20 (31 page)

Stewart O'Nan

My father calls about the grass. It's December, I'm trying to sell our place, and we've got a squatter jumping house to house down the beach, building fires on the marble floors.

“You said once a week,” my father says, “it's more like once a month.”

It's long distance—peak hours—and I pay no matter who calls. That's all going to change once Eileen gets the papers together. The market's depressed, and I'm eating Corn Flakes a lot.

“Look,” I tell him, “I'll give him a call, all right?”

“I don't want to be a pain in the ass about it.”

“You are being,” I say, to let him know he isn't.

“So when are you coming down?”

“Christmas.”

“When Christmas?”

“Things are crazy up here,” I say, and end up telling him about Eileen.

“That's a shame,” he says. “I bet you feel different now, don't you?”

“It's a collarbone.”

“That's not the point,” he says.

“All that's over,” I say, “and I'm not going to talk about it.” He shuts up to make me feel bad.

“I'll call the guy,” I say.

I'm living in the guest room off the kitchen so Sandy the realtor can show the house looking nice. The furniture's here; Eileen only took the kids. I have the drapes open and the shades up, the rug's just been shampooed. I've taken down all the crosses except Dan's over my bed. I keep at the dishes, the counters. It's with the multiple listing; when I get off swing shift I find cards by the sink. I'll leave a few rounds on the dresser to give them a thrill.

“He's a detective,” Sandy or Barb or Gerry will say. It sounds better than a plain cop, like the pay was really different.

The buyers'll give Dan's Jesus the eye, and depending on the sell, Sandy will or won't tell the story. I wonder what they think I'm going to do. I wonder if they have any suggestions.

Swing isn't as bad as graveyard. Everything's open, and you don't have to change the way you sleep. The day is basically the same, the meals and everything, you just call dinner lunch. You're never late for work.

I don't like to be in the house days. I'll drive down to the ocean and read the Psalms, which sometimes works. I have the department Blazer while I'm on the squatter. The waves come up the sand until they're under me.

     
O Lord my God, in thee do I take refuge
;

     
save me from all my pursuers, and deliver me
,

lest like a lion they rend me
,

     
dragging me away, with none to rescue
.

My father hates Winter Haven, the people always out. He says he wants to come back north now that my mother is gone. He doesn't have any friends in Florida, he misses the winter. When the spray is blowing and the gulls hover and the wind herds the trash barrels, I can see the attraction, but the old place is gone, and his friends are dead. But you can't tell him that.

“Any luck?” I ask Sandy.

“Things will pick up with the weather, it's just a buyer's market right now. One problem is people with children don't like breaking up the school year, and that's I think who we're looking for, a family with children. Unfortunately you know what the economy is like around here, I think that's keeping the market slowed down, but things will pick up I'm sure come March, it's just a slow time of year normally.”

Eileen's face is coming along but she has to wear a sling, and I have a hard time stopping my sympathy. Once on a bust I fell into a boat and broke my hand. I hated her cutting my food; no matter what it was, halfway through it was cold.

“You want pizza five times a week?” she said. “You want hot dogs and hamburgers like a little kid?”

Our squatter dumps in the toilets but they're capped for the winter. It hits you a foot in the door, that and the smoke. He snips the alarms, even the big ADT systems, that's why Jimby thinks it's a pro. Jimby's from the city; to him if you can fix a car you're a genius. When I was a kid we used to do the same thing, that's why I'm swing and Jimby's days. Jimby comes in, there's an address on his desk, something-something Dune road, and by the time I get in it's pictures. A dried dump, charred ends of driftwood by a grand piano. I put on my duck gear and roam the dunes around the empty houses. Baymen say the sea talks if you listen, but I'm safe. God isn't like a star that can go out.

The grass guy says he's been there. “914 Clarendon,” he says, “I got it right in front of me.”

“What's the date?”

“Says Thursday.”

“This Thursday.”

“The Thursday just was.”

“What about this Thursday?”

