by Ron Hansen
“And you talk to them?”
“Yes.”
“In English?”
She didn't say.
Ed showed his tan teeth in a skeptical smile. “I take it, then, you're sort of a spook psychiatrist.”
Avis said, “I try to route them toward the God-spirit to seek peace and love.”
“You ever get laughed at when you say that?”
She scowled in an august and sovereign way. “I have been brought to test by ugliness of all kinds.”
Ed jotted a note and then cagily thought for a second or two, tapping his thin lips with his pen. “And how would you describe this God-spirit?”
She said, “The Holy Trinity of the Father, Son, and Comforter, plus the twelve high spirits that help govern the universe.”
Ed hurriedly scratched his pen across his notepad and shook his head in rich amusement. “Avis, you're almost too good to be true.”
She took the 30th Street bus to Ames and walked up Larimore Avenue with groceries from the Safeway, getting winded as the street tilted up, and watching curtains part as scornful widows frowned out at her. An old Austrian in a cardigan sweater was weakly scratching a garden rake across his bluegrass lawn just east of her place, and she could see him tilting against the upright rake and angrily judging her skin and attitude. Everyone white on the block was sickly and old and scared about how much they could get for their properties now that the colored were moving in. Four homes were just recently for sale. The Walker house was white, two stories high, with a green screened porch and a great, sick elm in the yard, and halfway up the slope of Larimore, at exactly the spot where boys had to stand hard on their bicycle pedals in order to try the hill.
Avis couldn't go another step with her heavy groceries, so she put the sack on the sidewalk and angled across the yard with just the spoiling things until she got the sense she was being stared at from her own house. Her purple eyes went upstairs to the sewing room and to a joyless girl of eighteen in a yellow nightgown sitting there at the windowsill with her jaw in her brown right hand. And then, as though she'd been ordered elsewhere, the girl turned aside and slowly withdrew, anxiously tying the nightgown strings over significant breasts. And half a minute later Priscilla was greeting her on the green screened porch in her own slippers and an overlarge yellow nightgown that she got from her mother's closet.
“Were you upstairs?” Avis asked.
The girl said yes, she'd been sick.
“You know why you're wearing my nightgown?” she asked, and Priscilla considered herself with surprise.
Avis couldn't sleep, so she went down to the front parlor to work. She paper-clipped a snapshot to her press release and slipped in a note about her willingness to appear without fee, and then she printed the addresses of Omaha television and radio stations on some manila envelopes. Cold air passed over her and she got up to close the kitchen door. And then she had a premonition. She looked into the pantry room and just then the telephone rang.
She picked up the receiver, and Gary was already speaking. “A great big white house and green trees. A ceiling light on in an upstairs window, and I'm on the sidewalk looking up as some woman in an overcoat—she's a doctor, I think—she's moving the drapes aside. And then I'm inside the house on the upper floor. And I know the people there.”
“Are they your family?”
“She passed away.”
“Your mother?”
“She was in a lot of pain. And she passed away and it was easier for her.”
“Is it your mother you see?”
Quiet. She could practically see him. His green eyes were squinched up, stopping his tears; his open mouth was twisted with pain. She skipped ahead by asking, “How about your father?”
Gary governed himself a little and said, “Dad was just coming in from the night shift.”
“Was?”
“You know, night shift? Overtime?”
“Just then you talked like you weren't actually dreaming.”
Gary didn't say anything.
“And then what happens?”
Gary said bitterly, “As if you actually wanted to hear.”
“Only if this is helping.”
He sighed. “Another room and this colored girl is sleeping on a cot. No. She's not sleeping, she's pretending to sleep. Her back is to me. And I lie down next to her and she's hot for it. She knows what she wants and so do I. And one thing leads to another and I'm touching her, and then she spoils it. She speaks. Her speaking is how I wake up.”
“You recognize her?”
“She's not the girl. She's changed. She says angry things.”
“Angry things?”
