Know Your Beholder: A Novel (18 page)

When Glose dropped out of Waubonsee Community College and moved to Chicago, he broke his mother’s heart. Lorna Glose still lives in the small tar-paper house where her only son was born, on the east side of Aurora, Illinois.

Glose’s father is an unknown entity. Kent, for reasons that were never entirely clear to me, believed him to be living on a pot farm in Jamaica. I’m still not sure how Glose wound up in Pollard. Morris and I met him at the Crooked Dog, a now defunct bar where he briefly worked busing tables. One night he overheard us talking about forming a band and he started talking about drums in a cool way, particularly about the idea of melodic drumming, so we invited him to jam with us. He blew our minds on a makeshift kit and the rest is history.

“Don’t worry,” Glose said, “you won’t even know I’m here.”

With a dirty index finger he probed inside his ear, employing a slow, churning technique that issued audible squishing noises. Critters were inside him. Did he have lice? Crabs? Or worse yet, scabies?

I wanted to scream at him for killing our band, something I’d never done. I wanted to scream so fucking loud that his face would cave in from the megahertz, but instead I said, “I’ll track down an air mattress for you.”

“No need for that,” Glose said, ceasing his ear probe. “I’m happy on the bearskin.”

Though I knew I was in for trouble, I nodded.

And thus the mooching began. And thus was I forced to abandon my typewriter, at least for the time being.

I called Haggis and traded the Bunches’ DVD player for a month’s supply of his new penis-enlargement pills. When he came to drop them off, I met him at the front porch.

“So they really work, huh?”

“They’ve put an inch on me,” he volunteered.

I handed him an old Pollard Memorial High School gym bag containing the DVD player. He held his fist out and I bumped it idiotically.

“You could probably get a hundred bucks for that,” I said of the DVD player.

“Oh, I’m not sellin’ it,” Haggis said. “It’s gonna be the main cog in my new backseat entertainment system.”

“In the Nissan?”

“Hells yes in the Nissan. I got me a twenty-seven-inch, high-def LED monitor, Bose speakers.”

He was in good spirits. I wondered if the penis pills were helping his mood.

“I might get a hibachi,” he said, “start hosting client barbecues.”

I told him I was impressed. And I was. Here was someone finding great joy and purpose in the confines of a compact car.

Afterward, he shoveled the front and back porch steps, and the walkway from the street.

For the first time in years Hazard Groom’s wife, Eugenia, crossed the street and buzzed the attic apartment. The last time she had paid a visit to the house was after my mother died. On that occasion she had dressed in all black, complete with a mourner’s snood. She brought with her a huge bouquet of red carnations and was so made-up she looked waxen. You would’ve thought it was
her
mother who’d died and that she was coming over to borrow an egg for some memorial cake she was baking.

When I met her on the front porch, she seemed deeply troubled. I thought maybe Hazard had suffered a stroke, or worse yet, died. Somehow I always expect senior citizens to go in the winter. Their fragile, brittle bones turning to glass, their hearts winding down like shrinking, faulty clocks. Their lungs thinning to faint sacs of frost. Hundreds of Pollard seniors slowly teetering while filling the teakettle or reaching for the refrigerator door, landing face-first on their cold kitchen floors.

I brought Eugenia Groom around to the side porch and we sat on the wicker furniture, which was actually colder than the air.

I said, “What can I do for you, Mrs. Groom?”

Eugenia Groom has been wearing the same brown wig and identical shade of tuxedo-red lipstick since the midseventies. She is pretty the way an official Susan B. Anthony one-dollar coin is pretty. Her voice is a faint warble of desperation, perhaps more suited to a pigeon than a woman. You always feel like you’re going to have to console her when she approaches you. She trembles and moves at the same steady pace as, say, a canoe. How she’s survived all these years with a bombastic legendary football coach for a husband is anyone’s guess. Kent used to joke that she might have some kind of unexpected jack-in-the-box energy in bed.

