Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "What is this? Jerome!"

  Jerome kept his eyes down, picking at his food, and then murmured, "We were having a track meet over at school and Arvin was on Chuck's side. Tim and I were on the other. Arvin got tired toward the end and didn't want to run, so maybe Chuck did something. I don't know. I didn't see it. I was running, too."

  Jerome, who was acting half his age, had said all he was going to, so Martin moved his eyes to Charles. "Is this true?"

  "No."

  "Don't lie to me!"

  "Arvin just started crying and wanted to go home, that's all. He's a baby-face, for ga—goodness' sake."

  "Quit eating and look at me when I speak to you! Now nobody starts crying for no reason—I know that, and you know it, too."

  "I told him to play right. He wasn't playing right.”

  "Right? What's right?"

  Apparently sensing he'd exposed an aspect of himself that had caused trouble in the past, Charles seemed breathless and back in the race again. "We were way ahead in points, and then Arvin faked like he was tired. He wouldn't do anything anymore. Then when we were running the mile, lie just walked along. He could have got second or third, at least, and we score 5, 3, 1. He didn't care whether we got those last few points. We needed them."

  "You mean you hurt him because you were worried about losing?"

  "Who says I hurt him?"

  "Tim said you kicked him."

  "If I had to run every race; he could run at least one. He was just in field events."

  "How could you do such a thing?"

  "What?"

  "Whatever you did."

  "Well, what would you do if you were all tired out, and came around the track about the third time, and there was your teammate, walking along like a crippled-up old poopel-de-doo?"

  "Watch that tongue."

  "Like an old lady."

  "So you kicked him."

  "I brushed against him. Maybe I nicked him with my foot."

  "Can't you leave other people alone? Don't you realize he's one of the few friends Tim's got? Let him walk or crawl or sit on his can or do what he wants, damn it!" Silverware jumped as Martin hit the tabletop. "What's the matter with you? What makes you think you're a judge of others?"

  "I know I was running and he wasn't."

  "He's not you. He's—"

  "He was on my side."

  "Will you listen to me!"

  Martin started to rise and his belt buckle caught on the edge of the table, upsetting his coffee and a carton of milk. Charles pushed off and tipped his chair over backward, and the slap that was intended for him carried past and struck Susan. She went off her stool as neatly as a bundle and dropped to the floor, and when she realized where she was, she started wailing, and then Marie joined in.

  "Now, look! Look what you've made me do," Martin said, and started around the table with the galling details —Susan on the floor, the puddle of coffee and milk beside her, Tim with his hands over his face—streaming along the edge of his vision, sharpening his outrage. Charles was on his hands and knees, scrambling around among the chairs and table legs, trying to make it to a safe spot. Martin got behind him and kicked hard and struck bone and Charles's limbs went flying out as he hit on his stomach, and Martin had a flash of himself slipping on a scaffold and landing hard on his tailbone, and felt pain. He yanked Charles to his feet. "Now get to your room," he said. "Get up there before something worse happens, you hear?"

  Charles gave him a furious going over with his eyes before he ran up the stairs. And then Martin realized what he'd done and started trembling. He sent Tim and Jerome outside, took the girls, one in each arm, and carried them to their bedroom and tried to comfort them. Their eyes were wide with terror and Susan wouldn't allow him to touch her. When they were calmed down, he undressed them and put them to bed, hardly aware of what he was doing. The presence in the upstairs room demanded all his attention.

  He went into the kitchen and sat at the table. He ached from balancing on a scaffold the whole day, carrying his hawk of heavy plaster, and reaching overhead to skim finish coat on the ceiling. He felt too old to go on with the work. No, there was bookwork to finish, orders to call in, material to line up, his lunch to pack.

  He wanted to go upstairs but wasn't sure it was the right thing to do. He didn't want his thoughts to focus; he was afraid of what he'd done. He started eating, but the food was chilly and he had no appetite for it.

  He cleared the table, carried the dishes to the sink, shook detergent over them, adjusted the temperature of the water, and let it run as he took a rag from the S-trap under the sink and wiped off the table. Then he got down on his knees, and as he was mopping up the milk and coffee, his vision narrowed, the patch of linoleum he was staring at darkened, became the colored world he was caught in, and he felt faint. He stood up and leaned against the table. An even, abrasive sound was traveling through his consciousness as though it meant to erode it. He hurried over to the sink and shut the water off. The sound stayed.

