He reached the edge of the front lawn and saw that the taller weeds had been kept back here, the grass obviously not mown, more likely hacked back to the ground. Household debris littered the yard, plates, kitchen utensils, piles of junk, discards. He stopped and gazed at the front of the house: hard to believe it had lost this much paint in the few years he’d been gone. Maybe Jim had decided to repaint it, got maybe two-thirds the way done then gave up. Normal weathering, once that top layer of milky-white skin was off, could very well have done the rest of the damage: eaten through the layers, lay rot into the bones, attacking the weakest points until there was a collapse of material, which opened up a passage for still more deterioration. The devastated wood siding didn’t look so much plain wood now as a kind of colorless tissue letting bits of sky and ground to show through.
The front door tilted forward, as if the bottom hinge might have shifted position in a rotted frame. The right-hand window had no curtain, but it was unnaturally dark. Then Eric saw the creases: someone had taped trash bags to the glass from the inside. The left-hand window, his mother’s bedroom window, had a broken shade, burnt amber by the sun. Eric stepped to the side a little. The house appeared to be giving him a sloppy, palsied wink, with one eye blind. He backed up and stepped on something. His right foot went through it like eggshells. He felt a sharp pain in his calf.
A dark stick of plastic had entered his skin. He sat down on the ground awkwardly, bent over and jerked it out. Blood ran into his shoe for a few seconds then stopped, so he figured the cut couldn’t be very deep. His pants leg was sopping wet—he rolled it up to look at the wound. A scrape and a small puncture. He wondered if there was any hydrogen peroxide in the house. A house like this needed a lot of disinfectant, but he wondered if his mother and brother ever thought about that.
He picked up the pieces of whatever it was he’d smashed: it was one of his mother’s old plastic flamingoes, but there was something odd about it. Someone had painted big red swollen lips on the end of the plastic beak, and hot-glued rectangular carpet pieces above the eyes to make bushy eyebrows. There was also something on the top of its head: bits of a rotted blonde wig, also hot-glued on. The flamingo was a bizarre hybrid of Groucho Marx and Marilyn Monroe.
Eric looked across the yard. What he’d taken before to be piles of junk were in fact sculptures of a sort: modified lawn ornaments and discarded appliances, bits of clothing and rusted hardware and out-and-out garbage, collaged together and painted garishly. Toasters with vacuum cleaner hose legs, heads made out of mixers, trashcans, old lamps; wire hangers twisted into limbs; mason jars full of fish heads, ribbons, noodles, and other simulated “guts.” The one aspect of stylistic commonality shared by most of these assemblages were the big eyes and eyebrows painted on or constructed and attached. And those huge red lips, as likely to devour as to kiss.
A few feet away something moved. Eric watched as the long snake maneuvered its way through the sculptures before heading for the wall of weeds. Suddenly it exploded.
Eric jerked his head up. His brother Jim stood beside him holding a smoking shotgun. How could he not have heard his approach through this obstacle course?
“There’s a bunch of them living in the tall weeds. They act like they’re almost friendly, or that they don’t care you’re there, and then they turn. Did it bite you?” Jim was looking at Eric’s bloody leg.
“No, no—one of these things bit me. They yours?”
Jim looked around the yard with a slightly puzzled expression, as if this were the first time he’d seen the sculptures. “These things? Mother made them.”
“They all have eyes and lips.” Eric didn’t know why he was stating the obvious.
Jim did not treat the statement as odd. “The last few years, she painted eyes and mouths, eyes especially, on everything. She got artistic, like you sometimes, I guess.” Eric thought his brother might very well have been talking about a disease. “Here,” he said, as if done with this part of the conversation, “take my hand.” Jim pulled him up off the ground.
Eric’s leg stiffened up almost immediately. Without waiting to be asked, Jim put his arm around Eric’s waist and helped him to the front of the house. He smelled of sour sweat, maybe a little tobacco. This physical contact, the closest they’d had since childhood, made him quiet.
