No Dark Valley (54 page)

The walls of his living room were mostly bare except for a mounted pair of cow horns that had been his father's as a child, an old shotgun, and, above his beige-and-brown tweed sofa, The Painting.

After he had found out that Celia next door worked at an art gallery, he had meant to ask her to take a look at The Painting sometime and give him her opinion of it. But then she kept acting so paranoid whenever he came anywhere near her that he had never followed up. It didn't matter anyway what she thought about it or what kind of actual monetary value any appraiser placed on it. It might not be what so-called experts would call great art, though Bruce thought there was a good chance that it could be, but what mattered most was that he liked it.

The Painting, which was untitled and unsigned, had suggested different things to him at different times, but if pressed to give it a name, he would call it
Bridge at Nighttime
. It was an oil painting, mostly black, gray, brown, cream, and white with a few brushstrokes of the darkest, deepest blue. The frame was a brushed silver less than an inch wide. Bruce had no idea who had painted it or where it had come from. His grandmother had been an artist in her youth, but she had done mainly portraits, which she always signed.

He had discovered it in his father's workshop, leaning against a wall behind a stack of boxes labeled Garage Sale that contained all sorts of useless trifles. Before she lost the love of her life and therefore her love of life, his mother had been fond of garage sales, not only of going to them but also of organizing her own. Whether she had intended to sell The Painting at an upcoming garage sale or had purchased it and never got around to hanging it in her own house, Bruce had no way of knowing. When he had tried to ask her about it four years ago, she had merely shaken her head and said, “Oh, Bruce, Bruce, it's all just a bunch of . . .” and had trailed off before screaming a single curse word, a word she would never have let him say while growing up.

Thankfully, she or somebody else had wrapped butcher paper around the painting so that it had been spared an accumulation of dust and dirt over the years. Bruce hadn't even shown it to Kimberly or Suzanne, both of whom were busy amassing piles of stuff to take home, but had set it in his pickup truck with the few other things he was taking.

After she moved into the assisted living place, Bruce had quit asking his mother much of anything. He had learned that any question about what she had been served for supper or whether she had gone to bingo or exercise class the day before would be met with the same response: a dry flat laugh punctuated at the end by a single word of profanity. Yet she was perfectly capable of lucidity. Over the telephone one day she had said out of the blue, “Remember that pistachio green suit I bought you for your fourteenth birthday? It came from Packard's Menswear in Hattiesburg. I sold it for five dollars to a Negro boy after you left for college.”

In the kitchenette Bruce pulled an extra chair up to his card table and set out three glasses and three bottles of cold IBC root beer, along with forks, plates, and napkins. Nothing fancy, but it would do. No sooner had he decided to seat Joan Dunlop facing the window and sink instead of one of the bare walls than he laughed out loud. Here he was again, finagling a way to please a woman.

He thought about Joan Dunlop, whose face, though not pretty in the classical sense, had its own kind of beauty. She had silky black hair, Oriental fine, and a smile that went up higher on one side of her mouth than the other. She wasn't a woman who laughed very much, and never mindlessly. Bruce had already decided that she must have gone through some rough spots in life to give her such dark incisive eyes. She seemed to size a person up in a glance. She didn't joke around much, but she had a kind of serious pleasantness that made you want to behave well in her presence, like a favorite respected teacher.

As a girl, she had likely been studious, but not stuffily so, and smart as a whip, with a wicked wit if she chose to use it, which she probably didn't often do. Not one of the popular girls, maybe even a little unsure of herself, though she shouldn't have been. Middle of the road as far as looks went, but not much concerned about it. Not very interested in school affairs, but appearing to have her eyes fixed instead on some large threatening object in the distance, some weight of responsibility other girls didn't have.

Back in the living room, the thought of running the dustcloth over a few surfaces crossed Bruce's mind, but he dismissed it in favor of selecting some CDs for background music. His collection of CDs was much smaller than his collection of videotapes, but the ones he owned he really liked. He chose one called “Mountain Songs,” played by flute and guitar, and another of Sylvia McNair singing Jerome Kern songs.

