That afternoon Dieter let go of her hands and leaned down and kissed her cheek. A nurse brought her wheelchair and Dieter helped her into it. He wheeled her out to the courtyard which looked south over rolling hills of deep forest. The building was situated in such a way that you couldn’t see the clear-cut to the west. You might be looking at the land the way it looked hundreds of years ago. Okay, you had to ignore the blacktopped road and the line of houses to the east but if you held your head just right …
Dieter receded, and I pushed Mother up to a metal patio table and pulled a chair around for myself and sat down beside her.
“How have you been, Mom?”
“It’s so noisy here,” she said.
I listened but could hear only the sounds of birds and insects, cut occasionally by laughter or louder talk from inside. Way back in the background I thought I could hear traffic on Bailey Hill Road. I must have seemed puzzled.
“All that crackling and popping,” she explained.
“Yes,” I said.
“You kids can’t imagine.”
You kids would be me and my disguises—or maybe just my disguises these days.
“I’ve been telling Louisa about the lard,” she said. “I love the way it makes her face go purple when I tell her she’s got to start with real lard if she wants to make good enchilada sauce.”
“You can use butter,” I said.
“I know it.” She grinned and winked. “I just like to see her turn purple. ‘Your heart! Your heart!’”
“My heart?”
“No, silly, that’s what Louisa says. ‘Think of your heart!’”
“Well,” I said.
“The flour,” she said. “The crushed chilies. The…”
She paused for me to fill in the secret ingredient, but I knew she really didn’t expect me to do it. One of our little games.
“Nice try,” I said and patted her hand, and we laughed together.
We spent some time just sitting. I loved the air on the back patio—the crisp forest smell. The place was above any auto or wood stove smog. I bet there would be a good view of the stars whenever there were stars to see (such a rare and special sight in Oregon), but then I realized there would be no one sitting out here at night.
“So what’s new?” she asked.
“Sky is working on a murder case,” I said.
“Has he figured it out yet?”
“No.”
“Tell him to look the answer up in The Big Book of Clues,” she said.
“I’ll do that.”
“I remember the way you all hated to dance,” she said.
The word dance sent a chill down my back, but I’m used to running into it in odd contexts so I pulled myself together. I wondered who she was talking to. In her world had there been six little dancers and Brian, too?
“All that fuss,” she said. “Do a couple of steps for me. I do so miss that.”
“What?”
“I said dance for me.”
As she spoke, I could see that her words no longer matched the movement of her lips. Who knew what she was really saying?
“Here?”
“Why not,” she said. “They expect crazy things from me.”
“But maybe not from me.”
I had to clear my head. This conversation was happening on several levels for me, and it was probably happening on more than one level for her, too. On the one hand we were both talking to ourselves and missing one another altogether, but on some other level I felt we were approaching some defining moment in our relationship.
I could feel some uncontrollable dancing coming on.
“Show your mother that old soft-shoe, Brian.”
Because she suddenly knew who I was, I couldn’t help thinking she’d known all along. Calling me by my name took me back, made me see the kitchen table in the old house on Lincoln, Mom in an apron (or maybe that was the Beaver’s mom) and me in my gleaming black tap shoes and white shirt and red crepe paper vest with the sparkling green stars. Someone had blown glitter onto the front of my outfit. White foam hat. What was that stuff they used to make your hat? You could bite a piece out of the brim of a hat like that, but you’d get in big trouble if you did.
“Don’t just sit there looking so glum,” she said. “Listen to the song in your heart!”
So I got up from the kitchen table and jumped around the room trying to remember the steps Mrs. Fountain had run the twelve of us through last Saturday. Boy, was she ever a tyrant. A woman of one age or another. Her face looked years older than my mom’s, but she could have stolen her body from a teenager. She always wore a scarf around her neck, and I figured that was to hide the stitches that held the head and the body together.
My mother clapping time to the tap-along music on the stereo.
