them

  A year ago she’d still played horses, but now she was getting too old. She had played the leader of a herd of horses, a great black stallion. She had dug her heels into the earth and kicked into the air, playing alone, concentrating painfully on being a horse—she had played in secret, shaking her long hair like a mane. Around the house or in the presence of other children she never let herself go like that. She didn’t “play.” She was not large for her age but she seemed somehow older, and that was why, when something went wrong in the kitchen, she never tried to escape but said calmly that she’d fix it—spilled food, a broken plate, something Betty might have done. She never made excuses. One time when her mother and Flora Stonewall had spent the whole day drinking beer and telling stories about their childhoods, and her mother had done nothing about starting supper, Maureen had taken over in the kitchen and both women had teased her. “Look at Maureen, she’s going to make somebody a good wife,” Flora said. She was a handsome, lazy woman with long red hair, sometimes tied back from her face. Her arms were big, big-boned, and her legs were rather thick. Her voice was musical in a slightly accusing, singsong way: she seemed to like Maureen. Scraping garbage into the smelly pail under the sink, doing the dishes until her face was flushed from the heat, Maureen forced her mind to concentrate upon the schoolroom she presided over or upon the ravine in which the wild horses lived or upon the library with its waxed, smooth floors and the occasional clicking of the librarian’s typewriter. When she was by herself her thoughts wandered to these things. She sometimes woke to find herself standing in a doorway, absent-mindedly caressing her own arm, while Loretta sailed past and said, “Wake up, kid, the house is on fire.”

  She woke to see her family at supper, shapes inside clothes, weighed down in their chairs. It made her dizzy to think of them this way. Her father was a dense object, his shirt partly unbuttoned; her mother was a fluttery, insubstantial object; her grandmother was thick, heavy, brooding, dressed in black. One time, downtown, she had seen her own sister with a wild bunch of girls, fooling around by a bus stop. The girls were all dressed in blue jeans and sweatshirts. They surged around a corner and signaled a bus, and when the bus pulled over to stop and the door opened they ran away. Betty was shrieking with laughter, a hard, wiry little object, like a puppet or even like a top, spinning out of control, turning round and round on the sidewalk until she bumped against a passerby and her friends all laughed at her. Maureen had shrunk back, not wanting to be seen. Was that her sister, that awful girl with the dark blond hair cut short as a boy’s, shorter than Jules’s hair, that girl with her hard, muscular legs and her hoarse voice? And she often watched Jules when he walked through the house, always tired, narrowing her eyes until her brother became a shadowy object passing her, bringing out no response in her, no love or kinship. He was growing up and had to do the things grownups did. He had to entwine himself around some girl, he had to do certain things with her and with the crowd he ran with, he had to work, he had to make money, he had to shave, to fuss with his hair, to run his hands wearily across his eyes, to answer in a sharp, ugly voice if someone bothered him—“Go to hell, Maureen,” he would say, or to Betty, “I don’t have time for screwing around, get away.” He was always pushing himself off from them, always escaping.

  One day in spring, on her way home from the library, Maureen scared up a toad near a house on her block. She chased it under a nearby porch. She found a stick and tried to poke it into jumping, but the stick wasn’t quite long enough—there the toad sat, its body puffed and gulping, terrified but not moving, in a pile of leaves. She felt mean. She thought, If I crawled under the porch I could get that toad, and there was something in the very kinship between them, their similar breathlessness, their terror, that made her want to crawl under. She poked around with the stick, leaning forward on her hands and knees, but the toad did not move; they eyed each other in silence.

  When she got home Flora Stonewall was sitting on the front steps. She said casually, “Oh, Maureen, where you been? I’m spost to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “Your ma and grandma have gone somewhere. They didn’t know where you were. Jules drove them. They told me I was spost to wait for you—”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I guess your pa had some trouble.”

  Maureen stared at her. “What kind of trouble? With the police?”

  “Honey, no, don’t talk like that,” Flora said, pained, drawing her lips and eyebrows up in the same instant. “Your pa had some trouble at work. An accident. He got hurt at work.”

  “Hurt? How?”

  “I don’t know, honey. Why don’t you go inside or something? You want a Royal Crown? I got some in my refrigerator. You want one?”

  “No.”

  “Loretta told me to wait for you. I’m real sorry to tell you bad news, it just makes me feel awful, honey. You sure you don’t want no Royal Crown? Why don’t you come in my place and relax?”

  “No, I’m all right,” Maureen said.

  She went past Flora, dignified and cold with fear, and the very silence of their house told her: the end. The end of something. The front room looked like hell, the sofa’s slipcover was loose on one end and the lamp shade was crooked, sunlight from the side window fell upon a worn brown rug; it was all familiar, the very staleness of the house was familiar and should have been a relief, but suddenly Maureen realized how temporary it was—even if it was ugly it was still temporary and it could still be lost. She went to lie on her bed, which was unmade. She looked up at the ceiling. She waited.

  After a while the back door opened and someone ran in. “Hey, Maureen,” Jules called.

  She did not answer.

