Читать книгу Down in the River - Ryan Blacketter - Страница 6

He crossed the bridge toward the retaining wall of the bright cannery parking lot and heard the cry of night birds. He hunted them in the river fog, but saw none. Fast water punched a wide rock below and smoothed out beyond it, pushing downriver in expanding circles and then into a black shadow of trees. The motion pulled at him, and he ran across the bridge, then climbed a short staircase to the parking lot. The front transoms of the cannery, running along each floor, looked like rows of glowing gun ports on a ship made of brick.

His mom’s truck was parked at the edge of the raised lot, facing a short concrete wall and the river below. He got in and held the wheel. His eyes clung to the water. Soon a train sounded and the gates lowered at the bridge—a calamity of horns and bells—and it pulsed invisibly below the lot, the pavement trembling. Red shapes of memory bloomed in his mind. He dismantled those pictures but they rushed to form again and he prayed his mom would come soon. Now and then when he was alone, memories jostled loose in him in a way he didn’t like.

It was after youth group one day in Marshal and he had walked the mile of highway toward Seven Devils Road where his family lived. Frost furrowed the canyon tops. The high crag that marked his turnoff came into view, and he saw Lila weaving toward him on the road, her arms swinging loosely and bouncing off of her body. She wore a white shirt gone gray. The wide collar displayed sores on the tops of her breasts, purple in the cold like those on her face and arms. As she passed him, she clenched her teeth, her head shaking as if with palsy. “You’re going to town looking like that?” he said. “Go home and get your hat and coat!” If she recognized his voice she made no sign. He jogged after her. She would walk in front of Hair Shack, Burl’s Hardware, and Ranchman’s Steak House, in front of Bible Youth Center and Christian Book. “Put your coat on,” he screamed.

He burned to forget how his sister was then—geriatric with meth, stooped and troll-faced. She had sores on her lips and a mouth of yellow glass for teeth. Her meanest eyes haunted every good memory he had of her.

When she was a kid, his sister had big silver eyes set deep in her head, and she was wild for talking. She followed his mom around, chattering on about osprey and bears, planets and stars. “Listen!” she yelled at her mom’s back. She ran in and out of rooms, shouting as if the curtains were on fire, till she was fifteen, when she lowered her eyes in a permanent brood.

But Lyle didn’t believe she was dangerous like people said. After the twins burned down a shack outside of Marshal, the state child psychiatrist had given them quick diagnoses. Since Lila got into fights at school and defended herself in town, they called her “violent manic-depressive,” and slapped the tag on Lyle as well. But a lot of kids in Marshal raised hell. One meth head liked to drive his ATV into the woods in night vision goggles, blasting Metallica on his headphones, and waste deer with his M16. Nobody called him crazy.

At five years old, the twins would roll around on Lila’s bed, fists full of each other’s hair. While she giggled, Lyle trapped her arms and swirled his tongue in her deep eye socket and her ear. She was all his, never Craig’s or his mom’s, only his own. They often woke inhaling each other’s breath—in bed, on the couch, in the backyard. His mom said that kind of affection was unnatural. When Craig found them embracing, he slapped at their heads or ran and told.

Lyle pulled on one side of the steering wheel now as if to make a turn, breathing out hard, then closing his eyes. In a while the driver’s side door opened.

“How did you get here?” his mom said. “I was looking at you through the glass, thinking who on earth? Then I remembered what you did to your hair.”

“How was work, Mom?” he said.

She displayed the brace on her right hand—flesh-colored, with Velcro straps.

“Would you drive tonight? My hand hurts from grabbing. My lead gave me this to wear, but she said I did a good job.” She sniffed the air in the cab. “Never mind. Not if you’ve been out swimming gutters. But maybe I’ll ask you to shift for me.”

“I only had a couple drinks.”

She eased the truck out of the parking lot, humming high and strained to the radio gospel, and he shifted gears when he was told, trying to sweep away his thoughts.

