Our Daily Bread (15 page)

She tried once, a few months back, to talk to Bobby. She wanted to know if he got scared, too. He laughed and told her she was crazy, then opened his mouth wide to show her the chewed-up cookie he was eating. He was a teenager, and a boy, so of course he was oblivious to most things. He slept like a bear in hibernation; he never heard their mother when she wandered through the house as if she were a boat slipped from its mooring in the night.

Even now, when their mother floated out into far waters, mysterious and lost as a rudderless skiff, and left them all behind in the haunted house, Bobby seemed only to be
more
like himself, careless, loud, sullen and needy all at once. Although he added to this his anger. Anger at their dad, mostly, but at her, too. Like tonight. “I'm hungry,” he whined, as though he was five and not fifteen.

“You want Spaghetti-O's and hot dogs?” she said.

“Are you kidding? What crap. I'm not eating kid's crap.”

“Well, I'm hungry too, Bobby. Why don't
you
make us something?”

“Fat chance, freak,” he said, his face like a mask, “You want to take her place, play little mommy? Be my guest, but leave me out of it.” And then he stomped out the door and slammed it behind him and still had not come home.

Maybe he was afraid after all.

Her father was certainly afraid. And that in itself was a new thing to be afraid of, for if he was afraid—her big, strong dad—then he couldn't reassure her any more, could he? How frightening it was, the way a person could be there one minute and gone the next. This is the way things are, though
,
she thought: uncertain, shifting, treacherous.

Ivy drained the water from the sink and shook powdered cleanser onto the enamel to clean it. She liked the feel of the scratchy powder, scouring away all traces of oily dirt, liked the sharp, medicinal smell of the bleach.

When she was done, she poked her head into the living room. Her father sat in his old lounger. Rascal lay sprawled on the carpet with his hind legs stretched out behind him and his muzzle resting on his crossed paws, but his eyes were fixed on Ivy's father, who in turn stared at the television. On the screen, a man wearing nothing but a bathing suit and a pair of goggles lay in something that looked like a coffin, while two other men poured garbage cans full of rats over him and girls in bikinis squealed with disgust.

“Dad?”

“What is it, Ivy?”

“Do you want anything? A cup of tea?” She noticed the glass of whiskey in his hand then, and the bottle on the floor next to his chair.

“No. I don't want anything.”

“I'm going to go up to my room, okay?”

“You do whatever you want.”

Ivy did not want to do whatever she wanted. She wanted to be told what to do. She wanted to be told to do her homework, or come and sit on her father's knee, or get out the Parcheesi board, or something, anything that would make her believe she wasn't living in a house full of nothing but ghosts.

“Fine,” she said, and turned away. Rascal roused and ran to the front door, toenails scratching on the linoleum. He wriggled and whined and Ivy let him out. The dog dove off the porch and raised a leg against the nearest shrub, releasing an apparently never-ending stream of urine. “Poor Rascal,” she said. “Good boy.” Her father, it seemed, was an invalid incapable of even letting the poor dog out. She waited and waited, such a long time even the dog looked embarrassed, but then, at last he was done and ran back into the house as if unwilling to leave the fragile, broken humans alone for longer than necessary. Not even the scent of fox in the night tempted him. “It's all right,” said Ivy, closing the door and locking it, hoping Bobby had his keys, wherever he was. “It's all right.”

She schlumped upstairs, Rascal trailing behind her. “Good boy,” she said and took comfort in his warm fur under her fingers, the confident way he entered the dark hallway. Over the past weeks, the dog had become her shadow, following her around, sniffing in corners, looking for that absent-present person.

In her room, Ivy looked in the mirror above her dresser. She looked at her curling brown hair, looked at her skin, which wasn't like her mother's, not a freckle to be seen, and wasn't like her father's, nothing pinkly burnt, not ever. And wasn't like her brother's, all milky pale, almost bluish sometimes. Even her mouth was different. Blubber mouth, they called her, fish lips, they called her. And her mother had said, “Pay no attention to them. They'll all be getting collagen injections to get what you've got, all be getting tan out of a bottle to get what you got. Just like my grandmother, who was Spanish, you know, from Madrid.” Maybe that was where her mother was. Dancing with the Spanish gypsies in Madrid.

