Late in the Standoff Read online

  “I love my present,” Sarah’s mother said. She squeezed Sarah’s hand. “I’m the one who’s sorry. Since your daddy’s been gone, I’ve not been myself. Do you understand? It’s hard on you, I know.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “We’ll have fun again. Soon. I promise.”

  “Why did Daddy have to go?”

  “You know why he went. Remember what you read in the paper?”

  “He’s carrying the beacon of freedom,” Sarah said.

  “Well, then.”

  “The paper also said—”

  “I know. The paper says a lot of things. The words are confusing, but sometimes, you just have to trust that, that—”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, Sarah. Honey, will you be upset if I’m not up when Santa comes?”

  “He’s—” Sarah twisted her head to see. The street was quiet.

  “Tomorrow I’ll feel much better, and we’ll enjoy opening our presents.” She kissed Sarah’s cheek. “All right?”

  “All right.”

  “I love you, Sarah. Sweet dreams. Thank you so much for my beautiful music box.”

  Sarah’s mother slipped back inside. Sarah moved the swing again. Its chains clanked. She could still smell her mother’s perfume on her coat.

  She stood and peered at the sidewalks, looking up and down the street, then into the trees. She saw the Big Dipper, above the tallest pine, and remembered two summers ago, at a barbecue in the park, her father had put frog legs on her plate, telling her they were catfish. She wouldn’t have eaten them if she’d known they were frog legs. When she found out the truth, she thought she’d gag, but she didn’t. She liked the taste and wanted more. Later, her father had chased her up the street, making bear-grrs. Still later, when everyone else had gone indoors, he had showed her Sagittarius, in the southern sky, just above the trees. “See those stars there, honey, they form a teapot, with the handle over here—”

  “And there’s the spout!”

  “Right.” His aftershave smelled like Mr. Leery’s Emporium on a hot August day—in the far back corner of the store near the lights, with all the soap. As he knelt beside her, his cheek scratched her skin. Always, even after he shaved, his face was rough. She rubbed her arm where he’d brushed against her. “And that blurry line of stars, the Milky Way, see, it’s like steam rising from the pot.” As he pointed, the trees rocked in a breeze. It was as though he’d set them in motion with the wave of his hand.

  Clock. Spoon. Stars and tea.

  The boy tiptoed out of the park. Sarah stopped swinging. He moved his light along the street. He didn’t see her, or pretended not to. He spotted a piece of candy, then another, in the middle of the road. Sarah noticed their yellow wrappers in the beam. He ran out to snatch them, then vanished into the trees.

  Her cousins shot each other dead inside the house now, falling against the Crosley, imperiling the Christmas tree. Sarah had moved the music box into her bedroom. Her mother’s door was closed. The uncles glanced at the door and shook their heads. They tried to calm the boys. “I wish the hell Santa’d get here,” the men groaned, “so we could call it a night and toss them into bed.”

  It was fun, in a mean sort of way, to see the uncles frazzled. She imagined her father at peace, asleep inside a tent, warmed by the beacon of freedom.

  The aunts were in the kitchen, helping Grandma with the dishes.

  There was a boot-scrape on the porch steps. A knock at the door. The boys froze and stood at attention. One of the uncles called, “Who’s there?”

  “Special delivery from the North Pole!”

  The boys leaped and screamed. Santa came inside with a big belly-laugh. He knelt beside the couch, below the pictures of her mother and father’s wedding. He felt around in his bag. Sarah leaned forward. To the boys, Santa passed out apple taffy candies, then reached inside for more. “Well, now …” he said. “I seem to have …” He turned the bag over. He shook it once, twice. Nothing. He looked at Sarah. “I’m afraid I’ve …”

  “It’s all right,” said one of the uncles. “The boys will share.”

  “No no no!”

  “Come here, little girl, and tell me what you want for Christmas. I’ll put you at the top of my list,” Santa said.

  She recognized his voice. Her own voice had fled. She shook her head. Santa. Santa. What did it mean?

  He waved her over. She didn’t move. The first time she’d seen her father in his army uniform, one weekend when he was home on leave from boot camp, she’d almost laughed at him, but something had stopped her. He was funny: a grown man playing dress-up. But the costume made him serious too. The material was stiff and perfect, with sharp creases at the elbows and down the sides of the pants. Her daddy was a new person now, wrapped up where she couldn’t get at him.

