Round Rock (36 page)

Together, everyone at Round Rock moved slowly out of a stunned lethargy. In retrospect, the first week following Red’s death—the huge nightly AA meetings, the funeral—seemed lit in rich, somber tones and executed in slow motion. Bit by bit, Lewis felt himself jerked back into the harsh glare of daily life with all its demands and the awful knowledge that Red would not be joining the staff for coffee in the mornings. He would not be telling stories while painting at the new house. He would not walk by on his morning rounds or clatter past in his old Ford truck.

The truck was at Harry Zeno’s junkyard, and Libby asked Lewis to decide whether it should be repaired, sold, or junked. The sheriff had brought in the groceries and new luggage that were strewn in the ditch at the accident, but nobody had gone through the cab.

The junkyard was a small field of wrecked cars sunk in weeds, with a teardrop trailer for an office. Red’s truck was right by the front gate, its toothy grille snarled as if still frozen in the anticipation of impact. The accident itself wasn’t much more than a fender bender—the fan wasn’t even smashed into the radiator. There was not nearly enough damage to kill anyone.

The heated-up cab smelled strongly of old oil, hot dust, and decomposing rubber, the smells Lewis remembered from that first ride he took with Red Ray from detox. His fingers went numb around the glove-compartment clasp, his vision suddenly darkened. A cardboard coffee cup lolled on the floorboards. The glove compartment contained maps, a half-full bottle of Excedrin. Lewis’s lips tingled, as if charged with electrical current: the smears on the steering wheel and floor that looked like dried chocolate ice cream were Red’s blood.

Lewis curled up on the front seat. It seemed unfair, cruelly ironic, and unspeakably sad that Red, who devoted so much of his life to chiseling away at human desperation and loneliness, was alone when his heart exploded, when his truck sprang for the trees.

Lewis had the Ford towed to a body shop in Rito. Once it was repaired,
he and David caravaned south and sold it to a prop house in Burbank.

C
LEO
B
ARKIN
, as president of Round Rock’s board of directors, served as the temporary director; that is, she signed the checks. Lewis took over the supply runs and helped Libby with the secretarial tasks. David coordinated the staff and volunteers and split the intake and exit interviews with the psychologist. By each taking a few of Red’s duties, they kept the place operating, but any long-range planning was put on hold. For Red, Round Rock had been an ongoing, dynamic picture in his head, and he knew instinctively and absolutely what should come into that picture and what should go out. Countless small decisions were made against his sense of the larger whole: when to call a repairman, arborist, or psychiatrist, when to just fix the problem himself. Nobody else had Red’s overview, not yet, and slowly a sprung or fractured quality crept into farm life. No single thing faltered, but on some days it felt as if a good gust of wind could sweep the entire enterprise off the map.

L
IBBY
was confined to bed. She stretched this to mean sitting on pillows on the back stoop, sunning her legs. Barbara and Lewis moved bookshelves and a large bow-front dresser out of the bedroom to make way for a white wicker bassinet. The top of a small, low dresser became a padded changing table. Red’s closet was emptied and refurnished with Formica shelves filled with cloth diapers, receiving blankets, and stacks of doll-sized clothes. Red’s wardrobe was heaped in the living room in languorous bales of lightly starched dress shirts, plastic-wrapped, custom-made suits. Given his choice, Lewis took two cashmere sweaters and three silk ties.

When Barbara left, David arranged for his aunt Gloria to come in mornings and evenings, prepare meals, and sit with Libby. During the days Libby read books, tried to do office work. She called Lewis at all hours, at his bungalow or in the kitchen. “I hate to bother you,” she said. “Can you talk?”

“Sure.” Holding the phone to his ear with his shoulder, Lewis would chop onions, flip turkey burgers.

“I was thinking,” Libby said. “Maybe Billie really was in love with Red all these years. She showed up for his funeral, after all. Have you heard anything about her moving?”

“Maybe you should write about this in your journal,” said Lewis.

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” she said.

“Pretend it’s a letter. Pretend you’re talking.”

Sometimes, after Gloria went home at night, Lewis came over, and they read or discussed farm business. She didn’t know what to do about the new house on the hill, which was being painted, tiled, and carpeted according to schedule. “I say I want to stay in this valley, because that’s where my friends are, but when I actually look at what I mean by that, I see that Red is dead and Billie won’t talk to me, and you’re going away to teach soon and David I’m just getting to know. … Do I want to ramble around the new house all alone with a baby? Should I move back to Los Angeles? I don’t have any friends there, either.”

“Maybe now isn’t the time to make any big decisions,” Lewis said. “Let’s concentrate on having a healthy baby first.”

“Since when do you sound like a shrink, Lewis?” Libby laughed, then began to cry. “Oh, I know Billie’s not your favorite person. I wish I knew what happened. Do you have any idea?”

“She has a mean streak,” he said.

A few days later, Libby handed him a letter to read.

“Should I mail it?” she asked Lewis.

“I don’t see why not,” he said.

L
IBBY
sometimes played the violin when she couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t loud enough to keep anyone else awake; Lewis was already an insomniac. She played Bach cello suites, transposed for the violin—dry, vigorous workouts designed, it seemed, to carry the listener down some endlessly branching path deep into the soul. Or she’d take up a fiddle tune—“Sweet Georgia Brown,” “The Maiden’s Prayer,” or “I Don’t Love Nobody”—then break it down into variation after variation, complicating, tangling, slurring, sometimes deconstructing the melody into a few coughy, unrecognizable phrases sawed this way and that; and then, gathering energy, she’d slowly tool her way back home.

One night, prodded by the violin’s restless meanderings as if by an insistent finger of smoke, Lewis hauled himself to the kitchen table. The last chapter of his dissertation was the one place where, after citing some two hundred secondary sources in the preceding pages, he could actually express his own opinions. Without looking at any notes, Lewis wrote the first sentence in longhand: “Fondness and abiding mutual interest characterize the friendship of Flaubert and Turgenev….”

L
IBBY
dug out her journal:
First time I’ve written since you died, Red. I couldn’t face the page. Lewis has been after me. He’s only being nice, though. He never did like my journal. Pretend it’s a letter, he says. And I thought, I could write to you, which filled me with relief. Am I refusing to let you go? Who cares? I’m as entitled to denial as to the other four stages of grief. And you do seem close by. I suspect you are seeing and hearing everything.

It was odd to keep a journal where the big events were lacunae. Red’s death was missing, and—Libby counted—the four weeks that followed. A month. Is this how life was going to be, she wondered, a dreary accumulation of time without Red?

I’m housebound in bed. How nineteenth century. The invalid—what a strange, accurate word. One does feel so marginalized, so out-of-life’s-flow,
so stumped by sadness here in this bed. It makes me cry to write to you, Red. Who could cry this much?

T
HE THOUGHT
of writing to Red woke Libby up each morning. She couldn’t wait. So she went batty for a few months, nobody would blame her. There was something deliciously dotty in writing to her dead husband while wearing his pajamas. She had new empathy for her mother’s friend Betty. When her husband died, Betty wore his clothes every day for over a year—pants cuffed broadly, the sleeves of his shirts rolled up around her wrists in thick doughnuts—as if to reanimate them. Such visible, guileless grief had made Libby’s mother frantic, of course. But Libby now understood the quaint and harmless charm of Betty’s actions; and who could’ve guessed Red’s cotton pj’s would be such perfect maternity wear?

My mother calls last night. I try to tell her about Billie, how she still hasn’t phoned or answered my letter.

Oh honey, you can’t let every little thing bother you, Mom says. You’ve just got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Mom, I say, I look down and can’t even see my feet. And even if I did, it’s been weeks since I could tie my shoes.

Wouldn’t it be easier not to be reminded of Red everywhere you look? she says. You should be in a place where time can work its cure.

But I don’t want to be cured, Red. I want to have this baby in your house. I want her to have a sense of you. I want her to feel the way this bungalow feels, see the endless rows of trees, smell the groves, inhale the cool morning fog. After she hears the voices of your friends, once she gets your world in her blood, then, if need be, we can leave.

“B
ILLIE
hasn’t answered my letter,” she told Lewis. “It’s been over a week.”

“Sounds like let-it-go time, Lib.”

“If only I could. I try and I try, but she made it possible for me to live in this valley after Stockton left. I’m not sure I know how to live here without Red
and
Billie.”

“You’re not going anyplace tonight, or tomorrow either,” Lewis said. “Come on. I’ll sit with you until you fall asleep.”

“You better lay in supplies, then. You might be here a lot longer than you think.”

“I think I know just the sleeping aid you need.” Lewis went over to his house, brought back the last chapter of his dissertation. “It’s just the first draft,” he said, and began reading aloud to her. Libby tried her damnedest to stay awake. She failed.

Dearest Red, You’re dead, baby. I know that. I don’t expect you to walk in the door. I don’t expect mail from you. With Billie, there’s always a chance that the phone will ring and it will be her, that the next car pulling up to the house will be that ridiculous white truck.

Hazy hot day, Red. A day to sweat.

Joe came by with a U-Haul to take some furniture for the apartment he and Little Bill have rented in Palo Alto. We had a long talk about names for the baby. He votes with you for Susanna or Elisabeth. Little Bill, he says, wants me to name her after you, more or less: Rosie. I love Little Bill, but …

I wish you could see the cats tease Gustave. He’s tied up under the oak tree. The cats know exactly how far his rope goes. They prowl the perimeter, tails in the air. God help them if he ever gets loose.

Oh Red. I can feel you fading.

T
HE BOARD
met in Libby’s bedroom to discuss restaffing: if David became the director, as everyone hoped, the farm would need a new house manager. Since Libby didn’t know how much she’d want to do once the baby came, at least a part-time secretary was necessary. And the Blue House needed a new full-time cook right away.

“Or part-time,” said Lewis. “A lunch cook. That way I can help out with more secretarial and just do dinners.”

“Yeah,” Libby said, “but you’re leaving in a week.”

“Says who?”

“You have to go teach, Lewis.”

“Not this semester.”

Libby appealed to the men and women clustered in chairs around her bed. “He’s going to go teach.”

“Too late,” said Lewis. “I already put them off. The old family-emergency excuse.”

Libby waved her hands at him. “Lewis, please …”

“I can stick around until January.”

“What was the point, Dr. Fletcher, of finishing your dissertation if you’re not going to teach?”

“I want to see what this baby looks like.”

“Please, everybody,” Libby said, “tell him to take that job.”

Lewis held up a hand to halt any protests. “Besides, somebody has to take Gustave to obedience school.”

H
E STAYED
because he could. He stayed because he hadn’t when Libby’s trailer burned. He stayed because he was frankly worried about Round Rock and because one-year appointments in freshman English composition weren’t so goddamn precious. He stayed because it seemed like something he could do to honor Red. He stayed to demonstrate to Libby—and to himself—that he actually had changed, mended his ways.

Lewis hoped, too, that he could relieve Libby’s anxiety about being alone, all of which she channeled into her breach with Billie Fitzgerald. Recently, she was trying not to talk so much about Billie—knowing it was neurotic and tiresome, a weird manifestation of her sorrow. Yet she couldn’t help it: “Has Billie left town? Do you ever see her at the grocería?” She tried to sound offhand, but her voice invariably rose in pitch. “I know I should let her go. I just need more information. How can I let go of something that’s gnawing away at me?”

Lewis tried to think of how Red would handle the situation. He phoned Doc Perrin, who listened closely, wheezing into the receiver.

“I don’t know if there’s anything I can actually do,” said Lewis. “I’m not even sure if it’s any of my business.”

“Jesus Christ, of course it’s none of your damn business,” Perrin said, then paused. “You prayed about it?”

“Sort of.”

“What’d God say?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, if you can’t figure out God’s will, sometimes it’s good to try the one thing you swore you’d never do. The thing that scares the holy hell out of you.”