It was near the end of her son Thomas’s redeployment that Bethann kept running into Mr. Angell in the grocery aisles. There he was again, advancing in her direction. Moving the basket from one arm to the other, putting coy distance between his foodstuffs and Bethann. Hot Pockets, dried plums, toothpaste. They’d given him a gift voucher in restitution for a quart of moldy blueberries, but he suspected they wouldn’t let it go to the price of a beer, and he cared greatly for pumpkin ale they sold singly near the front, which surprised him because he used to think never the twain of squash or gourds and beer, but now he was older and had taken up childish things instead of putting them away. So on, so forth. He needed something from Bethann, and the whole show fretted her like hives.
Half a year ago Mr. Angell had bought the house on the end of her street. He nursed it back from black mold and the vengeful impingement of trees lethally injected by the city. The good offices of the city, he said, kill trees to save power lines they should bury three feet deep. He measured this for her, his hand flat on an invisible table. He had come here from Montgomery, he said, because the timing was right. Bethann expected he would flip the place. But he moved in when the new drive was dried to a dull shine and the front door replaced with a glass-paneled, art-deco thing. From then on they swapped little bits of friendliness out on the street.
On a few Friday nights, when Bethann got home from late closing, the buzz-squeal of destruction or repair sounded from his garage. She liked the notion of someone working late into the night, resolute with a welder or whatever he brandished inside the clamor. She opened her bedroom window to listen longer. She unsnapped her top buttons and ushered cool air onto her chest.
In the times of his grimmest drinking, her husband had vowed to use more courteous language. The more sour mash, the more sanctimony. He stopped saying tawtaws and boobalovelies, deeming the region her chest, asking to see its terrain. Bethann felt no racier than a bowling pin.
Her husband went on to conflagrate his insides, and he died, contritely Bethann was assured, in the care of his sister. The funeral happened in a paper mill town during livid August. The day’s only bright moment was the reappearance of his aspirational middle name. Ulysses, said his sister. Ulysses! A persecution to him the length and width of lower Alabama. His sister said he had always given money for groceries, though, and never missed church on Sundays. She looked in sudden accusation at Thomas, round-shouldered in black, wearing a T-shirt under his shirt that Bethann knew said What Would Hüsker Dü?
Thomas was sixteen then. His middle name was Hayes, from Bethann’s side. The sulfur smell of paper pulp had them retching out of town. Thomas took the wheel halfway home and said a load had been lifted from their shoulders. He was wise and serene in the late evening light. His cheeks were hale, his year already full with football practice and wooing from Junior ROTC. Small dilapidated houses flitted fast and faster past the windows. In the small states up northeast there were colleges like red castles, cities with parks the size of towns. Bethann always thought she’d have gone some worthier, endless distance if she lived up there. She placed her hand on Thomas’s. He smiled irascibly, and slowed down.
They mourned a decent while, and pushed on with life. Bethann saw a few men in those years. She prepared riverside picnics and cooked three courses from Julia Child. She watchdogged her weight. The men brought wine and sometimes ice-cream, and one time a better-bred fellow brought prosecco and strawberries to drop into the glasses. Bethann admired that detail very much. Even when he told her he loved too many women in too many towns to be able to devote himself uniquely to her, including one in London, she valued those strawberries. Topped and halved, they settled to a seethe in the palest wine she had ever seen.
At that critical juncture, when she needed to hear it, Thomas said she dated like she swam: lots of short choppy strokes, then hauling herself out, winded, unhappy, and determined never to get in again. He said none of the paramours were worth it. She thought paramour wasn’t the word here, but she loved the clear-headed defender Thomas was during that time of men coming and going.
She surrendered to Mr. Angell at a church Wednesday evening when he appeared across the refectory salads. He had seen “Passionate Worship” on the sandwich board outside and it got him snooping, he said. His eyelids were creased and arid, unblinking as far as she could tell. She looked round to see if anyone else felt the same dry heat.
He spooned dark-brown and purple olives onto her plate. He asked what Bethann knew of the hard white cheese cut to cubes. It wasn’t feta, he said, because feta was salty, briny even, and this cheese had no taste at all. His fingernails were outstandingly neat. Nearby two young women in peppy denim and coral lipstick popped grape upon grape and giggled becomingly, but Mr. Angell paid them no mind. All his gauges and dials were trained on Bethann.
