Sign Languages (11 page)

But I paid little attention. Instead, without a single completed thought, I stood and put the book in my pocket. Edging quietly around the table, I took two steps and opened the French doors. Again, I didn't pause to think but crossed the lawn, passed the empty tennis court, and intersected the gravel drive near the gate. The whole way, from the doors to the street to a bus stop down the hill, I imagined the tall angular men standing at the French doors watching my descent. And one of them was most certainly my brother, Allan, his hand on the shoulder of an American Army colonel. The look on his face the old look of disappointment. You've no patience, he'd chide. Where's your self-control?

You know me, Dave. I'm a mediocre scholar, a better-than-average carpenter, someone who's meticulous about income taxes, my children's education. So you know I didn't run off into Tegucigalpa in shambles, in the state of one of our young protagonists—feverish from starvation, in a rage over money, gasping from the final stages of tuberculosis. True, I was terrified at what I'd done by taking the book, my mind running in highest gear. Downtown I stepped off the bus in front of a hotel, and realized I'd left my suitcase in that room near the door. Fortunately, I had my traveler's checks and passport in my coat pocket so I managed to check in. Later I hurried out, away from the book, and bought a couple of shirts, some underwear, and an inexpensive nylon overnighter.

But I was distraught, dismayed. Fully dressed, I sat on the balcony, the city noises of Tegucigalpa the same as everywhere else, only the smells really different. Harsh, animal, uninhibited by rules or regulations.

The book was impossible to read. It had been cheaply printed, which didn't help. But even had it been perfectly legible, it was mostly equations, formulas, diagrams of islands or amoebas—I couldn't tell which. And where there were written passages, the words, though English, were in some meaningless combinations of code. Here and there someone had underlined a series of numbers or a phrase. In the margins there were interjections, I think, but those too were all scrambled.

The first night I awoke with my new pajamas soaked through, and, in the dark, I groped my way to the flimsy bureau and searched out the book and took it to bed, pushed in far up under the mattress and realized, by my action, something I'd kept quiet and secret from myself—they might come for this. Early the next morning I flew to Panama City.

But all this was thought out, you see. It wasn't really panic. I was worried, I admit. The more unintelligible the dirty yellow book, the more unsettled my peace of mind. And besides, I simply couldn't come home five or six days early, could I? I had no plans at all about what I'd say to B.

I toured Central America, I guess. Though I didn't pay much attention at all to San José or Belize. I spent most of my money in airports, hotel restaurants. The last couple of days I spent the good part of the day bent over the book, searching through its pages again and again, drawing on cheap hotel stationery the figures, diagrams, copying the passages. I needed to understand what was happening.

The last night, under the weak yellow light in the dirty bathroom, I inspected my face, jerked closer to the glass, my heavy breath fogging it, to stare at my lips. I didn't think I'd ever looked closely at them before. Now they seemed foreign. I moved them, mouthed a dozen crazy phrases from the Friends of Beccari, and waited. The water dripped in the stained lavatory; a phone rang through the thin walls. My lips moved again, but this time I spoke out loud. “Jesus Christ,” I said over and over. Just look at yourself.

I flew back to Houston the next day and landed in an afternoon thunderstorm full of heat and dazzling flashes of light. I stood a long time at the baggage carousel until I realized my suitcase had passed me several times. But it wasn't the nylon bag full of dirty underwear and shirts wrapped around the book. It was the leather suitcase the liveried servant had put just inside the door. You know, I didn't even open it. The weary customs official waved me through and later in the car I just sat for a long time. The rain whipped across the parked cars in vast heavy sheets. I practiced making up stories. And decided to write you whenever I could.

That night, with B. at my shoulder, I laughed, grinned, talked loudly, my voice ringing around me and her and the children. The happy traveler had returned. No, Allan decided to stay. I unlatched the suitcase and, on top of my unused clothes, there was an array of souvenirs. Beautifully dressed dolls in native costumes; silver earrings for B. and, for me, a heavy mosaic, tesserae depicting some ancient Mayan ritual full of animals, bizarre men, the smoke of incense rising from stubby pyramids. Everyone talked at once.

