My parents were technically still married, but my mother lived with the tribal peoples of the southwest African coast and was only home for a month here and a month there. When she was stateside, she made me uneasy. We did not have conversations—talking with my mother was more like taking a series of oral quizzes on subjects ranging from feminism to socialism to my feelings about my own sexual identity. She would sometimes ask me to sit on the couch with her so she could read me an article about genital mutilation from National Geographic. She would announce that the practice of women shaving their armpits was a form of patriarchal control and then look at me with a certain hostile fascination, as if she expected me to disapprove of the wiry gray thatch beneath her arms. Once I asked my father why they didn’t live together, and he said because she was brilliant.
She was, too, I think. I’ve read her books, and they aren’t what you’d call page-turners. But I admire the way she could fold together a series of small observations and then suddenly spread them out before you—open them like a fan—to reveal a single great insight. Her curiosities gripped her entirely, held her transfixed. I don’t think there was room in her head to wonder about her husband and son.
I stretched out on the couch, underneath the picture window, in the dimness of the living room. I was running my thumb along the edge of the photo in my shirt pocket for maybe half a minute before I realized what I was doing. A part of me didn’t want to look at it now or ever, which was a peculiar way to feel. It was, after all, just a photo of me sitting next to the soda machine, reading a magazine. There was nothing wrong with it, as long as you didn’t know that it had been taken today but showed something that had happened days, or maybe weeks, ago.
A part of me didn’t want to look at it—and a part of me couldn’t help myself.
I picked it out of my pocket and tilted it to examine it in the afternoon’s weird stormlight. If ghosts have a color, then they are the color of an August thunderstorm getting ready to break. The sky was the exact filthy gray of a Polaroid just beginning to develop.
In the photograph I hunched over that crumpled copy of Popular Mechanics, looking fat and unlovely. The fluorescent lighting above gave me the bluish tinge of the undead in a George Romero picture.
Don’t let him take a picture of you, Shelly Beukes had told me. Don’t let him start taking things away.
But he hadn’t taken a picture of me. I was in the picture, but he hadn’t pointed his camera at me and pressed the button. In fact, he hadn’t taken a picture at all. I had—and I’d been pointing the Solarid at Mat.
I dropped the photo with a kind of revulsion, as if I had suddenly realized I was holding a squirming maggot.
For a while I sprawled in the shadowy cool, trying not to think, because everything in my head was rotten and strange. Ever try not to think? It’s like trying not to breathe—no one can do it for long.
Maturity is not something that happens all at once. It is not a border between two countries where once you cross the invisible line, you are on the new soil of adulthood, speaking the foreign tongue of grown-ups. It is more like a distant broadcast, and you are driving toward it, and sometimes you can barely make it out through the hiss of static while other times the reception momentarily clears and you can pick up the signal with perfect clarity.
I think I was listening for Radio Adulthood then, remaining perfectly still in the hopes that I could catch a transmission carrying useful news and emergency instructions. I can’t say anything came to me—but in that moment of enforced stillness my gaze happened to settle on the small collection of family photo albums that my dad had arranged on the top shelf of the bookcase in the corner. My dad liked to keep things in order. He wore a tool belt to work, and everything was always in just the right place—the pliers in a holster, the wire stripper snug in a loop that was meant for it.
I picked an album at random, dumped myself back onto the couch, and began to turn through the pages. The oldest photos were glossy rectangular squares and—hold on to your hats, kids, I’m not making this up—were in black and white. The earliest showed my parents together in the days before they married. They were both too old and too square to be hippies, and I’m not sure I can honestly describe them as an appealing couple. My father’s only concessions to the time period were bushy sideburns and tinted sunglasses. My mother, the great African anthropologist, wore khaki shorts pulled up above her belly button and heavy hiking boots, even to family reunions. She smiled like it pained her. There wasn’t one shot of them hugging or kissing or even looking at each other.
