Theo

by Ed Taylor

I don’t know. Haven’t talked to her. She’s here now, you know.

  Yeah. I saw her car.

  That’s something to look forward to, right. Your dad might be here the whole summer. That’s good news, right.

  The times his dad had been around were oases in Theo’s memory, bright clear sharp moments. They hadn’t happened a lot since he was a baby. He knew there were different times, when his mom and dad lived together, but that was a long time ago. Theo didn’t know why they didn’t live together anymore. Whenever he had asked either of his parents they said different things. We’re still together, we just live apart. Or your mother’s mad at me right now, so I’m laying low. Or your father thinks I’m sick, but I’m not sick and I certainly will not be treated as if I am.

  Theo wonders if maybe his dad would be bored at the house.

  We need to get furniture. Where will my dad sleep.

  Theo has walked back toward Gus, who is now looking at Theo carefully, like adults do, like Theo’s a book but the print’s too small.

  Right. Everything’ll be ship-shape, a proper place. You can help us get the place ready.

  I can show him the butterflies.

  Right mate. Maybe they’ll hatch by then, eh.

  There’s a man with no clothes on in the gazebo.

  Gus’s face closes up and his mouth tightens under his gray mustache, then he sighs. I’ll go and have a talk with him in a minute, soon as I finish this fag. He shakes his head.

  Theo turns and resumes walking, he’s not sure where, his head down. He feels the ground rise and he’s uphill, at the hump in the lawn where something used to be, a long time ago, a shed or building. Now it’s just a slope up to a flat patch, like a stage made of lawn. Sometimes people sit here and play guitars.

  One of his mother’s guests rode a motorcycle up it once when Theo slept, really fast, but he ended up hitting that big tree – he left teeth in the bark. You could still see them, two big chips and his front teeth dug in, and brown at the top now. Theo guessed that was blood. Colin said the man trying to fly was evolution at work. Theo didn’t understand. Colin just said, it means the guy was not very bright. There was a long scar cut in the yard all the way back to the circle part of the driveway; the ground had been wet and the motorcycle chewed up the lawn, surprisingly sensitive, and nothing grew back yet. Colin called it the border. One side is sanity and one side is madness. Which is which, Theo asked. Ah, that is always the question, isn’t it, Colin said.

  The border passes under Theo’s bare feet.

  The motorbike in the ballroom is Colin’s. It snarls like an animal. He calls it his Italian spitfire. He tried to ride it up the stairs but he couldn’t get further than halfway up to the second-floor landing. So far at least. He says he’s going to try to ascend Everest: which means to ride to the fourth floor. It’s one of his projects. He has a lot of them.

  Before, Colin used to travel with Theo’s father. Colin’s a kind of minder but not like the others. He’s more like Theo’s dad Adrian than like the other minders. Theo knows his dad asked Colin to watch him and his grandfather, but Theo doesn’t understand, because it seems like Colin is the one who needs watching and Gus is old so Theo’s not sure why he needs minding. Colin is also supposed to get Theo to go to school, Theo knows, although he doesn’t think he’s supposed to know, because nobody’s said anything about school.

  Theo overheard Colin on the phone with Theo’s father, talking by satellite. Theo’s dad was in Thailand or South Africa, he couldn’t remember, and Theo had talked and then hung around outside the door. Sure. The local district. Yeah. Forget the private, or – no. Those places give me the screaming meemies. Sure, I’ll keep him from becoming any more feral but he does have his genes to contend with. Right. Heh heh. Bloody hell. Right.

  Theo tries to stay out of Colin’s way mostly, but it’s hard because Colin’s always finding him. My job, mate, he always says. Guarding the prince.

  Theo tries not to get too excited about his dad coming but he can’t help it. If his father makes a record, Theo knows he might be there for a while. He is not sure what his mother will think.

  Air is getting warm and the ground’s warm, and Theo stops and turns toward the trees. He hears birds, a lot of them, and there’s an arrow low over the trees, almost too far too see, and it’s pelicans. Up close they look like dinosaurs, something ancient, and Theo is silent when he sees them, feeling as if people should talk a different language around them. Everybody’s forgotten that language, what people used to say. Pelicans and owls, he thinks. They know things. A real arrow skids past him on the thready, stiff grass, the arrow red with feathers and a round silver nose like a bullet.

