by Jon Cohen
“I got up while you were asleep last night, Gracie,” he said. “You’re usually the one who gets up, I hear you every time, and I always think, There she goes, she’s taking off. Isn’t that funny? All you’re doing is going to the bathroom, or checking the stove, and I’m as sure as my next breath you’re leaving me. Well, I got up, I don’t know why. To look out the window, to look at the dark.” Atlas stared into the distance. “Up here, the dark is different—not just darker, but fuller. I guess all that means is it’s fuller of things I’m not used to. At home, I know my work shed’s out there, and my garden… but up here, you don’t know. Well, I’m thinking about that when all of a sudden something big pushes around through the tall grass down below the old pear tree, and it’s not moving right for a deer, it’s too deliberate. I start to get spooked—you know how it is with things in the dark. I move away from the window a little, like it could jump up two stories.”
Gracie nodded. She could see it, Atlas peering down at the shadows. “Louis,” she said.
“Louis, that’s right.” Atlas smiled. “There he is, steps out from behind the pear tree, not spooky at all, or playing a joke on me or anything. He didn’t even know I was there.”
Louis, Gracie thought. Louis in the light of the moon.
“His hat was off. And his scarf, too.” Atlas’s face went tight, and his voice dropped down. “It hurt me. Even now, even after all these years, it hurts me. With the baseball hat and the scarf, you forget.”
The hat and scarf. Was there ever a time, Gracie asked herself, when Louis didn’t wear them? Yes—and she saw herself, younger, and Louis a small boy, as she lifted him to kiss the skin on his cheek for the sheer pleasure of it, her lips tasting the coolness of his skin.
Atlas trailed his hand back and forth in the water. “But he never forgets, does he? Wraps himself until he’s hidden from us.”
“And from Waverly,” said Gracie, watching the rippling water behind Atlas’s hand. “From the fair citizens of Waverly.”
“Louis, our monster boy.” Atlas’s eyes cut to Louis crawling on the hillside. “And what was our monster doing last night in the dark below my window? My God—sound the alarm, let the citizens light their torches and brandish their clubs and pitchforks!”
Gracie reached for him, her hand moving out to stop his words from echoing across the water to Louis, to stop them from entering her.
But Atlas caught her hand in his and finished in a whisper. “What was he doing? Catching fireflies.”
Gracie’s eyes remained on Louis. Not a monster, because what mother could recognize or acknowledge that? What mother could abandon the dream that lived inside her, deny the one thing in this world she knows as certain, which is the absolute and everlasting beauty of her child? Yes, there was a time before he hid himself, a thousand times, and she closed her eyes and immersed herself in them, moments within moments, so that she was able to reconstruct Louis from her memories, at all ages, from all angles, capture simultaneously every mood that had ever shaped his face. For the briefest instant, there on the dock with her eyes closed against the reality of Louis on the hillside, he was hers as he had once been, before he had drawn his purple curtain across his face.
Gracie chose from the memories that swirled before her. “The fireflies,” she said.
Atlas turned to her. “Last night, you mean?”
“No,” she said. “When he was six or seven.” Louis at six or seven. His face, the lashes around his eyes. “Remember?” she said quickly, speaking before the words caught in her throat. “How he was about the fireflies, how he wanted to put them in jars and sell them at the hardware store?”
“I remember,” Atlas said.
“Sell different strengths, he said. Some jars would have five fireflies, some ten. It’s funny to think that’s how the store seemed to him—a place where his father sold hammers, and paint, and for all he knew, jars with different strengths of fireflies.”
“He loved the store.” Atlas smiled suddenly. “That’s why he thought of shelves stocked with fireflies, and who knows what all. The store is what he misses most, I think. All these years it’s been only four blocks away, and he hasn’t been able to get to it, could not bring himself to venture out on the streets of Waverly even if he wore a hundred hats and scarves.”
Then Gracie saw Atlas find a memory, saw it take shape behind his eyes, watched him work his mouth in preparation for the telling of it. Here we go, thought Gracie, there’s no stopping him now. She was glad though, at least for the moment, to have his recollections quell her own.
