The Good Neighbor

by William Kowalski

  Colt tried to imagine the world that was being conjured up, and failed. He sipped his drink again.

  “I lived on the street,” Forszak said. “I spoke three languages,

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  and none of them English.” He managed a woeful smile. “All I knew was, ‘Hey, Joe, got chocolate?’ ‘Hey, Joe, you buy ciga rette?’ That don’t get you too far in this town, I can tell you.”

  “No, sir,” said Colt.

  “And now all she can say is ’emotionally absent.’ As if I wasn’t busy working my ass off so my kids wouldn’t have to end up in a tent, too. So they could enjoy the best of things, instead of living covered in mud and shit every day of their lives, like I did.” Forszak reached his right hand up under his left jacket sleeve, ab sently rubbing his forearm. In the gloom Colt could just make out a series of digits in blue ink, tattooed into his skin. Again he looked away, feeling as if he had just seen the man naked.

  Forszak smacked the table with his open hand and straightened up. “Listen to me,” he said. “I sound like an old man.”

  “No, sir, you don’t,” said Colt. “It’s very inspiring to hear you talk, as a matter of fact. I always love to hear stories about people who made it with nothing.”

  “Yeah, right. You’re sitting here wondering when the hell I’m gonna shut up so you can get on with your life.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Bullshit. Anyway. Let’s get onto other things. Your country place.”

  “Anytime you wanna come out,” said Colt. “Just let me know.” “Yeah. How about next weekend?”

  Colt froze.

  “Next weekend?” he croaked.

  “Not this coming, but the next one. Okay? Thing is, I’m gonna be busy all through December, and I’m going to Russia in Janu ary,” Forszak said. “For more training. And I do wanna come. I like old houses. Besides, I wanna see what old Coltie has done for him self. It’s good for me to see my guys happy and successful. Makes me feel like it’s all worth something. Know what I mean?”

  “Sure.”

  “You guys are like my family,” Forszak said. “My own family

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  won’t even call me on my birthday. Waddaya think of that?” He patted Colt on the shoulder. “Seriously. You’re like a son to me, Coltie. You and all the other younger guys that started out here. I love to see you succeed. It does my heart good. I hope your old man knows how lucky he is to have a son like you.”

  Embarrassed, Colt muttered something.

  “Besides, it ain’t healthy to stay cooped up in the office all the time. You’ve had time to get the place set up already?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Colt quickly. “That’s no problem. I mean . . . it’ll still be a little rough. But you’ll be quite comfortable.”

  “Good,” said Forszak. “Next weekend it is, then.” He drained the rest of his bitters and hopped off the banquette. “I gotta go,” he said. “We’re going to a play tonight, me and my wife. You be in tomorrow?”

  “Yes, sir, I sure will.”

  “Awright. You email me the directions. Look forward to it.” Colt felt another hearty slap on his shoulder, and then Forszak, concentration-camp survivor and future astronaut, was gone.

  Colt rested his forehead on his hands. Furniture, he thought de spairingly. Food. Rugs. Paint.

  Then he sat up, alarmed, thinking:

  Oh, yes, and there still happens to be a goddamn cemetery in my backyard.

  17‌

  A Historical Digression

  (continued)

  Ellen Musgrove, eldest daughter of Captain Victor T. Musgrove, was in her eighth year the first time McNally, the tonic salesman,

  came walking down the dusty road to Adencourt, toting his large suitcase. Just for variety, she’d been sitting on the porch roof, a place that was strictly off-limits; this, of course, was what gave it its attraction. Ellen had to be quiet, for her father, a stern old man with handlebar mustaches and iron eyes, had come out onto the porch and seated himself in his rocking chair. This meant she was trapped. If she moved, she would be caught, and she would get whipped for certain.

  The Captain roused himself at the sound of approaching foot steps. Ellen flattened her body against the shingles as the stranger climbed the porch, and she listened with one ear pressed against the warm wood shakes. Their deep male voices echoed loudly, but they were muffled and she could understand little of what they said. When her father and the stranger went inside, Ellen crawled back in through the bedroom window and went downstairs,

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  where she was introduced to the visitor. He was tall and sun burned, with eyes set close together—a trait that signified un trustworthiness. Ellen didn’t like the way he looked at her, or at any of them, or the house. He had a way of running his eyes over things as though trying to figure out how much they were worth. She found him so frightening that she feigned a stomachache that evening just so she wouldn’t have to sit at the dinner table. The obligatory dose of castor oil was a small price to pay for escaping the stranger ’s company. Instead of staying in bed, however, she crawled down into the wall, into the secret space that had been created when the house was built.

  To get into the secret space, one had to go into the built-in clothes closet in the master bedroom and through a hidden door in the wall. A closet was an unusual and highly modern feature in those days. People generally had wardrobes instead, but the Cap tain, in a rare stroke of foresight, had insisted that his wife have what amounted to a separate room just for her dresses. Marly, em barrassed by this largesse on the part of a man who otherwise barely spoke to her, used it as a general storage space—among other things, she kept her dressmaker ’s dummy in there, which scared the children because it looked like a headless nude woman. She hardly owned enough dresses to justify a closet, anyway. Ellen had wondered if her father was planning on buying her more, just to fill it up. That would have been exciting. But no such wonders were forthcoming. Instead, the closet went mostly un used, which suited the furtive child perfectly.

