Stay Awake Stories Part 15

There is two hundred dollars left in his wallet, plus the credit cards, which, Deagle suspects, will mean more to them than they will to him. He can feel the warmth of the fire in the barrel as he pa.s.ses the wallet to Boomer, and Boomer grins, showing a row of nice teeth, the orthodontia some long-ago parents once paid for: only one missing.

In exchange, Boomer offers a thin gla.s.s tube, about the size and shape of a cigarette. He extends it, n.o.bly, like a king presenting a sword to a knight. "Take this, brother, may it serve you well," Boomer says, and Deagle places the tube to his lips, drawing smoke when Boomer holds a lighter to it, and he can feel it go branching through his lungs and brain. His heart quickens. The barrel fire glows orangely, its waves of heat like ripples in an old windowpane, and he leans back as Chloe and Boomer curl in their chair together, and he loves the way they touch each other, the way she puts her lips to his ear and the way his nail-bitten fingers absently roll the edge of her skirt up her thigh, their two heads bending over his billfold, examining its contents like children who have opened a gift.

"Sweet," his wife would say, and Deagle closes his eyes.

Maybe there is time for Chloe to see what is left in his palm.

Here it is. He holds it out to her.

The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands.

1.

Alone for years now, Daddy has settled into his rituals and routines. He wakes up a little before dawn, dresses in the dark: white running shoes and warm-up pants, a plain blue T-shirt. His dog fetches her own leash and stands there, waiting, holding it in her mouth.

It's a beautiful morning, middle of June. Birds. Lawns. Flowers. It's the kind of pleasant upper-middle-cla.s.s old suburb on the edge of the city where you wouldn't necessarily expect to find a man like Daddy. But he has changed a lot over the years, has transformed himself into the sort of handsome older guy who jogs with his dog early on a Tuesday morning.

Six A.M. and they go winding down the long hill that leads from the Ambleside apartment building, everything green and blooming, the dog, Angeline, trotting and gazing up at Daddy with her black Labrador sort of love, soft brown eyes and a coat the same shiny color as Daddy's hair. His hair still doesn't have much gray in it.

In general, Daddy is in great shape for a man his age, broad of chest and flat of stomach, and even the smoking hasn't done much noticeable damage. He doesn't have the kind of wrinkles you'd expect from a fifty-four-year-old with a pack-a-day habit. His teeth are healthy, a little yellow but no cavities, none have fallen out. His eyes are still that devastating dark.

Does he have a lady friend, someone to have s.e.x with? Probably not, but he could, if he chose to pursue it.

He prefers his solitude. Daddy uses his key card to buzz himself back into the quiet of the apartment building and none of his neighbors notice as he pads along the white fluorescent hallway, leashed Angeline panting demurely beside him.

If he were to disappear, if police went from door to door in the Ambleside apartment building with his photograph his neighbors would shake their heads. I've never seen the guy; oh, once or twice, maybe, but rarely; can't say I've ever spoken to the man And turns the key in the lock, opens and closes the door. Angeline goes to the kitchen and laps some water from her dish.

Alone for years now, Daddy doesn't usually think about what his apartment might look like to a stranger. The bare walls, the unemptied ashtrays. Easy chair facing a television in the middle of the undecorated living room, jar of spare change on the counter in the kitchen, mattress on the floor of the bedroom, the sheet and blanket braided together by Daddy's restless feet as he sleeps.

He tries not to think of how it would all look if he died, for example, and the building super had to unlock the apartment with his master key and they found him there on that mattress, floating on the surface like a fish belly-up in an aquarium, eyes and lips slightly parted and the ceiling fan turning and dirty ice cream bowl with a cigarette put out in it, and so on.

He tries not to think of these kinds of things and yet it is true that such thoughts sometimes circle around in his head and he finds it difficult to fall asleep, he wakes up in the middle of the night gasping, sleep apnea, sometimes choking or crying out. Angeline, also startled, will rise up from her curled position beside him on the mattress and begin to bark warnings at the dark opening of bedroom door.

Usually he doesn't remember his dreams but there was one last night in which he woke and his eyes were still closed and he could sense someone bending over him. A face was pulling close to his own face, the exhalation of breath touching his lips, feathery brush of lashes against his forehead. A face like someone from childhood, an adult who had once loved him, leaning over his bed at night to smell his hair.

He was paralyzed. He had stopped breathing.

He had stopped breathing for a moment and then he sat up abruptly with a glottal choking sound as if mucus were caught in his throat.

The dream disappeared, and yet a little sc.r.a.p of it hung above him, like a little ragged strip of cloth caught on a barbed-wire fence like the lyrics to an old song or story from childhood.

The farm.

The gold.

The lily-white hands.

He couldn't quite put his finger on it.

