Dispensations

by Randolph Thomas

  Who would look after me for the rest of the summer? My mother told me about the Crislips, a farm family who lived a couple of miles away in the direction of town. She told me about the Crislip daughters, the beautiful Laura, who was finishing high school. Laura and Mrs. Crislip would both look after me. The younger daughter, Ginger, was close to my age. We would be playmates. Mrs. Crislip was a warm woman, a real Christian, my mother assured me.

  My mother said the Crislip girls were missing their father, too. He had gone off and left them. My mother said I was not to point out this connection I had to them. It was a secret.

  A man who worked the farm would be there. He was the uncle, the brother of the missing father. All of it would be good for me, and I would be a long way from the dangerous lake.

  The next day I met the Crislips. Their house was much older than ours, with big rooms, high ceilings, and a tin roof. The Crislips kept hogs, chickens, and a few cows. In addition to an outside toilet, they had other interesting things: a washing machine in the kitchen with two big spools that mashed the clothes together before Mrs. Crislip hung the clothes on the line behind the house, and a stove in the living room with a bucket of timber, or sometimes coal, sitting beside it. Mrs. Crislip was a tall, freckled blond; she wore flowery farm dresses and called everyone honey. Laura, the oldest daughter, was a thin wispy redhead. Ginger was a year younger than I was, with light red hair, almost blond, and very pale skin. The uncle was tall and thin, in overalls and a straw hat. He only grunted at me when our paths crossed. Ginger and I played Chutes and Ladders and other games, and on nice days we played outside.

  When I was inside the house, I avoided looking at the pictures of Mr. Crislip, the missing father. They were all around the rooms, much more on display than the pictures of my father in my home, but the Crislips’ pictures were very much like ours. Mr. Crislip was also in the army. In their wedding pictures, he held Mrs. Crislip exactly as my father held my mother in our pictures. Mr. Crislip looked like my father in our pictures, like the man staring down at me in the playpen: stout and ruddy, with dark hair and eyes. When I dared to look at the pictures, it appeared that his lips moved, that he spoke to me, saying my name the way my own father would say it. I asked my mother again and again about Mr. Crislip, and she squirmed uneasily in the car the way I had squirmed when my grandmother, or others, had accused me of cheating at games. My mother repeated that he had left them high and dry, that he had skipped town. She had known him. She had met him once or maybe a few times. Was he ever in our house? No, not that she remembered. Had he known my father? Yes.

  When the summer ended, I began the first grade. In the afternoons I got off the bus at the Crislips’ house and stayed with them until five o’clock, when my mother came home from work. Some afternoons in the winter, the uncle sat in the living room by the stove rubbing his long hands. I drew or watched TV with Ginger, or we played games. The uncle snorted and coughed. When he spoke to me I didn’t understand him, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He smiled or laughed, and I saw that he was missing most of his teeth.

  Laura rarely helped her mother or looked after me, but some days she sat at the kitchen table talking to her mother. Sometimes I sat where I could see under the table. Laura’s legs were long like my grandmother’s and smooth without stockings. I watched her and went into the living room. I climbed onto the armrest of the chair. I lay across the armrest. I rode it and rubbed myself against it. Ginger sat on the floor coloring, pretending she didn’t see me. The back door opened, someone was coming. Although it was hard for me to stop, I stopped. I climbed down and lay on the floor beside Ginger and pretended to look at what she was doing. One day while I was riding the armrest of the chair, I looked up and saw the uncle watching me through the screen door. He stared at me, smiled, and walked on.

