The Invisibles

by Hugh Sheehy

  Clive left home at seventeen and spent twelve years in New Orleans, working the till in a voodoo shop near the river end of the Quarter to pay for his drug habit. Daniel and Lucy knew the location of the store, but they never visited the business when they drove down for a weekend or the odd day of drinking. At that point in time Lucy didn’t want to see her son again. She’d found him passed out on the bathroom floor, screamed unforgivable things at him, and seen him driven off by sheriffs too many times. She’d given up trying to make him behave. She said he could come home when he was ready. It seemed unjust to Daniel, whose father had been fond of saying that you knew who truly loved you by who fought back when they came to drag you off.

  Once when they were a block away from Clive’s place of employment, drinking margaritas in plastic cups and feeling young and loose-limbed, Daniel proposed they walk over to the tourist shop. He had collected an ad from a window, a slick pamphlet with a cartoon of a bloodshot eye on the front. Lucy puckered her lips and shook her head. Visiting that haunted city was her vacation, and if one of its ghosts belonged to her, it just made her that much realer. She shrugged off his suggestion, and the afternoon began to wind down. Daniel tried to imagine what his wife was thinking, holding her hand on the patio while they ordered another round and then another to reignite the dying day. Matching with eager nods and laughs the cheer she forced into her face and voice, he was sorry, devoting his affections entirely to her, damning himself. Lucy needed to free herself for an afternoon, to be nothing more than a woman in a city of hedonists, with a man at her side, a man who was him, after all. Maybe he’d never understood her in the first place, and when he insisted that he did she’d patted his hand. After that, he didn’t mention Clive again. And then, after years of forgetting, after new reasons for grief replaced the old ones, the telephone rang, and when Daniel picked it up, Clive spoke to him from the other side. Though he hadn’t thought of his stepson in years, though he no longer saw the face in the framed pictures he’d left hanging on the walls, though twelve years had made Clive a damaged man, Daniel knew the voice that spoke his name with trepidation. He knew that Clive was in trouble. There could be no other reason for the call. Though his obligations to his stepson had gone with Lucy, Daniel felt the boy’s house all around him where now he, stepfather, outsider, lived alone. He wanted badly to tell Clive how sorry he was, to make up for what he felt he’d taken, which did not belong to him. On the other end of the line, Clive rambled on about an adrenalin shot, a mugging, an eviction, debt, his sick girlfriend. Both men comprehended that the other was overjoyed.

  Daniel spoke with so much force that he silenced Clive. “Where are you? What is your exact location?” he said. “I’m going out to my truck right now. I’m coming to get you.”

  The long drive gave him time to reflect on living without family. His parents were gone, leaving him with no one to visit, and he’d come to forget the dense familiarities of living in a house of people’s habits. To walk into a living room and be at peace with the child sprawled out on the couch, rapping along with a music video. To find a woman in his bedroom, trying on earrings in her underwear. His days had grown so meager with what was not exactly asceticism and not exactly self-neglect that he worried he wouldn’t know what to say when he found Clive and the girl he’d said would be with him. Living alone and working all week on the driving platform, he felt, had reshaped him into a subhuman creature, a being lean and smart and distrustful of folks, and he was ashamed of himself. He was sweating, speaking in a voice more boyish than the one he knew as his own, when he pulled up to the curb where Clive and Haley stood guard over two suitcases. He saw they were younger than he’d imagined, she even younger than Clive but just as worn down, and both of them tough in the way young people are, how they held their breath in and then spoke all at once, eager to impress him. They were just as nervous as he, and the ride home, three packed into the cab of his pickup, was just as silent as the drive down.

