Shiloh and Other Stories (28 page)

He says, “Kevin has a sore throat. Is that hepatitis?”

“It’s probably just a cold. I’ll talk to his mother.” Nancy is holding Robert’s arm, partly to keep him still, partly to steady herself.

“When do I have to get a shot?” Robert asks.

“Tomorrow.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes. It won’t hurt, though.”

“I guess it’s a good thing this happened,” Robert says bravely. “Now we get to have Grover another day.” Robert spills his books on the floor and bends to pick them up. When he looks up, he says, “Daddy doesn’t care about him. He just wants to get rid of him. He wants to kill him.”

“Oh, Robert, that’s not true,” says Nancy. “He just doesn’t want Grover to suffer.”

“But Grover still has half a bottle of Pet-Tabs,” Robert says. “What will we do with them?”

“I don’t know,” Nancy says. She hands Robert his numbers workbook. Like a tape loop, the face of her child as a stranger replays
in her mind. Robert has her plain brown hair, her coloring, but his eyes are Jack’s—demanding and eerily penetrating, eyes that could pin her to the wall.

After Robert leaves, Nancy lowers the venetian blinds. Her office is brilliantly lighted by the sun, through south-facing windows. The design was accidental, nothing to do with solar energy. It is an old building. Bars of light slant across her desk, like a formidable scene in a forties movie. Nancy’s secretary goes home, but Nancy works on, contacting all the parents she couldn’t get during working hours. One parent anxiously reports that her child has a swollen lymph node on his neck.

“No,” Nancy says firmly. “That is
not
a symptom of hepatitis. But you should ask the doctor about that when you go in for the gamma globulin.”

Gamma globulin. The phrase rolls off her tongue. She tries to remember an odd title of a movie about gamma rays. It comes to her as she is dialing the telephone:
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
. She has never known what that title meant.

The office grows dim, and Nancy turns on the lights. The school is quiet, as though the threat of an infectious disease has emptied the corridors, leaving her in charge. She recalls another movie,
The Andromeda Strain
. Her work is like the thrill of watching drama, a threat held safely at a distance. Historians have to be detached, Nancy once said, defensively, to Jack, when he accused her of being unfriendly to shopkeepers and waiters. Where was all that Southern hospitality he had heard so much about? he wanted to know. It hits her now that historians are detached about the past, not the present. Jack has learned some of this detachment: he wants to let Grover go. Nancy thinks of the stark images in his recent photographs—snow, icicles, fences, the long shot of Grover on the hill like a stray wolf. Nancy had always liked Jack’s pictures simply for what they were, but Jack didn’t see the people or the objects in them. He saw illusions. The vulnerability of the image, he once said, was what he was after. The image was meant to evoke its own death, he told her.

By the time Nancy finishes the scheduling, the night maintenance crew has arrived, and the coffeepot they keep in a closet is
perking. Nancy removes her contact lenses and changes into her fleece-lined boots. In the parking lot, she maneuvers cautiously along a path past a mountain of black-stained snow. It is so cold that she makes sparks on the vinyl car seat. The engine is slow to turn over.

At home, Nancy is surprised to see balloons in the living room. The stove is blazing and Robert’s face is red from the heat.

“We’re having a party,” he says. “For Grover.”

“There’s a surprise for you in the oven,” says Jack, handing Nancy a glass of sherry. “Because you worked so hard.”

“Grover had ice cream,” Robert says. “We got Häagen-Dazs.”

“He looks cheerful,” Nancy says, sinking onto the couch next to Jack. Her glasses are fogged up. She removes them and wipes them with a Kleenex. When she puts them back on, she sees Grover looking at her, his head on his paws. His tail thumps. For the first time, Nancy feels ready to let the dog die.

When Nancy tells about the gamma globulin, the phrase has stopped rolling off her tongue so trippingly. She laughs. She is so tired she throbs with relief. She drinks the sherry too fast. Suddenly, she sits up straight and announces, “I’ve got a clue. I’m thinking of a parking lot.”

“East or West?” Jack says. This is a game they used to play.

“West.”

“Aha, I’ve got you,” says Jack. “You’re thinking of the parking lot at that hospital in Tucson.”

“Hey, that’s not fair, going too fast,” cries Robert. “I didn’t get a chance to play.”

