by Drury, Tom
Albert sat on the toilet lid looking up at the light fixture as she painted antiseptic beneath his eye with a stiff black brush built into the cap of the bottle.
“Now it looks really terrible,” she said.
Then, for no reason other than play, she painted a stripe under the other eye.
“Now you’re a football player.”
“She never hit me there.”
“Oh, I like this look.”
They went into the bedroom and closed the door. The room was dark except for the light from the windows.
He undressed her, rolled her black tights down. Lyris breathed slowly, fingers trembling at her sides. Being with Albert was more than she’d ever expected. They liked making love in the early hours of the night, when time lay like emptiness before them. They liked being close to coming. The blue light from the street made a halo around the bed.
Two hours went by. The softest kiss of the night and they rested, flat on their backs beneath a sheet. Lyris traced with her fingers the marks she had painted on his face. Albert slept. She crossed his body with her leg and lay her head on his shoulder. This was the best, the most bearable loneliness.
Lyris’s bad dream was of places—rooms in the orphanage, in foster homes, in Grouse County. Other rooms she did not know yet, maybe would never know.
She saw them from above. Apparently she was on some kind of catwalk. The rooms went by one by one as in a slideshow, dimly lit and empty of people, with tables and chairs, beds and cupboards. Maybe the future had come, when everything alive would be swept away.
All Lyris had to do was decide which room should be hers and claim it. But it was a long way down. The fall could hurt her. It seemed more logical that she should just appear in the room but that didn’t seem to be happening. Meanwhile her chance to be anywhere at all was slipping away, leaving her stranded in this cold nowhere, and she called for help.
“What is it?” said Albert. In confusion he’d gone to the windows.
She slid on her back across the mattress and took him by the arm, pulling him to the bed.
“Help me wake up,” she said.
Ned Kuhlers was the most influential lawyer in Grouse County. Once Dan’s adversary, he was now his biggest client. He had an office above the park with a tropical fish tank running the length of the reception area.
Ned’s secretary pushed a button on the intercom. “Dan Norman’s here.”
“Get that bastard in here.”
Dan entered Ned’s office and sank into a green leather chair with brass grommets running along the seams.
“What’s different?” said Ned.
“The clock is slow, the fern is dying, and there’s a stain on the paneling that appears to be oil of some kind,” said Dan. “Likely you were eating at your desk and shook up a bottle of salad dressing and the top wasn’t on right.”
Ned laughed. He’d boxed flyweight in the merchant marines and would sometimes move his hands fast to make people flinch.
“Correct on some counts,” he said. “Anyway. You will like this. My client had a car accident. He pulled out on 33 and plowed into some other guy. Now, we’re not contesting fault. We had the stop. So be it. But it turns out the other driver is a bowler. Do you bowl?”
“Not often.”
“I know. The pins go up, they come down, so what. But this guy loves bowling so much that it gives him pain and suffering not to.”
“Since the accident.”
“They say he’ll never bowl again.”
“Too bad.”
“Yes, but for the simple fact that he is bowling,” said Ned. “Just doing it where he won’t be seen. Moved from the Rose Bowl in Morrisville to Rust River Lanes.”
“In Romyla.”
“Tuesdays at nine o’clock.”
“Probably trying to get his form back.”
“You’re either bowling or you’re not bowling.”
“You want pictures,” said Dan.
“I want video.”
“What’s he look like?”
Ned tossed a manila envelope across the desk and Dan caught it.
Dan figured he could use a partner, as one lone-wolf bowler might notice another. He asked his assistant Donna, who was always up for anything undercover. She’d been Woman A in Lord Norman’s exposure of sexist hiring patterns at Airstream Creamery in Morrisville.
Dan told her to dress naturally, but when he arrived at her house she came out wearing an orange mohair half-sleeved sweater, a strapless white dress with black polka dots and flared skirt, shimmery green anklets and heels. She got in the car, gathered the papery folds of the dress, and shut the door.
“Let’s do some bowling,” she said.
“Nice outfit, but the idea is not to draw attention,” said Dan.
“Say you were doing something secret,” she said. “Wouldn’t the person trying not to draw attention be exactly the one you’d worry about?”
“That almost makes sense,” said Dan.
Romyla served as a bedroom town for both Morrisville and Stone City, though the Romylans did not like the term, as it made them seem less than the whole show. Rust River Lanes had eight alleys on Main Street in a building that had once been a bank. A big pin stood on the roof of the building, but it was not lighted, so at night it looked like an apparition.
Dan and Donna got shoes from the counter and glasses of beer and took a lane two up from the man who had been broadsided on Route 33. A sign on the wall set out the rules.
NO SMOKING
NO LOFTING
NO CURSING
NO FIREWORKS
NO GESTURES
Dan placed a small and cunning video recorder on the scorer’s table. The works were concealed in a Fanta pop can with a button on top that turned the camera on and off. Lynn Lord had made it himself. They called it the Fanta cam and it took HD video and stills.
Everyone’s hands are low at some point in their bowling delivery, but Donna kept her hands low throughout. She wove her way to the line as if herding small animals in a party dress.
The ball rolled slowly, and the pins fell wearily in on themselves, leaving splits. Dan’s release point was inconsistent, and he’d usually end up with a blister on his thumb. Together they seemed bad enough to be innocent bowlers.
The target of their investigation bowled like a man on the tour. He whipped his arm around and finished with gloved hand held high and pins flying like pheasants from grass.
When it got to be ten-thirty and they had bowled long enough to seem credible, Dan drove Donna home and parked beside the tall and narrow house in Mixerton where she rented the top floor.
“We make a good team, teammate,” she said.
“Ned will be happy.”
“Who cares.”
“He’s the client.”
“You knew when you asked me. I knew. I didn’t say anything.”
“Knew what?”
“You wanted my company. People need each other’s company. That’s all right.” She smoothed her dress. “I made myself nice. Life goes on a little while and then it’s over.”
“Donna, I didn’t mean to give you the idea that, um, well, that this was—”
“And I suppose all my ideas come from you.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
Dan leaned down to give her a friendly kiss or maybe she was right and he didn’t know what he intended. Anyway it’s not what happened.
They made out in the car, her dress rustling like fire. He pressed her hair back and kissed her lips. He knew he’d feel terrible when the kiss was over, but it seemed natural as could be in the moment.
A car drove down the quiet road, the light passing ov
er them. Dan got out of the car and went around to open her door. Millers swarmed around a streetlamp.
“Do you want to come up?” said Donna.
“Truth is I do, Donna. But what I ought to do is go home.”
“Okay, Dan. But you know what?”
“What?”
“Some things are not serious.”
Louise kept thinking of Lyris and Albert’s apartment. At an estate auction in Chesley she outbid competitors for a fine oak table and a copper pan rack and had them delivered to the third floor of the Kleeborg Building.
That night after closing she took her toolbox and went upstairs. The table and rack waited in the hallway. Albert answered the door in his stocking feet.
“Hi,” he said. “I was just watching a special about the yeti.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He might be a bear.”
“That’s no fun.”
“Is that Louise?” called Lyris from inside.
“Yeah,” said Albert.
“Tell her she’s got to stop.”
“You can’t keep giving us stuff,” said Albert.
“Don’t you like them?”
“The table I love. The other thing I don’t know what it is.”
“I’ll show you.”
The kitchen had an island and Louise and Lyris climbed onto it to install the pan rack, which would hang suspended from chains. Lyris held the hardware while Louise drilled holes in the ceiling as thin columns of powdered plaster drifted down.
“I’ve always wanted one of these,” said Louise. “I see them in magazines and they make me think the people must have lots of friends.”
It was hot near the ceiling and Lyris wiped sweat from her cheek with the back of her hand. Louise wondered what reason on earth kept her from leaving this poor young couple be.
Albert leaned against the counter and watched them working. “I think I’ll go out to a bar or something,” he said.
The women looked down on him. “I could kick you from here,” said Lyris.
“But would you?”
“No.”
When the rack was installed and level Albert helped them down from the island and they hung pots and pans and a big spoon and stood watching them turn slowly in the air.
“I can’t believe this is really our kitchen,” said Lyris.
Albert and Louise carried the table in from the hallway, and Lyris brought the leaves that went with it. The table was well made and heavy, with stout spindle legs rarely found, and they would rest and lean on it now and then.
They put the table in the dining room, pulled the ends apart, laid the leaves on the rails, aligning pegs and holes, and pushed the table snugly back together.
“I love putting leaves in tables,” said Albert. “It’s the only thing I used to like about holidays at home.”
He rounded up chairs and Lyris got a bottle of wine and poured three drinks and they sat at the table and raised their glasses.
“To Louise,” said Lyris.
“This is a big table,” said Albert. “We will need to have many children.”
“I don’t know why you’re being so nice to us,” said Lyris.
“No special reason,” said Louise. “That’s what mothers do, isn’t it?”
She closed her eyes and laughed softly.
“Jesus,” she said. “Where did that come from. I’m sorry. What friends do.”
Albert drank his wine. The yeti show played in the living room, a storm howling in the mountains.
“It’s all right,” said Lyris. “I know what you mean.”
Louise covered her embarrassed smile with her hand and shook her head. “I think I will be going.”
She drove home in the Scout II, shifting gears harshly. She listened to the radio for a while, shut it off, and punched the dashboard.
What she said came out so easily. In that moment, when they were relaxed and together, she must have believed it.
At the farm, yellow leaves scratched and spun across the yard. The lights were on in the house, but she would not go in yet. She sat in the truck with her hands on her face, looking out over the tops of her fingers.
She was a mother, though who would remember? Her daughter died at birth sixteen years ago. Louise almost died too. If she had, she wondered, would she and the girl be together? In any way that they were aware of, she meant.
Sometimes she thought of Iris, imagined the life she would have had. Watching television, putting on Louise’s makeup, riding in cars with reckless boys. Or playing soccer, running and kicking, hair flying in the wind.
Dan Norman had learned of Jack Snow’s prison term, which would satisfy his clients’ desire to discredit him in their daughter’s eyes. He still wondered what Jack and Wendy were doing in the warehouse.
He staked it out, watching with binoculars from the trainyard. They worked bankers’ hours, arriving in the red Mustang. Parcel trucks came and went. There was one visitor, a lady who went inside and left half an hour later.
Dan ran her license plates and found that she was a professor named Mildred at the community college in Stone City. He found her one day in her office, a small room musty with books at the end of a hallway in the Culture, Media and Sport Annex.
She was a tall woman, in her sixties, Dan guessed, with long brown hair and a gray felt hat with a black ribbon on the side.
“Mr. Snow put up a notice on a bulletin board looking for someone to appraise Celtic relics,” she said. “I was curious. And the truth is, I could use the money. Part-time college professors are not highly paid in this area.”
“You went, you talked to him,” said Dan.
“They’re not real,” she said. “He’s tried to make them look old, but I don’t know who they would fool. They’re not, they don’t, no.”
“What does he do to them?”
“Tarnishing solutions, crude abrasives. I believe he wraps some of the larger items in blankets and hits them with a two-by-four.”
“So you say, Whoa, this stuff is no good.”
“Something like that. And he suggested that I could estimate what they’d be worth if they were real, and I said I didn’t think that would be a very wise use of my time.”
“Good call,” said Dan.
“I was disappointed.”
“Where are these things from, Ireland?”
“Being copies, I suppose they could be from anywhere. The designs are most likely based on excavations in Europe, Britain, and Ireland. The Celts, you know, were not a single culture, and would not have referred to themselves as ‘Celts.’ They were a lot of different people who spoke a similar language and lived all across central Europe at one time, from Ireland to the Balkans and as far east as Asia Minor.”
Mildred beamed, giving knowledge.
“I had no idea,” said Dan.
“Say, 200 B.C.E.,” she said. “The Greeks called them Keltoi. But then came the Romans and the Germans, and the Celtic speakers of Europe were mostly defeated. I mean, it didn’t happen all at once. Over several centuries. The reason we think of Ireland is that Ireland evaded Romanization. So it was there that many of the stories were written.”
Dan drove out to the warehouse that night, pried open a window in back, and climbed in. He did not mind breaking laws now that he was not in charge of keeping them. The transgression amounted to nothing against making out with Donna behind Louise’s back.
He shined a flashlight down the long and narrow space. Metal shapes glinted on tables. The air smelled of sulfur.
One table held steel swords and scabbards, some new, some in degrees of decomposition. They were simple—broad tapered blades, with crossguards and without. Dan picked one up, tossed it hand to hand. The grip had spiral ridges, making it
easy to hold. Dan ran a finger down the blade, drawing a bead of blood that he wiped on his sleeve.
And so he went through the warehouse, examining helmets, tiaras, crowns, stone and bronze figurines of people and animals with shapes softened as if by fire, a horse with a human face, countless pins and rings and C-shaped neck pieces, oval shields with carvings and eroded edges.
Snooping in the dark, he felt the magic going on here. It was a common magic, as in a gun shop or camera store where people gather around things that have been made and become excited. And why? he wondered. What would account for that. Maybe an ingrained love of tools, from caveman days. Things are not what they seem.
The workbenches were laid out with rasps and saws and ball-peen hammers and sealed plastic containers of many sizes. He opened one and clapped it shut because of the smell. In a clawfoot bathtub, a sword lay submerged in dark greenish liquid. Dan kicked the tub with his boot and a tremor ran the length of the sword.
“What a strange job,” he said.
Having spoken, Dan felt the presence of someone watching or listening. This did not concern him. He would have the upper hand.
There was a door in a corner of the warehouse, and Dan opened it and stepped into a small room with windows. There was an erasable board on the wall with the optimistic title “Shipping and Receiving.”
In a desk he found a cash box and a revolver. He removed the bullets from the gun and put them in his pocket and left, taking nothing else from the warehouse.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MICAH ENTERED Deep Rock Academy in the fall—Eamon went there, and the school was obliged to admit his stepbrother. Deep Rock stands on a hill north of Los Angeles, in Sun Terrace, west of Shadowland, built in the style of a Spanish castle. Round towers anchor the corners, and it was a tower that would get Micah in trouble.
All the students at Deep Rock must do something to care for the school. Micah disinfected the drinking fountains, a humble task but one that allowed him to wander the hallways and the upper floors, where the seniors lounged at their lockers, more handsome and worldly than the teachers.
Micah carried a bucket of cleaner and a sponge on a stick. One day, trying the door to the northeast tower, he found it unlocked and went up the spiral staircase, running his free hand over the gritty bricks. There could be a drinking fountain up there. It was not impossible.
