Part 7 (1/2)

A voice was alive in the house when I woke up. I a.s.sumed it was the police-talking to Berner, beginning to search for the money. My heart had quieted. But it immediately began pounding. The kitchen drawer would be the first place to look.

I opened my bedroom door abruptly, intending to startle whoever was there, possibly make them run away. But it was Berner, in the hallway speaking into the telephone receiver, standing by the little receptacle outside our parents' bedroom. She was wearing her pajamas with blue elephants. She was barefoot, looping then unlooping the phone cord around her thumb, pus.h.i.+ng a finger into her thick hair and smiling at something she was hearing. Her voice was deeper. She'd put on makeup again and lipstick. ”Oh, yes,” she was saying. ”I don't know. That's a good idea.” Her voice sounded like my mother's. I didn't know who she was talking to, but I a.s.sumed it was Rudy Patterson. He was the only person I knew she knew, and she had told me what they did.

I was relieved it wasn't the police. I had a strong feeling, however, they'd soon be back. The older detective had said so. I went to the front window and looked out. Our street and the park were empty in the dappled sunlight. The Lutheran church was locked up. Shade fell across our lawn in a pretty way. In the park, the fat young deaf boy from up the street who I'd seen before was throwing a stick for a black Labrador dog. It ran, picked up the stick, then brought it back and dropped it at the boy's feet. He petted the dog's head and said something to it. No police cars were there. Occasionally the boy would turn almost secretly and look at our house.

I walked to the kitchen window and looked out to where our father's car was. But it was gone. The s.p.a.ce it had occupied beside the garage was like a box of air the Chevrolet had been in a moment before, then vanished from. I instantly opened the silverware drawer and expected to find nothing. But there were the two stacks of twenties under the plastic tray, which let me know I wasn't dreaming and these goings-on were really happening.

I picked up the pieces of the broken dish my mother had dropped earlier and put them in the trash under the sink. They were all large pieces and didn't require a broom. In a little while Berner came in the kitchen. She seemed-in her elephant pajamas-unfazed, as if being in the house this way was better, and she'd been waiting for this time and intended to make the most of it.

”They pulled his car away. A big wrecker truck came,” she said and looked out the front window. ”Nice big ole doggy.” She watched the boy throwing his stick in the park. I wanted to move the money. I didn't want to have anything to do with it. ”I don't think anybody's coming,” Berner said. She scratched her behind below her pajama-bottom waist, while she stared out at the boy with his dog. Her hair was bushy and disheveled from sleeping on it. ”That means we can do whatever we want to.”

”Why?” I said.

Her lips made a mean smile, and she squinted at me and breathed out the way she did when she was acting superior. ”I'll do whatever I want,” she said. ”Whatever you do will be what you want.” She pointed her finger at her ear and made a circle, then pointed it at me. ”You're loony,” she said. She often said that.

”What're you going to do?”

”I don't know.” She opened the refrigerator door, looked inside and closed it back. ”It won't be nothing. I've done nothing enough. Rudy wants to get married.”

”You can't,” I said. I knew you couldn't do that. We were fifteen. She'd already told me she didn't want to get married. She'd said it yesterday.

”Some places they'll let you. We'll go to Salt Lake City, Utah. It's better than here. Though he's not in the church now.”

I was disgusted to hear this. It made everything about me and everything I thought feel flimsy. Standing in our kitchen in her pajamas, talking about getting married to Rudy, she cast a shadow on me and whatever I thought-as if my fate had to be like hers, and you could tear my plans apart like wet tissue and watch them disappear.

Only, I didn't feel that way about myself and my plans. I could feel my own outline now. I would be myself no matter what else happened. My heart went calm then, which I thought was a positive sign. If I'd really felt all was lost and my life was over because I was tied to my sister, I don't know what I would've done. Except I'd have had very little chance of going on from that moment.

”I won't be getting married right off the bat,” Berner said. She turned and peered out the window again. Suddenly she whipped around with a big distorted smile. ”Mother told me I have to take care of you.” Tears all at once sprang from her eyes. It's possible I was starting to cry, too. We both had reasons to. But she cut hers off. ”I hate their G.o.dd.a.m.n guts,” she said.

”You don't have to run away,” I said. It was an awful feeling we had.

