Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  The door swings and he emerges from the shadows, regarding me across the years with that expression I remember.

  –Listen, David . . . Margaret’s back beside me. I can’t speak for Bill, but I imagine he was thinking he and George A. have been hunting several times now, almost every year, it’s become a thing between them. You’ve never gone or shown much interest—any interest really, have you? Now you’ve stopped eating meat. I imagine your father assumed you wouldn’t want the shotgun. Do you?

  Do you want it? When she says this, I feel the way I did the afternoon Bill called me upstairs to read me “Prufrock,” as though I’m stepping into ambush. I sense the trip wire, only I can’t see it. Because the answer should be, No, I don’t, let George A. have the shotgun if it makes him happy. What’s the shotgun but an opportunity to shed another material attachment to a past I’ve left and don’t believe in while being generous to my sick brother? But the answer isn’t No, it’s Yes, I want it, only if I say it, then I’m the one extinguishing the light in George A.’s eyes. If I say no, though, if I let George A. have the shotgun . . . what then? Something just as bad or worse, only I can’t parse it. My head is swimming, I feel alarmed and curiously sleepy, as if I don’t know where I am or really even who I am and the sensation is familiar, I’ve been here many times before between the mirrors, and the look in Margaret’s eyes, the look of grievance.

  Under the impasse and the turmoil, a younger voice I can no longer hear is crying out inside me. Don’t let him do this to me. Don’t let Daddy take the shotgun from me, Mama. Pa gave it to me, not to George A., not to you or Genevieve or Nanny, Bill stole it, it’s the theft, you see, I can’t abide it. Don’t pretend that it’s okay or tell me I’ll understand it when I’m older. Bill never apologized for Boston. He invited me to Mattamuskeet and when I refused he took George A., and now, because I wouldn’t go to Henderson, he’s giving my one treasure to my brother, all I have left from our first world before it sank beneath the ocean. And his gift to George A. is a message to me also, Fuck you, David, because I never forgave him because he never admitted that he hurt me, and if you let this happen you’re complicit and forcing me to choose between extinguishing George A.’s happiness or consenting to my own violation.

  At twenty, I can’t parse what’s happening, and Margaret doesn’t understand it either, so I’m not going to ask her for her help and she’s not going to offer. Everything that matters now is unfolding in the underwater portion of the iceberg, below awareness, while on the surface Margaret sits regarding me with a concerned, bemused expression, as if to say, Your brother hunts, you don’t, why not let George A. have the shotgun, as if to say, Why are you so angry, David, why can’t you let bygones be bygones the way in this world we all have to, darling?

  And the portraits of the Manns look down, and Pa’s copied portrait, as we sit at the table she had copied because she couldn’t bear to yield it to her sister.

  –I have to go, says Margaret. Go see him, go see George A., you two work it out like brothers. I know you’ll do the right thing. I swear, your father. I wish I could protect you.

  I know, go, Mama . . .

  Our old agreement, iteration after iteration, back into the past and forward to the future.

  Margaret leaves me staring at the candles in the sconces, wondering why tall, new things must be touched with ruin before they ever hold a light and throw it.

  And now I’m pushing through the swinging door, sleepwalking down the hallway. In the den, there’s Christmas music playing, “Up on the Housetop” by the Jackson 5. I’m walking toward the music, and here’s the tree, decorated with white lights only and no tinsel, and all the generations of ornaments—Margaret’s ornaments, and her share of Nanny’s, and Nanny’s share of her mother’s, another Margaret—and the bay window is black and the tree lights twinkle there like stars in deep space, like the Mystic Bridge reflected in the hotel windows once upon a time in Boston.

  Through their reflection, through my own, I see George A. on the patio outside, at the glass-topped table, under the floods, poring over his work like a jeweler with his loupe. A cigarette smokes unattended in the ashtray at his elbow. On the table lies the gun with its twinned barrels of brownish-blue Krupp steel. As I watch, he withdraws the cleaning rod from one of them, removes the brass-bristled brush, screws on the mop and moistens it with solvent, Hoppe’s 9. Pinching his cigarette between thumb and index finger, he takes a wincing puff and shoves the rod back in the bore.

