The Hollow Ground: A Novel (7 page)

I waited by a display of rhinestone clips that were in the shape of bows and circles meant to dress up shoes. I spun the display case around, admiring the way the stones caught the dim overhead lights and sparkled.

After several minutes a man approached Daddy. The man’s face was all red and bumpy and every time he talked he blinked his eyes. I knew from Daddy’s description that this was Mr. Wicket, Daddy’s manager, who Daddy called Mr. Shit-it. Daddy hated the way Mr. Wicket bowed and blinked to the customers as if they were royalty. “Obsequious,” Daddy said about Mr. Wicket as if that were worse than being one of the perverts we read about in the paper who touched little kids.

Daddy was dressed in one of Gramp’s old suits. His arm must have been bothering him because he held his shoulder up and his elbow pressed to his side. The stock boy retreated through a swinging door to the back room and I could tell Mr. Wicket and Daddy were exchanging words, though I couldn’t hear clearly what was said because the two little kids were making sputtering crash noises.

Mr. Wicket pointed to the lady waiting to be served and Daddy pointed at the door the stock boy had just gone through. Mr. Wicket said something else and Daddy put his hand on Mr. Wicket’s shoulder and pushed him back a step. Mr. Wicket’s big brown eyes blinked slowly closed, then open. He said something else and Daddy turned from him and started walking toward me.

“Princess!” he loudly exclaimed and the sour look that had been on his face so quickly became one of delight that it made my heart hurt. He lifted a pair of clips from the rack and said, “What do you think of these clips? Pretty, aren’t they?”

“Beautiful,” I said, my voice thick with desire for them.

“Ma’am,” Mr. Wicket said, bowing his head slightly toward the woman as he passed her on his way to us. “We’ll be with you in a minute.”

I looked up at Daddy in surprise. Daddy had made fun of Mr. Wicket’s stutter so often that I was shocked to hear him speak with no stutter at all.

Mr. Wicket’s face had flushed a deeper red than his pimples. “Mr. Howley, if you leave now, you come back a paying customer. Your working days here will be through!” Mr. Wicket’s voice went as high-pitched as a girl’s and his eyes turned weepy.

“Then I guess I’m through,” Daddy said as happily as if he’d wished Mr. Wicket good day. Daddy reached his hand out for me and I took it. Together we walked out of the shoe department and into the women’s dress clothes, aiming for the door. Daddy blinked his eyes and mimicked Mr. Wicket, “If you leave now, you come back a paying customer.”

My laugh was edgy and when we pushed through the doors I felt my insides turn as hard and blank as the slate on the walk. “Daddy,” I said. “Ma—”

“Shh,” he said. From his jacket pocket he pulled out the rhinestone clips. “They have plenty. They won’t miss them.”

He placed the clips on my opened palm and for a few moments all I could see was their glinting brilliance. “But, Daddy, are you fired?”

Daddy ran his hand through his hair, his jaw already bluish with growth. He stared ahead as if he was gazing for the first time on some wondrous sight but all that was ahead was a second-hand shop that had a scratched-up rocking horse and a ratty baby carriage out front.

“Daddy?”

Daddy turned to look back at Kreshner’s. “Shoes,” he said bleakly. “What a joke.” He shoved his hands into his pant’s pockets and started walking at a fast clip. Together we crossed the bridge into the west side of town and kept walking deeper and deeper into the fire zone, sidestepping cracks and dips in the street. A man called from the doorway of a shingled building that had no windows in it. In faded letters above the door it read The Shaft.

“Adrian. Hey, Adrian, I’d heard you were back.”

Daddy waved and crossed the street.

“Buy you a beer?” the man said.

“Daddy, what about Ma? What you promised Ma?” I gripped the elbow of Daddy’s jacket but he shook me off. “Please, Daddy,” I cried. “You need to apologize to Mr. Wicket. You need to get your job back. Please, Daddy. For us.”

The man pinched my cheek. “What’s the problem, sweetheart? What’s got you worked up?”

Daddy told the man he’d meet him inside and then he pushed me toward the dirt parking lot where someone had dumped a TV and an armchair. The blue of Daddy’s eyes went as glassy and dark as night water. His fingers squeezed my shoulder until I imagined them touching bone. This was the part of my daddy I hated. The part that didn’t love us and wished us harm. “Get on your way,” he said, shoving me in the direction of Gram and Gramp’s. “Get on your way and don’t come back here again.”

