Authors: Ed Taylor
He’s down and onto the cool tiles.
Theo navigates among the tall things standing, Colin’s chessmen made of drift wood and suitcases and plastic junk. Theo moves toward the front doors, through dust floating in the gold sun from the leaded glass beside the front doors. He’s underwater, holds his breath. Gus usually puts a big piece of wood against the back of the doors to keep them shut at night, but he must have forgotten. Floor here is cooler, and grabbing a knob in each hand, Theo strains to open both doors at the same time. The heavy black slabs move, but slowly, and he has to keep pulling, backing up.
A silver car sits on the marble entrance steps. At the top of the steps the car’s silver hood and grill and fender come to a point in the middle and stick out more at the top than the bottom: to Theo it’s a shark.
That’s what he heard last night. His mother is here.
Other cars sleep on the grass and along the gravel drive at angles. He notices the blue edge of something under the silver
car’s front bumper. Theo lowers himself to a knee and ducks sideways to look. Another cake box, with red ribbon. And a teddy bear. And a yellow plastic toy guitar neck sticking out from under the left front wheel. More offerings.
The last time, his mother fussed when he told her he’d eaten some of the cake that had been left – it could be poisoned, you just don’t know with these people. Promise me you won’t do that again.
Theo said yes, his face cupped in his mother’s hands, her face inches from his, her eyes starry and dark. It was hard to say no to her when she was close like that, her eyes so big. But later when she’d vanished again he’d eaten a bite of cake, because he was hungry. And nothing happened.
Colin had then found that cake, where Theo had set it in the scullery, and Colin grabbed fistfuls and tamped cake into his mouth until there was no room, then he found the dogs curled on a sofa and tried to make the dogs eat some. Uninterested, they patiently stayed and allowed Colin to try, but shyly kept turning their heads. Colin stuck fingers in the back of Alex’s jaw like pushing a button to open and managed to get a pink hunk onto Alex’s tongue, but Alex shook his head and the wet cake slumped into a mound now dried and gray on one of the sofas. Theo couldn’t remember which one.
At the silver car now Theo slides the box out from under, smelling the car smell of things he just knew as car, warming in the sun. He unties the ribbon, flips open the box, crouching. The cake is red, with icing piped in swirls and curves, and words Theo knows are French, and pictures. An icing guitar, and an icing skull.
He pushes the box out of the way and reaches under the car for the bear, on which a little greasy fluid dripped. It has a ribbon, pink, and a little T-shirt that says ‘rock n roll.’ He stares at the toy guitar fretboard, a small arm reaching out from under the fat black tire. When his mother leaves, he can collect the guitar and put it with the other things.
It has been a week since the last offering. Things appear in a variety of locations, occasionally on the back terrace, sometimes at the foot of a tree, but mostly on the front steps. Early one morning Theo had awoken and threaded his way down the long stairs and through the back hall toward the house’s rear and across the ballroom, the leaning motorbike’s bright lime-green against the far dark wall, Theo’s head swirling and light feeling and still mossy with sleep, and he saw a man in a tuxedo outside on the terrace laying a bunch of red roses in the middle of the tiles, alongside a black bottle with a cork. Theo walked to the French doors and stood, while the man carefully finished, then noticed Theo. He bowed, and turned, and walked toward the trees and the ocean. Theo walked out behind him, watching the man get smaller and disappear into the dense wiry low forest that stood up against the ocean and the storms and wind and salt just behind the dune line. The man had also left a book that said
Les Fleurs du Mal
. Theo yawned, and his eyes watered. He stood for a while until he began to sway, and wandered back in and up the stairs and back to bed. When he came down later, Colin sat cross-legged on the terrace drinking out of the black bottle and wearing a wide Mexican hat made out of straw.
He’s got the wrong celebrity map. He thinks he’s visiting Poe’s grave. But champagne cognac, he’s got excellent taste.
It’s one of the side benefits of being a priest in this particular temple, eh.
What.
Nothing, my friend. Why don’t we go fishing today.
Sure.
Theo squinted up into the sun and down at Colin, the hat big as an umbrella. Then Colin had forgotten about fishing and gotten into a sword fight with somebody Theo’d never seen before who burst out of a room, and Theo then spent the day in the trees, reading and listening to the ocean.
