Closer All the Time Read online

  “Cool!” Junior said. He never saw stuff like this in Baxter.

  The crane gathered itself for another heavy blow. Its ball swung forward and more stone fell, but not nearly as impressively as the tower with the clock. “Je veux voir!” the old man said.

  Junior’s parents got out. They met at the back of the wagon and worked together to lift the wheelchair free, spreading its armrests until they clicked into place. Then Junior’s father pushed the chair along the brick sidewalk. He bent down and locked the wheels.

  “Slide out,” he said to Junior.

  They helped his grandfather onto the sidewalk, where he stood unsteadily, staring at what was left of the stone building. Junior noticed his grandfather’s patchy complexion and the cowlick in his white hair and the way his hands trembled.

  “Can I push?” he said.

  “I’ll do it,” his father said.

  “Let him help, Roger,” Junior’s mother said.

  “All right, then. Come on, Papa. Junior will take you over for a look.”

  They eased him down onto the canvas seat of the chair.

  “Je veux aller!” the old man said.

  Junior leaned against the chair, rolling it along the sidewalk. It was noisy with the crane working and the loaders scooping up stone fragments and dumping them into the shaking trucks. The demolition ball seemed to pause on impact and then push slowly into the stone. He watched closely, shoving the chair along. Behind him his father said he couldn’t believe the goddamn station was coming down today, of all days.

  “Isn’t it always the way?” Junior’s mother said.

  The dump trucks rumbled past, and Junior’s father called for them to come back.

  “It’s too dusty for you, Papa,” he said, crouching at eye level with Junior’s grandfather. When the old man didn’t respond, he put his hands on his thighs and straightened to look at his son. “It’s just that this place meant a lot to your grandfather.”

  Junior squinted at the ruins. “How come?”

  “You’ve heard the story,” Junior’s father stated, and Junior realized then what all this was about: the legend of his grandfather’s return from the Great War, and how he’d met Junior’s grandmother.

  This was the exact place!

  He had heard the story, several times, of how his grandmother, Marie Carrièr, a Maine French from Lewiston, had been waiting for hours in the station, and how she’d stamped her foot and cried Òu es-tu! when her missing soldier wasn’t among the troops that got off his grandfather’s train, either.

  And he’d heard how his grandfather, whose parents spoke French at home, had stopped to strike up a halting conversation en français with the young lady—not wolfishly (he was shy around women), but out of a sort of tribal concern. And of course it wouldn’t have become a legend if things hadn’t gone on from there, so that by the time the next train chuffed up to the station they had managed to fall head over heels in love.

  The tale always ended with the two of them hurrying out of the station before any more passengers debarked, in case Marie Carrièr’s missing beau walked through the door and complicated things at the last minute.

  Junior looked at the battered train station, at the huge clock in the rubble.

  He let go of the wheelchair and stepped to the side, pretending to stretch, angling to peek at the old man, and thought for a moment that he saw something telltale in the worn face, something revealing about the train station and his youth and all that had happened to him.

  But it didn’t last long enough for Junior to be sure.

  A large, flat section of wall collapsed. Junior’s grandfather tried to look, but Roger Lambert wouldn’t move out of the way.

  “What if you fell again, Papa?” he said, “and I wasn’t home to help you back up?”

  The old man leaned the other way and craned his neck.

  “All right,” Junior’s father said. “I’m sorry. We have to go.”

  Junior pushed his grandfather back, noting the soft sound the wheels made on the bricks. His parents helped his grandfather into the car and wrestled the chair into the back. Then Junior got in beside the old man and they set off again, driving away from the demolition and up to the high-arcing bridge, crossing the wide river. Far below them an old barge moved ponderously upstream past the oil tank farms.

  When they got back to Portland the sun had set, turning the water black. Up ahead lights were coming on in the hilly city.

  “Grandpa didn’t like it there one bit,” Junior said.

