American Morons Page 2

  On impulse, he slid his arm around Jamie’s shoulders. Her skin felt hot but dry. Her flip-flopped foot tapped in the dirt. She neither leaned into him nor away. Years from now, he knew, they’d be telling this story. To their respective children, not the children he’d always thought they’d have together. As an excuse to tell it, just once more, to each other.

  At least, that’s how it would be for him. “Diesel,” he muttered. “Who uses diesel anymore?”

  “People who care about the air. Diesel’s a million times leaner than regular gas.”

  “But it stinks.”

  She shook off his arms.

  “You smell anything?”

  Kellen realized that he didn’t.

  “They fixed the smell problem ages ago. You’re just brainwashed.”

  “Brainwashed?”

  “Oil company puppet. George Bush puppet. Say W, little puppet.”

  “W,” said Kellen, tried a smile though he still felt unsettled and dumb, and Jamie smiled weakly back, without taking her eyes off the placid face of the thin boy.

  “Okay!” called the troll, waving. He stuck his head into the yellow car, continuing to gesture even though no one could see him, then reemerged. “Arrivo. Si? Coming.”

  Jamie smiled her thanks. Reedy boy turned his head enough to watch the sun as it vanished. Shadows poured over the retaining wall onto the freeway, and with them came a chorus of shrieks that flooded the air and took a long time evaporating.

  Squeezing Jamie once on the elbow in what he hoped was a reassuring manner, Kellen made his way around their dead rental, climbed the dirt incline that rimmed the superstrade, and reached the retaining wall, which was taller than it looked. Even standing at its base, Kellen couldn’t see over the top. The wall was made of the same chipped, ancient-looking stone that dotted excavation sites all over Italy. What, Kellen wondered, had this originally been built to retain?

  Standing on tiptoe, he dropped his elbows on top of the stone, wedged a foot into the grit between rocks, and hoisted himself up. There he hung, elbows grinding into the wall, mouth wide open.

  Without letting go, he turned his head after a few seconds. “Jamie,” he said quietly, hoping somehow to attract her and not the reedy boy. But his voice didn’t carry over the traffic, and Jamie didn’t turn around. Against the yellow car, the troll leaned, smoking a thin, brownish cigarette. “Jamie,” Kellen barked, and she glanced up, and the reedy boy, too, slowly. “Jamie, come here.”

  She came. Right as she reached the base of the wall, the screeching started once more. Knowing the source, as he now did, should have reassured Kellen. Instead, he closed his eyes and clutched the stone.

  “Kel?” Jamie said, her voice so small, suddenly, that Kellen could barely hear it. “Kellen, what’s up there?”

  He opened his eyes, staring over the wall again. “Peacock Auschwitz.”

  “Will you stop saying shit like that? You sound like your stupid president, except he probably thinks Auschwitz is a beer.”

  “He’s your president, too.”

  She was struggling to get her feet wedged into the chinks in the wall. He could have helped, or told her to stay where she was, but did neither.

  “Oh, God,” she said, as soon as she’d climbed up beside him. Then she went silent, too.

  The neighborhood looked more like a gypsy camp than a slum. The tiny, collapsing houses seemed less decayed than pieced together out of discarded tires, chicken wire, and old stones. The shadows streaming over everything now had already pooled down there, so that the olive trees scattered everywhere looked like hunched old people, white-haired, slouching through the ruins like mourners in a graveyard.

  Attached to every single structure—even the ones where roofs had caved in, walls given way—was a cage, as tall as the houses, lined with some kind of razor wire with the sharp points twisted inward. Inside the cages were birds.

  Peacocks. Three, maybe four to a house, including the ones that were already dead. The live ones paced skittishly, great tails dragging in the dust, through the spilled innards and chopped bird feet lining the cage bottoms. There was no mistaking any of it, and even if there were, the reek that rose from down there was a clincher. Shit and death. Unmistakable.

  In the cage nearest them, right at the bottom of the wall, one bird glanced up, lifted its tail as though considering throwing it open, then tilted its head back and screamed.

