by Brian Hodge
So she listened.
But there wasn't any scream. None. Zip. Nada. Zilch.
Feverish, excited, fearful, she dipped the nail back into the polish, and this time the black flowed where she wanted it to, and she was sure she got all of the finger blotted out—all of two of them, in fact. And she was about to take the fuzzy applicator and just go at it, but then she thought: Maybe it has to dry first before anything happens.
She read the label, which said that Kiwi shoe polish was nontoxic and had extra scuff protection, but it didn't say anything about fast drying. She knew from her mother that paintings sometimes went on drying for weeks, even months, so you couldn't always tell. Still, the polish looked dry already. Upstairs, her twin might be missing part of her hand. She could wake up any second and start screaming. And if the rest of her wasn't painted out right away, then however much longer she waited to do it, that's how much longer it would take before the screaming would stop. She was almost sure now the polish was dry. But what if it wasn't? If it wasn't, she could be committing suicide. She wouldn't know it was really her own picture until it was too late.
Do it!
Dropping the finishing nail, she dipped the fuzzball applicator back in the bottle and brushed out the left hand, then the arm, then the face. She thought of the monsters she had done in the cupola—how, no matter how badly she painted them, they came to life exactly like that—and now, in a way, she was making another monster: one-armed, headless Amber flopping around on a bed upstairs.
Choking with passion and fear, she poured the shoe polish over the canvas and began spreading it with her hands. It seemed to gush from her fingers and palms now. But to her horror, she could still see the feet. Frantically she pawed over the saw-toothed canvas until the stain transferred to the lower part, and when she was satisfied that every discernible part of the image was obliterated, she jerked her hands up reflexively, allowing the last of the liquid to trickle down her arms like black blood.
Chapter 27
The clothes dryer still reeked of dead crows. The drum had been scoured with bleach, but you couldn't turn the thing on without being bathed in a warm acridity that quickly led to nausea. It was up into the duct and inside the frame, the crow stench, bonded to every mote of dust and felt snubber on the old Maytag, and it "fuzzed" into the air through the lint filter and the seams around the venting. Clothes came out smelling putrid. Even Paavo, whose nose had no more functionality than a nose on Mount Rushmore, wouldn't wear his shirts unless they had been line dried.
Twice Denny had tried to rake out the bits of lint that curled around the drum and inside the shell, but the odor persisted everywhere in crevices and in foil corrugations and in syrupy patches of congealed grease. That was why he was outside looking up at the sugar maple. He had fifty feet of new plastic clothesline still in its sleeve, a cordless Black & Decker drill and a pair of twenty-gauge screw eyes. But he saw now that he was going to have to get up in the damn tree to remove the old line, which hung at an absurd slant. Dana or someone had managed to loop it into the first crotch. The person had cinched it tight, like a lariat, and if he cut it off from below it was going to leave the knotted part hanging up there.
He could swear a kind of stasis was setting in down on the farm. Everyone frozen by pain or favoring the muscles of the day, palsied extensions where yesterday steady hands had prevailed, and still no one making much eye contact. Maybe he was just now getting it. Maybe he had rationalized a more Pollyanna-like atmosphere because he wanted his father to fit in. Maybe it was time to get his old man the hell out of here.
He went inside and found a six-foot stepladder in the pantry and carried it back out, but he couldn't stop the polemics in his head. It was nice and simple to just think Get the hell out of here, but then what? Truth be told, it was still a better deal than the depressing diaper decrepitude of the institutions. Hired compassion in eight-hour shifts, where you were buying a benevolent prison and the guards came and went and the one-size-fits-all rules were administered from afar. Flowers and carpet couldn't hide sanctioned family abandonment. Guilt. You could smell dead crows everywhere.
The ladder got him halfway to nowhere, because unless he wanted to stand on the very tippy top, he still couldn't work handily with the knot. He should have brought a kitchen knife; then he could have severed the lasso. Easier to pull himself up on the branch now. Easier if you were sixteen and you didn't have hemorrhoids or bruise easily. But he managed it, sliding along like chiffon over a pineapple, catching his pants, abusing his privates. He hoped it wasn't going to be a Gordian knot.
And then he got distracted by a nest in the crotch of the sugar maple, and that was fairly odd for midsummer, because even if you couldn't see that it was freshly built, you couldn't mistake the single egg therein. Fairly odd too that the egg was just sitting there, yet he had neither seen nor heard any squawking from momma bird. Most of all, it was a fairly odd egg. Big, for one thing. And for another, it was bright, bright red. Not just some off-hue brown, but Fabergé crimson.
Ha-ha. Someone playing a joke. The old folks at KNEAL, who could barely get off their whoopee cushions, had planted this thing up here, anticipating that he would drive up today with plastic clothesline and two twenty-gauge screw eyes and climb this tree and hump along this branch to discover a Jurassic Park egg.
But it wasn't Easter, it was summer, he repeated to himself. What was a leftover Easter egg doing up here? And then he remembered the mouthless creature he had struck with his car that day, and this egg was exactly that shade of vermillion.
Someone was jerking him around and he didn't know why, but he felt very, very threatened by it. Red fur, red carrion, red straw, red egg. Not funny at all. What was causing mutations around here—a rogue pigment in the food chain?
Like his mother—like the sympathetic school counselor he was—he could rationalize anything. But now the evidence was done tapping him on the shoulder; it was staring him in the face. The shaggy eccentric in the wheelchair upstairs telling him the place was a "nursery," the barn burning down, and then there was Paavo's chicken wire all around the windows.
Denny scrutinized the egg. Definitely not poultry. Ostrich maybe, except it wasn't buried in the sand. Maybe he'd been burying his head in the sand….
He resisted the impulse to confront Ariel. One of the underlying premises he was good at was manipulating other people's credibility, usually by inflating it. He had done so to navigate young people through the shoals and reefs of maturation, done it to keep his parents afloat, reversed it a bit to get his father installed at New Eden, and now he was at the far negative limit with Ariel. People could be dangerous when you bankrupted their credibility.
He untied the old rope, drilled one hole in the tree and another in the porch stanchion, twisted in the screw eyes, strung up the new line, and took the ladder back. Then he went to see his father.
"How are you, old man?" he said.
"I've been better."
"Yeah? You need a shave, but I guess that doesn't bother you."
"Not a bit."
A Kleenex lay on the floor, one slipper was under the bed, the eyeglasses were on the window ledge. The newspaper Denny had brought last Sunday lay undisturbed on the dresser. Even if his father could read well enough with the magnifier, he couldn't concentrate through a whole story.
"Looks like the Twins are starting to fold in the pennant stretch," Denny said with the brass brightness of small talk.
"Do you have enough money?"
"I'm fine, Dad."
"Take all you want."
Anachronistic philanthropy. The money had dried up years ago. "Thanks, Pop. You always took care of everyone. Good planning. Everything runs well because of you."
"Not everything. Your mother is dead."
"You can't blame God for wanting her in His garden."
"I wish it was time for me." He was lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, and he drummed his fingers on his chest. "I guess they don't t
ake weeds."
"You're not a weed, Dad."
"Hmm. At least Tiffany is okay now."
"What do you mean?"
"She finally came out of the house. She wanted her picture."
"Yeah?" (Attention, please: today's lucidity is now ended.)
"I kept one, gave her the other."
"A picture?"
"Yeah. I'm keeping it in the wardrobe."
It bothered Denny to play along with these mirages of memory, as if he were disrespecting his father. But nevertheless, a little later when he walked to the window, he opened the wardrobe. He had hauled it here from the basement in Little Canada—his sister's old clothes closet from the tiny front bedroom she had chosen over the larger one at the rear because she wanted to look out at the park instead of the alley. He remembered thinking, as he had trundled it step by step into his father's room, that the hollow boom of the metal was like the empty descent of Tiffany's life. So now he stared at it again, the dull, sculpted coating like metallic surf, scratched at the corners, the even duller patch where a sticker (RAINBOW GIRLS) had once adhered.
"How are you doing for clean shirts, Dad?" he said.
But his father had closed his eyes, so Denny didn't need a pretext to check and make sure there really wasn't a picture.
Only there was, of course.
He pushed the hem of the champagne-colored bathrobe aside and lifted out the frame. Amber. The little girl he seldom saw, who bore more than a passing resemblance to his sister, Tiffany, at age nine. Tiffany had looked almost exactly like this: blonde hair, green eyes, rosebud mouth, a certain serenity that said she was in control. But after the fire that had scarred her face and scarred her soul, she hadn't been in control. Not for almost four decades. Dead seven years now, she would be fifty-four if she hadn't overdosed. But she would always be nine years of age and unscarred in their father's resurrections.
So his old man had somehow swiped the portrait, and Denny supposed he ought to bring it to Ariel's attention.
He could take it with him and do a quick check for missing pictures on the first floor, even though he was pretty sure he would have noticed if he had seen it before. So it must be from the second or third floor.
Despite the clanging of the wardrobe, his father's breathing was deeper and his thin eyelids stayed closed and trembling with the rapid eye movements underneath. What right did he have to mess with the old guy's dreams, Denny thought. Let him have the picture until someone hollered about it. Waggling it back behind the champagne-colored bathrobe and a line of shiny trousers hanging by their unstylish cuffs, he gently closed the wardrobe doors.
He went looking for Dana then, and found her behind the house, puttering listlessly in the small garden on the side opposite the rubble of the barn. She probably knew he had parked out front; probably she was avoiding him. But given that she felt hopeless about having a relationship beyond the confines of New Eden, he would regard this as not entirely a rejection. In fact, you could almost read something flattering in the fact that she felt she had to avoid him.
"How are all the little cabbages and tomatoes today?" he said, barely glancing at the seared rows.
She straightened, fired a slate blue glance at him. "The rabbits and the caterpillars like them."
"Safe to say you won't be becoming a vegetarian any time soon?"
"Safe to say …"
"Ah, well, there's always green eggs and ham."
"Not on this farm."
He surveyed the fields and the yard. What she said was true. Other than the mangled remains of a small chicken coop, the farm had clearly kept its commitment to cash crops. "You can see why I'm a city slicker. I still think the cow's in the meadow and the sheep's in the corn." His eye paused on the sugar maple. "Then again, red eggs are not out of the question."
She offered him mild perplexity.
"You practically lassoed a redbird with your clothesline," he said.
"What are you talking about?"
"There's a nest in the maple right where you looped the rope. And it has an egg in it as big as a Ruby Red grapefruit and twice as bright."
She wasn't very good at hiding shock, this Scandinavian woman with fair skin and high color, and he almost joked about her sudden flush, "That's the shade"; but the way her glance skittered from roof to tree to sky brought him back to his own misgivings and the question he kept putting to her.
"Dana, what's going on here?"
"I don't know," she said, and she murmured a couple of half phrases, half aloud, half focused, that came together with startling vehemence. "Let's kill it!"
"What?"
"The red egg. I think we should destroy it."
"Why?"
"It's red. It's unnatural. Just show me where it is." And she started off walking toward the maple.
He picked up the conversation at her shoulder, "Okay, but I'd still like to know why. So what if it's unnatural? Better red than dead."
She wasn't going to laugh today, and she just kept marching along until she was at the base of the sugar maple, where she began to circle, craning upward at the first branch.
"I'll get the ladder," he said.
By the time he returned, lugging the stepladder, she was farther out but still circling, and he had more questions, all of them off the mark.
