As I Die Lying (3 page)

On one of those mornings, while we were
snuggling on the couch, I asked him about Granddad. His muscles
stiffened a little under a shirt that smelled of rust and
sweat.

"Why do you want to know?" His words were
quiet, cautious, like thunder on the horizon that wasn’t sure of
its direction.

"I never got to see him, except when he died.
The other kids at school talk about going to their grandparents'
house all the time."

"Well, he lived a long way away."

We had taken a plane to the funeral. I had
looked out the windows at the clouds and, far below, saw the little
squares that I thought made up the world, patches that were sewn
together like on the quilt Mother brought out of my closet every
winter. I wondered if that was how Jesus saw everything. If it was,
I wondered how He could see little boys kneeling beside their beds
in the dark. And I was pretty sure Jesus couldn’t see what went on
in the Bone House.

"The preacher called him a hero," I said.

"He was in the war. Bomber pilot."

I thought of war movies I had seen, of planes
flying in the air with balls of fire puffing up all around, of
planes falling to the earth with black trails of smoke streaming
out behind them.

"He must have been brave," I said.

"He wasn't afraid of dying. But he was scared
of everything else."

"Did you love him?"

"You have to love your father, no matter
what.”

So I was doing the right thing after all,
even if it hurt. "But you were happy when he died."

"Because I got to fly in a plane."

"Oh." Then, "Father, what's the Coldiron
Curse?"

His lips tightened and grew white. His
sewage-green eyes narrowed to bright slits. On the television
screen, a mouse was hitting a cat on the head with a fat
hammer.

Father said between clenched teeth, "It's
what's fucking with you from the inside."

With no warning, he swung out a fist,
knocking over the coffee table and a floor lamp that didn't have a
shade. The bare bulb shattered on the wooden floor. Mother murmured
from the bedroom, shaken from sleep.

He stomped the table, snapping off one of its
legs. “Fucking with you.”

I was scared. I tried to find the Bone House,
but the rage was so sudden, I was confused and lost.

He flung the lamp against the wall, nearly
knocking Mother’s Jesus plate from its wire perch.

“
From the
inside
,” he
roared.

Mother yelled from the bedroom, but I guess
she kept the door locked. I don’t blame her.

Father didn't answer. He looked at me,
through me, as if I were invisible, and went into the kitchen. The
refrigerator door opened then ice cubes rattled in a glass,
followed by the gurgling of liquid. I looked at the television. The
cartoon cat had a stick of dynamite in its mouth, the burning fuse
growing shorter.

It was time to change my clothes and go to
the Bone House.

Nest
, I mean. Nest.

CHAPTER THREE

Spring turned into summer and brought
black-eyed Susans and black-eyed Mother.

A family moved into the apartment next door,
the Bakkens from Pittsburgh. Even though they turned out to be
minor characters, I remember them more vividly than I do my
parents. Mister Bakken had a thick neck and fat slouching jowls
that looked like they were trying to slide off his face. A bulbous
clown nose, freckled like his cheeks, dangled like a fruit above
his lips. Bumblebee eyes peered out from under the avalanche of his
eyebrows. His hair and dustbroom mustache were bronze red.

His wife was thin and sharp-faced. She had
the air of a weasel, furtive and bloodthirsty. Her skin was pasty
and nearly translucent, as if mayonnaise had been swabbed over a
skeleton, then shrink-wrapped and given life. She bit at her nails
constantly, and when they were down to the quick, she gnawed at the
red ends of her fingers. She wore knee-length cotton dresses, and
her legs stuck out below them like birch branches, white and
slender, as if they would fray instead of snap if you tried to
break them.

They had a daughter named Sally. She was
just a little older than me, which she found out the first day we
met and seemed happy about. She had her father's freckled,
red-headed features and her mother's nervous mannerisms. Her hair
was in pigtails tied by rubber bands, and they bounced when she
ran. A mouthful of braces turned her smile into a
Frankenstein-monster flash of pink gums and silver wires.

