House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  “We could take a ride,” Annie said.

  “Legs, if all I wanted was a ‘ride’ I’d find somebody else to take me.”

  “You didn’t find me.”

  “No, but I’ll tell you what. I thought about you these days. Maybe I was thinking about your sister, getting blown up like that. You’re like, I can’t take any more of this shit, and it’s like you’re waiting for it to happen to you. You never think it will. People get hit by lightning. A tornado picks up a trailer with a whole family in it and drops it three miles away. I saw that on TV. Won’t happen, can’t happen. But all you know is something’s gonna explode. Happens to someone you know means it’s getting that much closer.”

  “You didn’t know Michelle, not really.”

  “She was the sister of a friend of mine. She got blown up. When I felt like it was going to happen to me, I thought of her. So that means I’m thinking of you. I’m thinking before you go off and conquer the world you’re gonna come find me. Next thing I know you’re knocking at my door.”

  “I didn’t knock. I didn’t get the chance.”

  “I knew you were there.”

  “When did you get to be such a spooky little thing?”

  “If you need ’em to survive you’ll grow eyes in the back of your head. I read that in a book. Got any tapes?”

  Annie lifted her elbow off the armrest, which swung open to reveal a compartment. She knew her father kept things in there.

  “Tracy Chapman?” Patty groaned. “We gotta listen to ‘Revolution’ all the way to the Gulf?”

  “Is that where we’re going?” Annie said.

  Twelve miles due south was a small lake where they used to go with groups of friends, and Annie drove them there. Midafternoon, it was still heavy and hot, and the coolness coming off the water never quite made it up to where they sat in the flickering shade of a poplar tree. But there was grass there, and Patty unfurled a small blanket where she set out water and juice and a jar of applesauce and an extra Pamper and some swabs. It turned out Lizzie could walk, and she stumbled around their patch of grass in veering headlong rushes that reminded Annie of drunken boys who would never accept a steadying hand and who were always going to kick somebody’s ass. Soon Patty had reached her limit. She said, “Watch her a minute, Legs, will you? I gotta cool off.”

  Patty stripped off her jeans, panties, undershirt—she wore no bra— and stepped out of her sandals. It was too hot for fishermen, and what had once been a small sand beach was now just mud. The water level was down and the surface filmed with algae, which gave off a dank, clinging smell. Annie watched Patty wade out into it, so white, so boyishly bony and so small and sagging in the breasts that Annie almost cried out in protest. Patty went under, and her little unendearing daughter suddenly sat down at Annie’s side and appeared to be staring out at the water with her. Patty came back up, her whiteness a stark pallor, like something you see at the back of a cave, and little Lizzie began to smile with her mouth wide open and to wave her hands and coo. She appeared to be calling out to her mother. Ma-ma-ma something, sitting like a little sultan robed in her baby fat. Her mother waved back and stepped up onto the mud. Except for some heaviness in the thighs, Patty was all bone.

  Annie didn’t even see the yellows and greens and the dark dot of that daisy tattoo. Had Lizzie taken that too?

  “She likes you,” Patty said. “You like your aunt Annie, don’t you? She’ll never sit still for me like that.”

  Aunt Annie told the truth. “I don’t know why.”

  No sooner had Patty sat back down beside her friend than Lizzie rolled to her feet and began to waddle away. Patty caught up with her. They went down to the water and Patty coaxed her far enough in to get her feet wet. They squished mud together. They picked up objects from the shore. Patty taught her words, “stone,” “leaf,” and then Annie heard “crawdad,” and watched Patty touch the crawdad shell she’d picked up, lightly, to Lizzie’s skin. At Lizzie’s age Annie would have screamed bloody murder, but Lizzie began a sputtering laugh. Patty touched herself with it, then touched her daughter’s fat little leg. She inched the shell up the leg, and Lizzie never stopped laughing. Patty was laughing too, and before it was over she’d touched them both all over their bodies. It was like some curious—and crazy—initiation, as strange a thing as Annie had seen, and when Patty held the crawdad shell up to Annie to see if she’d like a touch too, Annie screamed, “You bring that thing up here and I’m gone!”

