Margaret from Maine (9781101602690) (15 page)

Chapter Seventeen

M
argaret turned her face to get the early morning sun directly on it. The air felt luscious. It was still early; the inn provided a buffet breakfast. Charlie had already said he would fish only a half hour or so, just to try his luck. Margaret felt hungry and content and part of her wanted to sit like a tortoise in the sun and think about nothing. But Blake needed her and she straightened a little on the boulder, making herself concentrate on her friend's situation. It was not a story she hadn't heard before, but perhaps Blake's voice sounded more fatigued and dispirited than in any previous recounting.

“Did you talk to Donny this morning?” Margaret asked.

“No, he was out of here before it was even light. He works hard, I'll always give him that. He might get a new contract doing the government offices in Bangor . . . the grounds, the arbor work. He's put a bid in and he feels like he has a good shot at it. We'll see.”

“I'm sorry it's going that way, Blake.”

“You make your own bed, I suppose. It's weird, but hearing you talk about getting away from here, I keep thinking if Donny and I could go somewhere and reconnect a little it would help. Just spend time as a man and woman instead of a husband and wife and parents . . . you know what I mean.”

“I'll watch Phillip anytime you say.”

“I know you would. What's your soldier boy doing now?”

“Still casting. He hasn't caught anything.”

“You're crazy about him, aren't you?”

“Yes. To my toes.”

“Be careful, sweetie. I know I've said that, but it bears repeating.”

“I'm being as careful as I can be. But it's not easy.”

“I should run. I'll swing by this evening and check on your boys. What's Gordon think of this whole thing?”

“He doesn't really know what's going on, but he's good about it. I think it lodges somewhere in his head in the ‘for Dad' category, but what that means the Lord only knows.”

Margaret hung up a moment later. A small wave of worry started in the pit of her stomach, but she pushed it down.
Not now,
she told herself again. Not while there is sun and a sparkling river and a man you are crazy about fishing and enjoying himself fifty yards away. Not when he is going to come back and you are going to have a good breakfast, and maybe you will see spectacular blossoms and you will travel on the Blue Ridge Parkway and take in the delicious air.
Not now
.

* * *

Charlie fished a hare's ear nymph through the tailwater at the base of the Ruggles Rapid. He was not very good at this, he decided, and he felt slightly pretentious in his waders and fly jacket, waving a fly rod at innocent fish. But he liked being out; he liked standing in water, studying the currents, deciding how to replicate whatever happened naturally on the river. A hare's ear, he knew, was as close to a universal fly as an angler could choose. He let it plunk in the white water above him, then chatter down gracefully into the swirls and eddies of the deeper pools below.

His leg hurt. Through the months of rehabilitation, that had been the most singular thing about his injury. His foot and ankle and a portion of his shin had disappeared, shredded to strings of confetti by the blast, and yet he still felt pain in the missing area. Phantom limb syndrome, he comprehended, but no matter how he worked his mind around it the concept refused to make sense to him. It should have been the single advantage of losing a limb, the lack of pain, but instead it had become a troublesome annoyance, one that bothered him as much for its irrational underpinnings as it did for the actual sensation. It had something to do with the mind-nerve transfer, he had read, and doctors currently experimented with mirrors: it seemed if a patient could visualize the missing limb, see its absence reflected through the eye to the brain, then the brain would begin to let the limb recede and disappear. That was the coming thing.

It was all too confusing, Charlie decided. He did not want to think about it now, although his missing foot, remarkably, felt cold with the river water. He deliberately waded a few steps downstream, careful to keep his balance, and he turned to Margaret for a moment and called to her softly across the water.

“Getting hungry?” he asked.

“Famished.”

“I won't be long. They don't seem to be biting.”

“You look like you know what you're doing, Charlie.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

“How's the water?”

“Cold.”

“It's wonderful in the sun here.”

“How do I know you're not a mermaid?”

“No tail.”

