by Jodi Angel
“Sonny’ll be at that age someday,” my mother said. “Right now he just cares about being in his bedroom. That’s it. Just him alone in his room, building things. Isn’t that what you do, Sonny? Put things together?” When I was younger, I had put together models, classic cars, and I wanted to tell her this, remind her that it had been years since then, but she didn’t pause for an answer. “I had to buy him something in order to get him to spend time with his own mother.” She hiccupped and laughed. “I mean, I found him a car, flew us out to pick it up, and I am paying for the road trip to drive it home. The experience of a lifetime. And look at him. Nothing.” She paused while everyone stared at me. “Anyway, you ever seen that cop movie where the bad guys crash that helicopter into the Golden Gate Bridge?” She had both elbows on the table and was leaning forward over her plate so that she could hold her beer with both hands. Her cheeks were pink, as though she had just stepped inside from the cold. “You know, and there’s the car that catches on fire and when the people jump from the bridge they don’t realize that they’re jumping into shark water?” She looked around the table. I picked the dark meat from a small window I had torn in the crisp skin of a thigh. My mother had fucked somebody famous when she was younger. He hadn’t been famous then, but he used to hang out at her apartment and drink red wine and talk about foreign films. Whenever she met new people, she couldn’t keep from dropping his name, even though it had all happened eighteen years ago—a few weeks in the summer—when he was still in college and she thought his lips were too thin to date him seriously.
She drew out the pause longer than necessary to build the dramatic finish. “The actor who played the cop was my boyfriend,” she said.
“Really?” Casper said. “That guy with the dark hair—kinda short, but built real good?” I could tell that he was genuinely impressed, like most people were. “That’s something. It’s like you’re practically famous then.”
The pink in my mother’s cheeks spread to her ears and brightened like the glow of brake lights on wet pavement. “Well, it was years ago, you know, but we were close.” She winked and put her mouth over the rim of the bottle so she could drink from it without lifting her arms. She swallowed and looked over at Casper. “Very close,” she said.
He pushed his almost-untouched plate away from him and tipped back in his chair so that the front legs rose off the floor. His shoulders were wide and I could see hard muscle under his shirt. My mother was watching him, and from across the table I saw all the places where her eyes could land. “You want another beer?” he said.
“I’ll get them,” Ruby said. “I want to go check on Thumper, if it’s okay.”
“You can clear these plates up first. Put the food away.”
My mother stood up and pushed her chair back. She was unsteady on her feet and the top of her thigh knocked against the edge of the table and made the empty bottles rock. We all reached out our hands to hold everything in place, but the table settled and she sat back down. “Why don’t we let them go out and check on the bunnies, Casper? Me and you can clear the table and get the dishes done. I’m very good at washing, and you look like a man who knows his way around a dish towel.” My mother picked up a boiled carrot with her fork and bit into it, then set it down.
Ruby sucked in her lower lip and started gathering the silverware from around her plate. Casper held his balance backward in the chair and was quiet. Finally he cleared his throat and dropped the chair back to all fours. “I guess that’d be okay for one night,” he said. Ruby let go of a deep breath. She piled her wadded napkin onto her plate and pushed back from the table.
“You can take your own plate to the sink,” Casper said.
I gathered up my things and followed Ruby to the kitchen. I scraped what was left on my plate into the trash like she had done and set it on the counter. She grabbed a flashlight from a drawer and I followed her out of the kitchen and toward the front door.
“Ruby.” Casper’s voice caught us. “Did you forget something?”
She turned and looked at me, and I shrugged my shoulders.
“The beers, Ruby. You said you’d bring them.”
I could see her wince in the darkness. “Sorry,” she yelled. “I’ll get them right now.” She handed me the flashlight. “Wait for me,” she said.
I leaned my weight against the arm of the couch and looked at the bare walls. There were picture hooks but no pictures. Casper’s voice carried through the room. “So I see them, you know, five or six of them sittin’ on the tailgate of this pickup truck instead of working like I was paying them to do, and they got the engine running, burning up the gas so in case I show up, one of them can jump in the front and act like they were just finishing up with a load. So I just let them keep sitting there, you know, I don’t say nothing. I just creep around to the front and slide onto the seat and I put the truck in gear really gentle, so they can’t feel it, and then I hit the gas as hard as I can—I mean hard enough to put my boot through the floorboard almost, and that truck just shoots right out from under them. All of ’em hit the ground, ass over teakettle, you know? Rolling through the dirt. Busted one guy’s lip pretty good . . .”
My mother was laughing so hard she could barely catch her breath between words. “You’re terrible, Casper, I love it. That’s too much.”
I didn’t have to look at my mother to know that she had her hand gripped to Casper’s arm while she was laughing, her fingers pressed into his skin.
We had been around the table for what seemed like hours, long enough for the sun to set and throw the evening into night, and when we were outside, Ruby took the flashlight and aimed the beam toward the garage. The night was cool, but not cold, and I could hear crickets all around us, chirping in different pitches like an orchestra tuning up before a show. I could smell the dampness again, but it was stronger, as though my face was pressed against ground. The sound of the crickets muffled the crisp shift of gravel under our shoes. The weak light from a bulb above the garage shined across the hood of my car, but otherwise it was dark and useless in the driveway.
“I like your car,” Ruby said. “Is it really yours?”
I thought about my mother’s overexcitement when she told me that she’d bought the car for me and we were going to fly out and pick it up and drive it home—a real road trip, both of us together and on our own. I had been standing in the kitchen with a glass of milk in my hand and she was talking about what to pack and when we were leaving and how this car was like a dream, and I didn’t feel anything. I just dug a calendar out of a drawer and tried to figure out how many miles we could cover each day and how long it would take for it to be over with.
“It’s okay, I guess,” I said. “I just want it fixed so that we can drive it home.”
We walked past the car and around the corner of the garage. In the darkness the scrap parts were odd and hard to identify. The stacks of tires were humped shapes pressed against the flat wings of unhinged hoods so that their combined shadows looked like giant insects. Ruby pointed the light at the hutches and I could hear the rabbits change positions inside, shift around and come forward to watch us. We both pressed our faces against Thumper’s cage. My eyes strained to see something that hadn’t been there before.
“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I said.
“Here, take the light.”
I held the beam at an angle. Thumper looked at us with wide and wild black eyes, but she did not turn her head away. I ran the light the length of her and we could see her side heaving with her breath, and every now and then it would stop, tense, shudder, and begin again.
“Wait,” Ruby whispered. “Move the light forward a little.”
I pointed the flashlight at the alfalfa hay that was threaded with tufts of light fur, and we saw darkness and something thick like snot. “She’s doing it,” Ruby whispered. “Look at that.”
I pushed my face closer and then I saw it, something wet moving the green stalks, a tiny paw with nails so thin I
could see through them. The newborn rolled and writhed like a worm pulled from under a rock. It looked like a fat severed finger under the light. Its head seemed too big for its body and its eyes were shut tight with its tiny ears flat against its head. It was hairless, naked, pink, bloody, and blind.
“What’s wrong with it?” I said.
“Shhhh, I think there’s another one coming,” she said.
Thumper’s side heaved and strained and tightened. There was more blood, and the mucus. I looked away. “They’re deformed,” I said. “There’s something wrong.”
Ruby stood up. She was smiling. “That’s what they look like,” she said. “They get hair later, and their eyes open, too. Haven’t you ever seen something get born before?”
I pointed the flashlight at the ground and we stepped back from the cages. “No, I guess not,” I said.
“Well, all babies are different when they come out, just like us. They change as they get older.”
I started walking around the edge of the garage back toward the house, but Ruby took my arm and pulled me toward the tall sheet-metal door that was open wide enough for us to step through sideways. “I don’t want to go back yet,” she said. “I want to wait until Thumper is done.” The breeze caught stride and I shivered. “We can sit in there for a while.” She pulled me through the opening in the garage door and what little light there had been was suddenly cut to nothing.
Ruby took the flashlight from me and pointed it at a couple of milk crates that were turned upside down on the floor. We walked over and sat on them. I could smell oil and grease and sweet gasoline. There was a window in the wall and after a few minutes my eyes adjusted and I could see shapes in the darkness. Ruby turned off the flashlight.
“Casper is out here most days,” she said. “This is where he spends all his time.” Her voice echoed in the small building.
“He works on a lot of cars, I bet. Stays pretty busy, huh?”
Ruby cleared her throat and I could hear her shoes scrape on the cement floor as she shifted her weight. “He hasn’t worked on a car in a long time,” she said. “A really long time.”
I waited for her to say something to change that statement, but when she stayed quiet I shook my head a little and turned so that I could try to see her. “Wait a second. I thought he was a mechanic. That’s what he said.”
“Oh, he was a mechanic. Now he just works on this.” She pushed the button on the flashlight and suddenly I could see a lawn mower in front of us, its engine split open, the parts pulled free and dangling like guts. The light went off again and my eyes could still see the negative image of the lawn mower in the dark.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Well, it’s not the whole lawn mower that he works on. It’s just the carburetor. He keeps it over there on the workbench under the window, and he sits out here with a stopwatch so he can time how fast he can take it apart and put it back together again.” I could hear her thumb rattling the switch on the flashlight but she didn’t push it hard enough to turn on. “When he was in Vietnam, they used to do it with a gun, you know, take it apart, lay out the pieces, and see how fast they could put it back together. Now he does it with a carburetor.”
I tried to imagine Casper out here in his dirty jeans and unlaced work boots, clicking the button on a stopwatch so he could beat his best time.
“He was in Vietnam?” I said.
“That’s where he got his name. He says he was like a ghost.” Ruby set the flashlight in her lap. “He is still like a ghost, I think,” she said. “Sometimes I wake up at night and he’s standing in my room, against the wall by the door, and I never heard him. Even when he walks up to the bed, I don’t hear him, and I even try to hold my breath, but there’s nothing.”
I tried to picture Casper’s dark shape in my bedroom, and I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up a little. “Can I ask you something?” I said. “Where’s your mother?”
