Praying for Sleep

11

She called it the Berlin Wall.

A six-foot-high stockade fence of gray cedar, surrounding most of the four acres of the L’Auberget estate. Lis now walked along a stretch of this fence on her way to the dam. To enclose the property had cost Andrew L’Auberget eighteen thousand dollars (and they’d been 1968 dollars, no less). But despite the price he was adamant about the barricade. Lis jokingly named it after the German barrier (the reference shared only with Portia and friends, never with her father) though the man’s concern hadn’t been the Red Peril. Terrorist kidnappings were his main fear.

He’d become convinced that he, as a successful businessman with several European partnerships, was targeted. Goddamn Basques,” he railed. “Goddamn them! And they know all about me. The SDS, the Black Panthers! I’m in Who’s Who in American Business. There for the whole world to see! Where I live! My children’s names! They could read your name, Lisbonne. Remember what I told you about answering the door? Tell me what you’d do if you saw a Negro walking around outside the gate. Tell me!”

The fence, even Lis the naïve child supposed, was easily breachable and less a deterrent to the bad guys than an inconvenience to the family, who had to walk three-quarters of a mile around it if they wanted to go for walks in the woods across Cedar Swamp Road. But like the builders of its namesake, L’Auberget’s purpose seemed only partially to keep the enemy out; he also wanted to restrain his own citizenry. “I will not have the children wandering off. They’re girls, for God’s sake!” Lis had often heard this declaration, or variations on it.

As she walked along tonight Lis reflected with some irony that while its German counterpart was now dust, Andrew L’Auberget’s cedar folly was still as strong as ever. She noticed too that if the water did overflow the dam, the fence would make a perfect sluice, preventing any flood from spilling off the property into the woods and directing it straight to the house.

She now approached the beach-a small crescent of dark sand. Just beyond was the dam, an old stone-and-cement slab twenty feet high, built around the turn of the century. It was against this wide lip of cement that the white rowboat she’d seen from the house thudded resonantly. Behind the dam was the narrow spillway fed by the overflow; usually dry, tonight it gushed like a Colorado rapid, the water disappearing into the creek that ran beneath the road. The dam was part of the L’Auberget property though it was under the technical control of the state Corps of Engineers, which had been granted an easement to maintain it. Why weren’t they here tonight? she wondered.

Lis continued a few feet toward the dam, then stopped, uneasy, reluctant to go further, watching the white jet of water shoot into the creek.

Her hesitation had nothing to do with the safety of the dam or the ragged spume. The only thought on her mind at the moment was the picnic.

Many, many years before: a rare event-a L’Auberget family outing.

That June day had been a mixture of sun and shade, hot and cold. The family strolled from the house to this beach, and hadn’t gotten more than ten yards before Father started carping at Portia. “Calm down, quiet down!” The girl was five, even then cheerfully defiant and boisterous. Lis was horrified that because of the girl’s rowdiness Father would call off the picnic and she bluntly shushed her little sister. Portia tried to kick Lis in retaliation and, with a dark glance from her husband, Mother finally swept up the squirming girl and carried her.

Lis, then eleven, and her father hefted picnic baskets packed by him so efficiently that she nearly tore muscles under the weight. Still, the girl didn’t complain; she’d endured eight months of her father’s absence while he was in Europe on yet another business trip and nothing on earth would stop her from walking at his side. She was thrilled speechless when he complimented her on her strength.

“How about here?” Father asked, then answered himself. “Yes, I think so.”

It seemed to Lis that he’d developed a minuscule accent in his recent travels. Portuguese, she supposed. She observed his dark slacks and white dress shirt buttoned at the neck, without tie, and short boots. This was hardly American fashion in the nineteen sixties but he’d have nothing to do with Brooks Brothers or Carnaby Street and remained faithful to the look favored by his Iberian business associates. It wasn’t until after he died that Lis and her mother would laugh that Andrew’s style could best be described as post-immigrant.

That afternoon he’d watched his wife arranging the meal and gave her strident instructions. The food was cut geometrically, cooked perfectly, sealed in containers airtight as the NASA capsules that so fascinated him. Mother set out expensive stainless-steel utensils and ceramic plates the shade of milky plums.

A Warre’s port appeared and they each had a glass, Father asking Mother her opinion of it. He said she had an uneducated palate and for that reason was worth more than a dozen French sommeliers. Lis had never heard her mother utter a single negative syllable about any of the wines in her husband’s inventory.

