The Bleeding Season (17 page)

At the end of Sycamore I turned right onto Bridge Street and followed it slowly, reducing my speed to a creeping roll.  Like everything else, the street had changed over time.  Some new inexpensive homes had been built where small sections of woods had once resided, and many of the houses had been renovated, but for the most part it looked basically the same as it had years before when I’d grown up here.  Bridge Street, named for the small wooden bridge built above a stream that cut across the very end of the road, was still a relatively poor neighborhood abutting the beginnings of more exclusive parts of town.  The last outpost, the last street where houses weren’t quite as big, where cars weren’t quite as new and where people weren’t quite as well dressed, even after all these years, good bad or indifferent, Bridge Street summoned true feelings of
home.
  Yet at the same time I felt strangely uncomfortable here as well.  Familiarity, in this case, did not exclusively breed warmth and solace.  I studied first the stretch of sidewalk where my mother had taught me to ride a bicycle, then the ancient stone wall where I’d had many a crash and where years later my friends and I congregated and spent hours talking, smoking cigarettes and hanging out.  Despite these and a wealth of other landmarks that invoked fond childhood reminiscences, this hallowed ground also brought forth a great sense of uneasiness in me.  Good and bad, even here, even amidst the perceived simplicity of the past, had melded into a single enigmatic entity.

Blinking away phantoms, I pulled over in front of our old house.  I lived less than two miles away, but seldom returned here.  Bridge Street was out of the way, a place people only went to if that was their destination, and it was rarely mine.

The house, a small single-story set back from the road had sat in the middle of a dirt lot when I’d lived there, but the dirt had been replaced by a lawn years ago, and instead of cracked and weathered shingles, the house now sported relatively new vinyl siding.  Still, beyond the aesthetics, it basically looked the same.  My old bedroom window was now dressed with lacey curtains, and I wondered who lived there these days.  We had never owned the house, and after my mother’s death the landlord sold the property to another family.  Since that time ownership had changed hands again, but I knew nothing of the current tenants.  In fact, as far as I knew none of the families who had resided on Bridge Street at the time of my childhood were still there.  Even smaller-town America had become transient it seemed, the days of families occupying homes for generations relegated to a nostalgic quaintness of yesteryear.

Hesitant to leave the false sense of security the car provided, I turned off the engine and looked to my left, further down the street toward the squat two-story house Bernard and his mother had lived in.  Of all the houses on the street, it was the only one unoccupied, and since Bernard’s mother had died less than a year before, the only one still closely tied to the past.  A modest two-story badly in need of a paint job, the windows were dark, the front yard unkempt and the driveway empty.  Taken over by the bank, it had apparently sat unsold, empty and sealed shut since, and was well on its way to becoming the neighborhood eyesore.  If it remained vacant much longer, the kids in the area would undoubtedly dub it the local haunted house—if they hadn’t already—never realizing just how near the truth they might be.

In her later years, Bernard’s mother had lost much of her beauty to the ravages of cancer.  In and out of the hospital for months, eventually the doctors had admitted there was nothing else they could do for her, and she was sent home to die.  Less than a month later, in the upstairs bedroom just to the right of the staircase, that’s precisely what she did.  Bernard later told me he had been in the room when she died, that he’d held her hand and watched her take her final breath.  I knew all too well what it was like to see that happen.  My mother had died in my arms, gray skin stretched across a face I barely recognized, eyes sunken but open, awaiting things only dying eyes could comprehend.  To watch your physical creator, the human being from whom you came, the literal flesh and blood vessel responsible for your conception and birth, wither and die, was something beyond explanation.  Like soldiers who have survived the horrors of combat, you’d either experienced it or you hadn’t.  You either understood what it was like, what it meant to be infected to your core by such things, or you didn’t.          

She went quietly
, he’d said desperately, as if determined to convince me.
I don’t think she could even feel the pain anymore, she—she went quietly
.  His voice murmured to me from the past, sounding the same as it had through the phone line that morning.  I’d told him how sorry I was, and that I understood what he was going through.