And just as he heard the opening tune of “Barbara Allen,” there were footsteps at his door, a sharp knock, and the voice of Virgil Dunlop. “Come on, Healey, open up! Food's here!”

27

Emblem of Suffering

November was Bruce's favorite month, partly because he still enjoyed celebrating his birthday but also because of the way the world turned gold in the fall. October was pretty, of course, and in these parts was considered the peak month for fall foliage, but November was even better, in Bruce's opinion, when the leaves floated down and spattered the ground with color. They couldn't be allowed to collect indefinitely, however, which led to days like today—leaf blower in hand under a pure blue sky.

It was Friday afternoon, and Bruce was glad for the weekend that stretched out before him. If he took care of the leaves now, he would have the day free tomorrow. There was no better time than fall to hike in the North Carolina mountains. He already had it planned. He would get up early, then wash his truck and take off for the day, pick up a sandwich somewhere, hike, take some pictures, maybe poke around over in Walhalla, Westminster, Clayton. Just walking down the main street of some of those little mountain towns did his soul good, transported him back to a time when things were innocent and uncomplicated.

He looked up at the sky before cranking up the leaf blower, trying to think again of just the right word for that particular color of blue, that solid layer-upon-layer of absolutely serious blue. It was different from the pale, hopeful blue of a spring sky or the lazy, meandering blue of the summer sky, and certainly from the exhausted, washed-out blue of a winter sky. This blue looked like it was baked on, enamel hard.

He heard a car door close and looked over to see his neighbor, Celia, firing backward out of her driveway. It was unusual for her to be home at this time of day. She usually didn't get in until five-thirty or six. Maybe she was playing in a tennis tournament.

He wondered if she had noticed him standing stock-still in his backyard holding a leaf blower and staring up into the sky. There was a time when he might have cared, but since their argument through her window three months ago, he had reached the definite conclusion that any woman with that many hang-ups was a lot more trouble than she could possibly be worth, regardless of how nice she was to look at. He was done with women anyway, at least when it came to any kind of personal relationship. The Montgomery experience had changed him for good.

He had talked at length with Virgil Dunlop about how God could expect bachelors to keep the seventh commandment, and he had decided that the best way for him to do it was to simply stay away from women. That's why every time he had slipped and found himself at Celia's apartment door, he had hated himself for his weakness. He could only look at their big shouting match back in August as a blessing. He had watched her off and on since then, sure, but for the most part he had been delivered of the temptation to talk to her.

Kimberly and Suzanne had both been hinting for months now that it was time for him to start dating again. Kimberly had even tried the old trick of bringing somebody home for him to meet one day back in July. She'd used the pretext of needing his help in choosing fabric for reupholstering a sofa. And there was nothing really wrong with the woman, nothing at all that he could see. She was a trim, tan, thirty-something elementary schoolteacher named Lindsay, who divided her time in the summer between lifeguarding at the YMCA, which was how Kimberly and Madison had met her, and interior decorating, which was something she did year-round on the side.

Kimberly had wanted Lindsay to see the colors in the living room where the sofa would go, she said, and also give her some advice about using a cornice board as part of the front window treatment. Then she had called downstairs and asked Bruce to come up and see the swatches of fabric she was considering, to help her decide on one—if there was ever a more transparent matchmaking ruse, Bruce couldn't imagine what it would be—and then later loudly asked Lindsay to repeat her full name and phone number before she left, both of which she wrote down on a piece of paper. “I'll keep this handy right here beside the telephone,” Kimberly said, patting it conspicuously as if to say, “Right here, Bruce, here's where it will be in case you'd like to follow up.”

As soon as the front door closed, Bruce said, “Nice try, Kimbo, but don't ever do that again, not ever. I'll do my own picking when the time is right, okay?”

Though Kimberly pretended at first not to know what in the world he was talking about, she finally shrugged her shoulders and said, “Oh well, no crime in trying.” Later she said to Madison, as Bruce sat at the kitchen table with them one night, “Here, punkin, let's try some peas. Just 'cuz we had an itsy little problem with them once doesn't mean we can't try again, does it, sweetie? We mustn't make up our minds too soon about anything, huh? Give things a second chance. Isn't that right?”

