The Slab

by Michael R Collings

  But this…

  Except for a ragged fringe of green along the edge closest to the sidewalk, there was no lawn. As the yard sloped slightly upward to the foundations of the house, the desolation became worse. The few straggling clumps of St. Augustine grass and Bermuda grass-normally impervious to almost all attempts to eradicate them-quickly died away completely. In the middle of the yard, the ground was bare, naked earth packed to concrete-hardness. The cold shadow cast by the house obscured skeletal remains of what had once been roses. The canes might have been bare simply because it was November and because the weather had been unusually cold for this part of Southern California, but Jay knew at once that he was looking at more than just normal winter kill. Those plants were dead. No amount of judicious pruning and feeding and watering would bring them to bloom the next spring.

  In what should have been narrow borders of color along the sidewalk there was more desolation. Irises were nothing more than clumps of wilted, brittle brown and yellow spears, and the chrysanthemums, short stubs of blackened growth without leaves or greenery.

  Along one edge of the driveway, a ragged clump of dense shrubs covered in unattractive grey-green leaves provided the only break from the sense of utter devastation.

  Jay shook his head wonderingly. The house was in bad shape, too. This close he could see the paint peeling from the stucco wall as well as from the hardwood trim around the eaves, the windows, and the doors. A hairline crack started four or five inches above the foundation line, midway beneath the front bedroom window and jagged continuously for six feet or so to the corner.

  Jay whistled under his breath.

  “What’s wrong,” Linda asked, shooting him a worried, questioning look.

  “That,” he said, nodding toward the yard and house.

  “I know,” she said. To herself she wondered what Mattie would have thought about the state of the house and gardens. She was probably spinning in her grave like a top, Linda decided.

  By that time, though, the girls had unwound their tangle of coats and books and toys and were piling pell-mell out of the car. They pounded down the sidewalk, oblivious to the deadness around them. They skirted a leafless bougainvillea that should have overhung the entryway with masses of scarlet brilliance but now grew more like the wall of thorns from Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty than anything else. They were knocking excitedly on the front door before Jay and Linda were even out of the car.

  Ellen’s oldest, Thad, opened the door. He’s grown up, Jay thought as he glanced up and saw the fifteen-year-old towering over his girls, his hair long and greasy and blond and unkempt, and the glint of something gold dangling from his left earlobe.

  “Hey, it’s the insects,” the boy called over his shoulder, his voice a vibrant bass.

  He’s only grown up physically, Jay amended. Mentally he’s as immature as always. A nasty little boy squashed in an almost-a-man’s body.

  The girls filed by their cousin, their enthusiasm dampened by his crude welcome. The incident didn’t bode well for a pleasant Thanksgiving weekend.

  8

  Abraham Morris met his younger child and the boy’s family with a slow smile. He spoke little, beyond a soft, “Good to see you, Jay.” He gave Linda a brief peck on the cheek, but seemed unusually aloof around the girls. Elizabeth looked worried and disappointed when Grandpa virtually ignored her, but Anna squatted in a corner and watched Ellen’s two younger boys fighting over a PlayStation console that couldn’t have been out of its box for more than a couple of hours. The Styrofoam packing material lay scattered across the living room like stark white bones in a desecrated graveyard.

  Jay shuddered at the image.

  Josh and Colin tugged simultaneously at one joystick; a second lay unnoticed in the middle of the floor. Jay picked up the joystick and held it out.

  “You don’t need to fight over that one. There’s another one right here.” He thought nothing of the action, but Ellen shot him a vicious glance that clearly said keep out of my family affairs, I don’t tell your kids what to do, do I?

  Jay and Ellen hadn’t gotten along well for a long while now, but even he was startled by the vehemence implicit in her expression. He dropped the joystick and turned away from the squabbling boys.

