A Ship Made of Paper (13 page)
He finds himself on a semicircular stone porch, a repository for busted-up furniture. He can’t tell what direction he’s facing; the world is chaos. He looks up at the sky, at the deluge of snow floating down. He opens his arms wide. He wants to shout out her name. Her name is her body, her scent, the shadow she casts upon the world. The violence and unexpectedness of this weather leads him not to the actual belief that the
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world is in a state of emergency and that everything now is suddenly permitted, but to something close to it, something that suggests what that would feel like. He walks carefully down the stairs, snow seeping through his shoes. Then he walks around the house until he finds his car, which in the half hour he has been here has accumulated a five-inch coating of wet, heavy snow.
He must dig around in his trunk to find the scraper and brush to clear his windshield, and once that is done he has no idea where the road is.
He looks for the tracks left by the men who delivered the flags and rockets, but the tracks have already been filled. He drives the mile and a half slowly, slipping in the wet snow, having no idea if he is driving on pavement or grass.
He calls his office from the car. The answering machine comes on, but with a new outgoing message left by Sheila Alvarez. “This is the office of Daniel Emerson. We have closed early because of the snow. And Mr. Emerson, Kate called to say that the day care center has closed and Ruby went home with Iris Davenport, and if you can make it over there would you please pick her up. Everyone else, leave a message after the beep.”
An immense oak tree lay on the ground a few feet from where they stood. Hampton rested his foot on it and then shouted Marie’s name as loudly as he could.The
veins on his neck swelled; Daniel had a sense of what it would be like to deal with
Hampton’s temper, about which he had heard a great deal from Iris. Like many
men with clear goals, Hampton was impatient, quick to anger. Hampton shouted
again. If Marie were nearby she might have cowered from the furious sound of his
call. Daniel sighed, folded his arms over his chest.
t was snowing and it was snowing and it was going to snow some more.
I A truck bearing the sign wide load and carrying behind it a tan-and-brown modular home that was being delivered to a hillside already filled with similar ready-made houses lost traction on the main road about a quarter mile south of Leyden, jackknifing into the northbound lane and colliding with an oncoming U-Haul truck, which was being driven up from the city by a young couple who had just bought a little weekend house and were bringing up their sofa, chairs, tables, lamps, bed, pots, pans, silverware, mystery novels, cross-country skis, aquar-ium, and paintings. Firemen, police, and paramedics struggled to the scene—many had difficulty driving there—and once the wreckage was cleared away and the victims transported—the truck driver to Leyden
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Hospital, the couple from the city to the morgue at the south end of the county—they were called to another highway disaster, and then another.
Six miles north, on the same road, a trucker on his way down from the Adirondacks, carrying twelve tons of freshly harvested hemlock, slammed on his brakes to avoid a collision with a Chevrolet driven by an old man who was moving no more than ten miles per hour. The trucker avoided rear-ending the old man, but the suddenness of the stop created a lurching backward and then forward motion in the logs, and, though they had been secured by braids of heavy chains, two of the smaller trees broke entirely loose and shot out over the back of the truck as if out of a catapult. One of them flew over the roof of the Toyota behind the truck, hit the pavement, and bounced off the road, entering the woods end over end.The other log, however, went straight through the Toyota’s windshield, like a giant leg stomping through a thin sheet of ice, crushing the driver and sending the car killingly out of control, directly into another Toyota, a blue one, in the northbound lane.
An old silver van, with a high rounded roof and oddly diminutive tires, flipped over on a sharp, slushy curve on Frankenberg Road.The van was carrying two chestnut-and-white racehorses down from Canada to a horse farm in Leyden.The horses, a gelding and a mare, were both in canvas harnesses, which were strapped to the sides of the van to keep the horses in place during their three-hundred-mile journey. When the van overturned, the canvas did not tear and both horses dangled upside down, whinnying in terror, their pink, powerful tongues wagging back and forth, their chin whiskers soaked in thick white foam. The woman who owned the horses and the man who was their trainer staggered around on the side of the road, banged and bleeding, feeling lucky to be alive. But then, as the van began to smoke, and then to burn, they realized that the miracle of their survival would be forever compromised by having to spend the rest of their lives remembering the crescendo of cries and then the even more terrible silence as their horses were immolated.
