Now, Grover lay in the shade, his back pressed against the cool sliding glass door. I discovered the bleeding when he licked my hand and left a swath of blood behind, death’s autograph.
I knew if we didn’t get him help soon, he would die. But maybe that would be for the best. Because his life had been no kind of life at all. Always sitting out there on the deck, watching the other dogs inside, through the glass. He wouldn’t have been able to understand why these other dogs got to be indoors and have dinner in the kitchen and come and snuggle up whenever they wanted. He would have wondered why he had to stay outside, even on the coldest winter night. Maybe he even wondered if he’d been bad. Maybe the reason his tail would wiggle so fast it became a blur every time somebody opened the sliding glass door was because he thought he might get a chance to be an indoor dog, too.
Grover couldn’t understand my father’s awful indoor, outdoor rule. He couldn’t understand it at all.
The only thing he ever wanted was to lick a person. And that’s where he got his growth, his cancer, his dead lump—right there on his tongue.
The awful truth was that it might be better for Grover to be dead. For him to not be, than to be always on the outside.
I wanted what was best for Grover, and perhaps what was best was death. Still, I couldn’t let him go. I had to find a way to get him help. And maybe I could make my father understand it wasn’t right to make Grover live apart.
“Dead? We ought to take Grover to the vet right now, he’s bleeding. I mean, that thing in his mouth, it’s bleeding and bigger and worse. It’s bad. I’m scared.”
My father surprised me by giving me his attention. “What did you say? We ought to take Grover to the vet, is that what you said?”
“Yeah, because his lump is worse, it’s bleeding. I just saw.” Among our family photographs was one of me dressed in a jacket and tie, holding tiny Grover in my arms. My puppy, named for the Grover on my then favorite show, Sesame Street.
My father was seated at the kitchen table and now he leaned back in his chair. He cocked his head to the side and extended his hands before him, as though he were shaping something, a bowl from invisible clay.
“You know, son, there are many interesting and important problems associated with the notion of ‘ought.’ There is the problem, which each of us faces at one time or another, of exactly what we ought to do. Then, there is always the problem of understanding exactly what we mean by saying that something ought to be done, and whether or not we make a distinctive claim when we assert that something ought to be done. There is also the problem of determining what kinds of statements are relevant for the support of such obligation statements, and even if any statements whatsoever are relevant for their support. It’s very interesting to consider, how best can we express an ought statement?” He leaned forward and placed the sides of his hands on the table about a foot apart. “People have obligations, and the things which people are obligated to do are concrete actions. Now, as far as our obligations are concerned, we know that many of the things which we consider ourselves or others to be obligated to do are things which are not, and perhaps never will be, done. Therefore, you see, from the fact that a certain action ought to be done, we cannot always conclude that there is a concrete action which is the action that in fact ought to be done. Many of the things that ought to be done are never done. In those cases, it will then be false for us to conclude from the fact that some action ought to be done that there actually exists some action-event which is an action that ought to be taken. I mean,” he chuckled, “did you ever consider the ramifications of such a simple word?”
Grover died.
ELEVEN
MY BROTHER WAS rarely home anymore, spending weeks on Mount October with his friends, only his torn blue nylon tent between him and the wildlife I secretly hoped would consume him. He rode his Honda 750 to Georgia to visit our grandparents, built sound systems for local bands. I didn’t know what all he was doing, but I was glad to have him out of the house.
At least, at first.
For one thing, there was more food in the house without him. And items I personally selected at the grocery store—cake frosting, hot dogs, Devil Dogs—were not likely to end up devoured, their ravaged packages abandoned on the kitchen counter.
Best of all, I was now free to venture into his room on expeditions and search for money and other things I might have missed on previous excursions. The downside to his absence was that I was now alone with my parents, with no buffer between us.
My brother and the chaos that accompanied him had always allowed my parents another channel for their unhappiness. Instead of fighting with each other, they could scream at him about leaving greasy fingerprints on the good sofa fabric, car parts in the yard, or turning his room into a “fire hazard.”
But with him gone so much of the time, their fights soon increased in frequency and intensity, driving me deeper into my solitary world.
And I had a feeling my brother wouldn’t be coming back. If ever there was a candidate for leaving home at an early age, it was he. I was allowed to hate him because he was my older brother and he deserved it. But to my parents, he seemed to stand for all that had failed between them.
Our bedrooms were almost exactly the same size, except there was a small hatchway in the ceiling of his closet that led to the attic. When I thought about climbing into the attic, it was nearly like imagining visiting another country—I wanted to go, but it didn’t seem I was quite ready. I needed to be older, or have certain equipment.
I was cautious of the attic because my brother said it belonged to him and it was dangerous up there, but he hadn’t said why it was dangerous. His warning only made me more curious.
His bedroom was white with a single bed pushed into the corner beneath the window, a nest of tangled sheets and a blanket piled on top. A soiled pillow was punched into the corner, the case long gone. There was a desk in there, a dresser taller than me. Beside his bed was a small table that supported a lamp.
