Piper (6 page)

Dirk sat down on the floor, untied his Nikes, and began restringing them to get the laces even. He stuck his little finger in his ear and ratcheted it back and forth, then studied the wax on the tip of it before wiping it on the back of his pants. “If
my
mom ever kicked the bucket, I'd be outta there.”

“That's different.”

He licked the frayed end of the lace and twisted it into a point. “You're not shittin' it's different. Your dad's human.”

“He leaves me alone,” I said, as if that were an asset. In fact, I would have welcomed a little meddling. I'd rationalized Dad's aloofness since Mom's death by reminding myself that he wasn't my real father. In my theory of creation, there was no such thing as genetics anyway; everyone was free-floating, ad hoc. Heaven was filled with amateur artists and each soul was a new canvas. God handed out paint brushes and said, see what you can do with them. They'd painted Dad with a Roman collar, Mom with a great body, and me with no breasts and a giraffe's neck.

When Dirk finished tying his shoes and tucked in his shirt, I opened the window over the porch roof to let him out, head first. I had to slide his socks down and hold onto his ankles, which were smooth and hairless, until his hands reached the asphalt shingles. From there, I knew he could shinny his way down the maple tree that had worked its way into the eaves because I'd done it plenty of times myself.

As I watched him tip-toe toward the alley between the dead corn stalks and barren tomato vines, I remembered one of the big dinners at our house for the newspaper staff when Mom had adorned the house with vases of wildflowers and mustard weeds. Through the rails of the banister, I watched them after dessert begging Dad to do a poem, and he waved them off until Mom dragged a kitchen chair into the middle of the living room and led Dad over to it with her little finger. “He just needs a stage,” she said.

Dad stood up on the chair, cleared his throat, and recited Yeats' “Innisfree” by heart. There was an Irish lilt in his voice and the air in the room seemed strewn with Stardust as he spoke. Maybe this was the mysticism Seamus had spoken of. When he was done, Dad pushed the chair back to restore noise to the room and seemed almost embarrassed by the respect they'd paid him with their gaping silence.

As I stared out the back window, I also thought of running away. It was probably the honorable thing to do in the circumstances. But then I remembered how people had bad-mouthed my mother and I felt like a traitor for even entertaining the notion.

I was needed here in Stampede to make sure no one trampled on her grave.

4

While I was waiting for Dad to show up for dinner, Marge brought me a piece of chocolate pie with whipping cream around the perimeter that had been squeezed through a pastry nozzle in a star pattern. The mustard stain on her uniform was at eye level.

“It's the first wedge of the pie,” she said, “the one your dad always gets.” For Marge, food was love. She was pleasantly plump and invited others to join in her quest.
Love thy neighbor as thyself
. I knew what was going on though: Marge was trying to restore normalcy.

“No thanks, maybe later,” I said, shoving the plate with my thumb to the center of the table. I used to love to come into Marge's and sit on my legs on one of the stools and joke with her until she gave me someone's leftover french fries or the part of the milkshake in the steel mixing canister that didn't fit into the customer's soda glass, but that was then. Now I wanted change.

“Shame on you, honey. I can practically see your ribs. Your father must be starving you.” What she really wanted to know was how things were going at home without Mom. She clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth. She must have been a knockout when she was young: high cheekbones, good eyes, full figure. She seemed oblivious to the transformation that time had accomplished on her and she always flirted playfully with my dad.

“Really, Marge, I'm eating fine,” I said.

“Got to be well-rounded, honey,” and she put her hands under her breasts and clucked out the side of her mouth, all the time looking straight at my chest. Why did everyone have to have milk jugs for tits?

“Did my dad leave a message?”

“You know better than that. Why do you Scanlons always have to be so busy anyway?” She picked up the pie plate and carried it with both hands back to the counter like it was a religious offering and put it into the refrigerated rack next to the coffee makers. I knew it wasn't the last time I'd see that piece of pie.

