Rilke never would know if Julia and Handelman would be granted their wishes, but his mean wish about the one-way door’s effectiveness sure as hell came true.
A week after the exodus, a bat wheeled into Julia’s hair right there in the hallway. The creature’s high-pitched screeching pierced the house, woke Rilke from one of his violent dreams so abruptly he couldn’t tell at first whether the squeaks were dream-sound or real. The moment Rilke freed her, Julia ran from the house. After Rilke released the bat out back he found her crouched on Handelman’s knobby pine stoop, cradled in the old man’s cottony arms, weeping her soundless unnerving cry. Her poppy-red shirt shook with her sobs like a darting bird. Handelman was holding that look of triumph. Rilke’s mismanagement of Julia’s fear had transformed Handelman from a drunk, withered loner to a strong man holding tight to another man’s beautiful wife. That he could harbor jealousy over Julia’s girlish hold on her childhood hero; such was the spectacular bungling of Rilke’s own fear.
Julia’s hair, still tangled where the bat had clung, shrouded Handelman’s wounded fingers in gold. From the court, a door creaked. Grace Smith stepped out to check her mail, lingered at the box, gaped at the huddle on the fragile porch across the street.
Rilke had to pry Julia free. Handelman’s wormy fingers left dimples in her skin. Her lip was still swollen a bit from the bite and the shots. He wanted to kiss the tiny wound hard right there, suck and swallow the cries she kept from him.
“Come home,” he said. “Please.”
She came home, all right. Straight to the bedroom to pack a bag.
Rilke stood insubstantial in the doorway while she filled her case and clicked the locks shut. Handelman’s sour-milk drunk’s odor wafted from her skin and hair as if she’d bathed in the old man. Now was the time to tell her about Handelman’s cowardice, how he’d caused that little girl’s death, for Chrissakes. He should have told her. He’d never understand what misfiring protective instinct silenced him. Maybe he sensed that undermining the old man at that particular moment, when she was fresh from his touch and comfort, would drive her away for good.
Julia stood in front of him, not too close, gripping the case. “Will you move out of my way, Dan?”
He didn’t move out of her way. Instead, he confessed.
He told her how one evening, when Rilke was fourteen, on her way out to the store his mother had told Rilke to fetch Papa because the slop sink near the furnace had backed up and if he didn’t unclog it a fire might spark so it couldn’t wait till morning. Rilke tried to snake the drain himself to avoid the chore of dealing with Papa. He was holed up again in the guest cottage at the back of the property, across Scipio Road beyond the cornfield. Tying one on, as his mother would say. Rilke was ten years old before he understood his mother wasn’t referring to Papa’s boot laces.
The blockage wouldn’t budge. Rilke was soaked in gray water. The old furnace spit like it was already drowned. He shop-vac’ed the water that had spilled on the concrete floor and sprinkled kitty litter to wick moisture. The cat had gone missing weeks ago, but Rilke couldn’t bring himself to get rid of her things just yet. He felt the hiss of the furnace like breath on his neck. He was worried to leave the situation for the hazard it posed, but he’d only be away a moment.
He’d crossed Scipio Road at a run. Trudged through the line of pines and the fallow field. The papery bones of old husks crackled under his work boots. The guest cottage shimmered under a half-yoke moon. Rilke was sweating when he arrived breathless at Papa’s door to parry a tentative knock.
His mother had told him to never open the door when Papa was holed up in the one-room cottage, advice Rilke had always accepted as good common sense. When Papa didn’t answer, Rilke rapped again. Listened carefully, heard only uninformative murmurs and rustlings, and then a come-in grunt. Rilke pushed open the door to find Papa sprawled spread-legged on the bed with a faded quilt bunched over his head. The raw flame from an unshaded lamp bulb lit Papa’s bare arms. The tidy room gleamed cleanly in the bare light. Buffed brown shelves glowed like shoe polish. The urethane streaks on the oak floor were burnished to a slick icy film. Even in his rubber-soled boots, Rilke could skate to Papa if he wished. Papa peeked at him. Flapped the quilt’s bright edging with a peek-a-boo gesture that might have been playful coming from another man.
“What is it, Son?”
Rilke cleared his throat. “The utility sink’s clogged, sir.”