For this particular visit she wore an orange silk headscarf over her wig, black suede gloves, and black heels over sheer nylon stockings. Her navy mackintosh had specks of powder on the shoulders, which I assumed to be some sort of scented talcum that had escaped from her wig. She obviously hadn’t yet beheld the beard I’ve been farming and I could tell she was trying to make sense of my new look. Was the nice boy from across the street, the one who used to deliver her
Chicago Tribune
and play in those silly rock bands, still in there somewhere?

She removed her gloves, placed them in her lap, and took my hands in hers, which I was sure meant Hazard Groom had indeed died. For a moment, she ceased breathing, enlarged her funereal eyes, and, with an expression that was distinctly corvine, said, “Francis, you have circus killers living in your house.”

I took my hands back. “Mrs. Groom,” I said, “if you’re referring to the Bunches, I’ll have you know that they are very nice people.”

“They’re cold-blooded killers. Circus killers.”

I told her that there was absolutely no evidence that they’d done anything to their daughter. “They’re actually going through a lot right now,” I added.

“They’re killers from the circus,” she said.

She was starting to seem downright robotic with the variations on the “circus killers” refrain. It was as if she’d been somehow digitally downloaded with a well-mastered MP3 track and some fellow neighborhood witch huntress was zapping her with a remote from behind a nearby snowy hedge.

“It’s unfair to say that, Mrs. Groom, it really is.”

She cleared her voice and continued: “Gene and Cathy were wanting to bring the grandkids over this weekend, and I have to say it makes Hazard and me very uncomfortable knowing that these people are right across the street.”

The thing that drove me craziest was her gentle, warbly voice. She really was scared to death.

I assured her that she had nothing to fear. “They’re good, normal people,” I added. “Todd is a fireman and Mary watches George Clooney movies.”

“That’s all a front,” she replied. “Can’t you see that?” She went on to say that
she
could see it—meaning their obvious murderous guilt—from all the way across the street, plain as day. “It’s all a performance,” she said.

For a moment I doubted myself. Was it all a performance? Were my initial suspicions about the Bunches correct? Was I being fooled?

Eugenia added that Hazard had wanted to join her on this visit but that he was too upset.

I imagined Coach Groom standing behind the drapes, even-faced, smoking a pipe, his arteries thickening with a slow dull rage, poised to call out to the neighborhood with a bullhorn and unleash the ignominy, leading end-zone-style chants against the Bunches until they came out to face the throng.

I suggested that she meet the Bunches for herself. “They’re probably home right now,” I said. “Let’s go knock on their door.”

She stood and put her gloves back on. “I don’t think so,” she said, her voice quavering ludicrously.

“You’re wrong about them,” I said to the back of her mackintosh.

She clicked across the porch, faster than I’ve ever seen her move.

“At least meet Mary,” I called after her.

But she exited without a response, scooting across the icy street in her heels, as if chased by winter bees. Hazard Groom was already at their front door, just as I’d imagined him, stalwart as a can of nails, ready to let her in.

It’s March at last.

Glose has now stayed for three days and into a fourth.

From the Internet, for thirty dollars, I bought him Calming Cleanse Delousing Shampoo and Conditioner. I paid for overnight shipping. The kit came with a comb and an instructional booklet. We didn’t discuss the critters that were living on him. I just handed him the little clear plastic zipper pack and he read the label and nodded.

“Three showers should do the trick,” I said.

“Like three in a row?” he asked.

I’ve heard about how homeless people resist showers because the high-pressure directional water feels like pins and needles. Had it been this long since Glose had actually bathed? “Maybe take one now,” I offered gently, “and then again tomorrow morning and the following morning too.”

Equally gently he replied, “But I could use it more than three times, Francis. Just to be safe.”

“Sure,” I said, noting how he’d affably feathered my name in there, practically childlike in its benevolence. “Just to be safe,” I echoed.

Even more gently he said, “Like I’d be willing to do six or seven showers with this stuff.”

“Probably a good plan,” I said.

In this precise moment there seemed to be some tacit agreement cemented between us that Glose would be living with me indefinitely.

Just to be safe, I took these pages, along with my Corona, down to the laundry room, where I hid them in a wooden box on top of the cupboard over the washer and dryer. I loathed the idea of Glose snooping around in this manuscript. I figured the last place he would go looking for anything would be a room where things were cleaned. I am tired already of writing longhand and will hope for some typing sessions, or at least transcription, in the basement.

