All the Old Haunts (6 page)

He turns his head slightly, to be right in her ear. “You said everybody dreams it.”

“Ya,” she says.

“You? Lis?”

“Me? Of course, me. All the time.”

The speed, and the volume, of his heartbeat is instantly trebled.

“Really?” he says, trying for a casual tone. “You? Thinking about, like, girls and girls?”

She turns her head to get a look at his newly brightened and alert eyes. She smiles into his smile.

“Ya,” she says. “Think you can forgive me?”

He must force himself to pause, for respectable effect.

“Well,” he says, composure seeping out of him like sap. “Well, you know, Lis, you’re probably right … like that I should be a little more open-minded … and stuff … like.”

He swings one leg over her, presses himself into her curved hip.

“Good of ya, Curt,” she says, twisting slightly away from him. “Awfully good of ya.”

He follows her closely, crossing into her territory, on the other side of the bed median.

He gets all whispery and close in her ear. “So then, y’know, when you are thinking … this
stuff …
what other girls are in there with you?” he asks. Suddenly busy, suddenly interested.

Suddenly cured.

“Y
OU NEVER KNOW WHAT
to do with Satan. I mean, I like him. I love him. But he is a bastard. He knows he’s a bastard, he makes an effort to be a bastard, and most people agree he is very successful at it.”

“But I like him.”

“Who are you talking to, jerk? You talking about me? If you’re talking about me I’m gonna kick hell out of you. You know I will. Who you talking to, Stanley?”

Stanley sighs. He rolls over in bed, checks the clock. Seven forty
A.M.
He shuts off the machine.

“The tape recorder, Satan. I’m making a taped record of us, so that when you kill me there’s a clear accounting of things.”

Satan makes an approving
mmmm
noise.

“That’s an excellent idea.”

Satan snatches the little handheld recorder out of Stanley’s hand. He switches it on.

“Die, Stanley. Don’t ever go to sleep, Stanley. I’m gonna kill you, Stanley.” He switches the machine back off. “There,” he says, handing it back. “That should help, huh?”

“Thanks,” Stanley says. “I believe it will, yes.”

“We share a bedroom ….” Stanley resumes, into the tape.

They do share a bedroom, and have for all of their seventeen years. They have similar interests—baseball, guitar music, girls, fried clams, omelettes stuffed with anything you could think of, movies—but have some notable differences.

“Satan thinks he’s ugly,” Stanley says, trying in vain to avoid his brother’s attention.

“Gimme
that thing,” Satan says, snatching the recorder again. “I don’t
think
I’m ugly. I am pig’s-ass
ugly.
I have dung-color eyes, and hairy spots all over my face. My skin is the color of boiled baby. My hairline begins ten inches above my eyes. Did I mention that those eyes are like little beady dung-nuggets? I have such an under bite my chin looks like an open cash register. My top teeth are the color of Gulden’s mustard, and the spaces between them are so serious that no two teeth on the top row touch each other. And I’m a hunchback. Uh-huh, as a matter of fact I think I’m ugly. And so would you. And if Stanley tries to say one more time that I’m not, I am going to beat the piss out of him so bad all you’re going to hear for the next ten minutes is crying.”

Satan hands the recorder back.

There is a pause. The tape keeps rolling.

“Satan has exaggerated everything. If you look at his jaw from the right—”

Smack.
The unmistakable sounds of slapping, punching, grunting and crashing take up the next three minutes of the tape.

They fight a great deal. They have always fought a great deal. Satan is the only person Stanley ever fights. Satan fights everybody.

“He thinks, because he is supposedly ugly, and I am supposedly not, that everything’s too easy for me, and too hard for him. We are really not all that different in appearance. Yes, he has a more prominent jaw. We have different skin. He is
not
a hunchback, he just has bad posture. His teeth look like that because he believes it is somehow uncool to pay attention to oral hygiene. His yellow teeth are a badge of honor, and nobody’s fault but his own.”

“Brushing would be selling out.”

“You stink, Satan. You really smell awful.”

“That’s because of you, too. You took all the oxygen and nutrients in the womb, and that’s why I’m a hunchback and—”

“Satan is lying. He does a lot of that.”

“It’s all in the medical records, you can look it up. Stanley
stole
my life.”

