The next morning Agnes told us Rosemary’s social worker had informed the police, and that they were out looking for her as well. I went to school afraid and nauseated all day, waiting for classes to end so I could get out of there. When the school day ended I ditched the bus and walked downtown in the rain. I hurried down Main until I reached the thrift store where Rosemary worked, hoping to find her, to talk to her, to see her—but she wasn’t there. A woman working told me she hadn’t seen her since last week. “She missed work the last two days,” she said. “Is she missing?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, she needs to call me if you see her,” the woman said. “She needs to call me as soon as possible if she wants to keep working here.”
My head was beginning to hurt. I felt like I was going to vomit and stepped outside, where it was raining harder. I leaned over and took a deep breath. I stood under the awning, unsure what to do. I thought about whether I should call Agnes or wait it out. Then a car pulled up in front of me and the driver rolled his window down. I couldn’t tell who it was from the rain, but he called my name.
“Sequoyah,” he yelled from the window, waving his arm. “Come on.”
I rushed over to the car in the pouring rain and opened the passenger’s side door. It was Jack, the man with the dog from down the street. The man with the hat, the man I had seen in the supermarket.
“Get in,” he said.
I got into his car and closed the door. I was wet and a little confused, but he was laughing.
“You’re awfully wet,” he said. “I’m Jack, remember me?”
“Yeah.”
“Need a ride? What’s going on?”
I sort of shrugged. “Looking for someone,” I said.
He seemed charmed by my reluctance to talk. In truth, he made me nervous. I wasn’t threatened by him out of fear for my life, but his interest in me was not unlike the men who would ask me for rides when I would walk along Highway 30 back in Cherokee County.
We sat in the car while rain blurred the windshield. I didn’t say anything or look over at him, but I didn’t want to run away either.
“You’re quiet,” he said, and started to back out of the lot. “So, how’s it going?”
“Fine, I guess.”
“So, where do you live? I’ll give you a ride home.”
“Out in the country.”
“With your parents?”
“Foster family, the Troutts.”
“Harold Troutt?”
“Yeah, you know him?”
“I knew his father, Max Troutt,” he said. “You know Harold’s a bookie, right? Max Troutt ran a little gambling hub on the outskirts of town back in the fifties.”
“I think Harold told me he was a bootlegger.”
“Right,” he said. “Right, he was a bootlegger. He was a friend of my uncle’s. I liked him a lot. When I was a kid he taught me how to hit a golf ball. He showed me his clubs and explained the difference between irons and woods, a hook and a slice. He showed us how to grip a club. We couldn’t afford our own golf clubs, but he had some old junior clubs. He always told me there was a certain grace in a good golf swing. It involved timing, balance, slowness. It involved patience. I watched him put on his golf shoes. We watched him tee up and stand over the ball with a driver. He shifted his balance from foot to foot. He made it look so easy. When he hit the ball, sometimes the tee flew out of the ground and landed in front of his feet.”
It occurred to me I hadn’t given him the address. He put on his blinker and pulled into a Sonic Drive-In.
“You want a drink?” he asked. “It’s on me. Do you like Cherry Cokes?”
“Sure.”
He rolled down his window and pushed the button on the OrderMatic. He ordered us both Cherry Cokes. He looked at me, then stared straight ahead. I saw the ring on his pinkie finger. I saw his hairless hands.
“So what do you do?” I asked.
“I was in advertising for a while in Chicago. My parents passed and I moved back. That’s it. That’s my whole story. What about you? What grade are you in?”
I looked out the window. The rain had let up and a gathering of grackles were walking around the parking lot, looking for food.
“Ninth,” I said.
“Only a few years left of school,” he said. “You’re practically done.”
The carhop, a girl I thought I recognized from school, brought our drinks, and Jack paid her.
“Harold’s dad was a good guy,” he said, handing me my drink. “I remember he became obsessed with catching the ferruginous hawk, which was rumored to be some three feet long with a wingspan of six feet. Do you know about the ferruginous hawk?”
“No.”
“You don’t know the story? Harold didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“People in town were fascinated by the ferruginous hawk,” he said. “It was a long time ago. Everyone wanted to kill it. The hawk swooped down and killed babies. It clawed kids by their hair and carried them away.”
“A hawk,” I said.
“A ferruginous hawk.”
I thought about this.
“One night,” he said, “some of Max’s gambling buddies sat at the bar in the basement of the White Antelope Inn, where illegal slot machines and poker games were held, and discussed hunting the bird. Max wanted the bird badly. Four years earlier it had attacked his daughter, Harold’s sister, when she was only six. The hawk swooped down and dug its claws into her scalp.”
I crunched the ice with my straw.
“So they drove twelve miles out of town on County Road 9, turned north and took a gravel road overhung with branches a few miles until they reached a pasture near the woodsy Catoosa Creek area. Once they parked, they climbed a split rail fence and walked through thick pasture until they made it to the trees. They walked with their shotguns, searching for that hawk. They hunted all morning for it but never found it. I think around this time was when Harold started booking.”
I drank my Cherry Coke and kept pushing the ice with the straw. There was too much ice.
“Isn’t that a creepy story?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Not really.”
“Do you trust Harold?”
The question came out of nowhere, surprising me. I glanced at Jack and then looked away.
“I guess so,” I said.
Driving with one hand on the wheel, he started searching his pockets with the other. “Oh damn,” he said. “Damn, I forgot my nitroglycerine tablets. I have a heart problem. See, that’s what happens when you hit fifty, Sequoyah. Do you mind if we stop by my apartment? I just live in south downtown. I live there with my dog. Then I’ll take you home.”
“No problem,” I said.
He backed out of the Sonic parking lot and pulled away. We drove down Raider Street, past the used car dealerships and old cafés. There was a man on the street corner holding a bicycle wheel. He stared at me as we drove by.
Jack turned up the radio, some sort of old country music. “I have some friends staying with me,” he said, tapping the steering wheel with his ring. “You should come in and meet them.”
He lived in a building off Main Street, near the refinery in south downtown. He parked in front of his building, and I followed him upstairs. His apartment was dim but unusually spacious for a man who lived alone. When we walked in, there were other kids there. Jack told me to make myself at home. I watched him walk into a room, maybe the bedroom, and he closed the door.
I saw a boy lying on the couch. He yawned and rolled over, facing the back of the couch. There were two other boys sitting on the floor. They were playing a board game of some sort. One of the boys was wearing fingerless gloves, the other had his shirt off. Neither of them said anything, too focused on their game, staring down at the board between them. One
of the boys rolled dice and moved a plastic piece along the board. The other stared at the board with his fingers on his temples, studying. Above, the ceiling fan hummed, the only sound in the room.
I stood quiet in the entryway. The walls were white and covered with framed pictures and paintings. The floor was hardwood with only a single rug near the window across the room. The two boys played their game quietly. Near the kitchen I saw a girl sitting on the floor with her head down. She was so silent I almost didn’t see her. She might’ve been praying. She never looked up, never even moved. Maybe she was sleeping. Her hair was long and straight and hung down in front, so I wasn’t able to see her face. I heard Jack’s dog barking from another room.
The boy on the couch coughed in his sleep, hoarse and rich with phlegm, and out of nowhere I started to feel nauseated again. Before Jack returned, I slipped out the door and headed downstairs quickly. I left the building and hurried down the dark street, then I broke into a run, past the slumbering old buildings and cloudy windows. Cold, moldy air rose around me, heavy in my lungs, and I kept running until I was out of breath.
South downtown at night was dead, full of abandoned buildings, pale walls, and empty rooms. Once I was far enough away from Jack’s apartment, I started looking for a pay phone. I walked past the old stores with “For Rent” signs in them, crossing to a parking lot on the other side. As I crossed, a man pulled up in a car beside me and rolled down his window. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, where are you going?” I didn’t look at him and kept walking with my hands in my pockets. I broke into a run across the parking lot and heard him calling after me, “Hey, where are you going?”
Darkness thickened around me as I headed down a residential street with cars parked along the curb in front of a house. It seemed a party was going on. Some people were standing outside on the porch, smoking. What was the occasion for a party in the middle of the week? I could hear a train in the distance. Farther down the street I heard a woman cry out. She was trying to help an old man from a car to a house, but the man had slipped and fallen, and now the woman was kneeling down to him. I hurried over to her and asked if I could help. The woman turned to look at me, startled or frustrated, but when she saw that I was a kid she said, “Yes, please.”
I put my hands underneath the man and helped her sit him up. The old man didn’t seem to register his surroundings.
“He has dementia,” the young woman said. “It’s okay. If you can wait here for a minute I’ll go to the front door and call for my husband.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, still holding the man so he wouldn’t fall.
The woman stood and hurried to the porch. She opened the front door and called for her husband, who came out and helped lift the old man to his feet. The old man mumbled something, but I couldn’t understand him. He had unkempt white hair and was wearing a coat and scarf.
“Let’s get him inside,” the woman’s husband said, and we walked him to the porch, where the woman was holding the door open for us. We led the old man inside and helped him take off his coat and scarf, then sat him on the couch. Throughout all this, the man mostly remained silent, clenching his jaw every so often but never seeming angry or afraid.
“Thanks for your help,” the woman’s husband said. “He’s gotten worse lately.”
“Daddy?” the woman said to the old man. “Everything’s all right?”
The old man nodded and started picking at something on his hand.
I could tell the husband and wife were staring at my face. “We appreciate your help,” the husband said. “Do you live in the neighborhood?”
“No, I was at a party. I was at a friend’s house,” I said. “It was nothing really. I’m going home.”
“Would you like something to drink?” the wife asked. “Tom, get him a pop. Do you want a pop?”
“Sure,” I said.
I followed Tom into the kitchen. On the walls was thick wallpaper with flowery designs and ovals and rectangles where pictures once hung. The place was a mess: dirty dishes piled in the sink, spilled coffee, vials and prescription bottles of pills on the counter. In front of the prescription bottles were small paper cups, each filled with pills. “His medicine,” Tom said. He squinted at them. “He takes six different kinds of pills,” he said, “just to keep from having another stroke.”
