How long have the potatoes been in the oven? I’ve lost track of time. Hours, I think. But no. Not long enough for them to bake. Should I start the mushrooms? I open the oven. I can’t remember if I poked them with a fork before they went in. I always poke potatoes before I bake them. I stab a fork into the potatoes, one by one. They’re done. The last potato explodes onto my hand; clumps of hot potato spatter my arm, burst onto the floor of the oven.
“What was that?” Jonah says.
I barely hear him over the running water. My hand reddens beneath the cold. My mother smeared burns with butter. Did all mothers do that?
“Nothing,” I say. “A potato burst.”
“I’d like some more of that brandy,” he says.
“Good,” I say.
Good. My hand drips water onto his jeans while I pour the rest of the cognac into his glass. He thanks me. How ironic. He thanks me for the liquor.
Carl hears it first. He glances toward the back door. I listen hard until I hear footsteps crunching dry leaves on the stones of the driveway. Halfway back to the kitchen I stop to think. Carl rustles in his chair. Jonah sips the rest of the cognac. The footsteps kick at a stone. Feet wipe on the landing. It isn’t Sylvie. She never knows what her feet are doing.
“Hello, you folks. No light out here.”
Hans. He clicks on the driveway light from the back porch before he knocks on the glass panel and turns the knob of the door.
“Run,” Carl says. “Get help.”
“Left the car in the turnaround,” Hans says.
“Don’t open the door. Run.”
“What?” Hans says. “What’s going on?”
The door opens a crack. Jonah struggles to his feet. I think he’s a bit drunk.
“Go.” I’ve never heard Carl shout so loud. “Go. Get help.”
“Sylvie?” Jonah asks.
When I turn my back to him and run to the door, I am ready for a bullet in my back. I yell to Hans to run and slam the door shut. Jonah doesn’t shoot me. He shoves me away from the door before he rushes out, revolver waving. I slam the door again behind Jonah, crouch, move toward the telephone. Just as I lift the receiver, I hear the first shot. There is a dial tone. What’s the number? Who am I calling? The police. Another shot peals into the night. Hans? The gun. I think it’s empty. Nine one one. The bullets on the shelf? Should I hide them? What first? I push the 9 and the 1 and the 1, wait for the ring. Ring. Damn it, ring. He bursts into the house with the gun, jerks the telephone cord from the wall. Where’s the rock? Now I could hit him with the rock.
I’m on the floor before I even feel the gun smack against my cheekbone. Carl yells out, “Jesus. Stop it.” I look up to see Jonah reloading, slipping bullets from the small cardboard box into the empty cylinder. Six of them again. How stupid. Why didn’t I go for the bullets?
“Chicken ready?” Jonah asks.
“The chicken?” It hurts to talk. Maybe he’s going to shoot me right here lying on the floor. I close my eyes, listen to his movement around the room. He opens and shuts the oven. He lifts the empty cognac bottle and places it back on the counter. He touches my leg with his foot, pushes at it until I remove my hand from my swollen cheek. Is he checking to see if I’m still alive?
“Your face. Is it sore?”
“Yes.” I cry. I can’t help it. I weep for myself mostly. But for Carl and his mother and his sister. For Hans. And for Sylvie. My Sylvie. Behind my closed eyes I see her dancing at the base of her tree. I wrap my arms around her. Mommy? Yes, my little wood sprite? Can I have a fairy dress? One with sparkles and diamonds and fairy dust? Yes, my darling. Can it be purple and pink and black? Black? Black for the darkness. The fairy darkness, where fairies go in the night.
Is that the crazy place where Sylvie goes? The fairy darkness? In my own darkness I see them, waves and waves of dancing fairies in purple and pink dresses, in violet waistcoats, waving ribbons in the air. I wend my way through raspberry bushes toward the sparkles, toward incandescent air, toward high voices singing in harmony with one another. Sylvie skips at the edge of the group, waves, calls, Mommy, Mommy. Away from Carl, away from a crazy man with a gun, away from burst potatoes and Hans in the driveway. It would be easy. To just go to that place. But then I see him. Jonah. Ralph. Slicing air with a golden sword, prancing the perimeter, his waistcoat shimmering. He’s there, too, in the fairy darkness.
