Picturing Will (21 page)

Corky had finished her drink. The timer went off, and she inserted a toothpick into the cupcakes, careful not to burn her hand on the top of the oven. The toothpick came out clean. The cupcakes were baked. As Corinne moved her chair aside to escape the oven’s pulsing heat, the doorbell rang. Corky stopped, oven mitt suspended in midair.

“That can’t be Will,” Corky said.

The doorbell rang again.

“Where’s Wayne?” she whispered.

She went toward the door. Simply rushed forward, as if she needed fresh air. She thought again of the day she stood with her mother in the side yard, and of her mother’s words: “I’m just airing the mattress. Is it a crime to air the mattress?”

Mel stood in front of Corky, taller than she remembered, pale and obviously tired. Standing beside him was Will, the small boy who would determine her future. Corky bent forward and kissed Will on the cheek. “We’re so happy you’re here,” she said, realizing as she spoke that there was no
we
. She folded her arms around him. What would she say when she let go?

The awkward handshake with Mel. They never knew whether to embrace or to shake hands.

Beyond Corky, Will saw the baby on the table. He wondered if he had a brother or a sister. He wished that Wag could be his brother. As they came up the front walk, Mel had made him promise that he would not ask about visiting Wag until the next morning.

EIGHTEEN

I
should of brought my camera,” Susan said. “I put it out and everything, and then I just forgot it.” It was the end of the day and everyone was in good spirits. To Wayne’s amazement, Corky actually seemed to enjoy talking to Susan. If he had overheard correctly, Corky was going to see if Marian was hiring anyone else for part-time work at Bathing Beauties. He felt a twinge of gratitude toward Corky, not because he cared anything about Susan, but simply because Corky really did have a good heart. She cared what happened to people who were down on their luck. Wayne knew that, in a way, both he and Will were down on their luck. He was grateful for her affection toward them. It seemed that she and Will had really warmed up to each other after their day of exploration in the gem store. Will wore a small bluish crystal around his neck. The crystal was crisscrossed with thin leather cords and dangled like a miniature papoose. He gave Corky credit for knowing what Will would like. He would never have thought of cupcakes and crystals. And the boy could swim! He was really pleased when he saw that—as pleased as a parent learning that his child had tried out for, and made, the Olympic team. Maybe one day Will would: Will, butterfly-stroking on TV, with a muscular body the girls would all adore, a body that would make the men take it easy on the buttered popcorn. Right now Will was a little skinny.

Wayne wished this could be his life. That being at a pool with people he liked, on a sunny day when no one had to work and everyone was in good spirits, could be the norm instead of the exception. Of course, it was also very pleasant to know that Kate was pining away for him, waiting for the moment when he could sneak away. And it was because the lady of the house was sweet on him that they were all at the pool. Zeke had let that be known, in a none-too-subtle way. Who could figure it: Instead of being jealous, Corky had actually been proud to find that Wayne’s attributes had been noticed.

Susan had brought a cooler filled with cans of Hawaiian Punch. There was also a pint of rum, which was added to the adults’ drinks in big splashes that made the bottle dwindle to almost nothing after the first round. There were chicken salad sandwiches. Corky had even been smart enough to put in two slices of white bread, in case Will objected to the pita pockets, which he had. She really understood small children. Wayne had thrown in two tins of stolen anchovies and a tube of tomato paste—a wonderful combination, spread on Saltines—to get into the spirit of the picnic. Zeke had brought homemade pickles, which had been delivered to the doorstep of his trailer by his mother. Every week she dropped off food and a written progress report on her lobbying efforts to get his father to forgive him for having been thrown out of the Army. In her notes she always referred to his father as “Ret. Col. Pyke.”

“You know what heaven would be?” Zeke said, looking over at Wayne from the diving board, where he was sitting. “Surf ’n’ Turf,” he said. “Heavy on the butter with the Turf, too. And a side of steamers with broth to dunk ’em in to clean out the sand.”

“I think heaven for you would be the certainty of your convictions,” Wayne said. “Not having to check with anyone to see whether they’d bear you out. Not caring if other people felt the way you did. Not caring jack shit, unless you felt like considering their opinion.”

It was more of a response than Zeke expected. It was also a bit puzzling, as many of Wayne’s replies were. It was Wayne’s tone, more than the words: that cold way Wayne pronounced on things, though you could tell by his expression that he didn’t care passionately, at all, about what he was saying. It was almost pugnacious, as though the other person had asked a question looking for a fight.

