Balance of Fragile Things (19 page)

A
s far back as he could remember, Vic had been a victim. He'd grown used to being teased by his peers at school. He'd even become accustomed to his father's gaze, which said volumes about how disappointed he was in him. Vic sometimes imagined that his father wondered, at times, if Vic had been switched at birth with a stronger, born-to-wrestle son. Most recently, since his father had seen the ultimate mark of weakness, the damn black eye and broken nose, Vic's training lessons had expanded to include strange variations of martial arts he was convinced his father had made up by combining Tae Bo and aerobic television workout programs with a genuine lack of knowledge of karate and kung fu. The addition of Vic's grandfather as an umpire—he actually wore a baseball cap instead of a turban when involved—made the fitness circus complete. Vic had hoped his grandfather would temper his father's increasingly rough-and tumble-exercises. But that was not the case. His father wanted to impress Papaji with his progeny's agility and backyard prowess. These sessions were more intensive than the ones that Papa held before Papaji came because, as it seemed to Vic, the two men fed off each other. The session had ceased to be centered on Vic at all and had morphed into a battle of masculinity between father and grandfather.

This day was no exception. Vic was embarrassed when Papa made him show Papaji how many pull-ups he could do while hanging on the lowest branch of a tree. But it was even more humiliating for Vic when he had to stand in the yoga tree position on one foot with his hands pressed together above his head to prove that he was as well-balanced as his father insisted he was. He made it almost two minutes in the position and would have made it longer if Papaji hadn't poked him gently in the side with a stick during the test. When his father instructed Vic to throw his knife at an old poster of Lee Van Cleef he'd tacked to the fence, his grandfather finally interrupted.

“Why would you want to damage such a wonderful poster? It's a classic.”

“He's a villain.” Papa shrugged, unpinned it, and gave the poster to the old man, who, later that evening, hung it on his bedroom wall like a schoolboy.

What Vic truly hated most about these sessions was that he was invisible during the process.

Papa grimaced and bent his knees. “Papaji, he needs to thicken up in the middle. That's where you get balance. You wrestle from the stomach!”

“Nah,
puttar
, you've got it all wrong. It's the legs that need work.” He smacked Vic's knee. “Here and here—he needs to learn to turn quickly and defend all sides!”

Vic hated fighting. Of course, he didn't like being on the receiving end of a punch either, but the idea of intending to do damage to another individual, to break or bruise or cut someone, made him physically ill. He knew this was
his
problem; this was the reason every bully had targeted him specifically. They seemed to know he'd never retaliate, no matter how much confidence he was cultivating. He was quite certain his aversion to violence actually encouraged his father and grandfather. The less enthusiastic he was about learning how to bend an adversary's arm until it broke, the more they inundated him with terrible tales of the village life.

“
Puttar
,” Papaji said to Papa as he inspected his knife, “your brother could throw a knife.” The old man seemed to retreat into a memory, far from the present.

Vic watched his father's expression turn from joy to pain, as though someone had stuck a shard of glass in his chest. Vic had asked many times about his father's family, about other relatives he might have lingering in other parts of the world, but his father never offered an answer. He would turn away as though there hadn't been a question. Vic watched the distance between his father and grandfather expand until he realized the moment was ripe for his escape.

Papa mumbled something about snake wrangling and its similarities to disarming a
dacoit
as he took his knife back from his father.

“Knife throwing is not a talent,” Papa said. “It's a circus act.”

Vic excused himself to the bathroom and walked directly through the house and out the front door. He knew he'd only be free of the training session if he got lost. So he kept walking at a confident stride down Peregrine Court. He picked up the pace and turned to look behind him only when he arrived at the top of the community park on the edge of their small neighborhood.
Park
was a very generous term for the half-acre of grass, two benches, and stone-carved sign that read
The Commons
. A dry bench seemed as good a space as any that was
not
his backyard.

