Piper

by John E. Keegan

  There was only one flaw in my logic. If John Carlisle was a freak, then maybe so was I. The only difference was he’d acted on his impulses and been caught.

  11

  The night of the Christmas open house it was raining, so Willard and I waited under a giant blue spruce across the street from the Carlisle house to stay dry. The roots at the base spread out above the ground like church kneelers and a white phosphorescent fungus that grew against the north side of the tree smelled like cottage cheese when I split it open under my nose. Occasionally, a gust of wind shook down a shower of giant drops through the boughs.

  Willard sometimes went out without an umbrella, but he never went anywhere without one of his dogs and tonight it was Paddy, the Irish terrier with the flat skull and elongated muzzle. In seniority, Paddy had been second to Freeway. Willard brought him, he said, “Because we need a daredevil in case things get crazy.” The terrier was known for its courage and carried messages across enemy lines in times of war and that’s what it felt like as we hugged the trunk of the spruce and took the names of those who crossed the Carlisle threshold.

  “This’ll tell us whether anyone believes he’s innocent until proven guilty,” I told Willard.

  Since Freeway’s death, Willard had become quieter and harder to decipher. He’d taken to spending more time hunkered down in his room, petting the dogs. I recognized the syndrome and felt it was my job to come up with excuses for getting him out of the house. When I first told Willard what John Carlisle had been charged with, he’d gone stone cold on me and just sat on the edge of his bed, puzzling the idea. I wasn’t comfortable explaining sodomy to him.

  “Willard, he molested an underage kid.” I wanted him to take the same perverse joy in the news I had. The emperor wore no clothes.

  He just nodded and rubbed the stubble on his face, making a sound like the bristles of a whisk broom. “What’s gonna happen?” he finally asked.

  “They’ll probably convict him.”

  He got real dreamy and massaged a couple of dog kibbles in the palm of his hand. “I went to jail once. They thought I stole Humphrey’s jackknife. I didn’t, but I know who did.” I had no idea who Humphrey was, but I knew it had to be someone he worked with in the asparagus fields. The kibbles turned to sawdust and dribbled out the bottom of his hand.

  Payton Miller pulled up in front of the Carlisle house in the same black four-wheeler that we’d used to put Freeway down. He got out and pushed up the canopy of his umbrella, which had broken loose from the prongs on one side, and he centered it over his head as he walked around to the other side of the vehicle and opened the door for his wife. She was short and had to slide down off her seat until her feet hit the ground. Then she took her husband’s arm and marched up the steps with him to the Carlisle’s Queen Anne mansion, which had every turret and cubbyhole lit for the event.

  “Why did Dr. Miller have to come?” I said.

  “It’s his job.”

  And Willard was right. Dr. Miller attended to the afflicted. If John Carlisle were well, he would have stayed home. Still, I thought, it was a pretty pathetic turnout. If Dad wanted to get an early poll on where his readership was, all he had to do was stand under the spruce tree and count them. They were staying away in droves. John Carlisle was a one-man plague and nobody wanted to touch him. Of course, if I told Dad about the low turnout, he’d probably blame it on the weather.

  Willard tapped me on the front of my sweatshirt with the back of his hand. “Hey, why don’t you go in?”

  “Have you gone loco?” I hadn’t been in the house since Mom died. “You go.”

  Willard stroked Paddy’s head, pulling the forehead skin back so hard that it made little whitecaps at the tops of his eyes. “Take him.”

  The idea of going inside the house made me itchy, but I had to admit I was curious. I’d never stood next to an accused felon and I wondered what kind of transformation the charge had accomplished in him. I’d be able to tell by looking him in the eye whether he’d done it. I’d put the question to him directly and see if he blinked. Still, my mere presence could be interpreted as a sign of support. He’d assume I was there because of Dad. “Let’s just watch it from here, Willard, and say we went in.”

  As I was fingering Paddy’s tail, a threesome of guys without umbrellas or raincoats came up the hill, laughing and cackling. One of them was wearing a muscle shirt with no sleeves. Skin exposure was something I’d never gotten into, like the girls in our class who wore cutoffs when it was snowing. The three guys were a huddle in motion, as one of them walked sideways to keep up and another one backwards. When they passed under the streetlight I could see that the only one walking frontwards was Condon Bagmore. At the gate, they turned left and started up the walk toward John Carlisle’s door.

