by Nick Arvin
Elizabeth shrugged.
Allison giggled. “Kids are pretty strange these days, aren’t they?”
“He was weird.” Elizabeth laughed and looked at the sky. “He was offering buy two, get one free on the magazine subscriptions.” The lie felt fine. She was comfortable with it. She saw Allison smiling toward the trees.
Allison was in the attic. Dust lay over everything and the air had a dry, stagnant feel and it seemed to sit heavy in her lungs. The exposed lightbulb hanging from the rafters lit the center of the attic with an unflattering harshness and left the corners enclosed in darkness. Elizabeth was downstairs. Her arrival had made Allison recall the tornado, and somehow she could still hardly believe that the house had not been touched. She had come up here half-seriously expecting to find a hole or something, something somehow unnoticed for months now. But she saw nothing wrong. “Looks okay,” she said aloud, to stir the air. “Looks just fine.” There were stacks of cardboard boxes that had not been opened in many years. She began pulling apart their interfolded flaps. She found the tarnished urn that had once contained her father, then a pipe rack with two pipes in it—though as far she could recall her father had never smoked—and a wooden box in which her mother had abandoned a series of heavy eyeglasses with scratched lenses and badly unfashionable frames. She found clothes she and Elizabeth had worn as children—little dresses and overalls and jeans stained at the knees and tiny, matching pink jumpers. She found a button-eyed rag doll. She gazed at it, confused, because it was not one of her own. Then she recalled: Elizabeth had played with this as a child. Perhaps, she thought, the two of them had not really been so absolutely different then as it now seemed to her. There had been many days when it rained or the winter weather was too cold for Elizabeth to go outside and the two of them had played, and fought, together in the house. But somehow those days were never the ones that came readily to mind.
She opened the urn and peered inside as though something might be there, but of course it was empty. She closed it and put it into its box. She sat crouched on her knees, gazing at the wooden rafters. During the tornado, in the basement, it had seemed the wind would pick up the house and throw it aside as one might lift and toss a ball cap. She had imagined she saw things moving in the darkness, had imagined she could see the basement ceiling bowing out and in like the ribs of a breathing man. She had been so glad to simply be alive when it was done.
She wondered now if she should say something to her sister about the things she had been ready to pour out when she came back from the woods, just after the tornado. She wondered if she should tell Elizabeth that she had already known Elizabeth was lying, for example, about the boy and the magazines. If she should tell Elizabeth that she wasn’t a very good liar. That she understood Elizabeth needed to have her secrets, her hidden things. That it did not matter to her what Elizabeth had hidden in the woods.
But no, Elizabeth had recovered her self-possession now. She would not want to talk about it, would try to deflect the conversation. She might become angry if pressed.
What had shocked her was that Elizabeth had broken down—had cried. She had never seen her do that before, and at that moment she would have said anything to Elizabeth to calm her.
Why could Elizabeth weep over this boy, but not her own father? She had read in the papers about the boy that had been killed—a tragedy, he had been buried beside his parents, already dead many years. Allison had concluded that was the same boy who had stopped in their yard one evening. Beyond this, she couldn’t make anything of it.
She opened a small box of unpaired socks and gloves.
These secrets indicated only a fraction of the chasm between her and her sister. Allison could see it yawning before her in the darkness of the shadows across the attic floor. The trust of children seemed to her to be the only human variety that was truly infinite, and maybe trust that had not been completely formed in childhood would always find its limits.
Old toothbrushes. Why had anyone kept these?
She heard Elizabeth, downstairs, calling to her, but could not make out the words. “I’ll be down in a minute,” she yelled back. She sat still and the house was quiet. The exposed pink of insulation had a disturbing, fleshy appearance. There was a faint, earthy odor that might have been the smell of stale mouse droppings.
Elizabeth’s head appeared through the trapdoor. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
The question filled Allison with a peculiar, mellow happiness. “Everything is fine,” she said. She held up the rag doll for Elizabeth to see. “Remember?” she said. “When we were kids?”
