Piper (2 page)

People screamed. The casket rocked on its webbing, and I thought it was going to plummet down on top of him. Father Tombari, who was so self-assured reciting his prayers, became helpless and gathered his vestments around his legs. Dad and I bent over and peered down into the hole, but it was so bright above ground that my pupils couldn't dilate wide enough to see anything.

I knew this was going to turn out to be another Willard story. People still talked about the time he'd broken up Grandma Carol's marriage to another man by firing a shotgun into the ceiling of a Lutheran Church over in the Okanogan Valley. The strategy worked because they locked up Willard, and Grandma Carol broke off the engagement and later married him. When she was in the hospital dying of emphysema he snuck in at night and got into bed with her under the oxygen tent. Willard had trouble with wrong endings.

The Coopers moved to Stampede after World War II, and Willard took over the Phillips 66 station that was later razed and never rebuilt. To Willard's regret, the site was now packed with rows of scrap metal, used rain gutters, towing chains, steel rods, rowboat bottoms, all inside a fence with a hand-painted sign that said “NX + MFT = LSD.” Whoever ran it was never there.

“I don't know whether it's an outdoor hardware store or an indoor wrecking yard,” Willard said.

It wasn't the big things as much as the little things that drew attention to Willard. He once showed up for a musical tribute to Rodgers and Hammerstein at school in a Scottish plaid sportcoat and a pair of Vaudevillian blue-and-white striped pants with a big safety pin to hold the fly shut. Mom said his dress had deteriorated after Grandma Carol's death when he started buying his clothes at garage sales. Stampede was small enough that people recognized the clothes on Willard by their former owners.

The funeral director and the maintenance man at the cemetery finally had to take Mom's casket off the webbing and slide the support apparatus out from over the hole. With the help of a stepladder they managed to rescue diminutive Willard. There was a knob on his forehead, his tongue was cut where his teeth had clamped together when the chrome caught his chin, and the baggy navy blue suit that used to belong to the president of the local savings bank was dabbed with mud. But Willard was conscious and climbed the ladder on his own, mumbling something about the darn flowers.

Dad was the first person to him, grabbing him by one of his padded shoulders. “You stay right here with me,” he said, and I thought I heard him add, “you old coot.”

Willard just stood there at parade rest, licking his wounds for the remainder of the ceremony, while Father Tombari re-blessed the casket.

She died on August twenty-seventh, so I had about a week to decide whether to run away or go back to school. I dreaded going to school. There had always been this undercurrent of curiosity about my mother because she painted nudes and played billiards at the Comet and didn't make layer cakes for the bake sales. I had to admit she'd been a source of anxiety growing up, like when I found out she'd raised her hand at parents' night to ask whether the school was going to make condoms available for the students. But she always defended me. When I refused to wear gym shorts for PE and the school sent a note home, she called the principal and interrupted his dinner.

“Are you running a school or a chorus line?” she said. “You tell them to practice abstinence, then you make them run around half naked in PE. My daughter will undress when and for whom she chooses.”

I never knew what she'd say or what she wouldn't do that would put me out of synch with everyone else. And in Stampede, kids were held responsible for the behavior of their parents.

The first night Dad worked late at the paper after the funeral I dug the barber set out of the linen closet and stationed myself in front of Mom's dresser mirror. I'd once let my hair grow to the bottom of my shoulder blades like Mom's, but unlike hers, mine was dry and without sheen. I plugged in the clippers, stripped off the comb attachment, and tested it on my forearm. The vibration warmed my skin as I skidded it from wrist to elbow, the teeth of the blades accumulating curlicues of fuzz that fell into my lap. I pressed harder on the second swipe, creating a furless rectangle. I held the clippers against my cheek and just let it run. The buzz made me drowsy. Then I turned it around so that the blades were pointing straight at me and put it on the center of my forehead.
One thousand, two thousand, three thousand.
…

With my eyes closed, I mowed the clippers over the top of my skull and listened to the motor as it dumped the first strip down the back of my neck. My hair was kinky if I didn't wash it and it felt good to see it fall in clumps onto the floor around me. Separated from my head the hair looked lighter, almost blonde instead of walrus brown. I felt the places I'd missed with my hand and kept buzzing my scalp until the clippers were too hot to hold. Then I went into the upstairs bathroom and found one of Mom's plastic razors in the soapdish next to the tub, lathered my head with suds, and scraped myself with the razor until I was as smooth as a wet peach.

