Still Life with Plums (10 page)

Normally Jeff wouldn’t either, but something about this dog, this night, makes him forget about ringworm and flea infestation and he reaches in and snatches the swan by Betty’s feet.

“You ass!” she says, as he unfolds the foil, exposing tender bits of rare steak, lobster, a dinner roll. He kneels, gravel jabbing his knees, and sets the bait down. The dog stops and faces Jeff, tongue lolling, but she won’t cross.

When the road is clear Jeff says: “Here!” and hurls a bit of meat at her. The dog hears where it hits and sniffs in frantic circles until she finds it and gobbles it down. She looks over, licking her chops.

He tosses another hunk of meat which she gulps without chewing and looks at him expectantly. “Oh no,” Jeff says. “You have to come get it.” He steps away from the foil to give her a wide berth. She eyes the food and takes a step toward it, but stops.

“It’s all right,” Jeff says. “Come on.”

She takes another step into the road but an RV zooms dangerously close, ruffling her fur, coating Jeff in a gritty spray.

“Jeff, get in the car!” Betty yells.

Jeff doesn’t listen. He squats down by the car’s rear tire to appear less imposing, marveling at the dog’s street smarts as she watches and waits for cars to pass, then darts across the road and pounces on the food. As she snarfs it down, Jeff sees her sagging teats. “She’s just had pups!” he says.

“Then leave her be!” Betty says. “She’s probably heading back to them right now.”

“No. She’s lost,” he says with such certainty he almost believes it. “She’ll get hit if we don’t help her.”

“She’s fine!” Betty says. “Get in this car!”

Jeff takes one step toward the dog, then another, another. He knows that if he can just wrap his arms tightly around her he can drag her into the car where it’s safe. The dog frantically licks the foil, desperate for every grease dripping, every bread crumb. She’s too engrossed, Jeff thinks, to notice, to care that he’s almost upon her, arms wide, ready to encircle, but the second he reaches forward
she jerks her head around and bites his opened hand.

“Son of a bitch!” he yowls, yanking his hand back while the dog snatches the foil and runs into the field.

“What!” Betty calls. “What happened?”

“She bit me,” Jeff says, shaking his hand as if that’ll dispel the pain.

Betty slides over the bench seat and gets out. “Let me see.”

“It’s all right,” he says, pressing the skin to see if blood beads form.

“Did it break the skin?”

“No,” Jeff says, pulling out his shirt tail to blot up dog slobber, resisting the urge to check the glove box for a Sani-Wipe.

“Well thank heavens for that.”

“I’ve got to get her,” he says, looking out across the field where the dog has stopped to work on the foil.

“She’ll bite you again. She may have rabies.”

“She doesn’t have rabies,” Jeff says, heading into scrub brush that tugs at his pants.

“How do you know?” Betty calls. She steps toward him but her high heels wobble and tip in the dirt. “Get back here!” she screams.

Jeff pushes his legs through patches of knee-high bramble, keeping sight of the dog who keeps one eye on him.

“It’s okay!” he calls to her, offering comfort and assurance as he fiercely tries to save her life. But as soon as he’s within twenty feet she abandons the foil and bolts deeper into the field, zigzagging under power lines, the hum so loud Jeff feels his bones vibrating. He starts chasing her, leaping over mesquite and sage, ducking under electrical towers. He hears a car horn screaming and looks back at Betty, leaning in the car, frantically pounding the horn. “I swear to God I’ll leave you here if you don’t come back right now!”

When he turns back around he can’t find the dog. He stops and squints to his right, his left, looking for movement, for rustling weeds, but there’s nothing. If he could just see over the brush—and
before the thought registers he heads for the next electrical tower which looks so much like a mini oil derrick except for three pairs of outstretched metallic arms on top gripping the thick wires. He grabs the framework and hauls himself up though it’s difficult climbing since much of the grid work is welded in at angles, his boots sliding down. He hoists himself higher and higher, muscles straining, sweat already dripping, the buzz growing louder in his ears, his brain, and the frantic honk-honk-honk as his wife pounds the horn, her muffled shouts.