A few feet from the front door they stopped. “The front porch is gone. I didn’t notice before.” He scanned the front face of the farmhouse, saw the shadow where the porch roof had been, and could almost see and feel the porch itself like a shadow appendage projected into the air between them and the house.
“It fell off last fall after a big storm,” Jim said, as if that was all the explanation necessary.
Eric saw the jumble of lumber and weeds piled just west of the house. “You didn’t rebuild it.”
“Mother didn’t tell me to.”
They moved a few steps farther. The house appeared to wink again. The front door shifted in a gust of wind, tried to close itself but the frame was warped so badly it would never close. Obviously they didn’t bother to lock up at night.
Closer still, Eric could see that eyes had been drawn on the front of the door, in marker with an unsteady hand. The door, with its awkward tilt, looked like a drunken cartoon character.
Inside the house the air was the dim yellow he remembered—even the white ceilings appeared tarnished. “Haven’t done that much to the place since you left, I guess.”
Eric didn’t know what to say. Two great, crudely-painted eyes looked down from the living room ceiling. Veins like tree branches had been painted in blue. On the dining room ceiling were painted a set of huge, blood-red lips surrounding the light fixture, which had teeth painted on it. There were eyes and lips of all sizes painted, drawn, assembled from cloth, paper, wood, metal, on the floors, the walls, the wood trim, every lamp shade, every chair and table, graffitied onto magazines and books, arranged into mobiles in the doorways.
Eric twisted in his brother’s embrace to look at the front window whose outside had been encased in black garbage bags: a painting of a giant-sized eyeball trailing nerves and veins.
“Didn’t much like the way the light showed through it, especially round sunset,” Jim offered. “Besides, I didn’t think the neighbors should see it.”
They passed by his mother’s bedroom. Eric turned his head expecting to see her, but no lights were on. The door was open enough he could see part of the bed, boulders piled high in the middle of it, making it sag sharply. He turned to Jim, and, feeling awkward with the proximity of their faces, turned his away slightly and spoke to the floor.
“Why are there boulders on Mother’s bed, Jim?”
“I got tired of it jumping around.”
“Where’s Mother sleeping now?”
“Damn near everywhere.” Jim eased Eric into the couch. Eric sank immediately into the cushions, which panicked him momentarily, until they adjusted themselves to his weight, and pushed him back up again.
“Jim, where’s Mother?”
“She’s been dead a year now, brother. And she thought it was about time you came home to visit.”
Eric sat still, trying to take it all in: the devastated condition of the property; the obsessive portrayals of eyes, kissy lips, mouths; Jim’s odd (but consistent with his earlier years) demeanor, their mother’s death, a year ago? Impossible.
“Jim, what’s happened here? I’ve spoken to Mother at least once in the past year. Twice, I think. She was pretty drunk but I know it was her.”
“She insists on keeping in touch. I talk to her all the time, and she never liked me as much as you.”
“You still think like that? That’s stupid, Jim. She treated me like crap.”
“I know it seemed that way to you.”
But Eric wasn’t about to get side-tracked into an argument over Mom always loved you best. It was just Jim’s paranoia manifesting—and Eric had had to deal with paranoids before. Best to not even acknowledge their delus
ions. “Seriously, Jim, where is she?”
Jim stood. “Come on over to the door.”
Eric pushed himself up, fearful that the couch arms would collapse under his weight. It looked like the same couch they’d had when he was in high school, but that was unlikely—it had been rotting even then. He hobbled over to join Jim at the door. “Look out there,” Jim said. “What do you see?”
Eric looked, half-expecting to see his mother at the edge of the weed field, biting into one of her fancy wooden cigarette holders. But nothing had changed since they’d entered the house. “I see weeds, a yard that looks like a gardener’s worst nightmare, and that, yeah, there’s another snake …”
“Mother liked to call them salesmen, you know?”
