Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "What the Sam Hill's going on back there?" Martin cries, and Marie's shoulders strike against Charles as she struggles to pull herself up.

  "I'm trying to sleep," Charles says. "She won't let me."

  "Where are we now?" Marie asks, popping upright in the seat.

  "About the same four hundred miles from the same old place," Susan says. "Let's stop."

  "If I saw a place along here that sold ice cream, believe me, I would," he says above the car noise.

  Charles flips up his shirt and does quick double strokes close to his belt and then rises, his face struck in half by August sunlight, and whispers, "Marie. Hey, Marie, have you ever seen this?" and touches his fingers to a pearl-colored pool of his newly leased life-force, and runs the tips of his fingers down the curve of her wrist.

  And remains stilled, his face cleft by the sunlight, and wonders over the events that have left him without a mother, doing what he has in this car, rocking and swaying along different planes, with its central bulge like a dividing line between the real and the unreal of the unsorted and transitory but never outlined adolescent world, where in confusion the sexes began to take on their own or other sides, or neither, as with Marie, who is herself alone.

  Four

  34

  BURNING THE COUCH

  They're burning the couch. Blue flames scumble low over the cotton, wadding and yellowish columns of smoke ascend from the cushions and climb above their heads into the misty-blue, cerulescent sky of June, which the sun, a silver disc, clings to and hovers behind. Tim, tall and skinny, nearly six feet at the age of sixteen, does a happy tap dance over the packed dirt of the back yard, strutting with sudden dips around a pile of cement blocks, bricks, a broken hod, his hands in his pockets and his lips pursed as though whistling, jumps into a mixing vat encrusted with finish coat, kicks around in it and knocks plaster loose, and then does a down-on-one-knee finale, gives his head a shake, and says, "Hotcha!"

  Charles, a collegian now, tries the Indian dance the costumed chieftain does between halves of football games at school, but his feet are stuck in self-consciousness. His elbows knock against things the Indian wouldn't do. He flips his long hair back from his eyes.

  Tim punches his shoulder. He swings and hits Tim's fist. Tim's harder to hit, now that he's so tall, and what can an older brother, caught like this, do? "Bo hittio pitcha to me now!" Tim says, and Charles runs at him as he takes off for the house; he disappears around the corner, and then, too fast for feet, backs around the other end of the house doing a leg-stretching cakewalk with his hands pumping as though over a scrubboard and his feet popping in loose flaps. "I'm a-workin' off the flab and asshole, folks!" he cries. His teeth are clenched and his eyes crossed. "I'm a-dancin' my way from here to heben and back! Feets, do that thing! I'm idio may-tut!" He does a shuffling stomp that kicks up cinders and dust and then drops into the splits and saves his jewels with an outspread hand. He bounces his weight and then springs up and strolls over, himself again, his long thin fingers in the tops of his pockets, and stares at the couch, and says, "You know, dancing's hard."

  "You have to know how to do it."

  Tim does a mincing toe-rise with his hands on his chest. "Oh, do we, sweet one," he says. "Do tell me now."

  "Eat it."

  "Whip it out, Charoontarus."

  Charles stares at the couch. Ever since they reached the age of reason they've wanted to burn this, he thinks, this thing that is (was, it's going) the ugliest piece of furniture in the house, a distinction, since most of the pieces, without a woman to watch over them, have been abused so badly over the years they're beginning to resemble castoff wreckage; this maroon-brown monstrosity that dates from their parents' marriage and followed them from Hyatt to here, where it took up residence, as there, in the heart of the living room.

  Its wooden arms are loose and can be lifted up like alligator (or "eggilator,” as Tim says) jaws, its seat cover is worn through to cotton wadding, which in spots is worn through to the springs—half of which have snapped these past years and have to be covered with rugs to keep them from flesh—and the mechanism that once enabled it to convert into a double bed has collapsed, so it has to be shoved against a wall and its front legs shimmed to keep it from sliding out with a crash and leaving you supine when you sit in it.

  They were embarrassed to bring friends into the house, because of it sitting there, and on the occasions when somebody had to confront it directly, they'd work up a patter:

  Have a seat if you like to be goosed.

