Hide

by Matthew Griffin

  By the time we get to the bathroom the front of his trousers is drenched all the way down one leg.

  “Clean yourself up,” I say. “Fast.”

  “I believe I’ve got to use the bathroom,” he says.

  “You’re wearing diapers from now on. I’m going to have to go to the store in the middle of the day and get you diapers. Now clean yourself up.”

  I leave him there while I shove the hammer in the drawer and slam it shut, kick forks out of my way, and snatch my wallet off the table in the hallway and pull out two twenty-dollar bills. I take them out to the back patio and wave the boy down. He drives his mower right up to the concrete edge but doesn’t cut the engine off. The whir of the blades flutters in my ears. Makes me dizzy.

  “Here.” I press the folded bills into his sweaty palm and close his fingers around them. His body radiates warmth sure as the motor does.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I yell. He gazes longingly over my shoulder at a spot far away from me where he’d rather be.

  “He’s sick,” I say. The boy tugs the hem of his shorts down to cover his grass-stained knee. A little bit of me mourns its loss.

  “Just don’t buy drugs with it,” I say.

  He turns the mower and retraces the path he cut through the grass.

  When I get back inside, Frank’s leaning in the door to the hallway, resting his head on the molding. His eyes are closed.

  “What are you doing?” I say. “Get back in the bathroom.” I grab him by the arm of his shirt.

  “You shouldn’t have called them,” he says.

  “Come on.” I pull him toward the shower. The roar of the mowers rattles the window glass. “Get your pants off.”

  He tries to undo his belt, but it takes him so long fiddling with the leather, trying to slide it out from under the buckle with his palsied fingers, that I have to knock his hands out of the way and do it myself, open his belt and unzip his zipper and yank his pants and underwear down to his ankles, like a child. His rumpled shirttail hangs over his privates. The whole room smells of his urine, sharp and ammoniac.

  “What if they tell somebody?” he says.

  “They’re not going to tell anybody.”

  “You shouldn’t have called them. You shouldn’t—”

  “Sit.” I point to the plastic chair. He waddles over and slowly lowers himself into it, his legs hanging over the edge of the tub, and proceeds to do nothing but stare anxiously out the window, even though you can’t see a thing through the cloudy scallops of frosted glass but vague shadows passing.

  “Can you clean yourself?” I say. “Or do I have to do that too?” I close the toilet seat and sit down. “You could have killed somebody. You know that? Or yourself, more likely. That boy could have knocked you flat without even trying. He could have mowed you down. How’d you even get out there?” He didn’t have his cane, didn’t have a wall to hold on to. And I know he didn’t have an amateur detective’s clue where that hammer was. I made sure of that. “How’d you even get out of the bed?”

  He crosses his arms, staring at the damp, dark plaid between his legs, and doesn’t say a thing.

  “Give me your foot.” He has to pull up on his knee to lift it. I set his shoe in my lap and undo the laces. “Pull.” It takes us a good minute of wrenching and tugging before we manage to pry the thing off. I peel down his long, soggy white sock, slide it over the hard yellow talons of his toenails. Little black grass seeds are caught in its stitches.

  He sits forward, grabs my wrist. “You don’t know who they are,” he says, his voice low. “You don’t know who they are, or who they might know. You understand me? They could be anybody. They could be the foreman’s sons for all you know, they could be the police chief’s brothers. They could be—”

  “They’re not,” I say. I pull my wrist free and press my hand to his chest, push him back into the seat, but he sits right forward again. I try to hold him back, but he’s too strong. “Just calm down, just relax. Everything’s fine.”

  “If anybody finds out,” he says, “if anybody finds out, they’ll—”

  “They won’t. Nobody’s going to find out.”

  “How do you know? You can’t—”

  “I checked. When I called them. I asked where they were from, and who their people were, all of it. They just moved here from New Jersey a couple months ago. They don’t even live in town. They don’t know anybody.”

  “You promise?” he says.

  “I promise.”

