The Listeners (10 page)

 

On his date my brother would have worn dark stiff denim, hoping Pine couldn't tell the britches were new. In the night air, colder than he'd planned for, his windbreaker would have been like paper.

Maybe once, with her. Just once. After once, it would have been over, not regretted but never spoken of again. In the Caribbean there grows a kind of cactus whose flowers bloom only one night a year, carry out their sex lives, and are dead by morning.

“My favorite was the flute,” he told Pine.

“Mine was the oboe,” she said, “although I wouldn't want to meet an oboe player in a dark alley.” Pine did the trick of making her eyes go in different directions.

“Stop that with your eyes!”

She shut them obediently and Riley thought, Now would be a good time. When she's not looking. But they opened again. Maybe when they were back in their neighborhood, at the intersection where she went left and he went right?—maybe then he would do it. He was the boy, after all.

“Thank you for the concert,” she said as they got off the bus. “It was brilliant.”

“I'm glad you liked it,” said Riley.

“Thank you,” she repeated at the corner where he went right and she went left.

“You're welcome.”

They stood apart, arms hanging.

“Well,” she said, “I shall see you Monday.”

He waved and smiled, the virgin youngest.

A BULLET IS
a mouthful of pennies. A bullet tears metal and meat. A bullet shot on the night of June 2, 1984, went through my sister's head and they found it later on the floor. It carried, the forensic tests would show, tiny pieces of her hair, skin, and brain. We had been sleeping with our heads to the window. The glass was up. The bullet made a hole in the screen. They threw away the screen. They patched the skull for burial so the brains couldn't climb. Fod wanted her cremated but Mert said they weren't burning her girl.

“We have to clean the floor. The floor has got to be cleaned. We need soap and a bucket.”

We watched our mother move in little swipes around the kitchen, looking for things in the air, muttering, “That floor in there. It really can't stay like that. We have to fix it.”

“Coo,” I said.

“Coo,” finished Riley.

“Why are you two just
standing
there,” Mert mumbled,
opening a cabinet. She stood for a long time looking at the shelves.

“Are you going to start cooking again?” I asked.

“What?”

“
Cooking
, Mert, like when you take food and make it hot?”

Why did Mr. Walker keep a pistol? Why did stupid goddamn Mr. Walker keep a pistol in his stupid goddamn house? Why did Mr. Walker have to get it, and cock it, and fire it six times at the goddamn kid? The burglar was not even voting age. Fod did not blame the burglar, who'd had no weapon. He blamed Bill fucking Walker that gun-loving Republican who had seen fit like the fuckface he was to keep a pistol in his kitchen drawer.

Don't say fuckface, don't say fuckface, said the back of my mouth, but he kept saying it and from the bathroom Mert screamed, “If I hear that word one more time I'm going to kill myself!”

I explained to Riley what a figure of speech was.

I was peeling my fingers, seeing how long the strips of skin could go. I had three peels laid out already on the coffee table. Fod saw. “Disgusting,” he shouted. “You're fifteen years old, stop acting like a baby.”

If Walker showed up to the funeral, I planned to slice his throat. I sharpened my army knife the night before. Riley, watching me scrape its blade on a stone from the yard, said: “But then you have to go to jail.”

I said I didn't care and besides I was a minor so the sentence would be short.

“Why isn't Mr. Walker in jail?” asked Riley.

I shrugged. I'd duct-taped a cotton sheath to the inside of my dress so I could bring the knife out quickly, before Walker knew what was happening. In the throat I would cut him. The funeral home would have to get a new carpet.

“ENCORE,” I SAID
from the end of the bar. Mink poured me a fifth, a sixth. “My tab,” I nodded, though there had never been a tab. I scratched the sleeve of red and black, a dragon and a sailor's ghost and a doll with crimson eyes. Nearby hovered venereal Lad. He was playing later, down the street, in the terrible band helmed by Geck. Who still had his hopes. It was impressive, really. After all these hundreds of years, he was still making a go.

“You nervous?” I bellowed at Lad.