  Now, Santa stood in her grandma’s living room holding an empty bag. Another man in a funny get-up. Sarah couldn’t pretend she didn’t know the truth. Her mother was right, she thought. Best to shut the door. Grandma turned to her and smiled. “It’s fine, honey. Tell him what you want.”

  A clock. A spoon. A wonderful time.

  She backed up, bumped against the radio, then pushed through the front door, onto the porch. The park trees bent with the wind. She rubbed her arms. A minute later, Santa followed her out. He folded the bag across his arm. Sarah slid behind the swing. She heard the window blinds rattle and saw her uncles’ squinchy faces, peering out at her.

  “I’m sorry your father’s not here, Sarah,” Santa said. “I’m sorry your mother’s upset.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. A croak. She cleared her throat. “I already got one.”

  “One what?”

  “A taffy. The other day. In your store.”

  Santa laughed. “Well. We can’t fool you, can we?” He sat on the swing.

  “Is that glued on?” She touched his beard. It felt like Blackie’s fur. What she remembered of Blackie’s fur. She didn’t want to forget the old dog. Please don’t let me forget, she thought.

  “Just a string, around my ears.” He tugged it off. There he was—Mr. Leery, the man with all the lights. In his lap, the beard looked like the cotton batting her grandmother used in making quilts. He set it on the swing. “I suppose what you want is for your mom to feel better?”

  “Like out at the rodeo,” Sarah said. “Some kind of cure.” A car passed. Elvis was on the radio. “I want …” She thought. “Frog legs and lemonade,” she said.

  “Well, now.”

  A gust of wind. The tops of the trees bowed low.

  “And fireflies. Do you remember?”

  “Remember what, Sarah?”

  “How they look in the summer, after dark? How bright they are?”

  “You’re right,” Mr. Leery said.

  “If I come into your store tomorrow, can I turn on all the lights?” she asked.

  “I’ll be closed for Christmas. But any time after that, you’re my gal. Are you going to be brave, now, for your mother?”

  “Brave like Pop?”

  Mr. Leery’s eyes clouded, but he smiled at her. Sarah smoothed her fingers through the beard on the swing.

  Power Lines

  In the fall of 1967 Bucky Dean quarterbacked the Midland Lee Rebels to eight straight victories and a shot at the state high school championship. In the spring he received his draft notice and was headed to Vietnam. The town mourned while celebrating his patriotism and courage. I turned ten that summer, the day after Sirhan pulled the trigger on Bobby Kennedy. In still moments, when I thought about it, I felt something of the volatility of American politics and the fear that Vietnam had become a “quagmire” (a new word for me that year), threatening one day to swallow my pals and me.

  The Rebs didn’t go far in the playoffs, but Bucky remained my hero. Through a friend of a friend, my dad arranged for him to come to our house one night to sign autographs for me and my buddy Pat. Up close, Bucky was gangly and tall with a rash of pimples on each of his chee
ks. Pat and I didn’t speak. We sat at his feet, holding out paper and pens. My sister and her friend Michelle, both twelve, laughed at us on their way out the door. “Dorks,” Janey said.

  Bucky seemed embarrassed, hunching his shoulders, shifting his weight; apparently, he hadn’t got used to adulation, though my dad said every car dealer in town was waiting to use his face in its newspaper ads. They hankered for him to turn pro, maybe with the Cowboys or the Oilers, so they could recruit him for endorsements—surely, when the neon lit him up he wouldn’t forget his hometown. The war was just an inconvenient break in the Bucky Dean saga.

  “When you shipping out?” Dad asked.

  Bucky etched his name on a sheet of notepaper. “Headed to Fort Bliss in early June, sir, right after graduation. ABAR maintenance training.”

  “I was in the Navy myself.”

  “That so?” He knelt and handed me the autograph. “You gonna be a star passer?”

  “Sure,” I said, though I was asthmatic and, except for Pat, the least athletic boy in our school.

  In the presence of celebrity, Pat had puddled with sweat. His grip had dampened his paper, and the pen wouldn’t work on it. My mother fetched a blank sheet from the back of her financial ledger. Bucky knew Pat would never be a quarterback. The crutches told him that.

  “You take care of yourself over there,” Dad said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  From the front window Pat and I watched Bucky cut through Mogford Park, which sat between our families’ houses under a series of powerlines. “We’ll have to keep following his exploits in the paper, eh?” Dad said. Bucky had written to me, Always give one hundred and ten par sent. Yr. pal Buck.

