Men in the Making (19 page)

He checks the speedometer, checks his watch. He'll be back in town in forty-five minutes. There are almost two hours left allocated for his trip, plenty of time for a detour, so when he sets the cruise control at seventy, though he is technically now ten-seven from the hospital, he turns the two-way off without calling in. He takes his brace off, lets his hand quake atop the insulated box beside him while he drives, lets himself ask a question he so rarely permits of himself, one that has forever gone unanswered:
How is it, Lord, that you've left me in the world this way?

 

The children have vanished. Their bicycle ramp sits abandoned in the street. Dean's noticed this before, how easily, despite their numbers, they can make themselves invisible. Last summer, while fertilizing the front lawn, he'd thought for sure he'd have to make an appointment with his neurologist. The hum in his ears was faint, but there was something else rising in its place. He'd walk awhile behind the spreader, spinning fertilizer onto the grass in front of him, and there it would be, a ghostly, animal chatter, a flittering of wings, but when he turned toward the sound it fell silent. He shook his head hard and went about his work until he noticed a rustling in the leaves of his neighbor's towering pecan tree. He walked closer, and on a thick lower branch beneath a dense overhang of foliage there stood, in a row, six bare little pairs of feet. "Well," he said, smiling, "I'm not going to have a bunch of squirrels making off with Mr. Diggles' pecans when they're still too green to eat. I'd better go get my pellet gun." Then he turned and the children dropped fast and giggling from the tree, scattering in a half dozen directions to hide themselves in houses and hedges.

Now Dean parks in his driveway, straps his brace back, looks up and down the quiet street. He switches the two-way on and calls in. "Ninety-six, Luanne."

"Ninety-six," she says. "Go ahead."

"I'm ten-seven now. Got held up behind a harvester on the way down, but I shouldn't have any trouble getting back on time."

"Ten-four," Luanne says, and then the radio falls strangely silent.

In the living room, Dean puts the box on the couch, throws the front curtains wide to let some light in. He pulls his rosary from its leather pouch on the end table. Then he gets on his knees before this little body in its box.

He crosses himself with the crucifix, thumbs the rosary's medal and recites the Apostles' Creed, an Our Father, three Hail Marys, and then, before he begins the first decade of beads, he lifts the lid from the box. In the car, on the way home, he had imagined this moment, imagined a body swaddled in a new white blanket, its face serene, unexpressive. Here, instead, is something that looks like it's been in the world for an eternity, a body curled into itself, its legs tucked and bent as if arthritic, its skin wrinkled and translucent, tinged with gray.

Dean's bad hand has fallen so still it startles him, and he pinches the next bead hard between his thumb and fingers. He had wanted to replace the prayers of the Sorrowful Mysteries with demands on behalf of this child's mother, to interject her name into every prayer, to kneel until his knees went numb and his body trembled with its own electricity, until he found himself waiting, this baby cradled and shining in his arms, aglow in the hot wash of light at the foot of the void tank's ladder, until Sarah Kneeland Whiteside descended to him, kissed him softly on the cheek, and reclaimed her swaddled son.

Instead, when he closes his eyes to pray, when he thumbs the beads, when the visions come, he sees only himself, a man with paint-splattered coveralls, a man laid out and unconscious in a deep well of darkness. Helpless.

Dean remembers a promise, a promise of the Virgin that his mother taught him when he was just a boy, the promise that those who devoted themselves to the rosary would receive signal graces, and now, now as his hand begins twitching and his spine tingles with the onset of seizure, he stands, squeezing the beads in his hand, shaking them hard.

He pulls his cigarettes from his pocket, fires one up, blows smoke onto the beads. He imagines standing over that deck portal, pulling the air hose and the worklight up onto the deck, and what he wants right now is to toss this rosary inside, to hear it hitting bottom, to bolt the portal shut and walk away.