The carpet was gold but you couldn’t see the actual nap because the whole thing was covered with transistors, tiny bolts and screws, melted rivulets of long-dried solder. There were glass vacuum tubes extracted from old radios, clippings of wires in all colors, quarters, dimes, half-dollars with Kennedy’s chiseled profile on the face. Discarded clothing was strewn throughout the room, along with magazines, books, manuals, instructions, warnings.
It was a captivating room, new on every visit, stuffed with electronic components, bullets, keys, mechanical pencil leads, various clips, drill bits, most of a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle engine, the silver wreath crest from the hood of a Cadillac.
He would have had a conniption fit if he’d seen me rummaging around on his carpet, but he wasn’t home, was he? And what that filthy billy goat of a brother didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, was my feeling.
I always found something new, something that could be taken and saved as an amulet or charm, fashioned into jewelry with just a length of black rawhide cord.
There were things in here I could bring to school to show people, eliciting gasps or, even better, a low-voiced, “You shouldn’t have this.”
Once, in his dresser, I found a box of silver dollars. I pulled each coin out of its little plastic envelope then dumped them all into an old sock. Almost forty coins, the most money I had ever had in my life. I carried the sock with me to the mall and spent all the money on candy and magazines, records, and a mood ring. At one store the clerk asked me, “Are you sure you want to spend this? This isn’t just a dollar, you know, it’s an old coin, it’s valuable. You could start a collection.” He held it out to me so that I could take it back but I said, “No, that’s okay. I have lots of them.” He shrugged and dropped the rare, uncirculated coin into the register.
The summer of my tenth year my brother stayed away longer than he ever had before. He was missing for weeks. When the wind blew the screen door open and held it like a breath and before slamming it shut, I would run to the door, ce
rtain he was finally home and suddenly very excited about it.
THE PSORIASIS THAT covered most of my father’s body was angry, blazing on his skin. Patches of silvery, flaking skin, raw and meat-red underneath, expanded. Islands of rash merged, creating whole continents, until his arms and legs were covered completely, as well as his chest and neck.
Only his face was spared. A small patch behind his left ear threatened to metastasize and overtake even his features.
Despite slathering himself with lotion, blood continued to soak through his clothing making him look stabbed, wounded. There were actual piles, mounds of scales on the floor beside the bed each morning. When my mother peeled the fitted sheet away from the corners of the bed and snapped it tight, a blizzard of scales filled the air.
Arthritis inflamed my father’s joints, especially his knees. Fluid gathered there, stretching the skin of his kneecaps so that they were swollen, tight, and polished. He winced in pain when he walked. His pain was endless.
I wondered if psoriasis would one day consume my body. Unstoppable, disfiguring, ruinous. At night I prayed to be spared. Don’t make me like him, PLEASE.
My mother wrote. Closed away inside her office across from my bedroom. She even had a bathroom in there, a shower stall filled with boxes of her papers. She was self-contained.
My mother’s typing was ceaseless. The machine was famished. She fed it pages of onion skin paper, and it spit them out covered in text. A bell sounded at the end of the far right margin, then a swift ker-chunk, as the electric, automatic carriage return engaged, beginning a new line.
On her desk, empty marmalade glasses and a coffee mug with a broken handle were filled with pens and pencils. The rolling, constant clacking, the bell sounding every few seconds, the force of the carriage return so powerful that it shook her desk, the floor, the house.
HIGH IN THE black sky above my head, astronauts from the United States and Russia met in space. I watched the sky and looked for them. I imagined them floating toward one another in their plump, air-filled suits, hands outstretched for a formal handshake.
I was worried about nuclear war. I’d heard the phrase nuclear winter and imagined a blizzard of gray ash; black icicles hanging from the branches, breaking, falling, spearing small animals in the snow.
Russia was unknowable to me, but the name sounded jagged, like teeth on a saw blade. “Some general over there could push a button and that would be it,” my father had said.
I imagined a button the color of our house, the color of dried blood. A finger poised inches above it, trembling with anticipation. When I pictured that finger, the nail was pitted, like my father’s.
I hoped the astronauts, five all together, would make friends and the Russian finger would move away from the button, and scratch an ear instead.
My stomach hurt. I either couldn’t go to the bathroom or couldn’t stop.
I imagined the astronauts smiling behind their reflective visors. I imagined one of them turning back to look at Earth and winking.
I stood outside on the deck, careful to watch my step because the rot had spread farther and so many of the boards were soft—you could fall right through. I held my father’s heavy binoculars up to my eyes, working the focus dial with my index finger. I could see the moon, blue-white and swirled with shadows, rutted with mystery. But I could not see the astronauts. Unless the astronauts were floating in the sky exactly above the rotting deck, I would have no hope of seeing them, because our house was surrounded by tall pine trees pressing in on all sides.
I slid the binoculars off the moon and scanned the sky. Even the stars were just luminous specks, the resolving power of the binoculars deeply disappointing. I’d begged my father for a telescope but he’d said, “That’s too expensive. You can see pictures of the universe in the encyclopedia.”
But I didn’t want to look at flat pictures. I wanted the living sky.
