by Drury, Tom
He would read magazines, do crosswords, look out the window, watch the reaction of dogs when they realized there were cats inside cat carriers.
The twins weren’t happy about his hanging around but they could hardly object as he was their father and still owned the building.
When the crow died the old man decided that it should be stuffed and mounted and given to Louise. The twins disagreed, saying she might not appreciate the gesture.
He went ahead, enlisting the services of a locally famous taxidermist who had his own radio show and agreed to do the work at cost.
When the crow was finished the twin Roman Jr. said he would take it to Louise. He’d had a crush on her since he was fourteen and she was in her early thirties. He was almost thirty now himself and had two children but remembered how the image of Louise haunted his younger years. He would probably run off with her today. Not that he would ask or she would say yes. Just something to dream about.
A sign on the thrift shop door said Louise would be back at two-thirty. Roman Jr. sat down on the steps with the crow in an ungainly package of brown paper.
In a little while Louise pulled up riding a powder-blue motor scooter. She put the kickstand down and took off a black helmet. She shook her head and her red hair fell to the shoulders of a Morrisville-Wylie letter jacket.
“What’s that?” said Roman Jr.
“A Vespa. Someone wants to sell it to me so I thought I should know how it works. I like it.”
“I’ve got something for you.”
She sat beside him with the helmet at her feet. “If this keeps up I will be in the Fortune 500.”
Roman handed her the package.
“Now, this was our dad’s idea,” he said. “He’s always looking for something to do. Anyway, remember how hard you took it when that crow died?”
“It bothered me. Yeah.”
“Anyway, Dad knows this taxidermist, he’s got a show on the radio.”
“Oh Jesus, Roman. Not the crow.”
“Well, no, it is. It is the crow.”
“Will I want to see it?”
“I don’t know. I’ll take it and hide it somewhere if you don’t want it.”
Louise unwrapped the package. The crow stood on driftwood, feathers interlaced and smooth. The beak pointed down and to the side, as if the crow were listening intently to sounds of the wild.
“It does look natural,” said Louise.
“Yeah. The guy does a hell of a job.”
“Please thank your dad for me.”
Louise put the crow in the shop window on a wooden table engraved with sunflowers, where it remains to this day. She hung a tag on it saying I’M NOT FOR SALE.
On Saturday mornings Lyris would drive out to the Red Robin Bakery for cinnamon rolls and coffee and bring them back to Louise’s store.
She imagined that the people at the bakery would get to know her, saying, “I wonder where Lyris is this morning. I’m sure she’ll be here any minute to pick up her cinnamon rolls.”
Lyris drove back to town with the coffee and the rolls. The coffee cups were in a cardboard holder made for four cups. If you only had two cups you had to wedge them in diagonally across from each other—if they were placed on the same side the holder would tip over every time.
Lyris and Louise stood at the counter drinking coffee and pulling the rolls into strips. “I see you have a crow now.”
“A weird story,” said Louise.
She told it, from the day the bus hit the crow and the strange customer came in to the day Roman Jr. turned up with the package.
“You said a tall woman,” said Lyris.
“Could have reached anything in the store without a ladder.”
“Albert tried to interview a woman a while ago. Said she was really tall.”
“What was her name?”
“I forget. She had white hair.”
“Platinum,” said Louise. “Was she trying to find a rock?”
“I don’t know.”
“This one was.”
“The interview fell apart. She attacked a bartender with a yardstick.”
“That you do not do.”
“He tried to take it from her. She hit Albert too.”
“This must have been some interview.”
That afternoon Louise dyed Lyris’s hair magenta in the back room. Lyris sat on a wooden chair wearing a white plastic bonnet that made her look like a pilgrim maiden. Louise stood behind her with a crochet hook drawing locks of hair through small holes in the bonnet so that some hair would get the dye and some wouldn’t.
As Louise worked they watched a documentary about the Ouija board on an old Admiral television set with rabbit ears.
“Of course the thing moves,” said Louise. “People’s hands are on it.”
“I used to know somebody who was good at the Ouija board,” said Lyris. “It scared me. The staff at the orphanage would pay her to tell them things.”
Louise worked the dye into Lyris’s hair. “Like what?”
“This one guy, he was an electrician, he lost his wedding ring, and she said where to find it.”
“I know. A motel.”
Lyris laughed. “No,” she said. “Behind the sink.”
“Sometimes it seems like you thought the orphanage was okay.”
“It was the Four Seasons compared to the foster homes.”
After letting the dye soak in for twenty minutes, Louise wrestled the bonnet from Lyris’s head, washed her hair in the sink, and dried it with a heavy avocado-colored blow-dryer from the store. They looked at her hair, a lovely mix of brunette and wine red, in the mirror above the sink.
“I believe you are the prettiest girl in town,” said Louise.
CHAPTER NINE
THE SCREENWRITER for The Powder Horn asked for a meeting with Joan, as he had admired her audition reel and wanted to talk about her scenes.