In her kitchen they got bibulous on his Chablis. It was his one and only favorite wine, Mr. Angell said, all the way back to a life-changing year in France. The better part of his aeronautic training. Food and wine, his sentimental education. He dropped his eyes to his glass, and the wine glimmered old intimacies at him.
They talked in torrents and short-stops. Bethann told him she was more regular at church because her boy was away in the war again. To go to church, to do church things, felt like watching out. That was the only way she could describe it. Like home fires, Mr. Angell offered. Like those Women’s Institute women and the Battle of Britain. He wanted to pop the four doors down for another bottle. She consented because on first taste the wine was grassy and hostile, but two glasses on it was shaped just right.
Then Bethann was telling him about the police officer on his knees on the shallow steps of a house. The house had a roof like a pilgrim’s high hat. She only mentioned the officer because she needed to hold some ground. Mr. Angell was steam-pressing his attentions now, and so little remained between them. The perfidious Chablis was warmed to a sweat on the counter because she had boiled the kettle for tea beside it, and it was that kind of weather when clamminess stuck round too long after dinner.
Mr. Angell had a hand resting on the countertop, left and right. He looked like he might throw a gymnastic move, a fantastic forward roll into midair. His black denim shirt was new or remarkably well ironed, and it had those metal collar tips cowboys favored. Bethann wondered if they came affixed to the shirt or if there was a little saucer Mr. Angell picked through. Her husband had done that with cufflinks inherited from an uncle, whom he called a wily old flamer.
Bethann conjectured her police officer had skidded on leaf jam. With nowhere to go but down, both hands being in his pockets, and those police pockets cut so close, he hit the decking hard. A pot of begonias moped beside his calamity.
This was in another state and in a teenaged town, she told Mr. Angell, this was way back when she sold rouge and lipstick to women in their kitchens. Mr. Angell stood still and solicitous as a birdwatcher. She was a wife in those days, but not yet a mother. She drove down streets so new she was a pioneer on the blacktop. It was always afternoon, in that lax hour before children tumbled down from school buses. Women were amenable then. There was a kind of terrible even-temperedness those massive new houses catechized. For the youngest women, she occasionally threw in an extra lipstick. These days, at her counter job at Belk, she guided women to the emollient nudes and kept them away from the disloyalty of frosted stuff.
Mr. Angell still had not blinked. How did his eyes survive without him licking them like a gecko? Bethann should not have been telling any of this to him, so she bundled at speed to the end. Said she worried the officer had done himself a damage on the steps. How she rested off the pedal, waited until he was upright and soberly blue again. She wanted to see how he took what news he had to the door. She wanted to see who answered. He knocked vigorously, and several times. When it was clear there was nobody home, the officer set himself down on the glider. Bethann had to be on her way, but just before she gunned the engine she watched him light a cigarette. All the way home she remained within the serenity of that officer having a smoke. How offbeat it was, how marvelous, that and the mess of tubular kid-stuff on the verandah.
Mr. Angell smiled more than he responded, and he raised his arm to direct them into the front room and onto the couch. A car horn let the world know its dissatisfaction, and someone hollered a riposte: Fuuuuck youuuu too, my friend! Mr. Angell repeated the my friend, chuckling, turning it round like a good nugget. Bethann loosened and spilled sideways.
Mr. Angell palped her like he was looking for a puncture. He was bashful and clumsy and bossy. He was a smoocher, too, not a kisser. They knocked limbs all along the couch, and there was no right spot for thawing. Bethann breathed through her nose so she wouldn’t laugh or cry. She heard the soft crack of a knee flexing to stand. The front door closed with criminal precision.
In the kitchen the Chablis’s open neck smelled of cologne. Bethann blew across the bottle. Each gloomy bassoon note was a reason not to let this kind of thing happen.
