All Things Cease to Appear (7 page)

For a couple of minutes they just sat there, watching the sky go pink like it was hurt. Then Eddy got out, stretching tall with an air of ceremony. Get out.

They stood there waiting. Eddy opened the trunk and took out a bat and held it up over his head. This is for her, he said, and brought it down onto the hood. He raised it up again and brought it back down and went on like that over and over again, and you could hear him heaving with the effort, his face full of menace. Cole cried, he couldn’t help it, and Eddy said he’d better quit it or he’d give him something to cry about. Go on, he said, handing him the bat.

I can’t.

Eddy gripped his shoulder. Do it for your mother.

The bat was heavier than he could remember from his days in Little League. He raised it up and closed his eyes briefly, as if in prayer, then brought it down on the car. It scarcely made a dent, but Eddy nodded that he’d done good and rested his hand on the back of his neck, just like his father had.

They took turns. The hood jutting up in a heap of triangles. The windshield splintered. His brothers beat that car so hard Cole almost felt sorry for it. He watched and cried. Tears rolled down his cheeks into his mouth and tasted of dirt. It was their dirt. It was their father’s and their grandpa’s dirt and all the men who had come before who were ghosts now and guarded the land in their church suits and stocking feet, their pockets full of worms. When he was little, his grandpa took him out on the big orange tractor with wheels as tall as a full-grown man. Cole sat on his lap, surveying the pasture that would one day be his; then his grandpa cut the motor and you could hear all the little creatures scrambling in the dirt and you could hear the grass and the wind. You’re a Hale, son, his grandpa told him. Around here that counts for something.

They believed in things—the good Lord. His grandma was always saying the good Lord this and the good Lord that. She said most people were good on the inside, where it mattered. You have to give them a chance to show their goodness, she used to say. Some people need more time, that’s all. She liked to make stained-glass cookies and let him do the hammering, crushing the hard candy into tiny bits. He’d climb up on the kitchen stool at the counter and she’d do some design, usually a cross, and tell him how to arrange the pieces. Once it was done, she’d hold it up to the window, and splotches of color shone on the walls. We got church right here, she’d say. Don’t even have to leave the house. His grandma could cook. She had big hands for a woman. In her apron, she’d kneel in the garden, tugging weeds, cradling fat tomatoes. Snapdragons up to his elbows. A whole parade of flowers. He had a tire swing. Summers, his mother gave him lunch out of doors. She’d cut the sandwiches in triangles, cream cheese and jelly, her pretty hair full of sun, wind. He’d come through the screen door at the end of the day with dirt on his skin.

They left the car there in the field. They dug a hole and buried the keys like something dead. That car ain’t goin’ nowhere, Wade said, his shirt soaked through with sweat. We made sure of that, right, Eddy?

Eddy didn’t answer him. He was breathing hard, hugging himself. Cole saw that he was crying. The wind came up behind them, and it was a cold wind. Their shirts filled with it. His brothers stared at the car and what they’d done to it.

The house was dark. The windows pushed back the sunset. The cold wind came up again and he almost felt like running.

What we gonna do now? Wade said. What we gonna do without Mother?

I wish I knew, Eddy said.

They watched TV for a while, and Eddy and Wade got drunk on their father’s Jim Beam. Cole left them sleeping on the couch with the television on. He liked the sound of it as he went to bed, and for a minute he could pretend that his parents were out somewhere. He slept in, and when he finally woke it was afternoon. The house was quiet, waiting. He didn’t know where his brothers were.

He stepped into the hall and stood outside his parents’ door. Since that morning when they’d taken them away on stretchers and covered them with blankets, Eddy said he couldn’t go in. Sometimes Cole would put his hand on the wood as if feeling for a heartbeat. Now he turned the knob and stepped inside.

The room was dark; the shades pulled. He tugged on one and it snapped up and flapped around like it was angry, and the room filled up with so much light he had to squint. It was still windy out, and you could see all the trees moving around like a chorus of blind people. His ears filled with the sound they made, and the shadows of branches stretched across the floor and mingled against one another. He tried to open a window, but it was painted shut and he remembered his parents arguing about it, his mother accusing his father of being careless, and this brought their voices back to him and he looked at the unmade bed, half expecting them to be there. He could still see where their heads had been on their pillows. He was crying a little and couldn’t remember why he was here, or even who he was. He was like a spirit, feeling the whirl of some other place, the place his mother had gone to.