From this vantage point he could see the roofs of PMI's buildings peeking over the early autumn treetops. It looked like a self-contained space-age city. Vic went farther into the trees to get a better look, crossing the street and making his way into the thicket. The ground sucked at his feet and the air became heavy, moist. He looked up at the trees. Only dead or dying leaves clung to their branches. The forest was a skeleton army, petrified in its final charge. The branches were arms; the trunks were legs. He heard the wood creak as the wind picked up, and he moved backward to avoid a branch. It was then that he came upon another important discovery: an orange-and-brown butterfly with a touch of gray on the tips of its wings, sitting on a branch over his head.

Vic retrieved his new notebook from his back pocket. He had decided to begin a new one shortly after he'd witnessed his last notebook's cremation. He'd wrapped the replacement's cover in duct tape in hopes of making it fireproof. It was the Xerces Blue that inspired him to continue to record his surroundings. The idea that a butterfly could slip into extinction so easily troubled him deeply, and he decided that he would do his best to record what he saw and become a sort of lepidopteron watcher in his area.

Now, he used a dull pencil to sketch the orange-and-brown invertebrate as best he could. When he was done, it looked more like a manta ray than a butterfly, not in the vicinity of Nabokov's drawings, but his illustrations were improving. He felt honored to see it here—like this—yet he was also confused about its presence.

Vic continued to his fort, as it was the only place he could hide. He felt exposed and still too close to home to relax. The mine was safe, a space where he could be alone with his thoughts about the photo contest at school, butterflies, and Katie. It began to drizzle along his walk, but the dampness didn't bother him. A few times his sneakers got stuck in the mud, which made for uncomfortable walking, but in mere minutes he found himself at the birch tree that marked the entry into his underground fortress. He slowly lowered himself, rung by rung, into the darkness as he had tens of times before, but this time something smelled different. His nose was incredibly keen; perhaps its size did have at least one benefit. The air, he discovered, was thick with stale smoke that made him sneeze. As he turned on the fluorescent lamp that sat on the last step, he realized the cause.

Cigarette butts, smoked to the very end of their filters, littered the ground around his feet. Someone had been here and had used his pristine sand floor as an ashtray. He froze. What if the smoker was still in the mine? What if he was watching him right now? He shuddered and picked up a butt to test the heat, but it was cold. The person or persons were long gone. A scramble of footprints turned this way and that in the sand. His supplies were rearranged on the shelf he'd built, and his extra clothes, some books and cans, and his shadow box were missing. He didn't care about the other things, but the butterflies were priceless. He curled his hands into fists and yelled. The thieves had left the lantern, which meant they were planning on returning. They'd also left a lighter with an iron cross carved into its plastic skin. As Vic climbed up and out once more, with lantern in hand and lighter in pocket, he felt defeated. He had a strange urge to destroy the ladder and fill the mine with earth so no one else could enter after him.

I
t was early in the morning, and rather than being curled up within the groove he'd created on his side of the bed, Paul was wide awake in his garage, alone. He was careful not to make any noise, though he could probably run the lawnmower without alarming the rest of the family as the garage was on the opposite side of the house from the bedrooms. It was chilly and quiet at this time of the morning; for Paul, it was the best time to be alone in his office with his research.

If there was one thing Paul could do better than anyone else in the house, he thought, it was keep secrets. Regardless of how much he wanted to tell his wife about the small makeshift office he had constructed in the garage, he didn't. He didn't tell her about the desk he'd made of particleboard, duct tape, and a few cinderblocks. He hid the fact that when he told everyone he was organizing the garage, he was actually stacking a precariously tall pile of empty boxes that provided wall-like cover from anyone who'd enter looking for a rake, tape, or a misplaced book. Paul's decision to construct an area of his own was born from necessity rather than genius. He needed a private place to think freely about the business the station was losing and the unpaid bills that were stacking up. The most recent notice that pushed him over the edge was from his auto repair inventory supplier. They'd stopped sending windshield wiper fluid, engine oil, and car tchotchkes. The tower of blue bottles had shrunk to nothing. Now they threatened to take his spare tire inventory, too, but said they'd wait a week on good faith. He didn't have the money. He couldn't pay. The station's business had continued to decline slowly, and if he didn't find a way to fix the traffic problem, he knew he would be forced to close and find other work. No one knew how bad it was. No one would know. He kept this secret closest to his chest.

