by Shauna Seliy
I looked at my hands, cut up from opening the cans, and dirty from the snow and mud and boney. I was shaking. Marko looked at them too. He said, "It's okay, Uncle. It's okay." He ran his fingers through his hair. His eyes were bloodshot. They were usually hazel-colored and kind of blended in with his hair and the stubble on his cheeks, but the red around them had made them turn a deep green. He kept wiping them, like he had something over them he couldn't quite see through. He said, "It's okay. Say some words to me. Make some sign to me so I can see your ears are still working."
I nodded.
"No words, huh. Okay. There's no school today? But Walter's at school." He shrugged.
Marko was named after a Serb prince who lived for five hundred years. He had a Serb father and a Croat mother. Like my dad, he was born in Banning, and he didn't learn English until he went to school. I didn't really notice it until my dad was dead, but Marko sounded like him, the ghost of some other language twisting around in his English.
We were both quiet for a while. The booming echo in my ears slowed down. The dogs were still barking, but fewer of them. He started walking out of the woods. "Come on," he said. "No more explosions. Not today. My head." He stopped and looked up at the trees. "I haven't been back so far into these woods in a long time. A long, long time."
He started walking again. "When we were small, we played a game—Lay Low Sheepy Lay Low—sometimes back here. You know this game?"
I shook my head.
"It's a good game. I played it maybe a thousand times. Jimmy too. And Mirjana. All of us together. There are two teams with captains. One team hides and the other team looks for them. The captain of the team that is hiding draws a map of where his people are for the team that is looking. But what makes the game interesting is that he doesn't write on the map which way is north or which way is south. It's a map, but with no directions. Can you imagine, Uncle?"
I shrugged.
"It's a puzzle. So, the captain follows around the people that are looking for his team and yells out warnings to his team. Apples and oranges!' he says if they are far away. 'Lay low sheepy lay low!' he says if they are getting close. When it was Jimmy's team's turn to hide, I could almost never find him. But maybe he was not to be trusted, maybe Mirjana helped him somehow. Always the two of them, like this." He held up his hands and clapped them together.
We were almost out of the woods by then, close to his house. He said, "She wasn't herself after, you know, without Jimmy. Not herself. I try many times to make her talk with me, but she is not like her old self was . . . One time when we were small, playing that game, I hid with my team in some small cave. Mirjana was looking for us. I had picked this hiding place. And for a long time, I thought she wouldn't be able to find us. But then there is the sound of her feet. We will lose the game when she gets the whole way to me, the other kids on the team will be angry with me for picking the place. But, Uncle, I want to see her. I don't care if I lose the game. I want to see her."
"What for? Why'd you want to see her so much?"
"For a long time, I thought it was the three of us together. Me, Jimmy, Mirjana. I thought it was always going to be the three of us here together . . . But, now there's only me."
We walked around to the front of his house and stopped on the lawn. He said, "You think she left us a map this time, Uncle?"
"A map? To what?"
He looked above my head, behind me. I turned around. There was my house, sitting empty. "A map to where she is."
Chapter 7
One spring, five devils walked out of the woods and into Great-grandfather's village in Russia. They were all suited up in good clothes. They found five pretty girls from the village and asked them to go to a party. The girls thought they were men, and nice dressers too, so they went along. While they were walking to the party, one of the girls noticed how the men had these strange eyes, as if they were lit up from the inside. While they were looking away, she ran as fast as she could back to her house. The next day, people from the village followed the girl out to the place where she'd last seen her friends. Greatgrandfather went along too, even though he was just a boy. When they got to the place, all they found was the girls' hair, in a pile.
Great-grandfather told me this story when I was sitting on the floor in his room, leaning against the wall next to the door. He was wrapped in blankets and propped up against the headboard. After he was through, he said, "The devils take the girls and leave us only their hairs. One girl I knew, her braid was there left behind, so I take. I keep in box. Maybe is still there in mine old house. If house is still there. I didn't take to bring to America."
