The Shark Curtain

by Chris Scofield

  Mom and Dad used to make each other laugh using bad Swedish accents. Da-OO, da-OO, was usually in there someplace, like a stuttering owl trying to learn English.

  Luca and I leaned our bikes against the souvenir shop and, hand in hand, headed toward the Stations of the Cross.

  “Aren’t we going to stop someplace?” he asked after a while.

  But I didn’t answer and stared at statues of Jesus instead. In the first four stations, the sculptor gave Jesus a thumb and three fingers not four, and His hair is red, not black or even chestnut. His cheeks are either fat, like he has nuts in them, or starvation thin, and his skin is powdered-wig white.

  “Lily?”

  I turned to face Luca and kissed his cheek.

  As he hurried us along the trail, looking for the deer path between Stations Nine and Ten, I felt cameras on us, like we were actors in a film and nothing was real, nothing familiar. Until Luca and I sat Indian-style in the bushes and he pulled me toward him, and with one hand on the back of my head and his tongue scraping my teeth, I felt the Stations of the Cross press in around us, crowding us like the angry apple trees in The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know this for certain, but I think the Stations of the Cross embarrass Jesus—all that attention over something He’d sooner forget.

  He paced nearby, impatient for me to finish so we could head home again.

  And after nineteen minutes (a prime number of course) the movie men put down their cameras, the Stations of the Cross returned to duty, and I stopped kissing tall blond big-nosed Luca from Sweden. I liked kissing him, but not that much.

  I was myself again: Lily Asher of Crawford Heights, Portland.

  Racing Jesus home.

  His sandals slapping the pavement behind my bike.

  Chapter 27

  Red Strings

  It’s raining when I step off the school bus and walk to the entrance of Crawford Woods. I consider going in, then change my mind as elderly Mrs. Singer hurries by with her umbrella.

  “For goodness sake, Lily!” she says, slipping her arm through mine. “Let’s get home and out of the rain!” Mom’s trained the neighbors to look out for me, and Mrs. Singer is the most conscientious. She drags her basset hound, Edgar, behind us.

  “The woman has an unerring way of walking me just before a cloudburst,” Edgar says, with quiet contempt. Edgar’s never talked to me before. I can’t place the accent.

  Edith Singer’s yellow plastic galoshes belonged to her dead husband. They’re too big for her, and make a squish-fart sound when she walks in them.

  Lauren’s home; her wet umbrella’s in the laundry sink along with the empty birdcage. Harry and Bess Cockatiel died over the weekend, victims of a contaminated cuttlebone.

  I grab a towel from the dryer and hurry inside.

  In the kitchen, a bubbling pot of spaghetti sauce shoots little red strings all over the white stovetop. I turn off the burner, move the pot to the back, and cover it.

  The house is quiet. No jazz on the hi-fi, no Mom on the phone, no last-minute chores before Dad gets home. I remember the last time the house felt this empty: Mom’s miscarriage (the one before the hysterectomy), and Frog Boy floating in an ocean of stars.

  “Mom? Lauren?”

  Next to the stove is the wall phone and, below it on the counter, an ashtray with a dead lipstick-stained cigarette, most of it ash. The phone book is open, and on the page titled Pharmacy lies an empty Valium bottle.

  “Mom?”

  “Come here,” Lauren says. Her voice is dull and sluggish, like she can hardly be bothered to speak. I follow it into the family room, where she stands over our mother.

  Mom lies on the carpet, her back to the TV, her arms and legs extended, her body relaxed. She blinks but doesn’t change expression. On TV Mike Douglas laughs with actors Vincent Price and Dick Shawn, then holds up the new Turtles record.

  I look at Mom again.

  Then Lauren.

  And back to the TV. I like the Turtles.

  “She won’t talk to me,” Lauren says. “I was telling her about something at school, then the phone rang. I thought it was Simone so I grabbed it, only it was Dad saying he was going to be late.” Dad’s not supposed to be late anymore. “Then she put down the oven mitt, and walked in here and laid down.” She points at Mom. “Just like that.”

  I know I should be frightened but something’s always wrong with Mom.