This place in his garage didn't judge him. Here he could mull over his stolen maps for hours at a time without commentary, framed by an empty wall that wasn't afraid to bear the prick of several thumbtacked articles about Cobalt. Paul had managed to chart the entire web of Cobalt County's infrastructure, from gutter to sewer, bridge to river. How like a body a village was, he thought as he sat atop the thick tree-stump stool. The waterways were veins; the bridges were like joints connecting separate pieces of land.

Being a secret-keeper was the third item on his Life Goals List. The first item was the most important, and he hoped it was not just a dream: to find the cause of the construction and make it stop. Lists, in Paul's mind, were the only true literary art. Stories were for lazy people. Newspaper articles existed only to be drained of their information. Lists were active, forward thinking, organizing, helpful, and beautifully arranged. His list, a collection of oddly unrelated goals and dreams, was impaled upon a thumbtack against a wood beam to the left of his desk area. It read:

1. I will find the cause of the construction. I will have justice. When this one station is on track, I will open another station on Main Street.
   
2. Someday I will do something better than anyone else in the world. It might be small, like standing on one foot, or even just becoming a city watchdog, but my name will be recorded on an award, and there I will live on forever.
   
3. I will become a first rate secret-keeper. I will store hoards of information and knowledge and try my hardest to overcome the overwhelming desire to share. But if I do share, I will choose my confidant wisely.
   
4. I will, one day, reclaim my ownership and discovery of the knot I created that is useful when hitching two water buffalo. The Singh Double Bend will be my first patent. The knot, Uncle Chand said, looked uncannily like the Harness Bend, but he was senile, obviously. It looks nothing like it. It will be one of my claims to fame, certainly.
   

The most important piece of research he'd conducted in his office had been connecting with a laboratory that was willing to run an 8260 test for petroleum on a water sample. Paul had changed his name to Clint Jones and made up a story about how he lived across from an auto repair shop and was worried that his water was contaminated. In reality, he needed to eliminate the nagging feeling that his gasoline was leaking into the groundwater of his town. If his station caused the hole, he wanted to know so he could fix it. The lab was willing to take a sample via the post and would have the chromatogram results in a week or so. The technician said she'd fax the results, and he'd given her the fax number at the station, which wasn't listed and therefore could continue to keep his identity anonymous. He knew the lab had no authority to report the results to the EPA or any government office; they just wanted the eighty bucks for running the test. Now he needed to get a few samples from inside the hole in the ground and mail them in as well. That information would tell him what was going on.

As he gazed lovingly at his secret lair, right under his family's noses, he realized, uncomfortably, that he wanted to share the beauty of his organizational ability with another set of eyes. He bit his lip, pressed his hands against his belly, and sighed. Secrets were a difficult business because they lived only in the mind of the keeper. His burden was growing with his stress, and he wondered if he alone could carry this task. Paul shuffled his feet nervously, then stood and paced the few feet he'd cleared behind the wall of empty cardboard. He opened the door to the house and peered down the hallway for a moment before he ducked back into the garage. What would the harm be in telling just one other person about his burrow and his research about the station? No, he thought, I need to keep my secret or else I won't be able to cross that one off the list. But perhaps there were secrets that shouldn't be kept, or maybe there were some secrets that could be kept by two people? Paul felt fine with this justification, and he amended the listed item with a final statement that incorporated the benefits of “healthy sharing.”

“Son?” Paul jumped and dropped his pencil. Papaji was standing in the garage, with his Latvian socks on his feet and a puzzled expression on his face. “What is this?”

Paul pressed his forefinger to his lips. “Papaji? Oh, this is my office.”

“
Hánji
. Why so early?”

“Couldn't sleep.”

Papaji took in the whole operation.

“There is a matter we need to discuss,” Paul said. “I need to show you something.”

In a matter of moments Paul was going over the maps and diagrams of the city, trying to explain his theory about the disruptive digging across from the station.

“I think they are looking for something. That's why they keep flushing the water out from below. That's why they have the
badmásh
standing guard over the hole. See here?” He pointed to a map of the water system. “The pipes run right under the station.”

“What would they be looking for, I wonder?”

“Did the workers ever tell you anything?” Paul asked.