"How come?"
"Bad things that happen in one place you leave in that place, belongings of bad thing, thoughts of bad thing." He squinted at me. "What? You only believe me if I show you hairs?" He added, "I put her hairs in box to keep safe. They were very beautiful and make long blond braid. She was very pretty, this girl I knew. Always her blond hair is in perfect braid. I find in friend's house one glass box. I take and put braid inside, so I can look at all times, through glass.
"You know, when I tell this story to your mother, she asks me same kinds of question. Why I don't have glass box to show her, she wants to know. She was my first grandchildren. When she was coming to here, I tell her these important things all the time, like I'm telling you. But she is like it here very much, hard to keep her still for listening. The pond, she wants to swim into, the silo she wants to climb up . . . When your grandmother says to me that Mirjana is disappeared, I looked in these places for her. She wasn't swimming in pond or climbing corn silo since she was been ten or eleven years olds. Still, I was looking for her there."
Neither of us said anything for a while. Outside, I could hear the dogs barking at something, then the cows answering them. Great-grandfather smiled. "Dogs are waiting," he said. "Wondering I am where?" The windows were closed, but from his bed, he called for them, "Sobakal" They kept barking. "I will soon again be to walking with you."
"They can't hear you," I said.
"Of course they can hear me. Even I don't speak, they can hear me." He coughed a little and twisted around and around in his sheets.
He looked hard at me, waiting for me to say something. He said, "You have fear of me, Lucas?"
"What? No. I'm not afraid of you."
"Why you sit so far aways then? I can't hardly see you. Get chair. Sit next here to me."
"I'm okay here."
"Fear of my sickness? My oldness?"
"No."
"Don't be tricked by how I am looking. You should have fear of me. I didn't hardly need tools when I worked in mine. No pick! No shovel! Who cares! To me is like picking up feathers. If it is me against you, I am strongest, you know."
"Are you kidding me? You're so skinny, I could probably pick you up with one arm."
"Ha! Come over here. Try! Ha!"
I stayed where I was.
"You miss school to sit here?"
"I go there first before I walk out here," I said.
"What they teaching you there?"
"Regular things. Math. History."
"That everything?"
"Mostly."
"You have homeworks?"
"No," I said, though I did have homework. I just didn't have any plans to do it.
He said, "I think school is not teaching enough to you. My story about girls is to teach you something—to be careful to make sure you are person who gets away. She is very smart one, girl that sees they are devils and runs home. And for her smartness she is get to be alive." He coughed more, louder this time.
"You want some of this cough syrup?"
He waved my idea away. "I already said to your grandmother and to Benci and now to you. It's no cough. It's ghost come to take up living in my lungs. Medicine, thank you for it, but it can't give me help."
I read him the directions for the syrup and the advertisement on the box.
He said, "After my pear tree is burn, I am here alon
e, everyone gone. In my bed going to sleep, I see one ghost standing against wall. His face is to wall, but sometime he turns just some little, and I see he looks at me from corner of his eyes. I see side of his face. And I know it's this man from Banning Two. I used to know him. He was always difficult, hard on me. When Tot-to, when dedushka, was caring about us and saving me from bad luck, he always kept this ghost away from me. But now what does he care."
There was no such place called Banning Two. The Banning mine had only had one main entrance. I'd been to it a hundred times. Bigger mines than Banning could have two or maybe even eight or nine entrances. Sometimes towns sprung up around each main entrance; this had happened at Brilliant, and there were two Brilliants. The first one was bigger and had been there longer, so when people said Brilliant, you counted on them meaning the first one. They had to say Brilliant Two if that's what they wanted you to think about. I said, "You just mean Banning. There's no Two."
"When I saw he is in room, I hope I'm dreaming. I close my eyes to make him disappear. I keep closing and opening eyes and always he is there. I become very tired, and fall to sleep. When I wake up, he is go away, but my chest is so heavy I can't hardly sit up. Then I understand that he crawled into my mouth, into my lungs. And now is like I am breathing blackdamp in mine."
