Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (18 page)

Lomax came into the kitchen.

Chic lowered his voice. “So, you're telling me the place closed down?”

“I don't know what happened. I'm just the operator.”

Lomax got a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and carried it to the counter.

“Give me the number for the Sea Breeze Inn, then.” Chic wrote the number down on the back of an envelope, then dialed the phone. Lomax turned to him.

“Dad . . . ”

Chic held up a finger. “I'm sorta in the middle of something here. Can we talk later? Tonight maybe?”

Lomax picked up his glass of milk and left the kitchen.

On the line, a woman answered.

“This is Chic Waldbeeser in Illinois. I have some questions about your swimming pool. If you don't mind, can you describe it? The shape, the size. The furniture around it. How many gallons of water it holds?” On the same envelope he drew a picture of the pool based on what the woman told him.

After the phone call was over, Chic called William T. Daniels, who owned his own backhoe and did contract labor for Middleville Township, among other odds jobs. Chic told him what he had in mind. “I was hoping to get started this afternoon. Let's say noon.”

“I have work scheduled for this afternoon. Water leak on Third and Jefferson.”

“Then tomorrow. Sunday. Let's say 8:00 a.m.”

“I can maybe get over there next weekend. But I think it's going
to be too wet to start digging. Let's shoot for the first weekend of July.”

“July! That's halfway through the summer.”

“What's your hurry, Waldbeeser? Relax. I'll give you a call in a couple of weeks to confirm a date.”

Chic couldn't wait until July. He went right out to the garage and dragged out the wheelbarrow, two shovels, a garden rake, and some tent stakes. He then held up the envelope and tried to visualize how the pool would fit between the garage and the house. There'd be a deck table with an umbrella by the back door of the house, where he and Diane would sit and sip ice tea and watch Lomax and the neighborhood kids, who, actually, didn't spend a lot of time with Lomax; they were always playing baseball or football in the empty lot a few houses down and Chic was always trying to get Lomax to put away his notebooks and join them, but Lomax never did; he always said he would, but he never did. If they had a pool, though, the neighborhood kids would be hanging around all the time, and finally, maybe Lomax would get himself some friends. A kid shouldn't be by himself so much. Oh and what was Lomax wanting to talk to him about in the kitchen? He'd have to remember to ask him later. Anyway, the pool. He'd invite Lijy and Buddy over, after the air cleared, of course. And it would clear, he was sure of it. This pool would be the first step in setting everything back on the right path. Diane and Lijy would sit at the patio table under the umbrella with the new baby, while he and Buddy soaked in the pool and Lomax did cannonballs off the side (though he'd probably sit in the shade and mess around with his German translations, but Chic could imagine him doing cannonballs off the side if he wanted to). He'd invite Diane's parents over to sit under the umbrella's shade. Maybe he'd even invite Mr. Kendrick, his neighbor. He and Diane's father were about the same age. The two of them could talk about Middleville and how it had changed, about the teenage kids and how they were starting to grow their hair long and listen to rock and roll
music. They could lament the ranch houses popping up all around town. They could talk about the entire country changing, adding Alaska and Hawaii as states. He could just hear them now: two old men talking about the past. In the evening, he'd bring out the grill, and Diane would patty up some hamburger meat. Lomax and the neighborhood kids would eat fast because they'd want to get back in the pool, but Chic wouldn't let them go in for half an hour—he wouldn't want anyone getting a cramp and drowning. That would be horrible: one of the neighborhood kids drowning in his pool. That would upset Diane, and she'd blame him because it was his idea to put in the pool, blah, blah, etc., etc. But no one was going to drown, and he wasn't going to let his mind drift. He was putting in a pool and once it was finished, all the anger, all the ignoring, all of it, would be behind them, finally.

