Zero at the Bone

by Michael Cadnum

  “Tomorrow night,” I said. I felt like telling her, “I am not having a conversation with you. You are talking. But I am watching an airplane glide overhead, red lights winking.”

  “Eight,” she said. “Seven-thirty.”

  Strangers in Safeway see me, a tall, broad-shouldered kid, built like a lumberjack, and they smile. And I smile, too. And I mean the message smiles send out to people: I am nice, and you can trust me.

  But sometimes in the back of the smile, behind the real niceness that fills up 98 percent of my mind, there is a small room with a gray creature in it, someone broadcasting nonstop, twenty-four hours a day, the Cray Buchanan World Service.

  Detras and atras. They both mean behind.

  I didn’t think Paula had ever heard of either word.

  As I was heading into the house I could hear him coming from a long way off, making his noise. I hadn’t seen him for days, and I stood there marveling in an absentminded way that he was still alive.

  7

  Anita had said we could not have him fixed because it wasn’t natural, castrating a cat. He ran toward me through the dark, stiff-legged and crippled. I couldn’t see him yet, but I could tell what he was doing, avoiding the chain-link fence along the hill, taking the long way around the blackberry hedge. He probably fell down once or twice. And he kept up his noise all the while, a very old and stubborn creature saying, “Ow, ow,” over and over.

  I felt sorry for Bronto, but I didn’t like to pet him. He had little scars in his head where you usually scratch a cat. He couldn’t even stand straight in the porch light, leaning into my pant leg, purring. I scratched him a little, with two fingers.

  My dad was sitting with his head thrown back, his glasses crooked, his mouth agape like someone very old or very sick.

  The television was on with the sound off. My mother stared at it with her arms crossed in front of her chest. It was the usual TV mishmash, the Pope followed by an ad for denture cream. Big words jumped across the screen; people with the sound off weren’t going to miss anything important.

  “The beast is alive,” I said.

  My mother gave me a look: It meant either, You must be kidding, or, What on earth are you talking about?

  I didn’t call him Bronto in front of my mother because that was Anita’s name for him. My mother called him Saucers. Five years ago, when the cat was a kitten, Mom had taught him to drink, nudging his face down into plates of milk. Anita said we should gave animals names that smacked of authority.

  “He looks awful,” I said.

  Mom found a can opener beside the coffeemaker. She made a rattling noise with it, hitting it against the heel of her hand.

  The cat door crashed, a paw found its way through the flap, and then the whole cat was inside. In the light he looked thin and moth-eaten, a bald place in his head next to one ear.

  “Is he back again?” Mom said in a falsetto she uses only on cats. “Is he back again from being brave out in the world?” Talking to him directly. Mom found a can of Kitty Yummies in the back of a cupboard behind human food.

  “When Kyle called earlier tonight,” I said, “what did he want?”

  “He wanted to speak to Anita,” she said in her normal, flat voice.

  “She’ll be home soon,” I said.

  “She’s late,” said Mom.

  I paused at the door to Anita’s room and let the door swing slowly open. When Dad and Anita had one of their fights, it could be about anything. Once she had written the entire U.S. Senate, every single senator, about not cutting down the world’s tallest sequoia, and she had used Ziff Furniture stationery, with the big green Z. She’d done it with a pen in longhand, no computer, so each senator would be impressed with the sincerity and effort.

  Dad had been furious, and said that if she wasn’t his daughter, he would have sued her for making the politicians believe Dad’s business supported Anita’s views. Actually, Dad didn’t think the really historically important redwoods should be cut down, either. He just took a more complicated view of issues than Anita did.

  Sometimes they argued about ordinary things, how the yogurt containers in her room would attract roaches. And at times like that Dad would say he didn’t know what was going to happen to her when she found out what life was really like.