  Our grandma made those rugs—aren't they pretty? I don't know what that is underneath of them.

  Once I got the right combination of springs and had to be picked off the ceiling.

  It has to be assembled before you sit in it. Pick your style.

  Don't let it know you're scared.

  At breakfast this morning, their father and Jerome, back at carpentry for the summer, started off for work, and then their father, who'd begun dating a widow, reappeared in the kitchen in a rush, as though he’d just noticed the thing, wrote out a check for three hundred dollars, and said, "For God's sake, go get some new furniture."

  They whistled and applauded as they used to at the movies when the hero appeared ("Wait! What about the old stuff?" "It doesn't make a bit of difference to me; you can burn it, for all I care." He said it) and then borrowed a pickup from their Uncle Fred and parked in the alley behind a furniture store in Havana and picked out, first, a couch, of course, a sturdy Early American couch.

  Two maple end tables, a swivel chair of white Naugahyde, a three-foot lamp with a linen shade and an oatmeal-colored base (a reminder, to Charles, of Grandma Jones), and ran out of money. They were loading it all into the pickup, laughing at the looks of the salesmen and themselves—as they later laughed waddling toward the incinerator with the swaying weight of the old couch between them—when a stranger pulled up in the alley beside them, and said, "Say, it looks like somebody's getting married, ha?"

  Ha!

  It was gasoline they got it going with, and now Tim, who's disappeared for a moment, returns from the house on a run with a large can of lighter fluid and touches up some spots that seem reluctant to burn.

  Charles checks the sky again—for a while it looked like rain, and they haven't unloaded the new furniture yet—and sees Bill Ebbinger, their gray neighbor across the alley, leaning on his lath fence with fixed eyes; being seen, Bill Ebbinger, a watchmaker who's now the town constable, walks over with his frail and liver-spotted hands curled at his sides.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Burning our couch."

  "Does your dad know it?"

  "Sure."

  Will he ask them to put it out?

  "I noticed the smoke.”

  "Oh."

  "So did the wife. Sure makes a lot of smoke. Terrific; heat, too, just terrific standing here close by it."

  Soon, Bill Ebbinger walks off without finding out for' his wife why they're burning it. Crazy Neumiller kids.

  The worst thing, Tim thinks, is that it will be preserved forever; its smoke will reach the atmosphere, fall as rain, feed plant life, and those plants won't be normal.

  The worst thing, Charles thinks, is that it's preserved forever in photographs:

  Jerome as an infant in a knitted bonnet, propped against its back.

  A grinning father in forties dress with his arm around their mother.

  Susan as an infant, Tim and Marie on either side of her, a doily on the couch's back, presaging the layers of throw rugs to come.

  A picture by a man who came to the house the summer after their mother died, when the five were home alone, and said he'd been sent to do their portrait (a lie; but they were so conscious of how her death had changed them, made them different from their friends, they thought it only natural), and had them line up in graduated order on the couch, covered now with the rugs, and then adjusted his camera, hid under its executioner's hood, and caught everybody leaning back too
far—had the shims slipped?— fluffed skirts, bloomers, and the pulled-up. pants legs and shinbones of the boys; hunched uneasy shoulders. A row of eyes like holes in air.

  Charles punches Tim. Tim hits him. They treadle around the couch in an amateur boxing match. He hits hair. I trammel nobody. Who hits he. I hark three. They do a tango. He grabs my bush. "Is this a lady here,, or who's knocking?"

  "Pardon me all the way to hell and back. Goodness gophers!"

  Hold:

  Jerome in his mortarboard with its valedictorian's tassel—a close-up, somehow distorted, so that the couch seems to have its arm around him.

  Tippy, their since departed dog, lying in front of a leg with a wedge under it.

  A color shot of Marie and Susan displaying new dresses from Grandma Jones; Christmas wrappings strewn over the room, opened boxes and other tinselly clutter, and way in the background, right at the focal point, where some rugs have slipped down, a white area of wadding stares between them like a cyclops.

  And these after Jerome and Charles started using the family camera and purposely tried to keep the couch out of the frame!

