Read Ernie's Ark Online

Authors: Monica Wood

Tags: #United States, #Northeast, #Community Life, #Abbott Falls, #New England, #Short Stories (Single Author), #General, #Literary, #Fiction, #Short Stories, #Travel, #Social Interaction

Ernie's Ark (7 page)

BOOK: Ernie's Ark
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“Why don’t you want to go home?” Marie asked. “Really, I’d like to know.” She was remembering the parting scene at the airport, James uncharacteristically warm, allowing her to hug him as long as she wanted, thanking her for an all-purpose “everything”
that she could fill in as she pleased for years to come. Ernie, his massive arms folded in front of him, stood aside, nodding madly. But as James disappeared behind the gate, Ernie clutched her hand, and she knew what he knew: that their only son, their first and only child, was not coming back. He would finish school, find a job in California, call them twice a year. James had been waiting since the age of eight to try life solo and was not one to turn back on a promise to himself.

“My father’s a self-righteous blowhard, if you’re dying to know,” Tracey said. “And my mother’s a doormat.”

“Maybe they did the best they could.”

“Maybe they didn’t.”

“Maybe they tried in ways you can’t know about.”

Tracey looked Marie over. “My mother’s forty-two,” she said. “She would’ve crawled under a chair the second she saw the knife.”

Marie covered the mustard jar and returned it to the fridge. “It’s possible, Tracey, that your parents never found the key to you.”

Tracey seemed to like this interpretation of her terrible choices. Her shoulders softened some. “So where’s this son of yours, anyway?”

“We just sent him off to Berkeley.”

Tracey smirked a little. “Uh-oh.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Marie asked. “What do you mean?”

“Berkeley’s a pretty swinging place. You don’t send sweet little boys there.”

“I never said he was a sweet little boy,” Marie said, surprising herself. But it was true: her child had never been a sweet little boy.

“You’ll be lucky if he comes back with his brain still working.”

“I’ll be lucky if he comes back at all.”

Tracey frowned. “You’re messing with my head, right? Poor, tortured mother? You probably don’t even have kids.” She folded her arms. “But if you do have a kid, and he’s at Berkeley, prepare yourself.”

“Look, Tracey,” Marie said irritably, “why don’t you just take my car? If you’re so devoted to this boyfriend of yours, why not go after him?”

“Because I’d have no idea where to look, and you’d run to the nearest police station.” Tracey finished the sandwich and rinsed the plate, leading Marie to suspect that someone had at least taught her to clean up after herself. The worst parent in the world can at least do that. James had lovely manners, and she suddenly got a comforting vision of him placing his scraped plate in a cafeteria sink.

“The nearest police station is twenty miles from here,” Marie said.

“Well, that’s good news, Marie, because look who’s back.”

Creeping into the driveway, one headlight out, was a low-slung, mud-colored Valiant with a cracked windshield. The driver skulked behind the wheel, blurry as an inkblot. When Tracey raced out to greet him, the driver opened the door and emerged as a jittery shadow. The shadow flung itself toward the cabin as Marie fled for the back door and banged on the lock with her fists.

In moments he was upon her, a wiry man with a powerful odor and viselike hands. He half-carried her back to the kitchen
as she fell limp with panic. Then, like a ham actor in a silent movie, he lashed her to a kitchen chair with cords of filthy rawhide.

“You wanna tell me how the fuck we get rid of her?” he snarled at Tracey, whose apparent fright gave full flower to Marie’s budding terror. That he was handsome—dark-eyed, square-jawed, with full, shapely lips—made him all the more terrifying.

“What was I supposed to do?” Tracey quavered. “Listen, I kept her here for a whole day with no—”

“Where’s your keys?” he roared at Marie.

“Here, they’re here,” Tracey said, fumbling them out of her pocket. “Let’s go, Mike, please, let’s just go.”

“You got money?” he asked, leaning over Marie, one cool strand of his long hair raking across her bare arm. She could hardly breathe, looking into his alarming, moist eyes.

“My purse,” she gasped. “In the car.”

He stalked out, his dirty jeans sagging at the seat, into which someone had sewn a facsimile of the American flag. He looked near starving, his upper arms shaped like bedposts, thin and tapering and hard. She heard the car door open and the contents of her purse spilling over the gravel.

“The pre-med was a lie,” Tracey said. “I met him at a concert.” She darted a look outside, her lip quivering.

