The Slide: A Novel (36 page)

“I never touched your son. Or hurt him on purpose. And there’s something else I should say, regarding your wife. I shouldn’t have slept with her. It’s just. It’s all very.”

The first blow was a sweeping right haymaker that caught me just below my eye. I stumbled, then hovered for a moment while the jolty echo knocked around my skull. Lost balance and fell forward to my hands and knees. Then the sidewalk, which I was relying on for support in this dire moment of need, shot a slab of concrete up into my chest, spinning me onto my back. Like nothing I’d felt. Kick. It was a kick. Then he was standing over me, rocking back and forth as he leveled more kicks into my ribs and abdomen.

My left eye closed of its own accord. Halfway there. T. Worpley stood over me like an actual giant, fairy-tale notion, the boy’s mythical father. And perhaps this was all the proof I needed. He stopped kicking and I saw his boots move a few steps away. He stopped. I thought to stand up, but this was impossible. I heard a long series of heavy breaths. When I saw him step back toward me I thought to try harder, then thought to play dead, then thought of the time Audrey and I went to the zoo, how she hated the zoo but I dragged her along because, I tried desperately to explain, it was while watching monkeys cavort that I best understood mankind.

He knelt over me and pummeled downward, so now gravity was in on the act as well. Each punch gathered steam in those terrific, round shoulders, then spread in compact, economic motions to his arms and fists. He punched my chest and stomach and I tried to roll and lift and he punched my face and now I was all the way on the ground now, for good.

He ran a jackhammer, this man, and not one of those pussy forty-five-pounders. City would be in trouble without him, as my father had said to Ian. He was talking through clenched lips, and if I concentrated very hard I could almost make out his words, the passwords and whatever he could have taught me.

Each impact made for a cluster of floating candles out on the borders of the world. This was probably for the best. Get me off the streets. I smiled into his fist. Dancing candles floated out there but not as far anymore. I heard a terrific crack, and the candles got too close.

labor day

w
hen our progress slowed enough to see and understand the faces around us, we knew we had become part of the thing. A winding line like a pilgrimage of deep conviction, our procession to the New West County Mall. The traffic was everything the media had predicted, but also good-natured, in a sense; a self-selecting club of we who had been duly warned and had come anyway. Eventually we made it off the highway and found police in white gloves playing conductors, the new traffic lights not yet fully operational. They pointed and waved and chirped whistles. I felt pain in my cheeks, the bruises, which meant I was smiling. I turned to see Audrey in the passenger seat next to me, smiling back.

“I feel like you always kind of wanted a broken nose,” she said.

“I kind of did. You’re right.”

She was wearing jeans I recognized and a shirt with tiny sleeves that left her arms bare. She was tanned a deep olive, her face freckled astronomically. Pretty Audrey come to visit her college boyfriend.

Nine days since waking, I still felt some residual, lingering sense of wonder for the dimensions of the world, common enough among those who brush against death. I was enjoying it. There was a hot-air balloon floating above the parking lot. The police passed us off to attendants in orange vests waving orange flags, and soon we were walking, crossing the blacktop slowly while others passed us by, moving with the quick, gaping strides of anticipation. I was happy to have Audrey at my side. As we neared the structure we saw clowns painting faces and ponies being led in slow circles through hay. There was a radio station broadcasting live on location with a mixture of their morning hosts and their afternoon hosts. My face began hurting again.

It’s easy to imagine a parallel world wherein she was there when I awoke in the hospital, her face gleaming above me, tanned and present. In reality, my mother, back home after a lengthy stay at my bedside, heard the cell phone ringing in the junk drawer, saw Audrey’s name, answered, and explained. She had then gone to the computer in my father’s office and booked her a ticket. Between waking in that bed, flanked by a parent on each side, and Audrey’s arrival, I was given a week to prepare. On top of the entire summer. Driving to the airport was my first venture from the house, and I waited for her outside security. There were people all around me. I observed their shapes and motions, their interwoven desires and individual contingencies, and it made a solid kind of sense. She had lied about shaving her head. Funny girl.