Ruby was quiet for a minute. Through the window I could see thin clouds cross the moon. “She left,” Ruby said. “About six months ago.”
“Where’d she go?”
“She never told me.”
“Really?” I said. “Don’t you miss her?”
“A lot,” she said. “But if I need to, I think I can find her. She once told me that if something bad happens, I should walk down the road toward town and find the bus.” Ruby paused and in the half darkness I could see her tuck her hair behind her ear. “She showed me a picture of the bus, the one with the grey dog on the side. And she told me I should catch the grey dog and ride until I got to the first town that starts with an L.” She looked straight at my face without blinking.
“Wait a second,” I said. “So you take a bus and get off at a town that starts with the letter L, and you think you’re going to find her? I mean, you don’t know which bus or which direction to go. That’s impossible.”
I felt Ruby’s hand on my jeans, just above my knee. She leaned in close to me so that I could smell her breath, buttery with dinner’s potatoes. “The point is to leave, Sonny. First I leave here as fast as I can, and then I can be free to start looking.”
“So why did your mother leave you in the first place?” The hand felt warm on my leg.
“Because maybe something bad happened, and she had to go.”
I thought about that for a second, but her hand was distracting me. “Did something happen with her and your dad?” My own father had left years ago to be with a dark-haired woman he’d met on a layover in Vegas.
“Casper is my stepdad,” she said. “My real dad died when I was a baby.”
We were both quiet for a while. I listened to the wind outside as it tried to force its way in. “Can I ask you something?” she said. “Have you ever done it?”
I laughed suddenly and choked on my own spit so that I couldn’t answer until the coughing stopped. “No,” I said. “I’ve never done it.”
“Casper thinks that I’ve done it,” she said. “I haven’t, but he doesn’t believe me. He’s always looking at me funny, you know, watching me. And I get in trouble for everything. I can’t help it. I’m worse than Boone, but he won’t ever come back anyway.”
“Your brother? I thought he was coming out here to fix my car? That’s what Casper told us.”
“Boone won’t speak to Casper. He hates him.”
“Then how is somebody going to fix my car? Your dad . . . Casper, whatever, he said he can’t fix it, but Boone can, and he was calling him all night and he said that Boone would probably be here in the morning.” I realized my voice had risen to a whine and I forced myself to stop talking.
“It’s not true,” Ruby said. “Boone won’t ever come back. Casper says that Boone is weak and that’s why my mom always favored him. Casper says that maybe Boone is queer, you know, and that’s why he ran off.” I could hear the sound of metal rubbing metal outside in the wind. “Boone put a lock on the inside of my bedroom door before he left. I don’t use it, but Boone told me maybe sometime I should.”
I took three deep breaths of fumes and closed my eyes. All I could see was a dark blank wall and changing shadows and my broken car outside. “If Boone really isn’t coming, I guess we’ll have to figure something else out tomorrow,” I said. “We can get a tow into town.”
Ruby’s hand moved higher on my thigh. “It’s been kind of nice to have you and your mom here, though. It’s been really good.” Her small bony fingers squeezed at my jeans.
I wanted to tell her that when I was eleven, I heard my parents having sex in the middle of the night, and it was a terrible sound that I will never forget—worse than crying, and empty, and sad. I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard and started throwing our dinner plates against the floor, as hard as I could.
“Maybe we should go check on Thumper,” I said. I stood up and her hand slid from my leg. “It’s getting late.”
I waited near the entrance to the garage while Ruby took the flashlight and went to
check the rabbits. I stood against the door to block the wind, half of me in the darkness and half of me in the yellow light from above. There were bugs swarming the bulb, and every now and then I could hear one hit the glass with a solid-sounding ping.
When she came back, she was swinging the light and smiling. “There’s four,” she said. “Maybe more will come, but right now there’s four. Thumper’s got them all lined up against her.”
We went back to the house, where everything was dark and quiet, but after being outside our eyes were adjusted and we didn’t bother turning on the lights. I thought that I could hear voices somewhere in the back, but Ruby said it was probably Casper’s television, which he liked to run late into the night. They had made a bed for my mother in one of the extra rooms, but I didn’t try to find her. Ruby brought me blankets for the couch, crocheted afghans and a quilt that someone had sewn together from pieces of the clothes she had worn as a baby. She took my finger and ran it over the corduroy from her first pair of overalls. She covered the couch with a sheet and spread the blankets out while I sat and watched her and undid the laces on my shoes. When she was finished, I thought she might sit down and keep talking, or maybe I was afraid that she might, and I realized that we were alone and out of the wind with blankets and a place to lie down. Instead she fluffed up a pillow and put it on the makeshift bed, and then she touched my arm gently, almost like my mother would, and told me that she hoped I would sleep well. When she was gone, I slipped off my socks and pulled the covers around me, suddenly conscious that I hadn’t brushed my teeth, but too tired to do anything about it.
It was the screaming that woke me up before the sunshine did. At first I was unsure about where I was, the strange smell of the pillow under my head and the heavy bulk of blankets did not belong to me. I sat up and everything clicked back into place, except for the screaming outside, which was high-pitched and very loud.