Now and Again (37 page)

“How could I not have bothered? Once I realized all the terrible things that were happening, that's all I could think about. It seemed selfish to be concerned with myself or even with Lyle and Will when innocent people were in cages. So I started to look for evidence, thinking that was the way to convince other people of the truth. But I didn't convince them. They pointed to rules and procedures and only became more firmly entrenched in their positions. Which made me wonder—what if the important thing isn't reason or evidence at all? What if it's more to do with imagination? If you can imagine what it's like for someone else, you still might lock that person up—you might even kill him—but you'd comprehend the tragedy of what you were doing, wouldn't you?”

“Hmm,” said the proprietor. “You might be overthinking it…but at least you're overthinking it at the best little deli in Scottsdale! You might as well take advantage of it. You might as well sit right here at the counter and have a cold drink and my signature eggplant and feta sandwich.”

The proprietor busied himself behind the counter before turning and presenting her with two thick slabs of bread pinned together with a toothpick and garnished with parsley and a radish. If he had understood anything of what she was saying, he gave no sign of it. “Now,” he said, “I want to hear more about Lyle and Will.”

Maggie's heart leapt like it had finally been returned to water after lying helplessly on the bank. She had purposely put her family out of her mind, but now she poured out the story of her life in Red Bud. She told of dinners at the Main Street Diner and how the three of them had squeezed together in the front seat of the truck before she had quit her job at the munitions plant. She told how Lyle had loved turkey and cheese or ham and mayo in his lunch until she had stopped buying turkey because the birds were raised in such tight quarters that part of their beaks and toes had to be removed to prevent them from injuring each other and ham because of how the sows were confined to cramped gestation crates until they were too old to be useful, at which time they were killed. She was surprised to find herself voicing not only what she loved about Lyle, but also the things that irritated her. She described how Lyle would shake his head over a dilemma before declaring, “Who am I to say! There are experts for that sort of thing.” She recalled how she was always sticking up for Lyle, but when was the last time Lyle had stuck up for her?

“It sounds like you had a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. It sounds like Lyle took advantage of you. No wonder you ran away.”

“I didn't run away!” she exclaimed. “And Lyle didn't take advantage of me at all!” She tore a crust off her sandwich and tossed it to Dino, who was waiting for her by the door. It was disconcerting to be misunderstood. But how did a person tell his or her story exactly the way it was?

“When the responsibilities of your family became overwhelming, you traded them in for responsibilities of a different kind.”

“That's not the way it was at all.”

Right from the start, Maggie had assumed Lyle needed her more than she had needed him. Even worse, she had let other people think it. Whenever Misty or True said, “I hope Lyle knows how lucky he is,” Maggie had never corrected them or said that she was lucky too. And if Lyle gave Will what she thought was bad advice, she would interrupt and contradict him, right in front of Will. Now she wondered if the proprietor was a little bit right about running away, and if what she was running away from had mostly been her fault.

E
very evening, the first thing Lyle would see when he walked into the house was the pile of bills on Maggie's desk. He tried putting a kitchen towel over it, but that only made the pile seem to be taunting him. The Saturday after the phone service was terminated, Lyle got up early and cleared a space on the desk. After setting the checkbook and a blue felt-tip pen in the space, he poured a cup of coffee and sat in Maggie's chair with his knees bumping up against the underside of the pencil drawer. He hadn't worked at a desk in over twenty years, and his eyes automatically flew to the door and then to the window. A flock of crows settled on the lawn, their wings black and gleaming. Maggie's bicycle, which he guessed now belonged to Will, rusted against the side of the shed, and the mud-spattered truck angled into its parking spot, indicating that Will had been the last to drive it. Lyle hadn't heard him come in—where was Will going so late at night? He wished he could discuss it with Maggie, but he didn't want to worry her. He wished he could discuss it with Jimmy Sweets without Jimmy always taking Will's side and acting as if Lyle didn't know his own son. When the crows flapped off, Lyle tore his eyes away from the window, half expecting Miss Proctor to slap her ruler against the side of the desk and say, Next time, Lyle, I'm slapping it against your head!

Each time Lyle wrote out a check, he sealed it in an envelope and fixed one of the self-sticking Liberty Bell stamps into the top right-hand corner. Then he printed his return address on the lines provided and dropped the envelope into a pile at his feet and carefully subtracted the amount from the balance column in the check register, just as Maggie had always done. “Look at this, Will,” he said when Will came into the room rubbing his eyes. He tapped the checkbook with the pen.

“Good job, Dad.”

Will's big hand rested for a moment on Lyle's shoulder, filling Lyle with something deep and joyful.

Besides bills, the pile contained credit card applications and mortgage refinance invitations and packets of coupons for things Lyle didn't use. At the bottom of the pile were two letters on official school stationery—one inviting Will and his family to a meeting at the college counseling office, and the second saying that Will had missed two counseling sessions and also failed to turn in his scholarship application forms. A week later, a third letter arrived suggesting Will consider a trade school course if he didn't plan to go to college. It included a final counseling date, this one printed in bold red type.

“What do you want to do?” asked Lyle.

Will seemed surprised that the counselor had taken the trouble to write so many letters. “I guess they believed their own story,” he said.

Will spent the weekend picking the letters up and putting them down again. “About becoming a doctor,” he said when they were clearing away the Sunday supper things.

“Yes?” said Lyle when his son didn't continue.

“I mean, how do people know who they really are?”

The question unnerved Lyle, who had started to wonder the same thing. “Why don't you call Mom in the morning?” he suggested. “She gets in early on Mondays. She's sure to have some good ideas.”

“Mom's a perfect example of what I mean,” said Will. “We went for years thinking she was one thing, and then, all of a sudden, she was something else.”

