Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  Okay. Now. This is what’s important. This is where you’re going to start wondering whether you should have maybe sat just a little closer to the door. See, what happened to Donnie, didn’t happen then—it had already happened a week before. Seriously. Donnie, he didn’t disappear, blink out of sight, right when Esau said those words. He just shrugged and walked away, and Willa took Esau home to clean him up, and I got into a one-a-cat game—what you probably call “horse” or “catcher-flies-up”—with a couple of my pals until dinnertime. And Ma yelled some at Esau for getting into a fight, but nobody else thought anything more about it, then or ever. Nobody except me.

  Because when I woke up next morning, everybody in town knew Donnie Schmidt had been dead for a week. Hell, we’d all been to the funeral.

  I didn’t see it happen, but Willa did—or that’s what she thought, anyway. Donnie’d been walking to school, and old Mack Moffett’s car went out of control somehow, crossed three lanes in two, three seconds, and pinned him against the wall of a house. Poor kid never knew what hit him, and neither did anyone who ever went over the car or gave poor Mack a sobriety test. The old man died a couple of months later, by the way. Call it shock, call it a broken heart, if you like—I don’t know.

  But the point is. The point is that Donnie Schmidt was alive as could be the day before, beating up on Esau on the playground. I remembered that. But I’d also swear on a stack of Bibles that he’d been killed in an accident the week before, and Willa would swear on the Day of Judgment that she was there. And we’d both pass any and every lie-detector test you want to put us through. Because we know, we know we’re telling the truth, so it’s not a lie. Right?

  It’s just not true.

  Told you. Told you you’d be looking at me like that about now… no, don’t say nothing, just listen, okay? There’s more.

  Now I got no idea if that was the first time he did it—made something happen by saying it already had. No idea. Like I said before, it was just the first time I ever really saw my brother.

  Nor it didn’t change a lot between us, him and Willa and me. Willa was all books and choir rehearsals, and I was all cars and trucks and hunting with my Uncle Rick, and Esau pretty much got along on his own, same as he’d always done. He was just Esau, bony as a clothes rack, all elbows and knees—Papa used to say that he was so thin you could shave with him—but if you looked closely, I guess you could have seen how he might yet turn out good-looking. Only we weren’t looking closely, none of us were, not even me. Not even after Donnie. One of anything is still just one of anything, even if it’s strange. You can put it out of your mind. So across the dinner table was about it for Willa and me. If we were home.

  But while I wasn’t really looking, I can’t say I didn’t pay a little more attention in the looking I did, if you know what I mean.

  One time I do recall, when Esau was maybe twelve, maybe thirteen, in there somewhere. Must have been thirteen, because I was already out of high school and working five days a week to help with the rent. Anyway I’m up on the roof of the house on a Saturday, replacing a few shingles got blown off in the last windstorm. Hammering and humming, not thinking about much of anything, and suddenly I turn my head and there’s Esau, a few feet away, squatting on his heels and watching me. Never heard him climbing up, no idea how long he’s been there, but I know I don’t like that look—sets me to thinking about the one he gave Donnie. What if he says to me, “You fell off the roof,” and it turns out I’m dead, and been dead some while? So I say “Hey, you want to hand me those nails over there?” friendly and peaceable as you like. Probably the most I’ve said to him in a week, more.

  So he hands me the nails, and I say thanks, and I go back to work, and Esau sits watching me a few minutes more, and then he asks, right out of nowhere, “Jake, you believe in God?”

  Like that. I didn’t even look up, just grunted, “Guess I do.”

  “You think God’s nice?”

  His voice was still breaking, I recall—went up and down like a seesaw, made me laugh. I said, “Minister says so.”

  He wouldn’t quit on it, wouldn’t let up. “But do you think God’s nice?”

  I dropped a couple of shingles, and made him go down and bring them back up to the roof for me. When he’d done that, I said, “You look around at this world, you think God’s nice?”

  He didn’t answer for a while, just sat there watching me work. By and by he said, “If I was God, I’d be nice.”

