Sign Languages (20 page)

But it must have been darkness, twilight, the end of activity, that brought last night back again over all those objections of neighbors, Annie, the kids, misplaced currycombs, slices of cucumber from the Tupperware bowl in the bottom of the fridge. Bob Davis not carrying his weight at work. Hadn't for almost a year now.

Instead of showering, Charles took another hot bath. Gradually unclenching his muscles, the water worked on his mind, too. Looking up and over the lavatory, he saw the sky in its last dark blue light after the first star has appeared but not the rest.

He knew he'd only been deadening his mind, keeping it away paying penance, too—all at the same time—for some vague desire.

“I'm going crazy, is that it?” Charles's voice ruffled the surface of the cloudy, steaming water.

He knew he'd wasted the entire day. There was tomorrow and then, on Monday, he'd leave work early to drive back down to Nashville.

So at dusk, the stars all out now, he brushed a dried piece of chicken liver off the car seat and backed out of the driveway.

It's not at home; he knew that. What's not at home? He shook his head and drove past the office, the homes of friends.

Turning off Bledsoe onto Poplar, he slowed down as he passed Melanie Kirk's house. At the empty four-way stop he put the transmission in park and stuck his head out the window to look back. Her kitchen light was on. He ducked back in when he realized she was right there in the shadows watering the lawn. Her face, arms, legs, all pale in the dark up under the maples, catching the light from the street lamp directly over his flushed face.

What is this? He drove on, quickly, his foot pushing hard on the accelerator, going faster than he'd driven in twenty years. Speeding down streets crowded with homes, people in their yards, children he saw at ballet lessons, parents he recognized from soccer, piano. So once, years ago, she'd come up behind him at some party—Christmas, Halloween, or, back then, they had parties for no good reason at all. Where had they lived then? Over on Childress, before the oldest was born? Or was it even at their house at all? Charles was bent over the sink, twisting at an ice tray, and she'd fit her body snugly against his, run her fingernails down his spine. And he'd jerked around, popping ice cubes all over the place. They'd laughed, picked them up, talked too forcefully, not looking into each other's eyes.

That was years ago. Before Nick Kirk's second and last heart attack. Nick was small-boned and handsome. And though they were only casual acquaintances who played awful golf twice or three times a year, Charles had liked Nick. And now, oddly enough, missed him after neglecting his memory for ten years. Nick Kirk, who lived very carefully after the first heart attack. He had grown even thinner, more sunken-chested, but somehow that had only increased his handsomeness. He was thirty-two and had gone to bed without complaint and not gotten up.

Outside town, south on Antietam Road, he gathered speed. The car floated around the curves. Charles concentrated on the road. He moved the red needle past seventy. The tires squealed. He drifted over the twin yellow stripes. A blur of a sedan honked at him. The Buick brushed the high grass just off the shoulder.

He sped all the way to Madison County and the river. There at the Minit Market he filled the car with super unleaded and, sitting on the curb, drank a beer from a paper sack. He listened to the tick of the cooling engine. There were other roads in his head. He'd wanted a Mustang 289 for graduation.

“Then what the fuck do you want? What the Jesus fuck will get you to?”

Charles looked over his shoulder past the ice locker to the man on the pay phone. He paced between the rusted-out hood of a lime-green Gremlin and the minute privacy booth, the short silver cord limiting his range. Charles saw the pile of cigarette butts at his feet. He snuffed one out on the plastic side of the booth, the black pockmarks like bullet holes.

“Oh just hold that shit right there. Hell no I didn't. Not for a minute, you hear me? Goddamn right. Absolutely right. Well, so he's a motherfucker, too. You tell him that for me. Coming right from me. Go, tell him. Right now.”

“Just fuck you too!”

The young man slammed down the receiver and stood a minute. Then, lighting another cigarette, he put in a quarter and dialed.

“So, we have to talk, right? Am I right?”

At home Charles loaded in the vidéocassette and pushed the fast forward until the image became what he expected. He turned the sound off and lay on the couch.

No one knew him in Madisonville. He'd just walked right into the adults-only section and picked a number off the rack on the wall. Number 58. He hadn't flipped through the catalogs on the shelf.

