Carry the One (11 page)

Alice said to Carmen, “Actually—”

The flare came in from the right, whistling and then, when it was just grazing Carmen’s right ear, it blossomed with a crackling report into a cloud of liquid, orange-red smoke. Carmen slapped a hand against the side of her head, and bent forward, then folded to the ground. What came out of her was not a human cry, just pure
wounded animal. And it kept on going. Alice went down next to her and pried Carmen’s hand off the ear, which was blackened and in great part missing; what was left was smoking like a piece of bacon, also releasing a fast stream of blood.

“Oh God. Oh Jesus, come on,” Alice said as she lifted her up and started pushing their way back out of the crowd. Using a counterintuitive circuit of logic, she got Carmen as fast as possible away from the medical clinic and toward the first police car she saw. What was going through her head as she ran with Carmen’s arm over her shoulder, her own hand now holding in place what was left of Carmen’s ear, was fear for her of course, but also shock that her sister had turned out to be vulnerable after all.

teardrop

Nick pulled Olivia’s arm over his shoulder as she stood. She had stubbed her toe on an unambitious hike they took that morning. He set her into the side opening of the Teardrop.

“I know it’s a little early to hit the hay, but the outdoors wears me out.” She took the mug of cowboy coffee he handed her. Her nightcap. Caffeine was nothing to her. After learning to sleep through prison nights, nothing could keep her awake. She gave him a pinch under his ribs. Olivia dispensed affection in athletic gestures—arm punches, noogies, little flicks of a damp towel in the bathroom—as though they were teammates rather than husband and wife.

“I’m just going to hang out up here,” he said as he hoisted himself past her, up onto the roof of the trailer. “Like Snoopy.” He loved this—lying on top of the camper, looking through his very old Nikon binoculars, the ridges on the focus wheel nearly worn away from a million rubs of his forefinger. He could watch the lazy way he did when he first noticed stars, before he saw them up close through a Newtonian reflector, or read them by their radio waves, before he knew their chemical composition, the weight and age of their gases, the rate at which they were burning themselves up—back when they still held a blinky mystery.

He read the heavens like a worn page of a favorite book. He picked out constellations of the summer northern sky—Scorpius, Hercules with its brilliant star Vega, the harder-to-find Corona Borealis. Arcturus, a showman star, burning its heart out. And even though he knew better, knew that what he saw was still roiling and burning and exploding and being born, also dying an icy death, he could still calm himself by doing this sort of casual, Boy Scout survey, finding everything superficially in place.

His early stargazing had evolved into a narrowed vision that was his strong suit in the groves of astronomy. Although he could construct a decent equation, map out the Doppler shift of a star’s spectra to calculate its mass, that sort of thing, his real talent lay in being an astronomer rather than a physicist. He could look through a telescope, or read a radio image and see something others had missed, particularly what hid within the shadows of stars. This had put him on the receiving end of a lot of material, stuff that had stumped someone and someone else, who then, as a last-ditch gesture, fielded it off to Nick. This ability allowed him, in spite of a spotty attendance record and a few unfortunate incidents at school social occasions, to still occupy a place in the scientific academy. He would never get tenure. He’d run off the rails of that track. He had his doctorate now, but his recommendation letters overflowed with faint praise, and held between their lines invisible-ink warnings about his unreliability, his unpredictable behavior. He wouldn’t get an important job anywhere, ever. They kept him on part time down at the U of C. He might turn out to be a credit to them. In the meantime, they let him teach a basic astronomy course every semester, kept an eye on his student evaluations.

Nobody else wanted him. He was too much trouble. But a lot of people wanted his findings, that was what kept him on the game board. Recently he had scored a succession of grants to go down to Arecibo, the big dish radio scope in Puerto Rico. At the moment he could find what he needed through radio waves. But optical astronomy was still a big player, and poised for huge discoveries. This was its time. NASA
had already launched its big telescope—Hubble. A repair was necessary; a camera had to be replaced, to overcome the spherical aberration of the primary mirror. Once that mission was accomplished, the scope would linger in space, clicking away, capturing pictures not blurred by the earth’s atmosphere, and then the whole of cosmology would probably break wide open. It was a great time to be looking around, but also—for Nick—a little spooky. Like being the first people to stick their toes in a deep and unknown lake of water that was purple, or peach.

