Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (29 page)

“Mom!” They turned. Cray was on the road, straddling his bike.

“What?”

“Hi.”

“Hi, hon.”

“Hi, Cray.”

“Hi, Orvy.” Orville didn't pick up on it. “You
love
that word, right?”

“Sure do.”

Cray had just learned to ride a two-wheeler and wasn't all that steady on it yet. Miranda asked, “Where's your helmet?”

“Mo-om. It's not a big road.”

“The cars are big.”

Orville said, “Big boys wear helmets.”

“Okay. I'll go get it.” He paused. “Can I ride back, I mean, without my helmet, to get my helmet?”

She appreciated his making peace with them. “If you take care, honey.”

“Are you guys coming back soon?” They said they were. Cray shuffled the bike around, with difficulty got it moving, and bumped off down the pockmarked road toward the house.

The presence of the boy seemed a rebuke to their mean-spiritedness. After he'd gone, they felt drawn back toward an everyday level of kindness.

“I do love that in you, Orvy,” Miranda said softly, “the way you hold out the idea of what's possible, how we can do better. It's a great thing, really. I admire how you still hold up the sixties that way—people working together, joining in—compared to all the self-centered stuff we have now.” She turned to look at him, hoping. “I guess I just wish you would have walked with me.” Hearing herself, she felt embarrassed. “I mean, like for the Worth. Since that first time, you haven't again.”

“I carried the Jarlsberg.” She nodded. “Look, I spend my whole life helping, trying to keep the people in this town in one piece. It ain't easy.”

Suddenly she saw it. “Back then, did you actually join in . . . join in with people?”

“I . . .” He stumbled, feeling found out. “I was premed, in labs, and then I was over in Dublin—” Miranda looked down into her lap. He asked, “You?”

“I walked, yes, in the South. Alabama. Mississippi.”

He felt awful. Sinking. Trying to stay up. “We each do what we can.”

“But you're the one saying we can do more. Not just at our jobs, at our lives. Why waste time trashing ‘the Columbians' when—”

“What would you suggest?”

“Cry. Cry for someone else.”

He was surprised. “What? What has that got to do with anything?”

“When my mother died I cried for a year. Have you cried for her? Have you once visited her grave?”

“Jews don't. There's no headstone for a year.”

“Fine.” She tried to leave it at that.

“What?”

She shook her head, unwilling to say more.

“So this, between us, is falling apart because I'm a selfish guy who won't join a picket line for a hotel?”

“Damnit! This isn't about a hotel!”

“What is about then?”

“Staying. Walking the walk. With me and Cray.”

“Maybe it's about risking, about your being so cautious, so scared to risk anything, you lose everything.”

“Not my son. Not losing my son. I have to protect my son.”

“From what, for Chrissakes? From life? From me?”

“From your not being there—
really being there
—for him. And for me.”

“Fear is no protection.”

“Running is?”

“You're never wrong, are you? You're never weak and you're never vulnerable and you're sure as hell never powerless and you're never wrong, ever! You're right, I'm wrong? Talk about pride!”

“You couldn't stand her handicap so for some weird reason you went for mine?”

“Let's stop,” he said, stunned. “Let's go back. I mean, to the house.”

“No. I'll stay here a while.”

“Let me help you.”

“No.” She took a deep breath. “Good-bye.”

A stab in his heart. “Wait a second—”

“We'll talk.”

“I'll call you.”

He stumbled up the grassy slope to the dirt road and walked toward the Chrysler.

On the bench she wept uncontrollably, alone.

Numb, Orville went about his doctoring the next day as best he could. He missed Miranda and Cray terribly. That first night after their fight he picked up the phone to call to say good night to Cray. Cray was as he always was.

“Good night, Orvy.”

“Oh, I
love
that word very much!”

“Wanna talk to him, Mom?”

“No.” Cray hung up.

The next day Orville picked up the phone but couldn't dial. Hung up. Picked it up again, a number of times. Once or twice dialed but hung up before it was picked up on the other end.

