by Dan Chaon
“Hello, sexy,” was, of course, one of Wendell’s sayings, along with “Good God, baby!” and “Smell my feet!” both of which were also part of Wild Bill’s main repertoire. They had subsequently become catchphrases for her children. She’d hear Evan, their six-year-old, out in the yard, shouting “Good God, baby!” and then mimicking that laugh. And even Tobe had picked up on the sophomoric retort “Smell my feet!” It bothered her more than she could explain. It was silly, but it sickened her, conjuring up a morbid fascination with human stink, something vulgar and tiring. They repeated it and repeated it until finally, one night at dinner, she’d actually slammed her hand down on the table. “Stop it!” she cried. “I can’t stand it anymore. It’s ruining my appetite!”
And they sat there, suppressing guilty grins. Looking down at their plates.
How delicate she was! How ladylike! How prudish!
But there was something else about the phrase, something she couldn’t mention. It was a detail from the series of rapes that had occurred in their part of the state. The assaulted women had been attacked in their homes, blindfolded, a knife pressed against their skin. The first thing the attacker did was to force the women to kneel down and lick his bare feet. Then he moved on to more brutal things.
These were the crimes that Wendell had been convicted of, three months before. He had been convicted of only three of the six rapes he was accused of, but it was generally assumed that they had all been perpetrated by the same person. He was serving a sentence of no less than twenty-five years in prison, though his case was now beginning the process of appeals. He swore that he was innocent.
And they believed him—his family, all of them. They were all determined that Wendell would be exonerated, but it was especially important to Tobe, for Tobe had been Wendell’s lawyer. Wendell had insisted upon it—“Who else could defend me better than my brother?” he’d said—and Tobe had finally given in, had defended Wendell in court, despite the fact that he was a specialist in family law, despite the fact that he had no experience as a criminal attorney. It was a “no-brainer,” Tobe had said at the time. “No jury would believe it for a second.” She had listened, nodding, as Tobe called the case flimsy, “a travesty,” he said, “a bumbled investigation.”
And so it was a blow when the jury, after deliberating for over a week, returned a guilty verdict. Tobe had actually let out a small cry, had put his hands over his face, and he was still in a kind of dizzied state. He believed now that if he had only recused himself, Wendell would have been acquitted. It had affected him, it had made him strange and moody and distant. It frightened her—this new, filmy look in his eyes, the drinking, the way he would wander around the house, muttering to himself.
She felt a sort of hitch in her throat, a hitch in her brain. Here he was, laughing with Jodie and Evan, his eyes bright with amusement as she slammed her hand down. She didn’t understand it. When the bird croaked, “Smell my feet,” didn’t Tobe make the same associations that she did? Didn’t he cringe? Didn’t he have the same doubts?
Apparently not. She tried to make eye contact with him, to plead her case in an exchange of gazes, but he would have none of it. He smirked into his hand, as if he were one of the children.
And maybe she was overreacting. A parrot! It was such a minor thing, wasn’t it? Perhaps not worth bringing up, not worth its potential for argument. He stretched out in bed beside her and she continued to read her book, aware of the heaviness emanating from him, aware that his mind was going over and over some detail once again, retracing it, pacing around its circumference. In the past few months, it had become increasingly difficult to read him—his mood shifts, his reactions, his silences.
Once, shortly after the trial had concluded, she had tried to talk to him about it. “It’s not your fault,” she had told him. “You did the best you could.”
She had been surprised at the way his eyes had narrowed, by the flare of anger, of pure scorn, which had never before been directed at her. “Oh, really?” he said acidly. “Whose fault is it, then? That an innocent man went to prison?” He glared at her, witheringly, and she took a step back. “Listen, Cheryl,” he’d said. “You might not understand this, but this is my brother we’re talking about. My little brother. Greeting card sentiments are not a fucking comfort to me.” And he’d turned and walked away from her.
He’d later apologized, of course. “Don’t ever talk to me that way again,” she’d said, “I won’t stand for it.” And he agreed, nodding vigorously, he had been out of line, he was under a lot of stress and had taken it out on her. But in truth, an unspoken rift had remained between them in the months since. There was something about him, she thought, that she didn’t recognize, something she hadn’t seen before.
