It jammed twice more, and near the end of the day, it made loud rattling thumps, like gym shoes in a clothes dryer, and then an almost dental grinding. It smelled of burning rubber. Billy unplugged it.
“The only thing is take the motherfucker to pieces and put it all back together,” Vex said. “I need tools, a hookup, and some chicken or beef sandwich, no condiments.”
Resisting Vex’s offer once again, Billy Atlas pulled out one of the cafeteria tables and gave them each paper and a pencil. “Write a story,” he told them.
“Can’t we just sleep?” Maura asked.
“Not no but hell no,” Alonso said.
“What sort of story?” Rhine asked. “There are very many sorts of stories.”
“Whatever kind you like,” Billy said.
“I like different sorts of stories,” Rhine said.
“You’re going to have to tell him what kind,” Maura said. “Why are we writing stories?”
“I like stories,” Karly said, reaching out to Billy, who did not take the hand but patted her on the back. She reached around and patted him on the back, too.
“A fairy tale,” Billy said. “Here’s how it starts: Once upon a time . . .”
Remarkably, all of them started writing even though it was obviously busywork. Maura understood why they did it: they all liked Billy, even Vex. Who wouldn’t like him? He was like a tub of butter that even the meanest alley cat would lick.
Besides, there was only a half hour before the van arrived.
Maura retold “Little Red Riding Hood,” moving it to Minnesota so she could have some snow on the ground, which provided her with tracks in the white landscape, which tipped off Hood that the fathead wolf was in the cabin with her granny, and Hood peeked through the window (why don’t characters in stories ever shut the damn shades?) and observed Granny and Wolfy getting it on. Maura spent a paragraph describing this action explicitly, especially the wolf’s furry loins and wolfish cries, and then the van driver honked and she didn’t get to finish.
“It’s like we’re all dogs,” Jimmy said.
“We’re dogs now?” his mother asked, and at the same moment Billy Atlas said, “What kind of dogs?”
They were at the dinner table, Jimmy and Billy at the far end due to the filthy condition of their clothing. Pook had begun the meal with them but conversation had driven him away. He had taken his plate to his room: pot roast, yams, green beans, which was what everyone was eating except Billy, who would only eat boxed cereal, bread, pimento cheese, and potatoes. He had a bowl of Cheerios and a yam. May Candler insisted that a yam was the same as a potato. With his fork Billy poked the yam, which was the orange of traffic cones. There was no way he could eat a yam.
“Any kind of dog,” Jimmy said, “and we live by dog rules, like we jump around and flap our heads when other dogs come by and bark and play and chase each other and growl.”
“I don’t much care for thinking of us as dogs,” his mother said. “Couldn’t we be emu or something more elegant for your mother’s sake?” his father asked.
“Let him finish,” his sister said. Was she really there? Was it one of those rare nights when she wasn’t working or out with Armando Sandoval? Or had memory—Jimmy’s and Violet’s both—put her there, insisted that she had been present that momentous evening? The most true statement: she was both there and not there.
“I wanna be a Lassie,” Billy said. They had seen Lassie on Nick at Nite at his house earlier that week—they did nothing at the Atlas home but watch television since the Candlers did not have cable—and the boys hated the show, especially the apple-cheeked Timmy, but Billy refused to be prejudiced against the beautiful and amazingly well trained dog who could hardly be held responsible for the butt-stupid show. “What kind of dog is that?”
“A lassie is a girl,” Jimmy’s father said, and at the same moment Violet, if she was present at all, said, “Collie.”
“It’s just a comparison,” Jimmy said. “I don’t mean we’re really dogs.”
“What do you mean then?” his mother asked.
“It’s just that dogs see the world like dogs.”
“Thank you for that insight, son,” his father said. “Pass the yams.”
“I’m not done,” he said and passed the yams to his father. “Now I have to start all over.”
The groans came from multiple sources.
“Make us collies this time,” Billy said.
