Wolf Point Page 10

  When she came to see him in Salem, after the divorce, she had rushed into an old argument, intent, it seemed, on delivering a final blow. “You’re a void,” she told him. “You’re a vacuum, an abyss, a black hole.” T had long ago gotten used to her overblown rhetoric, her dramatic posturing. It was to be expected when married to an actress. She was making the argument she had made for many years, that there was something lacking in him, that he was directionless, that having no desire of his own, he relied on others to shape his life, to give him purpose. It was an argument that used to infuriate him. He had built a series of businesses from scratch to the point where they were making millions—money that she had no problem whatsoever spending. What was that, building those businesses, if not ambition? That took work. Hard work.

  The kitchen wallpaper in Salem pictured red and yellow blossoms on a white background. He had made a note to tear it down as soon as he moved in, and of course never did. Alicia in her New-York-artist black—black shoes, black pants, black top—gave the impression of being superimposed over the kitchen wall, a kind of digital special effect. She was thin, as always, but her skin seemed more vibrant, more healthy than he remembered. She was still an attractive woman. Not a stunning beauty, but beautifully interesting in her looks, her angular, lithe body, her newly blond hair, which was thin and streaked with platinum.

  “A black hole?” he asked from his seat at the table, resting his head on his hand, looking up at her where she stood over him with her hands on her hips. “Really?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A black hole.” She seemed nervous—jittery with a kind of anxious energy that suggested she was scared, scared about being there in Salem, in his house, alone with him. Yet she had made the long drive. She had called him. She said she needed to talk. Then, within moments of coming through the door, before they even made it out of the kitchen, she exploded into her lecture. T looked up at her. She stared back at him. Her look said she was frightened. Her eyes filled with tears.

  He said, “Don’t you think you’re being slightly dramatic?”

  “No,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Look, T,” she said, “I don’t know what happened, but at some point, I stopped being a real person to you. Actually, I don’t know that I was ever— To you, that I was ever—”

  T said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Alicia.”

  “I think maybe,” she went on, as if still working through the problem, “it’s women— For you— We’re like place mats, in some ways, like accessories.”

  T wondered if he had heard her correctly. “Women are like place mats to me? Is that what you just said?”

  “You don’t see,” she answered. “At least you got to be that way—or maybe you never did. I don’t know. But I know, eventually, you couldn’t see anybody but yourself.” She wiped her eyes and took a seat beside him. She spoke as if patiently explaining his own life to him. “You married Brooke because she offered you money and a way to live after you’d been drifting for years. After Brooke walked out on you, you married me because I gave you a family and, again, a way to live. And then you just disappeared. You went away, T. You left it to me to run everything that wasn’t business, that wasn’t work. You used me, T. To raise your daughter, to— Can you tell me one vacation you planned? One trip that was your idea? One move that you wanted? Anything? Any activity, any anything in our life that you initiated? Can you tell me anything at all that was yours?”

  “Maura,” he said. “Maura was mine.”

  “Maura was Brooke’s!” she shouted. “Until I took over. Have you noticed she’s more in touch with me than she is with her own father? Why do you think that is? She calls me twice a week from London. How often does she call you, Tom?”

  T looked down at his belly and closed his eyes. He laid his hands flat on the tabletop, as if to steady himself.

  “And Evan,” she went on, leaning closer to him. “Why is it that Evan won’t even talk to you? Don’t you even wonder about such things?”

  “Could it be,” T said reasonably, meeting her eyes, “could it be that they both, thanks to you, think I’m a child molester?”

  Alicia nodded and was silent. Her look suggested a deep sadness at the subject being raised. “I didn’t download that picture,” she said. “I thought you were just a monster of indifference, a monster of blindness, but when I saw that picture? When I saw that picture, I saw what a beast you really were. I almost died when I saw it. I think a part of me did die. I never would have believed—”

  “Oh, shut up,” T said. He got out of his chair and gestured toward the back of the kitchen. “Do you see an audience? It’s just me and you, Alicia, and you know goddamn well I’m no pervert, I’m no pedophile. That’s an ugly, ugly lie that you used to destroy me.”

  “Now who’s being dramatic?”

  “You think that’s dramatic?” He pointed out the window, toward the mountain. “I’m in fucking exile here!” he shouted. “I’m lost. I don’t have a clue—” He stopped when he heard what he was saying and saw the pity in Alicia’s eyes. “Fuck you,” he said calmly. “You try having your life ripped away from you in a matter of months and see whether or not you feel lost.”

  “Okay,” Alicia said. She closed her eyes for a moment, as if pulling herself together. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what’s happened to you. I came here to tell you that.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “That’s very kind of you.” He pulled out a bottle of chianti from its rack atop the refrigerator. “Will you have a glass?” he asked. She sat quietly at the table, not even looking at him. “I will,” he said, and went about opening it. He pulled a wine glass down from the cabinet above the microwave. “Why are you really here?” he asked. He held the glass out to her. “Are you sure you don’t want some?” he asked. “It’s a good chianti.”

  “To tell you what happened,” she said, ignoring the offer.

