by Shauna Seliy
The office girl had called Slats to tell her the news, that he was trying to get his job back, and that she'd seen him with her own two eyes practically blubbering about his lost dishes.
Slats was waiting for me when I got in the door. Before I had a chance to say a word, she told me the whole story about Zoli, all the while looking out the windows, checking the doors. She stuck her hand under the couch a couple of times to make sure the knife was still there. "Now don't worry. I already told my brothers. I called up Marko too, told him to watch out over at your house, you know, in case he sees Zoli around there. He's going to come over and get the key so he can go inside and check on things."
She stopped talking and looked at me. "You're white like a sheet. Are you all right? You know what else the girl in the office said? She told me she saw Frank D'Angelo hovering around here when she was getting out of her car this morning. I couldn't figure out what he would have wanted from me, but then I started to think that, hey, maybe it's not me he's looking for. You know what I'm saying to you? You do something to get yourself in trouble?"
"I found her," I said. "I saw her."
There was a chair behind her and she sat down in it like she was falling over.
I said, "Why didn't you tell me?" I felt like water was roaring through my ears. I could hardly hear myself talking.
"How is she?"
"You should have told me."
"She didn't want you to know, doll. She made me promise, not just that I wouldn't tell you while she was away, but that I wouldn't tell you ever. In your whole life. And don't you look at me like that . . . She thought she'd be gone just for a week, but then, I don't know what happened. It got away from her."
"How long is she going to stay up there?"
"And then she told me to stay away, and I thought I better listen to her, do what she wants. Not like some people."
"You could have told me."
"She made me swear on an actual Bible, I'm not shitting you. A real Bible—"
There was a knock at the door. Marko and Walter were outside. Slats and I went out on the porch and she gave Marko the key. There were saying goodbye, walking away, waving, when Zoli pulled up in his car and parked across the street at the Plate Glass. He had his old glass goggles on, propped up on his head, the kind he used to wear to work in the factory. I guess he was going in to make another pitch to get his job back, but he saw us. He turned around and stared. He looked hollowed out, like he hadn't eaten anything the whole time he'd been away.
I was almost relieved to see him—at least now I knew where he was. I didn't have to worry about him popping out of the woods at me everywhere I went. Everyone else was quiet. I yelled to him across the street, "Where you been?"
"Where've I been? Here and there. How about you? What've you been doing?"
"School."
"Kind of," Walter said under his breath. "Sometimes."
I kicked him. Slats was holding on to the railing of the porch, gripping it tight, watching Zoli, and she hadn't heard Walter, but Marko had, and he gave me a hard look.
Zoli took off his goggles and put them in the car. "You know about what happened to my house?"
"What do you want?" Slats said.
He crossed the street and came into the yard. He stopped at a strip of dirt next to the porch. There was a thin lead pipe sticking out of the ground near him. It was a post for Slats's roses, but since it was winter, there was nothing looping around it, no thorny stems or wires to hold up the stalk. He rested his hand on it. "Hey, Marko. Walter. How you doing, Slats?"
"I'll be doing a lot better when you get the hell out of here."
"I thought maybe . . . I don't know. . . When I saw my house, I thought maybe your brothers had been looking to get back at me for what happened at your dad's place."
"They don't do those kinds of things."
"Oh, they're like good upstanding citizens or something, not like me? Is that what you mean? What do you think, Lucas? Think they done it?"
Marko said, "All right, Zoli, how about you leave Lucas here alone."
"He knows though. Look at him. That soft mama's boy face of his gives everything away. He knows where Mirjana is. I bet too that he knows which of those brothers burned my house down." He pulled the pipe the whole way out of the ground. He lifted it up in the air a little and it looked, for a minute, like if it hit you, you would hardly feel it, but then it swung back down to the ground and knocked against his boot and made a loud thud; it was heavy.
"You can't help me out, Lucas?" Zoli said. The lines in his forehead creased together, like he was worried. He opened and closed his hands around the pipe.
