--YOU’RE
THE ONE GIGGLING AT THE FUNERAL
Eclipse
Of my stepbrother I knew very
little, other than his name and that he had killed a man. The few photos I’d seen showed a tall figure
with crooked upper teeth, the pale skin of a cadaver and eyes that seemed
ringed with soot. In each picture Clay
stood near the back of a room, alone and aloof like an agitated panther, making
me wonder as well about the nameless photographer and his decision to put such
distance between them.
As we drove to meet him, my skin
pimpled. I imagined the prison
first—razor wire fences and gunmen in turrets—then Clay, the inmate, his body
muscled from so much idle time, his eyes black and angry, even upon release
from the penitentiary.
It was nightfall in September and
Les had the top of the Caddie down. Though
I’d worn a cardigan, the wind shot frigid gusts through the seams in my dress,
leaving me feeling half-naked. In the
front seat Mother wasn’t faring much better, curls dangling out from under her
head scarf like loops of blonde ivy. To
light her cigarette she had to tuck a shoulder into Les and as she did so she
peered at me through her cat-eyed glasses and said, “How you doing, Sweetie?”
although the wind and Waylon Jennings on the radio made it impossible to hear.
Les kept a can of beer in his lap
and it was always when he rounded a corner that he had himself a sip, foam
snaking in the air, hitting the seat pad and splashing an odor I have always
associated with boys’ locker rooms-- perspiration and piss. Before Les married my mother, he raced stock
cars. As some kind of proof, his vehicle
number—113—was tattooed on his forearm just below the words, “So help me God.”
I kept my eyes pinned on the
speedometer, watching the needle push past seventy-five then eighty.
“He’s gonna kill us,” I said, forgetting
Jackie was there beside me, bouncing.
Jackie was only five, a whole ten years younger than me, but most of the
time he acted thunder-struck, auditioning in his own special universe, and so
people took him for retarded.
“Faster!” Jackie screamed, “Make it
go faster!” I broke a fingernail hitting
him in the chest. On a different time,
Jackie would have whooped and cried, but now he just grinned and gave me the
thumbs up sign.
I stretched my neck across the back
of the front seat, put my mouth right into Mother’s ear, shouting, “Why are we
doing this again, picking him in the middle of the night?”
Les turned and studied me and I
wished he wouldn’t because he was the only driver we had right then. Les’s eyes were shiny and gray, reminding me
of pond stones. With his jowly face,
long snout and the puddled skin beneath his eyes, he looked like the saddest
person I’d ever seen in my life, that or a starving basset hound.
“Les!” Mother shouted, a rare thing
for her, and torqued the red leather steering wheel.
Les cussed and took back
control. Eventually the Caddie eased
back down to sixty, but my heart never slowed a lick.
***
I have a habit of spying. I’m not proud of it, but it’s a thing I feel
compelled to do in the same way Ronnie Tucker picks his nose and eats it. Same as Mother and Les smoke, and Les swills
his Pabst, same as Hoss Cartwright likes flapjacks with plenty of maple syrup,
I’m a snoop. It don’t do a lot of harm.
The only time I stole something was
when I found a letter from my blood father stuffed inside the toe of Grandma
Frankie’s musty-smelling pumps. How the
letter got there, I’ll never know. The
words my father wrote weren’t anything special.
There was description of a rain storm in a town called Ellensburg and he
said something else about going to a drive-in movie with his buddies who hid
under blankets so they wouldn’t have to pay and how funny that was. I kept the letter and read it until all of my
father’s squiggly handwriting stuck in my memory like a brand, and after a year
of struggling to squeeze an ounce of special relevance from the words--anything
to ease this grip of doom his absence had created within my soul--I concluded,
unspectacularly, that my father was quite likely the most boring man that had
ever lived.
I revisited his tombstone a week
after. It said:
Harvey Merchant
“Beloved Husband and Father”
1930-1957
I noticed the slick use of quotation
marks and wondered who came up with that gimmick, trying to inject emotion into
the granite. I considered the word
“Beloved.” It was an old-fashioned
adjective meaning, as far as I could tell, nothing special. Beloved was a trick word, same as naming
one-eyed jacks wild in stud poker.
