The Flicker of Old Dreams Page 10

  Kids splashed in the water, calling, “Marco. Polo.”

  I let my towel drop and walked toward the water, stood at the pebbly edge, wanting to jump in as other kids did. Perhaps the whispering had already begun, but I was aware only of a swirling, woozy fear that made me choose the stairs. I held the handrail and went down one step, water barely covering my toes.

  The sun forced a dribble of sweat from underneath my hair and down my back. One more step and the water, much colder, came to my shins. It seemed that those soaked heads were all waiting for me. I held my nose, squeezed my eyes shut, and jumped.

  When I came up, my eyes still closed, I heard the whispers distinctly, “She lives with dead people. She’ll infect the water.”

  My eyes, stinging from chlorine, refused to open. I heard splashing and kicking all around me, and when I could manage to squint, I saw the blurred scrambling of children from the pool. And I was alone, bobbing in their wake.

  “That’s enough,” Bernice shouted to the other children. “Where are your manners?”

  She stood near the stairs with my towel. It was a very long time pushing against the resistance of the water to reach her, my ears clogged so that I mostly heard my heartbeat and an occasional tweep of the lifeguard’s whistle.

  “Let me get you home,” Bernice said in a faraway voice as I walked up the steps.

  She draped the towel over my shoulders, and my hands clutched it from inside. When we walked past the other children, the girl mouthed the word, weirdo.

  That was the first stone.

  Bernice kept her hand on my back, her voice soothing though I couldn’t hear the words. We walked slowly, both of us in bare feet. I felt every nub in the road. She took me to the back door of my house, where she used to find my father’s mucking boots set out on the mat. She knocked hard. He took his time coming up from the basement and answered the door in a soiled apron.

  “Sit here at the table,” she told me after we entered the kitchen. “I’m just going to talk to your father in the other room.”

  I felt slippery on the wooden chair.

  In the parlor, Bernice said, “Ask yourself if you could put away your work once in a while and be there to guide Mary.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ask your daughter,” she said. “You need to start having conversations with her.”

  Bernice touched the top of my head before leaving. I hoped she might stay.

  “Did something happen at the pool?” Pop asked me as the door clicked shut.

  “I just want to play at home,” I said.

  He looked quizzically toward the door.

  “All right,” he said. “Play at home if that’s what you’d like.”

  When he returned to his work, I went out back to the tiny lean-to I’d claimed as a fort. But I wasn’t in the mood to play. I kept thinking of the day I sat beside the older kids on the railroad track, sharing stories about Dead Eddie. For the rest of that summer and into the fall, we played our game in the dark among the rats and sour grain.

  I trusted them, particularly the girl. By the end of the summer, I’d told her about my home, and how my father kept dead people in our refrigerator and how I touched one. I told her that his job was to put makeup on dead people, and if she came to my house, we could open the giant tackle box and color our cheeks peach and salmon.

  But so much had changed since that summer. Something had hardened about our town. Though the accident rarely came up in games or conversations anymore, those who had lost their jobs had become meaner, and their children absorbed that meanness.

  The shade of my fort felt good, and so did being hidden. I opened the empty coffee can, where I stored objects I found around the house—paper clips, arrowheads, dressmaker pins, an old spoon, and a horseshoe.

  Pete was in town that day, visiting and doing patrols, when someone told him about the commotion at the pool. It was the first time he’d learned of what would soon become routine for me—kids afraid to touch anything after I did, and adults whispering, The poor strange girl without a mother. What it must do to her to be around the dead all day long.

  He didn’t seem to see me in the fort as he knocked on our back door and waited for my father. He removed his hat before he stepped inside. They spoke for some time and then Pop called my name. The two stuck their heads outside, where I was caught in an activity that seemed perfectly normal until others witnessed it. I’d spent much of the afternoon sticking pins through the outermost layer of my skin, and I’d done this on all five fingers of my left hand and had great plans to accomplish the same on the other. The idea was that I could clap the metal tips together, like finger cymbals, which Pop’s calling my name had interrupted.

