The Cage Keeper (10 page)

“El Cerrito, right?”

“Yeah,” Freeze says.

Dave guides the old taxi back into the lighted stream of traffic and into the tunnel.

“You Berkeley students?”

“No,” Freeze says.

“Just hanging out and taking it easy, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Dave feels the silence before it comes; he reaches down to turn up the radio.

Freeze is tapping the armrest with his knuckles, trying to keep the rest of his body still. Lorilee sees him look at the thick sheath muscle in the driver’s upper arm, its slight roll when he turns the knob on the radio, and as she watches, Freeze glances too at the swell of chest muscles that push tight against his T-shirt. They come out of the tunnel into the twilight and start down the hill.

“Where in El Cerrito, buddy?” Dave asks, smelling the booze now, the combination of that and young people and silence beginning to feel wrong to him; he reaches up to scratch a nonexistent itch at his temple then flexes his arm before bringing it back to the wheel.

“Don’t matter.” Freeze turns around to Barry and Lorilee sitting in the growing dark in the backseat, Barry’s face looking oatmeal-colored, moonlike. Freeze lets his left arm drop behind the seat to touch Barry’s knee. Lorilee looks at the hand, sees it tap Barry’s leg then turn over fast and open-palmed. She watches it do the same movement again, this time faster. Then Barry’s bulk shifts beside her as he moves to reach into his back pocket. She watches his pale closed fist move slowly to cover Freeze’s hand. Freeze clears his throat loud as his thumb and forefinger flick open the blade of the black wood-handled knife. Dave looks over at the lean sunglassioed face to his right. “I can take you as far as Ernie’s Pizza on San Pablo Street.”

Freeze nods his head and Dave looks back at the road lit yellow now from the streetlamps. He looks in the rearview mirror at the pudgy one with the shaved head, at the blond girl with the most hound-doggish face he has ever seen, then he sees the huge bruise on her cheek and as quickly as Jell-O sliding off a plate, he feels the elation of just a few moments ago leave him.

Barry puts his arm around Lorilee but she doesn’t let him pull her to him. She is looking at how tight Freeze seems to be gripping the knife, the blade pointing straight at the door behind the driver. She looks at the back of the driver’s head then sees the clean-looking boylike face in the rearview. He’s nice, she thinks. Then the driver’s eyes move up to the mirror and are looking into hers. Lorilee looks away so fast she is afraid she might have made a noise. She looks at the side of Freeze’s face, at his black oily hair, and she sees his eyes looking at the driver from behind his dark sunglasses, hears the tap of his knuckles above the radio, and she begins to rock back and forth on the seat, looks down again at the blade that shines every time they pass under a streetlight. She breathes fast and shallow as they uncoil dark and slick inside her, the pain of her buttocks having melted into something else now. And as Barry burps then drops his hand to her breast, she smells the stomach stench of his rum and closes her eyes to her nipple hardening under her shirt, to the moon-fixed feeling that this is it, this is what she has finally brought everyone to.

She feels the nervous squeeze of Barry’s hand, and hears the static whine of radio music, the tappity tap tap of Freeze’s knuckles in the front, the click of the lighted box that is showing how much they already owe. Then she hears sharp and clear the voice she has not let herself hear in months.
You’re my ugly duckling girl, aren’t
you?
She opens her eyes.

Freeze’s arm is pressed closer to the top of the seat, the knife just out of the driver’s view, and Barry is squeezing harder and faster. Her heart is speeding and she hears her father again. She closes her eyes to the pinch-throb of Barry’s fingers and gives in to it, is back in that hot bright kitchen, the fan broken and her father still dirty from the plant, his face sunburned and red from drinking too.
You’re my ugly duckling girl, aren’t you?
She looked at his mud-caked boots when he crossed the floor to her, and when he stood in front of her and unbuttoned her blouse she lifted her chin to his wide flat face.

Aren’t you?

Yes, Papa.

Then he carried her into the room and laid her on the warm sheets. In the dark he undressed all of her.
My little ugly duckling,
my little one.
Then he was inside her and it felt like tearing a scab and when the burn was gone it ached and she started to cry. He moved faster and then stopped and lay next to her and held her, and she pushed herself back against his hairy warm stomach, feeling so wrong.

Lorilee opens her eyes then pulls away from Barry’s crazy hand, hears the driver’s voice ask, “Are you all right, miss? Is he bothering you?”

Freeze says quietly, “She’s all right.”