And now it is morning and Daddy is still troubled, still something nagging at him. He opens a can of dog food and spoons it into Angeline's red dish; she waits with a dignified paw lifted, like a lady in olden days offering her gloved hand to be kissed.

He makes coffee, opens up the newspaper and turns to the funny pages where he puzzles over Sudoku and brings a cigarette to his mouth. He looks at the s.p.a.ce on his left hand where his finger used to be. Considers.

2.

Years before, he was working as an independent contractor: carpentry, house-painting, cabinet installation, doing pretty well for himself. He owned his own business and even had a guy on the payroll, a buddy, Skully, who worked with him on most jobs.

And yet we still crossed his mind. Despite the ten years pa.s.sed and despite himself he would find himself dialing the old home number (disconnected), looking through some boxes of old papers, bills mostly, thinking he might come across a photograph.

He was going through a little gloomy period, not depression necessarily though there was some insomnia involved, difficulty concentrating, that sort of thing.

But he got up that morning as usual. As he did every morning, no matter how blue he was. Coffee, funny pages, cigarettes. He packed himself a lunch, and when Skully honked in the driveway Daddy came out smiling; he laughed at Skully's dirty-joke-book jokes as they set up the ladders and spread the tarps and set up the circular saw. He had never missed a day of work in his life.

They were listening to a rock-'n'-roll station on the radio. Bruce Springsteen, Creedence, rock-'n'-roll oldies, the DJ said, and Daddy was uncomfortably aware that he was almost forty-four years of age. Forty-four! The recent birthday, that was a part of his moodiness, probably, though he would never admit it. He imagined the wry way his ex-wife might call these moods a "midlife crisis," and the notion made him actually blush. Crisis: a neurotic, effeminate word.

For a while after the divorce he had imagined that he might get married again, that he might have more children, new daughters to replace the ones who he had been separated from for so long.

So why didn't he? What was stopping him?

From the top of the ladder, he sang softly along with the radio as he worked and reflected and remembered and suffered hangover, "Badlands," he sang, and "Green River," and Skully told his joke about the rich farmer with the three beautiful daughters, the red-haired daughters with the pale hands and freckled cheeks, and yes, there we were. He could see us through the window, he stood on the ladder outside the third-floor window of the empty house and when he glanced through the gla.s.s there we were in our bedroom, in our beds, with our pink lamp on our nightstand and our toys put away and the covers pulled up to our necks. Faces sunk into pillows. Eyes closed. Waiting to be kissed.

and one minute Daddy was on the ladder and then almost in the same second he'd hit the ground and Skully came running Oh my G.o.d, oh my G.o.d, he said, and Skully was actually weeping a little because he a.s.sumed that Daddy was dead. Daddy's hand was bleeding, his finger was gone, it must have gotten hooked on something and pulled itself right off his hand, what happened to his finger? Oh my G.o.d! Skully took off his T-shirt and bent over Daddy and wrapped the shirt around Daddy's hand where blood was bubbling out steadily.

That was the part of the anecdote that Daddy liked to tell later. Poor Skully crying and then the two of them trying to find that d.a.m.ned finger in the gra.s.s. Looking everywhere but finally heading off to the hospital without it. Possibly it was carried off by a dog or a bird or something. He will say this later, half joking, just because it makes a good ending to the story.

On the other hand, he'll never tell anyone about what he'd seen up there, glimpsed, not exactly supernatural not something you would talk about

3.

We have been apart for a long time. Eden is a graduate student in Ohio and Sydney lives with her husband in New Hampshire and Brooke works at a restaurant in Portland and the last time we were together was for our mother's funeral.

Is it Brooke who is the most lonely? She sometimes believes so, leaving the restaurant at two in the morning, in the city, in the rain, and the barred metal grates have been pulled down over the front of the nearby liquor store. Her sisters don't miss her as much as she misses them, she thinks, everyone else has things, no one ever thinks about her with this kind of longing, they will not ever be on such a poorly lit side street where every window is dark and sleet taps hesitantly on the canopy of the umbrella.

She only wants to make her way to a decent street where there are cars, where she can catch a taxi back to her apartment but the water has acc.u.mulated and she is wearing her nice new shoes. It is such slow going. Such winding, careful steps. In the puddles on the sidewalk are dozens upon dozens of earthworms. Most of them are dead, but some are still alive, writhing weakly, trying apparently to swim. Brooke is staring down at her feet, trying not to step on them.

The wind makes her raincoat fly back and ripple like a sheet on a clothesline. Abruptly, the wind catches her scarf and carries it up into the sky like a leaf or a flap of newspaper.

"Oh!" Brooke cries, with frustration, grasping too late after her scarf. The moment she reaches out her hand, her umbrella is wrenched inside out. "Oh!" she says. "G.o.dd.a.m.n it!"

