Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (10 page)

Weeknights, Tommy and I had the lake to ourselves. For a while he wasn't drinking much at all. We were living on no money, which thrilled me. The evenings were warm. We would skinny dip at sunset and he would laugh at me, the way I paddled around with my neck craned, refusing to get my hair wet. The dog was devoted as ever, swimming joyous circles around us. We would discuss our children. I wanted six of them.

“Walter,” I would say. “Margaret, Robert, Jane, Richard, Nancy.”

“Bonaparte,” he would say, arcing a mouthful of water at me. “Aloysius, Ruby Pearl, Brutus, Octavia, Percival.”

“Tommy!” I'd say, splashing him. “Be serious.”

He would pull me close under the water and kiss me. “I am being serious,” he would grin.

 

Did things start to go bad because the parties stopped? Or did the parties stop because things started to get bad? I never have figured that out, and I guess it doesn't really make sense to try. By that point, I was a goner. I was just a moon in Tommy's orbit, controlled by his gravity, chained to him. All I could do was look in his eyes in the morning and know what kind of go-round I was going to have that day.

That fall he started to disappear. Gone all day, sometimes all night. I knew it wasn't another woman—Tommy was nothing if not faithful. No—he was paying visits to all his ghosts. I could only guess where he went. And what did I know?
When it came down to it, I didn't have the first clue about that place, or who Tommy had been before I came along, or what those ghosts might even look like.

Night after night, alone in that bed, it was like sleeping in a hospital waiting room. I'd wake up a dozen times with the same two thoughts whirling around in my head:
How much longer, and how bad is it?
And then at dawn I would hear his footsteps above me, the dog would come slinking out from under the bed, the motor would cough to a start, and by the time I got up on deck we'd be halfway out to the center of the lake, Tommy at the wheel with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and a look I knew better than to argue with.

It exhausts me to think about it, even now. Like trying to hold a drowning man's head above water. The nights I would drive to Valdosta, going in and out of bars, searching for him. Dragging him out, driving him home, arguments that he would not remember in the morning. The last few parties that turned ugly, blood on the deck. One night, I poured every can of beer and every bottle of liquor overboard. I didn't know what else to do. He pounded down the dock, raging. I heard the slam of his truck door echo in the empty parking lot. Heard him tear out. Let the last bottle
glug glug
into the water.
But the river ain't whiskey and I ain't a duck—

The trouble was, I knew exactly what I wasn't. I just didn't know who I
was
.

I huddled up in bed, and waited.

Ice formed on the edges of the puddles in the parking lot.

The dog, permanently spooked, up and ran away for good.

When Tommy smashed up my camera one night, I did not even care. I had forgotten all about it. For the best, anyway. If one thing was certain, I never had what it took to be a photographer.

 

“That's not true,” my daughter said. She pushed her chair back from the kitchen table, where she had been studying the photographs, and held up two of them. “These two are really good. These two are great.”

I looked at them. They were. They were Tommy's.

 

I have never liked the expression,
He drank himself to death.
It makes it sound as if someone sits down with that purpose in mind, rather than it being something that just happens along the way. I don't know what became of Tommy. When I got out I didn't look back. But those are precisely the words that come to mind every time I allow myself to wonder about him.

And if he did? Well, if he did, I wasn't going to save him. No, I wasn't going to save him, just the same as I wasn't going to find anyone else like him, despite the years I spent—the years I wasted—trying.

My daughter put down the photographs and looked at me. So beautiful. That clear face. Her father's eyes.

“God, Mom,” she said. “It sounds like those were the days.”

No, I told her.

“But wasn't it worth it?” she said. “Wouldn't you do it all over again?”

No, it wasn't worth it, I told her. Not any of it.

Not one damn minute of it.

Trust me.

C
harlie was headed to the Gulf. Since the hurricane, he had heard, the jobs were there for the taking. The kid who pumped gas at the Shell back in Red Bank had been down for a week in March and told him all about it. Places were cheap, the water was warm, and the girls were looking for action. “Good thing for Category Five hurricanes,” he said, and it struck Charlie that this was a hateful thing to say just as he realized it was exactly where he needed to go.