He gave that some thought before saying, “I mean, things that make me angry.”
“You keep calling it a nightmare.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How come you're scared?”
He paused before replying. “It's how I look when I get up from the bed, the bed where the girl was sleeping. My jeans and sweatshirt are soaked with blood. You can hear it dripping onto my shoes, and there's a pool of blood on the carpet. And I've got an ax in my hand.”
“Have you hurt somebody?” Avis asked.
“How do you mean?”
“Is this a nightmare, or are you telling me something you've done?”
“A nightmare.”
“You're sure you know the difference?”
He didn't answer.
“Have you been in prison, Gary?”
“You could say that.”
“You out now?”
“At night.”
She ignored that; she thought he was trying for petty mystery by being intentionally vague. “You said she speaks, the sleeping woman. Could you tell me what she says?”
“Don't know.” She could hear him becoming more passive, pitying himself. His voice was like that of a punished child.
“Here's something you can try, Gary. Next time you get your nightmare, just look at your hand. You right-handed?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Look at your right hand. You'll get power over your nightmare. You'll get rid of those people and you'll sleep. Could you try that?”
Gary wasn't paying attention. She could imagine his green eyes wildly straying, his lewd hand petting himself as he said, “I could try a lot of things with you.”
She sighed. “You're getting into trash talk now.”
“You think you could handle it?”
“Just be yourself, Gary.” She could hear nothing but quiet for such a long time that Avis said, “Are you there?”
And then she had an overpowering feeling that she wasn't alone downstairs, that his sleeplessness was phony, his night call a trick, that she was only being set up for harassment or rape, and a white boy who called himself Gary was creeping toward her even then. She heard his footsteps on the dining-room carpet, heard the soft bump and rasp of a wooden chair being slightly brushed by his jeans, but she was too frightened to turn. Her skin prickled and her heart trip-hammered, but she was otherwise stymied, her own body shrinking inside itself. She couldn't scream or run upstairs or even release the telephone from her ear. She smelled an overindulgence in Old Spice cologne and heard Gary say over the phone, “She's you.” And then his cold palms cupped her large breasts as though weighing them and, in his ignorance of women, crushed them painfully in his caress. Her legs mellowed and she nearly collapsed, but Gary lunged against her, holding her against the doorjamb as his chill lips skipped over her short hair in pecks, and she heard him whisper, “In my nightmare. She's a girl I know. And then she's you.”
Avis could only hang up the telephone, and with that his hard pressure eased up, his kiss disappeared. She spun around and the room was empty. Even the Old Spice fragrance was gone. And then the telephone was ringing again and she wept until it stopped.
His nightmare became hers, and she saw herself walking through a big house at night. Cold wallpaper on her fingertips, the steps yawping as she went up
stairs, fragrant rose bath salts in the air, a strip of light beneath one door, a girl singing along with The Temptations, and when Avis opened the door, an hour had passed and there was a pool of blood on milk-white bed linens and on the floor the horrible, hacked-apart body of a pretty young nurse. Her skin a cocoa brown.
Avis jerked up and pressed her racing heart with her hands as she placed herself in her own room, her nail polish on top of the dresser, the old, deep chair in the right spot, Claude's coveralls in a heap, and Claude piled up like railroad ties beside her.
She couldn't sleep. Avis looked in on the girls, pulling a green blanket up on Lorna, and then she went down to turn the gas up under a teapot. She got back all she could of the nightmare and again recognized her feelings as she looked at the young nurse's good body: jealousy, loathing, sexual passion. She ought to be for me.
She got a cup as the hot water piped and then stooped over with a pain in her side that wasn't her own. Her pain was a needle, then a spike, and the pain opened up wider than her own hips, and Avis dropped to the floor. His mother. She clasped her pelvis, crossing her arms. “Hush,” she said, and the pain was only a soreness, and then the soreness passed.
Avis opened her eyes and reached to the kitchen counter-top to pull herself up. “You poor old woman,” she said.
