by Maria Flook
“Where’s Munro?” the young man called to Rennie. “Just tell me where and I’m taking care of it. Don’t ask me how.”
Rennie pointed to her big house and told him, “Make it short and sweet, please. He’s giving me the hard sell.”
Holly noticed that the young man had a broken arm in a new cast; its glistening length caught the porch light in blinding swipes. Instead of walking over to Rennie’s house, he climbed onto Holly’s porch and popped into the kitchen. He started rustling through her utility drawers. Using one hand, he jerked the silverware bin open too far and the Oneida stainless clattered to the floor. Holly walked after him. “What are you doing? There must be some mistake, you’re in my house.”
“Just a second,” Willis told her.
“What’s going on? I’m telling you, this is my place.”
Rennie came in. She stopped at the rubberized threshold, letting the storm door slap her hip.
“Who is he?” Holly said.
Rennie said, “This one is Willis. The other one is Munro. Willis is my stepson. Munro is the real McCoy.” Rennie was shaking her head in wonder, as if she couldn’t make sense of it herself.
“Are you saying you know this person? Well, can you ask him to get out of my house?” Holly said.
“You must have a knife somewhere in here?” Willis said.
“A knife? You want a knife—”
In his haste, Willis upset a cardboard box of skillets. Heavy cast-iron disks clanged like tiny manhole covers; one pan rolled into Holly’s ankle and she felt a painful vibration, her funny bone.
He paced another way and kicked something over. It was her plastic sack of stained marine specimens.
“Have you got enough fish heads for supper?” Willis said. His smile threw her off balance.
She grabbed the bag from him and it spilled onto the linoleum in a fetid heap. Tarry scallop shells, skate eggs, black nuggets of moon snails, sand eels with tiny peppercorn eyes.
“These things are ecological victims for my students. From that oil spill,” she told him. She felt her teeth grinding, her fillings meshing their silver saddles. She was amazed at his nerve. She was a couple years his senior, but he didn’t seem to acknowledge the earned distance of those years.
Willis said, “What kind of exhibit? That’s just regular gurry. Fish slop.” He was watching her when he turned around and walked into an opened drawer. He banged his wrist and yiped. His eyes were shiny. His face seemed broken into sharp planes under the geometric pattern of his thoughts, or it was from simple pain. His skin was very pale, with a bluish tint like the bone china features of ceramic dolls; his face was hardly a tone deeper than his plastered arm. His arm dangled awkwardly unless he pulled it in and held it against his waist. Once or twice Holly thought she caught him wincing.
“Look, I just need something to chase a vulture,” he told Holly. He was eyeing the kitchen clock which was part of the furnishings. The clock was shaped like a coffee percolator with a lighted glass knob at the top that bubbled in sync with the second hand. Right below the clock there were some kitchen decorations, two oversized wooden utensils like the kind displayed above a salad bar in a steak house. A three-foot wooden salad fork and a matching spoon were bolted to the wall. Willis tried to pry the fork loose. It wasn’t coming.
Holly looked over at Rennie Hopkins. “What the hell is he doing? Is he trying to wreck something—”
Munro returned to Holly’s porch. He plucked at the knees of his nylon pant legs before he squatted down. He tried to clean the soot from the floorboards with a soapy sponge. He had an open bottle of ammonia. Holly read the bottle label that said WARNING: IRRITANT in bold letters.
She walked onto her porch and told Munro Hopkins, “You don’t have to bother with that. I’ll take care of it myself.”
He didn’t look up.
“Really. It’s perfectly all right,” she told him again. Munro didn’t listen to her and he scrubbed the porch floorboards, rubbing the sponge in brisk circles until the foam rose over his hand. Then he saw Willis. Willis came out of the kitchen with half of the giant wooden spoon, leaving its splintered remains still bolted to the wall.
Munro threw the sponge down and walked across the driveway to his car. Willis sailed after him, taking long strides. He tapped Munro with the broken utensil. The spoon was softwood but it made a dull smacking sound when it struck Munro’s skull.