“It doesn't grow that fast.”

“Then what, will you tell me, am I paying forty dollars a month for?”

“I'll go and do it again myself if you want.”

“Please,” I say.

I don't like talking on the phone with the kids. I don't know what she's said to them. “Your old man's not so bad,” I say sometimes, but they don't bite. Jay wouldn't trust me even if things were normal; twelve's an ugly age. I expected some help from Dan, but he's gone quiet. It's a bad sign, I say to her, but she thinks I'm getting on her about the whole thing. “Maybe I should move back in,” she says. “Sure. Give me a minute to pack everything up, OK?”

She doesn't bother to argue anymore. She'll hear it's me and hang up. She thinks the restraining order takes care of everything. Her sister's the one I feel bad for. Jenny's always liked me. “She's very confused right now,” Jenny'll tell me outside. We both know it's not true but it makes leaving easier, and she watches me walk away from the porch like I'll be coming back.

I've got the profit figured at sixteen thousand, clear. When the car commercials come on, I think about walking into the dealer and dropping an envelope on the desk and just pointing to the one I want. Not that we're going to get close to what we're asking.

I like to four-wheel at night, rolling slow over the dunes. The surfcasters' fires hop out of the darkness, then black. A camper forms, battened down for the night. I've got the kids' mattresses in back, beef jerky on the dash, my basic ordnance. It's not going to be easy to go back to the Caprice. I send the spotlight out over the water; even at night, it is still coming.

     
O Lord my God, if I have done this
,

     
if there is wrong in my hands
,

if I have requited my friend with evil

     
or plundered my enemy without cause
,

let the enemy pursue me and overtake me
,

     
and let him trample my life to the ground
,

     
and lay my soul in the dust
.

I don't have trouble sleeping, I just forget a lot lately. Jimby leaves me an empty pack of Salems, half-burnt, a blackened matchbook with JFK's face, and a pair of dead AA batteries. He has on a note card, “Menthol Crack Walkman?” I go down to the property room and get something to
keep me going. I'm supposed to drop by the rest area past exit 66 and shine my light into the bushes, but when I get there I open the window and listen to the rustle of the men. When is love not evil?

The lights are on at Jenny's, the curtains drawn. Jay's bike lies on its side on the front lawn. I eat a stick of beef jerky and watch the shadows cross and recross the living room window.

Sandy calls and wakes me up to tell me we have a buyer. I'm in last night's camo and still going. My eyes are like tinfoil, my gums sweat. The offer is eighty-seven-five.

“That's not even close,” I say.

“No one is getting list value out here right now. If I were in your position I'd think about a serious counter offer.”

“Things are going to pick up in a few months in the spring, is that right?”

“I can't predict the market,” she says. “They're a good risk for a mortgage.”

“One-oh-two.”

“I don't think they'll like that.”

My pump leans in the corner. Dan's Jesus bleeds down over me.

“Oh well,” I say.

Jimby comments on my beard. “You're really getting into the part,” he says, pointing at my hunting vest, my orange hat. They're my own clothes.

“So,” I say, “how close are you?”

“Don't get wise,” he says, “how're you holding up?”

“Aces, Jimby I'm living the life.”

Jenny's husband, Howie, bowls Tuesdays and Thursdays in Hampton Bays. He rolls three strings then yuks it up in the bar, two pitchers max. The season is on a chart on the wall; it's not half over. This cheap crank makes me see funny, but it looks like Howie's the team's anchorman. Good for fucking you, Howie.

“Jay,” I say.

“We're not supposed to talk to you,” he says, and hangs up.

The men groan in the bushes. I go down to the beach and shine my fog lights into the houses, go home and sleep till noon. Sin is no enemy.

I've got to remember to eat more often, and then when I try to have
cereal the milk is bad. I feed the cards into the disposal, pour the clotted milk in, and grind it all. The buyers are fuckheads.

“The grass,” my father says, “no one came about it.”

“I will take care of it,” I say, “I swear if I have to come down there myself and cut it.”

“I'm the only one here,” he says. “You don't know what it's like.”

“Do you want me to come down?”

“What about Eileen and the kids?”

“They're gone.”

“That's a shame,” he says. “Now don't worry about this thing with the grass. I know you've got problems.”

“I'm absolutely fine,” I say, “I'm just worried about you.”

“Don't,” he says, “I won't be in your hair much longer.”

The guy at the grass place says there was nothing to cut but he ran the mower over it anyway. He gives me the address again. “Does your father have a problem with his memory maybe?”

“How much do I owe you total?” I say, “because I am sick of this bullshit.”

Thursday our squatter's camped out at the Flamingo Club in the empty swimming pool and risks a fire because of the windchill. Jimby's coming back from a long lunch at the Crow's Nest and practically trips over the smoke. A local kid, what did I say? I get a change of shift day which takes me through the weekend, then Monday it's back to shaving.

I get down to the beach before sunset. The wind is up, the surf bucking. A few men in waders are letting fly. I've got the heater blasting, a cold six on the seat, my box of Flakes. I can't remember if I took the two I usually take around now, and take four to make sure. The sea never gets tired, never gives up.

O let the evil of the wicked come to an end
,

but establish thou the righteous
.

I fill up at a Hess and buy two of their Christmas tankers and drive over to Jenny's. They have a tree and presents under it, angels with pipe cleaner wings. Howie's into his second game. Either none of us or all of us are forgiven.

Jenny doesn't understand what I'm doing there. I hand her the tankers through the crack in the door and show her the gun.

“Ron,” she says, but won't stop looking at it. I open the door and she steps back.

“Who is it?” Eileen calls from upstairs.

“It's me,” I say.

She comes to the top of the stairs. “Jen, are you all right?”

“She's fine,” I say.

“What do you want?” Eileen says.

“I wanted to say good-bye. I'm going to Florida. I brought these for the kids.” I point to the tankers.

“Good-bye then,” Eileen says.

“Good-bye,” I say, and shoot her through the sling. She falls back instead of down the stairs so I can just see her feet, flopping. I figure the one's good enough.

I steer clear of the rest areas, sleep in the campgrounds. In the Carolinas everyone's friendly and has extra razors. Driving, I imagine a cop pulling me over, looking in my side while I pretend to get my registration. He'll figure I'm a regular guy and ask, “What's the lawnmower for?” and I'll say, “To cut grass With,” and then who knows what will happen.

Jennifer Cornell

This is a list of the things that went missing: half a metre of green nylon netting, a small quantity of stainless-steel gauze, a bolt of cheesecloth, two pairs of forceps, eight sheets of plywood and a box of syringes, half a dozen light bulbs, a spool of wire, a fret saw, a hammer, and a packet of needles.

It's that boy, my Uncle Vincent said. What did I tell you about that boy?

Now hold on a minute, my father said.

Hold on, nothing, my uncle answered. That's who's done it. And it's your own fault for taking in strays.

Alright, we'll go see him, my father said, but when we got to the house he wouldn't go in. Instead he went up to a man in his shirtsleeves who was leaning in a doorway on the other side of the street. The man straightened up when he saw us coming, and the girl on her knees in the hallway behind him sat back on her heels and set her brush down.

Michael Hagan, my father said. D'you know if he's in?

He is, the girl said. He's been in for a week.

He's sick, the man said.

Why, what's wrong with him?

That woman's what's wrong with him, the girl said. She took a sponge from the bucket beside her and slapped it down heavily onto the floor. Good bloody riddance if she has gone away.

They don't know what's wrong with him, the man said. He took sick last Sunday and he's been bad ever since.

Is it serious?

Could be, the man said. His mother's with him. A couple of times now she's sent for the priest.

A bad time to visit, then.

No, go on over, the girl said. She'll be glad of the company. It's been ten days now and he's not said a thing.

In the kitchen of the house we found a woman standing, her back towards us, making tea. Steam climbed from the mouth of the lidless kettle, but the woman's grip on its handle was bare. There were cakes on the table, a pile of cores and torn strips of peeling half-wrapped in newspaper on the edge of the sink, and the room was rich with the scent of cinnamon, the air just above the open oven still quivering with escaping heat.

Mrs. Hagan? my father said, and she turned.

Yes?

How is he?

Just the same. No change from this morning.

Is he eating?

Not a thing. I just took him soup but he wouldn't touch it. I tried porridge earlier but he left that, too.

And what about you, how are you doing?

Oh I'm alright, the woman said. I'm bearing up.

Have you sent for a doctor?

The woman looked at my father, at his tie and his spectacles, at the pen in his pocket and the briefcase in his hand.

Aren't you the doctor?

No, my father said, no. Just a friend.

From inside the cardboard box he carried came the fluttering sound of confetti falling, of raffle stubs tumbling before the draw. He offered the box like an explanation, and all of a sudden the woman's face cleared.

Oh, aye, sorry, she said. I do know you. You're the one who got him that job.

She led us up a narrow staircase, assisting each step with both hands on the rail. The woman's ankles were as thick as her calves, and I could hear the quick, uneven clouds of her breathing escape from her open mouth as she climbed.

That was awful good of you, she said on the landing. He liked that wee job.

Eight months before when my father found him—legs wide apart and fists on the table, staring down at a tray full of Bull's Eyes and Moon Moths my father had pinned the previous week—the jimmy he'd used to lever our window was in his back pocket, and the sack he'd brought to put things in was lying still empty at his feet. So what do you think of the royal family? he'd asked without warning. My father had spent the past forty-eight hours on a bench outside of Intensive Care; he'd stared at the boy in the black leather jacket, at his close-shaven head and the tattoos on his arms—trying to distinguish the uneven letters, to see in the purples and blues of the symbols an emblem he recognised, a slogan he'd heard—and said nothing.
Citheroniidae
, the boy had continued, they come from America. Only they're lumped in with the Saturnids now. Reclassified, my father had answered. That's right, the boy'd said. Seems they were silkworms, after all.

Michael, you have visitors, the woman said.

He was in a wooden chair by the window, and he didn't look up when we came in. Every flat surface—most of the floor, the desk and the dresser, the low wooden unit beside the bed—was cluttered with field guides and uncut labels, specimens in transparent envelopes, others on spreading boards, a few behind glass. My mind formed the names of the ones I could recognise—
Colias hyale
, the Pale Clouded Yellow, its wings and antennae outlined in lavender;
Lysandra coridon
, the Chalk Hill Blue;
Callophrys rubi
, the Green Hairstreak, fringed from wing tip to thorax in the softest of greys.

You should see it downstairs, the woman said. The kitchen's full of
them. I couldn't believe my own eyes. Every drawer and closet in this house, every shelf, full of them, and not one crumb of food in sight. Just those things, everywhere.

We've brought him another one, I'm afraid, my father said. He handed the cardboard box to me. Go on, wee woman, you give it to him. He'll like it better, coming from you.

We had brought him a new imago, the first to complete the cycle that started with the eggs we'd discovered in the field Michael introduced to my father, one of the few laying patches he hadn't yet found. What do you look for? my father'd asked him. All morning they'd been comparing notes. Michael shrugged. Videos, mostly. TVs, if they're small. This was shortly before my father hired him, paying him out of his own benefit cheque. Sometimes Michael would let me help him, let me pass a pin through the tight coiled centre of a slender proboscis and draw it down into sugar water till the insect stopped struggling and started to feed. The trick was to see if we could get them all started before the first one finished and began to walk away, wings opening and closing with the tentative speed of untried machinery, taxiing slowly in preparation for flight. We'd managed it once, working together, till all around the room on greaseproof paper Apollos and Peacocks and Camberwell Beauties were swallowing nectar, while I watched their wing patterns shifting and thought about bedsheets with people underneath. Don't move, Michael said when the last one had finished and I'd just returned it to the breeding cage. His hand brushed my cheek as he reached past me, and I expected to see a string of silk handkerchieves, or the smooth removal of an egg from my ear. Close your eyes, Michael told me, and I'd felt its feet flailing, frantically scrambling to reestablish their grip; then its claws caught my skin with the tug of small anchors, and I thought of moored ships and hot air balloons in extravagant colours, tethered and straining against their cords. You can look now, Michael said, and there it was, a Great Spangled Fritillary, indignantly fanning, imagining itself bold and imposing when every tremor of its rust-coloured wings sent another shower of scales to my palm.

Look, Michael, I said.

It had made its way into an upper corner, had been testing the meeting of lid and wall there, when I opened the box. Placing one slender leg carefully
after another until all six were pinching the rim, it climbed out, broad head first and wide-spaced antennae, then the short, stout body, wings flat at its sides—a butterfly, despite all the evidence, though even its flight was quick and erratic like a moth's. I felt the effort of its ascension just as I had when, with my father, I'd been a passenger in the plane he'd hired for an hour as a gift for my mother, who had always wanted to learn how to fly. We'd stood by the fence which guarded the runway, watching other aircraft take off and land while the pilot pulled levers and adjusted dials and untied the cords that kept our plane bound. They all seemed to rise with the smooth, steady lift of geese leaving water; I'd never imagined the shuddering fuselage, the thrust and drag of my heart and stomach, or the way my own equilibrium wavered with each changing attitude of the plane. The land below us looked artificial, like the scenes behind glass in the museum at home, tiny figures of farmers and livestock grazing on velvet under parsley sprig trees:
Belfast and Surrounding Country
,
1790
–
1801
. It bore no resemblance to what we'd seen of it when we'd taken the highway a few days before. We had come out of season, long after harvest, and well before blossoms hid the hunched, arthritic fingers of the peach trees again. The wizened phalanges of the apple orchards, the electrified carpals of the cherry trees we passed, the charred spinal columns of the naked vineyards, each with its singular pelvic twist—I could almost hear the startled hiss of them when our headlights swung round a corner and caught them unawares. Ah, look, my father'd said, slowing the car, and gradually my eyes did catch sight of them: Canada geese, two only at first, then three, then five, then a dozen or more, a whole flock of throats and bills and bandaged white jaws rising out of the mud and stubble of a cornfield in April in upstate New York. We'd intended to spend the day in Toronto, but Immigration had refused to let us in—something to do with our type of visa—so we were skirting the rim of Lake Ontario, hoping to see Canada on the opposite shore. But the weather was wet, and the lake barely visible; I could feel the mist on my face when we got out of the car—cool, like my mother's breath on my back as she slept behind me, all three of us together in a motel's queen-sized bed, and gentle, like the trick Michael taught me soon after she died. Give us your hand, he'd said, bending down, till I felt something lighter behind the touch of his hair, the insistence of eyelashes
against my arm. Do you know what that is, missus? he'd said. That's what you call a butterfly kiss.

You see how it is, the woman said to my father. I've tried to get him to talk about it but he won't, at least not to me.

You don't know what's happened, then?

Not all of it, no, but I can guess. You know she'd gotten a job in England? Well, I thought she was fixing it so he'd have work, too. Three months go by and every day I'm thinking, He'll be off soon now, too, but then I hear she's home for a visit. I never saw her myself, but I know she saw him. The couple next door says she stayed for an hour, went away in a taxi and that was it. Then the milk bottles and papers started piling up. They knocked on the door but nobody answered. That's when they reckoned they'd better ring me.

I had no idea, my father said.

No, well, how could you? Sure he never said anything to anybody. She's found herself some fancy man, that's what I think, anyway. I don't know what she told him, but he's been like this ever since.

It's been awhile since we've seen him, right enough, my father said. But the weather's been nice, you know? I thought he might be collecting. See, what did I tell your Uncle Vincent? My brother-in-law thought he'd been stealing again.

It wouldn't surprise me, the woman said. But he's not been out of this room for a fortnight. Was it stuff of yours, aye? You're welcome to look for it. I couldn't tell you what's in this house.

No, my father said, I'm sure it's not Michael. It's been going on for awhile, see. A couple things disappear every day. I think it's me, to be honest. I misplace things. I don't know what I'm doing half the time anymore.

Well have a look anyway, the woman said. Sure, I'll make us a wee cup of tea while you do.

Thank you, my father said. You stay with Michael, daughter, alright? he told me. Try to get him to talk. I won't be long.

He was wearing pyjamas, his arms loose in the sleeves, each elbow at rest on an arm of the chair, and still I could see the inflated vessels altering the contours of his forearms and hands. I took hold of his wrist and turned it over, placed my two fingers at the heart of his palm and began to move up
with a circular motion, crossing thin strands which began in confusion and later became conspicuous cords like the gradual gathering of slow drops of water, each bead jumping to join the stream till a single clear thread runs briefly down the length of a windshield or the cool face of a window, drains itself utterly and then is gone. Michael had taught me the game only recently, and the first time we'd played I'd fallen right into the trap, saying Now! There, stop! when his fingers were still a good two inches away from that tender hollow where an arm bends in, where the skin is creased even in infants, thin and defenseless behind the elbow's sharp bones. It's because of the way the nerves are laid out, Michael'd told me. It always feels like you've touched it before you do. But this time my fingers were well past the hollow and on toward that place near the armpit where all flesh turns smooth, in men as in women, regardless of age. I walked my two fingers onto his shoulder but he never responded, so I lay his hand back in its former position and smoothed his sleeves down.

You're awful pale, Michael, I said.

My mother had been white when the plane landed. She'd been sick for more than a year already, which is why my father had borrowed from usurers despite unemployment and the impossibility of ever paying them back, so she could visit her brother who now lived in America, having immigrated from Belfast some fifteen years before. But this time the illness refused to resettle, and a few days later we'd had to go home. What does it feel like, I'd asked her in hospital. Like you felt at Funderland last summer, she'd said—when I'd made myself sick on the main attraction, the one that replaced the Big Wheel that year. I forget the name of the ride now, but not the sensation. It began with the rise and tilt of the axis, then the floor fell away as we started to spin, the centrifugal force of lopsided rotation kept us pinned to the sides of the iron cylinder, the crush of the wind came from all directions, and against every warning I had opened my eyes. The bright colours of the cars and pedestrians on the Lisburn Road, of the shop fronts with their fruit stalls and displays of appliances, nearly new clothing and secondhand books, all tumbled towards me as if someone had lifted the asphalt at Shaftsbury Square and shook everything down towards the spot where I hung, the only solid the boy strapped opposite me, his own eyes shut across the bottomless space. I turned my head to look for my parents,
standing by the ticket booth on the good ground below, and the skin of my face stretched tight as elastic, my flesh seemed to pass through the metal grille, and I thought of wax melting, of the disintegration of the Lundy's features that time on the Shankill when I'd watched him burn. I'd gone on a dare with a boy from Clonnard Gardens, had stood at the end of a row of old houses and watched the flames consume the effigy, thinking, How much wasted effort. I had an art teacher once who made models and drawings for illustration, to show us precisely why our own projects failed. With broad thumbs and fingers he'd bend and pinch the mysterious clay, or with quick charcoal sketches of femurs and vertebrae, he'd illustrate the error which had crippled our plan. When he'd finished he'd destroy the model or scratch out the drawing and say, Now you do it. I'd often wondered how that point could be reached, when I'd no longer be invested in every project, when a torn sketch wouldn't trouble me, when I could watch easily as they dismantled my armatures, as the screws were recycled, the wire unwound.