Any Deadly Thing

by Roy Kesey

  Something gave way inside me just then. I smacked him across the room, asked him if that hurt. He was tough enough not to cry, but he didn’t get my point, thought I was just being cruel, and he was partly right.

  My father waded ashore at Iwo Jima—that’s all I know for sure of his service in World War II. I’ve seen pictures of the beaches that day, the bodies thick as driftwood, the water dark with blood. All the same, when I heard of Vietnam years later my first thought was to sign up, head over, get a look at the show. But you can imagine the scene, kid with no thumbs shows up at the recruiting office, how the secretary frowns, how the officers strain to keep a straight face.

  My father’s only souvenir from the war he fought is his bayonet. It’s stained with old rust or older blood. Though I asked, he never told me how it felt, the bayonet lifted and driven home. He was never one for speeches, except on the single topic that stirred him: the levee, how it was the only thing that kept us from being washed down into the Gulf, how if it ever failed we’d have third-class tickets to Cancún, and toward the end he’d stare at my mother as he said it.

  She’d been part of the war as well, one of the thousands of women who spent those years in New Orleans building Higgins Boats, the same kind of craft that landed my father on the beach. It’s hard to know how much anything has to do with anything else. My father’s arms are now skinnier than mine, and I make puppets for a living.

  Hand-puppets, finger-puppets, marionettes, I can make anything, with any degree of control you might desire. Half-body or full-body, puppets your children can dress however they like, carved in wood, cast in neoprene or latex, layered in papier-mâché. I can make animal puppets that produce real animal sounds—parrot, jackal, peacock, panther, rattlesnake. If you’ve got the computer to run it I’ll make you an animatronic skeleton with moveable arms and legs, and LED eyes to keep the neighbor kids screaming with nightmares for weeks. I’ll make anything you can dream up and many things you can’t, but what do people want? Clowns and nurses and farm animals, pathetic.

  I was twelve the first time I saw my mother with a man who wasn’t my father. She was in a rose-colored dress my father had bought her the week before, and that was all I saw at first, the beautiful dress, short-sleeved for the heat, lace around the collar. She was coming out of the drugstore, her long dark hair tied back, and I called down the block and started running, thinking she’d maybe slip me a quarter for a roll and a cherry Coke, but she didn’t look my way, and there was a man coming at her.

  Her hands lifted toward him. I stopped and watched. He was tall and thin, mostly bald. They could have just been old school friends meeting up for the first time in years, a pleasant coincidence, but their faces were all wrong for that. They met, held hands too long, and took off down the sidewalk.

  Harahan isn’t big enough for that kind of thing. It was a couple of weeks later that I came home from school and heard the shouting. I slammed through the screen door and found my mother on the floor, my father standing over her, one thick arm drawn back.

  He saw me then, and his arm dropped. He went to help her up but she wouldn’t have it, pulled away from him, ran out the back door and up the levee. She stayed there on the crest all afternoon, through dinner, all evening. The rest of us sat in the family room staring at the walls.

  My father sent us to bed early, and I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk. Out the window I could see my mother silhouetted against the glow from across the water. I tapped on the pane, heard my father coming in behind me, turned and went to my room.

  The next morning the only thing out of place was the thick black bruise on my mother’s face. We all tried not to look. I ended up looking at Bev instead, and her eye began its dance. I asked to be excused, and my father told me to stay right where I was.

  My father’s metal shop had always done just enough to keep the house looking decent, to keep us in shoes and clothes and food. Then a lot more business started coming in, Avondale Shipyards fat with defense contracts and desperate for custom parts. The following September my parents sent me to Jesuit and Bev to Sacred Heart.

  It was a different thing, this private school, uniforms and Latin class, but the stares were the same, me and my hands gone wrong. No one else there was from Harahan. They were all from Carrolton and the Garden District, knew nothing about my world and didn’t care to know.