Marge's was Stampede's meeting place. It was where the police took their coffee and donut breaks, where salesmen met clients to sell life insurance policies or recruit Amway dealers. It was also where you met your dad to talk about your report card or explain how things were going with a grandpa at home instead of a mother. At least I figured that's why he'd asked me to meet him. There was nothing fancy about Marge's. The pictures on the walls were prints of cattle drives and whiskered cowboys sitting on their haunches around a campfire that probably reminded Marge of Mussellshell, Montana where she'd grown up. The cafe was designed in an L-shape with padded red booths along the windows and matching swivel chairs mounted on pedestals at the counter. No matter the time of day, Marge served breakfast, her two eggs any way you wanted them, little pig sausages, hash browns fried in the sausage juice, and a choice of white and dark toast or homemade biscuits. The smell of grease that had seeped into the foam rubber cushions pretty well dominated the cafe, except for those times when she was baking biscuits. Tonight it was biscuits and there was a sweetness in the air thick enough to chew.

As I sat in the booth, tracing the lines in my palm the astrologist had read, the bells on the back of the door jingled and John Carlisle walked in. I slid over next to the window, turned my head, and watched the vapor wafting out of the exhaust pipe on his refurbished Mercedes. Carlisle collected old cars and fixed them up to look like new. People from all over Puget Sound came to the Stampede Antique Car Festival and drove down Main Street in the annual parade. Mom told me he started it as a way to bridge the distance people put between themselves and the Carlisles, which I thought was a strange choice of activities since John Carlisle and Harry Hosey, the retired banker, were the only people in Stampede with antiques that still ran on their own power. Behind me, I could hear Marge greeting him with the same motherly enthusiasm she'd used with me. I didn't care, as long as she kept him busy. I didn't have a thing to say to that man for the rest of my life.

There was a time when I thought our family had to be the luckiest in town because of how close we were to the Carlisles. The Carlisles were royalty. John Carlisle's father, Stewart, had died in the Vietnam War and there was a natural gas torch permanently lit for him in Klah Hah Ya Park. Stewart Carlisle's heroism in dragging his commanding officer to safety after a firefight in Dak To was better known in Stampede than John F. Kennedy's adventures on the PT 109. In fact people talked like the Carlisles knew the Kennedys. John Carlisle attended school at the Sorbonne, where he studied fine arts, French, and dance, not exactly world-beating skills in a town like Stampede. Mom said he never actually received a degree because of some kind of trouble. “There were letters back and forth with French stamps on them,” is all she said. Instead of medals of honor, John shocked his mother by bringing home women friends like Monique who smoked cigarillos and spit on the sidewalk. The Sorbonne was part of the reason people said John Carlisle was spoiled. The bloodline had run thin. There was never a question about his returning to Stampede, however. Mom said his mother would have disinherited him if he hadn't.

I remembered the time one summer John Carlisle came by the house in a fire engine red jeep and honked in front of our house. He'd been cut by a dance company in New York, moved into the family mansion up on the hill with his invalid mother, and taken over the newspaper even though he was ten years younger than Dad and without a shred of journalism training. He had the window of the jeep rolled down and his green beret was set at a jaunty angle. Me being on the verge of seventh grade, he was what I imagined the playboy of the western world would be.

“Let's go up the Stillaguamish and have a picnic,” he said, revving the engine. “Kate can do some painting.”

I remembered Dad massaging his whiskers and looking at the tires. “I gotta finish a story. Why don't you guys go without me?” This always happened. Dad was the work boy of the western world.

We headed north to Machias with the top down, Mom in the frontseat and me in back, leaning forward far enough to let the strands of her hair tickle my face. I measured the length of my hair against Mom's by feeling how far in back of me it was blowing. When I looked up, there was a propeller plane leaving a tube of white smoke that thickened and rolled away like a snake shedding its skin. The rush of the air was so loud we had to put our heads together to say anything.