She was never without her doll, a
round-headed baby girl with yellow yarn for hair and perfect
circles of blush painted on plastic cheeks. Its hard lips curled up
in a permanent pout. Sally called it “Angel Baby.”

Father got Mr. Bakken a job at the John
Deere plant, and they rode to work together in Father's ragged
pickup truck. Sometimes they didn't come home until after dark, and
from my bed I would hear Mother yelling at Father and feel the
floor shake as the furniture rattled in the living room. Then I
would hear the stinging slap of flesh on flesh, followed by a cry,
or more breaking glass. I would shrink even deeper into the dark
under the blankets, trying to crawl far away from the world where
things broke. Far enough that I could meet my invisible friend in
the Bone House if necessary.

One night Mother yelled "Did you go to that
damned bar again?"

"I work to put food on this table, I'll do
as I damn well please, bitch."

He also called her Puke-face and Fuckwit,
every name he could think of except Shit For Brains. He saved that
one. He must have had a special place in his heart for me.

Once Mother said something about "You and
your whores." This was followed by a cold, long silence during
which even the wind seemed afraid to breathe. Then Father's words
parted the stillness like the jagged edge of a glacier in a dark
sea or a frozen knife in a rotten cantaloupe or an ice cream
headache during a prayer.

“
You’re the best whore I
know.”

Then the walls bent and the clock shattered
and the blood flowed and the night fell in upon itself as the boots
danced.

The day after that, Mother slept until noon
and her face was puffy when she woke up. I was glad she didn't make
me give her a good-morning hug because I didn't want to touch her
watery skin. She must not have had an invisible friend to warn her
about the boots. I sneaked away to my nest while she was taking a
shower to steam away her soreness. Father didn't come home at all
that evening.

Sometimes Mother and Mrs. Bakken sat at our
kitchen table, talking about what they called the "menfolk." They
would cradle cups of coffee and tap cigarettes, sitting there in
house robes with dusty slippers on their feet. Mrs. Bakken looked
even more like a skeleton when her hair was pinned back away from
her face by curlers, making her taut forehead shine like a China
plate. Sometimes she, like Mother, had a dark circle around one
eye, but she seemed almost happy then. She smiled as if showing off
a hard-won trophy.

They would lower their voices and say things
like "Before he started drinking so much" and "He used to be so
handsome when he was young" and “Before the devil got him.” Right
there under the Jesus plate. Or "They're no good at all except for
that thing between their legs," followed by girlish giggles.

I wondered if people loved each other
because they were afraid to not love, if being alone was worse than
being hurt all the time. Or maybe it was just the things between
people's legs that made them love. I'd seen Mother naked in the
bathroom, accidentally of course, but I always had to look twice to
make sure it had been an accident the first time.

Even though the Bakkens seemed to cause a
lot of problems between my parents, and the other way around, they
spent lots of time together. Once in a while, they would all go out
together on Friday night, leaving me alone with the television set
for a babysitter. I didn't know what Sally did. I was afraid to
knock on the Bakkens's door, afraid it would swing open and she
would stand there in her little dress and pigtails, cradling Angel
Baby in her freckled arms. I was afraid she might invite me in.

When our parents visited each other, Sally
and I had to play together, and I suppose we became friends out of
mutual desperation. While the grownups talked and drank in the
living room, or grilled hot dogs on the scraggly patch of dirt out
back, Sally and I pretended to be pirates or space explorers or
cowboys. She was usually the leader and grew angry when I tried to
change her made-up rules. We played dolls one time, in her crisp,
neat room.

She had a crowd of dolls, and they all had
names that I never bothered to memorize. She arranged them as if
they were adults at a party and made up different voices for them
so they could carry on conversations. I chose a large stuffed
animal, a big green rabbit that had an upside-down straw basket on
its head. I pretended it was an evil rabbit come to get bad
grown-ups, hopping in and knocking over Sally's carefully seated
dolls.

