He stepped toward the outhouse cautiously. He would take a quick look at it and go, making a clean sweep of the place. He grasped the wooden door handle and yanked on it, but the door was jammed shut, and the entire outhouse wobbled on its foundation. He pushed on it to loosen it, then yanked again. Apparently the wooden door had swelled in the wet weather. Rain began to beat down hard now, soaking his shoes and pants, running down the collar of his shirt.
Suddenly filled with anger, with the shame of having been chased by fear from the burned house and then down this muddy path, he stepped back and kicked the door hard with the bottom of his foot, damning it to Hell. The entire outhouse tipped backward, hung there for a moment like the Tower of Pisa, then toppled over, slamming to the ground, the vent pipe breaking off when it hit the trunk of the walnut tree behind it. Bentley stood there breathing hard, half surprised at what he’d done, gaping at the fallen outhouse, at the sawn-out circle in the upended plank seat.
Then he saw that there in the dirt lay a heavy slab of wood, worm-eaten and rotted, lying where there should simply have been a hole dug in the ground. Collapsing his umbrella now, he poked the tip under the edge of the wood, reached under with both hands, and levered the slab over onto its back, revealing a dark rectangular pit in the earth. He hoisted the umbrella again, got the flashlight out of his pocket, and shined it into the hole.
The light reflected off a sheet of painted metal, a dirty ivory white with faded red hearts and curlicues painted on it. The paint was chipped away at the corners, and the metal was rusted and dented. It was the top of an old bread box. Bentley knelt in the mud, trying to keep the rain off with the umbrella while he reached down into the hole. He grabbed the rolled metal handle on top of the box and lifted it out of its shallow grave, clinging lumps of mud falling away into the hole. Whatever was inside clanked together like glass jars.
21
THERE WAS SOMETHING unfair in the dinner arrangements that night, although clearly Walt couldn’t say so, couldn’t let on that he was jealous of the children’s food. Nora and Eddie both had grilled cheese sandwiches that had been fried in margarine, for God’s sake, and the rest of them—the adults, who ought to have more sense, and ought to eat what they damned well pleased—were sharing Jinx’s “sailor’s meatloaf,” a casserole made out of albacore and broccoli and egg whites, stiffened with bran so that it cut like a pâté. Walt salted his plate for the third time and then passed the salt to Henry, who took it without a word. Everyone had boiled beets, too, which was probably unfair to the children, but Jinx hadn’t really known about Nora and Eddie’s arrival either, and the beets had already been boiling on the stove.
Nora, whose bobbed hair made her look like a character out of an old silent movie about street children, nibbled on the corner of her sandwich like a hamster. The freckles on her cheeks might have been dabbed on in ink. Walt winked at her, and she hid her face behind her sandwich and didn’t move.
Eddie called the sandwiches “cheesers.” Apparently they were the only thing he would eat aside from pizza, and he would only eat the sandwiches if they were made on white bread with a single slice of American cheese that was melted but not “burnt.” Nora apparently ate nothing at all. Despite all her hamster nibbling, her sandwich was still nearly whole. Probably neither of them had ever tasted real food, since Darla couldn’t cook. The one time that Walt and Ivy had eaten at Darla and Jack’s, Darla had microwaved raw chicken slathered in ketchup, which had turned out to be both gray and inedible. In the embarrassed silence, Jack had called her a “goddamn idiot” in a voice that was absolutely flat, no humor at all, and she had burst into tears and run into the other room.
Walt looked at Nora and Eddie and wondered how many of those scenes, or worse, they’d witnessed over the few short years of their lives. That creep Jack! Christ, the son-of-a-bitch needed a fist in the face. They were all living in Babylon or some damned place, and it was no small miracle that any of them survived, especially the children. The world was toxic to them. Walt was suddenly full of fear and affection for everybody at the dinner table, for Henry and Jinx tooling around the country in their portable home, sleeping under the mercury vapor lamps in grocery-store parking lots and eating noodles out of Styrofoam cups, for Nora and Eddie already cast adrift in a world that betrayed its children….
