No Dark Valley (62 page)

Bruce was mortified. Now without a doubt she was convinced that he was all stressed out over his age. Which he wasn't! He definitely wasn't.

Kimberly had already gotten a good start on her salad, Bruce noticed, and Madison had abandoned her place mat and crayons in favor of the applesauce. Whereas all her playing was done with great exuberance, she had grown into a curiously tidy little eater. He watched her fill her spoon with applesauce and carefully lift it to her mouth.

Bruce picked up his little cup of honey mustard dressing and drizzled it over his salad. “Forty years old—just think,” he said. There, if he talked about it openly, Kimberly would see how unbothered he was by his age. “I think it's a great age. You've gotten over trying to impress people, so you can focus now on what's really important.”

“Yeah, in the few short years left,” Kimberly said. She daintily picked a slice of cucumber from her salad bowl and popped it into her mouth, then munched contentedly, careful not to make eye contact with Bruce. He had often wondered how he would view Kimberly if she were somebody else's sister instead of his. Would he have been attracted to her, say, if she had been another single teacher at Berea Middle School when he started teaching there a couple of years ago? Probably not right then, not after what he'd just been through with that other woman in Montgomery, but how about later?

Kimberly had a lot going for her. Maybe she was a little undisciplined in some ways, but she was very funny and very big-hearted and very good-looking in spite of her extra weight right now.

“Hey, I just thought of something,” Kimberly said. “Wasn't Daddy around forty when he ran in the Memphis Marathon that year? Wasn't that the picture Mom always kept on her nightstand?”

It was true. Bruce had a fairly distinct memory of it, though he had been only five at the time. Kimberly hadn't been born yet, but somehow she knew her father's history better than any of them.

They had made a family vacation out of it, or tried to. Suzanne, who had been fifteen, had pouted all the way to Memphis and back because she was missing some party somebody was giving back home in Mississippi. She had complained about everything he did in the backseat, had even kicked him once when he was clicking two Popsicle sticks together, making harmless little noises.

He still remembered her bare foot, with its bright red toenails, swinging suddenly out of nowhere and landing a good one on his leg. And though he was only five and the kick was entirely unjustified in his thinking, he hadn't set up a wail about it, which must have stirred Suzanne to remorse, for she had immediately handed him a Milky Way candy bar and put a finger to her lips so he wouldn't tell. Even at five, he knew she was talking about the kick not the candy, and he had kept quiet about both. Already he was learning some important things about getting along with women.

“He was something, wasn't he?” Kimberly said.

Bruce nodded. “They both were.” Poor Kimbo, she had been only eleven when their father had died. She had worshiped him, had cried for weeks after the funeral.

It was a subject Bruce never brought up—his parents—though Kimberly was always looking for opportunities to do so, always trying to analyze what went wrong and why. For Bruce it was a subject that opened up too many
if
onlys and never led to anything productive.

What went wrong was very simple—his father had gotten cancer in his early fifties, had wasted away over the course of three horrible years, and had died an agonizing death at fifty-six, after which his mother had simply given up and willed herself to join him. At eleven, Kimberly had suffered more than any of them, for she had not only lost her father but her mother, also, whose emotional erosion began the day her husband died but dragged out over the next seventeen years.

The why of his father's death had been an awful question to wrestle with, the kind of question there's no answer for. Added to the enormous unfairness of it all, when his father had been such an all-round great guy—virile, handsome, strong, friendly, could pick up anything and do it well—was the ugly guilt that still reared its head during weak moments, even though Bruce knew in his heart that God's river of grace was broad and deep enough to carry away even that.
If only I had been there that last day to say good-bye
—that was the biggest
if only
concerning his father, the one that invariably started thrashing around inside his head at the very mention of his father's death.

