Bag of Bones (51 page)

“Don't tackle your own quarterback!” I yelled, grinning, and to my delight she yelled it right back at me: “Don't taggle yer own quartermack! Don't taggle yer own quartermack!”

I set her on her feet, both of us laughing. Ki took a step backward, tripped herself, and sat down on the grass, laughing harder than ever. I had a mean thought, then, brief but oh so clear: if only the old lizard could see how much he was missed. How sad we were at his passing.

Mattie walked over, and tonight she looked as I'd half-imagined her when I first met her—like one of those lovely children of privilege you see at the country club, either goofing with their friends or sitting seriously at dinner with their parents. She was in a white sleeveless dress and low heels, her hair falling loose around her shoulders, a touch of lipstick on her mouth. Her eyes had a brilliance in them that hadn't been there before. When she hugged me I could smell her perfume and feel the press of her firm little breasts.

I kissed her cheek; she kissed me high up on the jaw, making a smack in my ear that I felt all the way down my back. “Say things are going to be better now,” she whispered, still holding me.

“Lots better now,” I said, and she hugged me again, tight. Then she stepped away. “You better have brought plenty food, big boy, because we plenty hungry womens. Right, Kyra?”

“I taggled my own quartermack,” Ki said, then leaned back on her elbows, giggling deliciously at the bright and hazy sky.

“Come on,” I said, and grabbed her by the middle. I toted her that way to a nearby picnic table, Ki kicking her legs and waving her arms and laughing. I set her down on the bench; she slid off it and beneath the table, boneless as an eel and still laughing.

“All right, Kyra Elizabeth,” Mattie said. “Sit up and show the other side.”

“Good girl, good girl,” she said, clambering up beside me. “That's the other side to me, Mike.”

“I'm sure,” I said. Inside the bag there were Big Macs and fries for Mattie and me. For Ki there was a
colorful box upon which Ronald McDonald and his unindicted co-conspirators capered.

“Mattie, I got a Happy Meal! Mike got me a Happy Meal! They have toys!”

“Well see what yours is.”

Kyra opened the box, poked around, then smiled. It lit up her whole face. She brought out something that I at first thought was a big dustball. For one horrible second I was back in my dream, the one of Jo under the bed with the book over her face.
Give me that,
she had snarled.
It's my dust-catcher.
And something else, too—some other association, perhaps from some other dream. I couldn't get hold of it.

“Mike?” Mattie asked. Curiosity in her voice, and maybe borderline concern.

“It's a doggy!” Ki said. “I won a doggy in my Happy Meal!”

Yes, of course. A dog. A little stuffed dog. And it was gray, not black . . . although why I'd care about the color either way I didn't know.

“That's a pretty good prize,” I said, taking it. It was soft, which was good, and it was gray, which was better. Being gray made it all right, somehow. Crazy but true. I handed it back to her and smiled.

“What's his name?” Ki asked, jumping the little dog back and forth across her Happy Meal box. “What doggy's name, Mike?”

And, without thinking, I said, “Strickland.”

I thought she'd look puzzled, but she didn't. She looked delighted. “Stricken!” she said, bouncing the dog back and forth in ever-higher leaps over the box. “Stricken! Stricken! My dog Stricken!”

“Who's this guy Strickland?” Mattie asked, smiling
a little. She had begun to unwrap her hamburger.

“A character in a book I read once,” I said, watching Ki play with the little puffball dog. “No one real.”

*   *   *

“My grampa died,” she said five minutes later.

We were still at the picnic table but the food was mostly gone. Strickland the stuffed puffball had been set to guard the remaining french fries. I had been scanning the ebb and flow of people, wondering who was here from the TR observing our tryst and simply burning to carry the news back home. I saw no one I knew, but that didn't mean a whole lot, considering how long I'd been away from this part of the world.

Mattie put down her burger and looked at Ki with some anxiety, but I thought the kid was okay—she had been giving news, not expressing grief.

“I know he did,” I said.

“Grampa was awful old.” Ki pinched a couple of french fries between her pudgy little fingers. They rose to her mouth, then gloop, all gone. “He's with Lord Jesus now. We had all about Lord Jesus in V.B.S.”