  Bay laurels grow in the East Bay hills. They branch in the creek beds and smell like a spice cabinet—spreading, snaking trees with slender leaves. I had hiked up the trails with my mom a few times, and I always loved the way she would look out over the view when we reached a hilltop and tell me what was not there anymore.

  “That used to be an inland sea,” she would say. “All the way to the foothills. Saber-toothed tigers and dire wolves hunted these slopes, in what is basically contemporary time, maybe fifty thousand years ago.”

  I carried my mother’s pack for her, and it gradually filled with rocks, Franciscan formation sandstone. Or maybe chert. Rocks the color of toasted bread the way I like it, light brown. I was there when she found it, chipping with her rock pick at the side of a cliff, breathing hard—this was before she lost all the weight.

  I had it there in my room. I could look at it when I got tired of her report on the taxonomic features of an extinct species of bay tree. Paragraph after paragraph told how this was a kind of tree that had died out, and our current bay trees were a different variety—a new species.

  The stone was sandwiched together, and as I sat on my bed, I opened the rock, and there it was, just as she had found it that day, so excited she jumped up and down. The fossil leaf was a stain in the rock, the size and color of a deer’s eye.

  Had Anita read the report all the way through? I wondered. Or had she started and quit right away? It was interesting up to a point, stem diameters, millimeters, and comparisons with bay trees in faraway places. But it was boring, too. Not boring and ridiculous, but dull the way the financial page is—important, but not to me.

  There was something a little worrisome about it, too. I could not see any difference between the ancient, sixty-five-thousand-year-old specimen and the leaves we had in the kitchen cupboard, next to the instant coffee.

  I wondered if Mother realized this: She might be wrong.

  The bed jumped, scaring me a little. Bronto stood in the middle of the bed, and because he was so stiff, he anchored himself like a cat statue, giving me that cat hello, a gentle blink of the eyes. He was licking his whiskers. It was a little unusual for Bronto to come home at all, much less make his way into my room.

  The form Coach Jack had given me was on the dresser, under a pile of paperbacks, the kind of novels I didn’t like anymore, time travel and chopped-off heads. One edge of the release form was still curling from where Coach had rolled the paper up.

  My eyes started to itch, and I looked in the mirror. The whites of my eyes were pink, thanks to Bronto. I was starting to look like a boxer who was losing a bout, all puffy and flushed. In another few minutes I wouldn’t be able to see. I fumbled through my top drawer.

  My room was a museum, the way I used to be. I keep things. I care too much to give favorite toys to Goodwill. I don’t keep everything, of course. But here was a beanbag monster, something from my early childhood, and here was a yo-yo that long ago had done tricks. Plastic space creatures, powerful, half-human figures—they were all there, in a great pileup with useful items, dead batteries and virgin batteries all mixed up together.

  I wasn’t even that interested in galaxies anymore, I just kept the space creatures for decoration. I found some Benadryl in the corner of the drawer, among the lint and yo-yo strings. The pills make me sleepy, but I’m allergic to cats, and the mirror showed me the face of a boxer who was going to be counted out, not because he was hurt, but because he was growing too ugly.

  One of my favorite novels when I was younger was a story about a television reporter who hears a voice in his sleep. It is someone from another time, another reach of the universe, someone in trouble with his world. The powers of his time and pla
ce want him dead, and he can only escape by finding a person in a distant time to change places with him. And it happens: The drowsing man in Los Angeles wakes up in a landscape with scarlet skies and five moons.

  But there is a conversation with this space fugitive, and I can’t remember how it goes. I can’t remember if the man in L.A. is convinced that he should come to the assistance of this dream voice, or if he is forced to change places whether he wants to or not.

  I found one of Bronto’s fleas on my ankle, right by the heel bone. When I dug a fingernail into the tiny insect, it broke in two, scrambling and going nowhere, leaking a little bit of my blood.

  8

  When I woke I sat up at once, thinking: What was that?

  Bronto was gone, and there was a light on in the house somewhere. Someone had forgotten to turn it off, I told myself. I could forget about it and go back to sleep.

  But the light was bright, a lance of it falling through the bedroom door. The door had opened somehow, and the light was getting brighter the longer I lay there. I would have to climb out of bed, go downstairs, and turn off the lamp. It was one of those simple problems that loom when you are still half-asleep and don’t want to get up.

  And then I heard my dad’s voice. I knew he was on the phone by his tone, and the rhythm of his speech. He would talk, and then there would be a silence. Then his voice again, even more tense, and another silence. He was arguing with someone, keeping his temper. I could not hear the words.

  It was one-fifteen. I tried to tell myself that this was one of those Dad problems, an issue that had nothing to do with me. Sometimes he stayed up late, calling Poland, where the bentwood chairs were made and shipped in pieces, spools and chair legs, to be assembled here. I heard my mother’s voice, questioning.

  I never have figured out what to wear to bed. I hate pajamas, largely because I always outgrow them so fast, and when they are tight not only do you look gawky, with your arms too long, but when you wake up with an early-morning erection it sticks out obviously and embarrassingly. Even when no one is looking, I don’t like to feel awkward about what I’m wearing.

  These days I tended to wear a large gray sweatshirt to bed, but I still had to pull on a pair of pants to make myself fit for company. Dragging on the pants made this all the more significant—there was something going on.

  I padded down the stairs in my bare feet. The wooden steps were cold. The lights were on the living room, every single lamp, but there was no one there, only rumpled places in the chair and the sofa, impressions of their weight.

  My dad had just put the telephone down, and he was looking at me without seeing me.

  “What’s happening?” I said.

  “Dad was calling BART police,” said Mom.

  I didn’t like the way that sounded, and a very bad feeling flickered in my stomach. Then it was gone, and with a certain tenseness in my body I felt myself grow just a little stupid as a form of protection.

  Bay Area Rapid Transit is a subway system. BART has its own police department. It is its own world—you buy a ticket and you enter transit land, scenery blurring by.

  “The Oakland Police Department suggested it,” said my mom, sounding overly calm, someone reading lines from a book. She didn’t have to tell me. Anita wasn’t home yet.

  “It’s only one o’clock,” I said. “She’s late.” I meant: She’s been late before. That wasn’t quite true. She was rarely this late.

  “That’s right,” she said, not looking at me. “She must have gone somewhere with Kyle.”

  Anita always called when she was even a few minutes late. Anita was impatient with the rest of us, but she played by a certain set of rules: Write letters, make phone calls, don’t eat any more red meat than you have to.

  I wondered if there had been an accident, one of the trains derailing. Sometimes someone jumps onto the tracks on purpose or by accident, the electric third rail cooking them stiff. These were my thoughts, but I heard my dad say, “The OPD says she hasn’t been gone long enough for us to file a missing persons report. But they took her description anyway, because of her age.”

  “She’s only running a little behind,” Mom said, like someone referring to a train schedule. “God knows I was late all the time,” she said, looking off to one side, like she could see herself twenty years ago. “I bet I took years off my dad’s life,” she said, without much sadness, but philosophically, puzzled by historical fact.

  Anita worked near the MacArthur BART station. She would travel past the Nineteenth Street Station, Twelfth Street, Lake Merritt, and get off at Fruitvale. She would take the bus up into the hills. Dad had hated the plan, because of all the street crime, but she had found the job on her own and was even joining a union.

  “Maybe she made some new friends,” Mom was saying. “They stopped by after work.”

  Stopped by for a drink, she meant, or a cup of coffee. That didn’t sound like Anita. The legal drinking age is twenty-one, although Anita could pass for older in bad light. Anita drank coffee a little, after dinner at a nice restaurant. But she made friends slowly, like me. Maybe she was changing. But this sounded like a fantasy that belonged to Mom’s vision of the world, not Anita’s.

  Mom had friends, went out, drank caffe lattes in San Francisco. Anita was always in a hurry somewhere, running her fingers through her hair or giving it a toss to swing it out of her eyes.

  “She was supposed be home at ten,” Dad said. He did not look sleepy, and he had combed his hair. He was dressed in slacks and a fresh shirt, but he was barefooted, like me.

  “It’s very inconsiderate,” said Mom, not looking at either of us.

  “What’s the name of her manager?” Dad asked both of us. This was a word out of Dad’s way of life: manager. If you needed help, you talked to the person in charge.

  I gave him a look, a shake of my head: I don’t know.

  “I get an answering machine,” said Dad. “I call American Shelf and Filing and I get a machine to talk to.” He said this like it was an outrage he was bearing with as much patience he could muster.

  “It’s good they have an answering machine,” I said. “The phone could just keep on ringing. You wouldn’t like that.” Maybe I was taking Anita’s part, without thinking much about it. “Paula stays out to three sometimes.” I said it like this—not till three. Maybe I was signaling to everyone by speaking a little clumsily that I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  My mother turned her head in my direction.

  Paula had claimed to have stayed out with guys with motorcycles and Romanian accents, including one man years older than Paula who built skyscrapers, driving rivets. His favorite expression was “Don’t look down,” in a foreign language I had never heard of.

  “Last year I didn’t get home until two-thirty that time,” I said.

  “I remember,” said Mom, giving her words special weight.

  “You both go to bed,” Dad said.

  Mom started to speak and he shook his head, and that was all anyone could say.

  “I wasn’t home until almost three o’clock that time,” I said.

  “You got on the phone,” said Dad. “Oliver had a flat tire, and you called us twice, telling us you were okay.” Merriman and I had gone to San Jose to see a hockey game, and it took us half an hour just to find the jack.

  I had always wondered when Anita would do something like this. I had been expecting it in the back of my mind. Someday, I had come to believe, she would stay up all night and come home drunk. Or too happy, eyes bright with what Dad always referred to as Some Sort of Drug. As in: I think some of the people in the finishing room are on Some Sort of Drug.

  She had gotten good grades, except in math, returned her library books on time, learned to drive in about half an hour one Saturday afternoon. She had been too good, in the way kids are said to be good kids. It was time. Anita had finally decided to have a wild night, and I couldn’t really blame her.

  But my parent’s tenseness ate at me, e
ven when I went back up to my room. I wanted Anita to come home, say she was sorry, give a normal excuse, and then we could all go to bed, after Dad got over his speech about responsibilty, fumed a little, paced around for a while, and finally gave her a hug.

  And I was afraid in a part of me that could not hear my own inner lecture. I lay down in the dark and tried to trust my parents to deal with this. I tried to trust Anita, too. She had kept her own address book since she was thirteen. Computers, Spanish verbs—it all came easily to her.

  So I knew she would be all right.

  9

  An engine started up outside, a beefy rumble.

  It was still dark out. I got up in time to see Dad’s white Jeep veer out of the driveway. Gears clanked. The two headlights illuminated the sprawling junipers in the front yard while Dad pumped the clutch, trying to shift. Our front yard was in good shape. A man from Green Planet Garden Service dropped by to touch it up once a week. Round stepping-stones led out into the middle of the lawn.

  We have three cars, a twelve-cylinder Jaguar, a vintage MG, and the noisy Jeep. Each car is fun, and each has something wrong with it. We have money—a cabin at Tahoe, raw land on the north coast. But my dad’s life is crammed with projects.

  As Dad found first gear and accelerated, I caught a glimpse of his profile, portable telephone held to his ear. I could picture my dad following his plan, step by step. First, visit the place where Anita worked. There would be a night crew, security guards. Maybe Anita was still there, so involved in her work she couldn’t turn her head to look at the clock.

  Then he would cruise the BART station. After that he would follow the route home, checking out the bus stop, driving the short distance from the bus stop here, stopping every now and then to peer.