Читать книгу Kiss Me, Stranger - Ron Tanner - Страница 5

1. Handful of Nails

Unbeknownst to the children, I added wood shavings to their turnip stew last night: pine to be exact, which I grated meticulously as if it were hard cheese. I’ve had to do such things because my children don’t understand deprivation, they understand only their own appetites—which is what makes children so appealing: they are all desire, wide-eyed and voracious.

“Mama, can I have this?” Lori asks, my eleven-year-old.

She holds in both hands an oil-soaked sock, which looks, I suppose, delectable. Her siblings watch her hopefully. Recently they made a meal of wallpaper paste—a glutinous soup, heavily salted and peppered—and only the three youngest got sick. The others sat around afterwards and pretended not to gloat, though they looked very pleased with themselves. I suspect they all suffered stomach cramps.

Lori is the most sensitive of my six girls, the child who looks most like me, a small crooked nose, green-green eyes, a swanlike neck but the stocky build of a field hockey player. She knows better than to eat a sock; it’s obviously a sock. But the odorous oil, dark as molasses, might have fooled her. I recall how the heady smell of gasoline tantalized me as a child.

“No,” I tell her, “you can’t have this.”

I tug the sock from her grasp, then toss it into the fireplace, where last night’s embers ignite the sock in a splendid burst of blue flame. Lori weeps, hands over her eyes as if painfully blinded. The others join her. And I have a roomful of sobbing children.

Thirteen, to be exact.

Some nights I dream that I cut off my left arm for the children’s dinner and roast it for hours like a succulent leg of lamb, basting it with a thick gravy of my own blood, the house humid with the heady sweetness of its baking. I’m not usually inclined to melodramatic thoughts, but our war is a melodrama and all of us feel the strain.

The bullies of the Presidential Militia drafted my husband a year ago. I haven’t seen him since. Our eldest son, Lon, only fifteen, joined shortly thereafter because, I fear, he liked the look of the uniforms. Families, I’ve heard, have resorted to eating their house pets, something we don’t have, fortunately, and a number of children have run away because, apparently, they felt they’d find better elsewhere.

Had you asked me, when I was a teenager, what would become of my life, I would have told you any number of fantasies, none of which have come true. I was good at math and assumed that I would be a scientist. I met Marcel (pronounced MAR-cel because he thought Mar-CEL too effeminate) at the two-year Poly-tech, where those of us without money went. He was by no means the handsomest or the smartest. To be honest: I was the smartest in our class of six hundred.

When I found Marcel following me after class one day, I turned abruptly and asked him what he was doing. “Following my heart!” he answered, his voice breaking. He was, is, a small man with close-set hazel eyes, large, capable hands, and a beautiful smile. The kind of smile you’d expect from a kindergarten teacher, which was his secret aspiration. I had dated at least twenty boys by that time. The uncertainty the others cultivated, their callous disregard of my feelings, their adolescent self-absorption, made for an edgy excitement that I found almost addictive. I thought Marcel’s lack of guile an act, the way he’d blink at me, smile that beautiful smile, then say, “Don’t you look lovely today!” His kindness wore me down. Maybe I got tired of playing games. Marcel never lied. It was a novelty being with someone like that, and soon I couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.

Love sneaked up on me, it threw a hood over my head and kidnapped me. I found myself doing things I never imagined I would do. I opened a small computer-repair business with Marcel instead of going on for a degree in advanced mathematics. I agreed to live in a city row-house instead of a country home where I might have awakened every morning to birdsong instead of bus bleats. And then I let him have his dream, fourteen children instead of my suggested two. I feel selfish and embarrassed sometimes for having brought fourteen into the world. It’s a luxury Marcel and I clearly could not, cannot, afford. Strangers stare at us and shake their heads in dismay and disbelief. In jest, Marcel and I vowed never to touch one another again. “Look what becomes of love,” I would say, gesturing to the children. Everywhere, it seemed, there were children: children pulling pages from our precious books, children picking plaster from our walls, children gouging our dining table with their breakfast spoons, children peeling tiles from our kitchen floor, children wrenching knobs from our doors and faucet handles from our sinks, children unscrewing bulbs from lights and, inevitably, dropping them: bombs of delicate glass.

