Half World: A Novel (26 page)

They stopped for gas on the edge of the desert. Walter pumped and Sarah went into the station and Dickie got out, stretched his legs. Julian stayed in the car, looking at his maps.

Walter chewed a toothpick while he gripped the pump handle. “When was the last time you fired a gun?”

Dickie watched his own reflection, distorted in the lenses of Walter’s sunglasses. “During the war.”

“At anybody?”

Dickie shook his head.

Sarah came out of the station with a brown paper grocery bag. They drove for another hour, past the last signs of civilization save the road itself, and then they were off the road, Walter turning the wheel at some marker Dickie didn’t catch, out into the brown expanse, sand flying from the tires, engulfing them in a miniature dust storm. Walter rolled up his windows, lit a cigarette, hit the gas. The engine noise in the car was terrific. Visibility out the windshield was near zero, as far as Dickie could tell. Walter steered the wagon toward the one thing that could be glimpsed through the dust, the purple silhouettes of mountains in the distance. Sarah turned off the radio, set her head back, closed her eyes. Julian paged through the folded squares of his maps, seemingly oblivious to anything else.

Finally Walter cut the engine, let the wagon roll, the car burning through the last of its speed. The dust and sand settled around them, covering the windows. Walter popped the door latch, pushed it open. Sarah followed him out. Julian refolded his maps, slid them into the pocket behind the driver’s seat, opened his door. Dickie, alone in the car, realized that he’d been gripping his knees so tightly that it felt like he’d left bruises. He unlatched his door but couldn’t get it to budge. He finally kicked it open, stepped outside.

They were in a vast, empty space. Nothing but sand, scattered cacti, scrub brush. There was no sign of the road, just the trail they’d created. The mountains looked even farther away than they had when Dickie had last seen them.

The sand was still falling, clinging to Dickie’s beard, the hair on his arms.

Sarah lowered the back gate of the wagon, hopped up to sit, emptied the contents of the grocery bag beside her: bottles of soda and handfuls of candy bars. Walter and Julian removed the false floor, lifted out the duffel bag. They pulled out a picnic blanket, spread it across the ground, then unloaded the weapons, a pair of single-barrel shotguns modified to pistol grips and a couple of small-caliber handguns. Julian checked out the guns while Walter drank a soda, ate a candy bar at the back of the wagon. He brought a drink and a bag of M&M’s over to Julian. Sarah motioned to Dickie and he joined her at the back of the car, made his choices of what was left.

Walter pulled a brace of broomsticks from the duffel, a stack of large paper targets, human-shaped. He walked out a few hundred feet, drove the broomsticks into the ground in a long line, fastened the targets to the sticks. Julian handed out foam earplugs. Sarah opened a box of ammunition, began loading one of the pistols. Walter returned and asked Dickie which he preferred. Dickie chose a pistol. Sarah slid over and showed him how to load the clip, check the safety. Walter and Julian fitted shells into the shotguns.

Just the muffled blasts with the earplugs in, a noise Dickie always associated with World War II submarine movies, the sound of depth charges underwater. He stood at the end of the firing row, trying to keep his arm straight, his head steady, all the things that Jack taught him in a not dissimilar landscape, the scrubby wasteland a half hour from the Oklahoma base, shooting at soup cans balanced on fence posts. Jack’s hand under Dickie’s elbow, his body pressed close behind, his voice from just above Dickie’s left ear.
Steady, steady.
The quick muzzle flash, then the long, languid trail of gray smoke streaming from the barrel.
Steady, steady.
Everything slow, the world halted around them. The soup cans
glinting in the sun, labels peeled down to the ribbed tin flesh.
Steady.
The bang and flash and smoke, the jolt in the arm. Jack’s hand at his elbow. The smell of the gun, like the burn of some distant fire.

“You grew up shooting,” Walter said. “I can tell.” He had come up behind Dickie, stood looking out at the pockmarked targets. “You shoot like a kid. That’s good. The army teaches you all sorts of bullshit about firing a weapon. Overtrains you. A kid with a gun, though.”

When it was too dark to shoot they sat on the back gate of the station wagon and ate a dinner of candy bars and soda in the light from the dome lamps. Sarah went around to the front of the car, took a small shortwave radio from the glove box. Julian produced a baggie of pills and she joined him out past the light of the station wagon, disappearing into the darkness. Dickie could hear the radio come to staticky life, the smear of noise and voices as the tuner moved across the dial.

Walter opened another candy bar, peeled the wrapper, took a bite.

“Why banks?” Dickie said.

“Easy money.”

“Money for what?”

Walter looked at the chocolate on his fingers. “It’s still too early, Hinkle. You don’t need to know anything yet.”

Dickie walked out through the halo of the car’s light into the darkness of the desert. The sky was pinpricked with stars, but there was no moon, so the station wagon seemed to float in its own glow the farther he went. He followed the faint static sound until he found Sarah and Julian sitting in the dust, sharing a cigarette, the radio in Sarah’s lap, illuminating their faces from below.

She looked up and smiled when she saw him. Dickie sat down.