  “You know,” said the reedy boy, right beneath them, in perfect though faintly accented English, and Kellen and Jamie jerked. Then they just hung, clinging to the wall. “The Ancient Romans sacrificed the pavone—the peacock, si?—to honor their emperors. They symbolized immortality. And their tails were the thousand eyes of God, watching over our civilization. Of course, they also sacrificed humans, to the Larvae.”

  Very slowly, still clutching the top of the wall, Kellen turned his head. The boy was so close that Kellen could feel the exhalation of his breath on the sweat still streaming down his back. Even if Kellen had tried a kick, he wouldn’t have been able to get anything on it. Jamie had gone rigid, and when he glanced that way, he saw that her eyes had teared up, though they remained fixed unblinkingly on the birds below.

  “Larvae?” he asked, just to be talking. He couldn’t think what else to do. “Like worms?”

  “Dead men. Demons, really. Demons made of dead, bad men.”

  “Why?”

  “Yes!” The boy nodded enthusiastically, folding his hands in that contemplative, regal way. “You are right. To invoke the Larvae and set them upon the enemies of Rome? Or to pacify them, and in doing so drive away ill fortune? Which is the correct course? I would guess even they did not always know. What is your guess?”

  That I’m about to die, Kellen thought crazily, closed his eyes, and bit his lip to keep from crying out like the peacocks beneath him. “So Romans cherished their dead, bad men?”

  “And their sacrifices. And their executioners. Like all human civilizations do.”

  Carefully, expecting a dagger to his ribs at any moment, Kellen eased his elbows off the stone, let one leg drop, then the other. The birds had gone silent. He stood a second, face to the stone. Then he turned.

  The reedy boy was fifteen feet away, head aimed down the road as he walked slowly to his car.

  “Jamie,” Kellen hissed, and Jamie skidded down the wall to land next to him.

  “Ow,” she murmured, crooking her elbow to reveal an ugly red scrape.

  “Jamie. Are we in trouble?”

  She looked at him. He’d never seen the expression on her face before. But he recognized it instantly, and it chilled him almost as much as the reedy boy’s murmur. Contempt. He’d always been terrified she’d show him that, sooner or later. And also certain that someday she would.

  Without a word, she walked down the dirt incline, holding her elbow against her chest. When she reached the car, she stuck out a forefinger and began trailing it through the dirt on the driver’s side window.

  Okay, Kellen urged himself. Think. They had no phone. And who would they call? What was 911 in Italian? Maybe they could just walk fast toward the tollgate. Run out in traffic. People would honk. But they’d also see them. Nothing could happen as long as someone was looking, right?

  Then he remembered the way the men who’d helped them to the shoulder had vanished. His mind veered into a skid. They all know. The whole country. An agreement they’ve come to. They knew the yellow car, the location. The birds. They knew. They left us here. Put us here. Even the guy at the gas station, just what had he poured in the tank to supposedly save them?

  Peacock screams. A whole chorus of them, as the last light went out of the day. Kellen scrambled fast down the dirt toward the car, toward Jamie, who was crouched on the gravel now, head down and shaking back and forth on her long, tanned neck.

  At the same moment, he saw both what Jamie had scrawled in the window grime and the two men by the yellow car starting toward them again. They came side by side,
the reedy boy with one long-fingered hand on the stumpy one’s shoulders.

  AMERICAN MORONS. That’s what she’d written.

  “I love you,” Kellen blurted. She didn’t even look up.

  The men from the yellow car were twenty feet away, now, ignoring the cars, the bird-screams, everything but their quarry.

  Hop the wall, Kellen thought. But the idea of hiding in that neighborhood—of just setting foot in it—seemed even worse than facing down these two. Also, weirdly, like sacrilege. Like parading with camera bags and iPods and cell phones through places where people had prayed, played with, and killed each other.

  This was what he was thinking, as the two Romans ambled ever nearer, when the truck loomed up, let loose a gloriously throaty, brain-clearing honk, and settled with a sigh right beside them.

  “We’re saved,” he whispered, then dropped to his knees as the first and only girl he’d loved finally looked up. “Jamie, the tow truck’s here. We’re saved.”