“Say,” he said, “you know how Louis will ask me about somebody who was in some way connected to the store? How he does because he knows it will make us both remember and move up and down the aisles again, the way he and I used to when he was little?”
“Yes, I know.” Gracie leaned against one of the pilings on the dock, braced herself really, because that’s what you did when Atlas was about to take off on one of his tales.
“Guess who he asked about last week?”
“Who?” She knew he didn’t want her to slow him down by actually guessing.
“Mrs. Meem.” And with that, Atlas’s flight began. Gracie took a deep breath and climbed on board beside him.
“That’s right,” he said, “Mrs. Meem and the dog. She and Louis both felt the same magic in the place, I think, the sheer excitement of being surrounded by so many miraculous things, over your head, in drawers, hanging from the ceiling, spilling out of boxes. Louis was satisfied just to be there amongst it all, but for Mrs. Meem, it was more than she could bear. Brought out her criminal tendencies.” Atlas raised an eyebrow.
“Poor Mrs. Meem,” said Gracie, smiling.
“Poor Mrs. Meem? Rich Mrs. Meem, you mean, rich with all the stuff she stole from my store! And tricky Mrs. Meem, too, because she tricked me and Louis for the longest time, which was understandable. Who could believe that a fifty-year-old woman with a weakness for flowered dresses and fruited hats would be snatching sixpenny nails and electrical tape? That big pocketbook of hers should have been a clue, but on her frail arm it wasn’t, even when it bulged with half the contents of my store.
“But of course, what really confused the picture,” said Atlas rubbing his chin, “was the dog.”
Gracie laughed. If it was Mrs. Meem who always got Atlas down the runway, then it was the dog who lifted him off the ground.
“Laugh away, but you know that dog was unregenerate. Nothing about it was right. That dog was so wrong you couldn’t stop staring at him. He mesmerized you! Which of course, we finally realized, was the plan. To begin with, he swaggered, which is okay for a Newfoundland or a husky, but this dog was terrier-sized, and as a rule you should never trust a little guy who swaggers. His coat was gray, but to say coat suggests it covered him completely, when in fact it only sprouted out of him here and there. That way you got a good look at his skin, which had moist pink areas, partially healed wounds from the battles he waged with his own flesh. And then, of course, there was that smell and those eyes. I believe the two were related in that his god-awful odor, which could not have come from him alone, but was perhaps something dead and rotted he rolled in, something he applied to his pink spots like a salve—I believe this overpowering stink caused his eyes to squint and cross, as if they had done everything they could to get away from it, rolled this way and that with such intensity the damage became permanent. And a dog with crossed eyes is a killer, anybody will tell you that, or at least dangerous, and at a minimum up to no good.”
“Honestly, Atlas,” said Gracie, “he was unattractive, I’ll admit, but—”
“But nothing,” Atlas countered. “He was the absolute worst, and you know it, we knew it, me and Louis, and Yank Spiller, and everybody else knew it, were helpless to do anything but eyeball that dog, while unbeknownst to us, Mrs. Meem was easing her way to the back of the store. All according to her plan. She’d get herself back there, then to make sure no one looked in her di
rection, she’d signal the dog with a dainty cough, and it would suddenly break away from the crowd that had formed around it and skitter down whatever aisle Mrs. Meem was not in. Of course we’d chase after it. When a dog runs like that, you are compelled to chase after it. But the dog was too fast, and there were too many of us in pursuit, knocking things off shelves and bumping into each other, to gain on it. The dog would suddenly skid to a halt and look over his shoulder and give us a smile. Louis always said he heard it laugh too, but I heard it as a growl, and so did the others. Grin, laugh, or growl, it stopped us in our tracks. At which point, with a steely calm, the dog proceeded to lift its leg and release a mighty stream on my merchandise.”
“Oh, Atlas, please, not this part. How many times…”
Atlas grinned at her, pleased to go on. “You would swear, watching him as we all intently did, that he took aim before he fired. I once saw him, Gracie,” he said, nudging her with his bare foot when she tried to ignore him, “I once saw him place his flow between the claws of a rake and strike a roll of tar paper. And then there was the episode of the saturation of the cement bags. He soaked five of them, moving back and forth like a fireman working a stubborn blaze.”
Atlas laughed, and so did Gracie. “Well,” he went on, “while this commotion was taking place, Mrs. Meem, alone and undetected in the other aisle, scooped up the contents of my store and stuffed them into her pocketbook. We never would have caught her except for the two cans of yellow high-gloss exterior paint. She was almost out the door, after one of these episodes, when Louis pointed to her pocketbook and said, ‘Mrs. Meem, you’re leaking.’ The paint can lid had opened, drizzling the evidence all over her flowered dress and my wood floor. She broke down, of course, and confessed and generally caused a scene too painful to contemplate. Louis was mortified for her and kept whispering to me to please let her go, which I was certainly going to do.
“A week later she returned to the store, dog and all. It became Louis’s job, from that day on, to monitor Mrs. Meem and to account for everything she took. What did she steal? What didn’t she steal? Galvanized staples, wood glue, eye hooks, bailing twine, four feet of chain link, pieces of linoleum, a bicycle tire repair kit. Louis and I would go over the list and try to imagine that Mrs. Meem was building something large and complex, requiring odd and unrelated materials. By arrangement with Pastor Meem, I presented him a monthly bill, which he paid in full without comment.”
“You’re a good and decent man, Atlas Malone,” said Gracie.
“Hush, woman, you’re trying to distract me from my finale.”
She sighed.
“Well, as you may or may not know…”
“Would it matter?” she said.
“As you may or may not know,” Atlas repeated with emphasis, “the business with Mrs. Meem and her dog went on for three years until it came to an abrupt end one cold December morning. It had to do with an electric floor heater and the dog finally picking the wrong target. We chased the dog down the aisle like always, and then when we saw dog, A, lift its leg and aim at electric heater, B, we all let out a simultaneous gasp. I have to admit, in the interest of scientific curiosity, we did nothing to intervene. The spark that jumped back and forth between the dog and the heater was a sight to behold. The dog died instantly, was thrown five feet into the air, and landed in a galvanized bucket, which I presented to Mrs. Meem, dog and all, compliments of Malone’s Hardware Store.”
Atlas stretched out on the dock, grinning up at the sky.
“Every time you tell that story, it gets worse. Galvanized bucket. That’s a lovely detail I don’t recall.”
“Ho-dee-ho,” said Atlas.
“A galvanized bucket—not just a bucket.”
“Truth be told,” said Atlas, “it was Louis who provided that little detail. Also the color of the paint. I always thought it was green. Louis was right, though. Yellow.”
“You two.”
Atlas sat up. “Now if you want to talk details, you should have heard him go on about Harvey Mastuzek last night. There’s a story with details.” Atlas rubbed his chin and looked away.
Gracie hesitated, but then had to ask. “Harvey Mastuzek in the hardware store?”
Atlas still looked away. “That’s right.”
“Harvey, who never leaves his house except to buy whiskey?”
“That’s right.”
“In our store?”
“You want to play Twenty Questions, or you want me to tell you about it?”
Gracie looked at Atlas’s back as he sat dangling his legs over the end of the dock. I could just give him a poke and over he’d go. Give him the dousing he deserves. “Tell me,” she said.
“Well,” said Atlas, suddenly up on his feet and pacing back and forth over the wooden planks, his hands moving, his elbows pumping at his sides, everything charged up and ready to go, “well, Mrs. Meem and her dog, that’s a pair we all remember. But Louis, whose intentions are often more complicated than we can know, sometimes he’ll reach deep and pull up somebody we would never consider, somebody he’ll choose to enliven his recollections of the store. Like Harvey Mastuzek. ‘Remember Harvey Mastuzek?’ he said. ‘Remember the time he came into the store?’ No, I said. ‘You don’t?’ his voice incredulous, but kind of sly and amused, too, like he caught you not paying attention to something really important, but on the other hand not important at all, or important in a way you couldn’t imagine was important unless you were Louis.”
Gracie clutched the edge of the dock.
