Torch: A Novel Part 16

"Why do you say that?" he asked, trying to remember what monogamy meant.

"Because it's a system that's set up to self-destruct!" she exclaimed, as if he'd accused her of something. He could tell that she'd set her sewing aside. More calmly she said, "I don't expect you to understand. Not now that you're on this whole new love fantasy s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p with Lisa. But, Josh, it's true. It's all like a fairy tale and fairy tales are not real. And you know what's wild? I never saw it-I mean I thought I saw it-but I never really saw it until Mom got sick. I was walking around just completely believing in these archaic, s.e.xist, ridiculous notions about love and life and then Mom got sick and died and boom-the whole truth is revealed."

"About what?" he asked.

"Everything, Josh. Everything."

He didn't know what to say. He barely understood what she was talking about, which was true about half the time that she went off on one of her new theories of life. But if he tried to ask her about it in a way that seemed even to remotely disagree, they'd get into a fight. Since their mother had died, he'd entered a phase of avoiding fights with his sister. He had been wrong that morning as they sat in her Cutla.s.s on the frozen lake waiting for Bob Jewell to come with the tractor to get them out. Their mother had died. And she'd done it without waiting for them. I'm sorry, he'd said to Claire later. Sorry for being gone all those weeks, sorry for making it so Claire was not with their mother when she died. But whenever he spoke the word sorry in her direction, Claire held her hand up, and her breath became labored and heavy as if she would pa.s.s out that very moment if he said another word. Except for the first time, when she'd looked straight into his eyes and told him that sorry was not enough.

"So," Claire said. "I was thinking-you could bring Lisa to dinner tomorrow."

"Why?" School had let out and people began streaming out the doors on every side of the building.

"Because I want to meet her."

"You already know her."

"Yes, but not as your girlfriend. Plus I barely know her. I know who she is. It's not like I've really ever talked to her."

"She has to work tomorrow." Lisa worked at the Red Owl, like her mother, mostly on weekends. He saw her now, walking straight across the muddy field, toward him. The rain had subsided to a light mist. When she saw that he was watching her, she waved. "I gotta go," he said to Claire.

"No," she crooned. "Talk to me longer."

"I can't."

"I'm bored," she said suddenly, then added, "and lonely."

"Why?" he asked, taken aback. As long as he could remember his sister had a.s.serted that she'd never been bored or lonely-too interested in the world to be bored, too independent to need the company of others.

"I don't know," she said, on the verge of tears. "Why do you think?" He could hear her breath in the phone, the way she wasn't sewing b.u.t.tons anymore, but focused now entirely on their conversation.

"Because you're boring?" he suggested, but she didn't laugh, even though it was her own joke. Only boring people get bored. "I really gotta go."

"So go," said Claire darkly.

She hung up before he said goodbye, but he sat with the phone still pressed to his ear anyway, watching Lisa take the last few steps toward him, to stand beside his window, smiling at him without saying a word. She reached out and pressed her hand to the gla.s.s, as flat and elegant as a wet leaf. He placed his hand on the window too, lining it up so perfectly that, beneath his, hers disappeared.

When Lisa got in the truck he didn't wait to see if anyone would come out to buy. He started the engine and they drove out of town, north, to Lisa's trailer, where they made love quickly before Lisa's mother came home from work. Afterward, Lisa got two Mountain Dews and a bag of barbeque-flavored chips from the kitchen and they devoured them in her room.

"How was school?" he asked, and his face flushed, realizing that the question seemed foreign coming from him-a question his mother used to ask him almost every day.

"Good." Lisa was perched on the bed, Joshua on the floor beside it. "Oh, I handed in my final project for 'Love, Life, and Work.' " She looked at him with an amused pout. She'd had to finish it without him, pretending they'd divorced. "I can't believe it's just two more weeks, Josh, and then we're completely done. We're free."

"You are."

"You're already free," she said, wiggling her toes with their painted pink nails.

"Yeah, but I'm not done. I'll never be done."

She leaned off the bed and put her hand in his hair. "But you're getting your GED. That's the same thing."

They both turned, hearing Pam's car pulling up in the driveway. Lisa went to close her bedroom door. They listened to the jingle of Pam's keys as she tossed them into a wooden bowl on the coffee table. Joshua's heart raced, remembering selling to Pam's boyfriend earlier in the day, saying a silent prayer that he would never tell her.

"Leese!" Pam called.

"Yeah," Lisa replied reluctantly.

"I'm home." Pam came to Lisa's bedroom and tapped on the door. "What're you doing?"

"Studying," she said in a shrill voice, and then scrambled for a book. "With Josh. Josh is here too."

