Something Rising (Light and Swift) (9 page)

“Shut up, you little—Just shut up,” Emmy said, her jaw clenched. She moved as if she might hit him, and Mike didn't say anything but rose out of his chair and hovered slightly above the table, his hands in fists at his sides.

Diana ate a bite of peas. “You'll give your mom and sister my best, I hope, and tell Belle we're all real proud of her. She certainly is one of Roseville's finest.”

Emmy stood up. “We're leaving.”

“Where are you going?” Mike asked, the threat thick in his voice.

“To Wal-Mart, Dad. And then probably to McDonald's for ice cream.”

“Why do you need to go to Wal-Mart every night, Emmy?” Diana asked.

“If I see you in the McDonald's parking lot,” Mike said, shoving his napkin under his plate, “with that group that loiters there, I'll take your car away.”

“I'm well aware of that.”

“Is that an attitude?”

“You know it's an attitude!” Jeremy sputtered. “What else does she have, she hasn't got brains or a personality!”

“Thanks for dinner, Mom.”

“You didn't eat much.”

“Yes,” Cassie said, “thank you.”

Diana smiled. “Anytime. Come back anytime.”

*    *    *

They stepped outside into a fair summer evening, a couple hours left of daylight. Cassie patted the short stone statue of Jesus in the flower bed, as she always did, for luck. Emmy tipped her head back, spread her arms, said, “A beautiful night. A perfect night for killing one's parents. You drive first.” She tossed Cassie the keys to her used Ford station wagon. “I'm not nervous, I'm getting way better about that. I still don't want to parallel-park. And I don't want to pass anybody. I don't understand why passing is so all-fire important. But I'm not nervous, I just want to change my clothes.”

Cassie slipped into the driver's seat and started the car, which always gave a death rattle but never actually died. Emmy reached into the backseat for a pair of shorts and a pink tank top with spaghetti straps and began changing in the front seat as Cassie wound them through and out of Emmy's subdivision.

“What would old Mr. Lange make of this, I wonder,” Emmy asked, shirtless, as they drove past a white colonial on the corner, “or Mrs. Griffin, the widda-woman. They'd love it, probably, you know in the sixties? in places like this development? people used to have sex all over the place with everybody, I'm telling ya. Something about keys in a bowl.”

“Key parties.”

“Exactly, key parties. You just know my mom and dad and people like Mr. Lange were all up in seach other's business before we were born.” She laughed. “Poor Mom. Are these shorts too tight, I'm sucking my gut in, I can't really breathe, are they too tight? Why won't you look?”

Cassie approached a Village Pantry, turned in. “They're tight enough, I bet.”

“What are you doing?”

“You need gas.”

“I've got plenty of gas, look at that, there's probably, is that a fourth or an eighth?”

“Neither one.”

“Well, it's still plenty, let's go.”

Cassie pulled up to the pump, put in ten dollars' worth of gas, paid the skinny woman behind the counter who'd been there for years, smoking and looking like a chicken, a smoking chicken, then got back in the car, where Emmy was applying orange-scented lip gloss, and eyeliner to the inside of her bottom eyelid.

“Cassie, you about filled my tank up. I don't have any money.”

“I don't need your money.”

“Yeah, well, that's true. You know my mom was all raggin' on Belle because she couldn't say what she really wanted to.”

“Which was what.”

“‘So, Cassie, I hear you're quite the billiards player. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, does it. You've turned out exactly like your dad, haven't you. A charming man, as I understand it.'” Emmy's imitation of Diana was perfect. “‘Is this, now, is billiards going to be the way you—'”

“Emmy.”

Emmy looked at her.

“I don't give a shit about what your mom thinks of me.”

“I know.”

“No offense.”

“None taken.” Emmy looked out the window.

Cassie turned on to the highway, headed out of town.

