Mr. Splitfoot (16 page)

And a woman whose cardigan is pulled tight as a tourniquet round her middle sucks in her breath. “Harry is my husband. Harry.” Her cheeks spot with blood.

“Of course. Harry.” Ruth walks like a ballet dancer on her toes. She touches the living, placing hands on their shoulders to calm them. Ruth laughs. “Harry just made a joke. He was quite funny, wasn’t he?”

Afterward, over souvlaki this time, Mr. Bell asks, “What have you two been learning in school?”

“We don’t go to regular school. The Father instructs us.”

“What’s he teaching you?”

“Sine. Cosine. Jesus,” Ruth says.

Mr. Bell mulls it over. “Can’t say I remember that.” He looks above their heads. “How about Sherman’s charge on Atlanta? Did you cover that yet?”

“We’re still working on Herod’s expansion of the Second Temple.”

The storage center’s sign is big as a billboard.
OUTER SPACE
. The plastic veneer paneling of the trailer is made to resemble wood. A sign is taped to the wall.
RENT
DO
ON FIRST OF MONTH
. Someone had crossed out the misspelling. Zeke’s alone in the office, smiling like there’s no one he’d rather see.

There are a number of file cabinets, a gun locker, a plastic lunch box, and, behind the desk, a poster of the solar system with all the planets, including Pluto.

Zeke wears a country-western shirt with pointed pockets unsnapped to his sternum. He looks different today, sweatier, skinnier, more scruff on his chin. His eyes are red.

I can get divorced in ten months, Ruth thinks.

“You need some storage?” Zeke teases her, friendly as a man with something to sell.

She should’ve worn her new jeans. She feels like a child in her old dress and apron. “What kind of stuff do you store here?”

He leans into her. “All manner of celestial wonders.”

“Pardon?”

He huffs his shoulders in a fake chuckle. “Just getting started so at the moment I’m primarily storing space.”

There’s a newspaper on his desk, today’s paper. Upside down Ruth makes out a story about bodies in the Middle East and another piece speculating which movie will earn the biggest box office receipts this weekend. She’s been to a movie theater twice in her life. “Father Arthur told me you talked with him,” she says.

“Some big stuff is about to happen here. We need you. I do. I want to take care of you.”

“What sort of big stuff?”

“The cosmos aligning for the righteous.”

“Me?”

“Comets, collisions. One space rock is all it would take to send the whole of us into orbit.”

“You’re an astronaut?”

“No.” On Zeke’s desk there are a number of different rock specimens and a tiny souvenir, fake ruins molded out of plastic. He leans forward. “Have you ever been taken care of by a man?”

Ruth imagines the factory where they specialize in fabricating plastic ruins. “Nat,” she says. “The Father.”

“That’s not what I mean. I’m asking are you intact?”

Zeke reaches for her wrist. He bows into her open hand so she sees the back of his head, the gold in each greasy brown strand. She feels a wet warmth. Zeke separates her fingers. Every filthy word she knows comes into her head. “Intact” seems the filthiest. Moving from thumb to pinkie, Zeke takes each digit in his mouth, licking her clean. She’s unsteady. She’s damp. She couldn’t be intact. Each breath is a labor he can hear.

When Zeke finishes licking her fingers, he rolls back, dries his meaty lips on the side of his hand, done with his meal. Ruth canters forward.

“I need—” His voice is loud. Zeke stumbles for the right word.

“A wife,” she gives him, still reading the upside-down paper. The Pope is angry at some nuns.

Zeke smiles. “Yes.” He opens his top drawer. “But not just any wife. I need you.” He passes Ruth a foam squeezie toy cratered to look like the moon. The number of the self-storage is printed on it. “I want you to think, Ruth. I want it to be right. Are you ready to go with me? I want you to cogitate and give me a call. Will you do that?”

“Cogitate.”

“Come to me when you hear an answer.”

Ruth squeezes the moon, letting it absorb the sticky saliva Zeke left behind on her fingers.

When she gets back to the Father’s house, Mr. Bell and Nat are waiting. While it was a short walk home, she’s long done cogitating.

“Ready to go, love?” Mr. Bell asks.