Munro reached his car and turned around. “I’m warning you,” he told Willis. Then he started to cackle. His laughter had an ominous clarity in the still twilight. It was more than an older sibling’s power; it had the villainous tenor of someone on a higher perch. He stopped laughing and told Willis, “Look at yourself. A cripple. Look at that spoon. Where’s your Maypo?”
Willis said, “Rennie doesn’t want you around here. Don’t pull in here again.” He gripped the spoon in his left hand and rolled it across his knee, rubbing the denim the way he might clean fish guts from his knives.
Munro leaned back against his car. He crossed his arms, giving it a chilly, patronizing flourish.
Willis told his stepbrother, “Take that retirement crap and cram it up your ass. Maybe this spoon goes in and I dig the shit out with it.”
“I’ll tell you what. This is a legal matter in which you have no input. Try something like this again and I go into town. I’ll let them handle you down there. I can get the correct paperwork for you. I don’t need Rennie’s signature.”
“She lives here with me. She dies here with me,” Willis said.
“Now, that shows a lot of sensitivity. Say it again so she can hear you.” Munro sat down in his car and started the ignition. It was a new sport coupe; the engine whirred quietly, like a dishwasher.
Munro leaned out the car window and signaled to Holly. “Ignore him. He’s a pest. Thanks for the chat,” he said and he steered the tiny sports car over the clamshell driveway.
Willis yelled, “Clear off, horse ass—”
He came back to the women.
He held out the broken spoon to Holly. “I’ve seen these at Apex. I’ll get you another one. I’ll install it.”
“Install it? You’ll screw it on the wall?”
“He can fix it for you,” Rennie said, “he’s handy with everything.” She turned to go back inside her house.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” Willis told Holly, fingering the spoon. “Maybe I can glue it.” He was still concentrating on his stepbrother’s car, watching until its diamond-shaped taillights were gone. Then he looked at Holly. “You talked to my brother? What about?”
“I didn’t talk about anything.” Her denial of it sounded more ridiculous than Willis’s accusation.
He stood squared before her. His showy leather boots had thick heels which pitched him to a threatening height above her, and his lean frame looked postmodern, post-punk invasion, all in all like some nihilistic cowboy. She felt him turning it another notch, thumbing the psychological dial. His eyes pinned her. His eyes gave her the impression that they not only saw but generated whatever he saw about her. Willis Pratt made her feel nondescript. His skin was pale as milk, like anemic Victorian maidens, but his hair was dark and luscious. Beside him, her own dark hair looked coppery. Then, he was, of course, insane. That was it. Isn’t it true that certain madmen had luxurious manes. What about Manson? Madmen glowed.
Then Willis reached into her Toyota, touching the radio knobs.
“ ‘Sounds in the Night,’ with Jack Lazar,” Willis said. “WHDH. Ever listen to Jack Lazar?”
“No, never,” she said.
“A word of warning: your lonesome minutes make empty hours—”
Holly pivoted on her heel and walked six feet away from him. He kept talking. His voice was rich and smooth, expertly tongue-in-cheek, like a disc jockey who talks over a record. He started to whistle a tune as he prowled around Holly. Willis continued to whistle the song. He slowed it down, held its phrases, until Holly thought she recognized the melody. “I
Can’t Get Started,” a deliberately smoky, yet faithful interpretation. He whistled through his teeth, the haunting, almost atonal sound of men who have learned to whistle in any number of situations, at all hours. Then he was singing the lyrics, “I’ve flown around the world in a plane—I’ve settled revolutions in Spain—I’ve got a house, a showplace—but I get no place—”
She turned around to face him.
He shrugged.
He said, “ ‘The Music of Your Life’—do you ever catch that program? It’s one my favorites.”
“You’re kidding? What about rock ’n’ roll?” she asked him.
“What about it?”
He walked a circle around her. “Here’s a tip: the half-moon talks half-truths.” He looked at her, grinning.