Lucy's farm was only a stopover, a place to hide out, save up some money, and then get back on the road. Goats, Charlie figured. How much work could they really be? Getting out of Red Bank—that had been the hard part.

He was wrong, it turned out, on both counts. The days at Lucy's felt like a broken record, a never-ending limbo. He just couldn't seem to get anything right. Not to mention the
weather, which looked like it was there to stay. Triple digits for a week, hot as the hinges of hell, and going on forty-five days with no rain.

People were saying it was the worst drought in a century. Charlie, wrestling with the crazy-wheeled wheelbarrow, already sweating at seven-thirty in the morning, figured it had to be the worst drought in a million years. The pastures were as scorched as a space shuttle launch site. The low hills in the distance sizzled in the sun, too much to look at. All across the state, fields were going up in flames. One spark from a mower blade hitting a rock and the whole thing would go. Lucy reminded him several times a week that the tractor was strictly forbidden.

As he hefted each bale of hay across the field to a hayrack, the goats followed him, ripping off mouthfuls with their square little teeth. When they ran, their heavy udders tangled in their hind legs like big rubber balls. Sometimes they tripped, landing on top of them with a bounce, and Charlie would wince, afraid that one would pop like a balloon, spraying hot milk everywhere. The goats had yellow snake eyes and were the colors of stones: some brown, some gray, some white, some striped, sedimentary. They moved as one body. The kids, miniature versions of their mothers, scrambled to keep up and got punted around in the confusion. When he finally managed to get each bale forked into the big slatted hayracks, three or four goats leapt into each one and bedded down.

Lying in your food while you eat it, Charlie thought, stopping to catch his breath. Not such a bad idea. There were
plenty of nights he was so exhausted that he wouldn't have minded doing it himself. The goats slit their yellow eyes blissfully, grabbing mouthfuls of whatever was in reach, while at the other end, their puckered assholes winked turds into it. Smart, Charlie thought, leaning on the pitchfork, but like most things the goats did, pretty damn stupid, too.

Out here in the field, the goats had become Charlie's constant companions, for better or for worse. He was responsible for their care and feeding, though Lucy did all the milking herself. “Men and milk don't mix,” she told him on his first day. “Trust me, I've learned.” She brought the does into the barn two by two early each morning, before Charlie was awake. Even the sound of the milk hitting the pail nauseated him. Why would anyone want to drink something that came out of the inside of a
goat
?

Once a week, Lucy loaded a big vat in the back of her truck and took the milk to town, where she sold it to the co-op. For a while, she had invited Charlie along with her, and he would scramble for an excuse not to go, but she had finally stopped asking. It wasn't a big town at all, not much bigger than Red Bank, but the longer he'd been on the farm, the more he felt panicky about it. He had spoken to hardly anyone except Lucy and the mailman for two months now. In his mind, town was a bewildering place, crowded, full of untranslatable signs and dangerous strangers. His own truck sat under some parched black walnut trees next to the barn, unused except for an occasional trip to the crossroads gas station, sticky from the dead dropped leaves. Lucy hated the truck,
and she took every opportunity to remind him. Not that he could blame her. The truck would spit in your eye if it could. And it wasn't his, anyways. It was Darryl's.

You could say that Charlie had stolen it. But hadn't Darryl basically stolen it, too, from the old man down the road after they cut out half his lung, saying something about how he owed him? Jacked the tires, tinted the windows, and hung from the trailer hitch a pair of pink rubber testicles that swayed languorously when the truck was in motion and which Charlie hadn't had the nerve to touch, let alone remove.

