Nebraska: Stories

  Annette said, “My baby isn't Ivan's, you know.”

  I guess I sighed with the remembering of those painful times.

  Annette said, “I'm glad we were able to stay friends.”

  “Me too,” I said, and I scooched out to see my little girl with an angel-food-cake knife in her hands, waddling over to me. “Gina!” I yelled. “You little snot! Where'd you get that?”

  She gave it to me and wiped her hands on her coat. “Dut,” Gina said, and though my husband would probably have reprimanded her, I knelt down and told her how she mustn't play with knives and what a good girl she was to bring it right to me. She didn't listen for very long, and I put the knife in my sweater pocket for the time being.

  Annette was looking peculiar, and I could tell she wanted an explanation, but then there was a commotion in the cattle pen and we looked to where Ivan and Slick were pushing cow rumps aside in order to get close to the trough. They glared at something on the ground out there, and I glanced at the cake knife again, seeing the unmistakable signs of blood.

  “I'm going out to the cattle pen,” I imparted. “You keep Gina with you.”

  Annette said, “1 hope your stock is okay.”

  The day was on the wane as I proceeded across the yard and onto the cow path inside the pen, the cake knife gripped in my right hand within my sweater pocket. The cattle were rubbing against the fence and ignorantly surging toward the silage in the feed trough. Slick was saying, “You oughta get a photograph, Ivan.” My husband kept his eyes on one spot, his gloved hands on his hips, his left boot experimenting by moving something I couldn't see.

  I got the cattle to part by tilting against them with all my weight. They were heavy as Cadillacs. And I made my toilsome way to my husband's side only to be greeted with a look of ill tidings and with an inquiry that was to justify all my grim forebodings. He asked, “Do you know how it happened, Riva?”

  I regarded ground that was soggy with blood and saw the green creature that I'd so fervently prayed was long gone. He was lying on his scaly back and his yellow eyes were glowering as if the being were still enraged over the many stabbings into his heart. Death had been good for his general attractiveness, gloss- ing over his many physical flaws and giving him a childlike quality that tugged at my sympathy.

  Again Ivan nudged the being with his boot, acting like it was no more than a cow, and asking me with great dismay, “How'd the dang thing get killed, do ya think?”

  And I said, “Love. Love killed it. Love as sharp as a knife.”

  Slick gazed upon me strangely, and my husband looked at me with grief as I sank to the earth among the cattle, feeling the warmth of their breathing. I knew then that the anguish I'd experienced over those past many months was going to disappear, and that my life, over which I'd despaired for so long, was going to keep changing and improving with each minute of the day.

  Sleepless

  She walked her house by day, discovering it. She sat on the rough wooden staircase to the basement in order to look at the singing orange light of the gas water heater. She used a letter opener and stripped up a cattail of gray wallpaper in order to know how the front parlor was back when white folks occupied the room without speaking and sent their hard eyes down the newspaper and percolated their nasty opinions. She sashayed along the upstairs hallway, from the yellow sewing room past the second bedroom with the pretty girl-things in it, the hidden clothes hamper that sent your dirty laundry down a tin drop to the washer and dryer, the pink, wallpapered bedroom that was hers and Claude's and into the ugly, turquoise bathroom with the iron eagle-claw tub and the bleary green view of the yard. She would peer into the spotted mirror over the sink but could only see herself. She would trail her own fingers along the fingerprinted walls but get no history from them. Her family had been moving into the old house for four days before she knew about the wickedness in it, but that was like hearsay or a butterfly of gossip that Avis overheard in the yellow room. She could make out seventy years of ordinariness downstairs, but it was like the upstairs had been soaped clean, like the evil memories had been painted over, the conversation interrupted.