  The rest of the day quickly disintegrated into family quarrels over trivialities that left Jay exhausted by the time he finally got to bed late Wednesday evening. He and Linda shared a three-quarters width rollaway bed Abe kept in the closet of the back corner bedroom. Ellen and Mitch had apparently decided-as always-to act on a first-come, first-served basis. Jay had not been the least surprised to see their suitcases already laid open on the queen-size bed in the middle bedroom, between Abe’s and the one Jay and Linda inherited by default. Jay’s girls were sleeping in the first bedroom, just across from the master bath and next to their Grandfather’s room. Ellen’s three boys had finally sacked out in the family room, their bulky sleeping bags and stacks of clothing cluttering most of the floor space.

  The remaining bedroom-tucked between the corner room and the living room-was too tightly packed with the bulkiest and most cumbersome of Grandpa Abe’s books and collecting equipment for anyone to sleep there. Jay had glanced in earlier that evening and noticed with increasing alarm the thick coating of dust on the dead-grey filing cabinets, on the microscope, on the taxidermy table, on the ends of the thick books that had served his father for a lifetime of identifying the specimens of rocks and plants and animals and insects he had collected from nearly every part of the Western United States.

  The sight of that thick layer of dust had bothered Jay much more deeply than the usual snips and quips from his brother-in-law, whose law practice in San Diego was admittedly far more lucrative than Jay’s work with Compu-Corps, or from Ellen’s usual (but this time unusually flawless) impersonation of the massive iceberg that gutted the Titanic.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Linda asked, abruptly breaking him out of his dark silence.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t act like it.”

  He glanced at her and smiled. “It’s just…it’s just that I don’t really like sleeping in here. I always feel half-dizzy when I walk in.” He gestured with one hand around the room that was originally designed as a bedroom but was now functioning more like a branch specimen room of the Ventura County Museum of Natural history.

  Birds of all sizes-ranging from tiny hummingbirds to a huge Great Horned Owl-clung with needle-sharp claws to stumps of wood that seemed to jut from the very substance of the sandy tan walls. Small birds like wrens and sparrows seemed to flutter on invisible wires hooked into the ceiling. Abe’s collection of western birds created a sensation that Jay found intensely claustrophobic. There were too many birds, too close together, their arced wings almost touching, their glass eyes sharp and too reflective, their beaks and claws angled threateningly.

  Most of the floor space around the edge of the room was filled with glass-fronted display cases and small, narrow tables containing collections of pinned butterflies and insects, minerals and rocks, and mounted samples of the smaller wildlife of Montana, Nevada, Arizona-including ground squirrels, chipmunks, two skunks, a mole, and a full-sized rattlesnake coiled like an oversized ashtray on the top shelf of the bookcase just inside the door. Hundreds of leaves and seedpods and blossoms lay desiccated and crumbling and pressed beneath protective plastic sheets collected in thick ring-binders that stood blackly along the desk top underneath the window.

  Even the closet was open and crowded with parts of Abe’s collections. The original hardwood folding doors had been removed, and on homemade shelves rising above the blank space where the rollaway had been stored-now eerily apparent as the only empty, uncluttered stretch of wall in the entire room-were stacked case after case of slide carousels that Jay knew contained the life history of the Morrises as well as a pictorial, encyclopedic natural history of every area Abe had worked in during his decades with the Bureau of Land Management.

&
nbsp; The room was reasonably large, Jay thought, especially for the fifth bedroom in a five-bedroom tract house. But it was so crammed with boxes and files and specimens along every wall and in every corner that it seemed crowded, breathlessly cramped. He felt as if the walls were inching nearer, as if the birds and animals were not dead and stuffed but merely caught helplessly in some weird half-living stasis, waiting for the right moment to break loose and flutter creep scuttle crawl insinuate themselves into his life.

  “This stuff always gave me the creeps,” he said finally, “even when I was a kid. I hated show-and-tell because Dad always insisted that I take one of those.” He gestured toward the birds. He shuddered. “I hated them.”

  Linda reached across the low bed and touched his hand with hers. “I know. I don’t especially like it in here, either. But the girls would have absolute screaming fits.”

  He nodded. Then he grinned. “I’d like to see those three little heathens in the family room stay in here for a night. Maybe I could rig up something with flashlights and batteries and a few wires, so the hawk and eagle would appear to attack…”

  “Jay!”