A day and a night later he was paged at dawn and rushing out the front door when he tripped over something on the porch. A cardboard box, Scomparza Moving and Funeral. Taped to the top was a sealed letter. He ripped it open.

THE DETH OF RANDOLPH

A novel by ***
CRAY
***

Dedcasshun

 

I dedcat this book to my mom and Orvy who love me very much.

I have a cat and he is a very nice cat and I was 6 and 2

when I wrote this novl in skool with help from Ms Simon my teacher.

My Godmothers Ms Tarrs cat died. He died. The name of the cat was Randolph. He was a nice cat and a clevr cat and he was a very shy cat becass my Godmothers friend she lives with Mss Beeslee had 2 cats and Randolph was ascared of them becuss they were both big cats and he was a small cat.

He had a lot of love in his hart becuss my Godmother took good care of him and Randolph lovd tuna and he lovd to sit on her lap and on his place on the reefrigator.

Randolph lovd me very much and one day he died. My Godmother and me bureed him in her bakyrd with his toy mouse and some tuna.

THE END

Orville looked inside the box. Staring up at him was a letter with a Post-it note in Selma's handwriting: “Number 14, to be mailed on the tenth month and first week after he's back.” It was the top one of a packet of other letters bound by rubber bands. Also in the box were several large wrapped objects—by feel they seemed to be framed somethings, maybe photos—which he did not unwrap. He closed the box and put it away in his attic.

And called Miranda. A recording came on: “The number you have reached is not in service.” He called the phone company. No new number. He drove out there. No one home. No car, no animals. House sealed up tight. He talked to the neighbors, all up and down the dirt road. No one knew anything. Mrs. Tarr. Nothing. Nelda Jo and Henry. Nothing. Penny. No. The school. School had ended the day before. Summer vacation had begun.

Orville worried about foul play. Hoped, in a way, for foul play, but of a minor kind soon brought to rights. Talked to Officer Packy Scomparza. Nothing. Filed a missing person's report. Nothing. Tried to find relatives. Realized she had kept any relatives secret. Called Boca Grande, Florida, and Avalon, Mississippi, her dead husband's home. Nothing. Realized she had even kept her married name secret. As it dawned on him, her core of secrets, he felt dazed and astonished—as if he'd been hit in the head with a brick.

He wrote her a letter. It was returned, “No Forwarding Address.”

Amy was frantic. He tried to explain their breakup but couldn't.

It's as if they've fallen off the face of the earth.

Devastated, he sat alone in the ghostly house emptied out of everything but echoes. His mind filled with Miranda and that great little boy, Cray. And Selma.

“What hell!” he cried out. “Out of such love such hell!”

Part Three

In Humility, we call forth the Divinity,
to be with us in living our Understanding.

—
Quaker (anonymous)

· 24 ·

“How can I help?” Henry Schooner was asking, one evening a couple of weeks later, framed by the front doorway of Orville's mother's house.

It was the endless finale to a feverish day. The house was not air-conditioned. Orville had come straight home from a house call—rather, a stable call, lured out by the false premise of dire human disease and then pumping a flaccid heifer full of antibiotics—grabbed the bottle of Dickel, a six pack of Knickerbocker, a bag of Korn Kurls, and a fresh cardboard box of Parodi cigars, and, shedding down to his underwear as he climbed the elegant walnut staircase, flopped down onto the couch in front of the Yankees. Hearing the doorbell, he put on khaki safari shorts he'd bought in Nairobi and a black
T-
shirt with no logo. In America without a logo, he mused, that sort of sums me up.

Since Miranda and Cray disappeared, Orville had been left alone in the house with his dead mother and a songless lovebird, stunned by the depth of his despair. Feeling really
down.
Too sick at heart to eat, too restless to sleep. By day, at work, exhausted and preoccupied. By night, lying in bed going over and over it in his mind, hollowed out by the knife of grief. As desperate as he'd ever been.

