The Parallel Apartments (30 page)

The wind stopped, as though by a wall, allowing an instant of placid quiet.

Quince chirping: “You gotta, Ren, you gotta, Ren.”

Renée squealing: “No way, you suck.”

The wind blew down its wall and the obscuring hiss of sparklers returned.

Renée threw her pillow at Quince, who ducked. He chased her around the TV. She was scream-laughing under the din of the storm. He slipped and fell, but caught her ankle as she raced by. She went down. He grabbed her panties, which slipped and stretched unevenly down her legs, then caught at her knees, where Quince ripped them off and waved them like a shredded battle flag.

Murphy ducked and ran. It began to hail.

The hailstones got larger. They hurt. Now instead of bouncing like teeth when they hit the pavement, they shattered.

Murphy smelled smoke. It grew in pungency the closer he got to home. Soon the smoke was visible; then it was bodied; then it was its own weather—whorls of ash lit with tiny magma-orange live cinders. Then it was no longer smoke but a nebula of heat. He stopped.

Translucent peach-marmalade flames squirted out of all the windows of the north side of his house. Neighbors stood under the eaves of their porches, forearms shielding their faces, watching. Presently sirens broke through the noise of the wind and exploding hailstones, and soon there were yellow-and-black-jacketed firemen swimming through the smoke and ribbons of fire like storm-caught hornets, dragging ladders and hoses and axes.

Granny's Valiant wasn't in the driveway.

Murphy sat down on the sidewalk among the melting balls and shards of ice and watched the flames reach out of the windows for the cedar fence and the pecan trees and the resigned firemen with their arcing tubes of white water.

A shaggy explosion made the firemen back up a step.

My matches suitcase.

The shredded victory flag would not leave his mind.

Hailstones broke on his knees.

The fire marshal came to Murphy and Granny's room at HoJo's to report that it was most likely the dryer that had started the fire.

“Probably the lint trap,” he said, accepting a Vantage and a light from
Granny. “Was the dryer drying?”

Murphy, who was pretending to watch
The New Zoo Revue,
felt Granny's glance like grasshoppers under his shirt collar.

“I leave it on all the time,” she said.

“You gotta clean the lint trap.”

“I know that.”

“Y'orta save that lint. My nephew Ely, out in Gruene, can make paper out of it. He harvests lint from anybody's dryer in town who'll let him, and there's a lot of folks who will. He sells the paper to artists and whatnot for in the neighborhood of ten dollars a sheet no bigger than a welcome mat.”

“I wish he'd come by earlier.”

“How you holding up, boy?” said the fire marshal.

“Fine.”

“Don't worry, you can get all new toys with your mama's insurance.”

“You'll talk to Farmer's?” said Granny.

“Sure I will.”

He left.

Granny turned off the TV.

“Hey.”

“Did you hear what the man said?”

“No.”

“Did you clean the trap like I told you to?”

“Yeah.”

“Every day?”

“Yeah. Gah!”

He had cleaned it only once.

“Maybe,” Murphy said, “you left a cigarette burning and it lit the other cigarette butts and then they lit your bridge cards right next to your lighter fluid and then the lighter fluid exploded and threw flames everywhere and then the house burned down. That's probably what happened. It was your fault. Can you please turn the TV back on?”

Granny clenched her neck and jaw. She turned the TV back on. Then she lay down on her twin bed and went to sleep.

State Farm paid out. Before Murphy and Granny moved into a small,
newly constructed house off Chicon, they visited the remains of their old home. They waded through the charcoal and pools of melted and solidified plastic and metal. Granny recovered a skillet that had been her great-great-great-grandmother's and had survived another fire, a houseboat in Bayou La Batre in the 1840s. That fire spared nothing but the relative and the pan.

Murphy hoped to find his magnifying glass, but all he came away with was Grampoppy's bayonet. The fire had vaporized its box and its hilt, leaving only the fire-scaled blade and a three-inch tang that begged for a nice new handle.

“Don't you goddam dare let anything happen to that Jap-sticker, Murphy Lee Crockett,” Granny had said, shaking her skillet at him. She was as angry as he'd ever seen her.

When Murphy was eleven, he grew out of his fire stage, shortly after he had made a lightbulb-filled-with-gasoline booby trap and screwed it into a socket in the disgusting bathroom at the Round and Round go-kart track. He hid in some nearby bushes and waited for a guinea pig to go in and flick the switch. He waited and waited. Didn't anybody ever need to take a shit in this place? Eventually he went in and flicked the switch himself. The bulb exploded perfectly, a succulent arson. On fire, he ran onto the go-kart tracks. The next thing he knew, he and his fire were being smothered under the weight of a giant, gristled good Samaritan. When Murphy had been sufficiently doused, the good Samaritan rolled off, inspected Murphy for serious burns (they were all superficial), and then showed Murphy a badge indicating that he was a police officer. Murphy went to kid jail, was bonded out by Granny—who sold her Valiant to do so—pleaded guilty, received three months in juvie and two years' probation. When he awoke on the final day of his period of probation, he was dry. His bed-wetting had finally ceased.

That day was also the first that he hadn't at least once thought of the shredded pink battle flag.

X

April 1988

“Come in, Justine,” said Gracie Yin, holding her office door open and inviting Justine inside with the wave of a manila folder. “Nice to see you again.”

“Hi.”

Justine sat down, smoothed out her blue skirt, and checked her reflection in the glass of Gracie's framed counselor's certificate over the file cabinet in her office.

