Kissing the Beehive

by Jonathan Carroll

  "But you know what I have learned? The single lesson that's penetrated my cement brain? There are very few people you can hang around with and be content with most of the time. If you find someone who is your pal that way, fight for them. Fight hard for the relationship.

  "If Ivan fucked up today, tell him what upset you and try to work it out. You two go together well. I see it in your faces. The problem is everyone gives up so quickly now. Including me. It's too easy to turn around and walk away. Bye-bye. That was nice. Who's next? I don't know what'll happen with you two in the future, but it's worth trying to work out because I think you've found the person you were meant to be with now."

  Her eyes were so young and full of confusion. I saw six-year-old Cass in them, but also the woman she was quickly becoming. The head and the heart are always racing each other to some finish line. They never cross it at the same time. Cass slid across the floor. Closing her eyes, she put out her arms. We held each other like two hands wrapped in prayer. My magnificent daughter. The only longtime pal I had ever had. She would be gone so soon.

  Three days later a postcard with a bent corner sat alone in my mailbox. On the front was a photograph of me that had been taken for an article in Vogue magazine. I frowned and turned it over. On the other side was one typed line.

  "The book's good. Keep going."

  Nothing else.

  Jitka Ostrova died laughing. She and Magda were watching The Tonight Show and Robin Williams was on. Both women were laughing so hard at what Williams said that Magda had to run to the toilet before she burst. While in there, she still heard her mother cackling. By the time she returned to the living room, the old woman was dead. We could only hope one minute it was laughter, the next eternity. Not a bad way to go. It reminded me of a Muslim friend whose father died after a long and terrible illness. I was curious to hear where he thought his father was after passing on. My friend said, "Oh, in heaven. He did all his suffering while he was alive."

  I didn't know Mrs. Ostrova well but her death shook me. Such a good soul forced to live a hard and ultimately crushing life. All that mattered to her was her family, but two thirds of them died years before she did. What was most impressive was how she had somehow still managed to keep alive her kindness and good humor in the midst of so much misfortune.

  The day of her funeral was one of those sharp blue and white winter feats when the sky and sun blind you every time you look up. The air smelled of wet stone and the many chestnut trees that surrounded the cemetery. Once in a while a strong cold breeze blew up and the trees shuddered. Because of the intense sunlight, most of the people at the ceremony wore sunglasses. One might have mistaken the group for a bunch of the famous or infamous gathered one last time to say goodbye to someone who was probably wearing sunglasses too inside the wooden box.

  And it was wooden. Jitka didn't like funerals, ceremony or extravagance. "What would I do in a fancy coffin? Dance? Show off for the bugs?"

  So she was buried in the same kind of simple one she had chosen for Pauline years ago. The two lay next to each other in the Crane's View Cemetery. Mr. Ostrova was on the other side.

  There was a large turnout, which wasn't surprising. Frannie stood next to Magda and Magda's daughter, Pauline. I hadn't seen him since our last showdown and was surprised at how well he looked.

  I was also surprised to see Edward Durant there. He was not looking well. We stood next to each other during the service. He carried a cane that he incessantly shifted from hand to hand. He told me he had remained in touch with the Ostrovas over the years and frequently was invited to their house for dinner.

  A Czech priest from Yonkers performed the ceremony. I kept looking at Magda and her daughter, wondering what was going through their minds. Sometimes Magda rested her head on Frannie's shoulder and sometimes the two women embraced, but there were few tears. I think Jitka would have liked that because she overflowed with good nature and common sense. I imagined her watching over us with arms crossed and a pleased smile on her face.

  When it was finished, Frannie separated from Magda and came over. Putting an arm around my shoulder, he said, "How you doin', stranger? You finish your book, or what? We don't see you much these days." His voice was light and playful.

  "To tell you the truth, Fran, I kind of got the feeling you'd rather be left alone."

  "You've got a point there, but you coulda called and asked how I was doing."

  "You're right."

  He poked a finger into my chest. "I've been cooking, you know?"

