by Sarah Healy
Rose scowled in my direction. “But you don’t have a coat!” she whined.
“I have a layer of blubber,” I answered, then pointed inside the house. “Go.”
Rose pulled a little foot-stomp-and-turn combination as she rushed into the house.
“So what’s that plane, War?” I asked, again sliding the sandpaper up the column.
My mother perked up. “Is that the one you’ve been working on?” she asked. “The one that can hover?” She turned to me. “That’s hard to do,” she said. “To make one of those planes hover.”
Warren stood still, seeming almost annoyed that we were using such basic but irresistible means by which to draw him out of the house. When not fulfilling his duties for Pizzeria Brava, Warren seemed to prefer being indoors since the “incident.” “You just have to use multiple gyros,” he said, his lips barely parting to release the words. “On the canards and the rudders.”
Rose came bounding back out the door, dragging her coat behind her by its sleeve. “Uncle Warren!” she said, as I climbed down the ladder to help her put it on. “Are you gonna fly the plane?”
Warren made another soft groaning sound. Again he glanced around the neighborhood. He seemed to start for the door, then changed his mind before taking a step. “You really want to see Uncle Warren fly the plane?” he asked Rose.
And all she had to do was nod.
Warren seemed uncomfortable as he crept out onto the lawn, his head sunk into his shoulders, his posture tense. But as he looked down at Rose, who was bouncing at his side, a smile inched onto his face. He said something to her that I couldn’t hear, then set the controller down on the ground. Gripping the side of the plane with a single hand, he suddenly began spinning and spinning like a top, the plane held at the end of his extended arm gathering speed. When he released, it soared slowly, without ambition, until he darted down for the controller, and with movements that seemed instinctual, he directed the plane elegantly back into the air, lifting it out of the downward arc it had begun. The plane circled over Rose’s head a few times, and she jumped and squealed when it swooped toward her—her very own air show. His hands moved quickly and the plane seemed to stop in midair, its nose lifting until it was almost vertical, hovering there.
“Look!” said my mother. “Warren says that’s called ‘high alpha’ when it does that.” She stared at the plane, marveling. “There aren’t a lot of people who can make planes do that. He had to program that control panel and everything.”
But as Warren stood there, his plane in a state of equilibrium, totally balanced between up and down, right and left, backward and forward, I saw his gaze move away from the sky and toward the road, and the car that was moving down it. Almost instantly the plane dropped, free-falling until it hit the earth, helpless and unguided. Warren walked over to it and scooped it up, his eyes focused on the ground two feet in front of him; then he hurried back toward the house. “Uncle Warren!” cried Rose, with a small, joyful leap, looking from Warren back toward the sky. “Make it go back up!” But he didn’t respond; he kept moving as the car sped past, too fast for me to decipher much besides the fact that it was driven by a young kid and that he glanced discreetly but unquestionably at Warren—making it look so casual, so unintentional, so unremarkable—before disappearing down the road, the volume of the music coming from his car a blur of noise that lingered after him.
Warren kept his head down as he climbed the steps of the porch, silent as he brushed past us and went back into the house. “I knew it,” whispered my mother as the screen door clattered shut. “Goddammit. I knew it.” The words weren’t meant for me, weren’t meant to be spoken aloud.
“Who was that?” I asked.
Mom stared hard after the path of the car that had turned onto Mountain Road. “Zack Castro,” she said.
I recalled the threesome of teenage boys hovering over Mrs. Vanni’s Crock-Pot of sausage and peppers during the block party. “He was the one whose bike was stolen,” I said.
“Yup.” My mother’s jaw tensed and she remained focused on the void at the end of the road. “That’s him.” She looked over at Rose, who had followed Warren to the steps of the porch, her small face weighted with matters she didn’t understand. Then Mom smiled at her, made her voice light again. “Can you get Uncle Warren’s controls, honey? I don’t think he meant to leave them on the grass.”
