The Listeners (3 page)

The other was a letter from Carlton E. Shutz, Wilson High School alum:

It went on to ask for a donation to Wilson's alumni fund. I didn't remember Carlton E. Shutz and I did not know we had turned fifty-five instead of thirty-five. Mortgage rates? Cap back on the
toothpaste
? Or by thirty-five did pretty much everyone have an IRA?

“IF A
DRACUNCULUS
got under your skin, what would you do?”

“A
quoi
?”

The middle read sternly from her notebook: “
A worm bred in the hot countries, which grows to many yards' length between the skin and the flesh.
”

“Use a razor,” said the oldest, “to chop a flesh-flap, then pull the worm out.”

“I would use a snake-charming flute,” said the youngest, “and play it near my body and the worm would hear and crawl out the way it came in.”

“Down your throat,” whispered the middle.

GECK WOULD BE
on the flowered couch at his parents' house, where the world sank away. He had stretched across this couch for a lot of years with the same view (brown wall, green chair, white mantel) and in the same sausage-casing, though at different poundages and states of personal hygiene. Today he would be unshaven and thinnish. Wouldn't be thinnish for long unless he started using again. Already he could feel new fat filling the pockety skin. His mother had been cooking up a storm. “Glad to have you home again, honey!” but she was not really that glad about it, nor, God knows, was his father. They were old. They didn't need to be cooking for some son.
He
should have been cooking for
them
, or hiring someone to; he should have been buying them a house in a neighborhood with better trees.

She brought him a blanket and nodded at the television. “Anything fun on?”

“No, Ma.”

His leg would feel terrible—throbbing, raw. The old injury made itself known when it was damp out, or when
Geck was especially tired. A wee shot of dodge would have hushed the throb; clean, the whole bone ached. He'd rub arnica down his calf. Arnica was for muscles, not bones, but his legmeat hurt too and he liked the tingle of the medicine. Wanting it all over, that warm shiver, he would wipe the ointment on his forehead.

“Ham salad for supper,” his mother would say from the doorway. “How does that sound?”

“Good,” Geck would mumble, shifting on the cushions, his boxers disagreeably snug. Time to get some new garb for this plumpening bulk. Perhaps he and his dear mother would take a trip to the mall. They'd walk among the teens, all of whom were having more sex than Geck was; and they would browse for husky sizes; and they would eat cinnamon buns on a plastic bench.

 

And when he walked into the bar, my first thought was that he was looking better these days—not all withered and sweaty. My next thought was that I'd seen it before, the betterness, and did not trust it at all.

“Tonic water with lime,” he said. At Mink's raised eyebrow, he added: “I'm on the wagonista.”

“Congratulations,” she said. “Again.”

“Yeah, well…” His eyelids fluttered.

Mink, humming, busied herself with the nozzles.

“It was my birthday rather recently,” he remarked.

“Oh yeah? Happy birthday.”

“The big eff oh.”

If he was forty, Mink couldn't be far behind. The
same horror'd hit her when he had a birthday on tour: I'll be
thirty
soon? she had said to me, in actual wonder. Geck had been mad at us for not getting him a present and made a series of dark comments about our oversight, particularly mine, since by biblical standards I'd known him better than they did.

“Did I put enough lime in?” asked Mink.

“Yeah,” said Geck, “it tastes all right,
considering
.”

She could see he wasn't long for that wagon.

“Anyway, we're playing next Saturday—you should come.”

“Sure, uh huh!” she said.

Geck turned to greet his drummer, a battered old guy who still managed to hit the tinies, bequeathing venereal disease to the next generation. I leaned on the faux zinc, under the chandelier, next to an ex–danseur exotique, a dirty-deeds bore who had done all her living already and now roamed the earth putting others to sleep with it.

“Ever had your ass eaten by two guys at once?”

“Why no,” I said.

“It's not a laughing matter,” she muttered.

I edged away toward glingles-groined Lad, who was complaining: “Why do
I
always have to call?”

“Because you are more charming,” Geck said. “Did you talk to that Providence guy? We need to book some additional shit in the north. Hey Minkum, where else did we play in New England?”

I watched her blink. Did she ever miss it, our old life? Being gone for weeks and months on end and
how we draped ourselves like characters from a pageant and etched our eyes into flowers, and could have robot-mouths when we wanted, and moved through the world—so it sometimes felt—like a different species entirely? A species akin to, though not the same as, today's genus of the arrow-haired and the fly-eyed?

“Western Massachusetts,” she said. “And Maine.”

“Oh hell yeah, that VFW where all those earthlings got face-knifed by balders? That was Maine.”

“So I'll let you know,” said Lad, rising from his stool.

“Yeah, yeah.” Geck waved him away and announced to me, “I saw Jupiter and those guys last night. I was on the list or I wouldn't have gone, of course, but anyway, they did a cover of ‘Dear Done For.' ”

“What'd he say before the song?”

“Oh, just that they were going to play a local golden oldie and hoped we would enjoy it.”

“Golden oldie? Those douches are our age.”

“That's not what it means,” Mink said. “It's more like, the song is a classic. They were doing an homage.”

“Mother,” I said, “fucks.”

I wanted to tell Mink and Geck about the mistake made by the pretty little singer, and hear them scoff at it, and let them convince me it could not have been Cam he saw—that Cam lived in California, in Brazil, in the
Alps
for god's sake and was certainly not riding any subways around here. But I kept thinking about that old sorcery rule about saying people's names out loud. How it brought them back.

MY FATHER WAS
digging in the flowers. My sister was cutting with the little scissors. My brother, too young to be trusted, was indoors.

