The Pines

by Robert Dunbar

  “Now, you know the road to my place is all overgrowed, ’Thena.” Giggling, Pam closed the door. “You can’t get a car through there.”

  “I could drive you partway.”

  “Why? I mean, don’t be silly. I’ll tell you, first thing I’m gonna make that man do when he gets back is clear out them damn little pines. Well,” she sniggered, “maybe the second thing.”

  Athena looked away in embarrassment.

  “Least it’s a little cooler,” Pam went on. “Did you have your dinner? I never expected to see you this early. Soon as I heard the car, I said to Matty, ‘That can’t be your mother,’ I said.” She paused. “Where’d he get to, anyways? He was just here a second ago. He was sitting right at…”

  “It’s all right.” She stepped over the unflinching dog.

  Pam blushed. “I don’t know how that dog got in here. I know he’s s’posed to stay in the yard. I’ll put him out now.” She took a few steps forward. “Come on, Dooley, you big ugly thing.” The dog barely rolled an eye in her direction. “Come on now.” She stood there, not knowing what to do with her hands. “I guess I’ll just go on home now.”

  “No.” Athena spun on her, really looking at her at last. A dishwater blonde, Pamela missed being pretty by a wide margin—nose too broad, eyes too small. The thick makeup with which she tried to cover a large strawberry birthmark on her cheek did not enhance her doughy complexion; yet the overall effect managed to be not unpleasant. She smiled a lot. Athena forced a smile of her own. “Why don’t you stay a little while?” Appalled by her own desperation, she turned away quickly when Pamela beamed. “Is there any coffee?”

  “I just made some fresh.” Pam bustled over to the butane stove, lit it and began to reheat the cold mud left over from breakfast. “I’ll rinse out some cups. What’s that you got there?”

  “I found it on the back stoop.” Athena held it up. “Is it yours?”

  The other woman took a closer look. “Matty musta found it.”

  “Matthew was out?”

  “Just…for a minute.” Pam shuffled her big feet. “I brung over some more fresh eggs,” she added. “They’re in the icebox.”

  Pushing aside a Ouija board, Athena cleared a spot amid the dirty dishes on the table. When she dumped out the contents of the string bag, bobby pins spilled, scattering like insects, and out tumbled a hairbrush, makeup, a bathing suit. “No name,” she said. “Must’ve been dropped from a car.”

  “Can I have it?”

  “Matthew couldn’t have gone all the way to the highway? Could he? Where is he?”

  Pam shrugged. “In the other room, I guess.”

  Gathering things up, Athena stuffed them back in the bag. Come on, girl. She tossed the bag aside and slowly crossed the kitchen. As a loose board bounced under her, exaggerating her limp, she gritted her teeth. “Matthew?” She stood in the living-room doorway and looked around at the battered furniture and the crumbling holes in the carpet. “Matthew?” Behind her in the kitchen, she heard the dog get up with a yawning stretch, and a mumbling whisper came from behind the stairway. “Matthew, what are you doing over there?”

  Hidden in the shadowed corner, the boy refused to look up when she walked over to him. He kept his face down, his back pressed against the locked door that led into the closed-off section of the house. “Nn-nnooo…” Matty hunched into himself. “…ammy?” He began a gasping mumble down into his chest that worked toward a clogged weeping. “Sn-no t-time…don-wanna…go’way…” His words emerged as bubbles of sound.

  Helpless before such obvious misery, his mother had no idea what to do. “Stop that.” She noted the drool that ran along the boy’s chin and averted her eyes. And I was going to ask him about that bag. She repressed a painful desire to laugh. What point could there be in questioning a…in questioning him? She made her voice pleasant. “Matthew, it’s time for you to go to bed.” Placing her hands on his bony shoulders, she attempted to point him toward the stairs. The boy struggled, sniveling, and she tightened her grip. His shoulders were damp with spittle and sweat. She recoiled, and Matthew shrieked.

