by Jeffrey Ford
From the stairs I looked down on the scene through a cloud of smoke—people on the couches and chairs, standing in the dining room, leaning against the walls; ice cubes clinking, plates of cheese cubes impaled on toothpicks, celery with cream cheese and walnuts; a turquoise dress, a pile of hair, a strange deep laughter rising out of the noise of voices. I saw Nan’s door open and knew there was a whole group of men in there watching football on television.
In minutes, with stiff white shirt and polished shoes, hair bear-waxed up, I dove into the party. Uncle Jack did magic tricks for Mary at the dining-room table, draping a handkerchief over his hands and making cards disappear. His mother, Grandma, my father’s mother, sat straight as a statue, scanning the crowd. She had a big, smooth melted piece of skin under her chin that was supposedly transplanted there from her ass. Once she told me that when she was a girl in Oklahoma, she saw a woman with a disease that caused a cobweb to grow from her mouth and down across her chest. “Fine as frog’s hair,” she’d said to me, waving her hand in the air to show how the stuff caught the breeze.
Pop’s sister, Aunt Irene, told about her trip to the psychic and blinked every other second. I also had an aunt who burped every other second, but she wasn’t at the party. My father drank a whiskey sour with ice and a cherry in it and chatted with Aunt Gertie and her son, Bob, the priest. I went and stood near the back door, opening it a sliver to feel the cool air. In the kitchen my mother, surrounded by boiling pots and dirty dishes, a cigarette between her lips and a glass of cream sherry in her hand, knelt at the open oven, basting the sizzling bird.
My cousins Cillie and Ivy and Suzie, all in high school, sat with us at the kids’ table set up in the living room. They liked to joke around with Jim, but their long blond hair and lemon perfume made me shy. There was this other kid there, the son of my father’s friend. I forget his name, but no matter what you said to him, he’d say in return, “Naturally,” like a big know-it-all. Jim threw a black olive at him and hit him in the eye. When the kid started crying, Jim told him to shut up. Then we ate.
After dinner everyone jammed around the living room, and my cousins played “The Twist,” a record by Chubby Checker, on the Victrola, and taught everyone how to do the dance named after it. “Like you’re putting out a cigarette with the toe of your shoe,” they said. My mother even came out of the kitchen, drink in hand, and did the twist. Aunt Gertie laughed, Grandma stared, Edwin (I never really knew who he was related to or how) came in from the football room for another drink and fake-bit Nan on the head. Mary, talking to herself, snuck down the hallway to her room.
George circled the dancers, snarling. At one point Mrs. Farley dropped her glasses on the floor, and when she bent over to get them, George lunged for her ass. At that very second, my father, who was sitting on the couch and talking to someone, took it all in from the corner of his eye and stuck his foot out so that he caught the dog in midair, George’s mouth closing on his loafer. I don’t think anyone else saw it but me. My father, turning momentarily away from his conversation, looked over and raised his eyebrows.
Mary asked if it was okay, and we were allowed to go downstairs and check the Christmas lights. We did it every year on Thanksgiving night. My father led us into the basement, to the corner, back by the oil burner, on Mary’s side of the stairs. The party above us sounded like a stampede. I heard Pop playing the mandolin in the background. My father showed Jim the boxes and instructed him in how to plug the strings of lights into the outlet. He gave us two rows of replacement bulbs—all orange. Then he left, and we just stood there in the mildew-dust scent, listening.
“Bubble lights,” said Mary, and Jim moved into action.
“You know bubble lights are last,” he said.
“Could you possibly…?” said Mary.
Jim put one of the tattered red Nova boxes on the concrete floor. As soon as he flipped open its cover, I smelled the tinsel-pine scent of Christmases past. There they were, deep-colored glass heads asleep all in a row. He unstrung the cord and plugged them in. Mary sighed when they came on. “Wait a second,” said Jim, and turned off the overhead light. We sat in the dark, in a circle around the box, just staring at the glow. As the lights heated, they baked that Christmas scent, and we breathed it in like a cure. We started replacing dead bulbs: I pulled out a burned one, Mary handed Jim a replacement, and he screwed it in.
