All the Old Haunts (7 page)

Stanley shakes out of his grip, and breaks after his father. “Dad,” he says, catching up.

“Yes,” Father says stiffly, standing in the walk, in the light of the street lamp. He is clearly anxious to go.

“Can’t we do
something?”
Stanley pleads. The vacuum of his voice says he already knows.

Father begins silently shaking his head, then, with horror, Stanley sees his father wince, then cringe, as Satan comes flying past from behind.

He slams his father in the mouth with a rock of a right hand. Father’s lower set of dentures dislodges, hangs halfway out of his mouth in a bath of oily blood. He looks up again just in time for Satan to hit him again, bang on the mouth. The false teeth hit the walk just as Stanley drapes himself over his brother, pinning his arms to his sides.

Mother’s sobs can be heard even through the closed window of the car.

“Go on, Dad,” Stanley says urgently, grasping at Satan. “Go, go, go.”

Father leans over unsteadily, scoops up the dentures while the blood pours out of his mouth, and stumbles away down the walk for the car.

The engine races as Mr. and Mrs. Duncan tear away from the curb, and Stanley finally, slowly releases his brother.

“What did you think, they were gonna take you?” Satan says with a sneer. “You thought they would take you away from me?” He turns and heads up toward the house.

Stanley looks after the trail of smoke still hanging in the old car’s wake. Then he heads back inside.

“No way,” Satan says, holding the door for his brother. “We are a package deal, you and me. Always and forever. You think you’re just gonna go and be
normal,
with
them?
You don’t have normal in your future, Stan, you have
us,
just like I do. Womb to tomb, baby. That’s our story, womb to tomb.”

Satan shuts the front door. Bolts it. Chains it.

“And now, we got ourselves a house. The American Beauty Rose Dream for us, Bro.”

Silently, Stanley heads back upstairs, to their bedroom, with Satan right behind him.

“Anyway, Stan, you saw. They failed you. When the going got tough, they left you behind, one by one, remember. I never would. Never will. Remember.”

“Ya. I remember.”

The first full two minutes are taken up with the labored breathing, quick-hit sobs, sniffling. He can’t speak, until he can, and then he sounds so panicked, desperate, and hyperventilating he could be a whole other person.

“I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. Not fair. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I can’t share. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. So scared. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother. I love my brother.”

Her name is Olivia.

Stanley cannot even bear to call her anymore. It was hard enough before. Before, at least there were other diversions for Satan, other plots and schemes and missions to accomplish. Stanley had always managed to keep her away, to keep them apart.

Before.

The doorbell rings. This is such an unheard-of event now in the Duncan household, Stanley at first shrinks from answering it.

It rings again. Slowly, he rouses himself from the couch in front of the television where he is spending more and more of his hours bathed in the strobing light of the box. His days have become almost completely devoid of motion. He’s getting skinny.

He stands in front of the door. Satan has gone out to get food, but it couldn’t be him because he has a key.

He stands in front of the door. Waiting for it to explain itself.

The doorbell rings, and he steps back from it.

“Yes?” Stanley says.

“Stanley?” Olivia says through the door.

Stanley nearly faints. “Olivia,” he says, walking to the door, leaning on it, placing his hands flat against it and smiling at it, as if it is the door itself he is so happy to see.

“Are you going to let me in?” she says.

He hurries to unbolt the door, then anxiously takes her hand, then her wrist as he leads her in. Once inside he rebolts the door, then secures the chain. He turns to her, smiling broadly.

She is smiling too, but as she takes in the sight of him, her smile fades.

“What?” he asks, because he is unaware of himself.

He was always lean, Stanley, but he’s ten pounds leaner than he was two weeks ago. His clothes are not dirty, not stained, but they are tired. They hang off him at odd angles as if the green/blue stripes of the shirt are melting away from him. His eyes go squinty and wide, squinty, wide, as he has trouble focusing.

“Have you been sick, or what?” she asks, overcoming the initial shock to approach him. She puts her hands around his waist, then moves them up to feel his ribs. “Jesus,” she says.

“Yes,” Stanley says quickly. “I’ve been sick. That’s why … I didn’t want to see you until I was better.”

“And … this is better? What were you before, dead?”

“Yes,” he laughs weakly. “I was a mess. But not anymore.” He pulls her closer to him, gives her the best hug he can manage.

“I’ve been calling you,” she says, hugging him likewise.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“You haven’t been calling me,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

And for the moment that is good enough. Stanley buries his face into the neck of Olivia, into her hair and her shoulder, rubbing his face side-to-side over her, smelling the living patchouli bliss of her.

A small groan of appreciation comes out of him, and Olivia laughs.

“See,” she says, “you should have called me.”

“I should have. I know it. Olivia, I’m so glad—” The tumblers turn, in the lock, in the door. Olivia starts. “What is that? Who is that?” Stanley doesn’t even answer. He shakes his head and shakes his head, as his brother opens the door, snaps the chain taut, then bangs and bangs at the door until he’s let in.

“Mother called. Won’t even tell me where they are. Afraid. Everyone’s doing fine, though.

“Funny, huh? Everyone’s doing fine.

“He’s downstairs cooking again. For me. That’s all he does. Cooks, and cleans, and shops with the cash that comes in the mail every couple of weeks. No return address. They won’t even risk sending checks, in case they’re traced back somehow.

“Cooks, cleans, and shops. Cooks, cleans, and shops. For me. It’s all for me.

“He keeps an amazing house. Truly. Nobody ever knew this, because he never did anything for anybody before. He does everything now. He never stops. He never, ever, ever stops. “I’m not going to graduate. You have to go to school to graduate, so I’m not going to graduate.”

“What is this?” Stanley snaps, sitting down to breakfast. Satan has prepared every meal for months now, since their mother left.

“It’s breakfast,” Satan says flatly.

“It isn’t breakfast. Breakfast is eggs, and cereal, and toast, and stuff like that. This isn’t anything like that.”

Satan stands there, the half-empty pot in one hand, a ladle in the other.

“It’s soup. Stan. It’s soup, that I made out of things that we had around. The money is just enough, you know, so I have to stretch it. They’re doing that on purpose, you know, to get me back. But I can do this, it’s just there’s not a lot around right now. I have to think of something. But it’s pretty close to a recipe from one of the books I found ….”

Stanley slowly slides the bowl away.

“Soup isn’t breakfast.”

Satan puts the ladle back in the pot, slides the bowl back again toward his brother.

“I told you, we don’t have any breakfast stuff. There’s a lot of good food in here. Tomatoes and onions and celery and fish stock—”

Each has a hand on the bowl now, applying pressure. They could just as easily be pulling as pushing it, because it remains frozen in position between them. Two dogs, equal might, struggling over a scrap of tough meat.

They stare.

“No, thank you,” Stanley says.

“You have to. You’re disappearing on me,” Satan says. “You can’t
do
that.”

“Hallelujah,” Stanley says. “You guessed. Bye-bye, Satan.”

As they talk, the bowl makes tiny incremental shifts, toward the one, toward the other, and small slurps of red-green soup escape.

“Don’t call me that, anymore. Call me Stuart. Call me Stuart now, and that will be better, now.”

“Sorry,” Stanley says, sneering, “don’t think so. Don’t think it could work now, Satan. Don’t think we could go back.”

With this, Satan stops resisting. He takes back the bowl of soup. Or what’s left of it. The table is covered, like a child’s monochrome finger painting.

There is silence, except for the slurpy sound of Satan pouring from the bowl back into the pot. Then he drops the bowl in with it.

“You’re wasted as it is, Stan. You can’t not eat anymore.”

Stanley grunts.

“So, that’s it, is it?” Satan asks, pointing the ladle at Stanley.

“That’s it.”

“You’re just going to starve, right? I’m supposed to believe you’re going to sit here and just, like,
rot
right here, in front of me, and that’s going to be the end of it? The end of everything?”