  His grandfather’s new home was in an old gabled house that was bright and clean inside, and at first, Junior had thought it was nice. But the room was divided by a curtain, behind which another elderly man had coughed and muttered the whole time they were there. Junior hadn’t liked that so much, and neither had his grandfather, judging from the way he’d sat glumly while they’d moved his belongings in.

  “He’ll be okay, though,” Junior’s father said.

  “Once he adjusts,” his mother added.

  They swung onto St. John Street, rode along the foot of Western Promenade.

  When they stopped at the Congress Street intersection, Junior walked on his knees across the backseat to where his grandfather had sat on the way out. He looked at the lot where the old station had stood. It was mostly gone now, and the tracks behind it showed up clearly.

  He thought about the train pulling in and his grandfather shouldering his duffel bag, jumping down from the steps, and walking into the station. He thought about the young woman waiting alone, and how his grandfather had spoken to her in French.

  Then he thought about them falling in love, and hearing the train whistle, and hurrying out so nothing would stop them from staying together forever.

  He thought about his grandmother dying before he was born, and an entirely different sort of feeling struck him. Junior looked at the dark lot and the feeling struck him again, so that it shook him inside. The light changed then and they started across the intersection, but he wasn’t ready to look away just yet.

  He pressed his cheek against the window to keep the old station in view. It seemed high-minded to do so, and he’d never felt that way about anything before. They kept moving and he crawled into the way-back, to make it last a little longer. For at least another minute he watched cars coming off the Veterans Bridge throw complicated shadows behind the Union Station ruins.

  Larry

  It’s my stepbrother, Lucas, who calls to tell me. I’m in Palo Alto and he’s still in Baxter, but we’ve kept in touch over the years.

  Lucas says he has bad news. He says last night the old man went outside for a stroll on the desert but never made it off the boardwalk. Our mother saw the whole thing from the desk in the gift shop: how he grabbed at his forehead, staggered a few feet, and pitched facedown into the zinnias. She called the fire station, and the ambulance got there pretty fast and somebody jumped out and tried mouth-to-mouth, but it was too late; the old man was already gone.

  “So what’s the bad news?” I say.

  “Come on, Larry,” Lucas says, and something in his voice—it’s so little brother all at once—takes me right back. I see the eagle-eyed old man at the register. I see Lucas filling souvenir jars with colored sand. I see our mother at the snack-bar grill, and my sixteen-year-old self, leading a family of tourists out onto the desert. None of that changes my reaction much.

  “Larry?” Lucas says again.

  “All right,” I say. “I’ll come back.”

  Lucas never really understood how it was for me. When I finally worked up the nerve to escape, he actually tried to talk me out of it. I remember we took one last walk on the desert while he gave it his best shot. But the next morning I was gone, just like I’d promised. And I stayed gone, too. Sometimes, talking to him or our mother on the phone, I’d get a little homesick for them and for Baxter, and even for the desert in a funny way.

  But never for that old man. Because of him I kept moving, until eventu
ally I’d put a whole continent between us.

  See, I was the stepson, and he was a jealous man, and that made all the difference. I would always be a constant reminder that his wife had not only loved someone else, but had also managed to reproduce with him. And not only that, but had whelped a pansy, a kid who turned out to be a living insult to generations of steadfast and manly Hurds.

  I understood this on some level when I was very young, and it makes me cringe to this day to remember my attempts to change into someone the old man might find acceptable. It was almost comical, I suppose. But after a few days of walking bowlegged and scratching my privates and spitting, of throwing rocks and cussing and otherwise imitating my far more stalwart stepbrother, I’d somehow always forget myself, and then old man Hurd would catch me skipping down the boardwalk singing “Over the Rainbow” or some such nonsense, and we’d be right back to square one.

  If, indeed, he’d noticed my pathetic efforts in the first place.

  After Lucas says good-bye I call my boss and tell her I’ll need a couple of days off. Sandra is a typical restaurant manager in many ways, but can still muster a bit of humanity now and then, and after she goes on for a while about losing her sous chef with Easter coming up, it crosses her mind to ask if something might have happened.

