Outside my neighbors were filling a kiddie pool with water from their garden hose. I waved.
“Marvin died,” one of the women said glumly.
“Who’s Marvin?” I asked.
She turned to her sister, or mother—I couldn’t tell—and rolled her eyes.
Clark had chained the lids of my trash cans to the plastic handles on the barrels. For some reason, the people of Alna liked to steal the lids and throw them in the Omec. That was one of their summer recreations, he’d told me. As I stuffed the garbage down, the pregnant girl threw open the screen door and walked stiffly down the front steps. She held one hand down under her belly and the palm of her other hand up in front of her face. When she saw me and the neighbors, she turned her palm around. It was covered in blood.
“Oh, honey!” cried one of the women, dropping the hose.
“Something’s wrong,” the girl stammered, stunned.
“Well, honey, what happened? Did you fall? Did you hurt yourself?” the women were asking. The girl caught my eye as they surrounded her. I put the lid on the trash and watched as the women guided the girl across the muddy grass. They made her sit down in a lawn chair in the shade. One of them went inside to call for help. I went back into the house and got the girl’s flyers and twenty dollars from my wallet. When I got back outside, she was panting. I handed her the money, and she grabbed my forearm, smeared her blood all over it, squeezed it, shrieking, contracting her face in pain.
“Hang on, honey,” the neighbor said, frowning at me, her fat hands stroking the girl’s smooth, sweaty brow. “Help is on the way.”
• • •
When the ambulance left that afternoon, I took a walk down to the Omec. Squatting by the edge of the river, I washed the blood off my arm. I took the crystals out and let them plunk down into the rushing water, threw the crumpled foil at the wind, and watched it hit the surface and float away. I looked up at the pale, overcast sky, the crows circling then gliding down to a nest of rotting garbage on the opposite bank. I sat on a hot rock and let the sun warm my bones. My thighs splayed out; my white skin tightened and burned. It was nice there with the cool breeze, the sound of the traffic through the trees, the earthy stench of mud. An empty Coke can tinkled a rhythm against the rock, shaken by the current. A toad hopped across my foot.
Later that evening I dragged the sunlamp out onto the curb, thinking maybe the zombies would find it. The next morning it was still there, so I dragged it back inside. I walked up Riverside Road. I got what I wanted. I walked back home.
AN HONEST WOMAN
They met one summer day through the high chain-link fence between their backyards. His yard was just plain dry brown dirt. Hers was full of dusty bags of fertilizer andtools haphazardly scattered where she’d started planting flowers in the tough soil. The man had seen neighbors come and go over the many years he’d lived there, in the dark corner of the cul-de-sac. “Through seven presidents,” he told the girl, laughing nervously and swatting his neck as if to catch mosquitoes. He was only sixty but looked far older. Vitiligo had stripped his brittle hair of its color, made his face seem riddled with fat freckles. The girl was pretty, sturdy, in her early thirties. She had been living next door to the man for two months already. He had just been waiting for the proper moment to introduce himself.
“I’m Jeb,” the man said.
“That’s a long time, Jeb,” the girl said to him. “That many presidents.”
Jeb laughed again and sighed and looked at her through the fence. His shock of white hair gleamed in a single ray of light falling from the girl’s yard into his. His strange, spotted face and bulbous nose made the girl look away. White strands of loose thread hung down from her jean shorts and fluttered around her thighs. Her breasts, Jeb noticed, were untethered—no bra. What color were her eyes? Jeb looked down at them, perplexed to find that they were of different colors, one a strange, violet shade of blue, the other green with flecks of black and honey. Coils of green rubber hose snaked through the mess in the yard behind her. He was glad, he told the girl, to have a new neighbor, and relieved that the property was being cared for after so long. The previous owners of the house had ripped out its walls, banged around all day, left busted garbage bags of broken plaster on the curb, chalking up the blacktop. The bank had taken it over in a terrible state of disrepair, then sold it to the girl for next to nothing.
“How are you and your husband liking the neighborhood?” Jeb asked through the fence. But he already knew that the boy was gone. Over the last few weeks, Jeb had watched the boy and the girl through the scrim of brown paper covering their den windows. He’d heard their spats and squabbles. The boy’s motorcycle had been missing from its spot under the garage awning for days.
