“Let me at those sons of bitches,” Carla said.
From her fetal position on the floor, Ruth looked up at her. “What did I ever do to get such a great friend as you?”
Carla stopped. Her face was flushed with affection, her cheeks blotched with pink. “You think so?” A bat dive-bombed her hair. The old wives’ tale—that bats got caught in your hair—seemed truer to Ruth than the new wives’ tale—that bats getting caught in your hair was just an old wives’ tale. Bats possessed curiosity and arrogance. They were little social scientists. They got close to hair—to investigate, measure, and interview. And when something got close—a moth to a flame, a woman to a house, a woman to a grave, a sick woman to a fresh, wide-open grave like a bed—it could fall in and get caught.
“You gotta stuff your dormer eaves with steel wool,” said Carla.
“Hey. Ain’t it the truth,” said Ruth.
They buried the whacked bats in tabbouleh containers, in the side yard: everything just tabbouleh in the end.
· · ·
With the crows in mind, Ruth started to go with Carla to the shooting range. The geese, Carla said, were not that big a problem. The geese could be discouraged simply by shaking up the eggs in their nests. Carla was practical. She had a heart the shape of an ax. She brought over a canoe and paddled Ruth out into the cattails to find the goose nests, and there she took each goose egg and shook it furiously. “If you just take and toss the egg,” explained Carla, “the damn goose will lay another one. This way, you kill the gosling, and the goose never knows. It sits there warming the damn eggnog until the winter comes, and the goose then just leaves, heartbroken, and never comes back. With the crows, however, you just have to blow their brains out.”
At the shooting range, they paid a man with a green metal money box twenty dollars for an hour of shooting. They got several cans of diet Coke, which they bought from a vending machine outside near the rest rooms, and which they set at their feet, at their heels, just behind them. They each had pistols, Ruth’s from World War I, Carla’s from World War II, which they had bought in an antique-gun store. “Anyone could shoot birds with a shotgun,” Carla had said. “Let’s be unique.”
“That’s never really been a big ambition of mine,” said Ruth.
They were the only ones there at the range and stood fifty yards from three brown sacks of hay with red circles painted on them. They fired at the circles—one! two! three!—then turned, squatted, set their guns back down, and sipped their Cokes. The noise was astonishing, bursting through the fields around them, echoing off the small hills and back out of the sky, mocking and retaliatory. “My Lord!” Ruth exclaimed. Her gun felt hard and unaimable. “I don’t think I’m doing this right,” she said. She had expected a pistol to seem light and natural—a seamless extension of her angry feral self. But instead, it felt heavy and huge and so unnaturally loud, she never wanted to fire such a thing again.
But she did. Only twice did she see her hay sack buckle. Mostly, she seemed to be firing too high, into the trees behind the targets, perhaps hitting squirrels—perhaps the very squirrels she had caught in her have-a-heart cage, now set free and shot dead with her have-a-house gun. “It’s all too much,” said Ruth. “I can’t possibly be doing this right. It’s way too complicated and mean.”
“You’ve forgotten about the damn crows,” said Carla. “Don’t forget them.”
“That’s right,” said Ruth, and she picked up the gun again. “Crows.” Then she lowered her gun. “But won’t I just be shooting them at close range, after I catch them in nets?”
“Maybe,” said Carla. “But maybe not.”
When Nitchka finally left him, she first watched her favorite TV show, then turned off the television, lifted up her CD player and her now-unhooked VCR, and stopped to poise herself dramatically in the front hall. “You know, you haven’t a clue what the human experience is even about,” she said.
“This song and dance again,” he said. “Are you taking it on the road?” She set her things down outside in the hall so she could slam the door loudly and leave him—leave him, he imagined, for some new, handsome man she had met at work. Dumped for Hunks. That was the title of his life. In heaven, just to spite her, that would be the name of his goddamn band.
He drank a lot that week, and on Friday, his boss, McCarthy, called to say Noel was fired. “You think we can run a lawn store this way?” he said.
“If there was a gun to your head,” said Noel, “what song would you sing?”
