He was quiet then, and we heard the world around us; I felt like I was squatting in the navel of everything. After a good ten minutes he told me to shut my eyes.
“Hear it?” he said.
I wasn’t sure I could. There were cars, and dogs, and sirens, and crickets, but I couldn’t hear death, I couldn’t hear it anywhere. I wanted to hear it—it seemed so important—but in the end I confessed I couldn’t.
“That’s right,” he told me. “That’s goddamn right. Now close your eyes again, and I’ll show you what death is.”
I must have passed the better part of an hour waiting to be shown. And though I could smell the night through the open window, and feel the darkness like sackcloth against my eyelids, and hear the steady sound of my brother’s breathing, I didn’t know what he meant until his hand fell on my shoulder.
So when he curled himself up in a lump on the street and started to moan like he’d done so many times, I knew to leave him alone. There wasn’t no one that could help him. He was staving off the hands.
He rose from the street after having settled down and did not look at me as he walked past me to the frontyard of the house where our mama lived.
“How do you get to the backyard?” he asked me. I told him I could show him.
“Don’t show me,” he said. “Just go there.”
“But it’s a ditch,” I said. “You want me to wait in a ditch?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Wait in the ditchwater.” I looked at him.
“Are you going to talk to Mama?”
“I’m going to see her.”
“Are you going to talk to her?”
He did not so much look at me as through me. “Wait in the water of the ditch,” he said. “I am going to see her.”
I did not tell him I would wait for him, and I did not tell him that I wouldn’t. I walked away without saying anything. When I was sure he thought I’d gone, I crouched behind a fullspread ligustrum and watched him from where he couldn’t see me.
He stood in the gutter before the frontyard, not moving or seeming to want to. The streetlight lit him from top to bottom, and his skin, what you could see of it beneath the blood, looked like somebody’d gone over it with a yellow paint roller. His eyes were opened wide and filled with that look, and a cigarette hung uncoiling on his lip. He took in the face of the house like a wrestler takes in the face of an opponent. He must not have moved for the better part of ten minutes, and I didn’t know how long I could watch him and keep from falling asleep.
Above me, at the side window where my mama was sleeping, I heard Bohannon snoring. It sounded like a herd of cattle stampeding or a convoy of diesel trucks or a loud-ringing pneumatic drill or a thirteen-story building collapsing. I couldn’t understand how my mama could bring herself to sleep with a calamity such as that, and I rose up quiet to peek through the bedroom window, but the ledge was too high for me to see over. I imagined if I’d been taller I could’ve seen Bohannon lying beneath the bedcovers with his mouth open wide enough for a body to fish bass in, and my mama on her side, her head propped up on her arm, wondering how she ever let herself get fixed in such a situation. But I knew more than likely that wouldn’t be the case, whether for real or in my imagination. Bohannon was pretty much the only boy for Mama. Had I been able to look up over the window ledge I probably would’ve seen the two of them wrapped in one another’s arms like the day I came home from school and found them together—and she’d probably have her whole entire ear up at Bohannon’s mouth, taking in that racket like it were some sort of lullaby.
It made me uneasy to be beneath the same window where those two were lying, though I supposed I should’ve been used to it by then. For the most part I was immune to the company my mama’d kept; but with Bohannon it was less like company, more like she’d left my daddy and gotten remarried altogether. It didn’t bother me none, though. Some things you can’t do diddly about.
The day my mama left she never told none of us what it was she was doing. She just did it.
It was a Friday, the day she’d come back from the clinic with her face looking like a forced-together jigsaw puzzle. She went into the Florida room where our daddy was half out of his head, and she said a bunch of things that were too fast for me to follow. When she finished with him Daddy let out a wail like somebody’d put a spade through the mound of his belly and worked it clear through on up to his heart. I remembered how he rose himself up off the davenport and took a wild roundhouse at her, and how she pulled that can of something from her pocketbook and gave him a big old spray in the nose. He toppled back on the sofa hollering and clawing at his eyes, and my brother and me looked hard at our mama. We were proud of her; if anyone had had it coming, it had been our daddy.
