Torch: A Novel Part 13

Kathy Tyson expected him. He'd called the night before and she said he could come by at any time. It took him several minutes before he could speak to her because Spy and Tanner were so glad to see him, jumping up like they were trained not to do, almost knocking him over when he stooped down to their level.

At last he was able to move from the porch into the house, the dogs pus.h.i.+ng in with him. Kathy's house was a cabin, all one room, with a loft for her bed and a tiny bathroom just beyond the kitchen nook. Her parents' house was hidden behind a stand of trees a few hundred yards farther up the driveway. Kathy's grandparents had lived in the cabin years before, while they built the bigger house up the hill.

"How about a cup of coffee?" she asked, and poured some into a mug without waiting for him to answer. They sat down at the table. A stick of incense burned on the shelf behind her, a tendril of sweet smoke rising above her head.

"We're very grateful to you for taking care of the dogs."

"I don't mind a bit," she said, looking around for them. They lay near his feet under the table, both of them licking their private parts. "I'll miss them. They're good dogs."

"They are good dogs," Bruce said. A couple of weeks ago, Teresa had asked him to give Kathy a jar of jam that she had made, as a thank-you gift, but at the last minute Bruce left it on the kitchen table, feeling it was too valuable to give away, not for its contents so much as for Teresa's writing scrawled across the label on the lid. Raspberry, June.

"What happened to your face?" she asked.

He pressed his fingertips to the scab on his cheek. "I slipped."

She nodded. The bowl that sat between them on the table held a single tangerine.

"How's work?" he asked. She was a cow inseminator like her father. He didn't know whether cows were inseminated year-round or what she was doing home on a Wednesday at noon.

"Good," she nodded. "We keep busy." She stood up and refilled both of their mugs. She wore jeans and a purple s.h.i.+rt and a cl.u.s.ter of crystals and beads and stones around her throat and wrists and fingers. Once, Teresa had chatted with her about having her as a guest on Modern Pioneers to discuss the art of reading tarot, Bruce remembered now, though nothing had come of it. He had known Kathy all of his life, though, sitting here in her house, he realized he hardly knew her at all. They'd gone to school together, she four years behind him, and then when he bought his land they were neighbors, and they helped one another out in a neighborly way. He remembered that she played softball, not in high school, but now, for the Jake's Tavern team.

"Spring's on its way," he said. "It's already here, I guess."

"Yep," said Kathy. It had officially been spring for nearly a week. They both looked out the window at the snow, which was melting, the weather having warmed to the low forties.

"So that means you'll start practicing soon."

"Practicing?" she asked.

"Softball."

"Oh, yeah," she said, blus.h.i.+ng a little. A lock of her brown hair had come loose from her ponytail, softening her face. She pushed it behind her ear. "I don't know if I'll do it this year. It's very time-consuming."

"It keeps you busy," he said.

"It's not only practice and games, but I'm also the secretary."

Bruce nodded. He wondered what the secretary of the softball team would have to do.

"You could play with us. We could certainly use some men. It seems like only the women in this town want to do anything. To join in."

"I would want to play for Len's Lookout," he said sternly.

Her eyes flickered from her hands to his eyes and then back to her hands. "I can understand that," she said, a little breathless.

"Len's ... what are they?"

"The Leopards."

"Len's Leopards," he said quietly, ridiculously, without any intention of joining a softball team. Teresa had waited tables at Len's Lookout. Everyone had loved her there. Leonard and Mardell, the customers from Midden and from the Cities. Mardell had taped Teresa's obituary to the wall at the bar, along with a picture she'd taken of Teresa at the annual Christmas party. People had left flowers beneath it and notes and votive candles that burned until they burned out. He hadn't been there to see it himself, but Mardell had called and told him about it, how the notes and flowers were piling on the floor and covering the pinball machine that sat nearby.

"It's almost his name," Kathy said.

"What?"

"Leopard. It's almost Leonard. Only one letter is different."

"Oh. I never thought of that."

She reached back to her ponytail and draped it over her left shoulder. "It would be a way of honoring her perhaps."

"Perhaps," agreed Bruce, without committing himself. Now that they were on the subject, he hoped she would not say how sorry she was. She'd already said it at the funeral. He cleared his throat and then coughed hard, as if to free something caught in his lungs.

Her phone rang, but she did not answer it. When the machine clicked on, the person on the line hung up. "It's my mom," she explained. "She never leaves a message. That's how I know to call."

He gave her a small smile. It seemed that he should leave, but he didn't want to. He didn't feel happy, but he didn't feel sad either. He felt a glorious sense of safety from the rest of his life in Kathy's small house. It was not like the way he'd felt before Teresa got cancer, before he knew there was anything he needed to feel safe from. It was an entirely new sensation, and it filled him up like a drug.

"So I was thinking, I wanted to tell you, if you ever want to take a walk or talk on the phone or whatnot, I wanted you to know that I'm here. I mean, if you ever need an ear, I'm just right down the road."

She got up to stoke the stove.

