The Sky Below (6 page)

My hoard grew. At one point, I had close to $9,000. Think about it: if I'd invested that $9,000 in 1987, let's say in a CD with a reasonable rate—and remember, interest rates back then were high—I'd have had five times that much ten years later. I was a minor. I could have said I'd saved it mowing lawns and doing odd jobs—who would have asked anything further? Especially in Florida. They like cash in Florida. All my subjects in school—geometry, history, the tragicomedy of my French class, gym, English—were puny compared to what was in the shoeboxes under my bed. Classes were just talk. I had proof of that, mostly in small bills. For the first time since we'd moved, I felt hopeful. There was even one girl, Felicia, who I thought could maybe be my girlfriend. She was lush and happy, and she drew these great pictures of jungles. They looked like album covers. She kissed in a really deep, not shy, way. She put her hand on the crotch of my jeans—lightly, firmly—and kept it there. I thought Felicia and I looked good together, like a picture in a magazine.

When I looked in the mirror, I liked what I saw there, too. I liked my curly hair that was just a little too long, I liked that I was getting ropy in the arms and legs, I liked the way my jeans
hung. I thought that if I sneaked in Felicia's window one night, like a sly fox gliding over the sill in the dark, she wouldn't mind. I thought about how that would be, so easy. One good thing about Florida is that it's generally warm at night. Every day, it was as if I was hard all the time, even when I wasn't. It was as if I had an axis, a trueness. I knew what I was doing. $9,250. $9,565. I skimmed a lot less off the top than I could have, considering how much Jenny had come to trust me. I think she might have had a crush. She even showed me which panda she hid all her money inside of (it was the one with the red hat). I hit $10,000 like a Triumph taking a curve.

Meanwhile, every day my mother paced the concrete corridors of the Sunburst like a queen pacing her battlements, wreathed by cigarette smoke. She gazed outward, like a queen looking at the sea, but you couldn't see the ocean from where we were, just scrub on the side of the highway. She looked at the scrub accusatorily, but, honestly, I still thought she was so pretty. Once, when I saw her standing there, frowning in her cloud of smoke, I almost told her. I almost brought out the boxes and opened them for her and said,
Look.

But I didn't do that. Maybe I should have.

Instead, Jenny and I made plans. The pink Samsonite suitcase bulged with product; we expanded to the high school in the next town. We talked about Miami, how we could live there. Jenny said she was going to go on a diet. In the afternoons now, I'd go over to Felicia's huge, freezing, empty house. We drew album covers for bands that didn't exist. I unhooked her bra incredibly slowly; I left perfect hickeys on the insides of her upper thighs. I felt like I was going places, finally.

When I got home from Felicia's one afternoon, my lips sore from kissing, my mother was waiting for me at the kitchen table. Her braid was tighter than usual, as if she'd just rebraided it before I came in. Caroline was standing behind her, silent.

“Gabriel,” my mother said, “I've had a call from the police.”

Caroline shook her head, put her finger to her lips.

“The police?” I gazed at the ceiling. I began to sweat. Not one of those guys had ever asked me how old I was; I could say that; I got ready to say that.

My mother looked at her hands, which she had laid flat on the table. “They picked up Jenny at the bus station.” I exhaled with relief. She hesitated, then drove herself forward. “Gabe, you need to show me what you've been keeping under your bed.”

The universe folded in on me. “No,” I said. “No, no.”

She didn't care. She marched down to my room, threw the door open, and hauled out all the shoeboxes, the covers falling off as she shook their contents out onto the bed. She was a giant, tearing up the refugee camp.
Laurie
and
Anne
went flying, crying; they'd never make it to the City now. When my mother saw all that money, it was as if she had been hit. I thought she was going to be physically ill. I had left my body and become a fly. I was hovering somewhere around the ceiling fan, my spirit getting dizzy as the dusty blades circled. My small, once delicate mother stood surrounded by tumbling stacks of grubby money, her sun-baked face in her hands. Then she lifted her face from her hands and hauled off and smacked me in the face as hard as she could. It hurt: I was no longer a fly, just a cruddy fifteen-year-old boy. “You little shit,” she said. “You rotten little shit.” She pushed handfuls of money at my eyes, at my mouth. “For this? Are you kidding me? What is wrong with you? I didn't teach you this. You fucking creep. You horrible, horrible kid. You little bastard. You're an asshole, just like your fucking father. You're a thief.”

