Noah's Wife (12 page)

Noah's wife looks uncertainly at him.

“You're a photographer,” he repeats. “You've got the supplies for making prints, don't you? The only camera store in this town closed a year ago, and now there's no place for me to get these developed. Can you help me out?”

When he extends his arm toward her and releases the canister, she instinctively cups her hands to catch it. The weatherman grins. It is the first smile she has seen from him; the first real smile she has seen from anyone, she realizes, in days.

“So you'll do it,” he declares. It is a statement, not a question.

The zookeeper calls to her impatiently from below, and she shoves the film into her pocket as she rises. She leaves the weatherman's apartment, feeling pulled in more directions than she knew existed. How did Noah ever manage it—the weight of all these requests and expectations? By the time she arrives downstairs she has made up her mind to tell the zookeeper that she is serious, she is finished with all of this, that she simply cannot do any more for anyone except her husband—but before she can speak, a battered blue car speeds through the crosswalk right in front of them and then, a moment later, there is the screech of brakes and the scream of an animal in pain.

And how could she have walked away then? When she saw Mauro's car stalled in the street, one peacock dead at the curb and two more struggling out from underneath the bumper with broken wings and mangled tail feathers dragging along behind—how could she have left him? With the exhaustion weighing down her limbs, she helps the zookeeper bundle the remaining birds into the van while they are too dazed to fight back. She places her hand on Mauro's shoulder when he wails and wrings his hands. She nudges him into his own passenger seat and then slides behind the wheel to drive him back to his store.

In the car she listens to his confession—he was driving too fast because he was distraught. He tells her that he had gone to search for the savings he had hidden in an old fishing dory
along the banks of the river, only to find that the water had risen and swept the little boat away with the bills wrapped up and tucked under the seat. His dream of going home went with it. He contorts his face like a child and says that he is sorry for trying to leave but sorrier still that now he cannot. His eyes well up with salty tears and he covers his face with his gnarled hands.

“I was so wanting to be going home,” he says.

And how could she have left him afterward, when the zookeeper arrived with the two peacocks in tow, their wings set and their broken tail feathers clipped? Mauro is appalled at the sight of them, and appalled further still when the zookeeper tells him that there is no place for the peacocks but here, in Mauro's store.

“They can't go back outside,” he insists when the Italian tries to argue with him. “And who is responsible for them but you?”

But Mauro seems to cheer up a little after Noah's wife pours him a glass of his own wine from a bottle she finds below the register. The peacocks rustle their good wings and crane their iridescent necks, cooing as gently as mourning doves. In between his first glass and his second, Mauro builds a nest for them by pulling towels from the shelves of the outdoor aquatics aisle and arranging them in cottony folds on the bottom of one of the standing bathtubs for sale in the plumbing department. After some thought he drags over several of the tall potted plants from home-and-garden to make the birds feel more comfortable. He admires them there, their masses of feathers shimmering like precious jewels. They consider him with shining eyes and as soon as he returns to the front of the store they
climb out and follow him, leaving long four-toed footprints on the concrete floor. They flutter up to the counter and dig their beaks into their pinfeathers, preening, before finally settling themselves down beside the cash register. Mauro beams: the second smile Noah's wife has seen that day. She does her best to smile back. She doesn't ask him why he would choose to hide his life savings in such an irrational place; she understands that there can be no good answer. Instead she keeps the question to herself and stores it away with all the others that she has been burying in a dark place in her heart.

“This is all temporary, right?” she asks her husband when she finally returns home, physically and emotionally drained. She pictures the river rising in its banks, sees Mauro's homecoming being swept right out from underneath him. “Do you really believe that the rain will end and the water will go down?”

“I do and it will,” he says more loudly than he should, looking up in surprise from the stack of papers he is reading. He rises and comes to stand behind her, resting his broad hands on her narrow shoulders. “Try not to worry so much, love. Try to have some faith.”

I do, she wants to tell him, and she thinks she really does. He drops a kiss into her hair and she slowly climbs the stairway toward the bedroom. It is true that she doesn't have much faith in this plan, or this town, or this God to whom Noah swears he is praying daily for strong winds and clear skies. But she has always had faith in Noah—and for as long as she has known him, that has always been enough.

W
hen Mrs. McGinn's husband spots a dark figure shuffling down the muddy road ahead of him, he mistakes the shape for yet another lost or wounded animal.

He has become accustomed to braking for runaway mountain goats and reindeer, and he keeps his eyes peeled for other strays. Just last week he spotted a seal splashing in the ditch; and while he was climbing out to deal with that, a zebra went galloping by on the other side of the truck. Mrs. McGinn's husband simply stood and watched it go. There are only so many animals that one man can handle on his own.

The only creature he is glad to have found is the smaller of the two giant tortoises. He doesn't know why he stopped when he saw her paddling in the gravel at the end of someone's driveway, but he did. After a few minutes of watching the rain cascading down the sides of her shell, he stretched his arms into
the mud and heaved her up into the bus. He calls her George, feeds her canned fruit, and slaps the gnarled plates of her shell when he is irritated or amused. He feels more satisfied in the presence of this silent, sullen companion than he does with anyone else these days, and so when he runs his errands, George goes with him.

It is only when he and George draw closer to the figure on the road that he recognizes the minister: the black hood pulled low over his forehead, shoulders hunched, steps sluggish. He is at least two miles outside town; did he walk in the rain all this way alone?

“Hey,” grunts Mrs. McGinn's husband, throwing open the door and swinging the bus to the side of the road. He doesn't bother to ask whether the minister wants a ride or not; he simply stares the man down until Noah gives up and climbs in.

“Thanks,” says the minister. He glances with some trepidation at the tortoise on the seat behind Mrs. McGinn's husband before sliding gingerly past it, dropping down across the aisle. Mrs. McGinn's husband reaches back to pat the tortoise's shell, then shifts the bus into gear and lurches toward downtown.

He has never liked the feeling of being in motion. He hates the smell of the exhaust, the vibration of the rubber wheel beneath his fingertips. He hates the music on the radio and the sound of the windshield wipers squealing like pigs. Usually he drives with the radio tuned to static and with the windshield wipers off. The rain smashes into the glass and makes it difficult
for him to see, but he prefers to have his vision obstructed. The world seems less real.

On Wednesdays Mrs. McGinn's husband drives the garbage truck, on Thursdays the recycling truck. On other days he drives delivery vans or the town taxi. Nine months of the year he carts the children of the town to a schoolhouse several hills over. The final day of the school year was last week, thank God. The roads were getting worse every day. Sometimes it took him a full two hours to bus the kids there, all of them loud and rowdy the whole way back. These days the bus is empty of children, but packed instead with folding pens, bales of hay, and buckets of feed. When the zoo flooded the zookeeper transferred all the animals' supplies to a row of storage units downtown, and now it is Mrs. McGinn's husband who must load up the bus every morning and haul the day's supplies around to his neighbors' houses. His skin has begun to stink to high heaven, and when he showers he scours himself with extra-hard brushes and lemon soap. The regularity, the circularity. The driving, the rain, the route. This is it, over and over again: his life.

“So,” he says, his gaze flicking into the rearview mirror. “Nice day for a walk.”

Noah nods.

“What were you doing out there, anyway?”

“Nothing,” says Noah, his gaze hollow. “Walking.”

Mrs. McGinn's husband grunts. In the mirror he considers Noah's face—his skin corrugated and sallow; his beard much shaggier than it was when he arrived, his curly hair wild and
unkempt. Mrs. McGinn's husband tries to remember the man as he was only five or six weeks ago, when he appeared with his wife and spoke at the cemetery. He wasn't like this, anyway; his face was not ravaged with lines of weather and worry. His tone was resonant, his stance secure. He seemed certain of his purpose in this place—and now he goes out wandering for miles with no sense of direction? Mrs. McGinn's husband shakes his head, unsurprised. Well, well, what do you know—this town has ruined yet another one.

“If I were you, Minister,” he says, feeling good-humored with George by his side and thus more talkative than usual, “I'd walk right on out of this town. Your plans for the church don't seem to be working out. What the heck is keeping you here?”

Noah remains facing the window, his expression as smooth as stone. “The situation isn't that simple,” he says.

“For you? Sure it is,” declares Mrs. McGinn's husband. “You just got here—that means that you've got a life somewhere else. Hell, I'd leave in a second if I had a chance. I've been itching to get out of here since I was a kid.”

In truth Mrs. McGinn's husband does not often think of his childhood. And when he does, he rarely remembers his parents' home, which was full of broken glass and hateful words and hands lifted high, preparing to strike. Those years are a symphony of screams and slamming doors. Instead he remembers the weeks he spent at his grandmother's house, the summer wind pulling waves over his toes, the cries of gulls as he pelted them with bread crumbs. On the clearest of days he had stayed
out on the beach for hours, watching the way that the boats slid over the edge of the horizon and disappeared. He imagined standing on one himself, looking over his shoulder and watching as the shore grew smaller and smaller until the world, now, finally fell over the horizon and vanished beneath the sea.