  I set my eye on him then, and I don’t know what made me do it, but I said, “You would, huh? Tell it to Donnie Schmidt.”

  I’d never said anything like that to him before. I’d never mentioned Donnie Schmidt since the funeral, because I knew in my mind—like Willa, like everyone else—that Donnie was dead and buried a week before him and Esau had that fight. Anyway, Esau’s eyes filled up, which hardly ever happened, he wasn’t ever a crier, and his face got all red, and he stood up, and for a minute I thought he actually was about to come at me. But he didn’t—he just screamed, with that funny breaking voice, “I would be a nice God! I would!”

  And he was off and gone, I guess down the ladder, though maybe he jumped, the way he was doing then, because he was limping a bit at dinnertime. Anyway, we never talked about God no more, nor about Donnie Schmidt neither, at least while Esau still lived here.

  I never talked about any of this with Papa. He was pretty much taken up with his Bible and his notions and his work at the tannery, before he passed. But Ma saw more than she let on. One time… there was this one time she was still up when I come home from little Sadie Morrison’s place, she as later married that Canuck fellow, Rene Arceneaux, and she said—that’s Ma, not Sadie—she said to me, “Jacob, Esau’s bad.”

  I said, “Ma, goodness’ sake, don’t say that. There’s nothing wrong with the kid except he’s kind of a pain in the ass. Otherwise I got no quarrel with him.” Which was true enough then, and maybe still is, depending how you measure.

  Ma shook her head. I remember, she was sitting right where you are, by the fireplace—this was their house, you know—just rocking and shelling peas—and she said, “Jacob, I ain’t nearly as silly as everybody always thinks I am. I know when somebody’s bad. Esau, he makes people into ghosts.”

  I looked at her. I said, “Ma. Ma, don’t you never go round saying stuff like that, they’ll put you away for sure. You’re saying Esau kills people, and he never killed nobody!” And I believed it, you see, absolutely, even though I also knew better.

  And Ma… Ma, whatever she knew, maybe she knew it because she was just as silly as folks thought she was. Hard to say about Ma. She said, “That girl last year, the one he was so gone on, who wanted to go off to New York to be an actress. You remember her?”

  “Susie Harkin,” I said. “Sure I remember. Plane crashed, killed everybody on board. It was real sad.”

  Ma didn’t say nothing for a long time. Rocked and shelled, rocked and shelled. I stood and watched her, snatching myself a pea now and then, and thinking on how wearied she was getting to look. Then she said, almost mumbling-like, “I don’t think so, Jacob. I’m persuaded she got killed in that crash, but I don’t think so.”

  That’s exactly how she put it—exactly. I didn’t say anything myself, because what could I say—Ma, you’re right, I remember it both ways too? I remember you telling me she gave him the mitten—that’s the way Ma talks; she meant the girl broke up with him—and left, and I remember Susie doing just fine up there in the city, she even sent me a letter… but I also remember her and Esau talking about getting married someday, only then she stepped on that flight and never got to New York at all… I’m going to tell Ma that, and get her going, when the city health people already thought she ought to be off in some facility somewhere? Not hardly.

  Things wandered along, way they do, just happening and not happening. Willa went all the way on to state college and become a teacher, and then she got married and moved all that way to Florida, Jacksonville
Beach. Got two nice kids, my niece Carol-Ann and my nephew Ben. Ma finally did have to go away, and soon enough she passed too. Me, I kept on at the same hardware store where you found me, only after a while I came to own it—me and the bank. Married Middy Jo Staines, but she died. No children.

  And Esau… well, he graduated the town high school like me and Willa—unless maybe we just think he did—and then the University of Colorado gave him a scholarship, unless they just think so, and he was gone out of here quicker than scat. Never really came home after that, except the once, which I’ll get to in a bit. Got through college, got the job with that station in Baltimore, and the next time we saw him he was on the air, feeding stories to the network, the way they do—like, “And here’s Esau Robbins, our Baltimore correspondent, to tell you more about today’s tragic explosion,” or whatever. And pretty soon it was D.C. and the national news, every night, and you look up and your baby brother’s famous. Couldn’t have been over thirty.

