Wink (2 page)

Marty waited, but heard nothing more from his mother. He rolled to his feet and stood in the middle of the bedroom. A rustling noise made him turn, and he saw his mother’s face in the bedroom window. She pulled herself through the window, fell to the floor, and lay there breathing hard, looking up at the ceiling fan. She clutched the crochet needles to her chest like a warrior would his sword. Her shirt was torn and dirty, and she lay so still that he thought she might have fallen asleep.

Afraid to move, Marty stood frozen, wishing now he had not barricaded the door.

His mother sighed and held up her hand. “Help me up, Sugar.”

Marty waited, and when she repeated the command, he took three slow steps across the bedroom and helped her up. She put a hand on his shoulder for balance. Her breath was rancid. Marty kept his hands near his face, palms out, watching the crochet needles. He thought of his uncle’s blind eye, and how it would feel to have one of those needles thrust into the socket.

“Don’t you run from me again,” she said. “I’ll send you away for good.”

She squeezed his shoulder, and he said, “Yes, ma’am.”

She moved to the bed and stood over Marty’s father. He was on his back, mouth open, with the sheet thrown over his thighs. She slapped him hard enough that his head rolled, and there was a grunt, but nothing more. She hit him again, and again, pulled his hair, and pinched him under his arms. She shoved the crochet needles up his nose, clicked them across his teeth. She opened one of his eyes, held the needle above it, and touched the white part with the tip.

His father’s eye moved inward from the pressure, and his mother said, “How does that feel, Ike?”

His father twitched but did not wake up. She sat on the edge of the bed and slid a hand under the sheet. Her fingers worked beneath the sheet for about two minutes, and when his father’s eyes blinked open, he was only half-awake, but he reached out and squeezed her breast and threw his head back, eyes closed.

His mother’s other hand went beneath the sheet, the one with the crochet needles, and then Marty’s father howled and thrashed on the bed in a mad panic. His mother made for the window and was out and gone before his father was on his feet, tearing at something that seemed to be chasing him from behind.

His father turned several quick circles, and finally slowed, twisted, reached behind him, and held a crochet needle in his hand. “Goddamned crazy-ass bitch,” his father said. “Rammed a needle up my ass.” He went to the bedroom window, threw out the crochet needle, and followed it into the night.

His mother ran through the yard and into the driveway. She stopped, turned, and met his father with a fury of slaps and curses and claws. His father grabbed her wrists and held them up while she kicked, and after a while, she slowed, and then stopped. His father grabbed her by the side of the head, beneath the ears, and made her look at him.

Marty closed the window and ripped the sheet off his bed. He didn’t want to mix his scent with his father’s.

Chapter 3
  Sadie’s Window

Sadie Marsh spent most of her days in the front room, watching the cars go by on the freeway. Sometimes she read, sometimes she watched television, sometimes she played video games on an old
PS2
system she had gotten when she was five, but mostly she propped herself by the front bay window and watched the diesels roll by on Interstate 10. They were going somewhere, which was more than could be said of her.

Sadie’s legs had long ago shriveled into pitiful things that she kept clutched to her chest the way a normal person might hug themselves into a cannonball at the lake. She found it easier to drive her wheelchair if she didn’t have her legs jutting out in front of her banging into everything. She thought one day the circulation would give out and they would need to amputate them, at least that’s what Dr. Haley always said.

“You need to work your legs, honey,” she would say to Sadie. Then Dr. Haley would add, tight-lipped, “Or we’ll be faced with some tough decisions later on.”

Sadie knew what the tough decision was. It was to cut them off and feed her legs to the dumpster rats behind the hospital. Her legs were useless anyway, so what difference did it make if they were still attached to her body and drawing off blood and nutrients. One less thing to feed, Sadie thought, might as well cut them off.

Her mother’s hand touched her shoulder. Sadie turned and looked up at her. “You ready, baby?” her mother asked.

