Little Sister Death (19 page)

I have to see about him.

In a minute.

It may be time for his heart medicine.

He did not reply nor alter the rhythm of his thrusting. She was suddenly devoid of sensation, pushing at him, not playing anymore. The knock came again, and she was fighting him, trying to unwrap his arms, to stop the metronomic piston stroke inside her. She felt cold there between her legs, dead. His arms felt strong as steel bands, his stomach slapping hers. She could feel his hot breath on her throat.

She heard him fall against the wall, slide down it. David, please, she was crying, feeling him thrusting faster, beginning to come just as she shoved with all her might against him, forcing him off the side of the bed onto the floor, his penis sliding out of her.

Goddamn, David said.

She had a momentary vision of him leaping up, standing there naked and outraged, pendulous cock swinging. For a long time, that was the way she saw him: an enormous engorged penis swinging from a diminutive insignificant little man so far behind it you could barely make him out.

Her father was dead when she ran into the room, his face slack, eyes bulging and dull.

The will was read. There was twelve thousand dollars. Corrie had been his favorite.

Yet no one knew about that knock except she and David, and they had never spoken of it. The closest to an apology he had come was the gentle way he treated her the next week or so.

No one knew, so she must have dreamed it. Or, she had half a thought she wouldn’t let herself pursue: the house knew.

Late in the afternoon he would walk back across the fields and watch dark fall over the homeplace. Dusk gathered first in the dell where lay the ruins of the old houseplace, and it seemed to Binder that dusk dwelt there always, crept out when the shadows lengthened like ink seeping into blotting paper. He knelt against a great beech and smoked his third cigarette of the day, watched the mosaic of trees go dimensionless and depthless, jagged brushstrokes rendering black trees against the paler heavens. A solitary whippoorwill called. Night birds took up the cry. A moon of palest rose cradled up out of the hollow, cypresses darkened to red as the day waned. Dusk drew on and the moon turned the color of blood, fierce and malign, enormous, he felt he could rise and stretch his arms and touch it. A foreign moon out of another age and another world, it should have risen over Stonehenge a thousand years ago. The skeletal pear tree turned to a twisted hieroglyphic of blackened bone, a clue left him by a prior race could he but decipher it.

David, he could hear her calling, and for a moment he had forgotten who and where he was and the voice seemed to have drifted across a hundred years of ruined landscape.

He crushed the cigarette carefully against the heel of his shoe and arose. He went through the old cemetery, mostly given now to scrub sassafras and sumac, marble tombs, graven angels and crumbling spires recumbent in poison oak rising out of the honeysuckle. The lettering so worn you could hardly tell the tale. Old musty yellowed yesterdays, a bloody deranged tale carried to the grave. He thought of the bones beneath this quiet hillside, of the secrets he would never know, the words he would never hear, that had never even been spoken, and he felt an almost tangible sense of loss. J
ACOB
B
EALE
, the oblong block of granite read, N
OW
A
T
R
EST
. Somehow Binder doubted it.

He loved the solitude, the dreamy sameness of the days. Time folded in on itself, one century the same as the next. Time was really only a concept, he thought, a way to get a handle on things, and he had discovered that he didn’t need it: the house must have looked the same a hundred years ago. And the same dark enigma dwelt here then.

He didn’t watch TV anymore except videocassettes with Stephie. He particularly didn’t watch the news anymore. It had come to seem absurd, the curious doings of folk he wanted no truck with, folks fighting and dying in obscure countries for no reason he could fathom, Mercedes-driving good-old-boy evangelists with the clayest of feet, caught in seedy motel rooms playing doctor with whores.

It wasn’t real, none of them were and he wanted no part of any of it. The IRS wasn’t real, nor the CIA or the FBI or IRA or IBM or NBC. It was a game, a complex invention of boys playing grownup, a way to while away the time until the dark fell.

What was real was the slow timeless heart of midday, the sleepy drone of insects, the almost imperceptible murmur of the creek, and the hypnotic way the greengold pillars of light fell shifting through the trees into the haunted dell. The endless-looking fields that undulated away toward vague blue-looking woods, fireflies bobbing random as spirit lights. These are things that matter, he thought, and wondered about the wasted years when he hadn’t known, with a kind of resigned regret. These are things with an aura of permanence about them.