“Yup.” She climbs in back next to Nat. Mr. Bell adjusts his seat and the radio station before putting the car in drive. Ruth stares at his head. “Are you married, Mr. Bell?”

“Married? My. No.”

“Want to marry me?”

His accent goes British. “What a deep honor.”

Nat cuffs his fingernails in the palms of his hands.

“You and I get married, then we adopt Nat. No more foster home. No more Father Arthur.”

“That”—Mr. Bell turns in his seat, twisting a bit of his hair—“is a good one, Ruth.” He laughs but stops when he’s laughing alone.

“You wouldn’t, you know, really be my husband or anything. Nat and I would get an apartment by ourselves since we have enough money now. You wouldn’t have to take care of us. We’re fine on our own.”

“A genuine proposal. My goodness.”

“It’s easy, half an hour at town hall. Soon as I’m eighteen, we can get a divorce.”

“Ah, a romantic.”

“Mr. Bell,” Ruth says. “Please.”

“My,” he says. “Well.” He thinks. “Does marriage require a birth certificate?”

“Weren’t you ever born?” Nat asks.

Mr. Bell looks at him in the rearview. “I’ve been born again and again. They just keep forgetting to give me a certificate.”

When Mr. Bell drops them off that night, the Father’s outside on a metal folding chair. The chair leans to the left on buckling legs. The Father raises his hand to his brow, blocking the headlights’ glare. He’s been drinking. Nat and Ruth climb out of Mr. Bell’s car. Their breath is visible. The Father snickers, imagining bestial actions.

Nat has eleven ten-dollar bills neatly folded in his front pocket. They raise opposite arms, a Rorschach blot saying goodbye to Mr. Bell. The car pulls away.

“Shackles!” the Father calls out, as if landing the answer to a crossword clue.

Nat and Ruth stick to the dark, creeping their way past him.

The Father allows the broken chair to dump him on the ground. Nat passes by, but Ruth hesitates. The Father’s lying on his side, one cheek in the dirt. “Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established. God’s Grace. God’s Grace.”

Ruth goes to him. “Here.” She gives him her hand to pull him up.

“I don’t want your help.”

“What’s wrong?”

From the ground, drunk and spitting, he says, “No matter how much I pray for you Ruth, you’re going to die.”

She crouches beside him. “That’s OK.”

“No. It’s not OK to die until you’ve been forgiven.”

“For what?” She catches up with Nat. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

The Father’s laugh is scary, and when they reach the front door, they understand why. Nat tries the handle but the door is locked.

“Animals,” Father Arthur tells them, “sleep in the animal barn.”

Nat climbs into the boxwood hedge to bang on the living room window. Raffaella and Vladimir are watching TV. Raffaella shakes her head no. Vladimir switches off the set, and they disappear into the back of the house, scared sheep.

“Fuck,” Nat says. “Come on.” He takes Ruth’s hand.

“You’re really going to lock us out of the house, Father? It’s freezing.”

“Rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.”

Nat grabs Ruth. “Come on.” The mud of the yard is crusted with ice. He leads her into the barn, a small improvement. Nat collects a burlap sheet and a saddle blanket. He pitches fresh hay into the largest of the stalls, leading all four of the goats into the pen. Ruth constructs pillows. “Wish we could call Mr. Bell.”

“We’re going to be fine. Same as always.” Nat spreads the burlap then the blanket. He lifts one corner. “Come on,” he says. “Get close.” The goats sniff and nibble the new hay. Nat leans back, opening his arm so she can find a warm place beside him. Her breath is still visible, and the tops of her ears sting with blood, but in a few minutes beside him, she sees he is right. Ruth is warm enough. They are going to be OK.

Nat rests his chin on the top of her head. “Mrs. Bell.”

“You’re jealous.”

“Yes.” The stall smells of goat urine. “I don’t like people besides you.”

“And you don’t even like me. I mean in that way. The marrying way.”

His eyes are gray and shining, light leaking in from the flood. “No, I don’t.” Nat’s voice is a low whisper. “Nothing’s grown back since my mom.” He puts a hand over his throat. “I don’t feel anything. I love you, but I don’t feel anything.”

“Nothing?”

“No.”