  He dipped a plate in and out of the water, rinsing off the grease, and his sight fastened on the soapy rainbow sliding along the plate's rim. He let it slip beneath the suds and had an image of her turning from the sink, inclining her head to one side and shoving the hair from her cheek with the back of her hand, her face flushed, her eyes moving anxiously around the room, but with an abstract look, as if there was no name for what she was searching for.

  He went up the stairs. Charles was lying face down on Jerome's unmade bed, his back heaving, his exclamations and sobs muted by a pillow he held clasped over his head. Martin eased himself onto the edge of the bed, seeing with surprise the dormer he'd added. When had he been organized enough to do that? There was a leak in the flashing or the new asphalt shingles, at the point where the dormer joined the roof, and the aqua plaster below was stained beige and ashen, a crack in it fuming white with lime and calcium deposits.

  He tried to pull the pillow away. "Listen. listen, now. I've tried—"

  Charles grabbed at the bedclothes and tucked them in around his face.

  "How many times have I told you—" He couldn't stand being sanctimonious. He looked away and saw the bed with Charles's body stretched out on it and part of his own shoulder enclosed in a mirror, and it was as if he were seeing through to the past. The scene, scaled down, dimmer than in hospital light, was a scene he'd lived through before, with her, and he couldn't again; those close to you seemed solid and understandable, while their real selves were off at a distance, a part of the world, and then their individual door in the world opened on them, it closed, and they were gone and weren't seen again.

  And now another was opening for this boy, and he sat with his shoulder caught in a mirror, as helpless as with her. Then he felt a door opening for him, too. He looked around for something of this moment to carry with him. The room seemed filled with a gray rain. Wadded socks lay on the floor, gathering tufts of dust, there were glinting, tubes of a dismantled radio in the corner, a model flint-j lock made of plastic, a Boy Scout neckerchief with slide,! and the rest of the room was covered with dirty clothes of] the same color. Rain.

  "If your mother—" He stopped. The words drew him] down deeper. He took Charles's shoulder and tried to lift him, but he struggled free and dropped onto the mattress.

  "Don't," Martin whispered. "Don't carry on so. Please. Sit up."

  "I'm sorry!"

  "I know. Now don't."

  “I can't stop!"

  "Try to look at it from my—"

  "My head hurts! It feels like something's coming out of it!"

  He ran his hand over Charles's skull, and the stiff stubble scratching across his palm—what led Charles to do this? what did this hark back to?—made him feel even more helpless and afraid.

  "Don't now," he said, and felt the words encircle him. Father, mother, nurse, teacher, arbiter, guardian, judge—all the roles were too much. He no longer had the power to reach through to the children as their father, the man who l
oved them above others, and this inability, more than anything he might do, was the fault breaking in him.

  He heard a drumlike thumping and thought his heartbeat had filled him, but the sound was outside, and believed it was his last summons, a last lack in himself he'd have to face up to, and then saw Charles's hand tapping over the bed in a widening arc, trying to find him. It touched his knee, backed away, and came down, damp and hot with perspiration, on his thigh. He took the hand in his and saw how much it was like hers, and then room brightened, and a rearrangement took place in it.

  "I'm sorry," Charles said in a muffled voice.

  "I am, too. Can you forgive me?"

  "Yes!"

  "Did I hurt you?"

  "Yes!"

  "Do you want to come downstairs?"

  "No!"

  "Do you feel any better now?"

  "Yes."

  "Jerome and Tim are outdoors. The girls are in bed. I'm sorry they had to see it."

  "I didn't mean to. He wasn't playing right."

  "I know," Martin said, and lifted him and turned him so they were sitting next to one another. "Let's go downstairs and do the dishes. Then we'll both feel better." He put his arm around Charles's waist and Charles's head fell against his ribs so hard it hurt him. "Will you come downstairs and help me do the dishes?”

