Chapter Four #3
LaGrange had a look of scared confusion on his mustached baby face. He glanced at the hammer. Cal brandished it.
At the train station, Roman got the suitcase from the trunk, and he and Cal helped LaGrange out of the car.
Cal slipped the hammer into his coat pocket but kept his grip on it, pushing the head of it against LaGrange’s hip.
Each on an arm, they walked him inside. Bought him a ticket on the 8:22 to Toledo.
From there, Roman told him, he could go anywhere in the world except back to Bonhomie, and he was never to contact Becky.
Not a letter, not a phone call, not a psychic vibration.
Not if he didn’t want to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life.
“Does Rebecca know about this?” LaGrange asked as they stood on the platform.
“Rebecca’s fine,” Roman said.
“Yeah,” Cal said, “she’s fine.”
LaGrange looked from one to the other of them, as if trying to detect a crack in their combined front.
His shoulders dropped as much as they could, given that they had hold of both his arms, but he held his head high.
It wasn’t his first booting, or even his most dramatic.
They heard the train approaching from the east, saw its headlight straining against the dawn and a column of black smoke unrolling across its spine.
“Can I just say something?” he asked. They waited.
“I’ll go. I won’t write or anything. But she’s remarkable.
I’ve seen a lot, and I don’t know how she does what she does. She has some kind of gift.”
“Duly noted,” Roman said coldly.
The train stopped with a loud screech. A conductor opened one of the middle doors and stepped down, but no passenger left the train and no one else was waiting to get on. It was as if the 8:22 to Toledo had been sent for the sole purpose of picking up Casey LaGrange and whisking him away.
—
Cal’s reception that evening was not the hero’s welcome his imagination had allowed for.
Becky was waiting for him in the wingback chair.
Skip sat on the braided rug, surrounded by building blocks.
By then, Roman had told her everything they’d done—including a few choice details Cal would have omitted.
Roman had bragged about it all, canceling out any chance of Becky’s seeing even a shred of their good intention.
“I honestly thought it was what you wanted,” Cal said. “You said you wanted him gone.”
“I said I was going to take care of it. I was going talk to him. You threatened him with a hammer!”
He burned with embarrassment. He felt as angry as she looked, and she looked angry enough to tip over the furniture.
Was there, he wondered, zero room in this situation for him to have stepped in?
How was he supposed to have done nothing, given what she’d told him?
What kind of spineless chump lets a huckster try to lure his wife away?
He wanted to argue with every reaction she was having, but what came out of his mouth was, “The hammer was Roman’s idea. I just went along with it.”
No wonder there’s so much war in the world, Becky thought. She told him they’d pulled the rug out from under her. Stuck their noses into her doings, uninvited. She told him they’d treated her like a child who couldn’t manage her own affairs.
“Speaking of that,” he said, “if you’re so clairvoyant, why didn’t you know what a creep this guy was going to turn out to be?”
“Because I’m not clairvoyant, Cal. I can’t see the future. You know that much, surely, by now? I can’t look ahead and see how things are going to turn out. If I could, maybe we wouldn’t be having this argument at all.”
“Meaning what? You’d rather be with that exploitative clown?”
“Don’t act virtuous. You can’t stand that people admire me for something. You’re so insecure that you have to sabotage my efforts to try to do something with my life!”
Skip, two weeks past his first birthday, stepped away from the coffee table, waved his hands, smiling, and fell.
His lip connected with the table, and the amount of blood that came running down his chin alarmed them both.
After calming him down and inspecting the cut and determining he didn’t need stitches—Cal holding a cloth to his mouth and shh-ing him for a solid fifteen minutes—the argument seemed to be over.
Cal got out of his blood-spotted shirt and the rest of his clothes for his evening shower, wondering if it really was over or if they’d just put a pin in it.
He gave thought to apologizing for the way things had happened—owning up to his part of it—but he wasn’t about to apologize for ousting that carny.
He was still mad. She was still furious.
Two and a half years of marriage, and they’d never once gone to bed with a dispute left unresolved, they’d always managed to make at least a little headway, so that the next day had a foundation for moving forward.