Sarah passed him the baggie and Dickie felt around inside for a familiar shape. Julian was checking his watch in the meager light. After a while he said, “Ready, ready,” and Sarah turned up the volume on the shortwave. They sat listening to the white noise for a while, and then Dickie heard something else, a high screech coming through the static, getting louder, breaking apart into what sounded like a telegraph, a flurry of high-pitched electronic tones.

A woman’s voice, then, German-accented, saying, “Ready? Ready?”

“It’s Olga,” Julian said.

Sarah smiled. The woman recited a long string of numbers, then repeated the sequence. Hard to tell if this was a live broadcast or a recording. The sound quality was bad, swimming in all that static. Sarah and Julian watched the radio, enraptured, as the woman spoke.

Dickie listened to the voice, looked up at the stars, back to the glow of the station wagon, Walter’s dark figure sitting on the back gate. The pills were kicking in, and his nerves began to settle, the lingering jumpiness from the gunfire, the claustrophobia of the earplugs.

“Six, nine, six,”
the woman said.
“Six, nine, six, eight, three, three, five
.
Finis.”

There was another blast of the telegraph tones and then the static wave retook the frequency.

Sarah lowered the volume. “We call her Olga. There’s Olga and there’s Gretchen, a few others. There’s a man sometimes, and once we heard a little boy. Julian thinks they’re a lost family.”

“Sarah thinks they’re aliens,” Julian said. He stood and stretched, uncomfortable, maybe, with sharing whatever moment this was with Dickie.

“I’d like to find a way to send a message back,” Sarah said. “Whoever they are. Just so they know that someone can hear them. Julian’s working on it, a radio we can use to broadcast back to their location.”

A door of the station wagon slammed shut and they all turned. Walter had closed the back gate, was walking around to the driver’s side. Dickie stood and gave Sarah a hand, pulled her to her feet. She turned the radio off and they all walked back toward the car.

18

She worked in her studio. She took the picture of Henry down from its wall, regretting her decision to display it, feeling that she had left her memory of him exposed, endangered. When the photographer of the cabaret photos came to pick up his work, Hannah asked him about the subjects, hoping for more about the man who’d come into the gallery. He told her that he didn’t know anything about the performers, that everything he knew was in the photographs.

I know this man. This man worked for my father.

She was not sure what to do with this information. She wasn’t even sure that it
was
information, that it was anything more than mistaken identity or muddled memory. She buried it in work, but it surfaced again, late at night, while she watched the chess match on TV. Fischer’s hands and face on the screen and Hannah looking at her father in the Merchants Exchange photograph. The white ghost.

There was no response from Oakland. She called every night, and then began to call again in the mornings, but there was nothing, just the faraway sound of the unanswered ring.

*   *   *

The coastal drive was prettier, but the route up the heart of the state was faster, so she pushed Bert’s car north through the garlic ranches
and cattle farms and flat acres of brittle yellow grass; hot, dry country that seemed more desert than the desert itself. She stopped only for gas and coffee. The panic had set in as soon as she’d made the decision to go, and now she couldn’t get there fast enough, regretted turning down Bert’s offer of a plane ticket and asking instead only for one of his cars.

It was late afternoon when she arrived. The familiar house on the hill. A few of the surrounding houses were still occupied by the same neighbors, though much of the area had long gone to seed, gotten harder, poorer, sending most of the families they’d known, what was left of those families, fleeing to the suburbs.

Hannah parked in the driveway behind the station wagon, looked at the lawn, the weeds towering above the unkempt grass. Patches of dandelion, goldenrod, a few soda and beer bottles half buried in the overgrowth at the edges. The unkempt bushes like great shaggy beasts squatting at the front of the house. The bay windows covered by the same curtains Ginnie kept closed tight against the afternoon sun, what she’d always worried were prying eyes.

Hannah felt sick. She feared who would answer a knock on the door, the Ginnie and Thomas that lived in this house. One of them ill, possibly. Both of them ill. Hannah’s neglect made glaringly physical, something she had to walk through, broken glass and candy wrappers, flattening a path through the grass to the door.

There was no answer from the doorbell, so she worked her way through the bushes, stood at the windows with her hands cupped to the filthy glass, trying to peer through thin gaps in the curtains, looking for movement, changes in the shadows. She kept turning back to her mother’s car, which looked decidedly inert, like it hadn’t been driven in months.

“Hannah?”

There was an old woman standing at the edge of the lawn, indistinct, turned into a dark silhouette by the setting sun over her shoulder. Hannah shaded her eyes, stumbled out from the bushes, approached from a lower angle.

“Hannah, honey, is that you?”

The woman was wearing a terry cloth housecoat and soiled white slippers. She was unhealthily thin, her arms and legs little more than sticks wrapped in paperweight skin, the veins in her calves swollen and bruise-purple.

“It’s Mrs. Sullivan. Doris Sullivan, from across the street. I haven’t seen you in I don’t know how long, Hannah.”

Hannah hadn’t recognized her, still didn’t recognize her. This woman on the edge of the lawn was a sepulchral version of the poised and refined woman Hannah had known. A childhood ghost.