  “I changed my mind, Willard. I’m going.”

  Willard stripped off his belt, looped it around Paddy’s collar for a leash, and handed me the tapered end, which was still warm. Needless to say, the charges against Carlisle had been topic number one at school that first day. The jokes ran rampant. “If Carlisle is a ram and an ass is a donkey, how come a ram in the ass is a goose?” Someone had already painted a sign on the Carlisle Bridge: “In Stampede, you separate the men from the boys with a crowbar!” I was certain Bagmore would know who the kid was. He was a bottom feeder.

  A black man with a goatee and tails answered the Carlisle door. His gaze started somewhere on the bridge of my nose and journeyed down to Paddy’s paws. “Sorry, Ma’am, no animals.”

  My immediate reaction was to laugh nervously while I thought of what I was going to do. Willard said any establishment worth its salt allowed dogs. The doorman smiled and I hoped that meant he wasn’t going to be a hardass about it. He must have been from out of town, someone Carlisle had hired for the night. “I’m friends of the family,” I said. In this house I felt no obligation to tell the truth.

  The man pulled a towel from one of the hooks in the closet, bent down, and started wiping Paddy’s paws. Willard had told me that dogs’ feet were like their private parts. I tightened up on Willard’s belt and watched the hair on the back of Paddy’s neck in case he decided to bite. I was beginning to feel bad I’d lied. This is when I should have had a buck for a tip, but the only things in my pockets were the note from Rozene and a condom in an unopened foil packet that Colleen Waterston had found in the tunnel under the bleachers. The butler never actually petted Paddy—that would have been to treat him like an animal—and when he was done, he just assumed his perfect posture, adjusted the maroon cummerbund under his jacket, and watched us go inside.

  There were lighted candles everywhere, on the quarter-round tables, the sideboards, the armoire, the grand piano, and even on the sitting spaces in the bay windows. The candles gave off a generic holiday scent, part fir tree and part fruitcake, that covered the mildew I remembered from the last time I was there. Several couples milled around the hors d’oeuvres that were spread like a garish truck garden the length of the multi-leafed dining room table. One lady had her five-year old in tow, dressed in a coat and tie, but I noticed she wasn’t letting loose of the grip on him, just in case the state’s presumption of innocence was mistaken. Her husband had stacked his China saucer with prawns from the ice mold centerpiece and he was dipping them in the cocktail sauce and rushing them to his mouth before the sauce could drip onto the oriental rug. I took a rolled slice of rare roast beef and slipped it to Paddy when no one was looking. Even though I was wearing jeans with full knees and a hooded navy blue sweatshirt with no paint marks, I was woefully underdressed.

  The walls were adorned with paintings—silhouettes of contorted horses in the midst of stars and planets, a couple doing the tango in the eye of a swirling meteor, and a bloody meat cleaver slashing down toward what looked like the neck of a man in a bathing suit. Paddy was pulling on the belt, trying to take me back to the roast beef table, but I dragged him over to a picture of a nude draped across a canvas director’s chair. Each o
f the limbs and the parts of her languid torso—I thought it was a female—had taken on different shades of violet, crimson, and burnt orange. She was arresting, on fire, a kind of asexual Joan of Arc. My eye followed the arm that drooped over the back of the chair to a point just beyond the touch of her fingertips in the right hand corner of the painting. “K. Cooper,” it said, my mom’s maiden name. I looked again at the figure in the painting and wondered if it wasn’t a self-portrait, then I hurried back over to the dancers and the meat cleaver. They were all “K. Coopers.” I’d never seen any of these and I could feel myself blushing. These must have been painted in John Carlisle’s house.

  Outside the half-bath next to the Jacuzzi, I ran into Bagmore and his cadre. One of them was Clete Oster, the kid who confused Pythagoras with pyromania in sophomore geometry. The Osters were reputed to be so lazy they poured milk on their kitchen floor and let their cats and dogs lick it up to clean it. Bagmore was going through the bottles of pills on the shelves in the medicine cabinet. He had rubbed charcoal under his eyes the way football players did to cut down on glare, and it was smeared where he must have tried to wipe something out of his eye.

