The Bat Tattoo (3 page)

‘And that’s why you named me Roswell?’

‘Well, I gave you that name because …’ He seemed to have lost the rest of what he was going to say.

‘Because what, Dad?’

‘What, son?’ He was leaning his folded arms on the work-bench and his eyes were closed. Sometimes he dozed off standing there like that.

‘You were going to tell me why you gave me my name.’

‘Yes. Because … Because you never know.’

‘Never know what?’

‘All kinds of things. Mysteries, life is full of them, whether it’s UFOs or the Bermuda Triangle or whatever. And the government is always saying there’s nothing out there.’ He swept his arm to take in the whole basement workshop and knocked over the Jack Daniel’s which was stoppered and didn’t spill. ‘Saying this is all there is.’

‘You mean …?’

‘I mean this whole thing we call reality that you wake
up in every morning and go to sleep in every night. Not just the government, ordinary people too.’

‘Ordinary people what?’ It was hard to follow him sometimes.

‘Only seeing what’s in front of them or behind them. Just because the past is what it was doesn’t mean the future can’t be something else.’

I waited for him to go on but he didn’t. I said, ‘Is that why you named me Roswell?’

He went quiet and I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he looked at me as if we were resuming a completely different conversation. ‘It won’t always be like this,’ he said. He tapped a flask with some blue liquid in it and smiled at me. ‘“From this moment on,”’ he sang quietly, ‘“no more blue songs, only whoop-dee-doo songs, from this moment on …”’ Then he did fall asleep standing at his work-bench.

He was not a big success as an inventor; he often started out with something that led to something else that went nowhere. There was a self-winding hourglass. Why? I don’t know but I remember what it looked like: the hourglass was supported by an arm that held the waist of it. When the sand ran into the bottom part the weight of it released a spring that flipped the hourglass over and wound itself up to do it again. After a while it ran down because of what Dad called ‘the energy deficit’. ‘If I could just lick that,’ he said, ‘I’d have perpetual motion.’

Mom came down to the basement looking for something just then. ‘Perpetual bullshit,’ she said.

My father owned the house but we never had much and I don’t know what we’d have done if my mother hadn’t always worked, mostly as a waitress. I had a newspaper route until I was old enough to work in the supermarket after school and
on Saturdays. This was back in the sixties and Mom was a handsome woman then, fair-haired and taller than Dad, with blue eyes that seemed used to miles and miles of distance. Her maiden name had been Lindstrom and she looked like one of those pioneers who’d settled the Midwest, trailing a rope behind their covered wagons to help them steer a straight course through the tall grass of the prairies. Men liked to be waited on by her and tipped her well.

As soon as she got home from work she’d take her shoes off and put on a pair of fleece-lined slippers. Sometimes if she wasn’t too tired she’d read to me, more often than not from her Bible which was bound in black leather with HOLY BIBLE stamped in gold on the cover and spine. It had what I thought of as a Presbyterian smell; if I closed my eyes I saw men in black with large hard hands and stiff collars. There was a blue ribbon bookmark and the type was good and black, the columns of text very strong, like verbal pillars to support the roof of faith. Sometimes the numbers of the verses seemed like eyes that watched me. I still have that Bible. On the flyleaf is written, in a firm and faithful hand:

Presented to our daughter Rachael
on her seventh birthday, March 21st, 1930
by Christian and Ursula Lindstrom

Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain:
but a woman that feareth the Lord,
she shall be praised.
Proverbs, 31.30

Mom skipped around between the Old and New Testaments
when she read to me; she’d use a verse as a point of departure for a one- or two-minute sermon. I recall Matthew 5.13 — she was very intense when she did that one:

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?

She always paused there. ‘You hear that, Sonny? Remember that, and don’t you lose your savour.’

‘What’s my savour, Mom?’

‘Just remember the words — you’ll understand them when you’re older.’

Now and then for a special treat she’d read to me from
Grimm’s Fairy Tales;
her favourites were ‘The Goose-Girl’ and ‘Clever Elsie’, both women who were hard done by. She read those not in her Bible voice but in a younger and more intimate way. When she did the part where Clever Elsie got turned away from her own house it gave me goose pimples.

