High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel (11 page)

Like it usually went, Issy’s dad was a suspect at first, but he was cleared. I seem to remember this ruined what was left of that marriage. I definitely remember Mom sitting me down to tell me about Issy. She said she had some news to share with me, and that I needed to be a “young man” about it. She called me that, a young man. And this made such a powerful impression on me, because I’d been called a young man by the elder brothers in our congregation ever since I started giving sermons and scripture recitals at church. “
What a fine young man … A fine example for the other boys…”

But, until Issy, I was just a boy to Mom.

He and his mother hadn’t been to church that week, which wasn’t so strange a thing because, like I said, sometimes he went with us, and sometimes his dad dropped him off and he went by himself. Sometimes he wouldn’t go to church at all. But by the time Mom talked to me, the whole congregation was already whispering about his disappearance. It was on the local news, in the papers.

She said, “Young man, this world is sick and tired and broken, and one day our Heavenly Father will fix it. But until then, bad things happen. What you’re hearing about Issy is one of those things, because no matter where he is, it’s not where he wants to be, which is home and safe with his family. I want you to pray for him, okay?”

I remembered her makeup, and how much she seemed to have on while she talked to me, how there was a lot more on her face than usual, and how the ceiling fan in our foyer was spinning just above us. I came to know the word “foundation” around this time. Makeup fascinated me, because I figured I was supposed to like it on girls but I really didn’t, the UNO girls on the roof wore no makeup, and wasn’t it sort of like paint? This made me suspicious. I used to wonder what would happen if you kissed a girl who had a lot of makeup on. Would it get on your face and your hands? On your shirt? I thought girls mostly wore makeup to hide problems on their face. Issy’s mom, for instance, wore lots of makeup to cover the pocks and marks. Mom, though, just looked so tired. I looked up at her and I considered the safety of ceiling fans, wondering whether the speed at which they spun was quick enough to take off somebody’s head. I was confused.

Mom and I talked—I don’t think I said much—and then Dad led me into the garage when she wasn’t looking and asked me where Issy was.

“Tell me,” he said.

I thought I was in trouble. “But I wasn’t with him. How could I know?”

He asked me to concentrate, and said, “I don’t mean know where he is like that.” Dad asked me to think of Issy, only Issy, to try and reach up to God. He asked me to see if Issy was in Heaven.

He said, “You need to take this seriously.”

“Commune,” he said. “It’s in your blood.”

This only made me more confused. So I was relieved when Mom suddenly took me away by the hand. She glared back at Dad, and led me into the house. I couldn’t know what that glare was about, not really, only it appeared Mom and Dad thought differently about some things. About me. They were different people. I don’t think I really knew this before. From then on I wasn’t surprised when they had opposite opinions, or when my mom got mad at Dad for whatever reason. I think it was then, when Dad told me to commune, and when I did try to do it, later, in my room—I seriously did—that I began to question what had happened onstage that summer. Maybe not in some clear way, but I certainly asked myself how what Dad called communing with God was different than praying to God. I prayed to God and I did ask Him to tell me where Issy was. So many times I asked this. I also recall hearing my own voice asking for an answer and I remember making a small sound. A kind of “Oh.” My voice. I heard my voice, it was me. Dad asked me again, later that week, in a roundabout way, and I said I couldn’t do what he wanted. I didn’t know how, and I asked him to please not be mad at me. His face fell. We never talked about it again.

I want to say such sad and harrowing news of Issy made me cry, made me weep, but it didn’t. Kids are too self-involved. Or I was, anyway, in the way that young kids can be: life will never end, and my parents will always be here.… But there was
something.
I didn’t know what, a disturbance in my system of things, a first ripple in the unbothered water. Things did not add up. Where did he go? I asked myself that a lot. I prayed about it, thinking maybe I did have special access to God. But He never answered. One afternoon, I went out back and I cut at the one of the maples with a steak knife. I slashed at the tree. I threw the knife at the dirt at the base of the tree like I was throwing a hatchet. I pulled it from the dirt and I looked at the small hole I had made, and I punched the dirt as hard as I could. There was a small rock there and it cut the back of my hand, and like a bruised piece of fruit I now had a soft spot.

