Grandma ignored my question. “Goddamn freak,” she said, scratching a match on the porch rail and lighting one of her rollies. “Wait and see, he’ll get his wagon fixed.”
“Aunt Evelyn likes him,” I noted pleasantly, just to stir things up a bit.
“Your Aunt Evelyn’s screws are loose,” she said sourly. “And he’s the son of a bitch who owns the screwdriver that loosened them.”
“He must be an awful smart fellow to be studying to be a professor at a university,” I commented. It was the last dig I could chance.
“One thing I know for sure,” snapped my grandmother. “He isn’t smart enough to lift the toilet seat when he pees. There’s evidence enough for that.”
After hearing that, I took to leaving a few conspicuous droplets of my own as a matter of course on each visit. Every little bit might help things along.
I stood in his doorway and watched Thompson meditate. And don’t think that, drenched in satori as he was, he didn’t know it. He put on quite a performance sitting on the floor in his underpants. When he came out of his trance he pretended to be surprised to see me. While he dressed we struck up a conversation.
“You know, Charlie,” he said while he put on his sandals (I’d never seen a grown man wear sandals in my entire life), “you remind me of my little Padma-sambhava,” he said, nodding to the idol squatting on his dresser. “For a while, you know, I thought it was the smile, but it isn’t. It’s the eyes.”
“Its eyes are crossed,” I said, none too flattered at the comparison.
“No they’re not,” he said good-naturedly. He tucked his shirt-tail into his pants. “The artist, the maker of that image, set them fairly close together to suggest – aesthetically speaking – the intensity of inner vision, its concentration.” He picked up the idol and, looking at it, said, “These are very watchful eyes, very knowing eyes. Your eyes are something like that. From your eyes I could tell you’re an intelligent boy.” He paused, set Padma-sambhava back on the dresser, and asked, “Are you?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t be afraid to say it if you are,” he said. “False modesty can be as corrupting as vanity. It took me twenty-five years to learn that.”
“I usually get all A’s on my report card,” I volunteered.
“Well, that’s something,” he said, looking around the room for his belt. He picked a sweater off a chair and peered under it. “Then you see what’s going on around here, don’t you?” he asked. “You see what your grandmother is mistakenly trying to do?”
I nodded.
“That’s right,” he said. “You’re a smart boy.” He sat down on the bed. “Come here.”
I went over to him. He took hold of me by the arms and looked into my eyes with all the sincerity he could muster. “You know, being intelligent means responsibilities. It means doing something worth while with your life. For instance, have you given any thought as to what you would like to be when you grow up?”
“A spy,” I said.
The silly bugger laughed.
It was the persistent, rhythmic thud that first woke me, and once wakened, I picked up the undercurrent of muted clamour, of stifled struggle. The noise seeped through the beaverboard wall of the adjoining bedroom into my own, a storm of hectic urgency and violence. The floorboards of the old house squeaked; I heard what sounded like a strangled curse and moan, then a fleshy, meaty concussion which I took to be a slap. Was he killing her at last? Choking her with the silent, poisonous care necessary to escape detection?
I remembered Thompson’s arm flashing frenziedly in the sunlight. My aunt’s discoloured thighs. My heart creaked in my chest with fear. And after killing her? Would the madman stop? Or would he do us all in, one by one?
I got out of bed on unsteady legs. The muffled commotion was growing louder, more distinct. I padded into the hallway. The door to their bedroom was partially open, and a light showed. Terror made me feel hollow; the pit of my stomach ached.
They were both naked, something which I hadn’t expected, and which came as quite a shock. What was perhaps even more shocking was the fact that they seemed not only oblivious of me, but of each other as well. She was slung around so that her head was propped on a pillow resting on the footboard of the bed. One smooth leg was draped over the edge of the bed and her heel was beating time on the floorboards (the thud which woke me) as accompaniment to Thompson’s plunging body and the soft, liquid grunts of expelled air which he made with every lunge. One of her hands gripped the footboard and her knuckles were white with strain.