  He came to the door of her room and looked in. “Did she tell you, next door? Tell you what happened?”

  “Is Pa dead?”

  “He’s in the hospital.”

  Maureen stared at him. It was a surprise to see how tall Jules was now. He didn’t wear the tight-pegged pants of a year before, his hair was brushed back impatiently from his face, he looked shaken and sick. He said, “He’s going to die maybe. Another man did die who was with him. A load of steel casings fell on them—”

  “ ‘Casings’—?”

  “I guess. I don’t know. Steel. It was loose, and it slipped. It fell on them.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  They stared at each other. Finally Maureen said, stammering, “Pa’s in—the hospital?”

  “The emergency room at Ford’s.”

  The emergency room. It was real, then. She saw the hospital suddenly, that heavy fortresslike building.

  “We’re going there. First I’ll take you out for a hamburger or something.”

  Maureen covered her face with her trembling hands.

  “Hey, kid,” Jules said quickly, “don’t cry! You don’t have to have a hamburger, that was Ma’s idea. Feed the gut first. That’s Ma. Right? You and Betty. Don’t cry, honey—you want me to start bawling myself?”

  Maureen took her hands slowly away from her face and Jules was still there. His face was pinched and white. “You wouldn’t ever cry for anybody,” she said.

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say!”

  Betty was nowhere around so they drove out to a Biff’s restaurant on Woodward. Maureen felt liberated, daring, in the car—it was as if a holiday had come unexpectedly.

  “Did it really happen?” Maureen kept asking.

  Jules glanced over at her. “Yes, sure. You think I’d kid about something like that?”

  “But, I mean…did it really happen like you said? A ton of stuff fell on him?” she asked.

  “Two tons, it was,” said Jules.

  If Jules could only keep driving forever! Up north along the avenue, turning north continually, following any roads, getting them out of this city and away from the hospital where their father lay and had nothing to do with them, already changed, distan
t…Maureen kept gripping her face with her hands, feeling it, uncertain of her own face and skull, wondering at it. This skull could be crushed too. Jules glanced at her but said nothing about her odd behavior. Instead he said, as if knowing her thoughts, “It would be damn nice to keep on driving, huh? Up to northern Michigan where there’s lots of lakes and woods, past the tree line, someplace where nobody has been yet but that’s cleared off and ready for us to move in. I can imagine the sky there, and a lake. I can imagine a moose drinking from the lake. Or maybe it was in a picture I saw, in a magazine or on a calendar…”

  It frightened her, the way his voice ran down suddenly. It seemed to lose energy.

  “What’s a moose exactly?” she said.

  They went into the restaurant. Maureen had no appetite but, sitting next to Jules at the counter, reading through the menu again and again, she thought that she had better eat; it was a privilege, being in a restaurant. They had hamburgers and French fries. Maureen ate everything, even the last burnt, wrinkled French fries. She rubbed her finger on the plate and licked salt from it.

  Jules said, muttering so no one else could hear, “Maybe he’s dead already. I hope so. Then we can get over waiting. We might come in the door and they’ll say he’s already dead! And Ma will be bawling, and Grandma Wendall mad. We’ll just park the car and walk in and they’ll say, Your father is dead.”

  Maureen was ashamed now of having eaten so much. She had forgotten, in a way, why they were at Biff’s and not at home.

  “You never liked Pa, did you?” she said softly.

  “It’s a rotten mess. Those women bawling…The hospital stinks, I can’t stand that smell. No, I didn’t like him, Reeny, but shut up about it. Don’t you ever say that again. If I kidded around it was just for the hell of it—I mean, about wanting him to drop dead—for the hell of it and because…because I couldn’t stand it, him being so quiet! I had enough of his quiet.” Jules wiped his hand under his nose suddenly. “It got next to me and almost drove me crazy sometimes. Jesus Christ, he taught me all I need to know about quiet!”

  11

  After his father’s funeral Jules went for a walk downtown. He looked in store windows like everyone else and allowed himself to be brushed by people passing him in a hurry, feeling himself invisible, floating. He was almost sixteen years old. He could not understand what that meant: sixteen years of age. His father’s death had sloughed off onto him the heaviness of his father’s spirit, and his heaviness, like a gas, was filling up inside him. He had heard that the dead collect gas, internally. Yet he was strangely lightheaded, though his feet ached. His head felt as if it might float away. The dirty sidewalks around him and the hurrying feet of other people were going one way; and his brain seemed to be straining another way. There was something he had to get straight, come to peace with, but here he was, cold and disordered, lightheaded, crossing over to the Grand Circus Park, alive and dressed unnaturally in a good dark suit, while his father was dead and set in the ground.

  Who had his father been exactly?