To which Bruce replied, also addressing Madison, “Tell Mommy that Uncle Brucie catches her dark cryptic meaning and that he likes her clever analogy with the peas but that he's not ready yet to
try again
, okay, cupcake?”

Well, here he was still standing in the middle of the backyard looking up at the blue sky. He'd better get going on these leaves. No time to be thinking about women or groping for words to capture a certain color. He started the blower. Lately he had been doing things like this more and more—getting all ready to do something, then stopping before he even got started and staring off into space, often because he was trying to think of the most precise word to describe some sight or sound. It sounded like something an old person would do, or a boring introvert.

He had been so inspired by the beauty of fall this year that he had even sat down and tried writing out an entire paragraph of description one Sunday afternoon recently, just to see if he could. He sat outdoors to do it, right outside his apartment door at Kimberly's patio table. The paragraph wasn't bad, really. He read it over and over, both silently and aloud, revising it a little each time. He was really struggling with the sky part, though, searching for an adjective that never did come to him and still hadn't.

He even went upstairs while Kimberly and Madison were napping in the den and looked through the big shoebox where Kimberly kept crayons for Madison to scribble with. Sometimes those labels on crayons had just the right word: thistle pink, adobe orange, pine green, buttercream yellow. He sifted through them, past mulberry red and frosty gray, past plum purple and mahogany brown, until he spotted a tip of blue exactly the color he wanted. He dug it out, held it up, and read: sky blue. So much for any help there. He looked up to see Kimberly standing in the doorway of the nursery, sleepy-eyed and puzzled. “You want a coloring book, too, Brucie?” she asked.

As he moved up along the side of the backyard now, Bruce remembered how he had worked out regular arrangements with girls in high school and college to write his papers for him. So how did it happen, he wondered, that he was just now starting to discover something satisfying about putting words down on paper, manipulating the order and fitting them together? He wondered if he could have been a writer if he had started earlier. He was always wondering if he could have been this or that if he had chosen to try. That was the trouble with life—you didn't have time to try everything.

He loved his teaching job and had no intention of changing jobs, but he couldn't help wondering about other fields, such as medicine, for instance. He had always enjoyed the channel on television that showed real operations in progress, and he had often pictured himself as the surgeon, removing a tumor here, cauterizing a bleeding ulcer there, performing delicate heart surgery, transplanting a liver, reattaching a severed hand.

And whenever he flipped past the
Antiques Road Show
on television, he paused to wonder what it would be like to be able to tell people the history behind their treasures and trinkets, to assign an exact price to a vase or a figurine right on the spot. When he watched the dog shows on television, he imagined being the judge for Best in Show, examining the dogs' teeth, confidently placing his hands on their haunches, telling the trainers to take them around one more time, then pointing at the winner and saying with assurance, “That one—the Kerry blue terrier. He's the best.”

He had mused over all kinds of jobs—photographer, chef, architect, automobile designer, sportscaster, auctioneer, veterinarian, pilot, criminal investigator, on and on. Cinema had always fascinated him, also. In high school and college, though, he had decided he'd rather star in a movie than be on the technical end directing or filming, and he had even taken a couple of acting classes as electives, in which he had done quite well. But a writer—now that seemed a cut above most of the others.

Since he had added the role of drama coach to his teaching load at Berea Middle School, he was always thinking of ideas for new plays, though as of yet he hadn't gotten around to developing any of them. Maybe he should consider trying to write an article sometime for one of the area newspapers, maybe a short piece about good places to hike or the benefits of drama in the middle school. He was sure he could write as well as some of the people who wrote for the Derby
Daily News
and the Filbert
Nutshell
. He had read an article with Celia's by-line on it back in the spring sometime, something about an unsolved local murder, and it was far more interesting and a lot better than most of the others. Maybe if he ever wrote something and got it printed, Celia would see it and strike up a conversation with him about it.