Cementville (25 page)

Willis would stretch and say, “Well, I'm going to hit the hay!” as if everything was fine as frog's teeth. And Katherine would burn a hole in the television screen with her eyeballs and squeeze Maureen's hand under the afghan until it hurt.

Then one Sunday they had all gone to Mass, and when Katherine came home she made chicken and dumplings and four different vegetables for dinner, all spread out on the good damask tablecloth. After they ate she said, “Maureen, go get your father's newspaper for him.” And they never talked about Billy being gone and whose fault it was ever again. Maureen knew everything was going to be okay after the first letter Katherine wrote to Billy. She asked her mother if she could put a note of her own in the envelope. When she went to slip it in, even knowing it was a federal crime to look at someone else's mail, she read her mother's letter.
Dear Billy
, it said.

Well, you're gone now and there's no sense crying over spilt milk, as your Uncle Judge does not cease to remind me. Young men must serve their country, he says, it will put hair on his chest. And I could smack him. It would be ridiculous for me to say it's already high time you were coming home. I am not angry with your father anymore, although I maintain this could have waited. This war is not going anywhere
.

But I am done with fighting. If you get yourself blown up, you'll have me to answer to, mister. Maureen is, I am afraid, turning into a wild animal, and needs a big brother to rein her in
.

Oh heck, I have to say it. Come home. Lie if you have to. Tell them your mother is dying. Which is only half a lie since I am dying to hold my boy in my arms again
.

—
Your loving Mother
.

Eventually Katherine was cuddling on the couch with Maureen's father instead of Maureen, and watching
Dragnet
.

Maureen knew the truth of it: Nobody hated
Dragnet
more than Katherine Juell.

E
VEN WITH THE TENSION AROUND
the house now, there are still, once in a while, good moments. Take this evening, before supper. Billy is sitting in a kitchen chair, slipping out of some boots all muddy from tramping in Lem O'Brien's woods, and Katherine comes up behind him and rubs his neck, and he stretches like a cat. Maureen watches them from where she's standing at the sink rinsing garden dirt from some radishes. For a few brief seconds, it feels like the old days. Like before. Almost.

Then in walks Willis. “Don't tell me his majesty is going to grace us with his presence tonight?” their father says.

Their mother, who is not naturally given to smoothing over, does just that. “Well,” she says, and Maureen wishes for Katherine's sake that it could come out less forced, “I do happen to be making spaghetti and meatballs.” And all three, Willis, Katherine, and Maureen, seem to hold still like characters in stop-motion on a stage, and they wait for Billy to decide. It's one of those permissible white lies, Maureen supposes; Katherine has the ground beef already shaped into meatloaf. But it was spaghetti and meatballs that always made Billy take seconds.

“Sounds good,” he says. He sets the muddy boots outside the kitchen door and walks in his socked feet upstairs.

Katherine and Willis and Maureen stand there and listen for the sound of the shower overhead, the trickle of water as it rains down the drainpipe in the walls. Then all three break pose and go on about their business, Willis peeling out of the coveralls that are his second skin during work hours, Katherine breaking up the meatloaf with her bare hands and working in some oregano and forming it into balls. Maureen chews on a radish.

Later Willis will grumble about his son spending all his time at Pekkar's, blowing what pittance he earns from yard work on Millionaires' Row. When Billy first got home nobody thought much about the frequency of his visits to Pekkar's Alley. He was catching up with friends, he deserved some time to relax. They watched as it went from a few times a week to every night.

But for now, the five of them, this newly reconfigured family, sit together and pass the platters of salad and garlic bread and meatballs and spaghetti, and the conversation skims above the surface of the table. Katherine's lips tremble with fragile contentment. Maureen expects any second for Willis to fuss at Billy for coming to the table shirtless. But her father instead asks Billy how it was working for the late Evelyn Slidell. Did she trail after him, ordering him around? Did she have him trim her boxwood maze with fingernail scissors, as rumor had it?

“Not after she took to her bed,” Billy says. Since the old woman died, he's been doing yard work for Uncle Judge and the Duvalls and anyone else who will hire him.

Katherine continues to smile. None of her family's uncomfortable conversation matches her face.

Carl, seeming to note the effort the family is making, injects something barely audible into the conversation and Maureen asks him several times to repeat it. She snorts when her uncle grows agitated and turns over a glass of milk.

“Maureen!” Katherine says. “If you can't be civil, please excuse yourself.” This is mother-speak for
Go to your room
. They both know it, but Maureen tries to pretend that the order is lost on her. She doesn't want to miss anything. Under her father's glare, she finally pushes her chair from the table and leaves the kitchen.

Upstairs, instead of going to her own room, Maureen sits on Billy's bed and waits. She runs her fingers across the spines of the LPs lining the shelves he assembled from bricks and two-by-twelve planks. They form a U-shape around his bed, walling it in like a cave of hard rock. The records are perfectly alphabetized, from the Beatles, the Jeff Beck Group, and Cream to the Rolling Stones, Steppenwolf, the Who, and the Zombies. She picks out one she's never seen before. The name of the band, Iron Butterfly, calls to mind some bizarre combination of medieval torture device and mechanical insect. She holds the vinyl disk by its sides, her fingers straight, the way she's seen her brother do, and places it gently on the turntable.
The volume is all the way down, and she turns it up just enough to hear the words, deep and thrilling.
Oh, won't you come with me
, says the scary voice, so male and strange it runs a current through her. The song keeps going, seemingly without end.

When he comes in, she thinks at first that her brother doesn't even register her presence. Billy yanks a fresh shirt from his dresser drawer and pulls it over his head. He cranks the stereo to ten. Maureen can feel the vibrations of her eardrums—matching the beats of the drummer, now playing alone. The song, amazingly, is still “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

“Man, I am getting
wasted
tonight!” Billy shouts over the music without looking at her, and slaps cologne on his cheeks. His hair has grown over his ears. She watches this stranger in her brother's body and can't think of a thing to say.

Then he is gone.

“
Wasted
!” she repeats to herself, and she wonders what that feels like.

A
PPARENTLY
C
ARL HAS DECIDED THAT
Maureen is his favorite Juell. He has taken to following her around all day, and whenever he starts to get on her nerves, she reminds herself that he has lost all the friends he had at the nuthouse. He wanders around the yard, the house, an odd shoe looking for its mate.

She set her alarm this morning to start working early on her memoirs. She has taken to working outside at the new picnic table they bought with the insurance money from the May storm damage. She tiptoed past Billy's room—not that he would hear her, dead to the world till noon anyhow—and she stopped in the kitchen to smear peanut butter and molasses on a couple of last night's biscuits before heading outside. And who was already out there?

Uncle Carl, of course, standing at the very tip-edge of the bluff hanging above the valley. It wasn't even all the way light yet. Maureen cleared her throat and he jumped and she realized too late that
he wasn't just admiring the last stars or the twinkling lights on the cement plant but was privately peeing, him all rushing to put his thing away. She pretended she didn't see diddly-squat.

After a polite minute, “I love dawn,” she said.

Carl said, “I love the red angels best.” He talked in this mysterious whisper without a lot of ups and downs in his voice, which Maureen judged the best thing about him. “We had lots of those at Eastern State.”

“That's good,” Maureen said, nodding. She found herself nodding at most of what her uncle said, because often it was hard to tell what was crazy and what was just really smart. People said smarts were what drove him crazy, but her mother calls that nonsense.

Carl went on studying the sky, moving his eyes in a circle like he was following a moth's path. Maureen headed to the picnic table, knowing he would follow her. She spread her papers out. She was writing on loose leaf now. When she and Katherine went to the store to replace the diary that had been ruined by the storm, she had decided at the last minute that cute diaries with a lock and key were for little kids. She picked out instead a serious-looking three-ring binder and a thick pack of college-ruled paper and a Sheaffer cartridge pen with three prefilled cartridges in blue, black, and red. It was in that moment, standing in J.J. Newberry's, that Maureen realized childish scribbles in a diary were not what she wanted to be writing at all.

She was a girl who'd been “touched,” Adelaide Ricketts had told her. Katherine would be horrified to learn that Maureen and Eddie had been sneaking off to visit the root doctor. They always dismounted their bikes and pushed them up the steep woodland path, hiding them in the dense growth near Granny Ricketts's falling-in cabin. Maureen got a queasy feeling in her gut remembering how, after she had told the old woman about the lightning strike and the death of Curly, everything went blank and Maureen's hair seemed to be newly electrified from the roots out. That had to count for something, didn't it, being touched? But that seemed ages ago, since
Granny Ricketts put the blessing on her, and Maureen still waited for her special powers to make themselves known.

At the top of a new clean page she wrote:
Chapter 3
.

Carl stood behind her, breathing the same way her father did, stiff little hairs wheezing and complaining at the brink of his nostrils.

“You can't stand back there, Uncle Carl,” she said.

He sat across the table from her. “What are you writing?” he whispered in the creepy voice that she hoped none of the popular girls at school would ever hear.

“It's a combination memoir and history of Cementville.”

“Why?”

“Because I find life interesting, my life, I mean. At least I plan for it to be. Someday. If it goes on this way much longer I am going to have to off myself.” Maureen figured her personal life could not become duller, although thus far the only special power she had been granted from the lightning bolt appeared to be the ability to make her uncle stick to her like gum on the sole of a shoe.

But she was heartened by the thought that Cementville was getting more interesting and stranger every day. First, not long after all the soldiers had been buried, people were in a thrall of gossip about Augrey Ferguson who, so the story went, had begun working as a maid, which would not have set off any alarms in itself, except the person whose house was being cleaned and whose food was being cooked was an old colored man, Nimrod Grebe. And that's not all, people said; near as anyone could tell, she was doing it for free.

Then something way bigger happened, two weeks ago. Jimmy Smith's wife had allegedly been murdered. Maureen asked her mother why the
Picayune
still said “allegedly” when everybody in town knew about the gash in her skull and the purple bruises all around her neck (thanks to the big mouth of Roddy Duvall, who had seen the body before Tommy Thompson's autopsy). But instead of answering her, Katherine had snatched the newspaper out of Maureen's hands and thrown it in the trash.

Rumors were thick as pokeweed around town. Levon Ferguson had been questioned after several witnesses reported him making belligerent statements about the dead woman both before and after the discovery of her body. The sheriff had also picked up some of the GIs who came home in the last few months, as well as a few strangers who had been hired on at the new factory. Somebody said they even took Jimmy Smith in, which Willis said was ridiculous because a blind man could see he was nuts about his wife and torn to pieces over his loss. Willis said he would sooner believe the mother-in-law, Vera Smith, had done it before he would suspect Jimmy. Katherine swatted him with the classified section and rolled her eyes across the breakfast dishes at where Maureen sat scraping the last of the scrambled eggs from her plate.

Between what Maureen got from Eddie Miller and from eavesdropping on her parents' conversations and the rare snippets Billy brought home from Pekkar's Alley, people were behaving like a bunch of bees whose honeycombs had been ransacked by an enormous bear.

“Yes, I will just off myself,” Maureen repeated now, looking at her big uncle across the picnic table. She reddened, suddenly remembering the newest secret she had uncovered: Her grandfather really had offed himself (this being the new term she had learned for suicide). Her parents would have been shocked to find out Maureen was aware of this dark family secret. Who knew that her family even had dark family secrets?