“People have sides to them,” said Lyle. “Your mother was just discovering a different side. Kind of like you discovering you want to be a doctor.”

“But I don't want to be a doctor,” said Will quietly. “I don't want to now, and I never did.”

“But I thought…” Lyle sat down at the table, stunned and silent. “Let's call your mother,” he said. “I expect she'll have some good advice for you.”

“What would Maggie Rayburn do—isn't that how it goes? The thing is, I don't want to know what Mom would do. It's what Will Rayburn would do that counts, so don't you go telling her anything about it.”

Lyle understood that in some way the conversation was about him, for all around him, people were changing while he sat stuck to his chair. He alone had no facets or hidden agendas. He suspected that when the doctors eventually cut him open, what they'd find would be a brown zip jacket and a red felt cap.

After that, he spent ten minutes a day at the desk and watched the dwindling pile of bills with a deep sense of satisfaction. Less satisfying was the fact that the total in the right-hand column of the check register was going down. “I guess I won't be fixing that muffler,” he said to Will, who was sitting on the couch staring out the window at the crows.

“Did you ever notice that when one flies off, they all fly off?” asked Will.

“That seems to be in the nature of crows,” said Lyle.

“Yeah,” said Will. “Sometimes I think I must be part crow.”

One day a representative of the bank that held the mortgage on their house called to say the automatic payment had failed to go through for the second month in a row.

“My wife handles the mortgage payments,” said Lyle.

“In that case, perhaps you could put her on the phone.”

When Lyle couldn't, the bank representative informed him that payment in full would be expected within a week. Then he told Lyle the amount of money owed, including interest and late fees. Lyle wrote the number down on a notepad and said he would send a check, but when he used his calculator to subtract the amount the bank wanted from the balance in the checkbook, the display blinked out -623.58.

Negative numbers had always seemed highly theoretical and dangerous to Lyle. They reminded him of words like “antimatter” and “implosion” because they didn't correspond to real things, but to the opposites of real things. He tried to laugh it off—first to himself, and then to Will. “What's the opposite of a couch?” he asked.

“There's no such thing,” said Will.

“That's my point,” said Lyle, walking over to show Will the bank balance. “That's exactly what I'm getting at.”

“What about your paycheck, Dad? And didn't Mom send you part of hers?”

“Oh gosh, of course,” said Lyle, breathing a sigh of relief. He adjusted the numbers in the check register and experienced a warm rush of competence. But there was also a car insurance bill hiding in the pile along with an unpaid speeding ticket and a charge for filling the propane tank, leaving the bank balance still veering toward negative territory even without the mortgage payments. “I guess I don't absolutely have to pay the phone bill,” he said. “I guess I don't absolutely have to fix the truck.”

“Nah,” said Will. “We can live without a telephone, and if the truck makes a little noise, so what?”

“Turn off the lights,” Lyle said to Will when he went off to bed. As he said it, he remembered all of the things Maggie had been reminding him about in the weeks before she left. Had she been planning on going to Phoenix all along? “And we don't need the heat on high either,” he added. “Let's use extra blankets instead.” But Will just sank farther into the couch cushions and didn't answer. He didn't even turn his head.

T
he day after Will visited the recruiting station, he called his mother and told her he was following his dream just the way she was following hers.

“Will!” cried Maggie. “I'm coming home on the next bus.”

“I won't be here,” said Will, misrepresenting his departure date. Then he relented and said, “I'm proud of you, Mom. At least you're doing something you believe in. We can compare notes on our adventures someday. In the meantime, I'll be sure to write.”

That evening he and Tula sat in their usual spot under the apple trees and had their first beer together. A few snowflakes sifted through the lacy branches as they laughed about how beer was a gateway drug and also about how straitlaced they'd always been.

“Every class has rebels and good kids,” said Tula. “I guess we're somewhere in between.”

“We don't fit in at all,” said Will. It was something he kept realizing and then forgetting again. He thought being straitlaced was generally a good thing, but he also didn't want to be a stick in the mud. “Of course, I'll have to follow the rules in the army, but I won't follow them blindly. I mean, I'm going to think for myself.” The beer had loosened the gear that usually got in the way of speaking his mind, and he added, “Moderation—that's the key, isn't it?”

The beer also made him feel good. Tula said it made her feel good too. Good and also a little reckless, a little like having a second beer. “Was there a reason we said we were only going to have one?” she asked. “It seems kind of arbitrary, but if there was a reason for it…”

“It was kind of an assumption—I don't really know.”

“I can see how you might say you're not going to have any. That would be a line worth drawing, but I can't really see the difference between one and two, can you?”

“Two never killed anybody.”

“That's what I think. I think two would be perfectly okay.”

“It's probably not even a good idea to stop at one,” said Will. “If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing well.”

But there had only been two beers in the Rayburns' refrigerator, and it wasn't easy to figure out how to get more. “Everyone in town knows us,” said Will. “If we want to buy beer, we have to drive to Glorietta, which means we have to get the truck from my dad, who is probably at the Merry Maid…”

“Drinking beer,” Tula finished for him.

“Exactly right,” said Will.

The sky had been leaden and threatening all day, and now it started to snow for real, which only seemed to confirm that the world around them was changing and they would have to change too—either with it or in opposition. Either one would be good. They debated whether conformity was preferable to rebellion, and for once, they both agreed. It was exhilarating to run along the icy road in the knowledge that they had been marginalized by society and that, being excluded, they might not be bound by its laws at all. They whooped and hollered as they plunged down the hill past the athletic fields and through a dark stand of cottonwood trees to where a footpath ran beside the frozen slick of Ash Creek. They stopped for a long kiss, and Will located, deep within his alienation, a sense of belonging and completion.