The Sky Below (2 page)

 

I said,
You're wrong,
and ran into my tent and pulled the strings in after me. I heard Caroline, in her snowboots, thump down the stairs and out the front door. She was going to go sledding on cardboard boxes down the hill at school with her big, smart
friends, her black hair flying out behind her. I walked my bare feet on the raspberry silk wall first one way, then the other. I wasn't leaving that house, not ever. Then I jumped up, out of the tent, and ran downstairs. I stood at the foot of the stairs, looking at the City that all but covered the living room floor. I needed to know that it was still there.

The City was our masterpiece. We waited all year to build it every Christmas, my mother and my sister and I, out of the opened Christmas boxes and torn wrapping paper and empty paper towel tubes that my mother had saved up for the construction, plus my Legos and the murals Caroline drew of thriving citizens with lots of black hair on long rolls of butcher paper, and we had little wooden trees and rectangular colored blocks stacked like logs to make buildings or enclosures or the tracks of city trains. We began the City next to the Christmas tree, still in our pajamas, excitedly clearing a space on the floor. My mother moved the armchair out of the way. My father, in the years that he was there, usually watched for a while, then went out to the garage. Caroline would stand with her hands on her hips, surveying the bare plain of wood where the City was going to go.

“Don't start yet, Gabe. We have to make a plan.”

But my mother was usually already cutting the scalloped circles out of wrapping paper that would become the shimmering cartoon forms of trees pasted onto bits of cardboard, or folding the rough origami birds of construction paper that would perch, taped, on the wrapping paper and cardboard treetops. She was small and quite thin, like the dancer she had wanted to be; she liked to go barefoot, even in the Massachusetts house in the winter. While Caroline and I argued about where the first building was going to go, my mother, in her nightgown, would be curled up with her little white feet in that chair draped in emerald-green velvet, cutting out trees and birds and lions for the zoo. She walked barefoot into the growing City, towering
over all the buildings and streets, a shiny wrapping-paper lion in her fingers. I remember the hem of her nightgown brushing City Hall, which was made out of a box that said
Jupiter Telescope.
Caroline and I always built the City, but our mother populated it and made everything that grew in it. She affixed each origami bird to its treetop with great concentration and a light, sure touch.

Once the City was built, it often stayed up, winding into the dining room and bordering the kitchen, for months. Caroline and I stepped gingerly around it, not tumbling any of its buildings or houses. My mother seemed not to notice anything out of the ordinary about it, as if everyone had one in the living room: Turkish families would have minarets in theirs, Japanese families would make theirs with footbridges. Our City was American, civic-minded, happily functional. We spent one entire winter on an elaborate outdoor elevator system, with real pulleys. When the three of us packed up that house, we kept finding stray rectangular blocks and old wrapping-paper dogs and horses and hedges fluttering, half torn, in the corners of rooms and under the furniture.

Caroline said, “We should have built a City and left it here. For the new people to see.”

“No,” I said. I was so sure we would be back.

On that winter morning, after I sprang downstairs to make sure the City was still there, I ran, the cold burning my bare feet, out to the garage, as if my father might still be there, too, hiding. He wasn't. Instead, the unfinished bodies of his guitars hung from a length of clothesline in the gloom: tawny, curvilinear, hollow. I put my toe on an oil stain on the concrete where the truck had been before, but my toe remained unmarked, only cold. Why hadn't he taken the guitars with him? Were there already unfinished guitars hanging from the ceiling where he was going? I walked underneath the row of guitars with my arms raised overhead, just barely able to brush the
lower wooden curves with my fingertips. They swayed, clicked together with a hollow sound, but didn't fall. He had left his transistor radio on his worktable. I turned it on. Scratchy, incomprehensible noise came out—a sports channel? I held it to my ear. Men shouted excitedly from what seemed like a great distance. I studied the other things he had left behind—rags, nails, the knee-high machine I wasn't allowed to touch that turned flat planks into elegant spirals of wood. I touched the machine now. It was cold and completely still, as if it had been petrified. I clambered into his workbench chair, my bare feet dangling. The toolboard was empty, dotted with a few hooks.