It was mid-afternoon and time for their walk. “Sure,” Sadie said.

School was out for summer, and unlike the other kids, Sadie didn’t have much use for being outside in the summer air. All she could do was wheel around, and since there weren’t any sidewalks out this far, the best she could manage was a daily walk with her mother along the feeder road beside I-10, down to the Trinity River bridge and back, or the Stop-n-Shop for an iced soda. Sometimes the cars honked, but mostly they switched lanes and blew past Sadie and her mother without so much as a wave of the hand.

Sadie’s mom turned her around and navigated through the living room, most of it open space to allow easier wheelchair access. The house was like that, with the furniture pushed to the walls without coffee tables or other obstructions in the rooms. Only her mother’s bedroom was inaccessible, owing to the over-sized king bed that took up most of the floor space. Her mom refused to buy a new bed, even though the man who once shared it died the same day as Sadie’s legs.

The wheelchair twisted through the dining room and the kitchen and past the laundry room. Sadie’s mom leaned her back and pushed the front of the wheelchair into the back screen door and shoved it open. None of the screen doors had latches on them, nor did Sadie’s bedroom or bathroom, only a light spring to keep it pulled to. It was easier that way.

They went down the ramp, and the wheelchair bounced along the back driveway, crunching acorns and pinecones as they made their way to the gate. On the other side of the hurricane fence was the Jameson house. Sadie held her hand up and signaled her mom to stop.

“I saw Marty again, Mommy,” Sadie said. “Yesterday after it rained. He was up in the attic doing something by the window.” She looked up at her mom and back at their own house, not that much different than Marty’s, other than Sadie’s was well-kept and had been painted the year before her father died. “You think I can go up in our attic sometime? I’d like to look from there. I bet Marty likes it up there because he can see real good.”

Sadie’s mother squeezed her shoulder. “We’ll see, baby. You stay away from that Jameson boy, alright?”

“There’s nothing wrong with him, Momma. He’s just lonely.”

“That’s enough, Sadie-love. Now do you want to go down to the store or to the river and try and spot some alligators?”

“Alligators,” Sadie said. That’s what she almost always said.

As they exited the driveway and turned right, Sadie caught movement from the corner of her eye. Looking into the underbrush, she saw Marty hunched over and dirty, and except for his eyes, he looked utterly wild.

It was his eyes that Sadie liked best, and she lifted a hand and waved at him.

Chapter 4
  Finding the Handle

Marty stopped and crouched when he saw Sadie and her mom on the feeder road. There was a stretch of underbrush and a few china berry trees, a jagged barbed wire fence, and about ten feet of drainage ditch between him and the road where Sadie and her wheelchair were rolling past. Marty thought he was being quiet enough to remain undetected, but Sadie lifted a small hand and wiggled her fingers at him. Sadie’s mom looked that way and tilted her head, and Marty thought he saw her wrinkle her nose as she leaned into the wheelchair and pushed Sadie just a little bit faster.

Cars and diesels wheeled by at seventy or eighty miles an hour, in a deep rumble so consistent that Marty no longer heard it anymore than he heard his own heartbeat.

For a minute Marty watched, crouched, holding a roofing hammer-hatchet across his knees. Mrs. Marsh once turned her head toward Marty, and that’s when he ducked into the woods swinging the hammer-hatchet in front of him to swipe away the spider-webs. He had business out here, and it wasn’t the business of snooping on his crippled neighbor girl.

The hammer-hatchet was rusted to a dull brown, but sharp and shiny along the leading edge from the last time Uncle Cooper had held it throwing sparks against the woodshop grinder.

“Not too sharp,” his uncle had said to Marty. “You want two bevels. This first is called the shoulder bevel, and that’s the main part you see shine up on the blade. The other is the edge, and that’s not but a thumbnail width resting on the shoulder bevel. That’s your business edge, the little one, at a steeper angle.”

“Same as the wood chisels?”