Cheryl had always tried to avoid the subject of Tobe’s brothers. He was close to them, and she respected that. Both of Tobe’s parents had died before Cheryl met him—the mother of breast cancer when Tobe was sixteen, the father a little more than a decade later, of cirrhosis—and this had knit the four boys together. They were close in an old-fashioned way, like brothers in Westerns or gangster films, touching in a way, though when she had first met them she never imagined what it would be like once they became fixtures in her life.
In the beginning, she had liked the idea of moving back to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where Tobe had grown up. The state, and the way Tobe had described it, had seemed romantic to her. He had come back to set up a small law office, with his specialty in family court. She had a degree in educational administration, and was able, without much trouble, to find a job as a guidance counselor at a local high school.
It had seemed like a good plan at the time. Her own family was scattered: a sister in Vancouver; a half sister in Chicago, where Cheryl had grown up; her father, in Florida, was remarried to a woman about Cheryl’s age and had a four-year-old son, whom she could hardly think of as a brother; her mother, now divorced for a third time, lived alone on a houseboat near San Diego. She rarely saw or spoke to any of them, and the truth was that when they’d first moved to Cheyenne, she had been captivated by the notion of a kind of homely happiness—family and neighbors and garden, all the mundane middle-class clichés, she knew, but it had secretly thrilled her. They had been happy for quite a while. It was true that she found Tobe’s family a little backward. But at the time, they had seemed like mere curiosities, who made sweet, smart Tobe even sweeter and smarter, to have grown up in such an environment.
She thought of this again as the usual Friday night family gathering convened at their house, now sans Wendell, now weighed with gloom and concern, but still willing to drink beer and play cards or Monopoly and talk drunkenly into the night. She thought back because almost ten years had now passed, and she still felt like a stranger among them. When the children had been younger, it was easier to ignore, but now it seemed more and more obvious. She didn’t belong.
She had never had any major disagreements with Tobe’s family, but there had developed, she felt, a kind of unspoken animosity, perhaps simple indifference. To Carlin, the second-oldest, Cheryl was, and would always remain, merely his brother’s wife. Carlin was a policeman, crew-cut, ruddy, with the face of a bully, and Cheryl couldn’t ever remember having much of a conversation with him. To Carlin, she imagined, she was just another of the womenfolk, like his wife, Karissa, with whom she was often left alone. Karissa was a horrid little mouse of a woman with small, judgmental eyes. She hovered over the brothers as they ate and didn’t sit down until she was certain everyone was served; then she hopped up quickly to offer a second helping or clear a soiled plate. There were times, when Karissa was performing her duties, that she regarded Cheryl with a glare of pure, self-righteous hatred. Though of course, Karissa was always “nice”—they would talk about children, or food, and Karissa would sometimes offer compliments. “I see you’ve lost weight,” she’d say, or: “Your hair looks much better, now that you’ve got it cut!”
Cheryl might have liked Tobe’s next b
rother, Randy—he was a gentle soul, she thought, but he was also a rather heavy drinker, probably an alcoholic. She’d had several conversations with Randy that had ended with him weeping, brushing his hand “accidentally” across the small of her back or her thigh, wanting to hug. She had long ago stopped participating in the Friday night card games, but Randy still sought her out, wherever she was trying to be unobtrusive. “Hey, Cheryl,” he said, earnestly pressing his shoulder against the door frame. “Why don’t you come and drink a beer with us?” He gave her his sad grin. “Are you being antisocial again?”
“I’m just enjoying my book,” she said. She lifted it so he could see the cover, and he read aloud in a kind of dramatized way.
“The House of Mirth,” he pronounced. “What is it? Jokes?” he said hopefully.
“Not really,” she said. “It’s about society life in old turn-of-the-century New York.”
“Ah,” he said. “You and Wendell could probably have a conversation about that. He always hated New York!”
