(2005) Wrapped in Rain (29 page)

For a moment, I froze, studying the lines around her eyes. "Katie, I'm sorry." I put my right hand over my eyes. "I thought you were ... I mean . . . " I squinted my eyes, covering with my left so I could point outside with the right. I knew how it looked, so I just shut up and waited for the scolding-both Katie's and the one that would come as soon as I turned around. Regardless of how it had happened, no amount of explaining could help me now.

Katie never moved. She just stood there. I swallowed, my eyes closed fast, and my heart pounded loudly. I said in a muffled whisper, "Mutt needs ... a towel." I pointed outside. "For Mutt."

I heard her step toward me and slide a dry towel off the rack. I reached for it and her hand squeezed around mine. It was warm, wet, smaller than mine, and strong. Its language was not sexual but familial.

She flattened her palm over the top of mine, and the air between us felt warm-like the mist that rose off the water in the quarry. She opened my palm further and touched my fingertips with hers. Slowly, she placed my hand behind the towel and slid my fingers across the C-section scar on her tummy like she was reading Braille with my fingers. She pressed my palm to her skin, which was warm, soft, and following the measured flow of her lungs. I followed the six-inch scar across her stomach and sensed the goose bumps that appeared there. I pried one eye slightly open, and she was smiling like the girl who kissed me in the quarry. Katie had always been ticklish, so I was not surprised when she giggled slightly under the touch of my hand. She covered my eyes again and, in the darkness, held my hand firm to her tummy, placing my palm flat against her scar.

"Tucker," she whispered, "it's me." She pressed her palm flat against the back of mine. "In here lives the little girl who kissed you in the quarry. The one who held your hand when nobody was looking. Who passed notes between classes and who waved good-bye, blowing you a kiss from the backseat of her daddy's car." She wrapped the towel tightly around her, and I opened my eyes as she breathed another easy, steady breath. She stepped closer, and with both hands she placed my hand over her heart and pressed it in close. "I've just got a few more scars than I had then." She paused. "We all do."

I don't know how long I stood there. A minute. Maybe two. Looking at her but not looking at her. Lost somewhere in a place I'd run from and a time I had forgotten. I swallowed again, slowly picked Mutt's towel from the bathroom floor, and half-turned. I wanted to take her by the hand, race her to the quarry, talk beneath the stars, undress the years, and pick up where we left off.

To be the boy who loved and knew love-the first time.

Like a child, Katie stood honest, upright, hiding little, and ashamed of nothing. I looked back at her, searching for answers to questions I hadn't asked in a long time, and when I began to find answers I wasn't sure I knew how to take, I turned toward the door.

I walked out into the barn, handed the towel to Mutt, pulled Jase off Glue, climbed the ladder of the water tower, and dove into the tank, now spilling over with icecold water from the quarry. I submerged, kicked to the bottom, let the cold engulf me, and remembered the quarry, the joy of watching that boat fly off the cliff, sink to the bottom, what it felt like to hold the oarlocks, and how I missed that day.

When my head broke the surface almost two minutes later, I exhaled every ounce of air in me and squeezed hard with my stomach, expelling bits and residue of a painful past and sucking in everything that was new.

I climbed down a few minutes later to an incredulous Jase, who looked like he wanted to ask me a question but never opened his mouth. Mutt climbed down from the loft, dressed in a red-striped, three-button polyester suit, a vest, and white buck shoes. I have no idea where he got any of it.

"I'm ready to go to church," he announced.

I grabbed the towel hanging through the rungs of the ladder, wiped my face, and looked toward Miss Ella's cottage. "Yeah, me too. Me too."

MUTT WAS SHOWING THE EARLY SIGNS. I ALMOST CALLED Gibby but thought better of it. Wait and see. Whether that was hope or complacency, I wasn't sure. Mutt had become more introspective, his face often tilted and skewed like he was wrestling with his muscles and losing. His personal hygiene-fingernails, hair, beard, teethwas out the window, except for the bath, so I spent the afternoon alone and bought some deodorant, nail clippers, a razor, and a toothbrush. Alone in the drug store, I realized I hadn't had much time to myself lately. Something that I'd had a lot in the last seven or eight years. Something I'd always needed and valued. It's not that I don't enjoy people; I do. It's just that I needed to think, and with all the activity at Waverly, I could have used a weeklong assignment to someplace remote.

