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Chapter 7
  Marty Comes Home

Marty crouched on the rooftop above Gerald’s bedroom and watched the road to see if his mom and dad were close behind him. He placed one hand on the eave above him for balance. As he watched and caught his breath, he imagined he was a gargoyle, one of the monster-statues that perched above graveyards and banks to scare off the evil spirits. Gargoyles sat the same way he was sitting, on the roof looking down at the world, resting their thorny backside on their heels, ready to roll off and glide down on top of whoever happened to walk below.

One shift of weight forward and Marty would tumble into the air. He could fly, maybe, if he willed it hard enough, and never hit the air-conditioner unit below him, or at least land in the bushes outside his bedroom.

Marty wiped the back of his arm against his nose, and it came away wet with snot and blood. The slime dripped out of his nose and he didn’t care. He was a gargoyle now, something that lived above. He watched those living things below go about their business until it was time for him to drop down and consume them.

It was hot and Marty didn’t know how much of the wetness on his chest was blood and how much of it was sweat. They mixed together and stuck his shirt to his chest, and it was clear it was ruined. Marty wiped his cheeks and chin with his sleeve, and sniffed and spit off the roof onto the air-conditioner. The shirt was one of Gerald’s old ones. Most of what he wore was Gerald’s old something; his old boots, his old jeans, his old belts. Marty even inherited Gerald’s old bed when his parents finally moved from Yellow Pine Bay, after Uncle Cooper died and his mom got the house.

This shirt had a stick-figure face on it, a black outline on an otherwise white tee. The stick-figure’s eyes were squinted and his mouth was a squiggled line with a tongue jutting out. Beneath the face were the words,
Gag me
. All of it was stained with blood.

Marty peeled it off, wadded it into a ball, and wiped his nose and chest with the clean parts of it. His nose ached, and the back of his tongue tasted like copper pennies.

He drew back his arm and tossed it through the window, into the dark part of the attic. He let go of the eave and stood and walked across the roof of the house, shirtless, nothing but a pair of jeans and Gerald’s old boots with the worn-through soles. He was like his dad now, shirtless but without the spider-web cape.

Marty paused on the north side of the house and looked back at the road, making sure his mom and dad weren’t coming. Then he ran across the carport, swung one-armed off the mimosa tree, turned and sprinted around the wall separating the yard and carport, and ducked under the small railing along the back door steps. He yanked open the back door and dove into the house, through the breakfast nook area with the table piled high with ceramic teapots and bowls, all of them chipped. He hopped over the old vacuum cleaner lying on its side in the kitchen and made his way to his mom and dad’s bedroom.

Clothes littered the floor in the bedroom, piled like the mountains of junk at the trash dump. Clothing formed heaps in the corners against the wall, at the foot of the bed, on top of the mirrored dresser, and the taller bureau beside the window. The closet door was thrown open and wedged permanently into that position by a drift of clothing that nearly reached the doorknob.

He cut through the living area, making sure nobody was in the house and then ran to Gerald’s bedroom and grabbed Uncle Cooper’s whittling knife, an Old Timer jackknife with a walnut grip; and without looking back at Gerald, he ran through the kitchen and out the back door and through the carport, falling as he made the turn into the yard, but rolling to his feet as if he had bounced off a spring-loaded pad. He grabbed the mimosa tree’s limbs and swung himself onto the carport and glided across the rooftop with his arms out to the side, flying with the wind. If he launched from the peaked roof he would float away, Marty the Gargoyle, off into the world, a concrete statue with a pug-face finally able to defy gravity and sail through the air.

He topped the outcropping above Gerald’s bedroom just as his mom and dad turned into the driveway. Marty crouched there as he had before, in the shadows of the eave, on his heels with his hand balancing him like the hair-trigger on the .38; one little pull and off he would go.

His mom and dad did not look up at the roof but turned into the back gate and disappeared to the backside of the house. They never looked up. Nobody ever looked up.

Marty untied the string securing the shutter away from the attic, took hold of the top of the shutter and swung out to the windowsill. His boots caught the lip, about four inches deep, and with his free hand he lifted the window and crawled inside.