  Patty laughed and threw the shell in the water. Lizzie, of course, began to cry. Even after Patty had fed her daughter the applesauce and given her some more orange juice, even after she’d coaxed her to take a nap there on the blanket, in the shade of the tree, Annie could still smell the crawdad on her friend’s fingers, and over both the mother’s and the daughter’s skin. It was that smell of shell death, an emptiness that had once housed life and never would again.

  She lay back herself. She dreamed of Michelle, or of a sister self, who was stalking her around an empty house. The house was like her father’s except that the sunporch off the living room seemed to open out onto some vista like the lake. Her sleep was light. As her sister drove her from room to room—“You can’t stay here. He’s gone, don’t you see! This is house-breaking, this is a crime!”—Michelle’s ultimate objective seemed to be to drive Annie into the lake. But Annie would not go out there. She tried to say the word, “I have ‘proprietary’ rights,” but it was as if she were a child and two syllables were as far as she could string her sounds. At the door to the sunporch she turned to make her stand, and it was not Michelle she saw hounding her out of doors, it was the fat little toddler Lizzie, swollen to a truly destructive size. She was making a wreck of the house, and as Annie reached out to fend her off, it was the smell that drove her back. She complained, “Where’s her mother, she needs her Pamper changed,” but that wasn’t the smell she smelled.

  Annie woke up, the dream slow to wear off, still upset with her friend for letting her smelly daughter run amok.

  But it was Patty who got in the first word. “What are they afraid of, Legs? If they’re afraid we’re gonna fuck around on ’em I could understand it, because we will. But say we don’t. Say we’re as faithful as the six o’clock news. They got us where they want us and they’re still scared shitless. Why is that?”

  Annie had been dreaming her dream and Patty had lain there entertaining her thoughts. Somehow it came to the same thing. Annie closed her eyes again. “Men?” she murmured.

  “No, not men. Gorillas. Of course, men. Take Brian,” Patty went on, slipping back into her ruminative tone that was strictly for show. “When he catches up with me, if he doesn’t have a gun or a knife in his hand or something about ten times the size of his dick he’s gonna stand there and holler and not do a goddamn thing. I’m like, let him blow out, and he’ll turn around and leave and hate himself until he begins to build up steam again. What’s your opinion on that?”

  “My opinion is that women get beaten to death every day and some men like using their fists. Maybe it gives them a satisfying sense of contact, I don’t know. These women are called ‘battered women,’ and they’re the ones who’re scared. I’d be scared. I’d go the police.”

  “No, you wouldn’t, Legs. No one’s gonna lay a hand on you.”

  Annie was up on an elbow now. She found Patty up on her elbow, three, four feet away. She remembered sleepovers they’d had. They’d shared a double bed—most often in Annie’s house—and had lain like this, gossiping sometimes ’til dawn.

  “Probably not his kid anyway,” Patty confided.

  Annie let out a savvy, mock-incredulous, half-guffawing laugh. “Then who is the father?”

  “One of four,” Patty replied.

  The three or four feet separating them suddenly seemed like inches to Annie. She lay back and closed her eyes.

  “You don’t believe me,” Patty stated flatly.

  “You don’t believe yourself.”

 
“Mike Conklin, remember him?”

  “One of the four?”

  “The longest shot. Brian’s next to the longest, but he’s ahead of Mike, so that should make him feel better. Then there’s—”

  “I don’t want to know,” Annie cut her off.

  “What’s the difference? They’re all like little boys. They shoot off in you, then run and hide and wait to see which one’ll get caught with his pants down. Brian was always slow to zip up, so it’s Brian who’s running around trying to find his kid.” Patty gave a snorting laugh. “Lizzie’s mine. She’s got four fathers, which is the same as having none. I’m all she’s got.”

  Word for word, Patty’s breath was in her ear, and Annie opened her eyes. She said, “I knew you back then. You weren’t sleeping with four boys at the same time. I would have known if you were. Mike Conklin went to our church. I went out with Mike Conklin, not you.”

  “Only once. Like I said, a long shot. You jealous?”

