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Chapter 15
  Uncle Cooper

One day you’re picking peppers, the next you’re pushing daisies.

You’re with your grandson picking those peppers. He’s not your grandson but he sure feels like it. He’s your baby sister’s little boy, your nephew by all rights, and he calls you Uncle, but that gap in age puts him more than one generation behind you. He’s your grandson. We’ll stick with that, because it doesn’t matter what he is on paper only what he looks like in your Dead-Eye, which is something magnificent, something you wish you had in yourself or could see in others.

He is a magical, mythical creature in that eye, and when you wink, he flashes, erupts with blue light and Lord how he shines and shines.

In the other eye, your good eye, the boy’s thin as a hay straw, like his momma and like his daddy, doesn’t weigh more than a handful of nickels, but he’s a good kid, quiet, and Lord in Heaven can he listen when you talk. He’s like a sponge or maybe a movie camera, recording everything you say for later playback. It’s as if nobody has ever spoken to him like this, and in your heart you know that’s true, but it’s too painful to think his parents have been so apathetic with him.

Now there’s a word, ain’t it: apathetic. You suppose it means the opposite of pathetic since it’s apathetic, sort of the way theist and atheist are opposite, but that’s not the case at all. You wish it meant the opposite of pathetic but it doesn’t. It means your baby sister doesn’t give one whittle-stick about her littlest boy. Hell, she chased him into the woods with a carving knife, three blind mice, three blind mice, cut off your tail with a carving knife.

He sits with you in the woodshop, which used to be your baby sister’s bedroom back when you two were kids. He sits on the cutting table swinging his skinny legs and you say, “Martian, I got something to tell you. It’s a big secret, buddy, and you got to promise you won’t tell nobody.”

“I promise, Uncle Cooper,” the boy says. You could have been talking about ice cream he says it so calm, but this ain’t ice cream, not one bit. Swing go his legs, and he stares at you with those same blue eyes you feel staring back at him from inside your one good eye socket.

You and Loretta never could have kids. Loretta miscarried half a dozen times and that was half a dozen too many for either one of you. She tied up her tubes and you cut yours in sympathy.

Now there’s another word, sympathy. Being pathetic together, in symphony. How about that.

You say, “Martian, you see this eye here, my Dead-Eye? You know how I really got it?”

“Stuck it on a tree limb?”

Marty makes a face, and you smile and hug him. You know that story scared the bejeezus out of him, and after that he sort of cringed every time you two went hiking, which was near every day. God, it felt good to have someone on those walks finally, after Loretta died.

“No, boy, not from a tree limb.”

You stop and think maybe this one will scare his guts right out. You think maybe you shouldn’t tell him the truth, but then you think how you and Loretta never had kids and you never had anyone to pass this down to. You figured if you waited long enough an opportunity would present itself and here it is, swinging its legs, brought to you by a sad misfortune, but here nonetheless and swing swing swinging those knobby knees of his.

Here goes, you think. “I got my Dead-Eye from me and your momma’s granddad, Grandpa Babineaux. Now, you never met him, but I figure your momma talked about him some. Did she ever mention him?”

Marty shakes his head. You aren’t surprised, and you think about the meaning of apathy.

“Well, it don’t matter none, Martian. He was my granddad and he lived east of Lake Charles. He was what people call Cajun. He didn’t live on the bayou though. He had a farm a lot like this one, a few head of cattle and a big old pond for the cows to drink out of. He had a gator in that pond big as a Japanese car.

“This here is his eye, Martian. You understand what I mean by that?”

Marty shakes his head and you explain. God how you wish you didn’t have to explain, but these days the Boogerbears are swarming like angry bees and you know there isn’t much time left. Hell, you saw one this morning outside the fence.

“I mean this was his eye, literally. It’s ivory, the white part, and the green is emerald. The center part, the black part, that’s ebony. This here eye is worth a big old house, big as any you’ve seen, that’s one of the reasons you got to keep this a secret. If your momma or someone found out how much this was worth they’d cut it right out of my head and sell it for a truckload of crack cocaine.”

You regret the words because it was a punch at his momma, at your little sister, but Marty pouts his bottom lip and nods. He understands that point, way more than an eleven-year- old boy has any right to.

“There’s more to it than that, son. Way more.”

You tell him and he swings his legs and he listens. You think he’s going to cry but he doesn’t. He’s a good kid, better than Betsy deserves after what all she’s done, and as good as you and Loretta ever could have hoped for. He’s strong. When you finish, after you almost cry because it was far too much at once, all Marty says is this.

“So did it hurt, Uncle Cooper?”

“What?”

“When you cut out your eye?”

You shake your head. “No, Martian, didn’t hurt a bit. Eyes ain’t got no nerves in ’em.”

