Searching for Caleb (26 page)

   Little boy your teeth are green And your tongue it is rotting away.

   Better gargle with some gasoline, Brush with Comet and vomit today.

   She returned to the kitchen, feeling more cheerful. "Grandfather, let's take a trip," she said.

   "A what?"

   "A trip."

   "But we don't have any leads right now, Justine."

   "Why wait for leads? Oh, why won't anyone do anything? Are we just going to sit here? Am I going to get rooted to the living room couch?"

   Her grandfather watched her, with his eyes wide and blank and his hands endlessly drying an Exxon coffee mug on the corner of his apron.

   Justine took her grandfather to an afternoon concert in Palmfield, although she did not like classical music and her grandfather couldn't hear it. The two of them sat rigid in their seats, directing unblinking blue stares toward the outline of a set of car keys in the violin soloist's trouser pocket. Then they went home by bus with Justine as dissatisfied as ever, bored and melancholy. Each time strangers rose to leave she mourned them. Who knew in what way they might have affected her life?

   She took Duncan, her grandfather, and Ann-Campbell Britt to the funeral of a chihuahua belonging to an old lady client. "What is this? Where are we going?" her grandfather kept asking. "Don't worry, just come," said Justine. "Why do you care? Just grab up your hearing aid and come, Grandfather. If you want things to happen you have to run a few blind errands, you know." So he came, grumbling, and they sat on folding chairs in a cow pasture that had recently been turned into a pets' memorial garden. "The casket cost one hundred and forty-five dollars," Justine whispered to Duncan. "It's all metal. But they could have settled for wood: thirty-two ninety-eight. Mrs. Bazley told me. She selected the hymns herself. The minister is fully ordained."

   "Oh, excellent," said Duncan, "I wonder if he needs an assistant," and after the service he went up and offered Arthur Milsom's address to the minister. But Grandfather Peck wandered among the wreaths and urns looking baffled. Why had he been brought here? Justine could no longer tell him. She rode home beside Duncan without a word, swinging one foot and rapidly chewing coffee beans that she had taken to keeping in a tin container at the bottom of her bag.

   On Sundays she drove her grandfather to Plankhurst for Quaker meeting, which used to be something she tried to get out of because she didn't like sitting still so long. Now she would go anywhere. -\ Grandfather Peck was not, of course, a Quaker and had no intention of becoming one, but he resented regular church services because he claimed the minister wouldn't speak up. It made him feel left out, he said. Even the Quakers would sometimes take it into their heads to rise and mumble, perversely keeping their faces turned away so that he couldn't read their lips. Then he whispered, "What? What?"-a harsh sound sawing through the air. He made Justine write everything down for him on a 3 X 5 memo pad he kept in his breast pocket. Justine would click the retractable point of his ballpoint pen in and out, in and out, waiting for a five-minute speech to be over, and then she wrote, "He says that God must have made even Nixon," or

   "Peace is not possible as long as neighbors can still argue over a lawn mower."

   "That took him five minutes?"

   "Ssh."

   "But what was he up there working his mouth all that time for?"

   "Ssh, Grandfather. Later."

   "You must have left something out," he told her.

   She would hand back his pen and pad, and sigh, and check the Seth Thomas clock on the mantel and run her eyes once more down the rows of straight-backed radiant adults and fidgety children lining the wooden benches.

   After twenty minutes the children were excused, rising like chirping, squeaking mice to follow the pied piper First-Day

   608 ANNE TYLER

   School teacher out of the room, breaking into a storm of whistles and shouts and stamping feet before the door was properly shut again. She should have gone with them, she always thought. The silence that followed was deep enough to drown in. She would plow desperately through her straw bag, rustling and jingling, coming up finally with her tin container of coffee beans. When she bit into them, she filled the meetinghouse with the smell of breakfast.

   Once her grandfather wrote on the pad himself, several lines of hurried spiky handwriting that he passed to her. "Read this out when no one else is talking," he whispered. She struggled to her feet, hanging onto her hat. Anything to break the silence. "My grandfather wants me to read this," she said. " 'I used to think that heaven was-palatable? Palatial.