“I’m not asking you, pal,” Dave says into the dark sunglasses.

Barry’s hand stops squeezing but still holds the flesh tight. “We’re getting married, man,” he says. “What’s the problem?”

“What happened to your face, miss?”

“What’s it to you?” Freeze asks.

Dave snaps his face to Freeze. “That’s it. Ride’s over for you, buddy.”

“I ain’t your buddy.”

Dave pulls fast to the curb under the stringed and hanging lights of Arnold’s Auto Sales. He points to the meter. “Four-sixty, smart ass.” He picks up the notebook beside him. His hand is shaking. He lays it back on the seat then looks in the rearview to the big one looking back at him, a thin clear drool sticking to his chin. Dave looks at Lorilee rocking back and forth on the seat. “You don’t have to go with them, miss.”

“You hear me? I ain’t your buddy.”

Dave turns to Freeze. “Pay up and get out.”

“We don’t have no money,” Barry says.

Dave looks away from Freeze to the mirror, to this smiling Frankenstein creature with his arm around this scared-to-death girl; his fleshy hand holding her breast. His heart beating in his throat, Dave turns around to look at Lorilee. “You don’t have to go with these guys.”

She is rocking, looking into the clean face of this driver. She sees the muscles in Freeze’s forearm dance for an instant as the blade tilts up slightly. “Yes, Papa.”

Barry jolts into laughter beside her, and then Freeze too; and Lorilee thinks,
Now,
you guys.
Now.
And she feels the cumulative weight and deed of her life rising up in her like a roller-coaster car nearing the peak of the highest and final run, the wind blowing different way up there, pushing quiet and steady against the side of her face. She rocks faster as the driver turns away from her and Barry to face Freeze who is smiling behind his sunglasses, who is raising the blade almost into view.

“Just get you and your freaky friends the hell out of—” Dave grunts as his head is jerked back against the headrest. He sees the stretched gray of ceiling above him and digs his fingers into the fat ones around his chin and mouth. “You fuck—”

Lorilee stops rocking; everything is moving fast now, and a laugh begins to well up from deep in her gut as Dave gets one hand free, then reaches back to grab a warm bristly head. Then his eyes are slapped over and covered by the hand of the dark quiet one. He begins to twist his torso and pull forward, hissing in air between the fingers that pull him; he sees himself pushing a barbell off his chest and tries to bring that same guttural cry out now as he yanks forward again.

“Suck this, faggot.”

The hand of the dark one presses over his eyes then Dave feels the deep burn and rip of his insides; nausea shimmers through him then beads out clammy on his skin. He jerks away from the hard thing that slides out of him now and opens his eyes as the hand leaves too but his vision is hazy and he tastes the old metal of his blood rising in his throat. He opens and closes his mouth, trying to pump it out faster to breathe; he starts to spit as the liquid of him gushes warm down over the gripping hand of the big one. He is no longer able to pull now but just hold on, and he hears her high nasal laughter behind him, feels the buckle of his belt being pulled loose by the dark one, his coin box ripped free from his waist. He hears her laughing and feels the terrifying stop of everything as a groan comes up from his chest then ends in his throat. He breathes in deeply through his nose but his chest stays flat as he feels and hears his breath flap wetly out his side. Then the hands are gone and the car shifts as the doors open and he hears the dark one: “Leave the bitch. C’mon.”

He hears the asphalt-patter of their running, his heart fluttering briefly in his chest that feels strapped now to the seat, then he opens his eyes to her horrible sound. From behind the mist of his nausea he sees her bending over, holding her stomach, her breasts hanging heavy. Her mouth wavers open but silent, she is laughing so hard. He pushes his loose-clenched fist into the heat of his side as Lorilee straightens, gets her breath, then shrieks and cackles tears down her bruised cheek. His chest beginning to lighten, the top of his head seeming to dissolve now into the air of his cab, Dave looks at the hanging stringed lights above her, watches how prettily the salt-shine of Lorilee’s cheek catches the white glow of them. The pulse of him rises from his legs then passes quietly but quickly into his chest and he no longer hears the falsetto-wail of her laughing, so gives all of himself to what he can still see: her tear-filled blue eyes, and the long stringy blond hair that hangs in front of her reddened face. As his weight pulls itself in then up, through the hollow of his neck and to the top of his head, he looks back at the laughing girl, at the plum-purple bruise on her cheek, blue-black around the edges.