  Now I can bring Budke here, Charles thinks. He's dated her since high school and she's never been inside the house, although she's been at the front door a few times; one Halloween she and Charles were paired up for a treasure hunt and needed a 1941 penny to complete their list and win, so he sped toward home with her in the car, telling about the pennies he'd collected in jars and tins from the time he lived in that other state. North Dakota, and when she started to get out as though she meant to enter the place, he said, "No, now, wait a minute. That's right. I lost those about a month ago." And drove her off.

  A hole appears below a cushion and tines and fangs of flame spout out from it and mingle yellow-orange with the flames of blue. "Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Charoontarus!” Tim says, and feeds the hole more fluid as flames hop up the needle-sized stream toward the can where— Couldn't it explode?

  Charles studies Tim's maturing face, where the frizzy beginnings of a pink-blond beard sparkle from the fire or sunlight, and suffers a sudden shock, skip-beat, and parting of his being: who is Tim? He can see him as a seven-year-old, small for his age, pale freckles over his face and arms, sitting in overalls on the swing beneath the tree at the side of the house, a bare foot trailing in the oval of dirt below, his head bowed, because he's been told by Jerome or Charles to get the hell out of the way of their football game. Or walking across the yard, his hands in his pockets, toward the girls' playhouse, the box of a milk truck removed from its frame and painted chocolate, where hell lock himself up for the rest of the afternoon, because he's been kicked in the pants for pestering them..

  He disappears then. He spends the summer with Sue and Einard, and when their father goes to fetch him for school, he grabs the door, the car bumper, his uncle's legs, and is so desperate their father lets him stay. Einard pays him for helping with the chores and he accumulates an account of four hundred dollars, a fortune to Charles and Jerome, and raises garden products and calves he exhibits at fairs; a photograph arrives with him beside a Holstein steer, smiling and holding a ribbon up. Martin often says in quiet moments, or in the midst of a television program or a meal, "Goodness, how I miss Tim!"

  When he returns home (a form of bartering is entered on by Martin and Sue and Einard, whereby Tim will spend one year at home for so many on the farm), his freckles are so enlarged and dark from working outdoors they nearly cover the milk-colored skin of his face: "Freck-butt! Freck-butt!" he says through clenched teeth. He's wiry, charged with excess energy, with eyes that have a look, shy yet violent, that's in the eyes of Yeats, and if angered becomes ashen and compact, a pure source of power, and attacks Jerome and Charles with flying fists, baseball bats, brick-bats, table chairs, and flings Marie and Susan around like rag dolls when they enrage him.

  "It's the bone-cracker, folks! It's the dangerous beast without a peer or peter! Watch out for your whistle-holes!"

  "Tinvalin" connotes his diminutive size, his high voice, the sheath of protectiveness he keeps around him, and his razor's edge of violence; a neighbor, a plump, gossipy woman with pink glasses perched on a pointed nose and buck teeth, who calls them "You poor kids with no mother," he calls "Whit-tea-wheeow, Alabozhurs," a name that calls her up like an incantation, and lets you know she's hypocritically Christian and unctuous, and has the name of Lucille. You have to hear him do it, of course. He calls Forest Creek "Four-assed dick."

  Their father has never had any sort of patience with fooling or impropriety, and since their mother's death has handled all five in a manner that's almost formal, as though he's fashioned his only refuge; his dark and Indianlike looks have deepened and now he's even more silent, and then Tim—is it out of gall at having a life separate from the family's, or insanity?—starts calling him "Heap Big M." And gets away with it! makes their father blush, even, like a farm boy accepting a flower, or the boy he must have once been.

  Tim goes to Wisconsin again, and when he materializes next, at age twelve, he's hardly grown but gained fifty

  pounds, and his face is so fat his cheeks look inflated; his walk is waddling and burdened, his eyes dull, his hands stumpy and covered with warts, and he chews his nails until the ends of his fingers are ragged and bloody. "Tonofabelly," he calls himself, or "Big-prowed sowgut,” and at Christmas sings to the tune of "Jolly Old St. Nicholas," " 'Christmas Eve is coming soon, I can tell you that, but please-please don't tell anyone ah that I am too fat!' Merry Chrinchus, everybun!"

