Piper

by John E. Keegan

  A couple of school kids on bikes wheeled by, their tires throwing off gravel and pieces of wet bark. They were riding two abreast on the path, jabbering and cussing at each other. I recognized the attitude, that I’m smarter than anyone else and even if I’m not I don’t give a damn as long as I have my wheels. They skidded to a stop next to the gazebo and I watched them from under the eaves of the stone lavatory.

  I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the kid with the basket strapped to the carrier on his back fender slid his middle finger up and down in the tube he’d made with his hand and the other kid bent over laughing. Carlisle stopped his stretching to talk to them. I knew I should have gone over there and broken it up. It wasn’t as if I thought Carlisle was innocent. I figured they still only had him for a fraction of what he’d gotten away with. Still, I thought, those two little punks hardly represented Stampede. I wanted the public conviction.

  The other kid set his bike on its side, edged closer to Carlisle, dropped the back of his pants and mooned him. It was over in an instant as he scrambled back to his bike and the two of them tore out of there whooping and hollering.

  One afternoon, I edited an article for the paper announcing that John Carlisle had given fifty thousand dollars to the Lake Spigot Boys Camp scholarship fund for needy kids. Because I had no idea what the size of that contribution represented, either to the Boys Camp or to the Carlisle fortune, I didn’t know whether our running a story meant it was news or simply the prerogative of the owner. When I made the mistake of questioning Dad about it, his Irish came out.

  “What do you think we’re running, a vanity press?”

  The same day I edited the story of the scholarship contribution, I found an envelope on my desk with “Piper” hand-written on the outside. It had been sealed with a lick on the point of the flap and broke open easily. Inside, there was a long article that had been cut out of a national news magazine listing the best colleges in the United States. A yellow sticky on the front said:

  Piper,

  You need to be thinking of your future. Pick one and I’ll help.

  John Carlisle

  I hurriedly ran down the column showing the cost of attending the best liberal arts colleges in the United States. Four years cost more than the boys at Lake Spigot were going to get. Then I realized that my scholarship offer was no different than the Lake Spigot donation. They were both part of Carlisle’s desperate campaign to save his image and his ass. When his peers walked into that jury box, he wanted them to remember his unparalleled generosity to the community. His offer to me was probably aimed at Dad. He knew he couldn’t tell Dad what to write, but he could certainly bend his head in the right direction. If that was Carlisle’s strategy, however, it was flawed on two counts: he’d wildly overestimated my influence on Dad, and he’d underestimated my cynicism.

  I ripped the magazine article into four ragged squares and dumped it into the recycle box next to my desk.

  Dirk Thurgood had continued to be persona non-communicata since the poster flap, and when I asked at the vice principal’s office why he wasn’t coming to school, they said he’d contracted infectious mononucleosis. I didn’t believe them and decided to check it out for myself. I hadn’t been to Dirk’s in months, probably the result of false pride. He was the one who’d cut me off after the poster thing, so I figured it was his job to paste things back together once he’d gotten over it. Besides, I knew he’d be back. We’d been friends too long. He’d sulked in his tent before.

  There was a Century Real Estate “For Sale” sign in his front yard, hanging by thin silver chains from the crossbar of one of those fancy half-crucifixes that realtors used. This didn’t make sense. Dirk’s dad had retired to Stampede. I looked up at the naked maple trees, the branches as dead as roasting sticks. At its best, in the heat of summer, when the smell of sweet peas and heliotrope were bewitching and the sunflowers in the vacant lots gaped at you like circus clowns, Stampede was still a hard sell. It wasn’t like we built 737s or mini-vans. Who would buy a house here in the wintertime?

  His dad answered the door. I was always surprised how short Colonel Thurgood was compared to his reputation. He was in good shape for a man nearly sixty, partly because he played handball with old service buddies several times a week in Everett, but his face was always flushed like he’d been out in the weather or had popped his face veins from too much drinking. His sideburns were cut at an angle just above the place where his jawbones ground.

