The Invisibles (22 page)

“That right?” says Boudreaux. “Well, let's see it.”

After looking from Daniel to the sheriff, Clive leans against Haley and pulls up his right pant leg, revealing a welter of broken red bites, the size of tennis ball.

The sheriff whistles. “Shooee, better put some Calamine on that, boy.”

“I'm about to,” he says, patting Haley lightly on the back. “Come on.”

Boudreaux purses his lips, watching them go into the house. “Well, he's done something right. I tell you what, Daniel, I think he's going to be just fine.” His voice goes rueful and he looks Daniel in the face. “You know, I remember we had some trouble, too. There was a time when things weren't looking so good for either of us.”

“I know that,” says Daniel.

“And we turned out just fine. Just fine. Look at us now.” The sheriff laughs again, a high-pitched sound that grows plaintive. He frowns bitterly and glares out at the band of pink light thickening behind the houses of the street.

After he's gone home, promising to drive carefully, his words follow Daniel into the garage, where the parts of a weed-whacker lie in neat disassembly on the wooden work table. He goes around Lucy's old car to the table and stands not thinking, listening to the voices of his stepson and Haley on the other side of the door to the kitchen. Their words are unclear, but he listens only for the sounds of their voices, a warm river of syllables that swells up around him, raising him, carrying him to thoughts of Lucy.

He'd been trying to understand why he hated his town, why, when he tried to leave, he hated the flowering forests that climbed bluffs over low green rivers. Even miles out of the woods, where the fields of faintly yellow grass gave way to the pure cornflower blue spread over the gulf, he never felt as if he'd escaped. So he'd stayed but went mad in his parents' house, and one night found himself at the bathroom sink, poking himself in the neck with a razor. He didn't understand himself, or the sadness that sometimes rinsed over him when he went into town and couldn't find a single person he was happy to see. Then came the hospital, where he'd talked to doctors, stayed up all night reading Gurdjieff, and exercised each day, surrounded by men and women who'd lost the will to be themselves, who'd maybe never had that will in the first place.
It wasn't long before he felt ready to try again. He took the job on the ferry's driving platform, hoping that random opportunity would awaken a calling in him to be some kind, any kind of man. At first full of uncertainty about the tiresome work, the heat, and the grime, he was struck by the thought that his hopes had been answered when he saw Lucy Anderson climbing the iron stairs, holding the hem of her floral print dress in one hand as she stepped. As teenagers they'd noticed one another in school and around town, but she had married young and he'd given up dreaming of her. Shortly before he'd committed himself at the hospital, the news that her husband had been killed in a four-wheeler accident only depressed him, and he'd missed the funeral, not wanting to see her mourning. When he saw her climbing the steps to him, an older wiser Lucy, but one still certain of her interest in him, he opened up to wanting her, love and a woman, after years of learning to settle for disappointment. They'd been a happy pair, despite her grief, despite his coldness to her friends and people in town, despite her son's loss of control. It wasn't first love, but this was better, sharing what they had in a small house in the nothing historic neighborhood of a nothing town. Going back to the past, here in the garage, his happy past, he finds it worth living for, even if he's getting old and tired and spending too much time tinkering in his garage. Compelled to throw open the kitchen door and tell Haley and Clive to uncork a bottle of wine, he hovers with his hand at the doorknob, clearly hearing their words for the first time.

“Still, there's no way that sheriff knows,” Clive's saying. He sounds uncertain and paces in the kitchen.

“Maybe,” she says almost crying, “but that house is ready to go up. You better take care of it tonight. Just to be safe. And then that's the end of this shit. Clive, I mean it. I don't know how you get yourself into this shit. I don't know why I put up with it.”

“Don't worry. I don't know how it started.” Daniel senses them beyond the door, embracing in the center of the kitchen. “I don't know how it got hold of me but I can stop. I can stop.”

“Maybe the sun could somehow start the fire. If you just let it alone.”