“He proceeded to tell me the long and complicated story of Harvey Mastuzek, longer and more complicated, if you can believe it, than any of my stories, and filled with nuances inside of nuances, most of which I missed and won’t attempt to repeat. Louis went on for an hour, maybe two, about the time, now hold tight, Gracie, about the time Mr. Mastuzek came into the store and bought a black rubber washer. That’s right, a thoroughly unremarkable man enters my hardware store for the first and only time in his life and purchases, in a transaction that could not have taken more than three minutes from start to finish, one thirteen-cent washer for his faucet. Louis’s recounting of that transaction was beautiful and frightening. He described Harvey Mastuzek’s every feature—not just how he looked, but right down to speculating on when he last shaved and were those sideburns beside each ear, or simply missed hairs, missed hairs for God’s sake, Gracie. He went on about his sharp whiskey odor, the way he spoke and cleared his throat and breathed, the way he moved, what he wore, where he might have bought what he wore, whether or not what he wore was appropriate for the season. On and on. Then Louis discussed the journey down the middle aisle with Harvey Mastuzek and what they saw, what was displayed on the counters, what was on the Peg-Board hooks, the size of the Phillips screwdrivers, how much a ball-peen hammer cost, actually getting the correct cost for that particular year, Gracie. And then the search for the right rubber washer. Louis holding one up, then Harvey Mastuzek taking it and moving under the light to get a better look, then shaking his head no, and Louis holding another one up, until they finally find the right size. That’s the transcendent moment for Louis, the look that passes between him and Harvey Mastuzek, the recognition of rightness—the discovery of the rubber washer that will do the job. But there’s more, Gracie.”
And Gracie thought, Of course there’s more. It is the essence of Louis to give more, to reveal, even as he himself remains unrevealed. My shadowed boy, throwing light upon everything, the brilliance of your gaze causing us to look everywhere but at you. “Yes,” said Gracie, “more.”
“Then he tells me about the return trip up the aisle, past all the same stuff, but the perspective is different now, not just because they are moving up the aisle instead of down it, but because the discovery of the absolutely right washer has colored his view, has put a glow on everything, an aura. At last, they get to the cash register and money changes hands, thirteen cents—that’s one buffalo nickel, and one Jefferson nickel, and three pennie
s. It takes Louis ten more minutes of description to move Harvey Mastuzek away from the cash register and out the door, and when it’s all over, Louis lifts his eyes and peers at me from behind his baseball hat and his scarf. He wanted to see if I had gotten it. Of course I hadn’t. I was exhausted. I had heard the story, but I hadn’t heard the story hidden inside the story.”
Atlas knelt beside Gracie and lightly touched her arm. She looked up at him. “This morning, I got it,” he said. “I was brushing my teeth and it came to me, like Louis timed it to go off that way, after a night’s rest.”
“The story inside the story.”
“Yes. The way he saw it, Harvey Mastuzek could walk into the store only one time. It was Mrs. Meem all over again, as Louis perceived it. The magic abundance of the store overwhelmed him, too—the curative potential, the cascade of visual and sensual stimuli—but Harvey responded the opposite of Mrs. Meem. Where she had to immerse herself again and again, to possess because simple contact was not enough, Harvey Mastuzek had to stay away, look once, and then stay away. Like a quick glance at the burning sun. So that’s why, in Louis’s mind, Harvey Mastuzek’s three minutes in the store merited two hours of recollection. And no doubt he gave me the abridged version. A premiere moment in Harvey Mastuzek’s life took place before Louis’s eyes, so Louis had to give it the meticulous attention it deserved.
“But wait, right? The shelves of Malone’s Hardware Store contained no magic, just hammers and saws, and duct tape, and putty knives. Where’s the magic that compelled these people? The fireflies, Gracie. Squeezed in between the roofing nails and the wire clippers, or somewhere, who knows where, Louis saw the different-strength fireflies. Because Louis saw them, he believed Mrs. Meem and Harvey Mastuzek saw them, too. And the fireflies imbued everything in the store with their luminescent halo. Here’s another way of putting it: To a certain kind of person, a hardware store is a holy place. There, that’s a good moral to the story.” Now Atlas was beside Gracie, and together they sat, arms around each other as they watched their distant son moving in the grass of the hillside. When Atlas spoke again, it was in a whisper.