Piper (7 page)

“He doesn't go for all that town founder stuff either,” she said. “Frankly, I think it's a big pain in the ass for him. He'd trade it all to have Ashley back.”

If it was such a pain in the ass, I thought, why didn't he go over to the park and shut off the gas flame or etch onto the stone the names of the rest of the Stampede citizens who'd died in wars? Or take the Carlisle name off the bridge? Or convert his monstrosity of a house into a soup kitchen and move off the top of the hill so he could be down with everyone else? Or just leave my mom alone? If I'd spoken up and stuck to my intuition, maybe Mom wouldn't have drowned in his Jacuzzi.

When I glanced back over at Marge's counter again, John Carlisle caught my eye and I started muttering long-abandoned invocations to myself.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, have mercy on us. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph have mercy on us
. God, as was his wont these days, ignored me. John Carlisle, with the chocolate cream pie in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other, slid into the booth opposite me.

“Mind if I join you?” It was a rhetorical question because he sat down before I could say anything.

I fixed my stare on his veinless, pasty hands. The fingernails were nicely manicured and his hands were clean like he'd just washed dishes. Flesh was the word that came to my mind when I looked at him. Loose, tender flesh. He wore his hair long like a concert pianist and patted it down gently above the ears. Dirk said he looked like the pictures of Liberace on his mom's long play records. “As a matter of fact,” I said, looking at the clock behind the counter, “I'm expecting someone.”

He reached a hand across the table to put it over mine and I dropped my hands into my lap. “Oh, come on, Piper, this is feeling like a cold shoulder. We're practically family.” He took a bite of pie and gummed the pudding, smacking his lips. Even through the masticating, he managed to clip his words in a way that sounded British and prissy. It was the voice of a man who had never been stooped over in labor, whose pituitary gland was as superfluous as tonsils. “Your mother wouldn't have wanted it this way, you know.” He paused to gum another bite. “She was the most open person I've ever known. No fear of her own heart. I told her she was going to be another Frida Kahlo.” He was babbling, trying to make something stick. My lips were trembling, but I didn't want to touch them and call attention to it. “There's no reason we can't at least be friends.”

I put my hands back on the table, fingernail grime and all. “Except for what you did to my mother.”

He drew back like I'd spit at him. “What kind of bunkum is that?”

“It was
your
Jacuzzi.” This was why I didn't want to talk to him. I knew I'd end up spouting off with nothing to back me up.

“Please, Piper, don't …” He bit his lip like he was going to cry on me. I was Tom's little girl and he thought he could say anything he wanted to me. Everyone in town was scared to lay a glove on him after what his family had done for the community. John Carlisle's personal charity was the Boys' Camp at Lake Spigot. When the day lodge was completed, the paper ran a picture of him in short pants and a Safari hat surrounded by all those cute little boys in scout uniforms and kerchiefs. In a way, we were all Carlisle's charities. The assumption in every conversation and encounter was that he was better, smarter, and richer than the rest of us poor heathens who'd never touched down in the Sorbonne.

“Do you still use it?” I asked him.

“Yes, and every time …”

“Save it.”

“You may not have all the answers, Piper.”

“I gotta go.”

“We weren't alone, you know.” His face seemed wide and squishy like a jellyfish pressed against the side of an aquarium and I wished I could have believed him because the thought of him being the last person on earth Mom saw was almost more than I could stand.

I gripped the edge of the table and pulled myself out of the booth. I was going to ask Marge to say something to Dad if he showed up, but she was talking to someone in an old Stampede High letterman's jacket at the counter. I ducked out the door and turned left, even though it was the wrong way home, so I wouldn't have to pass in front of John Carlisle's window and subject myself to his false pity.

We'd had a September of sunny days and cold nights, the kind Mom said made the leaves go crazy, turning them into the colors from her tubes—Indian yellows, cadmium oranges and swatches of intoxicating Bordeauxs and bloody scarlets. Last September we'd hiked down to the river with our Igloo ice chest, the portable easel, and a tool box full of oils and brushes.

“Leaves are like people,” she said. “Sometimes you don't know their true colors until they die.”

