Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "I'll open it up and get the lights on," he said. "Then we'll take some of this in and make it a little comfortable. It doesn't look as bad inside. They know we want to buy at least two of their beds, so that many will be here."

  He went onto the porch and dug in the letter box, where the key was to be left, and found his nails scraping tin. Then he heard voices inside. He stepped to a window, cupped his hands, and was looking into eyes that widened and went retreating from him. Whose? The porch light came on. Hinges creaked, and an elderly man, the owner, stood behind the screen door in undershorts. What's happened to him, Martin wondered; he'd gained at least thirty pounds, his face shining fat, and there was such unyielding defiance in his eyes his pupils appeared red. "This is some hour to show up," the man said.

  "What do you mean? Here you are and we agr—"

  "The wife's had a change of heart."

  "But it's July twenty-fifth!" Martin said, as though the date could make the man's pounds disappear until he vanished. "You've had two weeks to be out! My wife, my kids—" He turned toward the car, to indicate the misery entrapped there, and saw Alpha's pale face, like a pale constellation, shining out from behind the car window on him.

  'The wife's decided we're staying here in town, and that's that."

  "Why didn't you at least let me know, for God's sake?”

  "I lost that card of yours.”

  "Why didn't you tell my father?”

  "Who's he?"

  "But surely you can't—I mean, my Lord! I've paid the first month's rent and the deposit!"

  "Take it easy." The man shifted back and was invisible in the darkness. A light deeper in the house went on, it went off, and then the screen door creaked out and the man handed him a sheaf of bills, and Martin knew without counting that it was his one hundred and ten dollars. The screen door quickly closed and was locked fast.

  "Just what the hell do you think you're doing?" Martin said.

  "Watch it, this is our house.”

  "I mean—" Martin stared into his eyes and had an impulse to put out the light in them, blast at them through the screen and do the man the violence of the bloodiest of his dreams, but this was his fault; he'd done business as he always had, on his word and a handshake, which he'd never do again.

  He turned away and went down the porch and out the walk toward the celestial geometry of the children around Alpha's waiting face.

  *

  There was no recourse. They went to his parents' to spend the night; they stayed on. They stored their furniture in an unfinished garage attached to the half-finished house and covered it with tar paper, blankets, and rugs that they unpacked. There was nothing for rent in the area that wasn't too small or frailly falling apart, or priced beyond their means, so he decided to find a place to buy instead, on the basis of his job, and started searching in a widening area, then a wider one yet, and gradually felt the search become halfhearted, helpless, without hope, conducted mostly for Alpha's sake, as he walked through tumbledown farmhouses and lemons and white elephants, thinking that when he wrote that book of his, this chapter would have to be headed "The Way Things Happen to Me Now."

  And while he looked, his parents and Tom and Davey and Alpha and himself and the children—eleven in all— slept and cohabited and tried to sort out themselves and their lives in the basement. Only one room of it was partitioned off, the room his parents slept in, and hanging up blankets for privacy was a joke, and then not a joke, and then abandoned. The meals were picnics outdoors, unless it was raining, and then they ate off card tables or the maze of their many-sized beds. A plastic curtain was strung across one corner where there was a floor drain, forming a makeshift shower that was used by everybody except the little girls, who had their baths in a laundry sink of slate. Shower times were assigned each night by Martin's father.

  A blight of box-elder bugs moved in from the State Forest at the edge of town, and Alpha, who'd never seen the insect, was appalled by its roachlike appearance. Trunks of trees appeared to pulse and waver from the black-and-orange-shaded masses of bugs in motion on them; they dropped from branches onto the picnic tables, into hair and food, and traveled so much on the sidewalks you couldn't step anywhere without crushing some, and covered one sun-warmed side of the house in a trembling epithelium. They got inside and down to the basement, which was perpetually damp and smelled of lime and cement paint and the overworked sump hole, and that week Alpha and the baby went to bed with bad colds.

  The boys dug a foxhole in one corner of the yard, camouflaged it with branches, and slept in it on the nights when it wasn't raining. One day they'd enlarged it to twice its size and were digging tunnels off its sides and adding on more foxholes. "Should you be doing that?" Martin asked. "You're ruining Grandma and Grandpa's yard."

  "Grandpa said it's O.K. This hasn't been landscaped yet."

  They were picking up a technical jargon from his father, who let them trail after him while he worked and answered their questions with thoroughness and absolute patience. Martin felt he gave only commands and that they were wearying of him as a father.

  "But why make it bigger? Somebody could fall in and get hurt. Why can't you leave it the way it was?"

  "We're building a house."

  They'd go crawling through the caves and labyrinths formed by the furniture in the garage, and spend hours searching for a particular piece they remembered and missed, and then emerge dazed in the sunlight, sullen and bewildered, as if they'd been tricked into believing their lives were intact.