Elizabeth shrugged. “Sure,” she said. She shrugged again, ducked, and vanished. Allison stared at the square hole of the trapdoor in the floor. She had known Elizabeth would react that way, had forgiven her in advance. She wondered if that was love.
Wilson stood beneath a thick elm, looking up into the branches above, the sprawling sun-spangled canopy. How did one go about this? He circled around the elm until he decided it was simply too intimidating, then pressed deeper into the woods. He found a maple, smaller and thinner than the elm, with a strong low limb. On his toes, he could reach up and grasp it firmly. He held it a minute, then let go and sat on the moldering leaves below. He found it strange to think that once he had been so small he could not possibly have grabbed that branch. He remembered what his grandfather had told him, about the need to become independent, a man. He remembered his embarrassment, his fear in the bowling alley. He stood and rubbed his hands together, then placed them again on the big, low branch. For several seconds he remained there, toes on the ground, hands gripping the rough bark, his body stretched between tree and ground. Then he scrambled with his feet against the trunk, pulled with his arms, and began moving upward.
Quickly his old fear of climbing seemed absurd, a childish notion he had somehow forgotten to dispose of while he grew up. He climbed dozens of trees before he started up a vast oak he knew immediately was the one, knew exactly what she had meant. Its branches went around the trunk with startling convenience, like a staircase spiraling to the topmost boughs. From there he had views across all the land that his grandfather owned, the houses around the periphery, and beyond, to fields, houses, woods, the town in the distance. The branches did sway with the wind, but the movement was exhilarating.
He climbed the tree repeatedly, and he began to prefer the windy times when he could perch near the sky and feel the rush of the air and watch the horizon fall and rise. He went into the woods whenever a big wind started. The first time he was out in a storm, he was thrilled by the thrashing of the branches and the leaves, the crash of the rain, the danger. Soon he knew the big oak so well he could climb it by moonlight. The rush was even greater in a nighttime storm, a chaos of motion and wet blindness. And when the storm passed and uncovered the stars, it was a kind of miracle to cling so close to them and wait and watch while a blush of color grew on the horizon, then unrolled and unrolled until all the air was lit with blue and bright as day.
In her office, still packing her briefcase, Elizabeth phoned Allison and warned her she would be late. Allison said okay, she would keep dinner warm. Elizabeth told her not to bother, just go ahead and eat. It would take her hours to get there. And Allison said all right. Yet both of them knew that when Elizabeth got there the dinner would be waiting, warm. Allison kept waiting for her. And she kept returning.
Then she was on the interstate, pointed toward home—the house, the woods—but traffic lay at a standstill for as far as Elizabeth could see. She sat unmoving in a car in the midst of an endless ribbon of unmoving cars, the sun setting and coruscating in a thousand reflections off all the glass and chrome. She hated this feeling of being trapped in her own car. Certain moments—at the fence, beside the boy’s body—would return relentlessly, unbidden, into moments like this. And all these other things were dragged up behind.
Sometimes, still, the unexpected broken appearance of that body came back so viv
idly it made her gasp for breath. Was she guilty of something? Surely not. Yet, she could not think of the boy without a terrible sensation forming inside her. And if not her, then who? The grandfather? Surely he had done everything he could, went to excessive lengths trying to protect the boy. No one’s fault then. These things happened. Nothing could be changed now. She tried to think about the tasks before her. But, in the interstices of the day, these things welled up.
At certain rare moments—ignited perhaps by a smell of acrid smoke or, as now, by the way reflected sunlight rippled along a stream of cars edging into motion—a memory exploded vividly in her: standing before the fence, her anger gathering and concentrating into a twisted, searing fiber within her. Suddenly it expanded immeasurably and she was light, airy—invincible—and she stepped forward, without hurry, toward all the familiar oaks and maples, the hollows and glades and groves, the places and paths she had known.
Radio Ads
This was the summer of Uncle Lewis, also the summer of the new Three Trees Shopping Mall. The radio ad ran every hour, blandly worded but emphatically read by Uncle Lewis: “Shop where shopping is the thing and bargains are king. Shop at Three Trees Shopping Mall, one place where you can do it all!”
