Ride Around Shining (7 page)

When I crossed to go out back, I saw he had her in his arms. They were dancing. I stopped in the doorway, and I could not look away. She reached both her hands up to his face and ran her thin, splintered-looking fingers through his beard. Then she reached up again and pulled on his ears to make him bend down, her face flushing with the quick, childish assertion of need. It was adorable, and bending down he was so swelled with pride and calm he looked bored, as a lion looks bored. I watched their lips meet once more.

Swaying to the song's tender mope, she drew away, and their dance became goofy, and entirely unselfconscious, and when they began to kick up their feet and shimmy at one another, I knew I'd been forgotten. I didn't know whether to break something minor so they would look at me, or grit my teeth and try to forgive them, or just to go away, and then Calyph pivoted, as if to give a specially strong kick, and his knee gave way beneath him, and as he crumpled to the ground I heard a little pop, as if a jar had been unsealed.

The next morning was cloudless again
. In a breeze sweet with the smell of pines baking in the sun, I took my laptop to the window, found an unsecured connection, and looked across the Internet for Calyph. I found him on the ESPN sidebar, with the secondary news:

Portland, Ore.

It was a distant, ignorant thing, and I wanted to pour more life into it. Never having been close to an event worthy of the sporting news, it'd never occurred to me that every dry summary must be backed by a weight of intimate and unprintable detail, the meows and dances of a private life. I was there, I wanted to shout, I know about it all. But what was Calyph to them? The next year would be the worst of his life, his career could be in jeopardy, and yet all the people open to that page at the same moment as I, what did they feel? A distant satisfaction. They had gone hoping for news and there was some. The world was going round. Even if they were fans, they'd say, “Well, that clears up the rotation.”

It was hard to know whether to feel responsible. I went back and forth about the sculpture a thousand times. He'd seemed fine afterward, had worked himself out and been satisfied. Still, I remember the look on his face when he leapt away from the ice. With knees sometimes it's the smallest thing.

After we heard the pop, he lay there a moment, looking only perplexed, like he'd tried to sit in a broken chair. I could see Antonia's face go gaunt with uncertainty, frozen in the last moment when denial was still possible. He clutched his knee with both hands, slowly, not like it pained him but like he wanted to gather it up and put it back together. Then he whimpered, once, a reedy, terrible sound, so distant from his ordinary voice it was like a note from a flute. He shook his head fiercely.

“I'm hurt,” he said. “I'm hurt.” And then she was on her knees.

The cat, sensing fun, bounded over and began to frolic. Antonia pushed it away, which only made it more rambunctious. Calyph shouted for me and I came out of the doorway and tried to grab the thing. I whiffed and it leapt away, chirping ecstatically, then rounded on me, waiting gamely for me to fail again. It led me from room to room, hunched over and mortified, locked in perverse and overmatched contest. The beast was spouting a sort of joyous horking sound. I remember thinking they must be able to see me hunching from room to room, the sounds of my hushed and desperate coaxing an absurd backdrop to their misery. At last I got the thing cornered in the kitchen and took it in my arms. I could barely keep from hurling it into the sink and running the disposal, just to see if a bit of limb might get nicked off. With the thing pinned writhing to my chest, I took back the house flyer and slipped it in my pocket. I guess I felt I'd done enough.

“Hush now,” I heard him say behind me, as I went up the stairs to lock the cat in. “It'll be all right. Get the phone.”

When I got the serval in a bedroom, it was bouncing and chirping all over. I looked around to see if the thing had a bed somewhere, like that would calm it, but all its things were in some other room. I tried the closet, and when I opened it the cat darted right in and plunged its front paws into a laundry basket, its hind still protruding into the room. It seemed occupied with snuffling the whites, so I made a move for the door. The next I knew the serval was busting past me into the hall, free again and horking joyously, a pair of Antonia's dirty silks dangling around its neck. It ran round and round the upper floor, sounding its triumph. I was looking for something to club it with when it ran back into the bedroom of its own accord. I locked it in the closet, and when I got back downstairs Calyph had his T-shirt pulled over his face. They told me to go right home and talk to no one.

He must have been on his way to Alabama already, but no one had called me. Someone else must have driven him to the airport. Throughout the night, while I slept, forces had been moving, and by dawn the panic was gone and agents of supreme competence had converged to handle everything. Hours before my first yawn of the morning I'd been cut from the loop and replaced.

When afternoon came and there was no word, I called the house line and his brother Talib answered.

“This is Jess,” I said.

“Who?”

“The driver.”

“Oh. Just, uh, sit tight. We'll let you know when he get back.”

“Is everyone else there with him?”

“Where with him,” he said curtly.

“Birmingham. It's in all the news.”

“What do the news know?” he said, his voice aggressive with the strain of keeping up the cover.

“I just want to know if I'll be needed. How long does the surgery take?”

“Surgery?” he repeated incredulously.

“I was
there
.”

He sighed. “Listen, people been callin'. Wantin' to know. I don't know who's who—I'm just tryin' to hold it down here. I wouldn't expect anybody back for three, four days at least. All right?” Then he hung up.

I tried to think of the time off as a luxury, but there was little to do. Some cloths I'd ordered for the car came in the mail and I touched the fine, soft fibers sadly. Once more I moved listless through the downtown streets, walking past the old happy-hour bars that had been nightly destinations in my past life as an ordinary Portlander, with a job at a nonprofit and a social life beyond my place of employment. I'd hardly been back from Northern a week when I realized all that was gone, that the whole scene I'd known had moved on, to marriage or to new discontentments I had no place in, or to California. My return to this city of youth, this city I'd once moved eighteen hundred miles to on the basis of a simple Web survey at FindYourSpot.com, had made me a stranger again. On my third morning off, I got a text that said “home soon,” and I was glad.