My fingers feel the dampness on my sore cheek. I think it’s bleeding. Blood and tears. There’s no cut. I touch my face all over. My eyes. My mouth. My cheeks. The skin is loose. When did I become old? The swelling puffs over my cheekbone. There, in that spot, my skin is smooth, young, tight. Is he still looking at me? I hear Carl shifting in his chair. He’s given up. How does it feel to give up? I’m almost there. I’m almost ready to give up. Perhaps that’s what Jonah is waiting for. How will he know when it happens?
I get to my feet quietly. Perhaps he won’t notice. He sits back in his chair, sips at the rim of his empty glass. He smiles at me. His teeth are straight. Did he wear braces? Did his father resent the money? I almost smile back. Years of smiling when someone smiles at me. It’s a reflex. But I don’t. I just stand looking at the two of them.
“Dinner?” Jonah asks.
“What about the man in the driveway? May I go and check on him? Did you shoot him?”
“Why would I shoot a man in the driveway?”
“I heard shots. Did he fall down?”
“Carl told him to run away. That was bad. That was a bad thing to do, Carl.”
“I’m sorry,” Carl says. He has given up.
“I’m hungry,” Jonah says.
“If you let me check on the man first, I’ll make your dinner.”
“You’ll run away.”
“No. Carl is still here. I wouldn’t do that.”
Would I do that? I could hide in the woods, away from the garage light. Get the gas can, pour gas into the empty tank in the car. No. I don’t think I would run away. Jonah would shoot him. I think he would. Yes.
“We’ll both go. Then you’ll cook? Carl is hungry, too. Aren’t you, Big Boy?”
“Yes,” Carl says. His voice is small, thin. He couldn’t be hungry. Is he going to sit there and eat his potato and chicken?
“Lie down,” Jonah says.
“Me?”
“Who else do you think I’m talking to?”
“Lie down?”
“I’m going to tape Mr. Man’s arms myself. We aren’t going out the door with him almost free, now are we? Down. On the floor. Facedown. You move and I’ll blow off Mr. Carl’s nose.”
I lie down as he asks. Now isn’t the time to do something. I hear the tape rip from the roll. It’s going to be tight this time. Getting up is painful. Everything hurts. My face. My arms. My battered private places. Inside. Way inside me hurts.
Jonah is ready to go out. “Carl? Are you there?” I say. “Carl?” He looks at me with blank eyes. Yes. I think he is hungry. “Carl.”
I say nothing else, hope it is enough to wake him up. Hope it’s enough to get him to do something. He’ll be alone in the house. Surely there’s something he could do, even taped to a chair. On the way out the door, I pocket a small flashlight that we always keep on the shelf by the door.
Jonah makes me walk ahead of him. He leaves the back door open, although the night air is cold. The gun points at my back. I can feel it. Not the gun itself. Its path. The one the bullet will take if he pulls the trigger. Such a simple action. Pulling back a small metal lever. Just a quarter of an inch. Perhaps if it hits my spine, there will be no pain.
“Sshhh,” Jonah says. “Do you hear that?”
“What?”
“Something. I don’t know what. Just keep walking.”
The scene is like a movie. I picture us from about twenty feet away and it reminds me of a bad thriller, a man with a gun jammed into a woman’s ribs, she stumbling along, tripping on an untied sneaker lace in the near dark. The light from the garage doesn
’t expose a body in the driveway. I catch a flash of some night creature, a skunk maybe, although there is no scent. Our footsteps crunch on the loose stones along the edge.
I hear something now. A moan. Should I speak? Did he see me take the flashlight? I don’t know whether we should find him or not.
“Jonah?”
“Keep going.”
“What are we going to do if we find him?”
“That’s for me to decide.”
It isn’t a question to be answered. My fingers wrap around the small flashlight in my pocket. It clicks on the key ring. Does he hear? No.
“Can hardly see,” he says.
“We’ll have to get him to a hospital,” I say.
“Now how are we going to do that? Be quiet and keep walking.”
