High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel

by Scott Cheshire

  I wanted nothing of the sort.

  I looked around at the elder brothers. They were so tall.

  “Where’s my dad?”

  There was a drop ceiling above us, rectangular foam tiles propped by metal ribbing, and I was filled with a sudden urge to push aside a tile and see what lay beyond there. Pipes? Electrical wiring? A dark empty space.

  “Your father gave us his blessing,” one of them said.

  But I didn’t want to give sermons anymore. Why? Because I was afraid it would happen again. I couldn’t really put it into words, but it was the total loss of self onstage, in front of everybody—or is that the right way to put it? Maybe the opposite. I knew what I’d done up there was special, like nothing anybody there had ever seen. Certainly like nothing I’d ever seen, or done, and yet I’d been physically compelled to do it. It wasn’t by choice, didn’t feel like a choice. But I also knew very well what I had done, knew that it was me who had done it, even though I didn’t exactly know what I was doing at the time. I imagine it like the way a child actor can’t stay away from a camera the very first time he sees one, and he never knows explicitly why. An infant, and he’s posing for pictures! All I knew was that getting onstage would mean doing that “thing” again, playing that part, and, frankly, it meant talking about God doing terrible things to fine people. How did I know who was or wasn’t good? It meant talking about blood, and war, and vengeance, and getting nice people, as far as I could tell, to applaud for it. I could not have articulated this at the time, but I felt it inside my body. In my skin. And I was also a little afraid that it wouldn’t happen—I’ll admit that now: that I could never do it again. I was afraid to find out.

  Plus the kids in church, they had already avoided me, but now, after Issy, they acted like I carried some kind of contagion. Get too close and disappear. Havi claimed he was Issy’s best friend, probably for the attention, although by that time I knew it wasn’t true. Some of the others, the older ones, closer to twenty, now started paying me attention. I was invited for after-church lunches. Let’s go to a diner, and see a movie at the Woodhaven Boulevard Cinemas. I think they had some vague religious ambitions, and thought befriending me would improve their standing. I just wanted to be alone. But soon it was settled. Again in the back room, this time with Dad and the congregation elders. I would give a short sermon at the end of October on the satanic evils of Halloween. On devils, and witches, and ghosts, all abominations in the eyes of the Lord.

  The year before, a few neighborhood boys were seen trick-or-treating dressed up like the rock band KISS. Obviously because of a local demonic influence. Just look to the acronymic herald: Kids In Satan’s Service. It would be years before I got the unintended irony, when I first heard “Rock and Roll All Nite,” and pretty much anything else from their totally benign catalogue. Evil as Saturday morning cartoons. Nevertheless, my subject: “The Satanic Dangers of Halloween, and the Everyday Demonic Influences Around Us.” Dad was enthused. Mom was not.

  Was the timing appropriate? I mean, there was Issy to think about, and that was what I should have been doing—as a family, what all of us should have been doing. Praying for Issy.

  She said, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t like it.”

  This was in the living room, at the table. We were having our weekly Bible study and she just came out with it.

  Dad said, “Let’s not argue in front of the boy.”

  That same week Mom went to the doctor, and told him how tired she always was, whole-body tired, and it wasn’t long after that we found out she had cancer. I ran off into the backyard, and sat myself again beside the maples Issy and I used to climb, and I tried to not think about it at all. I slapped at the ground beside me. It didn’t hurt much and so I got on my knees and I punched at the ground. Punched like I wanted to hurt it. And then I stood up and I looked at one of the maples, imagining one of them was me, and one was Issy, and I touched it with a knuckle to see how hard it was. I cocked back my fist, such a small fist, and I punched the tree. I scraped my knuckles on the bark. They bled. I punched it again, squarely, and I heard my knuckle snap. I started crying, and sat back down in the dirt. I prayed, cradling one hand in the other. Where had he gone? Why had he gone anywhere at all? And why that summer? I must have asked for this. Maybe I hadn’t talked with God himself, not had a conversation with him, not a dialogue, but that didn’t mean he didn’t hear me. My God, what had I done? I’d called out and asked for the End. I’d rolled out a red welcome carpet, and, yes, I didn’t know what this meant, not then: that really this meant death. Real blood. Red blood. But it was becoming clearer to me. It hadn’t touched me yet, not exactly, but nonlife, nonbeing, the hole in the air that Issy now was, that had touched me, and I couldn’t help but make a connection between the two. Here was the one kid who let me in, who treated me like a kid, like I wanted to be treated, and so I acted like a kid, the way I wished I could act with the other kids, or with my father. Here was the kid who became my brother, who made me feel less lonely, and now he was gone. My best friend, who never once seemed anxious or afraid. I used to wonder whether Issy somehow knew this would happen, that it was coming. Otherwise, why had we compressed what felt like years of friendship into months, weeks into days, hours? I wondered if it was my fault, whether God had simply answered my call. Issy was the first one to go. And now maybe Mom would go next.

