Everyone but You (28 page)

And so? I ask.

Wasn’t only a cow I killed, he says.

Oh? I say. Did you sacrifice a goat, too?

Killed a man once, he tells me, and suddenly everything about the room, about our interaction, changes.

I clear my throat, stare at my hands. You’re a combat soldier, I remind him, as if he needs reminding. Lots of soldiers have killed in the line of duty.

He looks at me intently. Wasn’t like that, he tells me. And it was after the war.

This is how it goes with Gun-Metal, then: Suddenly he is talking about a night many years ago, and suddenly I am implicated; I have to make a choice about whether I will sit here or not and listen. I have to make a choice about whether or not I think he’s crazy. But here’s the thing: Here’s what makes me me, that I would always listen to strangers when they disclose their
secrets, because I can’t not listen—it’s practically my job to gather up stories, like a spy gathers intelligence, except without all the snooping around.

He’s looking at me now, with those flat metallic eyes.

Is this a confession? I try to joke.

On the street one night, he says. I was out on the West Coast, Seattle. It was a dark night, no moon. I hate those kinds of nights. There was a man walking. Some gangbanger, probably. He called me a motherfucker—just like that, called me a motherfucker!—and he shuffled around in his pocket. Probably had a gun. I still think that. And, anyway, I wasn’t going to wait around to see. Pop, he says, pointing his index finger. End of that story.

I lean back in my chair. I know we’re going to be here awhile. I think, somewhat absently, that I’ll need a lot of wine, more than I have on hand, to hear this.

Sometimes, he tells me, I think I didn’t care to wait and see, either. Just one less asshole to worry about. The thing is, he says, once you step across that line you can’t go back, it’s not about war anymore; it’s about your soul.

Were you cleared of wrongdoing? I ask dumbly.

Would it matter? he asks. When there’s two men standing there with guns, or even one man with a gun and one without, it’s the one who’s left that gets to tell the story.

You could have just told the truth, I say, though I’m unsure exactly what the truth is. You could have told them it was dark, you were confused, there was a fight, et cetera.

I might have, he says.

Did you? I ask. Did you tell?

I’m telling you, he says. Bet you want to know why, don’t you? Bet that’s the question floating around in that brain of
yours. He grins then, crosses his arms. Because I could do it and I could walk away then, is why. Because shit just happens.

You’re lying, I say.

He grins wider then, Gun-Metal does, which unsettles me even more. It’s all a house of cards, he tells me. Truth and lies, combat and civilian life.
Civilian
life, he says again, as if he finds the entire notion amusing.

I
CALL MY FATHER
after my neighbor leaves. Hello, I say.

What’s wrong? he asks.

Nothing, I tell him, even though I am shaking. Nothing at all, I repeat, as if I am in court and have been asked what exactly it was, as a witness, I saw happen.

Liar, he says. No offense, honey, but you couldn’t tell a lie to save yourself, which is odd considering your line of “work.”

I deflect. Anyway, I say. I’ve decided against working at the Walmart, because it smells funny, like plastic and popcorn, and that gives me the willies. Plus, I’m not sure I could greet people in a way that actually feels welcoming. So, I add, what’s up with you?

I realized something about hell, my father says.

What about hell, I ask, thinking of Gun-Metal, whom I suddenly see burning up in flames, everything in him consumed by anger and hatred and fear. On the news there are burning forests, the fleeing animals running down hills. I think they are repeating the same coverage from before.

Hell, my father tells me, is repetition.

I agree.

I’m dying, he says.

I know you are, I tell him.

Now we’re finally talking. You don’t have to worry about me, he adds. I’m not afraid to die, you know. Try living for seventy years. That’s the hard part.

W
E PRAY
.

We pray because of Boop and her husband, because they are over at our house and it’s dinnertime and they both pray in public and in private, because they pray loudly and ask for the Lord’s blessings. They are serious prayers. They proclaim their devotion to God, if not to each other, shouting it from the rooftops and flaming mountains and valleys. Since we last spoke, Mr. Narcolepsy has been asked to give an inspirational speech to his church congregation, on the subject of slumber and God. He zonked out halfway through it, and everyone was very impressed.

I’m not religious, Boop, if you want to know the truth, I say. I really hate holding everyone’s hands at the table, I add, because I end up thinking about germs afterward.

It’s Harry who gives me that look, the kind that says, We should be nice to guests, the kind of look that says,
Fuck you, Chickie babe
.

I mean, I continue, it’s not that I don’t appreciate your hardcore religious ideology. You Baptists really have that down. I wish there were some cult I could belong to, too, of true believerism, like the Temple of the Anxious or something like that, a place where people don’t pray but sit around talking about how nervous everything makes them—public spaces, plastic cups, old-school paper versus electronics, that sort of thing. Then, at this temple, when one of us would get too old and die, we
wouldn’t go to heaven but would just come into another form, like a cow or something sacred and good.

Boop ignores this and folds her hands tightly, for once keeping them to herself. She prays for the sinners of this great big world. She prays for deliverance from the fires.

The brush fires? I ask, interrupting.

Hell, she tells me and scowls.

But hell is a very distant, abstract thing, and the brush fire is currently only one county away from us. The winds are blowing east, though, so we are supposed to be in the clear. Still, I think of all those poor people who have been displaced from their homes, and all the lost furniture and pictures and sentimental things. I tell Boop, Someone should wake Mr. Narcolepsy, because he misses everything, because he’s fallen asleep with a fondue skewer in his hand. I’m worried he’ll impale himself, I say.

Oh, she says, as if she hasn’t noticed him there, slouched over so that his balding, shining head greets us in a sad, sort of empty way. He looks so innocent when he sleeps. I regard him, thinking that sleep like that must be a blissful thing, all in all.

