In Reach (3 page)

Esther’s hand fumbles for the telephone, she has the receiver off the hook, her finger in the dial, she’s looking for the sheriff’s number, but how can she call? How can she report her neighbor when the whole town has branded them? Who will believe her? Even if they do, everybody knows these domestic abuse cases are
a lost cause, and that’s the Swartz girl who’s lived here all her life. The gossip will kill her, she’ll be papering her living room with pages of books. There would be questions. The sheriff, maybe Pastor Fowler, the Deacons, all the self-appointed judges swarming through their house, looking at Leland and what he’s come to. Esther’s hand trembles.

She may have misjudged the whole thing. She’s been under a lot of stress. Parents need to discipline their children. Sometimes it gets out of hand, but children recover. Her father smacked her sometimes, her brothers more often, but she grew up. She turns her head, sees the boy lying in the dirt, his father walking away. It’s over, then. The damage done. There’s nothing left for her to do. She can’t right all the wrongs in this world.

She breathes easier, still watching when the father turns. He’s back on the boy, straddling him, banging his head into the ground. The boy’s hands flail wildly, helpless against his father’s brute strength. She’s the only witness, her view a narrow tunnel created by the sides of both houses and their shed. The boy’s name is Samuel. She drops the phone on the cradle. By the time she reaches the sheriff or 911, Samuel could be dead. Brain damaged. Her eyes fixed out the window, she gropes through the flour canister and pulls out Leland’s gun. She dumps the sugar bowl to find the bullets. She knows how to load the thing, Leland made her learn to fire it when she worked late in the office at the elevator. She knows how to aim and shoot straight through the heart of a target. She prays Janet is home to call the cops and has enough guts to do it. Samuel, Samuel, she mutters, his name an incantation on her tongue. Leland’s in his never-never land, pasting paper on walls to ward off unseen enemies, while she stands with a cocked gun in their kitchen. She barks out a short laugh. She’s thinking that she hopes Rosalee won’t have to know, as she opens the back door, steps outside in the full glare of the sun, aims the pistol at the bleached blue sky, and fires.

All the Wildness in Her

Janet never should have accepted that gift from Leland. He wanted to thank her for all she’d done for Esther. That poor woman, shrinking from cancer. Esther died a year ago, and Janet has hardly seen or spoken to Leland since. When he phoned, Janet tried to tell him he’d no need to give her anything. He insisted. He said Rosalee thought it would be all right. Janet knows he’s lonely, and since Rosalee approved, what’s the harm? She agreed to meet him in the alley between their houses. She doesn’t want him coming to the door.

Broad daylight, he hands her a flat, narrow box. She doesn’t open it. Looking past his shoulder, she sees nothing but gravel and spent hollyhocks against her neighbor’s garage. The air smells like fall, of wet decay, yet crisp. She slides the box down, close to her hip, hiding it inside her palm and wrist.

She’s shocked at the look of him, the white hair, sagging skin. Her own short hair is gray, full and wavy. She looks a bit like a schoolmarm, buttoned up, proper, a crisp cotton blouse worn loose over beige pants. She stays fit, mows her own grass, scoops her walks, bends over rows of greens and burgeoning tomato plants in her garden. She takes a few medications, heart, mostly. Her body has compressed. She’s shorter, heavy breasts sagging toward what passes for a waistline. She hates the droop of her jaw,
the loss of definition between face and neck, but you can’t fight gravity. She’s not one to carry on about it. Freckled as a girl, her face, arms, and hands are mottled with brown age spots. Even so, she’s alarmed by the change in Leland. He must be, what, eighty-five? A few years younger than her.

“How are you, Leland?”

He shrugs. “You know.”

She does know. She’s been widowed. Long time ago, but it sticks with you. She’s lived across this alley from Leland and Esther for over thirty years, but she didn’t know them beyond a passing acquaintance until Esther took sick. Of course, she knew about that rough time they had. The bankruptcy. They stuck it out, though. Once the target of gossip, they had become legends of a certain kind.

“Well, it’s hard.” At a loss for what else to say, she nods and turns back to her house. She knows he’d like to talk. He’s a talker. She’s scared someone will see them, make this out to be something it isn’t, though why anybody should care what two old coots do on an autumn day is beyond her reckoning. She doesn’t stop to consider why she cares what people think. Conditioned by a lifetime of small town living, she draws her curtains at night. Puts her trash in sealed bags.

She perches on the edge of her bed, the lavender chenille worn smooth from years of sitting in this exact spot to put on her shoes or talk on the bedside phone. She lifts the lid off the box. A bracelet winks up at her, gold discs with small stones, all different colors. Must be glass, though it looks expensive. Damn fool. He ought to know she can’t manage the clasp. Let him to try to put a bracelet on himself at this age.

She holds it up to the light. Her eyes aren’t what they used to be. The jewels twinkle, green, yellow, pink. It’s a pretty thing, she does admit that.

