by Shauna Seliy
"I am thinking we should fix up one bedroom for Valentina, keep her inside so she'll be safe from Tot-to. Also she'll make good noise for me, keep away all that quiet."
"I am not keeping house for a goat. You can send that idea right back to the central office."
"Is my house," Great-grandfather said. To me he said, "Get her. I wait here."
"You joking?" I said.
"Joking? I might probably be dying. No time for joking. Bring Valentina."
Slats came over to the steps and looked up at him. "If you bring that goat in here, you losing your mind will be official."
"Oh, Raisa, how did you get so much blackness in your heart? Did I give you?"
He hardly ever used her first name. I think it surprised her. She looked at him for a minute, then said, "Okay, the goddamn goat can come in the goddamn house, but just for two minutes. Then she's going outside to the barn. People inside, animals outside, like they do in civilization."
Great-grandfather nodded and waved to me to go outside.
"How am I going to get her to come in here?" I said.
"Take raisins," he said.
I went to the cupboard and got a handful. "She might not want to come in here."
"Where I'm going? I have date? I have appointment?"
Outside, a bright lamp hung over the steps and made a circle of light I couldn't see past. I sat on the steps and started eating the raisins. I ate most of the ones in my hand and took a few from the pile I'd left for her before. I thought of getting a different goat and hoping Great-grandfather wouldn't be able to tell it wasn't Valentina. There was a white one dirty enough to pass for gray, but he claimed that Valentina had special powers and he'd probably test that dirty goat. He said Valentina had smart eyes, like smart people. He said she tilted her head when he talked to her, because she really listened to him and believed every word he said, not like his daughter and his great-grandson.
After a while, the house fell quiet. I stood up, looked inside, and saw that he was still sitting on the steps, leaning against the wall. I thought he might have gotten pulled down into sleep. I sat back down on the stoop and waited for the sound of Slats taking him up to his bed. But then his voice cracked down the stairs and out the windows, "Valentina! Come in! Visit! Lucas Lessar is here. He will make you safe!"
I stood up. "I hate it here," I said. Hard as I could, I flung the raisins out into the dark. Just then, Eli stepped into the light holding a rope. He tugged on it and Valentina came walking around, picking up the raisins I'd thrown. I jumped off the stoop, took the rope, grabbed her by the hair on her neck, and walked her to the door. I'd never been so happy to see an animal in my life.
"Be gentle, Luca. She was journeying far today," Eli said. He had dirt all over his coat.
"Where'd you find her?"
"I found her someplace that is where no animal should go, not goat animal, or young Lessar animal. So you never mind where I found her."
I opened the door and took her inside. Great-grandfather came running down the stairs. "It's you!" he said. Valentina was surprised by the lights and furniture and Great-grandfather making such a racket. She jerked away from me. She ran in fast circles around the kitchen, the rope trailing behind her. Greatgrandfather clapped for her, a steady clap, hitting his foot against the floor.
I went back outside to thank Eli. "You coming in?" I said.
"Sounds like party in there."
"You could come in for some soup. You see any dogs where you found that goat? I looked all over. Where'd you find her?"
In the house, something crashed and banged to the floor.
Slats hollered. Great-grandfather laughed.
"I will come inside for one soup," he said.
I opened the door for him.
Great-grandfather smiled and kissed Eli on one cheek and then the other. They watched Valentina. They started to clap in a rhythm and then the two of them were all of a sudden inside a song together, and then this strange thing happened—Valentina slowed down just a little and her hoofs hit the floor matching the beat of their song. Slats stopped cleaning the dishes and looked up. "What on earth?" she said.
The brass bands my mother liked weren't the kind with fancy straw hats and candy-striped jackets, or the kind that march around at football games. The one she liked best, Stevo's band, from Mineral, was a mess of flugelhorns and tubas and trumpets, and they played until they were all drenched in so much sweat that there were big puddles on the stage. They played the horns so loud that I'd find myself leaning back against the wall, like the music had pinned me there, like I couldn't move until they were through.
They always finished the night standing shoulder to shoulder with a song that started out slow and quiet. It was almost like they were pulling the song up a hill, or clicking up a spike in a roller coaster. There was even a space of quiet, where they all stopped their horns, and everyone seemed to stop breathing, and then the song rushed along into something so wild and fast that the floor shook.
They came around a few months after my father died, and my mother said we should go, that he would want us to since we'd been planning on it. We went, and at the end of the night, walking to the car, I couldn't help it—I felt better than I had going in, better than I had maybe even since the wake. I felt so strange and guilty about it, I had to tell my mother. "It's okay, L," she said. She could see I wasn't convinced. "Why do you think all those people were crowding in there anyway?" She put the back of her hand on my cheek. "That's what music is for."
In Great-grandfather's kitchen, I had the feeling—like I did some nights listening to that brass band music—that my heart was a kind of wilderness, some expanse vaster than anyone would ever know the all of, even me.
It was a cheerful tune they were singing to Valentina, and everything in me that was sad and heavy seemed to bolt out like startled deer at each note, each hit on the floor.
