Centuries of June (34 page)

I sat on the threshold, my back to the empty hallway and my feet resting on the cold tiles. My head ached and I was very tired at having
reached the point of the foregoing story when I awoke in the early morning hours with the urgent need to relieve my bladder, which in turn led to the bump on my head and the ensuing encounter with the old man and the women gathered in my bathroom, but something was not right. Something was missing. Asynchronous. Out of order.

“There is the matter of the seventh suspect,” the old man said. “Would it be wise to sit with your back to the bedroom?”

I swiveled to see if anyone approached.

“You could always confront her first, rather than be surprised like with the others. You would have the upper hand.”

Rising to my feet, I contemplated his suggestion. He handed me the toilet plunger, ostensibly for my protection, and thus armed, I stepped into the darkness. Behind me the door closed with a thick click caused by the failure to turn the doorknob. Almost instantly I regretted having left behind my companions and venturing alone into the unknown. Only a few paces separated me from the bedroom door, but I was afraid of what I might find. Six of the seven had attempted to kill me, but the old man had thwarted their assassination attempts. Why would the next one not have similar intents? Only now my so-called friend had sent me to face the killer with nothing more than a suction cup on a stick. I thought of comforting myself by whistling, as my mother had taught my brother and me to do when afraid, but then reconsidered the whistle as a dead giveaway when sneaking up on the enemy. I tiptoed silently to the door and gently cracked it open.

Alone in the bed rested the familiar body, her back to me, curved like rolling hills. The other body was missing. There was only one doorway, so she had not slipped past me, and since we were on the second floor, an exit from the windows was out of the question. She may have hidden in the closet or scooched under the bed, though she had little reason to do so, and I did not wake the sleeping beauty to inquire. No, the seventh chick had flown the coop. I retreated from the darkened
bedroom and closed the door with a whisper by gently turning the doorknob till the tumblers and pins slid into place. As I exited, the girl in the bed sighed in her sleep.

Where would the killer be hiding? The space of the house could be contained neatly in the space of my memory, for its rooms and traffic patterns were as habitual to me as the enchanted places of my childhood. There were only so many secret spots, and with the plunger hanging like a weapon from my belt, I set off to find the girl.

The best places to hide would be in the basement, so I bounded down two flights of stairs and flicked on the lights. Thankfully the bottom of the house was as I remembered, more or less, though someone had tidied the pantry and rearranged the small hand tools and jars of nuts and bolts and nails. The furnace was the same as ever, as were the washer and dryer. A collapsible rack stood near the ironing board, across which hung a sundress flocked with tiny tigers and monkeys and elephants in shades of gold and red, the kind of thing that Sita might wear. I pinched the fabric and ran my finger along the hem. A cricket chirruped in a corner, but I left it alone. Some cultures, the Chinese I think, believe a cricket in the house brings good luck, so I never bother a stray or two. When we were children, my brother ruined the story of Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio by telling me the real story. In Collodi’s original Italian,
Il Grillo Parlante
—the Talking Cricket—is the voice of reason and responsibility for the newly minted boy Pinocchio, who gets frustrated by the nagging and throws a hammer at the cricket, and that’s the end of him. An accident.

The talking cricket reminded me of my cat, suddenly able to speak, whom I now remembered putting out some time ago. I trundled up the stairs and opened the door from the kitchen to the back porch, where he often waited to be let in, but no sign of Harpo. I called him once or twice but dared not step out of the house. Rather, I just stood in the doorway for the longest stretch, feeling the damp June air on my bare
skin, and drinking in the smell of roses blooming next door and the newly mown lawn two doors down. While summer brings its share of miseries—the heat and oppressive humidity, the mosquitos and other flying-biting-stinging things, and the stench of trash day and the quick decay and rot—the sensual pleasures more than compensate. At least that’s what I tell myself. A few calls for the missing cat floated into the soft blackness and dissipated. I stuck my thumb in the saucer of water on the floor. Still cool to the touch, as though just filled from the sink. The pet flap on the door was unlatched, so I plugged in a canary-shaped nightlight for Harpo. The cat will come back when he is ready.

Very few hiding places existed on the main floor. In the dining room, a huge oak corner bureau in the Chinese style, with the fall front carved with a pair of dragons. My brother bought the extravagance at an estate sale. “The perfect size,” he said, “for hiding a body.” In the living room, I checked the closets and sought the telltale shoes sticking out from some floor-length drapes. I searched the joint, thinking of what I might do should I actually find her. If she attacked me with her ukulele, I’d have to parry with my plunger. After the possibilities downstairs had been exhausted, the only option was back upstairs. The disadvantage of the design of these houses can be measured in the constant tread upon the stairway from level to level. One spends a great deal of time either ascending or descending. Good for the legs, but unless one is a sherpa or a sheep, the climb is a chore in the early morning hours. From the bottom, a million steps loomed, and what was ahead but attempted homicide upon my person followed by some story bound to make me feel bad about myself? Had sense triumphed over curiosity, I never would have pulled myself up again.

My brother’s room was bare and empty, just as he had left it, the bed and dresser ready “in case I need to crash.” No lady with a ukulele hid in my office either. The plans usually strewn about the place were stacked neatly on the drafting table against the wall. Out of habit, I woke the
computer from its sleep and the anthem rang and blue light filled the space around my desk. The hardware chugged and the software spun, and eventually all the file and program icons filled the screen. I opened the e-mail browser and was stunned to find the memory full. Impossible, I thought, but thousands of unopened messages crammed the inbox. I checked to see if Sita had written recently, but her address was missing from the list. It will take me weeks just to organize the mail into
junk, delete
, and
read
piles. The dates on the most recent messages are wrong, too, as if they had been sent from the future, but just thinking about how to fix all this gives me a headache.

