Burning House (17 page)

“They were upset because he pulled his dog’s ears,” she said.

She had a bath toy he had bought for her. It was a fish with a happy smile. You wound it with a key and then it raced around the tub spouting water through its mouth.

He could hear Bryce talking quietly downstairs. Another call to Maddy, no doubt. When the boy was in Vermont, he was on the phone all the time, telling B.B. how much he missed him; when he was here in Pennsylvania, he missed his family in Vermont. The phone bill was going to be astronomical. Bryce kept calling Maddy, and Rona’s mother kept calling from New York; Rona never wanted to take the calls because she always ended up in an argument if she wasn’t prepared with something to talk about, so she made B.B. say she was asleep, or in the tub, or that a soufflé was in the last stages. Then she’d call her mother back, when she’d gathered her thoughts.

“Would you like to go to that auction tonight?” he said to Rona.

“An auction? What for?”

“I don’t know. There’s nothing on TV and the kid’s never been to an auction.”

“The kid’s never smoked grass,” she said, soaping her arm.

“Neither do you anymore. Why would you bring that up?”

“You can look at his rosy cheeks and sad-clown eyes and know he never has.”

“Right,” he said, throwing the comic book back on the tile. “
Right
. My kid’s not a pothead.
I was talking about going
to an auction
. Would you also like to tell me that elephants don’t fly?”

She laughed and slipped lower in the tub, until the water reached her chin. With her hair pinned to the top of her head and the foam of bubbles covering her neck, she looked like a lady in Edwardian times. The fish was in a frenzy, cutting through the suds. She moved a shoulder to accommodate it, shifted her knees, tipped her head back.

“There were flying elephants in those books that used to be all over the house when he visited,” she said. “I’m so glad he’s eight now. All those
crazy
books.”

“You were stoned all the time,” he said. “Everything looked funny to you.” Though he hadn’t gotten stoned with her, sometimes things had seemed peculiar to him, too. There was the night his friends Shelby and Charles had given a dramatic reading of a book of Bryce’s called
Bertram and the Ticklish Rhinoceros
. Rona’s mother had sent her a loofah for Christmas that year. It was before you saw loofahs all over the place. Vaguely, he could remember six people crammed into the bathroom, cheering as the floating loofah expanded in water.

“What do you say about the auction?” he said. “Can you keep your hands still? That’s what I told him was essential—hands in lap.”

“Come here,” she said, “I’ll show you what I can do with my hands.”

The auction was in a barn heated with two wood stoves—one in front, one in back. There were also a few electric heaters up and down the aisles. When B.B. and Rona and Bryce came in the back door of the barn, a man in a black-and-red lumberman’s jacket closed it behind them, blowing cigar smoke in their faces. A woman and a man and two teenagers were arguing about a big cardboard box. Apparently one of the boys had put it too close to the small heater. The other
boy was defending him, and the man, whose face was bright red, looked as if he was about to strike the woman. Someone else kicked the box away while they argued. B.B. looked in. There were six or eight puppies inside, mostly black, squirming.

“Dad, are they in the auction?” Bryce said.

“I can’t stand the smoke,” Rona said. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”

“Don’t be stupid. You’ll freeze,” B.B. said. He reached out and touched the tips of her hair. She had on a red angora hat, pulled over her forehead, which made her look extremely pretty but also about ten years old. A child’s hat and no make-up. The tips of her hair were still wet from the bathwater. Touching her hair, he was sorry that he had walked out of the bathroom when she said that about her hands.

They got three seats together near the back.

“Dad, I can’t see,” Bryce said.

“The damn Andrews Sisters,” B.B. said. “I can’t get their spooky voices out of my head.”

Bryce got up. B.B. saw, for the first time, that the metal folding chair his son had been sitting in had “
PAM LOVES DAVID FOREVER AND FOR ALL TIME
” written on it with Magic Marker. He took off his scarf and folded it over the writing. He looked over his shoulder, sure that Bryce would be at the stand where they sold hot dogs and soft drinks. He wasn’t; he was still inspecting the puppies. One of the boys said something to him, and his son answered. B.B. got up immediately and went over to join them. Bryce was reaching into his pocket.

