What You Need Read online

  Text copyright © Andrew Forbes, 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may

  be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method,

  without the prior written consent of the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Forbes, Andrew, 1976-, author

  What you need / Andrew Forbes.

  Short stories.

  ISBN 978-1-926743-54-7 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS8611.O7213W43 2015 C813’.6 C2015-901244-9

  Cover & Interior designed by Megan Fildes

  Typeset in Laurentian and Slate by Megan Fildes

  With thanks to type designer Rod McDonald

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Invisible Publishing

  Halifax & Toronto

  www.invisiblepublishing.com

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

  Invisible Publishing recognizes the support of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Communities, Culture & Heritage. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Culture Division to develop and promote our cultural resources for all Nova Scotians.

  For my parents, for their

  lifelong encouragement.

  “These are the days of miracle and wonder.

  Don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t cry.”

  — Paul Simon

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  What You Need

  In the Foothills

  Jamboree

  Edwards, On the Next Flight Out of Town

  I Was a Willow

  Dark Blue

  Cycles

  I Cannot Believe We Are Having This Conversation

  The Rate at Which He Fell

  Floridians

  Below the Lighted Sky

  Lighter Things

  Dorothy

  A Stunt Like That

  The Marys

  The Gamechanger

  Fat Albert

  What You Need

  From the driver’s seat of my rental car I watch the landscape of my upbringing approach and recede at 85 miles an hour. The fields in their robust spring colour, the blondness of wheat, the green of new corn stalks, sunflowers ringing a staid grey farmhouse. Home again, central Illinois.

  On Route 51, ringing Decatur, I pull into a rest stop near the Blue Mound turnoff, get out, stretch my legs. The air is hot and close. I swallow an Aspirin, undo a button at my collar. A bead of sweat rolls from my temple, along my jaw and across to my chin before it slides down the front of my throat. The sun slips down the sky.

  James Goodspear, my older brother, used to go by Jamie. Now most people call him Jim. I don’t know when that happened exactly. But even Janet, his wife, started off calling him Jamie and switched somewhere along the way. To his students at Macon County High, where he teaches math, he remains Mr. Goodspear, of course. Ms. Canty, the English teacher, his girlfriend, calls him Jimbo. In this she is alone.

  As I approach Blue Mound I stop at a grubby little gas station and pick up some beer, as is expected of me. Once I get to Jamie’s the beer goes into the chest freezer in his large, clean garage. When the kids go to bed Jamie and I will climb a ladder and take the beer up on the roof of his house, the bungalow on a couple of acres that he and Janet bought the year they were married, when Jamie was 29 and Janet 24. It’s a nice little house, a lot like the one he and I grew up in, and no more than 15 miles away from there.

  I arrive at dusk this Friday ahead of the long weekend, pulling into the driveway to find Jamie and Janet in lawn chairs out front, their kids Angela and Robert splashing in a blue plastic wading pool. The gravel crunches and pops under my tires as I pull in, and the car begins to click after I shut it off. I step out into the warm air of the coming night, the paper bag in my hands containing a pair of six-packs. Robbie and Angela run toward me in their bright bathing suits, their delicate torsos heaving and a tangle of their wet limbs around my legs and waist. Jamie approaches and shakes my hand. Janet offers me a kiss on the cheek.

  “Hello, Janet.”

  “How was the drive, Richie?” she asks.

  “Flat,” I say, and we both smile.

  “Come on, you two,” she says to the children, “time to get ready for bed.”

  “We said they could stay up until you got here,” Jamie says, taking the paper bag from my hands and heading toward the garage.

  We climb up onto the roof just as we would do when we were kids, and we watch the last of the light drain from the west, looking out over the sky and the dimming fields. Over the drone of crickets, we hear Janet inside the house talking to the dog in her ex-smoker’s rasp. Up here we can see the railroad tracks, their course a slash across the landscape, heading off toward Decatur to the northeast and St. Louis to the southwest in a line that suggests efficiency, and a hundred forgotten towns like Blue Mound along the way.

  As the stars appear over our heads I imagine them making a sound like beer can pull-tabs, crack-pop-fizz. I recline, feel the roughness of the shingles on my elbows and lower back.

  “Memorial Day,” Jamie says. “About goddamn time, isn’t it?”

  “Thought it would never get here,” I say.

  “Might as well be Labor Day for your Cubs,” he says. “Season’s over.”

  “That’s fucking rich coming from a Royals fan,” I tell him, then swallow a mouthful of beer.

  “How’s the big city treating my little brother?”

  “Cruelly.”

  “What about those big city women?”

  “Even more cruelly,” I deadpan.

  “Plenty of room around here for a guy to settle down, you know. Lots of good women waiting to marry.”

  “You should know. You got two of ‘em.”

  “Careful there,” he says, then chuckles. “I know, you got the city in your head now, probably never leave. But you won’t see a sky like that in Chicago,” he says, nodding toward the pink and orange horizon. I look at his face, softly lit by the dead sun. He’s earnest, I’ll say that for him, and deeply in love with this place, despite the headaches he’s created here.

  “You’ve got me there,” I say.