“You bet, but not as sharp on an axe. You don’t want to chip the blade. The bigger axes you have to heat when you sharpen ’em. They’re tempered.”

His uncle had worked with Marty from behind, holding his hands and arms around him in a woodshop embrace, with Marty’s eyes protected by a pair of foggy-scratched goggles. “You take the goggles,” his uncle said. “I can see with my good eye shut; go ahead, son. Sparks won’t hurt my Dead-Eye none.”

Uncle Cooper only had one blue eye. The other was glass with an emerald green iris that didn’t match at all. He would wink at Marty and say it was a Dead-Eye wink, and those were lucky because they scared off the Boogerbears.

The hammer-hatchet wasn’t much use for chopping trees, but it was what Uncle Cooper carried when they went hiking, looking for whittle-sticks, as he called them. It made short work of limbs and anything smaller than Marty’s wrist, which was about as wide as the hatchet head, and it could be doubly-useful in the woodshop in its intended use, which was hammering and plying and chopping. The weight felt good and familiar in Marty’s hand, and he ran with it gliding through the air in front of him.

Marty cut through the woods, past old fences and fallen trees and briars and underbrush, until he finally stopped at the edge of the tree line looking into a sparsely cleared pasture behind a well-maintained barbed-wire fence. This fence had fresh green steel posts and a tight-drawn wire that sang when he plucked it. A few cows lay in the shade of a wide, dead oak tree. Spanish moss hung from the tree like bearded old men skewered through the back of their heads.

The cows looked up when he twisted himself through the fence and walked across the pasture at an angle away from them. He found the cow trail and put his feet to it, avoiding the occasional droppings, and walked until he saw a lonesome stand of underbrush jutting out of the middle of an otherwise open field. There was a mother cow lying on the west side, in the shade, while her calf grazed a few yards away from her.

The calf bellowed at Marty. The mother swished her tail and more or less ignored him as he ducked into the underbrush and swung the hammer-hatchet back and forth to clear a trail through the limbs and spider-webs. It had been a dry summer and the brush gave way in uncontested snaps as Marty pushed through it.

There weren’t any briars, and Marty made his way to the center of the patch of brush without inflicting too many new scratches on his arms. A pair of jeans spared his legs. He always wore jeans when he hiked. That was one of Uncle Cooper’s hiking rules along with bring plenty of water and a knife (or hammer-hatchet) in case you found something that needed cutting.

One of Uncle Cooper’s other rules was this: don’t camp beneath the horse-apple trees. Marty had thought of this rule while he was watching Sadie on the feeder road and couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before.

Horse-apple trees are also called Bois D’Arc, and some other things Marty couldn’t remember, but he did remember that the Native Americans made bows from their wood. Uncle Cooper knew that, too, and had made a hammer handle out of horse-apple.

Other than pines, the horse-apple was the easiest tree to find and identify owing to the grapefruit-sized droppings that littered its base. They were lime green balls with a scaled texture. Some of them were cut in half where rabbits or squirrels ate them, but mostly they were round balls either fresh or rotted, too big to throw, and heavy enough to offer a good solid head-bonking if they fell on him from above.

That’s what Uncle Cooper said happened to him and Marty’s mom when they were kids. “Me and Betsy camped right here under this tree,” Uncle Cooper said. “No bags or nothing. That’s camping, Martian. That’s how you do it. Now the wind picked up sometime in the night and it started raining these big horse-apples down on me and your momma. One got me right here in the Dead-Eye. That’s how I lost this eye, you know, a horse-apple got it.”

Marty hadn’t believed that eye story anymore than he had believed the other eye-loss stories his uncle always told. Sometimes Uncle Cooper lost that eye in the war, and he never said just which war that was. Sometimes he lost it to an alligator, other times he lost it to a limb in the woods—which to Marty was the most frightening of any of his stories—and once he even lost the eye to a low-flying bird.