  ***

  Avis predicted a girl for a pregnant woman in Gretna, and that there would be no complications. She guessed, but didn't say, that the woman was twenty-eight or so, a Cancer, husband worked with his hands. Avis got a pledge of five dollars from her but knew she could forget about ever seeing it. Husband would say, “You what?” And that would be that. One of her weekly people complained that Avis had moved without giving him her new telephone number. She apologized but said she would have recommended his standing pat in the options market, anyway; she wasn't getting great signals. Avis told a white woman in Papillon to get a second opinion before going ahead with the hip surgery. She'd come up with twenty for Avis, probably mail it in a card with pink begonias on the cover, and inside the card she'd write, “Your prophecies have helped so many!” Claude phoned to get the numbers at noon, but Avis only saw a zero and nine and her husband said maybe he'd skip the play. She got a crank call from the Nebraska chapter of the white supremacists. A pregnant girl at Mercy High School wouldn't say why she was calling, only that she had a big problem and needed Mrs. Walker's advice. Avis suggested the girl say nothing to her parents just yet, that the problem was going to be ironed out in a week or two. The girl promised her a hundred dollars but Avis said, “You keep it, honey.”

  Her four-year-old scuttled in from the green screened porch, singing out that they'd gotten their first mail, and Avis opened the striped film processor's envelope in order to see the color prints she'd had made to promote herself: a jolly, overweight, sorta-pretty woman with cocoa-brown skin and lavender eyes and maybe an excess of jewelry. “You like me in these, Lorna?”

  The little girl said yes.

  Avis wasn't sure. She supported herself on the pantry countertop and pored over each snapshot, but could only exclude the garden one with the jagged light along her neck. Her ten-year-old came in from the pantry room with a box of cups and saucers that were wrapped in tissue paper. Avis turned a slightly overglamorous photograph toward her older daughter and asked, “You like this one, Priscilla?”

  Priscilla cut through the box's strapping tape with a paring knife as she scowled at the photograph. “Give you the likeness of a fish.”

  Avis saw what she meant. “You sure are plainspoken.”

  She clipped out an Omaha World-Herald newspaper coupon and printed out the classified ad she wanted inserted in the personals: “Anxiety—Questions—Curious? PSYCHIC READINGS, Mrs. Walker.” She went to the telephone to read the new number strip and there was another call. She guessed it was from Bellevue. Offutt Air Force Base. White man saying, “You the psychic?”

  Avis thought he was probably in his fifties, possibly a widower, sandpaper in his deep voice, nights misspent in a working-man's bar, and sleeping with a girl many years younger. He ought to stop it. She said, “You want to hear my advice or your prospects?”

  He coughed out a laugh and said, “You tell me.”

  Her secret impressions were that he wanted a new occupation. Hated his job. Could be an Air Force sergeant getting near retirement. She could see a green shirt. She could smell gasoline. Avis pressed the receiver between her ear and shoulder, put a notepad on the pantry countertop, shoved six bracelets up from her wrist. “You know a lot about engine parts,” she said. “You want to open a shop?”

  She heard him light a cigarette. “Go on.”

  “I see some problems scraping up the money, you know? You're thinking about some government insurance, you got a notion to take your cash out? Keep your money in there, you hear? And maybe you ought to get some more on-the-job experience before you jump into this.” Avis was cartooning on the notepad, a boy with big eyes and hanging arms, his head angled over to the right. She said, “You can't jump into owning a motor-repair shop with just your pension.”

  She was getting more certain as the guy sighed cigarette smoke away fro
m his phone and said, “You still got my attention.”

  Avis covered her eyes with one palm and interpreted all she was picking up. “Okay. I am perceiving a whole lotta pain. Your wife, she's older, and she maybe had some bad operation in the hospital and stayed poorly from it? Also, there's this sweet young girl coming into your house to sorta take care of your missus and clean up and so on. And you, you been creeping down to her room, nightly, saying please, sugar, please, please, please, and just once more and such. You know what I'm talking about. A pretty young thing. She's a nurse? You ought to stop it. Evil things could happen.”

  “Hate to say it, but you're way off in left field.”

  Avis asked, “Has your wife passed away?”

  “Nope. She's right here, sipping her Java.”

  “Huh.” Avis could see a dayroom and his urgent body and the girl's legs high and snugging him in. And she could see another room and a gray-haired woman asleep, or dying, purple flowers arranged all around her.

  Her caller said she was right about the shop idea and the insurance policy, but then she'd gone off on a tangent.

