“YOU COMING? Or want to stay in the car?”
Like this is a serious question! I tell him I’m coming with him for Christ sake.
Tyrell has driven slow past the Barndollar place. One of those old farmhouses that’s been fixed up with asphalt siding and a shingle roof and even got a carport like our house. Still it’s pretty run-down. A part-collapsed front porch and trash piled on it and in the yard and strips of torn plastic blowing in the wind from where they’d insulated the windows last winter. There’s lighted windows downstairs and not all the blinds pulled down to the sills so anybody could look inside. I’m thinking Tyrell will fire some shots at these windows then get us the hell out of here but instead he parks up the road a ways and gets out carrying the rifle. I’m scared now but excited. Couldn’t remain in this car for five seconds waiting for him to do whatever it is he’s planning.
These fuckers are alive and Dad is dead, we could change that.
Tyrell leads us back to the house but not on the road. We’re going through a cornfield that’s dried stalks seven feet tall, rustling and whispering in the wind. There’s a dog yipping somewhere, sounds like inside a house. We’re coming up behind the Barndollar house through tall grasses. Back here, the downstairs windows are lighted clear as TV pictures we can observe out of the dark. Tyrell keeps nudging me with his elbow to keep behind him. Like I’m going to push past and fuck things up for him! Through a window we can see into a kitchen and there’s somebody moving around. Two women. Maybe a man, sandy-haired. Tyrell says, “That’s them.” I’m squinting my good eye to see but it keeps misting over. I guess I can see this big-boned straggly-gray-haired woman that would be Clyde Barndollar’s wife. My mother would not speak of this woman now but before the fire she’d shake her head in pity saying Poor Janet. Mrs. Barndollar was a school guard at the Ransomville grade school when I was there, one of those persons wearing a fluorescent orange vest and with a whistle who act important like they’re stopping traffic for you when you cross the street, is how I recognize her. But she looks a lot older now. And there comes a man looking like Clyde Barndollar passing close by the window. His hatchet-face is about the color of baked brick. Sand-colored hair sticking up like a blue jay’s crest but at his temples he’s going bald.
It was just something that happened I can imagine my Dad saying. There was no intention to it, see, that I would die in anybody’s place.
These words I can almost hear! But I can’t make out the tone, if Dad is disgusted with how it turned out or matter-of-fact meaning just to explain to Tyrell and me.
While I’m thinking this Tyrell lifts the rifle slow and sights along the barrel at Clyde Barndollar not thirty feet away. Just to aim I am thinking. Not to pull any trigger just yet.
Because Tyrell is breathing kind of ragged. Like he’s been running. You don’t pull any trigger till your breathing is calmer than that, I know.
There’s this dog barking suddenly inside the kitchen, we can’t see. Clyde Barndollar comes to the window and shades his hands around his eyes trying to look out into the dark. I’m panicked thinking Tyrell is going to pull the trigger, must be I knock at his arm and ruin his aim saying, “Tyrell, no wait!” At the same time the dog’s barking and yipping like crazy, and Clyde Barndollar’s coming outside to see what’s happening saying in this scared drunk voice, “Who’s out there? Anybody out there?” There’s a crash, Clyde or the dog has knocked a garbage can off the back stoop. Tyrell crouches back in the tall weeds, in the dark. I’m just standing there like my legs are paralyzed. An outside light is switched on. It’s weird, I’m so scared I could piss my pants but I’m smiling. The thought has come to me If they see me, it will be O.K. Tyrell won’t shoot.
Clyde Barndollar is shining a flashlight onto me where I’m standing in the weeds. The dog is a fat yellow retriever who’s yapping and panting a few feet from me, hackles raised up his back, but it looks like he won’t bite. Clyde is saying like he can’t believe it, “Who the hell? Are you Raleigh Rawls’s girl? Is somebody else there?” Tyrell curses me and shows himself, he’s tossed the rifle into the weeds for safekeeping.
I will never know why Tyrell didn’t run off and leave me, but he did not. Why he didn’t fire the rifle anyway, but he did not.