  For our final school project that spring Pat and I made a model of the lunar surface with a cardboard mock-up of the LEM that, a year from now, NASA promised, would land on the moon. We slathered plaster of Paris, dyed green with food coloring, onto a piece of plywood and punched out craters with our thumbs. As accurately as we could, we followed a National Geographic map of the Sea of Tranquillity, one of the possible landing sites. To reinforce the adjoining mountains we used newspaper padding. We agonized over whether to shred the Bronco Chevrolet ads featuring American flags and GOOD LUCK BUCKY! wishes. Dad said Bucky would be preserved forever in our handiwork. As Pat painted our spacecraft, he steadied his arm with one of his crutches.

  The teacher was so proud of our moon she asked us to show it to all of the classes. Pat couldn’t carry it, so I lugged it from room to room and held it while he explained the Apollo program to our schoolmates. By the end of the day my arms were tired. I dropped the model on some concrete steps. It wasn’t badly damaged—a small crack on a crater’s rim. But a month later, as school was letting out for the summer, the crack had opened like a faultline. We had donated the model to the school library, and it had been sitting by a globe at the front of the room. Now the librarian said she’d have to throw it out. The crack would only get worse; our moon was doomed. Pat slumped over a magazine rack as the woman carried it out back. I stared at the globe. Pink and yellow continents. The oceans were colored black.

  Pat didn’t call for a couple of days. I nursed my shame in the backyard, sitting with my sea turtle, Bacon, brooding on the face of the moon, which rose early that week, pale as popcorn in the heatshimmery sky.

  How a sea turtle wound up in a West Texas alley I never knew. Perhaps he was an escaped pet, imported from somewhere. In any case, he appeared one morning beneath the humming powerlines, his green and coral flippers knocking back pebbles in a desperate search for food. He weighed no more than a small box of Cheerios. I brought him into the backyard, and he spent his days under my mother’s rose bushes, soaking up spray whenever she watered with the hose. Each evening at five, he’d turn up on the patio by our dining room door. I’d feed him two strips of cut-up raw bacon. He’d smack his lips and sit calmly while I moistened his shell with a wet paper towel.

  Now, he scrabbled in the grass while I decided that the moon was too fragile to bear human weight. “Look at it,” I exhorted Bacon. “It’s so thin. Like those Jesus wafers in church. Right?” Bacon blinked and munched a hunk of gristle.

  Three weeks later my mother woke me around seven one morning. “Happy birthday, honey. Robert Kennedy was shot last night.” She was shaken. She apologized for rousting me out so early but she’d got me, as a gift, a new desk for my room. The delivery men had just arrived. Profiles of Popeye, Snoopy, and Speed Racer scarred my old desktop. I’d scratched them into the wood with dry Bic pens, along with the number 16, over and over: Bucky’s number. I hated to let go of my old desk, especially since Mom warned me not to ruin the lovely mahogany of the new piece, but its right front leg had come unglued. It popped out at the merest jostle. We put the crippled desk on the back patio. Dad said he’d fix it up enough to give it to Goodwill.

  By now, Pat and I were playing together again. He rang the doorbell on the afternoon of my birthday, holding a stack of Spidermans. When he saw the abandoned desk he said, “Cool. Let’s get some boxes and sheets and make a fort. The desk will be our rampart.” He poked it with a crutch. The leg fell off.

  All day we worked, borrowing old towels from Mom, dragging empty book boxes out of the garage, arranging, rearranging the patio space, stretching sheets, tentlike, above our heads, using brooms and mops for support. Pat did the brainstorming, waving his arms like Arthur Fiedler leading the Boston Pops on TV. The heavy lifting fell to me.

  By early evening the fort was complete. The moon appeared above the power lines, a sliver small and bent like a staple in the middle of a magazine. (In his Spiderman stack, Pat had smuggled a couple new Playboys, swiped from his older brother. Staples, notched in intriguing spots on the bodies of women, had acquired a vague erotic charge for us. The fort, we hoped, would protect our pilfered centerfolds.)

  Bacon was agitated. Our sprawling structure blocked his path to the door. I gave him his food, and he disappeared under a hedge.

  “What should we call it?” Pat said.

  “Fort Bliss?”

  He curled his mouth and thought. “Fort Trat. Your name, Troy, and my name, Pat.”

  “Great!”