And then it comes. The buckling of his legs, the taut pull of gravity in his chest, the crack of his head against the hardwoods. The smell of cut grass and rising yeast, of sweet spices and chimney smoke. The surging release of his body's energy. He hears chiming, the violent work of the tongues of bells, and then there is only red giving way to black.

When he comes to, Dean Covin finds his cigarette burning on the floor a few feet from his face. He tests his legs and arms, clinches his fists. The rosary is still balled up in his bad hand. He stands, puts the cigarette between his lips, tucks the beads into his front pocket, and when the chiming starts up again he recognizes it for what it is. Dean takes one last look at this body in its box, replaces the lid. And then he goes to answer the door.

On the front porch, John Dalton stands with his hands out, his palms running with blood. "Check it out," he says. "Pretty nasty, huh?"

Dean's head is throbbing, so he steadies himself with his good hand against the doorjamb. John Dalton's eyes are wet and there's a trickle of snot creeping out of his nose. "What happened?" Dean asks. "What did you do?"

The boy sucks the mucus into his nose, spits into the front hedge. "I bit it," he says. "On my bike. You should've seen it. I totally flew over my handlebars."

Dean nods, looks over his shoulder at the box.

"You gotta help me," the kid says. "I gotta clean this up. My mom sees this, she's gonna freak."

"You bet," Dean says. "Wait here." He heads to the bathroom, grabs a hand towel and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and when he comes back out John Dalton is standing in the living room with his eyes on the box.

"What's that?" the boy asks. "What's in it?"

Dean adjusts his brace, pulls the Velcro tighter. He should make something up, he knows. He should fashion a lie the kid will believe, one that will get him away from that box and out of the house, one that will allow Dean to keep him from seeing something a little boy shouldn't ever have to see. Instead there's a flash of his vision, and he sees himself flat on his back, a man incapable of summoning comfort, for himself or for anyone else, and now something is smoldering in him, resignation fanned by curiosity. Why not? he thinks. Why not stand here and lift that lid, let the kid have a look, see in the boy's eyes the sudden recognition that he's walking around in a world all too willing to inflict wounds at random, in a world where even children stand to lose more than a little skin off their palms.

"It's a baby," Dean says. "A baby's body."

John Dalton looks at the box. Dean expects now that the boy will challenge him, will refuse to believe what he's been told, to need the proof only his eyes can give him, but John Dalton just stares at the box and nods, and when he looks up at Dean his eyes register only calm acceptance, then curiosity. "Did you look?" the kid asks.

Dean nods, gravity pulling at him again, but this, he knows, is not a seizure coming on. No, this is something different, something he recognizes as the grounding onset of shame. Here's this boy, after all, bleeding in his neighbor's living room, his eyes wider with fascination and concern than they've ever been when Dean opened a specimen container out on the driveway. What interests the kid, Dean realizes, what piques his curiosity, is not the body of a baby packed in Styrofoam on the couch, but the man standing in front of him, the man he's come to for help. He wants to know what Dean did or didn't do, to see what kind of man Dean might or might not be.

Now the boy holds his hands out, says, "I think I dripped some blood on your floor."

"That's okay," Dean says. "Come on. We'll take care of that on the porch."

Outside, the wounds fizz white when the liquid hits. John Dalton winces but doesn't pull his hands away. Dean dabs at the boy's palms with the towel, pours more of the stuff onto the cuts, and the whole time the kid is talking, talking about the grandfather he lost last year, about how the old man used to take him fishing every summer, about how he looked in his coffin, about how his aunts and uncles kept saying how good the old man looked, how lifelike, how it looked just like he was sleeping. "But it didn't," John Dalton says, spitting into the yard. "His face was all fat. Besides, it was way too quiet. Gramps used to snore his butt off when he slept."

John Dalton blows onto his wounds, shakes his hands a little and nods down at Dean's pocket where part of the rosary is dangling. "Those Mardi Gras beads?"

