Gypsies

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He kept his T-shirt on.

  It wasn’t the shirt, of course; it was the power in him. Willis must have sensed that. Michael thought about what Laura had told him, some of the hints his mother had dropped. He understood that the T-shirt was itself irrelevant; that Willis might as easily have objected to his haircut, his shoes, the way he held his fork. What he really meant was: here is this new person under my roof and I don’t control him and I don’t like that.

  Michael understood because the house in Toronto had operated the same way, though without the implied threat of violence. He recognized in Willis the shadow of his mother’s cryptic silences. He had grown up in that silence. The vacancy of unpronounced words. This wasn’t a new thing with Willis, only louder and more frightening.

  He wondered whether that was the way it always worked in families, whether fears were passed on from generation to generation, like the color of a person’s hair or eyes. Maybe it was like a curse, something you could never escape, something you carried with you whether you wanted to or not.

  But, he thought, some things do change. Willis depended on his ability to scare people, and it worked: Michael’s mother was frightened of him; even Laura was frightened of him…

  But not me, Michael thought.

  Not me.

  He lay on his bed in the gathering dark and watched an early-winter show begin to beat against the window. He felt the tremble of the power in himself and thought, Hell, I’m a long way beyond Willis Fauve. He doesn’t scare me.

  2

  When Karen stopped in to say good night Michael was already dozing. Cradled in the old bed, he looked almost like a child again. Predictably, he still had the T-shirt on. Rather than wake him, she folded the comforter around him and tiptoed to the door.

  He stirred long enough to raise one eyelid. And he said a strange thing, faintly, from the depths of his sleep.

  He said, “Don’t be afraid.” “I won’t,” Karen said. “Sleep now.” She eased the door shut.

  But she was afraid.

  She was afraid of the Gray Man and she was afraid of her father.

  It surprised her, the depth of her fear. Maybe it was predictable, maybe she should have expected it. After all, what had changed? Well, she was an adult now, she had been married, had lived on her own. Those things should make a difference. But they didn’t, and maybe that wasn’t unusual; maybe these angles of connection—parent to child, father to daughter—were permanent, timeless. Around Willis she was a child again, hapless and awed. It was not what he said but the force with which he said it… the absolute masculine certainty he projected. The words were like doors into a private blast furnace Willis Fauve kept stoked inside himself; through the words, she could feel the heat.

  The next day, after Willis left for work, she helped her mother with the laundry; in the afternoon she carried the plastic laundry basket up to the second floor where Laura was waiting. Karen sat with her sister in the guest room folding sheets. The sheets were warm from the basement dryer; the fabric softener had imparted a faint, delicate scent of lavender.

  Laura said, “We’re not getting anywhere.”

  “I know,” Karen said. This frightened her, too: this motionlessness. “It’s harder than I thought it would be.”

  “It’s hard because nothing’s changed.” Laura whirled a sheet out over the bed. “Everybody’s older but nothing’s different. They say you can’t go home again, but the scary thing is that you can—it’s too easy to step back into all the old mistakes.”

  Karen said, “Mistakes?”

  “You know what I mean. He rules this house. You saw him at dinner, yelling at Michael. And we sat there. We took it. Nobody challenges Willis Fauve, no, sirree—not on his turf.”

  “Well, it is, isn’t it? It is his turf.”

  “It was our home for twenty years, for God’s sake! We lived under his roof like prisoners—it was only Tim who ever spoke up.”

  But, Karen thought, look what happened to Tim. Tim had disappeared out into the big world; for all anyone heard from him he might as well be dead. Maybe was dead. Maybe worse. Maybe the Gray Man had found him.

  But she folded that traitorous thought into a dresser drawer along with the spare sheets. “Tim was braver than us.”

  “Brave or stupid. Or maybe he just liked getting bruised. But at least he fought back.”