Our modest row-house is like an ark too long afloat. I am continually amazed that we survive, every week a triumph when I parade my brood into the street and we make our way to the market. We are a family of scavengers. Even Marimar, my two-year-old, is adept at pulling copper from discarded computer casings. The children have never questioned their hard work. Still, I fear I will never be mother enough for all of them, that they will resent my constant distraction, that secretly each of them will curse Marcel and me for not having thought this through.

What can we say in our defense? We love their clamorous company. There are times when, stooping to pick up one or the other, I want only to bury my face in the warm tangle of their writhing arms and legs—to lose myself in their giddy chaos. Selfish, I know. I feel buoyed by my children as, during my girlhood summers, I felt buoyed when floating in our too-salty sea. But increasingly I have a fear of the depths my feet cannot reach.

Call it a fear of drowning.

“Metal man! Metal man!” the children scream.

They have clustered at the window. No tears now. The Metal Man, as they call him, is an Officer of the President’s Militia who makes the rounds once a week—unannounced—to collect metal to be melted down for the PM’s weaponry. It is the citizens’ job to gather nails, shrapnel, rebar, tin cans, anything for the cause. As our President puts it: “Your Metal Makes Me Strong!” Heaven help you if the Officer finds more than one cooking pot in your kitchen.

“Get your nails,” I tell the children. Every morning we spend hours picking through the debris from recent bombings. While the children, under the close supervision of my most responsible—Lori, Nadia, Del, and Simon—scavenge for metal scrap, nails from wallboard and aluminum from window frames, I scavenge for copper and, if I’m lucky, terminal boards, relay switches, network junctions, flatscreens. You never know what you’ll find.

The metals Officer wears an aluminum stewpot which he’s fashioned into a helmet. It bears a high, scratchy shine and sits a little too low on his head. An older man—that is, older than I—he is tall, lean, and handsome and looks remarkably like the English actor Christopher Lee, who used to star in so many vampire movies of my youth. The name “Hermes,” stitched in hand-sized gold script across the back of his shirt, could be his real name, a nickname, or a brand name. Every time I see him I wonder why he is not on the front lines with everyone else.

Some days we’re winning the war, some days we’re not. Every day, at random, the Mimis scream overhead. If they’re rocketing south, they’re fired by the President’s Militia. If they’re rocketing north, they’re fired by the Revolutionary Militia. Rumor says that half the PM has defected to the RM and half the RM to the PM. As one RM slogan puts it: Who’s the enemy? Look in the mirror!

The children open the door before Officer Hermes knocks. He bows ever so slightly when he sees me. It seems he finds me attractive, though I don’t know why, a mother of fourteen. I’ve lost weight, it’s true, and I’ve noticed that a streak of gray at my left temple, which seems to have appeared over night, gives me a haunted look, the kind of gloomy allure you might expect of the heroine of a romance novel.

“Officer,” I say stiffly. “What a pleasant surprise.”

He smiles his hungry smile. “Penelope.” He makes my name sound like an exhalation. I’ve decided that he is frightening.

“Metal man! Metal man!” the children call. It’s almost a taunt but also an expression of terror—as if calling after a scarecrow that has come alive and begun to haunt the neighborhood.

He holds open his canvas bag like a trick-or-treater, his jaw working a wad of toffee. He says, “Good morning, kittens, what gifts have you for me today?”

“Can we have some candy?” they whine. I think of chicks in a nest, mouths gaping. The children grasp at the Officer’s shiny polyester shirt, his leather belt, his rubber waders, his very blue jeans.

four views of the metal man

He’s well fed, anybody can see, a little paunch above his belt. Sometimes I’m tempted to punch his belly, just to feel how soft it really is.

“Where would I get candy?” he asks cheerfully.

“You’re eating it!” they shout.

“You’re an official!” Nadia says. “You can get anything!”

Join the President’s Militia, the PM says. Make yourself Official!

Had our President not squandered the nation’s trust, we would have done well enough. When younger, I was never political enough to keep track. I thought The Man, as he insisted we call him, was sufficiently presidential for his role. He made the trains run on time, he opened his Ferris wheel collection to the nation’s children twice a year, he posed for photos with people in the street.

