Hide

by Matthew Griffin

  The point of the scissors breaks through the leather. I twist the strap further down the blade to widen the hole.

  “All I can taste is sweets,” Frank says, holding what appears to be the final fistful of dust and hair midway between the vacuum and the trash bag. It’s threaded with a piece of silver foil from a stick of chewing gum.

  “What?”

  “I said, all I can taste is sweets.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

  “It just now occurred to me.”

  “All you can taste is sweets?”

  “Everything else tastes like metal.” He carefully places the clod into the trash bag.

  “Fine. Wonderful. I’ll make you some sweets. What kind of sweets do you want?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I believe I’d like some sort of cake. But I can’t put my finger on exactly what.”

  “You want some pound cake?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You love pound cake.”

  “I do,” he says, but he doesn’t sound too sure about it.

  “What about red velvet?”

  “Maybe.”

  I hand him his belt. He pushes up from the chair. His arms shake trying to lift him.

  “That would be a whole lot easier,” I say, “if all you had to do was push a button.”

  He pretends not to hear me. His shaking fingers have a hard time threading the belt through its loops, keep missing them right at the last second, and it’s hard for him to twist around enough to get it through the back ones. He stands there a long time putting it on, real careful, and still he misses a loop, but I don’t say anything. He turns around once, modeling it for me. His pants stay put around his waist, the extra fabric gathered up into bunting ruffles. Daisy scrabbles at the heat vent, trying to tear it out of the wall.

  “How do I look?” Frank says.

  “Downright respectable,” I say.

  I spend all afternoon baking his three favorite cakes: pound, red velvet, and pineapple upside-down. Soon as one’s in the oven, I start sifting the ingredients for the next. I wait until right before it’s ready to bake before I mix the wet into the dry, though. You don’t want your batter to sit there relaxing too long, everything in it getting too close and comfortable, or the cake comes out all rubbery. He does like his pound cake a little fallen, though, how dense and moist it gets, so I open the oven door and slam it shut halfway through.

  While the pineapple upside-down’s in the oven and I’m spreading cream-cheese icing across the red velvet cake, a goldfinch pauses on the bird feeder, tiny toes reaching through the wire. It’s a male, though the summer brightness is faded from his feathers, turned him dingy and gray for the winter, like winter’s light. He reaches inside with his beak, carefully draws a black splinter through the mesh, and streaks away. They mark their territory, the males, by singing as they fly along its boundaries, drawing the sound like twine from branch to branch. It stays there, thrumming in the air, long after it fades from our ears. The sound presses against their feathers when they try to fly across it.

  So that’s our supper for tonight, three kinds of cakes. It’s a good thing neither of us is diabetic. Not diagnosed, at least. Those swollen feet of his make me suspicious. I lay a slice of each one on his plate, the red velvet with its icing, which melted a little and ran onto the platter because I didn’t let the cake cool long enough before I spread it on, and the pineapple upside-down with a nice, perfect ring of pineapple and a mound of whipped cream on top, and the pound cake, plain and unassuming. It didn’t fall as much as I’d have liked.

  At first I don’t even pick my fork up, I’m so busy watching him as he debates which one to try first, but then I go ahead and eat some myself so the pressure doesn’t get to him. Daisy sits leaning against his chair, her legs splayed out. No modesty at all. He takes a bite of the pound cake, chews it with that same listening look on his face, and nods to himself. The red velvet makes a bigger impression—he raises his eyebrows in surprise and takes another big bite—but after that he gets bored and moves on to the pineapple upside-down. He takes three bites of that one, one right after the other, leaves whipped cream on the corner of his mouth. I don’t like the taste of it much myself. The pineapple was canned in syrup instead of juice, makes the whole thing too sweet, but he seems to be enjoying it. The texture of it keeps his interest, the stringiness of the pineapple. I can tell from the concentration on his face while he chews, the way he pushes it around on his tongue. Then he sets down his fork.