The women are outside now, too. Mrs. Barndollar is talking loud and excited and the younger woman is confused asking is it Hallowe’en so early?
Clyde Barndollar keeps saying, “You two Rawls kids? Is that who you are? Je-sus.”
This drunk man limping from a hurt leg like a man trying to walk with one foot in a bog comes right up to Tyrell and me where we’re standing blinking in the lights. Wanting us to come inside and sit down with them for supper, we’re just in time. We’re saying no, no we can’t, but they don’t pay any attention, it’s like they’re deaf. I don’t know why I’m allowing myself to be touched and grabbed at by these people I hate. By Janet Barndollar! Hugging me and crushing me against her big breasts slid halfway to her waist and calling me “Melora” like she actually knows me. She’s saying the worst kind of crap about our father everybody’s been saying but I can’t push away from her, I’m feeling so weak. And she’s crying, and I’m crying. Tyrell is mumbling, “We can’t stay, see? We got to leave. We just came over to see how you all are getting along…”
Almost, hearing Tyrell say this, you’d believe it’s true.
WE WILL NEVER tell anybody where we are, this night.
Eating supper with the Barndollars! We’d never have said we were hungry yet we’re eating. It’s like a dream of that kind that goes on and on where you’re just there. Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, bread pudding in big sloppy servings. Hard-crusted ketchup on the meatloaf. Clyde Barndollar gives Tyrell a can of Coors ale, and Tyrell doesn’t refuse. There’s three young children at the table with us staring like they’ve never seen anybody like Tyrell and me I’m damn grateful the Barndollars don’t think to explain to them who we are. It’s a noisy place. Eating in the kitchen with the dog yapping and whining to be fed from the table. There’s a strong smell of scorched food here, and a dog smell, and cigarette smoke, and mildew of old farmhouses. Halfway through the meal Mrs. Barndollar gives a little cry like a hurt bird saying, “Oh, hey! We forgot.” Making us put down our forks and bow our heads while she says in a drunk singsong voice, “Bless us O Lord and these our gifts which we are about to accept from Your bounty Amen.” Close up, Mrs. Barndollar doesn’t look so old but her face is like raw meat that’s been mashed by a fork and her hair is gray and oily and straggling past her shoulders. She’s drinking Coors too, and there’s a lighted cigarette behind her in an ash tray on the counter she keeps turning to pick up, panting and wheezing. And Clyde is talking a mile a minute like a TV turned up high in some room where nobody is watching. Something happens, Clyde’s voice cracks, looks like he’s going to bawl and the young woman says, “O.K., Pa. That’s O.K. They know all that, Pa. They know that you don’t need to tell them, Pa. These kids.” I’m eating meatloaf, chewing and swallowing. It’s got more onions than my mom’s meatloaf. The ketchup crust is kind of burned. Tyrell is sullen eating and not saying much. I’m trying to think what to say. Mrs. Barndollar is asking about the meatloaf, I tell her it’s really good. The dog nudges against my knees. Mrs. Barndollar has scars on her hands and forearms, looking like burn scars. She’s saying her own kids never liked sliced onions. I tell her the meatloaf is delicious. Mrs. Barndollar starts to say something then thinks better of it. Clyde Barndollar lurches to the refrigerator to fetch two more cans of ale for Tyrell and him. I’m doing something my mom and dad would give me hell for, feeding a dog from the table. Letting a forkful of meatloaf fall to the floor and the dog scrambles under my chair so eager he almost knocks me over.
Sometime later, after we leave, Tyrell will have to double back on foot to retrieve the fucken rifle.
Upholstery
HAD RYAN VOIGT guessed that thirteen-year-old Sharon McGregor had a crush on him? Probably. Sure. Lots of girls
had crushes on Ryan Voigt.