I whispered, “Charlie Edison’s in the lake, just like Mary said.”
“How do you know?” asked Jim.
I told him about Hinkley chasing me out onto the ice.
“I hate Hinkley,” said Mary.
“You probably saw your reflection,” said Jim.
“I swear he’s there,” I said. “Mary knew it.”
“What did he look like?”
I told him.
Jim stared at me through Christmas light. “I’ll take care of Hinkley,” he said.
“But what about the other?” I asked.
“Why didn’t you tell Dad?”
“I don’t want Charlie’s mother to know,” I said. “She still has hope.”
“Don’t tell,” said Mary.
Jim shook his head.
“The guy in the car. I think he killed Mr. Barzita, too.”
“Fig Man?” said Jim, and laughed.
I told him about what happened Halloween night.
My father came to the door then and called down to see if we were all right.
“Yeah,” called Jim, and he got up and turned on the overhead light. Then he unplugged and put away the box of lights. “We’ll do the bubble lights next,” he told Mary.
“Naturally,” she said.
He took a white and green box out of the stack and laid it on the floor. We gathered round as he opened it. They were rare, and there were no replacements for them—long glass fingers of colored liquid that boiled when they were lit. Jim plugged in the string, and it was so old and frayed we could hear the electricity running through it. Pop had bought them forty years back, and their glow was a message from the past. We watched carefully for the first bubble.
By the time we’d finished checking the lights and emerged from the basement, the guests were all gone. My mother was sitting in the recliner in her bathrobe sipping her wine, and my father, in his dress pants and black socks, sat on the couch smoking. They were talking about who looked good and who didn’t. I lay down on the braided rug next to George and listened till I fell asleep.
They’ll Go for That
In the days that followed Thanksgiving, Jim dusted off Botch Town and set to work on it again, fixing things that had fallen down, putting in a stop sign where Willow Avenue met Hammond Lane. He made figures for Mrs. Homretz and her dog, Tatel, and a new Mrs. Harrington. The old Mrs. Harrington had cracked from her own weight. I was his assistant. He saw the car I’d painted white and told me it was “almost good.” We worked every night on the board after doing our homework. His plan was to let Mary have her way and show us where the prowler was. “Then we catch him,” he said.
I asked around school if any of the kids had sighted the man in the white coat or seen a face at their window. I had to be careful the way I put it, so no one would get wise to what was going on. Not a trace, though. No one had seen anything. Hardly anybody remembered the prowler, and it had only been a couple of weeks since Mrs. Mangini had been “viewed in the altogether,” as her husband, Joe, explained to Pop out on the front lawn. I’d been standing there when Joe went by wearing his Long Island Rail Road conductor’s hat, his newspaper rolled up under his arm. After Joe had moved on, Pop said, “Christ.”
One night Jim called Mary over to our side of the cellar. We heard her stop talking to herself, and then the curtain that separated the two halves opened. She took one step out on our side but didn’t come any closer to the board.
“Do you get the plan?” Jim asked her.
“Yeah,” said Mary.
I laughed.
Jim hit me in the arm and told me to shu
t up. “We want you to tell us where the prowler is,” he said. He held up the figure he’d made from the army man—pin arms and bright eyes. “Show us,” he said, holding the figure out to her.
She shook her head. “Not yet.”
“Come on,” he said.
“No comment till the time limit is up,” she said.
We laughed because she’d stolen the line from an old Superman episode.
“What do you mean?” asked Jim.
She turned like a robot, walked past us, and went up the stairs.
The day I discovered the cheese ball in the kitchen garbage, we got our report cards. It was about a week before Christmas, and Krapp had done me wrong. When he handed it to me, he shook his head. I failed math and social studies, and the rest of the grades weren’t too good either. After a long walk home and on the verge of tears, I entered the house. Jim was waiting for me. He immediately asked to see my card. One look and he smiled. “Nice work,” he said. “They could use you at Harvard.”