“Salesmen?”
“She called the snakes salesmen. “Go and kill that salesman, Jim,” she’d tell me, but usually they’d be too fast for me to catch.”
Eric stared at him. “What is it that you want me to see out there?”
“Our mother. She’s in the weeds, she’s in the yard, under those sculptures she said she had to make, she’s pretty much all over, everywhere you see, every bit of her. She asked me to do that for her after the end came, and I couldn’t very well say no, could I?”
Eric gazed out at the yard. He tried not to think about what Jim might have been doing out there, but he was obviously doomed to fail. Every stone, every clump of dirt, every irregularity or shadow in the ground resembled a finger, the side of a foot, piece of a cheek, the curve of an arm.
Who was crazier? Her for asking him, or Jim for actually doing it? Eric really didn’t have it in him to blame Jim. It wasn’t as if Jim had decided to have no life other than this one of symbiotic delirium. He felt Jim’s arm coming around his side to support him. Eric closed his eyes. And saw his mother suspended in darkness, laughing while bits of her body fell away like chunks off a bloody iceberg.
Of course Eric called the local sheriff. What else could he do? He had no desire to hide what had happened—how could you hide something like that? Obviously Jim really didn’t understand what he had done—this was the one sure way to force him into getting the help he needed.
The sheriff had been in office for at least twenty-five or thirty years. Eric remembered meeting him when he was a little boy, out fishing with his dad when the sheriff had stopped to talk. They seemed to have known each other a long time, and Eric remembered the sheriff as a friendly older man.
Eric was surprised to see him show up by himself. He’d thought at the least there would be a forensic person or two. The sheriff’s voice sounded familiar, but somewhat enfeebled. Eric had to have him repeat a few things. Jim stayed in the house, after telling Eric to “tell the sheriff anything you like.” But before disappearing inside, in a curiously formal gesture, Jim had sat two chairs and a small table in a clear spot among the sculptures, and brought out a pitcher of ice tea, and two relatively clean glasses. It looked somewhat elegant in the junky front yard, and extremely uncomfortable as there wasn’t even a spot of shade. “I want the sheriff to remember that we’re not white trash,” he said. “Eric, I want you to keep that in mind when you’re talking to him. That’s very important to Mother.”
The sheriff seemed dismissive and impatient, barely letting Eric get the minimum outlines of his tale out before speaking. “So, you’re saying your big brother Jim killed your mother, cut her into … pieces? And buried her all around the property?”
“I didn’t say he killed her. She’d been sick a long time, but I think he did it because of some crazy deathbed request of hers; he … dismembered the corpse and interred the pieces … around the house. My mother could be really clear about what she wanted. I can definitely believe she’d make a deathbed wish like that.”
“Yep, that’s pretty crazy all right. So when’s the last time you talked to your mother?”
He should have expected the question. “Well, I don’t remember.”
“Three months, five months, six?”
“I really don’t know.”
“So when do you think she died?”
Eric thought for a moment. “I’m really not sure.”
“I see.” The sheriff studied the ground. “You know, I always thought I should have looked in on you boys more. Your daddy was a good man, one of the best I ever knew, and he managed to stay a good man despite the misfortune following this family. Your mother … you boys, well, we shouldn’t have left you alone out here. Something was bound to happen.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t believe anything’s just bound to happen. And we really don’t know what happened, I guess. I was away.”
“Yep, I heard about that. Guess the whole town knows about your going away. Did it work out? Things get better for you, did they?”
“Things are all right, I guess.”
“Yep. That’s good. See, my problem is your brother says your mom just packed up and left one day, and folks around have never known him to be a liar. And here you don’t even have an idea as to when all this might have happened. And there’s something about the timing of all this you should know. Fact is, it’s been years since your brother told me she’d left. And no one around her has seen her since. But it seems like you talked to her in that time.”
“He’s lying, Sheriff. Just do a little digging—I’m sure you’ll start finding … her.”