She ought to thank him proper. She sits at her kitchen table to write a note but can’t shape the words. She pictures the mailman, that Jerry, the smirk on his face. Plus, a note could lie around, if Leland wasn’t careful, and she’s never known Leland to be careful. Shocking, really. When Esther took sick, Leland was helpless. Couldn’t even boil soup. Some men are like that, but not her Carl. Carl liked cooking more than she did, was better at it. Ribs, his specialty, dry rub. She smacks her lips.

Not thinking more about it, she calls Leland’s house, the number still in her memory from those times with Esther.

When he answers, Leland’s voice sounds gruff. Not like him, in real life.

“I called to thank you,” she says.

“Did you like it?” There, that high whine at the end. That’s more like him.

“It’s beautiful.” She doesn’t say, I can’t wear it, you damn fool.

“Rosalee helped pick it out.”

“Oh.” She should have known. She sinks a little, a surprise to herself.

“It was my idea.”

Okay, then. Feeling bold, she says, “Some time, if you want to drive out to the farm, I wouldn’t mind.”

The three of them drove out to that farm often, Esther in the backseat with blankets and pillows. They watched the sunsets, the pheasants floating above the wild hay. Janet has missed that bit of country. It took her back to her childhood.

Months go by, robins show up, the forsythia blooms, and one day Leland calls. “Thought I’d take you up on that offer,” he says.

She’s not coy. Sees no point. “I’d like that,” she says.

“What about now?”

She has a day planned, but it can wait. There’s little urgency left in her goings-on. “I’ll meet you in the alley.”

They drive the ten minutes to the farm. If there’s a coal train, it can take fifteen or twenty, but the tracks are empty today. Her heart speeds up when Leland pulls into the long drive. There’s that meadow, crowning with larkspur. Across the creek. Past the windmill and into the yard. The house isn’t much, never has been. Marty waves from the front porch. Having Marty on the place is one step shy of it being vacant. Leland keeps him around to ward off thieves. That, and for old time’s sake.

Leland drives out past the alfalfa field, along the old windbreak creaking with age. He stops the car in that north pasture. Leland doesn’t run livestock anymore, so this stretch has reverted to prairie. It’s her favorite part of the place, wild and bountiful, flooded with insects and birdsong, monarch butterflies scavenging for milkweed, dragonflies with cellophane wings, dark-veined like stained-glass windows. Leland still keeps bees in this section, stacked hives abuzz. The honey is pure amber, dark and golden. He pays somebody to harvest the honey now, having lost the dexterity to move fluidly and not excite the hive. They stop under a stand of cottonwoods. She breathes in the scent of sweet clover and sighs.

“Beautiful,” she says.

“I remember how you liked it,” Leland says.

They sit for a while, not talking much. Old companions with shared history. Janet soaks in the ease of it, the pleasantness. She wants nothing more than this, friendship and a whiff of countryside.

He doesn’t call for a while, and then one day he does. She’s eager for it, and that bothers her. He says he’s got a surprise for her. Something lights up in her, and that bothers her, too. She doesn’t want to count on anything from this man. He’s not steady. Plus, she’s too old to start up any fuss.

She agrees to meet him in the alley, settles into his car, rides
with him out to the farm. He looks boyish, smiling like he’s got a big secret. She’s annoyed, with him and with herself. Such damn fools, the both of them. What’s he got to show her? A new litter of barnyard kittens? A prairie plant they’ve not noticed before? How big the alfalfa has gotten?

She’s trying to decide whether she’ll give him the satisfaction of thinking he’s pleased her, the way a person fakes a response to an unwanted surprise party, one your best friend doesn’t even attend and you’d rather be free to take your Saturday night bath, when he pulls up alongside the barn and stops the car. There’s some newfangled contraption parked there that looks like an overgrown tricycle.

Leland scrambles out, giddy as hot grease on a griddle. “C’mon,” he says. With some difficulty, he works a stiff leg over and straddles the seat. Janet has gotten herself out of the car, but she hasn’t strayed far from the front fender. “Git on,” Leland says.

He grins at her, and she sees a flash of the man he once must have been. She suppresses a giggle, throws a leg over the seat, and snuggles behind him. He flips a switch that sputters the engine to life. “Hang on,” he yells. The machine lurches forward. She almost topples off the back, but she grabs at his waist in time. Away they go, following rutted trails, over the jangling cattle gate, alongside the cloying alfalfa, back to the big irrigation ditch, and the whole time she clings to Leland, his body pressed against her heavy breasts, dust clouding her face, thinking she should have worn more sunscreen. Sheer madness, the two of them out there like that, but oh, it’s fun. She laughs out loud, lays her head back, and closes her eyes, the way a girl does who’s swinging high, high, surrendering to the open sky and all the wildness in her.

After that, they go riding three or four times a week. He calls first. She meets him in the alley. Their favorite time of day is dusk.
Sometimes they stop and pick up hamburgers at Hardee’s. They stick the hamburgers and a thermos of coffee in the sidecar, climb on the three-wheeler, and ride across Leland’s land. They stroll through the twilight, past the cattails and the marsh grass, among the nodding goldenrod. They laugh and talk, voices bobbing up and down under the blossoming sky. He drops her in the alley back in town. Nobody knows.