  But my old friends knew, and soon enough the talk started up, my mother and some Italian who ran a butcher shop down in River Ridge. I didn’t believe it at first, fought anyone who brought it up. You’d think she would have learned—don’t do it, don’t do it here, don’t get caught, whatever the lesson was.

  It was a Saturday morning this time, late spring, the river high. I’d just finished mowing the back lawn, was raking up the cuttings when the yelling started. I straightened and listened, and this time I heard it, I heard his fist land. Something shattered, and my mother came running out the back door, blood spilling from her nose.

  She ran right past me and up the levee, stumbled, flicked off her shoes and kept running. My father appeared at the back door and shouted her name. I raced up the levee behind her, but she wasn’t sitting at the top this time. I stepped to the edge and saw her kicking out into the river, called back to my father and he came charging up. We watched as she wriggled out of her dress, that same rose-colored dress. She slipped free of it, and it bloomed in the water behind her, hung full and bright for a moment before it sank. Her arms gleamed in the sun as she stroked away, and the current had her now, a massive vicious thing.

  I waited for my father to take off after her, but he didn’t, he just watched, so I dove in and swam as hard as I could until the current had me too, spun me once, again, and I was looking back toward home. I caught a glimpse of my father still standing on the top of the levee as the current spun me a third time, my mother’s head a dark spot far out ahead of me, smaller and smaller and then it disappeared. From where I was I couldn’t tell if she’d slipped under or if she was just too far away. I had a thought of diving once I got to where she might have gone down, but the current ripped me along—there was no way to stay in any one place, no way to know where that place even was anymore.

  I wouldn’t have made it back if my father hadn’t come in the neighbors’ motorboat. He hauled me in and we searched for hours, up and down both banks as far south as Belle Chasse, searched until the light was gone.

  There wasn’t much talk in our house after that, not much noise at all except from the metal shop out back, and Bev and I never swam in the river again. We survived our schools, barely. She went on to LSU, graduated with honors, moved to Dallas with her architect husband. I got involved in theater, went from there to puppet theater and on to puppet design. It was maybe an odd choice for a thumbless man, but it turns out I can do everything I need to—my fingers have gone something like double-jointed. A year ago I moved back in with my father, and I keep the house looking decent, keep both of us in shoes and clothes and food.

  I’ve been up all night working on a demon that a teacher from Gretna needs for Halloween. Body of foam, armature of joints and tubing and beads: the limbs bend just like real ones. I sculpted the head in clay last week and built the plaster mold yesterday, let it heat up and cool down. Now it’s time to slip-cast.

  I put the mold back together, left brain and right, and fill the seam. I pour in a bit of neoprene and slosh it around good. Then I pour and pour until the mold’s full, and tap it to get the air out. When it’s had a couple of hours to set I’ll toss the slurry back in the pail.

  In a day or two it’ll be dry, and I’ll blow in a little talcum to keep things from sticking, take the mold apart and pull the cast out. I’ll give it another few days to cure, and set about the sanding of it. I haven’t yet decided how to finish the job. Scarlet silk, maybe, or straight black paint.

  They never found my mother’s body, and Bev and I still talk about it on the phone sometimes—how there’s a chance that she didn’t go
down like we thought, that she got pulled out at some point, a riverboat or tug, or even that she made it all the way across, dragged herself onto the muddy shore, crawled away and started up somewhere else. She’d be seventy-eight this year, and I imagine her living someplace green and lush, a rest home in Florida or California, golf courses and swimming pools all around. I imagine that the folks who take care of her are good people with good hearts, and they take her for walks, remind her gently when it’s time to take her pills.

  Bev sends a bit extra along when she can—things are good in Dallas, or so it seems. When she calls, we talk about her husband, his job, their boys. We don’t talk much about my job or our father, and it’s best that way. Sometimes there’s a moment where we’ll both go almost silent, no sound but our breath against the receivers. In those few seconds of quiet I try to picture her, and wonder if her eye is twitching even now, touched by a thought down the phone line.

