Whippoorwill

by Joseph Monninger

  “It’s his car.”

  “Maybe. Maybe it’s registered under his dad’s name. I don’t want to get involved and you shouldn’t either. I know it’s hard, but put your attention somewhere else. Danny is going to have to make do on his own now.”

  “We could keep his car for him. Just put a tarp over it. Not drive it or anything.”

  Dad took off his glasses and put them on top of the note on the table.

  “You’ve got a good heart, Clair. I know that. But this isn’t our mess to clean up. It isn’t, sweetheart. Elwood might show up and say, Hey, where’s the car? That’s probably likely. Then we’re right in the middle of things. You’re right in the middle of things. It might appear to his dad that you’re trying to get something out of this. I know it’s hard, but try not to invest too much in Danny. I don’t mean to be cruel. You shouldn’t be cruel, but you have to understand he’s drowning and he’s going to reach out and grab at anything to keep afloat.”

  “So we let him drown?” I asked, and felt hot tears come into my eyes.

  “No, but we make sure we don’t jump into the pool beside him. That’s the first rule of water safety. You don’t make a bad situation worse by risking your own life. You know what I’m saying, Clair. I know you do.”

  We didn’t talk for a second. Then I asked if I should write Danny back.

  “You can if you want, Clair. I’m sure he’d like hearing from you. Just keep things on the level. Take things easy right now, if you see what I mean. You don’t want to fall into his drama.”

  Talking to my dad usually made me feel good, but I went upstairs feeling squirmy in my stomach. I brought Wally with me and we practiced sitting and paw and down for a while in my room. I gave him biscuits when he performed properly. He was getting good. Sometimes he started the behavior before I even made the hand motion to initiate it. I knew working with him was tied up with Danny, but I still couldn’t even say what I thought about Danny. Now and then I thought about kissing him, and the bowling and dancing. I tried not to do that.

  Holly called later and I talked to her for a while. She liked discussing the whole Danny situation, but someone—probably her parents, but maybe a counselor—somewhere probably told her to lay off it unless I brought it up, because she talked like a dragon sitting on a treasure trove. She talked about everything but Danny, except you knew the pile of Danny bones under her belly amounted to her real treasure. She needed to bring me closer, to get me talking, and I hated that she pulled me in, but I also wanted to talk about him. So I talked, and I hated myself as I talked, but I talked anyway.

  “I still can’t believe you dated a guy in prison,” she said when I told her about the car offer.

  “He wasn’t in prison,” I said, though I knew she would tell it that way around school. “He’s in prison now.”

  “But you were, like, with a felon. That’s just crazy. We both hung around with him.”

  “I know.”

  “I shouldn’t call him a felon. That sounds horrible.”

  I looked at myself in the mirror over my dresser. Wally watched me from my bed. He had his mouth open, panting, and occasionally he tried to smell something on the evening air leaking into my bedroom from the window. I stared at my mouth whenever it moved. I thought it moved too much, like it had to give each word an extra pat as it left my tongue.

  “It’s attempted patricide,” I said, stealing the word from an account in the newspaper. “Officially, I guess. It’s kind of a ridiculous word, but it’s accurate.”

  “People are fascinated with Danny. Everyone pretends he was some big friend of theirs now, but when he was around no one cared.”

  “Well, he wasn’t around that much.”

  “Still. He’s like a celeb for trying to kill his dad. I really think people admire him in a weird way.”

  “I wonder how Danny goes on from here.”

  “Do you think he’ll be in prison a long time?”

  “Not that long. I don’t know. He tried to kill his father but the whole situation was bad. The lawyers will try to explain what went on in that house.”

  “Did you ever see his dad be brutal?”

  I shook my head. Then I realized Holly couldn’t hear that.

  “No,” I said.

  “Will you be a witness?”

  “I guess so.”

  “God, that is sooooo weird.”

  I was still talking to Holly when I saw Elwood’s pickup pull into the Stewarts’ yard. It was dark so I couldn’t see much, but I stood back from the window and lowered my shades.

