“You ain’t gonna take me to Vegas after I tried to stick you up.”
But of course we did, dropping him on the main drag just before sunrise, wishing him the best of luck turning five into a million. The neon of the hotels and casinos flooded the night like a diamond bracelet in the sun, at this of all hours.
I asked Simon if he’d been scared.
“Of course. Weren’t you?”
I told him I was, because I didn’t want him to know I’d forgotten how to feel. If I was becoming more like our mother, I didn’t want to burden him with it now, when he had so much else on his mind.
On the way out of town we picked up Mrs. Hurley, a thin, frail old black woman with a thick braid of gray hair and a mouth full of jumbled teeth.
“Why, thank you, children,” she said in a sweet accent as she settled her lean old bones onto the back seat. “Poor old woman like to freeze out there in this desert. Can’t believe that bus driver begrudge an old lady some medicine for her arth-er-itis.”
She pulled a flask from inside her cloth coat and pulled a short swallow.
“He made you get off the bus?”
“Well, not the first time. First time he just took it away. But I got two, see, ’cause you never know. Second time he says, lady, I just cut you all the slack I can cut by law. And he set me by the side of the road. Can you imagine? I says to him, I says, somebody ought to be nicer to your grammy, and I hope they do. But he just drove on.”
I squirmed all the way around in my seat to watch Mrs. Hurley’s face. When she saw me watching, she smiled at me. It was a kind of smile I’d never seen before. Easy and real, as though it required no planning. Every one of her teeth seemed to point in a different direction, but no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t make that smile any less beautiful.
It made my stomach tingle. I worked on smiling at her, so she’d smile back. But it was an effort for me, a trip into the unfamiliar. It made me think of the tin man in The Wizard of Oz, getting his mouth oiled because he’d been left out in the field too long, to rust.
Mrs. Hurley asked our names, and why we were out in this cold, difficult world alone.
I watched Simon’s face change, watched the thoughts at work behind his eyes, deciding. Then he told her the whole truth about our parents.
“Sometimes it makes you wonder,” she said, “why the Lord would choose to balance so much on young shoulders. Must be because the young are so strong. Not rigid strong, but strong like a green stick.”
DeeDee said, good theory, lady. But of course Mrs. Hurley couldn’t hear.
Then Simon told her we were going to see our grandmother, who we’d never met, and who might or might not want to see us. Mrs. Hurley said she couldn’t imagine a woman on god’s green earth who wouldn’t be pleased to meet her own grandchildren.
Simon drove silent for a mile or more. Then he said, “She doesn’t like us because we’re half Jewish.”
“Ah,” Mrs. Hurley said, “there’s something I know and can understand. You wanta know something about me? I’m only three-quarters black. My father’s father was a white man. You think anybody cares? You think anybody gives me a quarter the respect they pay a white woman? No, sir.”
At a rest stop somewhere in northeast Arizona I woke in the morning to find Simon sitting on the hood of the Studebaker, and Mrs. Hurley snoring in the back seat, her cheek flattened against the glass.
I stepped out into the chilly desert morning to sit with Simon. I stared where he stared, at a red-brown mesa, stretching on forever, whittled and designed by eons of wind. I watched my brother’s eyes, knowing he saw something I didn’t.
“What does it look like to you, Simon?”
“Almost like god.”
I figured that Simon, damn near eighteen, must be close enough to god to see him in the distance like light at the end of a tunnel.
“Go in the ladies’ room and wash up,” he said. “And put on clean clothes and comb your hair. That’s important. If we don’t, we’ll look like hoboes, and that’s like sending a signal to everybody that we don’t respect ourselves. So then, why should they?”
I cleaned and groomed myself carefully, and when I came out, I found Simon still staring at the godlike mesa.
Mrs. Hurley bought us breakfast and a tank of gas, and we offered to drive her right to her doorstep in Columbus.
Halfway across the Texas panhandle, we had to stop over a whole night for Simon to catch up on his sleep.
