Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "No."

  "We better use the twines, then. He's going to be a doozy."

  Earl looped the nooses together and, when the tom was boxing at a smaller cat, slipped both nooses over its neck, stepped back, and jerked hard. "O.K., you big son-of-a-bitch," he said. "Here's your last time."

  The tom backed away, shaking its head as if to say, No, no, you've made a terrible mistake.

  Earl reeled it in close, then swung it overhead, nearly as high as the loft, and brought it down on the floor of the stall with a wallop. Then he grabbed the scythe and chopped it across the neck, and it laid back its ears and made gasping sounds as it spat at him.

  "Jesus Christ," he said. "Get it with something, Chuck!"

  "What?"

  "Anything you got I”

  Charles grabbed a sash weight, threw it, and missed, and Earl swung again with the scythe and caught the cat on the tail, and it let out a cry of anger and challenge that sent the rest of the cats bolting toward cover. One of them leaped against the piece of Masonite, knocking it loose, and a stream of cats of calico, tortoise shell, many-colored spots, gray, black, white, went pouring out the! open window. Earl handed the twines to Charles, was hit: in the head by a leaping cat, knocked another down in mid-flight, running a gauntlet of them, and got the Masonite back.

  The tom, its back arched and its hackles up, was dancing backward on stiff legs, fighting the leash of twine, and Charles let him have some leeway. "There's got to be a better way of doing this," he said. "We ought to have your rifle."

  "Not in town."

  "What about stringing him up?"

  "We could try." Earl took the twines from him. "Go on up in the hayloft and I'll hand you up these ends."

  Charles climbed a ladder of horizontal boards, his heart beating so hard at the base of his throat it was knocking his breath out. Cats in the loft scattered from him. He walked over above Earl, and saw that some spikes had been hammered halfway into the facer board of the loft, perhaps for hanging harness, and lay on his stomach and reached for the twines, but the cat was yowling and leaping from left to right at the end of its tether, and winning the tug of war.

  "You bastard," Earl said, and gave a jerk, and the cat came toward him as though it meant business. Earl got the twines to Charles and he pulled them in, feeling a sudden, tremendous, struggling weight at their ends, Ufted high, got them next to a spike, and made several turns around it, the cat five feet off the floor, kicking its hind legs, springing them as though to leap through air, and batting at the taut hanging twine with its forepaws. Its head was back, its scarred and battered nose turned up, and its undamaged eye, undimmed by all that had happened, in clear focus, fixed on Charles. He stepped back out of sight. "How long?" he asked, and felt that bats were flapping close around him in the shadowy darkness of the gable near the loft.

  "That one I choked took quite a while."

  Charles came down and stood beside Earl. The cat kicked and pawed at the twine, twisting itself in circles, making moist guttural noises, and after a prolonged minute of this, the two of them growing more uneasy, there was still no sign it was giving in.

  "I guess it doesn't work like with people," Earl said, and picked up a three-tined pitchfork. "Let's try this." Charles went up to the loft and lowered the cat, while Earl maneuvered a tine on either side of its neck, and then drove the fork into the ground, so it was held as in a stanchion.

  "Bring the equipment," Earl said.

  Charles moved the weights and killing tools closer, and Earl picked up the baseball bat and whacked the cat's spine. Charles got a hammer and hit it over the head. It fell to its side, pawing, and Earl picked up the fishing knife and stabbed its back but the knife point skidded over its skin without even penetrating it. Earl stuck the knife in the cat's ear. "Hit it!"

  "What?" Charles said.

  "Hit the end of this damn knife here! Hurry!" "You!"

  "I can't! I've got to hold him fast! You got the hammer, hey!"

  Charles hit the knife a blow, driving it into the cat's skull, and it released such a piercing cry of pain that Earl jumped back and the pitchfork jerked loose. The cat, with the knife protruding from its ear, came streaking past Charles. He stepped on the trailing twines and the cat went up high, its hindquarters reversing with its head, and hit on its stomach. The knife dislodged. Earl ran over with a sash weight and swung it from overhead against the cat's side, where it made a dull pop. The cat stood, tottered, took off in the opposite direction, and did another flip around as the twine, still under Charles's shoe, drew tight. Earl picked up the pitchfork and stabbed. Its center tine pierced the cat's abdomen and it began to bark like a dog and claw at the fork as though it could climb it.