“Snake it, then.”
“I tried.” From his slurry of vowels, Rilke determined Papa was far gone already. Whiskey’s musky odor plumped the air. A bottle stood on the kitchenette counter, half empty and open in a permanent state of access, the screw cap tossed aside. Rilke pressed against the doorjamb. His vision hooded. Papa rolled from the bed, stood up, shook the shivers from his legs one at a time. The crisp snap of denim rattled the room. “Mama thinks it’s a hazard.” Rilke hoped Papa would achieve the sense of his mother having sent him on this errand rather than Rilke relying on him for help. “Water’s leaking to the furnace.”
“Shouldn’t be leaks from a clogged drain. You check the pipes for faulty seams?”
“No, sir.”
“There’s your leak, then.” He glided to the counter, lifted the bottle. Papa’s size could take Rilke’s breath away when he wasn’t guarded against the basic intimidation the man posed. In matters of farming, Papa was cursed with incompetence. But the tireless work he performed had built up a rigid grid of muscle in his arms and chest. His height was nerve-racking, too, his girth outgunned by the limber stretch of his limbs. Papa looked like no one else, his mother had said once. Like rubber-band balls had been pinched together to form his flesh. When drunk, his eyes shone with old-timey brimstone. They flashed at Rilke over the curved rim of a shot glass as Papa swallowed a colorless stream without a single bobble of the throat. Blame was about to be laid, for the faulty seam, for overlooking the real cause of the trouble. Rilke braced for it.
Papa refilled the shot. “Shut the damn door, Son. You’re letting the heat in.”
It couldn’t be any steamier outside the cottage than in. Humidity poured from Rilke’s skin, now that he’d sweated out his run. His T-shirt reeked of sour gray water and the pus of his own perspiration. And Papa was holding out the shot to him. Dryness tatted Rilke’s tongue. He fought the instinctual impulse to run as hard as he could home.
Instead he shut the door.
Took the shot. Tipped back his head and tossed the whiskey down his gullet the way Papa had done. Choked like a baby on the sting of it, a sensation he hadn’t foreseen. The losers at school drank themselves sick every weekend, but Rilke had never touched a drop of alcohol in his life. They weren’t a family to discuss issues, but the one unstated principle of the house was that while Papa sober was no saint, Papa drunk was Papa ruined, the alcohol itself being the tip of that scale.
Papa laughed at his babyish gagging and clapped him on the shoulder. “Better chase that cough.” He poured him another shot full.
Rilke drank in the manner of the first, all at once with a rigid swallow. He found Papa was right about the sting yielding to a pleasant burn against his throat’s leather. His vision cleared in the light’s incandescent crown. A motor hummed unevenly, an earthy rumble that clotted his hearing, confused him for a moment. Once he’d located the sound, it would be the wonder of the rest of his days how he hadn’t spotted her the moment he’d opened the door.
The lost cat lay purring on the oak floor behind the stainless garbage pail.
Rilke cried out in joy to see her tail wrapped around two tiny kittens cloaked in fragile flakes of snowy hair. They blinked at him with nearsighted, crystal-blue eyes. The bigger of the two was decorated with his mother’s tiger striping between the pink, translucent ears.
Papa usually drowned unwanted kittens while they were still hairless. For a moment, Rilke was impressed by Papa’s love for him, that he’d not only found the lost cat but had spared her and her kits’ lives. He should have
assessed at once that the cat was protecting so few kittens.
He resisted the cloudy impulse to slide on his knees across the icy polish and take the cat in his arms. Instead he faced Papa, wedged a silly grin, raised a film of babyish tears. “Papa. You found her.” He did nothing to prevent the gratitude from seeping through his voice.
Papa was drinking as Rilke spoke. Once he’d drained the shot, he eyed the cat. She flicked her tail and roped it around her kittens. “Like hell. Snuck in here dragging her litter. Took up residence, didn’t she.” He spewed another harsh bubble of laughter. “Got ’em down to two.”
Down to two.
A gruesome subtraction. Rilke felt a bit stupid, a bit confused. The room tipped. Surfaces gleamed, a brittle riot. The cat warbled an off-key purr and then a hiss.
Papa strode to the pantry closet, pulled from it a heavy-handled metal broom, moved swiftly on the cat.