  Wally heard the pickup door shut and he turned his head to listen. He still panted, a tiny string of drool dripping from his flews. I wiped it away with a tissue, and after I threw the tissue away, I watched Elwood walk up toward his front door. His image was indistinct in that light, but I knew his size and shape. He wore black, or navy, and he looked bent over somehow, as if he couldn’t straighten his back after a long drive. He had no light to work with, so he fumbled for a while trying the lock, I guessed. Finally he walked out to the front yard and went to stand under the streetlight, his head down, his hand sorting keys. He looked like a shadow—like a shadow that had come to life and walked around but had nothing inside him. Eventually he must have found the key he needed, because he walked back toward the front door more quickly now, his dark clothes gobbled up by the increasing night. Then little by little the lights came on in the Stewart house, and I saw him passing by windows, slowly, finding his way. The light switched on in the kitchen, the place where Elwood had finally met his match. I didn’t wait for the other lights to come on. I shut my shades and went over to Wally and pulled him almost on top of me, letting his weight keep me from floating up in the air.

  Twenty-Two

  NOTHING HAPPENED for a while. School drifted away and I was glad to be done with it, although I missed seeing Mrs. Cummings. Then one Saturday Holly’s brother, Jack, took us to the Battengate Mall. He complained the whole way, saying it was bogus that he had to give us rides places just because he was older and wanted to use the car. He was a tall, thin kid who had lousy skin and lousy posture. He was a geek in a lot of ways, and he participated in robot gladiator contests with about six kids from the high school. His eyes kept meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror, and he always cleared his throat after they did.

  He dropped us at Old Navy and told us to meet him in two hours at the same spot. Then he drove off to go to a nearby electronics hobby store. Holly rolled her eyes when he drove away.

  “I swear wolves brought him to live with us,” she said, leading me inside. “He’s such an idiot.”

  “At least he gave us a ride.”

  “It was either give us a ride or he couldn’t use the Jeep. Don’t give him more credit than he deserves. He’s such a nerd.”

  It felt good to be in the mall. It felt normal and I didn’t even mind Holly’s incessant chatter. She wanted to buy shorts, something good for the summer, but she complained that her legs were too fat and shorts never looked good on a short person. We shopped Old Navy hard. She found a pair that looked okay, but the price was higher than she liked, and she hemmed and hawed for a while before finally handing them to the checkout girl. She really wanted two tops she found on the discount rack, but she said her mother would kill her if she came back with tops instead of shorts.

  “I love little plastic bags from the mall,” she said when we left. “I just do.”

  We shopped a drugstore and Victoria’s Secret, and then wandered around in the center court, looking at food options, before settling on pizza slices and Diet Cokes. We sat next to a new car that was set up on blocks and slowly turned on a pedestal. The side mirror flashed every time light hit it in a certain way, and I couldn’t tell if it was intended or not. It was a Ford of some sort and it reminded me of the car in the bowling alley on my day with Danny. Meanwhile, Holly talked nonstop, her mouth gobbling down the pizza without interrupting her speech. She had to start work as a nanny so
on, thus the shorts, and she already hated the two girls who would be left in her charge.

  “I mean, they are soooooo spoiled,” she said, her lips blowing on the pizza to cool it, “that they don’t even pick up their toys. They have a room that’s called Toy Land, I swear, and they’re allowed to leave anything out that they want to play with. Their mom, Nancy, thinks it spurs creativity, but I think it’s just nasty and lazy.”

  “At least she doesn’t make you clean it up.”

  “Not yet, but that’s coming. I’m her little slave for the summer. She gets me to do everything while she’s off playing tennis in her tiny white skirts. She goes out the door and the kids’ heads start revolving around on their shoulders. Demon children. My mom calls their mom Fancy Nancy. She knows her from a couple of clubs or something.”

  “It’s a job, at least.”

