Country of Cold (3 page)

When Sam came in that night to pick up Cindee, Lester said to him, “I want to take that barrel over the falls.”

Cindee had known Rhonda from before she and Lester started seeing each other. They had gone to school together but never in the same class. They had had ex-boyfriends and marginal friends in common. For a long time Cindee had not liked Rhonda much, had found her suspect, furtive almost. You saw it the clearest when she felt uncomfortable, at a party, say, when she couldn’t remember somebody’s name, and tried to hide it when it would have been easier to just get it out of the way. Or just in the way Rhonda had stayed in that little trailer out on the edge of town all by herself, even after she wasn’t working anymore. Fear ran through that woman like a bad secret, Cindee thought, and you never knew how much she was holding back. It was that same quality that drew Lester in when they met, that startled and frightened look she had. Cindee watched it happen and smiled tightly and ached for Lester. Not that Rhonda wasn’t entitled to leave Lester, or to have an unsuccessful marriage with him. But. When it seemed that
inevitable, it ending so badly, it just made you wonder what they were thinking.

For people to be kind to each other shouldn’t be the hardest thing in the world. Not to ask the world of each other, not to expect to be deliriously happy. Just to observe a few of the obvious rules, the ones that get broken so often. A certain amount of consideration. If you could have that it would be so much better than nothing.

Cindee didn’t really give Rhonda a chance until many months after her and Lester’s wedding. Cindee and Lester had always been work friends and Lester had suggested over and over again that she and Sam should come over for a barbecue or something. As eager as Lester was for all of them to be friends, Cindee couldn’t shake her reservations about Rhonda. Finally she ran out of excuses and they all got together one night in July in Lester and Rhonda’s backyard when the mosquitoes were like airborne pepper and the humidity was so high that everyone’s crotch itched.

Lester and Sam had stood by the barbecue in floral-print shorts, mesmerized by the flames under the meat. Lester weighed maybe 140 pounds then. “Think we should turn it?” one would say to the other.

And the other would reply, “I dunno, maybe in a minute.”

This left Cindee and Rhonda on the lawn chairs groping for conversation. “Do you remember any summers hotter than this?” Cindee asked.

“I don’t think so,” Rhonda replied. “How are the boys doing with the meat, do you think?”

Cindee shrugged and drank her piña colada.

“We’ve never used that barbecue before. Lester hates anything unfamiliar. I’m glad Sam is here to help him.”

Cindee looked over at the two men, standing slack-jawed by the smoking barrel. She looked back at Rhonda and realized for an instant how frustrating it would be to live with Lester’s passivity. As good a quality as it was, with all the hotheads around the bar, it would be hard, at night, or when the toilet started overflowing, or when you were trying to plan a vacation. She was glad Lester had met Rhonda, had found someone who loved him. Certainly it could have easily been her. Thank God it wasn’t. “I’m glad you’re around, to help Lester.”

“He doesn’t need that much help, actually. Just encouragement.”

“Still,” Cindee said.

Rhonda smiled. “He speaks highly of you, at the bar. He’s very fond of you. When we first started seeing each other I thought maybe he was in love with you.”

“That’s
hilarious.”

“I know,” Rhonda said. She sipped her drink and nodded at the mounting inferno. “Sam is quite a catch. Easygoing, competent, nice-looking.”

“Thanks. I like him fine.”

“Let’s get the potato salad dished up.”

Lester and Sam stared at the meat. “Do you think we should turn it?” Sam asked.

“I dunno, maybe in a minute,” Lester said.

Cindee and Rhonda became friends more quickly than either woman expected. As they got to know one another better, Rhonda started to complain about Lester more and more. He was so perfunctory in bed, he was so emotionally remote, he never said what was really on his mind, only what he thought he had to say to reassure her. Cindee listened to this and had to acknowledge that she had seen all these things at work too, well, except the bed stuff, and she could see Rhonda’s point.
Points
. There were a few of them.

But she wondered why Rhonda dwelled upon them. Lester wasn’t going to change much. Shouldn’t she get used to it? To him? And anyway, Cindee was Lester’s friend too, she didn’t necessarily want to hear about his sex life. But Rhonda was desperate for an ear, and there is something compelling about another woman being frank about her sex life, about how frustrating it is. Hearing you’re not the only one.