When we made it into the mall, we approached a large display map surrounded by a crowd of the overwhelmed and stimulated. Squeezing through while I watched over shoulders, Audrey pointed one finger to a large purple square, then squeezed back out, and we walked as a pair to the toy superstore, through a great jingling maw of moving parts and gesticulating robots. I secured a shopping cart while she watched a man in a giraffe suit pose for photographs with frightened children. Pushing our cart along the aisles, I took time to read the backs of boxes and kept only the toys buttressed by what I considered sufficient narrative history, those with some role in a grander story, however ridiculous. Pieces to some whole, armies of good and evil and a war that crossed the galaxy to land on our planetary doorstep.

I had explained that I wanted to make a donation, and she had smiled, and nodded, and left it at that. I hadn’t asked her many questions either, so the facts I knew were only those she had shared without prompt. She and Carmel were joined first by a writer and photographer from London, male, whom she referred to as the scribe. There were three Australians, trolls in disguise, from whom they were eventually forced to flee under the cover of Italian night. The search for the faeries began after meeting two South African witches, benevolent, who had tracked them (the faeries) across the better part of Europe, until finally uncovering a herd of them in Budapest. It was soon after finding the faeries that Audrey split with the robot and the others, spending the rest of her time alone, moving at will and whim, sometimes boarding trains for the sole reward of watching field and hills scroll by. She’d been home since the middle of August.

To make things fair, I told her of the covetous ogre driven by American myths of success and fulfillment, skilled in the equally American arts of manipulation and selective ethical disregard. I mentioned the wingless angel who lived in town (location ambiguous), who learned and taught the meanings of certain important words. And I spoke of a half-orphaned boy to whom I had spoken Audrey’s name, and my failed hero’s quest to locate and retrieve his mother. I mentioned a ghost only in passing. She allowed every abstraction, shrugging aside the euphemism and glaring holes of my story and focusing, instead, on what moral I could take away from the summer. If it was a story, she said, which it should be, then there would be a moral.

“Otherwise what’s the point?”

“Alright,” I said. “One thing would have to be about history, and that when you and the people around you ignore the history you share, or shove it aside to some dark corner of a dark room, you do that history a grave injustice. Meanwhile, we’re always searching for answers that we presume must be hidden somewhere. And the desperate faith that answers do in fact exist, the frustration of this search, might explain why we’re always beating and clawing at one another, like what’s inside you might remedy or at least explain what’s inside me. And so we become tangled and implicated in each other’s lives in ways we maybe shouldn’t be. That not everybody wants your help. Or maybe, simply put, the moral is all things change. All meaning all.
Staying
the same
only means changing in parallel, and is a kind of miracle when it lasts. Oh, and also that the center of a place, of any community, is desirable in a way that people who reside on the edges won’t ever understand. My father is right on that. I buy it completely.”

She said that was nice, then was silent for a minute before saying hers had to do with movement, with borders and how they define, or fail to define, and also how the world is overflowing with men who have no idea what to do with a full-size penis.

We drove with the toys to the Goodwill office downtown, following one-way alleys until we found the donation dock. There, teams of men wearing thick leather gloves unloaded furniture from a flatbed truck. To begin the process, I handed over an envelope containing the five hundred dollars my mother had given me at the mall. A woman with a clipboard asked if I wanted a receipt. I said no thank you, then Audrey and I began removing toys from my trunk. Call it atonement or call it generosity. Poorly veiled selfishness. Call it buying my way out or really call it anything at all. I focused on a thought of a boy or girl holding a new toy. The unloading went quickly with two of us, and soon we’d filled two industrial laundry carts with shiny and sharp-edged boxes, everything but the two baseball gloves I asked her to leave in the backseat.

