Goldenland Past Dark (22 page)

“Shh, what are you doing,” Nepenthe whispered. “Your dad’s prowling around outside.”

“He’s in the car.” Webern climbed on top of her. Nepenthe turned her head to one side, and he kissed the crackles in her neck. “I’m going to miss you.”

“Yeah, right. You’re going to take one look at all those normal girls and never come back.”

“I don’t want a normal girl. I want you.”

“Jerk.” Nepenthe grabbed him around the waist and easily pinned him down onto the mattress. Webern laughed and squirmed beneath her. “You little shit. Take it back.”

“What was I supposed to say?” Webern protested. He tried to slap her hands away as she tickled him. He could hardly breathe. “C’mon, what was I supposed to say?”

“Not that.”

“But it’s true.”

Afterwards, Webern picked up his rock candy and gathered a handful of spilled pocket change from the floor. He felt woozy and wished he’d had a decent night’s sleep. If he didn’t keep moving he’d pass out. Fortunately, he didn’t need to bring much of anything along: when he’d run away to join the circus, he’d left most of his clothes at home, and before coming to get him his father had packed him a bag.

Webern cringed to think of what he’d find in there: cardigan sweaters, no doubt, penny loafers, and pale pink collared shirts—probably even his old pyjamas, with tiny images of Roy Rogers printed all over them in patterns. But these clothes would be in better shape than the ratty jeans and armpit-stained T-shirts he wore in his off-time, and it wasn’t like Nepenthe would be around to laugh at him and call him a square.

Just before he got into his father’s car, she kissed the top of his head, and he hung on to the sleeves of her pink bathrobe for a moment after she released him, trying to take in the texture of her skin, her musty smell, her warm and quick-beating pulse.

“What’ll you do when I’m gone?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about me, kiddo.” She ran a hand over his forehead, then smoothed her veil of hair into place. “Catch you later.” She disappeared back inside the boxcar before they drove away.

Webern’s father had just gotten a new car, a Chrysler, and Webern spent the first few minutes of the trip feigning interest in the array of dials and knobs that lined the space-age dashboard.

“That’s nothing,” said Raymond. “Watch this.” He pressed a button, and he and Webern both watched the passenger side window roll down.

“Pretty neat.” Webern licked his rock candy. He didn’t really want to keep eating it, but there was nowhere to put it down—he was surrounded by supple leather upholstery.

Webern’s father cleared his throat. “You and her . . . quite a pair.”

Where had his father learned to make conversation? Neptune? Rows of corn scrolled past the car windows. Webern’s head ached. He needed a cup of coffee soon.

“Yep. We’ve been together a few years now.”

“Does she—work—too?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Work like you do?”

“Not quite.”

Raymond set his jaw. He squinted at the windshield, which was flecked with tiny dead bugs.

“I don’t believe in a woman working outside the home.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“But if she has a sort of—talent—I guess she shouldn’t waste it.”

“I guess not.”

“God gives us all our gifts.”

“Yeah.”

“And it’s good to save up. God knows insurance doesn’t cover everything.”

“Right.”

“Some people can’t be insured. They’re uninsurable.”

“That’s true.”

“You meet her parents yet?”

“Nope.”

“It’s good to meet a girl’s parents. You see how your kids turn out.”

“Sure.”

“Say the girl’s red-haired, but her parents are blonde. Well, there’s a blonde baby for you. But if her
parents
are red-haired too—”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, why haven’t you gone out to meet them?”

“I don’t know, Dad, because they netted her in a swamp and sold her to the freak show?”

Raymond didn’t say anything. After a moment, he rolled the window back up.

Over the years, Webern had gotten used to the rumbling, halting progress of the train; he hadn’t been in a car since leaving Schoenberg’s circus, and now it affected him strangely. He wasn’t used to seeing the world rushing towards him through the huge clean pane of a windshield. It was like falling forward at a tremendous speed. He could only look for so long before he switched on the radio. A call-in show came on, and Webern found himself listening to a local woman arguing that the “snoot-nosey” draft boards shouldn’t “favouritism” college students, but should put them in the front lines for causing all the trouble. It would have sent Nepenthe through the roof, but after a few minutes it started to wear on him, too.

“Is it okay if we listen to some music?” he asked. Raymond shrugged.

Webern flipped through the stations until he found something innocuous and swingy; no reason to start another argument about rock music he didn’t even like. Just as he started to relax, though, a terrible thought occurred to him.

“Willow and Billow aren’t going to be there, are they? At Bo-Bo’s?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call them that.”

“That’s what they call themselves.”