  "Really? Oh that's good news, Frannie! I'm so glad to hear that."

  "Yeah, well there's more. After you left, Magda started coming over a lot. She's the one got me cooking, cleaning up the house, going out again . . . We talked, you know, did things together. And . . . I don't know. We hit it off really well." He stopped and took a quick deep breath. He had something big to say and needed a lot of air for it. "We're going to get married, Sam."

  Before I had a chance to reply, Magda came up. Earlier she had been standing so far away that I hadn't really seen how good she looked. She had lost weight, and her high Slavic cheekbones stood out prominently. She had always been attractive, but now she looked much younger and almost beautiful. For some reason I looked at her hands and saw that her fingernails were painted a sassy Chinese red.

  "How are you, Sam?"

  "I'm okay. Congratulations! Frannie just told me you're getting married!"

  She frowned, then quickly smiled. "Frannie wants to get married. I haven't decided yet. I think he's just grateful to me for pulling him out of his space walk and back into the mother ship. I told you before, he's got a lotta kinks to work out before I agree to sign that contract!"

  He pinched her cheek. "You know you love me."

  "Loving's not the question – living is. Love builds the house, but then you got to furnish it. Sam, listen, we're all going down to Dick's Cabin for a meal. That was Ma's favorite place so we thought it was a good idea. Will you come? And would you ask Mr. Durant too? She always had a big crush on him."

  "Of course. But are you going to get married?"

  They looked at each other and a shyness passed between them that was charming. After all they had been through together, they were back to courting. Nothing had been decided. Frannie was eager, Magda honestly hadn't made up her mind. "She didn't say no."

  "That's right, I didn't say no. You go ahead now. I've got to say goodbye to the people. Remember, Frannie, you promised to tell him. Now's a good time."

  We watched her walk away. "She was so good to me, Sam. Did everything to take care of me. But those kinks she was talking about? I've got to tell you some things. I promised her I would and I've wanted to for a long time anyway. Let's take a ride before we eat. Drive around a little bit."

  Durant was very pleased to be invited to the restaurant. When I told him about Jitka's crush on him, his face went blank. Only after a while did he give a small smile. "Funny. I had a crush on her too. Ostrova women have magical powers over Durants."

  "Drive up to the Tyndall place."

  I looked at McCabe and raised an eyebrow. In all the time I had spent in Crane's View recently, I had avoided going back there. By accident I drove past once but looked away because it brought back bad memories.

  Lionel Tyndall had made a fortune in oil in the twenties. He had owned houses all over the country but preferred Crane's View because it was so close to New York. His was one of the largest houses in town, one of those Colonial behemoths you passed out on Livingston Avenue as you were entering the town limits. Oddly, there wasn't much land around his place.

  Tyndall died in the early fifties. His large and greedy family went to war with one another over his vast holdings. The legal suits and countersuits continued for years. During that time, the house stood empty. Town kids started breaking in almost immediately after Tyndall's death. What they found became legend.

  Lionel Tyndall was a collector: books, magazines, furniture so large it could
only have lived in a house of twenty-five rooms. He loved magic and was an amateur magician and ventriloquist. As a boy I'd heard marvelous tales of kids entering rooms full of elaborate decaying theater sets and mysterious objects with names like the Madagascar Mystery and the Heart of God, but I never saw them. These things were gone by the time we began snooping around inside, and the stories only enhanced the sense of danger and mystery attached to the house.

  What I remember was the smoky, dusty smell of the place. Light came in through the windows and played across the impossible number of objects still in there. Boxes of children's toys, a desktop covered with playbills from Broadway shows, a velvet chair that had been stabbed full of kitchen utensils – spatulas, carving knives, soup ladles stuck in backward. Who would think of doing something like that?

  Kids and bums. Part of the danger of the house was you never knew who would be there when you snuck in through the broken basement door. Vagrants loved the place because there was a roof over their heads, grand furniture to sleep on, a vast array of things to steal.

  Once when we were there two miserable, evil-looking men, both wearing porkpie hats, suddenly came around a corner and scared the shit out of us.