She dabbed blobs onto her palette and became lost in her canvas while I lay in the weeds at her feet reading. When I sat up to look at her painting it was nothing like the landscape in front of us. She'd taken a bird's nest in the denuded tree on the bank and magnified it into a fortress with the heads of hungry children peeping over the sticks and straw.

“Reality's just a platform,” she said. “My job is to rearrange things in a way that provokes people.”

The paintings I liked most were the unfinished ones, and there were plenty of those in the attic. She sometimes painted there, under a skylight Dad had installed for her. When she fell asleep up there at night, I'd go up and say good morning before leaving for school. You could tell by the brightness of the palette what kind of mood she was in, saving the darker colors for when she was in a good mood and “could handle it.” The finished pictures seemed more obvious. The unfinished canvasses, with dismembered torsos and misshapen faces, showed the struggle.

I must have been a disappointment to her because I was so plain. When I had hair, I abused it, washing it with hand soap, too much in a hurry to use conditioners, never bothering with face creams and coverups. My wardrobe consisted of jeans and plaid shirts, dark socks, and ankle-high boots with hooks for the laces. I didn't want anyone to mistakenly think I'd entered the competition for the boys on the playground. Of course, my strategy worked because they didn't notice me either. It was probably better Mom hadn't seen how I was turning out. It would have crushed her.

Since he'd come to live with us, Willard and I had more or less avoided each other in public. Once I found him loitering around school behind the cyclone fence in an old overcoat with one of the dogs. He looked like some pervert waiting to expose himself, and I told him to scram before someone called the police. We'd gotten into the habit of eating dinner together though. I never invited him; he just seemed to show up whenever I pulled the stove drawer open or closed the refrigerator too hard.

One night he showed up in an orange bib someone from a road construction crew had given him. Visiting job sites was one of his hobbies. “What's cookin', Piper?”

“Matar Panir.” Mom had shown me how to make it.

He wrinkled his nose, opened the refrigerator, and studied the alternatives as if this was the night he'd go gourmet, but it was always the same thing: a fried egg and the canned Spam he kept covered with a sandwich bag. “Aren't you gonna ask where we went today?”
We
meant him and one of his dogs. He never took more than one at a time in daylight for fear of being seen by Dad.

While I stirred the sauce, I was reading
Lolita
through the plastic cookbook holder, spying on her through Humbert Humbert's eyes, listening to Willard with half an ear. “I could never guess.”

“You know that project over by the Caterpillar place?” I could hear the Spam glucking out of the can and onto the breadboard. I didn't have to answer every question, because Willard's verbal momentum usually carried the conversation without me. “They're making a mess out of the street. Putting in sewer pipes.” In my peripheral vision, I saw his hand reach for a paring knife from the wooden rack next to me. “The old ones were cast iron and rusted out.”

“Uhm.”

“Now they're using some polyprobable stuff that lasts forever. I asked if they needed a hand.” There was something about subjects with five or more syllables that brought out the pedant in him. He poked me in the rib that stuck out. “You with me?”

“Huh?”

“I'm trying to tell you about the real world and you're reading make-believe.”

“What do you mean? Polypropylene's synthetic.” I sometimes surprised myself at my inadvertent retention of minutiae.

He'd speared a cadaver of pink Spam on his knife and there was gel all over his fingers. “I meant the job.”

“What job?”

“I'm trying to get hired on.”

“You're on Social Security, why would you want a job?”

He lowered a slice of meat into the small frying pan with the dent in it where Dad had driven a stake for my tent in the backyard. “I thought I could save up for a camper or something. One of them aluminum airstream jobbies with the steps that fold out. That'd be slick, huh?” His flights of fancy resembled the ones Mom painted, but his chances of ever pulling off such a ludicrous scheme were about as good as the chance those kids in her birdnest would wake up some morning and fly.

His meat was sizzling. “You're not eating your food groups,” I said. “That stuff is pure cholesterol.”

“I'm having an egg with it.”

“That's what I mean. You need vegetables. You know, those pesky green and orange things that grow in the ground.”

“Where's Tom?” We went through this every night. It was as if he forgot Dad worked at the newspaper. “Why doesn't he take you fishing or bowling?”

“I don't like to fish. It's boring.”

“Sittin' in your room is boring. Believe me, that's why I have my dogs.”

