Emperor of the Air (13 page)

Presently I hear Tessa come into the house. The door thuds, the coat rack jingles. I put my finger to my lips, and when she peeks into the TV room I motion for her to stay quiet. She comes in and leans down next to us to listen. Then she goes over and turns off the TV. My mother’s humming pauses, then continues, and Tessa goes out to the kitchen, where I hear her begin to cook our dinner. Pots clang on the stove, silverware chimes on the wood table. I lie still. My mother’s humming is soft, almost inaudible. Despite all science, I think, we will never understand the sadness of certain notes.

W
HEN MY BROTHER
Lawrence left us to live in California I should have tried to stop him, but I didn’t, have been sad, but I wasn’t. Instead it was just something happening in our lives. It was like the roof leaking or the electricity going out. I thought of him riding the Trailways bus across the western states, underneath the bubble skylight, sharing cigarettes in station diners, talking with girls he didn’t know. I thought of his new life in the Electronics Belt. I imagined going out to see him in a couple of years, heading out to California to stay with him in a split-level ranch with a dark-bottom pool. He was twenty-seven and I was sixteen and computers were booming.

On the morning he left, my mother gave him a Bible. I gave him a watch with a built-in compass, and our sister, Darienne, who was nineteen, gave him a four-by-six-foot oil portrait of our family, framed.

“I’m going to have to take it out of the frame,” Lawrence said.

“But it’s of our family.”

“Dary, I’m taking a bus.” Lawrence looked at me.

“Dary,” I said, “he’ll break down the frame and roll up the canvas. It’s done all the time.”

“I worked six weeks on it,” she said. She started to cry.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “He’ll be back soon.”

Lawrence held up the painting. In it we were sitting together in our kitchen—my brother, my sister, my mother, our spaniel named Caramel, and I. Lawrence’s wrist dipped below the back of Darienne’s collarbone so that his bad hand was hidden around her shoulder.

My father was in the painting also, or at least Darienne’s idea of him. He had left fourteen years ago, and not even Lawrence remembered much about him. We certainly never talked about him anymore. But Darienne still put him into her paintings. In them he had a hooked nose, a straight nose, the faintly Indian nose and angled cheekbones that I think he really did have; he had thinning hair, full hair; he stared out from the canvases, scowled out, held his head turned away from us. He had been a civil engineer. He had stolen some money from his company and left with a woman who was one of my mother’s good friends. One of the few times my mother spoke of him after that, years later, she told me that he was looking for something he would never find. In the painting Darienne now gave Lawrence he stood behind my mother. His arm rested on Darienne’s shoulder, and he was smiling. He almost never smiled in Darienne’s paintings.

“He’s smiling,” I said.

“He knows Lawrence is going to stay.”

“I’m not staying, Dary.”

“He’s not staying,” I said.

“He knows he’s coming back soon, then,” she said.

Lawrence was leaving because things had reached a point for him here. Although my mother said the good Lord subtracted five years from his age, the five years he spent fighting in blacktop lots and driving a car with no hood over the engine, twenty-seven was still old for him to be living where he was, in the basement of our house. He had an engineering degree from Hill Oak College and a night certificate in computer programming. His job, teaching math and auto mechanics at the high school, had ended in June, and on top of that my sister was having a bad summer. In July she had shown me a little black capsule inside the case where she kept her oboe reeds. We were alone in her room.

“Do you know what it is?”

“Cold medicine,” I answered.

“Nope,” she said. She put it on her tongue and closed her mouth. “It’s cyanide.”

“No, it’s not.”

“It is so.”

“Dary, take that out of your mouth.” I put my hand on her jaw, tried to get my finger between her lips.

“I’m not Caramel.”

“Caramel wouldn’t eat cyanide.” I could feel the tips of her incisors nibbling my fingers. Finally I got my hand into her mouth.

“It’s not cyanide,” she said. “And get your hands out of my mouth.” I pulled the pill out and held it on my palm. Saliva was on my fingers.

“You’re crazy,” I said to her. Then I regretted it. I wasn’t supposed to say that to her. My mother had taken me aside a few years before and told me that even though my sister and I had lived together all our lives, I might still never understand her. “It’s difficult for her to be around all you men,” my mother said to me. “You and Lawrence are together somehow, and that’s a lot for your sister.” Then she told me never to call Darienne crazy. She said this was important, something I should never forget. I was thirteen or fourteen years old. “Whatever you do,” she said, tilting her head forward and looking into my eyes, “whatever happens, I want you to remember that.”

At the beginning of the summer, before I knew he was leaving, Lawrence said he had something very important to tell me. “But I’m not just going to tell you,” he said. “I’ll mix it into the conversation. I’ll say it some time over the summer.” We were working on my motorcycle, which he had given me. “You have to figure out what it is,” he said. He had drilled the rusted bolts on the cam covers and we were pulling them out. “It’s about time you started doing that anyway.”

“Doing what?”

“Thinking about what’s important.”

We were living in Point Bluff, Iowa, in the two-story, back-porched saltbox my father had bought before he left us. As we took apart the rusting cams I tried to decide what was important in our lives. Nothing had changed since I could remember. Lawrence still lived in the basement, where at night the green light of his computer filled the window. Darienne was using the summer to paint still lifes and practice the Bellini oboe concerto, and I was going to go to baseball day camp in August. My mother sipped vodka cranberries out on the lawn furniture with Mrs. Silver in the evenings, and at night sat on the porch reading the newspaper or sometimes the Bible and watching the
Tonight
show. She was the high school guidance counselor and she believed the Lord had a soft spot for the dropouts and delinquents she had to talk with every day. Mrs. Silver was her best friend. Mrs. Silver was young, maybe ten years younger than my mother, and read the Bible, too, although she liked the newspaper more. My mother said she’d led a rough life. She didn’t look that way to me, though. To me, my mother looked more like the one with the rough life. Sometimes she wore a bathrobe all weekend, for example. I didn’t know any other mothers who did that. And except for the two or three times a week when she cooked, Lawrence and Darienne and I made our own dinners. My mother’s arms were pale and her elbows were red. Mrs. Silver’s were tan. Mrs. Silver wore three or four bracelets, a gold chain on her ankle, and blouses without sleeves. She came over almost every day. I talked to her sometimes in the back yard when my mother went inside to answer the phone or mix another pitcher of vodka cranberry. Mostly we talked about my future.

