by Hugh Sheehy
SMILING DOWN AT ELLIE PARDO
1.
After the Second World War an ambitious developer cleared woods east of the city, measured acre lots, and built colonial houses and cottages. Though he’d had a vision of white money flocking to the country, when the bank seized the land only half the houses had sold. In subsequent decades farmers razed most of the remaining forest to grow soybeans and corn, but when my parents bought the second house down from Woodacre Lane’s dead end, enough timberland enclosed the neighborhood to pass off the setting as an enchanted forest. Throughout my boyhood I played ranger in this paradise, exploring each grove with my pellet gun in hand; I eliminated rabbits, possums, starlings, and blue jays, and made room for squirrels, cardinals, robins, migrating finches, and sparrows. My sense of what made a pest came from my taciturn parents, amateur gardeners who poisoned shrew burrows and smiled to see the furry rodents lying swollen among the vegetables and vines. When circumstance forced me back into the house of my childhood, which devastated my pride at the age of thirty-four, it was difficult to regard the little wood around the neighborhood without feeling a pinch of guilt. I’d buried so many varmints in mass graves behind the woodshed that the random stab of a spade could turn up a pile of white bones.
Yet I had not committed my crimes alone, and when I opened the paper to see Henry grinning suavely in an ad for his legal services, I knew our paths would cross in a city of eighty thousand factory hands and bankers. A divorce lawyer, he’d helped more than a hundred residents leave their spouses. He was like a movie star, only less popular. I lacked the patience to let small-town fate reunite us. I called him at the office, and soon we were passing weekends together.
2.
The night a neighbor let herself into Ellie Pardo’s house and discovered Ellie cut to pieces in the basement, Henry and I were playing friends-turned-cops for money on Frogville’s center table. Frogville was a neon-signed brick billiards house in the snowy fields south of the city. We’d come here a lot in high school, hoping to witness fights or solve the mysteries that surrounded getting laid. Teens still gathered in the stale heat with the same ambitions. They lined the vandalized walls, smoking clove cigarettes and Marlboros, watching the matches proceed on the twelve red-felted tables.
We were the oldest players in the bar, maybe the only ones of drinking age, though a lot of kids had bottles in hand. What made us stand out more was the muscular guy in the police uniform handing over more ten- and twenty-dollar bills after the end of each game. The only thing that seemed to prevent him from killing Henry was the woman beside him, who was also a cop, though in her off-duty loveliness it was hard to believe.
“Don’t be so upset, babe, now listen to me.” Watching us with her big eyes, Officer Candy covered her hand with her mouth and talked strategy to Officer Perzik. Friends since childhood, they had become cops, fallen in love, and decided to get married. Maybe it had to do with the way they each looked in uniform.
Perzik’s radio crackled unexpectedly, startling shooters at the next table. He liked to have his presence known while he pretended not to notice. These little disturbances of other games were his only solace as he lost and lost.
“I should arrest you both.” Blue dust rained from his hairy fist as he chalked his cue. He missed an easy six-in-the-corner and shouted, loud enough to silence the hall for a moment.
“Am I up again already?” Henry asked. A slim pretty boy with parted hair and a suit, he never questioned his influence over the room, keeping a step ahead of his skeptics. As Perzik muttered in frustration over a mistake, he stepped right in to line up his shot. Though we were on a team together, he was the one winning. From the way Candy glared, as if wishing he’d get it over with so she could go home with her fiancé, I got the feeling he took their money often.
Striped tie thrown over his shoulder, his head in a hedge of smoke, Henry took the measure of a combo shot that would sink the nine. “You two must be broke by now, so here’s where it gets interesting. If I make this,” he said, “Candy’s got to give me a kiss.”
Candy sipped her beer and thought it over. “And if not?”
“Then Perzik gives you a kiss,” I suggested.
“If I miss,” Henry said, pretending to think about it, “then I’ll give Candy a kiss.”
“Fucking crook,” Perzik griped. Having copied Henry’s test answers in school, he’d recently admitted, while drunk, that his decent grade-point average had helped his admission to the police academy. He hated the thought of owing Henry; now he crossed the room to make a kid of about thirteen put out his cigarette. He came back to the table with his radio to his ear, frowning as he listened over the chatter and colliding balls.
“There’s more than one recipe for success,” Henry was telling Candy. He’d stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, like a little gangster or newspaper man. She smiled at me and shook her head, as if amazed by the flirt this former examinations worrywart had become. This was the guy who used to pee his sleeping bag whenever he stayed the night at my house. The first time he aimed my rifle and took out a crow, he insisted that we hold a funeral for it. But I knew him to be a fast learner. Less than a month after he dropped that first bird, he roamed ahead of me in the woodlot, leaving the animals where they fell until the timber stood perfectly still.
“He’s come a long way,” I said.
Candy nodded. “If I’d have known he’d be such a success, I might have gone with him to homecoming sophomore year.”
“You can’t distract me.” Henry made his shot and exhaled a stream of smoke, but Candy missed it because she’d noticed, as I had, the change in Perzik’s face. His eyes had a hollow look, his lips were pressed white.
