“Is that blood?” Bryan said, pausing to swipe at a mark I’d left on the new notebook. He didn’t wait around for an answer. He was already levitating back out the window, plunging into the afternoon glare with a new dark radiance, clutching the notebook in hand as if he intended to fill it with his own peculiar equations, ones that would incinerate all notions of relative elasticity and relegate Flacker and the Nagles to an underworld all their own.
AS HE LIES DYING
The stories of the dying have nothing to do with dying. They are all about past adventure. An inexpert listener might think the dying man is holding on to the hem of life, desperate to feel its weight and value, to make a kind of peace before moving onward. But the truth is, the dying man is opening a door for the living. You have to find out how to live; that’s his parting advice.
See, he says. Look. Can You Hear Me? Hey, I’m dying over here.
A few years back, my dad was inspecting a tailings pond and a load of debris fell off a partially raised backhoe, knocking him about and half crushing a vital organ or two, and in the hospital, after one complication after another and the infection to boot, the staff made ready to summon a white-collared professional to prepare him for the worst and in sober almost meaningful tones, they asked us: “What is his religion? What does he believe in?”
I had felt a moment of panic, sure my dad was about to fail a crucial test, one that would make his survival impossible, but neither my mother nor Uncle Lud hesitated.
“Science,” they both said, almost at once. “He believes in science.”
Well, that pissed them all off, didn’t it? The hospital social worker with her glossy brochures and clipboard and dozen clergymen on call, that brisk nurse with her not-too-subtle silver cross stud earrings—the pair of them disgusted with this family. Only the doctor managed a twitch of satisfaction, and his smug smile soon tinged with anxiety because now, for certain, he was on the hook, no higher power hovering in the wings to assume the blame my father—and presumably our family, as well—would certainly ascribe to the only scientist at hand.
But of course, my mother didn’t share my father’s true confidence in science, save as a means to my personal achievement. Instead, she believed in grand myths of the kind governed by multiple sets of arbitrary and often unsaid rules. Her Earth erupted from a fiery birth, and both life and death must involve a long passage, through mountain trails and wild river rapids. The elders around here loved her.
My mother parceled out her faith, also giving another portion to the Church, but not explicitly to Church doctrine. A fierce attendant of Mass, a devotee of Our Blessed Lady, she would bang her fist against your jaw for bad-mouthing a pope, but was more than happy to ignore what she called the lesser details and what His Holiness might call Church law. No, it’s the Battle Between Good and Evil my mother believed in: the Big Show. She collected candles and incense and rosary beads as if they were ammunition she’s stockpiling away for the day the Dark One comes sniffing around her door. The old tribal stories don’t get in the way here. My mother has widened the interpretation so that when the Devil comes to call, he might take the form of a lonesome wolf with black cloven hooves instead of paws and long, yellowed incisors. She’ll know when he’s close by, she says. She heard him once, years ago, pacing around an old shed where a weak-minded uncle raged with drink. The uncle grew calm; they all remembered that—my mother, especially—the high-pitched caterwauling winding down into a quiet that made them all uneasy. And yet they let him be until morning when they found he’d hanged himself in that shed, his hands laced with marks the doctor said were self-inflicted burns. She’d seen the holes in the yard, indentations that no dog, no cat, not even a moose would make. And though they’d raked the yard smooth a dozen times, those marks never failed to return, almost as if they were a bad memory continually surfacing.
Oh, yeah, my mother’s faith took the devil into account. Another reason she liked to keep watch over Uncle Lud. If he was going, she wasn’t letting him go with That One. Another reason she liked to keep me busy. If the devil wanted an entryway into our household, who would he choose? My engineer father? Her holy self? My good uncle? Or a weak-willed, socially ignorant pudding like me, a big, gangly, half-sighted, half-breed boy loping up the middle of the road right into danger, his nose in a fifty-cent notebook filled with scribbles? I’d be safe—we’d be safe—she reasoned, as long as I didn’t glance up from that notebook or dawdle around, waiting for trouble to snap me up. If she’d known for certain how I used those notebooks, recording all I could manage, she would have realized what I hadn’t yet: that I’d already been converted and was calling up trouble with each turn of the page.
