The Interloper (5 page)

When I was a child, I took one of my favorite records—a happy song about sunshine and sidewalks—and placed it between my mattress and the boxspring. By jumping up and down on the bed repeatedly, I managed to quietly smash it to bits. I have often wondered why I did that. I never told anyone. I threw the record away in the trash cans behind the house. I was too young to buy another copy, and I did not want to tell my father what I had done, so I never heard the song again. To this day, I can only remember that it was about sunshine and sidewalks. I composed the next letter, window glass clean and Neil gone for the night, with pen and paper, to be typed up at home while Patty was at work.

When one considers what one has lost in life, the things one really misses above and beyond everything else are totally unexpected. If asked back then what I would miss, I would have said: 1. Walking with Patty. 2. Sex with Patty. 3. Our house. 4. The ocean, though I’d always liked it more as an idea than something to swim around in.

What I actually miss the most, judging by how my mind turns to it again and again through no operation of my will: walking into our bedroom in the middle of the day and watching Patty sleep. At the start I did it absent-mindedly, checking on her to make sure she was okay, refilling her water glass if she’d emptied it. I moved as quietly as possible, not daring to disturb her slumber. Occasionally, I pulled up a chair and sat by the bed,
watching her face. People always claim they can tell when they’re being watched, but Patty was not one of those people. Sometimes her eyes moved back and forth under her eyelids in REM. I listened to her breathing in the silence of the afternoon. I wondered what she might be dreaming about. Oh what I would give now to hear the quiet whistle of air coursing in and out of her nose. To watch her flip from her back onto her side, from her side onto her stomach. Fingers tugging at the sheets.

She reminded me of the Patty I’d seen in pictures on her parents’ mantle, pictures from her youth and teenage years. I was always drawn to those pictures. I imagined myself knowing her back then. In Patty’s sleeping face I was able to glean the innocence of her youth. Something else came over her face when she was awake, when she was in time. Asleep, her face lost all trace of fear and concern. I felt honored to have the opportunity to witness that transformation. My love for her was refreshed by it. Only later did I realize that the governing factor in the transformation of her sleeping face to her waking face was not being in time versus outside time, but putting on and carrying the awareness that her brother had been removed from her life.

“In dreams,” she told me, “CJ sometimes shows himself. I get confused. I tell him I thought he was dead. And he smiles and tells me he didn’t really die. He tells me he faked the funeral. He comes up with any number of reasons why. To get away from my parents, for a laugh, because someone was after him … I believe it, every time.”

“The same thing happens to me,” I said. “With my cousin Eileen. But I’ve trained myself to recognize the dream as a dream.”

I tried not to check the PO box for a week. It was the only way I could maintain control over the situation. Besides, I didn’t want to have to drive to Second City every day. I had work to attend to. Near the end of the self-imposed week I ended up at the Mailboxes Store on a day when I should have been at the office.

I practiced, as I turned the key in the mailbox lock, a steadiness of emotion. Sliding the key in, feeling the tumblers, I turned myself into that same metal out of which the box was constructed. The hope, the anxiety—all of it I learned to quell. I knew that I would have to harden my heart even as I devised a way to seduce Mr. Raven, that this would be no precise shot from a guard tower but an intimate embrace concluding with a shank to the entrails.

The mailbox was empty.

The store was run by a man and a woman. I don’t know if they were brother and sister or husband and wife, but they shared the same last name on their business cards. I asked the wife/sister
behind the counter if any large packages had come, anything too big to fit into the mailbox.

“No, nothing.”

