Iona Moon (25 page)

She didn't go straight to Broadway. She walked to the rooming house first. Hills loomed, steeper with each step, and she was tired, so tired, her body buzzed with adrenalin and now drained. She passed the Mission-with-a-Heart. Men leaned against the building. A red light in a third-story window flickered and went off, one heart beating out. The men didn't bother to ask her for spare change, and she realized she looked as bad off as any one of them. Yellow fog hung heavy in the glow of streetlamps; yellow fog rolled down the dark streets, followed her under the viaducts, carried her all the way to Fir Street, where she stared up at her own dark window but didn't go inside. She was scared. Of what? She didn't know. A single word from Mrs. Hagestead might break her. So she headed down the hill, fifty blocks, a hundred, no, only a mile, but so far tonight, so far in the icy rain.

She was seven minutes late. “You're getting yourself in debt, little baby,” Stanley said. He pinched her cheek as if she really were a baby. She fondled the knife, deep in her pocket. “My sweetheart,” Stanley said, “don't make Daddy mad.”

“You better watch your ass.” Those were Odette's first words to Iona the next morning. “Stanley says you were late again last night, and you're filthy besides. I got my eye on you, girl.” Iona imagined Odette with only one eye above her nose, a huge eye, the white yellowed as an old egg, the iris cloudy. She wanted to knock every can of soup off the shelf, right now, while Odette peered at her with her one eye. But she didn't. She knew that if she ever wanted to see Eddie again she had to come back here tonight and tomorrow and the next tomorrow. She had to be patient and good. She had to wash her clothes and comb her hair and wait for Eddie.

Lying on her bed, Iona felt the room rocking. There was a pressure deep in her head, inside her ear, water in her brain, a steady sloshing. She closed her eyes and the boat capsized. She and Eddie struggled in the black waves; his pink leg bobbed on the water, floating out of reach.

On the third night, Eddie appeared. Iona watched him in his glass box, smoking cigarette after cigarette, drinking coffee from his thermos. She stared at his hands. Having seen him naked, she couldn't look at his bare hands without remembering all of him. He gazed at the pumps or out toward the street. At five he finally came to see her. His braid was gone, his dark hair neatly trimmed above his ears and collar. He wore a white shirt and a plain leather belt. His skin seemed paler, as if the red glow had burned out. He could pass, Eddie Rogers, husband of Alice Rogers, son of a white man who sawed off the heads of walruses, no relation at all to an old woman named Pearl Birdheart.

“She bailed me out,” he said. “I didn't have to spend the night.”

“Neither did I.”

“I know.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Iona said.

“Her father found me a lawyer. Cut a deal over lunch, five hundred bucks and no trial—I've got six months to pay it off.”

“I've got some money,” Iona said.

“I'm not telling you this to hit you up for cash,” Eddie said. “I'm telling you this so you'll understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Some people die in prison,” Eddie said. “Some people shrivel if you lock them up. They think they'll never get out even if you tell them how many days they have to serve. I was afraid—can you see that?”

Iona nodded. Eddie Birdheart would stop eating, squat in the corner, piss his pants and die a little more every day. She thought of Matt Fry. Eighteen days—it didn't take long to kill some men.

“I'm a cripple,” he said. “I can't run away.”

That morning, Iona walked down to the bay. The rain had no drops: air itself had turned to water, mist beading on her face and in her hair. Two old women sat on a bench. They leaned forward to draw pictures in the sand with their fingers, then erased them with their feet. Long-legged sandpipers skittered to the water's edge. Their paths made pictures, too, as they fled the rising waves.

The women moved down the shore, arms linked. A fishing boat returned from the sea. The man on deck wore a yellow slicker and yellow boots. Iona imagined his load, the hold full of silvery fish with black, open eyes. She could smell those fish. The sea washed up all the dead: carcasses of trees, stumps and bleached roots; broken shells and strands of kelp, their amber bulbs swollen with fluid. The ocean smashed bottles and battered boats, destroyed everything if given time. Waves tossed whole trees against the seawall. Their trunks were thirty feet long, thick as three men, but the sea threw them lightly, heaved them up as easily as children's toys. Seaweed clung to the roots like tangled hair. Waves lapped the shore. Waves splashed in the ear, relentless, a tormenting tide.