A bit of glossy paper protruded from the space between the empty toolboard and the garage wall. I pulled it; a creased
Penthouse
slid out. I spread it open on the workbench and slowly turned the slick, colorful pages. I knew what women and men looked like, but I had never seen women who looked like this. Smiling, they held their large breasts in their hands. They held their legs open. They licked their own big, round nipples. What were they trying to turn into? Where were the centaurs, the delicate nymphs? These women looked to me as if they wanted to eat themselves up and were trying to decide which part to start on first. I imagined my father at his workbench looking at this same magazine, and I felt myself stir and, immediately, my face burned. I closed the magazine. As I got down from his chair, I stubbed my toe on the wood-twirling machine, sending a red stream of pain into my foot and up my leg.

I grabbed his transistor radio from the worktable and carried it off, through the house and past the City, to my tent, holding my thumb on the place on the dial where he had left it. My toe throbbed. I fell asleep to my father's scratchy, incomprehensible station.

 

After my father left us, my mother changed. All the dance went out of her. She got very quiet and still and listened to my
father's old Bob Dylan records constantly. I thought Bob Dylan sounded like a sarcastic tree stump or some kind of enchanted troll lurking under a bridge. He haunted our house day and night with his endless sorrows. We made it through the first winter because my mother's two older sisters kept bringing things over, casseroles and gloves and hats, and they must have brought money, too, though I never saw them giving it to my mother. We had to keep the heat down low, which made my nose run. The raspberry silk seemed to darken and sag with the chill that was always in the air.

I asked my mother, “Where did he go?”

She said, “To California, the creep. The coward.”

“What's in California?”

“Nothing.”

“Can we go?”

“No.”

She put the casserole in the oven and slammed the door shut. She picked up the scissors to continue cutting out Buy One, Get One Free coupons from the newspaper, though she never did use those coupons. They piled up on the kitchen counter, week after week, like drifts of leaves, acquiring coffee stains and soap spatters.

Why is it that people get so much bigger when they disappear? When he lived with us, my father had always been like an extra planet that had somehow strayed into our solar system: rare, awkward, uncanny. He had never fit, exactly, but now his absence was everywhere, it got into everything, like the sound of Bob Dylan. Gone, he loomed. The car made an ominous noise because of him; the stray cats got into the garbage because of him; the house was cold because of him; idiots looked at my mother in the grocery store because of him and then she dropped the bag on the way to the car, spilling groceries into the slush, and then she burned her finger on the stove when she got home and was just trying to make herself a goddamn cup of herbal tea.

He was like a ghost, bent on some kind of revenge against us. A long time ago, my father had been his high school's football star and even with the curly brown beard and the loose jeans he had seemed formidable, strong. He had once run with extraordinary grace down football fields from Newton to Medford; he could hurl a spinning football for miles; he moved, my mother said, like a panther, which was also the name of his school's team: the Panthers. Even later, long after that glory, you could see the panther in him from time to time. After a few beers, he smiled a panther's smile. His eyes were blue. My mother, curled in his lap in the good years, had looked like a slender beauty to my father's beast, resting unafraid in his power. They looked famous together, then. He never knelt down to hug me; he always picked me up, lifting me high, holding me against him effortlessly. Once he was gone, I wanted him to come back, but I was also afraid that if he came back he would do us all some terrible harm, he would spring, tear us apart with his ferocious paws, claw the lining out of the sofa, sink his teeth into the curtains and shred them, shred us, before springing back into the night.

I asked Caroline as we walked home from school, “Do you think he's coming back?”

She shrugged. “Who cares?”

I started to sniffle, blinking back tears.

She stopped dead, putting her knapsack down on the snowy sidewalk. She took me by the shoulders. “Listen to me, Gabriel. You can't be like that. Things are going to get worse. We're screwed.”

“How do you know that?”

“Mom told me. We don't have any money. We don't have any credit cards that work. People are suing us about work that Daddy didn't finish.”