“I don't get nervous,” he said.

The junior bartender said, “Oh listen to you.” She was at the taps with her shoulders wrenched back, thrusting every inch of mammary gland into the sky.

He grinned her way. Lad liked to sleep with barely legals and to exaggerate for them the length of a brief prison term he had served back when they were still trading puffy stickers. This salty rooster had bedded half the young ladies in town—including, in the old days, if we are being entirely honest, myself.

When I pushed my empty glass at her, Mink elbowed it aside and leaned forward. She said, “I need to show you something.”

“Can you show me
after
you get me another drink?”

“No.”

Other than Lad, now having a giggle attack with the junior bartender, there were no other customers.

“Well, what?”

From her back pocket she pulled a crumple of newspaper and flattened it on the silver bar. It was a tiny article, one cramped paragraph, and my eyes were blurring; I had to squint. I saw the name of the university where my parents taught, and the word
appoints
, and Cam's name.

“He was appointed…?” I groped.

“A visiting professor,” Mink explained, “at the law school. For one semester.”

“Why would he teach at a law school?”

“Because he's a
lawyer
.”

“Cam would never be a lawyer,” I declared.

“Read it yourself,” she said. “He's a tax attorney in Seattle.”

FOR HIS FIRST-EVER
photo project, my brother had stolen pictures from Mert's closet box and photocopied them. He cut three different versions of our sister (laughing on the sunporch, frowning in the tree house, eating a slice of sugar cake) and glued them on a page. Photocopied again. Again cut them, this time chopping the sisters into halves and arranging them on a new page. Again copied.

The result was, to him, mesmerizing.

He bought a frame at the drugstore. He went to Belfry Street and showed it to Cam, who said too quickly: “That's really good.” Riley's snake photograph was already on a nail in the red hall; he hoped we might want to hang this up, too. When I came home, he waited for me to notice what was leaning on the mantel of the not-working fireplace. I brushed the rabbit off the couch so I could lie down. Finally Riley pointed and said, “Do you like it?” and I looked.

“No,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said, “but it's kind of—obvious? Death, fragmentation, distortion, blah blah blew. I get it, but I don't
want
to get it so easily, you know?”

Cam was nicer. He paid attention. On Sundays at the diner he would instruct the waitress: “This one will have the
rye
toast, please!” and Riley loved the pun. On the bed Cam asked, “Do you have a crush on anyone?” and Riley, facedown on black sateen, mumbled no.

“Oh, come on, there must be somebody. In your grade? Any cute girls?”

Riley rolled over onto his back. “No, not really.”

“Aha!” Cam lit a cigarette, shook the match. “Not really means yes.”

“Oh, no, I meant not really as in there aren't really any cute girls at…”

“Get your hand off your mouth!” He pulled Riley's fingers away. “Now
what'd
you say?”

“I don't like anyone,” my brother said.

BEFORE DIALING HIS
number I imagined Geck, golden mane and dents in his cheeks, belly astrain against polyester loungewear. He'd probably left his meeting early tonight. His mother went to the bother of cooking supper, the least he could do was not make them wait to eat it! When he limped in, she would ask her usual How was it, sweetie? and he would answer his usual Same. Worse, he might add, enraged by how relieved she looked.

He would reach the spaghetti bowl down from its shelf, lay out three tomato place mats, a good son.

The bowl he had left for her several months ago had not been a good-son bowl. The guest bathroom packed to its porcelain gills, brimming with at least four sits' worth of runny dump he'd been too dodge-sick to bother to flush—imagine her delight. It was possible she had not discovered the diarrhea until days after they'd driven him to Canterbury, by which time the stink—well, yeah. She'd never said one word. She would visit him on Sundays with foil-covered puddings and crisps.
These he had chosen not to share with the other patients.

“Supper in five minutes!” his mother said, and he sat up with effort, punching off the blanket. His leg was killing. Where was the penis cane? He'd need it soon. He was forty on a flowered couch.

They had just hit the table, napkins lapped, spoon driven into the pile of red-sauced spaghetti, when the phone rang.

