Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Page 12

  My first week in Charlotte’s house went pretty much like that first day. In the morning, my daughter would go off to school and leave me with a sandwich. I had no occupations. The watercolors and watching for the woman across the street—those were my occupations. The second fed the first. I wanted so much to see the woman that I stayed on the porch for many hours, doing my art. I painted not just my little samples of sky but everything I could see—the extra complex stuff they have on the power poles (you can’t bury cable in this swampy town), the little houses, a giant pothole in the street, which people had tried to fill up with their garbage, including a broom sticking out of the hole to warn drivers. I painted a big dead rat in the drainage canal, bloated up so hard you could see its hide shining between its fur. Nearby, a crew of buzzards slunk around ignoring the carcass, as if to say, We know we eat terrible things for a living, but there is a limit.

  I don’t know how the woman stood all the work she was doing. Men to-ed and fro-ed along her steps all day and night, but in three days of watching, I still hadn’t seen her. All I had to do was glance up at that door where a beige rag hung in the window, and my heartbeat would go a little quicker, and my temperature would heat up by a degree or two. What did she look like? Was she happy in there? Some men went in with packages. I wondered if she got her groceries this way. Giving herself away for a chicken or a can of beans because she couldn’t face her neighbors in the supermarket. Up and down the street, all day, I watched people coming and going from their houses. Only me and that woman I couldn’t see were stuck at home. It was ridiculous, but I felt I had this connection with her because of that.

  The fourth afternoon was a Saturday, and Charlotte said she wanted to make me a proper dinner of the last soft crabs of the season. She went off for groceries. I was on the porch when something happened that I could not believe. Somebody tried to burn the woman out. It wasn’t a man I’d seen before. He had light skin, and a jacket with the Empire State Building in sequins on the back. He did the ordinary thing of beating on the gutter, and when that didn’t work, he took out a cigarette lighter and held the flame against the door. I should have yelled or called the police, but once again in life, I was a coward. You call the cops on somebody like that, and before long it’s your house that’s on fire. Panic, a sour tin flavor, came into my mouth. But I just sat there, watching him, doing nothing.

  The man kept at it awhile, but he couldn’t get the job done. He only put long smears of soot on the door. Finally, he quit trying, and he stormed up the street. I’d been an eyewitness to a felony crime, and I had an obligation. I rolled back into the house and I rifled around for something to write on. I found an envelope of Charlotte’s from the gas company. On the back of it, I wrote, “Hello. My name is Albert Price. I am your new neighbor in 4903. I was a witness to someone trying to burn your door on Tuesday afternoon. I have his description.” I put my daughter’s number. Then I got out of my chair. I took up a cane, and I stepped out into the wind, which was blowing pretty strong. I crossed the street, no problem, but the steps to the woman’s apartment were very challenging for me. When I reached the top, I’d run out of breath.

  The idea was just to stick the envelope in the door and go away, but once I’d gotten up there, I had a hard time staying with the plan. I’d watched so many people try their luck on the door, it was as irresistible as a free roulette wheel. You had to give it a spin. I knocked. Nothing happened. I knocked again, a little harder. I was going to turn around when I heard footsteps inside. The door opened, just a crack. All I could see was an eye looking out of the crack, a large, nice hazel one. That eye had an interesting thing wrong with it. The pupil was enlarged and misshapen. It spread down into the hazel part like the hole for a skeleton key.

  “All right,” she said in a low voice. “What you want?”

  I was caught off guard. I couldn’t speak. I was still breathing pretty hard. “I live there,” I said, gesturing down at my daughter’s house. “Hell, I’m sorry. Here you go.” I held the envelope out to her.

  She looked at it without much interest. “You all right? You need a glass of water, or something?”

  “To be honest, I could use one,” I said. She opened the door. I glanced behind me at the street, but there was nobody to see me, just a dog sniffing at the storm drain. I stepped into her home and got a full look at her for the first time.

