Drink for the Thirst to Come

by Lawrence Santoro

Raymond smiled. His cut-glass laugh squeezed out and he ran to the kitchen. That was that.

  A week later I awoke. Another storm was coming. The cricket—cicada, whatever—had had a family. It was now locusts and other things, things I don’t know what. Mom had to be awake, she had to be, but when I went into the hall, no, she wasn’t, or if so, she’d ignored the night, gone back to sleep. They were behind the walls, both sides. Above the ch-ch-ch and lingering metallic buzz was a meaty, furry chatter that bounded back from the side passage to the attic. When the full downpour settled across the house, the buzz almost disappeared into the storm. Driven rain scoured the walls and windows. In the lightning, the old people on the walls licked in and out of being, flickered between storm-brightness and the yellow limbo of the table lamp. Four times, I went to the hall to look, to listen. Raymie was there on the fifth, asleep, as before. He walked with blind confidence. His fingertips slid the walls like electric brushes gathering a charge. His hands tipped the pictures. The faces, places, stories tick-tocked back as he passed. His eyes were open but he slept. Awake, he never had the face he had now. Now he was not here, he was there, inside, beyond night and storm, beyond the hunt, he was through the forest and into the castle, in the castle’s still wax light, in the dainty place Nanna had breathed on and Pop-pop and I built with stories.

  Raymond’s eyes were on me. As the lightning chattered up and down the hallway, I saw… How to say? I saw figures, dark, familiar shades, figures of men, horses, dogs, deer. They rose from beneath the old lace surface to the flickering hall. Forest murmurs drove them upward. And with them arose the sure but distant voices of men and horses, dogs and sobbing women.

  At the heart of it, Raymond, Raymond in the dainty place, so far away. I knew he was there.

  And finally, when I could call, call him awake, call for help, for Mother, it was morning and I was in bed and the sky was blue and washed and my call was a whisper.

  At supper Raymond sang.

  We sat at the table, Mom’s meatloaf and the last of the season’s corn on the cob in front of us, a single bulb overhead. Nothing much was said about the night, the storm before, just that it had been one doozy of a downpour, huh, guys?

  Yes. I’d heard Mom. Earlier, on the phone: Well, we were just kids, you know? Kids’ll be kids. No, he’s never been afraid of lightning! Why now? Well, kids will be kids! It’s something new, always.

  This to Aunt Erby, whose only kids had been dogs or glass figures on mirror shelves. I was the “he” Mother meant had never been afraid of lightning. And I wasn’t. I didn’t think so.

  Raymond had forgotten walking the hall, his hands sliding, tipping the pictures. He didn’t remember the dark shadows of horses, men and dogs and the near-dead deer surfacing. “Vast dark echoes rising from a deep mountain tarn,” Pop-pop’s Poe might have called it.

  Raymie smiled and rolled his corn in butter and sang the same songless tune. He used both hands. He ate, singing.

  “Raymond...”

  His eyes swung, lazy, to Mom...

  “Singing at table, Raymond?”

  He smiled and chewed. Raymie had just begun eating cob corn by himself, buttering, gnawing the ears. The kid slobbered, smeared butter across his cheeks, up his nose. It dripped up his arms to his elbows. I hated watching. Corn is one of those things…

  “Mom…” I tried.

  “He’s learning,” she said.

  “He’s disgusting…”

  She smiled. “He’s a little boy.”

  “Cripes. Can’t you eat evenly? That’s disgusting, strands and pieces, your mouth everywhere, over the whole ear! Look.” I took an ear from my plate. “Fifteen rows. Eat them three rows at a time, one end to the other, or four at a time three times and have one left of three rows.”

  Mom was laughing. So was Raymond.

  “You don’t eat ’em side to side and all around at the same time…”

  They were rolling on the floor.

  “Well, Jesus damn Christ!” I yelled. “Little bastard’s a pig!”

  That was that for me that night.

  That night Raymond broke the hallway light. Knocked it off the table then tripped over his feet and started screaming. I have no idea what he was doing at 3 in the morning. I didn’t care. Mom handled it.