  Theo knows this is a target arrow. He whirls toward the house and looks up along the rows of windows: at an open one, Mingus, with his big head wearing a yellow rain hat but no shirt, his globular stomach in the sun, holding his bow and a hand, palm out. Theo smiles and holds out his own palm.

  Mingus, under the yellow hat, smiles and yells something Theo can’t hear. But he likes Mingus, who yells something else he does hear.

  Give me back my arrow.

  It’s my arrow now, Theo yells and runs toward it, picks it up. Running, Theo feels the sun. This day already hot. And grownups wake up early sometimes.

  two.

  And sometimes

  we wash everything clean

  as if by doing so we could

  advance toward something.

  We ought to simply describe

  those sounds, those stains

  on memory.

  – Alejandro Zambra

  Theo hears surf and voices, the house waking, and runs with the arrow, past Gus smoking, legs crossed in shade at the lawn’s far edge, just before the trees begin, toward the path and a snaking set of old wooden trestles between the humped dunes, sea oats and grass spiking on their backs. Theo then circles back into the lawn.

  Gus smokes a pipe too, a curving black one. Theo always expects sound to come out instead of smoke. Theo knows that Gus will walk back inside in a few minutes to watch television in his room. That’s what he does a lot, and he drinks rum. Sometimes he argues or yells at people on the shows he watches. He likes Wheel of Fortune and The New Price Is Right, and the ladies on them, the ones who smile and point or turn letters over. When he thinks people are being mean to the ladies, he yells at the TV. Theo wonders if the man with half-arms is gone from the gazebo.

  He turns pretending someone’s chasing him and makes a wider circle so he can see the gazebo but not get too close in case the man’s still there. The dogs are barking somewhere, one inside and one outside. The man is gone.

  Theo warily approaches the peeling white gazebo, columns cracking and veins of vine on the lower parts. The grass is scratchy on his soles. He gets close enough to the gazebo to touch and does, and then begins walking with his hand on the railing’s posts, sliding it from one to the next and starts talking, a story, quietly. This one’s about animals.

  He tells himself stories circling, walking around the gazebo but only when no one else is there. He’s old enough to think maybe it’s because he’s lonely. Too many words and not enough space, which is weird because he lives in a huge house, houses, everywhere in different countries and surrounded by people all the time. But it’s like he’s in an aquarium looking out, seeing people outside doing stuff and looking at him, and what he knows in the water is so different.

  Stories feel like they make things understandable, whether it’s true or not. At least when he’s doing it he’s not thinking about anything else.

  When Gus sees Theo walking in a circle and talking to himself Gus hobbles out to ask him what he’s doing, ask if he wants to play something, or wants something to eat. Gus walks funny, with little steps and leaning over a little, bobbing like a toy. He says his legs hurt. Or his hip hurts.

  Sometimes when Theo has been at the gazebo around sundown and no one else is around, there are voices. Men and women. And twice, music – ol
d music. He didn’t tell Gus, but he did tell Colin.

  I’ve heard it too, mate. Out here on the bay, there used to be rum runners coming ashore on the moonless nights, barrels floating in and bodies washing up at night, and during the day garden parties and lawn tennis and hot jazz in the gazebo, and those paper lanterns, and servants in white jackets. Like Faulkner said, the past is never dead, it’s not even past. We’re still in it, right now. But it’s past me to light this bleeding cigarette.

  Theo wasn’t sure what Faulkner and the past stuff meant. Colin said this while trying to light a cigarette but sweating so much that he kept putting it out. He threw one down beside the mattress and plucked another one out of a pack on the floor. Colin’s room had a huge broken wood bed that you had to stand on steps to get into, but Colin had the pieces apart, like Theo sometimes took apart sandwiches to eat them. Colin had laid the mattress on the floor and the box springs next to it and put some sheets and scarves on both of them, and so the bed was just a frame, which Colin used like a boxing ring sometimes: a couple of times Theo had seen Colin and other adults, mostly ladies, crouched inside the frame laughing and slapping at each other. Once Theo had walked past the door and saw Colin in jeans pretending to be a bull, Theo guessed, holding hands at ears with fingers like horns, and a woman with no clothes on holding a towel in front of him, saying o-lay.

