The Mt. Monadnock Blues Page 18

  Taggart herself confused him. Her complete lack of humor made communication impossible; it was as if they were speaking different languages. Her voice was so soft (dead?) and her movements so careful they seemed choreographed. When she rose from a chair, she did so in slow motion, a Martha Graham dancer, the pivoting of the shoulders as gesture.

  But then a hard fire, a redhot coal, would burn in her eyes, and her blade-thin lips were mortared shut with unexpressed anger. The lips barely parted when she spoke. Tim would not have been surprised had Ms. Taggart stepped out of her skin, leaving the placid false husk standing while a smaller more intense creature, released, began barking like a dog.

  It made him feel unclean. He hated himself for trusting what Cindy might say, while doubting Billy. Billy was a wild card. The first hour (with the four of them sitting around the kitchen table) Billy submitted he did not mind change. Already this summer he had been to two camps and two houses and he liked being on the move. “It’s good practice for road trips,” he said, pounding his baseball mitt with deadly earnest, baffling Taggart who knew nothing of the boy’s future in the major leagues.

  And Billy was vulnerable to Earl’s folderol. Over there he would be offered a new deal, with tin cans to potshot and a tractor he could drive in circles. Perhaps a Michael Jordan poster, signed—by Earl, of course—“To Big Bill, from your good buddy Mike.”

  Earl could sell it, the same way a DeNiro could. A great actor could give you the Middle American verities or, with equal conviction, the serial killer of those same Middle Americans. So Tim felt obliged to do some acting of his own, selling himself to the impassive Taggart—not that she was buying. Every word he said was “true” yet it was truth in the service of manipulation and by the end he wanted to scream, Get out, go, do what you must but leave us in peace.

  Unclean. The whole day had been a splash in the muck. Not just Taggart with her trick questions, but The Pants Man and The Sneaker Man. The Trapper Keeper Girl. At least they smiled while taking his money. Not Michele Taggart; no free mints by her cash register.

  “Hey, Unk, is it safe? Is she gone?

  “She’s gone,” he laughed, though they had already emerged.

  “She’s creepy. She was searching my room, for drugs or something. Isn’t that against the law?”

  “Ms. Taggart is the law. So you didn’t like her?”

  “Hated her,” said Cindy, a frosty glaze over her rolled-up eyes.

  “She was so ignorant,” said Billy. “When you were saying all this nice stuff, and making jokes, and she just sat there?”

  “Why did she have to be here all day?” asked Cindy.

  “I guess she had a lot of questions to ask.”

  “Dumb questions. Who are my three best friends, who are my three worst enemies. What’s that about?”

  “I think she’s a lesbian,” said Cindy.

  This hit Tim like a wild crack of rifle-fire from the blue edge of the forest. His eyes widened. Where was this coming from? (Or going to?)

  “No way, Simp. Check out her hair.”

  “Wait a second, hold on here. What do you two think a lesbian is? What do you know about anything like that?”

  “Mom told us that stuff.”

  “She told Cynthia, too?”

  “She told both of us, Unk, and it’s not like we’re against lesbians. It’s just Cindy thinks that lady was one and I don’t.”

  “I’ll bet you could tell, Unk.”

  “I could, sweetheart? Because—?”

  “Because of you-know,” she answered slyly.

  They knew. Tim had just begun to absorb it.

  “Or,” said Billy, “is it like two separate worlds. Like all the basketball guys know the other basketball guys and the hockey guys know the hockey guys but the hockey guys don’t know the basketball guys.”

  “Is that a question?” Tim was touched by Billy’s tangled formulation, by what he heard as eggshell-stepping to avoid giving pain. But they knew! They had taken it upon themselves to make this exchange occur. “You mean do gay men know lesbians, and lesbians know gay men?”

  “Right.”

  “Well sure they do. Everyone knows all sorts of people, hopefully. But it never crossed my mind she might be lesbian. I was pretty sure she was a Martian.”

  “No way,” said Billy, rolling with it. “Check out her hair.”

  “You don’t know what a Martian’s hair is like!” shouted Cindy.

  “He might,” said Tim, beaming a bit on the newly subtle brow of his nephew. But they knew, and they were okay with it; he was gay and he was still Unk. Tim had seriously underrated “the minor children.”