Whenever Uncle Lewis’s voice came on the radio, Billy stopped what he was doing—model building, exploding aliens on his Atari, knocking golf balls across the piece of artificial turf that his father had given him—and he listened. If he was standing he sat down, as if to stand would divert too much concentration. Uncle Lewis never did TV ads, just radio, so whenever Billy watched television he kept a radio going in the background.
Uncle Lewis had other commercials on the air as well, this summer of 1985: “You think you know beer. But you don’t know anything until you’ve had Stray Tooth Beer.” And, “Pizza Joe’s exclusive eight-cheese, nine-meat, ten-vegetable pizza. There’s never been so much pizza in a pizza. It’s the pizza with everything. Get it at Joe’s.” And, “Diamonds. Diamonds. Diamonds. King Brothers Jewelers, the place to buy diamonds. Diamonds. Diamonds …”
That voice, its projection of salesmanship and confidence, awed Billy. Uncle Lewis lived not far away, and, before Billy’s parents divorced, he had come over now and again for a drink. He arrived in his Mercedes convertible, top down. The adults joked in the kitchen, gathered their drinks, then roosted in the living room where Billy sat to one side and listened to Uncle Lewis’s voice. It was huge and slow as a cruise ship, and it did not quite fit the physical facts of him. He was short and narrow, easygoing but capable of bursts of energy. Dad was the bigger, taller man, with the weight of an imposing belly suspended before him. Dad’s voice shared Uncle Lewis’s deep timbre, but Dad tended to hurry his words, as if he couldn’t wait to be through his sentences, as if he felt contempt for the clumsy customs of spoken language. It sometimes made Billy a little nervous when his father spoke.
After Billy’s parents divorced, his dad moved into a new house that was closer to his work and closer to Uncle Lewis. Billy stayed with Mom, but Dad got Billy for the weekends. Mom and Dad didn’t like to see each other anymore, so Uncle Lewis was nominated by Dad, and accepted by Mom, as a chauffeur between the two houses.
Every Friday Uncle Lewis arrived in his open-top convertible. He swooped with Billy along roads and interstates at seventy miles per hour, the rushing wind all around, delivering Billy from Mom’s doorstep to Dad’s. Every Sunday evening they followed the route in reverse.
The wind made conversation difficult. Sometimes they just listened to the spinning noise of it, or sometimes Uncle Lewis twisted the radio knob to blast Top 40 songs. When one of Uncle Lewis’s commercials came on, Billy listened to the voice and watched Uncle Lewis. His lips did not move. “Pride laundry detergent makes your clothes Pride-fully clean. Don’t forget your Pride!”
Occasionally, Uncle Lewis shouted a comment through the wind. On the very first trip, while barreling down the interstate, Uncle Lewis looked suddenly at Billy and boomed, “Do you want to drive?” Billy, throat throbbing with terror, refused. He began to regret it immediately.
_______
Billy’s mom said, “Uncle Lewis is a gentleman.” So Billy learned what a gentleman was by watching Uncle Lewis. A gentleman arrived in an expensive car and gave a distinctive three-two knock on the door, then stood with hands clasped behind the back and a broad smile. A gentleman wore a tie. He wore a heavy gold watch. A gentleman said—his voice deep and full and somehow containing its own echo, as if he always stood at the center of an empty room of enormous size—“Hello!” A gentleman took Mom’s hand and kissed it, which made Mom laugh.
And laughing, she backed away. “Do you have everything you need, Billy?”
Billy lifted his duffel bag and set it one inch closer to the door.
Uncle Lewis followed her inside. “How are things, Carol?”
“Oh fine, you know, the usual. Billy, you have your toothbrush? Clean underwear? You forgot your toothbrush last time.”
Billy nodded.
Uncle Lewis said, smiling, “My offer still stands, of course, Carol. Anytime you’d like to come down to the studio to see how things are done—You never know who you might meet.”
“Eventually, maybe, I’ll have some free time. I think Billy’s all set, aren’t you Billy?”
Billy nodded.
“Of course,” said Uncle Lewis. He tipped an imaginary hat toward Billy’s mother. “Hop along, Billy.” He held the door and shooed Billy outside. “Can’t keep my ladies waiting.”