Nora’s face was set in a glad-eyed smile, her cheeks pushing her eyes nearly shut, looking curiously at Walt as if he were the most comical thing she’d seen all day. He wiped his mouth and chin, thinking that maybe something was stuck there, a fragment of tuna fish or something. Nora set the sandwich on her plate with elaborate care and took a long drink of milk, still looking at him, and then held her empty glass out. Walt filled it out of the carton, and Nora squished up her eyes farther shut and made a rabbit nose. She’d been in the house now for nearly three hours and still hadn’t spoken. Walt winked at her, turned his head sideways, and pretended to swallow his butter knife. She put her hand to her mouth, as if to stop herself from laughing out loud, and right then Eddie leaned across toward her plate, and with the palm of his hand he calmly flattened her sandwich so that it looked like something that had been pressed in a dictionary.
“Whoa!” Walt said to him. “Cut that out. That’s Nora’s sandwich. Squash your own doggone sandwich.” But immediately he felt like a creep.
Eddie shrugged and shook his head, as if to say that it couldn’t be helped. “It’s ’sposed to be flat,” he said, finishing off his own milk. Then, as if to illustrate, he mashed his sandwich into his plate with the bottom of the empty glass. Rubbery-looking cheese pushed out from between the slices of cold toast. “See,” he said. He held it up to show everyone. “My mom puts it under a pan. On the stove thing.”
“I’m familiar with that,” Uncle Henry said helpfully. “Same idea as a bacon press.” He blew his nose heavily into his napkin, which was shredded by the blast. Nora giggled through her fingers. Eddie looked very serious. The bacon press comment had vindicated him, although he couldn’t have had any more idea about a bacon press than about a nuclear reactor.
“Edward,” Jinx said, nodding in the boy’s direction, “I’m happy to see that you’ve eaten your beets.” There were no beets left on his plate, only a pool of red juice.
Eddie nodded. “I ate a turnip once,” he announced. “They taste like sour dirt.”
At the mention of dirt, Nora giggled again and made her rabbit face at Walt.
“I nearly took a bus to work this morning,” Walt said, “but I took my lunch instead.” He winked big at Nora, who hid her eyes with her hands and slid straight down out of her chair, very slowly, entirely disappearing under the table. Walt could hear her giggling under there, mostly through her nose. Ivy gave Walt a look that implied she couldn’t understand why he had to talk like that, giving Nora fits. Eddie sat there stone-faced, acting incredibly grown-up and dependable.
Walt shook his head in wonderment, then lifted the edge of the tablecloth and peered at the floor under the table. Nora was crouched there, still with the cheeky smile, but with her thumb in her mouth now. He nodded toward her empty chair, suddenly afraid that this was going to turn into some kind of crisis.
“I’ll get her,” Eddie said, starting to push his chair back.
Walt shook his head. “It’s all right,” he said. “Here she comes now.” He widened his eyes at her, and she shook her head. Then he held his hand out, and to his surprise she pulled her thumb out of her mouth and latched onto his fingers, climbing out from under the table, back up into her chair. Walt picked up his napkin and, holding it out of sight, wiped the spit off his hand.
“Well, I’m through,” Uncle Henry said suddenly, standing up. Jinx looked hard at him and then nodded at his seat. “What?” he asked.
“It’s better to ask to be excused,” she said. “Let’s set an example.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.” He sat back down. Then, as if forgetting that he’d already quit eating, he forked up a cube of beet and s
tarted in on his plate again, making no move to excuse himself.
Aunt Jinx waited, looking vaguely astonished. “Why, this is remarkable,” she said, speaking mainly to Ivy. “What are they good for? Why did God bother?”
Henry was oblivious to the comment. With elaborate care he pushed together a piece of beet and a wad of casserole, salted it, and shoved it into his mouth. “You can use an old flatiron as a bacon press,” he said, looking at his empty fork. “Works as well as anything.”
There was a certain tension in the air now, a hovering cloud of uncertainty that made conversation impossible, and it struck Walt that like some baffling oriental tea ritual, the business of six people eating together was a deep and very nearly senseless mystery.
“May I be excused, please?” Eddie asked, looking at Walt.