  “We don't usually mess up like this,” Avis said.

  “I know that,” the sergeant said. “The wife had her palm read by you at that psychic fair in South Omaha. She got me to believing you were accurate as radar.”

  Avis said she was sorry and that she must've been picking up impressions from another person close by. She explained that it was simply like getting a couple of overlapping stations at one spot on a radio; or like when you snapped one picture on top of another and came up with a double exposure.

  “Had days like that myself.”

  After he'd hung up, Avis peered at her notepad until she knew what was missing. And where the boy's head angled over to the right, she penciled in a rope and a noose.

  She was up late, sewing draperies and slipping the pink-tuliped chintz onto rods for Claude to put up in the morning. Everything was jumbled from moving in, nothing was in its place; even the twin bed in the sewing room was just iron springs on a pinewood frame. She stitched a drapery hem and snipped the thread at the machine's presser foot. She could hear Claude tramping up the staircase and stopping to look in on the girls. And then she heard him creak open the door to the sewing room and peer in without a word as she stooped over her plastic bobbin case. Without looking up, Avis said, “You awake too?”

  She could hear his slow pant but Claude was apparently just staring at her as she picked through spools of navy blue and black in search of a simple dark green. She asked, “How you like the pink?” but Claude said nothing. He could have been an onlooker at a grisly street accident, or a jazzed-up boy who'd put a coin in the slot to gape at her body in a peep show.

  Avis asked, “You okay?” and turned; but the sewing-room door was already touching shut. And then she saw a deep red paint abruptly spray over the wallpaper and haltingly trickle down and little by little disappear. And when she smelled the penny odor of blood, she knew she'd had an inspiration of evil in the past.

  ***

  Avis placed the flat of a knife on a garlic clove and pounded it hard with her fist. She peeled away the dry husk and then chopped the pink garlic toe inside, faintly singing as she dumped the choppings into a bowl. The girls were at the dining-room table, saying silly things and giggling as they drew with crayons on a split-open grocery sack.

  Yard pictures in the windowpanes were warped and slurred by rain. Claude was sitting outside in his Parks and Recreation Department truck, waiting for the rain to pass, the radio probably tuned to a Royals game. He looked at his new property and lit a second cigarette. Gray smoke tumbled against the window glass. He tipped his cap down over his eyes and appeared to nap.

  She could hear the girls arguing over the red crayon. The more Lorna yelled for it, the more Priscilla ignored her. Avis looked at the recipe and spooned oregano into the bowl, then went into the dining room, drying her hands on a paper towel. Lorna was crying. Avis said, “Just give her the red, Priscilla.”

  “She always hogs it!”

  “How long have you had it?”

  “All day!” Lorna said.

  Avis looked down at the big house her girls had crayoned on the grocery-bag paper. One upper room contained the huge round heads and scarecrow bodies that meant human beings to Lorna. Priscilla was completing work on a sickroom. A yellow-haired boy was axing an overweight woman who was hooked up to orange tubes and green hoses. Huge amounts of blood were springing from her belly in raindrops and petals of red.

  “Yuck, Priscilla.”

  “Momma, it's a story.”

  “Whose story?”

  Priscilla kept the red crayon in her lap as she worked on the yellow-haired boy.

  “Are you listening, Priscilla? Who's the boy killing?”

  Lorna looked at her sister's picture and said, “The momma!”

  Avis crouched by her younger daughter and put a finger under a girl who had brown sticks for legs. The girl's wrists joined around the green coveralls of a white man with jackstrawed hair. “And who's this, Lorna?”

  Lorna screwed up her face as she looked at the brown girl in the picture, then smiled with accomplishment. “She the bitch!”

  “How'd you learn that word, Lorna?”

  Lorna squirmed a little.

  “Priscilla?”

  Priscilla snickered and Avis said, “You want to get slapped, you keep it up.”

  Claude pushed open the yard door and stamped the rain off. Lorna jumped from her chair and leapt into her daddy's arms. He picked her up overhead and kissed her knees and let her drop to his belly. “Saberhagen got hisself another win,” Claude said.

