Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (17 page)

“Really?” Wendy was startled.

“We're not as out of touch here as people think,” he said. “We're big-time.”

“There's still a lot of cocaine coming up here,” said Kim. “Bob, have you got any scissors? I'm going to whack that raveling off your shorts. It's driving me crazy.”

Kim snipped the threads off Bob's shorts, and when she pulled some of the hairs on his leg he joked that he couldn't afford her haircut prices. It would not have occurred to Wendy to cut off those threads. She plunged a chip into a bowl of salsa Bob had set on a stool next to his boom box, which was going full-blast.

“I thought moving back here would be like moving back in time,” Wendy said. She moved a wad of wet towels from a plastic chair.

“There's a lot of meanness around nowadays,” Kim said. “I don't mean just children murdering each other at school.”

“All that, and the law's still worried about potheads,” Jerry said. “The sheriff's office is full of pictures of marijuana plants he's pulled out of people's cornfields.”

“And probably took home to cure for himself!” said Kim.

Jerry and Kim were like a cross-talk act, jabbering at Wendy in a way that was hard for her to follow. Each seemed to be trying to outdo the other as they proceeded to report the details of their water-skiing adventures that afternoon. Wendy stepped over a pack of curl-tail plastic worms and Bob's crappie rig, a special pole with hooks spaced two feet apart. She could imagine fish lined up to feed on the pole like piglets at a sow. She followed Bob through the bright reflections on the sliding glass door, into the kitchen. He had told her he couldn't have survived the trauma of his divorce if it hadn't been for Jerry's friendship. Wendy couldn't imagine how that went.

The salad bowl contained screws and nails and flashlight batteries. Bob emptied it into a paper sack and began washing the bowl.

“Is it true? I mean about the cocaine?” Wendy asked.

“Who knows?” He rinsed the bowl and shook the water from it. “Remember the bananas? All the bananas used to come up here from New Orleans on the train and they'd get unloaded in Fulton, and then get shipped in all directions, all over the country. I think it's like that—a central location.”

“The heartland,” she suggested.

“Whatever that means.”

“Do they still have the banana festival every year?”

“Yeah. The world's biggest banana pudding gets bigger every year. But it's like everything else nowadays, just something that's supposed to remind you of how things used to be.”

She dried the bowl. “I wish I had some banana pudding like my grandmother used to make.”

“You've been away too long, Wendy.”

“I guess,” she said idly.

Bob backed her up against a broom in the corner between the refrigerator and the open hall door. He said with a grin, “Do you think it could be any easier with us than it is with most people?”

“I don't know,” she murmured. “It looks easy. But I'm afraid it's not.”

“I'm scared too,” he said abruptly.

Kim walked in on their embrace but didn't seem to notice. She disappeared into the bathroom. Wendy could see Jerry out on the patio fooling with a fishing rod, casting out across the grass and reeling in a large wad of plastic trash.

The day's heat had accumulated in a stuffy gauze over the sky, and the light was washing out. Wendy and Kim followed a trail through the marsh, where a green heron was poking about in the shallows. Lily pads—double-deckers the size of serving trays, with colossal blossoms—carpeted the edge of the water. A woodcock flew overhead. Shafts of dusty light blazed through the dim woods. Wendy peered ahead, trying to spot the nineteenth-century iron furnace she knew was beyond the marsh.

“Don't you miss it down in Florida?” asked Kim, slapping at a bug on her leg.

Wendy hesitated. “In a way. But I'd rather be here now. It seems different here now. Houses I used to dislike seem charming. But that's O.K. I'm the one that's changed, not the houses.”

“My dream house is going to have one of those Florida rooms,” Kim said. “But I may never get out of a double-wide.”

She brushed a spiderweb from her arm. She had on blue shorts and a white blouse she had pulled over her swimsuit. The top of her suit was dark through the blouse. Wendy imagined having a sunburn—warm, like passion, against her clothes. Last night her skin had felt like that, with Bob's hot body asleep next to her. For a dreamy moment now she thought about sex, looking forward to it again that night. She paused to pick up the gray dried center of one of last season's pond lilies. It was shaped like a showerhead.

