Sign Languages (2 page)

Henry took more iced tea from the waitress and couldn't tell if her face was smiling at the child's excess or scowling at his obvious lack of control. “Thanks.”

The waitress ducked her head and hurried off to her corner to resume a long brown cigarette. The only other customers were a trucker whose rig idled under the motel sign and a woman young enough to be his daughter. Her bare left shoulder was a patchwork of dark tattoos over her pale redhead's skin. Her hand, under the table, was in the man's khaki pants. They laughed and talked quietly. Henry wondered if they'd known each other for a long time, or if they'd met down the road somewhere when she'd asked for a ride or he'd been kind enough to stop.

Just as Henry finished eating, a thunderstorm rolled over them, rattling the stacks of tea glasses and causing the lights to flicker. The rain came down in heavy sheets, obscuring the parked truck, blurring the red, white, and blue neon of the motel sign.

“Wow… boom… bet Mom and Brother are scared, huh? Bet they wish they were here.” Maggie wet her finger and lifted bacon bits from the edge of his salad. “Hey! We could have gone swimming. Mom packed the suits!” She looked up, her blue eyes suddenly sad.

Henry nodded. “We got in too late. Grandmommie'll take you to the pool. Remember there's one right down the street in the park? You've been… but you don't remember it, do you?” He was afraid that now with the dark and the loud storm and the strange bed coming up she might think too much of Martha and home. He was afraid she'd cry and he wouldn't be able to console her. He recalled some truly awful night in a motel room in Wisconsin when David was nine months old. Looking out into the rain at the watery headlights of cars still on the interstate, he thought about how much things were going to change in less than a month. Soon their furniture would move past this café and over the exchange and west to Texas. He pictured himself and his family in the back of the van doing their usual stuff—watching TV or cooking dinner.

They lingered, waiting for the rain to diminish, until the waitress asked them to leave. She had another job somewhere else. They took a newspaper from the tiny vestibule and made a dash through the downpour that had brought a hot blanket of steam up from the concrete.

In the room, Henry toweled off their hair and prepared Maggie's toothbrush. She brushed methodically. He wanted to hurry her but didn't.

“Hey, let's phone Mom and Brother and tell ‘em about that cheesecake and sundae bar. Brother'll be mad as a wet hen.” Maggie laughed. “That's like us running across the parking lot. Two wet hens.”

“They're at camp, remember?”

“Oh yeah, that's right. I'm being silly now.”

Henry put her wet clothes over the shower curtain and dried her hair more thoroughly against the chill of the room.

“It's past eleven. You should have been asleep hours ago. What would your…” He bit his lip and gave her a kiss as she settled into the bed near the window.

“Can I color some?”

“Oh Maggie, aren't you exhausted?”

“Nope, not a bit.”

“I shouldn't have let you have a Coke.”

“Well, you did. And now I'll just have to color.”

“For a minute.”

“For two minutes.”

“Two minutes and that's all.”

She jumped down to her huge canvas bag of toys and brought out a cigar box of crayons and a thick coloring book.

In the bathroom Henry could hear the rain better. He undressed and washed his face. Though he was all aches, he decided to shower in the morning. If he closed his eyes he saw the interstate ahead and the desolation of flaring fields. The sky was dust and smoke. He thought about his father. He was two different men. One a starving young soldier forcing himself to keep up, to stay on the narrow roads leading from the fields into the more dangerous jungle. The other they'd see tomorrow morning standing behind the screen door. He'd wave brusquely with his left hand and fumble with the latch, mumbling to himself about the conspiracy of all things that stick or come loose.

He thought about Janet; saw her long thin arm on the back of the couch. Martha had never worn nail polish, and he had never asked her to. The memory of its dazzle further pained his eyes.

He put on his pajama bottoms and turned out all the lights except the dim one over Maggie's shoulder. Her head was down, her hand busy.

Henry read the HBO guide and found that a movie he had wanted to see for years had started less than fifteen minutes earlier. He rolled the TV stand as far as it would go and turned its back to Maggie.

“Not for kids, huh?” she said.