  “This one says, ‘Guaranteed to make flagpole erections,’” he said, and his boys guffawed.

  “Maybe it’ll cure premature ejaculation,” I said.

  “Look what the cat dragged in.” He’d undoubtedly told his minions how he got me in the supply shed. Somewhere in his bedroom, or in his cardboard memory, he probably kept a list of his targets. Since the incident in the shed, he’d left me alone. Somehow my sharing a sexual experience with him, however faulty, had given me immunity. I was off his list. Bagmore looked like his metabolism was running too fast or he was on speed the way his eyes watered and his fingers fidgeted with the tube in his hand. This wasn’t the guy I’d want holding the gun to my temple. The neurons shooting off inside him might twitch his trigger finger. Then he noticed Paddy. “Hey, guys, here’s Carlisle’s lover.”

  “Say that again and he’ll bite you where it hurts.” I jerked on Paddy’s belt to make it look like I was holding him back, but Paddy could no more bite Bagmore than conduct a symphony.

  “I like a woman with spunk.” His grin revealed the gap between his teeth that you could have slid a plastic stirrer through.

  “It’s a he,” I said, nodding at Paddy.

  He laughed. “I meant you, Scanlon.” Bagmore elbowed Oster and he laughed too. They could explain it to him later.

  “In your dreams,” I said. I let them finish their laughter, and waited for the chance to find out what I’d come in for. With these guys, thoughts came with big spaces between them so it wasn’t hard to change the subject. “Who was the kid?”

  The laugh creases on Bagmore’s face disappeared. “I thought you’d know. Through your dad.” His stupid grin was blooming again, and I knew I’d just exceeded his attention span. “We’re working on it though. I’m checking out assholes in gym.”

  I pulled on the belt. “Come on, Paddy. You’ll lower your IQ if you stay around these guys.”

  If one of them grabbed me, I’d already envisioned myself spinning and smashing my elbow into the side of Bagmore’s face like the meat cleaver in Mom’s painting, but they left me alone and I could hear them giggling and farting away in the bathroom as I passed through the library. There was no one in the dining room so I grabbed some cheese sticks and a couple of beef rolls for Willard and Paddy. I’d have made it out of there too, except that Dr. Miller called my name out just as I was passing the life-sized mahogany native with the exposed genitals. I put the fistful of meat and cheese under my armpit.

  “Oh, hi, Dr. Miller. Merry Christmas.”

  John Carlisle, who’d been talking to Dr. Miller, turned as well. We were five feet from each other. He was wearing that same gaudy red vest he wore the day I saw him in front of the emergency room at the hospital. He inspected me and the dog, all the time advancing like he was going to touch me. I was backing toward the door and I could feel the belt against my legs as Paddy twisted it around me.

  “Piper Scanlon, how nice,” he said, with a Peter Lorre smile.

  “I gotta go.” My fist was still buried in my left armpit and I could feel the cheese oozing between my fingers. He was close enough to read his eyes. Come on, you coward, Piper, ask him the question.

  “Don’t rush off,” he said, and I could feel the heat of his body.

  Paddy had wound the leash so tight around me that I was immobile. Only my tongue was still able to wag. “So what about the charges, are they true?”

  Just when I thought I saw him flinch, Dr. Miller stooped over to pet Paddy and his affection was so stimulating that Paddy spun me around. Everyone laughed. A glob of cheese fell to the floor and Paddy lapped it up while Dr. Miller ruffled the hair on his back. I used the distraction to hide behind my back what was left of the food in my fist. My test had been contaminated. I was the one squirming.

  “He’s gotta pee,” I said, nodding toward the dog, crab-walking sideways to the door.

  John Carlisle followed me.

  The butler opened the door and I stepped onto the straw welcome mat, the air instantly attacking my cheeks with its coolness.

  Holding onto the door jamb with his free hand, John Carlisle leaned out and whispered. “You of all people need to believe me, Piper. Please.”