In any case she got busy with Thomas’s return. He came back after three years and two theaters of operations. He had been badly hurt by a roadside bomb, and it was a miracle, she was told, that he wasn’t hurt worse, or killed. Everything moved nimbly to scoop him out of the situation, bring him back, get him the best care possible. That’s what she was assured, and when medical people told Bethann things, she accepted them as fervent and true.
Thomas’s rehabilitation began in yellow weather baking down to brown, and Bethann made the two-hour drive on Saturdays. He was twenty-six and terribly thin in places she wouldn’t have thought a person could be. The neck just below his ears. His nose when seen from the side. And tubby, too, in places she would, like his stomach in gray-blue T-shirts. Those T-shirts were god-awful dowdy, with unduly long sleeves. The cloudy color washed him out.
Thomas’s half-arm was like dough. Bethann badly needed it to double in size under the bed sheet. She was not ready for this, in spite of the long conversation she went through with his rehab liaison. So she fussed about all the other stuff first. His hair, his weight, the state of his toenails from living inside boots for so long.
Just below the bicep was a fat fold and two winsome dimples. Thomas reached across himself to fondle the wound when he talked about the surgeries. Bethann itched to ask if they had cauterized the wound at the field hospital. Was there even a field hospital? She had seen a little blowtorch on a film years ago. That poor soldier screamed more for the blackening burn than for his lost ear. But that was a cruder swathe of history. Things must be more efficacious now, they had to be.
Bethann watched Thomas’s face turn pale to fainting when he probed too far into the seam. She scolded herself to look more closely, and she saw that the skin looked smocked. What a different hue it was there, too, rose madder at the angry edges. Retreating back from the wound, the flesh was pale as a mushroom.
Bethann made provisions for Thomas’s return. She hadn’t turned his bedroom to any other use after he left home. It wasn’t that she was keeping it like a museum, she told Pam who ran bags-and-belts at the store. Early on Pam advised her to repurpose the space for storage. Now Pam agreed it was just as well. Pam had a teenager in addiction treatment, and she would give anything to have that kid home, she said, home, clean and in a bedroom where Pam could hear her mooching around. They said you had to take down the doors if you wanted your kid to recover at home.
Bethann bought new bed linen, in higher thread count than she had ever considered. She told Larry in bed-and-bath her son was coming home, and he gave her friends-and-family on top of employee. Larry was overweight and saturnine, and he plumped the show beds all day long. There was ruinous suspicion in how he fattened the pillows for sleep and love. He sold Bethann Egyptian cotton and said he was honored to do something for a man in uniform.
Mr. Angell asked if Bethann could do with company on the trips to see Thomas. No, but she brought him a toaster for fixing, just to show there were no hard feelings about the front room. In his austere kitchen he used tweezers to draw forth the toaster’s slender elements. With a careful tug and a slight warp they would burn closer to the bread, he said.
He talked as he tweezed. At a bar in Montgomery years ago he had watched Saddam Hussein’s big statue get capsized. He tipped down so easily, Mr. Angell said. Gently, like a man leaning over to pick a flower, smiling as he went. Then the statue got chopped at the ankles, did Bethann remember? The massive boots left behind? She didn’t, but she nodded fluently.
Mr. Angell said the worst of all stupid things they did in the world was get tangled up in that part. Look at it now. A cauldron. Bethann felt the pinch of an old nerve. As soon as Thomas got deployed she barred news of that terrible place from getting into her house. She didn’t watch cable, she recorded shows about travel and ancient history. She went online only to speak to Thomas. His Skype face in shadow and sepia made her think of a commemorative stamp, and it took all her strength not to bewail him.
But news got through no matter. Larry said things. Isn’t that where your boy is, telling what all he knew about a suicide bomb in a fruit market. No, Bethann would assure him, Thomas was near there but not right there.
Mr. Angell plugged in the toaster. It issued a bitter smell, and heat shadows swept across the bottom of the white cupboards. Bethann was entranced by the pale, muscular waves. She had stopped listening to Mr. Angell a while ago. He said something about them paying the price now. He placed the toaster lightly in Bethann’s hands, as if it were a box containing a baby bird. He bade a good recovery to Thomas.
The week Thomas came home Mr. Angell brought left-handed scissors and a spork he had forged in his shed. He said there was plenty more he could make, if Bethann would only let him know.
