A Parallel Life (8 page)

“More or less,” Charlie said. Like most barkeepers, he was laconic.

“It looks about the same.”

“On vacation, were you?” Charlie asked.

“You could say that,” Beck said.

“You been by the Mermaid yet?”

“Not yet. How's Rita?”

“About the same,” Charlie said and looked down at the section of bar he was polishing as if some nick in the finish might suddenly yawn into a gulf.

When Rita looked up from the coffee maker to see Beck standing in the doorway, framed there, neither in nor out, her body gave a jolt as if it were on the receiving end of an electrical current. Her knees almost buckled beneath her, and she began vibrating like a tuning fork.

Beck took a step forward and removed himself from the tentative hold of her doorway. “Turned to stone, are you,” he said, “by the sight of me?”

“I can't move,” she answered, in a whisper—which really wasn't necessary since the breakfast crowd had gone and there was no one in the place. She whispered because she doubted that she could take a step forward to where he stood with his sideways smile showing a bit of the gold incisor, his bottle green eyes looking at her and into her, and his voice both rough and tender as the bark on a tree.

“I haven't touched anyone in over a year,” he said, “and I don't know if I can touch you now. Help me, will you?”

“Beck,” she said and managed to take a step forward and stretch out her hand. “Oh, Beck . . .”

“Rita,” he said and took another step, and another, and reached out his hand and almost, but not quite, touched hers, almost but not quite, so that the spark of need could jump the gap from finger to finger.

They were in each other's arms in a second and their embrace was long. When finally they pulled apart for a breath of air, Rita placed the
Closed
sign in the window and went into the kitchen to tell Cherry Vivaldi, the college girl who helped out in the summer, that she was free for the day.

An hour or so later, Beck lay on Rita's bed like a man who had come through a desert and finally had a chance to drink deep. Rita lay beside him, her hair wet with sweat
and sticking to his chest, her heart finally slowing down.

He slept. She slept. And when he woke he noticed clothes he had never seen in her closet, and a pair of boxer shorts on the floor. He wore Jockeys.

When Rita woke she remembered that she hadn't heard from Beck for more than a year and that she had let him just walk over her threshold as if the entire path of the earth in its orbit had been pulled in like a belt to let him account for no more than a normal absence from her. And she also saw the pair of boxer shorts on the floor by the dresser, and the pair of Jockeys on the floor on the rug by the bed, and she realized that she had a problem.

Beck cleared his throat.

Rita sat up in bed and pulled the sheet up to cover her breasts.

“Who?” said Beck.

“Joe—the carpenter.”

“He's just a kid. You've got to be joking.”

“He's legal and he's a keeper.”

“He was driving my car!”

“His truck was out of gas.” She got out of bed and, taking the sheet with her, went to the closet and looked for something to wear.

Beck leaned over and found his Jockeys. He turned his back to her when he put them on. Then, with his loins girded in baggy cotton knit, he faced her. “I love you, Rita.”

“I love you, too,” she whispered, still holding the sheet. “There was never any question of that.”

At this very moment the siren, which Charlie Manhood had mounted on the roof of his tavern, sounded, announcing a fire. The next moment Rita's phone rang. It was Charlie saying that the VFD was a man shy on the
fire truck and wondering if Beck would like to resume his position as volunteer.

“We'll talk about this later,” Beck said to Rita and slipped into his jeans.

At this point things got a bit complicated and even those watching intently might have missed something.

As the fire truck on its way to put out the fire at the Polonius place ascended the narrow hillside road, Walt Tarver was descending the same road in his pickup with the two women he had discovered in his barn. They had been making love on the seat of a 1942 Reo truck that once belonged to his dead father, and he was taking them at gunpoint to the sheriff. They had been naked and avid, and their absorption in their passion made it possible for him to come upon them with a loaded .45—which he continued to hold on them while they dressed. Walt's outrage grew from the fact that this particular trespass not only violated the hallowed law of private property but also what he believed to be a law of nature. He saw the use of the truck seat as adding insult to injury by profaning the memory of his father.

