Storm Tide (27 page)

As the sun rose and the wet surface of the parking lot shrank to a small dark puddle, I pressed myself on the Passionate Plumber who wore the zipper of his coveralls open to his navel and doused himself in Old Spice; to my ex–sixth-grade teacher, who proofread my literature; an electrician Holly dated in high school; the chief of police; a couple who tried to sell me a water filtration system; and a man who warned me away with open palms, his wrists and arms slathered pink. “Poison ivy! Poison ivy!” he said, slipping past me like a leper into a dark Calcutta alley.

As afraid as I had been, each person was more afraid of me. What
did I want from them? Time? Money? What if they snubbed me and I actually went on to win? “Hi, I’m David Greene. I’m running for selectman. Could I ask you for your vote?”

He was bald and stout and wore brown rubber waders up to his chest, which made me think of something half dipped in chocolate. “You want my vote?” He folded his arms. “Where do you stand on the dike?”

“Out of the wind, so I don’t fall in.”

“So you don’t fall in?” His face brightened like a newly polished coin. “I like that.” He slapped my shoulder. “So you don’t fall in.”

“Hi, I’m David Greene. I’m running for selectman.”

She was maybe twenty-five, long black hair, sweater tight across her breasts, with a four-year-old trailing behind. She took my card and asked, squinting into the sun, “You the guy who told Donkey Sparks about those guys getting drunk on the job?”

I said proudly, “That was me, yeah.”

“You son of a bitch.” She ripped my card in pieces and threw it at me. “My boyfriend could have lost his job.”

When Blossom End-Rot drove up to get her mail, her face turned the color of boiled meat. “Well. David Greene.” She choked on a smile. “I didn’t realize you were mounting such a campaign?”

“You never know what to expect from us pushy immigrant types.” I left her to approach another voter. “My name’s David Greene …”

She wanted desperately to see my literature but couldn’t bring herself to ask. As soon as she thought I was distracted, she ripped a card from the hand of someone she knew and studied it front and back. She lifted her eyes to the hip boot man, walking to the car with his mail. “Ask him where he stands on the dike!” he said, waving me a victory sign. “God knows we need somebody with a sense of humor in there.”

Could I win? I doubted it but it sure felt good to ruin Blossom’s day. Of all the cars that pulled up, however, the one I was waiting for did not: Judith’s black Jeep Cherokee. I didn’t want to
tell
her I was running. I’d already done that and backed out. I wanted her to see me in action. When I left the post office just after noon, I drove by her office. Closed. I headed for Mary’s Tea Room. Judith sat at a rear table reading, her back to the door.

“Hi, my name is David Greene. I’m running for selectman.” I handed her a card.

“Where have you been?” I didn’t know what I was seeing in her expression. Skepticism? Annoyance? Maybe just my own guilt.

“Incredibly busy. It’s the big season for landscapers.” I sat down. “How’s Gordon?”

She shrugged, not wanting to get into a discussion about cancer.

“Do you think he’d still be willing to help?”

“You’ll have to ask him.”

“Would you still be willing to help?”

“Do you really want this?” Her eyes grew darker, somehow more serious, and I wondered if we were talking about the same thing.

She was wearing a blue silk blouse with long French cuffs and a wide collar, through which I imagined the delicate lacework of her underclothes. “Yes, I do very much,” I said.

“I’m talking about
this
.” She fanned my card in front of my eyes.

“Do I actually want to be a selectman? I won’t know until I win. Do I want to make trouble for Johnny Lynch? Big time, I do. Don’t you think that’d be fun?”

The meeting took place the next afternoon at Judith and Gordon’s. Along with the
alter kockers
for lynching Johnny, they had rounded up twenty people. There was a table of sandwiches and drinks, and street lists with voters’ names. This was serious politics, Saltash style.

Gordon set the tone. “No offense to the candidate,” although he looked at me as if I was a sorry excuse for one, “but I want to make it clear we’re here for one reason. To put the last nail in Johnny Lynch’s coffin.”