It was Sharon’s older sister, Eva, who first used to hang out at the Voigt Brothers upholstery shop; her closest friend was Karen Voigt. Ryan was Karen’s uncle. Ryan was a teaser. Loved to tease his brother’s young children, and they loved to be teased by their boisterous good-natured uncle. Karen’s pale, plain face blushed when Uncle Ryan called her “toots,” “babe,” “bombshell,” and quizzed her about which was larger, her foot size or her bra size. The younger children ran shrieking with laughter when their uncle Ryan threatened to tickle them; if he failed to follow, they slowly crept back to his workbench. Adult women, customers, lingered at Ryan Voigt’s workbench to see what his plans were for re-covering their furniture, examined dozens of sample swatches of fabric, traded flirty, just slightly risqué wisecracks with him, and went away (Sharon could see, even as a young girl) smiling and gratified. “Uncle Ryan” was a few years older than his brother Jimmy but he looked, and he certainly behaved, as if he were years younger. He lived in an apartment on Main Street downtown and he drove a new-model car, and had no wife and kids to “drag him down,” as he liked to boast. When he spoke this way he glanced with a small, self-satisfied smile at his legs as if you could see feeble hands grasping at his ankles and being repelled.
He was a beefy, solid-bodied man, with heavy eyebrows like streaks of tar, good-looking in a coarse, simian way. His hands were square and spatulate. He was one to hammer with precision blows. Whack! Whack! He pounded nails into the undersides of chairs that, upside-down on the workbench, made you think of human legs, upended. He had shrewd small “X-ray eyes,” as he called them. He had a quick sly insinuating smile. He liked to laugh, baring his big teeth, and he liked to provoke laughter. Especially, he liked to make you laugh against your will: his squinchy eyes gleamed with pleasure. His tone with most people, including his brother and sister-in-law, with whom he worked in the shop, was one of easy mockery: like a trailer truck rolling down a highway, Sharon thought. You were wary lest it swerve and roll over you, yet you had to admire such power.
Sharon’s mother had furniture reupholstered several times by the Voigts, and seemed to be pleased with the results. Sharon now wondered if her mother had been one of those women who lingered to laugh and flirt with Ryan Voigt. If she had been, Sharon hadn’t been present to see it.
AFTER COLLEGE, SHARON had moved hundreds of miles away; she rarely returned home to Yewville. It was Eva who remained. Sharon sent money when it was needed, but it was Eva who’d cared for their parents, and then, after their father died, arranged for their widowed mother to go to a nursing facility, Eastwood Manor, when it became clear that she could no longer live alone. Eva was a high school principal; she’d taught biology and general science; she was fifty-one years old and a woman of remarkable physical presence. There was something toughly radiant about her, a heat that could be intimidating yet also warm, magnanimous, protective. Sharon was three years younger, far less defined to herself or to others. Sharon had always admired Eva without especially liking her. But now that they were older, and lived at some distance from each other, she was beginning to feel a tentative, halting affection for her sister—though she still felt uneasy in Eva’s presence, as if subtly handicapped.
Eva’s tidy attractive house made it difficult for Sharon to breathe. Her sister’s life—husband an orthodontist, children grown, graduated from good colleges—was a reproach to her own, so much messier, undefined. By the second day of her visit, she wanted to leave, though the dinner the previous night had gone well enough. Eva’s lovely dinner. Their mother had been seated between her two grown daughters in a haze of—was it love for them? Surprise that she hadn’t been abandoned? The table talk had been of the weather, a safe topic, yet one you could have an opinion about, even a vehement opinion. Their mother had looked from one daughter to the other, smiling a vague sweet smile that seemed to say, “Wherever this is, why ever you have brought me here, I love you.”
This morning, Sharon had slipped away from the house, feeling Eva’s eyes on her back. No, not breakfast, not just yet. She called out an apology, a vague excuse. She could play the role of the slapdash younger sister here, behaving oddly, you might even say rudely. That was her prerogative.
Now she was tramping through a wooded lot behind her sister’s house, municipal land that opened into a residential area of older frame houses, a Methodist church, the Toll Gate Grammar School, where she and Eva had gone many years ago. Here, at the eastern edge of Yewville, Main Street was a three-lane state highway. So early in the morning, just past seven o’clock, traffic was still light.