“What are you doing?” B.B. said.

“Picking up a puppy,” Bryce said. He said it as he lifted the animal. The dog turned and rooted its snout in Bryce’s armpit, its eyes closed. With his free hand, Bryce handed the boy some money.

“What are you
doing?
” B.B. said.

“Dime a feel,” the boy said. Then, in a different tone, he said, “Week or so, they start eating food.”

“I never heard of anything like that,” B.B. said. The loofah popped up in his mind, expanded. Their drunken incredulity. The time, as a boy, he had watched a neighbor drown a litter of kittens in a washtub. He must have been younger than Bryce when that happened. And the burial: B.B. and the neighbor’s son and another boy who was an exchange student had attended the funeral for the drowned kittens. The man’s wife came out of the house, with the mother cat in one arm, and reached in her pocket and took out little American flags on toothpicks and handed them to each of the boys and then went back in the house. Her husband had dug a hole and was shoveling dirt back in. First he had put the kittens in a shoebox coffin, which he placed carefully in the hole he had dug near an abelia bush. Then he shoveled the dirt back in. B.B. couldn’t remember the name of the man’s son now, or the Oriental exchange student’s name. The flags were what they used to give you in your sundae at the ice-cream parlor next to the bank.

“You can hold him through the auction for a quarter,” the boy said to Bryce.

“You have to give the dog back,” B.B. said to his son.

Bryce looked as if he was about to cry. If he insisted on having one of the dogs, B.B. had no idea what he would do. It was what Robin, his ex-wife, deserved, but she’d probably take the dog to the pound.

“Put it down,” he whispered, as quietly as he could. The room was so noisy now that he doubted that the teenage boy could hear him. He thought he had a good chance of Bryce’s leaving the puppy if there was no third party involved.

To his surprise, Bryce handed over the puppy, and the teenager lowered it into the box. A little girl about three or four had come to the rim of the box and was looking down.

“I bet you don’t have a dime, do you, cutie?” the boy said to the girl.

B.B. reached in his pocket and took out a dollar bill, folded it, and put it on the cement floor in front of where the boy crouched. He took Bryce’s hand, and they walked to their seats without looking back.

“It’s just a bunch of junk,” Rona said. “Can we leave if it doesn’t get interesting?”

They bought a lamp at the auction. It had a nice base, and as soon as they found another lampshade it would be just right for the bedside table. Now it had a cardboard shade on it, imprinted with a cracked, fading bouquet.

“What’s the matter with you?” Rona said. They were back in their bedroom.

“Actually,” B.B. said, holding on to the window ledge, “I feel very out of control.”

“What does that mean?”

She put
From Julia Child’s Kitchen
on the night table, picked up her comb, and grabbed a clump of her hair. She combed through the snaggled ends, slowly.

“Do you think he has a good time here?” he said.

“Sure. He asked to come, didn’t he? You could look at his face and see that he enjoyed the auction.”

“Maybe he just does what he’s told.”

“What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Come over here.”

He sat on the bed. He had stripped down to his under-shorts, and there were goose bumps all over his body. A bird was making a noise outside, screaming as if it were being killed. It stopped abruptly. The goose bumps slowly went away. Whenever he turned up the thermostat he always knew he was going to be sorry along about 5
A.M
., when it got too hot in the room but he was too tired to get up and go turn it down. She said that was why they got headaches. He reached
across her now for the Excedrin. He put the bottle back on top of the cookbook and gagged down two of them.

“What’s he doing?” he said to her. “I don’t hear him.”

“If you made him go to bed, the way other fathers do, you’d know he was in bed. Then you’d just have to wonder if he was reading under the covers with a flashlight or—”

“Don’t say it,” he said.

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“What were you going to say?”

“I was going to say that he might have taken more Godivas out of the box my mother sent me. I’ve eaten two. He’s eaten a whole row.”

“He left a mint and a cream in that row. I ate them,” B.B. said.

