Earl
sat in the Angus Bowmer Theatre of the Ashland Shakespeare festival, and
realized his son had written a hit.
He had known it, he supposed, having read the review in the New York
Times. His son had sent him the
clipping from Brooklyn. He had
heard the play was a strong candidate for a Tony, an award his son had gotten
on a previous venture. Now on the stage,
the bearded parody of a king was lit up in a silver spotlight, his gray hair
all flying and his eyes heavily mascara-ed. Cordelia was in a white-print dress, covered with glowing
red hearts. And he thought of his
son’s success, his laurels, his money, and the way he would make magnificent
paper air planes as a child—also gliders in the lightest balsa wood—and throw
them at the family, all of a sudden when their backs were turned. This play, If I Were King Lear,
was something like that.
The King was getting zanier and
zanier—there was a cardboard skyscraper arising in the distance—followed by
"Lear” and “Cordelia,” who entered a rowboat and traveled down a river in
the underworld. The sides of the
marsh they glided through were punctuated with white-sheeted spooks which hung,
Halloween-like, from trees and by green, humanized bushes whose fingers tried
to snatch them. The guffaws were
coming more loudly, all bought at a very low price, and Earl, rather aghast,
sat there wondering why no one else in the country could see this play as a
rather decidedly easy shot. The
lines, balsa-airplane-like, kept hitting you from the side and when you weren’t
looking.
When
the play ended suddenly, and the whole audience got to its feet in an uproar of
bemused adulation, Earl stood up too and flushed crimson. The woman next to him said, “Oh I wish
I could have the talent of these young people these days.”
“Yes,”
Earl answered but felt dishonest for not admitting that his son was one of these
young people. He openly boasted of
Charles, his younger son, who was a carpenter, chef, and hardware clerk at the local
Eugene True Value. And also a
dater of women, as opposed to his
brother, a dater of men. A sense
of his shameless preference for Charles and near fear of Donny followed him
down the balcony stairs. He
lingered, took his steps slowly, afraid he might trip.
Much
of the audience had cleared out by the time he’d reached ground level. Through the glass, the sun striking the
box office outside looked merciless, and Earl thought with dread that he had one
more night alone at the Capri Motel before going back to Eugene in the
morning. No doubt the heat would
drop exponentially the moment he got over the brief, heavily greened-over
mountains, and he would be back to mid-September autumn again and the early
mists in the morning when he would get into his pick-up with his computer and
posting signs and travel into the west and north sections of town, the streets
giving way to the sun, the spent hawthorns dropping down, and he would be
approaching the named addresses, with people at the windows expecting him to
come and many of them refusing to answer his knock or the doorbell. A few delayed him with their stories.
But
while he just stood there in the lobby, he realized he was not alone after
all. Wine bottles were being
placed out at the concession bars and real glassware set out to honor—someone. A few smart-looking people, dressed in
black, were milling about. One
young woman with bare shoulders was outfitted with real diamonds as earrings
and a necklace which glinted blue throughout the room. She was shy, with heavily ribboned
hair. Soon there was a crush of
people, as the cast came flooding into the lobby from below.
Another woman—her name tag said
“Clara”—recognized him. “You’re
Earl, aren’t you?” she asked. “I
was married to Kingsley, your old roommate.”
“Oh
yes,” he answered, and suddenly he felt himself shrinking. “We actually had a reunion down here. Years ago. All four of us.”
“That’s
right. I hear your wife is doing
all sorts of great things up in Eugene.
As commissioner, I mean, and then running for re-election. My heart goes with her. I've always been against big business.”
“Yes, she is doing very well.” But then he had to say it—and he stammered—“Corinne is no longer my wife. We were divorced two years ago.”
“Yes, she is doing very well.” But then he had to say it—and he stammered—“Corinne is no longer my wife. We were divorced two years ago.”
He
could feel that she was attracted to his stammer. It lit up a vulnerability in other people. It was like the eleven weeks he had
been on crutches after injuring himself on the job. People—even punks—would come up and tell him their stories,
how they’d been laid up, too. She
went to the punch bowl and got him a drink.
