Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (32 page)

Then suddenly he had the Barlow knife out and was working away at the big padlock on the door.

“Sonofabitch,” he said quietly.

“Leave it, Jackie,” I said. “Jackie, leave it.” It was like I was nobody, like nobody was there. The lock stuck firm. Pushing his fedora back on his head, Jackie used the knife to pick his teeth for a moment. Then, with his long pale fingers, he made a series of turns and twists and the lock popped open.

“What,” I squeaked, “the hell you say.”

Jesus, I wanted him to stop. I felt like bawling.

“The equinox,” he said, “it’s a big deal to them. Oh six, two turns to the left, then twenty-one and then . . . that was the combination. I thought of it then, after I saw them ribbons.”

“Let it alone. I don’t want to know. Shut it.”

But now Jackie was picking at another lock, the Yale lock that was deep in the cherry door. Every kid who grew up there knew that the Gypsy king and queen, them dead about fifteen years from a car wreck, was buried in glass boxes with the air sucked out, like saints. The old people said she was dressed in lace and velvet and him in silk, though it was her was royalty. Romany is another breed, with their own church and so forth. I never knew but one; and he was a good man, with nine sons. They keep to themselves.

In the end, Jackie pried the lock right out of the cherry door.

“I’m walking home,” I said to Jackie. “I swear to shit.”

“Woman,” Jackie said evenly, and I saw him glance down at my leg not like he didn’t think of it but on purpose.

I hated him then.

I hated the person on Earth who I never felt anything but as if he was my own reflection.

“Open it,” I said, lighting a smoke so my hands wouldn’t shake so. “Go on. I don’t care. It’s on you.”

He did, and he went up the little marble step. I had to follow him. It wasn’t like there was a big overhead lamp inside. You could barely see.

There were shelves like the benches in a sauna bath, and caskets laid along them, a few of them white and tiny, little mirrors glued on in a circle around the widest part and a painted angel with red wings at the end, where I would imagine the head was. Infants. There were wooden boxes carved with leaves and faces. Older adults.

There was a sound then, of loud bells. Jackie and I grabbed each other. Cold sweat rolled like melted ice down my chest. But it was only those plates and tambors and stuff they had stuck on the outside of the roof, fretting in the wind. Both of us had to laugh.

We walked the few steps to the back.

Her tomb was there just like they said. The queen’s. Glass. We didn’t even look at him, the king.

She was beautiful, her blond braids carefully plaited around her head, her skin as white and soft-looking as soap, the pores the size of the littlest holes in a sponge, but not ugly. The car wreck must have smashed her inside, not her face. She was like a statue. Her eyes were open, with a milky cover, and even if she had been living, they would have looked blind. Around her neck was a rope of pearls in decks. It was like an Egypt collar, with a ruby in the middle the size of one of Nana’s mushrooms. On every finger was another ring, all the stones in them big, square rubies, too.

“Glass,” I said. “They’re glass. You wouldn’t bury a ruby.”

“They’re rubies,” Jackie said. “Glass would be really red.” He took out the knife and started to tap on the glass. “Get a rock,” he said to me

“Nothing doing,” I told him. “A rock’ll sound like a cannon shot in here.”

“I need a diamond,” Jackie said.

“You and me both,” I told him.

“You got a diamond in that graduation ring.”

“It’s just a chip, Jack.”

“But it’ll do. It’s got an edge. Look there. A point shaped like a pyramid.” He took my hand like I was a girl and pulled off the ring, then he cut a fat circle in the glass where the queen’s face was, over and over until the smell of her being dead started to seep through, and then he pushed it in and the sour air rushed out. She didn’t fall to dust or shrivel before our eyes, like you would think. But I couldn’t breathe right in there. It wasn’t putrid, but it wasn’t good. What it was, was like something stewed, set out and forgotten on the back porch, gone bad.