On the day of Lis’s birth, Andrew L’Auberget was in Portugal, where he happened to drop a bottle of Taylor, Fladgate 1879 because he was so startled by the sharp ringing of his partner’s telephone-on the other end of which happened to be his mother-in-law with the news that he was now a father. The story goes that he laughed about the catastrophe and insisted-there, on the phone-that they name Lis after the city in which she’d destroyed seven hundred dollars’ worth of port. Two things about this incident had always seemed significant to Lis. The first was the generosity with which he treated the loss.

And second: why wasn’t he with his wife at such a time?›

That day at the beach, sitting beside the dam, he’d lifted a silver spoon and, against Mother’s protests, poured a scant teaspoon down Lis’s throat.

“There, Lisbonne, what do you think? That’s a 1953. Not renowned, no, but good. What do you think?”

“Andrew, she’s eleven! She’s too young.”

“I like it, Father,” Lis said, repulsed by the wine. By way of compliment she added that it tasted like Vick’s.

“Cough syrup?” he roared. “Are you mad?”

“She’s too young.” Mother sent Lis out of harm’s way and the girls went off to play until lunch was ready.

While Portia sat in a cove of grass and picked flowers, Lis noticed a motion from the state park nearby and stepped closer to explore. A boy of about eighteen stood with a girl several years younger. She was backed against a tree and he was clutching the bark on either side of her shoulders. He would ease forward and kiss her then back away quickly as she wrinkled her nose in mock disgust. He reached suddenly for her chest. Lis was alarmed, thinking that a wasp or bee had landed on her and he was trying to pick it off. She felt an urge to call out to him to leave it alone. They sting when they’re scared, she nearly shouted, astonished that a high-school boy wouldn’t know this plain fact of nature.

It wasn’t of course a bee he was after but the button of her shirt. He undid it and slipped his fingers inside. The girl crinkled her face again and slapped his knuckles. He withdrew his fingers reluctantly, laughed then kissed her again. The hand crawled back inside and this time she didn’t stop him. Their tongues met outside their mouths and they kissed hard.

An eerie radiation of warmth consumed Lis. She couldn’t tell from which portion of her body it arose. Maybe her knees. Drawing some vague conclusions about the spectacle of the two lovers, Lis cautiously lifted her own hand to her blouse, beneath which was her swimsuit. She undid buttons, mimicking the young man, and eased her fingers under her suit as if his hand directed hers. She probed, with no discernible results at first. Then as she fumbled the heat seemed to rise from her legs and center somewhere in her belly.

“Lisbonne!” her father called harshly.

Gasping, she jumped.

“Lisbonne, what are you doing? I told you not to wander far!” He was nearby though apparently he hadn’t seen her crime-if a crime it was. Her heart quivering madly, she began to cry and dropped to her knees. “Looking for Indian bones,” she called in a shaking voice.

“How horrible,” her mother shouted. “Stop that this minute! Come wash your hands.”

“You should respect the remains of the dead, young lady! When you’re dead and laid out, how’d you like someone to molest your grave?”

The girls returned to the picnic blanket, washed and sat down to the meal, while Father talked about the paste that astronauts would have to eat on extended space flights. He tried, without success, to explain to Portia what zero gravity meant. Lis was unable to get down more than a few bites of anything. When they finished she hurried back to the cleft in the bushes on the pretense of looking for a dropped comb. The couple was no longer there.

Then came the part of the day that Lis had been dreading. Father took her down to the dark water. He removed his shirt and slacks, beneath which he wore his burgundy trunks. He had a dense body-not strong but with fat distributed evenly, in approximation of muscles.

Her shirt came off, then her culottes, revealing the plain red swimsuit. A thin woman now, Lis was a thinner girl then, but she pulled in her stomach vehemently-not in shame at a belly but hoping, futilely, that it might inflate her chest.

They strode into the cold lake. A championship swimmer in college, Andrew L’Auberget was, he’d told his daughter on a number of occasions, troubled by her fear of the water. He never missed an opportunity to get her into a pool or river or ocean. “It’s dangerous, yes. It’s far too easy to drown. That’s why you must learn to swim, and swim like a fish.”

Nervously she flexed her knees, feeling the gracious bed of mud beneath her arched toes. Father made a stern show of these lessons. When he noticed that she was resisting putting her head under water he ordered her to take a breath and pushed her face beneath the waves. Panic finally sent her scrambling upright. As she sputtered and shivered he laughed and told her, “See, that wasn’t so bad. Again, for ten seconds. I can do it for two minutes. Two whole minutes without a breath!”

“No, I don’t want to!”

