“Which is what he did.
“Then he turned to me. ‘Okay—you still wanna stay? You won’t have Cindy no more to keep you company.’ Then he laughed. But, see, he didn’t think I should ever have no pets. Because of the dogs. At all. Yeah, he was drunk—but that’s how he was. And I said, yeah, I’d still stay. Two weeks later, on the mainland, two days after his birthday, he had his accident. So, ’cause I was the only family he had, once they let him out the hospital, I took him in.” Jay turned one way, then the other, as if, momentarily, he was unsure where to go. “Hey, why do I kid myself? I hate ’im as much today as I did back then. But I do try to be nice, even so. Some people said ’cause him and one of Johnston’s men was both drivin on I-Twenty-two at nine o’clock at night, drunk as skunks in opposite directions, and whammed into each other and Shad caromed off into that ol’ hemlock and broke his back, shattered his shoulder, smashed his hip and broke one leg in three places and the other in four, it was God’s retribution on ’em both. Johnston’s feller was dead and gone and I can’t even remember his name, ’cept he was redheaded and only about nineteen. Farklin? Franklin? Somethin’ like that. But I say it was luck bein’ cruel to a couple of men who both drunk way too much. And down here, probably both had their reasons. Fact is, I’m surprised Shad hadn’t kilt hisself already. I mean both his damned step daddies beat on him all the while he was growin’ up, so he wouldn’t be no sissy—like me. And two wives done already left him…I think he even loved one of ’em. But both just wanted to take him for all they could get—as if there was somethin’ else you could do with a bastard like that.” Jay’s laugh was harsh.
Then, behind them, harsher: “You’re all damned sinners—damned and goin’ to hell! That’s what I say!”
It was loud and surprising enough that Eric flinched.
“See?” Jay grinned. “There he goes.”
Eric glanced back. But in his wheelchair and sweater, Shad hadn’t seemed to have moved.
“That’s Shad’s ‘good-night’ to you. Right, Mex?” And Jay walked away through a dark hall, pushing aside a hanging drape and chuckling. “…Crazy coot.” They followed, while, before them, Jay shook his head. “Next time we come out here, I’ll take you around and show you a few other things. It’s an interestin’ old place. But, like I say, tonight I’m kinda beat.”
As he walked, Mex smiled. In the shadow, it looked to Eric like general embarrassment.
They came into the long kitchen. On the ceiling, in rows of four, florescent lights were already on.
Fifteen feet down the space, barefooted Mex went to the refrigerator. Over the counter, sink, and stove, the windows were black.
Jay strolled to the range. “I’m turnin’ on the big burner for you,” he said in Mex’s direction. Then he nodded to Eric. “Go on, sit down, there.” A table was covered with red and white checked oilcloth. “We’ll phone your ma, and you can let her know we ain’t hog-tied you and violated your honor—yet.”
When Jay let him speak to Barb, on the blocky red phone’s receiver, the first thing Eric said was, “They live in a real big house out here!”
“Yes,” Barb said. “That’s what Clem told me.”
The chicken stew Mex heated up was good.
Between spoonfuls, Eric asked, “This is…your house?”
“It’s Hugh’s, now.” Outside, cicadas chirped. “It used to be Kyle’s—Hugh is Kyle’s cousin. I mean Kyle still owns it.” Jay’s spoon clinked the ceramic rim as he helped himself to more. Mex had also heated up a bowl of corn-off-the-cob with cut-up green and red peppers and onions and another bowl of okra. With their wrinkled edges blackened, the red peppers in the corn were hotter than Eric expected.
Noticing he hadn’t taken any okra, Jay said, “You know how to eat that stuff, don’t you?”
“Huh?” Eric asked.
“Put a piece in your mouth—” Jay forked up a vegetable tube like a two-inch length of green dowel—“then press it against the roof with your tongue—just once, now—for the flavor. Then you swallow it right down. Don’t chew it—don’t chew it at all—or it’ll go to a goosh even a snot jockey like you would up-chuck over, once it goes to slime. Press and swaller. Press and swaller. Ain’t that right, Mex?” Mex nodded, while Jay put the okra in his mouth—and (it looked like) pressed and swallowed. “Do it the right way, though, and it’s damned good.”
“Oh…” Eric said. He reached over to get the two-liter bottle of Pepsi Mex had set out and refilled his glass.
“Hugh’s Kyle’s cousin,” Jay repeated. “He used to work for Kyle and his family. After Kyle left to look after his business in Columbus, he said Hugh could live here, if he wouldn’t mind a friend of Kyle’s occasionally stayin’ with him. I knowed Kyle and Hugh long as I knowed Dynamite. We was all kids together—‘asshole buddies’ they called us. Which is another way of sayin’ we was the elementary school faggot mafia. When Kyle said Mex and me could come out here and stay in a room or two, Hugh said he was happy for the company. Besides, I’m handy—more handy than Hugh, anyway. And I don’t mind fixin’ this and that—an old house like this needs a lotta that kinda work. Takin’ care of Shad gives Hugh somethin’ to do, he says. If I had to do it twenty-four/seven, I’d’ve killed him already, probably. Hugh and Mex get along—but Hugh’s the kind of feller what gets along with ever’body. Four people in a place what used to hold a family of six with another ten servants—the older term, I believe, is ‘house niggers’—slaves, to you—don’t get in each other’s way that much.”
When they were finished, Jay carried the dishes to the sink and rinsed them. “Mex’ll put ’em in the dishwasher. We go to bed pretty early, ’cause we get up before light. But on the garbage run, you’re used to that. You’re gonna have to get up, too, ’cause we promised to have you back with your mama by the time she opens the Lighthouse. So let’s show you where you’ll be sleepin’.”
“That’s all right,” Eric said. Then, after a moment, he asked, “I ain’t bunkin’ in with…you guys?”
“Nope.” Jay grinned at him. “Not tonight.”
“Oh,” Eric said. “Oh…Okay. It would bother Hugh…?”
Jay grinned. “Hugh don’t give a fuck…” But he let it hang without elaboration. And Eric had no idea where to take it.
Somehow, first, they went out and across the hall into Mex and Jay’s bedroom to get something—it was as cluttered as Dynamite’s back in the Dump, which made Eric feel better. Or at least more comfortable. They showed him the bathroom at the end of the hall and gave him a towel. (There was another commode stall off the end of the kitchen.)
Then they took him down the hall to his room.
It was pretty bare. A day bed stood against one wall. A table and a chair with a lamp on it stood against another. “We’ll come wake you when it’s time to rise and shine.”
Mex gave Eric’s shoulder a squeeze. Eric wondered if he could at least ask for a goodnight hug, but, while he was debating how to put it, both Mex and Jay went out—and closed the door.
Eric took off his clothes, went out into the hall to the bathroom at the end, urinated, wondered if he should take a shower, but because there was no curtain around the tub, decided to give himself a washcloth wipe at the sink. He dried himself on the terrycloth, then went back down the hall, barefoot over the hallway’s uncarpeted planks, hoping either Mex or Jay might come out of their room just then and catch him naked. It would be easier to start something that way. Legs, arms, and the small of Eric’s back were cool with leftover damp.
In his room, Eric sat on his bed’s edge for a couple of minutes. He ran his hands out over the spread, with its embroidered knoblets every inch-and-a-half, that rubbed on his palms, already roughened from the near two months of garbage hauling.
He turned his hands up, put them on his thighs, and looked at them.
I like having rough hands, he thought.
(He remembered the first few weeks when he’d been proud of the dirt that had worked al
l but permanently around his nails and into the lines deepening on his hands. Only now he’d stopped thinking about it at all, when he realized that wash as much as he might, it would be back again in a day.)
Maybe, he thought, the boatmen don’t.
He got up, pulled back the covers’ edge so he could get in, then walked over and turned off the lamp. Darkness filled the room and his eyes, like ink poured—fast—into a glass bowl. He walked back over the rug until the bed tapped him above the knees, turned, and sat, turning his head left and right in the pitchy black.
This is where Robert Kyle lived and grew up, he thought. This is where the Dump—or the idea for the Dump—probably began. If not in this room, then in a room near it. He worked himself further back on the bed. Maybe Robert Kyle sat here, twenty-five, thirty years ago, in the dark, like this, and thought about a stretch of land on the mainland, a scattering of houses and cabins, and how he’d tell his friends Dynamite and Jay…
Eric moved still further back.
Tugging at his penis, he leaned over, lifted his feet, and slid them under the sheet, while the pillow caught his head—
—and woke.
Eric lay a long time, wondering what the hour was. Suddenly, he pushed back the covers, stood up, and walked toward the wall he remembered held the door. If he turned on the lamp…but it was more fun—hell, more interesting in the dark.
Eric felt around the wall to the left, but encountered no jamb. So, fingering gritty wallpaper, he worked back the other way—till he felt the door molding.
In the hall, orange came from the nightlight behind the partially open bathroom door.
Adolescent devilment surged suddenly, and Eric thought: I’m gonna explore this whole place tonight, naked!
In the kitchen, the formerly black windows were filled with the moon’s silver, lighting the sink, the counter, the stove, the floor’s vinyl. A minute later, somehow back in the dark living room, he padded across the rug, notably warmer under the balls of his feet than the boards of the previous rooms. On his left, a walk-in fireplace was the ghost of an entrance to another world.
From somewhere he found himself wondering if time itself were not increasing its speed, even as—was it the chill on the nighttime house?—in the forward hall he swung around the newel post and, two at a time, sprinted up the stairway.
How big was this place? At this point, Eric was still uncertain how many floors the whole of it had.
When I get to the top, I’m going to find I’ve become some old man, fifty-five, sixty-five years old—with white hair and everything. I bet this house is a hundred years old—even two hundred. That’s how it looked when I came in—like walking into someplace two hundred years ago. And now it’s two hundred years later. And I’m a hundred, two hundred years older than when I came in…
Reaching the top step, Eric swung around to sprint down a wide corridor—books filled the shelves to the left. He glanced right, and realized he was on an internal balcony, looking down into the living room. He swung through another arched doorway and smashed into moonlight—
Which was empty, bright, and without resistance.
It came from a large window at the far end of the…upstairs hall he’d entered. Couches, arm chairs, more books on the walls…
Eric walked onto the carpet, gritty beneath his feet. He moved along behind a sofa, between tables and armchairs. He slowed to rub his genitals. Once he felt something like a piece of gravel under his instep. As he stepped further, it occurred to him that, under heel or ball, it would have hurt. He moved among dark furniture, ghostly ivory from the windows. To the left of the great room, the wall was covered with shelves. Left and right of them were dark arches, which, at first, he thought were more shelves.
He reached the farther of the two—doors or halls into other rooms? Eyes fixed within, he came within twelve, eight, five feet: a stairway’s wraith rose behind the wall to the right, leading to a still higher floor.
From beside and behind him came a sound, like a squeaking wheel. Naked in the great room, Eric turned—
Crouching, he staggered back, six or seven inches. At the same time, chills enveloped him, so many and so thoroughly they did not feel like something within his body, but like waves and waves around him, rolling through him, across him, over him. He’d closed his eyes, tightly—
And opened them again.
What he’d seen was Shad, in his wheel chair, directly behind him. Only, with a blink, it was a huge Shad, a Shad three times as large as life! But that was impossible…Was it Hugh, in his dressing gown, sitting in some great chair—watching him?
The figure, in moonlight, was…Eric made himself stand up straight—twenty feet away, in the corner.
It was not directly behind him.
But it was big—and, he realized now, it wasn’t a seated figure at all.
Again outside, a wind made the sash grate against its sill. A branch beyond the window moved before the moon, and smoky light drifted back and forth over the immense statue.
Eric stepped forward.
A very large bear…bull? Boar? Was it stuffed…? Real…?
He stepped closer.
Nor was it rearing on its hind legs, one claw high, one claw—no, not a claw, but a hand—out, as if to sweep in the world. It was a bull, only it squatted like a man. Or kneeled, anyway, one knee down. The other, up before it, was some immense bird’s claw, big enough to grip his head. Those were wings, back in the shadows, but not bird wings. They looked like a bat’s—only not like any bat Eric had ever seen. Somehow, because he hadn’t been looking for it, he’d missed it in its dim corner. But, moving with the branch outside, moonlight kept making the forward of the two arms…move.
At last he was right in front it. It was…a minotaur? Or something like one, winged and kneeling on one leg in the corner. Between its thighs—the one it kneeled on seemed human enough, as was its great foot—he could see the huge lengths of its tail, like a serpent, thick as a thigh, rolling and coiling behind it. Knowing it was a statue, Eric reached out and up, expecting to feel the rough fur of ancient taxidermy on its forearm.
He touched the huge, extended hand.
It was metal—black with tarnish.
Eric’s heart began to still. Its pedestal represented rock and branches, with a shell among them—and a starfish—as if it kneeled on a length of beach.
Bent before him, the feathered knee shone where the patina had worn away; as it had on the knuckles of the upturned fingers—a hand for which, easily, Jay’s could have been the model—and the flattened snout, a pig’s nose on a bull’s horned head. He imagined generations of children, during holidays in this hall, at Christmas and high summer, Halloween and Easter, feeling the parts that extended, wearing the stain from its bronze, so that the yellow metal showed through, turned platinum by the moon.
Eric looked at the creature’s groin. One side of its hanging penis, joined to the sack of its testicles, had also been rendered a white gold by how many surreptitious touches when no one else was there.
Eric backed away, breathing more easily. At last he turned, walked into the archway, and started up the stairs.
Then, with a hand on the heavy banister and the energy of the night’s adventure, he began to run. Maybe I’ll come out a thousand years from now—
And came out at the head of the broad railing, in a small room—small compared to the room below—which, as he turned to orient himself, he realized, was round. About the walls, crowded bookshelves alternated with shelf-to-roof windows. Two of the windows had shades pulled down—one only a few inches, one at least two-and-a-half feet.
Beneath them, under moonlight, through old panes, he could see the sea.
The smell was like old wood and—ancient?—varnish. Was that smell, he wondered suddenly, owls? (Where had he smelled owls before? In Texas…?) On a wide desk that fit as if it had been made for the room, against the curved wall, stood an orrery.
Eric knew neither the word nor what the ob
ject was.
It looked, however, like some complex oversized medieval gyroscope, sitting on a snake coiled over the back of the great cast tortoise, its base.
Supported over it were rings and spheres, clear and scrolled, with scales and rods projecting from the crystal at its center. Now, on those rods, he began to recognize moons and planets—that one, because of the rings, he realized, was Saturn. Certainly it had been constructed before the discovery of Uranus’s rings—or before Uranus itself, not to mention the post-Plutonians. He reached for it, started to move one globe—and all the other rods and globes began to sweep at the same time, some faster, some slower.
He jerked his hand back, as if the material universe around him might topple and tumble from his disturbance.
The model stopped moving.
Turning away, Eric looked at the books on the shelves. (No, the room wasn’t round: it was octagonal.) The ones that stood in moonlight, so that he could read the titles and authors embossed in dark leather, were three volumes of François Villon, by Typhony Thayer, Travels in Arabia Desserta, Volumes One and Two, by Charles M. Doughty, Die Welt als Wille und Vorsstellen, also in two volumes, by Arthur Schopenhauer, several unnumbered volumes by Benedict de Spinoza—Ethica, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Principia Philosophiae Cartesianae, Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, Cogitata Metaphysica, Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch, en deszelfs Welstand—and still other books by Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Novalis—
Shelf after shelf of books bore the same titles in worn gold letters: Comedie Humaine. Under it were two volumes of Le Juif errant and three of Les Mystères des Paris, and six, seven, eight of Les Sept pêches capitaux—
Momentarily the room flared silver, flickered—and thunder filled it up, then fumbled away. Eric looked out the window. He looked out one of the others…and was surprised to see drops on the glass.
A storm…starting?
On one shelf directly in front of him, he saw a framed picture—no, with the moonlight coming in behind, he realized it was a glassed-over newspaper photo. Across the top of the page with its feathered edge it said The Hemmings Herald. The headline read: