Lamb (4 page)

“Will you be on the old horse?”

“Oh, you sweet girl. I’ll
be
that horse. Look at me. I am that sad old horse. I’ll come stumbling up
the edge of the road. So tired. But if you put your face very close, here, to my breath—here, closer, like that—and if you listen carefully, you’ll hear me whisper. Come up. Let’s go get the world while there’s still some of it worth getting.”

They sat very still.

“You want to?”

She opened her eyes. “Yes.”

“Okay?”

“You mean really?”

“I mean really. Ready or not. How long do you need to pack?”

She grinned. “Oh please,” she said. “About one minute.”

He tipped back his soda and went aaaaahhhhh and grinned at her. “Wouldn’t it be fun if we could?”

“Can’t we?”

“Of course not, stupid.”

The dear girl. How could she not carry Lamb with her, all the grassy fields he painted hanging between her little face and the world, bright screens printed with the images he made for her: flashes of green and silver; huge birds circling in the wind; the wet brown eye of a horse; yellow eggs
on a breakfast dish; the curve of their backs atop a weathered rail fence on a cool blue morning.

When she returned home the night after their tailgate picnic, it was almost dark. Lamb watched her go in and wait in the dirty yellow light for the steel elevator doors to open. She’d travel up the nine floors with a skinny boy whose face was lumpy and red with acne. He lived on fourteen. He wore skinny black jeans and a silver chain from his front pocket to the back. He might smirk and point his eyes at Tommie like he was hungry, and didn’t she know what for?

“What happened to your face?” he would ask her. “Did someone put a colander over your head and spray diarrhea on you?” He crossed his hands behind his head and leaned back against the metal wall. “I have a special lotion that’ll take them off. If you want me to spread some of it on you.”

Tommie would stare ahead until the boy spat across the car to the dented steel wall upon which she’d fixed her gaze. A yellow-brown glob would slide down the metal, and Tommie would shut her eyes, the bees and white heads of flowers nodding in the warm daylight and the silhouette of Gary’s baseball cap written across the inside of her skull.

Her mom and her mom’s boyfriend would be on the new couch watching TV, two plates greased
and salted and peppered before them on the coffee table. The boyfriend—we’ll call him Jessie—would turn around when Tommie opened the door with her key.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Jenny’s.”

“Your mom just called there.”

“I took the long way home.” Her hair falling in tangled strings about her shoulders and her skin gray in the weak light.

“It’s not safe for you to be out walking around there alone in the dark, baby,” her mother would call out from the couch.

“Okay.”

“What do you mean okay?” Jessie would say, the girl’s mother lifting her drowsy head from Jessie’s lap.

“I won’t do it again.”

Say she stood there watching them watch the screen for a minute. Two minutes. Three. No one saying anything.

“I know someone who died watching TV.”

“No you don’t.” Jessie turning from the screen to look at her.

“Hey, baby. Come over here and say hello.” Her mother would be a little round, soft, heavy. Her hair short, all her movements slow and tired. Tired all the time. “Are you hungry?”

“Well, not someone I know,” Tommie might say, coming around the couch. “Just someone I heard about. One of my teacher’s dads.”

“He was probably old.”

“It just goes to show, you know. You die the way you live.”

“Who told you that?”

“Some families do other stuff.”

“Tommie, your mother is tired. She’s been working her butt off for you all day. We sit here worrying about you, wondering where the hell is Tommie, and the first thing you do when you come home is tell us you don’t get enough attention.” Jessie might raise his voice, his neck very straight and head lifted toward her but his eyes pointed at the television.

“Give me a kiss. And go take a shower,” Mom might say. “You smell like a puppy dog. Where were you all day?”

“Making mud pies.”

“There isn’t any mud around here,” Jessie would say.

“You have everything ready for school?”

“Yep.”

Then Tommie would go into the bathroom and move all her mother’s and Jessie’s things out of the way and fill up the tub and sneak her mother’s razor to shave her legs. First time.

The first Monday after his father’s funeral, a dark belly of heavy, low-hanging sky split open before the first line of daylight had cracked the eastern horizon. Rain splashed against the concrete and pooled in colored puddles of grease. The chilly images a forerunner of winter, an early glimpse of those dark mornings and afternoons that fill a Midwesterner’s heart with dread.

