Peter’s hackles went down, identifying no immediate threat of attack. He sat Indian-style. “Territory is so bourgeois,” he said airily.
Roman eyed him. “Are you sure it wasn’t you?”
“You could try to like contain your disappointment,” said Peter.
“I was just asking,” said Roman, chastised. He sat too and picked a leaf from a bush. “Then who was it?” he said.
“Bear,” said Peter. “Cougar. Creative suicide.”
Roman tore the leaf down the middle and rubbed the halves between his forefingers. “It’s weird,” he said. “I knew her. I mean, I didn’t know her know her. But to see her. Parties and stuff. She liked my car.” Tearing the leaf into quarters. “Now she’s dead. How fucked is that?”
“It’s a nice car,” Peter said.
“I also knew your uncle or whoever,” said Roman.
“Vince?” said Peter.
“Yeah. Sometimes we’d have bonfires and he’d show up with a bottle of hooch. I liked his stories. The girls would get pretty freaked out, but girls, you know?”
Peter nodded that the intrusion of an alcoholic vagrant who had grown tired of shaving by the age of fifteen was the kind of thing to put girls in a state.
“I didn’t know him very well,” said Peter. “He called me Petey and I didn’t like that much. But he always used to slip me one last nip after Lynda cut me off and sometimes he had this way of passing out while he was still sitting at the table with his eyes open that I thought was a neat trick.” He was reflective. “I guess he had a real problem.”
A cloudywing moth passed close by and Peter’s arm darted out to catch it. A flair for opportunistic showmanship ran in the Rumanceks’ blood and he was pretty sure he could get twenty bucks from the rich kid in a dare to eat it. But his hand wasn’t clever enough and the moth fluttered off.
Roman tore the leaf into eighths and let them sprinkle to the ground. “I remember coming here with my dad,” he said. “I don’t have too many memories of him, but I remember when I was pretty young and being here and getting stung on like the webbing between my toes and the look on his face. How helpless he was. Because there was no way for him to figure out why I was crying like that. Until my foot swelled up like a tit with toes.”
“What happened to him?” said Peter.
Roman made a gun out of his hand and blew his own brains out.
“Shee-it,” said Peter.
“Shee-it,” said Roman.
“My mom says my dad is dead or something,” said Peter. “She doesn’t really get more specific. Ladybug.”
Roman brushed a ladybug from his lapel.
“What’s it like?” he said. “Living like, you know. You people.”
It didn’t bother Peter being referred to as “you people”—it respected the fundamental boundary of life: haves and have-nots. And Peter did not account himself the impoverished one.
“I guess there’s always something over the hill I gotta see,” he said. “What’s in your sister’s shoes?”
A pair of headlights fell on them and a police light flashed silently.
“Shit,” said Peter.
“It’s cool,” said Roman, but Peter was already sprinting for the tree line. He stopped in the same shadows from which Roman had appeared and watched as the pair of cops he knew emerged from a sheriff’s cruiser and approached Roman, who looked up into the flashlights without concern.
“Get yourself lost, buddy?” said the shorter one, who had a fat weight lifter’s build and no real neck to speak of.
“I’m fine but appreciate your concern, officer,” said Roman.
“It’s that Godfrey kid,” said the other, tall and reedy with a shrilly aggressive nose that led his stooped walk, a drawn bow waiting for release.
“You know it’s a school night?” said Neck.
“I’m a night owl,” said Roman.
“You know you’re not supposed to be here, wiseass,” said Nose. “I don’t care what your name is.”
“Am I disturbing anyone, officer?” said Roman.
“Who was that with you?” said Neck. “Was it that punk Gypsy? Now what could you two birdies be hatching out here that we would look upon favorably?”
“We were having a conversation,” said Roman.
“What about?”
“The mysteries of mortality,” said Roman.
“Okay, let’s go,” said Nose.
