Carry Me Like Water (46 page)

“I could go,” he said. “At least we won’t be living like this.” His arms Mew over his head in circles. “I hate how we live. We make everything so neat, overconstruct everything: nice lawn, porch, dogs—”

“We don’t have a dog, Eddie.”

“Sorry. You gel the picture. We’re so smug here. When was the last time you were in East Palo Alto? Shit, that’s poverty, too—and it’s awful, but we don’t want to see it. Remember the riots, Lizzie? When the students from Stanford were marching on the streets, a woman said to me, ‘Oh my God, they’re coming.’ It just fell out of her mouth—just like that. She didn’t know it was the students—she thought it was the people from East Palo Alto, and she finally voiced what everyone here fears—that all those people were coming into our nice neighborhoods to take away what we worked so hard to get.” He laughed and looked at his wife. “I could leave all this behind in a second—Italian bakeries, bookstores, everything.” He looked at his brother. “Will you go, Jake?”

“I could go,” he said. “I’m done here in this part of the world. It’s a place, a beautiful place with beautiful men and beautiful places to eat—and I’m done with it. It was only home because Joaquin was here. I haven’t been feeling so hot, you know? El Paso doesn’t sound like it’s a bad place to die. From the sound of things it’s already a bit of a cemetery.”

Nena laughed. “Welt, it isn’t that bad.”

“We’ll go then,” Eddie said.

“We’ll all go.” There was a smile in Maria Elena’s eyes as she spoke.

“But first,” Eddie said as if the thought had just occurred to him, “Jake and I are going back to say good-bye to a bad memory.”

“The house, you mean?”

Eddie nodded.

“You’re not really going to burn that place down, are you?”

Eddie bit his lip.

“I know you, Eddie,” she said. “I can read you like—

“A journal.”

“Yes,” she said.

Jake smiled.

“There isn’t any breeze tonight,” Eddie said, rubbing Maria Elena’s back. “I love the feel of your back when it’s damp with your sweat.”

She laughed softly. “I know.”

“Are you sorry you married a gringo?”

“What in the hell makes you ask that, Jonathan?”

“Jonathan? You never call me Jonathan.”

“Well, you’re acting like a Jonathan.”

“What in the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means your question is ridiculous.”

“Maybe you should have married one of your own.”

“One of my own? Oh, Eddie, you are my own.”

“But I’m not, Nena. I’m this rich—”

She placed her hand over his mouth. “Be quiet. Go to sleep. This conversation is too silly to have.” She didn’t let him say another word, just kept her hand over his mouth until she could tell he would be quiet. “Listen to me,” she said, “I married the right man.” She rose from the bed, and lit a candle in front of Joaquin’s santos.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I lit a candle.”

“What for?”

“So you and Jake would come back safely from your trip to La Jolla.” She got back into bed and turned her back to her husband.

“I guess Joaquin’s statues found a good home.”

“They’re not statues—they’re santos.”

“Santos,” he repeated. “Do they hear?”

“About as well as anybody else.”

“Will they put gas in my car?”

“Eddie?”

“What.”

“Put a sock in it.”

He kissed her back softly, “I’m just teasing,” he said. A sudden breeze blew softly through the room. The light of the candle swayed softly back and forth and the light in the room flickered gently. The shadows on the walls and the ceiling reminded Maria Elena of her childhood. She used to pray for her father to stop drinking. But the candle in the room kept the darkness away, kept it from swallowing her and her house and her mother.

“Eddie, you’re not really going to burn that place down, are you?”

Neither Jake nor Eddie spoke as they drove up the hill. The Southern California sky was calm and clear, and though it was still winter, it might have been spring. As they drove through the neighborhood where he had spent the first eighteen years of life, all Jake could think of was the day he was arrested.
Are you Jacob Marsh? … You ‘re under arrest far assault … I should have killed them … Jake, has Dad ever touched? … I swear if you ever touch him again I’ll cut your balls off and stuff them down your …
Jake looked at his brother, who was driving the car. He seemed so unscarred, almost innocent—like the sky. He wondered how some people managed the virtue of serenity as if cruelty and violence had no power over them. Jake felt nervous, scared, edgy—he’d felt this way every time he had approached his home when his parents had lived there, when he had lived there with them. His palms were sweating.
They’re dead. Can I say good-bye to him? No. We can take care of … They can’t hurt me anymore.

“Are you all right, Jake?”

He nodded. “It’s spring again. It’s hard to believe that after this winter, there could ever be another spring.” He laughed. “Anyway, in La Jolla, there was never a winter—not really.”

“Mom,” Eddie said, “Mom was winter.”

“She was, wasn’t she?”

“Why do you suppose she was so cold, Jake?”

“She must have come from a long line of sick people.”

Eddie nodded. “Maybe, But how do you account for us?”

Jake laughed. “Geez, sport, we’re on our way to burn our childhood home—we’re as sick as they come.”

“Guess so,” Eddie said, laughing as hard as his brother. “You know, Jake, Mom was really a freak about her family history. She had all kinds of picture albums and things—they’re still in the house. Dad had some, too. Should we save them—from the fire I mean?”

“No. Let the whole goddamned family tree die.”

Eddie turned into the driveway. The house looked empty and sad, but the lawns were still well kept. “The guy who lives in the chauffeur’s house keeps up the lawns—it’s pan of his job. The neighbors don’t like weeds.” He stopped at the gates, took out a set of keys from his pocket. He looked at his older brother. “Here,” he said, handing him the keys, “You do the honors.”

