“Yes, yes, one half for you!” Urging the money on him briskly. “Fifty-fifty, that’s it. No debates.”
Ricky took the bills and stuffed them in his pocket. He and Maria resumed their play. As the animal subsided its motions, Ricky began to worry. “What should I say to them?”
“My advice, you say nothing. Not one blessed peep.”
“Yeah, but I mean. They’re gonna want, like. Details.”
“The less you say, all the more excitement. This is human nature, my friend.”
“Huh.” Human nature was deeper than he normally went.
They played two more hands, which Ricky won. He wondered, though, if Maria might have let him. She was probably used to letting her son win.
Abruptly she put down her hand, as if some internal timer had sounded. She led the way back downstairs. “Study hard, grow up to be a good man and treat women with respect.” This over her shoulder. “You promise?”
“Okay.”
“Between us, remember? This business adventure.”
Maria buzzed the door and Ricky pushed it open. She flicked her eyes somewhere beyond him, then leaned over and kissed his cheek, ostentatiously. “Smile for the cameras.”
Ricky scrambled into the darkness. It was seven-thirty, forty-five minutes past dinnertime. He flung open the truck door and a half-hour’s worth of pot smoke and four people’s collective breath accosted him like a solid. “R. You did the deed?” Paul, sleepy.
“Look, I gotta get home. I’ll go in the back, but Paul, can you get me there fast? Or I’m gonna—”
“At ease. Forget the back.”
“I’ll go in back—I don’t want to hear.” Prezioso. Smallwood went with him, accommodating as ever.
“In the middle.” Paul to Ricky, who climbed over Catalani and retracted inside his parka, resenting the boys’ weight on either side of him.
“Paul, go, or I’m gonna be in grievous shit!”
Paul glanced at Ricky, then started the truck with an air of painstaking leisure, letting the engine run a few minutes before pulling away. “With her? Or someone else?”
“Her.” The lump of money was jammed against his thigh. There was bad luck in this arrangement, Ricky felt it physically, a creeping sensation of the heavens lining up in his disfavor. At last Paul was driving.
“You did it?” Catalani, incredulous. “You, like, put it in her?”
“Whoa!” Paul. “I want it in order. So I walked out the door. And.”
Ricky peeped at his watch. They were maybe ten minutes from his house. “Well, she pressed this button and talked to someone in Spanish I think.”
“And.”
Ricky told the story in atomic detail: ascending the staircase, the hallway, room, bed, sink. To his surprise, this dodge was entirely effective; the boys listened, rapt. In the middle of it all Paul suddenly erupted, turning to Chris. “This is real. This is totally real. He fucking did it. Thirteen years old, how egregious is that!”
“Lush!” Catalani. They were eight blocks from Ricky’s house.
“And.”
“Well, I lay down on the bed and she opened this, like closet, and went in there and started opening drawers and stuff.”
“Getting undressed!” Catalani, crowing.
“What about you? Did you get undressed?” Paul.
“For a hundred bucks, I thought that should be her job.” Hilarity flocked to this retort, and Ricky experienced a swell of bravura followed by a contraction of guilt followed by relief that he was almost home.
Paul eased to the curb and killed the engine. It was a dare. They were a block from Ricky’s house.
“And.”
Ricky leaned against Paul with his brain. He imagined it, their brains clenched together like two sweaty wrestlers. Paul wanted something from him—Ricky still didn’t know what it was. He was beginning to doubt he had it.
Ricky leaned across Catalani and jerked open the truck door, then rappelled over him and flung himself into the crackling winter air. It smelled like destiny. He looked back into the truck, every instant slow, weighted.
Paul watched him from the sides of his eyes, not even turning his head. Ricky heaved up his shoulders. “Paul, whaddya want me to do?” he begged, then heard the whine in his voice and stopped, let his face fall blank. Without another word, he turned and walked toward his house. Casually, at a normal walking pace. The truck sat there spookily; no one even shut the door. Ricky felt the eyes of all four boys fingering him from behind. Only when he was halfway up his own long driveway did the truck finally jerk away with a screech.
Ricky sprinted over the crusted lawn to the back door. In the kitchen, light bounced off his eyeballs and a faint buzz took up residence inside his head. His family was sitting at the table.
