Wink (5 page)

Chapter 9
  Sanding

Marty yanked the chain and turned on the fan. The room exhaled its breath. The breeze licked at the sweat on his chest and sent a chill up his spine. He listened hard at the ceiling to see if whatever or whoever was up there made any more noise. All he heard were the sounds of the house telling him to sleep, and after a while he lay in bed with his ears perked. He thought of dead things and snake skins and rats. He thought of being trapped in his father’s spider-web tattoo, of Uncle Cooper’s Dead-Eye and how he lost it, of his knife and how clean it would look, oiled and polished with a new handle, and how much it would hurt to dig out an eye with the tip. His last thoughts were of Sadie next door and he fell asleep with the image of her casting a spell on him with dainty girl-fingers.

Marty woke with the dawn. It was a habit he formed with Uncle Cooper who always stuck his head into Marty’s bedroom and said, “Wake up, Martian, you’re burning daylight.” Uncle Cooper would turn on the overhead light, shake Marty, and wink his Dead-Eye at him.

The ceiling fan clicked the same as back then and the traffic on I-10 still hummed, but now the molded stench of his mother’s junk scraped the inside of his nose.

Marty checked the floor for snakes and swung his legs off the bed. He pulled the dresser away from his bedroom door just enough that he could squeeze through. He climbed over the pile of junk in the hallway, slid into the bathroom, splashed water on his face and chest, and ran through his morning toiletries. He looked up at the ceiling where he had heard the dragging last night and listened. He could hear Gerald’s breathing machine but nothing else moved inside the house.

Marty went into Gerald’s bedroom and checked on his brother. A thin coat of dust covered Gerald’s sheets. Tubes ran into his nose. Another tube, the feeding tube, stuck out of Gerald’s side with a funnel-shaped attachment where his mother poured his food. The breathing machine made its up-down piston-pump every few seconds, and Gerald’s chest heaved and dropped and wheezed with the piston.

Marty lifted the sheet. There were bones and skin and nothing more. The blood had been leached from the veins until it was more like gauze than human flesh. His insides seemed to have been sucked out. Marty rolled him over enough that he could see beneath and there were large ulcerated sores on his back, bleeding and sticking to the sheet.

There had been a tattoo on Gerald’s left shoulder-blade, a red skull with a spike through the right eye. Beneath the jawbone was the word
Unmerciful
. Gerald said that when Marty was old enough, when he was fourteen, he would take him into Baytown to get the same tattoo but on the other shoulder-blade with the spike through the other eye, and the word
Unforgiving
beneath it. All that was left of Gerald’s tattoo was a bloody sore and a bit of the lower jawbone, grinning, and the word
Unmerciful
beneath it.

It stank in here and Marty guessed Gerald’s digestive system on auto-pilot must have cleared itself sometime last night. His mother would have to change Gerald’s diaper later after she woke and that thought made Marty turn toward the door and listen to the far side of the house.

He heard nothing toward the kitchen area and his parent’s bedroom, other than the television still on from last night and turned down low but without the constant flickering of his mother’s channel-surfing. Marty went into the hallway, leaned into the formal dining room, and looked through the French doors to the den. The couch and his father’s chair were empty, and since no cigarettes were burning Marty guessed nobody had recently been in there.

The kitchen was just as empty, and when Marty checked his mother’s bedroom he saw her feet sticking up from the pile of clothing on the floor. Her toes pointed up and her legs were splayed as if she had fallen from the ceiling and lay off-kilter the way she fell.

A few steps closer to the bedroom and Marty could see the bed was empty except for the piles of clothing, and he neither saw nor heard his father. He turned and moved through the kitchen and peeked out the back door window into the carport. He saw the far tin wall with the shovels and a wheelbarrow hanging nailed in place, and an empty space where his father’s truck had been. Marty breathed deep, relieved, feeling as if he had been un-buried after suffocating beneath a mound of dirt.

Marty went back to his mother's bedroom. He knelt on the pile of clothes and leaned over and touched his mother’s foot. It was warm, which both surprised and relieved him because she was laying the way dead things lay, in a wholly unnatural way with one arm twisted behind her back.

“Mommy,” Marty said. She didn’t answer. She didn’t move.

He crossed the pile of clothes as if he were scaling the trench wall, slowly, cautiously, a warrior into the breach. He put one arm under his mother’s knee and another under her armpit and lifted her in the same way his father had lifted her last night. She wasn’t heavy, not quite a hundred pounds, and since she was already halfway near the top of the mattress Marty managed to lift-roll her onto the bed. She landed face-down and he rolled her onto her side, arranged her ragdoll and seemingly boneless arms and legs the way a sleeping person should be arranged. Despite the summer heat, he pulled the sheet over her and wedged it between her chin and shoulder. He couldn’t get to the bedroom window or he would have opened it for airflow.

