The Monsters of Templeton (20 page)

"Go," I said.

He went, his footsteps quick and loud down the driveway. Somewhere in me, I hoped I would never have to see Felcher again. I didn't look up when he stood and fled, and I shut the door hard with my foot. But also, somewhere very close to my skin, I hoped he would come back. I sat in the dark for quite some time, waiting for that small knock on the door that didn't, in the end, come.

WHEN I CAME back to myself, I realized I was holding my navel in two hands. "Oh my God," I said to the Lump. "I forgot about you. I am so sorry."

I needed water: I needed fat. And after I had fried up two eggs and drunk a half a gallon of water, I saw my mother's note again and needed Clarissa. I dialed, and as the phone rang on the other end, I felt tears of self-pity, the stupid story about Felcher rise up like so many bubbles to my eyes and mouth.

But Sully was the one who answered, voice curt in the night. "Hey, Sully-Sully," I said. "Clarissa up?"

And though I counted Sully as one of my closest friends, one who came over to play our Thursday Scrabble game even when Clarissa was off on assignment, he gave a little hiss. He said, "Oh, fuck off, Willie. It's goddamn eleven at night. Try to think of someone other than yourself for once," and he hung up.

I stared at the receiver, shaking, and slowly put it back. Almost immediately, it rang again. I picked it up, but it was Clarissa, and it took me a few beats to understand what she was saying. Her voice was grim. "...don't pay any attention to him," she was saying. "He's under a lot of stress. I'm not feeling so good, Willie, so I can't talk too much, but I didn't want you to be upset."

"Whatever," I said. "He's an ass."

Clarissa's voice changed now and she said lightly, as if she were smiling, "You drunk, Willie? You drunk-dialing me?" In the background, I could hear a new burst of Sully's cursing.

"Well," I said. "I'm sorry. I guess I'm a shitty friend."

"No," she said. "But untimely. I was asleep. We'll talk tomorrow, okay?"

"Okay, yes," I said. "You sick again, Clarissa?"

"We'll talk tomorrow, honey. Drink some water and go to bed."

"Love you," I said.

"Sleep tight," she said, and was gone.

I HAD ALREADY changed into my pajamas, had brushed my teeth and washed my face when the phone in my bedroom rang once more. I felt sober, old, and went to pick it up. "Hello?" I said, tentative.

"Willie," hissed Sully. "Here's the deal. Old friend nephritis is back. Clarissa is so sick. I know that things are all messed up in your life, but, Willie, where are you? You're her best friend, but instead of being here, taking care of her, you're interrupting the only deep sleep she's been able to get in about a week with a stupid drunken phone call, and you've been gone all summer, and you're freaking her out, and the last thing Clarissa needs right now is to be freaked out. She has enough on her plate already. I know you're having some kind of existential crisis and everything, and you've just pretty much collapsed into a big puddle, and I'm really, really sorry to hear that, Willie, I really am, but, God, could you be any more selfish? And remember at the hospital you said you'd help me. You did say that. And here we are, and you're not."

"Oh, God, Sully," I said. "Where are you?"

He paused and then said, "On the balcony. Clarissa's asleep again. I made her take a few more pills. This is so insane, Willie. Who ever heard of a thirty-year-old woman dying of lupus? I'm not even clear on what the hell lupus is, anyway. Why the hell did it decide Clarissa was a good candidate? This is so freaking confusing."

"I know," I said. I imagined Sully in the cold San Francisco summer night, the Coit Tower bright and phallic beside him, his thinning hair whipping in the wind. "Sullivan, I promise you I am so, so sorry about running away from this." Then I heard again what he had said, and said, "Wait. Who said anything about dying? She's not dying, is she?"

"Well," he said, "that's what happens when the infection spreads into the organs."

"Oh, shit," I breathed.

"Yes," he said. "Luckily nothing irreversible has happened yet, but if she keeps refusing her therapy, it will. She's been going to this Chinese quack woman who's giving her herbs. Listen, when you talk tomorrow, can you please, please talk some reason into the girl? She won't listen to me. There's nothing I can do. There's nothing I can do." Sully's breath was coming out in short jags, and I wondered if he was crying.