You lie. Maybe that will make it easier on the boy if it ever comes to that, which it might, which it probably will, and you don’t guess he believes it don’t hurt any more than he believed a gator took your eye. He’s a smart one, and he knows what parts to believe.

You see a Boogerbear behind him now, peeking through the woodshop window, and you wonder how long it’s been there and how much it heard. You wink at the ugly sumbitch and damned if it doesn’t stare like it’s got you figured right out. Used to be they would scatter like scared pigeons.

They don’t scatter so much these days. Damned if that Boogerbear doesn’t wink at you, and then it turns and flaps off the way it came.

They’re everywhere now.

You put your arm around Marty and hug him to you. “I don’t have much time left, son. You dig me up if you have to, you hear, Martian? Dig me right up and yank out this eye and don’t you worry about me none. I’ll be around, I promise. This Dead-Eye is yours if you ever need it but don’t tell nobody; not a soul, not even yourself in the mirror. I won’t mind, you hear me?”

“Are you going to die?”

You don’t know what to say to that. All that comes to mind is this. “I love you, son.” You never got to say it to anyone but Loretta, and you figure it’s about time you mentioned it to Martian.

“Love you too, Uncle Cooper.”

He’s a good boy.

Chapter 16
  Marty’s Fortress

Marty worked with the mindless diligence of an ant bent on building its mound in one single stroke of the clock, clearing a path down the middle of the room, from his wall to the closet, while blocking the door and the window.

He shoved the dresser into the door until he could push no harder and then stacked boxes on top of it. When that was too tall to reach, he climbed on top of the lower boxes and stacked them so high they covered the top of the bedroom door and reached almost to the raised ceiling. He wedged Gerald’s old mattress against the bedroom window, slid boxes across the floor, piled them into it, and mounted the stack with a box on his shoulder and dropped it on top of it all.

He worked with the ceiling fan clicking until he created a veritable fortress of junk. Moats of broken silverware blocked the bedroom door. A towering keep of knitting supplies and plastic tubs and Gerald’s mattress secured the window. A busted ceramic owl sat on top of his dresser like some guardian bird of prey. That was his gargoyle, and Marty wedged it between the boxes such that its broken beak looked down on him where he would sleep from now on.

He freed the old mattress Uncle Cooper had given him and laid it out on the bedsprings, off the floor, and moved the bed to the center of the room, away from the walls with the foot toward the attic entrance. He cleared the floor between the bed and the closet down to the wooden planks, laid the closet shelves bare, and climbed up and touched the attic access but didn’t open it, testing his weight against the shelves. He put his feet where he had placed them so many times before his mother had obstructed the access with her boxes of junk. This was his and Uncle Cooper’s secret route, marked by worn edges on the shelves leading up to the entrance.

He couldn’t turn pinwheels in the room, but he could walk unobstructed from his bed to the closet, and other than that one access point, there was no entry into the bedroom. He couldn’t even see the walls.

Satisfied with his effort, covered in dust and sweat, Marty sat on his bed and fell onto the mattress. The room was a pent-up breath of hot summer air. Maybe it would have seemed claustrophobic to someone else, but to Marty it felt as cozy and warm as a womb, and he closed his eyes, slept, and dreamed of nothing more than empty silence.

When he woke, Marty couldn’t tell if it was dark or light outside, but his internal clock said night was still in full effect. He sensed the moon was up and the stars were out, and the cars on the freeway were chasing their headlights westward toward Houston.

He lay in bed listening to the footsteps in the attic. The footsteps didn’t surprise him as much as they had before. It wasn’t a frightening sound, and now that he had some place to store it in his mind, he filed it as a familiar noise, something he had heard before and found to be harmless. He placed it next to the rustling of the oak limbs, beside his father’s tapping on the window, and behind the gnawing of the rats in the walls. He willed himself to be unafraid, the way a man might hold his hand above a flame and will it to be cool.

He heard the clop of a boot heel followed by the slap of the sole against the wooden attic floor. The steps paced back-and-forth, back-and-forth, from one side of the floored-in strip to the other, moving east-west-east from window to window. The steps bled off and disappeared as they moved to the west side of the house, above the den and his parent’s bedroom, and after a few minutes they returned the way they came, always at that same slow, patient pace. It was the pace of someone waiting. It was the pace of someone thinking. It was the pace a man would make in a hospital waiting room, one Marty recognized from the time he had spent in Baytown while the doctors discussed whether to unplug Gerald.

As he listened, Marty heard a new sound, the rattling of wood-on-wood. Whatever was in the attic shook the entrance in the closet, or maybe rapped it with its palm, and he expected something to drop out through the opening. For some reason, he thought of his mother’s needle touching his father’s eye, and he squinted against the thought and rubbed his eye. He pulled his knees to his chin, afraid to get them too close to the edge of the bed.