At the Bridgeview Convalescent Home the loss of electricity would have normally switched on the auxiliary generator, but last winter’s a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
power failures had used up all of the generator’s fuel and no one had thought to gas it up—winter was still a couple of months away.The lights went dull, then dark, like dying eyes. Clocks stopped. Those nurses who were generally irritable became more irritable.Those patients who were generally confused became more confused. The bedridden propped themselves up on bony elbows and looked around for some explanation.
The patients who were chronically complaining shook their fists, spit on the floor, told the staff off. The fearful became terrified—the booming death of all those trees, the TVs with their gray blank screens standing in their corners like uncarved gravestones.
In a Victorian house out on Ploughman’s Lane was a facility for teenage boys who had tangled with the law and been ordered there by juvenile courts ranging from the Bronx to Buffalo. It was now called Star of Bethlehem and it was run by Catholic Charities. In deference to the people of Leyden, there were never fewer than four guards on duty, hulking, quiet men who patrolled the halls and the grounds in lace-up paratrooper boots and black turtleneck shirts, carrying black rubber batons.The doors were always locked and the windows were locked, too; the fence that surrounded its ten rolling acres was electrified. Shortly after the power failed, the staff herded the boys into their rooms. The staff at Star of Bethlehem were, for the most part, men who themselves had had tough dealings with the law in their youth, who seemed to operate under the principle that if they could put their lives on track, then these boys could learn to live right, too. They were usually rough, and with the power out they pushed and prodded the boys into their rooms, as if some gross breach of discipline had already been committed. It was a total lockdown.
The boys went docilely, confused by the gathering darkness, the moaning winds, and the distant sounds of cracking trees. Once they were in their rooms, they watched through barred windows as the snow brought down one tree after another. Star of Bethlehem’s auxiliary power supply was already in operation: the Honda generator was pump-ing out enough power to light the lights and keep the boiler running. But it was unlikely that the generator was sending power out to the electric
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fence hundreds of feet away. A couple of the boys picked up a bed and smashed the metal frame through the windowpane—the electric alarms were silent, dead, useless. Then six of the eight boys in the room pulled mattresses off their beds, and wrapping their arms around them, holding them fast, as if they were warm, soft sleds, they dove out of the second-story windows and out into the pearl-white snow.The mattresses landed with thuds ten feet below and the boys left them behind as they scrambled up and slid down the hill, toward the powerless fence and the icy woods beyond.
Discouraged, exhausted, Hampton sat on the fallen tree—and immediately sprang
up again. He had sat upon the Roman candle in his back pocket and it had split
in two. He quickly pulled it out, with frantic gestures, as if it might explode, and
tossed the top half of the candy-striped cardboard tubing as far from him as he
could.“Oh no,” he said.
Now his back pocket was filled with the Roman candle’s black powder, a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, arsenic, and strontium. If I kick him in the ass, he might
explode, thought Daniel. He had a comic vision of Hampton blasting off, sailing
high above the tree line, stars, pound signs, and exclamation points streaming out
behind him.
It takes Daniel nearly half an hour to drive the five miles between Eight Chimneys and Iris’s house on Juniper Street. Some roads are already closed, and on others the traffic barely crawls. He is listening to a mix tape he made—Don Covay, Marvin Gaye, Ray Charles, Irma Thomas. He curses the storm, the roads, the other drivers, and imagines himself making love to Iris. He thinks about her voice, the slightly spoiled, slightly shy, and always shifting quality of it. He is envious of not only Hampton but her fellow students, the library staff, the 7-Eleven clerks, the shopkeepers up and down Leyden’s miniature Broadway, a man
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named Timmy Krauss, who mows her lawn, the tellers at Leyden Savings Bank, even Nelson.
He pulls into the driveway behind Iris’s car. A branch from one of the four maples on her front lawn, as long and thick as a stallion’s hindquarters, has snapped off from the weight of the snow and it sticks like a spear into the ground. Daniel looks up. The downward rush of the snowflakes, unusually large, looks like the blur of the stars when a space-ship accelerates into warp speed. He hears the creaking wooden sound of a window opening.