“That's why I have this,” I said, pointing to
Lolita
. My finger left a smudge on the plastic holder and I tried to wipe it off with the side of my hand, which made it worse.
Damn
. Willard wouldn't let me read and now I couldn't see the print. “Besides, Dad's swamped at the paper.”

“No man on his deathbed's gonna cry 'cause he didn't put in enough hours at the job.” He flipped the Spam with the point of his knife and the pan attacked the virgin flesh with a crescendo of voracious sizzles. The black scab on the top side made it resemble real meat. “What's he do down there anyway?”

I didn't want to tell Willard what I suspected was really going on, but I'd overheard Dad say the paper was hurting. Everyone was getting as much news as they wanted on TV. “Print media is a dinosaur,” he'd told me, but that hadn't stopped him. The
Herald Stampede
was the only paper in the country that had run a six-part series on “The Decline of Excellence in American Arts and Letters” under Tom Scanlon's byline. He must have felt sometimes as if he were howling into the wind. Seven years ago, somebody had listened to him though because he was nominated for a Pulitzer prize in beat reporting for his series that led to the County Executive's indictment for taking kickbacks on the construction of a sanitary landfill that never opened. The big papers had missed it.

Business at the
Herald
was punk enough that they'd laid off several staff, and started using the press for printing junk mail, greeting cards, and school workbooks on the side. Although we never had much money, Mom always made sure we ate well, buying the best cuts of meat and organic fruits and vegetables. Now we were eating canned vegetables and ice milk instead of ice cream.

“Carlisle wants to turn the paper into more of a high society thing,” I told Willard, saving him the messy details.

“A what?”

“You know, personal interest stories about people who are loaded. Who just got back from Italy and who's going next.”

Willard had a puzzled look on his face.

“It's a joke, Willard. There
is
no high society in Stampede.” My rice was done and I flipped off the back burner and slid the pan onto a newspaper. “Dad could have been a Pulitzer prize winner at the
Washington Post
and Carlisle's got him babysitting a glorified handbill for the local merchants, running pictures of widows with wrinkled necks in costume jewelry.” I picked up the lid on the rice pan, forgetting to use a pot holder, and dropped it to the floor. “Ouch!”

Startled, Willard's egg went half into the Spam pan and half out as he cracked it. He licked the egg white off his fingers. “Them Carlisles could buy the
Post
.”

“That would take class and John Carlisle doesn't have enough of that to shine his shoes.” I licked the burn on my thumb and waved it in the air.

“They say never argue with someone who buys ink by the gallon.”

I couldn't help but laugh. Sometime I would have to find out what he really thought of the Carlisles. He'd been around long enough to have seen the full cycle, from the homesteaders to the freeloader.

I sat at the table in the nook to eat, not bothering with my book. Willard ate his fried egg sandwich standing up, as if he was in a hurry to get back down with the dogs. The catsup that he'd added to expand his food groups dripped onto his Scott towel. As he paced the floor and rattled on, I looked at his right ear, the cauliflower one that had been bitten off in a fight in the asparagus fields. Willard wasn't that shy about sticking up for himself. Mom told me that when Willard lost his ear the doctor had to attach it to his groin so it would heal before they sewed it back on his head. I wished sometimes Dad had some of that spunk. The Irish were supposed to be the ones with the hair-trigger tempers, but Dad was always the consummate gentleman.

“My Carol was high society,” Willard said. “Almost didn't marry me, you know.” He wobbled his head, pulling up his recollections slowly like a bucket from the bottom of a deep well. I thought he was going to tell me again about the wedding in the Okanogan Valley when he fired his rifle into the church ceiling. Willard had trouble remembering where Dad worked, but his memories of Grandma Carol were always resplendent in their detail. “I fixed a Valentine's Day dinner at her house once when the parents were away. Chicken fricassee and rice. Put a cup of them candy hearts next to her plate for dessert and she held it under the light, stirring it with her little finger. When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was looking for the jewelry. Can you beat that? I couldn't afford bus fare and she was looking for diamonds.” Tears of lost joy welled in the corners of his eyes, but I was stung by the insensitivity of the woman who'd turned out to be the love of his life.