The Invisibles

by Hugh Sheehy

  “They already took him away,” my mom says, as she starts the engine and puts the car into motion. The school is five stories, orange brick, looking down on a broad lawn with four black walnut trees and, across the highway, fallow soybean fields. Once, the sheer size of the building in the middle of this nothingness shocked me, as it does again now. I want to never go back. I want to run away or kill myself. I want an unimaginable fate to lie in store for me at home. As we get farther away from the school, driving in silence, these things become less and less likely.

  When we’ve gone a mile or so she switches on the radio and sings along with some band of whiners from the sixties. Her voice is soft and harsh, but she can bellow when she feels like it. Great, I think, sing me to death. I have a sour mouth. I realize that I know this song. I’ve sung it before, with my mom, on the road. She turns to me, slowly saying the words as though to remind me of what they are, though she knows that I do. It’s not okay to laugh, even though she’s teasing me. What am I going to do? Pout? I give it up, lie back in my seat, and sing along.

  That afternoon I don’t know what to do with myself, and I sit on my front porch smoking cigarettes and checking to make sure my mom isn’t moving around downstairs. I’m not in trouble, just brought home early, cautioned. I’m sitting on the flagstone front porch, paranoid, Camel to my lips, when Brooke pulls into the driveway.

  She is glassy-eyed and grimacing, more unhappy than I’ve seen her. I worry she’s abandoned Lionel and gone back to her quarterback ex-boyfriend. She mentions none of this, just says that she wants me to come with her out to our spot. On the way she bitches about how stupid it was of Lionel to try to kill her quarterback ex-boyfriend (for this is how she interprets his act) and then to get caught doing it.

  “What’s he trying to do?” she asks. “Punish me by taking all the men out of my life?” She is through with men, she says; she will become a born-again virgin and live in France as a nun.

  We weave fast through the stripped trees, and I look out for rangers and hope against a second encounter with the authorities in a single day. Not soon enough we are parked, and she is slamming out of the car, cussing out the gray disturbance in the sky, telling Fritz the crazy and now startled fisherman that he can go fuck himself too, and then running down the leaf-covered trail to the boulder, with me jogging in pursuit.

  She stands at the edge of the pond and utters a valedictory to love and life as she knows it, and reaches into her purse and brings out Lionel’s pipe, wrapped in tissue. She has it ready to smoke, and preserved this way, packaged, rubber-banded tight. “I’ve decided to kill the baby,” she tells me, theatrical and self-pitying.

  Of course, she’s been trying to kill the baby since I met her.

  “Oh for the love of Pete, don’t stand there!” she shouts at me in disbelief. “Come take this thing away from me.”

  I do this, look at the packed bowl, a real winner, and put it in my pocket. Later I’ll trash it. Crystal-form cocaine is not something I want to be smoking by myself.

  Brooke sniffs and dangles a crushed pack of cigarettes. “These, too.”

  I store these with the drugs.

  “Anything else you’d like to give me?” I ask.

  Brooke surrenders a miniature bottle of Jack Daniels. She sighs and cocks her head at me, dainty but for her protuberant belly under her gray peacoat. She’s out of tears and anger, and I can see that she’s done what she’s come here to do. I guess she’s making a lot of quick adjustments now that Lionel’s in trouble. In irony I offer her my arm. She takes it, and we walk this way to the clearing, to her car.

  Fritz is standing at the end of the dock, his pole beside his mucky galoshes. He’s got this big painter turtle in his hands.

  Brooke stops. “What is it?” she asks.

  “Ach,” says Fritz, holding his rod to the dock with a galosh. He’s biting down on his fishing line, keeping it taut so the turtle’s head stays out of its shell. Its neck fully extended, the turtle frantically paws the air.

  The line falls out of his teeth, and Fritz roars at the turtle, “What are you doing awake?” The turtle’s head goes into its shell, and Fritz’s throat catches like he’s going to get upset.

  I go over and take the line, and standing over the old man’s uneasy breathing, I sort of pull the turtle’s head out of its shell with the line. The poor animal’s wrinkly neck is taut and it hisses at me, but Fritz says not to worry, I won’t break it.