  All this remembering took work, and walking up and down Dad’s block, taking in the pungent nighttime neighborhood air, I got hungry. And thirsty, and I hoped to scare up some booze. I wanted to sit on the back porch and get tipsy. I wanted to look at the maples. Those same trees. Was it possible? The same dirt? I went back inside and stopped by the bathroom and listened there for Dad. He was talking in his sleep, mumbling. I said his name, quietly. Nothing. I heard his breath quicken and slow, quicken and slow, and I imagined his legs moving like how a dog’s legs quiver when the dog dreams of a chase. I tried the doorknob. It was locked. I looked at the red light and walked away into the kitchen, opened the fridge and took out the butter. I rifled through drawers in search of a knife, found one, cut a thick slice of bread. I looked at the kitchen, at the cat turds, at the trash on so many surfaces. I took the bottle from the fridge. Uncorked, and nearly empty. I said to myself, If I don’t move a muscle, then maybe the room will feel clean. I moved, and something crunched underfoot.

  On the far wall, there was a simple wooden cross and beside it a decorative plate. I walked closer. These were new. Maybe not new, but I’d never seen them before. A gold Star of David was painted in the center of the dish. And burned into the wooden cross, on the horizontal piece were the words “Beth Sarim,” and on the vertical, in smaller letters, “O. Laudermilk, 1930.” I wondered who the “O.” was. I knew my father’s father was an Orville, and I think he shared the name with his father, my great-grandfather. But I could’ve been wrong. Probably my grandfather’s. I had no idea who Beth Sarim was. Beside the cross was the backyard door. I pulled, but the door was stuck. The weather had done what it does, and the door felt grafted to the frame. I pulled, and again I pulled, until the door gave way, and stray leaves and string, paper cups and newspaper wads, all in an upswept pile against the door, tumbled into the kitchen. I jogged back to the counter. Grabbed the bread and the wine.

  It was a quiet evening, and the kerosene smell seemed less everywhere now, and there were lights in the neighboring windows. In a back window of the house behind ours, a family was sitting around a table, and the father, or I assume it was the father, was talking lively with his hands. The backyard was smaller than I remembered. All overgrown with weeds and littered with beer cans and bottles, probably from neighborhood kids. Three bald rubber tires were stacked beside a pile of paint cans, and a twisted bike knotted like a ribbon sat on top of a red metal car hood. The Ford Country Squire! —No. And just as fast, I remembered that poor thing had been repossessed, not so long after Dad brought it home. Because the world in fact kept turning, and it turned out we coul
dn’t afford the payments. At the back fence, like a V jutting from the ground, were the same two maples.

  The evening breeze was slight. The leaves up top were flitting. I sat on the back porch steps.