Facing Henry at the front door, Orville realized that, as usual, Schooner was more appropriately dressed than him. Ironic, he thought, that this ragamuffin kid who always wore hand-me-downs and mismatched colors is now the missionary of high fashion to the Columbians. Henry stood there in creased linen trousers, a crisp pink shirt with a button-down collar, and a jauntily loosened regimental striped tie—a costume you see in newsreels from the twenties of the upper classes at play. Across the red tie's blue and white diagonal stripes sailed a fleet of aircraft carriers, heading for deep water off the edge or maybe around on the other side.

Orville was sweating; Henry was not. Orville hadn't had time to shave for two days and was worn-out. Henry looked fresh and perky, his cheeks and temples shining a hairless pink. He gave off the ineluctable scent of baby shampoo.

Meeting Henry's gaze was always hard for Orville. It was as if Henry practiced how to look at you in front of a mirror. You felt he was looking only at you and in fact into you and more in fact through you to some more significant truth that, if he were lucky, you might just reveal. And when he was with you, you felt like you were the only one in the world who mattered. So far, in his run for Congress as the only Republican candidate in the primary, he'd been dynamite.

Orville found himself staring not into the Schooner eyes but into the Schooner forehead, into the pink flesh creased by a single worry line, and then higher up to his remarkable hair, which just could not be pinned down, so to speak, because it was neither the white-blond of the boy nor the gray-blond of the man. Even combed, there was always a cowlick in back. Henry's one sign of nervousness, Orville had observed, was to twirl his cowlick with a finger. It gave him a charming sense of boyishness. And who could resist that? Even as a doctor schooled in reading bodies and, to a certain extent, minds, Orville had never been able to read anything in Schooner—except for this slightly revelatory twirl of the cowlick.

Fingering the nubbin of scar tissue on the back of his neck where Henry had put out his cigarette two blocks away and twenty-five years ago, Orville considered Henry's question. He noted that Henry hadn't asked “
Can
I help?” but “
How
can I help?” “
How
can I help?” assumed that Orville would be overjoyed to have the help of such a great guy and it was just a question of working out the details.

“With what?” Orville asked, finally.

“Finding 'em, and helping you cope.”

Orville said nothing to this, staring down now, noticing that in Henry's hands clasped over the crotch of his creased slacks was a Panama hat, white straw, dark purple band—as if he were paying a visit to the recently bereaved, expecting even to join in sitting
shiva,
why not?

“They've vanished off the face of the earth,” Orville said. “People have been looking for almost two weeks and there's nothing.”

“Kinda awkward just standing here in the doorway, old friend.”

Shit, Orville thought, a choice point: if he sits, he stays; if he stays, I've got to
relate
to the jerk. But if I turn him out, then I'm the shit, I'm the barbarian, not him.

“Come in.”

They went into the kitchen. Orville cracked two beers and offered a jar of Planters Peanuts, salted. His doctor's eyes scanned the list of ingredients. He figured that the jar contained enough carcinogens to wipe out all the squirrels in the Courthouse Square.

Henry accepted, munching thoughtfully. “Sorry I haven't been more neighborly in your time of trouble. I've been in D.C. Takes a lot of money to run for Congress. Lucky I got contacts. You remember Beef Schweitzer?—
Food Solutions,
out on Route 9? Since '54 in Guatemala he's cooked for the
CIA
boys. Big success—third biggest food wholesaler around.” Orville nodded. “And remember Larry North, lived just out in Philmont?” Orville shook his head. “Oh. Well, he goes by ‘Ollie' North now, for some damn reason. I met him in the navy. Annapolis, him. Got to know him in 'Nam. He's on the president's staff, National Security. Last Tuesday I met with him about monies to help my campaign. In the basement of
the White House
.” Henry paused, seeming to be waiting for an awed response.

“He has money?”

“He
knows
money.”

“National security by killing Nicaraguans? Death squads and torture?”