Jake took the keys, jumped out of the car, unlocked the gates, and waved Eddie to drive in. He jumped back in the car without shutting the gates behind him. He looked at his brother and smiled awkwardly. “Are you nervous?”

Eddie nodded. “Why are we doing this?”

“We have to.”

He stopped the car in the circular driveway in front of the house. They both walked around the grounds in silence, afraid to enter the house. “It looks like Frankenstein’s castle,” Jake said.

“Are we going in?”

“Guess so.”

Jake looked through one of the windows. “Jesus, the furniture’s still there.”

“I didn’t get rid of anything. It’s all just been sitting here.”

“There’s gotta be an inch of dust everywhere.”

“We can write our names on everything.”

Jake laughed. “When you were little you would have said something just like that.”

“Nobody changes completely—not even you.”

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could?”

“No. No, it wouldn’t, Jake.” They walked around to the front of the house. “Open it,” Eddie said.

Jake stared at the door. I
swear if you ever touch him again … One more step. Dad—just one more step. I’ll kill you—I swear I will… Pederast! I looked it up in the dictionary when I was nine. You’re a goddamned monster, Dad … We found all those magazines underneath
your mattress… And I’m taking Jon-Jon with me …We can take care of everything … There’s one thing I always wanted to do, Mom.
He placed the key in the keyhole and turned it. The knob turned in his hand. The door opened. Eddie watched his brother walk through the door. He saw himself running up the stairs, the house so quiet. He saw himself staring at the blood and the two corpses, and thinking they were no more and no less ugly than they had been when they had been breathing. He saw himself picking up the phone and calling the police. “Come and get them,” he had wanted to say, “come and lake them to a place where no one will see them,” He felt his knees shaking, he couldn’t move, he wanted to get in the car and drive away. He felt confused, his heart thumping in his chest like a fist hitting a wall. He had felt this way when his father was on top of him. He couldn’t breathe. He felt his whole body tremble—then felt his brother’s hand on his arm. “It’s OK,” he said. “They’re not here, Eddie.” He felt his brother’s hand wipe his tears from his face. He heard his voice: “They’re not here, Jon, they can’t hurt us anymore.” It was a good voice. He felt he could walk. He reached for his older brother’s hand—he held it tight. They walked inside together and stood in the entryway, two little boys holding hands, overwhelmed by the enormity of a long journey. Having arrived at this place, their eyes did not ask, “Have I come home again?” but asked instead, “Now can I rest? Now have I earned my rest?” And Jake thinking that good things could not be born in houses like this because they were not meant to house people but things, and Eddie thinking that he would never forget this moment because he had just seen the past, and his future would not look like this—not like this—never like this—his future would look like a house where people lived and breathed and fed each other food.

They walked around the house saying nothing, going from room to room. It was like a museum where the retired arms of war were kept. They examined everything asking themselves if it had been real—were we here? Did we fight this war? Remember this battle—remember that one? They looked at each thing in the house distantly, curiously. Yes, it was nothing more than a museum—and like most museums the artifacts seemed out of place, valuable in a strange and removed and unnecessary way—and so, not valuable
at all precisely because they were no longer necessary, no longer a part of the daily lives they led. What was valuable now was the hand that each brother held, the life that each brother had led, but this house was not valuable, this house was good kindling since the civilization it housed was long dead and not worth preserving in the memories of the living.

“I used to give you rides on my back,” Jake said quietly.

“I remember.”

“You wanted me to carry you everywhere. ‘Carry me,’ you used to yell, ‘Carry me, Jake,’ and I would have carried you until my back broke.” He picked up an oil painting from one of the walls and tossed it as if it were a ball. The frame shattered as it hit the floor. “I wanted to take you with me.”

“I know.”

“I’m too old to carry you, now.”

“It was bound to happen, old man,” Eddie laughed—they both laughed.

“Can we torch it now?”

“Let’s wait until it’s dark—we can watch the flames in the night.”

“What if they catch us, Eddie? What will we say?”

“We’ll say we came back to see our old house. There’s no insurance, anyway, I cancelled it a long time ago. We’ll say it got dark and we lit a candle, and that it caught something on fire, and that we couldn’t put it out—and that we barely escaped with our lives.”

“Did you bring a candle?”

“Yup.”

“Smart kid.”

“Yup.”

They sat perfectly still in their parents’ bedroom, a sanctuary neither one of them had ever been allowed to enter. Jake lit one of the carpets—it was old and it lit as easily as paper. The room caught fire quickly, the flames burning higher and higher, as yellow and red as anything he’d ever seen. Eddie pulled him toward the door, coughing. ‘ ‘Let’s get out of here, Jake.” Jake was reluctant to move, his feet planted on the floor as if he were rooted and the floor was the soil that gave him life. He thought
of Joaquin, his hundred indiscretions, he thought of the heron dying in flight and wondered how it might feel to die, to bum with this house. He would be dying soon, anyway. This would be over quickly, no hospital rooms, no IV, no complications of the body caving in on itself It would be better to burn with the house, and he could die with it. It would be like becoming one of Joaquin’s candles. The room filled with smoke, and he could hear his younger brother calling him: “Jake! Jake! What’s wrong? We have to get out—” His voice was distant in his ears, but he remembered a little boy who loved him and had treated him as if he were as valuable as the air. He felt his brother trying to pull him toward the door. “Jake!” And suddenly that voice became more real and urgent than the smoke and the flames and the burning room. He felt his feet run toward the door.