The Time of Quarantine, page 27
But unlike Lyda, who’d got Helen, a thought that makes him bitter even now, Will had risen in that other night, stealthy as the thief he was, to siphon gas from the dun-colored van and sneak away with Baby in the night.
It’s not a dream, when he wakes on the deck, but an ache—an ache, and a terrible emptiness in his hands, which lie, the long fingers of them and their blackened nails, like little animals at the ends of his wiry forearms as if waiting for something to come back to life. In the ache that is not a dream or a memory there is a round, flat rock, and all around the rock are other rocks, round rocks that border the large center stone, or maybe a labyrinth. And there’s sun beating down there too.
Heat radiates from the stone, which is not, Will knows, a stone at all.
But it’s not the escape he remembers but the ambivalence, sailing along in the sleek black car fueled by stolen gas. In one part of his damaged mind he had thought that was close, and patted Baby on its head. But because the head felt wrong—neither too hot nor too cool but yet a terrible temperature, almost no temperature at all—he had already begun to regret the capable hands of the fleece mom, which surely would have known what to do and how to do it.
Now, by the river, he wonders for the first time how much gas he’d left them. He’d siphoned a lot—enough to get here. Surely he hadn’t taken it all, but how much did they need? And the thought of them stuck by that creek still, eking along with their store of cans, makes him sweat. Will’s not thinking yet he should go back to see. That thought may be coming, but not yet.
Instead, another thought: what would Peter do?
And because that makes no sense at all, is not even a fully formed thought, just something that floats out beyond him, a thought—a name—that he loses almost before he has had it, when it’s gone all that remains is this lingering, trenchant feeling of loss. Across the deck, the sleeping women stir—first one, then the other—gutting Will with a wrong, wrong feeling of displacement.
It’s not so much that Helen is furtive—she’s furtive, sure, but a lot of people are furtive these days—as it is that she does not entirely belong here, belongs, Will thinks, elsewhere, that reminds him now not so much of the fleece mom but the boy, who at least had his hope, and of whom, Will now remembers, he had, in fact, dreamed—but how could it be a dream, when it seemed so real?
They were camped, in the dream, the boy and his family and Will, too, all together on a wide, gray lake. But it’s not really gray, not even the right color for any kind of lake, almost red, with ugly puce-colored pockmarks where the wind stirs it up, except there isn’t any wind in the dream, only a terrible, hot stillness that makes Will so drowsy. But he’s not sleeping yet, just watching, in his dreamy sleepiness, the dad teach the boy how to fish with a stick and a string. The stick is long and green—the brightest color in the dream—and the boy is both bored and impatient. He wants to swim, but not here, sweetie, the fleece mom says, that water’s not clean—it’s dirty.
The dried mud of the shoreline cracks open in long, brittle ripples that wriggle, like the water, as if they were alive, making Will feel disgusted with himself and the parents, for who would bring a child to such a place to camp—to fish—but just then there’s a flash all along the unnatural shore, and Will sees that the boy and the dad have got something on their line. The boy is jumping up and down, anyway, and the dad is yelling, and the stick is putting up a fight. The lake smells suddenly pungent as the boy and dad bring something to the surface of the water that looks to be alive.
And for a moment, in the dream, there’s a dreamy kind of happiness—the boy and dad have caught a fish, the mom will grill it for supper! But then Will sees that it’s not a real fish but a garbage fish, the fish arcing up to flop in the dirt at the feet of the boy and the father, and move, the word rises up in Will although no sound comes out, get away, but now sound is coming out, sailing down the shoreline to the father and son, and again move, but too late, as the fish mouth clamps on the boy’s slender ankle, the razor-sharp teeth slicing all the way down to the bone.
But maybe that really did happen, Will thinks, fully awake now and the memory of fish teeth on boy bone and the semen smell of fish so precise and overwhelming that Will knows now what he’s going to do. And it is this—his new resolve to go back and get them, or at least return their gas—that pulls him from his bag and back through the night to his own black car.
