House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  Her mother could size men up as fast as she could face them down. All true.

  “He’d done some investigating, he said. Only a fool didn’t know his enemy, and he’d discovered I was the worst—by which he meant, I don’t mind saying, the best—of the lot. He proposed I sell his house for him strictly on the sly. I get the price he had to have, and the rest I could keep for myself. If I was as good as I was cracked up to be, I could get a lot—he wasn’t interested. He was admitting without saying as much that he needed help and wasn’t about to ask what it would cost. He gave me his figure. He demanded secrecy, and I set him a condition back. You know what it was?”

  Jonathan leaned in toward her mother. By the expression on his face Annie knew that he could make a good guess. She’d seen that expression often enough in class when he’d anticipated the professor to the extent that he could have spoken the professor’s next words.

  “You told him,” Jonathan said, “that when a buyer came out he couldn’t be there. You told him you didn’t even want him in the garage or barn or some toolshed.”

  “Off the property, entirely.” Her mother beamed.

  “It was as if,” Jonathan went on, “he were deeding the property to you and then you sold it to someone else.”

  “Something like that.”

  “The geese?” Jonathan asked.

  “The geese were the first to go. The geese didn’t make it past that night. I stood there when he shot them both.”

  That Annie had not heard. She’d heard the impressive sum of money her mother had made on the sale, and she’d heard that Mr. Maverick had taken his money and beaten pride and gone to Arizona, where he’d written her a letter speaking out of both sides of his mouth, praising her and calling her a high-handed bitch. A love letter, perhaps. Perhaps even another proposal. But gunshots that night, and two dead geese, the whole undertaking baptized in blood from the start? She doubted it.

  . . .

  Later, back in her father’s house, when Jonathan tried to claim his reward for the way he’d stroked her mother’s ego, Annie didn’t just say she was tired. She wasn’t tired. She was wide awake, with eyes in the back of her head. She said, “Not tonight.” Tonight she was keeping watch. Tonight she had to keep her wits about her. She didn’t tell him that. But this was her father’s house and she had to look out for her father’s interests, and her father was not interested in her sleeping with Jonathan in his house tonight. Jonathan had run his hands down the small of her back to cup her ass in a way that she liked. She stood there on alert. A clue was about to be presented to her, a clue to where she could find her father. Not that she intended to go out and find him. He would call on resources her mother didn’t believe he had and stay away as long as he liked, but a clue would be nice. Where had he gone? She wasn’t asking much. Where had that slightly overweight, somewhat shambling, not quite mysterious but certainly peculiar father of hers gone? She realized the world was small. A day on a plane could take you halfway around it.

  In that moment Jonathan was pleading how far he’d traveled, only he’d come in a car. She had her father’s car, and for a teasing moment that clue was near again. Patty, she thought. Jonathan was chuckling as he ran his hand over her belly, up over her left breast. He had large hands and long caressing fingers. With hands like that he should have played the piano. He could have covered the whole keyboard. Annie remembered her grand-mother’s hands, with their age splotches and swollen veins, and then her father’s hands, as they turned the pages of the songbook. Her father and grandmother seemed to sing through the whole book, but the song that came to mind was “The Nearness of You.” Annie smiled. She hummed the tune to herself. She heard the lyrics and must have sung them too—to herself. Or maybe not. Maybe out loud. Jonathan had his whole long body pressed against hers now, and the bulge of his erection fitted between her legs. Did he think she was singing to him? Thrilling to his nearness? They were in her father’s bedroom, and he tried to move her toward his bed. But she pried his large hand loose from her body and led him into another room.

  It was a joke, he understood. A game. Maybe even a fairy tale. She told him a little white lie. That bed had been hers when she’d been a girl growing up in her parents’ house. If he wanted to reach her up through the years, he’d have to spend a night there. It was a task she imposed. He was to catch up with her. She didn’t spell it out for him, but Jonathan with his resilient good humor would take to the game. She’d been little, midsized, and then full grown and far too big for this bed, but he’d follow her trail and find her before the night was out.