“Bewitched” was a better word, although it didn’t cleanly apply in a
case such as death, but the point was… the point was…
I wanted a life less ordinary, a
father with a thrilling legacy, if not also a mysterious one. Instead, all I got was dull word pictures of
rainy central Washington.
My father died in his sleep. Such a thing happened to children more often,
but it could strike adults, too, men even, for no reason whatsoever. I asked mother about it only once. I could tell she’d been waiting for the day
the question would come because her voice dropped down an octave, and in a
brassy whisper she started off with, “The night your father died,” like it was
a story-start to be memorized and passed on during classroom games of Telegram.
When I pushed her for additional
information—facts I deemed not only pertinent but critical—Mother fluttered her
eye lashes, hooked a string of fake pearls in her finger and asked, “What
kind?” So I asked what was he wearing
and did he smell, you know, the way an animal carcass will reek or invisible
mice when they get lodged in a heat vent.
I inquired how long had Dad been dead before she knew, what did his skin
feel like, was it as cold as they describe in Agatha Christie books, did it
seem as though he’d been dreaming, did he twitch or moan or scream the Lord’s
name? That was just my short list, but
Mother slapped me so hard my nose bled.
She said, “How dare you!” and ran off crying herself. And that was that.
***
My
disappointment was deep and physical, if not spiritual, a yearning broken
sharply in two. As we drove up to Bob’s
Big Boy my gut roiled. It felt like a
lizard had its hooks in me and was ripping the lining from my stomach shred by
shred.
Bob’s
was no prison at all. Even in the rich
fullness of evening, the place was lit up and would have been almost festive
were there more people in attendance, and if the juke box was playing rock and
roll instead of that mopey Patsy Cline song about being crazy.
Still
the jitters hit me when I recalled why we’d come. I stumbled over a table leg and almost fell
onto the parquet floor.
Clay
caught me by the wrists, like one of those possessive lovers from the
movies. “So you’re Wendy,” he said, not
a question at all, but a certainty, like Christmas comes on December 25th. His eyes were full and sparkly, making me thirsty
for root beer.
I
said that I was indeed Wendy and pulled my wrists to my side after a time of
him holding on. Once when Janine Green
and I swam naked in the coulee by her house I came home with a blood-sucker
stuck to right thigh. Mother heated the
tip of a paring knife in the wood-burning stove and dug the mysterious creature
out. For days and months afterward I
suspected she had not got it all because it seemed to me a left-over bit
remained inside, its whole body regenerating to the point where I could feel it
squirming and snaking down my leg at odd times.
One of those times—not odd, however—was during my meeting of Clay when
he failed to release his grip until I pulled away.
He didn’t smile, keeping the grin
for himself, I guessed. I noticed his
skin was not as pale as it looked in photographs. On the contrary, his teeth were just as
crooked as revealed in the pictures, the biggest upper ones crossed like the
legs of someone badly needing to pee.
Clay made a big show of holding his
arm out, gesturing for Mother and Les to take a seat in the booth opposite him,
which meant I was to sit on his side, which I did, my heart buzzing electric.
“You
look good,” Les said to me, though everyone, even Clay himself, seemed certain
this was a lie.
Gone
were Clay’s muscles I’d imagined him having, if ever he did have them. Instead he was thin and wispy, his plaid
shirt hanging baggy across his shoulders.
His crew-cut hair would have been nothing spectacular were it not for
the barb-like impressions running south alongside the hairline. He’d made someone good and angry.
“So
it’s been nice here, huh?” Clay said, and instantly my heart sank because the
weather was a favorite topic of Les’s.
He approached it in the same way boys at school favored Annette
Funicello’s bikini scenes, with a mouth-gawking appreciation for nature. So much getting banged up in the demolition
races had done their work on Les’s bones.
When he walked, his body careened and swooped, and if you didn’t know
better you’d expect him to topple over.