He felt a small quiver on the end of his line.

“I may have just had a hit,” he said, turning back to the water. He cast again, trying to place the fly in the same patter of water where he had experienced the quiver.

“A fish?”

“Maybe. It's hard to tell. It might have just been a little snag on the bottom, or a twig. . . .”

But then he raised his rod tip and he saw a fish fly up and out of the water. He tightened the line with his right hand and kept a steady pressure on the fish. It was not big. He knew that from the weight in his hands and the bend in the rod. He backed a little out of the stream and led the fish toward him, playing the fish quickly so that he wouldn't tire or injure it. The fish pulled and ran, darting back to the faster water, but Charlie checked it and moved it back. When it was within reach, he bent down and removed the hook easily. The fish hovered for a moment, stunned, then drifted away with the current.

“Did you have one, Charlie? I wanted to see!”

“It was a little brookie.”

“You're my hero,” she called, her voice teasing.

“You're easily impressed,” he said, smiling.

He turned and began winding in the line. He was not paying attention to his footing, and he felt his balance shift, his foot slip on something on the riverbed. He lunged sideways, feeling drunken, and he tried to catch himself. He succeeded partially, but he knew he was going down, and he lowered himself onto his knee rather than take the full fall. Water rushed in over the top of his waders and he jerked himself back onto his feet, annoyed and embarrassed. He nearly lost the fly rod when he opened his arms and tried to regain his balance. He knew he looked clumsy because he felt clumsy.

“Damn it,” he said as he finally got his stance squared on the bottom.

“Are you okay?”

“I think the fish is taking revenge. But I'm okay. I got some water down my waders.”

He saw her stand and come to the edge of the river, her face concerned. He couldn't help it; he felt annoyed with his leg, with the stupid awkwardness it spread to his body at inopportune times. He felt like Caliban from
The Tempest
, a hump-backed, misshapen child of the devil, a hoofed creature stumping through life with a loss of grace. He did not give in to such feelings often, but he felt it rise in him now and he despised seeing concern on her face. He would rather see anything else, he thought, but pity.

“Are you cold?” Margaret asked. “You must be freezing.”

“A little. I've got a bunch of water in my waders.”

“I thought you were going under.”

“So did I, frankly,” he said and felt himself gain the shallows.

He turned the fly rod around and held it out for her to take. Then he slipped the waders' suspenders off his shoulders and pulled down the bib. Water rose up and spilled out, dripping down into the stream. His shirt and trousers were wet.

“I told you I wasn't much of a fisherman,” he said.

“You caught one. That's not bad.”

“Are you always this nice, Margaret?” he asked, and he felt a small snake of his own frustration loaded onto the question. Why was he taking out his clumsiness on her? But he still felt annoyed at his leg's betrayal, at his own feebleness. He climbed out of the water and deliberately took his time fixing his waders, getting the water out. He felt flushed and cold and his blood was stirred.

She stood to one side with the fly rod.

“I'm sorry. I was just frustrated with my leg,” he said when he finished stripping off his waders. “I have a little temper from time to time. The leg . . .”

“Okay.”

“You've done nothing wrong. Not a thing. It was all on me.”

“I get it.”

“Irked. I was irked,” he said, trying to bend the silly word into a joke.

She stood on her toes and kissed him. She smelled like soap and lotion. He swung his arm down around the small of her back and pulled her to him. Her sweater gave off heat collected from the sun. He kissed her again, and he knew that he wanted her. He wanted her now, and he wanted her in the days to come, and he wanted her a dozen years from this moment. He wanted to tell her that, but it was better to kiss her, better to feel the sun in her hair, to smell the warmth of her sweater and feel her soft body beneath it.