Mom and I looked at each other for one honest instant before, with pursed lips, she turned away. That’s him. And the soft-sounding strokes of sandpaper once again sounded from her direction. That’s him. That’s him. That’s him.
“I’ll be right back.” I stepped down from the ladder. Distressed and curious, Mom looked at me. “Keep an eye on Rose?” I asked. Then I disappeared inside the house.
After gently knocking, I pushed open Warren’s door. “Hey, War,” I said, peering into his room. He was sitting at his desk, his back to the door, his hands efficiently and methodically dismantling his plane. “Warren,” I said, padding toward him. “Hey, hey, hey.”
“The gyros were overcorrecting,” he said, shrugging away from my touch, continuing to pull at wires. “The plane wasn’t stabilizing.”
I rested my hand on his shoulder. “So you can fix it.” It was the way I’d speak to Rose.
His hands slowed, and he gave me a discreet but suspicious look from the corner of his eye, as if making sure I was the person he presumed me to be. “That’s what I’m doing,” he said softly.
I lowered my head, feeling not like his twin, the person who understood him better than anyone, but like one of the people who tried not to stare at him as he flew his plane in the front yard, wondering what Weird Warren was doing now. For a moment, I listened to the sounds of his work. When I spoke again, it was without hesitation. “That kid was the one who beat you up, wasn’t it? The one who drove by?” Warren seemed to contract, to pull his entire being into a thrumming center, and concentrate more intensely on his plane. “Zack Castro?”
I watched Warren’s slender fingers work at pulling the tiny wires. When he spoke, he said only, “The plane is tail heavy in neutral.” He pulled at what looked like a small secondary wing on the side of the plane. “So the canards need to be angled down.” His focus seemed to narrow, his gaze to zoom in on the LED lights on the sides of the tiny aircraft. And taking a breath first, he said, his lips barely moving, “Sometimes after work at night, I fly in the park.” And I knew I had my answer. The backyards of half the homes in King’s Knoll abutted the park. That Warren hadn’t denied it was Zack was as good as his admitting that it was. I pictured my mother’s face. That’s him, she had said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Easter
1961
H attie liked the Hooper boys. “They’re just how boys are supposed to be,” she’d say of the three young men who lived next door and were handsome and cruel in equal measure. “Their mama’s raising them right.” But Silla found them terrifying. And even though she stayed in her room when her daddy was traveling, which was most of the time, she avoided the window, which faced the fence that separated her own yard from theirs.
For each one of the three Hooper boys, there was an enormous dog, all three with muscled but hungry frames and the sort of matted brown and black fur that became burdensome in the heat. The dogs were kept tethered to an iron stake in the ground, where their world had a circumference of about forty grassless feet. Most of the time, no one went anywhere near them, but sometimes the boys got bored. Sometimes, they would wait until the dogs weren’t looking; then they’d run up and try to kick them. The dogs would lurch around and begin their pursuit, their teeth bared, their snarls ferocious, as the boys would scramble away, laughing, their voices adrenaline-spiked. They knew exactly where the limits lay, when the dogs’ lines would become taut, where they’d meet the resistance of their collars.
Hattie would head out as soon as she heard their ga
me start, deciding this was the moment to shake out a tablecloth or prune the roses. Sometimes she didn’t need the guise of a chore. Sometimes she’d just lean against the porch railing, her lips curved into a crocodile smile, one of her feet sliding out of the back of her high heel. Hattie always wore high heels.
Once they had an audience, the boys became a bit more vicious, a bit more daring. They rarely got bitten, but when they did, before they even assessed their wounds, they’d look to make sure Hattie had been watching. “Serves you right,” she would say, her chin lifted regally. “You better go tell your mama to get the Mercurochrome.”
Silla could hear the Hoopers outside now, so she sat on the floor between her bed and the wall, singing quietly. She did everything quietly, though she couldn’t have told you why. And when she noticed the door to her bedroom start to open, her body stiffened, and her song hid in her lungs. But it was her father’s face that appeared. “Daddy,” she gasped, as she scrambled to her feet.