  “At first I thought she was looking for something under the couch,” Lauren continues, “but then she didn’t move. I turned on the TV because I thought that maybe, maybe she’d like it and sit up.” Lauren taps her bottom lip; it’s what she does these days instead of sucking her thumb. “What do we do, Lily?”

  Standing over Mom like this, it’s a long way down. Like the view from the top of the rope in PE. Or Mike Savage’s roof before he launched himself into a mountain of old mattresses and furniture cushions. Like the quarry pit, and the white horse.

  “Lily?”

  “She’s blinking,” I answer. “That’s good.”

  “Yeah, that’s good.”

  “Mom?” I say, touching her shoulder. Her hair is a mess.

  “Look at her lipstick,” Lauren whispers.

  “It’s smeared.”

  “I’m going to fix it. Mom would want me to fix it,” Lauren says, hurrying out of the room.

  “Don’t!” I cry after her.

  “But Mom wouldn’t like it if we . . .”

  Boo-hoo! I want to scream. Boo-fucking-hoo! But instead I say, “It’s okay, Lauren. Mom will fix it when she gets up. She doesn’t need makeup to rest.”

  But she does. She needs makeup and brushed hair and big beautiful terrible boobs and big beautiful terrible paintings. She needs people to think she’s gorgeous even when she’s selfish and drunk, and making spaghetti and calling in prescriptions and even talking to her youngest daughter is too much work. Maybe way too much work, so she lies down on the floor . . . right there . . . scaring her kids, stopping the clocks. Even Mike Douglas gets out of his chair and knocks on the TV screen asking if she’s okay.

  “What if it’s more than just pills?” my sister whispers. “What if she’s really sick? Like neurologically.” Lauren can spell the word too. She’s the second-best junior high speller in the district.

  “Maybe we should put her to bed,” I say. “We’re not supposed to call 911. Remember what she said when we moved in? She doesn’t want us to draw attention to ourselves.”

  “But what if we shouldn’t move her? Talk to her, Lily! Try talking to her!”

  “Mom,” I say, kneeling down beside her, “do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  “Nooo,” she slurs. “I’ll beeee ohh-kay in a minnn-it.” Is she drunk? I don’t smell the booze.

  “She said no.” I stand up. “But you could get her a drink of water if you want to. Put a straw in it.”

  My heart is pinched and frostbit from holding Mom too close. She doesn’t get to be beautiful and tired of doing married-mom-stuff at the same time.

  Not this time anyway.

  When I call the racetrack, we get a recording.

  We don’t call the police or ambulance. We don’t throw out her pills because we don’t know which ones she needs. We don’t interfere with the scene of the crime, move the body, or touch the evidence, like they say on detective shows. We don’t answer the phone when it rings or collect the evening paper.

  We don’t get up until after it turns dark, and the only light inside comes from the television.

  We kneel beside Mom instead and take turns holding her hand. In the next forty minutes, she sits up twice, mumbles about spaghetti sauce and making dinner, tells us she loves us, then lies down again.

  Rain blasts the windows. It fills the quarry pit, rinsing Beauty’s blood off its rocky walls. It knows Mom is sick and Lauren and I are alone with her.

  “She’s going to be okay, right?” Lauren whispers.

  Maybe Mom’s had a stroke. Maybe somebody poisoned h
er like someone poisoned Fifi.

  “Sure,” I say as I gather up the liquor bottles. “Besides, Dad will be here soon. He’ll know what to do.”

  Glug, glug, glug, down the kitchen sink.

  “She’ll be mad,” Lauren says.

  “So will Dad,” I tell her. “Booze is expensive, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe it was a bad batch and it made her sick. We have to protect her.”

  If Mom lies there much longer, she’ll sink through the carpeting, through the house frame, into the soggy ground where the water table leads to Crawford Woods and the quarry. Where the rain collects at the bottom, puddling where SOG shot Beauty, and angels stand around a giant doughnut hole in the sky looking down at all the stupid stuff people do on earth. There’s a picture like that in one of Mom’s art books.

  I feel SOG’s hands on my shoulders but I shrug them off.

  I told Him to leave me alone.

  * * *

  Dad insists on an ambulance, and after the paramedics leave, he sticks TV dinners in the oven and puts Mom to bed.