  “Whadda you want?” he said, holding the door just wide enough so I could see his crewcut head and the curlicues of gun-metal gray chest hairs in the neck of his undershirt.

  “I want to see Dirk.”

  “What for? He’s sick.” A drift of stale air hit me, like something trapped inside a shoe clambering to get out.

  “School stuff, just take a minute.” I could be as peremptory as the Colonel.

  “Give it to me.” He wasted no syllables and his words were clipped, as if he didn’t want to waste his voice on someone so inconsequential. I couldn’t imagine doing boot camp under this guy.

  “It’s up here,” I said, pointing to my head, “something from his teachers.”

  He scratched his butt in a way that made his sweatpants wag with each stroke. Then he opened the door. “He’s up there,” he said. “Make it snappy.” I was on his base, so he must have figured I was under his command.

  “Yessir,” I said, making a partial salute.

  I turned sideways to get by him and headed straight for the stairs, glancing left into the living room as I passed. A game show was playing on the television and the floorlamp next to the Naugahyde Lazy Boy chair was lit. I took the stairs two steps at a time. The door with the “D. Thurgood, Private First Class” plate was closed. This was a promotion. When he first moved to Stampede, the sign said “Private, E-1,” the lowest rank in the U.S. Army. There was another television playing inside Dirk’s room. I knocked and the volume instantly muted.

  “Sir?”

  “It’s me. Piper.”

  There was a shuffling inside, a book hit the floor, a hanger sprung off the rod in the closet, then he was standing in front of me in a terrycloth bathrobe that was yellowed around the collar. He cast his eyes downward and pressed one bare foot on top of the other as if to hide the toenails. His hair was greasy, unwashed, and uncombed. “Come on in.”

  The floor was papered with neat stacks of three-holed notebook filler. Clusters of video cassettes stood on his desk like tanks in battle formation. The monitor was frozen on a scene with doctors in surgical gowns and masks.

  “They said you’re sick.”

  He rocked his head from side to side in an expression that was maybe yes, maybe no.

  I picked my way between the stacks on the floor and lifted up one of the cassettes on the desk. “M*A*S*H: #27.” The next one was “M*A*S*H: #28.” They were all “M*A*S*H” tapes.

  “Where’d you get all this?” I said.

  He mumbled. “Someone’s collection.”

  “You what?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I bought ’em. All two hundred fifty-one episodes.”

  I hung a pair of his jeans over the back of the desk chair and sat down, moving a stack of papers on the floor to find a place for my feet. The index card on top of the stack said “Corporal Radar.” The notes on the first page, in Dirk’s handwriting, gave Radar’s weight, height, date and place of birth, grade school, high school, favorite color, religion, and other information. The minutiae went on for pages. The stack next to my other foot was labeled “Hot Lips.” Next to that one was “Hawkeye.” There must have been twenty-five stacks on the floor. “This is what you’ve been doing?”

  “Pretty much.” He sat cross-legged in the middle of his bed, his back rounded and his shoulders sloped. There was no spark in his voice. He sounded more like one of the geriatrics I’d seen when Mom and I visited her great uncle in the nursing home, with that same faraway look. I hated that place.

>   “Have you heard about Carlisle?”

  He looked down and picked at his toes.

  “Well, was I right or was I right?”

  No answer.

  I tossed one of the cassettes onto the bed and it slid next to his bare feet. “Speak to me, Buddha.” The left side of his cheek buckled slightly as if someone had pushed it up with a stiff finger. “Hey, I know you polished his silverware, but come on.” Still no rise out of him. He was methodically picking his toes, working from biggest to smallest. One knee was raised so I could see the inside of his thigh and his underpants. “The good news is you’re no longer sick joke number one in the lavatories.”

  His lips were trembling. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or confused. “It was me,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m the one who made the charges.”

  My heart dropped like someone had severed the elevator cables. I’d pictured the victim as some blonde tenyear old out in the new subdivision on Horse Heaven Highway. “I’m sorry, Dirk. Jesus. You worked for him, I should’ve known …”

  “Don’t sweat it. It’s not all bad.”