  “You can’t call people to the house.” His voice is hoarse now, shaking and tight to hold back tears. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “I know,” I say. “I know. I won’t do it again.”

  His heart’s pounding too fast. It feels like a hummingbird in his chest.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s okay. We’re safe.”

  He stares at me a long time, waiting for the terror to subside, then nods and slumps back in the chair, pulpy and sunken, a papier-mâché imitation of himself that might cave in at any moment. I heave his other foot into my lap and pry it out of his shoe.

  “You’re tying your laces too tight,” I say. “It’s no wonder your circulation’s so bad. The blood can’t hardly get down in there, and it sure can’t get back up.”

  I shimmy his pants and his underwear over his feet, doing my best not to touch the wet spots, open his shirt from wet tail to collar and slide its sleeves down his arms, gathering them as I go, peel them over the thick knobs of his elbows and wrists. The black lines of his tattoos are faded and worn. The birds on his chest sag earthward, their wings slipping on the air, and the sky on his shoulder is wrinkled in some spots and stretched pale in others, distorting the stars fixed in it, tugging at their edges until they ought to crack open and burn away the tangle of animals beneath them, and boil the ocean those animals all seem to be melting into.

  Bent over the lip of the tub, I run some hot water into a washcloth, lather it with soap, and clean him from the feet up, scrubbing as hard and as fast as I can to scour away that sharp, cloudy smell. A bunion’s bent his big toe so far that it’s crossed under and lies completely beneath the smaller one beside it, and his socks have worn all the blond hairs away from his calves, left them smooth and shiny. Just below each knee, all the way around his leg, their elastic’s dug a deep, pink channel into the skin.

  He’s quiet while I clean him, looks politely away with a resigned distance in his eyes. Every breath he takes is labored, wet and ragged. The skin of his thighs hangs wrinkled and loose in those places where it used to strain to hold in the brunt meat of him. I lift each fold, spread flat across the plastic seat, to wipe its underside.

  He puts a hand to his top teeth and pushes up. “These dentures are driving me crazy,” he says.

  “I didn’t think you’d noticed.”

  “It’d drive you crazy, too, if your teeth started sliding down every time you tried to talk.” He reaches far back into his mouth. “Can we get some glue or something?”

  His voice sounds like his voice. His eyes are focused, the light falling into their pupils instead of skimming frictionless across them, as if they’re actually seeing what’s in front of them for the first time in months. I pretend not to notice.

  “Frank,” I say, lifting the fold of his belly. Beneath it, his underwear’s stamped a damp, puckered band around his waist. Looks like an intestine, or pizza when you’ve pulled the cheese off. “Where did we meet?”

  “Out in front of your shop,” he says, sounding annoyed. “When you were done peeping at me and decided to come out and act like a normal human being.”

  “I was not peeping. I was just standing there in my own place of business while you flopped all around with your huge head outside my window.”

  “My head,” he says, “is perfectly proportional to the rest of my body.”

  I laugh as I run water into the washcloth. I’m afraid to look at him. I’m afraid he’ll be gone again.

  “What sort of a
question is that, anyway?” he says.

  My hands shake something awful as they fold the washcloth and lay it over the lip of the tub. His chest looms beside me, pale and pocked as the surface of the moon, chipped out of some cold, brittle rock that hovers always out of reach but never stops tugging at the tide. I grab his hand in both of mine. I don’t believe we’ll have many more chances to say anything that matters.

  “Do you ever wish,” I say, “that you could have done things different?”

  He looks at me a long, long time, trying to gauge whether to tell me the truth. I watch the lines on his calves, waiting for their blush to fade, for them to fill their emptiness from underneath, but nothing changes. Nothing moves.

  “I think—” he says. “Sometimes I think I would have liked to be a teacher. Helped some kids. Made their lives better. I believe I would have liked that.”

  “You would have been a good teacher. Or a detective.”

  “I would have been a lousy detective,” he says, laughing. It seems to hurt him.

  “I wanted real badly sometimes,” he says, “to be a part of the world.”

