Round Rock (31 page)

He called Lewis the next day. “I’ll be starting at Round Rock on Monday,” he said quietly. “And the dog who already smelled dead? We buried her this morning.”

A
ND SO
, David and Lewis went to work.

Ernie had agreed to stay on to train Lewis. Grayer, older, still precision-coiffed, he initiated Lewis into his meat-filing system in the deep freeze, the hot and dead spots on the griddle, the recipe for his much-adored Chicken Luxurioso—chicken parts baked in a murk of dried onion soup, apricot jam, and Thousand Island dressing. Together, on Monday night, they prepared Ernie’s last supper, a tribute to fifteen years of nonstop, super-fatted starch. Red Ray played host as dozens of alumni showed up to eat potato and macaroni salads, ham, biscuits, green bean casserole.

Lewis expected Red to show up the next night, too, for his first solo supper, but he didn’t come once all week. Although Lewis had moved into the bungalow right across the street from Red’s, he saw him only at the morning staff meetings, those rushed, fifteen-minute coffee klatches.

Lewis’s new residence was furnished like a tourist cabin from the forties: clunky blond bedroom set, the sofa and chairs he used to nap on in the office, a slack-stringed Steinway upright. Homey enough, except at night, when it was so quiet Lewis could hear mice chittering in the groves. How had Red stood it all those years—the lone resident in his own private ghost town?

At the fake-wood dinette in his breakfast nook, Lewis tried to write the last chapter of his dissertation; the effort invariably sent him straight down for a nap. He tried going to Denny’s again, but Phyllis, the waitress who’d afforded him squatter’s rights in her section, was gone, and it was too far to drive all the way to Buchanan just to piss off somebody else. David, his erstwhile partner in a drunk-farm takeover, had no time to spare, since the drunks clamored for his company, sought him out, hung close all week; then, on his days off, David made the exhausting roundtrip to Tijuana to straighten things out with Pauline. Lewis mourned Lydia and the Nightcrawlers, especially Barbara, and ran up a deadly phone bill calling L.A.

Heading home after serving dinner one night, he saw Red in the roadway hosing out the back of his truck. The lights were on in Red’s bungalow, and a round, lidded barbecue smoked in the yard. “Hey,” said Lewis, “I thought you guys lived at Libby’s.”

“Oh, it’s been back and forth since day one,” Red said. “My house
is
more convenient, but there’s always someone at the door. Then Libby has cats that need to be fed, and neither place has room for all our things, which is why we decided to build the castle on the hill.” Red walked around the truck and turned off the water. “Your little place working out okay?”

“Yeah, great. Stop by later and I’ll make you a cup of decaf.”

“Maybe I will.”

It was a hot night, all his windows were open, and Lewis could hear them across the way, their voice tones and bits of their sentences, Libby’s delighted laugh. Then, she played the violin, the first movement of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, music so sad and haunted, Lewis had to pace. He’d never heard her play before; when he’d known her, she’d been entirely disaffected with the violin. He drank coffee, waited for Red’s knock, roamed his four small, dingy rooms, which looked anonymous, like a film noir set, a good place to blow your brains out. By eleven o’clock, the occasional, indistinct syllable still floated through the windows, Red’s truck was still parked across the way, but all their lights had been extinguished.

B
ARBARA
came up with Celia and Kip; they ate dinner at the Blue House, where the company of women, as always, was highly appreciated.
Then, the three spoke as a panel at the AA meeting. Although Lewis had told him about it, Red didn’t attend. Afterward, Lewis and his friends drifted back to his bungalow.

“It
is
spooky here.” Barbara gave him a worried look. “You doing okay?”

“I came up here thinking it’d be old home week. Instead, I feel like an employee.”

“You
are
an employee,” Barbara said.

He hated her for saying that.

She only laughed. “Maybe you need to tell Red you’d like to see more of him.”

“Oh, right.” Even imagining such a conversation made Lewis pull at his own face.

Celia opened the Steinway, played a chord. “Who needs to drink? Just play this thing,” she said, and sang two new songs, which did indeed sound drunken and hilarious with such atonal accompaniment.

When everyone left, Lewis lay down on the bedroom floor, his cheekbone against the pine planking. He inhaled dust, exhaled a frustrated sob, and another, then stopped, having forgot what he was supposed to be crying about. Then remembered: I am so fucking lonely, God, I need a little backup here, please.