My tires squealed on the way out of the Mailboxes Store parking lot—my foot expressing my frustration, my ears surprised to hear about it—and I pulled into an inexplicable knot of midday traffic. No sirens, no construction, no special event—just cars and trucks in my way in every direction. And the sun, so bright and optimistic before I’d gone in, had now taken on a orange cast. Damn the shortening of days! I found myself caught in the grip of time-anxiety. Another day going by: I am going to die. One day I’m going to die, and when that day comes, if I’m unlucky enough to be conscious, I’m going to wish I could have back this half-hour in utterly pointless traffic. And then, blaming myself: If only I had written to Raven as Lily in the first place, I could be doing this from down the street, in our town, instead of way out here in Second City. How many more trips would I make? One for every letter, probably, plus days like today when I would jump the gun. Or, and this more than anything turned out to be the primary source of my anxiety, maybe Raven was already done with Lily. Maybe he would never write back.

I crept along, watching others lose patience on the road, honking and yelling at each other, and I managed to find a way out of my anxiety into a calmer state. There is nothing like the sight of someone else losing his cool to make one feel serene and calm. I noticed this in arguments. The more irrational Patty got, the more rational I would become, until she would accuse me of being either insensitive or not “on her team,” which would develop a second-tier argument, the subject of which—independent
from the first-tier argument—was always the immutability of my character flaws.

People honking. Owen in Zen-like calm despite time-anxiety and Raven-anxiety. Calm enough to venture a trip to the market, having just realized, a block from the house, that we were out of milk, cat litter, and various other things essential to the smooth running of our household. I say “calm enough” for the market because markets have always inspired in me a feeling of dread. The supermarket is a one-stop shop for everything edible, representing freedom from the bonds of subsistence, or from time-consuming trips to multiple merchants. Acquiring food from such a place makes me feel as though I have become fully detached from any sort of natural world. This is not uncommon, I’m sure, and this thought probably hovers around the packaged meat section like a fly, waiting to pop into people’s heads. Plus there is the massiveness of supermarkets, the recognition that one has entered a very dense territory for which one does not have a map. Not to mention the housewives, piloting their carts as they do their giant truck-cars, with abandon and entitlement. And then there is the strange primal phenomenon by which we view unfamiliar-named supermarkets as somehow suspect, evidence to my mind that we form subtle subconscious bonds to our local supermarkets, and do so solely out of familiarity, to the extent that anything that is not Pavilion’s or Gelson’s seems untrustworthy. We form relationships with giant corporate food warehouses as if they were the local butcher, smiling at us from above his blood-spattered apron.

Our local market was smaller than a supermarket and inspired proportionally less dread. Still I viewed everyone there with
suspicion, especially the rich older women who shopped with their sunglasses on. Patty thought they did it to hide bad eye-jobs. I was not so sure.

I had begun experimenting with sunglasses myself, testing the theory that my dread might have stemmed from having to make eye contact with too many unfamiliar people. (I detest festivals too, though they don’t require as much eye contact because you’re not negotiating a shopping cart through tight spaces and blind turns.) I wore a pair of gold-framed, mirror-lensed aviator’s glasses into the market. The first time I had done this I had found my dread decreased significantly. Though maybe I was so busy thinking about the effect of the shades, the dread couldn’t enter my consciousness. It was hard to see at first, but my eyes adjusted eventually. I’d avoided the mistake of colored lenses—many of the products familiar to us are recognized by color.

I retrieved a cart from the line of carts and proceeded to shop, loading up with coffee, eggs, milk, kitty litter, and so on. I was in the massive apple section, scanning the astounding number of varieties—Fuji, Gala, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Braeburn, Cameo, Pink Lady, Jonagold, Granny Smith, McIntosh, Rome, Criterion—when I heard a woman’s voice.

“Owen?” Patty’s mother. She was not wearing sunglasses. She appraised herself briefly in my mirror-shades, after which she waited for me to remove them, which I would not do.

“Hi Minerva,” I said, with an exaggerated peer into her cart, “what’s for dinner?”

“You know to call me Minnie,” she said. She smiled and answered my question. Pork chops with applesauce. After some
chit-chat, during which my glasses seemed to become more of a mystery to her, as opposed to something to get used to, she said: “Oh—I wanted to tell Patricia about this, but I’ll tell you first. The most amazing thing happened to me this afternoon, just before I drove here, actually.”

