The Laments (12 page)

“Put your hands up in the air slowly!”

“Buck, for chrissakes, it’s me! Howard Lament!”

“Lament? Good God, man, what are you doing here?”

“Julia has gone into labor, and Sandy offered to look after Will,” Howard reminded him.

“Oh, yes. Well, Sandy’s in Botswana,” Quinn replied, “but of course he can stay here!”

Meanwhile, Ajax, having lost his sense of direction in the darkness, heard Howard’s voice and imagined he had found a second interloper. He spun around and lunged. Howard felt a stab of pain in his other calf.

“
Ouch!
Quinn, call off your bloody dog!”

“Voetsek
!
”
roared Buck, and repeated the Afrikaans command until the dog dropped into a submissive crouch. Then Buck opened the door frame with the nozzle of his rifle.

Howard hesitated.

“Hurry up, man!” said Quinn.

“I’d be happy to come in if you’d point the gun
away
from my
son
.”

Buck grunted, and lowered the weapon.

Howard laid Will down in Matthew’s bed, then limped slowly into the kitchen. He reached down to his calf and found blood on his pant leg. Quinn frowned at the small trail of blood on the floor.

“Dammit, Lament,” he muttered, “you’re bleeding all over my house.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be if your dog hadn’t tried to tear me to pieces!”

“Ajax would never hurt a white man . . .” Buck began, before he realized that the blood on the floor contradicted his point. “Sorry, old chum; here, I’ve got a first-aid kit.”

“Never mind,” said Howard impatiently. “I’ll see to it later; I really must get Julia to the hospital.”

Buck gave Howard a compliant nod. “Well, don’t worry about your boy, Lament, he’s safe here.”

But this promise gave Howard pause. He considered Quinn’s dog, and the rifle still in his hand. “Buck, how can you live like this? I could have been killed!”

Buck shrugged this off with an uneasy smile and followed Howard out of the house. “Ten percent of the population is white, old man. One day the other ninety is going to demand majority rule. I’m just keeping my guard up till that day comes.”

“Well, if you see violence coming, why don’t you just do your family a favor and leave?” Howard said as he limped across the yard.

For a moment, Buck said nothing. He stood in the darkness, shirtless and gray-chested, his jaw flexing and his breath billowing in the night air. “Can’t do that, old man. A man’s home is his castle, you know!”

THE TWINS WERE UNDERSIZED
, though not nearly as small as Will had been at birth. Each one had a swath of black hair and puffy eyes, looking after the rigor of childbirth like a prizefighter after a tough bout in the ring. Will had expected fat, bouncy babies, but these two were scrawny; he felt a sudden surge of concern for his mother and demanded to see her.

“Follow me.” Howard limped away, his left foot bandaged to the size and shape of a melon.

A long, diaphanous curtain surrounded Julia’s bed. Will’s heart turned as he saw what appeared to be the shadow of an angel above his mother’s bed. But it was just a nurse folding up a blood pressure gauge.

“Mummy?”

Julia’s hair was plastered down, and her lips, usually a brilliant Ektachrome red, were as faded as the bed linen.

“What’s happened to you?” he asked.

“I’ve just had babies, darling,” she said softly, confirming Will’s fear that the twins, in their bid for life, had almost robbed his mother of hers.

“Are you dying?”

“No, Will, I’m fine. A few more days and I’ll be up and about with you.” Julia noticed Howard’s uneven walk. “Darling, why are you limping?”

“Buck’s bloody dog bit me.”

“My God, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. But that man is a lunatic. Greeted us at the door with his old army rifle. He’s expecting a revolution. We have got to get out of this country before everybody’s up in arms.”

Julia smiled, as if Howard were talking nonsense.

“Nobody’s up in arms, darling. Besides, I’ve got two babies to raise, and Will. You’d have to find a new job. How could we possibly move now?”

The Devil’s Spawn

Howard proposed that the twins be named Julius and Marcus. “Shakespearean names—I thought you’d like that!” he told Julia, who, nevertheless, expressed some skepticism about his choices.

“I don’t approve of Julius because it’s my great-grandfather’s name, and he was an awful man . . .”

“Darling,” Howard assured her, “nobody remembers your great-grandfather anymore.” Howard wanted to settle the matter quickly, perhaps because he believed that their hesitation in naming the first Lament baby had contributed in some inexplicable way to his loss.