  “Did she hassle you, Unk?”

  “No, Bill. You mean—?”

  “Right.”

  “No. She wasn’t exactly nice to me, but that’s probably just how she is. At least when she’s doing her job.”

  “She wasn’t nice to me, either,” said Cindy.

  “Which proves she’s not a lesbo,” said Billy, stretching his sophistication past the snapping point.

  Billy was on the muscle now, charged up, freed from Taggart’s cold probe. Did he like his friends, she kept asking—with all kinds of ketchup and mustard on ‘like’ and ‘friends.’ Was he gay, that’s what she wanted to know, but Billy knocked that knuckle-ball way over the fence. “No ma’am, I hate my friends. What do you think?”

  “Listen up now, Hergies. I forgot to say we’re having company tonight. An old friend is coming and we’re cooking on the grill.”

  “Ellie?”

  “No, sweetheart, it’s someone named Karl. You met him once, a long time ago.”

  “He’s not a friend, he’s your boyfriend.”

  “Slow down, Bill Hergie. What he is, is one of the world’s nicest people.”

  “So are you, Unk,” said Cindy.

  “So isn’t The Alien,” said Billy.

  “Okay, it’s time to forget The Alien. I want you two to go over to the McManuses and invite them to the cookout. It’s a late invitation, but round up as many as you can. I’m awarding five points for every McManus you bring.”

  “But what do we do with the points, Unk? What’s a point?”

  “Yeah, Unk, what’s the point?”

  They asked, but giggled and did not stay for an answer. Disburdened both of Ms. Taggart’s looming inquisition and of a secret they had carried too long, their feet barely touched the grass as they sailed off in search of points.

  When a couple of small planes from Silver Ranch floated over, Tim thought of Monty. Monty would shake his fist at them, dream of launching mortar shells, threaten to call Congressmen. He did research on how high one’s property rights extended.

  Tim liked the way they punctuated the sky, counterpointing the quiet with their lazy drone. Flipping hamburgers with his right hand, he waved to the pilots with his left, as though he had been standing out there barbecuing for decades. In the strong late sun every color was extreme, luminous—a Fellini concoction.

  “By the way,” said Karl, as they saw Al McManus approaching, “are we—?”

  “We are, though it won’t come up.… Al, this is my friend Karl. Karl, my friend Al.”

  “The father of the twins,” said Al. “Something smells almost good enough to eat.”

  Children, two of whom were the twins and two who were new to Tim, chased a skimming Frisbee. Someone’s Irish setter got to it first, but he seemed to know the drill. He would chomp the Frisbee once, almost furtively, and then release it.

  Billy was busy, but not so busy he didn’t have Tim’s back. He identified Karl as one of his uncle’s “buddies,” nothing more, and when Tim told him not to worry, not to make it a deep dark secret, Billy gave him a solicitous pat. “Sure, Unk, but you don’t want to go shouting it out, either.” Impressive balance, from a lad so classically heterosexual.

  And Billy was a changed man that way. In the wake of his summercamp kisses (and matured in numerous subterranean ways) he perceived Joy
ce Arsenault in a new light, this one also luminous. Where previously Billy had noted a reasonable throwing arm (for a girl) and decent speed on the basepaths, tonight he noticed freckles and brown curls. Smiling eyes that confessed to fealty.

  Joyce was a very cute twelve-year-old, no question. Tim, perhaps ungenerously, saw her future through a glass darkly: saw cigarettes and serial hairdo intervention and a weight problem at thirty. This he kept to himself (you don’t want to go shouting it out) while enjoying the hell out of Billy’s new lemonade-bearing courtliness.

  The kids were fed and the “grownup food”—salmon and grilled vegetables—was just coming off the fire when a gray Tercel steered into the driveway. It was Ellie and Mr. X. Ellie had barely stood before Cindy flew into her arms. “Don’t worry,” she told Tim, over Cindy’s shoulder, “we’ve already eaten.”

  “Victor Perry,” said Mr. X, shaking hands. “And she’s lying, we’re starved. Not that we expect to be fed.”

  “Feed them, Karl, for God’s sake feed them, these people are starving. Bill, we need two more beers—no, five more. Six, if you’re having one yourself.”

  It became a party, with plenty more beers. And as Al’s Heineken and Victor’s Sam Adams went down, the communal spirit eased higher and higher. Tim experienced an enormous rush of trust for Al and for Victor, though he hardly knew the former and had only just met the latter. On the strength of fermentation, goodness hung about them like an aura.

  “This one’s a keeper,” Tim whispered loudly to Ellie. “You’re the one,” he said, pounding Victor on the chest. They thanked Tim for his offer of lodging, but kept to their plan of heading to the seacoast, where Vic’s sister was expecting them.

  The night concluded with hugs, everybody hugging everybody. “If this was your ideas,” Tim said to Karl, “they were excellent.” He was so lit with affection for all concerned that beneath these hill-vaulting stars, Tim might have hugged Joe Average too. Average was back—on both machines in the city—and sadly diminished. Barely audible, he sounded close to tears.

  “I want you to hear this, Karl. I want you to tell me I’m not crazy.”

  Karl listened. “No, you’re right, the guy is in serious trouble. But you will be too if you start leaving him friendly memos.”

  “He’s sick, Karl.”

  “Very. And you have enough problems of your own.”

  “None. I have no problems. I’m happy happy, and poor Joe is miserable.”

  “Go to bed, Timmy. When you wake up tomorrow morning, you may remember a problem or two.”

  “Son, let me say that you may have good ideas, excellent ideas, but you are a fucking pessimist.”

  Cindy’s door lay ajar and her voice came as a clear invitation: “Hi, Uncle Tim.” It was too dark to see her, but Tim managed to locate her hand, then brushed back her hair and kissed her on the forehead. Tears were permissible, but he was relieved to feel none on her cheek. If only they could preserve the sweet delirium of this night.

  “I love you, Uncle Tim.”

  Inside the pitch black, with both eyes shut tight, Cindy liked to pretend her parents were still alive. That they would call soon, from the Manchester airport. Or that they were the ones making noise downstairs. There was no evidence to contradict it, even now; she had simply chosen to interrupt the game in favor of an extra goodnight kiss.

  “I love you too, sweetheart. Very much.”

  This was such a perfect ending to their serendipity that Tim was taken by the throat, the old swallowing problem, although this time it was pure sentimentality. “Poor Joe Average,” he said, at the mirror with his toothbrush, as he spread wide the net of that sentimentality. He was drunk, he finally grasped. Seven beers could do that to you.

  Or for you, God bless ‘em. Maybe they should be asked to do it more often. Maybe it was precisely what a country squire required: elbow patches and an ocean of alcohol.

  Eight hours later, still in bed, Tim labored to reconstruct the previous evening. It had gone fuzzy on him. He recalled Ell’s arrival and his approval of her new beau, the Victor. He just could not summon Vic’s last name, or his face. Plus there had been an important bit of gossip about Charles.…

  Finally the fog blew off his brain, and there was Vic: sandy hair slightly receded in front, round brown eyes and a round blunt nose. The shy smile featuring a snaggled bicuspid. Victor Perry, he was, in khakis and a blue oxford cloth shirt—and they were off to Kittery or Portsmouth, in an ’87 Tercel. Yes.

  And Charles had done it, ended his long engagement. Poor cindycrawford had caught him with an exotic younger woman—half Korean and half Swiss?—caught him at any rate and Charles had come clean. Ratted on himself and The Beast, on himself and others, and offered an unanswerable self-critique: I love you but doubt I can ever be faithful to anyone.

  What response could cindycrawford conjure to that? It was a formulation that precluded ultimatum. Tim could see the words, THE END, blooming on the screen of her sad beautiful face.

  Well, Vic Perry’s face said the exact opposite. A kind, intelligent face, it spoke of a clean start on a strong foundation. His was the visage of a solid character actor, one of those old pros who kept Hollywood’s feet on the ground. “Martin Balsam,” said Tim aloud, just as Karl walked in with a breakfast tray.

  “Twelve Angry Men,” said Karl. “These were fresh—yesterday. They’re from the place you hate, on Newbury Street.”

  “I hope you treat what’s-his-name half this well.”

