by Maria Flook
“If not me, someone else.”
Margaret said, “I heard of that. It’s a racket, but it’s a federal thing, you know. You better be careful. We have people in the joint who stole mail trucks, that’s U.S. government. They get sent up immediately, no lengthy evaluations. They go to those federal prisons. It happens fast. They send them up without a lot of pre-trial.”
Cam was still grinning. “You mean to tell me you’re a crook as well as a queer shit?”
Lewis shrugged, but he didn’t lose his elegant posture; he was the same, he didn’t stiffen. He wasn’t someone to flinch. Margaret believed he might have felt disappointed in his own carelessness. He’d permitted his son to discover a detail that could have been easily concealed. He could have put those checks somewhere out of sight. He wasn’t thrown off balance by what had happened in the last several minutes, not by her hair catching fire, nor by their discovery of these checks. Lewis was asking them if they wanted some Rémy-Martin.
“Absolutely,” Cam said. He tapped the envelopes against the counter’s edge, evening their corners, leaving them in a neat stack.
“Sure,” Tracy said, accepting the glass of brandy from Lewis. “A little nightcap for old times’ sake. To our ghosts from the past.” Tracy lifted his glass. He swallowed the brandy, keeping his face level. Margaret didn’t like the toast, but she admired the way Tracy drank his brandy. Another man might toss his head back or make a grimace. Tracy held his glass steady for another golden dribble of the Rémy-Martin.
“So you’re doing quite well for yourself,” Cam said to Lewis.
“It’s hit-and-miss. I have to deal with scourge, but I have a few loyal compatriots.”
“Fellow crooks,” Cam said.
“You’re coming through loud and clear, son. I don’t blame you. One day you’ll reach my age and the first part falls away like a rotten log. Then make your accusations,” Lewis said.
Cam told him he wasn’t accusing him. “I’m just a bystander,” Cam said. “Your stump can fall off for all I know.”
It was beginning to degenerate. The light was scratchy on the walls, the candles sputtered. Laurence was sitting on Margaret’s lap after waking when Margaret’s hair caught fire. “We should take him back to the motel,” she said. She saw the excuse was welcomed by all. They stood up to leave. The cashmere jacket was on a chair, and she brushed it with her hip as she passed. The coat slipped onto the floor. Tracy picked the jacket up and patted it admiringly before putting it over the chair. The ancient garment disturbed Margaret, its decay steamed and pressed, shaped and brushed.
They took the elevator down to the street. “Hello. Goodbye. That’s it,” Cam was saying. He must have had too much to drink. He kept repeating variations of the same words. “Hel-law. Good-bye. Thaz sit.” Tracy had his arm hooked around Cam’s neck and he knocked his hip into Cam. Cam pushed him off.
The motel’s long, carpeted hall caught the soles of their shoes. Margaret watched them stumble like a three-legged beast. Laurence was preoccupied, eating an ice cream sandwich from a freezer case they saw out on the sidewalk, and he followed a few paces back. Margaret had to take the key from Cam to unlock the door. Inside, Cam went right over to the bourbon and lifted it high, eye level, as he poured his drink. He was filling a Dixie cup, since the glasses were dirtied with cigarette butts. It was ridiculous. Then she saw it was a way to come back. Like dogs after a long swim—they walk onto dry land and shake themselves. They shudder, their hide twirls loose with water, their hair stands out straight like a wheel of fur, ridding one environment for the other.
She helped Laurence brush his teeth. “Open,” she said, “like a dinosaur.”
“A crocodile,” Laurence said, “you mean like a crocodile.” She saw how it starts early, the dogmatic search for the specifics, the insistence on correct details. She could hear Tracy’s voice, Cam’s laughter. She couldn’t make out the words; they sounded like sudsy rivers running into one another, a crosscurrent, alternating force and submission.
When she finished brushing the boy’s teeth, she started to brush her own teeth. Tracy came into the bathroom. He grabbed the toothbrush from her hand and tried to insert it into her mouth; he tried to brush her teeth.