  The secret space itself was not really a secret. The Captain, who was inclined to think of all places in terms of military de fense, had included it in the plans of the house as a hiding place of last resort for women and children, in the event that his home should be attacked by the Indians, or the Mexicans, or the French. It mattered not a whit to him that no military threat had existed in eastern Pennsylvania since Revolutionary times. In the Cap tain’s view, one could never be too careful—he believed that it

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  was not a matter of if war came to Adencourt, but when. Every so often, perhaps once a year, he conducted defense drills, during which he banged on an iron pot with a spoon and shouted orders as the other members of the family scrambled to their stations. Marly and the older children took up brooms, symbolizing rifles, and went to the third-floor windows, where they dutifully put the bristles to their shoulders and said “Bang! Bang!” The smaller children ran into the bedroom closet and scurried like mice into the crawl space, which was a narrow stairway that led back down through the walls of the second floor below, to a tiny room under the main stairs on the first floor.

  Most Musgroves, big and small, found being in the secret pas sage a terrifying experience. The only light available was that which leaked through chinks in the wall, it being unsafe for can dles, and there was scarcely enough room to turn around; you had to be truly tiny to avoid an attack of claustrophobia. But it was possible to hear things that were done and said in other rooms while remaining undetected, and if one wasn’t bothered by cob webs, dust, and dark, confined spaces, the crawl space was the perfect place to play.

  Ellen sat in there the night McNally ate dinner with her par ents, concealed like a mouse behind the wall, and she listened as her father recited the litany of things that were wrong with him: sore bones, aching joints, shortness of breath, headaches,
dizzi ness, a broken arrowhead in his left thigh, shrapnel from burst musket balls sprinkled throughout his body like salt. She had to move quietly, because even though she was invisible she was not inaudible, and her mother had the ears of a bat. She heard the glug glug of a bottle; this was McNally dosing the Captain for the first time with Oriental Tonic. Dinner finished, she scrambled back up to bed. The next day, she was relieved to learn that McNally was gone, and her stomachache miraculously disappeared.

  In later weeks, when the Captain became strung out and dis oriented, Ellen was prevented from entering the crawl space

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  because the only way to reach it was through her parent’s bed room, and she couldn’t go in there while her father was abed. This was a tragedy, for she’d cached her rag dolls there, as well as vari ous trinkets pilfered from her mother ’s meager beauty chest: a broken comb, and a brooch missing half its paste diamonds. She was forced to fall back once more on her second-favorite place, the porch roof. It was more exposed, but on the other hand she could see for a long ways. That was how she came to be the first to be aware of McNally’s return some weeks later, and how she also happened to see her mother frog-march him across the road and down to the river shortly after, a shotgun clamped firmly under her arm.

  This was a strange new development, and the young girl could make no sense of it. Ellen watched as the blond-headed salesman took off his clothes and raised his arms. From where she sat, she had a clear view of McNally’s penis. Ellen found this sight so re volting that she drew her breath in preparation for giving a loud scream. Only the fear of discovery, and punishment, prevented her. Growing up on a farm, Ellen had seen plenty of penises, all of them attached to animals; she knew that baby boys also had penises; but it was news to her that men had them, too. In fact, the adult male penis appeared to have nothing in common with the tiny little mushrooms her brothers possessed. It looked like a different organ altogether.

  McNally happened to have an extremely long, thin penis that cascaded several inches from his groin. It seemed to belong more on a horse than a man. It was so long, in fact, that Ellen believed she was witnessing an “abomination of nature,” a phrase she’d heard her father use often, but had never understood—until this moment. Here was a man who looked, quite literally, as if he were half-equine; he was proof that nature could, and sometimes did, go awry.

  Then there was a puff of smoke, and half an instant later she heard the double blast of the shotgun. Horrified, Ellen saw what

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  the now-horizontal Marly herself did not, which was the hail of shot busting through McNally’s body as though he was no more durable than a watermelon. It knocked him backward and into the nameless river, which promptly swept him away.

  Marly picked herself up and came quickly into the house. Ellen stayed flat on the porch roof until she was sure she could sneak back in without being discovered. Then she made a beeline for the closet, too scared to worry about her father, who didn’t notice her, anyway; he tossed and moaned in his bed in the strange kind of half sleep that had overtaken him lately—nothing of which had been explained to the children, except that the Captain was “poorly.” Losing no time, Ellen scrambled into the hidey-hole and down into the tiny secret room, where she caught her breath and tried to explain to herself what had just happened.