And he could so easily have been there. That was the part that gnawed at his soul. His mother had called him that morning, had told him his father probably wouldn't last the day. She had said it before, had urged him home on numerous occasions, but she sounded different this time, more desperate and sure. He had started up Highway 49 from Jackson, meaning to go straight home. It was his senior year at Jackson State, with only three weeks of classes left before graduation. He had dinked around for four years, but, as he liked to tell it, he had perfected the art of dinking to the point that he could still pull a B average.

If he had just kept his eyes on the road driving through the town of Belzoni, maybe the impulse to wander wouldn't have struck. Maybe he would have made it all the way up to the junction of Highway 82, where he would have turned west at Indianola and headed home. But he didn't do that. Instead, he slowed down going through Belzoni, which was wise, considering the fact that he had already gotten two speeding tickets in towns along Highway 49. But approaching the Phillips 66 gas station, he had slowed down even more, had in fact turned in to get gas even though he still had half a tank.

And she was there, as he had figured she would be. The only woman he had ever known named Fiona. He had loved to say it when he first met her at Jackson State their freshman year—“Fiona from Belzoni.” That's how he had introduced her to everybody when they went out, which was an off-and-on thing practically all year. She had had a jillion boyfriends herself, so it didn't bother her that Bruce came and went.

She was almost engaged to somebody back home, she had told them all, but she sure didn't act like it. She meant to have fun, she said, since this was her only year for college. Her daddy ran a Phillips 66 gas station in Belzoni, she said, and she was taking it over next year after she took a couple of classes in business management and computers and accounting. She had a raspy voice that always sounded like the onset of laryngitis and a faceful of freckles you could play dot-to-dot with. Not your typical southern belle.

She was behind the counter when he went in to pay for his gas that day, a ball cap on and a pencil behind her ear. She still wore no makeup, not even a tinge of lipstick. Her shirt had a streak of grease across the pocket, right under the little name patch with Fiona stitched in cursive. But somehow she struck Bruce at that moment as the most beautiful girl he had seen in a long time.

She had grinned at him right off, spoken his name in her same old friendly unpretentious way. “Hey there, Bruce Healey. I always knew someday you'd come walking through that door.” A few months later in a movie theater, he would recall those words when he heard Marian say almost the exact same thing to Indiana Jones in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
.

“So you're a fortune teller,” Bruce had said, laughing. “Well, here I am. Got a coffee break coming up anytime soon?”

The coffee break had stretched into a lot more than just coffee back at her apartment. The engagement with the hometown guy hadn't worked out, she had told him, though there were signs everywhere in her apartment that a man spent a lot of time there. She had told Bruce to stop again on his way through sometime, and he had said he would.

Back on the road again, he was surprised when he looked at his watch and found he had spent almost two hours in Belzoni. Maybe on another trip he would have stopped again to see Fiona if he hadn't found, upon arriving at home that day, that his father had died an hour earlier and had been asking for him at the end.

So you make a selfish choice and for the rest of your life, you regret it. And every time you hear the word
father
, you feel like crud. You never bring up the subject yourself, and you try to evade it whenever someone else does, but you make sure it's never far from your mind by choosing, perversely, to wear your father's wedding ring, so that every time you look at your right hand, you'll see it and be reminded of the heavy price you have to pay and keep on paying for a thoughtless spree.

Not that the wedding ring had served to alter his behavior all that much—he had still spent way too much time on women after that—but at least it had made a difference when his grandmother had called three years ago from the Magnolia Lane Home and said his mother was failing and wasn't expected to live.

He had been teaching in Montgomery at the time and had gotten in his pickup truck in the middle of the day and driven straight through Alabama and Mississippi, zipping past towns all along the way where he knew all kinds of girls—Selma, Demopolis, Meridian, Jackson. He had gone by way of Vicksburg this time so as to avoid Belzoni, taking Highway 61 north instead of Highway 49, and he had arrived at his mother's bedside in time to feel the squeeze of her hand, which was quite strong for a woman who was dying, to see her eyes flutter open as she felt the gold wedding band on his finger, and to hear her utter one word: “Donald.” Not
his
name, of course, but the name of his father, whose death had extinguished her in every important way. She had breathed for seventeen years after he died, but she had not really lived.