I'm sure you've noticed the enclosed clipping. It's from the
Houston Chronicle
about a week ago. Though it's a bit hard to make out, what caught my attention were the white officers leading the Indian troops across the bridge. You know, it's the old trouble in the Punjab with the Sikhs and here's the second Gandhi making the same mistake his mother did of storming the Golden Temple in Amritsar. But anyway, that there were still Anglo officers made me examine it more closely and, though it's pretty damned fuzzy, I'm almost positive the white officer yelling—the one who has lost his helmet and is half-turned to us—is Allan. Allan and those Friends of Beccari insinuating themselves in India again to lead the “coloreds” out of their own childish mistakes. There and elsewhere in Central America, Africa.

A couple of weekends ago I lied, said Allan'd phoned me at the university, and I drove up to Patroon.

It was a scorching day, there'd been little rain in a month. I thought about you much of the trip. And about what we'd said often—the world growing more callous, frighteningly racist again. I composed part of this letter on the drive, wondered what you'd think of my revelations. I guessed you'd believe me. I'm calm in my new misery. My despair isn't clinical in its proportions. I know I hoped you'd offer some answers. Though what's there to say, I wonder? It's one thing to fight those ideas in your opponents—political, departmental, community. There's some hope, even if it's distant, of changing minds, altering viewpoints. But the Friends of Beccari
become
all those antiquated perspectives full of avarice, repression, distrust. Now the world steps back when, as we believed, it was just barely in the light. What will such western chauvinism bring now, at this late date? Can't you see awesome numbers everywhere adopting it, clinging to it as the stained yellow book alters, regresses. The gibberish of numbers, diagrams, paragraphs offering the romance of antique order, control, clear-eyed white faces again in charge, the deferential, obliging masses hunkered down, their own good in all our minds.

I parked the car in front of the beautiful limestone building. The ground-floor office was locked. I squatted, opened the mail chute with my fingers, but there was no jumble of mail and all I could see were thick carpet and dark table legs.

I climbed the stairs at the side up to his apartment, but the door was locked and the expensive glass pane was frosted.

I sat for a while halfway down the steps waiting for something to happen. But what did I expect? Allan was something else. The cicadas sang in the heat. I figured I'd get a phone call some day soon. And a voice like theirs would tell me my brother was dead somewhere too far away for me to retrieve his body myself and that he, the perfectly modulated voice, having developed a close companionship with my brother, would take care of everything. Not to worry, old man.

I sweated on the steps. Then I stood. The apartment and office abandoned carapaces, cicada hulls, reflecting the perfect outlines but empty. My brother was Beccari Man, the newest-old manifestation. Dave, do you think there's anything we can do? Whose responsibility is it, if not mine? Is it yours, too? Ours? I picked up one of the empty hulls, gently parted it from the wooden railing and held its weightlessness in my palm. From all around they pelted me with their triumphant cry of terrible release.

Awaiting your reply,
Don       

BACKYARDS

Richard put the groceries on the table and walked back to close the door against the summer heat. For a moment he breathed deeply and inhaled the fishy odor he'd noticed yesterday the second day in his brother's house. And though he'd looked for its source, he hadn't found it.

Tom, his only brother, had begged him to house-sit the month he and his wife, Megan, would be in Chile on a faculty summer program. “It'd be great,” Megan had said over the phone. “You'd get out of that damned Houston in July. What's the humidity there, 98 percent?” And she'd laughed. Her laugh convinced him. That and the unexpected realization he was tired of Houston and the one woman he'd slept with in the last five years and she only recently; a new assistant accountant at work. Their recent months of sex becoming tangles of clothes because of her impatience. And once she'd bitten him on the forearm. After she was asleep, Richard went into the bathroom and examined the purple wound for a long time. Then he slept on the couch, waking often to watch the door to the hallway, afraid she'd come through it, her teeth bared. Now, though the wound had disappeared, he put his finger to his skin.

