The Bone Parade (5 page)

Still uneasy, I walk upstairs to the guest house. It’s as quiet as a cathedral in here. I look up at the timbers crisscrossing high above me, but see nothing but a single silky strand fallen from an unseen spiderweb. It’s snagged on a beam and catches the silvery light.

A long kitchen bar extends along my right as I enter, with the living area to my left. When I looked at the guest quarters for the first time they had their Christmas tree over here, a giant, the largest I’d ever seen inside a home. It must have taken days to decorate.

I walk past the furniture and enter the hallway, darting into my bedroom on impulse. But there’s no one there. There’s no one anywhere in the guest house, and feeling reassured I go back downstairs and open the back of the van.

Phew, it smells. I cut the ankle bindings on each of them and let them lean against the closest horse stall. I don’t know if any of them have slept, but the girl’s eyes now look puffy and red, like she’s been crying. Not so saucy anymore, is she?

I unlock the O-ring and twist it. The door rises easily. Lots of gears. I march them down like prisoners. June looks ridiculous in her pantyhose, and the boy affects a bowlegged gait, which I assume is the result of his mess. Which reminds me to tell them about the kitty box.

As they enter the cellar, I watch their eyes closely. I want to see their reaction. This is important to me.

They all startle. All of them, as a group, rear back to the wall when they see what the cellar holds, and I can hardly suppress a laugh.

“Move on. Keep going.”

This is the richest moment of all because they’re seeing the bone parade for the first time. Their eyes fall on the remains of the desperate and the dead, the smashed and the scattered, all the pathetic people who finally gave up on hope and good fortune, survival or escape. The skeletons stand before them, draped in the clothing they once wore. I’m not a sculptor for nothing; I’ve used my blowtorch to weld the figures into positions familiar to anyone who’s seen my art, though not once in all the times I’ve done this has anyone ever made that connection. Sculpture is so far below the radar screen for most Americans that it doesn’t even raise a blip. If they don’t care about me, why should I care about them?

But they do care about their fate, and they know death when it stares back at them. That’s what the dearly departed do, they stare from their empty eye sockets at every newcomer; and from the darkness of those orbital holes they speak too, of the future, the not too distant future when the newcomers will join them, and the bone parade will grow even longer.

“You should feel honored,” I tell them. “Not everyone gets to see this side of my work.”

They look confused, this is denial at work, and I herd them along. I don’t want open rebellion. I’ve got my gun, but I’d rather not use it. And now, yes I can see, they’re looking at the cage. This is truly a magnificent structure. It rises to the ceiling and stands as wide as the cellar itself. I also welded this together. It’s sculpture in its own right, made from found art. Mostly metal, steel from old car parts and wrecked trucks, chrome and copper from plumbing supplies, rebar, even old sewing machines and drill presses. If your only point of reference is popular culture, think
Waterworld
, or better yet think of any of those cheesy futuristic epics set in dark subterranean worlds where hopeless prisoners stare out from behind thick bars.

I’ve also woven in the sun-bleached skulls of cattle (think Georgia O’Keefe now), along with the bones of dogs, cats, and animals more feral than these. Their prison’s a tomb built from the rusting remnants of our culture. And it is strong. They can climb on it—and most of them are all over it at one point or another looking for a way out—but all they do is cut themselves on the bones and old car bumpers.

There is no way out—no climbing, no tunneling, no picking the locks—but only Jolly Roger seems to sense this. He has not followed his family into the cage. He stands at the entrance surveying everything before him. I have to prod his awareness with my gun before he joins his brood. I close the door, an irregular series of open spaces and harshly welded joints, all metal, all tested.

I throw the lock, and tell Roger to come over.

“Turn around.” He does this without protest. Perhaps he trusts me not to hurt him, not right now. Perhaps he no longer cares.

I have him press himself up against an opening so I can unlock the handcuffs. Most of them immediately rip the tape from their mouths, so impatient are they with the urge to scream. But he stands unmoving, a big man who’s fading faster than cheap denim.

June hurries over and pushes him aside, then turns around so I can cut the duct tape from her hands. As soon as she’s free, she tears the tape off her mouth and tries to shout, but can’t. Her throat is so dry she hacks, and when she finally forms words she sounds like Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
, every syllable torn and frayed, ripped from a parched throat.

“What is this? What do you want with us?” Her eyes race to the creatures we have passed, and she gasps, “Who are they?” But she knows who they are. She knows.

I signal her daughter to come over, and as she approaches, June smacks her face, and gasps,

“You horrible … girl. Laughing at your brother, playing along with him.”

June’s eyes flash at me, and I see fury in them, and hear it in her crusty voice when she turns back to her daughter.

“Don’t you
dare
start playing your games.”

The woman shakes as she tries to restrain herself from taking another swing. Seeing this stirs Roger to life, and he takes his wife’s arm, grunting—the tape is still on his mouth—as he leads her away. I can see it’s going to get testy down here.

I free the girl’s hands, and she turns to me as she peels the last of the tape from her mouth. “See what I have to put up with?”

Then she walks over to the kitty box, pulls down her pants and underpants, and without ever turning away pees long and hard. It’s as if she’s replaying what I did in the van. She never takes her eyes off me, not even when Jolly Roger finally pulls the tape off his mouth and starts shouting “Cover up!” June joins in. So does Sonny-boy.

None of this fazes the daughter, who calmly stands, her pubis brazenly naked, and slowly pulls her underpants up. Her lazy movements seem designed to incense her parents further, and they succeed splendidly with her mother, who leads the “Cover up!” chorus to a shrieking finale.

I’m on the verge of cuffing June for the girl’s protection when she collapses at her husband’s feet and pounds the floor weakly. Once, twice, and then she is spent.

L
AUREN HEARD HIS FOOTSTEPS, AND
realized that she could now actually recognize the sound of Ry Chambers walking down the hall. This was getting to be a regular Wednesday morning routine. Eight o’clock sharp, he strolls into her office and starts asking questions. By eight-oh-five she’s immersed in memory or theory or art, and quoting the likes of Kandinsky and Heidegger (last week it was
Building, Dwelling, Thinking
), offering the edifice of her thought to him, opening up as earnestly as she’d ever opened up to anyone, including all the students she’d ever taught. She loved it! She’d been seduced by the experience. Being interviewed was great. He was paying her more attention than she’d ever known. Three weeks now, going on four. Seduction, that’s exactly what it was. And never having been interviewed in depth, she had no idea if her reaction was simply to the attention, or more troubling, to the man who provided it. She suspected the latter. Why else would she have dressed like this: heels, inch and a half (nothing outlandish, but enough to lift her all the way to five-three), when she could have worn her Birkenstocks. Isn’t that what half the city wore? And a black skirt with silver piping that ran up the middle from the hem almost to the waist, falling short by a few critical, suggestive inches. Then there was the black sweater, which didn’t quite cover both black bra straps at the same time, leaving one or the other to sport coquettishly with the world. With him. To be frank.

Plus the makeup, the red lipstick so striking against her pale skin and blond hair, nicely cut just yesterday at a pricey salon she’d read about in the paper.

Seduction.
Except she was doing all the talking. Talking herself into it. Into what? More than a book, it seemed. All he’d done was look into her eyes and ask short questions, and off she’d roar. Short questions produced long answers. She’d discovered the guiding principle known to all good interviewers: the length of the answer is inversely related to the length of the question.

The more she talked to him, the more she told him about herself, and the more she told him about herself, the more she brought him into her world, her family, her history. Her father’s get-rich-quick schemes. How he’d started raising exotic birds in their backyard in Connecticut. Beautiful birds with the most amazing plumage. How she’d taught a macaw to perch on her shoulder. But this was New England, and guess what? Every one of those birds froze to death the first winter. What was he thinking!

