Beneath the Weight of Sadness (37 page)

“I know. We’re going over to a booth. When it’s done give me a wave.”

Lois looked at me and then at my food. “Anything wrong?”

“No,” I said. “Just waiting.” She nodded and walked away, her sexy strut gone also.

We made our way over to a booth and I drained my whiskey as we sat down. “I forgot to give a tip, plus I need another. How about you?”

“I wouldn’t complain.” She drained her own glass, and handed it to me. I walked back to the bar and put the glasses down. Lois was talking to a guy with a beard and a hat with CAT written on the front. She finally looked around at me and I raised the two glasses. She looked over at the booth and then back at me.

“I’ll bring them over,” she shouted over the din of the conversations. I took out some cash and put a five on the counter and pointed to it and then to her. She smiled.

Bea was checking her cell phone when I slid into the booth. The seats were low and I felt small in it. I wondered if part of that was the fact that I was across from a woman who was not Amy. I ate a few more fries. She put the phone back in her bag and looked at me, again, intently. Her green eyes had something behind them.

“So what do people do around here to make a living?”

“Same thing people do most anywhere, I guess. Work.”

“At what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I mean, in town there are merchants, banks, stores. Outside of town there’s the big chains, Walmart, Home Depot, those kinds of places. And then there’s the gas money.”

“What gas?” I was puzzled.

“Gas deposits in the shale. People sell the gas rights on their land.” She stopped talking and looked at me. She smiled. “You look like an informed guy. The Marcellus Shale? You must’ve heard of it? The fracturing process?”

“I didn’t know it was in this area.”

“This is one of the richest areas of gas in Pennsylvania.” She looked over at the bar. “Most of those guys over there can afford steak now instead of venison. In fact, most of them can come here and sit and have a beer and a shot and a steak and not have to wait for the end of the month to pay the tab.”

“So that’s why all the trucks are on 15.”

She nodded but her face lost its smile. “It’s done something to this area. Some of it good, mostly bad.”

“Why bad?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The roads are awful, people are divided on the results of money versus the environmental damage. Things have changed around here. I imagine that’s what it must’ve been like when oil was found in Texas. Money mostly corrupts, in one form or another.”

“What about you?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lois heading over with a tray. She set it down on the edge of the table and put out Bea’s food and her drink. She put down my whiskey and then stood straight, hands on her hips. “Anything else for you?”

“Not right now, thank you,” I said.

Lois looked at Bea. “Can I get you anything?”

“No, thank you.”

Lois turned and left. I watched her walk away.

“She sees every woman as a threat,” Bea said. “She was that way all the years we grew up together.”

“You’ve been here all your life?”

“Except for college, yes. My father and mother had a beautiful dairy farm that slowly died like all the farms around here.”

“What do you do now?”

“I’m a pediatrician in Wellsboro. Mostly I work out of the hospital. What about you?”

I had to think what Matt Linquist would be doing now. “I’m a lawyer in Patterson. Mostly doing stuff I don’t want to do. I started out with the ACLU. I should’ve stayed there.”

She smiled brightly after taking a bite of her venison burger. She pointed down at the plate. “I was raised on venison. Like every other man in this area, my father hunted. I even tried it once, but I couldn’t kill anything, let alone those pretty animals. Let someone else do it.”

“So you’re a doctor. Where’d you go to medical school?”

“University of Pennsylvania.”

“Ah,” I said, smiling. “Our rivals. I went to Columbia. So’d my wife.”

She wiped her hands on her napkin and then offered her hand. We shook hands and laughed.

“Have you ever been married, Bea?”

“Nope. Never got around to it. Almost, once.”

We both ate for a while in silence. Knowing her background: This wasn’t the way I’d planned it. Lois would’ve been the obvious choice, but as we sat there, I realized I probably couldn’t’ve pulled it off going in that direction. I wasn’t equipped with the facility some men had. I’d never been that way.

Finally she said, “Do you have kids?”

The question surprised me. Since Truman had been gone, I’d only been around people who knew not to ask a question like that, who knew that the subject of my son’s existence was inviolable. But of course that was one of the first questions people our age asked each other. It was part of being an adult, part of any introductory conversation.

“Yes,” I said, “I have a son. He’s seventeen years old. Truman.”

“I’ve never had children. I always found ways for that not to happen. I guess I regret it in a way.”

“Don’t,” I said. “A lot of things can happen when you have children. A lot of things you don’t anticipate.”

She looked at me levelly. “You and…Truman don’t get along.”

I shook my head and thought about how to answer that question. How could I say only one thing about Truman and not say everything? How was there a way to sum up how empty I felt without him in the world?

“We get along very well,” I finally said. “But his whole life I’ve worried about his welfare, I’ve worried about my responsibility to make certain he’s safe.” I smiled at her. “And that’s hard when you have a son who wants to hack away at his own path to the future.”

“I would think that’s what every parent would want.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, that’s exactly what they want.” I took a sip of my whiskey. “So why didn’t you have kids?”

She laughed and covered her mouth. “For one thing it’s hard to find someone to have kids with.” She nodded her head in the direction of the bar. “Not a lot of choice in the gene pool around here.” She looked down at her drink and twisted the glass around, clicking the ice. “I guess I got too busy watching out for other people’s kids, too. There’s some pretty sad stuff going on in an area like this. Not that
here
has any exclusivity on the vile ways kids are treated by adults sometimes, even adults who’ve brought them into the world.”

I looked over to the bar and got Lois’s attention. I pointed to our drinks and put two fingers in the air. I wanted to drink more bourbon so I could get the idea of Truman out of my mind, get back to the very welcome distraction Bea was providing. I looked back at her and she smiled.