  T poured his wine and then leaned back against the sink.

  “I fell in love,” she said. “I found a man who had something to give back to me, someone who could fill me up and not drain me.”

  “Victor? The guy you’re living with now?” he said. “The failed actor? You came here to tell me you love him?”

  She looked up at T then and leaned closer. She spoke carefully, as if intent on being understood. “He knows how to love a woman without draining her,” she said. “He knows who he is and what he wants from this life. He doesn’t use women.”

  “Good for him,” T said. “Did you really come all the way here just to tell me that? Really?”

  “You’re not getting it,” she said. “You’re not hearing me.”

  T considered what Alicia might be trying to tell him. “Before?” he said. “Are you saying— You were with him before—”

  “For a long time before,” she said. “More than a year.” She looked furious. “What does it say, T, that you never had an inkling?”

  T’s stomach was suddenly queasy, the way it got when he looked down from a great height. Along with the one incriminating picture he had downloaded, the one Alicia had turned him in for, the court had found other photographs, some more shocking than anything he had ever come across on his own. Where they came from had baffled him. All he could tell the court was that he had no way to explain their presence on his hard drive. He assumed that somehow the computer had downloaded them automatically, by itself, when he visited pornography sites, which he admitted to occasionally doing. It was how he found the one damning picture. He had browsed porn sites on occasion, and he knew computers could do such things, cache pictures, save them in hidden places. He’d read stories of hackers hijacking people’s hard drives and using them for their own purposes. He thought perhaps something like that might have happened. Some freak had gotten his address from the one site he visited and then hijacked his computer and used it to store child pornography. It was the only explanation he could imagine. The court discounted it. They said he had to have been the one wh
o downloaded the images. “Did you—” he asked Alicia. “Did you put those pictures there?”

  “You put that picture there,” she said. “That little girl. I found it. I found it right on your desktop.”

  “But the others,” he said. “The other—”

  She nodded. “I was with Vic,” she said. “He knows computers. We were looking for your financial records. I had already decided to divorce you, and I didn’t trust you to be honest. When we found that picture—”

  Leaning against the sink, T felt simultaneously heavy and light. His body was too heavy to move and yet it felt as though it might at any moment float up from the floor and drift away.

  “It was a terrible thing to do,” she said. She wiped away a tear, roughly, with the back of her hand. “But that picture was yours. You did look at that filth. We went back to the exact same site you had downloaded it from—and we just downloaded some more.”

  T said, “I just— The one picture…”

  “That’s what you did, ignoring me, leering at—”

  “I was only—” T started to explain himself but stopped abruptly when he realized what he was doing. “I never as much as dreamed it,” he said calmly. “All through the trial, it was a mystery. It never even occurred to me.”

  “All the years you took,” she said. “I was nothing to you. None of us were.” She drew a quick, sharp breath. “I’m not sorry. I’d do it again.”

  T opened the kitchen door and then walked away from it, indicating that she should leave.

  At the door, Alicia regained her composure. “It was wrong,” she said, “but I’d do it again, to get away from you, to make a new start.” She added, just before she turned to leave, “And you did download that picture.”

  T couldn’t look at her. He went into the living room with his glass of wine. He was sipping it and staring at the wall when he heard her drive away.

  The sound of running water came from the bathroom in the cabin, and T pushed himself up to his feet. He looked out the bedroom window to the river, where the sun was shining brightly now on water that was calm and blue. It was heating up outside, turning into a gorgeous summery fall day. T took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, shaking off the weight of memory, and then left the cabin and started down the embankment to the river.

  Lester pushed the boat out into the water and then nearly capsized it when he jumped in. It was sunny and hot, and he had taken off his jeans and boots in order to keep them dry while he waded among the rocks untying the bow and stern lines from a pair of submerged anchors. T had watched him do this, interested in the proprietary manner with which he approached the boat in particular and the whole fishing outing in general. As the boat drifted away from the rocks with T sitting quietly in the bow, Lester pulled himself up from his knees, where he had landed awkwardly, grabbing at both gunwales to steady the boat. He took a seat by the outboard and went about pulling on his pants. T was finding it hard not to look at his black bikini underwear, the crotch of which pictured the striped head of a roaring tiger.

  “One of the girls gave them to me,” Lester said as he stood to zip up.

  “The girls?”

  Lester looked as though he thought about explaining for a brief second and then decided against it. He handed T a fishing pole. “You know how to fish?”

  “I used to fish right here,” T said, taking the pole. “I lived in Syracuse and we’d come out here to go fishing.”

  “No kidding? Right here? This very spot?”

  “It’s possible. It was a long time ago.”

  “So you can tie your hook on, and bait and cast and all that stuff?” Lester placed a battered tackle box on the center thwart, between them. “Guy loaned us this,” he said, referring to the tackle box. “Look at all this shit.”

  The box opened to reveal three tiers divided into a dozen compartments, each containing an assortment of lures, hooks, and various colorful tackle. Lester picked up a sparkling red plastic worm and observed it for a second. “How are you supposed to catch anything with this?” he said. “Where’s the hook?”

