Phantom Nights (17 page)

Bobby paused in his doodling, responding to a draft from the hall, where the big standing fans at each end already had been turned on although it was only a few minutes past nine in the morning. Another scorcher on the way. His office door was wide open. Alex was gone.

C
ecily came into the kitchen, where Bobby and Brendan were having a disagreement about the goodness of the Gerber's carrots Bobby was trying to spoon into the baby's mouth, and said, "Alex is outside in the street on his bike, riding around in circles and staring at the house. What do you want to do?"

With his little finger Bobby scooped a dribble of spit and carrots off Brendan's chin and said, "Talk to him. If he'll just quit running off whenever I try." He made another attempt with the carrots and Brendan made a face. "Is it always this hard getting him to eat?"

"You have to sort of play with Brendy when it comes to vegetables. What you do is mix those carrots up with some applesauce."

"I like them better that way myself."

"You didn't say a word about my new dress."

"It's a winner. What do you call that material?"

"Organdy."

"What's your mother wearing to church this morning, sackcloth and ashes?"

"Ha, ha. Wish you were going with us. Everybody thinks you're a heathen."

"I'll repent on my deathbed, Cece." Bobby twisted the cap off ajar of junior applesauce. "Okay, Booger, try this."

"Bobby, I just wish you wouldn't call him that."

"I wish you wouldn't call him 'Brendy.' Sounds like a kid who's signed up for dance school."

Cecily let that one go by. Her mother called from the front of the house, "Cecily, it's six minutes to eleven! Our pew will be full before we get there!"

Bobby got up to give Cecily a kiss. He liked the scent she had on this morning. It came off the nape of her neck when the swivel head of the fan on the sink counter turned toward her.

"Where'd you say you and Bernie were going after church?"

"Visitation. We're taking the casserole I made and some magazines out to Midge Prechter; you know that hip of hers just refuses to heal. Are you sure you won't need me until, say, three o'clock?"

"Huh-uh."

"Just a little bit of carrots and the rest applesauce is how you get it past him," Cecily reminded, giving Brendan a kiss on the forehead where he hadn't managed to splash any of his food.

Bobby smiled and patted Cecily's midsection with his clean hand.

"You going to say anything to your mother about what we suspicion?"

"Sus
pect
."

"I know; I went to college too. That's just my down-home courtroom talk. You never want a jury to think you're smarter than they are. Got to lead 'em to the conclusion you want them to make."

"No, I don't want to say anything to her about another baby. It's just between us, if it's true. Bobby, are you going to let Alex in the house while I'm gone?"

"Yeah."

"Just keep an eye, all right?"

"Sure."

"And you
are
going to tell him?"

"Well, it's come down to that, hasn't it?"

"I know how hard this is on you, Bobby. But it's none of your doing. You know that Alex has been asking for it."

A
lex watched Cecily and her mother drive away in Cecily's Plymouth instead of walking the four blocks to the Methodist church, whose bells and the bells of three other churches around town were tolling eleven o'clock, an all-points summons to the tardy and a reminder to the doubters and backslid few of the community that their sloth or disbelief would not go unreckoned with.

Neither Alex nor Bobby Gambier had been big on churchgoing since the cruel death of their parents. Just the way it was.

Bobby came outside with a cleaned-up and freshly diapered Brendan and put him down to crawl in the grass. He put a booted foot up on one of the painted wagon wheels, covered with climbing roses, on either side of the walk. He had a smoke, compounding his spiritual felonies on the Lord's day.

Alex parked his bike against the low rail-and-lattice fence and came over, reeking of dried sweat. Bobby offered him a drag.

"Now get inside and wash. Change your clothes and don't leave a mess. I'll wait for you on the porch; we've got serious talking to do."

Alex shook his head, held up two fingers together, nodded toward the house. Brendan scrambled toward him and latched onto an ankle, began pulling himself up Alex's leg.

"What do I need to go with you for?" Bobby asked.

Alex gave him a steady look.
Because
.

Bobby shrugged and looked at Brendan. "Want to carry him?"

Alex nodded.

"You two get along, don't you?" Alex lifted Brendan and swung him onto his shoulders. Bobby followed them into the house and up the stairs. Alex's shoulders were getting tired. He handed Brendan over to Bobby and went into the bathroom. Bobby dangled Brendan upside down for a few seconds, which he never did when Cecily was watching, then turned the baby right-side up. They both laughed. "Remember how I told you your eyeballs would fall out if I did that?" Bobby said to Alex. "You believed me too."

Alex had other matters on his mind. In the bathroom he pointed at the tub, then pointed to himself and shook his head vehemently.

"So you didn't do it."

No
.

"Guess it must have been Rhoda or maybe the Antichrist then?"

Alex took a shaker of talcum powder from a shelf and got down on one knee to spread the powder on an eight-by-eight dark blue tile. He wrote in the powder with a forefinger,
She did it dumbass
.

Brendan wanted to get down and play in the powder too. Bobby draped him casually over one shoulder, holding him by the ankles, forgetting that Brendan had just had his lunch.

"Bernie, you mean."

Alex looked up, nodded.

"I can hardly wait to tell that one to Cecily. 'Hey Cece, your mom greased the tub so she'd slip and bust her head open.'" Bobby grimaced after he'd spoken, and he looked away from Alex, staring through the opened windows above the tub, higher than mosquitoes ordinarily traveled.