  She wasn’t the kind of hooker I was prepared for. She was an older person—younger than me, but she had plenty of years on her for that kind of trade. Her hair had gone silver, and it was knotted tightly at the back, proper as a Quaker woman. She had a smooth face and fine bones, and she wasn’t wearing any garters or lace or bedroom stuff, just a clean white V-neck T-shirt and a blue jean skirt, showing off some very nice legs. I didn’t know what to make of her.

  There was a little hall, and then more steps. I took my time with them.

  “You sure you’re all right?” she said. “I hope you’re not gonna keel over in here. This is a busy day for me.”

  “No, I won’t. I could use that water, though.”

  She went into her kitchen and ran the tap. It was dim and cool as a basement in her place, which was just a room with a bed in the middle of it and a kitchenette to one side. On a table was an old sewing machine whose plastic had gone yellow. A quilt covered the bed, and it was cratered in the center where the woman had taken a nap, or maybe entertained somebody. A tomato plant stood by the window with one big red fruit on it.

  She came back with the water, and I drank it in two slugs. “Need some more?” she asked.

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  She filled up the cup and brought it back to me.

  “Look, I just wanted to tell you, my name is Albert Price. I’m your neighbor. I live across the street.”

  “I know you do,” she said. “You out there on that porch like you was afraid somebody’s gonna steal it.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to disturb you, but there was a man out there just now. He had a cigarette lighter. He was trying to burn your door.”

  She made a clucking sound. “That’s Lawrence,” she said. “He thinks I owe him something, but I don’t owe him anything.”

  “Maybe not, but he could have done you harm.”

  “I’d like to see him try,” she said.

  “I saw him try!” I told her. “He tried to burn down your house.”

  She closed her eyes halfway and shook her head. “Lawrence likes to make noise. He ain’t really for real.” She lit a cigarette, blew out a plume, and drew some of it in through her nose. “How old are you, Albert?”

  “I’m eighty-three,” I said.

  Her brow went up and down.

  “And you came all the way up here to tell me that?” She leaned against the wall and crossed her arms across her chest. “Just to tell me about Lawrence? Nothing else I can help you with?”

  I needed to think. I’d never gone with a whore in my life, except one time, in Germany, a morale girl some buddies of mine snuck into the barracks. I don’t think she was fifteen years old, and we all pitched in on taking her in terrible ways.

  This was different, a grown woman. I thought about kissing her and my hands on her skin, and it came into my mind that maybe this would be the last woman I would ever get the chance to touch. What did it mean, I was wondering, to finish the count of women in your life?

  My breathing was the loudest thing in the room. I didn’t feel steady. “Could I sit down here?” I asked her. “Could I sit on your bed?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “What’s your name, miss?” I couldn’t hear over my heart.

  She stroked her throat with her fingers and took me in through half-closed eyes. “Carol,” she finally said.

  I reached out to put my water glass on the table. My hand was shaking so it made a loud noise when I set it down.

  “That’s a pretty name,” I said, though I didn’t particularly think it was.

  “Thanks,” she sa
id. I could see that under her shirt, she wasn’t wearing a brassiere.

  “Okay, Carol. What if you were to just get down here next to me? I just want us just to lie here for a little while. What would be the price for that?”

  A doubtful extra chin formed under her jaw. “What the fuck are you talking about, Albert?”

  “I’m not up for much,” I said. “I want us just to lie here. Now, I have twenty dollars in my pocket. I’ll give it to you. Twenty dollars for just resting. To me, that seems like a pretty good deal.”

  Then Carol began to laugh a high, chiming laugh, a really pretty sound. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said something to make a person laugh this way. When she finally got control of herself, she said, “Hold up, Albert. You think I’m a whore?”

  I said nothing, and she went into another laughing fit.

  “Whore,” she mumbled into her hand. “This will kill Glenda. This will break Glenda up.”

  “What?”

  “Pay me to lie down with you.” She rubbed her palm against her eye. “You lucky I’m so easygoing, Albert. Most people, you come out your mouth with that, you’d be in some shit.”