  She tucked him in, but when she entered the room she shared with her father she locked the door and as insurance jammed a chair back under the knob. She hung every stitch she wore on the closet door, then brushed her teeth and washed her face and brushed her hair with long, practiced strokes and stared at herself in the bathroom mirror.

  What if her father was dead? Only a voice on a machine, which she’d erased?

  She didn’t flinch. Her eyelashes stirred and her nostrils quivered, but barely, like the lacy side fins of fish.

  That night Jonathan scratched and pawed at her door. That night Jonathan visited every room of the house but hers. He prowled through the house, dragging the sad animal weight of his rejected self behind him. Annie found him the next morning on a chaise on the sunporch, where his exhaustion had caught up with him. He was sound asleep. She moved him over and made love to him there, visible to the neighbors had they been awake at that early hour.

  That afternoon she gratified another of his desires and took him to a horse farm. They watched the horses running around in green pastures, enclosed within long white fences, and then they visited them in their stalls, where their pedigrees were posted. There were separate stalls for the colts, who had enormous round eyes, almost wild. The stalls were kept clean—for horses’ stalls—and the smells were invigorating, about as close to pure horse as they could get. Jonathan had the good luck to talk to a handler. They were standing outside the stall of Quiet Scion. Jonathan got the dope on his diet, training regimen, grooming practices and career possibilities. Nine-tenths of those horses he saw prancing around the pasture would never make it onto the track. Quiet Scion, though, was a thoroughbred’s thoroughbred. Jonathan repeated the word as if he’d never heard it before. “Thoroughbred. Thoroughly bred. Bred through and through.” The handler let Jonathan brush out the coat, and he ran the steel-bristled brush over the barrel of the body with long loving strokes, which Quiet Scion responded to with deeply pleased shudders. Annie had to laugh.

  That night, curiously, Jonathan was subdued. Because of the horses or because she had allowed him into her father’s bed? Or, since he had not been admitted on the preceding night, did he consider himself unworthy? She doubted it. The trip, her mother, the day at the horse farm and the night Annie had put him through had simply caught up with him. He took deep breaths—she thought of Quiet Scion, filling that barrel of a body— and he was asleep. She would have gone downstairs to read, but she didn’t want to leave him alone in that bed. She was responsible for him. If he was there it was because she had put him there, and if her father walked in—as he might at any moment—she didn’t want him to find that strange body lying unclaimed in his bed.

  So she claimed it. She lay like a dutiful wife at his side.

  That clue to where her father had gone hovered near. For a period she concentrated on catching it, then she turned over, angry at being teased like this. Call Patty, she told herself again. Patty had had the conversation with her father she should have had. Patty knew more than she was saying. Promiscuous Patty. Patty the Pistol.

  Annie never slept that night, not really. And around dawn she did it again. She woke Jonathan and fucked him hard, right there in her father’s bed, as if she were the stallion, not he.

  At breakfast they had bagels as they would have had up north. He asked what was it, what was going on. He asked if he could help.

  He c
ould. Annie confessed she should never have come back. She asked if he would take her away. To Boston and the Cape—wherever he chose. She’d lock up her father’s house. He had his keys, just as she had hers.

  Her mother was pleased. She’d had it both ways. She’d gotten to meet the young man and create a memorable impression. Now it was her daughter’s turn to create one of her own. She’d want to hear all about it. They’d be in constant touch by phone.

  Partway up I-75 to Cincinnati, Annie asked Jonathan to pull off into a rest area. In the spirit of getting back what was rightly hers, she made the call to Patty, standing out from the parked cars before a field of tall green corn. The corn gave off a prickly smell that was the smell of sex. She made that identification just as a man’s voice answered the phone. Brian Paul. She asked for Patty.

  When Patty took the phone, Annie said, “I don’t hear glass shattering. I don’t hear the furniture being knocked around. I don’t even hear Lizzie crying.”

