Sign Languages

by James Hannah

  Tom, his only brother, had begged him to house-sit the month he and his wife, Megan, would be in Chile on a faculty summer program. “It’d be great,” Megan had said over the phone. “You’d get out of that damned Houston in July. What’s the humidity there, 98 percent?” And she’d laughed. Her laugh convinced him. That and the unexpected realization he was tired of Houston and the one woman he’d slept with in the last five years and she only recently; a new assistant accountant at work. Their recent months of sex becoming tangles of clothes because of her impatience. And once she’d bitten him on the forearm. After she was asleep, Richard went into the bathroom and examined the purple wound for a long time. Then he slept on the couch, waking often to watch the door to the hallway, afraid she’d come through it, her teeth bared. Now, though the wound had disappeared, he put his finger to his skin.

  At the last minute, Tom and Megan had left early in the sort of frenzy Richard should have expected from his brother. It was very much like him to have gotten the dates wrong or the plane tickets or something. Richard was sure that was why Megan had phoned with the news, her voice layered and deep—the only woman’s voice he paid much attention to. He hadn’t seen them in over two years—since the Christmas the ice storm had rushed into Texas fiercely and killed the power at their parents’ house, bent pine saplings almost to the ground. There’d been candles and kerosene lamps—the old days for his parents—and quilts on knees and early bedtimes. A lot of looking out of windows into deep gray afternoons.

  Coming from his bedroom at the front of the house, he’d seen Megan naked in the mirror in their bedroom. She was alone, at the window, her fingers slightly parting the blinds. She hadn’t heard him. He stopped on the cold oak floor amazed. There had been few women in his life, none before his second year in college. And he’d never seen such a sight before. The demanding woman in Houston was nothing like her.

  Richard had flown to St. Louis and taken the bus two hours to the northwest. There’d been a manila envelope in the mail chute with door keys, instructions about appliances, a pad of signed checks for incoming bills. And a brief note from Megan saying she hoped he would enjoy the slow pace of Coalston. She jabbered on so about mental health and locating our centers that Richard wondered about her own well-being here in a town a long way from Denver, where’d she been born. And besides, hadn’t they both just escaped to Chile? Richard couldn’t imagine such an impetuous action. It was hard enough for him to make it from Houston. He was much like his father, who’d once been offered a high-paying job in Europe but couldn’t leave the piney woods of East Texas he’d adopted as a young husband.

  But what had he done his first afternoon in their house? Richard shook his head. He’d taken a shower and tried to get beyond the memory of the Houston woman lying on the couch and asking him to play rough with her. Then he’d thought about the few women he’d seen naked, Megan in the mirror. In high school there’d only been hands, opened blouses, sweating windshields.

  Unhappy with the soft mattress in the guest room, he had taken his suitcase into their room and dropped it on the beautiful quilt he recognized as his mother’s work. He opened their dresser drawers; he opened the closet, pushed back clothes, poked through shoe boxes, found a snub-nosed revolver in one and felt as if he’d found cocaine. This wasn’t like Tom at all. Then, Richard smelled Tom’s strong and spicy colognes and, in the third bureau drawer, put his hands into her underwear. Pulling out a fistful of panties, he scattered them on the bed.

  For an hour or more he went through everything he could. He told himself that here was a chance to piece everything together—an opportunity to know them both better than he ever could any other way. Far more complete than what one learns over telephones, from infrequent letters about the superficial details of health, money, parents, work. Tom was his brother and Megan his sister-in-law. But their lives were secret and foreign, and here, suddenly, he had the perfect chance to find out who they were.

  So he took out things, examined them, put them back, fighting, all the time, his conscience, guilt, amazement, the fear of being caught by their sudden return. Their faces in the door of the small study dumbstruck at Richard sitting at the desk, rummaging through old bills, lecture notes, memos concerning the League of Women Voters.

  My God, he kept thinking, what am I doing? I’m the most secretive, private person I know. How would I feel? And he saw himself returning once from the kitchen and finding her with a book she’d taken out of his bedside table. He couldn’t comprehend such an action. He had thought then how he’d have to keep an eye on her.

  “Jesus,” she’d said, oblivious to her crime, “you keep this sort of thing in the bedroom? Wow, everything there is to know about junk bonds.”

