The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (10 page)

Abigail slowed the car and looked at him.

“It’s my father you’ve found.” He crossed his arms against a shiver in his chest. “You can show me tomorrow, but I’m certain.”

“Who would have killed your father?”

“He himself,” Conrad said.

Her gaze made her face naked. She stared so long that he had to reach over and correct the wheel. Her house was small and painted red, nestled among larger houses, hardly more than a cottage, but warm inside. She boiled spaghetti and heated sauce from a jar. Conrad told her a few things.

After his mother disappeared, his father gave up language almost completely. In the past, he and his father had never been alone in the house—only in the vegetable garden or in the woods hunting for game.

“I know it sounds implausible,” he said to Abigail, “to people raised in a house with a television and stereo, whose home was in a neighborhood, whose parents held jobs, but it’s the truth. My mother never left me alone in the same room with my father for more than a matter of seconds. When she went to the bathroom, she took me with her.”

“Unbelievable,” Abigail said. Then, “I believe you.”

Conrad and Abigail slept in the same bed. The shared bed was not about sex. The electricity in the house died shortly after dinner. They built a fire and lit candles. They kept each other warm.

“I’m tempted to entertain myself with your body,” Abigail told him, her painted nails touching his neck. “But I shouldn’t while you’re here on official business.”

Conrad recognized his disappointment in this dismissal. He hardly knew her, but he felt uncommonly alive in her bed. She fell asleep, the warm air from her nostrils ruffling the slight, bleached hair on her upper lip, her eyes moving beneath their thin sheathing.

He was too agitated to sleep. He ran a finger over the textured chambers of her insulated shirt. He traced a nipple, and it changed shape beneath the material. He thought of the emergency equipment left by the side of the road. He placed his hands just where the disks would go. She stirred but did not wake. The memory that had been summoning him for years blew against the dark windows.

His father had come into the kitchen where Conrad was building a fire in the stove. “Leave it,” his father said. He made a gesture with his shotgun, the buttstock pointing to the door.

Midday, a dim sun lit the snow on the ground, the sky cloudy and cold, wind lifting the skirt of recent snow up and into the freezing air. Conrad carried the shotgun. According to his mother, a dog had made the teeth marks in the gun’s buttstock. His father denied ever owning a dog. At the time of the walk, his mother had been gone four weeks.

The neighbor’s livestock seemed their most likely prey, but they did not head in that direction. His father said nothing. The teeth of the cold air gnawed at the soft places on Conrad’s face. He had to take two steps to his father’s one, but he felt a pathetic surge of glee. He had been terribly lonely without his mother, and the only time he felt comfortable with his father was when they were hunting.

At the edge of the woods, they stopped. Conrad needed to pee but it was his custom to wait, out of modesty, until they were among the trees, even though there was no one within miles to see. It had begun to snow. His father gestured for the shotgun. Their farmhouse, in the distance, seemed to have a hole of light in it. It took Conrad a moment to understand the front door was open. He shifted his gaze to his father’s face. His father appeared to be studying him.

He said, “You know what that word means?”

Conrad had spoken no word and, except to ask the question, neither had his father. His father seemed to think Conrad was privy to his thoughts. Conrad opened his mouth but only breathed. The cold air found his tongue, and he tasted winter. His father turned quickly. The barrel of the shotgun swung around. It would have hit Conrad had he not moved. He stumbled and fell, but got up quickly and dusted snow off his knees.

His father said, “It’s what you do to a woman.” He breathed heavily, the exhaust of his nostrils white and furious. “And there’s no pleasure in it.” He pointed to a tree stump covered in snow. “Over there.” He wanted Conrad to sit on the stump. His father evidently had more to tell him.

Conrad shoved the snow off the tree stump. A thin layer of ice covered the wood, but he sat anyway and looked up to his father, who gestured for him to turn, to face the other way. Snow animated the sky and painted the world about him. He heard the shotgun crack open behind him, heard his father load one shell and then the other. It was then that he understood. The frozen world paused for him, the woods still and orderly under their white quilt. Even the snow coming from the heavens became stationary in midair, a white organism Conrad had never before seen whole, but only in its million parts.

The shotgun reunited with a snap. Conrad sensed creatures in the forest going about their lives, refusing to be his witness. The fabric of his father’s coat made a little cry as he raised his arms. Conrad lost control of himself. Urine soaked though his pants and ran out onto the stump. It made a spirit of steam.

“You wet yourself,” his father said, his words startling and heavy. “Get up or you’ll freeze to the stump.” He lowered the shotgun. “You’d best hurry.”