“Telemarketers,” his mother said dejectedly.

“Leave it go,” his father said. “Those criminals need to learn you don't interrupt people while they're eating.”

Geck rose, shaking out his stiff knee. “Someone could've died,” he pointed out.

“Oh, Jonathan…”

“Hospitals notify day and night. Speak!” he crooned into the receiver.

“Hello.”

“Quinn?”

“Am I interrupting anything?”

“Shit no,” he said. “What's up?”

“I wanted to tell you something,” I said.

“What, that you can't curtail your sexual daydreams of me?”

“Shut up. It's Cam. He's back.”

“IF THE PRESIDENT
had died from the bullet, would you have cried?”

“
Cheered
.”

“I wouldn't cry either,” said the youngest, “but I don't think he should be dead, maybe.”

“Quinn's just saying that,” said the middle, “because Mert and Fod hate the president—she doesn't know crap about him.”

“Are you kidding me,” said the oldest, “I read the newspaper!”

“CRAZY-TOWN,” GECK AGREED.
“Are you going to call him?”

“What? No.”

“We could organize a reunion.”

“Are you serious?”

“Wull, I mean, why not? Have a few cold ones; reminisce.”

“The terms on which we parted,” I reminded him, “were not happy terms.”

“He might've forgotten by now.”

“Geck, he lost every single finger on his left hand.”

“So? He's had time to get used to it. Maybe his nickname is Fisty.”

Why had I gone looking for water in the driest of wells?

“THE IRONY OF
it,” our father said. “The fucking irony.” We watched the moving men tie blankets around the dining-room table. The August sky was hard white. I kept my hands in my pockets. “Moving
into
the city to get—” But Fod didn't say
safer
because that wasn't really the right word. We were moving to get away from the house, from the neighborhood. My parents had chosen Edinburgh Lane in the first place because the public schools were better out there; now nobody gave a crap about schools. When Riley asked, “Where am I going to go?” Mert whispered, “That's not important right now!”

But it was to Riley. And to me, though I didn't say, because it was embarrassing to worry about a new school when you were as old as tenth grade. Coyote could worry, because he was only starting sixth. He insisted: “What school will I go to?”

“I have no idea,” Mert said.

“When will you have an idea?”

“Goddammit,” she said, “I don't know.”

“But next month is September.”

“Riley, this isn't the time, it really isn't—”

“When
will
be the time, Mert?”

I admired him.

On our second morning at Observatory Place, Riley licked me awake. “Come down,” he whispered, tugging my wet ear. In the front room was a television more massive than any of my friends had. We stood shocked. The house law had always been none whatsoever. Rots the gray matter, Fod said, and Mert said, You have better things to do with your lives.

“Now if a plane falls into the river we won't have to go next door,” Riley pointed out.

I was thinking only of the music channel—videos after parents asleep—

“Squidlings, this is not going to be a free-for-all,” Mert announced at breakfast in her most clenched voice. “There will be limits, but…” She looked at Fod.

“We thought it might help everyone relax,” he explained.

 

It was a bigger basement than Edinburgh Lane's, though the house itself was smaller because now we were four. I took the longest knife from the wood block and went down to slice the top box. I wanted my sister's notebooks, but this one had little shirts and jellies and ankle-zip britches.
Where you are going, clothes won't help
. They smelled like nothing, least of all trees. She'd had the better nose and I the better ears (or the worse, because in
their acuteness they bothered me more). When she whispered
That man smells bad
she did not mean his odor, but that he did evils. She could smell in a yard if a cat's bones were buried there. She could smell at a bedroom door if the person who slept within had good dreams or sad. From the library she checked out a history of scent.
It was once believed, she copied into her notebook, illness could be detected from how a person smelled—that diabetes smelled of sugar; measles of freshly plucked feathers; the plague of mellow apples; inflamed kidneys of ammonia.
Yellow fever smells of the butcher shop! she sang in the kitchen, watching Mert pare white rinds off pink meat.