  “I’m going to go, Wheeler. I’m going to leave you here.” Brooke pouts on her way to the driver’s side. I wave okay and stand closer to Fritz to help him get the hook out of the poor turtle’s beak. It upsets Brooke that I do not chase her, and she sits a moment in her car, watching us, furious and prettier that way, in black eyeliner.

  “My friend is in love with that girl,” I tell Fritz.

  Fritz says, “That girl is a bitch. Eiskalt. Your friend is a scheisse.”

  I don’t argue with people who are insane or old. It turns out I can hold the turtle’s mouth open with a key as the old fisherman pulls the hook from the upper part of its beak, chipping it, but getting it out of there. The car starts and kicks up gravel. Fritz and I look over, and Brooke is staring straight at me, a second before she drives out of my childhood. There’s an understanding of this between the three of us, before it slips out to a place beyond words, and she squeals her tires.

  “There we are,” says Fritz, “good as new. Almost.”

  I step away, and he releases the turtle into the cold autumn water.

  From that moment I know Brooke won’t come to my house again by herself. As it will turn out, she will never return to the house where I stay the next four years with my mother. Lionel will be released from the Child Study Institute when he is eighteen, and we will not resume our friendship. By then Brooke will have a daughter and be married to her disfigured quarterback ex-boyfriend. Lionel will swear off terrorism and go live in some mountains somewhere to write poems for kids. Sad local Christians will put him in their newspaper, and I’ll read the article about his struggles and poverty and his vision of peace-loving kids. An hour later I won’t be able to recall any of it verbatim.

  I will hear of Brooke’s divorce in another city, and after I have forgotten about it, I will come into the watery state of the present moment, being twenty-three years old, a door-to-door book salesman passing through Missouri. I am the weirdo on the doorstep, the ogre in the trenchcoat, leather attaché in hand, preposterous, quoting Faust to housewives.

  “A man is being made,” I tell them, accept their rejections, and traipse away across their dry autumn yards.

  At a house in the suburbs, Brooke answers the door, older, sturdier. An attractive woman with a serious life, or at least she dresses this way. We share surprise, silence, and nervous laughter. We find we are happy to see one another. Each of us is happy to see how well the other has survived. There is an offer of coffee in the wood-paneled dining room. An introduction to the little girl spying on us from the kitchen doorway. Auburn pigtails a mess, the emcee of the great room. Through the passageway I see there are toys scattered across the white carpet — the plastic castle and the pretend-beach of naked, sunbathing dolls, beside the many pages of blue construction paper that Brooke explains make up the broad and deep Pacific Ocean.

  I think it for an instant only, but Brooke perceives my flinch. Our chatter fails as the daughter she once forsook for two months comes into the room, sensing something wrong, and wants to sit on her mother’s lap. She is too big for this and sits there blocking Brooke’s mouth, furious at my intrusion, shoulders hunched up beneath her tiny ears.

  I want to tell Brooke what Lionel once advised me, that when you remember something you’re not proud of, it’s best to think of the outcome as inevitable. It helps to pass the memory, he said. Instead I finish my coffee. Brooke sees me to the front door without the pretense of a smile, and we resume being the people we tell ourselves we are.

  AFTER THE FLOODr />
  The Mississippi swells up and covers the town and the surrounding forest, devastating all visible creation. Hundreds of egrets fly north; there is no counting the dead. The steeple of St. Francis of Assisi marks the submerged churchyard of obelisks, crosses, and angels. Broken boats and tables drift under convulsing clouds stitched up with lightning. There will be no going back from this deluge, no recovery of the lost civilization, no afterward. With his thoughts clear now, when actions matter, Daniel Gauthier pilots the auto ferry across churning brown currents, collecting survivors. His gray hair blows, and the waters drown his shouts as he pulls families from rooftops, men and women clinging to furniture, a girl shivering at the top of a pine. Townsfolk crowd the concrete deck, facing the horizon, straining for a glimpse of solid earth.

  A knocking at the window wakes him from his recurrent dream. At first he’s disappointed, a dried-up mansion of the past, an aging man who fits the ruts of his empty bed. His words jumble when he sees the dark face in the pane, then converge in a groan as he recognizes the profile and frown of Sheriff Charlie Boudreaux. Unable to comprehend why his onetime friend has trampled his peonies at 2:32 in the morning, he lifts the window and blinks several times, in the place of a what-the-hell kind of question.

