by Emma Bull
“This is okay,” Theo said. “You know, for the boondocks.”
“Philistine,” I said contentedly.
He twisted on his rail and looked down at me. “You like it, don’t you? Here, I mean.”
“I don’t… know. That is, yeah, of course I like it. But if you’re saying, am I going to stay here, then I don’t know.”
“There’s not enough tape here,” he said to the field before us.
“No. But I don’t know what to think about that anymore, either.”
“What’s to think about it?”
“Maybe nothing. But I don’t want to suck my living out of the past like a leech, Theo. I’m afraid of it. I’m still afraid of all the stuff I woke up knowing. It was put there to be useful over sixty years ago, so why should it be any good to anyone now?”
“It’s been useful,” he said, ruffled, “and it is useful. So who cares why?”
I sighed. “I do. Because I’ve been useful, Theo, and I am useful, I think. But I popped to the surface fifteen years ago wide awake and full of trivia, and now I want to know why.”
“Zeus and Damballah?” said Theo in a determinedly neutral tone, as if he thought someone ought to bring it up.
“Oh, sure. Or how about — was it the Blue Fairy? Who zapped Pinocchio? No strings on me.” I stopped, because that way lay self-pity, and I was trying to kick the habit.
“I always thought you were more like the Scarecrow,” said Theo. “You know — ‘If I only had a brain.’ ”
“This from the man who watched Guns II six times. What do you want to do?”
He knew I wasn’t talking about the next ten minutes. “Get everything at the Underbridge to work at once.”
“Then I guess you’re not an atheist.”
“Hell, to do that, I’d have to be God. I’d like to record those drummers who played the other night. Man, if I’d had a DAT recorder… ” He sat quiet for a moment; then he peeled all his brown hair back from his face with both hands. “I want to go back, Sparrow. And I can’t. And I hate it.” He did, too. It was in his suddenly harrowed voice, the desperate closing of his fingers. Those things sealed my mouth and robbed my mind of comforting phrases.
“Well, hey,” he said suddenly, slipping down off the fence. “We’re young, we’re strong, and we know how to wire a quarter-inch phone plug. Something’ll come along.”
“Any minute,” I said. I looked up at the sky, held out my hands, and added loudly, “Preferably in Hi-8 format, with a copy of Casablanca loaded.” I turned back to him. He was smiling, a little. “You’ve got grease all over your nose, from pushing your glasses up.”
Theo was staying in LeRoy’s house across the circle from Josh’s, a two-and-a-half-story log building so new it still had the heated smell of cut wood. When we reached it, Theo led the way around to the back porch. There was a pump beside the steps, and a big jar of soft soap on the porch railing. Theo pulled his shirt over his head, which, I found, made me uncomfortable. I sat on the top step and pretended to be absorbed in brushing dirt off my jungle boots.
“Pitch me the soap?” he said. I had to look at him after all. He’d been going without his shirt intermittently, it seemed; he was lightly browned, and freckled across the shoulders. It still made me uncomfortable, I decided. I threw him the soap jar, and he traded me his glasses for it. He cranked up the pump, stuck his head under the water, and let out a reverberating, gurgling shriek.
“I think,” said Frances, strolling around the corner of the house, “the water’s cold.”
“You wonder why he’d do a thing like that,” I said.
“No, you don’t. If he’s in the same condition you are, there’s no mystery at all. What were you doing, building an oil tanker?”
“He was worse, actually. We were wrestling a Honda generator.”
“It won?”
“Probably a moral victory. But it runs now.”
She sat on the step below mine. “So,” she said, watching Theo douse his head again, “what are we going to do next?”
I stared at her, keeping my mouth closed with an effort. Then I wrapped my arms around my knees. “I’ve had this conversation twice already in the last twenty-four hours. You people ought to coordinate better.”