He hadn't seen the title. And now he watched something he'd never seen before. Long tongues and penises as thick as beer sausages. The reds and pinks of women's genitalia. All the semen spent on backs and breasts. On opened lips. Lapping tongues. Charles had never had a woman take him in her mouth. And every single moment of sex, even then, in tents, canoes, cars at drive-ins done without such detail, without really looking.

Standing, his penis bulging in his pants, Charles went from window to window, lowering blinds, drawing drapes.

His eyes locked on the large screen that had shown him, Annie, the girls,
Swiss Family Robinson, The Sound of Music
. He felt a tremendous guilt.

Later he lay on the bed and masturbated—something he hadn't done in years. It was awkward, unnatural for him. Turning the light on in the bathroom, washing his hands and stomach, he felt caught. Before he went back to bed he rewound the tape and snapped the box shut. He'd mail it back to the store; he'd use the book mailer they'd gotten the latest Book-of-the-Month Club offering in, just last week.

Sunday

The morning began cool, but by eleven it was cloudy and humid. Charles's aftershave remained sticky, his wet hair soured slowly as he sweated in front of the TV. He finally got up and turned the air-conditioner down to sixty. He watched “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press.” He tried keeping his attention focused on this week's familiar faces. The country had discovered the poor again.

Often he looked out the window at the sky. He considered mowing now that he'd trimmed the hedges. Balancing everything out. Finally, a weed-whacker trim at the base of the flowerbeds, the swingset.

Charles grew despondent. He wasn't, he knew, the sort of person who dwells on things, who takes something and probes it, picks it to death. But in twenty-four hours he'd leave work and drive to Nashville and, by late tomorrow, the house would be filled with them again. The girls arguing like magpies; Annie making lists, catching him up on her family and the wedding. He lay back on the couch and tried his best to take comfort from those scenes sure to happen. He heard their voices and footsteps and his chest seemed difficult to lift, his breath shallow. He sat up.

Perhaps he should have gone to church; it would have helped pass the time.

He watched the Cubs lose until almost six, then he sacked the fridge for sandwich materials. Again in front of the television but looking out at the sky, he felt the same. “I really am going nuts, huh? Is that it?” He remembered a movie he'd seen years ago. In the very last scene Gene Hackman has gone nuts and, looking for a hidden microphone, had destroyed his beautiful apartment room by room. Stripped the wallpaper, pulled up the thin slats of oak flooring. Finally sat and played his saxophone in the middle of it all.

Charles turned off the TV and dressed in his yard clothes. But once outside he couldn't find pleasure anywhere. He mowed a strip from front to back but the grass was so short it barely showed. His mind seemed locked up tight by nothing at all. The mugginess drenched him and his damp underwear chafed. There was nothing unexplained, exotic, mysterious. Only the Sears mower belching, acting up. The Hallistons' terrible poodle barking.

Charles stopped the mower and drove off in the pickup. This time he drove slowly, carefully, through the neighborhoods. He chose streets he liked. He looked at the huge, tree-covered lots, the tremendous houses at the apex of circular drives. Then there were the narrower streets and smaller lots but older, too, with a more luxurious growth of lawns, trees, shrubs.

He drove all the way through town and out toward Mt. Carmel to the south. Five miles out he pulled off into an empty gravel parking lot. Here some huge international company had built and maintained a nature trail which looped through the hilly, forested countryside for two miles or so. It was a payback for a hundred years of corporate robbery. He and Annie had brought the girls out once and made it a quarter of the way around before insects and tired feet had turned them back. Charles shrugged his shoulders and locked the pickup. His sweat had left the dark outline of his back and legs on the upholstery.

He walked leisurely on the trail of pulverized wood bark. Every so often he stopped and read the slanting red metal plaques and stared off into the deep woods, his eyes searching hopelessly for certain types of maple, oak, ash. He remembered his silly canoeing trips, the dappled sunlight on bare flesh.