Six

The night Daddy came home from quitting his job, Gram and Ma sat at the kitchen table waiting for him, Gram sipping tea and Ma sipping a can of Schlitz, neither speaking to the other, but sharing a kind of general dissatisfaction. Through the window above the sink you could see part of West Mountain glowing red, matching the way Ma and Gram must have felt inside.

“Here you go insultin’ the grandson of one of Dad’s friends,” Gram said as soon as Daddy stepped in the house. “When Dad spoke up to get you the job, no less! Always such a big shot with all your awards and nose in the books, but where’d it get you? Frankie would a taken any job he could get his hands on.”

“Shut up, Rowena,” Ma said. She stood and tossed her beer can in the sink where it rattled against some forks and spoons.

Gram’s face went slack with surprise. “What on earth you stickin’ up for him for?” When Gram said
him
she jerked her thumb at Daddy.

Ma stomped toward the hall and as she passed Daddy, her eyes clouded over like frosted glass, the way they did if he’d lost a horse bet or spent our last bit of money on whisky. “Promises shmomises,” she said so softly I barely heard it.

Gramp cleared his throat from where he slumped in the living-room Barcalounger. He waved Daddy toward him and asked what had happened. Daddy said that the little twerp of a manager wouldn’t let him take any breaks. “He expected me to work straight through,” Daddy said. “Who the hell is he to tell me when I can go to the bathroom?”

Gramp tilted the spit can gripped in his hands and pondered the gunk inside it. “If true … should punched … his face.”

Daddy’s eyes misted red as the fog clinging to West Mountain. “I just said it, so why wouldn’t it be true?”

Gramp shrugged and hocked up into the can.

That night Ma had me pray extra hard to her dead ma and to Auntie. “Somehow we got to get out of here. Somehow we got to figure a way.” And I guess the prayers I said for Ma were answered because less than a week later Ma had something happen she’d been waiting for all her life.

It was a Saturday. On Saturday mornings Ma and Gram worked a half day at the mill and I had a list of chores to do while they were gone. I hated doing them because no matter how hard I tried, Gram was never happy with what I did. There was always some streak she could find on the windows or floor. A powder of dust on this or that molding or lamp shade. But all the drilling and flushing only blocks from the house made it impossible to keep things clean, as Gram herself had admitted the first day we’d arrived. “She ain’t a miracle worker,” Ma would say and Gram would say, “You got that right!”

In addition to basic cleaning, Gram also had me help with house maintenance and repairs. She had me cut up old dungarees so that we could go on the roof and patch it by spreading tar over the denim pieces. Together we removed the wooden window screens and replaced them with wooden storm windows. We painted the front railing, hammered down the loose nails on the porch stoop and changed the washers in the tub and faucets.

“See, girl,” Gram liked to tell me. “With what I’m teachin’ you, you don’t need a man. In fact you don’t need no one. I never let a sick husband or this hump”—she jabbed her thumb toward her back—“stop me from anything. That’s somethin’ your ma could use to learn.” Gram would repeat this lecture to me often, ending it with a smack between the shoulder blades and a warning to stand up straight. Gram was convinced that she’d gotten her hump from slouching because her mother had made fun of her so much. “But what did Mama know about being a mama, comin’ from an orphanage and all? You remember that too.” And Gram would give me this telling look that I didn’t quite understand and then inevitably complain about how haphazardly I’d washed the windows or hung the curtains.

Ma barely seemed to notice Gram’s complaints about my work and I’d learned not to bother complaining to Ma about Gram’s chores either. Once when I’d whined that the dust rags Gram gave me were either Gramp’s old drawers or hankies, Ma said I was lucky that was my only problem and then she’d tell me how in the orphanage the nuns would make you sit in a corner with a dunce cap on if you didn’t do your chores to their standard. When she’d talk about wearing that cap her face would glow with hate as if a bright hot light had been turned on inside her. I could tell Ma considered underdrawers and hankies luxury dust rags and thought I was just acting spoiled thinking otherwise.

That particular Saturday, by the time Ma came home, I’d finished my chores and Brother and I were sitting out on the side porch enjoying the spring weather. Saturdays were especially nice because there was no drilling or blasting. You could actually hear the breeze and the birdcalls and it was like you only right then realized you’d been missing them all week, which crazy as it sounded, made you miss them more. Brother was busy flipping through one of his favorite Superman comics and I was reading a book about Joan of Arc, eager to get to the part where she burned at the stake.