He never left, of course. Once his brothers grew old enough they were gone, peeling out of the driveway without a single glance in the rearview mirror. He had wanted to leave, too, but if he had taken off, then there would have been no one left to stand between his father and his mother. He was middle-aged when she died—too old to take up sailing, he decided—and so after he helped carry her coffin to the overcrowded cemetery he took a job as a driver. And here he is.

Sometimes when he thinks about the life he had imagined for himself, the universe feels so maddening and unjust that there is nothing for him to do but to lift up an empty bottle from someone else's trash bin and smash it against the side of his truck. There are moments when he sees his reflection in the window of the recycling truck—short and squat, red-faced, losing hair by the handful—and he thinks about clambering back inside and taking off, never looking back, but then he comes to his senses and tells himself what he already knows: Anytime you try to flee, you will only end up running into yourself. As the poet once wrote:
Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt
.

“You know Latin?” the minister asks, hearing him mutter the motto to himself over the rumbling of the bus engine.

Damn right, he does. There's a lot that people don't know about him. He likes to write stories, for one thing—tall tales and mysteries. He used to be a runner, but he won't run in the rain. Now when he has finished up his driving for the day, he goes down to the basement and slips ships into bottles. He paints the tiny hulls and assembles the tiny masts with a kind of furious patience that his neighbors would not understand, if they ever saw it. This is the closest he will ever come to the ocean.

“What does that phrase mean?” asks Noah. He tries to repeat it.
“Caelum—”

Mrs. McGinn's husband interrupts the minister before the man can butcher it. “It means that men are trapped,” he says. “It means that no matter how far you go, you'll always be stuck with yourself.”

The truck rumbles through a pothole and both men grab at the dashboard while water sprays in waves outside the windows. Mrs. McGinn's husband swears and heaves the steering wheel to the right. He had never wanted to be a truck driver or—for that matter—any other sort of driver. He had never wanted to be the kind of person who knocks over mailboxes on purpose, the kind of person who throws cereal at people he loves or smashes plates against kitchen walls. He had vowed that this was exactly who he would not become.

“Is that why you stay?” asks Noah, his voice so deep that Mrs. McGinn's husband must strain to hear the question.

He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I stay because of Evelyn.
That's what sets me apart from all those jackasses she married before: I wouldn't leave her. Not for anything. Every man needs something to set himself apart, doesn't he, Minister?” He chuckles bitterly, guiding the bus through downtown to the parsonage, ignoring the elk that stands between the pillars of the old post office and the toucans winging through the drowning trees. “But I'll tell you, it's not an easy life in this place. Every day is a battle.”

“And leaving,” says Noah, “is an admission of defeat.” For a minute or two they ride in silence. Then Noah asks, slowly: “What if you told your wife how you really felt?”

Mrs. McGinn's husband can see the minister's house now, and the lights that his wife has lit in every window. “She'd see it as a betrayal,” he states. “And within ten minutes, she'd be out the door. She's fallen out of love plenty of times before.”

He pulls up to the front door, tires crackling on the driveway gravel. The house looks crumbling and forlorn, the paint peeling from its siding, the white shades in the windows yellowed with age, the rain falling in curtains from the eaves. The minister's wife appears at the front door, a red fox cradled in her arms with its white-tipped tail hanging down to her waist.

For half a minute Noah remains seated where he is, gazing at his wife. “Jackson,” he says quietly. He stands up and stumbles toward the driver's seat, pausing on the stair before descending to the ground. “Do you ever wish that you were not yourself?”

“Hell, yes,” says Mrs. McGinn's husband. “Every minute of every goddamned day.”

His life is like a ship in a bottle: the promise of movement, the dream of wind. All the journeys that could have been, lined up one after another on the plywood boards of his homemade bookshelves.

When all is said and done, he is not a bad man. He could be a better husband, a better father. But no one else here knows how it is to be confined within the invisible walls of an unhappy family history. The philosopher in Mrs. McGinn's husband believes that we are born into a certain temperament the way we are born into a certain place or time.

When he finally returns home, he settles George into the garage before he walks into the house. Mrs. McGinn sticks her head out of the kitchen and asks him something, but he ignores her and heads straight for the stairs. Once he reaches the workbench, he hears the slam of cupboard doors in the kitchen, the clatter of copper measuring cups. A few minutes later the thud of his wife's fists in the dough sends vibrations through the legs of the kitchen table to the floor.

Can a man fight his fate? he asks himself, lifting down his box of tools. He shakes his head. No, it isn't possible.

All he can do is build another ship, slip it into another bottle, and set it on the shelf in the place that has been left for it.