Know Your Beholder: A Novel (35 page)

Then, with an ultrastern expression, she said, “What’s that?”

She was referring to Bethany Bunch’s teddy bear, which I’d brought along with the intention of giving it to her son, who stared up at me. It felt like I’d known the boy for years.

“Here,” I said, offering the teddy bear to him.

He didn’t reach out to take it. He just kept staring. I felt myself falling into his brown, cervine irises.

“It doesn’t have any eyes,” Deepa King said.

The boy was frozen, clutching his mother’s leg.

“Don’t you want it?” I asked him.

“No thank you,” Deepa King answered, adding, “I’ll speak to my husband about your generous offer.”

Before I could give her my phone number she closed the makeshift door in my face. Moments later the sound of a Master Lock clicking.

That evening it rained. A long, heavy, opiate rain. You could hear it detonating on the Grooms’ tarpaulin roof, drumming on the eaves.

I went downstairs and walked around to the back porch. Beneath the copper beech the new birdbath had filled to the brim and was flooding over. I kept expecting to see dead birds spilling out of it. Little thrushes and blue jays and swallows.

The rain pattered melodically through the new leaves of the copper beech. It released the metal in the air. The back porch was cool and smelled like an ancient stone well that you happen upon in a field.

I went into the Bunches’ unit and sat on their living room floor. They’d left behind their TV, their new DVD player, their TiVo. Their corduroy cat throw pillow was within arm’s reach. I had an impulse to take it back up to the attic with me—I thought it would go well with the similar hide on my reading chair—but stopped myself. I had the crystalline thought that these items should be left alone. A kind of archaeological respect had to be paid.

I felt a terrible ache. An emptiness was expanding. An earwig skittered across the carpeting and crawled over the cable remote, then disappeared.

I could smell something sour, something decaying. I got off the living room floor and went into the kitchen, where I opened the Bunches’ refrigerator, which they had turned off, perhaps a last-second bit of energy-saving generosity. Inside was a curdled half-gallon of milk with the top off, a cantaloupe turning bad, a bottle of Thousand Island salad dressing, and in the crisper a damp, putrefying head of romaine lettuce, floating in a film of brown water.

Was it in fact a gesture of energy-saving generosity or a final act of bitterness? I pondered whether they always left the cap off their milk, or whether perhaps, beyond their clothes and other soft goods, that little blue disc had been the one thing they’d taken with them, a souvenir to mark this terrible chapter in their lives. A thing for Todd Bunch to carry around in his pocket, to forever remind him of that fucked-up Illinois town where his daughter disappeared and the people called him and his wife murderers, where all he wanted was to live a normal life with a regular job and reside in a furnished home with no circus animals. An object whose dull plastic edge can be occasionally stroked with the pad of the thumb so he will never forget the awful inhuman capabilities of the neighbors and store clerks and coffee baristas and local news anchors of Pollard, Illinois.

I cleaned out their refrigerator, sprayed down the interior with a bleach-based disinfectant, and left the door open so it could air out.

When I got back upstairs I called Mansard’s cell phone.

He said hello like he’d fallen asleep with his mouth full of Kleenex. He coughed and sputtered, cleared his throat. “Who is this?” he growled.

“Francis Falbo,” I replied.

“They found her…,” he said.

My legs gave out. I fell into my bookcase and sent a row of paperbacks tumbling to the floor.

Mansard told me that Bethany Bunch had been found at a high school track meet in Manteno, Illinois. A young father had come upon her stranded in the grandstand of the small high school football stadium. According to the local authorities, there was no evidence of abuse. She wasn’t malnourished and she seemed perfectly fine. She was wearing a new cotton tank dress, robin’s-egg blue, with little white daisies. The dress had been purchased from a Target in Merrillville, Indiana, and the tags were still on it.

“What about her parents?” I asked.

“I spoke with the sheriff’s office up in Manteno about an hour ago,” Mansard said. “The Bunches are with their daughter now.”

I asked if he knew where they’d been.

“I figured they’d gone back to the circus,” he said. “But apparently they’d just been driving around.”

