Centuries of June (2 page)

“I’ll take that whiskey neat,” the old man bellowed from behind me.

Cinching my belt, I moved ahead through a house as quiet as a grave. At the top of the stairs, I stopped and listened, and faraway came a sigh from someone asleep, so delicate it may not have been a sound at all, but only the thought or memory of a whisper from some other point in time and some space beyond the walls or perhaps within the walls themselves. I could not tell whence it came, so I delayed my trip downstairs and sought its source. Three rooms flanked the balustrade. Two bedrooms and a tiny office where the drafting table and drawings lived. The sigh might have been a puff from the computer, putting itself to sleep, but when I opened the office door, the room appeared just as usual in mad disarray, heaps of paper, rolls of plots and plans. On the dear computer, blank and quiet, a dark apple rested like a shut eye. I ran my palm along the edge of the desk, furring my fingertips with a coat
of dust. Another sloughing noise crept through the walls, and I dashed over to the adjoining spare room, threw open the door, and discovered them.

The setting full moon cast a halo upon the bed. Some trick of mind allowed me, in that diffusion, to see with vivid clarity the fumble of colors and patterns, a swirl of quilts and coverlets of the most outrageous hues and designs. But I had forgotten, until that very moment, the strange naked women hidden beneath the fabric. They appeared at once and altogether, a floating cloud, flower and flesh, jumbling of limbs, hands, a bare breast, the curve of a hip, a half-dozen bare arms, skin and hair of assorted hues, some beribboned with garlands, others loose and unbound. Lips, faces at odd, unnatural angles. Eight women in a tangle, pretzeling bodies at rest. All but one of their faces were turned my way. One pair of eyes opened. Another blinked in my direction. The patterns on the blankets shimmered like colored glass in a kaleidoscope, stirring to life. The colors moved like a wave, the blankets parted like the sea. Another woman cracked alert and stared at me, caressed the shoulder of her neighbor as if to wake her, and I stepped back from the threshold and quickly shut the door. Someone sighed again, but I was not sure if this time it was not me.

Silence returned, and torn between wanting to open the door again to see and my panic over what might be there, I listened at the keyhole. Only the respiration of eight sleepers, quiet as kittens, soft as a baby’s foot. A round of fierce coughing punctuated the new tranquility, and I pictured my thirsty father in the bathroom and a cloud of downy feathers swirling in the air, floating to the bath mat, sucked up to the fan, settling in the sink and commode. Right, the whiskey. Each step of the descent, I could not shake the image of those women. The sharp dissonance of patterns on the blankets, the swell of breasts and roseate nipples, a triangle of hair, a derriere turned and split perfect as a peach, faces flushed with warmth, eyes popping open as if they sensed
my presence and suddenly sprang to life. The last woman, whose body lay outside the swirling colors, turned her face to the wall, and in that half-life made a crescent moon of her naked back. A film of perspiration clung to her dark skin. She resembled someone I knew quite well, though I could not place her name. Her utter mystery confounded me more than the others, whose faces revealed in the splendor of those few seconds some vestiges of intimacy. Yet I could not remember how they had arrived, what led them to my bed, why they had stripped themselves, where those richly hued covers had originated, and what, if anything, happened when I got up to empty my bladder a moment ago.

Each step seemed to take forever, as if my mind and body traveled at two different speeds. At several points along the journey, the goal escaped me, and once or twice I stopped, bound by a fog of confusion. The mental image of the bedful of naked women plucked at my cerebral cortex, but rather than clarifying meaning, the girls persisted as enigma. At the foot of the stairs, I stood still for a few minutes, trying to decide which way to turn and why. In the shambling gloom, a dark living object moved like a shadow met by shadow. A few seconds later, the cat unfurled himself against my bare leg, sending the thrill of memory straight from skin to spine. I whispered his name, and he mewed and ran away, a void in the blackness.