There is a pause. Then a heavy dramatic sigh from Stanley before he continues.

“Satan has always been our father’s favorite, and I have always been our mother’s. Can we agree on that, Satan?”

Satan chuckles. “Ya, that’s about true. Ma’s pretty stupid. But she can’t help it. She’s good-looking. Pretty people are morons.”

“Our father doesn’t live with us anymore,” Stanley continues.

“I chased him away.”

“He did not chase him away. Dad loves Satan.”

“And Satan loves Sara,” Satan says.

Sara is their older sister.

“Shut up, Satan.”

Satan laughs. “And Sara loves Satan.”

The tape clicks off.

The tape comes back on.

“There will be no more discussion of Sara,” Stanley says, “other than to say that she no longer lives here either.”

“Yup,” Satan says, “My brother and I certainly can be hell to live with.”

“We are not hell,” Stanley says. “People just leave … when they feel they must.”

“Except you, right Stan?” Pause.

“I
said,
except you …”

Wearily, Stanley must agree. “Right. Except me. End recording of June first, morning.”

“B’bye,” Satan chirps before the click of the off button.

“That is not his name,” Mrs. Duncan says after Satan has gone to the bathroom. “You could at least do that much. You only make him worse.
Must
you keep calling him that?”

Stanley shrugs, shovels another mouthful of scrambled eggs. “Yes, Ma, I must. He insists. Anyway, it’s not like it doesn’t suit him.”

“You are the only one who doesn’t have to do what he says,” she whispers desperately.

Stanley wants none of it.
“Wrong,”
he says, shaking and shaking his head.

“How many times did Sara have to wake up to find him—”

“Please, Ma.”

“You know by the end your father was like a child, sleeping with the light on and the door locked. You know in the morning he would still find the light off—and the door locked. If he had been allowed to sleep at all.”

“What do you want me to do, Ma? Should I take the bat to his head?”

Mrs. Duncan moves and stands over Stanley, staring at him as he eats, and repeatedly smoothing the creased skin at the outside corners of her eyes. “Mmm,” she says, which might be reluctant agreement, or more likely fear at the return of Satan.

“Well hello again, beautiful,” Satan says as he walks back into the room. As he says every time he walks into a room where his mother is. He kisses her on the cheek, as he likewise always does.

Mrs. Duncan freezes at the kiss, and only relaxes slightly when he sits down to eat. She looks like a prisoner in his presence.

“So tell us, how was your day, beautiful?” Satan asks, smiling, pouring himself a second cup of coffee.

Satan wants to double date. Satan’s concept of the double-date is two guys, one girl. And Stanley’s not supposed to forewarn the girl, naturally, or there would be no girl.

That is how it is normally for Satan. No girl.

“No,” Stanley snaps.

“Why?”

“Because it’s a disgusting idea, and you’re a disgusting guy for thinking it up.” Satan goes quiet. “Cut it out. Stop pouting. And straighten up. I hate it when you do that. Your hump isn’t half that big, faker.”

“You owe me,” Satan growls.

“I don’t owe you anything.”

“Yes you do. Because of you stealing my nutrition and oxygen, I can’t get a date of my own. So now you gotta share with me.”

This is how it goes. On and on, is how it goes.

“You’re not coming.”

“Wither thou goest, Bro.”

“Wednesday the third. Saint Stanley is in the shower. Okay, we look alike a little bit. But you know what I mean. Change the teeth slightly, and one guy’s a movie star and the other guy’s a donkey. One guy’s tall, the other guy’s geeky. One guy’s got strong, prominent forehead, the other guy’s a mutant.

“God flipped that coin over and over and over, and every time Stanley came up the heads and I came up shit-ass tails. So god, if you have a tape player, you can just bite me, too.

“But we look like brothers. No denying. The one who survived and the one who didn’t. He can’t ever forget, and neither can anybody else, what he did to me.

“That’s why he wears the stupid sideburns. The stupid Marty Van Buren sideburns that are supposed to make him look smart and bohemian cool but just make him look like stupid Marty Van Buren, but still don’t make him
not
look like me.

“What we are is, we are one. Stan is me, and I am Stan. We are Siamese. Nothing between us, nobody between us. Separation is death.

