by Nancy Mauro
He’s listening to Lily through the ceiling. Dropped things: a shoe, a book, a belt buckle. Also, something round and important. Round because, when it falls, it rolls in the direction of warped flooring. Important because she chases it out into the hallway. A man should be made to live beneath a woman before he marries her, he thinks. Before he even makes himself known to her. There is incredible intimacy in the ceiling, the floor, the space in between.
This evening, with Lily moving around up there, stacked on top of him, he’s got more checks in the Vague and Unstable column than anywhere else. He’s got a theory about fiefdoms and another about barnacles, but neither fully explains his situation. What is this coupling tendency? A man chooses a woman, selects her above all others, and takes her away to live in a box. Then the man loses the ability to address her like a human being. For reasons he cannot explain. And the woman locks herself away in a smaller box within the larger box. That they are in the same box is essential, Duncan suspects, for the ease of sex. He remembers reading that barnacles, while cemented headfirst to rock, procreate by extending their organ over and into a neighboring barnacle. For the crustaceous it’s necessary to live within a penis length of a neighbor. But remove the sexual (as he and Lily did so many months ago) and you’re left with largely agricultural motivations. Duncan suspects the contemporary custom of joining fiefdoms has its roots in smart farming policy, is evolved from the feudal system. And so here they are today, acting like vassals, when really, he is a robber baron at heart.
Duncan shuts the refrigerator, composing his thoughts. There’s a bit of swish left in the orange juice carton and he stands tipping his head back to catch it. Why is he unable to ask the simplest question? Where were you last night? What about her renders him an inarticulate ass?
Duncan holds the recalcitrant belief that, in love, one being must eventually consume the other. That two are superfluous; how long can two unhinged creatures rummage together in the wild? Duncan wishes for the companionship of an old geezer. Not a crazed vigilante like Skinner, but someone who has seen success with the opposite sex, who’s chosen a wife for her deft hand with the plowshare and her knowledge of calving practices. A salty dog who’s lived through a world war. Yes, an old man with rheumy eyes who’d punctuate his lessons with a quivering finger to illustrate where Duncan has veered from the path.
He looks out the kitchen door to the backyard and the barley beyond. The sun has lowered now, but still clings like a burr to the clouds. The garden is blistered into mounds of earth from which they’ve pulled the woman’s bones and over which he dragged the dead poodle last night.
It’s the perfect time of evening, he thinks, for Skinner’s clan to douse their torches in petrol and come after them. Hasn’t anyone noticed the correlation between their arrival in town and the number of missing animals? He’s reminded again how he botched things this morning. Not only by trailing Lily directly through town, but by blasting the hell out of there with Wakefield practically latched to his window. What should he tell Lily?
What about that you killed a dog and slept in the car? a salty old-timer would have advised him. Then you followed her. To make sure she actually goes where she says she goes.
Old men, Duncan thinks, know how to handle women. They had universal perils to distract them. An abundance of commies and Nazis to threaten their daily existence. Maybe the threat of a posse wouldn’t unnerve him so much if he were involved in large-scale issues. It was too bad they weren’t alive in the shadowy antebellum years, poised between one epic battle and the next. We might do well in crisis, he thinks. But without the immediate threat of conscription or the rise of a dictatorship, Duncan can’t see much to bind young man and wife together.
Doorbell’s ringing, the old man says.
The cop is not a swallower of bullshit. Lily understands this the instant she opens the door and sees the straining collar. Maybe it’s the way he’s driven the cruiser partially onto the front lawn and left the red and blue lights flashing. Maybe it’s the prairie flatness of his eyes or the puckered stretch of neck visible over the collar of his uniform, but Lily is already considering her escape options while he tells her his name.
Duncan walks out of the kitchen, comes and stands beside her so that their two bodies fill the entire door.
