Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Page 3

  “Now, look, goddammit,” Bob said, and Vicky hung up before he could tell her any of the things he’d really called to say.

  Bob walked home with the sunset nearly dead. He went past the town’s one bar and heard men and women laughing. He turned at the chamber of commerce, which was just an old converted garage where they’d hung out a wooden shingle with some crooked letters burned into it instead of a sign. Past the post office, he picked up the road home and followed it into the dusk.

  Bob was getting into bed when Derrick came over. He opened the door without knocking. “Oh, no,” Bob said out loud.

  Derrick staggered into the house on splayed legs. He squinted around the room for a long second or two before he spotted Bob sitting on the cot.

  “Get up,” Derrick said. “You’n me’s going into town.”

  Bob sighed. “Man, go home,” he said. “Where’s Claire?”

  “Fuck Claire,” Derrick said. “I’m telling you, she cursed at me. She disrespected me, and she spoke to me in a manner that was atrocious. Hell with her. Now, let’s ride down to Cocoa Beach and find some people to fuck and kiss.”

  “Sit down,” said Bob. “I’ll fix you a drink.”

  “Good idea,” said Derrick.

  Bob went into the kitchen and mixed up a jug of Kool-Aid and poured some into a cup. When he got back to the living room, Derrick was asleep on the floor, quietly honking in his slumber. Bob couldn’t wake him, so he turned Derrick on his side, covered him with a blanket, and lay down on the cot.

  Sleep had just dragged Bob down when Claire knocked, then opened the door and angled her head into the room.

  “He’s down there, out pretty hard,” said Bob. “I shoved on him a while and couldn’t get anything out of him.”

  She stepped in. “We can let him stay like that,” she said. “I brought this thing for you.”

  She clicked on a lamp. She was holding a glass salad bowl filled with water. A brown speckled thing lay on the bottom. Its spongy body was studded with thorny reddish nodes; to Bob, it looked like the turd of someone who’d been eating rubies.

  “What is it?” Bob asked.

  “Not sure. Sea slug, I guess. Found it today,” she said. “It’s ugly as death, isn’t it? Maybe it’d at least make the other fish feel good about theirself. You want it?”

  “All right,” said Bob.

  She pushed back the cover on the aquarium and dumped the thing in. Then she padded over to Bob’s cot. “You down for the count, or do you want to hang out some?”

  He slid his hand into the hollow place behind her knee and then drew it back. She knelt beside him. He reached under her hair and cupped the back of her skull, and she made a soft unhitching noise in the back of her throat.

  “You want me to get in there with you?” she said.

  “Yeah, but don’t,” Bob said.

  “Why not?”

  He didn’t answer. She frowned and waited for a minute. Then she turned off the lamp and lay down beside her husband on the floor.

  Bob woke up early. Claire was snoring hard. The air was close and boozy with her and Derrick’s breath. She was curled in the bay of Derrick’s arms, holding one of his big thumbs in her fist. When Bob stirred, her eyes opened for an instant and closed again.

  The sun was still low in the sky. It slanted in through the windows and washed the room in brittle light. Bob glanced at the far end of the room and saw that things were not all right with his aquarium. He couldn’t see the eel or the fantastic fish with the long yellow fins. He walked over and saw that they were all floating together, making an unsteady, fleshy terrain on the surface of the tank. In the middle of the empty water was the sluglike thing Claire had brought. It stretched and flexed, floating in happy solitude behind the glass.

  Bob thought he might throw up. He made a fist and drove it hard into the center of the glass. That didn’t satisfy him, so he hit it twice more, putting his full weight into it. The tank rocked back and then pitched forward off the stand, hitting the floor with a wet cymbal clap. Glass flew, and dead and dying creatures washed through the room.

  Claire jumped up when the wave hit her. Derrick, whose cheek had been flush against the floor, sat up and spat out a mouthful of aquarium water even before he had his eyes open all the way. Then he looked down at the crab that had fetched up on his lap, then at Bob and Claire with a question on his face that seemed to have no feasible answer. He said, “What in the hell is going on in this living room?”