Ivy took her rock collection from the shelf. She put the box on her bed and opened the lid. Each rock, so perfect, still and serene, tucked up in its little compartment, nestled in a fluffy piece of cotton, snug as little bugs in little rugs. Each one knew its place and stayed there. Biotite next to calcite next to fluorite next to galena next to graphite next to gypsum next to hematite. She picked up the quartzite from its cubbyhole at the end of the third row, next to the slate. It was pinkish, like burnt skin or a piece of petrified meat. Tough but brittle, a hardness of 7 on the scale. Its parent rock was sandstone, but the grains would not rub off like sandstone. She held it, gripped it tight, tight, tight, wanted to feel it bite her. She had seen a man in a movie once who held a piece of glass in his hand, held it hard until the blood ran out from between his fingers. She wanted to feel that, wanted to feel hot blood in her hand instead of cold rock, rock whose parent was sandstone. Sandstone, a mineral held together by compaction, made up mostly of pieces of other rocks.

She opened her palm. The rock was still the rock, and her hand was still her hand, marked red, but not bleeding.

Stupid rock. Stupid hand.

Rascal sat and looked at her and cocked his head.

“What are you looking at? Stupid dog,” she said. She thought she could throw the rock at Rascal and he'd still just sit there, waiting for something to happen, waiting for someone to feed him, to let him out, to play with him, to cut burrs from between the pads on his paws. He was like her father, day after day, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting to hear a key in a lock. Her father slept in the chair some nights. He had gone back to work, finally, but for days he'd called in sick, something he hadn't done ever before as far back as Ivy could remember. “She'll come home,” he kept saying, “She'll be back. She loves us, loves you kids. She's just gone off for a wee break. She'll come home.” That was the rosary he said, and for a day or two Ivy had tried to believe him, but she didn't, and after that she didn't think he believed it either, and then he pretty much stopped talking altogether. He went back to work, but when he came home he went straight for the chair, straight for the bottle. He ate if Ivy brought him food, changed his clothes once every couple of days, and then Ivy washed them. Just like she dusted and made beds and swept the floor, and picked up Bobby's towels from the bathroom floor and made her bed, but not Bobby's—let him take care of himself that much. And through it all her father sat with one eye on the television and the other on the car lights that went past the window, but never stopped.

Ivy wanted to shake him. Wanted him to be her father again.

Rascal cocked his head and whined. He opened his jaws, as though smiling at her, as though he was laughing. The one black patch over his eye looked like a target.

Ivy threw the rock, not at the dog, but at the mirror. It had not been her intention to throw the rock, and certainly not to throw it at the mirror. Still, she had thrown it, and time slowed oddly. She experienced a certain detached surprise as her arm made its arc, and as the stone sailed so unnaturally weightless through the air there was time to wonder whether this gesture would bring satisfaction, for she had seen on television, and read in books, that this is what people did when they were at the end of something, and could take no more of something, and so on. Then the miniscule meteor impacted against the mirror and, even though she had watched it happen, and so could not be taken unawares of its inevitability, the sharp and nearly shrieking sound, and the drama of the results—the shatter and scatter of it all—made her jump, and then she was instantly filled with regret as a spiderweb of tinkling, distorted glass and silver-shiny backing, exploded into sparkling shards across the bureau, into the carpet, where surely tiny slivers would remain embedded for weeks, looking to punish her naked feet. The piece of quartzite bounced back and now lay, chipped, near her foot.

Rascal barked, and then whined.

She heard the
ka-thump
of her father's recliner snapping closed and his footfalls, somewhat unsteady on the stairs.

“Ivy! Ivy, are you all right? Ivy!”

She would not say anything. He would have to come all the way; he would have to make that effort. She wanted him to worry about her for a change.

And then he was in the door, one hand on either side of the jamb, his face red, his eyes wide. “Ivy? What happened?”

“Nothing,” she said.

