Mutt opened his hand and studied the black, polished granite. "It helps me remember my name."
"You forget your own name?"
Mutt nodded. "Sometimes. But reading it here helps me remember."
"Can I see it?"
Mutt looked at the rock, then back at Jase, and extended his palm. Jase leaned over the top of the ladder and looked. "Can you make me one?"
Mutt pulled it back to his chest, hiding it behind the blanket, and nodded.
Jase took one step down the ladder and then climbed back up. "Mister Mutt, I don't know how to spell my name. Do you know how to spell my name?"
Mutt nodded.
"Oh, okay. 'Cause if you don't, you could ask my mom or Unca Tuck."
Mutt nodded again.
Jase climbed two steps down, reversed course, and then two steps back up. "Are you hungry?"
Mutt nodded as if the previous four nods had never occurred. "Unca Tuck and my mom are gonna cook eggs, toast, bacon, and biscuits. And something else, but I can't remember." Jase counted all five fingertips, but the answer didn't come.
Mutt lifted his head off the pillow and his eyebrows lifted. "Grits?"
"What's a grit?"
Mutt looked around, threw off the blanket, stuffed the rock in his pocket, grabbed his fanny pack, and climbed down the side of the loft, opposite Jase and me.
Mutt led the way to the cottage and pushed open the back door. Katie was whipping grated cheese into the eggs. He walked over to the stove, smelled the grits, and spread his chess set on the kitchen table where he promptly dispatched of me in seven moves.
Quiet through breakfast, Mutt forked an empty plate, turned to me, and said, "I want to go to church."
"Okay, which one?"
Mutt shrugged. "The one on the corner." I understood what he meant, even though it made little sense.
"I think it'd be a good idea if you took a bath first."
Mutt smelled his underarms and his hands. "Do we have any money?"
"Yes."
"Can I have some?"
"Yes."
"Can I have the keys to your truck?"
I pointed to the hook by the back door. Mutt stood up, grabbed the keys, and opened the door. Halfway out of the house, he turned around and said, "Money." I pointed to my wallet on the counter. "Visa card. The one that says `Rain LLC' at the bottom."
Mutt extracted the card and slid it in his pocket, opposite the rock. Thirty seconds later, the truck started and disappeared down the drive, pulling a small trailer. I don't know how long it'd been since he had driven, but when I looked out the front window, he was driving down the center of the drive.
Mutt returned at noon and began unloading the back of the truck and trailer, both of which were packed full with what looked like a hundred gallons of bleach and several large boxes of cleaning supplies. He handed me three receipts and disappeared into the barn. When I counted the receipts, one from Wal-Mart, one from a hardware store, and the last from a pool cleaning supply store, they totaled over two thousand eight hundred dollars.
Katie looked over my shoulder, read the receipts, and whispered, "Good Lord."
I stuffed them in my pocket and said, "It's cheaper than Spiraling Oaks."
I spent the next hour grooming Glue, but he didn't really need grooming. I wanted to know what Mutt intended to do with all that bleach and what was in those boxes. With the tack room stuffed with bleach, the smell of which was filling the barn, I let Glue out the back door into the pasture and watched Mutt climb the water tower with his belt looped through four one-gallon jugs of bleach. He reached the top of the ladder, tossed the jugs into the tank, and then disappeared into the tack room. He returned wearing knee-high rubber boots, a white face mask filter tied around his neck and mouth, and carrying two stiff brushes and an industrial-sized mop. He stuffed the brush handles into his back pockets like paintbrushes and slung the mop over his shoulder. He repositioned the mouth filter and climbed the ladder.
For the next several hours, all I heard from up above was scratching, brushing, grunting, and someone sloshing about in several inches of liquid. Every few minutes, layers of scum or algae sparkling with tadpoles would fly out of the top of the tank. At a quarter to four, Mutt appeared at the top of the ladder, covered head to foot in black and green algae, his clothes splattered with spots of white. He descended the ladder, leaned on the large wheel that turned on the water from the quarry, and waited for the two-inch pipe to carry the water up. The pump hadn't worked in years, but Mutt's mind hadn't yet centered on this dilemma.