WOLVES IN THE MARSH

For Ande

When Dean awoke, the room was still cast in shadows and he smelled pee. He looked over at Kip’s bed and saw him curled up with his knees almost touching his chin, his blanket sticking wet to the side of his leg. He was a year younger than Dean, eight, and he still wet his sheets at night, but so did Dean.

In the bathroom Dean peed but did not flush the toilet. He put the lid down then stood on it, and looked out the window through the bare tops of birch and beech trees to the sky. It was still a deep blue over the house and the slope leading down to the water, but it paled over the middle part of the lake and became a thin pink line just above the trees of the Boy Scout camp on the other side. The water was dark brown, almost black, and from the window the sand beach looked to Dean as white as bone.

He went back into his room and pulled on a pair of corduroy pants, a T-shirt, and Kip’s blue sweater. He found some socks that didn’t match but were thick, and so pulled them on and laced his boondocker boots on over them. He took his BB rifle from the corner, laid it on his bed, then pulled a sock full of BBs out of the top right drawer of his bureau and tied the hanging bulge to his front belt loop. He picked up his rifle and looked down at sleeping Kip and his pee spot; he thought about waking him up but then saw himself walking through the woods alone with his gun and huge supply of ammunition, not having to take turns to shoot or anything. He pressed the sockful of BBs against his thigh, went quickly down the stairs and out the door.

The porch was open on all sides and overlooked the water through the trees. Dean stepped off it and made his way down the slope, over exposed pine roots, to the gravel road in front of the lake. He stopped there and looked out over the water at the thin trails of mist that hovered and glided on its surface. Something splashed beside the tall water reeds near the beach and Dean looked and saw the flick of a fin before it went under. He started down the road away from the water and the house into the woods. He saw his breath in front of him as he walked by the summer cottages that were built close to the lake, and when he was past them, he could see the wide bend of the river through the trees. It began on the other side of his house where the lake made a small cove then flowed under a short wooden bridge to the marsh. It widened there then pushed itself all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, about twenty miles to the northeast, his father had told him; his father told him and Kip lots of things, like how moss grows on the north side of trees and it’s better to take a dirty skillet and wash it down on the beach with sand because soap isn’t good for the black iron. His father had been in the marines, a captain, and sometimes before they ate, he would have Jody and Dean and Kip and Simone hold their hands out for inspection, see if they were clean enough.

Dean walked along the road holding his rifle in front of him with two hands and letting the sockful of BBs bounce and sway against his leg. He was past all the summer houses now and into a part of the woods that was so thick with evergreen trees it was almost always dark here; even in the summer, during the hottest and brightest time of the day, when the mosquitoes would sting everywhere, even through Dean’s clothes, this place would be shadows where only scattered rays of light made it all the way to the ground. But this morning, with the sun still barely on the other side of the lake, the woods appeared so dark to Dean he felt he was almost in a cave. And there was frost everywhere; he saw the thin icy layer of it on the moss patches at the base of the trees, and the brown pine needles that blanketed the floor of the woods were covered with it. He stopped walking and sat beside the road. He rested his rifle on his thighs, unscrewed the long thin tube beneath the barrel, then untied the sock at his belt loop. He reached into it for a handful of BBs and dropped them one at a time into the tube’s tiny hole until his hand was almost empty and he no longer heard the BBs roll down to meet the others but stop just inside the magazine. He screwed the tube back into place, tied his sock to his side, then stood and slapped the cold pine needles from the seat of his pants. The woods were very quiet and he heard only the skitter of what he thought might be a chipmunk or a squirrel, then dead pine twigs falling to the ground, but no birds. Dean knew from his fourth-grade teacher, Miss Williams, that a lot of New Hampshire birds fly south for the winter; but it wasn’t winter yet, just November, and even if the others had left already, the woodpecker and whippoorwill were supposed to stay behind to hibernate in thick nests and tree holes.