  “It’s slavery. I’m a kid and I need work, so they rip me off. Everyone does that. And I’m responsible for the two little brats. Plus, my whole world is just girls. The mom, my mom, two girls, you. I need a man!”

  It made me laugh to hear her say it. She cocked her head and laughed too, her little coyote laugh that always made me laugh harder. It was a wheezy laugh, kind of in-sucking breath, and she saved it for moments when she liked to make me crack up.

  Then a weird thing happened. I saw Danny. It took me a couple heartbeats to realize it wasn’t Danny, but for that brief interval between seeing and knowing, I thought it was. It turned out to be another boy about his age and size, but I had a full moment when I thought, There he is. It was a kid coming out of Bed Bath & Beyond, and his head was turned away from me, but something about his body, his posture, reminded me of Danny. I opened my mouth to say something, but then the kid turned and I saw I was mistaken. Holly saw my expression and she turned to follow my sight line, and when she turned back she said, “What? You look like you saw a ghost.”

  “Nothing. I thought I knew that kid.”

  “Weird.”

  “You aren’t kidding,” I said.

  She took a bite of pizza and sloshed down a squirt of Diet Coke from her straw.

  “Did you guys ever mess around? You and Danny? I never really got to the bottom of that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean, Clair Taylor. You know.”

  I thought of kissing Danny that day by the bowling alley. I thought of that a lot.

  “I wouldn’t call it messing around. We kissed. I told you all that.”

  “I thought you might be holding out on me.”

  “I didn’t even think that way about him. He was more like a friend, but then sometimes he almost seemed like a boyfriend. I don’t know.”

  “I can see what you mean,” she said, dabbing at her mouth with a napkin. “He was a boy, but he was also Danny. I get it. Thing is, you have a little bit of a reputation because you were dating this guy who tried to off his dad.”

  “A bad reputation?” I asked, my stomach folding in half.

  “No, no, I just meant people look at you a little differently. They say, wow, I didn’t know Clair was this wild woman. You know what I’m saying.”

  I didn’t know what she meant. I had no idea.

  I said, “Nothing is as dramatic as you think it’s going to be. Life isn’t like that.”

  “I know. I hear you on that.”

  She burped. It was a loud burp. Then she looked around and did her coyote laugh.

  “Clair, that’s gross!” she said, blaming it on me. “I wish you’d stop doing things like that!”

  I blushed but Holly was pretty funny.

  We walked down to the pet store at the end of the mall. We always went there. It was closed, though. Someone had put up a sign that said OUT OF BUSINESS. The lights in the pens—where they used to keep puppies—still shone brightly in the window. It looked strange, wood chips scattered around, the lights on, but no animals.

  “How do you close down a pet store?” I asked, feeling anxious at the thought of it. “I mean, it’s not like a furniture store or something. You can’t just junk all the stock.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they found places to put them.”

  “But where?”

  “Someplace, Clair. Don’t worry about it.”

  But I did worry about it.

  And maybe I hadn’t cried much about everything that had happened to Danny, to me, to the whole stupid world, but I suddenly couldn’t keep it back any longer. I kicked the metal gate that someone had drawn across the door, then I started crying hard, harder than I had ever cried. Danny was somewhere in my sobbing, and so were all the animals that had no place to go, had no home, were sold and passed around like funny little creatures we got to control and use for our entertainment. I wanted to break every window in that stupid store, and I even picked up a plastic Rite Aid shopping basket to chuck at the door, but Holly grabbed my arm and pressed it back down.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Clair, it’s okay. There aren’t any pets in there now.”

  She thought I wanted to get inside.

  I let her make me drop the basket. Then I sat down on the bench where we used to sit to watch the puppies, and Holly put her arm across my shoulders and let me cry. My nose ran and my ears felt as if someone had set them on fire. I cried until I felt like a hand towel that had been twisted and squeezed to get all the moisture out.

