American Morons Page 19

  “My ups,” he said.

  “Your funeral,” I answered, and he stopped three steps down and turned and grinned. A flicker of butterfly light danced in his glasses, which made it look as though something reflective and transparent had moved behind me. I didn’t turn around, couldn’t turn around, turned and found the landing empty.

  “She’s asleep,” Martin said, and for one awful moment, I didn’t know whom he meant.

  Then I did, and grinned weakly back. “If you say so.” Retreating upstairs, I circled around the balcony into position.

  The rules of Martin-Miriam Balcony Ball were simple. The person in the foyer below tried to lob the sock-ball over the railing and have it hit the carpet anywhere on the L-shaped landing. The person on the landing tried to catch the sock and slam it to the tile down in the foyer, triggering an innings change in which both players tried to bump each other off balance as they passed on the steps, thereby gaining an advantage for the first throw of the next round. Play ended when someone had landed ten throws on the balcony, or when Roz came and roared us back to bed, or when any small porcelain animal or tuk-ing grandfather clock or crystal chandelier got smashed. In the five-year history of the game, that latter ending had only occurred once. The casualty had been a poodle left out atop the cabinet. This night’s game lasted exactly one throw.

  In retrospect, I think the hour or so between the moment our parents left and my brother’s invitation to play were no more restful for Martin than they had been for me. He’d lain more still, but that had just compressed the energy the evening had given him, and now he was fizzing like a shaken pop bottle. I watched him glance toward Roz’s hallway, crouch into himself as though expecting a hail of gunfire, and scurry into the center of the foyer. He looked skeletal and small, like some kind of armored beetle, and the ache that prickled up under my skin was at least partially defensive of him. He would never fill space the way our grandfather had. No one would. That ability to love people in general more than the people closest to you was a rare and only partly desirable thing. Martin, I already knew, didn’t have it.

  He must have been kneading the sock-ball all the way down the stairs, because as soon as he reared back and threw, one of the socks slipped free of the knot I’d made and dangled like the tail of a comet. Worse, Martin had somehow aimed straight up, so that instead of arching over the balcony, the sock-comet shot between the arms of the chandelier, knocked crystals together as it reached its apex, and then draped itself, almost casually, over the arm nearest the steps. After that, it just hung.

  The chandelier swung gently left, then right. The clock tuked like a clucking tongue.

  “Shit,” Martin said, and something rustled.

  “Sssh.” I resisted yet another urge to jerk my head around. I turned slowly instead, saw Sophie’s almost-closed door, Mrs. Gold’s wide-open one, the butterfly light. Our room. Nothing else. If the sound I’d just heard had come from downstairs, then Roz was awake. “Get up here,” I said, and Martin came, fast.

  By the time he reached me, all that fizzing energy seemed to have evaporated. His shoulders had rounded, and his glasses had clouded over with his exertion. He looked at me through his own fog.

  “Mir, what are we going to do?”

  “What do you think we’re going to do, we’re going to go get it. You’re going to go get it.”

  Martin wiped his glasses on his shirt, eyeing the distance between the landing where we stood and the chandelier. “We need a broom.” His eyes flicked hopefully to mine. He was Martin again, all right.

  I glanced downstairs to the hallway I’d have to cross to get to the broom closet. “Feel free.”

  “Come on, Miriam.”

  “You threw it.”

  “You’re braver.”

  Abruptly, the naked woman from the tree in the magazine flashed in front of my eyes. I could almost see—almost hear—her stepping out of the photograph, balancing on those pointed feet. Tiptoeing over the splinter-riddled floor toward those wrapped-together dresses, slipping them over her shoulders.

  “What?” Martin said.

  “I can’t.”

  For the second time that night, Martin took my hand. Before the last couple hours, Martin had last held my hand when I was six years old, and my mother had made him do it whenever we crossed a street, for his protection more than mine, since he was usually thinking about something random instead of paying attention.

  “I have a better idea,” he whispered, and pulled me toward the top of the staircase.

