The God of War

by Marisa Silver

  I left the library and stood outside the door for a few minutes, staring at the sign that read “Testing. Please do not disturb,” until Malcolm let loose with one of his backward laughs. I wandered down the empty hallway toward my classroom. The bell had already rung. When I opened the door, all the students looked at me as if they had forgotten who I was.

  Two nights later, Mr. Philipson called my mother. She listened and then said, “No. I do not want to hear the results of your testing, okay? Just tell me what you people want me to do.”

  SEVEN

  The following week after school let out, Malcolm and I rode our bikes to Mrs. Poole’s house. Philipson had told my mother that if Malcolm attended once-a-week sessions with the librarian, and if his behavior improved in the classroom, he would be allowed to stay in school. Mrs. Poole lived in a part of Niland that had houses and lawns. Her low, ranch-style home was freshly painted an egg-yolk yellow that stood out among the other drab and sun-faded exteriors on her street. The front door was made of wood and beveled glass, which revealed a ghostly shadow as she came from within her house and opened it. I followed Malcolm inside, but she stopped me.

  “You can do your homework on the porch,” she said. “We need quiet.”

  While they worked in the kitchen, I sat outside, trying to concentrate on my studies, but I was distracted by the unfamiliar surroundings. At one point, I looked through the window. Mrs. Poole sat close to Malcolm at the table, never taking her eyes off him while she talked and made big gestures and held up flash cards and different-shaped blocks. I couldn’t hear what she was saying but I could tell by watching her mouth that she spoke slowly, as if she thought Malcolm’s problem was that he was a foreigner who didn’t understand English.

  I walked around the perimeter of the house. Mrs. Poole had laid out a substantial garden on one side. There were tomato plants bending under the weight of large ripening fruits. A strange kind of lettuce spread out in a fan, its leaves scalloped in lazy curves. Oblong yellow squash lay on top of the dirt like fat baseball bats. We did not eat foods like squash or exotic lettuces at home, and the only gardens I’d ever seen were studded with cactus and other drought-resistant plants that seemed untended. In Mrs. Poole’s backyard, a white wrought iron table and three matching chairs sat in the middle of the grass, which was wet and spongy due to all the watering it must have taken to keep it green. A short distance away at the fence line stood a white gazebo. A single chair, the fourth of the wrought iron set, sat inside the structure as if it were taking some time alone to think. I tried to picture Mrs. Poole sitting in that chair. Maybe she read library books there. Or maybe she went there when she wanted to think about her son. Mrs. Poole’s house was not large but it wasn’t a trailer, and the way it spoke so simply of a life different from the one I knew filled me with awe.

  At the end of the hour, she and Malcolm appeared at the front door. “Tell your mother he did very well,” she told me. “And I’ll see him next week at the same time.”

  “Okay.”

  “How was the tour?”

  “What?”

  “I saw you walking around the house.”

  My face grew hot.

  “It’s a good idea to ask for permission before you wander around another person’s property. Some people might not like being snooped on.”

  “I wasn’t snooping.”

  “Different families have different rules, Ares. It’s important to remember that.”

  All the way home, I replayed her chastisement, feeling freshly humiliated with each passing mile. But by the time we arrived at the trailer, I realized I was holding on to the moment because like a good dream or a heroic fantasy, I did not want to let it and Mrs. Poole go. It felt oddly gratifying to be the object of her precise censure; I had strayed and been contained, and beneath my embarrassment I felt a relief I had never experienced. No matter how much I might try to please my mother, I knew that I never really could because I had done something so terrible to my brother that her love could only be qualified. But I could please Mrs. Poole just by following her rules. I could be a boy who was not shadowed by an old, mongrel guilt. At her house, I could reinvent myself as a boy who did things right.

  “MRS. POOLE SAID HE DID a good job,” I announced proudly when Laurel came home from work late that afternoon.

  “Is that what she said?” she sighed, exhausted. She stepped out of her sandals and unbuttoned her uniform as she walked into her room.

  “I think he had fun,” I said, deflated by her lack of enthusiasm for my report.