  But he hadn’t stopped himself. Not until a folder had buckled and spilled across the floor, and, bending down, he’d read the medical expenses for artificial insemination at a hospital in St. Louis. They were enormous, and evidently the college insurance didn’t cover them. There were several angry letters from Tom to the insurance people and one from Megan, less angry, her approach one of quiet logic.

  Richard sat for a while, completely convicted, and then he had straightened up and unpacked in the guest room and drunk a large glass of sherry from the serving cart in the dining room.

  That night in their bed he listened to them talk about him. My poor brother Richard, he could hear Tom say. He doesn’t have much of a life there in Houston. Oh, he’s perfectly fine. He could hear Megan’s rich voice. But his life really is mostly work, work, work. He’s always been that way, you know. And Richard winced at Tom’s voice and, for a while, was glad he’d gone so drastically out of control and had searched their house.

  The next morning he’d woken to the fish smell he’d been unable to locate and now guessed he’d just have to get used to.

  In midafternoon Richard was interrupted by a series of sharp raps on the front door. He laid his autobiography of Henry Ford on the end table and got up from the couch. Out the big bay window the sky was cloudless, the leaves on the maples along the street drooped. He knew how hot it was; this summer was defined by drought and crop failure throughout the country and, in the west, tremendous forest fires. At night, on the news, it looked as if the whole nation was hot and weary.

  When he opened the wooden door, he looked down on a short, broad woman in her late fifties, her hands full of brochures, small plastic bowls, flyswatters. Richard shook his head. “I don’t live here; the owners are away.”

  The broad, moon face broke into a smile, and she came up the steps and under Richard’s arm. “Of course you don’t, honey. You’re Rich, Tom’s baby brother. Bet it’s hotter in Houston now, huh?” Her lime-green, shiny dress was all reflection and motion as she laid the items on the coffee table and dropped heavily onto the couch. “Whew, it ain’t no picnic here, is it hon?” And she wiped her forehead and chin with a handkerchief from her huge purse. Richard smelled the sharp bitter lemon odor of perfume as she clicked her bag shut.

  “Barbie Glass,” she said, leaning back to look up at Richard. She patted the couch at her side. “Have a seat, Rich; I can’t stay a minute you know.” She shook her head. “Can’t leave the old man alone these days. You know how they are.”

  Richard sat and nodded his head. He looked through the window, but there wasn’t a car anywhere. He realized she was a neighbor.

  “Anyway, Megan and Tom told me all about you,” she reached out and patted his arm. “Big-time accountant, CPA,” and she rolled her eyes. “So, how’s little ole Coalston shaping up? I’d have come over earlier—saw the taxi out the kitchen window,” she twisted herself around. “That’s us—me and Buddy—right over there. But I thought I’d give you a day to get settled in.”

  Richard turned too and nodded at the small brick house with green, mismatching trim.

  “Anyway, it’s an old people’s neighborhood, you know. Tom and Megan the youngest in a dozen blocks. And we all love ‘em, the honeys. You’re a lu
cky man, you know.”

  Richard nodded.

  “Anyway, here’s the Welcome Wagon,” and she rolled her head back and laughed loud. Richard laughed too and looked down at the coffee table.

  “Really, I’m one of two of us. Me and Julie Hutchinson,” she wrinkled her heavily powdered nose. Her eyes were small and the depthless blue of water in a swimming pool. “So, I thought, I’ll leave Buddy just a minute and meet Rich and why not take him the usual, huh? Why not?”

  Richard nodded and smiled. And Barbie went quickly through the assortment of pizza coupons, bottle openers, flyswatters—from a funeral home. “Can you believe that?” Barbie cackled. Richard said he couldn’t. She rattled on about the quality of the schools, troubles with the few blacks who were ruining everything in the county, the weather, the nearby lakes.

  “Well,” she said, and stood up surprisingly quickly for so large a woman. “Buddy’s missing me for sure by now.” And she reached out a hand that Richard, puzzled, met to shake. But instead, Barbie grabbed his wrist in a cool grip and led him through the living room to the adjoining dining room that opened onto the rear deck. She brought them close to the large sliding door. Richard looked out with her. Barbie’s finger jabbed the glass.