“What did you get?” I asked.
“I only failed one,” he said. “And straight C’s.”
“Wait till they get home,” I said.
“Don’t worry, just tell them Krapp hates you. They’ll go for that.”
But they didn’t. Even Mary, who spent all that extra time in her make-believe school, did lousy. There was a lot of yelling. My father, red in the face, poked me in the chest with his index finger and told me I’d have to learn math from him now. Jim sat quietly, no matter what happened, and nodded. When it was over, we were all sent to bed. Mary went down the hall, and I dried my tears as I followed Jim upstairs. He went toward his room and I toward mine. Just before I closed the door behind me, he whispered, “Hey.” I turned around. He dropped into a squat, grunting and making faces. His hand was behind his back. Suddenly the report card fell to the floor between his legs. He stood, gave a sigh, and shut the door.
Snow Globe
Two days after Christmas, there was a blizzard. The heat went off, and we were all huddled in the kitchen on couch-pillow beds. The oven was on and open. My mother had tacked blankets up over the entrances to the living and dining rooms. Mary and Jim and my mother were all sick with the flu, coughing and shivering, wrapped in blankets. My father sat in the cold in the dining room, drinking coffee and reading an old newspaper. He called for me.
“Go upstairs and put on a lot of clothes. If you stay in here with me, you might not catch what they have.” Steam came out of his mouth when he spoke. “Or you can go in Nan and Pop’s—they have their electric heater on.”
I nodded and went past him toward the stairs, and I saw, out the bit of the front window not obscured by the darkened Christmas tree, a wall of snow, reaching up beyond the top of the glass. The wind shrieked around the house.
“How high is it?” I asked.
He turned to look at the living-room window. “They said five feet on the radio a couple of hours ago. But it’s drifted up around the houses to the gutters. That’s some serious snow.”
Up in my bedroom, teeth chattering against the cold, I dressed in layers of pajamas and shirts and pants. I put on my socks and sneakers, which I never usually wore in the house. Outside my ice-crusted window, I saw a tidal wave of white in the front yard, and it sloped down to about four feet in the space between our house and the Farleys’. The street was blocked from view, and I could make out only the roofs on the other side. It felt like we were trapped with the wind in a snow globe.
When I got back downstairs, Mom was sitting at the other end of the dining-room table, a shawl over her bathrobe, smoking and shaking. “We’re going to need aspirin and children’s aspirin, and some frozen orange juice, a carton of cigs. I doubt the liquor store’s open, but get a half gallon of wine if it is,” she said.
My father was hunched over the table, writing with a pencil stub on the back of an envelope. “Okay,” he said.
“How are you going to get to the street?” she asked.
“I could get out the back door,” he said, “but from the looks of it I’d have to dig through the drift in the front to get to the road. But that’s like twelve feet of snow. Once I make it to the road, it should be all right. I heard the plow go through last night a couple times.”
“You can’t go out the front door,” she said.
“I’m not gonna. I’m going out the upstairs window. I’ll lie flat and breaststroke to the street,” he said, smiling. He lit a cigarette. “I’ll go in a minute.”
“How are you going to get back in?” she said.
“I’ll worry about that later.” My father turned to me and said, “Go ask Nan and Pop if they need anything from the store.”
I went next door, and it was warm. The rings of the little electric heater glowed bright orange. Pop was sitting in the chair in the corner, his head back, lightly snoring, and Nan was on the couch at a tray, doing a paint-by-number.
She looked up and said, “Close the door, quick.”
I did and went over to see her picture, which was of a bullfighter. Although she wasn’t great at staying in the lines, the blobs of color were starting to become something. “It’s good,” I said, and then asked if she wanted anything from the store.
“No, but who’s going to the store in this mess?” she asked.
“Dad’s going,” I said. “He’s going out the front window upstairs.”