"h.e.l.lo!" he yelled politely. Lisa made a gesture for him to look like he was studying too, so he grabbed what was closest to him, a copy of Seventeen, and began to page through it vigorously.

"Are you hungry?" Pam asked, still standing outside the door.

"We had a snack," said Lisa.

Pam pushed the door open and looked in at them, and they both looked up and smiled at her. In Lisa's tiny tin garbage can with Snoopy on the outside, the condom they'd used was wrapped up in a stream of toilet paper. "You staying for dinner?" Pam asked Joshua.

"I can't." He felt he should explain why he couldn't stay, but his mind went blank when he was nervous. He had more deliveries to make. The messages from Vivian had been stacking up, unanswered.

"Next time," said Pam. She turned and walked down the hallway, without bothering to close the door.

Lisa's bare foot hung lazily off the side of the bed. Joshua reached out and held it and then very silently he lowered himself to the floor and kissed it. She laughed without making a sound and then jumped from the bed and shut her door without allowing the latch to so much as click and returned to Joshua and pulled him into her closet, where they wedged themselves in between the wicker hamper and the clothes that were hanging there and made love again, crouched in an impossible position, knocking the hamper over, coming silently.

Out in the kitchen Pam was frying pork chops, their sizzle and aroma filling the house.

As Joshua drove through town, he saw R.J. walking down Main Street, his hands in his pockets. He turned as Joshua slowed and pulled up next to him, and then R.J. got in and Joshua continued driving, out of town, to the Lookout. They didn't get out of the truck when they arrived. They sat in the parking lot, in the spot behind the Dumpster, so no one inside the bar could see them waiting for Dave Huuta to pull up. Vivian had called and told Joshua that Dave would meet him there.

"What happened?" Joshua asked, gesturing towards R.J.'s face.

R.J. touched his cheek and traced his fingers along the scratch that went from his nose almost back to his ear, scabbed over now. "My f.u.c.king mom one night when she was trashed."

Joshua nodded and took out his one hit. They'd been over it all before, how Vivian could be. He loaded up the one hit, keeping it below the window, and handed it to R.J., who crouched and took a hit.

"I'm moving out anyways," R.J. said, after he exhaled the smoke. "In a couple a weeks, as soon as I graduate." He watched Joshua take another hit. "I was thinking of heading up to Flame Lake, to my grandma's." He blushed, knowing this would be a surprise. R.J.'s father's family lived on the reservation in Flame Lake, though R.J. hardly knew them.

"To the res?" Joshua asked.

"Yeah, I been talking to my dad, eh. He called me up one day. He's a born-again now, so it's G.o.d this, G.o.d that, but it keeps him from drinking, so it's not too bad."

"How long's he gone without drinking?" Joshua asked skeptically. He'd only seen R.J.'s father once, when he'd staggered drunk into the school gym to watch a basketball game that Joshua and R.J. were playing in, become disoriented about where the restrooms were, and urinated on the gym floor in front of everyone.

"I don't know. Like at least two months." He took his hat off and smoothed his hair and then put it back on. R.J. had the same name as his father: Reynard James Plebo. "I was thinking of going up to there to live for a bit, you know? Just to check it out and see what it's like living on the res, being a nitchie." He smiled at the word and blushed a little because he'd never used it, the n.i.g.g.e.r word for Indian. "Being Ojibwe," he continued, more seriously now. "Anis.h.i.+nabe," he said, with a strange flourish.

Joshua stared out his window at the canoe in the gra.s.s behind the bar. Something rose in this throat. He couldn't quite think what. He wished he were Indian. When he was a kid he had a s.h.i.+rt with beads sewn onto the front and when he wore it he let himself imagine he was. "But there's no jobs up there," he said after a while.

"There's no jobs down here, either," R.J. shot back.

"There's this," Joshua said, meaning what they were doing now, selling drugs. "I thought that was the plan, once you were done with school."

"That wasn't the plan. That was never the plan." His brown eyes were defiant and then apologetic, and his face flushed and Joshua knew that R.J. was remembering the same thing he was: that they had had a plan and it was neither staying in Midden to be small-time drug dealers, nor was it moving to Flame Lake. What they'd planned was to move to California together after graduation and become private mechanics for rich people and their fleets of fancy cars. Joshua still thought it was his plan, though now he had to admit that it had been set back by a few months.

"Anyways, I got a job up there," R.J. said. "I'm gonna work with my Uncle Don. Ricing. That's what my dad's doing too. The tribe has a whole operation now where they sell the rice to all these distributors and they might have a casino coming up there too pretty soon." He looked at Joshua hopefully. "If the casino happens, maybe I can get you a job there, and we could both be blackjack dealers."