“Because I think eatin’ what you want is a big part of the pleasure of life,” Zeke said. When he did not know what to make of Wayne’s replies, he usually just ignored them, or reasserted his opinion.

“Stayed in the Army, you’d be eating cow-flop hamburgers and seaweed spaghetti,” Wayne said. “Lift those paddles up. Those things you call feet. Let’s see your marks of disgrace that got you out of the mess hall and into this great society where you can wolf down a steak and chew one of those rubbery lobsters all at the same meal, every time you can pay for it.” Wayne crossed his eyes. His arms were extended and his hands rather convincingly bent to look like lobster claws. He pursed his lips. He could see through his squint that Will was looking at him from the shallow end of the pool, smiling. He turned the lobster claws toward Will. Will did the same imitation of a lobster. A lobster with a little-boy belly that stuck out above his bathing trunks.

Wayne stretched out on the chaise longue—the only one at the pool—groping for the bottle of rum to tilt another splash into what remained of his Hawaiian Punch. That done, he recapped the bottle and sloshed the can a few times before taking a drink. Zeke looked at him, biting the inside of his cheek. Wayne was going to be the tannest person at day’s end. He was the one who never got stung by a bee and was rarely bitten by mosquitoes. His back was muscular and smooth—no pimples, no big smear of a birthmark, just a long, glowing expanse of skin. Even when he was lying on his stomach, you could tell that Wayne was handsome. Still, Zeke thought, not every woman would be attracted to such a strange man. A lot of women liked younger, quieter men, such as himself. Susan, for instance. And he didn’t have Wayne’s track record, either: two divorces, living with more women than you could count, a period in his life when the IRS had put a lien on his bank account, two rounds of clap. Hell, he might even know more about Wayne than Corky did. Working side by side with him for so long, he’d heard a lot of things. Maybe they should know that in the CIA: A person made to plant rhododendron bushes day after day will tell you anything.

Zeke held his breath and slipped off the edge of the diving board into the water. It was chilly and had an oily feel. Where the shadow fell across the pool the surface was inky blue. Zeke smoothed his hand over the top of his head. It was like putting ice on fire. He ducked under the water, came up, and smoothed the hair out of his face. No one had paid any attention to his entrance into the pool except Will, who was butting the inner tube with his belly in the shallow end, talking to himself as he sent it scurrying along. Zeke began to swim toward Will, clowning as he stroked, eyes bulging and jaw dropped. Will stopped playing with the inner tube and looked at Wayne, a hesitant smile on his face. Zeke must be nearer his age than his father’s. Zeke’s teeth sparkled like the big white teeth the Tooth Lady brought into Will’s classroom twice a year so that she could show everyone how to brush their teeth with a whisk-broom toothbrush. Then she poked between the teeth with a piece of rope, making the same sawing motion adults made rubbing their backs as they dried off. As Zeke came near him Will smiled, partly at his approach, and partly because of the memory. The Tooth Lady’s teeth were big enough to be the entranceway to a medium-sized dog’s doghouse. The Tooth Lady herself had small white teeth, and enormous breasts that made the boys laugh. The Tooth Lady, Nancy Spears, was nicknamed Bicycle Pump because of the sixth-graders’ assertion that she pumped up her tits with a bicycle pump. All through her presentation, the boys would push their hands down to the floor and raise them and push them down again, giggling, and the girls would hang their heads in shame. Will did not know, as Zeke neared him, that Zeke’s shiny white teeth were false. Gum disease had necessitated the pulling of all but two top teeth and the molars, though when he was in the Army Zeke had chosen to say that a jealous husband had knocked out his teeth.

“Hop on,” Zeke said, backing up to Will. “King Kong will take you for a swim.”

Will could not imagine Zeke as King Kong. He was too thin and too white. Also, King Kong didn’t hang out in swimming pools.

“You’re not King Kong,” Will said. He came nearer, though. Zeke looked over his shoulder and saw Will take a few steps forward.

“Well, I don’t know the names of any monsters of the deep,” Zeke said. “Just pretend I’m one of those. Oh—wait—I know: I’m the monster from the black lagoon. Black lagoon or blue lagoon. Something like that.” He gestured toward his back.