And then Rhonda left Lester and everyone seemed so astonished and Cindee just wondered where everyone had been. He didn’t make her happy and that point couldn’t be argued. But there was the question of whether or not he should have made her happy—which nobody ever wants to talk about: as if people have no
control over their feelings, you feel what you feel is all, like we are all sea anemones, tasting the water and filtering whatever comes our way. But she
should
have been happy with him—Cindee was prepared to say this.

In the end it was inevitable that she would leave, and that was hardly a bad thing, if she was determined to be that unhappy with him. Except when you looked at poor Lester, who was poleaxed. But that capacity for sorrow was in him before he met Rhonda. Cindee knew that. Oh, Cindee didn’t know what to think.

What had Rhonda seen when she looked at herself in the mirror that she would be so unsatisfied with Lester? What’s not to be happy with? Idiot. Don’t stare too hard at someone else’s cellulite unless you can stand in front of the mirror and look at your own little bulges just as hard. Who does she think she is, Miss America? Why can’t we be happy with one another, anyway?

The barrel was basically ready to go from a structural point of view. It had been designed to survive a drop farther than the height of the falls, and into deep water too. There was good flotation present and brackets for oxygen tanks. As a welder, Sam had lots of oxygen tanks lying around, so that wasn’t a problem, but there was a question of how best to regulate the oxygen flow. This wasn’t really Sam’s field. The other thing was, once the barrel was shut up tight, where would the carbon dioxide go—and what sort of flow rate should the oxygen
have, and how do you keep that constant with no vent and a steadily increasing pressure inside the barrel? Unless you did put a vent in. But then that meant a hole in the barrel. Lester wasn’t much use on any of these questions, but he came by every night after work with beer and wings anyway, to chat, to hold things.

Sam looked at Lester sometimes, and tried to figure out why he was doing this. He knew a little bit about the trouble he’d had for the last year, and all that weight he had put on, of course that was obvious. But who knows what makes anyone else tick? Not Sam.

Sam was the best welder Sam had ever known. This was simply a fact. At the Rockwell plant he was considered a prodigy; all the engineers asked for him to work on their prototypes. It had been great then, working around people who cared as much as he did about flawless work and craftsmanship and could appreciate the attention he put into it. Since then it had been hard, being another out-of-work guy. It’s hard to not want to be the best and to be seen that way. Which sounds ungracious to say out loud, but doesn’t anyone who tries hard think like that? As opposed to people who have given up, say. You don’t want to be like that. It’s dangerous even to pretend to be all modest and helpless like that. It really is.

All around Sam were people who were just coasting, just trying to get used to their shitty jobs and their
marginal marriages. Cindee and Lester and the losers they worked with down at that bar—look at their days. Sleep till noon or one o’clock, get up and eat cereal and smoke cigarettes in front of the television. Get dressed in the mid-afternoon. Maybe run an errand, do a crossword puzzle, and then go to work. Home at three or four. Fall asleep as the sun rises. Just what are you going to accomplish living like that? These people hate themselves and they reveal this in every faked and hearty laugh and in every round they buy for their friends, after closing, in that dark and stinking-of-cigarette-smoke bar.

You have to aim for something bigger, just to stand yourself. Anything will do, almost. Anything even a little out of reach is worthwhile. You have to choose a beautiful thing, imagine better, or everything around you just gets worse.

It was dawn and Cindee and Sam and Lester were at the lookout over the falls. Lester and Cindee were sitting on the fenders of Sam’s truck. The light was stabbing silver and bright through the mist below the falls. Sam was standing on the safety rail, balancing easily and looking down. Lester and Cindee drank from bottles of beer they cradled in their laps. Lester was nervous about Sam falling over. Cindee told him not to worry.

“We’ve been coming down here a couple times a month as long as we’ve known each other. He always does this. At first I thought he was trying to impress me
and I thought it was sort of stupid and sort of cute.” She said that loudly enough for Sam to hear and Sam looked over his shoulder at them and smiled quickly. Then, more quietly: “But then I realized that, like with everything, he’s just trying to impress himself.”

“Reassure himself, maybe.”

“Maybe.”

