Theo

by Ed Taylor

  He’s got the wrong celebrity map. He thinks he’s visiting Poe’s grave. But champagne cognac, he’s got excellent taste. It’s one of the side benefits of being a priest in this particular temple, eh.

  What.

  Nothing, my friend. Why don’t we go fishing today.

  Sure.

  Theo squinted up into the sun and down at Colin, the hat big as an umbrella. Then Colin had forgotten about fishing and gotten into a sword fight with somebody Theo’d never seen before who burst out of a room, and Theo then spent the day in the trees, reading and listening to the ocean.

  Theo leaves the thick house doors open; the car looks like it wants in, and they are wide enough. He threads his way back through the chess field and then up the left staircase to the second floor, thumping on the carpet, a bleached color with an old design but still sponge-thick. Theo keeps his hand on the banister all the way, feeling the cool red-brown, not thinking much. He reaches the top and turns left, where his mom usually ends up.

  His mother often came with gifts for him: animals, candy, things she thought were pretty like rocks or pictures, hats, clothes, toys from places like Peru or Thailand, puppets, and sometimes weird stuff. An ashtray, a napkin from a restaurant, hotel shampoo, a piece of pizza, a record, a fistful of guitar picks, a drawing of her by somebody else – once with no clothes on – a feather, a flower. He figured that was when she was high. He knew what high was, knew what drunk was. It was a way people were, just like happy or sad. He also knew about bail, hearings, possession, depression, institutionalization.

  His mother never brought anything for Gus or Colin: she didn’t like them, although she’d never said this to Theo. He just knew.

  Are you mad at Gus and Colin.

  No darling, why.

  You act like it all the time.

  No, my love, I like them. Gus is your grandfather and a man deserving of respect. A respectable and upright man, just as Colin is.

  His mother’s accent was different than his dad’s. He knew she’d been born in Hungary but she said she grew up all over Europe and so, she said, she sounded like everywhere and nowhere. She called herself a pirate, said she and his father were part of the pirate nation. Theo didn’t know what that meant, really.

  People at school made fun of Theo’s accent, which they said was faggy. Fag. Faggot. Which his dad said was a cigarette. Theo had lived in England, Jamaica, and America so far. And other people’s houses and hotels.

  God help me, I’m starting to sound American, his mother said.

  Is that bad.

  His mother had laughed out a cloud of cigarette smoke. For your sake, I tolerate the place, my love. But there are better places to be.

  Like where.

  She exhaled again. That is a good question. If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go.

  He couldn’t really think of a place: what were the choices. He didn’t know. Every place seemed mostly the same so far.

  I’d like to go to the bottom of the ocean.

  She squinted at him, stubbing out the cigarette. That’s an interesting choice. Could I come too.

  He shrugged. Sure. Maybe Gus and Colin could come. And his dad maybe, in a big glass ball.

  Why do you want to go there.

  I wouldn’t have to go to school.

  He sort of knew what would happen if he said that, but he did anyway. She started crying. Oh baby. She pulled him into a hug, jangling with bracelets. She always wore a lot of things and he couldn’t separate her from the sounds she made when she moved.

  She had the smell. Sometimes he didn’t know, she might seem okay, whether she was okay or not, until he smelled the smell. Then he would know. Colin and Gus had the smell a lot, and many of the people who came to the house. There were different smells but they all meant pretty much the same thing.

  She cried a lot, and laughed a lot, and screamed, and punched and kicked, and danced, and staggered, and snored, and fell, and jumped – once from an upper hall landing and broke her ankle. He hadn’t seen that, only heard the sounds and cried. He wondered what had made her jump, and whether he had anything to do with it, or with the way she acted. He didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure who to ask.

