When We Get There

by Shauna Seliy

  "I didn't know you could be in there for that long."

  "Some people live out there till they die, even. I think they got a cemetery up there, behind the cornfields." She put her hand on my back. "Lucas Lessar," she said. "Your hands are shaking." She lit a cigarette and handed it to me. I put it in my mouth and shoved my hands in my pockets. After a while, she said, "I don't know about getting her out of there, but when you visit her, you could try some things to get her feeling better."

  "Like what?"

  "Mum sometimes brings Dad things from his old shop. Lets him sniff some formaldehyde, look at some paint brushes. Or you could maybe try to do something a little more big time."

  "Like what?"

  "What's her favorite thing? Something that always makes her happy?"

  " . . . I don't know." I choked a little on the cigarette, but she didn't seem to notice. I could hear Walter coming back, tramping through the woods. "I got to get her out of there," I said.

  She said, "Do something big. It's hard to think that way around here, but you know, I try to anyways, and I think you should too, Lucas. Okay?"

  I didn't know what she meant, but I nodded.

  Walter stepped into the clearing, "He found that bobcat out here in these woods? That's crazy, how big that bobcat is. I like how he made it have its mouth wide open like that. You can see all of its teeth. But it makes it sort of terrifying too, right, like it's going to chew you up."

  "Well, it is the crown jewel of Jameson taxidermy."

  Walter asked for another cigarette. He lit it and walked around the ring of trees. "You got ice skates?" he asked Helen.

  She said, "You an ice-skater?"

  "I'm taking lessons," Walter said, which couldn't have been true. "You want to go skating sometime? I got a rink. I made a rink."

  "You did not make a rink," I said.

  "You ever see bobcats out here?" he said.

  "One time, when Billy and I were out here, we saw one. We sat up and looked at it and it looked right back at us."

  "What happened?" Walter said.

  "I think it hypnotized us," she said. "Instantly."

  Walter walked out to the center of the clearing and lay down. He put the smoke in his mouth and spread out his arms. "So this is how Lessar lives," he said. "My dad is always worrying over him. Always saying we got to look out for him. I'll have to tell him it's not so bad—Lessar’s just cutting school, going from town to town, sharing smokes with Catholic girls."

  We stayed there until we'd gone through her whole pack of cigarettes, and then we stayed some more.

  Walter and I sat in the very last seats in the bus on the way back, across the aisle from each other.

  He said to me, "You like that girl?"

  "She's like a grown person, already out of high school."

  "She's pretty, right? Don't you think?"

  I didn't answer him.

  "I like that coat she has with that nice collar—that's a good kind of coat. I'd like to have a few dollars and get a coat like that for my mother."

  "Woj, your mother's like two and half times bigger than her."

  "So what? I'll get a big one. And then I'll get the man's version for me."

  "You want to have matching coats with your mother? Hah. What about your dad? Then you could have a whole family in the same coat."

  He thought about it for a minute. "No. He don't get one. He wouldn't keep it nice." He laughed at this, and then seeing him laugh, so did I.

  I looked out the window for the rest of the ride, at all the towns flying past us. Coming into Banning, the bus twisted between the boney piles, the last sun of the day lit up the skins on the sycamores. There were a few clouds out by then, but they weren't the low, mean clouds we were used to in winter, the kind that fell over us like a heavy lid. They were pure white, tall piles. I inched down in my seat so I could see high up and watch them knocking into each other.

  I walked with Walter back toward our patch of houses. When we got close to the Markovics' place, I saw that there was something glittering all around the Nash. Marko was standing next to it. Walter broke into a run. Closer up, I saw that it was glass and that all the windows on the Nash were smashed. Walter walked around and around it. "We can fix it," he said to Marko. "It's okay. We just need new windows. We can get some new windows in here."

  Marko looked at Walter and drew in a long breath. Later, when I would think about Marko, I would remember him as he was then. He looked to be pulling parts of himself up from his feet with that breath. He was standing a little taller than he usually did. You could tell it was hard for him, that he'd rather just drop down on the ground. He put his hand on the side of his face and ran it over the stubble on his cheeks. He ran his fingers through his hair, tried to pat it down. He took a long look at Walter. "It's okay, son. It's okay. This car, we are maybe done with this car."

  Walter opened the door and used his coat to sweep the glass off the seats. He stopped a few times, turned around and looked at me. When he was through trying to clean it up, he ran at me, grabbed me around the middle, and knocked me down onto the gravel. "It's your fault, you piece of shit."

  "Goddamn, Woj."

  Marko grabbed his arm, but he yanked it away. "We were trying to help you. You didn't have to light that place up. That's why he came after us." He wailed at my head. "You should have told him it was you who did it, so he'd break something of yours." I saw blood on my coat. He'd hit my eye.

  "Get the fuck off me," I said.

  Marko came down on both of us. He wrestled Walter away from me. "It's okay, son. It's okay. It's all right."

  I stood up. My ribs creaked in my chest. I went across the street to my house and climbed up through the window on the concrete blocks I'd left there the last time I'd gone inside. I looked in the bathroom mirror. Walter had dragged me over the gravel and my face was cut up. I couldn't tell yet what was going to happen to my eye, but above it I could feel pulsing. I broke a bunch of ice into the kitchen sink and grabbed some up with a rag. I lay down on my bed.

  Outside, Walter and Mrs. Markovic were shouting at each other. Marko was quiet. Mrs. Markovic and Walter started inside their house, their shouts getting muffled.

  I sat up and looked out the window. Marko was staring at the Nash. He kicked the tires and spread the broken glass around with his shoe. I laid back down and held the ice to my eye. When I closed my eyes, flickers of colored light bloomed in the dark. I was dizzy.

  I could hear the sounds of glass smashing apart. I jumped up and looked out the window. Marko was sliding a crowbar along the bottoms of the windows. Zoli had left the windows jagged, sharp pieces sticking in the air. Marko was trying to make it a clean break.

  I lay back down and listened. When that sound was coming from the Plate Glass, or when it was coming from anywhere, really—old houses, broken-up mines—a kind of thrill would run all through me. But the noise of Marko finishing off the Nash, sweeping the glass onto the ground, made me feel like I'd swallowed a cup of needles.

  To get away from the sound of it, I left the house and walked up the street toward Slats's. I turned around and looked back at Marko and his car.

  Then I looked at my house. I started to walk backwards, like my mother and I used to do, until I could fit my house in the palm of my hand.

  "Let me see your face," Slats shouted when I got to her yard. I couldn't even see her yet. She was looking for me through her kitchen window.

  Inside, I said, "How'd you know about it?"

  "I got special powers, and also, a telephone."

  I sat on the edge of the bathtub. She put some peroxide on my cuts. It sizzled and stung. When she was through with me, she started in on her own cuts with the iodine. She said, "It'll turn out okay with the Markovics, don't you worry. They always stand by you Lessars."

  "Who said I was worried? I don't care about them."

  "Okay then."

  "Can you think of something that always made my mom happy?"

  "Tha
t's some kind of question. Sheez. Let's see. You, for one. Almost always, except for when you're being a stubborn shit, like you can be. I don't know. Lots of things made her happy. That's maybe why everyone liked her so much." She put the back of her hand on my cheek. "I was just kidding about you being a stubborn shit. I mean, you are one, I wasn't kidding about that, but she even liked you then. You even were making her happy then. Why that's so, I couldn't tell you. It's an actual mystery."

  It turned out that we hadn't missed the sound of them pulling out the stump at King. They did it in the middle of the night, a rumble slipping into our dreams. I sat up and held on to the windowsill until it was over.

  In the morning, I walked over to the pit to look at it. It was a ghost of a mine. All the doors were open on the offices and the lamp houses. They were dragging things away on trucks. The pit was still open. I walked right up to it and looked inside. It was the darkest thing I'd ever seen.