“What’s this about?” he asks the cop as she knew he would. He thinks they’ve come for Tinker. Or the boar. Someone has finally put the pieces together. She feels Duncan’s arm loop over her shoulder. It’s intended to look protective, but feels inflexible there, rigid. She glances at it from the corner of her eye; instead of closing around the cap of her shoulder, his fingers and thumb are spread and neutral. Not the way a man grasps a woman, Lily knows.
On the other hand, he is close enough that she smells him, the quiet battle of his soap and sweat. What if she reaches for his hand? If she drags it down around her breast, forces his fingers to clamp down around her nipple?
And then what? Lily tells herself not to think too carefully on this one.
Out front, the synchronicity of cruiser lights in the yard—now red, now blue—is mesmerizing, a helix spiral in the eyes. She’s susceptible, it seems, to these trances and flusters. Earlier she had fled the library and biked along the river, trying to keep an eye on the calm green of Ulster Landing a mile across. But her head was swimming in a milky broth and she surfaced from it only to pick small rocks from her sandals. What should she tell the cop? That the details were justifiable? That she was the one who had spurred the pervert to action. We die by our lethargy, Lloyd! A rally cry as tight as a good boat.
To see it, though—the girl pinned like a creature to cork—to see it was another matter. First thing her brain did was clear out of the room. The great cheerleader vanished, left only bits of string and paper in the corners. It was the gut that had to step in. The gut that finally transmitted the image of that word, No No No. What an ignoble creature, her brain. All along it had convinced her to shout down the rest of the body. What a double-dealing snake in the grass.
“We got a complaint about a guy’s been harassing some young girls,” the cop says to Duncan. “Guy’s been seen at the library. Checking if you got some information on his whereabouts.” He pulls a mug shot out of a notebook and holds it just above Lily’s sight line.
“We’re told you’re doing some studying at the library? You might have any contact with him?” The cop’s eyes graze over Lily for a second before retreating back up to the safety of her husband. “Lot of the ladies don’t want to admit when they’ve been harassed.” He starts clicking a ballpoint pen with his free hand.
Lily’s mouth opens, she’s struck by how young Lloyd is in the photo. His hair is ruffled, the jowl paunch extending from mouth to chin is barely an embryo.
“What did he do?” Duncan asks.
“Just like I said.” The cop, as though recognizing in himself a nervous habit of repetitiveness, stuffs the pen into his breast pocket. “We got reports on him before: exposing himself, making lewd comments, that sort of thing. This time he got a girl right in the library.” He coughs. “Touched her improperly.”
Here then, Lily thinks, a chance to break from the bloodline. Here’s the moment, let the peasant gut step forward. In overthrowing the head it will represent the body below the neck, all that lives coiled and stacked, sightless and overlooked. Of course I knew the man in the photograph; we are on intimate footing. Together we have stalked the daughters of the village.
Duncan’s arm has sunk into the groove of her shoulder. Without thinking, she puts her hand up against his chest. Only realizes it because of the pleasant hardness of his body, the thump of heart beneath. How will she explain this to him? How far back will she have to go? He’s just relieved that Tinker’s safe, she knows. That the boar continues to be shrouded in mystery. Still, he wants the cop gone. Duncan takes the picture from the officer’s hand, shows it to Lily. What he doesn’t realize is that the mug shot captures a youthful face. Not just full of
requisite hope, but of something better. Certainty.
“You know this guy?”
It is no easy task to take down an entire system. What has been set in place has guided her for years. She feels herself shaking her head. “No,” she says. “Never seen him.”
He has created a convection current using only a fan and an open window. What late-night genius, what craft, he thinks, shoving the mattress to the middle of the room. He pushes it like a barge through the reeds, into the radar zone, into the crosshairs of two conspiring machines. The window and the fan. Duncan believes his only hope for sleep is to locate the bed at the heart of this static crackle, where hot air is displaced by cold. His hands are blistered from the shovel. He presses them together and drops one knee on the mattress to test the orientation. There’s a definite chill. A less handy man would have suffered, pacing the halls in boxers, sat up smoking in the kitchen, running wet cans of Coke across the forehead. But not Duncan. He holds up his swelling hands to the current.
