The Clinch Knot (18 page)

This is the End of Us

 

So how come you’re not home with your wife?

A good, hard question. But just try me. The Dog doesn’t say much about the past. The Dog lives not to think about it, endeavors to fish hard, to drink hard, and to sleep like ancient mud. There exists, out there, an endlessly open tap of trout water, a cool and intoxicating wilderness of clear waters along blue highways. And when all this ceases to soothe me, there is always the Big Two-Hearted. But now and then memory does lay siege. And then God help me. I would, I could, do anything to fight back, to conquer the past. I would die. Of course I would. I would offer up myself.

“Can’t you hear me? Ned? Can’t you just respond?”

My sweet bride Mary Jane calls me from too far away in the house, a practice I abhor. Injured somehow, she has gone away to clatter in the kitchen and now she tests me, wanting me to follow, seeing if I won’t. I post a numb and angry won’t, vigorously thumbing a seam on the couch cushion and feeling trapped. What haven’t I done? What haven’t I provided? What demon has gotten in past my guard? What the hell is her problem?

The upstairs water has stopped some time ago. The pipes are silent in the wall behind me. I haven’t noticed.

It is April. Our fight is about her mother, and about my father, and about six red tulips. These are the coordinates.

Crime is up in Boston. My business is good. We have just upgraded to a three-story, turreted, nineteenth-century textile merchant’s mansion in West Newton. Her mother is sick with what turns out to be uterine cysts, painful but benign. My father, on the other hand, has been sick all his life in certain ways that a scrupulously fault-free girl like Mary Jane cannot reference.

“Ned, can’t you just respond to me? I’m asking you where is Eamon?”

Of course, I don’t like the tone. I post a silence, and one small, internal breakdown in diction: bitch.

Irate, slamming things, my wife repeats, “Ned, I’m asking you: where is Eamon?”

I wonder suddenly: when have the pipes stopped hissing and hammering in the wall? I have no idea. “He went up to take a bath.”

“By himself?”

“Yes.”

“And you think that’s a good idea?”

“Obviously, I do.”

“I can’t hear you. What did you say?”

I am too tired for this. “Come in here and talk to me. I don’t have to follow you around.” And here is the twist, the tangle that costs us. She arrives angrily. Returning to our original topic, I say, “I did what I thought was a good idea. Dad was happy with it, and your mother doesn’t really mind, she just talks, so what is the problem?”

Things mix up, but I don’t budge. What is the problem? If the water is off, then Eamon hasn’t overflowed the tub. What else is there to worry about? Tulips? Shall we worry about the six red tulips? Eamon is a smart kid. He’s a Manta Ray at swim lessons.

Now my wife steps in front of me, crosses her arms. Interrogation.

“He wanted to take a bath himself. He said he knew how.”

“And you think that’s a good idea?”

I say again, “Obviously I do.”

“He is four.”

“Yes he is.”

“Jesus, Ned.”

Mary Jane is just exactly the woman you would expect out of the Dog in those days. A tall blonde, angular and fragile beneath a big bust, the daily authoress of an edgy, clingy, classical beauty that can disappear in a flash. And I am just the man to match. I am a quivering side of corporate beef. I wear expensive suits. I work out and then afterwards I eat and drink too much. I just barely keep my pants on around the hotties on my office staff—all of them young women I’ve hired because I own the company, all of them young women who look like my wife before she became a mother. I am, as we sometimes say, a piece of work.

At home, ever wary, I have learned to read Mary Jane’s quicksilver moods like a seaman reads a barometer. I fix on the text of her face. I check it every minute, trying to spot harbingers of the change that could come any moment. Her brow and lips and skin tone, how much freedom her hair dares to assume—any of these can shift suddenly and spook me, summoning guilt and reparations on my part. A year or so later in my life, hearing of this kabuki-like arrangement, a shrink will paint a picture of yours truly in the image of a pet dog—and hence I name myself—a slave to the external, a creature eternally unsure from one moment to the next whether he is good or bad. Only later will I understand. Only later—too much later—will the Dog go bad, gloriously bad, snap the chain, and run.

But poor Mary Jane. Really. And poor me, too.

This isn’t what we need.

