Something Is Out There (16 page)

The catafalque, as Jenny calls it, sits there in the backyard, an enormous rib cage of wood amid scattered scraps and piles of packed-down sawdust. Max tells anyone who will listen that when it’s finished it will be a cabin cruiser, eighteen feet long, with an inboard motor and all the modern equipment. Of course finishing is years away.

Walker keeps up with what business there is. He puts in an occasional ceiling fan or paints the inside of a house or builds bookshelves—but mostly he helps keep his mother’s little place, and he has more free time than is healthy. He lifts weights, plays basketball with Sean, goes more often than he should over to the Highpoint house, and then tries to keep to himself, a young man with too much room for thinking, as his
mother would put it. Casting about, she would say. And he rides off in the truck to Mud Island, alone, and walks the long concrete model of the Mississippi, and stands on what he knows to be the Highpoint area of the black bronze-crossed representation of Memphis. He goes on down the fake river to the little park at the end and eats an ice cream and looks at the fountain. People walk by him; children play in the water. He sits there. Idleness and worry all the time, fidgeting, nervous, unable to think about anything but the one thing that has come to occupy him above all else, with a constant pressure under the breastbone. He’s continually brooding about it and turning on it in his thoughts, even in sleep, this affliction that came out of nowhere, this terrible surprise and misery, this secret hunger and aching.

He has fallen desperately in love with Jenny Glass Clayfield.

When he and his mother and Sean visit the old Highpoint house, they all end up sitting near the big wooden frame, try
^o
ing to talk over the noise of Max’s labor. Walker watches his sister-in-law move back and forth from the house to the end of the yard, and the rib cage of blond wood there, and then he tries hard not to watch her. She’s a shape in his peripheral vision, and he hears her voice, that softness coming from her throat; he could pick it out of a crowd of people all talking at once. When he glances at her he sees the soft curve of her breasts in the little area of the open collar of her blouse. He hates his own mind, his own senses, because they are so attuned to every nuance of her being—sound, breath, touch, the fragrance of her, the physical power of her proximity, bones and flesh and the dark shine of the eyes and the hair with its perfect straight shimmer in sunlight.

Work on the boat takes up the hour before dinner. The family moves through the shade of the lawn in the sound of it.

Finally their mother shakes her head and makes her slow way into the house, to sit with Jenny and play gin rummy. Walker tolerates Sean’s teasing and banters with him, not really attending to what is said, feeling only annoyance with the other’s constant chatter. Sometimes they toss a baseball back and forth. Walker wonders if Jenny can see him from the window. Now and then Max joins in the talk—that is, when he’s not rattled and aggravated, trying, he says, to focus on the work. He allows Walker only a boy’s tasks, really: holding tools and fetching things.

Jenny serves the evening meal out in the yard, and they all sit in the striped shade of the unfinished boat, and Walker attempts to see past her, around her, away from her. He knows that this thing he’s struggling with is not a crush. This is a passion so deep it has taken everything else out of him; it feels like a form of starvation—or, no, a form of drowning. Something wells up in his spirit, and leaves him inwardly gasping. She talks about trying to sleep in the ruckus at night, Max with his boat, his manic dream of maritime riches, the floodlights pouring in the window, her weekends and evenings sacrificed to this set of ribs on scaffolding. Her husband treats the talk as a form of mockery. Nothing gets through to him. It occurs to Walker that Max has one obsession and he, Walker, has his. Walker desires to set the older man straight, and then, like part of the same thought, hopes that Max will never get it and that Jenny’s discontent will grow. This thought makes him sorry and sick inside.

Most days now, after Sean gets home from school, Walker will play a little distracted basketball with him, and then leave him with their mother and, when there’s no job site to go to,
will drive over to the park or into the city center to walk around, and finally he ends up at Max’s. He tells his mother and his younger brother that it’s to help with the boat. Sometimes he can find a way to believe it himself: a brother is supposed to be there for a brother.

“They’re gonna get tired of seeing you,” his mother says. “They
are
a married c-couple you know.”

“I’m helping out. You want me to stay here?”