“Get help,” said McCarthy. “That’s all I have to say.” Then there was a dial tone.
Noel began to collect unemployment, getting to the office just before it closed. He began to sleep in the days and stay up late at night. He got turned around. He went out at midnight for walks, feeling insomniac and mocked by the dark snore of the neighborhood. Rage circled and built in him, like a saxophone solo. He began to venture into other parts of town. Sidewalks appeared, then disappeared again. The moon shone on one side and then on the other. Once, he brought duct tape with him and a ski mask. Another time, he brought duct tape, a ski mask, and a gun one of his stepfathers had given him when he was twenty. If you carefully taped a window from the outside, it could be broken quietly: the glass would stick to the tape and cave gently outward.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. He turned on the light in the bedroom. He taped the woman’s mouth first, then the man’s. He made them get out of bed and stand over by the dresser. “I’m going to take your TV set,” said Noel. “And I’m going to take your VCR. But before I do, I want you to sing me a song. I’m a music lover, and I want you to sing me one song, any song. By heart. You first,” he said to the man. He pressed the gun to his head. “One song.” He pulled the duct tape gently off the man’s mouth.
“Any song?” repeated the man. He tried to look into the eyeholes of Noel’s ski mask, but Noel turned abruptly and stared at the olive gray glass of the TV.
“Yeah,” said Noel. “Any song.”
“Okay.” The man began. “ ‘O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain …’ ” His voice was deep and sure. “ ‘… for purple mountain majesties …’ ” Noel turned back and studied the man carefully. He seemed to know it all by heart. How had he learned it all by heart? “You want all the verses?” the man stopped and asked, a bit too proudly, Noel thought, for someone who had a gun aimed his way.
“Nah, that’s enough,” Noel said irritably. “Now you,” he said to the woman. He pulled the duct tape off her mouth. Her upper lip was moistly pink, raw from the adhesive. He glanced down at the tape and saw the spiky glisten of little mustache hairs. She began immediately, anxiously, to sing. “ ‘You are my lucky star. I’m lucky where you are/Two lovely eyes at me that were—’ ”
“What kind of song is this?”
She nervously ignored him, kept on: “ ‘… beaming, gleaming, I was starstruck.’ ” She began to sway a little, move her hands up and down. She cleared her throat and modulated upward, a light, chirpy warble, though her face was stretched wide with fright, like heated wax. “ ‘You’re all my lucky charms. I’m lucky in your arms. …’ ” Here her hands fluttered up to her heart.
“All right, that’s enough. I’m taking the VCR now.”
“That’s practically the end anyway,” said the woman.
At the next house he did, he got a Christmas carol, plus “La Vie en Rose.” At the third house, the week following, he got one nursery rhyme, half a school song, and “Memory” from Cats. He began to write down the titles and words. At home, looking over his notepad, he realized he was creating a whole new kind of songbook. Still the heart of these songs eluded him. Looking at the words the next day, a good, almost-new VCR at his feet, he could never conjure the tune. And without the tune, the words seemed stupid and half-mad.
To avoid the chaos of the house entirely, Ruth took to going to matinees. First-run movies, second-run—she didn’t care. Movies were the ultimate real estat
e: you stepped in and looked around and almost always bought. She was especially stirred by a movie she saw about a beautiful widow who fell in love with a space alien who had assumed human form—the form of the woman’s long lost husband! Eventually, however, the man had to go back to his real home, and an immense and amazing spaceship came to get him, landing in a nearby field. To Ruth, it seemed so sad and true, just like life: someone assumed the form of the great love of your life, only to reveal himself later as an alien who had to get on a spaceship and go back to his planet. Certainly it had been true for Terence. Terence had gotten on a spaceship and gone back long ago. Although, of course, in real life you seldom saw the actual spaceship. Usually, there was just a lot of drinking, mumbling, and some passing out in the family room.
Sometimes on the way back from the movies, she would drive by their old house. They had sold it to an unmemorable young couple, and now, driving past it slowly, eyeing it like a pervert, she began to want it back. It was a good house. They didn’t deserve it, that couple: look how ignorant they were—pulling out all those forsythia bushes as if they were weeds.