I got to my feet and adrenaline hurtled from my kidneys to my throat. My body was moving at breakneck speed. I was careening down the aft staircase, heedless of the unsuitability of wool slippers for sprinting on stairs. I found myself in the basement, pounding on Baylor Phebe’s door. The thrill of Mansard’s news tingled in my wrists, my fists, the tips of my fingers. There was no answer and I pounded more.

Moments later Bob Blubaugh opened his door and peered into the hall. “Everything okay?” he said.

“They found her!” I exclaimed.

“Who?” he said.

“Bethany Bunch!” I cried. “She’s alive!”

He said that was great news and before I knew it I was rushing toward him. I hugged him with all my might, lifting him off the floor. I don’t even recall setting him down. All I know is I was running up the stairs to the second floor.

“They found her!” I shouted down the hall. “Bethany Bunch is alive!”

And then I was coursing headlong down the stairs. I burst through the front door and scampered across the street. The rain was coming down hard—cold and aggressive—and the air was thick with ozone. On my way across the Grooms’ lawn I almost knocked over their ancient ceramic deer, the one that had miraculously survived the tornadoes, as well as its new companion, a wide-eyed stone rabbit. My shin connected squarely with the rabbit, but at this point, pain meant nothing. I pounded on their door and in a matter of seconds, Eugenia stood on the other side, staring at me through its rectangular glass mullions. Her wig was a tad lopsided and she wore a yellow velour jogging suit top. Her folded arms made it clear that she wasn’t going to open the door.

“They found Bethany!” I shouted over the din of the rain. “Bethany Bunch!”

She just kept standing there, staring at me, unblinking.

“She’s ALIVE,” I exulted. “They found her up in Manteno!”

Eugenia Groom’s eyes scanned me, top to bottom. In her reserved, even manner she said something, but I couldn’t make it out.

“What?” I squawked.

“You’re bleeding!” she called out, loud this time, and pointed toward my lower leg.

I looked down, and indeed, blood was blossoming through a long white tube sock. And I realized that, underneath my bathrobe, my only covering was a pair of old fraying briefs and mismatched tube socks. I must have looked crazy with excitement, my shin gushing blood, my hair and beard soaked from the rain, bare-chested under my robe.

“Isn’t that great about Bethany?” I shouted.

Eugenia made a face that was almost a smile. Her lips went flat against her teeth.

I turned and ran back across their yard, careful to avoid the deer and rabbit this time. When I got to the attic, I lowered my sock and cleaned the gash in my shin with peroxide. It stung but I didn’t care.

It wasn’t until after I applied the Band-Aid and put on a new pair of socks that I began to cry. When they came the sobs were unbearable groans, like great sopping wads of grief being pulled out of my throat, one after the other. I sat on the floor, with my back against the kitchen island, as these unfathomable sounds escaped my body.

The rain continued long into the night. Thunder gently bellowed. An occasional car sluiced by on the wet street below. I fought the urge to start wandering around my house again. Sometime near dawn, when the rain finally ceased, I pulled myself off the floor, moved over to my bed, and fell asleep.

The following afternoon I received an e-mail from Morris. We hadn’t been in touch since September, when he said his teaching load was starting to get hairy. The family of tornadoes now known as “the Midwest Marauders” had made national news, and he wrote that he was worried about me. He’d heard about the devastation in Missouri and south-central Illinois, Pollard in particular, had seen the footage on CNN, and kept looking for my house. Naturally it held meaning for him as well, since we’d spent so much time recording in the basement during the early months of the Third Policeman, and then, later, had written all that dirgelike stuff during my mother’s decline.

Morris is still teaching, composing stuff on his guitar at night. “I’ve been using an old Fostex multitracker,” he wrote. “Recording on cassette tapes just like I did when I was in high school. I’m loving all the care this requires. The Ping-Ponging. The weird, imperfect limitations of quarter-inch tape. The manual mixing down. Getting back to the analog ways.”

He also mentioned that he’d met a woman. Her name is Mina Feer and she has two kids, six and four, both boys. Her husband left them three years ago and hasn’t been heard from since. “She teaches reading to illiterate adults,” Morris wrote. “They’re mostly immigrants and middle-aged floaters who’ve somehow slipped through the cracks. Lost souls who were in jail or who’ve been fighting addiction or just plain homeless people trying to get off the streets for the first time, making a second or third go of it, attempting to get their GEDs.” He added, “I think I’m in love, Francis. Mina is teaching me how to really share myself, to get out of my own head, to appreciate nature, children, the North Carolina sunsets, the goodness in the world. I never thought that would happen, Lord Francis. Like ever.”

