Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Page 11

  The policeman puts a thick hand on your arm. “Come on. Come on in the car and get cool.”

  With the policeman’s help, you gather up the envelopes and catalogs. He ushers you into the passenger’s side of the cruiser and slants each of the dashboard vents so that they are all blowing at you. He races the engine. The breeze pouring from the dash is sumptuously cold and laced with a faint hint of medicine smell, like the waiting room of a dentist’s office. Nothing your mother owns smells bright and clean like this.

  Jutting up from the dash is a shotgun in a metal brace. Scattered on the bench seat are other police tools—a big black flashlight, a notepad in a vaguely martial leather case. Somehow, these things are more genuine and frightening than the shotgun, whose exact resemblance to what you’ve seen in movies makes it seem unreal.

  “You feeling okay?” he asks you. “Not dizzy or nothing?”

  “No,” you say. “I’m fine now. Totally.”

  “What’s this thing here?” he asks, pointing at his lip to indicate the hamburger.

  “I had that before. It’s just a fungus.”

  The policeman looks at you for a moment. His nostrils rise in distaste. Then he unhitches his radio. “Two-oh-five, two-oh-five,” he says. “You can kill that call to Roger’s Road. It’s just a kid who got a little dizzy and passed out. It’s copasetic now,” he says, winking at you, though you are not sure why. It occurs to you that you despise him a little for being so easily fooled.

  The policeman goes on talking. “Tell you one thing,” he continues. “I won’t need my coffee break this afternoon. After seeing you lying there like that, I’ll be keyed up all day. I mean, damn, I was sure we had another dead kid on our hands.”

  Your ears prick up at that word: “another.” Last spring, Samantha Mealey, a nine-year-old girl from your elementary school, was found naked in a maple tree on the public golf course, a length of clothesline knotted around her neck. In fact, you’d met her at the bus stop just a few weeks before she died. She’d been a brassy, fearless little girl with a hoarse, appealing laugh. On that afternoon, much to the chagrin of her older brother, she’d been trying to pull some boys’ pants down and cussing out loud for fun. She was an exciting girl.

  You have not had your first kiss, but you are already worried about sex. Just two grades ahead of you, kids are having it already. When you learned that the man who killed Samantha Mealey had raped her before he tied the noose around her neck, what occurred to you was this: At least she didn’t die a virgin—a thought you cannot share with even your wickedest friends.

  You feel a manic impulse to start talking, to spare yourself from being alone with thoughts of Samantha Mealey’s murder. You show the leopard flier to the policeman. “Have you heard about this?” you say. “There’s a leopard running around out there.”

  He accepts the sheet and looks it over.

  “Somebody had it for a pet,” you say.

  “See, I do not know who would have this thing at their residence, but I’ll tell you one thing for sure: they’re probably a dangerous element.”

  “Drug lords,” you say.

  “Could be. Bikers, maybe,” the policeman says. “I swear, this whole area’s changing. You just don’t know anymore. Used to be this was a nice little town. Now it’s turning into one of these places where anything can happen.”

  He passes the flyer back to you. You reach for the door. “So, thanks,” you tell the policeman. “I should probably get going. My dad’s probably wondering where I am.” You pull the door handle. It’s locked.

  “Oh, you ain’t walking anywhere, buddy,” he tells you with a stern fondness that makes you uneasy. “I’ll drive you. You keel over again, knock your head, I’m in real trouble.”

  He puts the cruiser into drive, and the car rolls forward. Untrimmed thorns and sapling limbs clutch at the car with intermittent shrieks that embarrass you.

  “Thanks,” you tell the policeman once the house pulls into view. “Thanks for the lift and everything.”

  He turns in the direction of the leaf grinder, where your stepfather stands with his back turned. “That your dad?” he asks. “Probably ought to talk to him,” the policeman says. You don’t want him to, but there is nothing you can do.