I watched until the critical moment, right through the growing frenzy and ardour. They groaned and panted and heaved and shuddered and didn’t know themselves. At the very last he lifted his bony, hatchet face with the jutting beard to the ceiling and closed his eyes; for a moment I thought he was praying as his lips moved soundlessly. But then he began to whimper and his mouth fell open and he looked stupider and weaker than any human being I had ever seen before in my life.
“Like pigs at the trough,” my grandmother said at breakfast. “With the boy up there too.”
My aunt turned a deep red, and then flushed again so violently that her thin lips appeared to turn blue.
I kept my head down and went on shovelling porridge. Thompson still wasn’t invited to the table. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, his bony legs crossed at the ankles, eating an apple he had helped himself to.
“He didn’t hear anything,” my aunt said uncertainly. She whispered conspiratorially across the table to Grandmother. “Not at that hour. He’d been asleep for hours.”
I thought it wise, even though it meant drawing attention to myself, to establish my ignorance. “Hear what?” I inquired innocently.
“It wouldn’t do any harm if he had,” said Thompson, calmly biting and chewing the temptress’s fruit.
“You wouldn’t see it, would you?” said Grandma Bradley. “It wouldn’t matter to you what he heard? You’d think that was manly.”
“Manly has nothing to do with it. Doesn’t enter into it,” said Thompson in that cool way he had. “It’s a fact of life, something he’ll have to find out about sooner or later.”
Aunt Evelyn began to cry. “Nobody is ever pleased with me,” she spluttered. “I’m going crazy trying to please you both. I can’t do it.” She began to pull nervously at her hair. “He made me,” she said finally in a confessional, humble tone to her mother.
“Evelyn,” said my grandmother, “you have a place here. I would never send you away. I want you here. But he has to go. I want him to go. If he is going to rub my nose in it that way he has to go. I won’t have that man under my roof.”
“Evelyn isn’t apologizing for anything,” Thompson said. “And she isn’t running away either. You can’t force her to choose. It isn’t healthy or fair.”
“There have been other ones before you,” said Grandma. “This isn’t anything new for Evelyn.”
“Momma!”
“I’m aware of that,” he said stiffly, and his face vibrated with the effort to smile. “Provincial mores have never held much water with me. I like to think I’m above all that.”
Suddenly my grandmother spotted me. “What are you gawking at!” she shouted. “Get on out of here!”
I didn’t budge an inch.
“Leave him alone,” said Thompson.
“You’ll be out of here within a week,” said Grandmother, “I swear.”
“No,” he said smiling. “When I’m ready.”
“You’ll go home and go with your tail between your legs. Last night was the last straw,” she said. And by God you could tell she meant it.
Thompson gave her his beatific Buddha-grin and shook his head from side to side, very, very slowly.
A thunderstorm was brewing. The sky was a stew of dark, swollen cloud and a strange apple-green light. The temperature stood in the mid-nineties, not a breath of breeze stirred, my skin crawled and my head pounded above my eyes and through the brid
ge of my nose. There wasn’t a thing to do except sit on the bottom step of the porch, keep from picking up a sliver in your ass, and scratch the dirt with a stick. My grandmother had put her hat on and driven into town on some unexplained business. Thompson and my aunt were upstairs in their bedroom, sunk in a stuporous, sweaty afternoon’s sleep.
Like my aunt and Thompson, all the chickens had gone to roost to wait for rain. The desertion of his harem had thrown the rooster into a flap. Stanley trotted neurotically around his tethering post, stopping every few circuits to beat his bedraggled pinions and crow lustily in masculine outrage. I watched him for a bit without much curiosity, and then climbed off the step and walked toward him, listlessly dragging my stick in my trail.
“Here Stanley, Stanley,” I called, not entirely sure how to summon a rooster, or instil in him confidence and friendliness.
I did neither. My approach only further unhinged Stanley. His stride lengthened, the tempo of his pace increased, and his head began to dart abruptly from side to side in furtive despair. Finally, in a last desperate attempt to escape, Stanley upset himself trying to fly. He landed in a heap of disarranged, stiff, glistening feathers. I put my foot on his string and pinned him to the ground.