Theo leaves the thick house doors open; the car looks like it wants in, and they are wide enough. He threads his way back through the chess field and then up the left staircase to the second floor, thumping on the carpet, a bleached color with an old design but still sponge-thick. Theo keeps his hand on the banister all the way, feeling the cool red-brown, not thinking much. He reaches the top and turns left, where his mom usually ends up.
His mother often came with gifts for him: animals, candy, things she thought were pretty like rocks or pictures, hats, clothes, toys from places like Peru or Thailand, puppets, and sometimes weird stuff. An ashtray, a napkin from a restaurant, hotel shampoo, a piece of pizza, a record, a fistful of guitar picks, a drawing of her by somebody else – once with no clothes on – a feather, a flower. He figured that was when she was high. He knew what high was, knew what drunk was. It was a way people were, just like happy or sad. He also knew about bail, hearings, possession, depression, institutionalization.
His mother never brought anything for Gus or Colin: she didn’t
like them, although she’d never said this to Theo. He just knew.
Are you mad at Gus and Colin.
No darling, why.
You act like it all the time.
No, my love, I like them. Gus is your grandfather and a man deserving of respect. A respectable and upright man, just as Colin is.
His mother’s accent was different than his dad’s. He knew she’d been born in Hungary but she said she grew up all over Europe and so, she said, she sounded like everywhere and nowhere. She called herself a pirate, said she and his father were part of the pirate nation. Theo didn’t know what that meant, really.
People at school made fun of Theo’s accent, which they said was faggy. Fag. Faggot. Which his dad said was a cigarette. Theo had lived in England, Jamaica, and America so far. And other people’s houses and hotels.
God help me, I’m starting to sound American, his mother said.
Is that bad.
His mother had laughed out a cloud of cigarette smoke. For your sake, I tolerate the place, my love. But there are better places to be.
Like where.
She exhaled again. That is a good question. If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go.
He couldn’t really think of a place: what were the choices. He didn’t know. Every place seemed mostly the same so far.
I’d like to go to the bottom of the ocean.
She squinted at him, stubbing out the cigarette. That’s an interesting choice. Could I come too.
He shrugged. Sure. Maybe Gus and Colin could come. And his dad maybe, in a big glass ball.
Why do you want to go there.
I wouldn’t have to go to school.
He sort of knew what would happen if he said that, but he did anyway. She started crying. Oh baby. She pulled him into a hug, jangling with bracelets. She always wore a lot of things and he couldn’t separate her from the sounds she made when she moved.
She had the smell. Sometimes he didn’t know, she might seem okay, whether she was okay or not, until he smelled the smell. Then he would know. Colin and Gus had the smell a lot, and many of the people who came to the house. There were different smells but they all meant pretty much the same thing.
She cried a lot, and laughed a lot, and screamed, and punched and kicked, and danced, and staggered, and snored, and fell, and jumped – once from an upper hall landing and broke her ankle. He hadn’t seen that, only heard the sounds and cried. He wondered what had made her jump, and whether he had anything to do with it, or with the way she acted. He didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure who to ask.
Now this morning Theo walks the long secondfloor hall, strewn with clothes and shoes, a bowling ball like Jupiter, swirly and pink, stopped against a door – he hasn’t seen that before. At the distant end of the hall, in front of the big curved windows that remind Theo of churches from movies, pokes the silhouette of a big stuffed bird that he knows is an emu. His mother usually stays on this wing, but not always in the same room, and Theo doesn’t like opening doors unless he knows who is in the room. So he walks, and listens. He hears something and turns: Alex
has dragged himself up the stairs and, panting, follows Theo. Theo stops to scratch Alex’s wiry head, bumpy with warts, but keeps listening. He hears ahead the sex noise. He knows what sex is, and he knows what it sounds like. He keeps walking down the hall, Alex tottering behind, to where the noise is. Noises. Two rooms. He stands outside, between the rooms, listening. He feels funny, and kind of hollow. He also gets stiff, and knows about that. He doesn’t want the noise to be his mother, but he doesn’t want to find out. He listens longer, then scuffs back down the hall making more noise, hitting his hand along the wall as he walks, holding his hand on his pajamas. Alex pants behind him.
