Goldenland Past Dark (25 page)

The undertaker stopped in front of the coffin at the base of the stairs. His tongue darted out to moisten his lips.

“She’s gotten a head start on me, I see.”

Webern shrugged. Just looking at the box made him feel a little sick. He tried to imagine what Bo-Bo had been thinking when she closed that lid on herself, but it was beyond him. Maybe she’d been preparing herself all those nights she’d crept through narrow crawl spaces, hunting raccoons in the dark.

“Do you need help . . . rolling it out to your car, or anything?”

The undertaker cracked his knuckles and sighed deeply. “If you’ll excuse me, I thought I might have a look here first. See what I have in store.”

“All right.” Webern picked up the overalls Marzipan had left on the coffin’s lid. Where had she gone? “Let me know when you’re . . . done, I guess.”

“Oh, I will.” The undertaker smiled; his lips clung unnaturally to his teeth.

Webern went out into the kitchen and let the door swing shut behind him. He half-expected to see Marzipan bent over the stove, her wizened faced hidden in a cloud of steam, but, except for a sink full of dishes floating in brackish water, the kitchen was empty. Maybe she was upstairs, stretched out on one of the beds. Or in the dining room, chain-smoking Pall Malls and ashing into a saucer. But somehow Webern didn’t think so. Hesitantly, he set the overalls on the counter, then slowly approached the kerosene freezer. Might as well check. Inside, shelves of iced raccoons stared out at him, their eyes black and accusing, their fur dusted with frost. But no Marzipan, thank God.

Webern took a frozen Snickers bar off the top shelf and closed the door again. He sat down on the stepladder Bo-Bo kept to reach the cupboard’s highest shelves, carefully unwrapped the chocolate, and took a bite. He looked out the window as he chewed. When he stayed with Bo-Bo before, she’d given him these every so often as a special treat. Webern never liked them much—he preferred candy hearts and wax bottles, pure sugar, and the rock-hard caramel hurt his teeth—but Bo-Bo’s manner of doling them out made them seem inestimably precious. Judging from the way this one tasted, she might have had it since the last time he visited. Webern wondered if she’d been expecting him back all these years, if she’d saved this one chocolate bar just in case.

Webern took the blue velvet box out of his pocket and held it in his hand. Don’t keep it in a drawer, she’d said. But what was he supposed to do with it? Webern opened the box and held the glass eye up to his. He stared into the pupil, and as he did, he realized that he could see through the murky, shaded glass. There was the window, and past it, the yard, midnight dark but visible. A soot-coloured rosebush hulked in the shadow of the eaves; grasses swayed like a green-black sea. And, just as Webern started to lower the glass eye, a dark figure—or maybe two—darted around the corner of the indistinct garage.

Webern blinked and shoved the eye back into the box, but it—they?—had already disappeared. He tried to open the window, but it was painted shut.

“Hey! Marzipan?” he yelled, rattling the glass. Great. If it was Marzipan, he couldn’t just let her wander around in her current state, swinging through trees and scaring the neighbors. But if it wasn’t Marzipan . . . Webern got down off the stepladder and went out the back door into the yard. If it wasn’t Marzipan, he’d probably just been imagining things.

“Marzipan?” he called again. He stepped carefully through the grass, avoiding raccoon traps. There was a trick to opening them that only Bo-Bo knew. Raccoons were clever animals, intelligent as spies—not many people went to the trouble of outsmarting them. In a way, they’d probably miss Bo-Bo; scheming against her had given their lives spice and meaning. Webern picked up a fallen tree branch and angrily jammed it into the spring release at the heart of the nearest trap. The metal jaws chomped down, splintering the wood in half.

“Marzipan?” Webern shouted so loud his throat felt sore. Dark birds flushed out of a nearby tree. This was ridiculous. He kicked what was left of the stick and went on toward the garage.

Bo-Bo’s garage had always been off-limits. Not that Webern had cared too much about it anyway. Ever since his mother’s crash, he’d hated cars, hated the smell of them, the intestinal twisting of their engines, the cranks and jacks and lug nuts, the spilled gasoline, puddled like dirty rainbows on dips in the concrete. So it had been just as well that Bo-Bo’s garage was boarded up, its doors laden with iron chains and padlocks. Wild rose bushes, the kind he’d only seen in Tarantula, had grown up its walls, even onto the roof. Their ragged lavender blossoms filled the air with a heady sweetness that made Webern think of enchanted sleep.

