See How Small

by Scott Blackwood

  “Father, is Madya still holding my hand?” I asked. He did not answer. He then told me a story. One evening he was cooking at the restaurant and stepped into the dining room. He saw the customers eating his chicken kabobs and curried lamb. He felt satisfied. Then it occurred to him that just as he had prepared their food, they, in turn, were being prepared for Shiva’s terrible appetite. That one day Shiva would lift them up, eat them like nan.

  “Is Madya holding my hand?” I asked again.

  “We worry over each other, the living and the dead,” my father said, looking thoughtful.

  “It is not enough. I need her hand,” I said.

  My father shook his head and told me I was still angry over his criticism of my Emperor’s Saffron Chicken.

  I remember a baby crying in the distance. At some point, my father hobbled away, and the paramedics found me in the smoke. And, of course, they found Madya’s body soon after, in another part of the field. Six months ago, a newspaper reporter came by the restaurant. He ordered tandoori-style shrimp. He asked me how my life had changed since the time of the crash, seven years ago. Had I come to terms with my loss? I thought about this. I watched him eat. I remembered Madya running her fingernails through my hair that time, our joined grief. “I am always coming to terms,” I said, finally. “It does not end.”

  Michael’s head hummed. He put the essay down, and for a minute he saw Videsh in the smoky field with his dad. What they were talking about was important. But he couldn’t hear what they were saying because that baby was crying so loud. Then he wondered if Videsh and Madya had a kid somewhere. He thought how babies, before they’re born, can hear their parents’ voices outside. But words don’t go with anything in that dark.

  He got up, put the essay back. He turned off the lamp and lay down.

  Outside, the sprinkler system turned on. Chit, Chit, Chit, it said.

  24

  LAST YEAR KATE had made a New Year’s resolution to get out more. To meet new people, reconnect with her old friends. But it didn’t happen. So on the heels of the fifth anniversary, she’d RSVP’d to an early-December Christmas party some of her old neighbors were having. She felt a little raw so soon after, a little disloyal somehow. Her dreams still gave her pause—the girls’ quarrelsome visits, the odd new rooms added to the existing ones, the disquieting presence of men. She’d been preoccupied with the approach of the anniversary but now needed to get back to running her three miles along the river, eating better. She wasn’t thirty-five anymore but she still had her looks, hadn’t let herself go. She’d even called up Margo Farbrother, who was pregnant for a second time. Margo who’d intimidated her early on with her good skin, high cheekbones, and shapely ass. Margo had convinced her to rejoin the book group. They were reading Moby-Dick now, Margo said, but skipping all the whale stuff. “Where are all the women?” Margo had said. “How about throwing us a bone?” There were more troubles with Margo’s stepson. Calls from his probation officer. Why had she and Darnell thought having a kid would change Michael? Margo wondered. He’s adrift, she said, a lot like his brother Andrew, according to Darnell. Margo worried about Michael’s daughter, Alice, too. What might be in store for her if things broke a certain way? Michael seemed oblivious. “It’s like that old joke,” Margo said. “Why should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?” She laughed nervously.

  “You’ll have your own kiddo to worry about soon enough,” Kate said. “You’ll be such a great mom.” Kate was a good listener. It felt liberating to be out of her own head. To worry about someone else.

  “Wow. It just never ends, this worry stuff,” Margo said, and then there was a silence on the phone.

  “It’s fine,” Kate said. “It’s fine. And you’re right.”

  It was late when Kate showed up at the Christmas party. She’d even brought a date: Edward. She’d met him online. He worked contracts in the legal department at Dell. Edward had large hands and he bit his nails. But they were clean nails, she reminded herself. She ignored his bitterness about his divorce, concentrated on his attentiveness to her, their mutual interest in hiking and bird-watching—something, along with the book group, that she’d picked back up. Edward sometimes made birdlike sounds in his sleep, odd little clicks and coos. The sex wasn’t bad. Edward joked that he’d gotten such a late start because his strict Southern Baptist family viewed sex as an awful, filthy act that should only be saved for someone you marry.