Weirdly, the church brothers started paying me even more attention. They sat me down in the back room and explained that Issy’s disappearance was solid proof we were in the Final Days, and that he was my closest friend was proof of my gift. Satanic forces were actively working against me. Be careful. I must remain strong. And so it was time I give another sermon, perhaps at another local congregation.

I wanted nothing of the sort.

I looked around at the elder brothers. They were so tall.

“Where’s my dad?”

There was a drop ceiling above us, rectangular foam tiles propped by metal ribbing, and I was filled with a sudden urge to push aside a tile and see what lay beyond there. Pipes? Electrical wiring? A dark empty space.

“Your father gave us his blessing,” one of them said.

But I didn’t want to give sermons anymore. Why? Because I was afraid it would happen again. I couldn’t really put it into words, but it was the total loss of self onstage, in front of everybody—or is that the right way to put it? Maybe the opposite. I knew what I’d done up there was
special,
like nothing anybody there had ever seen. Certainly like nothing I’d ever seen, or done, and yet I’d been physically compelled to do it. It wasn’t by choice, didn’t feel like a choice. But I also knew very well what I had done, knew that it was me who had done it, even though I didn’t exactly know what I was doing at the time. I imagine it like the way a child actor can’t stay away from a camera the very first time he sees one, and he never knows explicitly why. An infant, and he’s posing for pictures! All I knew was that getting onstage would mean doing that “thing” again, playing that part, and, frankly, it meant talking about God doing terrible things to fine people. How did I know who was or wasn’t good? It meant talking about blood, and war, and vengeance, and getting nice people, as far as I could tell, to applaud for it. I could not have articulated this at the time, but I felt it inside my body. In my skin. And I was also a little afraid that it
wouldn’t
happen—I’ll admit that now: that I could never do it again. I was afraid to find out.

Plus the kids in church, they had already avoided me, but now, after Issy, they acted like I carried some kind of contagion. Get too close and disappear. Havi claimed he was Issy’s best friend, probably for the attention, although by that time I knew it wasn’t true. Some of the others, the older ones, closer to twenty, now started paying me attention. I was invited for after-church lunches. Let’s go to a diner, and see a movie at the Woodhaven Boulevard Cinemas. I think they had some vague religious ambitions, and thought befriending me would improve their standing. I just wanted to be alone. But soon it was settled. Again in the back room, this time with Dad and the congregation elders. I would give a short sermon at the end of October on the satanic evils of Halloween. On devils, and witches, and ghosts, all abominations in the eyes of the Lord.

The year before, a few neighborhood boys were seen trick-or-treating dressed up like the rock band KISS. Obviously because of a local demonic influence. Just look to the acronymic herald: Kids In Satan’s Service. It would be years before I got the unintended irony, when I first heard “Rock and Roll All Nite,” and pretty much anything else from their totally benign catalogue. Evil as Saturday morning cartoons. Nevertheless, my subject: “The Satanic Dangers of Halloween, and the Everyday Demonic Influences Around Us.” Dad was enthused. Mom was not.

Was the timing appropriate? I mean, there was Issy to think about, and
that
was what I should have been doing—as a family, what
all
of us should have been doing. Praying for Issy.

She said, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t like it.”

This was in the living room, at the table. We were having our weekly Bible study and she just came out with it.

Dad said, “Let’s not argue in front of the boy.”

That same week Mom went to the doctor, and told him how tired she always was, whole-body tired, and it wasn’t long after that we found out she had cancer. I ran off into the backyard, and sat myself again beside the maples Issy and I used to climb, and I tried to not think about it at all. I slapped at the ground beside me. It didn’t hurt much and so I got on my knees and I punched at the ground. Punched like I wanted to hurt it. And then I stood up and I looked at one of the maples, imagining one of them was me, and one was Issy, and I touched it with a knuckle to see how hard it was. I cocked back my fist, such a small fist, and I punched the tree. I scraped my knuckles on the bark. They bled. I punched it again, squarely, and I heard my knuckle snap. I started crying, and sat back down in the dirt. I prayed, cradling one hand in the other. Where had he gone? Why had he gone anywhere at all? And why
that
summer? I must have asked for this. Maybe I hadn’t talked with God himself, not had a conversation with him, not a dialogue, but that didn’t mean he didn’t hear me. My God, what had I done? I’d called out and asked for the End. I’d rolled out a red welcome carpet, and, yes, I didn’t know what this meant, not then: that really this meant death. Real blood. Red blood. But it was becoming clearer to me. It hadn’t touched me yet, not exactly, but nonlife, nonbeing, the hole in the air that Issy now was, that
had
touched me, and I couldn’t help but make a connection between the two. Here was the one kid who let me in, who treated me like a kid, like I wanted to be treated, and so I acted like a kid, the way I wished I could act with the other kids, or with my father. Here was the kid who became my brother, who made me feel less lonely, and now he was gone. My best friend, who never once seemed anxious or afraid. I used to wonder whether Issy somehow knew this would happen, that it was coming. Otherwise, why had we compressed what felt like years of friendship into months, weeks into days, hours? I wondered if it was my fault, whether God had simply answered my call. Issy was the first one to go. And now maybe Mom would go next.

