The Slide: A Novel (23 page)

Without turning to face me, she said, “He’d better get enough tickets for a funnel cake.”

“What percentage of you, approximately, would you say is full of shit?”

“No more than you, pally.”

“Nice fucking overalls.”

“Coveralls,” she said, turning. “Where I’m from we call them coveralls.”

“No. Coveralls are jumpsuits with sleeves. Onesies.”

“Says you.”

And then Stuart was back, emerging from the crowd to lace an arm between Marianne’s tanned back and her dishonest denim.

“I handed them dollars and they ripped pieces of cardboard from a giant spool and expected me to say thank you. Deal of the century.”

A volunteer checked our IDs while the troop in yellow collared shirts behind her filled millions of beers and set them onto a plastic table. We were given bright-green bracelets to prove we were of age. As we left the table I began playing with the bracelet and accidentally broke it. I went back to the table for a replacement, and when I returned Stuart and Marianne were gone. I continued deeper into the fair, through the rows of booths and attractions. I watched darts thrown at a wall of balloons and peered into a cotton-candy machine, relieved to be alone and anonymous among the throng of strangers.

Turning a corner, I caught sight of Edsel in one of the booths, leaning to speak into the ear of a man behind a vending table. The man nodded slowly. For a moment Edsel and I locked eyes, and I nearly smiled at the thought of a beard on an evening like this one. I stood still as heads and shoulders passed between us, only slightly curious what he was saying into the vendor’s ear. Some words of trade and exchange value. Simple numbers game here in our tiny little town on the river.

I left the maze of booths and attractions and moved into the crowded lawn beneath the Arch, stepping lightly around the feet and fingers of those already settled. I found a small plot of grass and dropped to the ground, untied shoes, piled my socks to my right, and lay down flat on my back.

Everything about the fair was growing louder, the mayhem of communal glee. I closed my eyes and imagined the lawn packed with men and women and blankets and coolers and those collapsible canvas chairs everyone was buying. I foresaw the arrival of vendors selling thin glow-in-the-dark tube lights that would make it home wrapped around children’s necks and wrists. Money would be exchanged. There would be mosquitoes like all get out, clouds of vile mosquitoes, and nobody here would care a bit.

I saw Stuart and Marianne moving across the lawn, not forty feet from me. I dialed his number quickly and saw them stop. Stuart pulled out his phone, looked at it, and put the phone away. I watched them take several steps across the lawn, then I lay back down.

july

seven

d
ennis rested thick and bitter on his stool and told me to load as many bottles as I could into the van. I stood waiting for an invoice.

“Hell are you doing?”

“Rule one of delivery, you said. No paper, no water. You were adamant. You gestured and deployed intonation to punctuate your point.”

“This ain’t business today. This is a gift, kid, compliments of Debbie Dinkles. Here’s your paper. Directions so you don’t get lost, have to call big Dennis come save your hide.”

I loaded as many bottles as would fit inside, then reversed down the ramp. I was to go west—deep into rural backwater Missouri until I reached something called Irenia Winery. My only delivery of the day, off the books, no official delivery at all. I followed directions onto Highway 40 and traveled beyond the Spirit of St. Louis airport and baseball fields, beyond the stores and dealerships and everything else until I reached Route 94, where I was to turn left and follow as it snaked south. I passed a police station and shooting range, then came upon a tight set of curves flanked by bosky walls of the most brilliant natural green. And here the road stayed for a bit beneath a canopy of overarching leaves that allowed sunlight through in disco-ball rays, splattering the blacktop roadway.

Signs said I was approaching the town of Defiance. Four or five short white houses with porches on either side of the road, a yard packed with rusted tractor parts, two roadside bars along one mellow left-hand curve, two empty parking lots, and then no more Defiance.

