No Dark Valley (70 page)

Driving home very slowly, Bruce wondered how many married couples would be able to transform the inconveniences of tonight into happy memories. He liked to think that it would be in his power to do that someday, to carry a woman through such a time with laughter and good cheer, to play off a disaster and shape it into a fine moment in a relationship. He used to be good at thinking up resourceful ways to rise above bad circumstances, but he wondered if he still had his touch.

Kimberly still liked to talk about the time she was seven and Bruce, who had recently gotten his driver's license, promised to take her to the community swimming pool one Saturday. But when they got ready to go, the battery in their parents' Chevy Impala was dead. Kimberly had burst into tears at the disappointment, but Bruce had whisked her out of the car and into the little red wagon they used to play with, then had handed her an umbrella to shield herself against the sun, and off they went. It was the ride of her life, she liked to say, from their house over to the pool some fifteen blocks away. They had even stopped at the Sunshine Grocery for cold bottles of Nehi grape soda on their way.

For most of his life, Bruce had always handled setbacks as challenges to be enjoyed. A forty-five minute wait at a restaurant? No problem. Whip out a deck of cards, play Twenty Questions, make up stories about the other people waiting—there were all kinds of possibilities. The lead actress in your play loses her voice the day before the big performance? Have her go through all the motions on stage and mouth all the words while you read all her lines over a microphone off stage. Luckily, the play had been a comedy, so his male falsetto had simply added to the effect. But there was always a way to make a bad situation better if you used a little creativity. Every time he watched that silly movie
The Out-of-Towners
, he imagined how he would have handled all those catastrophes differently from Jack Lemmon.

But in most situations there needed to be another person for motivation. For instance, he never would have pulled an empty red wagon across town by himself at the age of seventeen. So though it might be fun to tough out an ice storm someday, he had no desire to do so by himself this weekend. There was a fireplace upstairs in Kimberly's den, so Bruce knew he could keep warm, but without power what would he do tonight? He didn't have much to eat in his apartment, and he surely didn't trust Kimberly to have laid in a supply of food before she'd left town with Matt and Madison yesterday to visit Matt's parents in Tallahassee, Florida.

Maybe he should throw some things into a duffel bag and drive over to a motel in Greenville for the night. He could go to the old Sleepy Town Inn on Highway 25 with the trim little marquee out front that proudly advertised
VCRs and Movie Library
, only he would take his own movies along. He could imagine what kind of movie library a motel called the Sleepy Town Inn would have.

He had planned to go Christmas shopping this weekend, so he could do that tomorrow. He usually didn't buy many Christmas gifts, but he always tended to get extravagant with the ones he did buy. With only seven shopping days left, he should probably go ahead and get started.

Everyone he passed on the road looked worried. Not that he could see their faces, only the rigid slant of their bodies, their heads thrust forward, both hands clutching the steering wheel. It irritated him to hear northern aliens joke about drivers in the South when the roads were bad. So they were careful on ice—was there anything wrong with that? And all those other snide worn-out comments about everything shutting down and all the bread and milk disappearing from grocery shelves at the least suggestion of a possible snow flurry—it all got so tiresome. Those were the only things northerners seemed to be able to laugh about as they moved in and acted so superior. Take us or leave us, Bruce liked to say—preferably, leave us. Go back home to Yankee land, where everybody thinks it's a crisis when you have a whole week of ninety-degree weather in the summer, where the soles of your feet are so tender you couldn't begin to go barefoot on hot asphalt the way we used to do as kids.

He saw no lights on anywhere as he got closer to his own neighborhood. It was raining seriously now and freezing immediately. What a weight the tree branches had taken on in only a matter of hours. Already they were coated with ice and bending over like tired old field hands. Even though the storm would bring everything to a grinding halt, it would be a beautiful sight in the morning—a glittery crystal world like that scene in
Dr. Zhivago
.