  My vision blurs, as if that haze around a winter moon my father always promised us meant snow, even though the snow never came, had settled about his body.

  “Do you wish you could have had children?” I say.

  He looks away, now, at the pile of his soiled clothes on the floor. The mowers are gone. The house is quiet.

  “Well,” he says. “Nobody gets everything they want.”

  “I didn’t know.” I squeeze his hand. “I really didn’t, or I—I would’ve—”

  “Ain’t a whole lot you could’ve done about it.”

  “If you’d wanted to, if I’d known it would’ve made you happy, I—”

  He rests his hand heavy on my thigh, as if to hold me down. “I knew what I was giving up,” he says. “That day they put my mama in the ground. I knew I was giving up my family, and friends, and having children. I knew I was giving up my chance at being anything too great.”

  It’s a long time before I manage to say, “You never told me that.”

  He shrugs. I pick the washcloth up and squeeze it dry. The water runs out, leaves it wrinkled and stiff.

  “I wish I’d—I know I wasn’t always as good to you as I should’ve been,” he says. “I know I could be difficult. But I was just so scared. All the time.”

  “Of what?”

  “That they’d take you away from me.”

  Feels like there’s a fissure, a cold fissure running along my breastbone, up into my throat. Like plates beneath the earth’s crust, pulling it apart.

  “Was it worth it?” I say.

  “I reckon it was.” He smiles a sad, solemn smile. I hang my head down, so he won’t see me squeeze my eyes shut.

  “You think I’d have spent all these years cleaning up your mess if it wasn’t?” he says, smirking.

  “My mess?”

  “You ain’t the cleanest man I ever met.” He shifts in his seat. “Can we hurry this up? My rear end’s starting to fall asleep.”

  I run more water into the washcloth, work suds into it until they bubble. I clean his privates, hanging heavy and wrinkled. I do it slower and softer than before, careful. When I touch them, they rise a little, then fall again, like a wounded animal heaving a shallow breath: like the first bird I ever held in my hands, a bluebird, its neck snapped by its own image grown larger and larger and finally made solid in glass, lying on the porch of my parents’ house a year before I hopped onto the train that carried me away from it forever, when I was sixteen years old and wanted desperately to die. If you could just hold one, I’d thought, if you could just keep it still, you could find the source of its lightness. I lifted it from the ground and cupped it in my hands; I felt its life gutter and go out. I was surprised by the brittleness of its wings. There was no grace in them at all.

  “You know what I’ve a taste for?” Frank says.

  “What?”

  “Some of your good yeast rolls. You got any of them?”

  “I’ll make you some,” I say. “I’ll make you anything you want. Anything but fruitcake.”

  “Fruitcake? I don’t even like fruitcake. It’s too sweet.”

  I start to cry. Have to hold on to his thighs to keep myself steady.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he says.

  “Nothing.” I blow my nose into a wad of toilet paper. He frowns and brushes little bits of it from my whiskers. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nod.

  “Good. Make sure it’s a big batch. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”

  “It’ll be a while,” I say. “They have to rise overnight.”

  “Can’t you hurry it up?”

  “No, I can’t hurry it up. These things take time. You think I can control the gaseous properties of yeast?”

  “Lord,” he says. “There’s no need to be so sensitive about it. It was just a suggestion.”

  I turn on the hot water, cup it in my hands, and pour it over him. His skin dries out if you don’t rinse the soap off it good. The water runs between my fingers and onto his thighs, over his knees, down his legs to his feet, the rivulets catching here and there on stray, wiry hairs, in the pink lines that lash his legs. I scrub them, massage them with warm water, don’t take my eyes off them until he starts to shiver and I have to throw the towel over his shoulders and help him out of the tub, and still they linger there on his skin, carved into his calves like the imprints of grass blades.

