by Chris Lynch
I decided enough was enough with this nonsense. I opted not to kick the ball from afar, and instead charged him with the ball, which I was always better at anyway. I ran in, shifted left, shifted right, went straight in at him.
And banged right into him, without ever getting a shot off. I bounced right off Walter’s chest, went back in the direction I came from, then landed right on my backside.
I sat there looking up at him.
Walter’s healthy, round, happy face, sometimes mean face, always there face, puckered and pulled in, collapsed on him as he stood looking down on me.
I felt my eyes go wide, my throat lump up when I saw. He didn’t do this, didn’t show it anyway, and certainly wouldn’t do it over just bumping me to the ground.
He reached down with both hands and pulled me up, his face still all strangled up as he asked, “What’s wrong with Dad, Vee? What’s going to happen?”
When I stood, I was just about eye to eye with him. I figured it was only a matter of months before I was going to have to start looking up at him. But he still had a long way to go to really catch up.
“I don’t know exactly,” I said. “But I know it will be all right. Dad is Dad. He is always going to be Dad, no matter what. We didn’t get all the way to here, from all the way away where we started, through all the everything we went through just to suddenly go poof. Right?”
He looked at me a little bit harder then, as if to see if it was, in fact, right. As if the answer to the rightness of all was to be found just a little deeper inside my eyes.
His face uncrunched. Not all the way, but enough to make my own stomach feel a little less filled with bowling balls and bees.
“Right,” I said.
“The fish are all dead,” he then said.
“What?”
“They’re all dead. All three of them. They’re gone. Dad says the rat got them.”
“God, not the rat again,” I said as I spun away from Walter and headed for the goldfish pond. “He blames everything on the rat. The rat broke the garage windows, the rat stole the garden hose, the rat scratched his car, the rat’s been making screeching noises outside the windows at night. Like, we don’t have just a rat anymore, that’s not enough, now we have to have a rat with a grudge. Have you even seen this rat, Walter?”
We were just approaching the pond.
“Yah, I think so,” he said, stopping me dead.
“You have?” I said, turning on him.
“Yah. Maybe. I think so. It was at night. You were in the bath. Dad saw him, outside, going into the bushes. He pointed him out. I think I saw him. Saw his tail anyway. Saw the bushes move, almost for sure. It must have been the rat. Coming right from here actually, running away from the fishpond.”
I didn’t know who or what to get most furious with—Walter for falling so blindly into the rat myth, Dad for pushing the crazy rat myth…
Or the rat. I suddenly squirmed, quick-stepped this way then that around the edges of the fishpond. If we indeed had a rat—which we didn’t—then he had been right here. Yeck. No, god, no. My skin was prickling all over my body like a zillion tiny little claws. I scooted the last few steps to the fishpond, which indeed was now the fishless fishpond. Around the edge were some fish flakes, twinkling in the sun. A fin here, a few scales there. Possibly a couple of eyes. Rats made me sick.
“We have no rat,” I snapped at Walter.
“So,” Carmine answered, “did you want one? Because there’s a guy in the village—”
“No, we don’t want one,” I snapped again. “And what are you doing here?”
Perhaps it was the way I said it. But I had appeared for the first time to have actually hurt Carmine’s feelings. I hadn’t thought it was possible, and now that I had seen it I wished I hadn’t.
I reached and grabbed his arm as he was turning to leave. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just, right now, a little…”
It didn’t even matter what I was explaining. He was ignoring my words and staring at my hand on his arm.
And up they came, his hands, his arms, rising, encircling.
“Go ahead, hug yourself,” I said. “I won’t say anything this time.” At least I didn’t have to hug him.
With Carmine sorting himself out, I was freed to go and address our other little critter issue. I had had enough.
I marched past the two of them to the house, through the dartboard door, through the kitchen to the living room, where I stopped and listened. I heard nothing.
“Dad,” I called.
“Yes, sweetheart,” came the small voice up through the small opening made by the removed floorboard.
“There you are,” I said, my hands on my hips as I barked down into the hole. “You stay right there, Dad. I’m coming down.”
“No, don’t do that,” he said, the voice coming up a little louder, a little faster.
“I will do that,” I said, and started marching for the cellar door. I opened it, and even though it was pretty murky down there, and even though I had never enjoyed a particularly easy relationship with cellars generally and I kept a particularly keen distance from this musty one specifically, and even though there may or may not have been a rat with a grudge in the vicinity and if I were a rat this would be exactly where I would hang out, even though all that, I stepped down those stairs because I wanted to meet my dad in his own strange new territory and find out…
“What is going on, Dad?”
I don’t think he thought I would actually come down. He was there, in front of me, on his knees. He had a surgical mask covering his mouth. In one hand was a bucket of some kind of white goop—putty or cement or some combination of some such goopiness—and in the other was his putty knife.
“I’m patching up the house with Spackle,” he said so apologetically I felt immediately sad and guilty for asking, for being down there, for even looking at him.
I looked around at the trail of patching. Even in the dim light it was easy to see the nearly glowing whiteness of the Spackle against the crumbling dull of the walls and the packed dirt floor. He had obviously been feeling his way around, filling in any holes he could in the surfaces, mostly where the rock of the wall met the earth of the floor.
“How’s it coming along?” I asked, though not too hopefully. I think at that point I was trying to make conversation and that was the only subject that seemed topical.
To answer, Dad first started nodding, looking around, mostly behind him, and nodding, nodding, then back at me, then not nodding, then shaking his head, no. No.
“There’s a lot, sweetie,” he said, “a lot, and always lots more behind it, it seems. It’s like there’s leakage everywhere, whether it’s moisture getting in where it’s not supposed to or air and cold getting in where they’re not supposed to, or whatever getting in where it’s not supposed to, or heat getting out where it’s not supposed to. Just leakage, and every time you block it up somewhere, it bursts open someplace else.”
He appeared—there on his knees, covered in cellar dirt, looking out from inside his mask—like some kind of shrunken, battered, moldy basement version of my dad. I hated it, and I hated the cellar.
“Do you smell it down here?” I asked. “It’s that smell, that wet, burnt-charcoal smell. It is very much down here.”
He nodded. “Yes, it is very much down here. I’ll figure it out though. It’s on my list.”
“Your list. Your list is too long, Dad. First, you know, I don’t think the house is so bad, especially if you don’t spend all your time crawling around the most decrepit parts of it. As a matter of fact, I really, really like the house. So does Walter.”
“And me, too,” Carmine called from the space of the missing floorboard upstairs.
“And so does Carmine,” I said to Dad. “Thank you, Carmine,” I said to Carmine. “Go away now, Carmine.”
“Yah,” Dad said, finally getting to his feet but only to wander the perimeter of the cellar, checking for more holes in the walls. �
��But it really needs—”
“So, can’t you just get somebody in to do some of it? There are people who do that sort of thing, you know, Dad. Like carpenters. It’s their job. You already have a job, remember?”
“I remember,” he said, finding and instantly patching a hole. “But you know, Sylvia, how I don’t like having workers in the house.”
“You also don’t like doing this stuff, Dad. Remember? Because if you don’t remember, then let me point out that you used to look at putting out the trash on Wednesday mornings as a major home-improvement project.”
He stopped feeling the walls. He turned to me and stared. Then, through his mask, he chuckled. Like we were reminiscing about an old mutual friend.
It was a treat. I became aware then how little he was laughing lately. He used to think all kinds of stuff was funny—some of it actually was funny funny, some of it was kind of nuts funny.
Nuts funny was fine by us. Nuts funny was fun. Nuts serious was a whole different monster.
“Yah, true. I hated it.”
“Good. Great. So hate it again.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I don’t like it.”
“What? What don’t you like, Sylvia? You don’t like what?”
Grr. Why did he have to do this? He knew better than this. And he knew I didn’t like having to explain myself. Everybody hates explaining themselves. Especially me. Especially us. And anyway, especially if I came down here to this creepy place, asking questions, if I came asking questions, then I certainly didn’t feel like being the one doing the explaining. Anyway, he knew. I believed he knew. You could always tell he knew what you were talking about because he asked you to overexplain yourself. So he could bunch up as many words as possible to confuse things, like piling all the psychological furniture against his side of the door while your logic was trying to get in from the other side.
“It, Dad. I don’t like it. The it. This. Us. Here. The difference. Something has gone wrong, and it has gone wrong here, and it has gone wrong suddenly, and I hate it—and did you tell Walter that the rat ate all our fish?”
“The fish?”
“The fish.”
“Well, the rat did eat the fish. Why would I keep something like that from him?”
“Because maybe you don’t know that the rat did eat the fish. Because nobody but you has even seen the rat. Maybe Carmine ate the fish.”
“Hey,” Carmine called through the floor again.
“Walter,” I yelled, “would you please take him away from there?” I finally got worked up enough to leave the steps, to march over the cellar floor that hardly even made a sound when I stepped on it, over to where the ceiling was open and Carmine’s face peered down. “Go away, Carmine,” I said.
He had his face pressed tightly into the space between the floorboards. “This is a very great house,” he said through squished fish lips.
Walter hauled Carmine away, and I turned to find myself up close to Dad, in the middle of the bare and empty, somehow damp and dusty, space of the cellar.
“Walter did see the rat,” he said.
I sighed. I was starting to feel weighed down by the effort of it, by the unusual amount and intensity of talking between me and Dad, by the weight of the house, which was very much and very noticeably above me now, on top of me now, feeling like I was actually carrying the bulk of it now from here, from my place under the ground, with the dirt under me and all around me.
Dad was hunched over and kind of grimacing. His mask was removed now, hanging around his neck, and the dirt was seeping into the lines around his eyes, along the sides of his nose and mouth, and he looked the way I felt.
“But we won’t dwell on that now, sweetheart,” he said, and placed a clammy hand on my cheek. “We don’t need to dwell on that now, Vee.”
It didn’t used to bother me when he said that, almost no matter what he said it about, and he said it about almost anything. But it never did bother me, back then; and I figured there would be a time, and I hoped it would be soon, when it didn’t bother me again.
But it bothered me a great, great deal now.
It didn’t bother me as much, however, as the awful, oppressive, overwhelming feeling that I had to get out of this horror of a place, this fright of an underground monster of a place, right this minute.
“Dad, I want to go now, upstairs, now. I don’t care to be underground one minute longer.”
“Okay, Vee. Sure. Up you go. I’ll be up—”
“Now. You will be up now, Dad. Right now. With me, you will be up. You are going with me, up and out of this awfulness right this minute.”
I did not need to grab his hand then, because there are just moments when I know I am in charge, and Dad knows I’m in charge and this was very much one of those moments.
I grabbed his hand anyway. And I pulled him up out of that awful, awful place with me.
Vladimir
WALTER WAS STILL ONLY little when Dad got him the gray dwarf Russian hamster. He couldn’t even pronounce the name properly when Dad introduced him as Vladimir, repeating it instead as Flatmeer.
I was always afraid for Vladimir. He was so small. I was always wondering what was going to become of him in this place at this time. We were all still kind of getting used to things. Used to it being the three of us, the four of us with counting Vladimir, who was so small he looked like he would make a nice gray fur Russian hat for my Barbie. I even tried it out. Tried balancing him up there on Barbie’s head, but after a few seconds he fell right off.
It wasn’t too nice a thing to do to Vladimir. But then, I was still pretty little myself.
We all were. We were all small and young and still new, even Dad. Even Dad, in this new world we had, was still small and new, and so who knew? Who knew anything?
Who knew you could love something to death? Who knew that was possible?
Who knew Walter should not have been left alone with Vladimir? Who knew? We didn’t. None of us knew. None of us then knew anything. Not then. Not then, we didn’t know anything.
I was the one who found him. I banged on the door of the bathroom and called to him because I needed the bathroom, and he only needed the bathroom about half the time still, and he wasn’t supposed to be in there for a long time with the door closed, and so I was banging and calling him out until finally I just barged in.
And I found him. Vladimir, Vladimir the little hat, was still there, still alive in Walter’s hands, but just, just barely. And Walter.
Walter.
I would rather have cut off my own hands than see another bad thing happen to another animal in our house, especially something forceful and gruesome, and so I would be the least sympathetic person to find this, and so I would have screamed maybe, and attacked, maybe, but, but, I saw Walter.
His little round face. He was holding onto Vladimir with all the might his two pudgy hands could muster. Squeezing and squeezing on the little body until tiny black hamster eyes were actually pushing out of the sockets and blood began to appear. But worse was Walter’s face. As if he wanted to do more. As if there were no connection to the squeezing he was doing and the dying he was seeing. And so, what do you do if you are a little boy, a sad and scared little boy confused to the very top of the confusion scale?
You love it some more, is what you do.
That is what Walter did. He loved harder, and squeezed harder, and cried harder as he killed Vladimir and didn’t save Vladimir at the same time, and he did not know what was wrong.
“Here, Walter,” I said, almost whispering. “Here, here,” I said, as I pried his fingers loose as gently as I could and relieved Vladimir and him of each other. I pretended Vladimir was okay, cupped him and stroked him and talked to him nice.
And I took Walter by the hand and led him out of the bathroom even though that was the wrong direction for my body right then, and I led Walter to the TV, where I was happy to find some cartoons, and I left Walter there, and I told him I would be right back
, and I took Vladimir to Dad in his office room.
It was too soon. It was too soon already for this. We could never be ready for this, but we were not at all ready for this.
Dad and I went back to the living room and sat on the floor right next to Walter sitting there in the middle of the rug with his big round eyes wide at the TV. I got to hold Vladimir and Dad got to hold Walter and we all got to watch the Roadrunner and Coyote, which was good because it had no words, and because anybody who got hurt, crushed, or whatever just got back up again. And nobody sweet and innocent ever got hurt at all.
Dwelling
WE HELD A MEETING.
“There is nothing wrong with me,” Dad said.
The chair was going to be important.
“Sit in the chair, Dad,” I said.
And appearance. Appearances mattered.
“You have to get rid of that beard, Dad, and cut that eyebrow especially,” Walter said grimly, staring Dad close in the face. “You look like a villain.”
“Would you guys stop talking to me like that? You’re making me nervous. And I have things to do.”
“You do not.”
“Yes I do. Things. Loads and loads of things.”
“Get in the chair, Dad.”
Walter was very serious. Menacing, even. He stood like a toy tough guy, feet wide apart, pointing at Dad’s chair. His lovely and loved, comfy, legendary chair. The old, deep-seat, burnt-red leather chair with the rivetlike buttonholes all over, sunk so well you could only see the holes and not the buttons. Nobody ever sat in that chair but Dad, and Dad almost never sat in it these days.
“Sit in the chair, Dad,” Walter said, a little tougher. His voice cracked with the strain of his toughness.
“Mmm…no,” Dad said. “I’d like to, but I have so much to—”
Walter threw himself into the chair.
“Hey,” Dad said, very edgy, then calming himself, “hey, son. Those are old springs. Don’t want to pop them…” He had his hands extended in front of him and was speaking with the exaggerated calm of TV cops dealing with well-armed madmen.