Life in the Land of the Living

by Daniel Vilmure

  She leaves the room and I peel to my jeans. When she returns with the bottle she tells me to follow her into the utility room.

  “And be quiet about it, ” she says. “I don’t want to wake up your father.”

  We step carefully through the living room and into the utility and I sit on the washer with my hands on my knees. She dabs the lotion on a swab of cotton; then, for the first time, in the light of the overhead lamp, she takes me in fully.

  “My Lord! Would you look at you?”

  She stands there slack-jawed, staring, gaping.

  “What? What is it, Mama? Hey? What is it?”

  The piece of cotton falls from her hand. So does the bottle of calamine. It breads with a quiet quickpop on the floor and I hear my father stirring on the couch in the next room.

  “How old’re you?” my mama asks.

  She has not bent down to clean up the broken bottle and her look is still one of slow-thawing awe.

  “Fourteen,” I say.

  Her head begins to nod.

  “Fourteen,” she repeats. “Yes. That’s about right.” She looks down at her hands. “How old was the girl you were with? Little Miss Nobody. How old was the girl? And don’t lie.”

  “Sixteen, ” I tell her. “Maybe older. To tell you the truth, she never said.”

  “Sixteen,” my mother says, soft, like an echo. “Sixteen. Yes. But then she never said.”

  We do not speak any for a short while. Then my mama shakes her head and bends down to the floor and smears her whole hand in the calamine puddle. She carries a look of satisfied disbelief on her face and holds up her hand like it’s got a needle in it. The bright pink lotion runs rivers down her arm.

  “What I should tell you to do is to strip yourself naked and wallow around in that calamine tarpit down there, and maybe it’ll take the sting out of that mountain range of welts you got carved across your chest and back, and maybe it’ll take the wang out of whatever other diseases you got fightin for territory on the surface of your body. All I’ve got to say is the next time you go out with Nobody, you better make sure she’s got a full bottle of insect repellent on her, and if she don’t, you better have the sense to keep your nocturnal activities confined to the backseat of a car, or the canvas of a puptent, or wherever the hell else you let your sap drip these days. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I’m too overworked to be tending a boy with yellow fever, and you’re too undernourished to have to be thinking about a second mouth. And don’t think you ain’t old enough to be playing dumb to what I’m saying, and don’t you stand there more hangmouth than me, acting like you don’t know what from what nor where it goes. Now turn your back, Romeo, and when I’m gone take your dungarees off and do the legs and the rest of you proper.”

  “Yes’m.”

  Then the calamine, cool, across my back, and the movement of her hands around my neck and shoulderblades; and when she has gone I take up a shard of glass from a broken mirror in the corner of the utility room, and I study my body, with its jigsaw patch of welts and pimples, and there is not a part of me that is not dimpled—not chest, nor feet, nor face, nor thighs: not even there; and I think to myself, “There ain’t a place that the insects haven’t touched, not a piece of territory that they cannot call their own.” And I dress myself and begin to itch, and when I enter the living room I see my father, scratching himself in the crotch of his corduroys.

  “You didn’t have to pull that knife on them.”

  Walk fast to your own end. I’ll be there to see you. Go. I threw the knife in the ground, straight, like mumbletypeg. Then I picked it up.

  “No. I didn’t.”

  I watch him hold it.

  “See? Like this. Now!” He throws it; it goes in all the way. “Ah! Right? Right? Ah, ha ha!”

  I take the hilt in my hand and try it.

  “No, no, no!”

  He slaps me on the back of the head.

  “More wrist, ” he says. “Look. One, two, three —snap!” It drives in, farther than before. I pick it up for him, and he has me try it again. When I am not throwing, we are drinking. When we are not drinking, I am throwing. It takes me one night to learn it.

  “Here,” he says. “To keep.”

  His knife is my knife.

  “Stay put,” I told him. “And don’t move until I get back.”

  He wandered around the rocks and stopped.

  “You’re going to get medicine, aren’t you?”