At Granite Falls, we turned onto a two-lane road that pointed us toward the Cascades and I could see snow-marbled peaks off in the distance. Each time we passed through a shady section of the road, it cooled down like an air conditioner and the smell of pine rushed up my nostrils the way chlorinated water did when you jumped into the pool without plugging your nose. We stopped at Monte Cristo, a one-time mining town with remnants of old buildings, railway turntables, and mining machinery that Mom wanted to sketch. We made her settle for photographs she could paint from later. She shot an entire roll, taking pains to compose each picture from the perfect angle, close-ups that would turn out to be the slice of a building or have a weird shadow effect. Carlisle sat next to me, on the trunk of a fallen tree, watching her.

“This is a real treat for me,” he said, “to take you and your mom up here.”

“It's okay,” I said.

“Takes a lot to turn your head, doesn't it?”

“No, it's great. Really.”

“Look at her. She's in heaven.”

For our lunch, we hiked up a trail with switchbacks. Carlisle and I took turns carrying the wicker basket, and Mom carried her easel and paints in a brown metal toolbox with drawers that fanned open in tiers. We weren't exactly Lewis and Clark. Carlisle, in his Birkenstocks, wanted to stop at every vista to wipe the sweat off his face with a hanky. I thought Mom would complain, but she seemed energized by the increase in elevation.

“Why did we wait so long to come up here?” she said.

“There is no
here
,” Carlisle said. “The three of us could divide up and hike these mountains every weekend for the rest of our lives and never bump into each other.”

I never forgot Mom's response, which probably explained why she'd taken to Carlisle in the first place. “I couldn't stand to be that alone,” she said.

“It's hyperbole, Mom.”

She smiled and wrapped her arm around me. “See? I told you she's smart.” Her fear of isolation might have also explained our own bond. There was no place she could go, no endeavor so boring, that I didn't want to be with her. I was unconditional company.

Carlisle spread our lunch out on a red and white checkered tablecloth in a heather meadow: artichoke hearts, marinated onions, feta cheese on rye crackers, spiral pasta salad with pesto, a choice of Italian sodas that we iced down with cubes from the tupperware, kiwi and strawberry slices for desert. The champagne was French, of course, and pink. When Carlisle shot the stopper into the lupine and devil's club surrounding us, the champagne fizzed all over the tablecloth before Mom could get her glass under it. I thought it was all a bit dainty and not the fare of pressed ham and pre-sliced cheese that Dad would have chosen, but Mom savored every bite, dunking her strawberries into her champagne and practically kissing the kiwi into her mouth.

After dessert, she set up her easel and tied a scarf around her head to keep the hair out of her eyes. Barefoot and in shorts, I could see the muscles in her legs work as she leaned into her board to sketch the face of the mountain reflected in the stillness of the pond next to us. Carlisle sat on the ground, loosened his belt buckle, and opened up the case I thought contained a telescope. But it was a black piccolo with silver finger buttons that glistened when he played something that sounded like butterflies fluttering over a field of buttercups. Mom put her arms around her middle, closed her eyes, and listened, while a stick of charcoal dangled from between her fingers. John Carlisle's cheeks puffed in and out, the skin stretched beyond normal size. As I watched him pointing his piccolo toward the easel, it was almost as if he was trying to will the picture up out of the paper. I remembered feeling sorry that his family had left him with a newspaper instead of an orchestra or a dance troupe. I didn't know anyone else in Stampede who even listened to classical music much less played an instrument. John Carlisle was a soloist by default.

In those days I was glad Mom had someone like Carlisle, someone besides the typical Stampeder who stopped by wherever she set up her easel and said, “Hey, Van Gogh, why don't you just snap a picture?” As time wore on and the kiddish mucous cleared from my eyes, I began to see him differently. I began to worry about the amount of time she spent with him, at his house, on rides in the country, on the telephone. It started to irritate me the way he bowed and kissed her hand, escorted her by the touch of his fingers into a car, and patted the curve of her waist.

“It's too bad your dad doesn't care for the outdoors,” Carlisle said when we got back to the jeep. He probably meant it as a joke, but my eyes burned tunnels into the back of his head on the way home.

At breakfast the next morning with Mom, I mentioned how I was getting kind of tired of all the Carlisle mystique, and she jumped me.