She nodded. No doubt Wendell would have read House of Mirth and would have an opinion of it that he would offer to her in his squinting, lopsided way. He had surprised her, at first, with his intelligence, which he masked behind a kind of exaggerated folksiness and that haw-hawing laugh. But the truth was, Wendell read widely, and he could talk seriously about any number of subjects if he wanted. She and Wendell had shared a love of books and music—he had once stunned her by sitting down at his piano and playing Debussy, then Gershwin, then an old Hank Williams song, which he sang along with in a modest, reedy tenor. There were times when it had seemed as if they could have been friends—and then, without warning, he would turn on her. He would tell her a racist joke, just to offend her; he would call her “politically correct” and would goad her with his far-right opinions, the usual stuff—gun control, feminism, welfare. He would get a certain look in his eyes, sometimes right in the middle of talking, a calculating, shuttered expression would flicker across his face. It gave her the creeps, perhaps even more now than before, and she put her hand to her mouth as Randy stood, still wavering, briefly unsteady, in the doorway. In the living room, Tobe and Carlin suddenly burst into laughter, and Randy’s eyes shifted.
“I miss him,” Randy said, after they had both been silently thoughtful for what seemed like a long while; he looked at her softly, as if she, too, had been having fond memories of Wendell. “I really miss him bad. I mean, it’s like this family is cursed or something. You know?”
“No,” she said, but not so gently that Randy would want to be patted or otherwise physically comforted. “It will be all right,” she said firmly. “I honestly believe everything will turn out for the best.”
She gave Randy a hopeful smile, but she couldn’t help thinking of the way Wendell would roll his eyes when Randy left the room to get another beer. “He’s pathetic, isn’t he?” Wendell had said, a few weeks before he was arrested. And he’d lowered his eyes, giving her that look. “I’ll bet you didn’t know you were marrying into white trash, did you?” he said, grinning in a way that made her uncomfortable. “Poor Cheryl!” he said. “Tobe fakes it really well, but he’s still a stinky-footed redneck at heart. You know that, don’t you?”
What was there to say? She was not, as Wendell seemed to think, from a background of privilege—her father had owned a dry-cleaning store. But at the same time, she had been comfortably sheltered. None of her relatives lived in squalor, or went to prison, or drank themselves daily into oblivion. She’d never known a man who got into fistfights at bars, as Tobe’s father apparently had. She had never been inside a home as filthy as the one in which Randy lived.
But it struck her now that the trial was over, now that Randy stood, teary and boozy in her bedroom doorway. These men had been her husband’s childhood companions—his brothers. He loved them. He loved them, more deeply than she could imagine. When they were together, laughing and drinking, she could feel an ache opening inside her. If he had to make a choice, who would he pick? Them or her?
• • •
In private, Tobe used to laugh about them. They were “characters,” he said. He said, “You’re so patient, putting up with all of their bullshit.” And he kissed her, thankfully.
At the same time, he told her other stories. He spoke of a time when he was being abused by a group of high school bullies. Randy and Carlin had caught the boys after school, one by one, and “beat the living shit out of them.” They had never bothered Tobe again.
He talked about Randy throwing himself into their mother’s grave, as the casket was lowered, screaming “Mommy! Mommy!” and how the other brothers had to haul him out of the ground. He talked about how, at eleven or twelve, he was feeding the infant Wendell out of baby-food jars, changing his diapers. “Then, after Mom got cancer, I practically raised Wendell,” he told her once, proudly. “She was so depressed—I just remember her laying on the couch and telling me what to do. She wanted to do it herself, but she couldn’t. It wasn’t easy, you know. I was in high school, and I wanted to be out partying with the other kids, but I had to watch out for Wendell. He was a sickly kid. That’s what I remember most. Taking care of him. He was only six when Mom finally died. It’s weird. I probably wouldn’t have even gone to college if I hadn’t had to spend all that time at home. I didn’t have anything to do but study.”
The story had touched her, when they’d first started dating. Tobe was not—had never been—a very emotional or forthcoming person, and she’d felt she discovered a secret part of him.