“I guess I could have one more. I’m off tomorrow.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m over at the Colton Point Motel. Maybe we could have a nightcap there. I only have whiskey in my bag, though.”

She looked at me curiously and then smiled. “I haven’t been so smoothly romanced by a guy in a long time.”

I put my hands in the air in surrender. “I didn’t mean it that way. Really. I just came up here to get away from things, get some hiking in, maybe, do another thing or two. I didn’t expect to meet someone like you or that I would invite
someone like you
back to my motel room.”

She rested her chin on her hands and stared into my eyes. I’d bet children felt instant comfort by the green of them. I didn’t look away. I couldn’t.

“I like whiskey,” she finally said.

There are those moments in my life where everything seems to fall into place as if the universe has rested its laser beam on me. How could I have anticipated that taking Beatrice Kimble back to the Colton Point Motel would’ve been something far more profound than what I’d thought would only get me to where I needed to go? She opened her legs to me in the way I knew she must’ve opened her heart to the children she treated. I was overwhelmed by her sexiness, by her composure when I entered her, as if we’d been lovers for years. And yet I could instantly sense it had been a long time since she’d been with a man. What’s more, I didn’t have an ounce of guilt or regret—at least at that moment. Throughout our entire marriage, I’d never been unfaithful to Amy. Never even thought of being with another woman. But ever since I’d entered that room and seen my boy’s lovely body violated into un-Truman, all I’d previously thought to be sanctified now seemed ground to dust.

As we made love, I realized the flush that I’d seen on Bea was not the result of alcohol, but a tender and tantalizing rigidity I hadn’t anticipated. Beatrice was a name I associated with blue hair and gossip, but it was splendid on Bea, in the same way that an iceberg off the Florida coast would be splendid. She was lovely and tender and, when I awoke in the morning, her body entwined in my own, my resolve had begun to wane. I knew, though, I had to marshal whatever it took. I wasn’t doing this for me or Amy, but for my dead son, and so I sat up in bed with my back to Bea and I waited for her to wake. When she did, and placed her hand on my bare shoulder, I didn’t turn but looked at the opposite wall with the painting of the Grand Canyon, which was probably displayed in every room, and said to my new lover, “I need to buy a gun.”

Her hand froze on my back. What would I have thought had our roles been reversed? I didn’t know.

“I don’t understand,” she finally said.

“I was arrested in protest of the Iraq war. I have a record because of it.”

I felt her sit up. She pulled her hand away, but I didn’t want to turn toward her. I was fairly certain if I did, I would tell her the truth.

“This is why I’m here?” she asked. I could sense the hurt in her voice.

“Not now it isn’t. It was.”

There was a long silence and I could feel her breath on my shoulders. It felt accusatory.

“Why?”

“Why what,” I said.

“Why do you need a gun?”

“I can’t tell you why. I just need one.”

She laughed. “You’re not going to knock off a convenience store, are you?”

“No,” I said.

“If I do this, will I ever see you again?”

“If you’d asked me that eight hours ago, I’d’ve said no. Or I might have said yes, but I’d have been lying. But now I don’t know.”

I felt her roll over so that her back was toward me.

“Don’t do me any favors,” she said.

“I’m trying to be honest with you. I didn’t say that to hurt you. I said it because I needed someone to buy me a gun. I had no idea this would be…” I stopped there because I didn’t know how to finish.

“I feel like hitting you,” she finally said. “You probably think I’m a whore.”

Then I did turn. Her back was to me, and I lay next to her and put my arms around her waist. “I think you’re lovely.”

She spit out a laugh. “Jesus Christ.” She shook her head. “I imagine you lost your license to practice.”

“It was suspended for a year,” I lied.

“So next you’ll tell me you’re still happily married. Or maybe that’s why you want the gun. You’re not happily married.”

I smelled her hair, shampoo still lingering, and her neck and her shoulders, and I had the urge to make love to her again without remorse or regret or guilt. My life had changed so dramatically in two months. I felt like I was another person but in the same skin. I had even had a moment of lusting after Carly Rodenbaugh. The world would never be the same for me, and lying next to this woman only confirmed that fact.

“I don’t need it to kill anyone, Bea. I need it for protection. You may or you may not know that Patterson, New Jersey, is not the safest town to live in, even the nicer parts. My house was broken into twice. People have no respect for anything anymore.”

She laughed and I felt the heave of her shoulders. She remained facing the wall. “You’d fit right here. When you say ‘people,’ I imagine you mean blacks.”

“No, I don’t. I mean people who think the law doesn’t pertain to them. I mean people who are so full of hate and self-importance they think their idea of justice is embraced by everyone.”

“And that, you think, is the kind of people who broke into your house?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. But I do know that if I’d been inside my house with a gun at the time those people decided they could just come in and take what they wanted, I would probably not be here right now.”

“So you thought you would come up here and charm the pants off some woman and then get her to buy you a gun?”

“I thought I would pay someone to buy me a gun. I never thought I would be next to you this morning, Bea. Please believe me. I thought maybe Lois would do it for me if I offered her money.”

“From the arrows she shot across to me, I think she’d’ve done it for other reasons. Like I said, there isn’t a lot to choose from in this area.”

She sat up suddenly and turned to me. She had perfect breasts, probably because she’d never had children. I felt a sudden intense desire. She pushed me flat on the bed, her hands on my chest. “Okay, Matt Linquist. I’ll buy you a gun. I don’t know why I will. I’ll probably regret it, but I’ll do it for you.”