He rounded the garage’s corner, but there was nothing on the other side: only more rose bushes and a few tipped-over garbage cans, their black plastic bags ripped and spilling refuse. Webern sighed and set them back up. He’d been right about the raccoons. Already they’d started eating trash; before long they’d grow fat and lazy and over-numerous, their black paws stained with ketchup and chicken fat, their bellies swinging like overfed house-cats’.

As Webern put the metal lids back on, he glanced up. Just above the garbage cans was a window, small, but big enough to climb through, and its glass was missing—shattered. A branch of roses hung down over it, not quite concealing the gaping hole. Raccoons were smart, but not like this. Half-remembered scents—day-old road kill, bug juice, burnt hair—filled Webern’s nostrils, and as his throat tightened, he felt an old, familiar sensation: a strange, tipsy vertigo he hadn’t known in years. He gulped and breathed through his mouth, singing inside his head, forget it, forget it, forget it, there isn’t the slightest chance, until the words ran together into gibberish. But he had to know for sure. Before he knew what he was doing, he was climbing up on top of the garbage cans, and into the cool dark of the garage.

Webern tumbled down onto a workbench, knocking over what looked like several hatboxes and a pile of expired almanacs. It took a minute for his eyes to adjust to the light. Motes of dust swam in the air, and up among the rafters stretched a wire clothesline; at least a dozen men’s suits hung from it, their ancient lapels dotted with flecks of mould. In the centre of the garage was a car he’d never seen—an old Packard from the ’20s, midnight blue with a rumble seat. Cobwebs hung from its mirrors, and its convertible ragtop looked cracked and brittle with age. Its tires were completely flat.

Webern got up and dusted himself off. The rosebush branch had scraped his hand, and he licked away the beads of blood that glistened on his skin. The taste made him feel even sicker. He stepped over a Panama hat that lay brim up, on the concrete, and cautiously made his way around the car.

“Hello?” he whispered.

No one answered. Webern ran his hand over the car’s hood. His fingers left trails in the dust. He glanced around. A coat tree made of antlers leaned against one wall; a leather armchair sat in the corner, laden with mildewed suitcases. To his left was a large wooden crate with many glossy scraps of paper spread out across it. Webern blew away the dust shrouding them. Each one showed a single, isolated figure, like a paper doll cut from a photograph. It was the same man every time. In some of the pictures, he had a pencil-thin moustache; in others, a single hand tucked between the buttons of his jacket. In the one Webern held up to the light, he leaned jauntily on a lion’s head cane. Though Webern had never seen him before, the room was so full of the forgotten man that Webern almost expected him to materialize.

Webern heard a noise behind him and spun around, but it was nothing—only the rosebush branch tapping against the window frame. Biting his lip, he dropped the picture of his grandfather and, rubbing at the grimy windshield with his shirtsleeve, peered into the Packard’s dark interior.

The dashboard bore a large black scorch, and empty cat food tins, some singed feathers, and gnawed-clean pigeon bones lay on the front seats, grimy and old. Webern struggled to breathe. And that was before he glimpsed what was in the back.

The masks lay on the backseats, side by side. Time had only deepened their strangeness, their cruel otherness. Billow’s mask, stained and discoloured with age, had become as brittle and discoloured as bundled newspapers in a madman’s house; Willow’s knotty tree-face, thick with dirt and now-brown tree leaves, sprouted a pale spider egg, nestled in one cheek. Webern stared at the masks as if looking into a pair of living faces; their empty eyes gazed steadily back. For a single instant, he felt like he’d fallen out of the world. In his mind, he saw Willow and Billow, the way they must be now: sunburnt, skin cured like leather, with cracked and darkened fingernails; full-grown, with sweat and blood and tooth decay. Dressed in rags and garbage bags, feral, spiteful, crouching. Their room had always smelled like the woods; they had never feared the elements. They could be living here, in this shed. They could be anywhere. Webern heard a familiar laugh—a little boy’s—and everything went black.

Webern woke up to find the undertaker standing over him and a faint chemical smell in the air. But for a split second, the man’s pallor, his dark suit and darker hair, confused Webern and he saw Dr. Schoenberg instead.