“I’m just saying that it’s like we’re all dogs, everyone here sitting at the table.”
“Can I still use my fork,” his father asked, “or am I meant to bend over my plate and . . .” He lowered his head and took a lick of the roast.
Jimmy and Billy laughed appreciatively.
“I rather like being a dog,” his father said, gravy sticking to his nose.
“You’re pandering,” his mother said.
“That’s disgusting, Dad,” Violet might have said, but she would have been smiling and would have laughed aloud after she spoke. One of her roles in the family—a wholly unconscious role, though one she relished—was defender of their father against their mother. In her supple hands, the part did not require her to turn against their mother, and most of the time, she merely used laughter to undercut the tension.
“Don’t be a prig,” Mr. Candler said and cleaned his nose with a napkin. They could tell he was talking to Mrs. Candler because he did not look up from his plate.
“Will you finish?” Violet said or might have said to her brother. “So we can get back to a normal dinner?”
“It’s like we’re all dogs,” Jimmy repeated, “but Pook’s a cat. He doesn’t make any sense to dogs, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t make any sense to anybody. He doesn’t like barking and chasing balls and dog stuff, but if we could see him through cat eyes, he’d make perfect sense. It’s just cat sense.”
No one said anything for several seconds.
Finally, Mr. Candler said, “The only problem with that hypothesis—” Mrs. Candler cut him off. “That’s very creative. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“The only problem with that hypothesis—”
“Fred, please.”
“—is that there is no other member of his species. He’s in a dog’s world, all right, but there are no others like him. No one has ever seen any cat quite like your brother.”
“We are changing the subject,” May Candler demanded. “The subject is changed.”
“Your mother doesn’t like to talk about the problems of our eldest—”
“Billy, tell us one of your—”
“Your mother lives in a world disconnected from the rest of us. Not a cat world, exactly, more a—”
“Billy, damn it, you’re always interrupting us with some ridiculous story. Tell us one this minute.”
Violet leapt up from the table and left without a word. Or, if she was never there, her absence was suddenly felt.
“Now see what you’ve done.” Which parent said this to the other? They were both thinking it. Perhaps they spoke identical words at the same time. The remainder of the meal was consumed under the toxic cloud of accusation that often visited the family during those years. But this conversation became important to the boys and eventually to Violet. In its colloquial and nonscientific way, it filled a substantial gap. Except for the cat argument, Pook existed without diagnosis, as he might have in another century. Frederick and May Candler refused to permit one. Why hadn’t their parents had Pook seen to by professionals? This was a question Violet and Jimmy would talk about a great deal after his death. It was a mystery neither felt they could bring up with their parents. It was impossible to ask without acknowledging the implied criticism, and there could be no denying that Pook’s suicide was the most damaging moment in their shared life. To point fingers was to behave monstrously. It remained their secret topic.
“In cat world,” Bil
ly Atlas said after Mr. and Mrs. Candler had left the room and the boys were alone at the grubby end of the table, “bicycle seats are forbidden.”
“Talking is only for when you have to,” Jimmy added.
They worked up their list of attributes. It was probably as close as anyone ever came to understanding Pook while he was alive. And after he died, the family rarely talked about him, though occasionally Violet would tell a story of a bully following her home, taunting her, threatening her, and how Pook appeared from nowhere and leapt onto the boy’s back. How she had to get on her knees and beg her big brother to stop choking the kid.
“He was fierce,” she would say. “He loved us.”
That recollection would inevitably lead to the story of his roaring at the boys on the playground. “He wouldn’t let kids mess with us,” Jimmy might say.
