Excavation

Chapter 8

Something that had to be done… It took him only another day to decide.

Reed left the campus feeling rather foolish. Dr. Simms couldn’t understand why he was resigning; all Reed had told him was that he had to go home for a while. For an awkward moment in the old man’s office Reed had wanted to tell Simms the truth—he thought that maybe Simms would understand—but he was able to stop the urge. Dr. Simms liked him; Reed didn’t want him thinking him crazy.

He had no idea how long he would be away from Denver, knew he had to make some arrangements, make sure the kids were all settled, had everything they needed, something, but could not even begin to think about those things. Carol would have to manage. Things were moving fast, overlapping, transforming. A dam had broken inside, and the waters were creeping higher.

It had suddenly become so easy to make a decision. But he was still, for some reason, reluctant to leave this place. Leave his family. His family.

Most of the afternoon he sat in his car parked on the edge of Sloan’s Lake, just west of the city’s center. There were library books in the front seat with him; they were likely to go overdue while he was gone, and the branch was only a ten-minute drive away. But he was finding it strangely difficult to give them up. With their library stamp, their warning of prompt return or the levying of a fine… they tied him to this place.

The clouds were graying, the dark falling swiftly. He found himself peering into his rearview mirror repeatedly, anxious in case someone crept behind him. His black hair—”Dracula hair,” Carol had always called it—hung down into his face in long, stuck-together strands. He should get it cut—he was looking like a wild man lately. With his pale face and perpetually bloodshot eyes, he probably looked much the vampire.

There were a number of cars around; it was a favorite spot for necking. And cruising: on weekends Seventeenth Avenue was virtually a parking lot. The cops had started ticketing for tassels and flags hanging from rearview mirrors to discourage the cruising, and a riot here was threatened and worried over most every Sunday. He could see the tower of Lake Middle School on the far side, the St. Anthony’s Flight-for-Life helicopter landing atop the tall hospital building on his right. Pollution hung in the air beneath an inversion, the sunset suspended in the dark orange layer of cloud like an overdone egg, the entire mass congealing, seeming to drop lower with the weight.

The lake had come about when a farmer back before the Civil War was digging an irrigation well. He’d found water, all right. When it finally stopped running, the valley was full. They’d had boat rides and a big pavilion and circus animals here throughout much of the nineteenth century, all because of this mysterious gift of water. Reed had never heard where it all came from, if the farmer had hit an underground stream, or what. Maybe no one knew. It was odd to think about that. It made you want to watch your step—no telling where you might break through to. The Earth had its own, secret life, and it didn’t consult people.

Something he still had to do. He had something to take care of in Simpson Creeks. He seemed afraid to leave and afraid to stay.

Had it really been his father on the phone, his mother?

The urge to go and the urge to stay. It had begun to rain. Water rippling down his windshield, taking the light with it, melting his face and car and drawing it all into the lake.

He’d never liked driving in the rain. There was something less than real about it. As if you were driving through someone else’s dream—things weren’t quite as familiar as they should be. The sides of buildings melted into the dark street, and pedestrians seemed to flicker in and out of focus as they made their way in front of his wipers.

As he waited at a light the rain began to fall harder, then it seemed as if a gray wall had suddenly descended around the car. And in the roar he thought he could hear first his wife, then his two children, calling for help. He didn’t want to listen to them; he didn’t even want to think about it. He gripped the steering wheel, and the calls intensified into the car horns prodding him from behind.

He just began driving. They used to enjoy that, he and Carol and Alicia and Michael. They’d start by going up and down side streets they hadn’t explored before, vaguely seeking a house or a lot they might move to someday. As the Denver metropolis stretched its wings it left areas, pockets that were open and green, almost rural. If they could find an area like that, made private with large trees and bushes, and so situated that more urban kinds of development around it were unlikely, then they could have the best of the city and the country.

He’d always found living in an urban area vaguely unsettling. Back home in Simpson Creeks they’d had to drive a hundred miles or more to buy anything beyond the basic necessities. Towns with shopping centers and malls were places you visited. Living in the city was like always being on a shopping trip. With no way to get home, trapped in your car.

Something that still had to be done…

He drove down Sheridan Boulevard, slowing when he reached Lakeside Amusement Park. Something left to be done. The entrance was the original, with the old picture of “The Cyclone—Greatest Roller Coaster In North America” over the gate. He wondered how long ago that had ceased to be true, or even if it had ever been true.

