Like Light for Flies

by Lee Thomas

  “You go on down and eat your supper,” he says. “I need a word with Toby.”

  “What did Mr. Manheim say?” I ask.

  “Never you mind about that.”

  And I know it’s bad. I can tell by the frown on my father’s face. Whatever Duke’s father told him was hateful and wrong, but it was more than that. “He lied,” I say, though I have no idea what was actually said. My only instinct is to defend my brother from the motherless cur’s accusations. “You know he did. Toby didn’t do nothing wrong. Duke’s a liar and Mr. Manheim’s a liar and that’s all there is to it.”

  “Go eat your supper, Peter,” is my father’s quiet response.

  I stretched out on the sofa and listened to my brother’s messages. Each word stung like needles passing through my chest, and after listening to the last message—“The machine still works, Petey. It still works.” —it felt as if a surgeon were yanking the sutures tight, pulling my ribs together so that my heart had no room to beat.

  How could my father have built that thing? He wasn’t a bad man, ask anyone. Nearly a hundred people had attended his funeral, and all of them spoke of his kindness, his humor, his helpfulness. He was a Christian, but quietly so, never waving his Bible, never wielding scripture like a weapon. As a father, he was evenhanded and warm. He believed in the belt; he used it infrequently but with great seriousness.

  Lying on the sofa, looking at the ceiling and through it, imagining my wife in bed, turned to the wall the way Toby had been turned away, I remembered the sound of my father’s belt cracking across my brother’s backside as tears fell from my cheeks—more salt for the fried chicken on my plate. My mother said nothing. She ate nothing, merely pushed a fork through her potatoes, creating trenches as if preparing soil for planting.

  “Your brother is going to be staying in the workshop for a time,” my father says.

  I don’t understand. “What did he do?”

  “He’ll be staying in the workshop for a time,” my father says as if I hadn’t heard him. “Go fetch my army cot from the attic and take it down to the kitchen. Then your mother will take you into town for a cone and a coke.”

  I grew restless on the sofa. The past and present fell on me like blankets of fiberglass, scratchy and insulating, keeping things in that I’d rather expel. I stood. In the kitchen I took a beer from the fridge. With my tongue and throat soothed, I sat on a barstool at the kitchen island and traced the lines of grout that formed gutters in the tiled countertop. My finger pushed against a pile of mail, scooting the low stack toward the counter’s edge.

  No one said a word about what my brother had done. At the Dairy Queen my mother revealed nothing about what she knew, if in fact she knew anything. It was very possible my father hadn’t shared what Rick Manheim had said with her. You didn’t talk about the bad things, and the worse a thing was, the quieter you kept it. It was a practice everyone in Barnard seemed to ascribe to. At school the next day and the day after that, I noticed no changes in the way my schoolmates behaved around me, no whispers of scandal, no sidelong glances of pity or disgust. If Duke Manheim had said anything to his buddies at Beall’s High, it had yet to filter down to McNeil Middle School. Whatever had occurred between my brother and Duke was terrible enough that neither they nor their fathers would let the information escape.

  As a kid, I wasn’t equipped to think in broad terms, so my speculations were laughable. I imagined Toby had called Duke a bad name or maybe he’d stolen one of his friend’s toys or record albums.

  Again I nudged the stack of mail. A bill lay on top of the pile; it was from Willow House, where Toby lived, had lived for the past eight years. I found it comforting such institutions no longer called themselves asylums.

  The beefsteak is tough and the potatoes have been boiled too long and decompose into mush beneath my fork and nothing has flavor no matter how much salt I add. My father sits on my right and smokes a cigarette. His eyes are like Toby’s—red and dull. He looks as if he’s been awake since Sunday afternoon, since Mr. Manheim’s phone call. My mother chats throughout the meal, talking about Mrs. Burlingson’s crop of squash and raspberries, and Mrs. Turred’s lousy washing machine flooding her basement again, and how Mr. Evans at the grocery told her that he’d caught the Perry boy trying to pilfer candies from the rack by the register. She babbles on and on. It seems she speaks about every family in Barnard except ours. As she clears the dishes, my father stubs out his cigarette and immediately lights another.