“Nice pretty, pretty Stanley,” I said coaxingly, adopting the tone that a neighbour used with her budgie, since I wasn’t sure how one talked to a bird. I slowly extended my thumb to stroke his bright-red neck feathers. Darting angrily, he struck the ball of my thumb with a snappish peck and simultaneously hit my wrist with his heel spur. He didn’t hurt me, but he did startle me badly. So badly I gave a little yelp. Which made me feel foolish and more than a little cowardly.
“You son of a bitch,” I said, reaching down slowly and staring into one unblinking glassy eye in which I could see my fate looming larger and larger. I caught the rooster’s legs and held them firmly together. Stanley crowed defiantly and showed me his wicked little tongue.
“Now, Stanley,” I said, “relax, I’m just going to stroke you. I’m just going to stroke you. I’m just going to pet Stanley.”
No deal. He struck furiously again with a snake-like agility, and bounded in my hand, wings beating his poultry smell into my face. A real fighting cock at last. Maybe it was the weather. Perhaps his rooster pride and patience would suffer no more indignities.
The heat, the sultry menace of the gathering storm, made me feel prickly, edgy. I flicked my middle finger smartly against his tiny chicken skull, hard enough to rattle his pea-sized brain. “You like that, buster?” I asked, and snapped him another one for good measure. He struck back again, his comb red, crested, and rubbery with fury.
I was angry myself. I turned him upside down and left him dangling, his wings drumming against the legs of my jeans. Then I righted him abruptly; he looked dishevelled, seedy and dazed.
“Okay, Stanley,” I said, feeling the intoxication of power. “I’m boss here, and you behave.” There was a gleeful edge to my voice, which surprised me a little. I realized I was hoping this confrontation would escalate. Wishing that he would provoke me into something.
Strange images came into my head: the bruises on my aunt’s legs; Thompson’s face drained of life, lifted like an empty receptacle toward the ceiling, waiting to be filled, the tendons of his neck stark and rigid with anticipation.
I was filled with anxiety, the heat seemed to stretch me, to tug at my nerves and my skin. Two drops of sweat, as large and perfectly formed as tears, rolled out of my hairline and splashed onto the rubber toes of my runners.
“Easy, Stanley,” I breathed to him, “easy,” and my hand crept deliberately towards him. This time he pecked me in such a way, directly on the knuckle, that it actually hurt. I took up my stick and rapped him on the beak curtly, the prim admonishment of a schoolmarm. I didn’t hit him very hard, but it was hard enough to split the length of his beak with a narrow crack. The beak fissured like the nib of a fountain pen. Stanley squawked, opened and closed his beak spasmodically, bewildered by the pain. A bright jewel of blood bubbled out of the split and gathered to a trembling bead.
“There,” I said excitedly, “now you’ve done it. How are you going to eat with a broken beak? You can’t eat anything with a broken beak. You’ll starve, you stupid goddamn chicken.”
A wind that smelled of rain had sprung up. It ruffled his feathers until they moved with a barely discernible crackle.
“Poor Stanley,” I said, and at last, numbed by the pain, he allowed me to stroke the gloss of his lacquer feathers.
I wasn’t strong enough or practised enough to do a clean and efficient job of wringing his neck, but I succeeded in finishing him off after two clumsy attempts. Then, because I wanted to leave the impression that a skunk had made off with him, I punched a couple of holes in his breast with my jack knife and tried to dribble some blood on the ground. Poor Stanley produced only a few meagre spots; this corpse refused to bleed in the presence of its murderer. I scattered a handful of his feathers on the ground and buried him in the larger of the two manure piles beside the barn.
“I don’t think any skunk got that rooster,” my grandmother said suspiciously, nudging at a feather with the toe of her boot until, finally disturbed, it was wafted away by the breeze.
Something squeezed my heart. How did she know?
“Skunks hunt at night,” she said. “Must have been somebody’s barn cat.”
