I nodded, mumbled some sort of acknowledgment in a thirteen-year-old's broken words, and yanked the cord on the mower – it growled to life. I watched Angeline's back as she walked languidly to her screen-house, her long legs white against the dark little pie slice of material that failed in its attempt to cover her buttocks.
I must admit that I felt awkward and exposed – I wondered what Angeline's eyes were doing behind the mesh of her screen-house walls, behind her big dark glasses. I wondered if Mr. Silvestri was watching from the pink ranch house. Still, I mowed, dodging toads and grasshoppers as thunder heads mounded in the west, careful as I cropped close to the brightly painted totem pole.
I had never seen it up close before and I marveled at it (inconspicuously). I had only seen it from my own yard (before the fence went up) and from my bedroom window. I hadn't seen the back of it until that moment.
There, behind the scantily clad entanglement of vanilla-pale Mata Hari and coffee-colored Josephine Baker, was the carved image of Mandy Rogers, the missing teen. Her hair was painted dark and her wooden jean cut-offs were unzipped below her belly, all the way down to the upper wisps of pubic hair (nicely rendered). The fingers of one hand were missing.
* * *
I never told anyone else about the totem pole and apparently no one else, but for the Silvestris, ever saw it. They never entertained and they did not seem to have any relatives in the area.
Even though Mr. Silvestri had returned to his previous capable self, I was still called upon to mow and once to help the Mrs. find a pearl earring that had been lost in the grassy yard. It was the end of my thirteenth summer, and I blushed to see her down on her hands and knees with her backside in the air and her breasts swaying lazily in their small dark hammocks. In the fall I raked leaves and in winter I shoveled their snow. I never did see any strange symbols carved by Mr. Silvestri, by the way, though he did like to stand out and watch the storms.
There was a terrible accident that winter, and I did not set eyes upon Angeline again until the following spring. I had dreamed of legs like eels spiraling down through icy black water, long nylon-sleek legs drowning. In spring when robins and dandelions and the tulips returned, I watched from my window as Mr. Silvestri pushed Angeline out to her beloved screen-house. She was in a wheelchair and her legs – poking out from her shorts – were gone below the knees.
It was a few days after that when I noticed Mr. Silvestri working on a new totem pole.
* * *
After graduating from high school I went on to college at Lowell University, leaving my parents with just their remaining son, Tom, who was only two years my junior. Despite our nearness in age, Tommy and I had never been as close as we should have been. I was more the scholar, Tommy more the athlete, from our earliest days to our incipient adulthood. Whereas I had always been more reserved and solitary, Tommy was convivial and ever sought the company of friends. Our differences even extended to the physical, my sibling being short and muscular whereas I was tall and lean. Tommy had never seemed to share my interest in our unusual neighbors, except to make the occasional crude comment about the Mrs. – but these remarks were mostly dismissive, as if a woman of her age could only be grotesque, not alluring. Tommy was drawn to the blond cheerleader type. Despite all this, there was no animosity between us, and I was as sentimental leaving him behind as I was the parents that we were both so very attached to.
In the city of Lowell, I lived with a roommate on campus. It was there that I met Phoebe, and I was immediately beguiled by her, although she would not be the conventional ideal of American beauty – again, not the kind of girl Tommy would take notice of. Rather than being wasted to model thinness, she was plush and curvy, what most of my peers might reject as overweight. I’d long found myself attracted to women with actual meat on their bones. Not that I wasn’t attracted to slender women as well, but there are many forms of beauty, and who can say which is better? It’s all apples and oranges, I say. I had even had a strong crush on a pretty African-American student named Janice until my attention was diverted to the pallid-skinned Phoebe.
With many people, a certain individual characteristic seems to define them, and whenever I saw Phoebe, the word “hair” almost floated like a superimposed caption before my eyes. Hers fell to the small of her back, and was very thick, as indulgently lush as her flesh, dark brown with a subtle auburn sheen. Her eyes were long, hooded with an almost oriental aspect, and green. Once I saw her up close, it was obvious that she had bad skin, her cheeks pitted from years of extreme acne, though the raw volcanic pinkness of barely contained blood and pus that must have once raged across her face had healed and gone quiet. It was easy for me not to notice this scarring, however, after a time. Her hair, her eyes, her upholstered voluptuousness made it recede to the subliminal background.