Back into the trees for a while, around blind curves, strict no-passing zones. I slowed to a near crawl, taking it in. By now I’d given myself over to the delivery, whatever its length. Today I would be subsumed by this one task. Tomorrow would be different. I followed a long, gradual descent around an arching right-hand turn, and here the foliage parted, opening into a scene of great countryside, fields stretching to a river and beyond, where they stopped at a sheer gray wall of bluffs. And it felt that up until this point, the whole summer so far, I could have been anywhere, any of a hundred middling American cities pocketed by wealth and poverty and sex and violence, faith and despair, contrived success and palpable failure. But with these fields and this river, those legendary bluffs of song and portrait, I knew where I was.
Missouri,
her naked body hidden away for anyone who knew enough to want her.

Southwest, fields and bluffs on left, hills and wineries on right. How long had these places been out here? I passed the Sugar Hill Winery, Stone Creek Winery, Augusta Winery. Several others marked by signs with arrows and promises of live music or scenic gazebos. I held Dennis’s directions up against the steering wheel.
Stay on 94. Keep going.

I saw the sign appear as I came onto a particularly straight section of whatever name this road went by out here, an inconspicuous sign of natural wood.

“Eye-ree-nee-ahhh.”

The van, gravid with as much weight as it had likely ever known, could only inch up the steep dirt driveway. And this seemed a much more appropriate rate of travel for a delivery of this size. How reckless I’d been on Highway 40, how inconsiderate of my cargo.

Standing at the lot’s edge was a bald man wearing a pale-blue collared polo shirt tucked into khakis. He approached my van with a raised hand and something approximating a smile.

“You must be from Deborah. Welcome.”

I extended my hand through the window and we shook.

“Potter Mays,” I said.

“Mays. Glad you made it. We were starting to run low. Follow this path around to the back and the others will be out in a minute to give you a hand.”

I drove along the side of the winery’s central building, a squat home that looked like an old plantation mansion squished down to just one floor. The gravel path ended in a small circular lot behind the building. Here, four white Econoline vans much like my own were parked facing outward, as if ready to flee if the need arose. I got out of the van and walked a few steps for a better view of the land. The grounds were beautiful, gentle hills and walls of forest, the better part of a valley cultivated with sparse rows of grape plants. I turned back to the building in time to see a door open from inside where I didn’t think there was a door. Two men emerged, both dressed like the man out front, in khaki pants and light-blue collared shirt. I met them at the side of the van and we shook hands. They were both somewhere in their forties and had hair shaved to the skull, fingers blunted by years of work, and the quietly stunning musculature that can only come from true, purposeful labor. One was slightly taller, and the shorter was a bit bulkier in the shoulders.

“It’s good you made it,” the shorter man said. “Any trouble finding us?”

“Not at all. I had directions.”

The taller man had his arms crossed and his gaze fixed on a spot somewhere above my head.

“Any problem getting up the hill? Guess it depends which engine you’ve got in there.”

“This is the V8,” I said.

Tall one cracked a smile.

“After ’92, about all you find are the V8,” the other said. “Wondering if it was the 4.6 or 5.4, is all. Either way. Important thing is you made it. That’s good. We’re here to give you a hand with those bottles.”

“Mighty kind of you.”

“Pleasure’s ours. Job to be done, so let’s do what we can to get that job done.”

“Potter Mays.” I shook the shorter man’s hand firmly and then reached to meet that of the taller man, which consumed my tiny rabbit paw inside a great limestone cave of a palm while his eyes locked onto mine as if that’s where I kept my records of lies and cheating and mismanaged worth. My hand compressed inside his and I squinted, fighting the traditional battle of masculine will. When we released I slid open the door, revealing the wall of bottles stacked within.

