Goldenland Past Dark (23 page)

“Hey, Dad,” he said awkwardly.

“Didn’t see you there, ha ha.” Raymond slipped something into the pocket of his jacket, and Webern caught a glimpse of glass and silver. The flask. Jesus Christ, it was after five o’clock already. It would be better if they could just have a drink together, without all this sneaking around. Maybe in a day or two, Webern would work up the nerve to suggest it.

“I took your old room,” Webern said. “I hope that’s okay. If you’d rather I stayed in the guest room . . .”

His father shrugged, his eyes searching the ceiling. “I figure you can stay wherever you want, long as you keep it spic and span.”

Raymond tried to slip past Webern, but Webern stood in his way. An awful suspicion cut through him.

“Where are your bags?” Webern demanded. “I didn’t see them in the trunk.”

“Now, Bernie, don’t get all upset.”

“I’m not upset, just tell me where your bags are.”

“See, it’s like this. Your Bo-Bo asked me to bring you to her, and I did. You’re the one she really wants to see. And I’ve got my job to think of—”

Webern was so mad he couldn’t even speak. He felt his mouth opening and closing in angry hiccups, but no sound came out.

“Now, I’ll be back up for the weekend, but—”

Webern didn’t let him finish. He went back into the child’s bedroom and slammed the door. He heard his father walk down to Bo-Bo’s bedroom and murmur some good-byes. Then the stairs creaked and he was gone.

Webern wished he could call Nepenthe and rant about all this, but he had no way of reaching the circus on the road. So, as his father’s new car gunned its engine and sped off, he was left alone in the roomful of ancient toys, fuming.

He should have seen it coming. The last couple years Webern had lived at home, after his sisters had finally fled for good, the old man was forever abandoning him. Webern would cook dinner—hot dog casserole and a Jell-O mold dotted with marshmallows—and Raymond would fill his plate and shuffle off to his recliner while Webern ate alone at the table. Or Raymond would flip sadly through old Polaroids, but turn on the TV when Webern tried to talk to him. For a long time, Webern thought it was grief that did it. Maybe it was.

What made this particular situation even worse was that Raymond had done almost exactly the same thing the first time he’d left Webern at Bo-Bo’s. After overhearing the two adults’ conversation, Webern had some inkling of what was coming, but he was still surprised and terrified when he woke up to find Marzipan and Bo-Bo standing over him, like executioners pronouncing a death sentence: “Your father and I discussed it. We think this is best for the time being.” They’d presented him with a packet containing raccoon jerky and a new toothbrush; then they’d left him alone. Webern had spent the morning reading books about the moon, wondering if he would be able to live in a plastic-domed bubble there someday. Now he was twenty-one years old, and things had barely changed.

Webern picked up the weather house from the bedside table and balanced it on his knees. Raymond was giving this to him—as an apology? An attempt to erase everything that had happened since? Webern shoved the weather house off his lap. It
thunked
against the floorboards. Webern stared down at it, then stood up and kicked it under the bed. It served his father right for thinking that Webern was still just some kid whose affection could be bought off with toys. It was too late for that now.

Webern collapsed backwards on the mattress. He needed to forget all this, to make himself smile, if only for Bo-Bo’s sake. Cracks on the ceiling made a woman’s face. It almost looked like it had been drawn there on purpose.

Webern had always felt tiny in Bo-Bo’s dining room. Sitting in a looming throne-like chair, his feet dangled high above the ground, and the mahogany expanse of the clothless table stretched out before him in all directions. Even the silverware was huge: his fork and knife, heavy ironware, dwarfed his puny hands. Webern held the spoon up; its bowl was almost as large as his palm. It figured: unlike most everyone else, he would never experience the sensation of returning to a place from his childhood and finding it small and harmless. For him, the past would remain large and terrifying.

Marzipan banged around in the kitchen, so loudly that Webern idly imagined her crashing two frying pans together like a pair of cymbals. In a minute, she would probably come in, perfectly composed, to ladle soup into his waiting bowl. But if Bo-Bo didn’t feel well enough to come downstairs, it would be silly for Webern to eat here all by himself. He’d rather just grab a sandwich in the kitchen, or talk to her up in her room. He’d wait five minutes, then go up and check.