Joshua didn't say anything, though he was silently considering the notion. He'd never been to a casino, but working at one seemed like the kind of job he'd like.

"Plus, I can't live with my mom no more, Josh. I can't have anything to do with her from now on until she gets her s.h.i.+t together."

"Like your dad did?" he asked, his voice full of a rage that surprised even him. "Okay, so your mom's not always the coolest, but she raised you, a.s.shole. And now it's your dad who's this big hero ... and why do you even call him your dad? He's not your dad. When did he ever even show his worthless piece-of-s.h.i.+t face? Not once." Joshua couldn't bring himself to look at R.J. He rolled his window down, leaned out, and spat and stared at it as it congealed on the surface of the gravel. His throat burned, his nose stung, but he wasn't going to let the tears rise into his eyes. He was stunned and outraged by his sudden emotion. He wanted to punch R.J. in the face. Instead he pushed his door open and got out and paced along the length of the truck. The sun had sunk below the tops of trees by now, the light soft and fading. He glanced up at his apartment, at the window with an old curtain pulled over it, powder blue, with cherries dappled every which way. He wished he could be up there now, listening to his headphones.

"He showed it," R.J. said from inside the cab.

"What?" He stopped walking and stood near the open window, looking in at R.J.

"My dad," R.J. pressed gently. "He showed his face. Once. In fact, he showed more than that, eh." He smiled and then looked away and Joshua smiled too, without wanting to, remembering R.J.'s dad peeing on the floor, though it hadn't been funny at the time. R.J. got out of the truck and came around to the side where Joshua stood and they both lit up a cigarette.

"The thing is that I got to get outta here," R.J. said, and coughed. "Going to Flame Lake is not getting outta here," Joshua said. "Flame Lake is more here than here is. Flame Lake is Midden times ten."

"At least it's different. At least it's somewhere else."

"I'm going somewhere the f.u.c.k else too."

"Where?" R.J. asked.

Joshua stood thinking for a few moments, believing that he was still going to California and yet finding it hard to say the word.

"To California," he said at last, and killed a mosquito on his arm.

They didn't say anything for several minutes, swatting at bugs and making small concentrated rings with their smoke in a silent compet.i.tion until the light faded entirely from the sky.

"There he is now," Joshua said, interrupting the silence, gesturing toward the highway. They watched Dave Huuta's truck slow and turn into the parking lot. The headlights swept hard across their faces, and then it went dark again. Darker than before.

11.

GRIEF BECAME CLAIRE. Everyone saw it and said so, how good she looked these days, how thin since her mother got sick and died. Even Mardell noticed it, when Claire stopped in to the Lookout on her way home.

"Good heavens, look at you," she said, taking her gla.s.ses off. She was sitting on a stool at the end of the bar playing solitaire, done with her work in the kitchen.

"She looks just like she always did," said Leonard, disputing her, as usual.

"Well, I know she was always pretty, Len. But now she's downright glamorous-looking." She turned to Claire. "But you're getting too thin, hon, if you want to know the G.o.d's honest truth. I know that's all the rage these days, this gaunt look, but I like a woman with a little more meat on her bones. Len does too. Don't you, Len?"

"I think she looks fine."

Claire took a seat next to Mardell, relieved to be out of the car after the long drive from Minneapolis. It was a Friday night at nine, but there were only a few customers in the bar. "I thought Bruce might be here," she said.

"We don't see him an awful lot lately," said Mardell. "Though we try to get him to come in for dinner. I told him any time he wants, I'll cook for him. I know he's out there all alone during the week."

"What will you have, sweetheart?" asked Leonard.

She ordered a Diet c.o.ke, and then, before he had time to get it, changed her mind, and asked for a cosmopolitan, a drink Leonard disapproved of, though he made it for her anyway, taking extra time to twist an orange slice into a fancy spiral along the rim of the gla.s.s. She'd had a horrible day, which had included getting stiffed by a party of five at work, an argument with David, and a traffic jam on her way out of Minneapolis. When Leonard slid the drink in her direction, filled to the brim, she leaned into it and took a long sip without lifting it from the bar.

"So, I suppose you'll all be celebrating Josh's birthday," said Mardell.

"On Sunday." Claire watched her flip a card and then another one.

"Well, you tell him we got something for him, but he has to come in himself and get it. He's another one that we don't see much lately." She looked up at Claire. "How's your friend?" Mardell always referred to David that way, never as her boyfriend. She didn't believe in boyfriends, she told Claire once. Only friends and fiances and husbands and wives.