A gentleman spoke often of his ladies.
Billy’s mother laughed again, and Uncle Lewis gave her a little wave.
In conjunction with its grand opening, the new mall was having a promotion: “Hey kids! Every store in Three Trees Mall has four, that is four, unique, lifelike figures of your favorite Movie Heroes for sale. Just collect all 112 and you’ll win a Galactic Starfighter with realistic action sounds, movements, and weapons, plus amazing liquid propellant engines. Check out the display in the mall courtyard!”
Mom and Billy visited early in the summer, shortly after the mall opened. Mom bought kitchen towels and a romance novel. For lunch they got huge soft pretzels like Billy had never seen before. In a glass display in the central courtyard hung the Galactic Starfighter, suspended from wires as if in flight. It was the size of a large suitcase, and it had flashing lights and made electronic sounds. Its motorized, retractable wheels could propel it over any alien surface. A placard said it could fling its missiles twenty yards (in earth gravity) and it boasted twin pressurized water rockets for launches to the interstellar regions. Arrayed beneath it were the 112 Movie Heroes action figures in action poses. Each was molded in one piece of plastic, the face dabbed with pink paint. Billy bought three at the nearest department store, $1.49 each.
Dad owned a large and busy golf shop with a driving range and a putt-putt course. It was located in a cluster of gas stations and strip malls beside a tangle of looped interstate ramps. The parking lot was nearly always full of vehicles and dotted with people standing over their car trunks, getting out golf clubs for the range or putting away the new clubs they had just bought.
Dad loved his shop. Even on weekends, or especially on weekends since weekends were the busiest, he did not have much time for Billy. When he did find time, he wanted to stay close to the action, so he would take Billy out on the shop’s thirty-six hole putt-putt course, where they played round after round. Dad knew how to sink every hole in one putt, and he often did. It never took him more than two.
Billy spent most of his weekends alone at Dad’s house, eating pizza from the fridge and watching TV, or poking at the balls on Dad’s billards table. Dad’s new house was a manufactured home in a subdivision of manufactured homes that all looked alike, except that some had concrete driveways and some had asphalt. Dad’s was asphalt. Sometimes Ralph, an older boy who lived at the end of a concrete driveway next door, came over to see Billy. He was tall and lean with a long neck and
a crewcut. He always pretended he had forgotten Billy’s name during the time Billy was gone. “Bobby?” he would ask, squinting. “Or is it Buddy? Or Betty? Or Willy?”
When Billy and Uncle Lewis returned in the Mercedes on Sundays, Mom would open the front door and call, “You boys stay out of trouble this weekend?”
“Well, we had to go three rounds for the steering wheel,” Uncle Lewis raised his hands and air-punched toward Billy. Then he laughed. “Everything went fine.”
“How’s your brother?” Mom asked, looking at Uncle Lewis.
“The usual. You know him.” Uncle Lewis swung an imaginary golf club. “Working.”
“Working.” Mom’s face puckered. “He won’t give anyone time unless they hit him in the head with a fifty-percent-off nine iron or kick him in the shin with a pair of red-tagged cleats.”
She said to Billy, “Remember that your father loves you. He’s just not a very good dad. Not like Uncle Lewis. Uncle Lewis is a good uncle.”
Uncle Lewis beamed.
At Dad’s house, Billy noticed a pattern. Every Saturday morning, a red pickup truck pulled onto the concrete driveway next door. Five to ten minutes later, Ralph came over to see if Billy wanted to come out and do something. When Billy asked Ralph about the truck, Ralph rolled his eyes and then he made a circle with his left hand and poked his right index finger into it a few times. This, Billy knew, meant sex. “My mom kicks me out of the house so that she and her boyfriend can do it.”
Ralph suggested that they sneak around to the bedroom window to watch. They ran and ducked behind the red pickup and crawled on hands and knees to the house then, using their elbows and dragging their legs behind, they hauled themselves around until they lay directly under the bedroom window. Billy’s breath sounded to him like tearing rags, and he was afraid someone might hear. But, alongside Ralph, he pushed himself gradually up to the window.