“When they were kids, maybe.” Raymond shook his head. “Bernie, you know Wanda and Betsy left home years before you did. Your Bo-Bo and me, I guess you could say we’re all alone in this world.”

“You haven’t heard from them at all?”

Raymond sighed. “Well, now that you mention it, they did stop by the house not too long ago. Apparently they’ve made quite a name for themselves with their dog catching. I never could understand them much, the way they talk, but from what I gathered they were curious about you.”

“What? You didn’t tell them where I was, did you?”

“Nah. I was tracking you down myself, then.”

“I can’t believe you saw them. Do they really have jobs? Where do they live?”

Raymond gave him a sidelong glance. “You starting to miss your sisters all of a sudden? From what I remember, you used to lock yourself up in closets to get away from them.”

“That’s because they threw dead turtles on me when I was in a body cast.”

“It’s a sad thing, when a man’s children don’t get along.”

“I wouldn’t have even
been
in a body cast if it wasn’t for them.”

“Now, I won’t have that. Your sisters aren’t perfect, but you can’t keep blaming them for everything that goes wrong. You had an accident. People do.” Raymond lowered the sun visor. “One of these days they’ll be the only family you’ve got left.”

Webern leaned back and shut his eyes. He could see them, even now: Willow and Billow with their halos of smudgy dark, their fingers moving like spiders, like wind, like the scratching, grasping branches of malevolent trees, and always toward his throat.

A long time after he pretended to fall asleep, he actually began to doze. Images from Bo-Bo’s house flitted through his mind: pearly teeth smiling in a jelly jar, a bathtub with claws, radiators that leaned against the walls like skinny dogs with all their ribs showing. Going back there would be like opening an old picture book he hadn’t seen since childhood. Only it would be stranger, because he wouldn’t be able to shut it again so easily.

Raymond decided they would stop for lunch at a place called the Buzzard’s Den, and as Webern looked at the menu, he found himself wondering if his father was nostalgic for the subtle flavours of Bo-Bo’s cooking. Raccoon was conspicuously absent, but quail, frog, and hare dotted the list, along with the mysteriously named “Meat Stew.”

“Guess they’re getting easier to catch. Wild animals.” Raymond took off his fedora and set it on the table. Beneath it, his scalp shone; an isolated wad of hair squashed down in the front. Almost unconsciously, Webern ran a protective hand over his own short mop. “Lot of construction round here lately. Driving them out of their nests.”

“That’s a shame.” Webern decided to get a burger and shut his menu. He was still a little queasy. Maybe he’d feel better with some food in his stomach.

“Nah. I remember when this was all fields. Flat as a pool table, boring as hell.”

Webern thought back to the Dolphin River of his childhood. He’d hated a lot about it, but it sure was easy practicing his unicycle on the flat, wide sidewalks.

“That sounds about right,” he said. He read the back of the mustard bottle, then looked at his menu again.

After a few minutes, the waitress came by and took their orders. When she left, Raymond made a great show of unfolding his napkin and setting it in his lap. His hands shook a little. Webern wondered if he’d had a drink yet today.

“Do you think we’ll make it to Bo-Bo’s tonight?” The waitress put Webern’s coffee down in front of him, and he took it gratefully. The mug felt warm and secure, heavy in the familiar way diner mugs always did.

“Oh, I’d say so. We got a pretty early start. We’ll probably get up there just after dark sometime.”

Webern nodded, gulping his coffee. The car trips to Bo-Bo’s had always seemed epic when he was a child, but she was only about five hours north of Dolphin River. Compared to all the travelling he did now, that didn’t seem like much.

“What exactly is wrong with Bo-Bo? Just so I can prepare myself.”

“Well, if you were a little younger, I’d tell you her ticker’s getting tired. But medically, it’s more complicated than that.”

“Okay.”

“Your Bo-Bo liked her suet and her game meats, and a good pat of butter just like the rest of us. She stayed fit and trim, but I guess her veins got blocked up just the same. Including one in her heart. Now, here’s the kicker. Where most people would have a heart attack, Bo-Bo grew a whole new vein.”

“What?”

“It wraps around her heart, since the blood can’t go straight through the middle. Wait, let me draw you a picture.” Raymond grabbed a pile of napkins from a dispenser on the table and drew a shaky heart with one line passing through it and a second looped around the outside, like a noose. He tapped the second line. “See? Longer, but it still gets there. A scenic route.”