I know,
he’d said.
That’s why I told you first.
 

The squeak of the car door echoed along the pavement as I stepped from the Pontiac.  I made my way slowly along the sidewalk, waiting to cross until I was in front of Bernard’s old house.  Memories ricocheted about—mostly blurs—but large chunks of the past remained elusive.  Particularly those portions of the past tied directly to this street, this neighborhood, and this house.  I had always assumed those uneventful periods in life simply faded and all but vanished over time because they held nothing of particular importance, but now I felt differently.  As I approached the waist-high fence surrounding the backyard, it seemed a better bet that those things just beyond the grasp of memory had been forgotten deliberately, and not because they were unimportant, but because they held within them things too unpleasant to confront.  Even now.

I felt the aged wood against my hand, pushed open the gate and stepped through into the side yard.  The lawn was dead, a victim of winter, the parched brown grass accompanied by occasional patches of bare dirt scattered about like a sprinkling of landmines.  As I moved deeper onto the property an unseen bird shrieked more warning than welcome from its perch somewhere within the half circle of lofty trees just beyond the fence in the backyard.

Several windows on the side and rear of the house had been broken or cracked by thrown stones, and someone had written
Eat Me
in spray paint along the back door.  On the cement patio off the rear entrance sat the same lawn furniture that had been there the last time I had visited, days after his mother had died and only a month or two before the bank had seized the house.  The white plastic table and chairs had faded and cracked in places, and one of the chair legs had been broken clean off and tossed aside.  Next to a weather and time ravaged chaise lounge, several large garbage bags had been left in a neat row along the back of the house.  Each bag had been filled to capacity, and I tried to imagine what they contained.  The day Bernard lost the house he’d been served with a warrant and had been unable to retrieve many of his personal items still trapped within.  I pictured workers gathering items—
his
 items, his mother’s items—and stuffing them into those garbage bags.

Two entire lifetimes seemingly reduced to a neglected shell of a building, some broken furniture and a row of trash bags, as if nothing else remained of either of them.

I looked up at the back of the house and the darkness on the other side of the smudged windowpanes on the second floor.  The sensation of someone watching me from just beyond the swathe of shadows rattled my already frayed nerves.  “Bernard,” I whispered. “Are you here?”

The trees, stirred by a momentary breeze, answered for him.

Small windows along the foundation of the house reminded me of the cellar in New Bedford where he had hanged himself.  But this was his home, a place of history, so what had Bernard conjured here, in this house where he’d once claimed the Devil sometimes spoke to him?  What demons had he summoned and brought to life here?  And
why
?  Why had he done it in the first place?  Why had he listened when evil beckoned—even if it had come from within him—why had he chosen to embrace it?

I moved to the edge of the patio and crouched down; eyes fixed on the old chaise lounge, its canvas backing tattered and soiled.  What had I seen and experienced here, incidents my mind had relegated to hazy spirits that haunted me from the shadows even now?  How had they blinded me, stolen my vision and left a void where their memory should have existed instead?  Or had I given it away, buried the knowledge so deeply myself that it no longer seemed real?

If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out
.

Just as a lie, told countless times in one’s own mind eventually becomes memory rather than fantasy, blurring the line between that which was imagined and that which actually took place, could the same be true of real experiences?  If one pretended a literal occurrence never happened with enough passion and over a sufficient amount of time, did it eventually cease to exist in the conscious mind?  Did it too blur the lines between the imaginary and the actual?  Even as I reached for the decaying chaise lounge, I knew the answer to those questions was yes.

On particularly warm and sunny days the chaise lounge was always moved to the center of the backyard, where Bernard’s mother could lay out and sunbathe, the house blocking any view from the road and the trees in back forming a barrier between her and the houses beyond.  How many times had I seen her stretched out under summer sun, skin browned and glistening with tanning lotion, head back, eyes closed, chin tilted toward the sky, soft blonde hair contrasting with the gaudy flowery pattern on the padded pillow of the chaise lounge,
Jackie-O
sunglasses and a fluffy white beach towel resting next to a portable radio on the grass, playing disco tunes always a bit louder than necessary?  How many times had I watched her breasts, barely contained in a bright bikini top, rise and fall, her legs outstretched, toes pointed like a prone ballerina while the sun caught the gold bracelet adorning her ankle?  How many times had I touched myself and thought of her—my friend’s
mother
, for Christ’s sake—
how many times
?

In those years before she’d become sick she was beautiful, but not like everyone else’s mom.  Linda was different.  She was still a parent, but younger, sexier, more like us than other adults.  She’d possessed an impish quality, with expressive light blue eyes, a tiny nose and thin though shapely lips, dyed blonde hair that she kept relatively short in length but that was thick and always a bit wild, as if she’d not quite had the time to style it properly, and a deep, bawdy laugh that sounded implausibly obscene coming from such an otherwise delicate woman.  So delicate, in fact, that she often seemed practiced, studied in the ways of carrying oneself in an unquestionably female, unmistakably sexual, undeniably alluring manner.  In a boring town like Potter’s Cove, she was the most glamorous being any of us had ever laid eyes on.  A misplaced movie starlet banished with her bastard son to the ends of the Earth, sentenced to a life of boredom and loneliness in a place where but for those who ridiculed her, the only attention a woman like Linda Moore was paid was at local bars after dark.  I’d once heard my mother talking on the telephone with a friend about her, about how she had gone from her native New Bedford to New York City, where she had become involved with some shady characters.  Underworld types who liked to have a woman like Linda on their arms and in their beds.  But there had been a murder, so the story went, a mob hit where she had been caught in the middle of a bad situation and fled.  She had returned home pregnant, with a drinking problem and a bad reputation, and ended up in Potter’s Cove.  Most felt her stay would be temporary, that a party girl without a party would quickly tire of life outside the fast lane and eventually return to it.  And in a sense, she did, albeit a small town version.  Under more typical circumstances, she was the kind of girl who left the area and went on to bigger things in more sensational locales.  But instead she’d become a scandalous woman the older townies spoke about softly, sometimes in outright whispers, hands raised to cover their mouths and eyes cast askance; a woman most grown men and teenage boys alike fantasized about, and a woman Bernard worshipped.

I stood up and stepped back, away from the house, and again watched the upstairs windows for a time.  The sense that someone was watching me surfaced a second time, though I had the impression whoever or whatever it was had now moved to some point behind me—perhaps the trees just beyond the fence.  I ignored the feeling and without looking back walked slowly around to the side of the house from which I’d come.  As I closed the gate I glanced at the backyard, gradually lifting my eyes to the still gently swaying trees.

Satisfied that no one was there, I crossed to the front of the house.  The front door, a door we had always been told to knock on once and then feel free to enter through, drew my attention.  It was an odd thing, to simply knock once then walk into someone else’s home, not to mention a practice foreign to me and in direct opposition to the more formal rules of etiquette my mother had taught and insisted I adhere to.  But it was Linda’s rule.  And that was another thing.  Calling an adult, particularly a friend’s mother, by their first name was not done and considered disrespectful.  But again, it was Linda’s rule.  So, when visiting, I’d knock once on the front door then enter, and whenever in her company I’d address her simply as
Linda
, just like everyone else.

The countless times I had walked in and caught Bernard’s mother in some state of undress trickled through my mind, images of flirting ghosts and sneering demons blurring one into the next to form a single spectral whirlwind.  So often when I stopped by she just happened to be scantily or sexily clad, or was changing or had just stepped out of the shower, a skimpy towel somehow managing to cover all the right spots, though just barely, except for those occasions when it slipped or fell completely away to reveal a quick flash of nipple, buttock or pubic hair as she nonchalantly climbed the stairs or pranced into her bedroom.  In those days, I’d often wondered if she did the same thing when Bernard’s other friends came to the house.