Round Rock (16 page)

Libby’s favorite entry was the Vince’s Bait-and-Tackle-at-the-Lake float: a yellow El Camino with an enormous papier-mâché largemouth bass lashed to the hood like a dead deer.

T
HE
B
ILLS
dropped Libby off at her trailer in the early afternoon, just in time for her parents’ inevitable holiday phone call.

Evelyn and Francis Pollack still lived in Montrose, California, in the same house where Libby had grown up, but they were hardly ever home. For the last six years, they had traveled incessantly, as if her father’s retirement had unleashed a profound, compulsive restlessness. They called Libby faithfully, once a month and on holidays. Today, they were in British Columbia at an Elderhostel.

“Are you doing anything fun today?” her mother asked.

Libby had learned to divulge few personal details. Since she’d married Stockton, not much had met with Evelyn’s approval, including—paradoxically—the divorce. “Just taking it easy.”

“I wish you lived some place where you knew more people.”

“I have friends here.”

“Yes …” Libby could tell her mother was fighting to mince
words, swallow her opinions. The struggle was brief. “I would so love to see you around people of your own caliber. And in a job worthy of your talent. I think of all those hours of practicing, all those lessons….”

Libby now heard her father murmuring in the background. Without warning or transition, he took over the receiver. “How’s my girl?”

“Fine, Dad.”

“Glad to hear it. Need anything from British Columbia? They make mighty good marmalade up here. I’ll send you a jar.”

“Sure, Dad. Thanks.”

After hanging up, Libby dragged herself to her small vegetable garden, pulled listlessly at weeds, ate a few ripe Early Girl tomatoes. It got too hot to stay in the sun, so she took a long cool bath and a short, nervous nap.
Why was she still living in this valley?

Billie and the Bills picked her up at dusk. They drove to the Rito Town Park and set up lawn chairs between two other families. Billie served fried chicken and potato salad and covertly poured white wine into Dixie cups. Cherry bombs and M-80’s exploded around them. A mariachi band played in the parking lot. Sparklers swirled in the falling darkness like tiny, short-lived galaxies.

Libby saw Lewis in the assembled Round Rock contingent in the picnic area reserved for larger groups. She liked the way he moved among them, watchful, keeping an eye on everybody, sure of himself. She heard a gust of his laugh. He crouched next to a long-haired teenager, flung an arm over his shoulder, and talked until the kid cracked up.

Libby had never gone out with a man who did low-paying, service-oriented work. She’d always preferred the grand achiever, the ungainly ego, the high-performance, Stocktonesque characters. Everything she was not. Could selflessness be sexy?

Fireworks rose up over the trees in spidery arcs of light. Ash drifted onto her lap. Dogs howled. From the hills, coyotes answered with a wild, laughing bark that made Libby’s skin prickle.

Something touched her arm and she squawked, even as she looked into Lewis’s bright eyes.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said.

“I can’t help it. I already feel like I’m in a war zone.”

As if to illustrate this statement, a great volley of booms erupted. When the noise died down, Lewis waved to the Fitzgeralds. “Hey, Billie,” he said.

“Hey, Lewis. Not read any good books lately?”

“Dozens. And you?”

“The Complete Works of Everybody.”

“And what’s come clearer?”

“Since we last met?” Billie tipped her head. “Oh, I do keep hearing what a great cook you are.”

“I love the small-town life,” said Lewis. “You make one pan of lasagna and suddenly you’re Paul damn Bocuse.”

Libby couldn’t help noticing Billie’s easy way with Lewis, while she herself was tongue-tied, not to mention abashed by her Dixie cup of wine. When Lewis stepped forward to shake Old Bill’s hand, she tucked the cup under her chair.

“I’m here with the Round Rockers.” Now, he was talking to her again. “Our big field trip. No casualties so far. Nobody carried off by booze or wild women. Yet.” He gave the back of her chair a shake. She did want to heave him up, sling him over her shoulders, and haul him home. Lines of white light reached into the sky. Something—his fingers?—swept her cheek.

