Piper

by John E. Keegan

  Marge’s was Stampede’s meeting place. It was where the police took their coffee and donut breaks, where salesmen met clients to sell life insurance policies or recruit Amway dealers. It was also where you met your dad to talk about your report card or explain how things were going with a grandpa at home instead of a mother. At least I figured that’s why he’d asked me to meet him. There was nothing fancy about Marge’s. The pictures on the walls were prints of cattle drives and whiskered cowboys sitting on their haunches around a campfire that probably reminded Marge of Mussellshell, Montana where she’d grown up. The cafe was designed in an L-shape with padded red booths along the windows and matching swivel chairs mounted on pedestals at the counter. No matter the time of day, Marge served breakfast, her two eggs any way you wanted them, little pig sausages, hash browns fried in the sausage juice, and a choice of white and dark toast or homemade biscuits. The smell of grease that had seeped into the foam rubber cushions pretty well dominated the cafe, except for those times when she was baking biscuits. Tonight it was biscuits and there was a sweetness in the air thick enough to chew.

  As I sat in the booth, tracing the lines in my palm the astrologist had read, the bells on the back of the door jingled and John Carlisle walked in. I slid over next to the window, turned my head, and watched the vapor wafting out of the exhaust pipe on his refurbished Mercedes. Carlisle collected old cars and fixed them up to look like new. People from all over Puget Sound came to the Stampede Antique Car Festival and drove down Main Street in the annual parade. Mom told me he started it as a way to bridge the distance people put between themselves and the Carlisles, which I thought was a strange choice of activities since John Carlisle and Harry Hosey, the retired banker, were the only people in Stampede with antiques that still ran on their own power. Behind me, I could hear Marge greeting him with the same motherly enthusiasm she’d used with me. I didn’t care, as long as she kept him busy. I didn’t have a thing to say to that man for the rest of my life.

  There was a time when I thought our family had to be the luckiest in town because of how close we were to the Carlisles. The Carlisles were royalty. John Carlisle’s father, Stewart, had died in the Vietnam War and there was a natural gas torch permanently lit for him in Klah Hah Ya Park. Stewart Carlisle’s heroism in dragging his commanding officer to safety after a firefight in Dak To was better known in Stampede than John F. Kennedy’s adventures on the PT 109. In fact people talked like the Carlisles knew the Kennedys. John Carlisle attended school at the Sorbonne, where he studied fine arts, French, and dance, not exactly world-beating skills in a town like Stampede. Mom said he never actually received a degree because of some kind of trouble. “There were letters back and forth with French stamps on them,” is all she said. Instead of medals of honor, John shocked his mother by bringing home women friends like Monique who smoked cigarillos and spit on the sidewalk. The Sorbonne was part of the reason people said John Carlisle was spoiled. The bloodline had run thin. There was never a question about his returning to Stampede, however. Mom said his mother would have disinherited him if he hadn’t.

  I remembered the time one summer John Carlisle came by the house in a fire engine red jeep and honked in front of our house. He’d been cut by a dance company in New York, moved into the family mansion up on the hill with his invalid mother, and taken over the newspaper even though he was ten years younger than Dad and without a shred of journalism training. He had the window of the jeep rolled down and his green beret was set at a jaunty angle. Me being on the verge of seventh grade, he was what I imagined the playboy of the western world would be.

  “Let’s go up the Stillaguamish and have a picnic,” he said, revving the engine. “Kate can do some painting.”

  I remembered Dad massaging his whiskers and looking at the tires. “I gotta finish a story. Why don’t you guys go without me?” This always happened. Dad was the work boy of the western world.

  We headed north to Machias with the top down, Mom in the frontseat and me in back, leaning forward far enough to let the strands of her hair tickle my face. I measured the length of my hair against Mom’s by feeling how far in back of me it was blowing. When I looked up, there was a propeller plane leaving a tube of white smoke that thickened and rolled away like a snake shedding its skin. The rush of the air was so loud we had to put our heads together to say anything.