"I should go," he said, standing. "But thank you again."

"I enjoyed it, being of a.s.sistance." She walked him to the door and then stood on the porch as he drove away with the dogs beside him in the cab.

He drove past his house and out to the highway, to Len's Lookout, where he parked and shut the ignition off. He sat waiting, as if for Teresa to come out, as she'd done when he came to pick her up after her s.h.i.+ft. It was just after one: several people were inside eating lunch, their cars and trucks were in the parking lot. He recognized almost all of them. He started the engine again and drove to Norway and back, a sixty-mile roundtrip that took him a couple of hours because he avoided the highway and took the long way, on mostly dirt roads, for no reason at all.

When he got home Joshua was there, and together they cooked up a pound of hamburger, pressing it into four patties. They covered the patties with ketchup and ate them without buns. When Teresa had died they had all abruptly, inexplicably, without having mentioned it, stopped being vegetarians. It was one of the first things that changed. As Bruce did the dishes, Lisa Boudreaux pulled up into the driveway and Joshua went out to greet her. Fifteen minutes later they walked into the house and Lisa handed Bruce a card.

"This is from my mom," she explained almost inaudibly, without looking at him.

"Thank you," he said. He could not think of who her mother was. Lisa he recognized from school functions over the years, and also Teresa's funeral, though she had not spoken to him then, which meant she had not said she was sorry, a fact he now found himself strangely resenting.

"Would you like a burger?" he asked, though they'd eaten all the beef.

"We're going upstairs," Joshua said curtly. Teresa had not been a strict mother, but neither had she allowed her high schoolage children to sleep with their romantic partners in her house. Bruce watched them walk up the stairs and didn't see them for the rest of the day.

On the morning of the tenth day he woke from a dream in which he was murdering Teresa by beating her to death with his fists. He lay on his side, staring at the line of small yellow circular stains that a leak in the roof had made last year where the ceiling met the wall. He heard Joshua and Lisa in the kitchen. Almost immediately Lisa began to laugh, rather loudly, he thought, given the fact that she was in someone else's house at nine o'clock in the morning and it was obvious that he was not up. Usually by nine Bruce would have been up for three and a half hours, but he'd been sleeping late since Teresa died. He was on a vacation from work-which would actually become permanent since he would soon be dead.

"Josh," he hollered out from his bed three times before receiving a sullen, almost vicious, "What?" in return.

"Will you feed?"

Joshua said he would and then, without another word, the front door slammed shut. Bruce listened until he heard them drive away. Once the sounds of their engines faded, the house took on the quality of quiet he'd felt the morning before-that he was not in a house, but a field. He lay there in it, his eyes not shut but merely lowered as if to s.h.i.+eld against the sun.

It came to him then: he was not going to be brave enough to kill himself.

It came whole and solid, like a fish that swam up to him, the same way it had when he'd decided the opposite. He wailed, and then wailed and wailed, so loudly that all the animals came and jumped up to be near him on the bed-Spy and Tanner and Shadow. The dogs licked his face and throat and arms and hands, as though he were a plate, and then a new sound emerged from him, one he'd never made before or witnessed anyone else making: a kind of whimpering and peeping and coughing and hooting all at once.

When he quieted he became aware of the fact that he was encased by animals, the dogs lying against him on either side, Shadow above him, pressed up against the top of his head. He was surprised that Shadow in particular had stayed so near, in the midst of such horrible noise. He reached up and stroked her with both hands, the tears dripping silently at last, off his face and into his ears and neck and hair.

He knew something else then. That in some way he already was dead, that his life was killing him, and worse, that he would not ever be able to kill his life.

Once he had heard a terrible story about a man in New York City who had slipped and fallen into the path of a train, but only half of this man's body had been run over, the other half, his top half-either blessedly or not blessedly, depending on how you looked at it-had remained above, on the platform, conscious and fully alive. He could talk, he could listen, he could recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He could do everything but move from precisely where the train pinned him to the platform from the waist down. The rescue people came and soon it was determined that the man would die the moment they moved the train, but in the meanwhile he was kept alive by the train in its stillness, holding his organs together, his blood inside.

Bruce, in bed on the morning of day ten, remembered that man. He was that man.

An hour pa.s.sed while he stared at the ceiling and did not move. When he sat up it was only to reach over to rummage around in the drawer of Teresa's nightstand, looking for tissue to blow his nose, but he found a ca.s.sette tape instead. He lay back down with it in his hand and stared at it for several moments before he could make out that it was by Kenny G. He had never listened to Kenny G. He had never known Teresa to listen to Kenny G. He had no idea how the tape had found its way into the drawer on the side of their bed or why a grown man would call himself "G" instead of simply using his full last name. He leaned over and popped the tape into the player that sat on the shelf behind his head. When one side ended he switched it to the other side, and he did it again and again. He played it and played it, and it told him his whole life story, and hers. It pinned him beautifully, all day, to the bed, and though it made him weep, it also managed to shout down the other sounds that had pinned him to the bed before-the voice that hissed the questions that all began with why.