Evidentially the racing had given him arthritis, too, and with arthritis
came the magical by-product of E.S.P., allowing Les to correctly predict rain
or hail storms.
It
was all I could do not to interrupt. I
tore a paper napkin into confetti and shredded another and still one more while
the dull patter about climate patterns came from Les’s lips.
Weather
Schmether. My brother was a genuine
killer and I was dying to hear about it.
It
wasn’t until the bill came that Mother asked if I wanted something to eat. Then she asked Clay the same and Les
determined he needed a piece of banana cream pie as well. While waiting for the order to arrive, a
thing happened I’ll never forget: Clay’s palm landed on my knee and stayed
there.
I
was proud of myself for not gasping. I
took hold of the salt shaker and shook it, tapping a percussive sound until
Mother frowned.
Of
course my step-brother’s hand didn’t stay put.
His fingers moving over my skin reminded me of the blood-sucker I’d
contracted that day with Janine Green.
Each of his fingertips became the different head of a leech, heat-tipped
and alive.
When
the pie arrived Clay accepted the plate one-handed and no one seemed to notice.
The
thing that finally shook his active hand from my thigh was what I asked
him. “How does it feel after you kill a
man?”
Even
Les reacted, his puppet jaw dropping as if a spring had come uncoiled. Mother hissed my name.
“Did that fellow die instantly, you
know, the one you killed? Were there
words passed between you two of—“
Mother reached across the table and
took my wrist, pulling me up and out of the booth with a swiftness that must
have even startled the plastic material I was sitting on, for it ripped a patch
of skin from the underside of my leg, a spot exactly parallel to the one Clay
had been fingering seconds prior.
Mother wore long gloves similar to
ones I’d seen Jackie Kennedy wearing in “Look” magazine, and beneath the
fabric, mother’s fingers were on fire.
She didn’t wait until we were in the
restroom to slap me, just caught me in the hall next to the cigarette
machine. Quite frankly, I had expected
more—something shocking and brutal in the way of force—but I feigned injury so
we could be done with this required disciplinary stunt.
“How dare you, Missy,” Mother said,
her gloved finger stiff and pale pink, poking the air and then catching my
chest. “What’s wrong with you? Are you loco?
Don’t you ever, EVER, bring it
up again. You hear me?” I pondered her choice of the word “It” for a
label, my imagination rabid as it configured implications. When I failed to answer soon enough, Mother
grabbed me by the shoulders, gripping my dress’s epaulettes for traction, and
shook. I was too weak to respond,
entranced as I recalled Clay’s hand and where it’d been, where it was aiming to
go before the pie’s arrival.
***
He and I were never left alone. I had a suspicion we were under watchful
eyes, nevertheless, I was determined to make the best of our situation.
During mealtimes I sat opposite him and
I ate my food in slow bites, as if each dumpling or shred of lettuce were a
pulpy orange slice that had to be sucked dry, versus chewed. To avoid contact with my glossed lips, I
puckered them into a kiss and slurped soup from my spoon. I knew he was watching me and that was the
point.
Once Mother threw me a look and
stabbed my hand with the back of her fork, so, for payback, I pinched some
pepper up my nose and released three thunderous sneezes across her
shoulders. Even without looking, I could
tell Clay was impressed.
“Are you ever gonna get a job?” I
asked one night at the dinner table.
Clay’s face was as pale as the
moon. As a reply, he blinked and took a
long swallow of beer from the glass he’d been holding the entire time he ate,
as if he was afraid the thing would runoff.
Clay gulped and stared at over the rim, his nose practically swimming in
the drinking glass.
Mother let this question go. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her
chew, knowing she hoped for an answer the same as me.
“There aren’t a lot of places will take me.”
“Les says that Jason Wadell is
hiring.”
“That right,” Clay said, but it
wasn’t a question and he wasn’t even looking at Mother when he said it.
“That is right,” I said, backing her up.
“I heard him say so.”
“What’d I know about welding?”