  “He shrugged, the grin lingering on his face. “Hey, everyone’s entitled to a fantasy. After the way those boys treated Anna and Elizabeth…”

  “I don’t think the girls ever got to play with the video games, not once,” Linda said, tacitly agreeing with Jay. The evening had been rough on the girls.

  And it was even rougher, Jay knew, because Grandpa Abe had spent most of the time sitting silently in the old bentwood rocker Grandma Matty had bought as a young mother. He hadn’t even rocked very much; he spent the evening staring at a spot on the wall opposite, six inches under the faded, antique-framed photograph of his own grandparents-Jay’s great-grandparents-stiffly postured for a formal wedding portrait. He had sat and stared and spoken very little

  Jay sighed. Obviously things weren’t going as well here as he had been led to believe through Abe’s telephone calls. He reached over and flicked the light off. Moonlight streamed through the curtainless window, striking him full on the face. The light cast the stuffed animals and birds into sharp relief. He rolled away, covering his eyes with his forearm.

  Linda nestled close against his back, her arm over his side. “Try to get some sleep,” she whispered in his ear. “Tomorrow will be better.”

  9

  It wasn’t.

  The girls woke at seven, before anyone else was awake, and crept into the family room and turned the television on. They dialed the volume knob so far down that the sound emerged as little more than a blurring murmur. They sat three or four feet from the screen, neither moving, neither making a sound. But something woke Thad up anyway, and when he sat up in his bag and saw the two girls staring intently at a cartoon he had grown tired of when he was ten, he yelled, “Hey, get out of here, bugs! We’re sleeping.” Thad yelling full-voiced was in itself an interesting phenomenon, one capable of waking everyone else in the house.

  It did. It jerked Jay from a tangle of hateful dreams that had kept him tossing and turning all night on the narrow bed. For her part, Linda had not dreamed, but Jay’s restlessness had perforce communicated itself to her. Jay was up and out the door before Linda was fully awake.

  Within five minutes, the only person still asleep was Grandpa Abe. The door to his bedroom was closed, and Jay heard no movements behind it as he hurried down the hall to see why the girls were crying. He rounded the entryway only a few steps in front of Linda, who was followed closely by Ellen. Elizabeth was whimpering, but Anna was screaming full volume. Thad had her by the upper arm, his fingers gripping so tightly that even Jay could see the bloodless white of the boy’s knuckles. Anna was almost off the ground, only one toe brushing the carpeting. The television screen was black, and Thad clutched the on-off button in his other hand.

  “ Hey!” Jay yelled, forgetting for an instant that the six-foot-one, straggly-haired ape wearing only a pair of drooping boxers hanging from his bony hips was his own nephew. “What’s going on?”

  Thad let go of Anna instantly-so fast, in fact, that the girl almost fell. Elizabeth grabbed her and steadied her. Thad spun around to face Jay.

  “Uh, Uncle Jay,” he said, as if that flicker of recognition were deserving of special notice. “Uh…we were sleepin’ and the bu… the girls came in and turned the TV on and woke us up and…”

  Jay crossed the room, stepping deliberately over the cocoon-like lumps that were Josh and Colin-both of them sitting up breathless, wide-eyed, and tousled. When he was less than a foot from his nephew, he spoke in a voice that was so low and calm and controlled that he barely recognized it as his own. “You touch her again, punk, and I’ll break every bone in your body.”

  Thad stared down at his five-foot-nine uncle and started to say something.

  “I mean it,” Jay said before the boy could speak. “Every bone in your fucking body.”

  ‘“Jay!” Linda’s voice registered disbelief. Jay never cursed.

  Jay whirled to see Linda at the entry to the family room, Ellen pressed close behind. For an instant, it was as if a thick red curtain had parted from before his eyes.

  He blinked.