  “What’s the good part?”

  “These tapes, for one.” He nodded toward the battalion on his desk.

  “You bought these with Carlisle’s money?”

  “Hey, I made out.” He sounded like a character from one of his videos and I didn’t want to believe him, but there was a matter-of-factness in his voice that made it seem real.

  “I can see why you’re not at school.”

  “I’m not afraid of school!” There was a mood swing and he was suddenly defiant. “My dad won’t let me go.”

  “He won’t let you?”

  “I’m grounded.”

  “He can’t do that.”

  “The Colonel can do a lot of things”—there was hatred in his voice—“for now.”

  “Not if I report him.”

  He gave a dismissive laugh. “Leave it alone, Piper. It’ll play itself out and then we’ll all be better off. You too. Especially you.”

  I could only shake my head. I was missing it. If this was another one of his Hollywood-induced delusions, I didn’t like it. He was going to be chewed up and spit out so hard once word got out that he’d wish he was dog puke, but he seemed to relish the idea. The old shame was gone.

  “Sometimes there’s a higher purpose served,” he said. More video talk, I thought. Maybe he’d had a psychotic break. The experience with Carlisle had pushed him over the edge.

  12

  Before the charges were filed against John Carlisle, I thought I had pretty well figured out what had happened between him and Mom. I’d composed the whole thing in my daydreams and nightmares, editing it until every scrap of truth I could get my hands on fit, and telling no one what I knew.

  Mom was restless, aching for attention. The spirited tides she’d ridden as a young woman had deposited her high on the beach and receded. Although Dad wasn’t the kind of man who danced nude at rock concerts in the forest or painted peace symbols on his forehead, he was attracted to her independence, to her disenchantment with the status quo. It resonated with his own thirst for the unvarnished truth of things. He brought her to Stampede, but Stampede was too vanilla for her. She hungered for self-expression, as a way to distinguish herself from the dutiful housewives and working mothers. Dad didn’t understand pigments, mixing knives, brush strokes, and the clash of colors. Why would someone use a hog bristle brush and a palette of a dozen colors to express themselves when there was a printing press and the vocabulary of Shakespeare? Colors tickled the sense of sight; words engaged the full labyrinth of the brain.

  Mom was drawn to the eccentric like a moth to the light-bulb’s heat. Enter John Carlisle, the would-be toe-dancer amidst a mob of shufflers. He appreciated her passion. He didn’t just talk the talk, he bought her pieces, I’d seen them in his living room. Neither of them held steady jobs. They had time. First, it was painting in his library or the den. Then the painting was followed by a hot tub. With bathing suits, gradually without. What man wouldn’t be moved in the presence of a wet Kathryn Scanlon? Their stolen glances grew to playful touches—the arch of a foot in the water, a squeeze of the knee, a neck rub, he behind her, and then in reverse. John Carlisle probably dried her off with one of those oversize Turkish towels he stacked in the dressing room next to the Jacuzzi. Maybe they danced naked to his bed that first time, pirouetting, then waltzing, then collapsing in laughter on the bedspread, she warmed by his appreciative eyes, the same eyes that had admired her on canvas. He was her husband’s boss, so who would suspect? They were on the fringe anyway, so who would care?