  In no time at all, the driver was out, surveying the ruined rental, shoving pieces of puffy, cold pizza into their hands. He didn’t speak English either, just gestured with emphatic Italian clarity. The cab of his truck was for him and his pizza. Jamie and Kellen could ride in their car. They climbed back in, and as the driver attached a chain and winch to the bumper, began to drag them onto the long, high bed of the truck, Kellen thought about blasting his horn, giving a chin-flick to the yellow-car guys.

  Except that that was ridiculous. The yellow-car guys had called the tow truck. There’d never been any danger at all.

  He started to laugh, put his hand on Jamie’s. She was shivering, though it was still a long way from cold. The tow truck driver chained them into place, climbed back into his cab. Only then did it occur to Kellen that now they were really trapped.

  With a lurch, the truck edged two wheels onto the superstrade, answering a volley of horn blares with a bazooka blast of its own. Perched there, eight feet off the ground, chained in the car on the tow truck bed, Kellen had a perfect view of the blue Mercedes coupe as it swerved onto the shoulder directly behind the yellow car. He saw the driver climb out of the blue car, wearing a black poncho that made no sense in the heat.

  Stepping away from his own door, this new arrival simply watched as the reedy guy pointed a command and the troll dragged a little boy, bound in rusty wire, kicking and hurling his gagged head from side to side, out of the back seat of the yellow car. All too clearly, Kellen saw the boy’s face. So distinctly American he could practically picture it on a milk carton already. Wheat-blond hair, freckles like crayon dots all over his cheeks, Yankees cap still somehow wedged over his ears.

  Except it would never wind up on a milk carton, Kellen realized, grabbing at the useless steering wheel. When he’d called home to tell his father about the murders, his father had snorted and said, “Thus proving there are ungrateful malcontents in Italy just like here.” No one else they’d called had even heard the news. This boy would simply evaporate into the new American history, like the dead soldiers lined up in their coffins in that smuggled photograph from the second Gulf War.

  Shuddering himself now, still holding the wheel, Kellen wondered where the boy’s face would appear in its Italian newspaper photo. Drowned in a fountain atop the Spanish Steps? Wedged into one of the slits in the underground walls of Nero’s Cryptoporticus? Strewn amid the refuse and scraps of fast-food wrappers and discarded homeless-person shoes along the banks of the Tiber?

  Just as the truck rumbled forward, plowing a space for itself in the traffic, the guy in the poncho closed the door of his Mercedes on his new passenger, and both the troll and the reedy boy looked up and caught Kellen’s eyes.

  The troll waved. The reedy boy smiled.

  Like a Lily in a Flood

  “White and golden Lizzie stood,

  Like a lily in a flood;

  Like a rock of blue-vein’d stone

  Lash’d by tides obstreperously;

  Like a beacon left alone

  In a hoary roaring sea…”

  Christina Rossetti

  “Thoreau?” his hostess snorts, setting down the small china plate of molasses cookies wrapped in linen at his elbow. Where he sits on the veranda, the evening is already cool—amazing, given the stifling heat of the day—and he can feel the warmth from the cookies on the skin of his arm like a hot water bottle. “I’ll give you your Thoreau.” His hostess straightens, long and swanlike in her white summer sweater. Her hair is undyed, white and simple, cut short.

  Closing his book on his finger, Nagle leans back against the wicker, happy to be here. Happier than he will admit to Melinda when he gets home tomorrow night. Probably, next time, he should bring her. His hostess would like her more than he suspects she liked Elise, because Melinda is tougher. He watches the boughs of the red cedars rustle along the curving bank of Lake Waukewan as the bats and evening grosbeaks stir to meet the moon.

  “All right,” he says. “Give me my Thoreau.”

  “My great-great-great grandmother Mary used to trudge all the way out there twice a week, more than six miles each way, to fetch his washing and return it to him. That’s your back-to-nature, live-pure, transcend-yourself Thoreau.”

  Nagle expects her to tromp back inside—she has always been fond of exit lines—but instead she folds her arms and stands beside his chair, eyes clear blue, spine stiff and straight as the trunk of a spruce pine.

  “Now I know,” he says.