Yes, Ki,
I thought,
right now Grampy's probably teaching Lord Jesus how to use Pixel Easel and asking if there might be a whore handy.

“Lord Jesus walked on water and also changed the wine into macaroni.”

“Yes, something like that,” I said. “It's sad when people die, isn't it?”

“It would be sad if Mattie died, and it would be sad if you died, but Grampy
was
old.” She said it as though I hadn't quite grasped this concept the first time. “In heaven he'll get all fixed up.”

“That's a good way to look at it, hon,” I said.

Mattie did maintenance on Ki's drooping barrettes, working carefully and with a kind of absent love. I thought she glowed in the summer light, her skin in smooth, tanned contrast to the white dress she had probably bought at one of the discount stores, and I understood that I loved her. Maybe that was all right.

“I miss the white nana, though,” Ki said, and this time she did look sad. She picked up the stuffed dog, tried to feed him a french fry, then put him down again. Her small, pretty face looked pensive now, and I could see a whisper of her grandfather in it. It was far back but it was there, perceptible, another ghost. “Mom says white nana went back to California with Grampy's early remains.”

“
Earthly
remains, Ki-bird,” Mattie said. “That means his body.”

“Will white nana come back and see me, Mike?”

“I don't know.”

“We had a game. It was all rhymes.” She looked more pensive than ever.

“Your mom told me about that game,” I said.

“She won't be back,” Ki said, answering her own question. One very large tear rolled down her right cheek. She picked up “Stricken,” stood him on his back legs for a second, then put him back on guard-duty. Mattie slipped an arm around her, but Ki didn't seem to notice. “White nana didn't really like me. She was just pretending to like me. That was her
job.
”

Mattie and I exchanged a glance.

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“Don't know,” Ki said. Over by where the kid was
playing the guitar, a juggler in whiteface had started up, working with half a dozen colored balls. Kyra brightened a little. “Mommy-bommy, may I go watch that funny white man?”

“Are you done eating?”

“Yeah, I'm full.”

“Thank Mike.”

“Don't taggle yer own quartermack,” she said, then laughed kindly to show she was just pulling my leg. “Thanks, Mike.”

“Not a problem,” I said, and then, because that sounded a little old-fashioned: “Kickin.”

“You can go as far as that tree, but no farther,” Mattie said. “And you know why.”

“So you can see me. I will.”

She grabbed Strickland and started to run off, then stopped and looked over her shoulder at me. “I guess it was the fridgeafator people,” she said, then corrected herself very carefully and seriously. “The
ree-fridge-a-rator
people.” My heart took a hard double beat in my chest.

“It was the refrigerator people what, Ki?” I asked.

“That said white nana didn't really like me.” Then she ran off toward the juggler, oblivious to the heat.

Mattie watched her go, then turned back to me. “I haven't talked to anybody about Ki's fridgeafator people. Neither has she, until now. Not that there are any real people, but the letters seem to move around by themselves. It's like a Ouija board.”

“Do they spell things?”

For a long time she said nothing. Then she nodded. “Not always, but sometimes.” Another pause. “
Most
times, actually. Ki calls it mail from the people
in the refrigerator.” She smiled, but her eyes were a little scared. “Are they special magnetic letters, do you think? Or have we got a poltergeist working the lakefront?”

“I don't know. I'm sorry I brought them, if they're a problem.”

“Don't be silly. You gave them to her, and you're a tremendously big deal to her right now. She talks about you all the time. She was much more interested in picking out something pretty to wear for you tonight than she was in her grandfather's death. I was supposed to wear something pretty, too, Kyra insisted. She's not that way about people, usually—she takes them when they're there and leaves them when they're gone. That's not such a bad way for a little girl to grow up, I sometimes think.”

“You both dressed pretty,” I said. “That much I'm sure of.”

“Thanks.” She looked fondly at Ki, who stood by the tree watching the juggler. He had put his rubber balls aside and moved on to Indian clubs. Then she looked back at me. “Are we done eating?”

I nodded, and Mattie began to pick up the trash and stuff it back into the take-out bag. I helped, and when our fingers touched, she gripped my hand and squeezed. “Thank you,” she said. “For everything you've done. Thank you so damn much.”