Halfway up he pauses on a level bar and looks over the field, mostly in shadows, and surveys the land around him. Nothing. A slight breeze chills the damp streaks on his face and he cranes his head southeast to look at Texas City, lights clearly visible along the horizon. He wonders if some man stands in steel-toed boots on a venting column or cat cracker right now, looking in his direction, wondering about him, too. He looks back at the car, at Betty waving her arms. And though he knows she is angry, he also hopes she remembers and is impressed by his mettle, by the lengths he’d go through to save a poor stray though he doubts he’ll ever find the dog now. But Betty doesn’t know that, and the thought sends him higher, toward those metallic arms opened wide to receive him.

As he climbs, he feels Betty’s eyes on him and he knows this is the moment he so desperately needs. He reaches the next level cross beam and plants his boots firmly on it, though it cuts into his soles. When he feels stable, steady, he begins to release his hand grip. He will show Betty something about courage. He releases his fingers and pulls his hands slowly, slowly away from the bar, his feet teetering slightly for balance as he raises his arms high above his head to show her, to remind her, so that when he comes down she will run to him, wrap her arms tightly around him, gloriously impressed and relieved.

The air horn blast startles him and his feet tip back and forth,
arms flail just a bit before Jeff grabs hold of the bar and squeezes tight. He inhales twice before looking down at Betty, talking to a burly trucker who has pulled his rig behind the Monte Carlo. She points up at Jeff and wipes at something under her eyes. The trucker heads into the field and Betty crosses her arms over her chest and looks at him. Even from this distance Jeff can read her weary face, a face grown tired from night after night of sitting on the edge of Stephanie’s bed—as he has seen her do so many times—to explain that it’s all right to sit in the grass, that worms are
good
, that the boogie man will
not
get in the back door if we don’t check it five times; that her teeth won’t fall out if she doesn’t use a new toothbrush every week even if that’s what Daddy says.

Jeff looks at his hands gripping the steel, how dirty they must be, covered in industrial fallout and diesel spray. He has an overwhelming urge to climb down and scrub his hands with the Lifebuoy soap he keeps stockpiled, and that special soft-wire brush for under his nails, the bristles now flattened by his rough usage. Just last week he watched Stephanie drag her plastic step stool to the sink, pull down the Lifebuoy and hold it under a stream of cool water just as she watched her father do a hundred, a thousand times. She grabbed the brush and tried to drag it across her nails, clumsily mimicking her father’s bold strokes, his counting: one-humma-humma, two-humma-humma, three-humma-humma. He thought it was cute until she screamed and jumped off her stool, tender fingertips slightly bleeding, but bleeding nonetheless.

He squeezes his eyes shut when the full realization hits him, of what he has done, is doing, to his daughter. For a moment he can see into a future where she’s too embarrassed to have sleepovers because her dad will label the guest’s drinking glass or pillowcase. Or worse, she won’t invite them at all for fear that they will contaminate her room. It’s a future where she is afraid of public restrooms and restaurant
silverware and trying on clothes at department stores because you don’t know who tried them on last.

When he opens his eyes he peers into the night sky at blinking stars. The disk of the moon. A jet plane soars overhead and he pictures the cabin filled with sleepy passengers flipping through flight magazines or watching second-rate films, their thoughts back on earth with the families they are leaving behind, or speeding toward—families that long for the missing member’s return.

Jeff looks back at the ground, at Betty, who no longer looks at him. He follows her gaze which zooms past coastal plains, swampland, and finally into the foothills of the Alleghenies, back to West Virginia, White Sulphur Springs, to Bo, a man who will likely have no problem letting Stephanie make mud pies, or drink out of water fountains, or go to public pools.

A fist clenches in Jeff’s chest and he knows that Betty is right to move on, to move away, with their daughter.

Still squinting into the northeastern sky, Jeff conjures a vision of the Greenbrier Resort: crisp white facade, sturdy rows of columns, circular gardens of red and white tulips. But underneath. Underneath. And for a moment the fist in his chest releases at the thought of his daughter tucked deep inside that secret bunker with the thick metal door that will protect her, will keep her safe, now that he can’t.

“Come on down, buddy,” a voice calls. Jeff looks below at the trucker standing at the base of the tower, one foot propped on a beam, ready to ascend. He would do it, Jeff thinks. Come and fetch some poor lunatic for the frantic damsel on the side of the road.