He stepped back and looked at her and thought how much she resembled Gerald. The only difference sometimes was the breathing tube.

Marty went back into the woodshop with Gerald and dug through the drawer built beneath the workbench top. He fished out a rough-grit and a smooth-grit sandpaper. “Start rough and finish smooth,” Uncle Cooper would have said, and he folded them into his back pocket and walked through the house, out the back door, and stood beneath the mimosa tree looking up at the roof, toward the attic.

He had left his Jim Bowie knife up there along with the handle and the carving knife, beneath the toddler’s chair next to the west side window, next to the snakeskin and whatever clumped around up there last night. In the morning light the rooftop looked as it always did, with shingles banana-peeled and cast down onto the carport rooftop. The oak tree to the west seemed frisky as it moved with a gentle breeze.

Without thinking on it further Marty grabbed the mimosa tree and hoisted himself onto the carport and jogged across the tin roof. As always he kept to the rows of nails so he wouldn’t crash through the roof and skewer himself on rakes and sharp-edged tools.

He crossed the roof, and when he reached the shutter he crouched on top of Gerald’s room and looked at the attic. Marty half-expected a face to be there, staring at him from inside. He imagined it would be a pale face with sparse hair spider-webbing on its scalp, huge bulging eyes and cat’s teeth hissing spittle. He saw only darkness and the wedged shadow of light stretching across the wooden floor and open-raftered space beneath the south side eaves.

Holding the shutter with one hand, Marty balanced, leaned over the eave, and peeked inside. He saw about half of it now and nearly all the floored-in strip down the center. There was nothing that wasn’t in there yesterday. Here was the toddler chair next to the window, and down by the west window was the shadowed outline of the Jim Bowie knife and the handle.

Marty leaned back and was untying the shutter from the nail when he said, “Wait.” It was as if someone had blown into his ear and Marty shook his head. Holding the shutter again, he leaned out and looked inside.

The toddler chair was beside the wrong window. He had left it yesterday at the far window, on the west where the sun set, where he left it each evening, and each morning he moved it to the east.

Marty leaned over and ape-hung from the shutter by one clawed hand, with one boot on the rooftop and one boot dangling in the air. He wedged the free foot onto the windowsill and leaned over and yanked it up with his free hand. It came up easy on its well-worn path that had been worked smooth these past two years. He pushed away from the sill, swung back to the roof and scooted to the top of the peak above Gerald’s room. He squatted there facing away from the attic window, ready to run down the roof and roll to the ground if anything shot out.

Marty wasn’t sure what to expect other than he was afraid opening the window might free something inside the attic. He thought about bats spewing out of the mouth of a cave in a vomitus black cloud of wings and biting teeth. He thought about fire exploding from room to room.

Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen as Marty sat there on the rooftop coiled tight as a bowstring. As more nothing happened, Marty began to relax, and after a few minutes of silence the tension in his legs and arms unwound. He stood, wiped his hands on his pants to dry them and grabbed the shutter.

Marty swung himself boots-first into the attic, kicking aside the toddler chair as he flew through the window.

The inside of the attic was as quiet as it ever was. With only one window open it lacked the in-out cross-flow of air, and the heat pressed against Marty with a physical squeeze that made him keep his arms near his body. Stiff-armed, he walked across the floor and drew up the west window and freed the air.

He turned and searched the dark corners. The black spaces beneath the eaves were quiet. The spiders had abandoned their webs. Whatever snakes and mice nested there were sleeping. The only sounds Marty heard were those of the rustling oak tree and the traffic on I-10, both of which began quickly to fade into the background of his mind.

When he was satisfied there was nothing in the attic—there was no place for things to hide because the entire room was open—Marty looked out toward the neighbor’s house and checked the bedroom window where he had seen Sadie. She wasn’t in her window and the blinds were pulled. He wondered how long she had been watching him and decided it wasn’t important. He hadn’t been doing anything he shouldn’t have been doing, even though he felt guilty that she saw him in his secret place doing secret things. He wondered if she ever saw anything besides him in the attic.

Marty turned away from the window and picked up the piece of Bois D’Arc wood, unfolded the piece of rough-grit sandpaper from his hip pocket and began rubbing off the knots.

Chapter 10
  The Sign

When they finished their walk to the bridge Sadie’s mom helped her use the restroom, and they ate lunch at the kitchen table. Lunch was leftover turkey sandwiches from the turkey her mom had baked last Sunday after church. “For no reason,” her mother said.