There are more worms now, the sidewalk is thick with them, and she can barely put a foot down. Before she can avoid it, she feels the soft, slick ma.s.s of a night crawler squashing beneath the toe of her shoe.

She stands there, motionless, holding her inside-out umbrella as the flecks of icy rain catch in her hair. Above her, some birds are cl.u.s.tered on a telephone wire, looking down. Blackbirds, grackles maybe, ravens?

They seem to regard her for a moment. Then they begin to lift up from their perch, flapping off into the darkened sky one by one until the wire is just a bare line above Brooke's head.

It is not like a premonition of death.

It is as if she died a long time ago, and she just remembered it.

4.

Midnight and Daddy was on his way home to kill us all.

We were asleep in our beds and Mother was curled on the couch in the living room with the television going, dozing a little, exhausted after the past week and now a hot humid night in late June, the ceiling fan going on high so that the steady whirring practically covered the voices on the TV.

Mother opened her eyes partway when Daddy's truck crept up the driveway with his headlights turned off, the crackle of gravel beneath his tires, the flutter of sparrows in the hedge, stirring then settling. She closed her eyes and he came through the gate and stood there in the backyard in the moonlight, under the apple tree. He looked up and there was the darkened window of our room

5.

In the bas.e.m.e.nt of Sydney's new house is a little room that is about the size and shape of a coffin. Sydney and her husband discover it a few days after they have moved in. There is an old, heavy door that they hadn't noticed when they were touring the house with the Realtor. There is a doork.n.o.b, and one of those iconic keyholes like in cartoons, with a real skeleton key in it! They unlock it.

Behind the door is a s.p.a.ce just big enough for a little man to stand in. The walls are cement and plaster, the corners are curved rather than straight. It smells like a cave.

"I think this is possibly the creepiest thing I've ever seen," Sydney's husband says, and Sydney looks at him sternly.

"It's a closet," Sydney says.

"No it's not a closet," her husband says. "There's nothing to hang things on."

"Maybe it's a fruit cellar," Sydney says. "They probably kept their sacks of potatoes in there. To keep them cool."

It is cool in there, her husband concedes. "It's like something you'd store a dead body in," her husband says. "That's what it's like."

Sydney sighs. "Look," she says. "This was a great bargain. I hope you're not planning on getting into one of your superst.i.tious things."

"I'm not," her husband says. "I'm just speaking metaphorically." And they both glance over to where the washer and dryer are lined up, mute, open-mouthed, on the opposite wall. They will have to have their exposed backs to this dreadful coffin-door every time they put a load of clothes into one of the machines, they are both realizing.

Metaphorically. And she has an uncomfortable flicker, a little thought that swallows itself before it actually makes it to the forefront of her mind. "In the farmer's bas.e.m.e.nt was a little room where he kept his gold," she thinks briefly, a line from a story she read once as a child. Her mouth hardens.

Metaphorical. And she watches her husband turn the key in the lock of the coffinlike door.

Metaphorical for what?

6.

Without him for years now we talk on the phone and there is some agreement that we won't mention certain aspects of the past.

Which one of us said: Do you ever wonder where he is?

Which one said: He's alive somewhere, living somewhere, and I don't know why we shouldn't try, after all these years There were a few moments of silence. Our mother rose up out of her grave and stepped delicately through the headstones in the cemetery toward the little pub where we were sitting at a table with our beers, and outside the rain had begun to turn into sleet. This was the little bar next to the movie theater and we had been planning to go see a film that was a comedy about three sisters who lived in Manhattan and who were all struggling with the vagaries of love and life in a contemporary setting.

The spirit of our dead mother had begun to move swiftly toward us, gliding now through the night over the fields and interstates and rivers of the Midwest toward the city where we were having our little gathering. Sister Conference, we called it.

And our mother said: He was standing there above your bed with the pistol, and the three of you were asleep and I didn't know what else to do, I just got down on my knees and I said please don't kill them please just kill me, just kill me, they didn't do anything to you, they love you with all their hearts And he said it doesn't matter anymore, nothing matters anymore And he pulled the trigger. I thought I would scream, but I didn't. He pulled the trigger and it was your head, Brooke, and the chamber was empty. And then it was Eden. And then Sydney. Click. Click. Click.

And then he turned the pistol toward me, as I was kneeling there. Click, at my head. And then he put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger a last time.

Oh G.o.d I prayed there would be a bullet that last time, but there wasn't.

Of course we remember all this as we sip our beers, as we sit there, a football game playing on the television above the bar.

We were asleep and in one universe we didn't ever wake up, in one version of the story we died and the rest of our lives was just a long dream in which we grew up and became waitresses and housewives and graduate students, an extended extended extended pause before the bullet entered our brains.

7.