Shame (28 page)

“I don't know,” I said. “My future's a little uncertain just now.”

She smiled and laid her hand on my leg, our momentary rift mended. “Whatever you want to do is okay with me,” she said. “Johnny, can I come a little closer?”

“I'm stinking like a dog over here,” I warned her.

“I don't care. Can I?”

My hormones screamed yes; my few still-functioning brain cells shouted no. “Not just yet,” I said. “I'd like to make this decision without undue influence.”

She nodded and gave me a mischievous grin. “And you think that if I slide over there next to you, it's going to be harder to make?”

“Something like that,” I said. I could feel sweat beading on my forehead.

We reached the outskirts of the city, had to drop our speed down to fifty-five, began to hit a little congestion (of course, to someone from Watonga, a six-lane highway with more than three cars in sight means congestion), and looked for the buildings downtown that would signal our imminent exit—the First National Bank building, a trimmed-down version of the Empire State Building; the Liberty Tower, a featureless black rectangle; the Myriad Gardens, crowned by a circular glass greenhouse full of tropical plants where a cousin of Michelle's had gotten married a few years back; and the Myriad itself, a collection of squares and mirrors that served as convention hall and concert venue and where Michelle and I had seen Springsteen in the early eighties, one of the holiest nights in my life.

We took a likely exit, made a right at the Myriad and went under the railroad line. We found the printer the next block over. After loading the box of programs in the trunk (and they looked great; Michelle had outdone herself on the arrangements for this thing), we began to think about grabbing a bite to eat, since neither of us had had lunch.

“Let's go up to Twenty-third,” I suggested, and we drove up Classen Boulevard, turned left onto Twenty-third Street across from what used to be the Soul Boutique back in the seventies, and pulled through an Arby's drive-through a few blocks west.

I ordered two beef and cheddars, two orders of potato cakes, and a mocha shake; she got a regular roast beef and a water, no ice. Then I got back onto Twenty-third headed west.

“We're going to need some gas,” I said.

“That's not all we're going to need,” she said. “We need to decide what we're going to do.” She tore little bites off her sandwich, and she licked her fingers after each one, catlike.

“There's a Texaco,” I said, and pulled into it. “What does this thing take?”

“Gas,” she said, handing me two twenties, and I could read her frustration with me, with us, with the whole situation. I pumped what seemed like a thousand gallons into the Century and also paid for the discount car wash you get with a fill-up.

“I thought your car could use a wash,” I said. The dark blue did show road dirt. I pulled around to the wash, punched in the code, and idled forward into the wash bay until the little red stoplight signal came on. Water began to dribble, then to pound against the roof and doors and hood and windows, and then the rotating brush swooped down with a rumble, closer and closer. My body picked up the trembling, and Sam felt it too, for I looked across at her and each of us was holding our breath, and the look on our faces was mingled fear and fascination, and then she leaned toward me and put her hand on my right leg, just above the knee, and we were in each other's arms as the world itself rumbled around us. Her fingers were in my hair and mine were slipping to her back and pulling her closer, closer. My lips found hers, and I kissed her greedily, hungrily, as though she could feed me what I lacked, as though I could ingest the years I had lost, and the water pattered against the car like it had on spring nights in my old Chevy truck back in 1975, and I could almost feel the way it could have been between us all those years.

I saw us going off to college together, myself in law school, in a practice with that mahogany desk and a corner office, saw our family at the dinner table, and of course they wouldn't look like the kids we had now, they'd be some other kids.

I saw us in bed together, those lips on mine, as they were right now, for real, in the present.

I saw the life we never had, all the way to our twentieth high school reunion, where Michelle was decorating the cafeteria for a dance.

And then the water stopped and the dryer howled, high and mournful, and I pushed myself away from her.

“I'm sorry,” I said. I pushed her mouth away from my neck, where it had returned, and she withdrew slowly to her side of the car with a sad smile.

“Don't be sorry,” she purred. “That was wonderful.”

I shook my head. “Yes, it was. And yes, I do. Have to be sorry, I mean. I can't be anything but sorry. For you. For me. For the past.” I let out a breath, my hope of a different future whooshing out of my body, and then shifted out of park and eased the car forward into the flow of air howling from the dryer. The water on the windshield streaked and smeared like the brushstrokes of an Impressionist painting, like a world that could only exist on canvas.

“You're not going to leave her,” she said, and it was clear by her tone that she could not quite believe it.

“Leave them,” I said. “But no. I'm not.”

Her hand was on my arm for a moment, then gone. “Why? Can you tell me why? I could make you happy, Johnny. We could have a good life together.”

And maybe she could, we could. For so long, I wished I could have had her, wanted a life with her. But now I just murmured, “What could have been is the greatest enemy of what is,” and when Samantha gave me a quizzical look, I said it in another way: “Twenty years is plenty long enough to mope over what might have been.”

