Spirit

by John Inman

  I stuck my finger in my cheek in my best impersonation of a pensive Shirley Temple. “Well, now let me think, Sam. Oh, yes, I remember. Your brother wasn’t butch enough to deal with it or smart enough to hire a contractor, so I brought over my trusty hod and trowel, and after laying all the bricks to my satisfaction, I then poured out thirty tons of concrete and smoothed out the floor with a spatula from the kitchen. I’ve always adored construction work. Haven’t you?”

  Sam cocked his head to the side and gave me a blistering moue, with just a hint of a grin tweaking the corners of his mouth. “So the answer would be no, then.”

  “Yes,” I snipped. “No.”

  Timmy snickered from somewhere under the stairs. I glanced back at him and saw he had unearthed a hockey stick from somewhere. It must have been Paul’s. It sure wasn’t mine.

  I took advantage of the lull in the conversation to take another stab at clarifying what Sam had said upstairs. I lowered my voice so Timmy couldn’t hear. “Uh, remember upstairs right after you told me how cute I was? Well, pursuant to that, you said something about—”

  “The furnace is new too,” he interrupted, tapping the metal side of it with his knuckles. It gave out a hollow bonking sound. Sort of like his noggin might sound if I hit it with a shovel.

  I tried not to growl. “I know. But about—”

  Sam studied the raftered ceiling over his head, turning this way and that, following the lines of cables and water pipes and electrical wires heading off hither and yon to different parts of the house.

  “The electrical work is new too.”

  I heaved a sigh. Maybe if I played along, he’d shut up about the house long enough for me to ask about what he’d said upstairs. “Yes. The wiring and all the pipes were redone before Paul and Sally bought the house from the previous tenant.”

  “And who was the previous tenant?”

  “I don’t know. Some old lady. She had been living here for like fifty years and was too old and sick to keep the place up, so it was pretty rundown when your brother and my sister came along. But I guess they saw the house’s potential, and since the old lady was ready to sell, they jumped at the chance.”

  Sam was in the corner now, at the end of the new brick wall. He was standing on a chair, inspecting the cable and wires running across the ceiling. Electrician at work. For some reason that turned me on, but then, not much about Sam didn’t.

  Sam was tapping the wall with a pen. He sounded confused. “Whoever laid the brick wall did a terrible job of sealing the room around the electrical wires and pipes. The wall itself looks okay, but where it seams to the end wall and ceiling, it looks like a third-grader did it.”

  “The wall’s still standing,” I said. “That’s good enough for me.”

  Sam clomped down off the chair and smiled. “You’re getting mad.”

  “No. Dis my house all you want.” I lowered my voice again. “The next time I get your clothes off, you’re going to pay for every insult.”

  Sam grinned. “I like the sound of that.”

  “Talk louder!” Timmy cried from the other end of the basement. “I can’t hear you!”

  Sam laughed and called back, “Maybe you weren’t meant to!”

  When I turned to see where Timmy was, Sam walked up behind me and slid his arms around my waist, clasping his hands over my belly, squeezing me tight. His warm lips brushed the fuzz on the back of my neck, and a chill went up my spine.

  “Later, you’re mine,” he whispered.

  I almost said, “I’m yours now,” but bit my tongue before the words escaped. I closed my eyes, relishing the feel of his mouth on my neck, wishing it was foraging a little farther south. Wishing I could explain what he meant when he said what he said earlier. Hoping I knew. Wondering if I really did.

  My cell phone chirped in my pocket.

  Sam and I froze, waiting for whatever was about to happen. Would the furnace blow up? The phone start screaming and wailing again? The house be engulfed with sound? Six-foot crickets jump out of the wall?

  “Answer it outside,” Timmy said. “Maybe Daddy can’t hear you there.”

  We stared at the kid. My God, could it really be that simple?

  The phone chirped again. I could feel it vibrate against my leg.

  “Try it,” Sam said, loosing his arms from around my waist. “Go out the back door. Talk in the yard.”

  Not too thrilled about the idea, I decided perhaps it was worth the risk. Sally might be ready to sic the cops on me for disappearing with her child if I didn’t speak to her soon.