“Trevor left,” the girl said, crossing her arms. She looked down at the ground, hid her toes behind a tall tuft of crabgrass.
“He’s at work,” Jeb said, nodding, pretending to misinterpret her. “What is his profession, if I may ask?”
“No, I mean he’s gone,” the girl said. “For good this time.”
“He’s left you all alone?” Jeb hooked the fingers of one hand into the chain-link fence and took a step toward her. He placed his other hand over his heart and let his strange, sagging mandible soften into a deep frown. “That’s just awful. Poor dear.” He shook his head.
“Whatever, you know,” the girl said. She made fists of her hands, then spread her fingers out like bombs exploding. “That’s life.”
“I do know,” Jeb said gravely, his thick lips trembling in false sympathy. That was one way he knew to affect women—to seem overcome by his own unruly emotions, and then to apologize for them. “I’m sorry,” he said, gasping and frowning again. Jeb saw that there was no ring on the girl’s finger. She wasn’t a widow or a divorcée; she was only newly single, and not for long, Jeb supposed. “I just know the feeling all too well,” he said.
“Shit, don’t cry,” the girl said. Despite being pretty and soft of flesh, there was something harsh about her, Jeb thought. Something crude.
In the silence, he felt the girl’s gaze shift across his narrow torso, the crepey, spotted skin on his thin arms. She was assessing him, he knew. He cleared his throat and brought his hands together, clapped them twice as though he’d just finished a difficult task. He corrected his slumped posture. “Our houses are mirror images, you know,” he said. He held up his palms side by side in front of him. “La destra. And la sinistra, that’s me. I know a little Italian,” he added. “I took a class once, years and years ago.” Then his voice took on a bright, folksy twang as he said, as if the girl had prompted him to, “Well, come on over sometime if you get lonesome. Have a cup of coffee with your old next-door neighbor. You’re welcome anytime.”
“Are you southern?” the girl asked, ignoring his invitation. She looked snooty. She looked distrustful.
“I’m an Alabama boy,” Jeb answered. “But I’ve lived here forever. Too long. Seven presidents, if you can believe that,” he said, laughing at the repeated joke as though to cheer her with his senility. When he smiled he exposed the deep rot of his clawlike teeth. They were nearly black along the gums. “Nice to meet you,” he said. He put out his hand to mime a handshake through the chain link. The girl sniggered.
“We can shake E.T. style,” she said and extended her index finger through the fence. Jeb met the tip of it with his. He marked the moment in his mind, the feel of her finger—hot, dry, resilient. “Bye,” she said.
Jeb watched her round bouncing calves, brown from summer and flecked with mud, as she crossed the yard and went up her steps. “If you ever need a hand,” he began, but the girl didn’t hear him. Her silhouette passed behind the gray screens of the back porch, and then she was inside and her kitchen door was shut and her radio was on. She’d had the radio on a lot, Jeb had noticed, since the boy had left her. Jeb could hear almost everything that went on in her hou
se, he’d figured out, if he listened carefully from his basement window.
• • •
That night, Jeb ate his dinner in the basement, listening to the sounds the girl made alone in her house. Her radio was tuned to old folk singers. Women’s music, Jeb thought, spearing his food with a heavy silver fork. He chewed thoroughly, gagging now and then on the tough, pan-fried steak, the few raw strands of carrot and green bell pepper. He thought that drinking while you ate diluted the stomach’s acids, so he rarely drank more than his morning coffee and an occasional tumbler of Kenny May whiskey when he had something to celebrate or mourn. Otherwise he was dumb to the pleasures of consumption. He did, however, enjoy the thrill of frugality in stocking large quantities of meat, purchased on sale, in his storage freezer, which he now used as a dinner table in the basement. He liked to buy his vegetables at a discount, too, usually off the sale rack in the supermarket. He’d been doing it for so long that the very sight of that neon orange discount sticker could make his mouth water.
