Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (17 page)

“You said to be honest.”

“I didn't
really
want you to be honest.”

“I didn't sleep with her. That's honest.”

“Your brother thinks you did. Your son thinks you did. You just said you would have if she'd let you. Buddy will spend his entire life thinking you slept with her. Unless you tell him otherwise. You have to tell him the truth.”

“He's my brother, and his wife cheated on him.”

“You can't change that.”

“All I'm saying . . . ”

“Just please, Chic. Quit talking. You're making it worse.”

He tried the bathroom doorknob, but it was locked.

“Chic, I don't want to see you. I don't want to be around you. I don't understand you. I think I might hate you.”

“Hate me?
Really?
My god. Don't tell me that.”

“Please let's just . . . no more talking.”

“I want to make it better. I'm trying to make this better.”

“Chic please just . . . just please.”

“But you hate me.”

“I don't hate you.”

“You said you hated me.”

“Chic. Enough.”

“I lied earlier. I wouldn't have slept with her.”

“You're not making this any better.”

“She's my brother's wife. Even if she wanted to, I would have said no. Really. Truly.”

“You can't lie after you've told the truth. It doesn't work that way.”

“I want you to think I did the right thing. Tell me you think I'm doing the right thing.”

“Even if you're helping your brother, which you're not, but that's beside the point, the point is you're not helping me. You're not helping Lomax. And we're your family.”

“It's just that . . . she slept with another guy.” He put his forehead against the door, and mumbled. “And she didn't want to sleep with me.”

“What's that? What'd you say?”

“Nothing. It's just that . . . I said, you can't tell Buddy. Don't ever tell Buddy.”

Diane didn't answer.

“I know you're not going to say anything, but just know, if you tell him, if he knows the truth . . . even if you don't agree with what I did, you can't tell him.”

Outside, Lomax honked the car horn, two long blasts—honk, honk.

 

The adulterous relationship between Lijy and Chic was just too heavy a cross for Buddy to shoulder. Each time Lijy walked into a room he was in, he walked out. He refused to drink the tea she made for him, and, of course, he wouldn't sleep in the same bed with her. He grew a beard, and took showers at odd times, spending large amounts of time in the steam-filled bathroom wiping the mirror and staring at his bearded face. He started smoking cigarillos. He had dreams in which he strangled Chic until his head exploded. He had other dreams in which he stabbed him repeatedly in the stomach with a dinner fork (and another in which he whacked him over the head with a sledgehammer). The two of them used to catch frogs in the creek behind the farmhouse when they were kids. Buddy stood up for Chic in high school when the other kids tried to knock his books out of his hands. Alone, out on the road, in motel-room beds, Buddy had often thought of Chic at home with their mother and Tom McNeeley, and worried about how he was doing. Then Lijy sat him down on the couch and told him that she and Chic had . . . had . . . he couldn't even replay it in his memory. He didn't want to think about it. It had happened right there on the living room carpet. Oh, Jesus. He wanted to kill himself. Maybe he should go behind a barn and sit down in the snow like their father. No, he couldn't do that. He wouldn't do that. He would never let himself do that. What was he going to do? He couldn't leave Lijy; she was pregnant. He needed some time to think. He had to clear his head and get this all straight.

One afternoon, Lijy ducked her head into the living room and asked Buddy nicely (too goddamn nicely, he thought) to “extinguish” that “awful-smelling cigarette.” He told her it wasn't a cigarette; it was a cigar and it was supposed to smell this way, and besides, he liked the smell, and thank you very much, she really shouldn't be telling him what to do.

She stood there staring at him. “The smoke isn't good for the baby.”

“Fine. That's it.
That's it.
Not good for the baby. Not good for the baby. Not good for Chic's baby.” He stubbed out the cigarillo. “My God. My goddamn God. That maggot.” Buddy went upstairs and got his suitcase from the bedroom closet and threw some clothes into it.

Lijy came upstairs and stood in the bedroom doorway holding a mug of tea. “So that's it? You're leaving?”

“If I can't smoke my damn cigars in here, I'm leaving.”

“Does this mean it's over?”

“I don't know . . . actually, yes, it's over. Fini, as the French say. Actually, no. It's not over. I don't know what it means. I need some time to think.”

“I'm pregnant, Buddy.”

“That's why I'm leaving. You told me you don't want me to smoke around the baby.”

“I love you.”

He stood there, holding his suitcase.

“I do. It's true. I made a mistake. I admit it. A big mistake. I told you, I was just trying to get your attention. That's the truth.”

He didn't say anything.

“Are you going to say anything? Say something. You never say anything. You have to say something, Buddy.”

He stared at her, a hard stare with his eyes fierce like smoldering lumps of coal. “This would have been much easier if you wouldn't have slept with my brother.”

