by Daniel Kraus
XI.
DUSK DID NOT DROP UNTIL after eight, by which time Heavenly Hills had been turbulenced for hours by the two-bit firecrackers I’d heard inventoried by children all night. The resulting smoke made the sky look like a French battlefield after a day of machine-gun fire and shelling, scraped and scabbed, as if we’d wounded the world itself.
Having no foxhole in which to crouch, I’d squatted beneath the scarlet brume to wipe down the grill’s surfaces. My sleeves were sudsy from the Joy-brand cleaning liquid; I’d taken to scouring the grate with steel wool as if I might scrape away not only the evidence of our abortive banquet but also the caked-on memories of past cookouts, each one of them fictions of counterfeit camaraderie.
Clown snuffed my malaise. She nosed The Toe, certain that a frisky chew might lighten the mood. I shook my foot, popping her in the nose, and she yelped and withdrew. I felt rotten about it but redirected that anger to the Marlboro Man. Had I a quick path to Montana, I’d have tracked down the bastard, wangled a way to get the drop, and demanded answers for why he’d forced my irregular shape back into the world’s methodized matrix.
The screen door moaned, allowing inside the defeated dog, and after a deadly pause, Mrs. White appeared for the first time in hours. Though I kept my eyes on my dirty work, I could sense her surveying the chintzy decorations that, if not soon removed, would be bloated by rain into a purple pulp capable of spoiling the entire garden.
The Schmitts had hightailed it to the lake. For once we went unobserved.
“Well,” said Mrs. White, “what do you have to say for yourself?”
“Need more Joy,” grunted I.
Never had I uttered a truer statement.
“Maybe it’s for the best if you moved on,” said she.
“Maybe? For certain, Mrs. White. Where I linger, the earth itself rots.”
“You certainly talk like a writer.”
“What, pray tell, does that mean?”
“You think I don’t know what happens in my own home? I’ve dusted your desk enough to know there’s no writing going on down there. There’s not even any paper. You’re a fraud and a liar. I don’t know why it surprised me today when you opened your mouth and out came more lies.”
I clenched the steel wool, felt fibers screw into my flesh.
“I lied about nothing.”
“Hiroshima? Blackhand’s Disease? Mr. Gray, I can’t even keep up.”
“Believe what you wish.”
“Oh, I will. And I believe that you’re trouble, Mr. Gray, with a capital T.”
“You’ll receive no argument from me.”
She kicked a pinwheel. Faulty as everything else, it spun once before dying.
“So you planted some flowers! So you walk the dog! So what? That gives you no right to lie to my friends, to make decisions without consulting me—”
“Friends, ma’am? Friends?”
“I should’ve known the first day I met you. When you refused to say grace, which you still refuse, every day—a terrible influence on the children. I can’t have them growing up not trusting in Gød, not believing in something greater. What else do they have? It’s a struggle to get Junior to even say his bedtime prayers, and that’s your fault, Mr. Gray.”
Junior had so many genuine challenges—becoming a man, for instance, in a world fermenting with Herbie Hinkles—that the gratuitous burden of pleasing an ungrateful Gød enraged me. I bolted upward and booted aside the grate, which rolled like Franny’s hula hoop in concentric circles before clanging to cement and shedding a ring of cinder. By then I’d taken a long, loping step and planted myself directly in front of Mrs. White, staring down at her as my nearly six feet allowed.
“You wish to oust me from your uncomfortable basement? Please do, Mrs. White, for it is undiluted torture for a young man of my intellect to be subject to the anesthetizing strictures of such a place, where an offense as light as washing your car on Sunday gets you crucified by She-Devil Shoemaker. And yet it is I who tarnish the Goodness and Rightness of children? Let me tell you what I know about Gød, Mrs. White. He is a fabricant by both definitions: one who creates, and one who falsifies. The promised lands He dangles before us like fine silks are but the roughest reproductions, pulled away at the last second as a matador pulls his cape. You, your so-called friends, you all hippity-hop through life like hares, but life is over in a snap, so quickly that no one except yours truly, Mr. Joe Gray, would believe it. Gød, then, is the Tortoise, ancient and hard-shelled, but as Aesop knows, this is not a race He loses. He will claim you, He will claim your children, and He will not, at the end, be the kindly, magical grandfather upon which you rely. I wager that your husband, at his terrible, screaming end, learned this truth about Gød.”
Mrs. White’s green eyes blinked in confusion, but instead of backing down she pooched her bottom lip.
“Blaspheme all you want, Mr. Gray, but don’t you dare drag my husband into it. You’re not anything like him.”
“No, I am not like your husband, though I fail to see why that should buoy you. I have yet to see evidence that Mr. White was a husband to be missed. You keep no photographs about, no remembrances; everything the man owned is squirreled away in an unswept garage; and the photograph you tote day and night is not of him at all, but rather a picture of a kitchen that you will never be able to afford. And yet you chastise me for not living up to your husband’s precedent?”
There was a golden age, Reader, when being slapped by a woman was for your narrator an invigorating weekly occurrence. But six decades had passed since I’d had the honor, and Mrs. White, in our first instance of physical contact, delivered a spectacular reminder of the speed, accuracy, and decibel of this most feminine of maneuvers. Possessed of no lifeblood, my cheek cracked like seat leather. It was her face, however, that looked injured.
“How could you? Charles was—he was everything to me! Everything! I just can’t—I can’t look at him. How can I look at him? He left me here, he left me all alone, and I’m so angry with him, so . . . furious. Every time I look at Junior or Franny—they look like him, Mr. Gray. They look just like him. I’m angry with them, too. Can’t you see that? Maybe I won’t ever have that kitchen in the picture, but what else is there to do but try? What else can I do but go forward?”
With the slap still echoing between fences, our quiet suburbs were engulfed by the first boom of fireworks over the lake. Inside, Clown howled and the children moaned, certain that they were missing the defining event of their generation.
The array of whistles, pops, and bangs continued for twenty minutes, during which time I felt as if it were I being downed, and deservedly so, by a firing squad of giants. Mrs. White, too, swayed as if perforated by bullets. By the concluding explosion, I was able to see her without the hindrance of fury. Tragically, she still wore her party dress, its perky bows as deflated as the yard’s balloons. Her Eska Protein Wave had also capitulated to gravity, its buoyant tousle now an unqualified tangle. The naked shoulders that had broadcasted confidence now shivered.
“Mrs. White,” said I.
She raised a silencing hand. The same hand plunged into a pocket and dug out a pack of Chesterfields. She turned away from me to elude a nonexistent breeze, but after her cig was lit, she did not turn back around. Her voice was as soft as the plumes of smoke.
“What do you mean, how everyone speeds through life except you?”
It is easier to speak truth to a woman’s back.
“I have . . . certain characteristics.”
“I know. I suppose I wasn’t sure, but I had an idea.”
“How?”
“I told you, I know what goes on in my own home. You could stop flushing the toilet, you know, if you’re not really using it. Water costs money.”
It was a bizarrely practical request.
“Are you afraid of me?” asked I.
Her shoulder blades rolled. “I don’t know what to be afraid of. It’s hard to choose. You know, six months before y
ou came, they sent home Charles’s body. There was a funeral and everything; the whole neighborhood came. But I only ever got to see the box. The casket. The funeral people said he wasn’t in a state to be seen. But I regret not forcing them to show me, I regret it every day, because now when I think of Charles, I think of that box and how he’s in there just rotting away. Sometimes I think he probably looks a little like you, Mr. Gray.”
I touched the flesh of my cheek. It held the contour of her slap.
“I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t mind how you look. I don’t mind looking at you at all. Because it’s like looking at Charles, in a way. I don’t care how horrid that sounds.”
Perhaps she’d turned her back for her own sake.
“It is not horrid at all,” said I.
She sighed smoke. “You didn’t fight in Korea.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then what were you doing before this?”
“Would you believe I was a top-secret spy in Nazi Germany?”
She laughed once, then succumbed to an adorably antisocial impulse, holding her cigarette to the drooping end of a star-spangled banner. It began to sizzle upward like a stick of my father’s TNT.
“At this point,” said she, “I’d believe almost anything.”
Junior and Franny had opted to elevate their anguish to actual weeping, and Mrs. White went indoors to soothe them, for that was her job, but before doing so dropped her cig on a stomped party hat that swiftly took up the flame. I put out the burning banner with my hand and ground the cardboard hat with my heel, though I wasn’t sure why I bothered. Mrs. White had shown little interest in salvaging the grounds and might have enjoyed a cleansing blaze. In the tautology of her civil defense booklets, she and I, having revealed cold truths to one another and chosen to accept them, had made a silent pact of mutual annihilation. I, for one, having been all too slowly annihilated for some time, was glad to have found a partner with whom to share it.
XII.
OVER THE ENSUING YEAR, INSPIRED by the fateful barbecue, we Whites discarded, bit by bit, the homogenized provisos of suburban life, and it was exhilarating. To vault ahead decades in lingo, Dearest Reader, Mrs. White quit giving a fuck. Our garden of enchantment became an ogre’s lair of draping trumpet vine, thick carpetweed, ornery crabgrass, and bobbing ragweed, with pockets of poison ivy, prickly lettuce, and cocklebur to add an element of danger to Junior, Franny, and Clown’s explorations. The three of them bled, scratched, and sneezed, and were the stronger for it.
The kitchen also brambled. Its pink purity became scuffed by stains and scalds as Mrs. White forwent magazine chefs d’oeuvre like Gourmet Pâté de Foie Gras (liverwurst, cream cheese, bouillon) and replaced them with simpler, hotter, more toothsome fare: hams, meat loafs, sausages, soups. In this single sphere was I superior to Mr. White, for I had no colleagues comparing their wives’ culinary showpieces, nor did I have taste buds longing for exotic tangs.
The living room, too, wilded. Canasta and Tupperware party invites had dried up, so it was television all the time, and the four of us huddled without thought of propriety. In September 1956, as we, along with the rest of America, watched Elvis Presley jerk about Ed Sullivan’s stage like he had rickets, Franny declared that she was “mad about” Elvis, and Junior squirmed against me with laughter. In January 1957, during Steve Allen’s final night as the host of The Tonight Show, Franny bounced upon my lap to the musical interludes. In March 1957, after adoring The Wizard of Oz, Mrs. White insisted upon watching a broadcast of Gone with the Wind, a film I’d long picketed in Bridey’s honor, and when she cried during Melanie’s deathbed scene, I held out the Kleenex economy pack and she accepted it, her fingertips grazing my cold palm without even a shiver.
I gazed out the picture window, daring every busybody, from Mrs. Shoemaker to Gød, to take offense. In the reflective glass I could see the permanent speckles of my left cheek—popped capillaries from Mrs. White’s Fourth of July slap. They looked like pimples, and I prized them as memorials to my youth. It was possible, thought I, that I was the man of the house, and if so, artifice could no longer be permitted. One night, after everyone else was asleep, I packed away the Royal Quiet de Luxe typewriter, but not before typing an imagined apology to the Marlboro Man, who, in retrospect, had known exactly what he was doing, sending me here.
Without so much as a hat to shield my ugly face, I led a parade of White children across the neighborhood to matinees, play dates, lessons, and clubs, and on the occasion when they had stressors too uncomfortable to discuss with their mother, I coaxed the truth from them before delivering advice more nuanced than my old cure-alls of punching with fist and kicking with boot.
Junior, especially, needed counsel. Periodically our path would intersect with herds of “greasers”—leather-jacketed, Brylcreem-slathered delinquents revving their juiced-up, super-torqued, V-8-engined hot rods in anticipation of drag-race hooliganism. In each goon’s patchwork of scars Junior saw the natural maturation of his schoolyard shiners, and oh, Reader, could I ever sympathize with his longing to hop into one of the speedsters and peel off into the sunset, away from responsibility, away from his mother. I’d done the same thing to my own.
But hadn’t I mourned Abigail Finch when I’d learned how she’d died alone? More than the greasers represented escape, they represented a chance to steer Junior from error. Whenever we saw such rowdies, I’d take the boy by the shoulder, give it a hard squeeze, and run through the same routine.
“Who are those boys?”
“Herbie Hinkles,” Junior would respond.
“And what do we think of Herbie Hinkles?”
Junior would extend his tongue and offer a strenuous raspberry. Then I’d wink, shove him ahead with the surplus of force he enjoyed, and feel Johnny’s aggie in my stomach radiate with sudden warmth. Perhaps proffering guidance was part of the enigmatic know-how men were supposed to accrue?
One afternoon, after I’d propelled Junior into the Orpheum to see a picture called I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Franny, who’d tagged along, tugged my sleeve until I squatted down. She placed a hand to her mouth and whispered into my right ear, the one missing a lobe, from Leather’s scalpel.
“I love you, Mr. Gray.”
I recoiled as if bitten, scoffed with a rude exhale, and made haste toward Heavenly Hills so that Franny, with her podgy legs, had to run to keep pace, but not before I cast a last look at the Orpheum, where Junior stood at a window, watching us leave. He was eleven and male, not allowed to speak such sap, yet I could feel his confirmative emotion as surely as a teenage werewolf could feel the prickling rise of a pregnant moon.
As complicit as I’d become in raising the children, Clown remained my closest chum. Mrs. White had quit asking for rent (I merrily contributed more than my share to family expenses), and I, high on belonging, delighted at Clown’s every astute defecation upon the yards of the block’s biggest bullies. Through front windows I enjoyed Mr. Cunningham’s limp disbelief, Mrs. Shoemaker’s jaw-gnashing fury, and the old folks’ cancerous hate. To further goad them, I began extending tra-la-la hellos to their colored laborers. These men stared, wide-eyed, before lifting salutes that were at first tentative, weeks later earnest, and months later downright emboldened. Soon they took the initiative, calling out, Howdy-do, Mr. Gray! Howdy-do, Clown!
My camaraderie with Negroes was a step too far. Some infuriated citizen’s paperboy son was hired as sniper, and he hurled rolled-up newsprint missiles at me whenever he caught me misbehaving. After snatching several midair and fastballing them back, including one bull’s-eye that sent the underage terrorist somersaulting off his two-wheeler, I stayed my hand. As it happened, our Zenith was on the fritz, and famished for entertainment, I unrolled the newspaper and began to read it, even as Clown strained homeward.
It was the first of many issues of The Wichita Eagle that I stole; Mrs. White had no stomach for hard news and did not subscribe. Reclined in Charles’s old chair, I found, lo and behol
d, a war raging beyond the suburbs’ petunias. America’s gradual easing into racial desegregation was having a rough go of it, with Georgia and Florida refusing to acknowledge the Supreme Court’s progressive decrees. In May, I read about the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, a twenty-five-thousand-person civil rights demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial, at which Negro leaders asked—nay, demanded!—that their brothers and sisters be given full voting rights.
The dam broke in September. After a day-long filibuster by an impressive bladder-clencher named Strom Thurmond, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was cleared for President Ike to sign, though the pen he used would be inked with blood. Birmingham: a Negro reverend thrashed for enrolling his daughters in a white school. Nashville: Hattie Cotton Elementary dynamited after a single Negro girl’s admission. Little Rock: a militia ordered by the governor to forcibly block nine Negro children from entering.
Mrs. White hated to bitter her meals with distasteful talk, but it became unavoidable. Built into the front brick of her library were two water fountains, the larger labeled WHITE, the smaller COLORED. Federal fiat was to remove the offending placards, but you try it in such charged air! The task was put off month after month. Mrs. White’s green eyes flashed with the desire to do the deed in full view of Heavenly Hills passersby, thereby joining me in the rewarding pastime of exposing their hypocrisy and watching them squirm. If only, sighed she, she knew more about screwdrivers, drills, whatever else was needed.
Was she counting on me as she’d once counted upon Charles? On the same day that the Army’s 101st Airborne Division enforced the Little Rock Nine’s gutsy entrance into Central High School, I hooked Clown to a leash, grabbed a crowbar from the garage, and with those two weapons walked past the Orpheum to the library, a red-brick Andrew Carnegie in the middle of a bustling business area.