He used to come home from work late at night, stumbling and pushing things over, telling everybody about the sonsofbitches, and how the sonsofbitches had done this or that to him, and how the sonsofbitches were plotting his ruination, and how the world was nothing but a sonsofbitches shitpile and no decent hard-working guy could ever get an even break. Mama, who worked herself, would give him his supper regardless of his mood, and he’d throw it against the wall or taste it and spit the whole thing out or make a face maybe and pound his fists in the manner of a bad-behaved kindergartner. Mama took it like a concrete pillar, without so much as a mean look, cross word, or inch of self-pity. But after a while I supposed she couldn’t take it anymore, so she left.
We’d helped her pack. While Daddy was in the Florida room digging at his eyes we helped her get things together in the bedroom. “Get me this,” she would tell us. “Fetch me that over there.” We didn’t ask her where she was going nor why she was going there nor when she’d return. It wasn’t any of our business. When all her stuff was packed and ready, she bent down and squeezed my brother so hard I heard a rib crack. She took me and held me out at arm’s length and looked me long in the face; that is, we looked each other long in the face. In her, I could see from where I’d come. She was awfully beautiful and had the kind of eyes that made you feel like you were falling backwards into water.
Above me, through the window, Bohannon’s snoring stopped. I heard him turn his body in bed and murmur to himself in his sleep: “All right. I got it. It’s in my hand. It’s notarized.” He spoke quickly, and loud, and his voice had a pitiful, panicky tone to it, like someone who’s had something loved stolen permanently away from him. “All right. Attaboy. You can trust me, son. Attaboy.” I wondered what he was dreaming about, or whether he dreamed at all; wondering whether Bohannon dreamed was like wondering whether a dog did— it was sort of unsettling just thinking about it. “What? How’s that? Come back here! It’s me, boy, it’s me! Oh,
you don’t … you just don’t get it!” Whatever type of dream it was, it certainly must have been something, ’cause soon enough I heard Bohannon weeping. But, like a quick-leaking faucet, Bohannon put an end to the waterworks in no time, and got back to his infernal snoring.
I crouched low behind the ligustrum and looked out again at my brother. He stood in the gutter like a puppet with an armful of string, and his face had a flushed, exhausted look to it. He had another cigarette in his mouth, though this one weren’t nothing but a stub, and I noticed that every couple of minutes or so his left hand would work itself into a regular spasm. Gas from the can in his nervous hand sloshed onto my brother’s fingers, and the fuel caused the blood to peel itself away; there were long streaks of raw skin showing in the yellow streetlight. I imagined if I had a mind to, I could’ve peeled my brother right down to the bone. The gasoline seemed to wash him clean through.
Now the death of the night had just begun, and the burnt-out, copper-colored glow of the morning was beginning to come on. It was pitch dark, mind you, but a lighter pitch than the previous hour, and you could tell it was going to get gradually lighter. The streetlamps kicked suddenly on to a less powerful glow, and I could see my brother, however faintly, eyeing the house from the downslope of the g
utter. In the distance, a closetful of thunder slid open, rolling like bowling balls across the heavy sky. My brother looked up, closed his eyes, and stepped from the gutter. He threw down his cigarette and crossed Bohannon’s lawn, dousing the grass with gasoline. When he came to a tree he’d douse it too, pouring a palmful in his hand and smearing it slowly on the trunk’s puffed belly. He went to Bohannon’s milktruck and covered the hood with gasoline, then he did all the plants in the frontporch flower box, and the lawnchairs, and the screen on the frontdoor.
He wanted to climb onto the roof, so he stuck the can of gasoline beneath his underarm, reached up for the trellis, and began to scramble up the ironwork. When he’d reached the roof I moved from my hiding place out onto the street to get a better view of him. I bent down behind a punched-up Chrysler Plymouth and watched his shadow play across the pointed roof of Bohannon’s house. He crouched down on his knees, squash-bodied like a spider, and tipped the spout of the gas can to the gutters and blacktar rooftiles. When he came to a spot below a window he’d spread himself out belly down on the tar and shake the can hard backwards, so whatever gas flew out of the can drenched the glass of the windows.
