Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "So Where's your bright idea?" Brian said.

  "I’ll run him down and throw him a flying tackle, by golly!"

  "Oh, boy," Brian said. "Oh, boy-oh-boy.”

  "You're too big, Schonbeck,' Jerome said. "You'd hurt the kid."

  "Let's just take him down and give him a knuckle rub and turn him loose," Brian said. "Or else pull off his pants and run them up the flagpole for the rest of the afternoon. Somebody be a sport, guys!"

  "Shush," Leo said. "He's back. Over there by the playing field."

  It seemed a network of darkness darker than the leaves had settled down on us. I saw a shock of blue-black hair and part of a face among the boulders of the gray-black wall.

  Kuntz went to the edge of the clearing. "Hey, Ribs!" he called. "We see you. Come on out! We want to talk to you."

  Ribs sprang back into the open in a crouch, ready to run.

  "Take it easy," Kuntz said. "We won't hurt you, Ribs. We want to talk to you about joining in with us."

  Rib's face paled more as he shook his head.

  "Is it all right if I come over there?" Kuntz asked.

  Ribs shook his head.

  "See!" Buddy whispered.

  "I'll make a treaty with you," Kuntz said. "I’ll leave all these jerks right here and just me come over and talk. I'll stay on this side of the wall and won't come close to you. I'll hold my hands behind my back."

  Ribs glanced over his shoulder, as if the trap suggested by all this was behind him.

  "It's O.K.," Kuntz said. "I give you my word of honor, ah-rooo-ha, bright steed, Chuckaluck, ah, whoooo-up there! Really." And then he walked over with his hands behind him, in his pockets, and stopped a few feet from the wall. "Hey, we don't want to hurt you. We'd like you to join in with us."

  Ribs stared at him with his wide and tremulous eyes.

  "Wouldn't you like to?"

  It seemed no response would come.

  "It's simple. You could learn the stuff in a day."

  "Oh, yeah!" Buddy yelled, and Ribs tensed, about to bolt.

  "Shut up!" Kuntz shouted at him, and then turned back to Ribs. "Really. It's simple. Here's part of it: Are you a Catholic?"

  Ribs shook his head.

  "Was your mother ever a Catholic?"

  Ribs shook his head, his chin tucked in, and his eyes widened in anticipation of the next, logical question, but Kuntz said, "You believe in God, though, right?"

  "No."

  Everybody was on their feet and after Ribs, Buddy out front, passing Kuntz, leaping the stone wall when Ribs was halfway down the field, and then catching him before he reached the far end, where there were shrubs along the wall, and throwing that flying tackle he'd talked about. Ribs went sailing with his legs in a hug and his head hit the wall. The sound was like a football punted, stone hitting stone, a watermelon dropped, and we all stopped as though it had happened to us, and then Kuntz, who'd stood where he was, came pushing his way through us and punched Buddy on the shoulder. "I gave my word of honor, dumb-ass! What'd you do that for?"

  "It's what you told me to!" Buddy said.

  "It was not."

  "Well, did you hear what he said?"

  Kuntz punched Buddy again, in the chest, and Buddy went stumbling backward until gravity caught him and seated him with a shock, for good, it seemed the way he was splayed out. Kuntz took Ribs by the shoulders and turned him; whites of his eyes wiggling, lips parted and grayish, his tongue out and bleeding, head jerking with the torturous energy of an uncontained epileptic. Kuntz kneeled and said, "Hey, hey, hey," as he held Ribs head in his hands and massaged his cheeks with his thumbs. Ribs woke. "I knew you'd do that," he said. "I knew you were all a pack of lies." A blue-white swelling was forming a dome on his forehead and he started to cry without covering his face, as though tears weren't a shame among boys who'd reached our age and got by.

  "It was a mistake," Kuntz said.

  "No, it wasn't," Ribs cried. "You all meant it, all of you!"

  "Here, here." Kuntz helped him to his feet and smoothed the dirt off his face and out of his hair, and then brushed off his clothes. "It was that screwball Schonbeck did it," Kuntz said. "Do you want me to walk you home?"

  Ribs nodded that he did.