  At school I had a few friends, kids who had the same sense of humor as me, who liked science fiction and horror movies. They were also allowed to stay up late watching television and read some of the same comic books and monster magazines. None of these friends rode my bus. Some of the kids who did, knew enough about me to call me names, to whisper stories that I was a bastard, that my father had molested me and gone to prison, or that my mother had murdered my father and hidden his body in the lake. My only friend on the bus was Ginger, and she was not like me. But Ginger sat beside me every day telling me about her conversations at school, about friendships that were less than she believed them to be. Sometimes at her house I caught her cheating at board and card games. There weren’t many games or toys at the Crislips’ house. Many of the toys there were broken, and the games suffered from lost pieces. Once I brought a pair of gold-framed glasses that had belonged to my great-grandmother to school for Show-and-Tell, and I couldn’t resist showing them to Ginger that afternoon. She wanted to wear them, and we fought over them, pulling them apart. When I showed the broken glasses to my mother, she became so angry I thought she might black out, but she recovered herself. I still couldn’t stay on my own in the house beside the lake, she said, and the broken glasses were part of the price we had to pay.

  At night I fought sleep and snuck into the living room because channel 27 broadcast monster movies between midnight and four. I watched Son of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, and Dracula, but my favorite monster movies were The Creature from the Black Lagoon and its sequels. Many days, as I walked into the woods, I felt the pull of the lake and glanced that way, half expecting, maybe even hoping, to see the creature rising up from the water.

  One day when Ginger was watching TV and I was riding an armrest of the chair, Mrs. Crislip came into the room. She grabbed me by the collar and lifted me up.

  “We don’t do that,” she said. “Not in my house.”

  I sat down on the floor, and she kept watching me, her eyes blazing. Before it was time for my mother to pick me up, I walked out in the front yard. Mrs. Crislip watched me through the living room window. I waited and when I saw my mother’s car, I ran to stop her before she turned up the driveway.

  It was May, only a few weeks before summer vacation. In the car, on the way home, I told my mother I wanted to stay by myself this summer. She was quiet at first. I was sure she would react in the way she always had, and I was a little afraid of returning to the Crislips’ house, but this time my mother said she’d think about it. I’m sure she’d known this moment was coming, and had dreaded it since my father’s death. When we arrived home, she led me down to the chained pier and repeated her fears and warnings.

  “There is your father,” she said. “That is how he died.”

  Yes, I would be careful, I promised. Yes, I would avoid the dangerous water. I would never go on the lake without her permission. No, I would stay away from it always. Period.

  My mother hugged me, and I vowed to keep my promises. I stayed by myself that summer, contemplating the lake from a safe distance.

  I was fifteen when my mother saw the uncle’s obituary in the newspaper. We were eating breakfast, and my mother read the obituary to me, then handed me the paper. In the picture, the uncle was wearing a suit. He looked more haggard now, but had the same long, craggy face. I read the column quickly, the list of the living and dead relatives, a brother living and a brother dead. I remembered the loose connection my mind had once drawn between Ginger’s father and my own. It seemed silly to me, and yet I was still curious.

  “Didn’t you say he was strange?” my mother said. “Sounds like he’d wrecked his brain with drink.”

  My mother gave me a judgmental glance. She’d started dying her hair, and she looked almost pretty, almost young, when she was dressed up and made up for work. By this time, I had confronted her numerous times about my father’s disappearance in the lake. She’d said his body had never been recovered, but then she said it had. I wanted to see his grave, but she claimed he had none. My father had been cremated, she’d said, his ashes were spread over the mountains he loved. I wanted to see his death certificate. She had it somewhere,
but finding it would take pains. She’d come up with it if I really needed to see it. When I pressed her, she would cry. Why was I picking at old wounds? My father was dead, and we were together, we were a family. Wasn’t that enough? When I said I was going to write to the hall of records for his death certificate, she became so withdrawn and depressed, I promised I’d leave my father’s death alone. However, I spent hours in the town library reading newspapers on microfilm about the college student who disappeared, whose skeleton was found years later when the lake dried up for a season, and about the woman who was abducted from the Holiday Inn lounge, who was brought to a cabin near the lake, raped, and beaten to death with a steel-toed boot. There were a lot of unpleasant stories about the lake, but none that fit the name and the timeframe I was looking for.

  My mother and I fought over matters that cropped up, like my bad grades and cutting school. She complained about my roaming the woods, walking the road to town alone, and about my coming home late. She was tired of hearing my excuses.

  “You want to talk about lame excuses,” I said, but didn’t carry it any further. We both knew what I meant.

  “We’ve all made mistakes,” she said. She said she ought to sell the place and move us out of there, away from the lake. It had been a mistake to stay so long.

  We didn’t speak for hours, sometimes days, moving through the house separately, knowing each other’s patterns. Then, as we passed each other in the hallway, she’d mumble something, I would throw my arms around her, and we would both apologize.

  One night, drunk and stoned, I took the sledgehammer from the garage and carried it down to the pier, which creaked with each step. Glancing back at my mother’s dark window, I raised the sledgehammer high above my head. I brought the hammer down, easily breaking the rusted chain. Stepping back, wobbling, I dropped the sledgehammer and it thudded onto the pier. I leaned on the handrail, which shifted with my weight, and vomited in the water. A catfish swam to the surface, and I stared down at it, then into the eddy where it dipped under. The water was murky, impossible to see into. A few dead ducklings had washed up along the shore, and their twisted, sand-covered bodies lay by the weeds and small flat rocks. The pier and the water swayed under me, and gravity beckoned me to go lifeless, to crumple and fall.

  In the morning, neither my mother nor I spoke of what had happened, although I was sure she’d been aware of it even as it was happening. Perhaps she watched me from the window of her bedroom, stricken with fear that I would fall into the lake.

  After my mother had gone to work, I took the newspaper with the uncle’s obituary out of the trash. I hid behind a tree in the woods and watched the uncle’s burial in the small family graveyard at the back of the Crislips’ property. It was early March. I watched all of the Crislips gathered together. The mother’s long hair had turned gray. Laura, who was married, had put on some weight. Ginger and I still saw each other at school and on the bus, and Ginger looked almost identical to Laura when she was in high school. There were a few older people I’d never seen before, and there was a stout, dark-haired man who stood beside Mrs. Crislip; perhaps he was the brother of the dead uncle, the father of Laura and Ginger.

  When the graveside service was over and the Crislips all began their long walk back to the house, I stayed behind and watched the workers from the funeral home remove the tent and shovel dirt into the grave. When they too were gone, when I was alone with the chirping birds and the tall creaking trees, I walked to the grave to pay my own respects. As of yet, there was no stone for the new grave, but the one right next to it was shiny and slick, casting my reflection across another Crislip’s name and years. The sky above our woods had cleared during the service, and now the sun had come out. The air was still cold, but all around me a bright glare filled the woods, lighting the still, bare trees, casting a glaze on the stone in front of me, making my own image there translucent, rippled with gray light.

  I saw Ginger on the bus, on the way home from school. Those days were windy and cold, and every day I wore a long gray raincoat I’d found in a trunk at home, and a black beret I’d found while I was rooting around a dumpster behind an apartment building in town.

  I touched the shoulder of Ginger’s denim coat.

  “Sorry to hear about your uncle,” I said. For a moment she said nothing, just looked at me like she was thinking about it.

  “We saw it in the paper,” I said.

  She spoke about how they were coping with his death. He’d been sick for some time, but they’d been splitting up his work. Some of the farm work had been let go.

  “Things are fucked up at home right now,” Ginger said. “I don’t like being there.”

  The bus shook as the driver took the turns along the lake road. We were coming up on Ginger’s mailbox, her house and barn coming into view. I couldn’t see another soul, not in the windows of the house or around any of the buildings.

  Through the venetian blinds in my bedroom window, I watched my mom leave for work. I sat at the kitchen table and drank my mom’s liquor mixed with soda. It was windy by the lake, and when I walked by the place in the woods that overlooked the lake, I watched the gray waves rippling far out and close in. There were small ducklings, lines of them, little more than dots, lowering their heads and bracing against the wind and each cold wave.

  In my fantasies, Ginger came walking up the driveway into the house, her eyes outlined in dark eye pencil like an Egyptian goddess’s. We went back to my bedroom, and I put on some music. I took my bong out of the closet, and we smoked and kissed.