  I still wore my mustard-yellow suit, my hair in chlorine-scented ropes, one hand loaded with pins. Pete took me by the unpinned hand and walked me up the steps and into the kitchen. He had a solemn look on his face and asked how my day was, how I was making friends, questions that seemed to beg the answer, “Fine.” And he held my head tight between the palms of his hands and called me Button.

  He and my father asked me a number of questions. Did I like school? Did I want to invite some girls over to play? Did I want a special haircut at the Agate beauty salon? During the shrugs and silences, my father and Pete glanced at each other and at me. None of us knew how to do this. We had started this idea of talking things out too late. Eventually, my father made a long speech about sadness, about how some push the hurt down and down and down. He made a gesture emphasizing how one could run out of space.

  “Like eating too many hot dogs at a picnic,” he said.

  My father hugged me for too long, and the word hot dogs hung in the air between us, dumb and heavy.

  Later, I sat by the window in my room, my pinned fingers on the glass as I watched the other kids run and ride bikes and walk through town with wet hair and towels around their necks. I don’t remember when it became night or when I changed into my pajamas. I just remember lying on my pillow, my hand mysteriously free of pins, and hearing the comforting voices of Pete and my father one floor below. My guardians. My adoring, floundering guardians.

  Until that day, my father had heard only inklings that I was coming out odd. People would mention how strange it must be to raise a child in a funeral home or to raise a girl without a mother figure. But, until then, he hadn’t reached that conclusion himself. I could feel the change in my father, how he began to study me, reading every oddity as his own failure. His parenting became tentative, and the old sorrow returned, that it was my mother he trusted to make the right decisions, and now what was he supposed to do?

  He tried briefly to become a different kind of father, calling the parents of girls in my class to invite them to play at our house. I stood beside him as he said into the phone, “I understand. I understand.” When he hung up, I already knew the answer.

  Their parents, my father explained many years later, were afraid of the chemicals, the sharp instruments. They worried my father wouldn’t be attentive enough. I could play at their homes, he explained at the time. Or meet down the street at the rusted stove, where lots of little girls played pretend kitchen while mothers looked on.

  But I was no longer anxious to make friends. In fact, I was anxious to keep to myself. All my life, I have learned the lesson that closeness is tangled up with rejection and shame. I should know better.

  I kick one leg out of the covers and look to the open closet door, the row of flannel shirts on hangers, reminding me I should get dressed. But what if I didn’t get up just yet? Because I have found my way back to the lake. I smell the dark musk of Robert’s jacket, feel his fingers place a good flat rock in my hand. Though I dread the prospect of being rejected, I can’t help the wanting.

  14

  When he’s not driving the school bus, Slim takes a number of odd jobs. This morning, just after he drops off the kids, he changes into knee-high rubber boots and thick gloves and sets equipment around the hole in the empt
y lot by the church. Funnel trap, hardware cloth, shovels, oil drum, various bottles of chemicals, and a gun. One way or another he’s going to get rid of that den of snakes.

  From my window, as I watch him fidget with the funnel trap, I see Martha duck into the alley where the Dumpsters are stowed and emptied once a month. She cuts behind our house and knocks softly on the back door. I watch the whole journey, window to window.

  All morning Pop’s been trying to convince me to get out of the house. “They’ve got a whole batch of fresh-baked muffins at the Pipeline,” he says. “And I think there’s an open game of pinochle up there pretty soon. I know that’s one you like.”

  Pop and Martha have become more reckless about their time together. I’ve found cups in the sink with lipstick on them. I’ve heard them laugh in the dark driveway and at the kitchen table after midnight when I’ve peered down the stairs. He pours them both a drink and they spend maybe forty-five minutes whispering, Martha with her bosom so big and low that she needs to push her glass forward so she can rest the whole of it on the table.