Billy, when he wasn’t with one of the Candlers, told stories about Pook with some regularity. How Pook had pinned a smart-aleck varsity wrestler. How Pook could open a Coke bottle with his belly button, but he would not drink Coke. How the one and only time Pook played baseball with them he caught a high fly and then refused to give up the ball. How the Candlers’ feral cats would follow him around, stopping and going as he did, as if on a leash. How under the influence of peyote Billy had a vision and animals spoke to him, and the whole hallucination was ultimately about Pook—a fact Billy would perpetually intuit and forget. He told the story of the peyote revelation frequently, and during each recitation there would be a moment in which he thought Oh yeah, they were trying to tell me something about Pook.
During his sophomore year, after a half dozen suspensions, Pook was expelled for fighting. He was eighteen by that time, and he never returned to classes. The summer of 1987 was his first summer after the expulsion and the final summer of his life.
That night, after dinner and a bath, Jimmy sat out on the porch couch. He was in an odd mood. Pook had walked with Billy to Billy’s house to wait (he would stand outside, on the concrete stoop, hands in his pockets) while Billy took a bath and changed into clean clothes. (Jimmy’s mother required Billy to do this before spending yet another night.) Jimmy had not wanted to accompany them. He didn’t like Billy’s mother, who would rush up to him with an unhappy smile and a mad barrage of questions. What have you two been up to? When is my boy going to learn? Pook went because she would never say a word to him.
The yellow curtains flittered in the window’s narrow opening like a tongue speaking all the words of a language at once, and Jimmy studied the drawings Pook had completed for the comic book. He had drawn the panel they asked him to, but it had not turned out as Jimmy imagined it—Same Man exploding out of the closet, dressed now in his superhero costume, to attack the cringing Mango Fortitude. Instead, Same Man was hunkered down in the closet, whose door was open a sliver, pulling on pants, and he looked up in embarrassment at the intruding light. This drawing seemed to prove what Jimmy had said at dinner. Here was a cat drawing despite the doggy request. The thought excited him, and he decided to show his father.
“Pook drew this?” Frederick Candler didn’t merely look at it, he studied it. They moved to the dining room, and he held the drawing under the bright light over the table. Jimmy felt the specific thrill that children love and long for, the delight of having engaged a parent beyond the parent’s expectation. He had discovered something about Pook that his father had missed, and now, at this very moment, his father was recognizing that fact. Frederick placed a big, rough hand on Jimmy’s shoulder—a gentle, grateful placement—pulling the boy incrementally closer to him while he continued to examine the drawing, the boy’s pleasure like a mountain spring inside him, bubbling at the surface but pure and deep at the source. After another moment, his father said, “Let me see the other things he’s drawn.”
Almost no other moment in Jimmy Candler’s existence pleased him as much, and he would cling to that pleasure later, even as he came to understand that it made him complicit in Pook’s undoing, that it led to Pook’s death. Pleasure and pain and sadness and guilt, his father’s warm hand on the back of his neck, the best and the worst of his young life.
DAY 12:
The assembly mechanism was in working order, and Maura believed it was the most ordinary and dull day of her ordinary and dull life. That changed when a man in coveralls arrived with a work order to fix the butterfly.
“It’s already working,” Billy told him.
“Fix itself?” the man asked.
“I don’t know,” Billy said. “How would I know? Sorry.”
“No skin off my nose.”
Only Maura knew to look at Vex, who had not slowed his manic box folding but cast a glance in her direction, his head down but those dark eyes rolling up to meet hers. “I can fix anything made by man,” he had said to her, “and any woman fucked over by man.” This grown man, this grown wolf of a man, wanted to fuck her, specifically her. An adult male, handy with his hands and all blown gaskets upstairs, desired her. Vex wanted her in the same way that she wanted Mick. Or as close to the same as Vex was capable. He suddenly shouted something, eyeing her again, a millisecond of contact, before resuming his yell.
“Practice,” he screamed. “Practice, practice, practice.”
His hands on the boxes were a blur.