It was cold outside, freezing almost, but sweat was gathering all around my collar. I pulled it back away from my neck.
Mr. D'Angelo came driving down the street in his patrol car. He pulled into Slats's driveway, got out of his car, and said, "All right now, Zoli. I told you I was looking into it. I'm looking into it."
Zoli ignored him. "You can't help me out, Lucas?" He pointed the pipe at me.
Mr. D'Angelo said, "Okay. Okay—"
Marko said, "You know, Zoli, I only wish you were inside your shitbox house when I set it on fire—"
"Dad," Walter said. "What are you doing?"
"Marko?" Zoli said, and started to walk up the porch steps toward him.
Slats said, "Hey, you want your job back, you better not do anything more stupid than usual."
Mr. D'Angelo put his arm out in front of Zoli and stopped him.
Marko said to Mr. D'Angelo, "I did it. All right, Frank. You can lock me up, or whatever you have to do." He looked at me. "But get him away from Lucas here."
Mr. D'Angelo said to Zoli, "Let's be peaceable. You let me look into it. All right? I'll make sure everything ends up fair and square, but you got to keep away from these folks. Stay out of trouble. Can you do that? Can you agree to that?"
"All right. All right."
Mr. D'Angelo pointed at the pipe. "Get rid of that thing and get on back to your car."
Zoli opened his hands and looked at the pipe. He shrugged. "It's mine. I put it in there with Mirjana when we were trying to help Slats's flowers."
How I would wish later, still wish, even now, that someone had taken that pipe away from him just then. But he took it with him and walked across the street. He tapped it against the gravel, then he put it in his car. Just before he got in himself, he twisted up a half smile and looked at Marko.
Chapter 20
Next morning, Walter was waiting for me outside the school. He grabbed my arm and yanked it behind my back and pushed me inside the building.
"What are you doing?" I said.
"My dad said to make sure you stay in school all day."
"I'm here, aren't I? I'm not going anywhere. Let me go."
He let go. Before he'd grabbed me, I didn't have any plans to cut school again, but I dropped my bag of books and tore out of the building and the schoolyard and down the hill. He followed me. I cut off the road, through a gully full of brambles and sharp-cutting dead branches. I was wearing the big coat and I pulled my hood up so I wouldn't get scratched. I could hear Walter cursing and knew they were getting him. Still, he wouldn't let up on me. I could hear his feet pounding on the ground just behind me. We ran and ran. I thought my lungs were going to pop open in my chest. Finally, I heard him say "Fuck it." We both slowed down, then stopped.
Walter had brambles sticking out of his coat sleeves and a mess of scratches on his face. He leaned over and put his hands on his knees, catching his breath. We dragged ourselves out of the woods, up to the road, and I saw that we'd run the whole way to the edge of town. It was warmer than it had been in a long time. I opened my coat up.
I sat down on the shoulder and so did Walter.
"It's like, hot out," Walter said. He took his coat off.
I said, "What did Mr. D'Angelo do to your dad?"
"Told him to come down to the police station and fill out some papers la
ter."
"That's it? What else is going to happen to him?"
"I don't know. Maybe nothing. He seemed more worried about what's going to happen to you. He was all worked up about you missing school." He kept saying, 'If Jimmy knew how much school he was skipping, he'd flip over in his grave.'"
"He isn't in a grave," I said.
A few cars went by. We were far from the school. I could see the sharp tip of the bell-tower poking between the empty branches of the trees. I said, "They're pulling out the stump today at King."
He wiped at the cuts on his face. Behind him, I thought I saw a bus coming, way down the road. He spread out his coat and pulled some nettles out of it. He looked back toward the school. "Oh man, you know how fast I'm going to have to run to get back there in time?"
I wondered what it would sound like when they pulled the stump. Benci predicted something like a homemade earthquake. The town would wobble back and forth for a second and that'd be it, the last sounds out of King. Whatever it was going to sound like, I didn't want to hear it. "Let's get out of here," I said.