  I guess the plus side to my father dating a married woman is that she doesn’t have to get comfortable with the idea of moving into a funeral home or sharing space with the daughter who won’t leave her childhood room.

  I creep to the top of the steps and hear the whistle of the teakettle, the clink of teacups and saucers we save for special occasions. I hear soft laughter, then too much quiet. Clearly Pop believes I’ve left the house, and now I’m stuck. Who knows how long I’ll be trapped up here, tiptoeing around.

  I pace the hall—in sock-feet, close to the wall so the floor doesn’t creak—and nearly trip over Pop’s dirty suit, balled up on the floor. It’s somehow become my job to wash his suits. Not because I think it’s my responsibility but because he’s not careful. If he washed them, they’d shrink and wrinkle, or they’d sour, forgotten in the washing machine. He doesn’t have the patience to wash them by hand.

  I would really like to wash this now, while I have nothing else to do, but that would require walking past the lovebirds in the kitchen. I’ve spent so much time pretending I don’t know about their affair that I don’t know what to do other than wait this out. I’m even afraid to use the bathroom because the noise will give me away.

  I can feel myself getting agitated. And when the flirty laughter begins again, I’ve had it. I grab a stack of towels and walk down the stairs with the suit. Halfway, I cough to give them warning. I hear shuffling. Chairs scoot in and out. When I walk into the kitchen, I pretend to be surprised.

  “Martha,” I say.

  She hurriedly buttons a cardigan over a very snug top, no bra.

  “I thought you were playing pinochle,” my father says.

  “I never said I was playing pinochle.”

  I find the stain remover and Woolite under the sink. I squirt the stain, collar, cuffs, underarms. I’m the only one making noise in this room.

  My father takes a gulp of whatever’s in his teacup, and I can guess what it is because he’s left the cupboard open where he keeps his whiskey. He’s combed his hair to the side like a little boy dressing up. I wonder how he feels having a date at this age with all the folds and swells and sags. When you marry young, you grow into these changes as a couple. But what must it be like to start at this age? What does Martha think when he pushes up his sleeves, the way he does now, and his forearms are the texture of salami?

  I fill the sink with cold water and a capful of soap and catch him looking at Martha with those sad eyes. I think he may actually be in love this time.

  Love for my father is something guarded, something anticipating loss. I just wish the two of us would stop pretending his relationship with Martha is a secret. And I wish he would stop pretending first because he’s the dad.

  “Maybe you should tell her the news, Allen. About Mr. Purvis.”

  “Right,” he says. “Mary, did you hear Mr. Purvis is in the hospital?”

  “No,” I say. “You know I don’t hear things.”

  “That’s why I came by,” Martha says, as a rash of pink spreads across her throat and the lobes of her ears. “To give your family the news.”

  It’s a clever lie. I don’t doubt Mr. Purvis is in the hospital but it’s not why she’s here.

  “Bad?” I ask, turning the suit inside out.

  “At his age it’s never good.”

  What looms between us, what we would never dare to say, is the implied new customer, the income.

  I plunge the suit under the water, massaging and turning the fabric through my hands.

  Does Martha know the man my father tries to keep private? Does she know this drink in his hand in the middle of the afternoon is not unusual? There are clues to his secret battles right in this room. If she looks at the cupboard he’s left open, she’ll see the disarray, for one thing: coffee cups, batteries, lightbulbs, and items that must have been my mother’s—a coin purse, a small gold chain with a knot in it, and the rosehips tea bag we will never use.

  I wring out the jacket, then the pants. After, I press them a little drier between a towel.

  Martha wears a permanent smile, but Pop looks horrified that I’m still here. No one speaks or drinks from their fancy cups.

  Look in the cupboard again, inside the door. Right on the painted wood, he’s scribbled phone numbers in marker, and sometimes random thoughts—eggs, for example, and fix board on porch. A man whose mind is filled to overflowing, but he won’t complain. I’m tempted to straighten up and categorize that cupboard—because I get twitchy with messes—but that would be like removing one of the truest things he’s revealed.

