“I made a promise to my mother before she died. I was just nine, so maybe I’m just imagining it, or maybe it’s something my dad told me, but I like to think that I really did make a promise to take care of my dad, even though he didn’t seem to need my care, not one bit, and maybe I extended that promise out, I don’t know. Maybe I just have a thing for vets.” And then she shrugged again and spread her hands out as if to say that’s it, and she waited until he felt compelled to say something — anything to fill up the quiet — and he explained that in Bay City, after he had been released from treatment, from the Grid, one afternoon, listening to Kennedy on the radio, he had fallen hook, line, and sinker. It seemed to come, this desire to join, out of a need to help those who couldn’t be helped, something like that, he explained. She hugged herself, looking dejected and lonely (he thought), and then, suddenly, she said, her voice deep and confessionaclass="underline" “I don’t want to get involved with you, but here I am.”
“Jesus,” he said. He let the smoke sit inside his head until he could hardly think at all.
“I’m afraid. I don’t really want to unfold you. What I said before, it’s not that simple.”
“If it becomes too good, I’ll let you know.”
“Ha ha,” she said, frowning.
Later, when she got up to make coffee he lay in bed listening to the sound of water running, the scoop digging into the coffee, the tin percolator on the stove ticking as water pushed up through the tube and into the small glass observation bubble. He imagined it brimming past the curved glass, getting one last look at daylight before the plunge into oblivion.
DOWN & UP
Along the Indiana border the road began to yearn north. She dozed against the window, feeling the engine — all eight cylinders firing in a grumbling vapor lock of piston rings and sealed systems. Rake nudged her shoulder. When she opened her eyes it was dark and the fields of dead, unharvested crops had given way to a farmhouse. He pointed to it, cocked his thumb back, made a spoof sound to indicate gunfire and then slowed the car down, and when they got to a mailbox, he began to talk softly about the Jones family, saying, We’ll have to pay a visit to the Joneses. You got a name like Jones, a common name, Smith or Jones, and you make a target of yourself. You got all the lights on like that, you’re opening yourself up to the potential of someone like me coming your way. You sit in the house and wait. You know I’m coming. You got that sensation under your skin. You build a notion that it’s impossible and so forth, you pray to your God to sustain your safety, but he’s not listening and you know it, he said, and then he went quiet and she knew what that meant. She was only half-awake. She wiggled her fingers to see if they’d move (they did) and then her toes and pushed back against the seat.
She felt him staring at her in the darkness.
You move and you have to move somewhere, he’d said. I’m going light on the substance. I’ll learn you, as they like to say down south. I’ll learn you a new way of thinking so long as you move with me. A new way of moving. I’m gonna hold the death card close to the vest and then slap it down on the table when the time comes. I’m kidnapping you for your own sake. To keep my word of honor made way back. Not that I want to keep it. You’re bound to me by things you don’t even know. If you knew them, you’d know. If you were to know, you’d understand. Now you see a house here, a house there. A house passing in the night. It means something, just by itself. You remove the inhabitants and it means something more. Smoke coming from a chimney. Down in a valley, covered in snow. Means one thing. Tucked against another house in a street burned out, means another.
On the left side of the house was a tree with pink blossoms in the window light.
The farmhouse, surrounded by spring mud, was absurdly neat, with two stories and dormers and black shutters.
The whole package, he said. They’ve got the whole package here.
He parked the car up the road. Together they walked down the drive, hunching slightly, until they were at the side of the house. He pointed at the tree and she knew what he wanted because he’d made her climb a tree at a rest stop somewhere, an old one with a stone barbecue pit and a pump with a broken handle, just to watch her do it. She’d gone up into the branches, clutching, shaking, until she was caught like a cat, unable to get down, and then he made her jump into his arms.
I’m the bad luck brought home. I’m taking the bad luck I had and foisting it on somebody else.
The tree reached as high as the second-story window, and she got into the middle of it, against the trunk, found a branch and pulled herself up. (Light as a bird. Your bones are hollow, he’d said at the rest stop. You’re high enough to fly high.) In the tree, amid the blossoms, she took a breath. Threading through the floral perfume was the smell of spring grass.
Look forward, move through it, a nurse said, the one with the deeper voice. He looked at her the way you’d want to be looked at, with a calm and steady nonjudgmental gaze. You’ll feel it in there and at some point you’ll take comfort in knowing it’s there, the ball of old memories.
Through the window was an oriental rug and a big easy chair with a man reading a paper and smoking a cigar. Smoke roiled over his head and caught light from a television set. He seemed to be hiding behind the paper from his kids, who were at his feet with their legs crossed, looking forward.
She adjusted her grip and held still, feeling the serenity of the tree, the rustle of leaves in the breeze. From the window, which was open, came the smell of tobacco smoke along with the canned TV laughter and the giggle of the kids. The man lowered his paper and looked at them, tapped his cigar in an ashtray, and then he raised the paper, hiding again.
Rake was whispering, his voice weirdly gentle. Stay up there and look and I’ll give you something to see.
She looked out across the yard. The moon was rising and the light frosted the grass.
When she looked back inside, the man still had his paper up. Rake was in the kitchen by now, she knew. He went into back hallways and kitchens first, and there must’ve been a sound from the kitchen, because the man lowered his paper and tilted his head, and the kids, who were crawl-walking backward toward his knees, giggling again, also turned. For a moment all three of them sat still.
The cat, the man said. He lifted the paper again.
The desire to say something, to shout out a warning, to terminate the scene. Fear, fear, fear was something material. Hold still and you’ll live. Move softly and you’ll survive. Take it easy and you’ll make it, the nurse had said. If you feel yourself falling look down into the fall. Something like that.
The bloodbath that followed seemed distant. She was seeing it and not seeing it. (You saw it all, Rake would say. You might not’ve been looking but you saw it.) Rag dolls acted upon by some distant force. There was an explosion and the two children were dashed to the side, heads opening up while the man’s head snapped with the opening of his chest and the woman, who had been hidden from view, revealed herself in a scream. A moment later there was only the sound of the television set and he was looking up through the window glass, shrugging, and then he went from body to body and did what he had to do — that’s how he put it. I do what I do. You have to know that — making shapes in the carpet with his fingers, leaving messages.