  They must have been playing in the Jacuzzi that day. One of them dropped something. Maybe it was one of Mom’s twin dolphin earrings. Giggling, they tried to pick it up between their toes, but it kept slipping out and fishtailing to the bottom. I’ll get that little devil, Mom said, and she somersaulted head first like a duck, with her white buttocks breaking the surface. She felt along the bottom of the Jacuzzi with the flats of her hands, tickling his toes, holding her breath, trying to keep from laughing and losing her air. Her long, chestnut hair drifted toward the drain like smoke to an exhaust fan and then it caught. As more of it was sucked through the grate, the opening in the drain became smaller, and it sucked harder and harder until it had wound every strand onto its spool. Upside down in the murky water, Mom tried to find John Carlisle’s bleached torso, but she couldn’t move her head. She screamed and, in doing so, traded the precious air left in her mouth for warm water. She tried to kick, but she was pulled so tightly against the grate that she was not even sure her feet reached the top. The hum and gurgle of the jets camouflaged the bubbles rising from her trapped head and, desperate for air, she inhaled a sinkful of water laced with bacteria. Her body, no longer buoyant, collapsed to the bottom of the tub and her face went flush with the drain. She registered a last silent protest against the force that was threatening to pull her head through the grate like an egg slicer and it was at that moment the devil in the water plucked out her eyes.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what John Carlisle was doing while Mom struggled at the bottom of his Jacuzzi—that part of the story was still in gestation—but it couldn’t have taken more than a minute because I’d tried a hundred times since to see how long I could hold my breath and never gotten past about fifty-five seconds.

  Initially, I had entertained the idea he’d drowned her because she threatened to tell my dad about their affair, but that didn’t make sense. Why would she tell on herself? Then I decided his crime wasn’t homicide as much as trespass. He’d wandered into someone else’s pasture, not just Dad’s, but Mom’s and mine as well. He’d already taken one of my parents with his newspaper; it wasn’t fair that he should have both of them.

  The new truth, the one that Dirk had admitted to, however, was like an icicle driven through my brain. But it offered relief from the alternative I’d imagined. The same man couldn’t have done both.

  On the last day of school before Christmas vacation, I headed downtown to find a present for Dad at the Star Center Mall, a cavernous red brick building that used to be the Stampede Armory. Because of the job at the paper, it was the first year in my life I had money, so I knew I had to get something nice, maybe a brimmed hat (he was developing a bald spot on the back of his head) or one of those juicers (so he could make his own V-8). A brown Corolla pulled up next to the curb. At first, I thought it had stopped for the mailbox. The horn piped lightly and I looked over to see Rozene Raymond rolling down the passenger window.

  “Need a lift?”

  I didn’t need the ride anymore than my dad needed the juicer, but want was a different proposition. “Sure,” I said, already moving toward the door she’d swung open.

  She took the bridge over the river and drove out Highway 9. I didn’t protest. The heater was cranked up and she had a Kate Bush tape in the cassette. She seemed so comfortable, as if we did this every Friday af
ternoon. I rested my left arm on the top of the seat and turned so that I could watch her drive. She’d pulled a ligament in a girls’ intramural basketball game and the cast on her right foot kept the speedometer needle just over the limit. I was there when it happened and had to resist the urge to run out on the court and comfort her. Two teammates put her arms over their necks and helped her limp off the court to the nurse’s station.

  As she turned into the road for Harvey Field the aluminum crutches standing up in the backseat slid over and banged against the window. “Oops,” she said. We took a service road past a row of galvanized metal hangars and past a fleet of single engine planes secured to the ground with guy wires. The road ran parallel to the runway until it petered out and turned to gravel. She looped over to a place about a hundred yards past the ground lights and directly under the flight path, pointed us back toward the runway, and put the car in “Park.”

  “How’s that?” she said.

  “Are we supposed to be here?”

  “Nobody’s ever kicked me out.”

  “You do this a lot?”

  She laughed. “I come out here alone. Something about flying turns me on.” Then she picked up her leg and started maneuvering it out of the driver’s compartment. “Do you mind? This thing’s a killer if I don’t stretch it out.” She held her leg in the air while I tried to scoot over far enough so that she could set her cast on my seat, but my legs were too long and I couldn’t get out of the way.

  “That’s all right.” The weight of her felt nice on my thigh and I cautiously touched the plaster that entombed her foot. It was hard and coarse and I could smell the gauze in the mold. She reached over to adjust her cords so the ribs of the corduroy lined up with the extension of her leg. There was a lone salutation on her cast in a language I couldn’t understand, signed “Mom.”