“What’s going on?” Webern struggled to sit up. He was on the living room floor. His throat felt raw, and his voice sounded scratchy. He touched his cheekbone gingerly. It felt tender—bruised.

“Search me.” The undertaker’s voice no longer sounded melodious and consoling. “First the chimp, now you.”

“What?”

The undertaker jerked his head toward Marzipan, who was sitting in Bo-Bo’s rocking chair, an afghan drawn around her shoulders as she knitted. “That thing wouldn’t let me near the coffin. Then you started up out back.” He shook his head. “I’ve almost never heard such screaming.”

“I don’t understand. How did I get inside?”

“You kept slamming yourself into the back door—like you thought you’d jump straight through. After a minute or two, you knocked yourself out. Then I carried you in here.” The undertaker looked at him strangely. “You’re sure you don’t remember any of this?”

Webern closed his eyes, but his sisters lurked there too: a tangle of limbs, spindly and thick. Eight, like a spider. “Were they really there?”

“You might want to see a grief counsellor.” The undertaker handed him a business card. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Webern followed the undertaker to the door and bolted it shut behind him. He watched the hearse drive away. It occurred to him that the girls could be anywhere, even inside the house. He bumped his forehead against the cool window and bit the scratches on his hand.

“Marzipan?” he called. Dutifully, the ape rose from her chair. She followed him down the hall and sat with him as he dialled his father’s number on the rotary telephone. When he started shaking uncontrollably, she even draped her blanket around his hump.

In the yard around the house
, a fine mist hung in the air. Webern watched it from the front porch swing, huddled under the blanket Marzipan had brought him. A teacup full of Scotch trembled between his cupped palms, and he stared into it. He hadn’t slept that night, not for a minute, and his thoughts were jittery and confused. He thought about the coonskin cap Bo-Bo had given him so long ago. She’d cured the hide in her basement; the innards she’d stripped away with an old straight razor. Strange how easily a living thing became a hollow shell.

Webern could hardly believe Bo-Bo was gone; it wouldn’t have surprised him if she’d come out the front door, shotgun jauntily balanced on one shoulder. It certainly would have frightened him less than seeing his sisters again. But, despite the fact he’d sat up at the window all night, he hadn’t glimpsed them yet.

For a moment, when Webern first saw his father’s Chrysler approach-ing through the mist, he thought it was some sort of mirage. On the phone the night before, the old man had sounded pretty bleary, and Webern hadn’t been making too much sense either. Their conversation had been all stops and starts and pauses so long Webern kept thinking they’d been disconnected. Webern didn’t even know what he’d said. His words had made no sense to him; they’d come out like gibberish, faster and faster, until he realized he was sobbing too hard to make himself understood. Marzipan had pressed a damp washcloth to his brow to cool his face, and he’d held it there for a long time.

Whatever he’d said had somehow managed to lure his father back, though, because the headlights were real, making two tunnels of cloudy white down the road ahead. He stood up, and the blanket dropped from around his shoulders. Goosebumps rose on his arms; one hand slipped up automatically to cover his hump.

Webern remembered his own mother’s funeral, the wreaths of carnations piled around the casket, as if it had come in first in a race, and he remembered walking towards it, slower and slower, the funeral home’s plush carpet crushing beneath his shiny black shoes. At that moment he had wanted his mother desperately, needed her more than anything in the world; but at the same time, her body was more frightening to him than even the sound of his sisters rattling his locked door handle in the dead of night. Staring down at his mother’s face, waxy and artificial against those sea-foam green pillows, Webern had been consumed with the sensation of falling up, as though his own spirit was rising to meet hers in the cold cathedral of the sky. Today, Webern realized, his own father was feeling the same way. They were both orphans now.

For once, Webern felt like it might actually be possible to talk to Raymond. Maybe his father would even understand about Willow and Billow, would protect him for a change. He swallowed the rest of the Scotch from his teacup and went down the stairs to meet the old man’s car.

Raymond parked at an angle on the curb, the left front tire narrowly avoiding the jaws of a raccoon trap. Webern stood for a moment, staring through the windshield. For the second time in two days, he found himself peering into a car’s darkened interior with a mixture of horror and disbelief. Because there in the passenger seat sat a woman Webern had never seen before.