The fireworks, intermittent before, were now continuous; this was the grand finale, a preview of the end of the world. In the tiny gap between a high-pitched whine and the ensuing detonation, Lewis leaned down. “Gotta go. Bye.” And he was gone.
Boom!

Billie dragged her chair closer to Libby’s. “Happy now?”

“I thought you didn’t know him.”

“I’ve only really talked to him once.”

Little Bill knelt between his mother and Libby. “Is he your new boyfriend, Libby?”

Libby loved Little Bill. He was soft-spoken, considerate, and, for a teenager, exquisitely gentle. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“He’s cool,” said Little Bill.

“You think so?”

“Especially his ponytail.”

L
EWIS
helped Libby haul a futon onto her front deck, where they slept naked under the stars. Their sex was grunty, unabashed, undiscussed. Once, during foreplay, he’d asked her what she wanted from him sexually. “I hate that question,” she said. “I just want to be
ground
into the bedsprings.”

He constantly expected the other shoe to drop. He wasn’t hauling her to the opera, after all, or even to the movies. He wasn’t mowing her lawn or completing any bridge foursome. Just dinner at Red’s a couple times a week and fishing on Sundays. He was getting away with something; specifically, sex, free and clear. Occasionally he wondered—could it really go unpunished?

Libby intuitively played according to his rules. No accidentally bumping into him around town. No hangup phone calls at work. No surprise visits, ever. He made it clear he was leaving the first week of September, and she’d made no attempt to weave any connective threads into the future.

“It’s not serious,” Lewis assured Red in one postprandial walk over to the Blue House. “It’s just fun.”

“You’re seeing her three, four times a week? Sounds full-steam-ahead to me.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not about to move in with her.”

“But you’ve considered it?”

“I could never live in a trailer. Not with Libby, not with the Queen of Sheba.”

Red’s lips twitched in a smile, instantly suppressed.

“And if you must know, Libby’s not really my body type.”

“That matters so much to you?”

“I’m not saying anything’s wrong with her. She’s not accountable for my taste.” Lewis honestly did prefer either tiny, slim women or tall, strong, regal women—the dainty or the glorious—and Libby was neither. “She’s more like a friend than someone I’d fall in love with.”

“Ah, all this self-knowledge,” said Red. “Could it be the result of a fearless and searching moral inventory?”

Lewis balled up his fist and delivered a light punch to Red’s shoulder. “Nag, nag, nag,” he said.

I
F PEOPLE
wanted to know about Deputy Sheriff Burt McLemoore leaving his wife for the babysitter, they had to go to the grocería. If they wanted to know about town council and school board meetings, weddings and church news, blood drives and how promptly the fire department responded to a man in anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, they turned to the
Rito River News,
a small-town tabloid leavened with local advertisements. Round Rock placed the same ad every week: a photo of an unidentifiable man hunched over a bottle and a glass, with the caption “Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired?”

The most entertaining writing was usually found in short pieces from a third-rate wire service, stories selected solely on the basis of how much unsold ad space needed to be filled.
WIFE BEHEADS HUSBAND—HEAD FOUND IN BREADBOX. CANNIBALISM IN ECUADOR. WOMAN MARKETS GRANDMOTHER’S SECRET WART CURE.

Libby was paging through the paper as Lewis cooked dinner and Red arranged small, heat-kissed roses in a vase. “Hey, you guys,” Libby said, spreading the paper over Red’s kitchen table. “Read this.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Red said. “In AA meetings, you can see people relax when they hold hands for the prayer or hug each other.”

“Ugh,” said Lewis. “Hugging and the Lord’s Prayer. What I hate most in AA.” He jabbed the article with his finger. “Did this massage therapist open that jar of eggs? The real proof would be if she scrambled ’em up for breakfast.”