I returned to Waverly, set the toiletries next to his bedroll, and returned to my office, which was a mess, cluttered with months of receipts and unopened mail. I desperately needed to get on the phone with Doc, but he was not going to like what I had to say, so I put it off as long as I could.

A mirrored footprint of the first floor, the basement was a large room, filled mostly by rows and racks of more than two hundred old, dusty wine bottles and unused furniture covered in dusty sheets. The only other items of furniture in the room were my bed-a single pushed up against the wall and draped with a few wool blankets, a night table where I set Miss Ella's Bible and her picture, and a few feet away, my desk. The desk was one of my own creations where function definitely preceded form. A flat door, eight feet long, spread longways across the tops of two filing cabinets. Upstairs, scattered about the house were three or four nice leather-topped desks Rex had bought to fill every nook and cranny in Waverly, but I had no desire to sit at them, because for a little more than a decade, living beneath Waverly had become easier than living in it.

I planted myself in my chair, organized a month's worth of mail, paid bills, pitched the junk mail, and tried not to remember how the shower steam had risen off her skin and fogged the bathroom mirror. Finally, I picked up the phone. I had hoped to just leave a voice mail, but I knew better. Doc defined workaholic. He answered midway through the first ring. "Hey, Doc."

"Tucker!" I heard the cigarette switch sides and a thick exhale follow. "How the devil are you? The Whitey photos are superb. I told you it'd be vacation. Now, catch the first plane to Los Angeles and-"

"Doc."

Silence followed. He knew me pretty well by now, and the tone in my voice told him I wasn't going to Los Angeles. I heard his Zippo lighter crack open, the turn of the wheel and strike of the flint, a small inhale, and then the pop of the lighter as he closed it on his thigh and slid it back into his polyester pocket. A delicious sound. Chances were good that he was dropping the first ash of this cigarette into a cold cup of black coffee and looking out the window over lower Manhattan. Reclining in his chair, he let the smoke slowly filter through his nose and up around his eyes. Doc loved to smoke more than the Marlboro man.

"Tell me about it," he said.

"It's complicated."

"Does it involve your brother?"

"Yes."

"Is there a woman?"

"Yes."

Doc got excited, and I heard the spring on his seat as he sat up straight. "Is it that long-legged stewardess you told me about? The one with the dangling key card?"

"No."

Doc sat back in his chair, tweaking the spring the other direction and sounding not too impressed. "Is she married?"

"Yes. Or rather, was. They were married, then divorced, but recently tried to patch things up."

"And let me guess. To top it off, she has a child."

I paused, wishing I had reached his voice mail. "Yes."

"You're right, it is complicated. How'd you manage to get yourself in this mess?"

"Long story."

"I'm listening."

So I told him the short and the fast, minus the part about the .357. With it coming out of my mouth, and me listening to myself, I even thought I sounded a bit crazy.

"You mean to tell me, your brother Mutt, exhibit A in the cuckoo's nest, is living there?"

"Yes."

"And you've got this married woman, Katie somethingor-other, who has her five-year-old son with her, running from an abusive husband who probably lives, works, and eats within a few blocks of me, whose bar-drinking buddies work with the government?"

"Something like that."

"If I were you, I'd drop all three at the bus station and grab the first flight to Los Angeles."

"Doc, I can't."

"Can't or won't?"

"Doc, my brother is a mess, and this woman, well-"

Doc interrupted me. He sounded like Thomas Magnum. "I hear something in your voice I haven't heard before."

"Yeah, well .. .

"You don't have any idea what you're doing, do you?"

"Not in the least bit."

"Me neither, and I've been married four times. Women! Can't live with them, can't live with them."

"Doc, I just need some time. A month. Maybe two. I don't know."

"You got enough to live on?"

"For a time. I can't retire, but we can make out."

'-We' or `I'?"

I paused. "We."

"You know, you could make the upper echelon. You're almost there now." Doc firmly believed that I'd make a great photographer one day.

"And when I get there, where will that be?"

"At the top, Tucker."

"The top of what? Doc, there's only room for one man on top of Everest. It's cold, lonely, and it kills a lot of the people who climb it. My father showed me that."

"All right, Rain"-the Zippo cracked and popped again-"do what you've got to do, but don't make me come down there and kick you in the tuckus. You're too good to quit. You see what others don't. Always have. Remember that. Get your collective crap in order and don't wait too long to pick up the phone."

"Thanks, Doc. I'll be talking to you."

Doc hung up, and I knew I'd let him down. But Doc also knew bits and pieces of the whole story, and he could sense that pressure in the cookerwas building. Unscrewing the vent was often better than watching the top blow sky-high.

I splashed water on my face, wiped the grit from my eyes, and strolled out the back door, walking nowhere in particular. Aimlessly circling the cottage, the footprints caught my attention-they were large, about the same size I'd seen out on the highway pointing at Katie and me through the fence. I scoured the ground, and when I picked it up, the cigarette butt was cold, smoked down to the nub-like somebody had enjoyed it and the tip smelled of an overabundance of a cheap man's cologne.

FROM WEDNESDAY TO SATURDAY, MUTT WORSENED. Every time he used the barn toilet, he used an entire roll of toilet paper, clogging it every day since he got here. His hands were chapped, cracked, and bleeding regularly from hard water and too much soap. He had yet to break the seal on the toiletries I bought him, and his face was one constant contortion. But amid this digression, I had noticed odd progress-if you can call it that.

I woke Saturday morning to the sound of an engine running and another high-pitched sound I couldn't quite place. Like a mower or go-cart. I climbed upstairs, walked side of the house was soaked.

Mutt stood at the edge of the back porch, wearing protective safety glasses and yellow earplugs stuffed into each ear, and both hands gripped the biggest pressurewasher wand I'd ever seen. He had braced his legs against a column and looked like he was holding a flamethrower. At his feet was a thirteen-horsepower Honda engine on wheels connected to some sort of pump that fed water through a hundred-plus feet of pressurized hose snaking around the porch. A small transparent hose ran out the side of the pump and sucked bleach from a gallon bottle resting nearby. Mutt was spraying the sides of the house with broad strokes and had already made pretty good progress. The roof, windows, gutters, and sides of the house were covered in bleach, the smell was strong, and the sound almost deafening. None of which I wanted to face first thing in the morning.

I looked up, caught a wave of misty bleach in the eye, and felt the sting. Judging by Mutt's stance and evident pressure coming out the end of that wand, that thing could peel the chrome off a trailer hitch. Waverly didn't stand a chance. Algae, mold, and thirty years of goo trickled and then gushed down the cracks and crevices of Waverly like wet paint in the rain. Even the mortar came clean. The roof tiles, long since green and black with algae, were returning to their native orange and even glistening a bit. As was the brick and green trim around the windows and shutters. The difference between what had been cleaned and what remained to be clean was striking. To be honest, I hadn't thought the house was that dirty.

Mutt picked up on it the moment he first saw the house. I almost felt embarrassed. Circling the house, I stepped over the puddles that held yesteryear's scum and dirt. Within minutes, they had soaked through the earth and were gone. Above me, the house shone brilliantly.

I waved, and Mutt nodded in my direction and kept spraying while maintaining a strong grip on the wand. I walked into the barn, dropped a Maxwell House can's worth of feed in Glue's trough, and started rubbing his mane. I spread some hay, mucked out the manure, opened the gate, and let him follow his nose around the pasture. Thinking about a shower, I walked toward the house, and Jase hopped off Miss Ella's porch holding a baseball in his hand. It didn't take me a second to recognize it. My home-run ball from the College World Series.

I eyed the ball, hoping he wouldn't throw it and scuff the cover. "Hey, partner."

"Unca Tuck, can you teach me to hit?"

Twenty-five years ago, in roughly this same place on planet Earth, give or take about three feet, I had asked my dad the same question. He walked out of the barn dressed in his best riding boots and pants, having just wrestled one of his thoroughbreds around the pasture, and walked right past me. He never responded. He didn't even acknowledge that I had asked the question. He left me standing there holding a ball, the bat Miss Ella had bought me, and a raggedy old glove that needed new stitching. He walked inside-his face twisted and angry, his mind busy with the next deal or secretary-poured himself about four inches of scotch, and shut the library door. Discussion over.