Above

by Isla Morley

  “A Catholic, a Muslim, and a Jew show up at the Pearly Gates,” I hear him start, before he’s even got the door open all the way. Sometimes he brings food, sometimes he brings a book. Sometimes it’s this: a dumb joke. According to him, it’s because I always look so glum.

  Dobbs stops when he sees me poised with the slingshot. He seems more confused than threatened.

  “I want you to unclip the keys and slide them across the floor to me. Slowly.”

  “Put that thing down, Blythe.”

  “Do it!”

  I’ve got the mothball lined up perfectly with his forehead.

  He does as he’s told. The keys slide all the way and bump against my foot.

  “Get back!”

  Dobbs, having taken a step forward, lifts his hands in the air. “You can’t take aim at an unarmed man.” He starts smiling.

  “Don’t move!”

  He shrugs, then he folds his arms. “Go ahead. Pick them up.”

  I now see what he finds so amusing. I can’t pick them up, not without losing my aim.

  I hear him snort. Funny, is it? How about this? I pull back the sling till the tendon in my arm feels about ready to snap. And then I give my fingers the sweet relief they’ve been craving.

  The ball catapults forward, whizzes through the air. Not laughing now, are you! It hits him in the throat. He doubles over, coughs.

  I realize my mistake. I don’t have time to reload.

  He crosses the space in one bound. The slingshot goes flying from my hand. My arm is too late in trying to break my fall. My shoulder hits the concrete floor first, then my head. Still, I manage to grab the keys. The weight of them. If the earth could be condensed to the size of a tennis ball, this is how heavy it would be.

  HE SLAPS A newspaper article on the table in front of me, along with a bar of chocolate. He thinks I’m that easy.

  “They’ve taken Bix Littleton into custody.” When Dobbs is pleased, he preens. He rakes his fingers through his hair, then digs the wax out of his ears.

  I try to concentrate on the outside world neatly arranged in two-inch columns. The article tells about a girl in Lawrence claiming my piano teacher’s son exposed himself to her in the grocery store parking lot. It says the police are questioning him in connection with my disappearance. It says I disappeared a few hours after my piano lesson, four months ago. Isn’t there anyone except me keeping track? Four months, one week, six days.

  “Certainly looks the type.” Dobbs leaves a sticky mark where he taps Bix’s mug shot.

  Mama began sending me for piano lessons every Saturday afternoon at two o’clock not for my own enrichment, but to help Mrs. Littleton when her husband up and died. Other mothers in Eudora signed up their kids for music lessons, too, and off we were marched to the little blue cottage on Maple Street because Mrs. Littleton was not one to accept charity. For fifteen dollars, however, she was willing to instruct even the most tone-deaf child for an hour.

  During lessons, Mrs. Littleton’s son liked to park himself on an old stereo speaker in the far corner. He dressed like a soldier, in army fatigues and boots caked with mud. I was told to call him Junior, which seemed silly given he was a grown man, so I called him nothing at all.

  “You’re a quiet one,” he would say, putting his hand on my head. I can still feel it, the weight of it. Like it could have pushed me straight through the piano bench, through the floor to the basement below. I’ll never forget the last time he spoke to me. He stopped me in the hallway on my way out. “Girls like you don’t stand a chance.”

  Maybe he’s right. How much of a chance do I stand when accusing fingers go pointing in all the wrong directions? They gave up pointing at Arlo as soon as his grandma gave him an alibi, but then they did the rounds of equally unlikely candidates. Mr. Walt Wallis; Gerhard’s friend Jimmy Perkins; the carnie who left his booth at the fair for several hours about the same time I disappeared. The fingers always swing back to Daddy, though. Dobbs says they always will. He feels not the least bit guilty about this. He holds the position that a more vigilant father wouldn’t have let this happen in the first place. In Dobbs’s opinion, everyone’s guilty, one way or another, even the Mayor, the Governor, and the President, who is the Biggest Criminal of All.

  Why doesn’t Dobbs ever crop up on the list of suspects?