  Kate downed a half bottle of wine before Edward picked her up.

  At the party, she saw her old neighbors. Christine Fountain, who’d helped her plant a garden the year after the girls died—the zucchini squash they’d planted had taken over half the yard. Christine, picking purple hull peas and bringing them into Kate’s kitchen to shell. Christine, with her deeply tanned arms, who rode her bike everywhere in the heat. Winnie Lipsy, a nurse in the neonatal wing at the hospital where the girls were born and whose reserve reminded Kate of her mother. Kind eyes, she thought. The Gilmores with their two sons, toddlers when she’d moved. Jennifer, their mom, had let herself go, she thought. Jowly. Saggy ass. Then Kate felt ashamed for thinking it. Jennifer’s boys raced through the long dining room, bumped into Kate, spilling some of her wine on Edward, then slid on the wood floor and tumbled noisily into the den. Jennifer apologized, wiped at the spot on Edward’s sweater. Edward smiled weakly, said no problem, that he’d be sure to clothesline the boys the next time through. Edward swung his arm out. “Whack,” he said. Kate laughed, said Edward had been raised by wolves. Jennifer looked at them both blankly. Edward was hard to read. His deadpan sense of humor. But she liked him for it. He was who he was. Who was she?

  Many of the people at the party had called to check in on her at various points over the years. They were decent and kind. Why had she ever moved? she wondered. Kate had the disquieting feeling that of all the people in the room, she had changed the least. Edward poured her another glass of white wine in the kitchen and she pulled on her sweater and followed him out onto the deck. The moon hung just over the tree line beyond the fence. A knot of people, some of whom she recognized, had gathered on the deck to smoke. A tennis-playing friend of Ray’s said a shy hello. Claire, a woman she used to carpool with when the girls were in grade school, saw her and came over to talk. They kept it light, talked about all the changes to the neighborhood, the spike in property values. At the edge of the deck, a man with a crew cut was drinking a beer and talking with Brent Gilmore, who wore a hat with reindeer antlers. The man seemed familiar, even the way he stood, his feet splayed, a hand jammed in his jeans pocket. A much younger woman, a girl, really, with long braided hair joined him, grabbed his forearm. The young woman caught Kate staring and Kate looked away.

  Wine hummed in her head. Her mouth was dry. She looked around for Edward for some kind of ballast.

  A string of firecrackers went off in the distance. In the middle of the yard, a group of teenage boys was hunched over a large clear plastic bag. One of the boys held a lighter inside the bag and lit candles sticking from a block of Styrofoam. “Better water down your roofs!” one of the men shouted from the porch, and everyone laughed. The fire balloon threw shadows across the yard, made spindly human figures against the fence. After a few minutes, the balloon swelled with hot air, rose slowly above the yard. A kind of quiet fell over the crowd as they watched. For a moment, to Kate, their upturned faces seemed to betray fretful memories, all their regrets. She wondered what her own face looked like.

  The fire balloon floated over the creek bed behind the house. Illuminated live oak branches and telephone wires, where tennis shoes hung by their laces. She could see Edward standing on the lower rungs of the fence, watching. A few people who’d just come out onto the porch whooped and hollered drunkenly. The teenage boys, sheepish and amazed, stood around in the yard with their hands in their pockets, with no plan for what came next.

  Kate’s head detached from her body, drifted upward.

  “Ms. Ulrich?” a
man’s voice said, and Kate turned. The man with the crew cut stared back. The young woman stood behind him, smiling but appraising Kate all the same. The girl and the man had the same thick dark eyebrows, brown eyes. And it was only then that Kate remembered his halting interview with the TV news reporter and knew who he was.

  25

  ON HER COMMUTE, Rosa sometimes listens to old taped interviews she did for pieces she never wrote. Voices of ex-cops, witnesses, medical examiners, victims’ families, neighbors. Labeled and put away for some future use. Stories that have grown more inscrutable over time. More like intimations.