Chapter 13
I went looking for Walter in the morning, before school. I found him in the shack behind his house, where Mrs. Markovic sometimes made Marko sleep because he made too much of a mess and a stink to be let inside. I'd watched her put it together herself, her apron pockets full of nails.
Inside, it smelled like liquor and throw-up and sweat, all under a heavy cloud of freshly sprayed perfume. Walter was sitting on a cot reading an old Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and he didn't look up when I came in. I said, "Woj, where'd those ladies at the club say Zoli went looking for my mom?
"What are you doing here?"
"And who were they?"
"I don't know, Lessar, just some ladies. If I knew everyone's name who came in there, I'd have to have a whole telephone book in my head. They didn't say where he went to anyway." He started reading his magazine again.
The monsters in Famous Monsters of Filmland weren't even famous anymore. The magazines were from when Marko and my father were kids, so they were about old monsters from old movies. Sometimes the magazines had stories about how they made people look like creatures from swamps, or ghosts;. Other times there were scenes from the old movies and pictures of all the different kinds of monsters they had in them. In the back were ads for things they sold back then through the mail—pet monkeys and space suits and fake hypodermic needles. For all the mess that Marko sometimes was, he kept the magazines in good shape, all in the right order, by their dates.
There was an old hand-drawn poster tacked to the wall. The drawing was of a guy lying flat on his back on the ground. He had a boulder balanced on his chest. There was another guy standing over him holding a sledgehammer up in the air. "What's this?" I asked.
"It's from a show my dad used to do."
"I never heard of him being in any show."
"He's the one with the rock on his chest."
Under the drawing it said, "Strongest Man in the Universe." I remembered the song that Mrs. Markovic had sung when she'd pulled me into the refrigerator, the song about the man who ate iron filings—the strongest man in t
he universe. She must have known that Marko was inside the refrigerator, under the blankets. She must have been singing to him.
I said, "No way is that your dad. If that was Marko, they would have called the show Drunkest Man in the Universe." I had my back to Walter and he punched me so hard I thought the shack was falling down. I got knocked into the wall and hit my head.
"Strongest man," he said.
"Christ, Woj. I was kidding."
"We have to go. Staresina'll cut our hearts out and put them in her desk."
"I need to get inside Zoli's place."
"What for?"
"Maybe there's something in there that says where he went looking for my mom. And maybe that's where she'll be too. He could have found her by now."
He picked up his bag of books and opened the door. "You want to see my ice rink?"
I didn't want to, but I followed him out. He'd laid down bricks at the open sides of their patio, and cemented them together. It did look like an ice rink, only it was so small it looked like as soon as you took a step, you'd be at the end of the ice. He still didn't have skates. He was wearing tennis shoes. He dropped his bag of books and jumped onto the ice. "Watch this," he said. He slid fast across it and made turns at all the walls, crossing one leg over the other. I could hardly believe it, but he was skating.
In the afternoon, Benci came to school to take me to the farm. He pulled up to the front door and let his truck run. All the windows in the whole place chattered. Miss Staresina looked out the window, then shook her head. "Crying out loud," she said. "Just a pickup. Thought it was the four horsemen."
"I have to go to the bathroom," I said.
"Congratulations," she said.
I left the room, left the building, and climbed up into the truck.
He looked at the doors of the schoolhouse. "Where's the other kids? They coming out?"
"They let me out early," I said.
"How come?"
"The principal thinks I'm an orphan."
"Oh," Benci said. He wasn't one to make you have a conversation. The truck was so loud anyway, it was easier to keep quiet. Passing the old Banning mine tipple, I saw that it was leaning over farther than usual. It was halfway into a kneel. The next stiff wind that blew through town would probably take it down. I wondered what that would sound like.
When we were almost at the farm, I told Benci the dogs were gone.
"What do you mean?" he said.
"Great-grandfather's dogs, they're gone."
"They're probably just chasing after something. Is his cough getting better?"
I shook my head.
Benci's shoulders slumped down. He was so big, him doing that made the springs on the seat groan and sink.
I said, "He'd tell you he doesn't have a cough though, he's got a ghost in his chest. It climbed in his mouth one night. He said the ghost was some guy he used to know from Banning Two, but then he said there wasn't a Banning Two. You ever hear of a Two?"
"No." His shoulders slumped some more. The seat was down so low by then I had to crane my neck to see out the window.
Great-grandfather and I had tied Valentina to the railing on the stoop by the kitchen. He'd put out a bowl of water for her and big pile of food from the kitchen on a platter. He'd put all kinds of things out for her to eat. When we got to the farm, Benci slowed down and looked out his window at the plate. There was an apple, a couple of candy bars with the wrappers still on, raisins, and a collared shirt.
"What in hell?" Benci said.
"We're low on food for the animals."
"Somebody's been feeding them, though, right?"
"I gave them some apples and candy bars and cereal."
"Candy bars. Good Christ. You should have told me! You'll kill them."
"They aren't killed. They're all right. Go ahead and look."
He hit the brakes and we made a big swooping turn in the drive. I said, "What do you mean I should have told you? How am I going to tell you? You aren't up here."
He didn't say anything. We drove straight away to the feed store. I'd never been inside before. It had high ceilings, long wooden floors, and a million kinds of seeds in packets for every flower or vegetable or fruit you ever heard of. There were books about how to plant everything and take care of every kind of animal. It was so orderly, nicer than the library at school. I ran my hand along the wall of seed packets. I opened one of the books about how to plant vegetables. There were pages and pages of pencil drawings of leaves and different kinds of tomatoes and peppers. I opened another book, this one about trees. There was a picture of a pear tree that looked like it had been torched, only it hadn't been really. It was suffering from something called fire blight, a sickness that blackened its branches as if someone had held a flame to them. The book said that to set things right, at the end of the winter, you had to prune away the parts that looked like they'd really been taken to town. In the spring, you'd just wait and see if fresh buds sprung up, they might, or they might not. There weren't any directions in the book on how to fix a tree that had been burned for real.
Benci was through loading the truck and he yelled for me.
Back at the farm, he lifted the sacks of feed out of his truck and stacked them up on the ground. They were heavy. The farm was stone quiet. We started looking around for the animals. They weren't anywhere around the barn or up in the fields. "What the hell?" Benci said. I showed him the hole in the fence where I thought Valentina had chewed through when she ran away. He said it was much too small for the other animals.
We drove all around the fields looking for them. Though it was fenced off, we went to the cratered field where Greatgrandfather had tried digging for oil and water and looked in all the deep holes to make sure they hadn't fallen in.
"What the hell?" Benci kept saying.
When we got back to the barn, I said, "You think someone took them?"
"Took them? No. It's just, what are we going to do? You can't tell him. It'll kill him. We'll find them. Don't you say anything about it. Don't tell Slats. She'll hang me. She'll hang the both of us."
"What'll she hang me for? You were supposed to be looking after them. And what if he comes outside? He'll see then."
"Don't let him. We got no dogs. We got no animals. Dogs. Dogs are one thing. This is just—it doesn't make any sense."
We checked around outside the barn again. "We have to give him his syrup now," I said. I started to walk up to the house. "For his cough."
Benci didn't follow me. He looked down at the ground and said, "It's real good of you to be in there with him all these days."
"Slats makes me," I said. "Come on, we have to heat up water for him."
"I got to get going back," he said.
"Just come inside and say hey."
"I don't want to bother him. Let him rest."
"He doesn't do nothing but rest."
He looked at the ground some more. "When we were kids, he was—I don't know. I guess I'm used to him cutting a pretty-big figure around here. You let me know when he's back to himself. He's talking strange, all that stuff. I don't know. I never seen him so skinny and weak-looking. Even this one time when he got hurt in a slate fall and he got this bad infection in his blood and made me go get leeches. Even then, he looked better than this."
"Leeches?"
"He hates doctors. If he could stand one even just a little bit, Slats would have called one by now. But she knows about him and doctors. This one time, instead of going to the doctor, he sent me out to get ajar of leeches. They got the sick out of him. It fixed him up. Too bad there's nothing like that now. I'd get him whatever he needed."
"Come in and give him some of the syrup."
"You do what Slats tells you. And don't say anything to him about those animals, or about me being out here." He started his truck.
I had to shout for him to hear me. "He knows you're out here. You can hear that truck for ten miles before you see it."
In the kitchen, Great-grandfather was i
n his pajamas and boots, trying to pull on his coat. He was coughing like a machine gun.
"What are you doing down here?" I said.
He pointed to his boots. They were untied. His eyes were glassy, the blue in them too bright. I walked closer to him. "You okay?" I said. He couldn't get his arm in his coat the right way. He gave up and let the coat drop to the floor. I put my hand on his arm; he was burning up. "I think you should take those boots off and get back in your bed." A cold draft blew through the room. "Why's it so cold in here?"
He didn't answer me or take off his boots. After a while, he said, "They left here, Lucas. My sheeps. My cows."
"How'd you know? You go outside? You're supposed to stay in here."
He sat down.
"They'll come back," I said.
"Where's Benci go?"
"He had to get home. They're waiting on him."
"Weakness."
"Are you crazy? He just lifted about a thousand pounds of feed out of his truck."
"I had idea for us, Lucas. Big idea. Me and you. Together . . . Not good for Benci to be this way. He has to take over this everything, soon, you know, when I'm dressed up in my funeral clothings . . . Big idea I had before. Did I tell you?"
"You can tell me upstairs. You got a thermometer?"
He pointed to his boots again. I made him sit down so I could pull them off. I found a handkerchief and tied it around my face. I was always careful around fevers because of what had happened to the first two Lukacses. I led him upstairs to his room. He'd thrown his blankets and sheets on the floor. I saw why it was so cold in the house—he'd opened all the second-floor windows. After I got him to lie down, I went around and closed them all.
In the kitchen, I filled a bowl with ice and cold water and packed a rag with more ice. I put the bowl on the floor and pushed it under his bed. When I had a fever, my mother always did this. She said the water in the bowl would work its way through the bed and right inside the fever.
He reached out and pulled the handkerchief down from my face. "What I have, you can't catch. It's not sickness."
I pulled it back up. He twisted around, then he closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but he didn't stay down for long. He sat up and stared at me, "We should go to America. Walking to there."