The drinking started just after dark. The tide was low, the beer was cold, and no one seemed in a rush to get home. I milled around the room attempting to ingratiate myself, until Judith motioned me into the kitchen.

She said quietly, “Say goodbye to everyone personally.” This struck me as a sensible idea. “Then leave through the side door.”

“Now?”

“Now.” Her hand grazed mine. “And meet me in my studio around back.”

She joined me half an hour later with a satisfied smile. She drew the curtains and stoked the stove, and just when I thought I knew what she was thinking, took a seat in a rocking chair facing me.

From the house we heard singing. “I missed you,” she said. “I’ve been busy. So have you.”

“I’m here now.”

“Yes, you are. Yes, you are.” She took my face in her hands and outlined my lips with her tongue. She was tentative. Do you still want me? her fingers seemed to ask. Temples and earlobes, biceps and belly. My body was a new land she was mapping. When we began, it was cool in
the cottage, the little stove working against the evening chill. We dove beneath the covers and clung together, shivering until our bodies warmed to the boiling point and we came up to cool off and breathe.

Judith took a deep breath. Outside, it began to rain and droplets fell from the eaves, drub, drub, drub, to the wooden porch. An offshore buoy clanged in the early spring wind. She lay in my arms playing with my nipple. She sighed, “I missed you so much.”

When the phone rang, Judith sprang from the bed. Upon answering, she looked at the receiver incredulously. “It’s for you. It’s a child.”

The phone sat on her desk, plugged into a jack along with the modem, among law books and journals and briefs in towering piles. I crossed the room, naked, to answer it while Judith took my place under the covers. It was Laramie. “My mom said it was okay to call you.”

“It is, Laramie. Sure. What can I do for you?”

Judith mouthed, “Who is Laramie?”

“Um. She wondered if you could pick me up from school on Thursday because she has an—” From somewhere behind him I heard Crystal say, “an interview.” “—an interview about college.”

“Thursday I can’t, Laramie. I’m sorry.”

“David?” Judith said, but I looked away from her when I heard the boy say, “Oh,” like a small puncture in a lifeboat, and I felt him going under.

“But listen, man, we’ll get together soon.”

He sighed and I heard traces of a whispered discussion. “Uh, my mom says you should call her, okay?”

“Sure. That’ll be fine.”

“Thanks. ’Bye,” he said, and hung up.

Judith watched me return to bed. “Who’s Laramie?”

“He’s a little boy I know. My sister’s crazy about him.”

“He sounds very sad.”

“He doesn’t have any friends. A new kid in town. You know how it is.”

The bed was warm and the sheets smelled of perfume and sweat. I wanted the conversation over and done, but Judith was still curious. “You never mentioned him,” she said.

“I just met him pretty recently.”

“Pretty fast friendship. His parents approve?”

“Approve of what?”

“Don’t be naive. It’s not easy for adults to be friends with kids these days. You have to be careful. A lot of charges are thrown, a lot of things imagined. I think twice before I befriend a kid. Parents can be suspicious.”

“His parents are split up. His mother’s all for it. Okay?”

“That’s all I wanted to hear,” Judith said. She pushed her hair back and frowned at the far wall, looking past me. “Do you know her well?”

“What is this? Do you want to say what the hell it is you’re thinking?”

“All of a sudden there’s a child who calls you at my house, a little boy whose name you never mentioned. Naturally I’m surprised.”

“That’s because you don’t have children in your life, Judith. You’re not used to them.”

“Tell me I’m off here, David. But that sounds like an accusation.”

“It’s not an accusation. There are just things you can’t understand.”

“David, I don’t want to be mean, but I spent far more time raising Natasha than you did your own son. This sounds like you’re trying to create a surrogate son for yourself, all of a sudden.”

I had to remind myself where I was. In Judith’s shack, with a little fire in the stove casting shadows on the walls. In bed, naked, with a woman I was about to make love to. I could still taste the coffee on Judith’s mouth. How had this happened?

“Judith, let’s start over again. One. He’s a kid I feel sorry for. Two. His mother is cool about the whole thing. Three. I did not mean to imply that because you don’t have children you don’t know anything about … about how weird this world is around kids. I’m sorry. Please accept my apology.”

As I drew her against me, she turned. I loved the tight and delicate curve of her back, her small sickle-shaped breasts in the crook of my forearms, my sex thrust between her buttocks. But I could feel a taut coil of resistance inside her. I wasn’t surprised when she said to the wall, “Who is his mother, David?”

“Somebody I met.”

“Obviously.” Judith disentangled herself. When her back was flush against the wall behind the bed, when she had covered herself, she dropped her hands in her lap and stared at them. “She has a name.”

“Her name is Crystal.”

“And you sleep with Crystal.”

“Yes. Like you sleep with Gordon.” Even as it left my lips, the comparison felt crude. Gordon was a shell of a lover and had been before I met Judith.

“I understand your justification, David.” I had heard her use this tone with workmen who failed to live up to their contracts.

“I don’t have to justify myself. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s casual.”

“She called my house,” Judith said rising. “She knew you were here. Did you give her the number? It’s not listed.”

“Holly must have given her the number.”

“She’s a friend of your sister’s.” Judith nodded as if chipping away at the truth. Everything I said seemed to make it worse. “A single woman with a child. Of all the stupid people to pick.”

“What’s better, then? A married woman? A young student? A widow? Who? Do you want to set me parameters, Judith? Give me a list?”

Her face seemed to melt. Her lips trembled and when she finally spoke she sounded helpless. “Why did you do it?”

“Because I’ve never been involved in anything like what we’re doing.”

“We’re just loving each other, David.”

“Fifty yards away from where we’re sitting, your husband is entertaining friends. And you’re in bed with me. Is that any better or worse than a few lonely nights with some secretary who just moved to town? I love you as much as I ever did. I admit I made a mistake. We’ll come back from it.”

“I hope so, David. But if she thought the relationship was so casual, she wouldn’t have tracked you down and called here.”

“She didn’t call, her kid did.”

As she got out of bed, Judith said mockingly, “Right. As if we both believe that.”

“Aren’t we going to make love?”

“Do you have a condom?”

“What for? We haven’t used a condom since the first time.”

“Then get used to it, David. You’re screwing two women now. That changes things.”

D
AVID

    Some afternoons, between the time school let out and Crystal got off work, Laramie took the school bus to the nursery. It was Holly’s idea. She always had a job for him, watering seedlings, bagging wild bird food mix. He could work methodically for hours, seeming to absorb silence the way plants thrived in humidity. Watching him bag one-pound packages of thistle seed—not one-point-one pounds or point-ninety-nine—was like observing a chemist measure acid into a test tube. Holly paid him two dollars an hour. After work he and I drove around town putting up my election signs. Laramie held the wooden stakes in place as I pounded them into the ground.

I knew early on I hadn’t the experience or the organization or the base of support; that all I could really hope to do was to raise some questions, kick up a little dirt. But I was a trained competitor. Although speeches and land use policies were a far cry from lobbing baseballs, I couldn’t help playing to win. I’d ordered a hundred signs and put up eighty. Like a rancher in his pickup cruising his spread, I was up every morning before sunrise to check on my signs. Once, I’d dreamed of headlining the sports pages, but it was oddly satisfying to see the solitary squares proclaiming my name in block letters, black and white against the wet grass like Holstein cattle. One morning on my patrol, however, three of my signs were missing. Ten of Blossom End-Rot’s had sprung up overnight. I replaced the three. That afternoon, with Laramie’s help, I pounded in ten more. The following morning twenty more of hers appeared. Four of mine were down. Blossom had six nephews, but I was obsessed. At work that morning I called in an order for fifty more signs.