X
Liz insists that Tony is full of shit when I tell her what he said in the parking lot. I lean in close and speak quietly so no one else can hear. She says that men always cast aspersions on rape victims, even the cops. “You should know better,” she says.
“I didn’t mean anything like that.”
“I hope not.”
“She can do whatever the fuck she wants. Get her head chopped off, whatever.”
“That’s nice. That’s just lovely.”
It’s the alcohol. It makes me pissy sometimes. Liz doesn’t know the worst of it. Like the time I went out for a few with one of my bosses and ended up on top of him with my hands around his throat. He didn’t press charges, but he also wasn’t going to be signing any more checks for me. To Liz it was just another layoff. Quite a few of my messes have been of my own making. I’m man enough to admit it.
The bathroom is nasty, and there’s nothing to dry my hands with. My anger at Tracy rises. She’s been gone almost an hour. “Hey,” I yell to a busboy from the bathroom door. “You need towels in here.” He brings me some napkins. I have to walk across the dance floor to get back to the terrace. A kid bumps me and gives me his whole life like a disease. I see it all from beginning to end. “Fly, fly, flyyyyy,” the music yowls. “Fly, fly, flyyyyyy.”
X
They still have those donkeys painted like zebras down on the street, hitched to little wagons. I remember them from last time. You climb up on the seat, and they put a sombrero on your head that says KISS ME or CISCO and take a picture with some kind of ancient camera. Liz and I hug. We look like honeymooners in the photo, or cheaters.
There are those kids, too, the ones selling Chiclets and silver rings that turn your fingers green. Or sometimes they aren’t selling anything. They just hold out their hands. Barefoot and dirty—babies, really. So many that after a while you don’t see them anymore, but they’re still there, like the saddest thing that ever happened to you.
Liz and I stand on the sidewalk in front of the bar, waiting. The power lines overhead, tangled and frayed, slice the sky into wild shapes. Boys cruise past in fancy cars, the songs on their stereos speaking for them. The barker for the strip club next door invites us in for a happy hour special, two for one. It’s all a little too loud, a little too sharp. I’m about to suggest we have another drink when Tracy floats up to us like a ghost.
“You know, Trace, fuck,” I say.
“What a hassle. Sorry.”
A hot wind scours the street, flinging dust into our eyes.
X
The restaurant is on a side street, a couple blocks away. We don’t say anything during the short walk. Men in cowboy hats cook steaks on an iron grill out front, and we pass through a cloud of greasy smoke to join the other gringos inside. It’s that kind of place. I order the special, a sirloin stuffed with guacamole.
Tracy pretends to be interested in what Liz is saying, something about Cassie and Kendra, but her restless fingers and darting eyes give her away. When she turns to call for another bottle of water, Liz shoots me a quizzical look. I shake my head and drink my beer. The booze has deadened my taste buds so that I can’t enjoy my steak. Tracy cuts into hers but doesn’t eat a bite. The waiter asks if anything is wrong.
We go back to Revolución to get a cab. The sidewalks are crazy, tilting this way and that and sometimes disappearing completely. You step off the curb, and suddenly it’s three feet down to the pavement. Tracy begins to cry. She doesn’t hide it. She walks in and out of the purple afternoon shadows of the buildings, dragging on a cigarette, tears shining.
“Must be one of those days,” she says when I ask what’s wrong.
We leave it at that.
She cleans herself up in the cab, staring into a little round mirror, before we join the long line of people waiting to pass through customs. We stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers, and the fluorescent lights make everyone look guilty of something. There are no secrets in this room. Every word echoes, and I can smell the sweat of the guy in front of me. Four or five officers are checking IDs. They ask people how long they’ve been down and what they’ve brought back with them. When it’s my turn, a fat blond woman glances down at my license, matches my face to the picture and waves me through. We’re all waved right through.
Tracy’s mood brightens immediately. In fact, she laughs and laughs as we leave the building and board the trolley. Everything’s funny to her, everything’s great. The train is less crowded this time. We each get our own row of seats. Just some Marines at the other end of the car, talking about whores. “Oh, this little bitch, she went to town,” one of them groans.
Tracy reaches into her purse and takes out a bottle of pills, opens it, and pops one into her mouth. She smiles when she catches me watching her.
The trolley clicks and clacks like it’s made of bones. I stretch out, put my feet up. The reflection of my face is wrapped around a stainless steel pole dulled by a day’s worth of fingerprints. Tracy dozes off, head lolling. Liz too. I watch the sun set through rattling windows, and all the red that comes with it.
The trolley lurches, and Tracy’s purse tips over. It’s one of those big bags you carry over your shoulder. A half-dozen bottles of pills spill out and roll noisily across the floor. I chase them down, mortified. Tracy opens one eye. I spread the bag wide. It’s full of pills, maybe twenty bottles, all with Spanish labels.
“You’ve got kids,” I whisper. “Beautiful kids.”
“That’s right,” She grabs the bag away from me and hugs it to her chest.
