Brightfellow

by Rikki Ducornet

  How vivid the day! Asthma, a wood sprite bounding and skipping beside him!

  “Once I saw a cloud that looked like the face of a fox,” she had told him. “Once a cloud just like an owl, and once just like my daddy’s nose! It was exactly like his nose except it was a cloud!”

  It is long after ten. The Circle is empty except for Goldie’s Rod, who remains seated in his backyard nursing his rye. He is vaguely wondering about his teeth. He fears something is the matter with them. Perhaps he should make an appointment. Everything is so tiresome, so tedious. If only Pea Pod were an easier child to live with. And Goldie, too, is difficult. When they met he thought her handsome. He admired her heavy skeleton. She was clearly made to last. But now her size exhausts him. Living with Goldie is like living with a boa constrictor or a large piece of farm equipment. She’s a tyrant, when you think of it, and when she sits down at the piano the world trembles.

  Blackie’s Rod is flat on his back, sleeping with his mouth open. Blackie lies beside him chuckling to herself. What would happen if she poured a thimbleful of Triple Sec down his throat? Once, briefly, she was with a man, a sculptor, who wore a long skinny braid down his back. When he abused her she left him, only to be plagued by an extended fantasy about cutting the braid off. She would make a clean cut at the nape of the neck. She would take care to dispose of the braid without leaving a trace. She imagined tracking him to a crowded restaurant. He would be drunk, engaged in an animated conversation. Everybody at the table would be animated, drunk. She would slip past, barely visible in an overcoat and a hat, her face concealed by a delicate web of veil. With a very sharp, small pair of scissors, she would cut the braid off and slip it into her coat pocket. She’d drift around a little as if looking for someone, and then she’d walk out the door. She’d find a garbage can on the street and drop in the braid. She’d continue on to her own favorite restaurant and order the clam linguini. She’d flirt with the owner, who, she knew, harbored a special weakness.

  Suddenly she finds herself prodding her Rod. “Rod! Rod!” she cries. “Wake up, darling!”

  “Why?” he mumbles and, turning, throws an arm over her. “Why do I have to?”

  “Because,” she says. “I’ve come to an important decision.”

  “Yes, Blackie,” he mumbles. “Tell me quickly, will you . . .”

  “We must find a way to have more fun. We must!”

  Already he is fast asleep, his nose mashed up against her armpit.

  Blackie imagines the sculptor would finish the evening unaware his braid is gone. At evening’s end he would put on his overcoat, the one with the thick fur collar, and drive home. He’d peel off his clothes and tumble into bed. In the morning he’d take a shower. He’d reach for his braid to undo it and it would be gone. He would touch the back of his scalp first with one hand and then with the other. His palms flat against the back of his head he’d shout out a string of obscenities. He’d slam his fists together. He’d confront the inescapable.

  That night Charter dreams he is a man made of paper. Lifted by the wind, he floats above a paper city, its windows, doors, bricks, and roof tiles all printed in colored inks. He wants to be dropped into the streets; he wants to wander among the shops and houses. But he is held suspended in the air without bone or muscle, a victim of the wind. He looks down at the city and calls out for help.

  And then he gets his wish. He is dropped to the street and sees the walls of the city rise all around him. He wills himself to stand. But he is made of paper and can only lie on his back with the knowledge that sooner or later someone will step on his heart.

  In the morning he sleeps in. There is a world of weight pressing down on him. Outside, the day is balmy and bright, a clear sky, a kind of sacred stillness until Blackie cuts loose—I need a bigger theater than this!—and Asthma, a screen door jangling behind her, dashes out of the house and into the cemetery. Just behind Dr. Swoboda’s obelisk she nearly stumbles over Pea Pod who, on her knees, is packing a freshly made hole with indeterminate refuse. Pea Pod looks up at Asthma with terror.

  “What are you doing? Pea Pod!”

  “Shut your trap,” Pea Pod implores her. “Mind your own business, Asthma!”

  But Asthma is already poking around the hole.

  “It’s my hair.” Pea Pod says it defensively. Asthma finds a tooth.