“It could still
be
,” she insisted. And now there were tears in her eyes, but I suddenly saw—just as the windshield suddenly cleared with a flick of the wiper switch—that you could want something your whole life but realize in the moment of achieving your desire that it couldn't save you the way you always thought it could, that it could in fact change you irrevocably into someone you didn't know and would not want to be.

“I just can't do it,” I said, the world growing clearer to me with each word spoken. “There are too many people who stand to get hurt, people who love us, people who deserve better.”

“What about what we deserve?” she asked, and I could barely understand her for the tears.

“You know,” I said gently, “I'm starting to think that I've gotten what I deserve. Better than I deserve. And that I should start learning to be thankful for it.”

I pulled completely out of the wash bay and up to Twenty-third Street, waiting for a break in traffic.

“She knew you wouldn't leave her,” Sam said, realization dawning as I accelerated into the road. The cube had fallen into place. “She knew that when it was staring you flat in the face you couldn't do it.” She turned to look at me. “That's why she sent you.”

“Then she knew more than I did,” I said, thinking, not for the first time, about how often that was true. “Part of me wanted to take you and head for the distant horizon.” I sighed. “Part of me still does.”

“I wanted you to,” she said. “I guess part of me will always feel that way.”

“I hope not,” I said, looking across at her, slumped in the seat. “You have a family that loves you. And a husband who wants you more than he can possibly express.”

She knit her brows. “I thought you hated Bill.”

“Well,” I said. It was true that I was hard-pressed to think of a single thing I liked about him, but at last, one occurred to me: He loved this woman, and her loss had broken him in the same way I had once been broken. Finally I shook my head. “Not anymore. I've hated Bill Cobb for too long to no good purpose.”

She shook her head and sat silently. As we pulled up to the light at MacArthur Boulevard, I heard her repeat, “What could have been is the greatest enemy of what is.”

I nodded slowly. “Something somebody told me once.”

“Good advice.” She sighed. “If you can live up to it.”

The light turned green, and the enormous weight of the Century began to move forward. “We can,” I said. “We will.”

When we finally reached the high school after a drive full of reflective silence, Michelle's little car sat forlorn and alone in the parking lot.

“I'll take the programs in,” I said, popping the trunk. “Why don't you go on home and get dressed.”

She slid across to take over the seat I'd just vacated, and I walked back to the trunk and lifted out the box of programs.

“Johnny,” she called out the window as I closed the trunk and turned for the school.

I stopped momentarily in my tracks. “Yeah,” I said.

“Michelle's a lucky woman.”

I shook my head and found tears burning the corners of my eyes. “No,” I told her. “I'm a lucky man.”

The Century eased out of the parking lot, and I walked briskly through the silent hallways, my footsteps echoing, to the cafeteria, where Michelle sat, alone, head down, on the edge of the stage. Her shoulders were shaking, and I could see that she was crying so hard that she hadn't heard my approach.

“Hey,” I said, and the look that spread across her face when she saw me is the look I hope to see on the face of Jesus at the moment of my death. I set the box down and headed for her like she was a finish line.

Which, of course, she was.

“I'm sorry,” I said as we stood looking at each other. “So sorry for all the pain I've brought on you. I can never make it up to you. Never. But I'm ready to try.”

“Oh, J. J.,” she said, taking me by the arms, feeling me as if to make sure I was really standing there. “You just have.”

And then she was in my arms, and I was swinging her through the air, light and free, and the world had never ever looked so good.

“Why did you come back?” she asked when I finally set her back down on terra firma.

I looked at her and winked. “We better run home and throw on our fancy dancin' duds,” I said. “I don't want to miss a minute of this dance of yours.”

She nodded and took my arm and led me out to the car, and she stared at me all the way home with a look of bliss on her face that I returned every few seconds.

I can't remember much else about that evening except that I danced every dance with Michelle, waltzes and two-steps, twists and disco, until my feet were tender in my boots and I feared blisters.

“We don't want to ruin you for your game,” Michelle said, leading me over to the punch bowl with her arm around my waist.

“I could care less about that stupid game,” I said, and I discovered to my surprise and instant relief that I actually meant it. We sat down in a corner far from the dance floor and observed our classmates, graying and balding, rail-thin or losing the battle against obesity, faces lined with years of life's pain and laughter, as they danced to songs we had known when we were children—for that's what it seemed to me we had been, children, at least in our understanding of life and how it was all supposed to work.

“Look at that,” Michelle said, pointing discreetly, and I followed her finger to see Bill Cobb cross the room to Samantha, bow, and ask her to dance, to see her blink rapidly, bite her lip, and accept, to see them walk onto the floor and begin to turn, both of them rigid as posts, although his arm was on her waist, and her hand sat upon his shoulder.

