Next to the plastic rack of little round cubbyholes into which their children’s dirty shoes have been stuffed, a gaggle of mothers bundled in puffy, shiny jackets hug themselves tight against the cold and watch in alarm as Frank lurches past them, toward the foam steps that lead into the ball pit. The children shriek and howl for no apparent reason. Frank rests his knees against the sagging top step and leans against a foam-wrapped post while he starts digging through the balls. Out in the middle of them, a little girl throws one so hard at a boy’s head it bounces off and hits the net. They cackle maniacally and start rolling around like beached whales.
“Get your hands out of there,” I hiss, grabbing his elbow. “There’s germs swarming all over this place.” Even with all the diseases they’ve gotten rid of, completely eradicated from the world, there’s a whole lot more to catch than there used to be. Everything’s more communicable.
I try to tug him away. He tightens his grip on the post and reaches deeper into the balls, nearly up to his shoulder.
“A little germs are good for you,” he says, pulling up a miniature race car. He tosses it over his shoulder. “Keeps your immune system working.” He then graciously explains to me what the phrase immune system means.
“What are you looking for?” I whisper.
He pulls up the bare stick of a lollipop, green and scarred with teeth marks, hair stuck all over it, tosses it aside, and keeps digging. A dark-haired boy comes rushing through the enclosed slide, his arms thrown up over his head like he’s on the rickety roller coaster of some county fair, breathing a whispered shriek as he does it, the cries of all the joyful, fearful riders condensed. The slide throws him facedown in the balls with a muffled thud. He lies there completely still. He may be dead.
Frank pulls from the jumble a pink plastic Easter egg, holds it up to the light as if attempting to determine its authenticity. The little boy—he’s maybe three or four, with pointed features clustered too close in the center of his face—watches as Frank works a fingernail into the seam around its equator, pries it open, and stares at the emptiness inside. The boy crawls through the plastic quicksand toward us. His mother stares with undisguised nervousness, either because we’re two old men on a children’s playground together, or because one of us has fruitcake glaze smeared shiny to one side of his mouth, and sidles over with feigned friendliness.
“Hi there,” she says. Frank doesn’t seem to notice. “Are you—”
“There’s nothing in here,” he says to the boy. “Ain’t there supposed to be candy in here? What happened to the candy?”
“I think those are just for play,” the mother says. “For the children.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “He doesn’t mean any harm.” I reach for his arm, but he snatches it away, turns his shoulder to block me.
He wipes one half of the egg on his britches, polishing it. The boy stands a few feet away, up to his knees in balls, and watches Frank with fascination.
“When I was your age,” Frank says, “my brother Harvey used to hide these all around the yard for me to find on Easter morn. As yon sun rose in the east.”
“Is he—?” she says. I nod, very fervently, to accept whatever diagnostic excuse she’s willing to give us.
“Each one had a different treasure inside. There was a bullet pulled from the mortal wound of a Confederate soldier, and a murdered strumpet’s ear sent through the mail by her murderer to taunt the police, and a ring taken by a grave robber from the finger of his own mama’s corpse, right out the coffin. The rest of her he sold to the medical school for vivisection.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “Absolutely ridiculous.”
“He tapped a hole in the shell with a nail,” Frank says to the boy, who watches him, rapt, “let the yolk and the white drain out into a bowl for Mama to scramble for Easter breakfast, and then he’d slip the treasure inside and papier-mâché over it. Tucked them into the knotholes of the dogwoods, behind loose bricks—”
“And just how did he manage to fit a bullet through a nail-hole?” I say. “Or a ring?”
“And just how do they manage to fit those model ships through the neck of a bottle?” he says, real smug and satisfied. His breath’s bad. Smells like drowned mice.
“The masts are hinged,” I say. “So they lie flat to the deck. Then it’s slim enough to fit through the bottleneck, and when it’s inside you raise the masts and unfold the sails. With little tweezers and hooks. That’s how. Now come on. Our sundaes are melting.”
“He assembled them inside the egg,” Frank pronounces. “With little tweezers and hooks.”