It was a small-town museum located in a pioneer church house built in the early nineteenth century by a now extinct religious group. The building had a peaked roof but no spire; a porch ran along the front and another filled a corner of the back. During Candler’s campus interview three years earlier, an attractive young woman from John Egri’s office had given him a tour of Onyx Springs, including a visit to the Congregation of Holy Waters Museum. Candler had been impressed not with the museum but with the woman. When he later asked after her, Egri revealed that she’d been employed only for the interviews. He explained: “She was supposed to keep you from noticing what a crummy town this is.”
Candler’s rationale for meeting Lise at the museum was simple: no one ever went there. It cost five dollars to enter, a trivial price to pay for privacy. He had promised to meet her for lunch after making a mess of their plans the night before. Kat had needed an emergency babysitter, and Candler volunteered. The chore had taken longer than expected, and by the time he got to the Corners, the door to Lise’s apartment was locked. He had slipped a note beneath her door, proposing lunch at the museum.
Although there was no one else in line, gaining admittance to Holy Waters took forever. The florid middle-aged man behind the desk operated a sleek new computer with the pointer finger of his left hand. He had the appearance of a man born without a nose, and when they tacked one on they used whatever was handy—the tongue of a shoe, by the looks of it. He laboriously entered the numbers from Candler’s credit card. He fingered in another dozen bits of information—name, address, phone number, the expiration date of the card, and more new boxes continued to illuminate, demanding still more information. Candler could not imagine what. His weight? His shoe size? His IQ?
When the printer would not come out of hibernation, the screen cleared and the man had to poke in the information all over again. He never looked directly at Candler and never removed his white earphones, a book playing on his iPod. (Candler could hear the thrum of the narrator but not the words.) The cashier displayed enormous patience, never doubting the rationale for all those numbers.
At one time the province of the gods and later the dominion of science, omniscience was now the property of technology. Evidence of this was endemic in the culture: Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe displaced by the omnipotent, if ersatz, technology of CSI; Achilles and Agamemnon vanquished by the mythology of hi-tech laser-targeting systems that produce surgical strikes; human memory and folding road maps supplanted by GPS. If you require further evidence, consider the following: a three-chord rock song turned into elevator music and played through a speaker the size of a tear duct indicating the arr
ival of an all-caps, almost certainly clichéd message, to which the minion, no matter the circumstances, eagerly responds in kind—this is as close as we come to bowing before something greater than ourselves.
The printer lasered out a ticket of admittance, and the cashier handed it to Candler without ever meeting his eyes.
“Thank you,” Candler said, but the man still did not look up.
“What is it you want me to see here?” Lise stood in the doorway to the room beyond, hips canted, her colorful striped dress and complicated shoes making her seem like an altogether different species from the guy at the desk or Candler himself, who had abandoned his jacket and tie—it was ninety degrees out—and who lugged a white bag of carryout.
“You look nice,” he said. “When did you arrive?”
“Maybe thirty minutes ago or possibly a year.” She displayed a pamphlet. “I’ve read this twice, looked at the clothing, the memorabilia, the antiques, the photographs.” Though the museum was located in the church, it did not limit itself to the history of the congregation. “I read the fine print on every placard, took the trivia test. I like the rock paintings best. They ought to be in a better museum.”
“You’re so audience,” he said. He had been reading again from the Cabbage notebook. A young woman with Tourettte’s had said this to him. He explained the origin of the line while she steered him to the room with ancient artifacts. A stone roughly the size and shape of a backyard barbecue dominated the floor. It was covered with pictographs—human hands, arrows, what might be deer, lizards, boxy people, pointy mountains, and curving lines thought to represent water. Local historians—meaning a school teacher and a self-educated anthropologist—had translated the rock, and their interpretation, elaborately printed on parchment, was situated beside the boulder.
Ages ago, when the native inhabitants of the region left the comforts of the ocean to explore the mystery of the inland, Onyx Springs became a cheerful respite on that journey. The natural spring provided an endless supply of fresh water. People rested here. The weak or ill were left here to recover. Deer and lizards romped abundantly.
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