We heard the Goslants before we saw them: raised voices, emphatic and angry sounding. Then we saw their house: two conjoined mobile homes that sagged in the middle. Someone had tacked on a front porch made of two-by-fours and plastic sheeting, and odd tar-paper-covered sheds stuck out at random angles. Next to the house stood a caravan-type mobile home and a newer-looking garage with two bays, one with the rolling door jammed at an angle and the other open to reveal heaped plastic bags, cardboard boxes, car parts, TVs, broken aluminum lawn chairs, piled as if they’d been flung blindly through the door.
The yard was covered in random scatter: disemboweled snowmobiles, a toppled refrigerator, a sun-faded plastic kids’ minislide and wading pool. Piles of concrete blocks, stacks of firewood, a dilapidated rain-soaked couch, a rusted-out barbecue grill. The ground beneath was a mix of scrub grass and smaller trash. Torn plastic fluttered over the windows of the trailer. A big, shiny pickup truck and a couple of cars were parked up in the driveway.
Two young men leaned against the side of the pickup, one of them looking bored and talking into his cell phone, the other arguing with a very obese middle-aged woman who stood on the front porch, shouting.
“Give me the goddamned keys! I’m not going to say it again!”
One of the young men, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, held out some keys. “Why don’t you come down and get them? Because you can’t move your lard-ass butt that far!”
Off to the side, a pretty adolescent girl, maybe fifteen years old, yelled out in an acid voice, “Bobbie, I said GET your ASS over here!” This was to a toddler wearing only a paper diaper, who was teetering out toward Cat and me. “I said NOW!”
We walked faster, wishing we were invisible. The yard exhaled the smell of mildew. We were embarrassed to witness a family argument, and frightened by the malevolence of the combatants.
The obese woman started down the stairs toward the man with the car keys. “You don’t want to do this, Johnnie. You really don’t want to fucking go here, you little shit.”
Johnnie laughed and tossed the keys in the air, caught them, and moved quickly around the truck as the woman came off the steps.
Cat and I were abreast of the driveway by then, slinking by, looking forward but unavoidably glancing over at them. The young man on the cell phone put it away from his face long enough to stare defiantly back at us. “What the fuck are you looking at?” he snarled.
“What did I SAY!” the girl snarled at the toddler. She had come forward and now grabbed its arm and jerked it so that the kid spun around. She dragged the child screaming back toward the house. “SHUT UP! Or I’ll give you a real good reason to cry!”
Johnnie had gotten into the truck and fired it up, and the huge woman beat on the hood. “Don’t come home tonight, you little bastard. The door’ll be locked and all your shit will be out in the yard.”
“Don’t fuck with my stuff, Ma. Don’t even think about it.”
We were past the place by now, power walking, and couldn’t see them anymore. But a moment later, the truck roared up behind us, too close, and the cell-phone guy made moronic bug-eyes at us as they zoomed past.
We didn’t say anything for a long time. I was nauseated and ashamed: My little paradise had revealed an ugly underside. The Goslants’ lives were deeply destitute in uncountable ways, lived without any apparent control of circumstance. A broken chair was too complex to cope with except to toss into the yard and forget about. A damaged relationship was too complex except to vent rage and frustration at it.
We turned onto my road, the road to Brassard’s farm. When we came to the top of the hill and the view opened, I almost wept with relief. But our comfortable fatigue had become a poisoned exhaustion.
We talked that night, over the campfire, mainly about social issues, demographics, poverty, education. We were less comfortable together. Cat asked me if I wanted to talk about what had happened at Larson at the end—some catharsis—and I told her no. We hit the sack early. In the morning, we packed her up and walked down the hill together. She praised the beauty of the day and how tranquil it was, but the comment seemed rather rueful.
Whatever fun we’d had, the Goslants had polluted the memory of it. I desperately wished that Cat could meet Earnest, wanting to show her a decent, solid, intelligent person, but still his truck was not there.
We stowed her stuff in the car, hugged, kissed. Head against my shoulder, she said, “Honey, you know I love you. And I have no right to tell you how to live. But I think you’re making a mistake with this. I really think you’re doing the wrong thing this time. I’m sorry. It just seems … like, crazy to me.”
She had quoted my words about Sandeep almost verbatim. But she wasn’t being ironic or cruel. She was trembling with apology, offering it with all the sincerity in the world.
I hugged her harder. “I know. I know. Thank you.”
“Just tell me you’re going to take care of yourself,” she said. “You don’t have to do this, you really don’t … Promise me you’ll think about that? Promise me.”
I promised. And at that moment, I completely agreed with her. When she drove away, I felt her absence instantly, a hole in me. Loneliness, the little cringing kind, came