  Now this morning Theo walks the long secondfloor hall, strewn with clothes and shoes, a bowling ball like Jupiter, swirly and pink, stopped against a door – he hasn’t seen that before. At the distant end of the hall, in front of the big curved windows that remind Theo of churches from movies, pokes the silhouette of a big stuffed bird that he knows is an emu. His mother usually stays on this wing, but not always in the same room, and Theo doesn’t like opening doors unless he knows who is in the room. So he walks, and listens. He hears something and turns: Alex has dragged himself up the stairs and, panting, follows Theo. Theo stops to scratch Alex’s wiry head, bumpy with warts, but keeps listening. He hears ahead the sex noise. He knows what sex is, and he knows what it sounds like. He keeps walking down the hall, Alex tottering behind, to where the noise is. Noises. Two rooms. He stands outside, between the rooms, listening. He feels funny, and kind of hollow. He also gets stiff, and knows about that. He doesn’t want the noise to be his mother, but he doesn’t want to find out. He listens longer, then scuffs back down the hall making more noise, hitting his hand along the wall as he walks, holding his hand on his pajamas. Alex pants behind him.

  Someone may wake up, but Theo hopes not yet. Behind him down the hall a voice now sings, somewhere; muffled, hard to tell if it is a man or woman. Something in it makes Theo think: Mom. And he makes a face and runs, getting to the stairs and thumping down them, running down the stairs. The last time she smiled and flicked it with a finger, kissed him on the cheek and said it’s okay, love, a beautiful natural thing. That was awful.

  Colin, somewhere below, is yodeling.

  Gazebo, Theo thinks.

  Theo keeps flapping down on the carpet, to the cool tiles of the entry hall, feet now slapping like fish, he likes the sound, and toward the swung-open tall slab doors and over the car hood, scrambling and out and down the stone steps and onto the gravel bit ouchouchouch like on hot pavement and onto the grass, moist because the sun hasn’t reached this side yet, but everything is light, and he runs to the right down the line of windows and the wild bushes crazy with flowers and stems sticking out and untrimmed and reaches the edge of the wing and goes right again and past more windows, running, and the trees are getting bigger, and he dodges a rusty bike he had forgotten about and runs into the rear lawn and toward the gazebo and there’s a naked guy sitting in it, cross-legged. The man has long hair and a sharp face and something’s wrong with his arms. They stop at the elbows. And he’s naked, and his eyes are closed. Theo stops running.

  New people always showed up: his mother brought them home or they followed her. Sometimes they were friends of Colin or, very occasionally, of his father. These he liked best; he liked them because they knew his father and being around them was a little like being around his father.

  His mother attracted people, collected people, like pets. She called herself a broker, sometimes, said she should get a cut, she bridged worlds, that was her art, she said, a waving cigarette veiling her face as she talked to Theo sleepy in bed, him waking with her stroking his face, smiling lopsidedly at him, or crying. Sometimes, however, what she collected wasn’t nice like that; when they wanted things and took stuff or got loud or pushed and she let them. Sometimes she screamed at them, hit them, got other people to hit them: he’d heard it. He’d seen her point guns.

  It wasn’t always clear what the rules were, what you had to do to make her mad. Theo believed it mostly depended on how long it had been since his dad’s last stopover. Sometimes it happened after drinks and amber bottles with medicine labels and small ceramic boxes with flip tops and the skull with the top cut off and the white powder, yellow powder, brown powder, on book covers or tables or glass-covered pictures laid flat. Sometimes there was blood on the glass after. One time one of the dogs had
gotten really sick after licking something from a low leather-topped stool. Theo was really worried. After that it wasn’t hard to understand that it could do bad things to people.

  He stayed away from all that as much as he could, but as much as he could wasn’t much. Theo had to figure out a way around it kind of all the time.

  Theo was hoping to have the gazebo to himself. Even though the house and the land are big, like the last house, sometimes it is hard to be alone. A lot of the time adults think he needs babysitting, or that they need to do what they call ‘playing’ with him, because there aren’t other kids around. But it is the opposite of playing, and mostly he just wants not to be noticed. People fuss over him, rub his hair. Ladies hug him, make faces at him like they think he needs cheering up. Sometimes he finds someone looking at him oddly, their eyes half-closed, focusing, like they are thinking hard, seeing something else. Then they smile at him and act normal again.

