Something Rising (Light and Swift) (18 page)

Cassie rocked her head back and forth, trying to loosen the
muscles in her neck. Her left shoulder felt like someone was frying bacon on it. “So quit,” she said.

Jimmy took two steps toward her, then shouted in her face, “I can't quit!” Bud jumped up from the stool in the doorway, but Jimmy ignored him. “You know I can't quit, that money is
hers
,” he said, gesturing toward the parking lot, “and if I leave here without it, she'll not only kick me out of the house, she'll have her goon squad of relatives kill me, they will
kill me
, Cassie, is that what you want?” He ran his fingers through his hair. He looked sick, feverish.

“How is this Cassie's fault? Huh? You came in here blowing, you lost the money.”

“She hustled me, and you helped her. She just happened to be carrying around that kind of money?” The veins in Jimmy's neck stood out, and a vein in his forehead throbbed.

Cassie remembered that moment in particular and wrote to Belle that she had felt clearheaded but distanced from her body. She heard what Jimmy was saying, that if she beat him, he would Literally Die, and Cassie would be responsible for it. She didn't doubt what he said; Barbara Thompson came from a long line of puppy-drowning rednecks who target-practiced with a twelve gauge in the woods behind a trailer park filled with children.

“You know what I think?” Bud was in Jimmy's face, and even though his voice was raised, Cassie could hear a hum coming from the hanging light. Below the argument was such a silence. “I think you're a chickenshit failure who got himself—”

“What
did you say to me? What did you say?”

“You heard me, you—”

“Hold on a minute,” Cassie said, raising her hands. “Bud, stop.” She turned to her father. “It sounds like you're in a bind.”

“Cassie,” Bud said, “don't do this. He pulled this on your mother for fifteen years—”

“No,” Cassie said, “it's okay.” She looked at Jimmy, whose face was flooded with relief.

“I knew it, I knew I could count on you.”

“Here's how I see it. You need to leave here with your original stake, and maybe even a couple hundred extra to sweeten it at home?”

Jimmy nodded.

“So how about this?” Cassie began racking the balls. “One game. If you win, you leave with four thousand even. If I win, you can still have the money, but you lose the cue.” She lifted the rack and hung it on a hook. Both men stared at her, astonished, and no one spoke. Cassie could nearly hear Jimmy's mind at work, the full constraints, the bind he was in pressing against him. He'd never make it out past Bud, he could never move fast enough to hurt her. She realized that her clarity was temporary, that something was struggling underneath it; over and over she imagined Jimmy charging at her, and saw herself pulling the knife out of its sheath on her belt; she saw herself pulling it so fast she went through Poppy's shirt and nicked her own side. Bud was staring at her and blinking slowly, like a predator in overhead sun.

“You're saying—” Jimmy held his forehead—“that if I beat you, I leave with all my money, but if I lose, you're taking the Balabushka? You're out of your mind.”

“Okay,” Cassie said, yawning. “I'm going home then, I'm beat.” Bud yawned, too.

“Wait! Wait, what's plan B?”

Cassie shook her head. “I'm sorry, that's my only plan. Otherwise,
I'm taking this money home to Laura.” She headed toward the door.

“Jesus!” Jimmy laughed, letting his head fall back. “You're going to take everything away from me, if not you and Laura, then Bud. You're a bunch of
cannibals
.” He wiped his eyes, laughed again, then stood very still.

Cassie looked at Bud, at Jimmy, at the floor. For a moment she couldn't swallow. She cleared her throat and said, “Take it or leave it.”

He took it
, Cassie wrote,
and I broke and cleared the table without him ever taking a shot or saying a word
. After I sank the 9, Bud went to the safe and got more money, and we counted it all out until he had four thousand. Jimmy took the cue apart slowly and carefully, and wiped it down, then put it in the case and handed it to me, but he never met my eye. Bud let him out the front door, then locked it behind him, and we watched him give the deputy a salute. Then he got in Barbara's old Mustang and she peeled away. You know he must have been out of sorts to leave the Lincoln there. For a while I couldn't take the stick out of the case. I couldn't even look at it. But in time that feeling went away, although I never saw Jimmy again.

She straightened the pages, attached a paper clip, and slipped the letter underneath the essay on chaos theory. She stood and straightened her back, crossed her arms, and looked out the window. A clear November day, and colder than it looked. Girls came and went in the rooms around her, laughing loudly and slamming doors. From this angle, stared at long enough, the walkways leading
up to and away from Belle's dormitory looked like streambeds, tributaries meeting and diverging on the way to some greater body. Cassie stood that way twenty minutes or so, looked down at the clock. One-thirty-six. She watched for a thin girl braced against the cold, head bent and moving with great purpose. Cassie waited for her sister.

Part Three
R
ATTLESNAKE
K
ITE

A
t two in the morning Cassie was still sitting alone at the scarred kitchen table. She remembered these hours after Poppy's death, too, the way her mind struggled against the information and wouldn't let her sleep; the strange doubling of consciousness that lasted for months. She might be driving or measuring a piece of hardwood for flooring, and she
would
be driving but also telling herself that Poppy was gone. Pulling the tape measure out, marking the board, measuring it again, Poppy is gone, until he was in every gesture and every breath. There seemed to be no other way to allow him to die.

