The Slide: A Novel (10 page)

“It doesn’t work anymore. Dad knows a guy that gets fridges real cheap. The cooler should go over there. Then you’re supposed to bring three bottles for free.”

I set the cooler down in the corner and uncoiled the power cord. I crouched and looked for an outlet. There was grime amassed in the joint where the wall met the floor, dirt thoroughly integrated into the structure itself. The kid stood in the middle of the kitchen, wide-eyed and quiet.

I told him the cooler would work without power, but if he wanted the water cold, it would have to be plugged in. His hair was blondish and eye-length, typical boy. He squinted and pinched tight the left half of his mouth while slowly lifting his weight onto his toes, lowering, then lifting again.

“Hey. Dad’s got an orange extension cord in the shed.”

I stood and wiped hands on my shorts. I thought of my father’s old workbench in the garage, the two towers of miniature drawers standing side by side, finger-sliding drawers full with variously sized instruments of boyhood wonder. The kid looked at me.

“That cord sounds like just the thing,” I said.

As he disappeared through a back door, I turned to make my way back to the van for bottles. In the living room I stopped to watch a cartoon with a frenzy of flashing lights and flying dinosaurs zooming madly across the screen, clashing with bright stars of impact, pure magnetic chaos. Enthralling. The dinosaurs wore earpieces and spoke into wrist communicators. One of them had an English accent, one was brown and clearly voiced by a black man, and they kept repeating each other’s names so we all knew what to yell when our parents took us shopping.

I turned to find a silhouette of a figure filling the front door. At first I was so absorbed into the realm of cartoon I had a hard time believing the figure was real. Then he stepped work boots into the living room, great heavy booming tired steps.

“Hell is this.”

“Pine Ridge Water. Mr. Worpley? I’ve got you guys signed up for the Summer Special.”

I held out a hand he did not take. Instead, he exhaled deeply and shook his head.

“You got the wrong place, kid.”

“It’s free, Dad.” The boy had reappeared behind me, holding a bundled extension cord. “That’s what’s special about it.”

The father moved into his home. He flicked his bright orange cap onto the sofa and passed me without a look. The reek of sustained toil, a more permanent and pungent version of the smell I showered away each evening.

“Calling something free don’t mean a single solitary thing. Ask this guy here in green,” he said. “Ask him if it’s really free. Ask him what kind of fools go around handing out free water. Go on. I’m sure he’ll explain everything.”

I remained frozen. And when the kid didn’t answer or even look at me, the father stepped into the kitchen. After a moment, the kid turned and followed. I did not.

“But remember how Mom made me drink a glass every night before bed? Even if I thought it made me get up and have to pee, she would go like,
here,
and push it into my face.”

“That’s right. And now you sleep all night and take your pee in the morning. Instead of waking me up in the middle of the night.”

I found myself closer to the front door. The young boy stood with cord in hand, staring at either the floor or the clothing on the floor. I heard the father in the kitchen and once again wiped my brow with a shirtsleeve.

“But they got an ad in the paper says free. They got a Summer Special.”

I was standing at the door, one hand on the screen.

“Someone says free, Ian, don’t you believe it. Got that? No such thing.” The kid went silent. The father appeared in the doorway and pointed at me. “I think it’s time you removed yourself from my house.”

Then I was outside, motion, scrambling into the driver’s seat. I felt the van struggle to life and pulled away. I opened a sixteen-ounce sport-top bottle and drained it in one long sip. It wasn’t until I was back on the highway that I thought of the cooler sitting unplugged in that kitchen, humming in the corner, waiting patiently for a bottle.

june

six

t
here was no reward, as such, for hard work. One afternoon I finished my deliveries in what must have been some sort of land speed record, because Debbie Dinkles was shocked to find me in the lunchroom. She immediately found five more invoices and sent me back into the sweltering afternoon. I learned that day to place a ceiling on my productivity, and from then on when I finished my deliveries early, I did what came naturally—drove to the pool house.

I parked the van in the Hurst cul de sac and followed the walkway into the backyard. Stuart sat on the pool’s deck with one foot pulled up against the other leg’s thigh. A girl lay facedown on a lounger near the diving board, the strings of her bikini top untied and hanging on either side. Leaves, everywhere, did
not
rustle in summer’s complete stillness.

“If you figure a way to run cars on sweat, my undercarriage alone would bring in a small fortune.”

“Nice, Poot.”

I went inside for a beer, then sat at the deck table and watched my friend stretch. He switched legs and leaned.

“I realized that in order for me to get the most out of my mentation, which is after all my whole purpose for waking up every day, I should maximize harmony between my mind and body.”

“I rely on you to not be fruity,” I said.

“Read your Putnam,” he said. “The mind is nothing without the body. Read your Searle.”

“Different mind–body issue,” I said.

“Questions for you. One. Would you, if times and ennui were to get bad enough, would you further consider the option of attending law school?”

“Law school is the escape hatch,” I said. “The rip cord. I will absolutely not go to law school.”

“Good. Considering, next, all of the options you have in the morning, how do you decide which shoes to wear for the day?”

“It’s interesting. I find myself caring more about shoes than any other item of clothing. But why? They’re so far away from my head, everything about them is base. My shoes are either white, black, or brown. I keep my options limited to minimize the stress of decision.”

Stuart stood and waved his arms in circles. His interest in limbering up made me suddenly aware of my own inflexibility, compounded by repeated heavy and awkward lifting.

“Three. When you think of the transition from day to night, do you see the day giving way to night as if exhausted? As if the sun’s main job, to provide light for this world, at some point becomes a responsibility too burdensome for the day to bear? And so each evening the sun and its daytime grant themselves respite and yield to night?”