I didn't say anything. The ceiling fan whispered,
It's not my fault, it's not my fault, it's not my fault.

“At least I fucking did something!” I yelled. “At least I cared! Screw you! How were we ever going to get back—we can't live here. This is a terrible place. I almost had enough, too. You ruined everything. We never should have come here.”

My mother looked at me as if one of us were at the bottom of a well, with no rope. Then, regally, she stepped through a spill of money on the floor. “You shit,” she said quietly, and walked out. She slammed my door behind her, but it bounced back open, because it was a cheap door.

I stood there sweating. The necklaces, the little plastic tubs of grape jelly, the lanyards and Mickey Mouse pins, and everything else, my whole glittering plan for the future, was scattered across the floor. There was money everywhere, but it wasn't mine anymore. It wasn't anyone's.

I picked up a ten and began folding it into a small green and white bird. I hadn't forgotten how. I pointed a green and white beak.

Caroline, frowning, came to my door. “Come on,” she said.

I set the money bird carefully on my dresser to guard my wrecked room and followed my sister down the hall, out of the Sunburst Motel, and into the parking lot. Our mother watched silently, expressionlessly, from the balcony as we headed to the car. She threw the keys at us over the rail, hard, metal striking gravel. Caroline picked them up, we got in, and she drove, not looking at me, one arm out the window on her side of the car. Her black hair flew up all over from the hot wind, like she was jumping down a chute. I felt as if the pressure inside my head was changing, as if my ears were popping, though the road was as flat as ever.

We went down a road I didn't know and pulled off at a place I'd never been. The ground seemed firmer than in the other swamps. The water, when I put my hand in it, wasn't cold, but it had another note in it, a darker note. The sun kept moving in and out of clouds, as if it was restless. Caroline walked ahead with slow, intent steps.

“Let's go back,” I said.

She didn't reply. Usually, the swamp opened up at a certain point, and it was like being inside some sort of primordial
green plum. But this swamp was narrower, the trees overhead thicker and more entwined; when I looked behind us, I wasn't certain I could find the way out. Dismally, stupidly, I wanted to go home, though I knew we couldn't go back until our mother cooled down. I wondered if she was making a bonfire of the money, throwing bills into the flames one by one. My sneakers felt heavy on my feet. My balls itched; I discreetly scratched them. Caroline began whistling “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” and it made a pretty, thin sound there in the swamp. There wasn't much to eat that wasn't poisonous in this one: a few stringy purplish leaves. I knew we couldn't live here; I didn't need Caroline to tell me that. Maybe, I thought, we could live in the car and buy food in plastic packages from rest stops. I could earn our keep along the way. Maybe we could start driving and never go back. Maybe we could head north until we turned into ice versions of ourselves, with snow for hair.

Caroline was peering at the trees. She seemed to be counting. “This way,” she said tersely, plunging to the left. I followed her like a leaky balloon on a string. I felt like I was bleeding to death, invisibly.

“Okay.” She stopped at the foot of one of the taller swamp trees. A brown fungus covered one side. The tree listed slightly. Grasping the trunk, Caroline began climbing it, reaching high above her head for the lowest branch. She pulled herself up, looked down at me. “Come on, let's go, Gabe. Get up here.” She rested easily in the tree, as if they were the best of friends, leaning back to back. She scrambled up, reached above her for the next branch. One of her sneakered feet disappeared into the leaves.

I was afraid she might leave me here forever, keep going straight into the sky without me. I grabbed onto the trunk and pushed and pulled, scraping my arms, scraping my knees through my jeans on the wet, tough swamp bark. I followed her into the tree. She twisted ahead of me, going up gracefully,
fast. When she got about halfway up, perhaps ten feet from the ground, she stopped. I made it onto the branch next to her, huffing.

“All right, Gabe,” she said. She looked straight into my eyes with a raw solemnity that she rarely let me see these days. This, I knew, was her deepest secret. I squirmed, not sure I really wanted to know her deepest secret. She reached into her back pocket, took out a plastic bag, dipped her hand inside, and briskly rubbed something all over her arms, as if she was putting on suntan lotion, though it was nearly dusk in the swamp, the day's light rust-colored, shadows lengthening around us. She grabbed my hand and put something in it, a dab of some mushy, grainy stuff. “We don't have that much time before it gets dark.” She closed her eyes, balanced perfectly on her branch, and extended her arms, turning her palms up. Her hands and arms were shining. “Shhhh.”

Straddling my branch, I limply held up my palm with the mushy grainy stuff in it. I kept my eyes open. My sister was so weird, I thought. I wondered if my mother was crushing all my treasure, tossing it out the motel windows, putting it on the road and letting cars run over it. I imagined it shining on the asphalt, and then the crunch of the cheap metal under tires. The tires blowing out, cars skidding sideways, killing everyone inside. Bloody, whimpering dogs. The swamp smelled of life and rot, and my sister, on the branch next to me, gave off the calm alertness of a swamp creature blending into its home turf. Her crazy black hair seemed to have been pulled from the shaggy tree we sat in, and to be reaching to retwine itself among the branches. It was hot in this swamp; it seemed hotter than it had been outside of it, as if the heat of the day had collected and condensed in here, caught and held by the abundant undergrowth, waiting for the tide of night to cool it. Where we sat felt like the exact edge of day and night, heat and coolness, earth and air. The tree against my back was sticky and sharp, holding and biting me at the same time.

We were both sweating, but Caroline was smiling, a look of concentration, of will, wrinkling her brow. I tried not to think about how high up we were. I wondered if she knew how strange she was. No wonder she didn't have any boyfriends. Mosquitoes began biting me as the dusk thickened. Outlines blurred. I slapped at my arm, and Caroline again, sternly, hushed me. “Fuck you,” I said, but then I was quiet anyway. The sooner she was done, the sooner we could go home and I could see if any of my treasure was left. I particularly wanted to see if any of the Christmas trees with the rubies at the top—even though I knew they weren't really rubies—had survived. I focused on how bored I was and how stupid the swamp was. Gingerly, I licked at the dab of stuff Caroline had put in my palm. It was greasy and sweet; I sort of liked it.

They weren't there, and then they were. They seemed to arrive so suddenly that I might have said they emerged from her hair, that the ends of her black hair had turned into small black birds with yellow wings, but of course that isn't true. They flew to her and landed softly on her outstretched hands, her arms. They settled on her shoulders and the top of her head. They seemed to bring a light with them, but maybe it was a sound, or a motion. Or it might have been a feeling, or something that they knew all together. Caroline smiled, winced as they pulled at her hair, keeping her eyes closed. They jostled one another, dipping at her shining hands and arms. They were the most gorgeous things I had ever seen, and my sister seemed to be dissolving into them beginning with her outer edges, undoing herself into a flock of small birds streaked with gold. Her arms were their branches; her hair was their nest; the black-and-gold birds were her thoughts whirling in the air around her. Her eyes were closed. She had become something else. She was so beautiful. She was elsewhere. The gods had chosen her, they had changed her, they were changing her before my eyes. More than anything in the world, I wanted that to happen to me.

I held out my hand with the stuff in it. I did it like Caroline, wincing, palm up, but with my eyes open so I could see what to do next. She didn't move, so I didn't move. I wanted them to cover me the way they covered Caroline, to fill my arms and shoulders with their wildness, to pull on my earlobes and tug at my hair and tell me their secrets and take me with them. I held out my hand, waiting, trying very hard not to cry or fall out of the tree like an idiot. A few of them hovered near me but didn't land, wings whirring. “Caroline,” I whispered. “Hey.”

She frowned, making a short sharp sound, like a bark, that meant I was supposed to shut up.

I was damp with sweat and longing and the first swelling of rage. If they didn't come to me, I might be stuck in the swamp, petrified, for eternity. My arm was beginning to quiver, but I didn't give in. I could stay here as long as she could, longer, as long as it took. I squinted, held my breath. They were so close. Caroline's branch was inches from mine. Their cheeps were like small tears in the night, shreds of bright noise from another world very close by where it bent briefly, recklessly near to ours. I wanted to see it so badly. I needed to sneeze, but held it back for fear it would scare them away. I was pierced with jealousy, because I knew now that this was where Caroline had been going. She'd been practicing with her relentless fervor, and she was way ahead of me. I knew both that she was doing me a favor, giving me her best gift, and that I might never, ever catch up.