The bridge, the park, and Skinner Butte fell behind them. She had “visited” with some ladies on break. They’d invited the Rettews to an evangelical church in Springfield, a small town near Eugene. It was good to get out of the house and do a little old-fashioned hard work, she was saying. Her hand pained her but it was going to be fine. She’d get used to it. Her hands had been weak in the past, and then toughened, like when she’d spent summers on the ranch in high school—tying fences and throwing hay and twisting water from clothes.

“Don’t you miss her, Mom?” Lyle said.

“You like the truck? Five hundred bucks and it runs fine. Now Craig won’t have to worry about taking me anyplace. You can drive it, too. I’ll let you.”

“She wasn’t always the way she turned out. She was, like, a little kid once. Don’t you think we should have a ceremony or something?”

Her voice was thin. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know.”

“Why don’t we tell Craig we want to?”

“Let your brother guide us, son. He’s done a good job of it all these years.”

“We could do something—you and me. We wouldn’t have to tell him anything.”

“Those ladies I met tonight,” she said. “They seem like country. I think we’ll like them fine.”

While a man sang Heaaaaa-venly Father, the damaged speaker on his side cut in and out, throwing the voice side to side. He felt a swimming sensation in his head and he kicked the speaker with the side of his foot. “This thing’s wired up all wrong.”

“Your brother bought me this for next to nothing. I’d say we’re lucky to have any speakers at all.”

The news came on. “Hear that?” she said. “They’re taking down the cross, they’re taking down the cross! It’s been on the news. Listen.”

The city had voted to remove the cross on top of Skinner Butte downtown. They were planning to take it down in two weeks. The radio woman called for candlelight prayer vigils.

“At lunch when I heard the news,” his mom said, “I thought I was imagining it. Where have we come to? What kind of people would take down a cross? Lane County has less people going to church than any place in the country. I heard that on the radio today, too.”

“I’m going to be a painter,” he announced. “Of portraits. Like the ones they used to do for kings. I think the Catholic Church will be interested. I’ll have to switch religions, though.”

“Please don’t fight me now, honey. Not now. I’m feeling better today.”

“I’m not fighting. A lot of painters are Catholic.”

“Oh, you’re not going to be Catholic—you’re trying to get my goat. And you’ve never even had a drawing class, mister. Good luck with the portrait business. My word.”

“I’m going to start tonight. You’ll see. You’ll see in the morning.”

She turned onto the boulevard and drove twenty miles an hour, as though children were present. When he tried to shift into third gear, grinding it, she took over the shifting, murmuring in pain.

“Tomorrow you could be a witch doctor. Wouldn’t surprise me at all. So who’s this Mexican girl? Is she teaching you about Catholics? Out partaking in drink and talking about God? They can do that, I guess. Catholics. They can do anything they please.”

A tire slammed into a pothole. Lyle picked out the many holes and cracks under the lights as they drove. The decay of city streets put him in mind of some final abandonment.

“We’re trying to stay positive,” she said. “‘Healthy lifestyle,’ you’ve heard the expression? Craig and I want a happy home, clean and sober.” Her pleasant voice had moved into wariness and was approaching anger. “You want to end up like your father? He came home filthy, too—filthy with whiskey and fighting, always fighting.”

“Do you know where Craig hid the photo albums?”

“Just stop asking to see those.”

“I want to see when she was little,” he said. “We had fun with Dad.”

“Your brother wants to talk to you about him. He says you have a crosswise view, since you was so young. Listen to your brother. Listen to what he says. Those times were bad and best forgot. Well, I know what your dad was. You’re halfway there. First alcohol, then drugs and hanky-panky. True of your dad, and maybe you too—and somebody else I know.”

“Who’s that, Mom? Who’s somebody else you know?” He placed the backs of his thumbs in his shut eyes and breathed.

“Honey, don’t. Don’t. I didn’t mean to speak.”

“Who, Mom? Tell me.”

In the parking lot in front of the apartment building, she stilled the truck and leaned to the door, keeping the motor running for the heater.