She and Sadie had basted and tended the bird all afternoon as it baked, and they ate a mid-summer Thanksgiving feast complete with deviled eggs, sweet potatoes, and baked string beans.

Now all that was left was mostly dark meat which her mother served with homemade bread-and-butter pickles.

“Do we have any cardboard boxes?” Sadie asked as she ate.

Her mother shrugged. “I don’t know. Why?”

“Because I want a piece. About this big.” Sadie motioned that the piece should be about an arm’s length square.

“I might be able to find one. I have a box from the farmer’s market last weekend. It’s an old orange-crate box, open on the top, if I haven’t thrown it away. Will that work?”

Sadie nodded and chewed and swallowed. “Yep. And do you have a black marker?”

Sadie’s mom squinted at her. “What are you making? A garage-sale sign?”

“Nope. You’ll see.”

•

Sadie decided to show her mom the sign before she used it. Her mom would find out either way and she wasn’t in the habit of misleading her mom. Still, the presentation wasn’t easy. Her mom was frowning and it made Sadie’s back itch as if ants were crawling up her spine.

They were in the living room, in front of the bay window with the blinds open so she could watch the traffic on I-10 speed past. Sadie was on the floor hunched over the sign with her mother standing over. The sun was straight-up in the sky and would be dropping soon. Her hands smelled sweet with Magic Marker.

“Peaches?” her mother said. She leaned over Sadie and traced the arrow drawn beneath the word on the cardboard sign.

“Yep.”

“You want to sell some of my peaches? We only have two trees, and we make preserves and pies for the church, you know that. I don’t think I have enough.”

“Nope. Do you promise not to be mad?” The ants crawled faster on her spine and Sadie struck before her mother could answer. “I want to show the sign to Marty.”

Her mother sighed and stood up straight. She twisted her back and wrinkled her nose. After a few breaths she said, “What?”

If Sadie’s legs had not been worthless flesh-bags she would have stood and looked her mom in the eye or at least as close to that as she would be at her age, probably around her chin by now. There was no way of telling how tall she was anymore and it didn’t matter anyway. She couldn’t stand, she couldn’t look her mom in the eye, and she couldn’t do more than push herself off the floor and swing her broken legs around to face her mother’s kneecaps. She looked up at her mom towering over her.

“You said you and Marty’s mom used to eat peaches out by the back fence. I thought maybe I could eat peaches with Marty.”

Her mom shook her head. “No, baby. You leave that boy alone. That’s a bad house. I don’t want to bring that sort of karma into our house.”

Sadie let the words hang for a few second and then said, “You can’t stop me. I’m almost twelve, Mommy. Other kids go places. Why can’t I?”

“You can go places, Sadie-love. We go places all the time. We just got back from the river, and we go to church tonight and Sundays.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean friends. I don’t have sleepovers like I did before Daddy died.”

“Stop it, Sadie.”

“When was the last time Heather or Preston came over to see me? I don’t even go to school anymore, not since the wreck. Not since this.” Sadie waved her hands over her legs.

“We go to school.” Sadie’s mom pointed at the kitchen table and the bookshelf behind it, full of Sadie’s home-school curriculums and other materials. “We have library trips into town every Tuesday and I take you to science classes on Mondays and Wednesdays.”

“Nobody comes to the library except me, and I’m only at school a couple of hours a week for my science labs. I can’t make friends because I’m at the handicapped table all by myself and none of my old friends talk to me anymore. It’s like they’re scared they’ll catch crippled from me. They don’t call or come over or anything. Plus, who did Jesus hang around with?”

“Stop it. I don’t want you messing with the Jamesons. They do drugs and Lord knows what else, baby.”

Sadie’s mom leaned over her, picked up the sign, and looked at it. Her mom twisted the sign and looked at the other side, at the pictures of oranges and the words
Florida’s Best
. She turned the sign around and studied what Sadie had drawn on the front. Sadie saw her eyes move to the trio of hearts in each corner of the cardboard sign and the artistic squiggles beneath the arrow. Her mom fingered the question mark at the end of
Peaches?
and traced out the heart at the bottom of the mark.

Her mom folded and unfolded the sign in what Sadie could only guess was a nervous reaction and then she handed the sign to Sadie and said, “Alright. But I don’t want you going over there. He is welcome in our home so long as he leaves the devil outside. That’s the Christian thing to do, baby.”

“Jesus is the Friend of Sinners, Mommy. That’s what the song says. He hung out with prostitutes and sinners and bad people. He washed their feet and oiled their heads. It’s the only way they got saved.”

“I know, baby. And look what happened to Jesus.”