Goldenland Past Dark

by Chandler Klang Smith

  “You know a lot about things falling down and breaking. What does that make you? The devil?”

  “Bernie Bee, tell Lord Jesus what you’ve done.”

  Webern put his feet up on the coffee table. He bumped the chess set. Little kings fell to the floor. “Can’t He see all that on his magic TV?”

  Willow touched her finger to her own lips, then to Billow’s. Billow spoke as though her sister had given her voice back to her.

  “He wants to hear it from you,” she said. Webern had almost forgotten how deep her voice was. It sounded as if she was speaking from inside a drum.

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Yes, you have.”

  “Yes, you have.”

  “Okay, then what? What have I done?”

  The wheels churned beneath them like a pulse. Willow raised her voice again.

  “Thieving.”

  “What?”

  “You stole grandma’s monkey.”

  Marzipan blinked. Webern snorted.

  “Dad gave her to me. If you want to take her, by all means, go ahead. I’d like to see you try.”

  Marzipan cracked her knuckles. Her lips pulled back in the expression that was anything but a smile. Willow and Billow hesitated. Their linked hands raised a few inches, then dropped heavily onto the Mexican blanket again.

  “Confess the burning,” Billow said.

  The strap of Webern’s lederhosen pressed uncomfortably into his hump. He loosened it with one hand.

  “Which burning is that? The toast or the eggs?”

  “Lord Jesus knows what’s in your heart,” Willow repeated.

  “Then Lord Jesus knows that I’m not sorry. So what’s the point of confessing?”

  Billow reached for the other pillow on the bed. She held her boxcutter threateningly.

  “Go ahead. Hold my bedding hostage. I’m not afraid of you anymore.” Webern placed his empty glass on the trembling coffee table. “But I was then. Anyone would’ve done what I did.”

  “Bernie Bee, you made us take the blame. For your sin.” Willow wagged a finger at him. “You let them catch us, call us insane.”

  “You are insane.” The boxcar was so warm, he could almost see the red-hot iron rails through the vibrating floor. “I wanted them to take you away. I still can’t believe they let you out.”

  “You bore false witness,” said Billow.

  “They saw the fire, they drew their own conclusions.” Webern leaned over Marzipan. He picked up the bottle of Scotch by the neck. “Everyone thought you were crazy. Even Dad. Especially Dad. Having you in the asylum, that was like heaven for him. Better than sending me to Bo-Bo’s, even, since it was paid for by the state.”

  Willow lay back on his bed. She crossed her arms over her chest like a corpse.

  “He is a sinner. You are a sinner,” she told the ceiling.

  “The last time I checked God didn’t accept not guilty by reason of insanity.”

  “When did we sin against you, Bernie Bee? When did we sin against God?” Billow squeezed the pillow to her chest.

  Webern poured himself another glass of Scotch. Some slopped onto the knee of his lederhosen. “You know what you did. You should be the one to confess it. Isn’t that what Jesus likes? To hear it from you?”

  “What did we do, Bernie?”

  “What did we do?”

  “You mean before you put me in a body cast? Or after?”

  Billow leaned back on the bed. She and Willow silently conferred.

  “After,” said Billow.

  Webern looked at her steadily. Billow used to wear a thick brass ring in one ear, like a pirate; it had appeared there one day after school, in a hole still crusty with blood. The ring was gone now, but the hole was still there, half-healed, asymmetrical. Light shone through it like a sliver of moon.

  “You know what you did. To the car.” Webern raised his glass. “You killed Mom.”

  Willow sat up, her arms still crossed against her chest.

  “Bernie Bee, you take it back.”

  “Take it back.”

  “Take it back.”

  Webern swallowed all the Scotch in a single gulp. It tasted like sea and fire, mixed together. He wiped his mouth.

  “You tell me what happened, then,” he said. “You mean you didn’t fuck up the car? All those afternoons you elbowed around in there, after auto mechanics class, you didn’t snip a wire? Loosen some screws? I saw the grease on your hands, Billow.”