“Certainly,” Jinx said, nodding deeply. “And please clear your place. Put your plate in the sink. There’s a good boy.”
Eddie stood up out of his chair, holding his plate in one hand and clutching his crumpled napkin in the other. Walt looked at him in astonishment: the entire crotch of his khaki pants was stained blood red in a blotch the size of a plate.
For a long moment the room was dead silent, and then Nora, wide-eyed and no longer smiling, pointed at her brother and said, “Eddie blowed up.”
WALT GOT UP from the floor of the dining room, and put down his rag and spray bottle. The beet stain wouldn’t come out of the rug any easier than it would come out of Eddie’s pants. He had to laugh, though. He had barely stopped Ivy from calling an ambulance. When the wad of beet cubes had fallen to the carpet, Jinx and Ivy still hadn’t gotten it—that out of politeness Eddie had shoveled all the beets onto the napkin in his lap, intending to sneak the whole mess into the trash.
Walt remembered that one, a typical childhood ruse, way more effective than the usual business of shifting vegetables around your plate as if you’d eaten big healthful holes in them. When he was a kid he’d been a master of making food disappear in just that same way, but he had usually thrown the uneaten food onto the roof of his house, napkin and all. His father had found evidence of it once, when they were all out working in the yard on a Sunday afternoon—dried food in wadded up napkins lying among the dead leaves in the rain gutters. His mother, planting bulbs in the flowerbed below, had been utterly baffled. Walt’s father had looked down at him from the top of his ladder, shook his head just slightly, and said, “I bet it’s from that meteor shower.” And that had become a sort of code for them later on, especially when they were served alien foodstuffs. He smiled now, thinking about it, how hard they’d worked that line over the years….
Then he thought about poor Eddie, mortified over the beet incident. It was no good saying anything to cheer him up for a couple of hours yet; it was better to let the mortification ease up. Later on Walt could say something to make things right, before the boy went to bed. He picked up the remains of Nora’s flattened sandwich and took a bite out of it. Even cold the sandwich had a pleasant, salty taste. In a few minutes Ivy and Jinx and the kids would be back from their walk; despite their coats and umbrellas, they wouldn’t be out long in the threatening weather. Henry had retired to the motor home, where he was probably polishing off a box of vanilla wafers and sketching out potential popes.
Walt sat down to finish the sandwich. The sad remains of the sailor’s meatloaf sat in the serving dish, and he wondered vaguely if there was some way he could use it to terrorize Argyle. Nothing came to him. He poked at it. Somehow the loaf was setting up, like a hybrid of rubber and plaster of Paris—probably because of the gluten in the oat bran. He pressed it with his fingers, fashioning a head out of it, pinching out ears and a hook nose, surprised to find that it kept its shape like modeling clay. He gave it a long neck and a thrust-out chin and deep-set eyes under a heavy brow, then picked up scraps of cooked broccoli and shoved the little flowerets into the top of the sculpture, over its ears, but leaving it mostly bald on top. It looked like the bust of some kind of German nobleman, very dignified and proud, but with a terrible case of chlorophyll poisoning.
Hurriedly he cleared the rest of the table, tossed the tablecloth into the dirty clothes, and then put the head back onto the table as a sort of centerpiece.
The door burst open and Nora and Eddie tumbled in, dripping with rainwater. Walt could see that it was pouring, and a gust of rain-laden wind blew into the room. Nora stopped abruptly, as if she was caught on something, then gave her still-open umbrella a tug, yanking it through the door, which was about six inches too narrow to accommodate it. The umbrella turned itself inside out, and Nora happily dragged it dripping into the room.
Walt took it from her and tried to invert it again by pressing it upside down into the carpet and leaning into it. “Wind got to it,” he said to Ivy as she came in out of the rain. There was a popping noise as the wobbly little ribs snapped, and when he picked it up, half the umbrella simply hung there limp, like a victim of gravity. Ivy pulled her coat off and hung it on the coat rack. Then she took the umbrella from him and stared at it, nodding her head ponderously, as if to say that he’d done a tidy bit of work.
“You see?” Jinx asked her.
Ivy pushed open the screen door and tossed the umbrella out onto the porch.