Antonia's absence had made me feel the leanness of my life, and that night I bought a magnum of Belgian tripel, to remind myself of my proximity to eminence. As I drank I wandered through the bachelor's rooms, looking for treasures. I found a collection of foreign hotel soaps, a couple of bottles of white rum with faded Spanish labels, and, lying in a corner amid some camping gear, an old hickory switch, as smooth as if it had been oiled. A closet I'd never inspected before went back and back, and I took a flashlight in, expecting a grow room. Instead I just found the light switch, and, in an immaculate corner, a small lamp that lit up a tiny shrine to the bachelor's departed cat. The shrine had a Buddhist air, but its centerpiece was a Polaroid of the old tabby crouching proudly behind a dead bat. The cat was obese, and it was hard to believe the thing had come across a bat pitiful enough to be killed by it. It looked a little puzzled at its own prowess, crouching there in a crooked shadow that must have belonged to the bachelor himself.

As I reached down to flip the Polaroid over, my phone chimed back in the kitchen. “Late nite pickup?” it said, and I drank my glass down and watched the foam lace my empty chalice. For a moment in the garage I considered my sobriety, but as Calyph once assured me, only black men got pulled over in Jaguars.

Twenty minutes later I hit the chalk in Dunthorpe, and there under the floodlights Antonia stood on her steps, shivering in a party dress. She got her own door before I could, and I could see the gooseflesh coming down her shoulder.

“Why didn't you wait inside?”

“I wanted to wake myself up.” She spoke fast, and her breath seemed short from the chill. “I walked around the house. You ever walk around outside your own house at night? And look up at the walls, and there's so much out there you never really looked at? It's like how could it be your house really, until you knew about it all?”

“No,” I said. “Never.”

“There's all this wood out there,” she said. “There's all this stone. Come and look.”

I looked at her there, dolled up, lined around the eyes like I'd never seen her, shivering through some unknowable mood. A woman puts on eyeliner and suddenly she's nocturnal and difficult. She looks like she could be a fatal problem. “The climate's controlled in here,” I said.

“Come and look,” she said again. “It's the wilderness out there.”

I left the car running and let myself be led upon the lawn, around the side of the house, to where the chimney rose up. It didn't seem remarkable. They just looked like some white-bread quarry rocks to me. She strode toward the chimney and put her little slipper-shoe up on one of the stones of the corner and hoisted herself. I remember her little knee flashing, and the unexpected freckles of her leg as it bent in the moon.

She stepped into a little hop and slapped a rock at the apex of her jump, damn near seven feet in the air. “I own you,” she cried at the rock as she hit it.

She landed in a crouch and still her eyes were on the chimney's tower of moon-white stone. “I own that,” she said, in a puzzled voice.

When we came back to the car, I saw movement in the dark. Looking back at the house I saw the front door ajar, and a thin figure standing shrouded in the aperture. She stepped forward and I saw a woman with her arms crossed. She too was dressed and made up as if for a night on the town. Her face gleamed down on us petulantly, and I could see a tattoo on her calf.

Antonia must have followed my gaze, because she stopped in the drive. “What?” she asked the girl harshly. “What do you want? There's nothing to say.”

Some kind of complicated rebuke passed over the girl's face, and she took another step toward the car. Antonia motioned abruptly for me to get her door, as if to forestall her. “Don't wait up,” she said, and the girl melted back into the dark.

Out on the road we blew the heat and I edged around Antonia's wild mood.

“She was at the party,” I began, but Antonia waved her hand disgustedly through the air.

“Anything but her,” she said.

“Okay. How is he?”

“He's well enough—there wasn't anything for me to do. The family's all there.”

“I didn't expect you so soon.”

“It's not that long of a surgery, really. For what it is. For where they break your knee on purpose.”

“Is he definitely out for the year?”

“He is. I think they're still going to pay him, though.”

She said it like she actually thought that was what mattered to him. I glanced over, and the look of her dark painted eyes pained me. I wished she hadn't done that to herself. It made all the strange wildness, which otherwise might seem like a reckless opening of herself I was privileged to see, into trouble. I had a premonition that she was gathering all the trouble we could ever have into this night and loosing it, to have it out and behind her.

“Where are we going?” I asked. I'd just been driving toward everything not in her house that we could care about at that hour.

“Let's go to a strip club,” she said instantly.

“Excuse me?”

“I am a girl who just wants to have fun,” she said in a strange, wry voice, as if quoting someone else's assessment of her.

Clubs were not a totally foreign subject between us. The first time I'd ever been to a strip club had been delivering food, and she'd once trapped me in a painfully elaborate story about bringing Cobb salads to cabarets and lingerie modeling houses. She liked to tease me about going to this one place, Sassy's—I think she thought I had a habit. But I didn't want to go to a club. They were the only places in the city where I found it impossible to desire anything. I tried to imagine what kind of man it was who could get pleasure from laying dollar bills in front of a naked girl. Who could make a healthy, honest transaction out of that? I tried to imagine what type of man it took, what his face would look like, as he lorded over his little table with his roll of bills, laughing to his friends, taking a girl's sass and throwing it back to her, comfortable, enlivened, and unwithered.