He started into a long fit of coughing. It wasn't deep; it sounded more like something tickling his throat than digging into his lungs. But the way it knocked on the bare walls and the thin windows did make it sound bigger, made it echo, like something trapped calling its way out. He gestured that I could open the bottle of syrup. I fed him a couple of spoonfuls. He swung his feet out from the bed and stood up. The blankets fell away from him. His pajama shirt was unbuttoned and it fell open. I saw his skinny chest; it looked like it was caving in. I looked away. He walked slowly out of the room.
"Where are you going?" I said.
He walked to the window in the hall. He shuffled back into the room and looked out each of his windows, stopping, pressing his hands against the glass.
"Maybe it's not best, not always, to be the one that is escaped." He got back in bed and under his covers. "When you close your eyes sometimes after, too many times after, the ones that didn't get away are all there, looking at you. They have a terrible look, so starving for what they want."
"What are you talking about?" I said.
"They want what you have. Tastes on your lips, sunshines on your eyes, food, drinks, other peoples' skin to touch. Like that."
He closed his eyes and seemed to be falling asleep. After a while, the sound of him toiling away at his breathing was all through the room. Tunnels of air passed by me, as if he were pulling all the air from all corners of the farm into his lungs, and still, I got the feeling it wasn't enough.
Chapter 8
Instead of going to school the next morning, I walked over to my house. I tried to pull myself up by one of the windowsills, but my fingers were freezing. I couldn't hold on. I dragged a concrete block over from the driveway, set it up under the window, and used it like a step.
As soon as I was inside, I knew I wouldn't find anything, no map like Marko said.
There was a light on in the bathroom. "Hello?" I said. "Hello?" I stood still waiting for an answer. Water dripped someplace, a window rattled. "Mom?" I went from room to room pushing open all the doors. "It's Lucas." In the bathroom, I switched off the light and for a second everything was dark. Just then, the phone rang and I felt like someone had grabbed hold of all my nerves. I switched the light back on. I went to pick up the phone, but then thought it might be Slats. Maybe one of her friends had seen me. I let it go on ringing.
There was stuff scattered all over the house, as if someone had run out to get something and would be right back. It didn't smell that way though. It smelled close. I cracked open the window above the sink in the kitchen.
In the living room, my mother had a little desk where she sat to write letters or pay bills. I sat down in the chair and pulled it in to the desk. That's how she always sat, like she was going to lock herself into that spot until she finished her paperwork. I opened all the drawers. Scissors, scratch pads, pencils. There wasn't anything much. She liked to keep it clean. Even when she wasn't sleeping at all and the dirty dishes were stacked everywhere, that desk was still right and cleared off. Tucked between a cup of pencils and the lamp there was a big envelope. I pulled it down. For L, it said, in my mother's handwriting. I tore it open. Inside there was a picture of me on a pony. I looked about five or six years old. It wasn't a picture I remembered seeing before. I shook the envelope and then took it apart at the corners. There wasn't anything else in it. The phone stopped ringing and a heavy quiet fell on the room.
I moved to the couch and sat down. I turned the picture over. On the back, she'd written, J and L at county fair. I turned it over and looked at it again. Her note wasn't right. It was just me in the picture—my dad wasn't in it at all.
The phone started ringing again. I gave up thinking it was Slats. She didn't have that much patience. I picked it up and before I even had a chance to say hello, he started talking, almost shouting. It was Zoli. "Hey. Mirjana. Hey. You finally picked up the phone. I been calling there like every day about thirty, forty times . . . Don't hang up, okay? Just, don't hang up . . . I kept picturing the phone ringing and then picturing you picking it up, and then when I say something, hearing my voice makes you smile. It's nice to see you smile, even if it's only in my head. Still seems to do me good . . . You still there? You smiling yet?"
"No," I said.
Away from the phone, he said, "Fucking Christ," then back into the phone, "She there?"
It was different from when he was standing in front of me staring me down; I wasn't afraid of him over the phone. "You think I'd tell you?" I said.
"You'd better tell me."
I didn't say anything, but I didn't hang up. I could hear a television. "Well," he said. He took a long breath and then his voice changed, nearly back to the voice he was using when he thought he was talking to my mother. "How you been making out?" he said, like he really wanted to know the answer.
"Where you calling from?"
"Why? You worried about my phone bill getting too high?"
His words sounded muffled. "You chewing tobacco or something?"
"Cotton. One of Slats's brothers knocked my mouth pretty good, loosened up a tooth. I think it was the big one, Benci.
He's got a fist wide as a car door. I lost it all the way yesterday."
"He knocked out your teeth?"
"Tooth,'I said. One."
"Ha."
"You think I won't tear your whole mouth out from your tonsils next time I see you?" He was back to his regular-sounding voice. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. He said, "You in that house by yourself? I always thought that place was a little creepy, you know, after what happened to Jim. You and your mom should have moved in with me. I mean, maybe then, things wouldn't have gotten all—"
"You at your house?"
"—a mess like they got. Because, I don't know, I been out here driving around looking for her and . . ."
"And what?" I said.
He didn't say anything for a while. "I don't know, Lucas . . .
Sometimes I get this weird feeling that maybe there ain't no her to find . . . It's like she turned to vapors or something. How's something like that happen? And I start thinking about. . . Remember when that guy from the mine in Brilliant piled a bunch of dynamite in his bed all around him and blew the whole second story off his house?"
"What about it?" I said. I was too little when it happened to remember, but they still hadn't torn the house down. You could go and look at it. Rain falling into the rooms.
His voice turned almost to a whisper. "Not that way. She wouldn't. . . Slipping away, kind of quiet, that'd be more her style, maybe walk into the creek and swim under the ice, or swallow a bottle of pills and go to that meadow she likes and—"
I pulled the phone awa
y from my ear and slammed it down on the receiver. It started to ring again right way. Once I got outside, I ran and ran. The phone kept ringing. I could still hear it halfway up the street.
I slipped into school after lunch. No one seemed to notice I'd been missing. Miss Staresina announced that she was getting married. All the girls crowded around her desk asking her questions. Walter turned around and whispered, "My dad said he caught you trying to blow up the woods. He thinks you're about to lose your head."
I didn't feel like talking. I still had Zoli's voice humming in my ears.
"I told him you didn't have too much of a head to lose no more, that Staresina stuck you in the last seat, behind me."
I didn't say anything.
"He says that's all the more why we got to look out for you. Like me and him go over and take a look at your house every couple of days. Make sure it's still standing."
I was half grateful to him and the other half of me, and I couldn't say why, wanted to leave the room and tear both of our houses down. "You don't got to do that," I said.
"We don't go inside or take nothing. We just look around. Hey, when you were back by my house trying to blow up the woods, did you see how I hosed down that patio and made a slab of ice? Like a rink. I'm going to train on it, speed skating."
"How'd you get skates?" I knew the Markovics didn't have two sticks to rub together.
"You've got a couple of problems if you're me and you want to be a hockey player—no rink and no skates. The worse problem is not having the ice, right? So I already fixed that one. I can make skates or steal them or slide around in my shoes."
"No wonder you're always stuck back here with the people who can't hardly read."
"You're behind me now, Lessar. That means you're dumber than me."
"If I was dumber than you, they wouldn't let me in the building."
For the rest of class, Walter drew pictures of skates he said he could make with tin scrap from one of the broken-up tipples. I pulled out the picture I'd found in the house. I searched all through it, looking for some trace of my dad. Behind me and the pony there were some trees. I didn't see him back there standing in them. I turned it over and ran my finger over my mother's note. / and L at county fair.