Gulls circled, descending on a single piece of garbage. They pecked one another's chests, crawing and complaining; they flapped their wings, then hunkered along the shore, heads tucked down like little hunchbacks.

The clouds were gray, and the water was gray too. The sky sank and the waves rose and the fog rolled along the shore. This was the beginning of the day and the end of the night and the start of all days to come. This was the sky without rain that was always raining.

Iona Moon's life in Seattle without Eddie was different but no better than her life on the Kila Flats.
You take yourself with you
. She figured that was why Sharla came back to White Falls, and she knew for sure that was why Everett shot himself. Some people were split in half, like Eddie, so it seemed as if he could get away from his old self. But Iona knew Pearl Birdheart would talk to Eddie through his telephone some day, that it wouldn't ring and he wouldn't pick it up, but he'd hear her voice all the same. She felt sorry for him: she imagined Alice kicking his leg out from under him when he came home loaded, smelling of smoke and his mother's house.

She barely slept for a week. It was the ear that kept her awake. It throbbed, filling the left side of her head, pounding, as if a separate, swollen heart beat there.

At work she felt weak, pulled off center. Kids came into the store, joking and jabbering. The boys pretended they didn't see her. Pretty girls stared with pity and fear, wondering how they could stand themselves if they looked like Iona Moon. Perhaps they insulted her. She couldn't be sure. Words were muffled. After they left, she whacked the side of her head and her skull filled with light—brief and blinding.

By October, she was stealing things from the store that she didn't want and couldn't use: a jar of popcorn kernels, a bottle of vinegar, newspapers with stories about two-headed babies and passionate aliens who landed in cornfields to visit lonely housewives in Iowa. She got a thrill fooling Odette, walking out of the store with the newspapers crackling in her jeans, taking a scolding for her sloppy sweeping while an icy box of frozen peas dampened her shirt and chilled her belly.

Stanley was always glad to see Iona. He called her sweetheart, rubbed her arm while he talked to her. Somehow he'd found out about Eddie and the boat. He had hopes for himself. One night he told her there was a carton of milk leaking in the dairy case. “Would you clean it up?” he said. He'd had too much rum and lurched as he followed her down the aisle. When she bent over to peer in the case, he pinched her ass, the same way he'd pinched her cheek many times before, only harder. She turned, slowly, the punctured carton in her hand. The long strands of hair that Stanley had greased carefully over his bald spot had slipped, revealing his shiny scalp. He lunged, kissing her hard on the mouth, crushing the carton of milk between them.
Sweetheart
. She dropped the milk and the carton broke, splattering on the floor, squirting their pant legs.
Sweetheart
. The burn in her ear made her half-deaf and giddy. He forced his tongue inside her mouth and she let him do that too. She tasted cigars, the salami sandwich he'd eaten at seven, the last hot swallow of rum. He put one hand on her left breast and squeezed, poor little Stanley with his thin chest and mean wife, desperate, drunk, wheezing Stanley, such a small favor for a dying man. It wouldn't last long. What did she care? One more kiss, one more pinch—but she did care; she could have pulled the rusty knife from her pocket and stuck it in his belly.
For a quarter, I would;
that's what she thought. “Iona.” He choked on her name, doubled over, coughing, and never knew how close he'd come to the knife, never guessed that as he teetered away from the girl, she imagined blood spurting from his stomach, staining his shirt while he pressed his hands to himself, weak and bewildered, trying to hold it all inside.

15

The next time Willy Hamilton found himself in the Tylers' house, he and Delores sat in the kitchen. It was late October. He accepted the drink she offered, a short one just like hers, vodka on the rocks with a squeeze of lime. He was still in uniform and knew what his father would say.
You're on duty until the minute you step out of those pants
. But Horton Hamilton wasn't there. He called Mrs. Tyler
Delores
, lightly, as if he had called her that his whole life.
Thank you, Delores
.

