Jaguar (39 page)

Authors: Bill Ransom

BOOK: Jaguar

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Power.

He hoped Maryellen had the courage not to use it.

Could sex make the difference? No.
The quality of innocence was something else.
It was tangled with intent and sensitivity.

—Frank Herbert,
Soul Catcher

The deep dish of night held Eddie down in its cold bowl. He imagined himself a fleck of rice in the black bowl of night. Somewhere, along the rim, Maryellen slept and dreamed her woman dreams that sometimes reached to him.

Once, she commanded his presence in a dream. Not as a participant, but as a witness. This time the dreamways led them into her stepbrother’s brain. Eddie could tell that she wanted to scramble Chris like Eddie had scrambled the Jaguar.

She tried to give Chris a chance, but he didn’t know any better. She hated him for what he had done to her and it did her no good to fight it.

She ambushed Chris’ brain on the dreamways, and tested him with a few images from their past. He became aroused immediately, an arousal so powerful that it challenged her bid for control.

Is this why she did it?
Eddie wondered.
Does she think I can rescue her in there?

Eddie sensed her fury growing, the culmination of years of rage and fear. He saw the replays: Chris’ incessant grabs at her breasts, her buttocks, his hands and feet on her legs under the table; her weekends locked in the bathroom while he cajoled from the other side of the door; the times she woke to find him standing over her bed, stroking himself.

Eddie daydreamed the two of them back-to-back breathing the stars and a cold half-moon. Her imaginary back felt strong and warm, the integrity of their skins indecipherable.

The night was their bed. They pulled each other close and didn’t let go for anything but daylight. This woman who abandoned sleep in her dreams dreamed Eddie home. He knew this because he’d met her there and loved her more than dreams or night could tell.

Comes from hell
you can’t scare him with ashes.

—W. S. Merwin,
Asian Figures

The morning after the funeral Maryellen’s stepmother divided up her father’s things into cardboard boxes with different people’s names on them. Her stepmother took his pictures and family albums, even the ones with Maryellen’s mother in them. She never saw a picture of her mother again.

Saddle blankets and Indian rugs disappeared into what was left of her memory. Along with them went his guns, holsters, belt buckles and his marksmanship trophies. In her own box all Maryellen found were his camera, some letters he’d written her and her letters to him. Later, after unpacking at Mark and Sara’s, Maryellen found out she’d broken her father’s old camera in their flight to escape him.

Mel Thompkins’ camera still held a roll of film. Maryellen took the camera to Sara the next day, and they developed the film in her basement darkroom. All of the pictures but one were taken at the cabin. The first one was their Thanksgiving dinner the week before.

In the photo she wore the white cashmere sweater that her father had given her for her birthday. She was daydreaming, staring at the table with her hands in her lap and a full plate of turkey steaming in front of her.

Her stepmother, Olive, stirred her drink at the end of the table, one of her African masks leering from the wall. The flash washed out the back of Chris’ blonde hair like a halo. Maryellen had pushed his foot off her leg twice since they sat down to eat.

Maryellen wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore, and no one else would, either. She had taken care of Chris’ sex drive on the dreamways, while she napped beside Eddie in the hospital.

Her father had shot the rest of the film from each window inside the cabin. From the kitchen counter he had worked around each wall, ending with a shot of their mud-spattered truck from the loft window, the one right over her bed.

That night everything caught up with her. She was afraid to sleep and too tired to stay awake. Mark found her sitting on the floor and sobbing in the hallway outside Eddie’s room. He convinced Olive to let Maryellen stay with them until Christmas. She moved her things into Mark’s study, but she spent most of her waking hours at the hospital with Eddie. She spent some of her sleeping hours there, too. One of the night shift nurses always let her sleep on the spare bed instead of in a chair.

Maryellen returned to her house the day it was sold. Olive and her horrible son were moving to Oregon.

“I’m not going,” Maryellen said.

“Fine,” Olive said. “You don’t have to.”

Olive had taken up smoking. She tapped her long filter-tip on the table-top, end-over-end,
tap tap tap tap
then lit it and tilted her head back but did not inhale.

“There is some money,” Olive announced, her matchbook on the tabletop
tap tap
end-over-end, “for your college. If you want to stay here, I can put it into an account for you.”

She rolled the ash of her cigarette delicately into a saucer.

Maryellen didn’t have anything to say. She watched her stepmother’s hands, nervous and thin, their blue veins stark against her pale skin. Maryellen’s hands curled in her lap. Behind her hands, inside her warm abdomen, she imagined she felt a quickening.

“You have a week to find a place,” Olive said. “We have to be out by the first of the year.” She finished her pink wine and dragged on her cigarette.

tap tap tap tap

Olive poured herself another glass and gulped down half.

“Someone will have to be responsible for you,” she said. “I’ll get a lawyer to do it if you don’t know anyone.”

tap tap tap

She gulped the other half, set down the glass and finished her speech.

“Your share is twenty-five hundred dollars. Chris and I don’t have any money to spare; this move is eating me up. I’ll put it in the bank Monday. You’ll probably need a job.”

Olive finished her cigarette and stubbed it out in the saucer. She brushed all the little pieces of ash off her black sleeves and off the tabletop. Maryellen looked past her, out the window towards the river and Afriqua Lee.

“If people think you’re crazy nobody’ll rent you a place or give you a job. Snap out of it.”

Then she was finally alone. She found what she’d known all along—that breath came easier, and even temporary secrets were safer when she lived alone.

All the shadows of evening began their slow melt through pink to gray. Out the window a crow or raven lifted off, his wings bowed and slow. Maryellen glimpsed his quick eye looking back, bright in the last of the sun.

“Nevermore!” she hollered after him, “Nevermore!”

Christ,
she thought,
I bet they hear that all the time.

The End

Acknowledgments

James M. Mathias, MD; psychiatry

Robert B. Olsen, MD; psychiatry

Robert Colfelt, MD; neurology

Karen Hart, physiology

The McCarron family, the O’Keefe family and Johanna Nitzke.

Portions of this story appeared in slightly different forms in the following publications:
The Kansas City Star, Portland Review, Willow Springs Magazine
and
Iron Country.

Thanks again, Frank.

Bibliography

Silver Departures
by Richard Kehl

Landscapes of the Night,
Christopher Evans

The Country Between Us,
Carolyn Forché

Life During Wartime,
Lucius Shepard

Gathering the Tribes,
Carolyn Forché

The Origin and Treatment of Schizophrenic Disorders,
Theodore Lidz

The Drawing of the Three,
Stephen King

Ender’s Game,
Orson Scott Card

We the Divided Self,
John Watkins

Here Among the Sacrificed,
Finn Wilcox/Steve Johnson