  “My name is Betsy.” She touched the embroidery on the pocket of her coveralls.

  “Bernie Bee, accidents happen.”

  “Funny how they only happen in this family when the two of you are around.” Webern stood up unsteadily. His arms described circles in the air. He thought of all the falls he’d practiced that afternoon, how much closer the ground seemed to him now. “I’m sick of you playing innocent. You ruined my life. I want you out of my room.”

  “Bernie Bee, we know why Mom died.” Willow leaned close to Billow—Betsy? Their embroidered names were too blurry to read. Thick black outlines formed around their heads. “We all know why Mom died.”

  Webern tripped over the coffee table. He hit the floor face first. Marzipan sprang up from the couch. She tried to grab Webern’s arm. He pushed her away and raised himself up on his elbows. He touched his face. His nose was bleeding.

  “Bernie Bee.” Willow’s voice was gentle, almost kind. “Bernie Bee. You shut the garage door.”

  Webern pushed aside his glasses. He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Stop lying. I hate how you always lie, how it’s always—”

  Billow pressed the flat of the boxcutter blade against her hand. She shook her head. “Bernie, Mom died that night because of you.”

  “And the tantrums that you threw.”

  “—how it’s always two against one with your stupid, stupid lying.”

  Willow and Billow linked arms. They stood up together.

  “That party night, you cried and cried.” The girls stepped toward him.

  “You said you fell; you wished you’d died. You wouldn’t get up to say goodbye.”

  “She had to go up to your room. We listened outside.”

  “Your back hurt from the brace. You wouldn’t look her in the face.”

  Drops of blood stained the rug. It felt like Webern’s face was melting. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

  “She couldn’t wait to get away. She drank before she left the house. When she came back, she hit the gas—”

  “I didn’t throw any tantrums.”

  Marzipan leapt onto the mattress, hooting. She jumped up and down. Willow and Billow towered over him. Billow rested her foot on his hump.

  “The car hit the garage door and crashed.”

  “I didn’t throw any tantrums.” Webern hit the floor with his fists, once for each word. “You break my back, and then you accuse me of throwing tantrums?”

  “Hooo! Hooooo!” screamed Marzipan.

  Willow stooped over him as she whispered. “It started when you had to learn to walk again. They sawed you from your body cast. You yelled and kicked and rolled around—”

  “You’d run and hide.” Webern squirmed, but Billow’s foot pinned him in place. She went on: “Sometimes she’d knock and knock on your door ’til she didn’t believe you lived there anymore. She’d drink with dad, or in her room—she’d drink after dinner, but she’d never get mad—”

  “Stupid, stupid! Don’t you know anything?” Webern finally rolled out from under Billow’s boot. He slammed the back of his head against the floor. An almost pleasant ringing filled his ears. “You weren’t even paying attention. I never threw a tantrum. It wasn’t me—”

  “Eeee! Eeee-eeee-oooh-ooh-ah!”

  “Bernie Bee, you must make r
ight with God.”

  “You must confess.”

  Webern smashed the back of his head into the floor again. He thought of the star-shaped scar at the base of his skull: the pain he felt there scored the insides of his eyelids with a million whirling constellations.

  You must confess. But to what? What had he ever done to deserve this? His sisters had terrorized him—he had only been a child. They had been the ones to throw him from the tree; they had set off this whole chain of events.

  What can I do?

  A voice inside his head answered decisively: Jump.

  But even if they hadn’t pushed him, literally pushed him with their grubby hands through the treehouse window, they had pushed him into jumping with their torment; they had left him no other choice. And wasn’t that the thing? They had goaded him into jumping, laughed at him as he nursed his wounds, broken him up and put him back together like some monstrous doll. He still remembered the long days in the body cast, when they’d come and gone from his doorway at odd hours, when he’d been powerless to shut them out. What had they meant, anyway, with their odd combination of malice and tenderness—the daddy long legs they placed on his nose in the morning, the warm milk they spooned him at night? If they were learning the language of affection, they were like deaf children singing, imitating sounds they had never heard.

  Bernie Bee, we bring you treat.

  Nothing bitter, always sweet.

  Maybe they hadn’t had the same childhood he had, toy shopping with his mother, or feeling her thin arms grasp him back to safety as he dangled from the monkey bars. Willow and Billow didn’t have their so-so report cards taped up to the fridge, or hear their names inserted in familiar songs (“Hush little Bernie, don’t say a word, Mommy’s gonna buy you a golden bird”). But that was no excuse for how they’d acted, was it? Hadn’t they seen how crazy they looked, how frightening, when they came home with their mouths smeared red from what he hoped were berries, when they wiped their noses on the tablecloth? Hadn’t they ever learned to see themselves as others would, to sense when what they did was wrong?

  Webern had always thought of his mother as long-suffering as she mutely observed the girls digging doll-graves with her silver soup ladle, or thwacking bloated earthworms on the sidewalks with a stolen baseball bat. It had never occurred to him that the kinder and more difficult thing might have been for her to intervene. As his mother’s favourite, the girls seemed like animals to him, a destructive force, and the two possible responses to them had always appeared to be pity and repulsion. He had never thought to wonder, without his mother’s guidance, how they were supposed to know any better.

  His mother had been a delicate woman, nervous and frail; his own earliest memories were of trying to please her, to find the thing that would bring a flitting smile to her pale face. On days when she lay, listless and teary in bed all morning, he made her pancake faces with blueberry eyes and a bacon smile; it had been for her he had learned to juggle, to pinch his mouth into a fish face pucker and cross his eyes. Before Wags even, she had been his audience, the colourful clothes she chose for him the costumes for his acts. But she hadn’t expected these things from him; she hadn’t grown distant and mournful on the rare occasions when he misbehaved. She hadn’t turned to alcohol because of him. Or had she? It was difficult to remember. They had gotten along so well—always—those other occasions had been very rare. And the tantrums—well, that had been Wags—

  “Bernie Bee?”

  “Bernie Bee?”

  Here in the boxcar, Webern felt Willow and Billow’s hands—Marzipan’s too—patting his face, his wrists and eyelids. He didn’t open his eyes.

  Yes, the tantrums—those had been Wags. He remembered how it felt to walk in those early days, just after the cast had come off, how stiff and off-balance he’d felt. And how, each time as he approached the mirror, he had been almost relieved to see Wags approaching from the other side. How nice it had been to switch places, to let someone else take over for awhile, even someone who left fist marks in the pillows and Webern’s mother in tears. Webern remembered looking at his reflection: sometimes it had taken a moment to see Wags there, but if Webern was patient he always emerged, that smile cutting across his face like a knife.

  You said you fell; you wished you’d died.

  You wouldn’t get up to say goodbye.

  Webern had thought these things, but Wags had said them. Webern had just watched from the other side of the mirror, from behind the glass; he had been Wags’s reflection, powerless, looking back. He could still remember the way Wags threw himself down on the bed, overacting as usual, kicking his legs and howling, the shape his hunchback made beneath his red robe, the hunchback and the rigid line of the back brace, and the way Webern’s mother had tried to comfort Wags but only for a minute, before she left, her hands pressed to her eyes, sobbing down the hall, “Ray, let’s go, let’s go, let’s just go!” Webern remembered now, but that was because he had been there watching, behind the mirror. It had been Wags . . . .

  Webern struck his head against the floor again, and the stars orbited once, then disappeared. He was alone in the empty black tunnel of space. There was no Wags; there never had been. He opened his eyes. Willow and Billow—Wanda and Betsy—stared down at him; Marzipan twirled a lock of his hair.

  “All right, ladies,” he said. His voice was Wags’s voice. “I confess.”

  Wanda doused him with holy water from a thermos while Betsy made the sign of cross. Each twin clasped one of his hands.

  “The Holy Ghost will burn your brow.”

  “You’ll live in heaven with us now.”