She turned the spork round and round. It was a Martian-looking utensil, with its big head and a friendless prong. Mr. Angell had spiraled the handle to give it the impression of art, but that just made things worse. She put it in the jumbled back end of the cutlery drawer, with the frosting nozzles and the chopsticks.
Three nights that week ambulances yowled down the street to the retirement home. Bethann pressed to Thomas’s door. There was no way of telling if he was asleep or lying with eyes wide open to the ceiling. She had come upon him like that in the hospital, and it was horrible how demoted from life he looked. Worse was how she had reached across to stroke his good arm when the lonesome one was closer.
She watched his nifty means of drying his good hand at the kitchen sink. He held the towel between his good fingers and his teeth. He bound the towel round his good hand and then press-dried it under his neck. It looked like a papoose. He glared defiance at her. Like one time, years before, when she saw a film over his shoulder. There were subtitles, there was a naked woman fluctuating between two naked men on a beach. One was appallingly old, and the sunlight was refulgent as heaven. Thomas had cursed her and aimed the remote like a gun at the screen.
The new year was strangely, spitefully cold, and that’s when Bethann drove into the guts of the nights to drop off and pick up Thomas at no-window bars outside town. This was the barony of tire changers and bail bondsmen. Pestilential smoke reigned and peanut shells cracked underfoot. This was where she would find Thomas’s head resting on a counter.
Mr. Angell lamented not accompanying her. They were standing by the bay of soft fruit when Bethann told him about bars that never shut their doors. Mr. Angell admonished her to call on him to make the drive with her. He would not see her go alone in those defamatory places. She thought to pop one of the strawberries in his mouth for succor, he was that agitated.
Bethann came upon a bartender massaging Thomas’s head. Her long blue nails voyaged through his hair with calm know-how. Next to Thomas’s glass hers was drained to a skim. She gave him up to Bethann with a small acid laugh. On the way out Thomas bade the whole place a blessed night. Truckers turned to acknowledge the fiasco, and Bethann was astonished by the lurid compassion in their eyes.
Thomas needed nobody’s arm to get to the car; he wanted for nobody’s shoulder. He laughed a big drinker’s holler. Near the farm dealers’ he began to sing: I was ridin’ number nine, headin’ south from Caroline, I heard that lo-o-o-o-onesome whistle blow. Inside the fence all the tractors slept with lowered tusks. Bethann hadn’t heard Thomas sing since he was a boy and his voice a reed about to snap. He stopped suddenly and pinched his face against the road.
His bedroom was ground floor at the front of the house. The blinds didn’t close completely and street light drizzled orange onto the floor. Through the wall the toilet flushed and Thomas groaned soddenly. In the corner of the bedroom a small sink stood half hidden by folded shirts and pants. When Bethann touched these garments they were clammy, soft as cheese. His books on the sill were Kurt Vonneguts and big plucky McMurtrys.
After two more toilet encores, Thomas was ready for piloting to bed. Bethann got him onto his side, and she bent his knees for comfort. He breathed a sour plume into her face. She stayed until he was asleep and breathing dependably. All the while she felt the ceiling dangerous above her. Thomas threw sharpened pencils up there and they fixed in the tiles. He had been home for some months now, and their habits were setting in, old as something in stone.
Things were getting better when the new barbeque place opened nearby and Thomas became a fiend for ribs. He had called a halt to the nights of Viking drinking, he had enrolled in the gym at the Y. The equipment was retro and grubby, he said, but it did for the sequences he needed. He joined the public library. He decelerated to six-packs picked up with the groceries.
On ribs nights Thomas ordered sides in excess. Baked beans, hush puppies, collards in day-long pot liquor. He did mostly fine with the ribs, raising them with one hand, rotating them to his advantage. Once or twice Bethann held the slabbed bones forward for him. Or she shaved the remnants, mixed the meat with smoky sauce, and spooned the whole shebang to his mouth.
One time when his mouth was full and busy, she told him she loved him so much, it was bigger than all the world’s oceans. She wiped his burning lips with pads of soft white bread.