  Two days later the vet was back. He limped up and down, staring at the hallway ceiling. Mom stood aside. “Oh, heck, yeah. We could,” he said. “Maybe.” He was talking to himself. “Yeah, a small one. Right there.” He pointed. Mom nodded. “The joist should be there, I guess, coming off that side hall.” He tapped the ceiling three, four places with a broom handle. “Yeah. There’t is. Then I run your wire down, cut a channel, tie it into the same circuit as that there lamp…”

  He drifted away, mumbling, tapping, listening. Finally, “Sure. Nice little chandelier just there. A little spackle. Switches down there and over there.” He pointed. “No problem. You know what?”

  “What?”

  He looked right at her. “This is gonna be a whatchacallit.”

  Mom smiled. “No? What do you call it?”

  “You know…”

  Her smile became a laugh.

  “A showplace. My calling card, you know? This hall. I ought to take pitchers, bring customers to see youse. Heck, I ought to just move in!” He laughed in the middle, his words still running.

  The kid laughed with him and the vet ruffled his hair with his single hand.

  Mom went red through her chuckles and put her arm around Raymie.

  That night, the photographs came off the wall and went into boxes in the living room.

  Next day the vet was back. He came back every day for a week. The chandelier was not so simple. Scaffolding moved in, permanently it seemed. Dust and buzz, rolls of wire were everywhere. I was in school most of the time but Raymie, Mom, and the vet were there. He was there when I left in the morning; he was there when I returned in the afternoon. Every day the hall looked the same: no further along. No, I lie! Every day it was a little worse, maybe. Every time I heard the vet working, he grunted, cursed, dropped things and dragged them, the walls shook, he pounded and said words! Words I couldn’t.

  He ate with us sometimes, then went back to work. Doing whatever. That, or he sat with Mom and Raymie, listening to the radio and laughing along. Sometimes Mom played music and danced. He’d sit and smile.

  “Dance,” the kid said, pushing the vet. “Dance like this!” And Raymie showed him.

  “Naw,” the vet said. “I don’t.”

  “Leave it be, Raymond,” Mom said.

  “No, no. You can dance. I can. You can. See.” Raymond hopped from foot to foot, arms out like he was holding Mom.

  “Now Raymond, let me tell you,” the vet said. He leaned forward and rolled up his pants leg just above the ankle. “See, I have a funny leg.” And he did, a leg of metal and wood and hinges. From the top of his sock, his leg was metal rods encased in wood, sheathed with tin plate. Steel cable ran up and disappeared.

  Raymie looked at the artificial leg and smiled.

  “It only goes to here.” He showed where, below the knee. “But it leave me so I don’t dance so good no more. Not good as you, anyhow!” The kid laughed and the vet scooped him up in his one arm and swung him round his shoulder. Raymie screamed, laughing. “I sure ain’t good enough to boogie-woogie with your mom!”

  I had no idea. No idea what else wasn’t real?

  The chandelier was up. The wire runs were patched and painted, the switches set—one at the bottom of the stairs, one outside Mom’s room—and we had “a little ceremony” Mom called it.

  “Turn off! Turn off the lights! Everything!” Mom shouted. We did. We stood in the old lace hallway in the dark. In the dark, I felt I might fall. I touched the wall. Just to hold. I swear something. Something moved beneath my hand, like the floor when a truck goes by, like thunder against your chest. Mom said, “One... two... THREE!”

  The vet turned the switch at the bottom of the stairs. Th
e chandelier came on. The hallway was four-bulbs-bright. Hot damn. The rumbling beneath my hand stopped.

  “Hey.” He came up, admiring the work. “Hey, not bad,” he said. “Hey. Try the night setting!”

  Mom minced down the hall to her bedroom. “Okay!” she sang. “One, two three.” Click, click, click and one, two, three, the lamps went out, leaving a single bulb glowing dim yellow. Shadows of the other bulbs and the chandelier arms stretched across the ceiling. Yes, it looked like a spider. It wasn’t. The kid whimpered but the vet put his arm around him. Raymie gave up the whimper and laughed. “Spider,” he said, giggling.

  Mom and the vet drank some wine.

  “Perfecto,” he said.

  “Perfecto,” she said and clicked her glass against his. “Yes.”

  “Alikazam!” Raymond said.

  I went to bed and heard the vet’s truck leave, I don’t know, midnight maybe, maybe later.

  The cricket came back. The bugs had been silent while the vet had worked. Now to hell with them. I slept.

