Cold in July (3 page)

The milk tasted like chalk and rested mercury-heavy in my
stomach. I poured the rest down the drain and went to bed.

Ann was asleep, and I was grateful for that. I had feared
she would insist on a mercy fuck; sexual first aid. She worked that way
sometimes, and I hated it. She meant well by it, but that didn’t make me like
it. Tonight I would have despised it, no matter how much I loved her or how
enticing she might be.

I lay there looking at the ceiling, listening to Ann
breathe. My stomach kept churning the milk around and around, and an instant
replay of what had happened earlier was whirling endlessly through my head:
swirls of shadow and muffled sounds, a flashlight, revolver steel, the wind
from a bullet against my ear, the report of my own gun, the lights going on,
the empty eye socket, blood and brains on the landscape painting and the very
wall on which we taped our yearly Christmas cards. It wasn’t until daylight
that I felt like sleeping.

4

I could have slept in, but I didn’t. I got up, dressed for
work and went into the kitchen to sit at the table with Ann and Jordan.

Jordan was playing with his food, as usual. Seldom did a
morning pass without some sort of fight between me and the boy, or between the
boy and his mother. Something to do with the way he ate, or playing at the
table. The kid couldn’t get out of the house until he had spilled his milk. It
was like a morning ritual that had to be observed.

And there were thousands of little things he did that made
me climb the wall, and it was the same for Ann. She and I went through each day
joyful for him and mad as hell at him, trying to figure if we were overly
demanding of a four-year-old, or if he was a real life Dennis the Menace. Or
worse, some sort of criminal in the making, created by us, seasoned by our
impatience and anger, tempered by his genetics, having acquired all the things
we hated about ourselves, and none of the things we prized.

I thought too, each night as I went to bed, that no matter
how hard I tried, it wasn’t good enough. I never missed a day yelling at the
little guy, or losing my temper in some way, and I certainly told him no more
often than yes. Though I tried to listen to him describing what the Pink
Panther and Woody Woodpecker and the Pokey Puppy did, there were times when his
little voice was like chalk on a blackboard and I would tune out his
enthusiasms, and I knew he could sense it.

Then too, there was the other child, the one I thought about
more often than I ever expected. The one Ann had carried inside her for eight
and a half months and I had felt move inside her and had heard gurgling around
in there when I put my ear to her stomach. The same child that filled her with
poison and sent her to the hospital for days and prompted the late-night phone
call in which she told me, “Our baby is dead,” and then began to cry.

They used drugs to make her deliver, then offered us the
body. A little girl. They said if we didn’t want her they would autopsy the
body for research and dispose of it. Later, I found out if we had asked for her
they would have handed her to us in a black garbage bag.

At times I thought we should have at least looked at her.
Maybe given her a name and had her buried. Other times I felt we had done the
right thing. But right or wrong, the face of the child I never saw came to me
in my dreams; a cold, gray face with its eyes open, and the eyes were like
Ann’s, bright, bright green. And I would awake. Sweating.

Sometimes I would drive by the hospital and see dark clouds,
hanging over it, clouds that seemed full of storm. But I would know that it was
smoke from the black incinerators out back; incinerators where placentas and
lab experiments were disposed. And I wondered if my unnamed child had gone
there after autopsy. Just so much ruined meat in a black garbage bag, cooked to
past done, transformed to soot that would cling to the hospital roof and
outside walls.

And when I dreamed or thought these things, I would always
think of Jordan and wonder how he put up with my inadequacies as a father.
Times like that, I felt like a bad actor masquerading as a parent in a school
play.

I determined that this morning I would let nothing he did
irritate me. It was the millionth time I had turned over that leaf in my mind.
Each time I had failed to live up to it, but like some sort of Zen exercise, I
thought repetition might make it easier for me eventually. And after what had
happened last night, I saw the world in an entirely new and vulnerable light.
It was just good to see the boy sitting there with his cereal, and as always, I
took a secret pride in seeing my features on his little face. His hair was
blond like his mother’s, but the almond shape of his eyes, the prominence of
the lips, the cleft in his chin, were mine.