When no water appeared, his thoughts turned to the pump that sat rusted and long-since dead outside the barn beneath a rotten and brittle blue tarp. He took one look at it, hung up his breathing apparatus, slipped off his boots, climbed into the truck, and disappeared. An hour later, he reappeared carrying a new one-horsepower pump and a dozen or so pipe pieces and fittings. He exchanged the pumps, primed the line with a hose from the house, and turned on the pump. After a few seconds of sputtering and blowing out the air, the two-inch line gurgled and then resonated with the sound of flowing water. Mutt slipped back into his boots, donned his face mask, and ascended the ladder, carrying an extension cord connected to a spotlight. At 10:30 p.m., I couldn't prop my eyes open with toothpicks, so I left Mutt to himself and walked into the house.
I woke at first light, fraught with cricks and muscle cramps, in a chair in front of the kitchen fireplace. I swallowed two Advil with three sips of orange juice, mixed some hot chocolate, and sipped my way to the water tower, where I found no sign of Mutt. The truck sat idle, engine cold, and looked as if it had been cleaned again because it was sparkling and surrounded like rose petals by a bed of discarded towels and spray bottles.
I checked the loft but found his bed empty. The water pump was running, but above that noise I heard sloshing. Almost like a kid swimming. I climbed the ladder and pulled myself to the top of the tank. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and strained against the sun that was beaming. Inside, bathing amid sparkling clear water and polished stainless walls, swam Mutt. Frolicking about like a dolphin at Sea World. He was stark naked, covered in soapsuds, with a bar of soap in each hand. I shook my head and began the tenuous steps down the ladder.
"Tuck?"
I poked my head above the rim of the tank and tipped my chin at Mutt. He pointed behind me and returned to his swimming. Sunrays streaked through the pines and melted the dew, which steamed skyward, making the pasture look as if it were simmering on the stove. Outlined against the far side, a single speck sitting atop a larger single speck trotted across the pasture.
Katie returned to the barn thirty minutes later. Despite the cool morning air, both she and Glue were sweating and breathing hard. "I didn't know you could ride," I said, taking the reins.
"You didn't ask," she said, climbing down out of the saddle.
"By the looks of things, you've done this before."
"A time or two."
I loosed the saddle, carried it to the stalls, and slid the hackamore off Glue's nose while Katie nuzzled her nose against his.
"I'm going to get cleaned up before Jase wakes."
"I got him; go ahead."
While I groomed Glue, she walked toward the porch and untucked her shirt. She opened Miss Ella's door and Jase came running out, decked out like a cowboy. He ran around Katie, said, "Hi, Mom," and headed straight to me, where he ran up and latched onto my left leg. He was excited and speaking real fast. "Unca Tuck! Unca Tuck! Can I ride? Can I ride?"
I needed to get on the phone with Doc, to tell him of my plans, but one look at Jase and I figured Doc could wait. I resaddled Glue and walked him out the barn door, where Mutt stood with his arms crossed and back turned, butt-naked and soaking wet beneath the water tower. Not exactly what I wanted to see first thing in the morning. Or any time for that matter. Stark white against the backdrop of a field of dead peach trees, Mutt stood motionless, the muscles in his back and butt sagging after years of med
ication and forced sedation.
"Mutt?"
Mutt looked up from the ground but didn't respond. He just looked out over the orchard and dripped.
"You okay?"
"Yeah." I left Jase standing in the barn and walked around the side of Mutt.
"What're you doing?"
Mutt looked at his arms and legs. "Drying."
I pointed toward the house. "You want me to get you a towel?"
Mutt looked from side to side and nodded over his shoulder. I gave Jase the reins and said, "Don't worry, Glue won't move unless I tell him. Just don't kick him in the sides." Jase took the reins, smiled, and pulled his hat down tight, pretending.
With Mutt standing in his birthday suit, looking out over the orchard, I ran up to Miss Ella's front door and knocked, but Katie didn't answer. I pushed it open and said, "Katie?" Still no answer. Figuring she slipped into the house for breakfast, coffee, or I'm not sure what, I pushed open the bathroom door.