“Don’t do this to us, Lyle. I’m not very … strong right now. I’d like to be. I do feel a spark coming back in me with this job.”

“I don’t want to hurt anybody, but I can’t stay quiet. I think she visits me. She’s not doing very well.”

She cut the engine and placed her hand on the door handle.

“It’s not a big deal,” he said. “Everybody has a story like that. Somebody’s grandma comes back. It’s usually somebody’s grandma, right? Why is it always somebody’s grandma? Anyway it doesn’t always have to be a grandma, does it? I mean, does it?”

She popped open the door, heaved herself out of the truck, and ran up the staircase. After a moment, he went up into the apartment after her and tried her door. He heard her mumbling in prayer.

“I’ll yell for Craig if you try and come in here.”

“I didn’t want to scare you—only to talk. Can you open this?”

“I’ll yell for him. I will.”

“Is it really so weird that she would visit me? I thought you believed in that stuff.”

He rested his forehead where the door met the frame. She had gone back to praying.

His bedroom light was burning. On his bed he found a letter in Craig’s writing and a plastic bag. In the bag were a giant box of crayons and a John Wayne coloring book. One page showed John Wayne cracking a man’s jaw with his fist, the man flying backward in surprise. He read the letter.

Lyle. I found this stuff tonite. You never got to know dad before he was called home but he was a terranisorus wrecks. You don’t want to go his way. He used to hit mom. Mom prayed for him but he had his own devils to chase. Look at the second page. You colored outside the lines and mom wanted to teach you to do it right, you woudn’t listen, and dad yelled at her and threw a ashtray and broke a window. I know you have your own ideas about him but we wouldn’t have the problems we do if it wasn’t for him. Some of us got mom’s side and some of us got his. Your a Rettew by name. Mom and I would like to see you start acting like one. We believe in you.

He smelled the cigarettes on his fingers—his dad liked Old Golds, too—and sorted through the coloring book. There was fighting, shooting, riding. There was running at and running from. Old sights and noises crowded him. Once, when his mom drove the children to visit his dad at the tire store where he worked, he and Lila sprinted in there and wrapped themselves around the tires, not just smelling them but sucking the odor into their heads. His dad pulled him off one of them. Lyle was ashamed of the drool he had left on it. Another day, when his dad sat in his chair at home drinking little glasses of brown liquid, he let him and Lila smell his hands. Big and hairy, they smelled like cigarettes and tires, and his swollen knuckles were scabbed with bar fighting. His dad rotated his fists as though examining the process of their healing. After Lila kissed the scabs better, he took his hands back and drank his whiskey and smoked, gentle in the way he ignored them. Later, with many drinks in him, he corralled the three children into the dry shower stall and tickled them. The twins wiggled and screamed and laughed, while Craig, especially ticklish, bawled in misery.

His dad’s name was Jon Murphy. When the twins were six, he drove home from work and hit black ice, plunging into the river. His death kicked Lyle’s mom to the ground for a month or two. Then she told them his dad had been a wild, unchristian man. She changed their name to Rettew, her maiden name.

He tossed the coloring book and note into the rawhide trunk beneath the window. Studded with brass tacks, it had a wrought iron lock, and it slumped on one side, looking ready to collapse in dust. The thing had been in the Rettew family for five generations of ranchers. His brother wanted him to keep it in here, so that he would stay connected to their history.

His mom cried out in her sleep. Craig emerged into the hall and knocked at her door twice. Then he opened Lyle’s door, his eyes half shut. Above the white T-shirt his mustache looked very black.

“Did you talk to Mom when she got home?” he said. “Is she okay?”

“I think so. She was bothered about something, but I’m not sure.”

Craig nodded. “You get my letter?”

“Dad only hit people who fought him first, or deserved it. He didn’t go around picking fights. He stuck up for himself and other people.”

“Well, I think you got a pie-eyed notion of things when we were kids. No reason to go dwelling on those old days.”

“That time he threw the ashtray, I was having fun coloring and Mom went nuts because I wasn’t following the rules. Dad wanted her to leave me alone.”