I squeezed back, then let go.

“You know,” she said, “it's crossed my mind that Kyra's moving the letters around herself. Mentally.”

“Telekinesis?”

“I guess that's the technical term. Only Ki can't spell much more than ‘dog' and ‘cat.' ”

“What's showing up on the fridge?”

“Names, mostly. Once it was yours. Once it was your wife's.”

“Jo?”

“The whole thing—
JOHANNA.
And
NANA
. Rogette, I presume.
JARED
shows up sometimes, and
BRIDGET
. Once there was
KITO
.” She spelled it.

“Kito,” I said, and thought:
Kyra, Kia, Kito. What is this?
“A boy's name, do you think?”

“I know it is. It's Swahili, and means precious child. I looked it up in my baby-name book.” She glanced toward her own precious child as we walked across the grass to the nearest trash barrel.

“Any others that you can remember?”

She thought. “
REG
has showed up a couple of times. And once there was
CARLA
. You understand that Ki can't even read these names as a rule, don't you? She has to ask me what they say.”

“Has it occurred to you that Kyra might be copying them out of a book or a magazine? That she's learning to write using the magnetic letters on the fridge instead of paper and pencil?”

“I suppose that's possible . . .” She didn't look as if she believed it, though. Not surprising. I didn't believe it myself.

“I mean, you've never actually seen the letters moving around by themselves on the front of the fridge, have you?” I hoped I sounded as unconcerned asking this question as I wanted to.

She laughed a bit nervously. “God, no!”

“Anything else?”

“Sometimes the fridgeafator people leave messages like
HI
and
BYE
and
GOOD GIRL
. There was one yesterday
that I wrote down to show you. Kyra asked me to. It's
really
weird.”

“What is it?”

“I'd rather show you, but I left it in the glove compartment of the Scout. Remind me when we go.”

Yes. I would.

“This is some spooky shit,
señor,
” she said. “Like the writing in the flour that time.”

I thought about telling her I had my own fridgeafator people, then didn't. She had enough to worry about without that . . . or so I told myself.

We stood side-by-side on the grass, watching Ki watch the juggler. “Did you call John?” I asked.

“You bet.”

“His reaction?”

She turned to me, laughing with her eyes. “He actually sang a verse of ‘Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead.'”

“Wrong sex, right sentiment.”

She nodded, her eyes going back to Kyra. I thought again how beautiful she looked, her body slim in the white dress, her features clean and perfectly made.

“Was he pissed at me inviting myself to lunch?” I asked.

“Nope, he loved the idea of having a party.”

A party. He loved the idea. I began to feel rather small.

“He even suggested we invite your lawyer from last Friday. Mr. Bissonette? Plus the private detective John hired on Mr. Bissonette's recommendation. Is that okay with you?”

“Fine. How about you, Mattie? Doing okay?”

“Doing okay,” she agreed, turning to me. “I
did
have several more calls than usual today. I'm suddenly quite popular.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Most were hangups, but one gentleman took time enough to call me a cunt, and there was a lady with a very strong Yankee accent who said, ‘Theah, you bitch, you've killed him. Aaa you satisfied?' She hung up before I could tell her yes, very satisfied, thanks.” But Mattie didn't look satisfied; she looked unhappy and guilty, as if she had literally wished him dead.

“I'm sorry.”

“It's okay. Really. Kyra and I have been alone for a long time, and I've been scared for most of it. Now I've made a couple of friends. If a few anonymous phone calls are the price I have to pay, I'll pay it.”

She was very close, looking up at me, and I couldn't stop myself. I put the blame on summer, her perfume, and four years without a woman. In that order. I slipped my arms around her waist, and remember perfectly the texture of her dress beneath my hands; the slight pucker at the back where the zipper hid in its sleeve. I remember the sensation of the cloth moving against the bare skin beneath. Then I was kissing her, very gently but very thoroughly—anything worth doing is worth doing right—and she was kissing me back in exactly the same spirit, her mouth curious but not afraid. Her lips were warm and smooth and held some faint sweet taste. Peaches, I think.