Hans cries out from the side of the driveway in the darkness. There are no words. Just a cry, a noise of pain. There is no point in walking away from it. Jonah has heard it, too. I pull the flashlight from my pocket and flick it on. The beam is low. I aim it toward the sound but see nothing.
“Give me that,” he says.
The gun touches my backbone, pushes me forward. He waves the light back and forth in the drive, searching for Hans, thinking God knows what.
Then I see the silly hiking boot bought in Germany for climbing the Alps. Hans says they help his traction when he walks from his house to ours along the mildly hilly shore route. The boot moves. I see the other.
“Hans? Are you hurt?” I’m not sure what to expect for an answer. Of course he’s hurt. Otherwise he wouldn’t be lying at the side of the driveway in the dark. Jonah shines the light on him, moves the beam from head to foot. Hans is alive. He stares into the beam.
“Don’t shoot me again,” he says. He raises his head from the dried leaves. “Please.”
“Where are you shot?” Jonah asks.
“I think it’s my hip,” Hans says.
“Are you bleeding?” I ask.
The beam of light shows red down the thigh of his beige pants. If it were an artery, he’d be dead by now, or at least unconscious. He doesn’t answer my question about the blood, just drops his head back onto the leaves and sighs.
“He’s not bleeding to death,” Jonah says. “Go back to the house. Walk slowly. I’ll follow. If you do anything funny, I’ll shoot. I have new bullets, you know. Six bullets. That’s two for each.”
I bend over Hans and whisper to him. Just a few words. I tell him to rest and save his energy. His mouth moves. I think he says, “Don’t leave me.” On the way back down to the house, I don’t look around, just walk in baby steps along the side of the driveway. When I get in the stream of light from the garage, I search for a killing rock, small enough to throw, big enough to do damage. Behind me I hear low voices, rustling, wait for the shot. That’s why, isn’t it? That’s why he sent me ahead. He’s going to shoot Hans. Put him out of his misery. I stop walking. The quiet allows me to hear the men better. Jonah’s voice is low. I can’t make out the words. It sounds like prayer. I place my hands over my ears. I can’t listen. Hans is crying, weeping. I hum a song to myself, a lullaby.
18
CARL
SHE WANTS ME to do something. What? What can I do attached to this goddamn chair? Hans is dead. I know he’s dead. Probably shot in the heart. Shot in the mouth? Where does a bullet go when it begins at the lips?
Her lips were full. And soft. In the camp she held her lips to my cheek, and I, almost seventeen with a mother’s mouth on my face. She said everything would be fine, that we’d get back our horses and the government would buy us new wagons when the war was finished. She said that I was her own little boy, although I was almost as big as she. She lifted my hand and brought it to her lips, kissed my ragged fingers, said that we’d have milk, too, when it was over. Milk and beer and meat soup. Before the war, Mama wore bright red lipstick. That day, her lips were pale, cracked, peppered with sores. What did the Nazis do with all the lipstick tubes?
Jess and Jonah have been gone too long. They should have checked on Hans by now, found him dead, and returned. Where are they? I was supposed to come up with a plan, but what’s the point? I can’t do anything. I try to lift the chair and shuffle toward the door, but the chair’s too heavy. I bend my head down to pick with my teeth at the duct tape wrapped around my arms, and pain shoots from my wound. The tape is tight. But my legs are loose. Why can’t I wiggle my foot out? What if I took my shoes off? Then I could slip my feet through easier. I continue to pull my feet from my shoes, try to ignore the pain from the gunshot. A trickle of blood drips down my arm and pools in the middle of the blue fish. My mouth aches where my tooth was. I only had a few teeth left at the end of the war. Most fell out in the camp from malnutrition or beatings. With the shoes finally off, I move my feet back and forth, struggle to pull them from their wrappings.
There are no weapons in the house except for the gun that Jonah has. Are the knives in the kitchen sharp enough? I was supposed to sharpen them, but did I? I think we’re going to die here, together. I hope to go first. That’s selfish, n’est-ce pas? No. I hope she goes first and he makes me watch her eyes glass over and her hand twitch. I deserve it.
Night air blows through the open door. It’s cold in the house. There’s no fire in the woodstove. I always light a fire this time of year to take the chill off.
