World Gone Water (17 page)

When I emerge from Max Maxwell's, the sky is black. There is no trace of the sunset I missed, and the moon makes ghosts of the saguaros on Camelback Mountain.

As I walk back toward the ballroom, I can see where the resort backs into the mountain, where the cement ends and the rock begins. A rash of stars suddenly appears in the sky and everything glows for a moment, until my eyes adjust and all I see again is cement and rock.

A caravan of black limousines rolls past me to the chandeliered entrance of the Phoenician. Flashbulbs explode around the limos, making the night blacker. I feel like I'm hiding in the bushes as
I watch Belinda and Kyle and Alisha each step out of their own limousine. Jon isn't among the photographers but is at Alisha's side, holding her hand, waving at the camera like a movie star.

The Bandeses' limousine lumbers up the driveway toward the entrance. Dale suddenly appears, carelessly wandering in the flower beds. He trips and falls to his knees and I move to help him up, but when he sees me, he pulls a dirty pistol from his jacket pocket. The possibilities of just how badly this could end unfold and multiply.

“Dale, don't,” I say, but even I am unconvinced by my words, and I'm thinking no matter how it does turn out, all I'll be reading about in tomorrow's paper is Dale. What won't be in the paper, though—the story worth telling—is what happened when I arrived at the Bandeses'.

The contest was rigged so that someone from Arizona would win, and Carol Bandes was the first name we drew from the mailed entries that qualified. I made the half-hour flight up from Phoenix in the Buckley Cosmetics private jet to pick up Carol and Martin. From the airfield, a limousine shuttled me into the trees, in the direction of the Grand Canyon. The San Francisco Peaks loomed in the sky above. The snowcaps reminded you that even though you could see them, they were somewhere else, in a different place than where you were.

At a certain point traffic thinned, so that the only cars on the highway were those loaded down with families and crammed floor-to-ceiling with camping gear and luggage. The limo driver, a thin, dark-haired man, announced the address as he turned at the wooden sign bearing the number of the Bandeses' house.

I presented a dozen roses to Mrs. Bandes when I told her she had won the Buckley Cosmetics World Gone Water contest. JSB had stressed the importance of surprising the contest winner, if only to prevent the winner from declining, which would be bad publicity.

“The what?” she asked, leaning forward, squinting. Her close-cropped blond hair hugged her small features, and her smallish frame seemed to be swallowed by the open space behind her.

“Your name was drawn as the winner,” I repeated.

“But I didn't—” Just then a tall, severe-looking man covered the distance in the sparse front room to the front door in two or three steps.

“Can I help you?” he asked. He stood behind his wife, and the two of them made for an impressive couple.

I explained myself again, the look on Carol's face growing increasingly confused, until her husband said, “Oh, I entered you in the contest, honey. It seemed like a lark.”

Carol's confusion was replaced by an uncomfortable look, and she peered over my shoulder at the silent limo in her driveway. Finally they invited me inside.

The wooden floor creaked a minuet as the three of us made our way to the couch. Carol took the roses from me and I explained the day's plan to her.

“I don't know if I'm up for the trip today,” Carol said. “I had some things I was going to do. As a matter of fact, if you were thirty minutes later, you would've missed us entirely.”

Carol shifted on the couch. The silence inside brought every noise from outside right into the amphitheater of their living room.

“If you don't want to go,” her husband said, “you don't have to go. I just thought you might like it.”

Carol shot him an incredulous look and he glanced down at his shoes.

“I'm sure they have an alternate,” he said, looking at me.

“I think you might enjoy yourself,” I said. There was no alternate and I could feel this whole thing slipping into disaster. The idea that winning the contest would be an imposition in someone's life hadn't occurred to me, and I was unprepared to make a persuasive
argument against it. “A limo ride, a short flight to Phoenix, a party at the Phoenician. Not a bad way to spend a day.”

“I don't fly at night,” Carol said.

“We'll put you up at the Phoenician for the night,” I said. “We want you to enjoy yourselves.”

Carol looked at Martin. Martin smiled, and Carol shrugged and said, “Okay, let me change and we'll go.”

“There'll be a makeover in Phoenix,” I said, which came out sounding more offensive than a litany of profanity, but Carol understood my meaning and reappeared unchanged, a small bag in her hand.

Once we were riding back toward the Flagstaff airport, Carol and Martin relaxed and they seemed to become one person. They laughed about a neighbor who had cut a tree down onto his house, and Martin talked a little bit about his part-time job at Snowbowl, the ski resort nearby. Martin was retired from the railroad—he used to run the logging routes from Washington State to Montana—a business he said was “dying out.” His hands were large and powerful, and I felt myself hiding my own under my legs on the seat.

Suddenly the limousine sputtered and lost power. The hum of the engine choked off and we glided slower and slower until the driver pulled off the road and we stopped.

Carol and Martin looked at me, and we waited for the driver to appear at our door.

“She quit,” the driver said. “Could be the high altitude.”

Martin looked skeptical. “It sounded like the alternator quit.” He jumped out, and I felt inclined to follow him even though I knew nothing about engines and how they made a car run.

Martin lifted the hood and peered into the massive gray intestines underneath. He jiggled a few hoses and touched the metal of the engine. You got the sense you were watching a doctor
diagnosing a patient. “It's not the alternator,” Martin said. “I wonder how old the battery is.”

We both looked up to hear the driver's response, but he was leaning on the passenger door, his head tucked away inside the limousine, talking to Carol. Martin scowled and suddenly it was like I wasn't there.

