Here They Come

by Yannick Murphy

  “That’s new,” I say. He’s wearing a hat. The paper kind the boys wear who serve at the fast food.

  “You like?” he says.

  “Sure,” I say. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Same place I get all of these,” he says and pulls on his apron skirt.

  “None of the other hot dog men are wearing them. Maybe it doesn’t say Sabrett. Maybe people won’t want to buy your hot dogs because they think it won’t taste like the hot dogs they’re used to getting,” I say. John sits up.

  “You think so?” he says. “What do you know what says Sabrett?”

  “Fuck, I don’t,” I say.

  “You don’t know anything. You’re a kid,” he says.

  I nod my head. I look at his bloodshot eyes and wonder if it affects what he sees, everything covered by a veil of red lace that his hands can’t ever lift.

  At home, I look in the refrigerator. There’s nothing in it but old lettuce leaves, so old they’re dried to the glass shelf and can’t even be peeled off.

  My mother calls from work. I can hear her typing while I talk.

  “Are you typing what I’m saying?” I say.

  “No, I’m working,” she says.

  “I bet I can make you type what I say,” I say. I say, “Dear Mr. Elbow, renege, please advise, cordially, at your earliest convenience.”

  “Oh, merde,” my mother says, “are you happy now, I made a mistake.”

  “Happy,” I say.

  “I’ll be home late,” she says.

  I dial my father. He’s been missing for weeks and I think maybe he’s come back. I imagine him shopping at Balducci’s, buying persimmons and shiny egg-white baked bread. But there’s no answer. I slam the phone receiver down on the floor. It bounces. I do it again. There is now a nick in the floorboard. I don’t put the receiver back in its cradle. I sit in the chair, my mother’s chair. It gets dark, but I don’t turn the light on. The recorded voice tells me to hang up the phone. Then it finally stops and the phone is now quiet. I look through the drawers in my mother’s table, the one with all the burn marks on it. In the drawers are ripped photos. All the photos are of my mother with her missing arm around where my father used to be, but I can’t find the halves with him in them.

  I dial my mother.

  “I’m at work,” she says.

  “I know, I called you,” I say.

  “I’m working,” she says.

  “Where’s Dad?” I say. “Where’s the rest of the photos you ripped in half?”

  “What photos?” she says.

  “The photos with your arm around him and his arm around you,” I say.

  “I can’t talk,” she says. “Goodbye.” She hangs up the phone.

  “Let’s find the photos,” I say to my sisters. We turn all the lights on in the house. We start with the barrel we use to store old clothes. In it are fishing waders whose rubber is cracked, and dull-pointed ice skates, but no photos of our father. We pull down boxes from shelves in the storage room. Empty cockroach egg sacs cascade around our heads. We shake our hair and scream, but we still look for the photos. We get our brother to help. He can reach the upper shelves. There are pictures of my father in Illinois with his pet collie. There are pictures of France, the wave curl black and the surf break white and frothy, coming up the shore.

  “Look how young,” we say when we see the photos. Our mother waving. Our father with a smile. My brother’s silk robe gets caught in a space heater stored on a lower shelf, it rips from the hem upward, a long gash threatening the fire breathing dragon.

  “Oh, fucking Christ,” he says. He stops helping us. He sits down right away, with a needle and thread and starts to repair. We cannot reach to put the boxes back on the upper shelves. Our mother comes home.

  “What’s this?” she says, she sees the open boxes on the floor, feels the cockroach egg sacs crunching under her shoes.

  “What a mess, clean it up!” she yells. She kicks at the boxes, she pulls other boxes down off the shelves. Things come tumbling out, more photos, more ripped clothes, useless lamps, their goosenecks bent over backwards, switches twisted past their limits, bulbs black and filaments broken. We smell like dust. Egg sacs and cobwebs still shift in our hair. Our mother takes a plunger, dried toilet paper still stuck to its rubber, and starts to hit at us. We run from the room, our hands above our heads to shield us from the blows.