“You take that tone, you’ll go under for twenty seconds.”

She practiced her strokes, beating the water with splayed fingers, which he forced closed into paddles. He supported her and held her buoyant while she swam in place.

“Calm down, girl! Water won’t kill you. Calm down!”

She rested on his palm, trying to coordinate her legs and arms. Just as she struck a rhythm that approximated a breaststroke, a wave rolled in and lifted her from his hand. For a moment she was actually swimming on her own. Then the crest passed and lowered her once more. But when she drifted back down, she’d moved forward a foot or so and she came to rest with her groin on his fingers. For a tense moment neither father nor daughter moved and-compelled by an urge she understood no better today than then-Lis pressed her legs together, capturing his hand in that spot.

And then she smiled.

Lisbonne L’Auberget looked at her father and gave him a slight smile-not one of seduction or power or pride. Least of all physical pleasure. No, just a smile that sprang spontaneously to her cold, blue lips.

And it was for this transgression, Lis later speculated, rather than the fluke contact of bodies, that she was so ruthlessly punished. The next thing she recalled was being dragged from the water, her arm almost popping from its socket, and being flung to the hard ground, where she lay on her belly, as her father’s hand-the same hand that had moments before cradled the most enigmatic part of her body-now rose and fell viciously upon another.

“Don’t you ever!” he roared, unwilling to give a name to the offense. “Don’t you ever! Don’t you ever!” The raw words kept time with the loud slap of his palm upon her wet buttocks. She felt little sting from the powerful blows-her skin was numb from the cold-but the greater pain was in her soul anyway. She cried of course and she cried hardest when she saw her mother start toward her then hesitate. The woman refused to look then turned away, leading her sister from the shore. Portia looked back once with an expression of cold curiosity. They disappeared toward the house.

Nearly thirty years ago. Lis remembered those few minutes perfectly. This very spot. Except for the level of the water and the height of the trees, the place was unchanged. Even the darkness of night was somehow reminiscent of that June. For though the picnic had been at lunchtime, she had no memory of sunlight; she recalled the whole beach being shrouded, as murky as the water in which her father had dunked her.

Tonight, Lis finally managed to push the memory aside and walked forward slowly over the gray sand of the beach to the dam. The lake was already pouring over a low portion of it-a cracked corner on the side nearest the house. Some of this spillage made its way into the runoff and the creek beyond but much of it was gathering in the culvert that led to the house. She leapt over this flood and walked to the wheel, set into the middle of the dam.

It was a piece of iron two feet in diameter, its spokes in graceful curves like wisteria vines, the foundry name prominently forged in some Gothic typeface. The wheel operated a gate, two by three feet, now closed, over which flowed the water that gushed into the spillway. Opening it all the way would presumably lower the lake by several feet.

Lis took the wheel in both hands and tried to twist it. Rose breeders develop good muscles-from twenty-five-pound bags of loam and manure if not the plants themselves-and Lis strained hard. But the whole mechanism was frozen solid with rust.

She found a rock and pounded on the shaft dully, chipping paint and sending a few sparks flying like miniature meteorites. She tried the wheel again without success then drew back and hammered the mechanism once more, hard. But the rock dipped into the spume of water and was ripped from her hand. It bent back her fingers as it catapulted deep into the culvert. She cried out in pain.

“Lis, you all right?”

She turned and saw Portia climbing cautiously over the slippery limestone rocks. The young woman walked up to the gate.

“The old dam. Still here.”

“Yup,” Lis said, pressing her stinging fingers. She laughed. “But then where would a dam go? Give me some muscle here, would you?”

They tried the wheel together but it didn’t move a millimeter. For five minutes the sisters hammered at the worn gears and the wheel’s shaft but were unable to budge the mechanism.

“Been years since anybody opened it, looks like.” Portia studied the gate and shook her head. She then gazed at the lake. It stretched away, a huge plain of opaque water at their feet.

“You remember this place?” Lis asked.

“Sure.”

“That’s where we were going to launch the boat.” Lis nodded at the beach.

“Right. Oh, is this it? The same boat?” Portia touched the gunwale of the rowboat.

“That? Of course not. It was that old mahogany sail-boat. Father sold it years ago.”

“What were we going to do? Run away? Sail someplace? Nantucket?”

“No, England, remember? That’s when we’d read books out loud. After lights out. I’d read you some Dickens story. And we were going to live in Mayfair.”

“No, it was Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t mind them. But Dickens you did solo. That was more than I could take.”

“You’re right. Baker Street. Mrs. Hudson. I think it was the idea of a housekeeper bringing us tea in the afternoon that we liked best.”