Dad read to me sometimes too; he liked Andersen: his favourite was ‘The Tinder-Box’ in which the soldier ended up rich and married the princess. I could never understand how that soldier was able to lift the dog with eyes as big as the Round Tower in Copenhagen — that dog would have had to be at least as big as a house. ‘I’ve given that a lot of thought,’ said Dad. ‘The soldier was down inside the hollow tree when he saw that dog, and because it was a magic place everything around the dog got bigger, the inside of the tree and the soldier too; that’s how come he could lift it — he sort of grew into the job.’ Dad’s name was Daniel. If anyone asked him, ‘As in the lion’s den?’ he answered, ‘No, as in Jack.’

But I was talking about Mom. She hummed or sang when she was cooking and doing housework. Some were hymns and some were standards and there was one, a tune that she made up for Psalm 137 that she used to sing almost under her breath; sometimes she just hummed it: ‘“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion …”’ I don’t recall that she ever got all the way through it. We were not a religious family but Mom sometimes turned to the Bible in the same way that Dad turned to Jack Daniel’s.

‘What’s Zion?’ I asked her. Dad was down in his workshop and we were alone.

She was ironing at the time, and she paused and blew out a little breath. ‘Sonny,’ she said — she always called me that when she was about to impart maternal wisdom. ‘Sonny, Zion is where it was a whole lot better than it is now and you never get back there.’

‘What are we supposed to do then?’ I asked her.

She tilted her head to one side and looked at me across a few thousand miles of prairie. ‘“The ants are a people not strong,’” she said, ‘“yet they prepare their meat in the summer.” Proverbs, that is; I forget the chapter and verse.’

‘What does that mean, Mom?’

‘It means that winter is always coming, and don’t you forget it,’ and she went back to the ironing.

Dad patented several things: in his notebook there were sketches and notes for a new kind of safety razor, magnetic buttonholes, and a self-cleaning comb. Mom told me that the razor had actually been made and sold but hadn’t brought in much and was quickly superseded by a better one. Dad never got to develop all the ideas in the notebook. One rainy night in November after I was in bed but still awake I
heard him go out and start the car. When everything was all right Dad was careless about the noise he made shutting the front door, but this time he left the house without a sound so I knew that he and Mom must have had an argument. Later I woke up when the police came to the door. They told Mom that Dad was dead: he’d wrapped his car around a tree while driving under the influence. He was forty-two years old.

Next morning I took his notebook off the work-bench, and when Mom asked me if I’d seen it I said no. I could read most of the words but I couldn’t understand very much and there were numbers and symbols I couldn’t make head or tail of. I hid the notebook in a cigar box in my sock drawer for when I got older.

Right after Dad’s death my mother was on the phone a lot. A big man in a dark-blue suit came to the house, his aftershave was like a kick in the head; his eyes looked as if they’d been shot in with a rivet gun; you could tell from his smile that he enjoyed his work. He looked around at the furniture and the carpet and the wallpaper. He had a briefcase and he took some papers out of it, then Mom sent me out of the room while she talked to him. I listened at the door but they were too quiet for me to hear anything; I looked through the keyhole and saw Mom signing the papers.

After he left she just stood there looking out of the window. I asked her if that man was going to take away the furniture and she said no. Then I asked if he was the undertaker and she said no, there wasn’t going to be a funeral. She told me that some people left their brains to science and Dad was doing that with his whole body. ‘His brain too?’ I said. I was thinking of all the ideas he had in his head, like perpetual motion; I was thinking of the words he hadn’t said.

‘Well, yes,’ she answered, ‘they’re taking all of him.’

‘What are they going to do with him?’ I wanted to know. I wondered what kind of experiments they had in mind. I could see him high up on a platform in a thunderstorm where lightning would strike him.

‘They’ll do whatever scientists do,’ she said, ‘and he’s bringing home more money this way than he did when he was alive, so be proud of your father. He finally achieved perpetual motion.’

‘Is he in Heaven now?’

‘I don’t know where he is but it’s just you and me from now on. He’ll be missed at the liquor store but they’ll have to stagger on without him.’