She looked like the type of woman who had been called a “cupcake” long ago, but now, as she squeezed herself out of the Chrysler’s passenger side, she released a miasma of musky toilet water, corned beef hash, and day-old donuts. She wore tight-fitting black Capri pants and a green-and-black men’s bowling shirt, hiked up and tied around her middle, just below her ample breasts. A red bow snarled in her dirty-blond hair, and her pancake makeup, no doubt merry and bright in the neon glow of jukeboxes and beer signs, had the odd effect of flattening her features in the early morning light, so her face looked artificial, painted-on—almost clownish.

“Hon.” She minced toward him in a pair of ill-fitting slingbacks, her arms extended. “Hon, Madge is here now. Don’t you cry.”

“Who
are
you?” Webern whispered. Insanely, he thought:
she’s stolen my face
.

Webern’s father rolled down the driver’s side window. “Bernie, get in the car.”

Webern buckled into the backseat as Madge unsteadily mounted the front steps of the porch.

“I should’ve told you sooner,” his father said. He fiddled with some of the buttons on the dashboard. “But I figured you had enough on your plate as it was.”

“What’s she doing here?”

“Well, I figured, better safe than sorry. There’s been some vandals in Tarantula—killing birds, breaking windows, even burned down a kid’s playhouse. I figured they might’ve seen the hearse.” He rubbed his eyes. “Madge’ll keep a lookout ’til we’re back.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“A man needs someone to keep him warm at night. Horse doesn’t need to be a thoroughbred to pull the cart. Seems you know that well enough.”

“I love Nepenthe. I’m not ashamed of her. I wouldn’t be with someone I was ashamed of.”

“I didn’t say I was ashamed.”

“That’s right. You didn’t say anything about her at all.”

A loud shriek came from the direction of the house. Seconds later, Marzipan appeared at the door, wearing an eyelet bonnet and carrying two suitcases. She appeared unruffled as she made her way down to the Chrysler and began strapping suitcases to its roof. Then she walked around to the passenger’s side and let herself in. She sat shotgun, directly in front of Webern, and in this new space he noticed for the first time her peculiar smell: musty and sweet, like a fur coat stored with sage leaves and rose petals.

“So, are you driving me to Little Falls or not?” Webern asked. “Because I really need to leave. Right now.”

“I figured you wouldn’t want to stay for the services.”

“I figured you wouldn’t want to stay with Bo-Bo while she died. And I was right. You left that up to me.”

Raymond’s breath whistled. “I never thought a son of mine would grow up to be so cruel.”

“Maybe I learned it from you, Dad.” Webern kicked the back of the passenger seat. His tennis shoe left a scuff.

Webern tried to sleep all the way to Little Falls. But he couldn’t stop himself from waking up from time to time, and when he did it was invariably with confusion. Once he thought that Dr. Schoenberg and Nepenthe were in the front seat, navigating the vehicle down the ugly road to Lynchville. Another time, Marzipan’s quiet whimper brought to mind Fred and Ginger, growling from their cages in the jalopy. The last time Webern woke up, he thought he was in the old Studebaker with his father and mother side by side in the front seat. Even after this illusion fell away, he kept staring at his father’s craggy profile for a long time, trying to get it back.

As the road snaked through green cornfields toward the big top, it started to strike Webern as incredible that he’d lived the life he had for so long. Back in the days he’d spent manacled in a back brace, propped up at a desk in a classroom squeaking with chalk and clicking with overhead projector slides, he’d dreamed of one day travelling to a different world, full of festivals and costumes, exotic sights that could compete with the copies of National Geographic he paged through during study hall. Now here he was, about to step through the door of a boxcar into a magical room filled with forbidden herbs and growing candy, where a girl lay waiting under a Mexican blanket, naked except for her scales. Webern tried to feel relieved to be back, joyful even, but he couldn’t shake off a persistent, gnawing ache. It was as though his life at the circus, with all its pleasures and excesses, its gorgeous eccentricities, was a painting he’d never get to climb back into.

“Here we are,” said Raymond, turning the car into the patrons’ parking lot. White paint, still glistening wet, marked spaces on the dusty ground. Webern started to open his door, but before he could, Raymond cleared his throat. “I hope you get along all right. With your work, and your—lady friend.”