Roman looked at him, he looked into his eyes and for a fleeting moment his own candesced in that same cat’s eye way that had attracted Peter’s attention in the first place, and he said with a kind of rote inflection as though feeding an actor his line, “But his old lady’s gonna be a pain in the balls.”
Nose was quiet. His face was a whiteboard between periods.
Then his eyes blinked several times rapidly and he said, “You know, on second thought, his old lady’s gonna be a pain in the balls.”
“What?” said Neck.
Roman looked into his eyes. “Yeah. Beat it, kid.”
“Yeah,” said Neck. “Beat it, kid.”
“Yes sir,” said Roman.
They returned to the cruiser, Neck muttering, “Spooky little fucker.”
Once they’d gone, Peter rejoined Roman.
“I bet you save a lot of money on roofies,” said Peter.
“Potting soil,” said Roman. “That’s what’s in her shoes.”
Peter’s tongue stood at a crossroads between silent acceptance and trying to understand any of this. He said nothing.
Roman lay down flat and put his ear to the ground like a movie Apache.
“Can you feel it?” he said.
“What?” said Peter.
“Whatever it is that’s … down there.”
“Oh,” said Peter. “That.”
“Good,” said Roman. He stood. “It’s good to know you’re not going crazy.”
“Or you’re not the only one,” said Peter.
A cloud drifted over the White Tower. There was probably the sound of a train.
* * *
From the archives of Dr. Norman Godfrey:
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Let them eat croutons!
Dearest Uncle,
Another week and time again for you to indulge my incorrigible prattle. I would suggest you’ve opened Pandora’s (in)box, were it not so laborious pecking at the keys with the eraser end of a pencil—these fingertips the Almighty (with some assistance from Dr. P.) saw fit to provide too, shall we call it, abundant, to press one key at a time. I suppose it would be simple enough to request Mother order me some variety of keyboard receptive to a less dainty touch, but I’ve grown to appreciate that every word I choose is the product of deliberate effort. It seems to me so many who don’t need to select their words carefully, do not.
Now what’s happened since our last correspondence worthy of my eraser’s attention? (An irony that somehow escaped me until this moment—how wonderful!) Of course—you will be so proud of me, Uncle, I followed your advice and asserted my independence to Mother. We were having dinner at the club, Mother, Roman, and I, and while orders were being taken I noticed a salad of the most stirring medley of color pass. So just as Mother was telling Jenny I would be having my usual I impetuously took up a menu and pointed with great vigor.
“Is that what you want, honey?” said Jenny, my most favorite of the club staff.
“No, no,” corrected Mother, “we’ll be going with her usual, I believe.”
Which is, of course, a tureen of chopped beef.
But I shook my head and gesticulated once more to my bold whim.
“Darling,” said Mother, “you must have your meat.”
To which Roman made an off-color remark. Jenny, with whom he regularly engages in light flirtation (and perhaps more outside her place of employment—how fatiguing it is trying to keep track of my brother’s extracurricular activities), hid a smirk. Mother was
cross.
“Her usual will be quite satisfactory,” she said in her the-matter-is-settled voice. Which I confess would have withered my determination on the vine were it not for divine Jenny’s intervention.
Resting her hand on my shoulder with no hint of repugnance, she said, “Oh now, she’s just thinking of her figure. All those cute boys at the high school.”
I could have kissed each of her fingers one by one but restrained myself to an absurd grin from which Roman dabbed a regrettable strand of spittle.
“Now, Shelley,” said Mother, the terrifying reason of her tone reflecting her increased annoyance at this alliance, “whatever decision you make you’ll have to live with. I think both of us know you’ll end up wishing you’d made the more appropriate choice.”
She looked at me, naturally expecting acquiescence. How it startled her when I firmly tapped the menu one final time. And though Mother was, in fact, correct—my stomach was rumbling its second guess before we’d even gotten home—I nursed that hunger all night as proof I was indeed capable of living with my decisions. But without a single instant’s regret!—tasting all the while the delectable discord between the sweet of the apricot and bitter of the spinach, the effusive pepper and rakish scallion, chaste almond and concupiscent tomato: a feast if not for the belly then the spirit. And more important, I feel as though Mother took note. I am more than some living—albeit unwieldy—marionette who will dance obediently at the manipulation of her strings; as you have been so kind to suggest, I am an intelligent, autonomous individual with valid desires. I believe this encounter may have earned your nervy niece some small measure of, does she dare say it? respect.
Otherwise, I’m finding the transition to high school genial enough. My studies are coming apace; I continue to progress at a rate in defiance of standardization: while the more advanced of my classmates are occupied with Spanish subjunctives or trigonometric functions, I am at my corner—my sanctuary—in the back boning up on my classical Greek or Bohm’s quantum mind hypothesis (food for thought—I am indebted for the recommendation). I am also, it shall please you to hear, racking up friends at a positively dizzying pace! Christina Wendall has taken to giving me sympathetic looks when no one is watching—working her way, I’m confident, to a proper introduction (as though words had more to offer than the plain grace of the soul’s window); your own Letha remains, as I’m sure is no news to you, a positive angel; and that Gypsy boy I referred to once before continues to favor me with his charms. What a devil he is!—a few inches shorter than the other boys his age, but broader in the shoulder (of course, either way he is doll-sized relative to your affectionate authoress). He is of swarthy complexion with a black ponytail possessing the sheen that suggests petroleum jelly as his hair product of choice. Roman says he is a werewolf. Mother says he is vermin and to have no truck with him (directed, naturally, at Roman—it would not occur to her to include me in such an admonition).
I do hope he was not involved in the incident at Kilderry Park. (How I wept when I heard.) Of course, if I am to live with the decisions I make, I suppose I ought to take care with questions to which I may prefer not to know the answer.
Yours always,
S.G.
The Angel
The virgin placed the applicator on the counter and rinsed her hands and sat on the edge of the tub, waiting. Not for the answer; the answer she knew. The test was for them, for the proof she knew they would need. Or at least a certain extent of proof, to be sure a conversation starter.
Check with your physician if you get unexpected results, it said on the box. This was one way of putting it.
The virgin looked at the pending window of the applicator. She was not unafraid, but more so she remembered the way it had shone, the halo over his head, shining not just gold but all the colors in a shimmering aurora. She stood up and inhaled deeply, puffing out her belly, and held her breath and rubbed her hands over that uncanny foundry, the ember of his perfect light inside it.
* * *
Olivia Godfrey met Dr. Norman Godfrey at the Penrose Hotel bar the next afternoon. Olivia was an unpleasantly beautiful woman of indeterminate age. She wore a white Hermès pantsuit in brazen Old World indifference that Labor Day had been weeks ago, with a head scarf around a head of black hair and blacker Jackie O sunglasses. She sipped a gin martini. Dr. Godfrey was a trim man in his middle age with prematurely graying hair and beard, and eyes that under normal circumstances had a certain cast of patrician magnanimity, this the favored result of the parallel character traits of a deep fundamental kindness and near complete lack of humility. But these were not normal circumstances and his stride was hard with purpose, his green Godfrey eyes bullets in extreme slow motion. She slid a scotch neat down the bar at his arrival and he ignored it.
“Did you have anything to do with it?” he said.
“Why thank you, Olivia,” she said. Her accent was careful British with continental traces. She had been in her time an actress of some favor on the boards of the Lyceum and even at their most extemporaneous her words had the ring of her craft.
He regarded her evenly. His composure was volcanic.
“Don’t think, answer. Were you or that walking God complex in any way involved?”
“Norman, you’ll really have to be a little more goddamn specific,” she said.
“Letha’s pregnant,” he said.
“Oh.” Her lips were a perfect formation of the syllable. “Well, I’m afraid you’ll find me inadequate to such a task, and as for Johann, I think we both know his … proclivities lie elsewhere.”