Not without Lyda, he thinks.
But against the terrible urge Will has now to leave, this thought won’t stop him for long—Lyda’s got Helen, who does Will have?
Without even a car of her own, he’d said that first day.
You don’t get to do that, Lyda had said. Helen got me here—she found the bird.
So what, you just picked her up by the side of the road, like a cat?
No, more like a Baby.
Oh come on, Lyda—but Will was really thinking, even then, of the fleece family, and how things might be different if he’d brought them too—what do you even know about her? Is she even safe?
Lyda laughed. I’m telling you, she’s like a built-in GPS. You want eggs, Helen’s your girl. Besides, Will, trust me—we need her. Then she paused, a bit shyly, before adding, besides, Helen’s for me.
That was all the words she’d used, but when she used them—this was strange too—they had had the effect of draining the outrage right out of him. Will had just stood there, defused, looking helplessly at Lyda, who was small and strong and with muscles that showed in all the different parts of her body and whose words had the power to strip the inside of him completely like that. And then, he’d looked at Helen, who was even smaller, and paler, her head covered with its perpetual scarf and her elegant hands.
Now, he rubs a patch of dirt away from the car, and licking the rich mineral taste of it, lays his head in his hands, sleepless and alone in the world. The sound of the river, he knows, is the wash of the past, but however much he wants to be able to decode it—to write in the language of his symbols only he can understand—that part of it continues to elude him, and Will knows the time is coming when he’s about to do the very thing he knows he mustn’t, for inside the black car, as in all cars, there’s a glove box, and inside the glove box, another box, and inside that box—Will has at least looked—a small handheld device, nestled in its clever hiding place. Now, Will knows, if he takes it out—if he holds it—he’s going to turn it on.
What Will really should have done was tell the boy a story. If he told the boy a story, it would go like this.
Once in that long ago time all the boys—we—played a game we called baseball on green fields in parks beneath great canopies, batter up batter up batter up.
And this is the story that Will would tell because it’s the one he remembers.
In particular, Will remembers the mound. He remembers coiling his body, clutching the hard, round ball in his hand, cupped by the mitt. He remembers disappearing into that one moment—the exact instant of uncoiling and releasing the ball. And he remembers watching what happened after as the ball traced the arc of its unstoppable trajectory and it always still seemed that things might be ok, that this one pitch might be perfect. Will lived for that infinitesimal moment when the world would fade away and he would go with it, into the stripped-of-sound—chatter of boys, flapping of canopy, what his dad yelled—quiet. There, in that instant, Will and the skin of his tough boy body would coalesce into his one sure purpose of controlling the outcome, while what his father wanted—Will would only understand this slowly, over time—was that he, like his father before him, would be defined entirely by the elegant geometries of ball and base and boy—all this, and nothing more.
And Will hated him for it.
Will had hated, also, in this order, the shoes—the dangerous, clackety-clack of the cleats—the clumsiness of gear at the plate, the smack of bat on ball and probability of it coming back at him, and the flickering light of the canopy that caused shadows where shadows were not. Sometimes it would get so bad that pitchers would spin to throw out runners who were not even there, and although Will tried hard to keep track of where each boy was and what the next play should be, he lived in perpetual dread that the next game-losing error was going to be his.
They were all afraid of losing the ball in the flickering shadows of the canopy.
But Will would not tell the boy this.
Because Will wasn’t the boy who lost the ball but only the boy who pitched and watched, a cry rising up in his throat for the boy with raised mitt who was losing the ball as it sailed off the bat out over the field and straight for the boy’s fragile head—but who could track a ball in light like that?
Always keep your eye on the ball, Will’s father told him later—see what happens if you don’t.
They had all blamed the shadows, but Will had the opposite feeling, as if the ball had sailed true to its mark, gone slow in the treacherous moment.
