A few minutes later two mugs are deposited in front of Fern and Roy, along with a china sugar bowl filled with dead ants. Heather then returns to her table and magazines.
Moments pass. Fern pushes the bowl of ants to the far corner of their table. She leans over and sniffs her mug.
“I think this is chamomile.”
Roy sniffs his mug.
“Mine’s black. I think. But it smells burnt.” He turns the mug, revealing the blackened string with staple attached. “Here, this is why: something burned here.”
“Mine’s burned too. A little.”
“Are you going to drink it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Should we leave now?”
“I’m thinking yes.”
A sound has been asserting itself outside the restaurant, subtly at first, but now more confidently, a wobbling, droning note that can’t seem to decide whether it is deep or shrill. It is both, perhaps. It’s the wind. It is picking up strength. The light from the restaurant illuminates only about ten feet worth of parking lot, enough to reveal the dim outline of Fern and Roy’s car, which would appear to be rocking, trembling perhaps, in the new, stronger wind. It is now loud enough outside to make quiet conversation inside difficult. There is also a frantic, wooden knocking that Fern and Roy can’t discern the source of—it might be close, or it might be something much louder and farther away.
Bruce and Heather know what it is: it’s the wooden Buck Snort sign, flapping helplessly in its log frame. They do not connect the sign, however, to what happens next: a popping sound, a blue flash, and the fluorescent lights inside the Buck Snort dimming, flickering, going out. And then, one empty second later, blinking back on, one by one.
Bruce is sanding the seams and corners of his model car with one-thousand-grit wet/dry sandpaper. The comforting sound of sanding is too quiet to hear over the roar of the wind and rain, but he can feel it through the plastic model: it is the feeling of everything is going to be all right. His memories of their parents have become confused, but he is certain, absoutely certain, that their father used to sand their mother every evening before they went to bed. It was a process related to beauty. Their mother sat at her vanity, the mirror surrounded by colored globes of light, and stripped her face of makeup and removed her wig. And then their father would carefully sand down the edges of her face until they were smooth and dully gleaming, and then she would reapply the makeup for bed. Instead of the wig, their mother wore a head scarf to bed, and their father wore flannel pajamas that took the form of a three-piece suit: pants, vest, and jacket.
A new sound reaches Bruce’s one good ear (the other became clogged during a bad cold he had several years ago and has not worked right since): a thin, keening wail. He knows it well. It is the sound of his sister crying.
This sound has a galvanizing effect on Bruce. He stands up suddenly, his chair barking out behind him and falling over on its side. Across the room, Fern and Roy react with animal instinct, wrapping their arms tightly around each other. Bruce does not see this. He sees only his sister, hugging herself and trembling before her pile of magazines and papers and scraps.
Bruce is a big man. His heavy belly and stocky upper body belie a pair of long, strong legs. They are clad in overalls. He heaves himself across the room like an ape. His shaggy head descends to his sister’s and they appear, to Fern and Roy, to engage in whispered conversation.
Fern and Roy begin their own whispered conversation.
“Is she upset about the tea?”
“I don’t know.”
“We have to leave.”
“But the wind.”
“Still.”
Heather, for her part, is not upset about the tea. In fact she has, like her brother, forgotten that Fern and Roy are here. She has merely been overcome by futility and exhaustion, and the sense that something has been left unfinished—perhaps many things. She feels her brother’s arm around her shoulder and his breath in her ear and is temporarily soothed. She has a memory of the world outside this place. There was a time when she thought she might be able to outrun whatever it was that has made her this way. (She is able, occasionally, to recognize that their existence here is strange and perhaps dangerous. Maybe this is the thing that has been left unfinished.) She went to New York City. She accomplished it by hitchhiking. This must have been nearly twenty years ago. A man picked her up, a man twice her age with a mustache and a Stetson hat, and they drove to the city and he got her to ingest and smoke various things and they spent a week in somebody’s apartment having sex, which she liked. Then she got lost going out for cigarettes and ended up crying in a police station and her parents wired the cops money for a bus ticket home. And she was pregnant, and they went to a doctor and got it cut out of her, and then had her insides tied up so it wouldn’t happen again. Not much point since she didn’t have sex again. When his truck is too cold, Heather and Bruce sleep together, in the mattress in the storeroom. Now he’s saying “There there there there,” and she can’t remember what she was blubbering about.