  Bob tried to speak but his throat was painfully dry. A periwinkle was caught beneath his toes. He reached down and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger until he heard its shell give way. The slug was lying by the baseboard, caught up in a wad of hair and lint.

  “Claire, I guess your slug killed all my fish,” Bob finally said, breathing hard. He went over and tipped the creature into a coffee cup.

  “Fuckin’ sea cucumber is what that is,” said Derrick. “These things are poisonous as hell. You can’t put these sonsabitches in with other fish. Wait, now, you brought it over here, honey?”

  “Yeah, last night, but I—”

  “Now dammit, Claire, why didn’t you show me that fucker first? I’d’ve sure as shit told you—”

  “It’s all right,” said Bob.

  “No, man,” said Derrick, looking at ruined creatures at his feet. “That’s a crusher, just a straight crusher.”

  “Oh, Bob, I’m so, so sorry,” Claire said. “Oh, Bob, I feel so bad.”

  “No big deal,” Bob mumbled.

  “What a wicked thing. Oh, Bob,” said Claire. “Put it down the toilet.”

  “Pack its ass in salt. Make it pay,” Derrick said.

  But Bob felt a kind of kinship with the slug. Had he been born a sea creature, he doubted God would have robed him in blue and yellow fins like the splendid dead fish at his feet, or put him in the body of a shark or barracuda or any of those exquisite destroyers. No, he’d probably have been family to this sea cucumber, built in the image of sewage and cursed with a chemical belch that ruined every lovely thing that drifted near.

  “Nah, I’m going to chuck it back in the sea.” Holding the cup before him like a sentry with his candle, Bob went out the back door. Claire and Derrick followed him, talking about the used aquariums they had down at the St. Vincent DePaul, and how on Monday they would go down there and hook Bob up with a fifty-gallon outfit on Derrick’s dime.

  “Yes, we will,” said Claire. “And we’ll go down to Dubey’s Pet World and get you all kinds of real great things, way better stuff than even what you had.”

  “I guess we’ll see,” said Bob, sounding far away.

  As they reached the end of the stone jetty, they were surprised to see a catamaran sailboat swinging in from the sound side of the island, sliding through the sea oats and marsh bracken into clean, open water. A young man squatted at the rudder, a pleased and capable captain, his elbow cocked, a pink fist on his broad thigh. On the drum of black webbing stretched between the hulls, the young man’s girl sat cross-legged, sipping orange juice from a short-stemmed flute. The girl wore a man’s button-down shirt, yellow and knotted loosely at the sternum to show a white bikini top, brilliant in the late dawn light. The two beamed at each other in wholesome conspiracy, the look of young people having successfully escaped a dreary family holiday. When they rounded the spit, they waved ceremoniously at the trio standing there, as though Bob, Derrick, and Claire had gathered there expressly to wish the handsome couple well.

  Claire and Derrick returned the smile and wagged their hands. And Bob Munroe was smiling, too, even as he dropped back his arm and, with a loose-limbed underhand stroke, lofted the slug into the blue-gold morning air. It was a good, soaring toss, and it might have dropped the creature into the pretty young woman’s lap had not a surge of warm wind rolled off the land and pushed the sailboat from the shore.

  RETREAT

  Sometimes, sometimes, after six or so large drinks, it seems like a sane idea to ca
ll my little brother on the phone. It takes a lot of solvent to bleach out such dark memories as my ninth birthday party, when Stephen, age six, ran up behind me at the goldfish pond at Umstead Park and shoved me face-first into the murk. The water came up only to my knees, so I did some hog-on-ice staggering before completing the belly flop. My friends laughed until they wept. Our mother put Stephen across her lap and beat his calves red with the hard side of her hairbrush, which, in the eyes of my guests, only confirmed Stephen as a heroic little comedian willing to suffer for his art.

  Or the time in eleventh grade, when I landed a role opposite a girl named Dodi Clark in our high school’s production of Grease. We played a nearly invisible couple among the prancing et alia in the dance melees, and had maybe four lines between us. Dodi was a mousy girl with a weak chin and a set of extra, overlapping canine teeth. She interested me not at all, yet the sight of Dodi and me together drove Stephen into a fever of jealousy. He courted her with a siege of posters, special pens, stickers, and crystal whim-whams to throw rainbows on her windowsill. The onslaught did its job, but when Dodi finally parted her troubled mouth for Stephen’s kiss, he told me years later, he balked. “Those teeth! It was like trying to kiss a sand shark. No idea why I was after her to begin with.” But I know why, and he does, too: in Stephen’s understanding, nothing pleasant should ever flow to me on which he hasn’t exercised first dibs.