Mom driving the station wagon, still whistling—pick up Elsie and Peggy, pick up Ted(dy—he hates that), and Marvin, already bigger than the rest—here a kid, there a kid—maybe half the tap class.
The twelve of us in a line onstage, Marvin in the middle like a mountain peak. Mrs. Fountain in the wings looking like a bird, maybe a vulture. I could just die, Ted said. Yeah, but then she’d eat you. Curtain goes up. We look around blinking like someone’s just flipped on the lights and caught us with our pants down.
The crowd rumbles like a huge empty stomach.
Dorky music.
And we dance.
Crazy hail on a tin roof. We’re not exactly synchronized.
Every shadow claps anyway. Cheers and whistles.
Ted grows up as he dances and by the time he’s a teenager he wanders off shaking his head and grinning sheepishly. Elsie puts on pounds but perseveres. She dances to the left getting older, bigger; she dances back to me getting smaller; we patty cake and click our heels together and she dances away to the left again getting bigger. We repeat that a couple of times, she comes, she goes, but one time she just doesn’t come back, and it’s just Marvin and me. Then he whaps me a good one on the back of the head and I’m dancing alone on the stage. Grandparents and parents and siblings and friends and well-wishers have all taken up smoking and no one is paying much attention to the stage anymore. Everyone is talking and rattling the ice in their glasses. You’ve really got to dig in your heels and put on a show to get the attention of a crowd like that, but in most ways I don’t care if they’re watching—I’m an artist; I dance for myself.
I am large and I am the master of tap. I am small and clumsy. I am large and sweaty and the tangy pine air blows across the patio and cools my face. I can see my mother’s face, but I cannot decipher her expression. Her mouth moves but I can’t read her lips. I’m afraid she looks frightened.
Then there’s a guy on my left who takes my arm, and a guy on my right who takes my other arm. They make soothing sounds as they urge me from the patio and down and down and down the long hallway toward the front door of the nursing home. I’ve gone too far. Things have gotten out of hand. I wonder how much of that was real. How much of that did I share with my mother and how much of it did I live alone. Once I get wound up like that, I don’t stop until I crash. I felt a deep sense of embarrassment. I wondered how my mother would be next “Sunday.” Would she remember? The staff would pretend that nothing had happened. Except for Jennifer, the nurse at the front desk, who would give me a look that said you’d better behave yourself or else!
“I can walk,” I said.
“It’s okay, Mr. Dobson,” the guy on my left said. “We’ll just help you to your car.”
It was a long walk to the front door. I felt like a fool, but I was too ripped to put up a fight.
“Do you think he can drive?” the guy on my right said.
“I’m okay,” I said. I rolled my shoulders and shook them off. Okay, what really happened was we were outside so they just let me go. I held up my hands and backed away from them. “I’m okay.”
I walked to my jeep. I opened the door and climbed behind the wheel and then looked back at the fro
nt of the nursing home. My escorts had gone back inside.
I rested my forehead on the steering wheel and took a couple of deep breaths. Big raindrops splattered against the windshield. Maybe I needed a meeting. Of course, I needed a meeting; I’d needed a meeting for weeks, but I knew I wouldn’t make one yet.
How low can you go?
We’ll have to let you know.
Apparently I was still on the way down.
eight
I’d lied to the guys in white; I was in no shape to drive, so when the rain let up a little, I left the Cherokee at the Oak Leaves Care Center and hiked down the hill to Eighteenth Avenue where I sat for fifteen minutes in a bus shelter listening to the rain hitting the roof and waiting for a bus to take me back downtown. The only good thing you could have said about me at that time was that at least I wasn’t behind the wheel.
The bus driver gave me a nasty look, and nasty looks from bus drivers are not common in Eugene, so I figured I must look pretty much like I felt. I took a seat about half way back in the bus and struggled to get invisible. Maybe I was trying too hard since the driver kept looking up at me in his big mirror.