Daniel lingers there in his dirty work clothes, all his knowledge swirling in the cloud of his discernment of what will happen and what can. He feels his hands moving at his sides, their action unintelligible to him, and when he looks down he's holding his copies of Clive's keys. Outside there is yet a little sunlight, time enough before the sheriffs move in on the Kelly house to take their positions. All his neighbors are in their houses, moving toward meals, toward loved ones, into glad voices and warm skin. He can see the entire town radiating out from his house, the grid of empty streets, him at the wheel of his dead wife's car, harnessing what he's learned about this town and its people, this house and its things, through haunting it. He knows his decision before he knows why. Because redemption is a reality with a son and daughter, because an empty house is worth less than one with people in it, because the past is made of wood and iron and stone, because he is flesh and blood, because there is time. He takes a box of wood matches from a drawer in the work table before he goes out into the twilight.

As the story went, the Dravinski family lived on a federally owned wildlife preserve south of the city. The man of the house, a naturalist, had gone to high school with Erik's father, the sort of friend who never dropped in without a buddy. On the day this Dravinski telephoned, Erik saw his father happier than he had seen him since July ended and the ubiquitous reefs of dead, decaying may-flies joined the unremarkable past. There had been no great loss to speak of, but it had been one of those quiet periods during which the house felt unmistakably sad to Erik, when he and his parents all seemed separated by an insurmountable gulf. Now, squinting in shady amusement, his father hollered into the telephone, howled laughter, and spoke in clipped sentences. He called up a litany of strange last names — Kovacs, Horvath, Materni, Farkas — happily remembering the humiliations of high school. He faced into a corner, as if his wife and son couldn't possibly fathom his giddiness.

They would get their chance. The Dravinskis were throwing a party that weekend. His father couldn't understand why his wife shrugged and retreated to the living room, where she could read a mystery in peace, or why Erik sighed in defeat and slunk out into the yard, dreading the introduction to still more people who were probably cooler than he. “You don't
live
in a wildlife preserve,” Erik said to himself, going out to the vegetable garden, jar in hand, to hunt moles. His mother liked to kill them, so he relocated them to the field. “You
dwell
in a wildlife preserve.”

It was a long drive down the road that passed the point where the Maumee River widened to rapids. It was a Saturday in late
September, an evening the color of honey, mosquitoes cruising. Inside, the car smelled of vinyl cleaner and his mother's perfume, last of all the wind. They drove past corn fields and a graveyard on a high hill, as well as several barns converted to cider stores with gaudy, hand-painted signs and displays of tomatoes and blackberries set out front. This world of frank beauty was near Toledo, but you'd have never guessed it, and if its residents wanted to keep it a secret to preserve it, Erik sympathized. He was thirteen years old, short and soft-bellied, humiliated in all ways by the absence of puberty signs, except for his voice, which had always been deep. Though they lived in the suburbs, he went to a Catholic school on the east side with boys whose parents worked in factories and restaurants. At recess in the school parking lot, they liked to wait for him to approach them, accuse him in loud voices of releasing an egregious fart, then flee across the blacktop. School days were long and tedious and scarred with his humiliations, but the solitude of the weekends was harder on him.

As they traveled along, he tried to care about the local lore his father remembered. A man who drove a DeLorean lived in these hills. He zipped down the highway on Sunday afternoons, while the sheriffs ate biscuits and gravy in Grand Rapids. Erik thought cars were boring and dirty, and he was a little afraid of men who were enthusiastic about them. They drove past a seasonal carnival, its red and orange lights dull, its small Ferris wheel and roller coaster buried in a patch of woods. His father claimed to have taken him there before he was old enough to walk. What a waste that seemed, but his parents smiled at the memory. They passed a former boys' reformatory, Catholic, like so many of the region's institutions from the early part of the century. A tall, brick, vaguely military edifice on a hill near the river. His father said it was haunted by the ghosts of abused boys, all of them around Erik's age.

“Peter, let's not go into the Twilight Zone,” said Erik's mother. She had her window down, and her wispy hair, dyed red, flickered over the headrest of the ultramarine seat.

“I'm just trying to cultivate a healthy fear of boarded-up buildings in the child,” said Erik's father. He was a famous joker. His wife and son knew better. “Who knows what a little hooligan he'll turn out to be?” He laughed, a vigorous
ha ha ha
, with eyes comically large in the rearview mirror.

“Honey,” said Erik's mother, “you're not at the party yet.”

Erik was curious about the reformatory that now lay beyond the weeping willows getting smaller behind them. He could still see Spanish roof and clerestory windows. He had glimpsed, as they passed the proud structure, the stony dome of a grotto behind it. How many sulking boys had gone there, assumed the position of prayer, and then escaped into the rich shadows of the mind? He closed his eyes and saw a mess hall with high, curtained windows, corridors of miserable little sleeping quarters, bathrooms full of boys in white nightshirts. They spoke only in these moments of privacy. Here they traded cigarettes and playing cards with crude drawings of female nudes. A boy was humiliated, dragged into a stall. Priests roamed the halls with paddles and righteous frowns. Erik would have liked to have been one of the incarcerated, to have had a friend and a window on the third floor, to have broken out one foggy night. They would have lighted out up the river, toward the forests of Michigan, resilient as Huck Finn but never so lighthearted. That was the life Erik wanted, to be always on the run. You couldn't trust people, and the ones you could trust bored you.

The Dravinski house was a long ranch built off the preserve's main road, beside a giant ponderosa pine. A wooden patio extended from the back of the house and let down stairs on a broad yard framed by tall pine trees. There was a trampoline bouncing
children into the air near a soccer field where older boys ran, shouting. Their shoes fascinated Erik. Strange brands, clearly expensive. Because his parents were impressed enough to discuss it between themselves, Erik knew that the older Dravinski boys attended St. John's, one of the best Catholic high schools in the city. From the sports page he knew such schools had soccer teams. St. Boniface did not offer its young students the option to play soccer. How privileged that seemed, a world in which looks were taken care of for you, and you only had to choose a sport to play. The boys all had fabulous haircuts, long on top and parted in the middle, the sides and back of the head shaved. How these hairdos flopped about, like bushes in a storm, as their wearers chased the fickle ball.

Adults crowded near the garage, drinking keg beer, holding paper plates. Dogs chased each other in the yard, entertainment for some, who pointed and remarked. A three-acre lawn of even, healthy grass. Erik recalled a newspaper story about deer ticks, and the skin of his legs swarmed with thousands of phantom legs.

They parked among the cars along the road, with a view of the far side of the house. There was a volleyball pit, older girls, a few kids about Erik's age, a spike by a tall girl. One boy had removed his shirt, and his torso flashed, reddish in the dusk, to strike back the descending ball. These kids would determine Erik's career at the party, and he was beginning to sweat as his heartbeat quickened. Usually, larger boys picked on him, and girls found him an oddity, but he hung on the edge of their groups because there was only one party that meant anything. Isolation afforded him fantasies, but he had the rest of his life to pretend.

His father's one requirement was that he meet the Dravinskis. Gerald was tapping a fresh keg, handsomer and fitter than his former schoolmate. Erik's father lowered his head a little, oddly shy. He was slow to look either Dravinski in the face. Donna
Dravinski wore khaki shorts and a pink sleeveless blouse, blonde hair to her shoulders. She was prettier than Erik's mother. Beyond looks, Erik saw their bodies were different from his parents'. The Dravinskis were younger somehow. Their faces shone with the unchallenged optimism of the healthy. Erik foresaw a discussion of this on the drive home. His parents would agree that life on a wildlife preserve was better for the skin and the waistline, then travel on in silence. He held out his hand reluctantly to each of the Dravinskis, and when he'd muttered answers to their lame questions about school, he set out for the volleyball pit on the far side of the house.

The challenge mounting before him was to catch the interest of the kids his age. He lacked the good looks, flair, athleticism, and nice clothes that other boys relied on to admit them through the passageways to teenage popularity. When he had transferred to St. Boniface, he had hoped to simply blend into the popular group like a chameleon and to be one day discovered, to the joy of his peers, as their beloved friend, an inseparable part of their crowd. Where would we be without Erik? they'd ask each other — a rhetorical question because the answer was obviously nowhere. Perhaps it had been his strategic lingering at the edge of their recess discussion, distracted by this vision, that had led to the class hyena's spontaneous invention that he emitted toxic gases, and the boys' subsequent, cackling flight.