“Keep your voice down. Tell you what, you got a screwy sense of things. People color inside the picture, that’s what it’s there for.”

“Not me.”

“That’s right. You’re different. You’re original. How do you expect to find a job with that kind of attitude?”

“So I can’t see an album from when we were kids?”

“Those ones are put away,” Craig said. “Now quit asking.”

The only album Craig ever let him see was the creaky leather one that showed the early Rettews. Old and fierce-eyed, the first Lyle Rettew looked like he was fighting an evil noise in his head.

“You were born a Murphy and so was I, and so was …” Lyle let go of that sentence.

“Jayzee, Lyle.” He shook his head. “You almost said her name.”

People at River Baptist said Jayzee instead of Jesus.

Craig came in and shut the door. He drew the curtains against the green-lit Dollar Store sign across the boulevard. On the floor lay a couple pairs of Lyle’s underwear. He kicked them into the closet and slid shut the door on its rail.

“Mom doesn’t need any reminders,” Craig said. “You understand? She was sitting in her chair working her jaw for two weeks and not knowing anybody’s name. You want to see her go back to that?”

“No, but … I want to see pictures of Lila. Where’s the urn?”

“You didn’t hear a thing I said, about your own mother. She was one step from the nuthouse. You even care?”

“I never heard about anybody getting cremated in Marshal. Not once. Isn’t it supposed to be a sin?”

“You don’t know a thing. Well, keep talking, fretting about your own self, and it’s back on the Haldol.”

Lyle shoved his hands in his armpits, tensed. He had few memories of those months, panicky revelations about being underwater and having no gills in his neck to help him breathe, and other waking nightmares.

“You got to take care—of yourself, and Mom,” Craig said. “You don’t need to be running in the dark. You get some rest now.”

“You said we were going to sprinkle her ashes at the coast. I don’t think she’s okay. She still has her same body, with the sores and all that. If we had a service, she’d go back to the way she was when she was little.”

His brother covered his mustache with his hand, blinking at him.

“We need to visit a doctor,” he said. “Get you on something that works.”

“I can’t do that right now. I have to be very on top of it. Mentally. I’m about to do something important. Nothing will be the same. I’m in the preparation stages right now. I’m in training.”

His brother never listened when Lyle talked fast. “Well, the judge ordered the two medications. But maybe the doctor can give you something you like better. At least with the Haldol you didn’t run around at night with your panties on fire.”

“You chained her to her bed. That’s why she ran the highway in her underwear that time. She got away from you.”

“Don’t make me out to be some kind of—I had to do something. She was insane, buddy, and, I believe, demon possessed. I only tied her twice. You think I liked it?”

Lyle shrugged.

“I’m done here,” he said. “Got to wake up at five, and I don’t need any extra. You stay put tonight. You’re part of this family. We need to get Mom back on her legs. That’s the first order of business.”

Lyle nodded his head as his brother went out. Martin was lucky he didn’t have to live with Bible-thumping Christians from the sticks. Whatever his family’s troubles, he must have grown up with people who talked about history and art, not how his mom was close to crazy. Lyle was going to read more books and learn to speak like Martin.

An idea for a painting seized him: Napoleon, Joan of Arc, and that artist Martin had talked about—Cézanne—all as kids, running an urban street, setting fires and breaking windows, stabbing the old and raising the dead. Martin would like it. He had mentioned all of those people.

Lyle went out to the living room, where he opened the dark round glass door of the oil heater—its casing was a narrow steel box, waist high and painted black, with rows of slits on the top of it for the heat to rise through—and shoved his arm down inside it and scooped handfuls of warm newspaper ash, filling an empty glass candy dish that had lain on the windowsill. The lighting mechanism was broken, so he clicked the metal lever at the bottom of the heater to flow the oil, set fire to a twist of newspaper like his brother had shown him, and dropped it in the belly, the flame rising in red and blue waves. He turned it to high.

