Cat's eye (8 page)
My brother watches the water level in the giant hole next door, waiting for the hole to dry up so he can use it for a bunker. He would like to roof it over, with sticks and old planks, but he knows this isn’t possible because the hole is too big and also he wouldn’t be allowed. Instead he plans to dig a tunnel down there, into the side of the hole, and to get up and down to it by a rope ladder. He has no rope ladder, but he says he’ll make one, if he can get some rope.
He and the other boys run around in the mud; large extra feet of clay stick to the soles of their boots, leaving tracks like monsters. They crouch behind the trees in the old orchard, sniping at one another, shouting:
“You’re dead!”
“I am not!”
“You’re dead!”
At other times they crowd into my brother’s room, lying on their stomachs on his bed or on the floor, reading his huge piles of comic books. I sometimes do this too, wallowing among the pages of colored paper, surrounded by the fuggy scent of boys. Boys don’t smell the same as girls. They have a pungent, leathery, underneath smell, like old rope, like damp dogs. We keep the door closed because my mother doesn’t approve of comics. The reading of comics is done in reverential silence, with now and then a few monosyllables of trade.
Comic books are what my brother is collecting now. He’s always collected something. Once it was milk bottle tops, from dozens of dairies; he carried sheafs of them around in his pockets, held together with rubber bands, and stood them up against walls and threw other milk bottle tops at them to win more. Then it was pop bottle tops, then cigarette cards, then sightings of license plates from different provinces and states. There is no way of winning comic books. Instead you trade them, one good one for three or four of lesser value.
At school we make Easter eggs out of construction paper, pink and purple and blue, and stick them onto the windows. After that it’s tulips, and soon there are real tulips. It seems to be a rule that the paper things always appear before the real ones.
Grace produces a long skipping rope, and she and Carol teach me how to turn it. As we turn, we chant, in monotonous minor-key voices:
Salome was a dancer, she did the hoochie kootch;
And when she did the hoochie kootch, she didn’t wear very mooch.
Grace puts one hand on her head, the other on her hip, and wiggles her bum. She does this with perfect decorum; she’s wearing her pleated skirt with the straps over the shoulders. I know Salome is supposed to be more like the movie stars in our paper doll books. I think of gauzy skirts, high heels with stars on the toes, hats covered with fruit and feathers, lifted eyebrows, pencil-thin; gaiety and excess. But Grace in her pleats and woolen straps can wipe out all that.
Our other game is ball. We play it against the side wall of Carol’s house. We throw our rubber balls up against the wall and catch them as they come down, clapping and twirling in time to the chant:
Ordinary, moving, laughing, talking, one hand, the other hand, one foot, the other foot, clap
front, clap back, back and front, front and back, tweedle, twydle, curtsy, salute, and roundabout.
For
roundabout
you throw the ball and twirl all the way around before catching it. This is the hardest thing, harder even than the left hand.
The sun lasts longer and longer and goes down golden-red. The willow trees drop yellow catkins over the bridge; the maple keys fall twirling to the sidewalks and we split the sticky seed part and pinch the keys onto our noses. The air is warm, humid, like invisible mist. We wear cotton dresses to school, and cardigans, which we take off walking home. The old trees in the orchard are in flower, white and pink; we climb up into them, breathing in their hand lotion smells, or we sit in the grass making chains of dandelions. We unbraid Grace’s hair, which falls down her back in coarse brown ripples, and wind the chains around her head like a crown. “You’re a princess,” says Carol, stroking the hair. I take a picture of Grace and stick it into my photo album. There she sits, smiling primly, festooned with blossoms. The field across from Carol’s house is sprouting new houses, and in the evenings groups of children, boys and girls alike, clamber about inside them, in the fresh wood smell of shavings, walking through walls that don’t yet exist, climbing ladders where there will soon be stairs. This is forbidden. Carol won’t climb to the higher floors because she’s afraid. Grace won’t climb either, but not because of fear: she doesn’t want anybody, any boy, to see her underpants. No girl can wear slacks to school, but Grace never wears them at any time. So the two of them stay on the ground floor while I climb, up and along the beams with no ceiling covering them, up again to the attic. I sit on the top floor where there is no floor, among the rafters in this house of air, basking in the red-gold sunset, looking down. I don’t think about falling. I am not yet afraid of heights.
