Criminals (28 page)

What if you didn't have any idea what anybody else thought of you, or realize that they saw you through the window when you got out of the car together and walked in holding on like a pair in a three-legged race, with your shoulders rubbing and your hips bumping together, or that they heard you not answering anybody except the baby, or knew
you had sent all your kids out of the house at once, so that they ended up at our house all afternoon?

Strange that Mr. Ott should have as his daughter Mary Catherine, who came hushing and giggling to tell us when he got an Unsatisfactory at work. That James should be part of that house, and get polio, and disappear into his bedroom, James, tall and hard, able to twist your arm till you fell, able to grab the rim of the basket and make it clatter.

The luck was bad, in the Otts' house. Laura and I could feel it when we went through the front door, a fall in expectation, a penalty attached to being in the house. Diapers, bottles, coat hangers, and shoes piled in the baby carriage in the hall. Baby crying, loud warbling of the toilet that never stopped running. If Mr. Ott was home, a superficial quiet, broken by thumps of the younger boys' fighting upstairs. Mosquito dashing out if you left the door open. Mary Catherine yelling, “Catch him! And let's get out of here!”

The two policemen came up onto the Otts' porch and Audrey Ott opened the door. Mary Catherine gave a loud sigh. “I bet it's the bills. They have so many bills in that drawer that she says we could use them to burn the house down.”

We knew this kitchen drawer, stuffed with papers and books of green stamps that kept it from shutting. “What good would that do?”

“Insurance,” said Mary Catherine.

After a long time the policemen came out. They did not look our way. Although Mary Catherine had been glancing across the yard all afternoon, she did not go home to find out what had happened. And the next day she said nothing. We told our parents about the policemen. “That could be anything,” said my mother.

There followed a month during which we often saw the two officers and strangers in suits calling on Audrey Ott during the daytime. When Audrey came over she and my mother closed the kitchen door. Eventually we stayed up and listened from the stairs to what our parents were saying, and we heard the word murder.

Two murders, actually. Early in the summer two women who worked at Boeing had disappeared, the same week. They had not been
found but there was blood on something. Several times the word blood was said. We looked at each other. Something stuffed into a trash can had belonged to one of the women, and then a purse was found near the plant.

One of the women had worked in Mr. Ott's division. They had disappeared the week Mr. Ott put on the neck brace he had been wearing all summer. A man of his description had been seen in a car the color of the Otts', offering one, though not both, of the women a ride.

My parents went over and over this story.

“But Neil—”

“But Billie—”

I did not think of the two women—I thought of an act that completed Mr. Ott at last. It was a terrible act, to match his eyes and his awful secretive sadness. On the stairs with me Laura had started to giggle into her hands. “Stop it!” I whispered, yanking her hair so the barrette flew out and landed downstairs in the hall and our father came out into the hall to send us to bed. But he was making a face and he winked up at us, as if all the secret talking about the Otts were just a scheme between our parents, like where to hide the Christmas presents.

Later that week Mary Catherine said, “They never pay the bills.” We were sitting with our Ginny dolls at the edge of the ivy field. Mosquito lay dipping his tiny tongue like a bit of balloon between his toes. Owen was camouflaged in the vines halfway up the hill, reduced without James to shooting the hard berries down at us. “Dad never pays,” Mary Catherine repeated, unsnapping the long suckers of baby ivy that were always creeping out onto the grass. She glared at us. “They can put you in jail for that,” she said finally.

“Did you see how red her face was?” Laura said later. “Oh what, oh what if she knew?”

Not long after that the policemen came to interview our mother. She took them into the kitchen and shut the door.

What did she think? If our father talked about it, it would seem that something else altogether was happening, something of much less importance, possibly even something we could laugh at. But our
mother would have an opinion. And she would be right. But whether she would tell us what her real opinion was we did not know. She would not necessarily feel obliged to tell us the truth as she saw it. That was the thing about her that I had been working out. She would not necessarily think the truth belonged with us, she might even think it was for the Otts alone, or for herself if they included her.