Now he knew it wasn’t a horse-apple or any of those other things that stole away his uncle’s left eye. It was a knife like the one Marty had found and sharpened, the one which needed a new, solid handle.

Marty stood beneath the horse-apple tree, the bonafide bearer of whittle-sticks and hammer handles, and the offender of camping trips back when his uncle was still alive and they still owned this patch of land. Limbs littered the ground along with the horse-apples. Marty toed aside the smaller sticks and inspected some of the larger ones for cracks, rot, dryness, and straightness. He finally found a limb about the width of his wrist and wrapped his fingers around it, squeezed it, and opened and closed his fingers.

Holding the limb against the horse-apple tree Marty
raised the hammer-hatchet and delivered three quick blows. The hits shortened the stick, but jiggled the horse-apple tree. Several of its fruits rained down to the ground with thumps as loud as a cow hoof stomp.

Marty thought better of that technique, and squatted on the ground and hacked at the limb until it was about the length of his forearm. He stripped off the knots and the bark and held it in front of him, making sure it had the right weight to it.

“There we go,” Marty said. He whacked it on the ground to test its worth. He didn’t think he had the strength to break the stick even if he banged it on a rock or ran it over with a tractor. “You’ll make the perfect handle for my knife. I think I’ll name you Jim, like Jim Bowie.”

When Marty got home with his length of horse-apple wood, his father was in the back yard with the .22 rifle shooting AA batteries off the fence post, facing the back pasture. Marty was almost to the house before he heard the crack of the rifle, and he thought his father must be using the rat-shot loads, which were half a regular .22 load and weren’t much louder than a pellet gun. Even so, the sound of the shot made Marty twitch, and he wondered if he would ever get over his flinch.

“Got me some snakes,” his father said when he saw Marty.

Marty was still on the other side of the hurricane fence enclosing the back yard, coming up from the woods. He put a foot on the fence, hoisted himself over, and landed on the other side, carrying the length of Bois D’Arc wood in one hand and the hammer-hatchet in the other.

Marty’s father pointed the rifle at the base of the back yard oak and nodded his head. He faced away from Marty, shirtless, his skin moist with sweat, and the inked cobwebs along his back flexed as the spider crawled between his shoulder-blades. “Them’s the ones I got out by the shed. Must be mating.”

His father went back to shooting the batteries off the fence post, and Marty walked to the base of the oak and looked at the pile of snakes clustered atop the roots. There were six or seven of them heaped together. Some of them were blown in half, others were missing their heads. All of them were the rat snakes that infested the house and shed and the surrounding acres, black with a splotched white belly, long and thin and coiled together like one long string of twisted rope. The smell was unbearable, and Marty often thought there was no worse smell on Earth than that of a dead snake. God may have done that on purpose, such that the serpent received no mercy even in death.

“Get the shovel, boy,” Marty’s father said. He discharged a round and the post splintered beneath the battery. “Hell. Get the shovel and toss them snakes out into the pasture. If you see anymore snakes, club it and toss it out, too.”

“Yes, sir,” Marty said. He stuck the length of wood and the hatchet into his belt, and watching his feet with each step, he made his way through the back yard to the shed. He twitched every time his father shot.

The shovel was a wooden-handled spade that was probably older than Marty. He took it back to the oak, scooped up the snakes, walked them to the fence, and with a great catapulting action heaved them skyward into the pasture. Marty guessed there must be a hundred snakes out there by now, piled among the goat weeds and clover and bull nettles. It sure smelled like there were a hundred snakes out there. It took Marty three trips to toss all the snakes.

When he finished, he returned the shovel to the shed, and as he walked back to the house, his father said, “You want to go to the dump and shoot with me? Your momma wants to do some picking.”

“No, sir,” Marty said.

“Man up, boy. Long as your momma don’t see you near a gun, and long as you don’t shoot nobody in the head, I guess it’s alright.” His father laughed a full-open cackle.

Marty didn’t think that last comment was very funny.