One day someone appears in the schoolyard with a bag of marbles, and the next day everyone has them. The boys desert the boys’ playground and throng into the common playground in front of the BOYS and GIRLS doors; they need to come to this side of the playground, because marbles have to be played on a smooth surface and the boys’ yard is all cinders.
For marbles you’re either the person setting up the target or the person shooting. To shoot you kneel down, sight, and roll your marble at the target marble like a bowling ball. If you hit it you keep it, and your own marble too. If you miss, you lose your marble. If you’re setting up, you sit on the cement with your legs spread open and put a marble on a crack in front of you. It can be an ordinary marble, but these don’t get many shooters, unless you offer two for one. Usually the targets are more valuable: cat’s eyes, clear glass with a bloom of colored petals in the center, red or yellow or green or blue; puries, flawless like colored water or sapphires or rubies; waterbabies, with undersea filaments of color suspended in them; metal bowlies; aggies, like marbles only bigger. These exotics are passed from winner to winner. It’s cheating to buy them; they have to be won.
Those with target marbles call out the names of their wares:
purie, purie, bowlie, bowlie,
the two-syllable words drawn out into a singsong, the voice descending, the way you call dogs, or children when they’re lost. These cries are mournful, although they aren’t meant to be. I sit that way myself, the cold marbles rolling in between my legs, gath ering in my outspread skirt, calling out
cat’s eye, cat’s eye,
in a regretful tone, feeling nothing but avarice and a pleasurable terror. The cat’s eyes are my favorites. If I win a new one I wait until I’m by myself, then take it out and examine it, turning it over and over in the light. The cat’s eyes really are like eyes, but not the eyes of cats. They’re the eyes of something that isn’t known but exists anyway; like the green eye of the radio; like the eyes of aliens from a distant planet. My favorite one is blue. I put it into my red plastic purse to keep it safe. I risk my other cat’s eyes to be shot at, but not this one. I don’t collect many marbles because I’m not a very good shot. My brother is deadly. He takes five common marbles to school with him in a blue Crown Royal Whisky bag and comes back with the bag and his pockets bulging. He keeps his winnings in screw-top Crown preserving jars, donated by my mother, which he lines up on his desk. He never talks about his skill though. He just lines up the jars. One Saturday afternoon he puts all his best marbles—his puries, his waterbabies and cat’s eyes, his gems and wonders—into a single jar. He takes it down into the ravine somewhere, in under the wooden bridge, and buries it. Then he makes an elaborate treasure map of where it’s buried, puts it in another jar, and buries that one too. He tells me he’s done these things but he doesn’t say why, or where the jars are buried.
T
he raw house and its lawn of mud and the mountain of earth beside it recede behind us; I watch them out of the back window of the car, from where I sit jammed in among the boxes of food, the sleeping bags and raincoats. I’m wearing a blue-striped jersey of my brother’s, a worn pair of corduroy pants. Grace and Carol stand under the apple trees, in their skirts, waving; disappearing. They still have to go to school; I don’t. I envy them. Already the tarry, rubbery travel smell is wrapping itself around me, but I don’t welcome it. I’m being wrenched away from my new life, the life of girls. I settle back into the familiar perspective, the backs of heads, the ears, and past them the white line of the highway. We drive up through the meadowy farmlands, with their silos and elms and their smell of cut hay. The broad-leafed trees become smaller, there are more pines, the air cools, the sky turns an icier blue: we’re heading away from spring. We hit the first ridges of granite, the first lakes; there’s snow in the shadows. I sit forward, leaning my arms on the back of the front seat. I feel like a dog, ears pricked and sniffing.
The north smells different from the city: clearer, thinner. You can see farther. A sawmill, a hill of sawdust, the teepee shape of a sawdust burner; the smokestacks of the copper smelters, the rocks around them bare of trees, burnt-looking, the heaps of blackened slag: I’ve forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.