  The reasons, once she had thought them out, made sense. Mother had killed McNally because of his penis. Ellen, being a farm girl, knew full well what penises were for: peeing into fe males, who then made babies. What she did not understand was just how pregnant her mother was, of course. Marly Musgrove was not in the habit of announcing her frequent conceptions to her children until she was well along, and she had the kind of fig ure that made it difficult to tell that she was with child. It seemed to Ellen that McNally must have peed into her mother weeks ear lier, during his first visit, and this meant that Marly was going to have McNally’s baby.

  Clearly, this was not good news. For one thing, the baby would be an “abomination of nature,” like its father. For another, Marly herself must not be happy about it, else she wouldn’t have killed McNally. It went without saying that McNally had peed into Marly against her will—all intercourse appeared to the young Ellen as a kind of barnyard rape, a painful indignity that the fe male animals were forced to endure. No one could blame Marly for not wanting to put up with it. She was not a horse, after all. She was Mother, and her actions must be right.

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  What it all came down to, Ellen told herself, was that Marly had acted in self-defense—against McNally’s penis. He must have wanted to pee into her again. That all men would have penises did not occur to her; she was to believe, for a good part of her life, that simple possession of a penis was an act of treachery, and that only bad men had them. The eight-year-old Ellen vowed to herself then and there, as she hid under the stairs, that if she ever saw a penis again, she would find the strength to defend herself against it, just as her mother had. Ellen didn’t want to shoot anybody—but if she had to, she would.

  It was hours before Ellen found the courage to come out of the secret space and into the light again. When she did, she found Marly sitting in a rocking chair, calm as a statue, with Lucia oppo site her. The two of them were carding wool.

  “Did you hear?” Lucia asked her sister. “Mother shot a fox.”

  Ellen looked at her mother carefully. Marly glanced at her daughter.

  “Child, where have you been? You’re all dirt and cobwebs,” she said. “Draw some water and wash your face.”

  “Yes, Mother,” said Ellen. So this was how she was to play it; very well. She, too, could act as if nothing had happened. “Was it a big fox?” she asked.

  “Big enough,” said Marly, studiously avoiding her daughter ’s eyes now. “Go do as you’re told.”

  “Mind Mother, Ellen,” said Lucia, who though just a year younger was a terrible boss.

  Ellen went to the pump in the yard and drew a bucket of water. She rubbed her hands together in the cold, clear water and vigor ously scrubbed her face with her palms. Waiting for the ripples in the bucket to subside, she looked down at her reflection, holding her breath. The transparent version of herself looked back up at her from the silvery surface. Ellen stared into her own shocked eyes for a long minute, knowing that she had seen something she was not meant to see, and that she was therefore changed. She

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  was checking to see if she looked any different. If there were some way to freeze everything right there, she thought, she would do it; she prayed desperately that she would never grow one second older, not if womanhood was the eventual result. She tried all the tricks she knew of to stop time, including holding her breath. But nothing worked.

  No one knew what Ellen had seen, because Ellen never told; and no one knew what Marly did, either—except Ellen, who had succeeded better than she knew at stopping time. For the rest of her life, even as her body aged, in her mind she would always re main that eight-year-old girl looking into the bucket, holding her breath and wishing that things would go back to the way they were, before McNally came to Adencourt.

  ❚ ❚ ❚

  Ellen and Hamish, her twin brother, left Adencourt together, fol lowing Hamish’s graduation from high school with a certificate in bookkeeping. Hamish intended to find himself a job, hopefully in a bank, and Ellen—who had not gone to school beyond the age of fourteen—was to keep house for him until she found herself a husband. They were glad enough to have each other, for they had no idea what city living held in store, and they were both excited and scared. All they knew for sure about their futures was that they had no desire to remain at home—though, at the time, only Ellen understood why.

  In 1870, when they were eighteen years old, the twins bid farewell to their family and moved westward, first to Harrisburg, where steady work was not forthcoming, and then to Pittsburgh, w
here Hamish finally found a job keeping books for a small fac tory—really a large smithing shop. Without actually consulting her on the matter, Hamish made the assumption that his sister was interested in meeting eligible young men, and as her brother and male guardian it was his obligation to get her married. In fact,

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  he had promised their mother he would. He made efforts to intro duce her to the more well-heeled members of their social class— not quite nobility, of course, but definitely above the common cut, since they were the children of a war hero, after all. In the first few years, he made the casual acquaintance of several young men through work; occasionally, he brought one home to sample her cooking. Ellen, who had no intention of marrying anyone, retali ated against this show of proprietorship with subterfuge. She sprinkled the dinners of their guests with alum on the sly, know ing that a bad cook would never win a mate.

  She was right. The bitter powder, harmless but with a poiso nous taste, did its work. No young man ever came for dinner twice. After several valiant efforts, Hamish gave up, not without some relief. He hadn’t particularly wanted to get rid of his sister, with whom he shared the unspoken bonds of twinship; he’d merely acted out of a sense of duty. Once it became clear that no one was ever going to marry her, he felt free to regard her as his own helpmate—as he already had for some time.

  And Ellen, meanwhile, rested secure in the knowledge that she would never be forced to defend herself against the world of men in the same way that her mother had, with violence and blood.