And now he didn’t have drugs to buffer this anxiety. Now he had to fall back on carpentry and Olivia as his calming forces. He was a married man now, half of a two-income couple. He worked construction four days a week, taught one day. She cut hair at a neighborhood beauty shop and had a good base of clients. She made decent money. They owned a condo on Addison, near the lake. He drove an Impala that was only two years old. He was getting extremely close to respectability. He had Olivia to thank for this.

Even though the incident was a couple of years back now, Nick was still thinking about how to deal with Horace’s grotesque behavior at the birthday party. Nick had gone back to his parents’ place later that night, but just sat out front in the car. A few days later he bought a gun. He didn’t have a plan, didn’t even have an image of himself being able to use it. When Olivia came across it in the back of his under wear drawer, she said, “This is for your old man? Oh, please. Who is he really? Someone you’re connected to by sperm.”

He was so grateful to be let off the hook. And of course by now, so much time had passed. The longer he thought about how to deal with Horace, the more complicated it became and he had to further refine his message. He thought he’d be ready by the time they got home from this trip. Ready, or nearly ready.

He knew Olivia thought he was weak, but she didn’t seem to care.

“If I wanted tough, I would have married Freddi. Don’t think that wasn’t an option.”

He rolled over, hopped off the roof and climbed into the Teardrop. The little trailer’s sleeping cabin held a double mattress, but just barely; its sides rolled up the walls a little. He loved the trailer. He bought it from a guy in Ohio, then took the better part of a year to restore it. The outside he spray-painted a high-gloss robin’s egg blue, seven coats. Inside, he covered the walls with white paneling. He and Olivia hooked the Teardrop to the Chevy and spent long weekends driving around the Midwest to cat shows, camping along the way. They were their own traveling circus.

Inside, Olivia slept soundly, snoring. She had a deviated septum that she periodically considered having straightened out. Every now and then, she saw another specialist to get a tenth or eleventh opinion. She was not one to jump into anything. Nick shimmied out of his jeans, slid under the jumble of old bedspreads and army blankets, sheets soft with use and a dash of grime—they were, neither of them, big on housekeeping—then pushed his butt against her, and put a pillow over his head to shut out the noise. Sleeping with Olivia, touching her in some way, any way, especially inside the tiny trailer, kept him from hurtling into the special void he had created for himself.

When he woke up, the cats were meowing and walking over the pillows, also all over his head. It was five in the morning according to the small clock dangling from a string above them. One of the cats was standing on her hind legs, batting the clock around with a paw.

“I’ll get up and feed them,” Olivia said, leaving behind a ruffle of breath sour from sleep. She plucked a cat off his face, pushed open the door, and dropped it gently outside.

When he woke again, it was six-thirty. No Olivia, no cats. He stepped out into an air heavy with dew steaming off the surrounding pines.

“It’s so early. What can anyone do this early in the morning?” he
said to Olivia, who sat cross-legged on a webbed chaise, eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes. The cats peered out from inside their carriers, even though the doors were open. They were total cowards when faced with the wilderness.

“I know,” she said. “That’s the thing about the outdoors. It does get started a little sooner than you’d like.” They were rookie campers. This was a whole new thing to them. They were still getting the hang of it, and often gave up on whatever dinner they’d managed to scorch on the little gas stove, and drove out of this or that campsite to see if there was a McDonald’s by the highway. They defaulted to motel mode more often than they’d admit to anybody.

“How’s that doing?” Meaning her toe, which still looked like a red lightbulb, but a smaller one of a lower wattage.

“Nothing like yesterday. And all we have to do today is drive, so it’ll be fine.”

The cats emerged tentatively from their crates and circled his ankles; their purring made them seem motorized. They smelled shrimpy, from the special food Olivia gave them. They were not regular cats, not ordinary pets. They were Himalayans, white with puckered faces and long, ornate names on their pedigree papers. In their regular life around the house, Olivia called them Eggdrop and Chop Suey. Nick hated both the pretentious pedigree stuff and these over-cute names. He didn’t much care for the cats either as far as that went.