  The sheriff eases out of the flower bed, whispering, “Come out here, Daniel. First you better look in on that boy.”

  Minutes later the men share a front seat like they haven’t in years, only now it’s a police cruiser and not a truck recently resurrected on cinder blocks. When they reach the Kelly plantation the sheriff parks by a row of gardenias, where they can see the moonstruck white house through an alley of live oaks. Daniel broods quietly while the sheriff, sensing his ire, takes an apologetic tone. Someone has put the torch to four plantation houses in as many weeks, and not half an hour ago the sheriff saw a first-story light blink on and in the window, briefly, Daniel’s unhappy stepson, Clive. Aware of Clive’s records as a juvenile and adult felon, and how the newspapers would make the confused kid out to be a villain, Charlie Boudreaux suggests that maybe someone else struck the matches at the other fires. “He’s snooping around in there, probably.”

  “Dumbshit’s probably looking for something to pawn,” Daniel croaks, not wanting to admit his fear that Clive is using the mansion as a flophouse. His combination of logic and grouchiness satisfies the sheriff, whose loyalties to friend and to city compromise each other. The Kelly family hired Clive to clear the weeds from their garden and cut the lawn, not to clean the house. Before they left for the summer they told him to stay outside unless there was an emergency. They left a copy of these instructions with the sheriff’s office. Charlie Boudreaux should go in there and arrest Clive, but Daniel knows the man he called his best friend for more than half his days won’t do that.

  They see Clive’s flashlight beam touch a window on the third floor. A minute later they spy the same light on the floor below. The sheriff sighs and looks at his steering wheel. “If I called it in they’d think the kid burned them other houses. I mean I’ve seen Clive around town. He moves like somebody beat him in the back of a truck going sixty and then threw him out the back. He’s not the destructive kind, not anymore. But those people will think what they want.”

  “He’s mentally a child. He missed more of a decade of growing up because he was getting stoned. Basically he was switched off.”

  “That’s the reason I came to you.”

  “Thanks, Charlie. I’ll go get him.”

  “Promise me it won’t happen again, Daniel.”

  Daniel can’t promise what another person will or won’t do, least of all his troubled stepson, who’s recently come home after twelve years away, with a set of yolky eyes he developed by shooting New Orleans heroin into his veins. His pocked forearms look sprayed with birdshot, a record of compulsive behavior that one day convinced Daniel to copy the keys to the Kelly mansion while Clive showered.

  Daniel promises the sheriff that his stepson won’t trespass in the house again, having no other way to get out of the cruiser without a disquisition on free will. In the yard he ducks a bush to be startled by a white statue, a naked youth reaching out an open hand to the stars, or maybe the figure has flung them up there. Through the shrills of the cicadas comes a panther shriek, far away and quick, like a girl gladly frightened, and Daniel catches his breath. He knows that big cat, drove up on it once on the side of the road, where it cringed in his pickup truck’s headlights. So near he could’ve blasted it with the shotgun he keeps behind the seat. Since the panther eats local house cats, killing it would have made him a local hero. The thought never crossed his mind as he admired the crouching feline, who let Daniel see his teeth. Years ago, men from the state brought them in vented trucks from Florida and loosed them in the woods to prey on feral pigs. Now folks want the big cats dead, too, and these days they’re rare. Daniel laid on his horn and frightened the panther into the woods.

  He lets himself into the Kelly mansion’s carpeted entrance hall, eyes peeled for his stepson. He doesn’t know what to expect from the twenty-nine-year-old, who talks and acts like a teenager, and he scans the floor for the silhouette of the overdosed. He knows the figure in his own bank account and guesses he can afford the rehab clinic, providing he can find Clive and get him out of here before a less charitable sheriff shows up.

  “Clive,” he says, his voice small in the darkness. “You in here?”

  He’s drawn by a lighted doorway into an old parlor. Electric lights reflect in a small crystal chandelier, and once bathed in the bleeding color of the yellow walls, he gazes out into the hall with the unreasonable fear that some phantom will leap out at him. There’s a stairwell leading to the darkness upstairs.

  “Clive?” He’s reluctant to go up, even though Clive might be somewhere above his head, tying off this very moment. He looks over a row of dull Kelly portraiture and sees a player piano in one corner of the brightened room, its polished wood gathering dust. He flips a switch on its backside panel, and the keys begin to move, producing a doleful song he identifies as a hymn. He levers up the volume, trusting Clive, if he’s still conscious, to hear the music and come downstairs. Daniel used to do this when he was dating Clive’s mother, Lucy, and the boy would hide in the house. Daniel would be in his best suit and aftershave, Lucy in pearls with her hair up, and Clive would be hidden in a closet somewhere in the house. While Lucy clicked on her high heels from room to room, shouting her son’s name, Daniel would pull a record from the bookshelf and play it on the hi-fi, sending a tune through the air and along the floorboards to wherever Clive lay, and telling the boy that the two of them were bound to one another in ways that transcended the visual world. After a minute or so, Clive would emerge, pleased with himself, and run to Daniel, in whose arms he was safe from his mother’s spanking.

  Daniel doesn’t hug his stepson now that Clive’s grown. He rarely touches anyone. People standing too close give him gooseflesh. In his pinstriped pajamas and scuffed workboots, he watches the stairwell, nervous about the dark still rooms around him and the low ceiling and close walls in this one. He lights a cigarette to make himself comfortable. All day up on the ferry’s driving platform, in the high heat, these little rolls of tobacco make constant companions. He lights each new one with the cherry of the last.

  Clive creaks down the steps like a sullen child. In the parlor he stops beside an old yellow globe, looking at brown and green countries and beige oceans rather than make eye contact with his stepfather. “How’d you know where I was?”

  Daniel gives him an incredulous look, but Clive doesn’t seem to have a sense of his own wrongdoing ingrained in that bowed head of his. The kid stands there, frowning at his shoes, waiting for instruction. Daniel wonders how quickly an addict’s conscience breaks down when the need for oblivion kicks in. “I knew because you almost got arrested.”

  Clive swallows and glances up. Almost hopeful, he says, “Really?”

  “You realize that there’s someone runni
ng around setting fires in these houses? Are you awake when you’re walking around? Do you know that someone is scaring the bejesus out of the good old boys? Are you functional?” Daniel’s sure to be harsh. He wants a lesson to sink in. “Get out in the truck. You’re giving me a ride home.”

  “You’re wearing your pajamas,” Clive tells him. Weary-eyed, shiftless with his thumbs in his back pockets, he obeys, almost tripping on the last step down. His disorderly gait reminds Daniel of himself as a youngster, though they don’t share a drop of blood.

  Daniel keeps a stern face as he follows the shamed young man through the balmy night to his truck. He’s relieved when he’s not questioned about getting in the front door and remembers what it is to be young and fear people of authority. Certain of their power, you enslaved yourself to them. Clive climbs up into the driver’s seat and when he hesitates before unlocking the passenger-side door, Daniel raps sharply on the window to keep him in the present. The cab reeks sharply, of what precisely, Daniel can’t tell. He can’t smell much of anything anymore, but that sense can be a curse here, in the land of paper mills and oil refineries. He lifts a cigarette to his dried lips.

  “Don’t light that,” Clive says. He lowers his eyes and mumbles, “I spilled gas in here earlier. I’ll clean it up in the morning.”

  “Unbelievable, Clive. You’re lucky it was Charlie Boudreaux who caught you in there.”

  “I was just looking around.”

  “Better not be getting high in there.”

  “I haven’t done anything but drink a few beers since you brought me back here,” Clive says quietly, watching the road.

  “Whatever you’re doing, do it during the daytime, when it won’t scare people. And don’t think you can pawn a single silver spoon from that house. There’s not an antique dealer in three hundred miles of here that won’t know where it came from.” Daniel watches his stepson steer them around bends in the forest highway. Clive’s window is down, and crushed bugs accumulate on his bare arm. He takes no notice, as if, mentally, he’s all horizontal skies interrupted by chaotic squiggles of thought. Daniel taps his cigarette back into the box, calculating he has less than two hours to sleep before the alarm clock on his dresser does its noisy dance. Above them, stars of varying brightness evoke the many ceilings of the night sky. Not a rain cloud in sight.