The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (5 page)

What is it like? I don’t know. Did you like it? I don’t know. Was it bad? It was weird. Why are you crying? I’m not crying. Did he like it? He said he did, one of them says. He said it’s what you do. One of them says. One of them. Always.

Upstairs, there are parents. Three miles away, there are parents. And the sound of all of this, it carries. Through the floorboards, through the chimney, through the branches of the guardian trees, up toward the dimming sky. The motorcycle man, the three-pack-a-dayer, who is sitting upstairs with his wife, watching television in the darkened living room, and who, perhaps, has been drinking, has a feeling he can’t identify and doesn’t question. He stands. Checks the doors to make sure they’re locked. Turns on the front light. Walks down the hall, and opens the basement door quietly, soft enough not to wake anyone sleeping, cracked enough to hear if there’s any sort of structural damage being done by the two boys in the basement. He opens the door, is about to yell down to them that it’s time to knock it off and turn in, and stops. Something trips a wire in the back of his head: a sound, a feeling, he isn’t sure. He is a picture, now, of fatherly concern. He is ready to be angry. He places one heavy, slippered foot on the first basement step. A second step follows.

But these friends, what do they hear? Not the movie, playing behind them. Not a father, coming down the stairs. They are hearing nothing but each other. There are no words, but they are talking, now, in the language of friends, in the language of the basement, in the language of hapless Japanese commuters aboard a miniature subway car that has, to their surprise, been picked up by a disinterested, atomic aberration and held high over a Tokyo street. It is, they would admit to each other if they could, thrilling to be left so alone. One friend is clumsily showing the other—the other, who knows nothing of himself, except that he wants to be included, and to show his gratitude that he has been. There is milky, hairless skin. There is the L-shaped couch, dominating the room, and the idea, for one of them, of an ice pack plunged deep into an orbital socket. There is a flaccid taste, the bending of limbs, and a strange, tongue-less kiss. It’s a time-out. It is outside of time. They’ve whistled themselves to the bench, to regroup, tenderly, before suiting up again, and for now, it is just the two of them in this room. The doors are shut. No one is allowed in. It’s the end of summer, and they are looking, again, for that old equilibrium, attempting to make sense out of nonsense, and it comes out physically, robotically, without inflection, and it needs to be dubbed. The question that one friend is asking the other is, Where were you? Where were you when this was happening to me? And the answer, a fractured, proffered gift, is the first lie one has ever told the other, though it will take him years to figure that out. The answer is: Right here. I was in this basement, where I belong. I was always in this basement, and I will be in this basement the rest of my life, if that’s what you need from me.

john, for christmas

O
n the radio, they were calling it “snow-mageddon.” Joan had seen the storm on the news, as well, in a Doppler-radar swirl pulsing like a sick heart over the Cascade Mountains. The worst of it was supposed to hit tomorrow, midday, but already the snow had begun to fall in little eiderdown flakes, salting the bushes, promising cover. Her husband, Thomas, was upstairs. Earlier this morning he’d called weather prediction an inexact science. It comes, it goes, one never knows, he’d said. A little song. But this particular storm couldn’t arrive early. John—their son, the actor, the writer, the destructively depressed, self-proclaimed failure—was coming home for Christmas, driving up from Oregon with his girlfriend, and the thought of them stuck somewhere, the car they’d bought for him wedged in a snowdrift like a blunt splinter . . . It’d be on the evening news: the only people to freeze by the side of the road while everyone else got home safely, an accusation frosted on John’s features. Just like everything else, it would’ve been their fault.

She picked up the telephone, thought better of it, and put it back in its cradle. He’d call if he was stuck. And then, most likely, ask for Thomas. He wasn’t interested, these days, in talking to her. She unloaded half of the plates from the dishwasher before realizing they were dirty. Then she loaded them back in, packed a scoop of soap into the door, and started the cycle. The gift cards they’d bought for John were under the tree, along with the requisite sweater and a pair of pajamas she knew he’d never wear. The house had to be prepared, but she’d already done most of the cleaning. Thomas had to deal with the sick alpaca, which he’d been putting off. Dinner would have to be orchestrated. Then, if there was time, she’d promised Sarah, the medical student who rented the garret apartment above their garage and who was
not
going home for the holiday (a catastrophic divorce, she’d told Joan, had made family more of an idea than anything else), that they’d move some wood over so she’d have enough to make it through the weekend. The garage was not attached, and stood fifty yards away from the house, obscured from view. Thomas would stack the wood when he got back. He would, Joan thought passingly, do anything for that girl. Sarah was, in her own awkward and plump and helpless way, appealing to men like him.