  “Rubber worm,” T said. He found the appropriate hook and threaded it through another worm, a purple one. He held it up for Lester to see.

  Lester spit over the side of the boat. “We never used fake worms,” he said. “They any good?”

  “I seem to remember they were pretty good,” T said. “Let’s see.” He tied his line to the hook, fastened a pair of split weights toward the end of the line, and tossed it into the water.

  They both watched and listened as black line spooled off the reel.

  “We mostly just used bait and a few artificial lures,” Lester said, his eyes fastened to the fishing line where it disappeared into the water. “My dad used to take me all the time when I was little. We’d go to the lake mostly. We’d catch bream.”

  “Never heard of bream,” T said. He flipped the bail arm back on the reel as he felt the weights hit bottom. “What kind of fish are they?”

  “Fish fish,” Lester said. “I don’t know.” He went about tying a clip to his line and putting on a small silver spoon.

  The boat drifted slowly, parallel to the shore. T watched the red cabins slide past as they came up on cabin 6. The bright brass number nailed to the back door caught the sunlight and gleamed.

  “We used to have a cabin on the lake,” Lester said dreamily. He leaned back and expertly cast his spoon out toward the center of the river and then reeled the line back in slowly, moving the tip of the pole occasionally to change the action of the spoon.

  “You look like you know what you’re doing.”

  “Like I said…” He pulled in the spoon and then cast it out again. “I always liked fishing with lures. My dad was strictly a hook-and-worm fisherman. That and a trotline. Man loved to run a trotline out behind the cabin, drink beer all night, and get up in the morning to see what he caught.”

  T could feel the weights on the end of his line bumping along the bottom. They caught on something, providing him a surprising jolt of adrenaline before he recognized the constant pull as a snag. He jerked the pole slightly and it came loose. The jolt was surprising because he didn’t imagine that he gave a damn about catching a fish. In fact, he hoped he didn’t, as he had no desire to go through the slimy process of pulling his hook out of a fish’s mouth. “So a trotline’s what?” he said. “Like a net?”

  Lester laughed and said, “You are not a Southern boy. A trotline’s a bunch of plastic milk jugs or soda bottles or whatnot tied together with a rope, and the bottles have hooks and lines tied off them.”

  “Where’s the sport in that?”

  Lester shrugged. “Don’t know about sport. My daddy loved to go out there in the morning, though; see what he caught.”

  “He doesn’t anymore?”

  “Died of a heart attack when I was in middle school.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Been a long time.” Lester reeled the spoon in, unclipped it, and searched through the tackle box for another lure.

  “You sure that outboard works?” T asked. “I’d hate to have to row back to the cabin.”

  “It’ll work,” Lester said, preoccupied with examining the various bright-colored jigs and spoons and fish lures. “Besides,” he added, “I’d do the rowing.” He looked up from the tackle box. “I’m the young man here.”

  “I’m hardly decrepit.”

  “No. But you are old.” He picked out a marmalade-orange diving fish and clipped it to his line. “It kind of pisses me off,” he said, holding the fish in one hand and the pole in the other, hesitating before casting. “It kind of pisses me off that you get the girl.”

  “Is that what happened?” T said. “Did I get the girl?”

  “Look like it to me.” He cast the lure out behind him, toward the rocks on the shore. “You’re older than my father would be if he were alive,” he said. Then he added, “We’re drifting nice. We should catch something.” He pulled the lure back in and t
hen cast it out again. He nodded toward T’s fishing pole. “Ain’t it kind of boring, just letting your line drag in the water like that?”

  “I’m okay,” T said. “It’s the way old guys like to fish.”

  Lester grinned and gave the tip of his pole a jerk.

  T said, “I’m actually more interested in hearing what you have to say than I am in fishing.”

  “Say about what?” Lester asked. “About you?”

  “About what you want,” T said. “About what we’re doing here.”

  Lester spit over the side of the boat again. “You want to get right down to business, huh? You don’t want to fish a little bit? Relax?”

  “We’re fishing,” T said. “Tell me what happened with the drugs.”

  “With the coke?”

  “I thought Jenny said speed.”

  “Crank?” Lester said. “What did she say?”

  “Why don’t you just tell me?”

  Lester pulled back slowly on his fishing line, as if testing the feel of the lure. “If you get a bite,” he said, “you need to jerk the tip hard, set the hook.”

  T nodded and watched, waiting for Lester to get around to the story.

  “Basically, I screwed up,” he said. “Guy I share a house with, named Lyle, hooked up another guy, named Short Willie, with some college kids from UT who were selling what was supposed to be, I don’t know, some kind of supercrank, or some such shit like that.”

  T said, “The guy’s name is Short Willie? Are you putting me on?”

  Lester looked perplexed for a moment. On the shore, near the rocks, a blue heron waded in the water. The boat drifted out farther from the shoreline. “His name’s Willie,” Lester said, “and he’s only maybe five four, five five. But he’s built like a tank, and he even thought you were thinking what you’re thinking about his name, you’d wind up buried someplace in the Smokies, along with a lot of other guys.”