One day, mid July, the cicadas buzz up a symphony. Heat wobbles in the thick air. Humidity slathers their skin. They pick raspberries, lips and fingers stained red. Juice dribbles down Leland’s chin, and with a quavering thumb, Janet wipes it off. A creek wraps through Leland’s land, and they ride the three-wheeler to the backstretch, hidden from house or road.

“Janet,” Leland says, still astride the seat. She can’t read his face, but she hears the lightness in his voice. “Have you ever gone wading in a creek?”

Janet chuckles. “Oh, sure, Leland. Lots of times.”

Careful to avoid the thorny wild roses, keeping an eye out for poison ivy, they thread their way to the creek bank and lower themselves in the shade of a Russian olive tree. Laughing, they peel off their shoes and socks. She tries not to notice his yellow, ridged toenails. Hopes he doesn’t zero in on the blue veins gorged above her ankles. They each roll up their pant legs. Leland gets first to his hands and knees, then pulls himself to his feet and holds a hand out to her. Worried that the creek bed might be slippery, they cling to each other and step gingerly into the water. It has occurred to her that if he fell or had a heart attack or a stroke, she’d have no way to get help. She doesn’t know how to drive that thing. With her eyesight, she couldn’t find her way back to the house. Eventually Marty would come looking for them, but by then, one or the other could be in a world of hurt. Or dead.

They feel their way along the creek bed, wincing at sharp rocks, teetering toward one another for balance. The cool water bathes
her parched skin. The sandy creek bottom welcomes her poor old feet, as if to say, where have you been all these years?

They walk straight out into the middle and a few yards along with the creek’s flow, when Leland stops. She stops, too, rather than risk falling over.

“Janet, have you ever been kissed in a creek?”

He tosses this remark over his shoulder, his eyes focused on the bank farthest away from her, so if she laughs him off or disapproves, he can pretend he was joking. She sees through his game.

“No, Leland.” Her voice emerges soft and breathy, no wind left in her. “I don’t believe I have.”

When he turns to face her, she’s ready for him. His lips are surprisingly soft. She’s not sure what she expected. An old man’s mouth. Dry and chapped. He knows what a good kiss is made of, tender and lingering, and the warmth that spreads through her body, even down there, surprises her. She reaches for him with the hand he’s not holding, maybe (she thinks later) for balance, but he wraps his arm around her, too, and they kiss again.

Sweet, that’s all she’s thinking, there among the meadowlarks and cattails, her toes digging for traction in the sandy creek bed.

There’s quite a lot of kissing after that. When she gets in the car in the alley, she scoots over close to him. Sometimes she rests her hand on his thigh while he’s driving. She waits for his call eagerly. They broaden their activities beyond the farm, long drives in the countryside, supper in Scottsbluff, always out of town, nothing to get the gossips wagging. She’s grateful for his discretion. She wonders if she should cook him a meal, but it’d be awkward, sneaking him in and out the back door, hoping nobody sees. She keeps up her activities, the card group on Sunday afternoons, Bible study on Tuesdays, shocked to realize how much open time there must have been in her life before. She doesn’t worry about
Esther, who’s dead and not coming back and would never begrudge the living a moment of happiness. No, it’s not Esther that prompts them to this secrecy. Their—what is it exactly, not affair (good heavens), nor relationship—well, special friendship, feels somehow sacred. A private space they’ve created, like children who carve a haven out of hay bales, away from prying eyes of the adult and disapproving world. Janet tells only her sister that she’s been riding with a man on a three-wheeler.

Her sister, who lives far away in Ohio and has been married fifty-seven years, asks, “Where’s this going?”

“We’re friends.” Janet clamps her lips to keep the lilt out of her voice.

“Are you sure that’s all?”

“Oh, yes,” Janet says, that breathless feeling coming over her again.

She does entertain—thoughts. No, she doesn’t want to get married again. They’re too old. One or the other of them will take sick. Or die. She doesn’t want to go through being widowed again. She doesn’t want that kind of pain. She doesn’t want to put another man to bed, like she did Carl, who died a long slow death from a combination of emphysema and corrosive arteries.

Plus, she’s used to living alone. She and Carl found each other too late for children. He was a bachelor farmer, and she a spinster schoolteacher from down by Ogallala. They met at a dance at the Legion, and he stepped all over her feet. His embarrassment won her heart, long before he spoke of any affection for her. They’d made a good life together, though they only had ten years before he took sick. They moved to town, then. Sold the farm to his distant cousins. She nursed him until he died. Too young for Social Security, she went back to teaching history until she could retire. With her pension, Social Security, and proceeds from the farm sale, she’s doing all right.

Without Carl or anyone else to answer to, she’s made the house her own. The year after Carl died, she painted the kitchen ceiling red. She gets some looks from the women in the Bible study, but she’s never tired of that ceiling. It speaks to her of possibility. When she got interested in Civil War history, she hung a corkboard on the dining room wall and charted the battlefields, marking each site with different colored flags according to who won; blue for Union, red for Confederate. She loves opera, unheard of among her friends out here on the prairie, and she cranks up the volume on her old (but plenty good) record player, the walls humming plaintive song. She doubts very much if Leland would tolerate a red ceiling, and she knows for a fact he has no appreciation for opera.