  I told him I was.

  “You get medicine,” he said. “And you won’t come back.”

  I looked at him. He sat amid all the white pebbles, shoulders set real straight and solid, that bullheaded glaze in his eyes. “What’s with you, little professor?” He jammed his hands down into his pockets like it was thirty degrees below zero outside, and I saw the water starting down his face. “Stop that,” I said.

  “Stop what?”

  “You know,” I told him. I ran a finger down my cheek.

  “I ain’t stopping nothing,” he told me, wiping the tear hard and quick, like it was acid. “That was a raindrop. I got hit in the face.”

  I looked at the sky and felt one on my back. The air was all black and drawn back sort of ruffled, like a magician sweeping his cape. I felt two more drops on my head, then three again on my back, then the whole sky commenced to falling.

  “Ask that to stop,” my brother said, laughing. “See if you can do it,” he told me, grinning cold.

  I’m lying in the lawn belly down on the grass, finger in the slippery-round hole of the meter-reader. I feel it beneath me, the wet grass vibrating. Then she is behind me, hand around the mower throttle.

  “Hey.” She says my name. “Get on outta the way there.”

  I roll over a couple of yards where the grass isn’t mowed. In a few minutes I feel her behind me, like before.

  “Hey.” She says my name again. “Listen, you. It’s tough enough doing this with him dead out on the sofa. The least you can do is stay outta Mama’s way.”

  I grin up, not budging.

  “You want me to move you?”

  We are on the knob of the slope at the front of our yard. With a push she could send me tumbling down.

  “Come on, Mama. Gimme a good shove.”

  And she is laughing then, down on her knees, hands beneath my shirt all digging and pushing. She gives a giddy shout, and the world becomes a pinwheel, houses clinging to the sky and streetlights doing handstands and neighbors shooting up into space suspended by feet on warm-cement driveways.

  “Awwwww, awwwww! Aw ha ha hawww!”

  In the gutter, sweating, concrete against my stomach. There is grass on my elbows, mouth, thighs. When the mower moves away I can hear the women neighbors.

  “Look at her doing that. In her condition? Where’s the man responsible for her misery?”

  “I heard her tell the little boy,” says the other, not even looking at me, “that he’s inside, watching the television. But if you as’t me, he ain’t inside. If you’re talking about the father, why, he could be anywheres.”

  “Ah, yes, ” says her partner. “He could be acros’t the state-line by now.”

  I leave them in their laughter and run to her. She kneels stooped in the shorn grass. She and it smell sweet.

  “Help me with the catcher here.”

  I look at it and look at her. We lift.

  “It’s almost as big as you are.”

  She laughs.

  “No. It’s almost as big as you.”

  I touch her there and shrug at her.

  “What I meant, Mama, was your stomach.”

  “Oh!” She lifts the bag higher and dumps it. “I ain’t that big. ” Her hands sift through the grass and pull out a few living and chopped-up lizards. “And even if he were the same size,” she says, taking one lizard and holding it before her face, so it dances, “he ain’t gonna dump so easy.”

  I ask her why she says “he.”

  “Because.” She p
uts the lizard down on the lawn and it runs in broken circles and juts out its neck and does calisthenics. “I ain’t bringin’ another girl into this world.”

  I squat on the back of the carriage of the mower and she rolls me to the backyard tool shed. When she has finished with the mower she holds me by the arm and tells me to wait in the shed while she closes the shed door. I do. In five minutes she returns with the edger. Light floods the shed, and I can see her shadow moving in orange smears toward me.

  “Did you like that?”

  She puts my hand against her, there.

  “1 know how he feels,” I tell her, thinking: “Now I know what he’s going through.”