“Thanks,
but no thanks,” he said, holding up his hands when she returned. “It could have alcohol in it.”
“I
don’t think it does,” she told him.
“I
can’t take that chance.”
Now
he tried to consider how this petite “older” woman with graying hair herself
and a high color to her cheeks would have looked thirty years ago. He himself was still attractive and he
knew it. But he couldn’t determine
if she was. He wore a moustache,
had irony gray hair, with pale blue eyes.
He was a man with some Russian and African American blood, which had
shown up in his kinky hair. He was
considerate and conscientious, but his slight stammer, which came out
particularly when he explained why he had done something a certain way, made
him seem hesitating.
“Kingsley
and I have been split for over a decade,” she said. “It’s unbelievable, isn’t it, how everything collapses, and
then passes on.” She sounded
heavily discouraged, but also inviting, too, as if she were open to his making
a move, in honor of this coincidence, actually these coincidences.
But
he was not going to make a move.
He was happy and touched to see her, but he had not felt anything light
up inside of him—not like sex, anyway.
“Yes,
things collapse,” he answered.
“And how about this economy?”
“Has
it really hit you?” she asked.
“Yes,”
he answered. “I got laid off as an
electrician, and now I’m a posting agent.”
“A
posting agent?” She looked at him, suspect, as people frequently did.
“For
a foreclosure company. I travel
around giving people bad news.
Also—and I guess it’s a kind of poetic justice—I’m losing my shirt on a
house Corinne and I are trying to upgrade and sell. The one we lived in for so many years. And then I’m also trying to unload the
two-bedroomer I’m living in now.”
There
was a pause. He stammered a
little. “I’m, I’m not sure what
I’m doing just standing here.”
Several more attendants with bowties were bringing in glasses on trays. “What’s going on? What is this?”
“A
reception in behalf of AIDS,” she answered. “Evidently the playwright requires at least one of every
production. He’s so popular he can
ask for what he wants.”
“Seems
like a kind idea,” he said, still at a loss.
“It
is a kind idea,” a tall, eccentric-looking man said over Clara’s shoulder. “Excuse me,” the man—who looked
something like a magician—said to her, “this looks like someone I ought to
meet.” By then a critical mass of
people had formed, seemingly out of nowhere.
Clara
smiled, as though she were his indulgent mother, knew him well. “Earl, this is Michah, who owns the bookstore
two doors down from where I work.
Friends for years.”
Friends
for years, yes, but Earl would have nearly called him a young man, perhaps just
a little older than Donny, who was thirty-two. He had loose-fitting black trousers and a buttoned black
leather vest, with nothing underneath, and had a moustache and soft pork pie
hat. His bare arms were swarthy
and his muscles very much in evidence.
“Very
glad to meet you,” Earl said—and he was.
He was finding something light up inside of him, and once more he felt
off center. “But I’m afraid I’m
gate crashing. I just happened in
here, being too slow to leave the theatre.”
Clara
and Michah laughed together. “See
the snifter on the bar?” Michah
pointed to the huge crystalline piece, filled with bills. “Just add to that, and you don’t
crash.”
Earl
had his billfold out. “Well, I
don’t mind, don’t mind at all”—and put in a twenty, which was more, really,
than he could afford.
“What
do you think of the play?” Michah asked when Earl returned. Clara had gone off for a moment to talk
with someone else. In fact, he saw
her start to cry, while a woman, very much her senior, listened closely. Earl could feel the interest in Michah’s
question.
“My
son is the playwright,” Earl said rather too loudly—a couple of people turned
and smiled, looked curious. He
felt relieved saying it, as though he had made up for his earlier
reticence. But then he said, “So I
guess I have to like it.”
“The
father, really!” Michah’s face
brightened. His eyes were
glistening. His beard seemed
accentuated. “You must feel very
proud. You must brag all the
time. I would, if I had a son.”
“But
I think,” Earl said, “an appreciation of the play means you’ve read King
Lear.”
“You
haven’t read King Lear?” Michah asked hopefully. “We can go down to my shop in a few
minutes, and I’d be happy to supply you with a copy.”