“Stop it,” she told him when he poked her, scraping the bristles against her lip. Then he held her jaw with one hand and pressed his weight against her so she was pinned against the sink. He maneuvered the toothbrush in and out of her mouth; he brushed her teeth. She saw herself in the mirror, the small web of burned hair at her temple. She was laughing, but he was hurting her. She started choking on the minty foam. Still, Tracy circled the brush over her teeth. Cam was at the bathroom door, but he wasn’t going to help her out. Then Tracy was finished and he stepped backward. She kicked him in the shin; her toes cracked, but he didn’t flinch. She was furious; she looked into the mirror to check the abrasion on her lip.
“Look, leave me and the baby alone. You’re a couple of swills.” She took Laurence into the other room and put him in bed. She adjusted the air-conditioning unit so it wasn’t blowing too hard. Laurence rolled over and she rubbed his back; she recited “The Three Little Kittens,” which she knew by heart. They lost their mittens, they found their mittens, they soiled them, they washed them.
Margaret went back on the other side with Cam and Tracy; she ignored them, walked across the room and pulled on the TV button. The knob came off in her hand, and she had to find the way it was threaded before she could put it back. The picture flashed on, spiraled up and down for a moment, then cleared. It was an old movie. “Hey, look at this,” she told them. It was Fredric March in Death Takes a Holiday. She was asking Tracy if he liked the coincidence, two Arrow Collar Men in one night. She was pleased, this was something she could enjoy, but she couldn’t raise the volume without replacing the little knob that had fallen off in her hand.
She was holding the knob up to her eye when the light was switched off. She couldn’t see in the half dark of the room. Tracy took the knob from her hand and said, “We don’t need this button.” This didn’t surprise her, she saw it coming, but then she heard Tracy say, “Do we need this button, Cam?”
“What’s this?” she whispered.
Cam said, “We don’t need the TV.” She felt his breath on her shoulder. She could smell the sweet, caramel odor of the brandy.
She said, “Look, I don’t have a problem with this, just don’t rush it.”
Cam lit a cigarette and sat down on the edge of the bed. The match flared beneath his face: his dark eyes looked twice as shadowed; the mid-line crease of his lower lip was exaggerated. He must be having his second thoughts. Then Tracy was steering her over. She didn’t resist. He positioned her before her brother and tugged her blouse down to expose her breasts. She was illuminated by an external glow, rosy lumens of refracted city light coming in the window. Tracy was showing Cam something, but this didn’t alarm her. He was telling Cam a litany of erotic phrasings, his voice steady, convincing. He kept referring back to her, as if she were a case in point, but she didn’t try to follow, she didn’t gather the words until Tracy said, “Look.”
Cam lifted his face, his eyes narrowed in modesty or in restraint of appetite. He smiled, giving calm acknowledgment to her, then he looked down again. Tracy stood behind her, his front teeth sinking against the plane of her shoulder; he wasn’t going to wait much longer. Cam picked up Margaret’s hand and squeezed it. He dropped it again. She weaved slightly before her brother, Tracy in back of her. Still, Cam didn’t invite her.
As she moved onto the bed with Tracy, she searched her brother’s face, but he didn’t return her look. He sat hunched over on one corner of the mattress, his back to them. Tracy was fucking her, reciting directives when he surged and shifted. If her breathing increased or halted in effort or with pleasure, could Cam tell? For moments, she didn’t think of Cam. Tracy knew everything. He went ahead until her pink spur was jittering, then he paused. She felt the pillow weighted beside her, Cam�
�s face turned to her. His mouth moved down her throat to the narrow well at her sternum. Margaret lost her sense of location. She touched Cam, moved her palm down the tight plateau of his belly, but he rolled away from her.
“What’s wrong, what’s wrong with this? It’s lovely,” she told him; she refined her diction to hide her impatience. She could have just screamed for it. Tracy murmured in agreement. He said something flattering to Cam.
“It could change us. It’s changing us, Margaret,” Cam said.
“Right here,” Margaret whispered. She tugged her brother’s wrist and opened his fingers.
Tracy moved away. He turned on his side and leaned on his elbow. He was reciting the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change … courage to change the things I can … and the wisdom to know the difference.
“Change is a constant. The past is fluid, it merges. History is never static, events shift in meaning—”
“Shut up,” Cam told him.
