Fierce Pretty Things

by Tom Howard

  “We ought to just shake hands,” I said.

  Swofford slapped me in the face again, and my eyes teared up.

  “Goddamn,” I said. “You’re making it hard for us to become best friends, Swofford.” My eyes were stinging and I looked all around me. And what I saw was that everyone was just waiting for Swofford to give it to me. They didn’t care if I fought back or not. And when I looked at their faces I could remember something vicious I’d done to each of them.

  “Swofford,” I said. “I don’t know what to do here.”

  He threw me down then, and a big cheer went up. I put my hands over my face but otherwise I didn’t do anything to stop it. A couple other kids joined in, Hoyle and Sherman and Ledecky and even Stacy Adams, kicking me in the legs while Swofford pummeled me in the stomach and the chest. I turned my head on the grass and I could see Franny up on the top step by the school entrance. I wondered if she was going to run down to stop them, maybe make some kind of speech about how we were all in this together, about how I deserved a second chance just like anybody else would. But she only turned and went back into the shadows of the school, and then I took a punch to the face. I turned my head to see who it was and it was Muncie. He smiled and called me a demon son of a bitch and punched me again.

  It went on like that for a couple minutes. I knew I’d be floating above it like Jesus sometime soon, without any pain, but it was taking a good while.

  “You got it all wrong,” Jesus said, looking down on me between punches. “You think there aren’t any damn nails up here just because you don’t see ’em glowing?”

  After a time I did start to float. I looked down and saw the mess I was. I saw how big I looked, like a monster dragged down at last by the villagers, and I saw how happy they all were. My things had spilled from my bag onto the grass, and I watched Muncie reach down to pick up Ma’s hand from Dillard’s. He held it over his head and they all shrieked and cheered, and then he smashed it down on the sidewalk and broke it into a hundred pieces, and they cheered even harder.

  Sometime later I drifted back down. Everything ached at least a little, but nothing hurt more than anything else so I figured I was okay. I looked around for Franny but I didn’t see her. Then I saw black boots coming my way. I rolled over and squinted up at the afternoon sun.

  “Headly,” I said.

  He was smiling. And I knew for sure he was going to reach down to help me up. We’d put our arms around each other and it would be something good, something small but good, and it would teach me a lesson about something. We wouldn’t even have to say anything or make any big speeches. It would just be something true that we both knew.

  Then he lifted his boot.

  I said, “Okay, Headly,” as his boot came down.

  * * *

  When I came to, there was a note crumpled in my hand. I waited as long as I could to see if you were ok. Come to my house. Franny.

  It was growing dark by then. The streetlamps were coming on as I turned onto Old Meadow. I stopped in front of Franny’s place, swaying back and forth in the wind. The television wasn’t on tonight, and all the lights were off except for an upstairs bedroom. I went to the door and found another note in Franny’s writing, telling me to come in without knocking. I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  The living room was dark and cool, and I made my way through the shadows toward the bottom of the stairs. On the way I passed a hat rack with a fedora perched on top. Next to the hat rack was an ironing board wearing a bonnet. I kept going and went up the stairs.

  In the bedroom I found Franny, sitting in an armchair next to a hospital bed set up in the middle of the room.

  “She can’t hear you, it’s okay.” She waved me over. “You won’t bother her. But she likes having me next to her. She’s my aunt. You can’t tell now but she was some kind of beauty. I can’t get her makeup right, though.”

  I looked at the woman in the bed. I could see that she’d been a beauty, once. “Can I sit with her too?” I asked.

  “You should,” she said.

  So I brought a chair over and sat with the two of them. The window was open a bit and there were sounds coming in, cars going past and leaves scraping on the sidewalk and some other sound, too, something low and forceful that I couldn’t make out.

  What I was thinking of, sitting there, was just Franny. How she’d dance in the living room. I pictured her doing her ballerina spins in the glow of the television, with the hat rack and the ironing board propped up against the wall. I imagined the whisper of her feet as she moved along the floor. Trying not wake up her aunt. Bowing after she was done. Thank you. Why, thank you. And I don’t know why but it made me think of Roy, too, and the Board. All of it was running together in my head. And through it all the low sound I was hearing only got louder still. I knew it was the river I was hearing, moving past in the dark, far off.