I was back on the stool once more, post–encircling exercise, as naked as a man on a stool can possibly be. Harriet Gumm was at the other end of the room this time, manning a different easel, focusing on my posterior side. At first it was strange being drawn from behind, Harriet as an unseen omnipotent presence, a disembodied voice, no doubt cringing at my bits of back hair, acne scars, and other imperfections.

I’ve been on the penis-enlargement pills for four days. They don’t seem to be making a difference. I keep checking myself in the bathroom mirror after I urinate, which means I have to stand on the toilet, an act that makes the dick check oddly surgical, as it’s only my crotch framed in the medicine chest. Without the rest of my body as a proportional context, it’s not easy to assess progress. If anything, I think the pills are making my penis sort of, well, more brownish. Meaning the color brown. Like cooked-hot-dog brown. Or Buster-Brown-shoes brown. Maybe that’s the first step: a slight penile darkening, to be followed by incredible, rapid growth.

Let’s hope so.

For the first few minutes of the session I felt like prey to the huntress, but the trust exercise took the edge off and I was able to surrender to the new subject-artist relationship and connect to my breath, which smelled like way too much Dentyne Ice, a gum I’ve been chewing inordinate amounts of to ward off any bad odor my troubled molar might be releasing. And to ward off any possible Glose funk I might be absorbing, I’d showered so thoroughly that the soles of my feet were pruning.

I could feel her gaze crawling on my spine like a slow, deliberate beetle. I was surprisingly unaware of my brown penis. Or my brown mole, for that matter.

I think she went from chalk to charcoal or charcoal to chalk because the sound on the paper changed. Or maybe it was simply her technique that changed.

I asked if she would show me what she was working on but she said no, which I found to be a double standard, seeing as Keith’s study was on the wall when he walked in, and I told her as much.

“You can come to my thesis showing and see it all then.”

“When’s that?” I asked.

“Beginning of May. By that time maybe your back will be healed.” She told me it seemed like it was getting better.

I replied that sitting on the stool didn’t seem to bother it so much.

“Posing has medicinal effects,” she said.

At this point, the beginning of May seemed like a year away. Would I still be faking a bad back? Or would I have to come up with a more elaborate physical affliction, like bursitis or some unexplained adult version of rickets? Worried about what I would look like as a purchased, bonded, freed, and educated slave, I asked if she was crafting me the same visual narrative as her other subjects.

“No,” she said decisively. “Not at all.”

“Will my story relate to theirs?”

“Almost completely,” she answered obliquely.

I was suddenly all too aware of my penis and my mole.

The moon is full tonight. I have been watching it through my finial window. So bright you can actually see its shadowy depressions and fault lines. Its ghostly seabeds and phantom continents. The cloudless icy sky. Frozen winter stars. Astral penumbra. Endless glittering space.

All is quiet in the house. Only the heat turning itself on and off. The occasional toilet flushing, sending a rush of water through pipes; that distant, mysterious sluicing sound.

I am writing longhand again tonight, unable to leave the attic.

Glose is asleep on the bearskin. He sleeps so much and so unfathomably deeply it makes me jealous. Since the three consecutive showers, I’ve rarely seen him get up, even to use the bathroom, eat, or drink a glass of water. I get the sense that he’s in the throes of some essential restorative process. A kind of half-conscious hibernation. In recent days, the few times he’s been conscious, he’s been pretty quiet, if not a little dazed, occasionally emitting a faint sigh that sounds like a release of air from some unseen anatomical valve. At some point I will enter the attic apartment and he will have transformed into a jungle cat.

Or just a big plate of ham.

There is still an odor, an almost blinding halitosis, which I worried at first was from my molar, but realized, almost with relief, was emanating from Glose, even after the third shower. While working at my desk I’ve taken to blowing a small fan in his direction. A fan in the winter (it’s early March, but still winter in this part of Illinois) is absurd, I know, but it seems to organize his breath into a kind of rectangular mass that lives with him on his side of the room.