Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

Though Earl already had turned away and gone down to the lake bank to check on something in the johnboat he used to fish for bass and crappie in the lake. Avis stood there all alone for the moment, no doubt feeling slighted, feeling cheated by Finus for distracting her from one of the few openly pleasurable moments she’d had in some time. She came over and stood next to where he sat on the little parapet wall around the patio. And was about to say something to him when she looked over his head at the children and saw Eric out in the water up to his knees, his sailor-suit shorts rolled up high to keep them from getting wet.

Finus turned as Eric looked up toward the sound of his name, his mother’s voice. He looked shocked, as if he hadn’t expected to get caught. Then he called out in his own defense, — I took off my shoes and socks!

Avis set her can of beer down on the wall, stepped over it, and strode down the bank toward him even as Eric, a mild child’s panic causing him to hold the rolled ends of his shorts between his thumbs and forefingers almost as if they were a skirt, started pulling his feet out of the muck and high-stepping toward the bank himself.

— Avis, Finus said, hoping to check her.

But to his horror she met the boy as he came out of the water and had him by the ear pulling him up the bank, everyone on the patio now stopped to watch them. Finus saw her let go of his ear and get down in his face. He saw Eric bunch up his face in a frown and say something and stomp his foot, big mistake. He saw Avis’s hand draw back and slap him across his cheek, and then Eric opened his mouth wide and closed his eyes tight and let out a heartbreaking wail, and that’s when Finus went over the parapet himself, grabbed up Eric in his arms, muttered a furious Let’s go to Avis’s astonished face, and headed for their old Ford, whether she would follow or not. She barely had time to get into the car, mute and furious herself, almost didn’t get in at all when he hissed at her torso through the open passenger side window where Eric sat sniffling, You ride in the back . He popped the clutch and tore out of the gate and down the dirt road back to the highway. On the way home no one said anything until Eric, still sniffling, asked, as children will do when they know the advantage is in their court, — Could we stop at Brookshire’s and get some ice cream? Finus almost laughed, and said finally, — Later on this afternoon, I’ll take you. And he could feel the waves of intensified outrage from Avis in the backseat that he would take one step further to ostracize her in this situation.

Later, after he had taken Eric to get ice cream and had sat with him in the parking lot eating it, tall fountain glasses of ice cream and nuts and chocolate sauce and pineapple pieces and a cherry on top of whipped cream — Cupid’s Delights, the shop called them — and after he and Eric had driven out to the airport and watched an old biplane come in to land over the roof of the car, its wings wobbling slowly to stay on the center-line track of the runway, and they’d gone home with dusk approaching, Avis had come up as he sat reading the paper and drinking a bourbon and water in the den and stood there.

— I know I was wrong to do that, she said.

He looked up at her over the paper without replying.

— But you have no right to shame me for it, she said. -You know I love him as much as you do.

— Then why don’t you show it? he’d said.

She stood there a moment, her eyes moving back and forth between his own. Then she said,

— You have the gall to say that to me, when you hardly give him the time of day unless it suits your own fancy. When you stay at that newspaper office fiddling around until he’s almost ready for bed each night or already in the bed, and come in and tell him a story or just kiss him good night, then go to get yourself a drink and sit in this chair and ignore me. Meanwhile I get him ready for school in the morning, after you’ve gone early to have your coffee and breakfast with other men at Schoenhof’s and had yourself a shave at Ivyloy’s barbershop, and I take him to school and kiss him if he will let me and let him off, then go to school myself and teach a bunch of snotty brats all day, wishing a tenth of them were as sweet-natured and intelligent as my own child, and then I get out and go to pick him up again and take him home and fix him a snack, and let him go out to play, or I even play with him myself, help him put together his model airplanes, even throw him the baseball sometimes and chase his balls and comfort him when he frets he’s not as good as the other boys his age, and then I make his supper and make him do his homework and make his bath and make him say his prayers and put him to bed, and then sometime along in there you come home and fix yourself a drink and make some half-empty gesture toward being the most important man in his life and make no gesture at all toward pretending that you could ever want to be that in mine, and then sometime along around ten or eleven o’clock you go to your own room and go to bed. Sometimes you come in to tell me good night and sometimes you don’t. We are neither of us very important to you and yet you sit there like some righteous fool and lecture me on how I ought to show more affection to my son.

He’d had no reply to all that, for right then it sounded like the truth.

— I don’t know why you stay with me unless it’s for Eric’s sake, she said. -But I swear it doesn’t seem to me that you even care enough about him to stay for that reason anymore.

He grew hot over that and said through his teeth, surprising himself at the surge of emotion that nearly brought quick tears to his eyes,

— Who are you to say I don’t love my own child?

— Well if you do, she said, you might do a little more to show it.

ALSO AT THE barbeque had been Earl’s sister, Merry, now married to the hapless R. W. Leaf, who sold insurance with old Junius Urquhart. She’d sat apart from everyone in a reclining lawn chair, surveying the scene from behind a pair of sunglasses, her long dark hair curled and brushed back, her lips a bright red, fingernails and toenails to match. She sipped what looked like a glass of bourbon on ice. Whenever Finus’s glance happened to fall on her, she caught it like a fish he’d cast a line to and sent back along that line the tactile reverberations of a slow, salacious smile. He absorbed it into his own tight grin and cranked his gaze away from her legs, crooked and slightly askew up on the footrest of the chair.

Two days later, while Finus’s father was out for lunch, Merry strolled past the plate-glass window of the Comet , paused to look, then came in the door, little bell tinkling behind her like a fairy sprite announcing her entrance.

— Hello, Finus.

— Merry.

— I’d like to place a classified ad in your newspaper, if the rate is right.

She smiled, then unclasped her purse and pulled out a little notepad and tore off the top sheet, folded it, and handed it to him. He took it, looked at her standing there with an expression he could not quite read, then unfolded the paper and read: Meet me at 4:00, back lot of Magnolia Cemetery, in the oak grove.

What he would say to Avis in his mind when she had demanded, once — just once she had allowed him to see how this had hurt her, and he couldn’t remember too many times she’d shown her vulnerable side — demanded to know why he had done it, was: Because Merry was beautiful. Not pure, by any means, but she had a flowing, let-down, buxom, long-legged beauty that just made a man want to get down in a glade with her and rut. Let loose the wildness. Her hair was dark and long and full of wavy curls, and one of her dark brown eyes was cast just a tad inward. She kept her mouth parted in the company of men, just barely, as a silent and private signal to desire her. And always the not-quite-subtle eye contact, always looking at you at just the moment, and for the moment, that you happened to look up at her, as if she had been thinking privately how much she would like to give herself to you, and was now caught at it and secretly glad.