As for Uncle Lud, he claimed his faith in listening.
“That’s no kind of believing,” I countered.
“Listening to who? Listening to what?” I asked.
“But you’re the one we listen to,” I added, stating the obvious.
Still, there was no arguing with him. No real answers would be forthcoming. Nothing, that is, you could relay to the hospital staff should they be asking about Uncle Lud one day.
“Stories,” I would have to tell them. “He believes in stories.”
And from the room beyond, no matter how deeply into a coma he might have fallen, Uncle Lud would likely snort. But I would be telling the truth. I was sure of that.
Whenever I talk with Uncle Lud, I am in a huge field. Uncle Lud’s talk is a huge field, sky flung ’round us like a fresh cloth sprung from the laundry line, all sweetness and embrace. I lie back and listen, and fanciful though it might seem, we slip away.
We might be on a fragrant knoll, barely above waving flanks of what must be wheat—although I’ve never seen the stuff growing—the sun skipping between the rasping rows so that some are tawny and brindled, others pure raving gold. And though the vista narrows and widens with each tale Lud tells, the landscape never fails to unfurl itself, so that soon, too, I can see what my uncle sees and I know (I know) that there’s another route that leads in and out of town, a secret one that’s been here all along and is well traveled by other sorts of visitors, less strangers than well-forgotten kin. That road has none of the stark beauty of our highway. Uncle Lud’s secret route is meandering and narrow. In places, it tunnels through forests and giant mica-dazzled rocks that from a distance appear impenetrable. But the route is open and once the traveler reaches what he might suppose should be a wall, there it is: a twining ribbon coursing forward, the fields, the lake. Imagine maps laid upon maps, all translucent, all imperative, soul trails enveloping real space, real people.
Light folds and wind buckles in the field that is Uncle Lud’s talk.
Look here, Leo, he says, bending down to caress an insect with mottled wings, a crenulated leaf, a tiny sentient stippled rock whose tin and copper colors deepen with pleasure at his touch.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I can’t believe he’ll leave us. I can’t believe I won’t find my way to Uncle Lud. Because even now, I know where Lud will be.
In a deep, wide field in a town overlaid on this one. As long as I remember every story, I’ll know just where to find him, and maybe there, too, I’ll find what I believe in.
DEVILS MAKE THE BEST SALESMEN
A man appeared in Uncle Lud’s town the year he started Secondary. A man who went door-to-door with a suitcase. He wore a skinny tie and a shiny suit. What he was selling was hidden, locked within the case.
“I’d love to show you, if you have a minute,” he told the woman of the house, children clustered around her. “First, might I have a glass of water? The road up to the house was dusty,” he added, “so very dry.”
While one of the kids went to fetch the water, the rest noticed how the man’s shoes sparkled, and they nudged one another. The fellow’s hands were smooth and unmarked. They couldn’t tear their eyes away as he unbuckled straps, unsnapped locks, and opened h
is world for them.
Sweets, that’s what he was selling. Only one flavor. An astonishment. His suitcase crammed full of gold-wrapped candies that, unwrapped, made them all take a step backward. On the corner of the porch, a hound on a chain growled, not so much in response to the visitor but to the reactions of his family.
“Madam,” the salesman said. “Might I offer you a complimentary sample of my wares?”
How could she say no? The sweet was blood-red, varnished, and salty on the surface. The housewife half choked when it hit her tongue.
“My fault, Mister,” she apologized. “I was expecting something else—cinnamon, a spice of some kind.” Her tongue dried from the salt, even as the sweet beneath it beckoned. Her hand reached involuntarily for another. The salesman held back, eyeing the children, who’d inched behind their mother, clutching her skirts, hiding their faces from his temptation.
Did you dream this? I wanted to know.
A story is not a dream, Uncle Lud told me.
