Phantom Strays

by Lorraine Ray

When he returned to his bedroom and had spoken briefly to our mother, when he finally gave up his hysterical reaction to our midnight caller, Meredith changed into a T-shirt and got into her bed after crashing into the ironing board. She had ironed something at the last minute and hadn’t put down the board and I’d come to bed in the dark myself at eleven. Sometimes she cleaned up after getting ready for a date, but a lot of times she left everything where it had been, all the outfits she tried on, and I refused to clean up her portion of the room on my own time. I sometimes moved the heap of dresses she had tried on from her bed onto the ironing board.

  “Thank God that ordeal is over. Mom goaded him into that, telling us all that crap about him praying for the family. We know he doesn’t go to church. He’s not praying for anybody. Sheesh. I think he has got to be the most dramatic person on the face of this earth. I mean really, ding, dong, I’m gonna murder you,” she said yawning. “Logic really escapes him. If Paul were going to murder us, he definitely wouldn’t ring the doorbell first, would he? What kind of idiot would do that?”

  “I guess not.”

  “So, you’re upset, too?”

  “Not at you. I wish I was asleep, that’s all. The doorbell woke me up. I’m kinda aggravated because of that.”

  “I guess I’m horrible. I’m just a horrible person.” My best guess from the way her voice sounded was that her face turned up toward the ceiling. A car went by and moved light quickly along the walls.

  “No,” I replied, “but maybe Paul is.”

  I couldn’t think of what else to say, though she was logical I felt she was frightened of Paul herself. The whole thing gave me the creeps and I felt jumpy. There was no way having someone wake everyone in the house by ringing the doorbell at one in the morning was a good thing. The whole unseen scene of our father begging in the night in his underwear was so unbelievable it was taking hefty cables to suspend my disbelief.

  “Well, that’s the way it was moving west,” I suddenly croaked.

  “Why’d you say that?” asked Meredith.

  “I dunno.” I shrugged, but she couldn’t see my shoulders in the dark.

  “Why did you say that?”

  “I dunno where it comes from.”

  “Well, I can tell you if you can’t remember; it happens to be the last line in an old story of Dad’s, dummy. He used to tell it all the time when we were little.” Meredith sounded fed up with my blunders. Here Dad had just left the room and I had to remind her of one of his endearing stories; I suppose that was why she was so angry at me. I couldn’t remember anything about the story. Not how it began or how it ended.

  “Really? I wondered what it was from. It’s sometimes flitting around in my brain, but I don’t know what it means. How does the story go? I don’t remember and I’d like to. I like to collect stories.”

  “Oh, it isn’t a real story, silly. Nothing ever happens. You just improvise a bunch of modifying clauses about how wonderful the West is, descriptive clauses, with grass waving in the wind, covered wagons, antelope, little cottages, and then you end it with the line ‘That’s the way it was moving west.’ He told it to us a lot. One night right before Easter he was drunk and he told it and he was vomiting up liquor in the toilet. Remember that? We were all on his bed and Mom folded up clothes? It went something like this, ‘Across the fertile and golden prairies, trampled by the wheels of wagons, with the bounding graceful antelope and their grasses plenty, where the wide rivers bubble, stopping the great migrations, wagons loaded with cheerful people, people of varied nationalities, moving forward, following the Indians, watching the grasses, eaten by the buffalo, dark and hairy, and so on, until you say, ‘that was the way it was moving west.’”

  I didn’t remember it well at all, but with time and effort, with effort and silence, I would. “Oh yeah. I do,” I lied, “Yeah, I sort of do. Hey, Meredith. Ding, dong, I’m here to murder you!” I said this happily, ready to create a joke between us.

  “Yeah, ding dong. Your murderer is here to murder you. Sure, ding dong.”