The minutes ticked by. Just as Webern started to get up, a horrific sound came from the direction of the stairway—a
thunka-thunka-thunka
that made him leap to his feet.

When Webern ricocheted around the corner into the hallway, though, he didn’t find the old lady in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. Instead, an open coffin lay kitty-cornered between the wall and the banister. Someone had attached the soles of several roller skates to the bottom to give it wheels. Bo-Bo lay inside, tranquil, her cloudy eye half shut.

“Don’t just stand there, child,” she said. “Give an old lady your arm.”

“Where did you get this thing?” Webern asked, helping her up. Bo-Bo leaned on him for support as they walked back to the dining room.

“The undertaker. He came calling a few weeks back. A funny little man. Didn’t you see his card on the mantle?”

“But why did you buy a coffin?”

“He was hell-bent on selling it—needed the business I expect. I thought, if I’m about to buy one, I might as well get some use out of it first. Marzipan took the trouble to attach the wheels.”

“It’s . . . nice.”

“It’s a necessity. I can’t get around like I used to.” Bo-Bo stopped for a moment and leaned against the wall. “A stitch in my side.”

Webern helped Bo-Bo into her chair, then walked down to the other end of the long table. From this distance, she looked so faraway, it was like she was gone already.

Bo-Bo didn’t like to talk during dinner.
But Webern didn’t mind the silence much, especially not tonight. Raymond’s silences were dotted with little throat-clearings and half chuckles, surprised expressions and bemused head-scratchings—as awkward as conversation, and just as exhausting. But Bo-Bo’s silence was full of doing and quickness, a straightforward silence, meticulous and neat.

As she cut her meat into dark little squares that she ate one at a time, it comforted Webern somehow. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed the stringy raccoon chops, which left redolent grease pooled in the centre of his enormous plate. He tried to put it out of his mind that this might be the last time he’d ever taste them. Instead, he concentrated on Marzipan. Her table manners were almost perfect; she could have instructed debutantes except for the loud slurping sound her rubbery lips made as she inhaled each new spoonful of soup.

After dinner, Webern followed Bo-Bo and Marzipan out to the sunroom, where Bo-Bo took her Scotch and her pipe in the evenings. The sunroom jutted off the back of the house, facing the garden. Windows covered three of its walls, but the only light they ever let in was from the moon or the buzzing tails of fireflies that filled the backyard each summer. During the day, Bo-Bo kept the curtains drawn.

Webern sat down on the weathered sofa that Bo-Bo always called the davenport, while Bo-Bo took her customary place in the rocking chair. Marzipan disappeared, then returned with a bottle of Scotch and glasses. It was just like old times, only now she brought three glasses instead of two.

“I suppose you’re of age,” Bo-Bo said as Marzipan brought Webern his drink. “It doesn’t make much difference to me, anyhow. This was my medicine as a child.”

“Thanks.” Webern took a glass from the chimp.

“Besides, I have things to tell you. They say that liquor loosens the tongue, and there’s no doubt truth in that. It also makes it easier to set quiet and listen.” Bo-Bo settled an ancient quilt around her shoulders and closed her eye. “I don’t have much time.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’m no fool. It’s the truth. So I won’t mince words. Webern, do you know how you came by your name?”

“Dad heard it when he was in Germany, right? And he never wanted to forget about what a great war hero he was, so he pinned the name on me. Like a medal.” Webern shrugged and looked into his glass. His own words surprised him. “I dunno, maybe that’s not fair. But that’s what I always figured, anyway.”

“Your father wasn’t a war hero.” Bo-Bo rocked her chair backwards. Her blue hair caught the light like gas fire. “He was a fry cook in the mess hall.”

“What?” Webern pictured his father peeling potatoes like Steamboat Willy. Marzipan, already well into her glass of Scotch, let out a hilarious shriek and slapped her hairy thigh. Bo-Bo shot her a chill look before continuing.

“I’m not telling you this to tear down Raymond in your mind. You already think he’s a confounded idiot, and I’m not disagreeing. But I want you to understand him.”

“It’s not the first time he’s lied to me.” Raymond used to say he had to swallow his heart during the war, to hide it from the Krauts. For a long time, Webern thought that was why his father never cried. “I understand him fine.”

“I don’t think you do. You see, over there in Germany, he killed a man.”