  He has on his black-and-red-checked overshirt and the Red Man hat with sweat stains, and by now he’s put back twenty of the fifty pounds he lost and has begun to grow a beard, his first. Last weekend or the one before, when Margaret looked at him across the room, I saw her expression darken and then brighten as she said, I wish you wouldn’t hide that handsome face! At this, George A. grinned a grin of happy illegality, for me his signature expression, like a three-year-old caught out at some misbehavior he knows his mother finds more charming than compliance. What I most notice in this moment, though, is the extremity of George A.’s posture. He’s hunched so low over the table he’s almost lying on it, and his feet—he’s wearing brogans and is up on tiptoe, his heels against the chair’s metal uprights. He’s like a drawn bow from which the arrow is about to fly, and perhaps it’s the cold that makes him hold himself in this tense pose, but I fear it isn’t.

  –Hey, man.

  He looks up.

  –Ho ho ho.

  –Ho ho ho yourself. What are you doing out here in the cold?

  –Marge doesn’t want me stinking up the place.

  –So, what, she has you camping out out here now?

  He reaches for his cigarette.

  –She lets me in for meals and after dark.

  I drop my eyes toward the gun and bring them back to his.

  –Remember this? he asks in a way that strikes me as nervous and preemptive.

  –I do, actually.

  –Daddy gave it to me for Christmas.

  –Dad did.

  –He sent you something, too.

  I’m not much interested in what Bill sent me.

  –Can I see?

  When I reach toward the Fox, George A.’s face clouds and he grips the gun more tightly for an instant before pushing it reluctantly in my direction.

  –Don’t get your fingerprints on it, okay?

  –I just cleaned it, he adds in answer to the look I give him.

  The gun is heavy, heavier than I remember. The trigger guard and plate are sterling, as elaborately engraved as a scepter with vines and leaves I think must be acanthus. The central scene depicts flying doves, a pair against a trinity of mountains like the Urals in the background. It was the best thing, I admit it. I was selfish when I chose it; I didn’t give a moment’s thought to George A.’s or my cousins’ feelings, and what but accident of birth entitled me to take the best thing?

  Now George A. hands me a grocery bag, the top edge soft as chamois from refolding.

  –What’s this?

  –Open it.

  Inside is a faux-leather case. When I unzip it, black against the ivory fleece interior, the Luger.

  The thin gleam of the wire, the click . . .

  –Is this . . .?

  –Daddy said to wish you Merry Christmas.

  On George A.’s face for just an instant, there then gone, the grin, exultant, This one’s for you, DP. It’s like his expression in the photograph the day he beat me in the race to Avalon, like that, only different.

  I feel queasy. My heart is pounding.

  –You see what he’s done, don’t you?

  –What?

  –He’s reversed us, George A. He’s rewarding you for loyalty, for going down there, and fucking me because I didn’t.

  –I don’t know, DP. I don’t really see that.

  –Come on, George A. Thos
e guns were Pa’s. They were never Dad’s to start with.

  –Daddy said Pa gave them to him.

  –Bullshit. He stole them. He went to Woodland Road and went in the garage and took them.

  –How do you know that?

  –There’s no other way it could have happened.

  George A.’s face has fallen now. His brows are drawn in worry, opposition. He reaches for his Winstons.

  –Dad’s a lot of things, David, but he’s not a thief.

  –He stole Nanny’s timber.

  –So he’s a liar, too?

  –You’re telling me you don’t remember? Come on, George A., it was Christmas Eve, Louis and George were there. Pa marched us out to the garage and opened up the cabinet. I chose the shotgun, you chose the Luger.