Someone may wake up, but Theo hopes not yet. Behind him down the hall a voice now sings, somewhere; muffled, hard to tell if it is a man or woman. Something in it makes Theo think: Mom. And he makes a face and runs, getting to the stairs and thumping down them, running down the stairs. The last time she smiled and flicked it with a finger, kissed him on the cheek and said it’s okay, love, a beautiful natural thing. That was awful.
Colin, somewhere below, is yodeling.
Gazebo, Theo thinks.
Theo keeps flapping down on the carpet, to the cool tiles of the entry hall, feet now slapping like fish, he likes the sound, and toward the swung-open tall slab doors and over the car hood, scrambling and out and down the stone steps and onto the gravel bit ouchouchouch like on hot pavement and onto the grass, moist because the sun hasn’t reached this side yet, but everything is light, and he runs to the right down the line of windows and the wild bushes crazy with flowers and stems sticking out and untrimmed and reaches the edge of the wing
and goes right again and past more windows, running, and the trees are getting bigger, and he dodges a rusty bike he had forgotten about and runs into the rear lawn and toward the gazebo and there’s a naked guy sitting in it, cross-legged. The man has long hair and a sharp face and something’s wrong with his arms. They stop at the elbows. And he’s naked, and his eyes are closed. Theo stops running.
New people always showed up: his mother brought them home or they followed her. Sometimes they were friends of Colin or, very occasionally, of his father. These he liked best; he liked them because they knew his father and being around them was a little like being around his father.
His mother attracted people, collected people, like pets. She called herself a broker, sometimes, said she should get a cut, she bridged worlds, that was her art, she said, a waving cigarette veiling her face as she talked to Theo sleepy in bed, him waking with her stroking his face, smiling lopsidedly at him, or crying. Sometimes, however, what she collected wasn’t nice like that; when they wanted things and took stuff or got loud or pushed and she let them. Sometimes she screamed at them, hit them, got other people to hit them: he’d heard it. He’d seen her point guns.
It wasn’t always clear what the rules were, what you had to do to make her mad. Theo believed it mostly depended on how long it had been since his dad’s last stopover. Sometimes it happened after drinks and amber bottles with medicine labels and small ceramic boxes with flip tops and the skull with the top cut off and the white powder, yellow powder, brown powder, on book covers or tables or glass-covered pictures laid flat. Sometimes there was blood on the glass after. One time
one of the dogs had gotten really sick after licking something from a low leather-topped stool. Theo was really worried. After that it wasn’t hard to understand that it could do bad things to people.
He stayed away from all that as much as he could, but as much as he could wasn’t much. Theo had to figure out a way around it kind of all the time.
Theo was hoping to have the gazebo to himself. Even though the house and the land are big, like the last house, sometimes it is hard to be alone. A lot of the time adults think he needs babysitting, or that they need to do what they call ‘playing’ with him, because there aren’t other kids around. But it is the opposite of playing, and mostly he just wants not to be noticed. People fuss over him, rub his hair. Ladies hug him, make faces at him like they think he needs cheering up. Sometimes he finds someone looking at him oddly, their eyes half-closed, focusing, like they are thinking hard, seeing something else. Then they smile at him and act normal again.
The man in the gazebo opens his eyes, sees Theo and grins. He has glasses. Theo stares.
Come here.
Theo is unsure about whether to do it. The sun in his face makes him squint. Motion catches his eye – the heron flapping over its nest, in the big tree like a dead hand reaching out of the ground, gray-brown and smooth like driftwood near the dunes. Theo knows things about birds and thinks this one is lost – herons are freshwater birds that live on lakes. He hopes it’s finding what it needs. Maybe it’s not a heron.
It’s okay.
Theo notices the man again, and slowly walks at him. It seems to Theo the bird would want a little more privacy for a nest, like a tree with leaves to hide the babies. But apparently the big ones like that build in the open so they can see. One parent’s always there, for protection. Theo thinks about his parents, and then about teachers. Theo stops.