“You think you could run a marathon?” Kimberly asked him now. “We'd come cheer for Uncle Bruce, wouldn't we, Maddy?” He saw that his steak was now sitting before him, his salad pushed over to the side. He was holding a steak knife in his right hand, which he didn't remember picking up.

Madison was squeezing a puffy roll in one hand. She waved it around, then took a big bite and chortled something that neither of them could understand except that it ended with “Unca Buce!”

A marathon. Now there was an idea. Though jogging had never appealed to him, maybe he should pick it up. Maybe sometime this next year, before he turned forty-one, he could enter a big race as his father had done. That's what he needed: a goal. He thought of the verses he had read in his Bible the night before, where Paul had talked about enduring affliction, fighting the good fight, finishing his course.

He looked at Kimberly across the table and smiled. “A marathon!” he said, raising a finger as if suddenly seizing on a brilliant idea. “‘I shall run that I may obtain!'” Though Kimberly could pick up on most of his movie quotes, he knew she'd never recognize one from the Bible.

Kimberly smashed up part of her baked potato and placed it on a saucer in front of Madison. “Isn't Uncle Brucie a funny man?” she said. “A funny
old
man?”

“Well, that makes me feel better,” he said. “On the way here you said I
wasn't
funny, and I've been worrying about it ever since.”

As he placed a bite of steak in his mouth, he imagined himself and a hundred other runners gathered at the starting line, poised for the gunshot. He saw himself move quickly into the lead, round a curve, and leave everyone else far behind. He wondered what it would be like if somewhere along the course someone would snap a picture of him, then put it in a frame and keep it on her nightstand.

31

Mount Pisgah's Lofty Height

At first Bruce worked the sound into his dream. A steady
thwump thwump thwump
like a heavyweight sparring with a punching bag. The dream was nothing that would hold together as a story, as usual, but a crazy mélange of people, places, and things. Just once he would like to have a plot in one of his dreams, some single obstacle to overcome, followed by a logical sequence of events that led to a triumph. Instead, his dreams were mostly composed of many obstacles, one after the other, against which he struggled mightily but never prevailed.

Such as with the punching bag, which was actually nothing more than a gigantic roll of paper towels stamped with green cats. Though it didn't weigh much, it kept swinging back and knocking him down, so that only every other thwump represented him landing a punch. The alternating thwumps were him getting hit by the paper towels, which didn't seem to be fastened to anything, but bounced around and came at him from all directions.
Thwump, thwump, thwump, thwump
 . . . the sounds stopped for a moment, and in his dream Bruce crawled across the floor, sweating profusely, toward a tiny doorway to escape.

Then again,
thwump, thwump, thwump
! He squeezed himself through the door and suddenly found himself in the middle of a steamy jungle, right in the path of a . . . he couldn't really tell what it was except that it was wearing a gray cape and had two huge legs like Doric columns coming straight for him. He was on the ground, unable to advance through the dense tangle of undergrowth, but whatever it was bearing down on him was plowing through the trees and vines as if they were mere grass clippings, calling out, “A good meal and free birthday cake to boot!”

He was scrambling around on all fours, trying to find a way out, when all of a sudden the sounds stopped again and he was sliding down a slippery mudbank into a murky jungle river. Little heads were poking up above the water all around him—shriveled jack-o'-lantern heads with little fiery orange tongues flicking in and out. He tried to climb up the bank, but it was too slick. So he took a deep breath, dove down into the dark waters . . .

Which led to a huge underground tunnel where marathon runners were lined up behind a rotund bass drummer with a tall red plume on his helmet.
Thwump, thwump, thwump
went the bass drum. “Ready, set, go!” called the bass drummer. The echo was tremendous, a hundred times worse than thunder, and Bruce clapped his hands over his ears. It was hot in the tunnel, and he found it hard to breathe.