  Webern wiped holy water onto his shirt. He struggled to get up, but each twin pinned one hand to the floor.

  “I wish you’d let me go.” He squeaked on the last word.

  Betsy produced a rusty railroad spike from the pocket of her coveralls. A piece of yarn was wrapped around the top. “This will remind you of Christ’s pain.”

  “What do you—do with it?” Webern winced, bracing himself. Betsy gently set it by his foot.

  Wanda strung many saints’ medallions around his neck. “And these of faith through strife and strain.”

  Webern tugged his hands away and pulled the necklaces off over his head. “Listen, you should save this stuff for somebody else.”

  “Bernie Bee, these are God tags.” She jingled them emphatically. “They show the devil you’re not his.”

  “It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’re trying to do—” Webern rose unsteadily to his feet. “—but I don’t think things are this simple for me.”

  “But Bernie Bee,” Wanda said, “we forgive you. You are saved.”

  The twins gazed up at him from where they knelt on the floor. Their expressions, frank and plain, rounded and angular, were strangely calm, almost beatific; they glowed with a kind of radiance that sometimes came from old paintings, despite the cracks and wear of years. Webern thought of the masks they’d worn that day, so long ago; how those visions had eclipsed this light. Marzipan squatted beside them, unafraid; she grunted and dragged a knuckle on the rug.

  “We are the dogcatchers of the Holy Spirit,” Betsy said. “We found you and we brought you home.”

  “And like I said, I appreciate it. But I don’t deserve it. I hope you understand.” Webern walked toward the door; almost involuntarily, he glanced back over his hump at the mirror. His face was a mess, blood and tears and holy water—a face nobody would steal. He cracked a smile. “I don’t know why I didn’t invite you in. I was pretty lonely, up there all by myself.”

  “Bernie Bee . . . ?”

  “Bernie Bee!”

  Webern pulled open the boxcar door; outside the ground moved swiftly past. The train was at its fastest now. Dark fields undulated against a darker sky. Behind him, Marzipan howled like something was being torn from her. Webern gulped and leapt headfir
st into the night.

  It looked a lot like his old bedroom in Dolphin River, Illinois, but as soon as Webern sat up he knew where he was. Two unicycles leaned up against the wall, two copies of the same Space Ace Grin McCase comic sat on two nightstands on opposite sides of the bed, beneath two black tin constellation lamps. Two open boxes of crayons spilled two sets of sixty-four colours on the floor. Webern leaned over the side of the mattress and peeked beneath the dust ruffle. Down under the bed, a left-handed catcher’s mitt lay beside a right-handed one, collecting dust. He was on the other side of the mirror.

  “You get hit on the head, you’re bound to start seeing double,” said Wags, stepping out of the closet with two checkered vaudeville jackets slung over his arm.

  “That’s not funny.”

  “You want me to be serious? I’ll be serious, then.” Wags tossed one of the vaudeville jackets to Webern. “I’m beat. You have any idea how exhausting it is, running through your mind day in, day out? You’d think I was in a marathon.”

  Webern looked past Wags, into the open closet. Identical rows of clothing hung on opposite racks. “So why’d you do it, then?”

  “Why? Because I had to get you out of there, old buddy. You didn’t belong in that place anymore than I did. And what’s the point of being a freak amongst freaks when we’ve got everything we need right here? There’s costumes, there’s props, there’s a million things to do and a million years to do ’em. And there’s the two of us—the wacko and the straight man, the clown and the crowd. Without each other, we’re sunk—I’m a notion without a noggin, you’re an only twin. But together, we’re a team.”

  Webern slipped on the jacket. The lining felt silky against his arms. It fit perfectly over his hump.

  “Something’s missing,” said Webern.

  “Trust me, there’s nothing you can’t find in here,” Wags told him. “Go on. Take a look around.”

  Webern stood up uneasily; he approached the bureau that stood, as it always had, under the window across from the foot of the bed, and pulled open the top drawer. Two sets of face paint lay amid a sea of jacks. Two red rubber balls rolled to the front of the drawer.