There came a slap, a crack, and then the attic door fell through the closet and bounced off the shelves like a ricocheting bullet. It spiraled across the room and came to rest at the foot of Marty’s bed, a square piece of quarter-inch plywood, rough-cut, painted a worn and chipped white on one side and a faded natural gray on the other.

A heavy darkness spilled out of the attic as a waft of air circulated into the room. There was a chill to it, as if in defiance of summer, and he heard a voice whisper out of the opening. The words were low and distant, but there was the uptick of his name,
Marty
, followed by more mumbles, and then after a while, silence.

He found no more sleep that night, and when he sensed it was morning, and after it had been several hours since he heard the footsteps and whispering, Marty climbed out of his bed and dug around a box of Gerald’s old clothes. He found a simple, solid blue tee-shirt and pulled it over his head. Grit pressed against his skin, and it smelled old and musty and mildewed.

Marty clopped his boots to the closet and looked up at the attic entrance. In some ways, it felt like he was about to dive into his own alligator-filled moat and swim madly across before he was devoured. He had no choice but to barricade himself in his room. He had no choice but to lock his mother outside his bedroom and prevent his father from crawling through the window. Even though his mother knew about the attic opening here, she didn’t know how Marty climbed on the roof to get inside. From her perspective, Marty would be barricaded in his room indefinitely, or if she saw him outside, she would wonder how the hell he got out, the way someone might wonder about the snakes crawling in and out of the house.

Marty climbed the shelves, listened, and when he heard nothing, stuck his head through the opening. He was met with daylight and silence, and from that he drew courage and took another step up. He swiveled his head such that he could see every corner of the attic, and when he was satisfied it was empty, he rose like a man from the grave, reborn into the morning light pouring through the east side attic window.

Marty’s toddler chair was still against the west side window, where he had left it the last time he was in the attic. Whatever had clopped around up here, it didn’t move anything this time. Marty went to the chair and was about to grab the back of it and drag it to the east window when he saw a thick black rope coiled beneath it.

He backed up and squatted and looked beneath it. The legs were short, only eight inches off the floor, and the rope beneath it nearly touched the seat from the bottom, and he realized it wasn’t a rope at all, but a rat snake, coiled in sleep with a bulging belly full of rats swallowed crushed and whole. They were deaf, that’s what Mrs. Burleson said about snakes. She said they didn’t have ears, but relied on vibrations and a unique sense of smell with their tongue, and some of them, the pit vipers, relied on a sense of heat akin to the night vision used in the military.

The rat snake’s head was buried inside its coil. All Marty could see was the length of body stacked one layer upon itself, and the wisp of its tail thrown out forgotten on the floor.

There was nothing in the attic to club the snake with. Sadie had his knife and his handle, and even if he found something else, Marty didn’t want to thump around and make that much noise anyway. This was his secret room, his fortress, his impenetrable house of solitude, and part of its protection was well-protected silence.

Not so impenetrable, he thought. There were snakes and rats and something clumping around up here in the night. Still, his mother and father knew nothing of it, and that alone made it sanctimonious.

Marty lifted the chair away from the snake in slow-motion, being careful not to graze it with the legs or make too much noise on the floor.

He walked the chair to the east side window and set it down in the morning light. Outside there was a breeze and the traffic on I-
10
and nothing more.

When Marty went back to the west side window, the snake was gone. He hadn’t seen it so much as swish its tail. It cut a thin line in the dust of the floorboard leading toward where the eaves angled down and met the floor, and the trail ended where the floor ended. The snake had dropped into the ceiling and was either inside the walls or beneath the attic flooring.

Marty swung out the attic window and crouched on the rooftop in his gargoyle stance, watching the back yard for several minutes. When his mother did not appear, he made his way across the roof and carport, careful not to make too much noise, and lowered himself onto the mimosa tree and half fell, half climbed to the ground.

The back yard was empty and quiet except for the usual background noise, but more than anything, Marty was afraid his mother might see him from inside the house. Instead of going directly to Sadie’s, he kept the carport between him and the house and hopped the back fence, crossing between the posts where his father sometimes shot the rifle.

He wound his way about a hundred yards away from the house and horse-shoed to Sadie’s back yard. He hopped her fence and searched for either Sadie or her mom, or worse, his own mother. There was nobody back here but him and two peach trees and a few peaches on the ground begging to be sucked.

Marty kept to the edge of the fence until he was near Sadie’s carport. He poked his head around their minivan and saw the back door was open, shielded only with the screen door. Sadie’s mom stood in the kitchen, rinsing something in the sink.