“Do something,” Marie murmured. “Please.”

“You know how much power I have over my own life, Marie?” She lifted her hand and squeezed her thumb and index finger together. “This much.”

He was in again, tearing into the fridge, cramming food into his mouth. The food seemed to calm him some. He looked around.
He could have been twenty-five or forty-five, a man weighted by bad luck and a mean spirit that encased his true age like barnacles on a boat. “Pick up our stuff,” he said to Tracey. “We’re out of this dump.”

Tracey did as he said, gathering the sleeping bag and stuffing it into a sack. He watched her body damply as she moved; Marie felt an engulfing nausea but could not move herself, not even to cover her mouth at the approaching bile. Her legs were lashed to the chair legs, her arms tied behind her, giving her a deeply discomfiting sensation of being bound to empty space. She felt desperate to close her legs, cross her arms over her breasts, unwilling to die with her most womanly parts exposed. “I’m going to be sick,” she gulped, but it was too late, a thin trail of spit and bile lolloping down her shirtfront.

Mike lifted his forearm, dirty with tattoos, and chopped it down across Marie’s jaw. She thumped backward to the floor, chair and all, tasting blood, seeing stars, letting out a squawk of despair. Then she fell silent, looking at the upended room, stunned. She heard the flick of a switchblade and felt the heat of his shadow. She tried to snap her eyes shut, to wait for what came next, but they opened again, fixed on his; in the still, shiny irises she searched for a sign of latent goodness, or regret, some long-ago time that defined him. In the sepulchral silence she locked eyes with him, sorrow to sorrow.

He dropped the knife. “Fuck this, you do it,” he said to Tracey, then swaggered out. She heard her car revving in the door-yard, the radio blaring on. Now her eyes closed. A small rustle materialized near her left ear; it was Tracey, crouching next to her, holding the opened blade.

“Shh,” Tracey said. “He’s a coward, and he doesn’t like blood, but he’s not above beating the hell out of me.” She patted Marie’s cheek. “So let’s just pretend I’ve killed you.”

Marie began to weep, silently, a sheen of moisture beading beneath her eyes. She made a prayer to the Virgin Mary, something she had not done since she was a child. She summoned an image of Ernie sitting on the porch, missing her. Of James scraping that plate in the college cafeteria. With shocking tenderness, Tracey made a small cut near Marie’s temple just above the hairline. It hurt very little, but the blood began to course into her hair in warm, oozy tracks.

Tracey lifted the knife, now a rich, dripping red. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “But head wounds bleed like crazy.” The horn from Marie’s car sounded in two long, insistent blasts.

“You chose a hell of a life for yourself, Tracey,” Marie whispered.

“Yeah,” Tracey said, closing her palm lightly over the knife. She got up. “But at least I chose.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“Ditto. Take care.”

For much of the long evening Marie kept still, blinking into the approaching dark. She had to pee desperately but determined to hold it even if it killed her, which she genuinely thought it might. She was facing the ceiling, still tied, the blood on her face and hair drying uncomfortably. She recalled James’s childhood habit of hanging slothlike from banisters or chair-backs, loving the upside-down world. Perhaps his parents were easier to understand this way. She saw now what had so compelled him: the ceiling
would make a marvelous floor, a creamy expanse you could navigate however you wished; you could fling yourself from corner to corner, unencumbered except for an occasional light fixture. Even the walls looked inviting: the windows appeared to open from the top down, the tops of doors made odd, amusing steps into the next room, framed pictures floated knee high, their reversed images full of whimsy, hard to decode. In time she got used to the overturned room, even preferred it. It calmed her. She no longer felt sick. She understood that Ernie was on his way here, of course he was, he would be here before the moon rose, missing her, full of apology for disturbing her peace, but he needed her, the house was empty and their son was gone and he needed her as he steered down the dirt road, veering left past the big boulder, entering the dooryard to find a strange, battered car and a terrifying silence.

“Oh, Ernie,” she said when he did indeed panic through the door. “Ernie. Sweetheart. Untie me.” In he came, just as she knew he would.