He was glad the girl didn’t try to emulate the singer’s flourishes when she song along. He would have been embarrassed to hear that. She sang a sad song—clearly she knew all the words—and in the rests he thought he detected the faint swish of a magazine. He imagined her sitting on a colorful quilt, yellow lamplight glazing her bare arms and glinting off the vertebrae of her neck as she peered down at the pictures of everything she coveted. He felt that he was getting to know the girl by the sounds she made—her foul mouth on the phone with her girlfriends, the violent slams of her bureau drawers as she dressed, her quick steps up and down the stairs in the morning, her slow steps up and down at night. Jeb had even heard her passing gas a few times, and he hoped one day to tell her so. “And yet my affection for you did not diminish,” he imagined saying. “In fact, it only endeared you to me more.”
Before Trevor left, Jeb hadn’t liked to listen very closely. The two were always yelling at each other. “Where’re my shoes?” “Ready?” “What?” “Babe?” And then there was “Babe, come talk to me” and “Babe, look at this” and “Babe, get down here.” And the worst, “I love you, babe.” Babe. No one in Jeb’s life had ever called him that. “Jeb” was as sweet a name as he’d ever gone by, and still it had an ugly, rubbery ring to it, like a name for dishwashing detergent or soap used to mop prison floors. Jeb. It was short for Jebediah. But nobody ever asked him to explain it. Nobody could bear to look at him, he thought, much less sit and listen to him talk.
• • •
Sunday morning, Jeb’s nephew parked his black sedan in the driveway and threw his cigarette butt at the parched dirt yard. Jeb fried some eggs and bacon, made toast, poured coffee, peeled the waxed paper off a fresh stick of butter. He’d spent the past hour listening to the girl plodding around her house, scrubbing the floors, filling buckets of water with the nozzle from the kitchen sink, hammering nails into the walls. The occasional cry of “shit” or “ouch” or “motherfucker” punctuated the radio news broadcast that blathered on from her kitchen. There were protesters in Egypt getting killed. There were scientists discovering new planets. There were fires in a national park, a flood in India, a spree of robberies across the river. Poor people and immigrants liked the president. A storm was coming. High winds, they warned. Keep your pets safe inside. “Whatever,” the girl muttered, and turned the dial to jazz.
“My new neighbor’s nice,” Jeb said to his nephew once they’d sat down to eat in the breakfast nook. Jeb took for himself only one strip of bacon, one dry piece of toast. “Single gal,” he went on, “right next door. I’m sure she could use a friend her own age.”
The nephew ate a forkful of eggs. His face was thin and bearded. He wore a small gold hoop in one ear. “What’s she look like?” he asked, head tilted skeptically. “Truthfully. Head to toe.”
“Oh, please,” Jeb said. “You’re not one to be picky. Looks a bit like Lou Ann.” Lou Ann had been the nephew’s high-school girlfriend. “She has that kind of tan.”
“I’ll meet her,” said the nephew. “But I’m not saying I’ll take her out. I don’t need any drama.”
“What drama? You should be so lucky,” Jeb said. “A sweet gal. Comes with baggage, of course, as they all do.”
“Kids?” the nephew asked. “Forget it.”
“No, no kids. Emotional issues, more like,” Jeb said. “You know women. Stray cats, all of them, either purring in your lap or pissing in your shoes.”
“Amen to that,” said the nephew.
“She is pretty. Something special about her. A gal who might be worth suffering for, if you ask me. Anyway, you’d be so lucky,” he repeated. He pulled the nephew’s empty plate away. “Go over there and introduce yourself. Or better yet, bring her this piece of mail.” He put the plate in the sink and went to the kitchen drawer, where he’d been saving a letter the postman had misdelivered. It was a notice from a university library across the river. The girl was late in returning a book and the fee was multiplying day by day. “I meant to give it to her yesterday,” Jeb said.
“But it’s Sunday morning,” the nephew said.
“Never mind,” Jeb said. “She’s up. I’m sure she’ll be happy to have a visitor.” He put a hand on the boy’s muscled shoulder as they walked to the front door. “When you see her, tell her I send my regards.”
The nephew skipped through the front yard, kicking updust, and jogged across the crumbling sidewalk onto thegirl’s front lawn. Her yard had no fencing around it, just thick, overgrown grass, small evergreen bushes, piles of damp mulch spread sloppily around two crooked saplings. A few empty flowerpots sat on the stoop. The nephew rangthe doorbell, then knocked, his chest heaving with impatience. When the girl answered, Jeb ducked back into thehouse to watch the scene through his living room window.
