The Invisibles (21 page)

Comparing their love to the only one he's known, he lies on his
side, worrying, until the birds chirping outside his window seem to multiply and the twilight creeps in.

He comes home that afternoon to hear them fighting about Clive's trespass into the Kelly mansion. Reluctant to involve himself in a passion he regards as personal, he waits on the porch, listening to Haley yell and Clive sneer back. Along the street, his neighbors take advantage of the evening cool, uprooting weeds from the flower beds, walking their dogs in the road. He knows their darting looks, the same ones they gave him at the council meeting where he refused to put a white picket fence around his yard despite the disdainful sniffs of the Historic Society. They stare at his dented black truck as if at ugly children hoping their imperfections will vanish overnight. The local fad has long been to drive a German car because pickups and souped-up racers line southern front yards, and rich people here pride themselves on their unique neighborhood. They love to step outside and see a bus parked at the end of the street and seventy senior citizens with cameras following a tour guide who knows more about their houses than they do. Lucy was one of these people, less a snob than most, but she still insisted on living in this house. Daniel keeps her silver
BMW
in the garage, in good condition, because he likes to have her old things around.

Clive slams out of the house and comes at him in an unintended gesture of challenge, then veers off, pouting, to sit on the porch swing. Daniel leans against a porch post and sighs, planning to avoid Haley by opening the garage door and resuming yesterday's project. He intends to replace the drive shaft in the outboard motor for the rowboat he never uses.

Through the screen door, Haley shouts, “Don't walk out on me. You think that'll shut me up. You jackass! They are going to put
you in prison. I'm not going to be one of those women who visits.” She steps out, prettier mad because her eyelashes seem longer, so slight her tank top wrinkles over her long denim skirt. Seeing Daniel, she grows quiet. “Hey.”

“Hey,” says Daniel, deducing that they could not have fought at any other time. Haley sleeps so heavily she wouldn't have stirred last night when Clive crawled into bed with her. His stepson leaves for work early, and if the weekends are any indication, most days she stays in bed until noon. Wanting last night to be over, forgotten, he looks at Clive. “You clean up the truck?”

Clive nods without looking up. His face sags from needing sleep.

“Thank you, Daniel, he means to say ‘thank you.' He's so screwed up he forgot how to act to decent people.” Haley folds her arms and gives her boyfriend an imperious look, which goes ignored, and Daniel guesses the fight is over. They won't fight in front of him, which is for the best, since the kinds of neighbors they have are the kind who like to eavesdrop and then invent stories to supplement the dialogue.

Though he listens at the supermarket and the post office and even eats in a couple of restaurants, he hasn't been to for several owners now, that's the last he hears of the incident on the Kelly plantation, which means that Sheriff Boudreaux has kept his mouth shut. Daniel suspected he would, and he's happy he saw his old friend. Over the next week, his routine of driving the ferry, working in the garage, and sleeping hard at night restores itself. Clive and Haley go about their business as if nothing has happened, taking their long drives in the evening, quietly screwing in the room down the short hallway from Daniel's. Some nights he half-wakes to hear them leaving when the front door whines, going for a late-night drive or a six-pack maybe, and against worry he gives himself to sleep's undertow. Each day, as he drives the
motor ferry from one bank to the other, daydreams of a great flood wash him in a narcotic blandness that makes the time rush past him like a river of whiteness, and when he crawls into bed at night, he recalls nothing of his days.

He's finishing his morning coffee at the rail, watching the treacherous river currents roll over one another, when an usher stops beside him, wanting to tell someone about last night's fire at the Mimosa Groves plantation house in the next county. Having enjoyed this morning's hush, no radio or
TV
, Daniel wakes right up and listens to the whiskery guy. The sheriffs there left an empty cruiser at the end of the plantation's service road, faithful that its presence would deter any would-be arsonist. Around three they responded to a call about Mimosa Groves and found the 183-year-old house consumed in hot gasoline blaze. As before, the sheriffs suspect no one.