  At Granite Falls, we turned onto a two-lane road that pointed us toward the Cascades and I could see snow-marbled peaks off in the distance. Each time we passed through a shady section of the road, it cooled down like an air conditioner and the smell of pine rushed up my nostrils the way chlorinated water did when you jumped into the pool without plugging your nose. We stopped at Monte Cristo, a one-time mining town with remnants of old buildings, railway turntables, and mining machinery that Mom wanted to sketch. We made her settle for photographs she could paint from later. She shot an entire roll, taking pains to compose each picture from the perfect angle, close-ups that would turn out to be the slice of a building or have a weird shadow effect. Carlisle sat next to me, on the trunk of a fallen tree, watching her.

  “This is a real treat for me,” he said, “to take you and your mom up here.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Takes a lot to turn your head, doesn’t it?”

  “No, it’s great. Really.”

  “Look at her. She’s in heaven.”

  For our lunch, we hiked up a trail with switchbacks. Carlisle and I took turns carrying the wicker basket, and Mom carried her easel and paints in a brown metal toolbox with drawers that fanned open in tiers. We weren’t exactly Lewis and Clark. Carlisle, in his Birkenstocks, wanted to stop at every vista to wipe the sweat off his face with a hanky. I thought Mom would complain, but she seemed energized by the increase in elevation.

  “Why did we wait so long to come up here?” she said.

  “There is no here,” Carlisle said. “The three of us could divide up and hike these mountains every weekend for the rest of our lives and never bump into each other.”

  I never forgot Mom’s response, which probably explained why she’d taken to Carlisle in the first place. “I couldn’t stand to be that alone,” she said.

  “It’s hyperbole, Mom.”

  She smiled and wrapped her arm around me. “See? I told you she’s smart.” Her fear of isolation might have also explained our own bond. There was no place she could go, no endeavor so boring, that I didn’t want to be with her. I was unconditional company.

  Carlisle spread our lunch out on a red and white checkered tablecloth in a heather meadow: artichoke hearts, marinated onions, feta cheese on rye crackers, spiral pasta salad with pesto, a choice of Italian sodas that we iced down with cubes from the tupperware, kiwi and strawberry slices for desert. The champagne was French, of course, and pink. When Carlisle shot the stopper into the lupine and devil’s club surrounding us, the champagne fizzed all over the tablecloth before Mom could get her glass under it. I thought it was all a bit dainty and not the fare of pressed ham and pre-sliced cheese that Dad would have chosen, but Mom savored every bite, dunking her strawberries into her champagne and practically kissing the kiwi into her mouth.

  After dessert, she set up her easel and tied a scarf around her head to keep the hair out of her eyes. Barefoot and in shorts, I could see the muscles in her legs work as she leaned into her board to sketch the face of the mountain reflected in the stillness of the pond next to us. Carlisle sat on the ground, loosened his belt buckle, and opened up the case I thought contained a telescope. But it was a black piccolo with silver finger buttons that glistened when he played something that sounded like butterflies fluttering over a field of buttercups. Mom put her arms around her middle, closed her eyes, and listened, while a stick of charcoal dangled from between her fingers. John Carlisle’s cheeks puffed in and out, the skin stretched beyond normal size. As I watched him pointing his piccolo toward the easel, it was almost as if he was trying to will the picture up out of the p
aper. I remembered feeling sorry that his family had left him with a newspaper instead of an orchestra or a dance troupe. I didn’t know anyone else in Stampede who even listened to classical music much less played an instrument. John Carlisle was a soloist by default.

  In those days I was glad Mom had someone like Carlisle, someone besides the typical Stampeder who stopped by wherever she set up her easel and said, “Hey, Van Gogh, why don’t you just snap a picture?” As time wore on and the kiddish mucous cleared from my eyes, I began to see him differently. I began to worry about the amount of time she spent with him, at his house, on rides in the country, on the telephone. It started to irritate me the way he bowed and kissed her hand, escorted her by the touch of his fingers into a car, and patted the curve of her waist.