“You're so tall, Willy.”

“It's the boots.”

Those were their first words, and they almost deflated him before he was even inside the house. He was seven years old again, putting his feet in Horton's big shoes, drowning in his father's clothes.

“You look very handsome.”

The boots fit. His boots. He tipped the hat. “Thank you, Delores.”

Now he was sipping his vodka, sitting across the table from a pretty woman who just happened to be his best friend's mother. “How's Jay?” Willy said.

“The same.”

She didn't make excuses this time, didn't pretend he was asleep, didn't say he had the flu.
The same
. Willy had never understood how awful those words could be. They were the soothing words the doctor used at the hospital when his grandmother was dying.
The same
.

Delores Tyler cupped both hands around her drink and stared at the ice splitting in the warm vodka. It was only five o'clock but almost dark. The air turned murky and Delores blurred. Willy wondered if one of them might be drunk.

“I'm afraid I haven't been much of a mother.”

“It's not your fault.” His words came too fast and sounded false.

“Lousy wife, lousy mother—I made a mess of things.” Even in the fading light, Willy could see that her hands were unsteady. He almost reached for her, but she blinked hard, gripped her glass, and drained it. “I'm afraid I've had a few too many.” She laughed. “So you can't hold me responsible for anything I say.” He had never seen her with her hair down, curling around her shoulders. “Or do,” she added.

She filled her glass again. “You don't mind, do you?”

“Why should I?” But he did mind. The boy who was Jay Tyler's friend and his own mother's son wanted to take the glass from her and toss the vodka and ice into the sink. This boy wanted to dump his own drink too, but there was someone else here, someone who thought of himself as a young man. He was reckless and scorned the other Willy for his prudish rules; he drank fast and poured himself another.

“I tried in the beginning,” she said. “The good wife part, I mean.”

“It's getting dark,” Willy said.

“Yes, he'll be home soon.”

Willy heard footsteps above his head, then a thud, the dull sound of a body dropping to the floor.

“Jay,” Delores said. “He must know you're here.”

“Did he fall?”

“Maybe.”

“Shouldn't we see if he's all right?”

“He does it all the time.” She raised her glass. “Like mother, like son—much to his father's dismay.”

Willy thought of the Jay he knew, the Jay who said drinking destroyed the body, who wouldn't touch a drop when he was in training.

“Because of the pain, you know,” Delores said. “It started because of the pain.”

Willy imagined Jay's legs, the shattered bones, the months in bed. He realized he had no idea how much it hurt, no knowledge of pain beyond scraped knees and a bruised forehead, a cut on his foot that took a month to heal and left a scar an inch and a half long.

“That's how it started with me too,” Delores said, “because of the pain.”

Willy didn't want to know, didn't want to hear anything about the pain of a woman.

Never talk about sorrow in the dark
, his mother said, flicking on lights all through the house before she sat down to tell them their grandmother was dead.

“I was pregnant with Jay. I found a handkerchief in Andrew's drawer. A brand-new handkerchief with his initials embroidered in one corner, the kind of thing he'd never buy for himself, a gift—do you see what I mean?”

Willy nodded. He wondered why she was telling him this. He heard more steps above him, the awkward three-legged gait of a man with a cane.

“I moved it to the back of his drawer, so he'd know that I'd found it, that I knew he had a girl.”

She poured her third drink and topped Willy's too.

“I thought he'd see what a fool he was, that he'd look at me some night, pregnant with his child, and realize he loved me. The handkerchief would disappear.

“But that didn't happen. The next time I put his clothes away it was in the front of the drawer again, right on top. He wanted me to know that he wasn't going to stop seeing her. This was our life now, our
vow
.

“I imagined crying myself sick. I thought he'd come home and find me that way, on my bed, in the dark. That he'd see he'd been a fool. But Andrew wasn't like that. It's not in him to be sorry. He would have said, ‘Pull yourself together, darling.' So I didn't cry. I made myself a drink and cooked dinner. I got drunk, Willy, and I discovered I didn't give a damn if he was sorry or not.”

Willy heard a door open and close.