  George A. shakes his head—answering? or signaling his weary disapproval? I don’t know. He lights a cigarette with trembling hands, and his expression’s tragic.

  It’s Christmas, Dad gave me something special, and you have to ruin it, to turn it into yet another steaming shitpile—why do you always do this?

  And me to him, Don’t do it, George A. Don’t take the gun and fuck me. It’s still right between us—that’s why I’ve come home every weekend and walked these country lanes and why I ran those miles with you last summer—but if you take the gun it won’t be. This is why we have to leave here.

  But George A. isn’t coming. Bill’s offered him the scepter and George A.’s going to take it. Though out here in the future I might wish to alter it with insight, it falls out once again in memory the way it did in real life.

  Did George A. remember that old Christmas Eve and Pa’s assignment? I never got an answer. It’s hard to imagine that he didn’t. If he did, perhaps his memory was different, of going second and wondering why I got the scepter, and maybe George A. felt as aggrieved then as I do in the present. One lifted up and one cast down—that’s the way the world is—is that the deeper meaning of the Cain and Abel story? I didn’t like and still don’t like the Lord’s position. If Cain was a tiller of the field and gave of the first fruits, why was his sacrifice not pleasing? He gave of his nature just like Abel, but the Lord approved of Abel and not Cain, and Cain was wroth and slew his brother. I didn’t like that world and wanted to voyage to another and take George A. with me. Where is that world, though? Certainly not here on the cold back porch at Christmas, as George A. smokes and stares away across the road toward the tree line, where weedy fields drop down to 40 in the distance.

  –So, what, you’re telling me you want it? George A. asks me, as Margaret had.

  I have a second chance, and still can’t say it. Cannot. Am not going to.

  So we sit separate together as the headlights of the eastbound traffic wink through the black trees. I recall a smell now, something inorganic. Gun oil. Hoppe’s 9. And the sound of traffic. You always heard it from that house the way we heard the ocean at Four Roses—like surf that never ebbed but just came on and on, unceasing, toward the future.

  7

  Hey, boys . . .

  And here, in the nick of time, is Imogen our sister not-so-sister to break the impasse.

  –What’s up with you two? Am I interrupting?

  –Interrupt us.

  –Please.

  –Take my wife.

  Im tilts her head and grins at us with Jack’s grin, one eye squinted.

  –I was going to offer you a bit of this—a joint appears—but it looks like I’m too late.

  –It’s never too late!

  –Until it is, says George A.

  –Until it is, I agree, continuing our routine.

  Im supplies the relief, we supply—such as it is—the comedy. Like the Marx Brothers before us, like Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Cheech and Chong—like them, only not so funny.

  George A. takes the joint, cups it, fires up. His big hand now is steady as a rock. He rears away and flicks the lighter shut decisively. From the Titanic lifeboats and Gatsby shivering at the grotesqueness of roses, he’s gone to the Marlboro Man in ten or fifteen seconds.

  –Should you be doing that? I ask him mildly.

  –Probably not, he answers on the inhale, through clinched teeth, and in his black eyes there’s a trace of defiance, even glee.

  A hand in her back pocket, Im gives us that head-tilted grin again, the one she gave me that first night at Four Roses when Alvin offered to forgo the tater, a look of skeptical amusement like she was up for trouble and curious if I had any on the docket.

  After several gin and tonics, wine at dinner and a joint or two of California sensimilla, which she smuggled on the plane ride in her undies, so she told me, she and I decided to go swimming and since we didn’t have our suits we what-the-fucked it and hauled it up the dune and down the back side to the lightless beach, where we went skinny-dipping. Im, more comfortable in her skin than I was, stood up in the wash and slicked her hair back, giving me a frontal shot more stoning than the sensi, and I, trotting out my not-so-true and still not even very tried seduction playbook, swirled my hands in the chilly ocean and told her that phytoplankton caused the bioluminescence we were seeing and that the particular phytoplankton in this case were those called Noctiluca—“Night-lights, from the Latin.” And Im, appearing to be interested or just pretending like so many summer girls to follow, listened to my shy and nerdy and not entirely unstrategic explanation and I cupped my hand and made a fist and let the water drizzle down the front of her no longer masked by sheer white cotton, let the water and the moonlight and my eyes run all over Imogen. And when the waves broke, or when they break now in my memory, they lit up like George A.’s teeth in that grin of happy illegality, which shows up on my face, too, and Bill’s, from whom we got it. And before long Im and I were downstairs in the lair in my twin bed going at it.

