Flying Shoes (3 page)

Tuttle, the spooky kid down the street. A year older than Mary Byrd, but so gimpy that he mostly hung around the younger kids in the neighborhood. He had taken a lot of teasing at school, she remembered, and something nuts had happened to him—he’d gotten his dick caught in his zipper or something, in the boys’ bathroom, and after that he had gone off to military school. He had a dead mother, and lived with his father and older brother. She’d felt sorry for Tuttle and had been nice to him. At least she
thought
she had been. They’d all played in the street on summer nights together when they were younger, but by the spring Stevie died, she’d started dating and running around and she couldn’t remember seeing much of him. But the week after Stevie was killed, she’d gotten the weird little note from Tuttle, after he’d gone back to Charlotte Hall. So strange. Just hey, how are you, what’s going on in the neighborhood—as if he’d known nothing about Stevie and hadn’t been questioned by the police. The detectives had had a field day with the note, which Tuttle had backdated to make it seem like he hadn’t been around the weekend of the murder. They’d had her write back; she couldn’t remember a word of what they’d had her say. Then they’d taken her diary! Surely her mom and Pop, her stepfather, had known this but they’d never said a word about it. They had waited every day for Tuttle to be arrested. And then, nothing. Until now.

Oh, god. Mary Byrd could not think about it. Her chest hurt when she tried to draw a deep breath and she hoped she wouldn’t have a heart attack or something. Should she run take an aspirin? No, she’d keep on thinking about her yard. It steadied her. A few small round morning glory pods still were on the vine and she reached and pinched them, letting the tiny black pyramidal seeds fall into her open hand. They needed scattering in sunnier spots and maybe they’d take, and the little magenta trumpets would volunteer around the yard. An incorrigible seed poacher, she’d stolen the seeds a few years earlier from a friend’s Manhattan fence. Why hadn’t the Heavenly Blues, so startlingly and luminously azure, done well this year? Squirrels had probably gotten onto their hallucinogenic properties and were hoarding seeds and tripping on them. She’d certainly seen them doing some insane things—swinging like monkeys and stunt-fucking on bouncing limbs in the big water oaks that stood solidly at each corner of the rambling Victorian house. Sometimes they would drop like stones onto the tin roof, scaring the hell out of you if you were watching TV or quietly drinking or reading in the living room. At least they didn’t peep in the upstairs windows at night, like the raccoons and possums, terrorizing William and Eliza. Mary Byrd herself had tried a few Heavenly Blue seeds, crunching them up in her teeth. They’d made her feel like barfing, but nothing else.

A blue jay who’d been picking at the last few red berries that clung to the old dogwood cawed—or whatever they said—at her. Why did everybody hate them? They were badass—she loved their tiny bandit masks—and bossy to other birds, maybe, but so beautiful and military with their regimental striped tails, white collars, and heroic crests. And they didn’t wuss out and go south in winter; they stayed around and were welcome spots of color in the drab yard. They took no crap off Iggy and Irene, either; she’d never seen any telltale blue feathers strewn tragically around. Well, maybe once or twice. Mary Byrd threw the handful of morning glory seeds at the jay, saying, “Go with the flow, man.” She wished she had some Valium; it wouldn’t make her as dopey as a Xanax but would take the edge off the nasty afternoon. Hoping, she fished with one finger in the coin pocket of her Levi’s, only coming up with a few four o’clock seeds she’d filched somewhere, and she tossed those to the jay, too.

She wondered when Jack Ernest would come up to town again. She could call him; he’d have something maybe even better than what she had. But she did not need to be thinking about Ernest, the Big Bad Wolf to her Little Red Riding Hood. She was drawn to his manic dementedness and balls-out, absurd—or absurd
ist
—(he knew the difference) bravado. In a way, talking to him might be easier—he was so on another planet. He had nothing to do with anything real in her life. If she was weak enough to call Ernest and tell him what was going on she knew he’d probably offer to go up to Richmond and whack the killer and then the reporter but first fuck Fyce in some humiliating way. Or at the very least he’d say something like, “Baby doll, that truly sucks, what you need is to come over here and let Jack Ernest give you some of his medicines and special TLC.” Either offer would be so ridiculously disingenuous that it would cheer her up. Not that she would follow through on the latter offer. She might be crazy, but she wasn’t
that
crazy. Yet. Was she? But she really did want to get a few nerve pills to get through this mess in Richmond. She had one or two of something and some crumbs, and she was going to need handfuls. But then she’d be obligated to him, and nobody wanted to be obligated to Ernest. So, no, she couldn’t, wouldn’t, call Ernest. Bad idea. That had to be over. Or actually, that absolutely could not begin.