  We take showers. Later we look in on our mother. She is still wearing her clothes from work, sitting shoeless on the storage room’s floor, her pocket book beside her. We bring her bread. She does not want it.

  “Leave me alone,” she says. We bring her a drink made with her vodka and soda. She takes it, drinks a long drink. She wipes her mouth and sets her glass on the edge of a shelf.

  “What have you girls done here?” she says, and looks around the room, at all the opened boxes, their contents coming out. She picks up an old leather glove and tries to put it on but cannot wriggle into it.

  “These were once mine,” she says and holds it up, the shape of her young hand still visible in the leather’s curled fingers.

  “Help me up,” she says, and we lift her by the hand and she brushes off her clothes.

  “What a day at work,” she says and we leave the storage room the way it is and sit with my brother. My mother takes the robe from him.

  “Let me do it,” she says and she undoes all his uneven stitches and starts again, her small stitches sewn from the underside almost invisible when she is done. She holds the robe up to look at her work.

  “I’m incredible,” she says, and she tells us to look at her work of art and we do, and we agree how marvelous, how wonderful a sewing job. I get up and rub her shoulders. She screams in pain.

  “Too hard,” she says.

  “I’m barely touching you,” I say.

  “I know,” she says. “Just stop,” she says.

  We hope that he will kill himself.

  “Go ahead and shoot,” Louisa says to our brother over his wall, as we hear him throwing things and breaking them. He has been trying to get back together with Toffee, but she keeps saying no.

  “I’ll do it for you,” she says through the door. “Just give me the gun.” She turns to us and says she would, she would, under the chin is a good place, and she takes her fingers and sticks them up under Jody’s chin and then my chin and then the dog’s and says, “Right there, bang bang bang.” We fall dead to the floor, all except the dog who tries to lick us back to life.

  I come home from school and lock myself in the bathroom and sit on the floor and read. It is the room farthest from his room and where I cannot hear him breaking things he broke already, breaking them again. But then my mother is screaming and I come running out. My brother has smashed his fists through the glass, ruptured a vein, blood pumping through the air with the beating of his heart. My mother holds his wrist with her two hands, leading him out of his room while he cries, the snot clear and hanging long from his nose.

  Fires burn in New Jersey. Our mother calls us up. “Are you all right?” she asks. We haven’t been to New Jersey, no one was in New Jersey today, we tell her. “Stay inside,” she says, “the smoke.”

  Ma Mère is sick, a blockage in her leg. She sleeps in a chair sitting up, she says there is no other way. We hear Bambi yapping in the background.

  “I cannot walk my dog,” she says. We bring them to the house. She stares at what’s left of the burned-down trees in the empty lot below. She wears a leopard-spotted robe that she clasps with both hands at her neck.

  “I’m so cold,” she says, but it’s hot in the house. “We are the hot little tomatoes,” we tell her.

  The phone rings and she says, “That’s your father,” every time, but it’s never him. There has no been word from him at all. “When you were babies and you still cried after you were fed, he would walk you around the room for hours. He would walk you into the closet and turn the light on, he would hold up sleeves, showing you the pretty colors
and the patterns of the clothes. He thought you cried because you were bored, that your brain didn’t want you go back to sleep because it needed new information. Whatever he did worked. You shushed in the closet. Quiet as a mouse. He was a good father, the best,” she says. Then she says she wants to go down there and points to the back lot below. There is a way through the basement, a metal-hinged thick metal door you can swing open, but it takes strength. My brother helps us, carries her down in her leopard-spotted robe while he still wears his bloodstained blue silk robe. I hold a beach chair. We get the door open partway, enough to slip ourselves through.

  She sits on the beach chair. Bambi runs in the lot, gnawing on old milk cartons, barking at rats through missing bricks in the building’s wall.

  “This is the life,” she says.

  In the evenings we bring her back up. My brother holds onto one side of her and my mother holds the other side as if Ma Mère were still sitting in her chair. Ma Mère grabs my brother’s hand, “Weren’t you going to kill yourself?” she asks.

  We used to hide the liquor, but now my mother says, “Oh, give it to her, just give it to her.” And we do.