The same was true of the pink birthmark that covered half of her forehead. Funny that I didn’t notice it for quite a while, even after we had begun talking. But one afternoon she and I sat with mutual friends in an outdoor café, and she had her elbow on the table with her head propped in her hand. When she withdrew her hand, I saw the pink area on her skin but took it to be an impression left there by her palm...until I realized it wasn’t fading away. I gathered she had made a habit, either consciously or unconsciously, of covering the spot in that way. But just as with her acne wounds, I soon came to ignore it. Or perhaps not ignore it, actually. Perhaps I subconsciously found the wine stain attractive. These elements humanized her, made her real. Not like the airbrushed human blow-up dolls in men’s magazines, not like the overly tanned and overly augmented bubble-gum divas of pop music – celebrity women, fantasies, like golems shaped out of celluloid and silicon, collagen and diet pills, sun tan lotion and greasepaint, brought to life with a magic potion of computer-generated graphics and masturbated sperm. Phoebe was corporeal, tangible, of the flesh however imperfect, and she and I became lovers, at which time I was able to pay tribute to that flesh – fully revealed to me in all its glowing opulence. I made a religious communion with it.
Sometimes, however, she unnerved me. Though generally sweet, soft-spoken, Phoebe had a temper. I had felt the stab of her tongue on a number of memorable occasions, and she’d even gone after my brother one time, leaving him clearly shocked at this unforeseen characteristic. But it wasn’t so much this, really, that unsettled me. I think it had more to do with the fact that her eyes in their shape, if not precisely in their color, reminded me of my boyhood neighbor, Mrs. Silvestri. There was a vaguely feline, disquieting quality to them. At the same time, it was one of the features that had drawn me to her.
Naturally I returned home to visit my family when I could, and it was on one such visit that my mother told me that she’d read in the paper about Angeline Silvestri’s death. She’d never been well after the loss of her legs in that car accident we had heard about (though some people claimed she had been mangled after riding on the back of a snowmobile during a blizzard with a young man who wasn’t her husband and who was too drunk to be driving...while someone else had even said she was attacked by a shark while the Silvestris were on vacation in some warm location or other). She had rapidly aged over the remainder of my teenage years, her hair graying, though she still retained a shadow of her beauty. Once in a while, she had even sat in her wheelchair, in her screen-house, dressed in her black bikini. With my help no longer enlisted in mowing, raking and shoveling after the accident, I would peer at Angeline only from a distance, but protected by that distance; sometimes her image bobbed in my binoculars as I held them unsteadily in one hand, my other hand gripping another instrument.
The stumps of her legs, pressed together on the seat and thrust out from her, rounded and white, strangely echoed the cleavage of her breasts, or the halved globe of her full bottom. I would find myself focusing on these abbreviated limbs specifically...imagine rubbing my almost-manhood between them, lubricated by our summer sweat.
Sometimes, when she was inside her little pink house, I found myself
focusing on the totem poles instead. At least, what I could see of them from my window. The painted wood likeness of Mandy Rogers was not visible, but Josephine and Margaretha Zelle (as I’d since learned was Mata Hari’s real name) were in view...as was the totem pole Mr. Silvestri had sculpted with his hammers and chisels shortly after his wife’s return from the hospital.
As a biologist will patiently watch a caterpillar spin its cocoon, wriggle as a larvae, emerge and unfold its butterfly wings to dry, so I studied this artwork as it gradually took shape. At first, of course, that shape was vague. One time I swore it was a sculpture of me, in fact. That impression quite unnerved me...somehow I swore that it was. This shirtless figure held in its arms two shapely severed legs, embracing them to its chest, the tops of the legs – where torn wounds should have been – formed into full-lipped mouths, pressed to either of the figure’s cheeks in a twinned kiss. These lamprey-like limbs, sanded so smooth they appeared soft to the touch, were painted so masterfully that they appeared to be wearing sheer nylon stockings...red on one leg, orange on the other. Beneath this delicate, translucent layer of paint the toenails of both disembodied legs were painted a garish crimson.
When he finished painting the new figure, however, I saw the subject had red hair instead of my dark brown. It was then that I realized how much the figure held a resemblance to my mother. Not as she was now, grown stocky and going prematurely gray, but photos I had seen of her as a teenage girl...with a slender boyish body, and short red hair.
* * *
Mr. Silvestri spent less time outside after his wife’s death. At least as far as I could see from any of the windows in our house, even those in the attic, he hadn’t added any new totems to his high-walled backyard, and the close turf there had grown as tall as elephant grass, tangled with weeds, unchecked. My father groused that Mr. Silvestri’s twisty little apple tree near to the fence was dropping small inedible fruit to rot in our yard, and half-joked that I ought to offer to cut the thing down. “Pretty awful-looking yard for a greens-keeper,” he grumbled.
My mother never complained about the apples, though as I say she did make comments about the color of the neighbors’ house. I think she disdained it because she had always seemed to dislike Mrs. Silvestri herself so much, leading me to suppose it had been Angeline’s idea to paint the little house that shade of pink. Maybe mother did resent those apples falling into our yard, however, because one afternoon while she was lounging in our yard (though with her fair skin she never tanned), reading and eating the sections of an orange, I saw her toss another, whole orange over the fence into the Silvestris’ overgrown yard. A kind of vengeful cross-pollination?
One weekend when I was home, more out of curiosity than generosity, I knocked on the pink house’s front door and watched as the tall but now stooped Mr. Silvestri approached, the screen door making him look insubstantial, or broken up into dots like a newspaper photo. Through its mesh I saw he was unshaven, and I saw the glyph of a scar on his shirtless belly, raised and shiny like a brand.
He recognized me immediately, despite the fact that I hadn’t talked to him in years, and he even smiled with apparent pleasure...squeezed my hand for a longer period than I was comfortable with. When at last I drew my hand away, his grip slid down to the very ends of my fingers. But when I offered to mow the jungle of his backyard, he told me that it wasn’t necessary; he liked it wild and natural that way. It was his wife who had enjoyed sitting out there, and now that she was gone it no longer mattered to him to keep it neat.
“Angeline was very fond of you,” he told me, smiling wistfully. “And your mother is a lovely woman.”
I thanked him, a bit distractedly. I don’t know what movie was playing on his TV in the other room while we briefly talked, but something bad was happening, judging from the almost nonstop screaming and the buzz of a chainsaw. It almost caused me to shudder as we exchanged amiable goodbyes.
That was the last time I saw Mr. Silvestri before returning to school to begin my third year. Except, for the time Phoebe and I were attending the Spencer Fair, over the Labor Day weekend, several months after I’d offered to mow his lawn.
Evening was falling, the carnival lights were swimming phantasmally all around us, the air brisk so that the smells of frying food were all the more tantalizing, and we walked huddled together cozily against the chill. And above the music, the shouts, the roar of whirling machinery came an oddly familiar buzzing sound. I found myself drawing Phoebe toward it.
Inside a meshed enclosure, a man wearing a painter’s mask was shaping a tree stump with a chainsaw. Samples of his work, apparently for sale, ringed his little tent. There were owls, dragons, stumpy figures that were either trolls or children or both, remarkably detailed in view of the medium and the artist’s implement. But it didn’t occur to me at first that I was looking upon the work of Mr. Silvestri. For one thing, I’d never known him to profit from it. For another, he had always exclusively used hand tools, to my knowledge. But then, as we circled around the tent to get a better look at what he was shaping, I discovered a more elaborate sculpture on the opposite side. It was a life-sized rendering of silent screen vamp Theda Bara. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, exotic and voluptuous as was the aesthetic in those days. She was wonderfully painted, but entirely in black, white, and every shade of gray...as if a flesh and blood figure had stepped out of a movie screen, but still silent, wordlessly staring.
When I looked up sharply at the man, I realized that the tent he was in, erected to contain shavings and to protect his admirers from flying wood chips, was Angeline’s old screen-house.
After a while, Phoebe grew a little impatient and started pulling me away. It irritated me, I confess, because I wanted to figure out what Mr. Silvestri was sculpting. It looked like a black woman, judging from her roughly sketched-in features and from the hair, which appeared to be in plaited corn rows. He wasn’t really going to make her nude, was he, as it seemed? Not in front of these cotton candy-eating children?
As Phoebe yelled over the sound of the chainsaw that she was getting too cold, and tugged a little harder on my arm than I would have liked, I saw Mr. Silvestri lift his half-masked face and gaze directly at me through the intervening web of screen, his saw noisily idling in the air in front of him. He even lifted a gloved hand in a little wave, before turning back to his artwork.
We returned to college shortly after that. Phoebe and I had moved into an apartment together off campus. And on my first day back to classes, my former roommate informed me gently – knowing that I’d previously had a crush on her – that our fellow classmate Janice had been murdered on a hiking path in Maine’s Acadia National Park over the summer. Because she’d been beheaded, and her head not recovered, she’d been identified by the tattoo on her upper arm.
* * *
Inexplicably, the particulars of Janice's tattoo became something of an obsession with me. It was a difficult obsession to pursue with Phoebe underfoot. Between my studies, a part-time job and the tattoo, I was burning both ends of the proverbial candle. But I had to know...was the tattoo the same arcane shape as the scar on Mr. Silvestri's stomach?
The search took me into curious directions – tattoo magazines, tattoo web sites. Since tattoos, once the territorial pissing of edginess and counterculture, had (ironically) been homogenized into fad mainstream status, there proved an overwhelming number of places to search. I soon tired of looking at trendy tribal designs, butterflies, roses and grim reapers.
I turned to the strangely less annoying pages of esoteric books. I paged through Crowley and LaVey, books on ceremonial magic, wicca, Kabbalah. While there were many symbols, none matched the curious graceful lines of Silvestri's scar.
My investigative resources were contrastingly slim when it came to trying to find out what Janice's tattoo had looked like. I couldn't exactly waltz into a morgue and slip a bottle of whisky to a coroner and ask him on the sly. That was the stuff of television. I was limited to the meager scraps provided by the n
ewspapers, which were entirely unenlightening. My search led me nowhere, but it's just as well – a more disturbing death soon occupied me.
* * *
Women make better widows than men make widowers, and this proved to be the case with my father. He took mother's death even harder than Tommy and I. Father found her, after all, there on the kitchen floor. He just gave up after that, it seems. He stopped eating, stopped sleeping, stopped laughing. Before long his body, abandoned by his will, aged beyond its actual years, had to be interred in an institution amongst other lost souls ranging from the severely depressed to the severely deranged. It killed me to see him sitting pale and drug-dazed in one of those places, unshaven and wearing pajamas, watching younger residents play Ping-Pong with his once vivid blue eyes dully following the ball as if tracking a hypnotist’s bauble.
In case you're wondering, my mother died of natural causes, if one might dismiss a massive cerebral hemorrhage in those terms. Her death alone was tough enough for us to deal with – but the desecration of her corpse had made it all the worse. Someone had broken into Randal's Funeral Home and cut out mother’s heart.
Phoebe and a number of friends urged me to sue the funeral home, but I was too numb, too distraught to think of pursuing such a thing. I forgot all about tattoos and magical runes and plunged myself into my schoolwork. Phoebe and I stopped making love.
We even stopped talking eventually; her lush warmth had become little more than a shadow to me. Our apartment in Lowell came to reflect the quiet discord. By the time she left me the place was cluttered with dirty dishes, unwashed clothes, half-read books and neglected spider plants dangling like emaciated squid in a currentless sea.
I had a hard time paying the rent with Phoebe gone and guiltily decided to approach father and Tommy with the idea of selling the old family house. The thought of moving back there had more than simply occurred to me; I had pained over it. But it seemed a haunted place to me then, and it would have made traveling back and forth to Lowell an unnecessary effort. What had really started the idea in my head, though, was the offer of my Uncle Ralph to have father come live with him in New Hampshire – if my father was ever able to emerge from Eastborough State Hospital as a functioning individual. So, my father gave his nodding, blank-faced consent to all this, and Tommy agreed too, as he had just moved into an apartment with two buddies – too agonized to dwell again in that museum of family memories. Thus, I commenced the process of putting the house on the market, and cleaning out its contents, primarily on my own.
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