  The wine was cold and not bad at all and I watched evening come down behind the houses. The pearlike shadows of the Sikh temple domes darkened against the sky. I’m here, I’m right here, I thought to myself. And Dad’s here, too, right there inside and asleep. He’s alive. But the man should be in a bed. Were there beds anymore? Upstairs? I hadn’t even been upstairs yet. More wine. Too many years had sloughed off this place, like paint peeling from a surface, all of it and everywhere else, the backyard and metal fence, the rusting wrought-iron porch railing, the blue mailboxes on the street corners, and the ice cream trucks, takeout delivery guys on bikes, and the next-door neighbors asleep in their beds or watching the nightly news in easy chairs, from all of this and everything, the years were sloughing off too fast. What happens next? We’d hug in the bright morning, avoiding all mirrors, and cheer flat beer until he finally gave up and died, “went home.” I opened my phone and the digital green display lit up. I looked at the numbers.

  I decided I would march through the house first thing in the morning, and tear every drape and shade from the windows, open every window wide. I wanted to light every bulb and start sweeping. I would wake the man up with a busy morning commotion, fresh coffee brewing in the kitchen. He’d come shouting from the bathroom, blocking the sunlight from his eyes, and see me in the hallway working a broom. The front door open, trash bags piled on the porch. And then he’d say, Thank you, Junior, thank you. He’d say, This is just what I needed, good light in here! Just can’t get enough light! Then we’d go for a walk in the sun, me holding his hand, a giant hand, and my father a giant beside me. I drank. But part of me, I have to say, was also jealous of the man, of how he looked at the thing, unflinching. And yet a small part of me also disliked him for being so goddamn gullible about it all. Life is here. Now. God doesn’t need your company. Leave Heaven be. I would save him after all.

  I went back to the kitchen and foraged for more wine. I opened the refrigerator, dumbly, knowing there was no more left. I went through the cabinets, mostly empty; some were filled. One was lovingly stacked with newspapers, and another with pens and pencils bound by rubber bands. Another was stacked with empty wine bottles. One fell, I caught it in my hands, and this gave me hope.

  The pantry.

  It was a deep closet pantry with louvered doors. I’d hidden inside as a kid when my mother did the dishes, and also when she searched the rooms with a belt in her hands, anxious to give me a strapping for any disobedience. I don’t like to remember this side of her. Plus that sort of thing only happened occasionally, and when I was very young. I saw a worn-down broom leaned against shelves stacked with dusty canned goods, and a stack of cardboard boxes. One had been opened, flaps nicely folded. Inside it, I saw two lamps messily wrapped in bubble packing, the same lamp I’d seen in both the dining room and the living room. Behind, there was a box with four bottles of red wine, screw-topped.

  I chose a tall glass from the sink and rinsed it, dried it clean on my shirt.

  Back outside, shouting came from a dimly lit basement window next door. Maybe Korean. The night sky in Queens had no stars, and the moon was somewhere up there dozing. It was a nonstop sky of dark blue and nothing. I thought, My mother is here, she’s right here, and also she’s not here at all. She’s out there and nothing at all. And all of her was here when she was still here, even the yelling for my father, saying there’s a spider in the bathroom, and the prayers before meals with a supplicant’s napkin on her head whenever Dad was out of town, even the vein in her neck like the string on her red balloon face when she got angry. I let that memory go when it came. All of her was here when she was here, and nowhere else. I never thought of her name anymore. My father’s name is Gill. I wanted to say his name out loud.

  “Gill Laudermilk.”

  My glass raised, I said it louder. And I had a terrible feeling that there was more dead space between sons and fathers than all of the night air around me. Which version of Dad did I love? I loved mostly an invention, the best version of him I could think of.

  “I am Gill Laudermilk’s son!”

  The moon peeked over the roofs, and I was tired. The lightning bugs were blinking, and I thought of the brief electric marks they make when getting snuffed.

  I carefully closed the back door and took the wine bottle into the living room. And like rats after hours in a restaurant, the cats came out from the corners. They rubbed against my legs, flirting and following me with caution. I shook the sheet on the couch clean, shut off the lamp, and leaned back easy on the couch. Where was my bag? I pulled the phone from my pocket and tried to relax. The room was dark, very dark, and I set the phone green-lit and open on the table. I smelled the garbage in the hallway, but it was fainter. I was getting used to it. I deeply inhaled, filled my senses like I would in a Christmas kitchen. I drank in the stink and everything was going to be fine. The phone shined weakly and the numbers read “9:21.” Things would be better tomorrow.