All that attention made me so nervous I got off maybe ten blocks too soon and had to walk the rest of the way. Once I hit the downtown mall, there were more people about. They slowed me down, and everyone seemed to notice me. There is an opposite for almost everything. The opposite of being invisible is that state where everyone notices you. Everyone you pass looks at you, catalogues your failings, notes your distinguishing features for a potential police line-up. It’s like when you get a goofy haircut and everyone you pass looks at your head, smirks, and looks away. I put my hands in my pockets and watched my feet and hurried on down the mall to my office. Slipping into my building was like ducking into a cave. I almost never met anyone in the corridors or elevator and that evening was no different. I got to my door without seeing anyone.
Once inside, I sat down behind my desk and poured myself a big drink, drank it, and poured myself another. The scotch radiated warmth from my belly down to my knees and toes and up to the tops of my ears. I finished the second drink and then stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes. I needed to get away, but I didn’t want to drink myself to sleep. My head was spinning a mile a minute (as my mother would have said), and I planned on lying there with my eyes closed pretending to be asleep or passed out until it stopped.
I was still pretending when the door opened and a couple of bumblers came whispering and shushing into the office. I recognized Prudence at once and a moment later I was sure the other one was Yuri. I didn’t open my eyes.
“Put it down on the desk,” Prudence whispered.
They were moving around as carefully as they could, which meant they were making a lot of noise. I could smell barbecue sauce. Suddenly hungry, I thought about sitting up and rubbing my eyes and saying, “Hey, you guys brought ribs.” But then I thought that if they thought I was really out, they might say things they wouldn’t ordinarily say around me.
“I may need to unplug something else,” Yuri whispered.
“Later,” Prudence whispered.
I heard the client chair being dragged across the floor closer to the couch. And then a puzzling squeak that I soon figured out was from my desk chair being pushed across the floor on its rollers. They were pulling up chairs around the couch. Would they put the tub of ribs on my chest? What were they up to?
I almost sat up when Yuri said, “More sleep learning?”
“Yes,” Prudence said.
“He may be a lot further out than you think,” Yuri said. “Post-dance. I know what this is like.”
“I wonder if he found the next to last warning to Gerald?”
“You said he went back in,” Yuri said.
“Sure, but maybe all he found was EES stuff.”
“Tell him about the warning to Randy,” Yuri said.
I heard the chair scrape and scoot a little closer to me, and then I felt Prudence’s breath on my cheek. She whispered, “SOAPY sent Randy Casey an e-mail message just before he killed him. The message was like the one he sent to Gerald. It said, ‘You’re running out of time!’”
“Maybe you’d better tell him where to find it,” Yuri said.
“He is a detective,” Prudence said. “If he suspects a warning exists, he’ll find it.”
“Sure, but do you want him wasting his time looking?” Yuri said. “Also right now I don’t think he could find his own butt with a flashlight, a detailed map, and slowly spoken directions.”
Hey, watch it! I thought.
“Too bad we can’t just jack his head into the net,” Prudence said.
It was clear I was being played for a fool, a sucker. These two knew a lot more about the case than they’d been telling. They were stringing me along, and for all I knew they had killed Gerald Moffitt and Randy Casey. Maybe they were setting me up to pin the blame on this SOAPY character. You drop clues like bread crumbs along the garden path and Skylight Howells just follows along picking them up.
“Should I tell him about Sadie?” I could tell from the sound of her voice she had sat back up. So were they through feeding me information after just one piece? And who was Sadie?
“No,” Yuri said. “We don’t want him to start imagining he’s got paranormal powers. Let him pick it up on the TV news.”
“So what’s with the vegetables?”
“He doesn’t eat right,” Yuri said. “One of the things you’ve got to watch when you’re fighting the Dance is that you eat right.”
He walked back to the desk. There was a sound like seeds rattling in a gourd. “Vitamin C.” More rattling. “Beta carotene.” He went on rattling and cataloging vitamins and minerals for some time. If you took that many, when would you have time to do anything else?