The attic during the day sweltered and breathed and sighed with the breeze drifting east-west through the two openings. The boards were somehow quiet, and if they decided to speak, the sound was benign and natural, the exact creak an old house might make if the wind twisted the wooden frame on its piers.

During the day Marty was fearless and embraced it shadow and light alike. The dust padded his feet and smelled wholesome and musky in his nose, like the inside of a hay barn. It smelled Earthy and Godly. The eaves to Marty’s left and right where the roof met the floor were full of innocent shadows and empty spider-webs. The windows were his eyes, the roof his shelter, and the floor his bedrock. Even the fresh snakeskin he found, still wet and crumpled, didn’t bother him. He opened the window and tossed it outside before hauling his chair to the spot.

In the waking hours nothing moved but Marty. He sat in his toddler chair with the hammer-hatchet and the length of horse-apple wood. He opened his uncle’s Old Timer whittling knife to the short blade, the one with the blunted tip. Uncle Cooper had kept this blade sharp enough to shave fingerprints, and it was this blade Marty used to peel and begin shaping the new handle for his Bowie knife.

As he cut, Marty’s nose stopped throbbing or at least he didn’t notice it throbbing. All he knew was the act of carving, stay with the grain, long thin strokes away from him and away from his left hand and thigh.

He cut away the bark first. The wood beneath was a peeled-yellow and smelled like life, if life had a smell. He held the wood close. His nose was still clogged and sniffing was painful. He lowered the wood and set about cutting away the knots, careful not to dig out too much and leave divots.

When it was smooth, Marty clapped the wood against his hand and was satisfied with how firm it felt. It was heavier than it looked, way heavier than a piece of pine would have been, and he bet the stick alone could knock out a full-grown man.

By the time he formed the finger-grips, fitted to his hand, the sun had dropped behind the huge oak in the yard. Marty stopped carving and listened. It was the same each evening around this time, and he thought of it as an awakening, the way a graveyard might come to life after dusk if he were brave enough to stick around and watch.

As the sun abandoned him, the shadows from the eaves stretched out to the strip of wood flooring running the length of the attic down the middle, and the unfloored spans near the eaves bubbled like black wells. Things stirred in those wells. Snakes and the rats they ate wiggled and scuttled. Spiders shook their webs, hoping for an early-evening meal. The gaps between the rafters could have gone on forever they were so dark, and might swallow him whole.

Marty felt the airflow shift. For a few seconds the breeze halted and then began to blow west-east through the attic, licking against the front part of Marty’s chest where it had been cooling his back all afternoon. It was as if something had come through the window, filled the attic and pushed out the air.

Marty stood. He shoved the toddler chair back and picked up the Bowie knife and held it to the window where he could see in the waning light. He measured the wood against the blade’s tang, and with the sharp edge of the Old Timer he marked how long it should be when he finally cut it to length.

A speck of movement caught Marty’s eye. He squatted and looked outside, through the oak leaves and the air turning orange. Across the yard at the neighbor house, Marty saw a blind raise and a face appear. There were two knees resting beneath the face’s chin, and Marty could just see the far side of Sadie’s black wheelchair.

Sadie stared at Marty, looking up at him with him looking down on her. Here was the gargoyle, Marty thought, making eye contact. He suddenly felt naked with his shirt off and his chest still sticky from his bloody nose.

Sadie finger-waved at Marty, a dainty little-girl wave, as if she might be greeting him or casting a spell or both. Marty shifted the Bowie knife to his left hand, and when he raised his right hand at her, her face changed so suddenly it startled him. She burst into a smile and lowered her eyes.

Marty didn’t wait for her to look back up at him. He closed the window and made his way across the attic, quiet so the waking things wouldn’t wake any faster, out the window and across the roof and into his yard.

When Marty walked through the back door, he smelled the acrid-sweet mix of beer, cigarettes, and marijuana.

He went first to the kitchen and found his drinking glass among the stacks of unwashed dishes. It was a pink plastic cup with teeth marks on the lip, as if someone had held it in their mouth and clenched. Marty had no idea how the marks got on the cup because they were there when his mom found it at the dump and brought it home.