Jackie reached in and took her hand like he was taking her out to the dance floor and removed the rings. I walked out because of the smell, and I heard the rings fall into his pocket, one by one, that
chunk
sound as unmistakable as the sound of cars hitting each other—a sound you never forget once you hear it and it sickens your gut. And then I heard another sound. It was them pearls, pinking the floor like hail. Jackie had cut the necklace with that knife. To get the pearls off her neck of course. He couldn’t have uncurled it. My mind went chasing after the picture of Jackie pulling her forward so the pearls wouldn’t fall down by her feet, maybe trying to wrestle that heavy rope over her crown, the head lolling back and forth, maybe her mouth coming open. I turned around and run the best I could. I didn’t give a goddamn. I limped until my leg was on fire, but I kept on limping and hopping until I was at the pharmacy on Halsted Street. I ordered a vanilla Coke and drank it all in one slug, standing up. Then I didn’t know where the hell to go. I just stood there. When Jackie picked me up there later, he didn’t speak of it. I didn’t either.

We never did.

A week later, Auntie Maggie was wearing one of those short coats with a fox collar. Unkie had a double-breasted suit. He got embarrassed when I saw him wearing it, when I was out delivering flowers for Buffo’s. Jackie bought all kinds of flowers and a golden crucifix for Patricia Finnian, and one night I saw him with her in the Studebaker, her long white arm around him, Jackie just looking straight ahead, although Patricia was easy three years older. He gave new card tables to the sick home, where the simple kids lived. He spent the money fast. I don’t know who he sold the stuff to. Not Jaworsky’s or anybody who knew our family, or we would have heard.

The “desecration” of the tomb was on page one of the
Chicago American
. The queen was named Magda, like my aunt. By then, Jackie was already gone, to basic.

He came home after Christmas.

I took good care of the car. Jackie said I could use it anytime, but I only ever used it on Sundays to drive Nora Finnian around for an hour. And I backed it out into the driveway to wash and wax it. The others came over to look. Pat and Tommy Carney and Louie and Herman Kozyk, even though Herman was already married. It was that good a car. I almost felt like it was mine.

My dad had up and decided I was going to go to college. So I was working at a bank, as a teller, a job he got for me from Mr. Cohacki, who built the apartments where the old Wonderland Ballroom and Hotel stood. I had to wear the same two outfits all week, so Jackie’s sister Karin hid some scraps from her sewing class in high school and made me a red shirt and a blue collar to vary things. She give it to me the week before Jackie come home from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Unkie and Auntie were going to have a party before he was sent out (to the eastern front because he could speak German, Hungarian, and a little Russian and Polish, he was that smart). So I had myself barbered up, a real good shave and a three-dollar haircut.

When I walked in, my mom was having coffee with Auntie Magda.

She dropped her cup and screamed, and my mother looked like she was going to slap me.

Auntie ran upstairs.

“What the hell?” I said, forgetting I just cursed in front of my own mother.

“Are you a fool I raised?” she screamed at me. “You get your hair cut before your cousin is sent to war?” She spat on the ground three times like Nana did if anyone sat at the corner of the table or a bird crashed into the window. “Don’t you know this is a worse omen than you could make up if you tried a million times?” She told me to go back to the barber and get the clippings and burn them, and I said I would, but Jesus Christ, who would do that? I sat on the stoop until I saw Jackie come around the corner of Sheffield Avenue carrying his duffle. Man, he looked a foot taller. He looked like a grown man, instead of only seventeen. I felt like I was his baby brother.

“They work you hard,” he said, rolling up his sleeve to show me his upper arm that looked like it had an apple under the skin. Then he kissed me on both cheeks.

“Will you bring Nora tonight?” he asked me, because he knew from the letters I was seeing Nora, and then Auntie Maggie came running, giving me a look like I made the milk sour.

Reb Jaworsky got drunk that night and toasted Jackie and the other boys for fighting like the Maccabees to save his people and all good people; and the whole neighborhood went in and out the doors until my mother just wadded up the newspapers she always laid down to keep the linoleum clean and sat down on the piano stool. She played old songs like Chopin and waltzes, and new songs about the girls who waited for boys who never come home or boys who did. Nora came when she got off work at the store where she sold perfume.

It happened then. Not long after she got there.

