Dad offered a what are you looking at? expression, prompting Mark to resume perusing the filing system.
They compared outrageous cover art while passing them, all without speaking.
Mark wiggled his fingers over the Master of Puppets LP, raising it up for a closer look, and then pressing it to his chest. Working his way through the alphabetical catalogue, he picked up Shout at the Devil, hoping his father wouldn’t catch the title, since it was at the bottom of the flashy images of the band members. Mark’s last find was the hard to locate Led Zepplin album, which he added to his arms.
Today wasn’t the day for classic Beatles, although Mark enjoyed reading up on the whole Paul is Dead urban legend. How fun it’d be to write for Rolling Stone and cover all the craziness behind the scenes of the music world. None of that was on Mark’s mind now. No, today cast a darker mood here in the store. Whether the house had far-reaching antennae—as far-reaching as down the street was—or whether the grumpy old man at the register had anything to do with it, Mark wasn’t sure. There existed the possibility that the darkness boiled up from within. He himself was the beacon. Here he went again, resorting to blaming himself.
Breaking Mark’s mental trip to nowhere, his father mimed putting on gloves and trying to escape an invisible box. Then he arched his brows, thumbing at the exit.
Nodding with a snicker, Mark pointed his index finger at his dad to inquire about his findings.
Dad shook his head before doing a silly strut to the cash register, waving his son along.
Grinning ear to ear, Mark complied.
Dad’s fingers drummed the counter, until mister grumpy-face rang up the order. He punched the numbers into the cash machine and bagged the purchase like he was handling dirty underwear. The man’s hands brushed together in good riddance. “I see what kind of folks live at the Durley place. Figures,” the guy said, almost under his breath.
“What kind of folks is that?” Dad asked.
“And I will purge from you the rebels and those who transgress against Me; I will bring them out of the land where they sojourn, but they will not enter the land of Israel.” After plucking the receipt free, it drifted to the floor at Dad’s feet. As if that wasn’t his problem, the cashier resumed his seat on this stool and snatched up The Winona Republican, which likely held the secrets of the universe, or at least the ones not included in the Bible.
Mark and his father stood there, trying to make sense of how scripture had anything to do with buying the very music that this guy carried in his store.
“Good day,” the man grumbled as the paper covered his face—the vibe much less amicable.
“Yeah, well, we won’t be seeing you again,” Dad said.
The proprietor snapped the newspaper.
Once father and son left the store, they burst out laughing.
“Good day?” Mark asked, his tone dripping in sarcasm.
“That was quite the un-welcome wagon. Glad we came.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“No, thank you for dragging me to one of the circles of hell.”
They guffawed all the way back to the vehicle.
“Oh, and for covering for me with Mom. That was groovy. Nicely played.” Dad unlocked the car.
“I’m looking forward to spinning these.” After raising the purchase, Mark climbed into his seat.
Dad nodded and got behind the wheel.
On the drive home, his eyes not leaving the road, his father asked, “Hey, have you seen those bathroom photos I took?”
“Huh?” Mark broke into a sweat, peering out the windshield. He’d expected a rehashing of the pipe fiasco. Not this.
“Yeah, they’re missing. And you’re the only other person who’s been down there.”
“Why would I take them?” It should’ve been obvious that answering with another question indicated a falsehood, or at the very least an omission. The right thing to do was fess up. It’s not like he’d really get into trouble. Where had his rush of gumption gone? But part of Mark wanted to give his father convincing proof that things in the house weren’t copasetic by letting him think the prints disappeared. Besides, he was doing well with manipulating the truth, the message of today’s afterschool special. In fact, there might be a future for him in politics, he jested.
“True, it’s not like they’re Playboys or anything.”
“Dad—” Mark whined, his delusions of becoming a senator fizzling out.
“Relax, son. Lighten up, will ya?”
There it was. A hint his father was onto him. Sneaking the magazines from the trash meant sneaking the photos from the basement wasn’t much of a stretch. Both of these incidents traced back to Dad. If he’d never acquired the pornography, his son wouldn’t have had anything to pilfer. If he’d not omitted the truth about repairing the pipe, Mark wouldn’t have had to troubleshoot the fallout.
Neither one of them acknowledged the mystery of who really fired up the pipe. Maybe it was because his father took the artifact for a test spin? Or, were they both afraid to accuse each other of lying? Did they believe there was no point in asking a question that lacked an answer? The line between fact and fiction had officially blurred enough for one day.
Avoidance seemed the appropriate coping mechanism.
Dad cranked up the radio.
They caught the end of an anti-smoking public service announcement.
Somebody upstairs had a sense of humor.
October 1862
“Sasha, can you take him to an empty cot?” Emma whispered.
The servant nodded, her hand on the door to the dining room, sizing up the stranger who still smelled of smoke and spirits from the saloon.
“You be rid of me so soon?” the patient asked.
Emma chuckled, peeling off her mustache. “Hardly. But I need to change before anyone else sees me like this.”
His brow crinkled.