He went on to describe how a dream is a fractured shadow, a cardboard village.
A story, though, Uncle Lud said, now, a story has solid form. You can hang your hat on a story.
The devil doesn’t care about character development—that hidden code for moral expansion. The buds and branches of careworn emotional depth are anathema to him. He favors regression, backsliding, the wave-on-wave corruption, the dissolution, if you will, of character. Don’t ask for character here.
Eventually, if not that very day, the candy salesman would find the children at the doorway receptive. And they would be struck by how, once on the tongue, the sweet seemed to ripple as if riding an unseen current before dissolving with an audible whoosh, a tiny explosion on the tongue that nothing could replicate, although quite a few children would discover as they grew older how closely the physical effect of that tiny sugar rock resembled a popular homemade drug, the only difference being the candy’s effect ended with that marvelous eruption, while the drug’s explosion dug craters within them that could never be healed. And they would do anything to get more.
“It’s only candy,” the salesman said smoothly. “Surely, you’ve tasted it before.”
HOMEWORK
That day, the day of Hana Swann and Keven Seven, seemed unwilling to give way to night. It stretched on for hours, coming as it did at the height of summer, the burnt halo of sunset finally seeping away around ten thirty. At the Nowickis’, Bryan huddled at the kitchen table drawing diagrams in the notebook I’d given him while Ursie sat cross-legged at the table’s far side and fiddled with a new pack of cards she’d brought home from the Peak and Pine.
“They’ll bring you luck,” Keven Seven had told her. “A certain kind of luck, a type I’d bet you’ve never experienced before.”
And his words had been made true already. That afternoon, as she’d gone to haul her cart and vacuum back into the supply closet, she’d spotted a twenty-dollar bill on the floor. She’d had an uncharacteristic moment of doubt and greed, half-shoving the bill into the pocket of her jeans, where it bunched uncomfortably, but she’d turned it over to Albie once she got to the office. It wasn’t hers. She could hear her mother’s voice saying as much. But then, out of the blue, the usually tight-fisted Albie turned around and handed back a ten, a tip that afternoon. One of the truckers had left something—for the mess in the parking lot, he said.
“And I notice you’ve got a taste for that,” he said, nodding toward the cases of diet pop. “Go ahead and take a case of it home with you. Good to get rid of the stuff.”
Albie looked up to see Ursie’s eyebrows narrow, and he caught himself.
“Don’t get used to it,” he said.
Ursie and Bryan had taken the money right to the Hot Spot and bought a big greasy bag of Spot Burgers and fries. Ursie set the kitchen table, the same way they always had—two plates on the daisy placemats, two paper towels folded into fat triangles—and they’d eaten their supper almost wordlessly. Bryan didn’t mention Hana Swann, and Ursie had no words to introduce Keven Seven, whose face, despite an afternoon of close scrutiny, was becoming more indistinct by the second. Like smoke, she thought, imagining a puff rising from her rapidly expert shuffling. She marveled at the energy captured in tiny bits of paper. Paper and ink, that’s all the cards were really, and yet look what they could do.
A new letter from their father lay on the counter. Bryan had decided it could wait. They’d given up the phone; they’d had no choice. The only routes their father had to reach them were to write to them (rough slashes on his new girlfriend’s pink paper), leave a message with a neighbor, or show up in person. He hadn’t done the latter two in a good long time, and his letters were few and far between and rarely, these days, full of more than barely suppressed rants as if with a little help from the new girlfriend, he’d made strangers of his children, only to have conjured an argument with them, and he couldn’t let it go.
“He has nothing good to tell us,” Bryan told Ursie.
“Maybe he sent something,” she said.
It had been weeks and weeks. He’d been clear in his last letter, Bryan knew. He wouldn’t be doing that again.
“Or maybe he’s coming home.” A weird sense of dismay settled on her heart, surprising her.
“You want to open it?” Bryan asked.
“After supper, I guess,” she’d said. “I’m starving.”
But they’d eaten hours ago, and the letter remained unopened.