She looked up at the sky. She didn’t see any moon. The evening sky was overcast. He’s crazy, she was thinking. One of these idiot savants who can memorize radio patter. She thought of the others, Rennie and her older son, they too didn’t promise an easy spring. Why they included her in their confrontation, Holly didn’t understand. She was just in the way of it, like a dog or cat at the center of a family argument, sure to be kicked. After her arrest, she promised herself that she would never again exhibit her personal trials for public scrutiny. If she was a vessel of bad nerves and disappointments, the vessel should never tip. The image of a bed on fire seemed a remote dream, yet it had been a high point for Holly. No other feeling had equaled that triumph.
She watched Willis Pratt brushing up the remaining soot on her front porch. She told him not to bother with it.
“This situation got out of hand while I was away. I wasn’t around to look out for her. Rennie’s pretty good, she’s usually wise to things, but Munro shouldered his way in when she was sick. Now I have to take control.”
Holly said, “Well, there sure seems to be a difference of opinion—”
“That’s right. There is a basic conflict of opinion.”
“What exactly?”
“I’ll tell you exactly. My stepbrother thinks he exists. I have news for him. He does not exist.”
Holly was convinced of Willis Pratt’s conviction to ignore simple irrefutable fact. He twisted the blackened sponge and his cast became cuffed in grey suds. Sometimes his bottom lip betrayed a spasm somewhere else in his body. He handed her the sponge.
“That’s not mine,” she told him. She wrung it out and handed it back. “That’s from your house.”
Her voice clearly revealed the burden of making his acquaintance. She hated letting on that he was just too much for her. She watched him walk across the driveway. He hadn’t even said good night to her. Except for his radio voice, he didn’t use any small talk. Perhaps he knew that small talk would have tipped it a new way. She waited on her front porch for a minute, searching the black seascape. When she looked again at the big house, she saw a hall light switch on. It was the stairwell window between the first and second stories; Willis was climbing the steps. Holly waited for him to reach the landing. She was startled to see him searching the window for her, shielding his eyes from the overhead bulb. She turned away and went back inside the duplex.
Chapter Five
Wydette died when Willis was thirteen. Driving home from Horseneck Beach, Willis still wore a white crescent of zinc oxide across the bridge of his nose, imitating the lifeguards. He had spent most of the day with Wydette exploring the salt marsh. Wydette had seen a kingfisher there for the past three seasons. The bird liked to perch on sagging cables along the beach road. The kingfisher had a big scruff of feathers, a beautiful crest like a hatchet, an ivory neck ring, and a strong beak like the blades of Wydette’s sewing shears.
Wydette had left Cuba as a young girl. She was naturalized in Florida at the age of eighteen, the same year she was named runner-up to Miss Jacksonville. At the beach, Wydette wore a sarong bathing suit, tropic island style, like the one she had worn in the beauty pageant. The suit left a distinct tan line, straight as a carpenter’s level across her cleavage.
Willis’s father, Lester, preferred to stay put under an umbrella. He had a Coleman cooler with a six-pack of beer all for himself and a six-pack of White Rock ginger ale for the rebound.
On the drive home from the beach, Lester stopped in Fall River to buy drinks and sandwiches. Wydette ordered a sausage and pepper grinder and Willis and Lester chose chili dogs with transparent confetti flecks of onion. In the car, his parents started arguing, insulting one another. Wydette told Lester that she wanted to learn how to water-ski. She wasn’t really serious and Lester knew she was teasing him. He didn’t like her habit of making idle plans just to bargain with him. Lester criticized her, and instead of barking back she giggled with each of his comments about her. She ate her grinder, tugging loose a long strip of green pepper and eating it with her fingers. She encouraged bad table manners and Willis exhaled air through his straw. His iced coffee bubbled over the waxed-paper cup and stained the fabric upholstery. Together, they laughed until his father started swearing and punching the seat between them. Then, with the car going fifty, Lester reached over and took Wydette’s throat with one hand. He shook her. The car swerved onto the gravel shoulder and he had to let her go and take the wheel again. He looked better, relieved just to have throttled her once; it was a release, and his anger had crested. But Wydette had swallowed something whole, a wedge of sausage, and she was choking. Willis leaned over the front seat to pound his mother’s back. Her eyes looked pinched, then wide with fear. She could not tell him what to do, her voice was on the other side of the obstruction.