In town, after work, Daniel visits the video rental shop, the post office, a gas station, the library, renting and buying and borrowing for the sake of appearance, really just collecting information, and learns that his fellow townsfolk are all suspicious of one another. At the butcher's, his eyes on the stuffed pork chops on special, he waits in line behind two women comparing the alibis of their loved ones.

“My Chris was out, but he was at the Blue Moon with his friends. He said there were more than forty people who can account for it.”

“He'd never think to do that anyhow. Now, the twins, they're young enough that I could see them cooking up something like that, just because they don't understand the seriousness of it all. You should hear them and their friends; they think it's cool. And they sneak out all the time, to go skateboarding with their friends at midnight. But they don't have a car, so they couldn't have gone out that far.”

“Really? You think your boys would do something like that?”

“You wouldn't believe the things they used to do to the dog. Boys that age are cruel-minded.”

“Ain't that the truth? But these arsons aren't anything they would get up to. These are the act of a through-and-through madman. They're about us, too. In our very midst.”

Sensing an uncomfortable silence, Daniel looks up to see both women look quickly away from him. They flinch and then turn their backs to watch the butcher, in his bloody apron, carefully weigh two handfuls of ground sirloin on the counter scale. One of them mentions the new doctor's office going up on the edge of the town. The other says she's impressed by the fast work. They chatter as if Daniel has disappeared from behind them.

He waits, stiff with anger and the will to calm himself. He's been excluded like this since his childhood, and where normally his pride would heal him little fears gobble like piranha. Since hearing about Mimosa Groves he's tried to reconstruct the previous night, only to find himself stopped at the black wall of his sleep. He vividly remembers an incident from Clive's childhood, a little while after Daniel and Lucy married, when a sheriff brought the boy home because he and two other boys were caught trying to set fire to a kitten in the trees behind the baseball diamonds. The little cat, alive and well aside from a singed tail, belonged to another kid, one whom Clive's partners in crime said his stepson liked to bully at school. Fearing she'd raised a little pyromaniac, Lucy sent her son to a therapist, who after a few meetings with Clive assured her that a fascination with fire wasn't uncommon among children. He doubted that Clive was actually a firebug. Lucy was relieved by the man's opinion, and Daniel was unsurprised, having in his childhood known many boys who tortured animals at one time or another. Sure enough, the next time a sheriff brought Clive home,
it was for shoplifting, and the time after that, it was for striking a younger boy in the head with bat. He and Lucy forgot all about the kitten with the burned tail.

The episode returns to him as he drives home to find the house empty, as he searches the armoire and the strewn-about clothes in Clive and Haley's bedroom for some scrap of evidence that his stepson is an arsonist. He remembers it as he gazes in on the contents of his refrigerator. He takes a cold beer and sits on the front step, still wearing his sweat-stained work clothes, and waits for Clive and Haley to appear. He plans to question Clive this time and tries to invent a justification for burning those houses, for keeping it a secret from the town. The sour beer helps him stretch out time, put off thinking.

He's alarmed when a sheriff's cruiser parks at the curb but breathes a little when he sees Boudreaux at the wheel, dressed in a T-shirt, waving at him. He stands as his old friend climbs out of the car and crosses the yard carrying a twelve-pack, shaking his head and wearing a puzzled smile. “You heard about the fire, right?”

“Yeah, who hasn't?” Daniel stares at the sheriff's tucked-in shirt and knee-high socks. He can't remember the last time he saw Boudreaux out of his beige uniform. The man's put on a few pounds since the days they hunted ducks together with the sheriff's dogs.

“I'd offer you a beer, but it seems our thoughts were in the same phase. This'll make a healthy surplus.” Boudreaux unleashes a beast of a handshake, and they take a seat on the front step. Once the sheriff has enjoyed his first sip he holds his head aloft, as if in solemn thought. “That was the fifth house to go up. The forensics report came back and said that it was a gasoline fire, same as the others. But they're saying this is probably one of those copycat crimes.”

“Why's that?”

“The fire was started on the ground floor. In the others, whoever did it started a separate fire on each one. Now we got a man watching the Kelly place every night, from ten until dawn. Clive still working there?”