“This,” she waved close to her head and down the rest of her, “needs to be our secret.”
He clicked his tongue. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Go on, I’ll be back in a jiffy.” Emma turned and hurried up to her room to change. For the sake of time, she merely swapped the shirt and trousers for one of her dresses, leaving the binding around her breasts in lieu of all her other undergarments. Following a finger-comb of her hair, she dabbed away the dust from her face with the cloth from the basin.
On her way downstairs, she pinched her cheeks for color with one hand. The other carried one of her brother’s clean shirts.
Sasha sat beside the bare chested patient, in the midst of washing his wound. Emma’s face and neck warmed as she took in his tanned musculature.
The handful of invalids on the other beds were either fast asleep or in a drugged stupor.
“Thank you, I’ll take it from here,” Emma said.
When the man’s eyes completed the tour of her authentic identity, he promptly glanced away. He readjusted his position as Emma sluiced some water over where the bullet had done its damage. His body stiffened the first few times the rag touched him, but he fully recoiled with the application of alcohol.
“You’re fortunate it only grazed you.” She carried on less aggressively with the treatment. “Looks like you won’t even need stitches.”
“Who would’ve dug the bullet out? Your pa?”
“No, me.” Emma repressed a smile while she planted a strip of gauze and surrounded it with surgical tape. “His stitching leaves ugly scars.”
He stared at the ceiling. “I see.” His throat cleared. “Surely, this’ll all keep you outta trouble now that your poker days be over.”
Goddammit to hell. She could’ve hit the jackpot in there if it weren’t for that blasted blue-eyed devil crossing her path again. She’d been so close. “I suppose around here at least. What about you? Those winnings going to hold you over some?”
“Winnings?” He scoffed. “I put all that down on that last game—ya know, the one we abandoned? I be on my last coin, I’m af
raid.”
Emma smirked. “You interested in helping me rob the bank, then? Be my partner in crime?”
“Nah, I ain’t tempting the gallows, if I can help it. You best not, neither.”
She evaded his eyes, for fear of not being able to climb back out. With at least one intense moment of being in sync in their past, more of those had to be on the horizon. She couldn’t let herself look for them. Staying in the present tense and avoiding emotion were her reoccurring life challenges. “No, I best not.”
Her fingers pressed the tape in place. She helped him slip his arms into the clean shirt. He buttoned it up while she placed the medical supplies on the side table.
The patient sat up and put his feet on the floor. “Mighty obliged, miss.”
“Call me Emma. And you are?”
He looked as if he counted invisible stars before he opened his mouth to speak. “Jonathan.” It sounded as if foreign to his own lips.
Wondering if he was really down to his last coin and if that was really his name, she rolled up the gauze. “You can rest here the night. If you’re fittin’ to stick around these parts, I can ask Papa if he could use you through the winter. Perhaps longer, depending on when my brothers get back.”
“That’s awfully kind, but I got business of my own to tend to. You ain’t the only one with axes to grind.” He got up, sliding something dark from his pocket and striking a match against the fireplace.
It wasn’t until he lit one end and the aroma of tobacco reached Emma’s senses that she understood he puffed on a pipe. Where did he get such an unusual object? Who were his enemies? She wanted to barrage him with questions.
“Stay a day or two. Mull it over. If nothing else, you’ll get a taste of Sasha’s cooking. That might be the deciding factor. More than one household has tried to steal her from us.”
He picked up one of the framed photos from the mantel, studying the image. Fixated on a detail, he clenched his teeth. Then he replaced the frame in a slow and steady motion, not taking his eyes off the spot that had caught his interest. “If I stay, it won’t be for her.” Although he glanced to Emma, his expression softening, she wished his comment was a flirtation, but it was obvious his mind was elsewhere.
“Be aware there might be more doings that need tending than you think.” After playfully baiting him, she awaited his response. Maybe he’d flirt with her this time.
“Always are, ain’t there?” He looked through her, inhaling smoke from his pipe.
Summer 1988
Home from the record shop, Mark decided to put the photos in the witness protection program. Salem stalked him upstairs, his partner in crime.
It was tempting fate to leave the photos in the Casio case. Not because it was a place his parents would snoop, although that was a possibility. Murphy’s Law suggested he’d be carrying his keyboard somewhere—to music lessons, to a new friend’s house and he’d trip on an uneven floorboard—and bam! The case flies open and the pictures litter the ground around him. As a result, he stumbles over all over his words, failing to explain how he’s really not a liar.
In order to put that whole scenario to rest, Mark unlatched the case. Once he’d grabbed the photos, he raised his mattress as high as possible, leaving the pile smack in the middle where they’d be forgotten, along with his white lie about their existence. Suddenly, the guilt diminished.
Staring at the keyboard case made him think of Jack—that time he’d railed at Mark, telling him to go home. That incident still rattled Mark as if it’d just happened. That blowout of all blowouts severed their friendship. Even though he’d left his keyboard at Jack’s house, Mark couldn’t bring himself to retrieve it. He’d been too embarrassed to call Jack, or go up to him the last day of school. It was a relief when his ex-friend dropped it off at Mark’s house, leaving it with his mom.