“Did they mean the same thing I do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then how do you know you’ve had this conversation? I mean,” she added, before I had time to object, “that I want to know how you think my future ought to influence yours, and vice versa. I like it here, but eventually, being in striking distance of the City would rot my mind. I’d have to take another shot at him, and there’s no point. As you pointed out, shortening the running time on my life story would be ungrateful. So I’ll leave, sooner or later, and sooner is probably not a bad idea.
“Given all that, are you staying, or going?” She pulled her own knees up to her chest and looked at me.
“If I go, do I have to go with you?”
“Christ, no, but you’re welcome to. This is my Byzantine way of telling you so.”
It was one solution. It was a good one, in fact: guaranteed to remove me both from Tom’s reach, and from the thorn-hedge maze of reminders of my past mistakes. It didn’t help Theo, but maybe I could come up with a way to do that, too. “Can I think about it for a while?” I asked.
“No,” said Frances, “I expect you to fling yourself onto the back of my horse without so much as a clean handkerchief. Of course you may. Please do.”
“Oh, shit!” Theo wailed. “No towel!”
“No, no towel,” I agreed.
Frances shook her head at me. “You’re not a very nice person. I’ll get you a towel, Theo. In the meantime, pretend you’re a drip irrigation system.”
Theo pushed the streaming hair back from his face as Frances went in the back door. Wet-headed, without his glasses, he looked like a stranger. “She’s doing better, I think,” he said.
“Frances? Better at what?”
“That’s right, you were busy not noticing everything. She’d rattle off the speeches, but they were all bitter. And she wouldn’t fight back.”
“Wouldn’t fight back?”
“I don’t know how else to put it. I think she felt responsible for what had happened to you.”
I frowned.
“Well,” said Theo, “I know you can be stupid without anybody else’s help, but maybe she didn’t. Anyway, you were pretty much wired in series. You got better, she got better.”
I didn’t say anything, and it was just as well, because Frances came out with a towel and sailed it at Theo.
“LeRoy wants to know if you’d mind having corn fritters again,” she said to him.
Theo looked at Frances in disbelief. “Mind? I mean, do you?”
“That’s what I told him. But he wanted me to ask. Saints and angels, if there’s one thing people around here seem to know about, it’s food. The place must have been founded by an exiled cooking school.”
“You’re staying here, too?” I asked, surprised. “At LeRoy’s?”
“Attic. Why,” Frances said, aggrieved, “does everyone put me on the top floor, as if I were likely to have a nasty accident with a chemistry set?”
“Maybe they’re hoping the stair-climbing will cut into your natural vivacity.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Have you been listening to me for too long?”
“Sparrow, is that you?” LeRoy’s voice preceded him to the screen door. He opened it and poked his long amber-brown face out. There was a streak of flour in the cropped black fleece of his hair. “Mags asked me if I’d dig out some old schoolbooks of mine for Paulo. If I can find ’em, will you take ’em back with you?”
“If you don’t mind them a little seasoned with machine lube.”
“Nah. Someone threw the physics book in a vat of Coca-Cola once, from the looks of it. Frances, is it okay if I look around in the attic?”
“It’s your attic. Can we help look?”
“I don’t know,” LeRoy said, a little desperately.
When we’d all tramped up to the attic, I could see why. Frances occupied one end of the floor space: a camp cot, a crate with a few books ranked neatly inside and a candle lamp on top, another crate used an open-fronted dresser and filled with folded clothes. It was spare and obsessively neat.
The rest of the attic contained what looked like the pasts of the last three generations of every family in town, in boxes, in overflowing trunks, in storage cabinets made from the crawl space under the rafters, and a two-door closet built into the end wall. “I thought this was a new building,” I said, rather faintly.
“I moved it all from the old one,” said LeRoy. “There wasn’t time to sort it.”
“Yes, there was,” Sherrea said as her head appeared on the landing. “If you hadn’t put it off until the day before we needed to tear the old place down. Santos, what are you all doing, up here?”
“Looking for a needle,” Frances said.
