A Ship Made of Paper (21 page)

opening as if they were the lips on her face. At this point, it is barely exciting, it’s comforting, it feels warm and kind and devoted.

Footsteps. Have they been getting closer all the while? In a panic, Iris lifts herself up and twists away from Daniel. Her pubic bone bangs against his teeth. He looks bewildered, but she doesn’t have to tell him to get up, he knows what’s happening. There is a
pat pat pat
of footsteps getting closer. He rolls out of bed, grabs the clothes he gathered minutes before, makes a vain attempt to cover himself. Iris pulls the covers up to her chin.

It’s Scarecrow. The old dog waddles in, head cocked, her long lilac tongue out, a good-natured glint in her blue eyes.

“Thank you, Jesus!” Daniel says.

They are so relieved, they share the hysterical laughter of the near miss. Iris does something she hasn’t done since she was a little girl: she covers her mouth while she laughs her gummy laugh. And Daniel pretends to have a heart attack, grabbing his chest, staggering, falling back into the bed. Iris strokes his long, soft hair. She leans over, kisses the taste of herself off his mouth.

Nelson’s footsteps are softer than the dog’s. He is right next to the bed before they notice him.

“I’m cold,” he says, staring intently at Daniel.

[ 8 ]

Hampton was still pinching black powder out of his back pocket, rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger. His fingers were long, poetic; you could imagine
him playing piano, stroking a sleeping cat, caressing a woman. He tossed the
powder into the darkness, as if scattering ashes after a cremation.Then he raked
a handful of dead leaves off of a wild cherry tree, one that was still standing, and
used them to wipe his hands.“I used to make Iris laugh all the time.”

“I used to make Kate laugh, too,” said Daniel. He said it because he had to say
something. He couldn’t simply let Hampton go on about Iris and not say anything in reply. It would be too strange, and it would be suspicious, too. However,
what he said was true, meant.“First couple of years, I had her in hysterics.”

He noticed that Hampton’s shaved head had suffered a scrape.There was a
little red worm of blood on the smooth scalp.

“Kate doesn’t think you’re funny anymore?”

“No, she doesn’t,” Daniel said.

“Iris thinks you’re funny. Maybe you’re funnier around her.”

“Maybe she’s just very kind.”

“Or very lonely.”

Daniel must move quickly now that Nelson has crawled under the covers to be next to Iris; he slips out of her bedroom and into the a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

hall, where he dresses frantically and with more clumsiness than he thought himself capable of, before going into Nelson’s room and waking Ruby. He shakes her awake.
Time to go, sweetie.
She nods, accepting the wisdom of his edict. She never argues with anything he says. She assumes he knows what is best for her and what is correct. If he serves her peas and corn, she eats peas and corn. If he tucks her in bed, she closes her eyes. If he tells her there are no such things as ghosts, she believes him, she doesn’t even ask him to look in the closet. Daniel dresses her hurriedly, and then carries her down the stairs and through the door to the stunned, frosted, broken world outside.

His car has been spared. No trees have fallen on it during the night, though there are twigs and branches stuck in the snow on the roof and windshield. Next door, not thirty feet away, a dogwood has snapped in two; its crown rests on the roof of the house, right next to the chimney.

Ruby stares at it with no small measure of awe, her eyes open so wide that the whites show above and below her pupils. Daniel gathers her closer, though he, too, stares at the tree, feeling creepy but spared.

No one has yet come out to shovel a sidewalk or clear a driveway, though the snow has finally stopped and the sky is a ridiculously cheerful blue. The blanket of untouched snow stretches as far as he can see—

untouched, that is, except where trees or branches have plunged through the surface. At the far end of the block, a long coil of power line lies curled into itself like a snake in a basket, every now and then spitting out a warning venom of bright-orange sparks.

“We’re going home, honey,” Daniel says. His hands caress her cheeks, smooth as glass.