I asked my father, “What is the universe? How large is it?” And he told me, “It goes on forever. It’s infinitely large.” He drew a figure 8 on its side and called it “infinity.” I turned my head to the side to right the 8 and tried to connect this number with a sky so large it had no end.
That was interesting. How could something have no end? And if it had no end, where exactly did that leave us? On little Earth? I wasn’t sure I liked this endless sky business.
My father said, “The universe is always expanding, getting larger every second.”
“But what’s it expanding into?” I asked, not hiding the alarm in my voice. That the very sky above me was expanding, that everything was expanding, made me feel a sudden and powerful sense of dislocation. As if I, and not the astronauts, were floating.
If you could make it to the very edge of the universe, just before it expanded, would you face a barrier? Would you bounce back away from it, like walking into a rubber wall? What did the edge of the universe look like? At the point where it met with the nothing?
He replied, “Son, hush. Why are you asking all these questions?”
Because I had to know.
I ASKED GOD, Please make the astronauts be friends. Please don’t let there be a nuclear war. PLEASE.
I prayed often and I prayed hard. In movies and on television, I’d seen children clasp their hands together into a steeple beneath their chins and chant, “God bless Mom and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa.”
I did not steeple my fingers.
Instead, I tried to make my head empty, hollow, and then I prayed by speaking words, whispering them with my mind.
I’d always felt that God was a watchful, interested presence in my life. A friendly voice that sometimes asked, Are you sure you want to jump off that boulder? Are you absolutely sure? The voice warned through suggestion, asking me to ask myself again if what I was doing was the right thing to be doing. But it never scolded me. God never punished.
God, I felt certain, did not mind that I didn’t press my hands together to pray. I was casual, but I was sincere.
I knew that God existed as the Correct Answer inside my chest.
I often watched Oral Roberts on television and wanted to call and give him money. My mother never allowed this. I wanted to give him money because I wanted him to mention my name on TV. Even though Oral spoke of Jesus and Sin and Forgiveness, it never occurred to me that he was speaking about God, that same voice inside me that cautioned me against pouring hot water on my brother’s head when he was sleeping. The voice inside me, I knew with certainty, would never ask me to fork over some cash.
To me, Oral Roberts was more related to Jerry Lewis and his Labor Day telethon, which I watched every year, screeching with excitement as the numbers climbed into the millions of dollars, caught up, entirely, in the mania of the moment and all those glorious dollars.
On religious shows like The 700 Club, viewers called in and asked for favors. They asked for money, they asked for miracles. I listened to their pleas with sadness. Why did these people have to call a television show to ask for favors, if God was always with me, even when I was alone in the woods?
I glanced inside and saw my parents sitting in the living room, my father in his rocking chair, my mother on the sofa. Though she’d closed the sliding glass doors, I could hear her screams through the glass. “Bastard,” she shouted. “Coward.” Fragments of hate, that’s all I could hear. Nothing from my father. My mother’s face glistened with a sheen of perspiration as she worked herself into an athletic rage.
I let the binoculars hang by the strap from my neck and watched my parents, thinking, They are everything I have. Maybe that’s why it gave me a curious feeling of hope to look at the sky, to try to feel its magnitude. It was proof that there was so much more out there somewhere.
I studied my father; the slender, almost feminine fingers, so intensely disfigured, as he raised the cigarette. His tongue slipped out briefly to wet his lips before he placed the cigarette between them, drawing the smoke inside his body, and defining his cheekbones by plunging the
hollow of flesh beneath them into shadow. My mother had teased him once when we were at the Bonanza steak house, “John, you smoke just like a woman.” He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray and just stared at his plate for the longest time; there was the very slightest pulsing at his temples. My mother laughed at his pouting. And finally he exploded, “I’d like to just take a shovel and smash you in the face with it, you sorry bitch.” This made her laugh harder.
One day, he will kill her, I thought, watching them now.
Shocked, I gripped the railing of the deck. Why had I just thought this? Why had the words entered my head as though spoken? Was this what I really believed? Or was this just my mother’s paranoia, passed on to me like an inheritance?
Or, was this something I’d known all my life? Was this merely a fact, woven into the background of my existence and therefore, invisible? Until now.
I see him lumbering into her study while she works at the typewriter, her back to the door, to him. I see his thick corduroy slacks, his red-and-black check wool jacket. The ax he uses to chop wood in his hands, the handle resting on his right shoulder, the ax head shining. In one swift, assured motion, he brings the ax down the very center of the top of her head, splitting her skull in two. The halves fall away from the blade. He reaches down and unplugs the typewriter. He walks into the living room and mixes himself a drink. Carries it downstairs. Sits, again, in the dark before the television to watch college football, Florida playing California. Without saying one word, without smiling or making any display of excitement or favor, he roots for Florida, being from the South. Looking at him, you’d never know which team he preferred. You’d never know he killed his wife.
Without realizing it, I’d backed away from the sliding glass doors and my fighting parents in the living room. A cluster of pine needles brushed the back of my neck, making me flinch. Each year, the trees grew larger, fuller, their branches advancing, hanging heavy over the deck. Standing outside, I saw my father rise and walk across the room to his bottle.
A Wolf at the Table Page 11