  31

  SNAKE TRAILS

  The lot off the Neumillers' rear property line was a meadow of vetch and long-standing alfalfa that nobody mowed. Tim and Charles are crawling through it on their forearms, their elbows damp and smelling of chlorophyll and mint as the grasses shake sharp blossoms and saber tips in front of their eyes, and over the summer from a maze of trails that traverse the entire three-acre lot— snake trails, Tim calls them. They're speeding along on elbows and knees, keeping flat but moving in a fast scramble from one patioramus (Tim again), down a double path that splits around another patioramus— a circular area of packed-down grass with trails radiating off of it in several directions, many of them cul-de-sacs to confuse —and they're evading the girls again!

  Headquarters is a pair of four-by-eight concrete slabs, one on top of the other, the upper slab propped open with a rock like one half of a book, moss and leaf stems and damp-stained, hoarded cigarette butts lying on the pebbly texture of the open wedge, and their rallying call is a whippoorwill whistle. They've worked out maneuvers that keep the girls from catching them for weeks, or even seeing them, once they get below the grass, and yet the girls always come looking for them. They're tired of the game now and lie on their backs in a secluded patioramus, sweat drying along their hairlines and stiffening the country smell of meadow air, and watch clouds tow the meadow and the two of them above the surface of the curving earth, and Tim wonders if he'll die on his back, and Charles says, "Uh-oh, here come the girls again." They do a stomach flop, and their eyes, only inches apart and with no black and green lines of grass stems intervening, betray a communication from the quarter-horses below their belts, and then glaze, and then Tim cranes his head and squeezes out a popeyed maniacal look of abject, utter concupiscence, and says, "Do you want to tweakle and futz around with their little whistle-holes?" "Sure."

  They stand, bright air around their shoulders and the sky above, free again, and see the girls a few feet away, holding hands and looking in opposite directions, neither of them right. Susan rises on her toes above the level of the grass and squints her eyes, mouth open wide; then her caplike coif of brown-blond hair sways and slaps her face as she shakes her head in startled disbelief. "There they are!" she cries. "Sure. We're waiting. What do you think?" Marie's head is just above the August-browning grass and she turns to them, her large eyes crisscrossed by crossed green spears.

  "Hey, come on," Charles says. "We'll show you how our trails work."

  "Yeah, I bet," Marie says, and her voice comes from a greater distance than where she stands.

  "Sure," Susan says, and purses her lips, eyes pinched tight, and shakes her hair into whipping strings. "Then after that you'll try and make us take our pants down! Then you'll try and do stuff to our bottoms again!"

  "Oh, come on," Marie says, in a voice breathy but with a spangled and chiming tone tracing lines of irregular music over the air. She parts and steps over higher grass and lies and goes crawling after Charles, who wonders whether Susan's following Tim, and has an image of her with her dress off a shoulder, while he leads Marie into a patioramus at the center of the meadow, and then slips into a screened-in hiding place just to the left of it. Marie crawls in beside him, her skin scarlet, her eyes so liquid they look trembling, and lays her head on his chest. Spangled dots in a current flow.

  She won't look at him and clings to his chest so hard it would hurt if her hands weren't tremblingly weak and her nails chewed below rounded fingertips. Chips of shell in flesh. He turns her and lifts a swath of hair away and kisses her damp and feathery sideburn. She tosses her face to his and kisses his lips and jerks on his neck. He rubs a leg below the knee. She falls back and floats her skirt over her chest and stares with widening eyes and tight lips as she tugs white underwear down shining thighs.

  He kisses her hip.

  "Oh!" she cries.

  He rises, shoulders and knees shuddering and weightless (a rush of sound going in and out his ears like an opening sea), and lowers his face, cheeks burning holes in it, lips a trembling mass, to her stomach, at its base, on the raised curve above the downed wedge with its crease.

  "That feels good."

  He lifts his lips loose. "What?"

  "It feels nice to me."

  The whippoorwill whistle tears triangular patches of amber out of the air. He jerks up, then ducks. "Stay here. Pull those up," he says, and goes flat-stomached and thumping to the pair of parted slabs. Tim is waiting with a wild look. He flutters his fluffy eyelashes and says in a mincing voice, "Did you?"

  "Did I what?"

  "Tweakle and futz?"

  "Oh, I don't know. I kissed her on the stomach once."

  "I might have did a maybe a whee! Whistle, whistle, woof, chuckle, whistle, wheet-a-wheet!"