Chic set the envelope down in the middle of the yard and, using the back of a spade shovel, hammered a stake into it to keep it from blowing away. In about a month, that was his timeline, well before July, he was going to transform his backyard into a little slice of Florida. Diane couldn't be mad at him after he did that. They had honeymooned in Florida. They had conceived Lomax there. It was like their Garden of Eden. Chic went into the garage and got a spool of string and a hammer and staked off the shape of the pool, wrapping the string around the stakes like he was fencing off new grass seed.

Lomax came out the back door.

“Look, Lomax. A pool.” Chic gestured to the stringed-off area. “I mean, it'll be a pool pretty soon.”

“Mom know you're doing this?”

“Not yet. She will though. Imagine it. Our very own pool right here in the backyard.”

Lomax shrugged. “I don't really like to be out in the sun.”

“You're going to love it. We'll get one of those tables with an umbrella. Hey, by the way, I hear the neighborhood kids down the street playing baseball. Why don't you go get your glove and join them?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Lomax said, then went back inside the house. Almost immediately, Diane came out the door and huffed and stomped until she stood just outside the stringed-off area. She glared at Chic, her hands on her hips. “A bomb shelter? You're digging a bomb shelter in the backyard? Don't you think that's a little extreme? I know you think you're protecting our family somehow by taking the blame for Lijy's affair, but a bomb shelter? You really think something horrible is going to happen, a nuclear bomb, in Illinois, and all of us will need to hide out? Is that what you really think? Really? I mean . . . ”

“I'm digging a pool.”

“A pool?”

“You remember that pool at the Sea Shell Inn? Well, this is going to be like that, or sorta like that. You know they closed the Sea Shell Inn? Or the name changed. Anyway, yeah, I'm putting in a pool.”

“Here?”

“Yep.”

“Chic, you can't change what happened. Nothing you can do can undo that. Nothing. Not one thing. Not a pool. Not a bomb shelter.”

“I'm not building a bomb shelter.”

Diane walked back toward the house, but before she went inside, she turned around and faced him. “All of this ....this pool. You may think you're doing the right thing, but you just keep making things worse.”

Buddy locked the motel room door, put the key in his pocket, and nodded to the Mexican man wearing a sombrero sitting on a folding chair by the lobby door. He carried Bascom the Cat in a duffel bag; the bag wasn't zipped shut, and Bascom's head
was poking out. That morning, Buddy had run across a real estate listing in the
Journal Star
for an abandoned Central Illinois Light Company—CILCO—switching station. The ad said that the building was ten thousand square feet and overlooked the Mackinaw River. This would be all he needed—a giant empty brick building with concrete floors. He'd be so far outside of town that people would leave him alone. He could smoke his cigarillos and no one would bother him.

At Wyman's Hardware Store on Main Street, a few blocks from the pumpkin cannery, he bought a flashlight, extra batteries, and a black ski mask. The cashier, Mrs. Wyman, looked over the top of her glasses and asked him how his mother was doing. Buddy shrugged and told her she was fine. He, of course, didn't know how she was. He hadn't talked to her in years.

In the car, Buddy had a hard time keeping his head clear. Everything he'd worked so hard to achieve had slipped through his fingers. He'd gone on the road and ended up in California, and come home with a wife, a wife he loved, a wife who . . . he couldn't even let himself continue. “I had a goddamn plan,” he said aloud. The cat looked at him with big yellow eyes. Was he really talking to a cat? He drove by the cannery and slowed the car down. In the parking lot, he spotted Chic's car. He stepped on the gas and sped around the block and came back around again, like a shark circling its prey in the water. He was going to get even with Chic. He wasn't done. He tore around the corner and sped across town to Chic's house. In the front yard, Chic's odd son, Lomax, was on his hands and knees scooping dirt into a mason jar. Buddy wanted to roll down the window and tell him what a horrible man his father was. He wanted to tell Lomax that he hated his father, hated Diane, hated him, Lomax, hated Middleville. He had so much hate inside of him it felt like a small animal was nipping at his heart. He choked back tears. There wasn't any time to cry. He sped away.