He disappeared for a moment, and I supposed he’d gone to do the chimney and weathervane. Only when he came back did I appreciate what a thorough job he’d done. The roof seemed to glisten with a fresh sweat, and the wind carried the beautiful stench of the gasoline to you. All in all, he’d covered the whole house pretty good. He even had gas enough to douse the bushes in the planters.
To check his work, my brother walked the length of the roof four times, making absolutely sure he hadn’t missed a spot. When he’d finished he set the gasoline at his feet and moved his right arm one way, like when you drive in a nickel nail, and his left arm the other, like when you saw dead wood. He took off his jacket and undershirt and bent down and picked up the can of gasoline. Tilting the spout, he doused his neck and face and hair and chest. His entire body shone with whatever fuel remained.
He reached for the pack of matches in his pocket and I called out his name and ran to him.
“Hey!”
He didn’t answer me.
“Hey! Hey! What’re you doing there?”
He was trying to strike a match, but the length of his body was shaking so hard he couldn’t manage it.
“Hey!” I said his name again. “What’s that you’re doing? What’s that you got there?” I looked at the unlit matches in his hands. “You want me to go and do that now? You want me to light one for you?”
His body froze. The hand that held the box of matches fell to his side, and he swallowed hard and stared down at me. He had an angry, ashamed, lost look on his face. When he spoke his voice crept out in a hoarse whisper, like his words were pieces of ice thawing.
“What did you say?”
“I said do you want me to light that match for you?”
He looked at me harder, swallowing and figuring, then squatted down like a baseball catcher and gave me the once-over.
“Did you say you’d light the match for me?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I don’t want to smoke a cigarette, you know.”
“I know,” I told him. “I know what you want to do.
He snorted.
“Oh, do you?”
“Uh-huh.”
He scratched his head.
“I bet you do. I bet you goddamn do.”
I held out my hand toward him, so he could throw the matches to me.
“Nuh-uh,” he said. “You gotta come up here.”
I looked at the roof, and I looked at him on it. I didn’t think he would make me do that; I didn’t think he was so far gone as to ask that of me.
“You want me to light it up there?”
He nodded and laughed.
“That’s right. That’s what I want. You afraid?”
I looked at the ground.
“I ain’t afraid.”
“You like to play with fire?”
I looked up from the ground.
“I ain’t afraid.”
“Then you come on up. You come up here, and I tell you what—you won’t come down.”
“I told you twice I ain’t afraid.”
“Then you come on and show me,” he said. He held out the matches where I couldn’t reach them. “You just come on up.”
I went to the trellis and climbed it. On the roof of Bohannon’s house I saw the whole city laid out in a jigsaw of alleys and houses. It made me dizzy to be up there and I could barely make my legs work. I got to my brother and he rubbed his hands across his cheek and neck and smeared my face and hair with the gasoline. The cuts from where he’d hit me before stung from the fuel and I drew a quick breath and panted like a dog locked in a hot car. My brother looked at me and smiled, smiled through the blood and gas and yellow skin. “Hurts, don’t it?” he said. “Hurts like the living hell.” With a swing of his arm he indicated the city around us. “You know what I wish? I wish we had a can big enough to do the town. That’s what I wish. If we did, I’d be able to light the match myself. If it were the world, well, you’d better believe I could.” He sat himself down on the roof. “What did you think I had this gasoline for?”
I looked at the empty can.
“I knew why you had it.”
“You say that now.”
“No,” I told him. “I knew. I knew long before, back when you were in the shed.”
He scraped his knuckles against the tiles of the roof. “You knew,” he said. “You know goddamn everything.”
I turned my back to him, took in the city.