The shocking part of the e-mail, though, was that Glose had shown up on his doorstep. No possessions, no money, only a backpack. Morris opened the door to get the morning paper and there he was, curled up in the fetal position, under the mailbox. “He’s sleeping on my floor as I type this e-mail,” Morris wrote. “It’s like he’s been drugged and kept in a basement.”

Something sank through the depths of my viscera, some irretrievable bitter silt that will never be metabolized, a permanent sediment that I will carry in my bowels well into my dying days.

Morris wrote that his heart broke when he saw Glose, that our “beloved drummer” was severely dehydrated, crazed, malnourished, with blisters all over his feet and sores on his face. “Not sure what he’s been through,” he continued, “but it certainly seems life-changing.”

The possibility that I have inadvertently done Glose a favor pisses me off to no end, and I am forced to admit, as I write this, that I have no love left in reserve for him, only resentment.

Morris went on to convey that recently he’d been thinking about the songs we were writing during my mother’s illness. “They’re good, Francis,” he wrote. “They’re simple, heartfelt, and you never sounded better. I still listen to them. It was a pleasure to work on those eleven songs with you. I know you were dealing with so much. I am proud when I hear them, as proud of them as anything else we did with the band. We allowed space. There’s nothing tricky or ironic going on. Very few guitar flourishes. Only when necessary. Nice moody collage stuff. And just your voice and occasionally mine. They stay with you.” He asked if I’d thought about doing anything with them, and urged me to either release the collection as an album or just create a SoundCloud account so that people could hear them. “I play them for my eighth graders—we do automatic writing exercises to them—I play tracks one through eleven. Forty-seven-plus minutes. I wouldn’t cut a single song. Several students have asked how they can get them. I told them I’d have to consult with you before passing them around or making them sharable in any way.”

Morris said that teaching, despite the heavy load, had recently been incredibly satisfying, that reaching kids was a far less cynical pursuit than playing rock ’n’ roll to a bunch of people satisfied simply to be indie-rock sheep, interested only in participating in “the Currency of Hipsterdom…a bunch of bored, overeducated, privileged thrift-store drones who’ve already lost hope, whether they realize it or not.” There’s still an openness to twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, Morris continued. “They haven’t been sucked down the drain of expectancy yet. There’s still a fire in them. A genuine raw curiosity.”

I haven’t written back yet. I’m not sure what to say.

I miss Morris and I’m glad to hear he’s in love with magnanimous, nature-loving Mina Feer and her two boys and that he’s still so interested in those eleven songs we wrote.

After reading through his e-mail several times I attached a pair of speakers to my laptop, pulled up the mixes, and listened to them. Morris is right. They’re simple. Some don’t even have choruses. Most don’t have bridges. One is a dirge in which we play very few notes and I sing, simply and plaintively, the two lines “A sparrow in her eye / Aflight on blackened skies” over and over, with “Behold the rain / Behold the water” serving as a kind of terminal couplet. This is the eleventh and final track completing what I only now realize is actually a song cycle.

There are images of ghosts, women walking barefoot through neighborhoods at night, entering homes they used to live in. There are iron objects being searched for at the bottom of a river. There are dark, solitary birds, the depths of sleep. Things underneath things underneath things. I was encouraged by the honesty of the songs, by the one-or-two-takes recording style that we stuck to despite patches of imperfect playing and singing, the weird background noises that the mics were picking up in the basement.

Sometimes you can hear the dryer churning. Sometimes you can hear the heat turning on. There are textures within textures.

At one point, Morris gently clears his throat after a take and immediately following this moment there is a faint, distant wail, my mother suffering in her hospice room. It’s an excruciating animal noise, so pure it cuts through you. We left it in the mix. It all feels essential to the musical image. The impulse is true. There are no actual drums, only makeshift percussion: Morris lightly shaking a handful of change, me drumming on the face of my acoustic guitar with my fingers, Morris tapping on a hardcover book with the back of a spoon.