“Get your nails,” I tell the children again. We make a production of our offering, the children parading one after the other to the Officer’s open bag. As the nails accumulate, their collective noise like the sound of someone going through a change purse, I think of the money Marcel and I horded before he was forced to join the PM—big paper bills which featured The Man’s smiling face over the slogan that made him popular so many years ago: “Let’s grow grow smart,let’s grow rich!”

I try not to think of the many ways I could have spent our horde before it became worthless. Now the bills paper our leaky wall seams, and my children are wearing sandals I’ve fashioned from duct tape and polystyrene packing sheets. Boys and girls alike wear shifts I’ve stitched together from plastic shower curtains. I have failed them.

“Nice,” Officer Hermes is saying. “Very nice.” He nods his approval at each handful of nails.

Just then we hear a crash from the kitchen and I fear the worst, that Lori has not finished hiding the cookware.

The Officer looks up abruptly, like an alerted guard dog: “Sounded like a pan to me.”

“That would be surprising,” I say.

He purses his lips, suppressing a smile. “Let’s take a look.”

The children surround him, waving their hands and hopping in protest:“We don’t have any pans!” “We’re not hiding!” “Nobody’s in there!” All of which make a convincing show of guilt. Still, I can’t help but love them for trying.

When Officer Hermes opens the kitchen door, whose hinges are solid brass, by the way, Lori stands at the kitchen sink scrubbing a plastic bowl furiously.

“Little Miss, why aren’t you out here to greet me?” He speaks in sing-song. Why do some adult address children as if children were animals?

“I’m being punished,” Lori says matter-of-factly, “because I tried to eat a sock this morning.”

Officer Hermes nods his head agreeably as if this made sense. That metal-heavy canvas bag at his shoulder, he strolls the length of the kitchen, sizing it up like a prospective tenant, then he opens the oven, which we haven’t used in months, since there’s no gas. Major appliances will be the next thing we recycle, I suppose.

“I could use these oven racks,” he says.

The children crowd around. They are silent, watchful.

“You think we’ll never cook with gas again?” I say. “Is that what you’re saying? When the PM triumphs, our quality of life will be that meager?”

Hermes rights himself, his face flushed: “I didn’t say anything like that. Life will be better, everybody knows life will be better. But first—” he glances at the children as if to warn them, “first we have to finish winning the war, don’t we? We can’t hold back, can we? Everybody has to sacrifice, don’t they?”

Finish winning the war. How careful he is.

“We sacrifice plenty,” says Simon, aware of the implicit blame.

“Bring a written order from Home Base,” I say, “and we’ll give you our oven racks.”

“I don’t need a written order,” he snaps. “I can take anything that can be spared.”

Why is he suddenly angry?

“You’ve got plenty from us already,” I insist. Now I’m getting angry too, though I realize an argument is only going to put my family at a disadvantage. Calm the man, I tell myself. Flatter him. “But you’re right, Officer Hermes, you can do anything you please. May I suggest that today’s not the day for oven grills? Tomorrow maybe?”

He regards me skeptically. Perhaps my motherly authority daunts him or my disdain shows or he simply wants me to respond to his male charm, whatever that might be. With a determined grimace, he stoops into the open oven, pulls out the racks, one after the other—almost with a flourish—then tucks them under one arm.

I watch the children watching him, their pale lips compressed in anguish and anger.

Hermes draws himself up and seems to suppress a smirk as he regards us. “This will suffice,” he says curtly.

I slap him hard across the face. He drops the grills—they clatter like applause—then he’s reeling. He falls back onto Nadia, my twins Thom and Sara, little Pierce, and Spence. They yelp in panic. Pierce and Sara begin to bawl. Sprawled on the floor, my children squirming out from under him, Hermes looks stricken and disoriented.

Why I start weeping at this point is complicated. I’ve never respected women who resort easily to tears. I usually have a tremendous reserve of patience. In this instance, however, I feel thoroughly shamed by my loss of control. How will this act of violence affect my children?

They gather around me to offer comfort. It’s all right, they murmur. It’s gonna be fine. The kinds of things I’ve murmured to them.

“Where’s my helmet?” Hermes demands. He’s on his feet again. The dark pink imprint of half my hand flares from his clean-shaven cheek. He seems more disoriented than angry, turning from side to side to find his helmet, which one of the children has taken.

I surface for a breath, desperate to salvage this moment. I tell myself that somehow all of us will forget this ever happened. It’s over, right? Ignore the handprint on the Officer’s face. There’s scrap to gather and sort.

“I want my helmet NOW,” Hermes commands.

I nod for the children to comply. Del holds out the battered pot. Hermes snatches it from him, then fits it back onto his handsome head. “Let’s go,” he says to me.

I look at him in puzzlement.

“Do you want me to handcuff you?” he warns.

“You don’t have handcuffs,” I counter.

“I could get them,” he says. “You want me to get them? It will add to the charges.”

“What charges?”

“Insubordination, assaulting an officer of the President’s Militia, withholding assistance—“

“Oh, come on,” I interrupt. “I got emotional for a moment. How’s your face?”

“It hurts!” he says.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Really. Nadia, get a wet rag for the Officer’s face.”

“I don’t want a wet rag!” he says bitterly. “You’re under arrest.”

“You can’t arrest me!” I tell him. “I have fourteen children!”

“You should have thought of that before you struck me,” he says.

“You’re joking, aren’t you?”

“I’m NOT joking. Let’s go!”

He reaches for my left arm. I pull away. Nadia steps forward and says, “Don’t touch her or we’ll kill you and bury you in the basement.” She looks like she means it.

Hermes picks up the oven grills as if to use them for protection.

He says, “I don’t want to hear another word from anybody—you kids keep clear. Your mother is under arrest.”

My children wail their protests and rush forward in grief.

Hermes waves them off with his grills. “Let’s not have an accident,” he warns me. “Tell them to back off.”

I do as he commands. I pull on my cotton coat and he escorts me out. I call for the four oldest to take care of the rest. I assure them that I will be back shortly. They stand on the stoop of our row-house and wave good-bye, many of them bawling. It’s an overcast February afternoon, chilly but not snowing yet. This morning the children and I found a ruined couch whose stuffing we salvaged to burn in our fireplace. It comforts me to think that they will have heat tonight.

The neighbors have stepped out to see what has happened. They call to me, “Where you going, Penelope?”

“I’m arrested,” I answer.

“For striking an Officer,” Hermes adds.

“Penelope wouldn’t do that!” one of them protests.

“She would and she did!” he says. “Look at my face!”

“There’s nothing wrong with your face,” another says.

“Are you calling me a liar?”

This shuts them up. I try to pretend that my leaving is a game or that Hermes is trying only to teach me a lesson and soon will let me go. But after we have walked more than a mile—past the gutted school my children used to attend, then the twenty-foot-tall bronze monument of our President gripping a dead mocking bird in one upheld hand, and then a group of women and children warming their hands near the flames of a ruined Minotaur roadster—I realize that he’s serious. He’s taking me to Home Base.

He walks so fast I nearly have to trot to keep up with him.

detail of The Man’s statue

A fan of baseball, the President named his government buildings after elements of the game: First, Second, Third, Center, and so on. This was in the nineties when the dot. com boom made everything seem possible. We thought our new president was showing a sense of humor, loosening things up. Home Base used to be known as the Ministry of Interior Affairs, where the secret police—later known as Umps—make their home. It’s a tall building of black glass. The Revolutionary Militia has promised to raze it first thing after they take over.

When I see the black silhouette of Home Base in the distance, amid a forest of similar but less menacing highrises, I feel something break inside me, as if my liver has ruptured and the heat of its damage has started spreading through my gut and rising to my heart. This is panic, I decide.

I fight to keep my voice steady as I declare again: “I have fourteen children, Hermes!”

“Why should I care about that?” he says.

“Because children are our future.” I stop walking. To my surprise, he stops too. Then he then turns to look at me finally, his pale face paler in the growing gloom.

“Fuck the future,” he says. “I have no future.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I mean that. Why do you think you’re any different?”

“Because I have fourteen children!”

“What makes you think you’ll ever see them again?”

“That’s a cruel thing to say,” I scold. “You’ve made your point. Now let me go home.”

“You’re under arrest,” he reminds me.

“What do you hope to gain by punishing me?”

