Lying with the Dead (4 page)

In the evening, orderlies dragged metal cauldrons onto the ward, and the kids right away started crying. It was like a siren on a timer. One minute total silence, the next nothing but bawling. The orderlies jabbed tongs into the cauldrons and yanked out hot compresses, then went from aisle to aisle, wrapping our arms and legs. They burned like fire, those compresses, and my pink skin didn’t stop stinging till bedtime.

But I wasn’t in so much pain that I didn’t notice something strange. Kids on the ward started wailing even before the orderlies wheeled in the cauldrons. They knew, their skin knew, what was coming.

When I told this to Lawrence, he explained about Pavlov’s dogs. Right off the bat I realized that that described polio. It was a disease that reduced you to a howling mongrel.

After three months, they discharged me to what I dreamed would be happiness at home. But I had to stay in the house and rest most of the day in bed. With Mom at Safeway and Dad still hiding, Maury was all the company I had.

Out the window, I watched people on the sidewalk across the street, staring at our house and whispering, just as they did years later after Maury was arrested. Neighbors and rubbernecking strangers from around town had read in the newspapers about me, the umpteenth polio victim of the season, and they were anxious to have a look. They kept their distance, though. Like with AIDS today, people didn’t know whether to feel sorry or disgusted.

Parents wouldn’t even let their kids play on my side of the street. One daring little friend did dart over, and for a minute we hollered back and forth, me at the open window, she down on the lawn. But then her mother swooped in and toted her off to safety.

I suppose that’s when it started, this sense I have that I’m excluded, that my feelings don’t matter and I might as well not have them. That’s been the hardest part for Lawrence to handle—the way I act like if I ever drop my guard the past will eat into every corner of my life.

“Candy, you’re daydreaming,” Mom breaks in. “Shut your mouth before you catch flies.”

“I’m listening.”

“Not to me, you’re not.”

“I’m here as a Eucharistic minister,” I remind her. “I’m concentrating on the prayers. Are you ready?”

“I told you, I prayed all night. I have so many special intentions,” she says between cigarette puffs, “there aren’t enough hours in the day. ‘Hear me, Lord,’ I beg. ‘Your will, not mine, be done.’”

I know she prays for me to land a good man, which I regard as an insult to Lawrence. She prays for Maury to find a good woman and for Quinn to win an Oscar. Then on top of the missionaries and the souls in purgatory, she prays for God to have mercy on an A-list of dead celebrities—Audrey Hepburn, Elvis, Natalie Wood, Rock Hudson …

“Oh Lord, life is hard,” she groans. “The old griefs, the memories, so much pain.”

“Why don’t you just tell God that He knows what you need and leave it in His hands?”

“I’d rather itemize. It calms me down. At least it did. Now I’m so nervous you’ll ship me off to assisted living, I pray I’ll die soon.”

“What do you have against living in a nice room with all your needs looked after?”

“Roaches,” she says. “Those dumps are crawling with roaches.”

“We’ll find you a clean place.”

“And they’re expensive. A couple years of living like Lady Bountiful and there’d be nothing left for you and Maury.”

“Don’t worry about me. And you can count on Quinn to look after Maury.”

Mom flicks an ash from her cigarette. It misses the ashtray and floats to the floor. “Promise me one thing. Don’t commit me against my will.”

I tell her the truth. I wouldn’t dare to do anything against her will. If I did, she’d attack tooth and nail. They’d have to strap her into a straitjacket and stuff a gag in her mouth. Mom’s like those guys Maury did time with, cons who can turn anything—a rolled magazine, a comb, a toothbrush—into a deadly weapon.

As she gropes in the box for more photographs, she resembles a dealer plucking cards out of that gadget called a shoe. She deals me a shot of Dad, his hair brilliantined, his sport shirt splotched with Hawaiian flowers. Gamblers, I’ve heard it said, stay in the game secretly hoping to lose. But judging by his cocky grin, Dad wasn’t that kind. He always looked and dressed and acted like a guy with an ace up his sleeve and a joker to play. He had a wicked sense of humor.

I remember once he returned from a fishing trip on the Anacostia River lugging a snapping turtle by its tail. He chased Maury and me around the backyard until the turtle crooked its long neck over its shell and bit at Dad’s hand. That did it. He slapped it down and chopped its head off with an ax. Blood splashed everyplace and the headless snapper stumbled blindly in the grass.