“They both work all day. They n-need time alone.”

“I’ll stay here if you want me to. I won’t go anywhere at all.”

“I’m t-talking about what
they
might want. Stop it.”

“They’re fine with me coming over. Max says he wants my help.”

“Let’s hope—so.” She manages well enough on the cane, and her speech, which was slightly damaged by the stroke, is getting better fast. She’s a lady who has little tolerance for weakness, even in herself. Having lived through a bad marriage to a mentally unstable, increasingly alcoholic, and sporadically violent husband, and having raised the boys mostly alone, she’s got a streak of iron in her. Max, who is fourteen years older than Walker, remembers a lot of what went on before the old man died. More than he likes. He understands Minnie, and admires her, and he calls her by her first name, as if they are old friends rather than mother and son.

Minnie would side with Max
.

Walker keeps having this thought, while trying not to think at all.

Max and Jenny have been married nine years. Sean, who just turned fifteen, doesn’t really remember them any other way. Walker can recall the years of their going back and forth, the two early miscarriages, several of the bad fights, and a trial separation, when Jenny took a bus to Florida to be with her
parents for part of a winter, trying to deal with the fact that she was still childless and that her husband wasn’t the romantic she’d thought he was. This is how she has recently described it to Minnie and Walker, casually, standing in the kitchen with a glass of orange juice in her hand and gazing out the window at Max working on the boat.

One afternoon Walker goes over to help Max with some hand-sanding, and Jenny comes home early from her job at the antiques shop. Walker hears the car, and keeps his eyes fixed on the sandpaper under the heel of his hand. She stays in the house for a time, and then comes to the door and calls out: “I need something, Max.”

“Put me down for tonight,” Max says.

“Funny. And you wish.”

“Go see what she wants,” he says to Walker.

She watches Walker approach, and holds the door open for him. “I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the effing boat,” she says.

He goes into the house, turns, and waits. She leans out the door and says, “Hey Max, did I tell you I’m running away with Walker?”

“Good,” he calls. “Tell him to leave the truck.”

She slams the door and comes by Walker, who follows her through the kitchen. He sees her supple, curved, solid shape under the lime-green skirt and white blouse. They cross through the small parlor, with its pictures of Jenny’s family on the walls and its magazine baskets, three of them ranked next to one another in a row under the one window, stuffed with issues of
O
and
Redbook
. She stops at the entrance to the living room and puts her forehead softly against the door frame, holding on there. “Oh, hell,” she murmurs, and then straightens and gives him a weak little sad-eyed smile. He
imagines putting his arms around her. Then he hears Max drop something outside, wood clattering against wood, and everything seems to collapse inside him. He’s stripped clean under the skin, raw and stinging.

“Jenny?” he says. “Oh, God.”

She says, in almost the exact same instant: “Boy, I’m tired.”

He waits.

She says. “Did you say,
Oh, God?
What’s going on, Walker?”

“Can I do something, Jenny?”

“Something wrong?” she says.

“Can I do anything
for
you,” he gets out.

“Tell me I’ll get through this boat business. It’s killing me.”

He takes her gingerly by the elbow, feeling despondent and false. “You okay?”

“I’m not great,” she says, then lightly, unmindfully, casually pats his shoulder. “I’m very, very
tired.”
She leads him to the dining room, the hutch, and indicates a Crock-Pot on the top shelf.

He carries it back into the kitchen for her.

“Coming back for dinner?” she says.

“Mom said she wants to cook tonight. Wants me to be there.”

“Oh.” Jenny bows her head slightly, disappointed or simply, as she says, tired. Her eyelashes are so long and dark. “Well, I guess I’ll go to bed and read, then.” She moves one strand of hair away from her forehead, and smiles, as if it costs her. “See you tomorrow?”

“I think Max is out of his mind,” he tells her, just able to breathe the words out. “Staying out there with you in here.”

Now it will happen
, he thinks.

