Tumbledown (38 page)
Authors: Robert Boswell
Rhine’s paper had so many erasures, the paper was see-through in several places.
Once upon a time. The boy had one mother and one father. The boy had one brother and one sister. The boy and the one father and the one mother and the one brother and the one sister all lived together in one house. Each person had a bedroom each. The mother and father shared a bedroom, but each of the other ones had one bedroom each.
That was as far as Rhine got.
Karly’s handwriting was large and looping, but her story was short.
Once pond a time frogs and bees and in the water things. Swimming.
Billy liked this one.
Once pond a time
sounded like poetry. He needed to go to Karly’s house to do her laundry. The washing machine in the utility room at the senior citizens facility was a top load and Karly’s, according to her pantomime, was a front load, and it was too confusing to her—and to him—to make it clear what she needed to do.
“Boys and girls are different,” Karly said to him the day he was trying to teach her how to use the washer.
“Boy howdy,” Billy replied.
“Boys do whatever you want them to,” she explained. She smiled at him and shook her head to make her hair swing.
Billy had to quit thinking about her or he would never get through the stories. The girl broke his heart.
Alonso’s paper featured no words but only circles, fairly neat ones, in three rows, like a stack of firewood seen from the side.
OOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOO
That was Alonso, all right. All logs and no flame. Mick’s story:
Once upon a time in the land of Yuma, Arizona, when the boy was in high school, and he was fine back then, and he was happy it seemed like all the time, he went to a beach with his friends. They slept on the beach, which was long and made of sand, which is just rocks that the ocean has taken a million years to soften, and there were three girls and just two boys, and they weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend and the numbers didn’t match up, and that made it easier because they could just be friendly, and late at night when for some reason they woke up, the boy is saying he was going to swim and he took off all his clothes right there—how could he be the person who did that? He didn’t know how, but back then, he took his off, and the others did theirs, too. It was five not dressed people in the water, and in the water they swam, and back on the sand they ate cheese and honey sandwiches with no clothes on and they slept with no clothes on, and later on, back in Yuma, after he was sick, one of the girls that had been there came every day to see him for a while, and one night she said, “You have to get better.” She said, “That was the best night of my life.” And if only
It stopped there, and Billy thought it was a pretty good story, given the naked girls and everything. He had driven through Yuma once, but all he could remember were gas stations, fast-food places, and the heat, but he knew there was a prison, an old-west prison where desperadoes were sent. He made a mental note to ask Mick about it, and maybe he would rent that old cowboy movie
3:10 to Yuma
and they could watch it together.
Maura had turned Little Red Riding Hood into moderately effective porn. She might have a future writing the stuff. Not for the movies. He was pretty sure porn movies didn’t waste money on writers. It took him three seconds to imagine a script:
The plumber arrives.
Housewife happens to be wearing thong when she opens door.
Plumber: “You got a plumbing problem?”
Housewife: “What big tools you have!”
The movies were just a stall until the clothes came off, but there was an overlooked market of porn
readers,
people turned on more by reading about sex than by seeing video. Billy counted himself in this group. His favorite type of story involved surprise. An unsuspecting man would see a female friend, and this guy would say just the right thing, and the woman would . . . He had to quit thinking about this, too. Reading such stories made him horny, but thinking about them made him sad. He could never write that kind of story, but maybe it was Maura’s particular gift.
The final story belonged to Vex. It was full of words he had crossed out but could still be read.
They went into the
woods
forest
together
.
The trees were tall. The shadows
of the trees
were deep and long.
Stickers
Small plants
Undergrowth scratched at their ankles. They
trudged
hiked until they reached a
meadow
clearing filled with grass. There was a puddle at the center of the clearing. They took off their clothes.
When they were naked, they held each other.
Another thing came out of the forest. It was a tall man in dark clothes. He told them not to run. When he reached them, he put a hand on each neck. He choked them until they passed out. He raped them and urinated on their clothing. He went back into the forest.
He
The boy came to first. He looked at the girl. She was on the grass. She was naked. She was unconscious.
He
He
He
What he did next is unclear.
Then they got dressed in their
bad
ugly
stinking
foul smelling clothing. They went back into the forest. They held hands. The plants tore at their
smelly
scented
fragrant clothing. Smelling that way, no predator approached them. The path was not easy to follow in the
night
dark. They were in the forest
forever
for a long time. They are in there still. The stench of their clothes keeps them alive.
Billy read the story twice before grabbing his keys from the kitchen hook. He was going to drive to Onyx Springs and find Vex. Billy had his address, a halfway house near the railroad tracks. He could call the van driver for directions. Billy was afraid of what he might find. But that was his job, wasn’t it? To know the people in the workshop? To keep them safe?
Being with his fiancée and his sister at the new restaurant in Liberty Corners, Candler decided, was a lot like being the referee in a boxing match.
No, that wasn’t right. Boxers
know
they’re fighting each other. A boxing match is an acknowledged hostile engagement, while the conflict between these two women was pointedly unacknowledged. For that matter, with boxers, there was nothing personal in their violence. Each merely agreed to act as if he had reason to pummel the other’s head and body; while the clash in the Blue Willow was, he was certain, deeply personal, not to mention psychologically submerged, emotionally indirect, and perversely cheery. It was nothing at all like a boxing match, and yet he was very much stuck between them, like a referee. Where the holy fuck was Billy when he needed him? It couldn’t take more than an hour to drop off Lise and return. Unless he had lingered at her apartment. Candler didn’t want to consider that possibility. He thought about purchasing boxing gloves. Violet and Lolly could go a few rounds, and he and Billy could go a few more, and then maybe they would all be fine together. Boxing suddenly seemed the epitome of civilized sophistication and diplomacy.