On any normal night, brother and sister might have noticed the oddness of the other’s behavior, but not that night. Bryan drew and drew, ripped one crumpled sheet of paper after another. Ursie fingered playing cards. Heat pressed in upon them in the narrow kitchen, the bent screen on the back door wheezing, but no real breeze arriving.
Ursie had never held a deck of cards until that afternoon. Her father once pronounced that a girl playing cards was trashy. But she wasn’t playing cards, and she certainly wasn’t gambling, and he wasn’t there, was he? She fanned the deck out in one long line the way she’d been taught that afternoon and swept the line into a pile again to practice her new shuffle.
“Do we have bleach?” Bryan asked suddenly.
“Under the sink,” Ursie said.
The cards had a tendency, she was noticing, to tangle as if they were gripped by a peculiar urgency and must rush into place. Her task—she could see that now—was to provide calm, to stroke them so that they flanked one another in an orderly, well-reasoned line that would unfurl with her tender touch.
“Good,” Bryan said, keeping his eyes on the charts and diagrams filling his notebook page.
His reply came after a long beat of silence during which Ursie exchanged a series of winks with the Jack of Clubs. She’d completely forgotten Bryan’s earlier question, but she agreed with him; it was good. Containment and control: her index finger stopping each card as it streamed from hand to hand. Elegance: the neat, quick rhythm of a riffle shuffle. All cards have two faces, Keven Seven had proclaimed. One is public and conceals all true identity under a cover of uniformity. The other is the secret and true card, a revelation that can alter destinies.
Games depend upon this secrecy, Keven Seven had told her. In this way, they resemble life and death, because, after all, what meaning would life hold if it weren’t for its flip side? Like the “imperfect information” upon which a player must stake his fortune, glimpses of death, dealt, could pry open a life and allow the real betting to begin.
Ursie’s wrist burned. She could see two even lines of reddened skin on its smooth underside and nearly felt his grip again, saw the white knobs of his knuckles. How hard had he held her?
She set up the cards again for a shuffle.
Again, please, again, Keven Seven had said, one lean hand pressing on her shoulder.
She would like to have conjured his face right that moment, but he turned a
way from her. For the life of her, Ursie couldn’t recall his features. And yet he occupied her fully. Her chest rose and fell with a churning that for lack of a better alternative, she accounted to him. She would undress later that night to find the bruising blooms of his touch along her shoulders and collarbone, along her upper arms, and most alarmingly, within the velvet undersides of her thighs. And she would, against her better nature, preen a bit, feeling he was with her. His grip was that tight.
He had hopes for her, he said. Better than hopes. A wonderful plan. She was extremely talented, he said, and it wouldn’t be long before she could prove it. Did she like games? Of course she did. Who didn’t? Who didn’t like winning? He’d only seen one other like her, and unfortunately that girl squandered her talent. Ursie wouldn’t. Her gift was too great. His eyes followed her imitation of each of his lessons. Her own learning astounded her. She mastered technique, sure—but she possessed that other intangible: she could lead the eye and capture the beholder. Why even he, Keven Seven, said he was entranced.
That evening, Ursie’s hair flew back in her cards’ own dashing breeze. Bring it on home with a strip shuffle—Running Cuts, it was called—and she loved this best of all. It reminded her of a long time ago when they were a family and out camping and her father wouldn’t even start the truck but simply shift it into neutral so that the old truck came alive as if it had a life of its own, meandering down whatever back road they’d camped beside. And she and Bryan and their mother would lope behind it until, picking up speed, one by one, they hoisted themselves into the truck bed—slip, slip, slip—like cards falling back into the deck.
Ursie was sipping a Diet Bubble-Up from the case Albie had given her along with that astonishing tip. Now she wondered if he’d noticed her delay that afternoon and if he’d wondered what she had been doing in Room 14. She felt her lips and cheeks redden. Even her hair had a new swing to it, one that seemed to mimic the back-and-forth of the cards passing between her hands.
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