The Invisibles (20 page)

Minutes later the men share a front seat like they haven't in years, only now it's a police cruiser and not a truck recently resurrected on cinder blocks. When they reach the Kelly plantation
the sheriff parks by a row of gardenias, where they can see the moonstruck white house through an alley of live oaks. Daniel broods quietly while the sheriff, sensing his ire, takes an apologetic tone. Someone has put the torch to four plantation houses in as many weeks, and not half an hour ago the sheriff saw a first-story light blink on and in the window, briefly, Daniel's unhappy stepson, Clive. Aware of Clive's records as a juvenile and adult felon, and how the newspapers would make the confused kid out to be a villain, Charlie Boudreaux suggests that maybe someone else struck the matches at the other fires. “He's snooping around in there, probably.”

“Dumbshit's probably looking for something to pawn,” Daniel croaks, not wanting to admit his fear that Clive is using the mansion as a flophouse. His combination of logic and grouchiness satisfies the sheriff, whose loyalties to friend and to city compromise each other. The Kelly family hired Clive to clear the weeds from their garden and cut the lawn, not to clean the house. Before they left for the summer they told him to stay outside unless there was an emergency. They left a copy of these instructions with the sheriff's office. Charlie Boudreaux should go in there and arrest Clive, but Daniel knows the man he called his best friend for more than half his days won't do that.

They see Clive's flashlight beam touch a window on the third floor. A minute later they spy the same light on the floor below. The sheriff sighs and looks at his steering wheel. “If I called it in they'd think the kid burned them other houses. I mean I've seen Clive around town. He moves like somebody beat him in the back of a truck going sixty and then threw him out the back. He's not the destructive kind, not anymore. But those people will think what they want.”

“He's mentally a child. He missed more of a decade of growing up because he was getting stoned. Basically he was switched off.”

“That's the reason I came to you.”

“Thanks, Charlie. I'll go get him.”

“Promise me it won't happen again, Daniel.”

Daniel can't promise what another person will or won't do, least of all his troubled stepson, who's recently come home after twelve years away, with a set of yolky eyes he developed by shooting New Orleans heroin into his veins. His pocked forearms look sprayed with birdshot, a record of compulsive behavior that one day convinced Daniel to copy the keys to the Kelly mansion while Clive showered.

Daniel promises the sheriff that his stepson won't trespass in the house again, having no other way to get out of the cruiser without a disquisition on free will. In the yard he ducks a bush to be startled by a white statue, a naked youth reaching out an open hand to the stars, or maybe the figure has flung them up there. Through the shrills of the cicadas comes a panther shriek, far away and quick, like a girl gladly frightened, and Daniel catches his breath. He knows that big cat, drove up on it once on the side of the road, where it cringed in his pickup truck's headlights. So near he could've blasted it with the shotgun he keeps behind the seat. Since the panther eats local house cats, killing it would have made him a local hero. The thought never crossed his mind as he admired the crouching feline, who let Daniel see his teeth. Years ago, men from the state brought them in vented trucks from Florida and loosed them in the woods to prey on feral pigs. Now folks want the big cats dead, too, and these days they're rare. Daniel laid on his horn and frightened the panther into the woods.

He lets himself into the Kelly mansion's carpeted entrance hall, eyes peeled for his stepson. He doesn't know what to expect from the twenty-nine-year-old, who talks and acts like a teenager, and he scans the floor for the silhouette of the overdosed. He knows the figure in his own bank account and guesses he can afford the
rehab clinic, providing he can find Clive and get him out of here before a less charitable sheriff shows up.

“Clive,” he says, his voice small in the darkness. “You in here?”

He's drawn by a lighted doorway into an old parlor. Electric lights reflect in a small crystal chandelier, and once bathed in the bleeding color of the yellow walls, he gazes out into the hall with the unreasonable fear that some phantom will leap out at him. There's a stairwell leading to the darkness upstairs.