“And I am a certified hunchback, no matter what he tells you. That’s why he wants to make an audiotape, instead of a video. So he can spin it his way.

“And now you want to ask me if maybe I’m feeling a little bit sorry for myself.

“Eat me.”

“Stanley!”

The scream wakes Stanley in the middle of the night. He jumps up out of bed, stands there staring in the dark, unsure whether it is just the latest in an endless parade of nightmare screams that visit and evaporate in the unstillness of his nights.

“Stanley!”

The scream is for real, and Stanley tears out of his bedroom, down the hall, and into his mother’s room.

There, he finds his mother sitting upright in the bed, the reading light on, but lying on the floor, her black-rimmed glasses lying next to it. She is staring, unblinking, as she fidgets backward and backward into the headboard, going nowhere but dead anxious to get there.

“What the hell?” Stanley says wearily to Satan, who stands at the foot of the bed. “What the hell, Satan, can’t you just leave her be—”

“I heard her scream,” Satan says, his voice bloated with mock concern. “It certainly took
you
long enough to—”

“Make him get out, Stanley,” Mrs. Duncan says. “Please make him get out of—”

Everybody knows that nobody makes Satan do anything. They wait.

“You call me, if you need anything else,” Satan says. “Any time, day or night, I’ll be here. I’ll always be here, right here forever with my brother. Inseparable.”

Stanley lingers a moment as his brother heads back to their room. Mother and son throw stares at each other, but neither speaks. They can only maintain eye contact fleetingly, as both look away.

“Come on,” Satan calls, “leave her alone.”

Stanley leaves her alone, but first he picks up her glasses and her night-light.

She seizes his arm, and shakes her head as she speaks. “He will never leave me be, Stanley. He will torture me to death.”

Stanley stares into her squinting, darting, watering eyes. He wants to reassure her, it’s all a dream, it’s only the night as nights will be and in the morning it will be gone.

Instead, he nods.

There are certainly enough bedrooms in the house.

Satan has been thrown out of the house countless times.

The first time he didn’t leave, Sara did.

The twentieth time he didn’t leave, Dad did.

Both times, Stanley took advantage of the added free range to get himself loose. First he moved into Sara’s old room.

Satan followed.

Then he moved back to his old room.

Satan followed.

“Friday, the fifth. I love my brother,” Satan says to the tape.

There is a bump. Then more bumps, in the night. Stanley sits up, as Stanley does most nights. He can move his head now, like a contortionist, most of the way around. He checks his brother’s bed. His brother is there. Lying peacefully, with his prayerlike folded hands tucked up together under the pillow, under his cheek. He lies there, unstirring, as Stanley watches him.

And he watches back.

There are several more bumps, down the hall, by Mrs. Duncan’s room. A car door slams outside. There is stirring now in Mother’s room and at the front door simultaneously.

Stanley gets up out of bed, goes in his boxers and tank top to the door.

Satan rolls up.

“I got it,” Stanley says. “Stay there.”

“Ya, right,” Satan says, following in his low-rise briefs and nothing else.

Mrs. Duncan is already trundling down the stairs, lugging her biggest green flowered suitcase, when the boys reach the landing.

“Ma?” Stanley calls.

She doesn’t stop, speak, or look back.

Satan starts laughing.

They follow her to the front door, where he is waiting.

Mr. Duncan.

She scurries to his side, drops the bag there.

The four of them stop, squared up across eight feet of foyer. Satan laughs harder.

“Boys,” Father says cordially.

“Look at this,” Satan says.

“Ma?” Stanley says again.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Duncan says to him, but she appears to be miming.

“One big happy family again,” Satan says. “Let’s call Sara, and have a
real
party.”

Silently, Mrs. Duncan starts grasping at the brass doorknob.

“Let’s just, let it go, huh?” Father says. “You have what you want, Satan. You have what you need. We owe you nothing else.”

“Ma?” Stanley says as she gets the door open and slips outside.

“‘Ma?’” Satan mocks. “‘Ma? Ma?’ What are you, Stanley, a baby sheep?”

“Take care of the place,” Father says, as he too spins and grabs the doorknob. “We’ll … be in touch.”

Satan puts his arm around Stanley, watching the father leave. “Oh that’s nice. Isn’t that nice, honey, they’re gonna be in touch. We should have them over to dinner one night.”