Dance Real Slow (2 page)

Henry's was still there, unchanged, and I left it
much as I had in high school, with a paper bag of two-cent candy: mostly caramels, peppermints, red-hots, and jawbreakers; and a pint of mocha chip ice cream, which was Kate's favorite. On my way back to the car it began snowing heavy flakes, big as feathers. Kate was standing down by the river, breath pushing in bursts from her face. I came up behind, taking her gently by the elbow and then the forearm. She told me my teeth and lips were red. I opened the bag and pointed inside and she nodded as we walked back to the car. I had forgotten to get spoons, so we carved out chunks of ice cream using keys. And when we were finished we went back to the river and washed off, using a T-shirt I had in the trunk to dry ourselves. At one point, while Kate was bending low to cup the cold water to her mouth, snow settling evenly on her hair and shoulders, I remember thinking I loved her more than anyone else, more than I could possibly love anyone else. That I would never stop loving her. But, of course, I was wrong. I could love someone more. And, indeed, we could stop loving each other. For as powerful and encompassing as love is, during brief moments, it turns fragile, needing desperately to be protected.

Calvin and I finish in the kitchen and I take him upstairs to bed. From the time he was a baby, he has always been easy to put to sleep; it has never been a struggle.

Calvin's room is across the hall from mine, next to the bathroom. It is bright and spare and I have promised to paint large dinosaurs on the walls in green and purple
when I have the time. He also wants a big blue barn beside the doorway, below the end of his bed. I have told him that most barns are red, or at the least brown, but he seems unfazed, stoic. He wants his blue.

I close the window while he brushes his teeth. He is good about this, too, never needing to be told. He slides into bed and I pull the covers up close to his face. Leaning over, I kiss him lightly on the cheek and nose and whisper I love him.

The air is thin and active, pushing V-shaped parts into the front of my hair. I stand on the porch smoking a cigarette, breaking the ashes off against the wooden railing. The final draft of Roby Edwards's last will and testament sits flapping on the end of an aluminum-and-vinyl lawnchair. I did not go to law school to ensure that the estate of the third largest landowner in eastern Kansas was equitably divided among his family; things have simply worked out that way.

At 41,094, Tarent, Kansas, is the seventh largest city in the state—just ahead of Hutchinson and behind Salina. Tarent is twenty-two miles west of Lawrence, where the University of Kansas is located, and about sixty miles east of Kansas State, which is in Manhattan. The route to either is easy. Manhattan is 70 West into Topeka, then switch over to 50. Lawrence is 50 East all the way. I drive to one of the schools weekly to use the law library. Tarent's public library is small, and most of its legal section concerns itself only with basics. Exactly three and one quarter shelves of it, beginning with William B. Anderson's 1964 manual entitled
Constitutional
Law
and ending with Jerome Wiley's twice checked out
Defense for Hard-Core Offenders
. There are also quite a few legal volumes at the firm I work for, Blyth & Blyth, although we, too, are small. Just three lawyers, including myself.

I met Harper Blyth at Michigan, during my second week of law school. He lived down the hall from me in one of the few single rooms in our dormitory. I remember first encountering him after returning from a student-union showing of
It's a Wonderful Life
with Jimmy Stewart, which seemed to be a strange film for the university to play in late September. My roommate was Michael Bennett and the two of us were walking up the stairway to our floor. Michael was telling me how during Christmas his sophomore year of high school he had mononucleosis and was bedridden for nearly five weeks. He said the local television stations in Richmond, Virginia, where he was from, had shown
It's a Wonderful Life
nine times during that period and he had watched every airing. All except the last twenty minutes of the seventh broadcast, when he passed out from the codeine pills they had given him for his swollen throat. His girlfriend at the time had brought over a giant stuffed frog and placed it above the television set. The frog had a sign around his neck that read “Get Better Quick,” but his younger brother had crossed out the word “Quick” and had written next to it in red marker “Dick.” So now every time Michael sees
It's a Wonderful Life
he can't help but think of the obscene frog once perched on his television.

