When she opened the door, heated air thick and fragrant enough to eat embraced him. But she held a wide, flat hand against his chest.
“Tomorrow you get a job.”
“It’s a deal.”
“I want you out of here,” she said.
Robert said nothing.
“I’ll set a deadline,” Ethel warned, “and then I’ll kick you out. Do you want that? Or do you want to leave on your own terms?”
“I’ll get a job. I’ll be out of your hair in no time.”
“Good.”
“Though my presence,” he said, “is a bargain and a godsend to your family.”
She turned away without another word. Robert slipped back into the house as easily as that first time, when Ben was alive. Ben still wanted him around, he was certain, because nobody had presented him with a good reason to leave.
He went to the kitchen, where he fed himself cold chops and wine.
ROBERT WAS ASLEEP the next day when Ethel’s hard hand battered him in the shoulder and neck, bringing him up from a sleep that had turned painful.
“I meant what I said last night.” She smelled of gasoline. Her cheeks were rouged with the cold, or her anger at him.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“One o’clock. I knew you’d think I was an easy mark,” she hissed. She was leaning over him, one hand in a fist, the other in her hair. “I knew you’d ignore what I said last night and sleep the day away. Get up! Get a job!” She brought her fist swinging against his shoulder, the hand opening in flight into a hard board that slapped and stung.
By the time he got downstairs she was back in her cab, talking on the radio. Then she drove away.
He had coffee and toast, then took a shower. When he was dressed, in a coat and tie he had not worn since the last days of the Scale, his hair combed wet, he still could not bring himself to break away from the house. He stood for a long time in the sun in the kitchen. He felt the skin on his face tighten deep beneath the canopy of beard. Try as he might, he could not think of a single job skill he possessed aside from writing sports.
He had worked summers and after school in Mozart. Jobs that other kids kept from summer to summer he lost after one; he didn’t know why. Everywhere he went looking for a job, somebody knew his father. He was routinely hired for that reason. He also believed he was never rehired because over time he had proved beyond a doubt that he was not his father.
One man, his name was Thorp, Mozart’s only wedding photographer, broke from his tradition of hiring short-skirted high school girls and put Robert to work for the simple reason that he knew and enjoyed the whimsies of Dave Cigar. Within a month, however, Thorp had hired a girl named Audree to accompany him to the weddings, leaving Robert to busy himself at the studio. He kept him on out of respect for Dave. Robert, bored numb, quit.
“I’m sorry this didn’t work out,” Thorp said on Robert’s last day. “I never would’ve predicted it happening.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re an awfully dour young man,” Thorp said, “for being the son of Dave Cigar. I thought a last name like that would have given you a sense of humor all by itself.”
He washed cars for a while. He pumped gas. He scraped the hulls of boats until a sliver of paint fell in his eye and an infection burgeoned; for a week in the summer before his junior year in high school he thought he would lose his right eye. When he recovered, the job was gone. He sold bait for a time, rising before dawn to scoop worm-clogged earth from the plot behind the shop into Chinese food containers. He quit that job to become a lifeguard. He fueled boats. He waited tables. He applied at the Good-Ee Freez but wasn’t hired, a rejection of fate that spooked him later; how close he came to knowing Olive before he knew Ben. He passed out putters at a doomed miniature golf course in the center of town. The place closed soon after, its patchy carpeted greens, gingerbread house and windmill hazards flattened and paved over when SportsHeaven was built.
In time the day had bled away. It would be dark soon. He changed clothes and raked leaves; he filled three more bags that joined the others at the curb. Even as he cleared a space of ground, leaves fell, laughing, behind him.
Duke was the first home. He waved at Robert from the end of the block, a salute with his crutch that sparkled in the failing sun. Robert waited, leaning on the rake. Duke was smiling and out of breath. Each school day reaffirmed his return to the scheme of his previous life. The space his leg once occupied no longer seemed to call attention to itself like neon.
“Any luck?” he asked Robert.
“With what?”
“Finding a job.”
“No. No luck at all.”
“Did you look?”
“I made a perfunctory search,” Robert said. He shifted a plump bag of leaves with the toe of his shoe, settling it more firmly in the street.
“Where’s Buzz?” he asked.
“Throwing in the gym.”
“He can do that?”
“There’s a net cage under the bleachers,” Duke said. “He’s down there every day.”
“It’s not good for him,” Robert said. “He should give it a rest.”
“Don’t tell him that,” Duke warned. “That’s all there is to Buzzer, throwing that ball.”
Ethel came home in an hour and bathed and put on a blue wool dress. She had washed the gasoline smell from her skin and out of her thick, springy hair, or hidden it beneath a sweet scent that followed her like a balloon around the kitchen as she kissed her children goodbye. Robert offered his hairy cheek, facetiously, and she surprised him by kissing it. She did not mention his present state, or his job search. She valued the prospect of the evening too much to let him ruin it.
“Same man?” Olive asked, passing a bowl of wax beans.
Her mother nodded. She looked in her handbag for something. “Don’t wait up,” she said. “I love all of you but I don’t need you to run my affairs.”
“So it’s officially an affair?” Robert teased.