But she steps offhandedly, face turned to one side, into his arms; the embrace is sisterly, like all the others. Still, he holds
her for a second longer, saying nothing, feeling her pull back. He breathes in the scent of her hair, the sunscreen on her neck and shoulders, his hand wide on the small of her back. Finally he lets go and she dismisses him, almost brushing him away with her hands, busying herself with the dinner. “Tomorrow, then. There’ll be barbecue left over.”

“Good,” he starts to say. But his voice catches, and he makes his way out of there.

Night, and sleeplessness. Ablaze inside. Fever. Fright. He drowses, and comes out of it with a start, wide-eyed, breath-caught, sick. The ordinary objects in the room seem to expand, and his mind presents them to him as grotesque twisted shapes, though they are perversely only themselves, giving forth nothing but their plainness: dresser, lamp, lamp shade, alarm clock, books, the half-open door, the sliver of light leading into the hall. He hears Sean, one room away, shifting and turning in his bed, and he hears his mother’s late-night television.

He closes his eyes and sees Jenny standing with him in the kitchen of his brother’s house.

He tries to make his mind go elsewhere, but it keeps showing him her face, with those eyes—that look, the something confiding in it, yearning.
I’m his brother
, he says to himself.
I’m his goddamned brother. But she’s closer to my age than his. She’s only four years older. Stop this. Stop it
.

The slow hours of the night pass this way, and if he sleeps at all he is aware of it only as a kind of stupor, waiting for the real thing or some semblance of it, something like rest—a lull that will make him sink past the constant play of her image across his mind, and stop the sudden waking, those repeated stirrings, looking at the strangeness of what he knows, to his horror, is nothing more than a plain, quiet bedroom at night.

•  •  •

His own brief romantic history is complicated. He’s had several girlfriends, none of whom stayed long, and he was engaged to one, Milly Sparks, a couple of years ago. Milly Sparks had been a friend of the family, the youngest daughter of Minnie’s best school chum, and she changed her mind the day before the planned wedding, with several members of her far-flung family having spent considerable sums of money gathering from distances.

She was institutionalized later in the summer—disambiguation, psychosis, schizophrenia of the delusional variety. Walker visited her in the hospital, and her ravings seemed so classically nutty that he found himself wondering if she was staging them for his benefit. But no, she was gone, believing her visions utterly and simply, stridently, with the confidence of a child. Minnie said it wasn’t much different from her own history with his father, though, she said with some relish, having survived it all, he was never diagnosed as anything but a drunk.

They do not, any of them, speak of Milly Sparks anymore. And Walker sometimes senses the others being careful not to mention her in their talk when he’s present.

He never thinks of Milly Sparks. Not ever.

Saturday morning he rises from the badness of the night, puts on the clothes he wore the day before, steps out in the hall, and looks at Sean in his cluttered little room. Sean’s still asleep, blankets tangled around him like something tying him down, sun pouring on him through his window. Walker gazes at the boy, envying his ability to sleep through anything. Then he walks into the living room, to the screen door that looks out onto the little front porch. His mother’s sitting on the top step
there, sipping coffee and watching the trucks crossing the bridge to Arkansas. There’s clean, clear light up high over that way, where the sun is just hitting the spars of the bridge. Arkansas is a strip of bare trees and dirt yonder, across the far, gray running of the Mississippi in the early morning mist. He opens the door, and it protests slightly.

“You want b-breakfast?” she says without looking back.

He lets the door slap to. “Not hungry,” he says.

“You got a—l-lot on your mind.”

He steps below her and sits on the bottom step, reaches and pulls a stalk of knife grass from the lawn. He plays with the whitening green blade, stretching it and looking at the color of it in the light.

“Talk to me, son.”

“Pretty morning.”

“I’m not t-talking about the-the gu-goddamn weather.”

“Okay, then what are you talking about, Ma?”

“You been going around here like a—z-zombie. What’s got h-hold of you?”

“Well, damn. You tell me. Because I don’t have a clue.”

She sighs and leans back. “Ok-kay. You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

“There’s nothing to tell. I’m fine. I feel fine.”

“Half the time y-you don’t know what day it is.”

“That’s not a sign of anything, is it?” He has the upsetting thought that Jenny has gleaned something, too, from watching him. “Have you been talking to somebody?”