Mark recalled happier times with Jack. Liking and hating all the same teachers, razzing them behind their backs. The guessing of each other’s thoughts. Waking up too close to each other’s sleeping bags on that camping trip. The flutter in the stomach when their hands touched in gym class.
Then came that mother of all memories, the one that ended it all: the resting of his head for the briefest second on Jack’s shoulder. They’d been giggling at Airplane, almost pissing their pants. It was a reflex. By the time Mark realized he’d done it, there was no way to reverse time. His face flushed and Jack leapt off the couch, cursing him out and ordering him to go home.
Maybe all Mark needed to do was to apologize. Enough time had passed to take the oomph out of the whole shebang. They were also miles apart.
Facing this head on might balance out the lies he’d been telling lately. His health teacher had always talked about how it was such a shame that boys bottled everything up. It wasn’t good to go through life acting like a robot. What was wrong with crying or being vulnerable?
Mark decided she was right. If Jack told him off again, so be it. You had to start somewhere. If he had to, he’d sob into the privacy of his pillow until the episode ran out of steam.
Picking up his banana phone, he noted the sight of it was a stark juxtaposition to the vibe of the call he was about to make. The telephone had been his Dad’s gag gift one Christmas, a throwback to when the two of them had talked on actual bananas to each other when Mark was a toddler. Now that he was older, it seemed a tad inappropriate to be handling a phallic symbol. Thanks, Dad.
Mark dialed the number from memory and got Jack on the phone.
“Hey,” Mark said, heart pounding. Suddenly he regretted calling, but it was too late to hang up.
“Hey.” The voice on the other end was apprehensive, but not hostile. And, he was still on the line. That was encouraging.
“How’s it going?”
“It’s going. You?”
“Same.”
Static.
“It’s hot as balls here. And boring as shit.” Boring, of course, being code for I miss you.
“Yeah, well, that’s summer for you.”
“I guess.”
“So, ah, I’m figuring you read the note?”
“What note?”
“I left it in the case.”
If the phone cord reached the other end of the room, he’d have gone to it right then. “I didn’t notice anything in there.”
“It’s in the lining. Anyway, we’re cool.” Someone called for Jack in the background. “Sorry. Gotta go. I’m leaving for camp tomorrow. Maybe we can catch up when I get back.”
“Okay.”
“Later.”
“Later.”
Click.
Mark dove across the room and stuck his hand into the case’s lining. Plucking the paper square out, he unfolded it. Scrawled in Jack’s chicken scratch, read, I think about you that way too. I’m sorry. Don’t hate me?
Mark wiped his watering eyes. His lip quivered. He wanted to flat out bawl, to let it all out, but the release didn’t come. His body couldn’t do what he’d never done before. If weeping was like muscle memory, his was atrophied. This was exactly the male tragedy his health teacher spoke about.
All this time Mark assumed he was out of line, that his head on Jack’s shoulder was offensive. However, to judge the note, the problem was that it wasn’t so offensive. The build-up of all their time together came to a boil, bubbling out of the pot. Mark, of course, didn’t know that then. How could he have? You can never really know what another person is thinking.
How he wished he’d found the note sooner, prior to moving away forever. Perhaps circumstances were better this way. There was closure, without the awkward face-to-face conversation neither of them had the tools for in the first place. Knowing the closest person to him didn’t really despise him was a monkey off Mark’s back. No, it was a gorilla off his back.
Mark returned the note to the lining of the Casio case. It seemed fitting to leave the piece of Jack there, to carry with him.
His mood improved. Mark slid one of the new vinyls from the
sleeve and set it on the player.
While the needle found the beginning grooves, he rested on his bed, tucking his hands behind his head. With his subconscious aired out, Mark allowed his mind to roam, revisiting adventures at the arcade, the mall, and the movie theater. Hunky dory memory lane lasted up through his third new album, Master of Puppets. The final tracks held his attention while he stared into space, wiggling his feet to the beat.
Salem lay unfazed on the bedspread, until what sounded like a splashing startled her. Her eyes opened and her head raised, her ears aimed in the direction of the window. It was loud, like someone or something flailing in water.
After dialing down the volume on the record player, Mark leaned his arms on the sill. Although a breeze rustled the tree leaves and a bird chirped in the distance, the fountain sat undisturbed. No ripples betrayed any recent movement.
He bit a fingernail before lifting the needle and starting the track over. Concentrating, he listened for a background effect that might’ve been similar to what he’d heard. Nothing remotely reminiscent of splashing was there.
Once the song finished, Mark powered off the player and picked up his Walkman. Putting his headphones on, he blasted away anything and everything inside and outside of himself. No memories. No antics of the house. No real time worries. No wigging out about the future. Nothing. The guitar riffs and drumbeats effectively sedated him into oblivion.
—
Fountain Dead Page 8