  People said there were helpers that lived down in the mine tunnels, the gypsies called them pchuvushi. They were supposed to know which way the seam went, how to follow it, and they helped out when the very first miners started digging for it. Some people thought they showed up dressed in mining clothes, holding lamps, except they were small, half the size of regular men. Other people thought they showed up only as pieces of light. If you worked in a pit, they wouldn't let you get twisted up in the tunnels. You could follow those flashes of light back to the room you worked or the mantrip that would pull you back up the slope.

  Walking away from King, I wondered if those helpers had broken loose now that our last mine was shut down, wondered if they were drifting through the woods, on their way out of town.

  Chapter 21

  The other person in Banning who used to wrestle bears in the Austrian circus was named Jumbo, and he was tall, with wide shoulders and thick arms. He was as old as Greatgrandfather, but age hadn't thinned him out. He still looked like he could wrestle a bear if he needed to.

  It was hard to picture Great-grandfather doing anything alongside Jumbo. There were only a few pictures of him from back then: his wedding picture and one of him standing stiff as a board next to the farmhouse, holding his hat. He didn't look, in either one of those, like he was ready to stand alongside Jumbo and take on some bears. I always liked the picture of him by the farmhouse though. You could see, if you looked closely, that the photographer was trying to make things professional, so Greatgrandfather is standing on what is supposed to be some kind of black tile, but the frame of the photograph stretches past that, and you can see that at the edges of the tile the ground is white. He's standing on a few pieces of tile thrown down on the snow. He doesn't look it, but he must be freezing, standing there in his thin suit jacket.

  He never looks like a bear wrestler in any of my memories of him either, and when he started to get sick, or when he thought that ghost had taken up living in his lungs, he started to look less and less like he'd last a second with a bear. I wondered even that he'd ever worked in the mine. His fingers thinned, and the knuckles looked huge. His two hairs got longer and longer, and they blew around on his head nights when he was feverish and we opened the windows to cool him off. He slept all the time. Sometimes he gave me searching looks. "What?" I'd say. "What am I supposed to do?"

  The night I went to tell him about my mother, the room was full of great-aunts and great-uncles. I sat next to him, leaned over, and whispered, "Dedka, I found her. I've seen her."

  He gave me a long look. The skin around his eyes was turned out a little, red. He gestured to me to open the windows. He wasn't warm, or feverish, so I didn't understand why, but I did it anyway. It wasn't all that cold, that warm, almost-spring air was still hanging around, but, slowly, and I saw him watching, the great-aunts and great-uncles that were sitting in the room caught chills and went downstairs.

  It was just me and him. He sat up and waved for me to keep talking. I said, "She's a little sick, so, she's in like a hospital. But she's coming out. I'm going to go get her and then I'll bring her here soon to see you and everything." I didn't have any idea how I was going to do any of the things I was saying—they just fell out of my mouth.

  He got up out of bed and started rooting through his dresser. "You should probably lay back down," I told him. He covered his ears like he couldn't hear me. He got dressed in his brown overalls that he wore when he was working. He fished a coat out of the closet and then looked out a few of his windows. The only way downstairs was the steps that led to the kitchen. He went over a few times to the top of the stairs and listened. They were all down there, talking, their spoons and forks clattering on the plates.

  He popped open the window in the bathroom. "What are you doing?" I said. He'd hardly been out of bed since he'd gotten sick, let alone out of the house. The window opened onto the roof of the front porch. He climbed out there. Even though he was wearing heavy farming boots, he seemed light on his feet. He climbed over the side.

  I followed him. The roof was at a steep slant and it was a lot harder to walk on than he made it look. I sat down and pushed myself over to the edge. He was standing down in the yard looking up at me. He was crouching so they wouldn't see him out the window. "You got to get back in here," I said.

  I looked over the edge. There were wooden square pillars that held up the roof; he must have slid down one, but they were all splintered. I didn't want to cut up my hands. I hung on to the edge of the roof, dropped my legs down, then swung out and let go. It was a far drop.

