Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [50]
Since leaving the village, David had traveled all over the world, dogged by a persistent homesickness for the valley, this ranch. He wandered back again and again, driven by a need to check on things, see what new twist fate had taken. Like many people who had grown up in the area, he was an ardent student of the curlicued local history, all its false starts and surprises. When the ranch was sold to a wealthy San Francisco lawyer, for example, everyone anticipated subdivisions and commercial development. Then Red Ray turned out to be a profligate drunk and there were rumors of bankruptcy, repossession, a pending sale to Arabs. When Red sobered up and started the drunk farm, David had laughed about it for months; he himself had gotten sober, and this connection made it seem as if the ranch had, in a manner of speaking, stayed in the family after all. Someday, David thought, he might even risk slipping into an AA meeting to sit among fellow alkies in the former ballroom where once Sally Morrot and her companion, Dora, had tried to teach some of the local teenagers, including David, how to waltz.
David heard the Falcon drive off. Peering across the way, he saw Red Ray come out of his bungalow. David had followed his successes—the humanitarian awards and government grants Red received were well publicized in the local papers David’s aunt Gloria saved for him. And he’d observed Red out here on many occasions, alone in the village that fifty-odd people once inhabited: reading on his front porch or tending his rosebushes; smoking at his kitchen table or dozing in the living room. This was the first time David had seen any visitors.
Red and the younger man lit cigarettes and started walking east together down the road. Red walked calmly, hands in pockets, at a stately pace. The other guy loped sideways, gesticulating broadly, veering off first to one side, then the other, talking all the while: a man clearly desperate to make his point. They looked like king and frantic petitioner, or hunter and fractious spaniel. Hanging back in the shadows, David watched until the two men rounded the bend out of sight; then he struck off in the opposite direction toward his uncle’s house.
BY ELEVEN-TWENTY, when Lewis knocked on her door, Libby had given up on him and dressed for bed in nightgown and kimono. She let him in and saw at first glance that his earlier, pressing enthusiasm had dwindled. He slunk into her kitchen, bad news incarnate.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Sorry it took me so long,” he said. “Red and I had to have a little chat. You mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead,” she said, suddenly queasy. “What did you chat about?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“About me?”
“In the abstract.”
“What’d you say?”
“I didn’t tell him anything.”
What was to tell? “What’d he say, then?”
“He told me to watch my step in all this.” Lewis flung an arm to indicate her kitchen, her house, her.
“That makes two of us.”
“Maybe I should go,” he said. “No sense in dragging both of us down. I’ll finish this smoke and leave you the hell alone. Unless you want to make some coffee. I could stand a cup of coffee.”
“At this hour? Won’t it keep you up?”
“I only wish.”
Libby pulled the can of Yuban from the fridge and filled the coffee maker with water.
“This is it, this is who I am,” Lewis said. “Up and down, up and down, ever since I got sober.” He sat cross-legged on a kitchen chair. “This is me, the dull lump.”
Libby laughed softly. “ ‘Dull lump’ is the last term I’d apply to you.”
“I just think too much. My mind is an alternate digestive tract. I chew myself up. I make myself sick. I’m a living, breathing