  I get through four Buds by the time Jamie drains the last of his six, and then we lie on our backs for a while, feeling the earth spinning below us.

  “Glad you came,” Jamie says to me just before we make our wobbly way back down the ladder.

  Inside, it smells of spaghetti and meatballs and a timeworn dampness. Jamie points to my spot on the sofa, set up for me just like it always is. “You need anything?” he asks. I shake my head no. Then he heads down the hall on tiptoes, past the kids’ rooms, before slipping into bed next to a slumbering Janet.

  I wake up to eggs frying and coffee percolating in the Mr. Coffee machine, and the house already feels hot. Standing at the range with her back to me is Janet, wearing a short robe, her dark brown hair like an angry bird’s nest. Hazel-eyed Janet Evans is sturdily beautiful now, just as she was in high school. She has wide shoulders like a swimmer, long arms, August-brown skin even in deepest January. She has nicks and scars covering those parts of her body left exposed by shorts and tank tops because she has spent her life with men who took her at her word that she was willing to do whatever heavy work was at hand. Her father had her driving a tractor by the time she hit 11. With Jamie she has lived with her hands, laying sod, swinging careless hammers into her thumb, scraping her knees in the jagged gravel of the driveway while kneeling to check for the source of the oil leaking from their dusty Suburban. I visited them five years ago in the middle of a hot and dry July, and even eight months pregnant
she’d be on the riding mower once a week, and afterwards humping the gas weed trimmer around the yard, wearing tall rubber boots and leather gloves, safety glasses and big orange muffs to protect her ears, the kind you see on baggage handlers. A couple of years later, pregnant with Robert, she spurred the labour on by hefting around packages of laminate flooring that Jamie was laying in the kitchen. The next morning she was in the hospital, and by lunchtime she was holding little Robbie.

  What Jamie doesn’t know is that Janet and I spent a night together when I was back from school for Thanksgiving during my junior year at Iowa. She and Jamie had gone out a couple of times, and he was pretty serious about her. I knew that. I was at a party. It poured rain that night. Janet was there and she looked so pretty. We split a six-pack of wine coolers after somebody stole my beer. She got a bit frisky, and I wasn’t arguing.

  She and I have never spoken of it since, and it’s been so long that I honestly don’t believe it’s what either of us is actively thinking about when Jamie leaves the room for a minute. It’s there, of course, hazy and indistinct, but real. But it no longer requires thought; it has become a part of who we are.

  Jamie still counts himself a Royals fan, which probably means that were I to tell him of this he’d be capable of forgiving any of my transgressions with that oversized heart of his. But it would remain, I know, a nettlesome thing there between us, and so I will die withholding this truth from him: I want his wife more than any other woman I have ever known. I might even say that I fell in love with Janet that night. Might, if I knew just what that meant, what that felt like for people. I guess, since it is a thing I haven’t felt since, with any other woman, that might be my clue. The women I have dated have all paled next to Janet. The underdressed Chicago girls on trains, or in bars, with their loaded glances and their earnest curiosity, do not rouse me once I have compared their dewy cheeks and scrubbed, tawny limbs to Janet’s lived-in skin. I look at other women, of course, and date some of them, but to defeat any misapplied pangs of desire I have only to remember our one night together, when I was 19 and she a year younger, her soft shoulders and the simple manner in which she raised her hips to help me slide off her underwear. It is a dusty memory, but it has come to me more times than I can count, and I have worried it smooth like a stone.

  The kids put ketchup on their eggs. Jamie puts it on his steak. Every Saturday morning Jamie has steak and eggs, a thing I thought only the English and the very rich did until I learned of my brother’s weekly ritual. Janet offers to make me some, but I opt for Corn Flakes and a banana.

  Today Jamie’s wearing what I call his Republican recruiter’s uniform. He really goes for the Dockers look, all khaki and sky blue, beige, and white, but truthfully it suits his lean frame and close-cropped head, perpetually buzzed to minimize the aging effect of his balding. We both got our father’s wiry frame; so far only Jamie’s been lucky enough to inherit Dad’s hair loss. I’m dressed in black this day, as usual, and I’ll probably appear conspicuous here in pickup country.

  We climb into the minivan—it’s got a DVD player with a small monitor that descends from the roof just behind the front seats, to keep the kids quiet on long trips—and as we roll down the country lanes he slips in a Led Zeppelin CD.

  Like most American boys, we experienced a Zeppelin phase, spanning two or three summers. We grew our hair out and spent most of our time in the basement rec room, dark and musty and cluttered, sitting before Dad’s Radio Shack turntable and boxy speakers, listening to Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy.

  This is just what Jamie’s trying to invoke by putting this on, this newly released live CD culled from thirty-year-old tapes, and turning it up until his Caravan’s speakers are straining. He is calling on a time in the memory when we were teenagers, devious and grubby, curious and sullen. And it works.

  “Go faster,” I tell him.