Dean smiles, tells the boy no, not exactly. "It's a rosary. You pray with it. I was praying."

The boy glances down at Dean's hand, at his brace. "For what?" he asks. "For yourself?"

"For other people mostly. People in need."

The boy holds his hands up, tells Dean thank you, takes a step off the porch, but before Dean can walk inside the boy turns, asks if he's all right. "You don't look so good," he says. "Maybe you should."

"Should what?"

"Say one for yourself. I mean, it can't hurt, right?"

After he shuts the door and checks his watch, Dean Covin gets back on his knees, because he has time, if he hurries, for one short prayer; because there's a boy out on his driveway who knows already about the permanence of loss, that it can't be concealed, that grandfathers who sleep without snoring can't take you fishing; because Dean knows that the boy is right, knows that in all these years since his accident he's never once said a prayer for himself.

Now he balls the beads up in his bad hand so that he's praying the whole rosary at once, and if you could be there, watching over him, hunkered between the hedges and the house, peering into the front window with a curious little boy beside you, his hands cupped around his eyes while he steams the glass with his breath and smears it with his blood—if you could be there watching while this man inside puts his fist to his moving mouth, you wouldn't hear Dean Covin complete, in a whisper, a prayer twelve years in the making. You wouldn't see what he sees, his body twitching at the bottom of a dark metallic hold some forty miles from shore. You wouldn't feel the light that pours into him and bears him up in such a way that he's floating in midair toward the portal above, rising into the light that will find him, in just a few minutes, not on the deck of a drilling rig, but out on his driveway with an insulated box in his hands, out in a bright world overrun with the likes of Randi Stimmons and John Dalton and Sarah Kneeland Whiteside and Driver Eighty-two and you, all of you aching for what you're walking around without, for what you've lost somewhere along the way to today, the day when Dean Covin walks among you with a limp, and looks at you with a gentle and kind and wandering eye, and shakes your hand with a shaking hand, and knows, despite his injuries, or perhaps because of them, that to be a man, a whole man, is to remain forever in need.

T
HESE STORIES ORIGINALLY
appeared, often in different form, in the following publications, all of whose editors I gratefully acknowledge:

Descant:
"Where You Begin"
Five Points:
"Something for the Poker Table"
Glimmer Train:
"The Only Good Thing I've Heard" & "Among the Living Amidst the Trees"
Iron Horse Literary Review:
"Monuments"
One Story:
"What You're Walking Around Without"
Salt Hill:
"An Instance of Fidelity"
Soundings East:
"We Don't Talk That Way in Texas"
Story:
"Because He Can't Not Remember"
Zoetrope:
"The Last One Left in Arkansas"

Many thanks to the good folks at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Ohio Arts Council, Ohio State University, Lone Star College—North Harris, and the Sirenland Writers Conference for their generous support.

A whole passel of readers has helped nudge these stories, over the course of many years, toward their present forms. Special thanks to each and all: Lee K. Abbott, Will Allison, Steve Almond, Stephanie Grant, Michelle Herman, Karl Iagnemma, Marya Labarthe, Mike Lohre, Jason Manganaro, Erin McGraw, Tom Moss, Bryan Narendorf, Dan O'Dair, Kirk Robinson, James Robison, Steve Sansom, Samantha Schnee, Mark Steinwachs, Melanie Rae Thon, Hannah Tinti, Juliet Williams, Tom Williams, Nancy Zafris, and, most especially, Matthew Batt, who reads, bless him, every word I write.

Love and endless appreciation to my parents, my brothers and sister, and to the wondrous and beloved children: Evan, Jillian, and Dalton.

I am forever grateful for my talented, steadfast agent, Irene Skolnick, and for the finest trio of big-hearted women in the publishing business—Adrienne Brodeur, Carla Gray, and Taryn Roeder.

And for the woman who reads, with equal artfulness and care, my sentences and my oft-illegible heart. This is for you, Marya—this and any that may follow.