“What you don’t know Les could teach
you,” Mother said. I almost patted her
knee I was so proud. But then she went
ahead and ruined it. “Ah, take your
time. Enjoy your freedom.”
Clay flinched at that last work, his
face taking on a color like the belly of a flame. He bolted out of his chair, the legs clawing
across the floor. Mother watched him
storm off. Me, I watched Clay’s plate
swirl until it stopped, potato chunks spilling everywhere.
***
“What’s he like?” Becky Holzer asked
me
We were having a sleepover at
Janine’s house, just us three, plus Becky’s sisters and one of Janine’s
cousins.
“I bet he’s looks like Elvis, don’t
he?”
“Have you ever seen him with his
shirt off?”
“When can I come over and visit?”
“My Daddy would never allow it, so
you’ll have to bring him here next time they go out of town.”
“Oh, wouldn’t that be something!”
“Can you imagine? I’d die!”
“Me, too!”
“Tell me this: how many scars does
he have and where does he have them?”
I felt famous, even if it was a
false sensation, none of my own making.
For once it wasn’t me with all the questions.
***
Clay loved beer, but he loved
television more. I imagined they didn’t
have a set in the pen. My step-brother
was too old for school, with no job or any ambition to fine one, and so most
days he could be found butt-stuck on the burgundy sofa Granny Frankie had died
on—in her sleep, just like her son, my father.
Whenever I got home from school,
Mother ran out of the kitchen wearing a flour-dusted apron, greeting me so that
I’d know I wasn’t alone with Clay.
***
The day of the supposed eclipse was
an eventful one for several reasons.
Edgar Buckley, who claimed distant relation to Paul Revere, drove
through town honking his horn and screaming about aliens and the end of the
word. “A dark sun is coming!” he warned,
leaning out of his pickup and flapping his Massey-Ferguson cap. “Dark sun coming! Dark sun coming!”
Our milk cows, Cathy and Irene--so
named for Mother’s stillborn sisters--became moody and restless, somehow
escaping through the barbwire fence even though there wasn’t enough clearance
for such a thing to happen.
I had just stepped off the school
bus when Mother yelled for me to fetch them.
“What about Clay?”
“He’s busy.”
“He’s busy my foot!”
I set off in search of the cows,
having forgotten to ask which general direction they’d headed, and after
several frustrating hours, I returned home empty-handed.
Mother was gone, but Clay
wasn’t.
He sat on the sofa, the television
set off and slate gray. I expected him
to at least acknowledge my presence, but a trance of some kind had hold of him,
so I went to the kitchen and tugged open the fridge. Bottles and jars jostled. I enjoyed the sound of that. I found some orange juice and drank straight
from the carton as I’d seen Clay do. I
gulped as loud as I was able, but lady bug might have made more noise.
Next I sashayed into the living
room, but stopped half way in, pretending to just then notice Clay. “Well, look what the calico dragged in.”
It took him a moment to resettle his
concentration. Even though it was a
spring day, he had one of Mother’s quilts draped across his lap and beneath the
blanket something was going on, so he scolded me for interrupting. “What’re you looking at?”
“I need your help.”
“Of course you do,” he said, as if
he’d been expecting such a question since our first meeting at Bob’s Big Boy.
“Cathy and Irene are lost and I’m
not old enough to drive.”
“Who do I look like, John
Greenwood?” John was an ugly Canuck that
came down once a month to drive stock cars, but he was best known for his
abiding cruelty during demolition derby.
“Fine, go back to your activities
then.”
“What’s in it for me if I go with
you?”
“I can’t be bribed, bought or sold.”
His eyes were like drops of
oven-cooked molasses, hot and undecided.
For the first time, I realized what a wide mouth he had and that his
lips were practically bloodless.
Embarrassed to be caught quivering, I shot my eyes to the floor, but by
then the truck keys were already in his hand, jangling.
***
We never found the cows that day
and, on the drive, it struck me that Clay never intended to. He drove the truck east toward Kittitas using
back roads instead of the faster route via I-90. My knees knocked so hard I had to pin them
together. I rolled down the window as a
distraction but it felt like there was hardly any wind. Still, I stuck close to the door, like a
hunting dog sniffing and detecting.