The urine began to ice Conrad’s legs as they retraced their steps. He tried to run. His pants froze to the fine hairs on his legs. He stumbled and continued. He fell to his knees, got up, and fell again into the crusted snow, which embraced him, held him as his mother had, a comfort and protection. Conrad tried, but he could not get back to his feet. The snow was no longer cold but warm, and the warmth spread throughout his body.

His father lifted him by the waist of his pants and hefted him into his arms. He carried Conrad the final distance home. When they crossed the threshold, his father shut the door that had been left open. He put Conrad before the stove in the kitchen and rekindled the fire.

Conrad sat before the blazing stove in a kitchen chair. His father stood nearby, his back against the wall, his hands behind him, the shotgun at his side. He thought to bring the boy a blanket and then resumed his position. He did not speak. As Conrad remembered it, his father did not move. But he stayed there, watching while his son thawed.

Conrad was sent to bed. He heard the front door open and shut. His father did not come back until after dark, stamping snow from his boots, walking heavily to the bedroom door. The boy’s heart beat so hard that he imagined he could make it out beneath his flesh, hidden but present. His father spoke through the closed door.

“Pig you have to cook clean through.”

In the morning Conrad discovered that his father had stolen a neighbor’s pig, a small thing that he had gutted in his arms while he held it like a baby. Conrad found his father’s clothes on the porch, blood frozen into the fabric, and he reconstructed the butchering. His father himself was gone. Conrad would not see him alive again.

It occurred to him, while he lay sleepless in Abigail’s bed, to wonder about the boy who had been riding in his safety seat when Conrad crashed into the chain-link fence. How had that accident become one of the stones on which the boy’s character was built? The boy by now would be ten himself. He would no longer think another person might share his nocturnal dreams. Conrad understood that he had loved the boy.

Electricity returned to Chapman before dawn. Abigail made coffee. Conrad had slept little, but his head was clear. The coffee was strong and gratifying. He told Abigail about the walk in winter with his father.

“I feel better about it now,” he said.

“Why?” she asked him. “Why on earth would you? Because you know he’s dead? Because he can’t harm you now?”

This would be what his aunt would think, what his therapist would think.

“It’s more specific than that,” he said. His father had meant all along to include himself. Conrad understood that now. He tried to explain. “It makes it less personal.”

Outside, the morning snow fell onto the snow that had fallen through the night.

Let’s forbear the usual drift.

Billy, the main guy in all this, has trouble of female origins. His dally this time entails no tangible scram. Never up, never in. But the attempt, her name is Karen, carries the same wave, and his old lady gives him the stroll. Which is what sends him to me. Back when I was one hundred per, I was the female organs Billy troubled.

He comes calling here with nickels in his packet and a plaintiff, he tells me, that still won’t stand, even with a video in the mouth and women taking off their robes right and left on the big scream Mitsubishi.

“My body,” he says to me, “kept the faith.”

Did I convention how Billy and I were a pair for ten years? And he, I’m told, pulled the same stunt without me, and couldn’t get it up then, either. Even with my sister, who, I can tell you, has beauty.

“Why did you take him back?” she asks me.

I say, “Ten years is a big chump of your life.”

He arrives on the porch, hands in his golfing pockets, staring out through the mosquito screens at the groves of lemon backdrop and oriental oranges. I live in the citrus desert of Arizona, where, with enough laughter, anything will flourish. Billy used to live here with me. When I push open my door, he turns and stares. No one can believe I live alone.

“You know,” he says, and his voice is one of those familiar things, like the way some people recall music, “who I am?”

I go, “Billy,” and wonder how dressed I am for a man who used to be the one I was wife to. His car is clocking out by the porch steps, time running down as it cools. I’m in a nightgown but have a skirt under it, as if ready for the ball.

“It’s good to see you,” he says, and says more literal things that orbit my ears like the popsicle sticks and candy wrappers that swirm the dense water next to the canal gate. Suitcases lashed to the roof of his car make the picture crystal. He loves me again and he’s got no other bed to rest his buddy, which can, after a workout, have a sour effect, like that bathroom in some car station I can’t remember where, that had a wooden Indian ten feet tall and not made of wood.

“All of my parts still work,” I say, smiling at what it means and how it must sound to people who cannot, anymore, wonder about such things aloud. Whenever I get irrigated with my life, I remind myself of all they can’t say either.

Billy shows the teeth he’s been hiding just as the sun dips under the wooden eaves of my porch, making him like that god people talk about. But how often do they see him ablaze on a porch with suitcases tied to his car?