  Karen thought privately that Tim was like a small frightened dog: the harder you kick him, the more he tries to bite… until he chews through the rope and runs away. Tim, after seventeen years of this life, had finally gnawed through his rope. She said, “We won’t find out anything from Daddy.”

  “We haven’t tried to find out anything from anybody.” Laura smoothed the sheet over the mattress and slipped the two old pillows into their flowered cases. “It’s Mama we should talk to.”

  “She won’t like it.”

  “If we wait for her to like,” Laura said, “we’ll be here another twenty years.” It was undeniable.

  “Now,” Laura said. “We should talk to her now.”

  Karen hesitated and then wondered at her own reluctance. “Doesn’t it scare you at all—what she might say? Don’t you think about what it might mean —knowing?”

  Laura walked with her to the stairs. They were sisters now for certain. No time had passed; they were altogether children. Laura said, “I’m more scared of what might happen if we don’t.” The house felt suddenly colder.

  Mama was in the kitchen drying dishes.

  How full of memories this house is, Karen thought. But it was not so much the house as the furnishing of it, the lay of things. The kitchen was like the kitchen in every other house they had lived in. The tile was peeling up, the cupboards were painted a dingy flat yellow color. Dish towels hung on a wooden rack; the dishes were stacked in a white Kresge’s drainer. Cups on cup hooks, pot holders in the shape of roosters tucked behind the toaster, a hand-stitched sampler on the wall bearing a passage from Proverbs. It was late afternoon and the kitchen window showed a dismal backyard terrain of powder snow and hillside and empty sky. Daddy would be home in an hour or two… longer if he stopped to have a drink.

  It was Laura who had the courage to say, “Mama, we need to talk.”

  Jeanne Fauve looked up briefly. “Talk about what?”

  “Old times.”

  Mama stood still for a few moments, then set down the dish she’d been drying and turned to face Laura. Her expression was hooded, unreadable. “Wait here,” she said finally, and bustled out of the room.

  Karen sat with her sister at the kitchen table, tracing patterns with her finger in the chipped Formica. How old was this table? As old as herself? My God, she thought, we don’t need to dig up the past: it’s here, it’s all around us.

  Mama came back with a shoe box under her arm. She sat down at the table and pried up the lid.

  Inside the box there were pictures.

  Mama said, “These are the old days. All these photos.” She emptied them onto the table.

  Karen sifted through the pile. The photographs had aged badly. She remembered the various cameras Mama used to own: a Kodak Brownie, which had produced most of these mirror-finished black-and-white pictures; and later a big plastic Polaroid camera, the kind where the photograph rolled out by itself and then you had to wipe it down with some evil-smelling preservative.

  “Here,” Mama said. “The house on Constantinople… you remember?”

  Karen inspected the picture. Daddy must have taken it: it showed Mama standing by their new car, a steely blue Rambler parked in front of the house. Karen and Laura and Tim stood listlessly in the background leaning against the porch railing. How bored we look, Karen thought. It must have been a church day: everyone was dressed up, Mama in her pillbox hat with the preposterous black mesh veil, Karen and Laura in white starched dresses. Tim wore a black suit and collar. How Tim had always hated those collars. It made his child face seem piggish, baby fat pushed up into his chin.

 
; Briefly, dizzyingly, she remembered her dream, the ravine behind the house, the night they had passed into a grim world of Tim’s devising. And not just a dream. It was a memory. It was as real as this photograph.

  She thought, If we had taken Mama’s Kodak Brownie through that Door we might have a picture now—a picture of that strange night city, a picture of the Gray Man.

  In her mind the Gray Man said, Your firstborn son.

  “Those were good days by and large,” Mama was saying. “Your father had steady work. And I think I loved that old house on Constantinople more than any place I’ve lived since. More even than this place.”

  Laura said, “Then why did you leave?”

  Laura was focused, alert: Laura had not been seduced by the photographs.

  Mama said, “Well, you know. You remember what I used to tell you kids? We’re gypsies. We move around …”

  Laura said, “That’s not a reason.”