“I am not fucking around here,” he said. The bartender looked over.
“Lower your voice,” she said. “Sit down.” She patted the stool next to her. Come come.
He sat. “You will drop that patronizing tone right now,” he said.
“Well, you have to admit that’s a fairly astonishing accusation to respond to in a civilized fashion.”
“We haven’t reached the accusation stage. Right now it’s just a question and you will give me a straight answer.”
“No, Norman, I had nothing to do with it,” she said. “Nor, to my knowledge, did Dr. Pryce, and frankly that you would feel compelled to ask would be beyond outrageous were it one iota less mystifying.”
He tilted his glass one way and the other regarding the level plane of the liquor.
Her tone became delicate. “Has it occurred to you she may be … reluctant to share with her father the specific circumstances of conception?”
He tapped the glass on the bar top in punctuation of a private punch line and laughed bitterly. “Reluctant? No. Not reluctant,” he said.
She looked at him.
“She says she’s still a virgin,” said Godfrey.
She was quiet. He responded to her silence.
“She says,” said Godfrey, “it was an angel.”
She was quiet.
“She says it visited her this summer,” he said, “and she didn’t say anything at the time because she didn’t want us getting all bent out of shape—her words—but she felt the time had come she needed our help with the … child. And she took a pregnancy test, so she’s not hallucinating that part.”
“Has she got a boyfriend?” she said.
“None lately.”
“Has she been going to church?”
“When have you known this family to go to church when someone hasn’t died?”
“What’s your … professional evaluation?”
He looked at her. Was that a real question.
“Rape,” he said. “She was raped and her mind bricked it over with this fantasy. The clinical term is psychogenic amnesia.”
“Have you contacted the police?”
“With what? My suspicion of something that would have happened in July that she won’t corroborate? At this point my hope is to talk her out of keeping it.”
Her eyebrows arched. “Is that for the best?”
“As opposed to encouraging h
er to carry to term a child she’s convinced is a product of immaculate conception, at seventeen, when at any minute the actual event could come back to her after an irrevocable decision has been made?”
She nodded the point.
“Now might I ask what could possibly give you the notion I could have any involvement in this?” she said.
He regarded his reflection in the wall mirror across the bar. He had found that when his hair had begun to silver, maintaining a neat beard conferred on him a certain archetypal authority: I have things under control. The fact was he could provide no rational explanation for why he was here. Last night his crying wife had left the room and he had remained seated and his child had taken his hand across the table with the grace of the sunrise, and in that moment when there wasn’t another comprehensible thing left to him he had a feeling. Darkly and obscurely and defiant of any rational analysis, he felt Olivia’s hand in this. And that feeling, it had to be admitted, was not having things under control. It was in fact no more rational than his daughter’s explanation. It made his beard a liar. But independent of the absurdity of this intuition, hopelessly apparent on voicing it, he understood now its true and ugly little function. It gave him something to hit back.
“Because I honestly have no fucking idea what you would be capable of if you were afraid of losing me.”
He glared at her. She removed her sunglasses and met his eye.
And then the hard and angry thing sheltering him to his hot relief cracked and he covered his face and wept. A booth of half-drunk lawyers pretended not to stare. Olivia gently rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. She replaced her sunglasses with the other and pulled her olive from the toothpick and stripped it of brine with her tongue.
* * *
They went up to their customary room and had the customary dispassionately antagonistic sex that was the way things were done for years. Afterward Olivia lay on her stomach smoking a cigarette though smoking had not been permitted in their room for some time, but the notion of moving to another was not one they would have given any more serious thought than a bird would flying north for the winter. It was not the way things were done. There ran along Olivia’s spine above the coccyx, like the mountain range of a relief map, a pale, pinkie-length scar, the remnant of some crude surgery. Dr. Godfrey was up and stuffing his shirt into his trousers. His eyes swept the floor.
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