"Take that, Shit For Brains," I said, as
Sally squealed and the dolls fell in a jumble of plastic arms and
legs.

"No, grownups play
nice
." She propped the
dolls up again. "And no bad words, either, or I'll
tell."

Whether she was going to tell my parents or
the other dolls, I didn't ask. I sat there with the golden light of
sunset peering through her blue curtains, our parents' voices
rising over the rock music in the living room, one of them
occasionally breaking into rough laughter. I wondered if this was
how other kids lived, playing on a clean floor with dolls that
didn't bleed. I wondered if other kids had to hide in their
closets, dreading the sound of footsteps in the hall, talking to
themselves. I was suddenly lonely and afraid, even with an
invisible friend right there waiting in the Bone House, even with a
dozen dolls around.

"You want to know a secret?" I asked
Sally.

"Like a secret spy code?"

"Better than that. A secret place I know
about."

"If you know, it's not a secret." She hugged
Angel Baby to her chest.

"But I'm the only one who knows where it
is."

"Why are you telling
me
?"

"Because I was thinking we could be
friends."

"But we're already friends. We play all the
time." She fussed with Angel Baby's dress because the fabric was
wrinkled.

"But I mean friends
who
talk
to each
other. Who tell each other stuff."

"We already talk."

"But not about secret stuff."

"You mean boy-and-girl stuff, like grownups
do?"

I gulped, thinking about the Bone House.
"Yeah, and other things, things you can't tell grownups about."

"Things you can only talk about in secret
places?" Her voice had fallen to a whisper. I nodded.

"Then you have to be my boyfriend."

Boyfriend? Didn't that mean I had to love
her? But that wasn't as bad as being alone. What was it my little
friend had said? About being brave enough to love?

"Okay." My voice was as squeaky as chalk on
a blackboard or throat with toast crumbs or a rubber ducky when you
stomp it on purpose.

"Then you can't be mean to me anymore. Or to
my dolls. Cross your heart and hope to die."

Hope to die? My invisible friend had said
that the first time I met him. Love was even scarier than I
thought. I swallowed the knot that lodged in my throat like a
doll's head or other large, dry objects that you should never
swallow but sometimes do. "Cross my heart and hope to die," I
echoed.

"And you have to love me forever."

Did that mean all next year, even at school?
School was only two weeks away. I pictured myself holding her bony
hand in lunch line or carrying her books down to the bus stop. I
pictured myself passing love letters in math class, avoiding the
watchful eyes of Mrs. Elkerson. Those things weren't as bad as
being alone.

"Okay, then."

"You have to
say
it." She leaned
forward, her eyes serious.

"Say what?"

"Say 'I love you.' Just like that, only do
it like they do in movies, kind of deep down and slow and out of
breath."

In movies, there was always music, violin
players just off the set, and blossoms of spring erupting all
around. Here there was only the party noise in the next room and a
floor full of baby dolls. But I had the out-of-breath part down
easy.

My tongue was thick. My head buzzed, and I
thought it might be my little friend telling me to not say it. Then
the buzzing went away.

"I...I love you."

There. That wasn't so bad. That didn't
hurt.

Yet.

"I love you, too, Richard. Now we get to
hold hands."

She put her warm, moist palm to mine and we
sat on the floor in silence. Her room smelled of cake.

"Is this all there is to love?" I asked
after a minute.

"No, now we can tell each other secrets. Oh,
and one more thing...you have to love Angel Baby. Because I love
Angel Baby and you love me."

That made sense. But how many more would I
have to love? Did the small hutch of my heart have enough room for
more? What about those other dolls? Did I have to let all of them
move into the Bone House?

"What kind of secrets are you going to tell
me?" I asked. "I have the secret place to show you, but you haven't
promised anything yet."

She looked hurt. "I
promised to let you
love
me, didn't I? I promised to be your
girlfriend."