“Clive?” He's reluctant to go up, even though Clive might be somewhere above his head, tying off this very moment. He looks over a row of dull Kelly portraiture and sees a player piano in one corner of the brightened room, its polished wood gathering dust. He flips a switch on its backside panel, and the keys begin to move, producing a doleful song he identifies as a hymn. He levers up the volume, trusting Clive, if he's still conscious, to hear the music and come downstairs. Daniel used to do this when he was dating Clive's mother, Lucy, and the boy would hide in the house. Daniel would be in his best suit and aftershave, Lucy in pearls with her hair up, and Clive would be hidden in a closet somewhere in the house. While Lucy clicked on her high heels from room to room, shouting her son's name, Daniel would pull a record from the bookshelf and play it on the hi-fi, sending a tune through the air and along the floorboards to wherever Clive lay, and telling the boy that the two of them were bound to one another in ways that transcended the visual world. After a minute or so, Clive would emerge, pleased with himself, and run to Daniel, in whose arms he was safe from his mother's spanking.

Daniel doesn't hug his stepson now that Clive's grown. He rarely touches anyone. People standing too close give him gooseflesh. In his pinstriped pajamas and scuffed workboots, he watches the stairwell, nervous about the dark still rooms around him and the low ceiling and close walls in this one. He lights a
cigarette to make himself comfortable. All day up on the ferry's driving platform, in the high heat, these little rolls of tobacco make constant companions. He lights each new one with the cherry of the last.

Clive creaks down the steps like a sullen child. In the parlor he stops beside an old yellow globe, looking at brown and green countries and beige oceans rather than make eye contact with his stepfather. “How'd you know where I was?”

Daniel gives him an incredulous look, but Clive doesn't seem to have a sense of his own wrongdoing ingrained in that bowed head of his. The kid stands there, frowning at his shoes, waiting for instruction. Daniel wonders how quickly an addict's conscience breaks down when the need for oblivion kicks in. “I knew because you almost got arrested.”

Clive swallows and glances up. Almost hopeful, he says, “Really?”

“You realize that there's someone running around setting fires in these houses? Are you awake when you're walking around? Do you know that someone is scaring the bejesus out of the good old boys? Are you functional?” Daniel's sure to be harsh. He wants a lesson to sink in. “Get out in the truck. You're giving me a ride home.”

“You're wearing your pajamas,” Clive tells him. Weary-eyed, shiftless with his thumbs in his back pockets, he obeys, almost tripping on the last step down. His disorderly gait reminds Daniel of himself as a youngster, though they don't share a drop of blood.

Daniel keeps a stern face as he follows the shamed young man through the balmy night to his truck. He's relieved when he's not questioned about getting in the front door and remembers what it is to be young and fear people of authority. Certain of their power, you enslaved yourself to them. Clive climbs up into the driver's seat and when he hesitates before unlocking the passenger-side door,
Daniel raps sharply on the window to keep him in the present. The cab reeks sharply, of what precisely, Daniel can't tell. He can't smell much of anything anymore, but that sense can be a curse here, in the land of paper mills and oil refineries. He lifts a cigarette to his dried lips.

“Don't light that,” Clive says. He lowers his eyes and mumbles, “I spilled gas in here earlier. I'll clean it up in the morning.”

“Unbelievable, Clive. You're lucky it was Charlie Boudreaux who caught you in there.”

“I was just looking around.”

“Better not be getting high in there.”

“I haven't done anything but drink a few beers since you brought me back here,” Clive says quietly, watching the road.

“Whatever you're doing, do it during the daytime, when it won't scare people. And don't think you can pawn a single silver spoon from that house. There's not an antique dealer in three hundred miles of here that won't know where it came from.” Daniel watches his stepson steer them around bends in the forest highway. Clive's window is down, and crushed bugs accumulate on his bare arm. He takes no notice, as if, mentally, he's all horizontal skies interrupted by chaotic squiggles of thought. Daniel taps his cigarette back into the box, calculating he has less than two hours to sleep before the alarm clock on his dresser does its noisy dance. Above them, stars of varying brightness evoke the many ceilings of the night sky. Not a rain cloud in sight.

Clive left home at seventeen and spent twelve years in New Orleans, working the till in a voodoo shop near the river end of the Quarter to pay for his drug habit. Daniel and Lucy knew the location of the store, but they never visited the business when they drove down for a weekend or the odd day of drinking. At that point in time Lucy didn't want to see her son again.
She'd found him passed out on the bathroom floor, screamed unforgivable things at him, and seen him driven off by sheriffs too many times. She'd given up trying to make him behave. She said he could come home when he was ready. It seemed unjust to Daniel, whose father had been fond of saying that you knew who truly loved you by who fought back when they came to drag you off.