“And doing the dishes afterwards. Can you sail to Boston from here?”

“I can’t sail to the other side of the lake from here.”

Portia peered into the water. “I’d forgotten all about the beach. I think one of my dolls drowned here. Barbie. Probably worth a hundred bucks nowadays. And we’d steal Oreos, then sneak down here and eat them. We’d come here all the time.” She tried unsuccessfully to skip a stone. “Until the picnic.”

“Until the picnic,” Lis echoed softly, dipping a hand into the dark water. “This is the first time I’ve been back.”

Portia was astonished. “Since then?”

“Yep.”

“That was when? Twenty years ago?”

“Try thirty.”

Portia shook her head as the number sunk in. The rowboat gave a hard thud and bounced into the dam. She watched it for a moment then said, “It’ll go over if we don’t do something.” Portia eased the boat to the beach and tied it to a sapling. She stepped back, wiping the bits of rotten rope from her hands, and exhaled a fast laugh.

“What?”

“I was thinking. I don’t know if I ever asked what happened.”

“Happened?” Lis asked.

“That day? The picnic? I’d seen him mad but I’d never seen him that mad.”

Was it true? Had they never talked about it? Lis’s eyes were fixed on the jagged tops of three pines, rising out of the forest; the protruding trees were all different heights and for some reason put her in mind of Calvary. “I don’t know,” Lis answered. “I sassed him, probably. I don’t remember.”

“I wish I’d been older. I’d’ve turned him in.”

Lis didn’t speak for a moment. “See that?” She pointed to a rock the size of a grapefruit sticking up out of the sand and mud. The water was now an inch away from it. “After he finished spanking me, I crawled over to it. Tried to pick it up. I was going to hit him and push him into the lake.”

“You? The girl who never fought back?”

“I remember being on my hands and knees, wondering what it’d be like to be in jail-whether they had separate jails for boys and girls. I didn’t want to be in jail with a boy.”

“Why didn’t you do it?”

After a moment Lis replied, “I couldn’t get it out. That’s why.” Then abruptly she said, “We better get some sandbags here. It looks like we’ve got about a half hour till it overflows.”

Trenton Heck stared into the night sky through the sliding door of his trailer. In front of him, on a red vinyl place mat, sat a plate of tuna salad and rice; at Emil’s feet was a bowl filled with Alpo and spinach. Neither had eaten very much.

“Oh, Lord.”

The plate got pushed across the table and Heck swiped up a quart bottle of Budweiser, gulping three stiff swallows. He realized that he’d lost his taste for beer as well as his appetite and set the bottle back on the table.

Aside from a glaring light above the table the trailer was dark. He walked over the yellow-and-brown shag carpet to his green easy chair, a Sears “Best,” and clicked on the pole lamp. It gave an immediate comfort to the long space. The trailer was large, a three-bedroom model. It was sided in sunlight-yellow aluminum, the windows flanked by black vinyl shingles.

Although Heck had lived here for four and a half years and had accumulated almost everything that a married then divorced man would by rights accumulate in that time, the rooms were not cluttered. Trailer makers are savvy about closets and storage areas; most of Heck’s earthly possessions were stowed. Apart from the furniture and lamps the only visible accessories were photographs (family, dogs), trophies (silver-plated men holding pistols in outstretched hands, gold-plated dogs), a half dozen needlepoints that his mother had produced during the period of her chemotherapy (easy sentiments-“Love is where the home is”), cassettes for the stereo (Willie, Waylon, Dwight, Randy, Garth, Bonnie, k.d.,) and a couple of small-bore targets (center-riddled with tight groupings).

Because he was feeling sorry for himself he read the foreclosure notice again. Heck opened the blue-backed paper and laughed bitterly as he thought, Damn, that bank moves fast. The auction was a week from Saturday. Heck had to vacate the Friday before. That part was as unpleasant to read as the next paragraph-the one explaining that the bank was entitled to sue him for the difference between what they made by selling his property in the foreclosure and the amount he still owed.

“Damn!” His palm crashed down. Emil jumped. “Goddamn them! They’re taking everything!”

How, he thought bitterly, can I owe more than what I bought with the money they lent me? Yet he knew some things about the law and supposed that suing him for this sum was well within their rights as long as they gave him notice.

Trenton Heck knew how fast and bad you could ruin a man’s life as long as you gave him notice first.