In the morning, a large brindled dog stood on the porch. He had goofy ears and a terrier’s coarse hair, matted and filthy. He cowered but wouldn’t move more than a foot when Lewis tried to run him off. He was all bones, clearly starving. Consulting the midget refrigerator, Lewis found only a hard cinnamon roll and last week’s fried chicken, no doubt teeming with salmonella. He took the chicken off the bone and put it in a bowl: gone in a snap. Same with the cinnamon roll. This dog was possibly more pathetic than David’s dead hound. Very funny, God, thought Lewis.

He placed an ad in the
Rito River News
and tacked up a sign at the Rito post office. As he expected, there was no response. Nobody wanted this dog. Someone, obviously, had dumped him.

When Lewis patted his head or talked to him, the dog wagged his tail, growling and pissing at the same time. He might wander in through the open door, but if Lewis spoke suddenly, he’d spurt outside, as if caught raiding the henhouse. Lewis tried coaxing him into the car, just for some company, but the dog, cringing and snarling,
wouldn’t come; then, as Lewis drove off, he hurled himself against the fenders, barking insanely.

Lewis named him Gustave, after Flaubert, who also seemed willfully lonely and yet craved companionship, but then misbehaved whenever anyone actually took an interest in him.

L
IBBY
stood in the living room measuring windows. With her arms up over her head, she looked visibly pregnant for the first time. The windows offered an almost aerial view of the valley below. The Blue House, with its peaked roofs and turret, looked like a castle in a miniature golf course. “Red’s down the hall,” Libby told Lewis.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

She wrote down a figure before answering. “I’ve got to get these measurements.”

Lewis waited, thinking she’d talk to him when she finished writing, but she walked over and began measuring another window.

He found Red staining shelves in the library, a wood-paneled room with a large fireplace built of oblong riverstone. Red’s T-shirt had sickening-looking brown smears on it.

“Need some help?”

“Well, hello. Sure,” said Red. “My carpenter’s wife broke both her legs, so he’s got to take care of her. My painter can’t start for two weeks. And we need to move in
before
this baby arrives.” He went off to find another brush and Lewis heard him talking to Libby in a low voice.

“Should I leave?” he asked when Red returned.

“No. Please. I’ve hardly seen you since you got here.” Red handed him the brush. They applied a first coat of urethane to finely made, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Lewis could see Red in here in his dotage, the color bleached from his hair, his skin papery and pink, eyes twinkly as he read to his children—or grandchildren, maybe—
Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Rose Red, The Red Balloon.

“Been hearing good things about your cooking,” Red said.

“Come see for yourself.”

“Thought I’d give you some time to get the hang of it.”

“I’m ready. Bring Libby too, if she wants….”

“Will do. And you and David might think about coming to the Old Bastards. You’re welcome, you know.”

“Even if I only have three and a half years of sobriety?”

“It’s open to all professionals,” Red said. “Might make working here easier on you.”

“I’ll think about it,” Lewis said.

They got into a rhythm, slapping the brushes this way and that. Several times, Lewis almost mentioned his disappointment in not seeing more of Red. But here they were, painting side by side, a paragon of male bonding. Why make a big deal out of it? He was dragging the drop cloth over to the fireplace mantel when Libby appeared in the doorway. “Red,” she said, ignoring Lewis completely, “I’m starving. If I don’t get something in my stomach right away I’m going to throw up this baby.”

L
EWIS
found David behind the mansion working on a float for the Fourth of July parade. Men were trimming the trailer, looping red, white, and blue crepe paper around bales of hay while one guy was trying to figure out how to secure a flagpole to the trailer bed.

“Can I borrow you for a minute?” Lewis asked, and they walked a distance from the float builders. “I think I need one of your … you know … ritual things.”

“Let’s do it,” said David.

Before he moved into his second-floor quarters in the Blue House, David had removed all the furniture, taken up the carpet, painted the walls a clean white, sanded the floors, and applied coats of polyurethane until the mottled hardwood looked like still brown water. In the first room was a low, round table with a glass globe filled to the brim with
agua preparada,
the
curandero
’s clear, basic medicinal fluid. An altar occupied one corner of the room—candles and branches, bones and flowers, arranged beneath large painted-tin
retablos
of Santo Niño and the Virgin, around which hung smaller
retablos
and, on dressmaker pins, many silver and tin
milagros
of animals, disembodied limbs, hearts, stomachs, and tiny trucks, buses, passenger cars.

