Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel (3 page)

“Years.”

“Ours was a mayor’s office screening procedure, mind you, no actual decision authority. Purely advisory. We went over your résumé very carefully.
Very
carefully. What do you think we advised?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you suppose the mayor’s office told the school board about young Pete Robinson?”

“I don’t know, Jim.”

“Guess.” His neck muscles visibly strained, his head craned upward; and his hands still lightly waved—the impression was of some neurologic episode. He complained, “You’re not a lot of fun, are you? Won’t even guess.”

I figured he was probably in shock. But he spoke again, saying, “You got the job, right? Think about it.” So I did, I thought about it. And realized, or thought I realized, thinking about it, what this was all about, why we were out here doing what we were doing, why Jim’s death had to happen. Jim was no ordinary citizen. He’d once been mayor. He’d held influence over my life, over all our lives.

Now he would suffer a death consequent of dire actions, appropriate to high station: an old leader turned rogue, sundered by the people.

I knelt down close to Jim’s liver-spotted head and whispered to him, “You knew this would happen, didn’t you, old man? You did it for us. Sacrificing those families at the Botanical Garden. You knew your blood would be glue to hold this community together.”

“You’re crazy,” he sputtered as, from another part of the lawn, Jerry Henderson’s voice announced, “Gentlemen, it is time.” Car doors slammed. Tears blended with saliva at the corners of Jim’s mouth as, one by one, the automobiles’ engines did ignite—all except the Celica’s.

“Fuck,” Bill Nixon said.

From the crowd came a cry: “Jumper cables! Who’s got jumper cables?”

A minute later Abraham de Leon’s blue Dodge van advanced alongside Kunkel’s budding white hydrangeas. “Come on, Abe,” coaxed Jerry Henderson as the van growled past Jim’s driftwood mailbox and into the drive and toward him, toward Henderson, spotlit, now, in high-beam van light, waving his arms flight deck style, pointing a clear route to the stalled vehicle. I couldn’t help noticing how Abraham’s Dodge’s headlights threw Jerry Henderson’s shadow massively onto Jim’s oversized garage door: as Abraham approached, Jerry’s shadow, methodically, cryptically gesturing, grew; it loomed over us like an animate, pharaonic wall frieze.

I asked Jim, “Hey, do you know anything about Egyptian religion?”

“No. And Pete, could you please loosen these knots? I mean, if this is going to take all night?”

I watched Jerry, Bill, and Abraham fiddling with cables and plugs. I saw Tom Thompson leaning on his parked Mazda. I saw men I knew mixing with others I didn’t, all muttering to one another or looking away, as though no hogtied person lay at the center of this green place. It was as if boundaries had been painted. No one outside seemed willing to acknowledge the interior space or its contents—me and Jim—and it seemed to me, then, that this might be characteristic of what some call holy ground, and that the boundary was drawn of shame. With this in mind I said to Jim, “It’s not for me to loosen your bonds,” and began telling about Osiris King of Kings, son of Earth and Sky, who was deceived into entering his own coffin, which drifted down the Nile and was delivered to Set, King of the Underworld; and about how the corpse was cut into pieces; and how the pieces were scattered east, west, north, south, across the land; a hand here, a foot there, buried in holy graves.

“That’s beautiful,” Jim said.

Over by the umbilically linked cars, Jerry counseled, “Try her again.” Abraham de Leon juiced his V-8 to a high-RPM whine. Bill Nixon’s Celica clattered, spit, and caught. “All right!” Abe cheered, tastelessly, as he backed the van into the hydrangeas. Jerry lowered the Celica’s hood, then called out to all the drivers waiting like impatient race contestants, “Let’s do this thing!”

It was my cue to back off. Everywhere, people melted away from the center, even those already standing thirty, forty feet distant. “Get away from there,” mothers called to children. No one knew what this event might possibly involve in the way of spectator risk, so everybody got out of the yard, beyond cars, mailboxes, streetlight posts, citrus trees, deep into night’s shadow across Dune Road. Everybody but me. I was listening to Jim’s last words:

“Will you do a favor for me, Pete? After I’m gone?”

“Sure.”

“Scatter my body, and declare those places holy.”

Cars strained, lines tugged. I said, “I don’t know, Jim. That sounds kind of heavy.”

“Please, Pete.”

“Well.”

