Something Rising (Light and Swift) (8 page)

It had been handwritten by Laura, with no date and no title, on a light green sheet torn from a stenographer's pad with the orphaned scraps of paper clinging to the top. Cassie had never held with leaving such scraps, and now, reading the poem, or whatever it was—an idea, a group of sentences—she plucked them off one by one and dropped them on the floor of the truck. Laura and Belle talked about poetry all the time, but Cassie had no particular feelings about it. There was a way in which the obscuring of communication was painful, but the opposite was also true. She had no interest in anyone presenting her with the bleak, unvarnished truth. If Belle were here, Cassie thought, she would try to figure it out a word at a time, and she'd stick with it until she could make some judgment. Belle would take this tack in part because she had nothing better to do, and because the process of analysis struck her as pleasurable. Cassie shook her head at the notion. Belle enjoyed analysis, with the result that she
was back at the house with Laura; and Cassie, at sixteen, was the only person in the house with a driver's license and a vehicle, and the beginnings of tendonitis in her right elbow. She rubbed her elbow, then went inside the library to face the kindness of the librarians. The librarians were always kind.

She had memorized the poem, or whatever it was, and was repeating it to herself as she turned on to 732 East, the Percy Creek Pike. It was a long straight road all the way to the reservoir, and she would travel it for miles, so she sped up. Who were
they
who judged and bruised? Which rational creatures could transcend the stain, and the stain of what? And when had Laura ever been on a horse? And when had she seen a horse fall? Cassie passed the squat cinder-block building out of which a man with a wooden leg (that he kept displayed at all times; he actually rolled up his pant leg to do so) used to sell produce in the summer. The building had been unused for years. Next to the front door, in emphatic black lettering, someone had painted
NO CAR WASHING!
as if that were the world's gravest temptation. Then there was nothing on either side of the road, just trees and fields. Cassie squinted. Far in the distance she could see something in the middle of the road. Heat shimmered upward. Beware the mee-rahj, as Jimmy used to say; a lot of the world looks like one thing but is really something else. When she was fourteen, she and Bud had traveled to Georgia for a big game, a serious money game, with the man who was at that time unbeatable, Lewis Lee. Cassie had played him all night in a cowboy bar (no cowboys in evidence), her fortunes rising and falling, until finally Lewis pulled it out and remained unbeatable, and Cassie and Bud turned around and
headed home. She had been driving for hours in the dead of night when she saw a deer standing in the middle of the road (had it been a horse?), standing only a few feet away, standing and staring in that impassive way of the massive thing. Cassie had slammed on the brakes and thrown Bud, even wearing a seat belt, so far forward he had bruised his sternum and been mad at her for a week. She kept asking, Should I have hit it? And he would say, There was
No Damn Deer
, and she would say, Yes, but should I have hit it?

She slowed. The thing in the middle of the road was about the size of a three-year-old boy and was picking at the stringy remains of something, raising and lowering its head. It was mostly in her lane. A turkey buzzard. She was getting closer to it, and she would be damned if she would swerve. She thought she'd go ahead and speed up, she'd go ahead and get thick into events with this bird. She didn't care what they did or how foul they were, they could ravage all the carcasses of her county. But they weren't going to boss her around in terms of driving. She was twenty feet from the bird and it didn't move, and she was ten feet from it, a hot day and both her windows down, and just as she moved over—she did move at the last minute—the buzzard decided to take flight, and took flight. It spread its wings like an enormous black kite, and as Cassie passed it, the wind moving through the cab of the truck pulled the bird in through her window. For a single moment its lizard-skinned claws, its breast and face, were on her, one claw caught her forearm and tore it. She slammed on her brakes, and the bird tumbled out. It took flight with an awkward turn and then a terrible, fluid ease.

Cassie parked the truck at the side of the road and got out, doubling over in the heat. That, Cassie decided, was what a nightmare would smell like; the unbelievably dense odor of decay, layer
after layer, no end to it. Her forearm was bleeding, and she could still smell the bird on her clothes and in her hair. She gasped, kept her head down. Beneath her the pavement shimmered.

“Where are the groceries?” Belle asked.

“I didn't get to the grocery store,” Cassie said from the mudroom, taking off her work boots, her jeans.