  Every so often my father loses track of himself, asks for my mother, asks where she’s off to so much these days. Whenever that happens I tell him the truth of it, every single detail, make some of them worse than they were. He starts to fidget and sweat, and I wait for his fist to ball up, for his arm to draw back, but then his eyes go dead and he walks away.

  So it’s time to try something else. I put the demon up on a shelf, drag a big plastic tub to the end of the workbench, and carry in bucket after bucket of water. When the tub is full I go to the cabinet and bring out two puppets I’ve spent the past few months carving, sanding, dressing up just right: a Marine grunt with his helmet and his tiny M-1, and a tall, beautiful, dark-haired woman.

  It’s not quite six in the morning, and any minute now my father will come walking in dressed for work, his overalls thin at the knees, his flannel shirt sick with burn-holes. He knows it’s not his shop any more, but he’s always a little surprised to see me sitting in his place at the workbench. He looks around for his grinders and punches and lathes, and shakes his head at what’s taken their place—rolls of fabric and spools of thread, boxes of plastic eyes, old plaster molds that I’ll never need again.

  I hear his steps on the walkway, the door opens, and he pauses on the threshold. He nods to me, squints up at the ceiling. I tell him that I’ve been waiting, that I’ve got something he needs to see.

  He considers for a moment, and sits down on a stool in the corner as I clear the bench and take a puppet in each hand. My father’s thick eyebrows lift. I start the chase in slow motion, the Marine’s stained bayonet fixed, the woman’s lace collar bright under the desk lamp.

  I’ve been practicing for days, don’t have to watch my hands at work, can concentrate on my father’s eyes, rapt. The soldier closes in, and the woman stumbles. The bayonet rises, sweeps down as the woman lunges away. The soldier slows, the woman reaches the edge, the soldier stops, and the woman looks back. Then she jumps, drops from my hand, falls. There’s a splash as she lands in the water below. The soldier walks up to the edge. The woman floats face down.

  And I watch my father through all of this. Sweat beads on his forehead and he jiggles his legs. When it’s done he stands and steps forward and I’ve got him.

  Except his eyes go soft and empty. He nods, turns and walks out of the workshop. I sling the soldier into a corner, pull my father’s old sledge from under the bench, and bring it to my shoulder. Slivers from the handle dig into my palms. I open the door and my father’s halfway to the house, but I could catch him in five quick steps, could have his head in pieces with a single swing.

  Before I can move he trips on a loose brick, goes down, barely gets his hands out fast enough to keep his face from striking the walkway. I let go of the sledge, and it clanks to the concrete floor. My father’s slow to get up, slow to brush himself off. It feels like hours, and I just watch.

  Once he’s inside I take the sledge back up and tamp the loose brick into place. I head for the kitchen, knowing he’ll be there. He opens the refrigerator, stares for a while, closes it. There are cuts on his hands but he doesn’t appear to feel them. He rummages through the cupboards, finds nothing worth reaching for, and gazes out the window. I do these same things myself.

  He looks at me, asks me what I’m doing with his sledge, tells me to put it where I found it when I’m done. Now he’s walking past me, through the door and out into the yard, but he’s not headed for the workshop this time. He struggles up the face of the levee, his legs gone thin and weak. When he gets to the top he stands perfectly still. Fiery sunrise sky, roiling hush of the Mississippi. He’s forty years past handstands, and I wonder if he remembers how it was, the sky below, the river above, the world upside-down and beautiful somehow.

