later, Conrad’s smoking on the back stoop of the house. He needed some air and some space. The cigarette is just an excuse. He rolled it himself, carries the makings in his shirt pocket. He likes the ritual, the smell of tobacco, his tongue wetting the paper. He hardly raises it to his lips. He’s thinking about Nick and that deer, both frozen in transitions neither of them chose, the boy galloping into adulthood, the deer heading toward oblivion and death. His Granddad, too, marching toward the grave. All of them, for that matter. They just don’t know the details. He thinks about stuff like this a lot, stuff nobody ever talks about. He doesn’t know if anybody else thinks like he does. He suspects they do, but sometimes he worries that there’s something wrong with him, that he’s morbid or strange.

He’s out there by himself maybe ten minutes when the back door opens. Gary steps out, shrugs into a jacket.

“Mind some company?” he says.

“Suit yourself.”

They stand silently for a while. Conrad studies the way the sunlight slices around the old windmill. Gary clears his throat. Conrad knows he’s got something to say that’s hard for him. He won’t help him say it.

“It’s over. Between me and that woman.”

That woman. Conrad wonders what her name was. All he saw was her naked legs wrapped around Gary’s waist, Gary standing bare-assed with his pants around his ankles, the two of them leaned up against a chest freezer on her back porch. Even now, he shakes his head to get rid of the image.