The house had been in bankruptcy for a year, and there didn't seem much of a chance that anyone would buy it
today
, Puck was
fond of saying when Emmy fretted about them getting caught. Someone might eventually buy it, but not
today
. It was a gruesome little place on a floodplain; a gruesome house, that is, but anyone could see why the people who owned the land would be tempted to build there. The lane leading back to it was a quarter mile long, a straight lane traveling down a hill and into what looked to be a thirty-acre bowl surrounded by old hardwoods. You couldn't see the house or anyone visiting it from the road, and from the house there seemed to be no other world. When Cassie and Emmy arrived, there were already four or five pickup trucks backed around the big fire ring they'd built as a group, the fire was just getting started. Somebody was playing a Lynyrd Skynyrd tape in his truck—this was the usual fare, along with the Stones, Little Feat, Grand Funk Railroad. Cassie parked the car, and Emmy hopped out barefoot because Brian was there and she was compelled by the baroque and unyielding urges of mating, according to Laura.

Cassie walked around the perimeter of the house. It looked the same as it had last week, an ugly, ugly dwelling. It was a cube made of cinder blocks trimmed with cheap pine painted to look like California redwood; one corner of it was windows that looked into what had been the living room. The flimsy screen door would no longer latch, and after the house flooded, the storm door wouldn't close, either. Cassie stepped inside. Something here never ceased to be interesting: the fishy, moldy smell, or the brick floor unevenly laid, the freestanding corner fireplace wrapped in a metal bell like a woman's skirt. There must have been a rug on the floor, and maybe bookcases. Probably not bookcases. The couch would have sat here, facing a television. Life, Laura would have said, faced the television. But not at her house. It had been
allowed when Cassie and Belle were little, but it had since become Forbidden, and had been given away. Cassie didn't walk into the kitchen. There was a gap where the refrigerator had been that glared like a missing tooth, and the cabinet doors had swelled and now hung open on their hinges. But here, in the living room, she could see again the interesting thing—The Line—all around the room and only six inches from the ceiling, where the water had stopped. The Waterline. This room, this house, had been completely submerged. There were moments when the elements converged in such a way that this ridiculous cube, badly planned and poorly constructed, had taken on the majesty of a sunken ship, and everything inside, the silverware and the coffee cups, the floating end tables, became poignant.

“Where is Miss Cassie?” she heard Puck call. “Where is yon Cassandra? Get away from the stinky house, maiden! Be not obsessed with the stinky house!”

Or this could be one spot, one tale, in a town that voted to flood itself. Perhaps the government had said they would no longer rebuild, no longer declare a state of emergency, your bad planning does not constitute, et cetera, and the only option the cinder-block people had was to sell. Cassie had had dreams of houses: she had a long series of dreams in which she drove along roads she recognized, a grid, and arrived finally at her house—
her
house—and there was so much to be done to repair it. The inside was filled with old furniture, debris, clothes left lying as if the Rapture had come and the righteous didn't even get to keep their pink dresses and coveralls.

“Cassandra! Put down your tape measure! The cause is lost!”

She walked into the hallway, and there was The Line. The bedrooms were also cubes, the visual representation of inner desperation,
Laura would have said. In Cassie's dream house, the front door had three stained-glass panels: on the left was a perfect rendering of a small and twisted tree. In the middle was a boy kneeling in prayer, looking up at the sky. On the right was the sky itself, deep blue, a moon, a star. And the staircase in the parlor was dangerous and wide, and led up into pure darkness, and every night she could work on only one room. So she had started at the beginning, in the parlor, its mountain of debris, the hulking old piano. She had worked all night, hauling things out to the truck and studying the damage to the hardwood floors, and before morning she had taken a sledgehammer to the disintegrating walls and discovered that the plaster was mixed with horsehair, and in her dream the hair waved through the walls like seaweed.

“I know you're in there, Cassandra! You must come out and join America's beautiful people!”

Mornings she felt as if she'd never slept at all, and every night she thought it was surely over, she'd never see the house again, but somehow she returned. She completed the whole ground floor, she did things she'd never attempt in real life, and all alone. The tools she needed were always within reach. Then she moved ahead, into the darkness upstairs, and everything changed again. She was confronted with nostalgia, the discomfort of studying someone else's family photographs, trunks filled with memorabilia and rotting letters, fur coats, a contraption that might have been a birdcage and which Cassie was loath to study, a nest made of daily leavings. She had dealt with it gently, kept what she could keep, discarded the most intimate artifacts of the lost life, and she had turned the upstairs into one large room made of light, the room she would truly, standing here awake, live in if she could choose.

“I'm worried about what Brian Whittaker will attempt with our Emmy! I fear his intentions are less than honorable! He's afraid of you! Please come out!”

One night, the final night, she had driven the now familiar roads out to the house and pulled into the driveway, and there was the wide front porch painted dark blue, and there was the front door with the boy in prayer, but when she turned the doorknob, it was locked. The back door, too, was locked, and all the windows, and Cassie with no key. And she knew it didn't bear thinking about, how she had felt in the dream and the questions that had plagued her all the next day. Awake, asleep, the line was so thin, she looked everywhere. She didn't have the key, hadn't seen it, wouldn't know it if she found it. But over the weeks they'd been coming here, to the sad little cinder block on the beautiful land, Cassie had begun to develop a theory: in truth she'd been standing on a precipice all along. Somewhere in the tangled garden behind her dream house, once when she'd explored it surrounded by lazy bees, once when she'd traveled as far as the boneyard, she had dropped it. She'd dropped the key, and it had fallen into the water at the edge of the world, it had fallen past the place where light can penetrate, past the steeple of the sunken Methodist church; it had slid down the curved metal roof and floated on a current completely out of town. It had ended up here, at this ugly house, a site so deep only the blind fish could survive, and a blind fish had swallowed it.

She stepped out the front door just as Bobby Puck was about to call for her again.

“There you are,” he said, his spreading smile. He handed her a pint of Southern Comfort, and she took a long drink. “Cassie, we want to watch you
dance
.”

*    *    *

They all smelled smoky, they had eaten and danced. Cassie was not drunk but not entirely sober when she realized Emmy and Brian and Emmy's car were all missing. And where was Bobby Puck? Cassie could hear him somewhere at the edge of the flooded bowl; there was a stand of trees there, surrounding swampy land. This season Puck was claiming Satan lived there. He said, That is Satan's house, and everyone around the fire said, Okey-doke, Bob. And then he would wander over to confer with Satan, who was, he claimed (as many before him had), merely misunderstood. Ready to patch things up with his Brother.
A fallen angel, Cassie, just imagine, there is no idea more intoxicating than that
. Most of these summer nights, Cassie liked to reach the point where she wasn't precisely steady on her feet. Then she stopped. By morning she was fine, or relatively so, and she could practice two or three hours and still work.

“You can go with us.”

Cassie turned. Clay and Gary were standing next to Gary's truck, the two were always together. She went over and slipped in on the driver's side; the vinyl was still warm from the day's sun. Gary got in after her; he was a giant, shambling man in an old T-shirt from a Dead show, the sleeves cut off, and overalls. His long hair was down, his beard was full. He was only in his mid-twenties but seemed much older. Cassie imagined him lying down, a bearskin rug. Clay had long red hair tied back in a loose ponytail, a big red beard, more a Viking than a bear. He worked with his father on the family farm east of Roseville. His marijuana crop was legendary for its potency and consistency; he specialized in a Hawaiian variant called Orange, so named for the orange buds, heavy and sticky with resin.

They pulled away from the house and down the lane lined with locust trees so old they would eventually begin to die and no one would be able to prevent it. Honey locusts, too, the kinder of the species.

“You're a pool player, huh?” Clay asked, smoking a cigarette with his elbow out the window.

“Yep.”

“It's early, you want to go shoot a few games? That okay with you, Gary?”

Gary shrugged. “Fine with me.”

“I'll play you for money. Otherwise, take me on home.”

Clay laughed. “Play you for money, huh, Spark Plug? Those the rules?”

“Otherwise, take me home.”

Gary drove silently.

“Gary's not competitive,” Clay said, blowing smoke out the window. “He says of our baser nature,
just like cheetahs on the veldt
.”