by Lee Durkee
It was as if the La-Z-Boy contained an ejector seat. Roger, fists bunched low, eyes narrow and evangelical—like hell’s own Billy Graham—flung himself at Noel. Sometimes you see it coming. This time Noel did, a slow-motion tomahawk, a punch he could easily have sidestepped. But he didn’t. He stood there, smirking. If anything, he might have leaned into the punch. It exploded on his nose and down he went, collapsing through the open door and onto the porch, where he ended up balanced on his side, the warm blood filling the bowl of his hands. From that blurred vantage point he watched his mother step forward and gunshot-slap Roger from behind, half on the jaw, half on the neck. She was screaming, “YOU DO NOT—REPEAT, DO NOT—HIT MY CHILDREN IN THIS HOUSE, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? DO YOU?”
Matt was yelling too, and Ben was pulling Matt away from Roger, and Alise had picked up the phone as if to hit Roger with the receiver and everyone was screaming except Noel, who was testing his vision and trying to figure out how everything had lost coherence. The house was like a film running backward. Finally he sat up and lowered his cupped hands into his lap and tried to steady himself by staring into the blood, but the blood appeared to be rising from his hands back into his body, as if replenishing him. Alise, still wielding the phone, was threatening to call the police, and Roger was daring her to, and Ben was pushing Roger away from Matt, who was grinning and taunting Roger.
Nobody even noticed when Noel stood and walked upstairs to the bathroom. His nose had swollen out impressively, and a giant butterfly stain had spread its red wings across the white dress shirt. He lifted the shirt and saw that the red butterfly had soaked through to the T-shirt beneath. Gently he began pinching his way up the bridge of his nose until he found the bright diamond of pain where the nose was broken. He counted to three then pinched as hard as he could. When he emerged from the white flashes of pain, he found himself on his knees hooked to the sink by his elbows.
He took a hand mirror with a white plastic frame into his bedroom and sat on the bed and continued his examination. He was still staring into the mirror when blue lights began to wash against his face. Even then he did not lower the mirror. He just sat and waited, staring at his blue-strobed reflection. Finally it was here, the inevitable arrest that had broken down the doors of so many of his dreams. It took about fifteen minutes before he heard the slow heavy footfalls on the stairs. Two curt knocks were followed by a deep dry voice booming out, “Pleethe. Open up.”
Noel opened the door to a stout black officer with a perfectly round face. His hat was crammed under his right arm, his nose was flat, his hairline low over the forehead. A Polaroid box camera was hung around his neck. Noel extended his hands forward, joined, as if already cuffed. The officer glanced up from Noel’s shirt and asked if he needed to go to the hospital. The cop had a lisp, which, oddly, was not effeminate. Noel hesitated then shook his head no.
“Lookth pretty bad—you pothitive?”
“It don’t even hurt.”
“You intend to preth chargeth?”
“Me?”
“You’re the one got athaulted.”
The cop asked if his father had a history of such behavior. Noel shook his head and shucked his shoulders, the two gestures seeming to cancel each other out. “That a yeth or a no?” the cops asked. Then he raised the camera and took a Polaroid of Noel.
“He’s not my father, he’s my stepfather.”
“Turn thideway, pleath.” The cop took Noel by the shoulders and gently rotated him, then snapped a second Polaroid. While watching the prints develop, he urged, “If you preth chargeth, we can lock him up for the night. Then, if you want, tomorrow you can reconthider. That way y’all might thleep better tonight. He ever hit your mama?”
“He hit her?”
“No, calm down, but hath he ever?”
“I’da killed him already if he had.”
The cop was squinting at the Polaroids so intently that it appeared the developing process was of telepathic origin. The flash cube had not provided enough backlight. Noel stared forlornly into the camera, his eyes voids, his hair appearing wet it was so straight and shiny black. His pale skin and black-blood goatee and crimson shirt all lending the illusion he had been executed.
Noel and the cop spoke at the same moment. Noel saying, “I look like I’m already dead.” The cop saying, “It’s like magic.”
Noel sniffed in blood, then asked, “You’re really not gonna arrest me?”
“No law againth being coldcocked I know of.”