  Pamela rushed out of the bright kitchen. “Oh, what’s the matter with my boy?” Matty flew to her, burying his face in her dress. “I’ll take care of it, ’Thena,” she said. “What’s the matter with my big boy now? Is he crying? Is my big boy crying? You know what I think, don’t you? I think somebody’s tired. That’s what I think.” The boy’s arms stayed clenched about her thick waist, while her words—consoling and cooing and caressing—flowed over him, and she petted his head, wiping at his face with her dress. Gradually, he stopped trembling. As Dooley clawed lazily at the living-room carpet, Pam steered the boy up the steps. “Look at him, crying like a little baby—you should be ashamed. ’Thena? Does he feel hot to you?”

  Athena just stood there.

  “Are you a big boy or not? Huh? Aren’t you a big boy?” Pam called over her shoulder, “He is getting real big, ain’t he? Hard to believe he was only nine last Christmas.”

  Athena followed them slowly up the stairs. I could never do that. She listened to her sister-in-law, to the warm, moronic flow of her words. Never.

  “Now are you going to be a good boy for Pammy and stop crying and get undressed by yourself to night, like a good boy, like you did the other night? Huh? Are you gonna be a good boy?”

  The child’s mumbled reply seemed almost inaudible, incomprehensible, but Pamela kissed the top of his tousled blond head as though she’d caught every word. Perhaps she does understand him. She watched their backs. Pam’s flowered dress looked homemade, Matty’s T-shirt had small holes in it. Perhaps it’s some private language they speak. Just the two of them. Seeing the way Matty clung to Pam’s soft roundness, she ran a tentative hand over her own sides and sharp hips.

  All the way up the stairs, Pamela blabbered to Matty and Athena in turn. When he looked at his mother, the boy wailed and became so much dead weight. She would have gone back down, but Pamela never stopped talking to her.

  Somehow they managed to carry him, squeezed bodily between them, up the narrow attic steps.

  The cot springs creaked. “There you go now.” The light came on, and Pamela undid the boy’s belt. “Don’t you want to stop crying now?” Pam got his pants off, clucked over the scabs and bramble cuts. She left the dirty T-shirt on.

  Pretending to watch, Athena stood back. “We have to clear out this room.” She surveyed the disorder. A second cot, folded and grimy, leaned against the wall.

  “Gimme your other foot now. That’s a boy. You don’t want to sleep with your socks on, do you?” She struggled with his clothes. “You know, it’s sort of funny to think Lonny and Wallace used to sleep in this room, when they was little, I mean, and now Matty sleeps here. You know? Look how dirty you are!” The boy looked almost black in places. “You get a bath tomorrow, that’s for sure. Oh, your poor legs, that scab’s bleeding again. What were you doing today anyhow?”

  Matty lay down and then shot up again. “…st-stones…my p-pock…” He whined miserably, beginning to sob again. “…dd-d-don…st-st…don lose…” He rubbed at his runny nose and eyes with dirty hands.

  “What’s the matter, baby? What is it? Something in your pants pocket?” She lifted the jeans from where she’d tossed them. They were stiff with sweaty dirt and strangely heavy, and she turned them inside out. “Oh, your stones!” She turned to Athena. “He was playing with these stones before. No, I won’t lose them. They’ll be right here in your pocket for tomorrow. Do you want them? You want to sleep with them? How ’bout just one?” She gave him a smooth white pebble, and he clutched it tightly in his hand, smiled and lay back down. “What a little pack rat you are.” Smiling, she got him under the graying sheet. “That’s it, go to sleep now. You and Chabwok can have a good game with the stones tomorrow.”

  Chabwok. Athena shook her head. Pamela always insisted that “Chabwok” was the name of Matthew’s invisible friend, but Athena had her doubts. God knows the boy
must be lonely enough to have invented an imaginary playmate, but those few times she’d heard him use the word, surprising him at solitary play, it had been too slurred to properly understand. It might have been a name. It might have been anything.

  Pamela cooed and Matthew jabbered, a mindless recitation. Athena stood close by the doorway, looking at the junk, trying not to listen. My son. As always, she found herself dispassionately examining her responses. Why was she so numb with him? What was she afraid of feeling? Pity? Shame? The light bulb swayed slightly on its cord, and the string, tied to a short, broken chain, danced back and forth.

  Shadows swayed.

