Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  He lived at the edge of town, where there weren't many children his age, and when his widowed grandaunt told him she had too many cats, and wondered if Earl and some of his friends wouldn't get rid of a few, he came and knocked on the Neumillers' front door.

  It opened partway and Charles appeared, shadowy and detached behind the screen; he'd finished seventh grade with Earl but wouldn't be twelve until the fall, and was the only one of Earl's acquaintances neutral enough to be called a friend. He was as short as Earl and poor at marbles.

  "Stuttlemeyer," Charles said.

  "Chuck."

  Their mutual reserve and suspicion stood around them like the still Illinois air.

  "What are you doing?" Earl asked.

  "Making a model airplane."

  "Oh, heck."

  "Do you want to see it?"

  "Sure. Well, ah—"

  In the boxy room off the entrance, a single bed stood against the wall, and a rickety card table beside it was covered with balsa shavings, tissue paper, straight pins, glue, and the skeleton of a fuselage.

  "What's that stink?" Earl said.

  "Banana dope. You paint it on the paper that you first glue over the ribs—like on this fuselage—and it pulls the tissue up tight. Then you keep putting it on until the paper is solid like a drum, and then you assemble the plane, put on the landing gear and struts, and then it's ready to fly."

  "How do you fly it?"

  "When it's finished, I'd like to buy a motor—maybe free flight." Charles held up a picture, an artist's rendition of the finished plane, and studied it. "Isn't it nice?"

  "Uh-huh."

  Earl was stunned by the room. A wall of built-in bookshelves was filled with old books laid every which way, and a desk below that opened down was covered with piles of magazines. There were bookshelves along the top of another wall, and glassed-in bookshelves sat just inside the door, reflecting books. The bed was unmade and dozens of snapshots, as though undergoing arrangement, were spread across the twisted sheets. The door of the closet was open and he could see, piled along its bottom, dirty clothes, crushed boxes, work shoes caked with plaster, plaster on the floor, coat hangers, and a pillow spilling feathers. At his house, even in the country, they all made their beds the minute they woke, the floors were waxed and shining, there was a cabinet or a niche for everything loose, and even a special hassock on which you placed the evening paper. A few years back, he'd signed a sympathy card to Charles along with the rest of his class, and had noticed from then on that everybody kept off to the edges of Charles as if he had some sort of disease, but it hadn't ever occurred to Earl that he didn't actually have a mother.

  "Is this where you sleep?"

  "Not in the summer," Charles said. "It's too hot. It's Dad's room. He hardly ever uses it."

  "My aunt, Emma Dawson on the other side of town, wants to get rid of some cats in that barn behind her place."

  "What do you mean?"

  "She wants me to kill them."

  "Oh?"

  "Whatever way I want to do it, she said. Do you want to help?"

  "Wow! I'm supposed to stay and watch the girls."

  "What girls?"

  "Over on the other side." Charles went to the doorway and called, "Tim! Hey, Tim!"

  There was a response from so far away it seemed it came from another house.

  "You mean she really wants you to do this?"

  "That's what she said, and my aunt don't lie."

  "Did you ever kill one?"

  "Sure I choked one to death on the farm once. And then another time I held a bag of them in the water tank till they were drowned." Earl grinned, and then covered his teeth, and he and Charles began to laugh and cough and throw punches at one another's shoulders.

  "What is it now?" a plaintive voice said, and Tim came into the room, shirtless, his face and shoulders freckles, wearing blue jeans too big at the waist and rolled high on his shins. "I suppose you want— Oooo!" he cried. "A guestus! You have a guestus here!" He pulled back, held up his hands, and shook them so quakingly his fingers made noises knocking together.

  "Cut it out," Charles said. Tim was usually bashful and spoke in a deferential voice even among the family, with eyes lowered, as though he couldn't bear either smiles or shame, but when Charles had company, he'd speak in altered voices, make exaggerated faces, make up words, do flips that landed him on the floor on the flat of his back—anything to draw attention to himself. He bowed now to Earl and said, with crossed eyes, "I'm Tinvalin."