Mrs. Hurley and I, who slept whenever we wanted, sat out on a bench in the starry night. I made a game of seeing how many times I could get her to smile.
“Isn’t Texas just the flattest place on earth,” she said, wrapping me against her in her huge coat.
I looked around, saw nothing to break the landscape but the rest station bathrooms, a building in the midst of nothing like the manger in the nativity. The stars seemed to surround us in wide-angle, as if we lived inside the dome of a snow globe.
“I’ve heard it said there’s more stars in Texas than anywhere else in the world,” she said. “You know, he’s a fine young man, your Simon.”
I smiled without trying. “You know what my sister DeeDee says? She says insanity runs in our family, but it jumps over Simon.”
Mrs. Hurley laughed, a light, ringing sound, like something that would come naturally with the spring.
“I think it mighta given you a clean miss too, little Ella.”
“Oh, no. Not me. Only Simon.” Then: “Mrs. Hurley? Do you think maybe our grandmother really doesn’t want to know us at all?”
Mrs. Hurley hugged me tighter to her bony side. “Well, now, honey, maybe she just thinks she doesn’t. Because maybe she just doesn’t know yet what fine young people you grew up to be.”
We sat alone under the great dome of lights, allowing ourselves to be ever so much smaller than the world until Simon woke up.
THE NAKED MAN
The hawk screams, and light spills into my tunnel, dispersing it. I squint, then press my eyes shut for relief. When I open them I see a town.
More significantly, I am standing barefoot on a spot my brother Simon has crossed. For the first time since the start of my wanderings, I have chanced across a piece of my target.
I am pleased with myself for knowing this.
The town spreads out a mile or so below me, but the back door of the nearest house is practically in my lap. I stand facing a board fence where, just the other side, a fiftyish woman in a denim shirt and sun hat and heavy work gloves prunes roses.
The hawk screams again. I look up to see him above her yard in a tree, watching me with agitation. I wonder why the woman does not look up. Maybe the hawk is not really there. Or maybe I’m not. I could be invisible. It’s happened before. I take two steps toward her fence. My movement catches her eye; she looks at my face, questioning at first, then she smiles.
“Good morning,” she says. “You took a nasty scrape there.”
My hand flies to my chin, a band of cracked scab. I’d forgotten, although it hurts. I pull the photo from my bedroll.
“I’m looking for my brother Simon,” I say, and show it to her. “I thought you might have seen him.”
She studies the picture longer than necessary. She likes him, I can tell. Everybody likes Simon. She’s thinking that if she had lost someone like that, she’d want him back, too. I can see that in her face.
I want to tell her that my brother Simon used to be a gardener, years ago, but I am just lucid enough to know she doesn’t care about that.
“I can’t say that I have.”
“His clothes were found twenty or twenty-five miles west of here. I thought he might have come by this way.”
“Clothes?” she asks. “You think he might have come by here without them?”
“Well, it’s unlike him. But it’s hard to know what to think.”
“Unless he was the naked man. But that was over two months ago.”
“The naked man?”
“Well, he wasn’t naked, really. He had on jockey shorts. Walked down off the hill, just like you did now, then on toward town.”
“Was he a blond man, like my brother?”
She shakes her head. “Too far away to tell. Didn’t care to get too close to him, you know. We all thought... well, we weren’t sure what to think.”
“Who else saw him?”
“Seems like nobody except my neighbor. We think he’s the one stole that pair of overalls down off Mr. Mobley’s clothesline. Because a naked man in town—now that would’ve turned a few heads.”
I want to know which neighbor. She says the one who’s in Chicago just now. No, no emergency number. “She didn’t say if he was blond, only that his forehead and arms were all blistered from sunburn and he had something in his hand, something small and flat.”
We talk until I realize she knows nothing more to tell me, then I thank her and limp into town. I feel nothing. How do you feel things, Simon?
I show his picture to every shopkeeper, every passing pedestrian. Everyone shakes their head.