She wore her frayed denim shorts and a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. The nephew stood agog for a moment, then handed her the letter. As they spoke, the girl flapped the letter in her hand. She dug her finger under the seal of the envelope, failing to notice that it had been opened and reglued by Jeb. The nephew looked expectant, scratched his ear, put his hands in and out of his pockets. The girl shrugged and flipped her hair and smiled. Finally he backed down off her front steps. The girl waved the letter, then shut the door. Jeb watched her silhouette through her papered windows. He kneaded his shoulder with his hand. It was all gristle and sinew. He peeled a soft brown banana. He listened to his nephew drive away.
• • •
In the early afternoon, Jeb was in the backyard, dragging a rusted lawn chair across the dirt. He sat in a spot from which he could see the girl doing dishes through her open kitchen door.
“Beware the storm!” he yelled when she finally walked out to the porch and sat on the warped wooden back steps. “I love this time, the calm before.”
She looked at Jeb through the chain-link fence. He was just sitting there, facing her yard as if it were a TV set. “Hey,” she said. The soft, warm wind tousled her long, loose hair. She gathered it in her fingers, then turned her back to Jeb to light a cigarette.
“Say,” Jeb said, dragging the chair closer to the fence. “I don’t mean to pry, but may I say how pleased I was to hear you made a new friend in my young nephew. Been a while since he had someone special in his life.” He winked. “I wish you both well.”
“It’s not a big deal,” the girl said, picking a fleck of tobacco from her tongue. “We’re just having a drink together.”
“Now, now,” said Jeb. “I don’t want to poke my head in. I respect y’all’s privacy.”
The girl stood. “There’s nothing to be private about,” she said. “It’s not a date or anything. You could come with us if you wanted. It’s the same to me either way.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t intrude like that.” Jeb furrowed his eyebrows, shook his head. The girl looked so beautiful in the wind and the strange pink light of the sun
through the pale clouds. He watched her shirt flatten against her body in the wind. “You don’t need an old man getting in your way,” he said.
Holding the cigarette in her teeth, she wrestled her hair down again and twisted it into a braid. Her armpits were gritty with tiny hairs and flecked with white clumps of deodorant. “If you want to join us, I don’t mind. I don’t care,” she said flatly.
“If you insist,” Jeb said. “Come over to my side, why don’t you? We’ll toast you the Alabama way, and then y’all can go off wherever young folks go. You do drink whiskey, don’t you?”
“Who doesn’t?” she answered, dragging her cigarette against the doorframe.
“See you at eight, then,” Jeb said and watched her walk across her yard, pitched forward in the wind. She picked up a small potted sapling and carried it back to the porch. “It’ll pass quick!” Jeb shouted, pointing up at the churning, rose-colored sky, but the girl couldn’t hear him. The first thunder clapped. A flash of lightning. Jeb went back into the house and sat on the couch, listening and counting, waiting for the storm.
• • •
By eight o’clock the rains had arrived in lazy, side-sweeping sheets battering Jeb’s windows. The sky was black now, but lightning turned it amethyst and smoky each time it cracked overhead. Jeb had showered, put on a clean shirt, combed his hair with pomade, shaved, slapped his jowls with cologne. His dinner had been a boiled chicken drumstick, a small can of sauerkraut, a few tart early-summer cherries. Through the concert of the storm, nothing from the girl’s house had been audible at the basement window. Jeb’s own radio now reported downed power lines, flooding on the interstate. Fallen branches had forced some roads to close. It wasn’t safe to drive over the bridge, they said. The nephew called to convey a message to the girl. “Tell her I’m stuck. I can’t come tonight.”
“What a shame,” Jeb said. “I’ll tell her.” In the living room, he tidied a pile of clipped coupons on the end table by the couch, set out the bottle of Kenny May. From the kitchen cabinet he chose two crystal-cut tumblers, licked the rims of both, and set them next to the whiskey. He tuned the radio to easy listening.
Homesick for Another World Page 11