“You come along with me,” my grandmother said. She was standing in front of the full-length hall mirror, settling on her hat, a deadly-looking hat pin poised above her skull. “We’ll go into town and you can buy a comic book at the drugstore.”
It was Friday and Friday was shopping day. But Grandma didn’t wheel her battered De Soto to the curb in front of the Brite Spot Grocery, she parked it in front of Maynard & Pritchard, Barristers and Solicitors.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
Grandma was fumbling nervously with her purse. Smalltown people don’t like to be seen going to the lawyer’s. “Come along with me. Hurry up.”
“Why do I have to come?”
“Because I don’t want you making a spectacle of yourself for the half-wits and loungers to gawk at,” she said. “Let’s not give them too much to wonder about.”
Maynard & Pritchard, Barristers and Solicitors, smelled of wax and varnish and probity. My grandmother was shown into an office with a frosted pane of glass in the door and neat gilt lettering that announced it was occupied by D.F. Maynard, Q.C. I was ordered to occupy a hard chair, which I did, battering my heels on the rungs briskly enough to annoy the secretary into telling me to stop it.
My grandmother wasn’t closeted long with her Queen’s Counsel before the door opened and he glided after her into the passageway. Lawyer Maynard was the neatest man I had ever seen in my life. His suit fit him like a glove.
“The best I can do,” he said, “is send him a registered letter telling him to remove himself from the premises, but it all comes to the same thing. If that doesn’t scare him off, you’ll have to have recourse to the police. That’s all there is to it. I told you that yesterday and you haven’t told me anything new today, Edith, that would make me change my mind. Just let him know you won’t put up with him any more.”
“No police,” she said. “I don’t want the police digging in my family’s business and Evelyn giving one of her grand performances for some baby-skinned constable straight out of the depot. All I need is to get her away from him for a little while, then I could tune her in. I could get through to her in no time at all.”
“Well,” said Maynard, shrugging, “we could try the letter, but I don’t think it would do any good. He has the status of a guest in your home; just tell him to go.”
My grandmother was showing signs of exasperation. “But he doesn’t go. That’s the point. I’ve told him and told him. But he won’t.”
“Mrs. Bradley,” said the lawyer emphatically, “Edith, as a friend, don’t waste your time. The police.”
; “I’m through wasting my time,” she said.
Pulling away from the lawyer’s office, my grandmother began a spirited conversation with herself. A wisp of hair had escaped from under her hat, and the dye winked a metallic red light as it jiggled up and down in the hot sunshine.
“I’ve told him and told him. But he won’t listen. The goddamn freak thinks we’re involved in a christly debating society. He thinks I don’t mean business. But I mean business. I do. There’s more than one way to skin a cat or scratch a dog’s ass. We’ll take the wheels off his little red wagon and see how she pulls.”
“What about my comic book?” I said, as we drove past the Rexall.
“Shut up.”
Grandma drove the De Soto to the edge of town and stopped it at the Ogdens’ place. It was a service station, or rather had been until the B.A. company had taken out their pumps and yanked the franchise, or whatever you call it, on the two brothers. Since then everything had gone steadily downhill. Cracks in the windowpanes had been taped with masking tape, and the roof had been patched with flattened tin cans and old licence plates. The building itself was surrounded by an acre of wrecks, sulking hulks rotten with rust, the guts of their upholstery spilled and gnawed by rats and mice.
But the Ogden brothers still carried on a business after a fashion. They stripped their wrecks for parts and were reputed to be decent enough mechanics whenever they were sober enough to turn a wrench or thread a bolt. People brought work to them whenever they couldn’t avoid it, and the rest of the year gave them a wide berth.
The Ogdens were famous for two things: their meanness and their profligacy as breeders. The place was always as warm with kids who never seemed to wear pants except in the most severe weather, and tottered about the premises, their legs smeared with grease, shit, or various combinations of both.
“Wait here,” my grandmother said, slamming the car door loudly enough to bring the two brothers out of their shop. Through the open door I saw a motor suspended on an intricate system of chains and pulleys.
Man Descending Page 3