He opened the refrigerator and handed me a can of pop, which I opened. I thanked him.
“No problem at all,” he said. “We appreciate your help. My father-in-law is really going downhill fast. He liked to talk about the Korean War and used to build sheds with his own hands. Poor guy can’t do anything anymore.”
I imagined his sleepless nights, lying on a hard bed with no sheets or pillows, unsettled thoughts racing through his mind. Alone, with no help, enduring the pain of the elderly, the back and knee aches, the bad dreams, difficulty breathing. Mumbling to himself.
“Forty years ago he built this house,” he told me. “He hauled lumber and erected strong beams. He built a solid roof and laid good floors. He devoted his life to this place. It’s sad.”
I followed him back into the living room, where his wife was now sitting.
“Where do you live?” she asked me. “Do you need a ride?”
“East of town, in the country,” I said.
“Tom, give him a ride home,” she said to her husband. She looked at me. “Tom can give you a ride.”
“Sure,” Tom said. “Let me get my keys.”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “I can call someone to come pick me up.”
“It’s no problem,” the woman said. “Thanks for stopping to help.”
A few minutes later I was riding in the car with Tom. He was quiet most of the drive. He asked me a couple of typical questions, like what grade I was in and what I liked to do for fun. He turned on the radio and asked what kind of music I liked.
“Anything,” I said.
“I can’t take country music,” he said. “Not even the old stuff. So many people love it, but it makes me depressed. All the songs sound the same to me.”
“Yeah.”
“All those songs about misery and whiskey.”
He laughed at himself. He was pleasant as we headed out of town, east toward the country. I kept thinking how nice he and his wife were, and so I asked if they had any kids.
“We have a little girl named Chelsea,” he said. “She’s four. She was in bed when you were there.”
I directed him down the road toward the Troutt house. When we pulled into the drive I could see the light on in the living room, and I figured Harold and Agnes would be angry that I was coming in late.
I thanked Tom for giving me a ride. He gave me a thumbs up and told me to take care of myself. He was so friendly and charming I wanted to run away with him.
Inside the house, George was sitting at the typewriter, hunched over, pecking at the keys with two fingers. He was alone in the room and never looked up when I entered.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
He looked up at me, squinting. “Rosemary came back,” he said. “They had a fight. You missed it. Where were you?”
“She’s back? Is she okay?”
“Yeah, you missed it. Where were you?”
“Walking around town. Where is she? Where is everyone?”
“Agnes went to bed and Harold’s downstairs in his office. There’s chili for you in the kitchen if you’re hungry. Agnes wanted me to tell you. Did you eat supper?”
I stood there a moment, unsure what to do. I was exhilarated that she was back.
“Should I go talk to her?” I said.
“I wouldn’t go up there. They had a fight. It was bad. You missed it.”
I thought about it and decided he was right. I took off my coat and hung it up. George followed me into the kitchen, where I heated up a bowl of a chili in the microwave. I sa
t at the table and he sat across from me. I put a fistful of crackers into my chili and listened to George talk about what had happened. Rosemary had come home drunk. She’d stolen money from Harold, a few hundred dollars. Harold called her social worker and threatened to call the police and have her arrested. There was yelling. I was glad I wasn’t there. George seemed bothered by it.
He looked at me and said, “I cowered into the couch. All I could do was pull the afghan over me. It was happening right in front of me in the living room.”
“You were scared.”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
He looked away. “You sound like Rosemary.”
“You were scared,” I said again.
The chili wasn’t very good, or maybe I wasn’t hungry. I ate only a couple of crackers and poured a glass of ice water. I drank the whole glass and when I finished I got up and put the bowl in the sink. Then I went upstairs and George followed closely behind, neither of us speaking, our steps creaking on the hardwood floor of the quiet upstairs hallway. All the lights were off. Rosemary was sleeping, so I didn’t wake her. I went into my room and lay down on the bed. George came in and sat on the bed, watching me for a moment, then said he wanted to go back downstairs to type more.
From the window, I watched the drizzle come down in the yellow glow from the house light. Time passed, thoughts came. I couldn’t think of what to say to Rosemary. Minutes crept by. I heard Rosemary’s voice in my head, instructing me to breathe slowly. Her voice came and went. Her voice was there. I heard her say my name and I wondered whether we were communicating on some higher level of consciousness. Maybe she was awake in her room, I remember thinking this, and we were talking through each other’s minds, each other’s thoughts, if such a thing were possible. Of course this was insanity. But of course it wasn’t insanity. I marveled at the thought as I lay in the dark, my breathing steady, silent.
The next morning when I woke, she remained in her room. I went to school as usual, struggled through the long misery of another day, and when I returned home she was still in her room. She was like this for a couple of days. I thought: I’ll leave her alone. She’ll appreciate that. All of us left her alone to grieve, to mourn, be angry, or do whatever it was she needed to do by herself. She ate her meals in her room, took two-hour baths in the upstairs bathroom, and kept her door shut.
Where the Dead Sit Talking Page 17