The Scotch tasted of smoke and leather, with no ice to dilute it. Webern coughed. “With his cooking?”

“Don’t make light.” Bo-Bo set her glass on an end table and folded her hands in her lap. The veins stood out, thick and green, like the vines on the outside of the house. “Raymond took an assignment with the military police to catch some local toughs, men in the black market. He wanted a story to take home with him, I expect. The war was over then, and I believe your father felt he’d missed his chance. Chance for what, I don’t know. He always was a funny child.”

Webern kicked off his sneakers. Every day in the newspapers, draftees boarded buses without him. “What happened?”

“From what I understand, he was told to wait outside for trouble. That boy never could handle a weapon. When a stranger walked out, he shot without seeing. The man died on the spot. The worst of it was, though, the man was a professor—wrote music—had nothing to do with the black market at all. Raymond was torn up, of course, but what could he do? He came home a sorry sight—pants on backwards, shoes on the wrong feet. Your mother wouldn’t let him in the house. Said she didn’t recognize him. She’d only just recovered from some troubles herself, nervous thing that she was. So I took him in for a week or two. He learned to butter his bread, of course, but he never was the same. When you were born, one year to the day after he’d shot the professor, he took it as a sign.

“He named you after the man he’d killed. He believed you were his last chance to make right.” Bo-Bo opened her eye slowly, as if waking from a dream. “Sometimes I wonder if that name wasn’t a curse on you.”

Webern drank. The Scotch went down smoother the second time.

“Why are you telling me all this?” he asked.

“Raymond’s just a man, Bernie. He’s had some very bad luck.” She smiled wryly; toward the back of her mouth, silver flashed. “He had a terrible upbringing, you know.”

“Let’s not talk about my dad anymore.”

“Fair enough.” Bo-Bo held out her glass as Marzipan refilled it with Scotch. “There’s something I want to give you. Something I haven’t used in a very long time.”

“Okay.”

“Marzipan, get the box.”

Marzipan left the room, and Bo-Bo and Webern sat quietly for a long while. With a
clunka-clunka-clunk
, Marzipan dragged the coffin back to the top of the stairs before her footsteps retreated beyond Webern’s hearing. Bo-Bo’s rocker creaked against the boards. Finally, the chimpanzee returned, holding a little velvety blue box about the size of a jewelry case. She handed it to Webern and he held it for a moment, imagining what could be inside: Bo-Bo’s wedding rings? His father’s silver rattle, dented with ancient tooth marks? He opened it. Inside stared a pale blue, wide open glass eye.

“After your grandfather left us, I swore I’d never wear it again. I blamed it for drawing him in the first place.”

“It’s beautiful.” Webern picked up her eye from the velvet. It felt like an oblong marble in his hand.

“Don’t keep it in a drawer.” Bo-Bo finished her second Scotch, took out her teeth, and set them in the glass. Without them, her face looked like a cake fallen in on itself. “Now I’ll say goodnight. Marzipan, put some water on these.”

Marzipan took the cup of teeth and disappeared. Webern felt a lurch inside. Bo-Bo hadn’t even smoked her pipe yet. He stood up to help her out of the rocking chair, but she shook him off. By the time she reached the top of the stairs, she was wheezing, and all colour had drained from her face.

“I should call the doctor,” said Webern.

“Nonsense, child.” Bo-Bo squeezed his arm with uncanny strength, and for a moment he felt frightened. Already she had taken out one eye and her teeth; he could imagine her nose and ears pulling out just as easily, her blue hair and her tongue, until her head was nothing but a mask of caverns. “Bed rest, bed rest, is all that man ever says. The undertaker took a greater interest in my health.”

Webern guided her down the hall to the bedroom, where Bo-Bo turned back her covers and folded herself under them with her old deft precision. It wasn’t until she looked back at Webern that her face took on a strange expression, the changeful look of a fading dream.

“Bo-Bo?” Webern felt very far away from her. He tried to make his voice sound manly and sure. “Bo-Bo, I’m calling the doctor right now. Are you all right?”

“I am.” Bo-Bo drew the covers up to her chin. “Now take that monkey and get out of my house. I don’t want you to see me die.”