I had never exactly thought about money before, not in any concrete way, but our not having any suddenly seemed like an
enormous pit into which we were about to fall, and I was afraid. My father had dug the pit. I began to cry, and then I peed myself, the hot pee running down my leg and into my sock. I cried harder as it reached my toes. I felt I might pee forever, that I'd engulf the world in pee, a yellow tide washing over everything, flooding all the cities, drowning all the people.

“Gabe, shit. Stop. Stop it.”

“I can't.” Panic engulfed me, made my ears hot, though it was so cold outside and the pee was already chilling my foot. I tried desperately to stop peeing, which only made me pee more. “Are we going to die?”

“Only if I kill you for being such a retard.”

“I hate him.”

“Take a number,” Caroline said, picking up her knapsack. I stopped peeing, more or less, and we trudged home in silence. My pee and my tears dried on my skin. Why hadn't I heard his truck that night, pulling away? That truck was always so loud. I could have banged on the window, gotten everyone up.

Sometimes I imagined that my father had had another family the whole time, even when we were in Bishop, a secret family. And that they all moved to San Diego together; he finally chose. Maybe that was what my mother had meant by “coward,” or maybe she meant something else. I no longer understood what she meant by anything. My father had done that, too: scrambled language. It was all so unfair, so wrong. I lay in my silk tent at night and imagined that he was with his other family, building big houses and throwing footballs to his other sons on the beach, who caught every throw in their big, meaty arms, and I hated what I thought of as
his fucking guts.
He could have his stupid fucking California family, I thought with voluptuous contempt, like shooting arrows high into the air.

But my arrows didn't matter. As the winter dragged on, we were caught in his enormous, spectral grip. It dimmed the lights and thinned the soup, burned the pancakes, turned over
the garbage cans, knocked the City flat, put the needle back at the beginning of
Blood on the Tracks.

 

One damp March afternoon after my father left, I was sitting on the floor in the kitchen trying to get one of my papier-mâché dinosaur's legs to stay on with more glue. It had fallen off during an epic hundred-year dinosaur war. Bob Dylan was complaining about everything on the record player. My mother, in a kitchen chair, had her back to me. The chair had an uncertain leg, too. My mother wore her hair in a long braid all the time now, like a red rope reaching down for a red anchor. Her face was bony. She had on two sweaters, both very fuzzy and bright white. I thought she looked like the North Star. She was also wearing a pair of my father's huge, old slippers with woolly hiking socks. She wore those slippers every day, big soles slapping on the wood floors.

Aunt Sheila said, “Mary, Kathleen ran into Mark the other day.”

I glanced up. My mother was sweeping crumbs into a little design on the table with a forefinger. I wondered what the design was: a whale? In my memory, the light in the kitchen was yellow, but I don't know if that's possible, if it was really yellow.

“Remember Mark?” continued Aunt Sheila. “He went into the Peace Corps?”

“I remember,” said my mother. “Mr. Earnest Mustache. Mr. Saltwater Conversion. Isn't he gay now? Maybe that's what happened to Jeff. Maybe he went gay.” She laughed roughly.

“Mary,” said Aunt Sheila, leaning forward. I could see the tip of her sharp nose. “You really have to focus.”

“Well,” said Kathleen in her gentle, reasonable way, “I ran into Mark at the Galleria and your name came up. Anyway, his uncle has this property—”

My mother's red braid didn't move, no part of her moved, as she said, “A property?”

“In Florida,” Kathleen said. “A motel. He needs a manager.” She paused.

“It's warm there,” said Sheila. “The kids can swim.”

I took the dinosaur leg off, put it on again, backward. I thought about what it would be like to be a dinosaur with a backward leg, if that leg would walk backward on its own.

Sheila said, “I'll sell the house for you. I won't take a commission. We can get you something, at least, for the house. You might be able to break even, after they clear up Jeff's mess.” Aunt Sheila, twice divorced, was a real estate agent.

My mother didn't say anything. Her red braid remained perfectly still. After a while, she said, “Did you tell Daddy about this?”