He filled the cup with water from the tap. The water was brownish and tasted like licking a rock, but he was thirsty and used to drinking that sort of water anyway. He wet a paper towel and wiped off his chest, face and arms.

“Marty?” he heard. It was his father in the other room. “Is that you?”

“Yeah,” Marty said.

“Don’t you sass me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s better. Don’t you be disrespecting your elders, boy, or by God I’ll clap you one good.”

Something moved on the kitchen counter, behind the stack of plates and the pot full of black beans his mother cooked last week and never put away. A green hairy film covered the beans.

“Get me a beer, boy,” his father said.

“Yes, sir.”

Marty went to the fridge, opened it, and dug out a Miller Lite. Most of the fridge when his father was home was dedicated to storing his beer. When he wasn’t home, after the beer was gone the fridge remained empty but for a drawer of rotted fruit in the bottom, a swollen jug of milk, half a ham that had been in there since Easter, and a door filled with sauces and ketchup and mayonnaise and salad dressings.

His father sat on the couch leaning over his mother, about to drop a white pill into her mouth. She was laid out wearing the same tank top as she had that afternoon, but her pants had been removed and were crumpled at her feet. Her head rested in his father’s lap, facing the ceiling. Cigarettes and a joint burned on the coffee table, and the television played a commercial involving cartoon bears and the toilet paper they preferred.

Marty could just see the top of his mother’s head. Her hair was splayed across his father’s lap and the arm of the couch, brown with a few blonde highlights. Her mouth opened and closed slowly, gaping, and when Marty reached his father, he saw his mother’s eyes were brown and empty. She didn’t look awake. She barely looked alive.

“You didn’t shake it, did you?” His father pointed to the beer.

“No, sir.”

“Good.” Then he spoke to Marty’s mother. “Take this, baby. It’ll do you good.”

His mother shook her head. It wasn’t much of a movement. She opened her mouth and looked at Marty. The words were slurry and her throat sounded raw. Her lips were full and cracked. “I’m sorry, Sugar. You know mommy loves you. I love you so much, Marty. I’m sorry, Sugar. I’m sorry.”

Her words made his nose ache and his eyes itch. He lifted his hands subconsciously as if to deflect what she said, and she started crying in his father’s lap.

Marty’s father shooed him away. “Leave her alone, boy. She don’t want you none. Go jack off or something. That’s what we used to do when I was your age. That was the only thing Ricky was better at than me.”

His father laughed and the sound was something a human shouldn’t make. It sounded more like it should come from a reptile, or maybe a rooster. The sound was raspy and damaged.

Marty stepped out of his mother’s view and put his father’s recliner between them. His father dropped the pill into his mother’s mouth and lifted her head. He opened the beer and held it to her lips. “Drink, baby. Medicine of the gods, Betsy, medicine of the gods.” He rubbed her throat as she swallowed and said, “Good, baby, that’s it. Good job.”

Marty’s father laid her head back on his lap and looked down on her. She took a deep breath and turned her head into his father’s belly and lay still. It seemed peaceful until his father snaked out a hand and grabbed one of her breasts.

“She’s a fine woman, ain’t she, boy,” his father said. “Thin as a hay straw but that’s the way I like ’em.”

He laughed, pushed her head off his lap, and stood. He leaned over the coffee table and plucked up a pill from the ashtray. He swallowed it along with the rest of his Miller Lite.

His father turned and picked up his mother with a smooth scoop under her knees and armpits. She was limp as an old shirt and just about as light and faded. Without looking at Marty, his father hauled her into the bedroom. Marty heard her weight test the springs on the bed, followed by more sounds, and his father saying things he couldn’t make out, gruff words he probably didn’t want to hear anyway. It seemed to Marty that the spider-web tattoo on his father’s back hung in the doorway long after his father turned out of view.

Chapter 8
  Waking the Attic

After his father took his mother into the bedroom, Marty went into the kitchen to make himself dinner. Another door led into the bedroom from the hallway but Marty couldn’t close it owing to the mound of laundry wedging it open. He heard his father moving about, but he didn’t look that direction, not down the hallway. It was a mess he didn’t want to see.