”Yes, I do,” she said. ”I . . .” I wanted to put my arms around her. It seemed like the most natural thing to do if I was going to be in control of everything. The telephone started ringing in the hall-loud, jangling miserable rings that destroyed the quiet in the house. And that's how the moment pa.s.sed-Berner and me almost holding on to each other, the phone ringing, and nothing else taking notice of us.

Chapter 33.

What was left of Sunday is a part that's not very clear. I remember everything feeling free inside the house and the house feeling comfortable with just the two of us in it. We ate some food out of the refrigerator-cold spaghetti and an apple. We ate looking out the front window at the park in the late afternoon shade. Cars drove by. One or two slowed and people inside leaned into the windows and looked at Berner and me standing there. One person waved and we both waved back. I didn't understand what anybody could possibly know about us. It was forward thinking of our mother to discourage us from a.s.similating, since if anybody-someone from the chess club-had come to gawk at us, I'd have been humiliated. And worse, because I hadn't done anything personally to feel humiliated about except have parents.

Before it got dark, Berner and I took a walk around the block, against our mother's instruction that we not leave the house. We did it because we could. No one noticed us. All the neighbors' houses were silent and shut up looking on Sunday afternoon. The neighborhood seemed nicer than I'd always thought it was.

We came back and sat on the front steps and watched the sky turn purple and the moon come up and a few lights p.r.i.c.kle on in our neighbors' windows. I noticed a paper kite that had been caught high up in the tree limbs in the park. I wondered how you'd get it down. We expected any moment for a car to drive up and strangers to tell us we had to go with them someplace. But no one came.

We didn't talk much about our parents. We both a.s.sumed, as we sat on the steps watching bats flit around the darkening trees in front of the humped moon, and pale stars showed up in the eastern sky, that they'd done what they were accused of doing. It had been too dramatic not to be true. They had gone away overnight-which they'd never done before. The pistol had disappeared. There was the money, and the Indians calling us and driving by. I may even have briefly wanted it to be true-whether I could've said so or not-as if by robbing a bank our father had supplied himself with something he'd been lacking. What it meant about our mother was a more difficult question. It could also be true that Berner and I, for that afternoon, may have lost the part of our minds that makes you fully aware of what's happening to you when it's happening. Why else would we have become calm, and taken a walk? Why else would I have thought my father was more substantial because he'd robbed a bank and broken our lives apart? It doesn't make much sense. Neither one of us thought to ask why had they robbed a bank, why had that ever seemed like a good idea. To us, it had just become a fact of life.

When we finally went in, it was full dark. Mosquitoes were in the air. Moths fluttered at the windows, and the cicadas were humming. Sunday night traffic on Central had all but stopped. We locked the doors and pulled the curtains and turned off the porch light. No matter what Berner thought, I believed someone would come and get us-the police or the juvenile officials, and that the police would search the house. We decided we'd let no one in-as if we were the man and the wife who lived there.

I went to the kitchen and got the money and told Berner where it'd come from. I didn't know if she'd seen it the day before, but she said she hadn't. She said she thought it was money our parents had stolen and we should hide it or else put it down the toilet. We counted it out at the dining room table and it was five hundred dollars. Berner then changed her mind and said we should divide it and each decide what to do with our half. We'd be accused anyway, because we had it, so we should keep it. She said there might even be more hidden in the house, and we should find it before the police came. We went in our parents' bedroom and looked in our mother's purse, inside their drawers and under their mattresses, in their clothes closet, inside their shoes, and up on the closet shelves where there were older shoes and sweaters and my father's Air Force hat. We found no more packets of money, though our mother had thirty dollars folded in her change purse. We also found what she had called her ”Jewish book,” which I'd seen but didn't know anything about. It was small and had what she'd said was Hebrew writing in it and was in her bottom dresser drawer with some baby pictures of us and a View-Master with a Taj Mahal card and her eyegla.s.s prescriptions and some artists' pencils and her poems and her journal, which we still wouldn't have dared to read. The book had a name I couldn't p.r.o.nounce when she'd said it and began with an ”H.” I'd never asked more about it. It occurred to me there was no place in a house a person could hide anything where no one would find it, and that the police were professional at finding things. Our house had no cellar, and again I was unwilling to go in the attic on account of it being hot and the home of snakes and hornets. We couldn't guess where more money was, and we eventually stopped looking.