“This was before you were born,” Nancy says, running her fingers through Robert’s hair. He is on the floor, leaning against her knees. “We were lying in the van for a week, thinking we were going to die. Oh, God!” Nancy laughs and covers her mouth with her hands.

“Why were you going to die?” Robert asks.

“We weren’t really going to die.” Both Nancy and Jack are laughing now at the memory, and Jack is pulling off his sweater. The hospital in Tucson wouldn’t accept them because they weren’t sick enough to hospitalize, but they were too sick to travel. They had nowhere to go. They had been on a month’s trip
through the West, then had stopped in Tucson and gotten jobs at a restaurant to make enough money to get home.

“Do you remember that doctor?” Jack says.

“I remember the look he gave us, like he didn’t want us to pollute his hospital.” Nancy laughs harder. She feels silly and relieved. Her hand, on Jack’s knee, feels the fold of the long johns beneath his jeans. She cries, “I’ll never forget how we stayed around that parking lot, thinking we were going to die.”

“I couldn’t have driven a block, I was so weak,” Jack gasps.

“You were yellow.
I
didn’t get yellow.”

“All we could do was pee and drink orange juice.”

“And throw the pee out the window.”

“Grover was so bored with us!”

Nancy says, “It’s a good thing we couldn’t eat. We would have spent all our money.”

“Then we would have had to work at that filthy restaurant again. And get hepatitis again.”

“And on and on, forever. We would still be there, like Charley on the MTA. Oh, Jack, do you
remember
that crazy restaurant? You had to wear a ten-gallon hat—”

Abruptly, Robert jerks away from Nancy and crawls on his knees across the room to examine Grover, who is stretched out on his side, his legs sticking out stiffly. Robert, his straight hair falling, bends his head to the dog’s heart.

“He’s not dead,” Robert says, looking up at Nancy. “He’s lying doggo.”

“Passed out at his own party,” Jack says, raising his glass. “Way to go, Grover!”

Edwin Creech drives a yellow bus, transporting a group of mentally retarded adults to the Cedar Hill Mental Health Center, where they attend training classes. He is away from 7:00 to 9:30
A
.
M
. and from 2:30 to 5:00
P
.
M
. His hours are so particular that Sabrina Jones, the girl he has been living with for several months, could easily cheat on him. Edwin devises schemes to test her. He places a long string of dental floss on her pillow (an idea he got from a mystery novel), but it remains undisturbed. She is away four nights a week, at rehearsals for
Oklahoma!
with the Western Kentucky Little Theatre, and she often goes out to eat afterward with members of the cast. Sabrina won’t let him go to rehearsals, saying she wants the play to be complete when he sees it. At home, she sings and dances along with the movie sound track, and she acts out scenes for him. In the play, she’s in the chorus, and she has two lines in Act I, Scene 3. Her lines are “And to yer house a dark clubman!” and “Then out of your dreams you’ll go.” Edwin loves the dramatic way Sabrina waves her arms on her first line. She is supposed to be a fortune teller.

One evening when Sabrina comes home, Edwin is still up, as she puts on the sound track of
Oklahoma!
and sings along with Gordon MacRae while she does splits on the living room floor.
Her legs are long and slender, and she still has her summer tan. She is wearing her shorts, even though it is late fall. Edwin suddenly has an overwhelming feeling of love for her. She really seems to believe what she is singing—“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.” When the song ends, he tells her that.

“It’s the middle of the night,” he says, teasing. “And you think it’s morning.”

“I’m just acting.”

“No, you really believe it. You believe it’s morning, a beautiful morning.”

Sabrina gives him a fishy look, and Edwin feels embarrassed. When the record ends, Sabrina goes into the bedroom and snaps on the radio. Rock music helps her relax before going to sleep. The new rock music she likes is monotonous and bland, but Edwin tells himself that he likes it because Sabrina likes it. As she undresses, he says to her, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t accusing you of nothing.”

“That’s O.K.” She shrugs. The T-shirt she sleeps in has a hole revealing a spot of her skin that Edwin would like to kiss, but he doesn’t because it seems like a corny thing to do. So many things about Sabrina are amazing: her fennel toothpaste and herbal deodorant; her slim, snaky hips; the way she puts Vaseline on her teeth for a flashier smile, something she learned to do in a beauty contest.