The buck came up the hill slowly, bleating. He was a grizzled silver beast who could escape any fence, even though the fences were so tight, Lucy liked to say, that they could practically hold water. Lucy had long ago chained him to a tire to keep him in, and it bumped along behind him, kicking up a cloud of dust. He stopped to twist his body around and piss on his long white beard, then leveled his head at Charlie and looked him straight in the eye. “You old boogey!” Charlie shouted. The buck smelled like a bus station urinal. Often he would use his tire as a step stool, dragging it to the base of a pear tree and climbing up on it to get to the higher leaves. Then he would curl up in the center of it and go to sleep. Charlie had to give him some credit. He knew plenty of human beings who weren't smart enough to make the most of their lot in life.

His friends, for example. Back in Red Bank, his friends were complaining about how they couldn't find work, getting drunk every night and sponging off their girlfriends'
waitressing tips. But not Charlie. Charlie had always known he would make it, as long as he stayed out of trouble. He picked up the trash in the yard, walked three miles to Shooters' to bring Darryl home when they called. He paid the bills. He cooked the meals. He broke the news and apologized to the neighbor when Darryl ran over her cat.

Charlie squeezed his water bottle over the back of his neck. He shook the memory away. A few more weeks. Then it was sayonara, goats. Sayonara, Lucy. A few more weeks and life would begin. When he got to the Gulf he'd drive that truck off a goddamn pier. And tell Darryl that he could just—no, tell Darryl nothing. That truck was never his. Charlie didn't have to answer for anything. He tightened his grip on the pitchfork and ground the tines into the dust.

Ah, shit. He lit a cigarette and took a long drag. Don't go there. It's over. It's behind you.

A brown and white doe looked up, opened her mouth, and let a hank of wet hay fall to the ground.
Eeh.

The group that was clustered around the nearest hayrack looked up and joined in.
Eeh-eh-eh. Neh-eh-eh.
They crept towards him, stretching their necks towards the empty wheelbarrow.

“Boo!” Charlie yelled, knocking the wheelbarrow over, and they reared up and scattered. When he turned to right it, he felt a tug at his jeans. They had closed back in on him. One had already pulled the pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and was gumming it to a pulp.

It was clearly a one-man job, feeding the crippled kid.

Charlie couldn't figure out why Lucy insisted he help her. Most of the time, she was shooing him off of things. “Never mind, Charlie,” she would say, “just forget it,” and snatch up the post hole digger and dig the post holes herself, or go back through the flower bed and weed it again as soon as he was done. He would vow to do better next time, and end up doing worse. She asked him to move the goats, and he put them in the pasture with the broken gate. They scattered and wasted their hay. He pulled flowers along with the weeds. The windows dried streaky.

But every day he and Lucy sat cross-legged in the shade of a pear tree in the paddock, knees almost touching, while the kid slurped its bottle between them, and Charlie had to admit that it was almost peaceful. The kid was pure white, with blue eyes in a little birdlike face and spindly crooked legs that could not support its body. When it was born, a few days after Charlie arrived, its mother got up and walked away, tripping over it. Now it bleated for her every time the herd came near the tree, trying to drag itself after them. The goats would turn their heads and regard it with disinterest, like people passing a bum on a sidewalk.

Lucy was convinced there still might be hope, if they could just get its strength up. She had shown Charlie how to hold it, how to stroke its neck to encourage it to swallow. When they were out there together feeding it, she talked about the farm, the state she and her ex-husband found it in when they moved down from the North twenty-five years before, and all
the work they had done: the wall of briars they dug out of the pastures, the fences, the new roof they put on the farmhouse. She talked about her run-ins with the neighboring farmers—the Jesus boys, she called them—how they had waited all these years for her to give up and sell out, and how she had proven them all wrong.

“This pear tree,” she said affectionately, waving a hand towards its branches. “When we got here this pear tree only came up to my thigh.” She looked almost pretty, her narrow face tilted towards the kid, her long, dark hair in a braid down her back, her blue eyes and turquoise earrings electric against her tan skin. The wrinkles around her eyes softened them when she smiled. The silver rings on her fingers glinted in the sun. A few days after Charlie arrived, he realized that she used to be beautiful. It had just been a glimpse, a flash of understanding—mostly she seemed like she had been exactly the same forever. The farm seemed that way, too, as if it was frozen in time, under glass.