“Fod, come here.”

It looked like a stepped-on pomegranate, pink nubs tangled in a smashed fuzz. One nub had rolled away—I went closer—a big seed? With a stick, I prodded it. It had two tiny hands, or starts of hands, stuck together like praying, and a bulby head, and the curl of where legs would grow. It lay in a sack of skin.

“Fod, come
here
.”

“Hold your horseradish.” He kept digging.

“I can't because there's babies.”

“What kind?” asked my sister in her red coat.

“Pink,” I said in my blue.

They followed me to the road.

“Mices!” screamed my sister.

“Moles,” corrected Fod.

“How did they get on the road?”

“A pterodactyl,” she guessed.

“An owl,” said Fod. “It must have dropped the mother's body while it was flying, or thrown it up out of its stomach.”

“But the babies are alive.”

“No, love, they weren't even babies yet—they were still developing.”

“But they
are
babies,” she insisted.

“No—”

“Yes they are,” I chimed.

“No, girls, they're not.”

I liked when my parents said
girls
because it made me as much of a girl as my sister, who was more girl. Girls, if this happens one more time, I am not buying cherry juice ever again!—our mother standing furious over a carpet stain; I had knocked over my cup.

My sister at dinner explained about the moles. She didn't tell about the baby she was keeping in a matchbox. It was velvet and rubbery, like an eraser. It was sleeping. Then it went gray. Had she forgotten to leave the box open at night for air to get in? She held a backyard burial to which my brother and I were invited. Flapping her hand over the matchbox she said, “The ground gets you now.”

THE ANIMAL'S NAILS
were longer than its teeth, body thumping sheetrock as it ran. Could it see me? Where were its holes? It left the wall at night, putting bites in the newspaper and tracks on the counter. I intended to kill it with a hammer. Its nails came through the wall. My brother's breathing used to come through the wall at Observatory Place, thinner plaster than at Edinburgh Lane; his sniffles and coughs had blown into my room where I lay all summer thinking about how Riley had just graduated from a good college whereas I had never even finished my bad one. He had a diploma (he framed it) and I had magazine clippings in a box. During the few hot months before Riley got his own apartment, we talked hardly ever, except to fight over TV channels or the last of the sugar cereal; but when I threw an unopened beer bottle into the living-room window, he told our parents a bird had flown at the glass.

If only Octy would do battle with the rat, curl a furry tentacle round the vermin neck and wring until death
throes, like tiny throat-clearings, could be heard.
But I am too old to fight rats!
Gnashy noises; the rat was chewing—what, a ball of blood and skin? Maybe when the old white lady down the block died the rat would whiff her corpse and find her through the pipes, nibble at the dry sinews, choke on the gristle. When you got that old, did your pubic hair fall out?

The phone rang, and my mother was interested to find out when I'd be settling up a small loan I had promised to pay back by Christmas.

“No, Mert, I know—”

“But you said you—”

“I'll take care of it.”

“…”

“What's that?” I said.

“I
said
, when do you plan to take care of it?”

“Soon.”

“We can't keep lending you money. It's humiliating for you.”

I dug my nail bed for a wisp of skin to work at.

“If you can't—”

“Look, as I have already
informed
you, Ajax asked if I minded not getting paid for a couple of weeks because the store is . . . we're having cash-flow challenges. I said fine.”

“But why would you—”

“He's my
friend
. And I'm the assistant manager.”

In a softer voice: “I'm just worried about you, pettle. It doesn't seem like much of a life.”

Red flared in my stomach. I peeled my finger with great care: one strip, two. “I'll write you a check next week,” I said.

Octy preferred the couch arm, but was willing to be moved: kitchen counter while I heated up a dinner, bed pillow when I did not want to be in bed alone. The little face of thread mouth and marble eyes could always see me. Its gaze never withered. Good night, I told him, patting a grubby tentacle. Only six were intact—the seventh hacked off by my sister, the eighth gnawed to stub by the pet rabbit of a dirt-child who had lived for a few minutes at the house I rented with Cam and a rotating cast of others on Belfry Street.
Sleep well. You too
. And now the dark bag of room tightening round my body, pressing the quiet at my skull to enlarge the sounds inside. The ring, the ring,
I hated it
and nowhere for it to go, trapped forever in the ears. I once knew a guy who was able to tell what notes his ears were making: C sharp, middle E.
Make sure to wear your earplugs!
They'd bought me fancy ones the Christmas after Cam and I started the band: Promise to wear them? said fiddly old Mert, who hadn't known you couldn't hear your own voice very well with plugs in.

I tapped on the radio, lit a cigarette. Dark whales rode the walls and the fist-fat rat gurgled through the plaster as it dreamed. Mert used to sing us to sleep with “Clementine.” A clementine was a baby orange. A rat was a baby devil. Under the radio, impervious to smoke, snarlings of tinsel plinked and bounced. I hit my ear
with a palm and slid a game into the machine. Skatepark in the California sun. You chose your own look: silver vest or black glimmie—leather briefs or green pegtops—shaved skull or blond mop. I liked playing as a boy. You could turn the blood function on or off. I kept it on to see his mangled knees and leaking face, gushy spats on the concrete.

“YOU ARE CADMUS
and I am Europa. We are the kids of a king. The god Zeus stole me to Greece and you looked and looked but couldn't find me. On your search you got advice from an oracle, met a cow, and killed a dragon.”

“So can I cut open Dragony's stomach?” I asked, pointing at her stuffed monster.

“No that's
over
, you already killed it and now you are even more sad because you still can't find me.”