Ethel would not be angered. The doorbell sounded. She made her escape from their steady glares of disapproval.
“Two dates,” Buzz said when the commotion of her departure had died down.
“Three,” Olive said.
“Three?”
“One was less publicized. He came after you guys were in bed. He brought a bottle of something and they went for a drive.”
“Where was I?” Robert asked.
“I don’t know,” she snapped. “Out?”
“The guy looks like two hundred and twenty pounds of cold mashed potatoes,” Buzzard complained. “What’s in it for her?”
“He’s a contemporary,” she said, and left it at that.
But she invited Robert to her bedroom later (Ethel not yet home, the boys edgy in their rooms, making frequent trips to the bathroom and kitchen to see if their mother had slipped in unnoticed) and said this man seemed to mean something to Ethel. She could not explain what it was, or Ethel had not voiced it sufficiently to make it understood, but something in her mother was responding to the man.
“She told me she likes the things he says,” Olive whispered into the base of his throat. They had made love and now lay in the residual warmth their friction had created. Robert hoped to be asked to stay; his room was already whip-cold, and it was still a week shy of Halloween.
“He’ll come to the end of his line,” Robert predicted. “Then she’ll see through him.”
“I don’t know,” Olive said. He loved the way her words broke over his skin like touchable objects. He was about to ask how anyone could compare to Ben, but refrained. Ben had never told Ethel the crow tales; what other charms had he kept from her?
“She’s been on my back about you,” Olive said. “Suddenly she doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Who? What?�
��
“You. This. She’s full of warnings lately. I don’t know why she’s started now.”
“Did she ever say anything to you when I first moved in?”
“She’s always telling me to be careful,” Olive said. “Nothing specific; just be careful. Everything is perilous. I think we had them fooled for a long time, early.”
“I don’t,” Robert said.
He saw lights swing into the driveway. “She’s home,” he whispered.
Olive wriggled out from under him and hurried to the window looking down on the front yard. Robert joined her, though it was freezing outside the bed.
Ethel and the man came up the walk from the car; they were foreshortened from that height, and before they passed out of sight under the porch overhang Robert glimpsed a pale coin of baldness at the crown of the man’s head, wide thin shoulders, and the fact he was holding Ethel’s hand. This contact seemed blatantly erotic to him; his used penis stirred even in the cold. With nothing further to witness, he got back in bed and Olive joined him.
“Does it worry you?” he asked.
“Does what worry me?”
“Your mother and this guy.”
She shrugged against him. The tips of her breasts were cool. “It’s her decision. Right?”
“They were holding hands.”
“What? When?”
“Just now,” Robert said. “They were holding hands coming up the walk.”
“You’re blind,” she exclaimed.
“It’s what I saw.”
She spun in the bed until her hard back was toward him. “They were not holding hands,” she said out of the darkness, long after he had abandoned the argument, preferring to concede the point rather than make her angry and be told to leave.
ROBERT HAD NOT found work by Halloween, when Ethel asked him to take the boys out.
“Duke has been working on his costume all week,” Ethel said. “He’s going as a refrigerator.”
“How about Buzzer? How about me?”
“You I don’t care about,” Ethel said. “Buzz has an old Nixon mask and one of Ben’s suits. He fits into Ben’s suits,” she said with wonder.
“You really don’t care about me?”
She made an impatient face at him. Lately she had stopped pestering him about finding a job; it evidently was sufficient that he went out and looked. He occasionally saw her on the street, or stopped at a light, with a fare in back, and she would bring one finger up off the wheel in a restrained greeting. The two of them were celebrities of sorts in Mozart, with their links to Ben, whose fame was his vanishing.
“Yes, I care about you,” she said. “I just don’t care if you get dressed up. Just keep an eye on them.”
“I’ve been looking for work.”
Ethel rolled her head twice around on her neck. Her eyes were closed. “You tell me that once or twice a day,” she said, “but nothing ever happens. I don’t think it ever will. Let’s put it this way: I don’t think you look very hard.”
“I look,” he said.
“I drive past the diner and you’re in there having coffee and reading the paper. Or talking to your father.”
“I’m checking the want ads,” Robert said. His father, bored with T-shirts but not daring to admit it, was there to be away from the store, his son only a bonus of freedom. Dave’s friends stopped by to talk to him, to listen, to be with him for a few moments. He was an optimist. Robert, by turns amused, curious, and annoyed by these chattering men, often thought his father would not attain his proper place in life until he was the mayor of Mozart. Robert found himself wanting to keep his father to himself during these visits; he and Dave seemed to share complaints lately, of work and seeking work, something utterly new between them.
Ethel held out her hands. “Don’t get me started, Bob-O. I’m in a good mood a lot lately. You help out around here quite a bit. The boys like you. I can’t complain.”
He asked, “Why are you in a good mood?”
“Don’t push me,” she said, and left.
It was the man she had been seeing, Robert guessed. He had appeared so often they had had his name drummed into their memories: Stephen. He and Ethel had been on five dates (seven, by Olive’s count). Each time Stephen appeared it made Duke and Buzz panicky. The man’s appeal eluded them completely. They saw their mother drifting away only a little less dramatically than their father.