  I leave the front door open so he can watch the birds. He sits in his recliner all afternoon, binoculars hung from his neck, twisting around to look at the goldfinches streaking bright and fast through the branches like the sun’s glare on a passing car, the cardinals like spots of blood dappling the leaves, the tree swallows, their blue cowls iridescent in the light, flying wild in pairs above the trees, across the yard, wheeling one way then dashing another with no apparent reason, mirroring each other’s every scoop and swerve so that the distance between them, though they climb and break and plunge, never changes.

  It’s evening. In the limbs of the trees, hidden birds sing the fevered sun to sleep. The sky’s turned a pale pink as the light fades, but it’s white just above the treetops, like sunburnt skin the branches have pressed into and let go, watching, waiting, for the color to rush back in.

  I only leave him long enough to mix the sourdough. I fed the starter and set it in the windowsill to bubble in the sun all day long, just like you’re supposed to, but something’s gone wrong with it. I stir in all the flour it calls for and then some, a little at a time, and mix it and mix it, but it never will stiffen into anything you could rightly call a dough. Maybe it’s too humid in here, maybe the starter’s gone bad, I don’t know, but I do know that if I add any more flour, they’re liable to end up hard as bricks. Finally I just give up, shove the bowl in the oven and turn on the light.

  “How’s it coming?” Frank says when I sit back in my chair.

  “Awful. The batter’s like pudding. I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t rise at all.”

  “You say that every time.”

  “I do not.”

  “You do. And then they turn out fine.”

  “No, you just tell me they turn out fine. And then I never know what’s wrong with them so I can fix the next batch.”

  “That’s because there’s never anything to fix.”

  “Well, there will be this time. I added so much extra flour, they’ll probably—”

  He throws the lever on his chair to put the footrest down. The force of its back slamming forward bestows him enough momentum to stand up. He sways back and forth a minute, then shuffles toward the hallway.

  “Where are you going?” I say.

  “Out back,” he says.

  “Again? For what?”

  He shrugs. “Just want to make sure everything looks all right.”

  “Hold on,” I say. “I’ll go w
ith you.” I haul myself up out of the chair and follow him down the hall, open up the back door. I leave the light off so he won’t see the splintered doorframe, so he won’t see Daisy. I got all the pins out already, but I still need to rub some corncobs into her fur, fluff it out a little, and mold the caulk in her elbows into their bony points, and snip off the little beads of it that have burst through invisible tears.

  The yard and the trees and the kitchen tile are coated in a thin wash of darkness like black wax, brushed liquid from a heated tin onto a lip, onto the hairless bottom edge of an eyelid, quickly cooling and hardening into a shining, translucent shell. I turn the patio light on as we go, and the surrounding night thickens, as if crowded together to make room for it.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Frank says, stopping in the doorway, and peers right down at her, still sitting on the air vent, as if waiting in utter dejection for a treat. “Daisy. I didn’t know you’d kept her.” He leans against the doorjamb to steady himself while he picks her up.

  “You weren’t supposed to see her yet,” I say. He carries her outside, into the light. “She’s not finished.” The oils from my hand have smudged her eyes, clouded them with cataracts. I wipe them with my sleeve.

  “It looks just like she was alive. Don’t it?” He sounds wistful, and only a little sad, as if he’s looking at a picture of somebody who died a long time ago, somebody he loved very much but hadn’t thought of in years. He puts his arm around me and pulls me close. I rest my cheek on his shoulder. It’s warm to the touch, burning with stars.

  “Just exactly like she was alive,” he says.

  I suppose there’s a little mercy left in the world after all.

  “What happened to her legs?” he says. Where they should be, the skin’s drawn over her excelsior stump, fur ruffled over the tiny brass tacks.

  “You’d fed her so much, her skin was slippery as a black bear’s. Kept on losing my grip, tore it to smithereens trying to get it off.” Her belly looks all right, if I do say so myself. Drapes heavy and soft off her ribs, and flattens in a pool against his hand just the way it did on the ground.

  “A black bear,” I say. I press my ear to his chest and listen to the thunderous rush of his heart as it opens, the thunderous rush of his heart as it closes. “The fattiest animal known to North American man.”