   I was told it had pearly gates and was paved with gold. But now I hope they are wrong about that. I would prefer to find that heaven was a small town with a bandstand in the park and a great many trees, and I would know everybody in it and none of them would ever die or move away or age or alter.' "

   She sat down and gave him back the memo pad. She took the top off her coffee beans but then she put it on again, and kept the container cupped in her hands while she gazed steadily out the window into the sunlit trees.

   One afternoon toward the end of May the doorbell rang and Justine, flying to answer it, found Alonzo Divich standing on the porch. Although it was hot he wore a very woolly sheepskin vest. He carried a cowboy hat, swinging by a soiled string. "Alonzo!" Justine said.

   "I was afraid you might have moved," he told her.

   "Oh no. Come in."

   He followed her into the hall, shaking the floor with each step.

   Grandfather Peck was on the living room couch writing a letter to his daughters. "Don't get up," Alonzo called to him, although the grandfather was still firmly seated, giving him that stare of shocked disbelief he always wore for Alonzo. "How's the heart, eh?" Alonzo asked. "How's the heart?"

   "Hearth?"

   "Nothing's wrong with his heart," said Justine. "Come into the kitchen, Alonzo, if you want your cards read. You know I can't do it right with Grandfather watching."

   While she cleared the remains of breakfast from the table, Alonzo wandered around the kitchen examining things and whistling. "Your calendar is two months ahead," he told Justine.

   "Is it?"

   "Most people's would be behind."

   "Yes, well."

   She went to the living room for her carry-all. When she returned Alonzo was standing at the open refrigerator, looking into a bowl of moldy strawberries. "How is my friend Duncan?" he asked her.

   "He's fine."

   "Maybe I'll drop by and see him. Is Meg out of school yet?"

   "She's married."

   "Married."

   "She eloped with that minister."

   "I'm sorry, Justine."

   He shut the refrigerator and sat down at the table to watch her shuffle the cards. He looked tired and hot, and the grooves alongside his mustache were silvered with sweat. A disk with Arabic lettering gleamed in the opening of his shirt. Last time it had been a turquoise cross. She didn't ask why; he wouldn't have answered. "Alonzo," was all she said, "you have no idea how it gladdens my heart to see you. Cut, please." He cut the cards. She laid them out, one by one. Then she looked up. "Well?"

   she asked.

   Alonzo said, "You realize, last time I took your advice."

   "You did?"

   "When you told me not to sell the business."

   "Oh yes. Well, I should hope so," said Justine.

   "It was the first time you ever said to keep on with something I was already doing."

   She stopped swinging her foot.

   "But I was tempted to disobey you anyway," he told her. "I admit. I went to see my friend, the one in merchandising. He has these clients, you understand, department stores and such, they come to him for ideas on ... but anyway. I said I might join up with him. 'Oh, fine,' he tells me. But then he starts suggesting I wear a different style of clothes. Well, that I can follow. I am practical, I know how the world works. But he doesn't see, he's still trying to convince me. 'Face it, Alonzo,' he says, 'we all have to give in in little ways. Look at me. I'm a tall man,' he says.

   And he is, a fine tall man. 'Well,' he says, 'when important clients come, know what I do? I try to stay seated as much as possible, and if I stand I kind of squinch down. I don't stoop,' he says, 'that's too obvious. Just bend at the knees a little. Understand, it's not something I think of so consciously. But you can see a client, important fellow like that, he wouldn't feel right if I was to tower over him. You got to keep a watch for such things, Alonzo.'"

   He shook his head, and pulled his great silver belt buckle around to where it wouldn't cut into his stomach so.

   "Justine," he said, "do you know that I have never before done what you told me to do?"

   "I'm not surprised," she said.

   "I mean it. You're always right, but only because I go against instructions and things turn out badly just the way you said they would.

   Now I discover things turn out badly anyhow. Is that your secret? I've found it, ha? You give people advice they'll be sure not to follow.

   Right?"

   She laughed. "No, Alonzo," she said. "And I'm glad you didn't sell the carnival. Whatever's gone wrong."

   "My mechanic's been arrested."

   "Lem?"

   "He robbed a bank in nineteen sixty-nine. They say."

   "Oh, I see."

