Читать книгу Twister - Genanne Walsh - Страница 8

Loop around, again, to the morning of the storm.

Here is the town, here are the people. Beyond are the farms, and the church with its steeple. Scottie Dunleavy pressed his fingertips to the glass. He didn’t care about churches or farms. Just watch what’s right outside your window and you’ll see more than most people ever will.

Across the street at Mondragon’s Emporium, Ward Mondragon swept the porch with broad, distracted motions, not much dirt to pick up since he did the same thing every morning. Stella Mondragon’s dark head moved among the shelves inside the store. Ward and Stella were the only signs of life from Scottie’s front window. It was early. Mondragon’s Emporium had been around even longer than Dunleavy’s Fine Shoes (&Shoe Repair), and Ward was trying to keep up appearances. All of the Main Street shops had lost customers when the Discount SuperStore opened, though Mondragon’s still took in business from people who didn’t have time to drive twenty miles down the interstate for cheaper duct tape or flour. Ward bent to work some dirt into a dustpan and then set the broom by his door, turning to straighten the chairs that lined the porch, looking up and down the quiet street. Five years ago when Crown Co. opened a meatpacking plant on the edge of town, they’d waited for the promised influx of workers with wallets full of cash. They were still waiting.

After awhile Ward went into his store and Stella came out with car keys and a cell phone in hand. Scottie stepped back nervously. Stella gave him funny looks. She spoke too slowly when she talked to him. Her eyes always found the spots on his clothes where he’d dribbled soup—he didn’t have time to use the Laundromat as often as he should. After his parents died and the house was lost, Scottie moved into the back stockroom of Dunleavy’s Shoes with his cat, Dogberry, shoeboxes full of his mother’s costume jewelry and his father’s cufflinks, a cot, and paperwork charting the two-decade decline of the family business. His appearance rarely mattered. Dogberry didn’t care. Ward didn’t.

After Stella slammed her sedan door and started the engine, he stepped to the window. Stella, like most of them, thought he didn’t see things simply because he looked at a slant. He did see things—he saw that Mondragon’s was in trouble. And there was something unsettled about Ward’s marriage to Stella. They never seemed to fight, but an air of struggle between them was palpable, and the conflict was about more than just the dead nephew. Stella had driven toward the old county road quite often in recent months, and there was only one place she could have been going: to her stepsister, Rose. Rose the estranged, Rose the thorn.

Ward reemerged from the Emporium and stood in the doorway watching his wife pull too quickly onto Main Street. His eyes met Scottie’s. Ward waved and called something, gesturing into his store, and then he raised his arms toward the cloudless sky like a conductor before his orchestra. The sound of Stella’s car engine filled the street and black feathers rustled overhead. Dogberry wound between his ankles. Time for breakfast.

At nine o’clock, as Scottie flipped the sign to Open, Nina Brown sailed by in her old tan station wagon. Nina was going to the bank, most likely, radio tuned to the Christian rock station, mind elsewhere, on her sullen husband or her irascible father-in-law, or their pale-faced teenage girl. Not so long ago, Nina’s pregnant teenage belly had pulled Perry Brown out of the community college, where he’d been studying auto mechanics, and back to the Brown Family farm. The Browns’ place was big and sprawling, confident, encroaching on Rose’s much smaller acreage. The Browns were the salt of the earth, people liked to say.

Nina Brown sailing by in her brown station wagon, cross hanging from the rearview. As she passed he saw them both clearly—the younger Nina and this current one, framed together in his store window. A quick snapshot. He watched Nina drive straight past the palimpsest of her scared, hopeful, pregnant former self, too busy now to stop and chat. The younger Nina pulled a blue jacket closer around her shoulders and her burgeoning belly. She checked her watch and looked overhead, and started walking east at a brisk clip. No fool, that one, even as a girl.

It wasn’t only Nina he saw this way. The past and present often intersected outside his store window. Two cars rolling through an intersection: kids in the back waving and shrieking, oldsters in the opposite lane watching the horizon with tired eyes. One heading east, one heading west, sliding past, treating the whole journey like a jaunty straight line rather than a spiral. Don’t they recognize themselves? Sometimes the past lingered while the present hurried by: the former selves pulled up to the curb in old junkers, got out, and stood along the street in ill-fitting coats, gathered at intersections, squinting and asking each other for cigarettes.

Scottie touched his fingertips to the window then dropped his hand. It was early yet, the sky clear. He suspected quite reasonably that he wouldn’t have a single customer today. Out of habit, he checked the change drawer in the cash register and turned on the store’s fluorescent overheads. He clicked on the radio and heard that silky-voiced buyer of wingtip shoes, former traveling salesman turned weatherman Ted Waite, talking about storm conditions. A thunderstorm likely on the way, friends. Stay tuned and I’ll have all the latest developments. We’ve got your back here at KA—He clicked Ted off, uninterested.

In the stockroom Dogberry waited on the cot, sphinxlike. The shelves were stacked high and tilted inward toward a small clearing in the center where Scottie stood, sipping his coffee. Towers of shoeboxes teetered, arranged in an order that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. Some that dated back to 1964 should have been donated or sold for scrap long ago but here they stayed, little cardboard coffins. Tiny x and o ciphers marked their sides. Stacks of old newspapers and magazines sprouted under and around his cot, narrowing the pathways from shelving to sink. His worktable was an old door resting on two sawhorses. Next to his cot, a small trunk held clothes and books. A hot plate rested on a shelf right above it. Reconstructed bird and mouse skeletons perched between shoeboxes and along the metal shelving edges. Here, where there was no single place for a person’s eye to rest, he was at peace, more or less.

On his worktable, a pear and his dirty soup bowl from dinner the night before sat atop a pile of outdated issues of ARTnews. There was one pair of leather shoes, Ward Mondragon’s, that needed resoling. The table also held a bird skeleton, a rat skeleton, two pairs of sneakers, and a messy stack of index cards with Scottie’s perfect, tiny block print running along the lines, occasionally veering off to form circles, loops, and animal forms.

He sat and worked for awhile on the bird bones, using a tiny blade to separate the joints, brushing the individual segments clean, and taking care to set each piece in the correct spot on a waiting piece of paper, laying the segments out like a blueprint. He would refer to his bird book when he put the pieces back together. This bird, a red-wing, had flown into his net by Johnson’s Creek forty-seven Sundays ago, time and date recorded on an index card. Now the bones were bleached clean, and so delicate he scarcely felt them between his fingers.

Dogberry leapt onto the table and perched with his front paws on a sliding fan of index cards, meowing. He was intrigued by Scottie’s skeletons, and if he got the chance he’d bat them to the ground and pounce. “Red-winged Blackbird,” Scottie said, shoving Dogberry to the floor. The cat, irritated, stalked around the crate that held Scottie’s lamp and alarm clock. His tail gave the merest flick: Caution. Look.

When Scottie had heard the news that Rose’s son Lance was killed in the war he’d had no reaction. Ward told him in a nervous whisper. Stella was all broken up at the loss of her nephew and home in bed, Ward said, and Rose, presumably flattened by grief, wasn’t responding to their calls. Scottie listened and replied, “That’s very sad,” as he had been taught to do whenever someone died. Then he’d gone back to his store and sat on his cot. Vomit rose in his throat so quickly he didn’t have time to make it to the sink. He was sick down the front of his shirt, stunned with the speed of it, bile seeping into the cloth. After a while he removed the shirt and washed his damp torso in the sink. He squeezed the soiled cloth into a ball and shoved it to the bottom of the trashcan. It was wasteful and unlike him, but he had to dispose of it.

He had watched for the boy’s ghost since but seen it only rarely. Through the town’s intersections Lance slid, unmoored, shifting meaning, cueing one memory after another. Lance. Everyone knew him.

But what had Scottie known of him? Lance’s feet were big. Rose had brought him in to buy sneakers about a year ago, the last time—and one of the few times—Scottie had talked with him. He had written a message on the soles of the boy’s new shoes, of course. That wasn’t unusual. More unexpected was that Lance had seen one of Scottie’s messages that no one else bothered to notice.

Now Lance was most apparent through the space he’d left behind. Sometimes he stood on Mondragon’s porch, a too-bright glow coming off him. Nina Brown’s daughter, Sill, almost ghostly herself, held constant vigil, and Lance trailed after her, occasionally reaching out to glance his hand across her shoulders. Scottie recognized him by the silky hair and the baseball cap and the way Lance seemed to lose texture based on where he stood, his outline fading into the old wood, or a street lamp, or a passing car.

Scottie imagined Lance, those long legs, that rectangle of a youth in the war and wearing Scottie’s hidden message on his shoes—carrying the words into battle, into mess hall and tank and Humvee and dank prisons; into the morgue. Perhaps the sneakers were on his feet now, turning in the quiet earth. The boy wouldn’t really have worn sneakers purchased at Dunleavy’s to war. Scottie knew this. Yet it was the way he chose to remember Lance—it put the kid in context. Which, when you think of it, is the only way to understand anything.

Working, Scottie lost track of time. It was close to the lunch hour when the bell over the front door tinkled.

Louise Logan stood staring out his front window, clutching her purse to her body.

“Can I help you?”

She held her purse closer. “Hi, Scottie. Do you have sneakers?”

“Why, yes!” He saw what she’d been watching. Rose’s blue truck was parked across the street and there were two heads inside Mondragon’s, standing together in a center aisle. Rose shorter and lighter, moving in one direction and then another as Ward followed. Louise scarcely breathed, she was watching them so intently. She worked as a teller at the bank and made a point of knowing everybody’s business.

“What, uh, what are you looking for exactly…uh?”

“Louise,” she snapped, offended because she thought he’d forgotten her name. She picked up a pair of canvas Keds and told him her size.

In the back, he found the size and style she’d asked for, but in the wrong color. He paused and picked up his pen, pondering the message. Then he wrote: How did I get here? and, Have you seen my lost youth?

Louise sniffed as she sat on the bench, simultaneously thumping her handbag to the ground and kicking off her loafers. She held her hand out for the shoe, slid it onto her left foot, and looked down. He watched her register that the canvas was stained, perhaps from water damage, and the cardboard box was a bit misshapen. She did not notice his message, tiny print running in the grooves of both soles.

Her feet smelled—rank from the build-up of sweat inside her cheap leather shoes—Scottie backed toward the window, wondering if he still had a can of air freshener under the register. People like Louise were always pointing out other people’s smells, completely oblivious to their own. She didn’t even bother to tie the laces, just sat with her feet stretched out on the footstool and her eyes on the window. Rose and Ward came out of Mondragon’s. Scottie and Louise dropped the pretense and gawked. Rose’s shock of white hair made her almost unrecognizable, and Ward’s big shoulders hunched as he leaned into her truck window—he looked as if he were pleading. Scottie touched his pants pocket nervously. Ward reached a bag through the truck’s passenger window, and Rose’s black dog pushed his nose into Ward’s hand.

Scottie cleared his throat. “What do you think, Louise?”

“Hmmm,” she glanced down. “I just don’t know.”

“Would you like to try on the other one?” He held out the shoe, looking somewhere to the left of her eyebrows.

“No. It fits, it’s…” She peered at the scene on the street. “It’s not quite right.” Though their sons had been close, Scottie knew, Louise and Rose were not friends. Never had been.

He took the shoe she shelled from her foot, returning the pair sole to sole into the box, folding the tissue paper carefully over the canvas. Outside, Rose’s truck engine ground and sputtered away. “Anything else?”

She said No and left without ceremony. He watched her cross the street to Mondragon’s, probably to pump Ward for information. Louise had shrunk since she’d last come in, and not from weight loss. Ward too, for that matter. And Rose, from the glimpse he’d had—she was practically shriveled.

Scottie had never been in a war. No, no, no indeed. He’d have gotten out any way he could, if he hadn’t been too young for Vietnam. A generation had forgotten what it was like—a generation spoon-fed glory tales of World War II, treated like children by politicians and pundits and the breakers of the news. And now they’d lost a child, Rose’s child. It was stupid that the boy had gone there, to war, and stupid now to see people bemoaning it, acting dodgy, stopping by only to peep out his store windows, flabbergasted at its proximity. It wasn’t a pretend war, though listening to some you might think it. How could this happen? It can’t be. It’s so unfair. It makes no sense. People were perpetually determined in their oblivion.

Soon Louise made her way down the street toward the bank, a small paper bag from Mondragon’s in hand. Scottie knocked his knuckles against the shoebox under his arm. Even though Louise hadn’t bought the shoes they belonged to her now, in a way that pleased him. His reconfigured bones were art, and the shoe repair was business. The sole messages he counted in another category entirely.

They were his tiny, secret protests, sent out into the world on the feet of his few customers, unknown to everyone except Scottie himself. When the idea first came to him, he’d clutched his pocketknife to calm himself. Since, he’d waited for an irate phone call, or a sullen demand for money back. But no one had ever brought back a shoe, and so he’d grown bolder, writing on the soles not only of the few shoes he sold, but also on his display items, and even along the dark stitching of the shoes he was asked to repair.

His long-term project was to write a message on each shoe in the store. He felt light at heart—light all over—as he made his tiny messages. Even if the shoes never sold and wound up in a landfill or on the feet of some charity case in Somalia or Bangladesh, his messages would remain.

A few years ago, in miniscule black print under the Dunleavy’s Fine Shoes (&Shoe Repair) lettering on the front window, he’d etched, You don’t see what’s right in front of you. The world makes fools of us all. This proclamation was the only thing that kept him flipping the sign to Open some days.

The sky, he noticed now, was thickening. His stomach rumbled, so he went to the back and ate a can of creamed corn and cherry pie filling from a jar. He turned on the radio for company. “Be alert, folks,” Ted Waite the weatherman said. Don’t take chances. That means you, too, Scottie. The ants that nested in his walls’ insulation trailed up the rim of the cherry jar, drawn from their storm shelter, made reckless by the sticky drippings.

They decided to board the shoestore window first. Ward’s shirtsleeves were rolled up his big forearms and his breath whistled a bit. He’d always been husky, but now he was downright fat. He took up too much room in Scottie’s small space, standing by the window with a display brogue in his hand.

Scottie retrieved the plywood from the storeroom and lugged the boards to the front. “I’m working on resoling your shoes, Ward?” he offered, his inflection rising nervously.

“Great.” Ward took some planks off Scottie’s stack as they angled out the front door. He didn’t ask when his shoes would be ready.

“I think they’ll look good as new.” Scottie set the wood under the window.

“I bet,” Ward said. “Do you have an extra hammer?” He was thinking about the visit from Rose, Scottie knew, and by extension, about Stella.

Scottie went to the back for his toolbox, wishing he had finished the re-soling project so he’d have something definitive to hand Ward. Instead, he gave him his smaller hammer and a few nails.

“Thanks.” Ward lifted a board and set it across the window frame. “How long has it been since we’ve had an alert over this many counties?”

Scottie placed a nail. “Eight years.” The effort of talking and pounding was too much. His hammer glanced off his thumb and he yelped.

“You okay?” Ward asked. Scottie didn’t answer, just sucked on his finger for a moment and returned to the task at hand. Ward didn’t really care how much time had elapsed since the last big storm warning, he was just trying to calm Scottie down. That was the problem with Ward, the closest thing he had to a friend—with one soothing word, he could remind Scottie all over again of his place in the world. The air that had felt heavy and close suddenly seemed thin, and the sky had a sickly tinge.

They finished and went to Ward’s store. Scottie wandered in the aisles while Ward went to the back for the boards and tools. Pausing in an aisle far from the stockroom door, Scottie pulled out his pocketknife and made a tiny nick in a five-pound bag of sugar. His heartbeat slowed. The radio blared the angry voice of an a.m. talk show host, and Ward dropped something heavy in the back. Scottie ambled down the aisle, picked up a small, unlabeled jar, jam of some sort, and then noticed there was a note tucked under it. A message scrawled on a piece of brown paper, signed by Rose. He tucked the paper into his pocket. His hands were moving, but his mind was on the overwhelming details of the store: the too-loud radio, the tired-looking merchandise on the shelves, the photos of Ward’s parents and grandparents on the wall near the stockroom door.

He touched a bag of rice, wondering what to do about the note, which wasn’t his. But now it was in his pocket. He would take it out and hand it to Ward, who obviously hadn’t seen Rose set it down while she was in the store. Relieved at this decision, he made one more cut, the bottom corner of a bag of cornmeal, and was setting it back into place when Ward asked him what he was doing. Just relieving a bit of pressure. Can’t you feel it? Scottie’s head felt large and square, too big for his body. He was stammering a non-answer when the phone rang. Stella, just in the nick of time, diverting Ward’s attention.

Scottie counted each step across the street to his front door. Eleven. His sleeves had unrolled, and they swung past his hands. He had played the Scarecrow once, in a middle school production of The Wizard of Oz. His mother had altered one of his father’s old suits, took in the arms and legs, and added rough patches and bits of straw. He’d sung and danced, pointing at his head and saying, “If I only had a brain.” He was a mediocre singer, and not much better as a dancer. But in becoming someone else, and having it acknowledged and applauded, Scottie had lost that feeling of displacement that he carried with him. As he flapped awkwardly, and sang, and pointed at his head with a goofy expression, he forgot how his clothes were separate from his body, his bones separate from his vocal chords. It all worked together, for a purpose—the message he conveyed was straightforward and disturbing and yet the audience was charmed. I am missing something. I am not whole. Bravo! He had swung his arms wide across his body as he’d bowed, letting the loose cuffs of his oversized shirtsleeves fling into the air. Bravo! The parents and teachers and siblings had given the performers an ovation at the end of the show.

He turned to face Mondragon’s. The power lines hummed. His young Scarecrow self stood catty-corner across the street, in the shadow of the old bank building. Scottie spread his arms and bowed. His ghost bowed back, and then stepped out of sight around the corner.

Inside, the boards across the windows made his place dim and close. A semblance of night had entered the store, and in the darkness the shoes lined his dusty shelves like a bodiless, expectant army. Scottie flipped the sign to Closed and headed straight to the back. He flicked on the overhead light in his stockroom and it fell in a warm, yellow circle onto his table and cot. Shoeboxes rose darkly around him, and his tiny skeleton figures seemed one beat from animating, circling overhead, and demanding flesh.

He sat at his worktable and made tiny cracks, crevices in Ward’s shoe sole, wondering what message to hide within. He had to think about what to say when Ward asked again about the cutting. Ward would ask, when enough time had passed, his voice even and full of regret, a resigned downward slope to his shoulders. Can’t you feel your stuckness, Ward?

The note. He’d forgotten to give it to Ward. He pulled it from his pocket and reread it: Rose’s handwriting sprawled, as many lines scribbled out as were left readable. They described a few domestic details of her life on the farm, and no mention of Lance, all in a snotty tone addressed to Stella. P.S. she’d written. The Browns are circling. The Browns—they must be doing an interesting dance, sussing out whether Rose’s land was up for grabs. With the note, she was pushing Stella away and also pulling her closer. He shoved the paper under a stack of magazines, wanting to be done with these people, his neighbors and their complications.

Scottie attached sturdy new leather soles to Ward’s oxfords and wrote in tiny perfect script along the seams. On the right, Who are you really? On the left, Wouldn’t you like to know? He pushed back from the table, regarding his work. Dogberry’s eyes grew wider and even more golden. All of it—the shoes, the bones, the tiny slices he made at Mondragon’s—he was a master of the microcosm, imperceptible seismic events centering on the same question: how small could his impact be yet still be felt?

He pressed his palm into the worktable and looked at the veins on the back of his hand. If he had once been primarily made of water, now an element with less weight composed him. “Dust,” he whispered. “I’m a fool too.” There was more work to do but he could not focus. He set Ward’s shoes onto a shelf.

“Well,” he said, and Dogberry, hackles raised, arched his back and hissed in a kind of triumph. The overhead light swung gently in the cloistered room.

The clock read 3:15. Scottie had never switched off the transistor radio, and he heard, faintly, Ted Waite talking about a tornado, pace urgent, reciting names of alerted counties. The weather felt far away inside this quiet, though he knew it wasn’t. Elements felt different: dust and decaying leather, slackening skin and mammal odors, the sharp clean scent of his indelible ink, and papery air. Now outside pressed in—the atmosphere was heavy and his skin, save for his lips, felt plush. Dogberry’s scratch on the back of his hand had faded to a dull pink. He warmed a can of greasy noodles on the hotplate and quickly ate, rubbing his lips together to feel the soothing oil work its way into the crevices.

He picked up the cleaned blackbird bones, wanting to etch sentences onto the white calcium. There wouldn’t be room, of course. So instead he wrote sunken on one wing, waiting on the other. Then he reset the pieces in perfect formation and pinned them together. He would add this to the flock perched on his shelves, skeletons with secrets embedded in their bones. Eventually he would bury them all.

He wondered what Rose’s boy, Lance, would have thought that day last year if he’d stumbled upon this message instead of the tiny one that Scottie had etched under the sign on the front window. The world makes fools of us all. Wishing that the boy had spotted one of his more elaborate creations was a kind of weakness and it unsettled him, like hearing the Scarecrow applause. Lance’s ghost had not shown himself earlier today when Rose went into Mondragon’s. Scottie had chalked this up to the weather, but now he wondered if it was due to some greater failure on his part. He could have looked harder for the boy, after all. He could have beckoned.

“Ask me about my winnowing shot at happiness,” Scottie whispered. “I am a fuckwad.” Dogberry arched his back and jumped onto Scottie’s table, knocking the reconstructed blackbird bones flat. It was too quiet. The light flickered overhead. A great rumbling drowned out the voice of Ted Waite on the radio, and the light clicked out with a definitive pop. Dogberry leapt to the floor with a low growl. “Time to flee,” Scottie said, grabbing the cat as he bent to yank up the trap door in the floor. He chucked Dogberry, still yowling, down the hole, pulled a battery-operated lantern from the shelf over his cot, and followed.

Above them, all of them, out in the world, the storm drew into a fist.