  And looking good, too, no question about it. Grew up taller than me, taller than Papa, with Ma’s dark hair and dark blue eyes, and that look—like he belonged right where he was, telling you things he knows that you don’t, and telling them in that deep, warm, friendly voice he had. Lord, I don’t know where he rented that voice—he sure didn’t have it when he lived in this town. Voice like that, he could have been reciting Mother Goose or something, wouldn’t have mattered. When you heard it you just wanted to listen.

  I used to watch him on the TV, my brother Esau, telling us what’s really doing in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in France, in D.C., and I’d look at his eyes, and I’d wonder if he ever even thought about poor nasty Donnie Schmidt. And I’d wonder how he found out he could do it, how’d he discover his talent, his knack, whatever you want to call it. I mean, how does a little boy, schoolyard-age boy—how does he deal with a thing like that? How does he even practice it, predicting something he wants to happen—and then, like that, it’s true, and it’s always been true, it’s just a plain fact, like gravity or something, with nobody knowing any better for sure but me? Town like this, there’s not a lot of people you can talk to about that kind of thing. Must of made him feel even more alone, you know?

  The visit. Whoo. Yeah, well—all right. All right.

  It wasn’t hardly a real visit, first off. See, he’d already been the anchorman on that big news program for at least ten, twelve years when they got the notion to do a show on his return to the old home town. So they sent a whole crowd along with him—a camera crew, and a couple of producers, the way they do, and there was a writer, and some publicity people, and some other folks I can’t recall. Anyway, I’ll tell you, it was for sure the biggest thing to hit this place since Ruth and Gehrig barnstormed through here back in the Twenties. They were here a whole week, that gang, and they spent a lot of money, and made all the businesses happy. Can’t beat that with a stick, can you?

  And Esau walked through it all like a king—just like a king, no other word for it. They filmed him greeting old friends, talking with his old teachers, stopping in at all his old hangouts, even reading to kids at the library. Mind you, I don’t remember him ever having any hangouts, and the teachers didn’t seem to remember him much at all. As for the old friends… look, if Esau had any friends when we were all kids, I swear I don’t recall them. I mean, there they were in this documentary thing, shaking his hand, slapping his back, having a beer with him in Henry’s—been there fifty, sixty years, that place—but I’d never seen any of them with him as a kid, ’ceptin maybe a few of them were pounding on him, back before Donnie. Thing is, I don’t imagine Esau was trying very hard to get the details right. Wouldn’t have hardly thought we was worth the trouble. Willa thought she recognized one or two, and remembered this and that, but even she wasn’t sure.

  Oh, yeah, her and me, we were both in it. They paid for Willa to come from Florida—flew little Ben and Carol-Ann, too, but not her husband Jerry, cause they just wanted to show Esau being an uncle. They’d have put her and the kids up at the Laurel Inn with the crew, but she wanted to stay here at the old house, which was fine with me. Don’t get to be around children much.

  We didn’t see much of Esau even after Willa got here, but a day or two before they wrapped up the film, he dropped over to the house for dinner, which meant that the whole crew dropped over too. We were the only ones eating, and it was the strangest meal I’ve ever had in my life, what with all those electricians setting up lights, and the sound people running cables every which way, and a director, for God’s sake, a director telling us when to start eating—they sent out to Horshach’s for prime rib—and where to look when the camera was on us, and what Willa should say to the kids when they asked for seconds. Carol-Ann got so nervous, she actually threw up her creamed corn. And Willa got so mad at the lighting guy, because Ben’s got eye trouble, and the lights were so bright and hot… well, it was a real mess, that’s all. Just a real mess.

  But Esau, he just sat through it all like it was just another broadcast, which I guess to him it was. Never got upset about all the retakes—lord, that dinner must have taken three hours, one thing another—never looked sweaty or tired, always found something new and funny to say to the camera when it started rolling again. But that’s who he was talking to, all through that show—not us, for sure. He never once looked straight at any of us, Willa or the kids or me, if the camera wasn’t on him.