“No, no, but they do look suspicious. I can tell when a man is lying—that's my gift.”

Paul laughed and said, “Well, what were they lying about?”

“We should find out ourselves.”

Paul and Papaji changed into working clothes. Paul helped Papaji slip his feet into an old pair of sneakers.

As Paul drove into town, he felt better than he had in years. He was a cowboy checking out the trouble at his station, and no one would stand in his way. Papaji was his sidekick who would back him up. The streets were completely empty. When they exited the car, he looked up at the early morning sky. The rain clouds had split and offered a glimpse of the still-starry sky above. They were lucky that the water had drained from the hole over the past two days.

Paul parked the car near the hole and asked his father to keep watch from the driver's seat. If something happened, or someone came, he told him to switch the headlights on bright. In Paul's fanny pack were several items: a small Maglite flashlight, a disposable camera with a flash, four empty sterile jars, and a few plastic baggies already labeled. On his feet were work boots. On his back was a black rain poncho. He wore a Yankees cap over his hair. In his pocket was his knife, freshly sharpened. He wished he had a rope ladder, but he only had a wooden one, which he dropped down, down, down, ten feet into the hole. He waved to Papaji, who was sitting in the car, key in the ignition, his hand on the headlight switch, ready to turn them on at a moment's notice.

Paul entered the hole with the flashlight in his teeth and his eyes agape, observing the different layers of earth as he went. First he saw asphalt and tar, then gray and cracked concrete. Brick and cobblestone came next. He imagined what this town would look like paved in hand-cut stone. The layer beneath was sand, then finally he came to brown soil. He'd thought the soil would have been black, but with the unnatural layers suffocating the earth, how could it breathe? He saw dismembered roots spear the rocks though no tree stood above.

When he reached the bottom of the ladder, he jumped into the cold water. It covered his calves and soaked into his jeans. With the flashlight still in his mouth, he unscrewed a jar and dipped it into the water, which smelled sweet and a little like chlorine, and then he filled a few baggies with samples of the soil. When he was all set, he inspected the sides of the hole. It was strange to be standing in a cross-section of the earth. He wondered what was below him. How far was it to the next layer of sedimentary rock, to the core? He remembered what they had told him when he bought the gas station. Leaking is inevitable, the inspector had said. That's why he'd installed a failsafe system. It was expensive, but he didn't want his gasoline to leak. Gasoline cost a lot, but most of all, Paul didn't want his business to harm the town he'd grown to love, even though the storms and freezing winters made it difficult to like. The forest here was lush. The ferns were plentiful. The rivers were full and content. They were growing fuller with all the rain. He rubbed his bare hand against the earth, then took the ladder in his hand and ascended, one rung at a time.

Papaji was sitting in the car. Paul half expected him to be in the station or driving the Cutlass in circles. At that image he laughed. He'd done it. He'd gone into the hole and gotten samples. It was still quiet. He waved to his father and began to pull the ladder from the earth's open mouth. A car was coming from the opposite direction. Papaji flashed the high beams at the car to blind the driver. Paul dropped the ladder on the asphalt and dove behind the side of his car. The other car passed them slowly. The headlights were bright and illuminated every imperfection of the road that Paul could see from under the car. Soon it was gone, and only the red rear lights shone in the darkness. He looked inside the blue whale and saw Papaji, like a manatee, spread flat against the seat. He tapped on the window.

“So?” Papaji asked.

“So,” Paul answered and shook the bags full of samples. He looked over at his station and felt it looked different somehow. He squinted in the darkness and saw that the tire rack with his spare tire inventory was gone. A pink piece of paper was adhered to the door to the convenience store. They'd done it.

In less than three minutes they were back at home, and in only ten minutes Papaji was in his bed. Paul went back to the garage to work a little more. His nerves were shot; his hands were shaking. He knew if he didn't get to the bottom of this soon, he would be in financial ruin.

The following day, Paul mailed the samples to the Creative Services Laboratory, to the care of Mrs. Shari Lawrence in Mason City. The website said it would only take one week to process the samples—then he'd know what was really down there. That night Paul dreamed he'd slipped through his bed into the center of earth, and that the core resembled the village in India where he grew up.