“Please.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll do it.”

But enough. What’s done is done. I’m just depressing myself. It’s time to buckle down and prepare class notes and lecture outlines; or maybe, for a change, do my duty as Town Scrivener and type up these dog-eared town meeting minutes with their proposals concerning funding for the library system and regular-basis voluntary mine sweeps of Turtle Pond Park and surrounding wooded areas, to locate and physically deactivate, once and for all, the hundreds of claymores placed by Ed Benson during the spirited conflict between the Bensons and the Websters, who lived across the park from each other during the time of buildup and fortification, when almost everybody seemed to have barbed wire scrolled around his or her backyard, as well as maybe a sod- or tarp-covered pit laid deep with danger.

Those pits caught on. They were the rage. Everybody just had to build one.

Abraham de Leon, for instance, dug beneath his bedroom window a very deep hole embedded with croquet wickets positioned upside down and jutting skyward.

Tom Thompson, more ambitious than Abe, covered his much bigger pit in custom-cut Astroturf that rested like a dream over deeply piled shattered beer bottles, gathered, under cover of night, from the reclamation center.

Ray Conover’s reef-theme memorial ditch contained a lot of extremely sharp coral draped in fabrics scissored—a poignant touch—from his dead wife’s wardrobe.

And interesting was the Isaacs’, over on Lovejoy. Their pit was designed by Betsy Isaac, a local earthwork installation conceptualist interested in our culture’s debasement of sex. Her nonlinear pit wound serpentine from front to side yards, and was chock-full of anatomically semicorrect Barbie and Ken dolls, shredded and pulped men’s magazines, several cases of hideous punch-out dime store valentines, and about two tons of dead mackerel. All in all, a provocative work, functional yet challenging.

Best of all was Jerry Henderson’s moatful of water moccasins. The moat was traversable by a narrow drawbridge cobbled from redwood decking planks. The drawbridge ran on a dining room dimmer switch extension-corded to a recommissioned garage door opener secreted in a hedge.

Simple, scary, effective. Just the result I sought one warm blue Saturday morning immediately—well, more like a week—after the Kunkel thing, when I marched out back to dig. The wind blew from the east that day, and a smell of wildflowers filled the salty ocean air. I took that sweetness as a sign that things were right in the world. Meredith was there in the yard with me, reclining in an aluminum chaise, idly carving and shaping bamboo stalks macheted, the previous day, from thickets lining a nearby canal.

“I love our old house,” she said as she sheared nine-foot stalks into three-foot sections. I’d planned a four-foot-deep pit, which would present an ample three feet of open fall space above a foot-high bamboo-stalk matrix. This allowed two feet of bamboo-implant anchorage, which I imagined would be sufficient for spike stability in the soft, wet, sandy backyard mud. Meredith’s naked machete caught the light of the day, lent arrows of sun to tangelo leaves dangling over our fence from the McElroys’ backyard citrus microgrove. She hacked a length and said, “Those condo neighborhoods along the canal get me down. They’re so anonymous, I don’t know how people live in them.”

“I did, once.”

“You were a bachelor.” She razored a stalk; I spaded earth, first excavating a pre-pit outline running the length of the fence. The topsoil’s top inches were grainy but yielding beneath shallow-rooted Saint Augustine grass; it was easy work to dig the grass free and fling it into low, clumpy mounds paralleling pit’s edge. Nonetheless the trench grew slowly. It was a job, this ditchdigging. The sun sat high over the roofs of neighboring houses.

Meredith gestured with her machete. “Honey, how sharp do these need to be?”

I reached out and touched a green bamboo point. “That’s good.”

“Glad you like it. Maybe we could coat them. What’s that Amazonian tree frog? Arrow-poison frog? Hunters soak their blow darts in neurotoxins secreted from its skin.”

“I think we want this to serve mainly as a deterrent, not an actual death trap.”

“You’re so serious. I was kidding.”

Deeper ground hardened. Roots blockaded the shovel’s point. Most of the roots severed under impact, but one ran thick, oak-hard; the blade clanged against it. Yet no ancient hardwood graced this yard or any of the others adjacent: the McElroys’, the Carters’, the Kinseys’. I said to Meredith, who was whittling now, with a paring knife, fine, devilish designs, “Hey, there was a tree here once.”

“What kind?”