“What is this noise they’re playing?” asked Violet, smiling grumpily. She had to be perfectly aware of the enormous retro jukebox and the fact that Lolly had punched in the preferences.
“Oh, you have to love this,” replied Lolly, showing maybe a thousand teeth. She undoubtedly recalled that Violet disliked rock and roll, especially the screaming variety. “I only picked songs from your generation,” Lolly continued gaily, though she could hardly be ignorant of the fact that “Communication Breakdown” was released at least fifteen years before Violet entered high school.
“Let’s all order, shall we?” Candler said, unnaturally cheery himself. “Billy, that rascal, may be gone all afternoon. We may never see Billy again.”
“I’m so happy that there’s a new place to eat in the Corners,” Lolly said.
“There’s not one piddling thing on the menu that looks appetizing,” Violet replied.
“Hamburgers are a safe bet, I bet,” Candler said. “Yum. Yum. Yum.”
“These fluorescent lights give our skin a green tint,” Violet said. “Luckily for you, your hair looks good green.”
“Thank you!” Lolly said. “Fluorescent lighting
is
green, you know, peachier for the environment. I was thinking we could make the house greener if we put in a few fluorescent bulbs, and do we have to flush every time? If it’s
yellow, be mellow,
that kind of thing?”
“Yes, indeed, a burger for me,” Candler said. “
Ham
burger. America’s—”
“
Mellow
is one of those words that makes me . . .” Violet’s head seemed to have developed a tremor.
“Unmellow,” Lolly offered and laughed. “Mellow makes you unmellow.”
“I’m going to have cheese on my burger,” Candler said brightly. “Sharp cheddar.” He pointed to the menu in his hand. “They let you choose what cheese.”
“Daddy would disapprove,” Violet said—a sentence like a lifeline, separate from the feminine tussle, and Candler yanked on it.
“That’s right,” he said. “I’d forgotten that.” To Lolly, he added, “Our father objected to cheeseburgers.”
“Still does, I’m sure,” Violet said. “He hates how people put cheese on everything. It’s a point of honor with him.” She smiled ever so slightly.
“And burgers are cheaper without cheese,” Candler put in, “but he did seem to be philosophically opposed.”
“I can’t wait to meet him,” Lolly said.
“He loved Arthur,” Candler said, recalling the first time that their father met Arthur. James had been there to witness the encounter.
Violet nodded but clearly did not want to talk about her late husband. “I guess I’ll have a burger, too,” she said. “If there’s nothing else. No cheese for me.”
A sweet respite of silence followed while they scrutinized their menus again.
James had not only attended his sister’s wedding, roughly ten years earlier, he had also joined the newlyweds on their honeymoon—for the second part of it, anyway. Their mother and father had divorced a few weeks before Vi’s wedding, and their mother’s decision to fly over the Atlantic for the wedding necessitated their father’s decision not to come. He claimed to have pneumonia, but James and Violet were not fooled.
Their mother was not much fun in London, and would hardly engage with Arthur, who was approximately her age. After a day of this, during an interval when Arthur had left the apartment on a business errand, Violet burst out, “I’m not marrying
Dad,
” and James had the urge to flee down the stairs and run after Arthur. “He’s
nothing
like Dad. Besides, I never dated any other older men, and I hardly dated Arthur. I worked with him for years before—”
“No details, please,” her mother said. “I like Arthur fine, but it will be easier from a distance. My own affairs . . . The wound is too recent.” Her lip quivered but she did not fully lose her composure. After another moment, she added, “She’s not even pretty, you know? It’s, I don’t know,
insulting.
To be left for a girl who isn’t even attractive, and she’s no goddamned painter. He just wanted a young body. That’s all. What am I supposed to . . . just a young body. Young flesh. She modeled for him, and, well, it’s so tawdry, and he’s nearly forty years older, and I am aware that you and Arthur aren’t the same thing, but forgive me, I cannot help my feelings right now, and you’ll just have to put up with me.”
“All right, I’ll put up with you,” Violet said, and she did. She kept their honeymoon plans—which included a week in the U.S.—secret from her. They chose Chicago because Frederick Candler had moved to nearby Kentucky. Following a few days in the Drake Hotel in downtown Chicago, they flew to Paducah, Kentucky, from which they would drive to the tiny river town of Wickliffe and on out to the farmhouse that Frederick Candler had purchased. Violet had asked Jimmy to meet her in Paducah, and in a drunken moment at the reception, he agreed to be there.
Candler hadn’t wanted to dip into his savings again, after flying to London, and he drove to Paducah from Flagstaff. Dlu was supposed to have come with him, but she was annoyed not to have been invited to the wedding. “I’m not welcome in London but I’m supposed to come to a farmhouse in Kentucky to see your father and his concubine?” Billy volunteered to take her place and share the driving, but Violet nixed that. “I want Arthur to have a
good
impression of us,” she had explained.
Jimmy drove his Corolla from northern Arizona to western Kentucky alone, in a single ill-advised twenty-four-hour non stop trek. He was sprawled across a row of seats in the Barkley Regional Airport, profoundly asleep and dreaming of the white lines on the highway, when their flight arrived.
“You need a bath,” Violet said, waking him. “Couldn’t you have bathed, at least?”
The Corolla wouldn’t start, and they had to rent a car. Jimmy nodded off in the backseat, his head against the suitcases that would not fit in the trunk, on the drive to Wickliffe, but he roused himself when they took the county road to the farmhouse. Their father had purchased a farm of more than one hundred acres. Land in Kentucky was cheap, he had explained to Jimmy over the phone. “A hundred of the richest acres this side of the Valley Nile.”
Jimmy caught the reference. “Okay, Big Daddy. See you soon.” But his father had not let it drop. “Is Skipper coming?”