Ruth lifts her chin, looking up to the rafters. “I’m going to get us out of here.”

“But Mr. Bell doesn’t have a birth certificate.”

“There are others.”

“Other people who’ll marry you? Who?”

“Is that so unbelievable? That a person would want to marry me?”

Nat shrugs. “Yeah. To me it is.”

At breakfast the next morning, one of the kids asks, “Do you know how to multiply a fraction?”

After chores Ruth returns to their room alone. The door is already open. Ceph, in a sweatsuit, sits on their bed. He broke in during their exile. He’s found some of the money and has it spread out on their blanket. “This you?”

Ruth nods. She approaches the bed and puts her hand on the crumpled bills.

“I need it,” he says.

“For what?”

“I’m getting extradited.”

“Emancipated?”

“Fuck.”

“How?”

“I’m turning eighteen.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“It’s almost winter.”

“I know. I need money.”

She thinks a moment. “You’ll be eighteen. What about a wife?”

“What about it?”

“You could take me with you. We could get married.”

“You?”

“I need to get out of here. Then you won’t be alone.”

Ceph looks at the bills, considers his options. “You know how to do it?”

“Leave the Father?”

“No. Fuck.”

She thinks of the question about fractions. She thinks about intact. “No.”

Ceph winces. “Pay me, let me do it with you, and maybe I’ll take you when I go.”

She doesn’t think long. It doesn’t mean anything to her. It’s her body and she’ll use it. She grabs some of the money and puts it in Ceph’s hand. “Fine.” She shuts the door, trying to think of Ceph as an opportunity, like government-provided job training.

“Take off your panties,” Ceph tells her.

She moves slowly, folding her underwear before depositing them in a laundry bag hung on the back of her door. Ruth keeps her dress on. Ceph lifts it up, uses it to cover her scar. He tucks his head into her neck, carefully opening her left leg and then her right. “Hold steady,” as if he is performing a precise surgical maneuver.

With Ceph moving on top of her, one thought fully jams her mind. “This is it?” It’s nothing. It’s nothing. It’s nothing, she says to herself, and moments later it’s over. She can’t reconstruct how it felt or what happened or what the big deal is. Words from the Father present themselves as still unsolved mysteries: membranes, fluids, cavities. “Can you do it again?” she asks, still under cover.

“Hold on.” He kneads her boobs for a minute or two.

The gray world. From under her dress, Ceph could be almost anyone.

“OK.”

This time Ruth pays attention. She peeks, watching Ceph’s chest and hips. She sees the shadow of someone’s feet arrive just outside the door, a person listening from the hall. She presses her lips to Ceph’s ear. She lets her breath come heavy, and Ceph responds in kind, grunting loudly.

When Ceph’s done, he sees three drops of blood on the blanket. He looks from the door to the blood, from the door to the blood. All the years Nat and Ruth slept in this bed not doing anything. Ceph feels strong as a criminal. “You’re mine.”

She tilts her head quickly, once. “You’re eighteen soon?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m yours if you get Nat and me out of here.”

Ruth sits on the edge of the bed, her legs still open to the room. Ceph slides the lock back, opens the door. “Mine,” Ceph says, marking his claim in front of Nat.

Nat looks in, past Ruth’s dark hair.

This is a test. She keeps her legs open, asking, Do you really feel nothing?

No.

Thought so.

“Get your coat on,” Nat tells her. “Mr. Bell’s here.”

T
HE OBESE WOMAN
is no longer on her porch. I bang once on her door, but Ruth doesn’t wait for permission to enter. We step into the foyer of the woman’s house uninvited and out of breath.

All manner of thrift store furniture clutters the space, chintzes and striped velvets. It’s as if the ocean rose and receded, rose and receded, a flood of unloved junk right here in this drowning woman’s living room. The walls are crowded with paintings of children and animals, photos of the mountains at sunset, posters advertising California vineyards, international craft festivals, tulip parades in Holland. One couch is given over to an arc of stuffed animals arrayed for a tea party. A patio lounger is covered with pillows printed with dogs, pillows made from madras, pillows with cross-stitched Christmas wreaths on their fronts. There are shelves of jigsaw puzzles. The room’s as fattened as her body.