Another Perfect Catastrophe (12 page)

“I just thought about him sweating, digging into the dirt, tearing up his back. The guy is slipping and puffing like he's going to have a heart attack, just so the dog could rest in the shade. I mean, a damn dog. It seemed like he had tied
himself
to the dog, not the other way around. No one even noticed the guy. No one helped him.”

He stopped, his lungs filling. T probably sound like a
Lassie
episode,” he said. Applause filtered down to them, the mayor having finished his speech.

“I love that,” Celina said. “I feel like I love that man.”

Jeremy nodded. “It's weird. That's what I felt, too. Like he deserved something from me.”

She turned toward him. “Well, now he has it. You told about him.”

He wanted to tell her everything, about the man and the dog, about the electrified boys in the rain, all the small moments of his past. Beside him he could just make out the movements of Celina, her starchy clothes rustling like grass. He felt the weight of his drunkenness, allowing his head to tilt against her shoulder. From this angle he could see high on the opposite wall the faint, crude scratches of cave drawings, dark as rust at the edges of his vision. Upstairs, the keyboard started “One O'clock Jump,” and feet shuffled across the floor above them, through the layers of insulation and particleboard and the concrete and fiberglass of the cave. He heard laughter, the faint wheeze of breath through Celina's nose, her fingers smoothing his hair.

“You'll be all right,” she said. “Sleep it off.”

He reached back behind him and found with his fingertips the indentations of other drawings, rough figures etched and painted into the stone, his hand careful as it traced the shallow lines, the thin, smoothed ruts. He heard his own name then, called in dim echoes, the laughing that followed it. He imagined Jean with the cordless mike, making a joke of looking for him, her voice altered and modulated, his name something far off and unrecognizable. The sound faded against the rushed pulse of his blood, the scant sigh of Celina's breathing. He held to the sound of his name as his fingers traced the jagged lines on the wall. He wondered what tales they told, of hunts or kills or defeats, and in what language they might be written, some ancient language lost to history, telling stories without words.

George Bartel has earned
enough money in commercial lending to finally afford an extravagance, and now finds himself seated on an airplane, muscle relaxants in his blood to forestall nervousness, his wife Maurya beside him. He liked the idea when it occurred to him, she loved it when he told her: three Valentine's Day dinners in three time zones, toasting twenty-two years of marriage across the continent. So romantic, she said, so expansive. They're due, he said. And so they began that afternoon in Boston, with orzo pasta and wild mushrooms,
fugasa
bread, and pear-and-hazelnut crisp, and now a three-hour hop to St. Louis for chicken with passion fruit and champagne, then on to San Francisco for Belgian waffles and mimosas. Roses and a limo ride started the night, sleepy handholding and familiar sex will end it. Two stones, they are, skipping across time and geography.

Like most plans, this one is already truncated, deformed. He's saved money buying coach and now sits with his knees scrunched, feet cramped. The air vent blows its staleness and stink. Every seat is full, babies crying in rounds, no one watching the mime show of flotation devices and oxygen masks. George's thighs hurt, and the prescription makes his heart race, his palms over dry, his scalp tingly. “This is
so
exciting,” Maurya says, and, God bless her, means it. She is still pretty, despite the years that have pulled him down into jowliness and a measurable gut, despite the severity of her haircut, which, if she were a boy of ten, he would call a brush cut. Gold hoops dangle from her ears, swaying as she dabs nail polish at the run in her stockings.

The ground drops away as the prescription smears his usual quiet panic into an agreeable fog. The pasta has settled badly, and he hides a belch in his fist. The young woman in front of him (he noticed her when they boarded—a round, plain face and chunky calves, but that
hair
, a shiny curtain of it hanging several inches past the hem of her T-shirt) tips her seat in full recline, squeezing him. He sighs, too loud. Nine more hours and two more meals of this, the airliner gaining time he doesn't want. Maurya kisses his hand, an old gesture that still moves him. He decides to do better.