Maury, who loved animals, dropped to the ground next to it, and rocked and moaned. I felt sick and upchucked on my Mary Jane sandals.

“When I think about it—” Mom breaks my train of thought. “Maury, when he was born, seemed like any other baby. Slept a lot, didn’t cry much. You need to nurse them, read their minds. The little devil’s got no words. But I quit breast-feeding him because he was a biter.”

This is my cue to say, “Don’t blame yourself, Mom.”

“Soon as he could walk,” she continues, “he did nothing but fall on his noggin. Not a week passed that we didn’t have to rush him to the emergency room for stitches. That’s the difference between Maury and Quinn. Quinn could fall in shit and hop out smelling like a rose. But poor Maury, his life is one long stumble of fits and starts and stutters and farts. The last straw, the final blow, was you coming down with polio.”

“How did my polio hurt Maury?”

“He loved you!” Mom exclaims, shedding a long ash from her Kent. “You were his favorite. Those months you were in the hospital, he never stopped moaning.”

Having polio was a pretty poor time in my life too, but I’ve grown accustomed to being a bit-part player in the family melodrama. The main plot has always been about Mom or Maury or finally and forever about Quinn.

Shoving up off the sofa, Mom announces, “I have to pee,” and walks briskly across the living room. Perhaps this spryness is meant to prove she doesn’t need to be in an old folks’ home. But at the bottom of the staircase she hesitates and like a tightrope walker slides a foot forward, then teeters and grabs the banister. She climbs a step at a time, planting her left foot and pulling the right one up after it, planting the left foot, pulling up the right.

There’s a sympathetic twinge in my leg, and I want to run and help her. And at the same time, I want to run away.

Maury

My room in Nicky’s house is at the top of the stairs, under the slanted roof. First time she showed it to me, she said, “Painted green, it’s like you’re in a tent.” It reminded me of Mom’s attic back in Maryland. After my parole from Patuxent, I spent months up there building my boat. Not a model. A big one, fourteen feet long. I stretched out in the bottom of it and stared at the nails in the rafters like I do at the stars over Slab City. Once I finished the boat, I planned to float across the Chesapeake Bay and into the ocean. Instead, I caught a bus to California.

In the desert summer, eight months long, the window unit in my room shakes and jangles and shoots lukewarm air across the bed. It’s strong enough to blow the hairs on my bare arms and legs, but never cold enough to stop me from sweating. This time of year, I like it with the AC off so I can hear the wind against the roof. It sounds like snow, but it’s sand. Hissing through my teeth, I can make the same sound.

We don’t get snow in the desert. Only up in the mountains. Some days, in the bright sun, the dunes look like snowdrifts, but when you press your hand to the ground, it’s hot even in winter.

Long as it’s been since I touched snow, I still dream about it. Nicky claims it’s natural to dream about blizzards in a place that’s hot. “Just like up north where it’s freezing, you dream about a warm beach,” she says.

I don’t really dream about any kind of weather except snow, and it’s more I’m remembering being a little boy and praying and watching for the first flakes to fall. If they stuck to the streets and turned slippery, that meant no school tomorrow. And if it got deep, then Dad couldn’t drive home from wherever he was playing cards and we’d all have a free day. I prayed for snow that would never melt.

At Patuxent, I used to watch it from my cell window. The glass had a spiderweb of wire in it so you couldn’t break it and cut your wrists. As the snow came down and covered the yard, I got more and more excited, hoping when it was knee deep they’d let us go outside and have a snowball fight. Of course they never did.

After dinner I’m in bed hissing the snow sound on the roof when Nicky shouts that I’ve got a phone call. That has to mean Mom or Candy, and because I’ve been remembering winter in Maryland, it’s like the call’s an answer to a brain message from me. But then I’m always remembering them and they almost never call.

From the top stair I watch Nicky at the bottom. She’s a big woman and blocks my way to the phone. I wait for her to move. She grins and makes me squeeze past, knowing I hate to be touched.

One night right after I moved to Slab City, she rubbed up against me in the hallway and I felt static, like I do walking over a rug on a cold day in the wrong shoes.