  When he looked back at Thad, he was shocked. There wasn’t a wild-eye, hippie-type hulk towering over him. It was his nephew, the boy he had dandled on his knee. A skinny, fifteen-year-old boy whose emotional growth had not yet caught up with his body. Jay remembered vaguely his own teenage years, how difficult and rare it was to wake feeling like anything other than a temperamental grizzly on the constant prowl for mayhem.

  “Uh, listen, Thad, I’m sorry,” Jay began.

  “Get away from him!” Ellen jerked at Jay’s arm, forcing him to turn and face her. “Get your filthy mouth away from my son!”

  Jay was so stunned at what he had said and at the unreasoning fury he had experienced, at what he felt- knew — he would have done to the boy in another moment or two, that he couldn’t speak. He strode past Linda, who was crouching by Elizabeth and Anna to reassure them. He walked past Mitch, who was cinching up his robe in the entryway and obviously wondering what he had missed.

  Jay continued on to the back bedroom. He entered and shut the door behind himself, meticulously careful not to slam it. He dimly heard Ellen’s raucous voice, interrupted and punctuated here and there by Mitch’s deeper, grating bass. Once or twice Linda’s voice came through as well. Thad didn’t appear to be saying much.

  Finally, even the dim rustle of voices died away, and Jay was left with silence and turmoil. What the hell had he been doing? Okay, so the kid shouldn’t have grabbed Anna like that, but did that make it all right for Jay to come on like gangbusters. And what in hell made him spit out language like that. He rarely used it, never to family, especially not in front of Linda and the girls. He shook his head and sat staring at the floor.

  A long while later, Linda cracked the door open and slipped in.

  “Ellen and Mitch and the boys have gone out to get something to eat. Your Dad’s still asleep. The girls are reading.”

  Jay nodded numbly. Linda rested her hand on his hands, where they lay limply across his thighs and loosely clasped.

  “I talked with Ellen. I know you didn’t get much sleep last night. You must have been having a humdinger series of nightmares. You were moaning and tossing and turning all night long.”

  Jay touched her cheek. “You didn’t get much more, did you?”

  She flushed. “Anyway, I think Ellen understands. You were just overtired, worried about Grandpa Abe, upset. And Thad apologized for losing his temper and breaking the television knob and grabbing Anna like that. He was pretty shook.”

  “I guess. I would have been if it happened to me,” Jay said softly.

  “So the upshot is that I think everything is pretty well smoothed over.”

  They sat quietly for a long time, just the two of them, side by side on the edge of a narrow, lumpy rollaway.

  10

  Whe
n Abe Morris woke at ten-twenty, the house was deathly quiet. He stared around him curiously, as if he were seeing the room for the first time. Then something in the back of his brain shifted, and the familiar furniture and pictures and clothing snapped into place and he knew where he was and who he was.

  But aren’t Ellen and Jay here? he wondered briefly. I was sure they came here.

  He got up, feeling every savage bite of pain in his joints and bones. He dressed slowly, wishing that he could just remain in bed and sleep and dream, but knowing that for some reason he had to get up.

  That’s it, Jay and Ellen are coming today for dinner. For…what was it, yes, Thanksgiving. The family all together for Thanksgiving.

  He smiled.

  Then the smiled faded. He looked down at the unruffled quilts and pillow on the far side of the bed.

  Not the whole family. Sweet Mattie had been with him all night, but now he remembered that she was dead. Not the whole family.

  Finally dressed, he opened the door and stepped into the hall. There was no one there.

  Better hurry, he reminded himself. Lot’s to do before the kids get here.

  He shuffled across the hall to the bathroom. Without noticing the crack of light beneath the closed door, he swung the door open.

  “Grandpa!” a thin, high voice shrieked. The door slammed, almost catching Abe’s toe as it shut.

  What who I thought they weren’t coming until later today that wasn’t Ellen who was that?

  An arm surrounded him, enclosing him in a firm, tight grasp.

  He looked up into Jay’s eyes.

  Jay’s not that old Jay’s only twelve and Mattie’s not feeling well and I’m going to cook the Thanksgiving turkey myself this year why is Jay looking at me like that…

  “Dad,” Jay said gently. “Dad, are you all right?”