  The rain came down in bucket tosses, making its best effort to drown the world on dry land. I could barely make him out as he sat unmoving on his rockpile, looking like a little boy anchored to the bottom of a public pool, cheeks puffed and breath held stubborn, not much caring for the commotion around him. There was lightning and the noise of palms and terrific winds and clouds like stomachs sagging, and the ground flinched and heaved undertoe like an animal trying to shake you off its skin. I could feel my chest going as the storm whipped up around us. I wished it would swallow me so I could settle in the thick of it, that there were palm fronds fastened to my forearms so I could catch a quick zephyr and shoot straight up, that there were some way I could breathe in the strength of the storm and launch my body high above the stationary earth. But there weren’t no way.

  “Listen!” I hollered. “You want to come with me?”

  He brought his legs in tight around his body.

  “What are you going to do?”

  I looked at him, full, and said nothing. There certainly was some kind of a resemblance, in the nose and hair and especially the eyes; even I had to admit it. It must’ve been some fluke of Mother Nature. Somebody’s mother had to be to blame.

  “I’m going to get some from the package store about a quarter-mile from here. That’s why you got to wait.”

  He buried his face, our face, in his hands.

  “Grader on the green lumber! Grader on the green!”

  The foreman wears a ragged Cincinnati Reds cap and waits by the moving belt with a pencil in his mouth. We watch him through the chainlink fence as he stands bouncing slightly on his heels.

  “Grader on the green lumber! Grader on the green lumber! Goddamn it, this green chain ain’t gonna stop for no man, even if he is determined to stop for it! Grader on the green lumber! Grader on the green!”

  A head pops out of the lumber office window. It is our daddy, clean-shaven and grinning, craning his head sort of backwards.

  “You hush your trap there, Charette!” he hollers. “That wood ain’t gonna get any greener, and my load ain’t gonna dump any sooner! I shit off the clock anyway, so stop your yawping. Everything’ll come out all right in the end!’”

  The pencil droops in the foreman’s mouth and he trods off bowlegged while the other workers chuckle. A boom man in the log pond takes a spill and comes up soaked and laughing. He waggles his head like a wet St. Bernard and my daddy calls from the office window: “Thar she blows, mateys! Boom whale on the port bow! Har har har!”

  I breathe in the sweet woody smell of the lumber and look at him beside me, hands around the chainlink.

  “See?” I tell him. “Our daddy’s a real popular guy.”

  He points to the conveyor where the foreman had stood.

  “Is that what Daddy does for a living?”

  “Sure,” I tell him. “He’s a grader. He makes his living there.”

  From across the yard a toilet flushes. We hear a door slam and our daddy comes running across the lumber yard. He is dressed in bluejeans and a plaid flannel shirt and he wears a baseball cap with the name of a company or something or other written on it. He carries two long sticks in his hands, one with a hook on the end of it, the other with a crayon. He flips the moving lumber with the hook, looks the wood over good, scribbles on it with the crayon, and moves on to the next piece of lumber. He cannot see us waiting for him outside the fence and he works quickly and finishes most of the pieces on the conveyor belt, talking quietly to himself. “Grader on the green, ” he says in a nagging voice. “Grader on the goddamn green.” When he finishes he turns and studies the fence and sees us and his face falls. He throws his sticks down at his side and makes a disappointed pretend-face. “Aw look, Doc,” he says to someone who isn’t beside him, “it’s those no-good kids.” He lets out a yell and comes charging the fence like a wildbull. We back away from the chainlink laughing. With a single clutch and bound he is over and has the both of us beneath his arms. “Teach you to nose around my place of employment,” he says, butting our heads together. “Teach you to respect a working man, punksticks.” We all settle down, and he pushes me on the back of the head and leads my little brother along by the hand. He whistles, poorly, and we both walk slow so my brother doesn’t stumble.

  “Where we meetin your mother for lunch?” he asks.

  “She says it’s up to you, Daddy, ” I tell him. “But you know what?”

  He grins. His eyebrows arch. “What?”

  “I bet she’d like to go to Snak City.”

  “Well!” he huffs, mulling it over. “I’d certainly go for that!”

  And he lifts my brother up in his arms, and we run racing for the company lot.

  “What you got to steal it with?” he asked, sounding like me too, like I must’ve sounded when I was his age.