“I
don’t know,” Earl said, now glad to be on a completely truthful tack. “The original might tear me up too
much, to be honest. I remember
reading the thing in Miss Komoronie’s class in high school and she’d read these
sections aloud to us and begin weeping.”
“Really?”
Michah asked, touched. “Cool. But why would the play tear you up?”
Standing
there in his pork pie hat, Michah seemed again more like a magician than
anything else. As though he might
start producing beautiful paper flowers from his leather vest. His questions also seemed as though
they were pulled from a hat.
“My
father—“ Earl began carefully. “My
father is in a position not all that different, as I remember it, from
Lear’s. He’s in a rest home, and
there have been some snafus about inheritance. I just came up from seeing him. And then yesterday I witnessed my uncle’s—his brother’s
–funeral. That’s what brings me to
this neck of the woods.”
“That’s
a little heavy,” Michah said, patting him. “Heavy, Man, really.
Good you came to this.
Really good.”
Clara
returned, her face still showing some streaking of tears.
“Are
you all right?” Earl asked.
Michah
was struck that Earl knew her well enough to ask something like that.
“Oh,
I’m all right.” But Earl’s
questions seemed a prompt for her to bring out a violet-patterned
handkerchief. Earl saw Michah’s
face register extreme compassion, hurt almost. “You probably haven’t heard,” she went on, “that we had a
son, Leighton and I. Billy. Billy died of AIDS—unusually. It was after the special medications
came out.”
“I'm
sorry,” Earl said.
“I
was just talking to another mother,” she added, “of a much older son, who’s
also gone.”
“It
doesn’t matter who it is,” Michah added.
“It’s just one great loss.”
The
presence of death—in several different manifestations—silenced them for a
moment. Appropriately another
man—short, dressed in black and very punctilious—joined them. He said, “It’s gotten around like wildfire around here that
you’re Don’s father. You should
have notified us ahead of time. We
would have made a special announcement before the performance.”
Earl
shook his hand, feeling even worse for having disliked this play so very much.
“You’re
Don Talbot’s father!” Clara said.
“I never even considered the name.”
“The
play has been this season’s sellout,” the Director said. “It’s been a Godsend, but Clara, you
must tell me how you came to know the father of the playwright.”
“We
knew one another in college,” Clara said, smiling through the traces of her
tears, which were clearly lost on the Director. “We in fact had a reunion in the Seventies—his wife and my
husband and the two of us to see a performance of Twelfth Night. Ray Walston was visiting as a guest
star and played Malvolio.”
“Ah,
that’s who it was,” Earl said.
“What a production.” He
could see the actor (who was also My Favorite Martian on television) dressed in
a yellow tunic during the trick letter scene, a giant “M” on his chest. “Oh, it’s a wonderful memory,” he went
on. “I would give anything for
something to remind me of it—a memento, a program, anything.”
“I’m
afraid I’ve saved nothing,” she answered.
And
then Earl was aware that a light had come on—perhaps with the sight of her
tears—and he had been following it unconsciously. He suddenly felt very physically alive beneath his clothes,
touched by the memory of his skin, as he had emerged, tingling, from the cold
motel swimming pool in this insufferable heat a few hours ago.
“But
I think I might have a program—just give me the year,” Michah said, “down at my
bookstore.”
Michah’s
bookstore—Retold Tales—was a little labyrinth of volumes such as you might find
in an eccentric’s mansion. In
fact, Earl had served notice on someone owning a library like this one not too
long ago. He felt a little strange
following a perfect, slightly tipsy stranger all the way over here. He had thought Clara would be coming to
look at the program, too, but she begged off at the crosswalk. Nevertheless, Michah clearly had been
interested in him from the very start—wanted his company, and Earl felt he couldn’t
afford to turn that down, when he had only an empty motel room waiting.
The
temperature had dropped to about 90 degrees—the bookstore had fans rather than
air-conditioning—and people were lingering in the place, even though Michah’s
second-in-command, a woman in her forties with a cane—was going about as best
she could, picking up books left on the floor and getting ready, slowly, to
close. It was nearly 7:30.
