Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

“She said, ‘Jackson, you don’t mean nothing to me anymore.’” He pointed at Henry’s lap. “Like I was that cat there. Which she didn’t want me to fix because she thought it was a waste of money and what good is a three-legged cat? She said, the kids are grown now, and I want something out of this life before I’m too old to enjoy it. She loved this guy, she said.

“I said I didn’t care, I loved her anyways. And she said if I really loved her, I’d move out. Leave her alone for a while, she said. Let her figure this out. So I’ve been sleeping out here these last few months, with just Rosie here for company, and she’s been letting this jerk live in our house with her, and I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you — do you think I’m a fool?”

“Who’s to say?” said Henry. The cat squirmed in his lap, settling her head into his armpit and her strange smooth chest against his. He tried to imagine what had kept Jackson from beating his wife, driving her lover off, laying claim to his own house, but when he thought about how he’d let Kitty push him away, he knew. Houses belonged to women — despite all the houses he’d sold to men, and all the ones he’d owned himself, he believed that. Men bought them, but women folded them around their bodies like shells as soon as they moved in. He could see Jackson’s wife sealing doors and windows until Jackson had no place to go.

“I’m trying to wait it out,” Jackson said. “She’ll let me back when she’s ready. Do you think she will?”

No, Henry wanted to say. No more than Kitty ever will. He knew, listening to Jackson’s tale, that his marriage to Kitty was over. She was never going to change back into the girl he’d married. She was never going to forgive him for losing their home.

“You had troubles,” Brendan said. “Always?”

Jackson shrugged. “Things were tough. Like they’re tough for everyone. Ronnie — that’s our oldest — he’s been in trouble since junior high. And Barbara got pregnant last year, and there’s never been enough money — but what does Rhonda complain about? She doesn’t like the way I smell, she says. She doesn’t like the way I look. ‘Jackson,’ she says, ‘I want some romance. ‘ Like we’re still kids. Shit, she’s forty-three, you’d thinks she’d know better. This guy she’s seeing can’t be more than thirty. He doesn’t know anything about her and she doesn’t care.”

“Nobody knows her like you do,” Brendan said. “That matters.” Henry thought how it did matter, but in the wrong way; Kitty hated some of the things he knew about her. That she was cranky in the morning and had frequent bladder infections and cried when she was angry; that the curl in her hair was not natural and that she scratched in bed.

“I tell myself that every day,” Jackson said. “But I’m sleeping on a cot here and cooking outside, and I’m lonely all the time.”

“We’re all lonely,” Brendan said. “It’s what we do with it that counts.”

“You want to see what I do?” Jackson said. “Check this out.”

He went into the garage and returned with two gas cans and three empty cans of oil. He made more trips for the five-gallon drums and the hubcaps and the leaf springs. While Henry and Brendan watched, he arranged the metal pieces in a circle at his feet. Then he seized two long sticks and started pounding.

The cans and car parts gave out different notes, something like steel drums, and Jackson pounded out a wandering melody on them. The notes rose in the cool air and settled like birds in the branches. Jackson’s face was red and heavy-cheeked; his legs were thick; his hands were enormous. The sparse, long strands of his hair stuck up from his head like wires.

“I made that up,” Jackson said when he was done. “I made it up for Rhonda.”

“It’s something,” Brendan said. “Really. I bet she comes back.”

“Maybe. But it’s all right out here, in a weird way. Sometimes I almost like it.”

Brendan said, “There’s a certain quiet that comes, when you’ve been alone for a long time,” and Jackson said, “I get these ideas for my cans, when I’m alone for a couple of days,” and Henry listened to them and wondered what they were talking about.

When he was alone, the way he’d been for the past six months in Waldo’s awful apartment, the silence drove him wild. He left the TV on all the time, even when he wasn’t watching; sometimes he turned the radio on as well. He left his window open through rainstorms, just to hear the pounding water and the occasional noises from the street. He’d thought about Brendan on those nights, surrounded by other old men and talking, talking, talking, and sometimes he’d actually envied him. Old, sick, stuck in a home that wasn’t his, at least Brendan had some company. There had been nights when Henry had wondered how sick he’d have to be to enter a place like St. Benedict’s himself.

And here Brendan was explaining to Jackson that he’d lived in a nursing home for years, and no, he didn’t always like it, sometimes the lack of solitude had been very trying; and yes, he surely was glad to be out for a while, he was grateful to Henry here. They were going, he said, to visit some family: “Cousins. Some second cousins of mine, in Massachusetts.”

They had, as far as Henry knew, no family left there at all, but when Jackson looked at him he nodded. “Cousins,” he said, wondering again why Brendan told these half-truths to everyone they met.

“We ought to sleep now,” Brendan said. “We have to leave early.”

The back of the van was a jumble of odds and ends, but Jackson helped Henry move things around until they’d cleared a space big enough for two men to lie down. Henry set aside the two blankets he’d taken from Kitty’s house and then folded Jackson’s blankets into a thick pad for the floor. He and Jackson lifted Brendan from his wheelchair and stretched him out on the pad. Bongo leapt in and tried to lie down next to Brendan, but Henry tossed him into the front seat.

“Sleep well,” Jackson said. “I’ll be around if you need anything.”

Henry wedged himself next to Brendan, who lay very still with his hands drawn up on his chest. Over both of them, Henry draped one of Kitty’s blankets. The blanket smelled; he drew it over his face and inhaled deeply. It smelled of leaves and dirt and his girls, and he remembered how Lise and Delia used to take it into the backyard and drape it over a tree limb to make a tent. The girls were so angry at him — too angry, he thought, for it to be just a reflection of their mother’s fury. It was as if they’d been angry at him for years and had only just figured it out. He couldn’t understand what he’d done that was so wrong.

Outside he heard the little pongs and pings of Jackson tapping gently on his homemade drums, and he wondered if Jackson’s children were angry as well. A kind man, Jackson — who else would have fed them dinner and let them camp there for free? Who else would have fixed the van in exchange for a watch that might easily have been fake? The watch happened to be real — Henry had bought it back when he had money, and he knew Jackson had gotten the better part of that exchange. But it could have been fake, and he and Brendan could have been murderers, and Jackson would have trusted them just the same.

He eased himself onto his right shoulder, trying not to disturb Brendan. The van was no wider than two coffins laid side to side. Their hips touched and his feet banged into the junk piled by the rear door. Bongo, curled in the front seat, whimpered and twitched. Brendan snored. Henry rolled over again. He could not, he thought, blame Jackson’s wife, or not completely; as kind as Jackson was, he was overweight and had bad teeth and blackened hands. His body was worn, wrinkled, used, and maybe Rhonda had only craved newer flesh.