There were at least a few shots of them taking turns holding me. Here was my mother on the floor, dangling enormous rubber keys above a chubby infant on his back, who grasped at them with fat fingers. Here was a picture of my father up to his waist in someone’s aboveground swimming pool, clutching his naked toddler in his arms. I was already a butterball.
My most frequent companion, though, was not my father or my mother but . . . Shelly Beukes. It was kind of a shock, really. When she retired five years earlier, I’d felt nothing in particular, was as indifferent as I would’ve been if my father had told me we were replacing an end table. Are you shocked to hear that a privileged seven-year-old from the Valley took the help for granted? My dad didn’t talk to me then about her open-heart surgery. He just said that she was a little older and older people needed more rest. She was in the neighborhood, and I could go see her anytime.
And did I? Oh, I dropped in on rare occasions, for tea and date cookies, and we sat in front of Murder, She Wrote, and she asked me how I was doing. I’m sure I was polite and ate my cookies quickly so I could go. When you’re a kid, spending an afternoon in an overheated living room with an old lady in front of daytime television is like winning a ticket to Guantánamo Bay. Love doesn’t figure into it. Whatever I owed her, or whatever I might’ve meant to her, never entered into my thoughts.
But here she was, in photo after photo.
We clutched the bars of a jail cell in Alcatraz, both of us putting on mock-horrified faces.
I sat on her shoulders to pluck a peach from the branches of a peach tree—my free hand crushing the brim of her straw hat down into her face.
I blew out candles while she stood behind me, hands raised, ready to clap. And yes . . . by this stage, the pictures were all Polaroids. Of course we had one. Everyone had one. Just like everyone had a VCR, a microwave, and a WHERE’S THE BEEF? T-shirt.
The woman in these photos was old but had bright, almost girlish eyes and a mischievous smile to match. In one Polaroid her hair was the red of a neon beer sign in a bar. In another it was a comical shade of carrot, and her nails were painted to match. In the snapshots she was always grabbing me, tousling my hair, sitting with me in her lap while I ate one of her date-filled cookies—a chubby little kid in Spider-Man Underoos with grape-juice stains on his chin.
About two-thirds of the way through the book, I came across a photo of a long-forgotten backyard barbecue. Shelly’s hair was Arctic Blu–colored this time. She had Larry with her, the Afrikaner wearing too-tight sand-colored trousers and a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled back to display his Popeye forearms. Each of them had one of my hands—I was a blur swinging between them in the dusk. Shelly was frozen in the act of whooping. Bemused grown-ups stood around watching, holding plastic cups of white wine.
The idea that these days had been taken from her struck me as vile. It was a swallow of curdled milk. It was indecent.
There was no justification for the loss of her memories and understanding, no defense the universe could offer for the corruption of her mind. She had loved me, even if I’d been too witless to know it or value it. Anyone who looked at these pictures could see she loved me, that I delighted her somehow, in spite of my fat cheeks, vacant stare, and tendency to eat in a way that smeared food all down my bad T-shirts. In spite of how I thoughtlessly accepted her attention and affection as my due. And now it was all melting away, every birthday p
arty, every BBQ, every plucked ripe peach. She was being erased a little at a time by a cancer that fed not on her flesh but on her inner life, on her private store of happiness. The thought made me want to fling the photo album at a wall. It made me feel like crying.
Instead I swiped at the water in my eyes and flipped to the next page—and made a sound of surprise at what I found there.
When I had glanced into the back of the Phoenician’s car, I’d seen a photo of a bodybuilder, a darkly tanned youth in an orange tank top, perched on the hood of a Trans Am. Some part of me had recognized him—had known I’d seen him before—even though I couldn’t place him or guess where we’d crossed paths. And here he was again, in my own photo album.
He held two straight-backed chairs over his head, one in each hand, gripping each by a wooden leg. I sat in one, hollering in what looked like joyous terror. I was in a damp swimsuit, jewels of water glittering on my fat-boy boobs. Shelly Beukes sat in the other, gripping the seat with both hands, laughing with her head tipped back slightly. In this photograph the big guy was dressed not in a tank top but in navy whites. He grinned wolfishly beneath his Tom Selleck mustache. And—look—even the Trans Am was there. I could just see the rear end of it, sitting in the driveway, visible around one corner of Shelly’s house.