  I fished the phone out and stared at it while unlatching the security door that led to the little flight of concrete steps leading from the basement to the backyard.

  “I’ll stay with Timmy,” Sam said, watching me go.

  I nodded and, blinking away the glare, stepped out into the burning sunshine. The cell phone chirped in my hand.

  By the time I reached my little stand of cypress trees, which I hoped would be a safe enough distance from the house, the phone had rung twice more. Holding my breath in preparation for whatever psychic nightmare was about to befall me once I hit the receive button, I braced my feet and laid the phone to my ear.

  Then with a click of my thumb, I answered the call.

  To my amazement the sky didn’t come crashing down upon my head. And to my further amazement, it wasn’t Sally calling at all. It was Jack. And he was in a sour mood. That part wasn’t much of a surprise. He was usually in a sour mood when I was around.

  “It’s about time you answered your phone, Jason! Where the hell have you been? Sally’s going apeshit!”

  I was in no mood to take abuse from Jack. “How can you tell? She’s pretty much apeshit all the time.”

  His voice was cold and unamused. “Answer me. Why haven’t you been answering your phone?”

  The lie came so easily I didn’t even have to pause long enough to sound guilty. “They’re having a problem with telephone reception in the area. They’re working on it, but they don’t know yet what is causing it.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Prove it,” I snapped back like a taunting twelve-year-old. “What do you want, Jack?”

  “How’s the kid?”

  “He’s fine. You want to talk to him?”

  “No.”

  “How’s the vacation?”

  “It sucks. Right now we just got off the train in some dump in Maine with a population of one hundred thirty-six people.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The fucking sign says so. So far, I’ve seen two Amish families in buggies clattering down the street. Christ, what a hole. There are three buildings I can see from here, and two of them are boarded up. The other one’s a church, and even it needs painting.”

  “What are you going to do in a place like that?”

  “Who the hell knows? Grab some sushi? Catch a musical? Go ask your sister. She’s the big tour director.”

  Am I actually chatting with Jack? I hate Jack.

  And lest I forget, Jack hates me. As if he suddenly remembered it too, Jack’s voice took a sinister turn. And if it got any more sinister, I was going to hang up on his ass.

  “Sally wants to know what you’re talking about when you said you had a surprise for her concerning the house. She’s all worried about it. What the hell were you talking about, Rosemary, and why are you playing head games on your sister? They always filter down to me when you do that.”

  “Good,” I said. “And stop calling me Rosemary, Dipshit.”

  “What?”

  It was fortuitous he couldn’t see the grin on my face. “Never mind,” I said. “Bad reception, like I said.”

  “You’re not tearing the place up, are you? Knocking out walls and stuff? Remodeling?”

  “What I do with my own house is no one’s business but my own. Let me talk to Sally.”

  “She’s not here.”

  “What do you mean she’s not there? There’s only a hundr
ed thirty-six people in town, and they’re all Amish. How hard could it be to find her? She’s most likely the only one not wearing a bonnet on her head.”

  “She’s in the ladies’ room.”

  “Oh,” I said. I knew my sister. She could spend hours in a ladies’ room. Who knows doing what? After almost three weeks on the road with her, it seemed Jack had learned that fact as well.

  A merry smile twisted my face. “They towed your car off this morning.”

  “What? What?”

  “They’re doing roadwork. You should have left me your keys.”

  I chewed on the heel of my hand so I wouldn’t laugh out loud when Jack started cursing like a drunken sailor with Tourette’s syndrome. He swore with a great deal of heart and passion. One would almost think he had been rehearsing.

  “Calm down,” I said. “I’m sure they didn’t dump it in the ocean. You can probably get your little toy car back at impound when you get home. May cost a few hundred bucks, but still—”

  So then he started cursing again.

  I hadn’t had this much fun since summer camp in the third grade. God, I had loved those all-boy communal showers.

  “Well, if there’s nothing else,” I said, happily ignoring his tirade, “I’ll be toddling off. Things to see, people to do, and all that. You take care, Jack. Have fun with the Amish. You and them should get along just fine. After all, they are used to looking at horses’ asses all day.”