Michah
went to a filing cabinet and asked for the year Earl had seen Twelfth Night.
It
must have been 1974? Donny was
born in January, 1976, and if Corinne had been pregnant with him at that time,
she would have complained the whole way.
On the other hand, it would have to have been after 1972, the year all
four of them had graduated from college.
A
sense of a splendid afternoon in probably 1974 came over him. Leighton had brought a tomato-red
frisbee, and Clara had gotten a long loaf of French bread (everything was still
white flour in those days) and sliced it, and spread various whipped European
cheeses in between. Someone hauled
in a gallon of red Gallo. They played
and ate on the lawns of Lithia Park.
Earl remembered his whole body covered with sweat—he was sitting on the
backseat of Leighton’s and Clara’s ’54 Ford station wagon singing afterwards,
“All we are saying/Is give peace a chance,” with all of them laughing about the
way they, the four of them, were dripping all over the upholstery, which had
been recovered in a red-plaid that felt like wool. He had never again been in love with Corinne the way he had
then. Seated later in the
Elizabethan theatre with the temperature dropping and a blanket over them, he
had held her fragile-boned hand and watched the grand reunion at the end of Twelfth
Night, with the hero entering from one side of the stage and the heroine
from the opposite, both dressed in dark-green velvet vests, leather boots,
feathered hats, swords apparent, and at least eighteen people attending in full
costume, from above and below. Music
was playing, and all was in a hush.
“1974,
I think,” Earl said at last to Michah, who then drew out the program—with Earl
opening it and turning to a black-and-white photo taking up two pages and
showing exactly that scene. The
caption below read: “One face, one
voice, one habit, and two persons,/A natural perspective, that is and is not!”
Michah
came alongside, his smooth skin exposed from beneath the vest brushing Earl’s
hand. “That is beautiful,
Man. Almost picture perfect.” He had taken off his hat. He was getting bald at the back.
“What
a good time we had,” Earl said. He
turned the program over. It was
marked a collectable--$20. “I
would like to buy this.”
“Oh,
hey, Man, I want you to have it—with my compliments.” Michah sat down, his muscular ribs also exposed. By this time his second-in-command and all
the customers had left.
“I
couldn’t possibly take it,” Earl stammered, although he knew, even so, he
couldn’t afford another indulgence, not just now. Even this trip, where he was serving as a kind of proxy for his
father at this uncle’s funeral, was an indulgence of sorts.
“Listen,”
Michah said, from behind his cash register, which gave him a certain authority—
he was locking the machine up—“you’ve got to give gifts while you can. You know the song ‘No Day But
Today’? Well, it’s like that. Man, in the work I did before this, I
saw hundreds go.”
“What
sort of work did you do?” Earl asked.
“HIV
counseling back in Missouri—until I bought somebody’s bookstore out in
Springfield and had everything shipped here.”
“You’re
too kind,” Earl replied, and all of a sudden found himself misting up. It could have been his father, it could
have been Clara, or the memories of Corrine, but he was definitely forgetting
himself at this moment.
Suddenly
Michah came up and hugged him, and Earl felt the bare skin, very smooth and
vulnerable, beneath his fingers.
The whole embrace of Michah’s body had a fine hardness to it, reminding
him of when he would hug his workout buddy. But it was in this embrace that it dawned on him that Donny
might have AIDS or at least be positive—why else this requirement added to the
production of his play?—and that’s what the tears were telling him.
Earl
stepped back. “Thank you, my
friend.” He wiped his eyes. “All right. I’ll take it, and thank you.” And he went back to his empty motel room.
By
the time he got there, it was too late to call Donny back in New York. But he couldn’t rest. He undressed and lay on the bed naked. He was all done over in sweat. Outside it was still 85, if it was a
degree. He had the curtains parted
just enough so that he could see the motel pool, filled with loud families still
who were using it well past the curfew.