You know, Boop says, I just can’t believe you haven’t
found
your home in God yet. The idea of a
cult?
she asks, indignantly.

My home in God
. I think about this. I don’t know if I ever felt at home, anywhere, really. Once, I thought my home was with Harry. Well, I say, feeling angrier than I usually do. I don’t know about God, I tell her. I pick up two clean skewers and hand one to Boop and one to my husband. But I think I found the two
screwers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Boop glares at my husband.

He frowns and shrugs at Boop apologetically. Maybe, my husband says, we should call it an early night.

I didn’t want things to break apart. I wanted everything in my life to hold together—my marriage, my various houses. I wanted, in a way, happiness, a life free from disasters. But after Boop and her husband leave, and while Harry and I ready ourselves for bed, I realize something and say it. It’s over, I say. You know that, don’t you?

He stops brushing his teeth for a moment and regards me. Us? he says, in a flat, resigned way. I know.

I decide I can pick myself up, pick up the pieces and start over again. My father is right. Everything is repetition.

I
T’S THE MIDDLE
of the night when the house alarm sounds. The winds have changed direction; the fire is at our front door. Right, I know, like you couldn’t have seen this coming, the flames, the smoke, the burning structure. But once it’s here, I’m surprised by how quickly it consumes things, how it makes the wooden floors creak and crackle and buckle. The fire swoops up the steps, consumes the railings and furniture and spare bed on the second floor. It ignites my paperwork. It burns all my books, my Tolstoy and Dickens and Alexie and Russo, my Pynchon and DeLillo and Roth, my Updike. The photo albums burn to nothing, the newspapers and magazines. And then there’s the noise fire makes when it mixes with wind, the howling of it as it tears through the rooms.

Our bedroom is on the third floor, and there is only one exit
that’s feasible: the balcony. Dressed in his pajamas, my husband motions me outside, where the smoke and flames billow up, around us. We climb up on the balcony. Across the street, Gun-Metal’s house is already in flames—an inferno that reminds me not of hell but words. Sirens sound in the distance, the fire trucks traveling here, right now. There is no choice but to jump—jump or die, believe that the landing won’t be entirely too hard, that there is such a thing as being saved. The heat pounds my back, singes the hairs on my arms. Beneath me, floorboards buckle. My feet burn. I look down into the smoke and flames and calculate my odds.

M
orty Langly awoke to find the December chill edging against his blanket. In the dawning light a heavy snow fell, the first snow of the season. He peered out the window to the cars parked along the eerily quiet street. The snowdrifts bunched up against the tires, a sight that surely meant reprieves were to come: Sister Deuteronomy’s religion test postponed and Sister Agatha’s obnoxious crooning of
The Canterbury Tales
ceased for a time, thank Jesus. For the past three days, the old nun had waddled to the front of the class, cleared her throat, and in a voice that belied her heft, begun,
“Wan that Aprill with his shoures soote”;
she then proceeded, as Aggie Tuft remarked, to massacre Middle English until the dismissal bell sounded. Aggie was what the boys in the eighth-grade class referred to as a
brainiac
, and so Morty supposed she was right about Sister Agatha’s pronunciation, though each day he didn’t think about
the nun’s language so much as what Sister Agatha must look like naked—her blubbery skin, her torpedo breasts.

Ice pinged against the glass. Morty writhed down, under the covers. He envisioned the Wife of Bath, her depiction brought to life in his textbook—her dress hiked up along her gartered thighs, her bosom thrust forward. Even the mole on her cheek was enough to give half the boys at Our Lady of Perpetual Help (aka Our Lady of Perpetual Misery) an erection, particularly those without access to
Playboy
s or those with parental locks on Internet porn. In gym, even Eric Brumble had recently confessed to working up quite a sweat over the lusty babe, though the boys also suspected that Sister Agatha had no intention of ever reading the Wife’s tale, because at the end of each class she would inform them all that they would
begin again tomorrow
, and everyone soon discovered this only meant starting over at the prologue, with
Wan that Aprill
 …, the Wife’s tale forever out of the boys’ collective grasp.

The snow swirled and whipped around, and Morty’s thoughts flitted about. He wanted to jiggle off. The act (THE act) seemed to necessitate blankets. It was difficult to be chaste at 6:37 in the morning, he realized, though he also reminded himself that if his mother could see him now, she’d surely be disappointed. Thinking this, he turned his attention to the image of the Virgin Mary taped up on his wall. She appeared in miniature, her face serene, her arms outstretched, as if to hold him. He might have said a prayer—there was a time he loved to pray; there was a time he loved to wonder about God and heaven—but instead he imagined the silk falling from the Virgin’s shoulders, her fair skin and perfect, holy nipples. His hands fidgeted then and instead of folding them in supplication, Morty
spit into his right palm and cupped his hand over his flesh. He hoped, in a vain, desperate way, that God was a late riser on snowy days, such as this, though he secretly feared it was possible that God and all the saints and mothers in heaven saw every small and large sin committed on earth. Jiggling off to the Virgin, he reasoned, was surely blasphemy of the highest order. And yet.

Ashamed, he closed his eyes and moved his hand,
faster, faster, faster
, until the friction heightened and guilt and pleasure tangled in complicated ways. His breath quickened. On the day of Judgment he’d be cast down to hell for all this, he just knew it, and there he’d suffer through fires, and there in hell would be countless nude virgins lying supine, legs spread, and every time Morty would look in any direction, some demon would thrust a poker into his side. Or worse! He moved faster and faster, aware of his breaths, aware of the cold and icy snow and the otherwise consuming silence.
Faster and faster and
 …