Webern turned the napkin toward himself and studied it. His father always drew everything out—whenever he gave street directions, described new models of cars, or recounted the events of the latest baseball game, he had a pen in hand, and his dinnertime conversations with Webern’s mother had come with their own booklets of illustrations. Images came easier to him than words. But even discounting the years they’d been apart, this was the first drawing he’d done for Webern in a long, long time. Webern folded the napkin in half and tucked it in his pocket. “So, what’s the problem, then? If the blood’s still getting through?”

“Because the new vein doesn’t give the heart room to pump. It’s squeezing the heart on every beat.”

“Bo-Bo’s heart is choking itself to death?”

“That’s right.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Their food arrived. Raymond lifted his hands in a little gesture of surrender as the waitress plunked down his chicken-fried muskrat.

“You know a lot of people with . . . conditions. You’ve got a condition yourself. I remember, when your mother and I took you to the hospital, they’d never seen anything of the kind.”

Webern ground his teeth. He thought of Dr. Show, his mother, Bo-Bo, even his little friend Wags. It was ridiculous: of all the people he’d loved in his life, his father was the one he got to keep.

“Bent up like a paper clip, but you could still wiggle your toes. Let’s put him in a body cast. Okay.”

This day was hell on earth. Maybe at dinner they’d rehash Mom’s funeral. Webern bit into his hamburger. The inside was cool and raw as earthworms. His stomach turned.

“I’ll be back.” Webern threw his napkin on the table.

In the bathroom, Webern splashed cold water on his face and held onto the sink with both hands. For a second he squeezed so hard he felt like he might break the porcelain, and he thought of Zeus Masters, the strongman, bending barbells into figure eights above his head. Nepenthe and Venus were probably watching him practice right now, giggling and nudging each others’ hips the way they did. The thought of that made him even madder, but not any stronger, and he finally let go of the sink. Maybe he could work this into a clown act sometime—the weak little harlequin trying to vent his rage—but he doubted it. He couldn’t see much humour in the situation yet.

As they neared Bo-Bo’s house
, the landscape changed. It reminded Webern of the thorny, overgrown path to Sleeping Beauty’s castle: wild rose bushes grew along the roads, their lavender blossoms shedding moth-eaten petals; the naked trunks of birch trees shone like tarnished silver; train tracks thudded beneath the car’s wheels, and out of the corner of his eye, Webern saw the hulking shell of an abandoned luxury caboose.

Bo-Bo lived in Tarantula, Illinois. The town’s name was pronounced “tare-ann-TOO-lah” by natives; until seeing the sign this trip Webern had never associated it with the venomous spider. Tarantula was a sleepy town, with thin soil the colour of eraser dust; what crops grew here were spindly and frail, propped up by trellises in old ladies’ backyards.

Raymond turned the car onto Bo-Bo’s street, a narrow lane paved with smooth stones like the bed of a river. He parked in the driveway, and as Webern got out, he saw the place was just as he remembered it. Bo-Bo’s house, grown thick with ivy, sprang from a yard full of tall, seedy grasses and steel-jawed raccoon traps. As Webern followed his father up to the door, he was careful to stay on the path. Purple twilight gathered in the house’s shadow. Maybe they should have called before showing up like this. Last time he checked, Bo-Bo was pretty trigger-happy with her shotgun.

Webern and his father scaled the uneven steps to Bo-Bo’s front door. The porch, a shelf of limestone, glittered dully in the early evening; from its ceiling hung a wooden swing that could seat two on its wind-worn slats. Webern touched the seat and it began creaking back and forth on its chains.

Raymond cleared his throat and looked toward Webern as if he was about to speak. Then he lifted the iron knocker and let it fall. Both men heard the hollow knock echo into the house. After a long moment, a bolt scraped, and the door swung inward on its hinges. A greying chimp glared up at them, her long prehensile fingers still wrapped around the knob.

“Marzipan,” said Webern. He could hardly believe she was still alive. He stepped forward to hug her, but she was too quick for him. She turned on her heel and swung on her knuckles into the dark house.

Outside the sky was purpling, but inside it might as well have been the dead of night. The living room was a cavern, with dark green curlicues seething on the wallpaper and a crystal light fixture dangling from the ceiling like a dripping stalactite. In one corner, Webern saw the grand piano, large and black. When he was a child, its curving, wing-shaped body comforted him—it was hunchbacked too, but, as Bo-Bo once explained, the lopsided frame gave its music particular loveliness. She used to play in the evenings, after her Scotch but before her pipe. Now the piano grinned to no one; its yellow teeth collected cobwebs in the gloom.