  Together, you and the policeman walk across the lawn to your stepfather. The lawn is choked with a special weed that explodes seeds when you touch it. Little clouds detonate around the policeman’s shiny shoes and land in his trouser cuffs. Your stepfather keeps feeding leaves into his grinder until the policeman is about three feet away. Then he turns. He narrows his eyes at the policeman, and then at you. The sweat is pouring off him, curling the hair on his bare chest into dozens of dark whorls. He turns the grinder off, looking hostile and put out.

  “Who are you?” he asks.

  “Officer Behrends, sir. I was driving past and I found your son lying in the driveway. He gave me a real scare.”

  “Hm.” Your stepfather turns to you. The muscles around his eyes are tense. “What were you doing lying in the driveway?”

  “I don’t know,” you say. “I just got dizzy and then I woke up. I guess I passed out.”

  “That mail was all scattered around and he was lying on his face,” the policeman says. “I didn’t know what had happened to him. He gave me a scare. I was thinking maybe he’d been shot.”

  “Maybe you sat down and then you fell asleep,” your stepfather says after a moment. “That’s probably what happened.”

  “I didn’t sit down,” you say. It is just like him to question your story, even with an officer of the law beside you, corroborating it. “I fell.”

  Your stepfather takes your chin in his thumb and forefinger and turns your face back and forth, as though it were a piece of merchandise he was thinking about buying.

  “You must have fallen pretty easy,” he says. “When you faint, you go down hard. You don’t have any cuts.”

  “I don’t know how I fell,” you say. “I wasn’t there watching.”

  “All right. Go inside, now,” your stepfather says.

  But you don’t move. You don’t want to. The sun slips behind a cloud. Something—you don’t know what—is about to happen. You feel it, and you stand there, holding the mail, scraping the sharp edge of a magazine against your chin, out of which a single precious hair has lately dared to curl.

  “Hell of a lucky thing that I saw him when I did,” says the policeman. He seems to be angling for a handshake or words of gratitude from your stepfather, and you pity him for that. “Who knows? Somebody could have pulled in quick and run him over. It’s a lucky thing.”

  “Yeah, pretty lucky,” your stepfather says. Then he turns to you. “Go on inside. Wait for your mother.”

  But you stay where you are. Then, off in the trees behind the clothesline, you hear a branch snap, and the sound of something big tussling in the wooded shade. Your breathing goes quick and shallow. You close your eyes. Picture it, the leopard, its shoulders rising and falling as it lopes across the lawn.

  “Hey,” your stepfather says, lightly slapping your cheek. “What’s the matter with you? Blacking out again?”

  Don’t answer. Listen. Be still.

  DOOR IN YOUR EYE

  My daughter, the very first night I was in her house, she wanted right off to put me in a state of fear. I was not even through with my soup when she came out, very excited, with a stack of photographs. She had them in a plastic Baggie so they’d be safe even in a flood. What was in those pictures she needed to be so careful about? Somebody lying dead in the street in front of Charlotte’s apartment, shot in his chest, a black man about eighteen years old. “See, Dad? Right in here? See the blood dripping out of his mouth? That’s how fresh he was when I found him.”

  “So what?” I told her. “It’s a dead man. Do I know him? There’s not enough terrible stuff around, I have to look at this?”

  But my daughter was so excited about her photos, she made me go through every single one, all t
he way until we hit the pictures where the police and ambulance drivers arrived and spoiled her angle with their barricades. “After here it’s no good,” she said, pulling down her mouth. “You can’t see anything. They blocked me out before I could actually see rigor mortis.”

  “You saw too much already, Charlotte,” I said. “You never should have seen it, and then you turn around and show it to me. Some idea of how to make somebody feel welcome.”

  She knocked the stack of pictures hard against the tabletop to even them up. Then she slipped them back into the plastic bag. “I’m just saying it’s not like Pottsville. You have to be careful here.”