  I felt something had changed in the Stewarts’ house as soon as we pulled into the driveway after the mall. I hadn’t seen much of Elwood since his return except when he left the house for doctor’s appointments. I knew it was a slow recovery for him, all beds and raw skin, and it made their house feel haunted.

  After Jack and Holly let me out at my back door, I fumbled with my keys, nearly in a panic, and I wanted to call to them to wait as they slowly backed out. I knew my dad wasn’t home, and for a tense second I felt stranded and vulnerable, like someone might slap a drugged handkerchief over my mouth and drag me off into the night. A little shock of worry ran up my spine.

  I fit the key in finally and pushed into the kitchen, my heart beating louder than it should. Wally’s tail thumped in his crate as I put my bag down, flicked on some lights, then let him out. He smooched me up when I bent down to him, giving me big licks and sitting to give me his paw. I knelt next to him and felt better immediately.

  “Who’s the best boy?” I asked him. “Who is it?”

  He squiggled in my arms until I clipped on his lead. His feet scrambled on the linoleum on the way out. Now that I had lights on, it was pleasant outside. I brought Wally into his place of business and I let him sniff around for a while. He urinated twice, spraying some bushes, then he began growling a little. I turned and saw Elwood watching me from beside the stockade fence. I hadn’t heard him approach. He had appeared without making a sound.

  “You’ll be bringing that dog back in the morning,” he said, his voice ugly and flat and hard. “Didn’t sign no papers to give him to you. I’m back on my feet now.”

  He had a thick bandage on his head. You could tell the bandage marked a second stage of his recovery, not the first mummy version, but his face—up around his forehead and around his right eye—had taken on blisters of red that looked like pocked moon soil in the weak light. His skull had been dented too. It looked like it would stay that way.

  I tried to feel some sympathy for him, but it didn’t come.

  Before I could say anything, Wally made a lunge toward him, trying to say hello, and I barely caught his force. I jerked Wally back but I nearly fell. I felt stupid with the dog spazzing.

  “Did you hear me?” Elwood asked. “Play time is over. You understand me? I’ll expect the dog to be on the pole first thing in the morning.”

  I nodded. My heart said no, but I nodded.

  “You ask me, you drove him to it,” Elwood said. “Nothing like a woman to turn a man around and make him stupid.”

  “You don’t want the dog,” I managed.

  “I don’t want yo
u to have it,” he said, “and that comes to the same thing. You put it on the pole tomorrow or you won’t like what comes to you, believe me. I’m sick to death of you kids. Don’t test me.”

  He turned and left. I watched him walk back toward his house. My brain clouded and I bent down to hug Wally, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Elwood.

  Twenty-Three

  LATER, WAITING FOR my father to get home, I made Wally go through his obedience. I practiced him through everything. He did every command immediately, no problems or confusion, and I found myself getting emotional watching him. Twice I bent down and circled his neck with my arms. I buried my face in his neck and cried a little.

  “You’re a good boy, Wally. A really good boy.”

  It’s what Danny had told him a long time ago.

  He rolled over on his back, asking for a belly rub. I petted him a long time. Then I got him up into bed and we rested together, not doing anything, except that I passed his ear slowly through my fingers. I closed my eyes but I knew I wouldn’t sleep. My head felt choked with images of Wally and Danny, the car bouncing across the dirt field, the cop yelling getonthegroundgetontheground. Sometimes I pictured my mom’s statue, the gears turning slowly with the wind, and then I pictured Elwood, too, his black aura, his white bandage holding his skin together. He was a hole, always hungry, always yearning for something and never finding it. I did not like knowing Danny was his son.

  A little later Dad came in and I met him downstairs, Wally clattering after me, and I told him what had happened. He had hardly put his helmet down when I started in, and he backed slowly into his chair, his eyes sorting me out. He interrupted me once to ask for a beer, but he kept his attention on me and nodded when I explained things.

  “I was afraid of something like this,” my dad said when I’d finished. He took a long drink of his beer. He always drank Rolling Rock.

  “Like what?” I said, my voice too loud.