Marzipan left the living room and climbed the ancient stairs to the second floor. Beneath the faded red and gold carpet, boards groaned. Webern looked at the photographs that lined the walls as they passed. Some were daguerreotypes of people he’d never known: an angular woman in a tuxedo and top hat, a fleecy-bearded man standing with one arm around a cigar store Indian, a stout, stern baby wearing what appeared to be a wedding dress. When Webern had asked Bo-Bo about these characters, she’d only shook her head and replied, “That was long ago.” But as they neared the top of the steps, Webern did recognize some of the faces he saw: first Bo-Bo, young and furious, with one bright eye and a second, even brighter, made of glass; then Raymond with Uncle Eddy, dressed in suits with shorts, each holding a wooden box and a butterfly net. A third photograph showed Bo-Bo with the boys on the porch’s steps. In this picture, an additional figure had been razor-bladed out, leaving behind only the jagged shape of a man. Even when he was a child, Webern had known well enough not to ask Bo-Bo about this one.

In the upstairs hallway, it was almost too dark to see. Marzipan’s fur brushed along the ancient wallpaper as they walked toward Bo-Bo’s room. The cut glass doorknob turned in her rubbery hand.

Bo-Bo lay in bed, under comforters piled so thick that they hid the shape of her body. Only her head protruded. But even this was enough to reveal changes. Her hair, once tightly curled in a blue poodle cut, was now an azure wisp, and next to the black of her eye patch, her skin paled to the fragile white of old Bible pages. She was asleep, and as she dreamed her mouth moved soundlessly. On her nightstand, a set of teeth floated in a highball glass.

Marzipan stretched her lips into an exaggerated pucker and blew the loudest raspberry Webern had ever heard. Bo-Bo stirred. She slowly rose to her elbows. She squinted her one eye at Webern and Raymond. Then she drank the glass of water, teeth and all.

“Well, don’t look so frightened, Bernie.” Her face formed a new, more familiar shape around the teeth. “I’m not about to sit up and grab you.”

Webern walked up to where she was lying and perched on the edge of the bed. Looking at her up close, he could see that her one eye had dimmed considerably. He thought of her antique rifles, the midnight target practice that always woke the neighbours. Bo-Bo, the crack shot, nearly blind.

Bo-Bo reached up and touched his face. Webern closed his eyes, and she touched his eyelids, too. It was like she was sculpting his face with her knotted hands.“Bo-Bo,” Webern finally said, “I’m sorry I haven’t come to visit.”

“Don’t start with an apology. That’s worse than a weak handshake.” She released his face, then reached behind herself to set up the pillows. “I’d ask what you’ve been doing with your life, but with young people these days, maybe I’d rather not know.”

“I joined the circus. I’m a clown now.”

“I danced the Charleston once, but I didn’t make a career of it.” Bo-Bo smiled. Her false teeth shone unnaturally; Webern had forgotten that some of the ones toward the back were silver. “A traveling show. That explains the postcards. What else?”

Webern tried to think. The circus nights swam in his memory. He thought of the way his boxcar looked through the bottom of bottles, Nepenthe’s veils strewn all over the place. All the irritations and successes seemed too small to tell.

“I’ve got a girl,” he said.

“I’m glad to hear it. Take care she doesn’t break your heart.”

Webern looked into her milky eye and saw a ghost of himself reflected there.

“I will.”

Bo-Bo nodded. She leaned back in her bed. “Go away now and let me sleep. I just might join you for dinner.”

When Webern was a boy, Bo-Bo dined at eleven, shot skeet at midnight, slept four hours and woke with the dawn. Once a week or so, if her traps stayed empty, she skipped the skeet and hunted the raccoons that lived under her house instead. If pickings were slim there, she ventured under the houses of her neighbours. Webern could still remember sneaking into the narrow dark of other people’s crawl spaces, holding a shaky flashlight, and bursting into tears when Bo-Bo perforated a bristling ’coon, whose soft dark ears resembled his favourite teddy bear’s. Later, in a rare show of tenderness, Bo-Bo rewarded him for his help with a freshly stitched Davy Crockett cap.

“It occurs to me that I’ve paid little mind to the interests of boys your age,” she said, lifting the pelt from the newspapers she’d wrapped it in. “Now, I think it’s foolish looking, myself, but the television tells me it’s the latest craze.”

Though Bo-Bo’s neighbours had never pressed charges—Tarantula’s raccoon problem had long since spiralled out of control, and they considered Bo-Bo an inexpensive, if noisy, extermination service—now that she was dying they showed her little regard. Since her illness began, she had received only one card, and it offered condolences rather than get-well wishes. It was on the living room mantelpiece when Webern went back downstairs to get his suitcases. “May God Bless You and Keep You,” it read. Below the elegant script was a coloured pencil drawing of a well-tended grave.