* * *

Blake carried the wicker basket toward Donny's truck, the sun warm for so early in spring. She felt self-conscious. She had dressed with particular care and had packed a turkey club and salt & vinegar chips and a huge dill pickle from Diebler's Deli—Donny's favorite restaurant, probably his favorite meal—but she felt herself losing confidence in her idea with each step she took. She doubted, frankly, that he would see the visit for what she intended it to be: a reminder that they were married, that they had been in love, that they did not have to give up. She had even put on special underwear in case, she didn't know, in case they could sneak away in his truck, do something wild and different, be a little naughty. There had been a time, she remembered, when he could not get enough of her, when he had made a thousand excuses to get her alone, in the dark, in a secluded parking spot. But now it had been a long time—she did not want to attach a number to the interval, did not want to be that specific—since they had made love.

When she reached the truck, a diesel F-250, big enough for a plow, she put the sandwich basket on the lowered tailgate and took a breath. The truck smelled of Donny, she realized: lubricating oil and grass clippings and soil. It was a familiar smell, not a bad one at all, and she put her hand to her eyes for shade while she scanned the grounds of the state DMV office. She saw Donny and Little Jim shoveling cedar mulch onto a row of hedges near the front door of the DMV building. The mulch looked orange and artificial, but it was probably all right for a government building. She watched as Donny upended a wheelbarrow full of mulch; Little Jim forked it out with the edge of his shovel. They worked well in unison, Blake knew, and did twice the work of the other crew Donny had in his business.

Little Jim spotted her first. He was big and strong, a man who looked like a cartoon version of a Native American, frankly, whose broad cheekbones and impenetrable silence never failed to unsettle her. She watched as he said something to Donny, then she saw Donny's head swivel. Donny seemed to take a moment to put the elements together: wife, work, what was she doing here? Then he tossed the shovel to one side and she worried that he had jumped to the conclusion that Phillip was in some kind of danger.

“Everything okay?” was the first thing he said.

“Hi, Donny,” she answered, trying to be soft. Trying to be feminine and warm. “I just wanted to see you is all. Nothing's wrong.”

He stopped when she said that. She saw the wheels spinning, his brow furrowed in distrust. And why shouldn't he distrust her? she wondered. She never visited him at his jobs, never brought him a turkey sandwich, much less wore special underwear for him. She tried to chase those thoughts from her head and turned slightly so he could see the wicker basket. He didn't advance and he didn't seem to tie the facts together.

“I brought you a sandwich from the deli,” she said, “and some chips and a pickle.”

“I ate already,” he said.

“Oh, so early?”

“I get hungry,” he said, his voice slightly defiant.

“I meant, I'm sorry. I would have gotten here earlier if I knew.”

“What's going on, Blake?”

“Nothing, Donny. We've just been missing each other. You know. I'm not your enemy, I mean. I just . . .”

She felt her eyes get damp and she turned to the basket and picked it up. How stupid had she been? How idiotic could one woman be?
Abracadabra
and everything was supposed to be okay on the strength of a deli sandwich?

“Sorry,” she said.

“Hold on, Blake,” he said. “Just wait a second.”

But she kept going. Maybe she should have stopped, she couldn't tell, but she knew one thing: he didn't follow her.

She watched through the windshield as Donny went back to work beside Little Jim. She saw him raking the mulch into an even bed. Somewhere, she decided, somewhere down inside him was her husband, but she could not see him, could not even know if he was still alive.