  Patty protested—on her ex-husband’s behalf. “He’s got a right to see his daughter, and Lizzie likes to see him. I’ll never know why. Something between a daughter and father, I guess.”

  “He hasn’t threatened you?”

  “Nope.” Patty tried to give a bright turn to her voice.

  “Really?”

  “No way.”

  “You’re being honest?”

  “Fuckin’-A.”

  “Tell me where my father is.”

  “Dunno, Legs.”

  “There was something he said that afternoon. Something you said. I told myself, that’s a clue. It’ll be there when I want it.”

  “What’s the rush? I told you, your dad adores you. Let the man have some fun.”

  “I want to know.”

  “What, are you leaving town or something?”

  There was the sound of semis at her back, the rushing sound of a world on the move. Traffic wind in the corn and that musky sex smell.

  “For a while.”

  “Let me guess. That boyfriend in New York?”

  “Boston.”

  “Wasn’t there one in New York?”

  “Maybe. There might have been.”

  “Don’t be a slut, Legs.”

  Patty didn’t give Annie a chance to say it. She added, “Don’t be a slut like me. Look what I got for my loose living.”

  Patty paused so that the baby yelps of Lizzie and the mock growls of her father could get through.

  “Patty, I want to know!”

  Patty’s voice went flat and factual. A badly tuned twang. “I told you everything he said. Everything he said to you was everything my father never said to me. I told you that. I don’t wanna say it all again.”

  “Patty!” Annie waited.

  Patty took her time. Her voice was cocky and cold. “People been screaming at me all my life. Not one of them is my friend.”

  In the noise of the world rushing by and the vigorous sex-scrape of the corn, Annie would abase herself if that was what it took. “Anything, Patty.”

  And she could hear Patty relent. For just an instant it was like the friendly outcome of any number of girlish games they might have played.

  “I know what your clue is, Legs. It was nothing he said. I meant to tell you—you’re living too much in your head. Crawl out here in the world with the rest of us and take a look in the glove compartment of your dad’s car.”

  Instead Annie crawled back into her head, away from the world of traffic and corn and the boy waiting for her in his car, and there, of course, it was, her clue. She felt like a very dull-witted child. Her clue had not gone anywhere; she had. Patty could no longer be accused. “Sorry,” Annie muttered, but the phone had gone dead or Patty had hung up. Either way, Annie was talking into the wind.

  She asked Jonathan to take her back.

  He smiled and shook his head and thought perhaps of trips his family had begun when his mother or one of his sisters had made a similar request. Typical. He asked what she had forgotten.

  “Just take me back,” she said.

  Now she got his confounded look. His eyes clouded over with a strange sort of strain, and Annie escaped his understanding. He knew to keep her in sight, though, since she’d always come back before. But this time was different. This time he gave up on her. He did it by releasing a breath and by looking off to the side.

  She wouldn’t call it a sigh of resignation, nothing like that.

  Finally he just looked away.

  But gentleman that he was, he did her the courtesy of asking, “Are you sure?”

  She couldn’t match his courtesy, and didn’t try.

  He took her back to her father’s house and carried her bags up onto the front porch. Since she made no move to open the door, he didn’t offer to carry them inside. He said he’d see her at school in the fall, and he kissed her on the cheek, a last touch, very much like a dusting off of the hands. He left her standing there with her bags on the porch and drove down the street. When he’d disappeared, she walked around back and used one key to open the garage, another to open her father’s car. There was no key to the glove compartment—it had been unlocked all along. Without pause she opened it and found the glossy white envelope from the travel agency on top of the maps, brochures, guarantee agreements, traffic tickets, bills. It was the sort of envelope travel agencies sent out with itineraries—more of a folder than an envelope. She paused then, weighing the consequences, and made her decision. She clicked the glove compartment shut. She knew where her father was. From that point on, he was in the glove compartment of his car.

  VII

  Then he saw a face, which he realized he’d been seeing all along, and which he’d dismissed because it did not look Basque. And because the man’s first name—Armando—sounded as if it belonged to some cruise-ship crooner.