On the appointed day Joan drove into the wilds above Malibu to a property guarded by a chain-link gate. She parked her silver car and walked around the fence and up a soft trail in the shadows of the trees. She’d read of skeletons discovered in the canyons, remains of persons unknown or missing for years.
A short walk brought her to a cabin with walls of rough rails, small dusty windows, and a steep and mossy roof. It was surrounded at some distance by a crooked picket fence, missing paint and slats, and she walked through the gate and sat down on the steps.
The screenwriter came along after a bit, wearing a flat cap and summer suit of lightweight tweed, one hand in his pocket and the other idly tapping the points of the fence.
“This belonged to a studio called Pinnacle Pictures in the forties,” he said. “They made The Cattle Raid and Past Ruined Abilene here. This is the cabin I had in mind as I wrote so I thought it would be a good place for us to talk. I hope it’s no trouble.”
Joan picked up a pine needle and rolled it between her fingers, enjoying the tackiness of the sap. “It helps me understand Ann Flowers.”
The screenwriter removed his cap and ran a hand over his dark and wavy hair. “You helped me understand Ann Flowers,” he said. “I’ve watched your reading a hundred times.”
“Hmm,” said Joan. “That’s too many.”
“There is a power in it.”
“That’s like The Ring.”
He looked at her with large and melancholy eyes. “What were you thinking of?”
“When?”
“In the reading.”
“How alone she is,” said Joan. “How her life changed because of a memory. Which she’s probably forgotten, on the surface.”
“I think she has forgotten.”
“But all the same, it’s there. The way things are for everyone.”
“Let’s go inside.”
He took a key ring from his pocket and unlocked the door. The cabin had a farm table, a fireplace, and a sleigh bed with a red quilt. It was dark and musty and cool.
“Do you know why I asked you here?” said the screenwriter.
“It was foretold by a man in the desert.”
“He mentioned me?”
“It was more general. A man. A cabin.”
“So what happens?”
“That would be a little easy,” said Joan. “What do you want to happen?”
“Well, you know. Take you in my arms. Kiss you. Get back what is lost.”
“Like Ann Flowers and Davy.”
“Is that it? Maybe that is it.”
Joan moved close to him. His deep and transparent sadness excited her. She had a thing for the troubled ones. The blood rose to her face and she felt the heat pulse beneath her eyes. She kissed the screenwriter on the mouth. “That is what happens,” she said.
They spent the afternoon in the cabin bed and then took a walk in the forest. The screenwriter, whose name was Gray, said there had been a zoo of exotic animals on the grounds until the fifties, when many escaped and it was shut down.
A few days later Joan visited a clothes shop called Hazmat on Robertson Boulevard. There was a stone Buddha in a black marble fountain, and music played softly, French women singing in English and in French. The saleswomen stood prettily around the shop, sleek and alert.
Joan took a dress into the dressing room which was large with green wallpaper and a wicker couch and bottled black tea. She put the dress on and looked in the mirror, shifting her shoulders, putting one leg forward, then the other. Someone knocked on the door. Joan opened it a little and there was Gray holding a pair of fawn ankle boots.
“Are you following me?” she said.
“Yeah, pretty much. Try these on.”
She sat on the couch and Gray knelt like a shoe salesman slipping her feet into the soft boots and zipping them up the sides. He wore a double-breasted cotton suit of light blue. Joan thought he must make a lot of money.
“When do you write?” she said.
“At night.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Not clinically. See how they feel.”
Joan’s natural curiosity about the fit of the boots overrode her urge to send him from the room and from her life. She got up and walked around.
“Do you like this dress?” she said.
He pulled her close and kissed her.
“Oh, Gray,” said Joan. “Will this be the last time?”
“Yes.”
“Promise?”
“Never again.”
She took the dress off and put it sadly on the hanger.
“Not one sound,” she whispered.
He thought she should sit on the couch but she took him by the lapels and laid him on the floor. She wanted to mess up his precious clothes. She saw herself in the mirror, hands on his arms. She looked like no one she knew, and the sense of there being someone else in her place made her come so hard it scared her.
Joan dried her eyes with the tissues thoughtfully provided by Hazmat, and they got dressed and left together. She bought the dress, a normal thing to do; people bought dresses all the time. Her credit card she offered with both hands to keep it from shaking.
The affair, though Joan told herself it did not really qualify, made her avid for family life. She would sit with Rob on the couch, legs tucked warmly beneath her, watching the football games and horror films that he loved above all other entertainments.
Joan knew little about football and usually couldn’t tell who had the ball or where it was on the field. She liked the referees, their jailhouse shirts and loud voices that filled the stadiums without visible amplification, reminding her of Vavoom from the Felix the Cat cartoons.
The horror movies gave her nightmares in which the monsters she killed would never stay dead. She would shoot or stab them to no avail. She came to feel sorry for the relentless creatures that, after all, her mind had created.