  As soon as he laid himself flat on the top step, I knew what he was going to do. “You can’t,” I whispered, but what I really meant was that I didn’t believe he’d dare. There he was, though, tilting onto his side, wriggling his head through the railings. His shoulders followed. Within seconds, he was resting one elbow in the dust atop the grandfather clock.

  Kneeling, I watched his shirt pulse with each tuk, as though a second, stronger heart had taken root inside him. Too strong, I thought, it could throb him to pieces.

  “Grab me,” he said. “Don’t let go.”

  Even at age ten, my fingers could touch when wrapped around the tops of his ankles. He slid out farther, and the clock came off its back legs and leaned with him. “Fuck!” he blurted, wiggling back as I gripped tight. The clock tipped back toward us and banged its top against the railings and rang them.

  Letting go of Martin, I scrambled to my feet, ready to sprint for our beds as I awaited the tell-tale bloom of lights in Roz’s hallway. Martin lay flat, breath heaving, either resigned to his fate or too freaked out to care. It seemed impossible that Roz hadn’t heard what we’d just done, and anyway, she had a sort of lateral line for this kind of thing, sensing movement in her foyer the way Martin said sharks discerned twitching fish.

  But this time, miraculously, no one came. Nothing moved. And after a minute or so, without even waiting for me to hold his legs, Martin slithered forward once more. I dropped down next to him, held tighter. He kept his spine straight, dropping as little of his weight as possible atop the clock. I watched his waist wedge briefly in the railings, then slip through as his arms stretched out. It was like feeding him to something. Worse than the clock’s tuk was the groan from its base as it started to lean again. My hands went sweaty, and my teeth clamped down on my tongue, almost startling me into letting go. I had no idea whether the tears in my eyes were fear or exhaustion or sadness for my grandfather or the first acknowledgement that I’d just heard rustling, right behind me.

  “Ow,” Martin said as my nails dug into his skin. But he kept sliding forward. My eyes had jammed themselves shut, so I felt rather than saw him grab the chandelier, felt it swing slightly away from him, felt his ribs hit the top of the clock and the clock start to tip.

  I opened my eyes—not looking back, not behind, it was only the vents, had to be—and saw Roz step out of her hallway.

  Incredibly, insanely, she didn’t see us at first. She had her head down, bracelets jangling, hands jammed in the pockets of her shiny silver robe, and she didn’t even look up until she was dead center under the chandelier, under my brother stretched full-length in mid-air twenty feet over her head with a sock in his hands. Then the clock’s legs groaned under Martin’s suspended weight, and the chandelier swung out, and Roz froze. For that one split second, none of us so much as breathed. And that’s how I knew, even before she finally lifted her eyes. This time, I really had heard it.

  “Get back,” Roz said, and burst into tears.

  It made no sense. I started babbling, overwhelmed by guilt I wasn’t even sure was mine. “Grandma, I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry—”

  “BACK!” she screamed. “Get away! Get away from them.” With startling speed, she spun and darted up the steps, still shouting.

  Them. Meaning us. Which meant she wasn’t talking to us.

  The rest happened all in one motion. As I turned, my hands came off Martin’s legs. Instantly, he was gone, tipping, the clock rocking forward and
over. He didn’t scream, maybe didn’t have time, but his body flew face-first and smacked into the floor below just as Roz hurtled past and my parents emerged shouting from the guest bedroom and saw their son and the clock smashing and splintering around and atop him and I got my single glimpse of the thing on the landing.

  Its feet weren’t pointed, but bare and pale and swollen with veins. It wore some kind of pink, ruffled something, and its hair was white and flying. I couldn’t see its face. But its movements…the arms all out of rhythm with the feet, out of order, as if they were being jerked from somewhere else on invisible strings. And the legs, the way they moved…not Mrs. Gold’s mindless, surprisingly energetic glide…more of a tilting, trembling lurch. Like Sophie’s.

  Rooted in place, mouth open, I watched it stagger past the blacked-out mirror, headed from the pink room to the blue one.

  “Takes care of his own,” I found myself chanting, helpless to stop. “Takes care of his own. And no mistake. No mistake.” There had been no mistake.