“Let yourself in, okay?” It’s Iris from the second story. She has stuck her head out the window and her short black hair whitens instantly. “I’m up here with the kids.” Her voice rings out in the silent world.
He steps into her entrance hall and peels off his gloves, feels the melting snow trickling down his back.There are raucous screams of crazy excitement coming from Ruby, who is beside herself with joy to be in Nelson’s house. He hears Iris moderating.
Because the pickups and deliveries of Ruby generally fall to Daniel, he has been to this house ten or fifteen times, but each time Iris has Ruby dressed and ready to go upon his arrival. Nevertheless, in those moments of polite exchange, he has breathed in the smells of her domesticity—
the aromas of whatever meal was being prepared, the smell of a newly painted room, of eucalyptus stalks stuck into a beaded glass vase that stood upon an end table in the living room, just visible from where he usually stood. He has taken in everything there was to see in the foyer itself: the blue-and-silver-striped wallpaper, the illustrative hooked rug (streetlamp, horse and buggy), the tiger maple table near the door, with its resident wicker basket filled with junk mail, the occasional stray mitten, and the curling cash register tape from the supermarket. From this he learned that her purchases included such items as Playtex tampons, and Dry Idea deodorant, Marcal bathroom tissues, Sominex sleeping pills, Tom’s Natur-Mint mouthwash, Revlon emery boards, Tylenol PM.
Outside: the crack of falling trees. For a moment it seems the electric power will go out here, too.
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
Iris comes downstairs, beckons him in. She has taken off her shoes; her socks are bright electric blue. She wears a loose-fitting yellow sweater, jeans. She is a woman at home, she has put the world behind her.
“Are the kids okay?” Daniel asks.
“Ruby’s amazing. She’s got such compassion and wisdom in her eyes.
I love looking at her.”
Daniel feels unaccountably moved by this. It seems somehow more tender and appreciative than anything Kate has ever said. Kate loves Ruby, of course she does, but she has no patience for motherhood. Its unending quality confounds and irritates her. Kate longs for privacy, for uninterrupted mornings, for what she calls her Dream Time.
“Have you ever been to Ruby Falls?” Iris asks.
“No, where is it?”
“In Tennessee, outside Chattanooga. It’s an underground waterfall, the biggest in the world, and it’s red. Well, they might just shine red lights on it to make it look that way. I was ten years old when my family went there. I mostly remember how hot it was outside and how cool it was in that cave, and that everyone on the tour was white, but they were super nice to us.”
“How wonderfully civil of them,” Daniel says.
“I wasn’t really used to seeing white folks, not then. I was so nervous.” She sighs, closing the subject. Then: “I’m going to have some tea.
Do you want some?”
He remembers the appearance of tea on one of her IGA receipts: Celestial Seasonings Almond Sunset and Celestial Seasonings Emperor’s Choice.
“Sure.” He is still in the foyer, stomping loose the snow that was jammed into the waffle sole of his shoes. “Tea would be great. Do you have like an almond tea or something?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” says Iris.
The dog comes in. Daniel crouches down to let Scarecrow sniff his hand. She has no tail but moves her rump back and forth to signal her acceptance of him. He strokes her lightly on the top of her head and she makes a low groan of pleasure.
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“This dog is Jesus,” he says, glancing up at Iris. He turns back toward Scarecrow. “Are you Jesus?”
“Don’t answer that, Scarecrow,” Iris says.
It strikes him with the force of revelation that this is the most fun he has ever had, ever, in all his life, this is the pinnacle, the greatest happiness he has ever known, right there, asking the dog if she is Jesus, and Iris telling the dog not to answer.
They walk across the living room, with its bay windows, dark ma-hogany molding, a white marble mantel over the fireplace. On the north side of the room, French doors lead to the dining room; on the south, a newly hung door leads to the kitchen. Daniel stops at the rack of compact discs to see what music she listens to and feels a rush of confusion, disappointment as he reads: Fleetwood Mac,Tony Bennett, Boyz 2 Men, Aaron Copland.