At plaque number twenty-seven Charles just stepped off the trail and walked down the hillside, crossed a dry stream, the water in its pools stagnant, covered with a hairy scum, and pulled his bulk through the thicket of undergrowth. He had scared himself already, and each step was taken with dread. Charlie, he kept saying to himself. Charlie, what are you doing? You idiot, the sun's going down. My God, man, turn around. You're not that teenage trailblazer. His thoughts kept hammering in his head trying to stop him, drag him back to the pickup. But after a while he'd sweated them away, and by sunset he only considered his raw thighs and heavy calves.

He walked a full hour, until almost dark, before he knew he could stop and rest without turning back, without running headlong toward the loop of trail and the pickup in the gravel lot. Because by now, with all the twisting and turning up easy valleys—treacherous slopes and limestone ledges soon proved too thwarting—he was lost. The sun was down, the clouds heavier than this morning.

He was tired. He figured he'd sweated away a couple of pounds. He pulled his soaking shirt away from his chest and stomach and looked around at the woods. The light was failing rapidly now. And all of this was incomprehensible. His back and legs began to stiffen; he stood clutching the trunk of a tree and walked on, amazed at the depth of these woods. He'd thought this countryside mostly open and cleared. Where farmers raised corn and soybeans, hogs and dairy herds.

In the dark, the travel was difficult. He learned to move carefully, to judge the distances of dark, unfamiliar shapes, to plant his feet cautiously, aware of the unevenness of the ground. He had fallen a half-dozen times and no longer feared falling, though by moving slowly he only stumbled occasionally, usually catching himself on a low bush or thick, supportive branch. He feared snakes, animals that shuffled away in the absolute dark of the lowest brush and fallen tree trunks. There was rain high over his head in the treetops; he heard it but it never reached his hot face.

He thought about Annie eating at her brother's dining table. Later, birdsong, harsh and hesitant, broke out all around him.

Suddenly he stepped out of the woods and onto a dirt road that bordered an open field. The dark shape of a cow lumbered past on the other side of a rail fence. He smelled it, heard it defecate. To his left a few hundred yards was a large white frame house up under some trees. Charles blinked his eyes in what seemed intense light after the darkness of the forest.

He turned up the road. The windshield of an old car caught the light from a high window. He heard animals move easily as he passed the barn. Turning his watch face to the sky he tried to tell the time but couldn't.

Almost at the front gate of the chain-link fence he stopped as a pack of small dogs tore out from under the house and raised an alarming racket of yelps and snapping teeth. The bravest lunged against the fence. Charles stepped back, gauging the height to the top bar.

Then a yellow porch light came on and the front door opened.

“Jasper, Mary, shut up, you hear me! Get quiet.”

Charles watched the thin old man descend the cement steps, his hand gripping the metal bannister. He scattered the dogs with a swipe of the cane in his free hand. Behind him, in the doorway, a small old woman pulled her quilted housecoat shut and locked it with clenched fists.

The old man hobbled to the gate and caught the top of it. Charles saw the scrollwork that framed a large letter W at its center.

“What the hell can I do for you? Sorta late to be making a social call, ain't it, young fella?”

Charles stepped up to the gate and smiled.

“By God, you're a mess.” The old man examined him. Charles noticed he tightened the grip on his cane, took half a step back toward the house.

Charles waved his right hand in front of his face, dismissed his appearance, any threat he might present. But then, before he said a word, he moved his hands again, the way he'd seen it done in the movies, on TV during congressional hearings. The woman signing at a frantic pace to keep up. Charles hoped they didn't know any better, that they didn't have a deaf son or granddaughter. He took the chance; he had no idea what the odds were. He just knew he didn't want to say anything now. He had no desire to talk. He was amazed at himself; he felt his mouth open, his chin drop. But he moved his fingers in front of his chest slowly, trying hard to duplicate what he'd only half-noticed, hoping to hell this old man and woman didn't recognize the fraud, scream, do anything but let him up on the porch and inside. He considered the news on TV, in newspapers, what his own reaction would be. Dreaded the scream, felt an answering one at the back of his throat.

“My God… well I'll be goddamned.” The old man spoke over his shoulder. “Livy he can't talk. It's all with his hands. I'll be damned.”