When night fell, Buddy parked in front of the Stebbenthal house, which was next door to his home. The living room light was on, and Lijy was sitting on the couch drinking tea. His mind flashed to her on top of Chic. Buddy shook his head to erase the image, but he couldn't get it out of his head. Jesus Christ. Jesus H. Christ. He put on the ski mask. “I'm going to make this better, buddy,” he told Bascom the Cat.

The morning—a sunny blue winter morning—his father was discovered frozen to death behind the barn, Buddy was upstairs in his bedroom eating a Baby Ruth candy bar. It had recently stopped snowing, and a white blanket spread out in every direction from the farmhouse. Looking out his bedroom window, Buddy saw a black station wagon he didn't recognize pull into the drive. He didn't have a view of the back of the house from his bedroom, so he went into the upstairs bathroom and, standing in the claw-foot bathtub, watched as two men bundled in wool coats got out of the station wagon and went around behind the barn. His mother and Tom McNeeley were already in the backyard. A toboggan leaned against a tree. Buddy didn't understand what was going on; it looked like his mother and Tom McNeeley were preparing to go sledding, but why was that station wagon there? Tom McNeeley tried to hug his mother, but she pulled away. Just then Chic came into the bathroom and wanted to show Buddy his hands. He'd been tracing them on a piece of paper, and they were covered with different colors of ink. Buddy didn't care about the ink on his brother's hands, and kept on looking out the window. The men from the station wagon came around the corner of the barn carrying his father on his side, his legs out and his back straight as a ruler, his body forming an L. He was wearing his pajamas and no coat. The pajama pants were tucked into his untied snow boots. Buddy noticed that his father's eyes were open and that tiny icicles hung from his mustache. His mother yelled something and shook her finger at his father. Buddy couldn't make out what she was shouting about, but he could see the anger in her
jerky motions. Tom McNeeley tried to hold her back, but she shook him off and continued to wag her finger at his father. Even when the men put his father down on the ground behind the station wagon, she continued to rant at him. Finally, she turned away and buried her head in Tom McNeeley's chest. Through it all, his father's expression never changed. Buddy whispered, “Stand up,” even though he knew his father was dead. He whispered it again, louder this time, “Stand up.” Chic, who was washing his hands, asked Buddy who he was talking to. Chic then said he wanted to see what was happening outside, but Buddy told him to go to his room. Chic insisted that he wanted to see. The sink water was running and soap was lathered on Chic's hands and he was dripping on the bathroom tile. Buddy turned and gave his little brother a look that said if he asked again, he'd tell Mom and then he'd be in trouble, so Chic said, “Fine,” and finished washing his hands, dried them on his pants, and went down the hall to his bedroom. The two men from the station wagon positioned themselves on either side of Buddy's father, hunching over, preparing to pick him up again. Buddy suddenly realized that he hadn't seen his father since Friday night, when he had been in the kitchen fixing himself a drink, getting ice cubes from the aluminum tray in the freezer. Buddy had been in his room polishing his coins and had gone to the kitchen to get a glass of water. His father was whistling when Buddy came into the kitchen, and he said hello, which was strange since his father pretty much ignored everyone even if they were standing right next to him. His father poured some Scotch over the ice cubes and the warm liquid made the cubes crackle. He capped the bottle and held up the glass to Buddy and said to him, “America. You have to love it. Someday, you'll see. It's not worth it. None of it.” He downed the Scotch in one gulp and set the glass on the counter and put on his winter boots (he was wearing his pajamas) and told Buddy he had to check on something in the barn. He went out the back door. The men picked up Buddy's father, and like they were loading a piece
of furniture, they turned him this way and that, trying to find the right angle to shove him into the back of the station wagon. Downstairs, Buddy heard the back door open and his mother and Tom McNeeley come into the house, both of them stomping the snow from their boots. Chic's bedroom door opened, and he ran down the hall yelling, “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom.” Finally, the men found the right angle—his father on his side, head first—and pushed him into the station wagon.