“Meanwhile let’s eat the ribs,” Prudence said.
“Good idea.”
The barbecue smell got a lot stronger once they opened the tub. I listened to them eat for a couple of minutes, and then I groaned. It sounded pretty fake to me, so I didn’t try it again. I rubbed my eyes and sat up.
Prudence sat on the edge of my desk with a dripping rib held between thumb and finger. A smear of sauce on her cheek. She still wore the sheer purple dress and black boots. Yuri had been poking around in the ribs when I came awake and he was still bending over the tub. He looked over at me and smiled.
Who would guess Yuri was a Russian working for a company called Evil Empire Software? These days he even wore American sneakers. Did he even care about the workers who made those shoes? He was maybe five-foot-nine or -ten and slender with black hair and brown eyes, the kind of guy who could easily get lost in a crowd. Until I met Yuri, I didn’t know they tap-danced in Russia, much less that it would be a problem. I suppose, though, that it being a problem pretty much follows from the fact of them having it. You provide the opportunity to dance, some people are going to abuse it. Yuri once told me the Russian word for tap dancing was “chechyotka.”
“You look like hell,” he said. “You want some ribs?”
I sat up, then stood up and grabbed the back of my desk chair. “Why not?”
I pushed the chair back behind my desk like I was straightening things up. Actually I used the chair to support myself because I wasn’t feeling all that steady on my feet.
Once behind the desk I grabbed a rib. It took me a few minutes of messy gnawing before I noticed the machine on my desk. White plastic and gleaming stainless steel. I reached over and turned the machine my way. SuperJuicer III. When I moved the machine I saw Yuri’s line of vitamin bottles.
“What’s all this?” I asked. What I wanted to ask was why the two of them were holding out on me, but the machine and the vitamins distracted me. Not to mention the ribs, which were warming my stomach and making me think that maybe all was not lost after all.
“Healthy body, healthy mind,” Yuri said. “You know the drill. I’ll bet these ribs are the most healthy things you’ve e
aten in weeks.”
Actually that wasn’t true, but I didn’t correct him. He dipped down below my sight and then came back up with a grocery sack. He put the sack down on the desk by the SuperJuicer III.
Prudence reached over and pulled a carrot out of the sack. “What’s up, Spoc?”
Yuri rolled his eyes at her. He took the carrot out of her hand and put it back in the sack. He picked up the sack and put it in her hands. “Can you wash the fruit and vegetables, Pru? I’ll plug in the machine.”
Prudence hopped off the desk and took the sack of produce into the washroom. Yuri poked around beside my desk looking for the powerstrip. I had another rib.
“So,” Yuri said. He was still down on the floor beside my desk and I couldn’t see his face. “Prudence tells me you got into GP Ink.”
“That’s right.” I needed time to figure out what these two were up to.
When I didn’t say anything more, Yuri went back to moving around and looking for a place to plug in the juicer. A moment later he stood up again. “Got it. So what did you find?” He flipped a switch on the juicer and a little red light came on.
I decided to let him squirm. “So, why do you call your company Evil Empire Software?”
“Our little joke,” Yuri said. “In the new Russia we have a sense of humor.” Then his smile disappeared and he half closed his eyes and leaned across the desk invading my space, getting in my face. “Also it’s part of our evil plan. Soon every child in America will have one of our computer games which display devilish messages if you play them backwards.” He laughed an evil laugh.
I was in no mood to smile, so it hurt a little when I did.
“So, you found me out when you searched GP Ink,” Yuri said. It was easy to see he wanted me to pick up that line of conversation and fill him in on everything I’d learned. Since he and Prudence apparently already knew all that there was to know from GP Ink, he was just trying to make sure I had found what they wanted me to find. That seemed to be the warning to Gerald from SOAPY, so they wanted me to think SOAPY was the killer. Next they wanted me to track down a warning from SOAPY to Randy Casey. I wouldn’t bother, of course. The fact that the warning existed was all I needed.
The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces Page 8
