All Things Cease to Appear Page 13

  There was a horn at his feet, a beat-up trumpet. He looked older than he probably was, with skin like lager, hair all white and curly.

  Cole said, My brother plays.

  Nah, I’m just fooling with it.

  Paris smiled a little and handed him the horn. Let’s see what you got.

  Eddy held the instrument. It had a story to tell, the old, dull brass warming in his hands. He brought it to his lips and blew a little, played a tune he knew well. She had a nice sound to her.

  Yup, you stuck with her. Paris shook his head. That the only kind of love that don’t go away. I feel for you, brother. Ain’t nothing they can do for you now.

  Paris proclaimed himself a man of darkness who’d found the light in prison. He’d been in and out his whole life.

  They all find Jesus in prison, his uncle told him. What else they got to do?

  He’d go back into the dorm to see him, the cots lined up like in an army barracks. Paris sitting on the edge of his with his elbows on his knees, staring at his hands like they were lumps of clay and he was trying to figure out what to make of them. I couldn’t find nothing to do, he told Eddy. Nothing but sit here.

  My uncle’s putting you to work.

  I can work, the man said. I got no problem with that.

  He had a small black Bible beside him on the bed, its cover as soft as felt, and he’d marked his place in Revelation with a ribbon from his daughter’s hair that he let Eddy handle. The ribbon was pink and shiny and a little frayed. The daughter lived somewhere down south, worked in a truck-stop cafeteria. Paris had eyes like unpolished shoes, scuffed with wear. He played love songs, ballads. The blues. With everything he had he played the blues. You got to live hard, he told Eddy, taking hold of his shoulder. You got to live for her, he said, touching the rim of the horn. I don’t see you got much choice.

  —

  AT NIGHT he went up to the wires. There was this path through the trees, and wires stretched lazily in every direction. You had all this beautiful country, and then the wires appeared, buzzing, and people got upset. Maybe because they realized they weren’t as safe as they thought, tucked away in their little stupid lives. Bottom line: people were afraid of death, most of them were. Not him, though. He wasn’t particularly afraid.

  Sometimes this mangy old dog came out of the woods to follow him. It had kind of a bashed-in face. But it knew him, Eddy could tell. It would trail him at a distance, just two creatures sharing the night. They probably thought about the same things—the smell of the ground, the hard wet dirt of the trail, the grass thick as his shoelaces and long enough to trip you. Black and wiry-haired, the dog showed his teeth when he went along like he was smiling, his tongue hanging out of his mouth as long as a shoehorn. He’d look at him like: What am I doing here? Eddy shook his head and thought, Don’t be asking me philosophical questions. He walked on as far as you could up to a plateau and stood under the trapeze of buzzing wires while the dog went around him a few times making dog noises, and Eddy said, Quit your fussing and sit. The dog ignored him, then lifted his head like he’d heard something, and a moment later Eddy could hear the train.

  —

  YOU COULD WALK right up to the house and they never knew. You could look right in the windows. They kept it lit up like a music box. You could hear Franny running around, screaming or laughing, like little kids do, and Eddy thought these were the best sounds ever. He could see Mr. Clare emptying a box of books in his grandfather’s old room, taking out each one and examining it like some priceless object before placing it on the shelf as if it were rigged with dynamite. He watched her in the kitchen, doing something at the counter, her hair piled up on her head. She was wearing what had to be one of her husband’s cast-off shirts, with a banker’s stripes, and cutoffs, and she had a great pair of legs, long and tanned, her elbows pointing as she fixed what he realized was a sandwich. Again, he thought of his mother, whose life was already over and had ended without much consequence. That was the real tragedy.

  —

  SHE’D STARTED a garden and was up to her ankles in dirt. Eddy approached slowly, like he wanted to dance, and took the rake. Here, let me help you.

  I want flowers, she said. Lots and lots of them.

  We’ll get you flowers. He turned to his brother. Right, Cole?

  Cole nodded.