  "Jesus God!" Earl cried. "It's got nine lives!"

  "Don't be a dumb-ass!"

  "Well, if it still isn't dead, then what?"

  "We haven't got it in a vital spot."

  "Which one?"

  Charles came over with the hammer and hit the cat twice at the base of the skull. Its good eye clouded and closed, its tongue appeared, bloodied and chewed up, and blood ran from its ears and from between its bared and discolored teeth. It lay still at last, larger dead than alive. Earl carried it to a stall, his face altered and set, and dropped it into a five-gallon bucket. "O.K.," he said. "Where's the next?"

  "That's it."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm quitting."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  They studied one another in the gray-graven darkness of the barn, wide-eyed and hesitant.

  "Maybe I'll drown those few," Earl said. His fleshy lips were trembling.

  "Go ahead."

  "You won't tell anybody if I do or don't, huh?"

  "Don't worry," Charles said, and stepped outside. In the low afternoon light the lawn under the trees was alive with movement. Somehow the kittens had escaped from the sack and were crawling and tottering through the thick grass toward the doorway where he stood.

  Cats poured out of the barn behind him.

  *

  At home, Tim was in the living room, in a black suit jacket of their father's that came to his knees and a gray wig from an old Halloween costume; he'd found something black, cigar ash, most likely, and rubbed it over his cheeks to represent stubble. He did a skitterish dance up to Charles and said, "Where's Earl?"

  "I don't know."

  "Killing cats?"

  "Where did you hear that?"

  "I heard. Did you chicken out?"

  "Eat it."

  "Arms for the poor,” Tim said, flapping a sleeve of the coat. "Arms for the poor." He seemed reluctant to go into the act he'd prepared, for he'd certainly prepared one to go with this costume, and his voice was empty of its usual recklessness and spirit. There were glittering fans of perspiration over the freckles that flared up from his nose.

  "What's wrong?" Charles asked.

  "Nodding."

  "Where are the girls?"

  "Over on the other side.”

  "Why aren't you?"

  "I saw you coming back. Where's Earl?”

  "Why all this worry about Earl?"

  Charles turned to the doorway of their father's room and saw, on the card table there, the cause of Tim's agitation; the tissue for his plane was cut into shreds the size of confetti and the shreds were piled into a neat cone.

  "I did it," Tim said,

  "You? What the hell for!"

  "I don't know."

  "Do you know this?" Charles said, and punched his chest so hard it resounded.

  "Don't," Tim said.

  Charles shoved against his shoulders and he went stumbling backward, his face giving off fear and disbelief, and struck the wall with such force his wig flew off, and then fell, quick as a handclap, flat on his ass.

  "You thought if Earl was with me, you wouldn't get it, didn't you, damn you!" Charles cried, and slapped the back of his head and sent tears splattering over a jacket sleeve.

  "Why'd you do it?"

 
; "I don't know! I started cutting and couldn't stop!"

  "How can you be so stupid? You ought to be sent away to the State Institution, for God's sake."

  "No!"

  Charles grabbed a sleeve of the jacket and jerked, rolling him on his back, pulled the sleeve loose, rolled him again, and pulled off the coat. "And on top of it all, you've probably gone and ruined Dad's jacket. How can you be so stupid on top of being stupid!" Knowing he'd struck the sensitive spot.

  He dropped the jacket on the couch, and said, "Now quit crying, or you'll get something worse." And heard his mother echo in his voice. He went to the other side of the house, where the girls were sitting at a children's card table on small folding chairs, coloring fashion illustrations from a newspaper ad. Marie, her brunette hair stringy and oil-darkened, seldom washed or set, looked up at him; she had the placid face and nearly circular eyes of the Krulls, but her eyes were even larger, more owl-like. "I'm going to tell Dad you and Tim been fighting again," she said.

