Face (17 page)

All the same raw material, but rearranged forever.

“See what I did, Maibee? First shot a direct hit!”

Henry’s black eyes flashed. He reached with one hand and pushed his hair out of his eyes, a gesture he’d picked up from his
Chinatown cronies. He had exactly the same look on his face I’d seen in the boys who won at craps in the street below our
balcony.

“Now, don’t go getting all high-and-mighty,” said Grampa. “Beginner’s luck don’t count for much.”

That only fueled Henry’s determination to repeat his success. He galloped back to the stile. Grampa motioned for me to move
away, but I needed no encouragement. I turned and ran inside the house, wishing fervently for my brother to fail.

I went up to the attic and kneeled in the gable window overlooking the main road. I thought I’d be able to see Johnny coming.
Then I’d run down to meet him and we’d go back to our secret place. We’d go skinny-dipping and, afterward, he’d show me how
to kiss again and insist it wasn’t just practice.

Yesterday I’d tried to tell him we weren’t old enough, but he said he
was two years older and he was. Old enough to love me, that is. I asked how he was so sure about something as grown-up as
that.

“You’re the only other person I’ve ever met,” he said, “who knows fairy stories are true.”

Kaboom!

This blast shook the pane so hard I was sure the glass would shatter. I raced to the opposite window and was pleased to see
my brother shaking his head. He was positioning himself for a third shot when Grampa gave a shout and the two of them were
suddenly off, away from where the woodchuck had fallen, away to the other side of the pasture, the ridge by Glabber’s woods.

Something about their speed, that shout, made me nervous, but I had barely cleared the stile when Henry was back, shoving
me aside in his haste to get to the phone. His hand wobbled so he had to dial three times before he reached the hospital.
I’d never heard his voice crack as wildly as it did saying someone had been shot.

Johnny Madison did not die that day or in the days after. The bullet caught him in the shoulder. He said it hurt like hell
and made it hard to move his arm. But the doctor said it wouldn’t keep him from flying, which was all Johnny really cared
about.

Henry vowed to my mother that he would never touch a firearm of any kind ever again, and it seemed pretty likely that he’d
keep his promise. At least it was not the kind of thing he could shrug off—or ever forget.

But Johnny told Henry he didn’t hold it against him, said he’d even fired a gun once himself, though he didn’t like the kick.

“Besides,” he said, “I thought it was Glabber’s ghost come back to get me. Heck, I was
relieved
it was you.”

When he and I were alone, though, Johnny told the truth. How it felt to see his flesh torn open, the hole tunneling deep inside
his body. The skin so much thicker, the bone so much farther below the surface than he’d ever imagined.

“The pain was like fire, Maibee,” he said. “But it didn’t seem real, almost
like it was somebody else’s fire, if you see. It was so sudden— when I saw the blood it didn’t have nothing to do with me.
There was this hunk of metal inside my arm, but I couldn’t think how it got there. I didn’t see Henry or your grampa. I thought
it had to be Glabber. Or else it was some kinda sign.”

“What do you mean, sign?”

“Like they always talk about in church. The hand of God ’n all that.” His voice quivered a little and he looked away. “’Cause
of what we were doing yesterday.”

I was sitting on his bed. I’d been about to hold his hand because I thought it might make him feel better. But suddenly there
was a rock in my throat, and I couldn’t move.

“You told somebody?”

“Course not.” He looked at me and his face crushed down a little. “But God sees. Nothing you can do about that.”

“You think God thinks it’s bad?”

“Naked can be bad.”

“You said everybody did it.”

“Well, maybe we oughtn’t be like everybody.”

“I thought it would be weird, but it wasn’t at all.”

“Yeah.” He shook his head as if to convince himself. “And it wasn’t God shot me, I don’t think.”

“Wasn’t Glabber, either.”

“Naw. It was just a accident.” Johnny pulled his magic kingfisher’s feather from the bedside table and waved it in the air.
“But you can’t keep a good bird down.”

I leaned over and kissed him quickly, unashamedly, on the mouth and asked if he still planned to marry me.

“In China?”

“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Maybe we don’t need to go that far, after all.”

In a day or two Henry’s color returned. He apologized for treating Johnny like a demento and the three of us made our peace
by playing
cards together. Johnny was no slouch at poker and won so much money that pretty soon Henry was acting like the victim.

My grandfather ended up taking the brunt of the blame. Gramma Lou made him write a letter explaining what happened and taking
full responsibility. (Grampa considered anything to do with pen and paper to be a form of torture.) He paid for the doctoring
and extra help the Madisons needed while Johnny was mending, and offered the use of his combine to finish harvesting the Madisons’
rye.

Mr. Madison still might have sued, but Gramma Lou had delivered one of his children and Mrs. Madison said she would not stand
for war with their closest neighbors.