The woman looks at her son, gauging the distance between him and Frank.
“I thought Easter was better than Christmas,” Frank says.
“None of that ever happened,” I say. “You just made it up. He just made that up,” I say.
He leans forward and holds out to the boy in his shaking hand the two halves of the egg, smiling eerily, just exactly as if he were trying to lure him into a car to drive him off and chop him to bits, and the stupid child walks right over to him. A look of slowly-building panic pulls a smile tight as a wire across the mother’s face, deep into the wrinkles of her cheeks.
“Leave that child alone,” I say. “You look like a pervert.” I hook one finger through his belt loop and try to tug him away, but he hunches right down close to the boy’s face, with a fanatic’s bright eyes and breathless certainty.
“He melted that ring down and poured it through the hole in a river of gold, reached in with the tweezers as it cooled and bent it back in the shape of itself. It was still warm when I crushed the eggshell. Burned a pink circle in my palm.”
He grabs the boy’s wrist and pokes his clammy hand. His mother hurries forward, and the boy recoils, wriggles his arm and tries to shake loose, but Frank’s got ahold of him good.
“Enough,” I say. “That’s enough.” I shift the tray against my chest, hold it there with one arm while I try to pull him off—I’m afraid if I tug too hard he’ll fall backwards—but he drops the egg so he can clutch the foam post, digs his fingers into it.
“Come on,” Frank says, and starts trying to drag the boy out of the pit. “It’s time to go home.”
“All right,” the mother says. The smile pulls tighter across her face, deeper in, and she pats Frank’s hand as a pretense for prying his fingers up. “All right, now, that’s enough.”
“Don’t talk to him like that,” I say. “He’s not an imbecile.”
“You can have a hot fudge sundae when we get there,” he says. “A hot fudge sundae and a soda.”
The boy wrenches his arm free so hard it tugs Frank forward and me with him, soda spilling over my arm and all down my shirt, and he has to throw one arm into the ball pit to catch himself, the other still clutching the post, ends up sagged over the foam steps. The boy clambers past him and runs to the shoe cubbies, sobbing. His mother chases after him while the other two women hurry over, kneel beside Frank on the steps, and throw their arms out in a barricade so their children can scramble safely out of the pit without getting their ankles grabbed. They hurry away to the cubbies, exchanging knowing, sympathetic pursings of the lips and shakings of the head.
“He’s just confused,” I shout at them. “That’s all.” I help get his feet under him again, then, fast as we can go, before the authorities show up, I drag him to the car, where Daisy is sitting perfectly upright and attentive in the driver’s seat, as if she’s ready to man the wheel, and so excited to see him her whole rear end sways with her wagging tail. I shoo her away and sit down, only to discover that the entire back of my seat is sopping and cold from her licking it, and that her front teeth have left little pale crease marks all over the upholstery from her nibbling.
“Look at this,” I say. “Do you see what she did?”
I pop her on the nose. She looks startled, absolutely dumbfounded, and slinks off to tuck herself into the floorboard behind Frank’s seat, where she thinks I can’t
reach her. I shove the tray with our sundaes and sodas—what’s left of them, at least—onto his lap and turn the key in the ignition so hard the engine coughs.
“You want me to drive?” Frank says. “I’m not sure you’re in the best frame of mind.”
I laugh one sharp, humorless laugh, so he knows what an utterly ridiculous idea that is, and back out of the parking spot as fast as I can. Somebody honks at me. I honk right back.
The afternoon sun burns cold in my eyes. I pull on my sunglasses, the big wraparound-visor kind—they really block the light—and then, right as I’m about to pull out of the driveway, there’s a clanging and a flashing of red lights, and two white arms lower and cross in front of the road to hold us back as a freight train chugs past. They don’t carry passengers through this town at all anymore. Nothing but heaps of coal and wood chips, and mountains of gravel trailing dust through the air sure as the smokestack’s plume. Frank leans forward to watch it, swatting the tent-top fabric away from his face. In my rearview mirror, one of the mothers shakes her arms at a beleaguered man with a thick mustache and plastic french fries spread in a fan atop his hat. She points to our car. I lock the doors.