Michael had just finished telling this story and the
two of us were on our floor, standing next to a soda machine, when we heard a low-pitched crack, like the sound of an ax striking wood, followed by the breaking of glass. We heard someone yell out he was sorry, that it was
his
mistake. Michael and I moved around the corner, looking down the long hallway. Near one end, alone, Harper Blyth was sweeping shards of glass from a fire-extinguisher cabinet into a pile against the wall. He was using a polo mallet like a push broom. He was dressed in complete polo attire: a white helmet and jodhpurs, a navy shirt with a thick horizontal bar of white across his chest, and large brown riding boots.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked Michael.

“Oh. Well—” Harper looked around for something to whisk the glass onto, like a newspaper. “See, it's my birthday and—you wouldn't know where I could get a dustpan?”

“You're dressed like that because it's your birthday?” said Michael.

I handed Harper a magazine someone had abandoned on a chair.

“Thanks,” he said, opening the magazine to the middle, where the staples rise like Braille. “No—or
yes
, I guess I am dressed like this because it's my birthday. Actually, my father sent the stuff.”

“A present?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you play?” asked Michael.

“Nope,” Harper said, balancing the broken glass, piled in sparkling heaps, over to a trash barrel. “In fact,
I don't think I've ever even been on a horse. Except maybe when I was little, at one of those riding zoos or someplace.”

At that point, I did not think I would ever have much to do with Harper Blyth. Not for any particular reason, other than I didn't think he was the kind of person with whom an aspiring attorney should associate.

When I wake up, Calvin is standing at the foot of my bed, wet again. The rain is steady, like an engine, and Calvin has gone outside in only his pajama bottoms and a large sombrero that my mother brought back from Mexico.

“You're not normal,” I tell him, into my pillow.

“Are you gettin' up?”

He moves around to the side of the bed, near where my face is mashed against the stiff ridge of the mattress.

“Why did you go outside?” I ask him softly.

“To get Moonie,” he says, lowering his head to see if my eyes are open. Moonie is our neighbor Mrs. Grafton's cat. I lie still, breathing easy for several minutes. Finally, I roll from my side onto my back, staring straight up at the stucco ceiling.

“Calvin, where is Moonie?”

Calvin reaches over, grabbing the blanket above my chest and hoisting himself on the bed. He lifts up his leg, straddling my stomach, his knees pressed firmly against my rib cage.

“Oh, she's okay.”

“Where's okay?”

“She's drying off,” Calvin says, shoving his wet face onto my shoulder, the sombrero slipping down the side of his back. “In the basement. With the clothes.”

“Good,” I say. “With the clothes.”

I remain motionless for a few moments longer and then, as if on command, sit up, erect, knocking Calvin backwards onto my shins. I hurl from bed and run down both flights of stairs, until I reach our laundry room. The dryer is off, but I open the door anyway, peering inside. Calvin is behind me.

“Sheesh, Dad,” he says, his hands cupped together above his groin.

My chest slows as I stand. Looking across the room, I can see the clothesline is moving, rocking uneasily with the awkward rhythms of an EKG. There is a gray laundry bag hanging from the line, six clothespins fastening it along the top. Moonie is struggling to escape, her tiny claws tearing at the nylon. A stool sits off to the side with a puddle, smooth as linoleum, centered at its base. I undo the bag, and as I pull apart the drawstrings, Moonie scurries across the hard cement floor, trying to find a place to hide. A place to hide from my son.

“See, Calvin,” I say, taking him by the elbow and leading him toward Moonie. “Now she's scared of you.”

“She ain't a-scared. She just wants to play or something.”

The two of us walk out of the laundry area, into an adjoining room that is dark and mostly empty except for six or seven large boxes stacked in a far corner. Calvin
runs ahead, and when he reaches the boxes, he falls to his knees and starts crawling on all fours. He is making a squeaking sound, calling out for Moonie. The cat wants nothing to do with Calvin and she digs into one of the rear boxes and begins scaling it until she slips over the edge and inside. I reach down, placing my hand below the cat's front legs, pulling her free. Her claws are caught on a sweater and she brings it halfway out before it drops loose. Calvin comes over to me, taking the cat into his arms, against his chest.