  Mama hesitated, then turned back resolutely to the photographs. “Here’s the apartment in the West End. Karen, you were in fifth grade that year. That was your birthday party—you remember that? Here’s where we moved in Bethel. That’s Tim on the streetcar going downtown. Here we are with Mama Lucille taking the boat tour around the Point, I guess it was 1965 or ’66, the summer we had so many fireflies. Oh, and here I am—I was skinny in those days—riding up the Incline with your father. Here—”

  Laura said, “There aren’t any baby pictures.”

  Mama remained silent, her eyes on the pile of photographs.

  Laura went on, “It just seems strange. No baby pictures. And the way we moved. I mean, there was Constantinople Street, there was Bethel; there was the West End, there was Duquesne. And we could have stayed on. Daddy wasn’t drinking so bad in those days. And I remember how we moved. Pack up and leave overnight. Like we were skipping out. But I remember how you always left the rent in a white envelope taped inside the door. So we were running, but not because of money.”

  Mama said sullenly, “Is that why you came back here—to stir up all that old trouble?”

  “Is it so wrong to want to understand?”

  “Maybe. Maybe there was a good reason we left those places.”

  “We’re all grown up now,” Laura said. “We have a right to know.”

  “If it would help you,” Mama said vehemently, “you think I wouldn’t have told you? It was only ever to protect you … it was only so you could lead normal lives.”

  Normal lives, Karen thought. She was passive now, a spectator in this exchange between her mother and her sister, thinking, A normal life is all I ever wanted. A normal life is what I wanted for Michael.

  Laura said, “But we don’t lead normal lives.”

  “But you could!”

  “No. We can’t. Maybe for the same reason you couldn’t.” Laura held up a handful of the flimsy old photos. They looked, Karen thought, like so many brittle leaves. “Is he in here?”

  Mama looked fearful. “Who?”

  “You know who. Is he in here? Is he looking over somebody’s shoulder? Is he watching from the window across the street while Daddy waxes the Rambler? Is that why we moved all the time, because he found us on Constantinople Street and he found us in Bethel and he found us in Duquesne?”

  Karen was holding her breath now. She thought of what Michael had said about the Gray Man on the beach, the way he had flicked that little girl out of the world with a gesture. With his eyes.

  Mama said breathlessly, “You shouldn’t even talk about him. It could bring him back. It’s bad luck.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Laura said firmly. “He doesn’t need luck.”

  “God help us,” Mama said. The kitchen clock ticked; a wind rattled the windowpane. Mama added faintly, “He found you?”

  “He found Michael in Toronto,” Laura said. “He found all three of us in California. There’s no reason to believe he can’t find us here.”

  “So much time passed… we thought you were safe.”

  “Did you? What about Tim—is Tim safe?”

  “I pray for Tim.” Mama lowered her head. “I pray for him the way I prayed for you all these years.”

  Laura looked startled. She opened her mouth, closed it again.

  Karen found herself speaking. “We need to know all there is to know.” The words spilled out. “Not just for us. For Michael’s sake.”

  “It almost wrecked us,” Mama said quietly. “Do you understand? It could wreck us again… There’s nothing I can say to help you.”

  “Please,” Karen said.

  Her mother looked infinitely pained and, in that protracted moment, impossibly old. Her cotton print housedress dangled limply from her shoulders. Outside, the wind raised up a whirl of snow.

  “I can’t,” she said finally. “Try to understand. I never spoke to anybody about this. It’s hard. Maybe later. I have to think…”

  Then, at the front of the house, the door rattled and slammed. A draft of cold air swept in along the floor. Jeanne Fauve stood up, composing her face. “It’s your father,” she said, sweeping the photographs back into the shoe box. “I have to get dinner ready.”

  Chapter Eleven

  1

  The house was quiet that night, but Michael couldn’t sleep.

