Everything (5 page)

He looked at her under the brim of his hat like she was supposed to be impressed, but June drew a blank.

Baseball pitcher, said Howard Emerson. Middle relief, setup guy. Threw for the Cardinals for a while. Nicest person you ever met.

Great! she said.

Bunch of rich hippies now, said Howard Emerson. Ex-hippies, I guess, by now. Just goes to show.

What does it go to show?
June wanted to know.
To whom does it show what? To whom? Who tomb? No more of Howard Emerson for me
.

I’m not making you nervous, am I? asked Howard Emerson.

* * *

No, no.

You seem nervous.

No, I …

I guess you’ve had this place for a while, he said. Must have been pretty nice out here. You got in before the golf course. I remember it used to stink out here something awful from the paper mill. Glad they got that business cleaned up. Just like a wet dog, all day and all of the night. Don’t know how you could stand it.

It was never that bad.

Oh, yes it was. I remember. But, you know, all’s well that ends well. I imagine you got the place for a pretty good price. I’m not going to ask but I imagine it was a good, good price. I think you’ll be pretty pleased if you do decide to sell.

I haven’t really made up my mind yet, June said. I keep going back and forth.

I absolutely understand.

A lot of memories tied up in one place.

I’m not trying to talk you into anything, one way or the other, said Howard Emerson. I’m just saying. You don’t have to leave the memories behind with the place—you can take them with you, whatever you decide. Hell, I grew up in California, in a place that’s not even there anymore. The same houses and the same streets but nobody even speaks English now. And it’s a nice neighborhood, too,
still a nice neighborhood, it’s just full of people from the Philippines. But, you know, none of it goes away—we’ve all got the pictures and the memories. A lot of us still keep in touch.

June didn’t believe him. June thought he sounded wishful, like he was trying to talk himself into something. Time
annihilates
, she thought. Something is there and then it isn’t there anymore. My mother is gone, she thought, my father, my husband. This is what time
does
. This is how it works. She was not so much angry at Howard Emerson as angry in general at the workings of the world, the continual theft and promise.

A bright clear afternoon, anyway, with a few high hazy clouds. It was not autumn yet but it would be soon. Back to school, back to life. They walked through the dry tall grass at the edge of the hayfield and back toward the house, Howard first in his tall hat and his big waterproof boots, June following in her long skirt. She felt ladylike and landed as she had wanted to, an Englishwoman in the West. Maybe she would offer him tea when they got back to the house. Maybe she would toss him out. But she had invited him in the first place, a friend of a friend who could tell her ballpark what the place was worth, and English ladies do not throw out their guests. She would make him tea, and watch him filter it through his enormous mustache.

August, afternoon, lemonade, dresses. Tennis. The mood made her nostalgic, remembering high school, her own long legs.

In the front hall, though, in the big mirror, in her sporty sandals and short practical hair, she thought she looked like a lesbian, one of the outdoor cheerful practical lesbians she knew from the hospital. So much for the mood. She offered him beer, which he
declined, and then lemonade, which he took. A glass of white wine for herself. When they went inside, Howard Emerson took off his hat, and immediately shrunk, not just the inches the hat gave him but half his girth and stature. The top of his head was white and soft as a baby’s ass and his mustachio loomed enormous, out of place. June had a vision, first the hat and then the boots and then the coat and jeans, by the time you got him naked there would be nothing left, a tiny larva.

Do you want to know? he said.

They sat at the dining room table, afternoon sunlight across the wood floors and a little breeze to ruffle the curtains. Old appraisals and tax records and plats between them.

Why wouldn’t I?

It might change the way you feel about things. Might make things harder.

I doubt it, June said.

All right, then.

He shuffled the papers on the table in front of him and pursed his lips. When he looked up again he was a little angry, a little sharp. He had tried to be understanding and she had spurned him.

Two and change, he said. Two-two, maybe two-three.

Two million dollars.