This seems to give him pause. Then he says quietly, as if daydreaming, “It’s the one thing I know that I can do. The one difference I can make in this war.”

“My youngest is two,” I tell him. “Her name is Miramar.”

“I never liked children,” he says flatly, awake again. “They want too much.”

“All of us want too much, Hermes.”

“Don’t get philosophical, Penelope. I’m in no mood.”

I take one of his hands in both of mine. I press them as if to warm them, though my own hands are cold with dread. “Hermes. We have known each other for nearly a year.”

“Sixteen months, actually.”

He’s been counting!

“Since the worst of the fighting,” I remind him. “I’ve always been cooperative. My children and I have always made sufficient contributions.”

“Sufficient,” he agrees petulantly, “but little more.”

“But we’ve been cooperative. We’ve never shown disrespect.”

He shakes his head in disappointment. “I’ve known you’ve always hated me.”

“Hated what you do,” I say. “Not hated you.” I’m not sure what I’m saying. I’m not sure where this might take me. But I’m frightened and desperate and willing to go anywhere but to Home Base.

He pulls his hand from mine. “You showed me today how you really feel.” He speaks as if we were lovers. Only then do I realize how much danger I’m in. Only then do I decide to run.

As a girl, I was a forward in field hockey and good at it only because I ran headlong without fear. Other girls were much better at stick control and more generous as teammates. When the ball skidded my way, I was like a single-minded terrier. Ball to goal! Ball to goal! I heard myself yelling, my heart drumming in my head. As I sprinted downfield, I felt only exhilaration—a kind of thoughtless transcendence—until I fired at the goal and stopped finally. Then my joints burned and my lungs ached and my ears rang. Only then did I understand that I had limits.

So I run now, blindly down the Avenue of the Beloved Saints. Ball to goal! I am surprised at how fast I am still. A panicked rabbit. I hear Hermes gasping, his long legs keeping him close behind me, the soles of his rubber boots smacking the ruined asphalt. Then the tinkle and clatter of metal tumbling from his dropped bag.

I leap over a two-foot mound of rubble, then a wheeless plastic shopping cart, then I dodge an elderly couple whose wide eyes signal dismay and alarm. Then the street is suddenly crowded. I’m downtown. And it’s supper time and nearly dark. Everyone looks old and frightened and hunkered down when I sprint past—as if I were a screaming Mimi.

Behind me I hear the cathedral bell strike the hour: a skull-thudding bong! Someone snatches at my coat but I rip away and hurl myself down one of the ornate galleries—with filigreed grillwork overhead—that connects the Avenue of the Beloved Saints to the Avenue of the Departed Souls. The second gong echoes over me. This street, where all the monuments are, we call the Avenue of the Dead. When first proposed by our President two decades ago, people took it seriously. Yes, fine, our heroes deserve recognition, everyone agreed. I break through a small crowd, nearly slip on the slate walk. Hermes skids past me. I take off again. The third bong resounds. Ball to goal!

The first statue was of the President’s mother, who choked on a pulled pork sandwich while eating in bed. She was only sixty-two and the President called for a full year of mourning, all of us in black. The second monument was of Mister Gorman, the President’s college roommate and best friend who threw himself in front of a tram that was about to hit the President. (It still hit the President but didn’t kill him.) The third monument was to Gregory Peck, who wasn’t dead at the time but who was, in The Man’s estimation, “the greatest actor on earth and deserving of every monument we might erect in his honor.”

For thirteen years, until his death, Mr. Peck politely refused our President’s invitations to visit our humble country. No doubt the great actor had heard that our President was a dead ringer for him and, in fact, had financed a remake of “To Kill A Mocking Bird,” which every one of our citizens knows as TKM II, “starring The Man as Atticus Finch.”

As the fourth bong descends like a giant hand, I race past Mr. Peck’s statue. It towers nearly fifty feet and has a fine green patina streaked white with pigeon shit.

Behind me I hear Hermes growl: Kill you! Or is this my imagination?

Other monuments include statues to The Man’s first grade teacher, his voice coach, his dance instructor, and his first publicist. No one complained until he began erecting statues to his wife’s dearly departed shih-tzus—she had dozens of them. It seemed one died every year.