She paused, waiting for me to say “uh-huh,” which I did.

She tilted from side to side as if trying to peer around my shades. I was tempted to remove them, to make her feel more comfortable, but I didn’t want to mess with my experiment and so left them on. Now I imagine it from her perspective, dodging her own reflection, back and forth, while she told me the following. I remember it verbatim.

“I was trying to decide what to cook tonight, and I was absent-mindedly looking out the window at that big maple in our front yard, you know the one?”

I nodded.

“The wind was rippling the leaves and it was kind of pretty, so I kept my eyes on it for a second or two. Nothing I hadn’t seen before, really, but it was like Something said to me: ‘Stop, wait. Appreciate the moment.’ You know?”

“Sure,” I said. I thought she was about to ask me to take off the sunglasses, but she didn’t.

“And so I watched the tree a little longer than I would have and you know what happened?”

I shook my head.

“A single leaf dropped. Just one. No leaves on the ground, mind you, and no others falling. I waited. No others fell. And I knew it was Calvin Junior checking in.” She waited.

I nodded.

“Reminding me to appreciate my life. Just because one leaf falls, he was telling me, doesn’t mean the whole tree does too. A subtle message, for sure, but he always was the subtle one.”

“Sounds to me like he understood symbolism really well.” This wasn’t quite enough, so I added: “It’s always nice to get a message.”

“It sure is,” she said.

If I could get in a time machine and go back to that moment, I would add the following: “You think you’re the recipient, Minerva, but you’re really the messenger.”

Exactly one week after checking the mailbox and finding it empty, I returned to find a letter inside from Henry Joseph Raven. The delay, it turned out, had been occasioned by his tracking down and forwarding to Lily a photo of himself, pre-incarceration, a photo which slipped out of the envelope onto my lap in the Mailboxes Store parking lot.

In his mug shot, Raven had looked like someone dragged out of bed, and his bleary-eyed stare was both murderous and bored—a cold-blooded combo. So when I received this new photograph from him, an older photo, from the outside, I was caught off guard by how handsome and alert and full of life he appeared, standing in front of an old but shiny pickup truck. I was surprised by the total disappearance of any criminality from his face—that murderer look was nowhere in evidence. Notwithstanding that the picture was probably taken before he killed CJ, there was nothing of the criminal about Henry Joseph Raven. He had taken care to comb his dark hair and his cheeks were
fresh and ruddy from shaving. He didn’t look as gaunt and poor as he had in the mug shot. He and his environs were clearly working-class—red-checked flannel, blue jeans with a belt, work boots—but all of it was very neat, and one got the impression that the image had been taken to celebrate some special occasion, the repainting of his pickup truck, perhaps.

He stood before a 1970s Dodge, candy-apple red, clean. The sky was clear and blue, and the light was crisp, accentuated by the sharp edges of the leafless trees. A nest revealed by the loss of foliage was lodged in the fork of two branches. A green shed in the background marked the edge of the image. On the other side of the shed the ground dropped away as toward a creek. Hills above, then just through the treetops, mountains. Mountains to the west, the sun above them but not too far gone, casting Raven and his truck into muted light compared to the brighter beams hitting the female photographer, whose reflected image was discernible in the pickup’s shiny surface.

I studied the photograph, figured out when it was most likely taken, learned about the truck (no license plate visible) and the shed. I tried to take two dimensions and turn them into three, to hunt the geography that matched the image in my head. I tried—how I tried—but most of the time I ended up staring aimlessly into that 4 × 6 inch world, trying to extract from Raven’s image some shard of understanding. And even back then, sitting in the car outside the Mailboxes Store, photograph up on the steering wheel, even then I felt toward the female reflection in a red pickup a pang of jealousy on behalf of my Lily Hazelton.