He got up and pulled on a thermal shirt. He looked out the window and saw tree branches blowing.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac
predicted snow at the end of the week. He hoped it didn’t snow then; it would make it difficult taking Bryce back to Vermont. There were two miles of unplowed road leading to Robin’s house.

He went downstairs. The oval table Bryce sat at was where the dining room curved out. Window seats were built around it. When they rented the house, it was the one piece of furniture left in it that neither of them disliked, so they had kept it. Bryce was sitting in an oak chair, and his forehead was on his arm. In front of him was the coloring book and a box of crayons and a glass vase with different-colored felt-tip pens stuck in it, falling this way and that, the way a bunch of flowers would. There was a pile of white paper. The scissors. B.B. assumed, until he was within a few feet of him, that Bryce was asleep. Then Bryce lifted his head.

“What are you doing?” B.B. said.

“I took the dishes out of the dishwasher and it worked,” Bryce said. “I put them on the counter.”

“That was very nice of you. It looks like my craziness about the dishwasher has impressed every member of my family.”

“What was it that happened before?” Bryce said.

Bryce had circles under his eyes. B.B. had read once that that was a sign of kidney disease. If you bruised easily, leukemia. Or, of course, you could just take a wrong step and break a leg. The dishwasher had backed up, and all the filthy water had come pouring out in the morning when B.B. opened the door—dirtier water than the food-smeared dishes would account for.

“It was a mess,” B.B. said vaguely. “Is that a picture?”

It was part picture, part letter, B.B. realized when Bryce clamped his hands over his printing in the middle.

“You don’t have to show me.”

“How come?” Bryce said.

“I don’t read other people’s mail.”

“You did in Burlington,” Bryce said.

“Bryce—that was when your mother cut out on us. That was a letter for her sister. She’d set it up with her to come stay with us, but her sister’s as much a space cadet as Robin. Your mother was gone two days. The police were looking for her. What was I supposed to do when I found the letter?”

Robin’s letter to her sister said that she did not love B.B. Also, that she did not love Bryce, because he looked like his father. The way she expressed it was: “Let spitting images spit together.” She had gone off with the cook at the natural-food restaurant. The note to her sister—whom she had apparently called as well—was written on the back of one of the restaurant’s flyers, announcing the menu for the week the cook ran away. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he had stood in the spare bedroom—whatever had made him go in there?—and read the names of desserts: “Tofu-Peach Whip!” “Granola Raspberry Pie!” “Macadamia Bars!”

“It’s make-believe anyway,” his son said, and wadded up
the piece of paper. B.B. saw a big sunflower turn in on itself. A fir tree go under.

“Oh,” he said, reaching out impulsively. He smoothed out the paper, making it as flat as he could. The ripply tree sprang up almost straight. Crinkled birds flew through the sky. B.B. read:

When I’m B.B.’s age I can be with you allways. We can live in a house like the Vt. house only not in Vt. no sno. We can get married and have a dog.

“Who is this to?” B.B. said, frowning at the piece of paper.

“Maddy,” Bryce said.

B.B. was conscious, for the first time, how cold the floorboards were underneath his feet. The air was cold, too. Last winter he had weather-stripped the windows, and this winter he hadn’t. Now he put a finger against a pane of glass in the dining-room window. It could have been an ice cube, his finger numbed so quickly.

“Maddy is your stepsister,” B.B. said. “You’re never going to be able to marry Maddy.”

His son stared at him.

“You understand?” B.B. said.

Bryce pushed his chair back. “Maddy’s not ever going to have her hair cut again,” he said. He was crying. “She’s going to be Madeline and I’m going to live with only her and have a hundred dogs.”

B.B. reached out to dry his son’s tears, or at least to touch them, but Bryce sprang up. She was wrong: Robin was so wrong. Bryce was the image of her, not him—the image of Robin saying, “Leave me alone.”

He went upstairs. Rather, he went to the stairs and started to climb, thinking of Rona lying in bed in the bedroom, and somewhere not halfway to the top, adrenaline surged through
his body. Things began to go out of focus, then to pulsate. He reached for the railing just in time to steady himself. In a few seconds the first awful feeling passed, and he continued to climb, pretending, as he had all his life, that this rush was the same as desire.