It was her rule, in fact. He wondered how they would possibly manage to follow it this time.
She answered that question while he was in the shower.
When he emerged, the pajamas he’d laid out for himself on the bed weren’t there.
He found them in the bedroom at the end of the hall—formerly her spiriting room, now the guest room—along with his toiletries, the block he stood on when he shaved and brushed his teeth, and the copy of The Grapes of Wrath he was a third of the way through.
—
The war in Europe was either winding down or had yet to plateau, depending on who you talked to.
In the Pacific, things seemed as dire as ever.
There was a small parade down Main Street for a soldier returning from Germany, his head bandaged, one of his eyes ruined by shrapnel.
Days later there was another small parade for a sailor who had both arms bandaged wrist-to-shoulder and had survived an attack on a destroyer in the Philippine Sea.
But people were getting used to the parades, and the parades were starting to feel sad.
Then, in April, Roosevelt traveled to Warm Springs, Georgia, and sat for the painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff. During the sitting, on his 4,422nd day as president, he complained of a headache and slumped forward, breaking his pose. He died that afternoon.
The Gazette only printed one edition per day and so didn’t have the news, but someone in Paulson’s Food Market had a copy of the evening edition of the Blade.
Cal joined a huddle of people craning to read the story.
The cashier was crying. The man holding the paper said he didn’t want to believe it, and the woman next to him said she only wished the president could have lived a little longer to see the end of the war.
The cashier blew her nose, said the war was never going to end.
But nine days later, the Americans took Nuremberg and the Russians closed in on Berlin.
Nine days after that, Hitler, hiding in his bunker, married his fiancée, watched her bite into a cyanide capsule, and shot himself.
And two days after that, Mussolini and his mistress were executed in northern Italy and strung up by their feet in front of a gas station.
Such was the light at the end of that particular tunnel.
—
When Cal answered the door one afternoon in late April, there were two women who lived on the next block standing on the front porch and a third woman from down the street walking up the driveway. Mrs. Dodson was crossing the yard. Fred Yulin was coming up the sidewalk.
The Jenkinses were still living apart, within their house.
It had been weeks, their mutual stubbornness, as much as their anger, perpetuating the arrangement.
They functioned as parents and maintained the household together, but they lived as begrudging colleagues when it came to their interaction.
The matter remained pinned. Apparently for the foreseeable future.
Seeing all of these people show up at the house at once made Cal think Becky was throwing a party he wasn’t invited to.
Then Mrs. Dodson showed him the special ad Becky had taken out in the Gazette, inviting people to a group séance for the purpose of communicating with FDR. Express your grief.
Express your gratitude. Let him know. Today’s date. Now.
Cal carried extra chairs into the parlor to accommodate everyone, then excused himself.
—
May came. He sorted hinges and cabinet handles.
He sorted washers. Along with wondering, now and then, what his life would have been like if he’d been born with symmetrical legs, and what it would have been like to have a different father, and a mother and siblings who’d lived, he sometimes wondered—alone, at work—how things might have gone for him if he hadn’t married the first girl he’d ever gone on a date with.
There was no knowing, of course, and even wondering about it made him feel terrible. But he did wonder.
He couldn’t imagine getting the attention Becky got for something no one could see or touch.
He wouldn’t want that kind of attention for anything, wouldn’t take it if they handed it to him.
But on a deep and very private level, he envied her.
She mattered. And to people she barely knew.
Back in the fifth grade, Sean Robison had told him that some special thing was waiting for each of them in life—and look how that had ended up for Sean.
He’d died at twenty-four, gotten almost no life at all, and here was Cal, selling hardware and waiting for—nothing.
Killing time with both hands. He worried that the years would start passing more quickly, that the holidays and birthdays and anniversaries would domino.
He and Becky would stay roommates for the rest of their lives, become wrinkled while they were still mad at each other.
Skip would grow like a tree, get married, have children.
In no time Cal would be one of the old-timers hobbling up and down Main Street, known as a respectable, retired member of the business community.
Would that really be enough, if he were to keel over at seventy? Or fifty?
The bell sounded over the shop door. His first customer of the day, wanting to know if the store had a radio.