Another time Thomas said they should dance on the sidewalk. He looped his good arm round Bethann’s waist, and she had to clasp his flipper. That was what he had gotten to calling it. The flipper had a lively gumption and a haunting strength. The seam of stitches was softening into a quiet, tightly shut mouth. Bethann was getting used to how it looked, but to touch it still made her stomach drop to the floor.
The morning was acutely blue when Mr. Angell waylaid her before work. The air was sassy with pine pollen. The neighborhood cats sat peaceable as yogi. It was a good morning because Thomas had left before she had. He was in retraining for job placement, and Bethann was afire with tranquility. She made him hot cappy sandwiches and put ice cubes in his water bottle. He would go for a run round the lake and be home half an hour before her. He would get dinner going.
Bethann rested against the car and listened to what Mr. Angell was doing with his time. He took a class at the university on Wednesdays: sculptural forms, taught by a Scotsman. He was learning to work with a single big piece of wood, as ancient peoples had done. Entire tree trunks, he said, that’s how they hewed canoes. And coffins. According to the Scotsman, they were the monoxylous artificers of prehistoric times. Bethann’s head rang with this amount of information so early in the day. She had him spell monoxylous, to be sure she was hearing what she was hearing.
She knew how taken up with death those prehistoric people were, thanks to a PBS show. In ancient Egypt, even the most ordinary folk spent years building their tombs, and often they were handsomer than the modest little huts they spent their lives in. And all the jewelry they planned to convey to the afterlife! She could stay talking all morning of the big hooped earrings and ivory hair clips, the delicate anklets and the bright simple beads made from a beautiful rock that crashed into the Earth. They were for the tomb of a teenage boy. Her voice slowed to speak of those beads. More lovely, she said, than any amulets found with the royal dead.
There was a time when Mr. Angell would have fallen on this like a pointer pup. But he was guarded these days. His sculpture class would have a group exhibition, end of semester; he would put an invite in Bethann’s mailbox, not to worry if she couldn’t make it. She heard a hangnail in her voice when she thanked him, but he was already moving on about his day.
When Bethann’s officer showed up he was piggy, with a young bashful face, Thomas tarrying behind him. Thomas had walked to a middle school north of the lake and sat outside for hours. The school had no choice but to call it in.
There was a special reservoir of understanding set aside for men and women in uniform, the officer said. But a lone man making vigil outside a school was a very particular matter, a completely different thing. He hoped Bethann understood, the times being what they were. She pricked and sweated all over. She said she understood the times.
Her officer talked on, and it took great effort to nod understanding at all the tremendous and tedious detail. She tried to dwell on the small blue weather of his eyes. Thomas had gone to the living room. The sports channel fulminated green and red through the door panels.
Her officer said there would be no repercussions. One-off, piece of poor judgment, end of story. There was sympathy in the dampness of his handshake.
Before Thomas went to sleep he told Bethann the school security guard had given him coffee from an ornery old percolator in the office. The complexion of that office dejected him. Mugs stained dark as tobacco spit, stacks of old football magazines. The guard gave him a sudoku, with some numbers figured out, before things got heavy. There was nothing paltrier, Thomas said, than someone else’s half-done puzzle. The guard thanked him for his service. With tears in his eyes, Thomas said, the fool.
He threw a pencil at the ceiling, then another to let Bethann know the conversation was done. The second lodged unerringly close to the first, and Bethann was amazed they could both stick that fast.
Her second officer was severely tan. His narrow face was probably passing handsome when he was young, but now it just looked predacious. He stood at an angle in the doorway as he described things in starched and solemn sentences. He spoke like something from the serious news hour, which Bethann remembered used to stay with an issue until even the skinniest event got pregnant with meaning.
Thomas had been spotted on the cusp of dam water that fell from the high lake to the smaller one. He was standing there as poised and careful as a tightrope walker when the cruiser showed up. The woman who called it in drew her car up between picnic benches so she could get the details right. She reckoned Thomas had some kind of Jesus complex.
That dam had a slinky little catwalk you couldn’t see from the road, the officer said. Every so often a daredevil tried it for a shortcut, and those fools lost their nerve in the middle. It was a nothing but a short and ugly bounce down to the lower lake.