Laura would have said that at two in the morning the soul was less moored to the body than at any other time, and could fly free, and Cassie felt that, too, the vague awareness of a door not yet open. But a door that could be opened. And staying or going was the question at hand. On the table were Laura's journals, a stack of letters bound with a bright blue ribbon, scraps of paper torn from envelopes and message pads. The yellow lined notebook in
which Cassie and Belle and Laura had been leaving messages for one another. And two plane tickets. She gathered up the scraps of paper—on each was printed a few words, a phrase, in Belle's block handwriting—and lined them up randomly in front of her.
A man walks down the street / to be pregnant in a dream / In the chthonic realm everyone is wealthy / Like the ghost of pure spirit / Followed by a gray dog / and everything is cheap / the tyranny of the door frame / is to be pregnant with
something
. She read it, rearranged it, Belle's method of sense-making made no sense at all to Cassie.

She tipped her head back and closed her eyes. Her fingertips were cold, and she pressed them against her eyelids like a compress, letting the chill through. The act felt medicinal but was not. She had been awake almost seventy-two hours and would not rest until she had decided what to do about the plane tickets; she could go, or she could leave them somewhere in the house; no one would blame her either way.

The letter Laura had left in her jewelry box already looked worn, as if years had pulled something from it and put something different back in. Cassie had seen it for the first time only four days ago; since then, the letter, typed on the heavyweight cotton bond Laura favored for correspondence, had been taken from the envelope, unfolded, pored over, refolded, and tucked away over a dozen times. It was dated March 21, a little more than a year before, the day Laura was told she had lung cancer, and decided, after what surely had been only a few agonizing hours spent alone and without counsel, to forgo treatment. The letter, addressed to Cassie and Belle, was intended as a justification.

Play The Odds, Never Do Anything On Principle: these were the two pieces of advice Cassie had received from Jimmy like an Old Testament blessing. They had filtered through to his wife as
well, because Laura cited her chances of surviving the treatment of her cancer in a way that suggested anyone who held the hand would have folded. Laura saw no good end. “I would have cared for you if the situation were reversed,” she wrote, “I would have seen you through to the end. But to bargain for my life at your expense is untenable.” She also gave the reasons for her secrecy; the day, she wrote, that Buena Vista had been diagnosed with breast cancer, she had ceased to be Laura's mother-in-law, the grandmother to Laura's children, and had become instead the Dying Thing. “All that last year I read her life in reverse. When I thought of her as a young woman, when I thought of her in the kitchen rolling out pie crust, the picture in my mind of her at Christmas the year we gave her the photograph of all her loved ones gathered in a studio, in that ghastly light, I saw a woman who was always about to die. You will do the same, I suspect, now that I am dead, but at least you haven't done it for the past year or six months, however long. At least we lived normally. When you said good-bye before leaving the house, you did it because you chose to, not because you were measuring out your affection against my death. When you sat talking with me late into the night in the kitchen, you were not coerced by our limited time. I withheld the information for no reason but this, and I doubt I even need to ask your forgiveness. I think you, Cassie, are especially prone to such silences, and will respect mine.”

Cassie looked up at the clock. It was two-twenty-seven, and she felt closer to a decision than she had for the last two days (The Way To Decide Is To Decide, Jimmy's voice rang in her head), and because she was close to something, she went ahead and read the next section again, even though the pain it caused her had begun to seem formal. “And frankly,” it began, “I see no
reason to fight to stay in this world. I could lie and say it's poverty or the abuse of children or the destruction of the planet that makes me want to go ahead and die, or I could blame it on your father, which heaven knows I have done before and is closer to the truth. The truth is that I don't want to spend another day with the cat, Miss Mittens. That's for starters. I get up in the morning and she's waiting right in front of my door to be fed. And so I open the can and feed her that smelly wet cat food, and she eats it, and then I pick up the bowl and cover it, because if I leave it on the floor it draws ants and probably worse things. And then Miss Mittens wants to go outside, and so I open the door and let her out, and go to wash out the cat-food can, and while I'm in the kitchen I hear her meowing at the door or tearing at the welcome mat, demanding to be let in. So I let her in, and she comes straight into the kitchen wailing for her food, so I take the foil off and set it down, and we begin the process again. I do this all day. I ask myself, Should I kill the cat? and the answer is, No, I can't. But Miss Mittens never stops, except sometimes to nap, and not when I wish she would. If she is outside she wants in, and vice versa. If she is eating she wishes to cease eating and go outside, et cetera. If I set the food outside, she becomes confused and even more frantic and it draws bigger animals. And what I can read only as her deep dissatisfaction seems to me to be both projection and apt metaphor, and this knowledge is terrible, and life with Miss Mittens is no way for a grown woman to live. I ask myself, What does the cat want? And the answer seems to be, For the food to stay on the floor, and for a world with no doors. Surfaces, obstructions, thresholds. They pain Miss Mittens, and they pain me. The world was too much for me before I knew I was dying. But to face it with no hair or fingernails, with bleeding lips and diarrhea, to go
blind as Buena Vista did and then die anyway, sweet Jesus, as she used to say. No thank you.