“Where’ve you been, son?” Dad.
He felt the hash again, warping his thoughts. They all sat there, watching him. His mother looked like she’d been crying.
“With Paul and them.” Ricky slid into his chair, eyes down. Why should he say he was sorry? His father’s being pissed was not high on his Richter scale of worries, which included cheating Paul of money, being possibly abnormal, and something else, too, some bad thing he couldn’t fully see. His mother went to the stove and returned with a plate of beef stew and mashed potatoes, his least favorite foods on planet earth. Ricky nudged at the stew with a fork while paranoia tightened around him—Maria, Paul’s hash, the fifty bucks in his pocket felt like information too unstable to contain within the confines of his head—it would pop out, strafe from the top of his skull. He avoided looking at Charlotte, certain she would know.
“You’re thirteen, Richard,” Harris said. “Why the rush to hang around with these older kids?”
But Harris was bluffing, assuming the posture of indignant fatherhood to camouflage his real worry, which was Ellen. Something was wrong with his wife.
“Dunno.” Ricky kept his eyes averted. And now the other worry gained in size and mass until a clammy trickle issued from the base of his skull and edged down his spine toward his ass: Tony Hawk. In the back of Paul’s truck! His magical Tony Hawk. His shimmering, miraculous Tony Hawk.
“After all you’ve been through, Richard, ‘dunno’ doesn’t seem like much of an answer.” Harris glanced at Ellen, enlisting her solidarity, but she seemed beyond reach.
“What do you mean, all I’ve been through?” Ricky said.
Harris leaned helplessly into the argument, frantic to reclaim his wife’s attention, pinion her to this kitchen the way you tried to keep a person at risk for coma from falling asleep. “I mean,” he said, “you’re lucky to be as well as you are. And you show your gratitude by hanging around a bunch of hoodlums in souped-up pickup trucks I can hear all the way from this—”
“Gratitude,” Ricky objected. “To who?”
“You really need to ask?”
“You mean … Charlotte?”
At the sound of her name she looked up.
“No, Richard,” Harris said witheringly. “I don’t mean Charlotte.”
“Oh, like God? Hey, thanks, Bro.” Ricky lifted a hand and swerved his eyes heavenward.
“Are you hearing this?” Harris turned to Ellen, incredulous, but her face was empty. She didn’t care. Or not about this.
Charlotte felt the argument edge inexorably toward herself, as conflicts involving her father had a tendency to do. Silently she recited the essay she’d read to Uncle Moose that afternoon.
Originally, cows and sheep and pigs were herded through Chicago into railroad cars and taken to other cities to be butchered, but the animals lost weight on the trip.
“‘Bro’?” Harris said, appealing to his wife. “From a kid this sick?”
A disaster was mounting in Ricky. He turned to Charlotte and bawled, “Tell them!”
Then in the 1870s people started butchering the animals in slaughterhouses by the tracks, cutting them up and packing their parts in the railroad cars in pond ice …
&
nbsp; “Say it, Char!”
“He’s not sick,” she said, knowing it was a mistake. “He’s well.” And felt her brother relax beside her. There was silence in the room. “It’s—it’s just a thing we say,” she said, nervous.
For a long moment, Harris just stared at her. “Wipe that look off your face,” he said at last, “or you’re excused.”
“What look?” Charlotte asked.
“Harris, stop it,” Ellen said.
Ah, there. At last, he’d done it—delivered his wife back into their midst—in perfect time for her to take Charlotte’s side against him. Little piles of kudzu lay beside each plate; they had picked it from their salads without comment.
“That look,” Harris told Charlotte, feeling an irrepressible twitch of rage. “The look you’re wearing right now. Wipe that off or I’ll …”
“Stop it!” Ellen said.
He was standing up. Why was he standing up?
“That’s not a look,” Charlotte said, sounding tired. “It’s my face.”
The words lingered as she stood, carried her dishes to the sink and left the kitchen. They listened (Harris still standing) as she climbed the back stairs to her room. Almost immediately, Ricky bolted from the table and scrambled into her wake.
Standing by the half-empty dinner table, Harris experienced a wave of defeat.