And lately I have had enough of her, enough of myself, and enough of us. I have begun to snarl. I can’t believe how stupid we are. I tell her, “I never meant to offend anybody—”

“Well, congratulations, Neddy. That’s quite an aspiration.”

“I don’t know where you get this shit.”

“I married it.”

“Jesus, Mary Jane. Settle down.”

“Those were my red tulips,” she storms. “I planted them in front of my house. I watered them. They complemented the color of the house. I did not want to cut them. It was a sacrifice.”

“But I heard you say about a hundred times, ‘Mother would so love these red tulips.’ Then my dad called. He didn’t know your mother was sick. I told him. He said, ‘Neddy, I’ll take her some flowers. What kind of flowers does she like?’ I remembered the red tulips, and that you said your mother would love them. Something clicks. I tell Dad, ‘Go to the florist and get some red tulips. M.J.’s mother loves red tulips.’ I thought it was a good idea.”

Mary Jane squeezes her narrow fists and interrupts me with a growling sound. Her hair has come undone and her hyper-sensitive skin has exploded in a rash below the jaw.

“Ned,” she said, “Ned, that is not a thought. That is, like, half a thought.”

“Why is it such a big deal?”

“Ned. Ned, don’t you see the sacrifice I’ve made here? For nothing? Thanks to you? Don’t you see that I cut my red tulips? The ones that I planted. That I watered. That I would have liked to keep in front of my house, where I planted them. That I cut anyway, to give to my mother, who is sick?” My wife stops herself. For an unconscious moment she is a human female gyroscope, centering her anxiety. Then she shrieks toward the ceiling, “Eamon! What are you doing? Are you okay? Eamon? Eamon, answer me!”

“I told you, he’s taking a bath.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“He’s okay.”

“You know that?”

“I’ll check in a minute.”

She scowls at me.

“Finish your sad story,” I say.

“I cut them. My red tulips, Ned. I didn’t want to, but I believed that Mother would be pleased, so I cut them and I took them to the hospital in a vase. I gave them to my mother. And she says, ‘Oh, red tulips. More red tulips. It must be red tulip day. Neddy’s father dropped off

some red tulips just like that. Now I’ve got more red tulips than I know what to do with. ‘Jesus, Ned. Thanks a lot.” I stand up.

I can be enormously more sensitive than my wife will ever bother to know. It is me now—not my wife in her tulip rage—who senses that things have taken a fatal turn.

“Mary Jane,” I say, “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

Halfway up the stairs that afternoon in April I stop, overwhelmed by a dread all out of proportion to a fight over tulips. No one in our family is more sensitive than little Eamon. That boy’s skin can change five shades in a minute. That boy will crawl into my lap, feeling my sadness before I do. He just knows. And how long have Mary Jane and I been fighting? How many hours, months, years?

I bellow from the steps, “Eamon, answer your mother!”

From the entire upstairs comes a vaulted silence, drifting down on the iron smell of Boston bathwater. Then a single blink of sound—one drip from that old faucet onto a skin of perfect stillness.

“Eamon!” I roar.

I take the last flight of steps in threes. That sweet little boy has left the door wide open, the way he does when he poops, because he isn’t ready for privacy yet, not even when—

“Oh, God! Eamon!”

“Ned,” Mary Jane calls from downstairs, “what is it?”

I skid on his discarded t-shirt. The hand I fling for balance rakes toothbrushes and deodorants and cosmetics from the vanity. Our crap flies everywhere. A pink plastic razor hits the water and breaks the perfect seal beneath which lies our boy in a white-skinned embryonic curl.

“Ned? What’s wrong?”

“Oh, God. Mary Jane—”

“There’d better not be a mess all over.”

I tear our boy from tepid water. His skin is cold. His green eyes fix randomly on the direction from which his mother will arrive. His little body fits in the sink. The inside of his mouth is warm. I shove my own desperate breath in there. Snotty warmish water spews from

his nose. I stick a finger between his little ribs and feel no movement. I have no idea what I’m doing. I haven’t rehearsed this. Nothing like this can ever happen.

No!

I whip around and slam the bathroom door. I lock it. This is the end of us. The end of me. This is the end.