Beneath the desk, the octopus of plugs and wires lurked in darkness. In the linen closet, towels and sheets kept order. The last possibility was the attic, but the door was shut as I had left it. She had disappeared completely, if she had existed at all in the first place. The faint strains of a jazz tune slipped under the bathroom door, and above that background noise, conversation rolled and pitched, someone told a joke and the rest laughed, the sound of people having fun. I could hear ice clinking in glasses, as though a cocktail party was going on, some scene out of the late ’50s or early ’60s, the old man in a tux or evening jacket, the women dolled up with bright red lips and lacquered hairdos. The very thought of a party cheered me, and I was pie-faced happy as I opened the door. Pointing straight back at me was the business end of a revolver. Holding the gun in my face was the seventh sister, deadly in a menacing little black dress. Behind the pistol, she wore a devilish grin, and behind her, the rest of the gang had turned their smiling faces to me. “C’mon in,” she said. “You’re the guest of honor.”

I
found her oddly seductive, the woman with the revolver, though perhaps it was in equal part the danger of the little black dress. She waggled the barrel at me, and I obeyed her direction to squeeze into the room. We now numbered ten—the seven women, the old man, myself, and the boy. Boy, because in the time I had been away, the child seemed to have aged another few months. His baby fat was melting away to reveal a more angular facial structure, and when he smiled he had a full set of tiny sharp choppers.

While I was searching downstairs, the lady gunslinger must have snuck in from some hiding place, and the others had taken her in and included her in their usual high jinks. They were mugging for one another, winking their third eyes. Changes in hairstyles and clothes, and of course the moving tattoos. Another bit in the performance piece, or maybe it was all some elaborate game. Had I not been preoccupied with the thought of bullets, I would have inquired as to the meaning behind the cryptic symbols. Maybe they meant nothing. Maybe sometimes a slithering tattoo snake is just a snake; a cigar, Dr. Freud, is
just a cigar; and a gun is just a gun. In any case, she held the power in her hand.

Through a variety of signals—a raised eyebrow, a curled upper lip, and quick glances back and forth between me and the gun—the old man sought to assure me that he had a plan to disarm the shooter, but I had no idea what role I was to play in the drama. My hands were up in the air and my reflexes are very slow. The very idea was entirely too dangerous, someone would most likely be shot, but I had no way of communicating my anxieties.

“Don’t try anything funny,” she said.

“I have no intention of trying anything,” I said, “funny or otherwise. Do you really need to do this?”

“As a matter of fact, very much so.”

“In front of the little kid? You’ll scar him for life.”

“Somebody pick up that kid,” she said. “And avert his eyes. No, on second thought, let him watch. It’ll be good for the boy to know what happens when you wrong a woman.”

I lowered my arms to half-mast. “Listen, sister, I never met you before tonight. What cause you got for saying I done you wrong?”

“You got time for a story?” She laughed at herself, and the irony spread through the group till all the women were giggling.

Caught in the spirit, even I chuckled. “I’ve got nothing but time, though I’d feel a little bit better if you would point that piece in another direction.”

She lowered the gat slowly, all the while keeping her gaze trained on me. “No monkey business, see.”

I was sorely tempted to make like an ape, but under the circumstances controlled the impulse. Without the gun in my face, I took a closer look at her. No doubt, the ukulele woman, now done up in her killer black dress, stockings, pumps, and a choker of pearls. Her bleached-blonde hair was arranged in a bouffant with a saucy little flip
curl, and her reddened lips set off two rows of wicked white teeth. If the bullet didn’t work, she could bite. I wanted her to bite me. Like a pasha on a throne, the old man leaned back on the toilet seat. During my absence, he had acquired a red fez, now perched atop his silvery hair, which gave him an air of exotic intrigue while simultaneously making him slightly ridiculous. “Before you begin your story, Miss, may we have the pleasure and courtesy of an introduction?”

“Button your lip,” she told him. “One thing you should know straight off: she that’s got the gun calls the shots.”

“Oh, well played,” the old man said.

She pointed the pistol at him. “Seriously, chum, shut up and let me do things my own way.”

Thus chastened, we settled in like schoolchildren, polite and quiet, for story time. All except for the little boy, who was busy undoing the sheets of toilet paper, spinning the roll till all he had left was the bare cardboard tube. He pointed it at the woman in the black dress and said “Bang!” She clutched her chest so quickly and convincingly that I thought for a moment she really had been shot, and then she pointed her gun at the toddler and as it recoiled, she said, “Bang!” His pudgy little hand went right to his heart, and I thought she had really shot him, but it was all a charade.

“You may call me Bunny,” she addressed the child but was surely speaking to all of us. He clapped and pretended to shoot her again.

“If he’s bothering you, Bunny,” the old man said, “I can take that away from him.”

She stood on her tiptoes and stashed the revolver atop the medicine cabinet. “You’ll do no such thing. What everyone needs to do is relax.”

I felt much better with the gun out of her grasp, and the old man, too, breathed a deep sigh and leaned back against the commode to hear her tale. With a snap of her fingers, she dimmed the lights, and the hum of the bathroom fan switched tempo to a Cuban jazz melody. From
the registers on the floor, a cloud of cigarette smoke rose and settled near the ceiling. She reached inside the cabinet and retrieved a series of cocktails, passing the glasses one by one around the room so that we all had a drink. I put mine to my lips and felt the pleasant sting of scotch on the rocks. The old man sipped a martini and spun the glass by its fragile stem to watch the olive twirl.

Bunny commanded our attention with one deep breath.