  I love tiger lilies, don’t you?

  Sure.

  What about you, Cole?

  Well, I guess daisies.

  Their mother had liked daisies. She was always sticking them in water.

  Let’s plant some daisies, then, Mrs. Clare said.

  They were different. They’d come from the city, but they weren’t like the other people who came up here. For one thing, they weren’t rich. Most of the city people had money. They’d buy summer places. You’d see them in town. They were ornery and undeserving. But the Clares were different. She was.

  Anyway, Eddy was working for them now. This was business. She didn’t know they’d grown up here on the farm. She hadn’t heard any of the stories and he wasn’t planning on telling her.

  This was work, he thought. Nothing more or less.

  If she wanted flowers, he’d make sure she had them. As for the other feelings he had for her—they were not allowed. His mother had taught him right from wrong; he knew his boundaries. There were some lines you just didn’t cross.

  Now pull out all these weeds, he instructed his brother. I’ll give these beds a good raking.

  With agile hands, Cole tugged out the weeds. Not one escaped him. Eddy stood watching him. His little brother had things on his mind. Life and all its injustice. You could see it when he frowned at the ground, yanking out some knot under the earth. At first, working here had seemed like a good idea. But now Eddy didn’t know. He’d catch Cole gazing up at their mother’s window like he was waiting for her to look out and say this whole thing had been a big mistake. He couldn’t get past it. Most nights he cried himself to sleep. Everything they knew had changed. All you had left were old memories, pictures in your head, postcards from the person you used to be once. After a while you weren’t even sure they were yours.

  2

  ALL THAT SUMMER it was warm afternoons and her lemonade and the little girl and Catherine’s yellow hair in the wind and her bony white feet in the grass. She had exquisite feet. She said he could call her Cathy if he wanted. She said her parents did. She didn’t mention her husband. He got a feeling with her. He’d watch her when she sketched. She was always sketching something—the trees, the old tires, Franny’s rain boots, the house—and she was good at it. Used a blue pencil for almost everything. She did Cole’s face, his pointy chin, his cheekbones, his pretty eyes. She did Wade’s hands nestled in his lap like sleeping doves. Let me do you, Eddy, she said.

  No, you don’t want to draw me.

  You’ve got a good face. She’d already started, her hand moving around the page, parts of him taking shape. We don’t look at each other enough, she said. People never do.

  That wasn’t true; he looked at her all the time, she just didn’t know it.

  When you really look at someone’s face, you see a lot.

  Like what?

  In you? I see strength.

  Then you have a good imagination, he said, and she looked disappointed. If he had strength, he would’ve figured out how to get out of this town by now.

  He lay back on the grass, up on his elbows with his legs stretched out, smoking, watching her. When she moved a certain way he could see the strap of her bra, her long neck.

  What do you want to do? With your life, I mean?

  I’m a musician. It felt good to say out loud. I play the trumpet.

  A musician. She tilted her head, watching him, her hand constantly moving.

  Yes, ma’am.

  Will you play for me?

  Maybe.

  Maybe? She smiled, surprised, her eyebrows raised.

  I guess I could be convinced.

  She looked at
him. I’d really like that, Eddy.

  She turned the pad of paper around and showed him the drawing. She had gotten his face, his hard eyes. Made him look better than he really did, he thought. Hey, that’s pretty good.

  I’ve captured you, she said.

  Yes, I believe you have. Now he was sketching her in his mind, her small shoulders, her flat chest, her tiny nipples. She was angular, girlish.

  You have a good face, she said. I bet all the girls tell you that.

  He shook his head, shaking off a dream; he felt like he knew her.

  —

  THE POINT WAS, sometimes you just know someone. That’s what he’d come to realize about the thing between them. Something warm and bright was filling him up like his mother’s cooking, making him strong again.

  Maybe she’d come out to hang the wash. He’d watch her back, her arms reaching up, her elbows as knobby as garden snails.

