Thumbsucker (4 page)

“Mom,” said Mike, “my God. The
kids
.”

“And Rupert, your little nephew you’ve never seen, is still having tests. Poor baby’s almost bald now. They’re treating him at St. Joseph’s, a Catholic place.”

“Catholic hospitals bother you?” Mike said.

“You didn’t grow up with an Irish mother,” said Grandma.

“
You’re
an Irish mother.”

“Once removed.”

“Removed by
what
?”

“Americanization.”

Grandma turned from Mike and smiled at Joel, her makeup cracking and flaking around her mouth. Purple lipstick smeared her capped front teeth. “How nice to see you, dear. It’s such a treat. I’d tell you you’ve grown, but I really wouldn’t know.”

Grandpa opened his flask and freshened his drink, making a show of measuring precisely but adding an extra splash at the end. A stillness came over the kitchen, a lull, as if a storm had cut the power off and left us sitting together in the gloom.

“Imagine,” said Audrey, “a camper with a shower. Doesn’t that sound cozy to you, Mike?”

Mike didn’t respond; he was gazing out the window. Opening day was the day after tomorrow and the forecast was iffy, with a chance of snow. He had on his autumn face, calm and sorrowful.

“What’s that smell?” said Grandma. “Something stinks.”

“Tell Audrey about the Horizoneer,” said Grandpa.

“I will in a minute. What’s that awful
stench
?”

Mike rose from the table. “I’ve got a store to run. It’s the busy season. Shotguns. Licenses. I can’t afford to be away all day.”

“It’s deer meat,” said Grandma. “You’re making me eat
deer meat
.”

Mike left the kitchen and Audrey said, “I’m sorry. I don’t like venison, either.”

“No one does.” Grandma opened a silver cigarette case and drew out a Vantage. Grandpa flicked a lighter. He was her permanent bartender, her servant.

“So this is your life,” said Grandma. “Does he make money?”

“He’s building a business,” said Audrey. “It takes time. I could microwave something for you. Some lasagna?”

“Not if it’s been in the same refrigerator. Max, get our luggage from the motor home. I want to sleep in the house. I’ve changed my mind.”

“Your bunk’s all made up. Your sheets. Your special pillow.”

“I want to be near my grandkids,” Grandma said. “While you’re out there, fetch me a potpie.”

Grandpa drank up and went out to do his errand, leaving his minibar open on the counter. From the outside it looked like a briefcase, inconspicuous, but the
inner compartments were lined with crushed gold velvet. I wanted to curl up inside it and pull it shut.

Grandma got sick to her stomach the next day while showing slides to Joel and me. Mike was in the woods preparing his hunting blind, Audrey was at the county hospital working her emergency room shift, and Grandpa was under the Horizoneer draining and replacing the antifreeze.

“That’s your cousin Brent,” said Grandma. “He wins all his track meets. He’ll do well. He’s handsome.”

“How old is he?” Joel said.

“Exactly Justin’s age.”

“He looks older,” Joel said.

“It’s his dress sense,” Grandma said. “Here he is at the Park Club, on the cabin cruiser. That boy with him is the son of Homer Morse, the biggest wholesale grocer in Buffalo.”

The slides annoyed me and I couldn’t sit still. My cousins, two boys and two girls, looked spoiled and cruel, the sort of kids who can see into a future of Ivy League educations, good jobs, big houses. The boys had stylish, shaggy haircuts and movie-star suntans that showed off their slim builds. The girls wore pink polo shirts with the collars turned up and had professionally highlighted blond hair clipped into place with jeweled barrettes. They belonged to a world of country clubs and beach parties that might have been my world if Mike
had stayed in Buffalo, where the Cobb family had a street named after it and Grandpa, an ad salesman for the morning newspaper, had been a vice-president of the Rotary.

Grandma clicked to an upside-down slide of Dr. March and Aunt Jean, Mike’s older sister, racing a catamaran across Lake Erie toward a bank of glorious orange clouds. Grandma adjusted the slide but got it sideways. “Who cares,” she said. “I don’t know why I bother. You boys won’t ever meet these people anyway.” She coughed, and the cough sounded forced to me. An act.

“I’m gray,” she said. “I’m gray and clammy. Feel me.”

She took Joel’s hand and pressed it to her forehead.

“Maybe you need something salty,” Joel said. “Peanuts?”

“Nuts clog the small intestines,” Grandma said. “What I need is ginger ale or Gatorade.”

“We’re not allowed to drink pop at home,” Joel said.

“Gatorade has minerals. It’s a health drink.”

“All we have is water and milk,” Joel said.

Grandma swayed forward, shuddered, spread her knees, and vomited into the slide-projector box. She ran a finger around inside her mouth to clean out the extra, then shook the finger dry. She sank back into the couch and shut her eyes, her hands closing on her lap like curling leaves.

“That venison smell’s in the carpeting,” she said.

“We don’t notice,” Joel said.

“It’s inside you. You’re immune.”

Grandma bent forward as if to vomit again but nothing came out except a gassy burp. “I caught that one just in time,” she said, patting and rubbing her chest. “I swallowed it. One of you boys go find Max. I need my bucket.”