  “You were a horny little kid right from the start,” she whispered. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  I could feel the blood rise to my face. She could feel it, too, and she grinned.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “We were just kids, and kids don’t know anything. Hey, your secret’s safe with me.”

  While Ginger was riding me, her head back and hair cascading, her throat arched and tense, we were on the lake, the surface of the bed bending and rippling.

  I went into the garage and stood looking at the boat, chewing my thumbnail. I reached in and lifted out a Chinese Checkers set and a dented lampshade with a map of the world on it. There was a lot in the boat, stuff my mom never needed to save, magazines still in their paper sleeves, rusted and bent garden fencing that should have been thrown away, except that it was covering the boat.

  After moving an old clothes dummy that had stood in front of the bow, I saw the name of the boat in faded white script. The boat had a name, and as I read it I tried to imagine my father saying it.

  Seeing the boat so differently made the size of the room look wrong, like I was looking at it through the wrong lens, like I’d caught it at the wrong angle. I took a step back, my face sweaty and warm. I lowered myself to the concrete floor and lay down on my side. As I looked up at the light coming through the garage door windows, my vision narrowed. I was in the water, and my father, somewhere below me, grabbed at my legs. He caught hold of one, pulling me under and I saw his pale, gelatinous body. His eyes were milky and still. Snakes and small fish swam in and out of his mouth, in and out of bloodless gaping holes in his face and abdomen.

  “Sit up,” my mother said. She was kneeling on the concrete floor beside me, cradling me in her arms. She held a glass of water to my lips. I drank.

  “What happened here?” she said.

  “I got a little weak,” I said. “I guess I didn’t eat enough lunch.”

  She looked me over and glanced around the garage, at the boat and the things I’d removed and piled in the corner.

  “What’s been going on here?” she said, even though it was obvious.

  I wanted to walk by myself, but my mother pulled me to her and held on tight like I might collapse.

  My mother walked me to the couch in the living room. She said I should lie down, but I wanted to sit up. She brought me a cold soda from the refrigerator, and I held the can to my face.

  “God, I was
a fool not to get rid of that boat a long time ago,” she said. “I’m going to sell that damn boat as soon as I can. I know people who’d want it.”

  “It was my father’s boat,” I said, as though this might mean something.

  “We don’t need it,” she said. “We don’t need anything or anybody else.” She closed her eyes a moment. “We should have gotten away from here a long time ago.”

  About two in the morning, flashlight in hand, I followed the path through the woods, past the sewage plant and the salmon farm, under electric fences and beside stables of snorting horses, and past yards of barking dogs. The wind was blowing a fine snow. Standing at the edge of the Crislips’ property and looking at the house, I felt like I was tripping, like I had fallen out of kilter with everything. The miles I’d walked through the woods seemed like nothing, like a sleepwalk.

  The ground was rough. There had been plowing before the cold spell. Stumbling along the hard rows with the house bouncing between the ground and the sky, through the snow, I saw the dead uncle striking the ground with his hoe. We glanced at each other, knew each other, but didn’t speak.

  When I came to the back door, I stepped up on the concrete block step and opened the screen and the back door. I went in. Engulfed by the sudden heat of the house, I shut the door softly behind me. The old washing machine with its wringer was gone, and the kitchen had been painted. There was an electric stove and a dishwasher.

  I left the kitchen and walked along the dark hallway. At the end of it there was the door to the front room, the living room where I’d lay on the floor playing games with Ginger, where I’d ridden the furniture until Mrs. Crislip had caught me.

  The house smelled of damp laundry and heater ducts. I came to the door of the front room and pushed it open. I stepped into the room, which was lit by a floor lamp in the corner. Ginger was sitting on the couch next to the wall, and there was a man sitting beside her, kissing her. He sat pressing himself against her, and she stroked the back of his neck. One of her legs was stretched over his thigh, pulling him against her. A liquor bottle, plastic cups, and a bong stood on the coffee table in front of the couch.