He put down the radio and looked at me. “Nolan, what’s your parents’ address?”
“Twelve-twenty-six Woodacre,” I said. “Why?”
“Do you know a woman who lives at twelve-thirty-two?”
“Is that Ellie’s place?” Henry held his cue in two hands, bending it a little. He’d passed many days in my neighborhood and had a right to worry about my parents’ neighbor. She had been a kind of trial crush for us both.
“Yeah, it’s Ellie Pardo’s house,” I said. My dread must have shown in my face, because Candy came over and stood by my side. “What happened to her?”
Perzik looked at me, the twitch in his mouth reminding me of the crass, deadpan answers he used to give in class. His throat worked and he said, “Somebody tied her up and killed her.”
3.
Ellie Pardo bought the gable and ell house next door to our cottage when I was still new enough that strangers dropped in to meet me. She bought the last house on the street, blocked on two sides by the woods. What some people might have thought creepy she considered peaceful. She’d left a drunk who never got over high school graduation. The gossip said he had knocked her around a lot, but the woman I knew was indomitable.
A feisty Italian who always had a tray of lasagna in the oven or a red sauce bubbling on the stove, she jogged back and forth on our street each day, exposing her beautiful legs even to the wicked cold of our winters on the lake. She said that red thighs were a sign of good circulation. Most of our neighbors were elderly, but she stopped to talk to them all, running in place the whole time. Since she didn’t discriminate by age we became friends shortly after I began to talk.
I often cut through her yard to go to the woods. Her kitchen window looked back on her shady plot, and when I passed by I’d look up to her working at the counter or standing over the stove. If she looked up we would wave at one another. I wasn’t allowed to shoot any birds or rabbits in her yard, but she didn’t mind if I used her snow to make snow prisoners and then executed them with a pellet to the head. Once she came out and helped me pack snow into plastic crates, and together we built a sturdy fort, despite the neighborhood’s lack of boys needed for a good war. Ellie enjoyed her indulgence of the child next door, and our afternoon passed in harmony. Then Henry began to com
e over.
Henry was a small and sickly boy. He was winded easily and didn’t like to fight, and in the presence of mean children he kept his head low and his mouth shut. Yet around nice children and interesting adults, no one was more animated and jovial. When I taught him how to load, pump, and aim my pellet gun, he was afraid to pull the trigger. He said he didn’t want the kick to bruise him. When I convinced him to try a shot with a pillow between the stock and his shoulder, he pierced the empty soda can I’d put on a fence post. He ran to retrieve the container, and when he picked it up, admiring the puckered hole the pellet had made and how it had scraped away the can’s green paint, he fashioned a new appreciation of technology.
The first time Ellie saw Henry and me in her yard, she was moved by the sight of the small boy whose head had been wrapped in a homemade red scarf. His exact little nose reminded her of the men in her family. She ran outside in sweats and a race T-shirt and called out to me. She asked me to introduce my friend, then brought us inside and made us look at a photo album. Sure enough, Henry could have been a long-lost, much younger brother. Ellie believed in the sacredness of family and culture, and she persuaded us to agree with her by feeding us slices of homemade pizza and bowls of steaming wedding soup.
Once, we’d eaten too much to hunt successfully, and Henry and I conferred about our visit with Ellie and agreed that we each saw an opportunity to improve our days. It involved keeping our after-school kill a little more discreet. Instead of cutting through yards with our grocery bags of bloody animals, we’d pick a path through the woods and bury the bodies behind my shed. Then we would stage a snowball fight that crossed from my yard into Ellie’s, knowing she’d invite us in for a hot meal. Some days we deliberately starved ourselves at school, sitting beside one another at lunch, two ascetics among the devouring hundreds, to intensify the flavor of Ellie’s creamy, tomatoey dishes and the ecstasy we felt as we stuffed the gooey morsels into our mouths. Ellie would sit at the table, presiding as we cleared our plates. She encouraged us to take seconds, and we couldn’t say no, not to this beautiful woman so dedicated to pleasing us. Henry was more slap-happy than I was. Once his belly had distended, he’d sit back and sigh in his high-pitched voice, his bulging eyes in love with the act of smiling.
4.
A feeling of strangeness settled over me as we made our way from the pool hall to the parking lot. There was discussion about the logistics of our inebriated travel, but I just sat in the passenger seat of Henry’s car. It was good that I hadn’t driven to Frogville because the news about Ellie had reduced me to staring.
Soon we were moving along the roads to Woodacre, Henry steering his giant car between Officer Perzik’s cruiser and Officer Candy’s jeep. He was drunk, and as we passed between the twilit fields, his wheels crossed the center line and the shoulder many times. He cursed as we drove, intent on getting there, but I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. My mind had backed up to a point outside my body, flying over the three automobiles moving in a tight formation over the frozen highway. I could see a shadowed barn standing at the edge of a field against a staple line of trees. Hundreds of starlings alighted in the frozen furrows, only to flutter up again and trade places. The changing sky took on a pearly quality, full of a hard sunlight slowly grinding us into dust. Henry glanced at me as he rambled, his mouth unhappy and jagged. Gradually it came to me he was upset because Perzik, in the cruiser in front of us, would not exceed the speed limit.
Henry slammed a fist on the dashboard and, shaking his hand, shouted, “Why doesn’t he turn on his fucking lights?”
The suburb hadn’t seen a murder in over a decade, and the far end of the street was crowded with police cars, an ambulance, and almost everyone who lived in a house on Woodacre. As we parked at the end of the cruiser jam-up, I quickly looked for my parents and, not seeing them, put the task of finding them aside for the moment. Henry ran ahead of Perzik and Candy, and I followed him. Together we pushed through a line of vehicles and people that seemed to indicate Ellie’s house. The front yard was outlined with yellow tape stretching around the trees at the edge of Ellie’s yard. The dark windows of the house reflected the winter scene and the dour faces of onlookers. A woman in a parka talked loudly and quickly about how frightened she was. No one spoke to her. Police paced anxiously in the yard, trying to look busy.
Henry refused to recognize the police boundary. He was outraged by the official measure dividing officials from citizens. When he lifted the yellow tape a young cop pushed him back, saying, “Please, sir, you don’t want to do that.”
“Fuck you, I’m welcome in this house,” said Henry. “I’m going in there.”
“I’m afraid you’re not,” said the cop.
When Henry stepped back and made a fist, it was obvious that he was going to throw a punch. There was an interval in which the cop seemed to think outside himself, happily enumerating charges he would bring against Henry. Then he sidestepped the swerving blow and chased Henry into a zinnia, where they struggled and gritted their teeth at one another and then fell into the snow. Four more cops came running, and I knew Henry was in trouble if no one would come to his aid, preferably someone with more local influence than I had.
The neighbors silently watched the police restrain the man who’d played in their yards years before. They must have known him from his ads in the paper, but no one protested when one cop slapped him. The young cop straddled Henry’s chest and prepared to pummel him, but Perzik had gotten there, and he stepped in and pushed him off. Big enough to make the other cops hesitate, Perzik seized Henry from the ground and thrust him in my direction. Henry stumbled forward, confused, while Perzik held up a hand and told the younger cop to let it go. Then they began to argue, other cops started to shout at Perzik, and soon the crowd’s interest concentrated on the squabbling throng of men in navy blue uniforms. Henry hurried over to Candy and me. His nose was bleeding and he was crying.
“Nolan, can you get him out of here?” Candy asked me. “They’ll arrest him if he sticks around.”
Once I’d taken Henry’s car keys and gotten him to put on his seatbelt, I searched the crowd for my parents. They were at their house now, up on the front stoop, looking over the heads of the crowd at the policemen locked in debate on Ellie’s lawn. They wore no coats despite the cold, only sweaters, and they were holding one another, their gray hair and their glasses poor masks for the grief in their faces. My father saw me in the street, waved, and said something that alerted my mother to where I stood in the Cadillac’s open door, and then she waved, too. I pointed at the roof of the car, and sniffling Henry beneath it, in an attempt to explain that I had to leave.
My father gave me a thumbs-up and a nod, and it was clear that I didn’t need to explain myself to him or my mother. They’d seen the scuffle between Henry and the cop. For the time being they’d ceased to be my parents, and I’d ceased to be their son. We were just three sad people in a sad crowd.
5.
I didn’t notice Ellie Pardo’s unhappiness until I was in my teens and was suddenly tall. My new perspective proved my neighbor to be a tiny woman, though her age, wisdom, and arresting good looks gave her more authority over me than ever. I was a shy teenager, and I blushed when she teased me about my growth spurt.
She would come over and sit with Henry and me in the garage, where we had removed our shirts and hefted the dumbbells from my father’s old weight set. We’d set up mirrors and took our self-improvement seriously, choking down protein drinks between sets, and maybe Ellie sat with us for a little comic relief from her monotonous routine of work and exercise. We didn’t mind the intrusion, and we held in our stomachs and kept our arms flexed just in case she wanted to check us out. We were average-looking boys without girlfriends. We didn’t even have girl buddies to happen into romance with. Yet here was this beautiful woman whose deep green eyes seemed to see into us, talking about love.
“I’m through looking for men,” she’d say with total certainty. “T
hey can come to me from now on. You boys remember that. It’s important for you to approach the woman. Men have forgotten that. Don’t be shy. The girls will be glad to have you. And once you get one, don’t stop telling her how much you like her.”
She gave us tips to improve our lifting techniques. She told us when she noticed a new muscle line in an arm or an abdomen. I suspect she invented these lines on occasion, since her opinion of our physiques would drastically improve after a girl rejected one of us. I’d noticed how sometimes, when we’d cranked up the radio and were doing reps with our puny arms, that Ellie’s attention would drift away from our workout studio. She’d explore a dark corner of the garage and look over one of the generic pastoral paintings my mother bought at garage sales. Henry and I would share a frown and keep flexing. Whatever she was missing, we couldn’t identify it, and in those days the world of girls, music, and interesting subjects was expanding at such a rapid rate that, away from my garage and its weight bench, we easily forgot the melancholy silences of my next-door neighbor.
