“So what did you do,” Joanie asked, “call 911?”
“I sent him to the Arctic Circle,” Lucy said. She looked around at the bewildered faces and added, “I’m a travel agent.” It didn’t seem to clear up much, but she didn’t enlarge on it and “Arctic Circle” was absorbed as some sort of expression, descriptive of a deplorable state reached in many modern relationships.
It was here that Frank thought he would try to explain. He would tell them about the sense of freedom he had prowling around in the middle of the night, the sense of surprise, but Joanie jumped in to call, “Curiosity killed the cat,” and raised her arms like a choirmaster as the others cheered, “Satisfaction brought him back!”
“I was trying to get to the bottom of things,” he said, and got booed. He opened another beer and pushed his bowl away from himself. The others did the same. It was like a women’s locker room and he was the towel boy. Lucy belched without self-consciousness and looked off in thought.
“We should count our blessings,” she said with faint gloom, “that we haven’t arrived at the moon of the cruise and package tours.”
“What’s this all about?” June asked, rifling her purse until she found a lipstick. She screwed it up into her view, squinted and began applying it to her lips. Frank knew June as someone who deplored all avoidable melancholy.
“I mean, my company should be called Last Fling Tours. I don’t know if I want to work there anymore. It’s sort of depressing.”
“That people get old?” June asked. “I can’t wait to get old. I thank God I’m not a day under forty-one.”
“No, that they should do all this catching up at the end. Do you have any idea the quantity of adult diapers a cruise ship carries?”
“Oh, Lucy, come on.”
“I’m serious.”
“I think it’s touching,” said Joanie, “and if the ship goes down, it makes a kind of romantic ending.” Frank missed Joanie’s point, seeing only diapers bobbing on an empty sea.
June said, “I suppose we could take this view of everything. Every silver lining has a cloud. You guys think everything is a tearjerker. I sell convertibles to some very desperate people. I’m just sorry there’s not more of them. I’d have me a big rolling ranch outside of town like the cook here. Walking horses. Hounds. Yeah, that’s right. Y’all come. Sayonara ragtops.”
“You don’t want a ranch, June,” Frank said. “Or if you do, I’ll sell you mine.”
“You can’t sell it,” said June. “It’s the old family place.”
“Watch me.”
“Ever since I first met you, you’ve been wanting to get rid of it. Why’s this?”
“None of us live out there and it’s hard to keep it going, keep the weeds down, keep it irrigated, keep it fenced. You can’t find ranch hands. If they’re easy to get along with, they don’t work, and vice versa. I just fired one today. I hated it. Hard worker. I shouldn’t hire people because I can’t stand to fire anybody. This was a little different. He got me off the hook by insulting me. So, at first I was comfortable about letting him go. Now I’m unhappy again. I called his wife. She was literally savage to me, but it didn’t cure anything. I wish I knew how they were getting through this evening. He’s going to be job hunting tomorrow. But he and his wife are a pair of mean Joses.”
The women sat patiently through this maundering, then Joanie said, “Let’s go out there and look in their window and see how they’re getting along!” Frank shook his head, but June and Lucy shouted their support for the idea. Frank raised his hands to bring this to a stop but it had the opposite effect. He went into the kitchen to start coffee. Things were spinning along too fast. When he got back to the table they were deep into their plan of spying on the Jarrells. “What’s to become of this cowboy couple?” asked June. “Enquiring minds want to know.”
“You got any fucking brandy?” asked Joanie. “Schnapps?”
Frank doggedly hauled out the brandy, a pretty good cognac. They tossed it back without ceremony. They drank coffee too, which ought to have helped. He held out for a while but they got Jarrell’s name and conferred over the telephone book. “Here it is, and it’s a perfect address,” said Joanie with her finger on a page. “All cottonwoods along a creek. We can sneak around in there like real Indians.” Frank had a shot of brandy. This was going to be both exhilarating and mildly dangerous: the disconsolate Jarrells could come out blazing.
First, the dog biscuits had to be distributed.
“Let’s go down Tracy,” said Frank. “There’s a mutt every ten feet on Tracy. Let’s go down Tracy.”
Frank carried the dog biscuits as they walked along the array of lawns. Lights shone from the painted porches. Schoolchildren studied in lighted upper windows, and where they passed dark houses, the cool stars glowed close overhead. At each stretch of chain-link fence, a dog bounded out and received a dog biscuit. The starlight glowed on the roofs of automobiles along the curb and there was a faint murmur of radio and television, music and typing, the hollow tap of Ping-Pong. In a basement workshop a bandsaw sang. The air was full of the breath of cooling silver maples and effulgent spruces. The four walked in peculiar contentment and a feeling of rightness, afloat. On every side, life went on.
“I hate to break the spell,” said Joanie, “but I’d like to see how the couple is getting along.”
The idea teetered here on the edge of collapse. There was a quiet moment when the right words seemed out of reach, time enough for Joanie to say, “On your mark, get set —” and start the hysteria up again and a stampede for the cars. A relay of barking dogs marked their progress down the street.
11
By walking the creek bottom through the sparsely settled neighborhood, single file, they approached the small, run-down house of Boyd Jarrell. The muddy banks of the creek made a coarse sucking sound around their shoes as they walked. By the time they got close, hunkered down in the red willows and startling clouds of red-winged blackbirds, only Frank still had shoes on, and that was because his laced up. The others had lost theirs in the mud. Their legs were black almost to their knees, and those who had tried to retrieve their shoes, Lucy and June, had black arms. Frank tried over and over again to get them to be quiet, but they chattered away and laughed through their noses when he signaled at them with downward cuts of his right arm and mimed the words “Keep it down!” When they were close, he stopped and said in a low anchorman voice, “If he hears us, he might start shooting.” He got perfect silence.
A bank of untended lilacs enclosed a small back yard with a picnic table that had built-in bench seats on either side, a burn barrel, a clothesline, a swing set (Does he have kids? Frank wondered. How can I not know if he has kids?), a barbecue with a red enamel lid and a crooked little crabapple tree still in blossom. An open lighted window faced into this yard and there was a table just inside the window at which sat Boyd Jarrell, apparently asleep with his head on his arms.
They managed to slip through the lilacs quietly and Frank whispered his plan for them to sit at the picnic table and observe. They didn’t quite understand, so he went forward and sat on one end of the bench seat facing the house. He gestured for the others to follow. June came and sat next to him, then Joanie. Finally, Lucy came and sat. It was her relatively light extra weight that caused the picnic table to flip over on top of them. Frank felt the wood press his face and heard June’s hissing Okie curses. Joanie was on all fours, bucking, trying to get it off all of them in one powerful gesture but then complained she had gotten splinters in her rump. Frank grasped the table and raised the whole thing back into place with a red face. Lucy remained sitting on the ground, cross-legged, muttering, “I just hate it.” Frank’s first concern was Jarrell, but he saw his position hadn’t moved. They sat again at the table, two on each side.