“Right. And you need to go to bed now.”

“I'm in bed,” she giggled.

“To sleep. You know what I mean.” But he kept his voice light.

The movie was about alien things like long worms with terrible eyes and teeth. They crawled down throats and became people. You had to catch them in the dark when they became disoriented or something. Henry couldn't understand it all, though he couldn't believe missing fifteen minutes was the reason.

The movie was truly violent, and he kept glancing at Maggie and turning down the volume when they emerged to claim new victims and turning it up when the good guy, a smalltown doctor, was begging people to believe him, that he had the answers.

“Oh God, not them, they're ones too?” Henry spoke softly.

Near the end there was the butchery he expected in a movie where the violence is done to aliens that only look like people. When the credits came on, Henry remembered where he was and slowly turned his head to look at Maggie. But she wasn't asleep, though she hadn't made a sound in over an hour. She was staring at him, her face half in shadow, the eye in the lighted half bright and moist.

“What is it? Maggie, what's wrong?”

He switched off the TV but still sat on the edge of his bed.

“I have a funny feeling.”

“Is it your stomach? Do you need to potty?”

She shook her head, but her eye didn't leave his face.

“What is it?”

“I think something really bad is going to happen to us.”

Henry didn't move. He knew exactly what he should do and say but he didn't move or speak. Then he knelt, his hands on her hands. “What do you think it is? Is it about the trip? Or later… in Texas? Is it my job? Or Mommie or David? What is it, Maggie?” He clenched her hands and shook them. He thought maybe she knew because she was a child. He had never been superstitious before but now he was filled with it. He squeezed her hands harder and they stared at one another.

“I don't know,” she whispered. “It's just this feeling I've had. Something terrible is going to happen to all of us.”

She began to cry and pulled out of his weakened grasp. “I want my mother!” she shouted and flung herself to the other side of the bed.

Henry went to the bathroom and wet a hand towel. He wiped his face, but the cold water was lukewarm. He looked at himself without turning on the mirror light. He had never felt more exhausted.

He calmed Maggie by wiping her face and neck and chest. The crying and hours of travel caused her to drop off to sleep once he held her in his lap, his aching back against the flimsy headboard.

It was after one in the morning when he switched off the light and lay in his own bed. But he slept erratically. Though he turned the thermostat up, the fan continued to blow frigid air. Frequently he got up and made sure Maggie was covered.

Minutes before the six o'clock wake-up call, he sat up in bed. In the dream just now he had felt his large hands on the child's. But somehow that wasn't what he'd pictured. Or this part had come earlier. He had been coming up some stairs and, as he stepped onto the landing, he saw an old woman on a wooden bench waiting outside a frosted glass door. She was dressed in dark colors, long out of fashion, a flat hat on her head, her face turned away from him. Her bluish hair spilled from around her hat; she tapped anxiously on the back of the bench.

He was sure it was Maggie, and he knew, if it were true, he had been dead for a very long time. That if he were remembered at all it was there somewhere behind her graceful finger's rhythmic tapping.

Maggie sang under her breath as she took a bath and then dressed and carefully folded her clothes back into her suitcase. Henry raked his stuff into his overnight bag and left her in order to pay the bill. Outside, the sun lay like a huge deformed yolk on the tree line across the interstate. The humidity was almost unbearable; his earlier shower seemed useless.

By seven they had repacked the pickup and Henry had inspected the wilting plants. He checked the oil and dripped some from the dipstick onto his fresh khakis. “Dammit to hell.”

“Shame on you, naughty boy.” Maggie spoke to him for the first time since waking, but he didn't look over the motor at her. She turned away and sat in the opened door and began singing to Mr. Pete, the ragged, lanky monkey that had once been David's.

Chuck's Best Steak House was busy, filled with city employees and state road crews jostling one another, smoking early cigarettes that choked Henry as they sat.

“Wow! Look at that buffet.” Maggie turned on her knees in the booth and waved her hands.