  “If you don’t want to, that’s your business,” I said, a little angry now. “Only please don’t treat me like I’m stupid. I see the men coming in and out of here.”

  “Albert, you got it all fucked up,” she said. “I don’t sell this body.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Hell, no. I sell drugs.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  “Shit, everybody on this street knows that. I sell to everybody. Even them people on the corner with the big house and that big iron fence.”

  I put a hand to my face. “Oh, Christ. I apologize.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “You got confused.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “You’re up here, now, Albert. Now tell me, what kind of thing you need? I got sleeping pills, Vikes, Xanax, pills for your mood. They bring it up from Mexico. You spend more at the Walgreens.”

  “I don’t need that stuff,” I said. “I take a water pill. That’s all.”

  “I got some gentle weed. Help you with your appetite. You better put on weight if you’re trying to stay down here. It’s not a town for skinny people. It’s a town for the big set.”

  I thought it over. “You’re talking about reefer?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ll tell you what, then. I’ll buy a reefer from you.”

  “A joint?”

  “Sure,” I said. “A joint. What the hell.”

  “Come on, now, Albert. You can do a little better than a little old joint. I got some bills to pay.”

  “All I’ve got is this twenty. Does that buy a joint?”

  I held up the bill.

  “That’ll work,” she said, and took it. She reached under the bed and pulled out a plastic container that was full of bags of marijuana and pinched a little from one of the bags. Then she sat in a chair beside the bed. She had no rolling papers, so she emptied out a cigarette and began carefully tamping the stuff down the frail, empty paper.

  “Can I ask you a question, Carol?” I asked.

  “Depends on what it is,” she said.

  “What happened to your eye?”

  “It don’t work right. I can see light and dark and that’s pretty much it.”

  “Sure, but what happened to it?”

  She was quiet. “Impact,” she said after a time. “Detached retina.”

  “Okay, so what detached it?”

  She sighed. “Matter of fact, it was a bullet. From a .22 pistol. My husband shot me. That’s what they say, anyway.”

  She held the joint out to me. It was a pretty crooked joint for twenty dollars. “You get it started, Carol.”

  She shrugged. “I’ll take a little puff.”

  She put a match to the joint and drew in a deep lungful.

  “So what do you mean, ‘That’s what they say’? You don’t think he shot you?”

  “To be honest, it’s just as likely that I did it. I remember that gun in my hand at one point.”

  “I’d say you look pretty good for getting shot in your face.”

  “Well, I didn’t look good when it happened. My eye swelled up like a basketball. And you know how they prop you up in a hospital bed? I was sitting like that, blood running down like this, and it ran across here and made a perfect cross. They brought all the nurses and orderlies in to see that cross, like it was a miracle. But I wasn’t thinking about God in that hospital, and I don’t think about him now.”

  She passed the cigarette to me. I took a pull on it. “What were you thinking about?” I asked her when I’d stopped coughing.

  “I was just kind of tripping out on what getting shot is all about. How it’s just you getting touched by a little thing, only it’s touching you really fast. If it was going slow, you’d be fine as pie. The only thing matters is the speed.”

  It was quiet in the room, and then I said, “Funny you should have been shot.”

  She dipped her brow at me. “Yeah, it was funny as a motherfucker.”

  “No, I mean, it’s a funny connection for us, Carol. I’ve been shot, too.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. In Germany. In the war. Here.”

  I pulled aside my collar so she could see my wound. It seemed to interest her. She leaned in and ran her fingers over the scar a couple of times, very tenderly. Then she pulled up my collar and smoothed it out with her hand.

  “The Germans shot you?”

  “Nope,” I said. “It was my own sergeant. This was towards the end. We didn’t have much of an outfit left, no artillery or heavy weapons, but for some reason, he wanted us to cross the Elbe River, where all the fighting was. I said we’d be an asshole to try to cross without laying down a barrage, and I wouldn’t do it. Suddenly, behind me, a pistol goes off, and the guy shoots me. I said, ‘God, am I here yet?’ By the time I was healed up, Truman had dropped the bomb.”