So the waiting began. Through the kitchen window, Joan could see the alpacas standing dumbly near the fence; the snow was starting to catch in their fur, and their large, expressive eyes were glued on the horizon, as if they were collectively willing some ancient, alpaca Godhead to materialize. Zachary—she’d named him after he’d become sick—was on his haunches, fifty feet away from the herd. She had tried nursing him back to health, warming bottles and feeding him like a newborn, but if that had helped, it had helped only marginally. The local country vet—who Joan secretly suspected despised her for the way they kept their animals (
recreational
was the word he’d used)—had been out and told her it was a lost cause. Joan refused to believe him at first—the guy’d barely left his truck before he was back in it, talking about all the other animals who required his attention that day—but soon after his visit Zachary had stopped eating, and when he moved, if he moved at all, it was with clear and unhappy effort. The herd, no fools, had begun to shun him, and at night his pathetic bleating entered her dreams. She’d wake, thinking she’d missed something important, had left someone stranded, or had otherwise failed in some meaningful way. Two evenings ago, unable to sleep, she’d left the house to sing, softly, to him; but then she’d seen Sarah peeking through her window and had become self-conscious. This was the animal kingdom, she reminded herself. Silly to see metaphor where there was none.

She heard Thomas coming downstairs and turned from the window to greet him. “That was John,” he said when he came into the kitchen.

“I didn’t hear the phone ring,” she said.

“Cell phone.”

“Oh,” she said. Thomas walked halfway across the kitchen before remembering something upstairs. “Goddamn it, I’m unraveling,” he said.

“You’re just tired,” she said. “I didn’t sleep much either.”

Thomas looked at her. His eyes were bagged. His beard, which she still wasn’t used to, was neatly trimmed. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “It’s his birthday on Thursday. I’d forgotten.”

“I know his birthday,” she said.

He would be thirty. For the last year he’d been calling in the middle of the night, waking them, sometimes with nothing to say, sometimes angry, sometimes crying. It happened once a month. Maybe more. It was impossible to say what he wanted, needed, from them. Thomas would take the phone across the hall, and talk to him until he calmed down. John never wanted to speak to her, not recently at least, and when she asked Thomas what they talked about he gave her an abbreviated, bare-bones account. The rest, he said, was nonsense, that John had just wanted someone’s ear until he was tired enough to fall asleep. They’d been married for thirty-four years; she knew he was protecting her. She didn’t like being shut out, it drove the two of them away from each other and into themselves; but after John’s last visit, which had been frightening, and had shaken her, she was, at least partially, grateful for it. She was also grateful for Jocey, John’s girlfriend. Since they’d been dating, the calls had become less frequent; where they’d failed to find a way to help him, it appeared she succeeded.

Thomas walked back into the kitchen, holding his hat. The scar on his forehead, just below his hairline, was healing well. The accident had happened two weeks ago, when Joan was running errands: Thomas, chopping wood, had yanked their axe out of the stump too quickly and brought the blunt end to his head, opening a deep cut. He’d knocked on Sarah’s door, and she’d taken him inside and stitched him up. Joan had wanted to go to the hospital when she returned—when she saw his stitched forehead, his bloody bunched-up shirt on the floor—but Thomas insisted Sarah had closed it perfectly, and the hospital was unnecessary.

“So he’s on his way?” Joan asked. “He knows about the storm?”

“Already on the road,” Thomas said. “He does.”

“Do you think they’ll make it tonight?”

“I do.”

“Good,” Joan said. She wasn’t sure if she meant it. “Do they have an emergency bag? Just in case?”

“He said they’ve got jackets, and jackets, and jackets. He wants to go skiing while they’re here. I said that was fine.” Thomas picked up an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter, inspected it, put it back down.

“Well, they’ve got a cell phone, at least.”

“Yes. At least they’ve got that phone, thank God.”

“You don’t have to make fun of me,” she said, and turned toward the window. The snow was coming heavier now.

Thomas moved to her side and rubbed small circles at the base of her neck. A comforting, nonsexual gesture. She wasn’t used to the way he looked with a beard; it wasn’t him, he’d never worn one; and for the last two weeks it had been a surprise, always, when he entered rooms. Another surprise: just this morning, she’d caught him masturbating in the shower. He’d apologized through the glass. When she’d asked him, later, and playfully she thought, what he’d been thinking about, he’d said, “Oh, nothing. You.” She was embarrassed. She knew it wasn’t true. What she imagined for him was an orgy of young women who looked just like Sarah, thirty upturned mouths, some bad music—but whatever image or scenario it was that he conjured, Thomas wouldn’t say, and this morning, of all mornings, the inwardness of the action had upset her.

“I’m not making fun of you,” he said. “You’ve barely slept. I wouldn’t do that.”

“All right,” she said. “All right.”

“I’m going to take Zachary down to the pit,” he said. “You want to say good-bye?”

She shook her head. “No.” Then she said, “I already did.”

They stood near the window, looking out at the snow. “Call if you need anything,” he said.

“I will,” she said. Then she said, “Say hi to the nudist for me, if you see her.”