Looking at him now, I hoped I was more of a presence in his
life than my father had been in mine, and I hoped I wouldn’t haunt him the way
my father haunted me. That when it was all said and done he would have more
than some uncertain memories and that there would be more between us than
Christmas cards from distant cities with “love” written at the bottom.

I leaned out of my chair, kissed and hugged the boy. “Good
morning, big guy.”

“What was all that racket about last night, Daddy?” Racket
was his new word. He used it every chance he got.

“Some people we had over.”

“Why?”

“We needed them.”

“Why?”

“Just for some things.”

“What things?”

“Nothing much. You like that cereal?”

“Yeah.”

It was some sort of processed, multi-colored junk filled
with too much sugar and air. I felt like hell for letting him have that
garbage, but his mother liked it too, and there were those damn television
commercials that offered toys and games inside, and that fueled him for it, and
like so many parents, I had my weak moments. But I determined then and there
that next time we went shopping we would come home with oatmeal and granola, eggs
and bacon, a variety of fruits. Compliments of Richard Dane, part-time killer,
full-time father.

“Taste?” Jordan asked.

I dipped my spoon into the mess and brought it back full of
bright animal shapes. It tasted like shit.

“See,” Jordan said. “It’s good. You can get a fwizbee with
one bogs top.”

“That right?”

“Uhhuh.”

“You finish the cereal, then we’ll send off the box top.
Maybe you can start having some oatmeal when this is gone. Wouldn’t that be
good for a change? Oatmeal.”

“I don’t like oatmeal.”

“Some eggs. Maybe some sausage.”

“I don’t like that neither. Just seerul.”

I nodded, not wishing to argue, but grateful I had gotten
his mind off the police. I was even more grateful he hadn’t awakened last night
and seen the dead man on the couch.

“You going to work?” Ann asked.

She could see that I was shaved and dressed, but she was
giving me an invitation to stay home. It was an idea that did not appeal to me,
however. Being in the house all day with her gone and Jordan at day school
would just cause me to replay last night endlessly in my head. Every-time I
looked at the couch or at the brighter spot on the wall where the painting had
hung, it would come back to me.

“Sure, I’m going.”

“Feel like it?”

“Close enough. It’s better than staying here.”

“Did you sleep?”

“Some.”

“Sorry I was asleep when you came to bed.”

“That’s all right. I was too tired anyway.”

“That’s why you go to bed, Daddy, cause you’re tired,”
Jordan said.

I smiled at him. “You’re right. I should have known that.”

“I know everythang,” he said.

I winked at Ann.

“What you doing with your eye, Daddy?”

“Something in it.”

“Gid it out?”

“Think so.”

Jordan turned back to his breakfast, and I found there
really was something in my eyes.

Tears.

I excused myself before they could notice, went to the
bathroom, washed my face and stared in the mirror. I thought maybe I should see
a different face looking back at me, but it was the same goon I saw in there
every day. Killing a man had not altered my appearance in the least I still
looked like a fairly healthy, not too bad-looking, starting to bald,
thirty-five-year-old man.

Jordan appeared in the doorway.

“God to go bad.”

“Come in.”

“You gid out.”

I patted him on the head, closed the door and went out. The
tears started again. Goddamn, I’d never been this weepy before. But then it hit
me what the tears were all about. It wasn’t just that I had killed a man. It
was that I was suddenly aware of Jordan’s mortality. I had accepted my own some
time back, but not his. After the loss of the first child I felt that I had
paid my dues. But I knew now that was ridiculous. There are no such things as
dues. Nothing’s promised.

I got to thinking about what might have happened had Ann not
heard the noise and alerted me. What if Jordan had heard the sound, got up to
investigate, wandered into the living room in his feeted Superman pajamas,
clutching his teddy bear?

A grim scenario formed in my mind. The burglar hearing
Jordan, turning, drawing the gun, firing without consideration, a red blossom
opening in my son’s chest…

I heard the toilet flush, and I went into our bedroom and
closed the door, sat on the edge of the bed and hoped Jordan wouldn’t come in.
I tried to dismiss all thoughts of mortality from my mind, my family’s
mortality and my own. I sat there for a few minutes until the lie of permanence
and absolute happiness was once again real enough to hold and my inner eye was
blind enough not to see it slipping between my fingers like sand.

5

After Ann left for work, I let Jordan watch a few minutes of
cartoons while I had a last cup of coffee, then I drove him to his day school
at the Baptist church and took myself to work.

I parked behind my frame shop and got out. It was only
eight-thirty and the air was already sticky. July in East Texas is like that.
The trees hold the heat and smother you with it. Sometimes it’s so bad the
humidity seems to have weight, and walking through it is like trying to wade
through gelatin.

I stood by my car and breathed in the warm, small-town air.
In spite of the heat, it was times like this that I was glad I lived in a town
of forty thousand (counting ten thousand transient college students) instead of
a place like Houston. Ann and I had lived there briefly when we were newly
married, and we hated it. It was ugly, hurried and depressing. And there was
all that crime.

Crime. That was a hoot. Even a small town like LaBorde
wasn’t free of that. Just ask me, the burglar killer.

I got my key and went in the back and started coffee. At
eight-forty-five the hired help showed. Valerie and James.

Valerie is a bright, attractive woman and a good frame
builder, if a little impatient with customers. James, on the other hand, is a
so-so frame builder, and a master at knowing what the customer really wants.
But he hasn’t figured out what Valerie wants. She snubs him. He spends a lot of
his time with his eyes stuck to her ass, like a mountain climber mooning over a
cherished but unattainable summit.

I hoped plenty of work would come in today so I could stay
busy, and maybe not have to talk too much. I knew if I talked very long about
anything, I’d talk about last night, and I didn’t want to do that. Word would
get around soon enough without my help. There hadn’t been any reporters last
night, but it would certainly make the paper, if only in the abbreviated crime
report section of the LaBorde Daily, which is as close to being a real
newspaper as a water hose is to being a snake.

While Valerie and James poured themselves cups of coffee, I
went up front, turned the
Closed
sign around to Open and unlocked the
door.

          
· · ·

About nine-thirty Ann called during her break at the high
school.

“Just a minute,” I said. I glanced at James and Valerie in
the back of the shop. Valerie was working on a frame. She was bent over the
table giving James a nice view of her buns; the red dress she wore was
stretched over them tight as a bongo skin. James was gesticulating wildly,
giving her a line of prattle between flashes of his teeth and puffs of his
cigarette. I was somehow reminded of The Little Engine That Could. “Go ahead,”
I said.

“You doing okay?” Ann asked.

“I’m not in the mood for a parade or anything. But yeah, I
guess I’m all right. How about you?”

“I’m getting off next period to go talk to the police.
Richard, it’s all over school. I don’t know how, but it is. Some of the
teachers have asked me about it. I tried to talk to them, but I c
N="1em"0emouldn’t communicate too well. Even some of the kids have
asked.”

“Shit. Maybe you should go home.”

“Got to deal with it sometime, and I guess now is as good a
time as any… You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Fine,” I lied.

“All right. I got to go, baby. Love you.”

“You too.”

          
· · ·

About ten-thirty Jack Crow, the mailman, showed up. He came
in out of the July heat and it seemed to follow him, hung in the doorway like
warm dog breath for a full fifteen seconds.

Jack is one of those big men who thinks his size, rugged
face and disregard for intellectuals makes him a man. He can’t just deliver the
mail and say hello, he’s got to spend a few minutes each morning making catty
remarks to Valerie about how he likes redheads, and how she’s a looker, all the
usual routines men like Jack think are charming. He also likes to talk about
his hunting, fishing and war experiences. To hear him tell it, Hemingway was a
perch fisher and Audie Murphy was a windup soldier. And he’s the real thing.