Red Ant House

by Ann Cummins

  Scott says he wants the Farmington police department to bomb the badger holes with chemicals.

  “It’s not so easy,” Barry says. “We bomb one hole, we’re as good as killing off half a mile of the animal population.”

  “I tell you, I’m going to take a gun to the next one that gets in the garden.”

  “Go ahead.” Barry grins.

  Janet asks if the cops would look the other way, and Barry says, “I’ll bust his ass.”

  “It’s not just one, I’m telling you,” Scott says. “Barry, they’ll go after small animals.”

  “What you do, sucker them. Manipulate them outside the city limits, and you’ll be within your rights as far as the firearms code goes.”

  Scott says he doesn’t see how he is going to manipulate them outside the city limits, the way they’ll just spit in your face. He’s worried about rabies. Just one with rabies could infect countless small domestic animals. And they are enterprising sons of bitches, he continues—he points out again that they don’t go for just garbage.

  “They are little thieves,” Rosy agrees. She smiles at the skin of what had been her potato. “The badger is a little thief.”

  When he went through Rosy’s drawers, Barry told himself that it was more of a scavenger hunt than search and seizure, not so different from scavenging loot when he was a kid. From the ages of ten to twelve Barry and Scott organized scavenger hunts to gather booty around the neighborhood. The two were always divided in strategies. Scott said loot wasn’t loot unless you sneaked it pure and simple, but Scott was not a very complicated fellow. There were ways to steal and ways to steal. Barry liked the “It’s your civic duty” approach. During scavenger hunts he’d knock on a neighbor’s door and present a list of items needed by the New Mexico Children’s Home, although at the time he was not even sure that such a home existed. In spite of himself, Barry had to admire the Rosy Deemer method—sneaking into your friend’s bedroom, pilfering her rhinestone, then wearing it in the light of day; or palming an avocado when the cop’s back is turned, then stripping and eating it right in his face. What do you do when she holds out eight perfect black crescents of avocado skin that curl like a witch’s nails in the palms of her hands, opens her fingers, lets the peelings fall to the ground between you, grinds them in the dirt, and begins to stroke you: your upper arms, your neck, then your hair. What do you do? What Barry knows is the avocado was not a major crime. What he wonders is whether it is a symptom of some sickness.

  Barry fell in love with Rosy when he was eleven years old. Of course, he didn’t notice her until the day he intercepted a note from Rosy to Scott that read, “Who do you like?” in Scott’s pinched scrawl, and below it, in Rosy’s galloping hand, “I like you. Why?” That’s when he noticed her. He fell in love with her a few weeks later, when he saw her in her backyard, swinging on her swing set.

  The swing set, ungrounded, inched across the lawn. Rosy had her eyes squeezed shut, and she was talking—a whisper, really, or a hiss. Barry recognized the words to a jump-rope rhyme he’d heard the girls sing on the playground, but Rosy chanted venomously, as if accusing the air she kicked with her swinging feet:

  Fudge, fudge, call the judge,

  Mama’s got a newborn baby

  It ain’t no girl and it ain’t no boy

  It’s just a newborn baby.

  Wrap it up in tissue paper,

  Send it down the elevator.

  First floor, stop.

  Second floor, stop.

  Third floor, kick it out the door,

  And you’ll never see baby anymore.

  Every time she said the word “stop” she stuck her legs straight to the sky, tilted her back parallel to the ground, and pumped with such a force that Barry thought she’d wind herself around the top bar of the swing set. The whole swing set bucked like a mad thing, and when she finally bailed out, she twisted in midair, landed cross-legged sitting on the ground, faced the swing, and clapped—she clapped at the empty swing. Barry laughed, although it wasn’t really funny, that intent look on her face. He laughed. And Rosy fixed on him a wild, yellow-eyed animal look that made him feel as though he had been hurled down the elevator. He gagged on his laughter. Then the look was gone, replaced by befuddlement, as if he’d caught her in the bathroom, dancing naked before the mirror.

  He said the only thing he could think to say: “You like Scott Wentworth.”

  And then it was Rosy’s turn to laugh. She threw her head back and hooted at the swing. “That dope?”

  “Then who do you like?”

  She gave him a sly, furtive look. “I like you. Why?”

  She may have liked Barry, but Rosy and Scott were an item from the time they were eleven years old until Scott joined the army at eighteen and married Janet six months later. The funny thing was, those years in the back of the room during Civics when Rosy passed notes to Scott but kept her eyes on Barry, when she danced slow dances with Scott, her chin digging into his shoulder but her eyes on Barry, he wondered if maybe she did like him, if maybe she didn’t think Scott really was a dope (which he was). He wondered if it had been deliberate, that long adolescent dance with Scott Wentworth, a way of courting and teasing and seducing Barry Deemer without ever touching him, a slow angling, worth the wait—to let him know she was worth the wait.

  He and Rosy had been married ten years. He wondered why he still wondered about these things. He wondered where she got the barrette. Did she steal the barrette, or did Scott give it to her?

  Rosy is chewing on little bits of meat stuck in the grooves of a rib. She asks Scott which weapon he would use on badgers in the garden, and Scott says he figures his little .30-caliber Luger would do it, but Rosy disagrees; she’d use a .45 or nothing. “Isn’t that right, sweetheart?” she says.

  “You want to be sure,” Barry says.

  “Unless you’re right up on them. If you’re close enough to get a starburst, then a Luger would work,” Rosy says.

  Janet asks what a starburst is, and Rosy, who has always taken an avid interest in police work, explains that it’s a gunpowder-residue pattern from a bullet wound. The pattern will change depending on the distance from weapon to target, stability, and bullet path. They analyze the residue pattern to help reconstruct the circumstances of a crime, she says. A starburst indicates close range, so every suicide is a starburst.

  “Although the starburst does not always limit your options, does it, sweetheart?” Rosy goes on. “There are factors you can’t image. Dust. Corrosion on the inside of the barrel. This guy shot his wife from a distance of twenty feet, but they only knew because the guy confessed later. At first they thought it was a suicide, because there was a clear starburst pattern. It turned out that the gun had been sitting around for forty years—forty years of accumulated crud went with the bullet and happened to form a starburst.” Rosy pushes her plate away and smiles at Janet. “You can’t be sure about anything unless you can duplicate the exact circumstances of a crime.”

  Scott asks Janet if she made a lemon pie for dessert. Janet is watching the sprinkler in the backyard. It is sputtering—a tiny fountain in the middle of the lawn; she’s staring as though this were a fascinating object. Janet is twenty-eight but looks eighteen. Her skin is that ivory white, without a laugh line or blemish; she looks like she’d bruise if you put thumb pressure to her, and she has watery blue eyes, clear in the whites because she doesn’t drink. “Barry, she’s a dancer,” Scott had told him over the phone the night before he married Janet. “She’s got everything.” And she moves like a dancer. And the clothes she wears—short denim skirts with tennis shoes and thin little sleeveless cotton blouses unbuttoned halfway down so you can see a lace camisole, where if Rosy wore blouses like that you’d see a bra. And you can talk to Janet. She has been nothing but nice about the barrette.

  Rosy is studying the side of Janet’s face. She says, “Did you know, Janet, that the police investigating team uses cadavers to duplicate the exact circumstances of a cr
ime?” Rosy looks at Barry. She is lying. They don’t do that anymore, and Rosy knows it.

  Barry looks away. He watches the table move. Scott’s leg is jumping up and down—he’s got this nervous habit, and the picnic table twitches with the leg. Janet’s fingers, white-nailed from pressure, grip her fork. Janet would probably rather not hear talk about shooting holes in cadavers, which is why Rosy goes on about it. She knows Janet gets squeamish.

  “What they do is dress a cadaver like the victim,” Rosy goes on. “Say a victim is wearing a sheepskin coat. You dress the corpse in sheepskin of the same thickness, duplicate the ammo, and whammy.”

  A bald-faced lie. She has them completely conned. And when she isn’t making things up, she’s got this trick of making you wonder. Barry thinks of the first time he saw Rosy naked. It was clear they were going to sleep together, and she excused herself and went into the bathroom and came out naked. Maybe it was a stupid thing, because she got that funny, confused look she gets, but he said, “That girl’s bare-assed naked.” That was all. It had been a good first night, a fine first night. But the next day he saw the line in a notebook she’d left conspicuously open on her desk, just the one line with that day’s date: “That girl’s bare-assed naked.” What did she mean by writing it down? He couldn’t get it out of his head. And what was in his head at the time he’d said it, and what was in hers? He couldn’t get the notebook out of his head, which made him realize right away that Rosy would be an asset to any interrogation team, the way she had him guessing and made him think he was a chump for even paying attention.

  Barry pushes away from the table, picks up his empty plate, and carries it into the house. He heads upstairs, where the bathroom is, and switches on the light, but he doesn’t go into the bathroom. The Wentworths’ bedroom door is ajar. He walks down the hall and pushes on it. The room is over the deck and the window is open, so Barry can hear Rosy clearly, almost as if he were standing on top of her. She is saying that the cadavers are usually prisoners who die in jail. She sounds like an authority; she sounds delighted with herself. Barry moves straight to the bureau. There are two jewelry boxes, one at each end of the bureau, and Barry opens the box on the left. There’s nothing but rhinestones, which surprises him—rhinestone pins and earrings and two necklaces. Barry rifles through the colored glass. As far as he can see, Rosy got the pick of the lot. Then he opens the box on the right and is surprised again. This stuff looks real. There’s a pearl necklace, a ring with red stones, maybe some rubies. The ring looks old. Rosy was just trying to be cute. She didn’t take anything valuable. Rosy was just trying to be funny.

  Unless Scott gave her the barrette. Why would Scott give Rosy junk when there was this? Because Scott was two-bit. Barry saw this kind of thing all the time. Petty thieves who figured minor infractions would go unnoticed.

  Barry hears Scott ask Rosy how they could simulate a moving target. “They put it on rollers,” she says. “Silhouette rollers, like the kind they use at shooting ranges.” Another lie. Rosy took that barrette. Scott didn’t give her the rhinestone, and the only question is why she took junk.

  Barry closes the jewelry box. He opens the top bureau drawer. It is Janet’s underwear drawer. Silks, mostly, from what he can tell. Spaghetti-strap silk undershirts and matching bikinis. Some lace stuff, strips of lace—G-strings, stockings with sequins. It is definitely a more interesting drawer than Rosy’s.

  Barry takes from Janet’s lingerie drawer a pair of blue underpants; they feel like silk. He walks over to the window. Rosy is leaning across the picnic table, telling Scott and Janet more lies about what the police do. Barry wants her to look up. He wants her to see him looking at her. “And this is the reason I know you shouldn’t shoot badgers with that little Luger,” she is saying. “See, sometimes, instead of using a cadaver, what they’ll do is try to find a live animal and shoot it. Say, a jackrabbit, and—”

  “That makes me sick,” Janet says. Her face is flushed. Barry crushes the underwear, then lets his fist relax. He rubs the grooves in the waistband, then traces the elastic around the legs. He imagines Janet in the blue silk.

  “And what they found,” Rosy says, “is that even after ten shots from a gun the caliber of your Luger a jackrabbit won’t always drop. But if you use a Colt forty-five or a Winchester, you’ll drop it in three. This only applies if you don’t hit a vital organ first.”

  “You’re kidding! That makes me sick,” Janet says. Barry feels for her, the way Rosy will push and push.

  But then Rosy leans back, and when she speaks her voice is different. “Oh, Christ,” she says. She has dropped an octave. “Of course it makes you sick, Janet.”

  “They’re just killing those animals!” Janet says. She does not look at Rosy. Janet looks at the ground. Rosy stares at the side of Janet’s face; she looks exasperated. She can’t believe that Janet is buying this.

  “How else are you going to simulate?” Rosy asks.

  “Who would want to?” Janet says.

  “Hey, calm down,” Scott says. He gets up and walks to the barbecue; he begins scraping the grill with the spatula.

  Rosy continues staring at the side of Janet’s face, but Janet doesn’t look up. Nobody looks up. On the deck no one speaks. Rosy begins peeling bits of label off the ketchup bottle. She looks tired. Behind her the Farmington bluffs are turning blue and the sun rests on the plain. Barry knows it is her least favorite time of the day. She says that the day feels too close at dusk, as if the scenery is moving in—you go outside and the air has the feel of your own breath.

  Barry holds the underwear loosely—it’s like tissue, hardly any weight at all—and he wonders if Rosy has ever worn silk. “It doesn’t matter what you wear,” she said once. “Within fifteen minutes of getting dressed in the morning, your body no longer feels your clothes. You get numb.” Barry closes his eyes. On the inside of his lids, he sees moving red suns. He opens his eyes. Rosy is studying Scott’s face like it’s a problem. Scott scrapes the grill.

  “So,” Rosy says at last. She leans back on the bench. “So are you going to be the gorilla or what!” Scott laughs and looks at Janet. Janet is watching the bluffs. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

  Scott stares at his wife for a minute. Finally he shrugs. “Hell, I guess I’m game,” he says.

  Rosy laughs. “Good. You’ll come, won’t you, Janet?” Janet says no. “You’ll be sorry,” Rosy says. “It’ll be a gas.” She grins at Scott. Then she says, “I wonder where Barry’s gotten to.”

  Barry steps away from the window. He walks to the dresser, where the lingerie drawer is still open. He drops the underwear in the drawer. He stares at it. Then he picks it up again and puts it in his pocket. He shuts the drawer and goes downstairs.

  The Top Deck is dark except for the neon beer signs. One of the band members directs a red spotlight onto the stairway. The drummer has muffled his snare to make it sound like a tom-tom, and the female singer shakes a rattle. The first thing Barry sees is the bouquet of balloons, multicolored, floating up the stairs. Then the spot widens to include the gorilla. A female voice in the room says, “Oh, God,” and a group at one of the tables laughs.

  The gorilla looks fierce enough in the red light—the widow’s peak, the pronounced nostrils, the mouth like a blunted, downturned snout—and Barry can see the canines, probably bigger than a normal gorilla has.

  “He should bend over,” Rosy whispers. “He should stomp or something.”

  Another spotlight comes on, a white one that shines on a girl who probably just turned twenty-one. She wears jeans, a red tank top, and three little braids in her hair. She’s laughing hard and keeps saying, “How embarrassing!”

  The gorilla bows to the birthday girl and offers her the balloons. “He looks ridiculous,” Barry says, and Rosy laughs. The gorilla offers his hand and walks the birthday girl to the dance floor. The band begins to play, the vocalist sings, and everybody in the room cracks up:

  Can I have this dance for the rest of my life
,

  Will you be my partner every night?

  The song ends. Scott takes his mask off and dances a second time with the girl. Scott is a fair dancer. They country-swing to “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.”

  Rosy says, “You know, a guy’s got an obligation to ask a girl to dance.”

  Barry doesn’t say anything, and Rosy begins shredding the label on her Michelob bottle. They watch through the set. Scott takes turns dancing with all the women at the birthday girl’s table. He looks like he’s having a terrific time.

  “I could dance with Scott,” Rosy says.

  “Go ahead,” Barry says. Rosy continues peeling the label.

  Barry props his feet on the chair next to him. There is a distinctive odor to this place, a metallic smell of liquor gone stale and of cigarettes—like poor-quality wet aluminum that you can tear with your fingers. Barry has smelled the same odor on winos, and it seems funny to him how a human being at his most human, a human being ungroomed, will come to have that almost clean smell of cheap metal.

  In the dim light, the rhinestone barrette looks like a band of black hair bisecting Rosy’s silver streak. She seems to have forgotten it. She plays with bits of paper from her beer bottle and watches the dancers. After a while she says, “Where’d you go tonight?”

  “Tonight?”

  “While we were earing, where’d you go?”

  Barry puts his hand in his pocket. He says, “Where’d you get the barrette?”

  Rosy grins, like she’s been waiting for somebody to ask that question all night. “I found it,” she says.

  “Yeah?” Barry says. “You want to know what I found?”

  “What?”

  He says, “You didn’t find that barrette.”

  Rosy puts her arm around him and her chin on his right shoulder. She whispers, “So are you going to bust me?”