  “You’d better watch out for ‘em.” She stared up into Richard’s eyes, and he felt compelled to nod.

  “Who?”

  “There, in that mess of a garage apartment, the green one—right there.”

  Richard hadn’t taken the time to sit on the deck yet. There was no shade, and the planks and metal lawn chairs looked scalding in the harsh sunlight. Now he took time to notice the house at the end of Barbie’s finger.

  The backs of all the yards ended in a wall of dense woods that lined the banks of an invisible creek. The lawn to his left was manicured; he’d seen the old thin man who lived there mowing at noon. The house to the right was a bit closer to the street than Tom and Megan’s. And, obviously, the owners had built some sort of garage apartment, or perhaps had sold the back half of their large lot. The faded kelly-green house was unusually dilapidated for this neighborhood. Its gray roof buckled in several places. A low fence of raw cinder blocks surrounding it was almost obscured by high weeds. Abandoned pieces of rusting machinery lined the fence. There was a tangle of scaffolding and a cement mixer with a split bucket. It reminded Richard of housing in some third-world country—poorly planned, hand-built, unfinished.

  “Oh, I know Tom and Megan love kids… and who doesn’t? But they’ll come to see when they get back. They’ll learn. Those kids just moved in a few months ago. Parents never home and they’ve run amok. You oughta hear Buddy,” Barbie chuckled. “‘End of the world,’ he says. ‘Barbie, they’ll be the death of me.’”

  “Bad kids,” Richard said lamely.

  “Oh hon! I mean, they’ve just moved in. Before it was vacant a year—property’s hard to sell these days—and before that just Mrs. Clemson until she kicked the bucket. Didn’t realize it for a few days, those sorry kids of hers. And it was August, too.”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Just been a mess,” Barbie shrugged and walked back to the front room, pulling her purse up on her shoulder. “We’ve never had anything like it here. Most of us have called the cops on them at least once. They steal things—newspapers, lawn ornaments, Mr. Eaton’s three-wheeled bicycle, we think, and wrecked it where the creek crosses under Helena Road over by the fire station. They smashed Madge’s herb vinegar she was steeping on the porch. Now the Bentendorfs say they’ve caught them in their garage sitting in their new Buick. And later found nails all in their aluminum siding. But what can you do?”

  Richard shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, Rich,” Barbie whacked him hard on the shoulder, “just watch out for ‘em, huh? And if you need anything, Barbie and Buddy are right over there twenty-four hours a day. We never go anywhere… and seldom sleep. It’s a geriatric neighborhood, all right,” and she chuckled and waved a fleshy arm over her shoulder. Richard watched her cross the dry hot yard. Looking down at Megan’s zinnias bordering the porch, he decided he’d water and maybe even trim a few of the wilted hedges late in the afternoon, though Megan had written him about the young college student whom they’d hired to take care of the yard. Yard work was something he’d seldom done since he lived in an expensive condominium complex in Houston and had no yard and couldn’t possibly say who his neighbors were.

  Friday morning, a day later, Richard sat up in bed and screamed, his voice rebounding off the walls. The face at the window disappeared.

  He sat there and collected himself, breathed deeply before he swung out of Tom and Megan’s firm bed and looked out the window.

  It was almost midmorning, the beginning of another endless summer day. The sky was already a milky haze; the bush below the window was dying from the drought, dropping yellow leaves as if it were fall.

  A young, thin boy streaked around behind Tom’s metal storage shed. Then another child, a girl fifteen or so, leapt over the low, weed-covered wall and ran after him.

  Then another girl, a bit small, but also blond, burst through the back door of the garage apartment; Richard could hear her yelling. It was high and shrill, full of real fear. She had a sandwich in her hand, the bread flapping open at every step. Right behind her came another boy, terribly thin and redheaded.

  Richard opened his mouth, rapped on the glass. “No,” he said. “Stop it.” And, not taking the time to grab his bathrobe, he rushed through the quiet house to the rear deck, still damp in the shade from the dew.

  Now he heard her scream, high and awful, as she scrambled over the cinder-block wall and crossed into Tom’s yard. Like a pirate, her red-haired pursuer put the butcher knife in his teeth as he raced up the pile of scaffolding, jumped into the high grass, and emerged like some attacking animal.