On the sidewalk just below the yard she spotted some chalk graffiti. Uh oh. No doubt the work of William and his posse, Other William and Justin.
LAUREN HAS BOZOMS. SCHOOL BITS
. A crude, rear-view perspective of a dog with a bull’s-eye butt hole bore the curious caption:
THIS DOG WILL BITE AND DODO ON YOU
. WWJD
? Damn it. Neighbors and passersby had had since yesterday afternoon to consider the question, and Evagreen would have seen it when she got out of her old maroon Cadillac. She was surprised Charles hadn’t noticed it picking up the morning paper and raised some hell. Those crazy little dudes. Last week they had gotten themselves into trouble when they discovered a horde of
Playboy, Penthouse,
and
Hustler
that had been thrown in the Dumpster by a student vacating the ramshackle hippie hotel across the street. It had been a windy day and the boys, in a frenzy, had climbed into the Dumpster to get at the treasure. In seconds boobs and beavers were everywhere, slick pages and centerfolds gusting up around the boys’ heads and down the street, beaching up in the hedge around Walnut Hill—or Nut Hill as the kids called it—the geezer apartment complex. They got mildly punished, but you could tell they thought it had all been well worth it. It wasn’t so bad that they had seen, at eight years old, ladies’ private parts, it was just a little disturbing that their first glimpse of them was gigantic silicone breasts and shaved landing strips. Oh, boys. Boys, boys, boys. It wouldn’t be long before these little guys were in a hot-tub scrum too. If nothing happened to them before then.

Mary Byrd let herself think of Stevie, something she tried never to do, although she kept his tiny School Days photo on her dresser mirror where she saw it every day: his blond, crew-cut head and thin, goofy smile, his brown and orange striped T-shirt against a cheerful sky-blue background. The photo was like a scar on her face: not pleasant, she saw it in the mirror every day, but it did her no good to notice it. But still she kept it.

A sweet, transparent little guy, practically a baby when her mother married his recently widowed father. He’d been her real-life baby doll and he’d adored her, following her around, trying to hang out in her room, letting her dress him up in ridiculous costumes, listening to her records. He was crazy for her Beach Boys and Coasters 45s—“Surfin’ U.S.A.” (Pop called it “Sufferin’ U.S.A.” and always made her turn it down), “Charlie Brown,” and “Poison Ivy.” She’d tried to teach him to Twist and Swim, but all he really wanted to do was the Monkey and the Monster Mash but he couldn’t get the footwork on the Monster Mash. His dancing was so hilarious. Sometimes she’d get on her knees and slow-dance with him, swaying back and forth to “In My Room,” the big make-out song, pretending she was dancing with Richard or John or Joe, whoever it was that week. He was a big suck-up and loved to hug her legs and be adored in return. When he began to annoy her, she’d scooch him out, and he’d sit outside her door, singing or talking to himself, the pitifulness of which annoyed her even more, and she might let him back in. As he got older, naturally his allegiance switched to her brother Nick, who had all the cool boy stuff—plastic guns and models and sports equipment. She and Nick would mess with him some, but he could give as good as he got. Mary Byrd became a teenager, and Stevie became a boy. She supposed he never even remembered a time when he wasn’t in his new family, he’d been so little when he and Pop moved in.

Mary Byrd decided she could wait on cutting back the vines and ferns—save it for Teever or the Mexican guy—but she looked forward, sort of, to yard work, its practicality, its be-here-nowness and the pleasure of actually getting something done with visible results. Too little that she did all day lasted: the food she shopped for and cooked got eaten immediately, laundry and floors got dirty again overnight. And there was the simple physical satisfaction of lopping things off with big, sharp shears. Even the wing-bone ache that would be aggravated by the wide scissoring of the shears would be satisfying. Actually,
extra satisfying
because then she’d
have
to take a pain pill and the world would be a better place and any unpleasantness would seem far away. And points for yard work might be scored with Charles and Evagreen. But one of the things Mary Byrd did best was putting
off
. Off-putting too, but she was the Great Procrastinatrix. At any rate the most obvious thing to do right now was hose the walk off before someone complained.