He climbed onto her side of the bed and pulled the satin hem of the blanket under his chin. He could smell his mother. He shut his eyes very tight and tried not to be afraid, but he was. He tried to talk to God, hoping to feel His presence. He sensed that something was there but didn’t know if it was God or not. He had no proof; there were no signs. Gradually, the room came back to him, and he was no longer afraid. He could see the white mountain of his father’s pillow and the nightstand beyond it, where the hands of the clock twitched as they moved, and the glass of water his mother had drunk from—three-quarters full. He reached out for it and held it up and the sun filled the glass and then he drank the water and it was warm and tasted like nothing. Maybe he fell asleep, and after a while he heard footsteps and knew it was Wade, because he was slower and stockier than Eddy, and he was glad it was him and then he felt his brother’s thick hand pulling him out of the bed, his heavy arm wrapping around him. Wade got him into the hall and down the stairs and out onto the porch, where the sky was a crazy purple and you could see the top of the ridge, the jagged trees. And that’s when he saw her. She was up there on the ridge, waving at them. And he waved back. And the sun was behind her and it was red and bright, so very bright. And he shut his eyes, knowing that when he opened them she’d be gone.

3

THEY SLEPT
in their uncle’s attic on narrow army cots lined up like piano keys. Rainer was his mother’s only sibling. His father and his uncle hadn’t spoken in years, nobody remembered why. Cole wondered if Rainer even knew. He ran a halfway house full of used-up crooks and put them to work in his window-washing business. It was what he called a satisfactory arrangement. He was skanky as a ferret with his greasy ponytail and coyote face. People said the war had done something to him. He liked to show off his tattoos. Did this one here with ink and a guitar string, he’d announce with pride, twisting his arm back and forth. Every day he wore the same black leather vest with studs on the back like tooth fillings. Eddy called him a burnout, but Cole knew better. You could tell he’d seen things. Sometimes he’d call out in the middle of the night, like he was scared. He told Cole he’d lost his best buddy on a patrol boat. The guy had been blown to pieces. I held him in my arms till the blood ran out, his uncle said. Now he wore his friend’s earring, a tiny silver star.

Rainer’s woman, Vida, was from Mexico City. Her name, Cole knew, meant
life.
She had a tight mouth, like she was holding pins between her lips. Then she’d smile all of a sudden like someone on a merry-go-round. Rainer had found her someplace, saved her. It’s what their uncle did, save people. Now he was saving them. You could see she’d lived hard. In her eyes you could see her quiet past. After she cut onions and cried or rolled out tortillas, she’d rub her hands like they were sore. Her cooking tasted good, and she was nice to him. Sometimes she pushed his hair off his forehead with her damp, onion-smelling hands and said,
Tan bonitos ojos.
Just wait till the
chicas
find you. They no let you alone.

His uncle warned them to stay away from the ex-cons, who lived in a cinder-block addition off the back porch, but this one named Virgil did card tricks and one time pulled a blue feather out of Cole’s ear. He had a face like a mess of old wires. See here, he said. I got the devil in my pocket. He turned his pockets inside out, black dust running through his fingers. You ever seen somethin’ like that?

No, sir.

I already been to hell and back, can’t go twice.

What was it like?

Let me show you somethin’. He sat down and untied his shoes and took them off and set them aside. Then he rolled off one of his socks. The bottom of his foot was charred black, like he’d walked through fire. See what they done? That’s what you get in hell.

How’d you get out?

Virgil glanced up at the sky. The man upstairs got me out. That’s the only explanation for it. But I know somethin’ ’bout you.

What’s that?

Virgil took a pencil from behind his ear and drew an oval on a piece of paper and gave it to Cole. Hold that there, over your head.

What for?

Go on.

Cole did what he said.

Hallelujah! I’m in the presence of an angel.

You’re crazy. Cole crumpled up the paper and threw it away. I ain’t no angel.

They would talk about their crimes: what they did, what they should’ve done, what they would’ve done different if they’d had the chance. By the time some of them had gotten caught they were ready and went willingly. Others put up a fight. It seemed to Cole that their prison memories kept them company, like old friends.

Their uncle’s business gave them hope. To his assembled infantry he would declare, Here’s your chance at redemption. Make it count.