The one who would not forgive Grampa was his daughter. Mum refused to even speak to him after the accident.

“I was willing to put up with his bigotry and infantile behavior for your sake,” I overheard her telling Gramma Lou. “I thought
it was important for the kids to know you both, to see where at least one of their parents came from. But this time he’s gone
too far.”

I peeked into the living room, where they sat together on the faded davenport. My grandmother was nodding, holding onto Mum’s
hand.

“I can’t bring the children back here, Mother—not as long as he’s here.”

My grandmother closed her eyes. She seemed suddenly very old, a cloth doll with weakening seams. Her skin was as thin and
wrinkled as crepe paper, and the flesh in certain parts of her body—around the sleeveless shoulders of her shirtdress and
just above her collar—sagged as if by a gravitational pull all its own. Even her gray hair looked fatigued, sticking in fed-up
wisps to her forehead and the back of her neck. When she finally opened her eyes, I realized they had gone gray, too. She
turned those eyes on my mother, and they seemed to look straight through her.

“The two of you are so alike,” said Gramma Lou. “You’ll never forgive each other for that.”

My mother drew back. Her expression hardened.

“Oh? Just exactly how am I like him?”

“Diana, ever since you were a little, tiny girl, you’ve done exactly what you wanted. No one could get in your way. No one
could tell you
right or wrong. Close the gate in your face, put a boulder in your path, and in two seconds you’d find a way around it. If
this comes as news I’m very sorry, but you
are
your father’s daughter.”

My mother looked appalled. “Well, if I’m so goddamn determined, how come I never seem to get what I want?”

“Maybe because you pay more attention to what’s holding you back than what you’re aiming for.”

“Maybe it’s just that there’s nothing to aim for here in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’ve listened to you tell me that for thirty years, Diana. And you may be right. I assume that’s why you left us. But your
father and I are still your parents, and this is still where you come from. No matter how far away you go or how you change
your name, you can’t change that. And if any of your children want it to be, this is their home, too.”

“Oh, don’t go getting all sentimental, Mother.”

“Everyone needs a place to come back to.”

“For me and the children that place is New York.”

“I don’t think you really believe that.”

“Well, think again. I love you, and I suppose some part of me loves Dad, but I’ll be damned if I come out here anymore. The
next time, the person who gets shot could be Maibelle or Anna. Or Dad.”

We left the farm at dawn the next day, drove on into the night, and along about one in the morning arrived back in Chinatown.

The old lady next door is teaching her parrot to sing. She’s from my grandparents’ generation, give or take, so it shouldn’t
surprise me that she knows their songs, but the sound of her wiry, angled voice climbing through the chorus of “Toot, Toot,
Tootsie, Goodbye” is hardly the way I expected to greet this morning. She wavers just like the needle on Grampa’s old Victrola.

She’s put a collar around the feathered neck. Now she opens the door to the cage, reaches in, and brings the macaw out on
a scarlet ribbon. She lets him hop on the shoulder of her blue housedress, peck at
her loose white curls. His brilliantly colored head twists as if it’s screwed on.

I duck inside and come back out onto the fire escape with a telephoto lens, through which the animal’s black eyes glare at
me. My neighbor’s skin is delicately wrinkled under a veneer of irregularly applied rouge. Her nose is sharp, narrow, her
hands thin to the bone. Her head turns so I can’t look into her eyes, but her profile shows the tracks of a lifetime of polite
smiles, hollows where my father would have moonpuffs. I try to imagine my mother becoming this woman someday.

But you can’t make substitutions for parents, and anyway, what do I know of this lady beyond my imaginings? The bird could
be right. She could be a hateful old bitch, for all I know. She keeps the leash wrapped around one wrist like a noose.

And begins to warble, “La da, da da. Da, da da. Sugar’s sweet, so are you.”

The parrot hops off her arm to the table.

“Bye,” she sings. “Bye. Blackbird.”

The macaw listens intently, head cocked to one side for three or four rounds, then picks up the verse as accurately as an
echo. His mistress claps her hands to her cheeks and rocks from side to side.

He lifts one leg, then the other, as if stretching from the vocal exertion. She repeats the verse and they sing in duet. “Sugar’s
sweet, so are you.

“Bye. Bye. Blackbird.”

The old lady raises her face. Her eyes find me. She beams an indescribable smile. I lower the camera.

“Can you believe it!” she calls to me.

“You’re wonderful,” I holler back. “You two should go onstage.”

I’m too far away to tell for sure without putting the lens back between us, but I could swear she blushed at that. She lowers
her eyes, shaking her head, and strokes the ruffled feathers.

I’m off base. It’s not about performing. This is not a triumph of training. The bird has replaced her photo albums and papers.
He has lifted her out of her past. He has become her friend.

Chinatown Chicken