  Colin was trying to light the cigarette from the one in his mouth but that didn’t work, so he produced a box of wooden matches from the pocket of his canvas shorts after wriggling on the mattress for an instant. Colin was sick that day. He was sick a lot.

  Theo. Theo baby.

  His mom, calling. Theo stops the story, stops talking, but keeps his hand on the gazebo railing, circles around the near side, shady early, and then travels out of the shadow into the sun facing the wall of windows and the dark cliff face of the house. She is waving. He’s been around the moon, and now here is earth in front of him, far away.

  Hi mom. He waves.

  She blows him a kiss, smiling, wrapped in some kind of white fur coat or robe that rises behind her head in a fan. Hello my beautiful boy. Her voice is hoarse. Can you bring me my cigarettes. I think they’re in the car, darling.

  Okay.

  Theo knows that smoking is bad for you, that it can make you very sick. His dad smokes too. Lots of people do it, everybody around him it seems. Maybe it’s not so bad. Everyone seems fine, except sometimes they cough a lot in the morning. His dad says cigarettes help him sing, that they make his voice lower. His dad doesn’t like his singing voice, his dad says it sounds whiney and strained; sometimes he says he sounds like a girl. He usually sings harmony, but sometimes he’s the main singer. Theo’s heard some of his father’s early records and his voice does seem a little lower now. When he talks there’s a roundness to his voice like an old guitar, and an echo like he has a cold except all the time.

  Theo likes his father’s voice. He thinks of old wooden boats when he hears his father, solid and a little dark.

  Theo decides to run to the car and the house front. He’d forgotten about the man with no clothes – that man is now far away at the edge of the front lawn, squatting on one of the pillars that used to have a gargoyle, yelling at a car driving past on the beach road at one end of the long driveway. There used to be a wall there, then there was a hedge, Theo knew from photographs, and then just bushes and the front edge of the lawn and sand and the road, and two stone pillars on either side of the driveway entrances.

  The driveway is shaped like a horseshoe, curving at the house. The straight parts of the driveway are fifty yards long, Theo knows, because Colin once asked Theo to hold a watch and time him while he raced down it against Mingus.

  Hold this, mate. Colin handed Theo a watch, big and silver. Colin never wore a watch.

  Mingus wore his yellow rain slicker and a yellow rain hat, and carried a suitcase. Theo didn’t know what he wore under the slicker, but he was barefoot. Colin, in cowboy boots, had a towel tied at his neck like a cape, no shirt, and carried a pitchfork.

  Alright you chocolate sonofabitch. Your people are born with those extra muscles, but my people have better shoe technology. So may the best civilization win.

  You cracker cocksucker, I will run so fast I’ll run into your future and fuck the woman you don’t even know you’re gonna marry yet.

  Language, you goddamn savage.

  Colin waved at Theo, and Mingus said, sorry, man. Mingus lumbered over and wrapped Theo up in a weird plastic bear hug, sticky and crinkly.

  It’s okay, Theo said, his voice muffled.

  Theo could curse better than any of the kids at school, and that was one of the only things that slowed them down. So he didn’t mind hearing bad words and ways to say them.

  So let’s go, Quentin.

  Theo, start us.

  How do I do that.

  Say on your mark, get set, go. And then time us.

  Mingus and Colin stood next to each other, jostling and poking, sticking legs out and having them slapped, oh no you don’t.

  On your mark, get –

  They took off, flailing over the grass inside the horseshoe, toward the road, Mingus dropping the suitcase and Colin the pitchfork, Mingus taking one step for every two of Colin’s, them yelling at each other words Theo couldn’t make out, just the hoarse occasional bad words. Colin’s cape fluttered, Mingus’s slicker glided to the ground – he had on a hospital gown, like a dress on backward, with ties on the back. It had flowers on it. Theo followed, running too.

  Colin did one of his football tackles, sliding feet first into Mingus’ legs from behind and sending the big man into a slow motion stumble onto his hands and knees, like a statue falling forward. Then he started crawling, and Colin wobbled onto his feet and ran forward to try to sit on Mingus while he crawled, Colin hopping on one leg: Theo heard Mingus’s voice drifting up, something spider monkey, and Colin yelling hyah mule. Colin stopped hopping and flung himself forward to wrap his arms around Mingus, and they collapsed. Get the hell off me motherfucker, your skin is touching my skin. Ah paradise, Theo heard. He looked at the watch. He forgot to notice what time it was when they began.

  Colin had rolled over onto his back and had his arms crossed over his face. Mingus was sleeping, on his stomach, head pillowed on his arms, face covered by the round flower of the rain hat.

  What’s my time, Colin yelled up into the air, not moving.

  Theo arrived beside them: I forgot to see what time it was when you started. Sorry.

  Rematch, Mingus yelled, the sound muffled by the hat, not moving.

  Now Theo stops running for his mother’s cigarettes; if he doesn’t run the yelling man won’t see him. He rounds the corner of the house’s east wing and stays close to the wall, keeping an eye on the man, who’s still yelling, but no cars. He’s yelling about God. It’s hard to follow, what he’s saying, but it seems like a conversation.

  Moving among the stiff shrubs lining the house front Theo sidles toward the car, getting scraped by branches. Pieces of stone fallen from the house hurt to walk on, so Theo has to look down but also watch the man. Theo finally steps away from the shrubs and back onto grass. Then he remembers: opening the car door will make the man turn around. Theo worries. Maybe he can open very quietly. He’ll look in the window first and see where the cigarettes are and then. Maybe the car window is down – the ones on this side aren’t, he can see now, but maybe the other side.

  The man is not yelling. But he’s not looking Theo’s way either.

  Theo prowls to the house steps and the car, asleep in the sun. Theo must decide whether to go around the back of it, closer to the man, or maybe crawl over the hood. He crawls.

  The metal’s warm but not hot yet. It buckles once, making a sound sort of like thunder, and Theo freezes: the man turns around. Theo knows that the mission is vital; he has to complete the quest. He has orders and the game depends on his ability to steal back the magic.

  Theo also figures he’s
close enough to get help of some kind, should the man flip and turn weird again. So Theo keeps moving and slides down the metal, his pajamas riding up and legs sticking and hurting before the skin’s released.

  Windows on this side are down, as is Theo’s head, which he slowly raises to look into the car. There’s a person sprawled out on the back seat, snoring. The person has on a skirt that is like a checkerboard, red and black, and scratchy looking, and crumples up around her legs, but there is nothing to see unless Theo tries really hard.

  She wears old sneakers that come up over her ankles, but no socks, and Theo can see blue veins in her legs. Her hair’s spiky and dark and short, and in between is a black T-shirt with a picture of something on it, maybe a face. Her arms are very white and flung over her head; she sort of looks like she’s been hurt, but she’s just asleep, Theo assures himself. Her arms are bruised, however. He notices, under her head, something crumpled, like rolled-up clothes. And she has on sunglasses.

  Where are cigarettes. Where should he look. How without waking the lady up. The man’s behind him.

  Theo’s heart pounds – he whirls around.

  The man’s smiling and saying shhh. Don’t wake her up. The man is whispering.

  What do you want. Theo doesn’t whisper.

  Just seeing what’s going on. What’s going on.

  The man’s still whispering. Theo wishes he wouldn’t: I have to get cigarettes for my mom.

  Do you know who that is, the man whispers.

  I just need to get the cigarettes.

  The man glistens: she played last night.

  Played what. Theo is confused.

  Her band played. That’s funny. We play games, and we play music, and we play the fool, and we play the field, and we play a role. Are those really all the same word. It’s like I love you and I love the Giants. Really.

  I have to get the cigarettes.

  Theo steps to the side and strains to look in. The back seat floor is a sea of litter. In the front seat, more stuff: food wrappers, some toys. Empty bottles. Magazines. A scarf. A sock. A bamboo flute.