She suddenly saw it, what it was about— the Moffits. One way or another, he was always playing; he always had some kind of game going somewhere. It was his nature. He’d come home last night with both eyes discolored, his nose spread across his face. Neither one of them had said a word. That was a different kind of game— one she played with him— who would say something first.
Even so, it was strange that Packard would have the roof fixed without telling her ahead of time. He ordinarily kept a respectful distance from all the things that were here before he was.
She hadn’t felt queasy yet and hoped her luck would hold. Perhaps the morning sickness was over. She was late in the third month, not really showing yet.
Little Otis, she thought, conceived in an elevator.
The boy dropped another shingle into the yard, and she noticed a second worker, an older, shirtless Negro, reclining on his elbows beside a wheelbarrow, the sun shining off the bunched muscles in his shoulders blades. He made no move to help the boy, and she thought he must be the boss.
Two Negroes in the yard, and she was alone. Three months pregnant. She was suddenly conscious of the breath going in and out of her body. Furious with Packard for putting her in this position, for not seeing how she would feel after what happened on the boat, for not even asking if she’d been to the doctor. He was either too much or too little, all the time.
The Negro on the ground turned slightly and seemed to follow something across the sky, his head rolling strangely, and she stepped quickly away from the window, hiding, holding still behind the screen, hoping, without knowing why it would matter, that he was the boy’s father.
It seemed to her that she had seen the boy before, but decided it was probably only a resemblance to one of the defendants from Waycross. She couldn’t say which one. She still had all their pictures somewhere, and it came to her suddenly that she hadn’t looked at them in months. She did not wake up anymore outraged by injustice in the Deep South. These days, she did not think much about changing the world.
She moved closer to the window again and watched the boy work, the muscles under his skin. She put her hand on her stomach, as if she were holding the baby still, and watched. The man on the ground was nodding and seemed to be talking to himself, like the drug addicts you saw on the street in Venice. She wondered why Packard insisted on this, why he couldn’t just let things go. She walked into the bathroom and put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and tennis shoes. She brushed her teeth and ran a comb through her hair and went downstairs and out the door and got the newspaper out of the bushes where the delivery kid had thrown it.
She saw them again from the kitchen window, transfixed for a moment by the strange, easy way the boy worked. The roof seemed to come off almost by itself; the work somehow went faster than he did. There was a steady clatter of shingles falling on one another in the grass. She scrambled four eggs and ate at the kitchen table. Scrambled eggs and most of a quart of orange sherbet, watching them, listening to the sounds through the open window.
The boy on the roof stood up, and she saw he was taller than she’d thought, and younger. The man on the ground was talking, and she was beginning to pick out a word here and there, not that any of it made sense. She thought he said that a chicken never knew who stole it.
She left her spoon balanced across the top of the sherbet container when she finished eating, and it fell onto the table. The man on the ground heard the noise and turned, and she was terrified— almost screamed— when she saw that he was blind.
She held still, trembling, afraid for the baby’s own eyes.
The blind man turned away. She guessed the boy on the roof was about the age of the one who’d come on the boat with the mulatto. The newspapers— when she’d finally read the newspapers, forced herself to read them— had said that he was only seventeen. She’d been trying ever since to see if that changed what had happened.
She noticed the old ladder propped against the storm drain at the far end of the roof and wished she’d thrown it out when she went through the things in the garage. She was afraid, though, then and now, of what it would mean if she began cleaning Alec’s things out of the house. She had not touched the clothes in his closet, the books and papers on the desk in his den, his paintings, the pictures of his parents. She’d only gone in his den once, and left right away, feeling like a thief.
The boy walked to the ladder— he seemed unaware of the pitch of the roof— and came down easily, facing the front, the way you come downstairs, trusting the rungs were there for his feet. He went to the hose, turned on the spigot, and cooled the back of his head and neck before he drank. The water beaded in his hair.
Packard came home in the middle of the afternoon, driving a flatbed truck with
Orange County School District
stenciled across the door. The truck didn’t sound like it had a muffler. There were a dozen bundles of new roofing shingles in back, and several long, heavy-looking rolls of tar paper. He backed the truck into the driveway, past the house, where it could not be seen from the street. He was wearing an off-the-rack blue suit, one he usually only wore when he had to testify in court, when he wanted to look simpler, plainer than he was.
Which, of course, was another game, a different kind of game.