  “It’s too bad your dad doesn’t care for the outdoors,” Carlisle said when we got back to the jeep. He probably meant it as a joke, but my eyes burned tunnels into the back of his head on the way home.

  At breakfast the next morning with Mom, I mentioned how I was getting kind of tired of all the Carlisle mystique, and she jumped me.

  “He doesn’t go for all that town founder stuff either,” she said. “Frankly, I think it’s a big pain in the ass for him. He’d trade it all to have Ashley back.”

  If it was such a pain in the ass, I thought, why didn’t he go over to the park and shut off the gas flame or etch onto the stone the names of the rest of the Stampede citizens who’d died in wars? Or take the Carlisle name off the bridge? Or convert his monstrosity of a house into a soup kitchen and move off the top of the hill so he could be down with everyone else? Or just leave my mom alone? If I’d spoken up and stuck to my intuition, maybe Mom wouldn’t have drowned in his Jacuzzi.

  When I glanced back over at Marge’s counter again, John Carlisle caught my eye and I started muttering long-abandoned invocations to myself. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, have mercy on us. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph have mercy on us. God, as was his wont these days, ignored me. John Carlisle, with the chocolate cream pie in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other, slid into the booth opposite me.

  “Mind if I join you?” It was a rhetorical question because he sat down before I could say anything.

  I fixed my stare on his veinless, pasty hands. The fingernails were nicely manicured and his hands were clean like he’d just washed dishes. Flesh was the word that came to my mind when I looked at him. Loose, tender flesh. He wore his hair long like a concert pianist and patted it down gently above the ears. Dirk said he looked like the pictures of Liberace on his mom’s long play records. “As a matter of fact,” I said, looking at the clock behind the counter, “I’m expecting someone.”

  He reached a hand across the table to put it over mine and I dropped my hands into my lap. “Oh, come on, Piper, this is feeling like a cold shoulder. We’re practically family.” He took a bite of pie and gummed the pudding, smacking his lips. Even through the masticating, he managed to clip his words in a way that sounded British and prissy. It was the voice of a man who had never been stooped over in labor, whose pituitary gland was as superfluous as tonsils. “Your mother wouldn’t have wanted it this way, you know.” He paused to gum another bite. “She was the most open person I’ve ever known. No fear of her own heart. I told her she was going to be another Frida Kahlo.” He was babbling, trying to make something stick. My lips were trembling, but I didn’t want to touch them and call attention to it. “There’s no reason we can’t at least be friends.”

  I put my hands back on the table, fingernail grime and all. “Except for what you did to my mother.”

  He drew back like I’d spit at him. “What kind of bunkum is that?”

  “It was your Jacuzzi.” This was why I didn’t want to talk to him. I knew I’d end up spouting off with nothing to back me up.

  “Please, Piper, don’t …” He bit his lip like he was going to cry on me. I was Tom’s little girl and he thought he could say anything he wanted to me. Everyone in town was scared to lay a glove on him after what his family had done for the community. John Carlisle’s personal charity was the Boys’ Camp at Lake Spigot. When the day lodge was completed, the paper ran a picture of him in short pants and a Safari hat surrounded by all those cute little boys in scout uniforms and kerchiefs. In a way, we were all Carlisle’s charities. The assumption in every conversation and encounter was that he was better, smarter, and richer than the rest of us poor heathens who’d never touched down in the Sorbonne.

  “Do you still use it?” I asked him.

  “Yes, and every time …”

  “Save it.”

  “You may not have all the answers, Piper.”

  “I gotta go.”

  “We weren’t alone, you know.” His face seemed wide and squishy like a jellyfish pressed against the side of an aquarium and I wished I could have believed him because the thought of him being the last person on earth Mom saw was almost more than I could stand.

  I gripped the edge of the table and pulled myself out of the booth. I was going to ask Marge to say something to Dad if he showed up, but she was talking to someone in an old Stampede High letterman’s jacket at the counter. I ducked out the door and turned left, even though it was the wrong way home, so I wouldn’t have to pass in front of John Carlisle’s window and subject myself to his false pity.