  Carol smiled at me. Her teeth were very white and straight. “You a religious man, Albert?”

  I tried to think this over, but I couldn’t really focus my thoughts. I was pretty rearranged from the reefer. I shrugged my arms. The fabric of my shirt felt new against my skin, and I shrugged one more time for the feeling.

  “Sure,” I finally told the woman. “God’s a wonderful person. I like him.”

  Carol laughed beautifully at this.

  “You were right about this dope,” I said after a while. “It does make you crave something to eat.”

  “You hungry?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  “Well, don’t look at me,” she said. “I can’t be cooking now. This is one of my busy days.”

  “What about that?”

  “What?”

  “That tomato. We could eat that,” I said. “It looks ripe.”

  “You want to eat my tomato?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She reached out and snapped the tomato off its vine and handed it to me.

  “You don’t want some?”

  “Nah,” she said. “Go to town.”

  I took a bite. It was delicious, full of the strong, green flavor of the vine. So much juice ran out that Carol stopped me and went to get a towel. The juice ran down my chin. I could feel my beard getting heavy with it, but I didn’t care.

  I was nearly finished when Carol motioned me over to the open window. Charlotte had gotten home. She was out on the porch next to my empty chair, holding the crabs in a white paper package, turning her head up and down the street.

  “That your daughter?”

  “That’s her,” I said.

  Charlotte shouted out for me, a yell as loud as a bullhorn.

  Carol seemed not to hear. She held up the little remnant of our cigarette. “You want any more of this?” she asked.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  She lic
ked her fingers and pinched it out, and then she popped it in her mouth and swallowed it.

  Down below, Charlotte yelled for me again. “You’re not going to see about her?” Carol asked.

  I put my hands on the windowsill and stuck my entire head out into the afternoon. The wind chilled the wetness on my lips and my chin. “Hey,” I called out to my daughter. “Hey, Charlotte, look up here.”

  WILD AMERICA

  The bell on the cat’s collar roused her. He’d brought her something: a baby pigeon stolen from its nest, mauled and draped on Jacey’s pillowcase. The thing was pink, nearly translucent, with magenta cheeks and lavender ovals around the eyes. It looked like a half-cooked eraser with dreams of someday becoming a prostitute. Jacey screamed briefly, then got up and ran to the bathroom, shutting the door behind her to contain the cat in the room. Her hope was that the cat would eat the bird before she had to look at it again.

  Eleven thirty. Her mother would be counting pills at the pharmacy until eight o’clock tonight. This left Jacey to spend the day with her cousin Maya, who was down here for the week. Four days ago, Maya had descended from the mountains to visit before going off to a free government school for the best young dancers in the state. In Jacey’s opinion, Maya had already been here too long. As children, they’d spent nearly every summer together in joy. They’d suffered summer camp as a team, had stolen newts from mountain ponds and chocolate and lipstick from Charlotte drugstores and, in later days, some wine and painkillers from Maya’s unhappy mother. They had tried out their first kisses on each other, just as practice, and one summer, when Jacey was ten, they’d eaten scabs from each other’s knees to cement a pact to someday raise their families in the same duplex home on the Carolina coast.

  But the bond of that scab lunch was no longer worth much when puberty hit and aimed the girls at different destinies. Three weeks shy of sixteen, Maya had evolved into a five-foot-ten-inch mantis of legendary poise and ballet repute, while Jacey still went around with a shiny chin and forehead and a figure like a pickle jar. Maya sighed a lot over Rudolf Nureyev and often said how hard it was to love a dead man. She worried about her art in language borrowed from New York critics—“It’s so hard to find a balance between exactitude and passion”—talk as comprehensible to Jacey as whale song. She fretted over the precious cartilage in her knees and ankles, saying, “I’ll never forgive myself if I have to fall back on modeling”—already, she’d appeared in local circulars for a chain of department stores.