  "I'll tell your mother it wasn't a fight,” Kuntz said. "But sort of, we were, well, er—" They were through the hedge and off together down the block with one of Kuntz's arms around Ribs's neck. The rest of us returned to the clearing, repentant and uneasy, if others were like me, and lay down around the shrine, where the sanctuary lamp still burned.

  "I told you you'd hurt him," Jerome said.

  "No, you didn't! Kuntz said that!"

  "I was conked out once," Brian said. "You don't even feel it." Everybody looked at Brian's big head. "Except after you wake up." -

  There was only the occasional sound of the leaves. I felt chastened, reflective, and bothered by dark doubts; Kuntz had asked a question he wouldn't have if Ribs hadn't been so different from us, or Kuntz able to sense the difference in him, and it frightened me the way we'd got up on our feet and gone after him at the same time. Would I have tackled him? Perhaps, I looked around at the others, at Leo and Brian lying next to one another near the trellis, at Buddy digging in the ground with a Popsicle stick, tears dropping off his chin, at Jerome in front of the shrine on his stomach, and they all seemed absorbed in the same question, or a question of a similar kind. I looked at the sanctuary lamp casting its colored light across the Virgin's gown, and heard again, Do you believe in God? The final word came out of a whorl winding down from a great height, our parents, the authority of the Sisters, and Father Schimmelpfennig himself; God, a word I took for granted the way I took my heart for granted—although I couldn't see it or watch the way it worked, I never doubted its being there. I believe in God, of course I do, I thought, but then as I listened all I could hear inside myself was silence. Didn't I? Had I returned from the ragged jaws of pneumonia only to live inside silence and emptiness? Wasn't that a sin? What was it I believed in, then? There was some force that guided me from day to day and act to act and assured renewal and integration to all that I did, roughly as I might do it at times, and assured my good nature, too, and its stability within the progression of time, wasn't there? I listened. Wasn't there? Then the wind sprang up and the light on the Virgin swayed to one side and fluttered above her neck, higher than I'd seen it go, and stained her face scarlet, and Yes, the voices of the leaves whispered above me in a chorus—made by a mother who was made of earth— Yessss, Yessss. It seemed a dream or a miracle to me at the time then, and even more so today, now, still, as once in New York after my wife had had a miscarriage, I woke from sleep and saw over her body to the curtains of our bedroom windows, white-silvery, lit by the street lamp outside and imprinted with frondlike patterns of leaves, and silhouetted against their curves saw the shadow of a head, and before I had time to resort to reason or detachment, knew that the shadow was the shadow of our dead child, and that he was looking in on us, watching us with a patience so infinite it was no part of my experience and made it obvious that we were observing one another from opposite sides of a transparent mystery. Yes.

  *

  She'd studied under Father Schimmelpfennig for five years in a dilatory way, and was brilliant, prideful, witty, well read, limited, uncompromising, hyperbolic and extreme, open-minded, too critical both ways, serene, conservative, saintly, down to earth, yet a romantic who could feed on the food of illusion, and Father's fingers began trembling now, in the way they'd trembled only once, when he was ordained, as he took from the gold-lined ciborium a consecrated host and placed it on the curved bridge of Alpha Neumiller's wet, extended, orange-pink tongue.

  16

  AMATEUR HOUR

  Held at arm's length, he watches her eyes travel over his body and fill with unabashed pride. She's been to her storeroom and worked with awl, needle, and thread, and now, at last, he feels properly dressed. Covering his blue jeans are the chaps ("shaps," she
told him, is the correct pronunciation) that her father wore when he rode horseback over the unbroken plain farther west, a young man at the time. The leather legs of the chaps, rolled up and sewn to fit him, are faced with goat hide that she's brushed until its silver-colored strands of hair glisten like her brushed hair below his nose, fragrant with her scent. The holster below his hip holds a heavy pistol. Then the plaid shirt and blue bandanna. Their eyes meet and there's a smile of complicity between them.

  "Here," she says, and rises and takes a hat off a hook on the wall behind him.

  Charles says, "But it's Dad's."

  "His old one. Come here once." She kneels on one knee, and again her face is at his level.

  "But it's too big!"

  "With that head, I wouldn't be surprised if it fit."

  Her tone of voice exposes him as he's exposed when she checks to make sure he's had a thorough bath. She sets the hat on his head, steps back a step, crosses her arms, and then crosses one leg over the other at the ankle.

  "Well," she says. "Not quite!"

  If she weren't his mother, he'd know that noise is giggling, which he detests, but the truth doesn't register: his ideal of her blinds him to her spontaneity.

  "I'm anxious to go over it now that you're in costume. Aren't you?"

  He nods, the hat brim hits his nose, and there's more laughter from her.

  He lifts it. "See, I can't wear this big old thing.”

  "Stop whining. You sound like a girl. We'll put some tissue in the crown before tonight. Where's the script? Where did I put the script?"

  "On the table. Like always."

  "I'm so nervous I can't think," she says, and her changing voice contains less nervousness than delight, as she goes to the table and sits down. She's been rehearsing this monologue with him for two weeks, two hours each day, and it was her idea to coach him, although his father has had more training in speech and dramatics and the theater; his father defers to her in such decisions.

  She folds back the blue cover of the script, smooths it flat on the table, and inclines her head over it, chin in one hand. To him, her profile against the brilliant window is a silhouette, dark and featureless, and when she turns to him he bends back the brim of the hat and squints to see her clear.

  "You look like a fool!" she cries, and now there's no doubt that she's laughing.

  He throws the hat on the floor.

  "No, no," she says. "Don't. You don't look so bad, looking a fool."

  Charles thinks that perhaps his father is right when he says to her, "You know, sometimes you act like a kid," which makes her turn white-faced and walk off. But his father is just as bad, or worse; he works jigsaw puzzles and plays games with an exuberance that irritates the boy, who's dead serious about everything he does. His father doesn't smoke or drink or swear, like others do, but sits home and reads books, and sometimes even cries over them—a burning shame. And he's as easily affected by dramas on the radio. "Nonsense, I don't believe you!" she'll say to the radio speaker. Or, "How did she get a job as a professional? Listen to that shoddy articulation. Listen to that twang!" But in the end she usually succumbs in the same way as his father, and then stalks into the kitchen and busies herself there until she has her feelings under control.

  A few nights ago, when she was shopping in McCallister, his father took him through a rehearsal. "Start off," he said, and his large eyes swept and swam along the lines of the script as Charles went from the beginning of the monologue to its end without being stopped once. He was wary; he didn't think he was doing well, and his mother usually interrupted him the moment he went off-key and helped him find his way again. He waited, shaky and anxious, for the criticisms of his phrasing, his timing, and his comic sense, and wondered if his father would be as severe a perfectionist as his mother and make him repeat the lines again and again until it was right according to his father's ideal. His father raised his eyes, which were liquid with emotion, and said, "I don't know what to say to you. I really don't know what to say. You've got this whole thing memorized word for word."

  "Ready?" his mother asks now. "Hat and all?"

  "Oh, be quiet."

  "Oh, all right. Let's both be more businesslike. This might well be your last rehearsal before tonight."

  "Tonight" settles below his lungs and sends out appendages that cut off his breath, enjamb his self-control, and threaten to destroy all the techniques he's mastered in the last two weeks. He wishes he'd said, like Jerome, when he was asked to perform, "No. I'm not in the mood to talk in front of people anymore."

  He's a weakling, he's sure of it, but knows it better not be seen by her, and begins:

  "I'm a buckaroo from the Wild West,

  I rope and I ride and all the rest . . ."

  The words aren't words any more. Repetition has removed from them any meaning, and they affect only his vocal mechanism, which vibrates around their shapes, subdues them, and fashions them into images he can see as he speaks. They won't meld together at first, and come out as separate geometries—an oblong, an oval, a triangle —and fall to the floor in a multicolored jumble he can practically see but wouldn't care to look at. Then, as he grows confident, they begin to link and flow toward his listener, forming a current of feeling between them; that sentence, painted in primary colors, strings together the apples, bushel baskets, marbles, and coins from his first-grade arithmetic book; that pause before the last, fat, rhymed word of the line, is a beheading. In these phrases a locomotive takes shape, cars link behind, a caboose is there and it all starts down the polished tracks, its wheels settling into a regular clacking, the metallic singsong of a train, the S-curved sound of its whistle retreating into silence, and then the roadbend explodes and its scattering fragments are flushed quail roaring toward the cover of trees.

  He tries to affect her with his voice, sending her his version of what she's taught him, watching for her response, and when she has to shield one side of her face to hide her pleasure, or when her laughter draws her head toward the script and her dark hair swings over her cheeks, shining in the sunlight, he feels in himself the size and grandeur of an adult, filling with adult sensations, which, for some reason, in spite of their vastness and desirability, aren't quite satisfying.

  "No, no, no, no, no! You brandish the pistol in the air. You bran-dish it." She laughs at her exaggeration of the word. "You don't click the trigger, son." The tone of her voice and her stare—uncompromising, deep blue, a blue he can see and feel even though her features are in shadow—make him shrink back into the constricting limits of his years, seven, to be exact.

  "It's distracting. If you do that, nobody's going to pay any attention to the line, understand? All right, then go on from there. You were doing fine with the speech itself, it was just that pistol." She turns to her script, and says, "The next thing I know, you'll be wanting caps for the damn thing."

  "Can I?"

  All it takes this time is the stare. He lowers the pistol into the holster, dwelling on the act as though he hopes it will last forever. He focuses on the linoleum, through the geometry there, and goes on, feeling each word ring thin and hollowly in the air, convinced he's disappointing her. He reaches the end.

  "Now let's have a look at that hat," she says, in a voice that's strangely social and nonchalant. There's been no praise or encouragement, not even the usual criticism; he's failed her and might as well go back to the boys. In her silence and her concern for the hat (she puts on a version of one of her scowls as she studies its inside), she's withholding the truth out of kindness, he's sure, aware it would upset him so badly he couldn't perform "tonight." But her silence is as destructive. He wants to run and hide, be like backward footprints vanishing up over sand, so he'd never have to face her again. He doesn't even care about the Amateur Hour, although his goal for two weeks has been to win first place, his gift to her.

  He's more than surprised, then, and more troubled than ever about his mother, when she tosses the hat into the air with a cry of "Yippee!
" and gives him, most rare and consummate of her rewards, a kiss on the lips.

  *

  People are appearing on Main Street and moving around the Town Hall, the building covered with tin that looks like stone. A few feet above the foundation the tin is polished silver from children running their hands over it to create a miniature thunder as they walk past, which Charles does now. The slanting sheets are burnished by the orange sun and the building looks changed and portentous. Instead of housing the usual friendly social gathering, the Town Hall will be the setting tonight for what feels to him like a war. He steps into the entry, carrying a cloth laundry bag with his costume in it, and stares at the ticket booth (knotty pine, the same as the walls), where a half-moon is removed from the bottom of the window, and on another half-moon—the wooden tray for counting out change—a white hand is resting. Because of a reflection, the hand is all he can see, and the anxiety he's been holding down, now that the hand is there as a focus, swells in him and makes him weak inside, and his eyes bulge.

  "Don't just stand there and gape," she says. "They know we're on the program. We don't have to pay. Tonight we're not hoi polloi, boy. Ha! I didn't mean that to sound that way! Sorry about that."

  They go toward double doors that open onto the auditorium and the reflection slides to one side, revealing the heavily made up face and bejeweled breast of Mrs. June Koenig, the dentist's wife. "What's the matter with him?" she cries, her high voice made indistinct and flat-sounding by the enclosure she's in. "Is he ascared already?"

  "No, he's not," his mother says, and takes him through the double doors. He's surrounded by a smell of old varnish, damp crepe paper, mildew, and human sweat—a smell that's meant recreation and friends in the past, but doesn't tonight. He sniffs the air as an animal would, testing it; tonight it will be carrying the sound of his voice. The basketball backboard at the end of the auditorium has been hoisted against the ceiling, the curtains drawn across the stage, and the smell seems responsible for the curtains' particular shade of purple, for the way the folds in them fall, the way shadows curve between the folds out of sight, and then feet patter across the stage, the curtain billows out along its chain-weighted bottom, and somebody is saying, "Children's Division is first, and that's of course the one he'll be in."