“Can’t tell. I’ll have to dig around.” I could feel hamstring and back muscles working hard, arms tightening above hands gloved in canvas but sore nonetheless from unaccustomed pressing against dirt packed claylike above groundwater seeping invisibly in to puddle the deepest excavations.

“Shit.”

“What?”

“Water.”

She peered in. She held a handful of elaborate spears-in-progress. They were beautiful. Some, I noticed, wore curvilinear fillips at their ends. Others remained blunt but showing designs shallowly traced into their exposed domes of points, anemone shapes and dolphin, laughing. Meredith joked, “We’ll put some fish in,” and turned and strolled barefoot to the house. Her body as she walked away was thrilling to watch. And it wasn’t long before she returned with glasses, napkins, sandwiches, a pitcher of lemonade. While ants soldiered and earthworms wiggled from clay piled high nearby, we sat on prickly grass, sucking tart ice. I took off my shoes and let the grass tickle. Meredith sat a few feet away. We faced one another. Meredith semireclined and squinted into the sun. She had red in her face. I could feel a burn too, and freckles were appearing on my arms. I leaned back and rested on my elbows and watched my wife fiddle with a blade of grass; hair fell into her face and she blew it away; Meredith’s long black hair lofted in strands away from her mouth and eyes. “Want to fool around?” she said.

“Now?”

“Why not?”

“We won’t get this work done.”

She was wearing a sundress. Clay from my digging stained her legs. I told her, “You look good to me,” and she uncrossed and stretched her legs and extended her dark naked feet to brush against mine (also extended, toward her), while, with one hand pushing away loose bamboo, clearing space, a mattress of grass, she said, “Yeah?”

She stretched out, leaning back on her elbows. She was my sweetheart. Our feet touched and our heads were far apart, we were foot to foot. I looked down the length of my body and saw her looking back at me. White salty forms of hip and stomach showed under blue cotton open at the neck in unbuttoned folds beneath Meredith’s hair cascading around her eyes. She didn’t move, only seemed to float hips upward, barely, lending this impression of coming closer.

Her feet moved against the bottoms of mine. “That’s nice,” she said.

“Yeah.” I drank melted lemony ice. The muscles in Meredith’s legs contracted slightly with her toes’ pushing against mine; her feet pushed and I pushed back—hard. Her knees bent and up went her legs.

“Like that,” I said.

And from Meredith, her own sounds: just breathing, and her whispering, “Are you hard?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Show me?” Hips rising, knees coming upward revealing the backs of Meredith’s legs whitely imprinted with shapes of grass. I wriggled over, got close and lay down beside her. I touched Meredith’s stomach and her shoulder and her hair. I raised her lemonade glass, slipped ice into my mouth, held it melting against tongue and teeth before passing it between my wife’s teeth, into her mouth, where, sucked by her, it dissolved.

“Ah,” she said into my mouth.

“Ah,” I breathed back.

“Ah.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Hmn?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“Slow.”

“Mn.”

“Ah.”

“Mn.”

“Oh.”

“Mn.”

“Easy.”

“Sorry.”

“No. Good. Great. Just not yet.”

“Sure?”

“Yes. No.”

“Turn me over.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Doesn’t hurt?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

“Tell me if.”

“No, no, good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Ah, no, ouch.”

“Sorry.”

“Okay.”

“Mmn?”

“Mmn.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Ah,” I breathed.

“Ah.” We embraced in the harsh afternoon light. Down the street a dog barked. I looked up, through budding tree leaves, at the windows of our house.

Later, toward evening, we finished the job of burying bamboo in patterns meant to deny trespass. The pit’s wide wet bottom slopped, evening’s air glowed orange; Meredith and I splashed around in loosened, disarrayed clothes, getting muddy. I said, “Look how these spikes catch the sunset.”

“Yes, it’s pretty.”

“I like this pit.”

“Me too.”

“I think you did lovely work with those bamboo points.”

“Thanks.”

“I love the one carved like a miniature beach umbrella.”

“Well, I’d already started a whole beach series, and when you mentioned the water coming into the hole from the ground, it just seemed so right.”

“Yeah.”

“Weird, huh?”

“Kind of.”

“Like getting a phone call from somebody you were just thinking about, or suddenly thinking of someone and then running smack into that person at the store. Do you believe in synchronicity, Pete?”