He figured he could live without the trailer. The worse tragedy-what hurt him like a broken bone-was losing the land. The trailer had always been intended as a temporary residence at best. Heck had bought these acres-half pine forest and half low grass-with some money an aunt had left him. The first time he’d seen the property he knew he had to own it. The thick, fragrant woods giving way to yellow-green hills gently sloped like a young girl’s back. A wide stream slicing off the corner of the property, no good for fishing but wonderful just for sitting beside as you listened to the water gush over smooth rocks.

And so he’d bought it. He hadn’t asked the advice of his sensible father, or his temperamental fiancée, Jill. He went to the bank, horrified at the thought of depleting a savings account larger than any he’d ever possessed in his life, and put the money down. He walked away from the office of a surly lawyer the owner of four and seven-eighths acres of land that featured no driveway, well or septic tank.

Or a dwelling either.

Unable to afford a house, Heck bought a trailer. He’d allowed Jill a part in that decision, and the young waitress-born never to be cheated-had slugged walls and measured closets and interrogated salesmen about BTUs and insulation before insisting that they buy the big one, the fancy one, the Danger-Wide Load trailer (“You owe me it, Trenton”). The dealer’s men eased the long vehicle onto the pinnacle of the prettiest hill on the property, right next to the spot where he planned to build his dream split-level.

These hopes of construction he believed could be achieved as easily as he’d built his hundred-yard driveway: easing his pickup back and forth between the trailer and the road fifty times. But the savings he’d planned to replenish never materialized, and therefore neither did the house. Finally it came to the point where he could no longer afford the trailer either. When the first overdue notices arrived, Heck recalled to his dismay that the bank had loaned for the trailer on condition it take back a mortgage on the land as well-all his beautiful acreage.

The same land that as of a week from Saturday was going to be somebody else’s.

Heck folded the papers and stuffed them behind a statement from the veterinarian. He walked to the plate-glass picture window, which faced west, the direction the storm would be coming from in just a few hours. In the truck, on the drive back home, he’d heard several announcements about the storm. One of them reported that a twister had cut a swath through a trailer park in a town seventy miles west of here. There’d been no deaths but several injuries and a great deal of damage.

Hearing this newscast, just as he happened to click on the old radio, seemed to Heck a bad omen. Would his trailer survive intact? he wondered, then whispered, “And what the hell does it matter?” He picked up a roll of masking tape and peeled off a long strip. He laid down one long diagonal of an X. He started to do the cross strip, then paused and flung the tape across the room.

Walking into the bedroom he sat on the spongy double bed. He imagined himself explaining this whole matter to Jill-the foreclosure, the lawsuit-although he often grew distracted because when he pictured this conversation he pictured it very explicitly and couldn’t help but notice that his ex was wearing a hot-pink peekaboo nightgown.

Heck continued to speak to her for a few minutes then became embarrassed at the unilateral dialogue. He lay back on the bed, gazing at the roiling clouds, and began another silent conversation-this time not with Jill but with Heck’s own father, who at this moment was many miles away, presumably asleep, in a big colonial house that he’d owned for twenty years, no mortgage, free and clear. Trenton Heck was saying to him, It’s just for a little while, Dad. Maybe a month or so. It’ll help me get my life together. My old room’ll be fine. Just fine.

Oh, those words sounded flat. They sounded like the excuses offered by the red-handed burglars and joyriders Heck used to nab. And in response his father glanced down the long nose that Heck was grateful he hadn’t inherited and said, “For as long as you like, son, sure,” though he was really saying: “I knew all along you couldn’t handle it. I knew it when you married that blonde, not a woman like your mother, I knew…” The old man didn’t tell his son the story about the time he was laid off from the ironworks in ’59 then got himself together and started his own dealership and made himself a comfortable living though it was tough… He didn’t have to, because the story’d been told-a dozen times, a hundred-and was sitting right there, perched in front of their similar but very different faces.

Times aren’t what they were, Heck thought as he nodded his flushed thanks. Though he was also thinking, I’m just not like you, Dad, and that’s the long and the short of it.

He took a swig of beer he didn’t really want and wished that Jill were back. He imagined the two of them packing boxes together, looking forward to a joint move.

A truck horn sounded in the distance, an eerie carrying wail, and he thought of the lonely whippoorwill in the old Hank Williams song.

Oh, come on, he thought, rain like a son of a bitch. Heck loved the sound of the rain on the metal roof of the trailer. Nothing sent him off to sleep better. If I ain’t going to get my reward money, at least give me a good night’s sleep.

Trenton Heck closed his eyes, and, as he began to doze, he heard the truck’s plaintive horn wail once more in the distance.