Fern and Roy are convinced that Bruce is going to turn around and attack them any minute now. He’s big enough so that they would be helpless. They have to leave. They have to. Slowly they disentangle themselves and squeeze out from behind the table. Roy leaves a five-dollar bill on it. They are inching toward the door. The wind is screaming, and the mysterious knocking has intensified. Fern is remembering the wooden yardstick, painted red with black markings, that her mother used to punish her for forgetting the words to prayers. You can still see the marks on her behind: the thinnest and straightest of scars, tiny ridges. Roy runs his thumb over them after sex. In their cabin. On the lake. They should have stayed in the cabin. The trunk of their car is full of bass, and she will fry one for breakfast tomorrow if they can get home in the storm. Among their tackle is a filleting knife and she will go for it if the bearded man follows them. On her mother’s deathbed, her sister said “I forgive you, Mother, I forgive you,” but Fern would not. They are almost to the door.
Bruce notices their reflection in the reflection of a window in the window. He turns. He raises his arm and leans, every so slightly, in their direction.
Fern and Roy bolt for the foyer. Inside, it is like an echo chamber. The knocking and wind are deafening. Then Fern opens the outer door and it is ripped out of her hands and slams against the outside wall and the glass shatters. She screams. Roy screams. He thinks they will go back inside but no, Fern has dragged herself onto the stoop and now is clinging to the wrought-iron railing set into the cement front steps. She is making her way down. She turns back and looks at him, beseechingly, and he follows.
Now there is a change in the noises around them. The knocking has stopped. Roy turns to the absence of the knocking and sees, illuminated by the light from inside, the wooden Buck Snort sign, attached at a single corner by a length of chain and twisting like a flag in the wind.
Roy remembers: being eleven years old, lying on the front porch swing of his parents’ house in southern Ontario, the lumpy and moldy-smelling cushion beneath him, All Creatures Great and Small in his hands, the summer heat like a blanket over him, making him feel cradled, held, fully embraced by the world. And the squeaking of the chains the swing hung from, deep groans really, as he twitched, invisibly, his muscles in the exact correct order and at the exact correct intervals to set the swing into pivoting, oscillating motion. And then the placing of the open paperback over his face, inhaling its essence from the gutter between pages, and falling asleep. This is what he is thinking of as he follows his wife down the steps and across the six feet of asphalt to the car and when he is struck with crushing force to the back of the head, just below the occipital protrusion, by the wooden Buck Snort sign, which the wind has freed at last.
Meanwhile, Fern has reached the car and wrestled open the door, which is trying to wrench itself out of her hands, and when she turns she sees something, something large and dark, launch itself from the vic
inity of her husband’s head and wheel off into the darkness, and she watches her husband pitch forward and fall to the pavement on the other side of the car, and she sees that the bearded man is there, on the steps, his beard and clothes ripping in the wind like John Fucking Brown’s.
They are all soaked to the bone. They are all freezing. The raindrops hurt as they hit; it is like a rain of gravel. Bruce is trying to tell these people to come back inside, that they could die out here, but then the sign hits the man and he falls. Bruce looks up at the log frame; it is twisting and creaking now, one of the half-barrels lifts up off the ground, and suddenly the whole thing breaks apart and collapses on the pavement. He is trying to scream at the woman to go back, go back inside, but the words are ripped from his throat and carried away.
Bruce feels focused and competent for the first time in years. He needs to bring the customers back inside. He needs to pick up the fallen man and carry him into the Buck Snort and lay his unconscious body prone on a table and cover him with a tablecloth for warmth. This is an unambiguous good. He climbs down the steps. He makes his way to the driver’s side door where the man is lying on the pavement.
But Fern has abandoned the passenger door and moved to the back of the car and popped open the trunk with the key fob in her purse. The trunk lid flies up in the wind like a sail and the car bucks. Fern knows where to look. The tackle box. Unlatch it. Move aside the tray of hooks and lures and bobbers. Underneath, there is the knife. She has it. It’s in her hand. She peeks around the edge of the bucking, heaving trunk lid and sees the bearded man in motion. He is headed for Roy to finish him off. This is the moment. A snarl uncurls itself in her throat. Go. Go. Protect the husband. Kill the assailant. Your mother’s god won’t save him now. Do it.
Fern’s scream is too thin, too faint to be heard over the roar of the wind, the pounding of the rain, the creaking and flexing of the trunk lid. Only Heather sees the knife: she is standing at the window now, pressing herself against it, her palms white, flattened by the glass, like two captive sea creatures suctioned to an aquarium wall. That’s what they look like to Bruce when he glances up. The hands are white fish; the knife is a white flash in the gloom, a will-o’-the-wisp.
None of it seems real to Heather, no realer than anything outside the windows of the Buck Snort. She thinks, hit him in the mid-section, that’s the spot. You can’t kill the limbs, they grow back. Get the torso, the torso. And Bruce thinks, here comes something, what is it? He is three steps from the man, covers one more step against the mad wind, and the thing comes flying over the man’s body and part of itself lodges in his chest and Fern thinks, I’ve done it, I’ve protected him, and this is something no prayer could ever have the power to accomplish, no prayer can slip a knife between two ribs and pierce the heart, and Mother, I do not forgive you, not now or ever, forgiveness is for pussies, and I am glad you died without my absolution, and I will see you all in hell.
The Wraith
Carl Blunt was fully aware when he married her that Lurene was an unhappy woman, and he’d had no illusions about the possibility of her ever changing. She had told him as much when they met: “I’m not happy,” she’d said, on their second date, a dinner followed by a walk along the lake, “and I’m never going to be.” His response at the time had been a silent nod of understanding. Later she would tell him that this had clinched her conviction that he was the one; he was the only man she’d ever met who hadn’t tried to talk her out of it. He still hadn’t. His job was to acknowledge her unhappiness, accept it, and attempt, in ways that did not question her right to it, to comfort her in its throes.
Carl was a large man, over six feet and thick around the middle, and he liked being that way. He viewed his physical size as a single facet of a comprehensive personal identity, which also included among its primary features a quiet competence in all manner of practical tasks (filling the dishwasher, making things level, reading maps), an unerring mental fastidiousness, highly focused and slightly unorthodox artistic tastes, and a calm, friendly, unemphatic manner. He was attracted to Lurene because of her narrow hips, large breasts, wide face, stooped walk, and pessimistic worldview, and ten years of marriage had in no way diminished his attraction. If anything, she was more herself than ever, her hips thinner, face wider, breasts larger. She stooped no lower than before, but she gave the appearance of doing so, due to what years of unhappiness had done to her face. It was still pretty, hadn’t taken to wrinkling and sagging, but its flesh had taken on a grave heaviness that levity was powerless to penetrate. They had agreed when they married never to have children, and he was glad they had stuck to that promise, because it just would not have worked. They were too self-absorbed. They felt proud of themselves for knowing this.
Carl was thirty-three. Lurene was thirty-one.
There was one element in their lives that Carl hadn’t counted on when he married Lurene, a single wild card. That was politics. Lurene hated George W. Bush, utterly loathed him. This was 2005. She screamed, literally screamed, when she saw Bush’s face, which fortunately was not very often, because they had sworn off television news after the 2000 election, and because Carl got to the paper before she did each morning and was able to tear out any photos and throw them away. Lurene nevertheless often growled at the empty space Bush’s face had occupied.
Neither of them had ever been very politically aware, nor was anyone else they knew, back in the nineties. Carl could remember one or the other of them vaguely disapproving of something Clinton did now and then, and he could recall them both being very annoyed by the impeachment hearings of 1998. But nothing seemed of great consequence. They regarded the world as working more or less as it should, and concentrated on themselves, earning money, being married, and pursuing their various interests. They were content.
But Bush brought something out in Lurene that Carl hadn’t known existed. When the Supreme Court voted to stop the recount, Lurene picked up the transistor radio that Carl’s uncle had bought them as a wedding gift four years before, and she threw it against the kitchen wall, where it split in half, spilling electronic parts on the floor. After September 11, which Lurene blamed Bush for failing to prevent, and the invasion of Afghanistan, of which Lurene did not approve, such incidents became commonplace. She swept books off shelves, overturned chairs, and kicked a dent in the sheetrock wall of their apartment. She snarled at passing cars. When Bush invaded Iraq, she stopped having sex with Carl, and then only agreed to resume relations if she could crouch on her knees and press her raving face into the pillow. If he wanted it any other way, he had to catch her before sunrise, before she’d fully woken up, before the horrible world possessed her.
Abu Ghraib made her vomit, and when Kerry lost, she burned her own hand on the stove top on purpose.
For his part, Carl didn’t like the president either. Indeed, he disliked the man very much, the whole lot of liars and fascists. But he didn’t complain, because he had no intention of doing anything about it. He didn’t go to protests or marches, didn’t blog his opinions, didn’t stage voter-registration drives or man phone banks. His sole rebellion was his vote, which he cast every four years. He didn’t think this entitled him to much acting-out. And so he kept his opinions to himself.
But at some point during the era of Hurricane Katrina, Valerie Plame, Jack Abramoff, and warrantless wiretapping, Lurene’s misery reached a disturbing new nadir, a state of steady and imperturbable deadness. News of the latest atrocities struck her with the force of stones flung into the sea; they made their mark with a pale splash, and then vanished underneath the monotonous pummeling waves. At breakfast, she and Carl carried on conversations like this:
“If you get out of that meeting before six, let’s go to Jason’s for dinner.”
“—”
“More coffee?”
“Mm.”
“You look pretty this morning.”
“—”
The fact was, she didn’t look pretty this morning. She looked ghoulish.
Her hair had gone lank, her face ashen, her eyes sunken into purple calderas of damp flesh. Her lips were bitten raw and her clothes hung crookedly on her body. Several times each day, Carl found her frozen in some prosaic tableau, her mouth hanging open and her lips twitching, one hand flopped like a hunk of rotten fish on the kitchen counter or off the edge of the bed. And then, as if prodded with electrodes, she would jerk, cough, and start up again, ploughing into whatever was left of her day.
One night, Carl tried to talk to her about it.
“You seem different lately,” he said gently, his hand resting ajitter on her bony knee.
She shrugged, turned the page of her magazine.
“I’m afraid you’re falling into …”
“Don’t say it, Carl.”
“… that you’re suffering from …”
“Don’t.”
He stopped, pulled his hand away, settled back into his little nest of throw pillows. Depression, he didn’t say. The word, with all its clinical associations, was forbidden in their house. It cast unhappiness as a problem, one that could, and should, be solved. Depression was a frailty. Unhappiness, on the other hand, was a way of life. Lurene insisted upon the distinction and had lodged herself permanently and immovably in the unhappiness camp. End of discussion.
But not end of problem, because she got worse. She walked around crying. She began taking sick days off work. She smoldered with resentment for Carl and his asshole, cocksucking bonsai trees and 1920s jazz and arugula, and she took to spitting in his path, as if to curse him, or at least make him slip and break something.
And then, on an unseasonably warm morning in the middle of February—three days, in fact, before Valentine’s Day, a holiday they habitually, pointedly did not celebrate—Lurene broke through the floor of her misery and into some annihilating subbasement of agony. He heard her fall: she was standing at the kitchen counter in her business skirt and white blouse, pouring milk into her coffee, and her knees buckled, her hands found the countertop, and a sound escaped her, a mortal, creaking gong, like a pair of rusted cemetery gates at long last falling open. And once they did, the furies poured through, and Lurene keened like a dying animal, and tore open her blouse, scraping red lines down her neck and chest.
See You in Paradise Page 11