“I doubt anyone else would hire him, so there's not a whole lot of choice. Clive only got the job because Kelly was in a rush to get down to his beach house. Guy hates him, talks to him like he's a child.”

Boudreaux laughs at this. “Old man Kelly's not an easy man to get to like you. And I don't expect Clive helped him out in that area.”

“The kid won't look at him.” Saying this, Daniel swells with pride. He's always liked to see stuffy old money folks like Kelly annoyed by peasants like him. “But the job keeps Haley in plastic jewelry and milkshakes.”

“The important things in life,” Boudreaux says. “I used to think those were the law and the church. Then I got married.” He peers back at the quiet house. “Where are the lovebirds?”

“Out driving. Maybe parked somewhere.”

“Too bad I'm off duty.”

They watch the homecoming traffic stream into the neighborhood, and as the expensive cars and their well-dressed drivers pass they speak of unimportant things, easing themselves back into the grooves of their old friendship. Grateful for the sheriff's gentle manner, Daniel is beset by a sweet aching with each smile and look into his old friend's eyes. He wishes he had held on to this friendship. Just this one. After Lucy died, he stopped talking to everyone. He didn't answer the telephone, ignored the doorbell, and when people turned back it was easy to blame them. How stupid he feels now, seeing his former self for a confused and bitter man, locking his door against help. Boudreaux asks for
his thoughts on the weather, rescuing him from this self-torture. Daniel discovers he has theories of weather patterns on the coastal plain, from working so long on the river. Just as the sweeping rains make room for brilliant days, they turn to talk of the changing town, how the fountains have remained teeming with frogs for over forty years, of former classmates who've died, of canals and fields they once hunted, now too polluted or overrun by new generations of hunters to go back to.

“You remember when we stole the auto ferry?”

“Of course I remember stealing the auto ferry.” They'd come puttering back to the dock, drunk and mortified by the machine and the river they'd taken on. The sheriffs had been waiting for them and kept them in the Wayne cell until dawn.

“You remember why we stole the auto ferry?” Boudreaux sniggers into his fist, his face sincerely confused and yet mocking puzzlement.

“We wanted to see if anybody would notice if we did it.”

“Yeah, right on, and you knew how to drive it, even back then. You had a sixth sense,” Boudreaux says. “You were made to drive that thing.”

“Hell, they made you a sheriff.”

“Justice is a mysterious thing.”

They've finished most of the twelve-pack when Clive's red pickup pulls into the driveway, and he and Haley gaze a moment at the scene on the front porch. Clive says something and they both get out. He slowly comes around the front of the truck, squinting at Boudreaux, who drunkenly waves at him. Haley, less intimidated, walks smiling up the sidewalk, her purse dangling at her side. She stops in front of Daniel and the sheriff and flirtatiously cocks a hip to one side. The sheriff looks at her breasts long enough to study them. She grins. “Hey y'all. Looks like you two boys are up to no good.”

Boudreaux jabs a finger at Daniel and says, “It's all his fault. He flagged me down and got me drunk as a goat.”

“That true, Daniel?”

He shrugs, taken a little aback by the shift in the sheriff's demeanor, remembering now that Boudreaux has always put on a show for attractive women.

“Well, you ought to be ashamed, corrupting an officer of the law like that.”

Daniel goes along with the joke, mimicking the sheriff's drunkenness, and holds out his fists side by side. “Better put the cuffs on me.” The sheriff guffaws at this.

Haley widens her eyes and looks at the cruiser. “He driving home?”

“Somebody's got to,” Boudreaux says, and his glad entirety trembles with laughter.

Clive steps up beside his girlfriend, flashing his teeth, watching the sheriff. He shifts his weight from foot to foot and holds up a hand in greeting.

“Hey, Clive, how you doing? Yard work treating you good?” Boudreaux winces back a burp. “You look fit.”

“Yeah.” Clive frowns. “Yeah, I'm getting into shape.”

Daniel sees them all drift toward an awkward silence. He puts in, “You should have seen the anthill he stepped into the other day. Blisters all over his ankle.”