“So when’s the interview start?” he
asked.
I looked at him, holding my chin
upright and in place, wondering what Tippi Hedren what do in my shoes.
He drove one handed, steering with
the flat of his palm while his fingers danced.
“I ain’t got all day.”
“I know, you have to get back to
your television programs.”
“What’s so bad about that?”
I stuck my face out of the window
and let the hair swim over my face. I
imagined it looking fuller and lively as I turned and said as flat as I could,
“It doesn’t seem such a big deal anymore.”
“Killing a man doesn’t? How so?”
I wanted to tell him he was boring,
same as my dead father, but Clay had a way of reading my lies. “Just doesn’t.”
“Suit yourself, see if I care.”
As we drove I realized how ugly it
was—these small towns, my life, a certain probability called “My Future.” I started to hyperventilate. “You okay?” he asked me. I felt trapped, a prisoner of sorts
myself. If I didn’t get away soon, I’d
end up the same as Mother, baking pies, probably married to Muddy Waddell, a
welder’s wife. As we drove I decided the
time had come to do something bold and daring, and even though I hadn’t a clue
what that thing might be, I aimed to have it figured out by nightfall, or at
least before the so-called eclipse arrived.
Clay pulled up to a liquor store,
punching the brakes so that dust puffs appeared from the hind wheels. “Wait here,” he said.
He stopped after a few strides,
catching my close examination of his backside.
“Hey,” he said, poking his head
through the driver’s side window, “you got five dollars?”
“Now where would I store five dollars?”
He fingered an eyebrow, his
bloodless lips coloring some. “Where,
indeed?”
After I told him that it didn’t
matter to me one way or another, he left his whisky bottle in the store sack
and drank it that way, hobo-style.
Now he drove with his thumb on the
steering wheel, giving it a little nudge every so often. After some time we
came to a endless, unfenced field of waist-high clover.
The truck made a menacing rattle,
shuddering as it turned off. I feared
the engine had died for good, but the radio worked fine. “Dawn” by The Four Seasons was just finishing
up, segueing into “Rag Doll” as the announcer bragged about it being
double-header Tuesday.
“They sound like girls.”
“I like them,” I said. “They’re not afraid to sing high.”
“Where I’ve been, queers like
those’d be singing for mercy. Four
Seasons, my eyeball.”
“And would you be the one delivering
the punishment, or would you be the cheerleader?”
“What’s your guess?”
“You’re a watcher,” I said, knowing
how much he enjoyed television.
He took a swig of whisky, not
bothering to wipe away the leakage that sopped the corner of his mouth. He studied me, his eyes walking over my face,
taking in my hair, then my shoulders and what he could make out for breasts beneath
my denim jumper. My skin prickled and
itched, as if spiders were on the loose.
With a piggish snort, he had another
swallow. This one burned. I could smell it, woodsy and scorched. His elbow rested on the door, half out the
window. “I don’t see any goddamn solar eclipse.”
“It’s coming,” I declared.
“Yeah? So you studying to be a scientist?”
“Maybe I am.”
“Maybe you are,” he said, and
snickered. “You aren’t really my
sister.”
“Thank the Allmighty for that
favor.”
“You got yourself a smart lip.”
“At least I never killed anybody.”
“Bet you wished you had.” And sure enough, the way he looked at me said
he knew.
I felt my face and neck heating
up. My forearms went rashy whenever I
got embarrassed or found out.
“Look at you, a regular garden
beet.”
“All right,” I said, words running
out of me, a hole in the jug now. “Tell
me how you did it. How old was he? Did he die right away? Did he scream? What type of weapon did you use?”
“Hold on there, peach tree.”
“You brought me out here for a
reason.”
“Maybe I did. Or maybe you brought me.”
“I’ll give you a kiss if you tell.”