  Across the fields that had been his grandfather’s and his great-grandfather’s before that, the wind spoke to him. Wait, it said.

  The old farm, once full of cows, sheep, pigs, even two old quarter horses his pop had gotten cheap. His old man could do horse tricks. He could stand up on their backs and twirl a rope. He was a cowboy; he was a scholar. Smartest man he ever knew and couldn’t make a dime. Opera always in the house. And the smell of Mother’s cooking. Onions, fried potatoes, bacon.

  Now Catherine’s daughter was sleeping in his old room. He wouldn’t tell her. He wouldn’t tell her what had gone on in that house, how his father would come after them, turning over chairs and tables, how his mother would cry up in her room or sometimes sit in one place shaking just a little, like somebody who was scared.

  At night, it was too hot at Rainer’s to be inside. He’d walk through town. You could see into all the crummy little houses. People out on their stoops, smoking, just passing the time. Living their lives, making mistakes, bad decisions, yelling at each other, or sometimes you saw the joy, the moments of brightness.

  It could make you love this world.

  The night before she’d left them behind—because that’s what she did—she asked Eddy into her room. You’re the oldest, she said to him, her voice distant, spare. You look out for your brothers, Edward. Make sure nobody hurts Wade. He’s big and strong, but he’s too kind. She took his hand briefly. You see to it that Cole goes to college. He can’t stay in this town.

  Yes, Mother.

  I’m counting on you, Eddy.

  I know it.

  He sat there; he couldn’t look at her. You get some sleep, she told him. Good night, now.

  He left her there, thinking how his parents’ room and everything in it was a place he could never understand. His mother as a woman; his father. How they were together as husband and wife. Whatever they had that kept them there. Their quiet violence. What she took from him. What she endured. The old highboy where she kept her things, a monument to missed chances. Birth certificate, high-school diploma, acceptance letter from a nursing school, a tooth.

  —

  HE HAD THIS JOB working nights at the inn as a busboy. That’s where he met the girl, Willis. She was younger, maybe twenty, but was the type that had all the answers. She liked getting the goods on people. The first thing she said to him was, You look like an undertaker. To which he replied, They make me wear this. She carried around this book of poems by E. E. Cummings, thick as a dictionary, that she stole back in high school from her school library—she said she wanted to be a poet.

  The inn paid pretty good and was a popular place. People came from all over, driving up from the city or down from Saratoga, and everybody wanted to get in, and every weekend the place was jammed. Usually, he could get a plate of food after hours. Lamb was their dish. Sometimes even a cold beer. On breaks, they’d go outside and smoke and she’d tell him a made-up poem. She’d recite, with a nervous tremor in her voice, The moon is bright above the crazy trees, or some crap like that.

  Willis could be hard to figure. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but something about her drove him a little crazy. Maybe the way she moved, like a Spanish dancer with something on her head, straight-backed, elegant. She had a mole on her face and black-caterpillar eyebrows, eyeliner thick as crayon. She said she was from the city, and whenever she announced this to somebody she jerked her head so her hair flew back out of her face over her shoulder. They’d do shots on their break, out in the parking lot. Once they did flamers. She’d get a little drunk and start crying about her mother, saying she was the worst daughter you could ever have, and she’d get all soggy, with her mascara running all over the place and snot dripping out of her nose and her lips all slippery, and the only thing he could think to do was kiss her. She’d gone to college out west and was in town for a while, working at the inn. Claimed she’d gotten hired on account of her riding skills, for all the rich people in Chosen with expensive horses they couldn’t ride. She said she wanted to learn how to farm so one day she could have her own little place and grow stuff. That’s all she wanted. They were in the junkyard when she told him this, in the back seat of a limousine that had confetti all over the seats and floor, and kind of a puke smell, and you just knew something had happened in it, something bad.