  “How do you know?” She drew her uniform over her head. I saw her purple bra and her beige panties and the subtle torque of her backbone as she bent to loosen her muscles there.

  “He laughed,” I said. “A bunch of times.”

  She pulled on shorts and a tank top. “Well that’s good,” she said, without much conviction. “I guess laughing is good.” She came into the main room and sat down on the chair opposite the couch, her legs splayed. “I’m wrecked,” she said, massaging one hand with the other. “Retirement makes a lot of people very tense.” She let her head fall over the chair as though she were taking in the sun. “So, what did that lady make him do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not allowed inside.”

  “What do you mean?” she said, bringing her head forward.

  “She said it’s distracting for Mal.”

  “She better not be doing anything weird in there.”

  “She’s not! They sit at a table. He plays with blocks. She gives him snacks.”

  She studied me as if searching out a lie. “Well, I suppose she knows what she’s doing. They have me up against a wall, those school people.” She looked over at Malcolm, who was watching television with the sound turned off. Her eyes softened. “You have to tell me if it upsets him to go there, okay, Ares?” she said. “You have to be my eyes and ears.”

  “I will.”

  “Because I’ll yank him right out of there if she’s making him feel bad, or sad, or scared. I will. I don’t care if they never let him back into that school again.”

  I wanted to defend Mrs. Poole because Laurel knew nothing about her son, or what the other kids at school said about him, or about the pleasure I felt being in the librarian’s precise and orderly universe. But I decided Mrs. Poole was a secret I would keep to myself. She would serve as the boundary between my mother and me that I craved but hadn’t figured out how to draw. I would not tell Laurel about the vegetables that Mrs. Poole was able to grow in her garden, or about her gazebo, or about her smile that, when offered, was like a present. “Mrs. Poole is nice,” I said.

  “My parents were ‘nice,’” she said. “They could win the award for nice. That lady is just one more obstacle.” She stood and opened the refrigerator, staring into it as if waiting for it to speak to her. “You have to be careful,” she said. “You don’t want to end up on the wrong side.”

  “Of what?”

  She shut the refrigerator door without taking out any food or answering me.

  RICHARD ARRIVED AN HOUR LATER for dinner. Malcolm was more than usually excited by the food. Laurel always buried a hard-boiled egg in the middle of her meatloaf, and he watched as Richard ceremoniously carved. With each falling slice, Malcolm bounced in his seat, waiting for the first glimpse of the slick, off-colored egg.

  “He remembers!” Laurel said happily.

  That he remembered the location of this particular treasure from week to week made my stomach turn. I thought about the gun and hoped he would not remember where it lay buried.

  “Hmmm,” Richard said, peering down at the meat through his round glasses. “Maybe she forgot this time.” He grinned, but Laurel frowned and shook her head.

  “Kids don’t get sarcasm,” she said, laying a protective hand on Malcolm’s arm.

  “Kids get everything,” Richard said, winking at me. He carved another impossibly thin slice.

  “You’re driving him crazy,” Laurel said happily. �
��You’re driving me crazy.”

  “It’s good to know I can drive you crazy.”

  Malcolm erupted with a high-pitched squeal when he spied the first hint of egg peeking out from the grey-brown of the meat.

  “Ahh,” Laurel said. She squeezed Richard’s shoulder, leaned over, and kissed him. The kiss turned long and deep. An image of my mother and Richard having sex appeared in my mind. They looked like one of the pictures in her Kama Sutra book—Richard on his knees, his huge penis pointing at her like a warning finger. I tried to erase the image by focusing on the meatloaf, but the egg made me feel ill, its arrival reminding me of some perversion of a birth scene. I wondered if anyone had been around to exclaim over my arrival. It had never occurred to me to ask. I knew Laurel had delivered me at home, but I had never wondered who was there with her and had always imagined that somehow she had managed the whole thing on her own, delivering me on the trailer floor in her self-sufficient way, getting up after it was all over to make herself a cup of ginger tea. When she was pregnant with Malcolm, a doctor told her that the baby was too small and that she had better give birth under medical care in case something went wrong. Late one night, she woke me and drove us to the hospital, every so often pulling to the side of the road until a contraction eased. During her labor, she told me I shouldn’t worry if the baby was covered in blood because it wasn’t hurt, and that I shouldn’t be worried if she made funny noises or screamed in pain because it was not the kind of pain that made a person sad but the kind that made them the happiest they’d ever been. I could not imagine pain that made a person happy. Hours into the labor, she shrieked so fiercely I thought she was dying, and I flung myself across her body. A nurse pulled me away and, despite Laurel’s protests, told me to leave the room. Relieved, I sat on the floor of the corridor and studied the shoes and rolling wheels that hurried past, trying to ignore the sounds coming from the delivery room. At one point the door opened and a nurse walked out, and I heard someone say, “Does the father want to be present?” and someone else said, “No father on the chart.”