  “Wherever you’re coming from, Patty, go back. Start again. DNA tests will tell you who Lizzie’s father is—”

  “She’s got four! It’s a goddamn miracle, a freak of nature! I’ll have to explain it to her some day.”

  “Brian’s her father.”

  “For the record.”

  “That red hair, that dimple . . .”

  “Because of some red hair and a dimple, Brian gets to be the father? No fucking way!”

  “No,” Annie said, “because one of his spermatozoa got to your ovum at the optimum time and nobody else’s did. Those little sperms and those little ova have a mind of their own.”

  “Smart-ass college kid,” Patty muttered.

  “You never fucked Mike Conklin. Admit it.”

  “He tried to roar and beat his chest when he came. Don’t quite know what he was trying to prove.”

  “Not Mike Conklin.”

  A car drove in and parked beside Annie’s in the dirt lot just behind the row of trees. Patty stiffened beside her and didn’t look back, but Annie could see that there was a couple in the car, the woman with a blond bouffant head of hair and the man with his dark hair slicked back. They were smoking and listening to some twangy country music; then they cut the motor and the music off and Annie heard their own twangy voices, the woman’s querulous and high-pitched and the man’s close to a snarl. They’d come here to look at the lake and have their argument. They could have had it sitting in the back booth in some rancid roadhouse, but they’d decided on the lake. If they stuck to type, they would never get out and sit by the water.

  When had she become such a snob?

  Patty wasn’t waiting around. She’d woken Lizzie, who started to cry, like a bitter, morose commentary on the whole afternoon. With quick, practiced motions, Patty changed Lizzie’s Pamper, whipping her daughter around. She made no attempt to fold the blanket. She stuffed it and everything else into the bag. The wet Pamper she threw at a trash can up by the trees and missed. She didn’t go back to make good on her toss; neither did Annie. The arguing couple settled their differences long enough to regard the three of them with mutual hostility as they got into the car. Patty gave them their hostility back, and if she hadn’t had the still sleepy Lizzie crying in her arms would probably have gone up to their window and demanded to know what their fucking problem was.

  It was the old problem, getting older by the minute.

  The heat was all over them now.

  Annie and Patty got into the car and ran the air conditioner to the top.

  Tracy Chapman. Demanding one reason to stay here. Just one, and it better be good.

  At a McDonald’s, coming back into town, Patty asked for a Big Mac and some fries. They pulled up to the order station with its menu and mike only to discover that the drive-through service was closed for repairs. Annie parked and went in to bring out the food, and while she was standing in line she had a presentiment. She got back into the car, handed over the fries, the Big Mac and the Coke, and Patty was in an entirely different mood. She was wistful, almost in tears. Lizzie seemed to have been mastered by her mother’s mood and was quiet. “Let’s hear it,” Annie said.

  “Your father called. He said he was all right. He said he was taking a break. He didn’t want you to worry. Then he said he hoped your exams went well and your summer plans were working out. When he asked who I was and I told him he figured it out and said he hoped your homecoming wasn’t a disappointment. He said he loved you. He wasn’t crying, but he was sort of spaced and he forgot he was talking to me. He promised one day before long you’d be back together again. But he said ‘we.’”

  Patty stared at Annie, confronting her through her near-tears. “You don’t know how lucky you are to have parents like that,” she said. “You just don’t know. Your mother calls, then your father does, and what do they want? They want the same thing. They want you with them. I mean it, Legs. Where do you get that kind of luck?”

  Annie drove her friend back to her walk-up, where Brian wasn’t waiting for her. No one was. Then she drove away.

  V

  He didn’t leave. On the recommendation of a desk clerk at the Palace Hotel, Ben took a room in the three-star Regina Hotel, close enough to the Paseo del Castellana that he could sit there in the evenings. He didn’t go back to Retiro Park. Those promenading middle-aged couples might pass by him to the rhythm of his breathing and the beat of his blood, but it was as if they belonged to an exclusive club. He found he preferred a café on the esplanade of the Paseo del Castellana, where couples of all ages passed while beyond them six lanes of traffic surged by.