  “Well,” I say, “my stepfather has died.”

  “Oh, Lawrence!” she says. “I’m so sorry!”

  “We weren’t that close.”

  I carry the phone over to the window, look out at the President Hotel. I can’t quite see the restaurant behind the palmettos and palms along the street, but I know Sandra is already hard at work on the evening’s specials.

  “It’s all about family, at this point,” I tell her, because that sounds like something you would say.

  “Oh, honey,” Sandra says. “Of course.”

  Next I call the theater. I’m only crew for the current production, so that’s no big deal. Finally, I leave a message on Jeffrey’s voice mail, just in case he decides to get in touch. I doubt that will happen, since the last time we were together he told me I had a barren, godforsaken heart and he never wanted to see me again.

  But you never know, do you?

  The next morning I’m in line at SFO. The line moves slowly around stanchions and ropes, and I have time to think about home, about walking tourists around the desert, doing my family job, even enjoying it in some ways: my first taste of performing, after all.

  I remember some of the people clearly, like the man I thought was Bobby Kennedy but who changed the subject when I asked, and the kid from Madawaska who fell down the dune and sprained his ankle, and how he leaned on me when I helped him, and looked at me when we were back at the top, and how his pretty eyes made me feel.

  Of course I hated the feeling, and when I was back in the gift shop I made sure to point out the sissy kid walking to the parking lot with his parents, and to tell the old man how he’d carried on like a baby over a little sprained ankle.

  “You’re one to talk,” was what the old man said back.

  There’s no direct connection from out west to the little Baxter airport, so I have to fly into Portland. It’s three hours, and I’m stiff and tired when we finally arrive. I trudge through the terminal and outside to the curb, looking for points of reference that will feel like home. But there’s really nothing that stands out. People seem overdressed and buttoned up, for April. That’s about it.

  I find my way out of the new airport grid to the 295 ramp. They’ve redone the highway since I’ve been away. It’s smooth and dark now, with mirage puddles on the crests of its hills. I scoot past Portland on the bypass and head up the coast. I can’t find a radio station I like, but it only takes me a half hour to get to the billboard, right where it’s always been:

  COME VISIT THE SAHARA OF MAINE!

  EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD!

  THOMAS HURD, PROP.

  The sign features a camel and two smiling boys. One is a dirty blond, like I was, and the other, dark like Lucas, but that’s where the resemblance ends. We were never that carefree.

  My first job was wiring bumper signs onto the cars in the parking lot. We never asked permission, but nobody minded, and sometimes they even tipped me. I hoarded that money and made more when Lucas took over the bumper signs and I became a desert guide.

  The tours lasted an hour, and I would chatter the whole time about the history of the old property: how it had been a farm, how the topsoil had eroded and had exposed the huge glacial deposit lurking beneath. I would tell how the prevailing winds had spread the sand to the river, and point out the buried springhouse, where you could still lower a bucket and bring up sweet, cold water. I would “find” natural glass, where lightning had fused the sand, and lead them to patches of brilliant colors, where the sand had been stained by decayed plants and, possibly, animals. This very same sand, I’d be sure to tell them, was used in the sand jars that were on sale in the gift shop.

  The sand jars were a hot item, thanks to Lucas. The old man had conceived of layering the colored sand into jars and selling them, but Lucas had taken it about a dozen steps further. He’d figured out how to make little scenes and landscapes that were actually quite beautiful.

  Lucas could do nearly anything with sand.

  I ramp off the highway and head down the Desert Road, passing signs with red Arabic-like lettering: Two more miles to the Sahara of Maine! One more mile to the Sahara of Maine! And it’s exactly one mile later that I round a curve and see the gift shop and the barn and the stockade fence. The fence was there so people couldn’t see the desert without paying. Thomas Hurd didn’t give anything away—not to customers . . . not even to his family.