  “Exhaustion,” he explains, which means we’ll never know for sure. Sometimes Mom reminds me of the rose in the bell jar in The Little Prince. “You girls can tuck yourselves in tonight, can’t you?” Dad kisses us both. “She’ll be fine, don’t worry. We’ll all be fine after a good night’s sleep.”

  Fine, schmine.

  Lauren falls apart. She cries for three minutes and five seconds without blowing her nose, even after Dad gives her his hanky.

  “And you, Lily?” he finally asks. “You haven’t said much.”

  I shrug.

  “Kit said something happened to you yesterday. Can you tell me about it?”

  “No, nothing happened. I’m good.” And press Mrs. Wiggins’s tooth to my chest.

  Lauren and I play three games of Yahtzee before the rain stops.

  A scratch at my window makes me jump, but it’s only a branch. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so mean to SOG. Maybe I should have been meaner.

  “I’m tired,” Lauren says, lying back on my pillow.

  I sleep until 11:40 when I sneak into her room, untangle her lucky jump rope, and tiptoe downstairs with it. “Me too,” I mumble.

  Me too: M is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, E the fifth, T the twentieth, and each O a fifteen. Thirteen plus five, plus twenty, plus thirty, equals sixty-eight.

  We live at 1968 Crawford Heights Boulevard. Mom married Dad when she was nineteen. There are numbers that represent times and places, dates that tell you when things will happen like Jamie’s astrology charts. Numbers have colors, even music.

  It’s sixty-eight steps from my bedroom, down the stairs to the laundry room, where moonlight splashes the wet clothes sitting on the dryer and an unpacked grocery sack stands on the washing machine. Inside it are a bottle of bleach, a can of Insta-Starch, and two nooses of clothesline.

  I grab the clothesline and a flashlight, then throw the lucky jump rope in the basket of my ten-speed.

  I know what I have to do.

  It’s the last time I’ll ride my bike to the quarry pit.

  Promise.

  Chapter 28

  Spider Eyes

  It’s 11:32 p.m. when I rocket through the dark neighborhood to Crawford Butte. The drying streets are empty.

  Behind me is Mom.

  Up ahead is the basalt quarry, the bombed-out crater, the hole all the way to China. Up ahead is the quiet, cool openness of the pit and the star-filled sky overhead.

  Behind me is Mom.

  Up ahead is Beauty’s ghost.

  I race along the sawdust trail that narrows and widens, narrows and widens, breathing with me like the giant walk-through lung at the science museum.

  The woods are cold and black, but I don’t care. Emptiness is easier to see in the dark.

  I stick the dogtooth necklace in my pocket. I know what I have to do. Since I can’t take back the lie I told Beauty, I’ll do the next best thing: I’ll give him my most prized possession.

  Starting today, I’ll be a better person. I’ll take care of Lauren and love my parents less.

  I’ll stop talking to Jesus. If He says something, I’ll ignore Him. I’m a little shaky on what to do if He never leaves me alone, but as Frieda says, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

  The shimmering song of the bike’s wet tires fills my ears; the bouncing flashlight lights the bushes and trees off the trail. When it turns its blinding beam on me, I stop to readjust it, and shine it into the dark woods.

  You’re almost there, blink spider eyes in the bushes.

  Every branch points to the pit up ahead.

  Is that Wolfman Jack on the radio?

  At the chained barrier that reads, Stay Out! Trespassers will be prosecuted! I lift my bike over, lean it against a tree, and walk into the clearing where the dark sleepy shapes of Crawford Quarry dinosaurs sit in the shadows: long-necked earth shovels, snaggle-toothed rock crushers, big slow dump trucks. “Start your engines!” Mom jokes when the men begin their noisy day. Sometimes she swears she can hear them “open a lunch box.”

  Hurry! Beauty is waiting. A soul stays in the place where it died for sixty-two hours, or sixty-two days, depending on which book you read.

  If Wolfman Jack is on the radio it must be past midnight. The witching hour. Besides, the office door is open and a man sits inside listening to the radio and smoking a cigarette. If he sees me, he’ll kick me out and I’ll never have a chance to set things right with Beauty.

  I keep an eye on the office as I tiptoe to the center of the clearing and look into the giant black bowl.