Chapter Eighteen

I
t was the old dream. Charlie sensed it coming and he tried to wake, his eyes moving quickly, frantically beneath his slammed lids, but the dream did not permit it. The dream did not allow it and never would. He felt himself falling through a rabbit hole of memory, and part of it made sense, and part of it was cobweb and dream. He lay in the sun on an old blanket, Margaret beside him, asleep, but none of that made a difference. It never made a difference when the dream visited, because in the dream the addled logic of his foot—his limb was there for a moment, then gone, then returned, then turned into a hoof and a forked spatula like a dinosaur's three-fingered claw—defied explanation. Mostly the dream approached with heat. It had been an exceedingly hot day, he remembered, he dreamed, and the heat had been white light, had fallen on everything, casting diamonds even from the corner frame of the Humvee. Every piece of metal or glass or bucket of water caught the sun and juggled it, tossing it upward and letting it fall again, and Charlie recalled seeing a chicken sitting in the shade of a mud wall, its beak open, its tongue a tag of pink between the yellow beak halves. The chicken held its wings out to let air find its breasts and it appeared to Charlie, in the dream, in reality, that the chicken had decided it could not fly. The chicken struck him as hesitant, as if all the heat of the day had collected in its black feathers, and Charlie turned to say something to the Humvee driver, Erich, but when he opened his mouth only feathers came out. Just feathers, black and coiled, and the feathers turned into lightning bugs, blinking summer bugs on a quiet Iowa evening, and he suddenly found himself looking past Erich to the cornfield behind his childhood home and he smiled and felt great warmth and kindness and welcome.

He always saw it before he saw the boy.

Because when he turned his head back, he saw the boy for the first time. It was all that sickening slow motion, that terrible swivel of the head, then he watched as the boy came through the crowd. Why did he see him? Why was he so easy to pick out now, though he had snuck into the roadside crowd without a worry? A boy on the edge of puberty. A boy with a soft, fuzzy beard, a goat in his arms. He had seen the boy's eyes and the goat's eyes at the same time: the goat had been alive, wiggling in the boy's arms, and Charlie had felt a moment's pleasure at that domestic detail. A boy carrying a goat. It was the kind of thing that registered, remained in your memory long after all the horrible details of war and occupation dissipated. He turned to tell Erich about the boy, a detail, a point of conversation, nothing else, when he heard the eruption form underneath the Humvee. The dirt road had not erupted; it had been the cornfield, after all, the backyard of his childhood home, and he watched as the boy and the goat went sideways. He observed dispassionately as the pair of living creatures vaporized, became sand, their life force swept away as easily as one might clear crumbs from a counter.
Here today, gone tamale,
he thought. It was an old joke, one told by Bugs Bunny, he thought, a play on the Mexican dish.
Here today, gone tamale
. Because the boy and the goat had disappeared, had become wall and roof and road, had vanished in gouts of blood and gristle.

Here today, gone tamale.

That was what Charlie dreamed.

And when it came time to lose his own foot, his own injury, it took place in the cornfield. He walked toward his home, his parents turning on lights to welcome him, black crows rising from the sleeping heads of tasseled corn.
Home,
he thought. It had been something different in reality, but in his dream he lost his foot on a clod of dirt. He stepped on it, as he had stepped on a million dirt clods in his childhood, and an enormous gopher, a comic gopher, had suddenly popped up through the soil. He had stepped on the gopher's head, it appeared, and the gopher turned, annoyed, and Charlie's foot dangled from the rodent's mouth. Gophers did not eat feet; they were vegetarians as far as Charlie knew, but in dreams anything could happen. Charlie had tilted sideways, the gopher coming out of the hole toward him, growing as it approached, and the foot disappeared down the wobbly gullet of the animal. He wanted more. Charlie saw the gopher's rapacious gaze, his hunger, and as he fell Charlie kicked at the animal and his foot had been replaced by a bird's foot, a dinosaur's toes, and the gopher tore at those appendages, too. The corn husks fell around them, and Charlie's vision went into the sky so that he could see a black-backed animal climbing over him, watch as the corn husks moved and swayed like a miniature forest. Then he saw the boy, the boy with the goat, and he watched as the boy scattered again, became flying blood, and the dream ended there, ended with him rising and sitting up, his panic pushing like splinters into an ungloved hand.

* * *

“Charlie?” Margaret whispered, her body next to his. “Charlie, wake up. Charlie, you're dreaming.”

He mumbled. His face contorted and twisted as if flinching from something horrible.

“Charlie, it's okay.”