“Anything the matter?” she asked, seeing me jerk back.

“You surprised me, is all.”

She crowded in close again. She always wears baggy cotton dresses, the kind they sell across the border, with bright flowers sewn on the front. There’s no guessing what’s underneath. She has a good smile and her face is dark brown so her teeth shine. She tells people all the time that she has Indian blood. I believe her. When she stepped near me, I dropped back more.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You a homo?”

I told her I wasn’t. “I just don’t need problems in my life.”

“What kind of problem can it be working all day and hiding in your room at night?”

“I’m not hiding.”

“Don’t you ever get lonely?”

“I have all the company I need.” I didn’t mention the drawers in the box in my head and how I can be with Candy or Quinn or Cole whenever I want.

“Me, I’m lonely,” she said. Her husband, who left her this place, died years ago.

“I’ll be your friend,” I said. “But not that kind.”

I thought she understood. Still, there’s times she stands so near I feel a shock, and she thinks it’s funny. Now she steps aside, and I walk down the hall to the table with the telephone. The table’s another thing she bought across the border—a big round tray with jagged edges and hammer marks on the copper. I sit on the leather stool beside it, and Nicky stays close enough that she hears what Mom has to say.

Mom does most of the talking, and she talks loud. She asks me to come home one last time. I say I haven’t ever been home since I left, so this would be the first time. She isn’t listening. She says she has something to give me and something to tell me in person. With her talking and Nicky listening, I start to feel dizzy. But I don’t dare lie down on the floor and rock. Not with Nicky’s broad brown feet in their sandals taking up so much space. Her toenails are blood red.

When Mom hangs up, Nicky says, “She’s got something to give you.”

I need to go to my room and think. But Nicky blocks the stairs and says, “I bet it’s money.”

“She’s not rich.”

“I hope it’s money.”

Nicky has money on the brain. In her job I guess she’s got to. You can’t always trust people in trailers. Some of them leave Slab City in the middle of the night, skipping out on months of rent. I pay for my room and meals with chores, not cash. Nicky has to have a machine to keep it all straight in her head—the money she’s owed, what’s dribbling in, and what’s leaking out. There’s a computer on a desk in the dining room, and she shoos me in there to show me the problem.

The screen has white numbers running across it. Maybe they add up to her. To me they just stream on and on, down one blue page and onto the next. Nicky moves them with her finger, saying, “See, see.” But what I’m watching is her fingernail tapping at what she calls “the mouse.” I don’t know why that name. It looks like a clamshell.

“I’m almost broke,” she says, “I might have to sell the property and move away. What’ll you do?”

“Go with you.”

“Not without money or a job you won’t. I’ll barely have enough to live on myself.”

I fix my eyes on her finger. Then the screen. So many numbers, so much debt. I doubt whoever buys the place from Nicky’ll let me stay on.

“Is there room for you at your mother’s house?” she asks.

“I don’t think so.” Mom’s the one that sent me packing in the first place.

“Then you better damn well hope it’s money she has to give you. Who’s going to pay your way back east?”

“My brother, Quinn.”

“Can you stay with him?

“No, he lives on the other side of the ocean. What would I do there?”

She switches something that makes the numbers disappear from the screen. “You’re not all that much company,” she says, “but I’d hate to lose you.”

I don’t say it, but I’d hate to lose her too.

Back upstairs in bed, I think about money and how to get it. I shut my eyes and wonder what Mom has to tell me. Will she say it’s all been a big mistake? Not that things didn’t really happen, but that I looked at them wrong and didn’t understand. Her asking me to leave Maryland, it wasn’t that she didn’t love me. It was just the cops kept picking on me.

With the sand blowing against the roof and me wishing it was snow, I might as well be outside on a slab and wishing I was on an airplane. It’s stupid to worry about money or what Mom has to tell me when the biggest worry is she’s old and she’s dying. She didn’t say it on the phone. She didn’t have to. I know when you’re old, you die. Unless you’re already dead when you’re young, like Dad. Then they lock you in a box and bury you in the ground. Unless they burn you. I’d rather a box. I know boxes. I lived in one for twelve years and there’s the box in my head where I have everything stored. Burning is something I can’t bear to think about. But Mom always has her own ideas.