Rob studied the scenes for blank areas from which the bad surprise would emerge. He would lean forward, pointing. “Watch right here,” he would say.
He didn’t take the action seriously no matter how gross it became and would sometimes laugh as if watching a family film. He was a strange man in some ways. She knew he was glad to have her beside him by the way he would reach out and touch her hair.
What would he say if he knew that she’d had sex with a screenwriter in a whispery dress shop on Robertson? Had that really happened? Safe at home it seemed imaginary.
She helped Micah with his homework, with which he was overwhelmed. He had to do math and science and English and Spanish, to read The Turn of the Screw, to memorize the presidents in order. He and Joan came up with a mnemonic trick they called “The Age of Fabric” for a string of obscure presidents whose names suggested things that could be done to cloth: Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce.
Before going to bed, Joan would stop at Eamon’s door. He never seemed to be doing homework. At Deep Rock Academy senior year seemed a time for reflection and smoking weed. He would be playing the mandolin or talking on the phone. Joan would ask him to do “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” A children’s song, she knew, but it always grieved her when Jackie Paper came no more.
Gray did not keep his promise. He turned up one day when Joan was alone at home, having just made a volleyball court for Micah on the back lawn.
It was more work than she’d expected. She laid it out with strings and stakes, poured bright white court lines from a bag of lime. The net sagged when first put up, so she took it down and started over.
It was two-thirty when she finished. She went inside and made a gin and tonic and came back out to sit in a lawn chair. It was a volleyball court to be proud of, net taut and bordered by white tape between stout blue poles tethered to the ground. The sun had moved beyond the house, and sweat dried on her skin.
That’s when the screenwriter opened the lattice gate and walked into the yard. He wore gabardines, a batik shirt, leather shoes with basket-weave insets.
“No, no, no, no, no,” said Joan. “You do not come here.”
“I wanted to see where you live.”
“Shut up. Get out of my yard.”
He got down on his knees and put his arms around her legs, speaking into the front of her jeans. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, could only feel the vibrations through the zipper.
She bumped the side of his head with the hand that held the drink.
“Gray,” she said.
“What?”
“Get up, now. Have my drink.”
He stood and finished the gin and tonic. “I think it’s time we spoke to your husband.”
Joan took the empty glass, tossed it on the lawn, and hit him in the face. This seemed to have no effect. He kept looking at her with his deerlike eyes.
“It’s the honorable thing.”
“There is something wrong with you, Gray. Something serious. Now I’m going in the house. I will not see you again. You will not see me again.”
She locked the door and watched him from inside. He stood for a moment and then turned and walked through the gate, latching it on the way out.
“And I thought, you know, one time, what’s the harm,” said Joan. “Isn’t that how men are supposed to be?”
She and Paige England were having Irish coffee at El Camino in Los Feliz. Paige was the star of Forensic Mystic. She went everywhere with a red spaniel named Jim, and El Camino allowed dogs.
“Men have changed,” said Paige. “You can’t count on them to be callous and evasive anymore.”
“But this one is just nuts.”
“Have you lost wei
ght?”
“Do I look unwell?” said Joan.
“You look beautiful and unwell. Like someone with tuberculosis.”
“I’m just hoping this doesn’t mess me up in the film.”
Paige waved her hand. “If sex messed up films, nothing would ever get made.”
She had white hair worn in ringlets. She’d gotten into acting playing the teenaged daughter of a dockworker in Bay of Smokes in the seventies. The director came from Belgium and never made another film in the United States. It was a cult favorite.
“I think they’re writing me out of Forensic,” said Joan.
“It’s nothing I’ve heard.”
“But you would tell me if you did.”
Paige took a drink. “Yes. Absolutely.”
Her dog got up, barked, turned in a circle, and lay down again.
“Jim smells a coyote,” said Paige.
Micah and Thea had her house to themselves except for an artist named Donald who was said to be painting the walls of some distant wing.
Thea’s father was sailing around Catalina, her mother was gardening, and her brother was in Madrid playing the oboe with an orchestra.
Thea had been banned from the treehouse after her parents found the weed tin. There was a padlock on the door.
They went upstairs. Paintings of lords and ladies lounging about in nature lined the stairwell. They held things in their hands—a pear, a bird, a magnifying glass. The steps creaked and the subjects of the paintings seemed to watch them with mild suspicion.
Thea took plates of melon and lemon from a refrigerator in her room and they sat eating by the windows looking out on the green blades of a palm tree.
Micah twisted in his chair and bit his upper lip.
“What’s wrong?”
“The sound. Forks on plates. It makes me want to get up and walk around.”
“We can go bother Donald.”
The painter was in a hallway on the third floor with tables and chairs covered in drop cloths. He sponged red and gold paint on the walls while a radio played classical music.
“Thea,” he said mockingly. He wore white coveralls, a gold earring, and a blue handkerchief on his head.