Henry reached out and took her left arm and pulled her across the table, almost tipping the glasses of ice water. “What's this?” The tan back of her arm was mottled; the bruise almost encircled her wrist, more vivid on the pale underside. Look what I've done, he thought. Look at this. Immediately he lightened his grip, his hand barely touching her forearm.

“Oh, I fell off Brother's bicycle. Remember? It was the last day of school, I think.” She shrugged and smiled at him. “Let's eat.”

“But not so much. Not like yesterday, okay?”

Maggie turned and sat down hard on the vinyl. “It was
fun.”

Henry opened his menu. The photographs were too bright and sharp. Brilliant yellow eggs. Crimson rashers of bacon. “I think that's what made you unhappy last night… all that food… candy, hamburgers, chips, Cokes… your mother wouldn't like it.” He closed the menu. “We'll have some cereal, okay?”

Maggie rubbed her arm. “Food didn't cause it. It wasn't my stomach.”

“Listen, nothing's going to happen to us. It was all that food and riding in the pickup all day and the heat.” He reached for her hands, but they darted under the table.

He took up his iced water. The outside of it was slippery from condensation. “You don't know what it is, now do you?” He bent his head and looked into her dark blue eyes that held his own. “No, of course you don't. Because it was just the travel and the upcoming move.” Henry nodded. “Nothing'll happen. I'm your daddy and I solemnly declare that.” He heard his own voice and he lowered it, made it gruff like a cartoon character, a cartoon bear, and her eyes shifted to his lips and then she laughed and squirmed in her seat.

They ordered and ate their cereal and halved a sausage patty. He drank the rest of her milk and wiped his mouth.

“I'm sorry…” Henry said as he dipped the edge of his napkin in the cold water and removed flecks of cereal from her chin. “I'm sorry about last night.” But Maggie was twisting with energy and fussing with the monkey. “Let's get going, Mr. Pete. Grandmommie is waiting with open arms. She's got a candle burning in the window, Mr. Pete.”

They settled themselves in the pickup. Henry drove over the overpass and turned onto the access ramp. He tried keeping his thoughts on the traffic as he accelerated to seventy. The sun was behind them, and he hoped they'd reach Dallas before it arched overhead and turned the road to pewter and addled his brain. Right now he pictured his father in a meticulous dress uniform, as lanky as Mr. Pete. He would have some trouble coming down the front steps, but he had once walked at Stilwell's side right out of Burma.

EMOLLIENTS

Her chapped hands, dipped in the lavatory, turned the water pink. “Jesus,” she said, and held them there as she looked at herself in the unlighted mirror. Pushing her nose close to the cool glass, she turned her head. Where has the wind harmed me? she asked, and looked at lips, temples, cheeks. I am beautiful, she said with her eyes at their reflection.

And she is telling the truth.

But just in case, she applied a half-dozen oils and lotions. The consistency of Todd's semen, she thought. Warming it on her fingertips, she glistened eyelids and chin. She perused her olive face. I'm half Indian, she told them all at work and before in college and on down to when she had found out. On your mother's side, her mother had said. Because her father was pale, always twenty-eight, and in uniform in the photograph on the chest of drawers in the pink light of her girl's room. And now here, on the other side of this very wall.

She saw, as she rubbed her warming dark skin, the pores healthy and small-grained like the finest paper at work where she was immensely popular. The men took her to lunch, the women did too, or she treated them. There were no hard feelings; they were all the same age. Everyone in the office was. And so were the clients she opened up houses for or office fronts in strip malls.

She closed her brown eyes but remembered them and saw herself seeing Todd's body on her sheets, his smooth penis encircled by a pink ribbon she'd tied there. Happy Birthday to us all, they'd said earlier at the party. We're all twenty-six. Marvin Waters was thirty-three and owns us all, they'd laughed. Old Marvin, the old sport. Himself thin and muscular—that exciting combination. And opening her eyes, going to lie down for a moment, her face covered with herbs in some fantastic decoction of mint and chervil and gelatin from sheep's feet and glacier water, she saw Marvin's penis too. Thicker like the pony's she'd once seen. That before nine and therefore with her handsome but pale father before he failed to float to safety in Laos.