“In the fall there's a blue zillion of those here,” said Kim. “But in a gift shop you'd pay two bucks for one.” She examined the ground. “Bob really likes you, Wendy,” she said suddenly.

“Do you think so?” Wendy dropped the dried lily. “I can't tell how he really feels about me.”

“He's hard to know, but if he decides to be your friend, then he's your friend for life. That's why his divorce was so hard on him. But she took him to the cleaners—she carried every stick of furniture with her to Minnesota.”

“He told me this morning he wants to learn to fly an airplane. Maybe he wants to fly to Minnesota.”

“I don't know. He's done a lot of neat stuff—challenge-type stuff. Did you know he used to work for a guy that called himself a swamp specialist? They'd put on waders and just march out into the swamp and collect snakes and weeds and things for the university.”

The fading light was eerie, and mosquitoes were materializing from the thick air. Wendy gazed out over the water—patched with debris and plants and dappled light. The place seemed inviting. She had a pleasant image in her mind of that swamp specialist—a man in love with the murky deeps, like Jacques Cousteau.

Bob was serious about learning to fly. He began taking lessons the following weekend and for the next several weeks buried himself in instruction manuals. Wendy came out to the lake each Saturday. She found it peculiar that a small event, at secondhand report, could spur an ambition like flying and that it could possibly make your life turn a corner. The desire to fly must come from a romantic temperament, she thought—a fundamental rebellion against gravity itself—but the
ability
to fly required a single-mindedness, and a calm, almost mundane focus. It was a contradiction explained only by arrogance, she decided. When she watched Bob aim his motorboat out of the shallows into the open water, she could easily imagine him flying. He was nervous when he wasn't using his body, as if his mind had lost its anchor.

At the airport one Saturday afternoon, she watched the Cessna come in for the landing, wobbling and jerking. She could see Bob beside the instructor, and he seemed to be concentrating hard. The plane touched down, scooted along briefly, then lifted off again like a cat being chased up a tree.

When the plane landed again, he jumped out and rushed toward her. “Did you see us doing touch-and-go's?” he cried, grabbing her by the shoulders.

“Yeah, like that plane I heard that time.”

“I'll be ready to solo by the end of the summer!” he said. “Then I'll fly you to the moon, or wherever you want to go.” He laughed as he shed his light jacket. “Paducah maybe?”

Wendy was drifting with the summer, suspended, but knowing that summers always end too soon, like delicious dreams. On a hot Saturday evening in August, Kim and Jerry came out again. Wendy had forgotten how shrill their voices were. She went into the kitchen from the patio to get a beer. Searching for something to pour it into, she found a slim, ridged glass she liked. She could see the others out on the patio, their loud laughter slapping the air. Jerry's voice climbed above the rest—“He'll go crying home to Mama if they repossess his car.” In the lowering light, the heat of Kim's dark tan was deepening, flushing her face. Bob, grilling steaks, was clad only in a barbecue mitt and a narrow red swimsuit that fit like an Ace bandage. He shed the mitt and headed toward the reflective-glass doors like a bird captivated by the illusion of sky.

He came inside then and pulled a wad of loose paper napkins from a drawer. They had been crammed between some appliance manuals and what looked like paired socks. He said, “Jerry wants us all to go down to Mud Island next weekend. You want to go? It might be fun.”

“But Kim said she was going to St. Louis to see her mother.” Wendy turned away from Bob, not wanting to admit how the thought of a trip with Jerry and Kim gave her the heebie-jeebies, but she knew he caught her tone.

Bob's hand on her shoulder twisted her around. “Do you want to go some other time? Just you and me?”

“If you really want me to.”

“I just now invited you, didn't I?” Holding her arm against the refrigerator, he talked straight into her eyes. “If I ask you to go to Mud Island with me, I mean go to Mud Island with me.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, embarrassed. “I just feel out of place.”

“Do you think you're too good for my friends?”

She looked away. “I just don't think Jerry treats Kim with much respect,” she said, although that wasn't all of it.