“It’s not too early to think about college,” she told me.

“I know, Mrs. Silver.”

“And you ought to be saving money.” She put her hands on her hips. “Are you saving money?”

“No.”

“Do you know that life can be cruel?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“No you don’t,” she said. She laughed. “You don’t really know that.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“Are you learning, at least?”

“Yes,” I answered. “I’m trying to decide what’s important.” I nodded. “Right now I’m learning about motorcycles.”

Lawrence and I were taking apart the Honda CB 360 he had given me. We planned to have it completely rebuilt before baseball camp. He had given it to me in March, when the weather warmed and the melting snow uncovered it in the ditch by Route 80. It was green. The front fork had been bent double from impact, and when I touched the rusted chain it crumbled in my hands.

The first thing we took apart was the clutch. We loosened the striker panel and let the smooth round plates, bathed in oil, spill one by one into an aluminum turkey-roasting pan. With the oil wiped clean, they gleamed like a metal I had never seen before, the way I imagined platinum gleamed. They were polished from their own movement. Lawrence explained that the slotted panels were to dissipate heat from friction. After we took the plates out and examined them, noted how they slipped smoothly over their fellows, we put them back in. “That’s how you learn a machine,” he said. “You take it apart and then you put it back together.”

I thought about this for a moment. “Is that what you were going to tell me?”

“No, Edgar,” he said. “That’s not important enough.”

That spring, before he gave me the motorcycle, he had taught me his theory of machinery. In April he took me out to the back yard, to a patch of the softening earth that he had cleared of the elephant grass that grew everywhere else on the lot. He had sunk four poles there and made a shanty with fluted aluminum, sloping the ground so that snowmelt poured into two gulleys and flowed away from the center, where his machinery lay. His machinery was anything he could get his hands on. He got it from junkyards and road gulleys and farm sales. He made sealed bids on government surplus, brought home sump pumps, rifle mechanisms, an airplane engine, hauled them in a borrowed truck and set them underneath the shanty to be taken apart.

“Every machine is the same, Edgar,” he told me one evening. “If you can understand two sticks hitting together, you can understand the engine of an airplane.” We were standing underneath the shanty with Darienne and Mrs. Silver, who had wandered out to the back yard after dinner. Out there Lawrence kept a boulder and a block of wood and a walking stick to demonstrate the lever. “I can move the boulder with the stick,” he said that evening, and then he did it. He wedged the stick between the wood and the rock, and when he leaned on it the boulder rolled over. “Fulcrum—lever-machine,” he said. “Now”—and then he took the oilcloth tarp off the drag-racer engine and the Cessna propellor—“this is the very same thing.”

“Spare me,” said Darienne.

“If you don’t want to learn,” said Lawrence, “don’t come out here.”

Then my sister walked back across the yard, stopping to pick up a cottonweed pod for one of her still lifes. Lawrence watched her go in through the screen door. “She’s crazy,” he said.

I turned to him. “It’s hard for her to be around all us men.”

Mrs. Silver looked at me. “Good, Edgar,” she said.

I smiled.

My brother picked up a wrench. He cleared his throat. “That’s peckerdust,” he said.

“Pardon me,” said Mrs. Silver.

“I said that’s peckerdust. Darienne can take what I give her. People like it when you’re hard on them.” He looked at her. “Everybody knows that. And you know what?” He transferred the wrench to his bad hand and pushed back his hair. “They come back for more.”

“A lady wouldn’t come back for more,” said Mrs. Silver. She put her hands together in front of her. “And a gentleman wouldn’t say that.”

Lawrence laughed. “Well, Dary sure likes it. And she comes back.”

“It’s a nice night out here,” I said.

Mrs. Silver smiled at me. “It is,” she said. Then she turned and walked back to the house. The kitchen light went on. I saw Darienne at the sink putting water on her face. I watched her wipe the water from her eyes with a paper towel and then move away from the window.

Sometimes I tried to look at my sister as if she were a stranger. We spent a lot of time in the house together, she and my mother and I, and I had a lot of time to look at her. She was tall, with half-curly, half-straight hair and big shoulders. Sometimes Mrs. Silver sat with us. Mrs. Silver was lonely, my mother said. She had a husband who drank. She was beautiful, though. “I’m your mother’s charity case,” she would say, sitting in our yard chair while she and my mother waxed each other’s legs. “Your mother just feels sorry for me.” Sometimes I compared her with my sister. I watched her in the yard or on the other side of the family room as she smiled and laughed, as she brushed her bangs from her forehead or drank a vodka cranberry from a straw. Then I looked at Darienne. While she painted or played oboe, as if I were seeing her for the first time at a dance, I watched her. Her hands moved. She had the potential to be pretty but she wasn’t. This is what I decided. Not the way she was now, at least. Her face was friendly, but she wore boy’s cotton shirts and slumped her shoulders. In her shirt pocket she kept oboe reeds, which she always sucked.

“You ought to stand up straight,” Lawrence told her.

“So I can be prettier for you? I’d rather die.”

“No you wouldn’t,” said my mother.

“And you shouldn’t suck those things in public,” said Lawrence.