Round Rock (17 page)

“
We can’t all be gloriously profound like you, I tell him.

“
Me? says Lewis. I’m not so profound
.

“
Oh no, Red says. You only think you’re living a Dostoyevsky novel
.

“
What’s wrong with that? Lewis says. If anybody were to write the novel of my life, I’d want it to be Dostoyevsky
.

“
I can just see it, says Red
. The Genius.
A companion volume to
The Idiot.

“
Hey thanks, Redsy. But more likely it would be
The Obsessed,
companion volume to
The Possessed.

“
I say, Who would write the novel of Red’s life
?

“
Red says, I could see myself as a bit player in a Dickens novel. One of those good-hearted ninnies running a hopeless institution
.

“
No, I say, I mean the novel of your life. You can’t be a secondary character
.

“
Red thinks for a while and says, So how about Henry James? He’s suitably stylish and unflinching
.

“
Perfect! Lewis yells. Perfect! It could be
Portrait of a Saint,
companion volume to
Portrait of a Lady.

“
Red’s face reddens. Uh, I was thinking maybe,
The Ritonians,
like
The Bostonians.

“
Lewis says, I know who’d write Libby’s novel. Jane Austen
.

“
I don’t think so, I say. All she could do was get people married. And I’ve already been married. I need an author who can write beyond the happily-ever-after. Maybe Emily Bronte. Isn’t
Wuthering Heights
about how the wrong boyfriend wrecks life for two generations
?

“
Lewis rolls his eyes
.”

“I did not,” Lewis said. “I did not roll my eyes.”

“Yes you did, and you said ‘Priceless,’ too, really sarcastically.”

“It
was
priceless. I just wish my nineteenth-century-Brit-lit prof could’ve heard your synopsis.” He slipped his hand around Libby’s thigh. “Go on. Please. I’ll be good.”

“
Red says, It could be titled simply
Libby Daw.
Like
Jane Eyre.

“Wuthering Heights
was a house, I say. So mine could be
The Manatee.

“
You mean the sea cow? says Red. I don’t get it
.

“
Manatee’s the brand of my trailer
.

“
Lewis says, How ’bout
In the Belly of the Manatee?”

Lewis burst out laughing. “Sorry, sorry,” he sputtered.

“Ha, ha, ha,” Libby said, and read on.

“
Who knows? says Red. Maybe Lewis will write the book of all our lives
.

“
What, hollers Lewis, and bore everyone to death
?”

Lewis kicked the mud flats under his heels. “You’re already writing the book! I have to start watching what I say around you!”

Libby stuffed her journal into her canvas tote and turned away. He saw then that he couldn’t joke with her, not about her writing. “It’s good, Libby. Really. You even make me sound funny.”

“Right. Like that’s my whole purpose in life.”

J
OE
, Red’s son, spent every August at Round Rock. During the last week in July, Red drove up to San Francisco to fetch him. Red
hadn’t been gone six hours when Libby’s car pulled up in front of the Round Rock office.

Lewis’s heart sank. Did she think, now that Red was out of town for a few days, she could come over any old time? He didn’t want this casual dropping-by business to start. He’d say he was too busy to talk. Nip the impulse in the bud. As he waited for her knock, the phone rang. He talked to a woman about her husband’s medical insurance for ten minutes. When he got off the phone, Libby still hadn’t come to the door.

He found her in Red Ray’s living room. “Oh, hi!” She was curled up on the sofa watching the local news and drinking a glass of ice water. She had on a black tank top and snow white shorts. Her skin was the color of roasted peanuts.

“Hi,” he said.

“Done with work for the day?” she asked.

“Nope. I’m swamped with stuff.”

She held up the jar of eggs, then nestled them back between her legs. “Egg sitting,” she said.

“Why not take them over to your house?”

“Red and I agreed that the two jars should be in the same place, the only variable being human touch.”

Lewis stood between her and the television. She smiled up at him, a question.

“I got a lot of work to do,” he said.

“So you said.” She leaned to one side, to look past him at the television.

Back at the office, he kept wondering if he should go over again and act a little nicer. In the meantime, the Falcon disappeared.

Libby showed up the next day, too, going into Red’s without so much as a “Hi, how are you?” Red and Libby’s little science project was beginning to irritate the hell out of him. What was so damn fascinating about a couple of rotting eggs?

He found her in exactly the same circumstance: sofa, ice water, TV on, eggs nestled in lap. Lewis knelt and slid a hand inside her tank top, over her lace-harnessed breast. She held the eggs up and over to the side. “Put those damn things down,” he said, taking the jar from her grasp, “and let
me
demonstrate the benefits of human touch.”

Y
VETTE
released Joe to Red with the familiar litany of instructions: Do things with him. He’s at that age when he really needs his father.

Joe had grown four inches in the last six months. A trauma, Yvette told Red, and physically quite painful. The boy’s skin was so pale and his limbs so skinny that he looked long, cartilaginous, new, as if he’d just uncurled from incubation. His eyes were blue, his hair ash and likely to turn white in his twenties, as his mother’s had.

The two of them drove down the coast. Joe talked about baseball until it became obvious that Red didn’t know who was on any of the teams. The boy then read a
Rolling Stone
and the Sunday sports section. Spend time with him, Yvette had said. Do some projects together. These instructions sounded more and more like Zen koans.

Once at Round Rock, Joe was independent, intent on amusing himself. He’d brought fat science-fiction and spy novels. Every morning, while Red showered and made breakfast, Joe took a forty-minute run, returning flushed, bright red, every capillary in his sheer skin pumped full of blood. In the evenings, when Red went to his meetings, Joe ran again. Once, Red stepped out on the Blue House’s front porch and spotted Joe moving noiselessly down on the roadway, his skin gray in the dusk, his arms and legs pumping, spidery.

Think of some interactive activities: Yvette spoke with such a plea in her voice, Red wondered if Joe had any friends at all in San Francisco. Here in Rito, at least, he had Little Bill Fitzgerald. They hiked together, rode bikes, swam in the river, and, he hoped, amused themselves without resorting to anything illegal. When Red was Joe’s age, Frank was his best friend and their favorite activities were breaking-and-entering and drinking, naturally, whatever they got their hands on.

Yvette’s imperatives heightened Red’s already firm sense of
parental inadequacy. “His mother says I’m supposed to think up interactive activities,” he told Lewis.

“Take him fishing,” Lewis said.

“I haven’t fished for years. I wouldn’t remember which end of the line to put in the water.”

“Nothing to it,” Lewis said. “Take him to the lake, fish from the bank like Libby and I do. It’s great. Fresh air. Big body of water. Something always happens.”

“I don’t know,” Red said. “Rods, reels, hooks, tackle boxes, bait—it’s overwhelming.”

“Talk to Libby. She’s got it down to an art. Want me to ask her? We go every Sunday, anyway, so maybe we could all go together. Whaddaya say?”

Somehow, through no effort of his own, Red and son were booked for Sunday’s excursion. The night before, he took Joe to the Kmart and bought rods and reels. At five-thirty a.m., Libby and Lewis drove up and loaded an ungodly amount of fishing and picnic supplies into the back of Red’s pickup. Joe was thrilled to ride in the back while Red, Libby, and Lewis were crammed into the cab. Libby, in the middle, kept one hand against the dash to brace herself from leaning into Red. He had to touch her thigh every time he shifted gears. Her ponytail switched his face. She smelled of sandalwood soap.

“Maybe we’ll have bass for dinner,” Libby said. “Makes me hungry just thinking about it. Did anyone have breakfast? I’m starving. Lewis,” she said, “could you hand me one of those apples in the bag at your feet?”

Lewis dug around in the canvas sack and found an apple. Libby’s enormous, thirsty bites sent juice spraying. “Wanna bite, Red?” She held the half-eaten fruit so close to Red’s face that he could smell the cider, see her lipstick staining the crumpled white meat.

“Naw, no thanks, Lib,” he muttered, blood suffusing his face.

In all the years he’d lived in Rito, Red hadn’t spent much time at the lake. A CCC project from the thirties, a reservoir for Los Angeles, it looked to him bleak and inhospitable, simply a valley in chaparral foothills plugged up and filled with water. An enormous county park with spaces for four hundred RVs was often filled to capacity during the summer, and you had to pay six dollars at the park entrance to visit two small, overcrowded stretches of sandy beach.

Libby, however, directed him down a dirt road outside the park gates. The road, cut like a shelf in the hill, ran alongside a skinny inlet. Red parked behind three other vehicles and a trash can spewing beer cans and soggy garbage.

Toting a rusty cooler, lawn chairs, old quilts, and thickets of fishing poles, they picked their way down a steep bank of sharp fill rock. The water was as opaque and green as a farm pond. The wedge of sky overhead had a lemon-colored tint. Lewis led them along the shore halfway to the main body of the lake, then stopped and planted the ice chest a few feet from the water. The mud-flat bank looked like a floor of warped tiles.

“Best catfish hole in the whole lake,” Libby told Red. “But with your high-dollar equipment, you’ll want to fish further up there.” She pointed to where the finger of water widened into the lake itself. “I guarantee you’ll catch at least one crappie.” Deadpan, she pronounced the word obscenely.

Red smiled. Out here in the warming day, Libby seemed more physical and energetic, truly spirited. She was one of those people who seemed familiar to Red from the moment he laid eyes on her, as if, contrary to fact, there’d never been a time when she wasn’t somewhere in his life. As she unfolded chairs, assembled poles, her face was guileless and happy. Her shin-length pedal pushers made her calves look muscled, her ankles bony, her feet strong and capable of traversing great distances.

In the time that Red had one pole ready to go, Libby had all four of hers snapped together and threaded with line. She called Joe over to her. “You ever been fishing?” she said.

“Once, with a friend. Didn’t catch anything.”

“Your luck’s about to change, knock wood.” Libby rapped the side of her head with her fist. “Let’s get these lines in the water.” She spread out newspaper and opened a Tupperware container of pork livers. She tipped the bowl toward Joe. “Gross, huh?”

“Really gross.”

“Catfish go crazy for it.” She cut the meat into bloody chunks, baited the line of the first pole, rinsed her hand in the lake, and cast expertly. The liver sailed out and plunked in the water. Libby leaned the pole against the back of one chair. “Watch that for me, Joe, until Lewis gets it secured?”

Lewis clustered rocks around the handles until the poles stood on their own.

Joe frowned. “Don’t you hold the poles in your hands?”

“Not these,” she said. “You’ll hold the spinning poles your Dad bought, but this is catfishing. Nothing labor-intensive about it. Just bait and wait. You need your hands free. I mean, what if you have to scratch an itch?” She baited and cast the next pole. “Hold this now, okay? Couple of weeks ago, I leaned a pole up against the chair and before I knew it, both the pole and the chair were in the lake. Lewis had to go in after them. Got a big old catfish.”

Red was wishing by now that he hadn’t gotten the spinning rods. They were too fussy and fragile, the three-pound test like spiderwebs in his fingers. He was grateful Libby was distracting Joe, lest the boy witness his ineptitude.

Once their gear was ready, Red and Joe had to walk a good distance away from Libby and Lewis, and then from each other, in order to cast. Too far apart to talk. So much for interaction; fishing, it seemed, was yet another exercise in solitude.

The night before, Joe had spent a long time practice-casting in the Round Rock roadway. He cast until he could send out a lure in a fine, long arc in any direction. He hit specific rocks and trees and other targets. Now he fished with ease, casting, reeling in, casting, reeling in, his face expressing the same focus and intensity as when he read or ran. After a fruitless half an hour, Red worried that the boy was bored, and tried to project confidence that there were fish that
would
bite. And sure enough, Red had a strike and pulled in a pan-sized bluegill. Libby jumped to her feet and ran up whooping. Joe stared long and hard at the fish, as if memorizing what he should aim for. “All right, Dad,” he said.

They resumed casting. The morning was warm and still. Water lapped at the shore in tiny waves. From the mechanical daze of repetitive motion, Red heard Joe quietly and pointedly say, “Dad.” Joe’s pole was curling in a tightening parabola. Libby was over in an instant. “Good!” she cried. “Now keep your pole up. Relax, don’t panic. Let him swim. Don’t haul him in too fast. Right, good. Pole up! Let him run a bit. Jesus, Joe, what do you have there?”

“I don’t know!” Joe was jubilant.

Lewis came over for a closer look. An old man fishing farther
down the spit shaded his eyes to see what was going on, then put a rock in his chair and ambled up.

“Big, huh, Dad?” Joe said.

“I’ll say,” said Red.

The nylon line unzipped the water.