  Life was mysterious, he knew. People never said what they really meant and it always caused more trouble than it was worth. Eddy thought it was a defining characteristic of human beings. You didn’t find that kind of thing with animals. Sometimes, late at night, when it was very quiet, he’d imagine that all the words people never said, the true and honest ones, slipped out of their mouths and danced around wickedly over their stupid, sleeping forms.

  You couldn’t control much in this life. His brothers were counting on him for something—he didn’t really know what, none of them did. But something important. That might make them feel better.

  It was hard to say what people needed once they’d been hurt. Still, he didn’t mind the burden. If anyone should carry it, it was him. He could bear it. His mother had known it. He knew it, too. He hoped he could do some good.

  —

  IT WAS a small kitchen at the inn, and even with all the windows open and the fans going the air was blazing. You’d see the blue flames and the sizzling pans. Eddy was only a busboy, but they treated him like someone special. As a townie, he had their respect. Plus, he was fast. He cleared the tables and came back like a ghost; nobody even noticed.

  Everybody knew the town was changing. You could spot the New Yorkers a mile away in their expensive clothes, the women with their pocketbooks, their sunglasses, like they were famous, or just better. They had an attitude—what his old high-school teachers would call arrogance before making you stand out in the hall all period. You could feel the world changing. Money pouring in. The rich people getting richer, and everyone else, like him, going nowhere.

  One night, the Clares came in for dinner. They’d asked his brother to babysit, so Eddy had dropped him over there before work. Cole complained about it and said babysitting was for girls, but Eddy reminded him of the good money he was making. They’re new here. They don’t know anybody else. And she likes you.

  They were with another couple, some old guy whose wife used a cane. Catherine had on a blue dress that showed off her shoulders and her hair was pulled back kind of fancy, not her usual blond scribble. Mr. Clare wore a starchy white shirt and a bow tie, like he’d been gift-wrapped. Eddy couldn’t figure out what a sweet girl like her was doing with an asshole like him. More than once, Eddy had watched her transform into the person who was Clare’s wife, when she’d hear his Fiat down the road and start cleaning up the place like she needed to hide something, including her true self. Eddy wondered what it was like to be in his shoes: to have a wife like her in your bed every night, to drive a car like that. He thought it must be pretty good.

  Willis was their waitress, and for some reason she seemed pretty upset the whole time, slamming the plates down and acting like a rattling teapot about to blow its lid off. He wor
ried she might spit in their food. At one point he took hold of her arms and made her look at him, and she was all flushed from the heat of the ovens, and her eyes, which were almost black, had tears in them. I made a mistake, she said. I did something awful.

  Hey, he said, and kissed her forehead.

  She stood there with her cheeks bright red and sweat marks under her arms, putting out the bread plates, the squares of butter, and you could see her tattoo peeking out from under her sleeve, black tears falling down her wrist. They took a break at the same time and went out into the cool air and smoked under the black leaves. The leaves tittered in the wind and you could see this streak of orange in the darkening sky. Willis had a hard little mouth, like the smallest flower. It was the shape your blood took when you got cut. She smoked and shook her head, nodding at the screen door, the buttery light inside the kitchen. Guy’s a prick.

  Who do you mean?

  You know.

  He didn’t want to know. He didn’t press her and that was the end of it.

  Later, after they were done, she took him to her room to get high. When you worked in a kitchen you went home greasy, the smell of food on your clothes, your skin. They walked side by side down the empty road. It was a barn fixed up like a dorm and some of the help lived there. These were summer people, mostly, students and the like, who’d go back to their real lives before the first frost. They lay on her bed under the open window and you could smell the sweet stink of the sheep and you could see the moon.

  I wish things were different, she said, that people were nicer, you know? I wish people were nicer to each other.

  He looked down at her face and saw that she was really just a kid. She let him kiss her a few times. Her mouth was warm, salty, and when he kissed her with his eyes closed it was like being inside a dark little city.

  I’ve done things, she said. Stuff I regret.

  Like what?

  With men. She looked at him with her big eyes.

  You don’t have to—

  I want to. I want you to know me. I want you to know who I really am.