  Here’s something that might interest you. There was this guy who’d race his old Firebird through my neighborhood. This is the way he walked his dogs. I shit you not. The dogs would run through the yards chasing the Firebird. He’d roll right through stop signs. My kids were young then and always riding their bikes around, so I’d yell at the guy from my porch. Other neighbors did too, but they were wary of him, you could tell. You could see him hunched behind the wheel in there. He stared straight ahead, paid no attention. The kids in the neighborhood made up stories about him like kids do. He’d poisoned his children but got off on a technicality. He tortured runaways in his basement and fed them to his dogs. Urban myth stuff. Anyway, after a couple of these incidents I decide to go visit his place, three or four blocks away from my house. I wasn’t sure what I’d say exactly but I was going to make an impression. So I get over there and he’s got all these antique carnival arcade games on his porch. He fixed them up, sold them on eBay, I suspect. Morgana the Fortune Teller was one, I remember—the upper torso of a woman in a red velvet-lined box. Anyway, I know the guy is home because I can hear the TV going. When I knock, dogs start barking inside. A whole pack, by the sound of it. He comes to the door. Hobbles a bit, like he’s got a bad knee. He’s disheveled. Dark circles under his eyes. Nervous. He has a long screwdriver in his hand. The dogs keep barking. It’s loud. He keeps turning back to them, talking in a language I can’t follow. I think about him running the stop sign, smashing my son’s bike, launching him in the air. And for some reason, I don’t know why, I introduce myself as someone I’m not. I tell him I’m from Austin Animal Control. I’m coming from work, in a jacket and tie, so I look semi-official. I tell him that there have been complaints about the number of dogs he keeps in his house, about the dogs being a danger to the community. I tell him the dogs may have to be removed. Euthanized. He looks at me like he’s examining a piece of food that might’ve gone bad. His eyes jitter around as if he’s mulling over his options. I’m watching the screwdriver out of the corner of my eye. Then he says, in English, without raising his voice, that he’d like to come to some agreement. There is no need for this, he says. He glances back inside the house, and his face stiffens, like he’s imagined suddenly what all this might mean. He seems spooked. I notice the close smell of the house now, the dog smell, but something behind that, something that made me think of dirt and roots. Or maybe that’s just in retrospect? Who knows? Anyway, the dogs are really going at it now. So I tell him I’ll be back in a week with a court order and the constable. I’m not even sure if there is a constable, but he doesn’t know either. He says something sharp in his language—I can’t tell if he’s saying it to me or the dogs—and disappears back into the house. I leave. I get busy at work, with the kids. So then I don’t see him for weeks. Don’t see the Firebird or the dogs. Which makes me feel okay. Like maybe something sank in. I drive by his house. Firebird is still in the driveway. No lights on in the house. I can hear the dogs, though. They are having at it. A real uproar.

  After the UPS packages and mail piled up and the dogs kept howling, somebody calls the cops out. When they get to the front door, the smell’s unmistakable. They find the guy in the den, or what’s left of him, hanging from a rope, maybe a couple of feet off the floor. The dogs had likely tried to find a way out for a while. Maybe he’d even left a door open for them but the wind blew it shut (I try not to assume too much). But after four days of trying, well, there he was.

  But that’s not the end. Turned out he was Bosnian. He’d immigrated during the height of the war there. After a while, the cops are looking in the kitchen and they notice how uneven the floor planks are, even for an old house. They’ve been replaced recently. They’re curious. Maybe someone had passed along a few of the neighborhood kids’ stories to them. Who knows? They decide to pry up a few of the wide planks, which are old cypress. Underneath, between the joists, partially buried in the dirt, they find a girl doll the size of an infant. Its eyes and genitals have been gouged out. The cops’ eyebrows rise. So they pull up other planks and find dozens more dolls laid similarly to rest, all with their eyes and genitals gouged out. So, of course, they combed the property after that, expecting to find the worst. They started digging in the backyard where a recent garden had gone in. They double-checked missing persons reports. They asked neighbors about the man. Of course now all the man’s actions—his reticence, his reckless driving and weird affect, even his gypsy fortune-teller in the red velvet box—seem suspicious. May be harbingers of something else. But weeks go by and no bodies are found. No little girls turn up missing.