“Excuse me,” Martin said.

The driver's head popped up.

“How old is this battery?” Martin asked.

The driver laughed. “I don't work on them. I just drive them.” He grinned at his own cleverness.

Martin's voice lowered a full octave. “Do you have tools in the trunk?”

The driver unlocked the trunk and handed Martin a small, red plastic toolbox. The tools inside clanged against one another. The sound carried up the vacant highway.

I stood back to watch Martin operate, but the sound of the limo driver's voice chatting up Carol distracted us both, and the fact that the driver wasn't right there under the hood with us seemed like a fist that just kept pounding and pounding. The driver's voice grew louder as he laughed at something he'd said. His voice took the high, nervous tone of bar talk, and Martin started tapping a wrench against the metal engine housing. The tapping started intermittently and grew louder until the driver looked over in our direction.

I could sense an impending explosion and I feared what Martin might do, so I said, “We could use a hand over here,” but before I could finish the sentence, Martin had thrown the wrench to the pavement and was on the driver, asking, “What's the idea here?”

“Nothing.” The driver shrugged, unintimidated. “Just chatting.”

“That's my wife you're chatting to,” Martin said.

“Yeah, she told me,” the driver said, defiant. “So?”

The driver stepped back from the car and Martin pushed him into the road.

“Martin,” Carol said, emerging from the limousine. She appeared relieved in a way that made her look like she'd come back from a year's vacation on a tropical island where the only real concern she'd had was whether to eat coconuts or bananas for breakfast.

A sound like a clap of thunder echoed and the driver was on the ground, writhing in the middle of the two-lane highway. A look of complete concentration overtook Martin as he kicked the driver in the chest. Carol froze where she stood and then a curious thing happened. Martin's face changed to real anguish, a deep hurt flashed in his eyes, a look in sharp contrast to the look on Dale's face when he had Shane right where he wanted him in the parking lot of the County Line. Dale's look was that of a champion, someone who was enjoying another's defeat at his hands. Martin, though, seemed truly pained as he continued to hammer his foot into the driver, who was by now curled up like a caterpillar on the road.

One of the Bandeses' neighbors happened by, picking us up, and the remainder of the trip was made in silence. I came to believe that Carol and Martin despised me in some way that I could understand and agree with. I parted company with them after we landed in Phoenix, excusing myself on some errand for the company but promising to see them at the Phoenician later that night.

But the look on Martin's face haunted me. When the hurt came across his face, you knew that everything his life was about was wrapped up in his life with Carol. He was protecting the source of his happiness, and you had the immediate feeling, watching him, that he understood that that happiness couldn't be found anywhere else and any threat or challenge to it would be met and extinguished.

As I watched Martin and his warrior-like battle with the driver, I was transported into the dreams of my youth, dreams where I used to see myself way into the future, married to someone who loved me. I dreamed those dreams as a way of comforting myself, I suppose. Talie had told me she'd had the same dreams. We both dreamed of a house, and a car, and a neighborhood where children would play under the afternoon shadows of elm trees. We could easily see ourselves in the windows of these homes on these tree-lined streets, in these phantom neighborhoods. Talie's dreams included enough children to people an entire elementary school, and my dream included similar scenarios. I'd imagine myself coming home from a good job, walking up the driveway, anticipating the warmth just inside the front door, where small coats hung on hooks and lunch pails with half-eaten sandwiches had been dropped next to unlaced shoes. Before anyone knew I was home, I could sense my family, anticipate their excitement when they saw me, an excitement matched in pitch only by my own. And inside our home, everything else in the world remained locked out, strange and foreign in the light of family.

The dream comes back to me with a clarity that is startling, mined from the darkness where dreams stir. Even if the details are the fantasies of youth, buried and forgotten in time, the truth of the dream remains. Dusted off, it gleams anew, and I'm embarrassed at how much I want to believe in it now, how much I want to believe it is something still worth trying for.

My thanks to:

Josephine Bergin

Rebecca Boyd

Stephanie Duncan

Heather E. Fisher

Tim Parrish

Michael Rosovsky

David Ryan

Elizabeth Searle

Lavinia Spalding

Dan Pope and everyone at Roundabout

Clarkes, Gilkeys, Kaliens, and Cottons

Mary Cotton and Max

Jaime Clarke is a graduate of the University of Arizona and holds an MFA from Bennington College. He is the author of the novels
We're So Famous
and
Vernon Downs
; editor of the anthologies
Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, Conversations with Jonathan Lethem
, and
Talk Show: On the Couch with Contemporary Writers
; and co-editor of the anthologies
No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from “Post Road” Magazine
(with Mary Cotton) and
Boston Noir 2: The Classics
(with Dennis Lehane and Mary Cotton). He is a founding editor of the literary magazine
Post Road
, now published at Boston College, and co-owner, with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston.

www.jaimeclarke.com

www.postroadmag.com

www.baumsbazaar.com

www.newtonvillebooks.com

“Jaime Clarke's
World Gone Water
is so fresh and daring, a necessary book, a barbaric yawp that revels in its taboo: the sexual and emotional desires of today's hetero young man. Clarke is a sure and sensitive writer, his lines are clean and carry us right to the tender heart of his lovelorn hero, Charlie Martens. This is the book Hemingway and Kerouac would want to read. It's the sort of honesty in this climate that many of us aren't brave enough to write.”