“You, too.” They still hadn’t talked about anything, anything, and knowing his father, they never would. Webern gripped the handle of his bag. “Listen, I know—I know this has to be hard for you, and I didn’t mean—”

“Never mind that. It’s been good seeing you again. Don’t be such a stranger.” Raymond hesitated. “I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for your posters.”

“Well, don’t hold your breath. It’s not like I’m a high wire act.” Webern looked down at his foot and willed it to stop tapping. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do, okay?”

“Come to think of it, son, there is one other thing I’ve been meaning to ask you.” Raymond removed his hat. He glanced significantly at Marzipan.

As the Chrysler pulled away into the warm mid-afternoon, Webern and his inherited chimpanzee walked in the direction of the freak housing, carrying their respective suitcases. Marzipan seemed to take her change in surroundings in stride, hardly glancing up as they passed a team of practicing fire eaters and the elephants getting hosed down with Fat Rhonda. None of them paid any attention to Marzipan either: it wasn’t like they’d never seen an ape in a bonnet before.

Webern was marveling at her resilience as he climbed up the steps to his cabin and pushed open the door. But as soon as he stepped inside, all his other thoughts fell away. Because there on the rug stood a beautiful young stranger, wearing only a pair of underpants and a beaded necklace, looking herself up and down in the mirror.

She was standing with one arm outstretched, snapping Polaroids of herself. A pile of shiny photographs in various states of development lay scattered at her feet.

“Bernie,” she said, turning to look at him. Her voice sounded light and breathless—the voice of someone who’d just arrived. Before Webern could answer her, the flash snapped again. A permanent likeness of her expression—eyes wide, lips slightly parted—seared itself onto a square of paper. She popped it out of the camera’s back and tossed it down to the floor.

“Hi,” said Webern. He stared at her skin, pink and unblemished as a mermaid’s newly formed legs, and for an instant he knew he had to be in the wrong boxcar. Then a feeling crept over him, a feeling he’d known since childhood, a feeling he thought of as the opposite of recognition. It was the feeling he’d had when he’d woken up in his room back home, then realized he couldn’t move because of the body cast; the feeling he’d had when he called his mother’s name in the night, then remembered she would never answer him again. It was the feeling that nothing was familiar anymore. Webern thought of the way Nepenthe had looked just before he’d left: naked, sated, her eyes glowing the dim soft green of the ocean floor. The eyes staring at him now were the same, but all wrong.

“So, what do you think?” she asked. “I guess this is what you miss when you leave for a couple days, huh?”

She stepped back, as if that would help him take her in all at once. But the longer Webern looked at her, the more she began breaking into shapes: the hollow of her neck, the knob of her ankle, the curve of her hip, the whorl of her ear. He couldn’t hold her together in his mind.

“Bernie, are you okay?”

“I just need to be alone for a minute.” He sat down on the floor.

“What’re you talking about? You just got home! I’ve got so much to tell you.” Nepenthe walked over to him and unceremoniously yanked him up by the hands. Her palms felt smooth and slightly greasy; once he was on his feet, they slipped away easily. “Look at me!”

Webern tried to, but it was hard to keep his eyes focused. Nepenthe’s face floated above him.

“I mean, you haven’t even asked me what happened yet!”

Webern picked up a record sleeve from the couch; unreal psychedelic patterns swirled up at him. Count Five,
Cartesian Jetstream
. “Okay, what happened?”

“Thank you. Finally. So, Venus and I met this guy, this dermatologist. A classic oral character, this guy. Anyway, he had this whole bag of lotions and he asked me—”

But Webern wasn’t listening anymore. He had dropped the album cover and was staring at the Polaroids on the floor. In them, Nepenthe was mugging for the camera: leaning against the wall, a clove dangling from her lips; lying on the bed wearing nothing but a pair of high heels; sitting cross-legged on the couch with a white feather boa around her shoulders—a boa he’d used in one short-lived sketch where he’d played a chicken learning how to fly. If Nepenthe herself was impossible to take in all at once, these pictures encapsulated her beautifully. She was a voluptuous girl with the pouty, pillowy lips they used to call a Cupid’s bow, a girl with the body of a nightclub singer who lies on the piano lid and whispers into a microphone. Her breasts were just big enough to make other girls call her easy without knowing her name. At least, they would have at his high school.