  “I’m driving on up to Dallas,” he says through a cloud of blue-gray smoke.

  My mother halts as if someone has put a gun to her back. “The dealership sending you?” she asks.

  “I’ll be heading out here shortly,” he says, not answering her question. “I’ll try to be back by supper tomorrow, but no need to wait on me. I’ll call if things take longer than expected.”

  Mama continues on to the sink and gently places the dinner plates in it.

  “That’s fine,” she says. “We’re having hot dogs and beans. They’ll keep well enough.”

  I finished my beer, rinsed the bottle, and placed it in the recycling bin. With my ass propped against the counter, I listened to Toby’s messages again with the same ache and constriction in my chest. Though very late, after two in the morning, I decided to call him back, but he didn’t answer. I left a message so thick with false enthusiasm at hearing from him, I felt ashamed. The performance was as pitifully overblown as my childhood death scenes.

  Granted, at that point my brother was no longer able to detect such variances in vocal patterns. He heard what he wanted to hear and inferred the emotions he expected. Oddly enough, in many other ways his condition had improved. His paranoia and the violent outbursts it caused had lessened considerably, and I was grateful for that. Still, they shouldn’t have let him out of the home, not without supervision. A guy like my brother couldn’t care for himself, not for long, not for days and nights at a time.

  After Daddy leaves for Dallas I ask Mama why Toby has to stay outside, and she tells me that Daddy thinks it is best. I persist, because as always, I’m told nothing.

  “Don’t worry so much about this. Your brother is going to be fine, Petey, just fine. Your father is taking care of him.”

  I note the oddity of her comment. She speaks as if Toby is sick or injured, rather than being punished for whatever had caused his fight with Duke Manheim. My confusion grows and feeds my frustration, but my mother deflects my questions, tuts them away, smiles at me as if humoring a feeb. After a time, I become convinced she doesn’t know what’s wrong with Toby. I can tell by the confusion in her eyes and the way she smoothes her hair and the way she smiles, which isn’t really a smile at all, and I know that asking her questions is pointless.

  My mother accepted my father’s silences with the same gravity she’d accepted every word he’d ever spoken. As a boy, I’d thought she had as many answers as my father, an equal on the plain of adulthood with her husband, but that wasn’t the case at all. She wasn’t a partner quite so much as an appendage, a utensil, an appliance with a good nature and a pleasant face. It wasn’t until my father died that I understood the depth of her dependence on the man. Without my father, she turned to me for answers, looked to me to make her decisions. Should I sell the house, Petey? Should I move in with your Aunt Ruby and Uncle Lou? Isn’t it better if I don’t go to the hospital? My visits always upset Toby so. If you think I should, I will but…

  I called Willow House’s emergency number, but went directly to voice mail. Once the tone sounded I let them know that Toby had slipped out again. I asked that they not involve the authorities, though I know they are bound by law to do so. Leaving my number, I hung up and dig in my pocket for the keys I’d taken from the hook in the garage.

  Then I leave the house. In my car, I consider leaving Toby to the professionals at Willow House. All I had to do was call them back and give them the address. There was only one place he could be.

  “T
he machine still works, Petey. It still works.”

  It’s Friday, and I’m walking up the dirt drive to my house. The dust is thick and joins the pollen and both fill the air creating a golden filter for the afternoon sun, which hangs, glaring over the roof. The door to my father’s workshop is open, and I see Toby inside. He is holding a small bucket and a brush, and he’s covering the window in the door with black paint. He is concentrating on the task, lining up his brush carefully before touching it to the pane and sweeping it across the glass. He is so absorbed in the task that my arrival at the door surprises him.

  He flinches and steps back and then his posture relaxes. “Hey, squirt,” he says, and the familiarity, the normality of the greeting refreshes like a gulp of sweet tea.

  “Hey,” I reply. “Whatcha doing?”

  “Painting,” he says.

  “Painting windows?”

  “That’s what it looks like,” he says.