"What do you mean?"
"We're already in trouble. We'll never get back up there in time."
He didn't agree with me, but he didn't walk away either. When the bus came, I jumped up and waved for it. The driver stopped and opened the door. "Come on, Woj," I said. The driver gave us both a hard look. "He's injured," I said, pointing to Walter. "I'm taking him to the doctor."
We stayed on the bus until it got to Luna. I found out where the Jamesons lived from a phone book in the post office. "Where are we going?" Walter kept saying.
The Jamesons' house was at the end of a long empty lane lined with pine trees. To the side of the house was a little shed with an old peeling sign that said Taxidermy. The house itself was big and faded yellow brick. There were a pair of dead starlings pressed between the storm and outer windows at the attic.
I knocked on the door. No one answered. Walter said, "When my dad finds out, he's going to kill me, you know. He might kill you too." I knocked some more. "Then my mother will kill us all over again."
Helen opened the door. She looked different than she did when I'd seen her before. She was wearing makeup. I'd wanted to ask her about Bedford, but when I saw her, I forgot what I was trying to do.
"Hi," she said, and seemed to be waiting for me to say something.
Walter said, "You got dead birds up there." He pointed up. "In your attic window."
"Is that right?" she said. "Thanks for coming by to say so."
"You can see their bones. Bird skeletons. You probably got bird ghosts in your house."
"We probably got ghosts from all the animal kingdom in here."
Her mother came to the door and looked at us. Helen said, "Mum, they grow the strangest boys over in Banning. We should make a study of it."
Her mother shook her head and walked away.
Walter looked behind Helen, into her house. "Can we come inside?" he said.
"Woj, shut up," I said. "This is Walter," I told her, "Markovic."
"Believe you me, Walter Markovic, you don't want to come in here." She picked her purse up from a table and pulled on her denim coat with the sheepskin collar.
"Why?" he said.
"You'll get the creeps." She pulled the door closed behind her and came out on the porch. "You'll get them so bad, you mightn't recover," she said and sat down on the steps. "It's nice out here today, isn't it." The sky was cloudless, all blue.
Walter said, "I won't get the creeps. I live almost on top of the Bluebird toadholes."
She lit one of her flowery-smelling cigarettes. "The what?" she said.
"You don't know about the Bluebird toadholes? They're behind my house. There's a couple of miners trapped down there from a slate fall. You should come out to Banning. They're famous."
"Sounds like a nice place to go, a regular vacation spot."
"If you put your ear over the hole, you can hear them crying like babies."
"Is that right?" She tapped the ashes off her cigarette into the yard. She looked at me. "We're not in a library, you know. It's okay to say a few words, here and there."
"He's always like this," Walter said. "Don't worry about him. 'Gloom and Doom' Lessar."
She smiled. "You know, Walter, what we got here in Luna beats crying ghosts any day. We got our own unfeu infini?
"What?" I said.
"A fire that wont go out. Unfeu sans limites, unfeu sans fin. You learn your French at Catholic school and you'll learn all manner of ways to talk about fires and hellfires and things that don't end."
Helen's mother opened the door and said, "I'm going to steam the upholstery next. You helping me or what?"
"Give me two minutes, Mum," Helen said. "Okay? Upholstery cleaning will commence directly."
Her mother closed the door. Helen said, "I think this false spring has Mum all overcome. It's like she wants to wring out the house and dry it on a line." She crushed her cigarette out on the porch, stood up, and nodded for us to follow her. We walked past the taxidermy shed, through the backyard to where it ended at a stand of woods, and then we walked into the woods. There wasn't a path, but she seemed to know where she was going.
Walter asked Helen, "What kind of animals are in that taxidermy shop?"
"Strictly speaking, dead ones," she said.
"How about, are there any of that kind of fish with like a sail on its back—marlins. Or how about sharks?"
"Sharks? Walter, we are clean out of sharks in this part of Luna. The shop's closed; it's pretty empty."