  Today/Tomorrow

  I. TODAY

  You wake on the Métro somewhere southwest of Daumesnil. The Ukrainian girl beside you tucks her breast into her blouse, lifts her infant to her shoulder, and across the aisle stands a man who was not there before, thirty years old, long dark curly beard, he reminds you of Thomas, the needer of proof. You cross the Seine, Thomas holds a roasted chicken, and the smell of tarragon makes the train still warmer. The girl’s child reaches for you, would reach for anyone, wouldn’t it? The afternoon sky is unclear. At Corvisart coming onto the train are four English women who mutter like quail, and how long has it been since you last slept? Thomas abandons you at Glacière, is replaced by the man of entreating, his eyes refuse to focus, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am so sorry for disturbing you … You button your raincoat tightly across your chest though no rain will fall for several hours. The train moves and ceases to move and moves again, again. At Edgar Quinet, if you were to leave you would walk easily past the corner restaurants, down Rue de la Gaité, the theaters and porn shops, but you don’t, the doors close, the tunnel walls quiver and shift and now you’re at Montparnasse. The new arrivals stand in close, forgiving or ignoring, it comes to the same thing, say forgiving your stained breath and sulfur smile. Moving, ceasing, moving. At Cambronne no one is speaking: the voices have been pulled from the air with a small net, you didn’t see it happen but it must have, the voices replaced with the smell of newsprint. Those who enter at Dupleix are suited and furred and you cross the river again. At Trocadéro the girl and child accompany you out of the train but for them it is the hole toward other trains and for you it is the exit, up and out and hurrying down through the spread marble legs of the Palais de Chaillot, into the Jardins du Trocadéro and down between the fountains toward the tower, that great iron lattice, and you cross the river and stop. It is neither too early nor too late but time to wait for both the girl you have been stalking on and off for a year and the man who is not yet running toward Stalingrad.

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  It is not quite the age-old story. The Stalingrad toward which he’ll run is only a Métro station, and this will not make his trip any easier. It is now an hour ago. When you wake somewhere west of Daumésnil, he is lying in the oldest of three bathtubs in his ten-room suite on the Place d’Iéna, hot water running. It is clear to him that she will never call, that nothing lost is ever found. His skin is translucent, he reads the text and texture of his veins, and after he has read and thought and all but understood, he picks up a straight-edged razor and is beginning the work when he hears the voice of his telephone. He sets down the razor. The water keeps running, diluting. He lurches from the bathtub, dries himself with the sitting room curtains, wraps his wrist in cellophane, picks up the receiver and speaks as if to calm it. I’m afraid to leave work, says the girl. I’m afraid he’ll be there waiting. Is this how it will always be? How what will always be? You call only when you need my help. Please, Christophe. We’ll talk, I promise. But right now I’m afraid. I’ll be there as soon as I can, he says, and does not wait for her answer, hangs up the phone and dresses quickly, tucks a pistol into the holster at his ankle, leaves without locking the door. The elevator is singing far above so he vaults the cedar stairs three by three by three down into the marbled courtyar
d and takes a Gauloise Blonde from the lips of the Sicilian doorman. Lost Romanians are gathered outside the gate, and he scatters them like doves, away from the water’s hush he runs and he slips and falls to the sidewalk in front of a window display holding a small gold man in thin gold rags on a bare gold island. The gold man stands, waves, sits down. The man not yet running toward Stalingrad pulls off his boot and removes a stone. It is the diamond he’d given the girl and she’d given back and finally he has another chance. He tucks it into his bottom lip, pulls his boot back on and is running again toward the tower, across and along and around what intercedes, then down through the spread legs of the Palais de Chaillot, following the line you’ve drawn.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  You wait beside the great slow river, and the plan has withered, the girl has taken another path, but now you see him, he at least has not failed you. He does not know you for who you are and again the age-old story has changed. He runs past you, searches for the girl, and unknowing sits down to wait. You cross the bridge again and walk northeast, from a sidewalk stand you steal a plum and all is neither lost nor won, all is only as it must be. When you see him again he will not be the man who is not yet running toward Stalingrad, nor the man who is running toward Stalingrad, but the man who has come back; when you see him again it will not be today but tomorrow. You walk, and there is a different girl, her accordion prays to the terrace crowd, you haven’t seen or needed her before but you need her now like cloud cover, like potting soil. She packs away her voice, and when she leaves, you follow.