  “My hands. And the knife, if I got to.”

  He did not look up.

  “The man behind the counter’s going to have more than that.”

  “I know,” I told him. “But he won’t use it.”

  “He will if he sees you.”

  “He won’t see me.”

  “He will if you pull that knife.”

  “I won’t have to.”

  “What if you have to?”

  “If I have to I’ll run.”

  “And bullets run faster.”

  “And so do trains. And so do I.”

  His hair was plastered down around his forehead, and he looked like something peeking out behind draperies. His face had that undefeated tilt to it, and he took up a palmful of pebbles and started dropping them down at his feet. He was the thinking type, all right. Twice as quick as me, it was the truth. If I’d lacked the will to let him make my decisions for me, I probably wouldn’t have been in half the trouble I was in. But what good’s a conscience if you let someone else go and ruin it for you?

  “You comin’ or what?”

  “But the rain—” he began, and I had to laugh. As if the weather made any difference, as if a firestorm would’ve been reason enough to call the rest of it off. “No. Listen. You can go get the medicine afterwards, when the sky empties itself. I’ll go with you after the storm.”

  “All right,” I told him. “Pussy out. It don’t matter none to me no more. I just better find you here when I get back.”

  As I rose to leave him in the switchyard house I could see in the distance the outline of the old bay bridge; it looked like the abandoned skin of a water moccasin. Already I could hear the whistle of another train a couple miles off, and I knew after that there’d be a third come twenty-five minutes, and a fourth following that. Because of the warnings I’d given him I didn’t think my brother would have the courage to say my name again, but he did. I’d been walking away, but I turned back around and went to him and held him and struck him to the ground with my fist. He fell out of my arms and lay like a pile of bones scattered on the pebbles laughing. I told him to be quiet and wait in the switchhouse, but he wouldn’t. He just kept laughing, real low, and saying my name over and over like he’d never heard nothing in the world so funny. I managed to get a good fifty yards away from him before I convinced myself that he needed checking up on, so I went back and found him stretched out rail to rail. He was laughing a little softer and saying just my last name now, like when you say a word to your
self and wonder how it came to get that word sound, and the more you say it the more awkward and hysterical it gets, until pretty soon it isn’t even a word anymore, it’s just a sound; and you can’t bring yourself to remember what the sound stood for, or whether it stood for anything, really, and you feel your stomach tighten because nothing remains to distance you from the fear of what the word once meant.

  I helped him over to the switchhouse and sat him down on the bench out of the rain. I realized that he wasn’t laughing anymore. We sat there for a while and could hear ourselves dripping, and his throat made a struggling noise like something that wants air but has forgotten how to get it. After a while his breathing got back to regular and he said, “Where you going to put the medicine?”

  I touched my pants pocket.

  “Where’d you say?”

  I touched my pants pocket again, and when he saw what I’d done his eyes went straight and narrow, like a bird’s.

  He ran a hand through his hair.

  “I suppose,” he said. “I suppose that’s how it’s got to be done.”

  Outside the shelter of the switchyard house it rained less heavy than before, the noise of it sounding something like fingers tapping music on a station wagon dashboard. I asked him if he wanted me to stay with him until he was all right again, and he said no, I could go about my business. I made him promise he’d wait until I got back, that he wouldn’t lie beneath any more trains unless I was there to go about showing him the right way to do it.

  He lay near-sleeping on a bench when I left him. His lower lip was broken from where I’d hit him, and you could see where one of his teeth was crooked and where the gumline was bloody and torn. It had been a long night for him. It had been a long one. The last thing he said to me before I left him on the bench was, “Walk fast to your own end. I’ll be there to see you go.” When he said it his voice was like paper tearing.

  “Wake up.”

  “What?”

  “Wake up and go to sleep.”

  He stretches his arms behind his neck and his eyes squinch up tight like somebody’s bloom salt in them. He looks at me with a reluctant smile and tries to shove the pillow over his head so he wont have to face me.