Though there is no road to drive on, Daniel goes through the motions of leaving anyhow. Feeling at once drunk and ill with the flu, he brushes the snow off the front-door handle, yanks the door open, breaking the brittle spun-sugar sheet of ice, slides into the car, and gets the engine started. Ruby climbs into the back and puts herself into the child seat, slipping the straps over her shoulders.While the engine warms, Daniel clears the windshield and the back window, and then brushes snow and debris off

[ 143 ]

the roof. He gets back into the car and looks at Ruby. Her eyes are swollen with exhaustion, and she is shivering. “You all set?” he asks, and she nods.

He puts the transmission into reverse and guns the motor, hoping to shoot over the hump of snow at the end of Iris’s driveway. It doesn’t quite occur to him that if the road crew hasn’t cleared Iris’s street right in the center of town, then there is no possibility of any of the roads being cleared, least of all the dirt road where he and Kate live, well out of town.

His car’s back wheels spin uselessly. He puts the transmission into reverse, goes back a foot or two, and then puts it in drive, hoping to free himself by creating a rocking motion, back and forth. Soon, however, the spinning tires are melting the snow beneath their treads, and soon after that there rises the sharp odor of burning rubber.

“You know what?” Daniel says to Ruby, turning to look at her, smiling, trying to be as casual as possible. “Even if we get this stupid car out of the driveway, we still might not be able to drive all the way home.

There’s so much snow, honey.”

“What about Mom?” Ruby asks.

“Well, she’s the lucky one, isn’t she? She’s already home.”

“Can’t we go home, too?”

“Don’t worry. We will.” He looks back at Iris’s house and tries to gather the courage to go back in. She is likely tending Nelson’s abused sensibilities, but he has a little girl out in the snow.

Just then, he hears the urgent whine of a small engine revved to its upper limits, and a moment later an oversized, gaily painted snowmobile careens into view. It’s Ferguson Richmond—airborne for a moment, as he comes over a rise, and then bouncing off the snowy street, raising up fans of pure powder. He takes a long, looping turn, and a moment later he pulls into Iris’s driveway.

Daniel looks up at the second story, expecting that curiosity about this noise will have brought Iris to the window, but all he can see is a blaze of reflected sunlight in the glass.

“Enjoying Armageddon?” Ferguson asks. “Beats the hell out of locusts, doesn’t it?” His voice rings out like a blacksmith’s hammer. He wears a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

neither a hat nor a helmet. His thinning hair is soaked, his bushy eyebrows hold little balls of ice. “What are you doing here?”

“Trying to get home,” Daniel says. “What about you?”

“I
am
home,” Ferguson says, with an excited, expansive wave. “And I wanted to see if this thing would work.” He pats the snowmobile as if it were a horse. His hands are so red it looks as if the skin has been peeled off them. “And this Mexican kid who’s doing some tile work for us was going crazy, so I took him over to the trailer park to be with his wife and kids. Since then I’ve just been cruising, surveying the damage. It’s fantastic. Worse than I expected.” He smiles broadly. “Want a lift?”

“Can you manage both of us?”

“We’ll soon find out!”

They set off with Ruby sandwiched between them. Block after block of utter stillness and silence. Ferguson makes educated guesses where the turns would be, trying to adhere to what be believes is the road, and then he slows down as they drive through the center of town. No store is open and no one is on the street, except in front of the old brick fire-house, where a dozen volunteers are trying to clear the way, using chain saws and snowblowers.

At the far end of town, Ferguson cuts through a thirty-acre cornfield, taking a shortcut.The snowmobile hits an unexpected bump in the field.

A splash of wet snow. The curved tip of the skis thrust black against the scrubbed blue sky. Daniel grabs hold of Ruby’s jacket. Up. Up. And then down with a thud.

“Are you okay?” he cries out to her.

She nods nervously, her shoulders hunched, breathing shallowly through her mouth.

I’m putting her in danger,
he thinks.
Is anything worth putting her in harm’s
way? Or even hurting her feelings? What was I thinking? And poor Nelson.What
must it have been like for him to see his mother in bed with a stranger? Poor Iris.

And now he is going back to Kate, whose intelligence he suddenly fears like a loaded gun. They are speeding through a landscape of ruined trees and blinding snow. They come to Chase Farms, where a dozen

[ 145 ]

Holsteins stand in a foot of snow, staring at one another, and then at the ground, and then at each other again. They seem puzzled by the sudden disappearance of their pasture.Above them, the blue dome of sky is starting to crack away like cheap paint, showing the cement underneath.

