Things Invisible to See (21 page)

“Cut the cake now, little man,” urged Uncle Bill.

“Oh, he’ll cut himself,” exclaimed Aunt Helen.

“You baby him too much,” said Uncle Bill. “Let him try it. He’ll never learn if he doesn’t try it.”

“He’s only six,” cried his mother.

“When I was six, I could make a cake all by myself,” said Uncle Bill’s wife. “My sister and I got up one night and made a cake for Mother and told her the fairies did it.”

“And she believed you?” asked Clare.

“No. Cissy forgot to wash up the dishes.”

Clare, sitting beside Davy, guided his hand on the knife. Six pieces fell away from the blade, exposing chocolate, or maybe gingerbread, under the white frosting. He felt his happiness returning.

“There’s plenty left for tomorrow,” said Aunt Helen.

The sixth piece wore a fat yellow rose. His mother put the pieces on plates and handed them round the table. Of course she would give him the rose. He wouldn’t have to tell her that.

“You can give me the rose,” said Uncle Bill. “I’m allergic to chocolate. All I can eat is frosting.”

“I’ll never forget the roses Bob Larch sent Nell,” said Aunt Helen. Uncle Bill was eating the rose; Davy pushed his own cake away. Grandma was wrapping and rewrapping her piece in the napkin and trying to fit it into her purse.

“Oh, let’s not tell that story,” said Nell.

But Aunt Helen could not resist. “Bob Larch had the most awful case on you.” She turned to Uncle Bill and Uncle Bill’s wife. “He was the mayor of Cleveland, I think. Or was it Bloomington? He sent flowers every day, in big wicker baskets, the kind actresses get.”

“What happened to him?” asked Uncle Bill.

“He went to jail for embezzlement,” answered Aunt Helen.

“What kind of cake is this?” asked Uncle Bill’s wife. From her voice you could not tell if she liked it or not.

“Carob ginger, with custard filling,” said Aunt Helen. It was the only kind Hal would eat. “Nell, do you remember the time you told Mother she never gave you enough custard for dessert, and she made you a whole dishpanful?”

“I don’t know why you go on telling these stories,” said Nell. “Let’s start the game. I have the cards right here. Bill, you deal.”

“I have to go,” said Grandma. “I’ve had a lovely time.”

“Grandma, I need you,” said Clare. “I need you to hold my cards. Bring your chair close to mine.”

Uncle Bill dealt and Aunt Helen sprang up and cleared the plates to the sideboard.

They all took their places.

“Remember, Davy,” said Uncle Bill, “whoever gets the old lady tries to get rid of her.” He looked significantly at his wife.

“What old lady?” asked Davy.

“The queen of spades.”

“I don’t think much of the old man, either,” snapped Uncle Bill’s wife.

“He’s not so bad,” said Nell.

“He has no power in the game,” said Uncle Bill’s wife.

“But he can take the queen,” said Uncle Bill.

“Please, let’s not fight,” said Clare.

Uncle Bill’s wife turned to Nell and asked, “What was
your
husband like?”

Nell closed her eyes. “He drank.”

“Davy, do you remember your father?” coaxed Uncle Bill’s wife.

Davy shook his head. Of his father he had a single memory, but he did not want to give it to Uncle Bill’s wife, for fear that when she gave it back it would be changed. Once his father had come to visit Davy and wanted to take him for a drive, and his mother made Aunt Helen go along in the back seat. You have to go, his mother had insisted. What if he tries to kidnap Davy?

“A good Christian can get on with anybody,” said Uncle Bill’s wife.

“There were other things,” said Nell.

“Hal and I never had a cross word,” said Aunt Helen. “Never.”

“Everybody pass three cards to the person on his left,” said Uncle Bill.

Uncle Bill’s wife glared at him. “Our church does not countenance divorce.”

Uncle Bill rolled up his eyes. “Is snoring considered grounds for annulment?” he asked.

“I don’t snore,” she snapped.

“Yah, yah, I knew you’d say that!” shouted Uncle Bill, jumping up from the table so fast he knocked his own cards to the floor. “Well, I’ve got the proof. I’ve got the proof.”

Clare buried her face in her hands.

“What proof?” inquired his wife in icy tones.

“Jack came over last night and he heard you. I’ve got a witness.”

“Jack was in our bedroom?”

“That’s the last time you’ll ever tell me you don’t snore.”

“I was in my negligee and you brought Jack into our bedroom?”

“You were snoring so loud you never heard us.”

“For God’s sake, Bill, stop!” cried Nell.

“It’s my birthday,” quavered Davy.