* * *

Two million two hundred thousand dollars, he said. Could go a little higher, as I say, and it might go for less but I doubt it. There are not so many parcels this size left in the valley. Thank God for Hoerner Waldorf, right? You held on through the stink of it, when nobody else wanted to live out here.

It was never that bad, she said again, but this time dreamlike, an automatic repetition. She was dazed by the prospect of money. The places she could go, the shoes she could buy, the time, the days unending to herself … June touched the papers on the table, like the magic was contained in them. Howard Emerson was watching her. There was a person behind those blue eyes, she saw it all at once. A person. This came as a surprise. Not a doctor, not a predator. June kept her distance, fed her fear, but thought now that there was maybe nothing to be afraid of. His eyes looked kind and tired and they looked directly into her own.

That’s a bit of luck, she said.

Good luck, bad luck, he said gently. It’s all fine until you’ve got to pay property taxes on it.

I don’t mind paying taxes.

Howard didn’t believe her.

No, really, she said. She didn’t know why but it felt important to explain herself. She said, Schools and sidewalks and firemen, I’m all for them. As long as everybody’s paying their share.

Scolding and earnest, even to her own ears. Would you like to see my Birkenstocks?

* * *

Howard didn’t seem to mind, or even notice. He said, That’s the only thing, you know—there’s nothing wrong with just sitting on the place, I mean, it’s not going to go down in value and it seems like it works for you. There’s no real reason. But, you know, the neighbors get together and put through an SID, or you get reappraised. I’m just saying that other people might end up making this decision for you.

You’re the Devil, aren’t you?

Howard Emerson seemed startled.

Come to tempt me with the whole wicked world, she said.

I’m just trying to keep myself in Cokes and pizza, he said. Keep the horses in oats. I don’t know anything about the wicked world.

What kind of horses?

Nothing fancy, said Howard Emerson. Basically I’m running an old folks’ home for horses. Or maybe like a bar, you know, a bunch of old guys sitting around shooting the breeze. I like them fine but they’re no good for anything.

This seemed to June to ask as many questions as it answered but she didn’t want to press. Besides, she had other fish to fry. Would she be rich? It was like somebody had asked to marry her, and now she had to decide. Howard Emerson, she thought. The Devil himself. What would baby Jesus do?

Layla dreamt of that apartment
where the soldiers found the butchery, the headless disembodied corpses, the knives, the fat sleek butchers with their pink skin …. She knew one of the dead, she didn’t know why. Ghostly she watched, like a camera in the corner, an eye and nothing more. Like a Picasso, she thought,
Picasso, Picasso, Picasso
. The word was still repeating in her head when she woke, disassembled and senseless. She could taste it in her mouth, gray-blue and brown. Bitter Picasso. The very end of summer.

RL regards the telephone
. It rings again. It is his ex-wife on the line, the ex-wife who has left him five messages in three days, none of which say more than
Call me
.

Eventually he will have to answer, but he can’t think of any reason it has to be now.

He doesn’t like to talk to her. He doesn’t like to lie, and he lies whenever he talks to her—not even about consequential things, about the small stuff, the everyday, even about Layla. RL finds Dawn confusing and difficult, and he doesn’t want her in his life. It’s not even that he hates her—it would be simpler if he did—but instead he feels this basement mess of emotions: pity and exasperation and sometimes even nostalgia for a life, a partnership and
dream that they never actually had. A yard sale of a feeling, stuff he hasn’t thought about in forever and doesn’t want and now he has to do something about it. She should have a nice life if she wanted one. RL was fine with that. He just wished that she would have her nice life somewhere else—in Hawaii, for instance, where she actually went for a couple of years, making his life easy.

Dawn is not about making his life easy.

The telephone stops ringing, and then starts again. It’s her again. He loved her once, he must have. They made this miracle child together. Where did that feeling go? When did she become this pure and holy pain in the ass?

Hello, he said.

Robert, Dawn said. I’ve been calling and calling.

My phone was broken, he lied. I didn’t even know!