  "That's his new name," Charles said.

  "No, ho," Tim said. "I'm Toonvaloon and I'm of a Toonavaloony!" The tip of his tongue appeared and his head jerked like an epileptic's; there were flying flecks of spit."

  "Knock it off!"

  "Nat-ture-elly, Chelly."

  "Earl and I are going out. You have to watch the girls."

  "Dad told you to."

  "And now I'm telling you."

  "You're not my boss."

  "I am when Dad's gone."

  "That's not what he says."

  "Well, I'm saying it."

  "Oh, yeah?" Tim began shadowboxing with dodging crosses, brushing his nose with his thumb, and saying, "Snift-snift! Snort-snort, snift!"

  "Just watch the girls, marmalade face."

  "Ahh-yahtatta," Tim said, in imitation of a Chinese. He bucked his teeth, folded his arms, and his face turned Oriental, and then he bowed to them both and went into a clattering dance step.

  "If anything happens to my plane—"

  "Oh, dear, precious plane, dearie me. Precious! Ooo, Allah, Allah, oh, Great God Brown!"

  "I have to put on my shoes," Charles said.

  Earl followed him through a living room in worse disorder than the other, across gray linoleum with a dull cast to it, and into a kitchen where breakfast-food boxes and dirty dishes sat on a splashed and littered table. Tim rumped into a chair at the table's end, facing them, and cried, "Breakfast food, breakfast food, how I dearly love dear breakfast food!" He stuck a soggy mass in his mouth and swallowed it down. "Three meals a day! Three times a meal! Breakfast food! It'll make you fart and whistle and clap and get chicken pox." He picked with his forefingers over his cheeks and forehead, and cried, "Watch the spray!"

  Charles and Earl went around the corner and down the steps to the basement, which was damp and chilly and smelled of stale engine oil. Charles pulled a light chain.

  The concrete floor was painted gray and a shuffleboard court was marked out in red lines. A high double bed with an aluminum-painted frame sat next to a furnace, and there was a three-hundred-gallon oil tank, white, with rust spots showing through, in the corner beyond the bed; the cement-block walls, once painted light blue, were stained yellow and dark green from seepage, and there were fuzzy looping borders of browns and darker colors surrounding the stains. Two mattresses, placed side by side, lay on the floor. Charles sat on one and began pulling his shoes on over bare feet.

  "Is this where you sleep?" Earl asked.

  "Yes."

  "On those?"

  "Oh, no," Charles said. "Over on the bed. These are for our tag-team matches.".

  "Tag-team matches?"

  "Don't you have a television?"

  "No," Earl said, and looked ashamed.

  "It's wrestling. In a tag team, you each have a partner, and if you're getting trounced and need help, you tag your partner's hand and he comes in the ring and takes over for you. We have them Thursday nights after Boy Scouts. Would you like to try sometime?"

  "I'm a mean mother."

  They both laughed in the cool and liquid-feeling atmosphere of the basement.

  "I'm pretty good, too," Charles said. "Tim and I beat the Wilson brothers last week. He's my partner when Jerome isn't around."

  "Tim wrestles the Wilsons?"

  "He's really tough for his size. He's even beat me up. When he gets mad, he goes crazy and you can't hold him off." Charles stood up and started climbing the stairs.

  "Hey, wa
it," Earl said. "What's this for?"

  Charles stepped back down to the dark doorway where Earl was standing, near the foot of the stairs, and turned on a switch. Four oil-stained steps led to a long room with black walls, a black floor, and a ceiling of oil-stained joists less than five feet high.

  "Holy balls," Earl said. "What kind of room is that?"

  "This place was a gas station once. The part above here was a double garage before it was remodeled, and this was the grease pit. That old grease won't come off. We've even tried muriatic acid."

