Once Beyond a Time (7 page)

“Meg,” he says, “I just don’t see how we can live the rest of our lives like this. My fear now is that you will leave me.”

I fix my gaze out the window. I say nothing.

Tuesday, July 16, 1968

T
WELVE O’CLOCK NOON
, which means I can finally reach for the brown paper sack that holds my lunch. I lift it out of the bottom desk drawer and spread out the contents on my desk: a bologna sandwich, an apple, a bag of potato chips. I lift one corner of the bread to find a dollop of mayonnaise. Meg knows that if I must eat bologna, I prefer mustard.

But of course, it’s part of my punishment. A petty part, but obvious nonetheless. Because of course, she’s punishing me. I don’t blame her. When one does wrong, one can expect to be chastened. Maybe when she’s satisfied that I’ve been punished enough, she’ll come back to me. I’m willing to wait and to take whatever she dishes out. Maybe when she comes back, she’ll be empty of her anger, and I’ll be empty of my shame.

I have to wonder, though, whether she’ll end up leaving. I fear it’s a real possibility. Meg has always seen herself as weak and compliant, but that isn’t true. Heaven knows, she has always weathered well whatever I brought her way. Another wife might have complained when her husband left the security of the business world for the ministry, but Meg simply turned the corner with me and kept on walking. Never enough money, never a home of our own, the pressures of being a pastor’s wife. She and the kids always living under the watchful eye of the congregation—they
were somehow expected to be saints in the midst of sinners, as was I. Meg took it all with her chin up and with a serenity that seemed never to waver, even when I knew she wished our life was different. That to me takes strength of character. I took it for granted there was nothing I could do to knock her off course.

Maybe that’s the thing. Maybe I started taking her for granted.

I get up and pour another cup of coffee from the pot here in the trailer, sit back down, bite into the sandwich.

Maybe I should call Meg and see how she and the kids are doing, just as I used to call home from the church. Maybe I should get back to some of those familiar routines, however small. I look at the phone on my desk, but before I can lift the handset, the door flies open and Ike Kerlee enters, carrying a McDonald’s bag in one hand and a large drink in the other. He tosses the bag on his desk, removes his jacket and sits. “Feeding time,” he says. He pulls three cheeseburgers and large fries from the bag and digs in.

He’s a large fellow, with wild red hair and a full round face. The spidery veins on his nose tell me he’s had a few too many drinks in his time. I don’t know yet whether there’s an open bottle in one of the drawers of his desk, but if there is I plan to turn a blind eye. It’s the chain-smoking that bothers me, the ever-present cloud of nicotine that drives me out of the trailer gulping for air.

One cheek bulging with food, Ike says, “So how goes it, Shel?”

I nod slightly, work to swallow the bologna that suddenly wants to lodge in my throat. Once it goes down, I manage to say, “Fine, Ike. Everything’s fine.”

“Good deal, Shel.” His first cheeseburger disappears, and he picks up the second. “You’ll get your stride,” he assures me. “Won’t be long before you make your first sale.”

“Yeah,” I say. “That’ll be good, won’t it?” We’ve been working together a day and a half, and I’m trying to like him. Really, I am. But he doesn’t make it easy. In spite of his attempts at friendliness, I find him loud, crass,
and distasteful. On top of that, I simply don’t trust him. He is everything I don’t want to be.

I glance at the phone. I should have called Meg when Ike first left for McDonald’s. Now it’s too late. She’s probably eating lunch with the kids anyway, and I wouldn’t want to interrupt. Even if she’s not eating, well … let’s face it. I doubt she’s waiting for me to call. At this point, I’m hardly a person she’s eager to talk to.

Across the trailer, Ike takes a large gulp of his drink and belches loudly. I am ready to chalk up one more point against him when I realize—there is someone I don’t want to be and that person isn’t Ike Kerlee. I myself am the person I don’t want to be.

Ike swings his feet up on the desk and lights a cigarette. I leave the rest of my lunch untouched and head outside. The air is hot and humid and oppressive. There is nowhere for me to go to get away from the person I’ve become.

Wednesday, July 17, 1968

W
HAT’S THE WORLD
coming to? Reverend King was shot in April, Bobby Kennedy last month. College kids are too busy protesting the war to go to class. Negroes are too busy setting cities on fire to move ahead peaceably with civil rights work. Hippies are overdosing on Kool-Aid cocktails laced with LSD. And now they tell us on the news tonight another Miami-bound plane has been hijacked to Cuba. You can’t even take a flight these days without wondering whether you’ll end up in Havana.

I don’t like to watch the news. There’s nothing good happening anywhere. Of course, the very worst is when they tally up the dead in Vietnam. It’s a number I don’t want to hear and don’t want to think about. Why can’t we just pull out of there? This is not our battle to fight. After too many years of needless death, we’re no closer to resolving anything than when we first arrived. They say we’re supposed to be encouraged by the Paris Peace Talks, but all of that seems meaningless. Just more empty rhetoric.

“Shall we just turn it off?” Sheldon asks.

“Yes, I’ve heard enough,” I say.

Linda goes to the TV and starts flipping channels. “I want to see what else is on.”

It’s late. We should go to bed. Digger has already been asleep for hours. But Linda settles on a show and returns to the couch. Sheldon settles back in his reading chair here in the living room. He is reading—again—the sermons of Charles Spurgeon. He can’t seem to leave his old life behind.

Sheldon has been a used car salesman for three days now. He comes home looking tired and smelling of cigarette smoke. He says Ike Kerlee is a chain smoker, using the butt of a dying cigarette to light up the next one. Sheldon is the only person at the dealership who isn’t fortified for the job with large amounts of nicotine.

But he doesn’t complain. Not about the cigarettes and not about the job. He really hasn’t said much at all. Apparently, he is just going to do what he has to do to keep the family going.

Linda yawns and stretches, her long slender body taking up the length of the couch. She is in her baby-doll pajamas and her flimsy robe that reveal every inch of her long brown limbs. Her blonde hair is loosely rolled in pink sponge curlers, and her naked, pampered feet are capped with crimson toenail polish. She works very hard at sculpting herself into a fleshy work of art. She believes it is her ticket to paradise. Don’t all the pretty girls? It will be years before Linda realizes you can ride the beauty train to the end of the line and still not end up in paradise.

I’m surprised she has deigned to be in the same room with her father and me—we of the older, untrustworthy, square generation. We, who understand nothing about youth, as though we were never young ourselves. But then, she isn’t in this room to be with us, she is here to watch the television, one of the few items we hauled down with us from Pennsylvania. The reception here is awful—Sheldon and Steve spent Sunday afternoon installing an antenna on the roof, but still the TV’s rabbit ears must be rotated, twisted, and turned before something resembling a black-and-white world appears on the screen.

I don’t know what Linda’s watching. Something with a laugh track, though Linda isn’t laughing. I don’t suppose you could get her to laugh
now if her life depended on it. She is just too angry, and she wants her father and me to know it. Laughter would flaw her perfectly sculpted sullenness. Heaven forbid!

Saturday she’ll begin working at the ice cream parlor, thank goodness. She’ll start meeting people, which will be good for her. And it will get her out of the house, which will be good for me. There was a time when I liked nothing better than to be with her. And then time passed, and here we are, the three of us—Sheldon, Linda, me—a whole different cast from the people who started this show, as though our understudies stepped in and found themselves unequal to the task.

I shut my eyes, lean my head against the back of the chair, listen to the droning of the television. I feel myself sink, my breathing grows slow and even. I am not asleep, yet not quite awake. I hear the laugh track as well as the turning of the pages as Sheldon reads. I know that I should go to bed, but I cannot seem to rouse myself until I’m aware that Linda has stood and crossed the room to turn off the TV. The sudden quiet awakens me. I open my eyes to see Linda bending down to pick up the TV guide that she has knocked off the top of the set.

I really must get myself upstairs. Wondering what time it is, I haul myself up out of the chair and turn to say goodnight to Sheldon, but before I can say a word, my breath is stolen by the sight of two people standing in the archway between the living room and kitchen. Gasping, I feel my mind cartwheeling, tumbling, trying frantically to make sense of them. I want to tell myself I’m dreaming, but I know I’m not. Two strangers are in our house, and I didn’t hear them come in, didn’t hear a door open or footsteps across the kitchen floor. Yet there they are. Linda and Sheldon see them too. Sheldon, the only one left seated, slowly rises, and for several silent seconds we square off, the three of us in the living room and the two of them in the hall, like wax figures in a house of horrors. They—a woman and a teenaged boy—seem as puzzled and as frightened as we are, as though we are the ones who should not be here.

Finally, Linda cries, “Austin! What are you doing in our house?”

“Your house?” the woman begins, but Austin interrupts her by hollering at Linda, “Don’t you ever wear clothes?”

I am so confused I feel dizzy, but I hear Sheldon ask, “Linda, do you know these people?”

She turns to her father, looking helpless. “Not really, Dad. I saw Austin the other day when he wandered onto our property, but …”

The woman takes a step forward and lifts her chin defiantly. “This is our property—”

“Careful, Mother,” the boy says, putting an arm around her protectively. “They might be dangerous.”

“Dangerous!” Linda cries. One hand flies up to touch her hair. “If I were going to break into your house, do you think I’d do it with sponge curlers in my hair?”

Sheldon takes a deep breath. “All right, I’m sure there’s some misunderstanding here. Why don’t you tell us who you are and what you’re looking for.”

The woman looks appalled, as though Sheldon has insulted her. She opens her mouth to say something, but in the same instant a man appears beside them, and I hear the boy cry, “Wait, Dad!” and the next thing I know the barrel of a pistol is pointed directly at Sheldon.

Linda and I both scream and drop to the floor, and I hear the sound of the gun going off, and I hear myself crying, “Sheldon, dear God, Sheldon!” and I’m trembling and crazy with fear. This man, whoever he is, is going to keep shooting until he has killed us all. In a split second I think of Digger upstairs and pray to God that somehow he survives, and I think of Carl, whom I will never see again, and I scream with my face to the floor until I realize that the room is quiet and whatever has been happening is over.

I lift my head. The strangers are gone. Linda is crawling toward me across the room, tears rolling down her cheeks. I rise to my knees, and she falls into my arms and, oh, how I’ve wanted to hold you, but not like this.
Not because of something like this. Together, as though we are one person, we turn to face Sheldon, afraid and trembling at the thought of what we will see. We are still kneeling on the floor, huddled in fear, gasping for air, expecting to see blood—blood everywhere and Sheldon’s body slumped over the footstool.

But he is standing by the chair, unharmed. He comes to us, kneels down, puts his arms around us.

“You’re all right,” I whisper.

“Yes.” He sounds amazed.

“You weren’t hit?”

“No.”

“How can that be?”

Linda pulls back from us and looks at her father, then at the now empty hall. “What just happened, Dad?”

Sheldon shakes his head slowly. “I don’t know, sweetheart.”

“Where’d they go?” I wonder aloud.

“I don’t know that either,” Sheldon replies. “But—” He frowns and slowly stands. “Let me just check something.”

He walks to the reading chair—no, he walks behind it. I can’t imagine what he’s doing. I watch silently. He seems to be studying the painting on the wall. Then he reaches up and grabs it by the frame and eases it off the nail where it has been resting for who knows how long. There, behind the painting, is what appears to be a bullet hole, a splintered circle in the wood.

“Jeff said this place is haunted,” Linda reminds us quietly.

“We don’t believe in ghosts,” Sheldon says.

“Maybe
you
don’t, but how do you explain what just happened?”

Sheldon takes his eyes off the wall and turns his gaze squarely on us. “I don’t have an explanation for this right now. But there’s got to be one, and we’re going to find out what it is.”