The bankruptcy too. She’d told Ry all about her father ordering them downstairs for a family meeting. “And bring your piggy banks,” he’d said. “That’s when I knew we were in trouble,” she joked, and Ry laughed hard, a good honest laugh. Nothing quiet about it. She had too. All over again. As she had when she told him about her father’s hypochondria, the way he’d lie on a couch and tell his kids that “this could be it. You’d better be kind to your old dad. I might not be here much longer.” And her mother saying, “Oh, Jay-sus, Martin, you’ve got a common cough.” Him, lying there, shaking his head, murmuring, “You don’t know that, Lillian.”

She recalled uncomfortably that a novelist had once said that writers were constantly betraying the people closest to them. She felt distractingly close to Ry now. Was he going to betray her too? Take all those words and make her a fool? Her father had made fools of them, left them, all of them, for another woman. Then returned at five
A.M
. a week later to say it was the biggest mistake of his life, that what they all needed was a good vacation. A good vacation? They barely had the money to pay the rent. What did he have in mind? The Riviera? Provence? After he’d left them, she’d cried herself to sleep every night, cried till her insides ached, so she was glad he was back, but even then part of her was thinking, It’s five o’clock in the morning! Couldn’t you have done this at any other time?

Three days later he was gone again. And this time he didn’t come back.

She’d told Ry things she’d never told anyone else, not Chad, not Gene, not any of her boyfriends, lovers. Not even her therapist. Opening up her mouth, herself, opening up at every opportunity, so naturally she listened when he’d looked in her milky blue eyes and said that no one would ever care about what she had to say as much as he did.

The arrogance! To state that so baldly. But the truth of it landed right in her gut, because no one else had ever listened as closely as he did; and if no one ever had, why at age thirty-nine should she expect that anyone ever would?

Ironically, for all of her preoccupation with him, he startled her when he finally did walk in. Jumping like that had always made her feel fragile, like a canary, which had been one of her nicknames in high school, a biographical detail she had not divulged.

Lauren led Ry to the foundry ten minutes before the pour was scheduled. They could feel the heat from the furnace as soon as they stepped in the room, and she questioned her sanity for dressing like this. She noticed his water bottle, and asked him to put it on a shelf by the door.

“People get nervous about water in here. If any of it gets splashed on the crucible or mold, they can explode. They get that hot.”

“Consider it done.”

When he came back, she handed him a fireproof coat and a hard hat with a Plexiglas face shield.

“This is really going to make it hard to take notes,” he said.

“So will a hole in your head. That stuff,” she nodded at the glowing crucible of bronze, “is twenty-one-hundred degrees, and if a drop of it splatters and lands on your head, it’ll burn right through your skull and kill you.”

“Say no more, I already have enough holes in my head.”

He slipped them on, and they walked to the periphery of the pour.

She’d spent her first two years as a teacher at a private school in Texas. Ross Perot’s grandson had been among her students, and the Secret Service among the onlookers. It was the ’92 presidential race, which she’d been aware of only distantly. She’d spent so much time casting bronze with those kids that she’d learned to regulate the air and gas in the foundry furnace by the degree of vibration it triggered in her diaphragm. When she’d told Ry about this, he’d asked about a temperature gauge—didn’t the furnace have one? She’d said they were never as accurate as the vibrations. Then she’d looked up, as if she’d snapped out of a trance, and said, “Oh my, that’s so ooey-dooey.”

“Ooey-dooey? Is that some kind of technical term?”

He’d been smiling, but still she’d blushed, felt the blood rush right into her face. “So New Age.”

Two students held either end of a six-foot steel rod with a cradle in the middle that held the crucible. She explained to Ry that the young man who had his back to them was the pourer, and the person who held the other end was called the shank. Despite the face shield, Ry took notes.

It took muscle to do the job, she pointed out to him, but it wasn’t nearly as macho an ordeal as most of the men who worked in foundries would have you believe. Though the psychological tension, she allowed, could be intense.

“Why’s that?” he said.

“You’re pouring everyone’s work, not just your own. A lot of students, and even some artists for that matter, work directly in wax. You blow the pour, that’s it, all their work goes down the drain.”

“Have you ever done that?”

“No, but I’ve seen it happen.”

“Do you miss … bronze?” He held up his reporter’s notebook, as if holding a bar of it.