  Avis couldn't stop pressing. “How do you know the story, Priscilla?”

  The girl wouldn't speak. She was as psychic as Avis, as skeptical as Claude. Her mother thought she'd lose her second sight pretty soon and happily accept just being ordinary. Claude sauntered around to look at the picture and complicate everything by saying, “You good, baby girl! You got talent! You know she could draw like that, Avis?”

  Avis asked, “How's the story come out?”

  Priscilla got a stupid look as she peered out at the yard. Avis presumed she was seeing it played out, but only like a creepy late-night movie on their black-and-white television. Priscilla glanced down at her picture again and said, “The girl gets killed.”

  “You get pictures in your head?”

  “Sorta.”

  “She get killed by the person called her a bitch?”

  Priscilla didn't say.

  “Who kills her?”

  Her husband whispered into Lorna's ear, “Your momma and sista makin’ their spook talk again.” The telephone was ringing, so Claude carried his little girl into the pantry room to get it.

  Avis tilted up Priscilla's chin and squinted into the girl's angry brown eyes. “Who kills her?”

  “The boy.”

  “A boy you know?”

  The girl jerked her chin away. “You're pestering me!”

  Claude stood in the doorway with Lorna. “Telephone must be for you. Won't speak to me.”

  Avis said, “How do you know the story, Priscilla?”

  “I don't know how I know! I just do!”

  Avis hugged the girl and angled her head low enough to smell her slightly dirty hair. She said, “I know, sweetheart. I know.” And then she went to the telephone.

  “Can't sleep.”

  “And you are?”

  “I'll try, but I keep getting scared.”

  His speech was poky, like he was sickly or a little simple, gloom or ignorance in his voice, a sulky white boy in some Omaha high school. His problem would wind up being about a pretty girl who liked him less than spit. “Could you give me your name?”

  “Gary.”

  Sixteen, probably skinny, poor, obnoxious. She could hear him playing with the phone cord, and then there was an over-long pause.

  Avis said, “I like your name.”

&
nbsp; He didn't say anything.

  “How old are you, Gary?”

  He gave it some thought and said, “Twenty-eight.”

  “You lying to Avis?”

  The boy seemed irked and scared. His right hand was possibly squeezed between his thighs, tendering himself. “Sixteen and twelve is twenty-eight, isn't it?”

  She couldn't follow that talk, so she only said, “You sound younger.”

  Gary said, “Each night it's the same.”

  “Well, upsetting dreams do repeat themselves.”

  “I'll be standing outside this big house, and then I'll be standing inside it. And I walk into the rooms.”

  “And why is that scary?”

  The sleepless boy didn't speak.

  Avis said, “Just tell me what you see.”

  “Just the rooms and some people.”

  “You mean, people you know?”

  He didn't say.

  “How do they react toward you?”

  “Afraid.”

  “And why is that?”

  She heard nothing.

  “Hello?”

  Priscilla was in an apron and cranking an opener around a can of tomato paste. Without looking up, she asked, “Is he still on the phone?”

  “Are you there?”

  Gary sighed. “I just wish I could sleep.”

  “I know.” She jotted Willa on the notepad.

  “Could you help me sleep?”

  “I'll try.”

  Priscilla tipped the can and spooned the tomato paste into a bowl.

  Gary asked, “Is she your daughter?” and then, as if he'd overstepped, Gary hung up the phone.

  She attempted to get a promotional interview at an Omaha weekly newspaper and was introduced to a Scorpio named Ed who admitted to writing “hash and thumbsucker pieces” that he could probably fit her story into. She could smell his prejudice like onions as his yellow eyes skirted away from hers and cigarette ash dripped onto his notebook and she was cornered and misinterpreted and preposterous words were put in her mouth. She heard herself saying she could predict a baby's sex from skin temperature. She got a sick feeling whenever she got too close to a Ouija board. Auras were usually pineapple-colored. She said a psychic was someone who saw the world just like an educated person could see the word dear, say, in read. She said she'd get herself into an altered state between consciousness and sleep and house ghosts and spirits would grayly appear in the corner of her eye.