Miserable in jeans and his father’s ball cap nearly soaked a dark and even blue, David Lamb went in early to work, to pack up and clear out his desk. When Wilson came by in his long coat, still shaking out a cool slime of rain from his dark umbrella, Lamb sat down on the edge of his desk and faced the doorway.

“I’m sorry, David.” Wilson stood in the doorway. There may have been a time when Wilson would have called him Lamb. Would have had David and Cathy over for dinner with his wife and two daughters at Wilson’s house in Evanston, the kitchen full of clear, steady light glancing off the metal lake outside the French doors.

There was a time ten years earlier when he and Wilson met after work to talk about the five-year plan, the ten-year, and the twenty. Cheerfully bent on establishing their own firm, and equal partners.
They took a vacation together, then two, with their wives, with Wilson’s girls.

“He was a good guy,” Wilson said.

“Thanks.”

Wilson held a stainless-steel mug of coffee before him like an offering, raising it a little in anticipation of stepping back and excusing himself.

“It’s been one thing after another,” Lamb said.

“Family in town?”

Lamb nodded. “Staying with me and Cathy.”

Wilson looked down at his shoes, his ears red. “You’ve kind of made a mess of things here, David.”

“With the girl.”

“With the girl.”

“She’ll be all right. She just needs not having me around for a while.”

“It puts me in a hell of a spot.”

“I can appreciate that.”

“She know you’re leaving today?”

Lamb said nothing.

“Jesus, David.”

“Will you give me a few weeks, Wilson? I just need a few weeks.”

“She doesn’t know you’re divorced, either.”

Lamb’s face warmed. “You talked to Cathy.”

“Months ago, David. July.” It could not have been an easy conversation for a man like Wilson.
“There are real limits to what I can do here. This is all sort of beyond what I know how to deal with.”

Lamb said nothing.

“This is a great position for Linnie, David. And she’s good for us.”

“I know it.”

“Don’t wreck her career. Take your three weeks. Take a full month, okay? Figure it out.”

“I understand.”

“I want you here, David. We all want you to stay. In spite of. Everything.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll carry your accounts till we hear from you.”

“I can keep them.”

“No.” He stepped out into the hallway. “I’ll tell Karen to forward your calls. It’s only a few weeks. You just go.”

Leaving the office, a cardboard box under his arm, he ran into Linnie in the lobby in the long blue raincoat he bought her.

“Oh,” he said. “You’re in early.”

Water ran from the ends of her hair. “Where are you going?”

“I’m just making calls today,” he said. “Thought I’d work from home.”

He looked around, lifted her chin, and kissed her lips and the corners of her mouth.

“Can you come to dinner?” She stepped back a little on one foot and looked out at the rain, sorry to be asking. “I have this really good wine.”

“I know what you have.” The heat rose in her face. She was a beautiful girl. Woman. He checked his watch. “I don’t think I can wait for dinner.”

“You say.”

He lowered his voice. “Will you open your raincoat for me?”

“David. We haven’t had a proper conversation in two weeks.”

“We had a proper conversation last night.”

Her face reddened. He loved to see it. “Come,” he said and took her hand. “Let’s take the stairs.”

In the stairwell she twisted her hand from his. “You know there are plenty of guys who would be happy to come sample my wine.”

“Lin.” He kissed her mouth. “You knew how this was going to be.” He kissed her neck. “Would you rather I just leave you alone?” He backed up. “This is just hurting you, isn’t it?”

Nothing.

“Am I just hurting you, Lin? Am I ruining your life?” She slouched into her hips and reached her arms around his neck. He untied the belt of her
raincoat. “Okay?” The coat swished in the stairwell and her shoes echoed as she adjusted her feet. They listened and watched and moved slowly. He held her head in his hand to keep it off the cinder-block wall behind her. “Right?” he said. “Is this what we do?” She nodded her head in his hand. “Say yes.”

“Yes.”

“Say this is what we do.”

“This is what we do.”