I change into my clean clothes at a service station, wash with paper towels, comb my hair, brush my teeth. This is important. I take my dirty clothes to wash at a laundromat, and as they’re washing, I eat lunch in a diner. The waitress notices my bare feet but chooses not to fuss. I have a turkey sandwich, a Coke, two pieces of apple pie, and seven glasses of water. My legs throb and tingle and stiffen up, and I find it hard to stand again. The linoleum floor of the diner burns my wounded feet with its coolness. I can’t walk anymore. I take wincing baby steps to the cash register. I never should have stopped.
I stay over one night in a bargain motel. In the morning I lever out of bed and crawl to the shower, standing in the warm water until a wash of diluted blood puddles under my feet and swirls down the drain. I comb my wet hair and touch the black scar of my chin.
I can barely walk.
I roll my belongings into my sleeping bag and head out of town anyway. As soon as I do, I can’t feel him anymore, though I know he went this way. East. Due east. Sunset at his back, sunrise in his face. But I can’t feel him. And in losing him, I lose myself.
I try to move my legs, but my steps remain short and jerky, like an old woman hunched over a walker. A little cry of pain accompanies each step, but this is the least of my worries.
The tunnel slams in, full and extensive, so long that no light filters along its length to meet me.
Somewhere in this siege I lose several days. I suppose, looking back, that they are days well lost.
I remember finding a creek, drinking my fill, rolling in it to soak my clothes in its icy relief, a strike against the gathering heat. I remember a glimpse of light as I do, and traces of blood left on the rocks as I step in and out.
Other than that, there is no accounting. No Simon, no time.
Still, life gives us so many days, often more than we would have ordered. Perhaps this is my way to strike back.
THEN:
Grandma Sterling’s house looked scarier in person and in color. It was the first thing I saw when I woke up. Then I saw Simon, resting his head on the steering wheel, his eyes open, unblinking, staring at his feet.
“Hey, Simon, how many people live in there?”
“Just one, I think.”
I wanted to ask Simon why only one person would live in a house clearly big enough for twelve, but he seemed busy in his own head. I stared out the window.
Grandma Sterling trained roses to climb trellises on the sides of her house. She trained ivy to climb the gazebo in the side yard. Every window was framed by open shutters, every blade of grass a uniform green.
“Simon? How come we’re not going in?”
He lifted his head as if a great, invisible weight rested on the back of his neck. “Okay, let’s go, then.”
On the way up the walk I took in the weedless border gardens, the two floors of smudgeless windows, and I wondered, when a person does all this, do they have time left over for other things?
On the way up the walk my heart pounded too hard, a sensation I could feel in my chest and hear in my ears, and I wanted to ask Simon if that was what scared meant. I didn’t. Maybe he thought I already knew, and I didn’t want to complicate his thinking.
I walked so close behind him I almost stepped on his heels, and I remember thinking the sun must have gone behind clouds, turning the red and green and white world a little grayer. I didn’t know yet what that meant.
Simon stopped at the door and I slammed into his back, accidentally pushing him forward to knock once with his forehead. He stepped back in a stupor, as though he’d planned nothing so radical as knocking, but it was too late.
A woman opened the door, a woman with gray hair done up in a deliberate style, her dress starched and white, an apron flecked with roses. She smiled at Simon, exposing a row of large, perfect teeth, each one seeming to perform its role with grace. I had to wonder why, with those teeth going for her, her smile wasn’t beautiful, like Mrs. Hurley’s, and why I knew I’d never play a game designed to make Grandma Sterling smile.
“Yes, may I help you children?”
Simon spoke up. “Mrs. Sterling?”
“Yes, young man. How may I help you?”
“I’m Simon. This is Ella.”
“Simon who, dear?”
“Simon Ginsberg.”
A cloud passed across her metallic blue eyes, like the cloud I blamed for blocking the sun, turning Grandma Sterling’s face a little grayer.
“Yes, I see.” She looked past Simon to our car, as if expecting a busload of Ginsbergs. Then she conceded that we had best come inside.