“Huh. I was going to invite myself to dinner.”
“Great!” said LeRoy. “As soon as we find these books.”
“We’ll starve,” Theo sighed.
The possibility seemed to send Sherrea into action. She pointed each of us at a box or cupboard, and took one for herself. I got the two-door closet.
The floor was stacked with magazines, and if they were sorted, it was into an organization that I didn’t understand. Car and Driver, Popular Electronics, Wigwag, The Utne Reader, Air and Space, Convolution Quarterly, something called Dirty Linen…
I felt as if I’d fallen, with a bad toothache, headfirst into a candy box. The urge to sit and read was unbearable.
Not that the magazines were the only things there. I pulled out a smelly wool quilt, three fluorescent tubes, an electric fan with a blade missing, a fat-bellied painted reed basket, a stack of stamped-tin ashtrays bearing the legend “Reynolds Radiator: A Good Place to Take a Leak,” and an enormous framed brown photograph of a beaming blond woman, from around the mid-19408. I sneezed and raised my eyes, daunted, to the closet shelf.
There were some books there, the bindings disguised by a barely arrested cascade of newspapers and an inverted pyramid of cardboard boxes that, if anything in that closet had seemed to be arranged by intent, I would have called a booby trap. I recognized that. I pointed it out to myself, almost in so many words, in mingled amusement and dismay. And still my hands went out to ruffle under the heap of newspapers, to try to draw the books from the very bottom of the stack.
Newsprint slid, one fold, then two. The boxes trembled and rocked. At last, inexorably, in the same style as avalanches filmed for documentaries, the boxes tipped forward and poured their contents and themselves over my head and shoulders. I think I yelled.
I stood finally at the end of a long drift of mixed paper, sneezing. The mess eddied gently around Frances’s knees, where she sat cross-legged in front of an open box. “Just think,” she said mildly. “It could have been paint… What’s that?”
Lying between us, face up, was a bent and battered postcard of a city by night. The buildings were illuminated and rich against a blue-black sky, lovely and unimaginable in their use of power. Once people had lit the outsides of skyscrapers, and turned them into sculpture and monuments when their insides were empty.
Then I recognized the pillar of glass in the middle, reflecting its sisters and the cool night sky on its flanks, crowned with a halo ring of little white lights. I was looking at my City.
No, I realized, after a glimpse of Frances’s face — I was looking at hers. The City as she’d left it, whenever she’d left it to do her nation’s bidding and ride the bodies of strangers. The city, maybe, that she’d been innocent in, blank tape herself.
“But what’s the big gold one?” I asked aloud.
“Pardon?” she said, looking up blindly.
“The one with the top lit to a fare-thee-well. That’s almost as big as—”
I realized it as I said it, but Theo answered me anyway. “Cripes. It’s the Gilded West.”
Frances laughed, just a little. “The second-tallest building in town by popular fiat; did you know? My mother always claimed, when it was lighted, that it looked like an electric shaver.”
“No,” Sherrea said, peering over Frances’s shoulder. “It looks like a skull. See? From this side, anyway. Those shadows are the eyes—”
Theo had crouched in the multicolored reef of papers and was stirring through them. “Here’s another one — and another one. Look at this! The Tent Farm with the roof still on. Cool. And that building’s not there now.”
“The Multifoods Building. And City Center,” Frances told him, her voice steady. “Both desperately ugly. They will not be mourned.” But I could see her face. I wandered over, as if to look at the postcards, and touched my fingers lightly to her shoulder.
“Here’s another one of the Gilded West after dark,” said Theo. “It looks like a toad in this one.”
“It’s the other side,” Sherrea said. “Bullshit. Where’s the toad?”
“Right here. There’s the two front legs, and the body, and the two red lights on top are the eyes.”
“Santos. It does look like a toad.”
Frances tipped her head back and met my eyes. Her expression was an unstable mix of hilarity and distress. “Thank heaven,” she said, “the Norwest board of directors are no longer with us.”