“. . . and Caesar
kills
Mark Antony in
Antony and Cleopatra
.”

Howard cast his red forelock back in exasperation, gazing at his watch, as though every minute that the twins spent unnamed brought them closer to crisis. “Darling, they’re fine names. It’s not as though I named them Cain and Abel.”

“No, but you picked names out of tragedies. Couldn’t you have picked comedies?”

Howard looked incredulous. “Malvolio? Bertram? Bottom? Darling, the names in the tragedies have elegance, gumption, history! We want these lads to have a destiny, don’t we?”

As far as Will could tell, the twins’ destiny seemed to involve a sacrifice of his own; his doting parents were helplessly distracted by their needs and demands. To his credit, he felt no regret, for he was the first child, and could never lose his place in the family. Yet he knew that he had lost the precious trinity of his babyhood.

Fortunately, Will was now old enough to have a life of his own. The following September, he started school, dressed in a uniform of khaki shorts and white shirt, with a wide-brimmed hat to protect him from the sun. After school, he and Ruth would practice their letters and numbers together. Sometimes Ruth would entertain him by acting out her versions of Old Testament stories; Will’s favorite was Ruth’s depiction of Delilah, which began with Delilah clipping Samson’s long hair and making a wig out of it that made her the strongest woman alive. Ruth would don a mop head and prance around, raising chairs as if they were mountains.

JULIA REMEMBERED LITTLE
of the twins’ early months, for her time was spent attending to their needs, which were emphatic and unceasing. Their early conquests of the physical world were inspired by camaraderie and competition: Marcus used his brother’s head in order to sit up the first time; Julius used his brother’s sleeping body as a platform to hurl himself over the crib’s side. When Julius made his first independent steps, Marcus thrashed in his sleep for three nights until he could match his brother, step for step.

In their second year, their temperaments diverged, lending credence to Howard’s choice of names. Julius was full of grand plans, larcenous impulses, and combative urges. Marcus, on the other hand, was sentimental and sweet, but easily swayed by loyalty and brotherhood; Julius could persuade him to do practically anything. One afternoon Marcus became fascinated by the stinging ants that used to march in long columns around the house looking for dead birds to feed upon. When Abraham came to spray them with pesticide, Marcus burst into tears and wrapped himself around the gardener’s leg, wailing hysterically until the poor gardener promised to let the ants live.

“That boy love the animals,” he said.

But in spite of their natures, they remained abettors, concealing their plans in expressions that no one save Will, in some circumstances, could divine. When they were three, Abraham caught the twins trying to give one of his prized rosebushes a “haircut.” Will saved the rest of the garden by suggesting that the twins behead the Pughs’ azaleas instead. Marjorie Pugh was so upset that her little olive-sized mouth puckered shut whenever Julia crossed paths with her.

Of course Julia reproached the boys for their crime; but the twins sensed that in spite of her warnings, she was amused by their sabotage.

One night in the summer of their fourth year, the twins were unable to sleep, so Howard told them the story of the scar on his calf. He turned it into an epic tale of man against beast. Ajax became a hound of supernatural size, and Howard’s role became heroic, for, after suffering his injury, he cast the villainous creature into the heavens, denting the stars to produce the constellation Canis Major.

In no time, the story became part of the family lore.

“Daddy,” Julius would cry after dinner, “you be yourself and we’ll be Ajax!”

“Oof! Not now,” Howard would complain as his sons began sinking their teeth into his legs. “Ouch, stop that, Julius. I’m not in the mood!”

As with any legendary battle, it mattered not that the original combatants had made their peace. As far as Julius and Marcus were concerned, vengeance was required. As they went about their games, one subject always came up: how to teach Ajax a lesson. One hot Saturday afternoon, when the house was stilled by a mass of hot, immovable air, and the parents were sleeping and Will lay on the cool terra-cotta floor, drawing with his pencils, the twins concocted a plan that required nothing more than a can of syrup.

They crossed the quiet street and padded toward the Quinn compound; Julius carried the syrup while Marcus held one of Will’s drawings—a sketch of a snake, tail in mouth, eating itself into nothingness.

“What if he won’t eat his tail?” worried Marcus.