  That first wild night at Four Roses started off the summer and the summer was a wild one, and Im and I were wild things. We shattered the commandments in the lair and upstairs in her bedroom and in the outdoor shower and on the island in the kitchen and in the bathrooms and in Jack and Margaret’s bed while they were dancing at the Sea Ranch and pretty much on every horizontal surface at Four Roses and not just the horizontal ones.

  And one day two or three weeks later, I came back from a morning run and found Jack Jr. twirling nunchucks in the driveway in his white gi and black belt and throwing shuriken—he called them “ninja death stars”—zip, thwack, zip, thwack, splintering the garage wall. With a big grin that struck me as a little crazy, his blue eyes magnified and googly behind those lenses, Little Jack said, I like you, but I really ought to kick your ass.

  –Why’s that?

  –Don’t kid a kidder.

  –Look, she’s not my sister, I said, I’m not her brother. Frankly, I don’t see the big deal.

  –The big deal, he said, is my dad’s married to your mom, your mom’s married to my dad, that makes us family.

  –I like you, too, man, I replied, but you’re not my family, your father’s not my father, my mother’s not your mother, and as to Imogen and me, as far as I’m concerned, I might as well have met her in a bar or at the grocery.

  –It’s different, said Jack Jr.

  – I don’t see it.

  –I really ought to kick your ass.

  –Well, if your mind’s made up, I don’t guess I’m going to stop you.

  Little Jack stood there frowning. You could tell he really wasn’t sure what the right thing was under the circumstances. This one wasn’t in the old instruction manual.

  He didn’t kick my ass, though. Instead, he outed us to Jack and Margaret and Jack picked up the phone and called the airline and bought Imogen a one-way ticket back to her mother Molly’s place in California. Im and I, however, weren’t having it, we decided it was bullshit, fucking bullshit, not to put too fine a point on it. So we packed a bag a
nd round about midnight jumped out the second-story window at Four Roses, and Imogen turned her ankle in the sand and leaned on me and limped a little down the driveway and we thumbed a ride with a guy in an old Lincoln convertible heading up to Norfolk with a pint between his legs and he offered us a sip and we declined politely. And somewhere up toward Great Bridge I noticed the speedometer inching toward ninety and then past it and I said We’d like to get out here and he ignored me and then I shouted in his face and he stopped and glared and scratched off and we stood there in the Dismal Swamp and roosters crowed in the distance as day broke and we went on from there, north to New York City.

  I called Eric from a pay phone on the Jersey Turnpike and told him what was happening and he met us in Washington Square Park, beneath the arch, and tried to sneak us into his parents’ place only his mom was wise to us within the first five minutes. She called Margaret, who asked us to come home and was ready to forgive the whole thing, but we said No, or I did, I guess I didn’t want to go back, I guess I didn’t want to be forgiven, Im and I were off on an adventure.

  After we wore out our welcome with Eric’s family, we took off over the George Washington Bridge, hitching into New Jersey where we picked up 80 around Teaneck, starting west toward California. In Illinois, somewhere outside Chicago, we got picked up by two girls in their twenties, one driving, the other sitting close beside her. Catching our eyes in the rearview, the second angled down the mirror so we could see her diddling the driver, who had her skirt hiked up and wasn’t wearing panties. The passenger put an elbow on the seat and turned and said to Imogen, You want a little bit of this? and when Im declined she asked if I did, and I said no thanks.