by Chris Wiltz
Thea stopped combing her hair when she caught the reflection of the Rapunzel doll's lifeless yet curiously alert blue eyes in the mirror. They were aimed straight at her, too bright in that white death-mask vitreous face. Thea stared at the eerily white face. It wasn't staring at the face that scared her, but staring at it jelled the inchoate jittery feeling that had begun at the Hindermanns’. And fear of being alone in the house set in.
She lay in bed in the dark, wide awake for a long time. She tried to talk herself out of being afraid by telling herself it was time to get rid of things in the house she didn't like and didn't want. She would give the dolls away, and when Burgess’ men were finished in the parlor, she would have them start in Aunt Althea's bedroom, with its window-seat alcove, huge closet, and a bathroom right off a large dressing room. She would make the room over for herself and put in a tub with a Jacuzzi. But thoughts of a Jacuzzi and modern decor and charitable donations couldn't shake her fear or drown out the creaks and groans of the old house. She knew Bobby had wanted to spend the night with her, and she almost wished she had let him. She thought of him driving home with all that bourbon in him and began to worry. Her worry was a relief from the fear for a while and was easier to deal with, since, after all, Bobby had only a few blocks of familiar lamp-lit empty streets to negotiate to get home. Where he would have been for some time now.
Bobby stayed at Thea's front door, his cheek pressed against the tiny squares of beveled glass, watching through one as Thea floated up the wide staircase, her fingers dragging lightly along the varnished wood banister. For a moment he felt those long, short-nailed fingers glide over the small of his back. The hair on his nape rose slightly, his dying erection revived briefly, until she pulled her foot up the last visible step.
He knew he'd turned her off, and he knew it was because he'd had too much to drink. Christ, he hoped it was only because he'd had too much to drink. He wanted to ring the doorbell, make her come back so he could ask her was that it, too much bourbon? He'd admit he'd had too much; he'd tell her he'd stop.
But even in his booze-befuddled state he knew it was better not to push it tonight. She was upset: that damn Lyle and his guns. Bobby was beginning to wonder if Lyle was ever going to talk about anything else, anything besides crime and people getting robbed and niggers in his backyard and shooting to kill. Thea had said she was sick of the cold weather up north; he didn't want her to start thinking that it might be cold but at least it was safe.
He stumbled on the steps, his own shadow blocking the soft light from the gas lamps on either side of the leaded-glass doors, the large oak tree in front of the house making a pattern of dark lace on the brick walk. He went through the low iron gateway and closed the gate carefully behind him. He walked to his car, patting his pockets, getting out his keys, thinking he'd come to see her tomorrow, tell her he wasn't going to drink so much any more, make her believe him. He tripped on the sidewalk where it was cracked from the roots of the old oak pushing up, persistent, impervious, then he tripped again on the thick, gnarled roots themselves, like small tree trunks half buried in the earth. He fumbled with first one key then another at the door of the old Lincoln. Fantasies about the time he would stay with Thea all night rolled pleasantly before his mind's eye, and he could feel her straight smooth hair like inky silk in his hands, he could see her breasts flatten as she reclined, her back arch as he touched her, her small foot on his thigh, and he was starting to get hard again when he thought he heard something, not quite behind him, on the other side of the oak, but before he could turn around to see, Bobby felt a crushing weight on his head, his fantasies went black, and he went down.
Thea slept for a while, then woke from a dream she forgot instantly. She lay rigid, the way people do when they wake in the middle of the night, listening. Had that been a whisper outside her door, was that thud a footstep on the stairway? No, no, it was only her own blood rushing in her ears, the thud of her own heartbeat.
Their fear had spread like wildfire to her stale dread of being alone. One night with them and her fear was like theirs, no longer a fear of being alone in the world, a fear whose character had changed over the years, melting down into sadness; now her aloneness was compounded by a fear of what was outside and what might get inside. And how could she control that? How could Bobby control that if he were here with her? Ah, yes, well, that was where Lyle's guns came in.
Thea tossed back the covers and moved her feet up and down on Delzora's starched sheets, making noise, daring whatever was there, if it was there, to show itself.
Gradually the fear subsided. She tried to imagine Bobby asleep in this room with her, this little girl's room with the cabinet full of dolls, spending the night with him, how sex with him would be. She wondered if he would start making demands on her, after all these years. Maybe that's what had been the matter, no demands, he'd been too easy. She wanted someone to make demands, but she couldn't make Bobby into that someone. She thought about the letter she'd written to Michael a few days ago with a list of the belongings she wanted him to send her. He would have gotten it by now, but he had not called. She wondered if she was wanting him to call and ask her to come back. She tried to imagine him on the phone, begging her, but she couldn't make that fantasy work either.
She sat up in bed, turning to hang her legs over the side, dangling them reluctantly at first, then swinging them, another dare, finally dropping the few inches to the floor. Old childhood fears— silly, but she couldn't help it. She put the terry robe on in the dark, the fragrance of the bath oil still so strong on it that someone could find her by smell alone. She went out into the hallway, heading for the bathroom, but at the last minute she passed it by to go to the second-story front porch, a small curved screened porch just under the third-floor gable. She unlocked the door to it. The door was swollen with dampness and she had to tug on it to get it open. She pulled at it in something of a panic, hating having her back turned to the hallway, wanting out of the house yet knowing it was absurd to think she would feel safer on the porch.