Stanley smiles at his brother. He stands up, slowly, unsteadily. He shrugs, before heading for his couch harbor.

Satan stands there, glaring at him, motherly almost. A lot of things, almost.

“You think I’m going to just let you do it, just, leave me like that,
Brother?”
Satan says.

“You think I need your permission?
Brother?”

Satan slams the ladle into the pot, turns, and goes crashing into the kitchen. Stanley turns on the TV with the remote. Satan starts throwing—dishes, utensils, pans and glasses and everything else—around in the well-kept kitchen. He screams as he does it, no words, no point, just sound, walls and walls of wailing sound accompanied by all the breakage and clatter.

Stanley turns the volume up on the television.

They only used the one audiotape. They just went on taping, taping over whatever was on there before, getting to the end of the tape, then turning it over again.

“I love my brother,” says the voice over the growing hiss of the taped-over taped-over tape. “Not fair. I love my brother. Not fair. I love my brother. So scared. I love my brother.

“Not fair.

“I love my brother …”

I
DON’T UNDERSTAND.

What’s with all the music everywhere? Does everyone, I mean
everyone,
think he can sing in this country? Everyone thinks he can sing in this country. Why do they do it? Why would they want to?

It rains every damn day here. Not like, a little rain. Not like, most days. It rains buckets and damn buckets every damn day.

Postcards. Traffic jam, Ireland. Blackface sheep standing in the middle of a road that wouldn’t get you anyplace fast even if it wasn’t blocked with blackface sheep. Sunsets gold and orange over Inis Mor or the Burren across Galway Bay. Great, but doesn’t the sun have to come up before it can set?

Guinness. You are more likely to locate a shorty leprechaun with a pot of gold than you are to locate a travel guide without a picture of some old geezer sitting in front of or under a pint of motor oil. Creamy rich warming is what they will have you believe, but if you are looking for what the rest of the world thinks of as beer and decide to do the local economy a favor by buying one of these mothers, which, by the way, take about as long to pour as it takes the average Irishman to whip off his version of “Carrickfergus,” then you are going to receive a quick first lesson in Irish language: Creamy rich warming means, in English, flat soapy burnt.

And while we’re at it. How do you say nine o’clock sharp, in Irish? Eleven thirty. Doesn’t anybody have anyplace to get to?

“Where you been? I been standing here forever, and those jugglers and mimes won’t quit juggling and miming. This is the arts festival, right? Like, the world-famous …”

“I’ve something to tell you, O’Brien.”

She had never been serious before this. I mean, never. As relentless as the miserable weather had been through that entire alleged summer, that is how persistent Cait’s cheeriness was. And it wasn’t like that crap Celt sweetness from the Irish Spring commercials that make you want to puke and change your name from O’Brien to Stanislaus and never, ever use the soap or any other green products ever again. But this was real, she was real. I know, because I tested it every chance I got because, to be honest, I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t see why a person should be so sunny in a place where the sun refused to shine.

She was like those palm trees and tropical plants popping up all over the west. What’s a nice flower like you doing on a rock like this? She stood out, Cait did. Maybe that was the thing. Maybe that was the why of it. Why maybe I did some things that possibly I shouldn’t ought to have been doing.

So anyway, I took notice, when she got serious.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “You have something to tell me.”

I was supposed to be getting away from my “element” for the summer. Better things, you know, on the Emerald Isle. As if maybe it was sunlight that had been turning me to the dark side of the force. Ireland’s basic goodness was supposed to right me. Noplace is
that
good.

Cait was, is, near as I can figure, my second cousin. Something like that. I never was any good at the math. For sure, she is a relative of a relative. I know that because I met her at a clannish gathering of about a hundred people gathered at what I guess was a farm even though it didn’t appear to be growing anything much besides little stone buildings with no roofs. My arrival in Galway was an excuse for these folks to get together and have what they call a hooley. And holy hooley they did. I don’t believe any one of them even noticed when I left after a couple of hours with Cait as my guide to the fun side. And for sure, Galway had a fun side.