  Dobbs has been quiet the whole time I’ve been reading. He can hold a silence as though it were a bag of water. I do to it what a pair of rusty scissors would.

  “They’re going to find out eventually. They’re going to figure out you’re the one who’s kidnapped me. They’ll find me, and you’ll go to jail. You’ll get locked up and then you can see how you like it.”

  He looks at me calmly. In the beginning I would never have dared talk to him like this, but fear and crushing loneliness make a person reckless. Like any second, you might just not give a damn.

  He doesn’t say, “No, they’re not going to find you.” He doesn’t say, “I’m not going to jail.” He says, “I didn’t kidnap you.”

  To define the terms by which I am here, he uses words like delivered and rescued and saved. I’ve developed a physical reaction to those words. Nauseated is how I get. Which is a problem now because he’s started to prepare a meal, which will lead to the same fight about me and my hunger strike. I cannot control but two things down here: when I go to the bathroom, and when I eat.

  “You should be thankful you’re not up there.” He’s round-shouldered, which makes him look like he’s cowering at his own words. He cranks his chin at the ceiling. “It’s only getting worse. Won’t be long before there’s a run on the banks. Washington’s throwing money it doesn’t have at the problem, and it’s not going to make a dime’s worth of difference. You wait. Wait till Europe goes belly-up. Wait till China goes belly-up. You’ll have the president declaring martial law and mobilizing the National Guard, but it will be too late. It’s the beginning of the end, no question. You’ll be thanking me one of these days, Blythe. You’ll be thanking your lucky stars you won’t have to put up with the anarchy. We’ve got order down here.”

  What kind of evangelist proselytizes with a bunch of keys on his hip and a lock on the door?

  “We’re preserving a way of life, don’t you see? The way of life. They’ll look back a hundred years from now and call you a saint. Imagine that. Imagine one day some kid praying to you.” He squirts some ketchup into a pot of runny swill.

  “I chose this for you, granted, but I do believe, given enough time, you would have chosen it for yourself.” He goes on. “I can’t explain it, Blythe; you’re going to have to experience the truth for yourself. I thought with the books and all, you’d have understood by now.”

  By books, Dobbs means the spiral-ring binders scribbled with his mumbo jumbo. He means the tracts he sets out for me to type up for him. The Manifesto, it’s called—the blueprint for the New World Order that he and I, the Remnant, will establish.

  “Anyone in his—or her—right mind would choose this. You ever hear of the Tribulation? What they are about to see up top will make that look like a garden party. Do you want to be preserved or do you want to be part of the destruction? That’s the question. When it boils down to a simple choice like that, it’s not really a choice at all, is it? Thing is, though, the people up there, they’re insane. They just don’t know it. You try talking some sense, and they look at you like you’re the one who needs to be thrown in the booby hatch! That’s how crazy it is. All you have to do is breathe one word about the end of the world and they think you’re some whacko from a street corner with a sandwich board and a bullhorn.

  “But the world is ending; it is blowing up in our faces right this very minute. And what are we doing about it? We’re going out to Wal-Mart to buy stuff we don’t need!”

  As soon as the table is set, Dobbs bows his head in silent prayer before taking up his spoon.

  I watch him. He is precise about everything except eating. Juice runs down his chin. Listening t
o him eat makes it easy for me to swear off food.

  He cocks his eyebrow at my plate. As has become my custom, I push it away.

  When he’s finished his meal, he rinses his bowl and concludes his speech. “I chose you, Blythe. I chose you.”

  I laugh, softly at first, but quickly the sound gathers itself into one hysterical ball. I chose you. It runs away with me, this laughter.

  He reddens.

  I should shut myself up, but it’s all just so funny. Being chosen. Like I’m Mary, the mother of God.

  “You think this is a joke, do you?”

  I nod.

  “Starving yourself is a joke, too, I suppose? Your big plot to overthrow me?”

  I quickly grow sober.

  “How hard do you think it would be for me to replace you with someone else—your sister, say?”

  He leaves the table, goes downstairs. I rush to the center column and try peeking through the gap between it and the floor, but I can’t make out what he’s up to.