The door grated open. Thea rushed out onto the porch, dragging the door closed behind her, the porch floor gritty beneath her bare feet. The limbs of the oak almost touched the house. She looked through the dirty screen, the dense leafy tree limbs, and she started. Why was Bobby's car still here? She dropped to her knees, her hands and forehead and the bridge of her nose pressed against the screen, and she saw him on the ground at the base of the tree, his body inert, twisted, uncomfortable, and she jumped up, struggled with the door, cursing it, crying, then running, almost slipping on the stairs, almost tripping herself on the robe but never slowing down, never thinking what might be behind her or what might be lurking outside, waiting. She flung open the front door and sped down the walk.
His face was turned toward her, his right cheek pressed into the rough tree roots. She scraped her ankle trying to get around him and saw the blood on the crown of his head. But she could see also that his chest was rising and falling.
Once she saw that Bobby was alive, Thea ran back into the house. Maybe it was because the number was written on a pad next to the telephone, maybe it was because calling the police emergency number seemed so impersonal, maybe because he was Bobby's best friend—whatever the reason, like a preprogrammed automaton, Thea called Lyle Hindermann.
13
The first time Bobby's father said he wanted to be cremated, he and Bobby were sitting in a duck blind out in the Louisiana marshland about eighty miles south of New Orleans.
It was before dawn, freezing cold, and Bobby had the worst hangover of his life. On the way out to the blind he had thrown up over the side of the pirogue, and now he was huddling sick and weak within the camouflaging brown roseaux surrounding the blind. He felt nauseated from the miasma created by a kerosene-soaked roll of toilet paper slowly burning in an old coffee can. He'd rather be cold than smell it, but he knew that when the toilet paper burned out, the kerosene fumes would be replaced by the stink of the decayi
ng marsh, a swampy brew that made the mud a reeking, gooey mess. His and his father's clothes were already smeared with it. He was telling himself that he was never going to drink again and he was never going duck hunting again, when his father handed him what was left of the bourbon from the night before and told Bobby he wanted to be cremated. After that, the ducks were flying and Bobby was on his feet, taking aim, backing up his father's missed shots, forgetting about everything except the sight of those ducks falling out of the sky.
The next time, they were out in the Gulf of Mexico fishing for snapper. The sun was so bright it was a blinding buttery smear on a baby-blue ceiling. The heat had Bobby pinned to his swivel chair in a state of pleasurable lethargy that he broke every now and then to take a cooling sip of beer or to reach over into the ice chest and grab a couple more for himself and his dad. They sat together in silence, neither of them having much to say, both of them comfortable with that. Nothing on their minds anyway, or so Bobby thought, except knocking back a case of beer and catching a few fish.
When his father spoke, he picked the conversation up where he'd left it in the duck blind. “After they cremate me, put my ashes in a paper bag and bring them out here, to the blue water.”
Until that moment, Bobby had forgotten his father's talking about cremation in the duck blind. “Imagine Mother's reaction when she sees me putting your ashes in a paper bag,” he said. His father dismissed that by shrugging one shoulder then tilting his head back and draining off the end of a beer. “Have you told her?” His father shook his head. “No, of course not. She'd have every Jesuit at Holy Name praying for you and trying to talk you out of it.”
His father tossed the can overboard. “The hell with that. I don't want any wake gawkers or graveyard visitors. Gives me the creeps. They can say their prayers and sing their masses and then you bring me out to the fishes.”
“All right, but whatever you want, Daddy, you better write it down.”
“Just promise me, Bobby.”
There were several such conversations, always out in the marsh or on the water, but a few years later Bobby could find no excuse for himself in his father's failure to either write down his wishes or tell his wife he preferred cremation to burial. Surely his father must have known that Bobby would never be able to override his mother.
Millie McKenzie Buchanan planned the funeral services for Robert Buchanan, Sr., with the same attention to detail that she had applied to parties for their group of uptown New Orleans socialites. She wrote a carefully worded newspaper story and included a picture taken ten years previously. She decided the casket should be closed and ordered nearly a thousand dollars worth of flowers to drape it. She arranged for the opening of the Buchanan family tomb in Metairie Cemetery and called the caterer. All the while Bobby protested that none of it was what his father wanted, that he wanted his ashes carried in a paper bag to the blue water.
“Oh, Bobby,” his mother said, “you know your father just said morbid things like that when he was sick.” When he was sick meant when he was drinking. Millie burst into tears.
“But he made me promise,” Bobby said.
Millie didn't answer because she was psychosomatically hard of hearing. There were some things Bobby never could stand up to; one was Millie's tears, another was her deafness. This, however, was a situation worthy of raising one's voice.
“I said, he made me promise.”
Millie sniffled and remained deaf.
“Mother, you know good and well you hear exactly what you want to hear.” It felt good, accusing her.