Or maybe they were weeds. She never knew anymore what was good life and what was bad, what was desirable matter and what was antimatter, what was the thing itself and what was the death of the thing: one mimicked the other, and she resented the work of having to distinguish.
Which, again, was the false spirea and which was the true?
The house was hers. If it hadn’t been for that damn banana bread, it still would be hers.
Perhaps she could get arrested creeping slowly past in her car like this. She didn’t know. But every time she drove by, the house seemed to see her and cry out, It’s you! Hello, hello! You’re back! So she tried not to do it too often. She would speed up a little, give a fluttery wave, and drive off.
At home, she could not actually net the crows, though their old habitat, the former cornfield that constituted the neighborhood, continued to attract them like an ancestral land or a good life recalled over gin. They hovered in the yards, tormented the cats, and ate the still-wet day-old songbirds right out of their nests. How was she supposed to catch such fiends? She could not. She draped nets in the branches of trees, to snag them, but always a wind caused the nets to twist or drop, or pages of old newspaper blew by and got stuck inside, plastering the nets with op-ed pages and ads. From the vegetable garden now turning flower bed came the persistent oniony smell of those chives not yet smothered by the weed barrier. And the rhubarb, too, kept exploding stubbornly through, no matter how she plucked at it, though each clutch of stalks was paler and more spindly than the last.
She began generally not to feel well. Never a temple, her body had gone from being a home, to being a house, to being a phone booth, to being a kite. Nothing about it gave her proper shelter. She no longer felt housed within it at all. When she went for a stroll or was out in the yard throwing the nets up into the oaks, other people in the neighborhood walked briskly past her. The healthy, the feeling well, when they felt that way, couldn’t remember feeling any other, couldn’t imagine it. They were niftily in their bodies. They were not only out of the range of sympathy; they were out of the range of mere imagining. Whereas the sick could only think of being otherwise. Their hearts, their every other thought, went out to that well person they hated a little but wanted to be. But the sick were sick. They were not in charge. They had lost their place at the top of the food chain. The feeling well were running the show; which was why the world was such a savage place. From her own porch, she could hear the PA announcements from the zoo. They were opening; they were closing; would someone move their car. She could also hear the elephant, his sad bluesy trumpet, and the Bengal tiger roaring his heartbreak: all that animal unhappiness. The zoo was a terrible place and a terrible place to live near: the pacing ocelot, the polar bear green with fungus, the zebra demented and hungry and eating the fence, the children brought there to taunt the animals with paper cups and their own clean place in the world, the vulture sobbing behind his scowl.
Ruth began staying inside, drinking tea. She felt tightenings, pain and vertigo, but then, was that so new? It seemed her body, so mysterious and apart from her, could only produce illness. Though once, of course, it had produced Mitzy. How had it done that? Mitzy was the only good thing her body had ever been able to grow. She was a real chunk of change that one, a gorgeous george. How had her body done it? How does a body ever do it? Life inhabits life. Birds inhabit trees. Bones sprout bones. Blood gathers and makes new blood.
A miracle of manufacturing.
On one particular afternoon that was too cool for spring, when Ruth was sitting inside drinking tea so hot it skinned her tongue, she heard something. Upstairs, there was the old pacing in the attic that she had come to ignore. But now there was a knock on the door—loud, rhythmic, urgent. There were voices outside.
“Yes?” Ruth called, approaching the entryway, then opening the door.
Before her stood a girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. “We heard there was a party here,” said the girl. She had tar black hair and a silver ring through her upper lip. Her eyes looked meek and lost. “Me and Arianna heard down on State Street that there was a party right here at this house.”
“There’s not,” said Ruth. “There’s just not.” And then she closed the door, firmly.
But looking out the window, Ruth could see more teenagers gathering in front of the house. They collected on the lawn like fruit flies on fruit. Some sat on the front steps. Some roared up on mopeds. Some hopped out of station wagons crowded with more kids just like themselves. One carload of kids poured out of the car, marched right up the front steps, and, without ringing the bell, opened the unlocked door and walked in.