"Does this have something to do with the crows in the dryer? … Is there something about birds around here? … Is that why Paavo had the chicken wire around the windows?" This last even though he knew the chicken wire had only been around the lower level. And then he said: "What's with the color red?"
"Ask Amber."
"Amber?"
Dana was three steps up the ladder before he put his hand on the back of her knee. "I'll get it, if you want. What do you mean ‘ask Amber’? Is it something to do with her name – Amber … red?"
"Just steady me."
"You can't reach far enough. You have to climb out onto the branch."
She hesitated. "How will you kill it?"
"How?"
"Bring it down. I'll take care of it."
She backed off the ladder and up he went.
The branch felt solid, but the leaves were shaking and he searched the upper foliage for another source of disturbance. It was a mature tree at the zenith of the season and there were many dense clusters of leaves. Whatever laid the egg could still be up here, as aberrant as the thing itself, a Mayzie bird gone missing or mad after its involuntary act of motherhood. But nothing came at him. And the egg was still there, garish and mysterious, displayed on a nest that was more like a pile than a weave. He looked for a feather or any other sign, but no, nothing. Just the egg.
He lifted it and, like a blob of mercury, it seemed to dance in his hand. All the way down the ladder he never took his eyes from it, but he could feel Dana watching him as carefully as he was watching the egg. At the bottom he discovered she had the shovel, so she must have gone back to the garden while he was up there concentrating on the prize.
Still moving slowly, he extended his hand to show her, but before he could react, she knocked it to the ground. It hit with a muted crunch, defying gravity as it rolled upright. Something quite red shot out to hold it in that position. The thing was alive at that instant—he was sure of that—incubated without heat beyond the ambient temperature, and already consciously performing its single trick of balance in a desperate bid for survival. With unbelievable venom, Dana slammed the shovel down and crushed it flat.
She smashed it twice more, pained with the effort but swinging her forearms and hunching her body weight into each blow. The almost hatchling was mangled into a literal blood pudding of red feathers, red fluids, red membranous skin and red scaly legs, with only the sclera around its flattened remnant of an eye showing white.
Denny could not abide cruelty—could not clean a fish or kill a mouse—and though he was trying to understand the threat that this deviant embryo posed, he could not. He looked at Dana, and the repulsion in his eyes must have
penetrated her manic act, because she suddenly burst into tears and covered her face. He caught her as the shovel clanged to the ground.
He had wanted to hug Dana Novicki for a long time, he realized, but there was nothing romantic in it now. It felt paternal. If he could have somehow known that she was twenty-three years of age the day he was born, it still would have felt paternal. He held her buried against his chest, her arms crossed between them, and her remorseful shudders contradicting the ghastly act she had just committed. Things were very wrong throughout New Eden, but all he had to substantiate this was the eccentric and circumstantial evidence of a bizarre summer.
In a moment she regained her composure and, with her arms still hugged against her breasts and her eyes downcast, she stepped away.
"Tell me what it is, Dana. What's all this about pictures and red things?"
She looked dazed and weary, not even a distant relative of the woman who had swung a shovel three times against the defenseless thing at their feet.
He caught her wrist to stop her retreat.
"All right, I won't ask you anymore. But listen, I've decided to take my father out of New Eden. Things are too shaky around here. And since I don't know what's going on, I've got to take him out—even though I can't take care of him myself. In fact … in fact, I'm asking you to go on taking care of him. If you'll come with us back to where I live in Little Canada, I'll pay you everything I'm paying Ariel—"
She shook her head vigorously.
"You can live there the same as you do here, Dana—independent, no strings attached—except that I can help when I'm home from work. You can drive a car, go shopping, have a life. Don't tell me you don't want that. I know you do."
"You don't know what you're asking."
"The hell I don't."
"It would be over as soon as she knew."
"You mean Ariel? Why?"
Each flurry of head shaking gained celerity, as if she were trying to convince herself. He took her by the shoulders, but she wouldn't look at him.