Olivia adored them. She was as close as she got to happy whenever one or the other won a ribbon. She fussed over them at home. She found their behavior endlessly fascinating. They chased a tied-up pair of pantyhose across the floor! They sat in a box! She had concocted intricate personalities she professed to see in them while to Nick, it appeared that they only ate, slept, batted around sparkle balls, and were almost totally indifferent to Nick’s and Olivia’s presence in their lives. The cats were part of the ticket price to Olivia. He’d keep buffalos, if that would make her stay. It always felt to him as though she had one foot out the door, although whenever he asked her about this, she
looked completely surprised, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her.

“You just be a good boy and I’ll stick around.”

With their head start, they drove through the day, down from Missouri into Arkansas. Country stations spanned the dial. The car swelled up with fiddles and pedal steel. Olivia rolled the knob, trying to get some George Jones. They were huge fans, went to his concerts wearing matching cowboy shirts. Corny, but so what? They got into country through Emmylou Harris and Randy Travis, but by now they had gone way back to Buck Owens and Hank Williams, back to the Stanley Brothers and Lefty Frizzell.

A quick stop for gas and Cokes. They were careful not to disturb the cats, who were topped off with Valium, meek in their carriers on the backseat.

Through the afternoon, with her head propped against the open window, her foot with its swollen toe up on the dashboard, Olivia read a romance novel. She could get totally wrapped up in these. Which seemed so peculiar to Nick. She was the least romantic person he had ever met. He read a couple to try to understand where she plugged into them. As far as he could see, they were just pages and pages of longing and bogus historical crap leading up first to a big ravishing, then to a royal wedding.

“Good one?” he asked her now.

“Mmhmm,” Olivia said, deep into the story, which, from the cover, appeared to be about a man and a woman with matching long, windblown hair.

It was late afternoon when they reached Eureka Springs, where the cat show was being held.

“This town is made of motels,” Nick said as they wound around, profoundly lost. “And every one has a sign for a whirlpool bath. It’s like they took the ‘spring’ concept way too seriously.”

“I think we’ve been on this street already,” Olivia said. She smoked in a dreamy way, exhaling out the open window. “We’re going in circles. Maybe turn left there. That street just past the Goofy Golf.”

But the left turn was yet another mistake followed by another half hour of winding around before they finally pulled into the Blue Jay Inn, where they had a reservation. By this time, the cats were coming off their tranquilizers, pacing inside their carriers, wailing.

“Stage butterflies,” was Olivia’s diagnosis. “They always get worked up before they have to face their public.”

The room—Number 217, on the second floor, a long haul up with luggage and cats and cat-grooming equipment—had blue everything—carpet, bedspread, walls. A coin box on the bed’s headboard activated the mattress with a Magic Fingers massage. Across from the bed, against the opposite wall, a full-size refrigerator took up a good part of the room. Nick wondered if this was supposed to count as a feature. The room was small but the bathroom was huge—to accommodate a large, blue, molded plastic Jacuzzi.

“Whirlpool,” Nick said, poking his head in, reaching around behind himself to slide a hand between Olivia’s legs. Playing around.

“Later,” she said, backing away to open a carrier and pull out a cat. “We’ve got to clean these girls up. They lost their lunch in here. Oh, this is bad. Poor babies.” She pulled on long rubber gloves and handed another pair to Nick. He could see that the cat was crusty with dried vomit.

The next half hour was a blizzard of flying suds and spray, bared claws, the high whine of the cat dryer, and finally, a soft falling mist of fur spray.

When they were done, Olivia slumped into the room’s only chair. “Cats think they should be left to do their own grooming. Lick, lick, lick. They don’t get the bigger picture, like that they have to be ready by tomorrow morning.”

They had sex in the Jacuzzi.

“I think it’s mandatory,” Nick said. Olivia sat on his lap and rode him hard as he held her and bit her shoulder from behind. This was a favorite position of hers, not just an aquatic adaptation, and he hoped it wasn’t because she didn’t want him to see her expression while he fucked her. In his worst vision she was staring into the distance at something he couldn’t see. Fundamentally, Olivia was unknowable.