Men stand on corners, outside general stores, outside small banks, outside beer parlors with gray asphalt shingles on the walls. They have their hands in their windbreaker pockets. Some have dark, Indian-looking faces, others are merely tanned. They walk differently from men in the south, slower, more considering; they say less and their words are farther apart. My father jingles his keys and the change in his pockets while he talks with them. They talk about water levels, the dryness of the forest, how the fish are biting. “Chewing the fat,” he calls it. He comes back to the car with a brown paper bag of groceries and packs it in behind my feet.
My brother and I stand at the end of a ramshackle dock beside a long blue craggy lake. It’s evening, with a melon-colored sunset, loons calling in the distance, the drawn-out rising note that sounds like wolves. We’re fishing. There are mosquitoes, but I’m used to them, I hardly bother to slap them. The fishing goes on without commentary: a cast, the plop of the lure, the sound of reeling in. We watch the lure to see if anything is following it. If there’s a fish, we’ll do our best to net it, step on it to hold it down, whack it over the head, stick a knife in back of its eyes. I do the stepping, my brother does the whacking, the sticking. Despite his silence he is poised, alert, the corners of his mouth tensed. I wonder if my eyes are gleaming like his, like some animal’s, in the pink dusk.
We’re living in an abandoned logging camp. We sleep on our air mattresses, in our sleeping bags, in the wooden bunks where the loggers used to sleep. Already the logging camp has a feeling of great age about it, although it’s only been empty for two years. Some of the loggers have left inscriptions, their names, their initials, intertwined hearts, short dirty words and crude pictures of women, carved or penciled in the wood of the two-by-fours of the walls. I find an old tin of maple syrup, the lid rusted shut, but when Stephen and I get it open the syrup is moldy. I think of this syrup tin as an ancient artifact, like something dug up out of a tomb.
We prowl around among the trees, looking for bones, for hummocks in the earth that could mark diggings, the outlines of buildings, turning over logs and rocks to see what’s underneath them. We would like to discover a lost civilization. We find a beetle, many small yellow and white roots, a toad. Nothing human.
Our father has shed his city clothing, turned back into himself. He has on his old jacket again, his baggy pants, his squashed felt hat with the fishing flies stuck into it. He tromps through the woods in his heavy lace-up bacon-greased workboots, with his ax in its leather sheath, us in his wake. There’s an outbreak of forest tent caterpillars, the biggest in years: this is what fills him with glee, makes his eyes of a gnome shine in his head like blue-gray buttons. The caterpillars are everywhere in the woods, striped and bristly. They dangle from the branches on threads of silk, forming a hanging curtain you have to brush out of the way; they river along the ground like a rug come to life, they cross roads, turning to greasy mush under the tires of the logging trucks. The trees around are denuded, as if they’ve been burnt; webbing sheathes their trunks.
“Remember this,” our father says. “This is a classic infestation. You won’t see an infestation like this again for a long time.” It’s the way I’ve heard people talk about forest fires, or the war: respect and wonderment mixed in with the sense of catastrophe.
My brother stands still and lets the caterpillars wash up over his feet, down on the other side of him, like a wave. “When you were a baby I caught you trying to eat those,” says our mother. “You had a whole handful, you were squashing them around. You were just about to pop them into your mouth when I caught you.”
“In some respects they’re like one animal,” our father says. He sits at the table made of planks left over from the loggers, eating fried Spam and potatoes. All during this meal he talks about the caterpillars: their numbers, their ingenuity, the various methods of defeating them. It’s wrong to spray them with DDT and other insecticides, he says. That merely poisons the birds which are their natural enemies, whereas they themselves, being insects and therefore resourceful, more resourceful than humans in fact, will merely develop a resistance to the sprays, so all you get is dead birds and more caterpillars later on. He’s working on some thing else: a growth hormone that will throw their systems out of whack and make them pupate before they’re supposed to. Premature aging. But in the end, if he were a betting man, he says, he’d put his money on the insects. The insects are older than people, they have more experience at surviving, and there are a lot more of them than there are of us. Anyway, we’ll probably blow ourselves sky-high before the end of the century, given the atom bomb and the way things are going. The future belongs to the insects.