The captain comes on fuzzy through the speakers and tells them—George could swear he hears this—to eat their peas. The cart rattles down the aisle and he buys two tiny bottles of rum to mix with Coke, then accepts the foil packets of almonds and a cellophane packet of candy hearts, for Valentine's Day. Everything is whimsy now, the world laughing at its own jokes. Maurya reads some aloud as she feeds them to him: BE MINE. HOT STUFF. Air hisses through the fuselage, and the seat belt sign winks out. The old, darkened NO SMOKING signs are still at the ready, should the latest tyrannies ever vanish from the world. Maurya asks if he's okay and he promises he is, speaking through the sugared paste on his tongue. He rinses with drink and thinks better of taking another pill, his palms still papery and dry.

Just as Maurya settles in with
People
, as George allows his eyes their heaviness, the young woman before him, stirring in half sleep, lifts her heavy hair from behind her and tosses it free of its confinement, her motion practiced and effortless. The hair fans out in slippery waves, a billowing of auburn, gold, saffron in slow motion, like a shampoo commercial. The bulk of it settles, thickly, in George's lap.

Maurya, engrossed in Mel Gibson and celebrity weddings, fails to notice. The hair, dense and opulent, slides along the folds of his wool slacks, cascading as he shifts. Night encloses the plane as the cabin lights darken, people napping on pillows or sitting under their spot lamps, quiet performers on a dozen tiny stages. In the shadows George lets his knuckles graze the tips of the woman's hair. Soft, a silk chemise, the fur of some exotic animal. Maurya slowly nods off, and George, emboldened, a little drunk, extends his fingers so the hair slides down between and through, the gold of his wedding ring a nugget in the bed of some coppery autumn stream. The young woman sleeps, her nose slightly whistling. He combs her tresses with his hands, bundles it loosely in his fist like bolts of voile, and admires its liquid falling. Then the woman shifts, stirs. George's heart whirs like a small machine. He closes his eyes, then thinks better of it, imagining Maurya waking and finding him, with half an erection, touching one of the other passengers. He holds her hair and bends to sniff it, careful of his movements, pretending to adjust his socks. The smell is honeyed, ambrosial …

The woman sits up.

He drops the hair and adopts good posture, snatches a safety folder from the seat back and opens it. With feined concentration he studies the cartoon drawings of faceless, androgynous passengers escaping down an inflated slide. The woman turns, blinks, looks at him without accusation. He smiles, and she settles back again.

Hands shaking, he flips the safety card to a map of the airline's hubs, red dots spread across the country, a disease. The map is made of colors: red for Eastern Time, blue for Central, yellow for Mountain, green … He looks again at that boxy yellow swatch, the jaundiced middle. Somehow, he's forgotten Mountain. For weeks he's bragged about his plans, and no one asked about Idaho or Montana. The travel agent never brought it up. Even the TV neglects Mountain. Every night, the announcer speaks only of Eastern, Central, and “later on the West Coast.” Not one word about Mountain, that yellowed hole in his plans. The entire scheme seems pointless now, riddled with faulty plans and superfluous time zones. Even the woman's hair is probably some kind of ruse—a wig, maybe, or expensive chemicals purchased at a salon. He reaches up again, lets his fingers slide through the soft strands, remembering the experience of finding beauty there as though it had happened years ago and not two minutes prior.

How wrong can he be? First the trip and now the hair, all his feeble desires filtered through his own candied heart. He lifts her hair again in both hands. The smell is the thing, all the old nostalgias. Grimsley High, class of 1972—cheerleaders and backseats and sweat and promise and ache. The captain announces their arrival time, the hour shedding minutes to the swiftness of the plane, and George shedding years to the swiftness of his life. He presses his nose into the handful of hair, breathing. Why had they made this trip at all? The full implement of love became operational at age sixteen; the rest was only packaging, bright distraction from rust and wear. His entire plan feels arbitrary, fake, set up, the whole idea of Valentine's Day nothing more than some corporate contrivance, propped up by Hallmark and Whitman's. He knows how the world works. The grown-up world of falseness and whimsy. He holds the fan of hair to his face. They should have stayed home, bought a porch swing. Built a porch. Sat and held hands. If not that, not in their own mortgaged space, then what is there to find in St. Louis or San Francisco?