  Before Richard sliced the rest of the loaf, Laurel fished out the entire egg with a spoon and put it on Malcolm’s plate, where it spun lazily. Malcolm picked it up and rolled it in his hands. He would not eat it. He would admire it, rub it against his cheek, and then he would put it on his shelf of treasures and trash where Laurel would allow it to remain until it started to smell. Richard dropped a slice of meatloaf onto each plate. He reached for the ketchup and poured a steady stream over his food.

  “Maybe next time I should skip the meat and just serve ketchup for dinner,” Laurel said.

  “Army,” Richard said, by way of explanation. Once he told me that when he couldn’t sleep he patrolled outside his trailer, listening for the sounds of life in the desert brush. He claimed he could distinguish a human sound from that of an animal, that he could even tell the sound of a man from a woman.

  A helicopter flew over the house so low I ducked my head. A shaft from the copter’s spotlight flared in the windows. “Something’s going on,” Laurel said, not looking up from her meal. Malcolm was distracted by the light and craned his neck around the room, following its trajectory.

  “They’re flying a little far off base tonight,” Richard said. “Unless it’s a drug bust.”

  “Okay, baby,” Laurel said, gently turning Malcolm’s head back toward his meal. “Let’s do one thing at a time.”

  The light lingered around the perimeter of the trailer before it and the sound of the helicopter faded away. I stared at my plate, my heart pounding. I was certain they had found the gun. They would find my fingerprints, and I would be accused of stealing it. Maybe I would be put in the same prison as Mrs. Poole’s son. I wondered if prisoners wore pajamas or if they just slept in their prison clothes. The helicopter returned, the beam lighting us briefly as it swept past.

  “Sounds like a Huey,” Richard said. “That k-ching, k-ching.” The multicolored lights from a passing police car danced across our wall.

  Malcolm stood and began to spin around the room with his arms on either side of him like airplane wings. “Awm! Awm!” he cried.

  “So much for dinner,” Laurel said, putting down her fork. She stood and reached for Malcolm and began to dance with him. He hugged her and leaned his head back so that his face was nearly upside down. “You’re going to barf up all that good food,” she said, gently slowing him to a stop. “Alright, buddy. Let’s go see what all the fuss is about. Let’s go, Ares.”

  “I’m not done eating,” I said. I thought I should run away. I wondered how long it would take me to bike over the border to Mexicali.

  “You can stay if you want,” she said. “I want to see what’s going on.”

  Richard took a pocketknife from his jeans and extracted the toothpick. “Is this the evening’s entertainment?” he asked, rolling the bone-colored pick back and forth across his lips with his tongue.

  “At least it’s free,” Laurel said, leading Malcolm out the door.

  Richard looked across the table at me. There was something about his watchfulness that made me think he was onto me and my secrets. “Do you like to watch car accidents?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Most people do. Most people will slow down on the road to see what happened. You know why?”

  I looked down at my plate.

  “People like to see terrible things happen to other people.”

  “Okay,” I said uncomfortably.

  “But what people don’t get is that the terrible thing is happening to them. When they speed back up and turn on their radio and forget about what they just saw. That’s the terrible thing. We’re all implicated.”

  I could not meet his eyes.

  “Come on, kiddo,” he said finally, his chair stuttering along the floor as he stood up. “Let’s go see the show.”

  Crowds had gathered at the shore. I recognized most people: Ed, who owned the general store, his wife, Vera. The kid who played varsity football and was supposed to get recruited by San Diego State was standing next to Calvin’s brother Ronald, the dealer. Ronald wore the beat-up leather jacket I always saw him in, no matter how hot the day. Mrs. Vega, wearing a flowered apron over her caftan, stood with her son Milo, who was grown but still lived at home. It seemed that the few hundred inhabitants of Bombay Beach had dropped whatever they were doing and come from their homes, cocking their heads curiously as if emerging from hibernation. Down by the water’s edge Richard stood behind Laurel, his fingers caught in the belt loops of her shorts. A Coast Guard boat sat on the water, lit up like a power plant. The helicopter circled, its cone of light tracing a wobbly figure eight on the sea. The sound obliterated all conversation. I saw the bodies of divers appear and disappear beneath the surface like the dark, slick backs of dolphins.

  “What do you think?” Laurel yelled above the noise.

  “I think they’re using a lot of your tax money to get whatever is under there out of there,” Richard said.

  The divers surfaced holding something between them. Others on the deck of the boat hauled the object on board.

  “Oh my God,” Laurel said. “Is that a body?”

  “Two arms, two legs,” Richard said.

  I thought I would throw up. I reminded myself that I had not killed anyone. I had only found and buried a gun. I looked over at Malcolm, wondering what he remembered. Maybe nothing, maybe all of it. The helicopter veered away from the scene. I watched the cone of light slide across the water, grow faint, then disappear as the helicopter rose higher in the sky.

  “Dead people in the water. This is a crazy-ass place,” Richard sighed, shaking his head dolefully.

  “You come back year after year,” Laurel said.

  “I come back for you.”

  “You’re a liar,” she said, smiling.

  “Your mother’s a real romantic,” he said to me, wrapping his arms around her shoulders.

  “I’m a realist,” she said.
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  “That’s no fun.”

  “Have you ever noticed,” she said, staring out across the dark water, “that whatever you fantasize about never actually happens? You just end up disappointed.”

  “Maybe you have the wrong fantasies,” he said. “Life isn’t like on TV, right, Ares? Nobody finds a free car behind door number one.” He looked at me closely. “What’s wrong with you, boy? Looks like you saw a ghost.”

  Laurel put an arm around my shoulder. “Did that scare you, baby?”

  “No,” I said, shrugging out of her hold.

  The motor of the boat erupted as it headed away from the shore. The crowd broke up, and people began to drift back toward their homes. Someone popped open a beer can. Some kids laughed. Their sound jangled in the night like a few loose coins in a pocket.

  “Well, I’m freaked out,” Laurel said, taking Malcolm by the hand and moving away from the sea. “Let’s go home, baby.”

  I looked back toward the water one more time. The sky was not quite black. I could make out bands of low clouds hanging like laundry lines. By the shore, I thought I saw a firefly draw its erratic design in the dark. But the spark was just the lit end of Richard’s cigarette. He stood alone by the water’s edge. After a moment, he released a sigh of pale smoke.

  LAUREL WAS UNNERVED BY THE dead body, so for the first time ever Richard spent the night at our house. I slept in my mother’s bed so she and Richard could have the privacy of my room. I lay awake listening to their groans and sniffles, the low murmur of their conversation, my narrow bed complaining under the weight of two adult bodies. I got up and walked through the card curtain, careful not to make noise and startle Malcolm into one of his terrors as I headed out the trailer door. The night air was cool, and I sat down on the metal steps, hunching over my knees to keep warm. The leaves of Laurel’s struggling plants tickled my arms. I thought about the dead body in the sea, how it was forever separated from the life that once inhabited it. In science class, we had cut a worm in half and watched as each part continued to squirm inside the petri dish, a headless body, a bodiless head. Students screamed with delight. Some boys pretended to vomit. A girl cried. The disturbing image of the severed body stayed with me for weeks after the experiment. The worm, not realizing that its life was over, thought that it could somehow continue to live despite the impossible fact of its situation. I felt sorry for the worm not because I had killed it with a razor blade, but because the two halves seemed so witless, each searching for a futile purpose.