  The man in the gazebo opens his eyes, sees Theo and grins. He has glasses. Theo stares.

  Come here.

  Theo is unsure about whether to do it. The sun in his face makes him squint. Motion catches his eye – the heron flapping over its nest, in the big tree like a dead hand reaching out of the ground, gray-brown and smooth like driftwood near the dunes. Theo knows things about birds and thinks this one is lost – herons are freshwater birds that live on lakes. He hopes it’s finding what it needs. Maybe it’s not a heron.

  It’s okay.

  Theo notices the man again, and slowly walks at him. It seems to Theo the bird would want a little more privacy for a nest, like a tree with leaves to hide the babies. But apparently the big ones like that build in the open so they can see. One parent’s always there, for protection. Theo thinks about his parents, and then about teachers. Theo stops.

  Why are you not wearing any clothes.

  It feels better, man. Do you live here.

  Yes.

  Are you Frieda’s kid.

  Yes. This is my house.

  Listen to the birds.

  Are you high.

  The man laughs, and then he frowns and stands. Theo steps back. He’s seen this before and is glad there is plenty of room to run. He hears something: Alex and Paz and Baron sit behind him now, panting, looking at him, their dog eyebrows raised. He had forgotten about them and now feels better.

  Standing, the man looks short, his penis like the nest with a dark purple baby bird Theo had found on the ground under one of the gnarled beach trees. His own penis is pale and wormy. What happens, Theo wonders, between now and then.

  My mom asked if you could put some clothes on.

  The man stares up and out and around. And down at Theo. Then he moves fast, his hair blowing, across the gazebo floor to the steps and jumps, landing and collapsing, then scrabbling up, grass sticking to him, and runs at Theo, his arms like flippers spinning at the air. Theo screams.

  The dogs hop and jump, barking, Paz stumbling, Theo scooting sideways as the man gets closer, faster, saying something but Theo can’t figure it out. Theo runs without thinking, the dogs frantic and the man suddenly there and grabbing and the dogs barking and the man laughing.

  Theo away, watching, now the dogs calming, licking, the man on his knees, sticking his face against theirs, his arms like penguin wings rubbing the dogs.

  Theo isn’t sure what to do, so he looks at the brown ground, the grass like dirty hair, and then up toward a long-needled pine waving and shaking at him. There is a lot of wind early, making ocean noises. Theo feels himself moved a little by it as he decides to scuffle his way toward the cracked terrace that runs the width of the big house’s back side, facing the trees in front of the dunes, the naked man now squatting on his haunches and the dogs trotting after Theo.

  ‘Mansion.’ Theo had found the word in the big dictionary with the tissue pages smelling like an old coat. 1. A large stately house. 2. A manor house. 3. Archaic a. A dwelling; an abode. b. A separate dwelling in a large house or structure. 4.a. See house. b. Any one of the twenty-eight divisions of the moon’s monthly path. Middle English, a dwelling, from Old French, from Latin mansio, from mansus, past participle of manere, ‘to dwell, remain’; see men- in Indo-European roots.

  It is a big house. He isn’t sure about stately, marked by lofty or imposing dignity. On the same page was Their swords are ruste, their bodys duste, Their souls are with the Saints, we truste, about something else. He passes the sundial at the side of the house.

  Come, light! visit me!

  I count time; dost thou?

  Theo whispers the words to himself, walking.

  Weeds poke up through the squares of the terrace, a hairy chess board. It would flinch and throw off all the pieces. You’d have to tame it to play. Pink and brown, faded and pale. He feels like stomping a puddle but everything is dry. The sun is a big flashlight in the sky, white in the white.

  Then music. The music starts in the house, and flies out the open windows on the third floor and drifts down around him. Colin is definitely awake.