“Tracy.”
“Look, I didn’t ask you to show up; I just didn’t say no.”
“I wanted to help.”
“I fully realize that.”
I try to talk to her some more, but she pretends to be asleep. Nothing I say means anything anyway because she thinks I’ve had it easy. Liz is suddenly beside me. She takes my hand in both of hers. The jarheads are rapping. Bitch. Skeez. Muthafucka. I could kill them. I could.
X
We can see the fire from the freeway. The entire hillside is ablaze. Tracy’s condo is up there somewhere. Flames claw at the night sky, and smoke blots out the stars. I don’t even know how you’d begin to fight a thing like that. Maybe that’s what the helicopters are for. They circle and dip, lights flashing.
Tracy is still asleep. She could barely walk from the trolley to the car but wouldn’t let us touch her. “Stop laughing,” she yelled, so messed up she was imagining things. She’s curled up on the backseat now, her arms protecting her head. We decide not to wake her until we’re sure of something.
The police at the roadblock can’t tell us much. The wind picked up, and everything went to shit. The gymnasium of a nearby high school has been pressed into service as a shelter. We are to go there and wait for more information. A fire truck arrives, and they pull aside the barricades to let it through.
“How bad are we looking?” I ask a cop.
He ignores me.
I back the car up and turn around, and Liz guides me to the school. We pass a carnival on the way, in the parking lot of a church. A Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, a few games. People wander from ride to ride, booth to booth, swiping at the ash that tickles their noses. A beer sign sputters in the window of a pizza parlor. A kid in a white shirt and black vest sweeps the sidewalk in front of the multiplex. His friend makes him laugh. A mile away everything is burning.
My stomach is cramped by the time we get to the school. I can see into the gym from where I park. Cots are lined up beneath posters shouting GO TIGERS!!! Two women sit at a table near the door, signing people in, and further away, in the shadows by the drinking fountains, a group of men stand and smoke. That’s about it. Most people have somewhere better to go. Tony must have told Kendra about angels. What a thing to put into a kid’s mind.
A news crew is interviewing a girl who just arrived. She’s
carrying a knapsack and a cardboard box full of china. They shine a light in her face and ask about what she lost and where she’ll go. She says something about her cat. She had to leave it behind.
I close my eyes and bring my fists to my temples. I have to be at work early for a meeting. I can see Big Mike sliding out of his Caddy, squeezing his gut past the steering wheel. He’s my mentor, he likes to say. He’s been married four times. He gets winded walking to the john. There’s nothing lucky about him.
“I want a baby,” I say. The words just get away from me.
“Jack,” Liz says. I’m afraid to open my eyes to look at her. Tracy giggles in the backseat, and we both turn. She reaches up to scratch her face and grins in her sleep.
Richard Lange
has had stories in The Sun, The Iowa Review, and Best American Mystery Stories, and as part of the Atlantic Monthly’s Fiction for Kindle series. He is the author of the collection Dead Boys and the novels Angel Baby and This Wicked World. He received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Los Angeles.
WINDEYE
BRIAN EVENSON
1.
They lived, when he was growing up, in a simple house, an old bungalow with a converted attic and sides covered in cedar shake. In the back, where an oak thrust its branches over the roof, the shake was light brown, almost honey. In the front, where the sun struck it full, it had weathered to a pale gray, like a dirty bone. There, the shingles were brittle, thinned by sun and rain, and if you were careful you could slip your fingers up behind some of them. Or at least his sister could. He was older and his fingers were thicker, so he could not.
Looking back on it, many years later, he often thought it had started with that, with her carefully working her fingers up under a shingle as he waited and watched to see if it would crack. That was one of his earliest memories of his sister, if not the earliest.
His sister would turn around and smile, her hand gone to knuckles, and say, “I feel something. What am I feeling?” And then he would ask questions. Is it smooth? he might ask. Does it feel rough? Scaly? Is it cold-blooded or warm-blooded? Does it feel red? Does it feel like its claws are in or out? Can you feel its eye move? He would keep on, watching the expression on her face change as she tried to make his words into a living, breathing thing, until it started to feel too real for her and, half giggling, half screaming, she whipped her hand free.
X
There were other things they did, other ways they tortured each other, things they both loved and feared. Their mother didn’t know anything about it, or if she did she didn’t care. One of them would shut the other inside the toy chest and pretend to leave the room, waiting there silently until the one in the chest couldn’t stand it any longer and started to yell. That was a hard game for him because he was afraid of the dark, but he tried not to show that to his sister. Or one of them would wrap the other tight in blankets, and then the trapped one would have to break free. Why they had liked it, why they had done it, he had a hard time remembering later, once he was grown. But they had liked it, or at least he had liked it—there was no denying that—and he had done it. No denying that either.
X
So at first those games, if they were games, and then, later, something else, something worse, something decisive. What was it again? Why was it hard, now that he was grown, to remember? What was it called? Oh, yes, Windeye.
2.