  “Hey, stop it!” Richard pounded the wooden railing. He didn’t know what to do. He looked at the green house, hoping a parent would intervene, but the torn screen door sagged halfway open.

  In the middle of the yard, the girl stopped, turned, and flung the meat-and-bread sandwich at her brother, who stopped too, stuck the knife in the ground at his feet, and glared at her.

  “You sonofabitch,” she said, taking in gulps of air.

  The redheaded boy squatted and pieced together the sandwich. Carefully he wiped the grass off it onto the knee of his pants and then took a bite. He spoke with his mouth full. “Fuck you.”

  Richard was appalled. He felt trapped in the balcony at some terrible play. Again he stared at their house, the opened door, the black mouth of it. Some yellowed sheets and underwear hung motionless on a clothesline.

  He’d never liked children, never wanted any of his own. Neither had the biting woman in Houston. “Little shits,” she called them. And, for a moment, he admired her, wished she were here to witness this.

  “Hey, you two,” he shouted, and they turned and stared at him. The boy reached down and pulled up his knife; the girl shaded her eyes from the morning sun. Richard looked at them but didn’t know, now, what to say. He wished he’d stayed inside; he realized he was in his pajamas. He recalled what had woken him and turned his eyes to the metal shed. He saw two heads duck back around.

  “You two come out from behind there. Right this minute.” He spoke in the office voice he used on subordinates who’d caused him inconvenience.

  But they didn’t come out. Instead they laughed loudly.

  “Kimmy, Chip, come on… hurry,” a girl’s voice coaxed. And, in a flash, the redheaded boy and girl were gone.

  “Stay out of my yard, you little brats,” Richard shouted at them.

  “It ain’t your yard,” the older boy’s voice answered.

  Richard listened to the sounds of their feet and bodies scurrying through the underbrush. Turning to go inside, he stopped and moaned. All along the porch, where Megan had placed pots of flowers, were clots of wet dirt and shredded plants.


  Richard sat on the deck and drank a freshly made old-fashioned. It was too dark to read any longer. He laid the opened book on Peter the Great on the wire end table.

  Next door they’d been making noise since sunset, but, out of principle, Richard hadn’t paid attention. Now he watched them come in and out the battered door.

  There were no lights on in the house. The older girl had a flashlight. They worked like ants, passing one another, pausing for a second’s contact—a shove, a pounded shoulder. “Ouch.” “You’re asking for it.” “You sissy.” “Little piece of shit.” “Bastard.”

  They were loud, oblivious of the neighborhood. They brought out a folding table, straight-backed dining-room chairs, paper sacks.

  All of a sudden, with an orange flash, the older boy had lit a fire on the ground.

  They yelled behind their low wall and gathered closer to the fire, their faces yellow flickering masks. Richard noticed Kimmy the sandwich girl, wore glasses.

  He thought about how, in the city, he didn’t live near children. And, in the malls, he paid them little attention except to sidestep them and their mothers.

  Beyond the wall the fire died down until the older girl poured something on it and it erupted, causing them to scream with excitement. Then they began to sing, or maybe it wasn’t a song but a poem or chant of some sort. It was less melody than rhythm. He couldn’t understand the words.

  In bed, before he slept, Richard parted the curtains. There was only a flicker of light; the house still dark. He thought he saw their shapes sitting on the chairs. He was sure they’d used the fire to cook their supper. He’d smelled the odor of meat. On the edge of sleep he wondered if they had electricity.

  Then, after the memory, everything happened quickly. It was as if everything else was waiting for Richard to recall something he’d never really forgotten. It was early afternoon and he drove under the carport after a late lunch at the Golden Corral. Coming around the corner to enter the house from the deck, he stopped and edged closer to the wall. He felt like a spy as he cautiously looked around the corner. The blue-and-white police car was parked in the apartment’s driveway, and the officer stood by the opened car door. The children stood in a semicircle a few feet from the patrolman, whose lips moved and right index finger wagged. But a hot rising breeze obliterated his words. Richard watched him pull out of the driveway. For a moment the children stood transfixed, and then they shouted one long gleeful shout and scattered in four directions, hopping over upturned bicycles, screaming over the fence.