“See, she's
not
scared.”

The cat looks terrified and she struggles to climb away from Calvin—across his shoulder and down his back. But Calvin is quick and he adjusts Moonie along his sternum.

“Does Mrs. Grafton know you have Moonie?” I ask, picking up the sweater.

“I s'pose,” Calvin says.

“Suppose nothing. You take her back over there.”

I lift the wool sweater to my face, inhaling deeply when it reaches my nose. Beneath the pungent ammonia stench of mothballs, it smells faintly of Kate.

“Here,” I say to Calvin. “Slip this on.”

“That's not mine.”

“I know,” I answer, holding Moonie in one hand while I pull the sweater down over Calvin's head. I roll the sleeves up several times. “It's your mother's.”

He is unimpressed. He takes back the cat and walks toward the staircase, the hem of the sweater flapping a few inches above his feet.

“And before you go over there, put on your boots.” He lets out a small huff and then climbs away.

This morning her hair is pulled back tight, into a small blond plume at the back of her head, fastened with a floppy, oversized ribbon. She is wearing a white blouse beneath a pair of coarse, new overalls. Calvin waves to her from the passenger seat of the car.

“Listen, I'm coming by early today—remind Charlotte,” I say to him, combing the hair out of his face with my fingertips. “I told her last night, just remind her.”

Meg is still standing in the doorway, adjusting one of the overall straps against her shoulder. She is Calvin's closest friend. Her mother, Charlotte, watches the two of them most days, while I am at work. Kneeling up, Calvin kisses my cheek and then slams the door behind him. Both Meg and I watch as he navigates the soggy pathway to the house. Part of me imagines that Meg wants to see Calvin slip, landing face-first in a kidney-shaped puddle of creamy mud. She has a dark side not normally so well defined in a child her age. Once, I saw her squish a ladybug beneath her thumb and then smear it down her nose, like war paint. Another time, she took a barbed pine branch and wrapped it around her neck, a fallen crown, yanking until it turned her throat red with irritation. Charlotte hopes she will outgrow this behavior and, truthfully, so do I.

When Calvin reaches the porch, he turns and gives me a forward nod, as he does most mornings, as if to say, “Go
on
, already.”

The car's stick shift sometimes has trouble with reverse,
like today. You have to move it into neutral and shake it with quick, short snaps of your wrists, as if making popcorn in a pot. The car is a cream-colored 1966 Volvo station wagon that belonged to my maternal grandfather, Sanford Blaine. He gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday, four months before he moved from Akron to Phoenix. My father did not want me to have it; he didn't think I needed a car and he certainly didn't think I was responsible enough to own one. So, the day after my grandfather brought it over, my father took a baseball bat and caved in both the front and rear windshields. He told me when I could afford to have them replaced I could drive the car. He also told me to sweep up the glass. It took me nine weeks, working two jobs—one before school and one after—before I got new windshields. Three days after I was driving again, the carburetor went. That took me another five weeks to replace.

I pull onto Kenimore, which is a long two-lane stretch of road that fills most of Tarent. It will take me to Mercer Street, at the center of town, a block from my office. My father was like that, with the windshield and all. He was used to getting his way and making a point in doing so.

When I was nine months old he quite suddenly moved the family from Des Moines, Iowa, to Lakeshire, Ohio, outside Cleveland, and in the twenty-six years that followed he served as the men's head basketball coach at Eastern Ohio University. He took the Eagles to fourteen straight NCAA basketball tournaments, eighteen overall. He also won a national championship, in 1979,
and was runner-up two other times. I have his national championship ring in a blue velvet box at the back of my underwear drawer, along with a St. Michael's medallion that was given to him when he was born, and a knuckle of mashed gold—unrecognizable as his wedding band. It had once gotten caught in a lawnmower, along with his finger, and he never bothered to have it restored.

World's Loudest Frog
reads the cardboard sign, written in dark green marker and stapled to the side of a small wooden crate resting near the walkway to my office. A thin-limbed boy is kneeling in lemon grass, stroking the aforementioned frog with his bony fingers.