“‘Freedom Fighters,' you bet.” The voice was edgy. “Like the president says. Fighting the ‘evil empire.'”

“Making the world safe for dictators?”

“There you go again!” Henry said shaking his head, as if in admiration for Orville's spirit. “But I'll die for your right to say that—seen my buddies lying facedown in the dirt of 'Nam for that.” Orville wondered why his buddies, in the navy, would die in the dirt. “But listen up.” He leaned his elbows on the table, as if he were acting the part of someone in power telling someone not in power to listen up. “They can find 'em.”

“Ollie North can?”

“And Beef, and their operatives. Find anybody, anybody in the world, in a day or two. Unless they're professionals, shaving off fingerprints, plastic surgery, you know.”

“No, I don't.”

“'Course you don't, and the less you know the better. Just give me the go-ahead and we'll find 'em.”

“How much will it cost?”

Henry seemed devastated by this. His smile faded to disappointment. He averted his eyes as if witnessing a bad accident.

“Sorry,” Orville said, worried that if he didn't stop the implosion he might have a puddle of Schooner on his floor and he'd have to spend even more time mopping it up.

“Accepted,” Schooner said, brightening right up. “I mean, shit, Orvy, how could you know the drill? Civilian life is different.” Cupping his hand around the peanut jar as if it were filled with gemstones instead of toxins, Henry asked, again, “Is it a go?”

Orville again felt trapped. If he said yes, what would he owe Henry? Would Henry's methods intrude on Miranda and Cray's privacy? But he was getting nowhere trying to find them and had just about given up. His sense of loss and his frantic despair were unbearable. Every morning when he woke up his first thought was
They're gone!
It tore his heart out. All day long it haunted him—and affected his doctoring. Distracted, he was making mistakes. He would forget to order a test, to check it, to make a referral, to keep an appointment, and, worse, he would screw up with patients. There had been only one fatality—eighty-eight-year-old Mr. Targ, one of the Rope Alley Targs who Bill and he had been treating for prostate cancer, was hospitalized with an ominous tachycardia that, day after day, no matter what med Orville tried, wouldn't break. Finally, his heart gave out. Awake that night, thinking over the case, he realized he'd forgotten to consider hyperthyroidism. The next day he had the lab run a test on the saved blood.
TSH
, the thyroid hormone, was off the scale. Would he have caught it before? Maybe, maybe not.

“Okay,” Orville said to Henry. “Go ahead. But nothing intrusive. I don't want them to know you're following them, or that you've found them. I just want to know that they're safe.”

“Think I don't? They're dear to me, too. Tell you something, old buddy. Ever since I came back to this town almost three years ago now—my hometown and yours too—I feel like the town is part of me. This person, that person, this church, that synagogue, this soccer team and that, even the damn manhole covers and chichi antique stores!—all part of me. And if a building comes down or an antiquer gets sick with that gay disease shit or if a Nazi swastika is painted on that Temple Anshe Emeth of yours or even if there's a murder in Bliss Towers with the blacks?
I feel it.
Even the nameless blacks. And if I know the person who goes or dies
personally?
” Henry again seemed to crumple down into a depth of unfathomable grief. “I
take
it personally. It
kills
me. Like your dear mom's death. That great lady that was like the mom I wished I had. Like Miranda and that boy, um . . .”

“Cray.”

“Cray, yeah—getting old, memory's not what it used to be.”

“It's Reaganesque.”

“Ha! Haha!” Henry slapped his cheek. “What a hotshit wit you got!
Still!
” Henry chortled a little more and then, sighing, went on. “I know you really love her and him, and I love her and him too. Hey, the boy spent a lot of time in our home with Maxie and Junior. And they disappear? Thin
air
into? Telling nobody nothin'? Not even sayin' good-bye? My Maxie is, well . . . devastated.”

“Okay. See what you can do. I've got to go back to work.”

“God, you work hard!” Henry said, shaking his head in amazement. “Why not relax a little?”