After the officer left, Bethann lingered on the woman near the picnic benches. Whoever she was she wanted in on Thomas’s quandary. She wanted that story to tell. Draw people close, maybe get their arms around her if she shuddered winningly enough. Bethann went to bed with hate for that woman mounting like heartburn.
Thomas sequestered himself for a week, and Bethann brought their meals on a tray to the bedroom. His slow absent spooning left her hungry between bites. For every bite he took Bethann snatched three. His face changed to shadows and caverns as the light evaporated. He was her boy and not her boy. He turned brusquely to the wall, putting all his weight on the flipper. Bethann hoped he would turn in the night and take the pressure off.
Spring was whipping its stormy tail when Thomas affirmed he was coping and no longer a danger. He got enrolled in therapy, two sessions a week. He got blunted on several prescriptions. All the pills looked the same through the yellow walls of the small bottles, but some were once a day, others three times. And they weren’t all for his head, Thomas reminded Bethann, he still had chronic pain in the arm. He slept until lunchtime, he watched home improvement through the afternoons. Bethann was always busy, too busy, to answer when Pam or Larry asked how he was doing.
The invitation to Mr. Angell’s exhibition showed up, a postcard with details in neat stout letters. The picture on the front looked like a totem pole. Bethann held it closer. Faces were stacked one atop the other. All movie stars, all women. There was Bette Davis with the hooded eyes of a cobra, and Marilyn pouting a kiss from the solid wood. There was somebody heavyset, Bethann didn’t know who, and a narrow little bug-eyed creature. Audrey Hepburn. Whoever it was had managed to flare her kohl good and thick.
She did not want this to be Mr. Angell’s handiwork. It was vulgar and drastic. Not what she took for art and the mysterious messages it was supposed to entail. Now she would have to go see what Mr. Angell had made of his tree trunk. Thomas said yes, he would go with her.
Bethann felt quivered by something as she stepped from the wide sidewalk onto crisp-cut campus grass. Elegance, maybe, but more so composure. Under enormous old gingko trees squadrons of fireflies burned into view and pinched themselves out. Two young men in T-shirts sailed a football back and forth between them like a mild argument. Thomas was wearing a smart indigo button-down, its slack sleeve rolled and pinned. Bethann saw less and less of the flipper these days. When she did it was like coming upon a dear, long-broken toy.
The exhibition was in a big sublevel room. There were lots of people with earnestly bobbing heads; there were short sudden claps of laughter. Here and there a word came loose like a stitch from the wide croon of conversation. The Scotsman was circled by students at a high table. Bethann knew him from the voice. It was little rocks in lush grass, it was beguiling. His students drank wine from short plastic glasses and listened ardently.
Mr. Angell found them first. He was a hand on Bethann’s shoulder, he was plenty welcome. He insisted his piece was the last thing to see, there were other, smaller, finer objects by his classmates he wanted seen instead. So he had made something big, then. Bethann prepared expressions. How clever of you to get all of those faces so life-like. Is that . . . is it the fanatic lady who broke the writer’s ankles with a hammer? Wow!
His sculpture was a small simple bench. It stood alone against a wall. It was hauntingly lit from above and beneath. Its edges were so smooth it could have been poured. And the smell was poignant, too. Cedar, was there anything lovelier? Mr. Angell said she was welcome to try it out.
The bench was lower than it looked. Bethann extended her legs like she was in a lake boat and demurely pressed her ankles together. Mr. Angell joined her. They looked out on the crowd as it got bigger. Mostly young people, moving in cadres of threes and fours. They formed bigger groups; they broke off into new permutations. There was a world where people went out to see sculptures and drink wine and talk seriously and laugh in big, unembarrassed bleats. Perhaps they found friends and lovers, too, or at the very least some like-minded people. Bethann hoped Thomas was talking to a pretty art student.
Mr. Angell placed his hand on hers. First he went nonchalantly. Then he pinioned all her fingers. He made it so she had no act or part in the matter. The close-knit immobility reminded her of something she had seen before. He continued to look straight ahead. She looked around for Thomas. She thought she saw his inky shirt on the move through gaps in the crowd.