And then? They no longer looked back on this season as the autumn when they lost their second child. This season—with its uneven temperatures and propensity for inspiring flight—they recalled instead as that one autumn when those awful people, that terrible pair, broke into the cabin. They exchanged one memory for the other, remembering Ernie’s raging, man-sized sobs as he worked at the stiff rawhide, remembering him rocking her under a shaft of moonlight that sliced through the door he’d left open, remembering, half-laughing, that the first thing Marie wanted to do, after being rescued by her prince, was pee. This moment became the turning point—this moment and no other—when two long-married people
decided to stay married, to succumb to the shape of the rest of their life, to live with things they would not speak of. They shouldered each other into the coming years because there was no other face each could bear to look at in this moment of turning, no other arms they could bear but each other’s, and they made themselves right again, they did, just the two of them.

“Hold me, Ernie,” she says now, lifting her arms just as she did then. He does. He holds her.

The Temperature of Desire
 

Dan Little, electrician

On the afternoon in question, we had been on strike for nine months and counting. It was around four-thirty, snow in the air. I was on my way to get a burger with my dog, Junie, feeling dull and thickened, burdened by what my little brother and I had come to. Under the darkening sky, the mill looked like a ruined picnic, a sorry brick blanket at the deep center of the valley. Main Street showed signs of wear: a missing letter at Dave’s Diner, and at Showers of Flowers, which is owned by my cheerful ex-wife, the storefront featured nothing but a few carnations headed for the top of some lucky bastard’s cut-rate casket. Beyond that was the long green arch of Porter Bridge, the river running low beneath it. I was seized by an urge to stop the car, pitch my clothes, and hurl myself over the guardrail.

Why not? I asked myself. I’m a divorced man with no kids; my ex-wife is married to an eggheaded cadaver who welds scrap metal into giant pretzels and calls it art; my little brother who once adored me hates my guts. The rocks are bare this time of year, I’ll be dead before I know I’m drowning, my sister will take care of the dog.

You get this way. You get to thinking God’s got a sticker next to your name. But it’s strange, the things that hold us to the
earth. Just as I was thinking I could really do it, the water churned up what looked like a lost plank, painted red, maybe six inches wide and about a foot long—part of a front step, maybe, or a kid’s wagon. And I thought of this guy I’d met, a pipefitter who’d gone a little over the bend. He was building an ark next to his house over on Randall. An ark. As in Noah. The flood. Animals two by two.

Ernie Whitten, his name was. Ernie was a story I’d come upon by accident, a story I thought Timmy might help me figure out. So I turned left instead of right at the bridge, praying that my little brother hadn’t already left for good.

We used to be a close family. Barbecues and birthday parties, lots of bad jokes and belly-laughing, everybody’s kids marching in and out of all the kitchens. Excepting Timmy’s place on West Main, you could pitch a penny from any one of our doorsteps to another. Then Timmy crossed the picket line, and we went all odd and squirrelly. Elaine and her husband, Bing, wouldn’t let him near the kids. Our aunt Lucy fed him a couple nights a week but sent him home early. Sonny lit candles at St. Anne’s. Roy, the oldest, who busted his hump in the wood room for twenty-five years, don’t even ask. And our dad: let’s just say he was probably seizing in his coffin.

Timmy crossed about four months into it, after people had gotten fierce and unpredictable. By then the networks had descended with their lights-camera-action, panning across each shift change, where an army of so-called replacement workers streamed in and out with a police escort like they were visiting royalty and not the mercenary soul-crushing scabs from Georgia that they actually were. Local 20, our union, and the UPIU, the
national union, had a lawsuit pending, but you wouldn’t catch any of us holding our breath. There’d been some long, violent, failed paper strikes back in the eighties that were supposed to teach us once and for all who we were messing with. But we weren’t taking clues this time, we were giving them out.

CNN sent this Barbie doll in a khaki jacket who kept referring to us as America’s backbone, which actually flattered certain people, like Roy and Bing for example, who stood next to her in these brand-new denim workshirts. Roy and Bing tend to dress like schoolteachers when they’re not working, cotton shirts and chinos, and Roy usually looks kind of hapless, big hands fluttering loose like a couple of schoolbooks. “Fold your arms,” Barbie tells him, so he does, and there he is on the videotape we’ve got, America’s backbone, my big brother the union prez, arms folded over his scratchy denim shirt, delivering some overcooked spaghetti of an opinion about solidarity and corporate barracudas and the Founding Fathers. I love Roy, but the man can’t string two sentences together. The viewing public must have thought America’s backbone had slipped a disk. Bing didn’t say much, just nodded a lot, looking sort of mean and squinty-eyed, which he is not in real life.

BOOK: Ernie's Ark
2.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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