"Great," Claire said, attempting to sound more upbeat about David than she was. "He's coming up tomorrow, actually. He'd've come up tonight with me, but he tutors on Sat.u.r.day mornings, so he's coming up after he's done."

"What's it he does again?" asked Leonard.

"He's a graduate student. But he also teaches-it's part of his deal, you know, with the department-and he does research so he can write his dissertation. Actually, he's done with the research part and now he's starting in on the writing." She took another sip of her c.o.c.ktail and hoped they wouldn't ask again what his dissertation was about: an obscure Scottish poet who founded a community in the 1930s based on the belief that a mix of Marxism, free love, and daily artistic expression was the key to human advancement. This seemed like a perfectly legitimate and fascinating topic to Claire when she discussed it with David or her friends, but with Leonard and Mardell it became something different entirely. She'd explained it to them perhaps a half dozen times before, but each time, they could not be made to understand what it was David did, or rather, she could not make it seem to them that what David did was anything but an absurd and comical sham. It was the same with Bruce and Joshua, though they'd both given up on asking after the second time. Her mother had done the opposite, of course, taking an avid interest, as she did with almost everything, much to Claire's humiliation. She'd asked David to give her copies of a dozen poems by the Scottish poet-his name was Terrell Jenkins-and then she'd read her two favorites on her radio show, going on at some length about David's research and branching off into a discussion about Claire's studies at the university. Claire had settled at last on a double major in political science and women's studies-the latter another subject that Leonard and Mardell could not be made to understand, no matter how many times she explained it.

"So, he's a professor," said Leonard.

"Yes," she answered joyously, though it wasn't entirely true.

"Well, I'm glad he's coming up," said Mardell. "It seems like he never comes anymore."

Claire took another sip of her drink. Earlier in the day, she and David had fought over that very issue. Why she never wanted him to come to Midden with her-she hadn't brought him home since her mother's funeral. Why she never wanted to have s.e.x with him-they hadn't made love since her mother got sick. He'd pulled her to him when she came out of the shower that afternoon, after she'd gotten off work from Giselle's, running his hands along her bare hips. She'd moved away, attempting to seem as though she'd only done so in order to more thoroughly dry her hair with a towel, but he hadn't been fooled.

"f.u.c.k it," he'd hissed, and left the room.

"What?" she called after him, trying to conceal the guilt from her voice. She didn't know what was wrong with her, what kept her from him lately. She only knew that something had changed when her mother got cancer. She couldn't see David anymore in the light that she'd seen him before, and she didn't know whether this new way of seeing him had been distorted by her grief or unveiled by it. Whether her life with him was fraudulent or the best thing she had. She loved him and, in equal measure, felt sickened and swaddled by his love. At times, it rose in her throat, filling it like strep.

"Are you having an affair?" he'd asked that afternoon, coming back into the room.

"An affair?" She wore a robe tied with a sash around her waist, her wet hair bundled in a towel on top of her head.

"An affair, Claire. Are you cheating on me?"

Of Bill Ristow, David knew nothing. The thought of him finding out filled her with a dizzy panic and yet also a terrible hilarity. "Yes," she could say and, in that single word, her life would change.

"No," she said, and then made a crumpled, helpless gesture with her hands that she hoped would represent her innocence. In some ways, she truly did believe herself innocent. She hadn't spoken to Bill since a couple of days before her mother died, in another lifetime, really. It was as if Bill had never existed, though in fact he often came into her mind. Not him entirely, but instead a flash of him. The hair that grew on his wrists, the way he would say "put that in your pipe and smoke it," the shape of his two jagged front teeth. He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.

"I would never cheat on you," she said earnestly.

"Never?" David asked morosely. He placed his hands over his face, as if he didn't really want to see or know, despite the fact that he'd asked, and then he removed them and looked at her. "Okay, so maybe you haven't acted on it, but are you interested in someone else?"

"No!" she exclaimed. "No," she repeated, more insistently now. She pushed her hands into the pockets of the robe. It had been her mother's-terry cloth, coming apart at the hem. Her mother had called its color "French pink," though Claire could not discern what was French about it. "No, no, no," she chanted softly to David. Even in the dim light of the room, she could see how deep and tender and open his eyes were to her, and she tried to make her eyes convey those same qualities to him. She was the first to admit that she'd been a terrible girlfriend in recent months. She'd taken to spending hours staring at the ceiling or sitting on the grubby cus.h.i.+on of the bay window that faced out onto the street, going too long without saying a word. She'd previously thought herself a romantic, believed that David was her future husband-they'd even gone so far, in a playful and yet serious way, to propose to one another the summer before.