Cam rolled onto Margaret, stretching her arms over her head. He smoothed his palms down the insides of her wrists, went lightly over the creases of her elbows and swirled his fingertips in the hollows of her armpits. He traced her breasts with weightless, unfrightened scrawls. He wrote over her, wordless crosshatches and dreamy numerals. His lips tightened around her nipple and she shuddered, grinding her hips deeper into the mattress. She guided his cock, centering its heavy tip, letting it sink through the silky hymenal curtain. He was steadied there and she thought about the Horror of God, how painful love is without representation. Then Cam was deep, his cock different from Tracy’s; perhaps in circumference, larger. He was fucking her and she wasn’t feeling it in one place; it was everywhere. She felt the door of the soul ripped free from its house, an airy whiteness like sheets snapping. Her muscles triggered, twisting like knotted linens, sea-sweetened ropes. He tugged her hips and froze, then moved farther in, kept going. Cam watched her; if she closed her eyes, he exhaled his breath, a cool jet to arrest her, keep their gaze even. He stopped moving and she felt his release, an internal wing-beat, a whirring. Then her own tight hitches of sensation.
He was almost too shy to withdraw from her. He rolled his forehead against her throat and dragged himself away without looking back. Then Cam was standing up. She heard some coins fall from his pockets as he picked up his jeans from the floor. They were Tracy’s. He dropped them in an even fold, and reached for his own clothes.
Margaret reached into her paper sack and took a fresh coffee bean. She had only nine beans left, eighteen if she nipped each obelisk. The bus window turned back her reflection; her blond hair fell in ashy spirals against her face. Laurence was in the next seat, prying the tiny ashtray from its recessed notch in the armrest. The sun was coming up, its harsh red condensed, trapped in the lines and droplets on the glass. Outside, the Pennsylvania landscape scrolled by. She hugged Laurence, but he squirmed. She tried to explain why they had left his father in Chicago, but he could not believe her fluttering eyes, her eyebrows too highly arched in false crescents. It was awful to see his alarm, his button-sized Adam’s apple rising and falling. Before taking the bus, she had tried to buy him some fruit; she stopped at a market that displayed a misted cluster of grapes in the window, but the grapes were plastic, studded with artificial dewdrops. She bought him a cellophane package of six miniature white doughnuts. Laurence sat down in his seat and arranged the doughnuts on his knees, ordering them in two lines of three, then he began eating the sugar off the first one.
During the night she was unable to rest. The low skimming sound of the bus tires wasn’t soothing to her, as it might have been to some. She slipped into dreams once or twice, but the dreams were unpleasant; the dreams awakened her. She dreamed of the ant towing the Monarch under the earth. Too often, she fingered the frizzy patch where her hair was burned and she sniffed her fingers for the scorched scent. She took some relief in having crossed three state lines during the darkness of night, and she figured it would be less than a half day’s drive to reach Wilmington. She watched for the tiny luminous flecks of the mile markers that sparkled on posts and guardrails. She was pleased to be returning with Laurence, although she wasn’t sure she should hand him over to Darcy. Mostly, she longed for her reunion with Celeste. Yet the thought of greeting her daughter made her uneasy. Recent unwholesome events churned through her. She would have to transform herself, shedding another skin. It was always like this: During the day, she must wear a mother’s face; then at night, it was the cold mask of Venus above a constant searing below her waist. It wasn’t to scale.
Early that morning, when the bus stopped in Toledo, she had tried to call her daughter. Elizabeth answered the phone and told her the child was in bed. It was the middle of the night. Margaret demanded she go wake the girl up, but Elizabeth talked her out of it. There wasn’t anything else to say without having to explain everything, and her words started to catch when she told her stepmother that, yes, she was on her way home, but without Cam, without even Tracy. Margaret thought of Celeste in Elizabeth’s house with all its expensive bric-a-brac. What if her daughter bumped into a shelf and the Canton china shattered, a splash of porcelain sharks’ teeth? Margaret tried to see the past few days from an official point of view, that of a judge or a state trooper: the long drive in the Duster, the stolen tires, Laurence transported across the state border. These illegalities didn’t plague her. She was disturbed by images of Sandra’s tombstone; Tina dipping a ladle into the icy water; Jane’s gauzy curtains filled with the sea wind; Cam, his erection bumping against her hip as he lifted her arms over her head the way men open the wings of their hunting trophies, caressing beautiful flight feathers serrated from tiny shot pellets.