  “Well?” I say.

  “They’re just fine.”

  “Do they taste like metal?”

  “Only just a little bit,” he says, real encouraging, as if to imply he’s sure I’ll be able to do better next time.

  “I shouldn’t have given you pound cake. It’s more buttery than it is sweet. The pineapple’s sweet, though. Too sweet for me. I thought that was what you wanted.”

  “Just fine,” he says, as if continuing his thought uninterrupted, “but it’s something else I’ve got a hankering for. I wish I could put my finger on it.”

  “What about chocolate rum? You like chocolate rum.”

  “It could be chocolate rum.” He rests his chin on his fist like he’s thinking about a matter of great philosophical difficulty.

  “You’ve got whipped cream on your face.” He wipes it on the back of his hand and wipes his hand on his pants, while his napkin sits on the table, trapped underneath his fork. “At least eat a little more. For my sake. I spent the whole afternoon on them.” He uses his fork to break open the upside-down cake and separate out the pieces of pineapple. “I should have waited longer to ice the red velvet,” I say. It soaked up the melted icing, and now it’s sopping as a used sponge, falling apart on the plate. Between his thumb and forefinger, Frank holds a piece of pineapple in the air between us and studies it. Daisy stares at it, transfixed. Saliva starts streaming uncontrollably from one corner of her mouth. A few cake crumbs fall off the pineapple onto the table.

  “Stop acting strange,” I say. “What you need to do is figure out what kind of cake you want. What about birthday cake?”

  He frowns and shakes his head. Daisy bumps the elbow of his pineapple-holding hand with her nose and stares at him gravely, as if trying to mesmerize him into giving her a bite. Her saliva forms an enormous bubble, like the kind frolicking children draw through the air with a soapy wand.

  “If you give a bite of that cake to the dog,” I say, “I will drive her back to the pound first thing in the morning.”

  He drops the pineapple and leans back in his chair, holds his hands up like I’ve got a gun trained on him.

  “Eat.”

  Slowly, glumly, he hunches over his plate, skims some whipped cream onto his fork, and holds it in front of his face. I nod. Daisy looks back and forth between us, trying to appear patient and bored while the bubble hangs quivering from the corner of her mouth, and waits for the standoff to end.

  I bake every cake I know, and some I don’t: rum and earthquake and spice, angel and devil’s food, German chocolate and lemon-blueberry and oatmeal-coconut, and when I run out of cakes, I start on cobblers: cranberry and blueberry and strawberry, peach and pumpkin and rhubarb, and when I run out of cobblers, I start on pies: pecan pie, apple pie, lemon meringue, key lime, banana cream. Daisy keeps me company, at least, while I cook, stands right behind my legs, wheezing with an addict’s desperation and waiting to vacuum up any crumbs I might drop.

  Each one Frank takes his obligatory single spoonful of, chews it and listens close, then sets his spoon and napkin down on the table and goes back to the den. I put the leftovers on the floor, and Daisy sets on them like a wild beast, gobbling up entire pies in two or three bites, and then I start on the cookies: blondies and brownies and chocolate-chunk delights, ginger molasses snaps and snickerdoodles and rosemary-rosewater-poppy-seed tea biscuits.

  Those last ones he takes one look at and turns his head away from the decora
tive platter I’ve brought them on, artfully arranged with holly painted around the edge of the china. Won’t even touch them.

  “I said I wanted something sweet,” he grumbles. He always gets into a funk after the leaves have fallen.

  It takes me a week. Then I trudge, with the little strength I have left, from the kitchen to the living room.

  “Congratulations,” I say on my way down the hall. “You win. I have officially run out of desserts. You’re now free to starve to death.”

  But when I get to the living room, it’s empty. The bathroom’s empty too, and so’s the bedroom. “Frank?” I yell. The front door’s shut and locked, but I know they can’t have gone out the back, so I open it up and step onto the porch. It’s raining, big fat drops just barely not cold enough to be snow. Far away, through the bare trees, Daisy’s paws scatter the leaves on the ground. I can see them rustle, the movement around her, more than I can see her. After a second that disappears, too. The leaves settle placid.

  “Frank,” I yell, but there’s no answer. I grab myself an umbrella and coast the car slow down the drive, and there, at the far edge of our woods, almost to the street, he’s leaning against a hickory with his hands in his pockets, looking very intently out at the road, while the rain soaks him.

  I roll down the window. “Get in the car,” I yell, but he doesn’t seem to hear. Daisy sits next to him, her tail swishing back and forth through the wet leaves, steady and swift, and looks over her shoulder at me, urging me to do something, anything, so she doesn’t have to keep sitting out here in the rain.

  “Frank,” I yell again, as I’m getting out of the car and opening up my umbrella, but it’s not until I’ve made my way over to him and shaken him by the shoulders that he looks at me, and still that same expression, like he’s watching something far away and indistinct slowly take shape as it moves closer, stays on his face. There’s mud smeared across his cheek, and caught in the hairs on his forearm, and grass stains on his knees. Water runs down his forehead, along his nose, and drips off it. He turns back to the road. I hoist the umbrella over our heads.

  “What happened?” I say.

  “I don’t know.” He sounds distracted, dazed.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “How did I get here?”

  “Did you fall?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You fell. You must have fallen.”

  “I wouldn’t have been able to get back up if I’d fallen,” he says.

  “How else would you have grass stains on your knees?”

  He looks all around, as if for clues: at the last curdled leaves dashed from their branches, at the rain pounding loose the yard, gathering it into trembling pools that seem to seep upward out of the dirt instead of falling down on it.

  He shakes his head. “The cleanliest of waters,” he says, “becomes tainted as soon as it touches our human refuse.”

  “Is anything broken?”

  He moves his hands up and down his arms, squeezing. “I don’t believe so.”

  “How long have you been out here?”

  “A while,” he says. “I believe.”

  Human refuse. He must have read that in a book someplace. Lord knows he didn’t come up with it himself.

  “Let’s get in the car,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “One minute I was watching that program, then all of a sudden I was out here. I was doing something, though. When I got here. I got here right in the middle of doing it. I just don’t know what it was.”

  “You must have fallen asleep,” I say. “You must have been walking in your dreams.”

  “Naw.”

  “You must have been.”

  “When have I ever done that? I sleep fine. You’re the one who sleeps crazy.” I used to talk while I dreamed, he said. Sometimes I even sat up in the bed and carried on long conversations he couldn’t understand without their other side—Not that one, I said, not that one, with increasing desperation, no, please, no—until he could hush me and pull me back down to the mattress and keep me there with the weight of his arm flung over my chest.

  That’s what he says, at least. I never remembered any of that myself.

  “I didn’t fall asleep,” he says. “I was watching my program.”

  “There’s no other explanation. Unless you think there was some kind of supernatural force came and transported you out here and decided to smear grass and mud all over you. Unless you think there was some sort of happening.”

  He doesn’t answer. He’s distracted again by whatever he’s looking for, but there’s nothing there to find: just the road, and the trees on the other side, and a river of red clay running out from the roots of an oak and into the street, washing in waves across it.

  “What’re you looking at?” I say.

  He shivers, crosses his arms, and keeps on looking at it, until finally Daisy can’t take it any longer and stands up with her muddy forepaws on his knee and nuzzles him. He pats her on the head. His hand’s covered in fine scratches.

  “Come on and get in the car. My arm’s tired.” I shake the umbrella, and it flings drops of water in a circle all around us. Frank keeps staring across the street. “You’re going to get pneumonia,” I say. “They could try me for manslaughter. Criminal neglect. You want me to spend the rest of my days in prison?”

  He ponders carefully. “Naw,” he says. He’s shivering bad.

  “Then get in the car.”

  When we’ve got him in it, and Daisy seated on the floor with her head jammed between his thighs, I turn the heat all the way up. It blows thick and hot in our faces. Frank presses his palms to the vent. The rain pounds the roof of the car, sounds like machine-gun fire. Or at least how it sounds in the movies.

  “We ought to take you to the doctor,” I say.

  He points to the street sign across from us.

  “Hillcrest Drive,” he says. “That’s where we live. On the crest of the hill.”

  “Look around you. There’s not a hill in sight. And there surely isn’t a crest.”

  “You know what that means, don’t you?” He chuckles. “It’s all downhill from here.”

  “There’s no slope to this road whatsoever. It’s just a name.”

  “Somebody’s lying, then,” he says. “And I’ll put my trust in the sign, thank you very much.”

  “Why do you keep talking like that?”

  “Talking like what?”

  “Tearing words up. Acting like you don’t know anything.” Like somebody who was just learning what words meant and still trying to figure out the boundaries they drew, testing the edges and seams of things.

  “I’m just trying to explain it,” he says.

  “All you’re doing is rearranging the exact same terms. You’re not defining them at all.”

  “It all makes perfect sense,” he says, “if you can just break it down into its components. Look at one piece at a time. Then it’s all clear.”

  “All I need clarification of is how you got out here in this condition.”

  He shrugs and scratches the inside of Daisy’s ear, right where it meets her head. She leans into his hand with all her weight but looks at me sidelong, warily, for the signal that it’s safe to relax.

  “Just break it apart,” Frank says. “Look at one little bit at a time. It’s easier that way.”

  “Stop it. You make me feel like I’m losing my mind.”

  “Maybe you are,” he says. “You’ve been acting mighty strange.”

  “Like nothing makes a bit of sense.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t.”

  “But you just said that it does!” I shout. “You just a minute ago said it makes perfect sense.”

  “See?” he says. “You never used to have outbursts like that.”

  Another empty spot hovering over the street catches his attention, even though not a single thing has changed. I pull out of the driveway, through that very spot, flattening it as I turn the car a
round. I can’t drive in reverse too well these days. Not the whole way back to the house, that’s for sure. Hurts my neck to turn it around that long, and I don’t trust the rearview mirror.

  And as soon as we’re facing the house, he looks all around, bewildered, and for the first time seems to fully comprehend where and who he is. He reaches one shaking hand out and runs it over my arm, as if to make sure I’m really here. Panic widens his eyes.

  “Wendell,” he says. His voice is troubled, trembling. “I—”

  His mouth keeps moving, but he can’t manage to get anything else out of it.

  “I know.” I put my hand on top of his. “I know. It’s okay.”

  I drive the car rattling over the gravel and park beside the porch. We sit here a long time, waiting for the rain to ease, watching it wash down the windshield. It warps the porch, blurs the trees beyond it into dark shapeless swaths. He keeps his hand on my arm.

  “That rain sounds like machine guns going off,” I say.

  Frank listens to it, carefully, as if it’s a dessert he’s chewing.

  “Naw,” he says. “Not really.”

  The rain ends. The eaves drip into the raw silence it leaves behind; the waters seep into the dirt, the sky reflected within them breaking apart around the blades of grass. Frank takes a warm shower, dresses himself, and sits in his recliner. I drape an afghan over his lap. He’s still shivering. While he flips through the television channels, trying to find something decent to watch—they never play anything good once the holidays get near, just a bunch of sentimental nostalgia for a time that, as far as I can remember, never happened in the first place—I page through the newspaper in the one measly circle of yellow light from the lamp between our chairs. The house feels shut up and huddled close. I can feel it drawing tight around me. Can’t hardly turn the page, I’m so tired.

  Daisy sleeps with her back pressed against his feet, so she’ll feel it if he moves, her paws twitching like they do when he tickles the fur between their pads. She whimpers, and her jaws work, desperate to feel the weight of dream rabbits.