Once when they were a block away from Clive's place of employment, drinking margaritas in plastic cups and feeling young and loose-limbed, Daniel proposed they walk over to the tourist shop. He had collected an ad from a window, a slick pamphlet with a cartoon of a bloodshot eye on the front. Lucy puckered her lips and shook her head. Visiting that haunted city was her vacation, and if one of its ghosts belonged to her, it just made her that much realer. She shrugged off his suggestion, and the afternoon began to wind down. Daniel tried to imagine what his wife was thinking, holding her hand on the patio while they ordered another round and then another to reignite the dying day. Matching with eager nods and laughs the cheer she forced into her face and voice, he was sorry, devoting his affections entirely to her, damning himself. Lucy needed to free herself for an afternoon, to be nothing more than a woman in a city of hedonists, with a man at her side, a man who was him, after all. Maybe he'd never understood her in the first place, and when he insisted that he did she'd patted his hand. After that, he didn't mention Clive again. And then, after years of forgetting, after new reasons for grief replaced the old ones, the telephone rang, and when Daniel picked it up, Clive spoke to him from the other side. Though he hadn't thought of his stepson in years, though he no longer saw the face in the framed pictures he'd left hanging on the walls, though twelve years had made Clive a damaged man, Daniel knew the voice that spoke his name with trepidation. He knew that Clive was in trouble. There could be no
other reason for the call. Though his obligations to his stepson had gone with Lucy, Daniel felt the boy's house all around him where now he, stepfather, outsider, lived alone. He wanted badly to tell Clive how sorry he was, to make up for what he felt he'd taken, which did not belong to him. On the other end of the line, Clive rambled on about an adrenalin shot, a mugging, an eviction, debt, his sick girlfriend. Both men comprehended that the other was overjoyed.

Daniel spoke with so much force that he silenced Clive. “Where are you? What is your exact location?” he said. “I'm going out to my truck right now. I'm coming to get you.”

The long drive gave him time to reflect on living without family. His parents were gone, leaving him with no one to visit, and he'd come to forget the dense familiarities of living in a house of people's habits. To walk into a living room and be at peace with the child sprawled out on the couch, rapping along with a music video. To find a woman in his bedroom, trying on earrings in her underwear. His days had grown so meager with what was not exactly asceticism and not exactly self-neglect that he worried he wouldn't know what to say when he found Clive and the girl he'd said would be with him. Living alone and working all week on the driving platform, he felt, had reshaped him into a subhuman creature, a being lean and smart and distrustful of folks, and he was ashamed of himself. He was sweating, speaking in a voice more boyish than the one he knew as his own, when he pulled up to the curb where Clive and Haley stood guard over two suitcases. He saw they were younger than he'd imagined, she even younger than Clive but just as worn down, and both of them tough in the way young people are, how they held their breath in and then spoke all at once, eager to impress him. They were just as nervous as he, and the ride home, three packed into the cab of his pickup, was just as silent as the drive down.

After coming back from the Kelly plantation, unable to sleep, Daniel thinks about these things and tries to reconstruct the events of the day, to figure out exactly why Clive was in that house. The kid didn't seem stoned, just confused, and the thought of the meek young man setting two-hundred-year-old houses on fire is too much a stretch of the familiar for his old mind to perform this late. He tries to remember whether he saw Clive this afternoon, after work, and he thinks maybe he did, though it could have been yesterday. Each day here feels the same, and between fixing things in the garage and driving that big orange barge back and forth across the river from five until three, he barely finds time to eat his supper, let alone babysit his stepson and Haley. They're grown-up, wayward perhaps, but not so much as others in town, the slobs on the roadhouse stools or the drones who surf the net all day at the public library. Sometimes Clive and Haley drive out of town at sunset to speed though the swamp woods in the dark in the red pickup he gave Clive as a homecoming gift. They don't go to the bars, not since Clive's second night back in Saintsville, when he got rolled over a pool table and thrown out into a gravel lot for saying the wrong thing to a deer hunter. Daniel thinks that they just go for long drives. That's what he did at their age. The cockleburs along the highway grew to your knee, and dead dogs lined the highway, and you just drove and drove, as if in search of a portal to someplace else. And after a while, it was like you'd found your way through, even though you were still rumbling around the coastal plain in your truck. He likes the thought of Clive and Haley cruising through the dark, young and pretty and too stupid to think beyond the easy intimacies at the disposal of all lovers. It reminds him of the good days with Lucy, before she got sick and he became the community recluse.