Double

“No, just talk you into joining the party.”

“I’m not in much of a party mood.”

“I can understand that.”

“She did tell you about the custody fight, though.”

“A couple of weeks ago, on the phone.”

“Is that why you came down here?” His responses to those around him had become the self-centered ones of a person in pain.

“No, I came down for a convention of private eyes.”

He laughed harshly. “That must be something to see.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can picture you all, comparing notes on the best place to buy your deerstalker hats.”

I smiled faintly. “I think that was Sherlock Holmes. Private eyes are supposed to wear slouch hats.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Does anyone?”

“Probably not.”

We were silent for a moment, sipping beer.

Finally I said, “John, are you really going to go through with this custody suit?”

“Yes.”

“Do you stand a chance of winning?”

“Maybe. I’ve got to try. They’re my kids, and they belong with me.”

“Ma said you’ve been offered reasonable visitation rights.”

He crumpled his beer can and tossed it down the hillside into a clump of manzanita. “It’s not the same thing, Shar. I want to be with my kids every day, the way Pa was with us. I don’t want to see them every other weekend and a month in the summer. I want to be there, to teach them things, to help them when they have problems, not—”

“I understand how you feel.”

“Do you?” He turned to me, and I saw that in spite of his anger, his eyes were still oddly dead. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because you were the smart one of all of us. I don’t mean it as something against you, Shar. I admire you for it. You didn’t fuck up. You got a good job after high school and then you went off and put yourself through college, and then you got another good job. You own a house, you’ve got a life of your own. You never got married and had kids and put yourself in a position where you could lose everything — and everybody.”

“You make me sound pretty cold.”

“No, but you play it safe.”

Did I? I wondered. I thought of Don, and of how I could lose him — in so many ways, at any time. Not being married was no guarantee against shattering loss.

John cracked another beer and took a swig. “A few months ago I thought I had it all. I’d gotten my contractor’s license, bought a house — hell, I hadn’t even had so much as a speeding ticket in a year. I thought it was all together, and then that bitch comes to me and says get out. ‘Get out, you don’t meet my needs anymore.’ Meet her needs! I thought I was meeting them, working eighteen hours a day. But no, I don’t consider her needs, don’t listen to her. There’s no one else, the bitch says, but she doesn’t want me around anymore.”

He wasn’t going to refer to his wife by her name. I remembered Tina, the embittered divorcée at the party the night before; she’d called her ex-husband “that bastard” the whole evening.

“So you want to punish her by taking the kids away?”

“No! All I want is my kids. And I’m going to have them.” He looked off over the canyon, his jaw thrusting forward in determination. “There’s no reason a man can’t be as good a parent as a woman.”

“I guess not.”

“There isn’t.”

“I agreed with you.”

He laughed bitterly. “Yeah. You give it lip service, like Charlene does, and like Patsy did when I talked to her on the phone last week.”

“But?”

“But you don’t really believe it. Underneath, you’re just like Ma.”

“John, all I think you should do is consider what you’re getting into. You don’t even have a job now.”

“I could go back to housepainting, I guess. That’s what I did before I got the contractor’s license.”

“And then what? You’d be working hard, then coming home and cooking, and getting them ready for bed. Helping them with their homework, doing laundry. There’d be doctor’s appointments, P.T.A... Good Lord, think of it.”

“Lots of women do all that. And more.”

He was right. But some people — male or female — are equipped to cope, and some aren’t. I knew my brother; he’d always been a little bewildered by the world of day-to-day reality.

John waited. When I didn’t respond, he said, “Ah, hell, I knew you wouldn’t understand. Why don’t you just go back up there with the rest of them.” He motioned toward the house.

“John—”

“Just go.”

This discussion wasn’t getting us anyplace, so I went.

Halfway across the yard, I turned and looked back at the canyon. The sun was falling behind it, and the shapes of the bushes and trees were twisted and elongated in the shadows. I’d never liked that canyon since our proud black cat had disappeared into it — and I liked it even less now.

6: “Wolf”

Charley Valdene was a character. And then some.