  Theo turns back toward the trees for an instant, shading his eyes with a hand. Colin sometimes didn’t sleep for days. His mother, when she came, he wasn’t sure about, because her door was always locked. Is she asleep or awake. Mostly awake, he guessed because of all the noise and people when she came, which was always like a wave washing through. Things would be empty and quiet when Theo locked himself in, then in the morning people in the hall or on couches, sometimes looking dead, and different smells, and different things scattered around. Hello, my beautiful boy, she would yell at him from somewhere, above on the stairs or from an open door, or in from the outside, her standing outside naked one time staring up at something, her body broken into squares by the big iron and glass doors to the terrace. Theo remembers again he needs to find something to cover the broken panes with.

  It is Wednesday, Theo guesses. He smells ocean. One of the dogs noses at him now, and Theo flicks his eyes down and smoothes Baron’s head and leans into the big yellow and black shepherd, nudges him for an instant, then turns and moves toward the doors, hungry, too, flanked now on his other side by Alex, the thickest animal on the planet, Gus calls him. Theo feels sorry for the dog, who has seizures and pants when he walks.

  The faded coppery dog’s domed head makes him look like a human baby, although he is thirteen and totters. He needs something soft, his teeth going. Upstairs Colin yells now, and somewhere beyond the beach is the buzz and thump of speedboats, and the day is on its way. Theo slips through the French doors into the dark ballroom.

  There is a Japanese magazine on the parquet floor, his father on the cover. His face very white, like a doll. Is that powder. Aidoru. Dog claws click and slide on the wood, the sounds loud. A piece of floor is missing since yesterday, Theo notes. He keeps moving.

  Sand grains are scattered on the parquet, and Theo feels them under his feet. There are crumbs everywhere: sand, salt, food, because people like to walk everywhere in the house eating. The dogs lick at the floor a lot, and at spills everywhere.

  There’s not much furniture but there are lots of pillows, and cloth. Blankets, tapestries, sheets, rugs, carpet in piles or folded or left limp and crumpled in the middle of a floor, as if the person wrapped in it vanished on the spot.

  Theo skates across the ballroom, sliding his bare feet. A bird darts through the French doors he left open. It moves too fast for him to identify but he figures it is one of the little ones, sparrow or wren, always around outside, flocking to peck at grass or the terrace. All the people leave trails, or create them.

  He skates over to a plant tipped sideways in a Chinese vase. It has deep green leaves with wine-colored hearts and big veins and reaches toward the light. The shoots are arms extending, ending in brushes of little purple flowers. Theo sweeps the dirt back in with his hand and tips it up, pets it, and drags it over into a rectangle of sun. Then he skates the other way, toward the kitchen.

  The dogs stare up as he yanks on the heavy pantry d
oor and goes in to rummage for something to feed them. Dog food ran out but no one has bought more, so Theo gives them peanut butter and things from cans, some of which they eat and some of which sits until someone else eats it: usually Colin or a guest.

  That’s what Theo’s mother called them. Make our guests feel at home, or friends. Theo wasn’t sure about the difference, except the guests came less often.

  There is a gunshot, loud and echoing, close. The dogs startle, whimper. Theo’s ears dampen a little, sound gets slightly muffled.

  Theo sighs, leaves the pantry and shuffles back to the ballroom as the dogs orbit him, jumping. The sound whirls as crazily as the bird, moving now like an insect, flitting and erratic: scared too, Theo imagines.

  Colin stands across the ballroom, wearing boots and a towel wrapped around his waist, his ropy arm up and pointing with a silver pistol at the bird. He points the gun at the floor and does something clicking with his other hand: chambering, he’d called it before.

  Colin now has an eye closed and follows the bird with the gun, letting off another shot. Theo’s ears hurt.

  Colin, can you stop please.

  Birds makes me nervous. Too undisciplined. Or maybe it’s just jealousy. One more for luck and then we’re done.

  Colin fires out through the opened glass door toward the ocean – clears out the sinuses, that’s for certain. Prevents constriction of the bowels, too, man. Nothing like a little cordite in the morning to remind you why you’re alive.

  He clomps across the ballroom, smiling with big square yellow teeth in the sunlight, as Theo turns and moves back toward the kitchen. He wonders what happens to bullets if they don’t hit anything.