“You’re so brutal with her,” Ellen said, not looking at him.
“She’s arrogant.”
“She’s calm. It’s her personality. And Ricky thrives on that.”
Harris loaded the dishwasher, then returned to the table with a bottle of Chardonnay. Ellen hadn’t moved. He poured the wine and watched her take a sip. “Ellen,” he said. “I’m worried.”
“About what?” She sounded afraid.
“You.”
Now there were tears on her face—so many, as if they’d been waiting behind her eyes. “I’m fine,” she sobbed.
“Tell me what to do,” Harris said, leaning close, shaken by the intensity of her grief. “Tell me and I’ll do it.”
She shook her head. She was ready to tell him—she was! Her despair had an authority of its own, it demanded to be recognized. “Oh, Ellen,” Gordon had finally said this afternoon, hardly meeting her eyes, “I’d love to, but.” Like someone declining a dinner invitation. Smiling at her in edgy apology. He looked older, Ellen noticed then, tired around his mouth and eyes. And abruptly the time had presented itself—more than three years since they had last been together. Ellen had forgotten the length of time because for her, they hadn’t been years of life so much as a dreadful hiatus from life. I’d love to, but. Embarrassed for her because it was long over, their affair, and her query was so foolish. So inconvenient.
“Three years is a long time,” Ellen told Harris. It relieved her to say it, to lean against the truth in her husband’s presence.
“It’s a very long time,” he rejoined eagerly. “The strain has been unbelievable. And it’s not over, really, not until June.”
“Not ever.”
“That’s not true,” he said. “After a year his chances are excellent.”
Upstairs, Charlotte waited for Ricky to come in her room. When he didn’t, she opened his door and discovered him facedown on his bed, the floor beside him littered with crushed ten-dollar bills. “What’s that?” she asked.
He looked up at her, his face grooved from the spread. “Money.”
Charlotte came nearer the bed. When Ricky didn’t move to let her sit, she squatted and picked up the bills, flattening them in a pile.
“What’s that?” Ricky asked, and she frowned. “On your chest. What you keep touching.”
Without realizing, she’d been fingering the amber bead through her sweater. “Nothing,” she said. “A necklace.” She left it there, out of sight. It hung between her breasts, as she now thought of them.
They eyed each other, Ricky waiting for Charlotte to take out the necklace and show it to him. She didn’t. And then he didn’t care. Severed from his Tony Hawk, he was slowly dying.
“Where were you?” Charlotte asked.
“Nowhere.”
“Ricky,” she said. “You won’t tell?”
He turned upon her his blankest face, the face she’d taught him herself. “Tell you what,” he said.
“Maybe the stars are out,” Harris said. “Let’s take a look.”
Ellen pushed back her chair, her face wet. She was ready to do whatever Harris told her; some tiny flame of volition, of independence, had finally been snuffed. In three years, Ferdinand Magellan’s crew had circumnavigated the globe for the first time in history, withstanding mutinies and supply shortages, teasing three ships through a tortuous South American strait and then seeing Magellan killed in an internecine dispute in the Philippines. Three years was that long.
“I’ll get our coats,” Harris said.
Ellen waited in the empty kitchen. I’d love to, but. Even as Gordon spoke, the words had landed in her ears with a kind of echo. “I completely understand,” she had answered—breezily, she thought. Hoped. And then she’d stood to go, surprising him. Maintaining her dignity, which was something.
Harris pulled the coat around Ellen’s shoulders, took her hand and led her outdoors. She was afraid he would show her the constellations. He’d loved to do this when they first met, her sophomore year at the University of Michigan, Harris twelve years older, in business school. And at nineteen, Ellen had relished touring the stars with her boyfriend, as if they were rooms in a mansion that one day she would own.
Tonight the sky was cloudy. Thank God.