She was retying her hair when Lamb pulled her in by the loose ends of her belt and pressed his forehead to hers. Both their faces damp and warm, their breath quickened. “You should let the world have you a little more than it does,” he said. “Go find your local alum chapter. Hang out with some of those young Princeton guys. Do it. Have them over for your wine. It hurts me to say, but it’s the truth. You should let one of them take you to the Nine and you should share a dessert and let him put his arm around you while you walk through the city.”

“Don’t.”

“Let me say this, Lin. It’s important for me to say it. You should. You should let him walk you to the end of the pier.”

“The pier is yours.”

His eyes filled. “Do you mean it?”

“It’s just how it is.”

He looked down at his hands. “It isn’t easy for me to say these things.”

“I can’t share myself like that David. I’m not like that.”

“Oh.” He let her go and leaned against the metal rail behind him. “I see.”

“No, come on. I wasn’t … I just need you to know that. It’s important for me to have you know it.”

“What do you want me to do with that information?”

“Just keep it for now.”

“Okay. You’ll tell me if there’s something else I ought to do with it?”

She nodded, and again he kissed her mouth and her neck and her throat and told her she was the prettiest girl on the block, and that someday the world would be theirs and they’d have every day and every hour and every minute.

“Make your calls from here,” she said, the curled fray of her bangs dry now. Her eyes big. “We can do lunch here. On the stairs.”

He looked at his watch. “I’m already on my way to being late.”

“Okay.”

“I have a life, Lin. There are certain things I need to do.”

“I know.”

“Listen. I’m not stupid. I know I don’t deserve you. No. I don’t. And I know I’m lucky to have you now.”

“Come over tonight. Please.”

He went down the stairs where his box of papers and junk sat propped against the heavy door. “If you don’t hear from me tonight or for a couple of days, you’ll know I’m thinking of you, right? Doing the things I have to do so we can take a couple of days together.”

“We should go to the Michigan dunes before it gets too cold.”

“Bucket of chicken?”

“Bottle of champagne.”

“Good. Pick one out. And wait for me.” He opened the heavy door of the stairwell and went out.

Two blocks from the triplet apartments Lamb found the girl, alone at her bus stop and soaked beneath a small, sagging pink umbrella.

“How did you know to come here early?” He grinned.

“How did you?” She pulled the door shut and set the umbrella at her feet. Rain dripped from her nose.

“You and me,” he said. “We seem to talk without talking.”

“I know. It’s totally weird.”

“I think maybe you were strategizing,” he said. “You don’t have a crush on me, do you?”

“I just like rain.” Pink behind her freckles.

“I see.”

“Are you driving me to school?”

“I thought we’d skip school today. Want to?”

“Duh.”

“Do we need to call in? As a kindness to your worried teachers?”

“I’ll just tell my mom I was sick and stayed home and she’ll write me a note tomorrow.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“Once.”

He gave her a look.

“Okay, twice.”

“So I’m not corrupting you.”

“Nope.”

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

“I’m going to trust you on that.” He glanced sideways at her. “Can I trust you?”

“Yes.”

“Shake on it?” They shook.

He drove twenty miles west to a little town at the falls of the Fox River, where every house sat alone on a soft green hill strewn with yellow leaves. The center of town made a crooked stripe of brick and stone storefronts, of windows strung with colored glass beads or draped in damask. The sidewalks were bare and wet; no one was out. The sky was a lightless pewter and lamps inside the shops shone bright yellow. He removed his coat and put it over the girl’s head and shoulders to shield her from a fine, cold rain, and he lifted his face and throat into the weather, smiling with all his teeth. He took her into a candy store and filled a little brown paper bag with Coke bottle gummies and lemon drops and sour red licorice coated with sugar. The woman behind the counter folded the bag and sealed it with a golden sticker and gave them each a vanilla buttercream. Outside he took her elbow like a gentleman, which made her laugh, and he handed over the bag.

“I would just like to draw your attention to the fact, my lady”—he cleared his throat and furrowed his brow—“that you are taking candy from a stranger.”

She took the bag. “Am not.”

“This is a lesson for you,” he said, holding her forearm. “A man should always take your arm and let you have the inside of the walk.”