But what he’d tell the boy was how, afterwards, you couldn’t get through a game without one mom or another calling time-out to ascend the ladders and repair the canopy. And these were the good times, he’d say—our moms on the ladders above us and us in the shadows below, spitting sunflower seeds at each other and doing calisthenics to keep warm. That’s when we were safe, he would say—our moms making sure of that above, and us on the ground, with nothing to do. And sometimes, he would tell the boy, it would seem to us they had called time-out when nothing at all was wrong with the canopies above us, or maybe not wrong yet. It would seem to us they did this just to go up on their ladders above us, to hang out and chat a little up there, intimate and purposeful, to stop the games and what the dads yelled from the bleachers to chastise or cheer us on.
Now, it sometimes seems to Will that all he’s really wanted in these long days by the river, is something like a baseball, and a canopy, above, to protect them. He’s wished for a ladder and someone to climb with, for enough others to field a team, or at least a decent game of catch. And sometimes, he can’t help it, he’s wished there were one thing he remembers that his father told him he might cherish as a talisman or good advice.
But the girls threw like girls, and the fiddle was starting to warp from the heat, and between Lyda and Helen, Will couldn’t tell which he preferred—Lyda’s legs were better and she had her general cheerfulness, but while Helen more and more these days seemed increasingly remote, he had that other feeling, as though beneath the layer he was seeing, another layer lay that he could love.
And there were still times there—not so many, but some—when none of this seemed to matter, and he could almost imagine the river alive. They’d have finished with their dinner—all the work of their day—and maybe Will would be playing something on the fiddle for the others who would not notice how out of tune it was, or maybe he’d just be lying on the deck in his blue sleeping bag looking up where there’d once been so many stars. Here and there, he might think, there were places in the woods where the green was coming back, and if the woods could come back, why not the river—grown green with algae and stippled with fish, why not the weather that comes from the mountain?
Why not the stars?
Why not Baby?
But in the morning, Lyda would be fussing over it, still so inert in its tie-dyed sack, and the light would be as bleak as it ever was in Little League, and Helen would already be tromping off into the woods—what did she do in the woods each day, where did she even go?
Lying there, putting consciousness off a while longer, Will would wish it was only one of them—either one, it didn’t matter—Helen, whom he’d never once seen sweat, or Lyda, whose body, even from a distance, Will could sometimes smell. If there were only one—Lyda in the red car, or Helen—Helen by the stone that is not a stone—then he would not have to choose.
And then one day Helen came back from the woods with a tomato. She came cupping it in the palms of her hands, holding it before her like a promise, all red and ripe and with a little bulge of half formed seed or fruit on one side, as though it had tried—and failed—to twin itself. Split three ways, the tomato was hardly more than a taste of tomato, and when it was gone, they only wanted more.
And isn’t that an odd thing, Lyda said. Before we had the one, we never gave a single thought to tomatoes.
Ravenous now for tomatoes, Will saw the first one as a variable—an x, like Helen herself. But solving for Helen was not going to turn out as hard as he thought, for as soon as he saw this, Will knew Lyda was wrong—Helen wasn’t for her: she was for no one.
Or they were for her.
The next day, there were carrots, and after that, beets.
Soon, Lyda would be cooking up a storm.
And Will, curiosity piqued, had started to explore in earnest, although he didn’t yet know he was looking for a way out, or back. Will couldn’t know this yet because the food was good and it was going to be a while before he had the dream of the lake, or the one just before—or after—where it’s not the boy or the fish that dies, but Will himself. But it’s a gentle kind of dying, not violent, just a slow fading, or leaking through the open spaces of his body—the layers between—and someone in a clear voice saying not to be afraid. But Will isn’t afraid, only anticipating something, even eager for it, and although, in the dream, he knows this idea of light is not original, he can’t help but want it. It’s not really dying, the voice reassures him—I think you are going to like it.
Will wasn’t leaving yet when he started going off, not even so much following Helen as trying to see—to map—where they were. He went out with his compass and instruments for writing, and as much of the keen part of his mind as he had left. He went after breakfast, and he told Lyda when he was going, but even so, he was the one who felt furtive, for it seemed, in the bifurcation of his longing, either way, betrayal was his only real option.