A half mile from home a large tree branch lay right in the middle of the street, one end ripped jaggedly where it had broken off. Thankfully it had landed parallel to the curb so there was room to ease by. Maybe he should have headed south without coming home first. He could have bought toiletries somewhere and worn the same clothes tomorrow. But then he would have had to watch one of the motel's movies or whatever happened to be on television. He thought of some of the pathetic one- and two-star stuff he had sat through, with titles like
Cries from the Tomb
or
Tender Caress
or
Swamp Leech
, all of which had two things in common: pointless plots and very bad acting.

A night away from home might be a good way to start his Christmas vacation, Bruce decided. It would provide a clear dividing point from the concerns of school, and he was more than ready for a break from all that, even if it had to start out with an ice storm. This past week had seemed way too long. The prize rock collection of one of his eighth graders had disappeared from his classroom without a trace, and the girl's parents were irate. Two boys in his homeroom had gotten into a fistfight out in the hall, and his seventh graders had bombed another test—this one on vertebrates—the average grade being sixty-eight percent. These were setbacks he hadn't been able to counter very cheerfully. He had been every bit as exasperated as Jack Lemmon, had even shouted at the two boys, had actually pulled at his hair when he looked through the test papers.

He stubbornly refused to admit the test was too hard. If
one
student—someone like a Nate Bianchi, for example—could remember that frogs had two sets of teeth, the maxillary and the vomerine, then why couldn't all the other lazy sluggards? Maybe he was imagining things, but his students back in Alabama had seemed a little quicker than the ones at Berea Middle. He certainly wasn't willing to consider that his teaching skills might have diminished.

Then again he had taught mainly math classes in Alabama, so maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe he was better at teaching math than science. Although he really enjoyed science, especially life science, there was nothing like the solidity and exactness of math. He liked the fact that an equation always had a specific answer, not something you could argue about. It wasn't iffy like the weather—this fifty percent chance of more rain tonight, for example. Math was dependable.

A few months ago he had run across a copy of
Gruber's Complete Preparation for the SAT
in a used bookstore in Greenville and had bought it just to see if he could get all the math questions right. It probably should have alarmed him that he had spent one entire Friday evening zipping through pages and pages of practice algebra problems, writing down his answers, then checking them all. He especially loved the ratio problems for some reason:
If m + 4n = 2n + 8m, what is the ratio of n to m?
Easy as pie, he'd say. It's 7 : 2.
If P + Q = R and P + R = 2Q, what is the ratio of P to R?
In a flash he had the answer—1 : 3. Nothing but child's play.

Ratios were such an interesting way to look at life, to consider its problems as simple relationships. Maybe he should take his Gruber's SAT book along with him to the motel tonight. He could watch a movie, work a few math problems, eat a snack, watch another movie, and so forth. He shook his head. That wasn't one bit funny.

Since Kimberly and Matt's driveway was sloped, Bruce decided to play it safe and park on the street for now. He half skated down to the back of the house. The patio in front of his apartment door was glazed over in a solid sheet. No sign of Celia's Mustang next door, though the Stewarts' Buick was there. Evidently Patsy and Milton were holed up inside their house. They had a woodstove in their kitchen and kept a stack of oak logs beside the front door. He wondered what scintillating conversation would go on between them tonight in the dark.

He wondered how Celia would spend an evening without power when she got home. No doubt she was well stocked with candles and flashlights. She would probably do something sensible like eat a peanut butter sandwich, then straighten a few closet shelves and go to bed early. It would get awfully cold in her apartment, though. The Stewarts would probably invite her upstairs to sit by the fire.

Inside, he quickly got his things together, then stopped at his bookcase on the way back out. So which movies should he take along with him? He wasn't in the mood for anything really intense, nothing like
The Fugitive
or
Day of the Condor
or
Clear and Present Danger
, three of his favorites. He didn't want to watch anything tonight that would increase his heart rate. And nothing really long or fantastical—no
Star Wars
or
Lord of the Rings
tonight.