“You mean you’ve never ridden a roller coaster?” Carol’s face had looked so shocked he had to laugh.

“Never. And I haven’t been to a Greek restaurant, or visited a synagogue, or gone to a street fair. All that stuff isn’t exactly popular where I come from.”

It was their second date. Carol had practically dragged him to her car and driven directly to Lakeside Amusement Park and the Cyclone. Later that evening they went to a Greek restaurant for dinner. The synagogue and the street fair came on succeeding weekends. That entire summer had been spent on “kids’ big city pleasures.” Catching up.

The Cyclone. Even now he could hear the roar, and feel his hands clutching hers, surprised that he needed to hold her so badly, surprised at the depth of it. It thrilled and terrified him. As the car plunged down the incline, he’d welcomed the excuse to open his mouth and scream.

Wind and rain rattling the metal. The dead roaring down the tracks and screaming into the black, damp air.

“I never expected you,” he’d said to her,

Carol looked at him with obvious admiration. “The good stuff comes when you don’t look for it.”

He couldn’t remember ever being admired before.

He drove across the Nineteenth Street Bridge after darkness had fallen completely, to eat dinner at My Brother’s Bar. They played only classical music, and there wasn’t any sign so you had to know where it was to find it. Steer-burgers and the best french fries in town. Watney’s on tap. Reed and Carol had spent a lot of time there, slipping over a bit guiltily after Michael had finally gotten off to sleep. It was a good place to talk. The Forney Transportation Museum loomed behind it, one of Michael’s favorite places—Florence Nightingale’s car. Special movie editions. Row after row of ancient automobiles covered with dust and dimly lit by the yellowed light filtering down from high, dirty windows. You didn’t see many people there; usually you’d be the only one. Reed used to wonder what the place would be like in a hundred years… neat rows of rusted mummies. He couldn’t imagine the lives of the people who had owned them.

The bar was crowded that night, which bothered him. Normally he could find an entire corner for himself. He made his way through the narrow space between two tables, the rounded backs of chairs squeezing his thighs like hard, oily hands. He sat under an old miner’s lamp. The bench was old and stained, like an ancient church bench. He thought about that every time he came here, and wondered what kind of people had sat on the bench through the years. Did they ever see ghosts? Find images in the fireplace? Hear voices over a dead phone?

After the waitress brought him a Watney’s, he spent a moment finding a safe spot for the top-heavy glass on the uneven tabletop. There were shallow depressions worn or, perhaps, intentionally pressed into the plastic coating the old, scarred wood. He’d always intended to ask but never got around to it. He sat staring at the people in the room. Something left he had to do… There always seemed to be the couples who acted so unnaturally out in public he had to wonder about them. But perhaps that was cynicism. He knew that most likely they were unnatural only because of social constraints, that alone with their spouse they behaved more genuinely.

But seeing people like that always made him anxious—what if they were the same at home? What if the world was full of people who were uncomfortable no matter where they were, who never really recognized themselves?

An older woman with light blonde hair fading into gray sat beneath a dim light set next to one of the framed menus. Staring off, listening to the music. She was smoking, the rising smoke mixing with her hair and making a nimbus around her head. As if her head were smoldering. She smiled at him and he was unaccountably chilled by her smile.

Older women had always fascinated him. For a time he wondered if there was something oedipal about it all. He’d never known his mother very well; she was quiet, reserved, though even in her mystery she was always kind to him, and loving within limits.

But still she would not interfere when his father raged against him. She would not keep him from being hurt.

At first he’d thought Carol was an “older woman.” When he met her she’d had her law practice for over two years. Perhaps that had made her seem older. He’d been having some trouble with a former landlord trying to get his damage deposit back. Furious, he’d gone to the first lawyer’s office he could find, a storefront a couple of blocks from his apartment building.

Carol had patiently explained to him that there was a tenants’ board he could go to with his complaint, and that hiring a lawyer would cost him far more than it was worth, despite his urge for vengeance. Reed had been impressed with her gentleness, her obvious knowledge of people. They were married nine months later.

But Carol had her child side, which slowly revealed itself the more she grew to trust him. Underneath the professional woman were all the anxieties and insecurities children are prey to. She was afraid she was ugly. She was afraid no one would ever really love her. She was afraid she would lose him. She was afraid of dying, of ends in general. He had been surprised at first, but then it had only made him love her more. She had allowed him to know her, and that felt good. But it was still hard to talk to her about himself.