In Bohannon’s backyard blackbirds had gathered single file on a wire. They were meaner than hell, and kept trying to push one another off. I wondered why they didn’t get electrocuted, bouncing on and off the wire the way they did. It was something my brother would know. He was a nut for things like that, a regular authority. I said his name.
“Stop saying that.”
“How come?”
“Because I don’t want to hear it.”
His chest was working up and down like our daddy’s would after medicine, and he clung to the corner of the roof like an animal. I did not turn my look away from him.
“You give me the matches.”
He did not answer.
“You give me the matches,” I repeated. I said his name.
“I told you not to—”
“Give me the matches.”
“—say my name.”
“I knew why you had the gasoline.”
“You say that.”
“I knew when you were doing tricks at the drive-in.”
“You—”
“I knew when the night fell you didn’t need gasoline; I knew when the day broke you’d manage it with anything.”
“—say that.”
“Now give me the matches, like you said.”
“I ain’t—”
“You thought I was afraid.”
“—gonna—”
“Afraid of it.”
“—give ’em.”
“But I ain’t like you. I ain’t like you and I ain’t like her and I ain’t like Daddy and I ain’t like anyone. I ain’t afraid of what’s got to be done. Now give me those—” He reached between his legs and handed me the matches. He did not throw them at me, he handed them.
“Here,” he said. “Here.”
We were breathing like horses. Our eyes were in each other’s.
“Listen,” I said, as if I needed to tell him, “I ain’t afraid of it.”
I walked to the edge of the roof and struck the match. For a moment I stared into the mouth of the flame, then I dropped it in the planter. The bushes caught fire, and the grass did. Then the house went; I could smell it burning.
“Jesus!” my brother said. He had my head beneath his arm, and we were running up the roof, down the roof. “Jesus!” he said. “Jesus!” And it was the strangest thing, all of it, and though I kept turning it arou
nd, I couldn’t figure it out.
We squatted in the water of the ditch and watched it die. I knew I was out of my head, but as I stared at the fire I imagined I could see a flower becoming stalk and a stalk becoming flower. I supposed it was the kind of thing you could think better than describe, but it was like there was a magnolia blossom before my eyes, and an invisible hand would come along and pick it clean, then up from the stalk would rise a new ring of petals, and so forth and so on. After a while I couldn’t even see the burning anymore. I just saw a big wall of white-hot blossoms and a field of moving hands, and the whole scene was forever dying and undying before me.
My brother knelt next to me in the water, but he wasn’t watching the house burn. You’d think he would’ve been, but he wasn’t. He had his face down in the water, and he looked like a drowning man whose feet still clung to the floor of the ocean. Every once in a while he lifted his face from the surface of the ditch-water and blew a spout of steam in the smoking air, then his throat would gulp and gulp and he’d plunge his head back down into the water. The way he was doing, he missed everything. He didn’t even see the woman.
She came into the backyard with a wet dishrag across her face and a baseball bat in her right hand. A little girl in a patched-up nightgown followed her hollering and coughing. “Is the backdoor like the frontdoor?” she cried. “Is it locked on the inside like the front is, Mama?” When the woman heard the little girl’s voice, she ran to her. She took the hem of the little girl’s nightgown and showed her how to hold it up over her face so she wouldn’t inhale any of the smoke. The little girl did how she’d been told and stood in the farthest corner of the backyard, away from the smoke. Beneath her gown she was naked.
The woman left the girl and ran to the backporch of the burning house. She swung the bat through the sliding glass door, and smoke billowed up from the mouth of the fire. The woman stumbled backwards, like somebody’d struck her in the jaw, then she shook herself to her senses and ran groping for the little girl. In the darkness of the smoke the girl wasn’t even looking for her mother. She merely trembled and hollered in all the commotion, and when her mother found her she lifted her quickly and the little girl’s gown tore away from her body. You could see the whiteness of her skin beneath the swimming thick smoke, and it gave the impression that the little girl had never bathed, not even once.
Life in the Land of the Living Page 14