Lucy sighed and shook her head at herself, muttering something about her husband. Charlie, catching every few words, had the feeling that he was loping along behind a train, trying to grab hold and pull himself up and on.

“Decades. Entire decades gone to that asshole. And I begged him to stay. Why? I was scared. Meanwhile, he was dragging me to hell and back. Sometimes I wonder how I got out of it alive.”

She took the empty bottle from Charlie, wiped the kid's chin with her thumb, and handed him another bottle. He
tried to imagine the husband. At first he pictured someone like Darryl, slithering around in his greasy-backed chair in front of the TV with half a dozen empty beer cans at his feet. But of course he'd be nothing like Darryl. He'd be a Yankee with a college degree and glasses and a little beard. A different breed of asshole entirely.

Lucy leaned back and considered the kid, took the bottle from Charlie, and shook her head. “From your point of view, I imagine it all seems pretty damn foolish.”

Charlie cleared his throat. It made a hollow sound. He moved his face into the shade, looked down at the kid's little face, the pink heart-shaped hooves that had never touched the ground, clean and soft as new pencil erasers. Look, Lucy, he wanted to say. You done what you did, and I don't know enough about it to judge one way or another. But she'd only shoot him one of those looks she was always giving him. He could tell her he knew exactly what it was like, living with someone like that, but he could imagine what she'd say to that: Oh, do you now? He ran his tongue over his dry lips and searched for something else.

“People is just—stupid.” He winced as soon as he heard himself say it.

Lucy brushed a lock of hair off her forehead. “Now what the hell is
that
supposed to mean?”

Charlie shrugged and coughed into his fist, cast down his eyes to avoid her glare. He felt like scratching a hole in the dry dirt and climbing in. The kid nosed the bottle and burbled as if it was a baby—
their
baby. Charlie was starting
to like the kid. It was the only thing on the place that had a sense of humor.

 

When Charlie arrived in June, Lucy was just recovering from kidding season and desperate for help. He was desperate, too—the truck had broken down just seventy-five miles out of Red Bank, like a final
fuck you
from Darryl, and he'd blown most of his money on a new starter when he found Lucy's help-wanted ad on a bulletin board at the gas station. He was grateful that she didn't ask questions. A week or two, tops, he thought, surveying the old frame farmhouse and rolling fields, deciding it might not be half bad. He had started to drag his duffel bag into the house, and Lucy shook her head and pointed up to the barn. He thought she was kidding. Then she gave him a foam mattress, a lamp, a few milk crates, and an armload of blankets and told him to make himself at home. “For real?” he said.

She gazed at him with those blue eyes, challenging him. “None of the others ever had a problem with sleeping in the barn.”

You can do this, he told himself, lying on the floor of the grain room that first night, flies dropping from the rafters to land on his lips and the tinkling of the goats' bells waking him every time he started to nod off. Be a man, Charlie. Buck up. So she didn't seem to particularly like him. Who cares, he thought, so what? He was used to being misunderstood. He went about the world in two ways: there was the real Charlie, and then the Charlie he showed everyone else.

He had learned never to say what he was thinking, because no one else was thinking the same thing. “Oh, yeah, Mr. Know-It-All?” Darryl would say when Charlie started speaking his mind. “I got news for you. You think you're so smart. Smarts ain't all you need, you know. Plenty of smart people end up cleaning up other people's shit for a living. So you just remember that, smart-ass.”

There were women at home—mothers of his friends—who tried to take care of him. Let him spend school nights at their house, always tried to send him home with leftovers. He would sometimes warily accept their offers of kindness, but mostly he'd curl up tight as a pill bug until they left him alone. Refuse the hot dinner even when his stomach was rumbling with hunger. Shrug the friendly arm off his shoulders. He was determined to show everyone that he could take care of himself. If that meant being alone in the world—well, in the end we all are, aren't we?