“Sometimes I don’t think I know you at all,” she’d say at night, in the dark, when they were alone together. “You completely surprise me. Some layer comes off, and it’s as if there’s a stranger underneath.” He never knew what to say. And even more frightening, he wasn’t always sure he knew what she was talking about. Sometimes he was afraid she would find out things about him that would disgust her, that would drive her away from him. She seemed able to pry beneath the skin so easily. Sometimes that was terrifying, and he’d wish he’d never met her.

The older woman at the other table seemed to be inviting him with her eyes. The cloud of smoke around her hair was thicker, more luminous than before. Burning above her eyes. He tried to ignore her as he left the bar.

Muddy’s was only a couple of blocks up the street, across the bridge. He walked, a cold wind seeming to rise up off the interstate, tearing at his clothes. He paused near the center of the bridge and gazed down at the cars slipping through the gray darkness beneath like luminous insects. He shuddered, and hurried up the sidewalk.

Reed entered through the used book store, browsing nervously, noting that there didn’t seem to be any new additions to the stock since the former proprietor had died. He felt foolish; he had no idea why he’d come. Killing time. He stared at the woman behind the counter until she looked down in obvious discomfort, then turned to leave. It was time to go home. He had a phone call to make.

Reed parked in front of his house and sat there for a long time. The wind had picked up, much colder than normal for this time of year. Leaves and other debris seemed to rock the car. A shingle blew down from the roof and clattered against a hubcap and he wondered, briefly, how secure the rest were.

The house was of the type called a Victorian castle—bay windows like turrets, a curved, wraparound porch. It was in the Old North Denver section, one of the earliest, filled with quaint old houses and ancient brickwork. The neighborhood had been slightly run-down when they bought the house, but property values had soon skyrocketed with well-to-do young couples buying the properties as fix-ups.

They’d spent a great deal of time remodeling the place; replacing the kitchen tile, cleaning the fine old marble fireplace, rewiring several rooms. Reed had spent hours delineating the carved sunburst patterns at each corner of the house in bright yellow and orange. Over the past two years he had been stripping the six layers of paint from the ornate baseboards and door frames, and although the downstairs had been refinished and stained, the upstairs still had long strips of patchworked wood. Carol had reminded him every spring that it needed to be finished. He had never told her, but he had put the job off as long as possible because he felt uncomfortable while stripping the wood. Long, angular shadows would seem to appear suddenly in the wood, as if it were discolored, but then they’d vanish again, and he never did find any combination of lighting that could duplicate those shadows. And sometimes as he worked, there’d suddenly be some shape in the corner of his vision that would disappear as soon as he turned. The rooms seemed suddenly charged, as if by removing the old shielding of paint he were releasing energies centuries old.

He walked through the first floor in the dark, negotiating the furniture by memory. As in a dream, he could visualize each piece in silver gray, its exact size and placement, where he needed to step to get around it. He didn’t bother to turn on the lights; it was as if he couldn’t bear to turn on the lights.

He walked slowly up the staircase, the darkness so grainy, his arms outstretched as if he were pushing soft dirt aside in his ascent, turning now and then to a shad owed picture on the wall, pictures of Carol, Michael, Alicia, the four of them together. He knew them by heart, and could almost see them raised out of the ebony glass, coming to life.

He sat down on his bed, Carol’s bed—the one she’d picked out in the antique store in Georgetown—and stared out the bedroom window. The tree branches outside, illuminated by moonlight, the whiter light of the street lamp. Something he had to do.

He stroked the bedspread gently, and breathed in the house, the smell of bedroom, kitchen, the yard outside; imagined each room in detail, the look of it from the outside in summer, winter, fall, the weekend they painted the outside, the day she’d planted her first flower garden, the day Alicia had been big enough to try the tricycle Reed had saved for her since the day after her birth.

Reed opened the door of the bedside table and a pile of small packages tumbled off the bottom shelf. Each one marked “Things of Science.” He’d subscribed for the family, for Michael mostly, planning to study each experiment carefully before helping Michael through them. But there never seemed to be enough time to really look at the damn things, and they’d accumulated month by month until he had a full year’s worth and still hadn’t looked at the first one.

An old shoebox full of pictures sat on the top shelf. Reed pulled it out gingerly and laid it on the bed beside him, staring at it. At the top was a picture of Carol, weeding her flower garden with Josef resting beside her. She was looking over her left shoulder and frowning at the camera because she didn’t want him taking a picture of her rear end—she thought she was getting fat. Other color snaps clustered around her: Alicia walking for the first time, her fat little legs bowed; Michael working on his bike, his dinner plate balanced precariously on a bicycle tire; Alicia and Michael trying to give Ben a bath, Alicia with her face bearded in suds. He peeled the pictures away, one at a time, dropping them on the bedspread.