We followed her to the parlor, her steps a smooth glide that tossed her skirt about her calves. I walked behind Simon, clutching the back of his shirt, wishing to be invisible. The hall seemed miles long, like a forced march down death row. My vision darkened at the periphery, until I could only identify those objects directly in front of me. A knickknack shelf with pearly blue and white porcelain figures dancing a minuet. A grandfather clock with a swinging pendulum and great, brass-chained weights.
I wanted to ask god to absorb me into the floorboards, to make me disappear, but I owned no god as yet, being too young to merit his attentions. I knew that, if seen, I could only be seen as not fitting here. I was not a child who lived in a house with a grandfather clock. I was a child who had to wash her hands before she could touch one. I was not a child who would be trusted to dust the fine bric-a-brac, but the one who would break something special.
Grandma Sterling sat in a frail wicker chair and Simon and I perched lightly on the edge of a love seat, my hip bumping against his. I thought if I touched as little of the furniture as possible she might admire my futile efforts not to defile her environment.
DeeDee spoke first. She said, oh, man, did I warn you. She laughed at us.
“You look a lot like your mother, Simon.”
Grandma Sterling’s voice echoed down to me, like a voice that breaks through a veil of sleep. My stranger-grandmother was drifting farther away. Or I was.
She asked Simon what brought us, and if we traveled alone, and how we found the trip. She focused only on Simon, her smile store-bought, her voice crisp, a voice reserved for asking questions of strangers when the answers don’t matter. She never looked at me or called me by name. I began to think I might really be invisible, and the more sure I became, the more light flowed into my peripheral vision.
Simon stood and tugged at my sleeve. I didn’t dare ask what I had missed. I followed him bumping-close into the kitchen, a sprawling white room with bay windows and hanging plants, by far the brightest room in the house, yet the light appeared black to me. I can’t explain it any better than that.
Grandma Sterling set three blue willow china bowls on the table in front of Simon, then a quart of handpacked vanilla ice cream and a scoop, and slipped away to boil water for tea.
“Simon, is it dark in here to you?”
Simon gave me a funny look and pressed a hand to my forehead. I told him I felt fine and sat with my chin on the table, watching him scoop ice cream. It was packed hard, and he applied more and more pressure until the scoop slipped and a curl of ice cream skidded loose, flew into the air and landed on Grandma Sterling’s kitchen linoleum.
For the first time in my life, it seemed poor Simon was in over his head. He stared at the blob on the floor, his eyes frozen wide in terror. I looked around to see Grandma Sterling filling a kettle, her back to us, and did the only right, logical thing. I grabbed the scoop out of Simon’s hand and bumped him out of the way.
I wondered if he’d ask me later why I did it. I had plenty of time to wonder. Time slowed to a crawl as Grandma Sterling blew lightly on the burner and adjusted the flame.
I knew that, when she turned around and saw what had happened, she couldn’t possibly think less of me than she already did. But Simon had a chance. I could tell by the way she looked at him—like he was there. Like she had pictured her grandson looking something like him, blond and fair-skinned and handsome. Why ruin Simon’s chance?
When she turned, her face fell. She stood for a moment, hands on hips, as if the whole situation was simply too much for her. Then she moistened a linen towel and wiped up the mess. As she straightened up, a wisp of gray curl fell onto her forehead, and she brushed it back into place, seeming anxious to make everything perfect again.
“I guess we should have left that to your brother Simon.”
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”
We ate our ice cream and drank our tea in the most deafening, wearing silence. It seemed to stretch forever, like the god mesa, only not beautiful in any way.
I glanced obsessively over at Simon, hoping he’d say it was time to go.
Grandma Sterling broke the silence. “Before you go, maybe you’d like to see the room where your mother grew up.”
We followed her up carpeted stairs to the second floor, where she opened the door to my mother’s bedroom and motioned us inside. She did not cross that threshold herself.
Funerals for Horses (retail) Page 5