“Who the hell are you?” I whispered.
I was talking to myself and didn’t expect an answer, but my father said, “Who?”
He stood in the doorway to the kitchen, wearing a single oven mitt. I wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there, watching me.
“Guy with the muscles,” I said, gesturing at a picture he couldn’t see from halfway across the room.
He wandered over, craned his neck for a look. “Oh. That jackass. Shelly’s boy. Sinbad? Achilles? Something like that. That’s the day before he shipped out to the Red Sea. Shelly had a going-away barbecue at her house. She made a cake looked like a battleship and was almost as big. We brought home the leftovers, and you and I ate battleship for breakfast all week.”
I remembered that cake: a three-dimensional aircraft carrier (not a battleship), churning up waves of blue-white frosting. I also remembered, faintly, that Shelly had told me that the party was a graduation party—for me! I had just finished the third grade. What a Shelly Beukes thing to do: tell a lonely little kid that a party was all about him, when it had nothing to do with him at all.
“He doesn’t look so bad,” I said. It bothered me, my dad calling him a jackass. It seemed like an offhand criticism of Shelly herself, and I wasn’t in the mood.
“Oh, you loved him. He was Larry’s boy through and through. Competed in bodybuilding contests, liked to show off with his muscle-boy tricks. Pick up one end of a car with his dick or whatever. You used to think he was the Incredible Hulk. I remember that stunt. Picking both of you up at the same time and walking around with you while you balanced on those chairs. I was afraid he’d drop Shelly on her head and I’d have to find a new babysitter. Or he’d drop you and I’d have to find a new kid to eat my Panama Thrill. Come on. Food’s done. Let’s tuck in.”
We sat catty-corner to each other at the dinner table with the Battle of Stalingrad on our plates. I wasn’t hungry and was surprised when I found myself using a roll to mop up the last of the gravy. I moved my bread around and around, smearing juice and thinking of all those photo albums in the back of the Phoenician’s car. Thinking of the picture in my shirt pocket that showed something it couldn’t possibly show. An idea was developing, not unlike a Polaroid, swimming slowly, inevitably, into clarity.
In a distant, artificially calm voice, I said, “I saw Mrs. Beukes today.”
“Oh, yeah?” My father gave me a thoughtful glance, and then asked, in a mild tone that was as artificial as mine, “How’d she look?”
“She was lost. I walked her home.”
“I’m glad. I wouldn’t have expected you to do anything different.”
I told him about finding Shelly in the street and how she thought she was supposed to work today and how she wouldn’t say my name because she didn’t know it. I told him about Larry Beukes swerving into the driveway in a panic, how he’d been scared to death she might go wandering into traffic or wind up lost for good.
“He gave me money for bringing her home. I didn’t want to take it, but he made me.”
I didn’t think my dad would like that, and a part of me expected—was maybe even hoping—to be shamed. But instead he got up for the Panama Thrill and said, over his shoulder, “Good.”
“It is?”
He set down the Jell-O, wobbling under four inches of sherbet-colored whipped cream, and began to scoop globs of it into bowls.
“Sure. Paying you is the way a man like Lawrence Beukes makes himself feel that he’s back in control. He’s not a man who lost his senile wife because he’s too old to see to her needs himself. He’s a man who knows how to pay someone to solve a problem.”
“He asked if I’d help out sometimes. If I’d . . . you know, come by and sit with her when he has to go out. For groceries or whatever.”
My dad paused with a spoonful of Panama Thrill at his lips. “I’m glad. You’re good to help out. I know you loved that old lady.”
Funny, huh? My father had known I loved Shelly Beukes, something I hadn’t known myself until only a few minutes before.
“Anything else happen this morning?” he asked.
My thumb crept to my shirt pocket, ran along the edge of the Polaroid (Solarid?) there. I’d been touching it off and on in a nervous, restless, helpless way ever since getting home. I considered saying something about the Phoenician and the clash at the Mobil mini-mart, but I didn’t know how to bring such a thing up without sounding like a rattled little kid.