  Tim shows fangs, rolls striations of shadow over his face, his eyes turning as green-colored and electric as the shoots between them, and says, "Well, fond Chugeloon, now that that's that, how about the old switcheroo?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Ah oh, ho!"

  "You mean that?" Charles says.

  "You want to give it a try?"

  "Well."

  "Tiny is in patioramus number five!" Tim cries.

  "Patioramus number nine!" Charles cries.

  They scramble past one another laughing, and their laughter echoes up as up a well to Tim and Charles over all their years, for now they're crawling in ragged circles around the concrete slabs, still laughing, and then they rise, free for good for now, and call out to the girls, who are off with a flutter of birds, and all tour run as if with their lives in their hands toward the house, where none of this has happened.

  Or has it? Or not happened? Or rather really happened in out-pressed lines outside their own world in other ways, such as a tiger lily in Turkey along a rock wall, perhaps, or droplets of rain raining on a rainy day over the day-old hills of new Duluth?

  *

  That same fall, on September -, 195-, wearing a gray shirt and gray pants (the same gray twills he wore as a plasterer) and a geometrically patterned green and beige necktie preserved from the forties, their father walked up the steps of the Pettibone Junior High School —neither happy nor humiliated but knowing that now he could at least be at home most of the time when the children were—where he'd been hired as an instructor in P.E. and mathematics, to begin anew his career as a teacher.

  And also that same fall, Lionell and his mother decided that their father and husband, old Ed Jones, couldn't withstand another Minnesota winter, though he seldom complained, and a neighbor of theirs, Scottie Schaack, a thirtyish Serb or Croat or Hungarian with a dark hue about him that seemed to have shaped his
face, long, felinelike, the temples dipped and triangular, unsmiling from his meltingly brown wildwood-tangled eyes, who two years before had left for California, wrote to them to say that he was settled and well, in Washington State now, and that opportunities were so much better for everybody on the West Coast.

  Lionell and his mother sold the farm, auctioned off the equipment and livestock, and on the day their check cleared the bank, left for Los Angeles with only the old man and their clothes packed into a new Ford sedan they'd bought with part of the down payment.

  Ed Jones enacted a seizure so well when he saw the Rocky Mountains it nearly gave him one.

  "Take it easy, Dad. You've seen hills before."

  "These aren't hills, Lionell, and you know it. These are mountains, boy. I've seen them in the East and once is enough. These are outcroppings of the goddamned innards of the earth, by God, and I'm not going over them! You can let me out right here!"

  And then the gently rolling breadth of them at first, the long and local lateral up-and-down glides, and then at their bases blasted rock, cubes and chunks at the bottom 'of a reddish-brown, steep corrugated slide, where the road curves out to the left around a bronze rock pylon, and over its edge of ticking, white posts with swooping cables between, the first town can be glimpsed from above, the air, and from here until the California desert on the other side Ed Jones won't lift or let anybody lift the pulled-down hat covering his eyes, and when his wife at last convinces him that the mountainy part of the trip is indeed done, after riding long stretches of desert without a curve or a sound, in a well-lit gasoline station, she also reaches to give him an encouraging squeeze, and then jerks back her hand.

  "Why, Ed!" she cries. "You've wet your pants, you fool."

  "Well, ogha yah?" The muffling hat comes off. "I've got some news for you, milady. I've also gone and shit the dirty lousy old horny motherhumpers too!"

  32

  DON'T YOU WISH YOU WERE DEAD

  Earl Stuttlemeyer wasn't well liked by anyone. Martin could see that in class. He'd moved into Pettibone from an outlying farm during the spring and wore bib overalls, flannel shirts, and high hook-and-eye shoes, dress that had been acceptable enough while he lived on the farm and was bused in to school, but was now looked upon as the dress of a hick. He had an oval face longer than most adults, parted lips that were fleshy behind, slaty-blue eyes beneath eyebrows so blond they were invisible, and a big gap between his front teeth, both of which were broken off—more than enough to make him an object of derision among his classmates, seventh-graders, who were at one of the most sensitive and snobbish of ages, but he was also uncircumcised and had picked up the nickname of "Needledick, the canary raper." He attacked anybody he suspected of calling him that, and parents complained to the principal that their children were being injured by him at school. Then he swung on an eighth-grade bully who'd been taunting him for weeks and knocked him unconscious. He was suspended from school for three days.