  “The Wolfman’s next dedication goes out to Sis in Baltimore. That’s right, you knooow who you are.” Wolfman Jack howls and I get shivers. “On your six-month anniversary,” he growls, “Tony says . . . ‘I Got You Babe’ by Sonny and Cher.”

  I hold out my hands over the pit (like Allison did) to calm the dying horse.

  “I’m coming,” I say out loud.

  They say our love won’t pay the rent, before it’s earned, our money’s all been spent . . .

  Something flies past me and I flinch. It’s a bat, and a second later a bat cotillion, diving and dodging and dancing midair. The pit echoes their high-pitched chirps.

  “Stop it,” I say, waving them off. “Stop!” even louder. They’ll scare Beauty. “Leave him alone!”

  The guard turns off the radio and listens. I dart behind a dump truck and watch while he flips off the office light. He stands in the doorway looking for movement in the dark. Satisfied there is none, he turns on the light and radio again.

  The closest thing to the rim of the pit is a deformed gnarly old tree. In the dark it reminds me of an enchanted tree from fairy tales, but tonight it has to get me to Beauty, and as I talk to it softly, I tie Lauren’s jump rope around its trunk, knot one clothesline to the end of it, then another to the first, pull out the kinks, and slowly lower myself over the edge.

  I got flowers in the spring, I got you to wear my ring . . .

  Step.

  By.

  Step.

  Down.

  The.

  Wall.

  Angry.

  Scared.

  Angry.

  Scared.

  I got you babe . . .

  Billy Vega calls me “babe.” He’s the biggest flirt at school. It doesn’t even bother him that I’m a weirdo.

  . . . got you to walk with me . . . you to talk with me . . .kiss goodnight . . . hold me tight . . .

  The tune fades as I climb further into the quarry pit. My hands and back hurt, but for a moment I’m braver than I’ve ever been, braver than Dog Girl or Wonder Woman. I’m a girl version of Trevor Howard in Von Ryan’s Express, following some stupid order from Frank Sinatra that will probably get me killed.

  My skinny-girl muscles gleam with sweat as I lower myself down the side of an old Italian villa that’s crawling with Nazis.

  Inside, Jesus instructs his aide, �
��Kill every white horse you see. And when you’re done with that, kill all the Jews.”

  “But sir . . .”

  Jesus grabs the halo off His head and sticks it in His young assistant’s face. “See this, soldier?” He spits. “I’m your superior, damn it!”

  Only suddenly it’s a swastika. Maybe it always was a swastika.

  It was silly to think a lucky jump rope and two lengths of clothesline would be enough to get me to the floor of the pit.

  I fall and, before I can catch my breath, land with a thud.

  On my side. On my arm. And without thinking, I roll, for good measure, roll like a potato bug or a hedgehog, roll like they taught us in fire drills.

  The pain is immediate, but it doesn’t matter. Beauty suffered more. Jesus suffered too, but He wanted mortality so let Him have it. Mom says men never suffer as much as women do, anyway.

  My whole body hurts. Taking shallow little breaths, I inventory each part: feet, legs, hips, chest, back, hands, neck; everything’s fine except my left arm. Mom’s going to kill me. I broke that arm in the car crash; the cast just came off three months ago.

  How many times can a person break the same arm before it decides to grow in a different direction?

  The ground is hard. My sweater and windbreaker won’t be warm enough tonight; it’s cold at the bottom of the pit. When I roll onto my knees, the monstrous outline of a steam shovel stares at me.

  The pit is filled with big machines, their powerful jaws lifted in mid-bite.

  I hold my arm against me and try not to cry.

  I came here for a reason, right? Concentrate, I tell myself. We have business. Do what you have to do, then somehow get out of here and go home.

  Where is the . . . I left my flashlight on the rim. Good thinking, Lily.

  Lily Lily bo-billy, banana-fana fo . . .

  I smell the gunfire and taste the cold sour metal of Beauty’s blood in my mouth. He’s close.

  Emptiness pulls, and I know where I’m going.

  Beauty’s ghost lies on his side, his legs extended, his body relaxed, his head turned away from me, just like Mom this afternoon. He’s not surprised to see me but even with the necklace in my pocket I don’t know what to say to him at first, and the minutes pass slowly.