  "It's got a barn gutter right up the middle!"

  "That's what they drained the grease into, I guess. There's a big sump hole down at the other end that stinks like shit."

  "You'd have to be a midget or something to fit in the place!"

  "We didn't use it till last year. Then we made it into a shooting gallery. It's perfect."

  At the far end of the confinement, a cardboard backstop reached from ceiling to floor; three wires were strung across standards in front of the backstop, and rows of paper targets, held in the jaws of clothespins, were spaced along each wire. Higher up, a round fruitcake container, with blue-and-black target circles painted on its bottom, and a scattering of dents in it, hung from a wire attached to one of the big, oil-blackened beams.

  "What do you shoot with?" Earl asked.

  "A BB pistol."

  "I've got a .22."

  "We could use it on those cats."

  "My dad won't ever let me shoot it in town. What about your pistol?"

  "It's broke. Tim got mad and threw it on the floor. We're going to have it fixed. Soon, too."

  "Boy," Earl said. "You couldn't get me into that scrunched-down place for twenty bucks."

  "We shoot from here."

  "How do you know if you hit anything?"

  "Well, once in a while we do have to go in for a target check. Tim does that."

  "I bet he has to wipe his feet off like a bastard afterwards, huh?"

  Charles turned off the lights. He let Earl go up the steps ahead, toward the back door with its rectangle of light, and as they stepped into the kitchen Earl stopped with such suddenness Charles bumped into him. In the middle of the floor, close to the sink, Tim lay on his back, his chin high, his mouth opened wide, and the whites of his eyes rolled up; his chest and the gray tile around him were spattered with blood, which was also leaking from

  his lips. The handle of a butcher knife showed above his rib cage.

  "Oh, for God's sake," Charles said. It was about the tenth time Tim had tried this piece of business, which was invented by Charles to frighten the girls; the butcher knife was gripped between arm and rib cage, the "blood" was ketchup. Charles prodded Tim with his toe. "Come on, get up." What if Tim ever did try something like this?

  Tim raised his head. "I can't. I'm dying. I have maybe ten seconds left." He dropped his head with a clunk. "Five, four—"

  "Get up, goddamnit!"

  He jumped to his feet and tossed the knife into the sink. "Thank you for them swear words, Prince Valiance," he said in a falsetto. "You've just saved my life, kind sire. How can I thank the big horseshit hero, wa! wa!"

  "Go see what the girls are doing before I clobber you one."

  "Clabber-ass," Tim said. He began to shadowbox around, saying his snifts, and went to the door to the other side of the house and started knocking it back and forth between his fists. "The Toonvaloon rat-a-tat-tat bone-cracker, folks. Practicing up. Going to use it on the he-man, the big scary one. Wow!"

  Charles walked over and slapped the back of his head. "I told you to get in there. Now go!"

  He and Earl went through the living room as Tim shuffled along behind, making his sounds, and just as Charles reached for the knob he felt a slap, halfhearted yet imperative, swipe his hair. He swung around and Tim was dancing in front of him, revolving his fists, so furious his eyes were sunken and close to tears. "Come on," he cried in his voice of challenge. "Come on, you chicken-shit! Fight!"

  Charles went out the door.

  *

  The old barn was overrun with cats. There must have been fifty. Charles and Earl made a cursory inspection and then went to the back of the house and Mrs. Dawson, a plump, nervous-voiced woman with black hair wound in such tight curls they seemed ironed in place,

  gave them a bowl of scraps, and said, "I haven't put anything out for them for a week or more, so they ought to go for this like it was gold cream. It'll give you a chance to grab some. I hate to see it come to this, but they been killing robins and getting into people's garbage and causing so much general complaint there's naught I can do. When I farm them out, they're back the next day, and when other folks throw out the cats they don't want, they congregate here, and they've been keeping the neighborhood up at night, what with their caterwauling and making new kitties. If my John was still here, things Would never have come to this pass, may the Lord bless him where he lies."