  For a few moments, they stay together on the veranda while loon call erupts over the lake. Out front, a mobile home blunders down the access road toward the campground a mile or so away. Two thoughts occur to Nagle simultaneously: first, that he has been coming here for over twenty-three years, ever since he had the urge to see where his parents had stayed on the night before their death, and in all that time, he has never seen his hostess stand still this long; and second, never before has he been here when none of the other three guest rooms have been occupied. In fact, he can’t remember any of the other rooms ever being vacant.

  His hostess unfolds her arms and slaps her palms against her blue-jeaned thighs. “Come inside, I’ll find you something a mite fresher to read.” She starts for the doorway. “Come soon. Mosquitoes fit to suck your eyes out this year.” She waves her arm in the air, and a trail of midges seems to float off her fingers as though she has conjured them.

  “Mosquitoes don’t bother with me, much,” he says, as she bangs back through the screen door, which slaps into place behind her.

  This is the first time she has offered him a literary recommendation. He will wait, he thinks, just long enough to provide the appearance of disinterest both he and his hostess are most comfortable with.

  So for ten minutes, he sits. He loves the lake at twilight, the motorboats and Jet Skis returning to their berths, the loons circling as tiny black waterbugs skitter over the surface of the water like the crowd at the end of a high school football game, the light almost standoffish, flat greens and golds, nothing flashy like the sunsets over the ocean or even a polluted city. Elise had loved this, too. Melinda would want to go find the nearest Putt-Putt, then get a beer. She would have her kinked hair corded, and she’d be well into the third of her three-every-evening smokes, singing Patsy Cline. What is it that keeps him from bringing her here? Maybe it’s simply the nature of their relationship, which is also the nature, he is willing to bet, of most serious second relationships with both partners over forty and no kids involved: he and Melinda get on well, and they each leave the things the other loves alone.

  He stands and passes quietly through the screen door into the den with its comfortably stuffed but fraying white couches, its framed photographs he assumes were taken by his hostess: a black bear rising on two legs beside the white ash off the veranda; the Frozen Joy ice cream shack over in New Sandwich, its lot uncharacteristically empty of Winnebagos; one of those tiny roadside New Hampshire cemeteries that house at least one dead soldier from the Revoluti
onary War and three or four infants, with tree roots enfolding their graves like mothers’ arms. He is halfway through the dining room when he realizes it isn’t just the absence of other guests that has made the house seem bare. It’s that none of the four round breakfast tables in the dining room have been set with so much as a water glass.

  Maybe, he thinks, his hostess no longer considers him a guest. But he knows right away that’s ridiculous. So maybe something terrible has happened, someone has died or moved away. At the moment, he does not want to ask. He hasn’t even asked Melinda that sort of question, and he has appreciated not being asked himself.

  Before habit set in, it was the square, red-carpeted library tucked right off the kitchen that lured him back here those first few summers—the mushy yellow recliners, fire lit on cool nights, lamps filled with paraffin and the electric lights switched off. Not for the first time, standing in this room, he wonders what it would be like to have books as his workday tools, rather than circular saws and levels and four-by-fours. But the jobs that involve reading also require more engagement with people than he generally enjoys, and of course he might not love reading so much if he had to do it for a living, and if everyone around him was reading, too.

  Here, books are crammed every which way on the sturdy maple shelves. The verticals are lacquered walnut straight up to the ceiling. Skirting the recliners, Nagle peruses the collection, impressed, as he is every year, by its variety, by its almost willful oddness, as though each succeeding owner of this home had her own monomania and pursued it relentlessly.

  He starts in the northwest corner, with the four complete rows of New Hampshire-set murder mysteries. There is one, it seems, for every lake and notable site in the state, such as Murder on the Mount. Climbing the library ladder, he lingers momentarily at the shelf full of nasty-looking proper parenting books from the 1920s and ‘30s with vaguely ominous titles like When Your Child is Bad. Never once has he pulled down one of these books, though they have always intrigued him, strangely. So have the books on the row above them about making ham radios, with their bright blue and red spines cracked from overuse, their titles—You Can Tune in the Moon is his particular favorite—a cheerful mirror to the parenting volumes. Clambering up even farther to his favorite shelves, jammed with disordered, leather-bound editions of the classics, Nagle reaches for a slim, gray volume whose title he does not recognize, then stops and stares at the shelf. Surely, he thinks, it’s a trick of the lamplight.