  "We haven't." "Sue and I heard."

  "I just gave him heck. He ruined my airplane."

  "Dee, de, dee, de," Susan sang, smiling and swinging a crayon like a metronome in front of her eyes. "Eee, eee, dee, de. You said I'd break it, smart one." She gave a toothy grin and stuck the crayon like a hatpin through her hair.

  "Did he watch you two?"

  "He was with us till you came," Marie said. "He told us why it was more fun to color these than color books."

  "How come?"

  "Because nobody else ever colors them.”

  "Everybody knows that," Charles said.

  "Did you see his funny clothes?" Susan asked.

  "Yes."

  "Doesn't he look dumb?" She giggled.

  "I guess."

  "Dee, de, dee, dum. Like that," she said, and pulled the crayon out and pointed to her coloring. The model's face was a blackened craze.

  Charles left the room. He couldn't find Tim anywhere and was about to go outside when he heard sounds from the upstairs. He went up the steps. Their father had put down flooring behind the bedroom with the dormer, up to the front of the house, to make another room, and had fitted a double window in the gable there, but the place stood as it did on the day when he'd hammered home the last flooring nail. Along the stairwell was a wall that was merely studs covered with tar-impregnated paper, or less in spots. Charles went to the door in it and listened there, and then opened the door onto blackness. There weren't any windows beyond the wall, not even a ventilator to let in light, and it was a three-foot drop to the bare joists below; the ceiling of the other side was that much lower, and a floor hadn't been put down yet.

  "Tim. Are you in there?”

  "Yes! No!"

  "Come on out.”

  "No!"

  An extension cord with a bulb screwed into its socket was draped over the doorknob. Charles turned it on and in its dim light could see a row of planks that led to a layer of grain doors that had been placed over the joists to form a platform; unpacked boxes from North Dakota, old suitcases, a grain separator, a broken carom board, and broken furniture were piled on this platform, and Tim lay there on his stomach with his hands over his head. Charles lowered himself onto the planks and walked out to him. "Come on," he said.

  "I want to stay in here!"

  "Cut it out."

  "This is the place I belong!"

  Charles tried to lift him up, but he struggled and cried out so, he let him drop.

  "It's just that, well, dammit, when I came home and— Anyway, now somebody will have to go somewhere and get me some more of that paper."

  "I know! What's the matter with me? Why can't I ever do anything right?" Tim rolled his face back and forth on the grain doors.

  "Don't, please. You'll hurt yourself."

  "I don't care!"

  "I shouldn't have got so mad.

  "It wouldn't be so bad if—" Tim gasped for air. "If I wasn't so stupid!"

  "I just said that. You aren't. I was just—"'

  "I don't even feel you want me around anymore! It's worse than when you hit me!" Tim's fists kicked up spurts of dust as he struck them down.

  Charles sat and tried to turn him so they were sitting next to one another, but Tim's head dropped and lay in his lap like a stone. "I like you, Tim," he said. "Especially when you're just yourself. You're my best friend then."

  Tim drew up and sat back on his heels. “Really?" His face and stomach were caked with blackened dust from the grain doors, and the dust was streaked and maplike from mucus and tears.

  "Yes," Charles said.

  Tim put his head on Charles's thigh, and with the touch of it, it seemed to Charles they were sitting in a newly framed house, with only bare rafters above them, laddery beams open to the light. He looked up. Shingle nails showed through the roofing boards and there were gray cobwebs woven like cloth in the spaces between.

  "I feel so awful," Tim said.

  "I'm sorry I—”

  "Not because of you. I feel awful all the time. I'm a sonofabitch. I don't have a mom."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I never saw her, or if I really did, I don't remember her much."

  "Oh, sure.”

  "No!"

  "Sure you do.”

  "Why can't you ever believe me?”