She said pitifully, “Bobby, I just can't talk about this anymore.”
“Mother, don't you understand, he made me promise. I want to do this for him.”
He was quite familiar with the hard look she turned on him, a look of cold determination, something else in her trove of southern matriarchal responses, but he was a bit taken aback by her viciousness. “If you wanted to do something for your father, Bobby, you should have refused to help him drink himself into the grave, which is where he is going to go. I doubt seriously that you could find your way out to the blue water with him in a paper bag anyway.”
Two days later, in a drizzle, Bobby stood under a canopy in the Metairie Cemetery, supporting his mother on his arm while his father's body was slid into the tomb, an ornate above-ground room with stained-glass windows on the east and west walls. He went back home and drank his way through six hours of friends and relatives comforting the family, eating tiny sandwiches, drinking, remembering, and suffering.
The following morning Bobby went out to the cemetery alone. He stood in front of the granite and marble vault and said, “Daddy, I told you to write it down.”
Besides some guilt, Bobby's father left him with a piece of property, a once-beautiful Greek Revival house that was now cut up into five apartments. It was several blocks off Convent Street in a neighborhood that had been described at the time of purchase as marginal but had since gone all black. When Bobby's father bought it in the early eighties, at the tail end of the real-estate boom in New Orleans, he thought young professionals would move into the neighborhood eventually, fix up the houses, and triple the property values. At the time, renovation was the name of the game in up-town New Orleans, and Bobby's father wanted to cash in so he could replenish the family fortune, which was drying up along with the oil leases held by the Buchanans for three or four generations. What he hadn't counted on was the oil crunch. Property values stabilized, then they fell; nothing was moving. Tenants came and went. Later they came and stayed, bringing so many others with them that Robert Buchanan could never be sure how many people were living in one apartment at one time. Things began to happen to the building. All the outside shutters, the gutters, and a whole section of weatherboards were stolen. A toilet fell through the floor. Two plaster walls were demolished by machine-gun fire in one of the back apartments. Instead of replenishing the family fortune, the apartment house slowly drained more of it.
Late Sunday morning after being mugged outside Thea's house and spending the rest of the night in the hospital, Bobby drove up in front of the apartment house. The For Sale sign was face down in the square of muddy yard between the porch and the sidewalk. It didn't make any difference; the house wasn't salable anyway, too dilapidated, badly in need of a paint job, the wood rotting, but he got out of the car and went over to pick up the sign. When he bent down, the inside of his head pounded against his skull. He stood up, palm to forehead. He didn't know if his head was splitting because of the enormous hangover he had or because it had literally been split open by some blunt instrument, the butt of a gun maybe. He thought he remembered Lyle counting twelve stitches.
The door to the downstairs front apartment was ajar. Bobby pushed it open slowly. As he suspected, the apartment was empty— that is, if you didn't count all the rubble left in the middle of the living room floor. Once again he was out at least two months’ rent. It occurred to him that he ought to take the For Sale sign down and put one up that said Free Apartments. And just let the place fall down. If he had the money, that's exactly what he'd do. Then when the city came after him, he'd hire a demolition company.
He stepped inside cautiously. You never could tell what you might find: bodies—starving, sleeping, murdered; rats hiding under the greasy chicken take-out bags; cockroaches, always, everywhere the roaches.
It was dark inside. Someone had tacked pieces of heavy card-board over the windows. Bobby flicked the light switch but nothing happened. He looked up. The light fixture was gone. Wires twisted like worms out of the cracked plaster medallion of fruit and flowers at the center of the ceiling.
He skirted the trash and went into what had once been the dining room. Shit—the crystal chandelier, a nice piece with long prism crystals, was gone too. His mother had told him to take it down and store it. He'd told her he would. And once he'd told her he would, in his mind he had. He'd catch hell now. No. No he wouldn't. His mother would never have to know. One thing a
bout her illness, her reign of terror—most of his life—when she kept tabs on everything he did or didn't do was over. Problem was, he kept catching himself trying to shirk blame for something or another. Maybe one day he'd get used to his new freedom.
In the dining room, against the inside wall, was a sleeping mat made from newspaper and an old blanket. Some poor bugger had made himself right at home. Too bad. No more freebies. He went into the kitchen, crossing some seriously spongy floorboards, doing his best to ignore the disgusting mess in it, to see if the back door was bolted. A couple of boards gave and he nearly fell through the floor. Cursing, he went to the front room and ripped a piece of cardboard away from one of the windows to lay across the hole. On his way out through the dining room, he picked up the blanket and newspapers, his nose twitching at the stale human smell they released once he disturbed them, and threw them out on the front porch. He locked the front door.
As Bobby was coming down the front steps, Lyle pulled up across the street from the apartment house. He was in uniform, and as he got out of his car, the sun glinted off his badge and off the gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses he always wore on the beat. Bobby could hear the belt and holster leather creak as Lyle crossed the street. There was something tough about the way that sounded. There was something tough about the way Lyle walked when he was in uniform, different from the way he walked in a three-piece suit.