At four the phone rang. He a.s.sumed it would be Claire, who had called him three times that day already, leaving messages for him in her new sad voice. He picked it up, ready now to possibly drag himself out of bed.

"Bruce. It's Kathy," the voice said, then added, "Tyson."

"Hi." He reached over to click off Kenny G.

"How are you?"

"Fine," he said, clearing his throat.

"I was wondering if you wanted dinner. I made chili. I could bring it over or you're more than welcome to come here."

"I can't. But thank you. Claire's coming home," he lied. She wouldn't be there in time for dinner. She wouldn't be there until past ten.

"Oh," she spoke quickly. "I meant that you could bring the kids too. If they would want to come." She paused. "But it sounds like you're all set."

"I think Claire has something planned. She already bought the food."

"Well, anyway, before dinner ... I was thinking of taking a walk."

He agreed to meet her at the stream, the midway point between his house and hers. He wasn't so much interested in seeing Kathy as he was in getting out of his bed, and miraculously, the house. He walked the three quarters of a mile slowly, feeling strangely feverish and out of breath. He pa.s.sed one cabin and then the other one-both stood empty most of the time, belonging to city people. No one lived between his house and Kathy's, which he'd known all along, but hadn't thought of specifically until today. When he saw her in the distance he waved, and Spy and Tanner lowered their tails, thinking Bruce was leaving them again.

"Greetings," she called in response to his wave. She did not walk toward him, but instead gathered her poncho in more closely around herself, and stood waiting in the part of the road that covered the culvert through which the stream flowed, the official spot where they'd agreed to meet. When he was near enough to her, they shook hands awkwardly and walked to the edge of the road and looked at the water.

"So," she asked, solemnly, as if out of respect. "How was your day?"

"My day?" he asked, surprised at what he would tell her. "Hard."

When Bruce returned home Claire was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee.

"There you are," she said.

"You're home early. Since when do you drink coffee?" he asked, pouring himself a cup.

"Since the hospital, I suppose. Where were you? I worried-your truck was here and I didn't hear your chain saw. And I called you today. Did you get my messages?"

"I thought coffee made you sick."

"It doesn't anymore," said Claire. "I lost my sensitivity and now I'm addicted." Her hands gripped the cup, bony and hard-looking and pale. She seemed suddenly older to him than she was, and he realized that this had probably, recently, become true. In the course of Teresa's dying and death, Claire had been less his daughter and more his comrade in arms. Together they had tended to Teresa, together they had searched for Joshua, together they had sat businesslike with Kurt Moyle and told him what they wanted-which casket, which flowers, which program, which songs. Alone, she wrote the thank-you cards, in one long day, signing all of their names.

"Did you ever meet that guy named Bill?" he asked.

"Bill?"

"At the hospital. He lost his wife."

She stared at him for a few beats and then stood up. "No. Why?"

She got the coffee pot and refilled both their cups. He noticed her hand trembled as she poured.

"You're still sensitive," he said.

"What?" She set the pot down too hard.

"To the caffeine. It's making you shake."

"Oh," she said, sitting down. She pushed her hands between her legs as though she were trying to warm them up.

"So, this Bill. I thought of him the other day. I only talked to him once or twice, but he seemed like a good guy. We had a lot in common. His wife was about your mom's age and she died a couple of days before her-her room was a few rooms down from your mom's. Anyway, I wondered how he was."

Claire nodded coolly. "I'm sure it's difficult for him just like it is for us." She took a sip of her coffee and swallowed hard, like she was taking a pill. "Where were you?"

"I took a walk."

She combed her hair with her fingers. It was longer than it had been for years and tinted a faint, unnatural red. She wore lipstick that was the same color as her new hair, the rest of her face bare.

"What happened to your braid?" he asked, noticing for the first time that it was gone. He'd teased her about it, but he'd always liked how the little bells tinkled when she moved. It had reminded him of a cat entering the room.

"I cut it off." Her hand went to where the braid had once rested on her neck. "Did you work today?"

He shook his head. "But I will Monday. I figured it's time. What else am I going to do? I'm broke."

"I could loan you money."

"No."

"Well, if you need it, just ask. 'Cause I have it. My tips have been good." She was now waiting tables full-time at the restaurant where she'd worked part-time before she dropped out of school, before her mother got sick.

"So, how are you doing?" Bruce asked.

"I'm hanging on," she said, giving him a twisted little smile. "I can't sleep much. I keep waking up with nightmares. And I still can't eat anything yet."

"What do you dream?"

She propped her chin on her hand, thinking of what to tell him, which dream. "I dream that I have to murder her," she said. "That she forces me to do the most horrible things like beat her to death with a bat or tie her to a tree, pour gasoline on her, and light her on fire."

"That's probably normal. It's your way of saying goodbye."

"No, it's not," she snapped, and looked angrily at him. "I'm not saying goodbye, Bruce. I'm never going to say goodbye, so don't say that, okay?"