He looks at the flotsam and jetsam of sheets on the floor. He’d torn the linens from the mattress during his first phase of sleep, a failed attempt to drift under the wave of the fan alone. He spreads his body back on the bed. It would be good if his blisters released their warm fluid. The fan points up toward the window and if he lifts his hands, he can hold them in the stream.
Duncan studies the hump in the ceiling plaster and thinks, Where’s this all going, anyhow? He lays in the air stream with this trinity of frayed ropes. His work, his marriage, and the skeleton in the garden. He is trying to connect them, sniff out a plot where the terrors of the first teach him patience for the second, which brings meaning to the third. But he’s missing the bend and hitch that’ll tie all three together.
“Duncan?” The door is open (necessary engineering for his air system), and he lifts his head. Lily in a nightgown and glasses, a book pressed against her stomach, tentative at the door. Duncan can almost hear the vibratory hum of her nightgown skirting the floor as she hovers. Waits to be invited. And it seems to him he has spent years coaxing her into rooms, guiding her in and out of doors, carrying her across thresholds—I’ll still love you in the morning, Lily.
“You okay?” he asks.
She walks into the room and steps over the litter of bed linen without answering. Swims out to his barge, hands him the book. The Quiet American.
“Maybe it’ll help you. With the campaign.” She pushes her glasses up her nose. Duncan sits up, scratches a spot through his boxers with one hand, flips to the spine of the book with the other. This is an instinctive move, executed to assess the weight of her sincerity. It’s not from the library. It doesn’t bear the military spinal stamp of the Dewey decimal system. It’s a real book, one she had to purchase. He’s surprised by the gesture, the effort behind it.
What should he say? That the more he pulls from the ground of one woman, the less he understands of the other? Instead he holds up the book as if she might not know to what he was referring. “They published this in ’55. You know that Greene was, uh, basically predicting the American war with Vietnam?”
Lily nods, flops down on the mattress, and he feels the coils sink away beneath him.
“I can’t stop thinking about Tinker,” she says. Lily wants to talk about the bones, cozies up for some discourse on their discovery. But he’s not thinking about the nanny, can’t put his mind there. Not with her body splayed out beside him, not with that red-herring paperback at his side. Why is she here? Why did she think he’d still be awake?
“And that dog, running through town with Tinker’s shin in its mouth. They’ve got part of her leg in a police station somewhere.”
“I think you need to let it go,” he says, remembering how the shovel-on-dog impact vibrated to his elbows. “The dead are often spread around. Especially the important ones.”
“Yes. All those saints, cut up into relics.”
“When you’re hot, everyone wants a piece of you.”
Her smile is thankful but suspicious, as though he had told her she was beautiful. “I’m so tired, but I can’t stop wondering what happened to her.” She turns over on her side. “Do you wonder what happened?”
“No.” He says it before considering all possible meaning.
She pushes her glasses back on her head, pulls herself up. They sit on the mattress regarding one another. “I probably haven’t given enough credit, I don’t think, to the complexity of the situation.”
“Yes,” he says.
“I mean, I didn’t leave enough space for instinct.”
“You’ve just evolved beyond it.” He’s determined to stay light on his feet until he figures out what the hell she’s talking about. “Sort of like the appendix.”
“I credit my family for underestimating impulse,” Lily admits. “If an argument’s well thought out it has a right to exist. And vice versa.”
Duncan shrugs. “They are German.”
“Well, how about this for a break in the bloodline?” Lily sucks at her cheeks in an enunciative way. “I think Tinker’s death was a crime of passion.”
He has to laugh at the hush in her voice. This coming from a woman who chronically defaults to the obvious explanation. “I don’t know,” he says. “I was thinking she got caught in the thresher after all, Lil.”
As her truncated name leaves his mouth he flushes with embarrassment. They both look away, eyes hunt for shore in opposite corners of the room, two strangers acquainting over a soggy mattress. Yet there’s a piquancy in Lily’s voice that he has nearly forgotten, and to extinguish it would be either cruel or impossible. He plucks at the mattress pad.