  I notice something is missing from my brother’s eyes. They are red and the lids are heavy and a dull cast covers them.

  “Why?”

  “It’s a project I’m working on with Daddy,” he says. He seems unsure of the words, and he gazes at the concrete floor of the workshop and then back at the black band he has painted on the glass. “It’s a secret.”

  “Are you gonna come back inside?” I ask.

  “Not for a while,” Toby says. He dips the brush into the bucket and stirs the black paint gravely.

  “Why not?” I’m desperate for information, and even though I see my brother pulling into his thoughts, moving away from me as surely as if he were being dragged behind a speeding truck, I persist. “What happened? What did you do?”

  “You better go on inside, now,” he says.

  I look past him into my father’s shop. The space was always off limits to us unless we had permission from our father to enter it for a tool or a can of oil. It is large, a converted two-car garage. The floor is clean and cleared except for the army cot, which Toby has made up neatly with sheets and a blanket. The workbenches form a large L in the far corner, and they are similarly devoid of clutter. Neatly organized shelves run floor to ceiling on the right just beyond the cot.

  Switching tack I ask, “Can I help?”

  Like my father Toby responds as if I’ve said nothing at all. “You better go on inside.”

  Then he scrapes his brush along the side of the paint can and presses its bristles to the window. With his customary precision, he coats the glass from frame to frame without getting a speck of paint on the trim.

  It is the middle of the night and I can’t sleep. I’m still not used to having the room to myself. Toby’s absence is a hole I fear I’ll be dragged into. I leave my bed and go to the window and stare down on Daddy’s workshop, and the dark building with its black windows makes me think of a haunted house, and I think my brother is the phantom prowling it. Daddy’s truck is parked only a few feet from the door. He’s back from Dallas. I don’t remember having heard him come home.

  After I tire of looking at the workshop, I leave the window and then leave my room and wander down the hall to the stairs. Though I’ve made no conscious decision about where I’m going, I creep downstairs and detect a muffled clicking sound that draws me to the kitchen. Daddy sits at the table under the cone of light falling from the hanging brass fixture, bent over a box with a number of colored wires snaking from its side. A brown paper bag rests to his left. Next to this is the slide projector Mama bought at the flea market in Bastrop. She’d never used it so far as I knew, but she’d been very proud of “the deal” she’d found at the time, and I wonder why Daddy has scavenged the device from the hall closet.

  He looks up and fixes grim eyes on me. The overhead light casts shadows down his face, and the dark patches beneath his eyes and chin, and the lines around his mouth look like blotches of rot. A stricken quality passes over his face, and he blinks, and I wonder if he recognizes me at all. He puts down his screwdriver and rubs his eyes and I again think he looks as if he hasn’t slept since Mr. Mannheim’s call all of those days ago. His hair is greasy and flat and the skin on his face hangs as if the muscles beneath have relinquished their grasp.

  “Peter,” he says quietly. He reaches out and lifts the brown paper bag from the tabletop and lowers it to the floor beside his feet. “You shouldn’t be up.”

  “Did you have a good trip to Dallas?”

  “Fine,” he says dryly.

  I think to ask if he’s found anything that will help Toby, but the expression on his face, empty of all but flickers of life, warns me away from the question. So I stand there silently, following the trajectory of the wires poking from the metal box before him, and I look back to the slide projector sitting like a turtle near the edge of the table, and I take in the spools of wire and the cutters and a box with the word “rheostat” stenciled across its oatmeal-colored cardboard box.

  “You should be in bed,” he says.

  “Maybe I could help.”

  “Get your ass to bed, Peter!”

  The following day I see neither Daddy nor Toby, but when I’m outside playing in the yard, kicking a ball across the scrub grass and dirt, I hear evidence of their presence in the workshop. Whispers. The clicking of tools. At one point I kick my ball toward the back wall of the workshop and press my ear close to the blackened window. The glass muffles Daddy’s voice, but I recognize his tone, and I realize he is doing all of the talking. I want to hear the words but they are garbled and incomprehensible like prayers spoken under water.