Marty didn’t bother opening the refrigerator. There was nothing in it anyway. He went to the pantry and kicked aside the broom and mop on the floor sticking out as if they might be trying to escape or died trying. Little white grub-looking creatures spilled out of the cereal, engorged on the sugary puffs of processed grains.

Marty hauled a can of beans to his picnic table, and after he finished eating he tossed the can into the pile of trash that grew on his Uncle Cooper’s built-in kitchen desk. When Uncle Cooper had been here, they sat at the desk and drew plans for what they would build next in his woodshop. They drew up a board with a set of chess pieces, the picnic table, and a couple of picture frames. They drafted plans for the shed, how it would be Marty’s clubhouse once they cleaned it out, with a trap-door getaway and two extra windows.

Now his uncle’s chair, the pens and paper, and his rulers were all buried by junk and fetid food remains. His mother wiped away everything of her brother Cooper, telling Marty when he cried that there was no place in this house for a dead-man’s remains.

Without meaning to Marty glanced down the hall and saw his father straddling his mother beside the bed. He held her stick-legs in front of him and jabbed his hips about, and for an instant he seemed to be a snow skier plowing his way downhill. When he looked up at Marty, he screamed so loud and high that if Marty had not been looking at him, he might have thought the sound came from a woman as her hair was being yanked.

“Get out!”

It startled Marty so much, both the words and the scene, that he pissed his pants. It was no more than a squirt but it came out hot against his crotch. He turned and stumbled through the house and crouched in the hallway outside of Gerald’s bedroom.

His heart pounded in stark contrast to the steady rhythm of Gerald’s breathing tubes. Marty in the back of his mind wondered if anyone had fed Gerald today. He couldn’t remember if his mom had fed him at all in the past few days, or changed his diaper.

Marty crawled over the junk in the hallway and shouldered open his bedroom door. It wouldn’t open all the way, just enough to squeeze through, because his dresser was still wedged against it. When he got inside he leaned into the dresser and pushed it flush against the door.

This had been Marty’s bedroom since he moved in with his uncle, right after he shot Gerald. Before that Marty lived out in Yellow Pine Bay with his mother, Gerald, and his father when he showed up. Their old house had been a lot like this one, what his uncle called a Brown & Root carpenter home. Both houses had a front porch with deep eaves. Both were raised off the ground a few feet. Both were single stories with large attics and sprawling yards. Neither one was brick like the newer homes.

From outside the houses looked the same. They could have been sibling houses built by one architect during the buzzing 1950s, which they probably were. From outside they were both comfortable-looking, country-style rural homes. They were fixer-uppers waiting for the right family to take charge. It was the inside that was different.

While his uncle wasn’t a pristine housekeeper, he at least had not been a collector of junk. Uncle Cooper kept food in the fridge and on the table. He even grew a pepper and melon garden behind the shed which Marty tended after his death with a sad mix of frustration and sorrow, until winter killed it and spring gnawed it into a flurry of briars and thorns.

This had been Uncle Cooper’s bedroom when he was a boy, and he showed Marty the door where he used to climb into the attic and sit when he was Marty’s age. The access point was a twenty-four by twenty-four inch opening with a piece of quarter-inch plywood guarding it, in the top of what used to be Uncle Cooper’s closet. Marty could climb the shelves like a ladder, push up the opening, and pop into the attic like a sailor emerging from a submarine hatch.

When Marty moved in his uncle emptied the room completely, even swept the wood floor, and removed everything but the old mattress that now stood leaning against the wall. Marty could lay on the floor and turn circles, stand at the window, and he didn’t need to climb the roof to get into the attic. He and his uncle spent the afternoons in the woodshop carving and cutting, and they ate dinner sitting next to each other at the new picnic table they made.

“Got to have some place to eat,” Uncle Cooper had said. “Now that I got someone to eat with.” He winked his Dead-Eye at Marty for luck.