Then she knew what Mr. Angell’s hand on hers was. It was lions copulating on one of the nature shows. The king showed up when he pleased, he held down one of the several females for an age. Both creatures squinted against the Serengeti’s grimy sunlight. The she-lion appeared tranquil, smug even. But perhaps she was mesmerized by danger. There was always that possibility.
It was a matter of prerogative, the narrator said. A word Bethann would be slow turning into another, shorter word if she had to for a crossword. But she knew it when she saw it. It was in that king lion’s percussive hip motion. It was in his nonchalant survey of all that was his. The other females were a lissome gang of courtesans, just over there, under the only tree there seemed to be. The edible animals were farther out, all doing their best to go undetected. But they were his, Bethann knew very well, just as much as the she-lion under his four hundred pounds of weight.
It was there in the hot dint of Mr. Angell’s hand. And come to find out it wasn’t so very terrible. Bethann relaxed into it. She watched the crowd move round to look at sculptures.
She began to compare Mr. Angell’s to other prerogatives exercised over her. When it came down to it, there wasn’t much difference. He would continue his campaign and he would make Bethann a fool to herself, which was far shabbier a place for the soul than being somebody’s fool. She almost laughed aloud to remember Thomas’s injunction to swim with her arms fully extended. Use her hands to pull the water behind her, he said, use those hands like paddles! She wondered if there was anything she could tell him about safety and survival in return.
When Thomas found them Bethann made her hand into a cub small enough to slip free of Mr. Angell’s. She needed somewhere to stow it, that hand that had been impregnated by so much surplus feeling. She raised it to point Thomas to the bench, to sweep over its luminous contours. Mr. Angell continued to watch the plains. When he stood up his eyes remained narrow in rumination.
Thomas wanted to try out Mr. Angell’s bench. After walking around it twice he chose to lay along its full length, his knees bent over the end. His shirt sleeve had come untucked and it dribbled darkly to the floor.
He started to spray Mr. Angell with questions. The amount of man-hours put in and how many coats of lacquer. How much it cost from start to finish, and how much would a thing like it be sold for. There was no real interest in his voice. His tone was the lightly manic whine of his pills. Mr. Angell took the questions with forbearance, and he gave answers as he could. He wouldn’t think of selling the bench, so he couldn’t put a price on it.
Thomas said that was noble. Bravo! He congratulated Mr. Angell’s resolve. He bent his good arm back at the elbow and brought it together with the flipper, brought it in and out, in laboriously quiet applause. Bethann and school friends used to bring the fat of their forearms together like that, and touch their elbows together, just to push what bantam breasts they had into cleavage. Did it count as clapping if it couldn’t be heard? Somewhere she felt certain there was an idea about that peculiarity. The empty sleeve flailed like a scarf until Thomas quit.
Thomas wanted to know if the Scotsman was habitually such a dog? Hadn’t they seen he’d gotten the young women boozed and then left for the night chain-linked to two blonds? And the totem pole was his, did they know that? What a piece of total and utter crap! This bench, though, this thing was good. And where were the joints and where were the nails? He was damned if he could see any.
The room went empty in spite of them. Mr. Angell remained warily standing, studying Thomas, whose eyes were now screwed shut. Thomas went fuck fuck fuck in the lowest of voices, fuck fuck fuck, then sorry sorry sorry, secretive as a prayer.
In due course a security guard called time on them. He was affable and rolling in apologies. He was getting paid four hours minimum for this kind of detail, didn’t matter if they didn’t leave exactly yet. He would wait out front until they saw fit. He grabbed a half-empty bottle of wine on his way out, after inspecting the label and sniffing some dregs in a glass. The cheapness, the nerve of it, flabbergasted Bethann.
Out in the night were real officers taking calls to where terrible things had transpired, where the worst was already over and done. And there were officers summoned to ongoing situations, each of them primed to be first to take a bullet. And there were officers, the world was finding out, who asked no questions and suffered no protest, who looked for skin and drew and fired again and again, and several times more beyond that. So they should all stay put, was Bethann’s wish, with no decision passed among them. All three of them in situ, like those trees people desperately hoped existed in rainforests not yet found.