  “You whiny little fruitcup motherfu—”

  I tsked his bad language, then clicked off the phone with a chuckle.

  God, what a beautiful day!

  Of course, beautiful days never last.

  And to prove it, I heard Sam calling from the basement. “Jason, you’d better get in here!”

  Now what?

  It was Timmy’s furious howl of outrage that really got me moving.

  I STUFFED my phone in my pocket as I raced across the backyard and down the short flight of steps into the basement. There was an unholy racket going on inside. It sounded like someone was beating the crap out of the place with a baseball bat.

  I wasn’t far wrong.

  Sam stood in the center of the basement floor, waving his arms and urging me to hurry. As I drew near, he pointed to the banging noises coming from beyond the furnace in the far corner, farthest from the light.

  Timmy was wielding Paul’s hockey stick like he was born to it. The kid was furious. His face was red, snot was running from his nose, and he must have been almost blinded, his eyes were so filled with tears.

  He was cursing up a storm too. For a four-year-old, his vocabulary was pretty extensive. And while he was cussing and dripping tears and blowing snot everywhere, he was beating the hell out of the brick wall with the hockey stick.

  The head of the stick had already broken off, splintered, and was lying at my feet where it had flown across the basement after the last strike it had made against the unforgiving bricks. Timmy was down to the four-foot handle now, but he was still flailing away at the brick wall like a man on a mission. He wanted to inflict pain. He wanted that wall to bleed!

  “Let him go, you shitty, poopheaded, assholey Pudding Pop!”

  Pudding Pop?

  Timmy railed on, accenting every curse with another stroke of the bat against the bricks. “Let him go, dammit! Let him go. He’s lonely, you stupid bunch of ugly fucking bricks. Let him go now.”

  With every curse, Timmy slammed the hockey stick against the wall as hard as he could. Over and over and over again. Chips of fiberglass were flying everywhere. Already the stick was a good foot shorter than it had been when Timmy first found it among the boxes under the stairs.

  Sam was frozen in place, too stunned to move, not knowing what he should be doing. I wasn’t much better.

  I did finally gather up enough sense to step toward the boy, cooing softly, afraid Timmy would inadvertently take my head off with the hockey stick if I moved too close. Timmy didn’t look like he was tracking very well. I’m not sure he saw either Sam or me standing there at all.

  I squinted my eyes against the fiberglass chips still flying through the air with every stroke of the stick against the bricks. Timmy was getting tired now. He was so mad, he was sobbing. But his sobs were still interspersed with what must have been every nasty word the kid had ever heard uttered by every foul-mouthed adult he had ever run across, including me.

  “Poopy dickheaded mean old pile of stupid bricks! Nooooooo!”

  I swooped in low and fast and grabbed the hockey stick from his hands just as he was rearing back to take another swipe at the wall. I threw the stick as far away as I could and reached in to pull Timmy into my arms, shushing him, trying to get him to calm down.

  But he was hysterical. Any fool could see it. He began beating at my chest as I held him in my arms. Kicking and yelling like I was the brick wall now. His tiny fists flailed at my face as he screamed unintelligible noises like a feral animal, lost and blinded in his own world of fury and choler and homicidal wrath. It was a scary thing to watch in a four-year-old. Truly horrifying.

  Sam finally got his wits about him and moved in too. His face was warped with worry and fear. He looked as if he couldn’t believe the things Timmy was doing, Timmy was saying. He scrambled around trying to catch Timmy’s hands, but the boy’s little fists kept pounding me, pounding me.

  I could feel a rivulet of blood dribbling from my nose where Timmy had bopped me a good one. I cried out when one of his hands struck my open eye. I turned away, and Timmy almost ripped my ear off in his anger, crying louder now. Keening in misery and fury and helplessness. Screaming at the top of his voice. Wailing.

  “Shush now. Shush, Timmy. Stop. Stop.” Sam tried to soothe the boy, holding Timmy’s hands in his own now, protecting me from the blows, fighting with Timmy to make him quiet down.