Solemn as pallbearers, they’d line up to receive their ammunition: a squeegee, a sponge and Rainer’s marvelous window-cleaning solution, the recipe for which he would take to his grave. Everybody jammed into Bertha, a boxy copper van that said
Truly-Clear
on either side of it, and, like warriors, they set out to wash windows all over the county, from Hudson all the way to Saratoga.

On weekends, Rainer let the boys work off the books. Even Cole got paid, and he absorbed the experience like an education, peering into the fancy houses in Loudonville or the crooked old row houses down in Albany or the factories on the river, the dirty windows blinking in the sunlight like the sleepy eyes of gangsters and thieves. They did the old house where Herman Melville had lived as a boy, and his uncle gave him a rumpled copy of
Moby-Dick.
Read this, he said.

Cole did. He stayed up turning its pages, the book heavy on his chest. Wade fussed, yanking the blankets up over his head, but Cole kept reading until his eyes drooped. Then he set it down on the nightstand and closed his eyes, thinking about the sea and the smell of it and the sound of the wind and what it would be like out there in the middle of the ocean, and he wished he could go. He wanted to be free, to be on his own. When he worked for his uncle he felt good and he enjoyed it. He liked to use his hands. To go out in the truck. You saw things on the road, people doing stuff you never thought of. Ordinary things. You’d catch people doing this and that.

You see all kinds of things in this business, his uncle told him. Rich and poor, we see it all.

One time they did the college, named after some Indian chief. The campus was high on a grassy hill. You could see the river in the distance, bright as a switchblade, and it gave him the feeling of a miraculous recollection, a memory that comes to you so sudden and true, like the smell of his mother’s coffee, how it always woke him before light, or her perfume at the end of the day, hardly noticeable, when she’d lean down to kiss him good night.

They set their ladders up against the library and went to work. The men tried not to be noticed, like they’d get kicked out for being stupid, and it occurred to Cole that being smart was another reason people could be afraid of you. On the drive home, his uncle asked if he wanted to go to college, and the men started whistling and making jokes, so he shrugged as if he didn’t care, but Rainer reached across the seat and gripped his shoulder like he knew better. I got a feeling about you, boy, he said. You may just make it out of this town.

—

RAINER SAID
he knew what people were made of. The war had taught him. I could tell you stories, he’d say, make your hairs stand on end. Speculating about one person or another, he’d say, Well, I wouldn’t put it past him. If you messed with him he’d never forget it. Same thing if you did something nice. He’d read the newspapers with a magnifying glass, like someone searching for clues. Taking an interest, he called it. You had to look out at the world. You had to open your eyes.

He knew things about his customers, what cars they drove and when they went on vacation. Once, they did some banker’s house in Loudonville. Rainer tiptoed all around the place, like someone walking through a minefield. He told Cole to do the garage windows. You won’t find no trouble out there. Cole set up his ladder and got started. He had a view of the pool. It was still cold and the pool was covered. He could see a boy around his age in the yard, playing catch with a friend. Must be nice, he thought, rolling out of bed on a summer morning and jumping into that pool. He wondered what it was like to be rich. It didn’t seem right that some people got to live like kings and others lived in shit-boxes like the old farm.

After he finished his windows he told his uncle he had to use the bathroom.

Make it quick.

The housekeeper was a black lady with tough eggplant skin, wrangling the hose of the vacuum like an alligator wrestler. She pointed him down the hall. He wandered up a back stairway and found the boy’s room, his name, Charles, spelled out in red letters on the door. Soccer trophies lined a shelf, along with other things the boy had collected. Cole had begun to perspire. He went to the window and saw the boy and his friend in the yard, tossing the football. The men were loading the ladders into the truck. He could hear the housekeeper running the vacuum. He was about to leave when something caught his eye on the shelf, a snow globe. On impulse, he took it down and got some dust on his fingertips. Inside the globe was a trolley car. Cole wondered where he’d gotten it. He knew there had once been trolley cars in Albany and he remembered seeing one on a box of rice in the cupboard, but since the boy had put it on his shelf he concluded that it was a souvenir from some special place. Cole didn’t have any souvenirs of his own; he’d never gone anywhere. He shook the snow globe and watched the little flakes dance. Then he put it in his pocket and went back downstairs.