  He was a stranger in this house, the house where we’d all grown up—more of a stranger than all those cameramen, those producers. He could just as well have been from another country, where everybody’s great-looking, but they don’t speak any language you ever heard of. With all the craziness and confusion, the lights and the reflectors, and the microphones swinging around on pole-things, I probably studied on my brother longer and harder than I’d ever done in my life before. There at that table, having that fake dinner, I studied on him, and I thought a few new things.

  See, I couldn’t believe it was just Esau. What I could believe is there’s no such thing as history, not the way they teach it to you in school. Wars, revolutions, all those big inventions, all those big discoveries… if there’s been a bunch of people like Esau right through time—or even a few, a handful—then the history books don’t signify, you understand what I’m saying? Then it’s all just been what any one of them wanted, decided on, right at this moment or that, and no great, you know, patterns to the way things happen. Just Esau, and whatever Others, and you got run over. Like that. That’s what I came to think.

  And I know I’m right. Because Susie Harkin was in that film.

  Yeah, yeah, I know what I told you about the plane crash, the rest of it, I’m telling you this now. She walked in by herself, bright as you please, just before they finally got around to putting real food on the table, and sat right down across from Esau, between me and little Ben. The TV people looked at the director for orders, and I guess he figured she was family, no point fussing about it, and let her stay. He was too busy yelling at the crew about the lights, anyway.

  Esau was good. I am here to tell you, Esau was good. There was just that one moment when he saw her… and even then, you might have had to be me or Willa, and watching close, before you noticed the twist of blank panic in his eyes. After that he never looked straight at her, and he sure never said her name, but you couldn’t have told one thing from his expression. Susie didn’t waste no time on him, neither; she was busy helping little Ben with his food, cutting his meat up small for him, and making faces to make him laugh. Ma had said “Esau makes people into ghosts,” but I don’t guess you’d find a ghost cutting up a boy’s prime rib for him, do you? Not any kind of ghost I ever heard about.

  When she’d finished helping Ben, she looked right up at me, and she winked.

  As long as she’d been gone, Susie Harkin didn’t look a day different. I don’t suppose you’d ever have called her a beauty, best day she ever saw. Face too thin, forehead a shade low, nose maybe a bit beaky—but she
had real nice brown eyes, and when she smiled you didn’t see a thing but that smile. I’d liked her a good bit when she was going out with Esau, and I was real sorry when she died in that plane crash. So was Willa. And now here Susie was again, sitting at our old dinner table with all these people around, winking at me like the two of us had a secret together. And we did, because I knew she’d been dead, and now she wasn’t, and she knew I knew, and she knew why I knew besides. So, yeah, you could say we had our secret.

  Esau didn’t do much more looking at me during the dinner than he did at Susie, but that was the one time he did. I saw him when I turned to say something to Willa. It wasn’t any special kind of a look he gave me, not in particular; it was maybe more like the first time I really looked at him, when he did what he did to Donnie Schmidt. As though he hadn’t ever seen me either, until that glance, that wink, passed between Susie Harkin and me.

  Anyway, by and by the little ones fell asleep, and Willa took them off to bed, and the crew packed up and went back to the Laurel Inn, and Susie right away vanished into the kitchen with all the dirty dishes—“No, I insist, you boys just stay and talk.” You don’t hear women say that much anymore.

  So there we were, me and Esau, everything gotten quiet now—always more quiet after a lot of noise, you notice?—and him still not really looking at me, and me too tired and fussed and befuddled not to come straight at him. But the first thing I asked was about as dumb as it could be. “Squirrels still chasing you?”

  Whatever he was or wasn’t expecting from me, that sure as hell wasn’t it. He practically laughed, or maybe it was more like he grunted in a laugh sort of way, and he said, “Not so much these days.” Close to, he looked exactly like he looked on the TV—exactly, right down to the one curl off to the left on his forehead, and the inlaid belt buckle, and that steepling thing he did with his fingers. Really was like talking to the screen.