How had it begun? And when? A few years later, when the house started to change for him, when he went from thinking about each bit and piece of it as a separate thing and started thinking of it as a house. His sister was still coming up close, entranced by the gap between shingle and wall, intrigued by the twist and curve of a crack in the concrete steps. It was not that she didn’t know there was a house, only that the smaller bits were more important than the whole. For him, though, it had begun to be the reverse.
So he began to step back, to move back in the yard far enough away to take the whole house in at once. His sister would give him a quizzical look and try to coax him in closer, to get him involved in something small. For a while, he’d play to her level, narrate to her what the surface she was touching or the shadow she was glimpsing might mean, so she could pretend. But over time he drifted out again. There was something about the house, the house as a whole, that troubled him. But why? Wasn’t it just like any house?
X
His sister, he saw, was standing beside him, staring at him. He tried to explain it to her, tried to put a finger on what fascinated him. This house, he told her. It’s a little different. There’s something about it . . . But he saw, from the way she looked at him, that she thought it was a game, that he was making it up.
“What are you seeing?” she asked, with a grin.
Why not? he thought. Why not make it a game?
“What are you seeing?” he asked her.
Her grin faltered a little but she stopped staring at him and stared at the house.
“I see a house,” she said.
“Is there something wrong with it?” he prompted.
She nodded, then looked to him for approval.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Her brow tightened like a fist. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “The window?”
“What about the window?”
“I want you to do it,” she said. “It’s more fun.”
He sighed, and then pretended to think. “Something wrong with the window,” he said. “Or not the window exactly but the number of windows.” She was smiling, waiting. “The problem is the number of windows. There’s one more window on the outside than on the inside.”
He covered his mouth with his hand. She was smiling and nodding, but he couldn’t go on with the game. Because, yes, that was exactly the problem, there was one more window on the outside than on the inside. That, he knew, was what he’d been trying to see.
3.
But he had to make sure. He had his sister move from room to room in the house, waving to him from each window. The ground floor was all right, he saw her each time. But in the converted attic, just shy of the corner, there was a window at which she never appeared.
It was small and round, probably only a foot and a half in diameter. The glass was dark and wavery. It was held in place by a strip of metal about as thick as his finger, giving the whole of the circumference a dull, leaden rim.
He went inside and climbed the stairs, looking for the window himself, but it simply wasn’t there. But when he went back outside, there it was.
X
For a time, it felt like he had brought the problem to life himself by stating it, that if he hadn’t said anything the half-window wouldn’t be there. Was that possible? He didn’t think so, that wasn’t the way the world worked. But even later, once he was grown, he still found himself wondering sometimes if it was his fault, if it was something he had done. Or rather, said.
X
Staring up at the half-window, he remembered a story his grandmother had told him, back when he was very young, just three or four, just after his father had left and just before his sister was born. Well, he didn’t remember it exactly, but he remembered it had to do with windows. Where she came from, his grandmother said, they used to be called not windows but something else. He couldn’t remember the word, but remembered that it started with a v. She had said the word and then had asked, Do you know what this means? He shook his head. She repeated the word, slower this time.
“This first part,” she had said, “it means ‘wind.’ This second part, it means ‘eye.’” She looked at him with her own pale, steady eye. “It is important to know that a window can be instead a windeye.”
X
So he and his sister called it that, windeye. It was, he told her, how the wind looked into the house and so was not a window at all. So of course
they couldn’t look out of it; it was not a window at all, but a windeye.
He was worried she was going to ask questions, but she didn’t. And then they went into the house to look again, to make sure it wasn’t a window after all. But it still wasn’t there on the inside.
Then they decided to get a closer look. They had figured out which window was nearest to it and opened that and leaned out of it. There it was. If they leaned far enough, they could see it and almost touch it.
“I could reach it,” his sister said. “If I stand on the sill and you hold my legs, I could lean out and touch it.”
“No,” he started to say, but, fearless, she had already clambered onto the sill and was leaning out. He wrapped his arms around her legs to keep her from falling. He was just about to pull her back inside when she leaned farther and he saw her finger touch the windeye. And then it was as if she had dissolved into smoke and been sucked into the windeye. She was gone.
4.
It took him a long time to find his mother. She was not inside the house, nor was she outside in the yard. He tried the house next door, the Jorgensens, and then the Allreds, then the Dunfords. She wasn’t anywhere. So he ran back home, breathless, and somehow his mother was there now, lying on the couch, reading.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He tried to explain it best he could. Who? she asked at first and then said Slow down and tell it again, and then, But who do you mean? And then, once he’d explained again, with an odd smile:
“But you don’t have a sister.”
But of course he had a sister. How could his mother have forgotten? What was wrong? He tried to describe her, to explain what she looked like, but his mother just kept shaking her head.
“No,” she said firmly. “You don’t have a sister. You never had one. Stop pretending. What’s this really about?”
Which made him feel that he should hold himself very still, that he should be very careful about what he said, that if he breathed wrong more parts of the world would disappear.
The New Black Page 27