Papa’s muscular back blocked Rilke’s view. It seemed to him that the cat maintained her broken-motor purr under the broom head’s wet, steady slap. The kittens fled sightlessly to the corner by the bedside table and cowered, their glassy sight too immature to see the obvious shelter of the dark space under Papa’s bed. A wail, thin as gruel, yawned wide and entered him. Rilke became aware of blood pooling between Papa’s heels. He hadn’t noticed until then Papa’s bare feet, the thin yellowing toes, the rough, chipped nails. Papa grunted. Effort or ecstasy, impossible to tell.
When it was over, Papa swiveled on the balls of his yellowed feet. His features protruded off kilter, his body too bright, like his skin was another of the room’s gleaming finishes, and he was advancing on his son. Rilke awaited his own beating with eyes closed against the crumple and the blood and the kits in the corner, crystal-gazed and shuddering. Breath wadded with whiskey dabbed his neck. More laughter unfolded. A hiccup at first, and then a horrifying honking riptide. Rilke opened his eyes. Papa slung a taut arm around his shoulder, not as a fatherly gesture but to keep from falling down under laughter’s gale. His droopy eyes ran with cloudy tears. His belly and chest flexed against Rilke’s arm and hip. They were almost hugging, which Rilke couldn’t ever remember hugging his father before. The narrow space between them reeked of grain and gray water as if Rilke’s own foul odors were leaking from Papa now. A sound rose from Rilke’s throat, something painful that he only recognized as laughter by the fat rude sound of it. Papa watched the fit take him with a drunkard’s crafty glance. Just like that he quenched his own laughter the way he tossed down a shot full of drink.
“Save me the trouble of the drowning then, Son.”
And he’d handed Rilke the metal broom, the head dented and dinged, the bristles speckled with blood.
What happened next was very confusing, and Rilke never would remember it just right.
He knew he’d picked up a dish towel from the kitchenette counter.
He knew he’d lifted the kits to the towel, maybe to bundle them against the blows, maybe to protect the floor’s satin polish.
He knew he hadn’t been able to throttle his laughter in the efficient way Papa had.
And he knew, when he’d finished the telling, that it was a fatal misjudgment of the marriage ever to admit to Julia what he’d done.
He was still floating in the doorway of the bedroom, aware that he was blocking her way out; aware of her awareness of his body’s barrier. Her poppy-red shirt filled his vision. She settled a wary gaze on him which suggested an outlook that from now on anything he did was bound to be dangerous.
To mitigate his error, he added, “So I can’t ever hurt an animal again. On purpose.” As if the cruelest act of his life was merely by way of explaining why he had failed to deal with the bats.
She set down her case. She grasped his arms.
Her response might be bestowing compassion and understanding. She’d witnessed more than a few of Papa’s behaviors. Ever since they began dating, their bastard fathers had bound them together in a protective pact. But in his stupidity and confusion he could not decipher her. The kindness might be carrying the terrifying caution she held toward him lately. But her lips, still tender from the bite, were parting in a kiss. He awaited the grace of her mouth and limbs. From the hallway, the baseboards hummed. He should feel hot. He should feel her grasping hands. He should feel the grace of sensation.
Miraculously, she did kiss him.
Rilke peeled away his papa’s rubbery crawl on his flesh and kissed her back.
She relaxed under the pressure of his mouth. All right. He drew in her breath, sticky and curdled from that morning’s sugared coffee. Fit to her as he’d always done. It made sense that her body would melt into his as if nothing had ever caused any trouble between them. He ran his tongue gently over the tiny swollen mound on her lip, the bite so healed he barely felt it.
He barely felt it, too, when she bit him hard, nearly plumb through the skin. Jerked her head back, ripped open a cut like she was carving meat. Rilke knocked her back, swallowed a lukewarm lump of blood. Julia went down hard and silent against the bedstead.
“Jesus, Jules.” Rilke snatched her up by her arm, hauled her to her feet. Dribbles of blood sprinkled and vanished into Julia’s poppy-red shirt.
She wrenched her arm free. “God dammit, Dan, get off me.”
Rilke stepped back, grabbed a T from the dresser top and stuffed it hard against his weeping lip. Through the open blinds, he saw Handelman standing at his bathroom window, messing with something on the sill, pretending not to gawk. “Come on, Jules.”