  “It’s my tooth,” says Pea Pod. “All my teeth are there. Goldie keeps them. And my baby hair. I found this box. She keeps fingernails! Every time she cuts—”

  Asthma is aghast.

  “I’d hate it!” she tells Pea Pod ragefully. “If Blackie held onto, onto . . . my own body’s stuff !” And she settles down beside her as Pea Pod finishes burying her hair, packing the top of the hole with earth. For a second they sit together behind the obelisk looking at the fresh spot of earth in the wet grass. Other than the birds, the cemetery is so still they can hear one another breathe. It is Asthma who breaks the silence. “What if all the mothers keep our bodies’ stuff?” she whispers in horror, lamenting. In the distance Blackie pounds away at The Boy Beamed to Mars.

  A Sunday brunch on the lawn, Charter squirreled among the lilacs. Blackie’s Rod does all the talking. He speaks and cannot stop speaking. Asthma is silent. Brooding. Silence fills her head like small bells, the kind sewn to woolen Christmas hats, ringing. A kind of tinnitus of the soul. The child, Charter thinks, will break away any minute. Unspool like a dervish, maybe ramble among the graves.

  Blackie’s Rod has his theories . . . at the moment he is attempting to prove that Michelangelo did not exist. Blackie knows he is compelled to deny the existence of genius because he is no genius himself. He loves smaller men. Puvis de Chavannes, for instance. A painter who never learned how to paint. If Puvis de Chavannes were alive today, he’d be designing labels for cold cream and chowder.

  Blackie’s Rod likes Senator Ratmutterer’s courage. Ratmutterer, too, has no love of genius. Both hate the pretentious Hollywood crowd, whereas Blackie torments herself with envy for Ava Gardner, who at this very moment Blackie knows is having one hell of a good time. Her Rod likes to think he is related to Rusas, Chaldea’s last king. A thing impossible to prove. He’s going on and on about Chaldea right now. Perhaps he speaks more intelligently about other things. It’s hard to say. Hard to say because no one can listen to him for long. She thinks he is like a negative vessel. A sinkhole. Things getting sucked into him. Air, for example. The minutes of the day. The passing of the hours.

  Suddenly Asthma leaps up with a small, irritated cry and dashes into the house. For the next hour he cannot track her down. What Charter does not know—no one does—is that there is a trapdoor in the attic that opens onto the roof. The roof is steep, shingled in slate, but she makes her way to the chimney and perches there. In a sea of branches, she has a full view of the Circle below. She sees Charter doing his funny thing among the lilacs, slipping in and out of the shadows. She has never understood why he doesn’t just walk around like everybody else but, after all, Brightfellow is not everybody else! A small flock of crows break into the air above her; she gazes at them, excited by the closeness of their wings and bellies, their little feet. When she looks down, Charter is gone.

  Just next door, Goldie’s jewelry, scattered on the dresser, glitters. Charter pockets some loose change. These women remind him of his mother. Her vanity, her restlessness, her fistfuls of paste and glass. He thinks that someday they will walk out, just as his mother did. Their houses too small, their lives too small; even their children are too small! Perhaps for the first time he thinks of his mother’s betrayal as the crime that eats up his life.

  He knows the family is gone for the day and that he can take his time. Luxuriating, he rifles through Goldie’s Rod’s office. His coin collection is kept in heavy leather folders like talismans, and he has no idea as to their value, or how he can get money for them. But there is one thin little coin, possibly very ancient, stamped with a rooster-headed man with the tail of a snake. This he pockets
, thinking: Wonder is the first of the passions. Was this . . . Descartes? Yes! The rest comes to him:

  Wonder is a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.

  The room does not offer much else; he finds a cigar box packed with silver dollars and a very ugly pair of gold cufflinks tucked in the back of a file cabinet. This he takes along with a brand-new eraser—only because of its newness. That night he sleeps heavily, as if drugged, the coin beneath his pillow.

