But I can’t back out on something as unfreighted as a simple walk and a drink, especially since it’s me did the asking. Canceling will make me out to be a weepy, cringing nutcase who can’t go a step without scuttling back three for fear and shame.
“Maybe I’ll just have to break down and cook you a fried-egg sandwich à la Charlane. Since you’re so starved.” She’s moving toward the front screen, her hard butt encased in denim like a rodeo wrangler’s, her thighs chunky and taut.
“I should try to find my son eventually, I guess,” I mutter not quite loud enough to be heard, following onto the porch, where little town lights twinkle in through the trees.
“Say what?” Char gives me a head-cocked look. We’re in the solid porch darkness here now.
“My son Paul’s here with me,” I say. “We’re going to the Hall of Fame in the morning.”
“Did you leave Mom at home this time?” She rolls her tongue around inside her cheek again. She has heard a warning signal.
“In a sense I did. I’m not married to her anymore.”
“So who are you married to?”
“Nobody.”
“And where’s your son gone?” She glances out around at the dark lawn, as if he’s there. She runs a finger under her tank top strap, attempting to seem noncommittal. I sniff apple perfume again. That would have to go.
“I don’t know where he is,” I say, trying to sound both at ease and concerned. “He sort of took off when we got here. I had a nap.”
“When was this?”
“I guess five-thirty or a quarter to six. I’m sure he’ll be coming back pretty soon.” I’ve lost all heart for everything now — a walk, the Tunnicliff, a drink, oeufs à la Charlane. Though my failure is a part of human mystery I understand, even have sympathy for. “I should maybe stick around here. So he can find me.” I smile cravenly at her in the darkness.
Out on the highway a dark car rumbles past, its windows open or its top down, loud rock music blaring and thumping through the silent trees. I can make out one scalding phrase only: “Get wet, go deep, take it all.” Paul could be there, in the act of disappearing forever, to be seen by me only on milk cartons or grocery store bulletin boards: “Paul Bascombe, 2–8-73, last seen near Baseball Hall of Fame, 7–2-88.” It is not a relaxing thought.
“Well, whatever stokes your flame the hottest, I guess,” Charlane says, already I hope thinking of something else. “I gotta take off, though.” She’s leaving down the steps right away, concluding I’m more trouble than I’m worth, though also probably embarrassed for me.
“Do you have any children?” I say just to say something.
“Oh yeah,” she says, and half turns back.
“Where’s he right now?” I say. “Or she. Or they?”
“He’s at wilderness survival.”
I hear a faint cry then, a woman’s high-pitched voice, brief and ululating, from somewhere above. Char looks up and around, a little smile crossing her lips. “Somebody’s enjoying her fireworks early.”
“What’s your son learning to survive?” I say, trying not to think about the Ohioans right above us. Char and I are descending back through the stages of familiarity and in a minute will once again be unknown to each other.
She sighs. “He’s with his dad, who lives out in Montana in a tent or a cave someplace. I don’t know. I guess they’re surviving each other.”
“I’m sure you’re a great mom,” I say, apropos of nothing.
“Eastern religion,” she says in a wise-cracky voice. “Motherhood’s as close as I come to it.” She raises her small nose toward the warm, spruce-scented air and sniffs. “I smelled a lilac just then, but it’s too late for lilacs. Musta been somebody’s perfume.” She squints down hard at me as though I’ve suddenly moved far, far away and am moving farther (which I am). It’s a friendly squint, full of sympathy, and makes me want to come down off the porch and give her a bustly hug, but which would only confuse matters. “I assume you’ll find your son,” she says. “Or he’ll find you. Whatever.”
“We will,” I say, holding my ground. “Thanks.”
“Yep,” Char says, and then, as though she’s embarrassed by something else, adds, “They don’t usually stay gone long. Not long enough, really.” Then she hikes off into the trees alone, gone out of sight well before I can manage an audible good-bye.
Très amusant,” a voice familiar to me speaks out of the summer’s wicking darkness. “Très, très amusant. Your most important sexual organ is between your ears. Eeeck, eeeck, eeeck. So use it.”
Down the porch, in the last rocking chair in line, Paul is slouched barely visible behind his drawn-up knees, his The Rock shirt giving out the only light hereabouts. He’s been overhearing my cumbersome parting, no doubt wondering if I’ll get around to finding our dinner.
“Howz ur health?” I say, walking down the line of rockers, laying a palm on the smooth spindled back of his and giving it a small, fatherly push.
“Fine ‘n’ yours?”
“Is that Dr. Rection’s anatomy advice?” I am, God knows, full of airy relief he’s not departed for Chicago or the Bay Area in the blaring-music car, or not off getting his ashes perilously hauled, or, worse, stretched out in the Cooperstown ER with a wound drip-drip-dripping on the tiles, waiting for some old turkey-neck GP, woozy from the Tunnicliff, to shake his head clear. (If I intend to have him home with me, I’ll need to be more vigilant.)
“Was that my new mom?”
“Almost. Did you eat anything?”
“I got a mocktail, some mock turtle soup and a piece of mock apple pie. Don’t mock me, please.” These are all holdovers from childhood. If I could see his face, it would be worked into a look of secret satisfaction. He seems, however, completely calm. I might be making progress with him and not realizing it (every parent’s dearest hope).
“Do you want to call your mother and say you got here safely?”
“Ix-nay.” He’s tossing a little Hacky Sack up and down in the dark, barely making movement but suggesting he’s less calm than seems. I have an aversion to Hacky Sacks. My view is that its skills are perfect only for the sort of brain-dead delinquents who whonked me in the head on my way home from work this spring and sent me sprawling. I understand from it, though, that Paul may have made a connection with the towny kids on the corner.
“Where’d you get that thing?”
“I purchased it.” He still hasn’t looked around. “At the local Finast.” I would still like to ask him if he killed the helpless, driveway grackle, only it now seems too unwieldy a subject. It also seems preposterous to think he could be guilty. “I’ve got a new question to ask you.” He says this in a more assertive voice. Conceivably he’s spent the last four hours in a badly lit diner studying Emerson, fingering his Hacky Sack and mulling issues such as whether nature really suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom that can’t help itself; or whether every true man is a cause, a country and an age. Good issues for anyone to mull.
“Okay,” I say just as assertively, not wanting to seem as eager and encouraged as I am. From across the lawn the tart odor not of lilac but of a car’s exhaust reaches my nostrils. I hear an owl, invisible on a nearby spruce bough. Who-who, who-who, who-who.
“Okay, do you remember when I was pretty little,” Paul says very seriously, “and I used to invent friends? I had some talks with them, and they said things to me, and I’d get pretty involved doing it?” He stares fiercely forward.