There was no sex. What brief physical contact we had was for photographs, plus a few passing touches to a wrist or a shoulder to confirm presence: a refresher course in object permanence. Sex, as I’d come to understand it, was driven primarily by speculation. Our bodies by now had adjusted to a certain distance between them, and they had learned that desire for sex brought about the consequences of sex. Although, had she chosen to cross the hall late one night from the guest room, certainly I would have loved her.

For the most part, our time together was passed in loaded, but not unpleasant, quiet. When she first arrived, our timing was stuttered and awkward, but with each hour we settled into the shape we’d cleared over the course of the summer, one of comfortable mystery. Only once did I look at her in a way designed to convey the remorse I felt. In her return look I saw that she neither expected nor desired further apology, nor
nor
did she especially want to apologize for anything of her own. Her immediate plan was to spend time in Portland before even considering what to do next. Settle into her familiar role as youngest daughter. I mentioned that I’d been thinking about moving to Louisville, Kentucky. She laughed and asked why. I said no real reason.

On her last day we drove north, across the Missouri River to Elsah and along a road that bent with the path of the river. We stopped to watch levees fill and empty, found stores that called themselves antiques stores, and ate fried catfish at a riverhouse of dark impressive wood. We posed for an on-site photographer, leaning against a railing on the second-floor deck so that the wooded bluffs, and the river, and the whole country could be seen behind us. Two prints cost us nine dollars, buy one copy get a second half price.

And then she was gone.

Someday soon I will figure a way to get the last of the toy-store purchases into Ian’s hands. Anonymously, or under the veil of a third party, so he will accept them for what they are. Two baseball mitts and nothing else.

Audrey’s departure set into motion the household activities everyone saw coming. Cardboard boxes began accumulating in the sunroom, my mother’s possessions ready to go even if she was not. There is a condo in Webster Groves, a renovated two-bedroom unit in an old six-flat building heavy on charm. She and I walked through it together. For now, my father has taken over the guest room. The snoring is nothing after the squirrels. While it hasn’t been stated explicitly, it is clear that whatever ultimately happens, they need to abandon this house. At some point it will appear on the market and sell immediately to a family with truckloads of strange furniture and flatware and abundance. There doesn’t seem to be much of a rush; parents behaving like old friends, teammates in this grim but not crippling preparation. And at the same time unrestricted in their sadness, allowing it to spill into the open freely. Tears at all hours, my mother padding a box with crumpled newspaper, pausing to cough strange laughter into her hands. The curtains in the family room came down one afternoon, and the new levels of sunlight made us wonder why we’d needed them in the first place.

On the day of the grand reopening ceremony for the Union Rock Bridge, I stood in my bedroom, listening to the silence of the attic above me. Boxes up there and nothing more. I was to dress presentably and get to the site, ten minutes upriver from downtown. This was a project my father had been spearheading for several years, an old truss bridge that had once been part of Route 66, now a cornerstone of the new River’s Edge Bike Path. A late-afternoon ribbon-cutting and dedication. Would my mother be there? Yes, she told me, of course she would. By the time I arrived, the refreshments tent was deserted, everyone already on the bridge aside from a few caterers and my old friend Stuart, who stood with both hands submerged in a tub full of ice. I approached and stood next to him for a few minutes, trying to organize the gratitude I knew I owed him, along with an apology for so gravely misunderstanding why he had given Edsel the Explorer.

In the swollen clarity of my hospital bed I had come painfully to suspect that Stuart’s gift was not to the ogre, but to me: a car provided to settle half of the formal blackmail demands. Several days later, during my recovery at home, a postcard arrived from Harrisburg, PA, scrawled in stickish handwriting I knew without doubt was Edsel’s. The photo was a young blond girl, a child in a yellow dress, standing on the front porch of an old home with a mansard roof. The message was two short lines:
Game over.
Thanks for playing.
I tore the postcard into small pieces and understood. The car, a gift to take the ogre away from here, Harrisburg or anywhere else. A wonderful thing Stuart had done for me. But in the days that followed I had still not thanked him. Why? Other, subdermal bruises, perhaps; pride and ego.