“I think you better arrest me anyway. You don’t, I’m liable to go down there and kill that son-of-a-bitch tonight.”
“But you ain’t done nothing wrong. Bethide,” he added, “you ain’t no killer.”
“Maybe I am.”
The cop blew on the Polaroids, then told Noel, “I know killers, I’ve arrethted them. You ain’t no killer, you juth a puthycat. Now, that fella down there, your old man, he hath that look, like he juth might kill thombody.” He slipped the Polaroids into his shirt pocket. “Hereth what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna lock him up for the night. I theen too many of theth thithuations ethculate.” He pointed a finger at Noel’s heart. “Remember, though, tomorrowth Chrithmith.”
“Yeah. That’s what my name means. Noel. It means merry Christmas, in French.”
“Well then, merry Chrithmith, Noel.”
“Yeah. Merry Christmas.”
•••
Early Christmas morning Noel watched from his toy-box perch as his mother returned from the police station with Roger in tow. Noel, still holding the hand mirror, fogged its surface by saying the word Poplarville. “Not Transylvania. Poplarville.” Roger remained in the passenger’s seat until Alise went around and opened his door. “You juth a puthycat,” Noel told the mirror.
An hour later he was summoned downstairs to open presents. He had not washed his face or changed his shirt. The purple lines cupping his eyes had thickened overnight. Matt took one look at him and busted out laughing. The tree was unlit and akilter. Ben handed Noel a teacup of eggnog, which made Matt laugh again. Roger kept his back turned to the tree and was harassing the yule logs with an iron poker, a handy enough murder weapon, Noel noted.
Usually Roger led the family in prayer before allowing them to open presents, but today all prayer was forsaken. Noel sat away from the tree in a stiff-ribbed rocker and watched with haggard, raccoon eyes as Alise carefully untaped and spread open the gifts for both him and Roger, as if they were invalids. Neither of them in any way acknowledged their presents. The last gift she opened for Noel was a two-hundred-millimeter Nikon telephoto lens. Noel stopped rocking but then forced himself to start again. The tag claimed that the lens was a present from Roger. Noel glared at his mother, who, he knew, had switched tags in the night so that Roger’s present would be the one Noel had begged for. Roger continued feeding wrapping paper and bows into the flames, which changed colors and sent out sparks red green yellow blue.
After all the presents had been opened, Noel left the telephoto lens untouched under the tree and went back upstairs and packed two duffel bags with clothes and two laundry hampers with darkroom equipment. He loaded all this into the Mustang, then stood a long time in the den doorway watching his brothers watch some college all-star football game on TV. He remembered, or seemed to, a whole childhood of Christmas trees, year by year, propped in that same corner, all of them leading up to this last sorry tree, which might fall forward at any moment and collapse upon the new Nikon lens beneath it. Noel untugged himself from the telephoto lens, then from his brothers, then from the house itself, closing the door on his family and leaving his brothers to the Blue-Gray Game.
An hour of aimless driving and he stopped at Tim’s on the theory Tim was Jewish and might be hanging around bored. Tim’s apartment was on the second of five floors, a communal balcony overlooking an almost empty parking lot. When t
he door opened, Tim was naked except for a green towel around his waist. He appraised Noel’s bloody shirt and concluded, “Coffee.”
The giant TV was dwarfed by the stereo speakers enclosing it. Tim came back from the kitchenette with two mugs of coffee. He had apparently started lifting weights. And there was a cosmetic tightness to his features now, especially his eyes, which appeared too large for his face. Tim sat on the white couch across from Noel and took a sip of coffee, then ran his fingers through his long wet hair and said, “Weatherspoon, I’m afraid to ask.”
Noel was halfway through his Christmas saga when Tim made the time-out hand signal. “Continue,” he said as he returned from the bedroom holding a penny-size vial filled with dark brown glue. While Noel finished his story, Tim took out a sewing needle and scrape-painted six short slash marks of the brown goop onto a sheet of torn aluminum foil. Then he took a white pen and using his teeth he withdrew the catheter of ink from inside it. He picked up a black lighter buried among a week’s worth of fast-food garbage on the coffee table, all of this shored up against the blue ceramic bong, and he held the flame on its lowest setting under the tinfoil until the first slash mark started to bubble, then he sucked its brown tail of smoke up through the hollow pen into his lungs and held his breath studiously in the way Noel had taught him so many years ago.
“Hash oil,” he said after exhaling. “It’s what they smoke in California now.”
Noel smoked three of the remaining slash marks then forgot about his nose and his problems and stared into the blank TV until Tim got up and turned on some parade. Later they drove to Burger King, the only place open. When they returned to Tim’s apartment, three other guys were waiting in the parking lot. A steady stream of customers began to arrive, all of them scoring pot with Christmas money. Noel sat there wearing a paper Burger King crown and smoking bongs and watching It’s a Wonderful Life. Eventually a girl came over—she looked about fifteen—and Tim kicked everybody out.
Christmas Day afternoon, the sky polished gray, the sun a white circle. Noel, alone in his car, held a Burger King sack filled with six bags of pot, ten quaaludes, and five vials of hash oil. He had only ten bucks left in his pocket. The banks were closed and the dorm would not open for another week. He started driving the empty highways until he passed a green exit sign for Laurel and decided to give Jay a call and wish him Merry Christmas. He found a pay phone but had to crawl around the floorboard searching for a dime. Finally he found one, sooty and heads up, in the ashtray. Jay’s mother answered the phone and said the boys were across the street playing touch football. At least she hoped it was touch. She gave Noel directions.
Even though he had changed shirts and washed his face, the game came to a halt as Noel walked up. Jay jogged over and placed his hand on Noel’s shoulder, as if to claim him, and of course everyone wanted to know what had happened to him. Noel grinned and sat to the grass while both teams, including Jay’s two younger brothers, huddled around Noel like he was the new quarterback. His version of events was still in the developmental stages, and he spoke with long pauses, all the while trying to make it sound funny and who-gives-a-damn.
For the next week he slept on a mattress on Jay’s floor. The Underwoods’ home was modest. The swimming pool, the size of a large trampoline, had been drum-skinned with a black tarp. Jay’s mother did not look like a former Miss Mississippi except for the scope of her smile. She was a tall woman with the skin and spidery eyes of someone who has spent too much time in the sun. She insisted Noel call her Babs. Every afternoon the boys played touch football in the vacant lot across the street. The games lasted until dark, the players ranging in age from eight to fifty. Noel and Jay always had to be on opposite teams because they were the two best. Noel never wanted those games to end. The weather stayed blue and crisp. Then, on the last day of vacation, it snowed three inches, and the town lost its mind. Kids were sledding on torn boxes, building muddy snowmen, and pummeling cars with ice balls. Jay’s youngest brother fell off a makeshift sled and broke his leg, and it was Noel who had to carry him the three blocks home. By early afternoon the snow was all used up.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NOT MUCH HAD SURVIVED of the crop circles, only a large oval erasure where the cornfield had been mulched over by a yellow Caterpillar harvester. The latest rumors held that the brown stalks had been matted down and woven into rattan passages that snaked deep into the brittle corn. Seen from above, these paths had formed a series of tentacles, each terminating in its own perfect circle and each radiating out from the one large central vortex, which was, like the smaller capsules, filled with an intricate system of hieroglyphics. All this was hearsay, as the crop circles, born overnight on Christmas Eve in the agriculture-school farm, had been destroyed by the time the students returned to campus. The yellow combine harvester remained parked inside this womblike absentness, as if a symbol of godliness and defiance, guarding the school against the encroaching UFOs and the vampiric butchers of cattle and the blue-movie mongrels from Hollywood.
Enrollment at PRC had been truncated. Countless evangelists still roamed the sidewalks. A house on Pine Street rumored to be haunted was now rumored to have been exorcised. Local dogs had started to disappear, and a strangely delicate and arabesque graffiti had begun gracing the sides of buildings and bridges, its message indecipherable though suspect.
“I will transform you into a cocksman,” Lily promised Noel over the phone. “You will obliterate women.”
Their affair was proceeding under certain impositions, the most controversial of which was Lily’s rule prohibiting intercourse. Neither were they allowed to use the bedroom; instead, they made use of the blue sofa in the living room or the plush off-white carpet in the den. They met Tuesdays and Thursdays. Lily would set a portable round-faced cooking alarm. She also enjoyed startling Noel by asking, What was that? or Did you just hear something? But, as she later explained, there was little risk. Kevin had never cut a class short in his life. Add the fifteen-minute stroll to campus, which he did for exercise, then figure in office hours, et cetera, and the risk was negligible.
Over Christmas break the judiciary board had voted nine to one against Lily’s appeal, and now she was unemployed and planning to enroll at USM to start a second Ph.D., this one in comparative religion. In the meantime she had no students save Noel, and this isolation had softened her disposition a little. There was still something totalitarian about Lily. In spite of her acerbic charm, she was not altogether likable. But now she seemed more aware of this fault and more bruised by it. All of which served to increase Noel’s loyalty. It wasn’t so much that he saw himself reflected in Lily, it was more that he felt spotlighted by her intelligence. She told him that he was special, that there were great things in store for him, that he was above all this.
But now, to make matters more confusing, Lily kept pestering him to ask out Cecilia.
“How are we ever going to get her to pose naked for us if you don’t ask her out first?”
“I don’t want her to pose naked, I want you to.”
Lily’s posture collapsed. She was sitting on the living room carpet and looking up at Noel on the couch and she was wearing a fishnet shirt over a black T-shirt and green pleated slacks. Noel sometimes wondered if she was color-blind. She lifted her knees to her chin and said, “I have to ask. How would you take my picture?”
“Like those Bellocq ones I showed you. Like you’d died a hundred years ago. And with you doing all that yoga stuff you do.”
“And naked, of course?”
“Some, some not.”
“Where?”
Noel took his time answering because he sensed Lily might be serious about it this time. He scratched his scalp above his right ear then grinned and told her, “In that weird back room of yours.”
“Weird room?”
“Yeah.” He fronted a smile. “Cecilia showed me it my first night here.
”
“She didn’t? Oh my Gosh, she did!” Lily made a scraping motion down her face and momentarily left her fingers hooked into her bottom lip. “Do you realize what this means? They’ll burn me at the stake. Noel, Noel, Noel!” she cried. “I didn’t suck the blood out of those cows! I didn’t set the woods on fire! I didn’t call down the UFOs! You won’t let Billy Graham burn me at the stake, will you, Noel? Will you protect me? You can be my alibi. Mr. Graham, I can prove I didn’t eviscerate those cows, why I was right here in my own living room with this eighteen-year-old boy.”
“I’m nineteen, and I’m not a boy.”
Lily stared at him, her pout deepening.
“And what did Cecilia have to say about her little archaeological dig? Does she think I’m some kind of Satan worshiper?”
“Probably.”
“Of course she does, I bet they all do by now.” Lily feathered her hair behind her ears with the backs of her fingers. “And what about Noel? Does Noel think I’m a Satan worshiper? Because if he does, then that makes it all very interesting that he keeps trip-trotting over here twice a week.”
“I don’t care what you are,” he said, but then he asked about the black statue.
That made her smile. “Follow me,” she told him.
He assumed they were going to the back room, but Lily stopped at the large bookshelf in the bedroom.
“You’re not gonna give me any more books, are you? I’ll fail if you do.”
“Just one more.” And she handed over a paperback called The Crying Heart Tattoo and told him it was a novel about a married woman seducing and educating a young artist. She explained, “I’m showing you this to shed some light upon our affair. Upon the nature of affairs. I want you to understand the haphazardness of things. For instance, if I had not read this book, I would never have seduced you. And if I had never seduced you, then I would not be teaching you how to undo Cecilia. And so on, and so on, until a man gets shot in the back or a woman is burned at the stake—who knows how these things end? Perhaps right now some writer is finishing a book that will inspire a beautiful woman to pose naked for you. Or maybe she’ll sew you into your bed linen while you sleep one night and beat you to death with a broom. Beware what you read, Noel. But beware mightily what those whom you believe you love are reading.”