Fragile Beasts (4 page)

“I suppose she’ll come and take you boys back to Arizona with her,” she continues and my heart plummets.

“What do you mean?” I cry out. “This is Klint’s junior year. There are gonna be scouts looking at him. He’s gonna get scholarship offers.”

“So what?” she says. “He can play baseball in Arizona.”

Klint flicks me an astonished look. I know for him she might as well have suggested that he could play baseball on Mars.

“You don’t understand,” I begin.

“They just lost their dad,” Bill helps me out. “Don’t start talking about taking them from the only home they’ve ever known. Their school and all their friends.”

“And the team,” I add.

She steps closer to me, and I smell sour sweat beneath the smoke and perfume.

“What do you boys think you’re gonna do? Live here by yourselves?”

“Why not?” I ask.

“You’re kids.”

“Klint turns seventeen in a couple months. Next year he’ll be eighteen. He’ll be an adult.”

She throws back her streaky blond head and eyes me critically.

“And what are you gonna live on? Is he gonna quit school and get a job? Are you?”

I don’t have an answer for her. All I know is I can’t quit school and I can’t move. I have goals. I want to kiss Shelby Jack. I want to go to college even though I’ve never told anyone. I want to study art, not just think about it. I want to travel to other places, but Arizona’s not one of them.

“It’s up to your mother,” she says. “You got no say in the matter.”

I reach inside my pocket and finger Krystal’s shoe.

I want my sister back but not at the expense of my brother.

Klint stands up.

“We’re not going anywhere,” he says. “If you talk to her, you can tell her that. Now why don’t you leave?”

“Are you kicking me out?”

“It’s my house.”

She laughs sharply.

“It’s gonna be the bank’s house in a couple days.”

“Until then, it’s mine.”

She grabs her purse and shakes it at him before sliding it over her bony brown arm.

“You got some nerve little boy, talking to me like that.”

He doesn’t respond. He stands his ground and looks right through her.

She won’t fight him. Klint has an aura about him, the righteous power of the wrongfully condemned. Everyone recognizes it and respects it, but they don’t understand where it comes from. I do.

He’s been held captive his entire life by something more precious and terrible than any of Dad’s lost plans or my stupid goals. Klint has a destiny.

I
’ve never been to a funeral before. I guess that’s because I’ve never known a dead person before besides my grandma Bev who died when I was eleven. I probably should’ve gone to her funeral but I didn’t. Klint was playing in a tournament that weekend and even though Dad did everything he could to postpone the burial, he finally had to give in. “You can’t fight nature,” Bill had pointed out to him over a couple of beers on our back porch.

Klint got a ride with his best friend, Tyler, and his family, and Dad made me go with him. I’ve never missed one of Klint’s games so it wasn’t exactly a strange request. He told me I shouldn’t feel bad about missing Grandma’s funeral. He said she’d want me to be with Klint because it was important for Klint to know he always had someone from the family there rooting for him. I almost laughed when Dad said that, but then I realized he was serious. I knew that Klint could care less if any of us were there. Half the time I don’t think he noticed if anyone was in the stands. Jessica Simpson could have strolled in front of the batter’s box, whipped her shirt up and flashed him, and Klint would have told her to “Move.”

But Dad wanted me to go and I couldn’t say no. He took Grandma Bev’s death very hard, and the fact that he missed the tournament to see her get buried was one of the most powerful displays of love I’d ever seen. Even Mom was touched by it.

Mom’s here. She got in last night. I thought she might come and see us right away but she didn’t. She just showed up at the funeral.

She smiled at me when I went over to her, and gave me a hug, and ran her hand through my hair the way she used to, and told me she couldn’t believe how tall I was getting. I expected it to feel good, but the touch of her fingers on my scalp sent shocks of pain down my spine.

I couldn’t help remembering the last time I saw her before she left. I was on my way to the school bus. I had slung my backpack over my shoulder and stopped to give her a hug while she held her cigarette and coffee cup up in the air trying not to get ashes on me.

“I can’t believe you still want to hug me every morning,” she said. “I guess I should enjoy it ’cause in another year you’ll be a teenager and you won’t want me anywhere near you.”