Sher had both postcards, skull and toad, in her hands and was studying them. “They’re both death symbols.”
“Oh, happy bankers,” Frances sighed. “No wonder the building’s standing empty now.”
“Noooo… Theo, hasn’t your family got it? Why’s it empty?” Sher tapped the edges of the cards and fanned them like her tarot pack, her brows drawn together.
“I’m not sure. Something about security, I think. And maybe just that they’re so close in size, and somebody didn’t like the competition. It’s not really empty. It’s got stuff stored in it.”
I sat on my heels next to Frances. “What kind of stuff?”
“Groovy stuff. I’d have gotten it all by now, except you can’t exactly take most of it out in your pockets. Uninterruptible power supplies, the four-hour ones; about three dozen heavy-duty storage batteries; some charge controllers; a whole pile of halogen floods — hey, they must be replacement bulbs for the outdoor lights. Take that look off your face. Just because the place isn’t lived in doesn’t mean it’s not guarded.”
I’d forgotten LeRoy, and was startled when he said, “Y’know, if we’re not going to find the books, we might as well have dinner.”
Sher said, “LeRoy, it’s your house, but don’t you think we oughta put this back in the boxes, at least?” She flourished the postcards. “Hey, can I hang on to these?”
I stood up and worked my way around the pile to the closet again. The books I’d tried to get at on the shelf were still there. I pulled them down. Modern English Grammar, 7th Ed. Windows on Western History. And, binding and page edges irregularly tan, Adventures in Physical Science. I stared at them, and at the pile of paper on the floor, and the postcards in Sher’s hand.
“If you want to send a message,” I said softly, frowning again at the books, “try Western Union.” But no telegrams were forthcoming.
I wound up delivering the textbooks to Paulo and coming back to LeRoy’s for dinner. Theo and Frances had been right about the corn fritters. Conversation was easy around the table during the meal; but as we finished, Frances leaned toward me and said in a low voice, “I think I’d like to get embarrassingly drunk, in good company. Would you mind? And Theo and Sher, too, if they can stand it?”
Sher contributed a bottle of Iron Range malt whiskey. We climbed to the warm, barely sloping roof of one of the hay sheds and sprawled there, drinking from the bottle and watching the emerging stars and talking, erratically, about nothing particular. The whiskey was smoky and full on the tongue, and the roof slope faced south, away
from the City.
The bottle had gone around a few times when I dropped my gaze from the sky to the roof. Sher, Frances, and Theo were picked out in monochrome by starlight and a half moon, the uneven rickrack lines of heads, shoulders, and knees dusted silver. The moody voice of a clarinet rose behind us, from somewhere in town, asking rhythm-and-blues questions that didn’t need an answer.
Frances held the bottle on her chest and said thoughtfully:
“Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes?”
I said, “Who—”
“W. B. Yeats,” Frances sighed. “There’s nothing like the Irish for times like this.”
“Bottle,” said Theo, and Frances passed it.
I looked at them, and thought it was no wonder that I hadn’t subscribed to the concept of friendship. The silliest exercise I could imagine would be to squeeze these three profoundly dissimilar people under the umbrella of the single word “friend.”
But, it seemed, I’d been silly. “Bottle,” I said to Theo.
“But of course, my little chickadee.”
“’Sparrow,’ you asshole. That’s a good Fields, though.” I held the bottle up to the moon. “To us,” I said, very softly, and drank.
The moon was high when we slid, graceless but undamaged, down from the roof. Frances was still collected and fluent, but I thought the whiskey had worked; the wild taint on her words since she’d seen the postcards was gone. It occurred to me, my own feelings rocking more freely than usual on the surface of the liquor, that I’d probably just attended a wake.
We walked Frances and Theo back to LeRoy’s house. I turned to the town circle, and the sight of the farmhouse and its wide front porch. Then I said, “Sher?”
“Well, don’t shout. I’m right next to you.”