Webern dressed Marzipan in the pair of old yellow overall shorts from his luggage and led her outside, first carefully through the yard, among the metal jaws, and then down the sidewalk beneath the blooming trees.

It was a beautiful summer night, with a sky so dark blue and glowing it could have been made of stained glass. Marzipan’s fur ruffled in the breeze, and Webern thought of how Bo-Bo used to trim it with a pair of rusty, grinding scissors. He wondered who would do it now, and he felt a pressure in his chest so strong that it was like his own heart was choking to death.

Marzipan’s feet slapped the pavement as they walked through the night-dark town. Webern played games in his mind: he imagined that he was a little boy, and that Marzipan was his kid sister; he imagined that he lived in a house with Nepenthe, that people came to his own backyard to see his circus shows. He imagined that he was a doctor and that tomorrow he was shipping off to Vietnam, where he’d be made a hero for gathering up all the blown-off limbs of his fellow soldiers and gluing them back into place.

When he got tired of these games, Webern tried to remember the little train-car room he shared with Nepenthe, down to the very last detail. He tried to picture her lying there, her hair a mass of loose curls, her scales drinking in cool moonlight and steaming off heat. He loved her so much it twisted in him; he almost couldn’t believe that he would get to go back to her and that woozy train-world, where bottles rolled across the floor and the world slid by endlessly, too big to ever use up.

Webern and Marzipan stopped in an all-night diner, with glossy laminated menus that showed pictures of the food. The fry cook looked askance at Marzipan until she pointed to the Denver omelet. Webern drank a glass of orange juice with ice cubes in it that chattered. Then they walked back to the house and sat on the stoop for a time.

As the light began to grey the sky, Webern was struck by how much Marzipan’s wrinkled, malleable face resembled Bo-Bo’s. He wanted to warn the chimp that her life was about to change, but he didn’t know what words to say. So instead they sat there without speaking, completely silent except for the heavy animal sound of Marzipan’s breath. Only after morning came, really and truly, and people started coming out their front doors, did Webern and Marzipan go back inside.

“Bo-Bo?”

Down at the bottom of the stairs, Webern found the coffin again. This time, the lid was shut.

When Webern opened the grave-card on the mantelpiece, he found the undertaker’s number inside. He dialed it on the heavy, clanking wheel of Bo-Bo’s rotary telephone. The undertaker sounded delighted.

“Your grandmother was a wonderful woman. So kind-hearted to send business my way. Especially at a time like this. With all the ugly rumours that’ve been circulating about me, I was starting to think I wouldn’t break even this year.”

“Well,” said Webern. He stared at the coffin down the hall. “I’m sure they’re unfounded.”

“Unfounded?” The undertaker said the word like he’d never heard it before. “Oh, the rumours. Ha ha ha. Unfounded. Of course they are.”

The undertaker was still laughing nervously when Webern hung up the receiver and went into the sunroom to wait for the hearse. Marzipan was already there, hanging from the curtain rod by one hand. Webern stopped in the doorway and looked up at her. It was the first time he’d seen her do anything so monkeylike. Marzipan gazed down at him, her face moulded into an exaggerated frown. She let out a single cry—high-pitched, lingering, and forlorn—then dropped to the ground and swung out of the room on her knuckles. Webern turned to watch her go down the hallway. She paused for a moment beside the coffin, unfastened and shucked off her yellow overalls, then draped them over the lid. Naked, she swung on past, around a corner where he couldn’t see.

Webern had never been in the house without Bo-Bo. He opened the sunroom drapes and for the first time saw the yard in daylight. It was pitifully small, with scraggly, wheat-headed grasses, shards of skeet, and a lightning struck tree that raised its burnt black arms to the sky. A dying raccoon writhed in one of the steel traps. Webern started to shut the drapes again. As he did, something dark and shapeless fluttered near the trunk of the ruined tree. But when he turned his head to look, whatever it was had disappeared.

Webern sat down on the davenport. He took the blue velvet box out of his pocket and opened it. The glass eye felt cool and heavy in his hand. He wondered how he could contact his father, if their phone number could possibly be the same after all these years. Webern pulled off his shoes. Maybe if he dialled home, he wouldn’t reach his father. Instead, another, equally impossible person from his history would answer: his mother, his rhyming sisters, his old friend Wags, his own scrawny, fearful, six-year-old self.