Her life was a matter of domestic triage. First things first. Or trying to figure out exactly what the first things even were. She began to scuff around on the sidewalk, scumbling the chalk and water to obliterate the goofy messages. She jerked at the hose to get it to the side of the house where the dogs stayed. Why were hoses such dumb colors having nothing to do with nature? Kelly green just showed up a neglected lawn. Why weren’t there brown ones to match crappy winter yards? Or if they were going to be some unreal colors, why not something fun like pink or clear with glitter? Or python print? How fun would
that
be to see lying around in the grass.

Mary Byrd turned the hose on the dogs’ water dish, which they never drank from, clearing it of oak leaves and refilling it. Green slime filmed the inside of the bowl; she needed to clean it and maybe the dogs would prefer it to the toilet, which they rushed to the second they came in the house.

Puppy Sal and the Quarter Pounder dozed in the holes they’d dug, and hearing the splashing in their bowl but not the desired clatter of kibble, they lifted their heads in mild interest. They were the best of dogs, she thought with a surge of affection. Nondescript mutts, not too smart, not too dumb, but with all sorts of endearing quirks. They could both lie down and die when you cocked your fingers at them and shouted, “BANG.” They could shake. Puppy Sal had a nervous tic—some kind of neuro-damage from contracting distemper before they had found her—making her jaws snap constantly, like a heartbeat, even in her sleep. She was a reddish golden-brown color, so they told people her breed was Golden Snapper. Puppy Sal had been famous in town, before the leash law came down, for bolting to the Holiday Inn, where she would scrounge in the restaurant garbage area and, after she was completely slicked up with bacon grease and funk, take a little swim in the hotel pool. Then the ladylike manager, Mr. Selff, would call and practically have a nervous breakdown. He claimed she left a
dithguthting earl thlick
on the pool. Of course she did. The Quarter Pounder, Sal’s son by an awful science experiment of a Corgi-Bassett mix, could also sing. Mary Byrd would croon in a falsetto, “
It’s over, it’s over, it’s o-o-o-ver
,” stretching out the end on a high note, and the Quarter Pounder would throw back his head and howl.

“Good dogs,” Mary Byrd said to them. The dogs rose expectantly, plumy tails slightly wagging. “Good puppies.” She wanted to pat them but didn’t want her hand to smell doggy. She loved these guys without really being a dog person. The children and Charles would allow the dogs all over them, even letting them lick their faces, but Mary Byrd could never get past all the butt-sniffing, shit-eating, and carcass-rolling that dogs did. She constantly caught them guiltily slinking around with kitty litter sprinkles on their noses after snacking. And when Eliza and William were little and threw up or when the cats horked up hairballs, one of the dogs would be on it like a hornet. Rancid deer legs and dead armadillos, which Mary Byrd had heard could have leprosy, had been hauled up into the yard by Puppy Sal and her accomplice son. Dog germs were a huge reality—one of the major cootie groups—right up there, in her estimation, with those in salad bars, airplanes, New York subways, and on William’s hands. For some reason it didn’t bother her at all that cats licked themselves all over. She’d bury her face in a cat’s fur any time. You’d never,
ever
see a cat chew dirty socks or underwear crotches or bloody bandages or roll happily in roadkill.

She would have to make sure that Charles and the children could see about the animals and themselves while she was in Richmond. All the drills: food, school, walking the dogs on time, dealing with any piles or puddles, dealing with homework. Odd that her mother hadn’t called.

The impulse to whine to someone came over her, but at the same time the last thing she wanted was to talk about it. Her family had been sucked up into a tornado of grief and fear and the unknowable, and when the storm subsided, their bodies fell scattered about their house and they were zombies; the walking dead. The awful thing had never been discussed with her mother or with her brothers, and certainly not with her stepfather, who died not long after. They’d all chosen not to know; newspapers went straight to the trash, news channels were quickly changed. That day, those days, were rarely spoken of again. The implications and the volatility of the matter within the often touchy, so-called blended family—it had just been too big a risk for any of them to take. The price in terms of their necessary relationships with one another was too high. But was it
still
? Over the years, each of them had hunkered down into their personal pods of regret and sadness. And ignorance, and, she supposed, blame. Although life had changed forever and Stevie’s loss, the terrible way they’d lost him, gripped them all, they tried to put it aside. It was easiest. That much they all seemed to understand.