“Stop here!” Daniel calls out.Without asking why, Ferguson slows to a stop, and Daniel slides off the seat, gives Ruby a little squeeze, and then runs into the wrecked and tangled woods opposite Chase Farms. He is sure Ferguson assumes that he is going into the woods to take a pee. As soon as Daniel’s out of sight, he pulls off his gloves, then scoops up a large handful of snow and presses it to his face, scrubbing back and forth.

He must. Most adulterers have the luxury of modern plumbing with which to wash the scent of sex off before they return to their official life.

But Daniel feels he bears the scent of every kiss, every secretion, on his hands, his face, his hair. It’s a painful business, washing himself with snow, but his anxiety acts as a partial anesthetic, and when he finishes with his face he grabs still more snow and squeezes it between his hands.

As it happens, Kate is not in a position or a mood to detect the scent of infidelity on Daniel; she is frightened and a little drunk, and when Daniel and Ruby enter the house they find her in a frenzy of activity, trying to maintain some sense of domesticity in a house without lights, heat, or water. The only household appliance that works is the kitchen stove, which runs on gas that comes from two silver cylinders near the back door, and Kate hovers continually over this stove, cooking everything that would otherwise spoil, grilling the salmon, scrambling the eggs, broiling the chicken, and steaming the vegetables—without tap water, she uses club soda that she allows to go flat in the bottom of the pot before turning on the flame.At one point, Kate has something simmering on all six burners of their Garland range (inher-ited from the house’s previous owners) and is swigging on a bottle of vermouth as well as a bottle of gin, as if to mix a martini in her mouth.

When she is not discussing in hair-raising detail last night’s invasion by the Star of Bethlehem boys, Kate’s spirits are darkly manic, her jocularity a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

seems to scan the horizon for likely targets. To Daniel, she says, “This is some romantic, ain’t it?” and pulls his hair, not quite hard enough to be thoroughly aggressive. “I hope you’re hungry,” she announces to the house, singing it out, like some nutty kid imitating an opera singer. “And I hope you like really really shitty cooking.” Though it is cold in the house, she is flushed, little drops of sweat collect in her facial down. “Come on, Ruby, I’ll play hide-and-seek with you.” And when Ruby declines the invitation—the last thing the child wants to do is slip into a closet or slide under a bed in a house filled with darkness and cold, a house that is increasingly unnerving to her—Kate doesn’t only look disappointed, she seems offended, as if she herself were a little girl, a lonely little girl, suffering the rejection of a playmate.

Without electricity, home life is less private than ever.They are cast back to some preindustrial reliance on each other. When the home technolo-gies are up and running, each member of the family can be a self-sustaining unit, in a private room with its own source of heat and light, listening to music on his own set, watching a movie, purchasing dried apricots from Haifa via the Internet.With only the fireplace for heat, the hearth becomes the locus of their lives. If Kate takes a candle to light her way to the bathroom, Daniel and Ruby are left in darkness.

Ruby has to be next to at least one of them, and the constancy of her presence, along with her nervousness and her boredom, begins to wear on Kate. Finally, however, Kate is able to coax Ruby to go upstairs, giving her a candle and convincing her that the little red radio in her room will afford her some entertainment.When Ruby is finally out of earshot, Kate makes a martini for Daniel and hands it to him with a certain forcefulness that tells him he had better accept it, though, in fact, he would like to remain coldly sober, so as to defend himself if Kate should turn her intelligence against him, and also to continue trying to figure a way he could leave the house, make it back into town, and see Iris.

[ 147 ]

“You know when I told you about those men coming into the house last night . . .”

“I thought you said they were boys,” Daniel says.

“They were men,” Kate says. “Maybe some asshole lawyer could argue they were juveniles, but they were thudding around here like a herd of elephants.”

He wants to say
By “asshole lawyer” I assume you mean me,
but why bor-row trouble?

“And if they had found me,” Kate is saying, “then I promise you it wouldn’t have been some boyish prank.”