  I can’t remember his face or anything he said, Jules thought in a panic. It was his father he had to come to grips with. It was not right that a man should live and die and come to nothing, be forgotten, with his own son unable to really remember him—it did not seem right. As Jules passed a park bench an old man watched him closely, as if about to recognize him. Jules looked away. He did not want to be recognized. His mother’s sloppy, whining grief and his sisters’ fear chilled him; he did not want to be a part of it. He had to get away from everyone. So his father had been killed, so it had happened and was now quite naturally being passed by, and maybe his father had never really recognized him either, what difference did it make? He tried to absorb it all. His mother could absorb nothing, everything spilled out of her like those hot painful tears and so he, Jules, would accept everything and make it normal. He lingered by the movie houses, looking at posters—the handsome, made-up faces did not seem to mean anything to him. They could absorb grief, pain, joy, without strain—no lines appeared on their faces, nothing. Jules wondered if these faces would someday betray him. Inside the big old movie houses everything went on as usual, thin crowds came and went, there was the usual odor of soiled carpeting and stale popcorn and that musty darkness of old, large, downtown buildings, inexplicable. Jules stared at the posters, waiting to become interested. He stared at a photograph of Marlon Brando. Much of his life had come from movies, much of his language and his good spirits. From the movies he had sensed that life is backed by music, but now, out on the sidewalk, he felt depressed and lifeless, and there was no music anywhere around him or the promise of music.

  His father had been—how old? What pain had he felt? And the body that had felt pain—had it really been his father’s, the man who had sat for so long at a certain place at the table, the man who had eaten supper in a certain way every night, anxious to get it over? The man Jules had always hated?

  He walked slowly home. It was a long walk. The weather was cool, and he could not think of which season it was—spring or fall. The river looked steamy, but that was probably from factories on the west side. Smoke billowed up from a number of points. It rose and flowed gently across the Ambassador Bridge, passing through the bridge, making it look unreal; cars and trucks drove through the smoke. Jules could not remember why he’d come so far for a walk, what he was looking for, what he had hoped to figure out, when he had many things to do at home—his mother needed him—and he was uncomfortable in this suit. His mother needed him at home and would need him permanently.

  He began to sweat. Out in the river there were maybe bodies beneath the surface of the water, or at least there were stories kids told about seeing bodies bob to the surface and then disappear again…The dead, the drowned, so silent and patient….Jules felt that these dark mysterious people moved about in ordinary air, corpses that looked alive. You might stumble into one of them, fall into an embrace, feel that cold heavy breath upon you and that ratty, stringy cold hair….

  Just what had his father been like, anyway? Jules remembered suddenly his father trying to fix the toilet, trying to stop a leak. The bathroom door was warped. The linoleum was of various levels, bloated and worn smooth, so that when he sat in the bathroom Jules stared down at this landscape and had the vague idea that it was a relief map of something, a secret land. His father had tried to fix the toilet many times, the faucets many times. No luck. The heavy breathing, the muttering, the minutes and minutes of silent struggle, and then, “Goddam it!” and the noise of something being thrown down, a wrench or a pliers, whatever. The silence, the breathing and then the noise. That was his father. Never any luck fixing things. Roaches came out of the secret edges of the bathroom at night and sometimes they were still out in the morning, lazy things, and often they were in the kitchen cupboards and under the sink, very often—they made his father swear. The floor must have been a real landscape to the roaches. Jules narrowed his eyes and tried to think about his father. What had his father to do with roaches? Why was it easier to think of them than of his father? His father and money: that was important. That was maybe the secret. He had complained about money. He hadn’t complained about much, but when he did it was usually about money. Where did that money go, a paycheck’s worth? Where did that twenty dollars go? And on and on, the misery over money, the worry over money, not having enough, too many people to feed, a sick mother in the house, and every year the kids got flu and the antibiotics were very expensive. Pills were expensive. Loretta had had some trouble with her kidneys and had to take pills every six hours, and those pills were expensive, like everything else in the United States, very expensive, so that Jules’s father would say viciously, “One of these days I’m taking off! You can all go to hell!” Or he would say, looking up from the newspaper where he’d read something, “All the niggers are on welfare, why not me? Us? Everybody can go to hell!”

  Jules had thought of his father’s anger during
the Mass said for him. No special Mass, a funeral Mass. A dreary church. Jules had sat beside his mother, immensely weary of her sorrow, which was as confused and lightheaded and uncontrolled as her anger usually was. If only he could depend upon her….Jules hadn’t paid much attention to the funeral Mass. He no longer went to church. He felt the churches of the city drag at him as he passed, a melancholy lure. They were like vast legendary caverns in the sea, luring swimmers down, breathing them in with mysterious currents—promises of secrets, rewards, a special knowledge that no longer mattered. He did not care. His father had not cared. There hadn’t been any anger in it, there had been only nothing. His father’s face smooth and blank as a skull with white skin stretched over it—that was his father. Jules could almost remember him. The Mass had obscured him, the dead man, but now he was returning to Jules, painfully. Anger was at the core of him. That was his secret—anger.

  But Jules hadn’t killed him.

  Yes, anger was at the core of him; his soul was anger, made up of anger. Anger for what? For nothing, for himself, for life, for the assembly line, for the cockroaches and the dripping toilet. One thing was as good as another. Anger. No money. Where had the money gone? Where would the money come from? Anger, money. His father.