When I had wiped off with a bath towel, I stood in front of the mirror again. The skin where hair used to be was pale, with a tinge of green. My forehead was a huge expanse of wasted space that made the scrunching together of my eyes, nose, and mouth seem like bad planning. There were blue veins over my eyebrows with pathways that ran up the skull that I noticed for the first time. When I opened and closed my mouth, the jawbones moved enormous muscles underneath the temples. I looked like a monkey, but I couldn't just do nothing. I had to offer some protest. Besides, I'd become obsessed with the idea that I was also going to die by my hair, catch it on fire, entangle it in the press at the paper, or somebody was going to just tie a hank of it to their bumper and drag me around until they wore the skin off me. Almost as if I was afraid of what I'd done, I swept up the hair on the floor with the sides of my hands as best I could, stuffed it into a leftover lunch sack, and hid it in my dresser.

“You look like a skinhead,” Dad told me next morning, which I knew from his moral compass was the wrong direction to go. That night, he called me downstairs and I could tell by the narrow set of his eyes that something was wrong. “I'm taking you to see Father Tombari,” he said.

“I'm fine, Dad. Some people are doing tattoos and rings in their lips. It's just a kid thing.”

For the next several nights, I could hear his footsteps on the stairs and see his shoes darken the crack under my door as he checked up on me, which I obliged by taking long audible breaths until the full length of the crack lit up again.

Dad was the one we had to worry about. Besides his longer hours at the paper, he'd taken to fixing himself a drink when he came home—gin, vermouth, and marinated onions. He didn't even measure the ingredients, just glugged them into a glass, and swigged them down. Nor was his drinking confined to the house. One night a police car pulled up and two policemen practically had to drag him up the sidewalk to the front door. Next day I found out he'd gotten into a fistfight at the Comet Tavern when someone asked him if it was easier to keep track of his wife's whereabouts now.

Some days he seemed to revere her memory, like the night I heard rustling in the attic and found him sitting on the floor in his underpants and socks surrounded by rows of family photos. One morning I came down for breakfast and he was out back stoking a fire in the barbecue grill that turned out to be Mom's brushes and oils. Later, I noticed he'd hauled one of her unfinished canvasses out of the attic and hung it in their bedroom. He put paintings up and took them down, sometimes both on the same day.

I couldn't blame him for wanting to stay away from the house. Every room was marked by her absence—the candle chandelier over the dining room table, the bean bag chairs in the living room she'd saved from college, the unframed canvas over my bed of the wobbly fawn in the long corridor I'd chosen as my own while she was still alive. Dozens more unsold paintings leaned like dominoes against available walls throughout the house.

I didn't know if it would help more to talk with Dad about her or to totally ignore the subject. I thought we should be making visits to her gravesite, kneeling and wailing together on her stone, but as far as I knew Dad hadn't gone out there since we buried her. He certainly hadn't volunteered her name in a conversation, which was unnatural because it was obvious she was the main thing on his mind.

Through notes I'd left on his bathroom sink, I tried to plan meals together and then he'd come home late and I'd eat alone anyway. He was always at the newspaper or a city council meeting or school board and I was usually in my room reading. “The best stories never break on day shift,” he told me. I wanted to scream at him for acting as if nothing had happened, but what was the use? We were practically strangers to each other and, without Mom, we'd lost our broker.

You'd have thought I had bird shit on my head the way everyone stared at me the first day back at school. I wanted to interpret their silence as respect for the dead, thinking they couldn't criticize me without criticizing her. Even though Dad's newspaper article had finessed around the deeper implications of the story, the sheer horror of how she'd died had rocked everyone back on their heels. For some, the drowning had made her a martyr. The grace period at school, however, was short-lived. Behind locker doors and in the cafeteria line the grapevine bristled with thorns.