  They were halfway to the barn when she cried out, "Now don't kill them all! Especially that white one! I need me some mousers!"

  A rock held a Dutch door at one side of the barn ajar. They rolled it out of the way and latched the door from the inside. Until they became accustomed to the dark, the holes in the roof and walls surrounded them like distant constellations, and Charles felt as he had once in a planetarium in artificial night—that the earth had shrunk to the size of a room and he was standing at the North Pole, fur-warmed and gigantic, and could reach out and extinguish with a fingertip, one by one, each star. The pin-.-points swayed along with his vision as he looked around., The building must have been a barn for a driving team at one time; there were closed stalls along the right side, and the other half was open, with double doors at each end, as if for parking a carriage; a platform loft above; the stalls, and an alley in front for throwing down hay. There were also two open stalls filled with shadowy equipment. In a low window, Earl discovered a broken pane,; an "escape exit," and they covered it with a splitting piece of Masonite.

  Earl handed the bowl of scraps to Charles, and cats began running the lengths of themselves along his legs, purring and miaowing, and pawing at his pants. Which whit one, he wondered, and held the bowl higher. Earl stepped into one of the open stalls and laid out a hand scythe, baseball bat, several cylindrical sash weights, twine, hammer, and a fishing knife that was badly rusted and had old scales glittering along its red-brown blade. He cut a couple of lengths of baling twine, about nine feet each, made noose snares of them, and laid them aside.

  He took a gunny sack and went into the open stalls, then the closed ones, looking in the feedboxes and mangers, and whenever he came across a litter of kittens dropped them into the sack. Mother cats followed him, rising on haunches and walking on hind legs to reach the sack, and showed pin-sparkling teeth as they craned up and cried out at him. He tied the top of the sack with twine and started for the door.

  "Hey!" Charles cried. "Where the hell do you think you're going?"

  "There's an old rain barrel out here behind the barn. I'm going to put the sack in there and then put this on top of them." He turned his ass toward Charles; a sash weight tugged down a rear pocket.

  "There're about a dozen cats following you!" Charles cried, and was astonished by his voice; he sounded afraid.

  Earl reached in a shirt pocket and lifted a baby kitten out by the scruff of its neck. "They'll follow me back," he said, and smiled, then rolled his eyes.

  More cats, twenty or more, had discovered Charles and were swirling and straining against him, switching him with their tails, leaning on his pants with forepaws, punching their claws through, and pressing against him with such strength and persistence he was afraid that if he moved he'd be thrown off balance and step on one. Or fall. He hated cats and the idea that there were creatures so sneaky and feminine. He heard a shrieking like a nail being pulled, and looked up; cats had gathered along the edge of the loft and were staring down at him with extended necks, heads swaying from side to side, as if
readying to spring. Earl came into the barn with the kitten between his thumb and forefinger and most of the mother cats following, and shut the door.

  "The barrel's empty. I’ll just leave those outside till we're done in here." He placed the kitten in a feedbox, petted it, and said, "O.K. Put down the food."

  "You put it down," Charles said, and tossed the bowl to him. The swirl of cats followed its flight and by the time Earl got it to the ground were gathered around it like spokes around a hub, and then the cats in the loft began leaping to the floor, one by one, like precision divers, their colors flashing into blurs, and bounded toward the bowl, forcing their way into the mass of milling cats already there. There was a chorus of growls from the center of it.

  "O.K.," Earl said. "Where's the biggest, ugliest mother of them all?"

  "Right there." Charles pointed out a tiger-striped tom, sitting back like an overlord while it cleaned its mouth with a gray tongue. It had a flattened head, a spray of needlelike vibrissae around its brindled face, and a badly scarred nose. One of its gold eyes, clouded a pearl color from an injury or a disease, was turned over one shoulder toward them.

  "Oh, boy," Earl said. "He must be the granddaddy of them all. Look at those nuts on him. Should we castrate him first?"