  After coming back from the Kelly plantation, unable to sleep, Daniel thinks about these things and tries to reconstruct the events of the day, to figure out exactly why Clive was in that house. The kid didn’t seem stoned, just confused, and the thought of the meek young man setting two-hundred-year-old houses on fire is too much a stretch of the familiar for his old mind to perform this late. He tries to remember whether he saw Clive this afternoon, after work, and he thinks maybe he did, though it could have been yesterday. Each day here feels the same, and between fixing things in the garage and driving that big orange barge back and forth across the river from five until three, he barely finds time to eat his supper, let alone babysit his stepson and Haley. They’re grown-up, wayward perhaps, but not so much as others in town, the slobs on the roadhouse stools or the drones who surf the net all day at the public library. Sometimes Clive and Haley drive out of town at sunset to speed though the swamp woods in the dark in the red pickup he gave Clive as a homecoming gift. They don’t go to the bars, not since Clive’s second night back in Saintsville, when he got rolled over a pool table and thrown out into a gravel lot for saying the wrong thing to a deer hunter. Daniel thinks that they just go for long drives. That’s what he did at their age. The cockleburs along the highway grew to your knee, and dead dogs lined the highway, and you just drove and drove, as if in search of a portal to someplace else. And after a while, it was like you’d found your way through, even though you were still rumbling around the coastal plain in your truck. He likes the thought of Clive and Haley cruising through the dark, young and pretty and too stupid to think beyond the easy intimacies at the disposal of all lovers. It reminds him of the good days with Lucy, before she got sick and he became the community recluse.

  Comparing their love to the only one he’s known, he lies on his side, worrying, until the birds chirping outside his window seem to multiply and the twilight creeps in.

  He comes home that afternoon to hear them fighting about Clive’s trespass into the Kelly mansion. Reluctant to involve himself in a passion he regards as personal, he waits on the porch, listening to Haley yell and Clive sneer back. Along the street, his neighbors take advantage of the evening cool, uprooting weeds from the flower beds, walking their dogs in the road. He knows their darting looks, the same ones they gave him at the council meeting where he refused to put a white picket fence around his yard despite the disdainful sniffs of the Historic Society. They stare at his dented black truck as if at ugly children hoping their imperfections will vanish overnight. The local fad has long been to drive a German car because pickups and souped-up racers line southern front yards, and rich people here pride themselves on their unique neighborhood. They love to step outside and see a bus parked at the end of the street and seventy senior citizens with cameras following a tour guide who knows more about their houses than they do. Lucy was one of these people, less a snob than most, but she still insisted on living in this house. Daniel keeps her silver BMW in the garage, in good condition, because he likes to have her old things around.

  Clive slams out of the house and comes at him in an unintended gesture of challenge, then veers off, pouting, to sit on the porch swing. Daniel leans against a porch post and sighs, planning to avoid Haley by opening the garage door and resuming yesterday’s project. He intends to replace the drive shaft in the outboard motor for the rowboat he never uses.

  Through the screen door, Haley shouts, “Don’t walk out on me. You think that’ll shut me up. You jackass! They are going to put you in prison. I’m not going to be one of those women who visits.” She steps out, prettier mad because her eyelashes seem longer, so slight her tank top wrinkles over her long denim skirt. Seeing Daniel, she grows quiet. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” says Daniel, deducing that they could not have fought at any other time. Haley sleeps so heavily she wouldn’t have stirred last night when Clive crawled into bed with her. His stepson leaves for work early, and if the weekends are any indication, most days she stays in bed until noon. Wanting last night to be over
, forgotten, he looks at Clive. “You clean up the truck?”

  Clive nods without looking up. His face sags from needing sleep.

  “Thank you, Daniel, he means to say ‘thank you.’ He’s so screwed up he forgot how to act to decent people.” Haley folds her arms and gives her boyfriend an imperious look, which goes ignored, and Daniel guesses the fight is over. They won’t fight in front of him, which is for the best, since the kinds of neighbors they have are the kind who like to eavesdrop and then invent stories to supplement the dialogue.