I was so into the book that I didn’t even hear Ma come in the porch door. She walked in smoking and when she saw me she winked and started singing, “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” Me and Brother, surprised by Ma’s good mood, stole a glance at each other. Ma’s smile didn’t even quiver when Gram came in and yelled at Ma to put out her cigarette. Gram took one last puff on her own cigarette before smashing it out in a glass plate she used as an ashtray. Ma took a long slow drag as she happily rolled her eyes at me.

“Rollin’ your eyes like a little kid!” Gram proclaimed.

“I’ll hold my tongue out of respect, old lady,” Ma said.

“Fine with me. You got nothin’ worthwhile to say anyways.”

“Not to you,” Ma said, her voice relaxed and playful, the way I hadn’t heard it in years, and for some reason or other that unsettled something inside me.

Gram walked around the porch, inspecting my shabby dusting job. She asked how much brains it took to wipe up some dirt.

“What’s a little dust?” Ma said, smashing out her cigarette. “Live a little, old lady. I ain’t afraid of you.”

“’Fraid of me?” Gram said. “Now look at what a fool you sound, Dolores. I’m talkin’ about how to teach your child to ’complish a task.”

“Complish shmomplish,” Ma said and then we heard a sound like a cat hissing coming from somewhere on the front walk. We all turned toward the window and saw standing out between the two ash trees the crazy old lady who Gram had told us numerous times to ignore.

“What’s she up to now?” Gram said, stepping behind an aspidistra plant and peering between its large leaves.

“Who cares?” Ma said, not even glancing toward the window.

The old lady was staring at the house and slowly shaking her head from side to side. Her hair looked like she’d cut it herself and its uneven gray locks were crushed where she must have slept on them. Her dress appeared to be stained with gravy, or something worse.

Brother and I knelt on our chairs, hands on the windowsill, leaning forward.

“Go away!” Brother shouted.

“Shhh,” Gram commanded from where she stood frozen behind the plant. “Don’t go ’couragin’ her. Woman’s crazier than a loon. Her son goes killin’ himself and she blames us. When people can’t find nobody else to blame they blame us. You kids remember that. We’re what’s called escape goats.”

Brother’s face went red with anger but I found myself studying the old woman with newfound fascination. I’d always known about our own bad luck, but I couldn’t get over other people blaming us for theirs.

Ma tapped me on the shoulder and waved at me to follow her into the kitchen. From her purse she pulled out a folded page of newspaper. She sat down at the table and whispered, “Here’s our sign. Right here we got one. This is it.”

“What are you whisperin’ about?” Gram demanded, clomping into the kitchen. The hump pushed her weight forward and made her heavy on her feet.

“Don’t you worry about it,” Ma said. “Don’t concern you.”

But of course those words taunted Gram into peering over Ma’s shoulder to see what was going on because as far as Gram was concerned anything happening under the roof of that house
did
concern her.

Ma pointed at a photo of a man and boy above a caption that read
BOY HIT BY CAR SURVIVES UNSCATHED.
I looked from the photo to Ma’s face, which had turned as shiny and pinkish as a pearl. The tip of her tongue sawed her chipped eyetooth. You could feel the expectation all bristly on her.

“Can’t you tell?” she asked.

“What on earth there to tell?” Gram said.

Ma raised her eyebrows at me, doing her best to pretend that Gram wasn’t there.

I looked back at the photo again and said, “I guess the little boy looks like Brother.”

Ma nodded, all justified by my answer. Then she pointed at the kid’s daddy and said to Gram, “Know who that is? That’s
my
little brother. Told you I’d find him. You said I never would but I told you.” Ma said this like it was Gram herself who sent Ma to the orphanage all those years ago, and not Ma’s daddy’s new wife.

Ma pointed at the name,
JEROME CORCORAN
, below the photo and her voice got hushed like she was pointing at something sacred that belonged in the church. “And that’s
my
real last name. The way it was before the orphanage changed it to Coran. Can’t believe I forgot it. All these years it was right there, at the tip of my brain.”

Ma’s eyes turned golden, like the creek water with sun on it. Her gaze swerved up and around my face, searching for something.