Ruth put her tea down on the bookcase and walked toward the front entryway. “Excuse me!” she said, facing the kids in the front hall.
The kids stopped and stared at her. “May I help you?” asked Ruth.
“We’re visiting someone who lives here.”
“I live here.”
“We were invited to a party by a kid who lives here.”
“There is no kid who lives here. And there is no party.”
“There’s no kid who lives here?”
“No, there isn’t.”
A voice suddenly came from behind Ruth. A voice more proprietary, a voice from deeper within the house than even she was. “Yes, there is,” it said.
Ruth turned and saw standing in the middle of her living room a fifteen-year-old boy dressed entirely in black, his head shaved spottily, his ears, nose, lips, and eyebrows pierced with multiple gold and copper rings. The rim of his left ear held three bronze clips.
“Who are you?” Ruth asked. Her heart flapped and fluttered, like something hit sloppily by a car.
“I’m Tod.”
“Tod?”
“People call me Ed.”
“Ed?”
“I live here.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t! What do you mean, you live here?”
“I’ve been living in your attic.”
“You have?” Ruth felt sweat burst forth from behind the wings of her nose. “You’re our ghost? You’ve been pacing around upstairs?”
“Yeah, he has,” said one of the kids at the door.
“But I don’t understand.” Ruth reached over and plucked a Kleenex from the box on the mail table, and wiped her face with it.
“I ran away from my own home months ago. I have a key to this house from the prior owner, who was a friend. So from time to time, I’ve been sleeping upstairs in your attic. It’s not so bad up there.”
“You’ve been what? You’ve been living here, going in and out? Don’t your parents know where you are?” Ruth asked.
“Look, I’m sorry about this party,” said Tod. “I didn’t mean for it to get this out of hand. I only invited a few people. I thought you were going away. It was supposed to be a small party. I didn’t mean for it to be a big party.”
“No,” said Ruth. “You don’t seem to understand. Big party, little party: you weren’t supposed to have a party here at all. You were not even supposed to be in this house, let alone invite others to join you.”
“But I had the key. I thought, I don’t know. I thought it would be all right.”
“Give me the key. Right now. Give me the key.”
He handed her the key, with a smirk. “I don’t know if it’ll do you any good. Look.” Ruth turned and all the kids at the door held up their own shiny brass keys. “I made copies,” said Tod.
Ruth began to shriek. “Get out of here! Get out of here right now! All of you! Not only will I have these locks changed but if you ever set foot in this neighborhood again, I’ll have the police on you so fast, you won’t know what hit you.”
“But we need someplace to drink, man,” said one of the departing boys.
“Go to the damn park!”
“The cops are all over the park,” one girl whined.
“Then go to the railroad tracks, like we used to do, for God’s sake,” she yelled. “Just get the hell out of here.” She was shocked by the bourgeois venom and indignation in her own voice. She had, after all, once been a hippie. She had taken a lot of windowpane and preached about the evils of private ownership from a red Orlon blanket on a street corner in Chicago.
Life: what an absurd little story it always made.
“Sorry,” said Tod. He touched her arm, and, swinging a cloth satchel over his shoulder, walked toward the front door with the rest of them.
“Get the hell out of here,” she said. “Ed.”
The geese, the crows, the squirrels, the raccoons, the bats, the ants, the kids: Ruth now went to the firing range with Carla as often as she could. She would stand with her feet apart, both hands grasping the gun, then fire. She concentrated, tried to gather bits of strength in her, crumbs to make a loaf. She had been given way too much to cope with in life. Did God have her mixed up with someone else? Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job. I have never been your true and faithful servant. Then she would pull the trigger. When you told a stupid joke to God and got no response, was it that the joke was too stupid, or not quite stupid enough? She narrowed her eyes. Mostly, she just tried to squint, but then dread closed her eyes entirely. She fired again. Why did she not feel more spirited about this, the way Carla did? Ruth breathed deeply before firing, noting the Amazonian asymmetry of her breath, but in her heart she knew she was a mouse. A mouse bearing firearms, but a mouse nonetheless.