  Though he listens at the supermarket and the post office and even eats in a couple of restaurants, he hasn’t been to for several owners now, that’s the last he hears of the incident on the Kelly plantation, which means that Sheriff Boudreaux has kept his mouth shut. Daniel suspected he would, and he’s happy he saw his old friend. Over the next week, his routine of driving the ferry, working in the garage, and sleeping hard at night restores itself. Clive and Haley go about their business as if nothing has happened, taking their long drives in the evening, quietly screwing in the room down the short hallway from Daniel’s. Some nights he half-wakes to hear them leaving when the front door whines, going for a late-night drive or a six-pack maybe, and against worry he gives himself to sleep’s undertow. Each day, as he drives the motor ferry from one bank to the other, daydreams of a great flood wash him in a narcotic blandness that makes the time rush past him like a river of whiteness, and when he crawls into bed at night, he recalls nothing of his days.

  He’s finishing his morning coffee at the rail, watching the treacherous river currents roll over one another, when an usher stops beside him, wanting to tell someone about last night’s fire at the Mimosa Groves plantation house in the next county. Having enjoyed this morning’s hush, no radio or TV, Daniel wakes right up and listens to the whiskery guy. The sheriffs there left an empty cruiser at the end of the plantation’s service road, faithful that its presence would deter any would-be arsonist. Around three they responded to a call about Mimosa Groves and found the 183-year-old house consumed in hot gasoline blaze. As before, the sheriffs suspect no one.

  In town, after work, Daniel visits the video rental shop, the post office, a gas station, the library, renting and buying and borrowing for the sake of appearance, really just collecting information, and learns that his fellow townsfolk are all suspicious of one another. At the butcher’s, his eyes on the stuffed pork chops on special, he waits in line behind two women comparing the alibis of their loved ones.

  “My Chris was out, but he was at the Blue Moon with his friends. He said there were more than forty people who can account for it.”

  “He’d never think to do that anyhow. Now, the twins, they’re young enough that I could see them cooking up something like that, just because they don’t understand the seriousness of it all. You should hear them and their friends; they think it’s cool. And they sneak out all the time, to go skateboarding with their friends at midnight. But they don’t have a car, so they couldn’t have gone out that far.”

  “Really? You think your boys would do something like that?”

  “You wouldn’t believe the things they used to do to the dog. Boys that age are cruel-minded.”

  “Ain’t that the truth? But these arsons aren’t anything they would get up to. These are the act of a through-and-through madman. They’re about us, too. In our very midst.”

  Sensing an uncomfortable silence, Daniel looks up to see both women look quickly away from him. They flinch and then turn their backs to watch the butcher, in his bloody apron, carefully weigh two handfuls of ground sirloin on the counter scale. One of them mentions the new doctor’s office going up on the edge of the town. The other says she’s impressed by the fast work. They chatter as if Daniel has disappeared from behind them.

  He waits, stiff with anger and the will to calm himself. He’s been excluded like this since his childhood, and where normally his pride would heal him little fears gobble like piranha. Since hearing about Mimosa Groves he’s tried to reconstruct the previous night, only to find himself stopped at the black wall of his sleep. He vividly remembers an incident from Clive’s childhood, a little while after Daniel and Lucy married, when a sheriff brought the boy home because he and two other boys were caught trying to set fire to a kitten in the trees behind the baseball diamonds. The little cat, alive and well aside from a singed tail, belonged to another kid, one whom Clive’s partners in crime said his stepson liked to bully at school. Fearing she’d raised a little pyromaniac, Lucy sent her son to a therapist, who after a few meetings with Clive assured her that a fascination with fire wasn’t uncommon among children. He doubted that Clive was actually a firebug. Lucy was relieved by the man’s opinion, and Daniel was unsurprised, having in his childhood known many boys who tortured animals at one time or another. Sure enough, the next time a sheriff brought Clive home, it was for shoplifting, and the time after that, it was for striking a younger boy in the head with bat. He and Lucy forgot all about the kitten with the burned tail.