  I stayed for a while, only listening.

  When I left I walked to the cemetery. It was cooler now and the wind was picking up. Leaves were blowing across the back hillside and something was going on with my heart but I didn’t understand what it was. I thought maybe I’d gotten hit harder than I knew and I was all bruised up in there.

  Up ahead I saw someone at Ma’s grave. He was lying on the ground with his legs curled up to his chest. The light had fallen but I could just make out the green army jacket. I stopped then. I turned and looked down the hill, toward where I knew the river was. It’s a slow river but in my head the water was rushing like mad, like something fierce and relentless. I thought the right thing for me to do then was to go down the hill and leave Roy to himself. He didn’t want anyone to see him curled up like that. Nobody wanted to be seen like that.

  But I didn’t go back down. I kept hearing the river in my head, and the wind was blowing, and I didn’t know a damn thing about what to do. So I turned up the hill and made my way toward him as the night closed in.

  5

  Scarecrows

  They’re in Dixon’s yard again. A boy and a girl, both blond-haired and tanned even though it’s late March and the ground is covered in snow. They’re dancing around the wooden scarecrows in the corner of the fenced yard.

  Maude comes by on her way to fold the laundry, basket tucked against her hip. She stops and puts one hand on the back of Dixon’s wheelchair and peers out the window. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” he says.

  “Really.”

  “The snow,” he says, with a vague, wobbly-armed gesture toward the glass. The girl’s doing cartwheels now across the snowy yard. The Post-it note that Dixon found inside his medicine cabinet, in Dixon’s shaky handwriting, says, IT’S MOLLY. SHE WAS FIFTY-THREE WHEN SHE DIED.

  Weird. Well, okay, the whole thing is weird. He doesn’t know why Molly is a young girl again. She looks to be eleven or twelve. And yet. The dimples, the sea-green eyes, the toothy smile—it has to be Molly.

  “I’m sick of the snow,” says Maude.

  The boy, now. Molly’s brother. Dixon has been trying to remember his name, but it’s been so long. THE BOY—STARTS WITH A B. PROBABLY! Infuriating. Brian? Bradley? Barry? He was nine, Dixon thinks. But he looks younger out there in the yard. Insubstantial. A string bean of a boy. As Dixon watches, the string bean bows gravely in his direction, then turns back toward the yard. He raises his thin arms in a martial arts posture, preparing to face off against some invisible opponent across the yard. Then he moves forward, executing a series of wild but entertaining punches, double punches, leaps, blocks, and lunges. Halfway across, he tries an ambitious spinning leg kick and goes down in the snow just as Molly wipes out on her cartwheel, landing behind him.

  Dixon puts his hand over his chest. The slightest pressure there.

  Maude turns from the window. “Chest?”

  “Indigestion,” he says.

  She makes an unhappy mmmph sound. “The hip?”

  When Dixon hesitates, she goes to the kitchen and gets a laminate
d strip eighteen inches wide, showing faces in various stages of horror on a one-to-ten scale. Dixon points to the face in the sixth position, which is shaded orange and has a squiggly horizontal line for the mouth.

  “You always say six.”

  “I’m fine, Maude.”

  “You’re pale.”

  “I’m old.”

  Outside, Molly and B spring up from the snow, arms raised triumphantly, and Dixon hides a smile.

  Maude sets down the basket and folds her arms over her chest. She narrows her eyes. “Don’t,” she says.

  “I’m not seeing things,” Dixon says.

  “I can’t,” Maude says. “Not today.”

  The two kids are now linked arm in arm in the middle of the yard. B wiggles his free arm like a spaghetti noodle, starting a wave that moves across his body like a shiver. Through his small chest, out the shoulder, then down his other arm and into Molly, who executes the same move in reverse, completing the wave by blowing Dixon a delightful, snowy kiss.

  “You’ve got a look,” Maude says.

  Dixon turns away from the window. “It’s my face. I get looks,” he says. “I’m—”

  “Old, I know.”