“Look at that,” I said.

“Things could work out after all,” she said, and she spoke as an authority on the subject. I leaned across the table, kissed her long and hard, and stood to my blistered feet.

“Let's go home,” I said.

“What?” she said. “And leave all our friends? Do you know how long it's been since we've seen some of these people?”

I pulled her close and whispered into her ear. “Do you know how long it's been since I made love to the only woman in the world I desire?”

She looked up at me. “I don't know that I've ever been the only woman you desire, if that's what you mean.”

“Well, there you go,” I said, and when I whispered a suggestion that we ought to go make sure the coach's office was locked up safe and secure, she giggled like a teenager.

“You know, John,” she said, “I've always thought we'd be together someday.”

“And you were right,” I said. “Absolutely one hundred percent right.” I took her hand, pulled her up from the table, and led her across the dance floor, out of our past and into our future.

What Is, or
Back on the Tractor

And there is little left to tell, although of course there was much that later happened. Much of what had occupied my mind waking and sleeping proved to be so much smoke when I at last woke up and began to see the world more clearly. Phillip did not show up for our exhibition against my varsity team the day after the dance, but we did go ahead and play, after a fashion, with the help of our second-stringers. My varsity beat us handily, as they should have, although we old men did not disgrace ourselves, and I actually played fairly well until the second half, when I benched myself. I told the guys that my ankle was hurting, which, indeed, it was, if only a little. What perhaps was most important, though, was that we made enough money off gate fees and donations that the Watonga basketball program will be able to go a long time—certainly the rest of my coaching career—before having to beg Bill Cobb for anything else.

Although we continued to play unevenly for the rest of the season, my Watonga High team actually finished with a winning record and, by virtue of a huge last-second win over the Okeene Whippets, we went to the district playoffs, where Seiling beat us handily, as they should have. B. W. was recruited by a dozen colleges, but he has stuck to his resolution of going to forestry school in Montana, and Michelle is determined that we will go up this spring break—all of us—to find a place for him to live next fall. For the drive up, she has made reservations for us at a condominium in Winter Park, Colorado, where the youth of our church have gone on ski trips during past spring breaks. B. W. has told me about his first time skiing and gleefully shown me a map of the slopes at Winter Park, of ski runs called Runaway and Feebleminded. When I ask if there's a slope called Fall Down and Break Your Fool Neck, he and Lauren laugh and laugh and just say they can't wait to watch the old man eat snow.

Michelle and I have talked at length about our next twenty years of life, and the upshot is that, this fall, I'm going to start attending classes at Southwestern State University in nearby Weatherford. Mrs. Edmondson, Watonga's eleventh-grade English teacher, is getting along in years and will step down in the not-too-distant future, and it is my thinking that Watonga juniors deserve a good English teacher at least as much as the seniors do. Michelle says she could not be more proud of me, and although money will be tight, I look forward to our future together with the joy I might have been feeling all along.

Still, as I have said before but never understood so well as now: better late than never.

There is one thing more, a sad thing, I must tell. One February morning, some few short weeks ago, Michelle's mother called. Lauren answered the phone and then turned to us and said, “Grandma's crying.”

Michelle took the phone from her, said “Mom,” listened intently for a moment, and then her face crumpled and tears welled up in her eyes and she lowered the phone and slid to the floor, and I ran across the room and gathered her into my arms.

“It's the baby,” Michelle sobbed into my shirtfront. “They lost the baby. Michael and Gloria. She had a miscarriage.” She looked up into my eyes. “Gloria will be okay. But they lost the baby.”

I held her tight and felt my own eyes fill. “It's okay,” I said. I looked up at Lauren, who was biting her lower lip, and held a hand out to her. “Everything will be okay.”

Lauren hung up the phone and then we sat on the floor, the three of us, holding each other. Michelle looked up at me finally and said fiercely, “Don't tell me it's for the best. Don't you dare tell me this is going to be better for them than having that baby.”

“I wouldn't say that,” I said. “I don't even think that. Not anymore.”

She sank her face into my shoulder, and her muffled voice was soft in my ear. “I know they can have another. But I was so ready to be a grandma. Is that selfish?”

“You wanted them to be happy,” I corrected. “The grandma stuff was just a happy by-product.”

It took awhile, but at last Michelle stopped crying, although she was still shaking her head. “Why does something like this happen?” she asked. “Why couldn't things just go smoothly for a little longer?”

“There's a reason for everything that happens,” I said. “There's gotta be.”

She looked up at me. “Do you believe that, J. J.? Really truly believe that?”

“Yes,” I said, and despite the somberness of the moment, I felt suddenly at peace. “Yes, I do.”

My crisis of faith—if that was what it had been—was finally over.