  When he returns, I quickly take my place at the table. He puts an old-fashioned doctor’s case on it. When he pulls out a strange-looking pair of pliers with a long screw on the end, I start shaking all over.

  Next, he lifts out of the bag a long rubber pipe. “Do you know what this is?”

  I shake my head. It looks like what Gerhard uses to siphon the water from his fish tank.

  “It’s a feeding tube.”

  I scoot back from the table.

  “Don’t think I’ve overlooked anything.”

  That’s all it takes for me to take a mouthful.

  “Tastes good, doesn’t it?”

  I can’t look at him. I only nod.

  IF I THINK about Mama too long, I lose my way, so I try not to think of her, but she finds her way into my dreams, or in the snatches of a lullaby that runs through my head from time to time. I have to shut her up, and that’s the plain and simple truth. Keys are what I have to think about. Mama’s no use to me here, but those keys—they are everything. I have yet to figure out how to get them.

  The time I’ve wasted. Waiting for them to come; waiting to see if Dobbs is going to skid out of control and do me in; waiting for Jesus. Add up all the hours spent waiting, and what do I have? Nothing! It might as well be ten thousand years that I’ve been down here. How am I going to put up with one more day?

  I am so bored that I have measured out this space in inches. He says each level is six hundred square feet. In total, the space of an average-size house. Of course, I don’t get to use the lower level. It doesn’t matter. To me, the whole thing is a crate. It doesn’t help to rearrange the furniture or set up a little writing nook where my poems are blank pages stacked neatly on top of each other. It doesn’t help to hang my sketches on the outer wall or decorate with the plastic junk he brings from the Dollar Tree just as it wouldn’t help to go putting up paper lanterns in hell.

  I sit on my cot and wait for him to get done downstairs and come for supper. When we are done eating, I will come back to my cot and wait for him to leave, and then I will go to sleep sitting up. When the fluorescents kick on in the morning, I will straighten the quilt and then sit on the cot some more and wait for him to return or for somebody to come or for an idea about how to get the keys to drop into my head.

  I’ve tried writing poems. Nothing comes of it. Sinking sand is how I’ve come to think of poetry. If I write about being in here or something about what I miss from out there, he’ll read it. Still, there is something soothing about a pen. Sometimes, to feel its comfort, I will pick a certain word or phrase and write it over and over again in as many different ways. Tabasco, for example. Or odometer or 100 percent cotton. I’ll flip through the pages sometime later, and, for an instant, it will look as if many people wrote in my book. Sometimes, I’ll write every name I can think of that begins with the letter D for the same reason. Because I can’t do this all day long, I have agreed to type up his notes on the old Olivetti. The sound of clacking bars bolsters me. I like to watch the little bars punch the paper. They can be so fierce. Sometimes, they take their frustrations out on one another instead of the page, and I have to pry them apart. I have become a very accurate typist, but I like it when I make a mistake because then I have to pull the page out and put a new one in and start all over again. I never read the words. It’s always just one letter at a time, click-bang-punch.

  I get out Grandpa’s watch to check if it is time to start cooking.

  Dobbs hears my cry from the lower level. “What’s wrong?” he calls up through the gap.

  “Nothing.” But it’s not nothing. I keep winding it, and nothing happens. I have to sit down to bear it. I put the watch against my ear. Not a single tick. I swallow hard. Grandpa’s watch has stopped at a quarter to ten.

  All those hours spent on a tractor in the hot sun were bound to make anyone loopy, was how Grandma accounted for what Grandpa had engraved. Grandpa argued that, loopy or not, the immortal words of Mr. Alexander Pope were to serve as a reminder that the shady spot out by the oak tree was where he intended to be buried, and God help him—or her—who got the notion that some flowery carved tombstone beside the very people he couldn’t stand in life was better. Grandma thought it lowbred to talk of such things, meaning, the Everley family plot was bought and paid for. When he gave the watch to Mama for safekeeping, he made sure she understood it was his last will and testament. The watch has worn out, but I cry as if it’s Grandpa’s ticker that’s stopped.