“I’ve never been so ashamed in my life,” I say. “Never.”
“You look like a spaceman in those glasses,” Frank says. “Like you’ve just landed.”
He reaches up and feels along the edge of the ceiling.
“What were you thinking? Were you actually trying to snatch that child?”
Next to his window, the fabric’s frayed enough for him to work his fingers behind it. He rips the cloth along the edge.
“Stop that,” I say.
The woman stares at us, arms crossed. It wasn’t even her child he tried to take.
He tears the fabric from the ceiling all along his side, and then around its entire perimeter, unbuckles himself and twists around and reaches over the seat, over Daisy, over me, ripping and gathering the loose material in his hands until he’s torn it completely free. The corkboard ceiling behind it is orange and cracked, rotting with moisture from some hidden leak. He throws the fabric onto the floorboard.
“There,” he says. “Now we can see clear.”
Wood chips blow off the tops of the train’s piles and eddy away in the breeze. A few land on the windshield. I turn on the wipers and they scrape across the dry glass, sweep the shavings to one side. Frank digs into the ceiling and pulls a chunk out of it. It crumbles away in his fingers, grinds into dust, and the place it leaves in the ceiling looks like a crater on the surface of the orange moon. Its residue glitters iridescent on his fingers, probably with little shards of plexiglas. The caboose streams past us. Another bell clangs up a racket and more lights flash as the white arms open themselves wide to the bright blue sky. The woman finally goes inside.
“And what sort of ‘fast food’ restaurant,” I say, “situates itself such that its only entrance and exit is blocked for minutes at a time?”
Frank watches the rail cars go, the caboose slowly shrinking into a black circle, the circle closing in on itself into a dot, the dot closing in on itself into nothing.
“Look at the train,” he says, “long and black. Running on down the railroad track. One of these days when you turn your back, I’ll jump on that train and I won’t come back.”
He opens his mouth in astonished, genuine delight at his own cleverness, eyebrows raised in anticipation of my acclaim. Saliva stretches in a thick, whitish strand between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. I take a sip of soda and hold a smashed bundle of french fries out to Daisy. She snaps them up so fast she nearly takes my fingertips off.
“You can’t just rhyme back with back,” I say.
He thinks seriously about this criticism for a long moment, a frown digging troubled lines about his mouth, before he nods, as if conceding a point in a very civil debate. He leans back in his seat and paws the ceiling. It crumbles into a yellow fog. The particles sting my nostrils, gather heavy in the bottoms of my lungs. The dust settles over our skin.
I shove so many fruitcakes into his stocking that on Christmas morning, when we shuffle into the den, the yarn loop’s ripped and the whole thing’s fallen from its nail on the wall. Mine still hangs there, tattered and sagging like his heart in his chest. When he sees the fruitcakes spilled across the floor, he looks so happy you’d think he was a little boy who’d just got his first bicycle. He heads straight for them, and I have to grab his arm before he can try to bend over and grab one. Even Daisy knows they’re not real food: she hasn’t touched them, and she’ll eat anything.
I herd Frank to his chair and give Daisy her Christmas bone, one of those cow femurs you get with the gristle still on and the marrow still inside, which she will only be getting at Christmas due to the greasy smears and slick spots they leave on the floor. She walks around the dark house with the bone in her mouth for five minutes, whimpering some awful terror while she desperately tries to find a spot to hide it. She sets it behind the trash can, then pulls it out and nudges it under the couch, then pulls it out and drops it end first into Frank’s shoe, so it sticks out like his bony leg, then pulls it out, puts it in the corner, and frantically nudges her bed over it with her nose.
I set Frank’s stocking in his lap and turn on the Christmas tree. Its colors wash across his face, each one dissolving beneath the next as it sweeps across. It moves too fast, the way they’ve got it programmed, like a carousel wheeling out of control. Makes you dizzy if you look at it too long. He pulls the first brick of fruitcake out and raises his eyebrows in surprise.