  Or the spring day when I was sixteen and Stephen thirteen, and he found me in his bedroom, listening to his records. That my ears should hear the music that he adored constituted an irreparable defilement, so he gathered all the albums I’d played and, one by one, smashed them against the edge of his bureau, telling me to point out any other albums I liked so he could smash those, too.

  Or the winter morning when our mother was away and I locked Stephen outside in his pajamas for a solid hour, jeering at him through the window glass while on the frozen front steps he hammered at the door, sobbing delightfully with rage. I can’t explain why I did these things, except to say that I carry a little imp inside me whose ambrosia is my brother’s wrath. Stephen’s furies are marvels of ecstatic hatred, somehow pornographic, the equally transfixing inverse of watching people in the love act. I was still laughing when, after a chilly hour, I welcomed Stephen back indoors with a conciliatory mug of thick hot chocolate. He seized the mug with pink fingers, drained it, and then grabbed a can opener from the counter and threw it at me, gouging a two-inch gash beneath my lower lip. It left a white parenthesis in the stubble of my chin, the abiding sideways smile of the imp.

  But six deep ones, and our knotty history unkinks itself into a sad and simple thing. I go wet at the eyes for my brother and swell with regret at the thirty-nine years we’ve spent lost to each other.

  ______

  Anyhow, I started feeling that way one night in October, halfway through a fifth of Meyer’s Rum. I was standing on a mountain I’d recently bought in Aroostook County, Maine. In the thick of dusk, I hiked up to the peak, the air heavy with the watery sweetness of lupine, moss, and fern. Overhead, bats strafed midges in the darkening sky. I’d been here four months, but the glory of the place impressed itself on me every day. Stephen and I hadn’t spoken since the spring, but tonight, with sunset still smoldering behind the molars of the Appalachian range, I felt I had more splendor than I knew what to do with. Winter would be here soon, and I wanted to hear Stephen’s voice. I could just bring in a signal on the mountaintop, so I dialed him up. He answered.

  “Stephen Lattimore speaking,” he said. The voice itself was quiet and guarded, and poised to take offense. Three words from him were enough to put a chink in my mood.

  “Stephen. Matthew.”

  “Matthew,” he repeated, in the way you might say “cancer” after the doctor’s diagnosis. “I’m with a client.” Stephen makes his living as a music therapist.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Question for you. What’s your thinking on mountains?”

  There was a careful pause. From Stephen’s end came the sound of someone doing violence to a tambourine.

  “I have no objection to them,” he finally said. “Why?”

  “Well, I bought one,” I said. “I’m calling you on the cell phone from the top of it.”

  “Congratulations,” Stephen said. “Is it Popocatepetl? Or are you putting 7-Elevens on the Matterhorn?”

  Over the years, I’ve made good money in real estate, and for reasons I can’t quite figure out, this hurts Stephen’s feelings. He’s not a churchman, but he’s extremely big on piety and sacrifice and letting you know what fine values he’s got. As far as I can tell, these values consist of little more than eating ramen noodles by the case, getting laid once every fifteen years or so, and arching his back at the sight of people like me—that is, people who have amounted to something and don’t smell heavily of thrift stores.

  I love Stephen because he’s all I’ve got left in the way of family. A heart attack took our father when I was ten and Stephen seven. Liquor killed our mother before I was out of college, and it was around then that we began to really drift apart. Stephen became convinced that he was going to reach great fame as a pianist, and when he wasn’t practicing, he was moaning about how he should have been. He was not a great talent, but the piano offered my little brother an exit from a world he found bitter and complicated and which felt the same way about him.