Buddy took up residence at the Wel Kum Inn, a low-rent motel outside of Middleville on Route 7. It was by far the worst
motel he had ever stayed in. There wasn't even a sign, just a sheet of plywood with the name WEL KUM INN spray-painted on it and propped up by a bucket. An old Mexican guy wearing a sombrero slept on a folding chair outside the lobby door. A transistor radio, the antenna extended so high it was a hazard for the eyes, sat on the counter beside a rack of dusty old Wel Kum postcards. Hanging on a single nail behind the counter was a 1957 calendar from Kneep's Automotive Shop. Buddy remembered going there as a kid with his father, who was trying to get a job at the service station. As the men who worked in the shop clinked around with their wrenches, his father sat there, staring straight ahead, not a single emotion on his face, just a wash of blankness, while he waited his turn to interview. Buddy asked the guy behind the hotel counter to move to his left in order to block the calendar from his line of sight. He paid for a room in cash and checked in under the name Nate West.

That night, Buddy pulled the shades shut and stacked pillows on the desk chair and set his derby hat on top of them. He heard scratching on the motel door. He ignored it at first, but it continued, so he opened the door. Down on the ground was a cat, a mangy thing, thin like it hadn't eaten for weeks. It darted into the room and hid under the bed. Buddy tried to shoo it out, snapping and saying, “Here kitty kitty kitty kitty.” He got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed—the cat's yellow eyes glowed back at him. He tried to grab at it, but the cat hissed at him, so he left it alone. Maybe later he could pet it. Petting a cat would make him feel better.

Buddy lit a cigar. “So,” he said to the pillows. “So so so so. This is where you've taken us. Chic, your son, sleeps with my wife, impregnates her, and I'm on the brink of doing something horrible, worse than horrible, terrible, humiliating. Did you know that I couldn't even look at the Kneep's calendar in the lobby of this hotel? I had to ask the guy at the counter to step in front of it. Do you know why? Because of you—because it reminded
me of you.” The cat had come out from under the bed and was sniffing around the nightstand. “I need answers, Dad. What were you doing at Kneep's?” The cat sat down and looked up at him. Buddy ashed the cigarillo and took a drag. “I'm on my own, aren't I? Well, I don't want to be on my own. I want a father. In six or seven months, there's going to be another mouth to feed in Middleville—a bastard son, my bastard son.” Outside, a car pulled into the Wel Kum's parking lot. The headlight beams raked over the wall and disappeared when the engine stopped. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked. “I just want some answers.” There was a knock at the door. Buddy went to the window and peeked through the shades, carefully, so that he wouldn't be seen. In the parking lot, he saw Lijy's car parked next to his. She was standing at his motel room door. She was beginning to show her pregnancy, a bulge in her stomach. Buddy was shirtless, a cigarillo dangling from his mouth. His beard was straggly like a young Fidel Castro. He opened the window shades so that she could see him.

“Please come home,” she said.

He inhaled a lungful of smoke and exhaled it into the window. He shut the curtains. The cat was looking up at him. It meowed. Buddy picked it up. “It's me and you, now, little fellow.” He heard Lijy's car start and back out of its parking spot. Buddy went into the bathroom and filled up a glass with water and set it on the floor. The cat lapped at it. “A son should name his firstborn after his father. You know that, little guy. That's what my no good maggot brother never understood. He probably doesn't even like cats. I like cats. I like you, and you're my first cat, so I'm going to name you Bascom. Bascom the Cat. How do you like that name?”

Buddy squatted down to pet the cat between the ears. The cat continued to lap at the water.

Chic had stepped in front of a bullet for Buddy, and now he and Lijy were probably spending their nights snuggling together and talking to each other in baby voices. They were probably holding hands at the grocery store. He had probably rekindled their love, blown into its mouth and brought it back to life. Forgiveness is powerful, and he was responsible for theirs. He'd nailed himself to the cross for them, and what sort of thanks had he gotten? Nothing—just a wife and son who were furious with him. It had been six weeks, and Diane still wouldn't talk to him, wouldn't look at him, wouldn't even share a bar of soap with him. (She'd put his bar in a coffee mug and left him a note taped to the medicine cabinet explaining that he shouldn't use, shouldn't even touch, the bar in the soap rack, her bar.) Each time he tried to nuzzle close to Diane at night, she scooted away. If he tried to give her a kiss, she ducked underneath it. When he sat down to dinner and asked Diane and Lomax how their days had gone, neither answered. She dabbed at the corner of her mouth, took a sip of water, and continued to eat; Lomax wouldn't even look up from his book. Chic couldn't handle it when people were mad at him. He needed to do something. He bought flowers. He made dinner—macaroni and cheese. One Saturday morning, he cleaned the entire house, even scrubbing the bathroom, by himself. He gave Lomax a twenty-dollar bill. He bought Diane a card. He drew funny pictures and left them around the house. None of it worked.

Then, it hit him one night. He got out of bed and wrote himself a note—
a swimming pool
—underlining the three words. The following morning, he dialed the operator and asked her to put him through to the Sea Shell Inn in Pensacola, Florida, the motel where he and Diane had stayed during their honeymoon.

“I'm sorry, sir. There's no listing for a motel with that name.”

“What?”

“There's no listing for a motel with that name.”

“I heard you.”

“There's a Sea Breeze Inn. A Sea Side Motel. A Sea Beach Motel, but no Sea Shell Inn.”