  The white cat rubbed at my ankles.

  I patted my lap: Come up here. Stroked her back. I wanted to ask her about the bathroom, what it looked like inside the red-lit room, and how it felt to be such a good kitty, to be trusted to see what was going on inside there, to be such a perfect fucking kitty. I stood up and, picking her up with both hands, I let her hang. Dangling there from my grip, the softly hissed. I let go one hand and lifted her higher, stretching my arm as far is it could go. She scratched at my forearms with her back feet. Was this the same vicious thing that had scratched my arm before? An itchy red line puffed up on my wrist. I took a gulp from my glass as the cat fought back. I squeezed my hand slightly, and actually moved the cat’s ribs. I felt the shape of her rib cage, her interior, her tiny pink heart shaking there and sweating the closing rib walls between my fingers. The cage was closing in my grip. I put down my glass.

  I pressed my fingers against one of the pink pads of her right front paw, and a single claw came curling like a sharp thin pinky finger. I kept pressure on the pad, keeping the claw extended, and I pressed a thumb against the claw. It poked against my skin and broke the skin of my finger but I pushed back more against the claw, bending it backward. She cried out, fighting my grip. I was afraid my father might hear. I squeezed hard on her ribs and reminded her that I actually had two hands. I pushed back on her claw and she cried and she fought.

  She whimpered.

  She stopped fighting, and let herself hang. I thought of wishbones, totally ashamed. I sat and placed the cat in my lap. She didn’t run. She hopped off and just walked away, but not without stopping at the doorway and giving me a look of absolute disgust before leaving the room. The phone light had gone out. I closed the phone, opened it again, and left it there on the table, green-lit and glowing. I poured another glass and drank it down fast. It had been such a long first day. What would I find in the light of morning? I closed my eyes and the cats were slowly climbing up the couch, up my legs. They came out like shadows and covered me. I closed my eyes and prayed again. Again! I asked if I could please dream of Sarah, and I lay there for what seemed like only seconds before I fell into a deep heavy sleep, before falling into a long and semilucid dream.

  WEST

  2

  SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  It was a Sunday morning when Sarah first called to talk about Dad. I remember because I was standing on the treadmill she gave me. The TV was on, one of the news channels, and sometimes I looked at it, but mostly I just stood there staring at the dead odometer. I was fully dressed for the day, and sipping coffee. A glance here and there at the morning show. The power button on the treadmill totally untouched, no red numbers telling me how much time I had left. It should’ve been our eighth anniversary. A year already since the divorce, and things weren’t getting any better. They were getting better, in that
I no longer wanted to throw myself into the Pacific (in those fantasies, Sarah always came bounding down the beach, bikini clad, just in time…), but everything else was turning to shit. I still couldn’t believe Mom was gone and all the world around me hardly noticed. This was Mom. We did talk, Sarah and I, occasionally, but not much. I felt like a stranger in my own life. The sound of her voice used to be mine, and now it was his. Nikos, the infamous Grecian usurper. I wanted to hate the man, but more I wanted to avoid what I really knew in my heart, the basic truth that she went with him because she was lonely, and because somewhere along the line, her loving husband had become an asshole. I’ll say this: the phone call was unexpected. I took my cell from the holder on my belt.

  Sarah 8:55.

  “Well, hello, stranger,” I said.

  She said, “I can’t really talk, not now.”

  “So talk.”

  “Okay. There is something up with Dad. Your dad. Something unkosher, I mean definitely. But I can’t really talk right now. So call him.”

  “So nice to hear from you, too,” I said.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “I’m coming,” she said to someone else.

  “What, is he sick? He told you he’s sick? And who are you talking to?” I did not yet know about Nikos.

  “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s something else. There’s a quiver in his voice, a kind of manic thing. It’s depressing and a little bit scary. I can’t talk.”

  “And yet here we are talking,” I said.

  “I’m coming,” she said again to someone else. “Go see him. Just go see him.”