  He began to read the Spanish newspapers and was surprised at how quickly his college Spanish came back to him. He stayed away from international news, and especially from anything his own country might be up to. He read about Spain, he read what the Andalusians were doing in Seville, the Valencians in Valencia, the Catalans in Barcelona, the Galicians in Santiago de Compostela. And he read about the Basques. He tried to follow the latest developments in the Basque quest for ever more freedom, but he was increasingly drawn to the photographs. When ETA members were arrested in France or by the Civil Guard in Spain, or when they were deported from one of the Latin American countries where they had been granted sanctuary, a photograph appeared. These were mug shots. They were cold, stark, straight-ahead and expressionless. The men, or the occasional woman, were black-haired, black-browed and white-skinned. Sometimes there was a fixity in the eyes, a look of some wildness mastered and trained to a task. But these were photographs of men and women behind bars.

  Or photographs of the dead. A bomb exploded before it could be planted in a car. It had gone off in the faces of the bomb-makers, and the photographs showed what they’d looked like before. Young. Black-haired, white-skinned. One had a trace of a smile, so faint it was like something caught from the air. It told you nothing about the person on whose lips it had landed. The hometowns of these young men, openly sympathetic to ETA, declared them hijos predilectos, which Ben took to mean, “favorite sons.”

  Still, faceless faces.

  Those days, ETA killed a council member from Seville and his wife. They were shot in the backs of their heads as they strolled home on a balmy evening after a late supper. The photographs the newspaper printed were from a happier time. Perhaps at a party, he caught in a convivial moment; his youthful wife with her mouth open on a breathless smile.

  These were faces as Ben knew them. He tried to call his daughter during that time, just to let her know. He got her unfortunate friend.

  A block up from his hotel was a long oval-shaped plaza, somewhat flattened on one side, which was known as the Puerta del Sol, “the gateway to the sun.” It was said to be the center of Spain. There was a statue of a king on a horse there, a scaled-down fountain and a puzzling sculpture of a bear reared up on its hindquarters eating berries from a tree. But mainly there were people circling that oblong plaza in a steady stream. Ben walked with the crowd—Latin Americans, North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africa
ns, swarthy immigrants from Eastern Europe, sunburned Brits, tall blond tourists from Germany and Scandinavia, and Spaniards, of course, from all corners of the country. He was not used to such a heady mix. For a while it exhilarated him, and he let himself be borne. But when his mood turned it was as though this stream of humanity he rode were the dirty water of a city, and as it circled the spot—this epicenter of the center of Spain—it was about to go down the drain.

  He walked back down Calle Alcala and sat at a café on the esplanade looking out at the six lanes of traffic along Castellana and at couples promenading with or against the traffic’s flow. The foreignness of it all held him off even as it teased him into wanting to see more. The masses were one thing, but there was an intimacy to the foreignness too, there was, it seemed, an intimate coded rightness to the way people behaved. He was curious about the code. If he bothered to look closely he could see it all around him. Demitasses of coffee were sweetened and swirled and brought to the lips as if they were tiny chalices; between puffs smokers employed their cigarettes like gesturing batons. There came a moment when the coffee was almost drunk and the cigarette smoked that the two were placed side by side, as if in some mysterious communion.

  That was the way it was done. But even as it drew him in it held him off, and he sensed that there was no end to it. There was no such thing as an incidental act; it was all part of some elaborate arcane ceremony. When it became too much for him he’d walk back up to the Puerta del Sol until the flux and filth and endless human wreckage of it all would send him back down to the café he’d chosen, El Gijon, where he could simply sit and observe.

  He’d read the papers, looking for a face.

  He’d watch the white-jacketed waiters pouring wine, always with their free arm folded behind their backs.

  It was only a matter of time before he found himself sitting beside Americans at the Café Gijon and eavesdropping on what they said. The Americans were both women, roughly his age, and there was a third, a man with a ruddy face and wiry gray curls and an accent Ben judged to be Irish, although he hadn’t spoken much. One of the women was telling the other about a trip she and her husband—the Irishman, Ben assumed—had just taken to Zimbabwe.