Sure, we had some wine to drink. Jackie said he was used to wine by then. The army gave you beer for free. But I wasn’t drunk. Though Nora was an Irish girl, Jackie gave her our blessing, a kiss on each cheek. “You be good to my brother until I come home,” he said. He nodded at Joanie, who was wearing high heels, though she was only in the sixth grade. “Little Joanie,” he said.

“You’re that handsome in your uniform,” said Nora. I was jealous.

Nora had black hair cut real short the way girls were starting to do then, and the kind of eyes some Irish have, like a pond turned over after a storm. Angry at me because I was stuck on an Irish, my mother still melted when she saw those eyes. Joanie has them, too.

Nora is Sister Mary Dominic now, a Benedictine that’s cloistered. She could be Sister Eleanor Finnian these days if she wanted, but she does not want to. She can only see her sisters and her mother and father twice a year through the bars. She went in the convent when she was eighteen, that same spring. But then, she was just a beautiful girl, who loved a laugh and a dance—a girl among five sisters, whose father thought she’d never find a husband, there being so many Finnian girls. She never said a strange word to me before that night or since then. Just, when we went to her veiling ceremony, years later, with all Nora’s family, and saw her married to Christ in her beautiful bridal dress, she looked straight at me, not at her sister. But that one look felt as though she’d grabbed the flesh under my chin between forefinger and thumb and squeezed.

I knew she remembered the night at the party.

She remembered that something had happened. It scared her, like a tap inside her ribs that wasn’t her own heart. That’s what she was telling me at her veiling, not one word said.

And while I’m pretty sure Nora didn’t know what come out of her mouth, she’d seen my face and Jackie’s and what we did afterward. That moment must have slithered over her, the way static electricity will run up your arm just before a storm. For what she said, it wasn’t in Nora’s voice. Nora’s voice was light as a laugh, tilted up with a bit of a flirt or a tease. That voice was slow and dead, and it come like in a trance or what have you, from somewhere else, long ago.

I know as sure as I’m sitting here that was why she took holy orders. Her mom was probably glad of it—raising a nun being almost as good as raising a priest, though not quite. But Nora would have a pack of kids now and a man of her own if it hadn’t been for that moment at the party. She wasn’t no pale, praying kneeler, Nora, but a girl born for mischief. Kathleen was more religious, even Joanie, my wife. Something happened that she couldn’t name, no more than we could. And if she knows the half of it, like I do, she must wake up in her iron bed at night all ice and sweat like me, and she must beg the merciful Lord for his protection. I think of her alone there, and I pray she don’t know all I know. I hope it’s just a sense she has, like a child’s memory of a grandparent who died generations ago. It wasn’t a thing Nora deserved. Or anyone. She was a good girl.

It started when Jackie fished in his pocket and took out a tiny cross, one he’d carved on a base of apple wood. Like I said, he’d been using the Barlow knife for more and more intricate carvings, even before he went into the service; and he went on doing it at night in the barracks to pass the time. He had pockets full of whittlings—tigers and linked chains, little trees, a cup and teapot he’d sent Auntie Maggie, and little cowboys on horses for the little kids on the block. It was natural to him, being an artist, kind of, like he was. He did it as quick as you or me would deal out a hand of cards. That he fetched out a cross instead of a flower or a star for Nora was a coincidence. As far as we knew, Nora soon would be as wild as Patricia. At least that was what I was hoping. I was hoping I’d get me more than a kiss one time—a feel at least. Maybe Jackie hoped so, too. Girls then had a soft spot for boys headed for what might be a young death. Still, a cross was what it was, with clefts and flourishes and even a small blunt image of the body of Christ.

Jackie gave Nora the cross. She reached for it eagerly, but then she closed both her soft white hands tight. She looked down at them. Her nails were dug into her palms, like claws.

And that voice-that-was-not-Nora said, “The man who owned the knife was not dead. He died of thirst. It took three days for him to die.” Jackie jumped and the little carved cross fell between them to the carpet. “The bone in that knife’s handle belongs to the earth. It is a wolf’s bone. Zora’s.”