Lester pulled the car over to the shoulder and lifted his wife out of the passenger seat. He held her upside down at the waist and drummed her back with the heel of his hand; he bounced her over his bended knee until her dark bangs swept the littered asphalt. Finally, Lester ran out into the moving traffic. He tried to make the cars stop, as if stopping random vehicles could reverse his situation. Speeding cars screeched and sideswiped the inside guardrail. Lester came back to his wife and son. He lifted Wydette upside down once again. She choked to death despite the force of gravity. The force of gravity, that monumental natural law, could not save her, how could Willis? Wydette’s face changed, its color deepened, and Willis had to look away.
The winter following Wydette’s death, Willis discovered a ship’s figurehead from the nineteenth century at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford. The sculpture’s origin was a mystery, nor did they know from which ship she was salvaged. The figurehead was known simply as the “White Lady,” because she wore a snowy gown under a blue apron. Every Saturday afternoon Willis took the bus to New Bedford and paid student admission to go inside the museum, through the arching whalebones at the entrance, past the harpoons and the baleen corsets. He loitered for an hour near the subject of his erotic nightmares. The “White Lady” looked like Wydette. She was beautiful, an evocative wooden bust of a gargantuan woman. The figure was nine feet tall with full skirt draperies swirling around her legs, a blue bodice, and white diamond-shaped stomacher. She wore a large red stone brooch at her bust, a bracelet and two matching necklaces. Her hair was deep brown, and cascaded down to her waist but was bound at the top with a white crownlike headpiece. Like all classic figureheads, she kept her right hand over her bosom, her left hand down at her side. The sculpture stared over Willis. Her maternal gaze was both tolerant and lovingly chastising. For almost a century her face had watched the rough sea and remained sweetly forgiving. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Although the original paint was checked and alligatored, she had the honeyed skin and dark corona of a familiar beauty. The figurehead looked like Wydette as Wydette looked at her viewing.
All winter the White Lady was his fixation. He wanted to place the palms of his hands on her rough wood cheeks, and with the raw, sensitive pads of his fingertips feel the weathered grain, the notched recesses of her mysterious eyes, her full lips. He couldn’t stand around in the museum very long without imagining knocking the figurehead fr
om its permanent station. He looked so agitated, pacing back and forth, that finally the museum guides escorted him out of the building. When he came back inside, he stole an assortment of souvenirs from the gift shop. Humpback whale stamp pads, ships in tiny thumb-sized bottles. In the end, the museum director had contacted the high school in Newport to discuss Willis’s student profile. On the advice of the assistant principal, Willis was refused any further admittance to the museum.
That same winter, Willis’s father met Rennie at her souvenir shop on Bowen’s Wharf. He was hired to fix a sliding glass door that kept jumping its track, and in just three months he and Willis were living at Easton Way. Lester and Rennie signed marriage papers at the courthouse, but there wasn’t a ceremony.
It didn’t seem to bother Lester that Rennie’s first two husbands had gone down at sea. In fact, Lester had a perverse interest in the deaths of Rennie’s two husbands. He had lost his wife for no readable purpose; it was no different from the inexplicable seas and boiler eruptions that took Rennie’s husbands.
Willis saw Lester trying to shake his guilt about Wydette. Willis didn’t think that his father deserved even a tiny snatch of peace, not even a smidgen, nor a fleck. For months he gave his father the cold shoulder, never letting up. He lost his mother and disowned Lester.
When Willis and his father moved into Rennie’s big house above First Beach, Willis took the third-floor bedroom which had its own bath. An old clawfoot tub faced the bathroom window. The bathroom window was actually a full-sized storm door which framed a picture of the cold Atlantic, the rough surf breaking its green shingles on the shore. Rennie had a practical intuition about her new stepson. One night, Willis stood up from the tub, naked and dripping wet; he wanted to exit the tepid bath, exit the humid room. He wanted to go right through that storm door. Bathwater wasn’t enough. Soap was no use. Its lather was acrid, like white dung. He wanted the wet sea. He rattled the handle on the storm, but Rennie had nailed the door shut.