Alex knew the look on Bobby's face. He got up and dusted his hands on his shorts, unbuttoned his fly, and stood over the toilet. He looked back at Bobby while he was whizzing.

"No, guess that's not why she would've done it," Bobby said, swinging Brendan back and forth like a pendulum.

Brendan squealing with delight until he spit up. Bobby held him upright again and wiped Brendan's mouth on the sleeve of his old Evening Shade High athletic jersey.
Dancing school
, Bobby thought.
Over my dead body; he's a football player
.

Alex flushed the toilet, let his shorts drop. As usual in summer, he wasn't wearing undershorts.

"Bigger than when I saw it last," Bobby commented. "About to beat me out there, you know that?"

Alex smiled a little self-consciously, kicked off his moccasins and stripped his polo shirt.

Bobby held Brendan against his chest and gave him some sugar.

"Don't be calling me dumbass ever, or I'll kick your skinny butt sideways. I already figured it had to be Bernice. I've always been knowing you better than that, and even Cecily needs to admit her mother's got sneaky ways."

B
rendan was pushing himself around on the porch in his baby walker when Alex came outside eating a roast beef sandwich he'd made for himself in the kitchen. Bobby sat in a lawn chair with his back to the painted cement steps to keep Brendan from pushing himself off the porch. Alex sat on a swing and looked at his brother.

"There isn't anything I can do about it," Bobby said. "Because it puts you and me against Cecily and Bernice, and I'm not about to let that happen."

Alex chewed slowly, swallowed, looked at the floorboards and shrugged dispiritedly.

"But Bernie's not coming into my house full-time, made up my mind about that."

Alex looked relieved, for the moment.

"Made up my mind about something else too," Bobby said. "This is about you. You're not a kid anymore. Few more years and you'll be a man. I wouldn't be any good to you as a brother if I didn't think about that. You and me communicate okay, but how do you communicate with other people? Write down everything you feel or want to say? Easier just to pass on by, isn't it, ignore anyone who looks the wrong way at you. Well, you're going to be fourteen. Bad news for you. Life just gets harder. It's already past time when you ought to be learning the language of others who don't hear, can't speak. There's good schools where they'll teach you sign language. Closest one is Louisville. I want you to go there, Alex, because otherwise you won't stand a cut dog's chance. You've got to become part of the world, always improving yourself, not just drifting and living on the edge of things. You can't speak, but there's plenty worse things can happen. The Forney kid is in an iron lung for as long as he lives because he can't do his own breathing. Compared to him, you're lucky. You can see, hear, run, play ball. You're not shut off from two-thirds or all of the world. The world's waiting on you, Alex, to get the chip off your shoulder because you got bad cards once. If it's up to me, which it is, what Cecily thinks or wants doesn't enter into my decision: You're gonna pitch in and get on with life."

Alex sat with his head down, lips parted, breathing through his mouth. Then he gave Bobby a look dense with fear, loathing, and despair. He raised both hands and began waggling fingers in a parody of sign language, grinning hatefully. Bobby stared him down.

"You're scared to be called 'dummy.' But the only way you'll get over it is to share what you're afraid of with others who are like you. You're going to Louisville, Alex. I'm driving us there to the school Monday week, get you signed up, settled in."

Bobby looked at Brendan, who was sagging over in his walker, eyes closing. Nap time. Bobby picked him up and carried him into the house, glancing at Alex, at the back of his head. Feeling a little shaky himself, sympathetic, but glad he had got it over with. Now it was time for Bernie to write that check. Thinking she'd won something. But the answer to that might be in Cecily's belly this minute. They were going to need a lot of room in their house, all the room they had, for boys and girls to grow up. Bernice could spend her winding-down years with men and women her own age, once her arthritis got so bad she couldn't feed herself or brush her teeth.

When he went downstairs again after putting Brendan in his crib, Alex was gone, off somewhere on his blue-and-white Schwinn. But Bobby had expected that. His brother had thinking to do, reality to confront. Grow up a little. Bobby smiled (
I've been wrong, but now I've got it right
), took a deep breath, and saw a sheet of paper under a windshield wiper of the Packard station wagon in the drive. He went down the steps and across the lawn to retrieve the obvious message: "Screw You," probably.

The paper had been folded small enough for Alex to carry in his back pocket. It was a campaign flyer he had pulled off a telephone pole, Leland Howard's smiling, confident face on one side.
Leap Ahead with Leland!
There was, of course, a lot of talk about the young candidate from courthouse loafers and pundits in an election year, the consensus being that Howard was a comer, and if ever a post-Reconstruction Southerner had a chance to be elected President, then—

Bobby turned the flyer over. On the blank obverse, Alex had printed in red crayon:

I SAW HIM
RAPE

MALLY SHAW LAST NIGHT!!

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

A
long with a few other passengers, Ramses Valjean got off the 4:10 from Nashville at the Frisco Railway's depot two blocks from the courthouse square. Ramses wore a red polka-dot bow tie with his dark blue sharkskin suit, which appeared to hang on him as if his weight had crash-dived in recent weeks. The trousers were held up by red suspenders. His hat was a twenties-style cream-colored straw fedora with a wide black band. He was not a sightless man, but he wore the glasses of the blind, little round lenses dark as India ink to fit the orbits of his eyes. Ramses had a lion's head on his gaunt body and sported a short beard with a pure-white crest in it. He carried a pigskin valise in one hand and a black medical bag in the other.