I don’t think that would’ve been true. I think I would’ve kept hugging her all my life, but even if I didn’t want to, it would’ve been nice for me to have been able to make the decision.

She didn’t want to make small talk. She didn’t want to know about school or anything. All she wanted to do was smoke, and she had to go outside to do it so I followed her.

She had lost some weight and she was skinny to begin with. Her hair was blonder and puffier than before, and she had traded in her pink frosty lipstick for something orange and alarming. I told her she looked good. She smiled again and smoothed her short black skirt over her hips and said it’s too hot to eat in Arizona.

We stood outside the funeral home for a little while. It’s the most impressive building in town, which isn’t saying much because most of the buildings are boarded up. Dad said when he was a kid—back before Lorelei, J&P Mine #5, closed—downtown was a happening place with stores and a restaurant and even a movie theater and a bank with brass handles on the doors and marble floors. Now the only places still open are a couple of bars, an old white church with stained-glass windows badly in need of a wash, a Kwiki-Mart, and this big funeral home.

I guess it’s a crummy-looking town on the surface, but I always try to look deeper. Everything is sturdy and patient, soundly and sensibly built of wood and brick but decorated here and there with little touches of art like the bald eagle carved into the stone above the abandoned bank’s doors and the gingerbread trim hanging in pieces from the eaves of an old dress shop like torn lace. All the place needs to make it nice again is a good cleaning and a purpose.

People started filing in past Mom and me. They all stopped to talk to me. Men shook my hand. Women burst into tears and hugged me. Kids from school who knew me muttered “sorry” and made some sort of brief physical contact whether it was punching my shoulder or brushing a hand against my
arm or giving me a quick embrace. Kids from school who didn’t know me, but were there for the spectacle and would spend tomorrow missing all their classes while they sat in the guidance office sobbing with the grief counselor, avoided me. Klint’s teammates were somber and respectful in their dark sports banquet suits and all of them told me what a great guy my dad was and how they were going to miss him, even Brent Richmond, who was probably wishing Dad could’ve got killed during the upcoming season so Klint’s batting would’ve suffered and he could be top man. Then came Coach Hill, who was probably thinking how relieved he was Dad didn’t get killed during the upcoming season so Klint’s batting wouldn’t suffer. Klint’s teammates shook me up the most. I’d never seen any of them in a group when they weren’t in uniform, wisecracking, spitting tobacco, and calling me faggot and shit-for-brains.

Nobody talked to Mom.

I know it was awkward for her, but she had to have known it was going to be like this. It was Dad’s funeral after all. These were Dad’s friends. They all knew what she’d done to him and even though people like Aunt Jen said he deserved it, hardly anybody thought she went about it the right way.

It had come as a complete surprise to me. I think the only person more surprised was Dad. I knew my parents’ marriage wasn’t perfect, but at least it had been consistent. Dad drank a lot but not more than most guys. He held down a job. He never hit Mom. When he wasn’t fighting with her, he was all over her. He brought her flowers for no reason and told her she made his life worth living. I’ve never understood what happened to make it so bad all of a sudden that she couldn’t stay anymore or was it that this other guy offered her something so good she couldn’t stay anymore?

But why no discussion? No warning? And even if she wanted to leave Dad, why did she leave me and Klint? What did we do that was so wrong?

Standing there watching the grief parade troop past me, being clasped and grabbed and cried on and offered worthless words of advice and commiseration, I kept glancing at Mom smoking and pretending that she didn’t care that everyone was ignoring her, and all I could think of were those questions and why I couldn’t ask her any of them, especially the last one.

I look over again and she’s gone. I don’t know where she went. She probably got sick of the dirty looks and wandered off. I don’t care too much because here comes Shelby Jack.

She’s wearing a black dress and high heels and big black sunglasses and has her hair slicked back in a ponytail with a black bow.

I imagine rich people have the perfect outfit for every occasion. She probably has a charity luncheon outfit and one for watching tennis tournaments, so it would only make sense she’d have a funeral dress. I think she goes to a lot of old rich guy funerals. I know their family went to Ronald Reagan’s funeral. Ten million other people did too, but they were actually invited.