Webern had just turned eight when his mother died. When his father sent him to stay at Bo-Bo’s, she had put him in the room that his father and Uncle Eddy had shared as children. It was scary there at first, amid the dive-bombing balsa wood planes and the shadows of strangely sinister Noah’s ark animals, but after a while it started to feel almost like home. Lying on the narrow twin bed closest to the window, Webern stayed up late carrying on long conversations with his tiny friend Wags, who, being only the size of a thumb, slept in the centre of the other bed’s pillow, tucked inside a little blue sleeping bag made from a wool sock with a hole in it. Webern piled his Space Ace Grin McCase comic books on the nearly empty shelves, and, towards the end of his stay, even started putting his brightly coloured clothes away in the heavy wooden drawers that always stuck, unless he yanked hard enough to pull them free entirely. Now he went into the room again and slung his suitcase onto the bed. The springs gave a familiar groan under its weight.

Webern unbuttoned the shirt he’d taken from the circus’s wardrobe that morning. He suspected it had been worn most recently by Raoul, whose death-defying house cats leapt and clawed the centre ring: Raoul was always dousing those white Persians in talcum powder, and the sickly sweet odour still clung to the shirt’s cuffs and collar. Webern popped open the lid of the suitcase his father had brought for him from Dolphin River. It was loaded with things Webern thought he’d left behind when he ran away to join Schoenberg’s circus. No wonder it was so heavy.

Webern had forgotten how he used to dress in high school. Just looking at the selection of his old favourites embarrassed him. Webern discarded a red cowboy shirt, with ten-gallon hats embroidered on its lapels, a sweater stitched with reindeer, and a pair of bright blue corduroys, before he finally put on a mint green dress shirt that he used to wear to church on Sundays. Until he took to the road, Webern let his mother’s old taste in clothes guide him whenever he bought new ones; although it made him look even more freakish, it had comforted him to think that his colourful get-ups might bring a smile to her face if, by some miracle, she returned. Maybe that was part of the reason why clown costumes still appealed to him.

Beneath a pair of girlish overall shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a Jack-o-lantern orange cardigan sweater, Webern glimpsed something else in the bottom of the suitcase. He moved the clothes aside to look.

Inside a miniature model of a Bavarian chalet, two carved figures—a blond-haired girl and a soldier in a helmet with a little gold spike on top—balanced side by side on a tiny strip of wood. Webern took the device out of his suitcase and set it on his lap. The tiny girl drifted out of the house; the soldier stayed inside. Amazing; it still worked.

The weather house was the only souvenir his father had kept from the time he’d spent in Germany at the end of the war. When Webern was growing up, it sat on his father’s chest of drawers, along with a pile of change and some gold cufflinks he never wore, collecting dust. On the few occasions when Webern had hoisted himself up on the bed to stare at the tiny carved people, his father had told him to keep his hands off it, until one day just a few months before Webern’s accident. It was morning, before Webern’s father left for work, and he was knotting his tie at a mirror that hung on the back of his closet door. Webern had come in to tell his father the pancakes were ready downstairs, but instead of leaving right away, he had climbed up on the bed to peer into the tiny German faces. His father saw him from the mirror, but instead of scolding him, he sat down on the bed beside him, and, carefully lifting the weather house from its place on the chest of drawers, had held it in his lap and shown Webern exactly how it worked.

“See this little stick they’re standing on? It wobbles like that because it’s glued to a strand of catgut. When it’s dry outside, that shrinks up, so she swings out like this. When it’s wet, well, the catgut loosens up and the soldier comes out his door.” The little house had looked so strange in his father’s big, chapped hands; Webern had held his breath, for fear it would get crushed by mistake. But his father had been unimaginably gentle. He set it back in place on the dusty bureau, then tousled Webern’s hair and sent him back downstairs.

Webern carefully set the weather house on the nightstand and looked down at it. It surprised him that the old man had even remembered. He never thought his father was the sentimental type. Staring at the tiny wood-chip shingles, he wondered what other memories of their family his father lingered on and cherished. Maybe, like Webern, he often recollected the way Webern’s mother looked as she stirred cookie batter, the dreamy expression that crossed her face as she tossed in a handful of chocolate chips. Maybe he still saw little Webern sitting at the kitchen table sometimes, his back unbroken, colouring in line drawings of spacemen and explorers.

Webern stepped out into the hall. He shouldn’t have let so much of the car ride pass in silence. He’d probably been missing opportunities to talk to his father left and right since the day they’d put his mother in the ground. He saw his father coming up the stairs and stopped to watch him. He looked like the world’s shortest giant, stooped and clumsy, leaning on the banister.