And he noticed, above, in the spectacularly clear southern Oregon sky,
all the celestial motions of an early September night, with Mars rolling around,
as though following the line of a hoop, with Venus coming after. He was lying so he could see all of
this, while remaining unseen. He
remembered falling asleep and dreaming of the stars, from the perspective of
watching Twelfth Night and holding Corinne's hand again. Along about midnight, he awoke and
found all the noisy families gone from the pool—just a sole red-speckled
children’s inner tube lay floating.
He up and called his younger son Charles, who always stayed up and was
especially glad to hear from him this time, because he was stranded up in Salem
with a defective U-haul. He was
bringing down the furniture of his latest girlfriend. They would be back in Eugene by tomorrow and Earl could meet
her.
Earl
slept again and by five was in his jeans standing at the window with the
curtains parted, watching the sun come up as the moon descended.
He
dialed Donny at last—an unlisted number very few people had, and found that he
was still getting him up.
“I’m
here in Ashland,” Earl said, “and I just wanted you to know that I saw your
play at last. Just yesterday
afternoon.”
He
would have given anything not to open this way, but he knew of no other
method. He tried to imagine
himself in a comfortable spot, as a counselor had once suggested for times of
stress—in this instance in his mother’s wing-backed chair, now fully re-upholstered
and recovered with the scarlet cloth in his small house.
“Oh,”
Donny said in a sleepy voice.
“Thanks for going to the trouble.”
He gave his father an out by starting out generally. “How did the audience go for it?”
“It
was extremely well received,” Earl said, relieved and grateful. “A standing ovation, in fact. Son, you have another hit on your
hands.”
“Thanks.”
The
silence that followed was like a ping in the universe, in the night sky a few
hours ago, filled with celestial lights, which he had just dreamed about.
“I
went to the AIDS fundraiser afterwards,” Earl said. “Something else that went over well.”
“Good.” Another ping.
“Listen,
Donny”—and for some reason, maybe Michah’s hug, he said, “Donny, my Dear, I
have a worry. That’s why I’m
calling.”
“Well,
I don’t know if I can help you,” Donny answered in a tone that belonged to an
interview, “but what is it?”
“Well,
I was worried that you might have AIDS or might be HIV positive, seeing the
you’re requiring a fundraiser and all.”
“I’m
touched that you should ask,” Donny said very formally. And then his voice was muffled for a
moment—Earl could make out that he was asking someone to leave the room. “But that’s very naïve. You don’t have to have a disease in
order to do something for a global calamity.”
“Well,
I’m relieved—“
But
then there came one of the surprise paper airplanes. “But I am,” he went on. “I am positive. One of those incredible mishaps.”
“Are
you all right?”
“Yes. I am getting monitored.”
“Can
I help in any way?” Earl asked.
“No”—and
Earl knew this was coming. “You
can’t help in any way. Except
maybe you could tell Mom. When the
time is right. With her running
for re-election, I have no idea when might be a good moment. You being there could be a better
judge.”
“All
right. I’ll do that,” he
said. And wished now he could hold
him.
“And
what about you?” Donny asked—again suddenly. “Could you use some help? Some money? I
know things aren’t going too well for you out there. With those two houses you can’t sell and you being out of
work.”
Earl
felt crushed with tenderness and some shame, too. “No, no, Son, but thank you. I’ve got a job—not a great one—but I’ve got a job.”
“But
serving notices on people—I always thought you had to work with your
hands. I could fix it so you
could.”
“Thanks,
Donny”—and the sound of his actual name was even more intimate than “Son” or
“my Dear” this time. “Not right
now. Let me fend for myself.”
“Well,
then,” Donny said, “take care, then, Dad.”
“And
you, too. Let me know when you’ll
be on TV again for your Tony.”
They
laughed by way of exit.
He
had to be back at work serving notices on people by Tuesday morning. The day he had entered was Monday. How lucky to be packed up and ready and
in and out of a morning AA meeting by 9 AM, ready to avoid “the scorcher” which
the owner of the Capri Motel had said was on the way—104 this time. Usually on trips to visit his father
and sometimes his uncle, he packed a lunch in the cooler and stopped off at the
rest area near the Rogue River on the way back, but he was ambitious to get
over the brief mountains, which set him in periods of shade, and when he
stepped out to stretch his legs near Roseburg, he was somewhat dazzled
confronting the normal September temperature of eighty.