   "Now, here's what I want to know. Is he coming back, or not? I mean if he's coming soon I'll hold the machines together somehow and wait it out, but if he's guilty, on the other hand-"

   "Well, I don't think I'm supposed to say if someone's guilty or not."

   "Look here! What do I care about guilt? All they lost was two hundred dollars, let him keep it. Besides a little matter of a shooting. I want to know about my business. I want to know if I should just give up, because to tell the truth this fellow Lem was a man I relied on. He saw to everything. Now, merchandising is out but there is always something else, and the jodhpur lady still wants my carnival. Shall I sell, after all? Is the man gone forever?"

   Justine frowned at a card.

   "You see what I've fallen to," Alonzo said. "I used to ask about beautiful women. Now it's financial matters."

   "Well, Lem is not coming back," said Justine.

   "I knew it."

   "But you shouldn't sell the carnival."

   "How can you keep saying such a stupid thing?"

   "Don't argue with me, argue with the cards. Have you ever seen anything like it? I've turned up every jack in the deck, you'll have all the mechanics you want."

   "Oh, of course," Alonzo said. "One after the other. The first one drinks, the second leaves with my ponies-"

   "And look at the women! Look, Alonzo, you're not paying attention. See?

   Here you are, the king of hearts. And here's the queen of hearts, the queen of clubs, the queen of diamonds . . ."

   Alonzo sat forward, peering at the cards, resting his hand upon his knees.

   "Here is the good luck card, the card of friendship, the celebration card

   . . ."

   "All right, all right!" Alonzo said.

   She sat back and smiled at him.

   "Oh, Justine," he told her sadly, "sometimes I think I would like to go live in a cabin in the woods, all alone. I'd take a lifetime supply of slivovitz, my accordion, plenty of food, perhaps some books. Do you know I've never read an entire book? Just the good parts. I think about hibernating like a bear, just eating and drinking and sleeping. No tax, insurance, electric bills, alimony, repairs or repainting or Rustoleum, no women to mess up my life, no one shooting bank guards, no children. Then here you come galloping along in your terrible hat and your two sharp hipbones like pebbles in your pockets and you tell me all these things I may expect, a life full of surprises. How can I refuse? I feel curious all over again, I like to know what will happen next."

   And he shook his head, stroking downward on his mustache, but he did not look so tired as when he had arrived. All his tiredness seemed to have passed to Justine, who sat slumped in her chair with her hands limp on the cards.

   Duncan and Justine were on the front steps, watching the fireflies spark all around them. "Today I sold an antique garden engine," Duncan said.

   "What's a garden engine?"

   "It's this big wheeled thing to spray water on your flowers. What a relief! I bought it with my own money in a moment of weakness. I kept it sitting in the back room; I had to open the double doors to get it in and then I was afraid it would go right through the floorboards. A man named Newton Norton bought it. He's just started reconstructing this old-time farmhouse out in the country."

   "Well, that's nice," said Justine.

   "He also bought some fuller's shears, and all my carpenter tools."

   "That's nice."

   He looked over at her.

   "When I went into Meg's room," she said, "and found her note telling me she'd gone, I never read anything that hurt so. But then I looked up, and there I was reflected in the window that was just starting to go dark outside. There were these deep black shadows in my eyes and cheekbones. I thought, 'My, don't I look interesting? Like someone who has had something dramatic happen.' I thought that!"

   She laid her face against Duncan's sleeve. Duncan put his arm around her and pulled her closer, but he didn't say anything.

   II

   JLJUC icy Peck had to ride in the suicide seat, beside her husband Two, who was driving. Laura May and Sarah got to sit in back. Lucy had to put up with the hot air rushing in Two's open window and Mantovani playing much too loudly on the radio. She had to say what roads to take when she couldn't even fold a map right, much less read it. "Now the next thing is you're going to turn left, about a quarter-inch after Seven Stone Road. Or, I don't know. What would a little bitty broken blue line seem to mean?" Her husband set his front teeth together very, very delicately, not a good sign at all. A bumble bee flew in past his nose, causing Lucy to cry out and fling her road map into the air. And meanwhile there sat Laura May and Sarah, protected by layered hats with brown veils, contemplating two separate views peacefully like children being taken for a drive.