“There's more history there than you see,” said Bob. “You just don't know them.” He whipped the steak sauce from the counter, and she followed him out. He said, “Half the time I feel like I'm apologizing for the human race, and half the time I feel like there's been some mistake—why wasn't I born a catfish or a tree?” He laughed, but with little humor. “Nobody ever feels they belong, you know that?” He started spearing steaks. “And everybody has to feel they're superior to somebody. It stinks.”

Jerry and Kim stopped talking, whatever they were saying. “What's that all about?” they said to each other.

“Y'all get your butts in gear,” said Bob briskly. “Everybody grab a plate.”

It would be dark soon. The mosquitoes weren't bad. Bob had lighted some buckets of citronella. A rock station was playing Pearl Jam, the music disappearing under the talk-show gab of a million crickets. Something shifted in the evening as the light dimmed, as if they all felt safer now with one another, their awkward judgments and hesitations erased as their faces grew indistinct. Although Wendy still smarted, she was enjoying the languorous evening, the slow buildup of desire. The heat felt subtropical. Occasionally something unidentifiable pattered down from the leaves on the redbud tree.

As they were finishing the meal, a pair of headlights approached. A truck door slammed and Bob crossed the yard to speak to the driver. Wendy heard murmurs and the rise and fall of urgent talk. The truck roared off, and Bob hurried back.

“A little girl's lost,” he called. “We have to go look for her.”

Wendy grasped for details. Bob quickly explained that it was one of the Smith children who lived a few houses up the road. She had been playing in the backyard after supper. “Her mother thought the boy was watching her, and the boy thought his mother was watching her, so she slipped out of sight.”

“How long ago?” Jerry said.

“Not long. They reckon she wandered off in the woods. They didn't hear any cars come up.”

The tone of the evening shifted again. Wendy ran to the bathroom and grabbed some Kleenex and mosquito repellent. Sorrow descended in her like water whirling down a drain. Bob emerged from the house in jeans, with a flashlight and a T-shirt he pulled on as he walked.

“This is the kind of thing that makes me never want to have a kid,” Kim said angrily. She snapped open a fresh can of beer.

“We'll never find her in the dark,” Jerry said.

“Well, we have to try,” Bob said. “I know which one they're talking about—Marlie. She's a cute little girl. She's about four.”

On foot, they set out along the inlet. Kim and Jerry split off down the road that branched toward some houses and a small section of woods. Wendy and Bob headed toward the marina.

“Marlie!” Bob bellowed into the twilight.

They could see the wide-open point of land ahead, beyond the marina, with a few stark pine trees rimming the shore. A small road led up to some picnic tables. Bob was walking so fast Wendy had to take two steps for each one of his. They saw no sign of a child, no scrap of clothing or toy, no TV clichés. The point was deserted.

“This is impossible,” Bob said, kicking at a log.

“Listen.” Wendy cupped her ear. “No, it's nothing.” She called out the child's name.

They followed the road that joined the airstrip. They could see across the marsh to some lights on houseboats moored around the point.

“Man, what kids can do to you—it's a crime!” Bob said. “This is the hatefulest thing.”

“Maybe Kim's right,” said Wendy. “Perverts, guns, leukemia—think of the problems kids bring.”

“Ex-wives with a grudge. Add that to your list.”

“Someday you'll tell me more about that,” she said, reaching her arm around his waist as they walked.

He slowed his pace and waited a minute to speak. “Todd, my boy, ran away once, and it scared us to death. I panicked and ran all over the neighborhood, and up the railroad track. Come to find out, he had wandered down to a neighbor's. But they get out of your sight, and you're just helpless.”

“You must feel that way now, since he's literally out of your sight.”

“You know the last time I saw him? It's been a year and a half.”

“That's awful!”

“He was eight years old. He would be nearly ten now.”

“That's what you say when they're dead—he
would be.
”

“It's like he's dead in some way.”

“Why don't you go see him?”

Bob didn't answer right away. The night was quiet. The water lapping on the boats at the marina was still faintly audible. He said, “It wasn't any big fight or anything. She just up and left.”