“See what?” Walt asked.
“Men,” Jinx said. “Never you mind. We were having a conversation. I really don’t mean you, Walter. I needed an example and you obliged, that’s all.”
“I was trying to fix the umbrella.” He looked at Ivy for support, and she squished up her face, making one of Nora’s rabbit-noses at him.
“And while we were out you cleaned up the dinner dishes,” Jinx said. “I wasn’t being fair. I’m sorry.” She patted him on the forearm.
“That’s all right,” Walt said. “I don’t mean to be touchy.”
“Did you put the rest of the loaf in the fridge? Henry loves to make a nice sandwich out of the leftovers.”
“Sure,” Walt started to say, already turning toward the table. If he was quick he could hammer it flat before Jinx or Ivy saw what had happened to it, no harm done….
But there was a hoot of laughter then, from Eddie, followed by Nora giggling insanely. They’d already found it. “Such a funny!” Nora said, picking up the bust from where it sat on the table. She held it out by the neck so that everyone could see it. At that moment it broke in half, just below the chin, and the head fell heavily to the carpet where it lay staring up at the ceiling like a dead man, its features considerably flattened out by the impact.
“What in God’s name?” Jinx asked, looking down at it in apparent disbelief.
“I … bet it’s from that meteor shower,” Walt said. He bent over to pick it up along with the bits of cooked broccoli scattered on the carpet.
Nora took it out of his hands, and she and Eddie hauled it into the kitchen together, Eddie trying to snatch it away from her.
“In the sink!” Jinx shouted. She fixed Walt with a stare, then waved her hand tiredly and moved toward the door. “I’ll turn in with Henry,” she said.
Walt chanced a look at Ivy, who eyed him sternly. But then she clearly couldn’t stand it any longer and burst into laughter that she turned into a coughing fit before rushing away up the stairs. The front door swung shut, cutting off the sound of the rain, and Walt headed toward the stairs himself, glancing into the kitchen where Eddie stood at the counter now, beating the living hell out of the remains of the head with a big wooden spoon while Nora stood next to him on a chair, holding the egg beater and waiting for her turn.
22
BENTLEY THOUGHT SUDDENLY of money, of treasure: not gold coins—this wasn’t heavy enough for coins—but maybe rolled-up wads of twenty-dollar bills stuffed into jars and hidden in a hole beneath a privy!
He set the bread box on the dirt next to the hole, covering it with the umbrella. His hands trembling, he twisted the latch. The front of the box fell open. It was full of glass jars, all right—pint-size Ma
son jars, all of them lidded, all apparently empty, and certainly empty of money.
He picked one up and looked closely at it. Something lay in the bottom. He illuminated it with the flashlight. It was a tooth, a human molar with a silver filling. He set the jar down and picked up another, this one containing a lock of hair, curled together and bound with a single strand. He shone the light into the tin box now. All the jars were the same: each apparently contained nothing but a single small remnant of a human being—a fingernail paring, eyelash hairs, a tooth, a leathery little patch of skin.
Shutting the front of the bread box, he carried two of the jars toward the shed and ducked in out of the rain. He dropped the umbrella, shoved a couple of rusted trowels off onto the ground, and set the jars on a wooden shelf. He laid down the flashlight and picked up the first of the jars again. The ring twisted off easily, but the lid was tight. He pushed at the rim of the lid with the edge of his thumb but couldn’t move it. Someone had done a fair job of canning….
The idea of these things having been canned horrified him and he set the jar down, his mind returning to the empty room in the burned house, to the iron hooks in the ceiling, to the foul picture on the floor in the living room. He laid the edge of the jar lid over a protruding nail head and pried at it. There was a slight pop, followed by an exhalation of escaping air and what sounded unmistakably like a human cry, small and immeasurably distant.
And just then, out of the corner of his eye, Bentley saw a light moving through the trees. He switched off his flashlight, then hurriedly screwed the lid back onto the opened jar. It was raining hard enough now so that the house and the trees beyond were obscured by a gray veil of drops. The moving light swung in a misty arc, two barely visible shadows hunching along behind it.
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