The night at the motel, she had hardly slept. After that airy, supernatural moment with Cam, Tracy was fascinated and wanted her again. Then he dozed. Margaret tiptoed to Laurence, covering him with the blanket. She picked up his hands, gently sucked the fingertips, then rubbed them dry. Cam was up, he walked in and out of the rooms, sometimes going down the hallway to the outdoor stairwell to smoke where the air was cool. She told him to lie down, but he refused. He was unable to get off his feet, to lie supine in his state of shame. Each time she started to fall asleep, she was awakened by Cam. Cam clearing his throat, Cam shifting in the vinyl armchair, Cam hiking up and down in the hallway outside their rooms. Then she heard the incessant circulation of water in the plastic fountain parallel to their door. The drops fell hard and separate, tier to tier. It was impossible to ignore it.
Soon Tracy was up, getting after Cam. He told him he was wasting his time worrying about his momentary plunge into Margaret Heaven. “It’s downhill, after that,” Tracy said. Cam shouldn’t lose sleep over it. They shouldn’t all have to lose sleep.
Cam said he was sick of Tracy’s opinion. He called Tracy a “mind eater,” and this was interesting to Margaret, it was a clumsy epithet, but it seemed to fit.
“Mind eater!” Cam said.
Tracy said, “You sound pretty disappointed in yourself. If you couldn’t enjoy fucking your sister, don’t blame me. You’re what we call a blamer. You’re naïve, a sexual initiate. You could have had both worlds. Do you know what I’m saying? Both worlds.”
“Both worlds?” Cam said.
“Love and sex. Love and sex, don’t you see? It’s a combo some people strive for,” Tracy said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cam told him.
Margaret listened to this. She thought she knew what Tracy was driving at, but if she did, she was making a big admission to herself. Tracy was saying he didn’t have that ability, elementary to some, but he had never attained it. Tracy was saying Cam could have been lucky with Margaret, body and soul.
“God, that dripping water!” Margaret said.
Tracy went out in the hall to see about the fountain. He didn’t stop to put his pants on; he just strolled out in the hallway and leaned in between the network of plastic trays
searching for a water connection. Margaret waited at the door of the room. Tracy crouched over the pipes, his skin shivered over his backbone, his ribs flared open and collapsed tight as he reached in and out of the fountain.
Then Cam came out there. “What do you mean, I’m a sexual initiate? Because I don’t always stick my dick in just anyone? Because I don’t belong to Sex Anonymous?”
Tracy said, “You have to know your poison before you can decline to drink it. You haven’t signed the dotted line. You’re Sex Unidentified. Casanova in the Bermuda Triangle. You’re a love letter without a cancellation mark—you don’t know what you want. You’re drifting.”
Margaret closed the door, shut it until the brass tongue clicked in the lock. She didn’t want to hear anymore. Tracy was using his purple journalese to bait Cam. He was flirting with him. Perhaps it was just more of Tracy’s curiosity, but maybe it was appetite. Maybe it all came down to that. She went to check on Laurence and stayed on the other side with the boy when she heard the men coming back. She heard their voices rising and the words broken off, torn by physical blows. They were striking one another. Then it was quiet.
She climbed in bed next to Laurence. He rolled to her, it was natural. When the men appeared at the foot of her bed, they looked unsteady, similarly crazed, depleted, their knees jellied from surges of adrenaline. Was it really two of them? Did she suffer that exhaustion that brings delirium, an episode of double vision? She straightened herself on the pillow and tried to focus her eyes. She looked at Cam, then she looked at Tracy. How many days without sleep until a man loses it all? His normal height looks decreased; he slumps, stumbles, loses his elegance. Even if they wanted plain mothering, she wasn’t inclined to offer it. She wanted to invest the remaining night in the little boy. She peeled the sheet back from her shoulder and showed them Laurence, his arms and legs drawn tight in a sphere of warmth beside her.