  I, on the other hand, have always understood that life is an as-is, no-warranty arrangement, and if you want it to add up to anything, you’d better go at it with fire in your gut. I married young, and I have married often. I bought my first piece of property at eighteen. Now, at forty-two, I’ve been through two amicable divorces. I’ve lived and profited in nine American cities. Late at night, when rest won’t come and my breathing shortens with the worry that my ambition might have robbed me of some of life’s traditional rewards (long closenesses, offspring, mature plantings), I take an astral tour of the hundreds of properties that have passed through my hands over the years. Contemplating the small but grateful multitude living in or banking returns off of holdings whose hidden value I was first to spy, the terror eases. Anxiety quits its bagpiper’s clasp on my lungs, and I droop, contented, into sleep.

  Stephen spent his inheritance on music school, where he studied composition. What I heard of his music was gloomy, the sound track you might crave in an idling car with a hose running from the tailpipe, but nothing you could hum. When no orchestras called him with commissions, he had an artistic crackup, exiled himself to Eugene, Oregon, to buff his oeuvre and eke out a living teaching the mentally substandard to achieve sanity by blowing on harmonicas. When I drove down to see him two years ago after a conference in Seattle, I found him living above a candle store in a dingy apartment that he shared with a dying collie. The animal had lost the ability to urinate, so Stephen was always having to lug her downstairs to the grassy verge beside the sidewalk. There, he’d stand astride the poor animal and manually void its bladder via a Heimlich technique horrible to witness. You hated to see your last blood relation engaged in something like that. I told Stephen that from a business standpoint, the smart thing would be to put the dog put down. This caused an ugly argument, but really, it seemed to me that someone regularly seen by the roadside hand-juicing a half-dead dog was not the man you’d flock to for lessons on how to be less out-of-your-mind.

  “The mountain doesn’t have a name yet,” I told him. “Hell, I’ll name it after you. I’ll call it B.A.S.S. Hill.” (A family acronym: “Bald and Something Stinks.” Stephen started losing his hair in his early twenties, and he has an upturned, disapproving nose, as though he’s perpetually sniffing something foul.)

  Stephen chuckled dryly. “Do that. Hanging up now.”

  “I send you any pictures of my cabin? Gets its power off a windmill. It’s the absolute goddamn shit. You need to come out here and see me.”

  “What about Charleston? Where’s Amanda?”

  I spat a lime rind into my hand and toss
ed it up at the bats to see if they’d take a nibble at it. They didn’t.

  “No idea.”

  “You’re kidding. What went wrong?” His voice took on a practiced, clinical solemnity, though the tambourine slaughter ongoing in the background diminished its effect.

  There’s no shame in admitting that I was in a transitional period at the moment. Like a lot of wise and respectable people, I’d been caught off guard by sudden reverses in the Charleston real estate market. I’d had to borrow some cash from my ex-fiancée, a rich woman who didn’t care about money just so long as she didn’t have to loan out any of hers. Strains developed and the engagement withered. I used the last of my liquidity to buy the proud hill on whose peak I was standing now. Four hundred acres, plus a cabin, nearly complete, thanks to my excellent neighbor George Tabbard, who’d also sold me the land. The only hitch was I’d have to spend a year in residence up here, but next fall I could subdivide, sell the plots, dodge the extortionary tax assessment the state charges nonresident speculators, and cruise into life’s next phase with the winds of increase plumping my sails and a vacation home in the bargain.

  “Nothing went wrong,” I said. “She was hard of hearing and her pussy smelled. Anyway I got a beautiful piece of unspoiled America for peanuts. Come see me.”

  “Now’s not a great time for me,” he said. “Plus I can’t afford the airfare. Anyway, I’m with a client, Matthew. Let’s talk about this later.”

  “Fuck the airfare,” I told him. “I’ll pay for the flight. I want you to come see me.” Actually, this wasn’t an offer I’d planned to make. I’m sure Stephen had more money in the bank than I did, but his poor-mouthing worked an exasperating magic on me. I couldn’t take a second of it without wanting to smack him on the head and neck with a sack of doubloons. Then he said he couldn’t leave Beatrice (the collie was still alive!). Fine, I told him, if he could find the right sort of iron lung to stable her in, I’d be glad to foot the bill for that, too. He said he’d think it over. A marimba flourish swelled in the line, and Stephen hung up.