“How’s my pretty girl?” he asked, as Silla hurried to him.
She wrapped her arms around his waist, noticing that his hands were tucked behind his back, hiding something from her view. It was then that she heard the chirping. “I got a surprise for you,” said her father, as he brought around a small, lidless cardboard box.
Silla’s smile was instant when she saw the chicks, when she matched their high-pitched peeps to their soft, butter-colored bodies. Their heads were lifted and eyes alert as they tried to grip the smooth bottom of the box and gain their footing with their tiny claws. “They’re for Easter,” said her father, as Silla peered at them. “You like ’em?”
She nodded.
“Then go on,” he said, nudging the box toward her.
Silla slid the box from her father’s hands and went to her bed, her eyes not moving from the chicks. She sat on the mattress, placing the container carefully on her lap. There were six of them. Six chicks. She counted them as they huddled to one corner of the cardboard, running her fingers over each of their tiny skulls. “Shhh,” she told them, chuckling. “It’s all right.” Then she lifted her face to her father, blushing even before she spoke. “I’m singing with the choir tomorrow. At morning services.”
“You don’t say,” said her father, staring at his daughter, who really had become quite lovely. “Well, well.”
Silla bit away her smile and looked back down at the chicks, feeling her father’s attention linger. “You know, you should probably keep those outside, sugar,” said her father finally, giving his daughter a wink. “Hattie said she doesn’t want any dirty ol’ chickens in the house.”
For the rest of the evening, Silla stayed outside with the chicks, on the other end of the house from the Hoopers’ yard. She picked them up one at a time, cradling them into her chest, amazed at how light they were, at just how insignificant their bones felt. When her bedtime came, she put them in the shed with an old dishrag balled up in their box to help keep them warm. Surely, they needed something to do so.
The next morning, even before looking for her Easter basket, Silla slipped out of the house to check on them, a smile spreading instantly across her face as she opened the door to the shed to hear their greeting.
“You love those chicks, don’t you, Silla?” asked her father, as Hattie massaged his shoulders after church. And Silla dipped her chin to her chest and smiled. “I’m glad, sugar,” he said as he reached for his tumbler, then looked again at his daughter. “You sang pretty at church today.” The drink was like liniment; you could see his muscles start to loosen. “You sang real pretty.”
Hattie’s hand slid slowly down her father’s chest. “Silla, honey. Why don’t you go out to the shed?” she suggested. “Visit those birds of yours.”
• • •
That night, the rain started. Silla found its gentle persistence soothing. A thunderstorm was erratic. It would blow in and blow out, bringing spectacle and sensation. But a spring rainstorm would build gently, falling steadily until it passed through. And that night Silla slept soundly. The air was cool. Her father was home. And she heard nothing but the rain.
By the time she woke up in the morning, the skies had cleared and her father was gone again, back on the road. Still in her nightgown, she laced up her shoes and went out to the shed just as she had the day before. The ground was damp and almost bare in spots, and was still heavy with dew and a mist that would soon succumb to the sun. Before she reached the shed, she knew something was wrong. Before she had set her fingers on the handle, they started to quiver. And when the morning light filled the dark shed, it was the silence that she noticed first. Then she realized that the box was gone.
She circled the shed. She looked under the old workbench and behind the rusted-out washbasin. Once she knew for certain that the chicks weren’t there, something instinctual, some impulse for self-preservation, took over in her. She walked back in the house, trying to move like a ghost, invisible and unnoticed. But Hattie was in the kitchen, standing at the sink when she entered. “What’s wrong, Priscilla?” she asked, her voice too solicitous, too kind.
Silla couldn’t bring her gaze up from the floor. “My chicks are gone,” she whispered.
Hattie made a gentle tsk sound. “Ohhh,” she said. “Ain’t that a shame?”