  When he awakes his head chimes; yes, he awakens with a “chiming in the belfry,” as he thinks of it, attempting to make light. He is pretty certain no one else walks around submerged as he is in such a clatter. When he enters the kitchen he finds a note; Billy has a dinner plan involving a plateau de fromages, a thing he recalls from frequent summer visits to France back when he was married—such a mistake that was!—to a woman who did not travel well, who could not manage her wine, and who loathed cheese. Once, served lamb kidney, she shrieked! A woman who could not stomach the sound of foreign languages, but who had been beautiful, built like a boy with the thighs of a boy and the sweetest bottom! All this Billy had revealed the night previous as once again they sat together on the screen porch, the crickets sounding all around them, the locusts and the occasional owl, the air fragrant with the smells of freshly mowed grass and carried by the soft breeze of a deepening spring. The screen porch was divine, waiting for Charter as he wished, his eyes wandering his domain. With the sweetest bottom . . . but when she laughed, oh . . . when she laughed! I came to hear the mule, the jackal, the raven . . .

  Billy. Already Charter cares for Billy. In the first days he thought of him as the “Old Boy,” the “Old Fag,” but now it’s Billy, wistful, generous, trusting (!), clueless (thank god!), dependable—already he knows this—Billy. The note—Off on a cheese run!—left on the counter.

  Charter makes himself toast. His head clear, his heart calm. He is focused yet somehow relaxed; there is a new ease to his body, his entire manner. Billy has noticed this and is pleased to see Charter fits in his clothes, moves with a certain grace. He has provided Charter with shirts, beautiful shirts from years before when, full of hope, he took his wife to Normandy, the Val de Loire. They have been carefully washed, ironed, and folded by his vanished wife. A new pair of khakis has shown up in a locker in the gym and Charter has spent some of his pilfered cash on undershirts and socks. A bottle of Old Spice.

  He has been thinking that he should ask Goldie’s Rod how to do card tricks. He must do a better job entertaining his host tonight. Billy, a linguist with a special fascination for Romance languages, French above all. A language! Charter considers. Plucked as it were from the birds. Not only their voices, but their tracks in wet sand, the shapes of their beaks, the markings on their bellies and backs; a language painted on bark that looks like bird tracks (the birth of cuneiform? The tracks of bird feet on the wet mud by the riverside?); a people who cry out to one another like herons . . . yes! He must make this island he is inventing really shine. He climbs the stairs to his study.

  Asthma. Asthma in the glass! A grain of sugar in his eye. Today she is leaping around like a colt from the floor to her bed, bed to floor, floor to bed, then dashing through the house. Her feet are bare and her spare cotton dress billows like petals around her small frame. When he hears the front door slam he gets up to find and follow her. But when he hits the Circle she is simply in the front yard beside the beetle log, poking at it with a twig.

  “So where are they, Brightfellow?” she asks.

  “They live eventful lives.”

  “They’re beetles, Brightfellow. They live in a log!”

  As she speaks, Charter relishes the proximity to her skin, her little ears, her impossible eyelashes, a vague smell of piss, of violets. He thinks she is oblivious to her beauty, which is like a flame. He thinks, This is what angers Blackie. This flame. He says:

  “There’s a labyrinth under that log.”

  “No there isn’t.”

  “There’s a treasure at its farthest end.” She looks up at him eagerly, expecting a story.

  “Every lost ring, every lost earring, every lost button, each and every time a stone falls from Blackie’s sapphire brooch—”

  “How do you know—”

  “Because I see her wearing it sometimes when she walks over to Goldie’s for cocktails.”

  Asthma snorts.

  “Every time a pearl necklace comes undone and a pearl rolls under the piano—”

  “They find it!”

  “They find it and carry it between their teeth to their Queen.”

  “Brightfellow.” Asthma furrows her brow and, folding her arms across her chest, says: “Beetles don’t have teeth. And she’s not a queen. She’s a Papesse. Don’t you remember anything?”

  “A Papesse. Exactly. She sits in her chamber bedded down in one of your lost mittens, surrounded by all the things that we have lost.”

  “How boring is that?”

  “That’s not the end of it.” Asthma frowns and looks at him with a certain ferocity. She has a restless mind, and sometimes he wonders if he has met his match. “She craves far better,” he tells her. Asthma nods and moves closer. He notices how the sweet bones of her fingers come together as she hugs her knees.

  “There’s a beetle. A green one. Named ‘The Finder.’”

  “Because finders keepers!” Asthma approves. “He’s the one who finds this stuff!”