  The vet kept showing up. He did no work. He ate with us. Sometimes he and Mom went places, restaurants, movies, wherever. When they did, Aunt Erby came over and read the paper until they returned and had stupid stuff on the radio. “They dancing?” Raymie asked Erby. He showed his dance.

  “I think so, Ray,” she said.

  “Shazam,” Raymond said and pointed at me.

  On the last thunderstorm, I woke and there was nothing. Nothing in the house, nothing outside. That was it. Nothing. The cricket was gone. His friends the locusts, the others, the ones of meat and fur, they’d left. There was a distant bumble. Just something felt, like your ears feel, going up the mountain. The hallway light was on “night setting.” I lay in bed feeling nothing from everywhere. A thin slit of light crept through my mostly closed door. It swayed a little. Just a little. Finally, I got up.

  The pictures were back on the walls. Mom, the kid, and the vet had replaced them right after the chandelier ceremony. All the dark family was silent in the silence around them. I went to the bathroom and peed. As I did, I felt cool air slide around my ankles. A storm gathering. I could hear it now, distant. I washed my hands and turned off the light.

  The kid was in the hall, just outside his door, Pop-pop’s door. He stared up at the spider-shadow on the ceiling, down the wall. The chandelier was swaying in the breeze that had freshened in the last few minutes. He was talking. I couldn’t hear what, or what he said made no sense, like his tuneless song at the table. With his voice, though, the wind picked up, the chandelier moved quicker. Without taking his eyes off the shadows crawling across the ceiling and wall, he walked backward toward Mom’s room. Her door was open. Raymond pulled it shut. He turned toward me.

  “Raymie…” I said.

  “Shh. You’ll miss the magic!”

  “What…” I started.

  “Alikazam,” he said and flicked off the light. The hallway went black.

  “Raymie!” I yelled. I knew Mom would be up by then. I knew it. And of course I was wrong.

  The first lightning flickered and Raymond was halfway between Mom’s room and his. The next flash, and Raymond was beneath the chandelier. He touched the wall. In the lingering flicker I saw shadows rise through the near-white. They stretched themselves into shapes, the shapes I remembered from my earliest days: deer, men. With the thunder’s rumble, I heard dogs. For the first time, I heard the clabber of horses, hooves and whickers, the shriek of the downed mare.

  Raymond was still speaking, saying nothing, and his hand reached through the surface of the white. He smiled and waved goodbye. He reached into the far-away place with his other arm. And was gone.

  I shouted something. I think one of Malini’s magic words. I yelled to leave a word behind for Mom and reached for the wall, touched it, felt its old lace softness, its tapestry thickness and suddenly I was not. That was all: I was not.

  Where I was, where I am, is here. This side. Where the images float. It is not what I remember. Not exactly. Looking back to where the wall was there is more of here. But it is dark, very dark; it is blacker than the deepest mountain tarn. And no light from here goes very far, there.

  There is no Raymond. Not here. I arrived and, for a second, saw him, face and body. He was flattening, sifting through, returning through the darkness to the other side, Pop-pop’s hallway. Our mother’s. The one-armed veteran’s showplace. Raymie turned, folded like a paper doll in black and white, and said something, “Shazam,” I think and, whoof, he was gone. I reached for him but where he was, I wasn’t, and where I am, the darkness just goes on.

  This is a quiet place. The sounds of horse and dog? That was a trick. Of Raymond’s? I don’t know. A trick of the place? Perhaps. But the world is quiet near the stag and horses, the dogs and men. It is most quiet nearest the deep darkness where the horse’s hooves have not moved for years. Not that I’ve seen. The dog still flies. He’s not risen nor fallen a quarter inch, not in my time, and that has been long. The women sob but the tears do not fall, have not inched a fraction down their downy cheeks. Farther from all that is a small pond at the edge of the woods. I couldn’t see it from the hallway, or maybe I never noticed. The surface almost ripples. But it extends into the trees, away from the sunlight. There a person can sit and from time to time skip a stone across the still black water. The stones spin slowly, touch the surface gently and do not penetrate, not precisely. There, the air is fragrant—and I know fragrance implies movement, a movement, at least of air and particles in the air. I don’t understand it, but there it is.

  The temperature is mild. Miles away, at the far edge of the woods, it sometimes rains, gently, slowly. I think farther away there are quicker rains because a river flows from the mountain and it rolls with a thunder I sometimes hear in my sleep.