There was a birthmark on Zeke’s back, shaped like a crescent moon. Haveabud had moles on his back. Will remembered Haveabud rolling out of bed, and the sprinkling of moles across his back—so many that Will had squinted, the way he squinted to see the pattern stars made in the night sky. Haveabud’s moles, though, were more like measles than constellations. Will had only one mole, at the side of his knee. His mother had had the doctor look at it. He wondered what a doctor would think of Haveabud’s back. Though the water was not cold, Will shivered.

“You afraid of monsters?” Zeke said, smiling over his shoulder. You had to coax kids a little, Zeke knew. Kids and women. He had to take Susan to dinner six times before she would even let him feel her up, but the next time he really scored: right from first base home. Now, any time he wanted it. He looked at Susan, stretched out on the towel. From this perspective, her thighs looked like mountains. Will thought that maybe Haveabud’s moles had flown onto Zeke’s back like iron filings attracted by a magnet. Maybe hidden current moved through Zeke’s body, like electricity. It might not be safe to climb on his back. It would be just like Haveabud to find a way to get rid of something he didn’t want. Whenever he dropped anything out the car window, Haveabud always said, “It’s organic.” Kleenex were organic. The crossword puzzle, torn from the magazine in the motel room, was wadded up and thrown out the window once it was finished because the crossword puzzle was organic. Also the tabs Haveabud pulled off cans of Schweppes ginger ale. When they had driven far enough south so that the windows could be opened because it was suddenly so warm, Haveabud had let his socks flap out the window: little lavender-and-green argyle flags, snapping in the wind. Then he had just released them, not looking back to see where they went. “Ya-hoo!” Zeke screamed, as Will mounted his back. Zeke’s cry sounded like Haveabud’s shout when he released the socks. He remembered the look on Mel’s face as he sat in the driver’s seat, turning to look at Haveabud as the socks went snapping out the window. It was the same look his mother got when she found him stamping in two inches of water in the bathtub. Or the look she gave him when he said a bad word. Spencer had paid no attention. He was used to Haveabud’s enthusiastic shouts. He heard them when Haveabud concluded a successful business call. When they watched the Mets play. When Haveabud knocked down all the sand monkeys sitting on a shelf at the carnival and won the stuffed-snake prize—a superlong bright green snake that Haveabud later wound around the coatstand in his office, after moving the philodendrons from the reception area and putting them around the stand, so that the snake appeared to be coiling out of a forest.

“An Anatosaurus,” Will said suddenly, remembering the name of a monster of the deep.

“What?” Zeke said.

“They’re dinosaurs with big bony heads. Anatosaurus means ‘duck lizard.’ They swam in the water and had big bills, like a duck. Dinosaurs hung out in the water. People just think of them running all over the land but actually the water was full of them, too. The Anatosaurus had a head shaped like a wheelbarrow. Great big wheelbarrow heads on enormous bodies in the water.”

“Holy shit,” Zeke said. “Don’t tell me that stuff. I’ll have nightmares.”

“They’re gone,” Will said. “The dinosaurs are all dead, even though people say they’ve seen them. Those pictures they take are faked. They’re fog looking funny when it rises from a lake. There aren’t any dinosaurs, and nobody knows the mystery of where they went.” He was saying just what Spencer had taught him. Spencer wanted to be proven wrong, though—you could tell that. He had books and articles about dinosaur sightings, and even though he said he didn’t believe what the people saw, he still kept a list of sightings and possible explanations, using the person’s own words in one column, and commenting himself in the far column.

“There’s no Loch Ness monster, either,” Will said, bobbing through the water on Zeke’s back. “And did you know that one time an albino was photographed with a fish-eye lens in a thunderstorm, but the magazine that bought the pictures found out and never printed them?”

“Stop talkin’ about this stuff,” Zeke said. “I’ve got enough monsters in my nightmares.”

“Dinosaurs aren’t monsters,” Will said.

“Yeah? What are they? Harmless, like cheerleaders?”

“They’re
gone
,” Will said. “You’ll never see one in your entire life because they aren’t on the planet anymore.”

Spencer had been very emphatic about this: The dinosaurs were gone, every one, in spite of their size. They were gone, and nobody could have any sense of them except people who went to museums and saw their skeletons. Will kicked his heels lightly against Zeke’s sides. The dinosaurs were gone, but it was still possible to go giddyup on a horse. Zeke was a horse in the water. That was what you might see now, instead of dinosaurs. His mother had talked about the wild ponies at Assateague, saying that one day she would take him there.