“In each of the nine million retellings I’ve heard of your grandfather’s abduction, they always find him the next day. But in the barn—and not rescued by his father.”
Lily nods him on, as though welcoming his theory. Which, he realizes, will have to be made up as he goes.
“What if the reason no one talks about the father’s involvement is because when he actually finds them making for the river, the boy refuses to return with him?”
“Because Tinker raised him, essentially.”
“So he chooses her. The father has to drag them both back, but he sees the boy’s choice as a betrayal, a dishonor to the family.”
“Right. Like, what will the Astors say?”
“And Oster has no choice but to kill the kid too.”
Lily sits back; the jut of her lip tells him he’s overshot on intrigue.
“Think about it, Lily. What God giveth, God taketh away.” He forces the baritone out of his voice. “The power of destruction—there’s no greater achievement for a man.”
“My grandfather was alive until I was eight.”
“Technical detail.”
“No, but listen,” she says, bunching her nightgown under her knees. The fabric is stretched over her body like a fine tent.
“I’m listening.” Duncan wonders if she’s wearing anything underneath.
“I think Tinker was actually my great-grandmother.”
“Are the Crusaders aware of this?”
“My grandfather—the boy in her charge—is actually her son. Luis Oster impregnates Tinker, right? Most likely his wife is unable to conceive. So they allow Tinker to stay on as the nanny, but they raise the child as their own.” Lily shifts to her knees, her story requiring elevation for proper locution. Now the nightgown’s twisted so that the side slit parts over a thigh.
“Everything’s fine while the boy’s just a baby. But as he grows up, Tinker can’t be reconciled to the idea of her own son calling someone else Mother. Meanwhile she’s just treated as hired help. And so, one day, she takes him and tries running away.” Lily takes her eyeglasses off her head and bites on one of the arms. He can see her tongue, wet and preoccupied, prodding at the frame.
Duncan rubs his palms. “Tinker stays at the house because of her son,” he says with considerable effort, “even though Oster continues to, uh, rape her?” A t
ick of the heart dovetailing the end of his sentence.
“Maybe.” Lily folds the glasses. “Or maybe she liked it.”
Okay. He’s having trouble upholding his end of this plotted conversation. Even Lily, who has come to him under the guise of Tinker-talk, betrays a catch of the throat with her last words that suggests her intention is thumping away in a place her mouth can’t quite reach. He looks at her body, the fan rumpling her hair like fresh laundry.
She catches his look. “It’s cool in here.” She swallows. “My room is hot.”
A short while ago she made it clear that she couldn’t tolerate touching bodies in the heat. Why the change of heart? He can’t bring himself to ask, although there’s nothing he’d like to know more. He looks down at his palms and is overtaken by sadness, the opaque bubbles like a pox across their interior. He can’t even stretch them apart fully. Lily reaches over and slips her fingers into his palm. Her hand seems so small and submissive there. She begins to trace a circle around the blisters. Duncan’s head nearly flies to pieces. She leans over, the mound of her palm resting on his wrist.
“I made you work hard,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
He chokes on something—what? Anger? Yes, that she has to cloak this touch with double meaning. Anger that she is never willing to lay herself bare. Duncan reaches out, puts both hands on the neck of her nightgown, and acts with a violence that no longer surprises him. He tears her gown apart at the buttons. It splits like a shucked cornhusk. For a few seconds there’s just a rain of buttons against the hardwood, then the sudden exposure of her breasts. She pulls back, touches her chest as if he’s plunged a stick through her. But she doesn’t move to cover herself up.
Like the night in the kitchen, he thinks with horror. The slap zinging through the room with the trajectory of a rubber ball. Like the Grunts in the tunnel and the kids in the huts. The dog. Anne pouring dish soap over his filthy mess. The look on Lily’s face. What kind of man does she see with those amazed eyes, that open mouth?
There is a stranger kneeling on his bed not making a sound, and to her he says with sudden truth, “I wanted to see you again.”