  Davey built a tree house in the branches of an old oak, and there he sometimes slept. He'd attached a homemade machine gun to the tree that clacked and rattled as he turned a crank; he had war-surplus materials and souvenirs that Fred and Jay (whom Davey called "Dingle") had brought back from overseas, and he and Jerome and Charles were always dressed up in Army equipment and shooting at one another. Would Jerome and Charles, born during a war and aware of the newly awakened force that had ended it, be marked by that in any way, Martin wondered. Oh, probably not, but merely to have to speculate about its effects on them added to his guilt and sense of failure as a father. Did they think him unmanly because he hadn't served in the war? He was the last male school administrator left in a three-county area at the time of the Battle of the Bulge, and was expecting at any moment to be called up, when the president of the school board came to him and said there was a movement underway to get him a deferment. He said he didn't want one, or to be made a special case of, and would have no hand in it, but the board seemed determined and must have gone ahead with its plans; he was never called up.

  When he wasn't looking for a house, he worked part-time for his father or for Jay, who was a plastering contractor, and once spent fourteen hours tiling a church basement; being on his knees for so long seemed to exacerbate an old injury: when he was twelve, he'd been thrown from a hayrake and hit a rock with his right knee. It hadn't bothered him for twenty-five years—indeed, he'd forgotten it; it was his father who reminded him—but now he felt heated cinders were being pressed against his kneecap whenever he put weight on the leg, and his knee became so inflamed it wouldn't flex.

  A doctor from Pettibone, the only doctor around, a watery-eyed, evasive man who seemed so rich with ideas of treatment it was a trial for him to decide on one, put heat packs on the knee, then ice packs and Denver mud,

  and then tried pills and a series of injections; then decided the knee would have to be lanced, so he lanced it in the basement, without anesthetic, and then lanced it again, and lanced it yet a third time in still another spot. The swelling stayed. Martin had to walk with a cane and be helped up and down stairs, and began to feel like an old man near the end of his life. Ed Jones without the vinegar in him. He'd wake in the middle of the night, groaning with pain, and realize from the tenseness around that he'd waked everybody in the basement.

  And then his mother caught Jerome and Charles smoking in the foxhole, and brought them to him, pulling each by an ear, and said
it was a disgrace for children their age to be smoking cigarettes. Martin agreed as she shoved the boys down in front of him and went off. He'd caused such uncertainty and confusion in their lives, he'd have to remedy it soon, he thought, but now shook his head at them, prodded the floor with his cane, and said, "Please, boys, please don't smoke till you're older. Especially around Grandma, promise?”

  One night as he lay awake in the basement, empty of the desires that had kept him awake as a young man (for he no longer felt young), he recalled, with a clarity that made him wipe away the recollection, that some of the happiest times in Alpha's life had been when they moved.

  *

  He found a house at last, or, rather, his father found one, in Pettibone; a long, plain, unhandsome place at an angle across one corner of a block, facing a busy intersection. A concrete drive abutted against its front foundation and fanned out to the streets on either side. In the thirties or forties the place had been somebody's grandiose notion of a service station; there was a large central part, a small house in itself, with a second story and a basement, where the station attendant and his family had lived, with matching wings extending from either side of it—wings which were oversized double garages, thirty feet deep and more than twenty feet across, with large windows around them, and the wing on the left hand had been closed up and partitioned off and made a part of the house; "the other side of the house," as Alpha immediately called it.

  The walls inside were finished with stucco of a Spanish sort, textured into high, pointed nibs, a technique he'd thought was used exclusively on exteriors, and when Alpha saw it, she said, "If one of the kids fell against that, they could cut themselves or put out an eye." "Yes, Alpha, they could."

  With Susan in her arms, she looked back over her shoulder and cried, "And fix this screen! If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a bunch of those big-ass blue-and-black barnyard flies buzzing around all of my holes.”

  The front yard was merely enough to make a few passes over with the mower, and there was a chevron of stunted hedge at the streetside corner of it. The house stood on a pair of lots, nearly a quarter of a block, so there was a back yard with plenty of room for the children to play, and directly in front of the house, where a third street Y'd away from the busy intersection, was a triangular park with a shuffleboard court, a flagpole, and a seven-foot slab of gray granite that held a plaque commemorating the men who'd served in the Great War. All the streets around the park and leading away from it were overarched with magnificent elms.

  They moved in. Their furniture and belongings stood around in disarray until the gravitational lines of this new life became established and drew everything into place, and meanwhile became covered with plaster and years-old accumulated dust from inside the walls as the remodeling began. Alpha wanted to spade up a corner of the back yard for a garden, or at least start a few flower beds, but they found that old crankcase oil and a cinderlike compound used to absorb oil and grease had been scattered over the entire back yard, and the soil wouldn't support anything but weeds and the hardy variety of grass that grew there in browning patches. Beside the alley was an incinerator, made of four sidewalk grates set on end and wired together, and Alpha put in hollyhocks around it.

  Alan Spear showed up at the house one morning when Martin was working in the kitchen, and stared around with what seemed embarrassment at the tom-up room. Martin apologized for it. Spear waved his words away and asked about the remodeling, to be polite and to have questions to ask, it seemed, and then said that he was new at the job of heading up a school board; there were the other members to contend with, and he hadn't realized that the superintendent had so much say in hiring teachers, especially the principal, who was the one he had to work the closest with over the year, or more, if he was staying on, of course.