  Her leg hurts her more each day. They cannot operate until she is stronger. We all wonder what that means.

  “Give it time,” they say. We don’t know what we are giving time to. At night she moans in her chair and bangs at her leg with her fist.

  “Mon livre,” she sometimes says, and we know she wants To Kill a Mockingbird and one of us gets up to give it to her.

  Some nights I think our mother is talking in her sleep, but she has just gotten up to sit by Ma Mère and speak in French. Sometimes Ma Mère is crying, but through it all she is still hitting the blocked side of her leg. I can hear the steady thump of her fist on her thigh. Sometimes they fight, yell merdes and sacre bleus, and I wish our mother would just walk away from Ma Mère and let her die in the chair with its cushion stained by the beige Cover Girl powder that’s rubbed off her cheeks as she tries to sleep leaning back, the pain making her turn her face from side to side.

  Bambi runs off. He’s gone and we all have to look for him. We cross through the lot with its skinny pale burnt trees and stick our heads down into the basements of the other buildings. We walk the streets in our neighborhood, calling, “Bambi, Bambi.” Our mother tells us Bambi probably won’t work, what will instead is Mon Cherie, so now we are all walking down the streets calling “Mon Cherie, Mon Cherie,” and there is still no sign of the bulging-eyed dog.

  Jody comes home mugged. She was down in our hallway and two guys came up from behind her and held a knife and then they slashed her down coat with the knife before they left her. The feathers are all over and some are stuck to the tears on her face. She’s coughing so much she can’t tell the story and we sit her down and more feathers fly up around her and we wave them away and kneel by her chair and ask what the hell happened.

  After that we are everywhere with the dog. No one leaves the house without her and she goes on so many walks that she slinks away when one of us gets up to leave. I bring her with me to visit John, and we balance hot dogs on her nose and she goes crosseyed and salivates and finally I give her the okay and she tosses them up in the air with the end of her nose and catches them in her mouth, swallowing them whole. Fuck, what a dog.

  John wants me to sit on his lap, but the dog growls and bares her teeth when he gets near me, even after he’s given her all those hot dogs.

  “Don’t bring her again. It’s bad for business,” he says. He makes to hit her with his tongs and she rears, her ferocious bark turning heads from as far away as the fountain, turning the head of the stallion, stopping him up short and pricking his ears. I see his tongue glide over the brass bit, back and forth, as if he wants to swallow it or spit it out, a tic brought on by all the pulling of reins and the jabbing of hard boot heels.

  I signal the dog. Just one hand raised in the air by one of her family, and she knows to stop, to sit and obey. But I still hear a deep growl come up from inside her, like the far-off roar of the subway.

  Rena’s missing weeks of school. The boys all ask me when she’ll be back and I tell them I don’t know. Her letters are about roosters she hears in palm trees at night, their scuttling keeping her awake.

  * * *

  Our brother’s in his room again with the gun. I climb the ladder and look down over at him. He’s got the gun spread across his knees.

  “That’s a small gun,” I say. “Isn’t it?” I say. “Isn’t that the one Grandpa hunted rabbits with? Maybe it’s only big enough to kill a rabbit and not big enough for bigger things. Maybe it’s the wrong kind of gun,” I say and then I get down off the ladder and leave my brother alone.

  If we leave Ma Mère alone in the house, she falls from her chair, on her way to where we don’t know, still wearing her leopard-spotted robe.

  Our mother straps Ma Mère to the back of her chair with brightly colored belts from all our different bathrobes. We think about strapping her head back too, because it falls so often to the side and onto her shoulder or forward when she’s sleeping or drunk, but our mother thinks that would be too cruel. “We just don’t want her to stand up and hurt herself while we’re out during the day,” she says.

  When I’m alone again with Ma Mère I ask her to tell me more about my father, but she’s not hearing now. Her head is leaning back over the top of her chair. Her mouth is partly open and her eyes are closed.