She was thinking how it wasn’t Hell people feared any longer. In her own lifetime, that fear, like the promise of Heaven, seemed to have evaporated. Instead, it was the assisted-care facility. This was the Place of Dread. You tell yourself no. Not me. And so their mother had vowed, at times emotionally, “Not me!” Their father, during the last years of his life, in a perpetual rage over his body’s betrayal of him, had been adamant: “Not me. Not ever. Not your mother, either. We stay right here. This is our place. You hear? Not us!”
At dinner, their mother had said to Sharon several times, “I haven’t seen Dad in a while,” but it was said more in bewilderment than in sorrow. Somehow their mother had learned not to ask questions that betrayed her confusion. She wouldn’t ask, Where is Dad? If you spoke to her of something requiring an act of memory, she would respond guardedly, but usually smile. You would almost think (relatives said this, leaving Eva’s house, with an air of loyalty) that nothing much was wrong with her. She was so very attractive as always, and so nicely dressed, and when Eva and Sharon drove her back to Eastwood Manor at the end of the evening she hadn’t protested, as she had on previous occasions.
Sharon was walking quickly, though she did not know where she was headed. Often, in Manhattan, she left her apartment and walked in this way, as if a distant music were drawing her, or a conversation just out of earshot. Here in Yewville it was memory that drew her. She had reached an old, slightly run-down residential neighborhood. Nearly each house meant a name, a classmate. Her closest friend, Inge Sorensen, had lived in a gray clapboard house, which had been converted into a karate school. One by one, the old single-family homes facing the busy road had been converted into something—a real-estate office, a dentist’s office, a day-care center, a Chinese take-out. Karen Voigt had lived near here, in the barnlike shingle-board house where her father and Ryan Voigt had their upholstery shop. It, too, had been converted—into a secondhand furniture store. But it looked vacant now, derelict. A FOR SALE sign was hammered into the front yard amid weeds.
WAS THIS WHAT had drawn her here—the Voigts’ old house? She circled the building, peering through begrimed windows. The Voigts had lived in the rear; the store had been in the front. Mrs. Voigt had worked in the shop, too, at a sewing machine. After Karen had left for nursing school in Buffalo, Sharon had babysat for Mrs. Voigt a few times.
In the dusty front window, there had been displays, unchanged from season to season—a high-backed carved mahogany settee with a velvet cushion, brocaded fabrics in suggestive folds like luxuriant snakes. Hanging out with Eva and her friend Karen, Sharon would drift out of their company in Karen’s room and make her way out front, to the shop. There, Ryan Voigt was usually working at his cluttered bench, and if he was in the mood he might tease her, ask her questions about boys, flatter her with his apparent interest. Sharp and jabbing and indiscriminate this interest seemed to her, like the actions of a bored boy stabbing sticks into a pond in the hope of striking something living. Yet she was thrilled, excited. If a customer entered the shop, jarring the bell above the door, Ryan Voigt would forget her at once. His coarse face with its heavy eyebrows and just perceptibly mottled, singed skin took on a new expression: alert, adult, courteous, and helpful. The mockery would vanish, like a soiled handkerchief stuck into a pocket. And Sharon would think jealously, But I know who he is. Who he is with me, that’s who he is.
He laughed, saying maybe this was his business? It was his shop, she was the one busting in.
Hotly she protested, “I am not. Karen invited me, she’s my friend.”
“Hey, and I’m not? Sure I am, toots. Ryan Voigt is your friend.”
It was banter. It was of no more significance than the noisy rock music Ryan Voigt listened to on a portable radio. It was a diversion, at most. Yet to Sharon it was the first sexual interest any man or boy had taken in her or given the signals of taking. She wouldn’t realize this for years. At the time, she’d surprised herself with peals of childish laughter, rapid-fire verbal exchanges and feints—like snatching up a lighted cigarette of Ryan Voigt’s from an ashtray. Once, when Sharon dared to take up a newly opened, still icy-cold bottle of Black Horse Ale, Ryan Voigt grinned at her and told her to take a sip. “It’ll do you good, sweetheart. Grow you some—” He gestured at his chest. He meant “grow you some tits.”
I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories Page 12