Now it isn't easy to drive a stick-shift truck over a rocky road while holding a loaded gun on people. Even Walt, in his fury, had sense enough to know that if the gun went off and a bullet chanced to hit one of the women, he would not be without legal problems. So things were not in perfect control when Tom Scarlatti, at the wheel of the fire truck, rounded a bend and found Walt bearing down on him, either unable or unwilling to give way.

Tom made an effort to avoid collision and timing seemed to favor him. He was approaching the steep
driveway up to the Polonius place and was about to turn on to it. Unfortunately, just at that moment, Joe, driving Beck's Volkswagen, was rushing down the driveway to head off the fire department, to spare them the trip up the tortuous road, with the information that the fire, a spontaneous combustion in a compost pile, was under control.

He had seen it from where he was working on the ridge above, driven down, and doused it with a garden hose.

To avoid another collision, Tom swerved again and wound up with his right front tire in a ditch and a broken axle. Walt slammed on his brakes, but they failed to grip the loose gravel of the road and the right front of his pickup struck the rear of the stalled fire truck, which sent the pickup over the edge of the road and down through Murphy's orchard and through the fence that had prevented Fiesta the Shetland pony from nibbling at the green world beyond the tired brown earth of her yard. Walt managed to hold onto both the gun and the steering wheel during this and so was able to march his captives, one of whom had a slight concussion from contact with the windshield, back up the hill.

The blow from Walt's pickup sent Beck, who had been riding on the rear of the fire truck, flying off to sprawl in the dirt, a vantage point from which he got to watch Joe climb out of the Volkswagen and approach him. Beck had no way of knowing that Joe had only seen a body leave the pump truck and land on the ground, and that Joe had no idea who the owner of that body was.

“Don't touch me, you son-of-a-bitch,” Beck said as Joe, concern wrinkling his young smooth brow, bent over him.

“Beck?” Joe said, and then, “Beck! What are you doing here?”

Rita, meanwhile, was growing frantic with anxiety, remorse, and misgiving. Months ago she had worn herself out with guilt over having let things with Joe get started, but at the time it had seemed the only thing to do.

Now she loved him. But now Beck was here, and she loved him, too. After she watched Beck run down to the firehouse, she slowly began to get dressed, but that didn't seem like the right thing to do so she took off her clothes and flung herself naked on the bed and cried. Then she got up and dressed again.

She took the
I Ching
and the coins from the shelf by her bed. Then she put them back. She took off her clothes again and crawled into bed and pulled the sheet over her face to lie still as a corpse and wonder what life would be like if she had to give up either man. She wondered if this were some ultimate test that she might fail and, in failing, be stripped forever of her right to love.

After an hour or so under the sheet, she got up and dressed again. She wasn't good at passive anguish so she went down into the kitchen and began to do things.

She took out flour and yeast and soon there was dough rising. She went to her garden and picked tomatoes and cucumbers and green and red peppers, and onions, and fresh basil, dill, tarragon, sage, and rosemary. She kneaded herbs into the dough. She took out several chickens from the refrigerator and rubbed them with herbs and garlic and poured wine and olive oil over them. She brought out a salmon and stuffed it with bread-crumbs and garlic and herbs. She pulled down bottles of wine and placed them in a wash tub and covered them with ice. And she hummed as she did this. Hums that became incantations. She cried sometimes and sometimes
she smiled. It was hot in the kitchen and she opened all the doors and windows and set up fans to keep the breezes flowing.

“Don't touch me!” Beck said again. Then he groaned as the pain reached him. His leg was twisted behind him and he straightened it very slowly. Next he moved his arms, one at a time. He felt as if he needed oil in every joint.

“Beck,” Joe said again.

“Can't you think of anything else to say?” Beck said.

“No.”

“Do you want to fight?”

“No,” Joe said. “I'm a coward.”

“I can't fight you, anyway, you son-of-a-bitch,” Beck said, “because I've just had the piss knocked out of me. But you deserve something. You moved in on my woman.”

“You never even wrote to her. She used to cry about it all the time. I had to hold her in my arms while she cried.”

“Oh, hell!” Beck said and lost consciousness.