George breathes deeply, fighting tears, rubbing the hair into his eye sockets. He imagines this: a wife, a husband, swinging out and then back into the comforting drop he feels now as the plane begins its slow descent, swinging out over the night and the neighborhood, the welcoming blue-beaded landing lights below no more than the straight lines of TV sets, guiding them to ground, easing them out of the dark. He releases the bundle of hair and sits back, Maurya stirring, muttering in her sleep, settling against him. His feet push against the narrow carpet, moving Maurya lightly in her sleep, his fingers finding her severe hair, stiff with mousse. He moves his fingertips, over and over, soothing her, each tiny hair a needle of compunction, steely and familiar.

We are not big time
,
and as Tricia says, it takes no lethal act of imagination to see that. Here is how bad it gets: About sixty miles outside Jacksonville we were cruising high because Tricia's Blitz made his best showing all winter, coming from the outside eight box on a muddy track and placing second in the sprint stake, winning enough to get us motoring back toward West Memphis, tossing leers at one another, sharing little airline brandy bottles in the front seat with Tricia edged close to me and her hand on my thigh. Near dark we stop for burgers etc. at a Tastee-Freez and then get back in the station wagon and the horn and dome light stick. I mean they won't quit this blare of noise and light until I pop the hood to yank the ground wire, then claw at the headliner and start shearing wires with Tricia's nail cutters. After that it's two hundred miles of dark, with no light for bathroom breaks or road maps, no horn if we start to get killed, and that flap of headliner waving between our heads like some don't-get-horny warning flag. Highway 10 is a bad pull of road like this, the Delta scary quiet, the Gulf Coast just another something to get past; and like he knows things are going to shit, Tri-cia's Blitz whines and scratches at his crate, and we have nothing to feed him but pork rinds we buy off gas-station racks. The plan is to hit the winter races at Texarkana, then swing back through West Memphis, but the thing about no dome light is that every plan looks worse in the dark.

While my brain grinds through this current run of badness, Tricia walks out of the shower with a towel tucked around her breasts and another around her neck like a boxer. This is the thing about motels, for a few days you are rich in towels. We are on the second floor because Tricia believes that mice can't climb, that roaches are fearful of heights. I like this towel business, and Tricia all dewy from the shower, her face deep pink from a half hour in the exercise room, which in this kind of place is only a duct-taped bench and a weight bar, plus one of those bikes with a big box fan where the wheel should be. Tricia has been working on her pecs because, she says, they are in cahoots with her breasts, which are starting to give her worry. They are learning all they need to know about gravity, she tells me. She is forty-three and expert at fretting. And from Texas, where she used to work as a bank teller, which is tricky as jobs go because it looks like a good job but is really a shit job all dressed up and parked near the money. But just near, not in. We have been together seven months, circuiting dog tracks for three. She won't marry me because we are too new and because of her one other marriage, which got euthanized at a year, eight months.

“Can't we let the dog loose?” Tricia asks. She nudges the crate with her toe, and Tricia's Blitz sticks out his nose enough for a lick. I added that “Tricia's” part to his name just to make her happy, her name all over my life. Made him hers even though he isn't.

I shake my head, light a Marlboro, watch the water drops gather at the ends of her hair. “Best place is in the crate until race time. You build up their running until they can't stand it.”

Tricia takes the cigarette from me, puffs without inhaling. She bends down and sticks her finger through the wire mesh. “Happy New Year, doggy, my Blitz,” she says. Four hours now until Dick Clark lets the ball drop in New York. Out on the highway the cars are lined up, honking, the sidewalks full. We can watch from our balcony, a steady current of noisy drunks, teenagers in heat, Shriners outfitted with diapers and sashes. Tricia's Blitz whines, scratches, and Tricia pushes another pork rind through the wire. Try finding dog food on New Years' Eve in Biloxi, much less a motel room. This one was the last, I think, eighty bucks a night, and for that the paint around the door is peeling.

“Why don't you get dressed,” I say. “We'll head out to one of the casinos.”

She looks up at me, her brown hair drying at the edges. “With what? Think we can stuff these in the slots?” She rattles the pork-rind bag at me like Exhibit A.