Claude sipped his coffee as Avis scrambled eggs for him in a measuring cup. A light mist grayed the morning. The yellow eggs sputtered when she poured them into the skillet. Claude said, “Could be a prank, you know. Could be white people want us outa here. Niggers movin’ in, wreckin’ the neighborhood.”
“Isn't just the phone calls, Claude.”
“Except you been havin’ days you seen right and days you seen wrong. You ain't at a hunnert percent yet. You could be messin’ up.”
Avis told a Creighton University professor to spend more time around water, but to look out for a Pisces who was intent on injuring his reputation. A Fremont woman said she wanted to give up smoking, but Avis said the problem wasn't cigarettes, it was her marriage. And she was bullying her husband. Avis got a card from the elderly woman in Papillon, with pink begonias on the cover and a crisp twenty-dollar bill inside. And she got a call from a talk-show host, saying he'd like Avis to join him next month on his Coffee Break radio program.
Six or more times per day the telephone would ring, and no one would speak when Claude or Lorna said hello. Avis presumed that was Gary. She got in touch with the Nebraska State Department of Corrections, but an uppity secretary said she couldn't talk about ex-prisoners to just anybody who happened to call. She once woke up, and Claude wasn't Claude but a whiskeyed crazy man lying on a dirty bed, his skin very pale, his haunted green eyes wide open, his mechanic's hands clamped over his ears in order to stop the tramping noise of footsteps on the stairway. When the door opened, the apparition disappeared and Claude walked inside in his pajamas. “Went for a water glass,” Claude said.
Then, one night when she was getting out of her slip, Avis looked at the pink flowers on the chintz draperies and imagined a great mahogany bed angled under the high window. She could see a gray-haired woman sleeping, a purple tube up her nose and her hands greenly wormed with veins. Avis could hear an oxygen tank lightly hissing as a mechanic in green coveralls knocked sneakily at the sewing-room door, sandpaper in his voice as he harshly whispered, “Willal”
Avis went up to the girls’ room and gently tugged Lorna's right thumb from her mouth. She walked over to the twin bed alongside the wall, but Priscilla was sitting up in her nightgown, her right elbow on the windowsill and her jaw in her hand, solemnly contemplating the yard as if she were trying to interpret words that were not being spoken aloud. Avis rapped sharply on the window glass, and Priscilla's dark eyes jumped with shock before she simpered and said, “Hi, Momma.”
“Whatta you up to?”
“I just couldn't sleep.”
Avis inchingly touched a curtain aside and gazed down. No one was there. “You playing me for a fool?”
Priscilla hopped up into her bed and snickered as she covered her face with a pillow.
She'd given Claude some numbers, and he'd used them on the greyhounds in Sioux City, winning four hundred and sixty dollars on a quiniela. Claude learned about it from one of the brothers on the job the next morning and was still joyous when he called Avis from the Fontenelle Park golf course, where they were laying in irrigation pipe. Claude said his supervisor might just let him off early so he could bring home a big celebration. And then he said his cheeseburger was on the hot plate, kissed the mouthpiece, and said good-bye.
Avis heard the clank of the mailbox lid and waited for Lorna to carry it in until she recalled that she was in kindergarten now. And Priscilla would be in the public-school cafeteria, probably not eating, and swapping her cupcakes for change. Avis went out and collected two bills, a letter from a cancer patient in Soldier, Iowa, and a dirty envelope from the weekly newspaper with the name Ed Cziraki crudely printed on the upper-left corner in red ink. She sat down on the porch steps and scooped out some yellowed newspaper photographs from twelve years ago. Wording had been jaggedly torn away from the pictures, but she could make out what looked like “mercy killing” below a snapshot of a big mahogany bed and a sick woman's body, nicely arranged beneath a darkly stained sheet. Another newspaper picture was copied from a high-school yearbook. A joyless boy with yellow hair in an ugly paisley shirt, his hard eyes half an inch too close to his nose and his nose a half an inch too long. She thought, Who's the ferret? And then knew. Gary. The last photograph was of a pretty black girl who'd been hacked apart with an ax. Written over the picture was “Your household haints, I s'pose.”
