The morning after I’d first heard their love making, Father had soft-boiled eggs, which he’d crushed in the bowl and ladled with butter and salt. Mother’d fried slabs of toast, which she’d soaked in milk. The bacon was thick with fat and grease. I’d lined the plate with paper towels to catch the run off. What I remembered most about that meal was the laughter and the sound of the music on the stereo. The low notes were muffled as the speakers were small and old and failed to capture much range producing a tinny carnivalesque sound from what otherwise would’ve been the smooth depths of Southern jazz. A box of Domino sugar had been left open on the table. By the end of the meal, it was nearly empty and we were all giddy with food and high on one another.
That morning, under the cover of my parents’ enthusiasm, Birdie had escaped the task of clearing. As I’d headed from the kitchen to join her, I’d seen Mother glide into Father’s arms, pressing him up against the counter near the sink. She was carrying the sugar bowl and wearing a thin pair of white shorts and a tank top through which I could see the outline of her nipples. As she’d moved into him, he’d parted his legs slightly so as to accompany the wale of her. Before I’d turned the corner, I saw his hands trailing the shape of her body until they reached the curve of her breasts.
“Your mother is a beautiful woman,” he’d said as I’d passed them.
The night Father returned after the first of K’s watch, the only sound trailing him was the whine of the refrigerator and the click of the light in the front hall as he turned down the switch. I awoke in the night to footsteps pacing the hallway and the rattle of ice in a glass.
As I descended the staircase the next morning, Father was sitting in the old club chair in the living room. The chair had been positioned so as to face the television. From Father’s stillness, I thought he’d drifted off while watching the late nights, until I realized the screen was blank.
“It’s just me, Pop,” I said, not wanting to surprise him.
The way his eyes looked in my direction and then drifted, he seemed hardly to recognize me, any sign of acknowledgment in his face or his posture replaced by slack jaw and glaze. His cheeks and the broad expanse of his forehead had lost their hue. Even his features looked shrunken.
I stood in front of him for several moments hoping he’d adjust to the presence of life in the room.
The light that day was excruciating. The sun blasted through Mother’s windows with the kind of brilliance that bleeds landscapes of their color. The rug lost its grain. The room felt empty and cube-like. Everything in it appeared balded and gray.
Looking at Father with his back to the row of windows, when I shifted my head various parts of his body disappeared in the glare as though through them I could see out the window and beyond. Beyond him I imagined the image of Mother beneath the apple trees in the yard sowing the bed of begonias which lined the stone wall where our property met the road. Her skin was tan and leathery. Her breasts bounced as she bent over where she was not entirely buttoned up. She worked from the waist, pulling up small patches of green where they had raised their heads above ground. An ant climbed the inside of her leg. “Look at all these cues,” she said, straightening up for a moment, surveying the rows of wild flowers that shifted in the breeze. Inside her, I saw the reflection of the window at Father’s back. If I looked into it I saw into her stomach, the small pit where she kept all her food. I could taste the bits of roughage — dried apricots and bites of asparagus — mixed in with acid that had made its way down into her stomach from the hollow of her cleft. When I looked through it and beyond, I saw the old ceramic tub across the street where the Shetland was buried in Otto’s field. When I stood in that spot, a good clean breeze ruffled the back of my hair.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Father said from his chair.
11
When it came to private property, the Steelhead brothers taught me everything I know. They lived alone in a big brown house on the top of the mountain. According to local legend, they were fatherless. What they saw of their mother was what time she had between men. It was said they killed dogs in their basement. Rumor had it, they even tried killing a pony once. Tethered it to a stake in back of their house and watched as the pony walked itself in circles until it dug a track so deep it walked into the ground.
What I knew of the Steelheads’ story I’d gleaned from hearsay and what I’d observed from our front door. Each Sunday, I’d seen Mrs. Steelhead’s Impala clamor its way over the gravel and up the drive. Her hair she kept wrapped in a towel piled on the crown of her head. She came with some regularity and always at this hour, the hour of morning when the night was just burning off and the sun was rising over the road. Her Impala moved at such a clip that, if I nodded off, I feared I might miss the site of her gunning it up the hill.
One morning before Mother left us while waiting for Mrs. Steelhead, I had nodded off in my sleeping bag in the front hall. Mother had stumbled upon me on her way downstairs for breakfast.
“Who you waitin’ on, Jean?” she’d said, taking my feet off the tile and rubbing them between the palms of her hands.
“Mrs. Steelhead,” I’d said.
“Mother of three boys and the woman rolls home Sundays at six in the morning,” Mother’d said. “I bet that hussy’s still wet.”
I remembered this now, as I made my way toward their house. The Steelheads’ dwelling sat in a small clearing in a densely wooded knoll at the top of the mountain. More pothole and frost heave than surface, the road took a good bit of leg just to manage the weave. Macadam flew up under my bike wheels, nicking the backs of my legs. I avoided the big ruts for fear of getting a flat.
The house itself wasn’t the ramshackle structure I’d imagined. It looked like the first in a long series of houses that populated the new breed of pre-suburban developments: the fantasy of an old turn of the century carriage house standing on the foundation of its character and convictions, but recreated with a skeleton of new plywood and plaster. In premise, the layout embraced something of the great wide open. There was air in the rooms. Even a good deal of light. Somebody’d had money once. Somebody’d once proposed trying her hand at familial structure. Someone’d once wanted to care for these brothers.
They had a Lazy Boy, an old braided rug of the sort I’d seen in Grandmother’s house where the dog laid in the kitchen, and a big screen TV. Beyond that, the house lacked furniture and decoration. The front rooms were empty save for a few cardboard boxes and a large inflatable palm. The tree functioned as a punching bag. Here was WWF, monster trucks, and a sanatorium of white walls. Someone had punched a hole in the bathroom door.
The elder Steelhead boys had nothing of Fender’s wit or charm. Tall and dark-haired, there was a shiftiness to them I distrusted, a raw meanness that comes from experiencing some rupture in human dignity. History was afoot in that house. That stale acrid thing which eats children from the inside leaving the outside to blow around without consequence or intention like a dried out husk. Some days the brothers were harmless, their menace reduced to ghostly indifference. Others, they were entirely flammable. To add insult to injury, Fender’s looks eclipsed theirs. This made them a shade meaner.
Fender was the first person to call me on the phone. K was watching us that day. It wasn’t her habit to answer the phone when it rang. I kept a list of calls on the sticky notes. When it rang, I had to run for it.