Harris put his arm around his wife and pulled her close. There was so much he wanted to say. Courage! Look around you! The makings of happiness are before us! When Demographics in America first began to thrive, when he launched his focus groups of disenfranchised machine tool workers and reconstructed farmers, when the politicians started showing up, Ellen had been electrified. If all these people were coming to him here, she’d said—here in the middle of nowhere—imagine what would happen when they moved somewhere central! By then, Harris had glimpsed the truth that his wife still could not accept: this was the center. This. The center of the world. The place everyone turned to learn what American voters and moviegoers and worshipers, investors and sports fans, dieters, parents, cooks, drivers, smokers, hospital patients, music lovers, home-builders, drinkers, gardeners really cared about. What they would buy, yearn for, dream of. Harris had those answers. Or knew how to find them. The Lord had given him this gift.
But to Ellen, they were merely back where she had started.
“This summer, let’s go somewhere,” Harris said. “Let’s take a trip.” He needed her. Needed her to look at him as she was doing now, for the first time tonight. When he woke in the middle of the night, his wife was always turned the other way. Harris would reach for her, seal her in his arms, but the next time he opened his eyes, she had always escaped.
“Africa,” he said. “Asia.”
She glanced at the sky. “It was supposed to snow.”
“Ellen, look at me.”
She did. She held his hand and looked up at him.
“Anywhere you want,” Harris said.
As soon as it was quiet, Charlotte slipped from the house and pedaled madly through the cold. She looked for the moon, whose size she recorded occasionally in her notes. Tonight, a layer of violet clouds hid the sky, and the air trilled with flecks of ice.
His light was on. She pulled into the driveway on the quiet, ill-lit street, skimmed down it quickly and softly and knocked on the back door. He opened it, scanning the yard while she stepped past him into the kitchen. The shades were down.
“How are you?” he asked, his accent always most audible in those first words, when he hadn’t spoken in a while. Charlotte had given up asking where it came from.
“I’m good,” she said.
He poured her a glass of juice and sat across the table from her, sipping his Bud, watching h
er with his strange dark eyes. “Tell me what you did today,” he said, and Charlotte told him: a trigonometry test (what kinds of problems? he wanted to know, competitive with Mr. Marx, her math teacher). The fight at dinner, a short version because she didn’t want to think about it—she was here to forget it. She told him everything except about seeing Uncle Moose, whom she never mentioned.
She left her chair and came to him, kissing his mouth, relishing the sense of being taller, kissing down. If he smiles, then he loves me. If he kisses back then he but this was just habit, tiny corroborations of what she already knew.
He’d given her the amber necklace. Three nights after Christmas, pushed it into her palm while she slept so Charlotte woke to find it there, balled up and warm, a little sticky.
She kissed him, and Michael felt her pulse in his mouth, all that young, fresh blood lifting itself to him, rousing him from his torpor. At times he was hypnotized by the power of this release. Holding Charlotte’s face, he came as near as he ever did, anymore, to feeling the rage he so desperately missed, rage and desire commingled; he imagined snapping her neck, crushing her skull between his palms, and the eroticism of that vision made him catch his breath. She had died a hundred different ways at his hands, but what he did instead was pull off her shirt and her clothes and do it that way, kill her as many times as she could take it.
He carried her upstairs, bouncing her in his arms to demonstrate her lightness. Charlotte heard the whistle of a train, a last vestige of that network that had revolutionized the world, cars loaded with grain or beef packed in ice cut from frozen ponds, butchered parts neatly stacked. Michael set her facedown on his bed, took her hips in his hands and eased himself inside her from behind. Charlotte held very still while he moved, while he did everything, finding all the parts of her until she moaned and thrashed in his hands, and then he turned her onto her back and began again, mercilessly, ready, the veiled tails of fish flinging shadows on the walls. She looked at his face, his dark eyes fixed on her or was it something behind her (she could never tell). He moved with absolute concentration, his breathing measured and slow, and she flailed against him, trying to get away, but he wasn’t done with her yet, he could make it happen again and again until she hardly breathed. He wanted her spent, limp beneath him, and only when she was empty, her heart almost stopped, her head a can of broken thoughts, only then did he release himself with a quiet that astonished Charlotte, his body convulsing for whole minutes, it seemed, but soundlessly, like someone being electrocuted. Afterward he held very still, recovering himself, then withdrew slowly and pulled off the condom, dropped it in a basket he kept by the bed for that purpose, uncoiled his body and lay beside Charlotte as she dangled near sleep. His eyes open. She had never seen him even doze.