That and the intangible mystery he could not put his finger on, which changed and teased like a will-o’-the-wisp, achingly nostalgic, faintly erotic, a musky heady taste in the back of his mouth, like a lost fragment of a dream or a life he ought to be able to retrieve could he just put his mind to it.

At some clockless hour he arose stiffly from the typewriter and placed what finished manuscript he had in a manila envelope and fastened the thumbclasp and stored it in a desk drawer. Corrie had always read his work and let him know in subtle ways if she thought he was getting a little flamboyant but he was going to sit on this. He wasn’t sure if it was good or bad or indifferent but he did know it was the stuff of nightmares.

He also knew it would be useless to try sleeping for another two or three hours: he slept now when the house slept, as if in some curious way their cycles had become synchronous, catching catnaps in the daytime, dozing in the hot still honeysuckle afternoons. He knew the house was awake now, he could stand in its center and feel its heart beating around him, synced with his own breathing when he breathed, feel its attention on him, alert and focused as a cat watching a broken-winged bird.

He went out. The night was hot and still, holding its breath, not a leaf in motion. The creek murmurous across the polished stone. A whippoorwill called from some vague hollow far away and lost in the dark.

The toolshed was burnished silver in the moonlight, the rusted roof draining off what light there was, the canted door showing a wedged-shaped section of darkness. It was like no darkness that ever was, at once forbidding and achingly evocative and utterly foreign. His feet were damp with dew soaking through his sneakers before he even knew he was approaching it.

He went in the door, the rusted hinge protesting, a darkness here moonlight would not defray. At first he could see nothing, stood swaying in the hot still dark like a man unbalanced by wind or coalesced out of the darkness as if he were consciously creating them, and coincident with his dim vision felt the heat just leave, suddenly just not there anymore, trickles of perspiration down his ribcage gone icecold, the still fetid air, the cold charnel smell of the grave, and the hair prickled on his forearms and at the back of his neck.

There was a manlike bulk crouched in the corner of the toolshed. Heavyset hunkered the way a country man might sit, whittling, and very still, just something manlike and undistinguished moving the old singletrees and tracechains, smell that seemed to take him down bowered dusty roads to a long time ago, a smell compounded of sweat and tobacco and the smell of the warm earth and horses and the springtime smell of time itself, distillate and aphrodisiac.

Then the dark bulk stirred and a slurred voice said out of the darkness: Get you a little drink good buddy.

In a space between the boxing over the door lintel of the toolshed he found a half pint of whiskey three-quarters full: somebody’s hidey-hole, he guessed. He had long become obsessive about searching for artifacts of the place’s past, old bottles, broken tools, nameless chunks of rusted metal, an old one-bitted ax head he found beneath the rotted floorboards. Anything with threads of the past stringing off it, if you didn’t know what the lock looked like, who knew what the key might be?

He unscrewed the cap and drank. Sweet Jesus that’s awful, he said, and a low chuckle came from the corner of the toolshed. In the oblique moonlight he was someone else and he was somewhere he had never been before. He slid the bottle backhanded into a hippocket he hadn’t known he had and the dried-out brogan workshoes he was wearing chafed his ankles. He was walking through luxuriant thick wild oats that came up to his thighs, the path trending through them gleamed like quicksilver, vanished. The world was the same yet different.

The house still sat on its knoll against the hillside but there was no light now, nothing but the brooding bulk of wood and stone and the moonlight on the windows and even the trees looked different, lusher, more opulent, and when he turned, there was a cornfield where no cornfield should be, the rows clocking away into nothingness, the stalks blueblack and gleaming.

A dog brushed the calf of his leg and wended away, toward the creek, without noticing him. Somewhere along the creekbank lost to him in the shadows beneath the sycamores came a young girl’s laughter, achingly sweet and pure and nostalgic as the tinkling sound of some long-lost childhood carnival carillon. He was seized with longing so intense it ached in his chest, he wanted it always to keep, to drag out secretly and study it like a yellowed photograph, and he thought I am home, this is me, this is where I have been rambling down to all these years.

The moon rode above him, cold and still as a world locked in ice. When he raised his head to study it, it was no moon he knew, a moon of other seasons comfortless and uncaring and utterly remote.