  “Jay is his name. You’ll meet him soon. We want to do another of those weekends.”

  “Hot tubs, candlelight dinners—plus your excellent ideas.”

  “Speaking of which—the ideas, not the candles—I never had a chance to tell you what I learned.”

  “He files a report!”

  “A preliminary report. You know the double lot across the street? Looks unbuildable? Skinny saplings, kind of wet and squashy-looking?”

  “Geesh, it’s a good thing Earl sells the real estate around here and not you.”

  “Earl owns that lot, my dear. Earl Sanderson, Limited, no less. And he has an offer on another one. He’s buying up the block.”

  “He is a realtor,” Tim shrugged.

  Karl was astonished. Where was the outrage, where was the paranoia? Where was the real Tim Bannon? This one, sitting up in bed sipping coffee, was relaxed, impervious. “I don’t think it’s the kids he’s after, it’s the house.”

  “The house? What’s it worth, one-twenty tops? If you have two kids that age, a hundred twenty thousand isn’t break-even. Not over the long haul.”

  “I haven’t made it add up yet. Unless he plans on doing them in, like the dogs.”

  “Don’t even joke about it, Karl.”

  “He gets the house and the kids, shoots the kids, and pockets the whole one-twenty.”

  “When you get ideas, you get ideas.”

  “At least I do more than lounge in bed all day and criticize.”

  “Get your hands off me, you masher. Stop that or I’ll spill the damned coffee.”

  Camp White Sneaker had sparse company again, on the old Beeline Trail up Mt. Skatutukee. One older couple stooped for mushrooms near the trailhead, and two younger couples, in a foursome, kept gurgling through the forest like some rare uphill-going brook. The music of their progress filtered back from altered courses, fresh angles of referred sound.

  Tim sparked a fantasy game. “We’re being followed,” he said. “Be very still.” As the three of them crouched behind a fallen oak, he refrained from adding the suggestion that the little ad litem was stationed in these woods, to monitor the quality of their interaction. And though he did give them Butch and Sundance on the lam (they had watched the video) he withheld Pete Weissberg’s version, in which Butch and Sundance were two gay sombreros fleeing a posse of rabid homophobes.

  Billy kept driving them for the peak, in any case. That was the game for him, versus crouching and daydreaming of Bolivia. “We have to hu
rry,” he said, “if we’re going up Thumb, too.”

  “Let’s not and say we did,” said Cindy. “I’m hungry.”

  “But it’s the plan, Simp. You can eat while we hike.”

  The plan, the day’s little engine, was to survey the peak of Mt. Thumb from Skatutukee, then in turn the peak of Skatutukee from Thumb. These were miniature mountains, two-thousand feet high, yet the scheme was undeniably ambitious. Draining. Wrestling his nephew for power, Tim made them rest at times. There were ragged windows through the foliage opening onto views of the Wapack Range and at these infrequent prospects they would stop and sip the sewer-green Gatorade that was Billy’s current lifeblood.

  “No Thumb,” said Cindy, as they sat finally on the rocky top of Mt. Skatutukee. She was trying to surrender: no mas.

  “You’ll feel stronger after lunch,” said Billy.

  “No Thumb, please no Thumb.”

  She seemed fine, though. Tim’s decision was based on common sense, as prescribed: enough was enough. No Thumb. And it was the right choice, for he ended up carrying Cindy much of the rocky, rooted way down. More than once he was glad to sample the sewer-green ambrosia in Billy’s canteen.

  Though a week had slipped away (and though autumn, and anxiety, were one week closer), Tim was still relaxed. Still on summer leave, until reality intruded. Not the future, the present. For that night came word that Seth Turley had died.

  At first he felt guilty for being alive—as always. Yet he was also petty enough to resent the inconvenience, so much so that he considered not going down. Because he also felt a step closer to his own death—as always. How could you not? This was a war, and they were losing every battle.

  Seth had the AIDS variant which disabled first speech and then the brain. It killed you quickly and “painlessly.” It had initials, of course, an acronymic name which Tim could never remember; to him, this one was the brainkiller.

  “You have to be there,” said Peter Weissberg. “No exceptions. If necessary, I’ll pay for your babysitter.”