  The last name did sound Basque, and squint-eyed, pig-headed and crabbed.

  Ordoki. Armando Ordoki.

  The face was long and fleshy—vaguely egg-shaped. It bulged at the cheeks. The chin was heavy and the features—the eyes, nose and mouth— roughly modeled. There were deep fold lines from the wings of the nostrils to the corners of the mouth and small sagging folds under the eyes. By Spanish standards the eyes were not large; they seemed to crouch back in their sockets. Armando Ordoki wore his hair short and combed over his forehead in small leaf-like points, as though he had crowned himself with laurels. In almost all the pictures that had appeared in the newspapers he had on a black crewneck sweater or tee-shirt. In some photographs a small stud showed in the lobe of his left ear, and in one photograph his lower lip protruded in a childish pout, but this was basically a thuggish face, belonging to a man who seemed incapable of hosting an intelligent thought or carrying out an intelligent act, and Ben had dismissed it.

  But it kept reappearing.

  Having lunch one day, he saw Armando Ordoki on the three o’clock news and discovered that the hair was chestnut brown and the complexion faintly toasted. There was none of that stark contrast between the black hair and pale complexion of men who’d lived under the shadows of mountains all their lives. Basques could look as cold as their mountain streams and as steady-eyed as their peaks. This Ordoki looked like people Ben had known all his life. He was slouched back in his seat in some sort of assembly hall, and when he moved it was in a bearish roll. At any moment it appeared he would get up and leave, but he was held there by his disgust.

  The camera remained on Armando Ordoki long enough for Ben to see what couldn’t be seen in newspaper photographs: there was real drama in Ordoki’s face. In its fleshiness and length, and in the puffy buildup in the neck, it was a face that appeared to be sliding off him like wax.

  An ETA militant had walked into a restaurant at midday and shot a man in the back of the head, a town council member from a party unsympathetic to the ETA’s nationalist aims. No innocent bystanders were killed. Everybody in that assembly hall raised his hand to condemn the killing except the members of Ordoki’s party.
Ordoki, it appeared, was its leader. That was the reason the camera held on him as long as it did. The speaker, a woman, was expressing the outrage the assembly felt that a democratically elected representative could be murdered for his views while other democratically elected representatives stood by and refused to condemn the act. Her voice trembled, but it did not break.

  The trembling voice disgusted Ordoki, and Ordoki’s disgust arrested that slide of flesh off his face. Ben saw it clearly. The jaw set, the mouth tightened; there was a curdling of flesh like lava cooling—going stone cold—on the spot.

  The newscast turned to sports. Ben didn’t catch the name of the party Ordoki headed. He might have asked the waiter, or someone sitting at a nearby table, but this man Ordoki was someone he wanted to keep to himself.

  He and Paula Ortiz talked about other matters. They had yet to talk about him—he had not kept his half of the bargain—and he almost believed she preferred it that way. She could make wry, educated guesses about the purpose of his trip, what he hoped to find here. He was leaving behind a busted marriage—she was right about that. His business or career had not gone belly-up, otherwise he wouldn’t spend money the way he did; the Regina was overpriced for a three-star hotel—everybody knew that. She could show him hotels out of the way on charming plazas for a lot less money if he was planning to stay. But he liked the fact that the Regina was in the way, and he preferred to remain loyal to Juan. She laughed, and surmised: he was here because a midlife crisis had revived a boyhood dream of meeting a smoldering Spanish beauty before he got too old. One afternoon Paula showed up with one, a friend named Mercedes, perhaps ten years her junior and maybe fifteen years his, just to give him a look and to gauge his reaction. Mercedes was so stunning, so unapproachable, that she might have belonged to another species, and he must have let it show. So it was not Spanish beauty he’d come for. Spanish cuisine? and there was talk of a restaurant Paula would take him to. Spanish history? and there was talk of castles and palaces they could visit, trips they could take. Spanish art? and there was talk of museums.