Katie stood, bent at the waist, toweling her hair, while the steam from the shower rose off her hips and hung in the corners of the bathroom. She stood and I heard myself whisper, "Good Lord!" She eyed me, breathed calmly, and held the towel to her chest. It concealed everything but her outline. The water dripped off her shoulders, along the lines of her ribs, around her thin waist, the points of her pelvis, and streaked down the fronts of her thighs-a picture of twenty years ago.
The kid in me wanted to stay, to wrap myself in the memory of yesterday, but the man in me wanted to run, and in some odd sense to protect Katie from anyoneincluding myself-who would see her as anything less than the little girl she was or take from her anything she hadn't offered.
For a moment, I froze, studying the lines around her eyes. "Katie, I'm sorry." I put my right hand over my eyes. "I thought you were ... I mean . . . " I squinted my eyes, covering with my left so I could point outside with the right. I knew how it looked, so I just shut up and waited for the scolding-both Katie's and the one that would come as soon as I turned around. Regardless of how it had happened, no amount of explaining could help me now.
Katie never moved. She just stood there. I swallowed, my eyes closed fast, and my heart pounded loudly. I said in a muffled whisper, "Mutt needs ... a towel." I pointed outside. "For Mutt."
I heard her step toward me and slide a dry towel off the rack. I reached for it and her hand squeezed around mine. It was warm, wet, smaller than mine, and strong. Its language was not sexual but familial.
She flattened her palm over the top of mine, and the air between us felt warm-like the mist that rose off the water in the quarry. She opened my palm further and touched my fingertips with hers. Slowly, she placed my hand behind the towel and slid my fingers across the C-section scar on her tummy like she was reading Braille with my fingers. She pressed my palm to her skin, which was warm, soft, and following the measured flow of her lungs. I followed the six-inch scar across her stomach and sensed the goose bumps that appeared there. I pried one eye slightly open, and she was smiling like the girl who kissed me in the quarry. Katie had always been ticklish, so I was not surprised when she giggled slightly under the touch of my hand. She covered my eyes again and, in the darkness, held my hand firm to her tummy, placing my palm flat against her scar.
"Tucker," she whispered, "it's me." She pressed her palm flat against the back of mine. "In here lives the little girl who kissed you in the quarry. The one who held your hand when nobody was looking. Who passed notes between classes and who waved good-bye, blowing you a kiss from the backseat of her daddy's car." She wrapped the towel tightly around her, and I opened my eyes as she breathed another easy, steady breath. She stepped closer, and with both hands she placed my hand over her heart and pressed it in close. "I've just got a few more scars than I had then." She paused. "We all do."
I don't know how long I stood there. A minute. Maybe two. Looking at her but not looking at her. Lost somewhere in a place I'd run from and a time I had forgotten. I swallowed again, slowly picked Mutt's towel from the bathroom floor, and half-turned. I wanted to take her by the hand, race her to the quarry, talk beneath the stars, undress the years, and pick up where we left off.
To be the boy who loved and knew love-the first time.
Like a child, Katie stood honest, upright, hiding little, and ashamed of nothing. I looked back at her, searching for answers to questions I hadn't asked in a long time, and when I began to find answers I wasn't sure I knew how to take, I turned toward the door.
I walked out into the barn, handed the towel to Mutt, pulled Jase off Glue, climbed the ladder of the water tower, and dove into the tank, now spilling over with icecold water from the quarry. I submerged, kicked to the bottom, let the cold engulf me, and remembered the quarry, the joy of watching that boat fly off the cliff, sink to the bottom, what it felt like to hold the oarlocks, and how I missed that day.
When my head broke the surface almost two minutes later, I exhaled every ounce of air in me and squeezed hard with my stomach, expelling bits and residue of a painful past and sucking in everything that was new.
I climbed down a few minutes later to an incredulous Jase, who looked like he wanted to ask me a question but never opened his mouth. Mutt climbed down from the loft, dressed in a red-striped, three-button polyester suit, a vest, and white buck shoes. I have no idea where he got any of it.
"I'm ready to go to church," he announced.