It was only then that I thought of Sully's last months, waking up to Clarissa's sickness, working fifteen hours a day at a firm he hated, coming home on the bus at dark, knowing that Clarissa was still there, still sick, needing his patience. Needing him to make what food she could eat, to deal with her, querulous and pouty from forced rest, when she had never been querulous or pouty in their entire lives together. I had one bright image of him in the elevator to their apartment, eyes closed, hair askew, rain slicking his sparse hair to the skull. His one brief moment of peace. Then he had to step into the hall, pause before the apartment, open the door, when all he really wanted was a glass of wine and a little bit of kindness for himself.

"Should I take a plane?" I said.

"What?" he said.

"I'll drive to Albany right now. I'll take the first plane I can find. I'll be there tomorrow morning."

Sully paused, and I heard his breath in the receiver. He cleared his throat. "You know," he said. "I don't need you tomorrow, just really soon. Willie, it'd mean so much to me if you could call Clarissa in the morning and see what she says. I mean, I'm just relieved that you're willing to come. Thank you." He thought some more and said, "Tell you what. If you work on her and convince her to go to her real doctors, do her psychotherapy and antibody therapy as well as whatever homeopathic shit she wants to do, I can hold out a while longer. But can you please, please, please come back whenever I need you? And, if you can, try to call every day. You have no idea how lonely it is. You'd think from the way her friends are acting that lupus is contagious. The people from the paper? Gone. Once in a while, someone stops by with flowers, but they're always lilies, and Clarissa says lilies are for corpses, and throws them out the window. She'd never tell you because she knows you're having your own problems, Willie. But I think Clarissa's really sad."

I listened for a moment to the wind in the receiver, the nighttime life of San Francisco, the constant traffic, the distant sirens, the low rumble of a plane overhead. I began to feel again the way I felt just before I left for Alaska; that every step I took was one breath more than that fragile, fault-ridden city could handle. Those months, I had to close my eyes sometimes, fight the rising panicked urge to get out fast, or see that whole beautiful city just crumble under the knuckle of some great and angry god. Sully made a noise, and I remembered he was there.

"Oh, Sully," I said, "this is so incredibly hard for you, isn't it."

There was another long pause, and I listened as Sully's breathing slowed. "I needed that," he said, at long last. "Just to feel, I don't know. Understood."

"We'll whup this lupus thing," I said. "Just watch."

He laughed and said, "I needed that, too. A little bit of feist in my life. Good to have you on board again, Willie."

"Good to be back, Sully," I said. "I'll call Clarissa tomorrow." And then the phone clicked. The ghost, which had been pulsing in the corner of my sight, listening to my conversation, faded until it was nothing, and from my window I watched the soapy blue-black fog skulk over the lake and up the lawn.

Chapter
13

The Running Buds (Big Tom, Little Thom, Johann, Sol, Doug, Frankie) Speak Again

WE HAVE RUN though the dark orange days of July, run through the summer mornings soft as mouse fur, through the drizzle, through the baking heat, through the scent of wakening gardenia, under the wisteria draped on the covered bridge. By now we have run ourselves plumb into August, though this year has been hard on us. After the monster, the summer splintered apart. When we are together, we hold ourselves together, our old feet tapping on the Templeton pavement, our old hearts pounding in time. This is called solace, our morning run. When we have finished our coffee at the Cartwright Cafe, we drive away from one another, drive our old bones home to the messes we have made of our lives.

Big Tom's meth-head kid is gone, run off. Two years ago, she was the hard-nosed captain of the debate team with purple-framed glasses and a dimpled smile. We do not know where she went, though we have looked, contacted the papers, searched all of upstate New York. Together, we made up the flyers, that black-and-white picture, the girl changed, we are sure, from that dear goofy girl in replicate from Tom's office photocopier.

Little Thom's heart has been acting up again, and he had to take a moment when he was leading grand rounds in the hospital to step into a supply closet and press down. He was pale and shaking when he came out. We tell him he should not run, but he looks at us. I'd rather die running, he says, and we let him run because we would rather die running, too.

Johann's daughter's not talking to him because of something he did when he was drunk after the Clarke girl's wedding. Johann called his daughter in Memphis and said, in his slurred German accent, Honey, just so you know you didn't ruin my life by being a dyke. I dought you did, but you vill grow out of it, and get married and seddle down and haff kids. Just so you know, I luff you anyvays.

Yikes! we said when we heard this on our morning run the next day, and he looked at us mournfully, hungover, wincing.

It's dat bad? he said. He didn't know, honestly.

Oh, Johann. It's that bad, we said.

Sol's third wife, the spinning instructor at the gym, has delivered the divorce papers to him via her new boyfriend's sleek Harley. The kicker? Failure to provide children in the marriage: three marriages, three aging wombs, each time this the reason to find someone new. Alone of all of us, Sol has no children. He is silent when we talk of ours, all in college and beyond, sad-faced even when Big Tom talks of his meth-head girl. We see him blinking behind his sunglasses, we feel the weight of his silence. We sense he would take even Big Tom's druggie at this point, he would take trouble, he would take a kid who hated him, like Johann's girl. He would take anything, we believe.

Doug's possibly facing prison time for nonpayment of overdue taxes. Sol has offered to help him out (the only time we ever really realize he's so rich), but Doug scoffs: he'll fight them to the end, he says. Whose end? we want to say, but don't. He has a new girlfriend that his wife maybe knows about, an eighteen-year-old hostess at the wax museum who is paid to draw men inside the cool waxy place with her killer boobs and smile, to bring them inside that mausoleum where Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth begin to melt when the generator goes out. We are troubled more than he is by both jail and jailbait. He doesn't think he will go to jail. He doesn't think his wife knows about the girl. We feel certain about both, and shiver.

And, to top it off, Frankie has lost twenty pounds after his parents' death, and his skin hangs loose and yellowing on him. He swings through manic to depressed five times a day. Yesterday, he told a joke so long and incoherent Johann had to interrupt with his own joke to save Frankie some face. After that, we ran silently back and didn't linger over our coffee at the Cartwright Cafe as we usually do.

Templeton has become sad, we think. Templeton feels dark this summer. We have not had time to relax at the country club. We have not had time to play much golf. Crazy Piddle Smalley began foaming at the mouth and touched himself in front of a young girl, and his parents were forced to lock him in his room until his new meds kicked in. Secretly, in our deepest of our deep hearts, we think it is the monster's fault. As soon as it died, our lives spiraled down.

Even still, we run. We have not reached our average of 57.92 years without knowing that you run through it, and it hurts and you run through it some more, and if it hurts worse, you run through it even more, and when you finish, you will have broken through. In the end, when you are done, and stretching, and your heartbeat slows, and your sweat dries, if you've run through the hard part, you will remember no pain.

Chapter
14

Davey Shipman (aka Leatherstocking, Natty Bumppo, Hawkeye, etc.)

I WOKE OLD on the morning of the pigeons. Joints hot, brain aching. Looked out over the gutted land, the charred stumps, the lake brown with mud. Long ago I felt it were my own kin, but it hadn't been kin for a while. I should have left long before, pressed into the truer wilderness in the West, for I hated the settlers and their wasty ways. For their part, the settlers were confounded by me, a white hunter living like an Indian, past his prime, though still fearsome. Once, boys threw rocks from afar, calling me Ol' Stink-stockings, and though I could have picked them off with my rifle in a second, easy as crows on a branch, I only growled at them. They lit away quick enough, never did do it again. As for me, I hung on to the land like a snapper whose severed head still bites, naught else to do with its waning life.

Boiling coffee, I turned to Sagamore in his red blanket, and was not surprised to see he looked as I felt, weary to the marrow. He groaned as he stood, then looked shamed about it. I knew what he felt, though, pretended not to hear. Mornings like those, I could hardly remember we were young once, that I was just eleven when his family took me in after I run off from my own. My father was an Anglican preacher, godly during the day and a devil at night, whipped me until I preferred the dark woods and whatever would eat me there. Half-starved, I stumbled one day into a Delaware camp and found a better family. Sagamore my blood brother, taking me hunting and fishing, teaching me such joy. But by the time Duke came to the lake, the Delaware were mostly dead, and last I heard of my father, he was rich, owned a gin mill, brought a preacher over to his church all the way from England. That's how it went, the gentle ones died quiet while the mean ones thrived. Sickened me unto death all my life.