All the liquor bottles looked ancient and untouched, caked with a film of grease and dust. One shot short of full, the whiskey in brown glass sparkled with life when held up to the dim kitchen light. The skin around the circumference of the wound at the back of my skull stretched and tightened, as if the hole could close on its own, but the constriction produced a small double pain. For medicinal purposes, I took two glasses from the cupboard. On the way back to the staircase, I chanced upon my orange tabby cat again, eyes reflecting the moonlight. He purred at me from atop the DVD player, his tail roped over the glowing clock. I called his name again, and he whipped his tail, just enough for
me to see the numbers 452. With a fingernail, I tapped the crystal of my watch.

Passing by the closed door that led to the bare ladies, I held my breath and could hear the cadence of their slumber. A floorboard creaked. Someone sighed again. A vision of mad ecstasy fluttered across my imagination. I tiptoed past the fortress and into the bathroom.

Motionless on the edge of the tub, the figure of my father sat in the exact spot. A tiny pinfeather stuck out like a flag from the prodigious wrinkle of his brow. He did not drain his glass in a single gulp as might be expected of the parched. Rather, he held the tumbler to the light, judged the liquid’s clarity, sniffed its bouquet, rinsed his palate with a mouthful, and only then swallowed. The whiskey warmed him, brightened his eye, and raised the flow of blood to his pale skin. He sipped another mouthful and the dryness vanished from his breathing, and he looked almost alive. When he cleared his throat again, no feathers flew out of his mouth.

“Feeling any better?” I inquired.

With a sweeping arc of his free hand, he bade me sit down, so I rested myself on the closed lid of the toilet, face-to-face with the old fellow, our knees nearly touching. Between sips of his drink, he took me in with his stare, and the more he drank, the clearer his gaze became, so that by the time he reached the whiskey bottom, his eyes were as blue as fire at the heart of a candle flame. He iced me with that gaze, froze my brain, locked my tongue behind the prison of my teeth. I could do nothing but stare back stupidly and wait, just as I had as a child, until he deigned to speak the first word.

“The question is: are you feeling any better? That was a nasty blow to the brains.”

I reached behind my left ear, but the wound had completely closed. Just old smoothness of skin and bone where once had been a hole. I strummed the spot, and it felt as if nothing in the world had happened.
My father shook his head. The blood, too, had been cleaned off the floor, and only red spots on my robe left evidence of the assault. I pulled back my fingers and checked for blood, but they were as dry as bones. My day was becoming more complicated.

“I’m feeling much better, thank you.”

“Still,” he said, “quite a crack to the noggin. Are you sure?”

“Tell you the truth, I’m not sure about anything. This whole day has been one inexplicable puzzle.”

“The whole day, really? From the moment you woke till now? Until … what time do you have?”

“I’m afraid my watch has stopped.”

“No matter.” He poured himself another drink. “But you know, patience is its own reward, as you may have heard on more than one occasion.” A low chuckle followed his remark as if he celebrated an original thought.

He had me there. Instead of stretching back in time, my power of recollection seemed cemented in place. I scratched my head, wondering if he had asked me a question. He poured himself another drink and said nothing. I thought to ask him how he came to be here, in my bathroom, a dozen years or more since we buried him, but I was afraid of his several potential answers.

At last he spoke again. “What do you make of the naked women?” He frowned at my perplexed stare, shook his head, and raised his bushy eyebrows. “Surely you remember those naked women in your bed?”

“Please don’t tell me there’s more than one.”

“There’s seven,” he said, a randy grin curled across his face. “I counted.”

“I counted eight, including someone that I may well know.” I shook my head slowly, indicating the nullity of my consciousness.

“You seem to have forgotten everything.”

All evidence pointed to just such a conclusion, but in reality, too
many remembrances flooded my mind for any decent sorting and classification.

“I can understand forgetting being brained from behind; after all, you never saw it coming. And I can understand forgetting your old man,” he joked. “But how could you forget the octet of naked women and how they got in your bed?”

The question awakened some ancient memory. All at once, time itself did not stretch this way and that, but it was as if that very second divided in half and halved again until the images rushed into my head the way the blood had rushed out. The women, of course, show up, arriving perhaps on bicycles.

“Today was an ordinary day in June, the kind that seems to exist permanently, coming around each year for centuries. Not too hot, not too cold. Harbinger of summer, last sweet fling of spring. When I came home today, there were seven bicycles out on the lawn, glowing in the sunshine like mirrors to the sky.”

The thin man appeared to have ceased listening to my story just at the twist in the plot. Instead he focused on a spot just above my right shoulder, and at the same second, the light behind me changed ever so slightly and the room cooled by one degree. A presence had entered the bathroom, and my sixth sense tingled. As I swiveled my neck to see what lurked over my shoulder, the old man sprang to his feet and positioned himself between me and my attacker. “Put down that club,” he ordered, and the raised arm lowered the weapon in a slow and resigned arc. He stepped aside and revealed one of the girls from the bed.

She had donned a yellow cotton shift that clung to her like butter on a corncob, and her arms and legs shone the color of strong tea. Her hair hung down in a black braid thick as the club she carried, and her eyes, set in the dish of her face, shone blacker still. The vision of her, perspiring slightly from her exertions and panting from the effort required by
the heaving and lifting of the weapon, set my memory in motion. One of those faces to remember married to a forgettable name.

“My name is S’ee,” she said, as if reading my mind, but she spoke in a language that lived on a shore distant from the center of my brain. Her exasperation she expressed in a frown, but fortunately for everyone’s sake, she switched over at once to English. “But you may call me Dolly.”

“A most unusual name in any language,” the old man said. “Kindly refrain from swinging about that cudgel of yours. Someone could get hurt.”

As long as a baseball bat but much thicker at the business end, the war club was hewn from redwood, and on the protuberant bolus at the head, the maker had carved a stylized animal in the manner of the tribes native to the Pacific Northwest. The creature symbolized some manner of carnivore, judging from the rows of sharp triangles lining both sides of a curved mouth and the madness of the wide-set eyes. I could easily imagine the terror caused by such a face rushing to hammer down upon the forehead of its intended victims. One might die of fear before being felled. It was a humbling weapon designed for crushing blows from which little hope of recovery existed, and the mere sight caused my head to ache again. Dolly modestly withdrew the club and hid it behind her skirt, taking care to keep her right hand firmly gripped around the tapered handle.

My father relaxed and collapsed like a marionette on his seat at the edge of the bathtub. I studied Dolly’s face in a vain attempt to match her becoming features with those stored in the hard drive of my head, and though the search resulted in zero matches, she seemed a long-ago acquaintance accidentally erased from the files. Her black eyes revealed nothing but my own image, and her lips were drawn in a hard, straight line. She did not smile or frown at my monkeyish attempts to elicit any reaction, some sign that we were once intimates or friends.

From his perch, the old man said, “To what, may I ask, do we owe the pleasure of your delightful company?”

With her bare arm, she wiped the sweat from her brow, and in that gesture released the scent of rain and cedars, of dried fish and a musky perfume that opened my olfactory remembrance of bygone time. The old man cocked his head so the words might flow more easily into the trumpet of his ear. “You have a story for us? Do tell.”

B
efore his final daughter was born, a child he would never see, Yeikoo.shk’ lived like a fish. During the last months of his wife’s pregnancy, a steady, daily rain raised the waters over the banks of the creeks and streams. The trails flooded up to the village homes, and he laughed when the coho slapped their tails in the muddy pools at his doorway. Some mornings while his wife slept, Yeikoo.shk’ stepped out of bed and grabbed the nearest salmon swimming on the floor, took out his knife, and slit it throat to belly, the long strand of roe glistening like berries at dawn. He would slurp the viscous mess in one long gulp, the eggs rolling off his fingers and dripping down his chin, and then throw the rest of the fish through the doorway into the street, the gravest sin. Raven and bear and the poorest of the clan fed on the corpses that floated away.