"One time this guy tried to sell us one of those marlin fish to hang above the bar at the club. I liked it, but my dad didn't think it fit the decor right."
"Decor?" I said. "There's no decor there."
"That's how he wants it. If he bought this marlin, he figured he'd have to get like fishing nets on the ceiling and pretend portholes on the walls, and a couple of sea shanties for the jukebox—you know, to follow through with it. It'd kind of never end."
"Sea shanties?" I said. "What are you talking about, Woj?"
"You know what I mean, Lessar, sea shanties. Where are we going anyway?"
Just as he asked it, we were all of a sudden standing in a clearing. It was ringed with tall trees, and their branches, reaching together, made a kind of roof over the place. At the edge of the clearing, there was a log on its side. Pressed into the dirt near it were a couple hundred cigarette butts.
"Hey, this is nice in here," Walter said.
"Isn't it?" Helen said and sat down on the log. She put her hands in her pockets. "It's even better in the summer. When it was hot, Billy and me used to sleep out here. It's like natural air-conditioning." She pointed up at the ceiling of trees.
I sat down next to her.
"Who's Billy?" Walter said.
"Just my old brother," Helen said, taking her cigarettes out of her purse. She gave one to Walter and lit one for herself.
"You don't get one," she said to me. "If you choke to death, Walter and I will have to drag you out of the woods. That'd be a real burden on us wouldn't it, Walter?"
"It would," he said. He lit the smoke and I waited for him to break down coughing, but he breathed it in and then out, like he was born smoking clove cigarettes. At school, Walter never seemed right; it was almost like he was too young for our grade. He never understood what he was supposed to be doing. He was always in some kind of trouble, and having the wrong answer for the teacher's questions. But from working at the club, he could do other things—add up long drink bills in his head, refuse to serve drunks four times his size, and, apparently, smoke and talk to girls older than him like it was the easiest thing in the world.
He said, "The guy had the marlin in the trunk of his car and we went out there to look at it. It was shiny and all blue and purple and green. I got kind of instantly hypnotized. You don't get to see something like that too often, right? We should have bought it. If we'd have bought it, we could have looked a
t it all the time. I could go home and look at it right now."
Helen was smiling. "And that would be nice wouldn't it?" she said. "I'm sorry to say there's no marlin in there, Walter, but Daddy did leave the bobcat."
"Where'd he get a bobcat?"
"Right here. I don't mean here, sitting on this log, but somewhere in these woods—"
"Can I see it?" Walter said.
"Sure, go ahead. The door's locked but you can climb in the window. It's open."
"All right," Walter said, and walked out of the clearing.
When I could tell he was out of earshot, I said, "How can I get my mother out of there?"
"Oh, I didn't know it was your mum. You didn't say."
"How long do people stay in there for?"
"All different kinds of time."
"What about your dad?"
"I don't think we should use him as our sample. Even when he wasn't cracked, he was a hard case. When you saw her up there, how was she making out? Does she seem better than before?"
"She's different."
"Better?"
"No. I don't know. Different. Tired. Real tired."
"Resting can help, and some of the medicine makes them tired so they have to rest, even if they don't want to. Strictly speaking, her seeming tired isn't a hundred percent a bad sign. How tired? Was she all input and no output? Was she doing the Thorazine shuffle?"
"What's that?"
"It's a strong medicine that gets them tethered to the terra firma, you know what I mean? Some people, they sort of shuffle instead of walk when they're taking it. It makes them too tired to lift their feet, I guess."
"No, she wasn't doing that. What'd you mean about your dad being a hard case?"
She looked at me for a minute. "I mean, well, can you promise you won't get the creeps and run out of the woods while I'm in the middle of a sentence?"
I nodded.
". . . He's been up there for years and years. And he's been in and out of places like it since me and Billy were little."
"But I thought it was just because of what happened to your brother."
"That's the story I've been selling lately. It's not too far from being true, really. If he wasn't already cracked, that would have done it to him anyway."