Dean walked farther down the road to where it split off and went in two directions. He stayed on the right fork, which he knew would take him deeper into the woods to where he could no longer hear the big eighteen-wheelers that he began to hear now. The left fork led to those; and Dean started to walk faster; but it wasn’t that he did not like highways and cars and trucks—they were okay—though he found he could not get as excited about them as his friend Clayton and the other boys in school. During quiet time before lunch, they drew pictures of dragsters and dune buggies while Dean read books about Kit Carson, Daniel Boone, and Wild Bill Hickock. And after school, when he would walk one or two or three miles into the woods, it was not to hear the whiz and whoosh of cars and trucks; when he was deep into them, down on the river side in the spring and fall when the mosquitoes were not so bad, when he would come to a place between two trees where the ground was so thick with fallen pine needles that he felt he could almost bounce on it, and so would lie down on it, and look up at the sky past the tips of evergreen trees that must have taken root sometime around the Civil War, Dean felt that there was nowhere else he ever wanted to be. He would hear a bobwhite call out from somewhere near the river. He would close his eyes then catch the dirt scent of the decayed pine needles beneath him. And with his eyes shut, he would feel the bigness of things around him, but it was a big with soft places and nice smells and familiar sounds, and so he never felt afraid there.

Dean kept walking but did not know how far down the right fork he would go, maybe just as far as that place with all the hemlock trees. The last time he had been there it was a week before last Christmas and he and his father and Kip, and even Simone, had walked to it the day after a blizzard to cut down a Christmas tree. His father had worn his machete at his side and Dean had liked the look of it slapping against his leg as they made their way through the snow. Then Kip found a good tree, and they had watched as their father had cut it down and pulled it out onto the road. The woods had gotten very dark then, and Simone said that her toes were frozen, but she had begged to come and their father had to drag the tree, so he told her she was just going to have to march it out with the rest of the troops. She did, Dean remembered, but she had cried a little bit, too.

Dean cocked his gun, aimed at the thin white trunk of a birch tree, and squeezed the trigger. He felt the recoil of the spring with his finger and heard the tick of the BB against the wood. He cocked his rifle again then looked for something else to shoot, wishing a bird or a squirrel would show up. Or maybe even a bigger animal. No, not a bigger animal, he thought, and he walked off the road in the direction of the river and sat down, resting his back against the scarred trunk of a tall beech tree. He was aware of his fingers and the tip of his nose, and he wished he had taken Jody’s gloves from her coat pockets. But then he thought how he wouldn’t be able to load and shoot with them on his hands. He rested his rifle on his outstretched legs and tried to ignore the rumble of his stomach, and he remembered that Kit Carson book he read this past summer, the parts about the fur trapping and how Kit would go days sometimes eating only snow and sucking the bark of certain kinds of trees. Dean thought about that: sitting in the snow sucking bark for breakfast. And he thought of that morning last winter when he had gone into the kitchen for another bowl of cereal and had seen his mother and father sitting at the table. His mother was leaning forward and was talking in a quick low voice, and his father was listening, smoking a cigarette, and his face had looked calm, almost peaceful, like it did whenever Dean would see him listen to one of his jazz records for the first time—relaxed, but trying to feel what it was he was supposed to feel—and it didn’t seem to Dean to be the right face to have on because his mother’s was all tight while she spoke. When he saw that, Dean had stopped where he was in the doorway and heard her say, “You goddamned
marine.
” And he had not known why she had said it like that, because he liked that part about his father. He liked the way his voice could fill up the rooms of the house like his mother’s couldn’t, even when she was mad.

Dean pulled the trigger and heard the BB dance its way through the branches above him. He stood to cock his rifle, and when he did, he heard the hollow tapping sound of a woodpecker working up ahead of him and to his left. He knew how noises could fool you in the woods, though, especially when there was water nearby, and as he walked forward in a crouch, stepping lightly over sticks and twigs that broke dry under his feet, he looked up at the middle third of the trees and scanned them from east to west. He heard it again, but this time it seemed to be coming from his right. He walked straight ahead until he came to a swell in the ground that dropped steeply to the marsh. He paused there and looked out over it and the river, which he had never tried walking to before because in the spring the marsh was covered with water, and now in fall, almost winter, it looked like it could swallow you; there were clumps of earth covered with grass the color of straw, and in between them were dark ribbons of mud that looked to Dean like they would open up under his feet and suck him under. But in the summer the water grass would be green and yellow and three or four feet tall and when a breeze blew through them, Dean would watch them all bend in dry rolling waves like they were bowing down to the powers of the earth. But now, early in the morning and just before winter, when the straw clumps lay matted and weighted down with frost, Dean thought that the marsh looked as dangerous as ever—a flat wet land a man would have to face to get to the water for pickerel and bass. There was mist on the river, but Dean could still see its quiet swirling surface. Above the trees the sky was bathed in a pale gray light, and Dean wondered what had happened to the sun he had seen the beginnings of on the other side of the lake.