A few minutes later, my father, dressed in his jacket, a pair of gloves, and Jim’s black skullcap, led Nan, my mother, and me upstairs. We went into Jim’s room, and my father started moving the desk and chair away from the windows. I looked out and could see that the snow had drifted up to the edge of the roof. My father removed one of the storm windows from its frame and shoved the window the whole way up. The wind and snow blasted into the room, and we all stepped back. My father said, “If I sink in, throw me a line,” and laughed. Then he hoisted himself through the opening, into the storm.
Mom and Nan and I crowded around the window, the snow blowing in our faces. My father crept down the sloping roof and, when he reached the edge, lay down on his stomach. He carefully pushed himself out onto the snow and immediately sank in a foot or two.
“Oh, Christ,” said my mother.
“He loves the elements,” said Nan.
He started wriggling forward toward the street. He moved very slowly, and I thought the drift might devour him at any second. Halfway there he stopped and just lay still.
My mother called out to him, “Are you all right?”
“Things are shifting a bit,” he said.
He started forward again, and when he eventually came close to the street, he got up on his knees and crawled quickly like a crab. Then he went over the edge. I don’t know if he heard us, but we clapped. A strong gust pushed us all away from the opening. My mother stepped through the blowing snow and shut the window with a bang. The room went very still.
“It’s so dark out already,” said Nan.
When we got downstairs, my mother went back into our kitchen and I followed Nan into her house. She put the TV on for me, and I watched a Hercules movie with the sound off while she painted. Last night I hadn’t gotten much sleep, with all the coughing and maneuvering in the crowded kitchen. My weariness and the warmth of the heater made me doze. When I woke up a while later, Nan had put away her paints and was frying a pork chop at her little stove. On the TV, Hercules was lifting a giant boulder. Pop was awake now, reading a magazine. He saw I was also awake and said, “You shouldn’t watch this junk,” nodding toward the television. “You should read a magazine. It’s educational. See?” He turned the magazine in his hands so I could see the page he was on. There was no writing, just a picture of a naked woman sitting on the lap of a guy in a gorilla suit. I could feel my face flush red. Nan looked over and laughed. “Put that away,” she said. He closed the magazine and threw it down next to his chair.
After lunch Pop brought out his project. I sat next to him at the kitchenette table. He’
d been putting together a plastic model kit that had two figures—a Neanderthal man, who stood on one side of the base, and a human skeleton that stood on the other. The caveman was finished and stood, dressed in a leopard skin, with a club in his hand. Pop worked on the human rib cage, gluing each sharp bone in place, and I held the skull, working the movable jaw up and down. Nan passed by every few seconds, doing her daily exercise, walking from the living room to the bedroom one hundred times.
While he worked, Pop sipped at a glass of Old Grand-Dad and told me something that happened once when he was in the merchant marine. His ship was off the coast of Italy, and they were coming into port. It was a beautiful clear day, and the sun was bright. “The town we were heading for came in sight on the horizon,” he said. “I thought I was seeing heaven. The buildings of the town glowed pure white in the sun. As we got closer, it looked even more beautiful—even the streets were white. Then we landed and went ashore. And let this be a lesson to you….”
I nodded.
“Our ship had brought the seagulls, and they circled in the sky by the hundreds, thinking we were a fishing boat. That’s when I realized that the whiteness of the buildings and streets was from dried gull shit. Over time those birds had covered everything.”
When I went back next door to our house, my mother was drinking and smoking at the dining-room table. I could tell by the look on her face that she was in a bad mood, so as cold as it was, I went up to my room and, fully clothed, got into bed and pulled the covers up. Before long I built up some heat in my cocoon and drifted off to sleep. It seemed like only minutes later that Jim was standing next to my bed with a blanket wrapped around him. “Get up,” he said.
I opened my eyes, and he said, “It’s three-thirty, and Dad’s not back yet.”
“How long’s he been gone?” I asked.