“That’s right, it’s his birthday,” said Uncle Bill. “Some people have to ruin it for everybody.”

“Let’s play,” said Clare, lifting her head. “Please.
Please.
”

Davy looked at his hand. He had the queen of spades! He had the old lady.

“Pass three cards to your left,” said Uncle Bill’s wife.

To his left sat his mother, his good, kind mother. Perhaps he could pass to the right? On his right sat Aunt Helen, who had made the cake and invited the guests and gone to so much trouble for him. No, no—he could not pass her the queen. Pass to the left. Uncle Bill stood behind Davy and said, “Well, you’ll want to pass this, of course, and this”—the king of spades—“and maybe the ten of clubs. You don’t have many clubs. It’s good to clean yourself out of one suit so you can discard.”

If anybody could clean a person out of his suit, thought Davy, that person would be Uncle Bill’s wife. She was so clean, always sweeping up crumbs, brushing lint off other people. He no longer wanted to play the game; he felt sleepy and wanted to take a nap. He thought of the moment when the cake was brought in, how happy they were then, how wretched they were now, and an earlier moment flashed across this one, a night long ago in Christmas week when he woke to hear children singing. Grandpa had called, “There are carolers at the door,” and Davy rushed down and saw them through the glass—sixth graders, he supposed—and their tin lanterns dangled on long poles and the cutwork of the lanterns threw black diamonds over their faces and over the snow. He was the only listener at the door; Aunt Helen was running around the house, trying to find something for them to eat.

Good King Wenceslaus looked out

On the feast of Stephen.

By the time Aunt Helen returned with a box of Mary Lee chocolates, the carolers were gone, and she had let him put on his boots and his coat over his pajamas and run in the snow after them. But they had disappeared. Next year, Clare promised him, you and I will go caroling, even if there’s just the two of us.

“Clare, can we still go caroling next year?”

Nobody heard him.

“Are we ready to start?” asked Aunt Helen.

Davy slipped the queen out of his hand and sat on her. Immediately he felt better, lighthearted. Danger was out of the world. He chose three low cards, three good cards, all diamonds, and passed them to his mother.

Hearts fell, Uncle Bill told him to play this and play that, and his mother said, “Well, somebody’s got her,” and Clare said, “She never shows up this late,” and Uncle Bill whispered in his ear, “Play this” and “Play that,” until the cards ran out.

The last trick. The end of the game.

“This deck has no queen,” announced Uncle Bill’s wife.

“She must be here,” said Uncle Bill. “Davy had her and passed her on. I saw the queen in his hand.”

“Cheating hurts nobody but yourself,” said his wife, glaring at him.

“Who’s cheating? Not with you around.”

“Maybe she fell off the table,” suggested Nell, and she crawled under it and Uncle Bill followed her.

“Shake out the tablecloth,” said Aunt Helen. “She might have got caught in the ruffles.”

Uncle Bill’s wife bent down and peered under the table. She said not a word. She picked up the chunk of birthday cake when she saw Uncle Bill coming up and brought it down on his head.

Just like Eddie O’Toole, thought Davy. She’s just like him.

And started to howl.

I
T TOOK BEN A
long time to realize that Cooper was not cranky but shy, as unused to small talk as a hermit. When Ben admired the log he kept in the weather station, Cooper went so far as to show him the map he’d made of the island. A nervous line defined the coast, the five dead koa trees, and the patch of pigweed. A crude sketch of the government building defined the interior. He was also keeping a list of birds sighted:

The brown tern

The grey gull

The albatross

Rita Hayworth

“Is there really a bird called Rita Hayworth, sir?” asked Ben.

Cooper shrugged. “If I can’t find it in the bird book, I name it myself.”

One morning he invited Ben into the weather station and pointed to the ceiling. Ben followed his finger and gave a whistle of surprise. Over his head hung a dozen glass balls, pale amethyst and amber and luminous green like moss. On their shining surfaces Cooper had pasted the tiny silhouettes of cats, elephants, snakes, dogs, buffalo, otters, and voluptuous women. It was a galaxy of planets laced and fretted with shadows.

“Did you make it, sir? It’s fantastic.”

“Jap fishermen use these globes,” he said, nodding ever so slightly. “They probably drifted over from Tokyo. Or Manila.”

“They’re wonderful, sir.”

“But I can’t get any good glue here,” Cooper went on. “Everything turns so brittle. The animals fall off.”

As he spoke, his breath dislodged a lamb, which fluttered to Ben’s feet.

“Everywhere I go—catastrophe,” said Cooper. “Sometimes I think suicide’s as good a way out as any.”