  I rush to the Olivetti and quickly feed in a fresh page. Grandpa, I type. Grandpa, Grandpa, Grandpa.

  Dobbs comes up and pesters me to tell him why I am weeping, why I am typing the same word over and over again.

  Because I can no longer carry the words inside me, I tell him. “There is nobody to protect me.”

  He gets down on his haunches beside me. He looks so caring. “Protect you? All this—this is to protect you.”

  To him, this structure is a fortress; to me, it is a monster. It’s not protecting me, it’s digesting me. The air is acid. All you have to do is look at my skin. Cracks everywhere. It flakes off.

  “And I’m here to protect you. Nothing’s ever going to harm you. Ever.” He reaches out to pat my shoulder. It hurts, even before he touches me.

  * * *

  With his head resting on his folded arms, Dobbs looks as though he’s weeping. Except he isn’t. He’s snoring. Dobbs has never fallen asleep down here, not once. I wonder if he sleeps as soundly in his own bed as he does at this Formica table. I am about to make a study of his sleep when something hits me upside the head: This is it!

  Suddenly, my heart starts racing. I start shaking. My thoughts jumble around so that I go to the counter, then to my cot, then back to the counter. Whack him first, then pack? Pack first, then whack? What’s to pack? Just hurry up, and whack!

  With stealth, I move to where the dishes are drying. As quietly as I can, I lift the pot. I get a good grip on the handle with both hands. I tiptoe over to his side of the table. I stand and watch him, just to make sure he’s not faking. I move behind him. I raise the pot. His sleep is even and undisturbed, as though he’s found his patch of peace. Mustn’t think about these things. Must steady my arms. I grip the handle even tighter. It has to be done in one blow. There won’t be a second chance.

  Unarmed, asleep, dreaming of angels, perhaps.

  Do it!

  Are they robbers when they sleep, or do they become again the innocent?

  Whack him, for pity’s sake!

  Perhaps I should find another weapon. One of those scarves he expects me to wear. Maybe it would be easier if I just tied it around his neck real tight.

  The pot. Smash it down on his head! How hard can it be?

  I make my arms go tense. I take a big breath. I lift the pot as high as I can reach . . .

  I can’t.

  I consider waking him. If I could just look him in the eye.

  I put the pot down. This is what I tell myself: I don’t
have the physical strength to knock him out cold. I’d only hurt him, and what good would that do? He’d end up winning again. Better to get the keys. I tell myself this, and myself spits back, Weak!

  The latch on his key ring looks simple enough. I’ve watched him use it a hundred times—one small click and a slight pull downward, and the ring will fall clean away from his belt. With a rag, I kneel beside his boots at an imaginary spill. Only five inches separate my face from the keys, then only four. I slow my breathing and lift my hand, expecting to have to steady it as I did with the pot. It trembles not even slightly now. The tip of my index finger locates the little stainless steel button, while my other hand cups just beneath the cluster of keys.

  His breath snags.

  Dear God, don’t let him wake up.

  He shifts in his seat but then settles. The rhythmic pattern of his breathing starts up again.

  There’s no click as the keys are released. There’s no jingling as my waiting hand closes around them. The only sound is that of victory, and it pounds in my ears. Freedom is clutched between my fingers.

  I draw away from his belt. Easy, easy. Moving onto my haunches, I only now realize how my knees could have cracked. But luck is on my side. There is a meadow waiting for me, a brook ready for a game of chase.

  I’ve done it! I’ve outsmarted him.

  I straighten up. One step backward.

  There’s a shift in the silence. His breathing—has it changed? What is that sound?

  I hesitate, trying to figure it out. And then, it’s all too clear. The clack of his eyes moving.

  It is over. There is nothing to do but wait and listen to his eyes move.

  His arm slides out from under his head and swings across the table. His hand is cupped, waiting.

  His hand is patient.

  I drop the keys in it.

  It closes into a fist.

  His breath comes real shallow, while mine forgets even to sigh.