I grabbed the towel hanging through the rungs of the ladder, wiped my face, and looked toward Miss Ella's cottage. "Yeah, me too. Me too."
Chapter 28
MUTT WAS SHOWING THE EARLY SIGNS. I ALMOST CALLED Gibby but thought better of it. Wait and see. Whether that was hope or complacency, I wasn't sure. Mutt had become more introspective, his face often tilted and skewed like he was wrestling with his muscles and losing. His personal hygiene-fingernails, hair, beard, teethwas out the window, except for the bath, so I spent the afternoon alone and bought some deodorant, nail clippers, a razor, and a toothbrush. Alone in the drug store, I realized I hadn't had much time to myself lately. Something that I'd had a lot in the last seven or eight years. Something I'd always needed and valued. It's not that I don't enjoy people; I do. It's just that I needed to think, and with all the activity at Waverly, I could have used a weeklong assignment to someplace remote.
I returned to Waverly, set the toiletries next to his bedroll, and returned to my office, which was a mess, cluttered with months of receipts and unopened mail. I desperately needed to get on the phone with Doc, but he was not going to like what I had to say, so I put it off as long as I could.
A mirrored footprint of the first floor, the basement was a large room, filled mostly by rows and racks of more than two hundred old, dusty wine bottles and unused furniture covered in dusty sheets. The only other items of furniture in the room were my bed-a single pushed up against the wall and draped with a few wool blankets, a night table where I set Miss Ella's Bible and her picture, and a few feet away, my desk. The desk was one of my own creations where function definitely preceded form. A flat door, eight feet long, spread longways across the tops of two filing cabinets. Upstairs, scattered about the house were three or four nice leather-topped desks Rex had bought to fill every nook and cranny in Waverly, but I had no desire to sit at them, because for a little more than a decade, living beneath Waverly had become easier than living in it.
I planted myself in my chair, organized a month's worth of mail, paid bills, pitched the junk mail, and tried not to remember how the shower steam had risen off her skin and fogged the bathroom mirror. Finally, I picked up the phone. I had hoped to just leave a voice mail, but I knew better. Doc defined workaholic. He answered midway through the first ring. "Hey, Doc."
"Tucker!" I heard the cigarette switch sides and a thick exhale follow. "How the devil are you? The Whitey photos are superb. I told you it'd be vacation. Now, catch the first plane to Los Angeles and-"
"Doc."
Silence followed. He knew me pretty w
ell by now, and the tone in my voice told him I wasn't going to Los Angeles. I heard his Zippo lighter crack open, the turn of the wheel and strike of the flint, a small inhale, and then the pop of the lighter as he closed it on his thigh and slid it back into his polyester pocket. A delicious sound. Chances were good that he was dropping the first ash of this cigarette into a cold cup of black coffee and looking out the window over lower Manhattan. Reclining in his chair, he let the smoke slowly filter through his nose and up around his eyes. Doc loved to smoke more than the Marlboro man.
"Tell me about it," he said.
"It's complicated."
"Does it involve your brother?"
"Yes."
"Is there a woman?"
"Yes."
Doc got excited, and I heard the spring on his seat as he sat up straight. "Is it that long-legged stewardess you told me about? The one with the dangling key card?"
"No."
Doc sat back in his chair, tweaking the spring the other direction and sounding not too impressed. "Is she married?"
"Yes. Or rather, was. They were married, then divorced, but recently tried to patch things up."
"And let me guess. To top it off, she has a child."
I paused, wishing I had reached his voice mail. "Yes."
"You're right, it is complicated. How'd you manage to get yourself in this mess?"
"Long story."
"I'm listening."
So I told him the short and the fast, minus the part about the .357. With it coming out of my mouth, and me listening to myself, I even thought I sounded a bit crazy.
"You mean to tell me, your brother Mutt, exhibit A in the cuckoo's nest, is living there?"
"Yes."
"And you've got this married woman, Katie somethingor-other, who has her five-year-old son with her, running from an abusive husband who probably lives, works, and eats within a few blocks of me, whose bar-drinking buddies work with the government?"
"Something like that."
"If I were you, I'd drop all three at the bus station and grab the first flight to Los Angeles."