  I imagine my father and brother hunched over the slide projector and various electrical wires and components. Daddy might be pointing at a device and a wire and explaining why the two must be joined in a specific way, and I think Toby is lucky to be spending so much time with Daddy. A tickle of jealousy joins my curiosity, and for a time I forget that Toby is being punished, or that he’s not well. I still don’t understand his condition, but I know I want to join them in the workshop, to be part of the project. Resting my foot on the red ball, I look around the yard, searching for an excuse to knock on the workshop door. But instead of finding a magic key that will justify my intrusion, I see Mama standing at the corner of the house. Her arms are crossed, and she frowns at me.

  Later that night, I’m watching television. It is near my bedtime. Mama has given me a plate of two cookies and a small glass of milk to enjoy while Carol Burnett and her costars stumble and mug for the camera.

  Just as a skit is about to end, the lights in my house dim and the television screen goes green-black in a hiccup of electric current. I think little of it. Such hiccups are common during storms or high winds. But it isn’t storming, and I hear no gusts in the eaves. A roar of laughter, harsh and mocking, pours from the television when it comes back on, and I feel a chill. A minute later, the lights flicker off again.

  Vast stretches of darkness gave way to the occasional streetlamp. Driving toward my childhood home, I attempted to shake off the memories, hoping to loosen the tightness in my chest, but the program in my head was nearing an end, and I didn’t have a switch to turn it off, not even a rheostat to adjust its power.

  What I remembered clearly was that things in our house seemed to return to normal after the night of the flickering lights. The next morning, I found Toby at the breakfast table. He appeared exhausted and confused, but his fatigue didn’t seem quite so dire. He wore a clean white t-shirt and a baseball cap, which he’d pulled low on his brow. Mama had fixed pancakes and bacon and Toby tore through them. My father joined us. Unlike Toby, he barely ate. His exhaustion remained, and he smoked cigarettes through the meal, blowing smoke onto his plate, as if in a trance.

  Nothing was said about Toby or the workshop or what they had constructed within it, but apparently the experiment had done some good, because for the first time in a week, Toby slept in our room. He went to school on Monday, and when he came home he let himself into the workshop, where he would stay for an hour. And then suppe
r. And then to bed. The spark in his eyes had not returned, and he wore his baseball cap everywhere, somehow eluding Mama’s rule about hats at the dining table, which also distressed me because it wasn’t usual, but he was back in the house and things had reached a level of normality. And I started to believe the darkness that had tarnished our golden boy was finally being wiped away.

  A week before Christmas my father had his first aneurism. It didn’t kill him, that would take six more years and two more “cerebral events,” but that night, he died some in my eyes, because I saw what he’d built. I discovered his answer to my brother’s troubles.

  After my mother’s tears and my father’s expression of perplexed misery, and after the paramedics and the ambulance, and after the red lights vanish over the hill and the front door closes behind me, I trudge to the sofa and fall onto it. Toby is already there, staring at the television; both his face and the appliance screen are dark.

  “Do you think Daddy’s going to die, Toby?”

  “No,” he snaps. His gaze doesn’t wander from the blank-glass nothing of the TV. “He can’t.”

  “He looked real bad.”

  “He’s a great man, Petey. He’s strong. He’ll be okay.”

  And I know Toby is not stating a fact; he is voicing a wish.

  “But what if he’s not?” I ask.

  “Shut up, Petey,” Toby says. His command scalds me into silence and I lower my head because I can’t look at him anymore. We’re silent for a time before he says, “Go on up to bed. I’ve got things to do.”

  I do as I am told and I lay in bed, but my eyes are open, and I’m angry at Toby for dismissing me. Abandoning me. The house still stinks of the fish Mama fried for supper. My pillow is as hard as stone and the pillowcase feels scratchy and hot on my neck. My thoughts crackle and pop like damp kindling. I don’t understand how my family could crumble, just fall apart like a dirt wall in a hard wind. I don’t understand because no one has told me anything that sounds true. Toby will be okay. Daddy will be okay. But how can anyone know that? They can’t is the answer, but I’m supposed to accept the meaningless phrases as gospel?