Gracie sat down in a swivel chair and balanced the manila folder on the armrest.

“How goes it?”

Gracie wore a white fitted linen suit and a light blue silk blouse with the stitching of a breast pocket just visible under a lapel of her jacket. She wore a man's tie, saddle-tan with thin pink pinstripes, the knot tied loosely and hanging down to the second button of her blouse. Her brown suede kitten heels looked as light as cork and seemed so delicate that Justine wondered if she were to hook one finger between the leather upper and Gracie's instep and merely pull, would the shoe tear away like dime-store gift wrap?

“Fine.”

“When was it we saw each other last? A little while after you returned to school after your hospitalization?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

Gracie crossed one leg over the other. A run in her pantyhose disappeared into her shoe.

“How is the adjustment?”

“Fine.”

Gracie opened the folder and studied something inside. Then she looked up at Justine.

“Your arm. And how is that?”

“Getting better.”

“May I see?”

Justine's nipples hurt. The night before, after she'd hung up with Troy, the Christmas-morning-caliber anticipation, the woolly after-effects of the blue capsules, the imagery in her collage, and the horniness at the thought of seeing Gracie Yin had all combined to bring forth a creative lust that she answered by tying her nipples together with a length of grosgrain ribbon, holding the bight between her teeth, and pulling in the manner of reins; this proved to be an excellent addition to her workaday masturbation. And now, looking at and listening to the words tumble over Gracie Yin's lower lip, Justine's nipples started to harden and ache. She slumped forward so her hair would cover the front of her blouse, which would otherwise surely betray her. Justine unbuttoned her cuff and pulled up her sleeve.

“Hm. That's sure not just a cry for help,” she said, rolling her chair back on the hard rectangle of clear plastic on the floor. “Thank you for showing me.”

“Sure.”

“Now, are you still thinking about UT?”

“I guess. I'm also kind of thinking about NYU.”

“UT's harder to get into than it used to be, even if you're in-state, and out-of-state anything's going to be tough, and expensive,” said Gracie, smiling, her mouth slightly open so Justine could see the wet pink of the inside of her lower lip. She had small, talc-white teeth edged with little serrations, except for her canines, which, even though vaguely yellowing, dully peaked, and barely a sixteenth of an inch longer than her incisors, were as
subtly menacing as a cookie-cutter businessman with a faint smear of blood on his knuckles.

“I'm a pretty good artist.”

Gracie again examined something in her folder.

“It's the grades I'm a little concerned with.”

“I know. I'm trying to catch up. I missed a lot of school.”

“What's your third-choice school? ACC?”

“I don't have one.”

“What about extracurrics? Sports? Volunteer work? Girl Scouts?”

“Girl Scouts? Do they still have that?”

“Sure.”

“No.”

“If you can, Justine, try and do something outside of class. Start a reading group. An entomology club. Play chess. Join the cheerleading squad. That's the kind of stuff colleges look for these days.”

Cheerleading! Did Gracie Yin think Justine was attractive enough to be a cheerleader?

“It's okay, it's okay,” said Gracie with some urgency, as if she were thinking Justine might go south at that very moment. “Listen, do what you can. Meanwhile, did your parents go to UT? If you're related to an alumnus, that always helps.”

“My mom did. She didn't graduate, though.”

“Hmmm. Did she go to Austin High, too?” said Gracie, pointing to the floor with her thumb.

“Yeah.”

“Dad?”

“I'm adopted. Livia—my mom—her husband died right after they were married.”

Gracie leaned forward in her chair, put her elbows on her knees, and clasped her hands. Her pink and tan tie hung between her legs.

“We're going to do what we can for you, Justine. Look, see if you can join a club. Talk to Livia about writing a letter for you, for your UT app. And I'll help you with your NYU app. We'll get you into one or the other. Maybe both.”

“Okay.”

Gracie shuffled some papers and shut Justine's file.

“How are things at home?”

“Fine.”

“You can confide in me. Guidance counselors aren't just for breakfast anymore.”

“I don't know. I guess my grandmother's sick.”

“I'm so sorry. What's wrong?”

“AIDS. She's a hooker. Retired.”

“Oh. My.”

Gracie crossed her legs the other way. Her shoe slipped off at the heel, but she saved it from falling by straightening out her leg. Her tiny, arched foot, a shoe hanging off the toes, was pointed at Justine's knees.

“Yeah.”

“You sound like you admire her.”

“She's pretty cool.”

“How ill is she?”

Gracie allowed her shoe to hang off her toes. Slices of Coke-can-red toenail polish occasionally glimmered.

“Ms. Yin?”

“Gracie.
I'm barely six years older than you, Justine.”

“Uh, do you know a doctor who calls himself Sherpa?”

“Sherpa? Nope. Is he your psychiatrist?”

Justine smiled. Dr. Jumples, the shrink to whom she'd been assigned for post-discharge therapy, wouldn't have thought it funny to be compared to Sherpa. Justine had seen Dr. Jumples only a few times. He always looked like he was doing forced community service during their sessions, sighing and fidgeting and watching the clock.

“No, he's just a… guy. A specialist.”

“How are things going with your doctor?”

“I quit seeing him. He's an idiot.”

“I wish you'd go back.”

“I'd rather see you.”

“I'm not qualified, Justine, or I'd like to see you, too. We've got a rapport.”

Gracie reached down and pulled her shoe back on with a pinkie, then looked at the clock on her desk.

“Let's make another appointment,” said Gracie. “Two weeks?”

“Okay.”

“What class do you hate the most?”