He
had decided he could tinker for weeks with timing the disclosure to
Corinne. But by then he could very
well lose his nerve. So he
cellphoned her house while sitting in the car, got her surgeon boyfriend, who
told him she was out but would be speaking at a small fundraiser this
evening. As a matter of fact, the
doctor invited him to come. It was
the Peaceforce people, who were actually honoring her too for her help these
past four years.
“Will
there be an opportunity to speak with her in private afterwards?” Earl asked.
“I
should certainly think so”—a cautious surgical voice. “It’s being held at someone’s plush condo. Not very much like Peaceforce at
all. You can always retire to
their no-doubt beautiful balcony.”
A
certain grip of the heart followed Earl after he got back into his Toyota and
headed up the last fifty miles.
Times with Corinne were always friendly and remarkably civilized—look at
how well they had done on trying to sell this updated house (now updated
disaster)—but there was also some pain involved in thinking through these
episodes. Like the massage
therapist who could find hitherto unknown pockets of anguish in his back and
along his ribs, Michah’s touch had made him alert to what he still carried with
him. The feel of Michah’s skin had
set this off, and Earl considered ruefully the irony that while he sometimes
had kept himself distant from his son because he was gay, feelings like this in
his own body were not unusual.
Much
of this he considered in the shower once he was home and while he opened up his
house again—this small paltry house which he had to abide by until he could get
it off his hands.
He
watered the yard and arrived at the reception only a little late. He had tried reaching his younger son
to see if he could help him bring in his girl friend’s furniture, but there was
no answer.
Corinne
was quite eloquent standing in front of the informally arranged group. Her silver hair was perfectly
styled—abundant and parted down the middle. Yet nervous, she rolled her notes up and down like a
shivering child clutching sheet music at her first recital.
The
glory of the Twelfth Night experience came back as he saw that
hesitancy.
She
was a blue-silver figurine standing there, smiling sometimes, speaking out
against the ideas of her opponent, who was challenging her incumbency. Earl had heard him once; he was a big
blustery man favored by Earl’s fellow subcontractors but someone he
instinctively disliked.
When
she was done and the hat was passed, Earl put in a check for $25.00. Dr. Forster, who stood by guarding his
fiancee’s purse, had warned him in advance.
Corinne
came up. “Earl, don’t do
that. You don’t have to—“ She was too delicate to refer to his
hard times.
“I
want to.” He wasn’t sure what else
to say; he was still back in Ashland, with the performance of Twelfth Night.
“And
how is your father?” she asked, mistress of any conversation now.
Earl
stammered. “He’s all right, but he
wanted to give me all his money, because my luck has gone south. Right then and there. You can just imagine how that would
have gone over with his brother’s relatives.”
“And
the funeral—it was all right?”
It
was like her to be capable of immediately thinking of someone besides herself,
even at a benefit in her honor.
“Yes,
yes. Listen, Corinne”—he took her
wrist lightly—drawing a glance from Dr. Forster. “Could we talk?”
They went out on a balcony, which was decked with bent orchids, yellow-
and pink-streaked. “I have
something to tell you about Donny.”
“You
saw the play,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Horrible,
right?” she asked, looking slightly shame-faced.
“Yes”—and
with that he almost lost his nerve.
“But that isn’t it. I
called him this morning.”
“Oh,
no—and you told him you didn’t like it”
She smiled with tolerance.
“Well, don’t worry. I
nearly made the same slip myself.”
“No,”
he stammered. “No, he told me
that he’s HIV Positive.”
Her
eyes filled, and he was struck by the total obtuseness of telling her this
under these conditions. In a
moment, she would have to go back out into the living room again and answer
more political questions.
“Oh,
Earl,” she said. “I was afraid of
that.”
“He
wanted to tell you,” he said, stammering again, “but I can see I’ve been a
total bull in a china shop again breaking this to you now.”
“No,”
she said, wiping her eyes—she’d always made excuses for him, one of the
problems in their marriage, besides his drinking. “You let me know as soon as you could. Earl, our son might be dying.”