I heard her say something, down in the basement. I don't know what she said to herself, doing the wash, in a deep, tired voice. As she came up the stairs I said, “Did Mr. Ott kill somebody?” She had a stack of folded sheets in her arms—we had a dryer by that time—and she put them carefully down on the kitchen table. “Sit down,” she said. “Laura, come here a minute.”

In the middle of the story our father came home from work. “Well, well, what have we here? Am I intruding on a female matter?”

I pressed on. “OK, do you think he killed them? He's so strange.”

“And so are you. And so is Laura. And so am I,” our mother said in a louder voice than usual.

“But we're . . . we're . . .”

“We're what?” she cried, with none of the pity she normally mixed in with any disfavor.

“OK.” I took the offensive. “OK then, if he didn't do it why do they all think he did?”

“We don't know that they think that.” We went on like this for some time. Finally my mother turned her back and picked up the laundry. “I think I've had enough of this subject,” she said, “and it's none of our business, anyway.” She sounded as if she were ready to cry. If he were innocent, why would she cry?

“None of our business? If he killed people—”

“Karen, I believe you are hoping he did,” she said with her back to us.

“Time will tell. Either he did,” said my father, lifting the lid of a pan on the stove, “or he didn't.”

I thought,
If he thinks Mr. Ott did it, he should be afraid. Or maybe sad.

My mother turned around. “And
you.
You think—whatever it is. You think whatever it is you think because he has a fat ass.” This was
a word that had not been used in our house. It had been buried with all the language of my drunken grandparents—with the very memory of them, of whom we had no picture, told no stories. “And if you don't want their kids over here, you be the one to tell them not to come.”

The next day four men in overalls came with scythes and rakes and shovels and tore up the ivy field. All the years of layers that had fastened into the hill, with the morning glory wound onto the tough ivy, they hacked out and threw into wheelbarrows, which they heaved up and rocked down the hill and across the yard to their truck. The Otts' lawn mower appeared, humbled with rust.

“They have some sort of permit,” my mother kept saying. She watched all day. Twice she said wearily, “I wonder how old that ivy would be.”

The men raked the naked dirt and put the toys, scraps of cloth, chunks of newspaper, and everything else that fell out of the vines into burlap bags. They stabbed long sticks into the dirt and shoveled it here and there and then raked it neatly back, but it was still just a bank of gray dirt with a cave in the middle and a few low bushes, where the ivy field had been.

Mr. Ott came out. I looked over and he was on the steps of the screened porch watching, scraping his little finger with his thumb. His head stood stiffly on top of the neck brace and the rest of him sagged. He was home from work every day now, on a leave of absence, according to my mother. Why would they let him stand on the porch and watch? And Audrey had gone off to work, as if nothing were happening. Out of the blue she had a job at the Safeway.

What would it be like to be married to somebody who had, who might have, put bloody clothes in a bin and then come home to eat and go to the bathroom and sit on the couch with everybody else? What would it be like to be—worse than being his daughter, his daughters didn't pay any attention to him—his son? James. My skin went hot. After a long time, but before they finished with the raking, Mr. Ott went in.

In the evening I climbed up the sycamore tree while Laura was having her hair washed and set in bobby pins for her birthday party the next day. My mother had done Mary Catherine's first and sent her home. My
father stood in the hall outside our room making faces. “What about Annie, are you going to do her, too?” he said, winking at us.

“And Natalie Wood!” crowed Laura.

“Mary Catherine needed her hair put up,” my mother said. “Audrey Ott had her hands full.”

The Otts' house was in darkness except for the boys' room. There they were, the whole family, in the boys' room, James in his bed with the crutches propped against it, Mary Catherine in her pin curls, Clark and Owen sitting on the top bunk with their legs dangling, and Annie, and even Natalie on the floor in her diaper, all listening to whoever was talking. It must have been Mr. Ott.

“He's telling them,” I thought. He had on dark glasses and his neck brace. None of them, not even Mary Catherine, looked out at the tree where I was sitting. There they all were, and it gave me a shiver to see them all in one room, saying things that could not be heard. It made me wonder if Mary Catherine did not, after all, keep back something, if there might be something she didn't say, that belonged to the Otts as our jokes and stories and the wreck our grandparents were in and the things in our house belonged to our family and no other. But how could the Otts, in their mess and ignorance, with Mary Catherine spying on all they did wrong or never got done, everything they didn't do that had to be done to confer rightness, and the awful suspicion at the center of everything—how could they possess this thing? Yet there they were in James's room.

On the way down my hands let go before I was steady on the branch I usually jumped from. I teetered backward and landed on the gravel.

For a second I thought I might be dead, or close to dead, as I tried to get the first gasp of air. When I could breathe again I lay there bending and unbending my arm while the boys' lit-up window hung above me. There was the window of my own house showing the dining room light fixture on the ceiling. I began to resent my mistake, and to cry. After a while I got up, inspected my cuts, and limped to the door. I stood on one foot and looked in. If I had been lying with a broken neck they wouldn't know yet. Laura said, “Oh! Look at Karen! Eeuw, blood!” My mother took me upstairs and painted mercurochrome on my elbows and leg. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub I closed my eyes
and deliberately swayed in her direction. When we came downstairs she went over to my father's chair and said in a low voice, “Neil, she's dizzy. She couldn't have fractured her skull, could she?”

“What's that?” said my father, cupping his ear with a grin.

“I'm asking you if you think she might have hurt herself,” she said.

“Look at her. A little fall out of a tree? Nothing to a healthy eleven-year-old.”

My mother stood where she was. Then she went as far as the doorway and turned back. “Is anything serious to you? Is anything? Some people's kids fall out of trees and get killed. Some people get murdered. Oh, go ahead and laugh. What makes you so sure? What makes you think nothing will happen to us? Do you think we're so wonderful? I'll bet you think some people deserve to fraction”—I remember in her haste she said “fraction”—“their skulls but not us? I'll bet you think people who die deserved it. If they have a horrible death they must deserve it. That's the way you think.”

As far as I could remember nothing had ever been said about the way any one of us thought. As soon as she said it I saw that people think in ways, and from there I leapt to the opinion that my father's way was not, after all, mine. He could not think of an answer. In his chair he cocked his head and held out his hands to my mother.

She said, “I will not sit on your lap.”

He had an idea, his eyes twinkled with it. “I know what. Let's call the doctor.”

“No!” It was almost a shout. “Don't you
dare
get on the phone with him and laugh at me. No, leave me alone.” But she didn't leave the doorway. For a long time she stood pushing at the rug with her foot. When he stood up she said, “Don't come over here.” And then she said something else, very low. She said, “I can't stand you any more.” I thought that was what she said. But maybe I heard wrong and it was only “I can't stand it any more.”

My father pretended, and we all pretended, that she hadn't said any of this. He got up shedding his newspaper and went into the bathroom.

My father was right, there was nothing the matter with me. I tried to think of a way to undo that moment of pretending I might faint,
that had led to these things being said. Laura ran back and forth, cooling off the washcloth my mother gave her to put on my forehead. With her small, cushiony fingers she pushed my bangs out of the way. I had my hair short and straight, now, like my mother's. I felt sorry for Laura, in her pin curls, on the eve of her ninth birthday. She seemed to know nothing. I saw that although she kept her schoolbooks in a neat line and could knit like my mother, as I could not, really Laura was like my father.

She didn't know what murder was, when it was more than a gunshot on TV, when it was women with their blouses soaked in blood. She didn't consider that people by the thousands were alive right that minute who would be dead in the next minute, while someone was still expecting them to come through the door, or no one expecting them because they were dead in cars like our grandparents, because of being drunk, and the phone ringing on and on in three houses to find the right daughter, the one who would wake her family with her sobs.