In our father's monogrammed ”P” leather jewelry case, however-which smelled like him-I found his high school ring, bulky and gold with a square blue stone and engraved with a tiny ”D” for Demopolis, and two tiny rearing horses on each side, for the Mustangs. He'd said Demopolis meant ”where the people lived” in Greek, and he liked it because it signified everyone there was equal. I put the ring on-it only fit my thumb-and decided I'd wear it, since now I wasn't likely to have one of my own. His gold captain's bars were in there and his wrist.w.a.tch, and his blue-and-white Parsons name tag, and his metal dog tags and a paper box containing his war ribbons. Farther back in the closet was his heavy Air Force uniform, cleaned and pressed and ready to put on, though without the ribbons and bars. I put the jacket on. It was much too large for me and too hot to wear in the house. I'd had it on other times, and it was important feeling and I liked it. No money was in the pockets. When our father had put it on in the mornings and left the house for the base, he'd always been in a good humor. That had only been a few months ago. That time was gone now, no matter how not long ago it was.

Berner took out a pair of our mother's dark wool trousers she only wore in the winter, and held these up for display in front of the door mirror as if they were funny. They were too small for her to put on, though she tried. So she found a pair of flat black cloth shoes our mother had sent away for and squeezed her large bony foot inside and clopped around their bedroom with them half on, heels slapping, saying our mother lacked a sense of style, which wasn't true. She had a style of her own. We must've known our parents wouldn't be back. We wouldn't have put on their clothes and laughed and imitated them if life had a chance to be normal again.

Just after nine o'clock, a knock sounded at the front door. Of course, we thought it was the police and turned off the light in the bedroom. I crawled down the hall on my hands and knees-in my father's tunic-then crawled around to the kitchen. No one could see me through the front door gla.s.s. I got to the kitchen window and looked over the sill into the dark front yard, where the moon hung above the canopy of leaves and limbs, and the empty basketball backboard across the street cast shadows in the street lights. Rudy Patterson was standing on the front walk, tall and long armed and looking up at the sky, smoking a cigarette and holding a paper sack, waiting to be let in. He was talking to someone I couldn't see. I thought he might be singing. The porch light wasn't turned on.

I knew he was coming to take Berner away with him-that it was all planned. I'd be left in the house alone to face whatever happened and fend for myself. They were on their way to Salt Lake or San Francisco. That's what she'd decided. I didn't know what to do, but I didn't intend to let him in. I wanted the door locked and to stay in the house with Berner. I didn't think it would be better for her to run away. The same was true for me.

She had come to the hallway door and looked around the corner, as if she didn't care who saw her. ”Who's that?” she said.

I said, ”It's Rudy. He can't come in. Mother said no one could come in.”

”I forgot about him,” she said and moved out of the hallway. ”I told him to come. He can come in. Don't be stupid. He and I are in love.” She went straight to the front door and let Rudy Patterson into our house.

No matter how I'd felt when I saw Rudy standing out on the moonlit walk, when he came in our house he-at least for a time-changed everything. He was not the sort of boy you'd expect to have a good effect. But when he came in the door, time stopped and our lives stopped with it. Everything outside disappeared, as if the future and the past had come to their ends at once and it was just the three of us.

Rudy was immediately loud when he got inside. He walked around our living room, smoking his cigarette and inspecting things. The same things I'd taken a tally of earlier that day. The piano. The pictures on the wall. My father's discharge. My mother's suitcase and my pillowcase with my possessions inside. He seemed older and bigger than the last time I saw him, when we'd shot baskets in the park and Berner sat and watched us. He was only sixteen and had wild, curly red hair and long, red-freckled arms and big hands with hair already on the backs, and his little mustache that Berner didn't like. He had veins in his biceps below his T-s.h.i.+rt sleeves, and scratched, scuffed-up knuckles, as if he'd been crawling on rocks or possibly fighting. He wore dirty tight black dungarees with a wide belt and a bra.s.s buckle and a little scabbard knife on the side and thick black ankle boots-the kind men wore at the air base or where his father worked at the refinery. He bore little resemblance to the boy my sister had been friendly with in the summer and who I'd liked because he was nice to me. Something unusual had happened to him since the last time I saw him. I had no idea what.