  Timmy was no longer cursing; he was simply crying like his heart was broken. He threw his head back as I held him in my arms, and while Sam clutched his hands to keep them still, Timmy bellowed out a scream of frustration and rage that almost broke my heart.

  Sam and I were both making soothing noises now. Trying to calm the boy. Trying to bring him down from whatever horrible place he was in. That place no four-year-old should ever find himself inhabiting. Filled with a wrath no child should ever have to experience. Should never even know existed.

  While Sam still clutched Timmy’s tiny fists, holding them close to his heart, I pulled them both, Timmy and Sam, into my arms, and together Sam and I put our heads against Timmy’s and continued to mutter calming words, make soothing sounds.

  Slowly, his fury dwindled. His breathing slowed. His eyes, red and strained from weeping, gradually turned away from his own fury. He seemed to close down upon himself. Like a sheet of paper, crumpling up all by itself, getting smaller and smaller.

  In a meek voice, Timmy sputtered, “My hands hurt.”

  Sam loosened his grip on the boy’s fists, and looking down, we both realized Timmy’s hands were scratched and torn from wielding the battered hockey stick. Sam didn’t want to hurt him any more than he was already hurt. He kissed each hand gently and blew on them to ease the pain.

  Timmy watched Sam minister to his wounded hands. Still trembling in my arms, exhausted, his anger finally spent, Timmy dropped his head to my shoulder and shuddered. All the while, Sam soothingly stroked his back and I kissed his hair and whispered gentle, meaningless phrases into Timmy’s ear. Slowly, the boy relaxed. We held him close and safe between us as his breathing deepened.

  When we thought he was asleep, Timmy surprised us both by lifting his head and looking me squarely in the eye.

  Sam froze when Timmy uttered the words, “Poor Daddy.”

  Sam and I stared into each other’s eyes as Timmy burrowed his face into my neck once again. Slowly, we turned to face the silent wall of bricks behind us.

  Chapter 10

  “OUCH,” I said. And to take my mind off the pain of Sam dabbing at my bloody nose
with a fistful of tissues, I observed, “You always seem to be doctoring me up. Wonder why that is?”

  “I guess it’s because you never know when to duck.” Sam winced even more than I did when I squeezed my eyes shut at his latest attempt to stem the bleeding from my poor battered honker. “I’m sorry, but he really nailed you. Just think. My boyfriend clocked by a four-year-old. Tilt your head back.”

  “Am I?” I asked with a little intake of breath, dutifully tipping my head back.

  “Are you what? Clocked?”

  “No. Your boyfriend.”

  Sam stopped what he was doing and waited for me to open my eyes all the way and look at him.

  “Jason, we’ve been sleeping together for three weeks. I like being around you. I dig the hell out of having sex with you. I get a funny feeling inside when I think of you.”

  I felt tears coming to my eyes, and this time they weren’t tears of pain. I imagined a wondrous expression crawling across my face. “You get a funny feeling inside when you think of me?”

  Judging by the tender way Sam looked at me, my imagined expression of wonder must not have been too far off the mark. “Yes,” he said, dabbing more gently at my nose. “And I don’t think it’s a tapeworm. What do you feel when you think of me?”

  I considered that. “I’m not sure. I never seem to be not thinking of you.”

  Sam smiled and stopped tormenting my poor nose. “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. And I like being around you too.”

  “What about the sex part?” he asked.

  I dragged his hand to my crotch and rested it on the rather substantial (if I say so myself) hard-on residing there. When he felt it beneath his hand, his eyes opened wider. “I have one of those every time you’re within twenty feet of me, Sam. Even when I’m wounded. Like now.”

  Sam fought back a smile. “Well, that can’t be normal. Wounded people almost never get erections.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  We both turned at the sound of a bedspring squeaking. It came through the baby monitor sitting on the kitchen counter. We froze in place, listening for any further noises, but aside from Timmy’s faint breathing and Thumper’s not-so-faint snoring, we heard nothing more. We had treated the cuts on Timmy’s hands with antiseptic and Band-Aids. He had sat through the procedure more stoically than I was doing now. If he could sleep, apparently his hands were no longer hurting. That was a relief to know.