  When Wallace Monroe first brought her to this house, she’d had such enthusiasm. She’d even thought there might be something consequential hidden amid the clutter of this attic, something valuable, antiques perhaps…but hadn’t needed to examine things too closely before discarding that notion. It was all what Granny Lee used to call “cracker furniture.” The pieces looked old enough, certainly, but in an advanced state of disrepair and poorly made in the first place. Early American trash heap.

  Still fussing, Pamela kissed Matty one last time, loud and moist. “You go to sleep now.” She gave the light cord a tug, and the doorway became a gray rectangle surrounded by brown darkness.

  The two women started down, Pamela whispering. “I wonder how come he just won’t never talk around you hardly. You should just see the way he talks around me all the time. Sometimes I can’t even get him to shut up.”

  Athena nodded, half listening, not believing. Strange, the way she won’t accept the truth about him. Ignoring Pamela’s further prattling, she cursed the thin slats of the attic stairs with each twinge of her leg. I’m his mother and I’ve accepted it. Long since. The other woman’s murmurings seemed very far from her, empty and shrill as the creaking of the stairs.

  “He threw another one today,” Pamela confessed reluctantly while she clumped down the hall. “Oh! But not one of the bad ones!” Pamela Stewart Monroe lived in perpetual fear of Athena’s deciding to put Matty away. With no children of her own—and her husband in the p enitentiary—her entire life centered on the boy. “No, not one of the bad ones. Just one of the ones where he gets all kind of glassy-eyed.” At the end of the corridor, she continued down the stairs with slow, heavy movements.

  During the first eight years of Pam’s marriage to Lonny Monroe, four babies had been stillborn. At last one child, badly deformed, had survived, and “the lump”—as her husband fondly referred to it—survived still, in a state institution. As far as Athena had ever been able to tell, Pam had blocked all memory of her sole offspring.

  Dooley lay at the foot of the staircase, groaning in his sleep, and they had to step over him. The acrid smell of burning coffee filled the kitchen.

  The large-bodied woman shrieked across the room. “I forgot!” Black foam spewed out of the pot and over the burners.

  “It’s all right,” Athena muttered. Clearing the table, she stacked plates, piling some on the iron stove, dumping others in the overloaded sink.

  Pamela poured the coffee, sloshing dark liquid over the tablecloth, and the wet spots steamed while she fetched spoons from the drainboard. Athena pulled up a chair, and both women shoveled sugar into their cups. Thin crack lines traced the heavy white porcelain of the sugar bowl. The coffee smelled terrible.

  Athena scalded her tongue. Foul. She blew on the cup, and steam swirled away, her glance following it. “I remember the day Wallace papered this ceiling. How many years ago? All coming down now. Ruined.” Oily residue collected thickly on the surface of her coffee, and she found herself idly examining the chipped opalescent cup. All the old things. A fine thing once, the cup had come from her grandmother’s house. Broken. Or worn out. Everything. That house…the way it smelled toward the end… When Granny Lee had lost her strength, everything had just fallen apart. That’s the way it’ll happen with me. Not that I’m doing so well as it is. She wondered how the cup had escaped being packed away, hidden with the rest of her grandmother’s things…as though they shamed her somehow. “Why does everything in this house have to be so…so dismal?”

  “I never did understand why you would even want to live here,” said Pam. She waited for a response, then resumed, made bold by her sister-in-law’s uncustomary familiarity. “You ain’t, I mean, you’re not one of…of…” Agitated, she halted. “I mean, you’re not like a piney. You’re too good for…”

  “Oh yes. I have fine qualities.”

  Pamela faltered, confused by the bitterness of the brief laugh. “I mean, it just don’t seem right that you”—she gulped coffee and blushed—“that you…you…” Her voice became a pleading whine. “You know, I was thinking to night, Lonny and Wallace was so different, for brothers, I mean. I mean, Lonny’s so dark, not like Wallace was. I guess there must really be some Indian blood in the family, like they say. And Lonny’s got them eyes.”

  Athena took a deep breath, deciding she might as well make conversation. “Have you had a letter from Lonny recently?”

  “Not in a long time.” Pam relaxed into the subject. “I told you, the last one said that guy who was writin’ them for him was gettin’ out. I sure miss him. Those eyes.” She gave a small, dramatic shiver. “The way he looks at me sometimes—sort of like an animal.”