He woke suddenly. Margaret watched him become conscious and she felt something dark and shadowy had slipped away. She felt cold; it was afternoon and the sun had put its bottom edge on the mountaintops as if testing water with a toe. Charlie put a hand on his eyes. She wondered for a moment if she saw tears on his cheeks. She kissed his cheeks. She kissed him over and over until he moved his hand down and pulled her to him.

“What is it?” she asked. “Where do you go, Charlie?”

“My foot . . . ,” he said.

“In the dream?” she asked, still kissing him.

He nodded.

What was worth saying in those moments? She didn't try to say anything, but put her body closer, held him, and kissed him. In time she felt him return. She didn't understand how she knew he had returned, but she felt certain of it. The slithery dream fell away. She looked around. They lay on a blanket in a small hollow near a stream. The trees above them had tentative green leaves. The sound of the stream filled everything. Depending on the wind, she felt the coolness from the water seep close to them.

“Is it something you have a lot?” she whispered.

“Not really. It comes for a while, then it leaves.”

“Is it the same dream?”

He nodded.

“Can I do anything?”

He pulled her closer.

“You're doing it,” he said.

“I hate the war. The wars,” she said. “I hate what they do to people. They kill people, but it might even be worse for the people who don't die.”

“I'm okay.”

“I know you are.”

“The dream . . . it's not even accurate. I mean, it doesn't even follow the events. It collapses things and makes them wild and strange. I can't even make sense of it, really. It's more about sensation.”

“If it were rational you might be able to think it through and disarm it.”

He nodded.

“If I had a magic wand, Charlie, I would make it go away.”

“I know you would.”

“The sun's going down.”

“Are you cold?”

“A little.”

He sat up. Margaret ran her fingers through her hair. She couldn't guess what she looked like. Probably sleep marks on her face, leaves in her hair. But it didn't matter.

“Want to go skinny-dipping?” Charlie asked, teasing.

He smiled. Yes, he was back. He stood and extended his hand and pulled her to her feet.

“We're a pair of Rip Van Winkles,” he said.

“How long did we sleep?”

“Gosh, I don't know. It must be around six. We need to get to the next town, wherever that is. Are you hungry?”

“Starving. I'm always hungry around you. And sleepy. I think maybe I'm relaxed.”

He put his arms around her. She leaned into him and put her forehead against his shoulder.

“You don't have to worry about the dreams,” he whispered. “I'm okay, honestly. They come on their own and I usually have them in succession, then they go away. I don't know why. Maybe anxiety, maybe a change of venue. I've talked with a counselor. I've gone all through it. It's pretty normal for someone with my type of injury to dream about it.”

She nodded.

“You know,” he said, his voice lighter, his arms moving her back while he bent to grab the blanket, “we better get moving. We're at elevation. It could get pretty cold.”

“I need to call Gordon. I meant to call him after school, but we slept. . . .”

“We must have needed it.”

“You're turning me into a hedonist.”

She went to the stream and splashed water on her face. The water felt icy and bright. She splashed it on her face until her skin felt tight and chilled. Charlie squatted beside her and performed the same washup. A bright blue bird hopped in the branches across the stream. It was a bluebird, Margaret realized with something like wonder. She had never seen a bluebird, but this one was unmistakable.

“That's a bluebird, isn't it, Charlie?” she whispered, pointing her chin across the stream.

“Yes. It has to be.”

“I've never seen one.”

“I've seen a few. But that one is brilliant.”

“It doesn't seem possible. I can't believe that's what they look like. So blue.”

“They're making a comeback. Up where you live, you probably don't get many. That's likely to be the edge of their range.”

Margaret watched the bird hop from branch to branch. It appeared to be the size of a robin. No, smaller, she corrected. The last of the sun found it in small pulses, bringing the blue color out in tiny flashes. It had black eyes and a sharp beak. As she watched, it dropped down into the leaf litter and pushed things around, looking for insects.

“Isn't it some kind of omen . . . a bluebird?” she asked.

“The bluebird of happiness.”

“I can't believe there's a bird that color. It's bluer than a jay, even.”

“Probably nesting. They like nests near the edge of a meadow. They're active at sunset.”

Then it flew off. Just like that. Its wings made a beating sound and it disappeared into the forest, its brightness improbable and visible long after the sound of its wings had evaporated.

* * *

Gordon pushed back into the couch cushion, lifting the saw-chuck guy up with his left hand while his right hand guided the meerkat forward. The saw-chuck guy fired a dozen shots at the meerkat, hitting him each time, but the meerkat absorbed the shots and showed no indication of pain. Then the saw-chuck guy didn't move fast enough and the meerkat squashed him with one large, furry paw. The saw-chuck guy screamed a long, painful scream, but he didn't die. The saw-chuck guy never died, that was a fact, and when the meerkat moved forward, stumbling a little at a jujitsu move from the saw-chuck guy, the tiny soldier sprang up and delivered a karate chop to the meerkat's neck.
Ayyyyyy,
the soldier said, but whether he said it aloud or only in Gordon's head, the boy couldn't tell.

The phone rang. Gordon listened to Grandpa Ben pick it up in the kitchen. Gordon knew it was his mother, but he didn't really want to talk to her. He felt shy and quiet and he preferred to march the meerkat forward into combat with the saw-chuck guy.

At the same time, he thought about Charlie. He had been thinking about Charlie a lot since the day he had come and taken his mother away. The boy did not know what to make of the man. For one thing, he couldn't tell if the man was a soldier, like his dad, or a regular guy. His grandfather was a regular guy, and so was Mr. Raymond, the school principal, because neither of them had ever been in army clothes. But one of the teachers at school, Mrs. Mudge, had been an army guy, but she was a girl and that didn't make sense.

The other thing Gordon wondered about was Charlie's leg.

It didn't look like a leg, he recalled. It had had a strange shoe on it at the bottom, and his pants flapped around too much. Nothing in his experience gave him anything to go on in trying to understand the leg. He wondered if he could ask Charlie about it, but his mother had told him many times that too many questions were rude. But, he thought, if he had the right moment he might ask Charlie about the leg, and what was under the pant leg, and why when he walked he looked like a zombie man on one side.

“Gordon, it's your mom,” Grandpa Ben called from the kitchen.

Gordon kept marching the meerkat at the saw-chuck guy, ignoring his grandpa.

“Gordon?” Grandpa Ben said and came into the TV room. He wore a towel over his shoulder and his hands looked wet when he held the phone forward. “It's your mom.”

Gordon accepted the phone, put it to his ear, but did not say anything. It was silent on the other end, too, then he heard his mother say something. Probably to Charlie. Gordon made the saw-chuck guy deliver another kick to the meerkat's pointed snout. The meerkat fell back in slow motion.

“Are you there, sweetie? Gordon?” came his mother's voice.

“Mom?”

“So you are there. I couldn't tell. How are you? You doing okay?”

“Yeah.”

“What have you been doing? Have you and Grandpa Ben been having fun?”

Gordon nodded. He had the saw-chuck guy on top of the meerkat now, grinding him down. Gordon's jaw muscles worked in tandem with the saw-chuck guy's boots.

“Gordon?” his mother said. “Gordon, when I ask you something, I need you to respond.”

“Okay.”

“School was okay? Did Blake pick you up?”

Gordon nodded, then realized he needed to speak.

“Yes.”

“That's good, honey. I'll be home day after tomorrow. That means not tomorrow, but the next day, okay?”

“Yes.”

“I love you and miss you, sweetie. You're being a good boy, right?”

Gordon nodded but didn't speak.

“Okay, I'm going to hang up now. I told Grandpa Ben that I wouldn't talk to him again, so you can just push the button when we finish, okay? Like I've shown you?”