I have to pee again. I shouldn’t have had the wine. My feet won’t come free of the damn tape. I struggle again to pull my feet through, but the socks catch on the sticky tape. I can’t do it. I can’t even fucking untape my feet from the chair legs. I need my mother’s kisses on my cheek, her whispers: Veshi, Veshi, we’ll have chocolate and figs and even marzipan when we get out of here. And then I imagine her mouth around the cold gray metal barrel of an SS revolver. I see her shivering barefoot in the frosted ruts, watching my father lie naked on our beloved Nonni. Did she know the gun would explode in her mouth? Did she know I was under the truck? Oh, Jesus, did she? She did. Yes. She did.
I’m Mr. Fixit. I fix anything. Hips. Knees. Toilets. Fallen trees. What can I do here? If I could get my feet free from the tape, I could tackle him on the way in. I will drag the chair behind me to the kitchen, get a knife to cut the tape. I’m bigger than he is. Even at my age, I think I’m stronger. He’s a boy. Young. Small. But I’m wounded.
Jessie was my first real love after the camp. Camba and I were to be married when we came of age. But that was before Birkenau. She was shot because she stole a potato. Therese, a Sinti Gypsy from Lithuania, begged me to make love to her just before I escaped. I bribed my bunkmates with a piece of moldy sausage to squeeze into some other bunk just for one night and Therese and I slept with our arms around each other. Our bodies covered with thin, parchmentlike skin pressed close. She was afraid the bone rubbing on bone would cause lesions in our skin and we would be selected. When I lay on her, went inside, her hips poked sharp against my belly. She was dry. Like sandpaper. I was dry, too. We were starving. But we loved each other all night. She went to the gas with the others. She must have. I never saw her again.
In college I had a few lovers but no one I really loved until Jessie. After that day in the library when she dropped her books, I saw her walking along the river on a Sunday morning and stopped to chat. I asked her to movies. “Not until I defend my thesis.” To dinner, to the coffeehouse. “Not until my thesis is accepted.”
One day I got a call. She’d just come home after finishing her orals and wanted to take me to dinner. We went to a Chinese restaurant in Boston, then strolled through alleys and gardens and cemeteries back toward Cambridge. She asked me about my studies, about why I wanted to fix broken joints and where I was going to do my residency. I asked her why she wanted to teach. She said she had a talent for it. We walked through an old cemetery where the lights of the city dimmed and bushes sprang out at us from all directions. Beside the large tomb of some famous old man, she pulled me down by her on the grass and kissed me.
“You’re a good
man, Carl,” she said. She straddled my chest, bent to kiss my mouth, her braid brushing the side of my face. We heard someone walking close by. She held her finger against my lips, stifled a laugh, began to unbutton my shirt. She had no underpants on at all. When my shirt was unbuttoned, she opened it, pressed her dampness against my chest. “You’re so good,” she said, over and over. What did I say to her? Did I say she was good?
She slid down toward my thighs, unsnapped my chinos, tucked her hand down inside my boxers. I think I unbuttoned her blouse. It was purple. Crinkly cotton, something light. I expected an underthing, but it was just Jessie, her bare skin against the thin fabric. I opened the blouse, like a birthday present, and she leaned forward so that her breast lowered into my mouth. She smelled of nettles and spring earth and soy sauce.
She lowered my zipper so slowly that I felt my whole life go by like a movie. She kept stopping to press her face against the hollow at my rib, breathe in the scent from inside my clothes. When she had pulled the zipper as far as it would go, she squatted over me and tugged my clothes down to my knees. I knew what she was going to do. No one had ever done that before, but I knew. I said silent words to some great, powerful being to let me hold back, keep me from spilling too soon.
“Jessie, my Jess,” I said. “Je t’adore.” What a silly thing to say. But she didn’t think it silly.
When she ran her tongue up and encircled me with her lips, took me in her mouth, I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t have her do that. God, I wanted it. But I couldn’t. Not in her mouth. She understood. She lay with her blouse open on my bare skin until we fell asleep. When I awoke, I rolled her underneath me and entered her quietly.
A Brief Lunacy Page 14