He got out of the truck, said something to the boy on the roof, and came into the house. Two minutes later, the shorts she’d put on were lying in the sink and she was on the kitchen table with him inside her. She turned her head while he did it, and, through the windows in the kitchen door, glimpsed the boy on the truck, handing down new shingles to the blind man, who stacked them carefully in the grass along the edge of the cement.
“Who are they?” she said later. Packard was sitting in his underwear, peeling a line through a beer label. The frying pan she’d used to scramble the eggs was still on the stove. His shoes were on the floor with the cheap blue suit. And outside, the boy was still moving shingles.
He looked up from the beer, thinking he’d explain it to her now, explain the beauty of it, and that she would see it too. When he looked, though, there was a lynch mob waiting on the other side of the table.
The last couple of months with her, it was full moon around here every other night. He tried a smile, but it hurt to move his face.
She watched him smile and stop. He tipped the chair back on two legs and reached into the refrigerator for another beer. “The boy’s had some bad luck,” he said finally. “The other one, I guess he’s had some bad luck too.”
“He can’t see,” she said, and he shrugged, as if that were what he meant. “You aren’t going to let a blind man on the roof. . . .”
“No, don’t worry about that,” he said. “The boy watches out for him. He won’t let him near a ladder.”
“Who are they?” she said again.
“Roofers?” he said.
“Well, that’s what we need all right,” she said, “more roofers.”
“There’s always things that need to be done,” he said. “The kid’s very handy. . . .”
She waited, stared at him and waited.
“You want the whole story? He’s just a kid who got into something that wasn’t his fault,” he said. He swallowed some of the beer and told her. “He was a caddy at Brookline.”
She stood up, barefoot and naked below the T-shirt, and walked to the freezer and took out a glass, and then a fresh quart of sherbet. Then she went to the cabinet where they kept liquor and filled the glass halfway with vodka and added a scoop of sherbet, and then waited a minute for things to melt and killed it in four swallows. She sat back down at the table, feeling suddenly warm. She tasted the eggs and sherbet and vodka all at once. Not too bad, really.
“What was that?” he said.
“A float.” Then she sighed, and felt herself giving in. She wasn’t sure to what. “Why do you have to do things like this?” she said.
“It isn’t anything more than it is,” he said, and she could see he was disappointed in her. “It doesn’t have any meaning.” It was quiet a moment, and then he said, “Look, nothing’s permanent. If we don’t like having them around after a week or two, say so and they’re gone.”
“You’re moving them into the guest house, right?”
“The kid’s got a way with plants, making things grow,” he said. “There’s a lot of things to be done around here.”
She sat still, already sweating vodka. The boy was climbing the ladder back to the roof now, carrying a roll of tar paper over his shoulder. The ladder bowed under the weight, and she waited for it to break. He was fearless, though, and young, and took it for granted that it would be there under his feet. He was like Packard.
“Let’s give it a couple of weeks,” he said. Then he lifted his beer bottle and touched the edge of her juice glass and smiled. “To the Moffits.”
She got up to take a shower then and there was a peeling noise as her bottom broke the seal with the seat of the chair.
The boy and the blind man left late in the afternoon with Packard, went back to wherever he’d found them, and were in the backyard again in the morning when she woke up. She stood behind the window again, just watching the boy. She was feeling safer today, and for a while she imagined the Moffits next door and saw that Packard was right: It
was
funny.
The boy tore off the last section of old shingles and then walked to the very peak of the roof and squatted, shading his eyes to study the job. He gave no more thought to falling than the birds did. The blind man sat beneath him on the grass, quiet today, not saying much.
She noticed a long, narrow bruise along the inside of her thigh— she guessed you couldn’t be laid out and used on a kitchen table and not show some wear and tear— and the skin felt cool when she touched it. She went over again what he’d said when she told him she’d missed a period, the thing about Mexico. She thought of Pedro and his wife, still waiting for him down there somewhere, and she was afraid Packard would talk her into that, the way he talked her into everything else. He wanted her to himself.
It came to her now that from the very start, they had been giving each other permission to do anything.
She walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. The drain was slow, and she watched the water cover her feet. She shaved her legs, nicking one of them below the knee, and the blood washed down over her ankle and into the water, turning pale and thinning from the line of the cut down, and then disappearing completely. She turned away to protect the cut from the spraying water and watched herself bleed.
A little later, when the bleeding slowed, she moved the razor to the other leg and deliberately cut herself again.