  He was the sheik in his little desert kingdom, and we were all his subjects.

  “I run a tight caravan!” was his definitive, barked joke. He meant it, too. Nothing was free; wives were meant to serve the needs of the family; kids were to be seen and not heard. He issued commands that he didn’t want to have to say twice, always on the alert for goldbricking or carelessness.

  Old Thomas kept everyone on a pretty short leash, but naturally mine was the shortest. He never locked me in a closet and fed me dog food or anything like that, but it could get cumulative and dicey. I remember one evening when the mere sight of me sitting at the table, waiting for supper with my legs crossed and my hands in my lap—and, I must assume, a faggy look on my face—infuriated him to the point where he yanked me out of my seat and told me to leave unless I thought I could sit like a goddamn boy.

  He would have said more, but I started howling. He’d managed to dislocate my elbow and it hurt like blazes. When they realized I was actually injured and not just being a crybaby, they took me into town to the clinic, where the on-call doctor worked my arm like a pump shotgun to get everything back into alignment—something that still makes me queasy to think about—and where, when the old man lied about roughhousing and I gaped at my mother in outrage, she made it clear with a look that I was not to contradict him. (Later, after I figured out how badly I was being treated—but before I understood that she was a victim, too—that earned her the number-two spot on my shit list.)

  The old man did apologize on the way home, though. He said, “I’m sorry you made me do that,” which is what he always said.

  Lucas and I had long before made a joke out of it: One of us would sneak up on the other and slug him, or snap an ear, and as long as the statement “I’m sorry you made me do that” followed quickly enough, there could be no retaliation. One time Lucas caught me with a titty-twister right in front of the old man, and I remember his puzzled look after I whirled around to slap Lucas and he froze me by saying the magic words. Old Hurd wasn’t an imaginative or inquisitive sort of guy; he just shook his head and said, “Knock it off, you two,” and went back to whatever he’d been doing.

  Lucas and I ran up to our bedroom and shut the door and Lucas leaned against it, laughing through his hand.

  Our bedroom was right
over the gift shop.

  Every summer morning before daybreak the old man would bellow, “Rise and shine!” up the stairway, and we’d roll out and go downstairs, tucking in our Sahara of Maine T-shirts. He’d already be running a mop over the floor, rearranging the stuffed camels on the shelves, counting out the cash drawer. We’d eat our cereal and drink our juice and Lucas would get the bowls of colored sands and the jars and utensils out. I’d sweep the boardwalk and open the guide house—a tiny, renovated chicken coop—and stand ready to meet the tourists where the boardwalk began.

  There’s a scaled-down version of the highway billboard over the gift shop door, and I blow those boys a kiss as I walk up, just for old times’ sake. I really can’t believe I’m back. It seems surreal.

  I open the door and walk past shelves of stuffed camels, little plastic pyramids, T-shirts, and caps. Sand jars and tubes of lightning-glass, rough on the outside, glazed on the inside; SAHARA OF MAINE pennants. Then I reach the end of the aisle and see Lucas himself, sitting at the same old workbench under a hanging light, using a long-handled scoop to drop sand into a jar. He’s grown into a big, rangy guy, a lot like the old man. He glances up at me and his eyes open wide. He holds up a finger, squints, drops another bit of sand. I walk over to have a look. It’s a desert scene, and he’s working on the sky, with gulls. Gulls are easy—just shallow Vs—something even I could do. But I was never any good at the more-difficult stuff.

  “Very nice,” I say.

  “I could do this in my sleep.”

  “So where’s Mother?”

  “She’s been lying down every afternoon.”

  “Did she know I was coming?”

  “I figured I’d wait until you actually showed up.”

  Lucas doesn’t take his eyes off the jar. He pours a fine stream of plain sand into the middle, pushes it around with the hull of the scoop. Then he gently puts the jar into a wooden holder, where it sits with two others, each nestled upright through two holes. He dusts his hands together and says, “Okay. So, welcome home.”