Another crazy-busy summer night after closing, after rousing the unconscious and herding them to the door and pushing them into cabs and then collapsing likewise into the chairs around the bar and not talking much, just rubbing your temples. Cindee and Marilyn and Lester were drinking their first beers of the night when Sam knocked on the door. No one moved for a long moment. Finally Cindee put her cigarette in an ashtray and stood up and walked over to the door and opened it and walked back to her chair. Sam followed her, waving his hand in front of his face. “It reeks in here,” he said.

Cindee exhaled slowly. “It was nuts tonight.”

“You all look terrible.”

“Well, we’re tired.”

“Then maybe you don’t need more to drink.”

Cindee looked up at him. “Does this disgust you, Sam? Do I disgust you, Mr. Chiselled Jaw?”

Lester crossed his legs and stared at a wall. Marilyn looked up at Sam with detached disdain. Sam turned and walked out the door.

The tradition had always been to launch barrels very early on Sunday mornings, when the police were sleeping. Lester and Sam had spent Saturday afternoon going over the barrel one more time. They had double-checked all the safety systems—the air bags inside the barrel, the breathing apparatus and the backup oxygen supply, the radio. It all worked perfectly. That night Cindee and Lester worked at the bar, and, through all the smoke and music, Lester had felt as if he were stoned, moving slowly and easily through the line of customers, all urgently twitching to the music and looking impatiently at the repulsive and obese bartender who seemed hardly to hear them as they shouted out for their brands of beer and tequila.

Cindee stared at Lester all night long, and was likewise a target of abuse from the college kids. As she held her tray high and pushed along, the crowd would part and at the other end of the room she could see Lester there, rubbing his chin and smiling and blinking.

When she walked up to the bar, Lester didn’t recognize Rhonda at first, but turned and asked her what she wanted, prepared to reach for one of the beers, and then looked up at her non-response and it was her. “Hi,” he said.

“Lester, I’ve heard about this barrel ride you’re planning and I came by to tell you that I think this is even more pathetic than that business on Jerry’s lawn.”

“Oh,” Lester said.

“So don’t do this, and spare us both the humiliation, okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t embarrass me, don’t embarrass yourself.”

“Why would either of us be humiliated?”

“Lester, please tell me you won’t do this.”

“Okay.”

“Thank God.” They exchanged a long look and then Rhonda turned and walked away.

Cindee stopped by the bar and looked at Lester. He seemed to be moving even more slowly. “How are you, Lester?”

“I’m excited,” he said. He didn’t look it.

“What did Rhonda want?” Cindee asked.

“To wish us luck.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

Cindee didn’t sleep at all that night. Sam stayed down at his shop, tinkering with the barrel as Cindee sat on the edge of their bed. Sam and Lester were both idiots. Neither one of them could get used to his own life. Lester, in his pout, which looked to be becoming permanent, and Sam and his wouldn’t-belong-to-any-club-that-would-take-me ambition. The other night he had told her that anything a little out of
reach was a worthwhile goal. Like anyone around him is not?

She lit another cigarette and flipped the ash into a coffee cup. She looked at herself in the mirror, her tear-streaked face and her breasts, hanging down, her arms, reaching around and hugging herself.

In the morning Lester sat out on his porch waiting for Cindee to come by. When she pulled up in Sam’s truck Lester stood and waved to her. She got out of the truck and walked up to him. “Having any second thoughts?” she said.

“None worth mentioning,” he said. “

Are you still excited?”

“Not as much. It’s all afterthought now. How are you doing?”

“Better, thanks.”

“Good. I don’t know if Sam thanked you for us, but I really appreciate your help here.”

“Lester, I’m only helping out because you’re involved.”

“How’s Sam?”

“He’s fine. He thinks he’s gonna be famous.”

“Do you think we will?”

“Depends if anyone sees us, I guess.” And they got into Sam’s truck and drove over to the shop, where he had been up all night, double-checking.

When they got the barrel to the river upstream of the falls it was already very light and the streets were starting to wake up. Fishermen began appearing on the river, and the last of the morning mist dissipated. Lester climbed into the back of the truck. Sam swung the hatch of the barrel open and Lester squeezed himself in feet first. He buckled up the elaborate harness. For the first time he began to feel afraid. He looked up out the hatch and saw Cindee and Sam looking in. Cindee was almost crying and Sam looked stern, even angry.