Avis put the clippings back inside the dirty envelope and shoved it deep in her apron pocket and pulled herself up heavily on the handrail. Eyes were on her as she walked inside and indignantly locked the door.
She tried to nap on the sofa in the parlor but couldn't sleep for the upsetting visions of Gary twelve years ago, a slaughter-house ax in his reddened hands, his clothes sagging heavily with blood and the blood plipping like nickels onto the carpet.
Avis got up and paid her bills, cleaned up the parlor, then emptied the wastepaper baskets into a green plastic bag and dragged it out to the garbage cans in the cinder alley. The day had lost twenty degrees since noon and indigo rain clouds were turtling in. She had a premonition and looked up at the upstairs rooms of her house and at the high windows that Claude had covered with plastic weatherproofing and tape. She pulled her overcoat closed and looked up the alley at a gray old woman clipping her hedges in a see-through raincoat, her black poodle standing between her legs and idly sniffing the air.
She thought, Everything's changed. And she thought, Don't go back, but she did. She walked to the stoop and peered through the windowpanes of her kitchen door and saw the big house as it was when white people lived in it. Aprons and sweaters were hanging from nails, and green rubber boots made tan by yard mud had been slung into a corner. A twelve-year-old Knights of Columbus calendar was tacked up in the pantry, and hooked over the top of the inner door was a rubber-tipped cane.
Avis yelled unreasonably, “Hello?” and paused a second before stepping inside. She walked into the kitchen and called again, “Hello?” She could see the pecan pie she'd made on the stove top, and Lorna's storybooks by the telephone, but she could also make out a rickety table with a checkered plastic tablecloth and on it salt and pepper cellars and a soup bowl of truck-stop matchbooks. She opened cabinets and found her own soups and stews and cereal boxes, but also their ill-matched assortment of cups and plates, potato chips, beef jerky, whiskeys, antacids, cough syrups, and a huge variety of pills. Avis bumped against her own purple sofa in the parlor but only saw a heap of magazines and a frayed green chair no more than two feet away from a round-tube Zenith television. Unwashed clothing was on their sofa, overalls were on the floor, a motor was in pieces on an open newspaper.
She was getting overlapping stations at one spot o
n the radio. She was apparently picking up impressions from another person close by.
And then she went upstairs to the evil past, with apprehension, even chill panic, but also with pity and reverence and the concern of a physician. She could see photographs stair-stepped up the wall: of a young sailor in Navy whites standing with a testy older woman in a tulle wedding dress; a baby boy in cowboy boots in the yard with a 1956 Plymouth; the boy in a blue Cub Scout uniform; and Gary now fourteen years old, at Christmastime, getting a shotgun from his father. And at the top of the stairs was Willa—not a snapshot but an apparition, a girl acting out scenes from the past. Willa just stepping out of the bathtub and prettily reaching up for a towel in the hallway closet as green eyes spied on her nakedness. And Willa in a terry-cloth robe, carrying a food tray, slightly smiling at someone Avis couldn't see. And yet again Willa, in nurse's whites, standing up against the clothes hamper and shutting her eyes with pleasure as she yielded her right breast to Gary's father. Engine grease from his night shift was under his fingernails. Avis could smell gasoline on his green coveralls. And then the hallway was empty.
Avis saw a strip of light beneath the closed door to her bedroom. She put her palms to the door and perceived the room as she'd imagined it days ago, the great mahogany bed underneath the high window, the oxygen tank in the corner, the gray-haired woman sinking into a heap of yellowed pillows under stained patchwork quilts as an orange rubber tube drained into a saucepan. When Avis opened the door, the woman's head lolled fragilely to the right and she gazed at Avis for many seconds before saying weakly, “Gary?”