I sprint past one dog, then another: Lazarus, Boethius, Felipe, Serendipity, Rosalia. Poised on a marble plinth, each bronze replica looks exactly like the one behind it. The fifth bell sounds.

Is it starting to snow? My face is wet, my ears freezing. I am heaving, nearly sobbing, for breath. Suddenly something snaps in my right thigh. I almost hear it before I feel it. Hamstring! The pain needles from my lower spine clear down to my heel. Immediately I collapse, scraping my palms and forehead as I somersault. A huge weight tumbles over me. I see Hermes flying forward, arms outstretched like a ball player leaping for home. His chin grinds into the asphalt, his arms bounce like a shaken doll’s, then he hits the curb head-on.

Bleeding, gasping, I haul myself up. Hermes isn’t quite unconscious. He’s groaning. A crowd has gathered. They gape at me. Do I look like a madwoman? I’m pointing at Hermes. But I can’t catch my breath to speak. My hamstring howls in pain. Can I walk? I try to back away but the crowd hems me in. Maybe someone’s eager to claim a reward. As the President is fond of saying, “Reporting suspicious behavior makes heroes of us all!”

“Him!” I gasp.

“Who’s he?” someone asks.

“Rapist!” I blurt.

“Rapist?”

“Raped my sister,” I say. I pause for breath. “Then he went—” I still hear the bells. “After me.” I gulp another. “I ran.”

“Rapist!” someone else says in disgust.

A few older men stoop to pull Hermes up by the collar. He looks groggy, his mouth is open as if to speak. “We’ll take care of him,” one of them says.

“Don’t kill him,” I caution.

Then I stumble off, feeling drunk with relief and fatigue. Only now do I realize the trouble I’ve created for myself. Where did I think I was running to?

It is snowing fine flurries.

Maybe I could have talked my way out of Home Base. But the RM says, “No one’s safe at Home!” We’ve all heard stories.

My children weep when they see me, even hard-hearted Nadia. They clamor for a hug. They ask what has happened. How did I get away? I struggle to keep from collapsing in their arms. I’m suddenly so weary, I want only to sleep with them heaped around me.

“We have to take a trip,” I announce.

“Where?” they ask. “Now? It’s dark! And snowing!”

They’ve lit the couch batting we found earlier today. It smolders from the sooty fireplace nearby. We’re sitting on a tarp on the floor, Miramar in my lap.

I have no choice but to tell them that I am a fugitive, that we will have to go away until the Revolutionary Militia wins.

“They’re gonna win?” Nadia asks skeptically.

“Of course they’re going to win,” I say. “Then we’ll come home.”

“They’ll burn our house down,” Del says. “Maybe the whole block.”

“Let’s not be negative,” I advise. “We have a lot to do.”

The children ready themselves with impressive speed, thanks to the supervision of Nadia, Del, Lori, and Simon. Each child carries a pot or metal cup, a utensil or two tucked into his or her waist- band, every garment stuffed with wads of bills and other combustibles. When we set off, the sleet is falling in a fine needly rain. The children’s garbage-bag ponchos snap and stutter in the icy wind. I’ve got Miramar strapped to my back. In a single line we sneak out the rear yard, into the alley, then down the hill. In the distance a flare brightens the horizon, followed by the pop-popping of gunfire. The streets are empty but for a dog that sprints from one shadow to the next, then disappears.

“Look, a dog!” Rainy cries.

“Dog!” the younger ones echo.

People ate the cats before the dogs. Many dogs got away.

“Shush!” Simon cautions.

We’re only four blocks from our house and already my toes are cold and my hamstring threatens to hobble me. I’ve got to be mindful of frostbite. Miramar is whining, yanking at my hair.

Nadia nudges me: “Where we going?”

“To the landfill,” I whisper.

“Oh, god, mom,” she hisses, “we’re as good as dead!”

“What did I say about negative thinking?”

“The cannibals are gonna eat us!” she says.

“Where did you hear such nonsense?”

“Cannibals?” Lori asks, joining us.

“Nadia is letting her imagination run away with her,” I say.

“I don’t want to be eaten by cannibals!” Lori protests.

“There are NO frigging cannibals!” I announce.

Pretty soon all of the children are saying it, “Cannibals!”