Driving Miss Daisy
—now there was a possibility. He pulled it off the shelf and put it in his duffel bag, then added
The Trip to Bountiful
. Though he had watched it only a few weeks ago, he wouldn't mind seeing it again, a Hollywood movie with all those hymns in it. Okay, two movies about old women—well, he wasn't going to try to analyze that. They were both good stories, and he liked old women fine.
Singing in the Rain
—it was the only musical he owned. He pulled it out and put it in his bag with the other two. Okay, so now he had old women and dancing men. He quickly added
Citizen Kane
. There, that was a movie for the true cinema lover, somebody with an interest in the history of technique, camera angles, special effects, and all that.

Heading back up the driveway to the street, he was glad he wasn't staying in a cold, dark house by himself tonight. He stood for a moment beside his truck, looking up at the treetops, feeling the sting of rain on his face. All was quiet in the neighborhood except for the creaking of a tree limb somewhere nearby. Bruce wondered where it would land when it fell.

As he got into his truck, he saw a cat sitting in the window of the neighbor's house across the street, peacefully watching the world turn to ice outside. Thankfully, Kimberly had given her cat away a few days after Matt had gotten home from Germany, so he didn't have to worry about checking on it while they were in Florida. Matt claimed to have developed an allergy to cat dander while in Europe, but Bruce had his doubts. He suspected that Matt didn't like the way Kimberly baby-talked and cooed to the cat, who never returned one iota of her affection. He further suspected that Matt wasn't crazy about the fact that the cat had been sleeping on his side of the bed during his absence.

Even in a species known for its hauteur, Kimberly's cat was in a class of its own, nothing like the sweet cat he had had as a boy, the one that had died in the fire. Tabitha would lie contentedly in his lap for hours at a time and let him knead behind her ears. Out of all the legs in the house, his had always been the ones she had chosen to rub herself against. Kimberly's cat, on the other hand, acted like humans were a step below squirrels and field mice.

Out on Highway 11 cars were creeping along. Even in good weather people had grown wary of this road, and they surely weren't going to take chances on a day like this. More people had been killed on this stretch than any other place in the county.
Be patient
, Bruce told himself,
keep your place in line, stay on the road, and within fifteen minutes you'll be on I-85
.

Maybe he would eat supper at the Cracker Barrel off the interstate outside Greenville. He liked their food. Then he'd have the whole evening before him. Maybe he'd do a little shopping tonight if the malls were open, then check into the motel and start his movie marathon. Or maybe he'd forget the malls and go straight to the movies.

He suddenly realized how tired he was from four months spent with middle schoolers. Right now he didn't even want to think about facing another five months after Christmas was over. How would he ever find the energy to tackle the chapter on human reproduction? “Cover the material in a straightforward manner,” the teacher's manual said. “If you treat it maturely, your students will respond in kind.” He would like to have a talk with those textbook writers someday and find out what planet they were from.

Forget school for now
, he told himself.
Think about a whole evening in a comfortable motel room with a supply of snacks and some of your favorite movies to watch
. A question presented itself to him: What was the ratio between the number of different movies he had seen during his life and the number in his current collection? Well, what did it really matter, since so many of the ones he had seen were so bad? Here was a better one—what was the ratio between the number he now owned and the number he would have a year from now? Given the fact that his conscience had started protesting so much lately, he wouldn't be surprised if the first number in that ratio turned out to be larger than the second.

Things he had seen dozens of times before without even batting an eye were beginning to bother him. Only last weekend, for example, he had found himself stopping and ejecting a video when the scene suddenly shifted from a man and dog trekking up a snowy mountainside to that same man in bed with a woman. And it wasn't so much that the bedroom scene, to which he had never objected before, now seemed largely irrelevant to the main plot. The real offense, and the one that he actually shouted at the television screen, was the fact that the couple barely knew each other. “You just met her yesterday!” were his exact words, directed at the man—an actor Bruce had always admired for having won three Oscars.