  “I’m not afraid of this place,” I said. “I’ve seen some things. I’ve been around the track a few times.” If anything, I was afraid of my daughter, a grown woman who when she finds a dead man, the first thing she does is take a hundred photographs. I said nothing. Charlotte is a single girl, though she was married once. We threw her a big foolish wedding with tailcoats and a white limousine and a bagpiper walking around. Her marriage held on for ten months. Since then, Charlotte has gone to one school after another, hoarding up degrees, this latest one in public health. I didn’t see her getting married again. She was forty-one. Her face was still a little bit pretty, but she’d turned into one of these girls who carries a big load under her belt.

  “I hate to say it, Dad, but you’re naive,” she said. “Things happen all over this city, and you never know where. This is a risky place.”

  “So what? I just stay in the house all day, afraid for my life?”

  “Of course not. There’s plenty of good places for you to go. There’s the Mintz Center on Nashville Street. They have games there, and cards, and I think they’ll give you lunch and they don’t charge.”

  “I’ll go see about it,” I said. “What kind of girls are there?”

  “Old ones, I guess,” she said.

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “Maybe I can do some courting. Get myself a nice girlfriend.”

  “Oh, yeah? Been studying the pickup books? Getting your method down?”

  “Hell, no,” I said. “I don’t have a method. My method is to be nice and congenial. Maybe you should try it.”

  My daughter turned away and went to picking at something on her big white arm. Charlotte didn’t like to hear about me and girls. The whole reason she brought me down here was because of romance. I’d been mixing with a little Spanish girl in Pottsville. My daughter felt I was getting too romantic with her. So what? My wife was dead seven years, and there was no one else around.

  I went back to my food, and this caused Charlotte to put her fingers in her ears and murmur to herself and look at her lap.

  “What’s your problem, sweetheart?”

  “It’s you and that soup. You tell everybody not to slurp, but I couldn’t slurp as loud as you if I tried.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “I’ll take some dessert.”

  “There’s some butter pecan,” she said.

  “Any Hershey’s?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’d like mine with some Hershey’s, please.”

  She took my plate and walked into the kitchen, her heels clomping all the way. Everything sounded loud and strange in this apartment, because although Charlotte had been here two years, she did not have much furniture, and she hadn’t put any carpets down.

  Through the open window, I could hear more banging coming from across the street. A man was standing on an upstairs balcony, really giving it to the door. I undid the brake on my chair and turned it so I could have a better view. He pounded for a while, but no one answered. By the time Charlotte returned, the man was so frustrated that he was banging very hard on the tin downspout that ran along the edge of the house. This scared a row of little green birds from their perch on the power line. They swarmed around in the air, making hoarse calls. Apparently, the man had done this kind of knocking a few times before. The downspout was pretty beat up, bent and crimped like a stubbed cigarette.

  Charlotte set the ice cream in front of me.

  “Look at this joker,” I said, pointing at the man with my spoon. “He’s put himself in real trouble with his wife. She’s got him out here knocking like an asshole, and she won’t let him in.”

  Charlotte let out a little chuckle. “Ah. How apropos. That’s no one’s wife up there. That particular neighbor of ours,” said my daughter in an important, sneering voice, “is a whore.”

  “Charlotte,” I said, “what did this woman ever do to you that you have to be so ugly behind her back?”

  “I’m not being ugly, I’m being honest,” Charlotte said. “She goes to bed with men for a living. Just watch. She’s got johns going in and out of there twenty-four hours a day.”

  As if to prove Charlotte’s point for her, the door opened a crack right then. The man stopped his banging and slipped inside. The street went quiet and the green birds came back to the power line.

  The next day, Charlotte went off to class, and I stayed in the house. I couldn’t go to the Mintz Center. It would have been too much trouble for me. Even though Charlotte had said she was going to, she had not made the landlord come by and put a ramp on the steps. As a matter of fact, I don’t really need the chair. I just like it for the purpose of saving energy, my energy. The way I look at it, if all I’m going to do is get up from where I’m sitting to walk to some other place just to sit down again, I might as well stay in the chair.