  "What are you kids doing here?"

  "Same thing you are, mister," said dangerous twelve-year-old Frannie McCabe.

  The two looked at each other and, as one, disappeared back into the house's shadows. We continued our scouting party. Soon, though, we started hearing strange sounds coming from rooms not far away – high laughter, furniture being struck, fragile things breaking. We figured where it was coming from and sneaked up to the door.

  Racing through the dappled, split light of a cavernous room, the two men chased each other, playing a kind of ghostly tag. They were like children, laughing, scrambling, screeching, jumping over furniture, sliding on the wooden floors, tripping over rolled-up rugs.

  The bliss was that when anything fell down or smashed, it didn't matter! When kids play tag and something breaks, run for the hills. Heaven turns to hell in one second. Mom's favorite vase in shattered pieces, a table punted across the floor, the silver frame a hundred years old until this minute . . . Game over.

  But in Tyndall's living room that afternoon, full of stopped time and long shadows, no one cared about these objects, no matter how valuable they might have been. I'm sure they were valuable – the rugs were Oriental, and one glass that hit the floor shattered into beautiful colors. It didn't matter. The room was tag heaven that day.

  That is only one memory of the Tyndall house. There were many others, some equally queer or memorable. We were there often. It was our castle and forbidden land in one. It rarely failed to captivate us.

  The summer before I was sent away to private school, a bunch of us went back to the house. We knew we were too old for it by then. Having used it so often for our games and schemes, we'd squeezed out all of its juice long before. But this day, August boredom prevailed and we were desperate for anything different to do.

  McCabe had heard that one could make a fortune selling old copper wiring and pipe to a junkyard in Rye. His plan was to check out the Tyndall place, then come back with the right tools and strip it bare. The idea of ripping wire out of old decaying walls in ninety-degree heat didn't excite us, but what else was there to do that day? Part of the reason Frannie was such a good ringleader was his ability to get fired up about things. Projects excited him; he was the one who could imagine money in our pockets after a job was done, whereas the rest of us had to be pulled along behind him like broken toys. Normally we just wanted something to do; he wanted to turn our days upside down.

  Other than being hot as the inside of a kiln, there was nothing different about the house that afternoon. I knew it was pointless being there. Dumb too – like riding around on a bicycle so small that your knees keep hitting the handlebars.

  We went in through the basement and worked our way up the back stairs to the kitchen. McCabe kept pointing to pipes running parallel to the floorboards. He'd say only "Copper" in a firm professional voice, as if he was giving us a guided tour of untold treasure. We were unimpressed. We wanted girls in orange bikinis, free tickets to the Yankees game, a great party to look forward to that night. Copper tubing didn't do it.

  Al "Green Light" Salvato was there. After Frannie said "Copper" for the hundredth annoying time, Salvato picked up on it. Pointing to everything – his shoes, the floor, Frannie's ass – he said "Copper" in the same serious, informed tone of voice. McCabe pretended not to hear and continued to lead the way.

  Through the kitchen into a large pantry the color of burned toast. We climbed a servants' staircase to the first floor because our boss wanted to have a look at the bathrooms. We scouted one out and sure enough, a copper bonanza was in there. But by then Frannie knew we didn't give a shit, the house was hot, and none of this was going to come to anything in the end.

  His way of admitting defeat was, on catching Salvato mimicking him, shooting Green Light a savage knee in the balls that put the other on the ground in the shape of a comma.

  "You guys don't like my plan, fuuuuuck you!" He stomped out of the room, leaving us with guilty smiles and our hands in our pockets. We were too old for this nonsense. Too old to be traipsing around empty houses looking for anything to do. Too old to be hanging around, too old to be biding time when we knew out there in the real world every other teenager on earth was having parties and getting laid. They were living lives that didn't depend on copper tubing, the whims of Frannie McCabe, or luck. Of course we were wrong and in the intervening years we learned that every kid believes life is happening where he ain't. But that knowledge wouldn't have helped back then because we wouldn't have believed it.

  I was glad my parents had had enough of my bad behavior and sullenness to be sending me away to a school where there would be new faces and experiences. Looking for copper pipe in an old house couldn't have been a better reminder that anywhere had to be better than this nowhere.

  We helped Salvato off the floor and left the bathroom. Right outside the door, McCabe came rushing back up. He put a finger to his lips and beckoned us to follow.

  He moved along in a semicrouch, the way Groucho Marx walked in his films. Salvato copied him, but only because he was afraid McCabe would give him another nut-knocker if he didn't follow the leader step-for-step.

  "What're you doin', Fran? Practicing deep knee bends?" Ron Levao asked. McCabe shook his head and waved us to follow. He duckwalked down the hall till he came to the top of the main staircase. We caught up and saw for the first time what was on his mind.

  Down below in the strewn chaos of the living room, Club Soda Johnny Petangles was sitting on a decrepit once-pink couch, singing to himself. Lying across his lap was my dog, Jack the Wonder Boy. The two sat there unmoving, completely at peace.

  I had never heard Johnny sing and was surprised at his sweet, frail voice. My dog lay panting from the heat, eyes closed. His small red tongue hung out one side of his mouth. From his long daily walks I assumed Jack knew every inch of the town, but since when had he and Petangles become friends? Had the dog been lured into the Tyndall house, or did the two of them roam around together while the rest of Crane's View went about its business?

  Someone behind me snickered, "That's your dog, hah, Bayer?"

  I nodded but didn't turn around.

  McCabe looked at me and hissed, "What's that retard doing with your little dog, Sam?"

  "Singing, looks like."

  He slapped my head. "I see that. But I wouldn't let no fuckin' retard touch my dog! How do you know he's not feeling him up or something?"

  "You're sick. McCabe! People don't feel up dogs."

  "Maybe retards do."

  We squatted there and watched the simple man sing to the dog. The two looked blissful together. Johnny was crooning the Four Seasons' "Sherry" in a high falsetto that was a decent imitation of lead singer Frankie Valli. Jack was panting so hard it looked like he was smiling. Maybe he was.r />
  "You gonna let him get away with that?"

  "Get away with what, Salvato? The guy's singing!"

  Green Light looked eagerly at Frannie. "I think Petangles is a 'mo. I think he's a dog fag."

  I looked at him and shook my head.

  But McCabe thought it over, then nodded sagely. "Could be. You never know with retards."

  "Fuckin'-a right, Frannie! I think he's doing something to that dog. We just can't see it from up here."

  I hissed, "Salvato, you're full of shit! Come on, let's get outta here. It's hot."

  McCabe called the shots – all of them. Maybe it was the heat. Or maybe I'd come to the end of the line with these guys and this life. Maybe McCabe sensed that and wanted to throw one last uppercut. Whatever it was, just being there with him and those other knotheads made me want to go home and wait for fall when I would leave Crane's View.

  I started to get up but Frannie shoved me hard in the chest with both hands. I fell back down. We looked at each other and I felt sure he knew everything I was thinking about him and the situation. It frightened me.

  Everyone tensed. In a second, it felt like the heat had risen ten degrees. At a moment like this, McCabe was friends with no one; he'd bash whoever he felt like. No one was exempt. All of us had been his target at one time or another. If you wanted to hang around the guy, the unspoken rule was do whatever you could to stay on his good side – or else. We always knew when someone had crossed his line, but not what Frannie would do about it, and that made it even more alarming. Sometimes he would laugh, pat you on the back or offer you a cigarette. Sometimes he'd beat you until you bled.

  Joe O'Brien had brought a six-pack of beer. Frannie snapped his fingers for one. Joe quickly opened a bottle and handed it over. McCabe threw his head back and drank it down in one go. When he was finished he dropped it on the floor and walked over to the staircase. He looked down, then back at us – at me. He smirked and unzipped his fly. "Come on, guys. I think Johnny's hot down there. It's time for a little rain shower."