“I’m coming,” Jeff answers, but before taking a step he tugs that Ziploc from his jacket and palpates the goods inside. Not much to show for the last ten years of his life—except for Stephanie, of course. He takes out her picture and runs his thumb over it in the moon’s glow before sliding it in his back pocket. The Ziploc, though, he
wedges securely in the crook where two metal bars meet. Only then does he descend, slowly, one careful foot after another, but his mind already races into the future, fastening on the image of a maintenance worker coming to inspect the tower, maybe in a month, a year, two years. Jeff imagines the look on the lineman’s face when he finds the bag. He will wonder about the trilobite, the bolo tie, the New Spain Jola. Maybe he will discover the coin’s value. Or maybe it’ll sit in the back of his junk drawer for the next fifty years. But mostly, Jeff thinks, he will wonder about the kind of man who would leave such treasure behind.

The jet shoots like a missile through the westward sky. Natalie bends toward the sun outside the portal, the cadmium ball searing negative images of itself onto her eyelids when she closes them. But she can’t keep them shut for long with that frigid itch in her veins. Leaving her convalescing mother in James’s hands. She doesn’t know who to feel sorrier for. Well James, of course, with her mother’s incessant ramblings.

Natalie shuffles her feet, nudging the leather satchel in the footwell stuffed with scraps of her new novel, the one she has been chiseling at for over twenty years. She lugs it with her everywhere—doctors’ appointments, the vets—like a bagful of sins. She pulls a book from her purse about the bonobo chimps, research for the novel—changing metaphors yet again—captivated by photos of verdant central African jungles. Ironic, Natalie thinks, given her destination: the Sonoran Desert.

The trip is a gift from Natalie’s truest friend, Beth, a former college classmate.
Two workshops and a few meetings with awe-struck students
, Beth cajoled.
And we’ll write you an outrageous check
.

Natalie had nearly turned Beth down.
I don’t know
, she mewled
into the phone.
This is getting ridiculous. How can I call myself a writer if I don’t even write?

Quit being so fucking precious
, Beth stabbed.
Get your ass on the plane. When you get here we’ll shoot tequila and run naked through the desert
.

Natalie envisioned the desert: skittering lizards, parched heat, miles and miles of sand. A few arid days to thaw out her bones after being snowed in for the winter in the Eastern Panhandle, the last few grueling weeks of it with her broken-hipped mother. The double lure was time away from James. Away from the same old tension they’d been writhing in for years: Natalie’s discontent that she couldn’t articulate because words failed her there, too. “Is it me?” James would prod.
No
. “Is it another man?”
No
. “Are you worried about Nathan?” their son in Iraq.
Of course, but it’s more than that
. “Then what the hell is it?”
I don’t know
.

As added incentive, at that very moment Natalie’s mother crowed from the guestroom down the hall:
Natalie! Get the bedpan. Quick!

Yes
, Natalie told Beth.
God yes, I’ll come
.

Circling overhead, Arizona is both greener and beiger than Natalie expected, a Cezanne quilt flapped across the desert floor and up over the Tucson Mountains. Not like the footage of barren sand she views nightly on CNN. No desert life there, at least not that she can spy from so very far away. She wonders what Nathan is doing this very minute. What time it is for him since he is eight hours ahead of West Virginia. Ten hours ahead of Tucson.
Sleeping
, she thinks, she hopes, and suddenly she can feel the newborn weight of him in her arms, the way she rocked and cooed and never wanted to lay him down. Ever.

The baggage carousel labors under its shifting, man-handled load. Natalie skims the mostly-black suitcases and spots her yellow
one—a toucan in the rain forest. She hoists it down and starts toward Ground Transportation when she hears the familiar thwap-thwap of flip-flops against tile. It’s Beth, accompanied by her annoying scuffing habit, sporting a new spiked, bleached hairdo. Natalie is always dismayed by the change in this once-meek girl who barely raised her hand in class and tried to fold herself inside a three-foot curtain of auburn hair. It’s a stunning role reversal since Beth pursued the Ph.D., Natalie’s long-ago plan that would support her writing habit, a path she ultimately didn’t need or take, a nagging insecurity about her literary credentials regardless of her laurels. And with each year that she does not finish her
long-awaited second book
she finds herself lunging for her own imaginary hair curtain to hide behind.