Abbeville (26 page)

To my horror, Julie approached Grandma, reached out, and took her hand, whose skin was as dry as dead leaves.

“Nice to meet you,” Julie said. “I hope we're not intruding.”

“Pleased to meet you both,” Grandma said.

Now the problem was where to put everybody. The kitchen was out: dirty dishes in the sink, the old scratched-up table with moisture rings all over it like an Olympic flag.

“Why don't you just sit there on the piano bench,” I said.

That would put them as far from Grandma as possible, just in case any unpleasant sounds or smells emanated from her.

Julie lived in a much smarter part of the town. I had driven past her house a hundred times, wanting to walk right up and tell her why I had not met her that night at the Youth Center. But I never even stopped the car.

She moved to the piano bench. Her smooth legs rose into the tight mystery of her shorts. Her chest lifted and fell. Her face was framed by waves of hair caught in motion by hairspray as if by the shutter of a camera.

“Well,” said Judy.

“What are you two going to do tonight?” I asked.

“We thought you might want to come along with us,” said Julie.

It took me so much by surprise that I didn't know what to say. I looked at my watch. My mother and father were at the shopping center. I could not leave until they returned. If I knew my father, he was probably at this moment idling around the high-fi store dreaming of a new Stromberg-Carlson. When the hell were they going to get home?

“Well?” said Judy, who probably did not even have a grandmother.

“Could you give me just a few minutes?” I said. “My parents are on the way home.”

“You have to actually ask them?” said Judy.

Julie leaned over and whispered something to her sharply.

“Oh, right,” said Judy. “My parents make me babysit my brother. Don't you just hate it?”

What the hell was I supposed to do to keep them occupied? Play a minuet? And right after that I could suggest a game of chess. Or maybe I could just haul out my hidden collection of magazines so they could get to know my filthy soul.

“Did you hear that Annie O'Hara got pregnant?” I blurted out.

Immediately I knew it was a mistake. Grandma sat there, taking it in. Julie and Judy blushed and whispered something to one another. Hell, I didn't even have to show them the magazines.

“She's one of the sweetest people in the world,” said Julie.

“Frankie pressured her,” said Judy.

I didn't have any defense for Frank Lansing, who was the sort of dark, chiseled, inarticulate guy that attracted a certain kind of beautiful girl like a vacuum draws dust.

“They're sending her away,” said Julie.

“I guess it would be kind of hard for her here,” I said.

They looked at me as if I were the mayor of the Town Without Pity.

“We'd better go,” said Judy.

“Just a few minutes more,” I asked. “They've got to be here soon.”

I felt pathetic.

“George?” came Grandma's voice from across the room. “Come here close.”

Terrific, I thought. Now they got to hear her ordering me around like a pet.

I approached and she leaned forward.

“You know what Karl would say, don't you?” she said.

“Not really,” I said.

“Why, he would have said to go,” she said in a way that seemed almost girlish.

I was speechless.

“Your grandfather believed that people should never miss an opportunity for joy,” she said. “I didn't always agree with him about everything, but I did about that.”

“Mother would kill me,” I finally managed.

“I can handle your mother,” said Grandma. “I like the one you like. The one who likes you.”

And for the first time since she arrived in Park Forest a smile went all the way up to her eyes.

I turned to the girls.

“Let's go,” I said.

“Now?” said Julie.

“Now,” I said.

A stroke took Grandma's mind before the cancer took her life. She never knew what came of that evening. I'm sure she would have been glad that Julie and I eventually married, found joy, and had a child of our own.

T
HE MOON STOOD ABOVE
the Schumpeter stone like a crown. The air was absolutely still, as if the respiration of the earth for just that luminous moment had ceased. Then I heard a stirring above me in the boughs of the tree. I looked up and saw the eye of an owl looking down on me as if it knew something. I looked right back, because I knew something, too.

I
LEFT
A
BBEVILLE EXTREMELY EARLY THE NEXT
morning in order to beat the rush-hour traffic in the city. As I drove out of town, the big machines were already working the fields, their multiple headlights making them look like instruments of war. Grampa would not have recognized Abbeville today, but I had no doubt that he would have found a way to make a life in it.

When I reached home, Rob was almost ready to leave for school.

“I'll drive today,” I said.

“Are you sure?” said Julie. “You've already driven a lot.”

“Absolutely sure,” I said.

In the car I told Rob that we were going to take a fishing trip, just the two of us.

“Fishing for what?” said Rob.

“I had exactly the same feeling when my father and grandfather took me,” I said. “It's too bad you never got to meet your great-grandfather. He would have loved teaching you to cast a fly. But you'll just have to settle for me. Don't worry, though. I'll get a guide who
really knows what he's doing. We'll be going to the same river I did as a boy, the one where your great-grandfather worked in a lumber camp when he wasn't much older than you are now.”

“Whatever,” said Rob. “Is this about me?”

“It's about both of us,” I said.

And so, less than two weeks later we were on our way. We took the Indiana Toll Road through the remains of Gary and its mills. Then we got on the interstate that curved around the bottom of Lake Michigan, then headed north.

Many hours later the countryside went from flat to rolling. Eventually we left the divided highway and turned onto a two-lane road. When the fuel gauge went below a quarter of a tank I began to be a little nervous. The miles went by, up the long hills and down again, past widely spaced farmhouses and trailers on permanent foundations, but we saw nary a village or town.

“Where do people go for groceries?” I said. “Where the hell do they get gas?”

“Hey, I'm not the one who called this God's country,” said Rob.

Finally we passed a shack that appeared to be a store.

“I'm hungry,” said Rob.

“Let's feed the car first, okay?” I said. “If I have to call Triple A it'll take a day and half for the truck to arrive.”

“You worry too much,” said Rob.

The leaves in the North Woods were about to turn which meant that, thankfully, the first year of the new millennium was finally going to draw to a close. A few more months and it would be 2001, which had to be better.

“I see the motel,” said Rob. “It's a real dump.”

We passed it without slowing down. Other than one pickup truck with oversized wheels and antlers mounted as a hood ornament, the
lot was empty. Up ahead I spotted a BP station. I pulled up to one of the pumps and filled the tank.

As we doubled back to the River's Edge Motel, I told Rob about the guide I had engaged.

“He'll help us with the entomology.” I said. “The hydraulics of the river. The physics of the fly-cast.”

“Don't make it seem like school, okay?” Rob said.

We pulled up at a door marked, “Office.” No one was at the counter, which had scores of photos under its glass top. They came in two varieties: guys kneeling in the water, holding out fish toward the camera lens to make them look bigger, and autumnal men in camouflage holding up the heads of deer.

An old-fashioned buzzer button was mounted on the front face of the counter. “Ring,” said a faded, handwritten sign, smudged by countless fingers too tired or drunk to hit the mark. When I pushed the button, I heard nothing. I pushed it again.

“It doesn't seem to work,” I said.

“Yes it does,” said a woman in a housedress, appearing in a doorway behind the counter. “You George Bailey?”

“How did you guess?” I said.

“Well, let's see,” she said. “I only got two new reservations, and the other's already here.”

She pulled open a drawer and pawed through it until she found a card, which she dealt to me face up with a practiced flick of her chunky wrist. Stay out of that game, George.

When I handed it back to her filled out, she lifted from a rack a key attached to a metal disk about half a foot across.

“Don't take it with you when you go out,” she said. “Drop it off.”

“It looks heavy enough to anchor a boat,” I said.

“I'll need a credit card,” the woman said.

“No problem,” I said, finding my Visa and skidding it back to her.

She made an impression of it on an old slide machine and then had me sign for the whole amount of the reservation.

“Do you know anyplace good for dinner?” I asked.

“You'll have to go back to Chicago for that,” she said, then disappeared.

I pulled the car around in front of our room, which turned out to be clean enough, though it could have used a good airing. I bridged my fingers on the mattress of one of the twin beds. It was so thin I could feel the springs. The pillow was the kind you got on airplanes. Above the small bureau, a TV was mounted high on the wall.

“This will do,” I said.

I had outfitted us without any idea whether the climate would be like the Far Tortugas or the Bering Strait. Plus the waders and wading jackets the guide had said he did not provide. When I got it all inside, there wasn't much room left for Rob and me.

“Maybe we should just put some of this stuff back in the trunk,” I said.

Rob plopped down on the bed nearest the TV and took charge of the remote. Clicking through the channels, he announced, “They have HBO.”

I looked at the way the mattress sagged under Rob's lean frame. These were not beds for autumnal backs.

The next morning when the alarm went off in the darkness, my joints lived up to expectations, but still I got up with a real sense of excitement. I was sure Rob would feel some of the same thing if only I could wake him.

The guide's name was Johnny, and his truck, hauling a trailer-mounted float boat, crunched into the parking lot before Rob had finally pulled himself together. I went outside to greet him.

“Boy, it sure is early,” I said.

“I figure you and the boy will want some breakfast,” said Johnny. “There's a good little place on the way, and we've got the time.”

“Hear that, Rob?” I said back into the room. “We're going to put on the feed bag.”

“You two go,” said Rob.

“Not a chance,” I said.

Johnny was no taller than me, but he had the sturdiness of a man who pulled his weight at the oars. We stood and waited together outside the motel room door. When Rob emerged, he and I followed Johnny in my car. It seemed like miles before we pulled into the gravel lot of a little restaurant that looked as though it had never seen better days. The food turned out to be surprisingly good: pancakes and scrambled eggs and ample rashers of bacon. Even Rob gave it three and a half stars.

“We're going to be in and out of the boat a lot today,” Johnny said as we ate. “This here river is generous, but don't let her fool you. She can get wild.”

“Will we be shooting the rapids?” Rob asked, brightening.

“There's some white water,” said Johnny.

“I've been on the river before,” I told the guide. “My grandfather led the way then. He had been here back when they were logging the forests.”

“You'll still see some evidence of those times,” said Johnny. “Roll-ways where they slid the logs into the river, some abandoned rail tracks they built to get the timber from the deep woods to the rollways. Still and all, the woods have pretty much closed up over what men did to them.”

When we finished, I had the waitress pour me a Styrofoam cup of the strong, black coffee she had served us at the table, and we returned to our vehicles to set off into the dark.

“Johnny seems to know what he's doing,” I said as we followed him off the highway and onto a dirt road leading into the trees.

“He doesn't know enough to stay in bed until the sun comes up,” Rob said.

“The early worm gets the fish,” I said.

The road went from dirt to no more than two ruts through the tall grass. At some point we went down a fairly steep grade that I wasn't too sure I'd be able to get up again. Then the truck pulled to a stop, and I parked a distance behind it so Johnny would have room to maneuver the boat into the water.

“I hope you have a winch,” I said.

The headlights of our vehicles made eerie shadows in the woods. I heard something move.

“Just deer,” Johnny said.

He fiddled with the boat and then climbed into the truck and deftly backed the trailer down a narrow opening through the trees. As he did, I could see by the taillights the river running quickly past.

Rob and I watched as Johnny cranked the boat into the water, then let down a heavy steel anchor chain to hold it in the current as he pulled the truck and trailer back to higher ground.

“Time to suit up,” he said.

I opened our trunk and handed Rob his waders.

“These are going to be baggy as hell,” he said.

“If we happen upon a mermaid,” I said, “she will be enchanted that you have legs, however they're clad.”

I almost fell getting my foot down into the boot.

“I thought you'd done this before,” Rob said.