Marty slunk around the van and kept near the wall of the house. When he reached Sadie’s bedroom window, he put his fingers on the windowsill and pulled himself up until his chin was even with his fingers and his feet dangled about a foot off the ground.

Sadie was there in the window staring back at him. Her eyes went wide and her hand shot up to her mouth, and it startled Marty so much he lost his grip and fell on his back on the ground.

Looking up from the ground, Marty saw the window slide up, and Sadie’s small fingers latched onto the windowsill, followed by the top of her head and then her wonderful eyes. “What are you doing?” She spoke low and looked over her shoulder.

Marty stood and patted off his rear. “You got my knife and stuff?”

“I have the handle, but Momma threw the knife in your yard. It’s somewhere over there.” Sadie waved her hand toward Marty’s back yard. “Your grass is so high it’ll be hard to find, but it’s in there. Don’t step on it. It’s sharp.”

“I know. You got my handle?”

“Yeah. Hold on.”

Sadie disappeared, and Marty looked behind him. Finding the knife would put him in direct view of his mother’s bedroom and the kitchen window, not to mention the slit-window in the walk-in bathroom. He would either have to wait until his mother was confirmed asleep, or it was dark. “Asleep during the day,” Marty said to himself. “No way I’m going through that attic after dark.”

Marty heard someone in the window above him, and turned and saw Mrs. Marsh’s head poke out. Her hair was pulled into a tight ponytail and her cheeks hung around her lips.

For a few seconds she stared at Marty, and Marty wasn’t sure if he should run or freeze or speak or remain silent. He chose the bunny-method and held still and waited to see if she was going to chomp or chat.

Mrs. Marsh chose to chat. “Hello, Marty,” she said.

“Hi,” Marty said.

She looked over her shoulder, nodded, and turned back to Marty. “Are you hungry? I was just fixing up some BLT sandwiches.”

“What are those?”

“BLT?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She smiled, and Marty saw her eyes physically soften. It was as if she had cleared out a piece of sawdust with a blink. “Come on in, honey, I’ll show you.”

When Marty got to the back door, Mrs. Marsh was there holding open the screen. She fired a salvo of glances over Marty’s head, toward his house, and then shut the door and guided him to the breakfast nook table.

He had been right about the house. It was laid out exactly the way his house was laid out. From here he could see Mrs. Marsh’s bedroom, and the bed with the sheets pulled tight beneath a mountain of pillows. On the kitchen table rested a bowl of dried orange peels and peach pits and cedar shavings, all sitting patiently beneath their respective odors.

Marty sat where he was instructed and waited while Sadie wheeled herself up to the table.

When she laid out the sandwiches, Mrs. Marsh asked Marty to wash his hands and pointed at the bathroom beside the kitchen. Marty washed his hands and arms, and wiped his face. He noticed there was still dried blood on his chin mixed with dirt. He cleaned it, used soap, and when he finished, he lowered his head and drank a few long swallows from the tap. He hadn’t had water since yesterday.

Marty sat at the table next to Sadie, and after a few bites of his sandwich, Mrs. Marsh said, “Do you like your bacon sandwich, honey?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Did Sadie tell you about that knife of yours, the one you gave her?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, I’m sorry about what I did.” Mrs. Marsh waved her hand in the air, and Marty saw she still wore her wedding band. He thought Mr. Marsh was dead. “I threw it in the back yard. I forget sometimes how boys can be. It’s been so long since we had a man around here, you know.”

Mrs. Marsh chuckled and took a bite from her sandwich. She wiped her lip with a napkin that seemed to appear from her lap, leap to her face and dab, and disappear beneath the table. “Larry, he used to like knives, had a ton of them laying here and there and everywhere. He used to whittle some, like your uncle. I may even have one of your Uncle Cooper’s old whittles around here, if I can find it. We used to hang out more, back before Loretta died. Women are so much more social than men.”

Mrs. Marsh laughed and put her thumb in one eye and her index finger in the other, wiped it, pinched her nose, and went on. “That knife was too big to whittle with, though. What were you intending to do with it?”

“I don’t know. I got a littler knife for whittling. It’s my Uncle Cooper’s old knife.” Marty fished out the Old Timer from his pocket and set it on the table.

Mrs. Marsh picked it up, turned it over, and placed it in front of Marty. “Well, don’t you go cutting yourself. Always cut away from yourself, and make sure your fingers are clear. That’s what Larry always said.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As they spoke, Sadie laid out the Bois D’Arc handle on the breakfast table. She pointed at it and said to her mother, “Marty carved that.”

“You did not!” Mrs. Marsh said. She picked up the handle and rubbed it between her fingers. She laughed now, a genuine laugh, not one of the force-chuckles she had issued before. “Oh, my goodness,” she said after a few breaths. “Oh, my goodness. This is good, Marty. Really good.”