“You sons of a motherless goat.” Arthur now. His Steve Martin impersonation was more impressive than Eleanor would have anticipated. He even executed a dance step, more or less.
For a second there, Benny stepped out of character, addressing Eleanor. “Here’s the part where one of the bad guys says, ‘And who are you?’ You can be him. You can do that part.”
“And who are you?” Eleanor asked them.
“Wherever there is injustice, you will find us,” Benny said as Martin Short, the hero mariachi. “Wherever there is suffering, we’ll be there.”
The next line was delivered in unison. Clearly they’d done this before. Though if Eleanor had to guess, she would say this might have been the first time they had an audience. The first time they performed it for a woman, anyway.
“You will find the three amigos!”
They took a bow. Eleanor clapped. If this had been an audition—and in some ways it was—you would have to admit they’d done a good job.
There was one more thing they needed to do before she left, Benny told her. (It was always Benny taking the lead. Russell and Arthur were probably accustomed to this, and grateful for it. Without Benny as the emcee, this would have been an excruciatingly quiet gathering.)
“Do you want to see something really special?” he asked her. Who would say no?
He took her hand. A little unsteadily, he led her into a small, dark room at the end of the narrow hallway.
This was the bedroom of a man for whom a bedroom is nothing more than a place to sleep: a mattress on the floor with a faded spread pulled up over a single pillow. A pile of laundry waiting to be sorted at one end of the room. A plastic storage crate containing a great many white tube socks. On the bureau was a framed black-and-white picture of a geeky-looking wedding couple—the bride wearing glasses, with a broad bucktoothed smile, the groom bearing a strong resemblance to Russell, a younger, more hopeful one.
There was another picture—Russell with a crew cut, wearing a Boy Scout uniform. He was probably around fifteen at the time.
“You wouldn’t believe all the things our dad knows how to do,” Benny told her. “Astronomy. Leatherwork. Insect studies. Kayaking. Animal husbandry. Archery. Cooking. Any kind of knot you want to make, he can do it.”
For a moment then, crazily, Eleanor imagined herself in this bed with Russell—a place she would never be. She imagined his soft, pale, naked body on the mattress above her. Her hands extended behindher head as he demonstrated a particularly elaborate knot that left her powerless to resist him. Benny and Arthur asleep in the beds in the next room, happy in the knowledge they’d found themselves a mother.
Now Benny led her to a bookcase at the far end of the room, piled high with papers and folders, plastic bags full of receipts, an instrument case that suggested it housed a trombone, stacks of old comic books. More tube socks.
“We never showed this to anyone before,” Benny told her, taking down a wooden box. He set it on the bed as a person might some sacred possession. (A Fabergé egg. The last remaining copy of the Gutenberg Bible. A homemade apple pie, hers.) He opened it.
At first what she saw looked like a jumble of rocks, not so different from Toby’s, back at Cam’s house now, though his collection could not be contained in a single box, or even ten of them.
“They’re arrowheads,” Benny told her. His voice was hushed, as if someone might be listening in and, if so, might steal the precious box. “My dad found them in the woods all over Ohio when he was a kid. There’s two hundred and forty-six in here. My dad says some of the arrowheads in this box are probably five hundred years old.”
She sat there studying the contents of the box. Nothing she might have said at this moment seemed adequate.
“It’s okay to pick one up,” Benny told her. “Now he brings us along to look for more. Every weekend we go on an arrowhead-finding adventure. We never brought anybody along, before, but you could come.”
“That sounds like fun,” Eleanor said. There was no need to tell them, here, today, that she would not be joining those expeditions.
“Someday, our dad will probably donate our collection to a museum,” Benny told her. “The Smithsonian or someplace like that.”
He reached into the box. The arrowhead he chose to lift from the pile appeared to be familiar to him. He probably knew every one. He placed it in Eleanor’s hand.
She wrapped her fingers around it, letting herself take in thesharpness of the stone. She pressed it against her skin, hard enough that it almost hurt.
“There’s nobody else like our dad,” he said. “He’s the best.”
She studied his face. He could not have tried any harder to win her.
Later, driving home, it was the feeling of that arrowhead in her palm that she thought about, the sharpness of the point, every edge chiseled by someone who’d been dead for hundreds of years. Somewhere along the line—maybe after a battle, or a hunting expedition in the wilderness—that particular arrowhead had been buried in the dirt. A few hundred years later—what do you know?—along came Russell and his sons, with their trowels, to dig it up and bring it home and set it in the box with their other treasures.
“You know, some Indian brave killed a lot of deer with this arrowhead,” Benny had told her, with reverence in his voice. “All you have to do is shoot one of these straight into the heart of your prey, and he’s a goner.”
75.
The Advantages of Forgetting