“I bet she could’ve,” said Libby. “I’d like to try this experiment.”

“Why?” said Lewis.

“What if it’s true?” Libby asked. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“No.”

“I have fresh eggs.” Red opened the refrigerator. “Dropped off this morning.”

“Are you guys serious?” said Lewis.

Red and Libby rummaged through the cupboards until they found small, matching jam jars, which they sterilized in the water Lewis had boiling for pasta. After the jars cooled, they carefully cracked three eggs into each one. One jar went into the pantry next to cans of Progresso soup. Throughout dinner, Libby held the other jar on her lap, cupping it when she could.

Both Red and Libby became positively religious about those eggs. Lewis would find Red at all hours, at the table or watching television,
clasping the jar as he would a crystal ball. “Hey,” he’d say, “how’s Operation Stinkbomb?”

Red would hold up the jar, three slumpy yellow orbs in two inches of viscous, slightly cloudy fluid. “Looking pretty darn good, don’t you think?”

L
AKE
Rito on Sunday morning was the color of tarnished silver. The damp morning air was heavily spiced with sage. The sun was up elsewhere, but not in the narrow inlet where Libby and Lewis set up the poles. Libby cut the bait, pork livers that looked like clumps of solid blood. Lewis couldn’t watch or he’d gag. Instead, he positioned the chairs, secured poles against them, divided up the Sunday paper.

They each manned two poles, drinking coffee from a green metal Thermos. Fishermen trolled past, their engines a low throb. Libby wrote in her journal. Lewis meditated. A Tibetan Buddhist monk was drying out at Round Rock—a guy from Cincinnati named Simon—and he’d given Lewis meditation techniques, such as counting out-breaths up to ten, over and over, which supposedly could quell the ceaseless inner dithering. Lewis practiced this every morning for twenty minutes. Here at the lake, the sun appeared as a thin red line between his eyelids. The wind funnelled empty space into his lungs. He experienced infinitesimal stretches of mental rest.

Lewis rubbed his eyes, stretched his legs, pulling out of his meditation. Libby kept scratching away in her little cardboard-bound notebook. That killed him. Here he was, the published essayist, just loafing, while she filled page after page in her almost-daily journal.

Lewis touched her arm. “Hey, Lib. Read me something from your journal. I won’t be critical.” He jiggled her shoulder. “Something about me. I know it’s in there.”

“Don’t be so sure,” she said, and thumbed through pages of her symmetrical, clever handwriting. “Here’s where you and Red and I talked about who would write the novels of our lives. Remember?”

The conversation at dinner last week. “Sure. Read that.”

He hoped to follow along over her shoulder, but she canted the journal so all he could see was the faux-marbleized cover.

“Lewis, barefoot as usual, sits perched on the kitchen stool, picks
at his toes. Picking at one’s toenails, he says, is one of the great unsung pleasures of life.”

“I can’t believe you wrote that down!” said Lewis. “Jesus!”

“I won’t read if you’re going to interrupt me every two sentences.”

“I’ll be quiet.” He was so curious now, he would’ve agreed to almost anything.

“
I consider collecting his peeled-off nail bits in case I ever need to send them to Madame Wanda the Wangateuse
.”

“Wait just a second. Madame what?”

“Madame Wanda,” said Libby, “is a Haitian hoodoo doctor I knew in New Orleans.”

“You’d send my toenails to a hoodoo doctor?”

“Hopefully I won’t have to.” She gave him a round-eyed, leveling look. “But I can’t read if you’re going to keep flipping out.”

“I’m not flipping out. I just don’t want my toenails going to New Orleans. But go on. Please.”

“
Red comes in and says he just was at the grocería, and Victor Ibañez told him we were having chicken and red potatoes and chocolate mint ice cream for dinner.

“
Can’t you buy one damn bag of groceries in this town without it becoming a matter of public record? Lewis says. Don’t people around here have anything more important to talk about?