“Suicide, sir? No, thanks.”

“But if you had to kill yourself,” persisted Cooper, “which way would you choose? Pills?”

“Not pills, sir,” said Ben. “I’d probably botch it.”

“I’ve always favored shooting. In the mouth. That’s the quickest way.”

“It’s hard on the folks who find you, sir,” said Ben. The subject was making him uncomfortable.

Cooper had clearly thought a lot about it. “Who would find us?” he asked.

“How about a firing squad, sir?” suggested Ben jokingly.

Cooper frowned. “Where would we find a firing squad on the island?”

The island felt as small to Ben as one of Cooper’s gloves. He’d explored the grove of five dead koa trees, and he’d seen two of the three kinds of lizards Cooper told him lived here: the green lizard that sunned itself on the rocks in the morning and the brown lizard that came out to feed in the evening. All Cooper knew of the third kind was the message on a tube of sulfathiazole in the first-aid kit issued to him when he was assigned to Hewitt: “For the bite of the blue-horned lizard, apply twice a day. Also good for pigweed allergy.”

There were no pigs and no other living plants on the island except pigweed. To Ben it hardly seemed worth God’s time to make an island that had so little on it.

I gave unto Hewitt Island a host of microbes, seashells, sandal-worms, terns, albatrosses, cormorants, the speckled shark, the striped marlin, all lovely and lively beyond description,
said God.
Where were you
w
hen I made this island? Where were you when I broke the sea for its decreed place and said, “Hitherto shall thou come but no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?”

“Sometimes, on a good evening, I can pick up Harry Owens’s band at the Royal Hawaiian,” said Cooper.

Ben sat in the main room and fiddled with the dial on the radio, and Cooper watched him and went on knitting. Ben knew he would knit ten rows, and rise, and go to the weather station and check for fallen animals.

“Every day I lose a few,” he explained. “They get torn or bent. I paste them back on. It’s a losing battle. Are you going out?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Far?”

“No, sir. Just to look at the stars.”

“The Southern Cross is the best place to start. Once you find the Southern Cross, all the other stars fall into place.”

The wind was up; the water was choppy. Ben tipped back his head to search the sky and was not prepared for what happened next, did not even know when there flashed over him a deep, familiar darkness, through which Tom Bacco was driving, because he alone knew how to keep the old green Packard from stalling. Charley and Henry and Tony and Stilts and Louis and Sol and George and Ben. They drove down to the river where night came early under the black willows and they could not see the families gathered at picnic tables across the water, though they could hear them talking and laughing and their dogs barking and their kids yelling.

Durkee’s in Manila.

Look at that bird. Bet you can’t hit it.

Bet I can.

A high fastball rushed toward him and Ben slammed it to the spot where the white bird would arrive in three seconds. In the darkness a girl cried out. Ben sank to his knees, sobbing, and the waves pitched their cold tents over him and rolled him to higher ground.

What woke him? The sun? The stiffness in his legs? The grit in his clothes? The smell of coffee?

When he walked into the kitchen, Cooper, his back to Ben, was marking the calendar. “The first of May,” he said.

The date stirred a faint memory which came into sharp focus.

“That’s my birthday, sir,” said Ben.

Cooper did not hear him.

“The one thing you don’t want to lose on this island is time,” he said and crumpled April into a ball, which he threw with great dexterity into a basket on the other side of the room.

Time? To Ben they had more than enough time here—they had too much time. You could check the raft and the flashlight batteries and the ammunition—was it still dry?—and you could clean the floor and the dishes and your rifle—oh, you could clean your rifle for hours, burnishing each part lest salt and sand corrupt it—and you could hunt the rats, whose ancestors had come over on the ships of the first guano hunters when farmers started paying money for it, and you could fish for marlin and you could throw back to the sea the small yellowish-brown sharks that went for your bait if you used sardines or the green lizards that sunned themselves on the rocks in the morning, and you could clean the marlin and cook it (never would Ben forget the smell of cooking—kerosene and the dark dreams of smokestacks) and you could walk among the birds that nested in the rocks—there was no sand to speak of, just coral that cut your feet and raked your stomach when you swam, just a stinking network of small pools and the nests of birds; you could gather their eggs, still warm, feathers still clinging to the shells, smooth as if generations had touched them for luck, like alabaster trinkets from the tomb of a king; you could toss the garbage after lunch to the gulls and watch them dive for fish heads or a bit of gristle; you could shoot the plump terns and the skittery sandpipers which tasted like young ducks—but why bother? You could reach out your hand and take them. They were that tame and stupid.