“Eamon,” I whisper, “please …”

Again and Again and Again

 

Dawn, bottled up by the storm, now tore through a cataclysm between cliff and sky. Sneed spun slowly in the eye of a foam-flecked eddy against a shallow rung of sun-red rock. Then he rolled himself over, spouted faintly, and sank beneath the swirl of his Jose Cuervo shirt.

I fought to the outer seam of the eddy, but the current pulled me past him. I stopped my thrashing and dove.

Underwater, my eyes stung and blurred, but there was light and I saw the shape of him—curled and sinking into the bottom of a hole where a pod of big trout finned aside in silhouette as he settled gently down. I burrowed hard into the swirling water, but Sneed’s limp arm slipped through my grasp and the river pulled me downstream.

I got air and whipped my head around. This picture is fixed forever: The rain had lifted. The air was cold. A spotlight sunrise beamed beneath the bulbous, skidding clouds to illuminate Sneed’s mother and the boat as they drifted through a long, smooth bend and out of sight.

And meanwhile the relentless current spun me, shoved me into chest-deep water where the bottom cobble was slick as bowling balls. I kicked at those stones, backpedaling. I saw Sneed come up again—slow and still, passive as death—but as his face cycled through the world of air, he spouted again and sucked air feebly before he went back down to join the fish.

There had to be a way. I smashed ashore. Downstream of the eddy, the cliff had crumbled and laddered into a skree that I could I climb. Breathless, I squished across a treacherous shelf of rock and came even with Sneed, then upstream of him, trying to read the current, trying to time it and lead myself
—Go, Dog, go
!—he wouldn’t last another minute.

I gathered a fifty-pound flake of sandstone in my arms, raised it overhead against the twirling, green-and-silver sky. Then I tipped into an awkward plunging dive that keeled my legs over and buckled my spine and slammed me straight down to murky mid-depth in the eddy. Everything slowed down. The water chilled. I seesawed to the river bottom.

Big trout bumped me as they glided aside. I let go of the rock and snatched Sneed by the back of his pants. I kicked up and clamped an arm across his chest, which now heaved and hiccupped with startling strength. We went under again. For a long moment I had no traction, no direction. Then I kicked for the fast lane at the margin of the eddy and let the thrusting water have its way, tumbling us into the bowling-ball zone where I got my feet down and steered with desperate tiptoes.

Down the Roam we bounced and twisted, downstream, downstream, Sneed puking water across the side of my head and gripping my neck so strongly that when we finally struck shallow water I took two zigzag staggers toward shore, tore his hands off, and dropped him I pounced on him then. I jammed my fingers through his teeth and saw the blood as he bit me. I cracked his mouth like a nut and rammed my lips inside and pinched his nose. I had forced myself to study CPR after Eamon’s death. I pounded breath against Sneed’s throat. Water—cold and acidic—pushed back and I spilled him over, yanked him on his belly, drained his lungs into the cobble.

Then I fought his clenching jaws again. I blew air in, fast and hard. I pulled back, rolled him again, just in time as he puked bile and Gatorade and river water across my arm. Again I forced my air, again and again and again, until at last I felt his chest push back and I raised up, my brain black and tangled, to spit and take my own deep breath.

The sky boomed. A cold gust. Now it hailed. A stinging sheet of white advanced across the river as I watched over Sneed. He was taking air—and then, as hail lashed his face, he hiccupped violently and stopped. I blocked the onslaught with my body and burrowed back through his defenses. Hailstones stung my back, bounced madly about our faces as I stayed in for ten breaths, then fifty, then a hundred. Then at last, pressed together, we calmed. A rhythm came. The nipping, clattering hail settled around us like a blanket, a screen that closed out all else, and Sneed focused, worked with me. He pulled in my air, timed it, relaxed the clenching of his chest. I stayed … stayed … then eased away and sat back.

Sneed pulled air in … out … in … out. His eyes opened. At first, and for many minutes, he looked at nothing. Gradually the storm lidded past, opening a scrubbed blue sky over rapidly warming air. Sneed looked around. He hiccupped twice, then seemed to find the off switch. He found rocks with his hands and pushed himself up. He looked at me in puzzlement. I thought it was the old shakes again, the ones I couldn’t control.

“Where is she?” he asked.