Slide - Kyle Beachy [73]
The men backtracked silently to the van.
The job went on like this for half an hour. Through it all, not a single word was uttered among us. After my initial mistake I understood: language in this place, at this time, was frivolous. What could we have said? What could talk, large or small, do for our task? We were lifting and we were carrying. We descended and stepped quickly through hallways, determined. This was toil to transcend words, to simplify and reduce and deliver us to that ancient realm of human existence. There was a job at hand that would have taken me all day to complete alone. We were wearing our collared shirts, uniform of American labor, and we were working.
Once the last bottles were set into the storage room's back corner, I followed the two men silently back to the surface, where we stood beside my van. During the job I'd caught flashes of the occasional worker moving into or out of a door. At least one was a woman, which initially surprised me and then seemed perfectly appropriate, even necessary. I was aware of an unnameable something transpiring at the winery, but it was so secondary to the greater thing at play which was assistance. Which was reaching out with heartfelt aid.
The tall one brushed his hands. “Ford's talking about canceling the E-series altogether.”
“The van,” I said. “The Econoline.”
“I got a brother over at the Avon Lake plant,” said the other. “Tells me the whole state of Ohio is on edge. Whole lot of good people working those plants.”
“But that doesn't make sense,” I said. “Those vans are everywhere.”
“Yeah well, Ford's doing a lot that don't make much sense, aren't they?”
“I had no idea,” I said.
We stood quietly for several minutes. Clouds had moved in to cover the sun and plaster the sky in gray that stretched across the land. When my pager beeped inside the van, the men shook my hand again and I shut the sliding van door.
“Thank you for the water.”
“Thank you,” the tall one said.
“Thank you for the help,” I said.
“Not at all. Anytime.”
“Anytime.”
The third bald man, who stood guard out front, waved as I left the winery. Again I examined my hands and these calluses that could always, always grow thicker. It occurred to me I hadn't caught any of the bald men's names. I descended the steep driveway in a van comparatively weightless since shedding its burden, my Ford Econoline V8. Probably the 4.6, if I had to guess.
eight
it was within the private rapture of sustained focus that she was most angelic. She sat with legs straight beneath the coffee table, elbows wide, chewing her bottom lip or pencil. The teacher and student and the barriers between. I imagined Stuart telling the story of his finger to Marianne. Were they naked? They might have been naked. They were naked and he was speaking in the first person about that defining experience of his childhood, baring his inner self, and she was nodding. But were the nods sufficiently appreciative? Were they even somewhat bored or rote or feigned? This was a gift of terrific magnitude, the private childhood secret, one to alter the very DNA of a relationship. I looked at the clock hanging on the wall, then watched the angel finish her test. When she looked up, I asked if she would like to hear the true story of my best friend Stuart Hurst's missing finger.
“Hell yes,” she said, climbing onto the couch. “Totally.” “Stuart's family used to live in Tokyo. His father does some variation of financial advising that's almost covert, something there's really no point even trying to understand. So in Tokyo there was something tainted about a transaction between his dad's then up-and-coming small firm and a huge Japanese conglomerate. Allegedly. One afternoon, Stuart and his mom were walking through Tokyo and she turned to tell him to hurry up and he wasn't there. The kidnappers mailed his right index finger to his father so he understood the gravity of the situation. His parents went to the authorities, but apparently the group that took Stuart was such a force in the Japanese underground that when the police read the