He
took her hand, but just as he did, a whole retinue came out on the balcony to
reclaim her. Among the people was
Nick, the upholsterer, who tried to interest him again into going into business
with him.
Next
morning, he was pulling up to a house built in the Eighties, one separated off
from the rest of the block because of its huge lot. Already the neglected development looked like an ash
pit. The house’s estimated value
was $400,000—nearly $200,000 lower than what it sold for three years ago. He had his Notice of Default ready, but
as he moved to get out and approach the porch of the gabled place, he suddenly
had a sense of the folly he and the whole country were in just now.
Earlier,
out on the freeway to get himself this far north from his own little rental, he
had passed by a polished black Four by Four with a bumper sticker, “They Still
Make Em Like They Used to,” with a muscular marine in profile above the letters. But then, as a light drizzle began to
fall, he saw that the man driving was at least 300 pounds, bushily bearded and
wearing glowering dark glasses.
Even
earlier than that, Nick, his exercise partner on Tuesday/Thursday at 5 AM at
the Y, had stood above him as he lay on the bench press. Nick told him again—and this time as
though from a heavenly perch--he must be nuts for going on with this
foreclosure stuff when Earl could be joining him in doing something he wanted. Nick had more calls for furniture fix-it
work than he could handle. He knew
how good Earl was with his hands and at things which needed repair.
Earl
stood in front of the house and as he did, the heavy breeze set in motion the
loudest wind chime he had ever heard—from an old rusty bell hanging from a
spent apple tree. Then a furious
German shepherd—black with silver highlights—went straight for him, and Earl
rushed back into truck, shutting the door just in time.
He
just sat there, imprisoned. This
was not the first time. Turning on
the ignition, he pulled into the swooping driveway, the dog close at the tires,
and then backed himself into an arc so that the bed of the truck was within
reach of one of the fake gables.
The dog, puzzled, stopped barking and sat down. Within an instant, Earl was out the
door, jumping into the bed, and tacking up the notice from on high. The sound of the hammer crazed the dog
once more, and an old woman in a surprising blue gingham dress appeared on the
porch and began yelling, “What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do? My husband is sick and they made me put him in the hospital
so that we have no money now. And
they told me he might die! What am
I supposed to do?”
Earl
stood there, ridiculous in the back of the truck. “I’m sorry, Ma’am, but your dog looked like he might bite
me.”
“No,
no, no, no, no.” she said. “He
won’t bite anybody.” Then she
began to cry. “But where will we
go?” She went up and pulled at the
notice. “Where will we come up with
$29,382.68 cash? Where? Where?”
“I’m
sorry, I don’t know,” he said. He
inched his way out, wondering if the frail woman could really keep the shepherd
in place—she was holding him by the collar by now, with the notice on the
ground.
As
he got back into the cab, suddenly her look was one that did not take him in at
all—she was beyond blaming anyone now.
“Again,
Ma’am, I’m sorry,” he said, with the window down.
Pulling
gratefully away, he phoned Nick and told him he was done with this stuff, at
last, and what would the new job look like?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Henry Alley is a Professor Emeritus of
Literature in
the Honors College
at the University
of Oregon.
He has
four novels, Through
Glass (Iris
Press, 1979), The Lattice (Ariadne Press, 1986), Umbrella of Glass (Breitenbush
Books,
1988), and Precincts of
Light
(Inkwater Press, 2010). His
Leonardo
and I was winner of the Gertrude Press 2006 Fiction
Chapbook Award. His
stories have been published over the past
forty years in such journals as Seattle
Review, Outerbridge,
Virginia Quarterly Review, Clackamas Literary Review,
Gertrude, and Harrington Gay Men’s Quarterly Fiction. Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters, writes, “Henry Alley is
an excellent writer. His
fiction is artfully artless, clear, concise, and real.
Best of all, he
regularly tells stories that nobody else is telling.” Alley’s most recent
novel, Precincts of
Light, explores the Measure
Nine crisis in Oregon,
when gay and lesbian people were threatened with being
made silent.
Bay Laurel / Volume 1, Issue 2 / Winter 2012