Beyond Deserving (25 page)

She and Fish used to talk about things they had seen that day that were dumb, things that made them mad at the stupid way the world was run. They told one another the plots of books they were reading. They talked about Ursula and Michael and their kids, about what to make for dinner, and maybe about someplace to go next winter or next summer or next year. It didn't really matter what they said. They occupied the same space. They were companions.

The others begin speaking of the baby. Jane's mother will come first for two weeks. Oatley's will come next, and then he will take a few weeks' leave. They will decorate the back bedroom in yellow and white. They will use a birthing room at the hospital. Katie floats. Surely they will not ask her opinion. In her own pregnancy she did not so much as read a magazine article. She assumed someone would tell her what to do at the hospital. She was glad she hadn't fooled herself about who was in charge. She was glad she hadn't had any idea how humiliating and painful it would all be.

If they look at her she will say, How wonderful.

The wonder is that Jeff is so intrigued. He is enjoying the talk of babies and breathing lessons. He hasn't ever brought up those prospects for himself. Maybe only women speculate about babies. Maybe, for all his rambling revelations, he thinks she is too odd to talk about babies.

Oatley and his wife are hardly out the door before Katie jumps on Jeff. “You could really get into that, couldn't you?” He is an ordinary, hard-working, successful young man, with a strong ego, and every reason to want a normal life, a family life, which she has never assumed she would have. Which Fish has guaranteed she will not have.

His eyes flash with aggravation. “We must have covered fifty subjects tonight,” he says.

“Babies.”

“They're my friends. I'll be the godfather.”

“You'd like one, too, wouldn't you? You'd like to be a father?” She is growing angry, with no time or inclination to wonder why.

“Well of course I would!” He looks away. She takes a breath and calms down. She feels doltish. She feels, as she has for days now, that things are out of her hands. She did not mean to pick a quarrel. His very defensiveness is full of warning and hints of perspectives she has not considered. His private life. His future. For all his intimate discussions, he has never said anything that really matters.

She collects her wits. “I only ever had one real lover and that was Fish. I never dated. I don't have the experience to figure out where we are, you and I, Jeff. If I'm supposed to understand something, you have to tell me. It's probably not a good time to bring it up.” She tries to think why he would be attracted to her. She must seem so uneducated and outdated, though he once claimed she was intriguing.

“Christ, I asked you to go to Europe with me!”

“And then?”

He is exasperated. “I'll pay for it. I want your company. I thought you would be thrilled, Katie!” At least, excited, he calls her her own childish name and not the alternative one he has imposed on her without asking.

“I never said I wanted to go to Europe.”

“Everybody wants to go to France.”

“Everybody wants to have children, too. You should ask someone else. You don't have me in mind for that.”

“I'm not going to Europe to have a baby! Why are you trying to pick a fight? Christ, Katie, you are crazy.”

“I want to leave.” He said
crazy
. And maybe he is right.

34

They drive to her place in silence. After Jeff drops her off without apology (what does he have to be sorry for? why did they quarrel?), she sits in the apartment in the dark, sipping her own cheap Chablis until the bottle is empty, and so is her mind. All she thinks is, What was I thinking?

How did she ever forget that she is an outsider, and that only another outsider would ever understand?

She changes into her scuffed Reeboks and walks down the hill and across the boulevard, over to the Fisher house.

A single light shines in the front room, but she cannot see in the window. She imagines Michael reading. Or maybe Carter working on something.

She sees no light through the tiny basement window. She walks down the steps and stands there dumbly, still not knowing what she is doing. Did she expect Fish to be sitting on the curb waiting for her?

When she thinks back over all the years with him, all the anguish, the separations, the quarrels and silences, she remembers how there were perfect moments, too, when they understood that a bad time had passed, when they came together without explaining or dissecting what had happened before, just came together because it felt right and there were the two of them against the world, and there was nothing they needed to say.

She leans toward the door and hears the low murmur of a radio. Fish's truck is on the street. He has to be inside.

She aches, though she does not know just where.

The door opens and she jumps.

“I heard you on the stairs.” Fish slips out of the basement and closes the door behind him. He is wearing jeans and no shirt or shoes. He puts his hands on her shoulders.

“I'm sorry about this afternoon,” she whispers.

They are so close on the stairs she can feel his body heat. He is tan and strong, his arms ropy, his hands rough from his work.

She realizes there must be a reason he didn't want her in the basement. She feels a flush of embarrassment. “I'll go.”

“No.” He moves a hand to her waist. He touches the top button of her dress with the other hand. “Pretty,” he says.

She slides away and moves up the stairs to the yard, slowly, with effort.

“Let's sit in the van,” he suggests.

She turns back to him. “Who's inside?”

“Never mind. She's asleep. I was coming out for a smoke.”

She follows him to the truck and slides in on his side, across to the other seat. The stars are out. People are supposed to be happy. Somewhere nearby someone plays a melancholy song on the saxophone, not well, too slowly.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks. He takes a cigarette and match from the dashboard, lights the cigarette, and inhales deeply.

“I want you to tell me about it.”

“Jail?” She feels closest to him when he tells her things that happened to him when she was not with him, things he would not tell anyone else, things that will never be a story in his repertoire.

“Yes.” She waits while he takes several more drags off his cigarette. He flips the butt into the street.

“We planted trees.”

“I know. But before that, in the prison. Did they hurt you?”

“No. They hurt younger guys. Kids. Pretty boys.” He scoots closer to her. “Fresh meat.”

She makes a sound in her throat. “But not you.”

“I lay on my cot at night and listened to them scream.”

“And nobody came.”

“Nobody.”

“But not at the camp.”

“There wasn't that. There were two men who had their way, but they wanted it and nobody cared.” He touches her top button again. He undoes it, and touches the base of her throat with two fingers.

“And the Indian?”

He takes his hand away and stares forward. “Indian?”

“You wrote about an Indian.” How could he forget? It was his only card. (“He can do bird calls.”) “Did they send him back after he broke the rules?”

“They put him to work in the kitchen.”

“Oh.”

Fish crawls past her and begins moving things off the bed. Her heart is pounding so hard she thinks he must hear it. The loose button of her dress seems to flap against her pulse. He shakes the shabby quilt and smooths it over the bed. She made the quilt from scraps in a cabin they rented one winter in British Columbia. She felt so clever, like a pioneer cat.

“Come here.” He is sitting near the end, on the edge. She moves to the bed, not quite next to him. She notices the horn again, playing the same tune again, something she knows.

“There were deer.” His voice is sweet now, and it touches some place deep inside her. “There was a little fawn whose mother must have been shot. We heard it bleating in the brush and took it up to the cabin. They got us bottles so we could nurse it. I fed it from a bottle.”

She touches Fish's hand. He is warm. She is nearly shivering.

“It wasn't so bad,” she says. “Long, but not awful.”

“Not so awful.” He kneels in front of her, kicking things out of the way, and he puts his face into her lap. “It was half my life,” she thinks he says. Slowly, he pulls her dress up to her thighs and lays his face between her legs. “It was forever. It changed everything.”

She moans and lies back on the narrow bed. Her head pushes against the wall of the truck. She smells wood and the cold metal of tools, a mustiness in the quilt. Fish is kissing and caressing her. It is an old Nina Simone song, she's sure of it.

“But the Indian was okay?”

He moves onto the bed with her, shifting her to its length and to his. “The Indian put his head in a bread bag and suffocated. The Indian had the last say.”

“Fisher,” she says. The song says, ‘I see my life come shining … Any day now, any day now, I shall be released.'”

It grows cool in the night. She would have been cold but for Fish lying next to her. At the first tinge of gray light she wakes with a start and feels herself clutch with panic. Fish is awake, too.

“Katie,” he says, in a rare, throaty voice.

She sits up. “I've got to go. I've got to go to work in a while.”

“I'll drive you.”

“No.” She puts her shoes on and tries to smooth her hair.

“That's silly.”

“I want to walk.” She crawls over the seat and slides down out of the van. Fish follows her. He pushes her against the side of the van. He leans against her, his face along her cheek. “I do love you,” he says. “You're the only woman I've ever loved. You're the only person who ever understood the pain.”

“Shh! Don't talk, please don't talk.” Talk was what she wanted. Now she doesn't know. She remembers a story in a magazine, years ago, about a woman from New York on vacation. The woman fell in love with a Laplander. She went off with him to herd deer and she didn't know a word of his language.

“What's going to happen, Katie?”

“I don't know!” she cries out, pushing him from her. Quickly she walks away, down the street. She knows he will watch her until she is out of sight. She is glad she wore the dress.

What would he think of her silky slip, her linen skirt?

35

Gully wakes about five that same morning. He knows it is too early for Geneva to be up. He pads into the bathroom and back to his room, and sits on the side of his bed in his boxer shorts and shirt. He speaks quietly. “Yesterday don't count for nothing, tomorrow will come soon enough. Now's the day I'm going to make it, good or rough.” It is his own poem and he says it every morning. He believes it.

Then, because there is time to kill before Geneva gets up and makes coffee, he takes out a little book of reflections and reads for a while. He doesn't try to ponder what he reads, or make too much of it. He just reads, though he does tend to read a page two or three times before he moves on to the next. There are things he needs to be reminded of, like counting on a Higher Power, and knowing that, helpless and worthless as he is, he can get through the day cold sober and maybe useful to somebody for something, as long as he isn't too wrapped up in what
he
needs, what
he
wants, in what he wishes he'd done different, way another time ago.

His mind wanders from his reading. He has been dreaming of his boys, and bits of the dreams stay with him, happy thoughts. There was the year the Columbia River was so high it backed up the Sandy for several miles above them and made a lake. Fish went into what he called his gyppo logging business (and sure enough that's what it was), enlisting Michael and their dog Sprout, who would never be left behind. The boys scouted logs that had been stuck along the river bank by earlier floods, and took advantage of the high water to get them down. The hard part was leaving the slack water, to go into the flooding Columbia, with a twelve-foot boat and a 3 1/2 horsepower motor. At that point everything turned hind-to, and it was all the boys could do to keep the logs aimed to hit the log buyer's boom out in the river, but they never lost a log. What good boys they were, and smart to figure all that out. Fish, especially, had his wits about him, and a real go-to attitude. He always liked doing something nobody else had thought of or managed before him. He must have been good use to the navy, seeing the kind of boy he was. Gully remembered a time Fish told him about, when his boat challenged a North Viet freighter in the moonlight, goosing it to make it fire first so they could fire back. Of course there were lots of young men involved—it was a big Vietnamese boat, one of the biggest destroyed in the war, and the boys later got citations—but Gully always thinks of it as Fish in his Sandy River boat, fighting his way to the buyer's float, riding on the thrill of a challenge.

There is no shade on Gully's little window, and the room is brightening. He wonders if Geneva has had a hard time getting to sleep. All day Sunday she and Ruby talked and talked; he went stalking in the woods to get away from their rattling. It isn't like her to sleep in past six, though she sometimes makes coffee and goes back to bed again. He can wait. If she is still in bed, it is because she needs the rest.

He wishes he knew what else to do for her. He knows he has not succeeded in making amends to her, though he has come back to that step again and again. You never finish a step. You work in a cycle, finding new ways to be a better person, or—more likely, in his case—to hold on the best you can. You learn things about yourself and find new faults, remember wrongs you've done. You are never finished. Dr. Jim told him something important though. He said you could get puffed up with your own importance if you dwelled on your past sins and mortifications too long. It is a delicate thing, to remember and be sorry, without wallowing. One way or the other, there is Geneva, popping up in his daily ruminations, not only because she is there—God bless her, and what would he do if she wasn't?—but because there is a prickly bush between them, they are always reaching across.