When she sits on the bed, Edwin says, “If I say the wrong things, I want you to tell me. It’s just that I’m so crazy about you I can’t think sometimes. But if I can do anything better, I will. I promise. Just tell me.”

“I don’t think of you as the worrying type,” she says, lying down beside him. She still has her shoes on.

“I didn’t used to be.”

“You’re the most laid back guy I know.”

“Is that some kind of actor talk from your actor friends?”

“No. You’re just real laid back. Usually good-looking guys are so stuck up. But you’re not.” The music sends vibrations through Edwin like a cat’s purr. She says, “I brag on you all the time to Jeff and Sue—Curly and Laurey.”

“I know who Jeff and Sue are.” Sabrina talks constantly about Jeff and Sue, the romantic leads in the play.

Sabrina says, “Here’s what I wish. If we had a big pile of money, we could have a house like Sue’s. Did I tell you she’s got
woven
blinds on her patio that she made herself? Everything she does is so
artistic.
” Sabrina shakes Edwin’s shoulder. “Wake up and talk to me.”

“I can’t. I have to get up at six.”

Sabrina whispers to him, “Sue has the hots for Jeff. And Jeff’s wife is going to have a duck with a rubber tail if she finds out.” Sabrina giggles. “He kept dropping hints about how his wife was going to Louisville next week. And he and Sue were eating off the same slice of pizza.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

“You figure it out.”

“Would you do me that way?”

“Don’t be silly.” Sabrina turns up the radio, then unties her shoes and tosses them over Edwin’s head into a corner.

Edwin is forty-three and Sabrina is only twenty, but he does not want to believe age is a barrier between them. Sometimes he cannot believe his good luck, that he has a beautiful girl who finds him still attractive. Edwin has a deep dimple in his chin, which reminded his first wife, Lois Ann, of Kirk Douglas. She had read in a movie magazine that Kirk Douglas has a special attachment for shaving his dimple. But Sabrina thinks Edwin looks like John Travolta, who also has a dimple. Now and then Edwin realizes how much older he is than Sabrina, but time has passed quickly, and he still feels like the same person, unchanged, that he was twenty years ago. His two ex-wives had seemed to drift away from him, and he never tried to hold them back. But with Sabrina, he knows he must make an effort, for it is beginning to dawn on him that sooner or later women get disillusioned with him. Maybe he’s too laid back. But Sabrina likes this quality. Sabrina has large round gray eyes and limp, brownish-blond hair—the color of birch paneling—which she highlights with Miss Clairol. They share a love of Fudgsicles, speedboats, and
WKRP in Cincinnati
. At the beginning, he thought that was enough to
build a relationship on, because he knew so many couples who never shared such simple pleasures, but gradually he has begun to see that it is more complicated than that. Sabrina’s liveliness makes him afraid that she will be fickle. He can’t bear the thought of losing her, and he doesn’t like the idea that his new possessiveness may be the same uneasy feeling a man would have for a daughter.

Sabrina’s parents sent her to college for a year, but her father, a farmer, lost money on his hogs and couldn’t afford to continue. When Edwin met her, she was working as a waitress in a steak house. She wants to go back to college, but Edwin does not have the money to send her either. In college, she learned things that make him feel ignorant around her. She said that in an anthropology course, for instance, she learned for a fact that people evolved from animals. But when he tried to argue with her, she said his doubts were too silly to discuss. Edwin doesn’t want to sound like a father, so he usually avoids such topics. Sabrina believes in the ERA, although she likes to keep house. She cooks odd things for him, like eggplant, and a weird lasagna with vegetables. She says she knows how to make a Big Mac from scratch, but she never does. Her specialty is pizza. She puts sliced dill pickles on it, which Edwin doesn’t dare question. She likes to do things in what she calls an arty way. Now Sabrina is going out for pizza with people in the Theatre. Sabrina talks of “the Theatre.”

Until he began driving the bus, Edwin had never worked closely with people. He worked on an offshore oil rig for a time, but kept his distance from the other men. He drove a bulldozer in a logging camp out West. In Kentucky, during his marriages, he worked in an aluminum products company, an automotive machine shop, and numerous gas stations, going from job to job as casually as he did with women. He used to think of himself as an adventurer, but now he believes he has gone through life rather blindly, without much pain or sense of loss.