A zithering rush of movement. And the dizzying things that take us to bed do their work—in the him-on-top-of-me fashion—his cheeks juggling with each ricochet, and the candy going on in my middle like it always has, that memory a part of my gravitation, and it builds and sifts into something almost horticultural.

It feels so much I scream.

When I wake up, he’s got the car things in my drawers.

“I never,” he says to me in that same voice he has, “should have left you.”

I had sort of forgotten that he fled like a hat from a hive when the wind goes crying through. The memory winces down my atrium until I hear the timer that reminds me to eat. Food is one of the things not to do alone if you don’t have to. We park at either end of the tableau, Billy skinning the plastic wrap from the scheming platters.

“I’ll cook for you,” he says, which makes me happy and worried for my timer.

That is a fine day, the day he parks by my porch and disgorges his car into my—what is it when it’s more than a house? And the fellow days are the same—the good bright hallows and lighthearted skew. Nothing gets in the way of how he puts his hands on my round bottles and rubs a small circus. “Sweet Cheeks,” he calls me, which makes me look at the cobbler around my wrist with the letters of my name. “Valerie,” I say aloud, while he does with his mouth’s finger my one thing and then my other, a whole alphabet of pleasure.

Early one deepening, we watch from the porch as a coyote crosses the swath, a black kitten striving in its mouth.

“My god,” says Billy. “This place is a wonder.”

He begins happily dissembling our past, our years in this house—the hawk coughed in chicken wire, the cumulus of rain that throttled the road, the tracing chill of splintered mornings. I pretend to remember more than I hold on to. But the taste of flesh on my mouth when he kisses me is wish-making and longed for, like the satisfaction of eating when you don’t know you’re hungry.

Even if I can’t frame what I’m missing, I can tell it’s gone, and that makes it mine.

Billy was driving when the tree came through the window’s shield. He has in his soft place beneath the pit of one arm, a skashing seam, crooked as a burble in a brook. I don’t have mark one on me. Except the smile hidden by my trick of hair. Hair doesn’t have to remember. It goes on like nothing ever tarnished the pot it grows in. Mine is wavy when it gets long, like a sketch of highway on the nap of a mountain.

It’s a different day altogether when the fireplug—his recent ex—comes and returns his things to the roof of his Dodge. I don’t get it for a while and even help with a few loafs. When it hits me, I’m at the car, divulging a black boom box.

“Oh,” I say, “you’re moving up.”

“Out,” he says, “not up.”

Which makes me think for one monument that I have it all wrong. But, no, on this particular invasion, I’ve got it right.

Before they go, they show me how people look when they carry on in my bed. A more gentle stack than you might think. She offers me her bare hand. They disarray me kindly.

And they sleep, the three of us, in the following light. I dream a dream of waking, and flowers in the room, a set of shiny tools latched to the wall—silver pliers and bullet-peen hammer and a shiny crushing wrench.

When I really wake, it’s to the scrubbing sound of Billy reaming the tub.

“Everything is clean,” he says, streaks on his face as he erases me his arms. They have dressed. The girl skates my hand while he holds me.

Then wouldn’t you if you weren’t me know it? They and the car both papoose.

It’s not “dravel,” the little gray rockets that make up the road and hurt my feet, but all I have to offer is what’s prattling around in my bag, and “dravel” keeps enlisting. So…

I stand in my dravel drive-away umbrella a sky as wide and dark as the afterward of a fire—a black with no bottom and yet scarred with light. It’s a cool night and I’m naked, but a steeling warmth comes over me. The green scent of the groves and the canal’s artificial water hole me still. In this fraction of the country, people staple ranches from the desert. They burn crops out of land most people wouldn’t bother tasting. It’s where I below. And where I’ll stave.

I know I will not come fully to.

But what I think right now is,
This is beautiful
.

I’m unsure that I’ve got it right, what all this means—Billy’s sudden aperture and the hostly gray of the road, the white shaft from the kitchen wind row, the green orange trees, and the way I posture naked and skinflint in the sky’s widening yawn. For tonight, anyway, I’m willing to cast my trademark on faith.

There’s no shortage of wander in my life.

It’s a big house and getting around in it can be surprising, like when you discover it’s the next day. Unless there’s evidence, how can you know the difference from one to the next? We all need evidence. We need a life that is evidence-making.

Anyway, what house this is I know is mine. And that dingling noise is the timer, which means it’s morning and I’m hungry. Even when you’re alone, you’re requested to eat. Or you’ll forget and become so thin even the wind won’t notice. And then nothing in the wide world can move you.