I know times are tough, don't you think I don't know it. God knows it, too. He's standing there beside you when you're looking for honest work, trying to feed your babies, trying to pay your rent. He's got His hand on your back, propping you up in these hard times and you know it's true. We'll get through this, friends, like we got through the war and the influenza. We're not going to be like some around us, some I won't name—but surely God knows their names, knows the filthy cabins in which they sleep—stealing and cheating and fornicating and cursing the Lord's name. What does it say, friends, in The Book? It says,
“Yea, the light of the wicked shall be put out, and the spark of his fire shall not shine.”
That's Job 18:15. He knew a thing or two, did old Job.

—Reverend Clarence Goodall,
Church of Christ Returning, 1936

A chill wind blew from the northeast
every day, the weirdest month of May Albert could remember. The kids—the Lost Children—floated through the woods like miniature zombies, trying not to get caught, trying to grab food on the run and getting grabbed themselves. The sound of bottles breaking and the occasional scream, the occasional laugh, came from the main house. Around midnight Friday Dan appeared on the porch and took a few potshots into the woods, yelling something unintelligible. Albert came out to piss about three in the morning and found his fourteen-year-old brother Jack in a tree, like some ragged, rabid bat. Scared him so bad he'd pissed on his own foot.

“You're a fucking asshole, you know that?” Jack called to him from a branch above his head.

“What the fuck are you doing up there?”

A stupid question, since he knew the answer. He'd spent more than a few nights in the trees himself, back when.

The Uncles, it seemed, had stopped making shine altogether, and were concentrating their efforts on meth. They'd found a market. Albert counted eighteen cars coming and going over the course of three days, one of them Dr. Hawthorne's. The good doctor handed out oranges and put antibiotic cream on the children's cuts and bruises. Albert saw Jill around dawn, Saturday, kneeling beside a tree. She jumped a mile these days when anybody so much as touched her arm. Her nose had been broken some months back and even though Hawthorne had put a metal splint on it, it didn't look right.

“You hurt?” Albert asked.

She looked up. Her lip was split, her teeth stained with blood. “How the fuck do you think I am?”

There had been a time, when he'd first moved into the cabin—she was fourteen, maybe—when he'd brought her into the shack with him for a night or two, thinking he could protect her. It didn't work out. Having her in the cabin overnight made him too uneasy. She was too female, with her musky smells and her breasts, round and high and full, even at that age, straining against her sweatshirt, swinging free and loose. She was too careless with the way she sat, in that short little denim miniskirt she always wore, and too careless with what showed from the top of her shirt when she bent over. At least he thought she was careless. If she wasn't that was worse. If she'd stayed . . . well. He told her she'd have to find her own way. She'd spit on him. Scratched him, and then tried to rub up against him, until he pushed her out the door to land on her ass in the mud. Man, how she cursed him. But she got the message and didn't come back. She was too old now to hide in the little places the kids found all over the woods and too small to fight back, like he had done when the time came. She'd slip over to their side any time, pick a man to latch onto and begin some games of her own, or else she'd go find some sturdy tree limb and hang herself. Wouldn't be the first one. They called that old oak by the marsh the Judas tree.

Albert stayed in his cabin all day Saturday and Saturday night. It was the first time in a while he'd spent that much time up there—usually he stayed out as long as he could, often just getting some booze and some pot and sitting out in his truck in the woods until things died down in the wee hours. But he'd heard from Jack and Jill that things were shifting around from bad to horrible and he wanted to see for himself. And see he did. Where before The Others had been cruel and selfish and violent, now they were fucking psycho. Paranoid and picking fights even with one other. Still, the customers kept coming. All those cars of townies coming and going. And some of those good people would be at church in the morning, listening to the Reverend Hickland strutting his stuff and calling out about the war on God's people.

If Friday and Saturday were hellish, Sunday was plain weird. The place collectively crashed. After a week of using, The Others, both men and women, slept like they were in comas. The kids wandered about, scrounging food in the eerie silence. Only Fat Felicity, Harold and Sonny kept watch on the commerce.