  He wants to tell her. It kills him not to tell her. He wants to say, Maude, you’ve got to see them, they’re perfect! They’ve got the most beautiful faces and they’re happy, Maude! (Well, mostly happy. Sometimes when he looks closely, he might see that B’s fine hair is damp, matted against his forehead. That one of Molly’s green eyes doesn’t blink, or has grown muddy and dull. That B’s feet are webbed, or that he has no feet at all, only rootlike tendrils snaking down from his calves, affixing him to the earth. It’s only late in the day when he sees these things, though, and they’re easily forgotten.)

  But the Post-it note was clear. DO NOT TELL MAUDE. That one was stuck to the inside of his bedside drawer when he went to retrieve his glasses. Then there was the other one, folded and tucked inside the pocket of Dixon’s robe. DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT. STOP. NO.

  The notes are a new thing. He’s almost positive that they’re a new thing. He’s had trouble remembering, and the notes help. Maude thinks it’s the drugs causing him to forget, but it goes back a few years, since before Dixon’s last heart attack. He was better at hiding the lapses then. The broken hip—and the complications from the broken hip, and the painkillers, and the side effects from the painkillers—have only made things worse. He has a vague sense—but everything is a vague sense these days—that he’s forgotten much more than he realizes. Details small and large. The boy’s name, for example. So when an old memory surfaces, jewel-like, from the dark waters of his mind, he tries to make a note of that too.

  Maude goes to fold the laundry, squeezing his shoulder lightly as she departs.

  He’s told her about the kids already. About the ghosts. That has to be it. Explains the Post-it notes. He has a memory, fuzzy around the edges, sharp and unhappy in the center, of Maude’s face going slack, of Maude looking dead-eyed and broken while Dixon blathers on.

  And he gets it. He totally and completely gets it. The boy’s name is hidden from him, but Dixon remembers the day he and Maude went to select the casket. The funeral director suggested a silver one. It had a spray of doves against a field of baby blue on the inside panel, above the words Going Home. “My son doesn’t need to look up at birds when he’s dead,” Maude told him. She said her son had no use for birds when he was alive, and even less use for them now. Fuck your goddamn birds, she said. On the way home the radio was playing “Me and Bobby Mc-Gee” by Janis Joplin, and the wind was blowing orange and yellow leaves across the road, and Maude cried like a little girl.

  Dixon shifts in the wheelchair, getting comfortable. Molly looks good. Nice to see her with her long hair again. He thinks about Maude, how she knitted a cap when the adult Molly—still with the dimples and the sea-green eyes—was going through radiation. Knitted eighteen caps, actually. I know you didn’t need eighteen caps, Maude told her in the hospital toward the end. That killed him. The past tense. He wanted to tell Maude to take it back, to take back that past tense. I needed, said Molly, exactly eighteen. And they smiled at each other, the two of them. Dixon sobbed. The two women were fine, but Dixon sobbed.

  “Looking good, Mol,” he says, but quietly. No reason to upset Maude. Molly blows him another kiss, and then the kids approach each other. They clasp hands as their bodies meet, chest to chest and cheek to cheek. They tango their way to Dixon’s window, eyes shining and faces playfully serious. At the edge of the patio—they never come closer than the patio—they execute a turn, a surprisingly good one considering that they’re kids, and they’re dead, and they’re in the snow. He can see them begin to giggle as their faces turn away. They dance to the garden, now buried under the snow except for the tops of the two scarecrows in the corner. When they reach the corner, they fade into nothing, and then they’re gone.

  Later, lying on his side and facing the wall while Maude cleans him up, Dixon says, “Hey, Maude.”

  “Uh-huh,” she says.

  “We should take tango lessons.”

  “Turn just a little,” sighing.

  “I always loved the tango, Maude.”

  “More. Turn more. I can’t lift your whole body, Dixon.”

  He turns. “So graceful, so powerful, Maude. Like a love story. Like the whole arc of a love story in a single dance.”

  “Ah,” she says, and she stops.

  “Maude?”

  “It’s just,” she says.

  “Oh.” Dixon’s chest fills for a moment. And there is it, another jewel breaking the surface. This one is dark and ruby red, the color of Maude’s dress, Maude’s lips, the flush in her face as he pulls her young, graceful body to his.

  “I forgot, Maude.”

  “Not your fault, Dixon.” But she sounds tired.

  “Maude,” he says, thinking of something. Something that’s just occurred to him. “Our boy, his name is on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t—”

  “No,” she says, sharply. “Just—no. Not again.” And then she’s silent.

  DON’T BRING UP THE BOY ANYMORE. The problem with the Post-it note scheme, Dixon keeps forgetting, is that it’s so easy for him to forget about the Post-it note scheme.

  When she’s finished, she helps him back into the wheelchair. He can walk a bit, though unsteadily; the wheelchair, in Dixon’s mind, is mostly to keep her from worrying that he’ll do something stupid. In January he tried to shovel the sidewalk while Maude was taking a nap. Dumb, dumb. But he hated seeing Maude do it. He didn’t get far. She found him in the driveway, face down, lip bloodied and bruises all along one side of his face. Nothing too bad. But of course he looked frightful. Scared Maude to death. She sat in the garage by herself for half an hour after they got home from the hospital. Said she just needed a few.

  “Time for your Demerol,” she says.

  She reaches for a pill, and Dixon sees a shadow on her face. He leans forward to inspect her. When she raises her eyes to him, she’s different. A haggard old woman! Right in his house! Handing him a pill, of all things. Expecting him to not even notice!

  “Clever,” he says, and he swats the pill out of her hand.

  She looks hurt for a second. Hurt and confused. Foiled. Exactly the way he imagines that a murderess would look. Then she scoops the pill up from the carpet and stands up straight.

  “Dixon,” she says.

  “I know my name,” he says. He’s shaking a little now. “My name—my name—isn’t the mystery here.”

  “Let’s not do this.”

  “Oh, that’s fine. That’s fine coming from you. Let’s not do this.” He’s still shaking. Just a bit of drool happening, too, but that’s fine. The good news is that he’s figured it out in time. “Taking advantage of me,” he says, “because I’m in this wheelchair.”

  “I’m not doing anything of the kind. And you know it.”

  “When Maude gets home she’ll take care of you.
You think you can pull one over on Maude? That woman can move. She’ll dance around you like a—” He stops, trying to pull something free from the dark waters. Something he just had. “Hold on, hold on.” Oh, and there it is. It’s red. It’s ruby red. “She could—here’s what she could do. The tango.” He smiles, full of grim satisfaction. “You’re going to mess with a woman who can do the tango? There’s a whole love story in a tango, you know.” The pressure in his chest builds again. “A whole—a whole arc, is what I mean. Hold on. Let me just—I want to think for a minute.”

  She sits down at the table and puts her hands on her knees and waits.

  Dixon watches her for a few seconds. He watches how her face changes, becomes familiar, becomes more than familiar.

  “Hey,” he says. He touches her hand. “Hey, Maude. Hey.”

  She opens her eyes. Still a beauty, Maude. She says, “Listen, Dixon. How about you take your pill?”

  He takes the pill from her. She watches him put it in his mouth, then hands him a glass of water.

  “Dixon,” she says, “I have to run out. Just to refill some prescriptions.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Maybe you can take a nap while I’m gone. You must be tired.”

  “I guess I’m a little tired.”

  “You want me to help you into bed?”

  Dixon smiles at her. “I’ll sit here, Maude. I’ll sit by the window if that’s okay.”

  When she leaves, he removes the pill from under his tongue and drops it into a baggy in his pocket. He takes out the pad and writes, MAUDE LOVED TO DANCE. WE USED TO DO THE TANGO. SHE WORE A RED DRESS. He rolls himself into the bedroom, sticks the note inside the top drawer of his dresser, then rolls into the bathroom, where he writes a second note. Apologizing. Just in case he forgets that he upset her. At least she’ll know he was sorry. He can’t remember exactly what he did now, but he knows it wasn’t good. The note should please her, anyway. He pushes himself up from the wheelchair, leans across the sink to attach the note to Maude’s side of the mirror. The note falls immediately, and Dixon watches it join a graveyard of paper butterflies down by the faucet, a dozen yellow wings tattooed with the same three-word message, I’M SORRY MAUDE, I’M SORRY MAUDE, I’M SORRY MAUDE.