He says, “Donnie tells me you did a tour in the Mideast a few years back.”
And now Cindy turns around too. I tell the guy, “Personally I wouldn’t trust anything Donnie says. But in this case he’s right.”
“I was wondering about those desert boots GIs wear,” he says. “You must have a pair of those, am I correct?”
“Had a pair,” I tell him, and I can feel Cindy’s eyes on me now. I can feel the question she’s thinking.
That’s when the other guy takes a sheet of folded-up paper from his pocket and opens it up and holds it in front of me. The paper has two images on it. The one on top was probably copied off the Internet. It shows a pair of tan desert boots, with the right boot standing upright and the left boot turned to show the Panama tread pattern. Below that image is one he probably took with his cell phone. It’s a snapshot of a muddy boot print on a linoleum floor. That boot print has the same tread pattern as in the top image.
This other guy is bigger and younger than the wiry one, going soft in the middle, kind of sloppy looking. As for the girl with them, I feel her gaze on me but I can’t bring myself to meet it.
The sloppy guy says, “Some GIs who are bikers like to wear their boots when they ride.”
I say, “Is that more of Donnie’s questionable wisdom?”
The wiry guy says, “I hear they’re really comfortable. You know of a place I can get a pair?”
I say, “How about the place where you got that picture of them?”
The wiry guy takes the sheet of paper from the other one, looks at it and smiles, then hands it to Cindy. She’s too confused to do anything but take it from him and look at it.
The wiry guy smiles at me and says, “Well, if you think of anything, let Shelley know, okay? She says the two of you are old friends.”
I’d like to look at the girl now but I’m afraid to take my eyes off the wiry guy. He gives Cindy another big smile. “These bouncy houses are great exercise for kids, aren’t they? Your girls will sleep like babies when they get home.”
And then all three of them turn and walk away. I’m angry and scared at the same time. I’m breathing like I can’t get any air into my lungs, and I know Cindy is looking at me, waiting, but it’s only when I start hearing the kids squealing and laughing again that I realize I’ve been standing in a kind of soundless vacuum for I don’t know how long, a place where the only sounds that registered on me were what those two guys had to say. I feel exactly like I did after the propane tank exploded. I couldn’t have been more stunned.
“Russell,” Cindy finally says.
I turn to her, and she holds up the sheet of paper and says, “What’s going on here?”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I say, and I take the piece of paper from her hand, I’m not sure why, and I go marching over to where Donnie and Cindy’s mother are standing in front of the bandstand. I’m moving so fast that I bump into Donnie’s can of soda and some of it splashes up onto my shirt and I smell the whiskey in it.
“Who are those guys?” I ask him, too loud for where we were.
“Who—the McClaine boys?”
“They’re brothers?” I ask.
“Always used to be,” he says, and he grins like he thinks he’s funny.
“What did you tell them about me?”
“They asked a couple of questions is all, and I answered them.”
Janice says, “Donnie wouldn’t ever tell anything on you you didn’t want told.”
He grins and says, “Not for free anyway.”
“You don’t know anything about me, you understand? You keep your fucking mouth shut.”
“Whoa, hey, there’s kids around.”
I move even closer then, right up against him. “Cindy doesn’t want you here, you understand what I’m saying? Am I getting through to you? She doesn’t want you anywhere near her or the girls. And what she doesn’t want, I don’t want.”
He says, “Now Russell. A man’s got the right to see his own grandchildren.”
“A man does,” I tell him. “But you don’t.”
And I’m shaking all the way back to Cindy. Because the worst, I know, is about to come.
I’ve got my eyes on her and she’s got hers on me, and I’m walking slow and as steady as I can and trying to figure out what the hell I’m going to tell her. It’s time for a reckoning, I know that. I know I owe it to her and I know she’s going to demand it now.
But what I can’t figure out, Spence, couldn’t then and still can’t now, is where’s the line between total honesty and lying for a good reason? She’s the first person I ever met who I thought I could be totally honest with, and wanted to be, and promised to be, and was until that day I had a muddy naked woman in my arms.
I kept a lot of stuff from Mom and Gee and Pops over the years. And from you too. Stuff that mainly made me ashamed of myself. Looking back on it now, I can see how trivial most of it was, like stealing change out of Pops’ jar. But I like to think I could have told all of you everything and you wouldn’t have judged me harshly for it. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be unloading on you now. I only wish I could hear you say something back to me. I wish these one-sided conversations we’re having could bring me a little clarity and forgiveness.
I don’t know that I ever really told you about the day Mom had her accident. I wasn’t yet nine years old. Second grade. I’d get off the bus some three hundred yards or so from where we were living then. Anyway . . . I don’t know why I got started on this. The word “reckoning,” I guess. The first time I remember hearing that word was the Sunday after I came home from school and found Mom lying at the bottom of the basement stairs. She’d managed to scoop up some of the wet clothes from the basket she’d been hauling up the stairs before she slipped, and she was laying there with some wet towels and stuff bunched up under her head, barely conscious, with one knee shattered, one wrist broken, and that damage to her back that three spinal fusions only seemed to make worse. Anyway, that Sunday, Gee insisted I go to church with her so we could pray together that Mom would be all right. “Like new,” she told me. “We’re going to pray that God and the doctors will make her like new again.”
Unfortunately, Rev. Miller’s sermon that day was about “the reckoning that none can escape.” On the way home I asked Gee what kind of wrecking it was going to be. Could it happen in a school bus, for example? Would it happen when I was on my bike?