As he went further down into the pile, the pictures changed: smaller size, square instead of rectangular, wider borders around them, some of them with scalloped borders.

With trembling hands he pulled the small clump of yellowing, cracked photographs out of the bottom of the shoebox. A large man, overweight, his face almost completely whited out by the glare in the picture. All you could see was the thin, downturned line of a frown. Sitting in his favorite chair, his paper folded in his lap. The next picture was Reed’s mother. Reddish hair that looked a light brown in the black and white photograph. At one time she must have been beautiful; he could tell by her eyes, how large they seemed in her small face. Then his little sister, hiding behind Reed’s old teddy bear. Beautiful little thing. One small hand clamped over the bear’s mouth, as if she didn’t want Reed to hear what it was saying.

He had stopped to grab these pictures from his mother’s dresser the night he’d run away. The first time he’d ever stolen anything, though his father had accused him of thievery along with everything else. Remembering the scared, determined boy he’d been that night, Reed could scarcely believe he’d stopped to steal the pictures.

He stared at the three time-dimmed faces and put them back into the box. He’d find a lid for it, then find room in his suitcase for the entire lot. He’d call the airport tomorrow; he’d made his decision. The Badger House trash mound. Sifting through the layers of photographs had told him what he needed to do when he got to the Creeks. There should have been plenty of debris left even after the flood—the waters would have been boxed in by the cliff below the house. He could still excavate there.

The wind roared and pulled the shutter loose by the bedroom window, banging it on the side of the house. Suddenly excited, suddenly agitated, Reed jumped up and ran to the window.

The clothing hung up on the line in the yard below flapped wildly, twisting and turning on the line like emaciated children. One of Carol’s dresses, Michael’s pajamas, Alicia’s socks, underwear. They flapped and waved and twisted and wrung themselves ragged as the shutter beat and beat against the wall.

Carol’s dress tore loose from one clothespin, and Reed cried out. Then the other side spun loose, followed by Michael’s pajamas. They flew against the gray cedar fence, caught on the honeysuckle bush. A small sock flew up and over the yard, out into the street beyond.

Reed fell back into bed and began to cry. He felt ashamed. Because he felt relieved.

Carol was a long time coming to the phone. Reed could hear the kids in the background, her cousin’s and Alicia and Michael playing, but he couldn’t tell which was which. It made him uncomfortable, her taking so long. Several people were waiting to use the airport phones; one man was glancing down at his watch and then back to Reed irritably. Reed gazed out the wall-size window in front of him. That was his plane coming into the gate. For a moment the planes reminded him of giant, awkward sea gulls lifting out of the mist. Hundreds of them. Full of tiny insects and off to God knows where.

“Hello?”

Already she sounded distant. Suddenly he didn’t want to talk to her; he just wanted to get on that plane and go.

“Hello… Reed? Are you there?”

“Yeah. You’ll be glad to know I finally made up my mind.”

“You’re going back to Simpson Creeks, aren’t you?”

“Yes. How did you guess?”

“One, because you’ve been leaning in that direction the whole time. Two, because that’s what you need to do—with my blessing, I might add. And three, because I can hear the airport intercom in the background.”

He laughed. He suddenly felt much better. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too. Very much. Is the house a mess?”

“Nope. Cleaned it up this morning.”

“Good. We’re all getting antsy to get back home.”

“Me too, Carol. My home is here.”

There was a long pause. “Take care of yourself, Reed. I want you back safe with me and the kids as soon as you can.”

“I will.”

“And write.”

“That too.”

“I can’t manage long without you, you know. And that’s love, not dependence speaking.”

Reed gripped the phone more tightly. He couldn’t speak. He could tell she was aware of his discomfort, because suddenly the kids were on, both of them, giggling and asking him to bring back a souvenir for each of them and when was he going to be back because they missed him already.

“You’ll be back soon, I guess?” That was Michael, trying to act nonchalant. But Reed knew the boy still felt insecure; every time Reed or Carol went anywhere, Michael was sure they wouldn’t come back for him.

“You bet. I love you, Michael. Help your mother out now, okay?”

“Okay.” His son sounded much better now.

Reed talked to his children for a long time; he almost missed the plane back into his past.