I wasn’t sure she’d come. She’s missing school to be here.

She starts up the steps, sees me, and comes toward me, slipping off her sunglasses.

She’s been crying again.

“Kyle,” she says, then puts her arms around me and gives me a hug.

I let my hands lightly touch her back and her hair while she presses against my chest.

God, I’d give anything to be able to do this without someone having to die first.

“How are you doing?” she asks as she pulls away from me.

“I’m okay.”

She takes my hand and squeezes it.

“I guess that’s a really stupid question to ask someone at their father’s funeral.”

“It’s okay. I know what you mean.”

“Where’s Klint?”

Klint. Of course, Klint.

“He’s off somewhere with Tyler. He’ll be back in time.”

She keeps holding my hand.

“I saw your mom,” she says with a frown.

Shelby knows all about Mom leaving us. She hates my mother, pure and simple. She won’t accept any excuse for a woman leaving her children.

It hits me for the first time that the way I feel about Dad dying is pretty much the same way I felt about Mom leaving. Except I cried when Mom left. I cried every day for a month.

“Did you talk to her?” Shelby asks me.

“A little.”

“And?”

“We didn’t have much to talk about.”

“What about Klint?”

“He left with Tyler as soon as he saw her.”

She nods her understanding. I know she thinks Klint is acting the way he should, and I’m not.

“How did you feel? Seeing her again?”

“Good,” I tell her.

I’m not lying, exactly. It’s one of those things I can’t explain to someone else.

I thought I’d be happy to see her again and I am, but it’s a sick kind of happy, like what a wounded soldier must feel when he wakes up and finds out he’s going to live but without his legs.

“Why is she here exactly?”

“I don’t know,” I answer her honestly.

I know what she’s trying to ask. My heart beats faster thinking back to the night when Aunt Jen said Mom would make us move to Arizona with her.

I glance at Shelby’s pretty face, then at the hills behind her. The green of summer has begun to fade and soon the bright colors of fall will appear in patches of orange, red, and yellow. The air smells like damp earth and dry leaves. It’s warm and cool at the same time, like a breath.

What do I know about Arizona? It’s hot. It’s a desert. I imagine the air burning as I swallow it and cooking me from the inside out. Barren, treeless, huge white sun blazing down on tiny white houses, dry red dirt instead of moist black soil, horizons that stretch on forever instead of comforting, worn-down old mountains surrounding us on all sides.

“Are you going to have to move?” she whispers.

“I hope not.”

“What does Klint say?”

I sigh, irritably.

“Klint’s not saying anything. He’s spent the past two days hanging out with Dad’s truck at Sledziks’ junkyard. Bill says it’s so smashed up you can’t even tell what it used to be. Last night he came home with the chrome deer antlers off the grill, and his hand was all cut up and bloody.”

“He’s upset,” Shelby interrupts me. “People do strange things when they’re upset.”

Her eyes stop me from saying more. There are tears shimmering in them again. I realize I’ve said more to her in the past few minutes than I’ve said to
everybody else combined in the past two days. I feel embarrassed until I remind myself that she doesn’t know this.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I tell her.

She gives me a final squeeze of her hand and goes inside.

Bill comes and gets me a few minutes later. Bill in a suit and tie with no ball cap: the sight is so bizarre I can almost convince myself that none of this is really happening, that it’s all a dream, but then he opens his mouth and says my name and I know it’s real because that amount of sadness can’t be made up.

I follow him inside and sit beside him in the front row. Bill made all the arrangements. He’s been taking care of everything. Last night while I sat with him at his kitchen table poking listlessly at the franks and beans he made for dinner, he told me with a certain amount of shame in his voice that he wished Klint and I could stay and live with him, but he didn’t see any way he could afford to feed two teenage boys.

Klint wasn’t even there. He was hanging out with Dad’s mangled truck.

I told him we would’ve liked to live with him, too, that he was almost like a dad to us. He pulled the bill of his cap down lower over his forehead, stared at his beans for a moment, then got up and went and stood at the counter with his back to me.