  "You got to get back inside," I said. He didn't listen to me. He walked away. I followed him. We walked along the fence. He saw the hole where Valentina had chewed her way through, when she'd made her escape. He made some gesture to me that I was supposed to fix it. "How? With what? I don't know how to do anything needs doing out here . . . Who needs the fence anyway? There's no animals here to keep in."

  We went over to the woods that led to Eli's house. We didn't cross into the trees though, just walked all along next to them. He stopped and, for a long stretch of minutes, stood looking into the woods and then up at the tops of the trees. I said, "What are you doing? We got to get back inside before Slats finds out you're missing."

  We kept going. He walked so fast and with such a sense of trying to get something done that a couple of times I had to practically run to catch up with him. The color was back in his face. He touched the fence at each of its corners. We walked out to the pear tree. He took a long look at that too.

  When we got back to the barn, he felt his way around in the dark for a few minutes and then he led me to his workshop. It used to be some animal's stall, but he'd set it up nice, all clean with working lights.

  There was a big table and a wall above it covered with tools. He put all the tools out on the table and inspected them. They were all well used, molded at the handles, even the metal handles, by the long years of his hand gripping them. He turned on the sharpener and worked at a pair of sheers that had rusted.

  "I'll be right back," I told him. I slipped into the house and then down into the basement and hunted around until I found those ice skates I'd seen before. I took them back out to the barn and handed them to him. He hardly seemed to notice. He was just sharpening things and polishing things up quick as he could. He moved forward, but then he stopped just as he was about to touch them to the sharpener and handed them to me. He showed me how to hold them and how to slow the sharpener down or speed it up. The skates flew out of my hands and banged against the wall. Air popped in and out of his throat; he was laughing at me. He shook his head and gave them back to me. The same thing happened again. I got it right the next time though, and cleaned the skates up pretty well. They looked ready to cut through bread.

  There were some long pieces of plywood out in the barn. He handed me a saw and showed me where to cut them. "Cut them? What are we doing out here? Building something? Can't we do it in the daytime when it's not pitch-black?"

  He pointed again at the place where he wanted me
to cut the boards. After what felt like forever, we finished them up. He picked them all up himself in one quick motion and went outside. I followed him.

  We went back up to the fence and slapped the wood over the hole. The wood we'd cut fit perfectly from post to post somehow, even though he hadn't measured anything.

  He slipped two hammers out of somewhere in his pockets and put a set of nails, one after the other, in his mouth, the sharp ends sticking out. He put a few in my mouth too. And then we set to work, nailing the boards up. He'd cut up exactly enough pieces of wood to go from the ground to the top. It was all fixed.

  A car started up near the house and this seemed to wake both of us up out of some kind of dream. We walked back toward the house. It was Kaya leaving. We watched her car pull away and go up the drive. He gestured to the house. He seemed to think we should get back inside.

  When we got to the front porch, he hoisted himself up on the splintery pillar and then up onto the roof. I followed him. I thought we would go inside once we got up to the roof, but he wanted to sit out there. He sent me inside to get him something to drink. "What do you want?"

  He pointed back toward the pear tree.

  "You want pear brandy? I thought you said we should save it?"

  He waved that idea away.

  I snuck some up from the basement and brought it out to him. One by one, we watched the great-aunts and great-uncles get in their cars. Slats wasn't one of them; we always left last, or stayed overnight with him. They slid up the drive in their wide cars. As each one drove away, Great-grandfather raised his bottle to them and then had a big swallowful. His spirits got even higher. Benci was the last to leave. He came out of the house, walked around his car, looked up at Great-grandfather's windows, and then got in his truck.

  Great-grandfather peered inside the bottle at the pear. He hit the neck of the bottle with a short hard tap against the side of the house and broke it off. Then he pulled the pear out and took a bite of it. It was soft and dripping, like a sponge. He held it out to me. "No thanks," I said. "That pear's probably been in that bottle for a hundred years." He worked at the pear with his long fingers. I couldn't tell what he was doing.