At the last minute, Tom and Megan had left early in the sort of frenzy Richard should have expected from his brother. It was very much like him to have gotten the dates wrong or the plane tickets or something. Richard was sure that was why Megan had phoned with the news, her voice layered and deep—the only woman's voice he paid much attention to. He hadn't seen them in over two years—since the Christmas the ice storm had rushed into Texas fiercely and killed the power at their parents' house, bent pine saplings almost to the ground. There'd been candles and kerosene lamps—the old days for his parents—and quilts on knees and early bedtimes. A lot of looking out of windows into deep gray afternoons.

Coming from his bedroom at the front of the house, he'd seen Megan naked in the mirror in their bedroom. She was alone, at the window, her fingers slightly parting the blinds. She hadn't heard him. He stopped on the cold oak floor amazed. There had been few women in his life, none before his second year in college. And he'd never seen such a sight before. The demanding woman in Houston was nothing like her.

Richard had flown to St. Louis and taken the bus two hours to the northwest. There'd been a manila envelope in the mail chute with door keys, instructions about appliances, a pad of signed checks for incoming bills. And a brief note from Megan saying she hoped he would enjoy the slow pace of Coalston. She jabbered on so about mental health and locating our centers that Richard wondered about her own well-being here in a town a long way from Denver, where'd she been born. And besides, hadn't they both just escaped to Chile? Richard couldn't imagine such an impetuous action. It was hard enough for him to make it from Houston. He was much like his father, who'd once been offered a high-paying job in Europe but couldn't leave the piney woods of East Texas he'd adopted as a young husband.

But what had he done his first afternoon in their house? Richard shook his head. He'd taken a shower and tried to get beyond the memory of the Houston woman lying on the couch and asking him to play rough with her. Then he'd thought about the few women he'd seen naked, Megan in the mirror. In high school there'd only been hands, opened blouses, sweating windshields.

Unhappy with the soft mattress in the guest room, he had taken his suitcase into their room and dropped it on the beautiful quilt he recognized as his mother's work. He opened their dresser drawers; he opened the closet, pushed back clothes, poked through shoe boxes, found a snub-nosed revolver in one and felt as if he'd found cocaine. This wasn't like Tom at all. Then, Richard smelled Tom's strong and spicy colognes and, in the third bureau drawer, put his hands into her underwear. Pulling out a fistful of panties, he scattered them on the bed.

For an hour or more he went through everything he could. He told himself that here was a chance to piece everything together—an opportunity to know them both better than he ever could any other way. Far more complete than what one learns over telephones, from infrequent letters about the superficial details of health, money, parents, work. Tom was his brother and Megan his sister-in-law. But their lives were secret and foreign, and here, suddenly, he had the perfect chance to find out who they were.

So he took out things, examined them, put them back, fighting, all the time, his conscience, guilt, amazement, the fear of being caught by their sudden return. Their faces in the door of the small study dumbstruck at Richard sitting at the desk, rummaging through old bills, lecture notes, memos concerning the League of Women Voters.

My God, he kept thinking, what am I doing? I'm the most secretive, private person I know. How would I feel? And he saw himself returning once from the kitchen and finding her with a book she'd taken out of his bedside table. He couldn't comprehend such an action. He had thought then how he'd have to keep an eye on her.

“Jesus,” she'd said, oblivious to her crime, “you keep this sort of thing in the bedroom? Wow, everything there is to know about junk bonds.”

But he hadn't stopped himself. Not until a folder had buckled and spilled across the floor, and, bending down, he'd read the medical expenses for artificial insemination at a hospital in St. Louis. They were enormous, and evidently the college insurance didn't cover them. There were several angry letters from Tom to the insurance people and one from Megan, less angry, her approach one of quiet logic.

Richard sat for a while, completely convicted, and then he had straightened up and unpacked in the guest room and drunk a large glass of sherry from the serving cart in the dining room.

That night in their bed he listened to them talk about him. My poor brother Richard, he could hear Tom say. He doesn't have much of a life there in Houston. Oh, he's perfectly fine. He could hear Megan's rich voice. But his life really is mostly work, work, work. He's always been that way, you know. And Richard winced at Tom's voice and, for a while, was glad he'd gone so drastically out of control and had searched their house.