“Ajax will eat anything,” Julius promised. “I’d eat anything with syrup on it, wouldn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t eat my own toes,” replied his brother.

“If you were a dog you would,” said Julius.

They waved to Sandy Quinn, who was driving Matthew to his piano lesson in town. (Sandy had discovered Matthew masturbating in the jeep one afternoon and decided he needed something else to do with his hands.) As the sun streaked through the lavender jacaranda blossoms, the twins found Buck Quinn sitting on the ground with the gears of his Land Rover’s transmission laid on a tarpaulin in the precise order of their disassembly.

“Can a dog eat himself?” asked Marcus.

“Do you see what I’m doing here?” Buck growled.

“What?”

“This took three hours of careful work and concentration,” lectured the major.

“You broke your car?” Julius asked.

“No lad, I’m repairing it,” said Buck, his eyes glued to the careful assembly before him. “As long as I put everything in
exactly
the way it’s arranged here, I shall have saved a fortune on a mechanic.”

“Where’s Ajax?” asked Julius.

“God knows,” muttered Buck as sweat dribbled down the white stubble of his jaw. The twins gave him a wide berth.

They found the legendary hound sprawled a few yards away, legs quivering with dreams of rabbit in tooth, his bloodshot eyes rolled up, tongue hanging out, grunting and oblivious to the two titans. There was a buzz in the air nearby—the chorus of insects on a hot day; a deep, industrial hum emanated from the massive hornets’ nest under the eave of Buck’s bungalow.

Satisfied that the dog was asleep, Marcus took a flat stick and stirred the golden mixture. Preparing to apply it in dribs to the tail of Howard’s four-legged nemesis, he paused, shooting a worried glance at Julius.

Julius, sensing his brother’s hesitation, took the stick and proceeded to douse the dog’s tail.

“Now if he eats his own tail, we’ll see him disappear!” said Julius. He clasped his hands in excitement, already thinking ahead to the next plan, which was to entice Mr. Quinn to do the same thing.

As the syrup sank into the hair follicles of the Ridgeback’s tail, and a few molecules of the mixture entered the atmosphere, the pitch of the hornets’ drone changed.

Julius clamped the lid back on the syrup can and waited while his brother poked Ajax out of his rabbit dream. A few striped prospectors descended to investigate, and Ajax flicked his tail at them. Now the cry went out, and within half a minute, a swarm had gathered around Ajax and he let out a belly yelp of surprise.

Marcus and Julius watched with giddy wonder as the game shifted. Instead of eating his tail, the dog was trying to get as far from it as possible. Forgetting his age, Ajax leaped over the rusty jeep, baying and howling, dove beneath the veranda steps, and spun through the billowing washing line, flailing the sheets with streaks of golden syrup plastered with six-legged dive-bombers.

Then the dog tore across Buck’s tarp, scattering transmission cogs into chaos, and galloped across the street.

“You bloody . . .” roared Buck, cutting short his cry to duck under the tarpaulin as the swarm approached. When he emerged, there was no sign of the dog or the hornets. Buck staggered over to the twins, who were squatting by the storm drain.

“Where is my dog?”

Marcus and Julius pointed down. Frantic, Buck raised the grating to free the dog.

“Ajax! Ajax!” he shouted. “Come, boy!”

Misery wailed from the bowels of the sewer system.

But first a sudden cloud of hornets burst from the drain. Moments later, a fetid stench hurled the boys backward, as the slime-covered hound leaped up and out—he had found safety from the hornets in a pool of shit.

“Hell’s bells!” shouted Buck as a new swarm surrounded Ajax—flies, big bluebottle flies, eager to bury their eggs in this walking shitpile. The miserable beast now raced back toward the house, with Buck sprinting after him in a desperate attempt to bar the animal’s entry.

“Those two are the devil’s spawn!” Buck roared at Howard, later. “They can never come on my property again!”

THAT EVENING THE TWINS
had a fine time explaining their adventure over dinner. Though Howard took delight in the story, Will sensed his mother’s distraction. She had been listening to the radio, and he noticed her wrists braced against the countertop, as though a weight were pressing from above.

“Mummy, what’s on the radio?”

Julia wiped the tears from her cheeks and turned from the window. “Nothing, Will.”

“Why are you crying?”

“Oh God,” she replied, putting her hand to her face, “oh my God.”