  Martin sat at the table and laid his hammer on it. "What you're trying to say, Alan, is my job has been given to somebody else."

  “I’m afraid so. Yes, it has, Martin."

  Martin turned the hammer over. "All right. I’ll teach English or Math or P.E. I'll even take a job in the junior high school."

  "We wouldn't want somebody of your caliber and experience to take just any job, Martin. And it's so late on in the year now, I don't know; I'm afraid maybe most of your real good openings might be filled up. I want you to know that I take full responsibility for this."

  Martin stared at him and Spear's eyes moved away. "Are they, Alan?"

  "What?"

  "Are all the openings in the district filled?"

  "I'm afraid they are, Martin."

  Every other school in the county had filled its openings, too. Martin started working for Jay as a mixer and hod carrier on a plastering crew. He'd been passed over for the job because of his religion, he believed, but wouldn't think of mentioning that to anyone, especially Alpha; the Neumillers and a few rural families, plus some elderly women, were the only regular parishioners of the Petti-bone Catholic church. Everybody in town was Methodist. The superintendent was, and the superintendent and Spear and most of the members of the school board belonged to the Masonic Lodge. Those rings they wore. And Martin's father often said that his only difficulty when he moved here and began his business was getting people in the area to realize they could trust a Catholic.

  Alpha never really recovered from the summer cold she'd caught in that basement and, with every new arrival of bad fortune and reversal, drew deeper into her illness, as behind a screen from which she looked out in dimness on the six of them. None of the furniture was moved except to get it out of the way of the remodeling. She sat for hours with her head bowed. The Pettibone doctor said she probably had some mild form of jaundice, prescribed iron pills and eating a lot of liver, and said not to worry, but seemed irritated with her for continuing to be ill.

  She fell behind in her housework and fatigued so easily she couldn't even shop. One night she said she'd sent Tim to the store to get some canned soup and he'd come back close to tears, because the lady clerk had said to him, "I bet this soup is for your lunch. I bet your mother doesn't have anything else ready yet, does she?"

  "Did you?"

  "No. And I’m still stinging that anybody would think | that of me. Haven't I always been sort of organized?"

  "Of course you have I"

  "I sometimes wonder, now."

  It was December twenty-third and they still hadn't bought any Christmas gifts for the children. She gave him a list and he ran uptown and got what he could in the local stores, trying to bolster its meagerness with bags of candy, and bought one of the last Christmas trees in Pettibone. They couldn't find where they'd packed their lights and decorations, and perhaps it was as well; the tree was so small they had to put it on a table to have it above the children's heads, and its branches, which were sprayed with some sort of silver-metallic paint that made them appear artificial, didn't seem they could support much more ' than themselves.

  On the day after the New Year, he woke with rolling waves of chills that racked him so badly through the night and into the next morning, he didn't feel well enough to work, and spent two days lying on the couch in his bathrobe, staring up at a ceiling he'd soon have to finish, listening for the least sound of her voice. Anger or suffering? Not a sign from her, not a word. Every time he slipped into sleep he dreamed about the basement.

  21

  BLUE CHINA

  At the age of eight I wasn't afraid of the dark. When I ran down a deserted street at night, I knew the chilling pursuer I felt at my back was put there by my act of running and would disappear, like any creature of the imagination when put to a test, the second I slowed to a walk. The gray hands that reached for me as I lay in bed were of my own creation, too, and once I'd proved and reported my power to summon them up, I could let them retreat back into darkness again.

  When the change came, it came in a moment, but I think I was being prepared for it; I think it began when we moved to Illinois. Pettibone was on the highway between Havana and Pekin and
was known mostly for its export of peat. The kids wore their hair in heinies or burr cuts, as they called them, played basketball instead of football, and had bicycles gaudied up with saddlebags or BB-gun holsters, or streamers on the handgrips, or rear carriers with car aerials on them. Everybody talked in an accent and called Forest Creek "Forms Crick." My father started remodeling a duplex that was once a gasoline station. He ripped out twelve-inch baseboards and tore stucco and wood lath off the walls, knocked down a six-by-six enclosure in one corner of the living room (what it was, no one knew), sawed a long hole along a kitchen wall and put a partition up on this side of it, dropped a new stairway from there down to the basement, and converted the concrete island that had once held the gasoline pumps, a car's breadth from the front door, into a flower planter with seats, a place for recreation. Jerome and I were inspired and learned to tote and swing hammers and swung them at the awful place, too.

  The bedroom that my brothers and I were— Oh, yes, I'm Charles. Our bedroom had no window. It was an upstairs room with a ceiling that took its sharp slant from the pitch of the roof—an attic, really, or less than that. There wasn't a floor laid down in the rest of the second story, so the room was surrounded by wide-open ceiling joists (and more than one foot went through), and was as islandlike and desolate as we were in this gasoline station we'd moved to. No window to let in light, no smell but the smell of dust and car oil and old lumber (it had been a storeroom), and no communication with nature or the colors of the earth; the seasons outside were merely changes in temperature.