  I find a picture of our father. One our mother didn’t cut in half, probably because I’m in it. I’m maybe two years old, sitting on his lap. He’s got his arms around me, his hands holding the bottoms of my bare feet. I look like any moment I could stand up and he would help me spring into the air and I would do a perfect gainer, a graceful headlong dive.

  I made a few ten-cent copies on the machine at Woolworth’s, using change I found at the bottom of the fountain in the park. For a few nickels and dimes, I can always count on the fountain, where tourists think the dirty, wrapperfilled water can make a wish come true.

  With scissors I cut out the part of the copies that have the image of myself and then I write “missing” on the bottom of the pages. I leave our phone number to call and I also write “reward,” thinking no one would bother to call if I didn’t offer one. I think about giving away the TV as a reward, or maybe even two or three of Jody’s mice.

  I don’t have scotch tape, just band-aids. I use those to hang the signs to lampposts. After I hang up the signs, I go home and sit by the phone. It doesn’t ring. I go out and check the signs. Maybe someone had seen him but didn’t have a pen to write down the phone number so they tore down the sign. If that happened then I’d know I was closer to finding him. The signs are still up though, the band-aids doing a stellar job.

  The doctors say not yet when they see Ma Mère. They take her blood pressure, roll up the faded sleeve of her leopard-spotted robe. They ask our mother what Ma Mère is talking about because she speaks in French.

  “She’s telling you her dreams,” our mother answers.

  “Ask her if this hurts,” they say, pressing on her leg.

  “She says there are things that hurt worse but she has never felt them,” our mother translates.

  When she’s sleeping and I come home from school and no one else is there, I tell her about John the hot dog man. How he lost a tooth and it fell into one of the bins. He rolled up his nubby sweater’s sleeve and plunged his hand in after it, then he said the water’s burning hot, that he now knows how the poor hot dogs feel being boiled to death. She doesn’t wake up and it’s not until our mother comes home that she wakes up and asks in French for more wine or more gin.

  My brother is watching a soap opera and separating pot leaves from seeds with a playing card, getting ready to roll himself a joint in the cardboard lid of our Monopoly game.

  “Fuck,” I say. I turn the TV off.

  “Leave it on,” he says. “Or I’ll beat the crap out of you.”

  I laugh.
“Go on,” I say. I stand facing him with my arms crossed, blocking his view of the television.

  “I’m serious,” he says, but he keeps doing what he’s doing, then tilts the Monopoly cover and I can hear all the little tiny pot seeds rolling along the cardboard.

  “Why don’t you get off your ass and go find him?” I say.

  “Find who?” he says.

  “Dad,” I say.

  Now it is he who laughs. His eyes become slits again, his chest shakes. The blue silk dragon bathrobe slides farther apart on his chest, revealing his smooth skin. He only stops laughing long enough to lick the rolling paper on the joint and seal the pot leaves in.

  Then he says, “You’re better than TV, you’re a helluva lot funnier.”

  “Let me have some,” I say. I’ve never smoked pot before.

  “Like hell,” he says.

  “I wonder where he is,” I say. “Do you remember him ever saying there was some place he’d really like to go?”

  “Turn the TV back on,” he says.

  I just sit in my chair.

  He smokes his joint. The space between him and me becomes filled with a cloud of his exhaled smoke, but still I see him nod his head and then he says, “Only thing I ever heard him say was how he’d really like to get the hell out of this place.”

  “That’s a start, isn’t it? Not to look here first? Just anywhere but here,” I say.

  He laughs again. I can see him laughing easily this time. The cloud from his pot has cleared. “Yes,” he says. “I’ll start looking anywhere but here.” And then he says, “You don’t need pot. Your head’s already fucked up. Turn the TV back on, would you for chrissakes?”

  I do. I’m happy to turn it on. I’m happy to see a scene where a man for endless episodes has been out on a window ledge threatening to jump, and a woman inside cries.

  In the morning our brother gets up early with us. He stands beside us while we brush our teeth and brushes his teeth too, his silky dragon robe sleeves touching our heads as we bend down to spit and rinse. He is going to look for our father.