David closed and locked his door.

“It’s Libby,” said Lewis. “She hates me.”

David had adopted the basic Round Rock uniform of jeans and a white T-shirt. His long hair was twisted into a knot at the base of his head; his brown skin was smooth, his arms rivered in veins. A red string with bone beads hung around his neck. He lit the candles in front of his altar, then swept a space on the floor and asked Lewis to lie down. He gave him an egg to hold in one hand and a short, sturdy stick for the other.

“I feel,” Lewis said, “like I’m being prepared for burial.”

David smiled. “You are, in a manner of speaking,” he said, and crossed Lewis’s hands over his chest, pulled one leg a little to the left, aligned his head with his spine. David’s touch was gentle, confident, matter-of-fact. Once satisfied with how Lewis was laid out, he pulled a clean, coarse white sheet over him and tucked it close. The cloth smelled vaguely of corn. Lewis was relieved to be covered, especially his face; it eliminated his considerable self-consciousness.

“I’m going to call you several times,” David said, “and each time you must answer, ‘I’m coming.’ Now, take a deep breath. … Let it out. … Another breath. … Keep breathing.”

Lewis lay there breathing for a long time, maybe ten minutes. The room was hot and still. He heard David moving quietly, the birds outside, and distant pops—people setting off fireworks. Then the room brightened and the air smelled sharp and crisp, as if the smoke of a medicinal campfire were blowing through.

The floor creaked. Something touched Lewis very lightly. A shadow descended. At first, he thought David was touching him with his fingers; then he understood from the whispery, scritching sound that David was pulling a small broom over the length of his body. He was speaking Spanish in a low, soft voice, a prayer or chant. Lewis recognized only
Dios
and
Cristo.

“Come, Lewis,” David said firmly. “Don’t stay there.”

“I’m coming.” Lewis’s voice sounded strange to him, sudden, as it did when he blurted something out loud to himself. The broom moved across his chest, grazing his crossed hands holding the egg and the stick. David prayed continuously in Spanish, his tone gentle and straightforward, as if prayer were the most reasonable discourse. “Don’t stay there, Lewis,” he said. “Come here.”

“I’m coming,” Lewis said, and meant it.

David, praying, swept around Lewis in a circle. The broom’s work was hypnotic, soothing; the adjective that came to Lewis was “loving.”
Suddenly he was keenly thirsty, and drops of water instantly fell on him; it was alarming how loud they sounded landing on the cloth.

“Lewis, are you here with me?”

“I’m coming.”

“Are you here?”

“Yes, I’m here,” Lewis said, flooded with relief. His eyes welled up. He heard David sweeping all around him, chanting softly; it was like being a child in the room of a mother so quiet and gentle, all you could feel was her devotion. David swept in a wider and wider circle, then came close and knelt down. “You are here, now.” He touched Lewis’s forehead, his belly, each of his shoulders. He lifted the sheet off his face and smiled, as if in recognition, then slowly removed the sheet, folding it up length by length and setting it to one side.

David took the egg from Lewis’s hand, made the sign of the cross over him, and set the egg on the sheet. Taking the stick from Lewis’s other hand, he again made the sign of the cross and set the stick next to the egg. He wrapped both the stick and the egg in the sheet and stood up with the bundle. “Rest a minute,” he said. “Sit up when you’re ready, and I’ll bring you a cup of tea.”

David went into his bedroom and Lewis heard him put the water on. When the water started to hiss in the pan, Lewis sat up.

The tea David handed him was astringent, strong, head-clearing. Eucalyptus, pepper, and lemon, and God knows what else.

They sat quietly in the hot room for a few more minutes—until the men decorating the float came knocking on the door. Their work was finished, they said, and beautiful. They wanted David to see it, and Lewis could come too.

L
EWIS
set out covered trays of bacon and sausages and assorted pastries over Sterno flames. He slung bags of bread onto the buffet table with butter, jams, honey, halved grapefruits, wedges of cantaloupes. There were urns of regular and decaf coffee, pitchers of half-and-half, whole and skimmed milk. Now he was free until lunch prep on Tuesday and would slip down to Los Angeles, catch the Nightcrawlers’ Sunday meeting, see some friends. But first, he stuck a thermos of decaf and yesterday’s leftover brownies in his knapsack and tossed it into the front seat of his car.