‘I’ll miss him too, won’t you?’

‘Oh yes, but, like they say, there is a Balm in Gilead.’

‘Where’s Gilead?’

‘I’ll let you know when I find it.’

The first I heard of what was really happening was that afternoon. I was out on our front walk killing ants with a hammer and Herbie Johnson came by. ‘Are they going to let you watch when they crash-test your dad?’ he asked me.

‘What are you talking about?’ I said.

‘Don’t you know? They’re going to strap him into the driver’s seat of a car and crash the car into a wall — they must figure he’s got the experience for the job.’

‘Don’t come around here with that crazy kind of talk,’ I said. ‘I’ll crash
you
into a wall.’

‘My father works at Novatek,’ said Herbie, ‘and he’s the one who told your mother they pay good money for dead bodies and they use them for dummies to test how safe a car is.’

That’s when I punched him in the face and he went
home. And then I was left with Dad in my head singing ‘From This Moment On’ and smiling at me. Years later I bought a Frank Sinatra tape with that song on it but I always fast-forwarded past it. Psalm 137, though, that my mother used to sing to her own tune — I’ve got that on a CD with Boney M: ‘Rivers of Babylon’. ‘By the reevers of Bobby-lahn …’ they sing, and they don’t sound as if they’re sitting down by the water — they’re on a long dusty road and they’re moving right along, going somewhere. I’ve got recordings of Psalm 137 by the choirs of King’s College and Trinity College, Cambridge, Westminster Abbey, and Wells Cathedral, and they all sound like choirs in a church.

It was the summer of the last year of his life when Dad took me out to Cranbrook to see the Orpheus fountain by Carl Milles. We drove out there one afternoon, just the two of us. The heat waves were shimmering over Woodward Avenue and the smell of the upholstery in the car almost made me sick; when we got on to Lone Pine it was cooler because of the trees. We parked the car, walked through gates and an archway, went past a sculpture that I don’t remember, then down some steps, along a promenade, up some steps and through some columns, and there it was: eight naked bronze figures, male and female, all in a circle around the spray that was coming up in the centre. The figures were realistic but smoother and simpler than real people and very athletic-looking. Some of them had their arms uplifted and some didn’t; all of them seemed to be listening for something, listening so hard that their bodies stretched out and their arms and legs grew longer. All of them had one foot touching some foliage but that was only a support for the bronze; the figures were suspended in mid-air, suspended by their listening. One of the men was holding a bird in his right
hand and with his left he motioned it to be quiet. The girl to his right had turned her face away and raised her hands, almost touching either side of her head as if she was saying, ‘No, it’s too much!’ The listening seemed to go all the way up above the green of the trees to the blue sky and white clouds over us. There were mallard ducklings swimming in the fountain. The bronze looked cool; the water sparkled in the sun and a breeze was blowing the spray towards us. There was a smell of fresh-cut grass and flowers, purple ones that I didn’t know the name of and yellow daisies. I heard birds in the trees. ‘Remember,’ said their voices, ‘remember the listening of the bronze people.’

‘What are they listening for?’ I said to Dad.

‘The music of Orpheus. He made such wonderful music that he almost brought his wife back from the dead.’

‘Are these people dead?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Where’s Orpheus?’

‘He’s not here.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is one of the women his wife?’

‘I don’t think so. All that’s here is his music and these people listening.’

I listened hard but all I heard was the whisper of the spray and the splashing of the water falling back into the fountain basin. ‘I don’t hear any music,’ I said.

‘The music is in the silence,’ said Dad.

But I thought it must be very faint and far away from those eight in the fountain; they seemed to be trying hard to hear it, yearning for it to come to them. One of the men seemed to be saying, ‘Louder!’ with his arms up, both fists
almost clenched as if he was trying to pull the music out of the air.

‘I don’t think they can hear it either,’ I said to Dad. There was a sadness welling up in me that was almost choking me. ‘They’re trying but they can’t hear it. Can you?’

‘No.’

‘But you said the music was in the silence.’

‘It is but it’s not music you can hear. You keep trying but you can’t hear it. Maybe that’s all there is.’