  Roz was waving her hands in front of her, snarling, stomping her feet as though scolding a dog. Had she already known it was here? Or just understood, immediately? In seconds, she and the lurching thing were in the blue room, and Sophie’s door slammed shut.

  “No mistake,” I murmured, tears pouring down my face.

  The door flew open again, and out Roz came. My voice wavered, sank into silence as my eyes met hers and locked. Downstairs, my father was shouting frantically into the phone for an ambulance. Roz walked, jangling, to the step above me, sat down hard, put her head on her knees and one of her hands in my hair. Then she started to weep.

  Martin had fractured his spine, broken one cheekbone, his collarbone, and both legs, and he has never completely forgiven me. Sometimes I think my parents haven’t, either. Certainly, they drew away from me for a long time after that, forming themselves into a sort of protective cocoon around my brother. My family traded phone calls with Roz for years. But we never went back to Baltimore, and she never came to see us.

  So many times, I’ve lunged awake, still seeing the Sophie-Mrs. Gold creature lurching at random into my dreams. If I’d ever had the chance, I would have asked Roz only one thing: how much danger had Martin and I really been in? Would it really have hurt us? Was it inherently malevolent, a monster devouring everything it could reach? Or was it just a peculiarly Jewish sort of ghost, clinging to every last vestige of life, no matter how painful or beset by betrayal, because only in life—this life—is there any possibility of pleasure or fulfillment or even release?

  I can’t ask anyone else, because Roz is the only one other than me who knows. I have never talked about it, certainly not to Martin, who keeps the plaque he lifted from the attic that night nailed to his bedroom wall.

  But I know. And sometimes, I just want to scream at all of them, make them see what’s staring them right in the face, has been obvious from the moment it happened. My grandfather, the Muldoon who took care of his own, during the whole weekend he was away with Roz, never once called his mother? Never called home? Never checked in with Mrs. Gertzen, just to see how everyone was? And Mrs. Gertzen had no family? Had left no indication to the service that employed her of what jobs she might have been engaged in?

  My grandfather had called Mrs. Gertzen’s house before leaving for Delaware, all right. He’d learned about Mrs. Gertzen’s heart attack. Then he’d weighed his shattering second marriage, his straining relationships with his children, his scant remaining healthy days, maybe even his own mother’s misery.

  And he’d made his decision. Taken care of his own, and no mistake. And in the end—the way they always do, whether you take care of them or not—his own had come back for him.

  Story Notes

  “American Morons”: A couple of summers ago, I went to a cousin’s wedding in Tuscany on the weekend of the Palio. I didn’t see the actual race, but I was in Siena the day afterward, and spent an entire afternoon trailing through the cobblestone streets behind the victorious Giraffa contrada as they drummed and sang and pranced around the city, waving and tossing flags, guiding the winning horse into the churches and courtyards of vanquished neighbors, gesturing gleefully in the faces of widows weeping on windowsills overhead. It had been several years—since the birth of my son, at least—since I’d felt myself so deliciously on the outside of a ritual, so exhilaratingly alien. The next evening, on our way back to Rome, my brother poured gasoline into a car gas tank marked with a cap reading Diesel, and we spent four scorching hours broken down beside the superstrade, before eventually receiving a tow into a neighborhood overrun with peacocks (most, but not all of them, living). My brother scrawled the titular phrase in the filthy passenger’s-side window before we abandoned the car. Most of the good, self-mocking lines at the beginning of the story are his. I had the story sketched long before we made it back to Rome.

  * * *

  “Like a Lily in a Flood”: The first of two stories in this collection that originated in the discovery of a book inscription. I’d ordered a battered 1892 copy of Dante Rosetti’s Ballads and Sonnets online because the price was right and I needed a jolt of mad poetry and the book exuded a redolence, even through my computer monitor. The redolence, alas—God, I so much prefer trolling through used books endlessly in person—proved to be smoke. But on the first inside title page, I found the following cryptic inscription:

  Mary from the Counselor 1891

  Jackie Chan once said in an interview that where other people walk down the streets and see buildings, he sees opportunities for mayhem. Somehow, I think part of my brain works the same way, except what I tend to see are intruding (or invented) memories. Certainly, in this case, I tumbled immediately into alarming and delicious daydreams. Later that summer, we spent a few days in a cabin on a New Hampshire lake, not far from where the historical Millerites experienced their Disappointment, and the loons let fly. I finished the first draft of “Lily” three days into our trip, propped on the dock, swatting mosquitoes while my son floated free of both my wife and me for the first time in his life….