They took two bottles each and waited as I unloaded two of my own. I had always carried the bottles one at a time, but to do so here seemed an insult to everyone involved. I followed through the unmarked door into an undecorated stairwell; we descended immediately and moved through a long, plain hallway. The two men in blue moved with diligence that seemed a necessary part of who they were. I shuffled to keep pace, my hands burning. At the end of this hallway we descended another stairway into a slightly darker hallway lit by single lightbulbs at irregular intervals. The walls were unpainted cinder block, the floor smooth cement marked only by the occasional circular drain. I longed to stop and rest my hands. Sound of six shoes echoed in this hallway. Until finally we arrived at a double door that opened into a cavernous storage room, where I followed the men to a dark corner and dropped my load next to theirs.

“Jesus,” I said. “Long way down.”

The men backtracked silently to the van.

The job went on like this for half an hour. Through it all, not a single word was uttered among us. After my initial mistake I understood: language in this place, at this time, was frivolous. What could we have said? What could talk, large or small, do for our task? We were lifting and we were carrying. We descended and stepped quickly through hallways, determined. This was toil to transcend words, to simplify and reduce and deliver us to that ancient realm of human existence. There was a job at hand that would have taken me all day to complete alone. We were wearing our collared shirts, uniform of American labor, and we were
working
.

Once the last bottles were set into the storage room’s back corner, I followed the two men silently back to the surface, where we stood beside my van. During the job I’d caught flashes of the occasional worker moving into or out of a door. At least one was a woman, which initially surprised me and then seemed perfectly appropriate, even necessary. I was aware of an unnameable something transpiring at the winery, but it was so secondary to the greater thing at play, which was assistance. Which was reaching out with heartfelt aid.

The tall one brushed his hands. “Ford’s talking about canceling the E-series altogether.”

“The van,” I said. “The Econoline.”

“I got a brother over at the Avon Lake plant,” said the other. “Tells me the whole state of Ohio is on edge. Whole lot of good people working those plants.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Those vans are everywhere.”

“Yeah well, Ford’s doing a lot that don’t make much sense, aren’t they?”

“I had no idea,” I said.

We stood quietly for several minutes. Clouds had moved in to cover the sun and plaster the sky in gray that stretched across the land. When my pager beeped inside the van, the men shook my hand again and I shut the sliding van door.

“Thank you for the water.”

“Thank you,” the tall one said.

“Thank you for the help,” I said.

“Not at all. Anytime.”

“Anytime.”

The third bald man, who stood guard out front, waved as I left the winery. Again I examined my hands and these calluses that could always, always grow thicker. It occurred to me I hadn’t caught any of the bald men’s names. I descended the steep driveway in a van comparatively weightless since shedding its burden, my Ford Econoline V8. Probably the 4.6, if I had to guess.

july

eight

i
t was within the private rapture of sustained focus that she was most angelic. She sat with legs straight beneath the coffee table, elbows wide, chewing her bottom lip or pencil. The teacher and student and the barriers between. I imagined Stuart telling the story of his finger to Marianne. Were they naked? They might have been naked. They were naked and he was speaking in the first person about that defining experience of his childhood, baring his inner self, and she was nodding. But were the nods sufficiently appreciative? Were they even somewhat bored or rote or feigned? This was a gift of terrific magnitude, the private childhood secret, one to alter the very DNA of a relationship. I looked at the clock hanging on the wall, then watched the angel finish her test. When she looked up, I asked if she would like to hear the true story of my best friend Stuart Hurst’s missing finger.

“Hell yes,” she said, climbing onto the couch. “Totally.”

“Stuart’s family used to live in Tokyo. His father does some variation of financial advising that’s almost covert, something there’s really no point even trying to understand. So in Tokyo there was something tainted about a transaction between his dad’s then up-and-coming small firm and a huge Japanese conglomerate. Allegedly. One afternoon, Stuart and his mom were walking through Tokyo and she turned to tell him to hurry up and he wasn’t there. The kidnappers mailed his right index finger to his father so he understood the gravity of the situation. His parents went to the authorities, but apparently the group that took Stuart was such a force in the Japanese underground that when the police read the ransom note with the little freckles and streaks of Stuart’s finger blood, they were visibly shaken. What’s the name I want for the gangsters?”