  After supper and birthday cake, we ensconced ourselves in our stronghold. Pat had a little trouble squatting and squeezing through the opening between the desk and a United Van Lines box, but over the years he’d learned to compensate for his hip. He slithered through, pulling his crutches behind him, and closed our entrance flap: two yellow pillowcases clothespinned together. Safety-pinned to it, a sheet of notepaper proclaimed KEEP OUT! in purple Marks-A-Lot.

  By flashlight, we arrayed my presents at our feet: the Star Trek paperback from my father, the new Peanuts collection from Mom (“Of course, the desk is your main gift,” she’d reminded me all through dinner), and the transistor radio Janey had bought me (“I even put the batteries in, dork, ‘cause I knew you couldn’t figure that out.”). I switched the radio on. Tommy James wah-wahing “Crimson and Clover.” On the walls of Fort Trat we had taped our Bucky Dean autographs, Life magazine photos of Wally Schirra and Eugene McCarthy (because he had, Pat said, a kind face), and a picture of John Berryman. I didn’t know who John Berryman was. I just liked his looks. Life called him a poet. He was standing by a stone wall—somewhere in Ireland, according to the caption. The wind blew his long black beard nearly sideways. He appeared ludicrous and bold, a combination I found enormously appealing.

  We also displayed on our fort’s walls the Geographic’s moon map, last season’s Lee Rebels football schedule, a Country Joe and the Fish album cover (Pat and I thought their music was day-old garbage, but we loved the psychedelic artwork, so we taped it to the back of the desk). The Playboys we kept hidden beneath a towel. Since it was a special day, our folks let us play in the fort until nearly midnight—grateful, I think, to get us out of the house. Birthday cheer had been clouded for them this year. My dad hated the Kennedys—he considered himself “forever and always” a G
oldwater man—but the shooting in L.A. troubled the adults more than they would say. Pat and I fell asleep outside, safe behind our barricade.

  What did I fear, that the fort protected me from?

  1) Janey’s friend Michelle, who lived next door. She had begun to look at me as though I were one of the colts she coveted in Horse Fancy magazine. Even more frightening, I had started to imagine her in conjunction with the centerfolds—not while I was gazing at them, but afterward, thinking about the pictures and about girls as a category. I didn’t see much connection between the Bunnies and Michelle—something bubbled her blouses, and I’d heard her whisper with my sister about training bras, but her body was angular, skinny. Still, I understood that she was on her way to becoming one of those grown-up creatures. The caterpillar and the butterfly. Her batty-eyed stares at me behind Janey’s back made me part of her process. What was I to do with that? What did I want to do with that? Something, maybe. But I didn’t know for sure. A retired cop, Mr. Wallace, lived on the other side of our house. I’d see him in his red bathrobe early in the mornings, plucking the newspaper off his lawn. He was blocky and muscled, like Broderick Crawford in Highway Patrol. Even his ears looked powerful. The strict orderliness of his garden countered some of the chaos I felt emanating, day and night, from Michelle’s house.

  2) My mother’s financial ledger. As black as the school globe’s seas. Each Thursday after supper, Mom spread the family’s bills on the kitchen table and opened the ledger. Her face squinched as though the pages had appeared, all smelly, out of the garbage disposal. For the next hour, nothing we said could reach her. On the tabletop, the ledger’s leather cover scritched across old toast crumbs or fried chicken flakes, a grating worse than fingernails on metal. My dad was an independent oil man; he had a tough time competing with Exxon, Texaco, Mobil. “Your desk may be the last big purchase we’ll make for a while,” Mom told me. One night I overheard my folks talking, low, about “new directions,” “relocating.”

  3) Hip disease. Though Pat had told me his malady wasn’t catching, his crutches made me queasy. The kiss of their rubber tips on concrete … the bandage-like padding … these struck me as unnatural, and I feared proximity to them. Neither Pat nor I understood the word arthritis. We didn’t talk about his disability. Our bond had formed on the playground. While our classmates smacked softballs, Pat and I sat on the sidelines. He’d punch holes in the dirt with his “sticks,” and wheezing, I’d try to catch my breath. We shared an excitement for reading and jokes. “Where’s the Anal Canal?” Pat asked, hanging around the jungle gym one day. Kids scratched their heads. “I don’t know. Egypt? India?” We laughed and laughed. I think his physical agility made our friendship possible. He could twirl on one crutch. In water balloon fights with neighborhood boys he could move as fast as the rest of us, flying like a pole vaulter. He could prop a crutch against a fence, climb it with his good leg, and wriggle over the top.