By cutting holes for his arms and legs in a plastic garbage bag, then stuffing it full of leaves, tying it closed around his neck, and pinning leaves to a black knit cap, Robert created a costume for the evening. He used lamp black to daub those parts of his face not bearded.
Duke used Ben’s collapsible ice-fishing shed to create his refrigerator. He built a door for the three-sided shed with a large sheet of cardboard cut from a moving van carton. He painted these four sides and the roof with copper paint, and balanced the box on a frame of his construction over the arms of his wheelchair. He had fastened an old toaster and a vase of plastic flowers to the top of this refrigerator. The door contained false notes hung with tacks, a Philco handle, and a child’s artwork. The door opened for people to drop candy into Duke’s bag. Otherwise he traveled blind, guided by Robert or Buzz.
Buzz wore the Nixon mask and one of Ben’s houndstooth jackets. He kept thrusting his arms over his head, giving peace signs. It was hackneyed stuff; he had tapped no original thoughts for his costume. At houses where there was no answer to the bell he slashed a meaningless symbol on the nearest window with a bar of motel soap he had found in the pocket of the jacket.
“Don’t do that,” Robert protested.
“Don’t bug me, Bob. If you give me a hard time I’ll drop a match on you.”
Robert was not frightened. He would smolder for hours before the fire ate through the packed, damp leaves to the old clothes he wore. As they progressed through town he left a trail impossible to follow, the clues blending at once into the earth’s autumn floor. On the doorsteps of the houses they visited he stood to the left of the refrigerator; random shapelessness alongside simple geometry.
Toward the end of the night, when they were the last three people on the street, they came to the door of his parents’ house. The house had a fence in front with a squawking gate they had trouble getting Duke through. The house was small and neat, set back down a brick path that was murder to shovel in the winter; the house’s appearance always struck Robert as effortlessly cheerful. The ground was carpeted with fallen leaves.
“This is your house, isn’t it?” Buzz asked, his voice thickened by the Nixon mask.
“It’s my parents’ house.”
A candle burned in a small pumpkin on the front stoop, its face frozen in the same smile his father cut every year. A black cat with brass pins for joints hung in the window.
Buzz rang the bell and the door jerked open immediately. Dave had seen them coming, alerted by the unoiled gate. He wore a black T-shirt that exclaimed BOO!
Dave rocked back a step, his face taking on the stock contours of horror; scared witless by a disgraced president, a refrigerator, and a bag of leaves. Evelyn stood at his back with a tray of candy corn and chocolate kisses in wrapped baskets. She was looking intently at Robert, his blackened face, his leafy hat, his obese plastic-shiny shape. He had come to his parents last to gauge the impact of his costume. They would know him and laugh, or wince.
But the beard and the crown of leaves and the hunched way he stood in the porch light evidently was too effective. Dave looked at him closely just once and said, “I knew you’d come back to haunt me.”
Robert first thought his father meant him, his errant jobless son. But then he realized he was referring to the leaves; symbols of a hard autumn’s work, and of an entering into a death phase.
Dave dropped candy corn and silver-wrapped minarets of chocolate i
nto the bag. Evelyn seemed to know, however; even after her husband had turned his attention to Nixon, then the refrigerator, her eyes stayed with the bag of leaves. Her tall, thin form cast a shadow like a rake across her husband’s bent back. Her eyes were calm and loving, of Dave, of Robert, of this ritual taken part in. For the millionth time Robert was envious of his parents’ happiness. Together all day and all night, his parents never tired of one another. Those times Dave and Robert had coffee together, his father left only because he had to see what his wife was up to, what she might be able to tell him after their hour apart. Soon they would fall asleep together in the large bed that filled their small room like a ship in a lock, while Robert roamed Ben’s drafty old house, uncomfortable in Olive’s arms, too cold to sleep alone.
Evelyn winked at him as he backed away. His father watched him turn the refrigerator around and steer it down the walk. Nixon held the gate open for them. Evelyn put her hand on Dave’s shoulder. He got a broom and swept his son’s dropped leaves off the porch.
Sometime after midnight the first snow fell.
Chapter Eight
The Zebra
HIS FATHER SAID in mid-November, “Come to work for us.”
They were sitting on chairs in the back room of the T-shirt shop; Robert, Dave, and Evelyn sharing an idle afternoon. Behind her husband’s back Evelyn rolled her eyes and smiled at her son, not in disparagement of Dave, but at the absolute impossibility of that suggestion.
“You’ve got sales in your blood,” Dave said, slapping Robert’s knee. “I’ve got it. Your mother’s got it. Put us together, you’ve got it.”
Robert looked around at the high towers of colored shirts awaiting a message. Felt letters of every style, their backs gummed and ready for the melting kiss of the press, sat in wood trays divided alphabetically; more vowels than consonants. He had come to the shop when he had nowhere else to go on another day of looking for work. He could not sit in the restaurant because Ethel might see him. There in the back of the T-shirt shop he was safe.
“I’ve been here an hour and you haven’t sold a single shirt,” Robert said, not unkindly.
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