That afternoon an old Chevy pickup topped the rise and headed down the driveway toward the house, and Frank, who for once was standing guard duty instead of his usual practice of wandering the pastures looking for rabbits, let out a low baying noise—
ah roo roo
.

When the truck pulled up in front, I stepped out onto the porch to say howdy.

Phillip One Horse emerged from the vehicle, which on closer inspection proved to be the selfsame Chevy truck he and I had worked on those cold winter afternoons back when he was helping me out around the place.

We stood there for a moment, him in the open door of his truck, me on the top step of my porch. “I didn't think that thing would ever run again,” is what I finally said.

“Well,” he said, “it didn't run without some help. You were right, you know.”

“Right?”

“It was the head gasket. Simple enough to fix once I finally knew what needed to be done. Hop in.” And he motioned to the passenger side with his head.

I smiled sadly. “I'm happy to see you, Phillip. Really. Happier than I can say. But we've had some really hard news today. Can I take a rain check?”

“I know your news,” he said, and he motioned with his head again. “My grandmother sent me. She told me I ought to take you to your son.”

I shook my head. There was the tragedy of it all. “I think your grandmother must have her wires crossed. Michael won't see me. And even if he would, I wouldn't know what to say. There's too much distance between us.”

Phillip stepped closer to me, and his voice was low but full of feeling. “Words are not the most important things we offer those in pain. It's standing behind those words, John. Being there. Not giving up. You should know that. You should know that better than anyone.”

“But he won't see me,” I repeated. “I've—” I stepped down, took him by the shoulder. “Listen, Phillip, you go. Tell him how sorry we are—”

“I will not tell him,” he said, and he took a step backward. “If you have a message to give your son, then come with me.”

“But I don't,” I said. “I can't think of—”

“It's okay, John,” he said. “I know the words of your heart.” I felt his strong hand take my arm, and he would not let me go. He tugged me to the truck and up into it and closed the door behind me.

There was much I wanted to know, much I wanted to tell him, but when I asked how he had been, he simply said, “We can talk later. Now is a good time for silence. A good time to pray, if you believe in it.”

And I did pray, as hard as I've ever prayed in my life. I thought that I'd even uncovered some strength, but when we pulled up in front of the little frame house where Michael and Gloria lived, my courage fled like air escaping a balloon.

I had the image of myself standing at that door, knocking, knocking, and nobody answering. “He won't talk to me,” I said, a third time.

“Have faith,” Phillip said, and he came around and pulled me from the truck. We went to the door. Phillip knocked, and we waited for what seemed years before Michael opened the door and looked out at us through the tattered screen. He had lost weight, and his eyes had shadows beneath them, but even with the evidence of life's hard use, I thought he had never looked so handsome, so grown up.

Whatever he had been when he left us, he was a man now.

Michael did not turn on his heel and shut the door in our faces, but neither did he open the screen to us.

He stood there; he did not look at me, and he did not speak.

“Michael,” Phillip said, “we know there is nothing we can say at a time like this. We have just come to weep with you.”

Michael raised his eyes to mine. He searched my face for something that would tell him what to do, what to think. I don't know what he found there. All I know is that, at last, he opened the screen door and ushered us inside.

I will not say that all our problems are behind us, or that we have made up in weeks for years where we did not listen to each other and did not understand each other. But I can say that last Sunday we met Michael and Gloria for dinner at the Hooks' home after church, that Michael shook my hand, and that both of them were noted on occasion to smile, despite our presence.

And now I sit inside the sun-warmed tractor cab on a chilly March afternoon. I have no reason to be here. I was walking past, I saw the tractor, I climbed up. Maybe I wanted a temporary refuge from the howling north wind; maybe I was seized by a perverse impulse to once again look out at my farm through these dirt-streaked windows.

At first glance, this does not look like an appealing world. Rodents have made their home somewhere in here over the winter, for there are rat droppings at my feet; every surface is covered with red field dust; a discolored plastic spit cup from the long-ago days when I used to chew Red Man is wedged down between the instrument panel and my chair. Then, from underneath the seat, a fly buzzes, as if newly born into existence, and I watch with some interest as he stirs into flight, bounces off some windows, settles on the steering wheel in front of me after his adventures to rest in the sunlight and get his bearings.

Maybe he can see that there is a larger world outside, a world where he could fly endlessly. Maybe he even knows that there is a way to reach that world if he is only willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

But it is also a cold world out there, and the winds howl like wolves, and he could easily be carried off, never to be seen again.

Here there is warmth, there is light, and, within certain definable boundaries, there is freedom.

“Stay put,” I advise him, a message from God. Then I zip up my coat, pull on my gloves, and prepare to step briefly back into the cold before going back into my warm kitchen to kiss my wife, to hug my children, to take up again my wondrous life.