Unless, but he wasn’t yet thinking this either, he chose neither of them.
What he did not think was, walking would solve the problem of gas.
He didn’t think, these old railroad tracks must go somewhere.
He didn’t think, the least he could do was leave them two cars.
Three times Will tried to leave on foot.
But he didn’t really know that when he first started off—he was just walking. If he put it into words, what he was doing, the words might have been that he would walk until something stopped him, or his feet blistered down to the bone, or the need for water overwhelmed him, or—impossible—a train came, which he would hop.
But really, there wasn’t much time to think this because almost as soon as he left, maybe half a mile north, Will came to a massive rockslide, a mountain of slag that must date all the way back to the era of the great Western quakes. But it didn’t look old, it looked new, only recently formed—no crumbling of stone, no grass or weeds or moss inching up through the cracks, not even any sign of settling or shifting, but only a sound, like the wind or deep water that rose from the spaces between its boulders and thrummed all around him.
Well, that was that, he thought.
And that was the first time.
Feeling vaguely satisfied, Will went back instead along the river, clambering over its high rocky cliffs below which green holes, murky and swirling, promised good swimming. But without any access, it wasn’t until the last such pool, not so far above camp, that Will found a way down a narrow crevice that ended at a ledge still high above the river and warmed by the sun. Will stood on the ledge looking down for a while, calculating odds as a certain drowsiness began to overcome him. There were other rocks below he’d have to clear, and even though the water looked deep, as nearly opaque with sediment as it was, he couldn’t really say. Besides, he was so very sleepy now, mesmerized by the soupy heat, the eddying below, the quiet brush of water, the green.
Thus, when it came—the blissful cry of boyhood cannonball ecstasy—it came as if out of the churning itself, or through the cusp of time, bringing with it a memory of leaping—the rush of wind past his face, his own throat opening in that cry, the cold fist of water exploding around him, and him—his boy body—plunging deeper, hands dragged above, legs cocked to push from the bottom and pop him back up like a cork, blasting back into the light and air—as complete and exact as any memory he’d ever had—skin of whale, man and child on the hood of his car, a vast improbable wash.
But like the deer he didn’t shoot or the woman he had failed to recognize, there was something inchoate about it, and he knew it wasn’t his.
Had he ever even played baseball, Will thought bitterly.
Then he jumped.
The next time Will left, he followed the railroad tracks south to where they ended at a severed trestle above a gorge so deep he could not see the bottom.
The hills to the east were too rugged for walking at all.
That left the creek Helen went up—Will had seen her—to bring back her tomatoes. And tomatoes weren’t all she was bringing back now, but other vegetables as well—corn and onions and green beans and fat yellow carrots, eggplant, zucchini, peas. Helen was a veritable produce stand these days.
But, oh, was all she said now when he asked, there’s nothing up there—just some falling down trailers and an old freeway culvert. But it’s completely clogged up with debris—you can’t really get past it, no one can. Then she said something strange. She said, up there, anyway—it might as well be the moon.
They were working on the open deck—Will untangling fish line for his new dream of fish, Helen sorting ruined tents for Lyda who had spread them around her with her various sewing tools—marking pencils, scissors, straight edge, tape measure, pincushion, tape. Intent and oddly absorbed by her work, she crouched above the remnants as though hers were the most useful task in the world.
I want to make it beautiful, she said. It’s so much nicer that way.
Watching her piece it together, trying one piece, then another, working in from the circumference and slowly filling it in, Will had to hold himself back, for anyone could see she was going at it wrong. But despite what had happened in the rain, Will knew not to say it was never going to close, because he could see now that Lyda didn’t care, and how, looked at a certain way, she was fitting scraps together less like a geometry problem than a map. As soon as he thought this, Will heard again the sound that had come from the rocks and himself as he jumped to the water.