Have you heard about Betsy? she asked.

RL fought the urge to disconnect. This could only be the preface to bad news, Dawn’s favorite subject.

What about her?

Well, it’s back.

What do you mean,
back?

* * *

I guess she was having some neck pain or something, Dawn said. She went to the clinic up in Bigfork and I guess they found something when they did the X-ray.

A kind of glee in her voice that repulsed RL like a sickness, which it was. This was the real dope, the inside information.

So I guess she’s coming down on Monday for some more imaging, Dawn said, and I was wondering if she could stay with you.

How come?

Well, she needs a place to stay. The night before and then after—she doesn’t want to drive all the way back up the valley in the dark. Plus, she has a follow-up the next day.

No, he said, I understand that part. But why me?

I’ll be honest with you, Dawn said—which was the noise she made when she was getting ready to uncork some whopper. She said, That last time, when she had all the trouble, she was just such a negative force, you know? All that negative energy—I just don’t have room for that in my life right now. I’m just barely keeping my head above water right now, Robert, I’m just worried and worried.

But I’ll be OK with it.

You don’t let these things affect you so much, Robert. You don’t feel them the same way.

Thanks.

* * *

You know what I mean.

He knew exactly what she meant: an insensitive oaf who trod through life on a path of other people’s feelings. That’s me! he thought. And also: Fuck you!

But he didn’t say it.

Which is how RL found himself staring out the window at a night full of rain in just-September, waiting for the headlights. He was sitting in his dining room alone. It was around eight o’clock. The rain had come on late in the evening and RL had not bothered to turn on the lights, so now he sat in twilight, listening to the rain. Layla was out someplace and soon she would be gone to Seattle again, back to college. He was at home in this blue light, dripping and dark. Alone in the dark. These last weeks had been among people, out running rivers with clients, meeting with prospective tenants for his rental houses—the public and RL the public servant. RL needed the quiet, the time alone. Soon Layla would be back in Seattle and he would get his quiet in spades.

He knew he ought to get up and turn the lights on, just so it looked like somebody was home, but he didn’t.

He didn’t stir until he heard her Toyota pickup rattle dead in the driveway. A faint feeling of being caught. This was not what he wanted Betsy to know about him, this sitting alone in the dark. A man of feeling, a man of action. It took him a minute to get going, reluctant.

Hey, she said. How
are
you?

* * *

He had forgotten her accent, still faintly Tennessee. In the porch light, she looked beautiful. He had forgotten this, too: the delicate lines of her face, her dark smooth skin. She was tall, almost as tall as RL. In one hand she held a Mason jar of something clear and gripped the handles of a giant many-colored basket in the other, like she was running away from home. She rushed to embrace him, and the basket whacked him in the back.

Look at you, she said. Sitting all by yourself in the dark.

How are you?

I don’t know, she said, and grinned. I don’t think I’m too good, but we’ll know more tomorrow.

She came inside as ever with her basket and jar and several other bags and bundles. She moved through life in the middle of her own rummage sale, surrounded by rummage. Some of it was knitting, some of it was food.

She handed the Mason jar to RL and said, I brought you moonshine whiskey.

Excellent, he said. Am I going to die from this?

If you drink the whole thing, you will. A shot or two won’t hurt you.

They sat at the dining room table and RL brought them shot glasses and bottles of beer. Normally he preferred American trash beer in cans but Betsy would like this better, made locally with natural ingredients.
Fancy
beer.

* * *

Not too much for me, said Betsy as he poured her a shot. Not too much for you, either, if you know what’s good for you. This stuff will have you barking at the moon.

Where’d you find it?

I’m not supposed to say.

They touched shot glasses and RL downed his clear whiskey in one take. It ran down his throat like gasoline jelly and set him to coughing, coughing hard enough so he had to stand up, let the air back in. Something, the whiskey or the lack of air, went to his head right away and he saw tiny rockets in his vision and floating bright spots.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, RL said.