  The episode returns to him as he drives home to find the house empty, as he searches the armoire and the strewn-about clothes in Clive and Haley’s bedroom for some scrap of evidence that his stepson is an arsonist. He remembers it as he gazes in on the contents of his refrigerator. He takes a cold beer and sits on the front step, still wearing his sweat-stained work clothes, and waits for Clive and Haley to appear. He plans to question Clive this time and tries to invent a justification for burning those houses, for keeping it a secret from the town. The sour beer helps him stretch out time, put off thinking.

  He’s alarmed when a sheriff’s cruiser parks at the curb but breathes a little when he sees Boudreaux at the wheel, dressed in a T-shirt, waving at him. He stands as his old friend climbs out of the car and crosses the yard carrying a twelve-pack, shaking his head and wearing a puzzled smile. “You heard about the fire, right?”

  “Yeah, who hasn’t?” Daniel stares at the sheriff’s tucked-in shirt and knee-high socks. He can’t remember the last time he saw Boudreaux out of his beige uniform. The man’s put on a few pounds since the days they hunted ducks together with the sheriff’s dogs.

  “I’d offer you a beer, but it seems our thoughts were in the same phase. This’ll make a healthy surplus.” Boudreaux unleashes a beast of a handshake, and they take a seat on the front step. Once the sheriff has enjoyed his first sip he holds his head aloft, as if in solemn thought. “That was the fifth house to go up. The forensics report came back and said that it was a gasoline fire, same as the others. But they’re saying this is probably one of those copycat crimes.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The fire was started on the ground floor. In the others, whoever did it started a separate fire on each one. Now we got a man watching the Kelly place every night, from ten until dawn. Clive still working there?”

  “I doubt anyone else would hire him, so there’s not a whole lot of choice. Clive only got the job because Kelly was in a rush to get down to his beach house. Guy hates him, talks to him like he’s a child.”

  Boudreaux laughs at this. “Old man Kelly’s not an easy man to get to like you. And I don’t expect Clive helped him out in that area.”

  “The kid won’t look at him.” Saying this, Daniel swells with pride. He’s always liked to see stuffy old money folks like Kelly annoyed by peasants like him. “But the job keeps Haley in plastic jewelry and milkshakes.”

  “The important things in life,” Boudreaux says. “I used to think those were the law and the church. Then I got married.” He peers back at the quiet house. “Where are the lovebirds?”

  “Out driving. Maybe parked somewhere.”

  “Too bad I’m off duty.”

  They watch the homecoming traffic stream into the neighborhood, and as the expensive cars and their well-dressed drivers pass they speak of unimportant things, easing themselves back into the grooves of their old friendship. Grateful for the sheriff’s gentle manner, Daniel is beset by a swe
et aching with each smile and look into his old friend’s eyes. He wishes he had held on to this friendship. Just this one. After Lucy died, he stopped talking to everyone. He didn’t answer the telephone, ignored the doorbell, and when people turned back it was easy to blame them. How stupid he feels now, seeing his former self for a confused and bitter man, locking his door against help. Boudreaux asks for his thoughts on the weather, rescuing him from this self-torture. Daniel discovers he has theories of weather patterns on the coastal plain, from working so long on the river. Just as the sweeping rains make room for brilliant days, they turn to talk of the changing town, how the fountains have remained teeming with frogs for over forty years, of former classmates who’ve died, of canals and fields they once hunted, now too polluted or overrun by new generations of hunters to go back to.

  “You remember when we stole the auto ferry?”

  “Of course I remember stealing the auto ferry.” They’d come puttering back to the dock, drunk and mortified by the machine and the river they’d taken on. The sheriffs had been waiting for them and kept them in the Wayne cell until dawn.

  “You remember why we stole the auto ferry?” Boudreaux sniggers into his fist, his face sincerely confused and yet mocking puzzlement.

  “We wanted to see if anybody would notice if we did it.”

  “Yeah, right on, and you knew how to drive it, even back then. You had a sixth sense,” Boudreaux says. “You were made to drive that thing.”

  “Hell, they made you a sheriff.”