  There are birds in the woods beyond the stag and men, nearly still and almost silent doves. I can pluck them from the branches or the air. They’re clean. Pressing my face into their feathered breasts, I smell sunlight and dust. They must, once long ago, have flown where sun shines. What’s best, I can make them vanish at will, vanish for real, no trick to it, no gaffs or patter: I hold them up, I let them go and say, “Alikazam” or “Shazam” or just “Go ’way,” and they’re gone. The words don’t matter; it’s the will that makes it so. Where they go? I don’t know for certain, but I think I do.

  I’ve seen the castle, beyond. It is large, larger than our town. Things move on the battlements and, in windows, things dance, people, I think. There are voices, distant. I can’t understand them. Someday I’ll go there. Some night I’ll be a monster from a far-off land or an invisible thing and find my way to that room at its heart. My brother will not be there. He doesn’t need that dainty place, its cogs, wires, and gizmos. He has his father. By then, Mom may be there. Dad, Pop-pop, Nanna, the dark suited man, once the pirate scourge of the seven seas, his peasant wife, they’ll be there and others and me, invisible. Then we’ll hunt.

  AT ANGELS SIXTEEN

  “Old wars is mainly lies,” is what Daddy said. I got no reason to disagree; he was almost always right. So let me tell you one. An ancient critter, I still don’t know what to call him, saved my shot-down ass in the air war over Europe, 19-and-43.

  A lie? Matter of fact I don’t know about that one myself. Might could have been it was Miss Duchenne, my teacher, eighth grade, who taught me a waltz and fox trot and who I fell in love with. Maybe she saved my plummeting butt, or it could have been science like the Germans said, but it happened like this:

  Pearl Harbor was my sixteenth birthday and I wanted to go fight. Daddy said trenches is no place for kids. Said he ought to know, having been a kid in the trenches himself, the last war. But he kept thinking. That same Sunday evening we walked into the bottomland and watched night gather and scoot out from under the trees by the Red. Ground crackled underfoot and sucked my boots like it wanted to draw me down. Our place is rich loam and always keeps a little damp under an early freeze so
nothing strange there. That night smelled so pretty, a little charred hickory in the air. But we’re talking about Daddy, who was still thinking. I held my breath.

  “That Old World’s a strange place,” he said. “Europe’s got things in her soil, up her airs, probably under her waters, too. I won’t speak to that; I never been under them waters.”

  I didn’t know what Daddy was talking about but seemed like he was changing his heart. He didn’t do that much, so I stood quiet.

  “I learned things in the mud of France what I wouldn’t have got nowhere else.” He chewed on his cheek. “You can go,” he said. “But.” He looked at my eyes like he was sure it was me busted the kitchen window, which it was. “You watch now, y’hear?”

  “I’ll be careful,” me being agreeable, figuring he’d already changed his mind once that night.

  “I ain’t saying be careful. Cripes, careful ain’t for soldiers. I’m telling you, keep your eyes open and your ears clean.” He beaded down hard. “I’d tell you about the old ones as cares for earth and air, tell you about them things in the fire. Water too I guess, cripes. I’d tell you, but then you’d think your daddy’d gone crazy with fairy ways and Santy Claus.” He spat on the ground. “You’ll see. Maybe. Maybe only us folk sees them.” He looked at me. “Farmers—part spit, part dirt, and all hot air.” He kicked the place where his spit fell. “We got old ones, too. Old Folk here go back before the white man, so maybe they’re less partial to you and me…”

  The dark had crawled up to his face. For maybe the ninth time in his life, Daddy smiled. He shoved my hair around, then, “Anyways,” he said, “old wars is mainly lies.”

  Next day I ran across them fields to enlist. I lied about my age. Daddy confirmed the lie on a paper he wrote out, saying, “My boy is oldern he looks and smartern he seems.”

  Being small, I had nothing much to work the lie upon, but what I lacked in height and muscle, I made up for in face hair and brass, so they took me.

  Boot camp shaved my head and ran me ragged. We lifted, jumped, pushed-up, polished, threw, crawled, and fought. We got yelled at, told not to think Goddamnit and to jump when someone says to jump and quick too. When I got past thinking and got big where it mattered, the Army declared me a soldier then sent me to the Air Corps. Which would be all right, I figured, flying a plane of hurtling silver, shooting down my enemy man-to-man.