Marty slept on that old mattress for a year, in a sleeping bag, in a room that felt as large as the Grand Canyon, so empty it echoed when Marty spoke. He learned to use all the woodshop tools and how to carve and sharpen and cut. He slept in his wide-open bedroom with sawdust in his nose and dirt beneath his fingernails, and sometimes he even managed to forget the slip of a finger and the sharp crack of a .38 pistol that brought him here. Sometimes he even thanked it.

Then one morning Uncle Cooper wouldn’t wake up no matter how hard Marty shook him, and they said he died in his sleep.

“That’s the only way they’ll get me, son,” he had said to Marty. “Them Boogerbears’ll have to get me while I’m sleeping, else I can wink ’em away.”

Everything passed to his mother. The house in one week transformed into something sickly and horrible. His mother infected the property with two truckloads of junk, stuffing it in places throughout the house, wherever they and his father’s two friends could find a place to drop it and shove it against the wall.

The first room they filled had been Marty’s bedroom. They blocked the closet and the window and heaved his mattress against the wall, wedged it in place with more boxes, and spread out Gerald’s old bed and threw boxes on top of the mattress, on top of the dresser, and at the foot of the bed.

After his room was full, boxes of knick-knacks and sundries piled up in the hallway outside Marty’s bedroom, and then the front living area and the breakfast nook and the kitchen. They left paths through the boxes, and the only rooms not stacked with junk were the living room and the kitchen area directly in front of the stove and sink.

After a year of living there even those areas became cluttered same as their old house in Yellow Pine Bay, and as the outside of the two houses had matched before so matched the inside.

His mother brought everything with her not the least of which was the snakes. Marty hadn’t recalled there being snakes before when it was just him and Uncle Cooper. Sure, they found the occasional rat snake or garden snake or copperhead in the yard but not like this.

All Marty could figure was his mother didn’t bring the snakes so much as attract them. They were like ants, that’s what Mrs. Burleson said in science class, that snakes and ants and lots of animals emit smells that attracted more of the same. That’s why one or two ants on a donut turns into a hundred. Maybe that was what happened with the snakes and Marty’s mom had brought the donuts.

With her junk she hauled in mice. Then came the rat snakes, feasting on the mice. Marty knew mice could reproduce quickly and they make quite a meal for snakes. As more snakes came, the mice produced new mice to replace the lost ones. So long as there was junk there would be food for the mice, and so long as there were mice there would be snakes to eat them.

With his boot—Gerald’s old boot—Marty toed a snake skin on his bedroom floor. It was fresh like the one in the attic, recently left from a rat snake, who would glisten with its new scales and peeled eyeballs searching for mice to swallow whole.

He pushed back the sheets on his bed and checked for snakes. When he didn’t find any, he put his feet on the bed, laid his head down, and closed his eyes. He tapped the toes of his boots together to lull himself to sleep.

The ceiling fan light was on and after a few minutes of trying to sleep, Marty stood on his bed and yanked the chain to turn it off.

Marty slept in the darkness until the middle of the night, when his eyes jerked open and his ears strained against the silence. He was shirtless, sweaty, and still wore his jeans and boots. His nose throbbed, and he put his hand to it and listened.

He heard the clicking of the ceiling fan and something else besides that. He had enough light to stand on his bed and turn off the ceiling fan, and after the blades stopped humming the air inside the bedroom stilled as if it were holding its breath.

With the fan quiet Marty heard every creak the old house made. It wasn’t the mice. Sometimes they chewed at the walls and the boxes but this wasn’t the usual toothy gnawing sound. It wasn’t his father either, and his mother was asleep and probably wouldn’t wake until tomorrow night. It wasn’t Gerald’s breathing machine because the door was shut, and Gerald was down the hall anyway. It wasn’t the traffic on the freeway or the thump of the air-conditioner, because the air-conditioner had been broken since May.

Marty stood on his mattress with one hand on the ceiling fan chain and listened to a scraping sound in the attic. It wasn’t a scurry that could have been a squirrel or a raccoon.

This sounded like someone was in the attic, over the bathroom between his and Gerald’s rooms, a human with two heavy legs and short-stride steps near the east side attic window. They were dragging something. Marty heard the thump of boots moving heel-toe across the attic floor, several steps on top of the dragging followed by a final clump above the bathroom, and then silence.