  And he plays the piano. It's been discovered by a piano teacher from St. Paul that he can master the rudiments of a Chopin mazurka in a week, and he's her prize pupil; but he never plays at home, and when the family asks him to, slips on a string tie, white gloves of Marie's, and crosses his eyes as he sends his hands in a tuneless dance over the keys and then, reaching down, plays the metal pedals at his feet—"The gloves help!" he cries—and then gives a smile all teeth, and says, "Hi, there, sweet ones. Slobberace at the keys." And then falls on the floor and plays dead.

  Martin lets him return to Wisconsin for good, and when Charles is a freshman in college, he receives a birthday letter from Tim at a time when he's worrying about his next rent payment, his next meal, even, and finds a twenty-dollar bill enclosed; fumbling through Tim's scratchy, self-effacing script that takes three readings to translate, he learns that Tim is doing well in high school, has grown to five feet ten, is running over the hills and through the woods of the farm to train for the track team in Pettibone next year (further bartering has provided that he shall spend his last year of high school at home, and then be free to do what he wants), that he's going to submit more poems for publication in the school paper (Charles didn't know he wrote) and perhaps send a few that have already been printed in it to a national magazine, now that they've seen the air, and that their Great-uncle Einard is growing old and rheumatic and has turned part of the farm over to Tim, so he might have to take it on when he's through with high school, and run it while he attends college part-time; he's going to major in biology. He might buy a new car. One sentence near the end stands out as if in italics: "In your nineteenth year, may God grant you the happiness you have given so unselfishly to me and your friends."

  Happiness? All Charles can remember is torment. And what friends?

  He saw Tim in his latest incarnation at a track meet over the spring break; he was tall and spindly-legged, and in his track briefs looked made of bone. He started out the mile with twenty other runners and on the last lap began passing the entire field as if they were traveling backward, and came sprinting down the final stretch with nobody else in sight and snapped the string, throwing his sweat-cold arms around Charles (who's hardly prepared for this), to break the county record.

  Charles looks at Tim, who's near the couch with a leg forward and head bowed, chin on his chest, as though deep in some unreachable thought.

  Who is he?

  What's he thinking, Tim wonders. I
sure can feel some thoughts. He's probably wishing now we'd never burned it. He's always liked to save things. Maybe we should have kept it in the basement or the attic, or our room upstairs, as a reminder of the camping trips to the State Forest when I got scared, riding our bikes out to Kyle Lake all that summer, seven miles each way, and going swimming and fishing together and having a few smokes; the time I was sunburned so badly I couldn't sleep, and he sat up with me; how it took two of us to maneuver that big mower mounted on bicycle tires, one pushing, one pulling with a rope, when we mowed the cemetery nobody else ever mowed where Mom is buried; his "pigeon parlor" as he called it—wire cages of pigeons he'd caught in the attic of the old Opera House and kept in that milk truck of the girls'—and how scared of him I was when I let the pigeons go, but he just cursed me out and then watched them circle above us, dark and then light as they swung out around, dark and light, and then were gone.

  Charles studies the flames, the glowing network of springs rising from the tatters and ash, and feels remorse and guilt start to well in him, when Tim gives him a shove, and says, "Better stand back," and sprays on so much lighter fluid there's the whoosh of a smoke pot in a vanishing act.

  Better stand back. The words charge the air between them and make Charles realize that there might be times when he'll need to be protected and that Tim, for all his early frailties, might be a person powerful enough to do it. My brother, Charles thinks, and feels himself shift into another realm, unself-conscious and wholly wordly, where all he has to do is cry "Hey-hey!" and prod the couch to get it burning better, brightly ablaze in the breeze rising out of this afternoon.

  "Hey-hey!" Tim answers, and grabs a length of two-by-four and whacks the couch's back and watches a cloud of sparks climb the sky and disappear, and thinks. Someday I might write about this and see these sparks rise again, and wonders, If I do do that, will I feel as I do now that my mother was here?

  "They're burning the couch," would be a good way to begin it, perhaps, and then end with her voice in a low-pitched wail of—