“She had hinges on her heels,” someone said.

Condon Bagmore at least had the temerity to speak to my face. He was the kid who'd lost an older brother when his chute didn't open while skydiving at Harvey Field. He was one of the people I'd thought of when Mom died. I couldn't ever look at Condon Bagmore without thinking of how his brother had died, but rather than soften him the loss had made him bitter. I'd always been attracted to Condon in grade school, and not just because of the wavy Adonis locks that slipped over his forehead like honeysuckle. He had a rawness that refused to be haltered.

I was on my way to sociology class and the crowd around Bagmore was blocking my path. There was always a crowd around him, the kids whose lot in life was to inherit his cliches and hand-me-down girlfriends.

“Hey, Scanlon, come here,” he said, leaning against the lockers, glancing behind as if pretending to make sure no one would hear him. He looked down at his crotch and my eyes couldn't help but follow his. There was a noticeable bulge in his pants that I figured had to be ping-pong balls to enhance what nature had probably cheated him of. He cupped himself to adjust things. “The hair's gotta come back, kid.” His boys tittered.

“Why's that, Bagmore?”

He looked around again to make sure everyone was listening. “'Cause swear to God, it's the only way anyone's gonna know you're a dame.”

You, nonstarter
, I thought. He put his fists against his chest where a woman's breasts would be, and his boys tittered again. I couldn't help myself. I kneed him in the ping-pong balls and watched him buckle over in disbelief. I knew I wasn't really being fair because even Bagmore wasn't going to hit a girl in public, but I couldn't have cared less. As I walked away, I asked myself what Mom would have done and, of course, the question was ridiculous from the get-go because nobody would have questioned her sexuality. Me, I was gangly, undernourished, over-read, cheeky, now bald, and pissed off at the whole world.

2

When I was still small enough to sleep in the sleigh bed Mom had used as a child, she would climb under the covers and tell me bedtime stories about her and Grandpa Willard when she was young.

“When the circus unloaded from the train in Everett, Daddy and I would be there, watching the elephants parade and poop down the street.”

“Did Grandma Carol go?”

“Crowds gave her heartburn.” That was something I could understand, even as a child. After all, the most frightening part of the world was the other people. “We'd get in these tug of wars where she didn't want me riding horses because of what happened to someone she knew as a child. My mother always had a doom and gloom story to go with everything. People choking on fishbones, ladder rungs collapsing. And Daddy would nod his head and tisk tisk along with her. Then the first lonely cow we'd see in a pasture, he'd stop the car and climb through the barbed wire to pet it.”

“No way.”

She stroked my arm. “Don't act so surprised. You're just like him.”

Grandpa Willard covered for her when she had a boyfriend by saying she was over at a girlfriend's doing homework. “‘Kitty,' he liked to call me Kitty, ‘I know the boy's father and I'll beat the stuffing out of him if that kid so much as touches you.' Not that I was going to tell him.” She laughed and I wondered even as she was telling me these stories whether this was good parenting. Wasn't she worried I'd take these indiscretions and coverups as invitations to try the same thing on her? But Mom seemed to glory in making me feel I was missing out on my youth by not fooling around more. The picture of her childhood that emerged was a conspiracy between her and Grandpa Willard against her stick-in-the-mud mother. It seemed strange to me at the time that a young girl would buddy up to an old man when she could have had her mother, but the idea of a co-conspirator of any sex had obvious appeal.

When I turned ten Mom took me downtown to Marge's Cafe for a club sandwich with a toothpick and a flag in it. I blushed when Marge brought over a wedge of peach pie with candles blazing on top. Mom started singing happy birthday and everyone else in the restaurant joined in. As we were coming out, somebody hit a putty gray VW bug at the only signal in Stampede and spun it around right before our eyes. Shards of glass sprayed across the asphalt and the front of the VW ended up wedged under the elevated boardwalk. If it had careened in the other direction, it would have decapitated the landmark drinking fountain with the brass foot pedal that said “Brock Manufacturing, Cincinnati, Ohio” on the lever.