Albert wasn't sure how much more he could take. He told himself the only reason he stayed was a vague hope Jack might grow up fast enough. At least then there'd be two of them, unless Jack slipped over, too, which is why Albert didn't confide in his little brother. It might happen. It had to happen, generation to generation, sins of the fathers on the heads of the sons and daughters. Even The Others must have been children once.

It was as though they could read his thoughts. Every time they got within speaking distance they had something to say. “You better watch yourself, boy,” said Old Harold. “Don't go getting any ideas, Bert. Don't forget we all of us got a past together. Gonna have a future together, too,” said Lloyd. “What do you think you are, better than the rest of us? In your little bachelor pad. Bringing little girls in there, are you?” said Dan, scratching his armpit and then smelling his fingers. Thinking you were better than the rest was the worst thing there was up on the mountain. Punishable in any number of unpleasant ways. His mother and the rest of the women spoke to him less and less, but Old Felicity shot him death eyes and spit every time she saw him. He hated her eyes, with their drooping lower lids, their watery, red rims.

On Monday, everybody was irritable and depressed. Grey clouds dangled like old dishrags in a murky sky. It was late morning—a time when school kids (other than Bobby Evans who was ditching) were in class, and upstanding citizens were at their jobs, but before the mail truck came around at just past one and the UPS men got round to this neighbourhood. Albert and Bobby drove to Prattsville, twenty miles away. The air inside the cab smelled of coffee mixed with the sharp tang of adrenaline. On the side of the truck a stick-on vinyl sign read:
Garcia's Economical Landscaping.
Back at the compound, hidden in a metal box under a bunch of scrap metal, were signs that said,
Rodriquez Lawn Care, Szniak Plumbing, L.E.D. Electrical
and
Hidden View Nursery.

“Good day for it,” said Albert.

“You think so?” said Bobby.

“You're not such great company, you know that?” Albert reached over and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Come on, cheer up. I know it's hard, but who needs her, huh? You think I wouldn't stand up and fucking cheer if my old lady and all the rest of those shits took off? You're goddamn right I would. Fuck 'em. I'm never having any kids, you know that? Never. You ever met anybody didn't have trouble, and I mean real trouble, with their families? They are there to fuck you up. That's it. They are there to see if you're strong enough to survive and if you're not, you're not. It's like Darwin right? Survival of the fittest. Throw the baby bird out of the nest and see if it can fly and if it can't then feed it to the cat. They tell you it's all about love and that shit, but it's not. It's about biology. Survival of the species. It's a badge of honour, is the way I look at it.”

“What is?” asked Bobby.

Albert chuckled. Bobby was like every other kid—looking to make sense of crap that was never going to make sense. Life, as Albert saw it, was just a load of steaming horseshit and that was that. But if you were weak, like young Bobby was weak, you needed a reason. You needed meaning. “Look, you got abandoned, right?”

“She might be back.”

“Maybe. But let's say she doesn't come back. You're motherless, pal. Motherless. That means you got to be a man. No more kid shit. You think some guy in Africa or China or someplace, somewhere where they leave their weak out to be eaten by lions, like the Eskimos, tossing their old people out on the ice to die, you think they don't have to grow up fast and strong? Sure, that's why blacks are such good athletes, right? Because in olden days their parents ran off and left them out in the jungles and they had to survive. They had to fight for themselves. Fend off tigers and snakes and shit. And if they did, then they were stronger, tougher, more likely to survive. You got to think of it as a kind of gift from the natural order. You know?”

“You think?”

“I know. Trust me.”

Bobby fidgeted in his seat and cracked his knuckles. “You still live near your folks,” he said in a hesitant voice. “Maybe you should show me.”

“Goddamn it, Bobby. You know, I should do it.” It had started a few days ago—the kid pestering him to take him up to the compound. “I should take you up on the mountain one day and show you what tough really is.”

“Don't get mad, Albert. I'm just saying . . .”

“Well, stop saying. You don't have a clue. I don't get you sometimes. What do you want to hang out on the mountain for? Just drop that shit and keep your mind on the job at hand, okay? You think you can handle that? Good. Then focus. No rain yet, so there'll be no footprints if we move fast enough. That's what you have to watch out for in winter, if there's snow. But the cold's good. Keeps people inside minding their own business like they ought to. You got your gloves, right?”