“Come on, what? So you did some stupid shit with your fucked up dad once upon a time so now you get to act any way you please?”
“I don’t get to act any way I please.” An obvious statement if there ever was one. Maybe it came out crybabyish. The T was muffling his voice, messing up the necessary tone to manage this situation.
“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you, Dan?”
“Wouldn’t hurt,” he said evenly. A response he’d change if he could.
Julia hit his arm. The blow mashed the cut that stupid farm boy had carved into him. His wound wasn’t healing as fast as Julia’s bite. She probably knew that, too, when she aimed for the cut. “Do you know there are piles and piles of bat shit in the attic? That I can’t sleep at all anymore because I’m so damn frightened? Then you get to sleep every minute you’re home, and don’t give me that crap about your biorhythms.”
Rilke set down the T on the dresser to rub his throbbing cut. He let blood weep down his chin to see whether she’d make any damn move to help him, for Chrissakes. “I don’t sleep every moment I’m home.”
Julia was staring at his arm, not his lip. “You shot that kid for no good reason, didn’t you. I know how good you are at subduing people. Were your biorhythms off that night?”
Rilke took up the T again to mop his chin. “How do you know what’s in the attic?” he asked quietly. “I thought you were afraid to go up there.”
“Gary tells me it’s a real mess. He says you didn’t flash under the eaves when you did the siding, either, so we’ve got mold now, too, while you sleep all day and shoot children at night, and why did I only hear you’d been on probation from the damn secretary?”
Rilke curled his fists. “You never even asked about my cut.”
“Gary said you didn’t get nearly what you deserved for hurting that kid.”
“Is that what Gary said?” Rilke glanced out the window. Handelman had vanished, no doubt to gloat or make the call on Rilke to report some bullshit domestic when he was the one with his lip chewed off.
“So excuse me if I don’t give a shit about what you did to some cat once upon a time.”
“It was a kitten.” Rilke let his gaze drop to her lip. “Here’s the whole problem, Jules, which is what I’m really trying to tell you. I didn’t bite you. But under certain, ah, conditions, I could. So it’s important to avoid establishing those certain conditions in the first place. For your own good, I mean.”
Wel
l, that statement didn’t come out as he intended. Julia tweaked the T. The sleeve flipped up, slapped his nose. “So what are you telling me, Dan? That you’re just dying to beat me to a pulp for my own good, just like your itty bitty kitty?”
Through her baiting a fresh horror dawned. For the first time, Rilke understood how her bastard-of-a-father must have felt when he’d gone after her. The impulse seized him, to squeeze the throat’s tender hollow peeking through the poppy-red collar. But the bad moment passed and she probably didn’t even really know what she was saying she was so worked up.
As to her question, he certainly wasn’t about to dignify that with an answer. He sucked on his lip. She adopted a defensive stance, light and steady on the balls of the feet. Ready to flee or to come at him with everything she had, just as he’d taught her when they were still only kids.
At the start of his shift that night, Rilke parked in the Costco parking lot to tamp down his agitation. His lip was still throbbing, and when he wiped his mouth blood smeared the back of his hand. Julia’s bite had opened a ceaseless flow. No amount of cloth and Kleenex had staunched the wound. He’d managed to control the flow long enough at the station so he could get on duty instead of being ordered to the urgent care, but if the damn thing didn’t quit bleeding soon he’d need stitches all right. Plus, he’d have to explain to his mother both the reason for the bleeding lip and the reason Julia showed up on her doorstep with a packed bag. Rilke didn’t know whom he would throttle first, his wife or hero Handelman, if he could act any way he pleased.
Rilke turned over the engine, peeled out of the Costco to pull into the Burger King across Jackson Boulevard. He’d been too upset to eat that evening. Time to pick up a coke and burger, stretch his legs, get mind and body together, get through this shift. On his way to shutting the car door, he fished a napkin out of the glove box to press to his flowing lip.
He swung open the Burger King’s glass door. Above him a bell tinkled a thin high note.
“Hey man hey what the fuck?” A tall skinny punk had a weapon trained on Rilke by the time the door breezed shut.
States of Motion Page 6