Then he licked his fingers and dipped them into the candy dish. On the wall above the couch he made ash streaks—outlines of stars and half-moons over a coffin and a cross—and filled them in with crayons. A girl with spaghetti hair lay on top of the box. A tall, grinning man hovered beside the girl, sighting with a downward pointing rifle, smoke pluming from the barrel. Lyle turned off the overhead.

Flames rushed in the heater glass, and the figures in the mural danced in the spastic flickering. Soon it was hot in the room. He removed his shirt and dragged his damp palm across his forehead, ducked under the curtains, and slid open the window. He smoked and watched the street, the air cold on his chest. A four-seater truck pulling a U-Haul trailer was coming at a slow rumble on the far side of the road. A small, sleepy girl sat in the back seat of the truck. He thought-commanded her to look at him, and she did. He mouthed the words “I love you.”

At four in the morning, the mural was close, but there was work yet to be done. When a bedroom door opened, he squatted next to the heater and out of its light. His mom came out of the hallway into the living room. When she clapped her hands once, a table lamp came on near the front door, and she saw him resting on his heels. He clapped the light off, and she scurried down the hall where she spoke heatedly, waking Craig. They’d want to cover up his painting. As if to bring it to completion, he began to clap steadily, the lamp flashing behind him, his shadow thrusting up the mural to the ceiling. He varied the rhythm and settled on a frenetic applause, the brightness a pulsing force, as Craig and his mom moved into the room. His brother hit the overhead switch and ruined the effect with the clarity of light. His mom backed away two steps into the hall, leaning forward to see him.

“His face is black,” she said. “My God.”

“There’s nothing wrong,” Lyle said.

“He’s been skipping his pills again. He’s having an event!”

“I’m making a portrait.”

“Yeah,” Craig said. “Some piece of work there. Crayons?”

“It’s a crayon and ash medium.”

“Ain’t that fancy. A medium.”

“He told me he was receiving visits. From the dead.”

“I’m wide awake, is all. I have a lot of energy.”

“Slow down, buddy. Cool it down.”

“Remember what the counselor said? To check and see if I’m lucid.” He opened his arms in a gesture that invited them to see for themselves. “I’m fine. I can have normal conversations. I’m not having crazy hallucinations. I was tired earlier but I had this burst of energy. I keep having these bursts. I’m keyed up is all.”

“You better get some sleep. We’re going to see a doctor in the morning.”

“What about work?” said his mom.

“I’m calling in sick. This is family. You sleep in my bed tonight, buddy. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“This thing isn’t done yet.”

“Let’s get some rest. You’ll finish it tomorrow. Let’s go to my room.”

Craig took hold of his arm and put him to bed, then lay down in a sleeping bag in front of the door.

“Put all that crazy stuff out of your head. You’ll be all right.”

“There’s nothing crazy,” Lyle said.

In his waking dreams, ghosts came shuddering down the hallways of his mind: his sister, shivering on the toilet. His sister, lying sick in her bed for days untended. His sister, lighting a cigarette and draining a half bottle of Night Train before the last drag was done. His sister, his sister.

A heavy truck shook the ground, headlights yawning across his brother’s shut curtains. His brain hurt, as if too many memories festered there.

On their last night out together, he and Lila had run down the highway to Pioneer House Museum. Starshine sifted into the canyon mouth, the river giving back stray sparks. In the faint light a crescent of sand grinned on the bank. They left the highway and crossed a gravel parking lot to the museum, which had been recently shut down.

“Me and my friends have been coming here for a week,” Lila said. “Nobody’s even cleared out all the shit in this place.”

The front window of the one-room house was empty of glass. She stepped over the sill through the opening, and he followed her into the black air of the museum. She loosed the tall flame of her lighter and went to the far wall where a mannequin couple sat at a kitchen table, and lit the candle next to the Bible they read. She pulled back a curtain beside them. The window let in the moonlight. They planted themselves cross-legged on the floor near the table.

“Why have you guys been coming here?” he said.

“Tonight’s just one night. After this, you can go back to your Bible.”

“We shouldn’t be in this place.”