“Sure.” Bobby pulled a black leather pair out of his pocket.

“Good boy,” said Albert, as Bobby smiled and went a little pink.

Albert had scoped out the house six times over the past month. You had to be thorough. You had to be professional. No drugs. No booze. No crazy knife-wielding, psycho bullshit. He'd made that very clear to Bobby. This wasn't some jacked-up ghetto shit. This was clean. Mostly, he'd told Bobby, it was about seeing what you were made of. Seeing what kind of blood ran through your veins. It was also about seeing how far Bobby was willing to go, how far he was willing to push his limits on Albert's say-so.

Albert liked having Bobby around. It felt good to have a friend, someone who looked up to him. It was a clean thing, something he could be proud of. Not a trace of mountain on it. Some people might say Bobby was too young to be Albert's friend, but that wasn't so. Six or seven years wasn't much. And Albert believed he was doing Bobby good. Who else did the kid have to turn to these days? Having Bobby around was like having a protégé. But today would be a one-time thing. Albert was clear—he wasn't going to initiate the kid into a life of crime. This robbery was merely about gauging willingness and nerve, seeing if the kid could keep a secret, which Albert thought of as the measure of a man's integrity. It was also about . . . well, Albert couldn't think of a good word to describe it—
sharing
was too faggy. It was about the power of secrets. Things just between two people. Call it a rite of manhood. Maybe he'd take the kid up to the compound sometime. Just to show him how a man could live independent from all assholes, or nearly so, if he put his mind to it.

Albert glanced at Bobby. He was smoking, but then Bobby was always smoking these days. His eyes gazed fixedly at the road ahead. A muscle in his jaw tensed. Well, that was all right. It was natural. First time out. Albert reached over and gave Bobby's boney knee a squeeze. Not much muscle under that skin. Maybe he should abort the mission.

“You're all right, aren't you, sport? Still time to turn around, you know?” Leave it up to fate, maybe. Leave it up to the kid. He was old enough. A damn sight older than Albert was when he took responsibility for himself. “It's up to you. I'm okay either way. I won't lose no respect for you, if you want to go on home. What do you want to do, young Bobby?” And he smiled, to show the kid he meant it, the way a brother would.

There was only a moment's hesitation. “No. I'm good. Like you said, it's just an insurance thing, right? It's not like we're taking anything sentimental, right?”

“No personal things. Except maybe some jewellery, but even that, I take only replaceable stuff, like gold chains and single stone rings. Nothing that looks like Grandma passed it down. And no religious stuff like crosses. Bad karma. I knew a guy who threw a bar of soap into a kid's aquarium. Laughed when he imagined the kid's face when he came home to a tank full of dead fish.” There was no reason for Bobby to know the guy was Albert's uncle, Lloyd. Bastard. “No cause for that shit. You have to have ethics.”

“Right.”

“So? What's it gonna be? You wanna skip it? Go for a pizza?”

“I'm good.”

“Your call, Bobby.” And Albert kept on driving.

“Tell me about the house again,” said Bobby, as if it was a bedtime story.

“It's a nice house, but not too nice, so there's no alarm. Backs onto a wildlife preserve, so no backyard neighbours watching us go through the window, not that there's likely to be anyone home this time of day. Working neighbourhood, but not blue-collar. Those guys get laid off too much, or the job site's shut for one reason or another. Stick to office worker types. No kids, which means a better class of jewellery, most of the time, and a little more cash lying around, and maybe some cameras and silver and iPods and laptops and whatever other crap yuppies can't live without.”

Bobby lit a cigarette off the butt of the previous one. He jiggled his leg and drummed his fingers on the dashboard while Gregg Allman sang out about the midnight rider. It was one of the songs Albert listened to when he was on the prowl. Not gonna let them catch old Albert, no sir. The road goes on forever. As they turned off and got closer to the prey house, he switched the music over to “Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi. Kick it up a notch or two, but not too much, not so much some passing motorist heard the bass pumping and took a long enough look to remember who they were. Not so much young Bobby would flip out into psycho mode.