  I keep a diary. I don’t write anything in there except the weather, and I don’t say a lot about that. “Warm, clear” is about the extent of what I put down. And with my little watercolor kit, I paint the sky. Not all the whole thing, only about as much as could go on a playing card. I used to put more words in the diary, but when I looked back on what I wrote, I noticed I’d become like a cheap newspaperman about my life, only telling unpleasant things—when I fought with my wife, or how much money I had given my daughter, or a time I was eating at a restaurant and a woman fell off her chair from a seizure. So I stopped writing words and decided to stick with just the paintings and the weather. It isn’t much of a diary, but it’s accurate, at least.

  About noon, I went out on the porch with my kit. With the sun on my face, I ate the sandwich Charlotte had left for me, salami and mustard. Then I got to work. An unusual sky was happening that day. So much was going on up there, I had to make three paintings of it to get the whole idea across. Up above the power lines, it was pretty easy—just a simple blue. But down toward the Mississippi River there was a big green blackness with lightning going crazy in it, and this took some thought and care to paint correctly. Number three was the combination place of dark wisps where the storm clouds feathered into the blue.

  I must have spent an hour making my three little watercolors, and in that time, three men visited the upstairs apartment of the lady across the street. One was a thin black man with a big beard and a Vietnamese peasant hat. Maybe the woman didn’t like his looks, that hat or something else about him, because she made him whack the downspout for about ten minutes before she let him in. The second customer was a young white kid with baggy shorts and big pink calves. She didn’t let him in at all. This signified to me that the woman was probably an interesting person. She wouldn’t go with anyone. She had scruples of some kind. The third was a policeman in uniform, and he didn’t have to wait but a minute. I got excited, thinking he was going to drag out the prostitute in handcuffs and I’d finally get a look at her. But no, fifteen minutes later the son of a bitch comes out by himself and drives off in his car. If I’d been a decent person, I would have taken down the license and called it in to the station. But for all I knew, the whole goddamned department was in on this kind of thing, and it would mean trouble if I called. Anyway, I stayed very curious about the woman. Each time she had a visitor, the door would open and the man would disappear inside with no sight of the lady. Not once did I even see her hand, and that was frustrating for me. It was like watching wind. You could o
nly see her by what she moved.

  After the policeman left, I waited for someone else to come along, but no one did, so I went inside and took a nap. Just as it was getting dark, Charlotte came home. We ordered in some Chinese for dinner, and then Charlotte said she was going to a dance lesson. To keep me occupied, she’d checked out some videos from the library, The Thorn Birds, which I’d already seen. Charlotte went to go dancing, and I didn’t know what to do. I phoned up Sophia, the girl I knew in Pottsville, but there was nobody home.

  At a quarter after nine, I got into bed. I fell asleep and what I dreamed was a true memory. I dreamed about Claudia Messner, a wild girl from my middle school. One time, she said she wanted me to kiss her in a cemetery, and I said okay. So we went into a cemetery. She picked out a nice big stone to sit on, and I kissed her on that. Her mouth had the flavor of a blackberry candy she was sucking on. After a little while, a young guy came by in a car. He said, Hey, you two can’t do your kissing here.

  What’s it to you? I said, very tough.

  Hell, I don’t care, he said. But that’s my uncle’s stone and my aunt saw you two out here and it’s making her nuts. She sent me to tell you to get off it.

  So Claudia and me went to a little strip of forest right next to the highway and lay there in some vines until our lips were sore. It was a very nice memory for me. But I didn’t get to dream the whole thing, because when my daughter came back from her dancing, she stuck her head in my door and said, “Hey, Dad, I’m home,” as she used to do when she was a girl. It was dark in my room, and I still had Claudia in my head. I said, “Hello, Charlotte. I’d like you to meet Claudia, who’s lying here in bed with me.”

  Charlotte didn’t say anything. She just turned on the bright overhead light, looked at me blinking in my bed, and turned it off again.