But I still liked him and saw now, how my sister might decide to run away with him. He seemed mysterious and dangerous. I considered it might be a good idea to run away with them myself, and not face tomorrow and all it would probably contain.

As he was roaming the room, Rudy carried on talking. He'd never been inside our house. Possibly it made him nervous and act in an exaggerated way. He'd been drinking, too. In his paper sack he had three bottles of Pabst beer, plus a cellophane bag of peanuts in-the-hull, which he ate and left the hulls on our father's Niagara Falls puzzle. He also had a half pint of Evan Williams whiskey in his back pocket, which he referred to as ”the pete.” He made a considerable presence in our house, which was already in a strange state.

Rudy knew about our parents being in jail and us being alone. It was Rudy Berner had been talking to when I woke up, and she had told him. He said his own father and stepmother didn't get along at all and that Mormons were crazy, anyway. He didn't believe what they believed. Mormons had invented a secret language, he said, that they only spoke to each other. They planned to enslave Catholics and Jews, and Negroes were to be sent to Africa or else executed. Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., would be burned to the ground. If you left the Mormon Church, they hunted you down and brought you back in chains. He took ”the pete” out, pulled a drink off of it, smacked his lips, then shockingly handed it to Berner, who pulled a drink, then handed it to me and I pulled one. I swallowed mine down all at once and had to clench my teeth to keep from choking. It made my throat constrict and burn all the way to my stomach, and hurt more there. Berner took another drink. She'd done it before. She didn't scowl, and afterward she patted her lips with her fingers as if she'd liked it. Rudy then gave her a cigarette, which he lighted and she smoked and held away from herself between her thumb and middle finger. This was in the living room of our house! Twelve hours ago our parents had been there. Their rules had governed our behavior and determined everything we did. Now they were gone, and so were their rules. It was a dizzying feeling. I felt I had a rough idea, then, about what the rest of my life would be.

Berner sat down in one of the living room chairs and just watched Rudy. His behavior was a kind of performance. He walked around the room saying his parents had threatened him with becoming a ward of the state, and that was the most terrible thing that could happen. It meant you were sent to a big orphanage in Miles City and strangers could adopt you and make you their private property. At his age n.o.body would adopt him, so he'd be a prisoner left in the foul company of mean ranch boys whose parents had died or had abandoned them, or filthy Indian kids whose parents were perverted. Your life was ruined even if you survived it. This eventuality, I thought, was what our mother was fearful of and why she'd been definite about Berner and me not leaving with anyone but Miss Remlinger.

The living room soon smelled like Rudy's cigarettes and whiskey and beer. It had been clean not long before. We would have to clean it up again tomorrow. I went and turned on the attic fan, which began its clatter-racket and drew some smoke away. All the doors and windows were locked shut from when I'd locked them earlier.

I still was wearing my father's Air Force tunic, and Rudy said he'd like to try it on. I took it off, and he put it on, and it fit him better than it fit me. It also had an instant effect on him. He walked around our living room some more with his cigarette and his beer, but as if he was an officer, and our house was a staging area for a war he would soon be fighting.

”I'm ready to shoot down a lot of Commies now,” he said in a made-up official voice as he strutted about. Berner said she was, too. He was drunk, of course. I thought he looked a little silly. Part of his large presence had already begun to fade-though I still liked him. Possibly I was a little drunk myself.

”Do you have any music we can play?” Rudy said, admiring himself in the smoky gla.s.s mirror that hung over the davenport and had been in the house when we got there.

”He's got some records,” Berner said, referring to our father.

”I'd like to hear one,” Rudy said. He set his hands on his hips like pictures of General Patton I'd seen in the World Book.

Berner went to the phonograph and got out one of our father's 78s from the cabinet and put it on the turntable-things I'd only seen him do.

Right away, Glenn Miller's band started playing one of our father's favorites. ”The Little Brown Jug.” Our father had great respect for Glenn Miller, because he'd died in the service of his country.

Rudy instantly started dancing around by himself. He swooped and slid across the living room, smiling and dipping his knees and raising and lowering his arms and turning circles-his beer in one hand, his cigarette in the other.