“Find me a doctor to take over until I leave and I will.”

“You really leaving?”

“Nothing to stay for now.”

“Oh. Oh, shit. That hurts, old bud. Right here.” He placed a palm over what he thought was his heart but was his spleen. “Guess I personally never really believed you would.” His face fell, his body sagged. “Talk about pain. Us and this town might never recover, the way you've dedicated your life here, modern medicine, and—”

“Not as modern as Edward R. Shapiro, though, am I?”

“Fair enough. But y'know why we go to him?” Orville said he did not. “'Cause we been goin' to him ever since we been back, and we're loyal. Loyal folk. Like I am to you.” He rose suddenly and before Orville could get up Henry had plunked a hand down on his shoulder, man-to-man. Orville, in a man-one-down-to-man position, glanced up into those coal-black eyes and then away. “We got ourselves a growing relationship, Orvy, I know it. Takes time to trust and respect, but we're getting there.” Without waiting for confirmation of this, Henry went on, “Why not come over to our house for Fourth of July? Hot dogs, burgers, beer, you'd be honoring us, as part of the family.”

“I may have to work.”

“Whenever. But come over anytime, day or night. Look, I know how shitty you feel—about losing your mom, losing your girl and that cute kid who was like a son to you. But two points: one, we'll find 'em, guaranteed; two, let the Schooners help with the pain. C'mon over anytime.”

Orville thought he should say no but instead said nothing.

“Hey, hey! We got progress here! You didn't say no!”

Orville, puzzled by the pull of a sincerity he didn't buy, walked Henry back to the front door and out onto the porch. The evening was calm, recovering from the heat-stroked day. There was a hint in the air not of cool exactly but of lessening hot. Across the hazy park, the light on Schooner's front porch glowed golden, reflecting the gold-painted underside of the porch roof.

“So if not the 4th, come the 3rd or the 5th or whatever damn day you want. Come anytime. Drop in. No need to call first. Nobody much just drops in anymore, have you noticed? When we were young, we dropped in. Now, we don't drop in. Which is why I dropped in just now. Maybe, if you and me take the lead, in the ‘drop-in' movement . . .” He sighed. “One more thing.”

“Yeah?” With Henry there was always one more thing, and it was usually the one thing that underlay all the other things.

“The reason we haven't switched to you as our doctor is continuity of care. I mean, with you leaving. And also that Nelda Jo likes you too much to put it on a purely professional basis.”

“What?” Orville's mind was flooded with those muscat grapes.

“Just jokin', Orvy.” He popped him in the arm. “Laugh a little, okay?”

He turned away to go. Orville said, “One more thing, Henry.”

Henry turned back. On his face was a listening look. “Fire away, old friend.”

“Why me?” Henry seemed puzzled. “Why are you so interested in me?”

“You mean in addition to our just being old friends?”

“We were never old friends, Henry. You and I—”

“Well, what's a little difference of opinion among old friends?”

“Henry. Why am I so blessed with your friendship?”

If he caught the sarcasm, he hid it. “You want the truth?” Orville nodded, thinking, Here comes a lie. “Okay. I feel very deeply that I have to look out for you.”

“What?”

“For some reason you hated me growing up. But I respected you. When I left Columbia, walking off into those woods with you and Whiz and Tommy staring at me, I was lost, a lost kid headed for trouble. I enlisted in the navy. It was rough. A year later I found myself in Seattle, facing a choice. A tour of duty in Vietnam, or run away, desert. I was supposed to ship out that night. I walked and walked in the rain. Found myself down at the harbor. Staring at a ferry coming in from Vancouver.
Toot toot,
it was goin'
toot toot.
Comin' in. I could get on it, go to Vancouver, save my ass. A buddy had done it. Said it was nice over there in Canada. Flowerpots hanging from the lampposts. Nice life. Or, there was 'Nam. I didn't have much time. But I couldn't decide. And you know what I did?” Orville did not. “I found a pay phone and called you up.”