An hour later, the guest room was a sick room. Following Grandma’s whispered directions, I set a Lysol-sprayed bucket beside the bed, plugged in a humidifier, and stocked the nightstand with Dixie cups and Gatorade, which Audrey had bought on her way home from the hospital. I also put out tissues, Tylenol, and a
True Detective
magazine retrieved from under the Horizoneer’s front seat. Grandma sat up on a pillow, reading it. She’d let down her hair, a staticky gray horse’s tail that shocked me with its length.

“I need a TV,” she said. “My shows are starting. There’s a portable in the motor home. Go get it.”

“Grandpa drove to the pharmacy,” I said.

“When he gets back.”

“We have a radio.”

“I hate the radio,” Grandma said.

“St. Paul has an oldies station.”

“I hate the oldies.”

I was fetching a fresh box of Kleenex from downstairs
when Mike came in wearing a camouflage jumpsuit and holding the new compound bow he’d been sent as a demo model for the store. He’d darkened his face with mud and grease, which made the whites of his eyes jump out. A hunting knife with a sawback blade hung from a leather strap on his right hip.

“Great day,” he said. “She’s out there.”

“Who?” I said.

“The doe I’ve had my eye on since September. I like to have one picked out before the season starts. Makes it more meaningful. More one-on-one.”

I told him about Grandma’s vomiting.

“Where’s Dad?”

“Out buying Aspercreme and magazines.”

“Magazines about murder?”

“And detectives.”

“Believe me, it’s not the detectives she likes to read about. The woman has a fixation on random violence.”

Mike clomped up the staircase and I followed him, picking up chunks of boot mud from the runner and slipping them into my pocket. Audrey emerged from the sick room with Grandma’s bucket and Mike looked down at its contents.

“That’s just spit. There’s nothing but saliva in that pail.”

“I realize that,” Audrey said in a low voice. “Just talk to her. She wants her boy’s attention.”

I stood in the doorway next to the bucket as Mike stepped into the room and said, “It’s me.” Grandma lay
on her side in bed, a heating pad folded underneath one cheek. She looked weaker than she had five minutes ago.

“Don’t worry, honey,” she said. “I’m feeling fine. Everyone’s been so kind, so understanding …” Suddenly, she sat up and held her stomach.

“Mom, it’s okay,” Mike said. “You’re safe. We love you. The only reason I wasn’t home today was that I had to get ready for the season.”

Grandma sat back. “It comes up, but then it stops.” She blew her nose into a crumpled tissue, then carefully dabbed away the afterdrips. She opened the tissue and inspected it.

“You’re letting yourself get all wound up,” Mike said. “Those magazines, are they a good idea, Mom? Why not let Audrey find you a good book to read?”

Grandma lifted her glass and sipped some Gatorade, massaging her throat to help the liquid go down.

“I’ll leave,” she said. “I’m in your way. I’ll go. I’m interrupting your blood sport.”

“Suit yourself. I warned you what I’d be doing before you came.”

“You can’t even put it off until next weekend. Can’t even wait a week.”

“It doesn’t work that way. The other hunters would get the jump on me.”

“Fine, we’ll stay in the camper. Just send the kids out. Have your fun and act like we’re not here.”

Grandma swung a pale leg out over the mattress and Mike stepped forward to help. She waved him back. She
planted one foot as if testing the floor for firmness, then let out a long, sighing belch. I grabbed the bucket. By the time I got into position, she’d splattered everything, including Mike’s boots. He looked down at them and sighed.

Mike left the house at three in the morning. The smell of the bottled buck scent he’d rubbed on drifted into my bedroom, preventing me from falling back to sleep. I turned on the radio beside my bed and listened to Ron Ben Strong, a local evangelist, brief his flock about a government satellite whose mission, he said, was to spy on Christians’ houses and track the titles of the books they read. Like the rest of my family, I wasn’t religious, but I’d started to envy people who were. They seemed to know just what and whom to be afraid of.

After a breakfast of eggs and venison sausage that I only managed to eat two bites of, Joel and I went to the motor home. I knocked. From visiting a nursing home that Audrey worked in once, I’d learned the old people needed their privacy because they were always fussing with their bodies, dealing with ingrown nails and corns and such. I was already feeling pangs of indigestion and I didn’t want to walk in on something sickening.

Grandpa showed us inside with a gesture that seemed too sweeping for the tiny space. Grandma waved to us from her fold-down bed in the sleeping compartment
behind the bathroom. A magazine lay open on her lap and a cigarette in an ashtray on the sheet sent up a blue plume.

“I just learned something important,” she told Joel, tapping a finger on her magazine page. “If you’re being assaulted in a lonely place and there’s no one around to hear you scream, scream anyway. It breaks the attacker’s momentum.”

“Okay,” Joel said.

“Assault is a crime of momentum,” Grandma said. “And it’s not just the blacks you have to be afraid of now. It’s the Europeans, too.”

“Hush, Alice,” Grandpa said.

“He needs to know this.”

“He doesn’t need to know it now. Hush up.”

We passed the morning playing along with game shows on the motor home’s portable TV. On the first show, the object was to guess the prices of ordinary household items. Grandpa’s guesses were all dead-on, as if he’d priced the items only yesterday, but Grandma’s guesses simply made no sense. She priced a gas barbecue at a thousand dollars, a Mr. Coffee at three, a wok at ninety. I wondered when she’d last been in a store. I could only conclude that Grandpa did all their shopping.