  The fresh air and the vast space in which to escape emboldened me. “Who was it?”

  “Please. Have some compassion.”

  I threw the cheese ball in the general direction of the leaded glass windows in the bow window, but it stuck to my hand on the follow-through and landed harmlessly in the hedgerow next to the walk. “Shit!” He’d won this round. I’d come as pathetically unprepared to confront him as I’d come underdressed. I’d learned nothing from my dad’s plodding, tradesman-like habits as a journalist. My techniques for truth-telling were as primitive as black cats and broken mirrors.

  Paddy stiffened his legs, wanting to stay with the festivities inside. His nails scraped against the cement as I dragged him toward the safety of the tree with Willard. When I looked back, Bagmore was standing on the porch pointing towards us.

  The accusations against Carlisle became the buzz in the doghouse.

  “It was a mistake his mother ever let him take dance,” Pamela Palmer said. “Why didn’t they make him wear a mitt and catch flyballs like everyone else?”

  “I think it was those Frenchies at the Sorbonne,” Gerry Alexander said.

  Everyone swarmed in to take a piece of him. But now that I’d tasted the rush of direct confrontation, the behind-the-back stuff seemed tame, in fact, unfair.

  “There’s something else going on here,” I told Louise Mead. “I think we put our celebrities on pedestals so we can throw turds at them.” I surprised myself sometimes with my high-mindedness.

  Louise had taken up chalk sticks as a substitute for her cigarettes and she pulled one out of her blouse pocket and puffed on it. “You shock me, Piper.”

  “Nobody can stand the idea of someone else having more than they do.”

  “You’re saying all this talk is just envy?” There were little chalk kisses on her lips.

  “No. Revenge.”

  I knew because the symptoms were so obvious in me.

  In the weeks that followed the announcement of the charges, John Carlisle seemed to be everywhere.

  On the way to the Herald one afternoon, the Gracio Brothers produce truck was parked in front of Marge’s with the motor running. The side door was open and a crate jammed with lettuce, cucumbers, and carrots rested on the sidewalk next to the truck like someone had forgotten it. I reached the crate at the same time John Carlisle did. He was wearing a powder blue sweatsuit with a white stripe down the outside of the legs and the sleeves.

  “Can you catch the door for me?” he said.

  I was startled. “What door?”

  He stooped down, bending at the knees, keeping his back straight, and hoisted the c
rate up against his middle. “Please.”

  As I ushered him into Marge’s, everyone in the restaurant turned to watch John Carlisle hump a crate of vegetables past the stools and through the swinging doors that led to the rest rooms and the walk-in cooler. Before I could escape, Marge pulled a chocolate-covered cake donut out of the rack and handed it to me on a plate.

  “It’s day old,” she said. Marge knew I had a weakness for cake donuts and by the time I’d slid a buttock onto the edge of the stool she had a cup of coffee and a sugar packet sitting next to the plate. “You can’t work on an empty stomach.”

  Carlisle emerged, brushing his hands together like he’d just unloaded the entire truck. I thought he was going to join me at the bar, so I stood and took a huge bite of donut. Instead, he patted me on the arm with a thank you as he passed and returned to a booth where there was a half-eaten club sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup with the spoon in it. Jesse Little’s dad followed him into the booth with his coffee cup rattling against the saucer and sat down. Smelly, bloodshot, unshaven Mr. Little dining with the town’s prodigy. What an equalizer a criminal charge was.

  A few days later, I saw Carlisle jogging through Kla Hah Ya Park in black tights and a pair of yellow running shoes. His legs were spindly compared to his upper body, which was bundled in double sweatshirts with a towel tucked into the neck hole. He carried small white dumbbells in each hand that he pumped up and down in rhythm with his strides. He was surprisingly light on his feet and I thought maybe he really was once a member of the corps de ballet. He stopped at the gazebo to stretch, bending left, then right, joining his hands over his head, rising on his toes, and then with his body perfectly straight, he balanced on one leg and stretched the other one to the side, parallel to the ground. When Mom had told me how John Carlisle used to dance, I’d always tittered to myself. And I used to play football for the Seahawks.