All this remembering took work, and walking up and down Dad’s block, taking in the pungent nighttime neighborhood air, I got hungry. And thirsty, and I hoped to scare up some booze. I wanted to sit on the back porch and get tipsy. I wanted to look at the maples. Those same trees. Was it possible? The same dirt? I went back inside and stopped by the bathroom and listened there for Dad. He was talking in his sleep, mumbling. I said his name, quietly. Nothing. I heard his breath quicken and slow, quicken and slow, and I imagined his legs moving like how a dog’s legs quiver when the dog dreams of a chase. I tried the doorknob. It was locked. I looked at the red light and walked away into the kitchen, opened the fridge and took out the butter. I rifled through drawers in search of a knife, found one, cut a thick slice of bread. I looked at the kitchen, at the cat turds, at the trash on so many surfaces. I took the bottle from the fridge. Uncorked, and nearly empty. I said to myself, If I don’t move a muscle, then maybe the room will feel clean. I moved, and something crunched underfoot.

On the far wall, there was a simple wooden cross and beside it a decorative plate. I walked closer. These were new. Maybe not
new,
but I’d never seen them before. A gold Star of David was painted in the center of the dish. And burned into the wooden cross, on the horizontal piece were the words “Beth Sarim,” and on the vertical, in smaller letters, “O. Laudermilk, 1930.” I wondered who the “O.” was. I knew my father’s father was an Orville, and I think he shared the name with his father, my great-grandfather. But I could’ve been wrong. Probably my grandfather’s. I had no idea who Beth Sarim was. Beside the cross was the backyard door. I pulled, but the door was stuck. The weather had done what it does, and the door felt grafted to the frame. I pulled, and again I pulled, until the door gave way, and stray leaves and string, paper cups and newspaper wads, all in an upswept pile against the door, tumbled into the kitchen. I jogged back to the counter. Grabbed the bread and the wine.

It was a quiet evening, and the kerosene smell seemed less everywhere now, and there were lights in the neighboring windows. In a back window of the house behind ours, a family was sitting around a table, and the father, or I assume it was the father, was talking lively with his hands. The backyard was smaller than I remembered. All overgrown with weeds and littered with beer cans and bottles, probably from neighborhood kids. Three bald rubber tires were stacked beside a pile of paint cans, and a twisted bike knotted like a ribbon sat on top of a red metal car hood. The Ford Country Squire! —No. And just as fast, I remembered that poor thing had been repossessed, not so long after Dad brought it home. Because the world in fact kept turning, and it turned out we couldn’t afford the payments. At the back fence, like a V jutting from the ground, were the same two maples.

The evening breeze was slight. The leaves up top were flitting. I sat on the back porch steps.

The wine was cold and not bad at all and I watched evening come down behind the houses. The pearlike shadows of the Sikh temple domes darkened against the sky. I’m here, I’m right here, I thought to myself. And Dad’s here, too, right there inside and asleep. He’s alive. But the man should be in a bed. Were there beds anymore? Upstairs? I hadn’t even been upstairs yet. More wine. Too many years had sloughed off this place, like paint peeling from a surface, all of it and everywhere else, the backyard and metal fence, the rusting wrought-iron porch railing, the blue mailboxes on the street corners, and the ice cream trucks, takeout delivery guys on bikes, and the next-door neighbors asleep in their beds or watching the nightly news in easy chairs, from all of this and everything, the years were sloughing off too fast. What happens next? We’d hug in the bright morning, avoiding all mirrors, and cheer flat beer until he finally gave up and died, “went home.” I opened my phone and the digital green display lit up. I looked at the numbers.