“That takes a court order, son. And I don’t know how it is in the big cities these days, but out here in the boonies judges tend to be reluctant to dig up a man’s place without some clear and compelling evidence, or at least a witness they feel they can trust. And your brother Jim is considered to be a pretty reliable person in these parts.”
“And I’m not?”
“No offense, son, but people tend to judge you on past behavior. Your mother, well, we all know she had some problems stability wise. Now I tell people that a younger person, sometimes they grow out of it, but you know how people are. Your own history is going to work against you here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, Eric, I knew your daddy, as I say, so I’m not going to speak ill against you. People can’t help what ails them. Folks around here have long memories, and what happened with that Rooney girl …”
“Nancy? Nothing happened with Nancy. It was just my mother, being drunk and crazy that day.”
“Eric, I’m not saying you’ve done, or did, anything wrong. I’m just saying we’re going to need some evidence before we can search this place. Bring me something concrete, anything, and I’ll see what I can do. I’m going to go in and talk to your brother now.”
The sheriff got up quickly and walked around the clutter as he made his way toward the front door. Jim opened it and stepped out, as if to head off a meeting inside. The two men talked, occasionally gesturing around the yard, scratching their heads, looking now and then at Eric, who grew increasingly self-conscious about their demeanor. At one point they laughed, and unable to watch anymore, Eric headed down the path toward the road, determined to walk off his anxiety.
He had reached the edge of the weedy party of the property when the cell phone in his pocket rang. He’d forgotten he’d even brought the thing—he hadn’t expected service this far out in the country. He fumbled with the buttons. For a few seconds he couldn’t remember how to use it. He knew he must have done something correctly, however, when Marie’s voice suddenly erupted in his ear, so clear she might have been mere feet away.
“Eric?”
“Hi, honey, it’s great to hear your voice.”
“Is something wrong? You don’t sound good.”
He glanced back at the house. Jim and the sheriff were staring at him, stiff as two of his mother’s sculptures. He turned his back on them, cupping his hand around the phone, close against his ear to block interference from a wind slowly rising out of the weed patch.
“My mother died,” he said.
“Oh, Eric … I’m so sorry.”
“Jim says sh
e died a year ago.”
“What? But she’s called you …”
“I know—it’s bullshit. And something else—he says he took her out and buried her around … on our property somewhere.” Her breathing was slow and steady as if she were sleeping. She said nothing while he told her about the sheriff’s visit. “So I’m thinking I should pay close attention to what’s happening around here for awhile.”
“Do you want to leave? I think maybe you want to leave.”
“Do you need me to come home now? Are you okay?”
“I just think you want to come home, get as far away from that place as possible.”
He laughed then, but Marie didn’t laugh with him. He looked around—he’d been walking farther down the driveway and hadn’t even realized it. He was surrounded by tall weeds, and again could only see the top of the roof, a sliver of the small dark window that opened onto the shallow attic.
Eric.
He stopped, listening hard, pushing the phone against his ear until it hurt.
Eric, you should always speak when I call.
“Mother.” No question. “So you are, in fact, among the living.” He was pleased with himself that he was able to keep the fear out of his voice, the little kid out of his voice. And that he could be a bit of a smart aleck with her.
You just don’t get it, Eric. You never do. Jim may be boring, but at least he usually gets it. That’s why I asked him to run things—I knew he wouldn’t botch the job.
“Oh yeah, he’s done a great job running the farm. He’s got it to where a hail storm, or a tornado, could only make an improvement.”
See? You’re not getting it. Still. Not that job, Eric. Something a lot more important. To me, at least, and I hope to you. Why, I meant the disposal of my body, Sweetie.
Eric took the phone away from his ear and stared at the screen. The line identifying the incoming call displayed a row of asterisks, like flower heads, or periods exploding.
He brought the phone back to his head carefully, holding it next to his ear, but not touching it. “Leave me alone,” he whispered harshly.
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