  The dark third-floor windows were shrouded with snow. The snow, he thought, should have melted; it was early for this kind of weather. But the temperature had dropped and the snow had deepened, cold air sweeping down the valley where the Polger met the Monongahela, whipping through these old blacktop streets.

  Michael had spent the day exploring the town, walking from the north side to the south and back. He had bought a couple of paperbacks at a sad-looking Kresge’s and stopped for warmth and a cup of coffee at the tiny McDonald’s on Riverside, but mostly he just walked. One long depressing afternoon hike, one side of the valley to the other. The town, he had estimated, was about as big as Turquoise Beach, but older and dirtier and poor in a different way. Michael understood that many of the people in Turquoise Beach had volunteered for poverty, lived that way so they could paint or write or make music. But poverty in Polger Valley was an unforeseen accident, a disaster as tangible as a train derailment.

  He had climbed a hillside until he could see all the sooty length of the town and the broad winding of the Mon, the steel mill and the gray highway, clouds rolling like winter itself from the northwestern sky. Standing there in his heavy coat, Michael felt the power in himself—stronger, it seemed, than ever before. It was like a current rising out of the depths of the earth, the old coal veins buried there, carboniferous ruins—it was a river running through him. He understood that it did not come from him but that he was a vehicle for it; the power was something old, eternal, fundamental. There was no end to it; by definition it was limitless. The limiting factor was Michael himself.

  He thought, I can go anywhere I can imagine. The places he had seen were real places—as Turquoise Beach was a real place—but accessible only if you could dream yourself there.

  He thought about this, walking home. He endured Willis’s pointed stares that evening, thinking about it. He took his thoughts to bed with him.

  He lay in the cloistered warmth of this ancient bed with the comforter pulled up to his chin and the wind sifting snow against the window.

  He thought, What we dream, we are.

  Some things would be closed to him forever. There were worlds he couldn’t reach, worlds beyond his grasp. He felt them out there in the storm of possibility, tenuous doors he could not quite open. It made him think of what Laura had said about Turquoise Beach: It’s the best I could find. She wanted paradise but couldn’t truly dream it… maybe didn’t really believe in it.

  He figured Laura knew all this, understood that her ramshackle seaside Bohemia was also a testament to her own limitations.

  But at least she had tried. Michael thought about his mother, who hadn’t, who pretended she didn’t have the power at all—and maybe tha
t was true now, maybe she had lost it. Maybe it atrophied, like a muscle. She had spent her life living up to the pinched expectations of Willis Fauve, trying to lead a “normal” life that was, when you came down to it, as ephemeral as Laura’s paradise.

  A better world, Michael thought.

  Maybe there really was such a thing.

  Maybe he could find it.

  He felt sleep tugging at him. He felt, too, the maze of possibility, the twining corridors of time. He could walk that maze, he thought, pick a destination, feel for it, follow the tug of intuition… here and here and here.

  He closed his eyes and dreamed a place he had never seen before.

  He envisioned it from an immense height and all at once, a place where brightly colored cities stood amidst plains and wilderness, buffalo and redwood forests and busy towns where the rivers branched. He thought of names. They came into his mind unbidden, but with the feeling of real names, place names: Adirondack, Free New England, the Plains Nations.

  He saw fragile aircraft swimming through a clean sky; the focus narrowed and he saw crowds thronging a city marketplace, caged birds chattering, acrobats in a public square, a man in feathers buying spices from a woman in Chinese robes.

  And then he turned his head against the pillow, willed his eyes open, and saw only the dark outline of this attic room, the snow against the window.

  The vision was gone.

  Sleep, Michael thought longingly. Sleep now.

  He lay in the dark and listened to Willis moving through the house, locking and checking the doors, maybe taking a last sedating drink before he climbed the stairs to his own long and dreamless sleep.

  2

  Laura shared the twin beds in the guest room with her sister, but tonight she couldn’t sleep.