“This is just what I’ve been hungering for,” he says, as if he hadn’t eaten a fruitcake in years. He digs into his stocking, deeper and deeper, surprised each time he pulls one out, as if every minute the world made itself anew. He pulls the final fruitcake from the sock’s toe, places it atop the heap in his lap, and shakes his head in bewilderment and gratitude.
“This is what I’ve been hungering for all along,” he says. “I just couldn’t put my finger on it.”
Daisy unearths her bone and starts to gnaw, the muscles atop her head flexing on either side of the bony crest that runs down the center of her skull. Frank tears open a wrapper. It ought to make me happy, how positively thrilled he looks in the bright, shifting light washing green across his face, washing yellow. It ought to make me happy just to see him eat. Instead I watch him peel the wrapper back, smudged and greasy, and I think of the skin slipping down a deer’s leg, I think of that boy’s hand pulling free of his fingertips, of how quick the thing that used to be you separates into flesh and muscle, like the waters dividing from the waters, into sea and sky.
FIFTEEN
He started to work on the yard with such attention and fervor, you’d have thought he believed it indicative of some greater moral uprightness. Every Sunday afternoon, after we’d eaten our brunch, he changed from pajamas to work clothes while I washed the dishes, then dragged one of the kitchen chairs into the square of sunlight that fell through the open door and sat there, soaking in its warmth, while he pulled on his grass-stained mowing shoes. They smelled the whole place up like sweat and gasoline so bad I knew it even from the kitchen any time he pulled them from the rag he kept them wrapped in at the back of the closet. He mowed the yard slowly, tenderly almost, like he was scared to hurt it, first the front, then the back, pushing the mower along the perimeter in constricting, concentric squares, each one overlapping the last precisely halfway so that every spot was cut twice and cut even, the freshly-mown strips bright and suffused with green against the duller patch they circumscribed, the mower turning more quickly with each tightening pass until, at the very center, it seemed to spin in place. When he was finished, he crawled along the flowerbeds and the house’s brick foundation and meticulously clipped the lawn’s edges with a pair of shears.
And any patch of grass that started to look thin, any stretch of dirt that started to show bald beneath it, he sowed with seed and nursed back to fullness, though th
ere was one spot that he never could get to grow a thing, no matter how hard he tried. It’s still there, just a long swath of dusty dirt along the back fence, interrupted here and there by roots that break up through the ground and plunge back into it like cottonmouths arrested in the midst of slipping back beneath the river’s surface. He went out there with a burlap sack sagging from one hand, scattered seed over it, and worked the seed into the loose dirt with his rake, made us drive ten miles down the road in the very middle of the night, climbed the barbed-wire fence into some farmer’s cow pasture, and stole their dry old patties from the field, holding each one up to the moonlight to examine it for sprouting weeds before he dropped it into an old paper bag, and hurling the ones he didn’t like over his shoulder while I waited in the getaway car with the engine running like a common criminal. He crumbled the manure, scattered it over the seed, and watered it with his thumb stuck in the nozzle of the hose so the water spread in a fan he moved slowly across the earth, darkening it as though a cloud were passing overhead. The air was sharp with the smell of it, that fresh metallic tang particular to water from a hose that doesn’t smell like water at all, but like lawnmower blades and wet grass stuck to bare shins. He covered it in straw, roped the whole patch off so the dog wouldn’t wet it, ordered me with a lieutenant’s crisp firmness not to set foot across that line, as if he suspected I might be sneaking home from work every day to take secret walks up and down the fence for hours, rubbing the earth bare, and set the sprinklers to water it every morning until winter hardened the dirt against the drops, and by the next spring, a few sprigs of grass had pushed up through what was left of the straw, promptly shriveled, and died. Most of the straw didn’t even decay, just lay there atop the dirt the way it had the day he set it down, only a little dingier, bleached gray. When he pulled it away, in the spots where rain had stamped it into the ground, it left behind its imprint like slender ribs in plaster.
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