“Why not? Oh my God, what is that smell, don't even think you're coming in here. What happened, what is that smell? Where are the groceries?”

“Get me some clean clothes, Belle.”

“You smell like. Not a morgue, not a cemetery, not a funeral home. None of those places smell. A slaughterhouse, no, I don't know. A war crime. That's what you smell like.” Belle picked at a scab on the back of her hand, under which there was an imaginary blackberry thorn that she had been trying to remove for a couple of years. She was wearing Laura's shoes; every time she took a step, her feet slid out.

Cassie remembered the poem in the pocket of her jeans, removed it, and put the jeans in the washing machine. “I could use some clean clothes here, Belle.”

“Did you, have you, did you
roll
in something?”

“And a towel. I'll shower in the basement.”

“Please don't go down there, Cassie, those stairs don't have any backs on them, and I don't like the way that bare bulb is, the way that bulb is. And I remember that shower, it's just a nozzle sticking out of the wall, and you just stand there in the middle of the room, no stall or anything, there could be all sorts of, I think you should come on in.”

“In my room, Belle, clean clothes and underwear, a towel.”

“What is that, what's on your arm? What happened to your arm?”

“I had a run-in with a buzzard.”

“Oh God. You're going to get septus, septu-something, I can't remember the rest, like a cat scratch, how did it happen, a buzzard? Did you say a buzzard, like a vulture, you mean?” For a long time Belle's hair had been blond, but lately it had turned toward brown and was dry, she tucked it compulsively behind her ears. She was thin, thinner than Laura, her grocery lists always said: yogurt, celery, ice. Laura added: cigarettes, butane, corn flakes. One of the scabs on Belle's upper arm was bleeding, and a piece of toilet paper was stuck to it.

“It was squatting in the road like a three-year-old boy.”

Belle swallowed, picked now at her left arm. “A three-year-old boy?”

“Or a midget dressed all in black.”

Belle said nothing, looked away.

“It was picking at the strings of a rabbit.”

“A rabbit?”

“I passed it too close with my windows down, I thought it would fly away before I reached it.”

“So you were in a bit of a contest. With the vulture.”

“Sort of.”

“And you lost.”

“It would appear.” Cassie stood in the mudroom in her boxer shorts and sports bra, her arm throbbing. She remembered the grocery list, retrieved it from the jeans. Put them back in the washer.

“Should I get Laura?”

“No, you should get the things I asked for, along with some iodine and a bandage. I need to get this washed out and medicine on it.”

“Should I call Poppy or Edwin Meyer?”

“No. You should think about the iodine, it's in the upstairs bathroom, and a bandage, and some clothes and a towel for me.”

Belle nodded, then looked down and studied one of the imaginary thorns under her skin. “A little boy, you say? Or a dwarf?” She would write these phrases, Belle would, on slips of paper and save them.

“That's right. I'll shower, then go to the grocery store, then I'm going to Emmy's. And bring me my cowboy boots, they're next to my bedroom door. The ones with the two holes over the left ankle.”

“Two holes?”

“The snake bite. Where the snake bit me.”

Her sister stood still a moment, blankly. Then said, “You've had a great fright.”

Cassie took a deep breath. “Belle.”

At Emmy's house, hanging on the wall in the family room behind the big television, was a plaque that showed a man's dress shoes and said
THE GREATEST GIFT A MAN CAN GIVE HIS CHILDREN IS TO LOVE THEIR MOTHER
. Emmy's mother favored pastel-colored scented candles, never lit. In Emmy's kitchen was wall-to-wall indoor-outdoor carpeting in blue, and the walls were painted light blue with a wallpaper border of blue ribbons; the furniture was heavy early American. A corner hutch displayed dishes and glassware, including plates Emmy and her younger brother, Jeremy,
had painted in a ceramics class at Vacation Bible School. The round kitchen table shone with a thick varnish, and in the center sat a wooden lazy Susan that held salt and pepper shakers shaped like windmills, a plastic bottle of ketchup, and a basket of peach-colored silk flowers. These things, the windmills, the ketchup, and the peach flowers, had been there as long as Cassie could remember. An infinite number of props are necessary to shore up a serene family life, that's what Laura would have said, and once Emmy's parents, Mike and Diana, had gathered those props, they didn't change them. They didn't even move them.

“Heavenly Father,” Mike began, “we thank you for this meal spread before us. We thank you for our health, and for our loved ones, for giving us the fruits of the spirit and the blessings of Your Love. Please help us use this food to the nourishment of our bodies so that we are better able to perform Your work, in the name of Your son, Jesus Christ, Amen.”

Also on the table was a bowl of canned peas that had perhaps been in the can too long. They had gone sort of gray. A plate stacked with slices of white bread, a tub of margarine, five glasses of milk, dehydrated Parmesan cheese. A serving bowl was filled to overflowing with spaghetti in a hamburger sauce, and beside each plate was a steak knife, because Mike and Diana had taught their children to carve their spaghetti into one-inch strips before eating it.

“Cassie, your mom's okay?” Diana asked, serving the spaghetti.

“Fine. Thanks.”

“And your sister?”

“Also fine.”

“Her last summer at home.” Diana gave a sad smile. “Emmy, pass this to your brother. You'll miss her, Cassie.”

Had it been a question? One never knew with Diana, in the same way one never knew whether she was content in her life or had moved so far to one edge of the Despair Continuum, as Laura called it, that she appeared to be content. Cassie was tempted to say something like Miss Her? What does that mean, Miss Her? The bread at Emmy's was always too soft to withstand the spreading of the cold margarine, so Mike and Diana had taught their children to fold the piece of bread in half, with the margarine in the middle, and eat it that way.

“I won't miss Emmy when she goes to college,” Jeremy said. At fourteen he was so insufferable that Emmy had taken to calling him Greasy Little Monkey, and even he didn't dispute the name. “I'll never miss her ever, not a day of my life.”

“I'm sure you don't mean that,” Diana said, carving her pasta.

“I do! I hate her! She's—”

“You know you love each other.”

“I don't love her! I hate everything—”

“That's enough.” Mike gave Jeremy a warning glance, then went back to eating. Jeremy blinked back tears, his face red, all of his acne agitated and glowing. Cassie thought Jeremy might be less pimpled if he were allowed to say how much he hated Emmy. She could hear Laura's voice asking blandly,
So you hate your sister? That's fine
.

“Belle's valedictorian speech was really something, wasn't it, Cassie,” Diana continued. “I wish I'd taken a dictionary with me to the graduation.”

Emmy,who had so far stayed quiet, took a deep breath and sat back in her chair.

“Now, Emmy, don't get huffy, I was trying to say how impressed I was.”

“No you weren't, you were—”

“Put a plug in it, Emmy.” Mike wiped his mouth with his napkin, went back to eating.

Cassie took a few bites of her spaghetti. Diana put sugar in her tomato sauce, Cassie didn't know anyone else who did that. She took a drink of milk; at Emmy's house they drank whole milk, at Cassie's house skim.

“She's leaving for IU in the fall?”

“Excuse me?” Cassie asked, setting her glass down.

“Belle's leaving for IU in the fall. To study what.”

Emmy took another deep breath, Cassie cleared her throat. “Classics. Classical culture, Greek and Roman literature. Latin, I think.”

“All those things!” Diana had a skin ailment that had caused the pigment around her eyes to die, so she had the opposite of dark circles.

“Mom.”

“They're mostly the same thing, I think,” Cassie said.

“I see.” Diana gave her the smile again. Her sleeveless blouse was white with small red polka dots and a wide collar. “Well.”

“Mom.”

“Can it, Emmy.” Mike never made eye contact with anyone. He sold cars at a Ford dealership on the edge of Roseville and spent all his spare time mowing his lawn. Cassie wondered if he looked directly at his customers. He severed his spaghetti, shoveled it in his mouth.

“Emmy will maybe never go to college, will you, Emmy, because you can't pass algebra, even though I've already passed algebra and by the time I'm your age I'll be taking trig and calculus and by the time I'm your age you'll be a fat housewife.”
Jeremy seemed to be riding the rails of something; Cassie felt like congratulating him, except he was red-faced and his lips seemed to periodically get caught on his braces, and he still looked like he was about to cry.