Cold Rain (4 page)

Lucy turned horse-crazy. We fought it as long as we could but ended up getting her lessons at a local stable.

When Lucy turned ten, Molly and I bought her a ten-year-old paint gelding named Ahab. She had been riding seriously for over three years by then and showed no sign of losing interest.

We had shopped for a small animal, but all three of us fell in love with Ahab the moment we saw him.

He was enormous, standing over sixteen hands, black mostly but with white lightning streaks on each flank and a few broad splotches of white running up from his belly. He had a white blaze down his long, handsome Roman nose and three high white socks. And Ahab could run. He had an impressive list of first place victories in barrel racing to prove it, so, despite everything, he became Lucy’s first horse. Four years later, we bought Jezebel, a gorgeous bay quarter horse with good lineage and pure fire for a personality. Jezebel came off a racetrack, where she had finished first whenever she had managed to get out of the gate. For a couple of seasons, Lucy struggled with her new mare.

One weekend everything would be fine. The next she might not even take a saddle. I expect a lot of kids would have given up. Hell, I was ready to give up.

But not Lucy. Lucy had what she wanted. Now it was time to learn how to handle it. Molly and I ended up driving her and Jezebel to one riding clinic after another.

When that failed to turn things around completely we drove up to a professional and boarded Jezebel and Lucy for two months. From dawn until dusk Lucy rode every kind of animal that came through that barn.

By the time Lucy returned home, she was a different girl and all the nonsense with Jezebel was history.

The days were long past when I could give advice to my stepdaughter about anything relating to a horse, but horses still remained our hobby, with Ahab having long ago become my horse.

We took the horses through the pasture at a gallop and waded through the creek five minutes later. From there we raced over a couple wooded hills before coming to the back gate at what used to be an orchard.

Our property extended well beyond this gate, another eighty acres in all, but these fields we rented to a farmer who paid us a share of the crop.

At the gate Lucy moved Jezebel around and opened it while she was still in the saddle. This involved moving Jezebel sideways, having her turn from one side of the gate to the other, and then dance sideways again. Ahab was also trained to do this, but the one time I had tried it I embarrassed him so much that afterwards I either let Lucy open the gates or I dismounted and walked through.

Beyond the pasture, we followed the grassy lane that circled a field of corn. We were still a long way from any road, farther still from other houses. We had a small wood giving us some late afternoon shade. There was just enough breeze to keep us cool. It seemed like the perfect time to talk about marijuana, so I gave a whoop in the direction of the blue sky. Jezebel skittered like a race was about to start. Ahab lugged it along like an old hand. Touch his sides, he could still go. Otherwise, he just let folks make noise if that’s what they wanted.

‘It’s good to be sober!’ I shouted.

The hard clay at our feet seemed suddenly very interesting to Lucy. ‘Is it hard? Quitting?’ She met my gaze at the end of her question, curious, nothing more.

I had been sober two years, just before I started writing
Jinx
. I had quit for no other reason than I really liked to drink and I wanted to prove to myself I still had control of my choices, and because Jinx, a stand-in for my old man, didn’t drink. Once I was off the stuff a week, I felt ten years younger. So I stayed off. I called it my one-step program, and counted myself lucky I didn’t carry demons on my back like most of the heavy drinkers I knew.

‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘The payback comes when I can look at you and your mother and I don’t have to feel I’ve let you down. Then it’s not hard at all.’

‘You’ve never let me down, Dave.’

I could think of a few times when I had sent her out to feed the dogs and horses because I was still in town wrapped up in some important barroom talk, but instead of recounting my own failings, I started in on Walt Beery, our family’s poster child for the evils of drink. ‘Three days,’ I said, ‘and to save his life he couldn’t make it four.’ That was it. That was my talk on addictions great and small. Tubs would have mentioned his friend, poor soul, now locked up in an asylum because of that one joint laced with PCP, but I wasn’t the slimiest parent to have walked the earth, so I kept it simple and let Lucy work out the implications on her own. All things considered, I was fairly satisfied with myself, but Molly said later it was lame.

I expect it was, but I doubt anyone could have turned Lucy from the course she had chosen for herself that fall. She was growing up. She was suddenly something more than cute. She was, without quite comprehending it, a force of nature. Words can do nothing against that.

TWO DAYS LATER MY sabbatical came to its inevitable and tragic end, and I was sitting in a faculty meeting, the first I had attended in over fifteen months.

There were new faces and new procedures in place, but it felt like the same-old-same-old to me. A couple of days after that I met a new generation of students ready for the agony I was paid to deliver. The trouble was I wasn’t ready.

I had always liked going back to school in the fall, both as a student and as a prof. This time I had trouble adjusting. It had been too long: two summers and one academic year felt like a lifetime. I had developed new routines. I had gotten used to solitude. I liked staying in the country far away from people, especially academics. I had grown accustomed to silence and working the day through without a single crisis. If I wanted to scream profanities the horses never blushed.

The dogs wouldn’t dream of turning me in for a pat on the butt or a careless remark. Suddenly, all that was gone. Students were there with their expectations.

Colleagues needed a shoulder to cry on. People crowded into my life waiting for me to say something glib or intelligent or politically astute, and I discovered to my dismay I didn’t want it anymore.

My teaching, like my office desk, had a patina of dust covering it, as well. It would eventually get cleaned up and straightened out, the teaching and my desk, but not without effort and time. By the end of the first week, things were still not right, and I found I was ready for a drink. As I had no one to sponsor me, the only cure was a long talk with Walt Beery. Living the single life now, Walt’s biorhythms had begun a subtle transformation. At eleven-thirty he was still suffering from the night before and could not seriously think about a drink for another two or three hours. That was fine. We decided to have an early lunch at the Student Union.

I asked Walt on the way over if he was still off the booze. I could smell the answer coming out of his pores, but I thought things would go better between us if we got the confession out of the way early.

Walt gave a weary sigh, admitting his failure in a neat aphorism: ‘I’m not cut out for sobriety, David.’

Over a wilted salad and stale coffee, I said to him,

‘Have you talked to Barbara?’

‘She called me this morning.’ His eyes twinkled at the memory but faded at once, as close to shame as the practising alcoholic gets. ‘I was hung over like a son of a bitch, and she knew it.’

I laughed politely. Wives had certain powers denied other mortals, I told him. Then, ‘I take it you’ve got a place to stay?’

He shrugged, not exactly happy. ‘Got a one bedroom at the Greenbrier.’ I nodded, familiar with the place.

It was expensive, so there would be no students around.

That was good. Walt could screw-up all he wanted around young professional women. And he would, I knew that. Living too close to the co-eds, though, was bound to bring on early retirement.

‘Have you seen Buddy?’

This was not an especially pleasant topic for Walt, and his eyes avoided mine. His shoulders slumped a bit. ‘Not too much. I don’t think he was real happy about what happened with his girlfriend.’

‘The stripper?’ Walt nodded sorrowfully. ‘You were messing around with her?’ Walt nodded a bit less sorrowfully at this. In fact, I thought I detected a faint, proud smile, a story he meant to take to the old folks’

home. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘have you seen
her
?’

A watery smile, ‘Onstage a few times.’

‘What happened anyway?’

Walt shook his head. ‘It was just one of those afternoons. Oh! Before I forget. Barbara wanted me to ask you a favour.’

Barbara and I had never been close. That came with the territory, I suppose. You turn up in enough conversations involving lost afternoons that somehow drift into the early morning hours, and wives have a tendency to make rather comprehensive judgements. ‘A favour from me?’

‘Roger has written a book. Well, a novel. She wants you to read it, and see if it’s any good. And maybe talk to him about it.’ As he said this, Walt kept his eyes focused on the table. He knew what he was asking.

Roger was twenty-five, their only son. When I first met him Roger was a senior in high school with applications out to all the best schools in the country. He ended up turning everyone down, claiming he didn’t need to be ‘institutionalized.’ According to Walt and Barbara there was no reason for Roger’s strange and unexpected decision, but it did not take me long to realize Roger Beery had been slowing down and pulling back since the beginning of adolescence. The wonder of the science fair, who was taking Latin and Greek at the university as well as a couple of computer programming courses before his voice changed, had found drugs. Very serious drugs, actually, though nobody had noticed, at least nobody had told Walt and Barbara, because Roger comatose was still among the school’s best and brightest.

Since his dropout there had been reports of hopeful developments. Roger had decided to join the military.

Roger got a decent job at a local factory. Roger had been hired by a local company to update their computer systems. The follow up to whatever the good news never came. Something always got between Roger and success. I had lost track of Roger a couple of years ago because Walt just stopped talking about him. Then one day I saw him working at a downtown parking lot. He pretended not to know me, and that was the end of it. Until now.

‘What does Roger want?’ I asked.

Walt took a sip of coffee and looked away. ‘I don’t know, David. We don’t talk.’

I thought about complaining. I had kids come to me all the time who wanted me to read something. Some of them were in my classes, just not my creative writing classes. Some of the kids, the ones I didn’t know, would circle me in the halls like wolves edging closer to the campfire until they worked up their courage. The poetry, I could always shuffle off to one of our resident poets.

Fiction was not so easy, but I usually steered the younger writers to my introductory course in creative writing.

On those few occasions when I had been persuaded for one reason or another to read something outside of the classroom I always regretted it. The issue of quality aside, no one wants to hear criticism. People who have not submitted themselves to the rigors of peer criticism, the kind that occurs in a writing workshop, are especially sensitive to it. I did not want to read Roger Beery’s novel because I knew he wouldn’t be any different. He wanted me to love his story, and nothing else would do, but refusing Walt at this point in his life was difficult. The kid was a genius. How bad could it be?

‘Anytime,’ I said. ‘Just drop it off. I’ll take a look at it and give Roger an honest opinion.’

Walt looked relieved. ‘I hate to do this to you, David.’

But he was doing it, and that said it all.

A bit uneasy at having passed his family problems into my court, Walt reverted to form. He started talking about Randy Winston, whom he had seen ‘slinking’

around the TA offices checking out ‘the new talent.’

This of course meant that Walt had been slinking there as well, but I let that point pass. ‘New talent?’ I asked.

Walt cupped his hands in front of his chest. ‘
Talent
!’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know you.’

Walt laughed. ‘You can’t say tits anymore, David, so we call it talent!’

‘I suppose bodacious ta-tas is still frowned upon by the powers that be?’ Walt had picked up this unfortunate expression a few years ago. For a season it was all he talked about. It was my understanding he had been investigated for using the word in the classroom, but I could be wrong about that. The investigation I’m recalling might have been the joke about the perfect girl. Between rumours and the actual investigations launched against him no one could keep track of Walt Beery’s troubles, and I had long ago quit asking for the particulars.

I recall, as I look back on that afternoon, that after I spoke I happened to look around. It was something I usually did before I started talking to Walt, but I was out of practice. One table away, Norma Olson, Jane Trimble, and Marlene Moss were sitting in rigid silence.

The mention of bodacious ta-tas will do that, I’m told.

Walt answered me without noticing them or caring that they were there: ‘That’s real talent, David. You want
real
talent you have to see Johnna Masterson.

Johnna’s got more talent than I’ve got hands!’ Walt held up both hands for me to consider the propor-tions.

‘She’s in my creative writing class,’ I answered sullenly, hoping he would see that he was being monitored.

‘Winston dated her last year. Well, I guess it’s more like he cornered her at a party. All natural is the report.’

I glanced at the women again. They maintained a petrified silence.

‘Winston made a pass at Molly at the party,’ I said, hoping to divert Walt from any further discussion of talent by the handful.

‘Randy’s a son of a bitch.’

‘Of course, so did you and Buddy Elder, and probably half a dozen other men I don’t even know about.’

Walt’s grin flickered. ‘We’re all sons of bitches, David.’