The air was cold and a little damp, and it felt as if it might even snow. He thought of winter coming, how it’s the only season that stays like it will never leave; and he thought of last winter and how everything first started then; he remembered how he and Kip and Jody and Simone used to all sit together at the top of the stairs to listen and sometimes giggle until their mother would come yell up at them to quit being so nosy and to go to bed. Her face had looked okay then, almost cheerful, but then spring came, and summer, and that’s when all the parties started, that’s when almost every weekend people from his father’s college would come over and there would always be lots of music and loud talk and laughing, and sometimes crying, too. And on those hot late nights after everyone had gone home, Dean could hear his mother and father over the whir and rattle of the window fan. He would go out to the lighted hallway to listen and once he saw his older sister Jody sitting on the top stair in her nightgown. He sat down beside her, and they listened together. They sat there for a long time, and it had felt to Dean that what they were doing was very important, that if he and Jody could only figure out why their mother and father were fighting, then they could go tell Kip and Simone and, together, the four of them could all help to fix it. Then he had heard their mother interrupt their father and say, “Oh shut up! Just shut up!” And Dean had felt afraid, but Jody had burst out laughing and so he did too, and when their mother came to the bottom of the stairs her face had not looked cheerful but tired, very tired, and then angry as she told them, “This is none of your business, now go to bed right this goddamned
minute
.” And Dean had gone to bed, but later, lying in the dark with his sheet pulled up to his chin, he had felt that something big and dangerous was going on downstairs and that if he ignored it and went to sleep, he would wake up in a house on fire.

Dean aimed his rifle over the marsh at the river. He pulled the trigger but did not see the tiny splash of a BB. Probably sucked down into the marsh, he thought. He cocked his rifle again then just stood there with it. He liked this picture of himself standing on a hill with his loaded gun, guarding the woods and his family from whatever might try to crawl out of the marsh to get them. And he thought of wolves swimming across the river then making their way through the straw clumps and mud with their tongues hanging out and their fangs all foamy. He would lie down on his belly and pick them off one at a time, but with a BB gun it would be harder because he would have to hit them in the eyes to blind them and he would do it too, aiming, taking his time, then shooting the way his father had shown him, not pulling the trigger but squeezing it, hitting each wolf once in each eye until the whole pack of them would just stop in the marsh to grope and stumble through the mud, bleeding and howling at the darkness.

Dean listened for the woodpecker but only heard the faint but constant scurrying of what sounded to him like hundreds of ants and termites and spiders and ladybugs and crickets as they finished their morning feeding and went about their day getting ready for winter. And at the thought of food, Dean turned away from the marsh to head back for the road. But then he saw it: to his left and down the slope, almost in the marsh, was a tall dead pine tree. It was stripped of its bark in some places; its branches were thick broken stumps; and the top third of it lay on the ground at its base. The woodpecker was perched at the very top of the broken tree, darting its beak in and out of the hole it had made while its thin legs clutched at the bark. It was the yellow-tailed kind Dean saw mainly in the summer and he raised his BB rifle and put the bird in his sights, but he knew it was too high and out of range, so he lowered his gun and began to walk down the slope. He kept his eyes on the bird as he made his way down the incline, but some of the pine needles were giving way under his boots so he looked in front of him every few steps as he went. When he reached flat ground he felt it turn soggy and he could smell the wet grass from the marsh. It’s a very bad smell, he thought, like crap almost. He heard the woodpecker again, but it had stopped the hard drilling part of its work and was sticking its beak into the hole then pulling it out again, letting tiny chips of wood drop all the way to the ground so close to Dean that he could not believe it did not know he was there. He spread his legs and planted his boots in the soft ground. Then he raised his rifle and put the yellow strip of the bird’s wing feathers in his sights. I’ll hit it there, he thought, right there, and he held his breath and squeezed the trigger. At first it felt like a BB hadn’t left the barrel at all, but just a little blast of air. It did that sometimes, misfired like a real gun, and he lowered it quickly to cock it again, but when he did, he saw two single yellow feathers floating down the length of the tree. He looked up at the woodpecker and saw it pull its beak out of the hole; then it raised its wings and released itself from the tree, but instead of flying forward it flew backward, out over the marsh, treading air with quick awkward flaps of its wings. The bird’s beak was still facing the tree, and it seemed to Dean that it was looking straight into the hole, trying to understand how this had come to happen. Then Dean saw a feather come away, then another; the woodpecker flapped its wings in a flurry, stopped, then flapped them once more before it went still, and dropped straight into the marsh.