  “Yes. He uses it for barter. The Papesse has no interest in Blackie’s fake sapphires.”

  “They’re not fake!”

  Charter raises an eyebrow knowingly and looks at her with amusement.

  “How do you know they are FAKE?”

  “Hush,” he says. “Asthma—I have my ways.” He continues: “The Papesse has no interest in silver dollars or wedding rings inscribed with the word Forever.”

  “Beetles can’t read. But what does she want? Tell me.” She pokes Charter hard in the thigh with her finger. “Come on, Brightfellow.”

  “She wants a certain key.”

  But before he can say more, Goldie appears, wheeling toward them in platinum sandals, Pea Pod in tow, and they are formally introduced (Asthma’s words), and Asthma is being told to play with Pea Pod in her room for an hour or so because Goldie simply must get to town.

  “I’ll look after them,” he says. “I’ll take them birding.” And he flashes his binoculars.

  His pulse quickens as the three of them set off together into the woods behind Asthma’s house and into the little cemetery.

  “Look, Brightfellow!” Asthma leads him to a spot behind a familiar pink granite gravestone, one that has in the past provided him many long hours of concealment. “I buried a mole here. Don’t tell Blackie. She says it’s . . . I’m . . . macabre.” Turning, she points to an upstairs window. “I can see the exact spot where I buried it from my bedroom. It had fangs!” Charter shudders. They are standing just a foot away from one of his best vantage points in the gravestone’s shadow.

  And then she takes his hand.

  “Brightfellow,” she says. “Tell us about the key.”

  “I don’t want to hear about a silly old key!” Pea Pod whines. He notices how her eyes don’t quite match up, her expression somehow skewed, but he cannot put his finger on what it is that troubles him. Only eight years old, he thinks, and the child is already coming undone at the seams.

  “The beetles in my yard,” Asthma ignores her, “have a special key. Brightfellow has seen it.”

  “That’s stupid.” Pea Pod is scratching at a scab. She works her scabs with diligence. The air around them swims with the sounds of locusts rising and falling and rising . . .

  “The key is to a laboratory,” Charter persists, “deep beneath the earth. And it is here, in this secret laboratory, that precious things are made and astonishing things happen.”

  “Precious things,” Pea Pod muses, suddenly
mollified. “Like dollies.”

  “Dollies!” Asthma snorts.

  “Better than that. Things like . . . cinnabar. Which is a kind of scarlet sand you can find in the cliffs above the river. The ants love it—no one knows why—and grain by grain carry it in their jaws to a hidden place beneath their hill. Once inside, they grind the sand down to a fine powder and then they wash it in a copper bowl—copper, too, they manufacture, no one knows how—and then they wash it again.”

  Now the air is charged with a vivid interest from Asthma and Pea Pod both. They are sitting on a large flat stone that leans out above the woods below. Asthma and Pea Pod sit side by side, at peace with one another.

  “Then they go to sleep,” he continues. “And when they wake up the cinnabar has settled at the bottom of the bowl. They drain off the water and allow it to dry. It’s now a bright scarlet of great depth and beauty. The Papesse—”

  “Is red!” Asthma chimes, wildly excited. “Pea Pod! She’s red!”

  “Exactly so!” Charter musses Asthma’s hair affectionately. “How very quick you are, Asthma. So . . . now do you know why she is so beautiful and why she needs the key?”

  “Not really.”

  “Here’s why. The ants knead the cinnabar with soft beeswax into a paste . . .”

  “I don’t understand what you are talking about!” Pea Pod shouts and, in a rage, scrambles to her feet. “I want to go home!”

  “Don’t ruin it, Pea Pod!” Asthma cries, leaping up. “I bet the beetles wax her, Pea Pod! Like you wax a piano!” She doubles over with laughter. “Right, Brightfellow? They wax her? They wax her!” she says, barely able to get the words out.

  “But what about the key?” Pea Pod cries, on the verge of sobbing. “What about the key?”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Asthma is out of patience. “Obviously they use the key to get into the laboratory to steal THE RED WAX!”

  “Who? who?” Pea Pod screams. “WHO NEEDS THE KEY?”