Which spared him the pain of having to watch the two women, one tall and beautiful with blood streaming from her forehead, the other almost a dwarf, crest the hill with Walt Tarver holding a gun on them and watch Walt push them into Beck's own Volkswagen, the tall one first into the backseat where she collapsed and the short one, stoic, in the front.

“Hey, “Joe yelled, “you can't take that car!”

“I'm making a citizen's arrest,” Walt said, and with that he started the tiny engine and drove down the hill to the town that bore the name of his father, a man who had earned the right to name a town by stripping all the
trees from all the hills for miles around and turning them into lumber.

Just as Walt disappeared around the bend, the Polonius brothers came down their driveway in their truck. Two hunting dogs, ancient as their owners, sat in the back and sniffed the wind without much interest, merely paying homage to a memory of things wild. The Polonius brothers were on their way to the Manhood Tavern for their afternoon beer. It took very little to persuade them, the promise of a couple of free drinks each, to get them to take the unconscious Beck and the rest of the fire crew down with them. Joe said he would walk, for he needed time to think.

As the truck bounced over the rocks and through the potholes, Beck dreamed. He dreamed that he went down some stairs into a cellar where a card game was going on. At first he thought the game was poker, but then it seemed that it was some more complicated game where bets were made not on the cards but on other factors that Beck didn't understand. One man, a thin consumptive guy, was betting everything on his hand. He even took off his watch and shoes and put them on the table. Yet he had a terrible hand. It was nuts to bet on that hand. But then, after he bet, the guy's cards changed. Beck witnessed this himself because he was standing right behind the guy looking down. The little red and black spots merged together and grew and spread, and suddenly the guy was holding a royal flush. Beck began to breath heavily. He knew he had money in his pocket, but just as he was trying to get into the game, Tom Scarlatti
lifted him up in his strong arms and Beck felt himself being carried into the Manhood Tavern and placed on a pool table in the back room.

As Beck dreamed, Joe walked. Thought, Joe knew, was not his long suit. He felt guilty and vulnerable. He had known that Beck loved Rita, that Rita loved Beck, but he had fallen in love with Rita, too. He had loved her from the first time he worked for her building the new counters in her kitchen and making the big maple cutting board that ran the length of the room, measuring it and putting it together, smelling the smells of new bread and fresh-cut wood marry in the warm bright room where Rita cooked while he worked. He had known then that Beck was in jail, and he understood that something—shame or fear—kept Beck from writing Rita, but when she'd cried, and he'd held her, had felt her tangled hair under his chin, her sobbing head against his chest, he knew he didn't care. In fact, he hoped the authorities would find more freezers and televisions or whatever it was that had gotten Beck in trouble and keep him there even longer.

He wanted to do the honorable thing, but he wasn't sure what that was. He could go away. Instead of going back to town when he got down to the main road, he could stick out his thumb and be somewhere else in no time. Rita would understand, and tears would come to her eyes whenever she thought of him.

As he turned a bend and arrived at the main road, Joe was joined by an unsteady pony, a pony who looked him in the eye and appeared to be waiting for him. The pony had a far-off gaze like that of statues in church, and yet
the pony seemed to be staring directly into Joe's eyes—and even further than that. Joe had no idea what this pony was seeing and it made him uneasy. He tried to ignore the pony but the pony refused to ignore him. It placed itself in his path. Then it occurred to Joe that the pony wanted him to get on and ride it, which struck him as pretty silly since it was a small animal and he was a large man. There was something so implacable in the pony's look, however, that he got on and, with his feet dragging the ground, he allowed himself to be carried to the door of the Manhood Tavern.

Inside the tavern a party seemed to be getting started. The Polonius brothers were sipping the drinks they'd been promised and had ordered Charlie's best brandy. The Basque who was the caretaker at Murphy's was trying to find out why Tarver's truck had wound up in Fiesta's pen, and trying to figure out where the pony was. Tilly Worth had arrived. She had chased Fiesta out of her garden and had gone to complain about it to the Basque who wasn't there. Tilly knew the habits of the Basque and decided to confront him here—where he drank. Tom Scarlatti, the VFD's paramedic, had examined Beck's ankle and decided along with Beck that it was a sprain, and that he should just keep his weight off it when he walked.