A part of him stood aside and thought this is a dream, but I have got to remember this, there is something here I can use. Some lines from W. H. Auden drifted through his mind.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one:

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The creaking of the toolshed hinges drew him slowly around; his body felt foreign to him, awkward, an older man’s body, ill-used and heavy. The canted door swung slowly outward on its one good hinge, and a tide of black blood erupted soundlessly onto the silver grass. The blood pooled in the lowbank near the creek, rising incrementally, foaming in the thick wild oats, eddying onto the worn footpath, staining the moonwhitened road that wound to the bridge. He could feel it lapping about his ankles.

Then in an eyesblink it was gone and he could smell the dew and the wild oats again and three men were clambering over the wooden gate and dropping into the barn lot, dusting themselves off and crossing the yard toward the house, an old frockcoated man with muttonchop whiskers and a heavyset prosperous-looking man in a broad-brimmed hat and a felt-hatted black who walked with a stifflegged shambling gait. They seemed to be talking animatedly among themselves although he could hear no sound. One by one they vanished, as if they filed off the edge of the earth. Then a voice in Binder’s ear said, almost conversationally, Slit the little roundheeled whore’s throat, is what I’d do. A voice sourceless and genderless and somehow mechanical and Binder didn’t even wonder if it was talking to him or not.

A weight of morning light on his eyelids, featureless yellow world, reality seeping in, he awoke by degrees, like a drunk remembering the places he was and the things he did. The toolshed, he thought. Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with me. He felt strange and dislocated, half afraid to open his eyes, caught in the strand of the dream he half wanted to hang onto. Come on, he said, you’re a tough guy. You can do it. He became aware of white ceilings, walls of deep rose, the comforting whir of the air conditioner. He remembered Corrie saying: You had too much to drink last night, and another part of his mind said, Hell yes, the electric pruner, that’s what the damn manlike bulk was.

Corrie slept beside him, her dark hair tousled, a careless arm thrown across her face, and a wave of love and gratitude hit him with such force it left him dizzy. Then he saw the butcher knife. It had been inserted between Corrie’s pillow and the mattress, perhaps eight or ten inches. Beyond her tanned face he could see an inch or so of serrated blade and the fingergrip rosewood handle.

He got up incrementally careful not to jar the bed, noticing without surprise that he was naked, his bare feet clotted with wild oat seeds, soundless across the carpet. She stirred as he eased the knife from beneath the pillow, her eyes opened beneath his face, startled and blue, so close. Lefthanded he slid the knife out of sight under the bed, stroked her cheek with his right. Her eyes were depthless and guileless, so close to his own, eyes you could drown in. Abruptly tears stung his eyes and he hid his face in the soft hollow of her throat. Why, baby, she said, and raised a tender hand to stroke his hair.

It could work the TV now. Stephie had seen it do it with Pooh and Piglet twice. But intuitively she knew that it did not work the electronic things inside the back of the TV but with the things inside her mind or her head. Daddy said the brain was electronic too, just a very complex computer that ran on tiny bits of electricity, but she didn’t believe it and Mommy didn’t either. Mommy said God made it and no man could make anything approaching the mind because the mind was sacred. It had a soul, you unplug it and all it was was a bunch of junk.

She had watched Pooh four or five times before and already knew it word for word, scene for scene. It was the one about the blustery day, when it was raining all over the Hundred Acre Wood.

Daddy was taking a break from writing, and she was sitting on his lap in the recliner, the chair tilted back and Daddy’s socked feet bookending each side of the TV set, Mommy on the couch hemming a pair of curtains, a homey scene out of
lxave It to Beaver
.

The soundtrack was singing, The rain, rain, rain came down, down, down. Pooh and Piglet and Tigger were rambling through the Hundred Acre Wood looking for a house for Owl, Tigger bounding on ahead. They came through a spinney of larch onto a stony field stumbling downhill in the sun, and at the bottom of the field stood the old toolshed, angular and oblique, in the midday heat, the sides encroached with poison oak, greenblack, and simultaneously with the sight of the toolshed Daddy jumped and she could feel the harsh intake of his breath in her hair. The image flickered, muted, as if some light tremor had jarred the Hundred Acre Wood, rumbled way beneath the earth. Daddy had relaxed against the cushions and she knew intuitively that he wasn’t seeing what she was anymore.