Was it vain to feel a kind of claim over these feelings of Tobe’s? To take a proprietary interest in his inner life, to think: “I am the only one he can really talk to.” Perhaps it was, but they’d had what she thought of as a rather successful marriage, up until the time of Wendell’s conviction. There had been an easy, friendly camaraderie between them; they made love often enough; they both loved their children. They were normally happy.
But now—what? What was it? She didn’t know. She couldn’t tell what was going on in his head.
Winter was coming. It was late October, and all the forecasts predicted cold, months of ice and darkness. Having grown up in Chicago, she knew that this shouldn’t bother her, but it did. She dreaded it, for it always brought her into a constant state of predepressive gloom, something Scandinavian and lugubrious, which she had never liked about herself. Already, she could feel the edges of it. She sat in her office, in the high school, and she could see the distant mountains out the window, growing paler and less majestic until they looked almost translucent, like oddly shaped thunderheads fading into the colorless sky. A haze settled over the city. College Placement Exam scores were lower than usual. A heavy snow was expected.
And Tobe was gone more than usual now, working late at night, preparing for Wendell’s appeal. They had hired a new lawyer, one more experienced as a defense attorney, but there were still things Tobe needed to do. He would come home very late at night.
She hoped that he wasn’t drinking too much, but she suspected that he was. She had been trying not to pay attention, but she smelled alcohol on him nearly every night he came to bed; she saw the progress of the cases of beer in the refrigerator, the way they were depleted and replaced.
What’s wrong? she thought, waiting up for him, waiting for the sound of his car in the driveway. She was alone in the kitchen, making herself some tea, thinking, when Wild Bill spoke from his cage.
“Stupid cunt,” he said.
She turned abruptly. She was certain that she heard the words distinctly. She froze, with the kettle in her hand over the burner, and when she faced him, Wild Bill cocked his head at her, fixing her with his bird eye. The skin around his eye was bare, whitish wrinkled flesh, which reminded her of an old alcoholic. He watched her warily, clicking his claws along the perch. Then he said, thoughtfully: “Hello, sexy.”
She reached into the cage and extracted Wild Bill’s food bowl. He was watching, and she very slowly walked
to the trash can. “Bad bird!” she said. She dumped it out—the peanuts and pumpkin seeds and bits of fruit that she’d prepared for him. “Bad!” she said again. Then she put the empty food bowl back into the cage. “There,” she said. “See how you like that!” And she closed the cage with a snap, aware that she was trembly with anger.
It was Wendell’s voice, of course: his words. The bird was merely mimicking, merely a conduit. It was Wendell, she thought, and she thought of telling Tobe; she was wide awake when he finally came home and slid into bed, her heart was beating heavily, but she just lay there as he slipped under the covers—he smelled of liquor, whiskey, she thought. He was already asleep when she touched him.
Maybe it didn’t mean anything: Filthy words didn’t make someone a rapist. After all, Tobe was a lawyer, and he believed that Wendell was innocent. Carlin was a policeman, and he believed it, too. Were they so blinded by love that they couldn’t see it?
Or was she jumping to conclusions? She had always felt that there was something immoral about criticizing someone’s relatives, dividing them from those they loved, asking them to take sides. Such a person was her father’s second wife, a woman of infinite nastiness and suspicion, full of mean, insidious comments about her stepdaughters. Cheryl had seen the evil in this, the damage it could do.
And so she had chosen to say nothing as Wendell’s possessions were loaded into her house, she had chosen to say nothing about the macaw, even as she grew to loathe it. How would it look, demanding that they get rid of Wendell’s beloved pet, suggesting that the bird somehow implied Wendell’s guilt? No one else seemed to have heard Wild Bill’s foul sayings, and perhaps the bird wouldn’t repeat them, now that she’d punished him. She had a sense of her own tenuous standing as a member of the family. They were still cautious around her. In a few brief moves, she could easily isolate herself—the bitchy city girl, the snob, the troublemaker. Even if Tobe didn’t think this, his family would. She could imagine the way Karissa would use such stuff against her, that perky martyr smile as Wild Bill was remanded to her care, even though she was allergic to bird feathers. “I’ll make do,” Karissa would say. And she would cough, pointedly, daintily, into her hand.