S
he was talking about Sarah. It was a routine between them. Thomas squeezed Joan’s hand, grabbed his keys from the peg by the door, and left the house. On a walk last summer, a few weeks after Sarah had moved in, he’d caught her swimming in the river near their property. He didn’t realize—or, the word he’d used when telling Joan was
notice
—she was naked until he’d hailed her and begun a conversation. It wasn’t true, of course. He had noticed, her nudity had stopped him dead in fact, but he didn’t think about what he was doing—standing still, watching dumbly, and, the word had come later, peeping—until she’d looked up, started, and then, as she recognized him, relaxed, and put her hand over her naked heart. He’d been embarrassed; she, apparently, was not. She laughed, said something about not having a suit, and then waded to the bank and stood, nude, like some robust Greek emerging from a clamshell. One of her breasts was slightly larger than the other; on her hip was a scar like a holster. She’d asked Thomas to hand over her clothes, hanging on a branch behind him, which he’d done. Before he turned away, he caught sight of her stooping to step into her shorts and it had stilled him, even as he looked down the river to give her privacy. Midstream, there was a rock that was slowly parting the calm water, folding it over itself, and he concentrated on that until she’d said, okay.

He could’ve understood, and explained away, the sensation if it was merely desire. But it was larger than that. Seeing her exposed, and unafraid, had made him feel responsible for, and protective of, her. She knew very little about their troubles with John. Perhaps that was part of it. He knew Sarah felt affection for him, but also knew that was where it ended. He regretted telling Joan about seeing Sarah by the river. Recently, she’d confessed that she’d come to imagine Sarah as the daughter they’d never had: a successful, out-in-the-world-and-thriving child who offset the leaden feeling that congealed the air in the room whenever they talked about John. She didn’t like that Sarah was waltzing around naked, for anyone to see. Right, Thomas had said. That’s not what I was talking about, but right. That was five months ago, before John had become worse, before Sarah had stitched Thomas up. Before John’s last visit. Before they’d decided, together, that relieving Zachary from the burden of his pain was the humane thing to do, and was, in fact, something required of them.

Outside, the clouds were low and gauzy, and walking across the lawn to the garage, Thomas put his hand on the hedge and realized that this day held only the promise of things he wasn’t looking forward to: he didn’t want to see his son, their only child, a man now, who had begun to view his entire life as someone else’s fault; he didn’t want to drive the dying alpaca to the pit, unceremoniously shoot it, and leave it to nature so they could present a home front untouched by sickness; and he didn’t want to see Sarah. Earlier this morning, when Thomas had gone to the garage to take care of Zachary, there’d been a strange car, a red VW, in the driveway, parking him in. Someone visiting Sarah. This was a first. It was before dawn. Sarah’s lights were still on, but he didn’t knock. He didn’t say: I’m blocked in down here. He’d stood near the car for a few minutes, feeling strangely deflated. Then he’d turned and walked, quietly, home. He would wait for whomever it was to leave. It was an intrusion he didn’t like, but could do nothing about.

He was, however, looking forward to the storm. Deep snow, the kind they got in eastern Washington, dampened the landscape, rounding angles, muffling sound; everything became globular and remote, unrecognizable under the blanket. He wanted sloping drifts, up to the eaves. He wanted a crunch under his boots, the cold, granulated air in the back of his throat. Growing up, John had loved to shovel byzantine, snaking footpaths so one had to go first to the street, then in a small circle, and then, say, around the cherry tree in their front yard before getting to the car. Charming then. Indicative of character now.

The alpacas—there were ten of them—stood like a cluster of mops near the fence, away from Zachary, who was on the ground with his head nestled in a patch of grass, as if he were listening to the earth. “Hey, buddy,” Thomas said as he approached. The alpaca stirred and let out a soft moan, then regained his stillness. The others would watch this taking away, Thomas knew, with the same slack-jawed and impenetrable apathy they greeted everything else.

“Ah, poor little guy,” someone behind him said. He turned and saw Sarah. She was standing just outside the garage door, smoking a cigarette; he didn’t know how he’d missed her. She wore only a thin, white undershirt, and sweatpants tucked into a pair of oversize Sorel boots, seemingly immune to the cold. She was in her late twenties, the same age as John, but looked, on account of her round face, younger. And healthier. Her long hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail.

“He’ll be all right.”

“No, he won’t,” she said, taking a deep drag and blowing it out. “Isn’t that the point?”

A doctor who smokes. Thomas looked at the sick alpaca, and then back at Sarah. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and he could see the dark outline of her nipples through her shirt. “Not exactly tee-shirt weather,” he said before he could stop himself.

“Snow-mageddon!” she said cheerfully. She took another drag, and then nodded in the direction of the herd. “Some of those guys are pretty seriously dreadlocked. You should call them rasta-pacas.”

“What-apacas?”

“Rasta. You know, like Bob Marley.”

“Ah,” Thomas said. “That works. I get it now.”

Sarah stubbed her cigarette in the coffee can she kept outside for that purpose. Thomas walked over to the sick alpaca and roused him with a soft hand on his neck. The animal startled, then stood and allowed himself to be led to the trailer. Sarah watched with her arms folded over her chest. “It’s brave of you to do this,” she said when Thomas had the animal near the gate. Upon seeing the trailer Thomas had hitched to the back of his truck, Zachary teetered, then dropped to his haunches. Sarah kneeled, and took Zachary’s blank face in her hands as if, Thomas thought, to kiss it.