  We’re off to the Home Depot in Decatur, some twenty minutes away, to get lumber and supplies, because my brother and I don’t know what to with each other when we’re not drinking on the roof. So we build stuff. Truthfully, it is one of my favourite things, and not something I often have the opportunity to do back in Chicago, where I and my apartment-kept friends have janitors and superintendents and service people to tidy the edges and join the nuts and bolts of our daily existences. But when I visit Jamie he’s careful to have a project to keep us busy. This Memorial Day weekend we’re to rebuild his front porch, which was shoddily made to begin with and now stands rotting on pilings sent wandering off level by frost heave and the thousand bodies that have bounded over them.

  As we rush along highways bracketed by cornfields, we begin to discuss our list of materials, giving me a chance to slip into a practical voice I don’t get much chance to use in Chicago. We talk about two-by-fours and how best to hang stairs when Jamie suddenly turns to me and says, “Hey,” and I can tell this will have nothing to do with lumber or fasteners, “okay if we make a quick stop?”

  “Where at?”

  “Friend’s house.”

  “You’re driving.”

  Brenda Canty is red-haired and freckly, short, round, and inviting. Even her eyelashes are a pale orange, and her smile takes up half her face. She’s younger than Jamie, but not by much, I’d guess. I don’t want to like her, but I do. On this bright morning she’s reading a paper at a round plastic table on the front stoop of her small townhouse just outside Decatur. She pops up when she sees Jimbo’s van pull into the visitors’ spaces across the row, and bounds over to greet him. There’s a half a moment’s hesitation in her step when I emerge from the passenger side, but my brother must shoot her an “it’s okay” look, because she continues to advance right into his arms.

  “Jimbo,” she says, “and is this Richie?”

  “The one and only,” he answers, and she comes around the front of the van to shake my hand. “I’m Brenda,” she says. “Happy to know you.”

  “Likewise, Brenda,” I say. Jamie walks up behind her and joins his hands around her waist. She holds them and rocks gently side to side.

  “Wow. You know, I feel like I know you,” she says to me.

  “Brenda, honey,” Jamie says, “me and Richie’re headed into the Home Depot, so I thought I’d take care of that patching job for you.”

  “Right. Oh, right. You know, that’d be such a big help to me, Jim.” She turns to me. “Richie, your brother took down a bathroom cabinet for me. It was sort of in the way, you know? And he took it down off the wall, and wouldn’t you know there’s the ugliest hole back there?”

  “Big hole punched right into the wall,” he says, nodding to me. “I’m just gonna take another quick look at it,” he calls, bounding up the step and through the screen door.

  Brenda and I are left standing on the small front lawn. There is a silence. “What’s new in the world?” I ask, pointing to her USA Today.

  “What’s ever new?” she says, and we both offer polite laughter.

  There is a pause. “I understand you’re a teacher?”

  She says, “Oh, yes. I love it. That’s how I know your brother. I guess he told you that.”

  “Yes, he did.” We laugh.

  “You know, I hope this isn’t uncomfortable for you,” she says. “I don’t really know what to say here.”

  “No, I don’t either.”

  Brenda Canty gives me a wide-eyed expression, a smile that seems to offer an apology. It’s an open, Midwestern face that helps me understand how a person might decide to pitch irony altogether and buy a house and a lawn tractor and prepare to weather the last two-thirds of their life with someone capable of that look. This is a hell of a quagmire that Jamie’s created, an ungainly mess with more potential victims than solutions. I asked him awhile back if he had an exit strategy. He didn’t. Just a series of ill-defined hopes and ambitions, and a vague desire not to see anyone hurt, which is all well and good. But it’s a bad situation, and I can’t help but feel that by bringing me here he’s made me a p
arty to it. Not that I can hold that against Brenda. She seems like a very decent person who was open to the idea of love and happened to have the rotten luck of finding it with a married man.

  Jamie comes crashing back out the screen door. Brenda asks, “Can I get you boys anything? Coffee? A glass of water?”

  “Thanks, I’m fine,” I say.

  “Hey, look,” Jamie says, “I guess we should get going. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. Brenda, honey, I’ll bring some tools by later this week, maybe, fix that hole up.” Brenda looks at the ground, kind of paws at it with her sandalled foot.

  “That’d be so wonderful, Jimbo,” she says, and then turns to me. “Maybe we’ll see each other again, then.”

  “Who knows?” I say. “It was good to meet you, Brenda.”

  Jamie blows her a kiss as we climb back into the van. He glows. “See you later, hon,” he calls, then presses the button to roll up his window.

  Decatur is a dying city. I’m looking at the rotted shells of warehouses and silos that dot the south end as we cruise by. Jamie sits silent for a long while.

  Finally: “So, what do you think of her?”

  “She seems real nice, Jamie.”

  “You see what I mean about her not being like Janet.”

  “Well, hmm. I guess. I mean, she’s not your wife, so that’s one real big difference right there.”

  “Fuck you,” he says. “Fuck you, you fucking fuck.”

  This hurts, but not for the intended reason. It hurts because words like that used to roll out of Jamie, used to suit him, his defiant posture, his fearlessness—my brother would swear at anybody. Now he sounds like a father, or a teacher, someone who uses the words just to make sure he still knows them. That makes him old, and it makes me old.