  We’d had a September of sunny days and cold nights, the kind Mom said made the leaves go crazy, turning them into the colors from her tubes—Indian yellows, cadmium oranges and swatches of intoxicating Bordeauxs and bloody scarlets. Last September we’d hiked down to the river with our Igloo ice chest, the portable easel, and a tool box full of oils and brushes.

  “Leaves are like people,” she said. “Sometimes you don’t know their true colors until they die.”

  She dabbed blobs onto her palette and became lost in her canvas while I lay in the weeds at her feet reading. When I sat up to look at her painting it was nothing like the landscape in front of us. She’d taken a bird’s nest in the denuded tree on the bank and magnified it into a fortress with the heads of hungry children peeping over the sticks and straw.

  “Reality’s just a platform,” she said. “My job is to rearrange things in a way that provokes people.”

  The paintings I liked most were the unfinished ones, and there were plenty of those in the attic. She sometimes painted there, under a skylight Dad had installed for her. When she fell asleep up there at night, I’d go up and say good morning before leaving for school. You could tell by the brightness of the palette what kind of mood she was in, saving the darker colors for when she was in a good mood and “could handle it.” The finished pictures seemed more obvious. The unfinished canvasses, with dismembered torsos and misshapen faces, showed the struggle.

  I must have been a disappointment to her because I was so plain. When I had hair, I abused it, washing it with hand soap, too much in a hurry to use conditioners, never bothering with face creams and coverups. My wardrobe consisted of jeans and plaid shirts, dark socks, and ankle-high boots with hooks for the laces. I didn’t want anyone to mistakenly think I’d entered the competition for the boys on the playground. Of course, my strategy worked because they didn’t notice me either. It was probably better Mom hadn’t seen how I was turning out. It would have crushed her.

  Since he’d come to live with us, Willard and I had more or less avoided each other in public. Once I found him loitering around school behind the cyclone fence in an old overcoat with one of the dogs. He looked like some pervert waiting to expose himself, and I told him to scram before someone called the police. We’d gotten into the habit of eating dinner together though. I never invited him; he just seemed to show up whenever I pulled the stove drawer open or closed the refrigerator too hard.

  One night he showed up in an orange bib someone from a road construction crew had given him. Visiting job sites was one of his hobbies. “What’s cookin’, Piper?”

  “Matar Panir.” Mom had shown me how to make it.

  He
wrinkled his nose, opened the refrigerator, and studied the alternatives as if this was the night he’d go gourmet, but it was always the same thing: a fried egg and the canned Spam he kept covered with a sandwich bag. “Aren’t you gonna ask where we went today?” We meant him and one of his dogs. He never took more than one at a time in daylight for fear of being seen by Dad.

  While I stirred the sauce, I was reading Lolita through the plastic cookbook holder, spying on her through Humbert Humbert’s eyes, listening to Willard with half an ear. “I could never guess.”

  “You know that project over by the Caterpillar place?” I could hear the Spam glucking out of the can and onto the breadboard. I didn’t have to answer every question, because Willard’s verbal momentum usually carried the conversation without me. “They’re making a mess out of the street. Putting in sewer pipes.” In my peripheral vision, I saw his hand reach for a paring knife from the wooden rack next to me. “The old ones were cast iron and rusted out.”

  “Uhm.”

  “Now they’re using some polyprobable stuff that lasts forever. I asked if they needed a hand.” There was something about subjects with five or more syllables that brought out the pedant in him. He poked me in the rib that stuck out. “You with me?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m trying to tell you about the real world and you’re reading make-believe.”

  “What do you mean? Polypropylene’s synthetic.” I sometimes surprised myself at my inadvertent retention of minutiae.

  He’d speared a cadaver of pink Spam on his knife and there was gel all over his fingers. “I meant the job.”

  “What job?”

  “I’m trying to get hired on.”

  “You’re on Social Security, why would you want a job?”