  “I hear you’ve had kind of an unsavory visitor,” Martha says in a friendly, let’s-be-girlfriends way.

  “Sorry, what are you talking about?” I ask because I know exactly what she’s talking about.

  “The younger brother,” she says, all cute like we’re gossiping.

  I hang the suit meticulously on a wooden hanger.

  “What’s he done to you?” I ask.

  “Oh, I don’t have issues with him personally,” she says. “It’s just that there’s a lot of tension in town since he came back.”

  “And that’s his fault?”

  I hadn’t intended to stick up for Robert, but this feels personal. The town’s unwillingness to forgive him proves the opinion they’ve formed about me is not likely to change either.

  “I’m just saying he makes people uncomfortable.”

  There were people in town who lost their jobs after the accident, and they’ve had to settle for sporadic, demeaning work ever since. I understand their bitterness. But there were plenty of others, two of them in this room, who had always taken the stance that tragedies happen, that the town and whole world are changing, and what’s done is done. When did they turn bitter?

  Pop chimes in, “The Sweet Adelines aren’t happy, that’s for sure.”

  This is our town’s female barbershop quartet. Doris used to sing baritone.

  “One of the girls stopped by to see Doris,” Martha says. “And he sent her away.”

  “Girls?” I ask, because she’s talking about sixty- and seventy-year-olds. I grab another towel and lay it beneath the suit to catch drips.

  “Her singing partners,” Martha clarifies.

  Pop stares at me as if to say, Stop it, Mary.

  I plug in the clothing steamer, and Martha moves her chair away from the cord.

  “Later,” Pop says. His tone is sharp. “That can wait.”

  I pull the cord from the outlet and begin to coil it when I hear screams and laughter outside. I leave the steamer on a chair and hurry out the front door and onto the porch. Slim has reached the rattlesnakes. People in almost every home and business have been checking on his project all day, but now, many gather closer. Five men watch from the bed of a pickup, parked right on the grass near that hole, shotguns ready.

  Pop slips his suit jacket on, the clean one, before coming out to the por
ch. Neighbors narrate Slim’s final attempts—how he’s blocked off all but one opening and tried the funnel trap, become impatient with it, then decided to just start digging. I notice only now that Martha has not come out on the porch with us. I follow my father’s gaze as her blue coat disappears around a corner. She must have snuck out the back door, and she will not get to see this, the giant ball of sleepy snakes dropping into the oil drum.

  Shouts and applause seem to come from every window and porch, while Slim fights to get that lid on the barrel. Soon, he rolls it out of the lot while a few men, giddy as kids, stay back at the hole, pouring in the contents of different bottles.

  What pride as Slim marches down the center of the street in those tall boots, rolling the oil drum, students and teachers saluting him from the school playground. Kids who’ve quit school run after him, and the pickup follows, too.

  “Good number?” Pop asks as he goes by.

  “Probably sixty or more,” Slim says. “Most of ’em rattlers. Couple garters and rat snakes mixed in. Want to see?”

  “Sure don’t,” Pop says. “Keep that lid on.”

  The barrel buzzes from inside. I imagine the great, wriggling ball, how one by one the snakes free themselves and strike at the sides.

  “Where are you going to release them?” a boy asks, riding alongside on his bike.

  “Gonna blow ’em up? Light ’em on fire?” another asks.

  Slim just keeps rolling the large barrel down the road. He’s like the pied piper. A kid runs over with a stick.

  “That lid on tight?” he asks, then bangs the stick against the drum.

  I bet, never in his life, will that kid smile so big except when he’s retelling the story of this day. Children and adults cheer rather than work on a morning when the sky is an endless blue. You can make all kinds of cracks about Petroleum, but right now, who would trade this moment for anything?