Doris said, “You’ve come for the house?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m afraid selling it will be easier said than done. This is no longer the neighborhood it once was.”

Selling it. Hannah looked at the station wagon, the weeds growing up through the driveway at the base of the tires. Looked back at the house.

Doris’s hand went to the collar of her robe. “Oh, Hannah, I’m so sorry. How foolish of me. You didn’t know.”

Hannah placed a hand on the dusty hood of the station wagon, giving the car some of her weight.

“When?” she said.

“Some months ago,” Doris said. “We’d called the police because Dick saw someone snooping around the house. They went in and found her. She had passed. I wasn’t able to do much. Dick hasn’t been well for some time, and we’ve been in and out of the hospital. I told them that she had a daughter, but I couldn’t remember where. San Diego?”

“Los Angeles.”

Doris nodded, remembering, the nod ending but the movement continuing, a Parkinsonian echo. “They may not have known how to find you.”

Hannah could feel the drive’s coffee rising, burning into her chest, her throat.

“Where’s Thomas?”

Doris licked her bottom lip, released the collar of her robe, letting her hands drop to her sides. That little tremor, that little nod.

“Oh, honey, I thought he was with you.”

*   *   *

There was a spare key under one of the stones in the backyard. Hannah had hidden it there as a teenager for nights when she had lost her own key out on some adventure, though in the few instances when she’d used it, she’d let herself in only to find Ginnie sitting at the table in the dark dining room, smoking, waiting.

The house was cold. There was a damp, musty odor coming from the kitchen. She stepped inside, water pooling around her shoes.

There was a leak under the sink that had spread across the floor, rotting sections of the linoleum, the bottoms of the cabinets. Maybe a quarter inch of standing water. Dishes in the sink, the baby-blue decorative plate patterns Hannah had grown up with. Dishes on the counters, cups, open boxes of cereal. Bugs everywhere, crawling down the sides of the cabinets, drowning themselves on the floor in a mindless frenzy to find what food was left.

It was dark in the house, but she was afraid to touch a light switch with all the water. She sloshed into the dining room, the table piled high with newspapers, unopened mail, advertising circulars. Every chair covered, most of the floor. Invoices, bank letters, medical bills.

Back into the bedrooms, more of the mess, more clothes, more food. Every one of her mother’s dresses had been pulled from her closet and laid across the floor in her bedroom. Every piece of jewelry laid out in the hall, as if a trail to somewhere, or a remembrance. Thomas. This would make sense to Thomas. His room was the worst of all. The open cans of food and the bugs and the smell. Hannah retreated, closing the door behind her. And then her room, untouched, relatively, except for an imprint on the bedspread, a body at rest, long, wide. Hannah sat on the edge of the bed, lay down inside the hole Thomas had left.

*   *   *

She filed a missing persons report, almost a year too late. She described Thomas and the police officer wrote
history of mental illness
on the report. The officer asked questions, an incredulous tone in his voice, unable to believe the level of Hannah’s neglect. She hadn’t known that her mother was dead, that her brother was missing. She looked over the high front counter to the officers’ desks beyond. They all had framed photos of wives, kids, mothers. They kept their families close.

The church had handled the burial. She visited the graveyard, the small stone at the head of the plot, a cross and Ginnie’s name inscribed. Hannah brought nothing. Flowers seemed obscene. She came with only a useless apology, whispered to the dirt, too late.

The police told her to go back to L.A. and wait. Because of his postcards, she knew that Thomas had her address, and he might try to contact her there. She returned Bert’s car when she was sure he wouldn’t be home. The idea of explaining what she had let happen, and what Bert would think of her, rightfully, was too much.

She was an orphan now. She had been an orphan for some time and just hadn’t known it.

In her mother’s bedroom she’d found a few paintings. She’d forgotten that her mother painted. Hand-stretched canvases, slashed and speckled with color. Beautiful things. She’d only ever thought of her mother’s painting as a weapon to use during their arguments, evidence that Ginnie had given up.

She didn’t speak to anyone. She didn’t call Bert. She kept Ginnie’s paintings against a wall in her studio. She felt that she needed to work there with the canvases, to acknowledge them, at least, their existence.

She tried to picture Thomas, where he could be, and every possibility was worse than the last. Everything she could imagine was a horror.

She hung a new show in the gallery. She watched the chess match. She stayed close, listened for the phone, jumped out of her skin when she heard someone outside the front door. She went running at night, not far, not long, just enough to get herself outside and moving. She ran
with a loose-limbed gait, no grace, no rhythm. Pain in her knees and a burning wheeze in her lungs. She was smoking too much, drinking too much. Crying while she ran, sometimes, tears streaking laterally into her ears from the speed and the wind.

Whenever she saw a homeless man she slowed to look at his face. There were so many, sleeping in doorways, on benches, pushing shopping carts clattering with scavenged tin cans. But none of them was Thomas, none of them had the face she was looking for.

She didn’t run far, or for very long. She didn’t want to be away from the studio. She stayed by the phone, by the door, waiting for a call, a knock, a sudden appearance. A lost voice calling her name.