  "Oh, you're all right," Charles said, and remembered coming home one day the spring after she died, when the streets were underwater, and finding Tim marching around in the living room as if with a squad of troops, his teeth bared in fury and his eyes crossed, singing in time to his step a song he'd composed: "Oh, you cross-eyed baby, with the hole in your head! Oh, you cross-eyed baby, don't you wish you were dead!" From that day, the song had become his theme; he sang it when he was angry at the girls or frustrated or hyperactive, or too happy to express himself, and Charles had heard him singing it in bed at night when he couldn't sleep. Charles tried to imagine what their mother, who wouldn't have inflicted this unreasoning hurt on Tim, might say to him if she were trying to comfort him and thought of waking one night to total darkness, in the house kept calm and ordered by her, and hearing Tim, who couldn't have been more than three, screaming in his crib across the room, and then her footsteps and voice coming in:

  "Little one, little one, what is it?"

  "It's a tiger! He's trying to eat me up!”

  "There, there, you've just had a bad dream."

  "No, no, it's a real tiger, I know it's real. When he opens his mouth, it looks like a butterfly!"

  And Charles had seen, like a projection upon the blackness, the red-orange and rose and pink and bits of black and white of a tiger's opened mouth, with the feathery edge of a butterfly's wing around it, and felt as he had in the darkened barn when he and Earl, in spite of the wounds they'd inflicted, couldn't make the cat relinquish its hold on life, and wanted to say to Tim, It's all right, I know, I love you, I'll take care of you, or better, or worse, or more, or—

  "Hey! What are you two doing in there?" Martin cried.

  Charles stared up into the surrounding dark and at the glow of the bulb by the open door. There was nobody there. He'd imagined his father. Then he saw the three of them blazing noisily along an open causeway across naked, wide-open water in Lionell's white-painted, polka-dotted car, the stuttering and flashing white and yellow phosphorescent lines going by on either side, and then a curve with the railing gone and a fountaining gorge emptying around them as they were slowed, stopped, and then drawn straight down, the opened windows letting the car fill with the sucking rush of the sea.

  "Tim," he said, his voice coming up from him in a whisper. "Come on, Tim, let's get out of here. I've had enough of this. Let's go."

  33

  RED WING

  "How many more miles?" Susan asks.

  "How should I know?" Martin answers.

  "Well, if you don't, who does?" She's seven, sitting in the favored seat beside him, and now she turns her square cut, mature-looking face to her reflection in the
side window and sticks out her tongue, still angry that they didn't stop at Santa Claus Land in Anoka. The tongue in the window waggles back. Marie and Charles, in the back seat with blankets and rugs and a big box, look at one another and then intertwine fingers and hold hands; it's hot August and they're returning to Illinois after a long stay in Hyatt, where none of them enjoyed themselves, although none of them talked about it or wondered why, and they'll stop at the farm in Wisconsin to pick up Tim, who's been spending the year with their Great-aunt Sue and Great-uncle Einard, the childless couple Elling used to live with. For several miles there's no sound but the muted hum of the mechanism powering their movement through space in the terrestrial and road-restricted car.

  And then Susan says again, "How many more miles?"

  "I'd judge something over twenty-five to Sue and Einard's," he says. "And then about four hundred to home."

  She says, "Then we'll have to stop some place where I can poop or tinkle, because I need some ice cream."

  "Need?" he says.

  "I have to poop."

  "Can't you wait till we get over this?"

  They're crossing the bridge from the reddish-brown and silvery-green loaflike bluff at Red Wing, Minnesota —where they saw on a tree-lined street with a broad divider of grass a bandstand and a brick post office, a truckload of turkeys rolling by, and the shoe factory; red wings on buildings everywhere—over the Mississippi to the lower, level land of Wisconsin beyond. Marie drops to the floor between seats, terrified of water, of crossing over it, of bridges, ferries, trestles, and viaducts, and stares at Charles with her tremulous blue and nearly circular eyes, dark now with a question almost of Who are you? He stretches out on the seat, searching for approbation, and then puts his hand under her shirt and feels the humidity and heat of her skin, undoes the copper buttons at the side of her jeans and as she arches to slide them and the underwear beneath down below her thighs, her face rose and crimson, her features filled with her singularly lonely fear. He lies above her, takes out his peanut, as Susan calls it, and lets her touch it as he runs his hand over the damp parting of her sparse and silken hair.