And then there was that idea creeping around the edge of my awareness, a thought I was studiously trying to ignore. I didn’t want to go anywhere near that idea, and if I started talking about the Phoenician, I wouldn’t be able to avoid it.
So I didn’t say anything about the run-in at the gas station. Instead I said, “I’m almost done working on the party gun.”
“Outstanding. It’ll be easy to celebrate when you’re finished. All you have to do is pull the trigger.” He got up and carried our plates to the sink. “Mike?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t get too down if Shelly doesn’t know you or says things that don’t make sense.”
“I won’t.”
“It’s like . . . a house after someone moves out. The house is still there, but all their stuff is gone. Someone took away the furniture and rolled up the rugs. The movers crated all the parts of Shelly Beukes up and shipped her away. There’s just not much left of her anymore except the empty house.” He scraped the ruins of Stalingrad into the disposal. “That and what’s in old photographs.”
5
“YOU’LL BE ALL RIGHT HERE?” my father asked me on his way out the door. He had one foot on the front step and the other on our pea-green shag carpet. Lightning lit the low, boiling clouds behind him in a soundless flicker.
“Been a while since I needed Shelly Beukes to tuck me in,” I said.
“Yeah, it has. I don’t know that’s how it should be, but that’s how it is, huh?”
That was such an uncharacteristic thing for my dad to say—to acknowledge, even a little, that our life was somehow not quite ideal—that I opened my mouth to answer him and found I had no reply at all.
He glanced out into the turbulent, thundercloudy dusk. “I hate working nights. When Al gets back in the rotation, I’ll put in for days.”
My father had been pulling night shifts with the utility company all summer. They had a staffing gap. His best pal, Al Murdoch, wasn’t working while he received treatment for lymphoma. One of the line engineers, John Hawthorne, had recently been arrested for assaulting his ex-wife. Piper Wilson had left to have a baby. Suddenly my father was the senior lineman and working sixty hours a week, most of them after I went to bed.
At first I liked it. I liked staying up after I was supposed to be asleep, catching soft-core porn on what we called Skinemax in those days. But by mid-July all the fun had gone out of being alone in the house at night. I had a vivid imagination and in late July had made the mistake of reading Zodiac. After that the emptiness of the house began to seriously creep me the fuck out. I’d lie in bed dry-mouthed at two in the morning, listening to the silence, breathlessly expecting to hear a splintering crunch as good old Zodiac forced open a window with a crowbar. He’d use one of the kitchen knives to cut astrological signs into my fat gut—not after I was dead but while I was still alive, so he could hear me shriek.
I never talked about any of this with my father, because the only thing worse than my nighttime anxiety attacks was the idea that he might decide to hire someone to babysit me. All the Zodiac Killer could do was torture and kill me. If my dad hired some teenage Valley girl to put me to bed at nine-thirty and then spend the rest of the night on our phone jawing with her friends, I’d wish I were dead. The indignity would stomp up and down on my brittle, thirteen-year-old boy’s ego.
After my run-in with the Phoenician, I especially dreaded being alone that evening. Plus, there were those thunderheads and a sense of electrical charge in the air, a prickling energy I could feel in the fine hairs on my forearms. The thunder had been rolling all afternoon, and you could just tell it was going to cut loose soon—cut loose and roar.
“Think you’ll work on the party gun some more?” he asked.
“Probably. I—”
What followed was not melodramatic horror-movie thunder but more like a world-splitting sci-fi missile launch, a single obliterating cannon blast. It was noise at such a volume that it drove the air out of me.
My father would spend his evening offered up to that sky on an iron crane, repairing power lines, a thought that made my insides bunch up with worry when I allowed myself to think about it. He only looked disgruntled and a little weary, as if the thunder were a tiresome irritation, like the sound of kids fighting in the backseat. He cupped one hand behind his right ear to indicate he hadn’t heard me.