“I do, actually.” This was in fact remarkably accurate.

“And Audrey, is her perception of night, unlike yours, one in which night penetrates day like ink drops in water, a gentle but thorough dissolution of darkness spreading itself across the day? Wherein night is the aggressor, the force to overtake and erase the day?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course not,” he said. “This has been helpful. I am going to stretch my hamstrings now. If you think of anything to add, please speak directly into my asshole.”

I stood and began a walk around the pool. I slowed as I neared the girl. Her hair was brown and straight, pulled to one side of her neck. The undersides of her feet were white with prune and pool-deck dust. She was that nice middle weight, slim but still curved, the sort of body they were beginning to show more frequently on television so we’d all think how refreshing it is to see someone
normal
for once. Stuart sat at the deck table, sprinkling bits of Relaxation onto two overlapping papers.

“Who’s the young lady?”

“Late last night I went shopping for cake mix and found her wandering the aisles in bare feet with the most pleasantly detached look in her eyes. I felt a profound obligation toward meeting her. I said good evening, how are you tonight. She said nothing. I didn’t take it personally. Then, when I’m outside getting into my car, she climbs in the passenger door and fastens her seat belt. Hi there. Her name is Marianne and she’s from Cuba, Missouri.” He ran his tongue lightly across the joint and set it on the table. “She left town three months ago to come to the big city. I get the feeling she’s come to find a man. She admitted up front that her mother never taught her to cook. Couldn’t make an omelet if you put a gun to her head. But baking, she says, baking is her domain.”

“I’d love a piece of that cake if there’s any left.”

“The cake didn’t come together. We were up all night talking. It was frankly astounding how easy it all was. We spoke like this was our fourth lifetime together. Do you know Cuba? About an hour southwest of here, down 44 toward Rolla. Parents are literal farmers of the American heartland. I dozed off around eight, then woke at noon to find her lying out here. I told her that stepmother Deanna might get jealous and handed her a swimsuit. I think she’s planning on staying and I don’t think I mind. She has a farmish ease about her that rubs off on the whole poolside. Don’t you feel calm? I for one feel calm.”

I thought of our OA circle that first night, our group of children on the cusp of institution. I had a feeling then, even before school did something to me, a feeling of our cute little circle as gateway, a momentary figuration of bodies that pointed outward (upward?) to bigger circles, a series of expanding circles that began precisely then and would terminate eight semesters later. An experience to be bookended, a single happening that would also be a thousand. Nameless figure, female and with shoulders at my ten o’clock, to whom I would soon hand over everything. And then gradually thieve back.

Stuart held the joint between his lips and patted his shorts for a lighter. I watched the topless girl rise from the lounger, breasts exposed and bouncing a little with each step toward the table. Various articles over the years had named the Schnucks supermarket on Clayton Road a
Top 5 Local Spot to Meet Singles
. The girl pulled out a chair and nodded at me as if from beneath a Stetson. When he passed the joint, the girl received it in her open palm, so quaintly wrong a gesture I immediately liked her. She took a shallow pull and closed her eyes. The sacred red and white Budweiser cans sweat condensation. I allowed myself quick glances at her breasts. In a vacuum, such indulgences of the body seemed vain and flauntingly arrogant. But something about this girl’s demeanor, her generously plain face and peacefully closed eyes, made it okay. Stuart’s past relationships were brief codependencies with gorgeous but hideous New York daughters linked to inheritances in the range of his own. Here was a girl bred within the ethos of our middle land, reared among field and stream and earnestness. Others wore nudity like some costume, but not her. I looked at Stuart, then back to her, and had to give them credit for such brazen disregard for the regime of time.

But my watch said it was time to go back to the warehouse. I had to empty the empties from the van, break down cardboard boxes and fill out paperwork, return home to shower away the job’s evidence, and prepare for the night’s Cardinals game.

“I am too much in the sun. What about tonight? I hope you don’t mind driving.”

“I enjoy driving,” Stuart said to the topless brunette.

“To the game, I mean. A sea of red. Beer delivered from the brewery to the stadium through a system of subterranean pipes.”

“That’s right, yes, game tonight.” Now some gear clicked and he turned to me, and there was his crook-toothed smile. “I’ve got to go pick something up and I’ll come get you. Oh Jesus are you going to love this.”

Walking backward with tired, swollen arms spread outward, I watched the two of them battle for the joint, the Missouri girl’s eyes focused on my friend.

There were caterers wearing tuxedos moving through the kitchen. I sat at the counter and thought of Freddy in the attic and his top-down vantage. Because I assumed Freddy had X-ray vision, and that sometimes he watched us with judgment in his eyes, sometimes shaking his head at the preposterous fancies of the living. My mother waded among the tuxedos, overseeing and occasionally salting a dish.

When my father came home the circus reached a new level of absurdity, the caterers suddenly torn between who to fear and respect. My mother still essentially running things, my father changed from work shirt and tie to entertaining shirt and tie. Then he returned to stand by the counter and speak to me, so ambivalent to the inconvenience this created for everyone scurrying around the kitchen that I felt immensely proud to be the man’s son.

“How’s your back doing?” he asked. “Sore? I’ll bet it is. You’d expect as much, a good and sore back to remind you of the day.”

My back ached enough that it was starting to affect the way I saw the world. And I was beginning to wonder if this nebulous
maturation
everyone spoke of, capital Growing capital Up, was really nothing more than the psyche’s lunge to catch up with a deteriorating body.

“Not too sore,” I said.

“I envy you. Getting out there into the day and building a little sweat. Have I ever told you about my first job?”

“I forget.”

“I shoveled horse crap for about fifty cents an hour.” He reached for a stuffed mushroom cap. “Basically been shoveling it ever since.”