  * * *

  “Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air”: The place was actually called Loof’s Lite-a-Line, and it was pretty much the last vestige, I think, of the now-defunct Long Beach Pike amusement park at the end of the old pier. Even today, despite a typically ruthless Southern California bout of urban renewal that has clamped metaphorical mouse ears on every street sign and crumbling shop-front, there are parts of Long Beach that still feel like themselves, which is more than I can say for most municipalities within fifty miles of it. It’s also probably why this story took root there. Sadly, this Lite-a-Line and the dozen or so people I always seemed to find locked into their perpetual poses whenever I visited, has vanished.

  * * *

  “Safety Clowns”: I really did drive an ice-cream truck for a day, and that really is all I’m going to say about that day.

  Loubob is in name only my friend Lou(Bob), who owns Lou’s Records in Encinitas, California. He has never made or animated a muffler man, though he did spend several years failing to rebuild an MG.

  * * *

  “Devil’s Smile”: Like so many of my ideas these days, this one started with my children. More specifically, it emerged while I was reading my kids a book by Donald J. Sobol called True Sea Adventures (they’re those kinds of kids, fortunately) and discovering the astonishing story of Charles F. Tallman, his boat the Christina, and the blizzard of January 7th, 1866. My affection for the wandering chapters of Moby Dick generated some of this story too, I’m sure. And my visit to New Bedford, which still feels dark and blubber-soaked and bird-riven and good and strange, even before you stick your head in the Whaling Museum and see the wall of implements for carving up whales at sea—as terrifying and poignant in their shapes as the gynecological instruments for working on “mutant women” in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers—or the photographs of forests of baleen drying on the docks.

  * * *


  “Transitway”: If you want to know where this story came from, try sitting for five minutes at one of the Harbor Transitway bus stops along the 110 freeway between San Pedro and Los Angeles.

  The words “South Central” really have been expunged, by decree of city authorities, from future maps of Los Angeles.

  * * *

  “The Muldoon”: Book inscription story #2:

  Without question, my maternal grandfather rates as one of the most profound influences on my life. Born working-poor in downtown Baltimore, he scratched and worked and worked and scratched his way through law school, shone as a lawyer, became a raging civil rights activist, and wound up an Appellate Court judge, city councilman, and much-loved and controversial Maryland figure. A behemoth in every sense of the word (he weighed well over 300 pounds for most of the years I knew him), he sang leading roles in community theater and starred on the banquet circuit, but he seemed most at home in the sandwich shops near his downtown office or talking to the grinning parking lot crew at Memorial Stadium, all of whom he knew (down to the names of their wives and children). He read passionately, believed relentlessly in working for the public good, had a system for picking horse-track winners that worked, and remained open to an astonishing range of experiences—as long as they didn’t involve setting foot outside of Baltimore—for his entire life. His legacy is complicated, joyful, rich, and just plain large. He has been dead more than fifteen years, and I still miss him deeply, and think of him in one way or another almost daily.

  Mostly, what my grandfather gave me while he was alive, and left me when he died, were books. Primarily, these were his well-read hardbacks with the dustjackets discarded (my grandfather found jackets mostly gaudy and a waste). In many of the books, he left notes for me. Perhaps my favorite, up until just recently, was the one he scrawled in a copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Balthazar, from The Alexandria Quartet. Like many so-serious, writerly late teens, I fell in love with those books, and had been badgering my grandfather for his lovely editions for years, despite his surprising and uncharacteristic resistance. On my 21st birthday, my grandfather finally bestowed this volume upon me. Inside, I found the words: