An Ornithologist's Guide to Life: Stories
Ann Hood
TOTAL CAVE DARKNESS
HE CALLS HER Sweetheart, Darling, Honey Pie. Martha calls him Reverend. Even now, as she watches him stretch out on the hood of his car, shirtless, smiling to himself, face turned toward the blistering July sun, Martha thinks: The Reverend is so damn young. The pay phone is hot against her ear and she smells someone else’s bad breath emanating from it. Martha is sweaty from heat and humidity, sore from too much acrobatic sex. And she wants a drink. God help her, she wants a cold beer, a chilled white wine, a vodka and tonic. Anything.
Six hundred miles from this parking lot, Martha’s mother answers the phone with a weary hello. Massachusetts is in the middle of a heat wave too. Martha knows this. In between sex and free HBO she watches the Weather Channel. The whole country is hot.
“It’s me,” Martha says with forced cheerfulness. “I’m about to go into a cave so I figured I should check in, in case you never hear from me again. You know.”
Her mother lowers her voice as if the phone could be tapped. “A cave! Is that all you have to say for yourself?”
Then there is a silence in which Martha hears her mother thinking: You have done crazy things in your day, but running off with a priest tops them all.
The Reverend lazily wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He is nine years younger than Martha, with startling green eyes that remind her of her childhood cat Boo and a body that must come from God himself: wide shouldered and strong and golden haired.
“He’s not a priest, you know, Mom. He’s a minister. A Protestant.”
The Reverend scratches his balls with another lazy motion and Martha looks away.
“What did I say? Did I say anything about it? I don’t care what you call him,” her mother is saying. “He wears one of those little white collars, doesn’t he? He gets up on Sunday mornings and preaches to people, doesn’t he?”
Martha smiles at this. Today is Sunday, and when he got up with her this morning he was definitely not preaching. Although she had jokingly whispered amen when they were done.
“What are you thinking?” her mother says. “You’re a grown woman, Martha. Over forty—”
“Just over forty,” Martha reminds her, feeling cross.
“And you take off with him for three weeks—”
“Two! Almost two.”
“And everyone knows the two of you are not off praying together.” Her mother’s voice grows weary again as she repeats, “What are you thinking?”
Martha asks herself the same thing. She had been gripped by an urge to call home after all these days away as if this simple act of reaching out would make everything different. Instead, everything is exactly the same. Her mother’s voice, baffled and questioning, sounds all too familiar. Words like irresponsible and thoughtless buzz around Martha’s head like mosquitoes.
A bright yellow car pulls into the parking lot, and Martha squints at its unfamiliar license plate. She has been keeping a mental tally of all the different states’ license plates she sees. South Dakota? Yes. The faces of the presidents are stamped right on the plate. There was a time, before the drinking took over so much of her life, when Martha could easily do things like name the presidents who were carved at Mount Rushmore or rattle off the state capitals without hesitation. But now her brain is all thick and soupy. She tells herself one more drink would not make it any worse.
As if he read her mind, the Reverend appears at her side and takes her hand as tenderly as an adolescent on a first date.
“Reverend Dave,” Martha whispers.
He smiles at her with his even white teeth while her mother shrieks in her ear. “What? He’s right there? Right this minute?”
The Reverend nuzzles her. So many things he does remind her of her Boo that sometimes Martha worries that she will fall in love with Reverend Dave. She thinks of how Boo used to wait for her to come from school, perched on the low hanging branch of a maple tree at the corner of her street. Sometimes Martha would stop and watch him there instead of turning the corner. She would count—one minute, two, three. No matter how late she was, Boo waited. As soon as he saw her, he’d jump from branch to fence to sidewalk, landing right at her feet.
Thinking of his loyalty and patience makes Martha say, “Oh.”
“Martha?” her mother says, demanding, angry. “What is he doing?”
The Reverend lifts Martha’s hand in his and presses her close, swaying against her body like they are at the prom. He is humming, off-key.