Silla would never mention the chicks again and her father would never ask, as nothing held Lee Harris’s attention for long, least of all six baby chickens. But later that evening, while Hattie was watching her television program, Silla went back to the shed. Scanning the area around the door, her gaze caught on a small divot in the dirt, still moist with the previous night’s rain. She slipped her finger inside, feeling its boundaries. There weren’t very many things that could make a hole like that. It would have to be something slender, something sharp. The heel of a woman’s shoe, maybe. And as it turned out, they weren’t uncommon in the yard. In fact, Silla followed a path of them, one by one, from the shed to the edge of the Hoopers’ fence, where the world of the dogs met hers.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Chickens and Rats
B obby propped open the theater door, letting the girls walk out ahead of him, then gestured for me to do the same. “So what did you guys think?” I asked our small group as we hung together, walking down the theater’s dimly lit corridor, lined with posters of coming attractions and doors to other worlds. But Gabby and Rose were too absorbed with each other to pay any attention to the question. I smiled at Bobby, feeling a flash of discomfort as I found myself at a momentary loss for what to say next. Knowing each other since childhood had put us in an uncomfortable gray area between total strangers and blood relatives.
“Gotta love a good rat story,” said Bobby.
Our footsteps fell into sync until we passed a poster for a campy horror movie that featured an enormous cobra—its body coiled, its hood spread wide. “Hey, do you remember Ron Frankney?” I asked, though I knew he did. Ron was part of Harwick lore in the same way Bobby was. In the same way Warren probably was. All figures from a shared youth whose myth was greater, more sensational, than their person.
Bobby chuckled, his chin dropping to his chest. “Yeah,” he said. “I remember Frankney. He had that”—he glanced at the girls and lowered his voice, in the way parents do when they are about to use anything less than G-rated language near their kids—“big-ass snake. He used to feed it live chickens.”
“It wasn’t chickens,” I said. “It was rats!”
Bobby stuck his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. “I’m pretty sure it was chickens,” he said.
“It wasn’t chickens!” I protested, relishing the feeling of being teased by a handsome man. “Where would he have even gotten live chickens in Harwick back then?”
“The Boorschmidts,” he said, as if the answer were obvious. And I felt my head fall back with the sort of laughter that silently seeps through the whole body, warming it entirely. The B
oorschmidts were another Harwick legend, a trio of brothers who had a small farm near the center of town and in my youth had seemed ancient, though they had probably only been in their sixties at the time. They wore jeans that they belted with lengths of rope, and sold corn and their own hybrid string beans out of the back of their pickup truck. When the property around them became more developed, they sold off all but a small square of land, but didn’t relocate themselves. Instead they remained defiantly in their home—the yard complete with a half-dozen hound dogs and twice as many chickens—all in the midst of Harwick’s suburban splendor.
We took a few more steps. “You know they finally sold the house,” said Bobby.
I had noticed that the lot had been razed, but never thought to ask my mother what had become of them. “Where’d they go?” I asked, having trouble picturing the Boorschmidt brothers anywhere other than in their ramshackle home.
Bobby’s tone was softer. “I heard they went to a continuing care facility.”
“Oh, no,” I said, watching my feet as they moved along the maroon carpet. I supposed I had always imagined that the Boorschmidts would die one day all at once, collapsing simultaneously into their bowls of oatmeal. “That’s so sad.”
We pushed out of the dark theater and into the bright expanse of the mall, with its light floors and atrium ceiling. “So I guess Lydia Stroppe was at our house the other day,” said Bobby, his tone both casual and confessional. It wasn’t lost on me that he didn’t refer to her as Lydia Parsons; maybe we all had a tendency to allow the past to supersede the present, to overlay who someone was now with who they had once been.
“Oh, really?” I asked lightly.
“Yeah, my parents wanted to get her opinion on listing their house.”
“You guys are moving?” I asked, hoping my voice revealed nothing.