  The other woman stirred her coffee…around and around…and concentrated on the rattle of the spoon in the cup. It embarrassed her to hear Pamela talk this way. She knew Lonny Monroe neglected his wife, even during those rare intervals when he wasn’t doing time.

  “Course most a those guys in prison is black. I, uh, you think…I mean, I always meant to ask you if it was true what they say about black guys having…I mean, the reason I ask is just…”

  Athena didn’t know where to look. Resembling nothing so much as a transistor radio, the scanner lay on the table in front of her. Idly, she adjusted a control, and faint grumbling sounds issued forth.

  “So, what happened today?” Pam giggled, leaning forward and fairly quivering with anticipation. “Go on any calls?”

  Athena glanced at her eager face, then got up and limped to the door. “Out, Dooley.” She held the door open. “Go on out.” The shaggy brute of a dog rolled its head in her direction and exhaled heavily. Athena advanced purposefully, raising one foot as though to kick, and with vast reluctance, the dog struggled, yawning, to its feet, shook itself, then shambled with infinite slowness out the door and across the dark porch. She slammed the door.

  “So what happened? Was it bloody?”

  Tight-lipped with annoyance, Athena briefly sketched the events of the day, while Pam visibly savored every word. Finally, she described the last call and the woman who’d been so difficult. Ordinarily, she found Pamela’s company barely tolerable, but to night the alternative seemed worse.

  “Them damn pineys,” Pam interrupted. “They just don’t know when they’re well-off.” Pamela had once worked a civilian munitions job at Fort Dix, and in her own eyes this forever exempted her from piney status. Weak static crackled from the scanner. “Wasn’t there no other calls today?”

  She almost snapped but caught herself. “Actually…I don’t know how much longer I can afford to work on the rig.”

  “What? You’re kidding!”

  “The money’s almost gone.” Athena shrugged. The money—the few thousands that Granny Lee had left her. Every penny of Wallace’s had gone into the house before he died. “I can’t even pay you much longer. Not that I’ve even been very good about that.”

  “I keep telling you, you don’t have to pay me.”

  She stirred her coffee again. “I used to be so sure of myself.” She laughed. “God, I’ve made such a mess of things.”

  Puzzlement spread over Pam’s face. “So, what are you gonna do? Get on welfare?”

  “Like every other piney?” Grimly—as though it were the most important thing in the world—Athena examined her chewed and broken fingernails. “I hear there’s
going to be an opening at the state hospital.”

  Pam gasped. “But Matty’s…!”

  “A job opening,” she explained hastily as she turned her gaze to the horrible coffee and mused on a future of spoon feedings and bedpans.

  “Harrisville? But you can’t even stand to be around one….” Pamela blinked and set her cup down. “That’d be a real shame,” she continued carefully. “I mean, if you had to quit the ambulance and all. I know how much you like it.”

  Athena waved a fly away from the sugar.

  “Uh, you know, ’Thena, about welfare,” she explained with an audible gush of sympathy. “You could probably get some. I mean, since you got Matty and all.”

  The other woman glanced up and then averted her eyes again.

  Pam searched her face. Panicked by the conjunction of subjects—the boy and the asylum—she cast her eyes about wildly. The Ouija board had been pushed to one side of the table, and she pounced on it with desperate enthusiasm. “You want to play? You should of seen all the fun me and Matty had to night. Chabwok just wouldn’t shut up for some reason. You should of seen all the stuff he was saying. ‘Danger’ and ‘death’ and stuff.” She slid the board between them. “You want to play?” Pointed stars and moons with faces decorated the chipped and peeling board. An empty water glass rested upside down over the letters. “Come on,” she coaxed. “We can ask it about the ambulance!”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on, I bet it says you’re gonna get money from some-wheres.”

  “My grandmother had one of these.” She rested her hand lightly on the board. “She was so religious. Did I ever tell you? Something of an amateur spiritualist. All the neighbors and church folk always used to come in for advice.”

  “Yeah? Like old Mother Jenks?”

  “They used to try to give her money.” Athena’s voice stayed low and soft. “She’d never take it. ‘It’s a gift.’ That’s what she’d say. A gift.”