His eyes went on another stroll,
taking their sweet time. The skin
beneath them looked shop-worn and gray, same as the color of his teeth now that
I thought about it. In Biology Class Mr.
Fenick had an assortment of specimens pickled in jars and one such article was
none other than a human hand whose shading matched Clay’s sallow forehead. I noticed again the spiked scars around his
scalp and a shiver bristled inside me.
“Despite what you think, there’s no
joy in killing someone.”
I smoothed the hem on my dress, even
though it was meant to be puckered.
“I can tell you don’t believe me,
but it’s true. You might as well commit
suicide as kill somebody else, because murder is a ghost that don’t shake. Prison don’t lessen the debt. It’s one hell of a weight to carry.”
“How’d you do it?”
“Does it matter?”
It did, I told him.
He ran his knuckles across his beard
stubble, scratching as he considered my request.
“Outside of a bar near Wapato I got
into a tussle with this marine. He
didn’t like my hair, said I had a girl’s style.” Clay paused, sensing my question. “It was longer then. They shave it for you in the pen, same as the
military. It’s part of the emasculation
process.” I bit my lip and twitched my
fingers: Go on. “Anyway, I was drunk,
plastered, and I suppose he must have been also. We ended up getting thrown out of the
joint. It could have stopped there, but,
again, we were both loaded and full of ourselves, so we continued into the
alley. He’d have knocked me to next
Tuesday if it hadn’t been for that piece of lumber.”
“A board?”
“Two-by-four, ‘bout there long.”
I could feel my eyes watering from
the excitement but it no longer mattered if he saw. “Well?”
“I was on my knees, my face beat
into meatloaf and there it was. I
grabbed the thing like I was Kirk Douglas in Spartacus and didn’t stop. The end.”
He took a long pull from the bottle,
swallowing loud and hard.
“Go on. Tell me what happened.”
“I just did.”
“No, tell me how you hit him, how
many times, what it felt like.”
“You’re a Cuckoo bird.”
“You said you would.”
He ignored me, saying, “That stray
two-by-four changed my life. Changed the
marine’s, too. It’s funny the game fate
plays.”
My shoulders stiffened and I could
hear a heartbeat pulsating in my eardrums, same as the time I stuffed them with
earplugs to stifle Janine’s snoring.
“If you don’t tell it all, the
deal’s off,” I said, crossing my arms for emphasis.
He looked past me, over my head,
toward the jungle land of clover. “All
right, Sunshine,” he said, “if that’s how it has to be.”
Goaded by my questions and my desire
for specificity, Clay went on to describe the bludgeoning, sacrificing no
detail. He described the sound the wood
made as it cracked the marine’s skull to pieces, the picture such a thing
created, the colors and remains, the complete and gory aftermath.
I know he rightfully anticipated me
getting sick, and when I didn’t, I couldn’t tell if he was surprised or
disappointed.
“And that’s it?” I said.
“You’re an odd little ball, aren’t
you? Thrill-seeker? Like a lot of danger, do you?”
“It does get boring around here.”
“Well then,” he said, setting the
sack on the dash so that the paper whispered and crackled.
“I changed my mind,” I said.
“No fair. A deal’s a deal.”
“For all I know, you could have been
lying.”
“For all you know.” His laughter washed the truck’s cabin with
the smell of forest fires.
When
he lunged for me, I was prepared. I’d
spotted Les’s can-opener on the floor matt when I got in and now I used all my
strength to stab him in the neck.
It
was messy, a gusher really.
He
screamed loud and shrill, hitting notes none of The Four Seasons did.
***
At the edge of the field that day I
stopped, out of breath from running, pain jabbing my side like a knitting
needle. I didn’t feel the weight Clay
had described. I wasn’t sure what I
felt, perhaps because my deed had not yet settled upon me.
I don’t know why, but I took up a
long, throaty scream. The underbelly of
the clover shook as jackrabbits scattered and several birds whiplashed the
air. I followed their errant flight as
best I could, then I rested my eyes on the sky where the sun hung, bald and
boiling, nothing there to block its temporary glory.