  Of course, the dogs have to be destroyed.

  So for a long time after, I didn’t know how to feel about it. I felt partly responsible but I couldn’t say exactly how. I’d scared him by posing as someone else. Was he working his way up to real girls? Or was he just a troubled man who didn’t want his dogs taken away? Maybe he was fighting some terrible urge? One he’d kept in check for a long time, all the way back to Bosnia. Maybe he pretended so he didn’t have to do the real thing. Maybe what he did was even heroic? We’ll never know. Some stories don’t have an ending even if you want them to.

  26

  MICHAEL DROVE UP Lake Austin Boulevard toward his dad’s house. It was late. Alice was asleep in the backseat. He wasn’t exactly sure why he was going. The simplest answer was that he needed money for whatever was ahead. But his brother seemed somehow mixed up in it too. With a clearer head, he might have realized it also had to do with his dad’s girlfriend, Margo, whom he was a little in love with. Margo, who had bailed him out of jail several years before, who’d driven him to his probation hearing after a DUI, who’d lent him money (and inadvertently the bounty of her medicine cabinet) when his dad wouldn’t speak to him. Margo, who was pregnant again after losing the first one.

  He pulled into his dad and Margo’s driveway and got out, careful not to wake Alice. The glow from the porch Christmas lights made everything seem temporary. He knocked several times and then Margo stood in the doorway in her robe, her belly bulging underneath. She squinted out at him, hoping to see ahead, he suspected, to whatever trouble he might have in tow. He wavered there unsteadily for a moment while she got her bearings. He’d woken her.

  “Prodigal son,” Margo said in a cracked voice. “You have returned.” Michael said hello, smiled in a way that felt disconnected from his face.

  She stared at him hard. “You look like shit.”

  “Thanks.” Her robe hung open, and he could see her belly’s navel stem poking obscenely against her nightgown, which thrilled and embarrassed him. He tried not to look but looked anyway. She had on a necklace, a circle of small diamonds. Her hair was rapidly going gray.

  Margo pulled her robe closed. She followed his eyes. “My hair?” She croaked out a laugh. “Blame your sibling.”

  “For what?” For a few seconds Michael didn’t know what they were talking about.

  “Hormones,” she said, smiling. “So where’s little Alice?” He motioned with his head and she peered out at his car in the driveway. Her shoulders fell and she seemed disappointed in him. “Bring her in. It’s getting cold out.”

  He would make his way upstairs a little later, go through drawers, look for jewelry. He tried to remember where his dad kept the petty cash for his movie prop runs. He ran over in his mind the tools in the garage he might take and hock.

/>   “You okay?” Margo said. Concern flickered through her face.

  Michael thought of laying his head in Margo’s lap.

  “Sure,” he said. He glanced at the upper floor of the house, where he could see a light on. “My dad around?”

  “You still filming out in the sticks?” Michael asked his dad. They were sitting at the kitchen table, having some pie. The tree lights shone from the living room, where Alice slept on the couch. Michael realized he’d forgotten to take off the “MY NAME IS Alice” sticker they’d given her at the police station. It had been nearly six months since Michael had seen his dad. The last time, they’d had a fight in the driveway over his keys, which his dad had taken. Darnell had pinned him against his truck after Michael punched him. The cops came out but his dad, mindful of Michael’s probation, told them there had been a simple misunderstanding. The cops made notes with weary indifference. A little later, his dad, icing a welt below his eye, even made the cops coffee in the kitchen to make up for the trouble.

  “On the set out in Marfa during the week and here on the weekends,” his dad said. “Same old, same old.” He looked at Michael’s shaking hands on the kitchen table until Michael put them in his lap. Michael had helped his dad with movie props in his workshop when he was younger, his dad’s hands guiding his, sliding four-by-sixes along the table saw. For one movie, they’d built a 1930s replica of an old Lucky Strike cigarettes sign that welcomed baseball fans.